The Lies of Art Max Beerbohm's Parody and Caricature

and in the former he detects the uneasy animus that Max so charmingly and deliberately aroused. His elegant, non-partisan sniping, however, could disguise either esteem or disdain, or both as in the formidable presences of Wilde, Shaw, Ibsen. Behind the percipient cruelty of his caricatures, many of friends, there is a schoolboy's impulse to deflate and deface, as he habitually did the photographs in his books. And in the unexcellable sophistication of his parodies -- which now require the careful situating and anatomizing that Felstiner provides --