for everything: . . . it would be a kind of Hell, surely, a world in which everything could be at once explained, shown to be obvious and useful. I am sated with Lesson and Allegory, weary of monitory ants, industrious bees, and preaching animals. . . . I hate Ibsen and problem plays and the Supernatural and Switzerland and Adultery."

...

It is not that he is blind to realities. "Too often, among the thoughts in the loveliest heads, we come on nests of woolly caterpillars."

In spite of being able to assume an Asiatic detachment in Oxford Street the sight of a neatly fitted suit-case in a shop window is enough to chain him once more to the wheel of existence and envelope him again in the mists of illusion.

“And what are you doing now?" his school contemporaries ask. . . . And the answer is important.

"It somehow seemed enough, just to be alive in the Spring, with the young green of the trees, the smell of smoke in the sunshine; I loved the old shops and books, the uproar darkening and brightening in the shabby daylight. Just a run of good-looking faces-and I was always looking for faces-would keep me amused . . . and anyhow, soon, so soon (in only seven million years or thereabouts, the Encyclopædia said), this Earth would grow cold, all human activities end, and the last wretched mortals freeze to death in the dim rays of the dying Sun." It is this happy knack of linking up the trivial with the colossal, the transient with the eternal, that causes us to readjust our values after reading Pearsall Smith. His criticism of Anglican Church Services is shrewd and to the point: "We had gathered together to pay our duty to a highly respected Anglican First Cause-undemonstrative, gentlemanly, and conscien

tious-whom, without loss of self-respect, we could decorously praise."

A ruthless critic of others he is not blind to the possibility that others may find in him faults which he cannot see.

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'But there are certain people I simply cannot stand. A dreariness and sense of death comes over me when I meet them--I really find it difficult to breathe when they are in the room, as if they had pumped all the air out of it. Wouldn't it be dreadful to produce that effect on people! But they never seem to be aware of it. I remember once meeting a famous Bore; I really must tell you about it, it shows the unbelievable obtuseness of such people.' I told this and another story or two with great gusto, and talked on of my experiences and sensations, till suddenly I noticed, in the appearance of my charming neighbour, something-a slightly glazed look in her eyes, a just perceptible irregularity in her breathing— which turned that occasion for me into a kind of Nightmare.'

A man who is as human as that is worth his weight in rubies. He has found out many secrets worth knowing, not the least important of which is contained in Inconstancy.

"The rose that one wears and throws away, the friend one forgets, the music that passes-out of the well-known transitoriness of mortal things I have made myself a maxim or precept to the effect that it is foolish to look for one face, or to listen long for one voice, in a world that is, after all, as I know, full of enchanting voices. But all the same, I can never quite forget the enthusiasm with which, as a boy, I read the praises of Constancy and True Love, and the unchanged Northern Star."

When all else fails, wine, friendship, eating, making love, the consciousness of virtue, and we find ourselves lamenting our lost youth, we may turn to Trivia and find the true consolation of life. "Reading, the nice and subtle happiness of reading. This was enough, this joy not dulled by Age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene, lifelong intoxication."

That is the whole secret of Trivia's success it is full of intoxications.

"I should be all right . . ." he writes. "If it weren't for these sudden visitations of Happiness, these downpourings of Heaven's blue, little invasions of Paradise, or waftings to the Happy Islands, or whatever you may call these disconcerting Moments, I should be like everybody else, and as blameless a ratepayer as any in our Row."

That is just the point he might be all right, but we should have had no Trivia: it is just because he has had the sense to realise the importance of the fleeting vision and refused to be "bluffed " into believing in the ordinary man's sense of values that he has been able to scatter his pearls of wisdom over these all too brief pages.

Trivia not only deserves prominence, it deserves permanence. The few who care most passionately for its clear-sightedness, its warm, rich humour, its profound truth, its wholesale destruction of shams, and its touches of gorgeous colour and subtle music, will not lightly allow it to pass unrecognised. There is no book quite like it.

III

S

IR ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH'S reputation as a literary critic rests on three books, Studies

in Literature, Shakespeare's Workmanship, and On the Art of Writing. In all these he has brought something quite fresh into the academic world to which he now belongs, an atmosphere that one associates with Hazlitt and Frank Harris, and certainly not with University Dons; in other words, he approaches literature as a man of the world who realises how near it all is to actual life, and how far removed from codified formulæ or the rarefied atmosphere of the study.

In Studies in Literature, which is a collection of familiar discourses, and only a prelude to sterner work, he leads off with an essay on The Commerce of Thought which serves as an excellent index of the richness of his imagination. Why does not some one, he asks, write a History of Trade-Routes ?

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'By what caravan tracks, through what depots, did the great slave traffic wind up out of Africa and reach the mart at Constantinople? What sort of men worked goods down the Rhone valley; and, if by water, by what contrivances? . . . How did the Crusaders handle transport and commissariat?... Who planted the vineyards of Bordeaux, Madeira, the Rhine-land, and from what stocks?... Why and how did England and Flanders come to supply Europe, the one with wool, the other with fine linen and naperies ?

These and like questions are of the first importance, if you would understand history, if you would take hold, in imagination, of the human motives which make history. ." Roughly, he says, it is love and hunger that drive man to make wars and to migrate, though hundreds of thousands of men have left home and country for the sake of learning. Trade disputes, money-these are the causes of wars. Let your imagination play on these old trade-routes and you will wonderfully seize the romance of history. "You will see... dotted ships on wide seas, crawling trains of emigrant wagons, pioneers, tribes on the trek, . . . families loading their camels with figs and dates for Smyrna, . . . olive-gatherers, long trains of African porters, desert caravans, dahabeeyahs pushing up the Nile, puffs of smoke where the expresses run across Siberia, Canada, or northward from Cape Town, Greenland whalers, trappers around Hudson's Bay."

It is easy to see, in the light of this extract, the spirit of the romantic novelist, the passionate enthusiast of far-off days, the devotee of an ever-living history hard at work to rouse his pupils to a like interest. His fancy plays lightning-like on all sorts of obscure corners, revealing through the dust the underlying glory. From the dissemination of plants ("take some seed that has lodged on his long tramp northward in the boot-sole of a common soldier in Vespasian's legion. The boot reaches Dover, plods on, wears out, is cast by the way, rots in a ditch. From it, next spring, Britain has gained a new flower ") he passes to the wanderings, alightings, and fertilising of man's thought.

"Some one copies down a little poem on reed paper, on the back of a washing bill: the paper goes to wrap a mummy; long centuries pass; a tomb is laid bare