The Chameleon on Colours

Some Notes on Parody as a Form of Criticism

JOHN PEALE BISHOP

A. B. WALKLEY, in his Pastiche an Prejudice, laments that so many authors who aim at the pastiche arrive at parody. Only the pastiche of genius, he says, ever succeeds in faintly plausible mimicry of another writer, of another age. Max Beerbohm, for all his responsiveness to style, finds a pitfall in parody; Marcel Proust, who wins the fairest measure of Mr. Walkley's praise, is likewise more royalist than the king, more like St. Simon than the St. Simon originals. The literary chameleon, having come among the rosebuds, blushes to a deep crimson; under the green leaves, he becomes greener than they.

Now this, it seems to me, is the very splendor of parody: that one sees the work parodied through a concentrating glass, dazzlingly. If, as we have been told, great art "attains its effects by something not unlike caricature," it is the business of the mimic to intensify these effects and so, quite nonchalantly and with the slightest possible effort, produce a caricature. The successful parodist is nothing if not critical; but if he is wise he will go about his dirty work with something of that off-hand, disarming manner with which Charlie Chaplin greets inopportune policemen.

One reason, I think, why Beerbohm is so successful in parody is that he is always able to maintain an unfailing humility toward his victim's style and an unblushing impudence before his ideas. He assumes another man's cloak apparently without disarranging a single fold; then proceeds to so exaggerate the awesome pose that both attitude and raiment become ridiculous. Whereupon he walks away quietly with a pretty gesture. Thus in his Sequelula to "The Dynasts" we find Hardy's tortuous and crabbed blank verse reproduced, and nothing added but the underscoring of an occasional word; in the face of Hardy's sinister and piteous view of things, the dainty Max smiles unflinchingly.

Nothing is,

Out of the vast immensities

Where these things flit,

Irrequisite

In a minor key

To the tune of the sempiternal It.

The manner of the choruses from the Dynasts is faithfully preserved, but the deliberate flatness of "the sempiternal It" makes further comment, either on style or substance, an affront.

Without a Disguise

THE usual trouble with the American Jmaker of parody is that he forgets it can't be done without a makeup; he bounces upon the stage without pausing in the dressing room to have his false whiskers put on. Donald Ogden Stewart's Parody Outline of History is outrageously funny, but Mr. Stewart is too continuously present. When, as in the initial essay, he allows William Lyon Phelps to blow his own pink balloon to the bursting point, without once running forward with a pricking pin for the windbag or a bludgeon for Professor Phelps' head, he is admirable. But the episode after the manner of Edith Wharton does not deceive us for a moment: it is Mr. Stewart commenting on Mrs. Wharton.

Louis Untermeyer is a witty, penetrating and generous critic; he is a versatile and skilful parodist. And Mr. Untermeyer the Critic and Mr. Untermeyer the Parodist .have lately collaborated on an amusing series of sketches called Heavens! Softly working together, they have produced a hybrid form; first one speaks and then the other. And, • lest you should weary, there are puns.

Let us grant at once that for such a hybrid his frame-work is good. He supposes, by what effort of the imagination I know not, that he is dead, and transported into a colourless Limbo. There he is presented with a choice of Heavens, each the fulfilled vision of some literary god, admired, worshipped maybe, on earth: the Heaven of Queer Stars, where G. K. Chesterton, in his dual personality of Santa Claus and Lucifer, sits exchanging paradoxes; the Heaven of the Time Machine, where H. G. Wells delivers himself of grand, vague ideas; the Heaven of Lost Memorre, with George Moore peering through an infinite succession of keyholes; the Heaven above Storysende, where one more of the medieval incarnations of James Branch Cabell follows aiLer an unattainable end; the Heaven of Mean Streets, where the younger American Realists are, and H. L. Menken. Into each the critic wanders curiously, under an angelic guide. Upon each he pronounces a desperate judgment and in the end flees incontinently, I know not where—perhaps back to earth to read more books.

Mr. Untermeyer's Parodies

MR. UNTERMEYER'S presentation of these personages and their visions is at all times witty and diverting and is, I dare say, just enough. I am not disposed to quarrel with his critical judgments, though I should like to ask if the Cabellian world was not devised more for the sake of the Lyricist at the piece's close than for Ornitz' sake or Daniel's. If so, it seems to me unfair to go to so much trouble in order to introduce ballades and triolets into the text as prose, a device Cabell has used but seldom, and then as a conscious stunt.

Considered as pure parody, however, there are two points on which I should like exceedingly to quarrel with Mr. Untermeyer. The first is that he does not seem to me to have caught the exact rhythm of any of his victims, except possibly Mr. Menken. The other is his habit of punning. I am no snob in the matter of paronomasia, but I am willing to believe that George Moore would rather a thousand times that his first editions should be dropped tomorrow, and forever, from all collectors' catalogues; would even rather that his early poems should come into general circulation, than have written of Yeats: "I liked his later angularities particularly. To what instrument can I compare them ? I suppose an oboe is fairly accurate—in my younger days I would have summarized his writing in English rather than in Gaelic by calling it the music of a Celt learning to play the Anglo-Saxophone." And surely Mr. Menken would never have interrupted so sonorous a peroration for the sake of an inept pun on the name of Mark Twain.

The group of parodies in verse with which the volume closes are more successful. Here Mr. Untermeyer is on familiar ground, and the rhythms of each poet are woven with unerring fingers. If the critic speaks too explicitly in the parody of Ezra Pound, and goes sound asleep during the aping of T. S. Eliot, there remains the very fine work in which Sandburg, Frost, Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay and Sara Teasdale are disposed of. And with the exception of the poem supposedly attributed to Edna St. Vincent Millay, which is a patchwork of filched phrases, the rest are of but slightly lower quality.