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 independence 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 dichotomy 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 independence. 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 . Presumably, Deacon Plaster, like plaster busts and statues , represents those moralistic, nostalgic idealists of old, and Uncle Sam, of course, stands for Puritan forefath- ers or the America idealized by them. While Young Sammy personifies the America of Santayana's own day , Sammy's wrongdoings signify perhaps the American war with Spain, or its annexation of Puerto Rico and the Philippines.17) "Doctor Wise ," who speaks for Santayana, the doctor of philosophy, or the doctor of love-wisdom, replies to Deacon Plaster:

Can we blame them? Rather blame us,― us, who uttered idle things. Our false prophecies shall shame us, and our weak imaginings.

・・・・・・

Can we blame them we mistaught if now they seek another guide And, since our wisdom comes to nought, take counsel of their proper pride?18)

Doctor Wise blames "us" who rely merely on the old pieties established in past years and are resigned to being "idle" and "weak." He thus defends Young Sammy:

He's not Uncle Sam, the father, that prim, pompous, honest man, Yankee, or Virginian, rather: Sammy's an American―

Lavish, clever, loud, and pushing, loving bargains, loving strife, Kind, rude, fearless-eyed, unblushing, not yet settled down in life.19)

Using a forceful cataloging method, Santayana enumerates Sammy's characteristics as "an American," and stands by the vitality of young

155 America instead of the morals of the past. For the old were:

Trained by sordid inventories to scorn all he couldn't buy, Puffed with miserable glories Shouted at an empty sky,

Fooled with cant of a past era, droned 'twixt dreamy lid and lid, Till his God was a chimera and the living God was hid.20)

It is said that behind this poem is Santayana's disagreement with William James on the Spanish-American War.21) Like many other intellectuals of the time, James was vexed by America's expansionism in the war against Santayana's homeland, and believed he had lost his country. But Santayana could not understand why James was "so much upset by an event that the victims of it could take so calmly." According to Santayana,

[James] cried disconsolately that he had lost his country, when his country, just beginning to play its part in the history of the world, appeared to ignore an ideal that he had innocently expect- ed would always guide it, because this ideal had been eloquently expressed in the Declaration of Independence. But the Declara- tion of Independence was a piece of literature, a salad of illu- sions…William James had not lost his country; his country was in good health and just reaching the age of puberty. He had merely lost his way in physiological history.22)

Indeed, what helped Santayana form his view on the war was his premise of history as "physiological" dynamism, while James "held a false moralistic view of history, attributing events to the conscious motives and free will of individuals." Santayana reasons that history is driven by the force of "changing circumstances," "changing passions," which are "themselves physical impulses, maturing in their season, and often epidemic, like contagious diseases." James, a pragmatist and physician, should have known this biological force of history, but he 156 failed to do so because "the over-ruling tradition in him was literary and theological."23) In the above poem, too, Santayana suggests his perception of history:

All things mortal have their season: nothing lives, forever young, But renews its life by treason to the thing from which it sprung,

And when man has reached immortal mansions, after toiling long, Life deserts him at the portal, and he only lives in song.

・・・・・・Let him [Sammy] look up from his standard to the older stars of heaven, Seaward by whose might, and landward, all the tribes of men are driven.24)

Given this conception of history, it is clear that there is a marked divergence between Deacon Plaster's world view and that of Doctor Wise, not between Uncle Sam and Young Sammy as Wilfred M. McClay claims.25) Deacon Plaster's mentality is so enervated that he cannot acknowledge the physiological, quasi-Darwinian, fatalistic driving-force of the world but instead relies on the conventional precepts and, if they are powerless, shouts "at an empty sky." In contrast, Doctor Wise is prepared to accept the crude, callow, indiscreet vitality of a young nation. With "Young Sammy's First Wild Oats" in mind, one can see why Santayana's famous address delivered eleven years later is entitled "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy" instead of "The Genteel Tradition in American Culture." What matters to Santayana is not particular literary works or cultural phenomena but the world view, or philosophy, behind American life, or, as he puts it, the "vision of the universe and definite convictions about human nature."26) In that address, Santayana first expounds that the fact that America possesses "a living philosophy" is "extraordinary," for in this young country material preoccupations should have absorbed people's minds,

157 and they should have been too much engrossed in living to reflect upon life or have any philosophy. America thus has become "a wise child, an old head on young shoulders," and its wisdom has stunted and even deranged its physical and emotional growth. As a result, says Santayana in a famous paragraph,

[America] is a country with two mentalities, one a survival of the beliefs and standards of the fathers, the other an expression of the instincts, practice, and discoveries of the younger generations. In

all the higher things of the mind-in religion, in literature, in the

moral emotions-it is the hereditary spirit that still prevails… The truth is that that [sic] one-half of the American mind, that not occupied intensely in practical affairs, has remained, I will not say high-and-dry, but slightly becalmed; it has floated gently in the backwater, while, alongside, in invention and industry and social organization the other half of the mind was leaping down a sort of Niagara Rapids… The one is the sphere of the American man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American woman. The one is all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition.")

Then what shaped and enhanced the genteel tradition in America? In Santayana's view, it was Calvinism and Transcendentalism. Calvinism "is an expression of the agonized conscience," and a Calvinist philosophically feels "a fierce pleasure in the existence of misery, espe- cially of one's own" since "this misery seems to manifest the fact that the Absolute is irresponsible or infinite or holy." Santayana, in short, sees Calvinism as a sort of masochism. Transcendentalism, on the other hand, "produced transcendental myth," or the various Transcendental systems of the universe. The problem is that Transcendental myths enabled American philosophers to find a new status for their inherited theology and to give those parts of it they cared to preserve some semblance of philosophical backing. They placed the genteel tradition, for example, in the realm of Transcendental myth, and "to embrace this philosophy was regarded as a sign of profound metaphysical insight, although the most mediocre minds found no difficulty in embracing it."28) Santayana finds only Whitman and William James-not James the anti-imperialistbut James the "radicalempiricist" -freefrom the trap of the genteel tradition. Of Whitman he says, "His work, for the very

158 reason that it is so rudimentary, contains a beginning, or rather many beginnings, that might possibly grow into a noble moral imagination, a worthy filling for the human mind." James, in Santayana's view, gave some rude shocks to the genteel tradition by arguing that "nature must be conceived anthropomorphically and in psychological terms." With Whitman and James at his side, Santayana is optimistic about America's future, for he finds the genteel culture challenged by both "the revolt of the Bohemian temperament with its poetry of crude naturalism" and "an impassioned empiricism…declaring the universe to be wild and young."29) Taking a close look at Santayana's discussion in this manner, one can discern what Santayana describes as the genteel tradition. Contrary to general beliefs, it is not what is called Victorianism;30) nor is it the earlier unrealistic otherworldliness which Edwards typifies. Rather, it is a cow- ardly world view, marked by the inability of Americans to face naturalis- tic reality, the failure to boldly embark on the uncertain sea, the ten- dency to retreat to a "secluded glade," the disaffection toward the offending world, the indulgence in lamenting over "misery." According- ly, the antipode of the genteel tradition also differs from worldliness, money-making, or that which Franklin represents; instead, it is "aggressive enterprise," the power to grow, the courage to experience, the capacity to embrace.31) Bear in mind the targets of Santayana's criticism as well as the objects of his approbation as we further explore his insight into American culture. II. Battle of the Books

Given what Santayana means by the genteel tradition, it is not difficult to see why he decried Civilization in the United States in 1922 when he reviewed it in the Dial. This book, edited by Harold E. Stearns, is a collection of thirteen essays by thirteen authors, and the topics and contributors illustrate the range of issues characteristic of this symposium: H.L. Mencken on politics, Lewis Mumford on the city, John Macy on journalism, and Van Wyck Brooks on the literary life. Every essay therein pointed to the profound dualism of American life between ideal and reality and reiterated the sterility of American culture. In short, the bias of the symposium was thoroughly against the "genteel tradition." Probably the Dial reasoned that Santayana would give a favorable review because those young writers seemed to be apostles of Santayana's

159 criticism of America. But what he sent in was not a complete review but instead a set of fragmentary notes written on margins. In fact there is an Editor's Note in the first page of the review: "These marginal notes by Mr. Santayana are published in place of a formal review…"32) This informality alone shows his condescending view of the book. In the preface Stearns points out one of the three major contentions his book presents:

In almost every branch of American life there is a sharp dichotomy between preaching and practice; we let not our right hand know what our left hand doeth… There are certain

abstractions and dogmas which are sacred to us… Regardless… of the theoretical excellence or stupidity of these standards, in actual practice the moral code resolves itself into the one cardinal heresy of being found out, with the chief sanction enforcing it, the fear of what people will say.33)

Certainly one finds some echo of Santayana and Brooks in Stearns's paragraph, but Santayana dealt a hard blow to this part of the preface. He does of course "see the fact which Mr. Stearns points to here, but not as he sees it," for in Santayana's view, "the American conscience is not insincere; it is only belated, inapplicable." The reviewer, then, points his finger at the contributors, who do nothing but find fault with "mere man in America": "Things shock them; and their compensatory ideals and plans of reform are fetched from abstract reflection or irrelevant enthusiasms. They are far from expressing the manly heart of America, emancipated from the genteel tradition. They seem to be morally underfed, and they are disaffected." It is clear here that Santayana tries to liken the contributors to intellectuals of the genteel tradition. In fact he barely refrains from saying Civilization in the United States is itself genteel, but it is only because "that would enrage its revolutionary authors too much."34) Indeed, the young writers who gathered around Stearns remind one of Deacon Plaster, who is too much "disaffected" and "offended" by harsh substance to see American life as a process of organic growth. The intellectuals who tried to overthrow the genteel tradition were nothing more than its products. For they too try to apply their groundless ideal to American reality and, upon finding out that reality does not meet this

160 ideal, indulge in lamentation. Deacon Plaster and the radical critics are all part of the same gang.35) It thus becomes unquestionable that there is a grave discrepancy between what Santayana detected and named the genteel tradition and what the critics in Civilization in the United States identified as such. The one comes from the agonized conscience of the idealist; the other is a set of moral conventions of Victorian femininity and geniality. The former is also different from what Brooks refers to as Highbrow, for Highbrow is, after all, indifference to and detachment from anything worldly and practical. Santayana draws a clear line between himself and the modern critics.36) Santayana's attitudes toward the avant-garde intelligentsia were also patent in his essay entitled "America's Young Radicals." Therein he says that although he welcomes "different hearts" which are set on "different things ," he has "a word of warning" to young radicals:

The point is that they all proclaim their disgust at the present state of things in America, they denounce the Constitution of the United States, the churches, the government, the colleges, the press, the theatres, and above all they denounce the spirit that vivifies and unifies all these things, the spirit of Business. Here is disaffection breaking out in a nation which seemed the most unanimous, the most satisfied of nations: here are Americans impatient with America.37)

It is unmistakable that Santayana's criticism here is similar to his argument against the genteel tradition. Like the genteel, the radical are "disaffected" and "impatient ." Santayana then adds, "I see what they are against-they are against everything-but what are they for? I have not been able to discover it."38) They are, in a word, mere naysayers. Then why did Santayana denounce New Humanism in his most famous essay, "The Genteel Tradition at Bay"? The principles of the New Humanists such as Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More were as classical as were those of Santayana, who dared say, "I am a high Tory in my sympathies."39) New Humanism was also a new enemy of the modern critics with whom, as we have seen, Santayana disagreed. Moreover, it strikes one as peculiar that Santayana referred to students of New Humanism as genteel, for, conservative as they were, they were

161 far from effeminate; on the contrary, they were militant enough to engage in fierce controversy with modern critics. Then why did Santayana launch an attack on the school? This might be puzzling, but an examination of "The Genteel Tradition at Bay" provides a piece of evidence that Santayana perceived that the New Humanists and the literary radicals had much in common. In Santayana's view, the genteel tradition, which seemed "to melt gracefully into the active mind of the country" twenty years before when he discussed "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy," is "rais- ing its head more admonishingly than ever, darting murderous glances at its enemies, and protesting that it is not genteel or antiquated at all, but orthodox and immortal, and its true name is Humanism." Yet New Humanists, as Santayana holds, derive not from Renaissance humanism but from medieval Christianity, which the Renaissance stood against. Humanists of the Renaissance "believed in the sufficient natural goodness of mankind, a goodness humanized by frank sensuality and a wink at all amiable vices" whereas New Humanists, lamenting over life, merely "read, or pretend to read, the classics, and...would like to go on thrashing little boys into writing Latin verses."40) Santayana then summarizes his theory of history, or his world view:

The gist of modern history would seem to be this: a many- sided insurrection of the unregenerate natural man, with all his physical powers and affinities, against the regimen of Christen- dom. He has convinced himself that his physical life is not as his

ghostly mentors asserted, a life of sin… Even our greatest troubles, such as the late war, seem only to accelerate the scientific bridling of matter; troubles do not cease, but surgery and aviation make remarkable progress.41)

This may sound like a philosophy of sheer optimism, but in fact it is one of strength, masculinity, toughness. Santayana is indeed a child of what John Higham calls the Strenuous Age.42) A robust philosopher,

Santayana questions, "Why should any one be dissatisfied?," and pro- poses: "May not the ardent humanist still cry… Let us be well- balanced, let us be cultivated, let us be high-minded; let us control ourselves, as if we were wild; let us chasten ourselves, as if we had passions."He continues,"The discontent of the American humanists

162 would be unintelligible if they were really humanists in the old sense; if they represented in some measure the soul of that young oak , bursting the limits of Christendom."43) What he finds in the New Humanists is a lack of "the soul of that young oak ," a lack of perception of life as an organic and powerful process. Big Business was a favorite target of the American intelligentsia , but Santayana blasted such a view of leviathan-like capitalism: "Big Busi- ness is an amiable monster, far kindlier and more innocent than anything Machiavelli could have anticipated, and no less lavish in its patronage of experiment, invention, and finery than Bacon could have desired ."44) Santayana calls for both a view of the world as a process of growth and a fatalistic capacity to accept such a view. The similarity between the young critics and the New Humanists is now evident. The literary radicals like Stearns and Cowley, who were convinced that they were standing up to battle against the American past, were born of gentility. So were the New Humanists who cried. when modernism swept over American education. To Santayana, anyone who retreats disaffected to his sacred place without exercising a robust capacity to face life came from the genteel tradition.

III. Applied Culture Being a poet himself, Santayana was interested in the state of American poetry, particularly genteel American poetry which he and his fellow poets had outgrown, but his criticism was far different from that of young critics such as Brooks and Macy.45) To be sure, he employed the adjective "genteel" to describe the nineteenth-century American verse, but Santayana was not "disaffected" toward the Old Poets as the modern intellectuals were. A quasi-Darwinian fatalist, Santayana calmly observed genteel American poetry fading away. It was, to him, just a phase which American verse had to go through. In 1887 when Santayana visited London, the English ladies at his boarding house explained how much they all loved Longfellow, but the poet-philosopher was not surprised or disgusted. He just replied that Longfellow's popularity was "beginning to pass away" and that his fellow poets at Harvard "never read anything written in America except [their] own compositions." Unlike Brooks, he did not feel the urge to dethrone the old poet.46) Santayana, it seems, even treasured the Boston of former times which

163 produced Longfellow and Lowell. Of course, he was not nostalgic, nor did he call for a return to the past. But he at least judged Boston's nineteenth century as an interesting, if not important, epoch of American history. In his autobiography he recalls the day when at the age of eighteen he shook hands with Longfellow at a garden party. Then Santayana says of Boston,

There were gentle lights really burning in some of those houses, with no exaggeration of their range or brilliance: Tick- nors, Parkmans, Longfellows, and Lowells with their variously modest and mature minds. I came too late to gather much of that quiet spirit of colonial culture, that felt itself to be secondary and a bit remote from its sources, and yet was proud of this very remoteness, which gave it the privilege of being universal and just. In my time this spirit lingered only in Professor Norton, but saddened by the sense of being a survival.47)

In contrast to Brooks, who felt "we had had too much of the old New England poets," the strenuous philosopher accepted late nineteenth- century New England simply as a stage from which another stage would emerge.48) Santayana's essay "Genteel American Poetry" is historically di- rected, not accusatory. He finds the same problem with genteel verse as with Deacon Plaster: it lacks courage to confront the grim reality. "It was," he writes, "a simple, sweet, humane, Protestant literature, grandmotherly in that sedate spectacled wonder with which it gazed at this terrible world and said how beautiful and how interesting it all was…" Now this "grandmotherly" verse has "become obsolete," observes Santayana, and movements such as "the seductive aesthetic school," "symbolism ," and "the resolve to write poetry which is not verse" are taking its place. Note that there is no need for Santayana to "shout at an empty sky."49) In order to further discuss his view of poetry, it should be clarified how Santayana dealt with the Arnoldian idea of culture. As John Henry Raleigh shows, young Santayana was an Arnoldian, who, for example, wrote Interpretations of Poetry and Religion under the influence of the British critic.50) "One might guess him to have read all Arnold's works with care and enthusiasm," says Lucy Beckett.51) Nonetheless,

164 Santayana the Arnoldian is not of interest here; what matters is that he later came to disagree with Arnold, particularly when he saw America's young critics. In a letter he wrote to Van Wyck Brooks in 1927, Santayana attrib- uted the decline of the literary radicalism, which Bourne and other young critics had advocated, to their principle of "applied culture," saying, "Instead of being interested in what they are and what they do and see , they are interested in what they think they would like to be and see and do…"52) What he meant by the principle of"applied culture" is unquestionable: the rebellious literati wanted to generate something intrin- sic from American soil but ended in applying to their nation an extrinsic culture, a culture borrowed from somewhere else. Of course, implicit in the philosopher's discussion is his criticism of Matthew Arnold, who formulated culture as "the best which has been thought and said" and thereby evoked reverence toward "standards."53 As Santayana per- ceives, the radical intellectuals of his time were disciples of Arnold as their enemies-genteel custodians of culture like William Brownell- were, and what they wanted to see develop from American soil were, after all, nothing indigenous but something equivalent to foreign "standards." In the above essay, Santayana points where America should head for:

A certain degree of sympathy and assimilation with ultra- modern ways in Europe or even Asia may be possible, because

young America is simply modernism undiluted… I therefore think that art, etc, has a better soil in the ferocious 100% America than in the Intelligentsia of New York. It is veneer, rouge, aes- theticism, art museum, new theatres, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.54)

Again Santayana shows himself to be an exponent of the Strenuous Age and pronounces for an organic American culture. Unlike the young critics who made the same case for cultural fertility but only resulted in the practice of "applied culture" because of their Arnoldian ideal, Santayana was consistent in his principle. Santayana's stance toward the Arnoldian concept of culture is more apparent in "What Is a Philistine?," perhaps his most enjoyable albeit

165 unsung essay. This is a well wrought piece in which he elaborately defends Philistines, while trying not to enrage or discourage the reader. Arnold had divided the English into aristocratic "barbarians," bourgeois "philistines ," and lower-class "populace," and Santayana's essay serves as an antithesis to Arnold's definition.55) "Who knows," the philosopher rhetorically asks in the beginning, "if even you, dear Reader, inhabitant of Cambridge or Boston as you are, may not recognize yourself in my description? Be not hasty, therefore, in condemning the Philistine: haply he is all that you most admire and respect."56) "One essential trait of the Philistine ," says Santayana, "is convention- ality," or his "resting in the merely conventional." Nothing is so Philis- tine as "the habit of asking the money value of everything," for the Philistine is indifferent to "the supreme and ultimate." The philosopher adds, however, that although it is "vulgar to esteem things for their cost" it is "not vulgar to esteem them for the qualities which make them costly." This mental process we always exert when we purchase something, and it is even a "poetic" practice which has in it "one of the deepest possible claims to admiration."57) Another quality of the Philistine's is "indifference to the beauties of art." While art appeals to sensation and imagination, he is not capable of response, for there is no ideal of beauty in the beholder's mind yet. Santayana then continues:

If you set a Philistine before a picture, he will be inevitably bored. He can do nothing to the picture except buy it, and that is soon accomplished. He is too active and industrious a man to stand gaping at it, pretending he enjoys the harmony of its color, the balance of its design, or the richness of its light and shade. And he is too honest to say that the picture represents anything more than a man's face, or a pretty view, or whatever else the subject may be. If the reproduction is accurate, as far as his perception goes, he will be pleased to notice the fact.58)

Here Santayana does not blame Philistines for being uncultured; instead he implicitly and ironically satirizes those pretentious Arnoldians who are, unlike Philistines, not "active," "industrious," or even "honest." This essay thus clearly shows Santayana's contempt for the conceit of Arnoldian intellectuals and his praise of the vitality of the American

166 businessman. Whitman's judgment of Arnold as "one of the dudes of

literature" is oft-quoted ,59) but Santayana's wittier essay is equally worthy as a historical testimony against the prevalence of the Arnoldian

idea of culture.

Conclusion

As we have seen thus far, Santayana suspected that the young rebels came from the genteel tradition they attacked . He also found out that they were disciples of the Arnoldian concept of culture as their enemies were. And he perceived that "applied culture" did no good to American

society. Given these insights into American culture , one may say that Santayana was well aware that the revolt against gentility, which the

young intellectuals were carrying out then, broke out from within, from among conservatives themselves. Being outside of both the Old Guard

and the radicals, he was able to see the revolt so developing. Once coined, the epithet "genteel tradition" seems to have made its way on its own. Santayana meant to depict America's incapacity to swallow what appears to be a "terrible world." But he never fell victim to the genteel tradition, for he was capable of swallowing the very fact that there was a genteel tradition prevalent in nineteenth-century Amer- ica; he never complained of the past; he was prepared to accept anything as actual. In the strictest sense, then, anyone who uses the expression, "the genteel tradition" with resentment, is its disciple. If

Santayana knew the current popularity of his coinage among historians and critics, he would regard them as genteel. The fact that Santayana's coinage continues to be misunderstood is suggestive It signifies that what is called the "genteel" culture of nineteenth-century America has rarely had a due opportunity for re- appraisal since the 1920s. For as long as the epithet is applied, the American life of that time does not escape from the conventional charac- terization. True, epithets themselves are not to blame. But when we find a convenient one for judging something, we rely on it and use it uncritically. If ever cultural phenomena and artifacts in those days are reassessed, therefore, it will be when critics observe and analyze them from scratch. The frequent use•\and abuse•\of Santayana's phrase also suggests that the new America which emerged around the turn of the century is still existent, still breathing. To be sure, the cultural revolution which

167 New England conservatives launched and the "literary radicals" took over subsided long ago. But so long as the coinage is commonly used, America retains a legacy of the insurrection, a legacy which has even characterized American intellectuals. Simply put, they have had a censorious mindset which critically observes their bygone years by uncritically using an epithet to secure their present standing.

Notes

1) For the word "genteel," see Daniel Aaron, "George Santayana and the Genteel Tradition," in Critical Essays on George Santayana, ed. Kenneth M. Price and Robert C. Leitz (G.K. Hall and Co., 1991), p.223; and John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (Hill and Wang, 1990), p.34. According to Aaron, the adjective "genteel" had become "pejora- tive" by the first decade of the twentieth century. As to the gentility of late nineteenth-century America, see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture ([1977], Doubleday, 1988); and John Tomsich, A Genteel Endeavor: American Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age (Stanford University Press, 1971). As for the transformation of the genteel class, see Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace (Random House, 1981); and Stow Persons, The Decline of American Gentility (Columbia University Press, 1973). 2) For the attribution of the coinage to Santayana, see Danforth Raynolds Ross, "The Genteel Tradition: Its Characteristics and Its Origin" (Ph . D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1954), p.1. 3) Van Wyck Brooks, America's Coming-of-Age (B.W. Huebsch, 1915), pp. 8-9; H. L. Mencken, "Puritanism as a Literary Force," in A Book of Prefaces (Knopf, 1917), pp. 220; and Randolph S. Bourne, "This Older Generation," The Atlantic Monthly, CXVI (1915), 386. 4) For the "literary radicals," see, for instance, Kermit Vanderbilt, American Literature and the Academy: The Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a Profession (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), pp. 185-220; Richard Ruland, The Rediscovery of American Literature: Premises of Critical Taste, 1900-1940 (Harvard University Press, 1967); Robert E. Spiller, "The Critical Rediscovery of America," in A Time of Harvest: American Literature 1910-1960, ed. Robert E. Spiller (Hill and Wang, 1962), pp. 1-8. 5) Malcolm Cowley, "The Revolt Against Gentility," in After the Genteel Tradi- tion: American Writers 1910-1930, ed. Malcolm Cowley ([1937], Southern Illinois University Press, 1964), pp. 9-25. 6) Robert E. Spiller, "What Became of the Literary Radicals?" The New Republic, November 18, 1946, p.664. 7) Douglas L. Wilson, Introduction to The Genteel Tradition: Nine Essays by George Santayana, ed. Douglas L. Wilson. (Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 20-22. Though not discussed by Wilson, Brooks also owed the title of New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915 to Santayana's essay, "The Moral Back- ground." See Van Wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer 1865-1915 (E. P. Dutton and Co., 1940), p.330; Van Wyck Brooks, The Writer in America (E.

168 P. Dutton and Co., 1953), p.36; and George Santayana , "The Moral Back- ground," in The Genteel Tradition, ed. Douglas L. Wilson (Harvard University Press, 1967), p.78. 8) Van Wyck Brooks, An Autobiography (E.P. Dutton and Co., 1965), p.106. 9) Barrett Wendell, A Literary History of America (Charles Scribner's Sons , 1900), pp. 19, 29, 33, 102-103; Van Wyck Brooks, The Wine of the Puritans: A Study of Present-Day America ([1908], Folcroft Library Editions, 1974), pp. 17-18; and Brooks, America's Coming-of-Age, pp. 8-9. 10) Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs (Oxford University Press, 1985) pp. 123- 201. 11) For Santayana as a cultural critic, see, for example, James C. Ballowe, "The Last Puritan and the Failure in American Culture ," in Critical Essays on George Santayana, ed. Kenneth M. Price and Robert C. Leitz , III (G.K. Hall and Co., 1991), pp. 127-38; and Joe Lee Davis, "Santayana as a Critic of Transcen- dentalism," in Transcendentalism and Its Legacy, ed. Myron Simon and Thornton H. Parsons (University of Michigan press, 1966), pp. 150-84. As to Santayana as a critic of the genteel tradition in particular, see, for instance , Robert Dawidoff, The Genteel Tradition and the Sacred Rage: High Culture vs. Democ- racy in Adams, James, and Santayana. (University of North Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 161-69; Wifred M. McClay, "Two Versions of the Genteel Tradition," New England Quarterly 55 (1982): 368-91; Kenneth S. Lynn, "Santayana and the Genteel Tradition," Commentary 73 (1982): 81-84; 12) For Santayana's biography, see, for example, John McCormick, George Santayana: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987); and George W. Howgate, George Santayana ([1938], Russell and Russell, 1971). 13) He had been an instructor for so long that he thought in 1897 that if he should not be appointed assistant professor in a year he would look for a place else- where. George Santayana, Persons and Places: Fragments of Autobiography, in The Works of George Santayana, ed. William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp. Jr. ([1963], MIT Press, 1986), I, 394. Also, in The Sense of Beauty, he approached beauty psychologically and argued that beauty, "pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing," exists only in the beholder's mind and that to make an aesthetic judgment is to establish an ideal. George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty ([1896], Collier Books, 1961), pp. 43, 178. 14) The Life of Reason surveys the imaginative life of humanity and stresses reason as a union of instinct and ideation. Yet Santayana later disregarded reason and "nature" took its place . His "nature" is not as romantic as Emerson's or as sinful as Zola's but more materialistic and physical. His outlook on nature seems to be inseparable from his cultural criticism. George Santayana, The Life of Reason ([1906], Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925) I: vi; George Santayana, Scepticism and Animal Faith (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923), pp. 54, 159; and George Santayana, Realms of Being ([1930], Charles Scribner's Sons, 1942), pp. vi, 198. 15) Wallace Stevens, a former pupil of Santayana's, sings of the philosopher of his last days in Rome. Wallace Stevens, "To an Old Philosopher in Rome," in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens ([1954], Random House, 1990), pp. 508-11. 16) See Dawidoff, pp. 161-64; McClay, pp. 375-76; Lynn, p.82; Wilson, pp. 26-27; and George Santayana, "Young Sammy's First Wild Oats," in The Genteel

169 Tradition, ed. Douglas L. Wilson (Harvard University Press, 1967), p.27. 17) See Dawidoff, pp. 162-69; McClay, pp. 373-74; Lynn, pp. 81-82; and Douglas L. Wilson, Note to "Young Sammy's First Wild Oats," in The Genteel Tradition, ed. Douglas L. Wilson (Harvard University Press, 1967), p.27. 18) Santayana, "Young Sammy's First Wild Oats," pp. 31-32. 19) Ibid., p.35. 20) Ibid., pp. 35-36. 21) See Dawidoff, pp. 162-69; McClay, pp. 373-74; Lynn, pp. 81-82; and Wilson, Introduction, p.27. 22) Santayana, Persons and Places, p.404. 23) Ibid., p.403. 24) Santayana, "Young Sammy's First Wild Oats," p.33. 25) McClay, p.375. 26) Santayana, "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy," p.38. Unlike myself, McClay argues that the title of the essay shows that Santayana "resisted the increasingly narrow self-conception of twentieth-century academic philosophy." McClay, p.370. 27) Santayana, "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy," pp. 39-40. 28) Ibid., pp. 41, 45, 47. 29) Ibid., pp. 53, 57, 62. Italics mine. 30) For Victorianism in America, see, for instance, Daniel Walker Howe, "American Victorianism as a Culture," American Quarterly, XXVII (1975): 507-32. 31) Santayana, "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy," pp. 41-43, 46-47. 32) George Santayana, "Marginal Notes on Civilization in the United States," The Dial, LXXII (1922): 553. 33) Harold E. Stearns, ed., Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans (Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1922), p. vi. 34) Santayana, "Marginal Notes on Civilization in the United States," pp. 554, 555. 35) See also Lynn, p.83. 36) See also McClay, p.369. 37) George Santayana, "America's Young Radicals," in George Santayana's America: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. James Ballowe (University of Illinois Press, 1969), p.158. 38) Ibid. 39) Ibid., p.156. 40) Santayana, "The Genteel Tradition at Bay," in The Genteel Tradition, ed. Douglas L. Wilson (Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 155, 156. 41) Ibid., p. 164. 42) John Higham, "The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890's," in Writing American History: Essays on Modern Scholarship, pp. 73-102. (Indiana University Press, 1970). 43) Santayana, "The Genteel Tradition at Bay," p.166. 44) Ibid. 45) For Santayana as a poet, see William G. Holzberger, Introduction to The Complete Poems of George Santayana, ed. William G. Holzberger (Bucknell University Press, 1979), pp. 23-82. 46) Santayana, Persons and Places, p.269. 47) Ibid., pp. 45-46.

170 48) Van Wyck Brooks, Preface to Three Essays on America ([1934], E.P. Dutton and Co., 1970), p.10. 49) George Santayana, "Genteel American Poetry," in The Genteel Tradition, ed. Douglas L. Wilson (Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 73, 75-76. 50) John Henry Raleigh, Matthew Arnold and American Culture (University of California Press, 1957), pp. 155-56. 51) Lucy Beckett, "Imagination as Value," in Critical Essays on George Santayana, ed. Kenneth M. Price and Robert C. Leitz, III (G.K. Hall and Co., 1991) ,p.175. 52) The Letters of George Santayana, ed. Daniel Cory (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1955), p.225. Also see Ballowe, p.127. 53) Matthew Arnold, Preface to Culture and Anarchy, in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R.H. Super (University of Michigan Press, 1965), V, 233. 54) Santayana, The Letters, p.226. 55) Arnold, pp. 137-62. 56) George Santayana, "What Is a Philistine?," in George Santayana's America: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. James Ballowe (University of Illinois Press, 1967), p.132. 57) Ibid., PP. 135-38. 58) Ibid., P.140. 59) Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (Small, Maynard and Co., 1906), I, 45. Also see, for example, James B. Twitchell, Carnival Culture: The Trashing of Taste in America (Columbia University Press, 1992), p.37.

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