Sir Max Beerbohm
by LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
1
AS I have known Max Beerbohm — Sir Max Beerbohm — since his youth at Oxford, and have always regarded one so much my junior as still in the heyday of his years, I felt more out of date than ever when I learned that he was to come of age anti reach the Psalmist’s limit one day this August. By what, right, I asked myself, can he claim admittance to our venerable order of septuagenarians? Can he radote or drivel, or show the least symptom of softening of the brain?
Surely, I reflected, this assumption of antiquity is only Max’s fun, like the boyish dandyism and nice conduct of his clouded cane at Oxford. All his life Max has loved an ironic attitude or flourish: has loved to gaze at the world through a mask, like his hero, Lord George Hell. And yet this affectation of make-believe was in itself, I always thought, a kind of make-believe, for as to what the world thought of him 1 don’t think Max ever cared a hang. This mocking detachment, this ironical disdain of the world’s opinion, being, as I thought, the keynote not only of Max’s way of writing but of his way as well of living, I was not surprised when, after the happiest of marriages, he abandoned all his journalistic and worldly triumphs and left London for Italy, in order, as Walt Whitman puts it, to loaf and invite his soul.
As to the loafing, there could be no question; I have never known a more wisely idle person, and it was this idleness that enabled him, almost alone among his contemporaries, to mellow and mature his gift. He was quite content, so far as I could see, to live on the most modest of incomes and do nothing all day long. His indifference to fame and the rewards of literature seemed to me quite fantastic; and I remember once, when I had taken it on me to arrange for the translation of one of his books into French, though he seemed delighted with the notion, he could not bring himself to give in writing (he never wrote letters) the formal permission that was needed. I importuned him by word of mouth, I wrote to him, I sent him prepaid telegrams; the translator, who had done the work and arranged for its publication, bombarded him with letters, but it was only after years of delay that he received the answer that Max was of course delighted that the book should be translated.
What was Max doing all that time? I think he very seldom read a book, but he must have followed the course of literature, at least in England, for I was once told, I do not know how truly, that he had been heard to say that, of all the English achievements of his time, he placed highest the writings of Lytton Strachey, and some portions of the later work of Henry James. Of French literature I fancy he read nothing, and 1 dare say he had hardly heard the name of Proust. I have reasons to suspect that he spent a good deal of his time in elaborate mystifications. I know that after his very occasional visits to London he would sometimes, after bidding passionate farewells to his friends, go to the Great Western Hotel at Paddington and remain there unknown to all for weeks and sometimes months. He found the monstrous horror of its 1860 decoration (a horror that must be seen to be believed) and the awful insipidity of its cornstarch and custard cooking very congenial to his mid-Victorian tastes. He could hardly tear himself away from it.
He loved Bognor, too, when it was dowdy and deserted, and not yet Bognor Regis. Once when the author of novels no one ever read was about to visit him, he engaged the unhappy local sandboys to inscribe broadly in large letters on the seashore the news: “The famous novelist, Augustus Tubbs, has arrived in Bognor.” Max’s walk the next morning on the sands with his friend was for him also a pleasant promenade.
2
I have written of the Muse of Irony, since in our unsubtle speech I can find no precise term to describe the special quality or gift of this most exquisite, most enchanting, most enigmatic of our contemporaries. “Malice,” with its English signification, is far too crude and coarse a word; I must borrow it, therefore, from abroad, with one of its delicate French shades of meaning; la belle malice, as Voltaire called it, the malice of Molière and La Fontaine — that subtlety of expressing in one phrase more than one meaning, which Hamlet learned from his reading of Montaigne. Ben Jonson made “malice” into a verb, which I shall borrow also, to describe the exquisite, ironic art with which Max, in the greatest of all books of parodies, A Christmas Garland, maliced our English authors, sometimes cruelly, as in that deed of blood, the slaughter of Arthur Benson, or again with the tender touch which made the author of “The Middle Distance,” Henry James, love the silken lash that stroked him.
Every few years Max would descend from his alabaster tower at Rapallo and bring to England a sheaf of drawings, which products of his astronomical leisure he would present to Britannia, who, he tells us, would frown upon them, as being by no means in the best of taste. In the conflicts which raged in the angry island she presided over, Max took no part, save in the conflict which one would have thought would have interested him the least — the conflict led by the Pankhursts, for the suffrage, in which his great utterance, “Christabel, right or wrong!” became a war cry which, some of these grim ladies have averred, turned the tide of battle in their favor.
If Britannia did not greatly relish the image of herself in the mirror Max presented, others of his victims seldom rejoiced unduly when they saw their faces in that bright, polished steely mirror. “Logan,” Sir Edmund Gosse once said, as he drew me aside in grave warning, “I feel it my duty to tell you that something has happened to you that sooner or later happens to us almost all. Max has got you! We don’t like it, and you won’t like it, but you must pretend, as we all do, that you like it. You can console yourself, at any rate, with the thought that it will give enormous pleasure to your friends.”
Gosse was doubly right. Though at Max’s next show I found all the other drawings laughable beyond words, the caricature of myself I considered the only failure of the exhibition. Not that I minded in the least; I simply saw nothing funny in it; and was greatly surprised, though pleased, of course, as well, that it gave, as Gosse predicted it would give, so much pleasure to my friends.
3
It is curious how the world comes to adore those who scorn it. Since Max Beerbohm, bombarded out of his Ivory Tower, has returned to England, he has become — as Henry James, another Ivory Tower inmate, became — a personage, the most important person in any room he enters. And how many millions hang with reverent delight upon his lips when he only too rarely condescends to broadcast? And examining again his books of caricatures, or that masterpiece, Rossetti and His Circle, we rub our eyes to find how time has added to their luster. Why, a man of genius has been at work among us all the time, and we never knew it! A genius which we feel we must rank high, rank almost among the greatest. For is not Juliet’s Nurse, is not Polonius, is not Malvolio, a Beerbohmian character? Suppose Max had illustrated Shakespeare, had given us a drawing of the Prince of Denmark and the Ghost?
One grows so giddy with these speculations that, among all the mad hypotheses of the disintegrators, the notion that in some previous incarnation Max himself had figured among those Great Unknown hardly seems the maddest of such speculations.
At any rate, now that Max has goodnaturedly accepted the remorseful stroke of Britannia’s sword, may we not hope that he will ascend the scale of honor which another beloved lord of la belle malice sometimes dreamed of, as he mounted in imagination step by step from C. Lamb through Earl, Marquis, Duke Lamb, to an ineffable title in the Great Hereafter?
One at least whom Max has maliced, and who didn’t mind it, and sometimes with his glittering rapier (he didn’t mind that either), would gladly read, in successive lists of Honors, of Baron or of Earl Max, of the Marquess or Duke of Beerbohm, of an Emperor Maximilian, and indeed of a Pontifex Maximus, a Pope Max, a High Priest of a Europe at peace for good.