But it is no good trying to suggest that Max became unpopular in the age of the Angry Young Men. In most respects, Max had never been popular in the first place. He himself suggested he had a public of 1,500 in England and 1,000 in America. He was praised to the skies by an elite and ignored by almost everyone else. Max did not think much of democracy, and democracy did not think much of him. He began his essay on "The Humour of the Public" by pointing out that "perhaps the most effective means of disparaging an enemy" is to lay stress upon his many fine qualities, "and then to say what a pity it is that he has no sense of humour". Having enlarged upon mankind's belief in the general humorousness of the human race, and remarked that no one ever boasts of not having a sense of humour, Max goes on to postulate that the public's sense of humour may be regarded roughly as one collective sense.
By the public he means the vast number of human beings who are in the lowest grade of intelligence. It is thus recruited from the upper, middle and lower classes. To this "primitive and untutored public", Max says, "humour is a harshly definite affair . . . Violence and obviousness are . . . the essential factors." He proceeds to select from music hall and comic paper "certain ever-recurring themes" of public entertainment, which include mothers-in-law, hen-pecked husbands, various kinds of foreigner, extreme fatness, extreme thinness, baldness, sea-sickness, stuttering, and shooting the moon (meaning to leave a lodging house without paying the bill). These were not Max's themes, except that in his drawings the figures are often very fat or very thin.
Max himself described with characteristic clarity the feeling of not wanting to write. In 1898 he succeeded George Bernard Shaw as theatre critic of the Saturday Review: Shaw in his valedictory piece had dubbed him "the incomparable Max". For 12 years, Max composed an article a week, before in his own valedictory piece admitting:
I do not recall that I have once sat down eager to write, or that I have once written with ease and delight. But the cause of this lack was not in the nature of my theme. It was in myself. Writing has always been uphill work to me, mainly because I am cursed with an acute literary conscience. To seem to write with ease and delight is one of the duties which a writer owes to his readers, to his art. And to contrive that effect requires very great skill and care: it is a matter of technique, a matter of construction partly, and partly of choice of words and cadences. There may be — I have never met one — writers who enjoy the act of writing; but without that technique their enjoyment will not be manifest. I may often have failed in my articles here, to disguise labour. But the effort to disguise it has always been loyally made. And thus it is that Thursday, the day chosen by me (as being the latest possible one) for writing my article, has for twelve years been regarded by me as the least pleasant day of the week.
These are the words of a craftsman who allowed nothing shoddy to leave his workshop. The quality of his work is so high that I still cannot account for its neglect. I have several of his caricatures on my walls, but hardly anyone ever pauses to look at them. When Nick Garland, long the Telegraph's political cartoonist, examined them with close delight, I was taken aback. Yet so far as I know, the visitors to my house are not a particularly philistine lot. Some of them are no doubt distracted by my children, or my laugh. Max himself has distracted me from writing this essay. At least I have managed to quote a considerable number of his own words. It is late, and I find myself surrounded by the wreckage of his books. I am aware that I have said nothing about his dandyism, or about his enchanting glimpses of politicians such as Gladstone and Lord Randolph Churchill, or of poets such as Matthew Arnold and the Rossettis. I have failed to develop any kind of Beerbohm theory. But I hope I have said enough to show that he can still give great pleasure, and is essentially sane.
