A Philosopher and America: Santayana As a Cultural Critic

A Philosopher and America: Santayana as a Cultural Critic Yoji Sawairi The cultural life of America, particularly of New England , from the Civil War through 1890s, has often been characterized as "genteel ." Historians have used the adjective and its noun form "gentility" to describe a complex of values prevalent in the decades, such as effeminate sentimentalism, moral idealism, and carefree optimism. Scholars have applied the terms to what seem to be exponents of those values , including "fireside poets" like Longfellow and women novelists like St owe. Indeed, the words have occupied a central place in the vocabulary of American cultural and literary criticism.1) The terms, of course, became the more popular for the phrase "the genteel tradition," a famous coinage by George Santayana in his address entitled "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy" (1911).2) To be sure, his speech, though published in the University of California Chronicle two months later and in Winds of Doctrine, a 1913 collection of Santayana's essays, was not widely known for a while. But the term in his address unequivocally helped define the foe to young intellectuals of the early twentieth century. Van Wyck Brooks, for example, made a case against "Highbrow" and its divorce from "Lowbrow" while H.L. Mencken's thrust was aimed at an amalgam of "Puritanism" and "Philis- tinism," an amalgam which he called "the prevalent pecksniffery and sentimentality," and Randolph S. Bourne challenged "a religion which is on the whole as pleasant and easy as could be devised."3) So diverse as their targets were, Santayana's coinage bonded the "literary radicals" together by identifying their enemies as the genteel tradition.4) It is no coincidence, therefore, that Malcolm Cowley recapitulated their activ- ities as "the revolt against gentility" in After the Genteel Tradition.5) Of those who developed a campaign against gentility, Brooks is a suggestive case in point. Not only did he lead the rising generation of 151 intellectuals in their revolt against their fathers. His America's Coming- of-Age was, in Robert E. Spiller's words, "a declaration of literary in- dependence as historically significant for its day as was Emerson's American Scholar for the earlier renaissance."6) But he was also an avid reader of the philosopher, poet, critic, and Harvard professor, Santayana. As Douglas L. Wilson argues, although Brooks had never taken a course of Santayana's at college, his interest in Santayana started early and lasted long.7) Brooks in fact writes of his Cambridge days in his Autobiography, "Who could have escaped the charm of Santayana's style, which I discovered, like so many, in the library of the Signet, where I was the librarian and where I can still see The Sense of Beauty in a shadowy corner of the shelves."8) Brooks later transformed himself from a compelling insurgent critic of American life to what seemed an amiable nostalgic chronicler of the American past. This change in his career certainly looks like a reac- tionary conversion and has been a matter of controversy. Yet, closely examined, his early career is neither radical nor antiestablishment but rather is consistent with the tradition of New England cultural hegemony. In fact, his early criticism came from within the culture he damned. The seeming shift in his criticism was, after all, not so drastic as is generally believed. Nothing is more illuminating than a comparison of Brooks with Barrett Wendell the Anglophile and class-conscious Tory professor at Harvard for elucidating young Brooks's indebtedness to the Old Guard. Brooks learned from Wendell not only the problem associated with transplanting Puritanism from England to America but also the dichot- omy of American character exemplified by Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. Above all, he was Wendell's disciple in that both shared contempt for the contemporary America.9) One can thus argue that the cultural insurgence of the early twentieth century, of which Brooks was the ringleader, was not a revolution from below, a revolution by progressive minds against the ruling class; instead, it was a revolution from within, an organic metamorphosis of the conservatives themselves in their struggle to keep their cultural hegemony intact. Considering this development of the cultural revolution, it is easy to understand why Santayana is an important figure to students of American culture. It is not only because he coined the phrase, "the genteel tradition," and influenced the young intellectuals of the early 152 twentieth century. It is also because Santayana , as this study will show, did not belong to the same clique as the rebellious critics did , but rather detached from them and thereby noticed the revolt against gentility taking place from within gentility itself . Of course, the "genteel" culture of nineteenth-century America has recently received much reconsideration . Jane Tompkins, for example, has reassessed Stowe and other women novelists of her days by arguing that their "sentimental" novels can be properly understood only if one reads them not as art for art's sake but as the political and ideological works that are intended to give power to contemporary women, who could not vote or own property then.10) The ultimate purpose of my study, too, is to build up a foundation for reevaluating the "genteel" culture of the era. But my approach is different. I examine both Santayana, the philosopher who coined the term "the genteel tradition," and his insight into American cultural history in order to look into the very notion of "gentility," a key word with which "fireside poets" and women novelists of the time are assessed as if it were an omnipotent trump card. Santayana, to be sure, has been studied not only as a philosopher but also as a cultural critic, particularly as a critic of "the genteel tradition."11) But I go even further than my predecessors did. By clarifying what he meant by "the genteel tradition," I argue that Santayana detected an unbroken current running through nineteenth- century Boston Brahmins, twentieth-century New Humanists, and "literary radicals," and that he perceived that the alleged cultural revolution which took place in the early twentieth century was a mere continuation of the Old Guard's transformation. Santayana captured my interest when I was working on a reception study of Longfellow, particularly on why and how the celebrated poet became ridiculed in the turn of the century by the same nation that had once loved him. Surely, Santayana's discussion of Longfellow is sparse, but he played a significant part in the history of Longfellow criticism since his coinage helped form the negative image of the culture which produced and characterized the poet. Upon inquiry, however, I found that what the philosopher termed the genteel tradition is different from what it is generally believed to be. More important, it was revealed to me that Santayana shows a keen perception not only of "genteel" American poetry but also of the cultural history of the nation, a percep- 153 tion which cannot be ignored in the study of American civilization. An examination of Santayana is thus in order. I. The Genteel Tradition George Santayana was born in Madrid in 1863 to Spanish parents.12) His mother, the widow of an American businessman in Manila, had lived most of her life in Virginia, the Philippines, and Boston. After separat- ing from her second husband, George's father, she returned to Boston to raise her children. George joined them there at the age of nine and received an ideal Boston education: he attended the Brimmer School, Boston Latin, and Harvard University. But raised in a different envi- ronment from where he had been born, he always felt himself a foreigner in a strange land. One should add, however, that being a foreign-born observer must have lent Santayana a penetrating insight into America like that of Alexis de Tocqueville, James Bryce, and D.H. Lawrence. At Harvard, he actively wrote for The Harvard Monthly and The Harvard Lampoon but never joined any set and retained his indepen- dence. He did so well at school that he was awarded a two-year fellow- ship for graduate study in Germany. Upon returning and finishing his dissertation, he earned a Ph. D. and was offered a position in the philosophy department at the age of twenty-six. It was a golden age of philosophy at Harvard, and among his then current colleagues and former teachers were William James and Josiah Royce. Yet he avoided the company of professors. It seems that he was on unpleasant terms with Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, who found him too active in literary circles. In fact Santayana had waited for nine years before he was promoted to assistant professor, with his first book of philosophy, The Sense of Beauty, published in 1896.13) It took another nine years for him to become a full professor, with a voluminous work, The Life of Reason, written in 1905-1906.14) At forty-eight he came into an inheritance and resigned from Harvard to leave America for good. He spent the rest of his life wandering in Europe until settling in a nursing home in Rome.15) As scholars have pointed out, Santayana's theory of the genteel tradition dates back to 1900 when he read a satirical light poem, or "a little fable" as he called it, before a Harvard undergraduate literary club.16) The verse, "Young Sammy's First Wild Oats," begins with a description of "an old, secluded glade" which the audience apparently 154 identified as Harvard Yard . In this glade with a history, "Deacon Plaster" complains of the misbehavior of "Cousin Sammy ," and wishes "Uncle Sa m" were alive to punish Young Sammy .

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