Max at 80
By MICHAEL SWAN
NEXT Sunday, in his villino at Rapallo, Sir Max Beerbohm will welcome, perhaps with courteous surprise, the arrival of his 81st year; but the youthfulness which he has told us evaded him in his youth has found him out in his old age. When his occasional reviews appear in the Sunday newspapers, the rest of the literary page becomes elderly and earnest. When he talks of music-halls or the giants of the past on the wireless, there is no-one to equal him in wit and gentle high spirits—unless it is that other great Edwardian octogenarian, Mr. Gordon Craig-. During the last year or two, indeed, Sir Max has read on the air two of his finest essays in memoir—a genre which he has brought to the pitch of pure art. The essays on Hall Caine and George Moore stand worthily beside " No. 2 The Pines." No touch of tiredness separates the mind that described Swinburne, at the lunch-table, eyeing the small bottle of Bass's pale ale- " the ultimate allowance of one who had erst clashed cymbals in Naxos "—from the mind that recaptured George Moore's fluttering obsession, at the breakfast-table, with the novels of Turgenev, whom he had discovered the week before. Both essays have that quality of genial irreverence which avoids malice by some alchemy and is even touched with love and gentleness; how appropriate it is that " max " should be the Indian name for a gentle species of wild pepper grown in the forests of Yucatan.
For fifty-five years, since Bernard Shaw hailed the younger generation in his sprightly form with the word " incompar- able," Sir Max has been unique. From the first he stood alone, contemplating his small chosen world, moving the long lashes of his grey, hooded eyes in a continuous and innocent surprise at its folly and charming betise. But he was unlike the puritanical satirist; it seemed to be precisely this folly and betise which gave the admirable rest its eminence for him. With Lytton Strachey he was typically a child of the new century in his wish to show that the great are human, that the author of " Calydon " might be approached by Watts-Dunton with the words: " Now Algernon, we're at war you know— at war with the Boers. I don't want to bother you at all, but I do think, my dear old friend, you oughtn't to let this opportunity of . . . "
It was this role of the apparent trifler which attracted "Max." He described himself as a " dilettante, a petit maitre," and was content that people should think him a butterfly or, with Punch, a " popinjay.' And even today one is never quite sure how far the role has been assumed, how far it has been a gay persona to conceal a heavier awareness of things, how far the case of Lord George Hell in The Happy Hypocrite could be made applicable to " Max " himself. It would, for instance, be possible to see, behind the wit and humour of Seven Men a moving sensitiveness towards human failure and spiritual incompleteness.
When he was at Oxford in the 'nineties, " Max's " character as a trifler was already perfectly formed. He would sit in his pale blue room among his Pellegrini caricatures and tease Rothenstein about his admiration for the darling of the young conoscenti, Whistler; and if, in conversation with those intimates who penetrated his social detachment, the gloomy head of Russian literature should assert itself, he would admit that he had hardly read anything but The Four Georges and Lear's Book of Nonsense. His indifference to Russian literature, like his later indifference to Proust and the novels of D. H. Lawrence, _was certainly genuine, and thus his satire has never bothered with it, save for that one reference to the works in Gibrisch of the great Luntic Kolnyatsch. No, it has always been to those things with which he has most sympathy that he has turned his satire.
It was a paradox which mystified the Edwardians, and at first they came to think of " Max " as an exquisite misfit in their age" They could not quite understand his odd combina- tion of frivolity, irreverence and what they took to be malice; it was all so different from the amiable likenesses of Spy, and Pellegrini or the jocularity of Punch. The Daily Herald told him that his work was in bad taste, and he was generally accused of a cynical desire to pry out the failings of his subjects. Few noticed the paradox of his work, that when his subject was unsympathetic to him he was at his mildest, that his wickedest and most delighted satire was reserved for those whom, in some secret chamber of his mind, he could reverence.
In spite of all this one cannot think of Sir Max as anything but a perfect and eminent Edwardian. There is a story of him as a typical Edwardian pulling down the blinds in a railway-carriage, explaining to his fellow-travellers that they were just approaching the Crystal Palace. But was this an Edwardian's rejection of Victorianism, or a pure conservative's rejection of a hideous modernism ? It was perhaps not very perfect of him to have seen his monarch in just the way he did, but his attitude to royalty was always ambivalent; he loved it and loved to think of the possibility of its being ridiculous. However equivocally " Max " was an Edwardian, he retired from the London scene as soon as the decade was over. He had mapped it and defined it in his fashion, and could well live on its memories and impressions for the rest of his days. And he was changing. " In my unregenerate days," he wrote in a letter, " I was far too much of an egoist to seek for any pleasure save in the contemplation of myself : taking myself as the standard of perfection, I always found myself quite perfect and was never disappointed. But now I have become a tuist and all is changed." He married a reincarnation of Elizabeth Siddal, the beautiful actress Florence Kahn, and retired soon after to the villino on the hills above Rapallo, where he still lives. And from his little writing-room there would come from time to time an essay of perfect grace and, often, of mellow' tone; the earlier "Max"would not have written: " I pause to bathe in the light that is as_ the span of our human life, granted between one great darkness and another."
When war broke out in 1914, he returned to England to do something useful. "I saw two amiable men who seemed to like me," he wrote; " one of them made notes about me and gave me a card from which I learn that my Enrolment Number is 131,853—so that I gather I am up against a formidable amount of competition. Nevertheless I live in hope that I may save England yet by some kind of clerical work." It was suggested to him that he should become a propaganda cartoonist,but he did not feel his talents lay there. How well ilk might, all the same, have caught that scene imagined by Henry James when he said to Edith Wharton, " It is my day- dream, my dear Edith, to squat down with King George of England, with the President of- the French Republic and the Czar of Russia on the Emperor William's belly, until we squeeze out of it the last irrevocable drops of bitter retribu- tion." " Max," however, retired to the country, wrote Savonarola Brown and drew Rossetti and his Circle. After the war he returned to Italy, and was only interrupted in his restful life there by the last war, when he returned to England some time before Italy joined in the conflict.
Now his still sprightly form greets his frequent visitors from England on the terrace of his villino. Here he will look across the bay to the lights of Portofino, and casually remark that he once visited the village—" it must have beensjust before the 1914 war." Or he will read a poem which he wrote in his copy of a book on the theatre of the future by Harley Granville Barker—a poem which his guest may try to memorise, but succeed only in remembering the refrain of each verse, " Oh, my dear Harley, no ! " He may hint which eminent men fit his category of " Ghosts," a third classification of the world which he once divided between those who are Guests and those who are Hosts. And he will reminisce gently and beauti- fully about the people and things of the past, his voice taking no notice whatever of the present—in the form of a motor-car straining up a gradient of the Via Aurelia. In those moments he seems to hold the bridge between past and present- Pontifex Maximus.
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