Soliloquies in England, and Later SoliloquiesSantayana, George
Philosophy
Soliloquies in England, and Later Soliloquies
Santayana, George
American essays -- 20th century
happiness, if our character does not render happiness impossible, is
freedom, and some security against want is usually necessary for that;
but wealth, and the necessity of being fashionable if one is rich, take
away freedom. A genuine love for the pleasant surroundings and the
facilities which riches afford is often keener in the outsider, who
peeps in at the gate, than in the master or his children who perhaps,
if the Censor would let them, would prefer their low acquaintance and
their days afield. But the Censor-ridden inner man cannot break his
harness. He is groomed and reined in like a pony at the circus: at the
crack of the whip the neck must be bent, the tail switched, the trained
feet must retrace the circle in the sawdust, or tap the velvet barrier.
So we prance to our funeral, the last sham of all, after the Censor
has made our wills for us; whereupon somebody else's Censor gives us
the finishing touches by praising our character, and nailing down the
coffin.
The untutored passions which the Censor keeps down are themselves
remarkable dissemblers. That old propensity to allegory, which is now
condemned in literature, seems to rule unchecked in dreams. Invention
in dreams, as in mythology, is far-fetched, yet spontaneous. What it
sets immediately before us is a third or a fourth transformation of
the fundamental fact. It hides the fact, without misrepresenting it;
the orchestration of the theme, the alien images in which allegory
dresses it up, are suggested by some subtle affinity, some instinctive
choice, which is perfectly automatic and innocent; the Psyche could
find no simpler way of bringing her agitations to consciousness. Just
as we cannot see a material object more clearly than by seeing exactly
how it looks (though that may not be at all how it is), so we cannot
express a feeling more sincerely than by rehearsing all the images, all
the metaphors, which it suggests to us. Passion when aroused to speech
is rich in rhetorical figures. When we assert inaccurately that a man
is a cur we depart from observation only to register sentiment; we
express truly the niche he fills in our thoughts. Dramatic poetry is an
excursus in this direction; it reports the echoes which events produce
in a voluminous inner sensibility; it throws back our perception of
what is going on into the latent dream which this perception has for
its background: for a perception, apart from its object, is only one
feature in a dream, momentarily more salient than the rest. These
natural harlequins, the passions, are perfectly sincere in their
falsehoods and indirections: their fancy is their only means of
expressing the facts. To be more literal would require training, and
a painful effort; it would require the art of reading and discounting
dreams, whilst these simple poets have only the gift of dreaming.
When Juliet dreams (it is a desperate poetic little dream created by
her passion) that she will cut up Romeo into bits and make stars of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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