'Much What It Had Been in the Past'

“Now and again Max [Beerbohm] interrupted the gentle flow of his thoughts to do a little reading. Not in such a way generally as to change the current of his meditations: like his preoccupations, his literary taste was much what it had been in the past.”

Some would find Beerbohm’s behavior appalling. God forbid one should read for pleasure and reliably find pleasure in the same books across a lifetime. Tastes change, of course, but once a reader has matured – that is, jettisoned any lingering desire to be fashionable – he reads strictly what he wants. Why waste time impressing others? By now you can smelt slag out of silver.

“New books, however, formed only a small part of Max’s reading. So far as fiction was concerned he stuck mainly to his nineteenth-century favourites: Meredith, Henry James, Trollope. To these he responded as freshly and discriminately as ever.”

You can quibble with specifics. Meredith is tough going. I’ll probably continue giving his books a severe letting alone. James is in heavy rotation. Trollope, less so. I find I want to read only his novels that I have already read – The Way We Live Now, especially. Odd.

“Max also projected an essay on Johnson. He had come deeply to revere and delight in his personality; and now thought Boswell’s Life the best book of any kind in the English language.”

A sensible conclusion. Most of life can be found there. A book can’t substitute for life, though Boswell comes close.

“This was partly because it was a biography. Much as Max enjoyed Harry Richmond and The Eustace Diamonds, he liked reading true stories even better: biographies, diaries, memoirs, especially if they were about periods and people that he himself remembered. It did not matter if they were not very good or about undistinguished characters: if they recalled the part for him Max read them with pleasure, and their title-pages and endpapers were scrawled all over with his comments.”

I hate books about or set in the future. Prognostication is tiresome.

[The quoted passages are drawn from pages 363-366 Lord David Cecil’s Max: A Biography (1964).]