'These Pieces of Moral Prose'

“Where did you get your humility? I thought that was an extinct virtue.” 

Creating anything worthwhile, whether joke, villanelle or pot of lentil soup, calls for pride and humility. Pride because one presumes to add to the world’s bounty and impose it on others; humility because one acknowledges teachers and submits to lessons learned. Nothing is done from scratch.

 

In the passage quoted above, George Santayana is writing to the American-born English writer and critic Logan Pearsall Smith on this date, May 24, in 1918. Santayana refers to Trivia, Smith’s collection of aphorisms and brief anecdotes, often comic but gently pointed, first published in 1902. More Trivia followed in 1921 and All Trivia in 1933. Smith’s tone is deceptively breezy:

 

“These pieces of moral prose have been written, dear Reader, by a large Carnivorous Mammal, belonging to that suborder of the Animal Kingdom which includes also the Orang-outang, the tusked Gorilla, the Baboon with his bright blue and scarlet bottom, and the gentle Chimpanzee.”

 

In a Trivia entry titled “Edification,” Smith writes:

 

“‘I must really improve my Mind,’ I tell myself, and once more begin to patch and repair that crazy structure. So I toil and toil on at the vain task of edification, though the wind tears off the tiles, the floors give way, the ceilings fall, strange birds build untidy nests in the rafters, and owls hoot and laugh in the tumbling chimneys.”

 

Santayana’s letter amounts to an anatomy of Smith’s style and an acknowledgement of affinity:

 

“And I very much like your love of pleasure, and your humour and malice: it is so delightful to live in a world that is full of pictures, and incidental divertissements, and amiable absurdities. Why shouldn’t things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.”

 

Santayana might be describing a blog when he tells Smith, “Your point is to be incomplete, fugitive, incidental,” and continues in what amounts to a prescient prophecy:

 

“What I wish you would do is to write another Trivia, or two more (since Trivia had three faces) and make your bow to Luna and Hecate also, after having shown us Diana tripping across the flickering glades. Humility is not weak, it is just. Heraclitus said that justice presided over the flux, because such things didn’t deserve to last for ever.”

 

Santayana’s understanding of humility and Smith’s embodiment of it remind me of another writer, unlikely but inspired -- the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. In the title essay of Labyrinth on the Sea (trans. Alissa Valles, The Collected Prose 1948-1998, 2010), Herbert writes:

 

“I was not then a youth thirsting for originality, which as we know is easiest to achieve if you are an iconoclast, if you scorn recognized works and don’t respect either authorities or tradition. This stance has always been alien to me—even odious, if I leave aside the short phase between my fourth and fifth year that psychologists describe as the phase of negativism. I always wanted to love, to adore, to fall to my knees and bow down before greatness, even if it overwhelms and terrifies, for what kind of greatness would it be that didn’t overwhelm and terrify.”