'An Example of Abundant Good Nature'

The Rev. Sydney Smith writing to his friend Harriet Martineau on December 11, 1842: 

“I am seventy-two years of age, at which period there comes over one a shameful love of ease and repose, common to dogs, horses, clergymen and even to Edinburgh Reviewers. Then an idea comes across me sometimes that I am entitled to five or six years of quiet before I die.”

 

Without being complacent or self-satisfied, Smith was one of those rare people perfectly adapted to inhabiting the world and being a human being. We so seldom encounter such rarities they can come off as freakish or soft-headed. Smith was a serious man who behaved like a happy man. He was a fierce advocate of emancipation for Roman Catholics and helped shame Parliament into it. “Sydney Smith was,” Guy Davenport writes, “quite simply a good man, an example of abundant good nature.” My nature is less good than Smith’s, though as I turn seventy-two today I’m looking forward to a few moments, if not days or years, of quiet. In reviewing Alan Bell’s 1980 biography of Smith, Davenport writes:

 

“Once at Combe Florey in Somerset, he hung oranges in the trees, for the beauty of it, and fitted his donkeys with felt antlers, for the joke of it, and herded them under his orange-bearing cedars, and invited the neighborhood in for cider and fruitcake, for the fun of it.”

 

I’d like to be that kind of old man but I’m not sure I have it in me. But neither am I an old man like William Butler “Monkey Glands” Yeats, forever raging about something. If age teaches us anything, it’s surely that anger is tiresome, nasty, egocentric and pointless. Who cares if you’re pissed off about something? Among Yeats’ final poems is an untitled verse included in his essay “On the Boiler.” It begins:   

 

“Why should not old men be mad?

Some have known a likely lad

That had a sound fly-fisher’s wrist

Turn to a drunken journalist;

A girl that knew all Dante once

Live to bear children to a dunce;

A Helen of social welfare dream,

Climb on a wagonette to scream.”

 

Hopes are unrealized, talents wasted. Most of us by the time we leave puberty understand those realities. An angry man, old or otherwise, is a bitter man and makes for lousy company.

 

[The Smith letter can be found in Vol. 2 of The Letters of Sydney Smith (ed. Nowell C. Smith, 1953). Davenport’s essay, “The Smith of Smiths,” is collected in Every Force Evolves a Form (North Point Press, 1987). On the Boiler was published by the Cuala Press in Dublin in 1939, the year of Yeats’ death.]