'But I Am Impenitent'

“How then was he happy? By the laws laid down for us by moralists and psychologists he should not have been. Man, they insist, is born to act and construct. If, under the baleful influence of sin or psychological maladjustment, he does neither, the results should surely have been frustration and discontent.”

I’m always heartened when a human being avoids the conceptual flypaper of “moralists and psychologists” – especially the latter. Like eels, we’re slippery. Free will and its happy offspring, eccentricity, are the glories of our species. Even being conventional can be eccentric in the proper hands. Predicting human behavior, our emotions in particular, is a mug’s game.

“In fact, however, people who visited Max during these years were struck by the air of serene gaiety which gleamed in his eyes and made itself softly heard in his laugh. Although he did not laugh quite so often as in his youth, he laughed more than most men of his age. The truth was that he was so exceptional a character the laws applicable to most men did not apply to him.”

Lord David Cecil is writing of Beerbohm in his 1964 biography of the essayist, who was born in 1872. These passages come two-thirds of the way through the book, beginning in the 1920s when Max moved to Rapallo. True, his best work was behind him but Max never fell half in love with easeful self-pity. He remained amused by the world, even in Mussolini’s Italy. That and superb prose are his gifts to humanity.

“What was true of him as a boy was true of him in middle life: he was at once older and younger than the average man of his years. . . . He had experienced enough new impressions to last him for life; he realized that new ones would merely disturb him.”

The necessity of raw experience, preferably manly experience – by Byron, for instance, and, at a more ridiculous level, Hemingway – has been codified as a prerequisite for being a writer, or a certain type of writer. Henry James, Emily Dickinson and Proust give the lie to that silliness. So does Beerbohm, as in the radio broadcast (Mainly on the Air, 1957) he made on Jan. 18, 1942:

“Perhaps you will blame me for having spent so much of my time in music halls, so frivolously, when I should have been sticking to my books, burning the midnight oil and compassing the larger latitude. But I am impenitent. I am inclined to think, indeed I have always thought, that a young man who desires to know all that in all ages in all lands has been thought by the best minds, and wishes to make a synthesis of all those thoughts for the future benefit of mankind, is laying up for himself a very miserable old age.”

[The great Rebecca West said of Beerbohm’s wartime BBC broadcasts (which contrast nicely with Ezra Pound’s ravings): “I felt that I was listening to the voice of the last civilized man on earth. Max’s broadcasts justify the entire invention of broadcasting.”]