Lord David's Watering-Can
By PATRICK
ANDERSON
IN 1905 the dramatic critic of the Saturday Review wrote an appreciation of Sir Henry Irving who died in that year. It was an extra- ordinary piece of work; in its verbal dexterity, its mocking playfulness, its sudden divagations towards the wildest fantasy, it seemed a tour de force of qualification and detraction. The critic was a bland and glossy cat at play with an interesting but melodramatic, self-important and even slightly raffish mouse.
Sir Henry had done nothing to encourage the modern theatre—but then the Lyceum was so dreadfully big, and the public wanted hack plays and star parts, and at least he had sometimes given it spectacular Shakespeare . . . such an appeal to the eye (Irving may sometimes have overdone it, but he always overdid it beauti- fully') . . . and understandable in view of his inability to declaim the verse or to, well, im- personate a character ('All the parts that Irving played were exacting parts, but he had his revenge sometimes, exacting even more from them') . . . although his Hamlet must have been splendid (what a pity 1 never saw it) . . . and no one actually tittered, at least not in the theatre, despite the fact that he 'appeared always in a rather ridiculous light' . . . which was counter- acted, of course, by his magnetism (possibly due to rays) and the benevolence (tempered by pomposity) of his private life . . . but then, as a comedian, he enjoyed his 'sardonic reserve' . . . and, really, despite his name of Broadribb, he must have had foreign blood, he reminded one of Disraeli . . . in fact he would have shone just as brightly as Prime Minister!
The critic, of course, was Max Beerbohm, then thirty-three and only five years removed from his Italian retirement; the urbane and feline perform- ance in fact expressed affectionate respect. Max was too much of the detached ironist to commit himself to most of the big orthodoxies and abstractions, democracy, progress and the like, let alone the theatre either of Shakespeare or of the New Drama, but he accepted Irving as an
exotic personality who had been capable of giving him oesthetic pleasure. He mocked him as he mocked himself.
All his life Max was a fun-loving child with an exceedingly hard core of independence and idiosyncrasy. A photograph from Charterhouse reveals him as small, elegant, self-possessed, the parting of his sleek hair ineffably, preternaturally straight—it was said he pinned his cap to the back of his head to avoid any touslement. From his Yellow Book period with its elderly air and mannered prose, through the years as successful caricaturist, essayist and diner-out, when he scourged Edwardian vulgarity, to the long, increasingly mellow, increasingly conservative aftermath, with its patriotism and nervousness about hurting the Royal Family, Max really changed very little. He was always a dandy who strove to make his life a work of art: not con- ventionally vain, we are told, but certainly narcis- sistic, as his self-portraits show. He believed in old-fashioned things like honour and good man- ners and carefully chosen words precisely articulated. He approached life with a mixture of witty common sense and wstheticism : the com- mon sense had rendered his first view of Pater at Oxford ludicrous, had kept him clear-eyed about his friend Wilde, an orchidaceous giant who greW arrogant and gross, and had led him to prefer Henry James, whom he parodied so beautifully in 'The Mote in the Middle Distance.' (It also led him to regard most geniuses, and especially Yeats, as 'asses.') He had a nostalgia for the past because it was tidier and there were fewer people in it and less noise and machinery, but it was the nearer past that fascinated him : he knew nothing of history.
Re-reading him after many years I find the charm and wit undimmed and the persona, inevitably pervasive where so much is reminis- cence and reflection, usually sensible and even kindly. In youth he could be merciless, as he was with the seaside poet, Clement Scott; later his most cutting sayings were confined to his letters, although all his life he loathed Kipling, Hall Caine and Jerome K. Jerome, disliked Wells and had his doubts about Shaw with his 'temperance beverage face.' In Seven Men I personally prefer 'James Pethel,' the quiet study of a man who lived for kicks, to tall stories such as 'Enoch Soames, just as I like that book more than the balletic Zuleika Dobson (odd that one should think of both Saki and Firbank). I suppose one wants to find Max extending his range, as he does also in the simple and poignant 'William and Mary.' He was splendidly generous to Aubrey BeardsleY and delightfully appreciative of deaf old Swinburne. Nevertheless, the cruvre is small in matter, depth and size. One does a bit wonder what all the fuss was about. Reading the Chopin passage from Zuleika, reflecting on all those sudden deaths in the stories, examining Max's claim to be considered a moralist, one finds one' self thinking of E. M. Forster with his Beethoven passage and his murdering of his characters and his playful-melodramatic humanism. At once Max pales. Mr. Forster has Greece behind hirn, and the Renaissance; one is less aware of style and, of course, quite unanxious to prove the existence of his heart.
To the two major oddnesses of Max's career- the splendidly quick, cool success; the forty-two years of near-retirement in that poky villino at Rapallo—there is now added a third. Lord David Cecil has written a life of 500 pages. about a man who told a would-be biographer, 'My gifts are small . . . I've made a charming • MAX. A Biography by David Cecil. (Constable, 50s.) little reputation . . . Don't over-attend to it . . . The contents of a quite small watering-can will be quite enough.' One can imagine Max, whom a photographer described in his last years as `a very old, but beautifully exquisite, quite big fairy,' tiptoeing with alarm about the enormous edifice his scholarly and aristocratic admirer has built for him, so nobly planned, so obviously and echoingly definitive, and withal so cosily, so almost monotonously dotted with the silver- framed photographs and the tables of bric-h-brac.
Admittedly the central saloon (or should it be the great library?) is closed; Lord David has for tir most part eschewed literary criticism for the sake of `narrative flow'; we are allowed no more than a peep through the windows. And the Private apartments have a sterile air and yield few secrets, although Lord David does his best With the various flirtations: Cissie Loftus, the girl-mimic; the rather common Kilseen; the luscious Constance Collier; and then that intense Ibsenite, Florence Kahn, whom Max married at last. Max, Lord David reminds us, was of low vitality' and of `cool sexual temperament'; all the more to his credit, then, that 'Young Women were surprised to find how soon after a first meeting Max offered to kiss them.'
At times the biographer's voice utters a sigh: Max is such an enigma and for years at a time there is scarcely an event to report. There is much inconclusive reference to masks, such as the innocent one Lord George Hell wore and into Which he grew so happily. A jolly governessy tone occasionally intrudes : `Shaw, too, often failed to make the wsthetic grade' or 'After 1904 Max's love-life had for some years marked time.' People 'opine,' people `sally forth.' One can itnagine Max wincing at such expressions and searching the endless corridors of Lord David's prose for a rescuing figure; Lady Desborough, perhaps, or Ada Leverson, or dear, queer Reggie Turner.
But if the book is too long for a work of art it is interesting and entertaining to a degree. Max is liberally represented by quotations, including the staccato impressionism of the notebooks, and by his drawings. For those who want the verse— much inferior to the prose, in my opinion, even in the case of `Savonarola Brown'—Dr. J. G. Riewald has made a collectiont which includes a good deal of unpublished work.
Complementary to all this, Mr. Hart-Davis now supplies 200 of the 235 gossipy letters Max wrote to Turner : t a formidable footnoted col- lection in which even the Manchester terrier is documented. Nervously affectionate, for Turner was a touchy friend, these letters are particularly valuable for the light they throw on Max's feel- ings towards Cissie of the Tivoli--surprisingly warm and romantic--and on his association with the• Wilde circle (If Oscar could re-write all the Bible, there would be no scepticism'). It is sad, though, to find this comment about Mussolini's activities in 1935: `I am sorry . . . for the Abyssinians, but, after all, they are black and barbarous.' And I must regret an inadequacy amounting to heartlessness in Mr. Hart-Davis's introduction. This tells us little of the , recipient of the letters, whether as man, novelist or traveller, and in particular pays no recognition to the fact faced squarely by Lord David, and of some importance for the backgronnd of the correspondence, namely that `his love-life . . . was of a kind more easily lived out of England.'
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