The Works of Max Beerbohm quotes

Brummell’s art. Nor is it even peculiar to dandies. All delicate spirits, to whatever art they turn, even if they turn to no art, assume an oblique attitude towards life. Of all dandies, Mr. Brummell did most steadfastly maintain this attitude.

Like the single-minded artist that he was, he turned full and square towards his art and looked life straight in the face out of the corners of his eyes.

It is not hard to see how, in the effort to give Mr. Brummell his due place in history, Monsieur D’Aurevilly came to grief. It is but strange that he should have fallen into a rather obvious trap.

Already he has won the hearts of the people; but, in the years which, it is to be hoped, still await him, he may accomplish more. Attendons!

He stands alone among European princes⁠—but, as yet, only with the aid of a chair.

“History,” it has been said, “does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.”

Now, there are still some periods with which no historian has grappled, and, strangely enough, the period that most greatly fascinates me is one of them. The labour I set myself is therefore rather Herculean.

We may doubt whether the movement, represented by these ladies, was quite in accord with the dignity and elegance that always should mark the best society.

Any effort to make Beauty compulsory robs Beauty of its chief charm.

But, at the same time, I do believe that this movement, so far as it was informed by a real wish to raise a practical standard of feminine charm for all classes, does not deserve the strictures that have been passed upon it by posterity.

The English beauties were rather angry, especially with the Prince, whom alone they blamed for the vogue of their rivals. History credits His Royal Highness with many notable achievements.

Not the least of these is that he discovered the inhabitants of America.

It will be seen that in this renaissance the keenest students of the exquisite were women. Nevertheless, men were not idle, neither. Since the day of Mr. Brummell and King George, the noble art of self-adornment had fallen partially desuete.

We have our societies for the prevention of this and the promotion of that and the propagation of the other, because there are no individuals among us. Our sexes are already nearly assimilate.

Women are becoming nearly as rare as ladies, and it is only at the music-halls that we are privileged to see strong men.

We are born into a poor, weak age. We are not strong enough to be wicked, and the Nonconformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

Our sexes are already nearly assimilate. Women are becoming nearly as rare as ladies, and it is only at the music-halls that we are privileged to see strong men. We are born into a poor, weak age.

We are not strong enough to be wicked, and the Nonconformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

But this was not so in the days when George was walking by his tutor’s side in the gardens of Kew or of Windsor. London must have been a splendid place in those days—full of life and colour and wrong and revelry.

I know few pictures more pathetic than that of George, then an overgrown boy of fourteen, tearing the childish frill from around his neck and crying to one of the Royal servants, “See how they treat me!”

Childhood has always seemed to me the tragic period of life.

To be subject to the most odious espionage at the one age when you never dream of doing wrong, to be deceived by your parents, thwarted of your smallest wish, oppressed by the terrors of manhood and of the world to come, and to believe, …

She died from the effects of a chill caught when she was trying vainly to force a way to her husband’s coronation. Unhappy woman! Our sympathy for her is not misgiven.

Fate wrote her a most tremendous tragedy, and she played it in tights.

Let us pity her, but not forget to pity her husband, the King, also.

That he should have, in his old age, suddenly abandoned his career of vigorous enjoyment is, I confess, rather surprising. The Royal voluptuary generally remains young to the last. No one ever tires of pleasure.

It is the pursuit of pleasure, the trouble to grasp it, that makes us old.

Only the soldiers who enter Capua with wounded feet leave it demoralised. And yet George, who never had to wait or fight for a pleasure, fell enervate long before his death.

Had his father permitted George to fight at Waterloo, and had some fatal bullet pierced the padding of that splendid breast, I should have been really annoyed, and this essay would never have been written.

Sudden death mars the unity of an admirable life.

Natural decline, tapering to tranquillity, is its proper end. As a man’s life begins, faintly, and gives no token of childhood’s intensity and the expansion of youth and the perfection of manhood, so it should also end, faintly.

The good that he had done died with him. The refinement he had laid upon vulgarity fell away, like enamel from withered cheeks. It was only George himself who had made the sham endure.

The Victorian era came soon, and the angels rushed in and drove the nymphs away and hung the land with reps.

I have often wondered whether it was with a feeling that his influence would be no more than lifelong, that George allowed Carlton House, that dear structure, the very work of his life and symbol of his being, to be rased.

… elaborate era can man, by the tangled accrescency of his own pleasures and emotions, reach that refinement which is his highest excellence, and by making himself, so to say, independent of Nature, come nearest to God, so only in an elaborate era is woman perfect.

Artifice is the strength of the world, and in that same mask of paint and powder, shadowed with vermeil tinct and most trimly pencilled, is woman’s strength.

For see! We need not look so far back to see woman under the direct influence of Nature.

Now and again, as one of the frequent chairs glided past me, I wondered if its shadowy freight were the ghost of poor Romeo. I felt sure that the traditional account of his début was mainly correct. How could it, indeed, be false?

Tradition is always a safer guide to truth than is the tale of one man.

I might amuse myself here, in Bath, by verifying my notion of the début or proving it false.

They are quite wrong; Mr. Coates was a very good man. He never made a penny out of his performances; he even lost many hundred pounds. Moreover, as his speeches before the curtain and his letters to the papers show, he took himself quite seriously.

Only the insane take themselves quite seriously.

It was the unkindness of his love that maddened him. But he lived to be the lightest-hearted of lunatics and caused great amusement for many years.

He was so fantastic an animal that Oblivion were indeed amiss.

If no more, he was a great Fool. In any case, it would be fun to have seen him.

among them walked a young lady, the charm of whose figure was ill concealed by the neat waterproof that overspread her evening dress. Some day it may be … but I anticipate. These things will be but the cosy accompaniment of my days.

For I shall contemplate the world.

I shall look forth from my window, the laburnum and the mountain-ash becoming mere silhouettes in the foreground of my vision. I shall look forth and, in nay remoteness, appreciate the distant pageant of the world.

Already I feel myself to be a trifle outmoded. I belong to the Beardsley period. Younger men, with months of activity before them, with fresher schemes and notions, with newer enthusiasm, have pressed forward since then. Cedo junioribus. Indeed, I stand aside with no regret.

For to be outmoded is to be a classic, if one has written well.

I have acceded to the hierarchy of good scribes and rather like my niche.