cultivated paganism through contact with people of freer
spirit and fewer restraints,
comes close to perishing, but
finally triumphs by expelling those germs which tempt Oliver
to follow his instincts. There are three major crises: Oliver's
·break through the chains of Puritanism,
his return to the
fold, and his collapse when unable to adjust himself to the
grooves of sheer respectability,
each symbolized by some
dramatic event or entrance of a new person. Oliver's de-
composition is foreshadowed in the conflicts of his family.
His father, Peter Alden, despaired of as a wastrel, fulfilled
family prophecies by killing a watchman during a fraternity
initiation at college. The affair was hushed up and he was
bundled off to a series of foreign travels which he carried
on as a form of dope for the rest of his life, interrupted only
by the formality of inheriting several million dollars, marry-
ing an ambitious self-righteous prig, and permitting himself
to become the father of Oliver. Oliver's early education in
manners, restraints,
and the virtues of self-denial is super-
vised by his mother,
the full-bosomed conscience of the
household. A regimen of athletics rounded out Oliver into
a pinched Spartan of the mind and the body.
Early schooldays made Oliver envious of the freedoms in
conversation.
and dress of his poorer classmates,
and he
would secretly try to imitate them. Athletics became a duty,
and he served as captain of the football team. All this time
the influence of his father, with his philosophy of resigna-
tion, his search for experience, his roaming, his excursions
among artistic imaginations, his contempt for the amenities of
the household grew upon Oliver.
His father and mother
were wrestling for his soul. The issue was decided by
Oliver's meeting Jim Darnley, a young sailor in charge of
Peter's yacht. They go swimming,
and for the first time
Oliver undresses before another person. In Jim, Oliver sees
the freedom of the natural man unhampered by any moral-
ity or any fixed patterns of living, abandoning himself to the
joy of the senses and the innate curiosity of the mind.
Here Oliver's pagan phase begins. He travels on the con-
tinent; he fosters a bond of sympathy with his father; he
meets Mario, his cousin, a young student who dips like a
bee into one experience after another; he sees a lot of Jim
and his family. But what a tight-lipped paganism! He is
attracted to Rose, Jim's sister, makes a youthful engagement
with her, and after an inner struggle he seals the engage-
ment with a peck on the lips. Oliver is fascinated by the
ease with which Mario's mind traverses ideas and situations,
but he is suspicious of Mario's motives. Like a gradually dry-
ing stream, his mind trickles over his new experiences, until
the barren rocb of his Puritanism stand rigid. His mother's
admonitions have slowly helped to freeze his ardor to live.
Sensing this, his father kills himself with an overdose of
dope in order to release Oliver from all bonds, permitting
him to return without regrets to his mother and the res-
pected "useful" life she symbolizes.
Oliver's final phase is his tragic attempt to get back on
the tracks from which he has been derailed. Jim and l\t1ario
fade from his immediate life, like lost smells which become
a little stale each time they are recaptured.
Rudderless, he
looks for
a"
wife who will become his worldly manager and
spiritual guide. Edith a high-spirited busybody, social worker
and D. A. R., turns him down; and Rose refuses him be-
cause she is in love with Mario. The war comes. Santayana
points the final contrast between Oliver and Mario. Mario
joins the anllY, gets wounded. To him the war is an ex-
perience to be taken blithely, to bathe in its richness and
warmth,
like Odysseus adventuring through the ancient
world. Oliver has all kinds of moral and personal scruples,
PARTISAN
REVIEW AND ANVIL
but he finally joins. A few days after the armistice, Oliver
is killed in an automobile accident. Mario goes off speculat-
ing whether to have an affair with Rose. Santayana's picture
has been completed, his ideas have run their logical course.
He can now discarq the models.
I have summarized the story to indicate the way San-
tayana swings the Puritan-Pagan theme from one end to
the other. At bottom these swings have as little basis in
psychological development as the seasonal flights of birds.
Despite Santayana's assurance that he was recreating the
case-history of Oliver Alden, the actual impression the book
leaves is that Santayana juggled the events to fit the com-
partments of his mind. The symbols never emerge from the
situations themselves; but like ideal essences they seem to
have existed before Santayana has exhibited them in modern
dress. Puritanism and paganism battle through the pages
like medieval knights for the favor of Oliver. By cutting the
historical threads of Puritanism Santayana has arrived at a
concept, a quality which simply does not exist today in such
an isolated form. The early Puritans developed their philo-
sophy of thrift, virtue, Godliness, and work under the pres-
sures of early pioneering and later small business expansion.
Even from the beginning all kinds of traits spawned in the
stream of American civilization grew around the original
Puritanism until the terms Yankee, American, and Babbitt
were hardly distinguishable from "Puritan." Wasn't there
a strong tinge of "Puritanism" in Benjamin Franklin's com-
mercial morality?
Starting with the essence of Puritanism Santayana spins
Oliver's life like a spider-web outward from the center. Ex-
cept for a few references to the routine imposed upon the
Alden family by its economic and social position, there is
little connection between Oliver and the life of the com-
munities in which he moves throughout the book. At Prep-
school, on the yacht with Jim, at Harvard,
in .London-
everywhere he goes, Oliver meets forces and people which
either bolster or challenge hIs Puritanism. We feel as though
we are witnessing a controlled experiment in a laboratory.
Similarly the
freedom
posed as the antithesis to Puritan
aridity floats like an essence through the book. Jim Darnley's
unrestricted animal faith seems to exist only on the sea as a
sensuous cruise. On land, amidst his illegitimate wife and
bastard son, Jim takes on all the
animal 'Vices
of an ambitious
rake. Peter Alden takes drugs, travels, and talks about the
heathen
poets--hardly a freedom of the mind and spirit
that is either desirable or attainable.
And Mario wanders
from one physical and intellectual
adventure to another
without doing or thinking or feeling anything tangible or
significant. Although Mario seems to be Santayana's ideal
character in the book, he is the most imperfectly realized.
As a result the struggle within Oliver is not between any
tangible opposites. Neither his Puritanism nor what I have
roughly called
Paganism
is associated with concrete existing
ways of living nor with any specific beliefs. A leisured
estheticism, with its rootiess foliage of sheer sensuousness
and free speculation, with its pmfessional scepticism of all
traditions and codes, would probably come closest to San-
tayana's prescription for the good life. But the tragic aim-
lessness of those characters who seek this way of life sug-
gests that this is as noxiolls a fiction as Santayana's version
of Puritanism.
Like the "bohemian" way, Santayana's na-
turalized Platonism is an inverted Puritanism,
just as
spiritually. exhausting as the original virus to which it is a
kind of chemical reaction-with the formula reversed. San-
tayana's life-preserver turns out to be a pleasure cushion.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
