'A Terrible Thing, Time, Nevertheless'

“With all his gifts, he had of imagination not one spark. Fancy and wit he had in his earlier work; and grace he never lost; but for the rest he had only an immense quantity of that ‘cleverness’ which to the creative artist is of all qualities the most repellent.” Let’s thank Max Beerbohm who, like an entomologist identifying a previously unknown species of mosquito, renders the definitive description of a familiar literary type. The merely clever writer, skating across the surface of life, lives for immediate gratification. The reader snorts in appreciation and shares the gag with his spouse, who smiles politely. Beerbohm is writing in 1928 about a once-prominent critic and collector of fairy tales, Andrew Lang, who died in 1912. Today, a clever writer is Billy Collins or many associated with The New Yorker. None is evil, nor was Lang, but the satisfactions they offer, if any, are fleeting. In “A Very Critical Gentleman,” published in the June 1928 issue of Vanity Fair, Beerbohm…