all Socialists
or Radicals; our poets and writers Anarchists. Our artists are the only
conservatives of intellect. Our foreign policy alone can be called
'Edwardian,' so personal is it to the King. Everything else is a
compromise; so our time must therefore be known--at least ten years of
it--as the Lloyd-Georgian period. I can imagine collectors of the future
struggling for an _alleged_ genuine work of art belonging to this brief
renaissance, and the disappointment of the dealer on finding that it
dated a year before the Budget, thereby reducing its value by some
thousands.

Just as we go to Kneller and Lely for speaking portraits of the men who
made their age, so I believe our descendants will turn to Max for
listening likenesses of the present generation. Of all modern artists,
he alone follows Hamlet's advice. If the mirror is a convex one, that is
merely the accident of genius, and reflects the malady of the century.
Other artists have too much eye on the Uffizi and the National Gallery
(the more modest of them only painting up to the Tate). In Max we have
one who never harks forward to the future, and is therefore more
characteristic, more Lloyd-Georgian than any of his peers. Set for one
moment beside some Rubens' goddess a portrait by Mr. Sargent, and how
would she be troubled by its beauty? Not in the slightest degree;
because they are both similar but differing expressions of the same
genius of painting. The centuries which separate them are historical
conventions; and in Art, history does not count; aesthetically, time is
of no consequence. But in the more objective art of caricature, history
is of some import, and (as Mr. Beerbohm himself admitted about
photographs) the man limned is of paramount importance. Actual
resemblance, truthfulness of presentation, criticism of the model become
legitimate subjects for consideration. Generally speaking, artists long
since wisely resigned all attempts at catching a likeness, leaving to
photography an inglorious victory. Mr. Beerbohm, realising this fact,
seized caricature as a substitute--the consolation, it may be, for a lost
or neglected talent. It is as though Watts (painter of the soul's prism,
if ever there was one) had pushed away Ward and Downey from the camera,
to insert a subtler lens, a more sensitive negative.

* * * *

If, reader, you have ever been to a West-end picture shop, you will have
suffered some annoyance on looking too attentive