'Style Should Be Oscillant'

The Sketch was an illustrated weekly journal in England published from 1893 to 1959. It doted on high society, royalty, gossip and the arts. The January 2, 1895, issue included an anonymous profile titled “A Few Words with Mr. Max Beerbohm,” accompanied by a photograph of Beerbohm as a boy wearing a sailor suit and a bowl haircut.  He was twenty-two at the time of the article and was still a year away from publishing his first book, The Works of Max Beerbohm. The article begins: 

“Mr. Max Beerbohm left Oxford only last term to plunge into the delights of literature in London. In that short space of time, by his curious contributions to The Yellow Book, he has gained a more than merely esoteric fame. Indeed, he may be said to occupy in literature somewhat the same position as does Mr. Aubrey Beardsley in art.”

  

The writer visits Beerbohm’s home on Hyde Park Place in London and speaks with him in the room where “[Alexander William] Kinglake wrote his famous history of the Crimean War.” Beerbohm, he tells us, has “a passion for paradox and marivaudage – in fact, for all unusual things.”

 

Beerbohm mentions his essay “King George the Fourth” and says: “To treat history as a means of showing one’s cleverness may be rough on history, but it has been done by the best historians, from Herodotus to Froude and myself. Some of my ‘George’ was false, and much was flippant: but why should a writer sit down to the systematically serious, or else conscientiously comic. Style should be oscillant.”

 

The writer asks, “‘Oscillant’? Is that one of your queer words, of which we have heard so much? Do you intend to abandon them, as an affectation?”

 

Beerbohm replies: “Certainly not. They are not affected. At times there is no word in the English dictionary by which I can express my shade of meaning. I try to think of a French, or Latin, or Greek one. If I can’t, then I invent a word—such as ‘pop-limbo’ or ‘bauble-tit’ – often a compound of some well-known English word with an affix or prefix to point its significance. Sometimes I invent a word merely because the cadence of the sentence demands it.”

 

Already we hear hints of the mature Beerbohm, the poker-faced voice of nuanced irony. Seasoned readers covet a small class of writers with whom we share a significant portion of our sensibility. This is not a qualitative judgment. It’s an emotional/aesthetic sympathy. One reads them with the sense that the writer understands the reader, and vice versa. Such is Beerbohm for me. As he writes in “A.V. Laider," “Our mutual aloofness was a positive bond between us.”

 

Beerbohm died seventy years ago today, on May 20, 1956, at age eighty-three.