Amid the searching seriousness of the nineties, Max is like balm in Gilead. He has the infinite blessing of irony. The others, except Beardsley (who too has this gift), are so appallingly serious. The French influences that went to their making seem to have killed the valiant English humour of Falstaff, Pickwick, and Verdant Green. They are all like young priests who will take no liberty with their ritual; but Max saves the period with his whimsical irony. His is not the fearful, mordant irony of Octave Mirbeau, but a dainty butterfly fancy playing lightly over the pleasures of a pleasant life. To be essentially civilised is to be like a god. This is the pose of such a mentality. It is a winsome pose with no sharp edges to it, just as the _poseur_ himself must be wilfully blind to all the seaminess of life. In front of his window (if a temperament be a window looking out on life) there is a pleasant garden. Beyond is the noise and dust of the highway. He is the dandy in his choice of life as in his choice of literature, and in more than one sense he has written the happiest essays of the period. It has been said his caricatures are essays. May we not equally say his essays are caricatures? The essay, indeed, is the work of the feline male, the man who sits beside the fire like Charles Lamb. The out-of-doors man writes the episode. But Max is essentially an indoors man, who has a perfect little dressing-room like a lady’s boudoir, but much neater, where he concocts his essays we read so easily by infinite labour, with a jewelled pen. It is as though he had said: ‘Literature must either be amusing or dull; mine shall be the former.’ He is very much the young man about town who has consented gracefully to come and charm us. What he wrote of Whistler in _The Gentle Art of Making Enemies_, we may say of him: ‘His style never falters. The silhouette of no sentence is ever blurred. Every sentence is ringing with a clear, vocal cadence.’ And the refrain is Max himself all the time, and his personality is so likeable we stomach it all the time. It is the note that vibrates through all his amiable satiric irony, whether it be on the House of Commons Manner or in defence of the use of Cosmetics, or in describing the period of 1880. Everything, from first to last, is done with such good taste. Even in his wildest flights of raillery he is utterly purposed not to offend. In his charming paper, _1880_, he has given us a vigorous vignette of the previous decade to _The Yellow Book_ age. One can hardly help quoting a small passage here from this admirably worked up prose: ‘In fact Beauty had existed long before 1880. It was Mr. Oscar Wilde who managed her début. To study the period is to admit that to him was due no small part of the social vogue that Beauty began to enjoy. Fired by his fervid words, men and women hurled their mahogany into the streets and ransacked the curio-shops for the furniture of Annish days.