Mauberley 61than hotels.’ This struggle and rebuttal is, we see, still being carried on; a
new dimension of tradition and conflict is added to the efforts of the
epitaphed E.P. of the first poem. The success of official literary history in
discrediting the vitality of the century of Rossetti, Swinburne, and Fitzgerald
and turning it instead into the century of Ruskin, Carlyle, and Tennyson is
epitomized in the final stanza:
M. Verog, out of step with the decade,
Detached from his contemporaries,
Neglected by the young,
Because of these reveries.M. Verog, ‘author of The Dorian Mood’, is a pseudonym for Victor
Plarr, who appears in Canto LXXIV ‘talking of mathematics’.
The next three poems are vignettes of three contrasting literary
careers. ‘Brennbaum’ (? Max Beerbohm) embodies what passes for the cult
of ‘style’:
The stiffness from spats to collar
Never relaxing into grace.This style is neo-classical, not that of the leaping arch; Brennbaum’s motive
is simply to prepare a face to meet the faces that he meets; such emotional
intensity as he knows is not only repressed almost to imperceptibility, its
dynamic is private, alien, and accidental to the traditions of Latin Europe:
‘The heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai, and the forty years.’
Mr. Nixon, exhibit number two, is the successful public man of letters
(? Arnold Bennett). The forced rhymes (reviewer/you are) enact his hearty
grimaces; his drawled climactic maxim,
... as for literature
It gives no man a sinecure,unites the pretentious popular philosophy of a Wells, a Shaw, a Bennett with
the smug generalizations of commercial success and the hard-boiled saws of
Poor Richard’s Almanac.
‘And give up verse, my boy,
‘There’s nothing in it.’