Beerbohm's Kipling

 On this day in 1956, Max Beerbohm died, at the age of 83, at the Villa Chiara, a private hospital in Rapallo, the Italian seaside town where he had lived since 1910. He had recently married his former secretary and companion Elisabeth Jungmann, his second wife. Beerbohm was cremated and his ashes interred in the crypt of St Paul's, where his memorial plaque describes him as 'Caricaturist and writer', in that order – which gives me my cue to post another example of his skill as a literary caricaturist (drawing on J.G. Riewald's Beerbohm's Literary Caricatures). This one – one of his best and most amusing – is captioned 'Mr Rudyard Kipling takes a bloomin' day aht, on the blasted 'eath, along with Britannia, 'is gurl.'

  Kipling's work, unsurprisingly, was not at all to Max's taste – but, as he wrote to Holbrook Jackson (author of The Eighteen Nineties), 'I carefully guard myself by granting you that Kipling is a genius. Indeed, even I can't help knowing him to be that. The schoolboy, the bounder, and the brute – these three types have surely never found a more brilliant expression of themselves than in R.K. (Nor, will I further grant, has the nursery-maid.) But as a poet and a seer R.K. seems to me not to exist, except for the purpose of contempt. All the ye-ing and Lord-God-ing and the Law-ing side of him seems to me a very thin and trumpery assumption; and I have always thought it was a sound impulse by which he was driven to put his 'Recessional' into the waste-paper basket, and a great pity that Mrs Kipling fished it out and made him send it to The Times.' A harsh judgment – particularly of 'Recessional' – but true enough of Kipling at his worst. At least Max recognises that there was real genius in him too.