'The Top Thing of the World'

 John Keats’ meditation on a reader’s paradise: 

“I had an idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner. Let him on a certain day read a certain Page of full Poesy or distilled Prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it and reflect from it, and dream upon it: until it becomes stale—But when will it do so? Never—When Man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting-post towards all the ‘two-and-thirty Palaces.’ How happy is such a voyage of conception, what delicious, diligent indolence!”

 

Keats is writing a letter to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds on February 19, 1818. His spirits are high. Never theory-minded, here he proposes a bona fide theory of reading, one uncluttered and pleasure-driven. Slow down. Savor. No “multitasking.” Minimize distractions, internal and otherwise. For real reading, that is, not junk or obligatory texts. His letters often double as compact anthologies of literary snippets. In this one he cites passages from Pliny, Swift, Wordsworth and two of Shakespeare’s plays. Keats’ genius for poetry and prose is baffling, an affront to journeyman writers, especially coming from a man who would die at age twenty-five. If I were compelled to choose between the letters and the poems, I would defy the conventional choice and stick with the letters. He is one of those writers from past centuries – Swift is another -- from whom we can learn how to write,

 

Logan Pearsall Smith used the Keats passage above as the epigraph to A Treasury of English Prose (1920). Smith’s selection runs from Chaucer and The Book of Common Prayer to H.G. Wells and George Santayana. He is particularly fond of the seventeenth century, which remains unequaled in the history of English prose – the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Donne, Burton, Browne, Hobbes, Walton, Milton, Taylor, Traherne and the rest. Five Americans are included – Lincoln, Emerson, Whitman, Henry James and Woodrow Wilson [!].  Smith’s friend Desmond McCarthy reminds us of “what he had preached incessantly, that style is the sole preservative.” A young writer could learn much about prose style from Smith’s choices. In Fine Writing (1936), Smith suggests irony is the saving grace of fine writing, not purple prose:

 

“. . . I should be inclined to say that an ironic way of writing is the one to which Prose is peculiarly adapted. I could instance among the ancients the irony of Plato, of Tacitus, and Lucian, and among the moderns the irony of Hamlet and of Falstaff, of Pascal, of Burton, Sterne, and Fielding, of Voltaire, of Swift, and of Gibbon, who was perhaps a greater artist than he knew.”

 

Smith isn’t talking about today’s cheapened, reflexive sense of irony, the lingua franca of undergraduates and second-rate comedians. Naturally, he choose more samples of Keats’ prose from the letters for inclusion in his anthology, including another addressed to Reynolds, on August 25, 1819:

 

“I am convinced more and more, every day, that fine writing is, next to fine doing, the top thing of the world; the Paradise Lost becomes a greater wonder. The more I know what my diligence may in time probably effect, the more does my heart distend with Pride and Obstinacy. . . . My own being which I know to be becomes of more consequence to me than the crowds of Shadows in the shape of men and women that inhabit a kingdom. The soul is a world of itself, and has enough to do in its own home.”

 

[Logan Pearsall Smith was born on this date, October 18, in 1865, and died in 1946 at age eighty.]