POETS AND POETRY.
A MASTER OF FORM.* I FEEL on reflection that I had no business to seize upon Mr. Pearsall Smith's new Trivia. I am sure that it was not a little shameless to do so and to review it here. But, after all, the exquisite little pieces of prose of which the book consists are all quite as careful in workmanship, quite as elaborately cadenced, as was Miss Amy Lowell's Can Grande's Castle or some play of Synge's, which nobody would grudge me. Here is a collection of the most perfect prose vers de societd that can be imagined.
His reviewers usually do Mr. Pearsall Smith justice in so far as the charm of his content is concerned. His light touch, his knowledge of when to stop, his power of observation, his amusing clashing of those two cymbals—the Commonplace and the Fantastic—all these have been admired, but I wonder if his readers and his critics have ever considered how very difficult they themselves would find it to write a page of Trivia ? I don't think they can have done so, or we should have had rather less of the mildly patronising approval which has been the insufficient reward of his unduly modest muse.
He takes it all so lightly ; philosophy, observation, erudition are all made so easy, so readable—this cannot be serious philosophy, nor beautiful art, nor satire that is meant. But I think we should not take Mr. Pearsall Smith's effort at its superficial value. Should we not rather suppose that, because Mr. Pearsall Smith has so comprehensive and tolerant a view of himself and the universe, that he never has the heart to be pompous, hardly to be serious, he has come back to this lightness ? He has, in fact, re-entered the mood, having traversed many hard and stony miles of abstract thought. Recollect he is the writer of a book on the English language and the anthologist both of Santayana, and of Donne. But to turn to my privilege and to quote. Here is a charming example of his art, the humour thinning to delicate, elusive thought and then materializing again :- " Dove-grey and harmless as a dove, full of piety and innocence and pure thoughts, my Soul brooded unaffectedly within me—I was only half listening to that shrill conversation. And I began to wonder, as more than once in little moments like this of self-esteem I have wondered, whether I might not claim to be something more, after all, than a mere echo or compilation—might not claim, in fact, to possess a definite personality of my own. Might it not be worth while, I now asked myself, to follow up this pleasing conjecture ' • to retire like Descartes from the world and spend the rest of life, as he spent it, trying to prove my own existence.? "
Or here, again, is a kind of epitome of Dangerous Ages :- " The anecdote which had caused the laughter of those young people was not thing to joke about. I expressed my conviction briefly ; but the time-honoured word I made use of seemed unfamiliar to them—they looked at each other and began whispering together. Then one of them asked in a hushed voice, It's what, did you say ? ' I repeated my monosyllable loudly. Again they whispered together, and again their spokes- man came forward. Do you mind telling us how to spell it ? '
I spell it with aWl'I shouted. ! ' "
A rather more obvious, though not less amusing, mood :- " If it didn't all depend on me ; if there was anyone else to decide • the destinies of Europe ; if I wasn't bound to vindicate the Truth on all occasions, and shout down every falsehood, standing alone in arms against a sea of Error, and holding desperately in place the hook from which Truth and Righteousness and Good Taste hang as by a thread and tremble over the unspeakable abyss ; if but for a day or two ;—ib cannot be. I cannot let art and civilization go crashing into chaos. Suppose the skies should fall in while I was napping ; suppose the round world should take its chance to collapse into stardust again ? "
Or here, again, is a cadence of which De Quincey might have • More Trivia.. By Logan Pearsall Smith. London Constable and Co, ISa. nail been proud. But it is put to what a use ! It is called " The Platitude " :— " It's after all the little things in life that really matter 1' I exclaimed. I was as much chagrined as they were flabber- gasted by this involuntary outbreak ; but I have become an expert in that Taoist art of disintegration which Yen Hui described to Confucius as the art of ' sitting and forgetting.' I have learnt to lay aside my personality in awkward moments, to dissolve this self of mine into the All Pervading ; to fall back, in fact, into the universal flux, and sit, as I now sat there, a blameless lump of matter, rolled on according to the heavens' rolling, with rocks and stones and trees."
I hope I have quoted enough for the reader to perceive to what wonderful use Mr. Pearsall Smith puts the 'English
language ? He is one of those writers of whom it is reported that they know pages of the dictionary by heart. I can well believe it.. His flippancy may please or displease, we may admire him as a philosopher or as a satirist, or patronize him as a dealer in articles de Paris, but any of us who know anything of that difficult, maddening, elusive pursuit, the art of writing, must acknowledge him as a master stylist.
wreerams-Eenis.
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