Soliloquies in England, and Later Soliloquies. George Santayana

and religious, the Englishman is a mad ghost; and wherever he prevails he turns pleasant England, like Greece, into a memory.

      Those first holidays of mine, when I was twenty-three years of age, laid the foundation of a lifelong attachment—of which these Soliloquies are a late fruit—to both Oxford and Cambridge: not so much to the learned society of those places as to their picturesque aspects and to the possibility of enjoying there in seclusion the intense companionship of the past and of the beautiful; also the intense companionship of youth, to which more advanced years in themselves are no obstacle, if the soul remains free. I have never liked the taste of academic straw; but there are fat grains and seeds of novelty even at universities, which the lively young wits that twitter in those shades pick up like hungry sparrows, yet without unmitigated seriousness; and unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs. Let not the unwary reader think me flippant for saying so; it was Plato, in his solemn old age, who said it. He added that our ignominious condition forces us, nevertheless, to be often terribly in earnest. Wanton and transitory as our existence is, and comic as it must appear in the eyes of the happy gods, it is all in all to our mortal nature; and whilst intellectually we may judge ourselves somewhat as the gods might judge us, and may commend our lives to the keeping of eternity, our poor animal souls are caught inextricably in the toils of time, which devours us and all our possessions. The artist playing a farce for others suffers a tragedy in himself. When he aspires to shed as much as possible the delusions of earthly passion, and to look at things joyfully and unselfishly, with the clear eyes of youth, it is not because he feels no weight of affliction, but precisely because he feels its weight to the full, and how final it is. Lest it should seem inhuman of me to have been piping soliloquies whilst Rome was burning, I will transcribe here some desperate verses extorted from me by events during those same years. I am hardly a poet in the magic sense of the word, but when one's thoughts have taken instinctively a metrical form, why should they be forbidden to wear it? I do not ask the reader to admire these sonnets, but to believe them.

      A PREMONITION

       Cambridge, October 1913 Grey walls, broad fields, fresh voices, rippling weir, I know you well: ten faces, for each face That passes smiling, haunt this hallowed place, And nothing not thrice noted greets me here. Soft watery winds, wide twilight skies and clear, Refresh my spirit at its founts of grace, And a strange sorrow masters me, to pace These willowed paths, in this autumnal year. Soon, lovely England, soon thy secular dreams, Thy lisping comrades, shall be thine no more. A world's loosed troubles flood thy gated streams And drown, methinks, thy towers; and the tears start As if an iron hand had clutched my heart, And knowledge is a pang, like love of yore. THE UNDERGRADUATE KILLED IN BATTLE Oxford, 1915 Sweet as the lawn beneath his sandalled tread, Or the scarce rippled stream beneath his oar, So gently buffeted it laughed the more, His life was, and the few blithe words he said. One or two poets read he, and reread; One or two friends with boyish ardour wore Close to his heart, incurious of the lore Dodonian woods might murmur overhead. Ah, demons of the whirlwind, have a care, What, trumpeting your triumphs, ye undo! The earth once won, begins your long despair That never, never is his bliss for you. He breathed betimes this clement island air And in unwitting lordship saw the blue. THE DARKEST HOUR Oxford, 1917 Smother thy flickering light, the vigil's o'er. Hope, early wounded, of his wounds is dead. Many a night long he smiled, his drooping head Laid on thy breast, and that brave smile he wore Not yet from his unbreathing lips is fled. Enough: on mortal sweetness look no more, Pent in this charnel-house, fling wide the door And on the stars that killed him gaze instead. The world's too vast for hope. The unteachable sun Rises again and will reflood his sphere, Blotting with light what yesterday was done; But the unavailing truth, though dead, lives on, And in eternal night, unkindly clear, A cold moon gilds the waves of Acheron.

      SOLILOQUIES IN ENGLAND

       Table of Contents

      1914–1918

      1

      ATMOSPHERE

      The stars lie above all countries alike, but the atmosphere that intervenes is denser in one place than in another; and even where it is purest, if once its atoms catch the sunlight, it cuts off the prospect beyond. In some climates the veil of earthly weather is so thick and blotted that even the plodder with his eyes on the ground finds its density inconvenient, and misses his way home. The advantage of having eyes is neutralized at such moments, and it would be better to have retained the power of going on all fours and being guided by scent. In fact human beings everywhere are like marine animals and live in a congenial watery medium, which like themselves is an emanation of mother earth; and they are content for the most part to glide through it horizontally at their native level. They ignore the third, the vertical dimension; or if they ever get some inkling of empty heights or rigid depths where they could not breathe, they dismiss that speculative thought with a shudder, and continue to dart about in their familiar aquarium, immersed in an opaque fluid that cools their passions, protects their intellect from mental dispersion, keeps them from idle gazing, and screens them from impertinent observation by those who have no business in the premises.

      The stellar universe that silently surrounds them, if while swimming they ever think of it, seems to them something foreign and not quite credibly reported. How should anything exist so unlike home, so out of scale with their affairs, so little watery, and so little human? Their philosophers confirm them in that incredulity; and the sea-caves hold conclaves of profound thinkers congregated to prove that only fog can be real. The dry, their council decrees, is but a vain abstraction, a mere negative which human imagination opposes to the moist, of which alone, since life is moist, there can be positive experience.

      As for the stars, these inspired children of the mist have discovered that they are nothing but postulates of astronomy, imagined for a moment to exist, in order that a beautiful human science may be constructed about them. Duller people, born in the same fog, may not understand so transcendental a philosophy, but they spontaneously frame others of their own, not unlike it in principle. In the middle of the night, when the starlight best manages to pierce to the lowest strata of the air, these good people are asleep; yet occasionally when they are returning somewhat disappointed from a party, or when illness or anxiety or love-hunger keeps them pacing their chamber or tossing in their beds, by chance they may catch a glimpse of a star or two twinkling between their curtains. Idle objects, they say to themselves, like dots upon the wall-paper. Why should there be stars at all, and why so many of them? Certainly they shed a little light and are pretty; and they are a convenience sometimes in the country when there is no moon and no lamp-posts; and they are said to be useful in navigation and to enable the astronomers to calculate sidereal time in addition to solar time, which is doubtless a great satisfaction to them. But all this hardly seems to justify such an expense of matter and energy as is involved in celestial mechanics. To have so much going on so far away, and for such prodigious lengths of time, seems rather futile and terrible. Who knows? Astrologers used to foretell people's character and destiny by their horoscope; perhaps they may turn out to have been more or less right after all, now that science is coming round to support more and more what our fathers called superstitions. There may be some meaning in the stars, a sort of code-language such as Bacon put into Shakespeare's sonnets, which would prove to us, if we could only read it, not how insignificant, but how very important we are in the world, since the very stars are talking about us.

      The safest thing, however, is to agree with the great idealists, who say there are really no stars at all. Or, if their philosophy seems insecure—and there are rumours that even the professors are hedging on the subject—we can always take refuge in faith, and think of the heavenly bodies as beautiful new homes in which we are to meet and work together again when we die; and as in time we might grow weary even there, with being every day busier and busier, there must always be other stars at hand for us to move to, each happier and busier than the last; and since we wish to live and to progress for ever, the number of habitable planets provided for us has to be infinite. Certainly faith is far better than