Page:Men of Letters, Scott, 1916.djvu/208

182 182 BEAU BEERBOHM of them. I, their host, often waylay them and try to commune with them, but always they glide past me ; and how gracefully they glide, these ghosts I It is a pleasure to watch them. It is a lesson in deportment. And let not the reader, that grand word " lesson " taking him back to a sense of the proprieties, allow its knell to shatter Zuleika as though it were nothing but bric-a-brac. Dandiacal enough, the book has yet a human heart. The danger, of course, was that the artifice would get vitiated and collapse. Can you make a meal of marrons glaces? Or sit out a three-hour ballet? That Mr. Beerbohm persuades you to these excesses is due in part to his exhaustless series of devices for freshening the atmosphere. Clio and Socrates are among them, and Mrs. Annie Swan, and a French maid called Melisande (engaged to a waiter in the Cafe Tourtel, called, of course, Pelleas), and a bottle of Cold Mixture and a Rhodes Scholar. Mr. Beerbohm is an even better juggler than Zuleika. Just as she and Cinquevalli and such great artists will introduce a second artifice, their "business," to heighten the effect of the first, and then a third, that of the stupid assistant, to sustain the second, so Mr. Beerbohm unpockets missile after coloured missile and tosses them incessantly up to keep the first iridescent fancy hovering excitingly in mid-air. That is half his secret; but the other, and the bigger, is the fact that it is all based on a strict study of natural laws. The bubble is the same shape as the earth ; and the reflections that gleam there are curiously like the delicate distortions we call truth. " Your way of speech has what is called the literary flavour," says the Duke to Zuleika. " Ah, yes," she says, "that is an unfortunate trick I caught from a writer, a Mr. Beerbohm, who once sat next to me at dinner. But my experience of life is drawn from life itself." So is the book's behind its literary flavour.