Why we should read. S. P. B. Mais
enjoy. … Poetry takes every present passion 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 passions, 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 nobody 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 anæmia."
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 assertion. 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."
But we read a philosopher mainly, I take it, to see how he himself reached his serene height of detached interest in the universe. We who have no philosophic bent fondly imagine that it is only after despairing of instinctive happiness that the philosopher turns his back on the struggle of life with his shout of "Sour Grapes." Reading Mr. Santayana will correct this delusion.
"We cannot venerate anyone in whom appreciation is not divorced from desire. And this elevation and detachment of the heart need not follow upon any great disappointment; it is finest and sweetest where it is the gradual fruit of many affections now merged and mellowed into a natural piety. Indeed, we are able to frame our idea of the Deity on no other model. … There is perhaps no more frivolous notion than that a good, once attained, loses all its value. … We turn from a beautiful thing, as from a truth or a friend, only to return incessantly, and with increasing appreciation."
This, then, is the reason why we should read Mr. Santayana, that we should clarify our aims, readjust our standards, and increase our capacity for appreciating the beautiful, for this is the royal road to the only happiness which is true, steadfast and eternal.
II
THE POEMS OF FRANCIS BRETT-YOUNG
Read but this one song:
"Why have you stolen my delight
In all the golden shows of spring
When every cherry-tree is white
And in the limes the thrushes sing,
O fickler than the April day,
O brighter than the golden broom,
O blyther than the thrushes' lay,
O whiter than the cherry-bloom,
O sweeter than all things that blow …
Why have you only left for me
The broom, the cherry's crown of snow,
And thrushes in the linden-tree?"
Is there any need of further reason?
One concedes to that at once a word not often unlocked from one's vocabulary; loveliness is implicit in it, music, harmony, beauty are all there. Alas! that we should have to search among so many heaps of rubble for one rich gem, but this at any rate is well-nigh flawless: for the rest, Mr. Brett-Young has approached excellence, achieved haunting lines and oftentimes failed to arouse any emotional feeling at all. He talks of the lovely words that wander through his brain, but they frequently refuse to leave their refuge. He is at his best when he is most simple, as here:
"High