The Useless Art: A Refined Sampling

Bell it was who pointed out that only the civilised artificiality distinguished him the barbarian. To the Blooms which he lived (and which Lawrence so much destested) thesis was an especially one; certainly it attracted respect than it does now. "," I would guess, is a dead it connotes the precious, the and the dilletantish. But it is with us, perhaps a little

fact that people publish which are very refined gives interesting support to Bell's . Parody, except in the rare where it is vicious or satiric, useful or even destructively purpose. Few people use it a writer's reputation, or to build it up. It is just fun, a sophisticated and artificial literary exercise, shouldn't need any other being.

Dwight MacDonald must have thoroughly enjoyable time his nearly 600 pages of ; they do indeed stretch Chaucer to Beerbohm--and Anyone who has read a number of medieval will no doubt find Chaucer's of Sir Thopas delightful, but I that MacDonald's interest purely historical. Beerbohm other figure of the title--is matter: he is unquestion the greatest of the parodists. (for instance), a take Henry James' later work, is raordinarily engaging piece of ; it begins:

it hardly was, that it all and unbegullingly wasn't for likes" of him--poor decent --to rap out queries the owner of the to him and unsuggestive name that these days, been thrust on with such a wealth of gesture, was precisely now, as he took, with his list of New Year colfichets whatever, his way to the great palace, fairly flicked his with the sense of his never so let himself in, as he phrased it, without letting any by the same token, out.

anthology includes also a Beerbohm parody of which is clever, but not funny, a "sequelula" to Hardy's , which is both. And, for no understood reason, there are of Arnold Bennett, Marle and Richard Le Gallienne, historically interesting. There is even a Beerbohm parody of Beerbohm: ..."I write for a weekly paper and call myself 'We.' But the stress of anonymity overwhelms me. I belong to the Beerbohm period. I have tumbled into the dark waters of current journalism, and am glad to sign my name, Max Beerbohm." Zulelka Dobson appeared in a time of wordspinners, and good parodists were in clover.

They were never so lucky before, and they certainly were far less adept. But to judge from MacDonald's collection, four centuries have yielded some intelligent and ingenious parodies as well as a lot of tripe. Wordsworth, Browning, and Swinburne, have paid well for their more curious mannerisms of style. J. K. Stephen cautiously and respectfully parodies Browning in a poem of "sincere flattery" that ends:

There's a Me Society down at Cambridge,

Where my works, cum notis variorum,

Are talked about; well, I require the same bridge

That Luclid took toll at as Asinorum;

And, as they have got through several ditties

I thought were as stiff as a brick-built wall,

I've composed the above, and a stiff one it is.

A bridge to stop asses at, once and for all.

And John Philips wouldn't be remembered at all if he had not had the nerve to parody Milton, which (despite the poet's odd syntax) is very difficult to do and which Phillips did rather well.

Parody may well be at its most uselessly enjoyable when the parodist is a century away from his subject. Since I bought this anthology I have grown very fond of Robert Benchley's Christmas Afternoon:

What an afternoon!... In the first place, there was the ennui. And such ennui as it was! A heavy, overpowering ennui, such as results from a participation in eight courses of steaming gravied food, topping off with salted nuts which the little old spinster Gummidge from Oak Hill said she never knew when to stop eating ... an ennui which carried with it a retinue of yawns, snarls and thinly velled insults.... The subject ought to be unmistakeable.

Benchley was associated with the New Yorker, and as MacDonald points out, so also were nearly all the good parodists of this century: Peter de Vries, Wolcott Gibbs, Frank Sullivan, and E. B. White. Their victims' language is pleasantly familiar, and for that modern parodies seem the funniest. One probably has to be a kind of literary snob to appreciate parody anyway, and although we are often told solemnly that parody must be funny in itself and not just because it mocks something, it is very satisfying to recognise a small and particular bit of cleverness. Of the contemporary rash of parodies Benchley's (again) are the most effective; they are gentle and charming as his stories. One of them has H. L. Mencken reviewing George Jean Nathan, and vice-versa. Mencken on Nathan:

...There is a current and quite pre-posterous impression that Nathan's hold on the intellectual booberle is a sensual one. He is supposed to titillate their nerve centers, causing them to jump. More palpaple tosh than this has not been formed a part of the public superstition since the Sermon on the Mount...I confidently predict that in a hundred years he will be remembered solely for his cravats.

Wolcott Gibbs is a conspicuously less exciting parodist, and some of his work is too crude to observe anything but the most superficial aspects of his subjects; yet he does well enough with J. P. Marquand. "Outside my window the river lay opalescent in the twilight, but for a moment I saw it as a dark and relentless torrent bearing me on into the unknowable future, and I shuddered," is not remarkable for its wit, but the next sentence--"I didn't want to get married; I just wanted to go back to Harvard"--excuses the rest. I like the ending especially: "Things often work out a lot better than you have any business to hope they will", a nice burlesque of Marquand's elaborately diffident conclusions.

Of the parodists still living the most brilliant is deVries, whose only serious weakness is his suspicious fluency. One feels that he could write ten sequels to The Tents of Wickedness in a year, and that hardly seems fair. But "Requiem for a Noun" has a lovely beginning: The cold brussels sprout rolled off the page of the book (by Faulkner) I was reading and laying inert and defunctive in my lap. Turning my head with a leisure at least three-fourths impotent rage, I saw him or rather the reverse, the toy the fat insolent flet and then above that the bland face beneath the shock of hair like tangible gas.

becomes as difficult to read prose itself, and the is no longer worth it.

would be easy to keep quoting this section of MacDonald's anthology. I ought to mention Henry Reed's "Chard ("As we get older we do not younger"), better even than parodies of Eliot, and of Gertrude Stein that a MacDonald informs us is the dying words of Dutch . Also, I should have thought to parody Robert yet Firman Houghton has go to Boston, see the up and down again, and "That's the way with and with people." He closes don't get me wrong. I wouldn't

to New York to ride up .

buildings come as close to now

would ever want to go.

half the collection consists ", which means any not quite parodic that considered amusing enough . Housman's attack on his ' translations of drama is here, ("O suitably -in-leather boots/Head of a , wherefore seeking whom/ce by what way how purposed come/To this well-night- vicinity?") as well as most "Oxen of the Sun" Ulysses, a parodic history English literature. Even "The Address in " finds a way into these with a genuine Ike speech as " to make sure the point .

also are conscious self- a sewerful of unconscious Poe's "Eulalie"'. "I dwelt a world of moan, And my was a stagnant tide, Till the gentle Eulalie became my bride." Of these I on Macaulay most: to Spain and saw only disguised and increased , dominions of vast bulk strength, tempting, un, and defenseless, an empty ry, a sullen and torpid nation, on the throne, factions on the council, ministers who served only themselves, and soldiers who were terrible only to their countrymen, Men looked to France, and saw a large and compact territory, a rich soil, a central situation...an active and ambitious prince, in the flower of his age, surrounded by generals of unrivaled skill.

This pixie selection of self-parodies is itself an attractive and temperate means of criticism, for it involves looking consciously for absurdity. It is sad that people now so rarely indulge in such pleasures. All sorts of parodic criticism seem to be drifting into torpor, even in the New Yorker. Perhaps the reason is, as MacDonald hazards in an Appendix, that "the sense of fun has atrophied in the thirties. Or perhaps the avant-garde is too hermetic to be parodied. The real world has become so fantastic that satire, of which parody is a subdivision, is discouraged because reality out-distances it."

This may be so, yet it seems still that there is much material for parodists to seize on, particularly if they are looking for unsympathetic seizure. The other day I read the conclusion of a diplomatic history by Professor William Langer which goes:

We have spoken much in these pages about personalities. That there was no Bismarck among them is clear. It would be too much to expect a Bismarck in every generation.... It was taken for granted that the world was marked out by Providence for exploitation by the European white man and that the principle of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost was natural law.... The rise of Japan, the Adua disaster, the Boxer rising, none of these epoch-making events really opened the eyes of Europe....?

If one looks at the passage critically it becomes a joke. The mindless cliches, the lists of important events, all the accoutrements of the historical scholar's language are displayed, and not one of them is bright or new. (It was with some charity that I did not choose the work of a sociologist.) Why should this chaff not be parodied? That the author is a distinguished scholar whose reputation would hardly suffer is certain; it sems a fine subject.

The only obvious answer is that nobody cares to waste his time doing it. And yet of all times this seems the most appropriate. Scholars are growing stuffy, literary men abnormally intense, and the parodist, almost alone, has the chance to refine and relax this culture with his sublime and useless talent

fact that people publish which are very refined gives interesting support to Bell's . Parody, except in the rare where it is vicious or satiric, useful or even destructively purpose. Few people use it a writer's reputation, or to build it up. It is just fun, a sophisticated and artificial literary exercise, shouldn't need any other being.

Dwight MacDonald must have thoroughly enjoyable time his nearly 600 pages of ; they do indeed stretch Chaucer to Beerbohm--and Anyone who has read a number of medieval will no doubt find Chaucer's of Sir Thopas delightful, but I that MacDonald's interest purely historical. Beerbohm other figure of the title--is matter: he is unquestion the greatest of the parodists. (for instance), a take Henry James' later work, is raordinarily engaging piece of ; it begins:

it hardly was, that it all and unbegullingly wasn't for likes" of him--poor decent --to rap out queries the owner of the to him and unsuggestive name that these days, been thrust on with such a wealth of gesture, was precisely now, as he took, with his list of New Year colfichets whatever, his way to the great palace, fairly flicked his with the sense of his never so let himself in, as he phrased it, without letting any by the same token, out.

anthology includes also a Beerbohm parody of which is clever, but not funny, a "sequelula" to Hardy's , which is both. And, for no understood reason, there are of Arnold Bennett, Marle and Richard Le Gallienne, historically interesting. There is even a Beerbohm parody of Beerbohm: ..."I write for a weekly paper and call myself 'We.' But the stress of anonymity overwhelms me. I belong to the Beerbohm period. I have tumbled into the dark waters of current journalism, and am glad to sign my name, Max Beerbohm." Zulelka Dobson appeared in a time of wordspinners, and good parodists were in clover.

They were never so lucky before, and they certainly were far less adept. But to judge from MacDonald's collection, four centuries have yielded some intelligent and ingenious parodies as well as a lot of tripe. Wordsworth, Browning, and Swinburne, have paid well for their more curious mannerisms of style. J. K. Stephen cautiously and respectfully parodies Browning in a poem of "sincere flattery" that ends:

There's a Me Society down at Cambridge,

Where my works, cum notis variorum,

Are talked about; well, I require the same bridge

That Luclid took toll at as Asinorum;

And, as they have got through several ditties

I thought were as stiff as a brick-built wall,

I've composed the above, and a stiff one it is.

A bridge to stop asses at, once and for all.

And John Philips wouldn't be remembered at all if he had not had the nerve to parody Milton, which (despite the poet's odd syntax) is very difficult to do and which Phillips did rather well.

Parody may well be at its most uselessly enjoyable when the parodist is a century away from his subject. Since I bought this anthology I have grown very fond of Robert Benchley's Christmas Afternoon:

What an afternoon!... In the first place, there was the ennui. And such ennui as it was! A heavy, overpowering ennui, such as results from a participation in eight courses of steaming gravied food, topping off with salted nuts which the little old spinster Gummidge from Oak Hill said she never knew when to stop eating ... an ennui which carried with it a retinue of yawns, snarls and thinly velled insults.... The subject ought to be unmistakeable.

Benchley was associated with the New Yorker, and as MacDonald points out, so also were nearly all the good parodists of this century: Peter de Vries, Wolcott Gibbs, Frank Sullivan, and E. B. White. Their victims' language is pleasantly familiar, and for that modern parodies seem the funniest. One probably has to be a kind of literary snob to appreciate parody anyway, and although we are often told solemnly that parody must be funny in itself and not just because it mocks something, it is very satisfying to recognise a small and particular bit of cleverness. Of the contemporary rash of parodies Benchley's (again) are the most effective; they are gentle and charming as his stories. One of them has H. L. Mencken reviewing George Jean Nathan, and vice-versa. Mencken on Nathan:

...There is a current and quite pre-posterous impression that Nathan's hold on the intellectual booberle is a sensual one. He is supposed to titillate their nerve centers, causing them to jump. More palpaple tosh than this has not been formed a part of the public superstition since the Sermon on the Mount...I confidently predict that in a hundred years he will be remembered solely for his cravats.

Wolcott Gibbs is a conspicuously less exciting parodist, and some of his work is too crude to observe anything but the most superficial aspects of his subjects; yet he does well enough with J. P. Marquand. "Outside my window the river lay opalescent in the twilight, but for a moment I saw it as a dark and relentless torrent bearing me on into the unknowable future, and I shuddered," is not remarkable for its wit, but the next sentence--"I didn't want to get married; I just wanted to go back to Harvard"--excuses the rest. I like the ending especially: "Things often work out a lot better than you have any business to hope they will", a nice burlesque of Marquand's elaborately diffident conclusions.

Of the parodists still living the most brilliant is deVries, whose only serious weakness is his suspicious fluency. One feels that he could write ten sequels to The Tents of Wickedness in a year, and that hardly seems fair. But "Requiem for a Noun" has a lovely beginning: The cold brussels sprout rolled off the page of the book (by Faulkner) I was reading and laying inert and defunctive in my lap. Turning my head with a leisure at least three-fourths impotent rage, I saw him or rather the reverse, the toy the fat insolent flet and then above that the bland face beneath the shock of hair like tangible gas.

becomes as difficult to read prose itself, and the is no longer worth it.

would be easy to keep quoting this section of MacDonald's anthology. I ought to mention Henry Reed's "Chard ("As we get older we do not younger"), better even than parodies of Eliot, and of Gertrude Stein that a MacDonald informs us is the dying words of Dutch . Also, I should have thought to parody Robert yet Firman Houghton has go to Boston, see the up and down again, and "That's the way with and with people." He closes don't get me wrong. I wouldn't

to New York to ride up .

buildings come as close to now

would ever want to go.

half the collection consists ", which means any not quite parodic that considered amusing enough . Housman's attack on his ' translations of drama is here, ("O suitably -in-leather boots/Head of a , wherefore seeking whom/ce by what way how purposed come/To this well-night- vicinity?") as well as most "Oxen of the Sun" Ulysses, a parodic history English literature. Even "The Address in " finds a way into these with a genuine Ike speech as " to make sure the point .

also are conscious self- a sewerful of unconscious Poe's "Eulalie"'. "I dwelt a world of moan, And my was a stagnant tide, Till the gentle Eulalie became my bride." Of these I on Macaulay most: to Spain and saw only disguised and increased , dominions of vast bulk strength, tempting, un, and defenseless, an empty ry, a sullen and torpid nation, on the throne, factions on the council, ministers who served only themselves, and soldiers who were terrible only to their countrymen, Men looked to France, and saw a large and compact territory, a rich soil, a central situation...an active and ambitious prince, in the flower of his age, surrounded by generals of unrivaled skill.

This pixie selection of self-parodies is itself an attractive and temperate means of criticism, for it involves looking consciously for absurdity. It is sad that people now so rarely indulge in such pleasures. All sorts of parodic criticism seem to be drifting into torpor, even in the New Yorker. Perhaps the reason is, as MacDonald hazards in an Appendix, that "the sense of fun has atrophied in the thirties. Or perhaps the avant-garde is too hermetic to be parodied. The real world has become so fantastic that satire, of which parody is a subdivision, is discouraged because reality out-distances it."

This may be so, yet it seems still that there is much material for parodists to seize on, particularly if they are looking for unsympathetic seizure. The other day I read the conclusion of a diplomatic history by Professor William Langer which goes:

We have spoken much in these pages about personalities. That there was no Bismarck among them is clear. It would be too much to expect a Bismarck in every generation.... It was taken for granted that the world was marked out by Providence for exploitation by the European white man and that the principle of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost was natural law.... The rise of Japan, the Adua disaster, the Boxer rising, none of these epoch-making events really opened the eyes of Europe....?

If one looks at the passage critically it becomes a joke. The mindless cliches, the lists of important events, all the accoutrements of the historical scholar's language are displayed, and not one of them is bright or new. (It was with some charity that I did not choose the work of a sociologist.) Why should this chaff not be parodied? That the author is a distinguished scholar whose reputation would hardly suffer is certain; it sems a fine subject.

The only obvious answer is that nobody cares to waste his time doing it. And yet of all times this seems the most appropriate. Scholars are growing stuffy, literary men abnormally intense, and the parodist, almost alone, has the chance to refine and relax this culture with his sublime and useless talent

Dwight MacDonald must have thoroughly enjoyable time his nearly 600 pages of ; they do indeed stretch Chaucer to Beerbohm--and Anyone who has read a number of medieval will no doubt find Chaucer's of Sir Thopas delightful, but I that MacDonald's interest purely historical. Beerbohm other figure of the title--is matter: he is unquestion the greatest of the parodists. (for instance), a take Henry James' later work, is raordinarily engaging piece of ; it begins:

it hardly was, that it all and unbegullingly wasn't for likes" of him--poor decent --to rap out queries the owner of the to him and unsuggestive name that these days, been thrust on with such a wealth of gesture, was precisely now, as he took, with his list of New Year colfichets whatever, his way to the great palace, fairly flicked his with the sense of his never so let himself in, as he phrased it, without letting any by the same token, out.

anthology includes also a Beerbohm parody of which is clever, but not funny, a "sequelula" to Hardy's , which is both. And, for no understood reason, there are of Arnold Bennett, Marle and Richard Le Gallienne, historically interesting. There is even a Beerbohm parody of Beerbohm: ..."I write for a weekly paper and call myself 'We.' But the stress of anonymity overwhelms me. I belong to the Beerbohm period. I have tumbled into the dark waters of current journalism, and am glad to sign my name, Max Beerbohm." Zulelka Dobson appeared in a time of wordspinners, and good parodists were in clover.

They were never so lucky before, and they certainly were far less adept. But to judge from MacDonald's collection, four centuries have yielded some intelligent and ingenious parodies as well as a lot of tripe. Wordsworth, Browning, and Swinburne, have paid well for their more curious mannerisms of style. J. K. Stephen cautiously and respectfully parodies Browning in a poem of "sincere flattery" that ends:

There's a Me Society down at Cambridge,

Where my works, cum notis variorum,

Are talked about; well, I require the same bridge

That Luclid took toll at as Asinorum;

And, as they have got through several ditties

I thought were as stiff as a brick-built wall,

I've composed the above, and a stiff one it is.

A bridge to stop asses at, once and for all.

And John Philips wouldn't be remembered at all if he had not had the nerve to parody Milton, which (despite the poet's odd syntax) is very difficult to do and which Phillips did rather well.

Parody may well be at its most uselessly enjoyable when the parodist is a century away from his subject. Since I bought this anthology I have grown very fond of Robert Benchley's Christmas Afternoon:

What an afternoon!... In the first place, there was the ennui. And such ennui as it was! A heavy, overpowering ennui, such as results from a participation in eight courses of steaming gravied food, topping off with salted nuts which the little old spinster Gummidge from Oak Hill said she never knew when to stop eating ... an ennui which carried with it a retinue of yawns, snarls and thinly velled insults.... The subject ought to be unmistakeable.

Benchley was associated with the New Yorker, and as MacDonald points out, so also were nearly all the good parodists of this century: Peter de Vries, Wolcott Gibbs, Frank Sullivan, and E. B. White. Their victims' language is pleasantly familiar, and for that modern parodies seem the funniest. One probably has to be a kind of literary snob to appreciate parody anyway, and although we are often told solemnly that parody must be funny in itself and not just because it mocks something, it is very satisfying to recognise a small and particular bit of cleverness. Of the contemporary rash of parodies Benchley's (again) are the most effective; they are gentle and charming as his stories. One of them has H. L. Mencken reviewing George Jean Nathan, and vice-versa. Mencken on Nathan:

...There is a current and quite pre-posterous impression that Nathan's hold on the intellectual booberle is a sensual one. He is supposed to titillate their nerve centers, causing them to jump. More palpaple tosh than this has not been formed a part of the public superstition since the Sermon on the Mount...I confidently predict that in a hundred years he will be remembered solely for his cravats.

Wolcott Gibbs is a conspicuously less exciting parodist, and some of his work is too crude to observe anything but the most superficial aspects of his subjects; yet he does well enough with J. P. Marquand. "Outside my window the river lay opalescent in the twilight, but for a moment I saw it as a dark and relentless torrent bearing me on into the unknowable future, and I shuddered," is not remarkable for its wit, but the next sentence--"I didn't want to get married; I just wanted to go back to Harvard"--excuses the rest. I like the ending especially: "Things often work out a lot better than you have any business to hope they will", a nice burlesque of Marquand's elaborately diffident conclusions.

Of the parodists still living the most brilliant is deVries, whose only serious weakness is his suspicious fluency. One feels that he could write ten sequels to The Tents of Wickedness in a year, and that hardly seems fair. But "Requiem for a Noun" has a lovely beginning: The cold brussels sprout rolled off the page of the book (by Faulkner) I was reading and laying inert and defunctive in my lap. Turning my head with a leisure at least three-fourths impotent rage, I saw him or rather the reverse, the toy the fat insolent flet and then above that the bland face beneath the shock of hair like tangible gas.

becomes as difficult to read prose itself, and the is no longer worth it.

would be easy to keep quoting this section of MacDonald's anthology. I ought to mention Henry Reed's "Chard ("As we get older we do not younger"), better even than parodies of Eliot, and of Gertrude Stein that a MacDonald informs us is the dying words of Dutch . Also, I should have thought to parody Robert yet Firman Houghton has go to Boston, see the up and down again, and "That's the way with and with people." He closes don't get me wrong. I wouldn't

to New York to ride up .

buildings come as close to now

would ever want to go.

half the collection consists ", which means any not quite parodic that considered amusing enough . Housman's attack on his ' translations of drama is here, ("O suitably -in-leather boots/Head of a , wherefore seeking whom/ce by what way how purposed come/To this well-night- vicinity?") as well as most "Oxen of the Sun" Ulysses, a parodic history English literature. Even "The Address in " finds a way into these with a genuine Ike speech as " to make sure the point .

also are conscious self- a sewerful of unconscious Poe's "Eulalie"'. "I dwelt a world of moan, And my was a stagnant tide, Till the gentle Eulalie became my bride." Of these I on Macaulay most: to Spain and saw only disguised and increased , dominions of vast bulk strength, tempting, un, and defenseless, an empty ry, a sullen and torpid nation, on the throne, factions on the council, ministers who served only themselves, and soldiers who were terrible only to their countrymen, Men looked to France, and saw a large and compact territory, a rich soil, a central situation...an active and ambitious prince, in the flower of his age, surrounded by generals of unrivaled skill.

This pixie selection of self-parodies is itself an attractive and temperate means of criticism, for it involves looking consciously for absurdity. It is sad that people now so rarely indulge in such pleasures. All sorts of parodic criticism seem to be drifting into torpor, even in the New Yorker. Perhaps the reason is, as MacDonald hazards in an Appendix, that "the sense of fun has atrophied in the thirties. Or perhaps the avant-garde is too hermetic to be parodied. The real world has become so fantastic that satire, of which parody is a subdivision, is discouraged because reality out-distances it."

This may be so, yet it seems still that there is much material for parodists to seize on, particularly if they are looking for unsympathetic seizure. The other day I read the conclusion of a diplomatic history by Professor William Langer which goes:

We have spoken much in these pages about personalities. That there was no Bismarck among them is clear. It would be too much to expect a Bismarck in every generation.... It was taken for granted that the world was marked out by Providence for exploitation by the European white man and that the principle of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost was natural law.... The rise of Japan, the Adua disaster, the Boxer rising, none of these epoch-making events really opened the eyes of Europe....?

If one looks at the passage critically it becomes a joke. The mindless cliches, the lists of important events, all the accoutrements of the historical scholar's language are displayed, and not one of them is bright or new. (It was with some charity that I did not choose the work of a sociologist.) Why should this chaff not be parodied? That the author is a distinguished scholar whose reputation would hardly suffer is certain; it sems a fine subject.

The only obvious answer is that nobody cares to waste his time doing it. And yet of all times this seems the most appropriate. Scholars are growing stuffy, literary men abnormally intense, and the parodist, almost alone, has the chance to refine and relax this culture with his sublime and useless talent

it hardly was, that it all and unbegullingly wasn't for likes" of him--poor decent --to rap out queries the owner of the to him and unsuggestive name that these days, been thrust on with such a wealth of gesture, was precisely now, as he took, with his list of New Year colfichets whatever, his way to the great palace, fairly flicked his with the sense of his never so let himself in, as he phrased it, without letting any by the same token, out.

anthology includes also a Beerbohm parody of which is clever, but not funny, a "sequelula" to Hardy's , which is both. And, for no understood reason, there are of Arnold Bennett, Marle and Richard Le Gallienne, historically interesting. There is even a Beerbohm parody of Beerbohm: ..."I write for a weekly paper and call myself 'We.' But the stress of anonymity overwhelms me. I belong to the Beerbohm period. I have tumbled into the dark waters of current journalism, and am glad to sign my name, Max Beerbohm." Zulelka Dobson appeared in a time of wordspinners, and good parodists were in clover.

They were never so lucky before, and they certainly were far less adept. But to judge from MacDonald's collection, four centuries have yielded some intelligent and ingenious parodies as well as a lot of tripe. Wordsworth, Browning, and Swinburne, have paid well for their more curious mannerisms of style. J. K. Stephen cautiously and respectfully parodies Browning in a poem of "sincere flattery" that ends:

There's a Me Society down at Cambridge,

Where my works, cum notis variorum,

Are talked about; well, I require the same bridge

That Luclid took toll at as Asinorum;

And, as they have got through several ditties

I thought were as stiff as a brick-built wall,

I've composed the above, and a stiff one it is.

A bridge to stop asses at, once and for all.

And John Philips wouldn't be remembered at all if he had not had the nerve to parody Milton, which (despite the poet's odd syntax) is very difficult to do and which Phillips did rather well.

Parody may well be at its most uselessly enjoyable when the parodist is a century away from his subject. Since I bought this anthology I have grown very fond of Robert Benchley's Christmas Afternoon:

What an afternoon!... In the first place, there was the ennui. And such ennui as it was! A heavy, overpowering ennui, such as results from a participation in eight courses of steaming gravied food, topping off with salted nuts which the little old spinster Gummidge from Oak Hill said she never knew when to stop eating ... an ennui which carried with it a retinue of yawns, snarls and thinly velled insults.... The subject ought to be unmistakeable.

Benchley was associated with the New Yorker, and as MacDonald points out, so also were nearly all the good parodists of this century: Peter de Vries, Wolcott Gibbs, Frank Sullivan, and E. B. White. Their victims' language is pleasantly familiar, and for that modern parodies seem the funniest. One probably has to be a kind of literary snob to appreciate parody anyway, and although we are often told solemnly that parody must be funny in itself and not just because it mocks something, it is very satisfying to recognise a small and particular bit of cleverness. Of the contemporary rash of parodies Benchley's (again) are the most effective; they are gentle and charming as his stories. One of them has H. L. Mencken reviewing George Jean Nathan, and vice-versa. Mencken on Nathan:

...There is a current and quite pre-posterous impression that Nathan's hold on the intellectual booberle is a sensual one. He is supposed to titillate their nerve centers, causing them to jump. More palpaple tosh than this has not been formed a part of the public superstition since the Sermon on the Mount...I confidently predict that in a hundred years he will be remembered solely for his cravats.

Wolcott Gibbs is a conspicuously less exciting parodist, and some of his work is too crude to observe anything but the most superficial aspects of his subjects; yet he does well enough with J. P. Marquand. "Outside my window the river lay opalescent in the twilight, but for a moment I saw it as a dark and relentless torrent bearing me on into the unknowable future, and I shuddered," is not remarkable for its wit, but the next sentence--"I didn't want to get married; I just wanted to go back to Harvard"--excuses the rest. I like the ending especially: "Things often work out a lot better than you have any business to hope they will", a nice burlesque of Marquand's elaborately diffident conclusions.

Of the parodists still living the most brilliant is deVries, whose only serious weakness is his suspicious fluency. One feels that he could write ten sequels to The Tents of Wickedness in a year, and that hardly seems fair. But "Requiem for a Noun" has a lovely beginning: The cold brussels sprout rolled off the page of the book (by Faulkner) I was reading and laying inert and defunctive in my lap. Turning my head with a leisure at least three-fourths impotent rage, I saw him or rather the reverse, the toy the fat insolent flet and then above that the bland face beneath the shock of hair like tangible gas.

becomes as difficult to read prose itself, and the is no longer worth it.

would be easy to keep quoting this section of MacDonald's anthology. I ought to mention Henry Reed's "Chard ("As we get older we do not younger"), better even than parodies of Eliot, and of Gertrude Stein that a MacDonald informs us is the dying words of Dutch . Also, I should have thought to parody Robert yet Firman Houghton has go to Boston, see the up and down again, and "That's the way with and with people." He closes don't get me wrong. I wouldn't

to New York to ride up .

buildings come as close to now

would ever want to go.

half the collection consists ", which means any not quite parodic that considered amusing enough . Housman's attack on his ' translations of drama is here, ("O suitably -in-leather boots/Head of a , wherefore seeking whom/ce by what way how purposed come/To this well-night- vicinity?") as well as most "Oxen of the Sun" Ulysses, a parodic history English literature. Even "The Address in " finds a way into these with a genuine Ike speech as " to make sure the point .

also are conscious self- a sewerful of unconscious Poe's "Eulalie"'. "I dwelt a world of moan, And my was a stagnant tide, Till the gentle Eulalie became my bride." Of these I on Macaulay most: to Spain and saw only disguised and increased , dominions of vast bulk strength, tempting, un, and defenseless, an empty ry, a sullen and torpid nation, on the throne, factions on the council, ministers who served only themselves, and soldiers who were terrible only to their countrymen, Men looked to France, and saw a large and compact territory, a rich soil, a central situation...an active and ambitious prince, in the flower of his age, surrounded by generals of unrivaled skill.

This pixie selection of self-parodies is itself an attractive and temperate means of criticism, for it involves looking consciously for absurdity. It is sad that people now so rarely indulge in such pleasures. All sorts of parodic criticism seem to be drifting into torpor, even in the New Yorker. Perhaps the reason is, as MacDonald hazards in an Appendix, that "the sense of fun has atrophied in the thirties. Or perhaps the avant-garde is too hermetic to be parodied. The real world has become so fantastic that satire, of which parody is a subdivision, is discouraged because reality out-distances it."

This may be so, yet it seems still that there is much material for parodists to seize on, particularly if they are looking for unsympathetic seizure. The other day I read the conclusion of a diplomatic history by Professor William Langer which goes:

We have spoken much in these pages about personalities. That there was no Bismarck among them is clear. It would be too much to expect a Bismarck in every generation.... It was taken for granted that the world was marked out by Providence for exploitation by the European white man and that the principle of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost was natural law.... The rise of Japan, the Adua disaster, the Boxer rising, none of these epoch-making events really opened the eyes of Europe....?

If one looks at the passage critically it becomes a joke. The mindless cliches, the lists of important events, all the accoutrements of the historical scholar's language are displayed, and not one of them is bright or new. (It was with some charity that I did not choose the work of a sociologist.) Why should this chaff not be parodied? That the author is a distinguished scholar whose reputation would hardly suffer is certain; it sems a fine subject.

The only obvious answer is that nobody cares to waste his time doing it. And yet of all times this seems the most appropriate. Scholars are growing stuffy, literary men abnormally intense, and the parodist, almost alone, has the chance to refine and relax this culture with his sublime and useless talent

anthology includes also a Beerbohm parody of which is clever, but not funny, a "sequelula" to Hardy's , which is both. And, for no understood reason, there are of Arnold Bennett, Marle and Richard Le Gallienne, historically interesting. There is even a Beerbohm parody of Beerbohm: ..."I write for a weekly paper and call myself 'We.' But the stress of anonymity overwhelms me. I belong to the Beerbohm period. I have tumbled into the dark waters of current journalism, and am glad to sign my name, Max Beerbohm." Zulelka Dobson appeared in a time of wordspinners, and good parodists were in clover.

They were never so lucky before, and they certainly were far less adept. But to judge from MacDonald's collection, four centuries have yielded some intelligent and ingenious parodies as well as a lot of tripe. Wordsworth, Browning, and Swinburne, have paid well for their more curious mannerisms of style. J. K. Stephen cautiously and respectfully parodies Browning in a poem of "sincere flattery" that ends:

There's a Me Society down at Cambridge,

Where my works, cum notis variorum,

Are talked about; well, I require the same bridge

That Luclid took toll at as Asinorum;

And, as they have got through several ditties

I thought were as stiff as a brick-built wall,

I've composed the above, and a stiff one it is.

A bridge to stop asses at, once and for all.

And John Philips wouldn't be remembered at all if he had not had the nerve to parody Milton, which (despite the poet's odd syntax) is very difficult to do and which Phillips did rather well.

Parody may well be at its most uselessly enjoyable when the parodist is a century away from his subject. Since I bought this anthology I have grown very fond of Robert Benchley's Christmas Afternoon:

What an afternoon!... In the first place, there was the ennui. And such ennui as it was! A heavy, overpowering ennui, such as results from a participation in eight courses of steaming gravied food, topping off with salted nuts which the little old spinster Gummidge from Oak Hill said she never knew when to stop eating ... an ennui which carried with it a retinue of yawns, snarls and thinly velled insults.... The subject ought to be unmistakeable.

Benchley was associated with the New Yorker, and as MacDonald points out, so also were nearly all the good parodists of this century: Peter de Vries, Wolcott Gibbs, Frank Sullivan, and E. B. White. Their victims' language is pleasantly familiar, and for that modern parodies seem the funniest. One probably has to be a kind of literary snob to appreciate parody anyway, and although we are often told solemnly that parody must be funny in itself and not just because it mocks something, it is very satisfying to recognise a small and particular bit of cleverness. Of the contemporary rash of parodies Benchley's (again) are the most effective; they are gentle and charming as his stories. One of them has H. L. Mencken reviewing George Jean Nathan, and vice-versa. Mencken on Nathan:

...There is a current and quite pre-posterous impression that Nathan's hold on the intellectual booberle is a sensual one. He is supposed to titillate their nerve centers, causing them to jump. More palpaple tosh than this has not been formed a part of the public superstition since the Sermon on the Mount...I confidently predict that in a hundred years he will be remembered solely for his cravats.

Wolcott Gibbs is a conspicuously less exciting parodist, and some of his work is too crude to observe anything but the most superficial aspects of his subjects; yet he does well enough with J. P. Marquand. "Outside my window the river lay opalescent in the twilight, but for a moment I saw it as a dark and relentless torrent bearing me on into the unknowable future, and I shuddered," is not remarkable for its wit, but the next sentence--"I didn't want to get married; I just wanted to go back to Harvard"--excuses the rest. I like the ending especially: "Things often work out a lot better than you have any business to hope they will", a nice burlesque of Marquand's elaborately diffident conclusions.

Of the parodists still living the most brilliant is deVries, whose only serious weakness is his suspicious fluency. One feels that he could write ten sequels to The Tents of Wickedness in a year, and that hardly seems fair. But "Requiem for a Noun" has a lovely beginning: The cold brussels sprout rolled off the page of the book (by Faulkner) I was reading and laying inert and defunctive in my lap. Turning my head with a leisure at least three-fourths impotent rage, I saw him or rather the reverse, the toy the fat insolent flet and then above that the bland face beneath the shock of hair like tangible gas.

becomes as difficult to read prose itself, and the is no longer worth it.

would be easy to keep quoting this section of MacDonald's anthology. I ought to mention Henry Reed's "Chard ("As we get older we do not younger"), better even than parodies of Eliot, and of Gertrude Stein that a MacDonald informs us is the dying words of Dutch . Also, I should have thought to parody Robert yet Firman Houghton has go to Boston, see the up and down again, and "That's the way with and with people." He closes don't get me wrong. I wouldn't

to New York to ride up .

buildings come as close to now

would ever want to go.

half the collection consists ", which means any not quite parodic that considered amusing enough . Housman's attack on his ' translations of drama is here, ("O suitably -in-leather boots/Head of a , wherefore seeking whom/ce by what way how purposed come/To this well-night- vicinity?") as well as most "Oxen of the Sun" Ulysses, a parodic history English literature. Even "The Address in " finds a way into these with a genuine Ike speech as " to make sure the point .

also are conscious self- a sewerful of unconscious Poe's "Eulalie"'. "I dwelt a world of moan, And my was a stagnant tide, Till the gentle Eulalie became my bride." Of these I on Macaulay most: to Spain and saw only disguised and increased , dominions of vast bulk strength, tempting, un, and defenseless, an empty ry, a sullen and torpid nation, on the throne, factions on the council, ministers who served only themselves, and soldiers who were terrible only to their countrymen, Men looked to France, and saw a large and compact territory, a rich soil, a central situation...an active and ambitious prince, in the flower of his age, surrounded by generals of unrivaled skill.

This pixie selection of self-parodies is itself an attractive and temperate means of criticism, for it involves looking consciously for absurdity. It is sad that people now so rarely indulge in such pleasures. All sorts of parodic criticism seem to be drifting into torpor, even in the New Yorker. Perhaps the reason is, as MacDonald hazards in an Appendix, that "the sense of fun has atrophied in the thirties. Or perhaps the avant-garde is too hermetic to be parodied. The real world has become so fantastic that satire, of which parody is a subdivision, is discouraged because reality out-distances it."

This may be so, yet it seems still that there is much material for parodists to seize on, particularly if they are looking for unsympathetic seizure. The other day I read the conclusion of a diplomatic history by Professor William Langer which goes:

We have spoken much in these pages about personalities. That there was no Bismarck among them is clear. It would be too much to expect a Bismarck in every generation.... It was taken for granted that the world was marked out by Providence for exploitation by the European white man and that the principle of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost was natural law.... The rise of Japan, the Adua disaster, the Boxer rising, none of these epoch-making events really opened the eyes of Europe....?

If one looks at the passage critically it becomes a joke. The mindless cliches, the lists of important events, all the accoutrements of the historical scholar's language are displayed, and not one of them is bright or new. (It was with some charity that I did not choose the work of a sociologist.) Why should this chaff not be parodied? That the author is a distinguished scholar whose reputation would hardly suffer is certain; it sems a fine subject.

The only obvious answer is that nobody cares to waste his time doing it. And yet of all times this seems the most appropriate. Scholars are growing stuffy, literary men abnormally intense, and the parodist, almost alone, has the chance to refine and relax this culture with his sublime and useless talent

They were never so lucky before, and they certainly were far less adept. But to judge from MacDonald's collection, four centuries have yielded some intelligent and ingenious parodies as well as a lot of tripe. Wordsworth, Browning, and Swinburne, have paid well for their more curious mannerisms of style. J. K. Stephen cautiously and respectfully parodies Browning in a poem of "sincere flattery" that ends:

There's a Me Society down at Cambridge,

Where my works, cum notis variorum,

Are talked about; well, I require the same bridge

That Luclid took toll at as Asinorum;

And, as they have got through several ditties

I thought were as stiff as a brick-built wall,

I've composed the above, and a stiff one it is.

A bridge to stop asses at, once and for all.

And John Philips wouldn't be remembered at all if he had not had the nerve to parody Milton, which (despite the poet's odd syntax) is very difficult to do and which Phillips did rather well.

Parody may well be at its most uselessly enjoyable when the parodist is a century away from his subject. Since I bought this anthology I have grown very fond of Robert Benchley's Christmas Afternoon:

What an afternoon!... In the first place, there was the ennui. And such ennui as it was! A heavy, overpowering ennui, such as results from a participation in eight courses of steaming gravied food, topping off with salted nuts which the little old spinster Gummidge from Oak Hill said she never knew when to stop eating ... an ennui which carried with it a retinue of yawns, snarls and thinly velled insults.... The subject ought to be unmistakeable.

Benchley was associated with the New Yorker, and as MacDonald points out, so also were nearly all the good parodists of this century: Peter de Vries, Wolcott Gibbs, Frank Sullivan, and E. B. White. Their victims' language is pleasantly familiar, and for that modern parodies seem the funniest. One probably has to be a kind of literary snob to appreciate parody anyway, and although we are often told solemnly that parody must be funny in itself and not just because it mocks something, it is very satisfying to recognise a small and particular bit of cleverness. Of the contemporary rash of parodies Benchley's (again) are the most effective; they are gentle and charming as his stories. One of them has H. L. Mencken reviewing George Jean Nathan, and vice-versa. Mencken on Nathan:

...There is a current and quite pre-posterous impression that Nathan's hold on the intellectual booberle is a sensual one. He is supposed to titillate their nerve centers, causing them to jump. More palpaple tosh than this has not been formed a part of the public superstition since the Sermon on the Mount...I confidently predict that in a hundred years he will be remembered solely for his cravats.

Wolcott Gibbs is a conspicuously less exciting parodist, and some of his work is too crude to observe anything but the most superficial aspects of his subjects; yet he does well enough with J. P. Marquand. "Outside my window the river lay opalescent in the twilight, but for a moment I saw it as a dark and relentless torrent bearing me on into the unknowable future, and I shuddered," is not remarkable for its wit, but the next sentence--"I didn't want to get married; I just wanted to go back to Harvard"--excuses the rest. I like the ending especially: "Things often work out a lot better than you have any business to hope they will", a nice burlesque of Marquand's elaborately diffident conclusions.

Of the parodists still living the most brilliant is deVries, whose only serious weakness is his suspicious fluency. One feels that he could write ten sequels to The Tents of Wickedness in a year, and that hardly seems fair. But "Requiem for a Noun" has a lovely beginning: The cold brussels sprout rolled off the page of the book (by Faulkner) I was reading and laying inert and defunctive in my lap. Turning my head with a leisure at least three-fourths impotent rage, I saw him or rather the reverse, the toy the fat insolent flet and then above that the bland face beneath the shock of hair like tangible gas.

becomes as difficult to read prose itself, and the is no longer worth it.

would be easy to keep quoting this section of MacDonald's anthology. I ought to mention Henry Reed's "Chard ("As we get older we do not younger"), better even than parodies of Eliot, and of Gertrude Stein that a MacDonald informs us is the dying words of Dutch . Also, I should have thought to parody Robert yet Firman Houghton has go to Boston, see the up and down again, and "That's the way with and with people." He closes don't get me wrong. I wouldn't

to New York to ride up .

buildings come as close to now

would ever want to go.

half the collection consists ", which means any not quite parodic that considered amusing enough . Housman's attack on his ' translations of drama is here, ("O suitably -in-leather boots/Head of a , wherefore seeking whom/ce by what way how purposed come/To this well-night- vicinity?") as well as most "Oxen of the Sun" Ulysses, a parodic history English literature. Even "The Address in " finds a way into these with a genuine Ike speech as " to make sure the point .

also are conscious self- a sewerful of unconscious Poe's "Eulalie"'. "I dwelt a world of moan, And my was a stagnant tide, Till the gentle Eulalie became my bride." Of these I on Macaulay most: to Spain and saw only disguised and increased , dominions of vast bulk strength, tempting, un, and defenseless, an empty ry, a sullen and torpid nation, on the throne, factions on the council, ministers who served only themselves, and soldiers who were terrible only to their countrymen, Men looked to France, and saw a large and compact territory, a rich soil, a central situation...an active and ambitious prince, in the flower of his age, surrounded by generals of unrivaled skill.

This pixie selection of self-parodies is itself an attractive and temperate means of criticism, for it involves looking consciously for absurdity. It is sad that people now so rarely indulge in such pleasures. All sorts of parodic criticism seem to be drifting into torpor, even in the New Yorker. Perhaps the reason is, as MacDonald hazards in an Appendix, that "the sense of fun has atrophied in the thirties. Or perhaps the avant-garde is too hermetic to be parodied. The real world has become so fantastic that satire, of which parody is a subdivision, is discouraged because reality out-distances it."

This may be so, yet it seems still that there is much material for parodists to seize on, particularly if they are looking for unsympathetic seizure. The other day I read the conclusion of a diplomatic history by Professor William Langer which goes:

We have spoken much in these pages about personalities. That there was no Bismarck among them is clear. It would be too much to expect a Bismarck in every generation.... It was taken for granted that the world was marked out by Providence for exploitation by the European white man and that the principle of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost was natural law.... The rise of Japan, the Adua disaster, the Boxer rising, none of these epoch-making events really opened the eyes of Europe....?

If one looks at the passage critically it becomes a joke. The mindless cliches, the lists of important events, all the accoutrements of the historical scholar's language are displayed, and not one of them is bright or new. (It was with some charity that I did not choose the work of a sociologist.) Why should this chaff not be parodied? That the author is a distinguished scholar whose reputation would hardly suffer is certain; it sems a fine subject.

The only obvious answer is that nobody cares to waste his time doing it. And yet of all times this seems the most appropriate. Scholars are growing stuffy, literary men abnormally intense, and the parodist, almost alone, has the chance to refine and relax this culture with his sublime and useless talent

becomes as difficult to read prose itself, and the is no longer worth it.

would be easy to keep quoting this section of MacDonald's anthology. I ought to mention Henry Reed's "Chard ("As we get older we do not younger"), better even than parodies of Eliot, and of Gertrude Stein that a MacDonald informs us is the dying words of Dutch . Also, I should have thought to parody Robert yet Firman Houghton has go to Boston, see the up and down again, and "That's the way with and with people." He closes don't get me wrong. I wouldn't

to New York to ride up .

buildings come as close to now

would ever want to go.

half the collection consists ", which means any not quite parodic that considered amusing enough . Housman's attack on his ' translations of drama is here, ("O suitably -in-leather boots/Head of a , wherefore seeking whom/ce by what way how purposed come/To this well-night- vicinity?") as well as most "Oxen of the Sun" Ulysses, a parodic history English literature. Even "The Address in " finds a way into these with a genuine Ike speech as " to make sure the point .

also are conscious self- a sewerful of unconscious Poe's "Eulalie"'. "I dwelt a world of moan, And my was a stagnant tide, Till the gentle Eulalie became my bride." Of these I on Macaulay most: to Spain and saw only disguised and increased , dominions of vast bulk strength, tempting, un, and defenseless, an empty ry, a sullen and torpid nation, on the throne, factions on the council, ministers who served only themselves, and soldiers who were terrible only to their countrymen, Men looked to France, and saw a large and compact territory, a rich soil, a central situation...an active and ambitious prince, in the flower of his age, surrounded by generals of unrivaled skill.

This pixie selection of self-parodies is itself an attractive and temperate means of criticism, for it involves looking consciously for absurdity. It is sad that people now so rarely indulge in such pleasures. All sorts of parodic criticism seem to be drifting into torpor, even in the New Yorker. Perhaps the reason is, as MacDonald hazards in an Appendix, that "the sense of fun has atrophied in the thirties. Or perhaps the avant-garde is too hermetic to be parodied. The real world has become so fantastic that satire, of which parody is a subdivision, is discouraged because reality out-distances it."

This may be so, yet it seems still that there is much material for parodists to seize on, particularly if they are looking for unsympathetic seizure. The other day I read the conclusion of a diplomatic history by Professor William Langer which goes:

We have spoken much in these pages about personalities. That there was no Bismarck among them is clear. It would be too much to expect a Bismarck in every generation.... It was taken for granted that the world was marked out by Providence for exploitation by the European white man and that the principle of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost was natural law.... The rise of Japan, the Adua disaster, the Boxer rising, none of these epoch-making events really opened the eyes of Europe....?

If one looks at the passage critically it becomes a joke. The mindless cliches, the lists of important events, all the accoutrements of the historical scholar's language are displayed, and not one of them is bright or new. (It was with some charity that I did not choose the work of a sociologist.) Why should this chaff not be parodied? That the author is a distinguished scholar whose reputation would hardly suffer is certain; it sems a fine subject.

The only obvious answer is that nobody cares to waste his time doing it. And yet of all times this seems the most appropriate. Scholars are growing stuffy, literary men abnormally intense, and the parodist, almost alone, has the chance to refine and relax this culture with his sublime and useless talent

would be easy to keep quoting this section of MacDonald's anthology. I ought to mention Henry Reed's "Chard ("As we get older we do not younger"), better even than parodies of Eliot, and of Gertrude Stein that a MacDonald informs us is the dying words of Dutch . Also, I should have thought to parody Robert yet Firman Houghton has go to Boston, see the up and down again, and "That's the way with and with people." He closes don't get me wrong. I wouldn't

to New York to ride up .

buildings come as close to now

would ever want to go.

half the collection consists ", which means any not quite parodic that considered amusing enough . Housman's attack on his ' translations of drama is here, ("O suitably -in-leather boots/Head of a , wherefore seeking whom/ce by what way how purposed come/To this well-night- vicinity?") as well as most "Oxen of the Sun" Ulysses, a parodic history English literature. Even "The Address in " finds a way into these with a genuine Ike speech as " to make sure the point .

also are conscious self- a sewerful of unconscious Poe's "Eulalie"'. "I dwelt a world of moan, And my was a stagnant tide, Till the gentle Eulalie became my bride." Of these I on Macaulay most: to Spain and saw only disguised and increased , dominions of vast bulk strength, tempting, un, and defenseless, an empty ry, a sullen and torpid nation, on the throne, factions on the council, ministers who served only themselves, and soldiers who were terrible only to their countrymen, Men looked to France, and saw a large and compact territory, a rich soil, a central situation...an active and ambitious prince, in the flower of his age, surrounded by generals of unrivaled skill.

This pixie selection of self-parodies is itself an attractive and temperate means of criticism, for it involves looking consciously for absurdity. It is sad that people now so rarely indulge in such pleasures. All sorts of parodic criticism seem to be drifting into torpor, even in the New Yorker. Perhaps the reason is, as MacDonald hazards in an Appendix, that "the sense of fun has atrophied in the thirties. Or perhaps the avant-garde is too hermetic to be parodied. The real world has become so fantastic that satire, of which parody is a subdivision, is discouraged because reality out-distances it."

This may be so, yet it seems still that there is much material for parodists to seize on, particularly if they are looking for unsympathetic seizure. The other day I read the conclusion of a diplomatic history by Professor William Langer which goes:

We have spoken much in these pages about personalities. That there was no Bismarck among them is clear. It would be too much to expect a Bismarck in every generation.... It was taken for granted that the world was marked out by Providence for exploitation by the European white man and that the principle of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost was natural law.... The rise of Japan, the Adua disaster, the Boxer rising, none of these epoch-making events really opened the eyes of Europe....?

If one looks at the passage critically it becomes a joke. The mindless cliches, the lists of important events, all the accoutrements of the historical scholar's language are displayed, and not one of them is bright or new. (It was with some charity that I did not choose the work of a sociologist.) Why should this chaff not be parodied? That the author is a distinguished scholar whose reputation would hardly suffer is certain; it sems a fine subject.

The only obvious answer is that nobody cares to waste his time doing it. And yet of all times this seems the most appropriate. Scholars are growing stuffy, literary men abnormally intense, and the parodist, almost alone, has the chance to refine and relax this culture with his sublime and useless talent

to New York to ride up .

buildings come as close to now

would ever want to go.

half the collection consists ", which means any not quite parodic that considered amusing enough . Housman's attack on his ' translations of drama is here, ("O suitably -in-leather boots/Head of a , wherefore seeking whom/ce by what way how purposed come/To this well-night- vicinity?") as well as most "Oxen of the Sun" Ulysses, a parodic history English literature. Even "The Address in " finds a way into these with a genuine Ike speech as " to make sure the point .

also are conscious self- a sewerful of unconscious Poe's "Eulalie"'. "I dwelt a world of moan, And my was a stagnant tide, Till the gentle Eulalie became my bride." Of these I on Macaulay most: to Spain and saw only disguised and increased , dominions of vast bulk strength, tempting, un, and defenseless, an empty ry, a sullen and torpid nation, on the throne, factions on the council, ministers who served only themselves, and soldiers who were terrible only to their countrymen, Men looked to France, and saw a large and compact territory, a rich soil, a central situation...an active and ambitious prince, in the flower of his age, surrounded by generals of unrivaled skill.

This pixie selection of self-parodies is itself an attractive and temperate means of criticism, for it involves looking consciously for absurdity. It is sad that people now so rarely indulge in such pleasures. All sorts of parodic criticism seem to be drifting into torpor, even in the New Yorker. Perhaps the reason is, as MacDonald hazards in an Appendix, that "the sense of fun has atrophied in the thirties. Or perhaps the avant-garde is too hermetic to be parodied. The real world has become so fantastic that satire, of which parody is a subdivision, is discouraged because reality out-distances it."

This may be so, yet it seems still that there is much material for parodists to seize on, particularly if they are looking for unsympathetic seizure. The other day I read the conclusion of a diplomatic history by Professor William Langer which goes:

We have spoken much in these pages about personalities. That there was no Bismarck among them is clear. It would be too much to expect a Bismarck in every generation.... It was taken for granted that the world was marked out by Providence for exploitation by the European white man and that the principle of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost was natural law.... The rise of Japan, the Adua disaster, the Boxer rising, none of these epoch-making events really opened the eyes of Europe....?

If one looks at the passage critically it becomes a joke. The mindless cliches, the lists of important events, all the accoutrements of the historical scholar's language are displayed, and not one of them is bright or new. (It was with some charity that I did not choose the work of a sociologist.) Why should this chaff not be parodied? That the author is a distinguished scholar whose reputation would hardly suffer is certain; it sems a fine subject.

The only obvious answer is that nobody cares to waste his time doing it. And yet of all times this seems the most appropriate. Scholars are growing stuffy, literary men abnormally intense, and the parodist, almost alone, has the chance to refine and relax this culture with his sublime and useless talent

buildings come as close to now

would ever want to go.

half the collection consists ", which means any not quite parodic that considered amusing enough . Housman's attack on his ' translations of drama is here, ("O suitably -in-leather boots/Head of a , wherefore seeking whom/ce by what way how purposed come/To this well-night- vicinity?") as well as most "Oxen of the Sun" Ulysses, a parodic history English literature. Even "The Address in " finds a way into these with a genuine Ike speech as " to make sure the point .

also are conscious self- a sewerful of unconscious Poe's "Eulalie"'. "I dwelt a world of moan, And my was a stagnant tide, Till the gentle Eulalie became my bride." Of these I on Macaulay most: to Spain and saw only disguised and increased , dominions of vast bulk strength, tempting, un, and defenseless, an empty ry, a sullen and torpid nation, on the throne, factions on the council, ministers who served only themselves, and soldiers who were terrible only to their countrymen, Men looked to France, and saw a large and compact territory, a rich soil, a central situation...an active and ambitious prince, in the flower of his age, surrounded by generals of unrivaled skill.

This pixie selection of self-parodies is itself an attractive and temperate means of criticism, for it involves looking consciously for absurdity. It is sad that people now so rarely indulge in such pleasures. All sorts of parodic criticism seem to be drifting into torpor, even in the New Yorker. Perhaps the reason is, as MacDonald hazards in an Appendix, that "the sense of fun has atrophied in the thirties. Or perhaps the avant-garde is too hermetic to be parodied. The real world has become so fantastic that satire, of which parody is a subdivision, is discouraged because reality out-distances it."

This may be so, yet it seems still that there is much material for parodists to seize on, particularly if they are looking for unsympathetic seizure. The other day I read the conclusion of a diplomatic history by Professor William Langer which goes:

We have spoken much in these pages about personalities. That there was no Bismarck among them is clear. It would be too much to expect a Bismarck in every generation.... It was taken for granted that the world was marked out by Providence for exploitation by the European white man and that the principle of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost was natural law.... The rise of Japan, the Adua disaster, the Boxer rising, none of these epoch-making events really opened the eyes of Europe....?

If one looks at the passage critically it becomes a joke. The mindless cliches, the lists of important events, all the accoutrements of the historical scholar's language are displayed, and not one of them is bright or new. (It was with some charity that I did not choose the work of a sociologist.) Why should this chaff not be parodied? That the author is a distinguished scholar whose reputation would hardly suffer is certain; it sems a fine subject.

The only obvious answer is that nobody cares to waste his time doing it. And yet of all times this seems the most appropriate. Scholars are growing stuffy, literary men abnormally intense, and the parodist, almost alone, has the chance to refine and relax this culture with his sublime and useless talent

would ever want to go.

half the collection consists ", which means any not quite parodic that considered amusing enough . Housman's attack on his ' translations of drama is here, ("O suitably -in-leather boots/Head of a , wherefore seeking whom/ce by what way how purposed come/To this well-night- vicinity?") as well as most "Oxen of the Sun" Ulysses, a parodic history English literature. Even "The Address in " finds a way into these with a genuine Ike speech as " to make sure the point .

also are conscious self- a sewerful of unconscious Poe's "Eulalie"'. "I dwelt a world of moan, And my was a stagnant tide, Till the gentle Eulalie became my bride." Of these I on Macaulay most: to Spain and saw only disguised and increased , dominions of vast bulk strength, tempting, un, and defenseless, an empty ry, a sullen and torpid nation, on the throne, factions on the council, ministers who served only themselves, and soldiers who were terrible only to their countrymen, Men looked to France, and saw a large and compact territory, a rich soil, a central situation...an active and ambitious prince, in the flower of his age, surrounded by generals of unrivaled skill.

This pixie selection of self-parodies is itself an attractive and temperate means of criticism, for it involves looking consciously for absurdity. It is sad that people now so rarely indulge in such pleasures. All sorts of parodic criticism seem to be drifting into torpor, even in the New Yorker. Perhaps the reason is, as MacDonald hazards in an Appendix, that "the sense of fun has atrophied in the thirties. Or perhaps the avant-garde is too hermetic to be parodied. The real world has become so fantastic that satire, of which parody is a subdivision, is discouraged because reality out-distances it."

This may be so, yet it seems still that there is much material for parodists to seize on, particularly if they are looking for unsympathetic seizure. The other day I read the conclusion of a diplomatic history by Professor William Langer which goes:

We have spoken much in these pages about personalities. That there was no Bismarck among them is clear. It would be too much to expect a Bismarck in every generation.... It was taken for granted that the world was marked out by Providence for exploitation by the European white man and that the principle of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost was natural law.... The rise of Japan, the Adua disaster, the Boxer rising, none of these epoch-making events really opened the eyes of Europe....?

If one looks at the passage critically it becomes a joke. The mindless cliches, the lists of important events, all the accoutrements of the historical scholar's language are displayed, and not one of them is bright or new. (It was with some charity that I did not choose the work of a sociologist.) Why should this chaff not be parodied? That the author is a distinguished scholar whose reputation would hardly suffer is certain; it sems a fine subject.

The only obvious answer is that nobody cares to waste his time doing it. And yet of all times this seems the most appropriate. Scholars are growing stuffy, literary men abnormally intense, and the parodist, almost alone, has the chance to refine and relax this culture with his sublime and useless talent

half the collection consists ", which means any not quite parodic that considered amusing enough . Housman's attack on his ' translations of drama is here, ("O suitably -in-leather boots/Head of a , wherefore seeking whom/ce by what way how purposed come/To this well-night- vicinity?") as well as most "Oxen of the Sun" Ulysses, a parodic history English literature. Even "The Address in " finds a way into these with a genuine Ike speech as " to make sure the point .

also are conscious self- a sewerful of unconscious Poe's "Eulalie"'. "I dwelt a world of moan, And my was a stagnant tide, Till the gentle Eulalie became my bride." Of these I on Macaulay most: to Spain and saw only disguised and increased , dominions of vast bulk strength, tempting, un, and defenseless, an empty ry, a sullen and torpid nation, on the throne, factions on the council, ministers who served only themselves, and soldiers who were terrible only to their countrymen, Men looked to France, and saw a large and compact territory, a rich soil, a central situation...an active and ambitious prince, in the flower of his age, surrounded by generals of unrivaled skill.

This pixie selection of self-parodies is itself an attractive and temperate means of criticism, for it involves looking consciously for absurdity. It is sad that people now so rarely indulge in such pleasures. All sorts of parodic criticism seem to be drifting into torpor, even in the New Yorker. Perhaps the reason is, as MacDonald hazards in an Appendix, that "the sense of fun has atrophied in the thirties. Or perhaps the avant-garde is too hermetic to be parodied. The real world has become so fantastic that satire, of which parody is a subdivision, is discouraged because reality out-distances it."

This may be so, yet it seems still that there is much material for parodists to seize on, particularly if they are looking for unsympathetic seizure. The other day I read the conclusion of a diplomatic history by Professor William Langer which goes:

We have spoken much in these pages about personalities. That there was no Bismarck among them is clear. It would be too much to expect a Bismarck in every generation.... It was taken for granted that the world was marked out by Providence for exploitation by the European white man and that the principle of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost was natural law.... The rise of Japan, the Adua disaster, the Boxer rising, none of these epoch-making events really opened the eyes of Europe....?

If one looks at the passage critically it becomes a joke. The mindless cliches, the lists of important events, all the accoutrements of the historical scholar's language are displayed, and not one of them is bright or new. (It was with some charity that I did not choose the work of a sociologist.) Why should this chaff not be parodied? That the author is a distinguished scholar whose reputation would hardly suffer is certain; it sems a fine subject.

The only obvious answer is that nobody cares to waste his time doing it. And yet of all times this seems the most appropriate. Scholars are growing stuffy, literary men abnormally intense, and the parodist, almost alone, has the chance to refine and relax this culture with his sublime and useless talent

also are conscious self- a sewerful of unconscious Poe's "Eulalie"'. "I dwelt a world of moan, And my was a stagnant tide, Till the gentle Eulalie became my bride." Of these I on Macaulay most: to Spain and saw only disguised and increased , dominions of vast bulk strength, tempting, un, and defenseless, an empty ry, a sullen and torpid nation, on the throne, factions on the council, ministers who served only themselves, and soldiers who were terrible only to their countrymen, Men looked to France, and saw a large and compact territory, a rich soil, a central situation...an active and ambitious prince, in the flower of his age, surrounded by generals of unrivaled skill.

This pixie selection of self-parodies is itself an attractive and temperate means of criticism, for it involves looking consciously for absurdity. It is sad that people now so rarely indulge in such pleasures. All sorts of parodic criticism seem to be drifting into torpor, even in the New Yorker. Perhaps the reason is, as MacDonald hazards in an Appendix, that "the sense of fun has atrophied in the thirties. Or perhaps the avant-garde is too hermetic to be parodied. The real world has become so fantastic that satire, of which parody is a subdivision, is discouraged because reality out-distances it."

This may be so, yet it seems still that there is much material for parodists to seize on, particularly if they are looking for unsympathetic seizure. The other day I read the conclusion of a diplomatic history by Professor William Langer which goes:

We have spoken much in these pages about personalities. That there was no Bismarck among them is clear. It would be too much to expect a Bismarck in every generation.... It was taken for granted that the world was marked out by Providence for exploitation by the European white man and that the principle of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost was natural law.... The rise of Japan, the Adua disaster, the Boxer rising, none of these epoch-making events really opened the eyes of Europe....?

If one looks at the passage critically it becomes a joke. The mindless cliches, the lists of important events, all the accoutrements of the historical scholar's language are displayed, and not one of them is bright or new. (It was with some charity that I did not choose the work of a sociologist.) Why should this chaff not be parodied? That the author is a distinguished scholar whose reputation would hardly suffer is certain; it sems a fine subject.

The only obvious answer is that nobody cares to waste his time doing it. And yet of all times this seems the most appropriate. Scholars are growing stuffy, literary men abnormally intense, and the parodist, almost alone, has the chance to refine and relax this culture with his sublime and useless talent

This pixie selection of self-parodies is itself an attractive and temperate means of criticism, for it involves looking consciously for absurdity. It is sad that people now so rarely indulge in such pleasures. All sorts of parodic criticism seem to be drifting into torpor, even in the New Yorker. Perhaps the reason is, as MacDonald hazards in an Appendix, that "the sense of fun has atrophied in the thirties. Or perhaps the avant-garde is too hermetic to be parodied. The real world has become so fantastic that satire, of which parody is a subdivision, is discouraged because reality out-distances it."

This may be so, yet it seems still that there is much material for parodists to seize on, particularly if they are looking for unsympathetic seizure. The other day I read the conclusion of a diplomatic history by Professor William Langer which goes:

We have spoken much in these pages about personalities. That there was no Bismarck among them is clear. It would be too much to expect a Bismarck in every generation.... It was taken for granted that the world was marked out by Providence for exploitation by the European white man and that the principle of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost was natural law.... The rise of Japan, the Adua disaster, the Boxer rising, none of these epoch-making events really opened the eyes of Europe....?

If one looks at the passage critically it becomes a joke. The mindless cliches, the lists of important events, all the accoutrements of the historical scholar's language are displayed, and not one of them is bright or new. (It was with some charity that I did not choose the work of a sociologist.) Why should this chaff not be parodied? That the author is a distinguished scholar whose reputation would hardly suffer is certain; it sems a fine subject.

The only obvious answer is that nobody cares to waste his time doing it. And yet of all times this seems the most appropriate. Scholars are growing stuffy, literary men abnormally intense, and the parodist, almost alone, has the chance to refine and relax this culture with his sublime and useless talent