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V Literature, Culture, and Criticism Santayana’s literary and critical endeavors did not take second place to his philosophical works. In fact, his first published book was Sonnets and Other Verses (1894). Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, his third book (after his well-known The Sense of Beauty), was as much literary criticism as philosophy. The essays of philosophical criticism included in this section—focusing on Emerson, Nietzsche, James, Royce, and Dewey—each offer assessments of a figure in light of his cultural context. The section begins with examples of Santayana’s literary work: “Sonnet III,” a famous and oft-anthologized poem; a series of poems for Warwick Potter, a student and close friend who died young; and short sections from the novel The Last Puritan. The novel tells the tragic story of Oliver Alden, the intelligent, wealthy, and conscientious descendant of well-established New England families. He is doomed because his integrity and virtue simultaneously incapacitate him and urge him to reject his crippling excellences. In the “Prologue” to the novel Santayana imagined a conversation in Paris with a fictional former student, Mario Van de Weyer, a friend and cousin of Oliver. Mario proposes that Santayana write the life story of Oliver and explains the significance of the title with the claim that “in Oliver puritanism worked itself out to its logical end. He convinced himself, on puritan grounds, that it was wrong to be a puritan” (ES, 489). The character of Santayana remarks that the secret of Oliver was “the tragedy of the spirit when it’s not content to understand but wishes to govern” (ES, 491). In the “Epilogue” the character of Santayana points out that Mario represents a relationship to tradition that is healthier than Oliver’s. Santayana says to Mario: “Your modernness sucks in all the sap of the past . . .; and any future worth having will spring from men like you, not from weedy intellectuals or self-inhibited puritans. Fortune will never smile on those who disown the living forces of nature” (ES, 494). In his novel Santayana dramatized his philosophy, his observations of modern American culture, and his ideas about literary art. In his critical essays he often considered specific literary figures. In one such essay Santayana observed that contemporary artists lacked a total vision and a capacity for idealization. This left the culture without its own standards of beauty or perfection. In place of ideals, barbarous art celebrates subjective, undisciplined passions as the highest values. As examples of such artistic practice, “The Poetry of Barbarism” considers Walt Whitman and Robert Browning. Both had powerful imaginations, but each was limited: Whitman to collecting sensations, Browning to subjective thought and The Essential Santayana 480 feeling. Neither could rise to the level of reason by which chaotic sensation and subjective feeling could be fashioned into an ideal. In “Emerson,” Santayana identified the hallowed American essayist’s single theme as imagination. It allowed Emerson to escape convention and avoid formulating a doctrine. Idealization rather than any particular ideal was his aim. But this resulted in disorganized thought and mystical tendencies. These tendencies were supported not only by his freedom of imagination but also the “moral intensity and metaphysical abstraction” of his ancestral Calvinism freed from any literal doctrine (ES, 525). He was, claimed Santayana, “a Puritan mystic” (ES, 524). Lingering Calvinism appears again in “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” an essay diagnosing American intellectual life as detached from the active Will of the nation. American Will was seen in the skyscraper; but American intellect remained in the colonial mansion: “The one is all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition” (ES, 527). The genteel tradition drew on an irrelevant Calvinism and an imported idealism, and these left American philosophy unable to express a meaningful vision of American life and unaware of its culture. Santayana observed that Walt Whitman and William James contributed in different ways to breaking the spell of the genteel tradition, but neither succeeded in overthrowing it. In “English Liberty in America” Santayana examined the fate of another European import in America. He contrasted English Liberty with Absolute Liberty. The first is characterized by the cooperation of free individuals and requires unanimity in society and plasticity in individuals. The second is characterized by the single-minded pursuit of some clear and unchanging ideal. It forces cooperation in its pursuit thereby eliminating individual liberty. English Liberty is a method of organizing society, whereas Absolute Liberty is radically individual and exhibited by fanatics, poets, and...

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