George Santayana

“ Santayana is not an author for loud streets or for them who tear round the country in a blatant char-à-banc. He avoids even the high roads, and we shall come upon him, if we are lucky, in a grassy hollow of the bank of some dark river, and hear him talking to himself in a voice which disturbs neither the dragon-flies nor the thrushes. He meditates by the hour together on the sunlight in the buttercups, which gives him the illusion of life, or on the hurrying flood of liquid agate, which reminds him of the illusion of death. ”

“ Poetry was made for man, not man for poetry, and there are really as many kinds of it as there are poets, or even verses. Is Hamlet's Soliloquy poetry? Would it have conveyed its meaning better if not reined in by the metre, and made to prance and turn to the cadences of blank verse? Whether better or worse, it would certainly not be itself without that movement. Versification is like a pulsing accompaniment, somehow sustaining and exalting the clear logic of the words. ”

“ But if thine own dear eyes I see beside
Sharpened against me, then my strength will fail,
Abandoning sail and rudder to the gale
For thy sweet sake alone so long defied.
If I am poor, in death how rich and brave
Will seem my spirit with the love it gave;
If I am sad, I shall seem happy then.
Be mine, be mine in God and in the grave,
Since naught but chance and the insensate wave
Divides us, and the wagging tongue of men.
XXXIII
A perfect love is nourished by despair. ”

“ And her long sleep a draught of primal night.
SONNETS
XXI
Among the myriad voices of the Spring
What were the voice of my supreme desire,
What were my cry amid the vernal choir,
Or my complaint before the gods that sing?
O too late love, O flight on wounded wing,
Infinite hope my lips should not suspire,
Why, when the world is thine, my grief require,
Or mock my dear-bought patience with thy sting?
Though I be mute, the birds will in the boughs
Sing as in every April they have sung,
And, though I die, the incense of heart-vows
Will float to heaven, as when I was young. ”

“ Everything is a symbol to him, and if he has a volume of poetry open at his side he does not distinguish its verse from the puzzling confidences of the blackbirds, and the insects are dreams which mingle with his own. ”

“ Philosophy is not an optional theme that may occupy him on occasion. It is his only possible life, his daily response to everything. He lives by thinking, and his one perpetual emotion is that this world, with himself in it, should be the strange world which it is. Everything he thinks or utters will accordingly be an integral part of his philosophy, whether it be called poetry or science or criticism. The verses of a philosopher will be essentially epigrams, like those which the Greek sages composed ”

“ To say that what was good once is good no longer is to give too much importance to chronology. Æsthetic fashions may change, losing as much beauty at one end as they gain at the other, but innate taste continues to recognise its affinities, however remote, and need never change. Mask and buskin are often requisite in order to transport what is great in human experience out of its embosoming littleness. They are inseparable from finality, from perception of the ultimate. Perhaps it is just this tragic finality that English poets do not have and do not relish: they feel it to be rhetorical. ”

“ The slaughtered braves should rise, crying, Saint James! Saint James!
Then, the day won, and its bright arbiter
Vanished, save for peace he left behind,
Each in his private bosom should bestir
His dearest dream: as that perchance there pined
Some lovely maiden of angelic mind
In those dark towers, awaiting out of Spain
Two Saviours that her horoscope divined
Should thence arrive. She (womanlike) were fain
Not to be wholly free, but wear a chosen chain.
That should be youth's adventure. ”

“ As they lie musing, large, in peaceful strength.
I see their children, bent with toil and terror,
Lurking in caves, or heaping madly on
The stones of Babel, or the endless error
Of Sodom, Nineveh, and Babylon.
Here the Egyptian, wedding life with death,
Flies from the sun into his painted tomb,
And winds the secret of his antique faith
Tight in his shroud, and seals in sterile gloom.
There the bold prophets of the heart's desire
Hail the new Zion God shall build for them,
And rapt Isaiah strikes the heavenly lyre,
And Jeremiah mourns Jerusalem. ”

“ He finds the nearest parallel to that old Greek temperament, which he adores, in the English modesty in determination. It seems to rest his spirit to see that we are self-sufficing. Not that he is blind to our national defects, for he thinks that an exquisite or subtle Englishman, although such exist, is a lusus natures. It is not our business to be subtle, and when we are, there is always a tendency in us to become wrong-headed. We turn affected or else puritanical, and these extremes are highly distasteful to Mr. Santayana. ”

“ He avoids the positive in all its forms. Not merely is he careful not to be dogmatic, but, speaking as he does to and as it were for himself alone, he is apt to combine an exactitude of language with a considerable dilution of thought. He is not averse from the pleasant foible of repeating himself, and as he does this in fresh language the reader, if he is at all censorious, is apt to resent a little the revolving flight of the ideas. Mr. Santayana soliloquises like an aeroplane making graceful curves and daring drops in one section of the ether. ”

“ Here is the uncertain hand of an apprentice, but of an apprentice in a great school. Verse is one of the traditions of literature. Like the orders of Greek architecture, the sonnet or the couplet or the quatrain are better than anything else that has been devised to serve the same function; and the innate freedom of poets to hazard new forms does not abolish the freedom of all men to adopt the old ones. It is almost inevitable that a man of letters, if his mind is cultivated and capable of moral concentration, should versify occasionally, or should have versified. ”

“ Santayana was for many years a professor of philosophy in Harvard University, where he showed no mercy to Hegel and was a thorn in the side of the Pragmatists. He is the author of a Life of Reason, in five volumes, which I know that I shall never read, but which I am sure it is safe to recommend to persons younger and more thoughtful than myself. Since he ceased to be a professor, Mr. Santayana has wandered much in Europe, which, distracted as it is, he prefers to America, as quieter. ”

“ It is amusing to pick out here and there, and put together in a bunch, some of this Hispano-American philosopher's impressions of our race, but we make a mistake if we suppose him largely or generally interested in any particular nation. What makes him attractive, but also a little alarming, is his excessive detachment from the modern life in which he moves so silently and observantly. ”

“ For as to the subject of these poems, it is simply my philosophy in the making. I should not give the title of philosopher to every logician or psychologist who, in his official and studious moments, may weigh argument against argument or may devise expedients for solving theoretical puzzles. I see no reason why a philosopher should be puzzled. What he sees he sees; of the rest he is ignorant; and his sense of this vast ignorance (which is his natural and inevitable condition) is a chief part of his knowledge and of his emotion. ”

“ He is anxious to disown the name of metaphysician, but he is a psychologist to the tips of his fingers, and he is still in hopes of discovering a scientific philosophy which may explain to him the apparent discord between man and nature over which he is always brooding. ”

“ With you a part of me hath passed away;
For in the peopled forest of my mind
A tree made leafless by this wintry wind
Shall never don again its green array.
Chapel and fireside, country road and bay,
Have something of their friendliness resigned;
Another, if I would, I could not find,
And I am grown much older in a day.
But yet I treasure in my memory
Your gift of charity, and young heart's ease,
And the dear honour of your amity;
For these once mine, my life is rich with these.
And I scarce know which part may greater be,—
What I keep of you, or you rob from me. ”

“ We are so well accustomed to attacks, often very petulant and silly, made against England by Englishmen, that it is quite refreshing to read the impressions of a Spanish philosopher trained in America, who has a much higher opinion of us than we are apt to have of ourselves. Mr. Santayana is prompt to protest that nothing would make him wish to become an Englishman. ”

“ In nature's inmost heart is no uproar,
None in this shrine; in peace the heavens roll,
In peace the slow tides pulse from shore to shore,
And ancient quiet broods from pole to pole.
XVI
A thousand beauties that have never been
Haunt me with hope and tempt me to pursue;
The gods, methinks, dwell just behind the blue ”

“ He carries his English weather in his heart wherever he goes, and it becomes a cool spot in the desert, and a steady and sane oracle amongst all the deliriums of mankind. Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls, and fanatics manage to supplant him."
To give a general idea of Mr. Santayana's essays, I find a difficult task, because of a certain density and uniformity in his expression. ”

“ The muffled syllables that Nature speaks
Fill us with deeper longing for her word;
She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,
She makes a sweeter music than is heard. ”

“ And the heart's anguish all unsung.
Youth dies in man's benumbed soul,
Maid bows to woman's broken life,
A thousand leagues of silence roll
Between the husband and the wife.
The spirit faints with inward strife
And lonely gazing at the pole.
But how should reptiles pine for wings
Or a parched desert know its dearth?
Immortal is the soul that sings
The sorrow of her mortal birth. ”

“ Being with joy and gratitude baptized,
Should lavish gifts of price by rarest art devised.
Or if (since churls there be) they should demur
To some least point of fealty or faith,
A champion, clad in arms from crest to spur,
Should challenge the proud caitiffs to their death
And, singly felling them, from their last breath
Extort confession that the Lord is lord,
And India's Catholic queen, Elizabeth. ”

“ The activity of existence is arrested for him, and time has become a vain expression.
This is his dominant mood, but sometimes he rouses himself and walks to the wayside inn, where he watches the farmers and the travellers, unobserved by them. He notes their ways and their talk with a shrewd and sometimes humorous pertinacity, but they hardly exist for him more vividly than did the thrushes and the dragon-flies. ”

“ What I felt when I composed those verses could not have been rendered in any other form. Their sincerity is absolute, not only in respect to the thought which might be abstracted from them and expressed in prose, but also in respect to the aura of literary and religious associations which envelops them. If their prosody is worn and traditional, like a liturgy, it is because they represent the initiation of a mind into a world older and larger than itself; not the chance experiences of a stray individual, but his submission to what is not his chance experience ”

“ His profound scepticism forbids him to alight, for he has no faith in the current assumptions of daily life, and but a very faint interest in facts. He swoops in the light like a swallow, and we must be content to follow his turns and returns, with sympathy for his candour and freshness, and gratitude for his gracious skill. ”

“ All are dreams, all are in a condition of maia, and the more he tries to distinguish them the more they melt into one. He exists, and he soliloquises, in a mood of perpetual reverie.
This is an allegory, and in plain terms Mr. Santayana is a cosmopolitan philosopher of wide reputation. He is the son of a gentleman of Spain, who emigrated to New York. He tells us that his father learned to read English, which implies that he never learned to speak it. The son not only speaks, but writes, our language with an exquisite exactitude and grace, so that he is one of those rare figures, like Mr. ”

“ But the essence of him is solitary, and he escapes from society not that he may forget it, but that, removed from that element in it which seems to kill the mind, he may reflect upon it with the minimum of disturbance. ”

“ Santayana's pages in search of his impressions of our race. They are not given in dogmatic form, but they are found to be consistent, and, as I say, they are gratifying in the mouth of so shrewd and so disinterested an observer. After traversing many lands he concludes that the English character is the best; it is as strong as the American, and softer, and less obstreperous. ”

“ Of the death-hallowed cypress, and the myrtle
Hallowed by Venus?
O for a chamber in an eastern tower,
Spacious and empty, roofed in odorous cedar,
A silken soft divan, a woven carpet
Rich, many-coloured ”