A MINUET


ON REACHING THE AGE OF FIFTY


I


Old Age, on tiptoe, lays her jewelled hand
Lightly in mine.—Come, tread a stately measure,
Most gracious partner, nobly poised and bland.
Ours be no boisterous pleasure,
But smiling conversation, with quick glance
And memories dancing lightlier than we dance,
Friends who a thousand joys
Divide and double, save one joy supreme
Which many a pang alloys.
Let wanton girls and boys
Cry over lovers' woes and broken toys.
Our waking life is sweeter than their dream.


II


Dame Nature, with unwitting hand,
Has sparsely strewn the black abyss with lights
Minute, remote, and numberless. We stand
Measuring far depths and heights,
Arched over by a laughing heaven,
Intangible and never to be scaled.
If we confess our sins, they are forgiven.
We triumph, if we know we failed.


III


Tears that in youth you shed,
Congealed to pearls, now deck your silvery hair;
Sighs breathed for loves long dead
Frosted the glittering atoms of the air
Into the veils you wear
Round your soft bosom and most queenly head;
The shimmer of your gown
Catches all tints of autumn, and the dew
Of gardens where the damask roses blew;
The myriad tapers from these arches hung
Play on your diamonded crown;
And stars, whose light angelical caressed
Your virgin days,
Give back in your calm eyes their holier rays.
The deep past living in your breast
Heaves these half-merry sighs;
And the soft accents of your tongue
Breathe unrecorded charities.

Hasten not; the feast will wait.
This is a master-night without a morrow.
No chill and haggard dawn, with after-sorrow,
Will snuff the spluttering candle out,
Or blanch the revellers homeward straggling late.
Before the rout
Wearies or wanes, will come a calmer trance.
Lulled by the poppied fragrance of this bower,
We'll cheat the lapsing hour,
And close our eyes, still smiling, on the dance.

December 1913.

TRANSLATIONS



FROM MICHAEL ANGELO


I


"Non so se s'è la desiata luce"


I know not if from uncreated spheres
Some longed-for ray it be that warms my breast,
Or lesser light, in memory expressed,
Of some once lovely face, that reappears,
Or passing rumour ringing in my ears,
Or dreamy vision, once my bosom's guest,
That left behind I know not what unrest,
Haply the reason of these wayward tears.
But what I feel and seek, what leads me on,
Comes not of me; nor can I tell aright
Where shines the hidden star that sheds this light.
Since I beheld thee, sweet and bitter fight
Within me. Resolution have I none.
Can this be, Master, what thine eyes have done?


II


"Il mio refugio"


The haven and last refuge of my pain
(A safe and strong defence)
Are tears and supplications, but in vain.
Love sets upon me banded with Disdain,
One armed with pity and one armed with death,
And as death smites me, pity lends me breath.
Else had my soul long since departed thence.
She pineth to remove
Whither her hopes of endless peace abide
And beauty dwelleth without beauty's pride,
There her last bliss to prove.
But still the living fountain of her tears
Wells in the heart when all thy truth appears,
Lest death should vanquish love.


III


"Gli occhi miei vaghi delle cose belle"


Ravished by all that to the eyes is fair,
Yet hungry for the joys that truly bless,
My soul can find no stair
To mount to heaven, save earth's loveliness.
For from the stars above
Descends a glorious light
That lifts our longing to their highest height
And bears the name of love.
Nor is there aught can move
A gentle heart, or purge or make it wise,
But beauty and the starlight of her eyes.




FROM THEOPHILE GAUTIER


ART


All things are doubly fair
If patience fashion them
And care—
Verse, enamel, marble, gem.

No idle chains endure:
Yet, Muse, to walk aright,
Lace tight
Thy buskin proud and sure.

Fie on a facile measure,
A shoe where every lout
At pleasure
Slips his foot in and out!

Sculptor, lay by the clay
On which thy nerveless finger
May linger,
Thy thoughts flown far away.

Keep to Carrara rare,
Struggle with Paros cold,
That hold
The subtle line and fair.

Lest haply nature lose
That proud, that perfect line,
Make thine
The bronze of Syracuse.

And with a tender dread
Upon an agate's face
Retrace
Apollo's golden head.

Despise a watery hue
And tints that soon expire.
With fire
Burn thine enamel true.

Twine, twine in artful wise
The blue-green mermaid's arms,
Mid charms
Of thousand heraldries.

Show in their triple lobe
Virgin and Child, that hold
Their globe,
Cross-crowned and aureoled.

—All things return to dust
Save beauties fashioned well.
The bust
Outlasts the citadel.

Oft doth the ploughman's heel,
Breaking an ancient clod,
Reveal
A Caesar or a god.

The gods, too, die, alas!
But deathless and more strong
Than brass
Remains the sovereign song.

Chisel and carve and file,
Till thy vague dream imprint
Its smile
On the unyielding flint.

A SPANIARD IN ENGLAND

BY EDMUND GOSSE

(Reprinted by kind permission of the author and of the proprietors of the "Sunday Times.")

Only in solitude can soliloquies be appreciated, and Mr. Santayana is not an author for loud streets or for them who tear round the country in a blatant char-à-banc. He avoids even the high roads, and we shall come upon him, if we are lucky, in a grassy hollow of the bank of some dark river, and hear him talking to himself in a voice which disturbs neither the dragon-flies nor the thrushes. He meditates by the hour together on the sunlight in the buttercups, which gives him the illusion of life, or on the hurrying flood of liquid agate, which reminds him of the illusion of death. Everything is a symbol to him, and if he has a volume of poetry open at his side he does not distinguish its verse from the puzzling confidences of the blackbirds, and the insects are dreams which mingle with his own. The activity of existence is arrested for him, and time has become a vain expression.

This is his dominant mood, but sometimes he rouses himself and walks to the wayside inn, where he watches the farmers and the travellers, unobserved by them. He notes their ways and their talk with a shrewd and sometimes humorous pertinacity, but they hardly exist for him more vividly than did the thrushes and the dragon-flies. All are dreams, all are in a condition of maia, and the more he tries to distinguish them the more they melt into one. He exists, and he soliloquises, in a mood of perpetual reverie.

This is an allegory, and in plain terms Mr. Santayana is a cosmopolitan philosopher of wide reputation. He is the son of a gentleman of Spain, who emigrated to New York. He tells us that his father learned to read English, which implies that he never learned to speak it. The son not only speaks, but writes, our language with an exquisite exactitude and grace, so that he is one of those rare figures, like Mr. Conrad and Mme. Mary Duclaux, who, having adopted in mature years a tongue not theirs by birth, contrive not merely to master but to excel in it. Mr. Santayana was for many years a professor of philosophy in Harvard University, where he showed no mercy to Hegel and was a thorn in the side of the Pragmatists. He is the author of a Life of Reason, in five volumes, which I know that I shall never read, but which I am sure it is safe to recommend to persons younger and more thoughtful than myself. Since he ceased to be a professor, Mr. Santayana has wandered much in Europe, which, distracted as it is, he prefers to America, as quieter. The Great War found him at Oxford, waiting for the spark from heaven and meditating on the importunities of the hour. He stayed there, listening to the whirr of the aeroplanes over Port Meadow, and admiring, perhaps not without envy, the gallant ardour of the youths who started forth so bravely to arrest "the demons of the whirlwind" in France and Gallipoli. He stayed in England, because, glancing over the world, he found England pre-eminently the home of decent happiness, even at that desolating hour.

It is amusing to pick out here and there, and put together in a bunch, some of this Hispano-American philosopher's impressions of our race, but we make a mistake if we suppose him largely or generally interested in any particular nation. What makes him attractive, but also a little alarming, is his excessive detachment from the modern life in which he moves so silently and observantly. He is not a social essayist, like Montaigne or Charles Lamb or Stevenson. He is almost obtrusively indifferent to whether he has an audience or not. This makes him, in spite of his extreme attention to moral action, a little inhuman. I do not think that he mentions the Scholar Gipsy, but he has a great deal of the spirit which made that hero of Matthew Arnold's beautiful poem fly the haunts of men. Mr. Santayana will not fly too far; he will see "the line of festal light in Christ Church Hall," before he turns to the woods and the wilds. But the essence of him is solitary, and he escapes from society not that he may forget it, but that, removed from that element in it which seems to kill the mind, he may reflect upon it with the minimum of disturbance.

He is anxious to disown the name of metaphysician, but he is a psychologist to the tips of his fingers, and he is still in hopes of discovering a scientific philosophy which may explain to him the apparent discord between man and nature over which he is always brooding. His temper, excessively disturbed by recent events in the political and moral history of the world, may be clearly studied in the very remarkable essay called "War Shrines," and again in "Tipperary," one of the most whimsical and most individual. He started life with a premonition of things noble and tender, and his dreams have often seemed to betray him. But when he has escaped from the fatiguing conventions of life, when he can forget the ugly side of society, his old visions come back to him with smiling eyes, and he can admit that they have kept half their promise.

We are so well accustomed to attacks, often very petulant and silly, made against England by Englishmen, that it is quite refreshing to read the impressions of a Spanish philosopher trained in America, who has a much higher opinion of us than we are apt to have of ourselves. Mr. Santayana is prompt to protest that nothing would make him wish to become an Englishman. His birthright was settled at his birth, and we feel that there is that kind of patriotism about him which if he had been born a Mongolian would not allow him to waver in his loyalty to Mongolia.

But he has been a sort of Ulysses, and the result of his wanderings is to make him prefer the Englishman to any other human variety. This is decidedly gratifying, and it will amuse the desultory reader to skim Mr. Santayana's pages in search of his impressions of our race. They are not given in dogmatic form, but they are found to be consistent, and, as I say, they are gratifying in the mouth of so shrewd and so disinterested an observer. After traversing many lands he concludes that the English character is the best; it is as strong as the American, and softer, and less obstreperous. He finds the nearest parallel to that old Greek temperament, which he adores, in the English modesty in determination. It seems to rest his spirit to see that we are self-sufficing. Not that he is blind to our national defects, for he thinks that an exquisite or subtle Englishman, although such exist, is a lusus natures. It is not our business to be subtle, and when we are, there is always a tendency in us to become wrong-headed. We turn affected or else puritanical, and these extremes are highly distasteful to Mr. Santayana.

"The Englishman travels and conquers without a settled design, because he has the instinct of exploration. His adventures are all external; they change him so little that he is not afraid of them. He carries his English weather in his heart wherever he goes, and it becomes a cool spot in the desert, and a steady and sane oracle amongst all the deliriums of mankind. Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master. It will be a black day for the human race when scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls, and fanatics manage to supplant him."

To give a general idea of Mr. Santayana's essays, I find a difficult task, because of a certain density and uniformity in his expression. He avoids the positive in all its forms. Not merely is he careful not to be dogmatic, but, speaking as he does to and as it were for himself alone, he is apt to combine an exactitude of language with a considerable dilution of thought. He is not averse from the pleasant foible of repeating himself, and as he does this in fresh language the reader, if he is at all censorious, is apt to resent a little the revolving flight of the ideas. Mr. Santayana soliloquises like an aeroplane making graceful curves and daring drops in one section of the ether. His profound scepticism forbids him to alight, for he has no faith in the current assumptions of daily life, and but a very faint interest in facts. He swoops in the light like a swallow, and we must be content to follow his turns and returns, with sympathy for his candour and freshness, and gratitude for his gracious skill. But to define what his object is, though he makes a hundred affirmations of it, is not altogether easy.