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II

TRIVIA

AVING read Mr Logan Pearsall Smith's most respectable and informative book on

the English Language in The Home University Library you will be totally unprepared for Trivia, but the first note in this amazingly frank book will key you up to the proper atmosphere required for appreciation of his philosophy.

"These pieces of moral prose," he writes, "have been written, dear Reader, by a large Carnivorous Mammal, belonging to that sub-order of the Animal Kingdom which includes also the Orang-outang, the tusked Gorilla, the Baboon with his bright blue and scarlet bottom, and the gentle Chimpanzee." And what is it that we are to learn from this large carnivorous mammal? Like a true son of the twentieth century he shows us the futility of the Eastern proverb which suggests that we should "go to the ant, thou sluggard."

"I have sought instruction from the Bees, and tried to appropriate to myself the old industrious lesson. And yet, hang it all, who by rights should be the teacher and who the learners? For those peevish, over-toiled, utilitarian insects, was there no lesson to be derived from the spectacle of Me? Gazing out at me with myriad eyes from their joyless factories, might they not learn at last-might I not finally teach them--a wise and more generous-hearted way to improve the shining hours?"

In other words, doesn't our Western civilisation need to be taught to seek a point of rest, not to be for ever patting itself on the back on account of its feverish energy? There are lessons to be learnt from the lilies of the field, which toil not, neither do they spin.

For instance, Mr Pearsall Smith in slack, reflective mood can absorb beauty without wishing to put it to a utilitarian use. "I had not remembered the glory of the wheat, nor imagined in my reading that

there could be anything so rich, so prodigal, so reckless, as this opulence of ruddy gold."

It is not to be expected that such an attitude could win approval from his elders.

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They sit there for ever on the dim horizon of my mind, that Stonehenge circle of elderly, disapproving Faces-Faces of the Uncles and Schoolmasters and Tutors who frowned on my youth. In the bright centre and sunlight I leap, I caper, I dance my dance; but when I look up, I see they are not deceived. For nothing ever placates them, nothing ever moves to a look of approval that ring of bleak, old, contemptuous faces."

His hatred of all that these Stonehenge Faces stand for can be judged by his note In Church. "For the pen,' said the Vicar; and in the sententious pause that followed, I felt that I would offer any gifts of gold to avert or postpone the solemn, inevitable, and yet, as it seemed to me, perfectly appalling statement that The pen is mightier than the sword."" And again :

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'Yes,' said Sir Thomas, speaking of a modern novel, it certainly does seem strange; but the novelist was right. Such things do happen.'

"But, my dear sir," I burst out, in my rudest manner, 'think what life is—just think what really

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happens! Why, people suddenly swell up and turn dark purple; they hang themselves on meat-hooks : they are drowned in horse-ponds, are run over by butchers' carts, and are burnt alive and cooked like mutton chops.""

"When," he writes later, " in modern books . . . I read about the Needs of the Age, its Dismays, Doubts, and Spiritual Agonies, I feel an impulse to go out and comfort it, wipe away its tears, still its cries, and speak earnest words of Consolation to it . . . but how can one toil at the great task with this hurry and tumult of birds just outside the open window? I hear the Thrush, and the Blackbird, that romantic liar; then the delicate cadence, the wiry descending scale of the Willow-wren, or the Blackcap's stave of mellow music. Why should all the birds of the air conspire against me? My concern is with the sad Human Species, with lapsed and erroneous Humanity, not with that inconsiderate, wandering, featherheaded race." But he is at his best in such a note as Vertigo: "No, I don't like it; I can't approve of it; I have always thought it most regrettable that serious and ethical Thinkers like ourselves should go scuttling through space in this undignified manner. Is it seemly that I, at my age, should be hurled with my books and dictionaries and bedclothes and hotwater bottle, across the sky at the unthinkable rate of nineteen miles a second? As I say, I don't at all like it. This universe of Copernican whirligigs makes me a little giddy. That God should spend His eternity—which might be so much better employedin spinning endless Solar Systems, and skylarking, like a great child, with tops and teetotums-is not this a serious scandal? I wonder what all our circumgyrating Monotheists really do think of it?"

It is pleasant, now and again, to come across a man who is not so encrusted with tradition that he must needs take everything for granted, a man, too, of no little wit and humour, who can see clearly and face every issue without flinching, a philosopher who is so much at the mercy of ludicrous images that he can see nothing in front seats, episcopal, judicial, parliamentary benches, but things for serious, middle-aged ambition to sit on. It is his whimsical sense of the incongruous that so endears him to us, his catching and nailing down those sweet fleeting impressions which seize upon us when our senses for a moment are alive. "I who move and breathe and place one foot before the other, who watch the moon wax and wane, and put off answering letters, where shall I find the bliss which dreams and blackbirds' voices promise, of which the waves whisper, and handorgans in streets near Paddington faintly ring? "

Though he frequently imagines himself an immense thought-bubble, a floating, diaphanous, opal-tinted dream, he is human enough to peer in through windows left open on hot nights and look in at dinnerparties, through lace curtains and window-flowers, at the silver, the women's shoulders, the shimmer of their jewels, and the divine attitudes of their heads as they lean and listen, imagining extraordinary intrigues and unheard-of wines and passions. He is human enough to hate social success. "The servant gave me my coat and hat, and in a glow of selfsatisfaction I walked out into the night. A delightful evening,' I reflected, the nicest kind of people. What I said about finance and French philosophy impressed them; and how they laughed when I imitated a pig squeaking.' But soon after : "God, it's awful," I muttered, "I wish I were dead."

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Though that particular feeling must be common to all of us who feel or think at all, I can remember no occasion when any one has expressed it before either in writing or in speech. That is one of the reasons why Trivia is the kind of book one will neither forget nor part with. It is just us at our freshest, most childlike, most individual, most human self-prattling, securing to all eternity the thoughts that matter, which are so precious and yet so evanescent that we never actually formulate them in speech or on paper.

...

It is a grand thing to be able to project oneself from one's wretched surroundings, as Mr. Pearsall Smith always seems able to do: "As I sat inside that crowded 'bus, so sad, so incredible and sordid seemed the fat face of the woman opposite me, that I thought of Kilimanjaro . . . the grassy slopes and green Arcadian realms of negro kings from which its great cone rises, the immense, dim, elephant-haunted forests which clothe its flanks, and above, the white dome of snow. Here we have the secret of him the author of these inconsequent notes is a poet in disguise: he could sit all day by a waterfall reading The Faerie Queene, or listen all day to the rain on the roof: instead of liberty, fraternity, and equality he preaches the golden gospel of Dignity, Stateliness, and Leisure, and the greatest of these is Leisure. He is one of those lucky men who "can hardly post a letter without marvelling at the excellence and accuracy of the postal system": like Dorothy Richardson he is definitely and literally in love with life, and is never able to cease from bursting into shouts of applause at things which most men regard with the utmost complacence. As a frame of mind the following has much to commend it: “I am sometimes afraid of finding that there is a moral