BOOKS
207
Elsewhere it tends to evaporate into a fog of doubtful generalities. The
truth is indeed that the great distinction of Santayana's work lies not in
its ideas but rather in its perceptions, its sympathy and its incomparable
expressiveness. Intellectually his work is not only derivative (his material–
ism is hardly distinguishable from that of Leucippus and his skepticism is
a mere sophistical exercise) but at many points banal. Its chief intel–
lectual merit, no doubt, is that it succeeds in settling most of the ques–
tions it raises; yet the greatest philosophies are perhaps not those that
settle old perplexities but rather those that generate new ones. Indeed,
Santayana's thought is wholly committed to a profound skepticism re–
garding the constructive possibilities of philosophy; and in consequence
it is he rather than
hi~
critics who has fostered the opinion that his
achievement has mainly been "literary" in a pejorative sense. There
is apparently a good deal of his father's negativism
in
Santayana himself.
Yet it is fatuous to deny that Santayana's achievement, despite its
intellectual deficiency, is of a sort possible only to a mind immensely
cultivated and immensely powerful-though, one might add, a mind,
for all its irony and aloofness, at home only among concrete images and
objects.
1
The predominant visual bias of Santayana's intelligence, exem–
plified not only by his poetry and prose but by his passionate interest
in architecture and by the talent for drawing which he inherits from
his father, is of course, like every virtue, inevitably a limitation as well.
Certainly his discussions of logic and cosmology are vitiated by it; for
they have the specious inexactitude that suggests a man of genius bravely
floundering in an alien medium. Yet this dominant pictorial interest, of
which his realm of essence is a kind of hypostatization, gives his major
work its most engaging theme, just as it gives the present volume its
charm, its truth and its persuasiveness.
MARTIN LEBOWITZ
'
WAR AND THE INTELLECTUAL
JEAN MALAQUAIS' WAR DIARY.
Translated from the French by
Peter Grant. Doubleday, Do_ran.
$2.75.
T
HE BOOK
could have been published at this moment only because the
army in which Malaquais served is out of the fighting. Its great
novelty is that it is the product of a contemporary consciousness, one of
the few of this kind to appear in recent years-which accounts for its
cogency, sharpness, and most probably for the strong reactions it has
aroused. Malaquais is contemporary because he is alienated, disabused,
radical, and a.znbitious. For someone-like myself-who has served in
a latter-day army, his book rings bells,
is
the first piece of writing I know
of (ex'Cept for some of Randall Jarrell's recent poems) to say anything
to the point about behind-the-lines military life during World War II.
Beginning his diary, Malaquais seems to have made a Gidean reso-
