MAX BEERBOHM
By Floyd Dell
The very name of Max Beerbohm carries the mind back to the time when he first emerged as a literary figure—the time of the Yellow Book—the time of Whistler’s letters and Swinburne’s newest poem, of velvet jackets and plush knee-breeches, and foot-in-the-grave young poets who caroused mournfully at the sign of the Bodley Head. But it was above all the period of the Enoch Soameses who are celebrated by Max Beerbohm in his latest volume, “Seven Men”—an age of strange young Satanists who would be content with nothing less than founding a new English literature upon the cornerstone of their own thin sheaves of unintelligible poems. They are dead, now—they got tired of waiting for their immortality to begin—and forgotten, except for the wreaths of tender and ironic phrases which Max Beerbohm lays from time to time on their graves. He survives them, the Last of the Esthetes. And yet Enoch Soames would say bitterly that it was just like Fate that the Last of the Esthetes should be a man who never was an Esthete at all!
And there is something to the Enoch Soames point of view. Max Beerbohm’s title to Estheticism is rather precarious. His words may be the words of Dorian Grey, but the laughter behind them is surely the laughter of Huck Finn! Yes, under the jewelled stylistic cloak of Max Beerbohm, what do you find but the simple-hearted amusement of a healthy child? From the story of the Young Prince in “The Complete Works of Max Beerbohm,” to the celebrated Bathtub passage in “Zuleika Dobson,” the whole effect consists in the sudden substitution of the obvious for the recherché. You thought you were going to have to pretend to enjoy pickled nightingale’s tongues, and you find—greatly to your relief—that it is just ice-cream-and-cake!
And yet his style cannot be said to be mere masquerade. Max Beerbohm, it is hardly to be doubted, loves the magic of word and phrase and rhythm as devoutly as any pure soul who ever took opium in an attic for art’s sake.
I like to think of Max Beerbohm as a boy who ran away to sea and was captured and brought up by a band of pirates. The pirates, you understand, are that romantic crew who embarked under the Yellow flag upon a career of ruthless literary destruction in the ‘Nineties, at a time when it seemed that the deeps of literature were given over to a peaceful and profitable traffic in morals and ethics, pieties and proprieties and puerilities. What havoc they did create! The royal Victorian navy, for all its literary big guns, was helpless against them. It was not, in fact, until Captains Gilbert and Sullivan sailed out against them in the good ship Patience that they received any serious setback! And if we go to the log-books of Gilbert and Sullivan for further information about this particular adventure, we shall find it, I think, in “The Pirates of Penzance”—where the tender and confident relations of the virtuous young hero and his piratical captors may serve as an illuminating picture of young Max Beerbohm in piratical captivity among the Esthetes.
He learned his manners from them; and a more graceful band of literary desperadoes never existed. Nothing could exceed the savoir faire with which they scuttled the traditions and made the familiar virtues walk the fatal plank. And so it is that when we read Max Beerbohm today, the superb gallantry of his style suggests that he is going to commit a felonious assault upon our most treasured ideals. But he never does. You are stopped by a gun-shot across your bow, and you prepare for the worst. But the worst is merely a jolly invitation in a boyish voice to a game of marbles.
The combination is irresistible.... I am reminded of an authentic tale of the South seas. A band of wicked mutineers set their captain and officers afloat in an open boat, and sailed to Pitcairn Island, where they proceeded to live in the most Nietzschean fashion imaginable, enslaving the natives, taking their wives away from them, and living in fabulous luxury. They were a fractious lot, however, and they quarrelled among themselves, and shot each other up, and went insane and committed suicide, until the natives got tired of it, and revolted and killed them all—all except one gentle person who had got mixed up with the mutineers by mistake. He was not a Nietzschean; he believed at heart in all the old-fashioned virtues. And where the Nietzscheans had failed, he succeeded—so notably that when the island was rediscovered half a century later, he was ruling there in a little peaceful paradise, the Last of the Mutineers. There is something about gentleness, it would seem, that makes for survival. And I like to think that Max Beerbohm remains with us to tell the story of quaint, devil-worshipping literary mutineers like Enoch Soames, precisely because he cannot bear ever to press home the shining blade of his wit to its most deadly extent—because he does not really want to hurt anybody after all, not even Enoch Soames.
Photograph by Robert H. Davis