indeed have been made to describe the literature, art and drama of the present as ‘Edwardian,’ from a very proper and loyal spirit, to which I should be the last to object.  We were even promised a few years ago a new style of furniture to inaugurate the reign—­something to supplant that Louis Dix-neuvieme decor which is merely a compromise with the past.  But somehow the whole thing has fallen through; in this democratic aeon the adjective ‘Edwardian’ trips on the tongue; our real dramatists are 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.

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If, reader, you have ever been to a West-end picture shop, you will have suffered some annoyance on looking too attentively at any item in the exhibition, by the approach of an officious attendant, who presses you to purchase it.  He begins by flattery; he felicitates you on your choice of the best picture in the room—­the one that has been ’universally admired by critics and collectors.’