Trivia by Logan Pearsall Smith
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TRIVIA
By
Logan Pearsall Smith
1917
_Bibliographical Note_
Some of these pieces were privately printed at the Chiswick
Press in 1902. Others have appeared in the "New Statesman" and
"The New Republic," and are here reprinted with the Editors'
permission.
_Preface_
"You must beware of thinking too much about Style," said my
kindly adviser, "or you will become like those fastidious people
who polish and polish until there is nothing left."
"Then there really are such people?" I asked, lost in the thought
of how much I should like to meet them. But the well-informed
lady could give me no precise information about them.
I often hear of them in this tantalizing manner, and perhaps one
day I shall get to know them. They sound delightful.
_The Author_
These pieces of moral prose have been written, dear Reader, by a
large Carnivorous Mammal, belonging to that suborder of the
Animal Kingdom which includes also the Orang-outang, the tusked
Gorilla, the Baboon with his bright blue and scarlet bottom, and
the long-eared Chimpanzee.
_List of Contents_
BOOK I
Preface
The Author
Happiness
To-day
The Afternoon Post
The Busy Bees
The Wheat
The Coming of Fate
My Speech
Stonehenge
The Stars
Silvia Doria
Bligh House
In Church
Parsons
The Sound of a Voice
What Happens
A Precaution
The Great Work
My Mission
The Birds
High Life
Empty Shells
Dissatisfaction
A Fancy
They
In the Pulpit
Human Ends
Lord Arden
The Starry Heaven
My Map
The Snob
Companions
Edification
The Rose
The Vicar of Lynch
Tu Quoque Fontium
The Spider
BOOK II
L'Oiseau Bleu
At the Bank
Mammon
I See the World
Social Success Apotheosis
The Spring in London
Fashion Plates
Mental Vice
The Organ of Life
Humiliation
Green Ivory
In the Park
The Correct
"Where Do I Come In?"
Microbes
The Quest
The Kaleidoscope
Oxford Street
Beauty
The Power of Words
Self-Analysis
The Voice of the World
And Anyhow
Drawbacks
Talk
The Church of England
Misgiving
Sanctuaries
Symptoms
Shadowed
The Incredible
Terror
Pathos
Inconstancy
The Poplar
On the Doorstep Old Clothes
Youth
Consolation
Sir Eustace Carr
The Lord Mayor
The Burden
Under an Umbrella
TRIVIA
BOOK I
_How blest my lot, in these sweet fields assign'd Where Peace
and Leisure soothe the tuneful mind._
SCOTT, of Amwell, _Moral Eclogues_ (1773)
_Happiness_
Cricketers on village greens, haymakers in the evening sunshine,
small boats that sail before the wind--all these create in me
the illusion of Happiness, as if a land of cloudless pleasure, a
piece of the old Golden World, were hidden, not (as poets have
imagined), in far seas or beyond inaccessible mountains, but
here close at hand, if one could find it, in some undiscovered
valley. Certain grassy lanes seem to lead between the meadows
thither; the wild pigeons talk of it behind the woods.
_To-Day_
I woke this morning out of dreams into what we call Reality,
into the daylight, the furniture of my familiar bedroom--in fact
into the well-known, often-discussed, but, to my mind, as yet
unexplained Universe.
Then I, who came out of Eternity and seem to be on my way
thither, got up and spent the day as I usually spend it. I read,
I pottered, I talked, and took exercise; and I sat punctually
down to eat the cooked meals that appeared at stated intervals.
_The Afternoon Post_
The village Post Office, with its clock and letter-box, its
postmistress lost in tales of love-lorn Dukes and coroneted woe,
and the sallow-faced grocer watching from his window opposite,
is the scene of a daily crisis in my life, when every afternoon
I walk there through the country lanes and ask that well-read
young lady for my letters. I always expect good news and
cheques; and then, of course, there is the magical Fortune which
is coming, and word of it may reach me any day. What it is, this
strange Felicity, or whence it shall come, I have no notion; but
I hurry down in the morning to find the news on the breakfast
table, open telegrams in delighted panic, and say to myself
"Here it is!" when at night I hear wheels approaching along the
road. So, happy in the hope of Happiness, and not greatly
concerned with any other interest or ambition, I live on in my
quiet, ordered house; and so I shall live perhaps until the end.
Is it, indeed, merely the last great summons and revelation for
which I am waiting? I do not know.
_The Busy Bees_
Sitting for hours idle in the shade of an apple tree, near
the garden-hives, and under the aerial thoroughfares of those
honey-merchants--sometimes when the noonday heat is loud with
their minute industry, or when they fall in crowds out of the
late sun to their night-long labours-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 teachers 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 wiser and more generous-hearted way to improve the
shining hour?
_The Wheat_
The Vicar, whom I met once or twice in my walks about the
fields, told me that he was glad that I was taking an interest
in farming. Only my feeling about wheat, he said, puzzled him.
Now the feeling in regard to wheat which I had not been able to
make clear to the Vicar was simply one of amazement. Walking one
day into a field that I had watched yellowing beyond the trees,
I found myself dazzled by the glow and great expanse of gold. I
bathed myself in the intense yellow under the intense blue sky;
how dim it made the oak trees and copses and all the rest of the
English landscape seem! I had not remembered the glory of the
Wheat; nor imagined in my reading that in a country so far from
the Sun there could be anything so rich, so prodigal, so
reckless, as this opulence of ruddy gold, bursting out from the
cracked earth as from some fiery vein below. I remembered how
for thousands of years Wheat had been the staple of wealth, the
hoarded wealth of famous cities and empires; I thought of the
processes of corn-growing, the white oxen ploughing, the great
barns, the winnowing fans, the mills with the splash of their
wheels, or arms slow-turning in the wind; of cornfields at
harvest-time, with shocks and sheaves in the glow of sunset, or
under the sickle moon; what beauty it brought into the northern
landscape, the antique, passionate, Biblical beauty of the
South!
_The Coming of Fate_
When I seek out the sources of my thoughts, I find they had
their beginning in fragile Chance; were born of little moments
that shine for me curiously in the past. Slight the impulse that
made me take this turning at the crossroads, trivial and
fortuitous the meeting, and light as gossamer the thread
that first knit me to my friend. These are full of wonder;
more mysterious are the moments that must have brushed me
with their wings and passed me by: when Fate beckoned and I
did not see it, when new Life trembled for a second on the
threshold; but the word was not spoken, the hand was not
held out, and the Might-have-been shivered and vanished, dim
as a into the waste realms of non-existence.
So I never lose a sense of the whimsical and perilous charm
of daily life, with its meetings and words and accidents. Why,
to-day, perhaps, or next week, I may hear a voice, and, packing
up my Gladstone bag, follow it to the ends of the world.
_My Speech_
"Ladies and Gentlemen," I began--The Vicar was in the chair;
Mrs. La Mountain and her daughters sat facing us; and in the
little schoolroom, with its maps and large Scripture prints,
its blackboard with the day's sums still visible on it, were
assembled the labourers of the village, the old family coachman
and his wife, the one-eyed postman, and the gardeners and
boys from the Hall. Having culled from the newspapers a few
phrases, I had composed a speech which I delivered with a
spirit and eloquence surprising even to myself, and which was
now enthusiastically received. The Vicar cried "Hear, Hear!",
the Vicar's wife pounded her umbrella with such emphasis, and
the villagers cheered so heartily, that my heart was warmed. I
began to feel the meaning of my own words; I beamed on the
audience, felt that they were all brothers, all wished well
to the Republic; and it seemed to me an occasion to express
my real ideas and hopes for the Commonwealth.
Brushing therefore to one side, and indeed quite forgetting my
safe principles, I began to refashion and new-model the State.
Most existing institutions were soon abolished; and then, on
their ruins, I proceeded to build up the bright walls and
palaces of the City within me--the City I had read of in Plato.
With enthusiasm, and, I flatter myself, with eloquence, I
described it all--the Warriors, that race of golden youth bred
from the State-ordered embraces of the brave and fair; those
philosophic Guardians, who, being ever accustomed to the highest
and most extensive views, and thence contracting an habitual
greatness, possessed the truest fortitude, looking down indeed
with a kind of disregard on human life and death. And then,
declaring that the pattern of this City was laid up in Heaven, I
sat down, amid the cheers of the uncomprehending little
audience.
And afterward, in my rides about the country, when I saw on
walls and the doors of barns, among advertisements of sales, or
regulations about birds' eggs or the movements of swine, little
weather-beaten, old-looking notices on which it was stated that
I would "address the meeting," I remembered how the walls and
towers of the City I had built up in that little schoolroom had
shone with no heavenly light in the eyes of the Vicar's party.
_Stonehenge_
They sit there forever 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 and contemptuous Faces.
_The Stars_
Battling my way homeward one dark night against the wind and
rain, a sudden gust, stronger than the others, drove me back
into the shelter of a tree. But soon the Western sky broke open;
the illumination of the Stars poured down from behind the
dispersing clouds.
I was astonished at their brightness, to see how they filled the
night with their soft lustre. So I went my way accompanied by
them; Arcturus followed me, and becoming entangled in a leafy
tree, shone by glimpses, and then emerged triumphant, Lord of
the Western sky. Moving along the road in the silence of my own
footsteps, my thoughts were among the Constellations. I was one
of the Princes of the starry Universe; in me also there was
something that was not insignificant and mean and of no account.
_Silvia Doria_
Beyond the blue hills, within riding distance, there is a
country of parks and beeches, with views of the far-off sea. I
remember in one of my rides coming on the place which was the
scene of the pretty, old-fashioned story of Silvia Doria.
Through the gates, with fine gate-posts, on which heraldic
beasts, fierce and fastidious, were upholding coroneted shields,
I could see, at the end of the avenue, the facade of the House,
with its stone pilasters, and its balustrade on the steep roof.
More than one hundred years ago, in that Park, with its
Italianized house, and level gardens adorned with statues and
garden temples, there lived, they say, an old Lord with his two
handsome sons. The old Lord had never ceased mourning for his
Lady, though she had died a good many years before; there were
no neighbours he visited, and few strangers came inside the
great Park walls. One day in Spring, however, just when the
apple trees had burst into blossom, the gilded gates were thrown
open, and a London chariot with prancing horses drove up the
Avenue. And in the chariot, smiling and gay, and indeed very
beautiful in her dress of yellow silk, and her great Spanish hat
with drooping feathers, sat Silvia Doria, come on a visit to her
cousin, the old Lord.
It was her father who had sent her--that he might be more free,
some said, to pursue his own wicked courses--while others
declared that he intended her to marry the old Lord's eldest
son.
In any case, Silvia Doria came like the Spring, like the
sunlight, into the lonely place. Even the old Lord felt himself
curiously happy when he heard her voice singing about the house;
as for Henry and Francis, it was heaven for them just to walk by
her side down the garden alleys.
And Silvia Doria, though hitherto she had been but cold toward
the London gallants who had courted her, found, little by
little, that her heart was not untouched.
But, in spite of her father, and her own girlish love of gold
and rank, it was not for Henry that she cared, not for the old
Lord, but for Francis, the younger son. Did Francis know of
this? They were secretly lovers, the old scandal reported; and
the scandal, it may be, had reached her father's ears.
For one day a coach with foaming horses, and the wicked face of
an old man at its window, galloped up the avenue; and soon
afterwards, when the coach drove away, Silvia Doria was sitting
by the old man's side, sobbing bitterly.
And after she had gone, a long time, many of the old, last-century
years, went by without any change. And then Henry, the eldest son,
was killed in hunting; and the old Lord dying a few years later,
the titles and the great house and all the land and gold came to
Francis, the younger son. But after his father's death he was but
seldom there; having, as it seemed, no love for the place, and
living for the most part abroad and alone, for he never married.
And again, many years went by. The trees grew taller and darker
about the house; the yew hedges unclipt now, hung their branches
over the moss-grown paths; ivy almost smothered the statues; and
the plaster fell away in great patches from the discoloured
garden temples.
But at last one day a chariot drove up to the gates; a footman
pulled at the crazy bell, telling the gate-keeper that his
mistress wished to visit the Park. So the gates creaked open,
the chariot glittered up the avenue to the deserted place; and a
lady stepped out, went into the garden, and walked among its
moss-grown paths and statues. As the chariot drove out again,
"Tell your Lord," the lady said, smiling, to the lodge-keeper,
"that Silvia Doria came back."
_Bligh House_
To the West, in riding past the walls of Bligh, I remembered an
incident in the well-known siege of that house, during the Civil
Wars: How, among Waller's invading Roundhead troops, there
happened to be a young scholar, a poet and lover of the Muses,
fighting for the cause, as he thought, of ancient Freedom, who,
one day, when the siege was being more hotly urged, pressing
forward and climbing a wall, suddenly found himself in a quiet
old garden by the house. And here, for a time forgetting, as it
would seem, the battle, and heedless of the bullets that now and
then flew past him like peevish wasps, the young Officer stayed,
gathering roses--old-fashioned damask roses, streaked with red
and white--which, for the sake of a Court Beauty, there besieged
with her father, he carried to the house; falling, however,
struck by a chance bullet, or shot perhaps by one of his own
party. A few of the young Officer's verses, written in the
stilted fashion of the time, and almost unreadable now, have
been preserved. The lady's portrait hangs in the white drawing
room at Bligh; a simpering, faded figure, with ringlets and
drop-pearls, and a dress of amber-coloured silk.
_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, hackneyed, and yet, as it
seemed to me, perfectly appalling statement that "the Pen is
mightier than the Sword."
_Parsons_
All the same I like Parsons; they think nobly of the Universe,
and believe in Souls and Eternal Happiness. And some of them, I
am told, believe in Angels--that there are Angels who guide our
footsteps, and flit to and fro unseen on errands in the air
about us.
_The Sound of a Voice_
As the thoughtful Baronet talked, as his voice went on sounding
in my ears, all the light of desire, and of the sun, faded from
the Earth; I saw the vast landscape of the world dim, as in an
eclipse; its populations eating their bread with tears, its rich
men sitting listless in their palaces, and aged Kings crying
"Vanity, Vanity, all is Vanity!" lugubriously from their
thrones.
_What Happens_
"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 the rudest manner, "think
what life is--just think what really 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!"
_A Precaution_
The folio gave at length philosophic consolations for all
the ills and misfortunes said by the author to be inseparable
from human existence--Poverty, Shipwreck, Plague, Love-Deceptions,
and Inundations. Against these antique Disasters I armed my soul;
and I thought it as well to prepare myself against another
inevitable ancient calamity called "Cornutation," or by other
less learned names. How Philosophy taught that after all it was
but a pain founded on conceit, a blow that hurt not; the reply
of the Cynic philosopher to one who reproached him, "Is it my
fault or hers?"; how Nevisanus advises the sufferer to ask
himself if he have not offended; Jerome declares it impossible
to prevent; how few or none are safe, and the inhabitants of
some countries, especially parts of Africa, consider it the
usual and natural thing; How Caesar, Pompey, Augustus, Agamemnon,
Menelaus, Marcus Aurelius, and many other great Kings and Princes
had all worn Actaeon's badge; and how Philip turned it to a jest,
Pertinax the Emperor made no reckoning of it; Erasmus declared it
was best winked at, there being no remedy but patience, _Dies
dolorem minuit_; Time, Age must mend it; and how according to
the best authorities, bars, bolts, oaken doors, and towers of
brass, are all in vain. "She is a woman," as the old Pedant
wrote to a fellow Philosopher....
_The Great Work_
Sitting, pen in hand, alone in the stillness of the library,
with flies droning behind the sunny blinds, I considered in my
thoughts what should be the subject of my great Work. Should I
complain against the mutability of Fortune, and impugn Fate and
the Constellations; or should I reprehend the never-satisfied
heart of querulous Man, drawing elegant contrasts between the
unsullied snow of mountains, the serene shining of stars, and
our hot, feverish lives and foolish repinings? Or should I
confine myself to denouncing contemporary Vices, crying "Fie!"
on the Age with Hamlet, sternly unmasking its hypocrisies, and
riddling through and through its comfortable Optimisms?
Or with Job, should I question the Universe, and puzzle my sad
brains about Life--the meaning of Life on this apple-shaped
Planet?
_My Mission_
But when in modern books, reviews, and thoughtful magazines I
read about the Needs of the Age, its Complex Questions. its
Dismays, Doubts, and Spiritual Agonies, I feel an impulse to go
out and comfort it, to still its cries, and speak earnest words
of Consolation to it.
_The Birds_
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. All these are familiar--but
what is that unknown voice, that thrilling note? I hurry out;
the voice flees and I follow; and when I return and sit down
again to my task, the Yellowhammer trills his sleepy song in the
noonday heat; the drone of the Greenfinch lulls me into dreamy
meditations. Then suddenly from his tree-trunks and forest
recesses comes the Green Woodpecker, and mocks at me an impudent
voice full of liberty and laughter.
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, feather-headed
race.
_High Life_
Although that immense Country House was empty and for sale, and
I had got an order to view it, I needed all my courage to walk
through the lordly gates, and up the avenue, and then to ring
the door-bell. And when I was ushered in, and the shutters were
removed to let the daylight into those vast apartments, I
sneaked through them, cursing the dishonest curiosity which had
brought me into a place where I had no business. But I was
treated with such deference, and so plainly regarded as a
possible purchaser, that I soon began to believe in the opulence
imputed to me. From all the novels describing the mysterious and
glittering life of the Great which I had read (and I had read
many), there came to me the enchanting vision of my own
existence in this Palace. I filled the vast spaces with the
shine of jewels and stir of voices; I saw a vision of ladies
sweeping in their tiaras down the splendid stairs.
But my Soul, in her swell of pride, soon outgrew these paltry
limits, O no! Never could I box up and house and localize under
that lowly roof the Magnificence and Ostentation of which I was
capable.
Then for one thing there was stabling for only forty horses; and
of course, as I told them, this would never do.
_Empty Shells_
They lie like empty seashells on the shores of Time, the old
worlds which the spirit of man once built for his habitation,
and then abandoned. Those little earth-centred, heaven-encrusted
universes of the Greeks and Hebrews seem quaint enough to us,
who have formed, thought by thought from within, the immense
modern Cosmos in which we live--the great Creation of granite,
planned in such immeasurable proportions, and moved by so
pitiless a mechanism, that it sometimes appals even its own
creators. The rush of the great rotating Sun daunts us; to think
to the distance of the fixed stars cracks our brain.
But if the ephemeral Being who has imagined these eternal
spheres and spaces, must dwell almost as an alien in their icy
vastness, yet what a splendour lights up for him and dazzles in
those great halls! Anything less limitless would be now a
prison; and he even dares to think beyond their boundaries, to
surmise that he may one day outgrow this vast Mausoleum, and
cast from him the material Creation as an integument too narrow
for his insolent Mind.
_Dissatisfaction_
For one thing I hate Spiders--I dislike all kinds of Insects.
Their cold intelligence, their empty, stereotyped, unremitted
industry repel me. And I am not altogether happy about the
future of the Human Race; when I think of the slow refrigeration
of the Earth, the Sun's waning, and the ultimate, inevitable
collapse of the Solar System, I have grave misgivings. And all
the books I have read and forgotten-the thought that my mind is
really nothing but a sieve--this, too, at times disheartens me.
_A Fancy_
More than once, though, I have pleased myself with the notion
that somewhere there is good Company which will like this little
Book--these Thoughts (if I may call them so) dipped up from that
phantasmagoria or phosphorescence which, by some unexplained
process of combustion, flickers over the large lump of soft gray
matter in the bowl of my skull.
_They_
Their taste is exquisite; They live in Georgian houses, in
a world of ivory and precious china, of old brickwork and
stone pilasters. In white drawing rooms I see Them, or on
blue, bird-haunted lawns. They talk pleasantly of me, and
their eyes watch me. From the diminished, ridiculous picture
of myself which the glass of the world gives me, I turn for
comfort, for happiness, to my image in the kindly mirror of
those eyes.
Who are They? Where, in what paradise or palace, shall I ever
find Them? I may walk all the streets, ring all the door-bells
of the World, but I shall never find them. Yet nothing has
value for me save In the crown of Their approval; for Their
coming--which will never be--I build and plant, and for Them
alone I secretly write this little Book, which They will never
read.