Burton Rascoe

Burton Rascoe, I suppose, is one of the most nervous men who ever lived. He is never still. He talks in stammering rushes. He moves about the room as he talks. He is slender, sleek, with high cheek bones, prominent lips, and eyes that are intense, and arresting. As violent in his opinions as in his person, he is a critic and a colyumist who is constantly provoking his public to disagreement and comment. In other words, he is an excellent journalist. He was born in Sulton, Kentucky. His family moved when he was quite young, however, to Shawnee, Oklahoma, where he lived until the time when he went to the University of Chicago. His first writing was done for a Shawnee paper. Later, he was literary critic for the Chicago “Tribune”. In New York, his “Bookman’s Day Book” for the New York “Tribune” caused a sensation by its rather breathless revealments. His first book, which has been years in preparation, is to be a collection of his critical essays. A voracious reader, a student of French, a young gentleman of violent opinions, he is always stimulating and often annoying.

GEORGE SANTAYANA’S “LIFE OF REASON”

George Santayana is a gifted Spaniard who succeeded to a chair of philosophy at Harvard, began to write when he was forty, got fed up with the Harvard atmosphere, and fled to Paris where he is now writing what are certainly the finest contributions, from the point of view of style and ideas, to philosophic thought since Remy de Gourmont’s death. To say that Santayana is the Emerson of his era is far from flattering to Santayana who is a logical, clear thinking psychologist, dissociator of ideas, and æsthetician as against Emerson’s confused and impalpable transcendentalism, Unitarian freedom of spirit, minor parish breath of vision, and suburban æsthetics; but Santayana occupies or is beginning to occupy with his generation in America a position analogous to that of Emerson in his. By fleeing to Europe he has been able to perform a pedagogical service of vaster importance than was permitted him when he was irked by the formalism of collegiate education, the petty academic fussing and narrowness of his colleagues, and the discouraging stupidity prevalent among students seeking mass instruction. He is now the one spar to which educated youths are able to cling amid the perpetual flux. He is the only remaining philosopher writing in English who is not a specialist in something or other—psychiatry, education, single tax, Manchester labor, Chinese history, or what not; hence he is the only one who can see things in the round, criticize freely with an unbiased and open mind, and offer ideas and suggestions not tinged with Utopian pink or parti pris. He is a free spirit, with all that that felicitous French phrase connotes. Philosophically he is a man of the world; spiritually, scientifically, literarily he knows his way about; he is nobody’s fool, not Lenin’s, Balfour’s, Freud’s, Cézanne’s, Rolland’s, Shaw’s, Morgan’s, or God’s. What is rarest among his coevals in his clan, he has taken the trouble to learn how to write.

You will not get the finest flavor of his style in the books listed here, of which, in a new edition, these remarks are apropos. When he wrote “The Life of Reason”, Santayana was still struggling with his technique of expression in a language alien to him by birth and temperament. He was still occasionally mixing his tenses, achieving an uneasy idiom with a foreign accent, and escaping only with the greatest difficulty from the jargon of the professional philosophers.

It is not that he is difficult to read in his earlier work, but that it is sometimes quaint reading, as if he were overwhelmed by the importance of what he had to say and was taking infinite pains to say it slowly, deliberately, distinctly. With “Winds of Doctrine” he had become at ease with his medium and familiar with his ideas; when he wrote “Soliloquies in England”, he had perfected the most charming address imaginable in English—subtle, smiling, cultured, allusive, witty, cadenced and nuanced. All traces of the old constraint had gone; his fancy was liberated to dance gaily and in rhythm with his thought; the data of his experience and the residuum of his reading had lost the blighting touch of the treatise and become the materials of an amiable and exquisite discourse.

But, nevertheless, it is important for the reader who is charmed and stimulated by Santayana’s later essays to know something of the foundation upon which this charm is builded. He will get that in “The Life of Reason”, wherein Santayana applies the intelligence test to the aspects of human progress observable in society, religion, art, science, and common sense. What he attempted to do, and succeeded in a great measure in doing, was to examine the concepts involved in those terms and pick away from them all the fallacious excrescences which have grown up and surrounded them. He sought the reasonable, the intelligent idea expressed by those terms. He pursued the Socratic method of elimination of the false by question and answer. He applied the rule of common sense to matters of belief, doctrine, theoretical ethics, personal conduct, artistic expression, and social theory—and by common sense he means an understanding arrived at by intelligent analysis, free from myth, illusion, and messianic hope.

One has the feeling that Santayana wrote “The Life of Reason” in order to discover himself, to give order and form to the impressions, conclusions, and intimations about life he had gained from experience and meditation. That is, of course, what all artists, philosophers, poets, and theologians do; but I believe there was in Santayana more than the usual serious self-communion. One finds in him no trace of vanity, of cocking an eye to a possible audience of influential but closed minds, of posturing for posterity, or impressing by erudition and long words. On the other hand, there is an intellectual self-reliance discoverable in almost no other thinker or essayist: he writes without footnotes and bibliographies; he almost never uses a quotation from another writer. He does not bolster up his ideas and opinions with pilferings from the accumulations of libraries. He is, in brief, independent, honest, and courageous.

Now, let us see what are some of his ideas. It is an ironic paradox that Santayana, who first built up a philosophy of reason in five volumes, has now come pretty much to distrust reason as an effective agent in the governance of human affairs. What he would now term a reasonable attitude toward life is one which holds that every man must forge his own philosophy. As for one George Santayana he has found it advantageous to sit like patience on a monument smiling at grief, checking his passions that he may savor and conserve—not waste—them, do unto his neighbor as he would wish to be done by, forego possessions and attachments as a check upon his freedom, and enjoy life as a spectacle (to write about) rather than submerge himself in the business of living. To arrive at this he has examined the possible other courses and has found what he conceives to be the factors of satisfaction and happiness in each.

But it would be wrong to assume that “The Life of Reason” is in the nature of a preachment or an exhortation. It becomes a moral philosophy only by its implications as a history of human ideas. Santayana is a naturalist of the mind, a questioner, a tester, a sceptic, and he has written: “Scepticism is a moral force, a tendency to sincerity, economy and fine adjustment of life and mind to experience.” The calibre of his reasoning, the light he throws upon human institutions, is seen to good advantage in his elucidation of the conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism in “Reason in Religion”:

This underlying Teuton religion, which we must call Protestantism for lack of a better name, is anterior to Christianity and can survive it. To identify it with the Gospel may have seemed possible so long as, in opposition to pagan Christianity, the Teutonic spirit could appeal to the Gospel for support. The Gospel has indeed nothing pagan about it, but it has also nothing Teutonic; and the momentary alliance of two such disparate forces must naturally cease with the removal of the common enemy which alone united them. The Gospel is unworldly, disenchanted, ascetic; it treats ecclesiastical establishments with tolerant contempt, conforming to them with indifference; it regards prosperity as a danger, earthly ties as a burden, Sabbaths as a superstition; it revels in miracles; it is democratic and antinomian; it loves contemplation, poverty, and solitude; it meets sinners with sympathy and heartfelt forgiveness, but Pharisees and Puritans with biting scorn. In a word, it is a product of the Orient, where all things are old and equal and a profound indifference to the business of earth breeds a silent dignity and high sadness of spirit. Protestantism is the exact opposite of all this. It is convinced of the importance of success and prosperity; it abominates what is disreputable; contemplation seems to it idleness, solitude selfishness, and poverty a sort of dishonorable punishment. It is constrained and punctilious in righteousness; it regards a married and industrious life as typically godly, and there is a sacredness to it, as of a vacant Sabbath, in the unoccupied higher spaces which such an existence leaves for the soul. It is sentimental, its ritual is meagre and unctuous, it expects no miracles, it thinks optimism akin to piety, and regards profitable enterprise and practical ambition as a sort of moral vocation. Its Evangelicalism lacks the notes so prominent in the Gospel, of disillusion, humility, and speculative detachment. Its benevolence is optimistic and aims at raising men to a conventional well-being; it thus misses the inner appeal of Christian charity which, being merely remedial in physical matters, begins by renunciation and looks to spiritual freedom and peace.

You will see from this that the dominant spirit of the United States, as it is of England and Germany, is Protestantism. Protestantism is a religious spirit best suited to a raw, new, energetic people. It becomes, as Santayana points out, unpleasantly materialistic by the very excess of its own virtues as an inspiration to progress and achievement. For himself, Santayana is steeped in the Catholic spirit and we find in his poetry no less than in his later essays the passive attitude toward life, the attitude of good-humored resignation; but he is never blind to the merits of Protestantism. England and the English fascinate him; he admires the Englishman’s bland ability to get on in the world, his self-control, his self-isolation, his manners, and his enterprise.

There is perhaps in no European literature a more illuminating and intelligent discussion of love, family life, industry, aristocracy, democracy and patriotism than is to be found in “Reason in Society”; there is no saner short history of religions than is to be found in “Reason in Religion”; there is no more provocative upsetting of petty complaisances than is to be found in “Reason in Common Sense”. In “Reason in Art”, Santayana pursues the dialectical method perhaps too far; but in this book he does away with a vast amount of lumber and gets at the essentials of great art and of the artist’s relation to society, about which relation he has none of the common or artistic sentimentalism. Best to illuminate Santayana’s attitude one should recall his answers to a critic who used the phrase, “one has a right to—”; to which Santayana replied that “right” does not exist in the abstract, that no one possesses “rights” except those which have been granted him or he has been able to exact. Santayana is not a sentimentalist or a mystic praying to the moon.

His poems are chill and formal, as they would be from his habit of checking his impulses or laughing at them. He has too much of the comic spirit in him to be a good poet; he is too much a man of cities to paint poetic landscapes; and he is too much a sceptic to put much fervor in meditative poetic sighs and grief at the tears of things. But in his poetry you will get, condensed, much of his philosophy, as in his essays, particularly his later ones, you will find him much of a poet.