A GENTLE SATIRIST.*
Nor even a good comedy is so rare as genuine satire, and when an example of the latter is produced some indulgence in super- latives may well be excused, for a long interval is bound to elapse before the occasion for them repeats itself. In the case of Mr. Max Beerbohm's new volume, which brilliantly achieves what Zuleika Dobson as conspicuously missed, it is difficult to restrain praise within the bounds. of judgment, for its beneficent, limpid ridicule is 'an undiluted joy. Thin, some people may call it who, not content with a diet of intellectual beef and beer, must always be eating between meals : but its thinness comes, not from dilution, but from rarefaction.
Seven Men is a delicate dissection, carried out through the medium of five studies, of certain mild but dominating follies from which none of us are wholly exempt—tiny deviations from the perpendicular of common-sense which require only the slightest exaggeration to make the whole fabric lop-sided. The charm which entitles Mr. Max Beerbohm's handling of these harmless 'vanities and engaging hypocrisies to an exalted and even unique position in satire is the sympathetic solemnity with which he gently revolves the almost imperceptibly gro- tesque human objets d'art of his choice. Not that there is any tiresome parade of gravity in his preeentation : he is far too skilled a craftsman to depend on so elementary a trick for • Seven Men. By Max Beerbohm London: Heinemann. [7s. net.]
heightening contrast. His pen is guided with fairy lightness : the writer smiles and jokes and even gently digs his reader in the ribs—but it is always the reader, never the character whose
elusive distortion or finely cracked glaze he is asking us to appreciate, if not to admire. Take, for instance, " Hilary Maltby
and Stephen Jackson," an analysis of toadyism and the Nemesis that attends it, which is quite the best thing in the volume. Does Mr. Max Beerbohm invite us directly or indirectly to repro- bate the unhappy novelist who prevents a brother-scribe from being asked to join a ducal house-party to which he himself has received an unhoped-for invitation, only to find, when ho arrives for his social baptism, fortified by expensive new luggage and a number of suits specially ordered for the occasion, that the ghost 'of his rival, palpably solid in aspect, comes between him and every phase of his enjoyment, makes him slash his face with zebra cuts while shaving, spill the soup on his shirt-front, knock a powerful and portly Countess off her bicycle, oreate a small scandal in church, and, in a bare twenty-four hours, pile up an indefeasible reputation for drinking ? Not at all. Mr. Beerbohm does not praise, true enough, but neither does ha mock. He shares, one feels sure, the reader's intense relief when the hag-ridden story-teller finally breaks loose from his majestic purgatory and vanishes to end his days, like an escaped convict, nameless and forgotten, by a sunny Southern shore.
The quiet roguery of the book—what the French call pine sans rire—can hardly be conveyed by means of quotation, for its charm lies in the complete absence of fireworks. The reader
is never startled by a rocket or blinded by a eatherine-wheel, but, to change the metaphor, feels his coat steadily stroked the right way by benevolent finger-tips with just the suspicion of a tickle in them. One purrs continually, as one reads, with even, unalloyed delight, breaking out now and then, though alone, into audible chuckles of content. But ono or two passages which will bear detachment may give some notion of the author's gentle malice : this one, for instance, where the Snob as Novelist is speaking :-
" I was the first to be presented to the Duchess. . . . I hoped I should keep my head. She wore a tiara. I had often seen women in tiaras at the Opera. But I had never talked to a woman in a tiara. Tiaras were symbols to me. Eyes are just a human feature. I fixed mine on the Duchess's. I kept my head by not looking at hers."
The same speaker, describing another great lady, goes on :-
" I had been told at fourth hand that she had a masculine intellect and could make and unmake Ministries. She was nearly sixty now, a trifle dyed and stout and weather-beaten, but still tremendously handsome, and hard as nails. One would not have said that she had grown older, but merely that she belonged now to a rather later poriod of the [Roman Empire."
Commenting elsewhere on the works of this incense-burning personage, to whom every member of the middle class is more or less a Scottish cousin, " Max " writes :-
" Aristocrats, when they are presented solely through a novelist's sense of beauty, do not satisfy us. They may be 119 beautiful as all that, but, for fear of thinking ourselves snobbish, we won't believe it. We do believe it, however, and revel in it, when the novelist saves his face and ours by a pervading irony in the treatment of what he loves. The irony must, mark you. be pervading and obvious. Disraeli's great ladies and lords won't do, for his irony was but latent in his homage, and thus the reader feels himself called on to worship and in duty bound to scoff. All's well, though, when the homage is latest in the irony. Thackeray, inviting us to laugh and frown over the follies of Mayfair, enables us to reel with him in a secret orgy of veneration for those fools."
With what perfect restraint, again, barely betraying the faintest twinkle, this portrait of the Snob as Failure—the intellectual Snob—is built up :-
" He flung back the wings of his cape with a gesture which— had not those wings been waterproof—might have seemed to hurl defiance at things in general. And he ordered an absinthe. . . . Re admitted that there were passages in Keats.' . . . And again, ' I can always read Milton in the reading-room.'- ' The reading-room ? Of the British Mtiseum. I go there every day.'—' You do ? I've only been there once. I'm afraid I found It rather a depressing place. It—it seemed to sap one's vitality.'—' It does. That's why I go there. The lower one's vitality, the more sensitive one is to great art.' " Occasionally " Max " allows himself, as the seventh member of the Pleiad referred to in the .title, the luxury of a neatly turned
apophthegm, such as : " No man who hasn't lost his vanity can be held to have altogether failed "—or, " He looked solemn ; but all men do look solemn when they speak of their own habits, whether positive or negative, and no matter how trivial." Space forbids the reproduction of the sly parody on futuristic spelling which adorns the close of the first tale, 'with its reference to " Max's " own " labud sattire " (" Labud '—what on earth was that ? To this day, I have never made out that word "). It is one of the discreetly purple patches in a volume of gentle rainbow hues manipulated by a Puck who never forgets his fairy kinship with Ariel, or his artistic association with that unrivalled virtuoso of polite travesty, the limner of Twenty-five Gentlemen and Fifty Caricatures.
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