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PARTISAN REVIEW
graphy that Santayana at Harvard knew William Randolph Hearst,
as if an unsuspected door suddenly flew open for a moment on the
rowdy and vigorous figures in the household that our host has so far
succeeded in making us forget were there all the time. Here, if the
philosopher had seen it, was a character full of rich signif!cance
beyond the circle of academic Harvard or of the Sturgises of Boston,
a symptom of a different America in process of growth, the vast in–
choate continent forming into a society, towards which a philosophic
interest in the Realm of Matter, if not his historic sense, should have
drawn him. Santayana remarks somewhere that Henry James con–
quered the Genteel Tradition by understanding it. Certainly San–
tayana himself shrewdly saw through this Tradition, or as much of it
as concerned him; but there is the difference, that while .James went
abroad in passionate search of another community, Santayana carried
abroad his isolation, nursing the illusion of an Olympian detachment
above and outside his time. Here-if we may be pardoned the
clinical terms-the patient's libido, directed towards the trauma, per–
petuates it as an imago.
The clinical terms remind us that Santayana has written an essay
on Freud and also suggest that we shall not succeed in explaining his
remoteness from his time without being tempted into the purely per–
sonal parts of his autobiography. Unfortunately his essay on Freud is
pretty thin, touching on one or two metaphysical issues and leaving
the clinical aspects aside; had it been more studious, we might have
in the autobiography a more analytic eye turned towards parents and
childhood. For the relations between his mother and father are ex–
traordinary and fascinating, although Santayana,-just where, it
seems, they are rising to the point of being understandable-manages,
whether deliberately or not, to hang a veil. His mother was forty, his
father fifty, when they married, and the reasons for this marriage
were, Santayana says, very obscure and perhaps did not exist. His
father, a country gentleman of very modest means, an amateur in
painting, a liberal in politics, his liberalism being a pale and genteel
descendant of French J acobinism, is altogether a type to be recognized
out of Spanish life and literature. His mother is a more complex and
marvelous figure, who just barely comes across in the book: a tho–
roughly forceful, coldly passionate, determined, practical and yet
romantic engine, she seems to have possessed both her husbands.
One gathers, for example, that it was she who courted and was
responsible for this second marriage. She wrote poetry to his father
of which, we rather regret, Santayana has included no quotation.
