Daily Dose

From Letters of Max Beerbohm, 1892 -- 1956, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis

ONLY ONE

"There seems to me to be only one good method of narrative -- Homer's and Thackeray's method, and Tolstoi's, and Tom's, Dick's, Chaucer's, Maupassant's, and Harry's; all of them very different men spiritually, and employing the method in very different ways, but not imagining that a new method is needful, or couldn't be unhelpful, and wouldn't certainly play the deuce and all, in its own time, and might by dint of various alterations and improvements become a sure and shining instrument in the hands of the Hereafter."

From a letter to Virginia Woolf, dated Villino Chiaro, 30. December, 1927