Why we should read. S. P. B. Mais
if we accept his theory of the finitude of life, we are braced up to do our part while we can. We strive to round off each day with the phrase, "I have lived," and we see our immortality in our oneness with the Universe, not in the endless projection of our own feeble personality.
And after the philosophy of life we turn naturally to thoughts on Love.
"Not to believe in love is a great sign of dulness," we read. "It is a true natural religion … it sanctifies a natural mystery … it recognises that what it worshipped under a figure was truly the principle of all good. The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations. Love would never take so high a flight unless it sprung from something profound and elementary. … When the generative energy is awakened all that can ever be is virtually called up and made consciously potential; and love yearns for the universe of values. … As a harp, made to vibrate to the fingers, gives some music to the wind, so the nature of man, necessarily susceptible to woman, becomes simultaneously sensitive to other influences, and capable of tenderness toward every object."
And after love, religion.
He adds an all-important corollary to Bacon's well-known axiom that "a little philosophy inclineth men's minds to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion."
"When Bacon penned the sage epigram," he continues, "he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them. It would be pitiful indeed if mature reflection bred no better conceptions than those which have drifted down the muddy stream of time, where tradition and passion have jumbled everything together."
I suppose that though most of us have had to listen to an amazing amount of nonsense about immortality and love, on the subject of religion we have rarely been taught anything that was not nonsense. Mr. Santayana clears the ground as with a hatchet. We feel after reading him as if we were able to see clearly for the first time.
In Prosaic Misunderstandings he makes us realise precisely what we mean by religion.
"Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretensions to be dealing with matters of fact. … The excellence of religion is due to an idealisation of experience which, while making religion noble if treated as poetry, makes it necessarily false if treated as science. … The mass of mankind is divided into two classes—the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad. The expedient of recognising facts as facts and accepting ideals as ideals, although apparently simple enough, seems to elude the normal human power of discrimination."
"A god is a conceived victory of mind over nature. A visible god is the consciousness of such a victory momentarily attained. The vision soon vanishes, the sense of omnipotence is soon dispelled by recurring conflicts with hostile forces: but the momentary illusion of that realised good has left us with the perennial knowledge of good as an ideal. Therein lies the essence and the function of religion."
Christianity conquered the world because it proclaimed a new poetry, a new ideal and a new God. "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 nobility of his life, the necessity of discipline, the possibility of sanctity.
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 æsthetic 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 friendship, 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 unæsthetic 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 encumber 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