'Cursed with an Acute Literary Conscience'

Who among critics would begin a review with so seemingly inartistic a statement?: 

“Some writers have a dread of platitudes. I have not. What is a platitude but an expression of the wisdom of the ages, the synopsis of a theory that was long ago propounded, tested, established, never subverted?”

 

Lusting after originality and snubbing the truths of tradition have sabotaged the work of a million writers. Originality is a myth. It has all been done before. A writer’s job is to do it again, perhaps a little better. The author quoted above is Max Beerbohm, writing his final column as drama critic for London’s Saturday Review, published April 16, 1910. He had served in that role since 1898, succeeding George Bernard Shaw. In his first column Beerbohm had famously written: “I have none of that instinctive love for the theatre that is the first step towards good criticism of drama. I am not fond of the theatre.”

 

Call it a rare gift for being charming while contrary. Joseph Epstein has said Beerbohm’s admirers must possess “a strong penchant for irony, a skeptical turn of mind, and a sharp taste for comic incongruity.” I would add a fondness for precisely calibrated prose. Take Beerbohm’s subsequent sentences in that final column:

 

“Truth, of course, is a delicate and many-sided affair. For every platitude there is at least one other platitude to dilute and qualify it. Thus, when we speak of ourselves as ‘creatures of habit,’ let us not forget to throw in something about ‘the charm of novelty.’ And never let our love of novelty break us of our wholesome habit of platitudinizing.”

 

Few writers possess the stamina to produce a weekly theater review for twelve years. Fewer still turn out memorable prose while meeting the tyrannical demands of a deadline. Beerbohm’s friends thought he was squandering his gifts on mere journalism. He disagreed, writing:

 

“I believe that the obligation to write every week a fugitive article for a largish public is no bad thing for a writer inclined, as I was, to ‘preciosity.’ I believe that my way of writing became more chaste, through journalism, and stronger.”

 

Writing the theater reviews cured Beerbohm of his more Wildean preciousness. He became a substantial, confident, amusing writer and produced his finest essays in the post-Saturday Review years – in particular, those collected in And Even Now (1920). Back to that final review:

 

“Writing has always been uphill work to me, mainly because I am cursed with an acute literary conscience. To seem to write with ease and delight  is one of the duties which a writer owes to his readers, to his art. And to contrive that effect involves very great skill and care: it is a matter of technique, a matter of construction, partly, and partly of choice of words and cadences. . . . I may often have failed in my articles here, to disguise labour. But the effort to disguise it has always been loyally made.”

 

In Beerbohm I hear an echo of Dr. Johnson, as reported in Johnsonian Miscellanies (ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 1897): “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”

 

Beerbohm was born on this date, August 24, in 1872 and died in 1956 at age eighty-three.

 

[The reviews quoted above are collected in Around Theatres (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953).]