Of Max Beerbohm’s Future

To most Americans, the news of Sir Max Beerbohm’s passing at the age of nearly eighty-four probably came as a mild shock—‘’mild,” because to most of us he was never much more than a name out of The Yellow Book or the yellower nineties; a “shock,” because most of us, if asked whether he was still living, would in all likelihood have replied, “I think he died some years ago.”

But to me, and many of my friends, the mere thought of Max’s having to leave us one of these days has for some time been casting a very real and very present shadow over our musings on today’s world. Max (I dislike the jauntily familiar form of address as much as the next person; I am only trying to avoid “Beerbohm” and “Sir Max,” both of which sound “wrong”) was something altogether other than a link of sorts between late nineteenth-century decadence and mid-twentieth-century barbarism. He came much closer to being a bridge between the civilization of the eighteenth century and the civilization of a not, I trust, too distant future.

JC

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John Abbot Clark

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To most Americans, the news of Sir Max Beerbohm’s passing at the age of nearly eighty-four probably came as a mild shock—‘’mild,” because to most of us he was never much more than a name out of The Yellow Book or the yellower nineties; a “shock,” because most of us, if asked whether he was still living, would in all likelihood have replied, “I think he died some years ago.”

But to me, and many of my friends, the mere thought of Max’s having to leave us one of these days has for some time been casting a very real and very present shadow over our musings on today’s world. Max (I dislike the jauntily familiar form of address as much as the next person; I am only trying to avoid “Beerbohm” and “Sir Max,” both of which sound “wrong”) was something altogether other than a link of sorts between late nineteenth-century decadence and mid-twentieth-century barbarism. He came much closer to being a bridge between the civilization of the eighteenth century and the civilization of a not, I trust, too distant future.