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259 ians permanently in his debt. University of Iowa Frederick P. Vi. McDowell 3. Scrubbing Max's Doorstep John Felstiner. The Lies of Art: Max Beerbohm's Parody and Caricature (NY: Knopf, 1972J. $8.95· J. G. Riewald (edJT" The Surprise of Excellence; Modern Essays on Max Beerbohm (Hamden, Conn; Archon, 1974). $12.50. In Beerbohm's copy of Victoria's Leaves from a Journal of Our Life in the Highlands appears the Queen's handwriting; "For Mr. Beerbohm, the never-sufficiently-to-be-studied writer. . . . From his Sovereign VICTORIA R. I. Balmoral, 1899." It's a joke. Beerbohm wrote it himself, chirography being one of the many forms of expression his caricaturing found. ln The Surprise of Excellence nineteen critics and scholars take "Victoria's" apposition seriously, among them Louis Kronenberger , Harold Nicholson, Edmund Wilson, Derek Stanford, Evelyn Waugh, S. N. Behrman, John Updike, W. H. Auden, F. W. Dupée, and David Cecil. Their articles exemplify Beerbohm's trial with the past thirty-three years of literary history. The surprise is not excellence, but how insufficiently Beerbohm has been, up to now, studied. The articles are presented chronologically, a dull arrangement. More interesting and illuminating would have been groupings which identify the three kinds of essays included: sheer appreciation, appreciation mixed with criticism, and full scholarly analysis. Those who simply appreciate had often known Beerbohm personally and contribute a sidelight now irreplaceable. But except for Waugh, they condescend to Beerbohm, even make him trivialj as if, in order to show esteem, they must reduce him, just as the effect of Beerbohm's parody was to diminish the originals which he esteemed. The critic winces when reading that Beerbohm never questioned the value of art or that Zuleika Dobson is a combination of "comedy and prettiness" equalled only by The Rape of the Lock. Those who bring critical tools to Beerbohm have asked what parody signifies and raises our sense of parody's place in literature as well as Beerbohm's status as an aesthete or an Edwardian . Auden, for instance, argues against the assumption that a writer who is all mask, like Beerbohm, is therefore unseen. What we see, he contends, is aestheticism and morality married; Beerbohm intuitively uncovers the moral failings of others in the caricature and parody of which he makes a crafted art. In exposing others, Auden says, Beerbohm seems cruel, but there is no brutality, malice, or pettiness. 260 This blunt categorizing invites response. What kind of artistic cruelty or malice underlies a parody or caricature? How is parody a method for Beerbohm to define himself as an artist? Auden and Wilson and Updike, by treating Beerbohm as a serious artist, bring us to the edge of questions like these. And suddenly we discover that Beerbohm is a hardly-explored puzzle. The best essays in Riewald address themselves to the conflicting pieces of the puzzle. Katherine Mix discusses the love-hate relation with Shaw. Beerbohm admired Shaw's "exquisite machine, his brain," yet deplored the implied enginery, its "inflexibility ." Behrman emphasizes Beerbohm's concern about madness and sanity. Dupee notices Beerbohm's "life-long obsession with the tedium of bigness." David Stevenson writes of Beerbohm's "ironic type of candor," a paradox sorely needing explanation - an explanation which would lead directly to the center of Beerbohm as artist. And that Shaw-bestowed epithet "incomparable"; a word of bondage? of apt characterization? an idea which Beerbohm spent a half-century trying to live up to? McElderry calls it "appropriate." Mix says that Beerbohm never "escaped" it. Muriel Spark, quoted by Stanford, substituted "the insufferable Max. " Perhaps the overall puzzle is how Beerbohm carried off so much against the establishment and then, because of it, found himself welcomed into that establishment. He parodies creative art, and learns he is counted a creative writer. He writes an ironic essay on the number of people currently knighted; later he is knighted. He tells his first biographer, Bohun Lynch, to write a very little biography: "Oh, keep it little! - in due proportion to its theme." And yet he puts the opposite suggestion in Victoria's handwriting. The only fully analytical attempt to put the pieces together is by John...

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