Enjpying : Life
Personal Pleasures. By Rose 'Macaulay. (Gollanez. 78. 01.)
LET us be grateful to this author for her delicate agility of style, preserving in a manner so gay,' so melodious and amiable. all the graces of elegant literature. This will be the first and immediate response of any literary person whO opens her new book—a cheerfully impulsive gratitude for the preservation of elegance. I know of no other word which can more fittingly describe the quality of this kind of writing. It has been the peculiar quality of the English essay, from Addison to Land). and .trom Lamb to Miss Macaulay herself ; and it is for this reason that one is justified in speaking of preservation and of happy continuity. Perhaps I may be allowed to misquote. by the alteration of a single word, a welt-known passage from Burke : " A disposition to preserve, and an ability improve, taken together, would he my standard of a writer;-, Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in -004 execution." Heaven knows, we have more than enough ; what is vulgar, and extremely perilous, in the poor, uneoutiN, material which takes up so much of the -time 'of our printOtt and which flows in such a painful regularitY of supply from tlie undiscerning bookshop to the undiseerning reader. No doubt' we owe this degradation,' like so 'many others, to the unfor-,., tunate improvement of 'machinery. It may be, unavoidable.; But the momentary dispersal of these tenebrous ideas will intensify our delight, will give, a lighter wing to reviving hope, when we receive a, new book which is als0 a new and
engaging piece of literature. . .
It is now customary to praise books (when interest or reason persuades the reviewer to praise them) in terms of polite. though incomprehensible. ecstasy. But I am not one of those enviably excitable persons who are so distracted by the joys of reading that you may see them resist for hours a warm and alluring bed, or hear them petulantly refusing their meals, until the perusal is over. Nor would a dogged perusal show a true appreciation of Miss Macaulay's delightful manner. Her style is only to be tasted fully in occasional sipping, as if it were a subtle, fragrant liquor, distilled with incomparable cunning, That is why her book is emphatically a book to possess.; not a book to borrow from the library. It is a per- petual refreshment.
These personal pleasures of Miss 'Macaulay are the varied pleasures of a sensitive and intelligent life, not unflavoui*4 with a salt of irony. Various, indeed, and occasionally
expected, are the pleasant observations. For example, there is the pleasure of -looking at the obtrusively female cow, the pleasure of sniffing Celestial midnight odours from an under ground bakery, the pleasure of looking through the window of an illuminated flower-shop when all the attendant people have gone'liOine. There is the blessed return to private ease .whieli follows the departure of visitors, and there is the int- effable joy, renewed, every night, of recumbency in bed'. There is the pleasure of travelling abroad (accompanied by memories of Sterne . and of Rabelais, we .observe), exploring Hellas with little English ladies and schoolmasters. Then again, there is the rather mitigated pleasure of inspecting those pale brown spotty pictures in the family album, pictures of Tnele -Fred with his farm in the Argentine, of Aunt Elizabeth among tier- corn•fed chickens Settle of the brighter PleaSureS are in reminiscence (and is it not invariably so ?), in memories of childhood. in. Italy, the telescope on the beach, the clang of Italian bells on ChriStinaS morning, the attempted hatching of unresponsive eggs. Church-going,' too, is among the innre sober pleasures, and a hot bath. Perhaps we are not to look for consistency in so agreeable a writer ; we need not be greatly shocked when Miss Macaulay says, on one page, I can be every man's gull, and am infinitely persuadable," and on another, " I believe very little : you will have to tell me something excessively credible before I believe it." What does it matter ? We are taught to regard the individual as, a congeries of irresponsible dissociated units, and all of Miss Macaulay's units are vastly entertaining.
. Reading Miss Macaulay has always been one of my personal pleasures ; dipping into this book will be a personal pleasure (if God pleases) for many years to come ; and Mr. Gollanez has kindly provided me with a bit of pink ribbon for a marker —it is not silk, of course, but it has the appearance of silk. I wish we could persuade Miss Macaulay to carry out her threat and write an unreserved autobiography. It would be a truly enlivening performance. And it so rarely happens that autobiographies arc written by literary people.
. C, K. Vuss.rssiv.
Previous page
