If I Had a Sense of Beauty

H. W. Fowler and his dog.

“He is merely shallow and—oh! so banal and trite.” —Pall Mall Gazette)

“This group of self-conscious, verbose essays.” —Yorkshire Observer

“A true autobiography of a second-rate soul.” —Morning Post

These are some of the “Extracts from Press Notices” at the beginning of If Wishes Were Horses (1929). They refer to the 1907 edition, published under another title. They are the very first thing we find in the book, before even the author’s name. Only Henry Watson Fowler—who by this time had authored two of Oxford’s all-time classics, The King’s English and A Dictionary of Modern Usage (see my other post on this subject)—could have had the humility and the sense of humor to begin a book by citing the most acerbic sneers he could find on it.

If voluntarily quoting those scalding blurbs were not enough, Fowler further proved his humility by publishing many of his books anonymously or under pseudonyms, one of which was Quillet, as in “little quill”—literally, a diminutive pen name. In addition to his work as a linguist, he wrote several books that defy classification. One of them, for instance, is a collection of “lay sermons” for boys (Fowler’s atheism cost him his teaching position), signed as Quilibet (Latin for “anyone” or “no matter who.”) Another was an attack on popular fallacies (“Childhood Is the Happiest Time,” “Time Is Money,” et cetera), much in the vein of Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées reçues or Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, only with essay-length entries.

Even within Fowler’s strange corpus, If Wishes Were Horses is a rather strange book. He first published it in 1907, when he was “a sensitive young thing under fifty,” under the pseudonym Egomet (“myself”), and reprinted it twenty-two years later, as a “married senior over seventy.” His tendency to smallness, a form of meek evanescence, is reminiscent of Robert Walser; his wit and economy, of Max Beerbohm; his comical hyperawareness of his declining years, of Italo Svevo. But the style and formal eccentricity are Fowler’s own.

The book, “mostly a catalogue raisonné of the things I wish the gods had given me,” is made up of eleven essays, each one beginning with “If I”: “If I Had Imagination,” “If I Had Manners,” “If I Had a Philosophy,” “If I Had a Cat.” In a way, then, this is a counterfactual autobiography—what his life would have been like, had he had any of theseprotasis apodosis