TO CONFESS one’s self to have had a seizure of pure happiness is, by one theory, to admit one’s self a boob.
And yet we do not know when we have been more happy—in our own secret definition of that state—than when we set off for the subway yesterday noon-time. A more timid or more subtle spirit, perhaps, would not dare the envy of the gods by mentioning it. A fig for the gods!
For, in the first place, that clear pearly light, the patchwork of sun and shadow down the harsh channel of Broadway, the close embrace of wintry air (so dartingly cold that it seemed to enfold and surround one as water does the bather) and the great Singer tower lifting above the cliffs in a tender wash of blue—these were enough of themselves to make one lively. Again, we were bound uptown on an errand of pure generosity, to turn over to a publisher the MS. of a book written by a friend of ours, which we believe to be a fine book. Further, we even considered it possible that the publisher might buy our lunch.
We went down into the subway, and clanked through the turnstile. The thought occurred to us that it seems pretty poor sportsmanship to make merry—as some of the papers have been doing—over the fact that many people have devised ways of bilking the turnstiles. We suppose we shall be accused of having been bought with mickle gold, but we must admit that we have never had any hankering to cheat the subway. There are many corporations we would cheat without a qualm, but the subway is not one of them. It gives us more for a nickel—not only in the way of transportation, but also privacy, mental relaxation, and scrutiny of the human scene—than anything else we know.
We stood in the subway express, about to open a book. We noticed, sitting a little farther along, a young woman whose hat interested us. It was pierced in front by a pin of silver and brilliants, zigzag in shape, representing (we supposed) a bolt of lightning. It was emblematic, we opined, of high-spirited humanity itself, that toys with lightning in more ways than one. This of itself, while valuable for meditation, was not the cause of our happiness. We had a book with us, a book that we have wanted to read for some time. We began to read it.
It was not necessary to travel more than a few lines to be perfectly happy. Why were we happy? We could write many pages to try to explain it to you, and even then should probably fail. This is what we read:
About the middle of the nineteenth century, in the quiet sunshine of provincial prosperity, New England had an Indian summer of the mind; and an agreeable reflective literature showed how brilliant that russet and yellow season could be. There were poets, historians, orators, preachers, most of whom had studied foreign literatures and had travelled; they demurely kept up with the times; they were universal humanists. But it was all a harvest of leaves; these worthies had an expurgated and barren conception of life; theirs was the purity of sweet old age. Sometimes they made attempts to rejuvenate their minds by broaching native subjects; they wished to prove how much matter for poetry the new world supplied, and they wrote “Rip van Winkle,” “Hia——”
That was exactly the first page, as we read it; we needed to go no further to have cause for complete and unblemished satisfaction. There was the kind of writing that we understand, that speaks to us. There, barring the fact that Rip was not written in New England, was that exact, humorous, and telling use of every word—“demurely kept up with the times”; “the purity of sweet old age”—if you don’t get pleasure out of that sort of thing, then there is no use trying to labour it in. And there, in every line and syllable, was exactly what we had expected to find—a genuine Intellect speaking, and not a pseudo and jejuvenile “Young Intellectual.” There were urbanity, charm, the word well-weighed, the strong, reticulated thought. To go into private minutiæ, we even had additional pleasure from the fact that the usage of the semicolons (a matter of great delight to some enthusiasts) conformed to our own private sense of felicity. And we gazed about the car in a tranquil ecstasy.
The book was George Santayana’s Character and Opinion in the United States.
We said to ourself, in a kind of anger (for truly a certain ingredient of anger is necessary for complete happiness; a zealous espousal of what one believes to be worth while carries with it the most cheerful flush of irritation towards those who have not, one thinks, sufficiently espoused it)—we said, Why is it that no one has hitherto driven in upon our mind that this book (published a year ago) is one that we could not possibly get along without? Why is it that our admirable colleague L. E. W., from whom we borrowed it, did not long ago come and sit on our desk and talk to us, endlessly, calmly, suasively, about it and about?
We went on reading, and stood there in as perfectly felicitous an absorption as we have ever enjoyed. We could have said to that golden instant, as Mephistopheles promised Faust he would be able to say, “Verweile doch, du bist so schön!” We had committed Grand Larceny. We had achieved what the news headlines daily describe as a “Daring Robbery.” We had stolen, from uncajolable and endless Time, a Perfect Moment.
We see you smile gravely, and perhaps pityingly, at our simplicity. Never mind. We shall never forget the mood of serene peacefulness and cheer in which we then turned to Mr. Santayana’s preface and began to read:
Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom—picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode—may be coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair....
Ah, we said to ourself, that is the kind of writing that makes us truly happy!
We cannot remember when we have marvelled more truly at the pregnancy, the wit, and the exquisite under-piercing insight of any book. We should like to ask those competent to speak—certainly we ourself are not competent; and it is the sheerest bumptiousness for us even to offer an opinion on a book so consummately wise and lovely—whether there has ever been written any more thrillingly potent examination of a whole civilization? In a book so packed and rifted with gold one knows not where to start quoting; but almost at random we seize this passage—not by any means one of the subtlest, but it will serve to begin with:
... The American is imaginative; for where life is intense, imagination is intense also. Were he not imaginative he would not live so much in the future. But his imagination is practical, and the future it forecasts is immediate; it works with the clearest and least ambiguous terms known to his experience, in terms of number, measure, contrivance, economy, and speed. He is an idealist working on matter. Understanding as he does the material potentialities of things, he is successful in invention, conservative in reform, and quick in emergencies. All his life he jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg.
Or, if you prefer, consider this:
That philosophers should be professors is an accident, and almost an anomaly. Free reflection about everything is a habit to be imitated, but not a subject to expound; and an original system, if the philosopher has one, is something dark, perilous, untested, and not ripe to be taught, nor is there much danger that any one will learn it. The genuine philosopher—as Royce liked to say, quoting the Upanishads—wanders alone like the rhinoceros.... If philosophers must earn their living and not beg (which some of them have thought more consonant with their vocation), it would be safer for them to polish lenses like Spinoza, or to sit in a black skull-cap and white beard at the door of some unfrequented museum, selling the catalogues and taking in the umbrellas; these innocent ways of earning their breadcard in the future republic would not prejudice their meditations and would keep their eyes fixed, without undue affection, on a characteristic bit of that real world which it is their business to understand.... At best, the true philosopher can fulfil his mission very imperfectly, which is to pilot himself or at most a few voluntary companions who may find themselves in the same boat. It is not easy for him to shout, or address a crowd; he must be silent for long seasons; for he is watching stars that move slowly and in courses that it is possible though difficult to foresee, and he is crushing all things in his heart as a winepress until his life and their secret flow out together.
You understand (don’t you?) that we do not necessarily recommend Santayana for you. As we grow, painfully, in sagacity, we realize the absurdity of recommending anything to anybody. We are simply saying that for us he fulfils (both in what we agree with and what we dissent from) most of the requirements of our private conception of beauty and happiness.
It is a book that quickens the mind. Continuing it on the train, as the smoking car spins through those green Long Island meadows, we look round on our fellow travellers with renewed amazement. Somehow it gives us a strange pleasure to see them immersed in the Evening Journal or the Evening World, those grotesque monuments of human frailty. How damnable it would be if they were all reading Santayana. How we should hate them! We know that all humanity are precious fools, and ourself the most arrant of the lot; but we like them that way. It adds to the cheerful comedy of the scene.
Certainly you would have said that two names that sound something alike are at opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum—Santayana and Pollyanna. And yet, oddly enough, the thought has come to us that the foundations of the two philosophies interlock. Santayana’s method of extracting happiness from life; his perfection of cool, tender, smiling, grave, cruel, and imperturbable resignation; the exquisitely sophisticated contentment of his solitude, flight from needless buzbuz, reverie in places haunted by old association; his noble ridicule of destiny—all this brings to a reasonably sophisticated mind the same kind of heavenly refreshment and sense of truth that simpler people find in literature of the Pollyanna sort.
We vented this tentative idea to some colleagues of ours, and they leapt upon us with shouts of anger and contradiction.
Yet we think there is something in it. There is no way of assessing the operations of other people’s minds. But we are inclined to think that very possibly the pure happiness we experience in Mr. Santayana’s calm, humorous, disillusioned, and poetic reveries is not essentially different from the cheerful exaltation some young woman feels reading either of the Mrs. Porters in the Y. W. C. A.
