BOOKS.
THE VELVET TOUCH.• Is any man in our time has " the velvet touch " it is Mr. Max Beerbohm. By a happy judgment such as is instinctive in certain minds, he has applied this gift of nature to the kind of writing in which it most charms us—in the essay pure and simple and the fantastic short story. Mr. Max Beerbohm's short stories—or shall we say essays in fiction 7—have won such golden opinions that it is not necessary to praise or appraise them. Whether he sinners it or saints it ; whether he is telling of the devil in the red waistcoat who turns up his nose and gives the cut direct to his futile client, or whether he anatomizes some gentle futility, he is supreme. Yet he is hardly less successful in his personal and " touch and go " essays. At any rate, these must be our subject on the present occasion, for the volume before us contains no stories.
What is specially delightful about Mr. Max Beerbohm's ventures is that he has brought back into our literature the • And Even Now. By Max Beerbohm. London : Heinemann. rte. Gd. net.]
whimsical element first used to perfection by Charles Lamb. Lamb showed how the artist's own mental characteristics and outlook could be transferred to the reader. Without imitating Charles Lamb, Mr. Max Beerbohm has caught the same, or to be strict we should say a similar, spirit. And here " the velvet touch " serves him admirably. It is exactly the thing. for subjects where the writer has to go like the lightest-footed of cats as it passes along a mantel- piece crowded with priceless china. If he were to be the least too imaginative, or too rhetorical, or, we had almost said, too anything, the charm would be broken. We should be either bored cr excited, or at any rate disturbed. Mr. Max Beerbohm never does anything of this kind. The reader, like the writer, is on v-;ivet. We can rub our cheek or hand against the delightful surface and not know which is the greater pleasure—to stroke or to be st eked.
But if we run on like this we shall certainly not be making Mr. Max .C-erbohm our exemplar as he is our theme. We shall be forc_bg the note while praising an author for avoiding that very error. The delightful thing about And Even Now is that, though it is the velvet touch, it is never too soft. It is never for a moment either luscious, or clammy, or stuffy, or perfumed. Its writer brings to his sweetness no satiety. Even his most delicate workmanship has behind it a kind of restraint and also a beauty of handling which is an intellectual stimulant, and prevents us from being bemused by his art. In the phrase which was so much liked in the eighteenth century and which Burke used in one of the best known of his Parliamentary eulogies, " He hits us between wind and water."
We cannot comment on all the good things in the book before us, and yet if we choose one or two we shall be seeming to make a preference where no preference can be just or desirable. Perhaps one of the most marvellous examples of deft handling, in which there is always a laugh implied, but never an actual laugh, is the essay entitled " 3fobled King "—a title fascinating in its evolution. Here is gaiety mixed with a kind of fascinating and fantastic melancholy which is utterly delightful. A French critic once spoke of " that gay melancholy which the English call humour." Here we have a supreme example. There is a touch of true pathos in the dear old Ligurian fishermen pottering round the base of the statue which has been dumped upon the little bit of waste ground where they spread their nets—a touch of pathos, also, though it, too, does not wound, in the poor King and even in the Mayor and Corporation, and the sculptor, who together have perpetrated the terrible piece of carved stone with the marble mustachios and marble boots. Over it all is the writer's smile, which is never mocking, never unkind, and yet never treacly or even sugary, and also, and best of all, never the sort of stupid, contagious chuckle which lures one into a laugh against one's inclination, a laugh for which the laugher instantly feels heartily ashamed. That is the kind of laugh raised by the column of jocularities in the local paper, a column which for so many of us fascinates, even while it is utterly intolerable, a column which, if we see it, we must as surely read as the beginner on the bicycle must direct his course to the biggest, sharpest, and most undesirable stone in the road.
Though " Mobled King " is an inimitable example of the velvet touch which is not velvety, perhaps the greatest tour de force in the whole volume is "No. 2. The Pines." This essay has the extra interest of being a piece of realism as well as an experiment in the whimsical. Mr. Max Beerbohm did really go to Putney to visit Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Watts-Dunton at No. 2. the Pines, and he does really give us an account of his visit. He makes us see the dining loom and the mutton and the library as clearly as he saw them himself. Still more, he makes us see Swinburne and his friend as they were, physically and mentally :—
" I gaze no longer, I myself am there. Sit on the sofa and the hot-joint share."
We get a picture of Swinburne which, though it is, in a sense, a caricature and meant to be a caricature, is also like so many caricatures—the truest picture of the man. And here, though we greatly admire Mr. Beerbohm's genius for figurative caricature and have testified thereto in these pages, we cannot help feeling in the last resort how much more powerful is the written word than the line, the shadow, and the tone, to call before us the animi figura, the image of the soul—the mind, which is the Man. Though the essay ought to be read as a whole, for every word is necessary to the complete picture, we cannot forbear quoting the first of the little vignettes of Swinburne. In " NO. 2. The Pines," short as it is, we get the poet in a dozen postures :- " Nor was I disappointed. Swinburne's entry was for me a great moment. Here, suddenly visible in the flesh, was the legendary being and divine singer. Here he was, shutting the door behind him as might anybody else, and advancing—a strange small figure in grey, having an air at once noble and roguish, proud and skittish. My name was roared to him. In shaking his hand, I bowed low, of course—a bow de &ear ; and he, in the old aristocratic manner, bowed equally low, but with such swiftness that we narrowly escaped concussion. You do not usually associate a man of genius, when you see one, with any social class ; and, Swinburne being of an aspect so unrelated as it was to any species of human kind, I wondered the more that almost the first impression he made on me, or would make on any one, was that of a very great gentleman indeed. Not of an old gentleman, either. Sparse and straggling though the grey hair was that fringed the immense pale dome of his head, and venerably haloed though he was for me by his greatness, there was yet about him something—boyish ? girlish ? childish, rather ; something of a beautifully well-bred child. But he had the eyes of a god, and the smile of an elf. In figure, at first glance, he seemed almost fat ; but this was merely because of the way he carried himself, with his long neck strained so tightly back that he all receded from the waist upwards. I noticed afterwards that this deportment made the back of hisjacket hang quite far away from his legs ; and so small and sloping were his shoulders that the jacket seemed ever so likely to slip right off. I became aware, too, that when he bowed he did not unbend his back, but only his neck—the length of the neck accounting for the depth of the bow. His hands were tiny, oven for his size, and they fluttered helplessly, touchingly, unceas- ingly."
We will take as our next example of what we might call Mr. Max Beerbohm's Amontillado style " Hosts and. Guests." Here was a task indeed if something new and worth saying was to be said. But Mr. Beerbohm does the work as quickly and as well as Ariel would have done it if Prospero had set him such a theme. Take for proof the following passage :— " Our deepest instincts, bad or good, are those which we share with the rest of the animal creation. To offer hospitality, or to accept it, is but an instinct which man has acquired in the long course of his self-development. Lions do not ask one another to their lairs, nor do birds keep open nest. Certain wolves and tigers, it is true, have been so seduced by man from their natural state that they will deign to accept man's hos- pitality. But when you give a bone to your dog, does he run out and invite another dog to share it with him ?—and does your cat insist on having a circle of other cats around her saucer of milk ? Quite the contrary. A deep sense of personal property is common to all these creatures. Thousands of years hence they may have squired some willingness to share things with their friends. Or rather, dogs may ; cats, I think, not. Meanwhile, let us not be censorious. Though certain monkeys assuredly were of finer and more malleable stuff than any wolves or tigers, it was a very long time indeed before even we began to be hospitable. The cavemen did not entertain. It may be that now and again—say, towards the end of the Stone Age— one or another among the more enlightened of them said to his wife, while she plucked an eagle that he had snared the day before, That red-haired man who lives in the next valley seems to be a decent, harmless sort of person. And sometimes I fancy he is rather lonely. I think I will ask him to dine with us to-night,' and, presently going out, met the red-haired man and said to him, ' Are you doing anything to-night ? If not, won't you dine with us ? It would be a great pleasure to my wife. Only ourselves. Come just, as you are.' That is most good of you, but,' stammered the red-haired man, ` as ill-luck will have it, I am engaged to-night. A long-standing, formal invita- tion. I wish I could get out of it. but I simply can't. I have a morbid conscientiousness about such things. Thus we see that the will to offer hospitality was an earlier growth than the will to accept it. But we must beware of thinking these two things identical with the mere will to give and the mere will to receive. It is unlikely that the red-haired man would have refused a slice of eagle if it had been offered to him where he stood. And it is still more unlikely that his friend would have handed it to him. Such is not the way of hosts. The hospitable instinct is not wholly altruistic. There is pride and egoism mixed up with it, as I shall show."
Another attractive paper is " A Clergyman." As an absolute contrast take " William and Mary." " On Speaking French," again, is full of delightful irony, while " Something Defeasible " has a touch of mock pathos so nearly poignant that it would be actually unbearable if Mr. Beerbohm did not know how at the last moment to heal the wound he gave.
Before we leave this delightful volume we may mention the article which attracted the attention of many of our readers when it appeared two years ago in one of the magazines. As is generally the case when we look back, Mr. Max Beerbohm exaggerates a good deal in his suggestions as to the relations between master and servant in the eighteenth century. That relationship was not half as servile as he assumes it to have been for the purposes of his argument, with which, by the way, we feel a very strong abstract sympathy. We get an insight of great value on the master and servant question in the eighteenth century in Tristram Shandy. The account is purely incidental, for Sterne gave no conscious attention to the subject.
Even if we eliminate Corporal Trim as an exception, how pleasant are the relations between Mr. Shandy and his coachman, and even between Mrs. Shandy and her maid ! However, we must
not take the essay on servants too seriously, even if it is in a sense meant seriously. Perhaps only a woman could do •real justice to Mr. Max Beerbohm's delightful, if fanciful, plea for the servantless house. She certainly would point out that his delight in the house when all his servants are out, and his con- clusion that therefore it would be the height of happiness to
have no servants, is essentially a man's proposition. It merely transfers a great deal of hard domestic work, which someone has got to do, from his servants to his female relations. After all, unless we return to the cave somebody must do the work, and on the whole it is probably better done when graded under a system of exchange both in service and commodities than in any other that ingenuity and humanity could devise.
But what are we doing, writing like this ? What a way of showing our overflowing gratitude for Mr. Max Beerbohm's book ! Talk of breaking a butterfly on the wheel : we are smacking Ariel's pretty head for one of his most delightful fantasies. We apologize humbly, and to show how much better Mr. Max Beerbohm corrects himself than we correct him, we will quote the last lines of the essay on " Servants " :— " Anarchistic ? Yes ; and I have no defence to offer, except the rather lame one that I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like every one to go about doing just as he pleased---short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed. Domestic service is not one of those things, and I should be glad were there no more of it."
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