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Now that the Internet and chronic solvent abuse have cruelly abridged my attention span, I can’t seem to concentrate on anything more demanding than a businesslike text message (“Where u at bro?��) I’ve come to accept that I’ll never read Sein und Zeit in German �� or any other earthly language. I’ll probably never read another novel. I might not read this paragraph.

Which is why Rossetti and His Circle is perfect for me. It’s short, beautiful and practically wordless. It’s also amusing. How come nothing’s amusing anymore? The term itself has a slightly archaic ring, like ‘gallant�� or ‘chaste��. I don’t think anyone’s even tried to be amusing since Dick Cavett went off the air. I watch something like the trailer for the new Mad Max movie and think, ‘Yes, yes, clearly awesome. But where’s the witty insouciance?�� Then again, old George Miller didn’t exactly set out to remake His Girl Friday, did he? So I don’t know what I’m complaining about.

Rossetti and His Circle was first published in 1922. Although it could now almost pass for an avant-garde graphic novel, it must have struck its original audience as bizarrely quaint. In an England that was already reading Joyce and dancing to jazz, here was this dandified aesthete composing a series of cartoons about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an extinct bohemia as remote from Beerbohm’s contemporaries as the beatniks are from us. But instead of doing what most modern graphic novelists would do when presenting some dimly remembered historical period—i.e. dumbing it down—Beerbohm assumes, on the reader’s part, an impossibly granular knowledge of mid-Victorian culture. This, for instance, is a picture called ‘Blue China��:



Thanks to an editor’s note, I can tell you that the dignified old gentleman here represents Thomas Carlyle and the little guy Whistler, while the vases point back to an old quarrel between the Aesthetes and the Ruskinites. So, yeah, if you happen to be an art historian, this scene might be unspeakably hilarious. Otherwise, though, not so much. And yet it still works somehow: you sense a moral seriousness behind the levity, even if the satire is partially occluded. It may be an inside joke, but the delivery is so perfect that you take the brilliance of the punchline on faith.

Not that it really matters, but I’ve never had the slightest interest in Pre-Raphaelite art. All those ethereal maidens drowning in rivers and whatnot appeal to the same vague romanticism that helped install Klimt’s ‘The Kiss�� in a million dorm rooms (right next to the obligatory Robert Doisneau photo). But Beerbohm, a man saturated with irony, manages to make these disreputable painters both interesting and sympathetic. He even gets at the strange nobility of the titular Rossetti, turning that BBW-loving slacker into some kind of hero, a proto-Lebowski �� mute, impassive, often recumbent, but still abiding:



Believe it or not, that picture contains, among other virtues, a sly allusion to S&M. I won’t spoil it for you, though. Just read the book, preferably in a high-quality edition with intelligent endnotes.