A MARIONETTE SHOW.*
Dors the reader recall a little yellow-paper book of some ten years ago with the device of a seraphic and magnificently pinioned pig on the cover, and the title of If? Endless were the vistas of speculation that it opened up. " If Hall Caine had written Paradise Lost 1" " If Income Tax were optional ?" " If authors wrote their own reviews ? " and many other such brief essays in revolutionary conjecture. We feel glad that Mr. Pearsall Smith will probably never have to review Trivia. He is so abominably contradictory ! He takes so much delight in the refuted egotism of self-depreciation, and would probably contrive to make himself most unpleasant to a very entertaining, wilful, and capricious little book. In form Trivia is a collection of carefully finished little pieces of prose. Each on its page do the marionettes pirouet ; restless, amusing, and always intensely self-conscious. But almost every doll, either for spangles or antics, is worth its little beam of limelight, and as for the back-cloths and " Oriental sets," they are often prodigiously impressive. What matter if he has read Do Quincey ?—The earnest young lady at a dinner-party in " Sanctuaries " speaks :- " She said, ' How small the world is, after all.' I thought of China, of a holy mountain in the West of China, full of legends and sacred trees and demon-haunted caves. It is always enveloped in mountain mists ; and in that thick white air I heard the faint sound of bells, and the muffled footsteps of innumerable pilgrims, and the reiterated mantra Nam-Illo, 0-mi-to-Fo which they murmur as they climb its slopes. . . . She said, ` Life is so complicated!' Climbing inaccessible cliffs of rock and ice, I shut. myself within a Tibetan monastery beyond the Himalayan ramparts. . . . I blow at dawn from the Lamasery roofs, conches and loud discordant trumpets. And wandering through those vast and shadowy halls, I tend the butter lamps of the golden Buddhas and watch the storms that blow across the barren mountains. . . . ' But I do wish you would tell me what you really think ? ' I fled to Africa, into the depths of the dark Ashanti forest. There, in its gloomiest recesses, where the soil is stained with the blood of the negroes He has eaten, dwells that monstrous Deity of human shape and red colour, the great Fetish God, Sasabonsum. I lite Sass- bonsum ; other gods are sometimes moved to pity and forgiveness,
• Trivia. By Logan Pearsall Smith. London: Constable and Co. 14s. Gd. net.)
but to Him this weakness is unknown. He is utterly and abso- lutely implacable, ruthless, unrelenting ; no prayers, no .human sacrifices can ever for one moment mitigate or appease his cold, malignant rage."
In " Mental Vices " and " At the Bank " are two very good " effects." In the first, of that dreadful and Uncle-Joseph-like tendency to platitudinize which is apt to assail one (particularlyin hot weather), and which fills a railway station or a post-office with obviousnesses on the benefits of civilization and man's triumphs over Nature, as if with " a faint rather unpleasant smell." In the second,a queer impression (from which the author surely rightly guesses no one is exempt ?) is very well portrayed. Will, say, that astute official the cashier at the bank not perceive that I am only posing as a Real Person ? Will he be deceived into handing me real sovereigns in a brass shovel ?-
" Now and then, at sight of my name on a visiting-card, or my face photographed in a group among other faces, or when I see a letter addressed in my hand, or oatch the sound of my own voice, I grow shy in the presence of a mysterious Person who is myself, is known by my name, and who apparently does exist. Can it be possible that I am as real as any one else, and that all of us—the cashier and banker at the Bank, the King on his throne—all feel ourselves like ghosts and goblins in this authentic world ? "
If The Holder of the Strings annoys us occasionally—as when his gloom too palpably springs from dyspepsia, or when ho tries to be funny about The Vicar, who should surely by now join The Mother-in-Law in her well-earned repose—there is no question that for the greater part of the performance he has juggled marionettes, lights, and set pieces with the greatest success. If Trivia lay on the hall table, one would not mind how long the others took to dress.
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