The art of deception

Max Beerbohm, dandy, cartoonist and penetrating drama critic, was par excellence the observer of the glittering English period that stretched from the 1890s to the death of Edward VII, poking unsparing but mainly good-humoured fun at the peculiarities of its political and cultural leaders: Swinburne, Asquith, Lloyd George, Chesterton, Kipling and the King among them.

At the same time he was himself part of the scene, the master of a carefully cultivated style. His fellow critic Desmond MacCarthy once wrote of him:

I remember walking one night down Piccadilly behind that high-hat with its deep mourning band. It was then perched above a very long dark top-coat with an astrakhan collar… In a gloved hand this figure held an ebony stick with an ivory collar… I remember also noting the little black curl in the nape of his neck like a drake’s tail. His walk was slow and tranquil, such as one could hardly imagine ever breaking into a run.

The Happy Hypocrite was Max’s earliest short story, first appearing in The Yellow Book in 1896. It is a sentimental parable, a kind of lighter-hearted version of his friend Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, full of epigrammatic flourishes and passages satirising the more mawkish authors of his day.

It tells the tale of Lord George Hell, a dissipated Regency buck, ‘proud of being horrid’, who habitually cheats at cards, beggars his companions and womanises. Thanks, however, to a beneficent Cupid, his jaded eye lights on Jenny Mere, a pure young actress. Truly in love for the first time, he proposes to her. She rejects him: she can only marry a man with the face of a saint, and Lord George’s face ‘is even as a mirror long tarnished by the reflection of this world’s vanity’.