Daily Inspiration Quote by Max Beerbohm

A neat piece of mischief hides inside Beerbohm's tidy prescription. "All fantasy should have a solid base in reality" sounds like craft advice you could stitch onto a sampler, but it’s also a jab at fantasy that wants to float above consequence. The word "should" does the heavy lifting: it’s less an observation than a rule delivered with the faintly raised eyebrow of someone who’s watched audiences fall for nonsense and then defend it as art.

Beerbohm came up in a late-Victorian/Edwardian culture addicted to performance: drawing rooms staged as theaters, politics sold as spectacle, taste policed as morality. In that world, "fantasy" isn’t just dragons and daydreams; it’s the self-mythologizing people do to survive society’s scrutiny. His line suggests that escapism only earns its keep when it smuggles in truth. The "solid base" is the ballast that keeps the hot-air balloon from drifting into pure decoration.

The subtext is almost prosecutorial: if your fantasy has no real anchor - psychological, social, observed - it becomes a con, a pretty lie that asks the audience to do all the believing while the artist does none of the noticing. Beerbohm, famous for caricature and satire, knew that exaggeration lands hardest when it’s tethered to recognizable behavior. Reality is the straight man; fantasy gets to be funny, cruel, or wondrous because the reader can feel the floor under the joke.

It’s also a quiet defense of artifice. He isn’t saying "be realistic". He’s saying: build your unreality like a set on a stage - convincing enough that when the illusion arrives, it hits like a fact.