Biological Poetry Santayana Aesthetics

BIOLOGICAL POETRY: SANTAYANA'S AESTHETICS
Author(s): Todd Cronan

Source: Qui Parle, Vol. 15, No. 1 (FALL / WINTER 2004), pp. 115-145
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
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BIOLOGICAL POETRY: SANTAYANA'S
AESTHETICS
Todd Cronan
How blind is the zeal of iconoclasts! They pour scorn
upon eyes that see not and a mouth that cannot

speak; they despise a work of art or of thought for
being finishedand motionless; as ifthe images of the
retinawere less idols than those of the sculptor, and
as if
words, of all things,were not conventional signs,
grotesque counterfeits,dead messengers, like fallen
leaves, from the dumb soul.Why should one art be
contemptuous of the figurative language of another?
Jehovah,who would sufferno statues,was himself a
metaphor.
-
Santayana
Santayana theAugustan
In his farewell address to Downing College, Cambridge, a

sixty-eight-year-old F. R. Leavis, bade goodbye to his colleagues
and students with a wry nod to the philosopher, poet, and novelist
George Santayana. Casting the mantle of aesthetics to Santayana
and the Santayanans he obliquely remarked, "He doesn't say it's
Qui Parle, vol. 15, No. 1 Fall/Winter2004

116 TODD CRONAN
good, he doesn't say it'sbad; he just stands there drunk in the bath
water."1 The "it" of this sentence ismeant to resonate with a sense
of stoic generality, "it" is the world at large.
Leavis's image is not as casual (and derisive) as itmay seem.
The aged philosopher in Rome, standing drunk in his bathwater
while the world outside tumbles into decadence is a picture of
as a latterday Dying Seneca
Santayana (fig. 1). Nearly twenty-five
years earlier, Leavis offered the readers of Scrutiny a scathing com
mentary on the author's "Senecan tragic attitude or philosophy."2
The essay "Tragedy and the 'Medium': A Note on Santayana's
'Tragic Philosophy'," considers Santayana's notorious impartiality.
For Leavis, Santayana's "Olympian" stance is only a cover for a
deeper mystification, "his attitude is really an exaltation of the

'established ego'" (CP 130). Santayana's imperturbability did not
reflect a higher understanding but mere insensitivity. Santayana's
well-remarked disinterestedness was a scientific posture; it really
spelled irresponsibility and personal caprice. An authentically trag

ic exaltation, Leavis declares, "has nothing alcoholic about it."The
image of Santayana "drunk" in the bathwater is no casual jibe

either. Leavis isobliquely referring to a recent book on Santayana,
edited by his conservator and one time assistant, Daniel Cory. In
bold letters across
the back cover of Cory's Santayana, The Later
Years we a
read description of "Santayana at Seventy":
Unless itwas raining heavily, we would walk to a near
by restaurant for luncheon, and here Santayana would

order a dish that struck me as being rather rich, such as
a spicy Indian curry or an elaborate dolce to cap the
-
feast. And he drank three glasses of wine nearly a
mezzo-litro - with his food. (It always astonished me
the way he poured any left-overwine on his cake.)3
Anecdotes like these are not hard to find. I suspect Leavis reveled,
with not a little smugness, in the hedonistic details of Santayana's
last years in Rome. According to Leavis, Santayana suffers from the
"self-dramatizing" attitude of Shakespeare's Othello, adopting the

BIOLOGICAL POETRY:SANTAYANA'SAESTHETICS 117
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118 TODD CRONAN
pose of a tragic hero when his true role is that of the sentimental
. . . to escape
"stoic-captain endeavouring reality [and] thinking
[only] about himself" (CP 151).4 Escapism is a familiar epithet
attached to Santayana's
philosophy as well as his way of life.
As Cory's image suggests, a complicated, or
merely contra
of was canonized
dictory, image Santayana becoming shortly after
the author's death in 1952 at the age of eighty-nine.
Among the
most popular of these was the retired
long philosopher from Har
vard, now the wise old "sage" (a word too often used by his sup
porters as well as his critics) living a monkish existence in the con
vent of the Blue Nuns off the
Capitoline Hill.5 This mythological
image grew considerably during World War II when many
American military personnel as well as graduate students and pro
fessors visited him at the convent, bringing back stories of an old
recluse dispensing wisdom to young men.6 The other popular con
ception, one equally prominent, was that of the portly stroller tak
ing his daily constitutional on the Pincio, heartily indulging in the
pleasures of food, drink, and conversation along the way, and
- -
seemingly oblivious to thewar or
anything else raging around
him.7 The Later Years recounts his daily rituals at length- these
stories became more renowned than his philosophy - describing
an extensive morning bath routine, walks, luncheons, letterwrit
ing, and an unrelenting publication schedule of philosophical
books and essays. For Leavis, and for a legion of other critics,
Santayana stood too far above the fray.Worse still, he seemed to

stand there smirking at the rest of theworld.
When Leavis said of Santayana "He doesn't say it'sgood, he
doesn'tsay it'sbad, he just stands there, drunk in the bath-water,"
he was summing up the sentiments of a generation of writers -
both on the left and on the right- who felt intellectuals had
to speakout on theurgentissuesof the
shirkedtheirresponsibility
day. Santayana was continually prodded to make his political posi
tion plain. Unfortunately, on the rare occasions when he did, far
fromallayingfearsabout his political leanings itprovokedfurther
skepticism.
The August 7, 1944, issue of Life magazine features a story

BIOLOGICAL POETRY: SANTAYANA'SAESTHETICS 119
on Santayana that has provoked much misunderstanding. The story

includes a photograph of the author sitting on a park bench read
ing a book. The article is entitled "U. S. Army in Rome Discovers

the Last Puritan Aloof, Serene," and the caption to the picture
reads, "George Santayana tears eight pages out of a book for his
afternoon reading in a Roman park. When he has read them he
throws them away."8 As ifthiswere not grievous enough, the read
er later comes to the following quote: "Of communism and fas
cism: doubtless there are good things in both." And of the war, "I
know nothing, I live in the Eternal." This latterphrase has haunted
the literature on the author ever since. As his student and friend
Horace Kallen tome themost pitiful remark
later noted, "It seemed
that probably had ever come from him or from any philosopher."9
The remark ismade all the more regrettable when viewed in light
of his most famous doctrine of enlightened progress from Reason
inCommon Sense, "Those who cannot remember the past are con
demned to repeat it." How should we evaluate the difference
between this thought and his later remark? I take it that "I live in
the eternal" was intended as a bombshell, the effects of which were
feltmost acutely among those at whom itwas directed, the liberal
establishment in England and America.
Leavis, for his part, responded immediately in the winter
issue of Scrutiny with his "Tragedy and the 'Medium'."10 His
response ispeculiar. Rather than taking up any of Santayana's con
siderable body of writing from the eight years that had elapsed
since the publication of "Tragic Philosophy" in 1936 he returned to
that essay from the pages of Scrutiny." To fully understand the
caustic tone of his response it should be noted that at one time
Leavis had seen himself as a Santayanan. Deeply influenced by his
philosophy, Leavis had a collection of his literary
begun editing
criticismin 1935 alongwith hiswifeQueen ie.'2 In 1958 he pub
lished an essay inCommentary on "T. S. Eliot as Critic" that takes
up the question of Santayana's impact on his early criticism.
Speaking of the largelynegligible impactwhich Eliot's Sacred
Grove had on him when he first read it in 1920, Leavis points to
the influence of Santayana's criticism on his thought at the time, an

120 TODD CRONAN
influence, it is important to say, he is now at pains to distance him

self from.
In those early years ... as in a dazed and retarded way

I struggled to achieve the beginnings of the power of
articulate thought about literature, itwas Santayana - I
picked up Logan Pearsall Smith's Little Essays [drawn]

from theWritings of George Santayana when it came
out - and Matthew Arnold [rather than T. S. Eliot] who
really counted. (Let me say at once that I didn't, and

don't, find Santayana fundamentally congenial: indebt
edness to an influence needn't mean radical sympathy
or ... )1"
approval
Leavis's dissatisfaction with Santayana hadn't fully set inwhen in

thewinter 1935 issue of Scrutiny Q. D. Leavis included two articles
on the author. The first,entitled "The Critical Writings of George
Santayana: an Introductory Note" is a penetrating eighteen page

overview of his literarycriticism. The second, "The Last Epicurean,"
is an extended review of his novel, The Last Puritan published ear
lier that year.14 Some of Q. D. Leavis's remarks in these essays are
worth recalling. Of Santayana's essay on "Dickens" from Solilo
quies in England, she writes, "It is the only intelligent critique of

Dickens I have ever met with" (CW, 283). Comparing T. S. Eliot's
recent monograph on Dante to Santayana's discussion in Three
Philosophical Poets she writes, "The cool approach of Santayana

... comes out in
refreshing contrast" to Eliot's, and "shows the
superior sophistication and detachment of the disillusioned
Catholic" (CW, 282; my emphasis). Q. D. was particularly sensitive
to, and skeptical of, Eliot's recent conversion to Catholicism. Santa
yana's skepticalfaithseemed to her a helpfulalternativeto Eliot's
newfound piety. Speaking of Santayana's essay on Shelley,
"Shelley: or The Poetic Value of Revolutionary Principles," from
Winds of Doctrine she says it "contains the first intelligent analysis
she findsinhis critiqueof Russell's
of Shelley" (CW 285). Further,
"A Free Man's Worship" a key to dissolving the author's trumped up

quasi-existential pathos. Russell's ethics, she laments, has left "a

progeny of rhetorical attitudes of the frail-human-pride-con
fronting-the-universe-undismayed breed to deck the path of the
aspiring adolescent with models of false style and cheap emotion

alism" (CW, 287). Her assent to Santayana's criticism of Russell is
important to note, as her terms are taken up nearly word forword

by F. R. Leavis in his later critique of Santayana. That is, F. R. Leavis
turns the specific terms of Q. D.'s valuation against Santayana. (The
reasons behind F. R.'s revision are not hard to find. They stem in
great part from F. R.'s wounded pride due to Santayana's lukewarm

response to his literarycriticism.)
Q. D. Leavis sums up her introduction by saying that
Santayana "provides the best possible corrective to the uncon
scious assumptions and prejudices of the English public school
. -. the insular Nordic Protestant limitations that it is the
product.
business of education to remove" (CW 288). That Q. D. makes
such a point of Santayana's anti-protestant inclinations is a surpris
ing but wholly accurate observation. While Q. D. and F. R. Leavis

were suspicious of Eliot's conversion to Catholicism, Santayana
was suspicious of the still lingering traces of Protestantism in the
Leavises as well as in Eliot's writings; Iwill come to Santayana's
criticism presently. In the end Q. D. sees the "essence of Santa
yana's criticism" in his well-remarked "wisdom" (CW, 289). She

concludes her essay by cataloging his numerous literary advan
tages including his "mature outlook reinforced by an ancient civi
lized tradition," his "close touch with the particular," his "suavity of
tone" and "fertility in illuminating (not decorative) metaphor and
imagery," as well as his unparalleled "use of epigram," all of which

display "simply the finest possible taste" (CW, 288-289). Finally,
she notes his aversion to predominant forms of tragic philosophy,
Hegelianism.She explains thisbyway of thefollowing
specifically
passage from hisCharacterand Opinion in theUnited States:
Hegel and his followersseem to be fondof imagining

that they are moving in a tragedy . . .The lifeof tragic
heroes is not good; it is misguided, unnecessary, and

122 TODD CRONAN
absurd. Yet that iswhat romantic philosophy would con

demn us to; we must all strut and roar . . . this earnest
ness will be of a histrionic German sort, made to order
and transferable at short notice from one object to
another, since what trulymatters is not thatwe should
achieve our ostensible aim (which Hegel contemptu
ously called ideal) but thatwe should carry on perpetu

... the strenuous
ally experience of living in a glorious
lybad world, and always working to reform it,with the
comforting speculative assurance thatwe never can suc
ceed. (CW, 290)5
There is a good deal of Santayana's philosophy contained in this
passage, and Q. D. is surely accurate in pointing to as

it marking
his truest critical intentions. His critique of Protestantism is the core
of his critical philosophy and what leads Q. D. to speak of him as
"The Last Epicurean." Iwill not pause further here to consider this
passage but only to say that itcomes up against Eliot's and F R.
Leavis's deepest commitments regarding the nature of tragic art. I
will return to these issues at length inwhat follows.
In appreciation forQ. D. and F. R. Leavis's admiring com
ments and remarks as well as their projected edition of his criti
cism, Santayana presented Scrutiny with "Tragic Philosophy," a
review essay of T. S. Eliot's Selected Essays published in 1935.
Rather than reviewing the book as a whole, "Tragic Philosophy"
closely treats two subjects in Eliot's collection, his shortmonograph

on Dante from 1929 and "Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca"
of 1927.16
The selection of Eliot for review was an appropriate task for
the author. Eliot had been a pupil of Santayana's at Harvard and
theyhad each followedtheotherswork since thattime.Eliot reg
istered his debts to Santayana many times in his lectures, conver
sation and correspondence, but more rarely in print.With the pub
licationof Eliot'sClark lecturesof 1926 and Turnbull lecturesat
Johns Hopkins University of 1933 we now have a clearer sense of
Santayana's impact on Eliot's thought.17

In these historic
lectures Eliot contemplates the contentious
issue of philosophical poetry. Hard as it is to believe now, the ques
tion of philosophical poetry was considered one of the most press
ing of the day. It is Eliot's view in these lectures that with the
decline of the "unified consciousness" of the Elizabethan Age, a
period whose formswere thought to be inevitable and self-justify

ing, artists had to turn in upon the process of art itself.This intro
version stopped at the medium of the artist's craft,which in turn
became a worthy constraint for an age without external, that is,
religious, limitations. Rather than imitating the art and subjects of

the past, artists of wide ambition were constrained to the limitsof
the specific medium for significance. According to Eliot, artists
derive their chief inspiration from the intrinsic properties and
demands of theirmedium whereas philosophical poets derive their
interest from preformed ideas.
Let us then begin with those poets whom we can agree

to be echt metaphysisch. . . .You can make the term
"metaphysical" equivalent to Mr. Santayana's term
"philosophical" in his book Three Philosophical Poets.18

... It is clear that forMr.
Santayana a philosophical poet
isone with a scheme of the universe, who embodies that
scheme in verse, and essays to realise his conception of
man's part and place in the universe. . . . Ifyou identify
"metaphysical" with "philosophical" and limit "philo
sophical" to those poets who have given expression to a

system or some view of the universe, and man's place in
it,which has some philosophical equivalent ... then the
distinction isperfectly clear.... But I think that the effect
of Mr. Santayana's book is a little too clearly to trancher
les genres. As a philosopher, he is more interested in
poetical philosophythan in philosophicalpoetry.This
stricture needs one qualification. I think thatMr. Santa
yana and myself have this common ground, thatwe do
notmean by philosophicalpoetrythatpoetrywhich is
given the sortof interpretation
which iscalled "occult"

124 TODD CRONAN
.... We have both, I imagine, a prejudice in favour of

the clear and distinct; we mean a philosophy which is
expressed, not one which is inexpressible.... But at this
point Imust offer, indistinction toMr. Santayana's poets

of complete systems . .. a humble tentative account of
the nature of philosophical poetry.... That is to say,we
must restrict itto poetical work of the first intensity,work
inwhich the thought is so to speak fused intopoetry at a
very high temperature. (VMP 48-50)19
I have quoted Eliot's criticism at length because it is instructive.

Eliot's strictures on philosophical poetry have much in common
with Santayana's views but they also show a fundamental point of
conflict between them, one that is expanded on by Leavis and the
New Critics. Eliot's negatively charged assessment of Santayana's
"philosophical poet" as someone with "a scheme of the universe,

who embodies that scheme in verse, and essays to realise his con
ception of man'spart and place in the universe" is one that
Santayana could never shake off.All three of Eliot's points aimed in

the same direction: Santayana's philosophical poet was a philoso
pher firstand a poet second. According to Eliot, philosophers, not
poets, have "a scheme of the universe" which they try to "express"
in prose or poetry.When reading Dante, for instance, "we
are not
. . . the we see it, as part of the ordered
studying philosophy,
world." Above all, Eliot is uncomfortable with the inherent tempo
rality of Santayana's scheme. His contention lies in the notion that

a poet has a view that is then expressed in the poem. For Eliot, this
is to mistake the task of poetry. In poetry, thought must be "fused"
with theword ina profound act of aesthetic transmutation. For this
reason there should be no lag between the thought and form-
they are galvanized together in the same intense moment of cre
ation. And once idea and form are fused there is no separating
them either for the sake of analysis or appreciation. To do so is to
commit the fallacy of paraphrase - something legitimate for the
philosopher, whose ideas are preformed, but not for the poet in
whom thought and experience are firmly united.

According to Eliot, Santayana's philosophical poets suffered

from the same confusions plaguing virtually all of the Augustan
poets and critics. As Leavis put it, speaking of Samuel Johnson,

"The thoughts that the Augustan poet, like any other Augustan
writer, sets himself to express are amply provided for by the ready
minted concepts of the common currency.What he has to do is to
put them together with elegance and point according to the rules
of grammar, syntax and versification" (CP 109). Again we are
meant to grasp the vast difference in temporality between the
"ready-minted concepts of common currency" "put together with

elegance" and that instantaneous "fusion" of thought and experi
ence found among the Metaphysical poets. Like the Augustans
before him, Santayana was culpable of advocating an aesthetics of
wit. A witty poet isevaluated in terms of mastery, of deftly "arrang
ing" ready-made ideas into a novel poetic construction, not in

terms of symbolic totalization.
Eliot's terms of censure became canonical for the general
understanding of Santayana's aesthetics both among the New

Critics and beyond. Leavis's criticism in "Tragedy and the
'Medium'" reiterates the terms of Eliot's dismissal indetail. Iwould
like to consider this essay further as it remains one of the most
cogent, if still deeply misconstrued, pieces of criticism leveled at
Santayana.
Ina fashion typical for Leavis, he quotes extensively not only
from Santayana but also from a multitude of other authors on vari
ous topics. In just under fifteenpages he quotes fromD. W. Harding
on Isaac
Rosenberg (three times), Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare,
Bertrand Russell's "A Free Man's Worship," D. H. Lawrence on
Russell, Yeats, Nietzsche, D. A. Traversi on Shakespeare, and a long
passage from I.A. Richards's Principles of LiteraryCriticism. To state
thecase briefly, Richardsand Russell are solicitedto sup
Johnson,
port Santayana's vision of Shakespeare as a stoic tragedian while
Lawrence, Yeats, Eliot, Traversi and Harding are ranged on the side
of Leavis, backing his aestheticsof "impersonality."
The guiding
principle of Leavis's account of tragedy derives from Eliot's notion
of "depersonalization" firstdescribed in "Tradition and Individual

126 TODD CRONAN
Talent." "What happens to the poet," writes Eliot "is a continual sur
render of himself as he is at the moment to something which is
more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice,
a continual extinction of personality" (SE, 17).
Against Santayana's
putative affirmation of the bourgeois "established ego," Leavis fur
ther avows Yeats's notion from "The Tragic Theatre" that "tragedy
must always be a drowning, a breaking of the dykes that separate
man from man" (CP 131). Leavis
characteristically edits out the
completion of Yeats's thought: "It is upon these dykes comedy keeps
house." Yeats, much like Santayana, was aware of a genuine antag
onism between "all the old art and our new art of comedy," but also
like him did not give exclusive priority to either.20The old art,what
he calls the "art of the flood," is tragic, "alluring us almost to the
intensityof trance" (El, 245). Before itwe "feel our minds expand
convulsively or
spread out slowly like some moon-brightened
image-crowded sea" (El, 245). Tragedy breaks down the viewer's
sense of the uniqueness of his self; the viewer is no longer preoc
cupied with the characters on the stage but with the full burden of
"humanity itself."To this Yeats contrasts the new "art of the real."
"The new French painting," he says, is a strictly comic art con
cerned with "interesting" subjects and novel ideas. Only after see
ingManet's Eva Gonzales at the Hugh Lane Gallery inDublin (fig.

2), he tells us, does he find himself relenting somewhat in his affec
tions toward the "new art of comedy." "How perfectly thatwoman
is realized as distinct from all other women that have lived or shall
live,"Yeats exclaims. Although Manet's picture compels him exclu
senses which isbut
sively "through a delicate discrimination of the
entire wakefulness, the daily mood grown cold and crystalline" he
is fascinated with its indulgence in immediacy (El, 243). Modern
art, as opposed to tragic art, thrives on "vitality," "energy," it"sings,
laughs, chatters or looks itsbusy thoughts" (El, 244). Delicate dis
crimination and wakefulness, vitality and laughter, it should be
clear, are the specific qualities inimical to tragic art. A distinct lack
of vitalityis themark of tragedy:"It iseven possible,"hewrites in
"Certain Noble Plays of Japan," "that being is only possessed com
pletelyby the dead, and that it is some knowledgeof this that

BIOLOGICAL POETRY:SANTAYANA'SAESTHETICS 127
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128 TODD CRONAN
makes us gaze with so much emotion upon the face of the

Sphinx
or of Buddha" (El, 226). Yeats terms are
obviously mythic in their
sweep; he is not interested in parsing the nuances of modern art for
itstragic qualities. The only way he could appreciate Manet's comic
art isby isolating itfrom itsopposite. The point Iwould like tomake
clear is that there is a genuine conflict inYeats's writings between
two tendencies in art, the comic and the tragic. There is ample evi
dence of a tension inYeats's mind between what he calls "charac
ter and lyric poetry," a quarrel that is not in evidence in Eliot's or
Leavis's writings.21 Tragedy, for them, is the guiding ideal of the great
tradition.
According to Leavis (who on this point follows Eliot closely),

Shakespeare is often guilty of promoting a "radically untragic"
vision of tragedy.22 Shakespeare could not create authentically trag
ic plays because he lacked an embracing religious worldview.
or myth is able to to the extremes of suf
Only religion give shape
fering and loss that tragedy gives vent to.Without this sustaining
faith,Othello's final speech expresses merely "a rhetorical infla
tion, a headily emotional glorification, of an incapacity for tragic
experience" (CP 128). Othello's closing words, "Of one not easily
... of one whose subdued ...
jealous, but being wrought eyes drop
tears as fast as theArabian trees /Their medicinal gum," regales the
reader with "unmistakable self-dramatization," an exaltation of
supreme egotism rather than the necessary suspension of personal
ity (CP 152). Authentic tragic experience demands "a transcending
of the ego - an escape from all attitudes of self-assertion" (CP
131). Santayana's putative affirmation of Shakespeare's "disdain for
. . . death" strikes Leavis as
humanity" and "defying coming close
to Russell's "A Free Man's Worship" wherein the tragic hero is
"proudly defiant of the irresistible forces [of omnipotent matter]

. .. [able] to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas" (C8 128).
Leavis isunderstandably
put offby such batheticself-exaltation.3
But how should we evaluate Leavis's own bathos of impersonality?
His admiration for such overindulgent ideas as this: "For death . ..
becomes by virtue of Shakespeare's poetic achievement an instru
ment of release, the necessary condition of an experience which,

. .. is 'immortal"'
though dependent upon Time and circumstance
- as one
(CP 132). Leavis's presentation of Santayana's position
or a "disdain for
advocating attributing humanity" and "defying
death" to Santayana or to Shakespeare - is unjust. Santayana is
merely describing Seneca's stoicism with these remarks. And of

Seneca's stoicism, he says plainly, Shakespeare "was not express
ing," because he did not, like Seneca, have a settled doctrine of his
own Leavis's misrepresentation does not end here. He
("TP," 205).
misquotes Santayana several times, cropping his thoughts to fithis
critique. The most egregious misconstrual of Santayana's thought
appears at the heart of his criticism.
To demand that poetry should be a "medium" for "pre
viously definite" is arbitrary, and betrays radical

ideas
incomprehension. What Mr. Santayana calls Shake
speare's "medium" creates what itconveys; "previously

definite" ideas put into a "clear and transparent" medi
um wouldn't have been definite enough for Shake
speare's purpose. (CP 124)
These are the familiar words of New Criticism and they are bor
rowed in large part from Eliot's earlier comments. And yet at no
point does Santayana say or suggest any such thing. The passage to
which Leavis is alluding is the following:
In Shakespeare the medium is rich and thick and more
important than the idea; whereas inDante themedium is

as unvarying and simple as possible, and meant to be
transparent.... A clear and transparent medium isadmir

able, when we lovewhat we have to say; but when what
we have to say is
nothing previously definite, expressive
ness on
depends stirring the waters deeply, suggesting a
thousand half-thoughts, and letting the very unutterable
ness of our passion become manifest in our disjointed
words. The medium then becomes dominant. ("TP," 207)
Clearly Santayana is of two minds regarding Shakespeare's medi

um. "Half-thoughts," "unutterableness," and "disjointed words" are

130 TODD CRONAN
not terms of endearment for the author. But we would be mistaken

to conclude that Santayana is in fact unsympathetic to Shake
speare's fuliginous way with words. Comparing Shakespeare to

Dante he goes on to say, "for our modern feeling" Dante's "clear
. . . is too
and transparent medium imaginative, too visionary,
soaked with too much emotion." "We can understand why Mr.
Eliot feels this to be a 'superior' philosophy; but how can he fail to
see that it is false?" ("TP," 211). For Santayana, Dante had no sense
of the tragic; his world isa dream, a moving vision of the better life
free from the pain, and the reality, of this one. Shakespeare's
on the other hand, express a vivid sense of the real while
tragedies,
limitingour view onto the ideal. Itwas Santayana's aim to combine
the strengths of Dante and Shakespeare in one - the "supreme
poet" would oscillate between Shakespeare's realism and Dante's

idealism. Far from "demanding" that modern poetry should con
vey, like Dante, "previously definite" ideas within a "transparent"
medium, or, like Shakespeare, fill up the foreground with incident

and action, Santayana contends "religion, language, all the pas
sions, and science itself . .. work in a conventional medium."
Santayana's understanding of the "medium" extends well
beyond the bounds of the traditional aesthetic. All thought, accord
- but a medium considered
ing to him, works within a medium
not from the point of view of material that is transformed through
effort and constrained by social or other traditional demands, but
one that is biologically grounded in the animal organism. He con
cludes "Tragic Philosophy" with a discussion of Shakespeare's
medium that goes unremarked by Leavis, but is nonetheless central
to Santayana's account:
The sensuous imagesand thecategoriesof thoughton

which common knowledge relies are themselves poetic
andwholly original inform,being productsof a kindof
inspiration in the animal organism. But they are con
trolled in theirsignificanceand application by experi
ment in the field of action. ("TP," 213)

Itwould be a mistake to think that Santayana does not give proper
weight to the specificity of artistic media traditionally considered.

In Shakespeare's tragedies, the medium "runs down to the very
rudiments of [his] mind."2 provides the reader with a
Shakespeare
profound truth about ourselves, namely that "our mind by itsani
mal roots . .. is a language, from itsbeginnings; almost, we might
say, a biological poetry."25 Poetry is indigenous to the very consti

tution of bodily perception. "The eye itself,"he says elsewhere, "is
an artist that has to paint pictures in order to convey facts."26
Santayana not only naturalizes poetry, he has discovered its status

as method. As a method of mind it isoften unreliable and ineffec
tive but it is also constitutive; it shapes very the terms of science,
history, law, as well as art. Santayana discovered in the very orga

nization of the body all those mechanisms by which art makes its
effects, such as formalization and expression. What Shakespeare's
tragedies express, whether eloquently or awkwardly, is this poetry
of the body. And it is in this regard that Santayana says of Shake
. .. in the
speare "his greatness lay gift of gab: in that exuberance
and joy in language" ("TP," 205; CP 126). To this idea Leavis curt
ly retorts,
Itwould be clearly misleading to say that a critic who

can express himself thus can properly appreciate Shake
speare's poetry. He clearly cannot appreciate the orga

nization that has its local life in the verse. He has no
inkling of the way inwhich the mastering living theme

commands and controls the words. (CP 126)
Although it is not entirely clear from the context what Leavis means
by the "organization that has its local life in verse," I suspect that
he intends the way inwhich Shakespeare's "medium creates what
it conveys," the central dogma of his argument. For greater eluci
dation of Leavis's thought, we can turn to a remark from The Great
Tradition (1948): "Borrowing a phrase fromMr. Eliot's critical writ
ings, one might say that [Shakespeare's Sonnets] achieve their
overpowering evocation of atmosphere by means of 'objective cor

132 TODD CRONAN
relates.'"27 These"objective correlates" are the details and circum

stances that build up to and provide a rich context for the total
organization of the poem. The irony of this criticism leveled at

- -
Santayana his putative neglect of the "local life" of verse is
that the term of censure, "objective correlate," is Santayana's, not
Eliot's.28When Santayana coined the phrase in 1900 he intended
exactly what Eliot and Leavis took itto mean; it is the atmosphere
out of which expression comes to realization. While the "substance
of poetry is . . . emotion," says Santayana, it "demands an appro
priate theatre; the glorious emotions with which [the poet] bubbles
over must at all hazards find or feign their correlative objects."29
Santayana iswell aware of the risks incurred by poetry when emo

tions lack a deep background of experience to give them signifi
cance. That said, Eliot and Leavis would still dispute Santayana's
phrasing. They would reject the idea that the poet must "find or
feign" his correlates in experience. For them, poetry is the creation
of an indissoluble unity of inner emotion and external object.
Like Eliot, Leavis is attacking Santayana's perceived overin
vestment in the artist's personality, an overinvestment that supports
a "metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul" (SE, 42).
The poet must destroy this fictional unity of the self inorder to dis
close the mythic content inhering in the medium. As Eliot puts it,
"The poet has not a 'personality' to express, but a particular medi
um" (SE, 42). Poets do not express themselves; they express their
medium. It is Eliot's view that the poet has a strictvocation towork
-
with and in language. In Eliot's inimitable and deeply anti-intel
-
lectual words, "The poet makes poetry, the metaphysician
makes metaphysics, the bee makes honey, the spider secretes fila
ment; you can hardly say that any of these agents believes: he
merely does" (SE, 138). The task of literature, then, is the task of for
getting, or what Eliot calls "depersonalization" (SE, 17, 24).
Opposed to any notion thatwhat the artistexpresses is himself,
Eliot finds in forgetfulness- the all but unconscious surrender of
the self to the medium - the means to tap into the repository of
transhistorical meaning embedded in myth and tradition. In the
process of doing what one does, as Eliot might say, the artist is best

able to overcome the bourgeois sense of the self and give vivid
expression to the universal meaning contained in the historically

determined medium.
Forgetting involves "a continual self-sacrifice" to the organic

system of world literaturewhich results in an extinction of person
ality (SE, 17, 23). It is on this point that Santayana recoiled. He
could not abide Eliot's constant iteration of the necessity for the
artist and critic to "sacrifice" himself according to the demands of
a compulsory "tradition." Here is Eliot:
The critic . . . ifhe is to justify his existence, should

endeavour to discipline his personal prejudices and
cranks- tares towhich we are all subject - and com
pose his differences with as many of his fellows as pos
sible, in the common pursuit of true judgment. When
we find that quite the opposite prevails, we begin to sus
. . . some tri
pect that the critic owes his livelihood to
fling oddities of his own with which he contrives to sea
son the opinions which men
already hold, and which
out of vanity or sloth they prefer to maintain. We are
tempted to expel the lot. (SE, 25)
It is this passage fromwhich Leavis derives the title for his book of
criticism, The Common Pursuit. The true critic must strive to eradi
cate his personal tastes, or rather to subsume them to the tastes of
the past. Of course what Eliot is really calling for is forothers to sub
sume their taste to his. And Santayana must have bristled at Eliot's
every word. His retortwas brief and to the point: "I have personal
tastes like everyone else; but Iassign no authority to them for
being
mine. It is simply impossible and would be artificial and ridiculous
for people to insist on everyone's having the same tastes." "I am a
naturalist," he concludes, "not assigning an absolute authority to
any particular form of morals or government."30 Santayana refuses
toarrogatetohimselfany superior"endowmentof thepsyche";he
has, he insists, no monopoly on "true" aesthetic judgment. "I am
rather tired," he tells Cory after reading an article by Eliot in the

134 TODD CRONAN
Criterion, "of this perpetual talk [of Eliot's] about who is the best or
the greatest poet or philosopher; as ifdifferentmerits had the same
measure" (LY, 155). One of the primary targets of Santayana's first
book, The Sense of Beauty, is the Kantian supposition that beauty
ought to be universal.
It is unmeaning to say thatwhat is beautiful to one man
ought to be beautiful to another. If their senses are the

same, their associations and disposition similar, then the
same thing will certainly be beautiful to both. If their
natures are different, the form which to one will be
entrancing will be to another even invisible, because his

classifications in perception will be
and discriminations
It is absurd to say thatwhat is invisible to
different....
a given being ought to seem beautiful to him. . . . Ifwe
were sure of our ground, we should be willing to acqui
escein the naturally different feelings and ways of oth
ers, as a man who isconscious of speaking his language
with the accent of the capital confesses itsarbitrariness
with gayety, and is pleased and interested in the varia
tions of ithe observes in provincials; but the provincial
is always zealous to show that he has reason and
ancient authority to justify his oddities. So people who
have no sensations, and do not know why they judge,
are always trying to show that they judge by universal
reason.31
-
Santayana's words are incisive they strike their target and draw
blood. Preferences, no matter how we justify them, are ultimately
irrational. They stem from our instinctive bodily desires. Santayana
was fondof quotingSpinoza on thequestionofmoral valuations:
"We desire nothing because we judge it to be good, but on the
contrary, we call itgood because we desire it" (SB, 15)."2 Spinoza's
words remain a powerful antidote to any transsubjective aesthetic
canon. What Santayana's naturalism emphasizes above all is that
structures change from age to age, from place to place, and from

person to person. For this reason there is no absolute or single tra

dition, no predetermined set of demands on a medium, to which
an artistmust adhere.
Irrelevant Life
Santayana objected to the religious underpinnings of Eliot's

and Leavis's criticism. Their Puritanical ideal of the artist's vocation
led them to overemphasize the labor and intensity that goes into
the work of art. For Santayana, Eliot and Leavis, despite their
protestations to the opposite, still adhere to Arnold's genteel tradi

tion and his ideal of art as the "criticism of life." Santayana, on the
other hand, valued art above all for the pleasure itbrought to him.
Art, he thought, could loosen themoral burdens of our lifeand free
us from the constraints of
society and all social norms.
Although Shakespeare is, according to Santayana's friend
Robert Bridges, "not an artist"- "he did not take pains to exclude
-
everything low or improper" from his plays Santayana did not
findhimself"distressedat thebawdy jokes; theyare partof thefun
of human life, and he was pouring out his riches from a cornu
copia, carrots and onions with the lilies and violets" ("SLT," 24). I
can imagine the word fun, like Santayana's admiration for Shake
speare's "gift gab," grating on Eliot's and Leavis's nerves. Far from
of
sacrificing the "tares to which we are all subject," Santayana the

naturalist sincerely appreciates their inclusion, for they are "part of
the fun of human life." In his review of Leavis's The Great Tradition,
Lionel Trilling offers some vivid remarks along Santayana's line of
criticism.
For Dr. Leavis . . . art has

its true being only in tension
and direction, only in completely organized conscious
ness and moral clarity. He takes no proper account, that
is, of the art that delights - and enlightens - by the
intentional relaxation of moral awareness, by its invita
tion to us to contemplate the mere excess of irrelevant
life. Nor does he take any account of the impulse of

136 TODD CRONAN
sheer performance, even of virtuosity, which, whether

we respond to it in acrobatics or in athletics or in pres
or in the ballet or inmusic or in literature, is
tidigitation
of enormous human significance. . . . [Miarked moral
intensity does of course contribute to the awareness of

the possibilities of life. But so does the mind's delight in
itself, in itspower of excess and fantasy, in itsability to
even freedom from law and
play the game of freedom,
the moral order, in its dream that, as Yeats said [in
"Meditation in a Time of Civil War"], lifemight overflow
"without ambitious pains" and that itmight "choose
whatever shape itwills.""
are provoked by Leavis's grudging admission of

Trilling's remarks
only one book by Dickens, Hard Times, into his The Great Tradition,
and that due to a "sustained seriousness" one "doesn't as a rule find
inDickens."34 Santayana himself could not have found better words
to describe his difference from Leavis's and Eliot's unremitting insis
tence on moral and formal rigor. Their unremitting demand for
moral exigency did a disservice to the literature they admired.
The central question that Eliot's and Leavis's accounts raise is
their exact reckoning of the role of the medium in art.35Does their
stress on the poet's necessary struggle with the medium overcome
the metaphysics of personality? Eliot's and Leavis's ideal of imper
sonality, as they make clear, is never a state that is achieved, but

to a or
rather is limited perpetual "local realization." And who,
what, exactly, determines what themedium is?Does the medium
have a sense of historical necessity to which an ambitious artist
must conform? Is there one, universal medium for all poets at any
one time? Are words the poet's medium? And ifso, are some words
no longerlegitimateforthemedium's presenthistoricalsituation?
Well, sense the answers to these questions
in an obvious are "ys,
but in a less obvious sense, not at all.
It is Santayana's central claim that the medium has a deeper
ontological status: it is indigenousto theveryconstitution
of the
mind. The mind, as Santayana sees it, is a poetry-making organ: The

very images of the retina are idols. Every perceptual act from its
very roots is both cognitive and metaphorical. The eye, in seeing,
selects, without our willing it,what itwants to see. And in this
account the historical media which Eliot and Leavis are concerned
with is a much later product formed of a multitude of prior- and
- Thus
wholly adventitious mental figurations. Eliot's demand that
the artist submit to a "continual self-sacrifice," a "continual extinc
tion of personality," inorder to better "express" the medium iscon
fused and gratuitous (SE, 17). The Puritan call to sacrifice oneself to
the medium is Eliot's method to give voice to the concealed arche
types beneath our waking consciousness. Santayana is a more
severely antinomian thinker. Each mind and eye, before itenters

into theworld of social convention, makes itschoices, and shapes
the world according to instinctual interests and desires. Santayana
goes so far as to stress the importance of embryology, "the most
obscure part of biology," in the shaping of aesthetic, or any other,
expression.36 This psychic mechanism at the bottom of our moral

and aesthetic valuations is the abiding constraint of our figurative
practices. Our biology, rather than the realm of myth, is the ele
mentary foundation of all aesthetic production, and itholds for the
most ambitious artist as well as for the newborn infant.
One way of putting Santayana's point is to say that one liter
ally cannot see without seeing what one wants to see. The very
process of perception for him is identified with the creation of

meaning. As Durant Drake once remarked, "We have always been
told that seeing is believing. This is a statement to be taken literal
ly:even seeing is a form of believing. Even when we walk by sight

we are still are in
walking by faith."37All aspects of consciousness
this sense creative. The appearance of even the simplest datum to
consciousness is the result of a complicated organic process
involvinga limitedsetofperceptualand sensoryfaculties.
Our fac
or expand thesignificance
ultiesof cognitionselectout and inhibit
of elementswithin themanifoldof perceptualdata available. The
data of perception are, therefore, selected according to the priority
of needs within the animal organism. If things do not reflect some
aspect ofour latentsenseof the idealwe would literally
notbe able

138 TODD CRONAN
- our entire organism -

perceive them. The medium in this sense
defines how we see the world; itmakes all of its necessary dis
criminations prior to our conscious will and intentions. Our pref
erences are made for us, we only submit to execute them or not.
This thought stands at the back of all Santayana's writings on art:
... essential to all our

Relativity to our partial nature is
...
thoughts, judgments, and feelings. And when once
the human bias is admitted as a legitimate, because for
us a necessary, basis of preference, thewhole wealth of
nature is at once organized by that standard into a hier
archy of values. There is then in the mere perceptibility

of a thing a certain prophecy of itsbeauty; if itwere not
on the road to beauty, if ithad no approach to fitness to
our faculties of perception, the object would remain
eternally unperceived. (SB, 82, 101)
The reason for this latent sense of organization is simple and

isdiscovered in the study of animal evolution. Survival necessitates
perceptual selection, frequently of a brutal and summary sort. The

hunted animal instinctually and continuously divides the world
intogood and evil, hunted and hunter. Such sharp (and wholly pre
sumptuous) distinctions are not optional to the animal mind; they

are constitutive of itsvery preservation. Though we may desire to
remain inert,or vegetative, and renounce our animal biases, we
a
cannot long "imitate the lilies of the field" without coming to
tragic end ("TP," 211). For rather obvious reasons a vegetative con
an animal life is inimical to existential
sciousness lodged within
were to stop
viability. If the hunted animal in the heat of pursuit
and consider the manifoldness of being (or the arbitrariness of sig
nification), the chase would be short-lived. (And at themoment the
chase came to an unfavorable end, any convictions regarding the
would lose theirimportand giveway
of signification
arbitrariness
to the existence of a monstrous material world outside.) Animal
bias, that is to say, is not an optional process of mental projection
but rather an inherent condition of existing in an impinging mate

rialworld. It is for this reason that themedium

is existentially prior
to, and the grounds upon which, any later sense of media, artistic
or otherwise, are established. In the case of the artist, he or she
"chooses" the medium that most closely fitswith his or her abili
ties to express a projected ideal. The poet Wallace Stevens, at one
time a close acquaintance of Santayana, suggests something of this
in The Necessary Angel.
. . .we
When say that the world is a compact of real
things so like the unreal things of the imagination that
they are indistinguishable fromone another and when, by
way of illustration,we cite, say, the blue sky,we can be
sure that the thing cited is always something that ... has
become a part of our vital experience of life,even though
we are not aware of it. It iseasy to suppose that few peo
. . . thatwe live in the center
ple realize on that occasion
of a physical poetry, a geography thatwould be intolera
-
ble except for the non-geography that exists there few
are
people realize that they looking at theworld of their
own thoughts and theworld of theirown feelings.38
When we say that theworld is likeour imagination- his example

is the blueness of the sky- it is because the world has already
been made over by the mind, already "become a part of our vital
experience" which we subsequently admire for its similarity to our

conception of it. Stevens is pointing to a certain habit of thought
that instinctively separates the world from the mind. The world -
or so we feel- iswholly distinct from our perception of it,and we
imagine that we consecutively apply our categories to it in our

daily interactions.While this isof course partly the case, Santayana
and Stevens are pointing to a more foundational "poetry" thatwe
"live in." Santayana calls it simply our "being-in-the-world," while
Stevens refers to itas "living in the center of a physical poetry." The
poetry of perception - biological poetry
-
precedes and to a large
extent shapes poetic practice. This explains Stevens's disinterest in
and even questionsof form.("Eliot
questionsofmedium specificity

140 TODD CRONAN
and I," says Stevens at one point, "are dead opposites and I have
been doing about everything that he would not be
likely to do."39)
In Stevens's terms the world would be "intolerable" if itwere not
made over by the mind, while
Santayana makes the more decisive
claim that the world does not even exist for us- it is "eternally
- our
unperceived" without constitutive mental framing of it.40
The crux of the argument between Santayana and the New
Critics rests on the relationship between the artist and his medium.
Santayana ultimately makes littledistinction between the subject

and the medium; they run down together into the rudiments of
being. This identity radically undermines Eliot's sense of the self as
a
"metaphysical unity." The self, says Santayana, should be mini
mized, as it ismerely a "habit," or "trope inmatter."41 "Subjec
tivity,"he goes on to say, "is a normal madness in living animals. It
should be discounted, not idolized, in the philosophy of theWest,
as ithas in that of the East."4 For the New
always been discounted
Critics, on the other hand, the integral subject, or at least a fiction
thereof, is a given and must be put under pressure in order to be
transfigured by the specific demands of the artistic medium.
One furtherpoint demands consideration. Eliot's and Leavis's
account that the medium necessitates a "continual self-sacrifice"
rests on a fundamentally religious ethos. It iswell known that
Santayana had little sympathy for the puritanical tradition, whether

in religion, philosophy, or art. According to him, the elevation of
sacrifice to an ontological status, combined with the agonistic
account of the work of art that accompanies it,was in fact merely
a disguised means of the status quo and one's participa
justifying
tion in it.The modernist story of the medium ismerely an updated
version of the narrative of Puritanism: "that sin exists, that sin is
punished, and that it is beautiful that sin should exist to be pun

According to Eliotand Leavis thepoet is thoughtto con
ished."43
tinuallyexpiate his sins inhis struggle
with hismedium.Themedi
um is the tool of self-criticism; it represents the inner voice, the
reservoir of original sin that needs perennial redemption. For the
truly agonized conscience, of course, one's sins can never be fully
expiated,as therearemorewelling upwithin us by thewill of the

"absolute." To a puritanical conscience, continual struggle is a

mark of health. In the face of any naturalist interpretation of art that
searches for "a development from below," Eliot contends, "some
thingmust come from above" (SE, 485). He calls this supernatural

sphere, "the absolute to which Man can never attain" (SE, 490).
This is sheer Calvinistideology, and I suspect Eliot and Leavis are
guilty of all of the assumptions spelled out by Santayana.
Santayana recognizes the religious seed of Eliot's and Leavis's
modernism: "To be a Calvinist philosophically," he says, "is to feel
a fierce pleasure in the existence of misery, especially of one's own,
in that this misery seems to manifest the fact that the Absolute is
or infiniteor In contrast to Eliot and
irresponsible holy" (WD, 189).
Leavis, Santayana offers an Epicurean inspired hedonism: "Spirit is
rooted in the flesh, and these [puritanical] rebellions on its part
merely derange without emancipating it.The solution would be a

sort of Epicureanism, that is, the enjoyment of life frommoment to
moment in itspurity, beyond care and regret" (L, 5, 281; L, 6, 24).
Santayana had littlepatience for the tortured and restive aesthetics

of Puritanism. He had littlepatience, in fact, for any art that did not
give way to pleasure. Santayana gave full assent toWalter Pater's
hedonist ideal of the arts aspiring toward the condition of music.
Life, Santayana might say, is tragic enough; it is the themes played
upon the necessities of existence that liberate us momentarily from
its thrall. To Leavis, he might say, there is no need to stand there,
drunk in the bathwater, one can lie down or get out. Our very
being-in-the-world is the mark of an "original sin" and there is no

cure for that except to enjoy the interval."
1 Charles Harrison who was present at Leavis's farewell address

relayed these remarks
tome.
2 F. R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit (London: The Hogarth Press, 1952), 127.
Hereafter cited in the text as CP.
3 Daniel Cory, Santayana, The Later Years: Portrait in Letters (New York:
George
Braziller, 1963). Hereafter cited in the text as LY.
4 In Eliofs and Leavis's estimation Othello "comes below Shakespeare's ?
supreme
his very greatest works" (CP, 155).
5 One of the earliest incarnations of this in Desmond
image appears MacCarthy's

142 TODD CRONAN
essay "Santayana, Sage and Moralist," 77mes (London), April 23, 1936. Santayana
seems to have played with,
played-up, this image of himself. Writing to George
Sturgis in 1925 he says, "American professors turn up at intervalswith lettersof intro
duction, and give me a chance of playing the part of ancient sage visited by inquir
ing pilgrims." The Letters of George Santayana, Book Three, 1921-1927, ed.
William G. Holzberger (Cambridge,
MA and London:MIT Press,2002), 263.
Hereafter cited in the text as L followed by the volume number. Santayana was
fully
aware that the a persona he
"sage" was put on, content to "play the part" for his
admirers.
6 C. Roland Wagner, inhis "Conversation with Santayana, 1948: A Letter to a Friend,"
records a meeting with the "sage": "Santayana looked older, more ancient than I
wore a black a
expected. He dressing gown, wide collar shirt,extremely loose about
theneck,and a black stripedtie.The collarof his shirt
extendedover thecollarof
thedressinggown.He has lost muchweightand theskinof his facehas sagged,
a turkey-likewattle under his chin. His was
forming complexion light,fair,not badly
We shookhandsand Inotedthatthethird
wrinkled. and fourth of hishand
fingers
remained bent, as though paralyzed into a claw" {American Literature, vol. XL, no.
3 [Nov. 1968], 340-341 ).The description is typical. Itcombines the notation of
grim
details with the transcendental hue of spirituality, as though Santayana were a saint
in a picture by Ribera. The conversation closes on a
ponderous note: "That session
was a terrificexperience. I got as much as I could from the opportunity, but I am
overwhelmed by the thought of your meeting him. I felt like crying afterward. You
will' {ibid,349).
7 A twenty-one-year-old Richard Lyon suggests something of the nature of Santayana's
Epicurean hedonism. Recalling his two week visitwith the author in 1948 he writes,
"I met him for tea in his room at the convent-hospital every afternoon, except for
the firstand the lastdays of my stay,when he hired a taxi and served as guide to his
?
favorite places inRome he delighted, as you know, in introducing newcomers to
St. Peter's, the Fantheon, Michelangelo's Moses, the equestrian Aurelius. We ended
over martinis in the Pincio." Quoted in JohnMcCormick, George Santayana: A
Biography (NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 473.
8 As Anthony Woodward rightlynotes about this remark, the "story isapocryphal and
makes Santayana seem rather silly if it is taken as a literalaccount of his habits. Yet
likemany a good myth ithas a symbolic truthand catches a certain airy dismissive
ness in the mask he sometimes chose to present to theworld" {Living in the Eternal:
A StudyofGeorgeSantayana[Nashville:
VanderbiIt Press,1988], 1).
University
9 on Santayana, ed. Corliss Lamont (New York: Horizon Press,
Dialogue George
1959), 52.
10 The latterpiece ultimately found itsway into The Common Pursuit, conspicuously
as Poet" and "Diabolic
placed between "[Samuel] Johnson Intellect and the Noble
Hero: or the Sentimentalist's Othello," a response toA. C. Bradley's and E. E. Stoll's
lectures on Shakespearean tragedy. (Bradley's lectures
were
subsequently published
in book form in 1951.) Santayana's placement between two leading accounts of
? ?
Shakespearean tragedy the Augustan model and the Academic is not fortu
itous. For Leavis, an accurate of was of the
interpretation Shakespeare's tragedies
utmost consequence. Johnson's crucial and ruinous misconstrual of Shakespearean

and thegeneralinability
tragedy ofcriticssincetheendof theElizabethan
periodto
graspthesignificance
fully may be seenas thecentralissueof Scrutiny
of tragedy
criticism. A good deal of the focus of the criticism produced by the editors and
favored writers of Scrutiny bears on the precise discrimination of Elizabethan, or
versus an Augustan construal of the
Metaphysical, tragic.
1 George Santayana, "Tragic Philosophy," Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review, vol. 4, no. 4
(1936), 365-376. Santayana's essay is reprinted in The Importance of Scrutiny
Selections from Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review, 1932-1948, ed. Eric Bentley (New
York:GeorgeW. Steward,1948),205. Hereafter
cited inthetextfromtheBentley
edition as "TP."
12 In a letterwritten in 1935 Santayana tells Cory that "Mrs. Leavis (are they Jews?)
seemstobe goingtoedita bookofmy literary witha prefacebyherhus
criticisms,
band" ( .,5, 272).
13 F. R. Leavis, "T. S. Eliot as Critic" [1958]
reprinted inAnna Karenina and Other
Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 177.

14 See Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review, vol. 4, no. 3 (1935), 278-295 and 320-328.
Hereafter cited in the text as CW.
15 The passage is taken from the chapter on Josiah Royce, inSantayana's Character and
Opinion in the United States (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920), 117-118.
16 The essay was also inspired in great part by
Logan Pearsall Smith's recent book
Reading Shakespeare (NewYork: Harcourt, Brace, 1933).
17 Inhis introduction
toEliot'sTheVarieties
ofMetaphysicalPoetry,
RonaldSchuchard
draws attention to Eliot's sources for the lectures: "In his firstessay on Dante ... he
drew upon a book that he had read and mastered at Harvard, a book that had stim
ulated his theory and thatwas to become a central document in his Clark Lectures
?
George Santayana's 7hree Philosophical Poets (1910). Reacting to Santayana's
Eliotmakes the distinction thatwhat the philosophical poet
study... really endeav
ours to find is the 'concrete ? to find itscomplete
poetic equivalent for this system
in vision'." T. S. Eliot, The Varieties of
equivalent Metaphysical Poetry: The Clark
Lectures at TrinityCollege, Cambridge, 1926 and The Turnbull Lectures at the Johns
Hopkins University, 1933, ed. Ronald Schuchard (San Diego, New York, and
London: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1993), 2. Hereafter cited in the text as VMP.
18 George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, Goethe (Cam
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1910). Of this book, Eliot says it is "too little
read, though one of themost brilliant of Mr. Santayana's works," VMP, 48 and 251.
19 This passage is repeated with slight variation in "TheTurnbull Lectures" of 1933. See
VMP, 251. Eliot firstanalogizes the poetic process to a chemical
"transforming cat
that it is "the
alyst," asserting intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to
speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts" in 'Tradition and Individual
Talent" of 1919. See Eliot's Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1935), 19.
Hereafter cited in the text as SE
20 W. B. Yeats, "The Tragic Theatre" [1910]
reprinted in Essays and Introductions (New
York: Macmillan, 1961 ), 241. Hereafter all citations from this book are indicated in
the text as El. To Leavis's credit he does
register some reservations regarding Yeats's
"protests" against "modern naturalistic speech." "We can never, of course, feel quite
safe," says Leavis, "reading these protests inYeatsian prose, against a suggestion of

144 TODD CRONAN
'Rosa Alchemica' and the 'trembling of the veil'" (CP, 131). Lois Hughson in
Thresholds of Reality draws some insightful connections between Santayana and
Yeats. See Thresholds of Reality: George Santayana and Modernist Poetics (Port
116-138.
Washington, NY and London: Kennikat Press, 1977),
21 L.C. Knightsprovidesa close
Inhis "Noteson Comedy" published inScrutiny,
as an example of the highest form of comedy.
analysis of Shakespeare's Henry IV
to IV's eminence isdue ingreat part to itsability to "bear
According Knights, Henry
the most serious ethical scrutiny because in itthe 'serious' is a fundamental part of
the 'comic' effect of the play." Knights's evaluation is typical of the concerns of
criticism. The comic must bear the weight of the serious in order to pro
Scrutiny
duce the most powerful effect. Knights's essay is reprinted in The Importance of
Eric Bentley
Scrutiny, Selections from Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review, 1932-1948, ed.
(New York: George W. Stewart, 1948), 237.
see George
22 For a full consideration of Shakespeare's "untragic" sense of tragedy
Steiner, The Death of Tragedy (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1961 ).Of prin
see chapter four of that book.
ciple interest for the topics considered here
23 For a penetrating critique of Russell's essay from a Santayanan perspective see
Michael "A Free Man's and Russell on
Hodges, Worship: Santayana
Transcendence," Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 22 (Fall 2004), 1-9.
or God inMan (New York:
24 George Santayana, The Idea of Christ in the Gospels,
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1946), 7.
inModern Philosophy: Five Essays (New
25 George Santayana, Some Turns of Thought
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933), 36.
26 George Santayana, Dominations and Powers: Reflections on Liberty, Society, and
Government (NewYork: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951), 168.
27 F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Chatte and Windus, 1948), 213.
28 Eliot firstused the term in his essay "Hamlet and His Problems," published in the
year inhisbook The

26,1919), and includedthefollowing
Athenaeum(September
Sacred Wood.
Critical Edition,
29 George Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion [1900],
eds. William G. Holzbergerand Herman J.Saatkamp (Cambridge, MA and London:
MIT Press, 1989), 165.
30 Letter quoted in
William Bysshe Stein's, "Santayana and LiteraryTradition," Modern
Language Notes, vol. 73 (January, 1958), 25. Hereafter cited in the text as "SLT."
31 George Santayana,The Sense of Beauty:Being theOutlines ofAestheticTheory
[1896], ed. William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp, Critical Edition
MA: The MIT Press, 1988), 29. Hereafter cited in the text as SB.
(Cambridge,
32 Benedict de Spinoza, The Ethics inA Spinoza Reader, ed. and tr. Edwin Curley
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 175.
33 Lionel Trilling, "Dr. Leavis and the Moral Tradition" [1949] in A Gathering of
Uniform Edition (New York and London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovano
Fugitives [1956],
vich, 1978), 111-112. See also, Trilling's essay on Santayana in the same volume,
"'That Smile of Parmenides Made Me Think'" [1956], 164-179.
34 See Santayana's essay "Dickens" in Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922), 58-73. Hereafter cited in the text as SoE.
35 In persistently saying "Eliot and Leavis" inone breath I have glossed over the con

put,Leaviswas
of opinion (andcriteria)forthe two.Briefly
siderabledifferences
committed to the social-minded ideals of the nineteenth century ina way that Eliots
more was Leavis's most char
aristocraticleanings could not support. Bloomsbury
acteristic antagonist. And where Leavis could find (and defend) the moral cogency
? an ?
of aspects of D. H. Lawrence's novels unforgiving task Eliot found (and sup
ported) only his saint-like negation of specious social values.

36 George Santayana, The Realm ofMatter (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1930),
335.
37 Durant Drake, Mind and ItsPlace inNature (New York: The Macmillan Company,
1925), 33. Drake is glossing Santayana's claim in Scepticism and Animal Faith that
"perception is faith" ([New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923], 69).
of theYouthas a VirilePoet,"inTheNecessaryAngel:
38 Wallace Stevens,"TheFigure
Essays on Reality and the Imagination (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1960),
65-66, my emphasis.
39 The Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and
London: University of California Press, 1966), 677.
40 Santayana'snotionof "biologicalpoetry"shouldbe sharplydiscriminated from
of thea prioricategories
Kant'sunderstanding of space and timethatare thought
to
be a part of our human nature. For Santayana, every organism carries itsown set of
a prioris thatmake theworld us.
perceivable for
41 For a brief consideration of this topic see his essay "The Self in Little Essays Drawn
from theWritings of George Santayana, ed. Logan Pearsall Smith (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1921), 19-20.
42 George Santayana, preface to the New and Enlarged Edition of Dialogues in Limbo
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948).
43 George Santayana, Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913), 189. Hereafter cited in the text as WD. After
reading Eliot's After Strange Gods in 1934, a book Santayana admired more than his
other prose writings, he tells Cory "he seems to me to give away his puritan preju
dices, underlying his 'Catholicism' and rendering ita littledisagreeable" (LY, 130)
44 George Santayana, Dominations and Powers: Reflections on Liberty, Society and
Government (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951), 12. The latterphrase is
taken from the essay "War Shrines" written just afterWorld War Iand reads, "There
is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval" {SoE, 97). There is a great
quibblingthatgoes on inEliofswritingsabout thestatusof

deal ofmetaphysical
"original sin." Eliot gathered the idea fromT. E. Hulme's lastpiece of writing, which
Herbert Read entitled "Humanism and the Religious Attitude." The essay first
appears in The New Age in seven installments from December 1915 to February
1916. Eliot most likely first came across it in Read's well-known collection of
Hulme's writings, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and The Philosophy of Art o?
1924.Theoriginaland completeversionof thepiece isreprinted
in7heCollected
Writings of T. E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994),
419-456. Briefly stated, Hulme's and Eliot's notion of "original sin" tends toward an
aesthetics of tragedy,while Santayana's leads in the direction of the comic.


Biological Poetry Santayana Aesthetics

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BIOLOGICAL POETRY: SANTAYANA'S AESTHETICS

Author(s): Todd Cronan

This content downloaded from 195.78.108.37 on Thu, 19 Jun 2014 10:48:20 AM

How blind is the zeal of iconoclasts! They pour scorn

upon eyes that see not and a mouth that cannot

In his farewell address to Downing College, Cambridge, a

Qui Parle, vol. 15, No. 1 Fall/Winter2004

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deeper mystification, "his attitude is really an exaltation of the

spelled irresponsibility and personal caprice. An authentically trag

image of Santayana "drunk" in the bathwater is no casual jibe

Unless itwas raining heavily, we would walk to a near

by restaurant for luncheon, and here Santayana would

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++..w ,. ... :.. + + , : . . .

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Santayana stood too far above the fray.Worse still, he seemed to

This content downloaded from 195.78.108.37 on Thu, 19 Jun 2014 10:48:20 AM

on Santayana that has provoked much misunderstanding. The story

ing a book. The article is entitled "U. S. Army in Rome Discovers

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influence, it is important to say, he is now at pains to distance him

In those early years ... as in a dazed and retarded way

picked up Logan Pearsall Smith's Little Essays [drawn]

really counted. (Let me say at once that I didn't, and

Leavis's dissatisfaction with Santayana hadn't fully set inwhen in

Santayana: an Introductory Note" is a penetrating eighteen page

quies in England, she writes, "It is the only intelligent critique of

Philosophical Poets she writes, "The cool approach of Santayana

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quasi-existential pathos. Russell's ethics, she laments, has left "a

fronting-the-universe-undismayed breed to deck the path of the

aspiring adolescent with models of false style and cheap emotion

important to note, as her terms are taken up nearly word forword

great part from F. R.'s wounded pride due to Santayana's lukewarm

ing but wholly accurate observation. While Q. D. and F. R. Leavis

yana's criticism" in his well-remarked "wisdom" (CW, 289). She

imagery," as well as his unparalleled "use of epigram," all of which

Hegel and his followersseem to be fondof imagining

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absurd. Yet that iswhat romantic philosophy would con

ously called ideal) but thatwe should carry on perpetu

There is a good deal of Santayana's philosophy contained in this

passage, and Q. D. is surely accurate in pointing to as

closely treats two subjects in Eliot's collection, his shortmonograph

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period whose formswere thought to be inevitable and self-justify

religious, limitations. Rather than imitating the art and subjects of

Let us then begin with those poets whom we can agree

"metaphysical" equivalent to Mr. Santayana's term

"philosophical" in his book Three Philosophical Poets.18

"metaphysical" with "philosophical" and limit "philo

sophical" to those poets who have given expression to a

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.... We have both, I imagine, a prejudice in favour of

expressed, not one which is inexpressible.... But at this

point Imust offer, indistinction toMr. Santayana's poets

I have quoted Eliot's criticism at length because it is instructive.

"philosophical poet" as someone with "a scheme of the universe,

Santayana could never shake off.All three of Eliot's points aimed in

rality of Santayana's scheme. His contention lies in the notion that

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According to Eliot, Santayana's philosophical poets suffered