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THERE was really nothing mysterious about Santayana's line: he was a psychologist rather than a philosopher. Like the early Greeks, he was a strict materialist who used philosophy to organize the world in a practical way. He had the profound Spanish belief in the vital part to be played by custom. What he aimed at was the discovery of a civilized and permissible attitude toward life. So he saw religion as a useful myth, not because it makes men moral, but because it civilizes them. He enjoyed mocking American. English and German Protestants for their rigid dismissal of superstition and their concern with questions of conduct. The doctrine of eternal damnation (he wrote) did not mean that man must behave himself lest he suffer torment in the afterlife, but was a poetically enlightening image which refined men's sensibility and hardened their stoicism before the intolerable truth that all human acts, all evils and all pain, are irremediable. What is done is done, and man must take the consequences with open eyes. Between Spanish stoicism and New England puritanism there was obviously a grim link, but behind Santayana's philosophy lies another traditional Spanish theme: that life is a dream.
To a younger generation of philosophers, Santayana did not appear to be dealing with philosophical questions, and indeed there are no Spanish philosophers and never have been. But there have been a number of distinguished essayists, unsystematic, highly individual intermediaries between personal agony and philosophy: writers like Unamuno and, later, Ortega y Gasset. To this group of brilliant egoists Santayana really belongs. His real excellence lay in literature. He was a good minor poet of the severe kind, and understood, quite well, that he had been torn away in childhood from the sources of passion which feed great poetry. He was an admired literary critic and, indeed, has been compared, because of their common elegance, with Matthew Arnold.
As a novelist, Santayana did not succeed. The Last Puritan was a very starchy, sententious book. He was unable to see people except in relation to himself or his ideas. In his volumes of autobiography, Persons and Places, on the other hand, which describe the spiritual history of his wandering, split-up family, the life in Avila at the turn of the century where sorrow, rigid custom and a melancholy religion absolutely ruled the population, and the strange contrasts offered by the earnest Boston of William James and the raffish England of Lord John Russell—in things like these Santayana is a master.
The prose has lost its lushness and artifice> Spanish precision and plainness have come through. Detail, passivity, indifference, a stoical acceptance of life, patience, an ironical resignation to the peculiar ways of human beings are its Spanish traits. Santayana's psychological powers are hardly less illuminating in his long essays on the Anglo-Saxon and the American characters; he had already lit up the follies of the German mind in his work on Egotism in German Philosophy, a work much consulted during the war against Hitler.