Interpretations of Poetry and Religion

by George Santayana

"O let this wretched life within me die
That I may live in thee, my life indeed;
In thee alone, where dwells eternity,
While hungry multitudes death's hunger feed.
I list within, and hark! Death's stealthy tread!
I look to thee, and nothing then is dead.
"Then eyes may see a light invisible
And ears may hear a voice without a sound,—
A voice and light not harsh, but tempered well,
Which the mind wakens when the sense is drowned,
Till, wrapped within herself, the soul have flown
To that last good which is her inmost own.
"When, sweet and beauteous Master, on that day,
Reviewing all my loves with aching heart,
I take from each its bitter self away,
The remnant shall be thou, their better part.
This perfect sweetness be his single store
Who seeks the good; this faileth nevermore.
"A thirst unquenchable is not beguiled
By draught on draught of any running river
Whose fiery waters feed our pangs for ever,
But by a living fountain undefiled.
O sacred well, I seek thee and were fain
To drink; so should I never thirst again."

Having before us these characteristic expressions of Platonic feeling, as it arose again in a Christian age, divorced from the accidental setting which Greek manners had given it, we may be better able to understand its essence. It is nothing else than the application to passion of that pursuit of something permanent in a world of change, of something absolute in a world of relativity, which was the essence of the Platonic philosophy. If we may give rein to the imagination in a matter which without imagination could not be understood at all, we may fancy Plato trying to comprehend the power which beauty exerted over his senses by applying to the objects of love that profound metaphysical distinction which he had learned to make in his dialectical studies—the distinction between the appearance to sense and the reality envisaged by the intellect, between the phenomenon and the ideal. The whole natural world had come to seem to him like a world of dreams. In dreams images succeed one another without other meaning than that which they derive from our strange power of recognition—a power which enables us somehow, among the most incongruous transformations and surroundings, to find again the objects of our waking life, and to name those absurd and unmannerly visions by the name of father or mother or by any other familiar name. As these resemblances to real things make up all the truth of our dream, and these recognitions all its meaning, so Plato thought that all the truth and meaning of earthly things was the reference they contained to a heavenly original. This heavenly original we remember and recognize even among the distortions, disappearances, and multiplications of its earthly copies.

This thought is easily applicable to the affections; indeed, it is not impossible that it was the natural transcendence of any deep glance into beauty, and the lessons in disillusion and idealism given by that natural metaphysician we call love, that first gave Plato the key to his general system. There is, at any rate, no sphere in which the supersensible is approached with so warm a feeling of its reality, in which the phenomenon is so transparent and so indifferent a symbol of something perfect and divine beyond. In love and beauty, if anywhere, even the common man thinks he has visitations from a better world, approaches to a lost happiness; a happiness never tasted by us in this world, and yet so natural, so expected, that we look for it at every turn of a corner, in every new face; we look for it with so much confidence, with so much depth of expectation, that we never quite overcome our disappointment that it is not found.

And it is not found,—no, never,—in spite of what we may think when we are first in love. Plato knew this well from his experience. He had had successful loves, or what the world calls such, but he could not fancy that these successes were more than provocations, more than hints of what the true good is. To have mistaken them for real happiness would have been to continue to dream. It would have shown as little comprehension of the heart's experience as the idiot shows of the experience of the senses when he is unable to put together impressions of his eyes and hands and to say, "Here is a table; here is a stool." It is by a parallel use of the understanding that we put together the impressions of the heart and the imagination and are able to say, "Here is absolute beauty: here is God." The impressions themselves have no permanence, no intelligible essence. As Plato said, they are never anything fixed but are always either becoming or ceasing to be what we think them. There must be, he tells us, an eternal and clearly definable object of which the visible appearances to us are the manifold semblance; now by one trait now by another the phantom before us lights up that vague and haunting idea, and makes us utter its name with a momentary sense of certitude and attainment.

Just so the individual beauties that charm our attention and enchain the soul have only a transitive existence; they are momentary visions, irrecoverable moods. Their object is unstable; we never can say what it is, it changes so quickly before our eyes. What is it that a mother loves in her child? Perhaps the babe not yet born, or the babe that grew long ago by her suffering and unrecognized care; perhaps the man to be or the youth that has been. What does a man love in a woman? The girl that is yet, perhaps, to be his, or the wife that once chose to give him her whole existence. Where, among all these glimpses, is the true object of love? It flies before us, it tempts us on, only to escape and turn to mock us from a new quarter. And yet nothing can concern us more or be more real to us than this mysterious good, since the pursuit of it gives our lives whatever they have of true earnestness and meaning, and the approach to it whatever they have of joy.

So far is this ideal, Plato would say, from being an illusion, that it is the source of the world, the power that keeps us in existence. But for it, we should be dead. A profound indifference, an initial torpor, would have kept us from ever opening our eyes, and we should have no world of business or pleasure, politics or science, to think about at all. We, and the whole universe, exist only by the passionate attempt to return to our perfection, by the radical need of losing ourselves again in God. That ineffable good is our natural possession; all we honour in this life is but the partial recovery of our birthright; every delightful thing is like a rift in the clouds through which we catch a glimpse of our native heaven. If that heaven seems so far away and the idea of it so dim and unreal, it is because we are so far from perfect, so much immersed in what is alien and destructive to the soul.

Thus the history of our loves is the record of our divine conversations, of our intercourse with heaven. It matters very little whether this history seems to us tragic or not. In one sense, all mortal loves are tragic because never is the creature we think we possess the true and final object of our love; this love must ultimately pass beyond that particular apparition, which is itself continually passing away and shifting all its lines and colours. As Heraclitus could never bathe twice in the same river, because its water had flowed away, so Plato could never look twice at the same face, for it had become another. But on the other hand the most unsuccessful passion cannot be a vain thing. More, perhaps, than if it had found an apparent satisfaction, it will reveal to us an object of infinite worth, and the flight of the soul, detached by it from the illusions of common life, will be more straight and steady toward the ultimate good.

Such, if we are not mistaken, is the lesson of Plato's experience and also of that of the Italian poets whom we have quoted. Is this experience something normal? Is it the rational outcome of our own lives? That is a question which each man must answer for himself. Our immediate object will have been attained if we have made more intelligible a tendency which is certainly very common among men, and not among the men least worthy of honour. It is the tendency to make our experience of love rational, as scientific thinking is a tendency to make rational our experience of the outer world. The theories of natural science are creations of human reason; they change with the growth of reason, and express the intellectual impulses of each nation and age. Theories about the highest good do the same; only being less applicable in practice, less controllable by experiment, they seldom attain the same distinctness and articulation. But there is nothing authoritative in those constructions of the intellect, nothing coercive except in so far as our own experience and reflection force us to accept them. Natural science is persuasive because it embodies the momentum of common sense and of the practical arts; it carries on their spontaneous processes by more refined but essentially similar methods. Moral science is persuasive under the same conditions, but these conditions are not so generally found in the minds of men. Their conscience is often superstitious and perfunctory; their imagination is usually either disordered or dull. There is little momentum in their lives which the moralist can rely upon to carry them onward toward rational ideals. Deprived of this support his theories fall to the ground; they must seem, to every man whose nature cannot elicit them from his own experience, empty verbiage and irrelevant dreams.

Nothing in the world of fact obliges us to agree with Michael Angelo when he says that eternity can no more be separated from beauty than heat from fire. Beauty is a thing we experience, a value we feel; but eternity is something problematical. It might well happen that beauty should exist for a while in our contemplation and that eternity should have nothing to do with it or with us. It might well happen that our affections, being the natural expression of our instincts in the family and in the state, should bind us for a while to the beings with whom life has associated us—a father, a lover, a child—and that these affections should gradually fade with the decay of our vitality, declining in the evening of life, and passing away when we surrender our breath, without leading us to any single and supreme good, to any eternal love. If, therefore, the thoughts and consolations we have been rehearsing have sounded to us extravagant or unnatural, we cannot justify them by attempting to prove the actual existence of their objects, by producing the absolute beauty or by showing where and how we may come face to face with God. We may well feel that beauty and love are clear and good enough without any such additional embodiments. We may take the world as it is, without feigning another, and study actual experience without postulating any that is hypothetical. We can welcome beauty for the pleasure it affords and love for the happiness it brings, without asking that these things should receive supernatural extensions.

But we should have studied Plato and his kindred poets to little purpose if we thought that by admitting all this we were rejecting more than the mythical element that was sometimes mixed with their ideal philosophy. Its essence is not touched by any acknowledgment of what seems true or probable in the realm of actual existence. Nothing is more characteristic of the Platonic mind than a complete indifference to the continuance of experience and an exclusive interest in its comprehension. If we wish to understand this classic attitude of reason, all we need do is to let reason herself instruct us. We do not need more data, but more mind. If we take the sights and the loves that our mortal limitations have allowed of, and surrender ourselves unreservedly to their natural eloquence; if we say to the spirit that stirs within them, "Be thou me, impetuous one"; if we become, as Michael Angelo says he was, all eyes to see or all heart to feel, then the force of our spiritual vitality, the momentum of our imagination, will carry us beyond ourselves, beyond an interest in our personal existence or eventual emotions, into the presence of a divine beauty and an eternal truth—things impossible to realize in experience, although necessarily envisaged by thought.