Christmas Garland, 2017

For many years now I have made it a bit of a tradition during the Christmas season to sit down with Max Beerbohm's A Christmas Garland.  First recommended to me in a news-paper article written by Robertson Davies (reprinted here), the book took some finding, but it was worth it in every way.  If you would like to read it but would prefer to avoid scouring dusty old websites, the full text of the book is online at Project Gutenberg.

A 1990 review of Davies' Enthusiasms offhandedly remarked that "when he edges into more recent territory, Davies naturally goes for eccentrics: Nabokov, Salinger, Ivy Compton-Burnett, John Cowper Powys, Iris Murdoch, as well as minor writers who took major pains with style, like Max Beerbohm and P. G. Wodehouse."  Since 1990, of course, both Beerbohm and Wodehouse have seen significant critical rehabilitation, and a wonderful volume of Beerbohm's essays appeared in 2015 with the diabolical title The Prince of Minor Writers.  

Even after rehabilitation - after the biographies, special editions, and Teller's completion of the tale of Enoch Soames - Beerbohm is still no more than a good secret in the literary world.  But the truth is that he is just too good to be minor.  As Updike says, "minor artistry became in him a creed, a boast; like Ronald Firbank and Nathanael West, he remains readable while many mightier oeuvres gather dust. The filigree is fine, but of the purest gold."

It is not easy to selectively quote from this year's annual reading, from the chapter by H.G. W*lls entitled "Perkins and Mankind".  The excerpt will give you a sense of Beerbohm's genius at style:

It was the Christmas party at Heighton that was one of the turning-points in Perkins' life. The Duchess had sent him a three-page wire in the hyperbolical style of her class, conveying a vague impression that she and the Duke had arranged to commit suicide together if Perkins didn't "chuck" any previous engagement he had made. And Perkins had felt in a slipshod sort of way—for at this period he was incapable of ordered thought—he might as well be at Heighton as anywhere.... 

The enormous house was almost full. There must have been upwards of fifty people sitting down to every meal. Many of these were members of the family. Perkins was able to recognise them by their unconvoluted ears—the well-known Grifford ear, transmitted from one generation to another. For the rest there were the usual lot from the Front Benches and the Embassies. Evesham was there, clutching at the lapels of his coat; and the Prescotts—he with his massive mask of a face, and she with her quick, hawk-like ways, talking about two things at a time; old Tommy Strickland, with his monocle and his dropped g's, telling you what he had once said to Mr. Disraeli; Boubou Seaforth and his American wife; John Pirram, ardent and elegant, spouting old French lyrics; and a score of others. 

Perkins had got used to them by now. He no longer wondered what they were "up to," for he knew they were up to nothing whatever. He reflected, while he was dressing for dinner on Christmas night, how odd it was he had ever thought of Using them. He might as well have hoped to Use the Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses that grinned out in the last stages of refinement at him from the glazed cabinets in the drawing-rooms.... Or the Labour Members themselves.... 

True there was Evesham. He had shown an exquisitely open mind about the whole thing. He had at once grasped the underlying principles, thrown out some amazingly luminous suggestions. Oh yes, Evesham was a statesman, right enough. But had even he ever really believed in the idea of a Provisional Government of England by the Female Foundlings? 

To Perkins the whole thing had seemed so simple, so imminent—a thing that needed only a little general good-will to bring it about. And now.... Suppose his Bill had passed its Second Reading, suppose it had become Law, would this poor old England be by way of functioning decently—after all? Foundlings were sometimes naughty.... 

What was the matter with the whole human race? He remembered again those words of Scragson's that had had such a depressing effect on him at the Cambridge Union—"Look here, you know! It's all a huge nasty mess, and we're trying to swab it up with a pocket handkerchief." Well, he'd given up trying to do that....

But then there is a moment of crisis:

One of the big conifers from the park had been erected in the hall, and this, after dinner, was found to be all lighted up with electric bulbs and hung with packages in tissue paper. 

The Duchess stood, a bright, feral figure, distributing these packages to the guests. 

Perkins' name was called out in due course and the package addressed to him was slipped into his hand. He retired with it into a corner. Inside the tissue-paper was a small morocco leather case. Inside that was a set of diamond and sapphire sleeve-links—large ones.
He stood looking at them, blinking a little. 

He supposed he must put them on. But something in him, some intractably tough bit of his old self, rose up protesting—frantically. 

If he couldn't Use these people, at least they weren't going to Use him! 

"No, damn it!" he said under his breath, and, thrusting the case into his pocket, slipped away unobserved.

But H.G. W*lls comes to the rescue:

He flung himself into a chair in his bedroom and puffed a blast of air from his lungs.... Yes, it had been a narrow escape. He knew that if he had put those beastly blue and white things on he would have been a lost soul.... 

"You've got to pull yourself together, d'you hear?" he said to himself. "You've got to do a lot of clear, steady, merciless thinking—now, to-night. You've got to persuade yourself somehow that, Foundlings or no Foundlings, this regeneration of mankind business may still be set going—and by you." 

He paced up and down the room, fuming. How recapture the generous certitudes that had one by one been slipping away from him? He found himself staring vacantly at the row of books on the little shelf by his bed. One of them seemed suddenly to detach itself—he could almost have sworn afterwards that he didn't reach out for it, but that it hopped down into his hand.... 

"Sitting Up For The Dawn"! It was one of that sociological series by which H.G. W*lls had first touched his soul to finer issues when he was at the 'Varsity. 

He opened it with tremulous fingers. Could it re-exert its old sway over him now? 

The page he had opened it at was headed "General Cessation Day," and he began to read.... 

"The re-casting of the calendar on a decimal basis seems a simple enough matter at first sight. But even here there are details that will have to be thrashed out....

The full piece is a powerful, modern take on the meaning of Christmas, as clear as the black snow in a photographic negative