The Knights of Ex-Arcady

139 REVIEWS 1. The Knights of Ex-Arcady Mary M. Lago and Karl Beckson (eds). Max and Willi Max Beerbohm and VJiIliam Rothenstein, Their Friendship and Letters, 1893-1945 !Cambridge : Harvard UP, 1975)· $12.50. In 1944, Sir Max Beerbohm wrote to his friend Sir William Rothenstein, "You and I were fortunate in being born so long ago - in having had our young days in beautiful days of peace and ease and civilisation - auspicious and nutritive days, days before the world was ruined by science and machinery and other things darling to the Devil." In their letters, this fortunate pair remind one of two scions of the ancien regime who have lived to see the death of Napoleon. The Revolution comes into their world and dissolves it in cataracts of blood as they watch helpless. Helpless but not desperate: they survive, they watch, they testify. Beerbohm and Rothenstein were efants terribles during Victoria's dotage. They lived through both World Wars and saw the defeat of Hitler, but the end of the old order began for them in^1910. Max and Will shows the friendship of these two artist-writers against the background of a shifting civilization; it is wisely organized around that watershed year when, according to Virginia Woolf "human nature changed." The editors have used a phrase of Beerbohm's to describe how Max and Will were transformed after that: they became "Ex-Arcadians." Why had they been Arcadians in the first place? Professors Lago and Beckson make the answer abundantly clear: in their selection of letters, in wide-ranging footnotes, they show us Rothenstein and Beerbohm moving across the public stage of post-Pre-Raphaelite London, makers of portraits and caricatures, wits, notorieties, dandies of the Whistler-Wilde tribe. Theirs were the last days of Arcady, when the parks were still ruled by the horse, the nanny, and the Queen. They were happy, but bliss implies innocence, and these bril*· liant butterflies had only intimations of what was to come. For the most part, they revelled in early fame, brilliant friends, the licensed ambitions of youth. In Max and VJiIl, we take them up at the start of their careers. Coevals, they both made their marks at age twenty-one in 1893· Rothenstein had come back to England after a sojourn among the Impressionists in Paris (he had first studied at the Slade under Legros); he came up to Oxford to do a series of portraits of famous dons, and there he met the undergraduate Beerbohm. They took to each other, and they took from each other. For Beerbohm, Rothenstein was "Paris in Oxford": the glamour of Degas and Puvis de Chavannes came with him; too Rothenstein was generous with suggestions 140 about such things as the refinement of line and the use of water-color washes in caricature. For Will, on the other hand, Max was the Haymarket in Oxford: he had the entree to the dressing-room of his brother Herbert Beerbohm Tree and to the drawing-rooms of the Irvings and Wildes one met there; he displayed as well a remarkable self-possession and a brilliant original style of caricature from which a portraitist could, and did, learn much. Thus, these friends made a good beginning, spreading their wings in the golden Imperial sunset, rejoicing and collaborating in one another's success. The picture is familiar, for the palmy 'nineties and the palmier Oughts make the background for the Beerbohm and Rothenstein we know best, the heroes of "Enoch Soames," trading mots under the glittering mirrors of the Cafe Royal. But Max and Will puts this scene firmly in the perspective of long lives, long careers, and firm commitments; in the process, it takes us much deeper into the minds of these dandies than we have been accustomed to go. This book has three central themes. First is the mere passage of time. Beerbohm and Rothenstein both wrote well, and they reflect in one another the slow ripening that can come to those who survive to be old. Youthful careerism and vanity grow into sober purpose. Sobriety becomes, in the fullness of time, deep reflection. The ex-dandies bow out as philosophers. Second is...