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PARTISAN REVIEW
history is itself conditioned and made acute by our standing in a
his–
torical situation where the possibilities of decisive action (and so of
human freedom) have been opened to us: our sense of the increased
determinism of human personality thus perhaps also increases our
appreciation of the decisive way in which its freedom can.assert itself.
Marx, the great discoverer of economic determinism, is also the
prophet of revolutionary action. The historical sense of medieval
man, to take the extreme contrasting example, with its single and
definite drama of human history, is simple, naive, almost non-existent,
bounded, as it was, by the limits of a feudal society, by a fairly static
alignment of classes; whereas every modern thinker faces both for–
ward and back, the conflicts within our present society laying open
the possibilities of actions oriented towards radically different futures
for mankind.
To bring this back to the subject of autobiography : if the auto–
biography has now become a form with great philosophical pos–
sibilities (as Henry Adams recognized, though he did not perhaps
altogether fulfill them), then we shall also expect from this
modern
autobiographer a vision commensurate with our own complicated
feelings about history and personality.
These remarks are amply illustrated by George Santayana's
recent autobiography,
Persons and Places.
If
this gracious little book
hardly realizes the possibilities indicated for modern autobiography
it does nevertheless make quite clear that these possibilities exist, that
the particular quality of Santayana's philosophizing is what it is for
a number of reasons which were not of his choice, as well as for
several on which he might po!:sibly have taken a different course.
It makes a good comment on the whole philosophic career, and,
examining it as such, we may perhaps produce some incidental
elucidation of the general remarks with which we began.
Several qualities seem to recommend Santayana for the role
of the serious autobiographer. A philosopher of importance, he has
also written a fairly successful novel, a pair of accomplishments that
suggest the combination of speculative ability and literary imagina–
tion which the genre demands. We can hardly imagine Bertrand
Russell, for example, approaching the autobiographical form with
equal chances of success; we would probably get a history of opinions
and series of witty anecdotes. This is in fact the kind of subject–
matter to which Santayana's mind and temperament seem best suited:
the criticism of persons and ideas, taken together, a genre in which
some of his best writing has been done, as in his
Character and
