'Your Point Is to Be Incomplete, Fugitive, Incidental.”

“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.” 

Any sensibility able to produce such admirable thoughts I diagnose as sane. The writer is George Santayana in a May 24, 1918, letter to Logan Pearsall Smith. The Spaniard has just read Smith’s Trivia (1917). The book’s preface, in its entirety, gives a fair taste of the contents:

 

“‘You must beware of thinking too much about Style,’ said my kindly adviser, ‘or you will become like those fastidious people who polish and polish until there is nothing left.’

 

“‘Then there really are such people?’ I asked, lost in the thought of how much I should like to meet them. But the well-informed lady could give me no precise information about them.

 

“I often hear of them in this tantalizing manner, and perhaps one day I shall get to know them. They sound delightful.”

 

As was Smith, who joins that small coterie of “minor” writers often more essential to me than some of the majors: Walter Savage Landor, Charles Montagu Doughty, Max Beerbohm, Maurice Baring, Walter de la Mare. Each qualifies as a sui generis thinker and stylist. Each ranks pleasure high among his responsibilities to readers. Life is too fleeting to squander it on, say, Noam Chomsky and Joyce Carol Oates.

 

I first learned of Smith (1865-1946), an American-born English essayist and critic, through his correspondence with Henry James. Later I read his best-known work, All Trivia (1933), which collects four earlier volumes published between 1902 and 1933 and includes this announcement across from the copyright page:

 

“These pieces of moral prose have been written, dear Reader, by a large Carnivorous Mammal, belonging to that sub-order of the Animal Kingdom which includes also the Orang-outang, the tusked Gorilla, and the gentle Chimpanzee.”

 

To speak of “best-known” in regard to anything Smith ever wrote recalls Dr. Johnson’s observation that a second marriage is “a triumph of hope over experience.” In our day, Smith and other “minor” (a patronizing word that shouldn’t be used qualitatively) writers of the past are stubbornly unfashionable, not forgotten but unknown, like those cold little planets said to be lurking beyond the orbit of Pluto. There’s a poignancy in their fate. They worked hard and often honorably. They can still give us pleasure if we make the effort to recover them. Of course, all writers are fated to slip into oblivion – if they are fortunate, only after they are dead. Santayana writes of Trivia, which had been called “immoral” by the poet Robert Bridges, then poet laureate of the United Kingdom: 

 

“[I]t is not immoral at all unless you take it to be complete and ultimate, which of course is the last thing you would think of pretending. Your point is to be incomplete, fugitive, incidental.”

 

Precisely the qualities in which Smith reveled. He prized precisely who he was and wrote like no other writer, as in “Humiliation”:

 

“‘My own view is,’ I began, but no one listened. At the next pause, ‘I always say,’ I remarked, but again the loud talk went on. Someone told a story. When the laughter had ended, ‘I often think—'; but looking round the table I could catch no friendly or attentive eye. It was humiliating, but more humiliating the thought that Sophocles and Goethe would have always commanded attention, while the lack of it would not have troubled Spinoza or Abraham Lincoln.”

 

[Aaron James produced a fine appreciation of Smith “the Belletrist” in The Lamp.]