'I Prize Civilization'

Agnes Repplier’s epigraph to her essay “Town and Suburb” (Eight Decades: Essays and Episodes, 1937) is a sentence by George Santayana: “I prize civilization, being bred in towns and liking to hear and to see what new things people are up to.” 

During her long working life, Repplier (1855-1950) was a prolific essayist and writer of popular biographies who was able to support herself, her mother and sister with her work in a way unimaginable today. She was a serious Roman Catholic and remains a charmingly old-fashioned writer, bookish, leisurely and occasionally tart, at once genteel and not. A native of Philadelphia, Repplier lived there all her life, and in her essay she defends city living while gently debunking the romance of the rural. Presciently echoing Jane Jacobs, she writes: “It is not because the city is big, but because it draws to its heart all things that are gay and keen, that life in its streets is exhilarating.”

 

Americans remain ambivalent about cities, which suggest crime and sophistication, poverty and raffish allure. Their true importance is often forgotten. As Guy Davenport, an admirer of Santayana, writes in “The Symbol of the Archaic” (The Geography of the Imagination, 1981): “The unit of civilization is the city. The classical ages knew this so well that they scarcely alluded to it intellectually. Emotionally it was a fact which they honored with rites and a full regalia of symbols.”

 

I had to look up the source of the Santayana epigraph: his essay “The Irony of Liberalism” collected in Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922). In the second paragraph he writes: “I often wonder, looking at my rich friends, how far their possessions are facilities and how far they are impediments. The telephone, for instance, is a facility if you wish to be in many places at once and to attend to anything that may turn up; it is an impediment if you are happy where you are and in what you are doing.”

 

Santayana is up to something more substantial than posing as a Luddite reactionary (though anyone who deems the telephone a nagging impertinence will sympathize). The philosopher was a complicated mingling of ascetic and aesthete, Catholic and atheist. For the final eleven years of his life, he lived at the Convent of the Blue Nuns of the Little Company of Mary in Rome, cared for by the Irish sisters. His paragraph continues:

 

“Public motor-vehicles, public libraries, and public attendants (such as waiters in hotels, when they wait) are a convenience, which even the impecunious may enjoy; but private automobiles, private collections of books or pictures, and private servants are, to my thinking, an encumbrance: but then I am an old fogy and almost an ancient philosopher, and I don’t count. I prize civilization, being bred in towns and liking to hear and to see what new things people are up to. I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.”

 

What we see here is an interesting knitting-together of minds: Repplier: Davenport: Santayana. I’ll add another intellectual patch to the quilt. The following is from Repplier’s essay “Living in History” (Points of Friction, 1920), and it begins with an impressive feat of namedropping:

 

“Mr. Henry James once told me that the only reading of which he never tired was history. ‘The least significant footnote of history,’ he said, ‘stirs me more than the most thrilling and passionate fiction. Nothing that has ever happened to the world finds me indifferent.’ I used to think that ignorance of history meant only a lack of cultivation and a loss of pleasure. Now I am sure that such ignorance impairs our judgment by impairing our understanding, by depriving us of standards, of the power to contrast, and the right to estimate. We can know nothing of any nation unless we know its history; and we can know nothing of the history of any nation unless we know something of the history of all nations. The book of the world is full of knowledge we need to acquire, of lessons we need to learn, of wisdom we need to assimilate. Consider only this brief sentence of Polybius, quoted by Plutarch: ‘In Carthage no one is blamed, however he may have gained his wealth.’ A pleasant place, no doubt, for business enterprise; a place where young men were taught how to get on, and extravagance kept pace with shrewd finance. A self-satisfied, self-confident, money-getting, money-loving people, honouring success, and hugging their fancied security, while in far-off Rome Cato pronounced their doom.”