Santayana on Literature

...As one progresses through this book, one becomes very deeply involved with a writer for whom thought and style were inextricably interwoven, a writer extraordinarily gifted at giving great pleasure by the very manner of his saying something in itself unlikely or dubious...

...What kind of philosophical temperament emerges from these pages...

...One can only conclude by reiterating that, wrong as Santayana can be, he is never merely foolish...

...Consider these bold words: "The only kind of idealism that Shelley had nothing to do with is the kind that prevails in some universities, that Hegelian idealism which teaches that perfect good is a vicious abstraction, and maintains that all the evil that has been, is, and ever shall be is indispensable to make the universe as good as it possibly could be...

...Or when it resulted in his later asserting the contrary: "The Renaissance needed no mastering living religion, no mastering living philosophy...

...For what is required for theoretic wholeness is not this or that system but some system...

...This is a very generous collection indeed...

...Tugged as he was from Apollonian to Dionysian, Santayana felt compelled first to say precisely what he felt and thought, and second to strike a balance, to curb his passionate belief with the leash of critical judgment...

...Inevitably, he regarded the belief that "life is an adventure, not a discipline" as one of the "maxims of a frank barbarism...

...But one may remark that, even as one page follows another, Santayana may be observed reversing his field and turning his judgments upside down: "Doubtless Dante was medieval, and contrition, humility and fear of the Devil were great virtues in those days...

...For his moral feeling was based on suffering and horror at what is actual, no less than on love of a visioned good...

...On the other hand: "He had a sentiment in the presence of this vast flatness of human fates, in spite of their individual pungency, which I think might well be the dominant sentiment of mankind in the future...

...and, however contradictory, he is almost always fascinating, compelling and utterly charming...

...he could write of Whitman: "he believed that Nature was or should be a formless flux...

...Just as inevitably...

...Professor Irving Singer (of the University of Michigan) has divided it into three parts: The first includes Santayana's "Three Philosophical Poets," the second (Critical Essays) ranges from "The Homeric Hymns" to "Proust on Essences," and the third (Critical Theory) contains some of Santayana's major essays on Literary Form, Expression in Literature, Speech and Signification, and so on...

...Singer remarks of this very instance in his introduction —without explaining why or analyzing the change?the climate of his opinions altered as he grew older...

...In this form, idealism is simply contempt for all ideals and a hearty adoration of things as they are...

...he set the standard for all possible performance...

...I regret that there is no space here to quote more from the aphoristic and witty comments which grace the pages of this elegant anthology and impart to it a dry but heady sparkle...

...He did not express himself in these terms, but referred rather to Platonism versus naturalism, and Mr...

...but in that capacity it would have been as hateful to Shelley as the powers that be always were and as the philosophy was that flattered them...

...But Santayana was very far from being a simple reactionary...

...Dante gives a successful example of the highest species of poetry...

...Its value is not the value of truth, but that of victorious imagination...

...I regret also that Mr...

...And, finally: "True vice is human nature strangled by the suicide of attempting the impossible...

...Singer is perfectly justified in pointing out how Santayana vacillated between the two, drawn alternately by the classic purity of the former and the expressive potentialities of the latter...

...Singer did not provide us with an index (a subject index would have been particularly helpful) or indicate original dates and places of publication for all the individual essays...

...Or consider his extraordinarily balanced appreciation of Dickens, which glitters with dazzling perceptions...

...Pointless snippets apparently included only to show the range of his interests, like his foreword to Iris Origo's Leopardi, or his popularized piece on Cervantes (written for the Library of the World's Best Literature), are far outweighed by the substantial "Shelley: or The Poetic Value of Revolutionary Principles" and the masterful "Dickens...

...This personal bias of Whitman's was further encouraged by the actual absence of distinction in his immediate environment...

...And, defending Dickens against the charge of exaggeration: "The world is a perpetual caricature of itself...

...And: "He denounced scandals without exposing shams, and conformed willingly and scrupulously to the proprieties...

...Suffice it to note that those who want Santayana's larger pronouncements on critical theory without having to hunt through half-a-dozen volumes will find them gathered here, and that like the rest of the book they are framed in language at once dogmatic ("The visible landscape is not a proper object for poetry") and disarming ("Lying is a privilege of poets because they have not yet reached the level on which truth and error are discernible...

...at every moment, it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be...

...and he regarded barbarism as "the lust of life, the dogged unwillingness to learn from experience, the contempt for rationality, the carelessness about perfection, the admiration for mere force...

...Not two paragraphs later, he tells us that Dante "touched the ultimate goal to which a poet can aspire...

...As Mr...

...Surrounded by ugly things and common people, he felt himself happy, ecstatic, overflowing with a kind of patriarchal love...

...a sense of happy freedom in littleness, an open-eyed reverence and religion without words...

...He did not seem to care when this resulted in his accusing Shakespeare of "being without a philosophy and without a religion...

...Yet, he is more exciting to read today than the vast majority of practicing critics...

...However, he has written a modest and perceptive introduction, "Santayana As a Literary Critic," which reads as well after one has finished as before, and he has brought us a well-edited, beguiling collection of the literary thoughts of a great mind...

...I think Dickens is one of the best friends mankind has ever had...

...This remarkably erudite man, who cherished organization, order, form, harmony and synthesis, tended always to prefer the Apollonian to the Dionysian...

...and as such it appeals mightily to the powers that be, in church and in state...

...On the one hand: "A series of shabby little adventures, such as might absorb the interest of an average youth, were romantic enough for Dickens...

...author, "Out Went the Candle" Even though George Santayana lived to a great age and remained productive until a few years ago, he seems now like a voice from a past long before the recent past—not a 19th-century rationalist who had lived on to write of Proust and cubism, as he does here...

...but the conclusion we must come to is precisely that the virtues of those days were not the best virtues, and that a poet who represents that time cannot be a fair nor an ultimate spokesman for humanity...

...Of this final section I shall say only that, while it is every bit as provocative as the first two thirds of the book, a good part of it spills over into the field of esthetics, which is beyond my area of competence and which I shall not attempt to comment upon...

...Of the miscellaneous writings on authors and literary works which form the central portion of the book, and which comprise, so to speak, the frame and features around which the critic drapes the more expansive cloak of his philosophical generalizations, there are very few which do not reveal something about either the work in question or Santayana himself...