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process of condemning an obsolete tradition, inadvertently celebrates it.
Qervantes and Santayana obviously have much in common. Both
are intransigent realists who are none the less half-committed to the
illusions they denounce. Both distrust the moral imagination, yet both
ultimately succumb to it: both find in it something even more persuasive
than the claims of reality, an ideal moral order that is an infallible
index of the ugliness and disorder of life. The beautiful, Santayana tells
us, has since boyhood remained for him imaginary. "That the real was
rotten and only the imaginary at all interesting seemed to me axiomatic
... it is still what I think." Undoubtedly the crucial paradox of Santa–
yana's life and thought is his invincible devotion to a tradition from
which he was irrevocably alienated. This sense of loss, exacerbated by
poverty and by his removal at 8 to Boston, was an inescapable moral
inheritance. His father's liberalism, "tolerant towards the minor vices ...
but ferociously closed against all higher follies," was almost wholly nega–
tive, and essentially anti-clerical; while his mother's piety was arid, un–
imaginative, moralistic: her Catholicism being purely nominal. Both he
and his half-sister Susanna turned inevitably toward the Church, she
going the whole way, briefly entering a convent, he remaining always, as
he says, "at the church door." It was not faith that moved him but a
kind of metaphysical hunger. His "faith indeed was so like despair that
it wasn't faith at all; it was
fondnes~
.. . " "I heartily agreed with the
Church about the world," he says, "yet I was ready to agree' with the
world about the Church."
It is of course just this diversity in his sympathies and allegiances, due
largely but not wholly to his mixed background, that gives an hypo–
thetical equivocal air to all his convictions on anything other than the
most general issues, and makes him useless if not repugnant to an,}'one
committed to a specific policy of belief or conduct. Moreover so radical
a detachment, with its inevitably conservative implications, tends in a
time like our own to appear factitious. And yet, for all its abstractness,
or perhaps because of it, Santayana's basic moral position is immitigably
just:
"One step," [he tells us, recounting the genesis of his mature opinions]
"one step was to overcome moral and ideal provinciality, and to see that
every form of life had its own perfection, which it was. stupid and cruel
to condemn, for differing from some other form, by chance one's own.
The other step, rising from the moral dissolution that might invade a man
who cultivated an indiscriminate sympathy with every form ·of life, made
it clear that sympathy and justice themselves are only relative virtues, good
only in their place, for those lives or forms of life that thereby reach their
perfection: so that integrity or self-definition is and remains first and fun–
damental in morals : and the right of alien natures to pursue their proper
aims can never abolish our right to pursue ours."
Oddly enough, however, the book is weakest and dullest in its purely
reflective passages; the discourse is vivid and pungent so long as it is
firmly controlled by some specific narrative or descriptive subject matter.
