Introduction to Beerbohm

Max Beerbohm (1872-1956), a British essayist, drama critic, and cartoonist, lived in Italy for about twenty years. There is "The Collected Works of Max Beerbohm" handed down from generation to generation.

Beerbohm is an out-and-out middle class. He was the youngest son, born into a large, wealthy and loving family in London, and there was no pressure on him to follow his father in business or to strive for a place in the aristocracy. In fact, he always wrote about the upper classes with a hint of irony reserved for beloved antiques. In terms of British origins, Beerbohm is not even as good as Disraeli, because his father immigrated from the Baltic Sea region of Germany only in the 1830s. His ethnic background undoubtedly had an influence in the formation of his personality, but there is no trace of it in his literary works. There is another factor that can be felt, and obviously more important: his father was sixty-two years old when Max was born. His father, Julius Beerbohm, experienced life in Paris in the 1920s and London in the 1930s. His other sons were much older than Max, who was born in 1872, and they infected him with a disease that should not belong to him. a sense of closeness to a bygone era. He affectionately called this era the "Mid-Victorian Era". The playboy style of young Beerbohm does not cling to the class ladder, rising or falling according to social status; he is leisurely and leisurely, walking slowly back to the past era. An oval portrait of his grandfather hangs in his mother's living room, dressed in eighteenth-century clothing. This sight once made Will Rosenstein sigh: "It's rare for my grandparents to become successful so early. "

Beerbohm spent his happy childhood quietly. After graduating from Charterhouse School, he entered Merton College. There, he came into exclusive contact with a certain type of people, those whom he wanted to associate with and who were in tune with the cultural atmosphere of his family: the major literary artists of the 1990s. He met most of them as the half-brother of Herbert Beerbohm Terry. Terry entered Oxford in 1890, three years before Max. He was already well-known as an actor and theater manager, and knew most of the people worth knowing. For example, Terry had a good relationship with Wilde and performed the latter's "A Woman of No Importance" in 1893. But Beerbohm relied on his own abilities and quickly became known to everyone for his unique personality. His talents earned him the honor of entering the first series of The Yellow Book, while he was still an undergraduate at the age of twenty-two.

In Beerbohm's work from the 1990s, the three major themes of dandyism, Regency style and fashion worship always figure prominently. In fact, it was as a prophet and evangelist of all three that he earned his early reputation. One visitor noticed the reappearance of nostalgic trends, such as Wilde's faint but long-lasting interest in Regency style, Beardsley's admiration for the decorative layout of Brighton Pavilion, G.S. Street's nostalgic essays about Regency London, Theater productions of early dandy life (such as Clyde Fitch's The Last of the Playboys, in which Beerbohm Terry played D'Orsay), and increasingly in the 1980s and 1990s of publications about the Regency, including memoirs and biographies. He asked Sir Max about the resurgence of Regency style at the end of the nineteenth century in the living room of Sir Max's house in Porto Raparo on the Italian coast. He replied with a polite sneer. Is there a general resurgence in Regency style? "I think I'm the only one." No one since Thackeray or since Beerbohm has been so fascinated by this little-explored literary genre as this budding essayist, and for him, discovery The new theme is a big blessing. The young and mature Max handles historical materials with ease and is refreshing. “Expressing one’s abilities by representing history is not treating history well,” he said in an interview with Ada Leifson in 1895. “But from Herodotus to Froude to myself, the best historiography No family is exempt from vulgarity.

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