Max

Beerbohm’s works

The Works of Max Beerbohm by Max Beerbohm

The author, then in his middle twenties, was bent-backed with age and time as this book was compiled, according to his publisher, John Lane. Worn out by the terrible exertions of the lettered life. Tired beyond endurance. Embraced, even rapturously, by the public. But uncertain indeed of the public’s value. This was the curse, quite the curse, of Max Beerbohm. He was, as the extensive personalia and bibliography at the end of this book make clear, quite the prodigal son. From a very young age Beerbohm was writing anonymous letters (tastefully anonymous) to the school paper. And he was making caricatures — tasteful caricatures — of all his schoolmasters. It was, of course, only in Oxford that the young Max became the old Max. He made caricatures, as was his habit, of the dons. And he wrote quite scandalous pieces for the new papers and the new magazines.

Beerbohm’s essay in defence of cosmetics, reprinted here as ‘The Perversion of Rouge,’ is a great classic, quoted even now. Max’s contribution on dandies and dandyism has remained — to many minds’ personal cost — the standard on the subject.

The Beerbohm thesis, then, is that artifice is good. At least in its place. Make-up gives women who are not perhaps in the first flower of youth, or who even if young are not beautiful, a chance at pretending they are — thus increasing the gaiety of the world. So does dandyism. Is not being a dandy a heroic act? A man who spends his time — the great majority of it — and not a little of his money on clothes and on his appearance: such a man is a philanthropist. He is a great artist whose art is his person. And he exhibits his art to all who might see him. He is not a painter or sculptor whose work is vulgarly sold. Whose work is sold to a rich man and locked up, hidden away from the public that might otherwise view it. A dandy is a fine man because he uses his art, donates it to the people for the public benefit.

(In John Lane’s bibliographical afterword, Lane makes note of a contemporary of Beerbohm’s, ‘one Richard Le Gallienne, an eminent Pose Fancier, [who] has committed himself somewhere to the statement that “The bravest men that ever trod this planet have worn corsets.”’)

Naturalness is to be disdained, Beerbohm says. We have had too much of the natural sort of girl who shakes her curls and swoons because she is told these emotions are natural and fitting. Let us have artifice, let us have conceit. It is better than being dull.

That is, in a sense, the Beerbohm philosophy. And if you don’t like his principles, he has others. Just as Beerbohm admires the vain and dandified (Beau Brummell), he admires the corpulent and grasping in appetite (the Prince Regent, later George IV). In his extended essay on George IV, Beerbohm tells us of the wonder and the greatness of having so fallible a man on the throne. Is it not better, he hints but does not say, to be ruled by someone at least as bad as you are and possibly worse — better than it is to be ruled by vainglorious statesmen, preaching schoolmasters and pompous priests? Hypocrites all, Beerbohm again implies. Is it not better to see the fleshy hand protrude from the thick, well-filled sleeve — a hand like a leg of lamb — as the king waves from his chariot as he is carted around? Is this not glamour? Is this not service?

Beerbohm’s account of the life of Robert Coates (nicknamed Romeo after a number of theatrical disasters where the rich man’s son from Antigua made either a terrible hash, or a brilliant parody, of Shakespeare) is one which pretends scholarship. In it, Beerbohm describes Coates’s arrival in Brighton, which was to be the scene of his theatrical exhibition, in his usual flippant, vivid fashion. But when Coates appears on stage for the first time, in an absurd costume of his own design, and interrupts the performance to offer the audience pinches of snuff from his private collection, Beerbohm says he has special insight into why this sensation occurred.

Beerbohm claims to have spoken to an old man whose father knew Coates, even let Coates lodge with him. And he says, Beerbohm claims, that before Coates left Brighton, Coates received a letter and tore it up — and the old man’s father kept that letter, and Beerbohm bought its fragments from the old man and reconstructed them in painstaking turn. What the letter appears to suggest, per Beerbohm, is that a lady to whom Coates paid elaborate court orchestrated his theatrical humiliation.

Beerbohm is an unreliable witness, however. His account does not fully accord with what we know of Coates, the theatrical amateur. It seems impossible to believe him when he implies he is truthful in this if no other matters.

Beerbohm’s final essay is about giving up the rat-race of the writing life, giving up on cities and going out, giving up on anything but imagination, and retreating to a small villa house (then a new middle class innovation) and living almost vicariously through the newspapers, living for imagination and these four walls alone.

Naturally, this was a lie.

How do we classify so dextrous a writer, a man of so little sincerity? A man who says, in concluding one essay, that ‘To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.’ How are we to read a man whose work was like that of the aesthetes, like the decadents, a man at least associated with the circle around Oscar Wilde — who shared a birth week with someone as vital as the illustrator and part-time writer Aubrey Beardsley?

I enjoyed Beerbohm’s little book. I like the conceit that, these few long but sprightly essays written, the young man had summited and ended his own career. And I like the fact that, in Beerbohm’s own mock-historic treatment aside, the things he discussed really have departed the newspaper pages and the magazines, and exist to many contemporary readers only in his own satiric works. The young man pretending fame and antiquity has become a great name, his comic works the best testimony most will now read of a long-dead time.