Essay Collection: Not That It Matters

Overview
Published in 1919, A. A. Milne’s Not That It Matters is a miscellany of short, conversational essays originally written for periodicals (most notably Punch). The collection’s title is both an apology and a tease: Milne insists that his chosen topics are trivial, then demonstrates how much charm, insight, and consolation reside in everyday trifles. Rather than polemicizing about the urgent public questions of the moment, he cultivates intimacy with the reader, turning minor irritations, social rituals, and private preferences into occasions for amusement and reflection. The result is a portrait of an intelligent, mildly baffled, and endlessly observant narrator whose pleasures are civilized and whose judgments are gentle. The book invites readers to attend to small things not to escape the world, but to rejoin it with better humor and more humane proportions.

Themes and Subjects
Milne’s subjects are deliberately slight, habits, hobbies, language tics, the weather, manners, books and bookishness, the drama of letters and lists, the pleasures of idleness, and the little negotiations by which we live with others. He delights in the gap between what we intend and what we actually do, in the unheroic compromises that keep daily life tolerable. Many essays anatomize tastes, how we come to prefer one chair to another, one way of arranging a day to its rival, or expose the comic solemnities of institutions, from clubs and queues to theatres and drawing rooms. He is fond of teasing the pedant in himself, worrying about definitions and rules only to conclude that amiability matters more than accuracy. Running through the book is a defense of harmless preferences and eccentricities: the right to be inconsistent, to change one’s mind, to fail cheerfully, to avoid zealotry. By treating minor matters seriously (and serious matters lightly), Milne suggests that character is revealed more clearly in the choice of a hat or a habit than in grand declarations.

Style and Voice
The essays are brief and shapely, typically building from an offhand observation to a mock-serious argument and then to a disarming reversal. Milne’s voice is urbane, self-deprecating, and conversational; he often addresses the reader directly, stages imaginary dialogues, or apostrophizes inanimate objects. His humor depends less on punchlines than on tone, on courteous exaggeration, playful logic, and the discovery of paradox in common sense. He is a stylist who loves cadence and understatement, and his sentences invite you to hear them as much as to read them. While the pieces are light, they are not careless: beneath the whimsy lies a steady moral preference for kindness, proportion, and tact.

Context and Underlying Mood
Appearing in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, the book largely avoids war talk, not out of indifference but out of a restorative instinct. Its attention to small pleasures and petty annoyances implies a world recovering its ordinary rhythms. The essays value civility and domestic comfort without becoming complacent; the mood is one of relief tempered by modesty, a reminder that public sanity is maintained by private good manners.

Legacy and Appeal
Not That It Matters showcases Milne’s gift for the lightly worn intelligence that would later animate his children’s books. It also preserves a vivid snapshot of early twentieth-century English middle-class life, with its rituals, anxieties, and quiet delights. The collection remains appealing because it makes a case, sunny, sly, and persuasive, that trivial things are not trivial at all when they teach us how to live together more agreeably.