'Passages of Especial Beauty'

Quietly, without much critical hemming and hawing, Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946) has become for this reader a major minor writer. I’m reminded of this by a friend who tells me he’s reading Smith’s autobiography, Unforgotten Years (1938), a title that sneaks up on you in its dry wit. He first encountered Smith while reading Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James. I met him while reading James’ letters, and like most of his readers soon moved on to Trivia. He’s an American-born English writer whose name I never heard while studying at the university, worth exploring and seldom trivial despite the title of his best-known work. I would suggest that to call a writer “minor” is not necessarily to damn him. Remember that Guy Davenport called himself “a minor prose stylist,” a judgment not entirely false modesty. 

I’m rereading parts of Smith’s Reperusals and Re-Collections (1936), a gathering of essays loosely unified by the theme of rereading favorite writers. Probably the best-known essay in the collection is “Fine Writing,” a title that will be taken as oxymoronic by certain readers. True, Smith devotes an essay to Walter Pater, whose prose is a little too rich in cholesterol for this reader, but his tastes are broad and his instinct for pleasure and praise remains intact. Let’s look at a typical passage in “Fine Writing.” Smith notes several “masterpieces” of English prose met a “chilling reception” when first published. Only with time was their brilliance acknowledged:

 

“Ten years were required to exhaust the first edition of Lamb’s Elia; Pater’s Renaissance did not reach a third edition till seventeen years had passed; and the book which some regard as the greatest prose-achievement of the nineteenth century, Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, remained unreprinted (save in one abridgement) for more than thirty years. . . . some books, like George Herbert’s Temple, and the Religio Medici, like the works of Sterne, like Gray’s Elegy and Gibbon’s History, became popular at once, the enormous and half-educated publics of present-day England and America, though welcoming the novels of our famous novelists, acclaim as masterpieces books that are soon forgotten, while ignoring all that is exquisite and rare.”

 

A familiar story. What impresses me are the literary tastes I share with Smith. All but the Pater are reverently lodged in my private pantheon. We learn to write by reading, and reading starts as delight and soon turns to emulation. We sift through what we can use and make it personal, resonate with our inner critic. Smith write a little later in the essay:

 

“If, however, we turn our attention from theories about Prose to the actual achievements of our great prose-writers (and such a shift of attention from abstract theory to concrete fact is worth making now and then) we shall find that English literature is extremely rich—rich beyond that perhaps of any other country—in Prose which is full of Poetry and colour, and rises now and then to passages of especial beauty (‘purple patches’ if you like). Few indeed of our authors of established fame have paid the least regard to the laws of composition which our critics so emphatically proclaim. Many of the Elizabethans wrote magnificent and imaginative Prose, Sidney, Bacon, Raleigh, Shakespeare; it illuminates the pages of the old translators, North and Florio and Shelton; the translators of the Bible used it with miraculous effect, and Cranmer, in framing the Anglican liturgy, was among its greatest masters. So, too, the old divines wrote it. Hooker and Donne and Jeremy Taylor, and other seventeenth-century authors, Burton and Milton, and of course above all and beyond all Sir Thomas Browne. In the eighteenth century we hear echoes of it in Burke and Gibbon, and not infrequently in Samuel Johnson. The nineteenth is even richer than the eighteenth century in Prose of this kind: Landor, Charles Lamb and Hazlitt, Coleridge, De Quincey and Ruskin, Carlyle and Newman and Emerson availed themselves of its resources; and among more recent writers may be mentioned Pater and Stevenson and Charles Doughty and Conrad and Henry James.”

 

I’m drooling. Nice to see Landor and Doughty recognized for their prose contributions. Sample the anthology Smith published in 1920, A Treasury of English Prose.