How might one describe Max Beerbohm to someone who knows nothing about him? Well, for a start, one might imagine D.H. Lawrence. Pi...cture the shagginess of Lawrence, his thick beard, his rough-cut clothes, his disdain for all the social and physical niceties. Recall his passionateness--his passion, so to say, for passion itself--his darkness, his gloom. Think back to his appeal to the primary instincts, his personal messianism, his refusal to deal with anything smaller than capital "D" Destiny. Do not neglect his humorlessness, his distaste for all that otherwise passed for being civilized, his blood theories and manifold roiling hatreds. Have you, then, D.H. Lawrence firmly in mind? Splendid. Now reverse all of Lawrence's qualities and you will have a fair beginning notion of Max Beerbohm, who, after allowing that Lawrence was a man of "unquestionable genius," felt it necessary to add, "he never realized, don't you know--he never suspected that to be stark, staring mad is somewhat of a handicap to a writer."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise, And the door stood open at our feast,... When there passed us a woman with the West in her eyes, And a man with his back to the East.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full- blown liberty, there is nothing like it in... its uncontrollable strength, just because it is the very essence of mind, and that as its very actuality. Whole continents, Africa and the East, have never had this Idea, and are without it still. The Greeks and Romans, Plato and Aristotle, even the Stoics, did not have it. On the contrary, they saw that it is only by birth or by strength of character, education, or philosophy that the human being is actually free. It was through Christianity that this Idea came into the world. According to Christianity, the individual as such has an infinite value as the object and aim of divine love, destined as mind to live in absolute relationship with God himself, and have God's mind dwelling in him: i.e. man is implicitly destined to supreme freedom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The convent, which belongs to the West as it does to the East, to antiquity as it does to the present time, to Buddhism and Muhamm...adanism as it does to Christianity, is one of the optical devices whereby man gains a glimpse of infinity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Learn what is true, in order to do what is right," is the summing up of the whole duty of man, for all who are unable to satisfy ...their mental hunger with the east wind of authority.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ship me somewhere east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise ...a thirst.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was man who ended the Cold War in case you didn't notice. It wasn't weaponry, or technology, or armies or campaigns. It was jus...t man. Not even Western man either, as it happened, but our sworn enemy in the East, who went into the streets, faced the bullets and the batons and said: we've had enough. It was their emperor, not ours, who had the nerve to mount the rostrum and declare he had no clothes. And the ideologies trailed after these impossible events like condemned prisoners, as ideologies do when they've had their day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not one man is forgiven! East, West, North, South! I bite off their dingbats. Christ rots in my mouth.... I curse the seed of my father that put me here for when I die there'll be no one to say: Oh No! Oh dear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When it is all over and the blood Runs out, do not bury this man... By the far river (where never stood His fathers) flowing to the West, But take him East where life began.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The frontiers are not east or west, north or south; but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be a neighbor, there is an ...unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, farther still, between him and it. Let him build himself a log house with the bark on where he is, fronting IT, and wage there an Old French war for seven or seventy years, with Indians and Rangers, or whatever else may come between him and the reality, and save his scalp if he can.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »