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The second time I saw Max Beerbohm, it was on his home
grounds—in the Villino Chiaro, on the Via Aurelia, in
Rapallo. In the summer of 1952, on the eve of his eightieth
birthday and four years before he died, I had visited him at
a mountaintop hospice, outside Rapallo, where he was
spending the hottest weeks. I had since been corresponding
with his secretary, Miss Elizabeth Jungmann, who reported
faithfully on how he was feeling and what he was reading and
doing; and I had received occasional letters from Max
himself. In one of them, he wrote:
Elizabeth is as wonderfully kind and good and delightful
as ever. I have had a return or two of gout—or rather of
what is diagnosed as "symptomatic gout," which sounds
less important. Elizabeth found the other day in the
garage an unpublished MS. which I had entirely
forgotten, and I read it aloud the other day into a
microphone imported by Douglas Cleverdon of the B.B.C.,
and it will figure in a Christmas programme. I was glad
to find that I didn't seem to have lost the knack of
microphony. . . . I have become conscious that this
letter consists of a single paragraph, without one break
in the dullness of it all. Forgive this fault.
As Max did not own a car, there was plenty of room in his
garage for forgotten manuscripts. The garaged piece was "Hethway
Speaking." I presently read it. Hethway is an imaginary
character whom Max invented for the purpose of satirizing
the quirks of real people represented to be Hethway's
friends—William Morris, Algernon Swinburne, George Meredith,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Carlyles. William Morris, for
instance, comes into the drawing room of Hethway's house,
where the poor man has fancied himself perfectly
comfortable, and immediately starts redoing it a la Morris.
I wrote to Max to tell him how funny I thought this salvaged
piece was, and how grateful we should all be to Miss
Jungmann for haunting garages. I insisted that Hethway was
more real than Hethway's real friends, and that Max was
boasting when he claimed to have invented him. Max wrote
back:
We laughed inordinately over your doubts about the
unreality of Hethway. I am so glad my description of
William Morris's visit to him gave you such pleasure.
The thought of him [Morris] has always slightly
irritated me. Of course he was a wonderful all-round
man, but the act of walking round him has always tired
me.
Confident that, not being an all-round man, I would present
no pedestrian problems to Max—in an essay, he had said that
taking any sort of walk was uncongenial to him, for walking
automatically stops all activity of the brain—I checked in
at the Excelsior in Rapallo, for the second time, in the
summer of 1953. I was met at the station by Charlie, an
English-speaking driver whom Turco, the hotel's concierge,
had assigned to me on my first visit. Charlie had once lived
in Pittsburgh, and missed it acutely. The ravishing Ligurian
coast did not console him in the least for whatever it was
that he missed in Pittsburgh. Turco, whom I addressed as
Il Presidente, because he was president of an
association of concierges, greeted me at the Excelsior, and
after I had had a telephone conversation with Miss Jungmann,
Charlie drove me to the Villino—down the hill to the
promenade that skirts the sea, past the cafés and
bandstands, and then up the steep hill of the Via Aurelia,
to No. 47. The motor traffic on the Via Aurelia is
terrifying; tremendous trucks go up and down it incessantly
on their way to and from Genoa. The traffic did not permit
Charlie to stop in front of the house, which is on the far
side of the road; he had to go almost to the top of the
hill, where there is a place to turn, and then come back to
Max's iron gate. Charlie had to huddle his car very close to
the gate to allow the trucks to pass by. Charlie knew the
house; he used to drive occasionally for Lady Beerbohm, who
died in 1951. He opened the gate for me, and told me to walk
up the stone steps and ring the bell. I asked him to return
at six. It was now four, and I had been invited to tea. I
walked up the flower-bordered steps and rang. Over the door
hung a curiously designed octagonal crystal lamp—a gift, I
found out later, from Gordon Craig. A girl of about
seventeen opened the door, bobbed, and said that the Signora
would be in in a minute. I followed her into a tiny hall.
Just as in Swinburne's hall when Max called on him at No. 2,
The Pines, the past was the present. The young girl walked
into a little library off the hall, meaning me to follow
her, but I was drawn—as Max had been drawn when he went to
Putney to call—by a girl with amorous hair; only she wasn't
by Rossetti, she was by Max. It was Elizabeth Siddal. In a
small, curved lunette at the top of the back wall, she stood
in an attitude of calm abeyance between Swinburne and
Rossetti; Swinburne, whose hair was rather longer than Miss
Siddal's, was reaching across Miss Siddal to flourish an
admonitory forefinger against the Gibraltar of Rossetti's
chest, exhorting the later, far from emaciated Dante to do
something of which Rossetti manifestly took a poor view.
Miss Siddal was staring at Swinburne as at an object
hitherto unclassified; Rossetti's look at Swinburne was so
concentrated and inimical that it would have put off anybody
in the world but Swinburne. Was Swinburne exhorting him to
do right by Elizabeth, or what? Only Max knew.
Miss Jungmann came in and greeted me warmly. I admired the
picture in the lunette. "Max is unhappy about Rossetti's
hair," said Miss Jungmann. "It has faded, and he is always
saying that he must touch it up." We both looked at the
embattled trio. "Do you know," she said, "Florence told me
this. When Max published his book of caricatures 'Rossetti
and His Circle,' the people around here somehow heard about
it, and Max for a time achieved a kind of local celebrity.
They thought—they were sure—it must be about Colonel
Giovanni Raffaele Rossetti, who was an Italian naval hero of
the First World War. And then they found out it wasn't about
their naval hero at all, and they lost all interest in Max,
to his great relief. Max," she went on, "is dressing up for
you. He is putting on his shade-of-primrose suit." She then
ushered me into a little library. The room was filled with
the thunder of the passing trucks. I asked Miss Jungmann how
Max stood it; I said that it reminded me of a remark made by
Gustav Mahler when he was taken to see Niagara Falls—"Endlich
fortissimo!" "Max doesn't hear it," Miss Jungmann said,
"and yet if as much as a teacup clinks unexpectedly in a
room he is in, he jumps as if a cannon had gone off!" She
showed me the treasures in the little library. There were
two water colors, in oval frames, of Max's grandparents, in
eighteenth-century clothes and with powdered hair. They were
both very handsome. Miss Jungmann told me a little of Max's
family history. Max's father, who had emigrated from Germany
to France when he was eighteen, had lived for several years
in Paris. He was so impressive in appearance that he had
earned the sobriquet of "Superbe Homme." "You know,
Max's father was horn in 1810. Think of it!" Miss Jungmann
said. She showed me, on another wall, a black-and-white
drawing by Max of his sister Dora Margaretta, who became a
nun, in her habit. "Max adored her," said Miss Jungmann.
"She was very worldly." Then, there was a large wash drawing
of Carlyle striding along the Chelsea Embankment, his face
writhing with dyspepsia and introspection. On another wall
was a flamboyant wooden signboard showing the Elizabethan
comic actor Dick Tarlton as the Harlequin, wearing a suit of
red, green, and yellow lozenges. He was dancing and waved a
belled stick; he dominated the room. "This is the change I
told you last summer that I was making," said Miss Jungmann,
with modest triumph, waving a hand toward a little living
room off the library. "I broke it through! So you can see
everything, both rooms, in the mirror—there! It took some
time for Max to get used to it, but he approves of it now."
The rooms composing this enlarged vista were both so tiny
that I couldn't help thinking that it was an ideal house for
a miniaturist. We walked into the living room, and I looked
at the mirror on the far wall—a perfect circle in a
wide-trellised gilt-and-ebony frame. It was a convex Regency
mirror, and it did indeed gather up everything in both rooms
in a curved embrace. The curtains of the living-room windows
curled toward it, as if impelled by a kind of tropism, and
so did the walls. Miss Jungmann made me stand dead center,
and there I beheld myself, diminished but with a somewhat
disturbing clarity of outline.
Max came in from his bedroom, which adjoined the room we
were in. He was wearing the full complement of the
shade-of-primrose suit, which I had met first the year
before, on Montallegro—a double-breasted gray flannel suit
with a primrose sheen. While he was greeting me, I was
conscious afresh of the quality of his voice and of his
speech, which had a way of endowing the sound of the English
language with lost overtones from a more leisurely past. I
complimented him on looking well and, since he had put it on
for me, on the elegance of his suit.
His hand flicked across the soft rolled lapels of his vest,
cut in a low V. "I like plenty of room," he said. "They do
not cut them like that any more. Gives the chest plenty of
breathing space, don't you know."
Since we were standing in front of the mirror, I made some
comment on that—how it infoliated the images and focussed
them, as in a burning glass.
"Well, you see, it is convex," Max said. "There is no poetry
in a straight mirror—just a reproduction of life. But what
one sees in a convex mirror is a complete picture, a
composition, an intérieur.
By miniaturizing, it concentrates and essentializes. It hung
in my nursery, this mirror. Then, when, as a young man, I
occupied rooms on the top floor of my mother's house, I had
it moved up there. It has been with me ever since. My father
bought it at the Paris International Exhibition of 1867. It
seems to me that during my childhood I was half asleep, but
as I grew a bit older, this mirror began to fascinate me. I
began to think of all that it had seen since my father
bought it; he used to have it in his rooms. And then, when I
reached the age of twenty-one—the age of reminiscence, of
seasoned reminiscence—I began to see this mirror as a
collaborator, with memories of its own, a temps perdu
of its own. I began to write a novel about it, an
autobiographical novel called 'The Mirror of the Past.' I
wanted to corporealize all the backs the mirror had seen
leaving my room. I have it somewhere, the fragments of that
novel."
I proposed to Miss Jungmann that we go at once to the
garage.
Max chuckled. "No, the fragments are in London—aren't they,
Elizabeth?" he said. "But it became too involved, you know,
too complicated. I couldn't understand it myself. But some
character sketches I made for it—oh, it was more than forty
years ago; I put them by, don't you know—I have read over
the B.B.C., and people seemed to like them."
Miss Jungmann went out to make tea. Max settled himself in
his armchair in front of a tiny, cheerful fire. He asked me
whether I had read Virginia Woolf's diary. I said I had, and
he began talking about it. Her acute and incessant concern
with what reviewers felt about her work was distasteful to
him. The perpetual concern with herself was distasteful to
him. "Rossetti allowed his life to be ruined by, among other
things, an adverse review of his work," he said. "A pity
he—and Virginia as well—couldn't have taken to heart
Turgenev's view of such matters." I expressed a wish to take
it to heart, too, if he would only tell me what Turgenev's
view was. Max waved a hand. "You'll find it in Henry James,"
he said. "Turgenev appreciated that criticism is a
delightful pastime for the critics—that, even, it may be
delightful to their readers. But, he says, it has nothing
whatever to do with the artist, nor with the process by
which art is achieved. A pity poor Virginia couldn't have
remembered that! It would have spared her so much." He
stopped for a moment, apparently saddened. He went on, "And
then this stream-of-consciousness business! All of us have a
stream of consciousness; we are never without it—the most
ordinary and the most gifted. And through that stream flows
much that is banal, tedious, nasty, insufferable,
irrelevant. But some of us have the taste to let it flow by,
not to capture it, not to amber it on the written
page, to spare communicating it. But then I always felt in
Virginia an absence of vitality. And, indeed, her end was
the abdication of vitality. When you think of Benjamin
Haydon! He was a painter, and full of work and projects, and
yet at the end of each day he had the vitality to sit down,
don't you know"—Max's hand began to scribble fast in the
air—"and write those immense diaries, which are so
fascinating to read."
I might have suggested to Max that it was odd to pose
Haydon's vitality against Virginia Woolf's anemia, since
Haydon had committed suicide also, but I didn't, because
when Max said this I didn't know of Haydon's suicide.
I asked Max, in my turn, whether he had read the
Shaw-Campbell correspondence, lately published. Max said he
had begun it but had found it too nauseating to go on with.
I told Max that by giving up he had missed a delicious line
of Mrs. Pat's, when she says to G.B.S., "Joey, you're
brain-proud!”
Max admitted that that was good—a kind of jewel of
understatement. He then said that he had done a series of
four caricatures, in water color, of Shaw's pursuit of
Stella, as he called Mrs. Pat. (I saw them later. They are
very funny. In one of them, Shaw is leaping over a piano in
chase of his beloved. Stella, a balloon in lavender, ducks
coyly under this leap.) In his placid, unhurried voice, Max
went on to dissect one sentence out of Shaw's vast ceuvre
that, he said, "unnerved" him. I have never seen a man
unnerved with such unclouded serenity. The sentence was from
"Maxims for Revolutionists," and had been often and
admiringly quoted: "He who can, does. He who cannot,
teaches." "The arrogance of it, don't you know," said Max,
without resentment. "He himself so manifestly can! Of
course, it is simply untrue. Many teachers have done moving
and delightful things—Lewis Carroll and A. E. Housman, for
example. But even those who haven't—if they teach well, if
they inspirit the young they are perhaps more valuable than
those who have done the moving and delightful things. But
then G.B.S. had been talking rot for more than fifty years.
Will anyone ever write a book on the vast amount of nonsense
uttered with such brilliance and panache by G.B.S.?"
I drew Max back to the character sketches that he had
written for "The Mirror of the Past" and had delivered with
such success over the B.B.C. I made some comment on the
viability of these prose pieces, which could be delivered,
unaltered, nearly half a century later, over a medium
undreamed of when they were written. I asked what some of
them were, and why he had not published them years ago.
Max waved his hand, and said, "Oh, they were all friends of
mine, don't you know, and I thought they might give offense
to their subjects—George Moore, Irving the younger, Yeats,
Hall Caine, Nat Goodwin . . ." At the evocation of Goodwin,
Max's face showed pleasure. "He was a most amusing
companion, Nat Goodwin. I met him in America, you know, when
I went with my brother on the first of his American tours. I
went as Herbert's press representative. I wasn't very good,
I'm afraid. I wrote all my formal communications to the
press in longhand. I have never had the secret knack of
typewriters. Typewriters can't spell, you know. I was too
slow. Herbert replaced me, but he allowed me to stay on a
while. But Nat Goodwin! He owned a house at Shooter's Hill
that my brother rented at one time, and I used often to
spend weekends with Nat. He was married at that time—Nat
never did such things for long—to Maxine Elliott. Her sister
Gertrude married Johnston Forbes-Robertson. Nat was orotund
in speech—like Coquelin." Max leaned forward in his chair
and became orotund. "'My Love for my wife Maxine,' he would
say, 'amounts to I-DOLATRY!' And yet, with the idolatry, he
managed to retain detachment also, don't you know, as far as
his judgment of acting went. Maxine was beautiful. I have
never seen eyes like hers; the whites of her eyes were not
white but brilliant blue. But"—Max's voice dropped to the
whisper of a confidence, as if he were wary of being
overheard disparaging the talent of a lady whose hospitality
he had accepted—"Maxine was not really a very good actress.
Now, Gertrude was really a fine actress." Max's voice boomed
into orotundity again; ordinarily soft-spoken, he didn't
mind being loud as long as he was quoting. "Nat used to say,
'Gertrude, on the stage, is great; Maxine, my wife, is not
great . . . but . . . she touches on greatness.' He was a
passionate theologian. His favorite book appeared to be
Paley's 'Evidences.' He would insist to me on the truth of
Paley's 'Evidences' with truculence, as if I had
contradicted him—a David without a Goliath, don't you know.
He was a great partisan, also, of the Sermon on the Mount.
He defended it vehemently in the face of no opposition
whatever." Max's voice became very loud, declamatory. "'THE
SERMON ON THE MOUNT,' he would insist, 'is ab-so-LUTE-ly ALL
RIGHT!' But he had a non-theological side, too. He was a
great singer of Negro songs. One, which I would never tire
of hearing, was about a man, broke in Memphis, who remembers
suddenly that he has a sweetheart, solvent, in Nashville.
Nat's eyes used to gleam with sentiment and avarice while he
sang this song." Max leaned forward in his chair and sang:
"I guess I'll have to telegraph my baaby. . . .
I want that money badly. . . .
I thank de Lawd who gave us Western U-u-u-nion. . . ."
In the middle of Max's aria, Miss Jungmann came in with the
tea. She also brought strawberries.
"From our garden," she said proudly.
"I always say," said Max, with a quick, sly look at me,
"that things from gardens just haven't got that special
something which you find in things bought in a shop, have
they?"
I asked Max what he remembered of his American tour with
Herbert. He remembered a great deal, and he began to tell
me.
On the sixteenth of January, 1895, Sir Herbert Beerbohm
Tree, the resplendent English actor-manager, who was then
forty-one, set sail from England for the first of his
numerous American tours. He took along with him as his press
representative his half brother Max Beerbohm, still an
undergraduate at Oxford. The offer was a windfall for Max;
it couldn't have come at a better moment, because he had
just been having a madly Platonic, and hopeless, love affair
with the child star of the Tivoli Music Hall, Cissie Loftus,
and was glad of an excuse to get away from London. He was to
find alleviation for his bruised emotions over Cissie in
America, because he fell in love again, this time with a
member of Herbert's company, Kilseen Conover. Miss Conover
was a very pretty and rising young ingénue; in London, Max
had listened to little jokes about her at the Garrick Club,
where she was referred to as "Kill-Scene Conover." Whether
this meant that she enervated the scenes in which she
appeared, or wantonly "stole" them for herself, Max did not
know. He twitted her about it, later, when he fell in love
with her.
Julius Ewald Edward Beerbohm, the father of Herbert and Max,
had married, at the age of about forty, Constantia Draper.
They had four children: Ernest, Herbert, Julius, and
Constance Marie. When Constantia died, Julius, then about
fifty, married Eliza, Constantia's sister. They had five
children: Matilda Helen, Gertrude and Marie Agnes (twins),
Dora Margaretta, and Max, the youngest. Two of Max's half
brothers, Herbert and Julius, were flamboyant characters,
and Max adored them both. They were much older than he was,
and he followed their careers with the fascination of a
child reading "The Arabian Nights." Max instinctively shrank
from bigness, but he made an exception of Herbert. Herbert
liked big things, Max little things. Writing of his brother
in a memorial volume he edited after Herbert's death, he
said:
I do believe he took as much pride in my little career
as I took in his big one. "Big" is a word that attaches
itself in my mind to so much concerning Herbert. His
body was big, and his nature big, and he did so love big
things! Mountains cathedrals, frescoes, Shakespeare,
summer skies, Wagnerian opera—his spacious temperament
welcomed everything of that sort. Things on a small
scale, however exquisite, did not satisfy him.
Max didn't care for His Majesty's Theatre, which Herbert
built and which was the apple of his eye. Max thought it
much too big; he liked small theatres, and much preferred
the Haymarket. He told me a story of Herbert's taking a
famous contemporary manager, Sir Squire Bancroft, to see his
theatre. Sir Herbert was lavish with money; Sir Squire
Bancroft was the opposite. In a glow of pride, Herbert stood
Sir Squire across the street to let him look at His
Majesty's in all its magnificence. "There'll be an awful lot
of windows to wash," said Bancroft, leaving poor Herbert
somewhat dashed.
Max's brother Julius gave Max even more to wonder at.
"Herbert was (then and always) a hero to me," Max once
wrote. "But, let me add, Julius was a god." Their father had
founded a successful trade paper, Beerbohm's Evening Corn
Trade List: it recorded the movements of ships and
cargoes in the corn trade. The elder Beerbohm took on young
Julius as a clerk, but Julius couldn't stick it. At the age
of twenty-three, he went off to Patagonia, where he resided
for two years among the local ostrich hunters. He wrote a
book in two volumes about his adventures there—"Wanderings
in Patagonia." On his return to London, he went in for
finance and wrote poetry. He was known to his friends as
Poet. One of his poems is a threnody on the death of Cecil
Rhodes, whom he idolized. Julius's career in the financial
world was characterized by an unerring instinct for failure.
For one thing, he was absent-minded; Constance Collier, Sir
Herbert's leading lady at His Majesty's and for a time Max's
fiancée, tells in her memoirs that once Julius put down a
deposit to buy a hotel near Marienbad and then, diverted by
another gleam of fool's gold, forgot all about it. At one
time, Julius was involved in a scheme to drag the Nile, with
the idea of finding Pharaoh's jewels. But Pharaoh, as it
turned out, had concealed them too cunningly. Julius was a
compulsive gambler; whenever he did make any money, he lost
it gambling in Dieppe and on the Riviera. According to a
contemporary description, he had "a long yellow mustache,
blue eyes, a languid manner, a nonchalant air, smart
clothes, drawling speech, and imperturbable deportment." He
had what is called "a crowded life" and was loved by
everybody. Max worshipped Julius because, he said, he was
"so cool and calm and elegant." There is a curious contrast
in the temperaments of the two batches of the elder Julius
Beerbohm's children: those of his first marriage ran to the
grandiose; those of his second marriage ran to
contemplation.
I asked Max where Herbert got the name Tree.
"Well," said Max, "when he first went on the stage, he had
the fantasy, which became actual, that he would one day be a
star. I don't suppose he could imagine the gallery, after a
triumphant performance, shouting with enthusiasm for
'Beerbohm, Beerbohm!' He had the prescience, don't you know,
to supply a shoutable monosyllable."
While Max was at Charterhouse, his prep school, Herbert had
the lease of the Haymarket Theatre. Max has said, "My body
was at Charterhouse. My soul was in the Haymarket." As an
undergraduate at Oxford, Max was able to wield the pleasant
patronage of inviting his friends up to London, getting free
seats for Herbert's performances, and taking them backstage
afterward to introduce them to his volatile and magnetic
older brother. At Oxford, Max wrote an essay on Oscar Wilde,
which had been accepted by a magazine called the
Anglo-American. Wilde was delighted. "No other
undergraduate could have written it," he said. "You must
take up literature. You have a style like a silver dagger."
Max brought the silver dagger with him to America, but,
unfortunately, he seldom pointed it at the theatrical
columnists. In spite of Max's hero-worship and Herbert's
affectionate indulgence, the business arrangement between
them on this American tour did not work out very well. Max
not only communicated with the press in longhand but also
answered all of Herbert's letters, including the fan mail,
the same way. His handwriting was exquisite and his sentence
structure cunningly architectural. Those who received his
letters must have been pleased with them, but, owing to the
unconscionable time it took Max to polish his dagger, many
correspondents and many newspapers remained uncommunicated
with. Max loved his brother, and before he became a drama
critic he loved the theatre, but he had two other loves as
well—the writing of prose essays and the drawing of
caricatures. His attitude toward the professional duties he
owed his brother was relaxed. Herbert found it necessary to
dismiss Max from his post and to engage someone less
fastidious. Prodigality was one of Herbert's notorious
characteristics, and he continued to keep Max with him and
to pay him his salary. Max took his lucrative demotion in
his stride.
Perhaps Herbert would have been well advised to take with
him as his press agent on this first American tour a writer
less famous than his brother. It is conceivable that
Herbert, who had risen with incredible speed to the top of a
profession that thrives on sensationalism, was misled by the
fact that Max was himself already an established
sensationalist. As Horace Gregory wrote in his biography of
James McNeill Whistler, Max "had come down from Oxford to
London, and had captured the town." He was already famous as
an essayist and caricaturist, and also as a dandy. He
regarded dandyism as a form of courtesy; it was something,
he felt, to gladden the eye of the beholder. In 1894, Aubrey
Beardsley introduced Max to Henry Harland, who was then in
the process of founding the Yellow Book, and Harland
thought it worthwhile to ask Max for a contribution to the
first number. Max contributed a bombshell. Sitting
tranquilly in his room in Merton College, Oxford, the year
before, Max had written an essay that was to rock literary
circles in London to their foundations. The explosive essay,
when it appeared in the Yellow Book, was called "A
Defense of Cosmetics." A well-known humorist of the time,
Barry Pain, was so shaken by it that he momentarily mislaid
his sense of humor. As Max had begun to frequent the Café
Royal, during his London sojourns, Pain, upon the
publication of this scandalous essay, lumped Max with the
other decadent denizens of that café and blasted it with the
withering remark, in his newspaper column, "A whiff of
grapeshot would do no harm there."
Punch's poet went to town:
ARS
COSMETICA
How would the little busy bore
Improve on Nature's dower,
And praise a painted Lois more
Than maidens in their flower!
How deftly he dabs on his grease,
How neatly spreads his wax;
And finds in dirty aids like these
The charm that Nature lacks.
In barber-born, cosmetic skill,
"Art" would be busy too;
And folly finds some business still
For popinjays to do!
The popinjay was relaxed about this attack and other
fulminations directed at his essay. He had expected the
barrage; he had courted it; he had known, sitting there in
the armchair his father bought him when he went up to Merton
College, in 1890, exactly what he was doing. Max included
this essay in his first published volume, "The Works of Max
Beerbohm," under the more veracious title "The Pervasion of
Rouge." The fact is that Max, far from being a defender of
cosmetics, had no use for them at all. If Barry Pain had
kept his temper under better control and read Max's
incendiary essay consideringly before he began whiffing
grapeshot, he would have discerned that Max's defense of
rouge was somewhat halfhearted; the essayist was merely
recording, somewhat regretfully, its pervasion. It would
never have remotely occurred to his sisters or his mother,
Max told me, to apply it, and had they done so, he would
have been saddened, even outraged. Up to that time, only
women of the streets resorted to rouge. "Fashion," says Max
in his essay, "has made Jezebel surrender her monopoly of
the rouge-pot."
Max was devoted all his life to the unassisted complexions
of unfashionable English girls; the natural English female
complexion of those early days aroused in him, in long
retrospect, a memorial dithyramb. Over the tea and
strawberries, Max enlarged on this sort of complexion. "It
was a delicate ruse pink, don't you know, and rouge would
only have blemished it," he said. "In those days, the houses
were very irregularly heated; the downstairs library might
be quite warm and the hall outside freezing cold. The ladies
moved from room to room, and their complexions had to guess
the next temperature they would encounter. It was this act
of guessing that kept their complexions suspended, don't you
know, between the lovely pink, the lovely rose."
I accused Max of acquiring an initial reputation on false
pretenses.
Max replied mildly, "It was just an exercise in euphuism.
Still, as far as anyone in literature can be lynched, I
was."
Feelings ran high in those days. The Westminster Gazette,
referring to the drawings by Aubrey Beardsley that were also
published in the first issue of the Yellow Book,
suggested "an Act of Parliament to make this kind of thing
illegal." Beardsley was badly mauled by the critics, and, in
a memorial essay on Beardsley, Max tells, with approval, how
Beardsley did them in:
Most of the qualified art-critics, also were very angry.
They did not know what to make of these drawings, which
were referable to no established school or known method
in art. Beardsley was not at all discouraged by the
contempt with which his technique was treated. On the
contrary, he revelled in his unfavourable
press-cuttings, knowing how little they signified. I
think it was in the third number of the Yellow Book
that two pictures by hitherto-unknown artists were
reproduced. One was a large head of Mantegna, by Philip
Broughton; the other, a pastel-study of a Frenchwoman,
by Albert Foschter. Both the drawings had rather a
success with the reviewers, one of whom advised
Beardsley "to study and profit by the sound and
scholarly draughtsmanship of which Mr. Philip Broughton
furnishes another example of his familiar manner."
Beardsley, who had made both the drawings and invented
both the signatures, was greatly amused and delighted.
Max's undergraduate success was similar to that achieved by
Edward Sheldon somewhat later. In 1893, Sir William
Rothenstein was sent up to Oxford by the publisher John Lane
to do a book of lithographs of university celebrities.
Lane's idea was that he should do dons; Rothenstein insisted
on including a few undergraduate celebrities. Naturally, he
drew Max, who was himself already well known for his
caricatures and writings. (In his memoirs, Rothenstein
describes Max, at their first meeting, as "rather tall," by
which he must have meant that Max was tall in comparison
with himself. In the innumerable caricatures that Max was to
do of Rothenstein, the latter is always minuscule, a
Lilliputian among Gullivers. There is only one caricature in
which there is anyone smaller than Rothenstein, and that is
one in which Rothenstein's brother Albert is included. Max
puts Albert under a table and William on top of it, so that
he can argue on terms of equality with the painter Wilson
Steer, who is sitting.) After Rothenstein had finished his
Oxford lithographs, he found that John Lane had commissioned
Max to do a book of Oxford celebrities also; Max wrote to
Rothenstein to apologize for Lane, but said he felt
confident that "there is room for both of us." Once Max had
launched his bombshell in the Yellow Book, he
relaxed. He wanted notoriety only in order to coast on it.
He coasted till he got to America—or, specifically,
Chicago—when he took a long look at his spangled past and a
controlled one at his future.
Herbert's company opened in New York and moved on to
Chicago. The journey to Chicago was a fateful one for Max.
Passing through the sleeping car reserved for the unmarried
ladies of the company, he was hailed by Kilseen Conover and
another young actress, Una Cockerell. They looked very
pretty in their nightgowns and were eating fruit out of
hampers. Miss Conover gave Max an apple and Miss Cockerell
threw him a banana. In London, once, I visited Miss
Cockerell's uncle, Sir Sydney Cockerell. This entrancing
gentleman was in bed. He was over ninety when I went to see
him, and the extraordinary vigor of his mind and his
vitality made me reflect that perhaps a lifelong
preoccupation with the arts can be a powerful factor in
longevity. Sir Sydney had been William Morris's and Ruskin's
secretary when he was young, had made a pilgrimage to
Tolstoy, and, as his books reveal, had made an art of
friendship with the great spirits of his time. The chief
devotion of his later years was to the Fitzwilliam Museum,
at Cambridge, of which he was curator. He was perhaps the
closest friend of Bernard Shaw; he was instrumental in
getting Shaw to write "St. Joan," and he spoke words from
"Pilgrim's Progress" at Shaw's funeral. We talked about Max.
Speaking of Max's drawings, Sir Sydney said, "There is no
one like Max. He is in a class apart. At his best, his
perception is unique and beautiful." The first time he had
ever seen Max, Sir Sydney said, was when he had gone to
Paddington Station to see his niece off on the boat train
for Herbert's first American tour. He saw a young man,
dressed to the nines, walking abstractedly up and down the
platform. He had never seen a young man so exquisitely
dressed. That was Max. Sir Sydney didn't meet him till many
years later. And when he did, he bought three of Max's
drawings for the Fitzwilliam. But Max didn't know anything
about Sydney Cockerell on the night he got the banana and
the apple, and it was then that he fell in love with Miss
Conover. As he wrote his close friend Reginald Turner at the
time, they rode around in Chicago in hansom cabs holding
hands, and Max asked Miss Conover to marry him. She gave him
no reason to believe that she wouldn't.
In Chicago, Herbert, who was adventurous, put on Ibsen's "An
Enemy of the People." The reaction of the first audience was
mixed, even tumultuous. Max did not capitalize
professionally on the controversial aspects of this
reaction, however. He did not stay for the end of the
performance. Instead, he did something that theatrical press
agents do not ordinarily do. Leaving the impassioned
audience to come to terms with Ibsen and his brother in its
own way, he went back to his room in the Blackstone Hotel,
made himself comfortable with pen and ink and paper, and
wrote an essay on Walter Pater, which he first called "Be It
Cosiness" and later called "Diminuendo." In this essay, Max
polishes Pater off quickly, and devotes the rest of the
essay to himself. The title is meant to convey that after
the awful, dizzying summit scaled in the Yellow Book
essay the rest of his life must necessarily be a prolonged
anticlimax. This anticlimax he welcomes; he defines its
contours, and begins at once to make himself at home within
them. On his arrival in Oxford as a freshman, in 1890, he
begins, he encountered Pater himself in Ryman's, where he
went to buy an engraving. "I think," he says, "I nearly went
down when they told me that was Pater." Max records that he
later tried to draw Pater and failed; he could never really
do funny caricatures of people unless he admired or, at
least in some grudging way, liked them. And he cared no more
for Pater's literary style than he did for his personal
appearance:
Not that even in those more decadent days of my
childhood [when Max was writing this, he was
twenty-three] did I admire the man as a stylist Even
then I was angry that he should treat English as a dead
language, bored by that sedulous ritual wherewith he
laid out every sentence as in a shroud—hanging, like a
widower, long over its marmoreal beauty or ever he could
lay it at length in his book, its sepulchre. From that
laden air, the so cadaverous murmur of that sanctuary, I
would hook it at the beck of any jade. The writing of
Pater had never, indeed, appealed to me, αλλ αιει
having regard to the couth solemnity of his mind, his
philosophy, his rare erudition, τινα Φωτα μαγαν και
καλον εδεγμην. And I suppose it was when at length I
saw him that I first knew him to be fallible.
After gracefully interring Pater in the cerements of a few
of his own sentences, the young press agent goes on to inter
his own past and to peer down the vista of his future.
Actually, Max told me, he overcame his original repugnance
to the author of "Marius the Epicurean" sufficiently to
attend several of his lectures. Evidently, for Pater, giving
lectures was a form of self-communion; he whispered them. At
one of Herbert's supper parties, Max met, for the first
time, Oscar Wilde. By way of break-in, he asked Wilde, "Did
you hear Pater at Oxford? I couldn't." "I overheard him,"
said Wilde. In "Diminuendo," Max writes that Oxford, like
Pater, is a visual disappointment ("On aurait dit a
bit of Manchester through which Apollo had once passed");
the charms of the traditions he expected are obsolescent
("The townspeople now looked just like undergraduates and
the dons just like townspeople"); the improvement in the
train service between London and Oxford has made the latter
a kind of suburb of the former, and when he looks at London,
though he finds it "fascinating to watch the ways of its
children," he is sure that "modern life" could not be for
him. He contemplates, in a few elegiac paragraphs, the
excessive and turbulent and incessantly amorous life of the
Prince of Wales, and is saddened by the reflection that a
life so busy must connote an interference with thought. "I
do not suppose," he writes, "that, if we were invited to
give authenticated instances of intelligence on the part of
our royal pets, we could fill half a column of the
Spectator. In fact, their lives are so full they have no
time for thought, the highest energy of man."
Chicago does not usually evoke searing introspection, but it
did in Max; ignoring completely the audience reaction to "An
Enemy of the People"—a serious lapse on the part of a
drumbeater for a theatrical enterprise—he casts a rueful
glance at his own spotted past:
Once, in the delusion that Art, loving the recluse,
would make his life happy, wrote a little for a yellow
quarterly and had that succès de fiasco which is
always given to a young writer of talent. But the stress
of creation soon overwhelmed me. Only Art with a capital
A gives any consolations to her henchmen. And I, who
crave no knighthood, shall write no more. I shall write
no more. Already I feel myself a trifle outmoded. I
belong to the Beardsley period. Younger men, with months
of activity before them, with fresher schemes and
notions, with newer enthusiasm, have pressed forward
since then. Cedo junioribus. Indeed, I stand
aside with no regret. For to be outmoded is to be a
classic, if one has written well. I have acceded to the
hierarchy of good scribes and rather like my niche.
Miss Jungmann removed the tea things; the three of us had
already disposed of the strawberries. I looked around the
tiny circumference of Max's present niche—a living room no
bigger than a few strides in each direction, and furnished
with the convex mirror, a small beige-upholstered armchair
that Max sat in, a small tea table beside the chair, two
straight chairs, a small dining-room table, a small
fireplace, and above it a white-painted mantelshelf on which
there stood two photographs and a delicate bronze figurine
of a girl with averted head. I encouraged Max to talk more
about his American visit. In Chicago, he said, he had
enjoyed the fires. Max was devoted to fires—rampant ones in
the outdoors and more controlled, indoor ones, such as the
tiny, brisk one in the grate before us. In an essay on
domesticated fires, he says that they are "to your room what
the sun is to the world," and continues, "Doubtless, when I
began to walk, one of my first excursions was to the fender,
that I might gaze more nearly at the live thing roaring and
raging behind it; and I daresay I dimly wondered by what
blessed dispensation this creature was allowed in a domain
so peaceful as my nursery." Chicago, he recalled—he had
earlier recalled it in "The Works," published more than half
a century before—provided him with a magnificent ungrated
fire. Most of all, Max liked the American attitude
toward fires, so different from the English one and so
compatible with his own. In his essay "An Infamous Brigade,"
he reproaches the fire department of his home town for its
destructive attitude toward fires. Chicago wins his
enthusiastic approbation:
Americans, as yet inferior to us in the appreciation of
most fair things, are far more spirited than we are
about fires. Many years ago, when all Chicago was afire,
the Mayor, watching it from the Lake-Side, exclaimed in
a loud voice, "Who will say now that ours is not the
finest city in all the world?" l remember, too, that
some years ago, on the eve of my departure from Chicago,
a certain citizen, who was entertaining me at supper,
expressed his great regret that they had not been able
to show me one of their fires. And indeed it must he
splendid to see those twenty-three-story buildings come
crashing clown in less time than was required to build
them up. In Chicago, extinction is not attempted. Little
value is set on bricks and mortar. A fire is enjoyed;
then the building is reproduced and burnt down again at
leisure. But we, who pull down, year by year, old inns
and almshouses, because they are obsolete in usage,
despite their prettiness and their tradition, we, in
London, suffer to be saved any wharf or warehouse,
however beautiful its encircling flames, however hideous
it.
Max had an agreeable memory of a New York fire, too. After
his press-agentry, he and Herbert, he told me, were staying
at the old Waldorf. One of the actors in the company, who
lived in a more modest establishment, was burned out. He
burst into Herbert's apartment to report on the experience.
Everybody had rushed out of the burning building carrying
souvenirs, but this actor, in his excitement, had forgotten
to take one. He joined the crowd of spectators on the
sidewalk, and, since he now saw that the firemen were
demolishing everything, he thought he'd help them out by
breaking in a bow window; while he was at it, he dragged out
an armchair that, he told Herbert, would do admirably for a
prop in one of his productions. Herbert inquired gravely
whether it was singed. "No," said the actor. "Just wet." Max
went on to tell me he had been interested in an American
book that described how frequently our theatres burned down
during this period. "There was no parallel in England," said
Max, "because we didn't choose to burn our theatres down."
Max told me that he had had a good time in America,
especially after he lost his job. Relieved of the necessity
of writing professional letters, he wrote professionally. He
sold two pieces to Vanity Fair and two to a
short-lived magazine published in Chicago. He got
twenty-five dollars apiece for them. He also sold several
caricatures. Nobody bought "Diminuendo;" it was, he said,
much too "stark." He went with Herbert to Cambridge,
Massachusetts, where Herbert read to the Harvard
boys—Hamlet's fourth soliloquy in the voice of Falstaff, and
Falstaff's "honor" speech in the voice of Hamlet—but the
main thing besides the reading that Max could remember of
that occasion was that all the undergraduates parted their
hair in the middle. One of them he used as a model for Mr.
Dover, the American Rhodes Scholar in "Zuleika Dobson,"
which he began to write in 1898 and did not finish until
1911. In Boston, also, Joseph Jefferson, the fishing buddy
of Grover Cleveland and the perennial Rip van Winkle, came
to call on Max and Herbert, and of this little visit Max
remembered that Jefferson kept his hat on the whole time.
His eyebrows went up in mild consternation when he told me
of this solecism committed by Jefferson's hat, and I did my
best to muster an answering expression of shock. In New
York, Max met Clyde Fitch, who took him to see Edward
Harrigan, of Harrigan and Hart; Max remembered Harrigan's
walk, "as if threading his way among broken bits of glass,
don't you know—at once comic and extraordinarily graceful."
Max greatly liked Fitch, and they became friends. Max wrote
in a letter to someone at the time, "He loves my writing,
which is a bond. I have never seen or read anything of his,
which is awkward." One memory he put in the category of the
grotesque. He was approached by an American impresario to
give a lecture tour. The impresario was quite insistent. Max
handled him. He made a strict counter-proposal. He undertook
to give one lecture but stipulated that it must take place
at Castle Garden. In addition, there must be no more than
twelve people present. The impresario refused to meet this
demand, and the whole deal fell through. But the American
recollection that gave him the greatest pleasure was of "a
triumph of commercial misjudgment." It concerned the Paul M.
Potter adaptation of George du Maurier's "Trilby." Herbert,
of course, could not go to any shows, since he was playing.
In pursuit of a vestigial duty remaining from his original
job, Max was sent by Herbert to see "Trilby," as his play
scout, and to report on it. Max's report was unequivocal;
the play was absolute nonsense and was bound to be a
resounding failure were Herbert so ill-advised as to produce
it in London. A lucky instinct kept Herbert ill-advised. On
his last day in America, having nothing else to do, he went
to sec "Trilby" himself. He bought the play at once, and
later, playing Svengali, made a huge success in it. It was
from the vast profits of "Trilby" that Herbert was able to
build himself a vast theatre—Her Majesty's. "He was
luckier," said Max, "than poor Chapman, the publisher who
turned down 'East Lynne' because his reader, George
Meredith, had turned in an adverse report on it. But we were
both right—Meredith about 'East Lynne' and I about
'Trilby.'" With the stubbornness of a drama critic, Max held
to his view. "Trilby" only demonstrated, as far as he was
concerned, that a play could be simultaneously rubbish and a
tremendous hit.
In Baltimore, Herbert asked Max to go out front and bring a
distinguished fellow-countryman of theirs backstage. This
was Rudyard Kipling. Max obediently introduced himself to
Kipling. Kipling said, with some surprise, "You are Max
Beerbohm! So young to have a style!" This was graceful
enough, but it did not alter a lifelong aversion that was to
have tragic reverberations for Max, that haunted him even in
his little niche in Rapallo. Perhaps of all the big things
in the world that Max could not abide, the one he could
abide least was the idea of a big England, and a big England
meant British imperialism; perhaps that was what was behind
the only virulent relationship in his life—his relationship
with Rudyard Kipling. Max was as passionately English as he
was passionately anti-chauvinist, but the Boer War revolted
him. (Oddly, Shaw supported the Boer War; he felt that the
Boers were backward and the British somehow forward, and
that this gave the British the right to annihilate the
Boers.) Max thought that Kipling, who was the minnesinger of
the national orgy, had put his powers to the service of
unholy ends. In 1901, Max published a large album of
cartoons under the title "The Second Childhood of John
Bull." It is as bitter as Daumier—unique in that way among
Max's productions as a caricaturist. The first two cartoons
set the tone of the collection. The first is called "The
Ideal John Bull, 1901." "I'm going to see this thing
through" is the caption. It shows the traditional
indomitable, stocky little figure striding along with a
no-nonsense walking stick, one hand in his pocket, the stiff
upper lip in an inexorable uncurve. The second is called
"The Real John Bull, 1901," and shows Johnny, his silk hat
wrinkled, his cheeks rubicund with wine, his body flabby,
cringing with bland ingratiation, invoking (by rote) bygone
glories and getting them cockeyed. The caption reads:
Ah, well, but I ain't doin' so badly neither. There's
Boney under lock and key at St. Helena. An' Drake he
have stopped that there Armada. An' Burgoyne's goin' to
teach them Colonists a lesson. Just you wait. What I say
is "Old England's old England still," etc. etc. etc.
There is a wicked drawing reflecting Max's pain at the
debauches of misplaced patriotism that swept the British
public after the newspaper announcements of victories that
were not victories. Johnny is lying on the ground with a
whiskey bottle, and is being given severe glances by figures
representing the other European countries. Johnny is, in
short, blotto. The first part of the caption reads:
J. B.: "What I shay ish thish. A man'sh ash young ash 'e
feelsh, an' ash dignified."
Below this Max appends a sober quotation from an imaginary
historian:
"We are often taunted with being a phlegmatic and
unemotional race; but the nature and the extent of the
recent rejoicings will convince even our neighbours,
etc., etc."
The insularity, the Philistinism, the indifference to art,
the cruelty and callousness engendered by the hysteria of a
war blundering along on a momentum of guilt are anatomized
in other relentless cartoons. When John Bull is drunk, he is
disgusting, and when he is sober, he is callous, but he has
one moment when he is all smiles and approval; that is when
he is congratulating the minnesinger of the national
orgy—Rudyard Kipling. John, well fed again and rosy again,
is drawing on a long-stemmed pipe. An obsequious puppy is on
its forelegs before him, yielding him true obeisance.
Kipling, a short pipe jutting out below the hedge of his
mustache, is flourishing a sudsy beer mug. The caption, the
longest in the book, reads:
DE
ARTE
POETICA.
J. B. to R. K. "Yes, I've took a fancy to you, young
feller. 'Tain't often I cottons to a Pote, neither.
'Course there's Shakespeare. 'E was a wonder. 'E was (sentimentally).
'Swan of Avon' I calls 'im. Take 'im for all in
all we shall not look upon 'is like agin. And then there
was Tennyson—'im as wrote the ode to Balaclavy. 'E was a
mastermind too, in his way. So's Lewis Morris. Knows
right from wrong like the palm of 'is 'and, and ain't
afraid to say where one begins and t'other ends. But
most potes ain't like that. What I say is, they ain't
wholesome. Look at Byron! Saucy 'ound, with 'is
stuck-up airs and 'is stuck down collars and 'is oglin
o' gals. But I soon sent 'im to the right about.
'Outside' said I, and out 'e went. And then there
was that there friend of his, went by the name o'
Shelley, 'ad to go too. 'E was a fair caution, was
Shelley. Drownded hisseif in 'a I-talian lake, and I
warrant that was the fust bath 'e ever took. Most of 'em
is like that—not wholesome, and can't keep a
civil tongue i' their 'eads. You're different, you are:
don't give yourself no 'aughty airs, and though you're
rough (with your swear-words and your what-nots), I will
say as 'ow you've always bin very civil an' respec'ful
to myself. You're one o' the right sort, you are. And
them little tit-bits o' information what you gives me
about my Hempire—why Alf 'Armsworth 'imself couldn't do
it neater, I do believe. Got your banjo with you
tonight? Then empty that there mug, and give us a toon."
When I was a child, on Providence Street, in Worcester,
Massachusetts, Rudyard Kipling was a very great name indeed.
My elders were avid for culture, and one of them gave me a
copy of "The Light That Failed," by Kipling. I read it with
awe. Many other people in Worcester read it with awe. The
demand for it at the Worcester Public Library on Elm Street
was terrific. Several years ago, after reading Max's review
of the play made from "The Light That Failed," in his
"Around Theatres," I read "The Light That Failed" again—this
time with incredulity. The hero, Dick Helder, has made his
reputation as a painter of war scenes in the Sudan, when
General Gordon was embattled at Khartoum; his two buddies
are war correspondents, terribly he-man. After a day with
his sweetheart, Maisie, Dick longs to join them for
"man-talk." When they have exhausted their man-talk, they
have sofa-pillow fights. When they hear that there may be
trouble again "down there," they salivate with anticipation;
the sights, the smells, the mere thought of war put them in
a state of ecstasy. In his essay on the dramatization of
"The Light That Failed" by a playwright who used the
pseudonym George Fleming, Max ambushes this rampant virility
of Kipling's. Because "George Fleming" is the pseudonym for
a woman, he hazards the opinion that "Rudyard Kipling" is
also; he starts his review, under the heading "Kipling's
Entire," as follows:
"George Fleming" is as we know, a lady. Should the name
Rudyard Kipling, too, be put between inverted commas? Is
it, too, the veil of a feminine identity? If of Mr.
Kipling we knew nothing except his work, we should
assuredly make that conjecture. A lady who writes
fiction reveals her sex clearlier through her portrayal
of men than through any other of her lapses. And in Mr.
Kipling's short stories, especially in "The Light That
Failed" . . . men are portrayed . . . from an
essentially feminine point of view. They are men seen
from the outside, or rather, not seen at all, but
feverishly imagined. . . . "My men—my
men!" cries Dick Helder when a regiment of soldiers
passes his window. He is not their commanding officer.
He was at one time a war-correspondent. . . . He had
always doted on the military. And so has Mr. Kipling. To
him, as to his hero, they typify, in its brightest
colours, the notion of manhood, manliness, man. And by
this notion Mr. Kipling is permanently and joyously
obsessed. That is why I say that his standpoint is
feminine. The ordinary male fictionist has a knowledge
of men as they are, but is preoccupied by a sentiment
for women as he supposes them to be. . . . Mr. Kipling
is so far masculine that he has never displayed a
knowledge of women as they are; but the unreality of his
male creatures, with his worship of them, makes his name
ring quaintly like a pseudonym. . . . Writing of George
Sand, Mr. Henry James once suggested that she, though
she may have been to all intents and purposes a man, was
not a gentleman. Conversely, it might be said that Mr.
Kipling, as revealed to us in his fiction, is no lady.
But he is not the less essentially feminine for that.
On the whole, Max praises Miss Fleming; he thinks she has
caught Miss Kipling entire. But he misses terribly two lines
of the original. In one, Dick Helder says of his sweetheart
"Maisie's a bilious little thing," and the other is a
heart-rending cry of the hero: "When Dick, after blindness
has overtaken him, ecstatically yells to the soldiers who
have been ordered to fire the machine-gun on some
skirmishing Arabs, 'Give 'em Hell, men—oh, give 'em Hell.'
Sad not to have heard that noble heart-cry uttered on the
stage—a heart-cry so inalienably characteristic of the
Kipling hero."
Max pursued Kipling inexorably. In "A Christmas Garland,"
his book of parodies, caricaturing in prose the manner in
which seventeen then famous authors would write a Christmas
story, he starts "P.C., X, 36," the Kipling one, with a
parody of the "Barrack-Room Ballads":
. . . 'Ustle 'im, shake 'im till 'e's sick!
Wot, 'e would, would 'e? Well,
Then yer've got ter give 'im 'Ell,
An' it's trunch, trench, truncheon does the trick. —Police
Station Ditties.
The culprit who gets the truncheon is Santa Claus, who is
arrested, by Judlip, the police constable, as he is corning
up out of the chimney, on the suspicion that he is a German.
Kipling's obsession with technical minutiae is parodied in
Max's description of Judlip's sigh:
Now, when Judlip sighs the sound is like unto that which
issues from the vent of a Crosby boiler when the
cog-gauges are at 260° F.
It is a slow Christmas Eve for Judlip. He complains, "'Avant
'ad so much as a kick at a lorst dorg. Christmas Eve ain't
wot it was." But with the advent of Santa Claus, emerging
from a chimney pot, things look up:
Judlip's voice clove the silence. "Wot are yer doin'
hup there?"
The person addressed came to the edge of the parapet. I
saw that he had a hoary white beard, a red ulster with
the hood up, and what looked like a sack over his
shoulder. He said something or other in a voice like a
concertina that has been left out in the rain.
"I dessay," answered my friend. "Just you come down, an'
we'll see about that."
Santa Claus was ill-advised to come down.
He didn't like the feel of Judlip's knuckles at his
cervical vertebrae.
"Wot wos yer doin' hup there?" asked Judlip, tightening
the grip.
"I'm S-Santa Claus, Sir. P-please, Sir, let me g-go . .
."
The captive snivelled something about peace on earth,
good will toward men.
"Yuss," said Judlip. "That's in the Noo Testament, ain't
it? The Noo Testament contains some uncommon nice readin'
for old gents an' young ladies. But it ain't included in
the librery o' the Force. . . . Hup with that sack, an'
quick march!"
I have seen worse attempts at a neck-wrench, but it was
just not slippery enough for Judlip. And the kick that
Judlip then let fly was a thing of beauty and a joy for
ever.
"Frog's-march him!" I shrieked, dancing, "For the love
of heaven, frog's-march him!"
C. E. Carrington, in his "Life of Kipling," refers bitterly
to the steady barrage Max levelled at Kipling:
Max Beerbohm published very little, and while he
protested so prettily that his muse was no bigger than
the servant-girl's baby, the literary world learned to
wait expectant for each of his tiny little
pronouncements, for Max had charm and talent. No one
could deny, or did deny, that his work was polished, his
wit penetrating—more penetrating with pencil than with
pen. For fifty years anything spoken or written or
depicted by Max called forth a shrill chorus of delight
from the reviewers, and the present writer supposes
himself almost the first to utter an unkind word about
this incomparable master of the smirk and titter. Max
was, as a rule, gentle, except when he touched upon one
topic. He hated Rudyard Kipling. He set himself to
destroy Kipling's reputation and, later, to assure the
world that it had been destroyed, with no small degree
of success among the literary coteries, but with no
visible effect upon Kipling's ever-growing fame and
influence in wider circles. At least nine caricatures,
two critical articles, and a ferociously malevolent
parody of Kipling's style have been recorded as the work
of Max Beerbohm, and while he discharged these arrows,
Kipling, for thirty years, remained entirely unmoved by
them.
There are two misstatements in Mr. Carrington's summary, of
which he was probably unaware when he made them. The first
is that Kipling was unmoved by Max's attacks. When David Low
wrote to Kipling asking to caricature him, Kipling refused,
because, according to Low, he was still exacerbated by a
caricature Max had done of him twenty years before, and on
this ground he repelled all caricaturists. The second is
that Max hated Kipling. As we sat by the fireplace, I told
Max how extravagantly idolized Kipling was on Providence
Street, and of my disillusioning experience in reading "The
Light That Failed" after I had read his review in "Around
Theatres." I hoped that he would talk about his relationship
with Kipling.
A truck thundered by; I thought perhaps he had not heard me,
because he made no comment on my remark. Instead, he told me
about the chair in which he was sitting—that it was the same
chair his father had given him when he went up to Merton.
"Florence had it re-covered, and now Elizabeth has had it
re-covered again—always with material similar to that which
covered it in Oxford," he said. "It is really a very
comfortable chair in which to sit and gaze at the fire. I
deplore the passing of fireplaces. In flats, you can't
usually have a fireplace; a house, no matter how tiny, with
a fireplace in the living room encourages conversation and
companionship. In my mother's house, we always sat in front
of the fireplace—my mother and sisters and I—and we had
endless conversations about people and books and things.
When I was a dramatic critic, I used to tell them about the
plays I had seen and they used to tell me about the books
they had read which I hadn't the time for because I was
constantly seeing plays."
I then got the feeling that he had heard my remark
about Kipling, that the subject was painful to him, and that
he didn't want to talk about it.
We sat in silence for a moment before the murmuring fire.
Looking up at the mantelshelf, I studied the bronze figurine
of the girl with averted head. I asked Max whether she had
been with him in his rooms at Merton, too.
"Yes," he said. "My father bought her in Paris—at the same
time that he bought the mirror."
Miss Jungmann put a rug around Max's knees. She asked him if
he was tired. He smiled at her and at me. "Not yet," he
said. I offered to go. Max refused my offer. Miss Jungmann
said she had a small errand to do, and excused herself.
"Show our visitor your two photographs," she said as she
turned to go out. "They are Max's household gods—rather,
goddesses. He can't bear to have them out of reach." Miss
Jungmann left us.
"Oh, yes," said Max. "Will you please reach me them, there?"
I took from the mantelshelf the two photographs, a little
larger than ordinary postcards. I gave them to Max, and he
sat looking at them as if he had never seen them before. "I
always keep them by me," he said. "Look. . . ." One showed
two lovely girls in white, standing on a lawn beside a low
wall on which there are huge urns. It is night. Above them
are great beech trees, part of their slender trunks and
their foliage white in the moonlight. "Gordon Craig bought
this in London in 1929 and gave it to me," Max said. "It had
been in the library of Augustus Hare. It is a country house,
Buttles, which Hare used to visit before the wars came, when
the world was civilized. Now, I am told, in the drawing room
of that house they play billiards!" Max looked up at me from
the photograph—a commiserating look, to ease the shock, to
show me that he felt as bad about it as he imagined I did.
"But aren't they lovely? It is after dinner, probably, and
the house is full of people, and perhaps they were bored and
wanted to get off by themselves to gossip or to exchange
romantic confidences. Aren't they lovely? Isn't it lovely?
Vanished. That life and that era—vanished."
He paused a moment longer over the two girls and then gave
me the other photograph. This was a study in pure joy: a
little girl of three or four is standing beside a priest in
full canonicals. The priest has just told her a funny story
and the little girl's freckled, pug-nosed, homely face is
crinkled with laughter; she is giving herself up to laughter
without a let. You feel that she will go on laughing and
laughing, and will laugh again whenever she remembers what
the priest has said to her; the priest himself is smiling,
revelling in the success of his joke. I asked where this
photograph had come from. "Oh," said Max, "it is a
photograph from a book about Huysmans; it is the Abbé
Mugnier with the little daughter of the Countess de
Castries. I never look at it without its cheering me up. How
happy she is! How happy they both are!"
Max took a farewell glance at the little girl and handed
that photograph to me. His cheek muscles worked. "You spoke
to me of Kipling," he said. He stopped for a moment. As
rarely happened, his tranquillity was gone; he was tense.
"When first I met him, in Baltimore, he received me so
nicely," he said. "He was charming. And later, in Herbert's
dressing room, so sympathetic, so kind. And then—you
know—his books kept coming out, and occasionally I was asked
to review them. I couldn't, you know, abide them. He was a
genius, a very great genius, and I felt that he was debasing
his genius by what he wrote. And I couldn't refrain from
saying so. It went on and on. Friends of his and mine kept
telling me that he was pained and shocked by what I wrote,
but I couldn't stop. You know, I couldn't stop. As his
publication increased, so did my derogation. He didn't stop;
I couldn't stop. I meant to. I wanted to. But I couldn't."
Max was suffering at this time from a severe inflammation of
the lower lid of his left eye. He was very sensitive about
it; he thought that it might be offensive to those who
talked to him. As he leaned forward in his chair, he was
still tense, and his eye seemed to water. He gripped the
arms of the Merton chair as if to sustain himself against
the pain of the memory induced by his feud with Kipling—as
one instinctively grips the arms of the seat in an airplane
during a sudden, violent dip. He went on, seeming
determined, now that he had started, to tell the whole
story. "After that meeting in Baltimore, I saw him twice.
Once in a hansom. I was in another hansom, and we passed
each other in the Strand. He saw me and he knew that I had
seen him. But as the hansoms passed, we each of us averted
our eyes. Then, some years later, I saw him again, in
White's Club. There was a table between us, and, looking
across it, over the heads of the diners, I caught his eye.
He was looking at me. I wished to get up. I very much wanted
to go over to him and to say, 'Mr. Kipling, I admire you. I
admire your very great genius. If I have written harshly of
you, it is because I do not believe you are living up to the
possibilities of your genius.' I so much wished to do this.
But I didn't. Why didn't I do it? Why didn't I unbend? Why
did I go on persecuting him? And now he is dead and it is
too late."
There was a silence. Max was still bent forward. His hands
still clutched the arms of his chair. His eye was still
watering. "But it had to be so. I had to do it. He was a
great genius who didn't live up to his genius, who misused
his genius. . . ."
Miss Jungmann came back. She looked at Max. He sank back in
his chair. "Now, Max," she said. "You are tired. You
must have a rest."
I rose to go. I asked Max not to get up, but he did. I
walked out of the room dead center, conscious that the
mirror, which had seen so many exits over so many decades,
was miniaturizing and essentializing my back.
Miss Jungmann saw me out through the little hall, and we
said good night under Gordon Craig's lamp. I apologized for
staying so long.
"No," she said. "I think it's good for Max. Your visits are
therapeutic."
She peered out at Charlie, his car jammed against the rubble
wall of the Villino. She called to him, in Italian, to back
up to the gate. "Charlie thinks that I am Max's daughter,"
she said. "All the tradespeople do, too. Don't disillusion
him!" She waved to me as I got into the front seat beside
Charlie.
"Very nice lady, the old gentleman's daughter," said
Charlie. "Speaks very good Italian."
I asked Charlie to drop me at the little bistro down
the road from the Villino, which is the hero of Max's essay
"The Golden Drugget." Charlie protested. "This is no place
for you," he said. I suppose he meant that it was much too
lowly for a guest of the Excelsior. But I overrode him. I
asked him to wait, and went inside, sat at a zinc-topped
table, and ordered a Cinzano.
Max wrote his essay in England in 1918. He had gone back to
England to live for the duration of the war; he returned
there in 1939 also. From England he remembered the kindly
light shed from this humble little bistro on a dark
night:
Primitive and essential things have great power to touch
the heart of the beholder. I mean such things as a man
ploughing a field, or sowing or reaping; a girl filling
a pitcher from a spring; a young mother with her child;
a fisherman mending his nets; a light from a lonely hut
on a dark night. . . .
These words are written in war time and in England.
There are. I hear, "lighting restrictions" even on the
far Riviera di Levante. I take it that the Golden
Drugget is not outspread nowanights across the high dark
coast-road between Rapallo and Zoagli. But the lonely
wayside inn is still there, doubtless; and its narrow
door will again stand open, giving out for wayfarers its
old span of brightness into darkness, when peace comes.
The light from the hostel on dark nights, Max says, offered
a promise that "you will find here a radiant company of
angels and archangels." Max never tested it; he never once
went inside. I did. I saw no angels, of any degree, but it
was consoling, just the same, to sit here. I thought of the
two girls in white whispering romantic confidences under
spreading beech trees, of the laughing little girl and the
smiling priest, of Max struggling, in unregretful remorse,
to resolve in his own mind his feud with Kipling. As any
great humorist must be, Max was incessantly and acutely
aware of pain and sorrow, of the evanescence of human life,
of the savagery and the impulse to destructiveness that are
beneath everything and from which, somehow, we must try to
pull ourselves up. Though he himself, as he wrote somewhere,
was "thickly veneered," he nevertheless knew, since he
belonged to the human race, that he had only lately emerged
from the cave. Some of the most casual and lightly begun of
his essays modulate into this tragic awareness, and none
more poignantly than this one. I paused, as Max does at the
end of "The Golden Drugget," "to bathe in the light that is
as the span of our human life, granted between one great
darkness and another."
(This is the second of a series of articles.) |
