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STEVEN MARCUS
real name is Paul Verlaine." One has to admit that this is very easy
hunting; besides, anyone could make such an error. A more representative
instance of Ashbee's critical procedure can be extracted from his discus–
sion of an eighteenth-century book of stories,
L'Annee Galante,
which
he doesn't regard very favorably. "The book is divided into 12 chapters,"
runs his comment, "each bearing the name of a month, for which there
seems to be no
raison d'etre,
as the adventures have no affinity to the
season in which they are told." So much for the weather. And here is
his descriptive evaluation of one of Rowlandson's obscene plates,
The
Larking Cull.
"A bed room; toilet table to the left, looking-glass hanging
on the wall to the right, a pot of flowers on a small table at the back, all
prettily drawn. Two figures; the youth's member is very large, and un–
naturally tapered at the end, a form particularly affected by Rowlandson.
Pleasure is depicted on the faces of both actors." That last sentence
rings in the ear as if it were a sepulchral admonition; one can almost
hear Mrs. Wilfer saying it. As for his general critical idea of the his–
tory of English pornographic writing, Ashbee commits himself to the
notion that since Cleland things have been going downhill. The reason
for this deterioration is that later writers have been influenced by
Sade "and have copied the cynicism, cruelty, and impracticable las–
civiousness which he made the distinctive feature of his books. Thus,
the nature of English erotic fiction has been changed, and its whole–
some tone (if any book of the kind can be called wholesome) entirely
lost." It seems to me that Ashbee's qualifications, intentions, and
achievements as a critic are fairly captured by his use of the word
"impracticable."
Ashbee may be regarded as coming under the class of minds
described by Arnold in "The Literary Influence of Academies"–
provincial, eccentric, Persian in their excessiveness, withal original.
What makes Ashbee particularly susceptible to such characterization
is that his subject is itself originally invested with those qualities and
is thus designed to elicit the latent irregularities and distortions in the
mind which undertakes to deal with it. We may also regard him as
belonging to the group of English gentlemen-amateur scholars, pri–
vate persons who turned a personal interest, hobby, avocation, pas–
sion, or mania to good account. These range from someone like Mr.
Casaubon at one end of the scale to someone like the Fowler brothers
at the other. Ashbee falls about in the middle: the nature of his
in–
terests pushes him in the direction of Mr. Casaubon, while the actual–
ity of his achievement tends to raise him above his subject. Although
in the preceding pages I have subjected him to rather severe analysis,
my purpose in doing so was not disparagement. In the first place I
