Assorted Prose (32 page)

M
AX IN
V
ERSE
,
Rhymes and Parodies
, by Max Beerbohm, edited by J. G. Riewald. 167 pp. Stephen Greene Press, 1963.

Into the present twilight of light verse an oblique ray has entered from the unexpected direction of Vermont, where the Stephen Greene Press, a Brattleboro outfit, has published (handsomely)
Max in Verse
, a collection, painstakingly scavenged from widely scattered sources, of everything from the pen of Max Beerbohm that can be construed, however remotely, as a poem. The construing and scavenging, along with much annotating, have been performed by Professor J. G. Riewald, Beerbohm’s bibliographer. His labors have been heroic—in fact, considering the fragility of his subject’s claim to the title of poet, mock-heroic. The literary oddments of Shakespeare, were some to turn up, could not be more reverently handled. Eighty-four items by Beerbohm, many of them tiny, are buttressed fore and aft by (1) acknowledgments to forty-eight institutions and individuals for their help; (2) a foreword by S. N. Behrman, one of America’s leading “Maximilians,” to use a term that apparently has the same relation to Beerbohm that “Mohammedans” does to Mohammed; (3) a preface by Professor Riewald; (4) thirty pages, in eight-point Baskerville, of sources and annotations; (5) an index of titles and first lines; and (6) another index, of “Persons,” ranging from

through

to

Of the four-score-and-four poems so elaborately enshrined in print, twenty or so were jotted by Max on the flyleaves or in the margins of books, two were scribbled in letters to friends, and one was found in his top hat. Five are in Latin; seven are sonnets of which Beerbohm, playing a game with Edmund Gosse or the William Rothensteins, wrote only alternate or third lines; one is a collection of spurious country saws (e.g., “It isn’t the singing kettle that scalds the cook’s hand” and “He that hath no teeth hath no toothache” and “A dumb woman sees more things than a blind man hears”); and another is a four-line epitaph for Bernard Shaw recited to two professors at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, in Washington, D.C., by an inmate, Mr. Ezra Pound, who had learned the quatrain at Max’s knee when they were neighbors in Rapallo—a remarkable modern instance of the oral poetic tradition, employing none but the most distinguished personnel. The longest items in
Max in Verse
are the pseudo-Shakespearean burlesque “Savonarola,” already available in the book
Seven Men
, and “A Sequelula to
The Dynasts
,” a blank-verse parody of Hardy that is woven into
A Christmas Garland
. Professor Riewald not only superfluously reprints these staples of Maxiana (as the Maximilians say), he snips from their familiar contexts several parodic snatches of Belloc and Kipling, the decadent poems of the fictional Enoch Soames, and two three-line fragments composed (in Latin and the Oxfordshire dialect) by Zuleika Dobson’s unhappy admirer the Duke of Dorset. This accounting leaves to mention a number of elegantly turned ballades, rondeaux, and triolets; some limericks no better than most; a few infallibly
deft takeoffs on Kipling, Yeats, and Tom Moore; two relatively heavy and personal ballads; and, here and there, redeemed from quaint corners, delicate as fossils, epigrams marking the flitting imprint of Max’s daintily waspish temper.

One might suppose that a collection so curious, a portentously served potpourri of private jokes and
déjà vu
, would add up to a worthless book. But
Max in Verse
is precious in both senses; it is both overrefined and valuable. Its value, which is felt in terms of delight, can perhaps be understood through some consideration of light verse.

Modern light verse, as it was created by Calverley, calls into question the standards of triviality that would judge it. When we open Calverley’s
Fly Leaves
to the first page, and read

a universe of importance is pulled down. The conceits and figures by which men have agreed to swear and live are tripped up by metrics, flattened by the simple inopportuneness of rhyme.

Language is finite and formal; reality is infinite and formless. Order is comic; chaos is tragic.
^†
By rhyming, language calls attention to its own
mechanical nature and relieves the represented reality of seriousness. In this sense, rhyme and allied regularities like alliteration and assonance assert a magical control over things and constitute a spell. When children, in speaking, accidentally rhyme, they laugh, and add, “I’m a poet / And don’t know it,” as if to avert the consequences of a stumble into the supernatural. The position of rhyme in Western literature is more precarious than is popularly supposed. The Greeks and Romans were innocent of it, and it appears in Latin poetry as an adjunct of the Mass, probably as an aid to the memory of the worshippers. Rhymed sacred poetry, of which classical examples are the “Stabat Mater” and the “Dies Irae,” dates from the fourth century; for a thousand years rather pell-mell rhyme and alliteration dominated verse. As the sea of faith ebbed and consciousness of chaos broke in again upon civilization, rhymelessness returned—in England, as both the deliberate revival of quantitative measure sponsored by Gabriel Harvey and the spontaneous ascendance of the pentameter blank verse invented by Surrey and developed by Marlowe and Shakespeare. The bulk of great English poetry, from Shakespeare to Milton, from Wordsworth to Wallace Stevens, is unrhymed. And those poets of the first rank, like Pope, who habitually rhyme do so unobtrusively—that is, Pope’s couplets turn on unspectacular monosyllables; there is no glorying in rhyme, as there is in a medieval poet like John Skelton or a modern light-verse writer like Ogden Nash. The last considerable poets who preferred to rhyme are Emily Dickinson, Yeats, and Housman. Emily Dickinson’s rhyming is often off-rhyme, Yeats was a magician in pose, and Housman’s verse verges on being light. When all the minority reports are in, the trend of our times is overwhelmingly against formal regularity of even the most modest sort; in the
Cantos
, Pound has passed beyond free verse into a poetry totally arhythmic. Our mode is realism, “realistic” is synonymous with “prosaic,” and the prose writer’s duty is to suppress not only rhyme but any verbal accident that would mar the textural correspondence to the massive, onflowing impersonality that has supplanted the chiming heavens of the saints. In this situation, light verse, an isolated acolyte, tends the
thin flame of formal magic and tempers the inhuman darkness of reality with the comedy of human artifice. Light verse precisely lightens; it lessens the gravity of its subject.

Weigh, for example, the opening lines of Swift’s “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift”:

When the same expressions are recast in prose, with the rhymes suppressed, the pert effect turns sombre:

The melancholy of the passage survives transposition into blank verse:

And even pentameter couplets permit, in their length and variability, a certain speaking seriousness of tone:

Pentameter is the natural speaking line in English; hexameter loses track of itself, and tetrameter chops up thoughts comically. Tetrameter is the natural light-verse line.

This couplet was written by Beerbohm in a copy of More’s
Utopia
, and most of the poems in
Max in Verse
are footnotes, of some sort, to serious literature:

On the verso of the title page of a copy of
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, Max, while still at Oxford, wrote a “Ballade de la Vie Joyeuse,” beginning:

Thus the neo-hedonism of the nineties is wickedly satirized merely by being too neatly put.
Max in Verse
is an enchanted island of a book, and its Ariel is a hovering, invisible, luminous insistence on the comedy (above and beyond the wit of the precious little that is being said)
of versification itself
. Beerbohm, following the lead of his master Calverley, whose parody of Browning abounds in tormented lines, repeatedly frames lines whose scansion is an absurd triumph of pedantry:

*

Examples abound: one final one. On the copyright page of his first book,
The Works of Max Beerbohm
, Max found the imprint

Beneath it, he wrote in pen:

The effortless a-b-a-b rhyming, the balance of “plain” and “nicely,” the need for nicety in pronouncing “Iambically” to scan—this is quintessential light verse, a twitting of the starkest prose into perfect form, a marriage of earth with light, and quite magical. Indeed, were I a high priest of literature, I would have this quatrain made into an amulet and wear it about my neck, for luck.

 
NO USE TALKING

L
ETTERS OF
J
AMES
A
GEE TO
F
ATHER
F
LYE
. 232 pp. Braziller, 1962.