I have a weakness for minor artists. But they must be genuinely minor, by which I mean that they mustn’t lapse into minority through overreaching, want of energy, crudity, or any other kind of ineptitude. They must not be failed major artists merely. The true minor artist eschews the noble and the solemn. He fears tedium for his audience, but even more for himself. He sets out to be, and is perfectly content to remain, less than great. The minor artist knows his limits and lives comfortably within them. To delight, to charm, to entertain, such are the goals the minor artist sets himself, and, when brought off with style and verve and elegant lucidity, they are—more than sufficient—wholly admirable.

Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson (1883–1950), the fourteenth Lord Berners, was the very model of the minor artist, a title he would, I think, neither disclaim nor disdain. He painted, he wrote, he composed (for Diaghilev but also for the movies), and he didn’t in the least mind being called an amateur or a dilettante, and on occasion declared himself both. When Max Beerbohm rendered Lord Berners at his piano in a caricature—nicely capturing his bald pate, his monocle, the careful mustache beneath his beaky nose—the caption read: “Lord Berners making more sweetness than violence.” This was Berners’s aim, sweetness and light, though in the correct mixture, which meant, of course, not too much of either.

Gerald Berners is a man who tends to show up in other people’s memoirs, letters,