A Mind Thinks Back

PERSONS AND PLACES--George Santayana--Scrlbner ($2.50).

Eighty years ago last week, on New Year's Day, 1864, Jorge Agustin Nicolas de Santayana was christened in Madrid. This week he published his autobiography.

It marks a major event in U.S. cultural history. For George Santayana, author of 23 books that have been authoritatively described as the most exquisite philosophical literature ever composed, is the first U.S. thinker whose work and life link the cultures of North and South America and interweave them with the old romantic culture of Spain. Readers may make their own decisions as to how important that work is now. But ever since Longfellow mastered Spanish, since Irving wrote his studies of old Spain, and tireless Prescott, grey, half-blind, burrowed into Spanish archives to write his histories, the works of interpretation have gone on, their very number showing how much misunderstanding existed and how deep was the desire to end it. For 50 years the man best qualified to do so has lived in the distinguished obscurity of Harvard, contemporary philosophy, England, exile, and loneliness.

Santayana is now in Rome. In 1912, when he received an inheritance, he gave up teaching to live first in England and then in the Eternal City. From time to time Santayana's books appeared, modulated and civilized, never quite sustaining the masterpiece proportions of their best contributions, never lacking passages of extraordinary penetration, and always written in prose as dusky and subdued as the firelit Harvard study he describes. The first of his books to reach a big U.S. audience was The Last Puritan in 1936. It was far less important and far more difficult than Persons and Places. For the complexities of Latin American politics and cultural relations have cleared enough to show how central a figure the philosopher has always been, how many current political problems are exemplified in his work, opinions, travels, and this book.

Virtue without Mortgages. Santayana's maternal grandfather Jose Borras, who "became a Deist, an ardent disciple of Rousseau, and I suspect a Freemason," fled Spain in 1823, settled in Glasgow, and moved to "rural, republican, distinguished, Jeffersonian Virginia. Here, if anywhere, mankind had turned over a new leaf, and in a clean new world, free from all absurd traditions and tyrant mortgages, was beginning to lead a pure life of reason and virtue." In 1835 Grandfather was back in Spain, U.S. consul at Barcelona, appointed by Andrew Jackson at a low point in U.S.-Spanish relations.

Later his 19-year-old daughter sailed to Manila with her father, where a change of administration dropped him to the governorship of a small island, where he died. Josefina, then 20, took refuge with a Creole family in Manila. "There was one wholly exceptional young man in Manila, tall, blond, aquiline, blue-eyed, an American, a Protestant, and unmistakably virtuous." He was George Sturgis, 32. This marriage was for him extremely happy. But George Sturgis, after taking his family to Boston on the clipper ship Fearless, died in the midst of a commercial failure. same ship. Years later, at the start of the Civil War, Josefina moved to Madrid, met him again and married him. "I have no evidence as to what really may have brought these two most rational persons, under no illusion about each other or their mutual position and commitments, to think of such an irrational marriage." The elder Santayana, one of twelve children, with the Spanish "dignity in humility," poor, meager, deaf, a painter, a law student, a quoter of Quintilian, solid and grey as the rocky heath of Avila where he used to walk with his young son George, consented when his wife returned to Boston with George and his half brother and half sisters. "How much in this was clearness of vision, how much was modesty, how much was love of quietness and independence? . . . Education such as I received in Boston was steadier and my associations more regular and calmer than they would have been in Spain, but there was a terrible moral disinheritance involved, an emotional and intellectual chill, a pettiness and practicality of outlook and ambition, which I should not have encountered amid the complex passions and intrigues of a Spanish environment. . . .

Yet what scraps of learning or ideas I might have gathered [in Spain] would have been vital, the wind of politics and of poetry would have swelled them, and allied them with notions of honor." Puzzling Parents. George Santayana writes of his father's beliefs with the same care and exactitude that he devotes to those of Lucretius and William James, and analyzes his mother's independent mind as if she too were a philosopher. He discovered his mother's poems, kept in secret and sent to his father 20 years after their separation, and her letters: "I am glad that our son has no inclination to be a, soldier. . . . Barbarous customs that I hope will disappear when there are no Kings and no desire for conquest and when man has the world for his country and all his fellow-beings for brothers. You will say that I am dreaming. It may be so.

Adieu." His father's letters to her were as remarkable: "Strange marriage, this of ours! So you say, and so it is in fact. I love you very much, and you too have cared for me, yet we do not live together. ... I should have wished that Jorge should not have been separated from me. . . . Unhappy compulsion! Yet it was much better for him to be with you than with me, and I prefer his good to my pleasure." Behind the Star. George did not like America. The family lived in one of two twin houses in Boston -- "a product of that 'producer's economy' . . . which first creates articles and then attempts to create a demand for them; an economy that has flooded the country with breakfast foods, shaving soaps, poets, and professors of philosophy." At No. 302 Beacon Street the sharp wintry weather blew in big blasts from the river. His mother was reserved and independent. When ladies asked her to join the Plato Club, and asked her what did she do, she replied unsmilingly, "In winter I try to keep warm, and in summer I try to keep cool." One of Santayana's earliest memories is of his mother carrying him to the window of their house in Spain. "Above the tower of the Onate house opposite, one bright steady star was shining. My mother pointed it out to me and said: 'Detras de ese lucero esta Pepin'." (Pepin, the dead child of her first marriage, was behind that star).

They were poor and lonely in Boston. Yet "there were gentle lights really burning in some of those houses, with no exaggeration of their range or brilliance : Ticknors, Parkmans, Longfellows and Lowells with their various modest and mature minds. I came too late to gather much of that quiet spirit of colonial culture, that felt itself to be secondary and a bit remote from its sources, and yet was proud of this very remoteness, which gave it the privilege of being universal and just. In my time this spirit lingered only in Professor Norton, but saddened by the sense of being a survival. I also knew Lowell, in his last phase; I once shook hands with Longfellow at a garden party in 1881 ; and I often saw Dr. Holmes, who was our neighbor in Beacon Street; but Emerson I never saw."

Apartment at the Asylum. The Sturgises, the family of the Great Merchants, were lively, erratic, odd. Their stage villain was Aunt Lizzie, "a tall strong woman of fifty or more, with black hair and bushy eyebrows that met over her nose, and a bass voice; in which it was impressive to hear her tell how her brother, an unemployed clergyman with whom she had a lawsuit, had attempted to poison her, all for the sake of the wretched pittance that remained to her." George Santayana bore Uncle James Sturgis a grudge, simply for "his commonplace talk, his hurry, his bustling unperceptive manners." His favorite was Uncle Samuel. Uncle Samuel kept private apartments in the Insane Asylum, appeared only once or twice, a tall, handsome, courtly old gentle man, amiable, dignified and even happy, who called on his relatives, talked pleasantly about the weather, shook hands, took off his very tall top hat, smiled, and returned to the madhouse. "Indeed, why should he not have been secretly a philosopher, saner than any of us? . . ."

Norte y Sur. Through the intricate details of Persons and Places, and by way of them, the vitality of the Spanish-American heritage glows through the supple prose. The 262 pages of the book (another volume is to appear, and war conditions interfered with this one) are packed with accounts of life in Harvard, written with mellow good humor, of the philosophy department, written rather perfunctorily, of the Lampoon, Boston Latin School, and, ceaselessly in each new scene, the effective contrasts of the old world and the new, and the pain that was suffered by the people of sensitivity and spirit who moved from one world to the other, and belonged to both, or to neither.

The mind of Santayana is restless and far-traveled; the flow of his thought is never the steady controlled intensity that he admires in the ancients, but glints with unexpected intellectual play over the current-like foam above the rapids of a river. After the long years when the very grace of his writing gave the impression that it lacked substance, his especial gift, intuitive, sympathetic, has come into its own. The ceremoniousness and hospitality of the Latin American mind are his, as is its sudden poetic insights, its brilliant intellectual discoveries that are tossed aside, like a master artist's sketch, as soon as they are made.

Forcing the the Latin Stones. American mind Santayana's in mind its comprehension of the meaning of progress while remaining quietly skeptical of it, and in its moderate, tolerant, and inwardly unyielding religious spirit which even in skepticism retains the training of its youth. His writing is starred with lines of poetry that break like flowers forcing the stones of the courtyard of his prose.

They are poignant, and they touch on the problem of faith. In Persons and Places there are some new explanations and corrections of mistaken views of Santayana's beliefs, but now they no longer appear to be written to an earthly critic.

So his vivid description of a child dead at birth gives way to his account of his religious training: "Especially present to me is the very philosophic dogma that God is everywhere, by His essence, by His presence and by His power; of which, however, the first clause has always remained obscure to me. . . . But the other two clauses are luminous, and have taught me from the first to conceive omnificent power and eternal truth. ... I have reasserted them, in my mature philosophy. . . . They belong to human sanity, to human orthodoxy; I wish to cling to that, no matter from what source its expression may come, or encumbered with what myths. The myths dissolve: the presuppositions of intelligence remain and are necessarily confirmed by experience, since intelligence awoke precisely when sensibility began to grow relevant to external things."

So he interrupts a comment on Englishmen--"I too love the earth and hate the world"--and in these words remembers a scene at home in Avila: "The broad valley remains visible with its checkerboard of ploughed fields and straggling poplars lining the straight roads, or clustered along the shallow pools by the river; and at night, in the not too distant mountains, the shepherds' fires twinkle like nether stars."

All that disqualifies George Santayana as the philosopher and teacher of the Americas and Spain is his inability to make the U.S. take him in earnest. The fault is less his own than it is another illustration of the unerring U.S. instinct for overlooking its own.

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