Of Logan
Pearsall Smith (1865-1946), American-born English critic and essayist, author
of the forgotten memoir Unforgotten Years and Trivia, a collection of aphorisms, the art historian Lord Clark waspishly wrote, "His tall frame, hunched up, with head
thrust forward like a bird, was balanced unsteadily on vestigial legs."
Vestigial they may have been, but those legs carried the old boy here and there
for 81 long years, through nearly 30 volumes of humor, criticism, and
scholarship. Known for his bons mots, Smith, clearly a hearty indoorsman, once
remarked, "People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading."
"Thank heavens," he also said, perhaps on the same occasion,
"the sun has gone in, and I don't have to go out and enjoy it." Along
the same Wildean lines, he noted that "There are few sorrows, however
poignant, in which a good income is of no avail"; and offered this aperçu,
a perceptive one indeed to us scribblers: "Every author, however modest,
keeps an outrageous vanity chained like a madman within the padded cell of his
breast."
