'I Shall Steep My Exhaurient Mind'

I’ve not seen it previously suggested, nor is he a self-evident candidate for the position, but I suspect the ideal writer for our time and place, the one whose gifts we most sorely need, is Max Beerbohm. A close second is Charles Lamb, whose aberrant strain of anti-Semitism, despite his obvious virtues, disqualifies him. Third is Jonathan Swift, who was Irish.

Above all we could use a writer with a comic sense, a knack for thinking in nuanced shades of irony and without partisan loyalties. Any humorless brute can take a hammer to a problem. Our troubles call for a scalpel wielded with dispassionate precision. We need a writer-as-spectator, not a writer-as-yenta. Beerbohm declares in his essay “Servants” (And Even Now, 1921): “I am a Tory Anarchist. I should like every one to go about doing just as he pleased—short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed.” A wise man, and wise men pay attention. They watch and listen and file away what their senses tell them. You can’t do that if you’re too busy complaining about something or telling somebody what they should be doing. A passage in “Diminuendo”(The Works of Max Beerbohm, 1896) is a close as Beerbohm ever got to formulating a philosophy of life:

“I shall look forth from my window, the laburnum and the mountain-ash becoming mere silhouettes in the foreground of my vision. I shall look forth and, in my remoteness, appreciate the distant pageant of the world. Humanity will range itself in the column of my morning paper. No pulse of life will escape me. The strife of politics, the intriguing of courts, the wreck of great vessels, wars, dramas, earthquakes, national griefs or joys; the strange sequels to divorces, even, and the mysterious suicides of land-agents at Ipswich--in all such phenomena I shall steep my exhaurient mind.”

Beerbohm was born on this date, Aug. 24, in 1872, and died at age eighty-three in 1956.