There is, perhaps, a reek about it all of a too-conscious imitation of Pater’s murmured obituaries which makes one in the end rather tired of this hieratic treatment of art, so that one turns rather gladly to the one or two tales he wrote. For example in The Lilies of France, an episode of French anti-clericalism, which appeared in The Pageant, 1897, he slowly builds up a thing of verbal beauty that one feels was actually worthy of him, while in the previous number of the same quarterly he perpetrated a delightful ironism on the literary men of his period entitled Incurable, in which, perhaps, we may trace faint autobiographical clues. Such, briefly, was the work of this young man who was found dead in Fleet Street early one morning, aged thirty-five.
But the writer who was to bring irony in English literature to a consummate pitch, and add to the age a strange brief brilliance of his own wilful spirit, was Max Beerbohm. Max, the ‘Incomparable’ as Bernard Shaw once described him, is the charm of the gilded lily, the fairy prince of an urbane artificiality: he is in literature what the cocktail is among drinks; he is the enemy of dullness and the friend of that Greek quality called ‘charis.’ He is the public school and Varsity man who is fond of, but afraid of, being tedious in literature; so with delightful affectation his vehicle is persiflage with a load of wit he pretends to disdain. Of all the prose writers of the Beardsley period he is the easiest and most charming to read. In fact, he is the ideal essayist. He titillates the literary sense. Fortunately his glass is small, for if one had to drink it in quart pots the result would be as disastrous as in his one and only mistake—the long novel Zuleika Dobson, which is a late work written long after the nineties had been swallowed up by that maw which swallowed up Lesbia’s sparrow and all other beautiful dead things.
Max said in jest, ‘I belong to the Beardsley period,’ and it is one of those jests which is only too painfully true. When he was at Oxford he was caught up in the movement, and wrote, under Wilde’s influence, A Defence of Cosmetics for the first number of The Yellow Book, and he also appeared in Lord Alfred Douglas’s magazine. Thenceforward he contributed to various quarterlies, while in 1896 the little red volume with its white paper label appeared as The Works, containing all the best of this precocious enfant terrible of literature, who assures us that he read in bed, while at school, Marius the Epicurean, and found it not nearly so difficult as Midshipman Easy. At the age of twenty-five he cries: ‘I shall write no more. Already I feel myself to be a trifle outmoded,’ and he religiously does not keep his word. He keeps pouring out caricatures, writes More, the companion volume to The Works, and perpetrates his short story The Happy Hypocrite. Beyond 1899 we cannot follow him, but he has been busy ever since with his parodies, his Yet Again, his lamentable novel, his one-act play, and so on.
It is to that Beardsley period to which he said he belonged we are here restricted. And it must be admitted that though the Boer War and the Great War do not seem to have gagged him, there is something so impishly impudent in his earlier work which renders it more remarkable than the complacent efforts of his later years.
Amid the searching seriousness of the nineties, Max is like balm in Gilead. He has the infinite blessing of irony. The others, except Beardsley (who too has this gift), are so appallingly serious. The French influences that went to their making seem to have killed the valiant English humour of Falstaff, Pickwick, and Verdant Green. They are all like young priests who will take no liberty with their ritual; but Max saves the period with his whimsical irony. His is not the fearful, mordant irony of Octave Mirbeau, but a dainty butterfly fancy playing lightly over the pleasures of a pleasant life. To be essentially civilised is to be like a god. This is the pose of such a mentality. It is a winsome pose with no sharp edges to it, just as the poseur himself must be wilfully blind to all the seaminess of life. In front of his window (if a temperament be a window looking out on life) there is a pleasant garden. Beyond is the noise and dust of the highway. He is the dandy in his choice of life as in his choice of literature, and in more than one sense he has written the happiest essays of the period.
It has been said his caricatures are essays. May we not equally say his essays are caricatures? The essay, indeed, is the work of the feline male, the man who sits beside the fire like Charles Lamb. The out-of-doors man writes the episode. But Max is essentially an indoors man, who has a perfect little dressing-room like a lady’s boudoir, but much neater, where he concocts his essays we read so easily by infinite labour, with a jewelled pen. It is as though he had said: ‘Literature must either be amusing or dull; mine shall be the former.’ He is very much the young man about town who has consented gracefully to come and charm us. What he wrote of Whistler in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, we may say of him: ‘His style never falters. The silhouette of no sentence is ever blurred. Every sentence is ringing with a clear, vocal cadence.’ And the refrain is Max himself all the time, and his personality is so likeable we stomach it all the time. It is the note that vibrates through all his amiable satiric irony, whether it be on the House of Commons Manner or in defence of the use of Cosmetics, or in describing the period of 1880. Everything, from first to last, is done with such good taste. Even in his wildest flights of raillery he is utterly purposed not to offend. In his charming paper, 1880, he has given us a vigorous vignette of the previous decade to The Yellow Book age. One can hardly help quoting a small passage here from this admirably worked up prose: ‘In fact Beauty had existed long before 1880. It was Mr. Oscar Wilde who managed her début. To study the period is to admit that to him was due no small part of the social vogue that Beauty began to enjoy. Fired by his fervid words, men and women hurled their mahogany into the streets and ransacked the curio-shops for the furniture of Annish days. Dadoes arose upon every wall, sunflowers and the feathers of peacocks curved in every corner, tea grew quite cold while the guests were praising the Willow Pattern of its cup. A few fashionable women even dressed themselves in sinuous draperies and unheard-of greens. Into whatsoever ball-room you went, you would surely find, among the women in tiaras, and the fops and the distinguished foreigners, half a score of comely ragamuffins in velveteen, murmuring sonnets, posturing, waving their hands. Beauty was sought in the most unlikely places. Young painters found her mobbled in the fogs, and bank-clerks versed in the writings of Mr. Hamerton, were heard to declare, as they sped home from the city, that the Underground Railway was beautiful from London Bridge to Westminster, but not from Sloane Square to Notting Hill Gate.’
It is thus that Max can play with a chord of almost tender irony on his subject, and such a style, so full of the writer’s personality, has the cachet of the veritable essayist. How charmingly, for example, he records his reminiscences of Beardsley. It is a delightful little picture of the artist, interesting enough to place beside Arthur Symons’s portrait: ‘He loved dining out, and, in fact, gaiety of any kind. His restlessness was, I suppose, one of the symptoms of his malady. He was always most content where there was the greatest noise and bustle, the largest number of people, and the most brilliant light. The “domino-room” at the Café Royal had always a great fascination for him: he liked the mirrors and the florid gilding, the little parties of foreigners, and the smoke and the clatter of the dominoes being shuffled on the marble tables.... I remember, also, very clearly, a supper at which Beardsley was present. After the supper we sat up rather late. He was the life and soul of the party, till, quite suddenly almost in the middle of a sentence, he fell fast asleep in his chair. He had overstrained his vitality, and it had all left him. I can see him now as he sat there with his head sunk on his breast; the thin face, white as the gardenia in his coat, and the prominent, harshly-cut features; the hair, that always covered his whole forehead in a fringe and was of so curious a colour—a kind of tortoise-shell; the narrow, angular figure, and the long hands that were so full of power.’[18]
[18] The Idler, May, 1898.
Outside this medium of the essay, with the exception of the caricatures, Max is no longer the incomparable, for his short story, The Happy Hypocrite, is not a short story at all, but a spoilt essay;[19] while his novel is not merely a failure, but a veritable disaster. With his first paper in The Yellow Book he fell in with the step of the men of the nineties, and he too became a part of their efflorescence. Sufficient unto that time is his work, and with a final quotation from this early paper so redolent of the movement that there is no mistaking it, we must leave him and his future on the knees of the gods: ‘Was it not at Capua that they had a whole street where nothing was sold but dyes and unguents? We must have such a street, and, to fill our new Seplosia, our Arcade of Unguents, all herbs and minerals and live creatures shall give of their substance. The white cliffs of Albion shall be ground to powder for Loveliness, and perfumed by the ghost of many a little violet. The fluffy eider-ducks, that are swimming round the pond, shall lose their feathers, that the powder-puff may be moonlike as it passes over Loveliness’ lovely face.’
[19] His Children’s Tale, The Small Boy and the Barley Sugar (The Parade, 1897), should also be mentioned as another case of shipwrecked ingenuity.