Volume 19, Number 11 & 12 · January 25, 1973
The Ancient Child
By V.S. Pritchett
A Catalogue of the Caricatures of Max Beerbohm
by Rupert Hart-Davis
Harvard, 258, 100 illustrations pp., $20.00
A Peep into the Past and Other Prose Pieces
by Max Beerbohm, collected and introduced by Rupert Hart-Davis
Stephen Greene, 125 pp., $8.00
The Lies of Art: Max Beerbohm's Parody and Caricature
by John Felstiner
Knopf, 320 pp., $8.95
Max in Verse: Rhymes and Parodies
by Max Beerbohm, edited by J.G. Riewald
Stephen Greene, 167 pp., $2.95 (paper)
The major pleasure of old age lies in the ruthless one of remembering. It is notorious that Max Beerbohm plumped for this very young, possibly because advertising was coming in and he chose impertinent humility as his line; but for other reasons memory rapidly became a principle. In the 1890s he went firmly back to a sly eulogy of George IV because of that monarch's wardrobe, and also proposed a return to cosmetics. Since the Regency the English had, he noted, exchanged the masks of rouge for the natural lobsterishness of vulgar Nature: the flesh had had its innings. Now was the time for reviving time-defying artifice. The romantics, no doubt because of the exhaustion caused by their reckless psychological insights, the bourgeoisie because of the glow of their moral satisfactions had begun to think of masks. The point was quickly seized by Max at the age of eighteen. So quickly that Wilde, already alarmed by the rise of a modish younger generation, asked a lady whether Max ever took off his face to reveal the mask beneath.
Review, 2841 words
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