SANTAYANA 'NEVER LIKED AMERICA'
Otto, Max C.
Santayana 'Never Liked America' PERSONS AND PLACES, by George Santayana. Charles Scribner's Sons. $2.50. Reviewed by Max C. Otto GEORGE SANTAYANA left the United States in January 1912 and has...
...After putting up for 40 years with the America which had so much of the sordid, feverish, get-rich-quick about it, in spite of which he had meantime become a distinguished professor of philosophy at Harvard, he turned his back upon us forever...
...The rumor is that the outbreak of the war found him in Rome and that he is there now, cared for by kindly nuns, and at work on his autobiography, the first installment of which, subtitled "The Background of My Life," somehow found its way in manuscript to New York City a year ago...
...The landing place was a "sordid scene...
...In Athens, while it was possible freely to engage in the play of ideas as the supreme end of life, he might not have felt himself an alien as he has in his own world and time...
...people worked feverishly for quick returns, and let the future build for the future...
...He never liked America, and he never liked Harvard, and, more than this, he has never liked the world...
...The book will no doubt be read and enjoyed for the distinguished style in which it is written even when its philosophy of life is rejected or perhaps not even understood...
...He speaks of himself as a solipsist, a solipsist being one who regards himself as the only indubitable reality and all else the stuff of his dream...
...All these years, then, Santayana has tried to live in a world made by himself for himself, a world of the mind...
...We lack the desire "to be poor in order to be simple, to produce less in order that the product may be more choice and beautiful, and may leave us less burdened with unnecessary duties and useless possessions...
...He is not sure that this is an altogether wholesome practice...
...and on it a vast wooden shed, like a barn, filled with merchandise and strewn with rubbish...
...Reviewed by Max C. Otto GEORGE SANTAYANA left the United States in January 1912 and has not returned...
...It will be treasured most by men and women who share the author's spirit of aloofness and whose taste is so perfect that they are in danger of swooning when they think of entering the world at large...
...Animals are born and bred in litters...
...Santayana never really liked the American way of life...
...America was not yet rich," he says looking back, "it was only growing rich...
...Born in Madrid in December 1836, he came to America in the Summer of 1872 and his first impression was unfavorable...
...So long as those who were devoted to this game were secure at the apex of the social pyramid, protected and supported by the soldier class below them, and the workers and slaves at the bottom, things would have seemed rational...
...not a word to suggest that they too may be able to live the good life...
...Still, writing a book about us after he had left, he said that the judicious would feel that it was affection for the American people which made him wish that what is best and most beautiful should not be absent from their lives...
...Personally, I have met only one other person who avowed this philosophy, though I have met a good many who acted as if they believed it...
...but there is a fund of vigor, goodness, and hope such as no nation ever possessed before...
...Instead of this we crave to have engagements, run from one to the other, and are infatuated with quantity...
...Since then he has lived in England, Spain, and Italy...
...The system suited me perfectly, since nature had formed me for a recluse and only the contrary force of circumstances kept me for many years from complete retirement...
...There is one period in human history when Santayana might conceivably have been happy-—the age of Pericles...
...It was not at all as in the countries he had left behind: "No docks...
...It is his claim that "in any tenement of clay, with no matter what endowment or station, happiness and perfection are possible to the soul...
...For there is not the slightest recognition in this biography of the many upon whose labor and faithfulness the possibilty of a decent life depends...
...Perhaps there is an explanation in a comment he makes on the fact that in his childhood home each person had a room to himself, even though it might be like his own, a "narrow one-windowed den at the top of the house...
...But for himself it was just the thing...
...All that is requisite is that we should pause in living to enjoy life, and should lift up our hearts to things that are pure goods in themselves, so that once to have found and loved them, whatever else may betide, may remain a happiness that nothing can sully...
...Solitude grows blessed and peaceful in old age...
...only a wooden pier raised precariously on slimy piles, with the stained sea water running under it...
...There is much for-getfulness," he wrote, "much callow disrespect for what is past or alien...
Vol. 8 • January 1944 • No. 4
