5)+A+Christmas+Garland

  A Christmas Garland



===="Such then is the play that I have stolen. For all the many pleasing esthetic qualities you will find in ^it dramatic inventiveness, humor and pathos, eloquence, elfin glamor and the like you must bless the original author : of these things I have only the usufruct. To me the play owes nothing but the stiffening of civistic conscience that has been crammed in. Modest ? Not a bit of it. It is my civistic conscience that makes a man of me and (incidentally) makes this play a masterpiece. Nothing could have been easier for me (if I weresome one else) than to perform my task in that God-rest-you-merry- gentlemen -may-nothing-you-dismay spirit which so grossly flatters the sensibili- ties of the average ====

[[image:http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51TQlbxl5FL._SL500_AA240_.jpg align="right"]]
====citizen by its assumption that he is sharp enough to be dismayed by what stares him in the face. Charles Dickens had lucid intervals in which he was vaguely conscious of the abuses around him ; but his spasmodic effort* to expose these brought him into contact with 159 realities so agonising to his highstrung literary nerves that he invariably sank back into debauches of unsocial optimism. Even the Swan of Avon had his glimpses of the havoc of displacement wrought by Elizabethan romanticism in the social machine which had been working with tolerable smoothness under the prosaic guidance of Henry 8. The time was out of joint ; and the Swan, recognising that he was the last person to ever set it right, consoled himself by offering the world a soothing doctrine of despair. Not for m e, thank you, that Swansdown pillow. I refuse as flatly to fuddle myself in the shop of " W. Shakespeare, Druggist," as to stimulate myself with the juicy joints of " C. Dickens, Family Butcher."" Of these and suchlike pernicious establishments my patronage consists in weaving round the shop- door a barbed-wire entanglement of dialectic and then training my moral machine-guns on the customers." ====

Purpose
Max Beerbohm is the author of A Christmas Garland, which is a parody that pokes fun of many different types of literary styles. The author’s that Beerbohm makes fun of include Rudyard Kipling, Conrad, and Henry James. The purpose of this parody is not only to make fun of the authors, but to point out the flaws that these authors carry. For example, here you can see that he points out the ambiguity of the author’s purpose. He also uses procrastination to exaggerate the brilliance of the author’s work. Max Beerbohm mentions to the reader the Shakespeare was a druggist, also says that Charles Dickens wrote so much that he sank into unsocial optimism. He directly point out the authors name to tell the reader their specific flaw. Beerbohm therefore effectively uses parody to get his point across, in total making fun of seventeen different authors, in a Christmas theme.

//Beerbohm, Max. A Christmas Garland. New York: Echo Library, 2000.// http://books.google.com/books?id=mE5aAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=a+christmas+garland&ei=oPaLSbmFHpH6lQSui6S7DQ

Archive. February 6, 2009. http://www.archive.org/stream/christmasgarland00beeriala/christmasgarland00beeriala_djvu.txt

Wikepedia. February 4, 2009. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Beerbohm

J. Antonio