You are stopped by a gun-shot across your bow, and you prepare for the worst. But the worst is merely a jolly invitation in a boyish voice to a game of marbles.
The combination is irresistible.... I am reminded of an authentic tale of the South seas. A band of wicked mutineers set their captain and officers afloat in an open boat, and sailed to Pitcairn Island, where they proceeded to live in the most Nietzschean fashion imaginable, enslaving the natives, taking their wives away from them, and living in fabulous luxury. They were a fractious lot, however, and they quarrelled among themselves, and shot each other up, and went insane and committed suicide, until the natives got tired of it, and revolted and killed them all—all except one gentle person who had got mixed up with the mutineers by mistake. He was not a Nietzschean; he believed at heart in all the old-fashioned virtues. And where the Nietzscheans had failed, he succeeded—so notably that when the island was rediscovered half a century later, he was ruling there in a little peaceful paradise, the Last of the Mutineers. There is something about gentleness, it would seem, that makes for survival. And I like to think that Max Beerbohm remains with us to tell the story of quaint, devil-worshipping literary mutineers like Enoch Soames, precisely because he cannot bear ever to press home the shining blade of his wit to its most deadly extent—because he does not really want to hurt anybody after all, not even Enoch Soames.
