Essay Collection: If I May

Overview
A. A. Milne’s If I May, published in 1920, gathers a run of brief, conversational essays that first made his name as a humorist in London periodicals, especially Punch. Written in the first calm after the First World War, the collection captures a society relearning its ease: city pavements, clubrooms, bookshops, theatres, and small domestic corners where life regains its comfortable fussiness. Milne’s narrator ambles through these settings with a genial self-mockery, turning the smallest inconvenience or whim into a polished occasion for wit. The book sits alongside his earlier Not That It Matters and helped to establish the airy, companionable tone that later readers associate with his most famous writings.

Themes and Style
The prevailing subject is everyday life, treated with an elegance that never mistakes triviality for emptiness. Milne examines social rituals and private habits, how one enters a room, conducts a conversation, chooses a seat, or procrastinates, with a mixture of mock-serious logic and gentle confession. He delights in the comic kink of human behavior: the way intentions bend under the pressure of a rainy day, or how the ideal holiday dissolves into minor misadventures. His persona is unfailingly courteous and slightly bemused, a man who notices the absurd without cruelty and who includes himself in the joke.

Language is part of the amusement. Milne toys with definitions, teases conventions, and often turns a paragraph on a playful paradox. He addresses the reader as a confidant, orchestrating surprises through changes of perspective and airy asides. The style owes something to the English essay tradition from Addison to Charles Lamb, familiar address, urbanity, and a preference for the revealing small moment, yet it is unmistakably modern in its lightness of touch and metropolitan tempo.

Structure and Contents
The pieces are short and self-contained, usually only a few pages, and set out without a didactic program. The looseness is deliberate: variety is the engine of charm. One essay will drift through the pleasures and perils of book ownership, another will weigh the etiquette of calling on friends, another will consider the weather as the true author of English plans. The theatre appears as both refuge and target for affectionate satire; sport likewise, when it furnishes not triumphs but muddles. London streets, rail journeys, and new conveniences such as the motor-car and the telephone supply occasions for minor catastrophes and well-bred recoveries.

A faint shadow of the recent war sometimes passes across the page, felt in the relief of peacetime normality and the tact with which Milne avoids bitterness. He prefers the reconstruction of manners to the rehearsal of losses. Even when he touches the responsibilities of adulthood, work, duty, the claims of critics, he steers the thought toward resilience and the saving grace of humor.

Voice and Appeal
What gives If I May its lasting appeal is the tact of the voice. The essays do not strive for epigram at the expense of sympathy; the author’s cleverness is inseparable from his patience with human foible. The reader is entertained but also recognized. Milne’s timing, his way of approaching a subject sideways, pretending to underestimate it, and then crystallizing a feeling in a clear final sentence, makes the slight seem substantial. The book preserves a particular English mood between upheaval and security, and it does so without clinging to nostalgia. As a portrait of everyday felicities and embarrassments, rendered with poise and warmth, it remains an inviting companion to a quiet afternoon.