THE INCOMPARABLE MAX
The New Urbanity had no finer expression than that which was summed
up and set forth in the personality and art of Max Beerbohm. It was
fine because it was at once normal and unique, sane but inconsequent,
sedate without being serious, and mannered without empty severity or
formality. Max was the comic spirit of the Nineties, and he took his
elegant way without haste or fuss, dropping appropriate remarks about
himself apropos of others and vice versa; throwing upon the decadence
of his day the critical light of a half-appreciative humour. Without
being decadent, this extraordinarily modern personality managed to
represent the decadence laughing, or rather smiling, at itself.
Max Beerbohm was born in London, in August 1872, and it is interesting
to note that he entered the world three days after his famous
contemporary, Aubrey Beardsley, who was born at Brighton during the
same week. He was educated at Charterhouse, and Merton College,
Oxford, where his critical and satirical gifts revealed themselves in
caricatures of masters and dons; in a letter to _The Carthusian_,
over the pseudonym, “Diogenes,” complaining against the dullness
of the school journal, and in a satire in Latin elegiacs, called
_Beccarius_, twelve copies of which were privately printed,
at the suggestion of his form-master, in the form of a four-page
pamphlet. A rough yellow paper was used for the publication, and the
year of issue was 1890. The colour and date may be noted; and, still
more significant, the title of his first notable essay, “A Defence of
Cosmetics,” written at Oxford, and published in the first number of
_The Yellow Book_ in 1894.
That year and the two following saw the reputation he had made at
Oxford carried to London, and Max, in the second year of manhood, leapt
into the front rank of the literary renaissance. During these years he
contributed to _The Yellow Book_, in addition to the above-named essay,
“A Letter to the Editor,” in July 1894, and “A Note on George the
Fourth,” in October 1894. Later he contributed “Dandies and Dandies,”
to _Vanity_, New York, February 1895; “Notes on Foppery,” to _The
Unicorn_, September 1895; “Be it Cosiness,” to _The Pageant_, Christmas
1895; “A Good Prince,” to _The Savoy_, January 1896; “De Natura
Barbatulorum,” to _The Chap-Book_, February 1896; and “Poor Romeo!” to
_The Yellow Book_, April 1896. These essays were collected, revised
and, in some instances, renamed, and published in a little red volume,
with white paper label, under the title of _The Works of Max Beerbohm_,
in 1896. During the same period he contributed caricatures to _The
Sketch_, _The Pall Mall Budget_, _Pick-me-up_, _The Yellow Book_, _The
Octopus_ and _The Savoy_. Some of these have been re-issued in volume
form, but the majority are buried in the files of those publications.
There is nothing specially remarkable in the amount of work recorded
above, but its distinctive quality for a young man still under
twenty-four years of age is characteristic of the precocity of the
period. More remarkable still, however, is the air of ancient wisdom
which pervades the essays. Max Beerbohm gives the impression of having
been born grown-up--that is to say, more or less ripe when others
would be more or less raw and green. One can well imagine such a youth
a few years earlier filling, in a more elegant way, the part of Sir
W. S. Gilbert’s immortal “Precocious Baby,” who was born, it will be
remembered, with
“A pipe in his mouth, and a glass in his eye,
A hat all awry,
An octagon tie,
And a miniature-miniature glass in his eye,”
for he assures us that at school he read _Marius the Epicurean_
in bed, and found the book as fascinating as _Midshipman Easy_.
The ripeness of maturity having established itself so early, it is not
surprising to find Max Beerbohm announcing his intention of settling
down to a cosy dotage at the great age of twenty-five, and, as a step
towards this comfortable end, publishing his collected _Works_,
with a Bibliography by Mr John Lane of the Bodley Head. “Once again in
the delusion that Art,” he wrote, in 1895, “loving the recluse, would
make his life happy, I wrote a little for a yellow quarterly and had
that _succès de fiasco_ which is always given to a young writer of
talent. But the stress of creation soon overwhelmed me. Only Art with
a capital H gives any consolations to her henchman. And I, who crave
no knighthood, shall write no more. I shall write no more. Already I
feel myself to be a trifle outmoded. I belong to the Beardsley period.
Younger men, with months of activity before them, with fresher schemes
and notions, with newer enthusiasm, have pressed forward since then.
_Cedo junioribus._ Indeed, I stand aside with no regret. For to be
outmoded is to be a classic, if one has written well. I have acceded to
the hierarchy of good scribes and rather like my niche.”
It was an age of poses, and this was one of the most refreshing: all
the other young men were frantically striving to cram into their youth
the multiple experiences of a generation weary of experiencing anything
older than the moment before last. But Max in his undue maturity was
not old; he was merely trying the alleged unruffled calm of elderliness
on the palate of waning youth (a period when men feel older than
they are, or will be) and, in contradistinction to the hot-house
ardency of the hour, he declared it to be good. Actually, Max was that
wise thing--a ripe youth. Even now he seems to be immune from the
trespassing years, having, doubtless, forestalled them in the Nineties.
The elderly by nature do not grow old. So, having terminated his life
as a writer in 1896 by the publication of his _Works_, with the
whimsical conclusion, “Diminuendo,” in which he confessed that he
believed himself outmoded, and declared his intention of living a life
of meditation in some unfashionable suburban retreat, he began writing
again. His second period produced a fantastic tale, _The Happy
Hypocrite_, and a companion volume to the _Works_, entitled
_More_. This book, published in 1899, is a selection from among a
considerable number of essays contributed to various periodicals, all
of which, with the exception of _To-Morrow_, are in the normal
current of publicity. More recently he has issued a further volume of
essays, _Yet Again_ (1909), a novel, _Zuleika Dobson_ (1911),
a volume of parodies on modern prose styles, _A Christmas Garland_
(1912), several collections of caricatures, and a one-act comedy of his
has been produced at the Palace Theatre.
A notable event in his literary life was the succession to Bernard Shaw
as dramatic critic of _The Saturday Review_, in 1898. Just twelve
months before Max had written his own valedictory--“Be it Cosiness,”
reprinted in the _Works_ as “Diminuendo,” Bernard Shaw joined
the staff of _The Saturday Review_, and when ill-health forced
him to relinquish his post he wrote an equally famous “Valedictory,”
announcing Max as his successor. “The younger generation is knocking at
the door,” wrote Shaw, in his generous announcement of the new-comer.
“The younger generation is knocking at the door; and as I open it
there steps spritely in the incomparable Max.” Max Beerbohm was not
exactly the younger generation knocking at the door of dramatic
criticism. Bernard Shaw was that younger generation. The incomparable
Max had no new axe to grind. He was neither new nor old, progressive
nor reactionary. He brought to the theatre nothing save his own
personality, and advocating no other cause, and upholding neither this
“movement” nor that, he contented himself by recording his own dramatic
likes and dislikes. And if his penetrating and creative criticism did
not always see eye to eye with the upholders of what was called the
“higher drama,” it had, in addition to its independence and insight,
the lasting charm of good writing.
[Illustration: “MR. W. B. YEATS PRESENTING MR. GEORGE
MOORE TO THE QUEEN OF THE FAIRIES”
_By Max Beerbohm_]
There are those even among the appreciators of Max Beerbohm who seem
to take special delight in laying stress upon what they call his
cleverness and brilliance. Such obvious characteristics of his work
are not to be denied; but, when all has been said upon the point, it
is only right to admit that cleverness and brilliance, common enough
stock-in-trade even of the literary huckster, are only a phase, and
a minor phase, of the art of Max Beerbohm. First and foremost, he
represents a point of view. And, secondly, that point of view is in
no sense a novelty in a civilised society. Every age has had its
representative of a similar attitude towards life, in one a Horace,
in another a Joseph Addison and, again, a Charles Lamb. In our age
it is Max Beerbohm. He is the spirit of urbanity incarnate; he is
town. He is civilisation hugging itself with whimsical appreciation
for a conservative end. “A delicate and Tory temperament precludes me
from conversing with Radicals,” he says. That does not preclude him
from laughing at institutions and what might be called institutional
persons. But it precludes him from shouting and arguing loudly, in an
age given overmuch to that sort of thing. He talks the quiet talk of
culture, and his finely balanced essays betray conscious appreciation
of the immemorial traditions of culture on every page. When he
reproves, in either prose or pictures, he reproves with a smile. His
laughter is ever Meredith’s laughter of the mind; that laughter which
the novelist considered a corrective of civilised foibles because it
is based in a love of civilisation; the laugh that, in Meredith’s own
words, “will be of the order of the smile, finely tempered, showing
sunlight of the mind, mental richness rather than noisy enormity. Its
common aspect is one of unsolicitous observation, as if surveying a
full field and having leisure to dart on its chosen morsels, without
any fluttering eagerness. Men’s future upon earth does not attract it;
their honesty and shapeliness in the present does; and whenever they
wax out of proportion, overblown, affected, pretentious, bombastical,
hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate; whenever it sees them
self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in idolatries, drifting
into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning shortsightedly,
plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with their
professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws binding
them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend sound
reason, fair justice; are false in humility or mined with conceit,
individually or in the bulk, the Spirit overhead will look humanely
malign and cast an oblique light on them, followed by volleys of
silvery laughter.” That benign yet critical spirit is the comic spirit,
and it fathered the urbane essays and caricatures of Max Beerbohm. But
it did not impress itself upon the genius of Max so as to overwhelm it
with social purpose. It left a fair margin for the play of personality,
for playfulness in itself, and even for that essential egotism whose
special flavour captivates by insinuation rather than by advertisement.
The attitude he adopts in his books is, of course, a pose, but he
himself would not deny the imputation. On the contrary. His pose is
as natural as anything civilised can be. Civilisation is the master
art of the human race, and Max Beerbohm insists upon his civilised
attributes, realising in his every mood and sensation that the long
years of human development have made him a detail of that master art,
just as a column is a detail of architecture, or rhythm of verse.
He is not, however, an expression of the hardness of even civilised
life; he is the expression of its delicacy and refinement, one of
the points, as it were, wherein the race in its artificial aspects
becomes self-conscious, contemplative, artistic, meet for Mayfair or
St James’s. He is a sane manifestation of dandyism. There is evidence
of this in every line of his essays--from the careful and inimitable
excellence of his prose to his delight, often satirical, in the use of
ornate and exotic words. You would deduce a dandy from such essays, but
not a D’Orsay, although Max is also an amateur in portraiture. D’Orsay
abandoned himself to personal display; he was more a fop than a dandy,
and his gorgeous clothes were flamboyant weeds rather than the nice
accentuations of a man and his works. Max is never abandoned, so you
could never deduce a fop from his essays. What you could deduce would
be a person more dignified, less theatrical, but none the less proud of
himself; and the quiet eccentricity of his clothes would serve as a
suitable background for the sly brightness of his wit. For the dandyism
of Max is intrinsic; it is a state of being rather than an assumption;
it is psychological, expressing itself in wit rather than clothes; and
wit is the dandyism of the mind.
It does not matter what he writes about: his subjects interest because
he is interesting. A good essayist justifies any subject, and Max
Beerbohm as an essayist is next in succession to Charles Lamb. His
essays, and these are his greatest works, are genial invitations to
discuss Max, and you discuss him all the more readily and with fuller
relish because they are not too explicit; indeed, he is often quite
prim. “On the banner that I wave is embroidered a device of prunes and
prisms,” he says. The author of _The Works of Max Beerbohm_, of
_More_, and of _Yet Again_, does not tell you all; he pays
you a delicate compliment by leaving you something to tell yourself;
the end of his ellipsis, as in all the great essayists, is yourself. He
is quite frank with you, and properly genial; but he is too fastidious
to rush into friendship with his readers. They must deserve friendship
first. He does not gush. In his earlier work he recalled the Wise Youth
in _Richard Feverel_, and Whistler of the _Ten O’Clock_.
But latterly he has grown more confiding and less artificial. His
whimseys have given place to irony--an irony with the flavour of a
fully matured wine. But he has not, as yet, achieved great distinction
in letters outside the medium in which he has proved himself a master.
His departures from the essay, in the form of a short story and a
novel, are, in a sense, extensions of his genius as an essayist. _The
Happy Hypocrite_ is really an essay masquerading as a story, and
_Zuleika Dobson_, a wreath of essays (including one exquisite
gem on Oxford), aphorisms and detached reflections, hung about a
refreshingly extravagant story. The real Max Beerbohm is, I fancy, an
essayist pure and simple, the essay being the inevitable medium for
the expression of his urbane and civilised genius. There are, he has
told us, a few people in England who are interested in repose as an
art. He is, undoubtedly, one of them. But he is also interested in
the art of the essay, and his essays are exquisite contributions to
that rare art. In them you see revealed the complete Max, interpreting
deftly, by means of wit and humour, imagination and scholarship, that
“uninterrupted view of my fellow-creatures,” to use his own words,
which he admits preferable to books, and which, doubtless, he prefers
better than any other view in life.
Even his caricatures are essays, and not only in the pictorial sense,
for many of them are incomplete in themselves; they depend for their
fulness of satire upon the carefully worded descriptions added by
the artist. His earlier style of drawing was far simpler than the
elaborate pictures which are the delight of so many who love fun with
a sting in it, at the now familiar Leicester Gallery exhibitions. His
_Caricatures of Twenty-five Gentlemen_ (1896) is a volume of
drawings in simple black and white, each in the nature of a grotesque
comment upon some contemporary personality. There is little of the
deeper satire which Max afterwards developed. It was a decade of
attitudinising, and caricatures in this early volume are portraits
of modern attitudes seen through the lens of a temperament which
distorts without malice for the sake of healthy and critical laughter.
But, with the exception of the caricature of Aubrey Beardsley,
which combines caricature of that artist’s personal appearance and
his art, plus a clever comment on his exotic and artificial point
of view in the introduction of a toy French poodle, there is very
little below the surface of these drawings; they lack depth. His
later work in caricature is broader as well as deeper, and his keen
sense of satirical fun does not hesitate to go hand-in-hand with a
sharper form of criticism when face to face with pomposity or the
self-sufficiency of our mandarins. The fulness of Max Beerbohm’s genius
as a caricaturist is to be seen in the volume of coloured drawings
called _The Poet’s Corner_ (1904). Here we have him arousing the
laughter of amusement in such drawings as “Omar Khayyám,” “Dante in
Oxford”; the laughter which is criticism in “Robert Browning taking Tea
with the Browning Society,” and “Mr Rudyard Kipling takes a bloomin’
Day aht, on the blasted ’Eath, along with Britannia, ’is Gurl”; and
the laughter which ceases to be laughter in “Mr W. B. Yeats presenting
Mr George Moore to the Queen of the Fairies,” and the unforgettable
“Mr Tennyson reading _In Memoriam_ to his Sovereign”--surely
among the great caricatures of all time. Max rarely knots the lash
of his satire, but his caricatures of certain aspects of Court life
prove him to be capable of inflicting criticisms which might well make
their subjects wince. In the main, however, his caricatures suggest an
amused impartiality. Most of us are in the habit of making to ourselves
sarcastic or whimsical remarks about the people we meet, see or hear
about. Max Beerbohm has put such usually silent comment into pictures;
and these pictures constitute in themselves a revival of caricature
in a country that had practically lost the art of personal satire in
pictures--and the taste for it.