'One Should Ask One’s Heart Three Questions'

“A man’s style is less rarely the man himself than what he supposes to be a somewhat flattering reflection of himself.  The monster has dominated the ingenious Frankenstein. And many writers become the slaves not only of their own manner but of their own matter too.” 

A meeting of two masters: Walter de la Mare is writing of Max Beerbohm in the January 1, 1913, issue of The Edinburgh Review. A charmed age. The start of the Great War is more than a year and a half away. De la Mare is reviewing eight books, four of which are by writers unknown to me. The others, besides Beerbohm (Christmas Garland), are Edmund Gosse, Austin Dobson and Samuel Butler (his Note Books). Very much a nineteenth-century, pre-Modernist selection, as Beerbohm and de la Mare would remain. The review is fifteen pages long.

 

Christmas Garland is a collection of seventeen parodies of such writers as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy and Beerbohm’s bête noire, Rudyard Kipling (a rare writer he genuinely disliked). Parody is a niche taste, dependent as it is on the reader’s knowledge of the original.

 

“Parody,” de la Mare writes, “is the most trying and insidious form of criticism because it is at the same time the most personal and impersonal. It records a lucid intellect’s adventure among masterpieces. At its best it is a mimicry not so much of the genius of the author as of his own gradually acquired conception of it.”

 

There’s little rancor or hostility in Beerbohm’s parodies, except for the Kipling. Seasoned Jamesians will relish his pitch-perfect take on James’ late manner in the opening of “The Mote in the Middle Distance”:   

 

“It was with the sense of a, for him, very memorable something that he peered now into the immediate future, and tried, not without compunction, to take that period up where he had, prospectively, left it. But just where the deuce had he left it? The consciousness of dubiety was, for our friend, not, this morning, quite yet clean-cut enough to outline the figures on what she had called his ‘horizon,’ between which and himself the twilight was indeed of a quality somewhat intimidating.”

 

De la Mare describes Beerbohm’s parodic gift as “a legerdemain little short of uncanny.” The author of Memoirs of a Midget was a gentleman and a gentle soul. Of the Conrad parody, “The Feast,” de la Mare describes it as “farce, not comedy,” and writes:

 

“A kindly counsellor of youth once suggested that before expressing any sort of opinion on a fellow-creature one should ask one’s heart three questions: ‘Is what I am going to say kind? Is it true? Is it necessary?’ The second question was plain sailing: but which of the others, we wonder, set Max to work?”