“My gifts are small,” Max Beerbohm wrote a prospective biographer in 1921 from his home at Villino Chiaro in Rapallo. “I’ve used them very well and discreetly, never straining them; and the result is that I’ve made a charming little reputation. But that reputation is a frail plant.” Beerbohm is cherished by his admirers for his wit, common sense, the elegance of his prose, and the way he shunned high ambition in favor of more modest goals. As one generation succeeds another in the pursuit of folly, Max’s observations on the times he lived through are both cheering and heartening. They may even give us some perspective on the follies of our own age.
Readers of The New Criterion will want to look at both John Gross’s 1994 piece, “A prodigy of parody,” which focuses on A Christmas Garland, Max’s parodies of several notable authors of his day, and Joseph Epstein’s comprehensive overview, “Max Beerbohm and the law of levity,” from 1985.
Max Beerbohm was a devastating caricaturist, and we owe something of our acquaintance with late Victorian and Edwardian England to his drawings and the witty commentaries that accompany them. “So many dead people,” his friend and biographer S. N. Behrman wrote, “depend for their lives on Max.” My favorite, I suppose, is “Mr. W. B. Yeats presenting Mr. George Moore to the Queen of the Fairies.” The willowy, effeminate young Yeats, with his lank hair, pince-nez, and flowing bow tie,
