Max Beerbohm
Max Beerbohm
Sir Henry Maximilian "Max" Beerbohmwas an English essayist, parodist, and caricaturist. He first became known in the 1890s as a dandy and a humorist. He was the drama critic for the Saturday Review from 1898 until 1910, when he relocated to Rapallo, Italy. In his later years he was popular for his occasional radio broadcasts. Among his best-known works is his only novel, Zuleika Dobson, published in 1911. His caricatures, drawn usually in pen or pencil with muted watercolour tinting,...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionActor
Date of Birth24 August 1872
You will think me lamentably crude: my experience of life has been drawn from life itself
He cannot see beyond his own nose. Even the fingers he outstretches from it to the world are (as I shall suggest) often invisible to him.
A swear-word in a rustic slum / A simple swear-word is to some, / To Masefield something more.
O the disgrace of it! - / The scandal, the incredible come-down!
It is doubtful whether the people of southern England have even yet realized how much introspection there is going on all the time in the Five Towns.
To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.
Only the insane take themselves seriously.
Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs.
But to die of laughter--this, too, seems to me a great euthanasia.
There is always something rather absurd about the past
There is much to be said for failure. It is more interesting than success.
Few, as I have said, are the humorists who can induce this state. To master and dissolve us, to give us the joy of being worn down and tired out with laughter, is a success to be won by no man save in virtue of a rare staying-power. Laughter becomes extreme only if it be consecutive. There must be no pauses for recovery. Touch-and-go humour, however happy, is not enough. The jester must be able to grapple his theme and hang on to it, twisting it this way and that, and making it yield magically all manner of strange and precious things.
Of course we all know that Morris was a wonderful all-round man, but the act of walking round him has always tired me.
There is laughter that goes so far as to lose all touch with its motive, and to exist only, grossly, in itself. This is laughter at its best. A man to whom such laughter has often been granted may happen to die in a work-house. No matter. I will not admit that he has failed in life. Another man, who has never laughed thus, may be buried in Westminster Abbey, leaving more than a million pounds overhead. What then? I regard him as a failure.