Chapter 1
E-text prepared by Gerard Arthus, Josephine Paolucci, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
MORE TRIVIA
by
LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
Author of "Trivia"
New York Harcourt, Brace and Company 1921
Copyright, 1921, by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.
Printed in the U. S. A. by The Quinn & Boden Company Rahway N. J.
CONTENTS
A GREETING _ix_
REASSURANCE _3_
THE GREAT ADVENTURE _4_
THE BEATIFIC VISION _5_
FACES _6_
THE OBSERVER _7_
CHAOS _8_
THE GHOST _9_
THE HOUR-GLASS _10_
THE LATCHKEY _11_
GOOD PRACTICE _12_
EVASION _13_
DINING OUT _14_
WHAT'S WRONG _15_
AT SOLEMN MUSIC _17_
THE GOAT _18_
SELF-CONTROL _19_
THE COMMUNION OF SOULS _20_
WAXWORKS _21_
ADJECTIVES _22_
WHERE? _23_
IN THE STREET _24_
THE ABBEY AT NIGHT _25_
DESPERANCE _26_
CHAIRS _27_
A GRIEVANCE _28_
THE MOON _29_
LONGEVITY _30_
IN THE BUS _31_
JUSTIFICATION _32_
THE SAYING OF A PERSIAN POET _33_
MONOTONY _34_
DAYDREAM _35_
PROVIDENCE _36_
ACTION _37_
WAITING _38_
THE WRONG WORD _40_
IONS _41_
A FIGURE OF SPEECH _42_
A SLANDER _43_
SYNTHESIS _44_
THE AGE _45_
COMFORT _46_
APPEARANCE AND REALITY _47_
LONELINESS _48_
THE WELSH HARP _49_
MISAPPREHENSION _51_
THE LIFT _52_
SLOAN STREET _53_
REGENT'S PARK _54_
THE AVIARY _55_
ST. JOHN'S WOOD _56_
THE GARDEN SUBURB _57_
SUNDAY CALLS _59_
AN ANOMALY _60_
THE LISTENER _61_
ABOVE THE CLOUDS _62_
THE BUBBLE _63_
CAUTION _64_
DESIRES _65_
MOMENTS _66_
THE EPITAPH _67_
INTERRUPTION _68_
THE EAR-TRUMPET _70_
GUILT _71_
CADOGAN GARDENS _72_
THE RESCUE _73_
CHARM _74_
CARAVANS _75_
THE SUBURBS _76_
THE CONCERTO _77_
SOMEWHERE _78_
THE PLATITUDE _79_
THE FETISH _80_
THE ECHO _81_
THE SCAVENGER _82_
THE HOT-BED _83_
APHASIA _84_
MAGIC _85_
MRS. BACKE _86_
WHISKERS _87_
THE SPELLING LESSON _88_
JEUNESSE _89_
HANGING ON _90_
SUPERANNUATION _91_
AT THE CLUB _92_
DELAY _93_
SMILES _94_
THE DAWN _95_
THE PEAR _96_
INSOMNIA _97_
READING PHILOSOPHY _98_
MORAL TRIUMPH _99_
A VOW _100_
THE SPRINGS OF ACTION _101_
IN THE CAGE _102_
SHRINKAGE _103_
VOICES _104_
EVANESCENCE _105_
COMPLACENCY _106_
MY PORTRAIT _107_
THE RATIONALIST _108_
THOUGHTS _109_
PHRASES _110_
DISENCHANTMENT _111_
ASK ME NO MORE _112_
FAME _113_
NEWS ITEMS _114_
JOY _115_
IN ARCADY _116_
WORRIES _117_
THINGS TO WRITE _118_
PROPERTY _119_
IN A FIX _120_
VERTIGO _122_
THE EVIL EYE _123_
THE EPITHET _124_
THE GARDEN PARTY _125_
WELTSCHMERZ _126_
BOGEYS _127_
LIFE-ENHANCEMENT _129_
ECLIPSE _130_
THE PYRAMID _131_
THE FULL MOON _132_
LUTON _133_
THE DANGER OF GOING TO CHURCH _134_
THE SONNET _136_
WELTANSCHAUUNG _137_
THE ALIEN _138_
HYPOTHESES _139_
THE ARGUMENT _140_
A GREETING
'What funny clothes you wear, dear Readers! And your hats! The thought of your hats does make me laugh. And I think your sex-theories quite horrid.'
Thus across the void of Time I send, with a wave of my hand, a greeting to that quaint, remote, outlandish, unborn people whom we call Posterity, and whom I, like other very great writers, claim as my readers--urging them to hurry up and get born, that they may have the pleasure of reading 'More Trivia.'
MORE TRIVIA
REASSURANCE
I look at my overcoat and my hat hanging in the hall with reassurance; for although I go out of doors with one individuality to-day, when yesterday I had quite another, yet my clothes keep my various selves buttoned up together, and enable all these otherwise irreconcilable aggregates of psychological phenomena to pass themselves off as one person.
THE GREAT ADVENTURE
Before opening the front-door I paused, for a moment of profound consideration.
Dim-lit, shadowy, full of menace and unimaginable chances, stretched all around my door the many-peopled streets. I could hear, ominous and muffled, the tides of multitudinous traffic, sounding along their ways. Was I equipped for the navigation of those waters, armed and ready to adventure out into that dangerous world again?
Gloves? Money? Cigarettes? Matches? Yes; and I had an umbrella for its tempests, and a latchkey for my safe return.
THE BEATIFIC VISION
Shoving and pushing, and shoved and pushed, a dishonoured bag of bones about London, or carted like a herring in a box through tunnels in the clay beneath it, as I bump my head in a bus, or hang, half-suffocated; from a greasy strap in the Underground, I dream, like other Idealists and Saints and Social Thinkers, of a better world than this, a world that might be, a City of Heaven brought down at last to earth.
One footman flings open the portals of my palace in that New Jerusalem for me; another unrolls a path of velvet to the enormous motor which floats me, swift and silent, through the city traffic--I leaning back like God on hallowed cushions, smoking a big cigar.
FACES
Almost always the streets are full of dreary-looking people; sometimes for weeks on end the poor face-hunter returns unblest from his expeditions, with no provision with which to replenish his daydream-larder.
Then one day the plenty is all too great; there are Princesses at the street-crossings, Queens in the taxi-cabs, Beings fair as the day-spring on the tops of busses; and the Gods themselves can be seen promenading up and down Piccadilly.
THE OBSERVER
Talk of ants! It's the precise habits, the incredible proceedings of human insects I like to note and study.
Walking to-day, like a stranger dropped upon this planet, towards Victoria, I chanced to see a female of this species, a certain Mrs. Jones of my acquaintance, approaching from the opposite direction. Immediately I found myself performing the oddest set of movements and manoeuvres. I straightened my back and simpered, I lifted my hat in the air; and then, seizing the paw of this female, I moved it up and down several times, giving utterance to a set formula of articulated sounds.
These anthropological gestures and vocalisations, and my automatic performance of them, reminded me that it was after all from inside one of them, that I was observing these Bipeds.
CHAOS
Punctual, commonplace, keeping all appointments, as I go my round in the obvious world, a bit of Chaos and old Night seems to linger on inside me; a dark bewilderment of mind, a nebulous sea of speculation, a looming of shadowy universes out of nothing, and their collapse, as in a dream.
THE GHOST
When people talk of Ghosts and Hauntings, I never mention the Apparition by which I am pestered, the Phantom that shadows me about the streets, the image or spectre, so familiar, so like myself, and yet so abhorrent, which lurks in the plate-glass of shop-windows, or leaps out of mirrors to waylay me.
THE HOUR-GLASS
At the corner of Oakley Street I stopped for a moment's chat with my neighbour, Mrs. Wheble, who was waiting there for a bus.
'Do tell me,' she asked, 'what you have got in that odd-looking parcel?'
'It's an hour-glass,' I said, taking it out of its paper wrapping. 'I saw it in a shop in the King's Road. I've always wanted an hour-glass to measure time by. What a mystery Time really is, when you think of it! See, the sands are running now while we are talking. I've got here in my hand the most potent, the most enigmatic, the most fleeting of all essences--Time, the sad cure for all our sorrows--but I say! There's your bus just starting. You'll miss it if you don't look out!'
THE LATCHKEY
I was astonished, I was almost horror-struck by the sight of the New Moon at the end of the street. In bewilderment and Blake-like wonder I stood and gazed at it on my doorstep. For what was I doing there; I, a wanderer, a pilgrim, a nomad of the desert, with no home save where the evening found me--what was my business on that doorstep; at what commonplace had the Moon caught me with a latchkey in my hand?
GOOD PRACTICE
We met in an omnibus last evening. 'And where are you going now?' she asked, as she looked at me with amusement.
'I am going, if the awful truth must be told, to dine in Grosvenor Square.'
'Lord!' she colloquially replied, 'and what do you do that for?'
'I do it because I am invited. And besides,' I went on, 'let me remind you of what the Persian Mystics say of the Saints--that the Saints are sometimes rich, that God sometimes endows them with an outward show of wealth to hide them from the profane.'
'Oh, does He? Hides them in Grosvenor Square?'
'Very well, then, I shall tell you the real truth; I shall tell you my real reason for going to dine there. Do you remember what Diogenes answered when they asked him why he had asked for a statue at the public expense?'
'No; what did he say?'
'He said--but I must explain another time. I have to get off here. Good-night.'
I paused, however, at the door of the bus. 'He said,' I called back, '"I am practising Disappointment." That--you know whom I mean?--was his answer.'
EVASION
'What do you think of the International Situation?' asked that foreign Countess, with her foreign, fascinating smile.
Was she a Spy? I felt I must be careful.
'What do I think?' I evasively echoed; and then, carried away by the profound and melancholy interest of this question, 'Think?' I queried, 'do I ever really think? Is there anything inside my head but cotton-wool? How can I call myself a Thinker? What am I anyhow?' I pursued the sad inquiry: 'A noodle, a pigwidgeon, a ninnyhammer, a bubble on the wave, a leaf in the wind, Madame!'
DINING OUT
When I think of Etiquette and Funerals; when I consider the euphemisms and rites and conventions and various costumes with which we invest the acts of our animal existence; when I bear in mind how elegantly we eat our victuals, and remember the series of ablutions and preparations and salutations and exclamations and manipulations I went through when I dined out last evening, I reflect what creatures we are of ceremony; how elaborate, how pompous and polite a simian Species.
WHAT'S WRONG
From the corner of the dim, half-empty drawing-room where they sat, they could see, in a great mirror, the other dinner-guests linger and depart. But none of them were going on--what was the good?--to that evening party. They talked of satiety and disenchantment, of the wintry weather, of illness and old age and death.
'But what really frightens me most in life,' said one of them, 'what gives me a kind of vertigo or shiver, is--it sounds absurd, but it's simply the horror of Space, _l'epouvante siderale_,--the dismay of Infinity, the black abysses in the Milky Way, the silence of those eternal spaces beyond the furthest stars.'
'But Time,' said another of the group, 'surely Time is a worse nightmare. Think of it! the Past with never a beginning, the Future going on for ever and ever, and the little present in which we live for a second, twinkling between these two black abysses.'
'What's wrong with me,' mused the third speaker, 'is that even the Present eludes me. I don't know what it really is; I can never catch the moment as it passes; I am always far ahead or far away behind, and always somewhere else. I am not really here now with you, though I am talking to you. And why should I go to the party? I shouldn't be there, either, if I went. My life is all reminiscence and anticipation--if you can call it life, if I am not rather a kind of ghost, haunting a past that has ceased to be, or a future that is still more shadowy and unreal. It's ghastly in a way, this exile and isolation. But why speak of it, after all?'
They rose, and their images too were reflected in the great mirror, as they passed out of the drawing-room, and dispersed, each on his or her way, into the winter night.
AT SOLEMN MUSIC
I sat there, hating the exuberance of her bust, and her high-coloured wig. And how could I listen to music in the close proximity of those loud stockings?
Then our eyes met: in both of us the enchanted chord was touched; we both looked through the same window into Heaven. In that moment of musical, shared delight, my soul and the soul of that large lady, joined hands and sang like the morning stars together.
THE GOAT
In the midst of my anecdote a sudden misgiving chilled me--had I told them about this Goat before? And then as I talked there gaped upon me--abyss opening beneath abyss--a darker speculation: when goats are mentioned, do I automatically and always tell this story about the Goat at Portsmouth?
SELF-CONTROL
Still I am not a pessimist, nor misanthrope, nor grumbler; I bear it all, the burden of Public Affairs, the immensity of Space, the brevity of Life, and the thought of the all-swallowing Grave--all this I put up with without impatience. I accept the common lot. And if now and then for a moment it seems too much; if I get my feet wet, or have to wait too long for tea, and my soul in these wanes of the moon cries out in French _C'est fini!_ I always answer _Pazienza!_ in Italian--_abbia la santa Pazienza!_
THE COMMUNION OF SOULS
'So of course I bought it! How could I help buying it?' Then, lifting the conversation, as with Lady Hyslop one always lifts it, to a higher level, 'this notion of Free Will,' I went on, 'the notion, for instance, that I was free to buy or not to buy that rare edition, seems, when you think of it--at least to me it seems--a wretched notion really. I like to feel that I must follow the things I desire as--how shall I put it?--as the tide follows the Moon; that my actions are due to necessary causes; that the world inside me isn't a meaningless chaos, but a world of order, like the world outside, governed by beautiful laws, as the Stars are governed.'
'Ah, how I love the Stars!' murmured Lady Hyslop. 'What things they say to me! They are the pledges of lost recognitions; the promise of ineffable mitigations.'
'Mitigations?' I gasped, feeling for a moment a little giddy. But it didn't matter: always when we meet Lady Hyslop and I have the most wonderful conversations.
WAXWORKS
'But one really never knows the Age one lives in. How interesting it would be,' I said to the lady next me, 'how I wish we could see ourselves as Posterity will see us!'
I have said it before, but on this occasion I was struck--almost thunder-struck--by my own remark. Like a rash enchanter, the spirit I had raised myself alarmed me. For a queer second I did see ourselves in that inevitable mirror, but cadaverous and out-of-date and palsied--a dusty set of old waxworks, simpering inanely in the lumber-room of Time.
'Better to be forgotten at once!' I exclaimed, with an emphasis that seemed to surprise the lady next me.
ADJECTIVES
But why wasn't I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed Peacocks, of eloquent Death, and the negro and star-enamelled Night?
WHERE?
I, who move and breathe and place one foot before the other, who watch the Moon wax and wane, and put off answering my letters, where shall I find the Bliss which dreams and blackbirds' voices promise, of which the waves whisper, and hand-organs in streets near Paddington faintly sing?
Does it dwell in some island of the South Seas, or far oasis among deserts and gaunt mountains; or only in those immortal gardens imagined by Chinese poets beyond the great cold palaces of the Moon?
IN THE STREET
These eye-encounters in the street, little touches of love-liking; faces that ask, as they pass, 'Are you my new lover?' Shall I one day--in Park Lane or Oxford Street perhaps--see the unknown Face I dread and look for?
THE ABBEY AT NIGHT
And as at night I went past the Abbey, saw its walls towering high and solemn among the autumn stars, I pictured to myself the white population in the vast darkness of its interior--all that hushed people of Heroes--; not dead, I would think them, but animated with a still kind of life; and at last, after all their intolerable toils, the sounding tumult of battle, and perilous seapaths, resting there, tranquil and satisfied and glorious, amid the epitaphs and allegorical figures of their tombs--those high-piled, trophied, shapeless Abbey tombs, that long ago they toiled for, and laid down their gallant lives to win.
DESPERANCE
'Yes, as you say, life is so full of disappointment, disillusion! More and more I ask myself, as I grow older, what is the good of it all? We dress, we go out to dinner,' I went on, 'but surely we walk in a vain show. How good this asparagus is! I often say asparagus is the most delicious of all vegetables. And yet, I don't know--when one thinks of fresh green peas. One can get tired of asparagus, as one can of strawberries--but tender peas I could eat forever. Then peaches, and melons;--and there are certain pears, too, that taste like heaven. One of my favourite daydreams for the long afternoon of life is to live alone, a formal, greedy, selfish old gentleman, in a square house, say in Devonshire, with a square garden, whose walls are covered with apricots and figs and peaches: and there are precious pears, too, of my own planting, on espaliers along the paths. I shall walk out with a gold-headed cane in the autumn sunshine, and just at the right moment I shall pick another pear. However, that isn't at all what I was going to say--'
CHAIRS
In the streets of London there are door-bells I ring (I see myself ringing them); in certain houses there are chairs covered with chintz or cretonne in which I sit and talk about life, explaining often after tea what I think of it.
A GRIEVANCE
They are all persons of elegant manners and spotless reputations; they seem to welcome my visits, and they listen to my anecdotes with unflinching attention. I have only one grievance against them; they will keep in their houses mawkish books full of stale epithets, which, when I only seem to smell their proximity, produce in me a slight feeling of nausea.
There are people, I believe, who are affected in this way by the presence of cats.
THE MOON
I went in and shook hands with my hostess, but no one else took any special notice; no one screamed or left the room; the quiet murmur of talk went on. I suppose I seemed like the others; observed from outside no doubt I looked more or less like them.
But inside, seen from within...? Or was it a conceivable hypothesis that we were all alike inside also--that all those quietly-talking people had got the Moon, too, in their heads?
LONGEVITY
'But when you are as old as I am!' I said to the young lady in pink satin. 'But I don't know how old you are,' that young lady answered almost archly. We were getting on quite nicely.
'Oh I'm endlessly old; my memory goes back almost forever. I come out of the Middle Ages. I am the primitive savage we are all descended from; I believe in Devil-worship, and the power of the Stars; I dance under the new Moon, naked and tattooed and holy. I am a Cave-dweller, a contemporary of Mastodons and Mammoths; I am pleistocene and neolithic, and full of the lusts and terrors of the great pre-glacial forests. But that's nothing; I am millions of years older; I am an arboreal Ape, an aged Baboon, with all its instincts; I am a pre-simian quadruped, I have great claws, eyes that see in the dark, and a long prehensile tail.'
'Good gracious!' said the terrified young lady in pink satin. Then she turned, and for the rest of the dinner talked in a hushed voice with her other neighbour.
IN THE BUS
As I sat inside that crowded bus, so sad, so incredible and sordid seemed the fat face of the woman opposite me, that I interposed the thought of Kilimanjaro, that highest mountain of Africa, between us; the grassy slopes and green realms of negro kings from which its dark cone rises, the immense, dim, elephant-haunted forests which clothe its flanks; and above, the white crown of snow, freezing in eternal isolation over the palm trees and deserts of the African Equator.
JUSTIFICATION
Well, what if I did put it on a little at that luncheon? Do I not owe it to my friends to assert now and then my claims to consideration; ought I always to allow myself to be trampled on and treated as dirt? And how about the Saints and Patriarchs of the Bible? Didn't Joseph tell of the dream in which his wheatsheaf was exalted; Deborah sing without blame how she arose a mother in Israel, and David boast of his triumph over the paw of the lion and the paw of the bear? Nay, in His confabulations with His chosen people, does not the Creator of the Universe Himself take every opportunity of impressing on those Hebrews His importance, His power, His glory?
Was I not made in His image?
THE SAYING OF A PERSIAN POET
All this hurry to dress and go out, these journeys in taxi-cabs, or in trains with my packed bag from big railway stations--what keeps me going, I sometimes ask myself; and I remember how, in his 'Masnavi I Ma'navi' or 'Spiritual Couplets,' Jalalu 'D-Din Muhammad Rumi says that our Desires, the swarm of gaudy Thoughts we pursue and follow, are short-lived like summer insects, and must all be killed before long by the winter of age.
MONOTONY