The Last Puritan

THE LAST PURITAN George Santayana Based on the text originally published in 1935, 1936, and 1937 The Santayana Edition www.iupui.edu/~santedit/sant/ PREFACE On principle it would seem futile as well as egotistical for an author to ex- plain himself and tell the public what they ought to think of him. He has once for all surrendered his work to their jurisdiction, and even surrendered his own person and private history, which they are now at liberty, if they choose, to make an object of investigation or conjecture: and he cannot be sure, when he thinks their praise or censure to be ill grounded, that after all they may not be right: for who is man, especially histrionic rhetorical man, to see the truth of his own doings? Nevertheless, in respect to The Last Puritan I have been asked for explana- tions; and in the Prologue and Epilogue I have already given the critics some hints: rashly, perhaps, since sometimes they have taken advantage of my frank- ness to exaggerate my limitations. For instance, when I say that my characters all speak my language and are in some sense masks for my own spirit, that is no reason for assuming without examination that they must be a philosopher’s puppets and not “living.” On the contrary, if these characters are expressions of actual experience, and only dressed, like an actor on the stage, for their several parts, they ought to be all the more profoundly alive, being impersonations of the soul and not sketches taken by a social tourist. When a man has lived as long as I have with his characters—forty-five years—they seem to him to speak and act of their own free will, and without prompting. No doubt this only hap- pens because they are parts of himself; yet these parts were originally contrasted and spontaneous potentialities within him, and by no means vehicles for his own later conventional personality or approved thoughts. If the book is something of a monologue, it is nevertheless acted throughout. The Prologue and Epilogue (and also Oliver’s college essay, which has deceived some people) are integral parts of the fable, and written in character, even when, for a moment, that character is a stage-presentation of myself. Indeed, what I am now adding in this Preface, though an afterthought and spoken 3 4 The Last Puritan Preface 5 before the curtain, is also composed for the public, and is no innocent aside. This to me to contrast the moral development of two friends, one gay and the other commentary therefore remains, like the rest of the book, subject to re-valuation demure, who should be drawn in opposite directions, such as to test their mutual and suspicion on the critic’s part. In fact, I am more confident of uttering sincerely affection and lend it a tragic touch. But I soon found that college life hardly af- the sentiments of my characters than of describing justly their place in my own forded occasions even for the slightest comedy. The canvas would have to be mind. Self-criticism and autobiography, no matter how sincere, are far from be- filled in with humorous details about the boys’ background and families. How ing naturally truthful. They belong to a peculiarly treacherous and double-dyed They Lived was indeed the title which I gave to my first sketches; but the original species of the subjective. Perhaps if, as Aristotle tells us, poetry is essentially moral theme tended to be submerged in those miscellaneous episodes, my domi- truer than history, one reason may be that fiction, by an avowed artifice, redresses nant interest turned to other projects, and the novel lay dormant for years, until the the balance of selfish illusion, and satirically exposes the dark labyrinths of self- war of 1914, and fresh contacts with university life, now at Oxford, suggested to deception to the light of day. me how the whole story might be unified and brought to a head. People ask: How much in the story of your Last Puritan have you drawn from Meantime a tragic circumstance in the American scene had aroused my spe- real life, and how much is invented? I reply: Nothing is wholly historical, noth- cial attention: the early death of five or six young Harvard poets in the 1880’s and ing is wholly imaginary. In the first page of the Prologue I have taken pains to 1890’s, all more or less friends of mine, whose unanimous collapse I could not establish my privilege of hopelessly mixing the two: many of the threads are real attribute to accident. To what insoluble conflict between the world and the spirit but the tapestry is a dream. I actually lived in Paris at the place and time indicated, could such failure be due? As I revolved this doubt, the whole nature and history and in that half scholastic, half cosmopolitan atmosphere. More than one young of Oliver began to grow clearer in my mind. My dead friends had all had philo- friend of my Harvard days has rung the bell of that apartment in the Avenue de sophic keenness and moral fervour; they had all been fearless and independent in l’Observatoire, and come to dine with me at a restaurant. Howard Sturgis, too, mind; but none of them seemed to have found matter fitted for his energies, or to was really a cousin of my family’s, and lived at Windsor, as I describe him: but his have had the intellectual power requisite to dominate his circumstances and turn halcyon days fell in the 1890’s, a little earlier than the events of my story. I laugh what might be unfavourable in them into a triumph of expression. Here, then, was at anachronisms, when they are not incongruities. All these real details, however, the essential tragedy of the late-born Puritan, made concrete in several instances are transfigured in my fancy and made to dance as they never danced in reality by and illustrated before my eyes. This, added to a certain aridity, difficulty, and con- the imaginary presence of Mario Van de Weyer. Oliver and Mario are the original fusion which I could feel in the spirits of the elder New England worthies, and in personages of my fable. In them converge sundry potentialities which from my my remarkable teachers and colleagues at Harvard, supplied moral substance for earliest youth I felt in myself or divined in other people: potentialities not realis- those sketches of manners and types which I could draw from observation. able together in a single person, nor perhaps realisable at all in the modern world. Old Bostonians will recognise the originals of my Nathaniel Alden and Caleb Both these figures were self-composed, by an accumulation of kindred traits, as Wetherbee: yet even these figures have not been copied literally from nature, but legendary figures take shape in tradition. They were not psychological manikins, caricatured and recomposed with an eye to the general theme of my story. More- contrived intentionally, but true heroes, imposing themselves upon me with the over the original of Nathaniel had no younger half-brother; and the mania for authority of a moral force. collecting bad paintings belonged not to him but to a different and more amiable I call this book A Memoir in the Form of a Novel, because it was never planned old gentleman. Caleb also had not one original but two; and the one who changed as a story with an artificial dramatic unity, but was meant from the beginning to his religion had not turned Catholic but Buddhist. For Peter Alden and his wife the be the chronicle, half satirical, half poetic, of a sentimental education. In the early models were legion, like those for the Van de Weyer family in New York. Even in 1890’s, when I had returned to Harvard to teach but still lived among undergradu- the case of Oliver, originals might ates, it occurred 6 The Last Puritan Preface 7 be found for some of his personal traits or family circumstances. But I paint no indomitable private religion. There was something primitive and sacred here, for full-length portraits from life: I fuse as many sympathetic intuitions as possible instance in the sentiment of my friend Robert Bridges, that escaped me, but that into a fiction which might have been actualised as easily as any actual experience, I revered: something at once Spartan, Christian, and feudal, yet merged in the and perhaps more tellingly. My sources for this whole American scene—Oliver’s English mist with a profound naturalism, as if the Druid also had survived in the inner life excepted—were diffused widely and observed somewhat externally; for modern man of letters. Was not this the fulness and the happy decline and self- though I was perfectly at home in that life and immensely interested in it, hav- transformation of that very spirit which in my American friends died so hard, or ing lived and gone to school in Boston through all the most important years of was so cruelly dispersed amongst irrelevant cares? boyhood and youth, yet I found myself in that world by force of peculiar circum- This brings us back to my hero, who is the hero and martyr of a spiritual stances of which I felt the strangeness. It always seemed to me a strained, kindly, crisis. Not all my readers have understood that what we may call Oliver’s failures humorous, somehow fleshless world. Spain, of which I say nothing in this book, were due to his superiority, not to his inferiority.

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