But the writer who was to bring irony in English literature to a consummate pitch, and add to the age a strange brief brilliance of his own wilful spirit, was Max Beerbohm. Max, the ‘Incomparable’ as Bernard Shaw once described him, is the charm of the gilded lily, the fairy prince of an urbane artificiality: he is in literature what the cocktail is among drinks; he is the enemy of dullness and the friend of that Greek quality called ‘charis.’ He is the public school and Varsity man who is fond of, but afraid of, being tedious in literature; so with delightful affectation his vehicle is persiflage with a load of wit he pretends to disdain. Of all the prose writers of the Beardsley period he is the easiest and most charming to read. In fact, he is the ideal essayist. He titillates the literary sense. Fortunately his glass is small, for if one had to drink it in quart pots the result would be as disastrous as in his one and only mistake--the long novel _Zuleika Dobson_, which is a late work written long after the nineties had been swallowed up by that maw which swallowed up Lesbia’s sparrow and all other beautiful dead things.
Max said in jest, ‘I belong to the Beardsley period,’ and it is one of those jests which is only too painfully true. When he was at Oxford he was caught up in the movement, and wrote, under Wilde’s influence, _A Defence of Cosmetics_ for the first number of _The Yellow Book_, and he also appeared in Lord Alfred Douglas’s magazine. Thenceforward he contributed to various quarterlies, while in 1896 the little red volume with its white paper label appeared as _The Works_, containing all the best of this precocious _enfant terrible_ of literature, who assures us that he read in bed, while at school, _Marius the Epicurean_, and found it not nearly so difficult as _Midshipman Easy_. At the age of twenty-five he cries: ‘I shall write no more. Already I feel myself to be a trifle outmoded,’ and he religiously does not keep his word. He keeps pouring out caricatures, writes _More_, the companion volume to _The Works_, and perpetrates his short story _The Happy Hypocrite_. Beyond 1899 we cannot follow him, but he has been busy ever since with his parodies, his _Yet Again_, his lamentable novel, his one-act play, and so on.