has recently re-read Max Beerbohms *Christmas Garland* (1912), a collection of 17 mostly affectionate and brilliantly executed parodies of the great literary names of the day. Of these, some are still great names (Henry James; Kipling; H. G. Wells; Joseph Conrad; George Bernard Shaw; Thomas Hardy); some are still known, if faded (G. K. Chesterton; Arnold Bennett; John Galsworthy; Edmund Gosse; Hilaire Belloc; George Moore; George Meredith); some have almost entirely vanished (A. C. Benson; Frank Harris; G. S. Street; Maurice Hewlett). The odd thought arises: What if the survival rate of such writers, five hundred years hence, were like that of the Classical world? What if all that survived, say, of Henry James were three copies of *Daisy Miller*, two of *Turn of the Screw*, a *Selected Tales*, and *The Bostonians*? Of Kipling, only an incomplete copy of *Plain Tales from the Hills*? Of Conrad, six copies of *The Heart of Darkness* and a scrap from the first half of *Victory*? Of Hardy, a handful of poems and two chapters from *Two on a Tower*? Of Gosse, oddly, five copies of *Father and Son*, and four pages of Merediths essay on comedy--and of all the rest, nothing at all, except for these parodies, and the short excerpts from the writers real works in the fine introduction by N. John Hall (the scholiast)? What a different picture it would yield--no *Portrait of a Lady* or *Wings of the Dove*; no *Major Barbara*; no *Old Wives Tale*; no Father Brown; no *Jungle Book*; no *Time Machine*; no *Lord Jim* or *Nostromo*. Scattered mentions and allusions, of course--but no texts of them. That, really is the Classical literature we have--bits only of Sappho and Alcaeus and Alcman; bits of Posidonius and Stesichorus and Xenophanes; rafts of missing plays from Aeschylus and Sophocles and Menander--on and on.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 00:03:28 +0000
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