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 plausiblepastichesare 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.
Parody, indeed, is the pitfall of allpastiche. 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 ofpastiche.
I was present one afternoon at a curious experiment in theatricalpastiche. This was a rehearsalofa rehearsal of the screen scene fromThe 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 apastichethis new part, written round the old, seemed to me on the whole very well done; there was hardly a word that Sheridan and his friendsmightnot have said. Just one, however, there noticeably was. Mr. Gerald du Maurier (asSheridan) 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 arôle 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 Italiansimpaticois, 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 apasticheof 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 debasedJohnsonese, 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 arepassées, 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 solitarypastiche, 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 betooterribly 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 thereisa 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.”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 purepasticheyou 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 inpasticheto 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.”