The Insufferable Max
‘. . FOR me at any rate,' writes Lord David Cecil in his introduction to the new World's Classics edition, '[Max Beerbohm's] Seven Men and Two Others is the finest expression of the comic spirit produced by any English writer during this century.' Very well, I thought; it is perhaps ten years since I last read these stories; let's see how they stand up in the light of Lord David's assessment.
To this there can be two answers. The first is that they stand up very well indeed, and not merely as the elegant jokes for which they are sometimes taken. Underneath the easy good humour, there are some abiding comments on the manners and vanities of literary men, some sympathetic studies of human loneliness and some shrewd insights into the psychology of gambling and assorted conditions of paranoia. Beerbohm, one might say, has taken a steady and discerning look at the stuff of the life around him and then, without cruelty or exaggeration, has demonstrated its absurdity. Since he does so With barely a misplaced word, in a style that seems leisurely but is in truth highly compressed, in a friendly 'man to man' tone of voice that never becomes either over-insistent or winsome, this is comic achievement of an unusual order.
The second answer is very different and much harder to give clearly. I think the easiest way to come at it is to say that Max Beerbohm, whether as a writer, an artist or a man, was exclusive. I am reminded of an account I heard of a recent exhibition of his cartoons: at least half the people present (the younger half), my informant remarked, seemed somehow to be out of it all. They were, so to speak, excluded from the club, and bitterly they resented it. Yet the reasons for their exclusion were largely of their own making. One was their ignorance —they just did not know who, for example, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was. A second was their self-righteous pride in this ignorance (why should we know and anyway who wants to?). A third was that they were not prepared even to try to understand the terms in which Beerbohm worked. These days (they apparently thought) an artist's job is to flatter his audience and affirm their preconceptions, to extend an indulgent blessing to their demands for effortless modes of 'self-realisation' and 'self-expression,' to reassure them that such qualities as discipline, knowledge or even intelligence, so far from being necessary, are injurious ('anti-life') and undemocratic. Beerbohm, on the other hand, had presented an artistic and (much worse) a social elite, in an idiom which showed that he himself was proud to belong to it, and with a conscious mastery which asserted in every line the importance of personal style and distinction.
So what the young really resented was this: that they were being made to feel inferior, un- wanted by their elders and betters. Their revenge, of course, was a cool dismissal of Beerbohm and his cartoons as irrelevant to our age, as simply not with it; and this is what will be said, in a few years at most, of Seven Men and the rest of his prose work. It will, alas, be true. For to enjoy Beerbohm's stories one must have an educated acquaintance with (at the very least) English literature and history; one must accept, with equanimity, the notion of at any rate a residual social hierarchy; one must prize individual talents above public welfare or aspiration; one must be prepared to encounter obliquity where good manners require it; and, above all, one must relish the sense of privilege which the ability to fulfil all these conditions will bestow. All right for Lord David Cecil, perhaps. All right, as it happens, for me, too—and, I hope, for you. But for the public—even a minority public—by 1970? Insufferable.
SIMON RAVEN
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