"Clear of Trumpery Little Passions": Auden on Smith

"Auden?" my friend Zoltan said, with a sneer in his voice (this was 50 years ago, but I remember it). "Auden? A writer of editorials!"

I shivered a little. I liked Auden, and I admired Zoltan, and I wasn't sure where to go with that remark.

In the fullness of time, I have come to suspect Zoltan was overdoing it. In poems like "September 1, 1939" for good or ill, he captured the temper of his time. And I do love "Herod." But in the fullness of time, I've come up with a different spin on Auden: I wonder if perhaps he isn't a better critic than poet--or at least a shrewd and insightful appreciator, whose enduring legacy may be his capacity to convey his own enthusiasms to others.

As Exhibit A, there is surely his Lectures on Shakespeare, about which the learned Patrick writes so forcefully. But there is so much more. I still have my old copy of the Portable Greek Reader, with his inimitable introduction. NYRB Classics has seen fit to republish his introduction to Kierkegaard. There's a great deal more--and wait, folks, here's one that's new to me. In Palookaville's best second hand bookstore, I discover an Auden edition of The Selected Writings of Sidney Smith (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, New York, 1956). I'm happy to report that it is all you would expect of an Auden introduction: learned, congenial and insightful, with a special knack for putting this B-list literary celebrity into his proper context.

In a way, it's a pity that Smith isn't known better: the most unlikely of preachers, the kindest and most civilized of companions, Smith probably did more than any other person to give the Anglican clergy its reputation for being more interested in cricket than theology. Auden, whose own religious impulse was strong, remarks that readers wonder "just why he was an Anglican and not, say a Unitarian." (viii). Yet Auden's respect for Smith's decency and generosity win out, and he pays him what is, for Auden, a high compliment: he mentions him in the same breath with his greater enthusiasm Kierkegaard. The Dane, as Auden recalls, had as his "chief complaint against the bourgeois ... that they were a parody of the Knights of Faith." He thinks Kierkegaard "would have appreciated ... Sidney Smith's use of bourgeois terms to define A Nice Person:"

A nice person is neither too tall nor too short, looks clean and cheerful, has no prominent features, makes no difficulties, is never displaced, sits bodkin, is never foolishly affronted, and is void of affectations. . . . A nice person is clear of trumpery little passions, acknowledges superiority, delights in talent, shelters humility, pardons adversity, forgives deficiency, respects all men's rights, never stops the bottle, is never long and never wrong, always knows the day of the month, the name of everybody at table, and never gives pain to any human being. . . . A nice person never knocks over wine or melted butter, does not tread upon the dog's foot, or molest the family cat, eats soup without noise, laughs in the right place, and has a watchful and attentive eye.

Id., xx

I don't know how many of his own terms Smith can be said to exemplify, although I'm pretty sure that he "is clear of trumpery little passions ... shelters humility, pardons adversity [and] forgives deficiency." Oh, and that Auden has "a watchful and attentive eye."

Afterthought: "Sits bodkin"--? I'm workin' on it.