Why we should read. S. P. B. Mais
I was always very curious in my Liquors. … Fill it up—I take as large Draughts of Liquor, as I did of Love. … I hate a Flincher in either.
Lucy, finding that she has released Macheath, only to let him fly to Polly, resolves to poison her with rat's-bane mixed in her gin, which Polly refuses: "Brandy and men (though women love them ever so well) are always taken by us with some Reluctance—unless 'tis in private."
Macheath is again captured, this time in a gaming-house, and sings a great number of songs (one to the tune of Sally in our Alley) in the "Condemn'd Hold" while he drowns his sorrows in drink. To send the audience away in a good humour he is reprieved at the last moment and rejoins his doxie in a dance.
Such is the substance of a play which few people took the trouble to read before they were unexpectedly given the chance of seeing it acted at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith.
But whether we read it or see it, there are certain points about it which make it perennially worth reading and worth seeing.
It is free from sentimentality, it is full of robust sense, and clears the air once and for all from the taint of prurience that has fallen upon us. The irony of it is mirth-provoking and delicious. It is a racy and true picture of human nature stripped naked. There is no savagery, only rascally good humour, true gaiety and buoyant vitality. As an antidote to depression or bad temper it would be hard to think of any quicker cut back to the joy of life.
And the best of it is that there are dozens of other plays equally enjoyable hidden away in the treasure-house of old English plays, waiting for you to unearth and rediscover them.
PART II
SOME CONTEMPORARIES
[Pg 64]
[Pg 65]
I
GEORGE SANTAYANA
Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith, for whom most of us have a deep admiration, reads George Santayana because he finds in this philosopher "much writing like that of the older Essayists on large human subjects, which seemed … more interesting and in many ways more important than anything … in the works of other contemporary writers … it has been his aim to reconstruct our modern, miscellaneous, shattered picture of the world, and to build, not of clouds, but of the materials of this common earth, an edifice of thought, a fortress or temple for the modern mind, in which every natural impulse could find, if possible, its opportunity for satisfaction, and every ideal aspiration its shrine and altar."
In a word, then, we should read Mr. Santayana because he has a definite philosophy, a rational conception of the world and man's allotted place in it. But what, you will ask, does a modern novelist want with a general philosophy when he has made it his business merely to describe what he observes in the particular lives of individual men and women? To which I would reply that though the philosopher has his eyes steadily turned to the infinite and contemplates eternal values in the round, by the light of reason, the novelist at times likes to turn from transcribing the trivial incidents of everyday life and from probing the characters of men and women to join the philosopher in his serene detachment. What is good for the novelist is good for every man.
Even the business man or the sportsman occasionally thinks of a future life either vividly and with acute misery when he has suffered an irreparable loss or loosely and vaguely when he attends the religious rites of his church. To such men—that is, to all of us who are not philosophers—such a passage as the following acts like a tonic or tests our courage.
"To imagine a second career is a pleasing antidote for ill-fortune: the poor soul wants another chance. But how should a future life be constituted if it is to satisfy this demand, and how long need it last? It would evidently have to go on in an environment closely analogous to earth; I could not, for instance, write in another world the epics which the necessity of earning my living may have stifled here, did that other world contain no time, no heroic struggles, or no metrical language. Nor is it clear that my epics, to be perfect, would need to be quite endless. If what is foiled in me is really poetic genius and not simply a tendency toward perpetual motion, it would not help me if in heaven, in lieu of my dreamt-of epics, I were allowed to beget several robust children. In a word, if hereafter I am to be the same man improved I must find myself in the same world corrected."
In a moment we feel as if the windows were opened for the first time in our minds and the pure air of Reason allowed to circulate in our weak lungs. Such clarity of thought may kill us by its freshness; on the other hand, it may restore us to real health. May not our pathetic clinging to a belief in immortality be only a gross form of selfish terror? The philosopher would raise us to a higher plane of thought.
"What a despicable creature must a man be, and how sunk below the level of the most barbaric virtue, if he cannot bear to live and die for his children, for his art, or for his country. … " "Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome. … " "Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on any how and in any shape: a spirit with any honour is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all."
"While the primitive and animal side of man may continue to cling to existence at all hazards and to find the thought of extinction intolerable, his reason and finer imagination will build a new ideal on reality better understood, and be content that the future he looks to should be enjoyed by others. … "
"The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it."
So we are bidden to follow the advice of Horace:
"He lives happy and master over himself who can say daily, I have lived."
It is this fierce determination to face the truth of things and not to take refuge in comfortable superstitions that endears the philosopher to us and makes us sympathise with his scorn for the irrationality of Browning.
"It [Browning's "philosophy"] is in spirit the direct opposite of the philosophic maxim of regarding the end, of taking care to leave a finished life and a perfect character behind us. It is the opposite, also, of the religious memento mori, of the warning that time is short before we go to our account. According to Browning, there is no account: we have an infinite credit … his notion is simply that the game of life, the exhilaration of action, is inexhaustible … but it is unmeaning to call such an exercise heaven … it is a mere euphemism to call this perpetual vagrancy a development of the soul."
Closely related to his thoughts on Immortality are Mr. Santayana's caustic comments on fame.
"The highest form of vanity is love of fame. It is a passion easy to deride but hard to understand, and in men who live at all by imagination almost impossible to eradicate. The good opinion of posterity can have no possible effect on our fortunes, and the practical value which reputation may temporarily have is quite absent in posthumous fame. … What comfort would it be to Virgil that boys still read him at school, or to Pindar that he is sometimes mentioned in a world from which everything he loved has departed?" … But yet the ancients "often identified fame with immortality, a subject on which they had far more rational sentiments than have since prevailed. … Fame consists in the immortality of a man's work, his spirit, his efficacy, in the perpetual rejuvenation of his soul in the world."
The whole essence of Mr. Santayana's teaching on this point is that we become a portion of that loveliness which once we made more lovely. It is a wholesome, sanative doctrine this … it leads us to the belief that if we are butterflies, we have a real immortality in that we have added something to the eternal beauty of the world: if we are beetles … and are squashed, I take it that one more piece of beastliness is suppressed at our extinction