Artist and essayist whose affectionate and mocking touch established his unique reputation in the last years of Victoria‚ SIR MAX BEERBOHM in the autumn of his career was occasionally willing to reminisce. In these words he reaches back to a Bohemian London which he had enjoyed as a young wit and dandy.
In his prose as in his caricatures, SIR MAX BEERBOHM proved himself the greatest parodist of our time. In Zuleika Dobson he wrote with perfect irreverence of Oxford, and in Seven Men and his volumes of collected essays he gave us a prose which is alive and full of wit. The following essay is taken from one of his incomparable broadcasts for the BBC’s Third Programme.
“A man must be judged by what is fine in him, not by what is trivial.”So writes SIR MAX BEERBOHM in this essay which gives us a hearing, seeing likeness of his friend George Moore. A master stylist whose drawings and first editions are collectors’ items, Sir Max lives today in his home in Rapallo, whence, thanks to the wire recording of the BBC, his voice is occasionally to be heard throughout the English-speaking world.
In his prose as in his caricatures. SIR MAX BEERBOHM is the epitome of ”the irrepressible, the light of touch, the inimitable, the insouciant, and the impertinent.” In A Christmas Garland he proved himself the greatest parodist of our time; in Zuleika Dobson he wrote with perfect irreverence of Oxford; and in Seven Men and his volumes of collected essays he has given us a prose which is alive and full of wit.
James Bone, who was far more than four decades the Manchester Guardian’s stouthearted correspondent in London, is one of four brothers, Scotch, talented, and independent. Daring his years in Fleet Street, Mr. Bone took note of the vanishing London, and from his pen have come two delightful descriptive hooks about the city, each of them illustrated by the artist of the family. Muirhead Bone. The first, The London Perambulator, appeared in 1925; and this year, on the appearance of its sequel, London Echoing.the Editor of the Mancjester Guardian published the endearing letter from SIR MAX BEERBOHM which follows. We reprint it for those who will value these bools and the friendship behind them.