ART.
MR. MAX BEERBOHM'S CARICATURES.
ALTHOUGH perhaps no one would think it from our comic papers, the art of caricature had quietly flourished in England through the Victorian times, when good taste and respect- ability grew like moss over the bard clear figure of Art, and in the Edwardian period when people had begun to doubt whether there was anything underneath the moss. Caricature flourished, but it was in the studios and haunts of artists, not in the market-place. The Pre-Raphaelites rejoiced in it. Even Burne-Jones showed a splendid talent for it, as, for instance, in his drawing of the snoring mid-Victorian father on the mid-Victorian sofa, the stumpy curves of which repeated and emphasized that living monument of the mid- Victorian dinner who reclined upon it— The Homes of England. It was not intended for publicity, no restraint was put on its high spirits, intimacy, and devilment, and it was often spiced with subtle parody of other art forms. The time is probably coming when the private humour of the professional artist will be put to a public purpose, just as his sketches and studies are now made public. If it does come Mr. Max Beerbohm will have led the way, for his is not only the sort of caricature that every connoisseur would like to do, but is like the carica- ture that most artists have tried to do. In his exhibition at the Leicester Galleries, which is now drawing the town, he shows that his long stay in Italy has made him more simpatico and also more remorseless than ever. From his eyrie in (say) the Apennines he had beheld our "goings-on," and has put down his thoughts about them with a firm, comprehending pen that, however much you may dissent from his decisions, gives them a terrible appearance of finality. He smooths away nothing, he gets all the angles beneath the outer curves; he sees circles as octagons. Perceiving clearly the fallacy of our smooth professional and party ways, lie decides that not to forgive all is to understand all. "Max "is unattached, and, so far as mortal man can be mentally free of the ties and prejudices of his time and class, he is that man. Much has been written of this artist's eccentricity, freakishness, and unaccountable ideas, but the truth is that, however rich and brilliant the expression, his point of view, when all is said and considered, is virtually that of the average man. If it were possible really to find an average man, he would turn out (when all his disguises were removed) to be Mr. Max Beerbohm. By the average man one means that mythical personage that leader-writers on both sides vainly appeal to as "every right- thinking man will agree, Sic." ; the man whose views, not on a few but on all points, are unprejudiced; the man, in short who turns elections and overturns cabinets. The point is that it takes a really normal man to see clearly what is abnormal in others.
Look round the walls at the cartoons dealing with the more public people. The average man believes that Mr. G. B. Shaw is always standing on his head. There you have him so, and the "mild surprise of one who, revisiting England after long absence, finds that the dear fellow has not moved." Mr. Roger
Fry worshipping a toy soldier (" We needs must love the highest when we see it"), Mr. Balfour pausing in a violin solo at the apparition of Mr. Boner Law banging a drum ("What virtuosity ! How sure, how firm a touch ! What verve! What brio ! What an instrument 1"), and Lord Halsbury as "the Rising Hope of the Stern Unbending Tories," are all visions of immense popularity. "Cold-Shouldered Yet," a pathetic picture of Mr. Boner Law—arm-in-arm with a fatuous figure cruelly representing Tariff Reform, all diamond rings and Union Jacks, but somewhat damaged—staring at the cold shoulders of John Bull and saying, "It's a quee-er thing, laddie, but there's evidently a sor-rt of a somewhat about ye that does not inspire confidence," represents, according to electoral results, the views of the unprejudiced voter who turns elections ; while the group of heavily dressed but unimpressive Liberal peers—" Liberalism in its more strictly Ornamental Aspect," and an assembly of the Cabinet Ministers imploring a very sleek Sir Rufus Isaacs to tell them if he knows of any stocks which they could buy "without fear of ultimate profit," are two flicks of his satire which find sympathy in some detached Liberal quarters. He crystallizes a vision that in some vaguer fashion has crossed most journalists' minds in his picture of Lord Northcliffe "feeling the demons of sensationalism rising in him and crying, "Hold me fast ! Curb me if you love me !" while mobile nonagenarians potter in to his aid from all sides of Printing House Square. In two of the drawings the caricature is almost savage : Mr. Justice Darling gives the black cap to his marshal with instructions to have some bells sewn on it; and a stout English athlete (with brandy and soda) is saying to a tremendously developed American athlete, " say, hang it, look here, you know. I tell you what it is, damn it; you're not a gentleman." The most detached of all is the cartoon of a sweating figure in aviator's costume hurrying along before symbolic figures of the two preceding centuries : "The Grave Misgivings of the Nineteenth Century, and the Wicked Amusement of the Eighteenth, in watching the Progress (or whatever it is) of the Twentieth."
Yes, if the average man were suffieiently average and detached, sufficiently endowed with wit and courage and richness of sensibility to find such brilliant concepts for his ideas, and sufficiently gifted with the instincts for art and a connoisseur's training to spice his drawings with inner parodies of style—if he had all these things he would undoubtedly produce caricatures just like these. J. B.
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