The Limits of Literary Malice

Why Is It Our Biographers Insist on Exposing Nothing But the Dullness of the Subjects?

L. L. JONES

THE demand for malicious character sketches of contemporary celebrities is at the present moment running rather strong, and publishers are rapidly gratifying it. Taking biographical sketches as they go, people prefer those which are written by men who rather dislike the subjects. The cool judicial kind of thing, the two-volume documentary kind of thing approved by the widow of the departed, and, above all, the politically defensive or offensive kind of thing may, for aught I know, be purchased as extensively as ever, but to judge from such conversation as I overhear they are not read. On the other hand the taste for vies intimes and chroniques scandaleuses, though never lacking in our public, seems uncommonly keen and catholic at present.

Now I value malice as a literary incentive as much as anyone. I admit that many of the most delightful writers in the world are at their best when most malicious, and that in their moments of benignity and of loving their neighbors as themselves nobody cares to read them. I also admit that the pleasure of seeing other people's characters maligned is often so keen that the beholder does not demand any skill on the part of the maligner. Comparatively dull writings are saved from oblivion by malignity alone. Long passages in the Letters of Horace Walpole, for example, are treasured merely for their spite; the thought, the style, the interest of the circumstances not being of a kind that could engage anybody's attention. And among the famous French memoir-writers there are long stretches in the very best of them, which would have bored posterity beyond endurance were it not for the writers' ill-will. The baser passions even when rather badly expressed are generally enjoyed and most readers like to see the reputation of a famous person taken away even if they did not know what the reputation was. There is always a satisfaction in learning that the slipper of the Duchesse de Framboisie was found next morning under the pillow of the Marquis de Croquembouche even though you never heard of either of them; and owing to the alluring nature of the circumstance, no literary grace whatever is required in its narration. Disparagement is the redeemer of literary commonplace.

Malice Without Manner

I ADMIT, as indeed I must, the verity of these platitudes. Nevertheless a few rude standards in respect to literary merit in the matter seem in the long run to exist. Malice cannot do quite everything for a writer. It is true that a depreciative writer need not write nearly so well as an appreciative one in order to be interesting, but a little ability is after all expected of him. Because we like a meanspirited view of celebrities, it does not follow that every mean-spirited person can satisfy all our requirements. Pope spitting like a toad, Horace Walpole with his even flow of animal spites, and the French memoir-writers ferreting in bed-chambers did, in spite of these engaging qualities, offer other charms. Form, wit, observation, and now and then a glimmer of philosophy seem to have had a part in it. But certain volumes of personalia now appearing seem not to meet these very modest exigencies. I would suggest the Glass of Fashion which has just been published by the author of the Mirrors of Downing Street as a fair example of the sort of writing that even a writer's hostile intentions cannot redeem.

Now the reason why I object to these intimate and personal views of the public characters of the last few years is not because they are prejudiced or untrue or inapplicable to the subjects of the sketches. It is because they are inapplicable to any man. To decide on the verisimilitude of these sketches ypu do not need to know anything about the subjects of them. All that you need to know is a little about human beings generally. There is no use in debating whether a picture resembles Woodrow Wilson if it does not even resemble a biped; and you may be sure a portrait is not a good likeness of Lloyd George if it is a perfect likeness of a clothes-pin. The bungling picture of an enemy, however malicious the painter may be, defeats the proper ends of indignation. Much as I dislike Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George from the little that I know about them, much as I suspect the worst in their private lives, and desire their exposure, the exposure has no charms for me if it is not an exposure of anybody. Even a caricaturist should make it plain whether he is caricaturing a politician or a fish. One of the best safeguards of a stupid politician is to have a still more stupid enemy, and as to a rascal, he ought to hire contemporary biographers to expose him, for they would certainly conceal him from our view. And if I were a conspicuous figure in fashionable life and up to a lot of deviltry I should dearly love to have my character described by just such a person as the author of the Glass of Fashion.

The limits of literary malice, elastic as they seem, lie somewhere within the outer bounds of credibility and interest. Not that the description of a man need be credible in respect to that particular man, but it must be credible of some man. It is obvious that when you start out to expose some despicable fellow creature, you must find some fellow creature to expose, and if you cannot find him you must invent him. Otherwise you frustrate the reasonable expectations of contempt, leaving us only an inanimate object to look down upon. Pope's hatred of Addison may not have resulted in a picture of Addison, but at least it gave us somebody to hate. Nowadays when a contemporary exposer starts on the trail of some prime minister, who ought to be exposed, not only does the prime minister slip away unnoticed, but everybody else in the world escapes detection. They divert the reader's interest from the natural subject of his dislike and leave him indignant in a vacuum. I know of no more disagreeable situation than to be left feeling generally angry without anybody in particular to be angry at. With as strong an impulse to hate a prime minister as anyone else has at this season, I am often left in the greatest embarrassment, laying the sketch down in a spirit of foolish charitableness toward everybody in the world except the writer of it. Bad workmanship in this genre of literary malice cheats me out of the dearest objects of my aversion and arrests the agreeable flow of animosity. For, an inefficient hater is a gun that explodes at the breech.

These objections do not apply to the greater part of the Mirrors of Downing Street and they apply to hardly any of the sketches in that far better American book the Mirrors of Washington, fortunately imitative in no respect except the title; but they do apply, I think, to the Glass of Fashion. Malice, to be sure, in this exposure of British fashionable life, is disguised as moral indignation, but as the subject is not one on which anyone could sustain a moral indignation, malice must have held the writer to it. No saint could be long angry with the tedious people in this volume. Only a malicious motive could keep a man awake.

The Dullness of Dukes

BUT malice itself breaks down amidst the terrible details of the private lives of the British aristocracy and time and again these two hundred years it has shown itself impotent of literary effect. The members of British leading families may not be the dullest people ever known, but they are certainly the dullest people ever read about. Dukes, if we may judge from reminiscences and diaries, not only never say a word of sense but are never expected to do so. It is a surprise to many British biographers that a duke can talk at all, and if it happens that a duke once said at the end of the eighteenth century "Damme, it's too bad," the remark is passed from one biographer to another for a hundred years. Exposures of the British aristocracy have always been far more inconsiderate of the reader than of the person exposed, and no man acquainted with the revelations of the private lives of members of the British ruling class during the last fifty years, would dream of beginning with their moral characters, if a chance presented itself for effecting an improvement in their personalities. The insipidities of ordinary social intercourse are indeed more highly valued by these peculiar people than by any other people on earth. There is a large storehouse built expressly for them on every English large estate, and several members of the family spend hours every day in collecting them. Never burn an uninteresting letter is the first rule of British aristocracy; never let a banality perish, but transcribe it and file it as a bon mot. The delight of the British aristocracy over a bit of commonsense, such as is quite ordinarily met with in other walks of life, has always been a marvel to those who have had the mental advantages of a humble origin. In the best British families, a word or two of commonsense is often preserved as an heirloom.

Owing to this strange unforgetfulness, the material for exposing the aristocratic private life is enormous. Hence that constant flow of memoirs and revelations, letters, diaries, and intimate remains, usually in two volumes, handsomely bound, and illustrated with the portraits of women remarkable for a certain large boniness of visage, the features seeming rather suited to a landscape than to the female countenance. Scandals of course may be found in them, but the text is in other respects so dreadful, that you can really take no pleasure in them.

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Now why should the author of the Glass of Fashion wish to expose class of people who have exposed themselves already, to the point of almost insupportable ennui during two hundred years, and have always looked precisely the same? Why expose Mrs. Asquith, for example, when she has just exposed herself in her autobiography far more completely than the interest of the subject warranted? He says it is from a moral motive. The reform of England, according to him must begin with the aristocracy. "Aristocracy, it must be boldly said, has played traitor to England. .. . We cannot suppose that Nature is content with the egoism of the social butterfly." Then he exposes a group of people whose morals seem to be just the same as those of any group of people anywhere, but with a mental simplicity commonly associated with shepherds and shepherdesses. This assumption of the Vicar of Wakefield point of view is of course a humbug, and the raison d'etre of the "revelations" is the familiar old James Yellowplush superstition that because they are revelations of the aristocracy they are necessarily piquant. The vices of the British aristocracy ought no longer to be exposed in this manner, and their veils should not be torn away by the sort of writer who usually tears away veils. It is not a question of moral but of literary criticism. The vices of the British aristocracy ought always to be concealed until they can be made more readable.