The Essays of Max Beerbohm by Max Beerbohm

First published:The Works of Max Beerbohm, 1896; More, 1899; Yet Again, 1909; And Even Now, 1920; A Variety of Things, 1928; Mainly on the Air, 1946

Critical Evaluation:

Max Beerbohm was a caricaturist, a writer of informal essays, and a drama critic for twenty years. His manner was always elegant, delicate, and grave, and he wore an air of perpetual melancholy. It was said of him that as a very young man he had mastered the secret of perpetual old age. Partly his melancholy stemmed from his deep admiration of the past. He looked wistfully backward to Victorian London and deplored changes of any sort. He began to draw at an early age and drew sharp, witty caricatures that both amused and angered his subjects. Often he requested permission of his subjects before drawing them, sometimes having an interview in order to catch closely their essential characteristics. He did caricatures of the royal family that were subsequently bought up and kept out of circulation. Many of his drawings are in museums.

He could not draw other than as he felt, and during the Boer War he was sharply critical of England’s role and of Rudyard Kipling’s imperialistic sentiments. As an old man he confessed that he had not intended to be cruel to Kipling, one of the few people whom he alienated, to his great regret. As a drama critic he upheld standards of good drama, deploring plays that were simply commercially successful. However, he made light of his work as a drama critic, as he did of all his work.

As might be expected in one who was an expert caricaturist, his chief interest was in people, their characters and the way they lived rather than in what they preached. He believed that most people wear masks and that the most successful people are those few who are what they seem, who have become one with their masks. Thus he felt that Bernard Shaw harangued his audiences, that the best part of him was in his stage directions and his criticism. Max, of course, was always for the underdog, the victim of society. He admired greatly the music hall singers who sang songs portraying the little man, pathetic but gallant and humorous in the face of overwhelming odds. His essays are built around trivial subjects generally and are written with the quiet humor and nostalgic air of one who looks to the past and finds the present generation rather strange and events moving too rapidly.

In his first collection of essays, The Works of Max Beerborhm, there are such pieces as “Dandies and Dandies” and “Poor Romeo!” In the former the writer discusses the true dandy and of the person that attempts to be one. Max felt that Beau Brummell was the true dandy and that many men have tried but failed to reach the pureness of Brummell’s art. Count D’Orsay tried to be a dandy but did not regard dandyism as a serious art and therefore fell short of the mark. Mr. Le V., a name given by Max, is shown in preparation for the serious art of being a dandy. The preparations take all morning and near noon Mr. Le V. enters his dressing room. In an interview he even tells Max what he will wear to approach the pearly gates.

“Poor Romeo!” is a wonderfully written essay on Robert Coates. It relates an interlude in Bath and tells how Coates was tricked into portraying Romeo in the most ridiculous manner by the woman he loved simply to get her revenge because of a trick he had enjoyed at her expense. Robert Coates was a real person, not a creation of Max’s mind, as were T. Fenning Dodworth, Mr. Hethway, or Enoch Soames. Coates went on to act the same role in England. Max’s account of the interlude is clever and polished as are most of his essays. His statement that he was for the underdog can be affirmed by this essay and by his character Enoch Soames, who did not exist in life but became real to the people who read Max’s article on him.

Max’s second publication of collected essays, More, contains several clever works. One, “Going Back to School,” is amusing and interesting. Max tells of his school experiences and how glad he is to be finished with them. It is Max’s style and manner of phrasing that keeps the reader entertained and interested. In this essay Max describes returning to school after a holiday as being something comparable to drowning; the rude sound of the first bell served to remind him he was now in school. Max desired comfort, something he felt was totally lacking in school life. Also, he felt that at Oxford all the nonsense which had been worked out of undergraduates in dreary, earlier schools was returned to them. He wonders why he should feel any pity for the present schoolboy; Max feels that the remembered unpleasantness of school makes his present complacency more enjoyable.

Max’s ideas on “Hosts and Guests” is found in his work And Even Now. His views were complementary to those of Gerhart Hauptmann. It was Max’s contention that people had either the desire to offer hospitality or to accept it, and it is this desire to be one or the other that divides people into the two classes: hosts and guests. His comments on the entertaining done by the Borgias is quite clever. Max says that a Roman could say that he was going to eat dinner with the Borgias, but you would never hear a Roman say that he had dined with the Borgias. Max is certain that he was born a guest and the fact that he must sometimes be the host makes him as uncomfortable as a host who is forced to act as a guest.

“Ichabod” was Max’s hatbox. The essay is found in the work Yet Again. “Ichabod,” as Max’s traveling companion, carried a collection of labels. When Max sent the hatbox to a trunk-maker to have the lock repaired, the well-meaning man removed all the labels. The collection represented only the places Max had actually visited. The labels are discussed as are the various incidents they bring to mind. Max ends the essay with the statement that greater adventures are surely awaiting “Ichabod.”

The same collection contains “Seeing People Off,” an excellent study of the futility of it all. The fact that people do not really want to see you off and that you would rather they did not rings true in his example. Also, “A Pathetic Imposture” shows us the length to which newsmen go to make a simple story complicated. He even shows us how this is done by the use of diagrams.

Max’s attachment to England was strong and during the war years he returned to London. During World War II he did many broadcasts, reading his own essays. At this time he came to be regarded with great affection. His quiet, elegant voice, serenely undisturbed by the war, was entirely occupied with personal matters and with upholding traditions, both large and small, and thus he contributed greatly to English morale at a difficult period. These broadcasts were later published with some essays in a collection titled Mainly on the Air. “Speed” is one of the most entertaining. Max states that today, speaking of the year 1936, you must creep into a car, crouch while in it, and squirm out of it. The old cars, Max says, were open to the elements. Air was forced into your lungs, dust filled your pores, and you were jostled about in every direction. Max felt that all this was good for you, that a good shower after such an experience made you feel like a new man. Inspiration could be created by a man running, galloping on horseback, driving a pair of horses at breakneck speed, sailing a boat, or flying by the use of natural wings. Flying in an airplane, motor-boating, or riding in a car was not inspirational and would not move writers as some more natural means could. Part of this essay was used by pedestrians in a pamphlet they published.

Several characters Max wrote about so vividly and in such detail that people believed they were real men. But they lived only in Max’s imagination. Mr. Hethway and T. Fenning Dodworth, particularly the latter, gained great reputation. Dodworth was dignified but had a pungent, barbed wit. His famous phrase was “And after?” Max also made up an interview with Albert Einstein in which Einstein explained how he came to discover his theory. Max finished by vowing that he would see that the world knew of Einstein’s discovery.

Often Max wrote essays about his friends. George Moore he considered an absolutely natural man. He spoke simply and if he had nothing to say he kept quiet in a blank sort of way. His expression never changed. Nevertheless, he was a fine critic, honest and modest, and his face was a delight to painters, who found it a challenge. Sir Desmond MacCarthy was a good writer and a fine talker, chiefly because his constant remarks were, “Tell me, tell me,” followed by, “I see, I see.” For Max, William Butler Yeats was a man apart, not really of this world. Often Max failed to get his meaning, and while Yeats’s speeches were not moving, Max considered this failure to be his, not the poet’s. He knew Henry Irving as a young man who even in his youth intimidated others. Max tells about his having luncheon with Irving one day. Irving asked him questions and Max began to talk nervously, unable to stop and feeling that he was making a worse impression every moment. Finally, in answer to a question about his future, Max said he thought himself called to the bar. At the very moment of saying this to Irving—who said simply, “Ha!”—he knew his statement to be so absurd that he changed his mind on the spot and knew he would never, never be called to the bar.

Max’s nostalgia about the past and its manners can be found in many essays, such as the one on the top hat, in which the hat seems almost alive, responds to different moods, care and weather; or the one called “Ichabod,” about the much-traveled hat box covered with labels; or the essays on the House of Commons in which Max says that in the old days speakers had true style, robust and impressive. Nowadays he feels that they have no style whatever and would do better to remain silent. Once he saw a performance in a small town of the Morris dance for May Day. He traces the history of this dance back to its origins, recalls the famous dancers Kemp and Thorndrake, and laments that this simple survival of the past will soon be gone. Grace itself he felt had gone into decline. Modern young men, he decides, are boorish. Grace in the little affairs of life must be learned, and the modern young man does not learn easily. While he liked to see some juvenility swagger, he did believe that all the things worth doing have been done; those left undone had better be given a wide berth.

Two places Max frequented by himself: the station hotel and the law court. He often bade his friends goodbye, said he was going on a trip, and then went to the station hotel in London where he enjoyed the spacious rooms, the meals by himself, and the sight every morning of the workers rushing off on the trains. The law court he found more satisfying than the theater. He loved the paneling, the wigs, the scurrying of the clerks, and the eagerness and ominousness of it all. He never considered whether the person concerned were guilty or innocent, but what kind of person he was. He derived acute mental enjoyment from a cross-examination.

Max’s real love was drawing, an art he continued to practice for his friends until his death. He had given up caricaturing some years before when he discovered that he was drawing true likenesses instead of caricatures. In one essay, “Fenestralia,” he considered portraits with the subjects placed in windows. He thought the window frame was to painting as form is to literature, as the proscenium is to a play. One’s imagination had entire freedom to picture what was inside the room. Also, words spoken by a person half indoors or outdoors are more impressive than words spoken entirely inside or outside.

In the hospital, during his last illness, Max pointed out to Elizabeth Jungmann, the secretary-companion who became his wife shortly before his death, how the setting sun threw a purple shadow across a portion of his room. This color and shadow he watched with pleasure and he would not allow a light to be turned on in the room so that the shadow might have a longer life. Max had an artist’s eye and was ever attentive to the nuances of character and color about him.