‘THE LAST PURITAN’

Evening Star, Issue 22206, 7 December 1935, Page 2

‘THE LAST PURITAN’

A PHILOSOPHER’S NOVEL [Written by Panache for the ‘ Evening Star.’] When I was told that I must read the novel of George Santayana, I asked, in giant ignorance, if he were a Japanese. When I was told that he was sin American professor I was not impressed, knowing the stories about Western universities that hand out doctorates for theses on the duties of janitors in primary schools. When 1 had listened to a diatribe about the country that accepted liberal grants from the Carnegie Corporation, while reserving the right to be sniffy about American education, I was pleased to return to the subject of Professor Santayana’s novel. The publishers said that here was the book that the many readers of philosophical wofiks had long awaited. Gerald Bullett said that George’ Santayana was the most brilliant philosopher still alive, T looked him up in tho Encyclopedia and found that he was a poet and philosopher born of Spanish parents at Madrid, in 1863; that he knew no English until, at the age of 10, he was taken to live in America: that he was educated at Harvard; that, after two years in Berlin he returned to Harvard as professor of philosophy, where he became one of the most famous teachers in the history of the university, and one of the most appreciated minds in America. After doing advanced work at Cambridge and lecturing at the Sorbonne, Santayana published his most ambitious work, tho ‘ Life of Reason,’ in five volumes. The Encyclopedia, with a candour unknown to the dust covers of novels, feared that this work did not attract the public and repelled the professional philosopher. With my own ignorance and the silence of my mentors thus explained, I searched for Santayana’s classic and beautiful poems, only to find them, when run to earth in a textbook of American literature, merely pleasant and urbane.

But Santayana, though he may not win us by his philosophy or his poetry, touches us in another place. He admires and likes the English. Since leaving Harvard he has wandered over Europe, and during the war years he lived at Oxford. To him England is “ preeminently the home of decent happiness and a quiet pleasure iu being oneself ”; and he finds that , tho English come nearer the ancient Greek temperament than any other race. In ‘ The Last Puritan ’ there is much about English people and English institutions. Oxford he loves, and his admiration for the Eton boat song is the counterpart of British excitement over a toreador. The novel tells the story of Oliver Alclen from his punctual birth in Boston (the city where Lowells speak only to Cabots and the Cabots speak only to God) to his death after the Armistice. His father, attractive’ ’ and unsatisfactory, saved from the pitfalls that beset a conscientious millionaire by committing murder, leaves the boy’s early education to his mother, a woman who believes in no songs, no poetry, and no prayers. Oliver had a German governess at home, and was sent -o school only when it was too late for his studies to suffer from a* modern institution. Though he had the choice of Europe, he preferred Williams College at homo. • Here he played games, training for his own sake, not to break records.

When he broke his leg in a spectacular touch down at a football match he soliloquised: “No more football ever. He felt a great peace. One duty at least was finished and done for, an old enemy vanquished, and vanquished gloriously.” As a private in the ranks Oliver found a parallel between football and the war. He remembered all the false reasons which his mother and other high-minded people used to give to justify that game, saying that it was good for the health, or for morals, or for testing character; whereas he knew by -experience that after the season was over every blackguard was as much a blackguard as before. . Football had been ah outlet for instinct, and a mock war. The howling crowds were like the public, each cheering its own side. , Life is not easy'for Oliver Alden, a scrupulous millionaire whose puritanical instincts make it difficult for him to have satisfactory love affairs or satisfactory friendships. As foils for the hero are his friend Jim, a good animal; and his cousin, Mario, who had the advantage of the Catholic tradition, “ that splendid error that conforms better to the impulses of the soul than life itself can do.” , Santayana’s gentle satiric pen is masterly with Oliver’s family. There is his uncle Nicholas, who found funerals the most satisfactory of social occasions, because there human attachments were expressed without unnecessary chatter. Cant, even in his own mouth, made Uncle Nicholas uncomfortable. There is Oliver’s mother, who hated having a guest in her spare room, because, when it was occupied, she had a spare room no longer. There is the cultured spinster, Letitia Lamb, who was so exceptional she could not eat bread and butter without a fork.

The publishers are anxious to deny that ‘ The Last Puritan ’ is a philosophical treatise in disguise. The story is the important thing, but criticism of life must creep in. The German governess talks of Goethe, and tho attractive, drug-taking father, when invited to admire the Walt Whitman that would turn and live with animals, criticises his philosophy; “I should have liked it well enough if he had said he could turn and no longer live with the animals, they are so restless and merciless and ferocious, possessed with a mania for munching grass and gnawing bones and nosing one another. ... Whitman pretends to turn only from the more refined devices of mankind to a wider and more stupid existence.” This last Puritan believed that what the cavaliers had been in the seventeenth century it was the Puritans’ turn to be in the twentieth, the mart' ' ' ' ’ H

tyrs of a poetic and chivalrous cause. Santayana coats his scepticism with wit and with humour, but the conclusion of his novel seems to be that of his philosophical works, “idealism is ‘true, but irrelevant and useless.”