Upon ceding his post as drama critic of the Saturday Review to Max Beerbohm in 1898, George Bernard Shaw wrote, "The younger generation is knocking at the door; and as I open it there steps spritely in the incomparable Max" (Behrman 21). The description stuck. To his admirers, Max Beerbohm (1872-1956) was always "the incomparable Max."
Over the course of a career that spanned more than sixty years, Beerbohm established himself as Britain's foremost caricaturist and as one of its most beloved writers. Beerbohm's writing owed much of its charm to his distinct literary persona. As Virginia Woolf wrote, "He has brought personality into literature, not unconsciously and impurely, but so consciously and purely that we do not know whether there is any relation between Max the essayist and Mr. Beerbohm the man" (Danson 25). Beerbohm's persona was discernible in his writing even when he imitated another writer's style. As Filson Young, an early reviewer of Beerbohm's parodies, remarked, "...behind these solemn parodies...lurks the shadow of Max himself, making it quite plain to you in what estimation each [parodied writer] is held and mocking with a merciful humour the mannerisms of them all" (Beerbohm, A Christmas Garland xii). The first writer Beerbohm mocked with a merciful (and sometimes not so merciful) humour was his mentor, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900).
According to John Felstiner, Wilde was Beerbohm's "presiding spirit" during the early 1890s ("Max Beerbohm" 195). When they became personally acquainted in 1893, Beerbohm was an undergraduate and a fledgling writer, whereas Wilde was already an established (and rather notorious) figure in the London literary scene. Beerbohm had been under the influence of Wilde's writings for some time. Wilde's controversial novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Intentions, his collection of essays, were published in book form in 1891, when Beerbohm was a freshman at Oxford (Wilde 1209; Danson 63). In fact, Intentions was one of the only books that Beerbohm admitted to reading while he was at college (Felstiner, Lies of Art 7).
Wildean style was fashionable among Beerbohm's circle of friends, and "he cultivated...their flippancy, their taste for the precious and artificial and nonsensical, their pose of amused self-admiration, [and] their impish pleasure in shocking" (Cecil 58). During the early 1890s, Beerbohm's letters resonated with Wilde-inspired posing and mock vanity. "My affectations are dying for want of an audience," he declared in a letter to his friend, Reggie Turner, in October 1892 (Letters to Reggie Turner 27). A similar Wildeism followed in a July 1893 letter: "I am suffering, my dear Reg, from a plethora of brilliancy" (Letters to Reggie Turner 42).
Beerbohm also shared Wilde's taste for aestheticism. The principles of aesthetic criticism maintained that art should be judged on the basis of beauty alone and excluded arguments founded on external criteria, such as art's moral influence or historical context. Like his mentor, Beerbohm's aestheticism was of a comic variety. As David Cecil notes: "Max was always a comedian. But his aestheticism began to colour and modify his comic sense. He aspired to blend the comic with the pretty....This is where the influence of Oscar Wilde especially shows itself" (60). An example of the aestheticism Beerbohm was learning from Wilde appeared in a letter Beerbohm wrote in April 1893:
After supper I walked as far as Hyde Park Corner when I saw a glare in the sky like some false dawn. A cabman told me it was a fire and drove me to it-right away past Westminster. It was quite lovely, though there was no life lost I am afraid. Still, the timber yard was quite burnt and as I walked away the dawn was making the helmets of the firemen ghastly. (Letters to Reggie Turner 37)
Beerbohm's admiration was not blind, however. "I am sorry to say that Oscar drinks far more that he ought," Beerbohm wrote to Turner in April 1893, "indeed the first time I saw him, after all that long period of distant adoration and reverence, he was in a hopeless state of intoxication. He has deteriorated very much in appearance: his cheeks being quite a dark purple and fat to a fault" (Letters to Reggie Turner 35). Throughout their acquaintance, Beerbohm's feelings about Wilde wavered between admiration and contempt, and this ambivalence found expression in Beerbohm's letters.
Lawrence Danson sees Beerbohm's references to Wilde in his letters from 1892 to 1895 as conscious attempts to integrate admiration and criticism into verbal caricature (66). In these letters, Beerbohm 's response to Wilde's influence displays itself in three basic ways: as imitation, as criticism, and as satire. The letters reveal a rough progression from imitation, to criticism, to satire over the course of the three-year period, although Beerbohm combined these modes of expression more often than he used them separately. Taken as a whole, Beerbohm's letters from 1892 to 1895 demonstrate that Wilde served not only as a model for Beerbohm but also as an object of criticism and satire.
The earliest references to Wilde in Beerbohm's published letters date from the summer of 1892. In June of that year, the Lord Chamberlain, who was responsible for licensing all plays for public performance, refused to grant a license for a production of Salomé (Beerbohm, Letters to Reggie Turner 22). Salomé was Wilde's dramatic interpretation of the biblical story of John the Baptist's martyrdom, in which John (Jokanaan) is beheaded at the request of King Herod's stepdaughter, Salomé. Beerbohm's indignation at the Lord Chamberlain's decision was expressed in a letter to Turner. In the letter he described a satirical drawing he intended to execute, in which the licensing fiasco would take on the form of Wilde's play.
...King [John] Bull makes a great feast and when they have feasted the daughter of Mrs. Grundy dances before the King--insomuch that he promises her whatever she shall desire. After consultation with her mother she demands that "they bring unto her by and by the head of Oscar the Poëtast on a charger." The picture--which will be called The Modern Salome represents Lord Lathom [the Lord Chamberlain] holding the charger.... (Letters to Reggie Turner 22)
Beerbohm's verbal illustration left no doubt about where his sympathies lay. John Bull and Mrs. Grundy, personifications of Englishness and Victorian respectability, took the places of Herod and his wife. Wilde became Jokanaan, the saint and martyr sacrificed to their whim. England, not Wilde, was the butt of this satire; Beerbohm's imitation expressed an implicit admiration for his mentor.
Wilde responded to the Lord Chamberlain's ban by threatening to quit England and become a French citizen. Beerbohm reacted in a tone that echoed Wilde's own urbane, amused style, remarking that "inasmuch as French naturalisation entails a period of service in the French army, I fancy that his [Wilde's] house in Tite Street will not be in the hands of an agent" (Letters to Reggie Turner 23). Beerbohm recognized the absurdity of Wilde's melodramatic threat, and undermined it with the same witty dismissiveness that was Wilde's hallmark.
Salomé was published in February 1893, and Beerbohm received a copy of the purple-bound volume from Turner as a gift (Beerbohm, Letters to Reggie Turner 32). Beerbohm's thank-you note contained what Danson calls Beerbohm's "first tentative parody" (64). Beerbohm praised the book in a style obviously modelled on Wilde's:
The book that they have bound in Parma violets and across whose page is the silver voice of the master made visible--how could it not be lovely? I an enamoured of it. It has charmed my eyes from their sockets and through the voids has sent incense to my brain: my tongue is loosed in its praise....In construction it is very like a Greek play, I think: yet in conception so modern that its publication in any century would seem premature....If Oscar would re-write all the Bible, there would be no sceptics. (Letters to Reggie Turner 32)
Beerbohm's passage purposely mimicked the floridly descriptive language of Wilde's play, in which Salomé compared Jokanaan's eyes to "black holes burned by torches in a Tyrian tapestry" (Wilde 558). The contradiction in Beerbohm's description of the play as "very like a Greek play" and yet "premature" in any age parodied Wilde's signature paradoxes. Beerbohm's final sentence, "If Oscar would re-write all the Bible, there would be no sceptics," was a typically Wildean pronouncement, structurally akin to "If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture" (Wilde 970).
In adherence to Wilde's doctrine that "Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art" (970), Beerbohm made Wilde the focus of occasional fabrications. "It seems that he speaks French with a shocking accent, which is rather a disillusionment," he wrote to Turner, "and that when he visits the Décadents he has to repeat once or twice everything he says to them, and sometimes even to write it down for them" (Letters to Reggie Turner 36). That this scenario was most likely Beerbohm's own invention is suggested by André Gide's assertion that Wilde "had almost no accent, or at least only such as it pleased him to retain and which might give the words a sometimes new and strange aspect" (Gide 2).
Beerbohm reported Wilde's mots with admiration, and used them as models for his own witticisms. In April 1893, Beerbohm commented appreciatively on Wilde's response to criticism of the actor, Henry Irving: "Oscar...was furious that all the 'wretched little donkeys of critics' had dared to attack him [Irving]. 'Surely,' he said, 'a gentleman has a right to fail if he chooses'" (Letters to Reggie Turner 35). Beerbohm used a similar tone about critics a few days later in an appropriately paradoxical comment about the premiere of Wilde's play, A Woman of No Importance: "The notices are better than I expected: the piece is sure of a long, of a very long run, despite all that the critics may say in its favour" (Letters to Reggie Turner 37). As Danson notes, the remark combined "satiric observance with imitation of the Wildean manner" (66).
An even more obvious case of Beerbohm imitating Wilde occurred in a letter from May 1893. "You need not, by the way, be jealous of Alfred Douglas as he does not peculiarly fascinate me," he wrote to Turner, "he is for one thing obviously mad (like all his family I believe) and though he is pretty and clever and nice I never judge my friends from an Aesthetic, an Intellectual or an Ethical standpoint; I simply like them or dislike: that is all." The tone and even the phrasing consciously reproduced Wilde's famous pronouncement in the preface to Dorian Gray: "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all" (17).
Richard Ellman cites the fact that Beerbohm called Wilde "the Divinity" as evidence of Beerbohm's discipleship (309), but in doing so he disregards the satiric overtones of Beerbohm's mock reverence. That the title was meant at least partially in jest is clear from the May 1893 letter in which it appeared. Having dubbed Wilde "the Divinity Oscar," Beerbohm put himself on the same level by describing the "aristocracy of intellect as represented by me and the Divinity." He then raised himself one step further by taking a condescending tone about Wilde: "He was in a very nice mood-young and schweet [sic] and most amusing" (Letters to Reggie Turner 41). It was not the letter of a disciple, at least in the usual meaning of the word.
In July 1893, fifteen-year-old Cissy Loftus made her debut at the Oxford Music Hall (Beerbohm, Letters to Reggie Turner 42). Beerbohm was one of Cissy's most ardent admirers, and for the next few months his letters were full of his infatuation with her. Beerbohm insisted that his love for the young star had purified him. "I have become good and am really happy at last," he wrote to his friend, Will Rothenstein (Beerbohm and Rothenstein 18). Under this romantic influence, the references to Wilde in Beerbohm's letters became more critical.
That Beerbohm was distancing himself from his mentor was evidenced by his 19 August 1893 letter to Turner, in which he wrote, "Apropos of my former self, Oscar was at the last night of the Haymarket [Theatre]....Nor have I ever seen Oscar so fatuous....Of course I would rather see Oscar free than sober, but still, suddenly meeting him after my simple and lovely little ways of life since the Lady Cecilia [Cissy] first looked out from her convent-window, I felt quite repelled" (Letters to Reggie Turner 53). Repellent or not, Beerbohm still admired Wilde's writing, as another passage from the same letter demonstrated. "I have just been reading Salome again," he wrote, "terribly corrupt but there is much that is beautiful in it, much lovely writing: I almost wonder Oscar doesn't dramatise it" (Letters to Reggie Turner 53). In this uneasy alliance between homage and parody, Beerbohm undermined his professed admiration with a flippant closing paradox.
Beerbohm echoed Wilde's style more successfully (almost prophetically, in fact) in a letter to Rothenstein written in September 1893. Describing Wilde's brother, William Wilde, Beerbohm wrote, "Quel monstre! Dark, oily, suspecte yet awfully like Oscar: he has Oscar's coy carnal smile & fatuous giggle & not a little of Oscar's esprit. But he is awful-a veritable tragedy of family likeness" (Beerbohm and Rothenstein 21). The Wildean note in Beerbohm's closing sentence was unmistakable. As a member of Wilde's circle, Beerbohm might even have already heard Wilde's famous line about the tragedies of family likeness, a line that would be heard on stage in The Importance of Being Earnest almost a year and a half later: "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his" (Wilde 335).
Beerbohm's harshest words about Wilde appeared in a letter he wrote to Turner in October 1893. Having heard that Wilde was complaining about Beerbohm's caricatures of him, Beerbohm lashed out with a severity that would have been unthinkable only a few months earlier. "How I wish he had written to me on the subject and how I could have crushed him....So long as the man's head interests me, I shall continue to draw it. He is simply an unpaid model of mine and as such he should behave" (Letters to Reggie Turner 73). In demoting "the Divinity Oscar" to the rank of unpaid model, Beerbohm proclaimed his independence from the influence of Wilde. The proclamation was premature, but its savagery suggested that Beerbohm was anxious to establish a separate reputation for himself.
In October 1893, having congratulated Turner on a letter of his that had appeared in the Daily Chronicle, Beerbohm wrote, "You have woken up and found yourself famous! How happy you should be. Poor Oscar went to bed and found himself infamous" (Letters to Reggie Turner 79). Beerbohm obviously was pleased with the remark, because he used it again in a letter to Robert Ross: "Poor Oscar! I saw him the other day, from a cab walking with Bosie [Alfred Douglas] and some other members of the Extreme Left. He looked like one whose soul has swooned in sin and revived vulgar. How fearful it is for a poet to go to bed and find himself infamous" (Ellman 394). Vulgarity was one of Wilde's favourite words. "With our James [Whistler]," Wilde had written in a letter to The World in 1886, "vulgarity begins at home, and should be allowed to stay there" (Danson 70). Beerbohm appropriated Wilde's accusation of vulgarity and levelled it at Wilde himself. He also connected it with the infamy that Wilde, in his provocative writings and indiscreet lifestyle, seemed coyly to be courting.
In spite of Beerbohm's increasingly critical opinion of Wilde, Wilde's stylistic influence continued to be obviously discernible in Beerbohm's writing even when he wasn't explicitly parodying Wilde. In a letter from August 1893, Beerbohm expressed a paradoxical wish fully worthy of his mentor: "Oh God-how I wish myself wholly free and able to lay vast riches at her [Cissy's] feet and marry and live with her unhappily ever after" (Letters to Reggie Turner 45). A new voice began to be heard, however, in a letter written while Beerbohm was on holiday in the country in early September. In a passage probably inspired by Wilde's insistence on the superiority of art over nature, Beerbohm wrote:
...I enjoyed having fresh flowers in the garden every morning-though when one thinks of what they must have cost, apart from the expense of their carriage from the London dealers, one cannot but wish the money were spent on some more lasting object: people talk of agricultural depression and so forth, but it is a fact that every tiny humble cottage has an enclosed space around it which is filled every morning with fresh flowers. The expenditure is simply profligate... (Letters to Reggie Turner 61)
This short passage on flowers was less affected than Beerbohm's earlier attempts at Wildean satire. Worldliness was one of the characteristics of Wildean style, but the tone of Beerbohm's passage was almost naïve. The voice of Beerbohm's literary persona was beginning to emerge
Beerbohm's infatuation with Cissy faded unobtrusively out of Beerbohm's letters after October 1893, making way for the re-entrance of Wilde and his circle. Far from being a soul "swooned in sin and revived vulgar," Wilde was once more described as "sweet," and Beerbohm again related anecdotes about Wilde with pleasure. In January 1894, he wrote to Turner, "I must tell you a sweet tale of Oscar....[Robert] Sherard, as is his wont, got drunk and frightful and rising from his chair assumed an attitude of defence, saying in a loud voice that anyone who attacked Mr. Oscar Wilde would have to reckon with him first. 'Hush, Robert, hush!' said Oscar, laying a white hand of plump restraint upon Sherard's shoulder, 'hush, you are defending me at the risk of my life!' Isn't it lovely?" (Letters to Reggie Turner 87). As the reference to Wilde's "white hand of plump restraint" suggested, however, Beerbohm's later responses to Wilde generally were tinged with satiric overtones.
In April 1894, Beerbohm's essay, "A Defence of Cosmetics" appeared in the first volume of the Yellow Book, a periodical created as an alternative to the commercial press and regarded by many as "an emblem of decadence" (Beckson 247). In both its style and its subject matter, "A Defence of Cosmetics" was a parody of Wildean aestheticism.
Too long has the face been degraded from its rank as a thing of beauty to a mere vulgar index of character or emotion....And the use of cosmetics, the masking of the face, will change this. We shall gaze at a woman merely because she is beautiful, not stare into her face anxiously, as into the face of a barometer. ("Defence" 143)
The reviewers did not get the joke, and were outraged by Beerbohm's essay. In a letter to the editor of the Yellow Book, which appeared in the second volume in July 1894, Beerbohm defended himself:
May I, Sir, in justice to myself and to you, who were gravely censured for harbouring me, step forward, and assure the affrighted mob that it is the victim of a hoax? May I also assure it that I had no notion that it would be taken in? Indeed, it seems incredible to me that any one on the face of the earth could fail to see that my essay, so grotesque in subject, in opinion so flippant, in style so wildly affected, was meant for a burlesque upon the "precious" school of writers. If I had only signed myself D. Cadent or Parrar Docks, or appended a note to say that the manuscript had been picked up not a hundred miles from Tite Street, all the pressmen would have said that I had given them a very delicate bit of satire. (Letters of Max Beerbohm 2)
A "hoax" of a different kind appeared in a letter to Turner on 12 August 1894. In what was probably an allusion to a raid on a homosexual club that took place on that date, Beerbohm wrote, "Oscar has at length been arrested for certain kinds of crime. He was taken in the Café Royal (lower room). Bosie escaped, being an excellent runner, but Oscar was less nimble" (Letters to Reggie Turner 97). Less than a year later, Beerbohm's fanciful fabrication would prove itself uncannily prophetic.
Beerbohm was in America when the Wilde scandal broke. In February 1895, the Marquess of Queensberry (whose son, Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas, was Wilde's ex-lover and constant companion) left a card for Wilde at his club accusing him of being a "posing Somdomite [sic]" (Ellman 438). In March, Wilde brought a libel suit against Queensberry. As a result of evidence given at the libel trial, Queensberry was acquitted, and Wilde himself was arrested for committing indecent acts. Beerbohm's sympathy for Wilde did not prevent him from seeing the affair's amusing side. "Though loyalty made him ready to support Oscar when in trouble," writes Cecil, "and though he admired his courage, he had during the last years grown steadily more conscious of his faults. His flashier side had come to jar on Max increasingly" (122). Beerbohm's detachment allowed him to see both the hypocrisy of Wilde's accusers and the melodramatic quality of Wilde's predicament (Cecil 120). "What a lurid life Oscar does lead-so full of extraordinary incidents," he wrote to Ada Leverson in March 1895. "What a chance for the memoir writers of the next century-the Thackerays and the Max Beerbohm's of the future" (Danson 79).
In the wake of Wilde's arrest in April 1895, Beerbohm wrote, "I look forward eagerly to the first act of Oscar's new Tragedy. But surely the title Douglas must have been used before" (Ellman 424). Again, Beerbohm utilised elements of the style he had learned by imitating Wilde. The Wildean paradox was in evidence in "Oscar's new Tragedy," since Wilde's success as a dramatist was based on his string of popular comedies. The mock-ingenuous tone, however, was distinctly Beerbohmian.
Beerbohm was not so flippant when he returned to England and saw the very real danger Wilde was in. He was present at Wilde's first criminal trial, and reported on it to Turner, who had been with Wilde when he was arrested and had left England for fear of being arrested himself. "Oscar has been superb," Beerbohm wrote. "....Here was this man, who had been for a month in prison and loaded with insults and crushed and buffeted, perfectly self-possessed, dominating the Old Bailey with his fine presence and musical voice" (Letters to Reggie Turner 102). Nor was the hypocrisy of the proceedings lost on Beerbohm. "It was horrible leaving the court day after day and having to pass through a knot of renters [male prostitutes]...who were allowed to hang around after giving their evidence and to wink at likely persons" (Letters to Reggie Turner 103).
Beerbohm went on to describe, with what Felstiner calls "involuntary cruelty"(Lies of Art 50), a scene that took place at the home of Ernest and Ada Leverson on the eve of the trial. "Mrs. Leverson making flippant remarks about messenger-boys in a faint undertone to Bosie, who was ashen-pale....Mr. Leverson explaining to me that he allowed his house to be used for these purposes not because he approved of 'anything unnatural' but by reason of his admiration for Oscar's plays and personality. I myself exquisitely dressed and sympathising with no one" (Letters to Reggie Turner 104).
And there, for all intents and purposes, Wilde's influence on Beerbohm came to an end: with Beerbohm (in good Wildean form) "exquisitely dressed and sympathising with no one" on the eve of Wilde's downfall. On 25 May 1895, Wilde was found guilty and sentenced to two years' imprisonment with hard labour (Ellman 474). He was never again to be such a presence in Beerbohm's life, or to wield such an influence over his work.
Felstiner writes that Wilde elicited "a revealing mixture of skepticism and allegiance" from Beerbohm (Lies of Art 42). What the mixture revealed was that Beerbohm learned as much from criticising and satirising Wilde as he did from imitating Wilde. In the early letters, as Danson points out, "hero worship alternates with a more objective criticism: the parodic focus is not yet clear" (65). Over the years from 1892 to 1895, however, Beerbohm became an increasingly deft satirist. Having mastered Wilde's style through imitation, Beerbohm parodied it. Having enumerated Wilde's faults with a critical eye, Beerbohm satirised them.
Wilde never fully recovered from his prison ordeal, and died three years after his release (Ellman 585). Upon hearing of Wilde's death, Beerbohm wrote to Turner: "I am, as you may imagine, very sorry indeed; and am thinking very much about Oscar, who was such an influence and an interest in my life....I suppose really it was better that Oscar should die. If he had lived to be an old man he would have become unhappy. Those whom the gods, etc. And the gods did love Oscar, with all his faults" (Letters to Reggie Turner 138).
So, too, did Beerbohm "love Oscar, with all his faults." This was a rather typical response from someone who was, in a sense, a rather typical ex-disciple. Like many young writers in mentor relationships, Beerbohm began by worshipping and imitating Wilde. When disillusionment set in, Beerbohm became critical and even cruel. Out of all his very typical reactions, however, Beerbohm made something unusual. By experimenting with the component parts of his responses to Wilde-the imitation, the criticism, and the satire--Beerbohm was teaching himself how to make his own voice heard even when he was imitating another's. He would get better at it with practice. In 1912, Young would write, "It is as though, instead of elaborately describing the clothes worn by his subjects, Max had himself put on each suit in turn, strutted or lounged awhile in the manner of each, and spoken thoughts like theirs in a telling imitation of their tones" (Beerbohm, A Christmas Garland xii). The Wildean suit may not have been the best fit, but it was the first Beerbohm wore.
In 1921, Beerbohm wrote a letter of advice to a prospective biographer, Bohun Lynch. "Years ago, G. B. S., in a light-hearted moment, called me 'the incomparable,'" he wrote. "Note that I am not incomparable. Compare me" (Letters of Max Beerbohm 128). Comparing Beerbohm with Wilde reveals, on the one hand, a typical young writer in a typical mentor relationship. On the other hand, it also reveals the origins of the writer who would develop into "the incomparable Max."
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Last modified 28 November 2004