PREFACE
After some considerable experience in the field of bibliography I cannot plead as palliation for any imperfections that may be discovered in this, that it is the work of a 'prentice hand. Difficult as I found my self-imposed task in the case of the Meredith and Hardy bibliographies, here my labour has been still more herculean.
It is impossible for one to compile a bibliography of a great man's works without making it in some sense a biography—and indeed, in the minds of not a few people, I have found a delusion that the one is identical with the other.
Mr. Beerbohm, as will be seen from the page headed Personalia, was born in London, August 24, 1872. In searching the files of the Times I naturally looked for other remarkable occurrences on that date. There was only one worth recording. On the day upon which Mr. Beerbohm was born, there appeared in the first column of the Times, this announcement:
'On [Wednesday], the 21st August, at Brighton, the wife of V.P. Beardsley, Esq., of a son.'
That the same week should have seen the advent in this world of two such notable reformers as Aubrey Beardsley and Max Beerbohm is a coincidence to which no antiquary has previously drawn attention. Is it possible to over-estimate the influence of these two men in the art and literature of the century?
Like two other great essayists, Addison and Steele, Mr. Beerbohm was educated at Charterhouse, and, like the latter, at Merton College, Oxford. At Charterhouse he is still remembered for his Latin verses, and for the superb gallery of portraits of the masters that he completed during his five years' sojourn there. There are still extant a few copies of his satire, in Latin elegiacs, called Beccerius, privately printed at the suggestion of Mr. A. H. Tod, his form-master. The writer has said 'Let it lie,' however, and in such a matter the author's wish should surely be regarded. I have myself been unable to obtain a sight of a copy, but a more fortunate friend has furnished me with a careful description of the opusculum, which I print in its place in the bibliography.
He matriculated at Merton in 1890, and immediately applied himself to the task he had set before him, namely, a gallery of portraits of the Dons.
I am aware that he contributed to The Clown and other undergraduate journals: also that he was a member of the Myrmidons' Club. It was during his residence at Oxford that his famous treatise on Cosmetics appeared in the pages of an important London Quarterly, sets of which are still occasionally to be found in booksellers' catalogues at a high price, though the American millionaire collector has made it one of the rarest of finds. These were the days of his youth, the golden age of 'decadence.' For is not decadence merely a fin de siècle literary term synonymous with the 'sowing his wild oats' of our grandfathers? a phrase still surviving in agricultural districts, according to Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. Edward Clodd, and other Folk-Lorists.
Mr. Beerbohm, of course, was not the only writer of his period who appeared as the champion of artifice. A contemporary, one Richard Le Gallienne, an eminent Pose Fancier, has committed himself somewhere to the statement that 'The bravest men that ever trod this planet have worn corsets.'