AN UNHISTORJCAL MIND
315
Opinion in the United States
and
Winds of Dogma.
His imagination,
being sensuous and concrete, needs the control of a concrete subject–
matter; when he pursues the idea alone, he gets lost.
He even seems to be striking the right key at the very beginning
with a statement that sounds quite remarkable coming from him:
"Now my little cockle-shell and the cockle-shells of the rest of my
family, and of the whole middle and upper class (except the un–
sinkable politicians) were being borne along more or less merrily
on the surface currents of a treacherous social Tevolution." (p. 2)
The reader reviewing the whole career will probably come back to
this opening passage with a number of unanswered questions. What is
this social revolution referred to? How did the politicians, least of
anybody, escape it? And how and where, if at all, does Santayana's
own career, his fifty years of philosophizing, relate to it? The word
"revolution" threatens just now, it seems, to degenerate out of all
sense; we have the revolution of this, that and the other, tomorrow's
book bringing us tomorrow's prophet with his absolutely new decision
about today's "revolution of our time":
in
an age of accelerated
change people are so dazzled by the transformations in the texture
of daily life that they become blind to the unchanged social fabric
beneath. But, in the strict sense of the term, there was at least one
revolution through which Santayana lived; which he might still ob–
serve taking place about him in Boston during
his
youth; which had
already laid a withering finger on the social class of the American
relatives with· whom he lived, the Sturgis family, once prosperous
merchants of Boston: industrial, and eventually also finance, capital
dispossessed the o,ld merchant capital class of New England, whose
culture, deflowered, quickly became extinct. Santayana observed this
decease of the New England culture; .he has analyzed certain aspects
of it shrewdly
in
his
Genteel Tradition at Bay,
and also in the pre–
sent work he observes sharply its wistful lingering on in the person
of Professor Charles Eliot Norton. But this cannot be the revolution
on which Santayana's own cockle-shell has continued to float; his
fortunes, having escaped that revolution, have been bobbing along
now for some . time on the surface of a much wider and deeper up–
heaval. And it is against the stream of this wider upheaval-"revolu–
tion," if you will, but whose revolution is in the process of being born,
and then maybe not-that we have to see this life, and eventually
also weigh the reputation. Has Santayana really grasped his story
in such terms? Here, alas, his opening statement merely announces a
theme which is never developed. Yet the statement remains remark-
