Parody, indeed, is the pitfall of all _pastiche_. Even Mr. Max Beerbohm, extraordinarily susceptible and responsive to style as he is, did not escape it in that delightful little book of his wherein, some years ago, he imitated many of our contemporary authors. I can think of but a single instance which faithfully reproduces not only the language but almost the spirit of the authors imitated—M. Marcel Proust’s volume of “Pastiches et Mélanges.” The only stricture one can pass on it, if stricture it be, is that M. Proust’s Balzac and St. Simon and the rest are a little “more Royalist than the King,” a little more like Balzac and St. Simon than the originals themselves; I mean, a little too intensely, too concentratedly, Balzac and St. Simon. But Marcel Proust is one of my prejudices. To say that his first two books, “Swann” and “Les Jeunes Filles,” have given me more exquisite pleasure than anything in modern French literature would not be enough—I should have to say, in all modern literature. Mrs. Wharton, I see from the “Letters,” sent Henry James a copy of “Swann” when it first came out (1918): I wish we could have had his views of it. It offers another kind of psychology from Henry James’s, and he would probably have said, as he was fond of saying, that it had more “saturation” than “form.” But I am wandering from my subject of _pastiche_. I was present one afternoon at a curious experiment in theatrical _pastiche_. This was a rehearsal _of_ a rehearsal of the screen scene from _The School for Scandal_, which was supposed to be directed by Sheridan himself. Rather a complicated affair, because Miss Lilian Braithwaite was supposed to be playing not Lady Teazle but Mrs. Abington playing Lady Teazle, Mr. Gilbert Hare had to play Mr. Parsons playing Sir Peter, and so forth—histrionics, so to speak, raised to the second power. To tell the truth, I think the middle term tended to fall out. It was easy enough for the players to make themselves up after the originals in the Garrick Club picture of the screen scene, but how these originals spoke or what their personal peculiarities were, on or off the stage, who shall now say? There you have the difference between fact and fiction. Lady Teazle and Sir Peter, having no existence save in the book of the play, are producible from it at any time, as “real” as they ever were, but Mrs. Abington and Mr. Parsons are not fixed in a book, and their reality died with them. Naturally enough the actual scene written by Sheridan “went” with very much greater force than the setting of conversations, interruptions, etc., in which it was embedded, for the simple reason that the one part had had the luck to be imagined by Sheridan and the other had not. But as a _pastiche_ this new part, written round the old, seemed to me on the whole very well done; there was hardly a word that Sheridan and his friends _might_ not have said. Just one, however, there noticeably was. Mr. Gerald du Maurier (as