PHILOSOPHER AMONG HARVARD 'HACKS' THE SECOND VOLUME OF SANTAYANA'S MEMOIRS
Netboy, Anthony
Philosopher Among Harvard 'Hacks' The Second Volume Of Santayana s Memoirs THE MIDDLE SPAN (Vol. II. of Persons and Plates), by George Santayana. Scribner's. $2.50. Reviewed by Anthony Netboy IN...
...Santayana praises the decorum and decency of these people, but obviously he does not like their coldness and austerity, their sanctimonious and deficient aesthetic sensibilities...
...To a person who perambulated, somewhat in a" daze, through the halls of Harvard some years after Santayana left, this judgment seems sound enough—and explains not only one's own failure to obtain any lasting profit from Harvard, but the vacuity that surrounds the institution even now...
...He was not interested in their god, Mammon, nor attracted to their pale Evangelicism...
...With the wives of the State Street tycoons Santayana found real affinity, in a platonic way...
...He devotes a fascinating chapter to Lord Russell, scion of a powerful British family who led a madcap career so different from that of his brother...
...But rising from its pages are many sharply etched characters and, above all, that of the Bostonian society in which, half reluctantly, the author circulated...
...It is safe to say that his numerous abstruse books on philosophy will not endure half so well as his novel, The Last Puritan, and his memoirs...
...Ber-trand, whose contribution to philosophy, incidentally, is so much greater though less pretentious than Santayana's...
...who peopled Back Bay...
...Much more satisfactory were Santayana's relations with the young men at Harvard and with the ladies of Back Bay...
...For Santayana religion has far more color and emotion, and his own taste runs towards more exciting characters than the Strugises, Codmans, Ca-bots, etc...
...In this cloistered atmosphere, the professors were, as Santayana says, overworked hacks, "an anonymous concourse of coral insects, each secreting one cell, and leaving that fossil legacy to enlarge the earth...
...No one who wishes to understand Harvard and Boston can afford to miss this book...
...art, literature, interior decoration, and other frivolities were their chief interests because, as in Victorian England, they were excluded from the business world, and, of course, not consulted in the commercial operations of the industrial system which their spouses dominated...
...There is no chronological sequence to The Middle Span, and the narrative flows freely and somewhat confusingly over time and place...
...Reviewed by Anthony Netboy IN the second volume of his delightful memoirs, George Santayana continues to reminisce about the interesting people he has known and places he visited...
...THE loveliest pages of The Middte Span, as in the previous volume of reminiscences, are devoted to Santayana's Spanish and European contacts...
...His portrait of the university dominated by the autocratic President Eliot is withering enough...
...With the publication of this little book, the fame of Santayana the memorist becomes even more assured while that of Santayana the philosopher grows dimmer...
...The glimpses of the oil king, described with Santayana's sardonic pen, are alone worth the price of admission to this book...
...It is clear that Santayana, half Boston Brahmin and half Spanish aristocrat, has given us one of the most incisive pictures of that strange place called Back Bay and its educational appanage, Harvard...
...Nor did Santayana find much cheer and comfort in Harvard Yard...
...Had they been consulted, perhaps the ruthlessness of the system would have been modified...
...The university in his day was becoming a training school for business men—and that meant high-class bond salesmen, ruthless bankers, cartel manipulators, and future imperialists...
...He dwells at great length on his Spanish relatives with their numerous and involved courtships, marriages, and offspring...
...And he returns again to his precious old friend Strong, the son of a Baptist preacher who made a marriage of convenience with John D. Rockefeller's halfwit daughter Bessie...
Vol. 9 • June 1945 • No. 25
