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
Men of genius are so few that they ought to atone for their fewness by being at any rate ubiquitous.
Men prominent in life are mostly hard to converse with. They lack small-talk, and at the same time one doesn't like to confront them with their own great themes.
I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect, either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.
It seems to be a law of nature that no man, unless he has some obvious physical deformity, ever is loth to sit for his portrait.
Great men are but life-sized. Most of them, indeed, are rather short.
Zuleika, on a desert island, would have spent most of her time in looking for a man's footprint.
Men of genius are not quick judges of character. Deep thinking and high imagining blunt that trivial instinct by which you and I size people up.
The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.
Every one, even the richest and most munificent of men, pays much by cheque more light-heartedly than he pays little in specie.
Women who love the same man have a kind of bitter freemasonry.
Men of genius are not quick judges of character.
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.
Reverence is a good thing, and part of its value is that the more we revere a man, the more sharply are we struck by anything in him (and there is always much) that is incongruous with his greatness.