The Common Pursuit (18 page)

HERE appeared in Scrutiny some years ago (March 1936) an 1 essay by Mr Santayana, Tragic Philosophy, in which I have always found valuable stimulus to disagreement. To say 'always' is to suggest that I have re-read it a good deal, and I have. In fact, I am indebted to the essay for its use as a stock resort in the discussion of Tragedy with undergraduates reading for the English Tripos. I don't want to suggest that the debt incurred has been purely a matter of opportunities for disagreement. Tragic Philosophy exhibits Mr Santayana's characteristic brilliance and wit-that rare wit (not rare in Mr Santayana, of course) which is the focussed sharpness of illuminating intelligence. But it has striking weaknesses (or so I see them), and it is the considerations raised by one of them in particular that I am concerned with here. They are considerations that take me back to a point I made in discussing Johnson's criticism.

Many admirers of Mr Santayana besides myself must have been surprised at the way in which he plays offMacbeth's speech beginning To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow against the passage attributed by Dante to Piccarda de Donati in which occurs the line

E'n la sua volontade & nostra pace.

True, earlier in the essay he has said that Shakespeare 'like an honest miscellaneous dramatist . . . was putting into the mouths of his different characters the sentiments that, for the moment, were suggested to him by their predicaments'. But he unmistakably slips into arguing as if Macbeth's comment on the plight to which the action has brought him may be taken as Shakespeare's, just as Piccarda may be taken as speaking for Dante. Mr Santa-yana's point, I recognize, is that Shakespeare hasn't a settled and coherent philosophy to set against Dante's— though 'possibly if he had been pressed by some troublesome friend to propound a personal philosophy, he might have found in his irritation nothing

else to fall back upon than the animal despair of Macbeth. Fortunately we may presume that burgherly comfort and official orthodoxy saved him from being unreasonably pressed'. But we are at the same time invited, unambiguously, to take Macbeth's speech as representing such substitute for a philosophy as Shakespeare, in this play, has to offer:

I questioned at the beginning whether the poetic value of unlike things could be pronounced equal: and if now I compare this whole passage with the passage from Macbeth I find that to my sense they are incommensurable. Both are notable passages, if that is all that was meant; but they belong to different poetic worlds, appealing to and developing different sides of the mind. And there is more than disparity between these two worlds; there is contrariety and hostility between them, in as much as each professes to include and to subordinate the other, and in so doing to annul its tragic dignity and moral finality. For the mood of Macbeth, religion and philosophy are insane vapours; for the mood of Dante, Macbeth is possessed by the devil. There is no possible common ground, no common criterion even of taste or beauty.

For the mood of Shakespeare too, we are moved to retort, Macbeth is possessed by the devil: the tragic dignity and moral finality of Shakespeare's world are focussed in Macbeth's cry of * animal despair' only in so far as this refers us, inevitably (one would have thought), to the quite other effect of the total action —the total action in relation to which the speech has its significance. By his plunge into crime, taken in fatal ignorance of his nature—

If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well It were done quickly

-he has confounded 'this little state of man' and the impersonal order from which it is inseparable. It is not on his extinction after a tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing, that the play ends, and his valedictory nihilism is the vindication of the moral and spiritual order he has outraged, and which is re-established in the dose.

How, one asks, can Mr Santayana have failed to see things so obvious ? The answer follows immediately on the sentence of his last quoted:

We might at best say that both poets succeed in conveying what they

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wish to convey, and that in that sense their skill is equal: but I hardly think this is true in fact, because in Shakespeare the medium is rich and thick and more important than the idea; whereas in Dante the medium is as unvarying and simple as possible, and meant to be transparent. Even in this choice passage, there are stretches of pure scholastic reasoning, not poetical at all to our sensuous and romantic apprehension; yet the studious and rapt poet feels himself carried on those wings of logic into a paradise of truth, where choir answers choir, and everything is beautiful. A clear and transparent medium is admirable, when we love what we have to say; but when what we have to say is nothing previously definite, expressiveness depends on stirring the waters deeply, suggesting a thousand half-thoughts and letting the very unutterable-ness of our passion become manifest in our disjointed words. The medium then becomes dominant: but can this be called success in expression ? It is rather success in making an impression, if the reader is impressed...

The critic who falls so complete a victim to the word * medium' as Mr Santayana here shows himself, doesn't, it is plain, understand the poetic—and the essentially dramatic—use of language that Shakespeare's verse supremely exemplifies. He cannot, then, understand the nature of the organization that goes with that use of language: he cannot appreciate the ways in which the themes and significances of the play are dramatically presented. Take, for instance, this betraying sentence:

So at this point in Macbeth, where Seneca would have unrolled the high maxims of orthodox Stoicism, Shakespeare gives us the humours of his distracted hero; a hero nonplussed, confounded, stultified in his own eyes, a dying gladiator, a blinded lion at bay.

We don't, when we are responding properly, say that * Shakespeare gives us Macbeth's speech': it comes to us, not from the author, but from the play, emerging dramatically from a dramatic context. It offers no parallel to Seneca's 'high maxims'. And the 'philosophy', moral significance, or total upshot, of the play isn't stated but enacted. But for Mr Santayana significance is a matter of 'ideas', and 'ideas' have to be stated, and so, looking for an epitomizing statement, he excises that speech from the organism to which it belongs and fixes it directly on Shakespeare, and gives us his surprising commentary. We have only shifted the question a stage further back, of

course. How can so subtle an intelligence as Mr Santayana's have let itself be so victimized ? The answer, I think, is that he is a philosopher. This is not to suggest that a philosopher can, for his own purposes, safely dispense with the ability to comprehend Shakespearean poetry. On the contrary, Mr Santayana's inappre-ciation seems to me to go with a naivet6 about the nature of conceptual thought that is common among philosophers, to their disadvantage as such. In venturing so far I may be merely exposing myself; but this, I am sure, must be said: to demand that poetry should be a * medium' for 'previously definite' ideas is arbitrary, and betrays a radical incomprehension. What Mr Santayana calls * Shakespeare's medium' creates what it conveys; 'previously definite' ideas put into a 'clear and transparent' medium wouldn't have been definite enough for Shakespeare's purpose. It is in place to quote again here a passage of D. W. Harding on Isaac Rosenberg:

Usually when we speak of finding words to express a thought we seem to mean that we have the thought rather close to formulation and use it to measure the adequacy of any possible phrasing that occurs to us, treating words as servants of the idea. ' Clothing a thought in language', whatever it means psychologically, seems a fair metaphorical description of most speaking and writing. Of Rosenberg's work it would be misleading. He—like many poets in some degree, one supposes—brought language to bear on the incipient thought at an earlier stage of its development. Instead of the emerging idea being racked slightly so as to fit a more familiar approximation of itself, and words found for that, Rosenberg let it manipulate words almost from the beginning, often without insisting on the controls of logic and intelligibility.

The control over Shakespeare's words in Macbeth (for what Harding describes is the essentially poetic use of language, a use in which Shakespeare is pre-eminent) is a complex dramatic theme vividly and profoundly realized—not thouglat of, but possessed imaginatively in its concreteness, so that, as it grows in specificity, it in turn possesses the poet's mind and commands expression. To explain how so marvellous a definiteness of conception and presentment can have been missed by Mr Santayana one has to invoke a training in inappropriate linguistic habits—inappropriate, that is, to the reading of Shakespeare: unable to relinquish irrelevant

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demands, the critic cannot take what is offered; misinformed and blinded by preconceptions, he cannot see what is there.

The case, readers will have noted, has much in common with Johnson's. Mr Santayana too has a way of paradoxically appreciating, while exhibiting his inability to appreciate, like that I have pointed to in Johnson's dealings with Shakespeare:

But as living poetry, as a mould and stimulus for honest feeling, is Dante for us at aU comparable to Shakespeare ? Shakespeare, in passages such as this from Macbeth, is orchestrated. He trills away into fancy : what was daylight a moment ago, suddenly becomes a candle: we are not thinking or reasoning, we are dreaming. He needs but to say 'all our yesterdays', and presently the tedium of childhood, the tedium of labour and illness, the vacancy of friendships lost, rise like ghosts before us, and fill us with a sense of the unreality of all that once seemed most real. When he mentions 'a poor player' we think at once of the poet himself, because our minds are biographical and our sympathies novel-esque; we feel the misery and the lurid contrasts of a comedian's life; and the existence that just now seemed merely vain, now seems also tempestuous and bitter.

Can we say that the author of this cannot understand the Shakespearean use of language, and cannot therefore appreciate the nature and force of the Shakespearean * medium' ? What we have here implies, surely, a pretty good analysis of the speech ? But Mr Santayana goes on:

And the rhythms help; the verse struts and bangs, holds our attention suspended, obliges our thoughts to become rhetorical, and brings our declamation round handsomely to a grand finale. We should hardly have found courage in ourselves for so much passion and theatricality; but we bless Shakespeare for enabling us still to indulge in such emotions, and to relieve ourselves of a weight that we hardly knew we were carrying.

These sentences are perhaps not so unequivocal as Johnson's pejorative remarks, but it is nevertheless impossible not to take them as cancelling the appreciation. We relate them to these earlier sentences, and their significant failure to distinguish between irresponsible exuberance and the mature Shakespearean mastery of language:

Shakespeare was a professional actor, a professional dramatist; hi? B

greatness lay there, and in the gift of the gab: in that exuberance and joy in language which everybody had in that age, but he supremely. The Renaissance needed no mastering living religion, no mastering living philosophy. Life was gayer without them.

to say that the critic who can express himself thus can properly appreciate Shakespeare's poetry. He clearly cannot appreciate the organization that has its local life in the verse. He has no inkling of the way in which the mastering living theme commands and controls the words.

It will have been noted that in the former of the two passages just quoted Mr Santayana gives us an account of tragic catharsis. It is peculiarly interesting because in it he associates the cathartic effect with a poetic use (as he understands it) of language. We are bound to question his understanding, and in attempting to provide our own account of a poetic use we find ourselves exploring for a profounder and more satisfactory account of Tragedy—of the tragic—than he implies here, or offers elsewhere in his essay. This at any rate is what, in my experience, gives the essay its peculiar value.

The view of the tragic implied in Mr Santayana's account of catharsis seems a very limited one. Does Shakespearean tragedy, does the tragic in. Macbeth, amount to no more than this ? If so, where can we look for anything profounder ? For surely the tragic experience is, or can be, a more important and serious matter than Mr Santayana here suggests ?

To postulate a 'tragic experience' or 'tragic effect' and then seek to define it is to lay oneself open to the suspicion of proposing a solemn and time-honoured academic game. Yet the critical contemplation of the profoundest things in literature does lead to the idea of such an experience, and we can see to it that the attempt at definition shall not be the kind of futility we associate with the Grand Style or the Sublime and the Beautiful. It need hardly be said, for instance, daat what we are concerned with, will not be found in all tragedies, or in most. And next, it is well to put aside the term * catharsis': its promptings don't seem to be at all helpful, and the exercise of refining upon, or interpreting away, Aristotle's medical metaphor may be left to the unfortunate student who knows that he may be required to * apply' the Poetics to Shake-

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speare, Webster, Racine, Ibsen or Eugene O'Neill in the examination-room. If * calm' may properly be predicated of the tragic experience, it is certainly not *calm of mind, all passion spent' in the natural suggestion of that phrase. According to what seems valid in the current notion of the tragic there is rather something in the nature of an exalting effect. We have contemplated a painful action, involving death and the destruction of the good, admirable and sympathetic, and yet instead of being depressed we enjoy a sense of enhanced vitality.

I take this general account as granted—as recognized for sound as far as it goes. The conditions of something ostensibly answering to it are described by Mr Santayana in his account of the Senecan tragic attitude or philosophy: