A Good Max

Beerbohm’s thoughts had to a deadline

Works and More by Max Beerbohm

The satirist and caricaturist Max Beerbohm discovers, he says, upon a lecture given to the Royal Geographical Society, that there is a man chained to a rock on a mountain summit in the Caucuses. He listens up as the celebrated traveller and old mountaineer who claims to have seen the man deduces that this prisoner — confined to a rock up there, menaced by an eagle — can only have been Prometheus.

Prometheus, cursed for eternity for stealing fire from the gods. And possibly, Beerbohm relates to his readers, also a patsy, the victim of a put-up job. Framed.

Now you people might well, Beerbohm writes, be able to go back to your lives after hearing that Prometheus lives and suffers greatly in this world of ours. But I can’t. Think of it. Think of him. Think of Prometheus! The progenitor of human ingenuity, the man who gave us our cleansing fire. Water may cleanse but it can corrupt. Fire only cleanses.

You all may be able to go about as usual, but I cannot. I’m setting off to the Caucuses forthwith. I’ll gather what I need as I go. Making light work of the mountaineering, I’ll use technology and money to arrive at the site of Promethean suffering. I’ll greet him in cheerful schoolboy Greek, and when the eagle appears, I’ll shoot it with my gun — a pleasant development afforded by the past millennia.

With an iron file, I’ll then free Prometheus from his rusty chains; we’ll descend the mountain together. I can give him the tweed suit I’ve had made for him and hand him the travelling suitcase with ‘II’ stencilled on it; and we will be home in time, perhaps, for the beginning of the new season.

I fancy, Beerbohm writes, that the rest of London society will like Prometheus, will be pleased to meet him. But even if the great and the good and the famous do not like my new friend, I’ll always have the eagle of Zeus, stuffed in a glass box, to remind me of an interesting adventure of no small note.

So goes the final essay of Max Beerbohm’s elegant second collection, More. Compared to The Works of Max Beerbohm, the book More is better affected, I think, by the requirements of paid literary production. The essays are less meticulously architectured; they’re shorter; they tackle less abstract subjects. One or two of them are almost free of the Beerbohm staple, irony. But not entirely.

The essay ‘A. B.’ is a little surprise. I kept waiting for the punchline that would land and tell us that Alfred Bryan, the illustrator who pumped out over a thousand pictures per year for the lower quality London papers and magazines, was in fact a man with no sense of line or proportion, a man of no talent. That his pictures of actors, captured from only a moment or two on stage, a caught glance, were grotesques; that his illustrations of society dinners and race meetings and hunts and weddings were all dull as anything. But instead, the opposite happened. Beerbohm assured me that Bryan was in fact a genius, and a hard-working genius (something I’d have thought the fey aesthete might take against). And a brief peruse of some of Bryan’s pictures tells me Beerbohm may well have meant what he said.

When Beerbohm likewise praises rococo novelists like Ouida — and does so almost as histrionically as her sort were said to write (hence: the fine young man, who was a great and noble cavalry officer, stood boldly after he had reclined so gracefully; and thus, with one great move, he threw the contents of a chased goblet down his throat; and remembered many a time on many a battlefield he had carried the day with similar wit and bravery and heart; and thought, too, of all of the state rooms he had adorned, and all of the ladies he had paid court: ladies tricked out in ermines and minks and satins, ladies of the most exquisite taste — taste bespeaking wealth and sophistication and glamour, and just a little mystery, on occasion. This man was known as ‘Fifi’ to his friends) — when I read something like that, I do wonder.

A particularly fine essay is Beerbohm’s little note on royalty, where he suggests that a recent display of coolness under fire by a European potentate might have an interesting mechanical rationale. Namely, that when the madman leapt from the crowd and pointed his gun at the king, who was sat — as kings are apt to be — in the state coach on a ride, and when the loon fired and the king appeared not to flinch, this was because the king was not in fact there. The figure in the coach was a wax dummy, an automaton, while the king was in mufti and in disguise in the neighbourhood, and was in fact knocked down by the police in their zealous arrest of the would-be assassin.

And as for the bullet which had missed the king — and was acclaimed a miracle by some — it had missed the king but lodged firmly in the breast of the dummy; and if it had been a little to the left, it would have struck the clockwork mechanism that kept the thing going, and thus exposed the whole illusion once and for all.

I liked Beerbohm’s suggestion that Wagner is a ruder composer than most because he makes his operas so loud that you have to shout to be made yourself heard over them. I enjoyed his pleasure at seeing a boy heading off to public school and contemplating all the sufferings the boy would shortly undergo, but which the author had now delightedly outgrown. You can’t put a price on things like this. I enjoyed this book immensely.