Max Beerbohm

Max Beerbohm: The Incomparable Miniaturist

In 1898 George Bernard Shaw gave up the drama column of the *Saturday Review* and handed it to a twenty-six-year-old with no degree and no obvious qualifications. His farewell sentence created a nickname that outlived them both: "The younger generation is knocking at the door; and as I open it there steps spritely in the incomparable Max." Beerbohm held the chair for twelve years, drew several hundred of the most lethal caricatures in English art, wrote one novel, and then spent five decades in an Italian seaside town doing very little, superbly.

Palace Gardens Terrace

Henry Maximilian Beerbohm was born on 24 August 1872 at 57 Palace Gardens Terrace in London, the youngest of nine children. His father, Julius Ewald Edward Beerbohm, was a grain merchant born in Lithuania, of Dutch and German ancestry; his mother, Eliza Draper Beerbohm, was English, and the sister of Julius's first wife. The household produced performers: his half-brother Herbert Beerbohm Tree became one of the great actor-managers of the age, another half-brother, Julius, an author and explorer, and his nieces Viola, Felicity and Iris Tree all went on the stage.

He was schooled first at Mr Wilkinson's day school in Orme Square, which gave him, he said, a "love of Latin and thereby enabled me to write English" — and, from Mrs Wilkinson, the only drawing instruction he ever received. That is worth pausing on: the man later called the greatest of English comic artists was, technically speaking, taught to draw by his primary school teacher's wife.

Oxford, Without a Degree

Charterhouse followed, then Merton College, Oxford, from 1890, where he was Secretary of the Myrmidon Club and a considerable social figure and a negligible student. He left in 1894 without a degree, having already begun placing articles and caricatures in London papers. In March 1893 he submitted a piece on Oscar Wilde under the pseudonym "An American"; later that year "The Incomparable Beauty of Modern Dress" appeared in *The Spirit Lamp*, edited by Lord Alfred Douglas.

The launch proper came in 1894, with "A Defence of Cosmetics" in the first issue of *The Yellow Book*, Aubrey Beardsley's magazine and the house organ of English aestheticism. Wilde delivered the verdict that everyone has quoted since: "The gods have bestowed on Max the gift of perpetual old age." He was twenty-two. In 1896, aged twenty-four, he published a collection of essays with the magnificently unembarrassed title *The Works of Max Beerbohm*, and his first fiction, "The Happy Hypocrite," appeared in *The Yellow Book* that October.

The Pencil

The drawing began even earlier. *The Strand Magazine* printed thirty-six of his "Club Types" in 1892, when he was twenty. His first appearance in a public exhibition came at the Fine Art Society in 1896, his first solo show at the Carfax Gallery in 1901.

The technique was pen or pencil with a delicate watercolour tint, deliberately light against the heavy inked tradition of *Punch*; he took his cues from French draughtsmen like Sem and Caran d'Ache. The method was reduction to a single ruthless idea: an essayist's judgement executed in line. *The Times* called him in 1913 "the greatest of English comic artists"; Bernard Berenson compared him to "the English Goya"; Edmund Wilson went furthest, calling him the greatest portrayer of personalities in the history of art. Yet as Britannica notes, the drawings caught "whatever was pretentious, affected, or absurd" in his contemporaries "usually without malice," and seldom alienated their subjects. He was a satirist people wanted to be satirised by. The collections — *Caricatures of Twenty-five Gentlemen* (1896), *The Poets' Corner* (1904), *Fifty Caricatures* (1913), *Rossetti and His Circle* (1922) — now hang in the Ashmolean, the Tate and the V&A.

Zuleika and Enoch Soames

The prose reached its peak in three books. *Zuleika Dobson* (1911), his only novel, is a burlesque of Oxford undergraduate life. *A Christmas Garland* (1912) parodies the stylistic tics of famous contemporaries, the Henry James pastiche the most celebrated of them. *Seven Men* (1919) contains "Enoch Soames," the celebrated tale of a minor poet who bargains with the Devil for a look at his own posterity — the sharpest thing in English about literary vanity. Britannica calls the book a masterpiece. *And Even Now* (1920) followed.

Rapallo

He briefly served as secretary to his half-brother's theatrical company in America in 1895 and was sacked for spending too long on the correspondence. In 1910 he married the American actress Florence Kahn, gave up the *Saturday Review*, and moved to Rapallo on the Italian Riviera, partly to escape the cost and social exhaustion of London. He stayed fifty years, leaving only for the two world wars. Visitors made the pilgrimage: Ezra Pound, who lived nearby, Somerset Maugham, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Truman Capote. In half a century he never learned Italian.

From 1935 he became an unexpectedly popular BBC broadcaster, talking about carriages, motor cars and music halls; the talks were collected as *Mainly on the Air* (1946). George VI knighted him in 1939 — delayed, it was said, by a 1911 satirical ballade that had mocked the king's parents. In 1942, for his seventieth birthday, admirers founded the Maximilian Society with seventy members, among them E. M. Forster, Graham Greene, Siegfried Sassoon, Kenneth Clark, Leonard Woolf and John Betjeman, and presented him with seventy bottles of wine.

Why Max Is Called a Genius

The case rests on a specific and rare double faculty: Beerbohm could perform the same act of critical perception in two entirely different media, at the highest level, in both. A parody and a caricature are the same operation — isolate what is most characteristic in a person, exaggerate it just past the point of comfort, and leave everything else out. Almost nobody does both. He did, and the judgement in his line is identical to the judgement in his prose: exact, economical, and mysteriously affectionate.

The endorsements are not casual. Shaw's "incomparable" was a professional's assessment of a successor. Berenson, the most exacting connoisseur of his generation, invoked Goya. Edmund Wilson, who was not sentimental, called him the greatest portrayer of personalities in the history of art.

The counter-case is that he is a miniaturist by choice and by limit. The total output is small; the novel is one novel; the parodies are by definition parasitic on other men's styles; the essays are exquisite and weightless. He wrote nothing that engaged with the century he lived through, retreating to Rapallo at thirty-eight. Wilde's "perpetual old age" was a compliment with a knife in it — the diagnosis of a young man who had chosen never to risk anything. Beerbohm's own defence would be that perfection at small scale is harder than adequacy at large, and on the evidence he is right. But nobody calls him a great artist and means large.

Legacy

He died on 20 May 1956 at a private hospital in Rapallo, aged eighty-three, shortly after marrying his former secretary and companion Elisabeth Jungmann. He was cremated in Genoa; his ashes were placed in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral on 29 June 1956, a few steps from other Englishmen with far larger reputations and far shorter shelf lives. His caricatures are in the Ashmolean, the Tate and the V&A; his papers are at Princeton, Harvard and the University of Texas. *Zuleika Dobson* and "Enoch Soames" are still read, which is a fitting afterlife for a man whose whole art was a raised eyebrow.

Achievements

• Knight Bachelor