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able, even though we doubt that the knowledge behind it is real. We
find it remarkable to hear Santayana, whose life has been a history
of withdrawal, connect himself and his career, however fragmentari–
ly, with his time and place, with the compulsions of history.
But perhaps also the development of such a theme would )Je too
ambitious and exhausting an effort for a man of eighty years: This
is an old man turning the pages of an album; Santayana himself in–
dicates the adequacy of his title: he is writing down what he remem–
bers of a long life, and these memories are, he says, nearly all of faces
and places, sometimes quite isolated. It is an occasion for public
regret that Santayana has come so late to his autobiography. Perhaps
he has been wasting some of his time during the last two decades,
since the labors expended upon other works might have been sufficient
to realize the full philosophic possibilities in the autobiography.
Scepticism and Animal Faith
introduced in 1923 an outline of a
philosophic system; all that was needed to complete this system was
a single volume postscript, but instead the next fifteen years were
to see him occupied with the four subsequent volumes of the
Realms of Being,
which add very little, if anything, to his philosophic
reputation, and where we get a Santayana rambling and thinning
out. And as for the novel of 1936,
The Last Puritan-that
labor
might have been more profitably spent on undisguised autobiography.
Could his invention as a novelist, for example, be equal to creating
the curious marriage of his mother and father that we find in the
autobiography? Santayana has come a little too late to this rich auto–
biographical material. The present work carries us only through
Harvard college; the years of Santayana's intellectual maturity, richer
in ideas and personal contacts, still lie before us. True, this is meant
as an installment and ends with a promise of more to come, but the
uncertainties of authorship, those ever haunting furies, are com–
pounded at a fearsome rate for a writer of eighty years. And even
if he does get around to writing of them, these events will hardly
get the treatment they might have been given ten or twenty years
ago.
Edmund Wilson has already ranked the book beside two of the
most famous of modern autobiographies, Yeats's
Autobiographies
and
Adams's
The Education of Henry Adams;
but this comparison is
somewhat out of proportion, to say the least, and serves in fact only
to throw into relief the relative slightness of Santayana's work.
This is not the re-enactment of the solemn drama and ritual of per–
sonality which in Yeats's work is made the vehicle for a great poetic
