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self in it. Oliver is a tragic hero, marvelously capable of seeing his world's
and his own limitations, their failure to live up to an ideal of the good,
but incapable of delivering himself from the disabling grip of his con–
science, largely because so pathetically trained in the arts of social being.
At the heart of Santayana's critique is the individual moral will, the iso–
lated conscience, for which the last duty becomes a willed release from
the fortress of the will. As Oliver tries to fit himself to the world
through a conventional romantic pattern - marriage with one of two
women both so idealized that he never has the least insight into their in–
ner lives - it becomes clear that his admirable moral energy has made him
unfit to live.
Santayana always felt that while Americans will argue with great
moral fervor for ideals like freedom, they too often have no conception
of what freedom can be good for, what to make of, or with, it. As he
once wrote, "in a country where all men are free, every man finds that
what most matters has been settled for him beforehand." Oliver has seen
through the game but has none of the facilities that would allow him to
experience his knowledge as a release. The only redeeming moments in
The Last Puritan
are moments of fugitive pleasure: either in the physical
presence ofJim Darnley or in the company of nature, whose radical oth–
erness Oliver always finds comforting, perhaps because it makes no de–
mands on his moral will. These are moments when Oliver's spiritual na–
ture is not so much abandoned as brought into fleeting contact with
compelling, even exciting physical realities. Then, too, there is the relief
of Santayana's finely honed irony, reminding us of his often avowed
preference for irony over truth, or irony in the face of truth, the ability
to laugh at and in so doing acknowledge our human limitations, instead
of compounding those limitations with an arrogant and mystified sense
of our intellectual and spiritual worth.
The editors, Herman
J.
Saatkamp, Jr. and William G. Holzberger,
have done a fine job in producing this volume, which is a critical edition
of the text with a full textual apparatus. Readers will find the Introduc–
tion, Notes to the Text, and even the Textual Commentary well orga–
nized and informative. Critical editions are by nature hybrid creatures,
and there will probably be something here for everyone to pick at, but
the editors know their business and perform it well. A case can be made
to have proceeded differently in the Prologue, where the most substantial
textual problem in the volume occurs, but the editors' reasoning is cer–
tainly plausible, and the text we have has the virtue of being pretty much
the text we've always had. Still, the rejected text, which Santayana was
forced to rewrite due apparently to a printer's mistake, is much too dif-
