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.