Speed

Speed - Max Beerbohm

In this essay "Speed", Max Beerbohm narrates the various incidents which affected his life – as a consequence of speed, and its effect in the day to day affairs of the common man. While exploring the aspects of speed in its context, he pleads for a humane outlook towards life.

Beerbohm cites the poem of William Ernest Henley, whose light of fame shone fiercely in the 1890s. in the very early days of motoring, young Mr.Alfred Harmsworth, who was one of his great admirers, took him out for a long drive in to the country. The Mercedes was for him a glorious revelation, and his muse vibrantly responded, prompting him to write the fine poem which he author has used as an epigraph to the essay.

In those days, cars were not the things they are now. They were wide open to the elements, and wind-screens were unknown and in fine dry weather, air rushed in to the lungs with the utmost violence.

According to Beerbohm, by the discovery of the Mercedes, our portion in Time has been very appreciably magnified. Henley had made a god of literature, the British Empire, and the Tory party. And here was a new god for him – speed. Because, he believed in the idea of Progress.

In a sense, mankind has always loved speed. Speed has always been acknowledged to be great fun. The Marathon race was a very popular institution. So were the Roman chariot races. Coaches seem, indeed, to have been a godsend to all novelists and essayists. There was magic in them. They are not romantic to us alone: they were so to their contemporaries.

It would seem that in machinery there is for most of us something non-conductive of emotion. A man on a horse, a man sailing a boat in a great gale, strikes a chord in us and is a promising subject for literary art. But the man in the aeroplane or in the motor-boat or in the motor-car is somehow less inspiring.

Mental speed has always commanded admiration, like speed of limb. Father Newman wrote his lovely Apologia in eight weeks, and Samuel Johnson his fine Rasselas in the evenings of one week. Edward Gibbon wrote the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in six months, and Christopher Wren designed St.Paul’s Cathedral in twenty-five minutes. The rapidity of transport that is now at our disposal had duly accelerated the pace at which our brains work. The author has an impression that most people do talk, and eat, much faster than when he was young. Most of the people he happens to meet now are employed somewhere, and after luncheon must hurry back to the places they came from. Bu the author would rather sigh for strolling home, well-satisfied, along the uncrowded pavements and across the quite safe roads.

Roads are a painful subject nowadays. They are places for motorists only. A motorist friend of the author was complaining to him bitterly about the behaviour of pedestrians who were abominably careless and stupid. The author tried to appeal to reason. He says, “After all, we were on the roads for many many centuries before you came along in your splendid car. And remember, it isn’t we that are threatening to kill you. It is you that are threatening to kill us.

When the children of this generation, brought up in fear, shall have become adults, what sort of nervous ailments will their progeny have, one wonders? Very old people and very young people form the majority of those who are annually slaughtered upon our roads.

Let us set a good example to posterity. Let us demand that a driver convixted of dangerous driving gets a more severe punishment. The main root of the mischief is that great fetish of ours, Speed. Some of the friends of the author argue

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