BOOKS.

A LATIN PHILOSOPHER ON SOME ENGLLSH CHARACTERISTICS.* To those who have had the pleasure of reading Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith's Santayana anthology it will seem a common- place to say that that philosopher's new book is packed, like the best sort of Christmas pudding, with the fruit of felicitous phrase and epigram. When the reader finds that it is also full of the most excellent literary and aesthetic criticism he will, most probably, have the pleasurable feeling that he had more or less deduced the necessary capabilities from the peculiar flavour of Little Essays.

To have done with the book's faults and to dismiss them that they shall no longer trouble us, let us say at once that Mr. Santayana somehow in this book shows himself an ageing man. Here and there in what he says about the War we see a hint of inflexibility. He has been a little taken in by some of the soothing syrup which was so lavishly poured forth during the War—phrases about the " cheery wounded " and " glad sacri- fice " and " a land purged by fire." He gives us the sense of being too remote from the agony, and when he writes of the War we feel thathis attitude is not always the calm of the philosopher but often that of the tortoise. And yet the slight feeling of exas- *.satikt.)eistea in England. By deorge Bantayana. London: Constable. Ps: no peration which a younger reader may experience in perusing some of his pages only shows with how little disinterestedness, with how strong a tinge of painful emotion the mass of the community who suffered or were in close touch with the agony still feel. It is then perhaps this sensitiveness in the reader, as much. as some insensitiveness in the writer, that makes the sum of the dia. agreeable impression produced by a good many temperate sentences about war and its emotions. On the whole, however, the book is charming. Certainly to the present writer the most agreeable pages are those which are concerned with architecture.

Architecture still lacks celebrants and analysts. " Ruskin 1 " the reader may immediately exclaim. But a perusal of Mr. Santa- yana's clear pages will show why in a fashion Ruskin, great writer as he was, and concerned as he was with great buildings, was not really a writer upon architecture. He was interested, as are most of the sages for whose pronouncements we really care a fig, mainly with manifestations of the human spirit. But the degree of his interest in this, and of his lack of interest in externals, was unusual. However much he is overtly con- cerned with the contrast between the beloved Gothic and the detested Baroque, Ruskin is really all the time just as much agonizing in the fight between Good and Evil as was Bunyan with his Christian and Apollyon. That is what makes Ruskin seem to many people a baffling writer. When wind and tide are in opposition, the apparent direction of the flow of water is not that of the veritable current, and the inexperienced onlooker has a sense of bewilderment as he sees feathers and corks blown one way and some heavier piece of flotsam carried the opposite way. It is with such a sense of bewilderment that many of us have read Ruskin and his followers, marvelling that an analysis of the differences between Classic and Gothic technique should lead them down to such a sea of emotion, when to us such a subject would seem rather to lead up to the calm harbours of disinterested thought. But our surprise has been because we have ignored the deep undercurrent below the symbols. We have not realized that for him the Baroque edifice—Santa Maria della Salute or St. Peter's—was Doubting Castle or Vanity Fair, and a Byzantine or Early Renaissance building the House of the Interpreter or the Delectable Mountains. But a little of this temper of thought makes half the pleasure of literature, and there is plenty that is anthropomorphic in Mr. Santayana's writing upon architecture. Take, for example, the first of these Essays, which he calls " The Human Scale," and which begins with the following phrase :- " Great buildings often have great doors ; but great doors are heavy to swing, and if left open they may let in too mach cold or glare • so that we sometimes observe a small postern cut into one leaf of the large door for more convenient entrance and exit, and it is seldom or never that the monumental gates yawn in their somnolence. Here is the modest human scale reasserting itself in the midst of a titanic structure, but it reasserts itself with an ill grace and in the interests of frailty ;

the patch it makes seems unintended and ignominious. Yet the human scale is not essentially petty ; when it does not slip in as a sort of interloper it has nothing to apologize for. Between the infinite and the infinitesimal all sizes are equally central. The Greeks, the Saracens, the English, the Chinese and Japanese instinctively retain the human scale in all that part of their work which is most characteristic of them and nearest to their affections. A Greek temple or the hall of an English mansion can be spacious and dignified enough, but they do not outrun familiar uses, and they lend their spaciousness and dignity to the mind, instead of crushing it. Everything about them hab an air of friendliness and sufficiency ; their elegance is not pompous, and if they are noble they are certainly not vast, cold, nor gilded."

Mr. Santayana has this trick of writing the opening sentence of an essay to a nicety, and is perhaps surpassed in it by none but Bacon.

" Nests were the first buildings ; I suppose the birds built them long before man ceased to be four-footed or four-handed, and to swing by his tail from trees."

Thus begins the next Essay. But it must not for a moment be thought that Mr. Santayana's style lacks splendour. Upon the tragic character of Classical architecture, and especially Roman building, he is magnificent. We seem to see the awful walls and colonnades of the Coliseum towering above us, or to stand in the shadow of some fortress of the Sforzas :— " This sort of architecture has a tragic character ; it dominates the soul rather than expresses it, and embodies stabilities and powers far older than any one man, and far more lasting. It confronts each generation like an inexorable deity, like death and war and labour ; life is passed, thoughtlessly but not happily, under that awful shadow. Of course, there are acolytes in the temple and pages in the palace that scamper all over the

most hallowed precincts, tittering and larking ; and the same retreats may seem luminous and friendly afterwards to the poet, the lover, or the mind bereaved ; yet in their essential function these monuments are arresting, serious, silent, overwhelming ; they are a source of terror and compunction, like tragedy ; they are favourable to prayer, ecstasy, and meditation. At other times they become the scene of enormous gatherings, of parades and thrilling celebrations ; but always it is a vast affair, like a Court ball, in which one insinuates one's littleness into what corner one can, to see and feel the movement of the whole, without playing any great part in it. Even the most amiable forms of classic architecture have this public character."

But how differently do the English build !

" How gently, for instance, how pleasantly the wave of Italian architecture broke on these grassy shores ! The classic line which is tragic in its simple veracity and fixity had already been submerged in attempts to vary it ; in England, as in France, the Gothic habit of letting each part of a building have its own roof and its own symmetry at once introduced the picturesque into the most ` classic designs. The Italian scale, too, was at once reduced, and the Italian rhetoric in stone, the baroque and the spectacular, was obliterated. How pleasantly the Palladian forms were fitted to their English setting ; how the windows were widened and subdivided, the show pediments forgotten, the wreathed urns shaved into modest globes, the pilasters sensibly broadened into panels, and the classical detail applied to the native Gothic framework, with its gables, chimneys, and high roofs ; whence the delightful brood of Jacobean and Queen Anne houses ; and in the next generation the so genteel, so judicious Georgian mansion, with its ruddy brick, its broad windows, and its delicate mouldings and accessories of stone. The tragic and the comic were spirited away together, and only the domestic remained."

And with younger architects with " better models and less wilfulness " than Ruskin's pupils or those who reacted from his teachings, Mr. Santayana perceives the hopefulness of the modern architectural renaissance :-

" I see the fresh building of to-day recovering a national charm : the scale small, the detail polyglot, the arrangement gracious and convenient, the marriage with the green earth and the luminous air, foreseen and prepared for."

But we are leaving scant space in which to quote from the witty Essay on " The Lion and the Unicorn." The opening words are tempting :—

" Every one can see why the Lion should be a symbol for the British nation. This noble animal loves dignified. repose. He haunts by preference solitary glades and pastoral landscapes. His movements are slow, he yawns a good deal ; he has small, squinting eyes high up in his head, a long displeased nose, and a prodigious maw. He apparently has some difficulty in making things out at a distance, as if he had forgotten his spectacles (for he is getting to be an elderly lion now), but he snaps at the flies when they 15other him too much."

" But why," Mr. Santayana goes on, " should the other sup- porter of the British Arms be a Unicorn ? " This is a creature of Mediaeval fancy, " a horse rampant argent, only with some- thing queer about his head, as if a croquet-stake had been driven into it." Is it, perhaps, he goes on, that, as the Lion expresses

the British character, so the Unicorn somewhat more subtly expresses the British intellect. Whereas most truths have two faces, and at least half of any solid fact escapes any single view of it, the English mind is monocular ; and the odd and singular have a special charm for it. This love of the particular and the original leads the Englishman far afield in the search for it. He collects curios. He rides hobbies. He travels through the wide world with one,eye shut, hops all over it on one leg, and plays all his scales with one finger :- "There is fervour, there is accuracy, there is kindness in his gaze, but there is no comprehension. He will defend the silliest opinion with a mint of learning, and espouse the worst of causes on the highest principles."

But in this fantastic, this benevolent creature there is an element of common sense. There is a great deal to be said for having one horn :-

" A single straight horn is like a lancet ; it pierces to the healt of the enemy by a sure frontal attack : nothing like it for pricking a bubble, or pointing to a fact and scathingly asking the Government if they are aware of it. . . . The Lion is an actual beast, the Unicorn a chimera ; and is not England in fact always buoyed up on one side by some chimera, as on the other by a sense for fact 1 " England is, he concludes, more than any other country, the land of poetry and the inner man, the land of mists, tenderness and dreams, of a whole nation that hugs hallowed shams.

Hardly less charming is the Essay on " Dons," on " Sea- faring," on " Privacy," on " The Irony of Liberalism," or on " John Bull and his Philosophers." The book would prove a charming holiday companion to a reader of meditative fancy.