BOOKS
And Even Now
BY BERNARD LEVIN IBELONG,' said Max Beerbohm, `to the Beardsley period.' But he said it in 1895, the year in Which Wilde was prosecuted and the Nineties, though but half-way through, came to a hideous end. Easy enough for us now to see that the jig was up, that the worm of decadence was already at the heart of the age, that of all the work pro- duced by the writers and artists who were truly of the fin-de-siecle only a tiny handful of things Were as good as their contemporaries thought them, and a vast quantity was simply rubbish; easy enough, even, for G. K. Chesterton to write, in the dedication of The Man Who Was Thursday: And the green carnation withered, as in forest
fires that pass Roared in the winds of all the world ten thousand leaves of grass.
But Beerbohm was writing in the very middle of it all, before Frank Harris had gone to eke out his days peddling pornography on the Riviera, while the Yellow Book was at its apogee and The Savoy had not yet appeared, and when he was only twenty-three years old. Remarkable insight ! Re- markable prescience! Remarkable young man, who had already published a volume entitled The Works of Max Beerbohm, and with its publication gravely announced his retirement, who survived sixty-one more years and who has not retired yet. For here is another volume from that infinitely fastidious hand, to recall with its reprints of his broadcasts that infinitely fastidious voice, and With its reprints of some more of his essays (`narrowcasts,' he calls them) that infinitely fastidi- ous mind. A few years ago Mr. Martin Secker edited an anthology of prose and poetry from the eighteen-nineties. There are thirty-nine writers represented, and the dedication is 'To Sir Max Beerbohm, sole surviving contributor to these en- suing pages.' Sole survivor, indeed. And the late Holbrook Jackson's The Eighteen Nineties, per- haps the best—certainly the best known—book on the subject, which was published in 1913, is also dedicated to him. He was responsible for one of Wilde's best epigrams—`The gods have bestowed on Max the gift of perpetual old age'—and for one of Shaw's most-remembered phrases--`the in- comparable Max.' What on earth did he have that the others did not have?
The first quality one notices is the fastidious- ness. The polished exquisiteness of his style, with its effortless air of having been achieved with an ouija-board, is not the, exquisiteness of the phraseur who polishes away until there is nothing left, as is so much of the work of contemporaries of hii like George Moore and even Wilde. For, although 'feline' is an adjective that has been applied to Max Beerbohm, there is in truth no hint of the feminine in his writing. Nor is he a miniaturist, working away on his square inch of ivory like, say, Logan Pearsall Smith, who grew exhausted after a paragraph of his wistful navel-
contemplating. Beerbohm's style is thoroughly robust, even, paradoxically, at its most delicate. Take such a passage as this, from Zuleika Dobson:
To all Rhodes Scholars, indeed, his [the Duke of Dorset's] courtesy was invariable. He went out of his way to cultivate them. And this he did more as a favour to Lord Milner than of his own caprice. He found these Scholars, good fellows though they were, rather oppressive. They had not—how could they have?—the under- graduate's virtue of taking Oxford as a matter of course. The Germans loved it too little, the Colonials too much. The Americans were, to a sensitive observer, the most troublesome—as being the most troubled—of the lot. The Duke was not one of those Englishmen who fling, or care to hear flung, cheap sneers at America. Whenever anyone in his presence said that America was not large in area, he would firmly maintain that it was. He held, too, in' his, en- lightened way, that Americans have a perfect right to exist. But he did often find himself wish- ing Mr. Rhodes had not enabled them to exercise that right in Oxford.
The balance and rhythm of this paragraph are immediately apparent to the least sensitive ear. The use of parenthesis, in its proper role as a device whereby a writer may reculer pour inieux saucer (and not, as some who are over-addicted to the parenthetical would apparently have it, a device for including afterthoughts in a sentence already planned before they occurred to the writer), is well exemplified in phrases like 'how could they have?' as being the most troubled,' 'or care to hear flung.' The slightly archaic phrase (also a two-edged weapon in the hands of the in- experienced), like 'large in area,' or 'of his own caprice,' is also in evidence. And the digressive element, one of the most important ingredients of a really fine and polished prose (and most danger- ous of all when employed by the inexpert), is there too. Yet• the total effect of the passage is one of vigorous, indeed almost testy, comment on the Oxford of which he wrote, more directly, in his preface to that flawless book : . . my fantasy was far more like to the old Oxford than was the old Oxford like to the place now besieged and invaded by Lord Nuffield's armies.'
For the fact is, Max Beerbohm was a commen- tator with opinions as bold, and as boldly held, as any of the noisier and more overtly engage of his contemporaries. This has. occasionally been recog- nised of his caricatures, which are among the most savage, as they are among the greatest, of exam- ples of that art. (There hangs on the wall of the editor's office in the Spectator his portrait of Sir Oswald Mosley—drawn while Mosley was still the great hope of the Labour Party and long before the rot had set in, yet with unfailing insight draw- ing him as practically all leg, tapering upwards to a tiny, tiny head which one feels can accommo- date only a tiny, tiny, brain.) Yet his social and critical judgments in prose, however obliquely ex- pressed, were hard and challenging; they never encompassed the greater issues of the times, for his diffidence prevented him from becoming in- volved in controversies about which others were making so much more noise than he would ever be able to or wish to. But in his two fine volumes of dramatic criticisms, his essays, even, obliquely, in his short stories, his quiet voice is heard insist- ing on the values which for him were permanent —beauty and civilisation, grace and favour. And in these broadcasts he returns again to such themes—condemning the foulness of the murder on our roads, the hideousness of advertising, the nastiness of London (`cosmopolitanised, demo- cratised, commercialised, mechanised, standard- ised, vulgarised'), looking back with an enlight- ened and justified nostalgia to the politicians, the music-halls and the actors of his youth, paying his tribute to friendship in a wonderful piece on George Moore. To the end, the style remained as pellucid, as firm, as ever; one is constantly, in this book, coming across some fine old word—rebar- bative, astriction, arride, limn, friable, ruth, im- presciently, quodlibetarian, illude—which is there only because no other word will quite do, and because the author thought that even sending readers or hearers to the dictionary was not too high a price to pay for exactitude and the maintenance of his standards. He mellowed to- wards the end—the sun at Rapallo had, soaked into his bones, and he gave up drawing years before he died—but he never compromised. At the end of his life, as at the beginning, he praised the good and the beautiful and condemned the bad and the ugly. His ashes stand in St. Paul's Cathe- dral, of all preposterous places; but his courage- ous, civilised spirit is among us yet. It will be a poor day for us all when it is no longer so.
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