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the relevant tension between these two very differently inflected anti–
foundationalists. "Soft and over-fluid" sounds like an anxiety-ridden as–
sessment of something fundamentally challenging to Dewey's own expec–
tations of what would apparently be "hard" and "solid" (if still formally
supple) philosophizing. Though Santayana's philosophical project would
diverge in important ways from pragmatism as developed under James,
Dewey, Mead, and others, his effort to combine a naturalistic materialism
with a kind of spiritual concern for creatures and things derives from a
decidedly pragmatic effort to locate the origins of higher impulses in
contingent contexts or environments, not in order to debase or expose
the higher impulses but to realize and develop them more honestly. This
is a good deal closer to Dewey's own formulations in books like
Art as
Experience
and
Experience and Nature
than Dewey was ever willing (or
able) to admit.
Published in 1935 to enthusiastic reviews,
The Last Puritan
was imme–
diately popular. It was a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and
was the number-one bestseller in the United States for three-and-a- half
months. Indeed, it is a very readable book. Though Santayana is, as he
admits in a letter, incapable of writing a believable love scene, he traces
the intellectual, moral, and emotional development of his hero, Oliver
Alden, with sensitive insight and wit. His narrator, never so self-assured as
Fielding's, so warm as Dickens's, so smoothly urbane as Henry James's,
or so verbally operatic as Joyce's or Woolfs, is still capable of a winning
irony, just enough to forgive other infelicities of narrative technique.
Many of the best moments come in what might be considered inexcus–
able digressions: on Whitman, on college athletics (football and sculling),
on Homer, on Oxford, on Harvard, on Eton, on Plato, on
Hamlet.
These superfluities of description and speculation are never so long that
the thread of the story is lost, but they are long enough, and frequent
enough, to point out Santayana's narrative limitations.
But the loosely digressive style of the book serves Santayana's larger
interests as well. This is a philosophical novel, in which characters em–
body larger philosophical tendencies and are frequently made to express
those tendencies as they become manifest in particular situations. Fortu–
nately, the novel doesn't attempt to explain the intricate mysteries of
Santayana's notion of essences, which he was working out before, dur–
ing, and after the writing of
The Last Puritan.
Rather, characters experi–
ence their worlds from the more generalized point of view of their
moral and religious temperaments. Though there is some discussion of
philosophers and other writers in the background, it surfaces only as
characters grapple with events in their own lives. For Santayana, to write
