Max Beerbohm was an entertainer. If a reader needed truths to be stared down or lessons to be imparted, an essay by Beerbohm was the last if not altogether worst place to look. Occasionally an insight could be spotted, but it could just as quickly dart back behind more abundant passages of satirical wit, much like a fox to wilderness. But it would require some effort to find any insight at all, and to read Max Beerbohm with effort might risk insulting the effort the man put into being so flagrantly unserious. In Beerbohm the stakes were never lower, yet the payoff was always plentiful and quickly returned. He was “the prince of his profession,” Virginia Woolf wrote. “He was affected by private joys and sorrows, and he had no gospel to preach and no learning to impart. He was himself simply and directly, and himself he has remained.”
It is from Woolf that the editor Phillip Lopate took the title The Prince of Minor Writers, for his selection of essays by Max Beerbohm, published this year by NYRB Classics. By Lopate’s admission it is the first standalone collection of his essays since those Beerbohm had published in his lifetime (1872-1956), which is strange given how prolific he was in that genre and how highly he held himself as a practitioner. Yet as Lopate himself writes in his sprawling introduction to this collection, Beerbohm was “a minority interest.” Living in London, he was highly sought after socially and professionally as a wit and critic. After a move to Rapallo, Italy at age thirty-seven, however, his prominence waned and he wrote less frequently. To read Max Beerbohm today one might first have turned to his comic novels and short stories, which have remained in print and have their merits, to be sure. Or one must have heard about him repeatedly through a coterie of “familiar” essayists of a certain age, for whom Beerbohm seems less like a writer and more like an inside joke gone wildly, but no less amusingly, out of control; a kind of belles letters Kilgore Trout. Lopate’s project might seem tardy to some, but the good fortune of having these works collected into one source is hardly diminished for readers new and old.
The Prince of Minor Writers culls fifty essays from the eight collections Beerbohm published from 1896 to 1946, on a vast range of subjects under the banner of “arts and culture.” He wrote about royalty, theater, letter writing (personal as well as editorial), laughter, and a surprising number of pieces on daily manners. That Beerbohm preferred the essay form does not diminish his entertainment value. Indeed, it intensifies it. “I claim an essayist’s privilege,” he wrote, “of not groping through the library of the British Museum on the chance of mastering all the details.” Beerbohm was an observer rather than a thinker, a reactor rather than a reporter. His knowledge was entirely secondary to his instincts for irony and contrarian theatrics. “I have the satiric temperament,” he wrote, “when I’m laughing at any one I am generally rather amusing, but when I am praising anyone, I am always deadly dull.”
That satiric temperament unites his essays better than any overriding theme. Yes, he was a dilettante on par with Hazlitt and revered the past with the same fondness as Charles Lamb. In subject and interest he did not deviate too radically from any other English essayist; his charm was what carried his works. But it was a very peculiar charm, a balance of a good nature and an indifference to taking anything seriously. “It is quite possible that, in the next century, forms of application for knighthood will be sent out annually to every householder and be thrown with other circulars into the waste paper basket,” he wrote on English knighthood. (Mildly hypocritical: Beerbohm accepted a knighthood in 1939.) “[A] man whose career was glorious without intermission, decade after decade,” he wrote of Goethe, “does sorely try our patience.”
But Beerbohm wasn’t always so restrained, and when lashing out took his art into unexpected new directions. Dark Beerbohm could very easily be a divisive Beerbohm, but admirers will not find him hard to defend. His short, cutting essays on electoral politics, rude letter writing, and “accidently” burning a book are the least indulgent and most refined of his craft. “When a man in the street sees two other men in the street fight,” he wrote in “General Elections,” “he doesn’t care to know the cause of the combat: he simply wants the smaller man to punish the bigger, and to punish him with all possible severity.” Yet it is “An Infamous Brigade,” Beerbohm’s ode to burning buildings, that is the model of this branch of his writing. “Nothing is easier than to be incendiary. All one needs is a box of matches and a sense of beauty.” He goes on to conclude:
I am forming an Artists’ Corps whose aim will be to harass the members of the fire-brigade on all occasions. I am maturing an elaborate system of false alarms, and I shall train my recruits to waylay the enemy in their onrush, seize the bridles of their horses, cut their reins. . . . We shall go about our work in a quiet, gentlemanly manner: servants, not tyrants, of the public. . . . Each one of us will trail a sinuous hose. It will not be filled with water. It will be filled with oil.
Beerbohm’s pinnacle Edwardian style—sensually repressed, unwieldy in structure, and Latinate in tone—will test the patience of modern readers, even older ones. The idea of a paragraph extending longer than half of a page, let alone an entire page, is alien to most of us. Many of his longer works have a monologue quality to them—that his last book, Mainly on the Air, was made up of radio addresses should not surprise. Yet these tighter pieces have both a fine crafting and an impishness that matches the stories of H. H. “Saki” Munro, born two years before Beerbohm.
Perhaps the biggest drawback of the collection is its mammoth size. Whether the irony of making a book entitled The Prince of Minor Writers nearly 400 pages long was intentional or not, it is still a great deal for any reader to acquaint himself with. On the other hand, a lean, practical book may not be the point. Taken too quickly, the quirks of his style could have adverse effects. Works like Beerbohm’s are better stumbled upon than pored over, to be picked up and set aside at the reader’s leisure. Like any good entertainment, one gets what one expects and is rewarded all the same. That the entertainment is smart, well-crafted, and abundant seems an incidental bonus.