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Library / Literature & Fiction

The Works of Max Beerbohm

by Max Beerbohm

Pages
about 120
Category
Literature & Fiction
Language
English
Reading time
2.2 h at 250 wpm
Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 73 min at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

--eidôlon amauron: shadowy phantom (phrase used by Homer in The Odyssey to describe the specter Athena sends to comfort Penelope)

--tina phôta megan kai kalon edegmen: I received some great and beautiful light

'Amid all he has here already achieved, full, we may think, of the quiet assurance of what is to come, his attitude is still that of the scholar; he seems still to be saying, before all things, from first to last, "I am utterly purposed that I will not offend."'

Say, shall these things be forgotten In the Row that men call Rotten, Beauty Clare?--Hamilton Aïdé.

'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. But it is also, for me, so far a labour of love that I can quite forget or even revel in its great difficulty. I would love to have lived in those bygone days, when first society was inducted into the mysteries of art and, not losing yet its old and elegant tenue, babbled of blue china and white lilies, of the painter Rossetti and the poet Swinburne. It would be a splendid thing to have seen the tableaux at Cromwell House or to have made my way through the Fancy Fair and bartered all for a cigarette from a shepherdess; to have walked in the Park, straining my eyes for a glimpse of the Jersey Lily; danced the livelong afternoon to the strains of the Manola Valse; clapped holes in my gloves for Connie Gilchrist.

It is a pity that the historians have held back so long. For this period is now so remote from us that much in it is nearly impossible to understand, more than a little must be left in the mists of antiquity that involve it.

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