MIRRORS UP TO ART Sut,—Mr. Julian Jebb wonders in the
Spectator why, in my concern to promote the intelligent study of literature, I haven't recommended the writing of parody, so perhaps I may be allowed some not very original observations (they seem to me truisms).
There is only one thing that could be learnt by the attempt to parody a writer whose distinction makes him worth close study; that is, how in- accessible to any but the most superficial, and falsifying, imitation the truly characteristic effects of such writers are. Mr. Julian Jebb speaks of 'the greatest parodies.' He illuminates the significance of that category by instancing Mr. Connolly's parody of Aldous Huxley and Mr. Kingsmill's of The Shropshire Lad. No one will be much disturbed by Mr. Connolly's or Mr. Kingsmill's parodying Mr. Huxley or Housman, and no one called on to make the essential critical points about the novelist and the poet would (I postulate an intelligent interest in literature) think parody an intelligent or profitable way.
Why not offer a 'great parody' of Shakespeare? We all knqw why. What does the parody of Words- worth in Rejected Addresses tell us about the great Wordsworth? Nothing. The parodist may practise his art upon (say) G. K. Chesterton or even Macaulay, without moving anyone to indignation. But there have been literary connoisseurs who thought they could parody Johnson; and to offer to parody Johnson is to expose oneself. Worse, it is to further that cult of Johnson which precludes—
which is inevitably and essentially hostile to—the recognition of Johnson's greatness.
The cult of parody, in fact, belongs to that literary culture (a predominant one, to judge by our in- tellectual weeklies—it is a branch of 'social civilisa- tion') which, in its obtuse and smug complacency, is always the worst enemy of creative genius and vital originality. It goes with the absurd and sig- nificant cult of Max Beerbohm—whom (to make, with one illustration, one directly relevant point) it is impossible to forgive for his kindly parody of poor James; a parody which did all it could to identify James with the complacently stupid pre- conceptions of that literary world which—to his death—denied him all intelligent recognition. Conrad, too, suffered from Becrbohm's attentions.
People who arc really interested in creative originality regard the parodist's game with distaste and contempt.
Mr. Jebb needn't feel that he has been insulted in any way he need worry about: 'Write a criticism of Pope in the style of Pope'—that invitation, or one substantially to the same effect, I remember to have seen on an English Tripos paper. F. R. LEAVIS Downing College, Cambridge
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