Max Beerbohm and the Wings of Henry James

Marcel Marceau’s terrifying dance, “The Mask Maker,” is above all a parable of his own art as pantomimist. The man, his countenance pure, tries on comic and tragic masks, becoming more and more caught up with his fluency in changing them. After a while he chooses to wear the comic mask: it takes him dancing around the stage. He comes finally to pull it off, but cannot. Underneath the laugh, his body revolts, his fingers wrench at his face. At last, he spends himself in a total agony and rips off the mask. The gesture leaves his arms stretched out strengthlessly. During the applause, his face is empty.

Pantomime is imitation of everything. Condensed into an image of mask-making, it holds as well for the writer capable of assuming any style, disponible to the extent that he parodies everything: Who’s Who, Regency memoirs, Victorian diaries, parliamentary reports, American and English journalese, Midwestern slang, Walter Pater’s talk and essays, Samuel Johnson’s, the speech of Whistler, Carlyle, Rossetti, George Moore, Ibsen, Einstein, John Bull, Labour, and the verger of Westminster Abbey, the poetry of Wordsworth, Byron, Landor, Yeats, Hardy, Housman, dialect verse, Latin elegiacs, Surrey proverbs, phonetic spelling, crossword puzzlers, Slavophiles, Baconians, letter-writing manuals, authorial inscriptions, popular romance, classical scholarship, Shaw’s prefaces, the stories of Kipling and Conrad, the novels of Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy, James, the plays of Shakespeare, neo-Shakespearean tragedy, W. S. Gilbert, Pinero, Wilde, Queen Victoria’s handwriting, and—once, with no success—himself.