Max Beerbohm

William Rothenstein

Pencil on paper

Photographically “reproduced by Mr. Emery Walker” (Preface)

See below for text accompanying this portrait.

Image capture, color correction, and text by George P. Landow

[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the Internet Archive and University of Toronto and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one. ]

[Rothenstein does does not identify which of the “various hands” wrote the commentary below that accompanies his portrait drawing.]

If a man were asked, given the wide range, if you will, of a movement, a force, a personality, a writer, to name the most completely distinguished fact in the England of our time, how happy would it be for his reputation with posterity if he had the wit to say, Max Beerbohm. Distinguished, like many other satisfactory words, is one that is overworked, but there is none that can be so perfectly applied to Mr. Beerbohm. Distinction with him is never oddity, or preciousness, or mere windy cleverness. His writing is so simple that every good phrase seems almost like a lucky accident; but the luck goes on always to the end of the chapter, and you finish reading with the consciousness of every phrase having been good right through. It would be safe to defy Mr. Beerbohm's most jealous critic to find an unsuccessful passage anywhere in his work. And this admirable sureness of detail means an underlying constructive power which, although Mr. Beerbohm uses it for delicate enough ends, is one of the major qualities of literary art. "Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton" is as compact a piece of craftsmanship as "Samson Agonistes," which, it may be pointed out, is not to affront Mr. Beerbohm by saying that he is as great a writer as Milton.

It is the same with his drawings. Wit is their apparent design, but (and especially in his later work) there is always the great sincerity of beauty. That, perhaps, is Mr. Beerbohm's secret; he has the wittiest mind of an age, but he is a serious artist.

References

Rothenstein, William. Twenty-four Portraits with critical appreciations by various hands. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1920. Internet Archive version of a copy at the University of Toronto. Web. 20 November 2012.

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Last modified 20 November 2012