" I MYSELF "
In Defence of Pink. By Robert Lynd. (Dent. 6s.)
Wrrx his usual leisured speculativeness, Mr. Lynd strolls round a variety of objects and ideas, such as pinkness, umbrellas, aunts, escape, railway stations, genius, humming- birds, and so on, politely and curiously fingers them, sets them down again in a different position, usually the other way up, and strolls on to the next. He is tolerantly detached, he debunks without the debunker's passion, he remains an easy gentleman, disagreeing all round (for room disagreement nearly all these essays sprout) with a kind of sub-acid geniality that sometimes recalls Sidney Smith's. He praises pink modera- tion because it is scorned by the inunoderates ; he proves that children and the nursery rhymes they enjoy are sadistically cruel, to get even with a solemn psycho-analyst ; he defends the purity of language used by bargees and fishwives ; he abuse some of it for being so ; he even praises those cockshies shows that all literature is escapig,_t_o_confound, those who ' of the human race, aunts. He accepts, in fact, nothing at its usual valuation. In his light and negligent hands, things take on a kind of comic skew ; he views them with the sardonic tolerance of one who, liking the human race a good deal, knows that it never has been, and never will be, up to much. _ Everything it has undertaken has been a failure. To the question " Is education a failure ? " he replies : " Of course it is. No one has betrayed man's hopes to anything like the same extent as the schoolmaster. No one, that is, exsxpt the clergyman, the doctor, the statesman, the merchant, the manu- facturer, the working-man, the psychologist, the free-thinker, the inventor, and a number of other people whose names cannot be given since they would fill a book. . . . Human beings, those supreme devisers of failure, can be guaranteed to make a failure of a ay gift."
Like Horace Walpole, Mr. Lynd might say " I have seen the vanity of everything that pretended to be serious." Among the absurd pronouncements of other people, among the umbrellas, animals, courteous bargees, lunatics, charming au-its, spiders in the bathroom, hairpin bends in the Rockies, there lounges, blandly inquiring into, amiably protesting against, neatly puncturing, the pompous or unthinking dicta of humankind, the agreeable and familiar figure of " I myself," strolling slippered, cynical and meditative through a crazy world.
" One of the wisest men in Montreal always dangerous. Never trust a bear, him unhesitatingly that I never would."
I do. If you do, you You either smile at that or you do not.
said to me : ' Bears are Mr. Lynd.' I promised
will enjoy these commentaries. I do. ROSE MACAULAY.
Previous page
