Page:The Borzoi 1920.djvu/32

 MAX BEERBOHM

By Floyd Dell The very name of Max Beerbohm carries the mind back to the time when he first emerged as a literary figure—the time of the Yellow Book—the time of Whistler's letters and Swinburne's newest poem, of velvet jackets and plush knee-breeches, and foot-in-the-grave young poets who caroused mournfully at the sign of the Bodley Head. But it was above all the period of the Enoch Soameses who are celebrated by Max Beerbohm in his latest volume, "Seven Men"—an age of strange young Satanists who would be content with nothing less than founding a new English literature upon the cornerstone of their own thin sheaves of unintelligible poems. They are dead, now—they got tired of waiting for their immortality to begin—and forgotten, except for the wreaths of tender and ironic phrases which Max Beerbohm lays from time to time on their graves. He survives them, the Last of the Esthetes. And yet Enoch Soames would say bitterly that it was just like Fate that the Last of the Esthetes should be a man who never was an Esthete at all!

And there is something to the Enoch Soames point of view. Max Beerbohm's title to Estheticism is rather precarious. His words may be the words of Dorian Grey, but the laughter be hind them is surely the laughter of Huck Finn! Yes, under the jewelled stylistic cloak of Max Beerbohm, what do you find but the simple-hearted amusement of a healthy child? From the story of the Young Prince in "The Complete Works of Max Beerbohm," to the celebrated Bathtub passage in 12