The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings

Emerson (1900)

Emerson Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. Volume three of the critical edition of The Works of George Santayana. Edited by William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp Jr., with an Introduction by Joel Porte. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989, 131–40. This essay appeared as Chapter VIII in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900). Its beginnings can be traced to an unpublished essay, “The Optimism of Ralph Waldo Emerson,” that Santayana submitted in 1886 as a senior at Harvard for the Bowdoin Prize (which he did not win). In the essay, Santayana observed Emerson’s love of idealization over any particular idea. Emerson’s devotion to imagination tempted him to mysticism , which was fostered by a religious inheritance from his Calvinist ancestors. Santayana appreciated the effort Emerson made to escape the dead Puritan tradition, but he also noted Emerson’s inability to replace it with any particular living ideal. This explains why Santayana would claim that Emerson “was in no sense a prophet for his age or country” ( ES, 525). Those who knew Emerson, or who stood so near to his time and to his circle that they caught some echo of his personal influence, did not judge him merely as a poet or philosopher, nor identify his efficacy with that of his writings. His friends and neighbours, the congregations he preached to in his younger days, the audiences that afterward listened to his lectures, all agreed in a veneration for his person which had nothing to do with their understanding or acceptance of his opinions. They flocked to him and listened to his word, not so much for the sake of its absolute meaning as for the atmosphere of candour, purity, and serenity that hung about it, as about a sort of sacred music. They felt themselves in the presence of a rare and beautiful spirit, who was in communion with a higher world. More than the truth his teaching might express, they valued the sense it gave them of a truth that was inexpressible. They became aware, if we may say so, of the ultraviolet rays of his spectrum, of the inaudible highest notes of his gamut, too pure and thin for common ears. This effect was by no means due to the possession on the part of Emerson of the secret of the universe, or even of a definite conception of ultimate truth. He was not a prophet who had once for all climbed his Sinai or his Tabor, and having there beheld the transfigured reality, descended again to make authoritative report of it to the world. Far from it. At bottom he had no doctrine at all. The deeper he went and the more he tried to grapple with fundamental conceptions, the vaguer and more elusive they became in his hands. Did he know what he meant by Spirit or the “Over-Soul”? Could he say what he understood by the terms, so constantly on his lips, Nature, Law, God, Benefit, or Beauty? He could not, and the consciousness of that incapacity was so lively within him that he never attempted to give articulation to his philosophy . His finer instinct kept him from doing that violence to his inspiration. The Essential Santayana 520 The source of his power lay not in his doctrine, but in his temperament, and the rare quality of his wisdom was due less to his reason than to his imagination . Reality eluded him; he had neither diligence nor constancy enough to master and possess it; but his mind was open to all philosophic influences, from whatever quarter they might blow; the lessons of science and the hints of poetry worked themselves out in him to a free and personal religion. He differed from the plodding many, not in knowing things better, but in having more ways of knowing them. His grasp was not particularly firm, he was far from being, like a Plato or an Aristotle, past master in the art and the science of life. But his mind was endowed with unusual plasticity, with unusual spontaneity and liberty of movement—it was a fairyland of thoughts and fancies. He was like a young god making experiments in creation: he blotched the work, and always began again on a new and better plan. Every day he said, “Let there be light,” and every day the light was new. His sun, like that of Heraclitus, was different every morning. What seemed, then, to the more earnest and less critical of his hearers...