The great difficulty in writing about Logan Pearsall Smith is in explaining what sort of an author he was. There is no category in the modern literary world that he fits; it is difficult to imagine his books finding a publisher today, and impossible to imagine this most fastidious of all prose stylists earning a living as a journalist or academic. And if Logan would be out of place in our time, he was hardly less out of place in his own. His published writings do not exactly ignore the world wars and tumultuous politics of his lifetime, but they regard the events around him with a certain polite bafflement:
‘And 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 me but cotton-wool? How can I, with a mind full of grey monkeys with blue faces, call myself a Thinker? What am I anyhow?’ I pursued the sad inquiry: ‘A noodle, a pigwidgeon, a ninny-hammer—a bubble on the wave, Madame, a leaf in the wind!’
The volumes of Trivia for which Logan is best known belong to no established literary genre: they mix fictitious anecdotes with aphorisms and pensées. Yet the polishing and revision of these pieces of light writing would occupy him for more than four decades, from the turn of the century until his death in 1946; each new edition of the popular Trivia books brought an opportunity for further refinement. Logan could spend an entire day rewriting a single sentence: in his old age, much of the day’s work would take place in bed, where he would add layer upon layer of near-illegible scrawl to a small piece of scrap paper, fumbling for his fountain pen when it got lost in the bedclothes. During this period a secretary was at hand to consult dictionaries and reference books as he searched for a word with exactly the right shade of meaning. In this Proustian atmosphere Logan revised his work again and again, aiming for the clarity and perfection that was his aesthetic ideal. A caricature by Max Beerbohm depicts Logan presenting his latest to the editors of the London Mercury: the manuscript, held between the author’s thumb and forefinger, is the size of a postage stamp.
Of all English writers, it is perhaps Logan Pearsall Smith who pursued with the greatest single-mindedness the cult of art for art’s sake. To the extent that his writings are about anything at all, they are about the art of writing itself: the technique of crafting beautiful prose, the painstaking process of developing a beautiful style, “the indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable Perfection.” This quest for complete flawlessness of expression produced the polished gemstones of the Trivia books as well as his more technical studies of English idiom and literary history. It is no exaggeration to say that, for Logan, the pursuit of aesthetic refinement was an ethical imperative, and any insensitivity to beauty was a moral flaw. “I hope that when you are older,” he writes to his hapless young secretary Robert Gathorne-Hardy, who had offended him by failing to appreciate a beautiful sentence from Moncrieff’s translation of Proust, “you will realize that a beautiful phrase is the most important thing in the world—that nothing else really matters.”
Another pupil in Smith’s exacting program of literary asceticism was the young Bertrand Russell, who befriended the Pearsall Smith family in the 1890s and would go on to marry Logan’s sister Alys. In a letter to him, Logan inducts Russell into the imaginary “Order of Prigs” and lays out the order’s austere rule of life: “Don’t let your board and lodging exceed two pounds a week. . . . Practice some slight self-denial every day, for instance—Getting up when called. No cake at tea. No butter at breakfast. No coffee after dinner. . . . Don’t let any opportunities of hearing good music, seeing good pictures or acting escape you.” The letter ends with a list of suggested penances for breaches of the rule, and a note that “hair shirts can be had of the Arch Prig on application.”
Here one needs no great psychological insight to notice the connection between the pursuit of artistic perfection and religious asceticism: everything is there on the surface. Indeed, Christianity and theology fascinated Logan. His favorite prose stylists were the great Anglican divines of the seventeenth century and the polymath layman Sir Thomas Browne. In the introductions to his anthologies of the prose of Donne and Taylor, Logan complains of the obscurity and dullness of the Caroline theologians, “with their imposed dogmas, their heavy and obsolete methods of exposition and controversy, almost as if they belonged to some remote geological era of human thought.” Yet for all the protestations of Smith the essayist, as an editor he shows considerable sympathy for the theology of these seventeenth-century clergymen. No mere collections of “purple passages,” these anthologies set forth the great themes of early modern theology with genuine sympathy: the nature of God, the burden of sin, and the prospect of death and judgement. It is almost as though the unbelieving Smith saw the edifice of theological discourse as the greatest and most sublime of the aesthetic objects that he cherished. In Trivia, Logan complains of a dull sermon by the local vicar and imagines himself as a preacher, speaking to his parishioners of “high and incomprehensible Doctrines, beyond the reach of Reason—Predestination, Election, Reprobation, the Co-existences and Co-eternities of the undemonstrable Triad. . . . Then there would be many ancient, learned, and out of the way Iniquities to denounce, and splendid, neglected Virtues to inculcate—Apostolic Poverty, and Virginity, that precious jewel, that fair garland, so prized in Heaven, but so rare, they say, on earth.”
The adult Logan’s affinity for the rarefied atmosphere of seventeenth-century Anglican theology would no doubt have surprised his parents, who were stalwarts of the Quaker community in Philadelphia. Under the influence of Wesleyan theology, Robert Pearsall Smith and Hannah Whitall Smith developed a highly idiosyncratic theology combining influences from Quaker, Plymouth Brethren, and Methodist traditions: this “Higher Life movement” became enormously popular, and the Smith family traveled to Europe for a widely acclaimed husband-and-wife preaching tour. Robert’s evangelistic career was cut short, however, by a sexual scandal involving a member of his congregation. Logan recalled his father’s misdeeds with characteristic irony, depicting the episode less as an ethical lapse than as a theological error: Robert had succumbed to a frenzy of antinomian enthusiasm, thinking that his sanctification by grace exempted him from the need to observe the moral law, and in this state of mind the Pauline injunction to greet one another with a holy kiss became too tempting to resist. Here as elsewhere, Logan’s lighthearted account of his past seems disingenuous. Robert’s extramarital affairs did not cease with his retirement from preaching and brought his family considerable distress, but not even an echo of this painful conflict will disturb the reader of Unforgotten Years, Logan’s autobiography. With her husband’s increasing withdrawal from family life, Hannah became the de facto leader of the household and consolidated her worldwide fame as a preacher, writer, and advocate for women’s suffrage. Her religious books earned her enormous popularity and have never gone out of print, a fate that her son, with his own somewhat more exalted literary ambitions, might well have resented: Hannah’s Christian’s Secret to a Happy Life, with its millions of copies sold (and hundreds of reviews on Amazon) has reached far more readers than even the most successful of Logan’s books.
Logan thus came to maturity under the formidable influence of his mother, in the distinctive atmosphere of American Quakerism—however much that tradition would be modified by the eclectic religious ideas of his parents. It is oddly touching to read his adult correspondence with his mother, whom he always addressed as “thee” in the nominative, following the Quaker custom (“In warning Ray and Karin against the perfidy of the male sex thee would do well to lay some stress on the special depravity of butchers”). And indeed, his childhood devotional life was so outwardly edifying that the story of his Christian conversion formed the basis of a short tract by his father, later titled How Little Logan Was Brought to Jesus. The tract describes the boy’s vain attempts to follow Christian moral teachings by sheer force of will, and his gradual realization that his own individual efforts were unavailing and that only by grace could he hope to keep God’s commandments. This titanic spiritual struggle, we are informed, began when Logan was four years old and ended at the age of seven. Writing in retrospect, Logan recast this childhood conversion as the beginning of his skeptical, detached adult self: where his parents saw a proto-Augustinian child renouncing the errors of Pelagius, the older Logan saw a child who would learn altogether to renounce the struggle against sin as meaningless and futile. “I may do, I have undoubtedly done, things that were foolish, tactless, and dishonest, and what the world would consider wrong, but since I attained the state of Sanctification at the age of seven I have never felt the slightest twinge of conscience, never experienced for one second the sense of sin.”
The experience of rejecting a strict religious upbringing in favor of more worldly forms of asceticism is hardly unique to Logan. What is more interesting is how his language seems to betray a kind of longing for the numinous. Many of Logan’s most beautiful sentences begin with something mundane and then suddenly overflow with an unexpected, superabundant richness of imagery; some dead metaphor is taken literally and pushed to its limits, and the reader smiles at the sheer audacity:
We are reminded of Taine’s image of [the Caroline divines] as giant mastodons or megatheria, slowly winding their scaly backs through the primeval slime, and meeting each other, armed with syllogisms and bristling with texts, in theological battle, to tear the flesh from one another’s flanks with their great talons, and cover their opponents with filth in their efforts to destroy them. . . .
Paris welcomes would-be artists with its urbane, heartless grace; it provides them with every facility for learning the art they will never learn to practise; it appropriates with a charming smile the savings they have brought with them, and with the same smile it watches them fade away or perish, knowing that new generations will soon appear to occupy their little hotels and lodgings. . . .
‘I must really improve my mind,’ I tell myself, and once more begin to patch and repair that crazy structure. So I toil and toil on at the vain task of edification, though the wind tears off the tiles, the floors give way, the ceilings fall, strange birds build untidy nests in the rafters, and owls hoot and laugh in the tumbling chimneys. . . .
The attraction of this sort of writing is the sheer beauty and lightness of the prose style, which transfigures the expression of what turn out to be rather ordinary sentiments (early modern theologians were combative; Paris has many artistic opportunities but a high cost of living; the human brain is a funny thing). “Style is a magic wand,” as Logan wrote elsewhere; “everything it touches turns to gold.” But the beauty of this kind of writing is not some arbitrary embellishment, as though the sentences could be reduced to a few bullet points with no great loss; the slow unfolding of metaphor in a sentence like this is inseparable from the author’s meaning, suggesting something about the experience described that exceeds mere literal description.
Logan belongs firmly within the tradition of English that runs from Browne and Taylor through Burton, Hazlitt, Carlyle, Pater, Walter Savage Landor, and Henry James. For these authors, there is no firm distinction between poetry and prose; the task of the essayist or historian is not merely a limpid clarity of utterance but a mastery of the expressive subtleties of language, the minute differences of rhythm and tone created by word choice, the use of archaisms and periodic sentences and exotic Latinate vocabulary. After the death of Henry James, Logan seems to have seen himself as the principal defender, and perhaps eulogist, of this tradition: Unforgotten Years ends with a witty denunciation of the shapeless prose of the younger generation of writers, and Logan’s last book, Milton and His Modern Critics, fulminates against the modern followers of Eliot and Pound for their hostility to Miltonic euphony. His theory of prose writing is set out most fully in the essay “Fine Writing,” which defends the older tradition of evocative, musical, and poetic writing against the severe modern rules of “prose composition.” The literary critics Middleton Murry and Herbert Read are quoted with horror for their insistence on an unadorned literary style that eschews “the terrible attraction of words,” the search for beauty in prose style, as an inevitable precursor to decadence. Logan’s devastating response to Murry and Read cannot be bettered:
The disconcerting fact may first be pointed out that if you write badly about good writing, however profound may be your convictions or emphatic your expression of them, your style has a tiresome trick (as a wit once pointed out) of whispering: ‘Don’t listen!’ in your readers’ ears. And it is possible also to suggest that the promulgation of new-fangled aesthetic dogmas in unwieldy sentences may be accounted for—not perhaps unspitefully—by a certain deficiency in aesthetic sensibility; as being due to a lack of that delicate, unreasoned, prompt delight in all the varied and subtle manifestations in which beauty may enchant us.
Such a message as this would never have been welcomed by the acolytes of T. S. Eliot in the British literary scene of the 1920s, even if Logan could have brought himself to be less venomous: the stylistic trend of the time was towards terseness and concision. And so Logan took on a role as the defender of a lost and perhaps unrecoverable tradition, a role that he played with a dedication that may have verged upon the histrionic: in the last pages of “Fine Writing” he casts his gaze across the landscape of America and asks why it is that no one in that vast country has thought to follow his example and dedicate their life to “the powers of magical evocation, the elfin music, the ironic echoes which are latent in English Prose.” One suspects that it would have been a disappointment to him if he had ever achieved wide popularity; he liked to imagine himself, in images that constantly recur in his work, as a Stylite, a dweller in ivory towers, a shaggy antediluvian creature blinking in incomprehension at the modern world. In a pivotal early encounter with his friend James, Logan was advised by the great novelist to embrace solitude and seclusion as the inevitable cost of literary excellence: “‘There is one word—let me impress upon you—which you must inscribe upon your banner, and that,’ he added after an impressive pause, ‘that word is Loneliness.’” Logan would repeat James’s advice in a letter to Desmond MacCarthy many years later: “Solitude makes one melancholy, but to taste life and its significance one must be alone.”
The scope of Logan’s talent was more limited than that of his mentor: he quickly discovered that he had no talent as a writer of fiction, and his early book of short stories has deservedly never been reprinted. There is a distinctive Logan Pearsall Smith voice, which can be detected in everything from Trivia to his literary essays and technical works on the history of the language—unfailingly eloquent, lightly ironic, tinged with longing for a celestial perfection that his own writing dimly images—but that voice has definite limits in what it can express. When Logan writes an extended piece of expository prose, like his long essay on “English Idioms” or his book The English Language, he is least recognizable as himself; you begin to realize that you are reading for something as pedestrian as information. He is at his best in the essays of Re-Perusals and Recollections, the episodic autobiographical reflections of Unforgotten Years, and the delightful On Reading Shakespeare. Above all, Logan will be remembered for Trivia and its sequels, which have earned begrudging admiration even from critics most hostile to everything Logan represented. Virginia Woolf, whose later relationship to Logan was one of cordial hatred, clearly understood his desire to capture moments of fleeting beauty: “It is [Logan’s] purpose to catch and enclose certain moments which break off from the mass, in which without bidding things come together in a combination of inexplicable significance, to arrest those thoughts which suddenly, to the thinker at least, are almost menacing with meaning.”
A book of brief descriptions of evanescent experience, however sumptuously written, will never attract a mass readership. But Logan has earned the forms of fame that mattered most to him: the admiration of likeminded contemporaries during his lifetime, and the continuing admiration of a small but loyal readership after his death. Only one form of posthumous distinction has so far eluded him: Logan’s greatest ambition was to add a new word to the English language. The word he proposed was “milver,” defined as a “fellow-fanatic,” a person sharing one’s interests and enthusiasms (it coincidentally supplied a rhyme for the word “silver,” which lacks any other rhyme-word in English). Almost a century after the coinage of the term, “milver” does not seem to have come into general circulation, but perhaps a slightly more restrictive definition would make the term more useful: a “milver” is a fellow-fanatic who shares one’s enthusiasm for the works of Logan Pearsall Smith. May we increase as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the seashore.
Aaron James is the director of music for the Toronto Oratory of Saint Philip Neri and a contributing editor to The Lamp.
