i6 
Land & Water 
May 23, 19 1 8 
Life and Letters Qj J. C Squire 
Insi<le a Man's Head 
THESli pieces of moral prose liave 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 (iorilla, the Baboon with his bright 
blue and scarlet bottom, and the gentle Chimpanzee." I 
hasten to draw the reader's attention to the quotation 
marks and to disclaim these humiliating relationships. The 
passage is the Preface of Mr. Logan Pearsall Smitli's book 
Trivia, newly published by Constable at 4s. 6d. net. 
Mr. Pearsall Smith's book will be generally described as a 
book of prose-poems. The t(>rm has unfortunate associa- 
tions. It is usually applied to compositions in which some 
useless dilettante has said nothing at all in su]ierficially 
pretty language. I therefore eschew it, and content myself 
with explaining that the work contains a hundred pieces, 
whose length varies from fifty to a thousand words, some of 
which are certainly poems' in prose, and all of which are 
exquisitely written, but which have the unusual charac- 
teristic of invariably expressing soinething at first hand. 
They are not easy to define, because nothing else quite like 
them exists. The author modestly refers to them as 
"thoughts (if 1 may call them so)," and all of them have a 
central idea. But their value is f3r from being confined to 
their interest as meditations. They are prose of a quality 
rare in any age ; they are perfectly polished, yet betray no 
sign of the pumice-stone or file ; they are most musical 
when read aloud ; they are decorated with an abundance of 
delicate pictures. Oueerly meditating upon the state of his 
own mind, his relations with men and women, nature and 
the Deity, Mr. Pearsall Smith ransacks the Cosmos for 
images : all the quaint and beautifur names of history and 
geography, all shapely and misshapen beasts, birds and 
fishes, sun, moon, stars, and the infinite darkness that con- 
tains them all, snow, rain, fog, the refinements of an opulent 
civilisation, the flamboyant trappings of militant barbarism, 
they are all made tlie servants of a mind and style which 
bridge the gulf between Watteau and Jeremy Taylor. The 
finest and most sustained piece of prose in the book — "The 
Starrj' Heaven" — is too long to quote ; but one may illus- 
trate the grace of his style with a shorter one — " Happiness" : 
Cricketers on village greens, haymakers in the evening 
sunshine, small boats that sail before the wind — all these 
create in one the illusion of Happiness, as if a land of cloud- 
less pleasure, a piece of the old Golden World, were liidden, 
not {as poets have imagined) in far seas or beyond inacces- 
sible mountains, but here close at liand, if one could find it, 
in some undisco\ered valley, /'ertain grassy lanes seem 
to lead between the meadows thither ; tlie wild pigeons 
talk of it behind the woods. 
That gives his natural background ; he drops into it, seri- 
ously or whimsically, at any odd moment, at tea, in church, 
or on a railway station. But his more instant preoccupation 
is with his own mind, chiefly considered as tv^pical of all 
human, or, at any rate, all self-conscious minds. In beautiful 
and brief prose he seizes the significance of casual meetings 
and tiny occurrences, visits to the bank, walks "owling out 
through the dusk" thrcjugh twilit London, stray sentences 
overheard, odd desires detected, vague hankerings after the 
beautiful and the divine ; all the things, in fact, which most 
people "be, do and suffer" without really, or at least actually, 
noticing them. He gets the drama out of tlie unmelodramatic 
processes of our' daily life. And if one illustra'tes one of his 
qualities more than another, it should be his truthfulness. 
» » » » « » 
\Vc hear a good deal in these days about frankness and 
candour. But the frank modern writer is generally frank 
about anything in the world but himself, and when he is 
candid about himself he is only willing to admit that he is 
the deuce of a dog, but seldom that he is an ass. His parade 
of abnonnal honesty, too, announced with beatings of drums 
and swinging of great bells, is somewhat suspicious ; he 
summons the world to hear the man who has the courage to 
confess what other people are afraid to confess; and it is 
difficult to sec, therefore, how he can avoid at best an uncon- 
scious lack of proportion and at worst King for effect. These 
apostles of brazen veracity woidd probably be incredulous 
if one told them that one thought Mr. Pearsall Smith one 
of the most candid writers alive. Nevertheless, it is true. 
He acknowledges, and in the quietest, most natural, most 
charming way in the world, the things of which people are 
usually most ashamed — for people are usually far more 
ashamed of their absurd dreams, their humiliating faux-pas, 
their humbugs, their snobberies, than they. are of the most 
flamboyant of the Deadly Sins. They ought not to be ; 
still they are. But no one wh.o has read Trivia will feel 
quite the same about them afterwards ; Mr. Pearsall Smith's 
open confession is good for other people's souls. Let me 
give a few examples of his revelations of his private life : 
Humiliation 
"My own view is." I began, but no one listened. .\t 
the next pause, "I always say," I remarked, but again the 
loud talk went on. Some one told a storj'. When the 
laughter had ended, "I often think "; but, looking 
round the table, I could catch no friendly or attentive eye. 
It was humiliating, but more humiliating the thought that 
Sophocles and Goethe would have always commanded 
attention, while the lack of it would not have troubled 
Spinoza or Abraham Lincoln. 
Who has not vainly attempted to turn a conversation his 
way : to unload an experience, an anecdote, or a jest, or to 
show that he also was intelligent and entitled to his view ? 
Who has not done it three times ? Who — and this is the 
subtlest touch of all — has not studiously modified his words 
of entrance each time to avoid the appearance of egoistic 
, insistence ? Apply this, again, to your own experience : 
The Goat 
In the midst of my anecdote a sudden mi.sgiving chilled 
me — had 1 told them about this goat before ? And then 
" as I talked there gaped on me — abyss opening beneath 
abyss — a darker speculation : when goats are mentioned, 
do 1 automatically and always toll this story about the 
goat at Portsmouth ? 
In "Symptoms," the record of one of the most painful and 
humiliating things that can happen to one, he tells how, 
at a dinner-table, he was talking eloquently about Bores, 
and how deadening they are and how obtuse, proceeding to 
add a few stories and some remarks about his own sensations, 
when "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." 
* * * * » . * 
To me, at least, Mr. Pearsall Smith's public exhibition of 
himself is balm, and his book will be a refuge. He knows all 
the other things, too : the idiotic resolves to start a great 
career to-morrow, to work, to get up at dawn ; the swollen 
conceits ; the certainty that one could do anything if one 
tried ; the other certainty that Providence has its special 
eye on one and warns those who threaten one with "Leave 
him alone, I tell you " ; the dissipation of energy ; the pre- 
tence at activity ; the desire to shine in company ; and, 
above all, those romantic, those towering castles in Spain. 
Do we all do it ? I suppose we do. Do we all— like Mr. 
Smith's romantic "Me," whom he caught looking into a 
fishmonger's window and saying "I caught that salmon" — 
live, whilst lying in beds, sitting in chairs, walking in streets, 
the lives of all the Heroes and all the Heroic Rascals ? Do 
you also, reader, you who would get out to any ball and 
run away from any fast one, hit six in succession over the 
gasworks, following up your tremendous innings by getting 
all ten Australian wickets in your first two overs^ thereby 
causing the cables to hum ? " Do you, timid and harm- 
less creature, return from deeds of 'amazing alertness and 
valour in the field, to receive the V.C. which you wear 
with a rare and becoming modesty. And you, a'lso,' most 
impecunious and unobservant of men, do you dive from 
W^atcrloo Bridge after would-be suicides, rescue rich old 
ladies from the descending feet of runaway cab-horses, and 
win the £100,000 offered by a Shipping Magnate to" the first 
man who Kills the Kaiser ? You do, all of you ; and you 
will find your similitude in Trivia, a book, however, which 
neither you nor I would have had the honestv or the in- 
genuity to have written. I suspect that, percola"ting through 
the centuries in the characteristically shy and unobtrusive 
way, Mr. Pearsall Smith's boqk is destined to a modest 
immortality. It will never be a widely popular book ; but 
I cannot conceive that there will ever be a time, two or three 
or twenty centuries hence, when a few men will not delight 
to find in it themselves, their hearts and minds, dreams, and 
doubts, and delights. 
