Unruffled
THE LETTERS OF GEORGE SANTAYANA. Edited by Daniel Cory. (Constable, 50s.) SANTAYANA was among the least obtrusive, yet most determined, in the recent colonisation of Europe by gifted Americans; and a surprising proportion of these letters are written from European addresses. This is true even of those which date from before 1912, when he retired from the, to him, mild tedium of teaching; crossed the Atlantic once again (was it for the last time?); and in the end settled permanently in Rome.
These letters are not, however, of the kind which throw light on the places they are written from; nap, indeed; on the people whom the writer met there. 'I walk about, knowing no one and speaking to nobody,' Santayana wrote when in Rome. Despite unfailing amiability, he was the philosopher at heart. Even his encounters in Cambridge with Moore and Russell are barely mentioned, though they much influenced him, and may have been at work later when his views were turning more and more overtly to realism and naturalism (he repudiated Russell, however). Nineteenth-century Oxford would not recognise the young Harvard Professor save as a potential undergraduate; he thought the lectures bad; and the Oxford Idealists of the time go unmentioned. The undergraduates, on the other hand, seemed better than those at home. Several things in this book, by the way, offer a daunting picture of the American student. One writes (in 1922) to advise Santayana to give up philosophy and stick to criticism (the answer is a model of the crisp-courteous); another, seemingly, bombards him when in his late eighties with a series of appeals to face the challenge of Russia and give Bp relativism. We certainly see here what he called one of his own works : The Genteel Tradition at Bay. Yet even at bay, at that age, it replies with unfailing decorum—and assiduity.
Here, perhaps is the most notable thing in these letters. Passing insights in matters of art, history, religion or philosophy— delivered as always with this writer in a limpid uninsistent elegance of style where, almost, vision and vacuity 'for lack of tread are indistinguishable'—these are not infrequent. A number of the individual letters, moreover, are outstanding literary docu- ments; where the editor points these out he scores a row of bull's-eyes. But the major increment is in respect of Santayana himself. Partly it is the effect of massive length, and the great intellectual vigour of the very end of his life that shows, for example, in the shrewd contemporaneity of his remarks on Sartre and the Existentialists. Partly it lies in the,, delicate sense of humour, even of fun, in some of the letters ('Your eulogy of me . . is very well expressed : and I am sending it to another friend who is writing an article about me, in case he should like to steal some of your thunder for his peroration. Would you mind?'). Partly it lies in the true insight and kindliness with which Santayana, when an old and famous man, replied to the many young or obscure writers who sent him their works. In the end, his unruffled gentleness is confirmed as a kind of strength, the mellifluous detachment proves to have its own incisiveness.
This is a notable collection. May one hope, in a second edition, to find even one photograph of the author, who looked so unlike
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