Logan Pearsall Smith

by CYRIL CONNOLLY

LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH died in the early morning of Saturday, March 2, in his eighty-first year. As a young man he had known Whitman and Matthew Arnold; his contemporaries at Harvard were Berenson and Santayana; at Oxford he was a favorite of Jowett; in middle age he was the friend of Henry James and Robert Bridges, of Edmund Gosse and George Moore.

In the last months he was particularly interested in young writers — John Russell, Stuart Preston, John and James Pope-Hennessy, Trevor-Roper and Veronica Wedgwood; in Edith Sitwell’s poetry also, and the literary prospects of Sir Kenneth Clark. The day before he died he rang up a friend to demand the fullest information about George Orwell, whose Animal Farm had just captivated him. “Who is he? What is he like?” “I’ll tell you all about him at tea tomorrow,” replied the friend, and the voice that sixty years before had been asking the same question about Walter Pater protested: “No. Tell me now.”

I mention this incident to show how impossible it is in a few words to convey anything of that immense magical continuity of being which is the attribute of great age. Pearsall Smith was not just an extraordinarily rich and complicated personality: he was that personality receding back through generations, he was “Logan,” a name consistently conveying the same highly concentrated and specialized flavor to people long since dead who remembered the eighteenth century, to their children, and to their grandchildren now middle-aged, and to the very young. This Logan note sounded like the ring of a fine glass through all his mutations of personality: it was his own unique resonance — a perpetual warm, ironical appreciation of life heightened by a never failing passion for the best in literature and the human heart.

This quality of mind owed something to the discrepancies of his character. The big, rather callow young American, brought up in an atmosphere of religious revivals — his parents were successful evangelists — against a background of puritanism and the family business, deliberately chose for himself the skeptical Epicurean philosophy of Horace and Montaigne and the dedicated literary life of Flaubert and Henry James; yet, while he settled happily into them, his native puritanism and no little of his native worldliness were constantly breaking through. Some of the aggression which might have been employed in making money went into elaborate teasing of his friends, and a relic of puritanism made him censorious of the ways we earn our livings — yet they also contributed to his moral force and gave to his serene, sunny philosophy that energy which Epicureanism often lacks and which chiefly distinguishes the true artist from the man of taste.

In his old age a mysterious rhythm of elation and depression gained increasing hold on him; in his “up” periods he joked and talked and went out and rearranged those elaborate sagas about his friends which were his contribution to the study of the nature of personality; in his “down” ones he would groan ironically about the fate of the world and read, read, read — absorbing and digesting his chosen author like a python, extracting his inner nature from the verbiage, sifting all the facts and theories and appreciations of him which other critics had compiled, extracting one or two precious titbits, the very marrow and pope’s nose of his subject, into little black notebooks whence they would be disinterred to provide an astonishing epithet or a disintegrating adverb.

Then during the between-stage when the bell note of his glass rang out with its clearest and most seductive music, he would write some long essay in which the gleanings of his dark winter hibernations were set down in those long shining sentences, where intelligence and feeling and scholarship and strange bleak flashes fetched from his spiritual underworld were integrated into that peculiarly radiant prose, so limpid and seeming artless, so penetrating in insight, so warm in texture, which constituted his own secret weapon against chaos and time.

Two weeks before his death, a friend asked him half jokingly if he had discovered any meaning in life. “Yes,” he replied, “there is a meaning; at least, for me, there is one thing that matters — to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.”

“And the State, Logan,” the friend went on, “the Family, the International Situation, Russia, India?”

Propped up on his pillows, he waved all this away with his hand, “A chime of words,” he repeated, “a few discriminating people.”

Well, Flaubert said — in almost those words — that nothing in this world is worth doing except the turning of a perfect sentence, and Pearsall Smith was well aware that he was working out his destiny as surely as the almond tree blossomed along the terrace or the great plane trees by his “bench of desolation” in the Hospital garden put out their summer shade. Let us consider how much he succeeded.

In the earlier part of his life his friends were chiefly scholar-artists, and came from academic circles; later he preferred artist-scholars, and became himself more purely creative, and there were always some poor lame ducks of literary journalists whose complicated backslidings he would patiently take in hand. After beginning with some poems and short stories the scholar-artist spent years preparing his Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton. The artist-scholar appeared with Trivia and More Trivia, which won him a small but choice and enduring reputation; the scholar-artist then took over with anthologies of Donne’s and Jeremy Taylor’s sermons (both of whose virtues he was largely responsible for rediscovering), of English prose and of English aphorisms, and with an anthology of Santayana (the philosopher whose doctrine of essences most appealed to him and whose work gave him a certain platonic fervor of belief, an idealism which went far beyond his epicurean temperament), and with his books on the English language.

For Pearsall Smith was a word addict who, like Valéry, worshiped the “honneur des hommes, Saint Langage,” and he wrote about words in Words and Idioms and The English Language with the same learned and infectious passion with which they always served him. One might complete his scholarly works by mentioning his exquisite On Reading Shakespeare, his volume on Milton and his book of essays, Reperusals and Re-collections, in which is distilled, in essays on Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve, Madame de Sevigne, and other favorites, some of the finest essence of his mind.

The artist returned with two more books: his autobiography, Unforgotten Years, which won him fame, where he had always maintained a fine reputation, in America, and his Afterthoughts, aphorisms which are among the most perfect of their kind, and where all his conflicting qualities — his loves and his hates, his affections and severities — are resolved into a marmoreal wisdom. Finally, an exquisitely revised edition of All Trivia and the Afterthoughts appeared just before his death.

One likes to think that he had this last satisfaction and that we also shall enjoy it, but what a poor benefit it is! How dismally do an author’s most individual writings fail to compensate for the human being we have lost! For though we may still perceive him through his phrase, what has happened to his perception of us? Just as it seemed that Logan could never have lived anywhere except in St. Leonard’s Terrace, looked after for thirty-five years with perfect consideration by his sister, waited on so intelligently by his devoted servant, Hammond, giving out, through all the especially malignant bombings of Chelsea, from his windowless, battered home his untiring and courageous enthusiasm, rediscovering Ruskin and Bossuet, applying to his friends that loving creative curiosity, finding subjects for them, planning how they could fulfill themselves — so it is impossible not to imagine him still living there, in his high study which looked over the Wren gates, “with cloudy trophies hung,” to the Hospital that symbolized that seventeenth century which he had loved so well and helped so much to elucidate, the England of Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Taylor, and Wotton, for whose sake he had become a British subject. To us who knew him in those war years Logan Pearsall Smith personified an indispensable quality in civilization.

Civilization will not lose by his death, for it has his books, but his friends will all feel less civilized. Who will care now how we turn out, or warn us when we decline, or advise us how to surpass ourselves? This is the real burden of mortality; a human spirit shines out for so long that it becomes encrusted with memories, the oracle of wisdom for a whole tribe, a fountain of humorous affection. “And yet, as with Tolstoy and with Proust, all is slowly changing beneath the unimaginable lapse of time, until suddenly the unimaginable happens; the shears of destiny snap together, the sun goes out, the curtain of darkness falls.” And around us, not him, the shades gather.