Once more unto the breach with Santayana! (Three posts in a day on this topic were not what I expected.) Before saying goodbye to him, at least for now, I thought it would be fun to look at his use - or abuse - of Shakespeare at a crucial point in The Sense of Beauty. As Santayana leads up to this definition of beauty, he quotes Sonnet 54, which runs as follows:
O! how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give.
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour, which doth in it live.
The canker blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumèd tincture of the roses;
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
When summer's breath their maskèd buds discloses:
But, for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo'd, and unrespected fade;
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;
Of their sweet deaths, are sweetest odours made:
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall fade, by verse distills your truth.
As always with Shakespeare, there is so much we could say about a mere fourteen lines! But first, let's see how Santayana makes use of this poem:
The passage from sensation to perception is gradual, and the path may be sometimes retraced: so it is with beauty and the pleasures of sensation. There is no sharp line between them, but it depends upon the degree of objectivity my feeling has attained at the moment whether I say "It pleases me," or "It is beautiful." If I am self-conscious and critical, I shall probably use, one phrase; if I am impulsive and susceptible, the other. The more remote, interwoven, and inextricable the pleasure is, the more objective it will appear; and the union of two pleasures often makes one beauty. [Here Santayana quotes all but the last two lines of Sonnet 54.] One added ornament, we see, turns the deep dye, which was but show and mere sensation before, into an element of beauty and reality, and as truth is here the co-operation of perceptions, so beauty is the co-operation of pleasures. If colour, form, and motion are hardly beautiful without the sweetness of the odour, how much more necessary would they be for the sweetness itself to become a beauty! If we had the perfume in a flask, no one would think of calling it beautiful: it would give us too detached and controllable a sensation. There would be no object in which it could be easily incorporated. But let it float from the garden, and it will add another sensuous charm to objects simultaneously recognized, and help to make them beautiful. Thus beauty is constituted by the objectification of pleasure. It is pleasure objectified. ~ The Sense of Beauty, §11
Here Shakespeare, as is his wont, seems to draw a contrast between appearance and reality. The canker (a.k.a. dog-rose) puts on a beautiful show but lacks the sweet odour that lives in and defines the true rose; similarly, the fresh loveliness of the Fair Youth will eventually fade away, whereas the truth of his many virtues will live on in Shakespeare's artfully beautiful verses.
Yet Santayana sees things differently. For him, the truth about the rose (its sweet odour, which distinguishes it from the dog-rose) is merely yet another ornament which, when added to the rose's visual appearance, doubles the pleasure and therefore makes us exclaim (if we are in an extravagant mood) that the rose is beautiful. Without the corroboration of scent, we think the dog-rose is rather plain, despite its deep-dyed color, its shapely form, and its pleasing motion in the summer breezes. There is no truth to claims of beauty - it's all subjective.
To my mind, Santayana has twisted Shakespeare's meaning to suit the purposes of his argument. Few indeed are the beautiful things that benefit from "the cooperation of pleasures" - Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has no color, Shakespeare's sonnets don't taste delicious, and the Mona Lisa isn't wearing an expensive perfume! Although classical Greek sculptures originally possessed the added charm of paint, it's not as if the ancients could call them beautiful whereas we, missing out on their vivid colors, therefore can call them, say, mildly pleasing or merely showy. Yet that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, would it not?
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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