Part 7 (2/2)
Christianity conquered the world because it proclaimed a new poetry, a new ideal and a new G.o.d. ”The moving power was a fable ... it carried the imagination into a new sphere ... it was a whole world of poetry descended among men.”
The Christian drama, he tells us, is a magnificent poetic rendering of the fact that what is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values: while the existence of things must be understood by referring them to their causes, which are mechanical, their functions can only be explained by what is interesting in their results: in other words, by their relation to human nature and to human happiness ... so the whole of Christian doctrine is thus religious and efficacious only when it becomes poetry.
Christian fictions beguiled the intellect but they enlightened the imagination: they made man understand the pathos and n.o.bility of his life, the necessity of discipline, the possibility of sanct.i.ty.
And though Mr Santayana would have us accept his dictum that matters of religion should never be matters of controversy, he does not hesitate to become controversial himself over what he calls Protestantism (which he would doubtless say is not a matter of religion at all). He lashes out in no uncertain tones: ”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.”
It is not surprising in view of what he has to say about the world of politics and religion to find that he expresses relief at being able to turn from them to almost any art, ”where what is good is altogether and finally good and what is bad is at least not treacherous: ... how doubly blessed it becomes to find a sphere where limitation is an excellence, where diversity is a beauty, and where every man's ambition is consistent with every other man's and even favourable to it ... with an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colours of a child's eyes.” But he ponders upon the rarity of aesthetic feeling. ”Men are habitually insensible to beauty ... moralists are much more able to condemn than to appreciate the effects of the arts ... and beauty (in which he finds a hint of happiness) is something indescribable ... it is the clearest manifestation of perfection, and the best evidence of its possibility. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the prevalence of the good.”
So we find that in his eyes the value of all art lies in making people happy ” ... to discriminate happiness is the very soul of art, which expresses experience without distorting it.” The queer thing is that though men ought to pursue happiness, they seldom do so ... by happiness Mr Santayana means friends.h.i.+p, wealth, reputation, power, and influence added to family life. ”If, then, artists and poets are unhappy, it is, after all, because happiness does not interest them; they cannot seriously pursue it, because its components are not components of beauty, and being in love with beauty, they neglect and despise those unaesthetic social virtues in the operation of which happiness is found.”
On the other hand, those who pursue happiness conceived in terms of money, success, respectability and so on miss more often than not that real and fundamental part of happiness which flows from the senses and imagination. ”This element is what the love of beauty can add to life: for beauty can also be a cause and a factor of happiness. Yet the happiness of loving beauty is either too sensuous to be stable, or else too ultimate, too sacramental, to be accounted happiness by the worldly mind.”
When he descends to particularise upon the arts we are surprised to find that he has nothing to say about painting, and begins with music, music which he calls ”essentially useless, as life is: but both lend utility to their conditions ... pure music is pure art. Its extreme abstraction is balanced by its entire spontaneity, and while it has no external significance, it bears no internal curse ... it is the chosen art of a mind to whom the world is still foreign ... it serves to keep alive the conviction that perfection is essentially possible; it reminds us that there are worlds far removed from the actual which are yet living and very near to the heart ...” and so while it is ”the purest and most impressive of the arts, it is the least human and instructive of them.”
Literature, according to his theory, takes a middle course between music and science and tries to subdue music, which for its purposes would be futile and too abstract, into conformity with general experience, making music thereby significant. Literature ”looks at natural things with an incorrigibly dramatic eye, turning them into permanent unities (which they never are) and almost into persons. The literary man is an interpreter and hardly succeeds, as the musician may, without experience and mastery of human affairs. His art is half genius and half fidelity.
He needs inspiration ... yet inspiration alone will lead him astray, for his art is relative to something other than its own formal impulse; it comes to clarify the real world, not to enc.u.mber it.”
He rightly differentiates between the philosopher and the poet when he says that the philosopher in his best moments is a poet, while the poet ”has his worst moments when he succeeds in being a philosopher.”
”Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's-length.... The first element which the intellect rejects in forming its ideas of things is the emotion which accompanies the perception; and this emotion is the first thing the poet restores. He stops at the image, because he stops to enjoy.... Poetry takes every present pa.s.sion and every private dream in turn for the core of the universe.” He finds that the prosaic rendering of experience has a greater value, if only the experience covers enough human interests: youth and aspiration indulge in poetry ... for ”youth, being as yet little fed by experience, can find volume and depth only in the soul; the half-seen, the supra-mundane, the inexpressible, seem to it alone beautiful and worthy of homage....
Mature interests centre on soluble problems and tasks capable of execution ... to dwell, as irrational poets do, on some private experience, on some emotion without representative or ulterior value, seems a waste of time. Fiction becomes less interesting than affairs, and poetry turns into a sort of incompetent whimper, a childish foreshortening of the outspread world.”
On the other hand, Mr Santayana finds in the abstractness of prose its great defect. It must convey intelligence, but intelligence clothed in a language that lends the message an intrinsic value and makes it delightful to apprehend apart from its importance in ultimate theory or practice. It is in that measure a fine art ... a poetry ”pervasively representative.” In a most stimulating little essay on _The Supreme Poet_ the philosopher propounds his ideal for literature. ”It might be throughout a work of art. It would become so not by being ornate, but by being appropriate: and the sense of a great precision and justness would come over us as we read or write. It would delight us; it would make us see how beautiful, how satisfying, is the art of being observant, economical, and sincere.”
Furthermore, life has a margin of play which might become broader....
”To the art of working well a civilised race would add the art of playing well. To play with nature and make it decorative, to play with the over-tones of life and make them delightful, is a sort of art.” The new poet of this double insight would ”live in the continual presence of all experience, and respect it: he would at the same time understand nature, the ground of that experience; and he would also have a delicate sense for the ideal echoes of his own pa.s.sions, and for all the colours of his possible happiness.” It is sad to think that this supreme poet is in limbo still, but now that the path has been so clearly indicated for him, are we not justified in thinking that Mr Santayana is merely the herald of his great dawn?
Just as he sees no great poet even in embryo, so he laments the death of all great men:
”A great man need not be virtuous nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive, luminous character ... greatness is spontaneous ... simplicity, trust in some one clear instinct, are essential to it; but the spontaneous variation must be in the direction of some possible sort of order ... how should there be any great heroes, saints, artists, philosophers or legislators in an age when n.o.body trusts himself ... in an age when the word _dogmatic_ is a term of reproach? Greatness has character and severity, it is deep and sane, it is distinct and perfect. For this reason there is none of it to-day....
A great imaginative apathy has fallen on the mind. One-half the learned world is amused in tinkering obsolete armour, as Don Quixote did his helmet; deputing it, after a series of catastrophes, to be at last sound and invulnerable. The other half, the naturalists who have studied psychology and evolution, look at life from the outside, and the processes of Nature make them forget her uses.”
These are hard words, but who can say that they are undeserved?
Not less scornful is he over our contempt for the intellect. ”The degree of intelligence which this age possesses makes it so very uncomfortable that it asks for something less vital, and sighs for what evolution has left behind. In the presence of such cruelly distinct things as astronomy or such cruelly confused things as theology it feels _la nostalgie de la boue_.” Instead of freeing their intelligence, our enslaved contemporaries elude it. They cannot rise to a detached contemplation of earthly things; they revert to sensibility: having no stomach for the ultimate, they burrow downwards towards the primitive.
”To be so preoccupied with vitality is a symptom of anaemia.”
Yet Mr Santayana is not the sort of man to indulge in sweeping denunciations. There is a reverse to this picture of the modern world.
”Without great men and without clear convictions this age is nevertheless very active intellectually: it is studious, empirical, inventive, sympathetic. Its wisdom consists in a certain contrite openness of mind; it flounders, but at least in floundering it has gained a sense of possible depths in all directions.”
But our poetry is the poetry of barbarism, because this age has no sense for perfection; its ideals are negative and partial, its moral strength is a blind vehemence. So we get no total vision, no grasp of the whole reality, no capacity for a sane and steady idealisation. In his little essays on Materialism and Morals we find this outspoken philosophy on the subject of war:
”There are panegyrists of war who say that without a periodical bleeding a race decays and loses its manhood. Experience is directly opposed to this shameless a.s.sertion. It is war that wastes a nation's wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation. Internecine war, foreign and civil, brought about the greatest set-back which the life of reason has ever suffered; it exterminated the Greek and Italian aristocracies. Instead of being descended from heroes, modern nations are descended from slaves: and it is not their bodies only that show it.... To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.”
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