Max Beerbohm

“ There I sat, hot-browed from sleeplessness, cold in the feet, stiff in the legs, cowed and indignant all through--sat there in the broadening daylight, and in that new evening suit of mine with the Braxtonised shirtfront and waistcoat that by day were more than ever loathsome. Literature’s Ambassador at Keeb.... I rose gingerly from my chair, and caught sight of my face, of my Braxtonised cheek, in the mirror. I heard the twittering of birds in distant trees. I saw through my window the elaborate landscape of the Duke’s grounds, all soft in the grey bloom of early morning. ”

“ Yet I found his aristocrats as convincing as Braxton’s rustics. It is true that I may have been convinced wrongly. That is a point which I could settle only by experience. I shift my ground, claiming for Maltby’s aristocrats just this: that they pleased me very much.
Aristocrats, when they are presented solely through a novelist’s sense of beauty, do not satisfy us. They may be as beautiful as all that, but, for fear of thinking ourselves snobbish, we won’t believe it. ”

“ Dapper little Maltby--blond, bland, diminutive Maltby, with his monocle and his gardenia; big black Braxton, with his lanky hair and his square blue jaw and his square sallow forehead. Canary and crow. Maltby had a perpetual chirrup of amusing small-talk. Braxton was usually silent, but very well worth listening to whenever he did croak. He had distinction, I admit it; the distinction of one who steadfastly refuses to adapt himself to surroundings. He stood out. He awed Mr. Hookworth. Ladies were always asking one another, rather intently, what they thought of him. ”

“ He warned me that what he had to tell might rather tend to stiffen my unwilling faith in palmistry, and to shake my opposite and cherished faith in free will. I said, "Never mind." He stretched his hands pensively toward the fire. I settled myself back in my chair.
"My hands," he said, staring at the backs of them, "are the hands of a very weak man. I dare say you know enough of palmistry to see that for yourself. You notice the slightness of the thumbs and of he two 'little' fingers. ”

“ Let’s race!” said Lady Rodfitten; and we did so--“just our two selves.” I was on the side nearer to the balustrade, and it was on that side that Braxton suddenly appeared from nowhere, solid-looking as a rock, his arms akimbo, less than three yards ahead of me, so that I swerved involuntarily, sharply, striking broadside the front wheel of Lady Rodfitten and collapsing with her, and with a crash of machinery, to the ground. ”

“ Dazed, I turned back at length into the little room, and I suppose I paid Berthe or Rose for my dinner and luncheon and for Soames’s; I hope so, for I never went to the Vingtième again. Ever since that night I have avoided Greek Street altogether. And for years I did not set foot even in Soho Square, because on that same night it was there that I paced and loitered, long and long, with some such dull sense of hope as a man has in not straying far from the place where he has lost something. ”

“ I walked ever faster and faster, to stifle thought; but in vain. Why hadn’t I simply ridden THROUGH Braxton? I was aware of being now in the park, among great trees and undulations of wild green ground. But Nature did not achieve the task that Mr. Balfour had attempted; and my anguish was unassuaged.
‘I paused to lean against a tree in the huge avenue that led to the huge hateful house. I leaned wondering whether the thought of re-entering that house were the more hateful because I should have to face my fellow-guests or because I should probably have to face Braxton. ”

“ But one must not condemn a thing because it has been over-praised. Maltby’s ‘Ariel’ was a delicate, brilliant work; and Braxton’s ‘Faun,’ crude though it was in many ways, had yet a genuine power and beauty. This is not a mere impression remembered from early youth. It is the reasoned and seasoned judgment of middle age. ”

“ I wasn’t sure,’ said Maltby, ‘whether it was ever published. A dreary affair, wasn’t it? I knew a great deal about suburban life. But--well, I suppose one can’t really understand what one doesn’t love, and one can’t make good fun without real understanding. Besides, what chance of virtue is there for a book written merely to distract the author’s mind? I had hoped to be healed by sea and sunshine and solitude. These things were useless. The labour of “Mr. and Mrs. Robinson” did help, a little. When I had finished it, I thought I might as well send it off to my publisher. ”

“ I wondered what train of thought poor Soames had been following. He did not enlighten me when he said, after a long pause, “You think I have n't minded."
“Minded what, Soames?"
“Neglect. Failure."
“Failure?” I said heartily. “Failure?" I repeated vaguely. “Neglect—yes, perhaps; but that ’s quite another matter. Of course you have n't been—appreciated. But what, then? Any artist who—who gives—” What I wanted to say was, “Any artist who gives truly new and great things to the world has always to wait long for recognition" ”

“ Statecraft and Diplomacy were well threaded there with mere Lineage and mere Beauty, with Royalty sometimes, with mere Wealth never, with privileged Genius now and then. A noble composition always. It was said that the Duke of Hertfordshire cared for nothing but his collection of birds’ eggs, and that the collections of guests at Keeb were formed entirely by his young Duchess. It was said that he had climbed trees in every corner of every continent. The Duchess’ hobby was easier. ”

“ But poor Soames! Doomed to pay without respite an eternal price for nothing but a fruitless search and a bitter disillusioning.
Odd and uncanny it seemed to me that he, Soames, in the flesh, in the waterproof cape, was at this moment living in the last decade of the next century, poring over books not yet written, and seeing and seen by men not yet born. Uncannier and odder still that to-night and evermore he would be in hell. Assuredly, truth was stranger than fiction. ”

“ I heard him say to Soames. “There is a type of person to whom the very mention of my name is—oh, so awfully—funny! In your theaters the dullest comédien needs only to say ‘The devil!’ and right away they give him ‘the loud laugh what speaks the vacant mind.’ Is it not so?”
I had now just breath enough to offer my apologies. He accepted them, but coldly, and re-addressed himself to Soames.
“I am a man of business,” he said, “and always I would put things through ‘right now,’ as they say in the States. You are a poet. Les affaires—you detest them. So be it. ”

“ Braxton turned in his sleep.
‘I resumed my seat, and... and... sat up staring and blinking, at a tall man with red hair. “I must have fallen asleep,” I said. “Yessir,” he replied; and his toneless voice touched in me one or two springs of memory: I was at Keeb; this was the footman who looked after me. But--why wasn’t I in bed? Had I--no, surely it had been no nightmare. Surely I had SEEN Braxton on that white bed.
‘The footman was impassively putting away my smoking-suit. ”

“ I can only say that nothing in the world seems to me more unlikely. Thus it is that these young bright envelops touch my heart even more than do their dusty and sallowed seniors. Sour resignation is less touching than impatience for what will not be, than the eagerness that has to wane and wither. Soured beyond measure these old envelops are. They are not nearly so nice as they should be to the young ones. They lose no chance of sneering and discouraging. Such dialogues as this are only too frequent:
A Very Young Envelop: Something in me whispers that he will come to-day! ”

“ I suppose the nearest I have ever come to practicing is now at this moment: I am defending a murderer. My father had left me well enough provided with money. I was able to go my own desultory way, riding my hobbies where I would. I had a good stableful of hobbies. Palmistry was one of them. I was rather ashamed of this one. It seemed to me absurd, as it seems to you. Like you, though, I believed in it. Unlike you, I had done more than merely read a book about it. I had read innumerable books about it. I had taken casts of all my friends' hands. ”

“ He looked at the palms of his hands.
"They are the hands of a very weak man," he said.
"A man so weak that he cannot believe in the possibility of free will for himself or for any one?"
"They are the hands of an intelligent man, who can weigh evidence and see things as they are." ”

“ I, being the one male of the party, sat at the end of the pew, beside the Duchess. I couldn’t help feeling that my position was a proud one. But I had gone through too much to take instant pleasure in it, and was beset by thoughts of what new horror might await me on the way back to the house. I hoped the Service would not be brief. The swelling and dwindling strains of the “voluntary” on the small organ were strangely soothing. I turned to give an almost feudal glance to the simple villagers in the pews behind, and saw a sight that cowed my soul.
‘Braxton was coming up the aisle. ”

“ Well, my weakest point—I told you this last year, but it happens to be perfectly true that my weakest point—is my will. Influenza, as you know, fastens unerringly on one's weakest point. It does n't attempt to undermine my imagination. That would be a forlorn hope. I have, alas! a very strong imagination. At ordinary times my imagination allows itself to be governed by my will. My will keeps it in check by constant nagging. But when my will is n't strong enough even to nag, then my imagination stampedes. I become even as a little child. ”

“ Soames repeated those last three words in a tone of intense scorn.
“In life and in art,” he said, “all that matters is an inevitable ending."
“But,” I urged more hopefully than I felt, “an ending that can be avoided is n’t inevitable."
"You are n’t an artist,” he rasped. "And you ’re so hopelessly not an artist that. so far from being able to imagine a thing and make it seem true, you ’re going to make even a true thing seem as if you 'd made it up. You ’re a miserable bungler. And it ’s like my luck.”
I protested that the miserable bungler was not I, was not going to be I, but T. K. Nupton ”

“ Maltby might once more have been compared with Braxton. But Braxton was now forgotten. So was Maltby.
This was not kind. This was not just. Maltby’s first novel, and Braxton’s, had brought delight into many thousands of homes. People should have paused to say of Braxton “Perhaps his third novel will be better than his second,” and to say as much for Maltby. I blame people for having given no sign of wanting a third from either; and I blame them with the more zest because neither ‘A Faun on the Cotswolds’ nor ‘Ariel in Mayfair’ was a merely popular book: each, I maintain, was a good book. ”

“ We do believe it, however, and revel in it, when the novelist saves his face and ours by a pervading irony in the treatment of what he loves. The irony must, mark you, be pervading and obvious. Disraeli’s great ladies and lords won’t do, for his irony was but latent in his homage, and thus the reader feels himself called on to worship and in duty bound to scoff. All’s well, though, when the homage is latent in the irony. Thackeray, inviting us to laugh and frown over the follies of Mayfair, enables us to reel with him in a secret orgy of veneration for those fools. ”

“ If other arts than painting were not utterly unintelligible to all but the men who practised them, the law tottered—the Monroe Doctrine, as it were, did not hold good. Therefore no painter would offer an opinion of a book without warning you at any rate that his opinion was worthless. No one is a better judge of literature than Rothenstein ”

“ The fatal age in Mrs. Brett's hands was—not past, no, for here she was. But she might have died when she was twenty-one. Twenty-three seemed to be the utmost span. She was twenty-four, you know.
"I have said that I am a weak man. And you will have good proof of that directly. Yet I showed a certain amount of strength that day—yes, even on that day which has humiliated and saddened the rest of my life. Neither my face nor my voice betrayed me when in the palms of Dorothy Elbourn I was again confronted with those same signs. ”

“ I had remembered Braxton at the moment of recognising Maltby.
‘Suppose HE hadn’t been asked.... But of course we both were. It happened that I was the first to be presented to the Duchess.... It was a great moment. I hoped I should keep my head. She wore a tiara. I had often seen women in tiaras, at the Opera. But I had never talked to a woman in a tiara. Tiaras were symbols to me. Eyes are just a human feature. I fixed mine on the Duchess’s. I kept my head by not looking at hers. I behaved as one human being to another. She seemed very intelligent. We got on very well. ”