PASTICHE AND PREJUDICE

BY A. B. WALKLEY

NEW YORK ALFRED A. KNOPF MCMXXI

Reprinted, by the courtesy of the Proprietors, from The Times.

Printed in Great Britain.

[1]

PASTICHE

Writing of Lamennais, Renan says: “Il créa avec des réminiscences de la Bible et du langage ecclésiastique cette manière harmonieuse et grandiose qui réalise le phénomène unique dans l’histoire littéraire d’un pastiche de génie.” Renan was nothing if not fastidious, and “unique” is a hard word, for which I should like to substitute the milder “rare.” Pastiches “of genius” are rare because genius is rare in any kind, and more than ever rare in that kind wherein the writer deliberately forgoes his own natural, instinctive form of expression for an alien form. But even fairly plausible pastiches are rare, for the simple reason that though, with taste and application, and above all an anxious care for style, you may succeed in mimicking the literary form of another author or another age, it is impossible for you to reproduce their spirit—since no two human beings in this world are identical. Perhaps the easiest of all kinds is the theatrical “imitation,” because all that is to be imitated is voice, tone,

gesture—an actor’s words not being his own—yet I have never seen one that got beyond parody. The sense of an audience is not fine enough to appreciate exact imitation; it demands exaggeration, caricature.

[2]

Parody, indeed, is the pitfall of all pastiche. Even Mr. Max Beerbohm, extraordinarily susceptible and responsive to style as he is, did not escape it in that delightful little book of his wherein, some years ago, he imitated many of our contemporary authors. I can think of but a single instance which faithfully reproduces not only the language but almost the spirit of the authors imitated—M. Marcel Proust’s volume of “Pastiches et Mélanges.” The only stricture one can pass on it, if stricture it be, is that M. Proust’s Balzac and St. Simon and the rest are a little “more Royalist than the King,” a little more like Balzac and St. Simon than the originals themselves; I mean, a little too intensely, too concentratedly, Balzac and St. Simon. But Marcel Proust is one of my prejudices. To say that his first two books, “Swann” and “Les Jeunes Filles,” have given me more exquisite pleasure than anything in modern French literature would not be enough—I should have to say, in all modern literature. Mrs. Wharton, I see

from the “Letters,” sent Henry James a copy of “Swann” when it first came out (1918): I wish we could have had his views of it. It offers another kind of psychology from Henry James’s, and he would probably have said, as he was fond of saying, that it had more “saturation” than “form.” But I am wandering from my subject of pastiche.

I was present one afternoon at a curious experiment in theatrical pastiche. This was a rehearsal[3] of a rehearsal of the screen scene from The School for Scandal, which was supposed to be directed by Sheridan himself. Rather a complicated affair, because Miss Lilian Braithwaite was supposed to be playing not Lady Teazle but Mrs. Abington playing Lady Teazle, Mr. Gilbert Hare had to play Mr. Parsons playing Sir Peter, and so forth—histrionics, so to speak, raised to the second power. To tell the truth, I think the middle term tended to fall out. It was easy enough for the players to make themselves up after the originals in the Garrick Club picture of the screen scene, but how these originals spoke or what their personal peculiarities were, on or off the stage, who shall now say? There you have the difference between fact and fiction. Lady Teazle and Sir Peter, having no existence save in the book of the play, are producible from it at any time, as “real” as they ever were, but Mrs. Abington and Mr. Parsons are not fixed in a book, and their

reality died with them. Naturally enough the actual scene written by Sheridan “went” with very much greater force than the setting of conversations, interruptions, etc., in which it was embedded, for the simple reason that the one part had had the luck to be imagined by Sheridan and the other had not. But as a pastiche this new part, written round the old, seemed to me on the whole very well done; there was hardly a word that Sheridan and his friends might not have said. Just one, however, there noticeably was. Mr. Gerald du Maurier (as[4] Sheridan) was made to tell Mr. Leon Quartermaine (as Charles) that, in his laughter at the discovery of Lady Teazle, he was not to expect the “sympathy of the audience.” That, I feel sure, was an anachronism, a bit of quite modern theatrical lingo. I should guess that it came to us from the French, who are fond of talking of a rôle sympathique. Mr. du Maurier, if any one, must remember his father’s delightful sketch of English people shopping in Normandy, when the artful shopwoman is cajoling

a foolish-faced Englishman with “le visage de monsieur m’est si sympathique.” The Italian simpatico is, of course, even more hard-worked. I felt sure, then, as I say, about the anachronism; but I am quite aware that it is never safe to trust to one’s instinct in these matters. It is by no means impossible that some one may triumphantly produce against me a newspaper or book of 1775 which speaks of “the sympathy of the audience.” The unexpected in these cases does occasionally happen.

And certainly any one who has tried his hand at a pastiche of a dead and gone author will have frequently been astonished, not at the antiquity but at the modernity of the style. Language changes less rapidly than we are apt to suppose. The bad writers seem to get old-fashioned earliest—because, I suppose, they yield most easily to ephemeral tricks of speech. For example, Fanny Burney, who, I cannot but think, wrote a bad style, and in her later books (as Macaulay pointed out) a kind of debased[5] Johnsonese, is now decidedly old-fashioned. But Jane Austen, whose style, though scarcely brilliant, was never bad, is not. A modern Mr. Collins would not talk of “elegant females”—but even then he was put forward as ridiculous for doing so. Jane was fond of “the chief of the day” and “the harp was bringing.” These phrases are passées, but I doubt if you will find many others.

Our sense of the past, in fact, may illude us. And that reminds me of Henry James’s solitary pastiche, his posthumous (and fragmentary) “Sense of the Past.” The “past” he deals with is, roughly, the Jane Austen period, and I think his language would very much have astonished Jane Austen. For one thing, they didn’t colloquially emphasize in her day as Henry James makes them do. I take a page at random:—“He mustn’t be too terribly clever for us, certainly! We enjoy immensely your being so extraordinary; but I’m sure you’ll take it in good part if I remind you that there is a limit.” Is this our ultra-modern Mrs. Brookenham speaking? No, it is Mrs. Midmore, somewhere about 1820. To be more exact, it is Henry James speaking with the emphasis that always abounded in his novels and his letters and his talk. Again: “I can’t keep off that strangeness of my momentary lapse.” That doesn’t sound to my ear a bit like 1820. Again: “It must have been one of your pale passions, as you call ’em, truly—so that even if her ghost does

hover I shan’t be afraid of so very thin a shade.”[6] Note the “’em,” the author’s timid little speck of antique colour, but note also how the speaker carries on the “ghost” figure—in a way that is signed “Henry James, 19—” all over. The fact is, Henry James, with his marked, individual, curiously “modern” style, was the last man to express himself in an alien style, particularly the more simple style of an earlier age. To write a pure pastiche you must begin by surrendering, putting clean away your own personality—how otherwise are you to take on another’s?

I have no illusions about the essays in pastiche to be found in the earlier of the following papers. If they do not always fall below parody, they never rise above it. Occasional fragments of authentic text will be recognized at a glance. “These Things are but Toyes.”

[7]

AN ARISTOTELIAN FRAGMENT

In the neighbourhood of Wardour Street, where the princes of the film hold their Court, a legislative code for film-making, a “Poetics” of the film, by some maestro di color che sanno, has long been yearned for. If only, they say, if only the maestro himself, the great Aristotle, had been alive to write it! After all, kinematograph is Greek, isn’t it? It seems to cry aloud, somehow, for its code by the great Greek authority. Well, they little knew what luck was in store for them!

To-day comes a startling piece of news from the East. A certain Major Ferdinand M. Pinto, O.B.E., R.E., whether on military duty or on furlough the report does not say, has been sojourning with the monks of Mount Porthos, and, in the most singular manner, has discovered in the possession of his hosts a precious treasure of which they were entirely ignorant. It was a Greek manuscript, and, as the Reverend Prior laughingly observed, it was Greek to them. It seems that—such is the licence of modern manners even in monasteries—the monks have lately taken to smoking, and to using what in lay circles are called “spills.” Now on the spill[8] which the Major was lighting for his cigar there suddenly stared him in the face the words

and the name Agathon thrilled him with memories of a certain Oxford quad, with dear “old Strachan” annoying the Master by wondering why Agathon should have said anything so obvious as that “it is probable that many things should happen contrary to probability.” To examine the spill, all the spills collected, was the work of a moment. They proved, at a glance, to be an entirely unknown MS. of the “Poetics,” more complete even than the Parisian, and with new readings transcending even the acutest conjectures of Vahlen. But, greatest find of all, there was disclosed—though with unfortunate lacunæ caused by the monks’ cigars—an entirely new chapter inquiring into the structure of the Moving Picture Drama. Through the courtesy of the Pseudo-Hellenic Society I am favoured with a translation of this chapter, and a few passages, which seemed of more general interest, are here extracted.

“As we have said,” the MS. begins, “it is a question whether tragedy is to be judged in itself or in relation also to the audience. But it is another story (ἄλλος λόγος) with the moving pictures. For it is not clear whether they have an ‘itself’ at all, or, if they have, where this self is to be found, whether on the screen, or in the lens of the camera,[9] or in the head of the photographic artist. Whereas there is no doubt (save in very inclement weather) about the audience. They are to be judged, then, solely in relation to the audience. And, for this reason, they do not resemble tragedy, whose action, we said, must be whole, consisting of a beginning, a middle, and an end. For the audience may arrive at the end of a picture play, and though, in due time, the beginning will come round again, the audience may not have the patience to wait for it. Some audiences prefer to arrive in the middle and to proceed to the end, and then to end with the beginning. By this means the general sense of confusion in human affairs is confirmed in the picture

theatre, and in this sense, but only in this sense, the picture drama may be said to be, like tragedy, an imitation of life.

“Nor can it be said of picture drama, as it was of tragedy, that the element of plot is more important than the element of character. For here neither element is important. The important element now is motion. Any plot will serve the picture poet’s purpose (indeed most of them take them ready-made from those prose epics known as ‘shockers’), and any characters likewise (it will suffice if these be simplified types or ‘masks’). The essence of the matter is that all should be kept moving. And as moving objects are best seen to be moving when they are moving quickly, the picture poet will contrive that his horses shall always, as Homer says,[10] devour the ground and his motor cars be ‘all out.’... Unity of plot—when there is a plot—does not, as some persons think, consist in the unity of the hero. It consists in the final dwelling together in unity of the hero and his bride. Final must be understood as posterior to the pursuit of the bride by other men, who may be either white or red. Red men are better, as more unbridled in their passions

than white. As Æschylus first introduced a second actor in tragedy, so an American poet, whose name is too barbarous to be written in Greek, introduced the red man in picture drama....

“With regard to the hero and his bride, though their characters should, as in tragedy, be morally good (χρηστά), it is chiefly necessary that their persons should be kinematographically good or good on the film. For at every peripety of the action they must become suddenly enlarged by the device of the photographer, so that every furrow of the knitted brow and every twitch of the agitated mouth is shown as large as life, if not larger. It is, in fact, by this photographic enlargement that the critical turns of the action are marked and distinguished, in the absence of the tragic element of diction. Where the tragic actor talks big, the picture player looks big. Nevertheless, the element of diction is not entirely wanting. Sentences (which should comprise as many solecisms as possible) may be shown on the screen, descriptive of what the players are doing or saying. But the more skilful[11] players habitually say something else than what is thus imputed to them, thereby giving the audience the additional interest of conjecturing what they

actually do say in place of what they ought to have said.

... “Picture poetry is a more philosophical and liberal thing than history; for history expresses the particular, but picture poetry the not too particular. The particular is, for example, what Alcibiades did or suffered. The not too particular is what Charlie Chaplin did or suffered. But the moving pictures do to some extent show actual happenings, in order to reassure people by nature incredulous. For what has not happened we do not at once feel sure to be possible; but what has happened is manifestly possible; otherwise it would not have happened. On the whole, however, as the tragic poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities, the picture poet should go, as Agathon says, one better, and aim at improbable impossibilities.”...

[12]

MR. SHAKESPEARE DISORDERLY

At the meeting preliminary to “Warriors’ Day” I was wending my way along the corridor of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, when I encountered an amphibious-looking figure with the mien of one of Mr. W. W. Jacobs’s people, but attired in the classic tunic and sandals of a Greek of the best period. Knowing that the meeting was to include all sorts and conditions of theatrical men, I taxed him with being somebody out of Orphée aux Enfers or La Belle Hélène. He said it was not a bad shot, but, as a matter of fact, he was a ferryman, “saving your honour’s reverence, name o’ Charon.” “A ferryman?” said I; “then you must be from the Upper River, Godstow way.” “No, sir,” he answered, “I ply my trade on the Styx, and I’ve brought over a boatful of our tip-toppers—our intelli-gents-you-are they calls ’em in the Elysian Fields—to this ’ere meetin’. Precious dry work it is, too, sir,” he added, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Where are they?” I asked in high excitement. “In this ’ere box, sir, where the

management have allowed them to sit incog.” “And who, my good fellow, are they?” “Well,[13] sir, let me see; there’s Mr. William Shakespeare, one of the most pop’lar of our gents and the neatest hand at nectar punch with a toast in it. Then there’s Mr. David Garrick, little Davy, as they calls ’im (though the other one, ’im who’s always a-slingin’ stones at the giants, isn’t no great size, neither), and there’s ’is friend Dr. Samuel Johnson, a werry harbitrary cove, and there’s Mrs. Siddons, an ’oly terror of a woman, sir, as you might say. Likewise, there’s Mr. Sheridan and Mr. Edmund Kean, both on ’em gents with a powerful thirst—just like mine this blessed mornin’, sir.” At this second reminder I gave him wherewithal to slake his thirst, directed him to the bar, and, as soon as he was out of sight, slipped noiselessly into the back of the box, where I hid behind the overcoats.

Mr. Shakespeare was beckoning Mrs. Siddons to his side. “Come hither, good mistress Sal” (this to the majestic Sarah, the Tragic Muse!), “and prythee, dearest chuck, sit close, for ’tis a nipping and an eager air, and poor Will’s a-cold.”

Mrs. S.—Sir, you are vastly obleeging, but where’s the chair?

Dr. Johnson.—Madam, you who have so often occasioned a want of seats to other people, will the more easily excuse the want of one yourself.

Mr. Shakespeare.—Marry come up! Wouldst not sit in my lap, Sal? ’Tis not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church door, but ’twill serve.

Mrs. S. (scandalized but dignified).—Sir, I am[14] sensible of the honour, but fear my train would incommode the Immortal Bard.

Mr. Shakespeare.—Oh, Immortal Bard be——

Mr. Garrick (hastily).—I perceive, sir, a stir among the company. The gentleman who is taking the chair has notable eyebrows; he must be——

Mr. Shakespeare.—Master George Robey. I’ve heard of him and his eyebrows.

Mr. G.—No, no, ’tis Sir Arthur Pinero, an actor-dramatist like yourself, sir.

Mr. Shakespeare.—Beshrew me, but I would hear the chimes at midnight with him and drink a health unto his knighthood. (Sings.) “And let me the canakin clink, clink, and——”

The House (indignantly).—Sh-h-h!

Mr. Shakespeare.—A murrain on these gallants! They have no ear for a catch and should get them to a monastery. But I’ll sit like my grandsire, carved in alabaster. Who’s the young spark, now speaking?

Dr. J. (shocked).—The young spark, sir, is His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales.

Mr. Sheridan.—Egad! This reminds me of old times, but the young man is not a bit like my friend Prinny. And though I managed Drury Lane, I never got Prinny on my stage.

Dr. J.—Sir, your Prinny never had so good a cause to be there. He only thought he fought in the wars; but this Prince is a real ex-Service man,[15] pleading for the ex-Service men, his comrades in arms. He has been a soldier, and not a man of us in this box but wishes he could say as much for himself. Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier; but he will think less meanly if he can help those who have. That is the very purpose of this numerous assembly.

Mr. Shakespeare.—Oh, most learned doctor, a Daniel come to judgment! I’ faith I am most heartily of thy mind, and would drink a loving toast to the young Prince and another to the ex-Service fellows, and eke a third to this—how runs it?—this numerous assembly. (Sings.) “And let me the canakin clink, clink, and——”

The House (in a frenzy of indignation).—Sh-h-h! Turn him out! (Hisses.)

Mr. Shakespeare.—What! the “bird”! Well-a-day, this isn’t the first time they’ve hissed my Ghost.

Mr. Kean.—Sir, they’ve hissed me!

Mr. Shakespeare.—Ha! say’st thou, honest Ned! But thou wast a jackanapes to let thyself be caught with the Alderman’s wife and——

Mrs. S. (icily).—Mr. Shakespeare, there are ladies present.

Mr. Sheridan (whispering to Dr. J.).—But what does little Davy here, doctor? He has always been represented as very saving.