Something Defeasible

 I've been reading Max Beerbohm's And Even Now, a collection of essays published in 1920 and reissued several times. The earliest essay is dated 1910 and the latest 1920, and most are written in two particular years, 1914 and 1918 – two dates with inescapable historical resonance. And yet, reading this collection, you'd hardly know a world war was raging; references are few and fleeting. But then comes an extraordinary essay, dating from July, 1919, titled 'Something Defeasible'. 
  This begins with Max admiring a fine old-fashioned Sussex cottage – but it is a cottage 'built on sand, and of sand; and the tide was coming in.' He is at the seaside, watching the children building sand castles – and in this instance a beautifully made sand cottage, on which a boy of about nine, with the eyes of a dreamer, is working with uncommon care and attention to detail. Max watches him admiringly and chats to him briefly about his little masterpiece, then wanders off to read his morning paper. 'During the War [there it is!]', he writes, 'one felt it a duty to know the worst before breakfast; now that the English polity is threatened merely from within, one is apt to dally...' What is happening here? This is very unexpected, and the more so as Max goes on to question his own phrase: 'Merely from within? Is that the right phrase when the nerves of unrestful Labour in any one land are interplicated [a fine word!] with its nerves in any other, so vibrantly?' Here is Beerbohm for once showing himself very much aware of a wider, less pleasing world, one in which 'we are all at the mercy of Labour, certainly; and Labour does not love us; and Labour is not deeply versed in statecraft ... Labour is wise enough – surely? – not to will us destruction. Russia has been an awful example. Surely! And yet, Labour does not seem to think the example so awful as I do. Queer, this; queer and disquieting.' Indeed.
  Max returns to the beach and finds the tide coming in fast. The sand castles are engulfed and fall one by one, to the loud delight of the children – and then the waters lick around that lovingly made cottage. As he watches, the young architect becomes animated. 'He leapt, he waved his spade, he invited the waves with wild gestures and gleeful cries. His face had flushed bright, and now, as the garden walls crumbled, and the paths and lawns were mingled ... and the walls of the cottage began to totter, and the gables sank, and all, all was swallowed, his leaps were so high in air that they recalled to my memory those of a strange religious sect which once visited London; and the glare of his eyes was less indicative of a dreamer than of a triumphant fiend.' And Max finds himself feeling something of the same 'wild enthusiasm' as he watches the process of destruction. The boy's exultant behaviour 'made me feel, as never before, how deep-rooted in the human breast the love of destruction, for mere destruction, is. And I began to ask myself: 'Even if England as we know it, the English polity of which that cottage was a symbol to me, were the work of (say) Mr Robert Smillie's [a prominent trade unionist and Labour Party member] own unaided hands' – but I waived the question coming from that hypothesis, and other questions that might have followed; for I wished to be happy while I might.' 
  So, an essay that looked set to be a charmingly whimsical piece – Max is often whimsical, but he has, as Antony Powell said of Betjeman, 'a whim of iron'; he is never sloppy or sentimental – takes a most unexpected turn into territory where the great essayist seldom trod. But of course he does not stay there; he wished, like all of us in threatening times, to be happy while he might.