I

MR. MAX BEERBOHM

1. THE STUDENT OF PERFECTION

Mr. Max Beerbohm generally leaves us with the impression that he has written something perfect. He is, indeed, one of those writers to whom perfection is all-important, not only on account of their method, but on account of their subject matter. He is not a man engaged in a Laocoon struggle with his imagination-a man desperately at grips with a tremendous theme. He is more comparable to a laundress than to Laocoon. His work has the perfection of a starched shirtfront, which if it is not perfect is nothing. Mr. Beerbohm takes what may be called an eveningdress view of life. One would not be surprised to learn that he writes in evening dress. He has that air of good conversation without intimacy, of deliberate charm, of cool and friendly brilliance that always shows at its best above a shining and expressionless shirt-front. He belongs to

the world in which it is good form to forget the passions, except for their funny side, and in which the persiflage is more indispensable than the port. Not much good literature has been written in this spirit in England. The masterpieces of persiflage in English literature are, in verse, The Rape of the Lock and, in prose, The Importance of Being Earnest. Can anybody name three other masterpieces in the same kind? Everyone who reads Seven Men can name one. It is called Seven Men.

Mr. Beerbohm is, in the opinion of some good critics, best of all as a parodist. His Christmas Garland contains the finest prose parodies in the language. And, even outside his confessed parodies, he remains a parodist in the greater part of his work. In Seven Men he is both a parodist of Henry James and a caricaturist of men of letters. Henry James loved to take a man of letters as his hero: Mr. Beerbohm loves to take a man of letters as a figure of fun. His men of letters have none of that dignity with which they are invested in "The Death of a Lion." They are simply people to tell amusing stories about, as monarchs and statesmen become at a dinner-table. This does not mean that Mr. Beerbohm is not a devoted disciple of literature. There is a novelist, Maltby, in one of his stories, who lives in the suburbs and

writes a successful novel about aristocratic life, and afterwards writes an unsuccessful novel about suburban life. "I suppose," he says, explaining his failure, "one can't really understand what one doesn't love, and one can't make good fun without real understanding." We may

reasonably take this as Mr. Beerbohm's own apologia. He has a sincere tenderness for this world he derides. In A Christmas Garland he protests his admiration for the victims of his parodies. And as we read Seven Men we feel sure that it is his extreme devotion to the world of letters that leads him to choose it as the theme of his mockery. When he writes of men of letters -especially of the exquisitely minor men of letters he is like a man speaking his own language in his own country. When he wanders outside the world of authors he writes under a sense of limitations, like a man venturing into a foreign tongue. In Seven Men the least remarkable of the five stories-though it, too, would seem remarkable in any less brilliant companyis "James Pethel," the story of a financier, who lives for the sake of risks and who is happiest when he is risking not only himself but those he loves his daughter, for instance, or a favourite author. The description of a motor drive, on which he takes his wife and daughter and Mr.

Beerbohm in Normandy, with its many hairbreadth escapes, is an excellent piece of comicosensational literature. But the story reads like hearsay, not like reminiscences of a man's own world. One does not believe that Pethel ever existed, or that he enjoyed drinking water in France simply because there was a risk of typhoid. Even the motor drive is not quite "convincing." Or, perhaps, one should say that, while the motor drive itself is immensely convincing, James Pethel's state of mind as he drives the car is not. Henry James might have made of him a queer study in morbid psychology. Mr. Beerbohm has hardly raised him above the level of a joke. It lacks the thrill of masterly and intimate portraiture. "A. V. Laider" is another story with a non-literary theme. It is, perhaps, the most refined example of leg-pulling in fiction. It is one of those stories in which the reader is worked up to a moment of intense horror only to be let down with mockery by the narrator. Everything in it is perfectly done-the grey introduction at the rainy seaside, the railway accident foreseen in the palms of several of the passengers, and the final confession and comment. If not a man of letters, A. V. Laider is at least a man of imagination, and Mr. Beerbohm knows the type.

As to which of Mr. Beerbohm's burlesque