To Logan Pearsall Smith
22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England. May 24, 1918

Dear Smith

Trivia is hardly a book to be read consecutively and only once: nevertheless I have done so, and I need hardly say with the greatest pleasure. It is not only the style and tone, so familiar and at the same time so exquisite, that delights me, for you know I can’t very well separate style from thought: it seems to me that the form in which a thought is cast is a part of its quality, and that the quality of the idea itself is only a deeper sort of form or style of expression: it too, like verbal form, expresses a reaction of the mind and its habits upon objects, rather the objects themselves; for ideas are not objects at all, but only views of objects. In your manner, therefore, I find and relish your way of thinking. Where did your get your humility? I thought that was an extinct virtue. 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. But I am afraid you don’t quite think so, are not quite reconciled to yourself and the world as you find them, and feel that it is ignominious to grow old and slant your umbrella against the wind. Now, if what is our inevitable fate is ignominious, I understand what Bridges says of Trivia, that it is the most immoral book ever written, although every word of it can be read aloud. But I don’t think so: it 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. Yet the devil of it that, if in being that you don’t suggest or keep in reserve a firm background, a religion or philosophy that enables you to face and to judge all these small delights, and say to them [I enjoy] then the thing becomes ultimate and complete for you against your will. That is the danger and the trouble with Trivia: you must have a philosophy, even in fooling, or the fooling will be spoiled and made bitter by having to take the place of the philosophy that is wanting: and the sweet treble will crack. 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.

You see I take Trivia very seriously, and I hope you will think it a compliment, and not mere ponderosity on my part.

Yours

G. S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910–1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Library of Congress, Washington DC.