University of Virginia Library

INTRODUCTION

THE promise of a full-length novel by the author of "The Happy Hypocrite" had an intense effect on Beerbohm "addicts" in 1911. Those who did not share in the excitement at the time may be bored now by being told how keen it was, yet it was indisputably keen, all the more so for being narrow and literary. A first play by H. G. Wells, a book of lyrics by Bernard Shaw, a comedy by Theodore Roosevelt, a volume of lullabies by Herbert Asquith — the announcement of such unexpected works might whet the simple and greedy curiosity of the large public, but the large public would never have a titillation that would exceed the Beerbohmites' titillation with "Zuleika Dobson." Only a few hundred in all the Americas may have felt it, because only a few hundred could have been reading his Works and his Saturday Review criticisms. It was not the less a delicious excitement, and it was one which he amply gratified.

But not, I think, as we supposed he would. So much of his criticism was admiration of sober realism that we might easily have hoped for, or

feared for, a realistic novel; or, if not that, a tenuous analysis in the mode of Henry James. What the Beerbohmite forgot when he heard that his author had written a novel was his author's eminence as a caricaturist.

How "great" is Max Beerbohm's eminence as a caricaturist I do not know. Somewhere, I suppose, there is an æsthetic Lloyds where the sure-enough rating of all the poets, painters, architects, sculptors, novelists and interior decorators is to be found, determined by spiritual insurance agents; and there one may find written down the exact percentage of importance to be given to Max's cartoons. In ignorance of this rating it is rash to call anyone eminent, but the memory of Max's drawings is so persistent, the means he employs so telling and the end so achieved, that no Englishman of his day seems to come near him. Is this because we who write about a caricature are literary? Is it because Max Beerbohm is caricaturing Yeats and Moore and Shaw and Bennett and Tennyson, instead of the war cabinets and the secret-treaty statesmen and the humors of Zionism? Perhaps. But no one who has felt a sore spot respond to the caustic of his pencil can be persuaded that it is familiarity of subject-matter which makes him seem a genius in caricature. There is something else, a precious sense of human proportion as well as literary proportion. This permits one to insist on him beyond

the literary reservation, to say that he stands high and alone. The curious thing, however, is to read the man who revealed for the eye the discrepancy between Queen Victoria and her regal furnitures. Curious, because you find in his verbal domain precisely the same kind of inclination and the same kind of power. "Zuleika Dobson" is many sorts of a novel, but first and foremost it is the emanation of a most subtle and deadly caricaturist, a "shrewd and knavish sprite" amongst mortal men.

There is, according to the sagacious, a secret excellence in "Zuleika Dobson." They see in it a caricature of a specific classical theme. If one have not the clue to this heroical story, they murmur, the finer points of the novel are lost. This is impressive, but it is consoling to discover how such enjoyment is left for the ordinary open-faced unclassical citizen. No one can deny to "Zuleika Dobson" its consummate literary flavor. Its literary flavor is one of its perfections. But literary flavor is one of the most popular sources of pleasure, and the strength of "Zuleika" is such that no particular legend, no definite mythology, is needed to give it edge. Classic as the Duke of Dorset may be ("fourteenth Duke of Dorset, Marquis of Dorset, Earl of Grove, Earl of Chastermaine, Viscount Brewsby, Baron Grove, Baron Petstrap, and Baron Wolock, in the Peerage of England") the charm of his portrayal, both as

a personage by himself and as the desperate lover of Zuleika, is the appreciation, the devilish appreciation, Max Beerbohm exhibits of the eternal verity, noblesse oblige. There may be sly reminiscences of Homer in the heroics of the Duke of Dorset, fittingly displayed at Oxford, yet Homer is only a lamp to cast another silhouette of the duke. By himself he is complete, a model of such austere masculine nobility as only our great receding civilization could have produced.

Zuleika, of course, is herself a romantic portrait of the first order, and it is perfectly easy to believe that she turned the head of Oxford youth ("youth, youth!"), in the manner that Mr. Beerbohm patiently and scrupulously describes. But while Zuleika has the imperishable attributes of a sex enslaving or enslaved, illustrated with a cruel disregard of undergraduate life at the beginning of Chapter XXI, there is something even more sexually characteristic in Dorset's male style and posture, his nature lofty and nonpareil. Without the noble Dorset to mark the abysms of tragedy, Oxford would not be quite Oxford nor Zuleika so Zuleika. And yet beyond Dorset and Zuleika, Noaks and Oover and Mrs. Batch and the Warden, it is Oxford, "that mysterious, inenubilable spirit, spirit of Oxford," which gives the novel its really deep intonation. A love such as Mr. Beerbohm bears Oxford could alone have steeped the book in sentiment as well as satire,

beauty as well as mockery — and beauty the book possesses. The Rhodes scholar Oover may seem to an American the best example of the author's sunny malice, but that is probably because it is the sententious Oover we know best, Oover for whom Max Beerbohm has defied the English rule of impercipience, to whose exact idiom he has actually listened. One may be sure he has listened just as faithfully to The MacQuern, and the Junta ("a member of the Junta can do no wrong") suggests a most sensitive accuracy in this country of undergraduate shibboleths, Yale Locks and Keys.

Only one thing "Zuleika Dobson" lacks that a regular novel has, and that is dullness. It is a long story taken at the pace of a sprint, its wit relentlessly sustained. But how varied, how ingenious in incident, how full of funny gesture and dry discrimination, is this undergraduate epic; with such a gay gallopade of mortality and such decorative archaism of expression, and such a solicitude for words. This last may not seem important; it is still an important constituent of its author. To most writers words are public characters, to be handled as the public is handled by thick-skinned officials, a mob to be regimented and shoved on. For Max Beerbohm words are persons with their own physiognomies, with their own frailties and proclivities, to be humored and made much of. His delicacy with words, however, is not limp-handed.

It is part of that strong sensibility which makes him what he is.

And that, I should say, is a spirit at one with sweet Puck, "merry wanderer of the night." Whether in "Zuleika" or his writings on another scale, he is one of the few pure comedic spirits of his country. He has the gilt of holding the mirror up to self-portraiture, of proportioning the heart and the head. To some it may seem that Max Beerbohm is "precious" in the sense of mannered and artificial, and that the best he does is to carve cherry stones. This is a misinterpretation of the best foolery of our time. It is not for nothing that the subtitle of "The Happy Hypocrite" is "a fairy tale for tired men." Mr. Beerbohm needs the license of labelled entertainment. But the fate that attended one of his books issued in the United States, burned in the end as not merchantable, is a reproach to the public rather than the author, a fantasy on popular taste. His dandyism, his daintiness, his restraint and precision of gesture, have all such inward laughter in them that they are irresistible, for the reader who has pounded literary pavements and been jostled along main traveled roads. To say this may be clumsy when Max Beerbohm can be as full of burlesque as follows:

"The very birds in the trees of Trinity were oppressed and did not twitter. The very leaves did not whisper.

"Out through the railings, and across the road, prowled a skimpy and dingy cat, trying to look like a tiger.

"It was all very sinister and dismal."

There are people, in spite of everything, who still cannot see that cat, or see Max Beerbohm. That is why downright emphasis on his amusingness, on any subtle man's amusingness, has claims to be forgiven. But the test, the reward, is waiting for the reader.