The Eighteen Nineties by Holbrook Jackson — Read

The New Urbanity had no finer expression than that which was summed up and set forth in the personality and art of Max Beerbohm. It was fine because it was at once normal and unique, sane but inconsequent, sedate without being serious, and mannered without empty severity or formality. Max was the comic spirit of the Nineties, and he took his elegant way without haste or fuss, dropping appropriate remarks about himself apropos of others and vice versa; throwing upon the decadence of his day the critical light of a half-appreciative humour. Without being decadent, this extraordinarily modern personality managed to represent the decadence laughing, or rather smiling, at itself.

Max Beerbohm was born in London, in August 1872, and it is interesting to note that he entered the world three days after his famous contemporary, Aubrey Beardsley, who was born at Brighton during the same week. He was educated at Charterhouse, and Merton College, Oxford, where his critical and satirical gifts revealed themselves in caricatures of masters and dons; in a letter to _The Carthusian_, over the pseudonym, "Diogenes," complaining against the dullness of the school journal, and in a satire in Latin elegiacs, called _Beccarius_, twelve copies of which were privately printed, at the suggestion of his form-master, in the form of a four-page pamphlet. A rough yellow paper was used for the publication, and the year of issue was 1890. The colour and date may be noted; and, still more significant, the title of his first notable essay, "A Defence of Cosmetics," written at Oxford, and published in the first number of _The Yellow Book_ in 1894.