I share entirely Mr Santayana's view as to the nature of this planet and as to its probable future, but I had not realized before that there was pleasure to be extracted from such a prognostic. In the world in which we find ourselves, the only reliable joys are those derived from hatred, since it is more likely that our enemies will suffer than that our friends will be happy. Therefore the true philosopher, if he cannot banish the passions altogether, will select hatred as the most comfortable.
There is one surprising passage, however, which suggests that Mr Santayana has not quite realized the effects of social cataclysms. It occurs at the beginning of his essays on Dickens:
"If Christianity should lose everything that is now in the melting-pot, human life would still remain amiable and quite adequately human. I draw this comforting assurance from the pages of Dickens. Who could not be happy in his world? Yet there is nothing essential to it which the most destructive revolution would be able to destroy."
Any one who will imagine Pickwick and his friends transported to modern Russia can see the falsehood of this optimistic belief. There are no comfortable inns, no fires blazing on the hearth, no plentiful suppers and no punch-bowls; there is no freedom to travel about the country, no leisure for enjoyment. The only character in Pickwick who could be happy in modern Russia is Mr Alfred Jingle, who would be in the Food Commissariat. One is compelled to conclude that Mr Santayana does not quite realize how profound is the effect of a really serious revolution.
The greater part of the Soliloquies has no direct bearing upon modern social questions. A great deal is concerned with the English character—always kindly, too kindly perhaps. The English character which Mr Santayana likes and chiefly considers is that of the "gentleman" who is mildly conservative and not too much in earnest. Intellectual England, Puritan England, the England of the various tribes of cranks and faddists, is recognized as existing, but regarded as a regrettable aberration. Mr Santayana's view of the world is a product of peculiar circumstances: Spanish temperament and American experience. What Spain has stood for in the world seems to him in the main good; what America and progressive England have stood for he dislikes. This outlook has in him a
