'The Spirit of Urbanity Incarnate'

Last week Nige wrote about a book previously unknown to me: The Eighteen Nineties (1913; rev. 1922) by Holbrook Jackson. I’ve read only Jackson’s The Anatomy of Bibliomania (1930) and browsed in some of his other book-related titles. I bought the Anatomy in 1998 from a used bookstore near the University of Chicago and soon gave up annotating because too many pages hold memorable aphorisms or allusions that demand to be followed. Not that my pleasure was unmixed. Jackson (1874-1948) cultivates a cloyingly tweedy persona, a variation on the unworldly English eccentric. He’s fond of archaisms. He often writes in a pastiche of seventeenth-century prose, aping Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Burton, as he acknowledges. 

The Eighteen Nineties is a better-written, more focused and disciplined work, devoted to an era Jackson lived through as a young man. The Nineties in literature tends to be treated as a homogenous period when dandyism and an occasional taste for decadence ruled. Jackson makes clear that Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Francis Thompson, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Hardy and early Wells and Conrad, among others, are a diversified bunch, no monolith. He writes:

 

“The use of strange words and bizarre images was but another outcome of the prevalent desire to astonish. At no period in English history had the obvious and the commonplace been in such disrepute. The age felt it was complex and sought to interpret its complexities, not by simplicity . . .”

 

Jackson dedicates his book to Max Beerbohm and devotes Chap. VII, “The Incomparable Max,” to him. At his best, Beerbohm is sui generis, a master ironist and writer of prose, unlike any of the other writers Jackson looks at. His masterpieces are the essays he produced after the Nineties, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, especially those collected in And Even Now (1920). Jackson writes:

 

“First and foremost, he represents a point of view. And, secondly, that point of view is in no sense a novelty in a civilised society. Every age has had its representative of a similar attitude towards life, in one a Horace, in another a Joseph Addison and, again, a Charles Lamb. In our age it is Max Beerbohm. He is the spirit of urbanity incarnate; he is town. He is civilisation hugging itself with whimsical appreciation for a conservative end.”

 

Jackson gets Beerbohm and places him in the history of the essay: “It does not matter what he writes about: his subjects interest because he is interesting. A good essayist justifies any subject, and Max Beerbohm as an essayist is next in succession to Charles Lamb. His essays, and these are his greatest works, are genial invitations to discuss Max, and you discuss him all the more readily and with fuller relish because they are not too explicit; indeed, he is often quite prim.”

 

Beerbohm is never strident or dogmatic. That would be vulgar and one can’t imagine him ever being vulgar. He respects his readers too much. The literal-minded and humorless need not bother reading him:

 

“[H]e pays you a delicate compliment by leaving you something to tell yourself; the end of his ellipsis, as in all the great essayists, is yourself. He is quite frank with you, and properly genial; but he is too fastidious to rush into friendship with his readers. They must deserve friendship first. He does not gush.”

 

The essay, that most formless of forms, is my favorite, providing a voice for those of us who can’t write fiction or poetry. No one does it better than Beerbohm.

 

“The real Max Beerbohm is, I fancy, an essayist pure and simple, the essay being the inevitable medium for the expression of his urbane and civilised genius. There are, he has told us, a few people in England who are interested in repose as an art. He is, undoubtedly, one of them. But he is also interested in the art of the essay, and his essays are exquisite contributions to that rare art. In them you see revealed the complete Max, interpreting deftly, by means of wit and humour, imagination and scholarship, that ‘uninterrupted view of my fellow-creatures,’ to use his own words, which he admits preferable to books, and which, doubtless, he prefers better than any other view in life.”