I have in front of me a beautiful little blue volume published by Methuen and Co. in London in 1928. Not That It Matters is a collection of essays from the end of that extraordinary silver age of English belles-lettres at the turn of the last century, when men such as Shaw and Belloc earned their daily bread by scribbling in newspapers and magazines about anything they could scrape a thousand or so words out of: socialism, dogs, the weather, how they celebrated Christmas, capital punishment, Wagner. For those who like this sort of thing, this volume is very nearly perfect: There are pieces on snobbery, oranges, cricket, bad fiction, “Smoking as a Fine Art” (“My first introduction to Lady Nicotine was at the innocent age of eight”), chess, thermometers, Holy Writ (“Isaiah was the ideal author. . . . He kept to one style”), and — prophetically — those bores who fetishize “good brown ale”:
If A. A. Milne had never written anything other than these delightful squibs, his short stories and light verse for Punch, his very amusing detective novel The Red House Mystery, and a handful of comedies for the stage, he would be one of those major-minor writers whose reputations some of us delight in shoring up. Thankfully for him and untold millions of readers, he had the good sense to invent Pooh Bear.
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