Two Quiet\ Lives
To the puzzled intellectuals of the twentieth century, the "reflective doer" appears as the apostle of human perfection; under each of Koestler's "thoughtful corporals" there lurks a Lawrence of Arabia. The choice for most of us, though, is not just war or All Souls: there is another division. We can make the best of the present intellectual and social set-up; or we can dwell apart. And when someone asks us if we are happy in our chosen way, we shall—if we are honest—say (as Santayana quotes). what Louis XIV's mistress La Valli6re said in the convent: "Je ne suis pas heureuse; je suis contente." Both Santayana and Mr. Garnett have avoided and ignored the hurly- burly where they could, the latter by temperament, the former by a more deliberate choice; and they make us look again at the fast, hierarchical tempo of the present-day. Each book is part of a trilogy, Santayana's the final volume, the other the first.
Santayana (who died last year) preferred private contemplation to the shared reticences of the market-place. "I have ultimately become a sort of hermit," he says, "not from fear or, horror of mankind, but by sheer preference for peace and obscurity." His book deals mainly with his travels (of body and mind) before his seclusion; there is a lot about England, especially Oxford and Cam- bridge (he liked Oxford more, although his reflective temper is in the Cambridge tradition). On the people he met in England he is incisive, often mordant; for Acton there is contempt; of Lytton Strachey he says, "Obscene was the character written all over him"1 the monks Of-Cowley at that time (1895) are succinctly dismissed : "for discovery they had no genius and for imitation no taste and no innocence." His portrait of the second Earl Russell (Bertrand Russell's elder brother) is brilliant: of this bizarre, truculent, ungrate- ful man, and his capricious amours, he writes with humorous affec- tion. Santayana's affable strolls in personal philosophy are equally attractive; he has Pater's ease of sensuous expression and Thoreau's spare candour. And, to aid his escape, he had a private income.
Santayana did not like his glimpse/ of Bloomsbury; Mr. Garnett, of course, is one of the cult's hoplites. Though this volume takes him only to 1914 (when he was twenty-two) and his youthful feet have hardly trod the foothills of Fitzrovia, there are promises of deifications to come: Bloomsbury is well-documented already, and we should like occasionally to reserve our judgment about its splendid inhabitants. It would be a pity if Mr. Garnett allowed his admiration to become the familiar hagiography; for The Golden Echo is one of the best pictures of a man's early years that has appeared for a long time, and its sequels should be kept as good. He shuns the revealing soliloquy: and rebuilds his life with short, wide-eyed, excellently written paragraphs. The world he paints is only half-believed in now: titanic bookmen, William Morris Socialism,, aesthetic teas, Georgian literary mellowness. There is a procession of musty giants; he is a little harsh, perhaps, with D. H. Lawrence. We see Constance and Edward Garnett (his parents) at home, Edward upsetting his wife by a "lifelong carelessness about doing up his fly-buttons." There are visits to Tsarist Russia—and the Bolshevik exiles in London; 'an earnest and abortive attempt to rescue an Indian nationalist friend from Brixton Gaol—"I was only eighteen and was well aware of my inexperience and unsuitability for the practical tasks I had taken on myself"; suffragettes practising revolver- shooting in the garden next door. And all this is re-created, rather than remembered; it is the small boy who shares the peasants' meal, the young man who rolls on the carpet in innocent, if misunderstood, jiu-jtsu; we grow up with the 'book—an exceptional and delightful effect.
Two men, two lives of interior charm; both unafraid of the night, both content, both showing that we do not all have to ride under the stars on racing camels and sway kingdoms to say we have lived a full life.
DAVID SUMO
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