About the Work
Persons and Places is the first volume of George Santayana’s autobiography, published in the early 1940s by Charles Scribner’s Sons. The book carries the subtitle “The Background of My Life,” and that phrase is exact: this is not a record of public events or a chronicle of achievements but an attempt to recover the soil, the people, and the early impressions out of which a particular mind and character grew. The volume opens with a baptismal certificate and closes with the author’s college studies, tracing a life from a Madrid birth through a childhood divided between Avila and Boston, and ending at the threshold of his philosophical career.
The book is written in a reflective, unhurried prose that moves easily between concrete recollection and abstract meditation. Santayana is as interested in the meaning of a memory as in the memory itself, and he frequently pauses to consider why a particular scene has stayed with him, what it reveals about the formation of character, or how the accidents of ancestry and geography shaped the person he became. The narrative is chronological in its broad outlines, but it is not strictly linear; the author circles back, qualifies, and interprets, treating his own life as a case study in how a human being comes to be what he is.
The front matter lists sixteen chapters, beginning with “Time, Place and Ancestry” and proceeding through chapters on his father, his mother, the Sturgis family, Avila, early memories, his transport to America, the Church of the Immaculate Conception, his first return to Spain, college friends, and college studies. An index completes the volume. The book was manufactured under wartime paper regulations, a detail that places its production firmly in the early 1940s, and it was printed by the Kingsport Press in Kingsport, Tennessee.
What distinguishes Persons and Places from many autobiographies is its refusal of self-congratulation and its lack of interest in the merely anecdotal. Santayana is not concerned to present himself as a hero or a victim; he is concerned to understand. The result is a book that reads at times like a family history, at times like a philosophical essay, and at times like a travelogue of the inner life. It is the work of a man who has come to see his own existence as one instance of a general human predicament, and who believes that by examining that instance carefully he may illuminate something larger than himself.
Context
Santayana was born in Madrid in 1863, the son of a Spanish father and a mother who had been born in Glasgow to Spanish parents and had spent part of her youth in Virginia. The baptismal certificate with which the book opens records his birth at No. 69 Calle Ancha de San Bernardo, his christening on January 1, 1864, and the names of his grandparents on both sides. His paternal grandparents came from Zamora and the province of Santander; his maternal grandparents from Reus in Catalonia and Barcelona. The child was named Jorge Agustin Nicolas, and his godparents were his uncle Nicolas Ruiz de Santayana and his half-sister Susana Sturgis, then twelve years old.
That half-sister is the first hint of the complicated family web that the book goes on to unravel. Santayana’s mother had been married before, to a Boston merchant named George Sturgis, and had three children by him before his early death. She then married Santayana’s father, a Spanish government official she had met in the Philippines, and the family that resulted was a transatlantic one, with branches in Spain, England, and the United States. The book is in large part an attempt to make sense of this inheritance—to understand how a boy born in Madrid came to be educated in Boston, and what he gained and lost in the process.
The world Santayana describes is that of the mid-nineteenth century, a world still shaped by the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. His maternal grandfather, Jose Borras, was a Deist and a disciple of Rousseau who was forced to leave Spain in 1823 when a French army restored Ferdinand VII to absolute power. He fled first to the Balearic Islands, then to Glasgow, then eventually to Virginia, where he became a respected figure in the democracy of Winchester. This grandfather’s wanderings are the origin of the family’s scattered geography, and Santayana treats them as emblematic of a general moral migration—the movement of liberal, educated Europeans toward the New World and its promises of freedom and opportunity.
The Boston into which Santayana’s mother married was the Boston of the 1850s, the city of Ticknor, Parkman, Longfellow, and Lowell, of the State House with its classic dome and the Tremont House with its rounded red-brick bay windows. It was a city that still retained something of its colonial culture, a culture that felt secondary and remote from its sources but was proud of that remoteness, giving it the privilege of being universal and just. By the time Santayana arrived there as a boy in 1872, that spirit lingered only in a few survivors, and the city was already changing, its rural suburbs giving way to half-built town quarters, its old gentility yielding to the pressures of commerce and industry.
The Sturgis family, into which Santayana’s mother had married, belonged to what he calls the aristocracy of commerce—the only aristocracy she respected. They were merchants, not professional men, and their fortunes had been made in the Far East, in Manila and China, in the days when Boston ships still sailed the world and great banking houses like Baring Brothers still dominated international finance. Santayana describes this world with a mixture of admiration and elegy, recognizing its virtues—wealth, kindness, honesty, competence—while also noting its limitations and its gradual decline. The Great Merchants, as he calls them, made their fortunes abroad in a poetic blue-water phase of development that passed away with them, leaving opportunities and virtues impossible for their children.
Structure of the Book
The book’s sixteen chapters follow the arc of Santayana’s life from his birth in Madrid to his college studies at Harvard, but they are not evenly weighted. The early chapters are largely concerned with ancestry and family history, establishing the geographical and moral coordinates of his inheritance before he himself appears as a conscious subject. “Time, Place and Ancestry” begins with the baptismal certificate and then ranges backward through the Borras family of Reus, the wanderings of his maternal grandfather, and the etymology of the Santayana name. “My Father” and “My Mother” are portraits of the two people whose characters and circumstances did most to shape the author’s early life, and they are among the most carefully drawn in the book.
The chapters on the Sturgis family extend the portrait to the Boston relatives who became, in a sense, a second family. Santayana describes “Uncle Russell,” the most distinguished of the Sturgises, who rose to be senior partner of Baring Brothers in London and whose career seemed to embody the perfection of manhood to both his parents. He describes “Uncle Henry,” whose career repeated Russell’s on a smaller scale and ended in tragedy, and “Uncle James,” the only Sturgis of the first generation surviving in Boston during the 1870s and 1880s, whose advice on investments led to the family’s financial difficulties. These chapters are not merely genealogical; they are studies in character and in the decline of a social type.
The middle chapters move to Avila, the walled city in Old Castile where Santayana’s father lived and where the author spent part of his childhood. “Avila” is a meditation on place as much as a recollection of events, an attempt to capture the essence of a town that Santayana describes as an oppidum in agris—a walled city that is also somehow in the country, all grandeur and granite, yet so small it seems to be surrounded by wheat fields and rocky moors. The chapters on early memories and on the author’s transport to America follow, tracing the boy’s gradual awakening to the world and his first encounters with the two cultures between which his life would be divided.
The later chapters shift to Boston and to Harvard. “The Church of the Immaculate” describes the Jesuit church where Santayana and his sister Susana attended high mass, and where Susana’s religious vocation was tested and found wanting. “First Return to Spain” records the author’s journey back to Avila as a young man, and the chapters on college friends and college studies describe his intellectual formation at Harvard, the books he read, the teachers who influenced him, and the friends who became his companions. The book ends not with a dramatic climax but with a quiet account of studies completed and a mind beginning to find its own direction.
Throughout, the structure is less narrative than associative. Santayana moves from a baptismal certificate to a meditation on fatalism, from a description of his grandfather’s flight from Spain to a reflection on the nature of accidents, from a portrait of his father to a consideration of the relationship between character and digestion. The book’s unity is not that of a plot but that of a sensibility—a single mind examining the materials of its own formation and finding in them the pattern of a life.
Inside the Book
The Baptismal Record and the Fortuneteller’s Clue
The book opens with a document rather than a sentence: the baptismal certificate from the parish church of San Marcos in Madrid, recording that a male child was born at nine in the evening on December 16, 1863, at No. 69 Calle Ancha de San Bernardo, and christened on January 1, 1864. He was the legitimate son of Don Agustin Ruiz de Santayana, a native of Zamora, and Doña Josefina Borras, a native of Glasgow. The grandparents on both sides are named—Nicolas of Badumes in Santander and Maria Antonia Reboiro of Zamora; Jose of Reus in Catalonia and Teresa Carbonell of Barcelona—and the child is entered as Jorge Agustin Nicolas. His godparents were his uncle Nicolas Ruiz de Santayana and Doña Susana Sturgis, a girl of twelve who was his mother’s daughter by an earlier marriage. Santayana observes that a fortune-teller would have seized on the two English names, Glasgow and Sturgis, as the significant clue, and he credits this young godmother with being his spiritual mother, the one who catechized his childish mind and initiated him into theology, architecture, and polite society—though she did not forbear, in time, to marry his godfather, his uncle Nicolas, a Spanish army major of forty-five already possessed of a wife and child.
Accidents, Fatalism, and the Family Current
How his Catalan mother came to be born in Glasgow and to marry a Bostonian named Sturgis is, he says, an accident of travel, exile, and colonial life—though he insists accidents are accidents only to ignorance, since all physical events flow from one another by continuous intertwined derivation. He declines to nail the flag of fatalism to the mast, calling the laws of nature hasty generalizations, and finds nothing more arbitrary than what always happens or more fatal than what happens once by absolute chance. Yet he sees clear currents in nature’s turbid stream, and his family, like the whole middle and upper class, was borne along on the surface of a treacherous social revolution—a general moral migration.
The Borras Family of Reus
His grandfather, Jose Borras y Bufurull, belonged to a well-established family of Reus, the town whose inhabitants reputedly speak of “Reus, Paris and London.” As a younger son under the law of entail, Jose inherited nothing; the house, land, and almost Roman authority fell to his eldest brother, and younger sons had to seek their fortunes in the Church, the professions, the New World, or a government post. One brother became a monk and later a parish priest in Montevideo or Buenos Aires; Jose went much further. A published history of the Borras family yields almost nothing about him and nothing about Santayana’s mother, and its traditions sometimes diverge from her accounts.
Rousseau, Revolution, and the Flight to Glasgow
The times were unsettled, the French Revolution still reverberating. Jose became a Deist, an ardent disciple of Rousseau, and a suspected Freemason. When a French army entered Spain in 1823 to restore Ferdinand VII’s absolute monarchy, he was compelled, or thought it advisable, to leave the country. He fled first to Las Palmas, where he saw and wooed Teresa Carbonell, a stout blonde with very blue eyes—his mother’s eyes were also blue and large—and after a romantic marriage persuaded her to follow him in his wanderings. The certificate lists her as a native of Barcelona, which is not strictly incompatible with her later living at Las Palmas. Why he chose Glasgow remains a puzzle; Mahon in Minorca had long been under British occupation, and occasions may have arisen to sail from there to Scotland or Lancashire. He seems to have stayed some years, probably giving Spanish lessons and learning English, and the exile in poverty and obscurity may not have been unwelcome, since Catalans are industrially minded and novelty and distance allure them.
Jeffersonian Virginia and the Santayana Name
His thirst for exploration eventually carried him across the Atlantic to rural, republican, Jeffersonian Virginia, where mankind had turned over a new leaf in a clean new world free of absurd traditions and tyrant mortgages—slavery, Santayana notes, being regarded as a temporary necessity, a kindly apprenticeship in the love of labor. Jose either came well recommended or ingratiated himself easily into the democracy of Winchester, Virginia, becoming, as a florid testimonial averred, something of a local figure. Turning to the surname itself, Santayana borrows an etymology from his friend the Marques de Montesa: “Santayana” derives by phonetic corruption from “Santa Juliana,” a shrine in the Cantabrian hills near Santander, which also yields Santillana, the village’s present name. His father’s ancestry points to northwestern Spain and Celt-Iberian blood; his mother’s to Catalonia and the Balearics, shores looking toward Provence and Italy. The name was tolerably well known in Spain—an eighteenth-century ancestor wrote a book on international trade advocating Spartan isolation—and his two forlorn unmarried aunts claimed noble connections no one could trace. The family name was really Ruiz, very common; the addition of “de Santayana” may have been as accidental as “de Espinosa” among Amsterdam Jews, and dropping Ruiz was his father’s doing, causing trouble in legalizing his abbreviated signature. His father loved simplicity, thinking plain Agustin Santayana as pompous a name as his modest position could carry.
Gil Blas and Spiritual Democracy
If he were looking for ancestors, the only famous one Santayana would claim is Gil Blas, whose blood he would like imagining in his veins, for he feels natural sympathy with unprejudiced minds, or rogues. The picaresque world is the real world; lying and trickery are contemptible because the game is not worth the candle, not because the method is unworthy. Gil Blas does not become a saint—his biographer is a Frenchman—but a good bourgeois, rich and happily married; the Spanish spirit demanded another sort of redemption, not prosperity but devotion, the solution Zorilla, a friend of his father’s youth, puts into the mouth of a Don Juan reformed by love. Gil Blas represents a spiritual democracy characteristically Spanish, Christian, or Oriental: an unprejudiced man will live happily in any class of society, finding occasions for merriment and kindness, and only snobs are troubled by inequality. Why assume dignity if you have it not, and if you have it, why parade it? The base and sordid side of life must be confessed and endured humbly; confession and endurance raise you above it.
His Father’s Genteel Poverty
This Spanish dignity in humility was most marked in his father, who lived when necessary, and almost by preference, like the poor. He was bred in the cramped genteel poverty of those poorer than they had to seem—one of twelve children in the household of a minor official with insecure tenure. For supper each had a small bowl of garlic soup, which his father loved in old age and Santayana also liked, especially with a raw egg broken in, as those twelve children were never allowed.
Widowhood, Enterprise, and a Second Marriage
After a crisis that left her a widow, the narrator’s mother showed courage and strength of character. She gathered ready money, pledged her jewels as security, bought or hired a small sailing vessel, engaged a native skipper and supercargo, and began sending hemp for sale in Manila. Though she had few friends in a social sense, those around her were friendly: her cook and maid offered to stay without wages, and her skipper and agent proved faithful. Soon she had gathered a small fund and felt secure and independent. She adopted native dress and may have fancied herself a lady-shepherdess and romantic orphan. Friends of her father in Manila invited her to live with them; later an uncle, a monk in charge of a parish in Montevideo, asked her to join him as his housekeeper. The narrator thinks her other uncle or cousins in Reus, and her mother’s relations, might also have offered to take her in, as orphan cousins or wards are found in bourgeois Spanish families, but she did not desire it.
Her solitary life was disturbed by a new governor sent from Manila to Batang. Now two white persons—a young man and a young lady without a chaperon—were alone together on a tropical island, an idyllic but dangerous picture. To avoid scandal, the young lady returned to Manila. The narrator says the life of pure virtue, by its inner ironical dialectic, transformed itself into conventional life; fate laughed at prudence and decorum, because though she turned her back on the young intruder and went to live with friends in Manila, he was destined many years later to become her second husband and the narrator’s father.
She took refuge with a Creole family in Manila whose head was probably a merchant or landowner rather than a government official. His name was Iparraguirre, a Basque name. The narrator reflects on the Basque element in the Spanish race, comparing Basques to other ancient peoples with strange languages driven to remote coasts, though he distinguishes Norwegians as a biological fountainhead rather than a forlorn remnant. The Iparraguirre family had only one child, Victorina, who became the mother’s second intimate and lifelong friend. Later, in Madrid, where Doña Victorina had gone with her husband, Don Toribio de la Escalera, a former Spanish army officer, the two families lived together for a time; Mercedes, Doña Victorina’s only child, was always regarded as family.
Doña Victorina is remembered as a diminutive, wizened old woman, round-shouldered and sunken in front, seeming hunchbacked, though it was her shoulder-blades that curved forward. The mother also had a right shoulder-blade somewhat bent forward, which she attributed to stretching her arm around her embroidery frame. Doña Victorina was lively, witty, affectionate, interested in everything, with a bright eye and a suggestion of a smile but never laughter. Her vivacity in repose made her a perfect companion for the mother, a link with the gay world that never pulled one into it. She knew everybody and had known everybody, whereas the mother, left to herself, was silent and sad.
Doña Victorina received the narrator at birth and wrapped him in a soft brown shawl that she and Mercedes often showed him, and which Mercedes still keeps at the foot of her bed. Doña Victorina was pious, but this did not obstruct her intimate friendship with the mother. Her piety was ancient, unquestioning, customary, remote from argument or propaganda, emotional only as life’s crises are felt emotionally—christenings, weddings, fêtes, and travels. One went to Mass or a novena punctually, in appropriate dress, then returned to other employments with serenity. The mother skipped piety; it was not in her private tradition, but piety in others did not offend her, and its absence in her did not offend anyone.
For the orphan living with the Iparraguirres, dancing could hardly have been again the chief social pleasure. Manila was too warm for much dancing, but people drove out in the late afternoon around the promenade. When the Angelus bell rang, carriages stopped, men took off their hats, and ladies might whisper an Ave Maria. Some houses held tertulias, daily salons or receptions; there were occasional official balls. Young people could make eyes at each other and marriages could be arranged. The mother always spoke contemptuously of love-making and match-making, yet she herself was twice married, not by simple circumstances but despite serious obstacles. In her, determination rather took passion’s place: she decided what was best and defied difficulties.
It was not best or possible to remain forever a guest of the Iparraguirres; Victorina might marry any day. Going to Montevideo to keep house for her uncle, the parish priest, was an alternative. But there was one wholly exceptional young man in Manila: tall, blond, aquiline, blue-eyed, an American, a Protestant, and unmistakably virtuous. He was probably as little passionate as herself and as little trustful of Spanish young women as she was of Spanish young men. He found her unlike other young girls: grave, silent, proud, blue-eyed like himself, English-speaking, having lived in Virginia, not a bigoted Catholic but a stern, philosophical, virtuous soul, courage personified, alone and penniless, like Benjamin Franklin making her own way. He thought her worthy, safe, suitable, even exceptionally noble and heroic to marry, and safer and more suitable for a merchant in the Far East to be married to a foreigner than not married at all. They would marry, but there was an obstacle: no legal marriage was possible in Manila except in
The Voyage of the Fearless and First Impressions of Boston
The narrator notes a second curious chance: his father was a passenger on the same clipper ship, the Fearless, that carried his mother, her husband, and their little children Susana, Josefina, and Roberto from Manila to Boston in ninety days. The father was traveling to Spain on leave for his health; by taking this roundabout route he could visit New England, New York, and Niagara Falls, glimpse England, and still reach Spain no later than those who sailed directly from Manila, since steamers already ran from New York to Liverpool.
The father wrote an unusually enthusiastic letter describing a genteel Boston suburb—likely Roxbury, which seemed shabby thirty years later when the family lived there. On a Sunday morning, under arching trees between neat wooden dwellings, happy citizens with well-dressed wives and children walked arm in arm to church; it seemed the perfection of human existence realized on earth. The narrator wonders whether the father, had he understood the language and entered the meeting-house, would have been as edified by the mentality as by the aspect. His second visit to the United States produced different impressions: from 1856 to 1872, from rural suburb to half-built town quarter, from summer to winter, from the flowering of New England to its industrialization, and from the prime of his life to its decline, many things had changed. Late in life, shown comic verses by the narrator comparing America with England—satirizing American men but complimenting the ladies—the father said, “No. The women there are just as second-rate as the men.” The narrator wonders whether the father took the passing compliment too seriously, fearing the narrator might marry an American, or whether his earlier view was colored by amorous sentiments awakened during the voyage by an interesting young mother seen for ninety days on deck and at table.
Susana and the Spanish Court
Susana’s enthusiasm for Queen Isabella was fed by family friends with court connections—Doña Primitiva and her daughter Milagros, a spirited young woman who smoked cigars and was rumoured to roam the streets at night dressed as a man. Their gossip painted the Queen as generous and regal, and Susana’s ardour lasted until the Queen once stopped her, asked her name, and parted with a vague word about the future. Later, in Madrid, Doña Primitiva arranged for Susana to attend a formal palace reception. Their mother, who detested royalties and priests, excused herself on grounds of health; she would never have kissed the hand of a Queen she considered so little virtuous. Her policy of laissez-faire let Susana go, and Susana, a gifted mimic, delighted the family afterwards by acting out everything she had seen.
That same laissez-faire had unpleasant consequences years later in Avila, when the Marqués de Novaliches conveyed a virtual invitation for Susana to become a lady-in-waiting to the Infanta Isabel. The mother was enraged, refused to see him, feigned illness, and left the father to make excuses: her illness, the family’s imminent departure for the United States, and the project’s incompatibility with their plans and modest means. Susana probably never knew of the proposal, and never expressed regret. The incident, together with the attentions of several young suitors, hastened the mother’s resolve to escape to Boston and bred in her a distrust of Susana as disloyal. Boston did not cure that disloyalty: Susana fell into the snares of the Jesuits and religious enthusiasm.
Avila, El Chenique, and the Return to Spain
Susana had always warmed to vivid doctrines and practices—children’s games, social pleasures, a reigning Queen—as spontaneous ways of giving life shape and enjoying it intensely, always with a touch of comedy. Toward the Queen that satire eventually became conscious; she kept her sympathy with royalties while laughing at her own pleasure in their vanities. In religion, however, she barred all dramatic insight or transcendental laughter, condemning it in herself as diabolical—a sad fate, to be solemn and fanatical against her nature and to the ruin of her happiness.
From fifteen to eighteen, in Avila, she dominated a limited field easily and happily. Avila was the quietest of provincial capitals, its tertulias gathering local worthies, with a Casino, a café, a billiard room, a dancing hall, and a small stage. An inner circle called El Chenique staged amateur plays, and Susana took the leading parts, though she later seemed to forget those years. Her sister Josefina, two years younger, timid and dull, took little part but retained every detail, so that she and the narrator could later reconstruct whole farces such as La Casa de Camyo and Las Hijas de Elena. When life in America failed Susana—in society, at home, and in the convent—she returned instinctively to Avila, renewed acquaintance with a few quiet devout ladies, lived in her father’s poor man’s house, and eventually married one of those presentable young men, now a widower with six children, whom she had danced with at El Chenique.
Boston, the Convent, and the Chasm
America affected Susana as it affected the narrator. The kind, civilized Bostonians who became their friends won their interest, affection, and confidence; they laughed with them, not at them. But beneath it all lay a chasm, bridgeable only by friends of the heart who shared one’s religion or philosophy—and for Susana that meant Catholics. At eighteen in Boston none of the Sturgises were Catholics, though at first it seemed not to matter, and she plunged heartily into that society. Her merry account of the Sturgis family and Boston was friendly but frankly comic.
In 1876 Uncle Robert, head of the Philadelphia Sturgises, died, and his widow invited Susana to stay. Aunt Susie had never seemed sympathetic, but Susana inspired confidence, and the visit produced a lasting affection not for the aunt but for the youngest child, Maisie, with whom she later corresponded from Spain. Aunt Susie also sent two trunks of almost-new gay dresses, useless to a widow in mourning; adapted, they furnished Susana’s wardrobe for years—the narrator remembers a salmon-coloured dress with an overskirt, yellow scalloped edges, and a wealth of trimming.
The first five years in Roxbury were the darkest of Susana’s life. Between thirty and thirty-five, with her sewing-circle and parties past, sullen disunion at home, and no new interests, she read and re-read Santa Teresa, conceived plans of offering her life for the family’s salvation, and wondered whether she had a vocation. Her confessor, Father Fulton of the Jesuit College, had a philosophical, sleepy mind and did not positively dissuade her; when tested, he advised her not to persist, but the experiment brought untold conflicts and disappointments that more wisdom could have avoided. Coming home from church one day, the narrator said he was better fitted for the cloister; she replied that he had the one required thing—he was detached—while she lacked it completely, unhappy entering the convent of her own will and happy leaving it by her superiors’ advice. She was too old at thirty-four, full of memories and attachments, tired and sleepless. Her protestations that she loved their mother very much struck the narrator as strange; perhaps this morbid love was hypnotic, or a verbal cloak for her craving to be loved—a symptom of her radical unfitness for asceticism.
She spent three months as a Postulant, then became a Novice, her hair cut, wearing the habit and white veil. Years later in Avila she told the narrator and cousin Elvira that her attachment to the Mistress of Novices was the strongest she had ever felt—evidence, he thought, that she had never been much in love with her admirers or future husband, and that her love for their mother was never spontaneous but unwilling subjection. The nun’s pious, motherly letters brought her spiritual consolation. Before six months of novitiate ended, it was agreed she should leave. Their mother then did a kind thing: she and Josefina spent the winter in a Baltimore boarding house so that Susana need not return home directly. When they returned to Boston, the narrator was about to leave for Avila and student life in Germany. Susana lived almost in seclusion, and the next winter decided to return to Spain for some years, living alternately with Doña Victorina and their father—practicable now that Robert, come of age, had taken charge of the family property and the Sturgis children had come into their modest money, a few hundred dollars a year, enough in Spain. The narrator met her at Gibraltar in September 1887 and returned with her to Avila; in winter she joined Doña Victorina and Mercedes in Madrid. She still had one foot in the stirrup: could she live as a paying guest forever, return to dreary Roxbury, or persuade their mother to move back to Spain? Only Robert’s good management of the property was favourable.
Avila as Oppidum: Walls, Clergy, and Custom
The narrator reflects that his second principal attachment, Boston and Harvard, mirrors his attachment to Avila; the extreme contrast between the two reveals the limitations of both.
Herr Schmidt and the Flight to Avila
The Alsatian tutor Herr Schmidt belongs to the unstable compromises produced by the narrator’s parents’ marriage. His father, who had lived in Madrid, found the climate unbearable in summer and winter alike, and his mother, needing to return to Boston, finally escaped with all the children on the express to Paris—only for the father’s eloquent remonstrances, backed by his right to keep at least the boy, to bring the family back. They settled in Avila, where no education could be had, so a young Alsatian was engaged: French and German native to him, a little English, modest demands, excellent character. Installed as a boarder with a poor widow, he taught daily lessons in the sunny back room—until German Cupid arrived over the flowerpots. Though this was before the Franco-Prussian War, Schmidt showed all the sentimentality of a pure German, whispering “Je vous aime” to Susana between the difficult names of the Harzgebirge. He was sixteen and had to be sent away, which the narrator considers a great injustice, since Schmidt wrote a long letter declaring his wish to marry Susana and his willingness to establish himself in America on nothing a year.
Uncle Santiago’s Household
The collapse of this superior international education made it urgent to send Robert to America, separating him from the narrator for five years; two more years passed before the mother and sisters followed. Of that interval the narrator remembers nothing, but then his uncle Santiago came to live with them, with his wife Maria Josefa and daughter Antonita, opening a new and distinct chapter. The narrator did not understand what was happening, but the force of it impressed his young mind and established a criterion of reality: that crowded, strained, disunited, tragic family life remains for him the type of what life really is—something confused, hideous, and useless. He neither hated nor rebelled, for he had suffered nothing; he was a child carried along as in a baby-carriage through a crowd of strangers, his eyes and ears growing accustomed to the unvarnished truth of the world, neither selected for his instruction nor hidden from him for his benefit.
Maria Josefa and the Marriage of Antonita
Aunt Maria Josefa was frankly a woman of the people, most at home in her kitchen in a large blue apron; the narrator never forgets the taste of her fried peppers and eggs and her great soft torta. A native of Jaen with a strong Andalusian accent, she spoke in diminutives and augmentatives, her every passion flowing out in unrestrained litanies of sorrow or endearment. She could hardly read or write, and her simplicity was so great that she would casually remark that Antonita had been a siete mesina, a seven-months child, from which anyone could gather the reason for her marriage. For the uncle the marriage had been unintended and undesirable—he was too young and she too common—but having got the poor girl into trouble he nobly made the amende honorable; terrible as the sacrifice would have been had he possessed ability or ambition, as things were it rendered poverty perhaps easier to bear. Poverty was not the only misfortune: Antonita and her child died.
Granada and the Tanner’s Brother
When the worst was over, the narrator found his aunt living in Granada with a brother who was a tanner, during the summer of 1893, when he had reached Spain via Gibraltar. His mother and he sent Maria Josefa a small allowance so that she was well received in her brother’s household. The tannery occupied the court of an old, possibly Moorish house, skins hanging drying from the gallery. To do the honors of the city, the brother took the narrator to see the University, which would not otherwise have occurred to him to visit. In the library stood a large globe; to make talk, the narrator offered to show the voyage he had just made from America, when the brother asked, “But which is Spain?—What, that little spot? I thought it was this,” and pointed to Africa. It occurred to the narrator that some great wits before him had seen no difference between Africa and Spain, but he did not go into the intricacies of that opinion.
Schooling in Avila
During the three years he was separated from his mother, the narrator attended school irregularly—a large, darkish ground-floor room in a public building opposite their house, entered around the Oñate tower into the back lane. Children stood in circles around the teacher, sometimes only an older lad, reciting the lesson after him; he remembers no individual questions, nor reading or writing instruction, yet they somehow learned both. He had two books: the cartilla and, perhaps in a later year, the catechism, whose Sacred History he recalls only through the picture of Moses striking the rock, but whose Christian Doctrine he remembers virtually entire—an excellent catechism that let him all his life detect the sapor haereticus of dangerous doctrine at first hearing. He dwells on the dogma that God is everywhere by his essence, presence, and power; the first clause remained obscure, since if God is everywhere by essence everything would seem essentially divine, a vulgar pantheism, so its meaning must be recondite and qualified. The other two clauses are luminous.
The First Voyage to America
His first voyage, had he not been deadly seasick, might have initiated him into primitive mariners’ life: they sailed the high seas in an open boat, a little freight steamer from Bilbao to Cardiff, hardly more than a tug, visibly freighted with reddish earth he believed was iron ore. The Bay of Biscay confirmed its bad reputation, but on the third day came sunshine and smooth water, and he recovered instantly—quick complete recovery characterizes his ill turns, especially seasickness, which purges the system. He loves moving water, ships, the sharp definition and sublime solitude of sea life; its dangers make present the peril inherent in all existence, which the untravelled land-worm never discovers, and its mathematical art appeals to courage, clears the mind of superstition, and fills it with humility and true religion. The world is a cockleshell amid overwhelming forces and everlasting realities, but those forces are calculable and those realities helpful if understood and obeyed.
In the Bristol Channel, in sight of the Welsh coast—smooth grassy hillsides, gray-green in slight mist, dotted with little white houses—he watched several boats with white sails, probably small yachts, and noted a British trait: a sporting youthfulness of the Anglo-Saxon he was to love much. On landing came an ungainly impression of Britain: arriving on a Sunday into non-conformist ugliness and desolation, lodged in a too modest quarter near the port, seeing only mean little brick houses in a straight street wet with rain, no soul stirring. When the rain ceased they came upon a forbidding castle wall skirted by the old High Street, learning this was the seat of the Marquis of Bute—another British note, the living survival of mediaeval material and moral in modern England.
Liverpool and the Samaria
Next day they travelled to Liverpool, where he remembers only the docks, with long inclined ways paved with cobblestones leading between great warehouses to the water’s edge. There they crept into a small rowboat to reach their ship. Several large vessels rode at anchor; his father pointed to the ugliest and most dwarfish, saying it would be theirs.
Angels, Doctrine, and a Boy’s Religion
The narrative turns first to theology, and to the Immaculate Conception—the doctrine that Mary, though born like anyone else, was preserved from Adam’s sin in view of the redemption her Son would accomplish. An inscription on a monument in Rome’s Piazza di Spagna is recalled, swearing by the Most High that He had sanctified His tabernacle. The narrator once complained to his sister about female angels, wondering how learned Jesuits could tolerate such a lapse; she answered that angels are sexless, so artists might paint them as young men, boys, infants, or occasionally women. He grants this is theologically sound—angels have no bodies, and according to St. Thomas each is the sole member of its species—but insists theology about angels is secondary: vision, inspiration, tradition, and literature come first. A Christian painter cares not what angels are in heaven but how they look visiting earth; imagination has hereditary idioms, and an artist working for a Christian people is carried along by the same tradition that shaped his Church’s doctrines. A footnote notes that the Jewish Book of the Jubilees held angels in heaven to be circumcised.
The survey of angelic appearances follows: the angels at Abraham’s tent and the one who wrestled with Jacob were plainly men; in the Old Testament angels are often strangers or travellers, recognized only afterward as angels of the Lord. Gabriel, appearing to Mary, is no less masculine than Michael, and his figure, like St. Joseph’s, was avoided in early Christian art until faith’s idiom became native—after which charming Annunciations could be designed. Crude evidence of angels’ sex appears in Genesis, where the angels sent to warn Lot cause commotion in Sodom; the two “young men” in white at the empty tomb speak mystically of not seeking the living among the dead, sex present only in the firmness with which it is suppressed.
The narrator then turns to himself as a boy: he was not pious, and daily life had little to do with religion. He dreamed in class, learned accuracy with perpetual effort, and felt he could have learned as much in half the time. His dreams bred no convictions or duties and had nothing to do with the poverty-stricken real world; at bottom he was a young realist who knew he was dreaming and so was awake. He never had superstition; following dogma and keeping feasts was part of the game, and the allegorical pageant passed unchallenged because its dramatic logic satisfied him. He never shuddered at eternal damnation as innocent Unitarians did, nor was he overawed like Calvinists; hell is set down in the bond like Shylock’s pound of flesh—the play requires it. Damnation must be eternal because every loss and pain is irremediable; nothing that has occurred can be annulled. But he never feared a material hell or desired a material heaven; such images were violent, childish, comic.
His faith was “clear in faith’s divine moonlight,” “my only friend,” “too like despair,” ending in “peace.” He had no wish for confession; his faith was so vague it was not faith at all but fondness, liking. He kept his freedom, agreeing with the Church about the world yet ready to agree with the world about the Church, breathing more easily in religion than in business because religion was more ideal, more freely imaginary, and in a material sense falser. Verses written at fifteen or sixteen are quoted, and seven years later a Byronic poem, “At the Church Door,” with a stanza on salvation as a trick of reason and roses that do not bloom in winter. A footnote records a bird-fancier friend’s observation that birds pluck feathers from their breasts for nest-building, which the narrator corrected in his manuscript.
At the Church Door
A step in clarification follows: from the Immaculate Conception to the church door, no change in sentiment—he was still at the church door. Yet he no longer wavered between alternate views of the world; there was only one possible play, the actual world of nature and mankind, though other characters and soliloquies might be found among religions and idealistic philosophies—profound, like Hamlet’s soliloquy, but only parts of the play, their value as criticism lying in fidelity to facts and sentiments. Two further steps remained before his philosophy was complete, to be spoken of when his successive books arrive: the dissolution of every form of life into relative virtues, and the right of natures to pursue their own self-definition. Why, he asks, did he stand so long at the church door, regretting never having lived inside? He might prefer an imaginary Atlantis but should not languish after it. There was in him a congenital idealism, long before he heard of transcendentalism—a spontaneous feeling that life is a dream, that the world might disappear or be transformed, with no presumption for anything. This invincible intuition leaves the mind empty and rescinds all faith; were it the principle of life it would condemn us to suspended animation, the crystal vision, and his childish verses “To the Moon” and “To the Host.” The light of spirit is pure and unprejudiced, but it is kindled by something else and must fall on something else.
Bayley, Potter, and the Model for The Last Puritan
A new chapter opens with a brief, intense friendship from sixty years before that the narrator struggles to explain. He compares this friend, Bayley, to Warwick Potter—Bayley like a stronger version of Potter, whose character was made more describable by superior social background and breeding, raised in the most select American way, though not merely through wealth or fashion. In the 1890s Potter, younger than Warwick, was drawn to the plastic arts and would have developed further had he lived. Both shared a purity free from the contaminations common to the very young; Potter delighted in good ways and was religious, his love of historic Christianity linking him to a world beyond America, at home in England and the Church.
How, the narrator asks, did Bayley—lacking breeding and education—possess a deeper spiritual intelligence? Why did his strict Puritan inwardness produce charity and hospitality of mind rather than narrowness? Bayley was not “liberal” in the sense of indifference; he was devoted to his beliefs. The narrator calls himself a New Englander yet accepts and envies Bayley for something he was not and did not expect to be—honest religious comprehension that there are many vintages in the Lord’s vineyard. Where did Bayley learn this? Perhaps from sermons or casual reading: Milton with his Latinity and Italian sonnets, the young Emerson of Nature, “a sort of Puritan Goethe,” before he fell into transcendentalism and complacency. The narrator may be reading his own ideals into Bayley, but thinks Bayley had something more than those great men: humility and renunciation—”a dumb inglorious Milton who was not a prig, an Emerson with warm blood.” Young Bayley was his first, perhaps fundamental, model for The Last Puritan. It was the discovery that they were both—differently—religious that made them quickly sure of each other; their trust was instinctive, complete, and silent, lasting sixty years. Recently he asked a Boston friend at Cortina about his first friends, Warren and Bayley: did he know them, were they living, what had become of them?
Tarragona and the Family of Tío Nicolás
The narrator turns to his father’s old affection for tío Nicolás, a feeling mixed with bitterness. In their youth Nicolás had been placed in a monastery and became a monk, but scarcely had he taken his vows when the Government suppressed all monasteries in Spain except a few supplying missionaries for the Colonies, dispersing their monies. A place was eventually found for him as parish priest in a village, where he needed a housekeeper. The narrator’s grandmother—punctilious, vehement in piety, poor, and burdened with twelve children—had two eldest daughters disinclined to become nuns. Thinking clerical life better for them than a modest marriage, she proposed the eldest, Mariquita, as housekeeper to the young priest, her cousin. The narrator notes the confidence this showed in divine grace, placing a young man and woman, practically strangers, under one roof on equal terms; a triumph of chastity over propinquity would have been admirable, but the contrary was more probable. A child soon appeared playing in that village; though no more children followed, the situation’s forced mendacity was unpleasant to consider.
The father’s affectionate tone and loyal conduct toward his family never varied; he sometimes quarrelled but soon made up, reverting to fundamental tolerance and deference toward all mankind. He combined enthusiasm and extreme courtesy with a total absence of illusions about the person favored—as when he courted the narrator’s mother, “as it were against his will.” Tío Nicolás’s conduct surprised nobody; his ecclesiastical superiors must have said, like Mephistopheles of Gretchen, he was not the first. The matter was unfortunate but overlooked, not interfering with his priesthood or his ultimately becoming a canon.
Irregularities breed irregularities. The father had secured for his youngest brother Manuel a small post in the Philippine Islands, opening a career and eventual pension. Spain was not then capitalist; nobody had money; the middle class held government positions expecting pensions. A colonial post was a virtual settlement. The father’s chagrin came when Manuel, leaving for Manila, was found to have been married off by Nicolás and Mariquita to their “niece”—a girl both cousin and niece of her husband. The narrator’s father called it outrageous: Manuel, who might have made his way in Manila society, was condemned to wallow in a tropical pigsty. It was this Manuel, with wife Hermenegilda and two surviving children, Manuela and Juan, that the narrator found living at Tarragona with tío Nicolás and Aunt Mariquita.
The family was unattractive, complicated, crowded in a modest ill-furnished flat, yet the narrator saw the human necessity of loyalty to one’s blood apart from inclinations, which his father practised. He brought no blessing, imposing endless trouble and responsibility, faced bravely, placing him under permanent obligation to acknowledge and assist them. After a hot journey, especially waiting at the station in Lérida, he reached Tarragona, singling out tío Nicolás by his clerical robes—a stout, sound, white-haired old gentleman, dignified and affable—with uncle Manuel passive, modest, limp, insignificant. At the house, two aunts and two cousins were embraced. Feeling dazed and unwell, he could eat nothing of the elaborate supper, excused himself on grounds of fatigue and heat, then became unmistakably ill and was put to bed. He had been delirious, talking in English and Spanish about imaginary things; the doctor spoke of high gastric fever. After a day or two an eruption appeared; they were relieved—it was only smallpox, a mild case. It was troublesome, but as crusts fell off he had rather a convalescence. Told not to scratch his face, he has no marks on his body, where he was free to scratch, and a few, not very obvious, precisely on his nose. His father came on hearing the news; his mother telegraphed asking for a cable, which could be brief and favorable.
The Cathedral was directly opposite; father and son walked in the cloisters, both given to pacing like beasts in a cage, but a continuous cloister has advantages of enclosed smooth space with fresh air. It was a nice cloister, with the dark gray castle-like Cathedral overshadowing it and one immense slanting palm tree spreading its crown victoriously. They were by the shores of the Mediterranean; a short walk took them to the ancient citadel overhanging the nutshell port. It was his first glimpse of that sacred sea, but the foreground was more vivid than distances; only years later, going by sea from Málaga to Gibraltar, did the full sense of ploughing Homeric waters come over him, expressed in the Ode written on that occasion. Here the accent fell on ancient Tarraco, with its Roman castle still standing, its Spanish mixture of Carthaginian and Celtic suggestions—capital of all northeastern Spain, more noble and Spanish than modern Barcelona—its archiepiscopal see retaining vestiges of preeminence. Its canons wore red silk cassocks like cardinals, with purple stockings; tío Nicolás, once handsome, looked very grand in his vestments.
He had a jovial temperament, carrying his heavy burden of flesh and responsibility with good grace, and was no fool. Hearing him and the father talk, the narrator compared them, wondering which had the sounder, riper mind. The father was better informed and freer to express himself; yet tío Nicolás seemed at home in a rich humanistic world of men, affairs, convention, and religion, on which the father had turned his back with strange hatred. The narrator can sympathize with preference for obscurity and solitude, preferring them for himself, but that does not settle the question of which mind was sounder.
College Friends: Charles Loeser
The narrator reflects on his deepest friendships, formed individually rather than through shared circles, class, or nation. He first discusses Charles Loeser, whom he met by accident in another man’s room; Loeser immediately took him next door to show him his books and pictures, which struck the keynote of their companionship. Loeser spoke French well and presumably better German, had attended a good international school in Switzerland, and frankly told the narrator he was a Jew—a frankness that cleared away pitfalls and insincerities. Loeser’s father owned a vast dry-goods store in Brooklyn and was rich, so his son always had money and never thought of a profession. Loeser showed him books and pictures he had collected, the beginnings of his passion for possessing and stroking objets d’art. This occurred in the narrator’s Freshman year, before his first return to Europe. Loeser had a tremendous advance in these matters, seeming to have seen everything and to speak every language; Berenson had the same advantage with public reputation, but the narrator felt more secure under Loeser’s sign, sensing he loved the Italian renaissance rather than merely displaying it. They read books Loeser lent, discussed them, and sometimes went to the theatre at Loeser’s invitation; foreign companies often played in Boston—French operetta, Salvini, Ristori, grand opera. The narrator saw everything, not at his own expense in the first years. He denies sponging on rich friends, noting he fled from many rich people, but friendship was easier with sympathetic people who had a house or could invite him on trips. Loeser was his first Maecenas of this kind.
Main Arguments
The book’s central argument, if it can be called that, is that a human life is not a series of disconnected accidents but a continuous derivation, each event flowing from those that preceded it in ways that may be obscure to the participant but are nonetheless real. Santayana makes this point explicitly in the first chapter, when he considers how his mother, evidently Catalan, came to be born in Glasgow and to marry a Bostonian named Sturgis. These seem like accidents of travel and exile, but he argues that accidents are accidents only to ignorance, since all physical events flow from one another by continuous intertwined derivation. He declines to nail the flag of fatalism to the mast—the laws of nature, he says, are hasty generalizations—but he finds clear stretches and traceable currents in nature’s turbid stream, and he sees his family and his whole social class borne along on the surface-currents of a treacherous social revolution.
A second argument concerns the relationship between character and circumstance. Santayana is interested in how the accidents of geography, family, and fortune shape the people who experience them, but he is equally interested in how people respond to those accidents. His father, he suggests, was a man of natural dignity and independence who was nonetheless undermined by chronic ill health, particularly by the dysentery that destroyed his will’s trust in itself. His mother, by contrast, was a woman of determination and courage who defied difficulties and decided what was best without regard to passion. The contrast between them is not simply a matter of temperament but of how each responded to the circumstances in which they found themselves.
A third argument, developed through the portraits of the Sturgis family, concerns the decline of a social type. The Great Merchants, as Santayana calls them, were men who made fortunes abroad in a phase of development that has passed away. Their virtues—wealth, kindness, honesty, competence—were real, but they were also limited, and their children inherited the limitations without the opportunities. Santayana watches the family’s fortunes decline with a kind of elegiac detachment, noting how the glamour of the Great Merchants faded and how the aristocratic path to success and power in Boston became business rather than commerce. This is not a moral judgment but an observation about the way social forms change and the way individual lives are shaped by forces beyond their control.
A fourth argument, implicit throughout, concerns the value of detachment. Santayana’s mother, he notes, was “detached” in a way that fitted her for the cloister, and he himself claims a similar detachment. This is not indifference but a capacity to see one’s own life and circumstances from a certain distance, to recognize their limitations and contingency without being enslaved by them. The book itself is an exercise in this detachment, an attempt to understand a life without either celebrating or condemning it, and to find in that understanding a kind of freedom.
Key Concepts
Several concepts recur throughout the book and give it its intellectual texture. The first is the idea of oppidum in agris, which Santayana uses to describe Avila. The phrase captures something essential about the town: it is a walled city, a defensible eminence, a place where country people collected and walled in their granaries, leaving an open space for meetings and fairs. But it is also so small and so surrounded by countryside that it seems to be in the country rather than apart from it. This is the opposite of rus in urbe, the country in the city, which describes a great English country house with its park and subject farms. Avila is urbs ruri—the city in the country—or rather oppidum in agris, a fortified town in the fields.
The second concept is that of the Great Merchants, the social type represented by the Sturgis family. These were men who made fortunes abroad, in Manila and China and other distant places, in a phase of commercial development that has passed away. They were not merely businessmen; they were representatives of a way of life, a set of virtues, and a relationship to the world that Santayana describes with a mixture of admiration and elegy. The Great Merchants were replaced in America by great business men or millionaires building fortunes at home, and the pathos of their story lies in the fact that their virtues were impossible for their children to inherit.
The third concept is that of spiritual democracy, which Santayana associates with Gil Blas and the picaresque tradition. An unprejudiced man, he suggests, will happily live in any class of society, finding occasions for merriment, pleasure, and kindness. Only snobs are troubled by inequality or exclusion from something accidental. This is a characteristically Spanish, Christian, or Oriental attitude, and it is embodied in the figure of the rogue who despises the world and cheats it only to laugh at it. When the rogue tires or is ruined, he may turn his free spirit toward higher things, or like the good thief in Calvary recognize their existence.
The fourth concept is that of the lares, the household gods. Santayana uses this term to describe the figures who were worshipped in his own household—his father, his mother, Uncle Russell, and others who represented for him the perfection of manhood or womanhood. These were not gods in any literal sense but ideals, models of what a human being could be, and they shaped his imagination in ways he only later came to understand. The lares are the ancestors not of blood but of spirit, the figures who inhabit the inner world of a child and give it its moral geography.
Themes
The most pervasive theme of the book is the relationship between place and identity. Santayana’s life was divided between two worlds—Spain and America, Avila and Boston—and he treats this division not as a misfortune but as a blessing. The extreme contrast between the two centers, he writes, reveals the limitations and contingency of both. Avila’s dignity was too obsolete and inopportune to do more than stimulate an already awakened imagination and lend reality to history; at Harvard, a wealth of books and generous intellectual sincerity coexisted with spiritual penury and moral confusion. Each place offered a maximum of air, space, and suggestion, and a minimum of deceptiveness and power to enslave. The orphan mind had to bring a firm soul to this World’s Fair and escape its merry-go-round to make sense of anything or know its own mind.
A second theme is the nature of inheritance—not merely biological but cultural and spiritual. Santayana is descended from Spanish hidalgos and Catalan merchants, from Boston Brahmins and East Indian expatriates, and he is heir to all their traditions. But inheritance is not a simple matter of receiving; it is also a matter of choosing, of deciding which elements of one’s heritage to claim and which to reject. Santayana’s father loved simplicity and thought plain Agustin Santayana as pompous a name as his modest position could carry; his mother was too proud to pretend to care for what did not concern her. The author inherits both attitudes, and the book is in part an attempt to reconcile them.
A third theme is the decline of social forms. The Sturgis family, the Great Merchants, the old Boston, the walled city of Avila—all are presented as things that were once vital and are now passing away. Santayana watches this decline with a kind of elegiac detachment, noting how the glamour of the Great Merchants faded and how the old colonial culture of Boston lingered only in a few survivors. This is not a lament but an observation, and it is connected to the author’s larger philosophical view that all things are transient and that the wise man learns to accept their passing without being enslaved by it.
A fourth theme is the relationship between character and circumstance. Santayana’s father was a man of natural dignity and independence who was undermined by chronic ill health; his mother was a woman of determination and courage who defied difficulties and decided what was best without regard to passion. His sister Susana was abundantly alive, warming towards religious doctrines and practices as she did towards anything interesting and vivid, but she fell against all dramatic insight in religion and condemned the laughter that came round the corner as diabolical. The book is full of such studies, each one an attempt to understand how a particular character was formed by the circumstances in which it found itself.
A fifth theme, perhaps the deepest, is the nature of memory itself. Santayana is acutely aware that memory is not a simple recording of past events but a reconstruction, colored by present concerns and shaped by the needs of the remembering self. He cautions against identifying the moral color of a memory with that originally proper to the fact remembered: Sunday morning in Roxbury may once have seemed ideal and been recorded in a letter, yet decades later looked mediocre or ridiculous, like thirty-year-old fashions. His philosophy would retain both impressions, each proper to the essence then present, but discount and smile at both as absolute assertions about Roxbury in fact or the unrecoverable feelings of a New England Sunday. This awareness gives the book its peculiar tone—nostalgic and detached at once, affectionate and ironic, always aware that the past it describes is not the past as it was but the past as it has been remembered.
The Author’s Conclusions
Santayana does not offer explicit conclusions in the manner of a philosophical treatise, but certain convictions emerge from the book as a whole. The first is that a life is not a series of disconnected accidents but a continuous derivation, each event flowing from those that preceded it in ways that may be obscure but are nonetheless real. This does not mean that everything is determined; Santayana declines to nail the flag of fatalism to the mast. But it does mean that the wise man learns to see his life as a whole, to trace the currents that have carried him, and to understand himself as a product of forces larger than himself.
The second conviction is that detachment is a virtue. Santayana’s mother was detached in a way that fitted her for the cloister, and he himself claims a similar detachment. This is not indifference but a capacity to see one’s own life and circumstances from a certain distance, to recognize their limitations and contingency without being enslaved by them. The book itself is an exercise in this detachment, an attempt to understand a life without either celebrating or condemning it.
The third conviction is that the past is not a burden but a resource. Santayana’s divided inheritance—Spanish and American, Catholic and Protestant, old world and new—might have been a source of confusion and conflict, but he treats it as a source of richness. The extreme contrast between Avila and Boston reveals the limitations and contingency of both, and the orphan mind that has to bring a firm soul to this World’s Fair and escape its merry-go-round can make sense of anything and know its own mind. The book ends not with a resolution but with a beginning, the author’s college studies completed and his mind beginning to find its own direction.
The final chapters on college friends and college studies describe the intellectual formation that would lead to Santayana’s philosophical career. He records the books he read, the teachers who influenced him, and the friends who became his companions. The tone is grateful but not uncritical; he recognizes the limitations of Harvard’s intellectual culture as clearly as he recognizes its virtues. The book closes with the author on the threshold of his adult life, his education complete, his character formed, his mind beginning to find its own direction. It is not an ending so much as a beginning, and that is appropriate for a book that is subtitled “The Background of My Life.”
Significance
Persons and Places occupies a distinctive place in Santayana’s oeuvre and in the literature of autobiography. It is not a confession in the manner of Rousseau or Augustine, nor a chronicle of public events in the manner of many political memoirs. It is rather a meditation on the formation of a mind and character, an attempt to understand how a particular human being came to be what he is. In this it resembles such works as Henry Adams’s The Education of Henry Adams, though Santayana’s tone is less ironic and more accepting than Adams’s.
The book is significant, first, as a record of a vanished world. The Boston of the 1850s and 1860s, the Avila of the 1870s, the Manila of the 1840s and 1850s—all are described with a vividness that brings them to life for readers who never knew them. Santayana is a master of the telling detail, whether he is describing the rounded red-brick bay windows of the Tremont House, the garlic soup that was supper for twelve children in his father’s family, or the black beard that General Novaliches wore to conceal the scar from his wound at Alcolea. These details are not merely decorative; they are the means by which the past is made present.
The book is significant, second, as a study in the formation of a philosopher. Santayana would go on to become one of the most distinctive philosophical voices of the twentieth century, the author of The Life of Reason, Scepticism and Animal Faith, and The Realms of Being. Persons and Places shows us the soil out of which that philosophy grew—the Spanish dignity and detachment, the American openness and energy, the Catholic imagination and the Protestant conscience, the love of essence and the acceptance of contingency. It is not necessary to know Santayana’s philosophy to appreciate the book, but the book illuminates the philosophy for those who do.
The book is significant, third, as a work of literature. Santayana’s prose is among the finest of his era—clear, flexible, capable of both precision and suggestiveness, always under the control of a mind that knows what it wants to say. He can be witty without being cruel, tender without being sentimental, philosophical without being abstract. The portraits of his father and mother, of Uncle Russell and Uncle James, of his sister Susana, are among the finest character studies in autobiographical literature. The meditation on Avila as oppidum in agris is a small masterpiece of descriptive prose. The book as a whole is a demonstration of how autobiography can be both a record of individual experience and a meditation on universal themes.
Finally, the book is significant as a testament to a particular vision of life. Santayana’s detachment, his acceptance of contingency, his recognition that all things pass and that the wise man learns to let them go—these are not fashionable attitudes in any age, but they are perennial, and they find in Persons and Places one of their most persuasive expressions. The book does not argue for this vision; it embodies it. It shows us a man who has come to terms with his own history, who can look back on the accidents of ancestry and geography that made him what he is without either resentment or self-congratulation, and who can find in that backward look a kind of peace. That is a rare achievement, and it is what gives Persons and Places its enduring value.
