A selection from Max Beerbohm

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32494, 2 January 1971, Page 10

A selection from Max Beerbohm

The Bodly Head Max Beerbohm. Edited by David Cecil. Bodley Head. 390 pp. Few people would envy the position of the young Beerbohm when, in 1898, he was asked to succeed G.B.S. as drama critic for the “Saturday Review.” Fewer still, having accepted the position, would proceed to inform dedicated readers of the column that Shaw was incapable of writing plays, and that what he offered as plays were essentially no more than Platonic dialogues. Of Shaw’s “Man and Superman” Beerbohm wrote:

“His characters come from out his own yearning heart. Only, we can find no corner for them in ours. We can no more be charmed by them than we can believe in them. Ann Whitefield is a minx. John Tanner is a prig. Prig verses Minx, with gloves off, and Prig floored in every round —there you have Mr Shaw’s customary formula for drama . . . The main difference between this play and the others is that the minx and the prig are conscious not merely of their intellects, but of “the Life Force.” Of tills they regard themselves, with comparative modesty, as the automatic instruments. They are wrong. The Life Force could find no use for them. They are not human enough, not alive enough. That is the main drawback for a dramatist who does not love raw life: he cannot create living human characters.”

These comments relate to an attitude of Beerbohm’s that was much deeper than his appraisal of Shaw’s plays. He states elsewhere that there were two things that he liked much more than the theatre: “raw” life and books. Although he persisted in it for twelve years and wrote nearly 500 articles, he did not like drama criticism much, and found the task of analysing a performance prevented him from enjoying it. He was, like the best critics and satirists, basically a creative writer: his criticism, whether of the theatre or of society; is of primary interest in its own right, independent of the object of his scrutiny.

Lord David Cecil’s biography of Beerbohm (Constable, 1964) showed that he knew him personally and his writings intimately; he is thus the ideal person to make a selection such as the present one, and the pieces he has included will meet with the approval of most enthusiasts. As well as the theatre criticism, there are thirteen of the essays, parodies of James, Conrad, Kipling, Chesterton, Bennett, and Galsworthy, extracts from “Zuleika Dobson,” the parable "The Happy Hypocrite,” and Enoch Soames, James Pethel, Savonarola Brown, Felix Argallo and Walter Ledgett from “Seven Men and Two Others.” There has been a need for a selected Beerbohm for some time, especially since the complete edition has been out of print. This volume is certainly to be welcomed—though a few illustrations would have been in character.