A Change of Heart

by GEORGE SANTAYANA

1

IF A MAN were a wild spirit without a body or a habitat, his philosophy might harmlessly change at every moment, and he might well pride himself on changing it often and radically, so as to display fertility of spirit and enjoy an inexhaustibly rich experience. Being absolutely free and unfettered by circumstances, why should he stick to any particular principles or ideas and waste his time repeating himself like an idiot or a cuckoo?

It happened in my case, however, that I reached the age of reflection in Avila, a little walled city where old people, old churches, and barren gray moors strewn with prehistoric boulders filled my mind from the first with a sense of antiquity. Xor did reflection later, in the New World, lead me seriously to think myself, or anyone else, a disembodied spirit. On the contrary, it seemed to me evident that no discoverable mind can ever have existed except in a body, so that by the presence and action of that body it might give signs and leave memorials of its passage. Then the past might be partly recalled on occasion, not as a vain dream, but as an experience and a lesson still applicable to a moderately stable world. Moreover, this stable world might contain other living bodies, similar to one’s own; and their action and gestures, by mimicry, might instantly suggest to us desires and intentions animating those creatures, and rendering them sympathetic or hostile to ourselves; and so a moral world, practical and social, would become, for our imagination, the theater of our action, and a roughly valid representation of ihc forces actually playing upon us and determining the weal and woe of our lives.

On the other hand, the true romantic genius who today cries to the West Wind “Be thou me, impetuous one!" will cry no less exultantly tomorrow to become the hast Wind for a change, although in infinite vacancy it might be hard to find the differcnce. A truly free spirit will never repent; he cannot revert to his true self, since he has no particular self to revert to. He must simply go on, as transcendental spirit actually does, from one fresh incarnal ion to another, in and out forever of every living thing. He must will everything, do everything, and suffer everything, but it can never die: at least it can never prevent itself from being born again. It must lust forever after the Eternal Feminine, or to put it more crudely, after the female of every species.

As for me, not only my body but my rather special and difficult relations to persons and places seemed clearly imposed facts; and in that setting my personal tastes and feelings became early apparent, and caused me to feel that I lived in a kind of solitude — not transcendental and spiritual, but decidedly solitariness in a crowd and foreignness among very distinct people. My preferences were clearly marked and out of harmony with my surroundings and, as I soon felt, with my times. But conceit, or firmness of disposition, kept me from suspecting that I ought to change my allegiances, and think and feel, play and work, as did the majority. Nor did I feel any impulse to contradict them or blame them. I had nothing to complain of, but I preferred solitude.

There was therefore no occasion for me to suffer moral revolutions or undergo any radical change of heart. My interest in religion had never been agonizing, only speculative and devotional. Nothing in me called for any conversion or mefanoia. Time might t ransmute, without erasing, my first opinions and affections; I might wish to change my surroundings and my way of living; I never undertook to change myself. I regard my occupations and interests somewhat as an actor regards his various parts or a painter his subjects. That a man has preferences, and can understand and do one thing better than another, follows from his inevitable limitations and definite gifts; but that which marks progress in his life is the purity of his art; I mean, the degree to which his art has become his life, so that the rest of his nature does not impede or corrupt his art, but only feeds it.

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Now in my mental life there have been two great impediments, two congenital vices, two initial temptations: the temptation of the primitive poet to believe his fables, and the temptation of the spontaneous agent to lose himself in his world. The primitive poet falls into that first temptation inevitably; his inspiration is passive and not an art; he lends credence to his obsessions as to a higher kind of knowledge, and proclaims each new intuition to be a revelation of the truth. The Jews, says Spinoza, whenever they think something, say God told them. Prophets indeed do this explicitly and with full conviction, opposing their sudden intuitions to the current views of mankind. They are even more credulous and absorbed in life than are ordinary people, only in some extraordinary direction. Yet, unlike madmen, good prophets proclaim new ideas that the world can be led to take seriously and to weave into its conventions, at least for a time and in some sect; whence all traditional religions and moralities.

I am naturally incredulous and not a willing dupe of life in the world or in my own head; yet my imagination is not inactive. I am therefore a sort of prophet at second hand, appreciating the inspiration of others and enjoying it as my own; and for that reason the temptation to mistake it for revelation was in my case never invincible. My youthful piety was accompanied by an equal delight in geography and in architecture. I had little leal contact with any of these things, but pure delight in the form and idea of them. All that I later clearly denied them was the assent due to matters of common knowledge or history: matters ol fact important to get right in action, but not especially interesting to the imagination of a poet.

All her life my sister Susana was a little troubled because, as she said, she feared that I was moving away from God.” Yet at heart I was not moving at all. I was only seeing what a catastrophe the Christian Weltanschauung was pregnant with, il you took it for history and cosmology, and not for a symbolic myth. And this intellectual catastrophe would also involve a moral one, in that it implied the exhaustion of an inspiration, the decay of a Kultur. It would be comparable to the catastrophe of paganism and of the classic world, tragic but interesting. The idea of such a catastrophe caused no revolution in myself: it was more like a bereavement or a total change of surroundings. I had never practiced my religion, or thought of it as a means of getting to heaven or avoiding hell, things that never caused me the least flutter. All that happened was that I became accustomed to a different Weltanschauung, to another system having the same rational function as religion: that of keeping me attentive to the lessons of life.

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny. A philosopher may perfectly well cultivate more than one Weltanschauung, if he has a vital philosophy of his own to qualify his adoption of each, so as to render them complementary and not contradictory. I had, and have, such a vital philosophy; and the movement of my mind among various systems of belief has tended merely to discover how far my vital philosophy ( could be expressed in each of them.

My variations therefore never involved rejecting any old affection, but only correct ing such absoluteness or innocence as there may have been about it, and reducing it to its legitimate function. So in 1D00 I published the result of the gradual transformation of my religious sentiments. Religion was poetry intervening in life. That insight had come to me twenty years before, though not expressed in those words; it had really been native to me and congenital. So when I first went to Germany and began to read Goethe, chiefly as a lesson in the language, my vital philosophy recognised itself at once in the lines; -

This is perhaps more cavalier-like and jaunty than I was, even at that time; yet. the title of this drinking song is Vanitas! vanitatum vanitas! and the stanzas describe a gay fellow’s discomfiture when he set his heart on money or women or foreign travel or reputation or war; so that when he repeats at t he end: —

there is evidently an equivocation in his boast. The whole world belongs to me implicitly when I have given it all up, and am wedded to nothing particular in it; but for the same reason no part of it properly belongs to me as a possession, but all only in idea. Materially I might be the most insignificant of worms; spiritually I should be the spectator of all time and all existence.

This implicat ion touched the depth of my vital or congenital philosophy, and for that reason doubtless the refrain of this song became a sort of motto for me at that time. Yet more than ten years had to pass before that implication, on the emotional side, came to expression in my Platonizing sonnets; while theoretically I came to clearness about it only in my old age, when I freed “essences from the psychological net in which we catch them, and distinguished intuition from knowledge.

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CLEARER to me in those student days was another point. Goethe’s old soldier urges, if we want to be good fellows, that we drown our disappointments in drink. But isn’t drink also disappointing in the end? And if it be a solution to drink, in order to forget the vanity of life and incidentally the vanity of drinking, wouldn’t it be a better and juster solution to live in general as the world lives, so as to forget the vanity of doing so? Didn’t all my American friends endeavor, with a good conscience, to drown unhappiness in work? Wasn’t there some intoxication also in wealth, in women, in travel, in fame, and in war? And if drink and comradeship have a good side, which makes them jolly even if vain, have not all those other vanities their good side also? To abuse them satirically, out of spite, because you had expected too much of them, would be merely childish or, if you like, romantic. It would prove you to be moody, ill-bred, and unphilosophical.

Being a philosopher, I couldn’t accept a solution not based on the truth. If all is vanity — and I heartily agree to that — the solution must be built on remembering that fact, not on forgetting it; and if drinking and comradeship have a good side — and I heartily agree to that too — the solution must recognize the good side of drink, and also of wealth, women, travel, fame, and war. Not being an old campaigner with one leg, like Goethe’s soldier, but a young man just beginning to see the sunny side of life, it was more the challenge to drink that appealed to me than the chagrin at having found that drinking didn’t pay. I knew that it wouldn’t pay, if you gave yourself up to it; I felt no temptation to do that; but without setting my heart on anything the point was to enjoy everything with a free mind.

This was a pretty program, easy for a boy to draw up; and my antecedent pessimism and religiosity lent a certain reality to the pose. It lay in my nature to foresee disappointment, and never to bet on the issue of any event. Yet without experience of the world, this programmatic distrust remained itself empty and insecure. Genuine detachment presupposes attachment. What can il signify for you to say that you renounce everything, if as yet you have loved nothing? I had been childishly absorbed in religious ideas, and il was a true though bloodless sacrifice for me to wash them clean of all pretensions to historical or material truth; yet I was able to do so when quite young, readily and even gladly, because when I learned to conceive those myths as poetry, their meaning and beauty, far lrom being lost, seemed to me clearer and more profound than ever.

The problem was not so easily solved when it came to exorcising the world and freeing myself from all illusions about it The world is not a myth, to be clarified by a little literary criticism. It envelops our substance with a kindred substance immensely more voluminous; it, stimulates and feeds from every quarter the concupiscence of the flesh, the concupiscence of the eye, and the pride of life. What can the poor rushlight of spirit, kindled in the midst, do to clarify them? The aspiration and the desire must be accepted for the performance.

That. nevertheless, as a sentiment, my eventunal1 metanoia was sincere may be seen in the slow change that appeared in my way of living. Old age contributed to it; on the other hand, I had larger means and easier access to the great world, had I been in love with it. But I have ultimately become a sort of hermit, not from fear or horror of mankind, but by sheer preference for peace and obscurity. Fortune has become indifferent to me, except as fortune might allow me to despise fortune and to live simply in some beautiful place. I have cut off all artificial society, reducing it to the limits of sincere friendship or intellectual sympathy. Instead of collecting pictures and books, as I had a tendency to do in the early 1890’s, I have distributed my few possessions, eschewed chattels of every kind, a fixed residence, servants, carriages, or anything that would pin me down materially or engulf me in engagements.

I have indulged rather freely at certain times in good food and good drink; but I think the glamour of those pleasures was due almost entirely to conviviality — that is to say, to a momentary imitation of friendship. In themselves, when I was alone, food and drink were never important to me. I was almost happier when 1 could be frugal, as at my father’s at Avila, in the Duval restaurants in Paris, in the teashops in London, or as now in the clinic of the Blue Sisters upon the Caelius. I am happy in solitude and confinement, and the furious factions into which the world is divided inspire hatred for none of them in my heart.

It should he normal, at least according to the ancients, for a philosopher to reach this moral settlement in old age; but why did the idea of it and the need of it come upon me powerfully at the age of thirty? There were various reasons. For a poet and a lover of youth the age of thirty is itself a ground for metanoia. Being a teacher had been forced upon me by the necessity of somehow earning my living; but being a student was my vocation, and I had been living among students, interesting myself in their sports and their pleasures, and loving their quick and unprejudiced minds. Still this second vicarious adolescence had a rift in it: my sympathy with the young and theirs with me had limits t hat were growing narrower and sharper. My young friends seemed to me every year younger and younger, more and more standardized and generic. They would no longer be my friends, but only boys at the school where I happened to be one of the masters. That chapter then had come to an end: yet youth, in the world and in the poet’s eyes, is perpetual. The Platonic transition was therefore at once spontaneous and inevitable, from the many to the one, from the existent but transitory to the ideal and eternal.

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EVENTUALLY four thoughts merged their currents and carried me irresistibly towards the same sea: youth was past, friendship had had its day, the future offered me nothing that I cared for, religion and social utopias proposed nothing that I respected. I was driven from the temporal to the eternal, not by any one crisis or conjunction of events, but by the verv nature of existence, when this had been honestly faced and frankly admitted. The cry of Ecclesiastes, Vanitas van datum, could be re-echoed, and the motto from Goethe about setting my heart OI1 nothing could be retained; but both in a new spirit. At twenty my empty spleen could make a clean sweep of the world beforehand, because nothing in it would last forever; it didn’t occur to me to ask whether lasting forever would improve anything that was worthless while it lasted.

But ten years later I had traveled. I had learned something of the pleasures and manners of mankind, and for myself I had made some progress in the primrose path of Epicurean wisdom. I had now forever in my fancy a lovely picture of ancient Greece and a lovely picture of modern England; and having begun by fully admitting that all was vanity, I could not be angry with the primroses lor fading or with the path for being short. I accepted them as vain but beautiful, transitory but perfect; and 1 was no less ready to give them up than to enjoy them. To give them up, I mean, as possessions, as enjoyments, as private hopes; I would never give them up as allegiances. Never should I esteem and love them less because they happened to pass out of my orbit.

I„ another field, not so strictly personal, I was compelled to accept a rather difficult renunciation. I was a teacher of philosophy in the place where philosophy was most modern, most deeply Protestant, most hopefully new —the very things from which, in speculation, my metanoia turned me away. I could never be, I will not say a leader, but even a happy participator in the intellectual faith ol my neighbors. Not that I had any hostility to that faith: it was as natural in its place and time as any other and contained important elements of truth; but it could never be my faith. In the midst of the living, I could live only with the dead. It was a comfort, but a cold comfort, to say that I was living among the immortals.

Reacting now against all these closed doors, I found the moral of Goethe’s drinking song cheap and hollow. His old soldier dishonors his past, as if his present cynicism and rowdiness could be something better. This is only one more mood, one more incident, and a more vulgar one because there is less courage in it. There was vitality in those human adventures; there is also wit and good humor in laughing now at their seamy side; but it is dishonorable and self-contradictory to forswear your honest loves, past or present. They it is that reveal your true nature and its possible iultillments; they are the Good, in the modes of it that you can apprecinte and unfeignedly worship. There is therefore enthusiasm no less than resignation in an enlightened metanoia. You give up everything in the form of claims; you receive everything back in the form of a divine presence.

This final settlement of the moral problem involved no visible change in my mode of living. I went on teaching and writing, drinking and traveling and making friends: only that now, beforehand and exjilicitly, these occupations were marked for me with a cross: the sign on the one hand of death and on the other of consecration. Gradual and bloodless as the change was, there was a wrench in it, a passage through dark night. I had become aware that? as a spirit, I was not myself but pure spirit, to whom all selves are mere objects, and all their joys and sufferings so many animal vapors, to be endured courageously and no less courageously dismissed and wiped away. The truth of life could be seen only in the shadow of death; living and dying were simultaneous and inseparable. For, as Emerson has it:

Yet this transit through darkness brought me quickly back into the light, into the pure starlight that transports without dazzling. No part of time is lost in eternity, only the haste and uncertainty of passing from one thing to another.I had not been ravaged by any hostile fate; my heart had simply uttered a warning against its own weakness. It had said to me: Cultivate imagination, love it, give it endless forms, but do not let it deceive you. Enjov the world, travel over it, and learn its ways, but do not let it hold you. Do not suffer it to oppress you with craving or with regret for the images that you may form of it. You will do the least harm and find the greatest satisiactions if, being furnished as lightly as possible with possessions, you live freely among ideas. To possess things and persons inm idea is the only pure good to be got out of them; to possess them physically or legally is a burden and a snare.

I know very well that this philosophic salvation is not such as nature or life looks for or can accept: it is only what the truth affords to the spirit. Life and nature do not ask to be saved from themselves: they ask only to run on at full tilt, It is the spirit that asks to be saved from that insane predicament. Yet spirit is an emanation of life, and it is more truly and naturally happy in the first phases of its career than in its final salvation. In the end, when it has understood and renounced everything, if you ask it whether it is happy, it can reply only as La Valliere replied to the friends who asked her if she were happy in the Carmelite convent to which she had retired: Je ne sais pas heureuse; je suis cuntente. Nature had been muted, but spirit had been freed. In that sense, and under the spell of that profound conviction, I composed the second sequence of my sonnets, using the traditional language and images oflove which can render that sentiment best. They belong to a second-rate kind of poetry that in itself has no claim to attention; but here, considered as autobiography, they may ho recalled. The key to the whole is given in the one line; —

A perfect love is founded on despair.

This paradox is condensed and rhetorical; to get at the truth in it we must expand it a little and ward off certain misunderstandings. It is not love simply, but only perfect love, that includes despair. Love in itself includes hope, or at least a desire to preserve the object of it, to enshrine and defend it. And in regard to the object even perfect love retains this solicitude. It is only in regard to the lover, as a poor human being, that hope must be cut off, plucked up by the roots, if love is ever to become pure, happy, and immortal. The perfect lover must renounce pursuit and the hope of possession. His person and life must, in his own eyes, fall altogether out of the picture. Stendhal, in his book Del’Amour (which unlike his others pleases me very much), distinguishes four kinds of love, l’amour physique, l’amour de vauite, l’amour goût, and l’amour passion. The first two are obviously imperfect and impure: they include craving, jealousy, cruelty, fear, folly, and self-degradation. Vet the vital side of physical love cannot be dispensed with, since it is the root of the whole growth and most intense in the grande passion. In the great passion this vital impulse is often diverted from physical lust and jealousy to absolute devotion, heroism, and suicide. It is therefore psychologically not only possible but normal for the passion oflove to be self-forgetful, and to live on in the very act of sacrifice and personal despair. So transformed, the great passion becomes worship. And the amour gout, which is more playful, and t urns the vital element into laughter and delight, also reaches perfection only when all thoughts of the self, all amour de vanté, drops out of it and it becomes wholly aesthetic, pure joy in beauty and charm.

Combine these two elements, the tragic and the lyrical, and you have turned love into a rapture in adoration which seems to me its perfection. It presupposes the total abdication of physical, social, or egotistical claims; yet these claims were instinctive in the psyche, and the spirit has either adopted them and repented, or at least felt and understood them in refusing to make them. The passion oflove, sublimated, does not become bloodless, or free from bodily trepidation, as charity and philanthropy are. It is essentially the spiritual flame of a carnal fire that has turned all its fuel into light. The psyche is not thereby atrophied; on the contrary, the range of its reactions has been enlarged. It has learned to vibrate harmoniously to many things at once in a peace which is an orchestration of transcended sorrows.