BOOKS AND WRITERS
LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH died in March, 1946, some months beyond the age of eighty, and this death left one with the sense of having lost not a friend only, but a stimulus and an example. The publication after five years of a first selection of his private letters' now provides an opportunity for reflecting on the place and future influence of this long-lived American expatriate in the world of English letters.
* * * * It is said that you may judge a writer's character and predilections by his favourite adjectives. " Fastidious " was one often on Logan's lips and pen, and it precisely applied to the more scholarly areas of his mind: "To set a chime of words ringing in the thoughts of a few fastidious people is the only thing worth living for," he wrote in old age to a younger friend, and there is no hint of preciosity in this sincere statement. An unremitting perfectionist, Logan set himself, and anyone he thought worthy of it, a literary standard that was remorselessly and disdainfully high. He practised and preached the " labour of the file," the need for work and more work on each sentence, and for the weighing up and scrupulous insertion of every word one used. The letter which Mr. John Russell prints as the final item of his admirably edited book opens with a rebuke to Logan's old friend Miss Rose Macaulay for having replaced the accents on the word " debacle." " Debacle (without accents)," he chides her, " was becoming, had become, like the best half of out vocabulary, a decent English word, naturalised and thoroughly at home (see N.E.D.) until some half-baked pedant tried to drive it back to France by accenting it as French." Who now so vigilantly guards the passes of the King's English ? Who now pursues the studious, serious life of application to writing English which men like Logan Pearsall Smith and Robert Bridges led ? For though strangers might be mystified by his facetiousness, Logan was invari- ably serious about what he considered important. And he considered the appreciation and writing of good English most important of all.
* * * * Deprived of his verbal counsel, we can turn, as posterity will surely turn, for advice and inspiration to his essays, above all perhaps to the brilliant Prospects of Literature (first printed in 1927 in that excellent series of the day, The Hogan!' Essays) and to the urbane volume of Reperusals and Recollections in which in 1936 he repub- lished polished versions of earlier prefaces and essays, including the supremely good introduction to his anthology of Jeremy Taylor. In both these books we find again all Logan's best qualities—his erudi- tion, his detachment, his French conception of fame (not to be con- fused with success, still less with publicity) as the legitimate, indeed necessary, goal for writers to set themselves. We find, too, all his scorn for slovenly work, and his contempt for self-advertisement, commercialism and every other form of literary vulgarity. To these essays we are now enabled to add the new volume of his letters, for a number of these (notably a lengthy survey of historians, sent as answer to his sister Mrs. Berenson, who had written in 1940, from Italy, to ask what books she should read, and another to a young American aspirant to authorship, aged seventeen) are of real importance, while all of them are alive and none could have been written by anybody else. Mr. John. Russell's introductory sketch of the writer of the letters himself is deft, judicious and affectionate, although he knew bins only in his latter and declining years. His evocative sketch and the selections it neatly prefaces should do much to counteract the sad effects of a recent volume of denigratory Recollections of Logan. Pearsall Smith by Mr. Robert Gathorne- Hardy,f an intimate- of seventeen years' standing, who elected to expose in cruel detail the several ills his old friend's flesh was heir to.
The published works of Logan Pearsall Smith are not, alas, as numerous as we could wish, but they are all of them consistent in
• A Portrait of Logan Pearsall Smith, Drawn from his Letters and Diaries. Selected and introduced by John Russell.- (The Dropmore Press.
£2 2s.) (Constable. 18s.)
tone. Even his earliest volume, a collection of short stories called The Youth of Parnassus—stiff, wan water-colours of the Oxford scene at the close of the last century—shadows forth certain characteristics of Logan's later writings, including the special form of humour—hitherto, I believe, unrecorded in English literature— which informs the famous sets of aphorisms and thoughts at which he chiselled away all his life long, and the final versions of which, All Trivia, appeared shortly before his death. The choice of Sir Henry Wotton as the subject for a scholarly biography, preceding a careful selection of Wotton's letters, was also characteristic, for, as Logan remarks at the end of this study (which appeared in two volumes in 1907), that Jacobean diplomat belonged to the " bookish, contemplative class of authors " who combined " pensiveness and wit," " acute observation and aloofness from the world," and it was these authors, amongst whom he listed Cowley, Marvell, Gray, Cowper, Charles Lamb and Edward FitzGerald, that Logan most deeply admired. In his most popular essay, On Reading Shake- speare, and in the autobiographical Unforgotten Years Logan gave his native humour full rein ; in the first case it may be thought rather too much rein. In his latest work, Milton and his Modern Critics, he enjoyed himself castigating "the Cambridge school" of literary critics, whose alleged views on art he regarded as heretical.
* * * * Logan Pearsall Smith was born a Quaker in Philadelphia, from which faith and city he freed himself as soon as he was able. It is plausible to suppose that to his early grounding in the Bible he owed his sense of language, as well as his fondness for the style and sentiments of the devotional writings of the great seventeenth- century English.divines. Horn his American upbringing he retained a slight and quite harmless romanticism for certain aspects of English life--for country-houses with lawns and cedar trees before them, for " armigerous " families, baronets and the " wickedness and worldliness of London." " Chelsea shines for me through a golden glow," he wrote from Bryn Mawr in 1922, during his one and only return visit to his native land. Indeed the secluded, intellectual, art- loving, somewhat dilettante, circle of cultivated persons who then formed his Chelsea shines for us, too, though now through the golden glow of time. For Logan was exceptionally fortunate in his friends and in the period in which helived. Reading his letters you feel this again and again: for through all the fits of melancholia, or through the cascade of euphorian and preposterous practical jokes he loved concocting, we see glimpse after glimpse of a life that seems to us now to have been lived under ideal circumstances.
" I ans.not," we read in the closing pages of Un forgotten Years, " one of those elderly sycophants and time-servers who pretend to like the young. I dislike them in many ways and disapprove of them in more." What he mostly held against them was that " they can't write ": yet when he found one of them who seemed sincerely anxious to learn to do so, Logan would take any amount of pains, issuing exhortations against the evils of " premature success " and " writing for remuneration," urging him to read the dictionary daily and to keep a notebook, telling him what else he should read, and, at times, what as well as how he should write. " The pursuit of perfection," he has written, "is a kind of vocation, and no alternative must exist. . . . When people commercialise their gifts, or make them stepping-stones to honour and success, I wish them all prosperity, but I do not find my life a blank when I am deprived of their society." Today there are possibly even more commercial traps and temptations for young authors than when Logan wrote these sentences in 1938, or first made a similar point in The Prospects of Literature in 1927. But since there must undoubtedly be standing upon some present threshold one or two young writers intent on the pursuit of perfection, where can they find more generous• encouragement or shrewder guidance than in the study of the Trivia., the essays and the newly published letters
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