George Santayana is a gifted Spaniard who succeeded to a chair of
philosophy at Harvard, began to write when he was forty, got fed up
with the Harvard atmosphere, and fled to Paris where he is now writing
what are certainly the finest contributions, from the point of view of
style and ideas, to philosophic thought since Remy de Gourmont’s death.
To say that Santayana is the Emerson of his era is far from flattering
to Santayana who is a logical, clear thinking psychologist, dissociator
of ideas, and æsthetician as against Emerson’s confused and impalpable
transcendentalism, Unitarian freedom of spirit, minor parish breath of
vision, and suburban æsthetics; but Santayana occupies or is beginning
to occupy with his generation in America a position analogous to that
of Emerson in his. By fleeing to Europe he has been able to perform a
pedagogical service of vaster importance than was permitted him when he
was irked by the formalism of collegiate education, the petty academic
fussing and narrowness of his colleagues, and the discouraging
stupidity prevalent among students seeking mass instruction. He is
now the one spar to which educated youths are able to cling amid the
perpetual flux. He is the only remaining philosopher writing in English
who is not a specialist in something or other--psychiatry, education,
single tax, Manchester labor, Chinese history, or what not; hence he
is the only one who can see things in the round, criticize freely with
an unbiased and open mind, and offer ideas and suggestions not tinged
with Utopian pink or parti pris. He is a free spirit, with all that
that felicitous French phrase connotes. Philosophically he is a man of
the world; spiritually, scientifically, literarily he knows his way
about; he is nobody’s fool, not Lenin’s, Balfour’s, Freud’s, Cézanne’s,
Rolland’s, Shaw’s, Morgan’s, or God’s. What is rarest among his coevals
in his clan, he has taken the trouble to learn how to write.
You will not get the finest flavor of his style in the books listed
here, of which, in a new edition, these remarks are apropos. When
he wrote “The Life of Reason”, Santayana was still struggling with
his technique of expression in a language alien to him by birth and
temperament. He was still occasionally mixing his tenses, achieving
an uneasy idiom with a foreign accent, and escaping only with the
greatest difficulty from the jargon of the professional philosophers.
It is not that he is difficult to read in his earlier work, but that
it is sometimes quaint reading, as if he were overwhelmed by the
importance of what he had to say and was taking infinite pains to say
it slowly, deliberately, distinctly. With “Winds of Doctrine” he had
become at ease with his medium and familiar with his ideas; when he
wrote “Soliloquies in England”, he had perfected the most charming
address imaginable in English--subtle, smiling, cultured, allusive,
witty, cadenced and nuanced. All traces of the old constraint had gone;
his fancy was liberated to dance gaily and in rhythm with his thought;
the data of his experience and the residuum of his reading had lost the
blighting touch of the treatise and become the materials of an amiable
and exquisite discourse.
But, nevertheless, it is important for the reader who is charmed
and stimulated by Santayana’s later essays to know something of the
foundation upon which this charm is builded. He will get that in “The
Life of Reason”, wherein Santayana applies the intelligence test to
the aspects of human progress observable in society, religion, art,
science, and common sense. What he attempted to do, and succeeded in
a great measure in doing, was to examine the concepts involved in
those terms and pick away from them all the fallacious excrescences
which have grown up and surrounded them. He sought the reasonable, the
intelligent idea expressed by those terms. He pursued the Socratic
method of elimination of the false by question and answer. He applied
the rule of common sense to matters of belief, doctrine, theoretical
ethics, personal conduct, artistic expression, and social theory--and
by common sense he means an understanding arrived at by intelligent
analysis, free from myth, illusion, and messianic hope.
One has the feeling that Santayana wrote “The Life of Reason” in
order to discover himself, to give order and form to the impressions,
conclusions, and intimations about life he had gained from experience
and meditation. That is, of course, what all artists, philosophers,
poets, and theologians do; but I believe there was in Santayana more
than the usual serious self-communion. One finds in him no trace
of vanity, of cocking an eye to a possible audience of influential
but closed minds, of posturing for posterity, or impressing by
erudition and long words. On the other hand, there is an intellectual
self-reliance discoverable in almost no other thinker or essayist: he
writes without footnotes and bibliographies; he almost never uses a
quotation from another writer. He does not bolster up his ideas and
opinions with pilferings from the accumulations of libraries. He is, in
brief, independent, honest, and courageous.
Now, let us see what are some of his ideas. It is an ironic paradox
that Santayana, who first built up a philosophy of reason in five
volumes, has now come pretty much to distrust reason as an effective
agent in the governance of human affairs. What he would now term a
reasonable attitude toward life is one which holds that every man must
forge his own philosophy. As for one George Santayana he has found
it advantageous to sit like patience on a monument smiling at grief,
checking his passions that he may savor and conserve--not waste--them,
do unto his neighbor as he would wish to be done by, forego possessions
and attachments as a check upon his freedom, and enjoy life as a
spectacle (to write about) rather than submerge himself in the business
of living. To arrive at this he has examined the possible other courses
and has found what he conceives to be the factors of satisfaction and
happiness in each.
But it would be wrong to assume that “The Life of Reason” is in the
nature of a preachment or an exhortation. It becomes a moral philosophy
only by its implications as a history of human ideas. Santayana is a
naturalist of the mind, a questioner, a tester, a sceptic, and he has
written: “Scepticism is a moral force, a tendency to sincerity, economy
and fine adjustment of life and mind to experience.” The calibre of his
reasoning, the light he throws upon human institutions, is seen to good
advantage in his elucidation of the conflict between Catholicism and
Protestantism in “Reason in Religion”:
This underlying Teuton religion, which we must call Protestantism
for lack of a better name, is anterior to Christianity and can
survive it. To identify it with the Gospel may have seemed possible
so long as, in opposition to pagan Christianity, the Teutonic
spirit could appeal to the Gospel for support. The Gospel has
indeed nothing pagan about it, but it has also nothing Teutonic;
and the momentary alliance of two such disparate forces must
naturally cease with the removal of the common enemy which alone
united them. The Gospel is unworldly, disenchanted, ascetic; it
treats ecclesiastical establishments with tolerant contempt,
conforming to them with indifference; it regards prosperity as a
danger, earthly ties as a burden, Sabbaths as a superstition;
it revels in miracles; it is democratic and antinomian; it loves
contemplation, poverty, and solitude; it meets sinners with
sympathy and heartfelt forgiveness, but Pharisees and Puritans
with biting scorn. In a word, it is a product of the Orient,
where all things are old and equal and a profound indifference to
the business of earth breeds a silent dignity and high sadness
of spirit. Protestantism is the exact opposite of all this.
It is convinced of the importance of success and prosperity;
it abominates what is disreputable; contemplation seems to it
idleness, solitude selfishness, and poverty a sort of dishonorable
punishment. It is constrained and punctilious in righteousness;
it regards a married and industrious life as typically godly,
and there is a sacredness to it, as of a vacant Sabbath, in the
unoccupied higher spaces which such an existence leaves for the
soul. It is sentimental, its ritual is meagre and unctuous, it
expects no miracles, it thinks optimism akin to piety, and regards
profitable enterprise and practical ambition as a sort of moral
vocation. Its Evangelicalism lacks the notes so prominent in the
Gospel, of disillusion, humility, and speculative detachment. Its
benevolence is optimistic and aims at raising men to a conventional
well-being; it thus misses the inner appeal of Christian charity
which, being merely remedial in physical matters, begins by
renunciation and looks to spiritual freedom and peace.
You will see from this that the dominant spirit of the United States,
as it is of England and Germany, is Protestantism. Protestantism is
a religious spirit best suited to a raw, new, energetic people. It
becomes, as Santayana points out, unpleasantly materialistic by the
very excess of its own virtues as an inspiration to progress and
achievement. For himself, Santayana is steeped in the Catholic spirit
and we find in his poetry no less than in his later essays the passive
attitude toward life, the attitude of good-humored resignation; but he
is never blind to the merits of Protestantism. England and the English
fascinate him; he admires the Englishman’s bland ability to get on in
the world, his self-control, his self-isolation, his manners, and his
enterprise.
There is perhaps in no European literature a more illuminating and
intelligent discussion of love, family life, industry, aristocracy,
democracy and patriotism than is to be found in “Reason in Society”;
there is no saner short history of religions than is to be found in
“Reason in Religion”; there is no more provocative upsetting of petty
complaisances than is to be found in “Reason in Common Sense”. In
“Reason in Art”, Santayana pursues the dialectical method perhaps too
far; but in this book he does away with a vast amount of lumber and
gets at the essentials of great art and of the artist’s relation to
society, about which relation he has none of the common or artistic
sentimentalism. Best to illuminate Santayana’s attitude one should
recall his answers to a critic who used the phrase, “one has a right
to--”; to which Santayana replied that “right” does not exist in the
abstract, that no one possesses “rights” except those which have
been granted him or he has been able to exact. Santayana is not a
sentimentalist or a mystic praying to the moon.
His poems are chill and formal, as they would be from his habit of
checking his impulses or laughing at them. He has too much of the
comic spirit in him to be a good poet; he is too much a man of cities
to paint poetic landscapes; and he is too much a sceptic to put much
fervor in meditative poetic sighs and grief at the tears of things. But
in his poetry you will get, condensed, much of his philosophy, as in
his essays, particularly his later ones, you will find him much of a
poet.
_Dorothy Canfield Fisher_
Dorothy Canfield Fisher was born at Lawrence, Kansas; but in my
mind she belongs firmly with her ancestors in the hills of Vermont.
Perhaps the addition of middle-western practicality to New England
imagination is one secret of her really great power as a novelist and
her determination as a student. In her house at Arlington, Vermont, not
so far from Robert Frost at South Shaftsbury, she is an eager mother
and wife, a swift, active, almost bird-like little woman. When I last
saw her she was busy on the proofs of her translation of Papini’s
“Life of Christ”. It is a rare thing for an author of such scope and
imagination to be also a student of language, of French, of Italian,
even of Old English, an earnest interpreter of Madame Montessori. Her
understanding of American life and of French character has made her
novels unique in contemporary fiction. They have a quality of wholesome
regard for social standards as well as a brave facing of fact. This
creed she gives us in the “Nietzschean Pilgrim Fathers”. She travels
much in Europe; but her keen interest in the people of Vermont and
their community affairs brings her back often to the Green Mountains.