What Cato did, and Budgell
Andrew Gimson
THE ILLUSTRATED ZULEIKA DOBSON by Max Beerbohm
Yale University Press, £12.95
S
. uicide, though still quite widely prac- tised, is no longer fashionable. It is hard to Consider this change without realising that It has a regrettable side. Within our life- times, or at the end of them, we are likely, bY means of nuclear war leading to nuclear winter, to commit collective suicide; it argues a sadly negative frame of mind to find no good in the prospect. It almost suggests a diseased society, to be set so firmlY against the future. I hope it will not be taken to betray bourgeois prejudices on the part of the re- viewer if I lay the greater part of the blame for the development at the feet of John, 14th Duke of Dorset. He, you will remem- ber, committed suicide by drowning him- self after his short and unhappy love affair with Miss Zuleika Dobson, the noted con- lurer. All the undergraduates of Oxford fc'llowed his example. Suicide became PoPular, and nothing which is popular can remain fashionable. Hence, perhaps, the stigma now attached to nuclear war. During the thousands of years of history which preceded the Duke's gesture, suicide had been the privilege of the few. Its status was correspondingly secure. The classic text dates from as late as the 18th century, to be more precise from 4 May 1737. It was ce, mposed by Eustace Budgell (1686-1737). This name is seldom, if ever, on the lips of the man in the street,' you murmur, seeing at once the resemblance between Eustace Budgell and T. Fenning Dodworth, subject of the most brilliant essay about successful failure ever written: the last piece in Main- ly on the Air by Max Beerbohm. Budgell's tabletalk has not been immortalised like Dodworth's, though he is mentioned in the Epistle to Arbuthnot and has two uncom- plimentary pages about him in the DNB. But his last words live still:
What Cato did, and Addison approved Cannot be wrong.
These lines were found on Budgell's desk after his suicide: in terrible and deserved legal trouble over a will, he drove, curious- ly enough, to Dorset stairs on the Thames, filled his pockets with stones, took a boat, plunged overboard and was drowned. He had chosen Cato's part. I implore my read- ers to opt for Addison's, which is much easier to play, besides being more Specta- torish. Budgell was, however, a minor con- tributor to the Spectator.
But for Missolonghi
Was Budgell representative?' a shamefully ill-read fellow of Lady Mar- garet Hall once asked, to the embarrass- ment of his more erudite and feminine companions at high table. It did not take much of their scholarship to answer: 'He was.' The fellow wanted medical testi- mony? Let him turn to Sir Thomas Browne: 'We all labour against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.' The word of an ornithologist? 'Now more than ever seems it rich to die,' one of them says, listening to a nightingale. A fore- igner's view? M. Baudelaire has written admiringly of the beliefs of the ancient Ro- mans: `Le stoicisme, religion qui n'a qu'un sacrement, — le suicide!'
Fifty years after Baudelaire, the Duke of Dorset took the same, sacramental view of suicide: 'He realised that to die for love of this lady would be no mere measure of precaution, or counsel of despair. It would be in itself a passionate indulgence — a fiery rapture . . . Poor indeed seemed to him now the sacrament of marriage beside the sacrament of death.' If the Duke has a fault, it is his tendency to exaggerate. But every emotion he feels during his love affair is an exaggeration of the emotions other lovers feel. Caricatures only work when they are founded on reality. Max Beerbohm's, both written and drawn, work peculiarly well because he had a peculiarly exact appreciation of how peo- ple and things really are, as well as the delicate sense of humour needed to see which characteristics it would be amusing to exaggerate. Zuleika Dobson even has its purely realistic moments. 'I left off loving you when I found that you loved me,' the heroine tells the Duke. Which of us has not come across this horrible perversity in real life?
Even before he falls in love, the Duke, whom one must suppose not to be a Christ- ian (for then he would have known the joy of the death which is no death), is inclined to use Christian language. Struggling to re- sist her, he knows that 'The dandy must be celibate, cloistral; is, indeed, but a monk with a mirror for beads and breviary — an anchorite, mortifying his soul that his body may be perfect.' To be perfect, the dandy limits himself to dandyism. Max, to be a perfect writer, limits himself to the things he can do supremely well. Step outside those limits and he would be lost, as the Duke is lost. Contemplating his own death, Dorset comforts himself with the thought of the perfection he has already achieved. 'Future years could but stale, if not actually mar, that perfection.' He imagines how atrocious Byron would have become in old age. In this edition we are given a picture of the elderly Byron, entitled 'But for Mis- solonghi'. For this alone the book is worth buying.
On first glancing at The Illustrated Zuleika Dobson, I wondered what crass American could have pasted the illustra- tions anyhow in the margin. Then I read Professor N. John Hall's short and modest introduction and realised that the book is a facsimile of Max's own copy of Zuleika, which within two months of its publication in 1911 he had illustrated with over 80 watercolours. At this point the beauty and wit of the pictures became fully apparent to me. They might, however, be distracting to a first reader of the novel. There are times, as Professor Hall reminds us that Henry James said of the unillustrated edition of Du Maurier's Trilby, when it is 'a positive comfort to be left alone with the text'. But on rereading the book, one becomes accus- tomed to finding, in the illustrations, yet further development of its brilliant con- ceits.
These conceits are not to most people's taste. Max himself put his public at 1,500 in England and 1,000 in America. Many find nothing to delight, much to repel them in sentences such as these, describing the Duke's writing: 'In his sterner moods he gravitated to Latin, and wrought the noble iron of that language to effects that were, if anything, a trifle over-impressive. He found for his highest flights of comtempla- tion a handy vehicle in Sanscrit.' But those who like this kind of thing like it very much indeed.
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