Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 25 Fall 2007

              "Primeval Automatism"
Santayana's Later Aesthetics
Reason, with its tragic discoveries and restraints, cannot stand alone; brute habit and blind
play are at the bottom of art and morals, and unless irrational impulses and fancies are kept
alive, the life of reason collapses for sheer emptiness. SANTAYANA
Writing to the art collector and critic Martin Bimbaum in 1946, Santayana
pressed him on the difference between naturalistic and symbolic painting. The
discussion was initiated by Bimbaum's recent book on John Singer Sargent.l
I write to thank you very much for your reminiscences of Sargent, including those of
Henry James and the plates of some of Sargent's paintings and drawings, I wish that you
had gone more systematically into the problem of naturalistic versus eccentric or symbolic
painting. It is a subject about which my own mind is undecided. My sympathies are initially
with classic tradition, and in that sense with Sargent's school; yet for that very reason I fear
to be unjust to the eccentric and abstract inspiration of persons perhaps better inspired. (L
7:218)
Any quick gloss of Santayana's early writings will show the measure of his sympathy
with naturalism and classicism. And yet Santayana's letter stands out within his
voluminous body of correspondence for its clear admission of indecision.
Nonetheless, the feeling of indecision is a long-standing one and It haunts his aesthetic
judgements from the beginning. Virtually the same remark appears in a letter written
sixty years earlier to his friend Henry Ward Abbot: "Greek statues," he writes in 1887,
"say so much more to me than any other form of art, and the Greek view of life and
nature appeals to me so strongly, that I am unjust to other forms" (l 1:44). The sense
of injustice toward those forms of art and thought that were foreign to his sensibility is
something that comes up again and again in his correspondence.
At no point in Sargent, A Conversation Piece does Bimbaum explicitly take up
the issue of naturalism versus symbolism in painting; most likely Santayana is
referring to a passage like the following:
As Henry James had admirably said, perception with Sargent was already by itself a kind of
execution. It is true that for the most part, he, like Velasquez, was occupied with facts, not
ideas. He told Arthur Rubenstein that he treated his themes objectively, not subjectively and
therefore when his sitters were uninteresting, Sargent's portraits were not great successes ...
Referring, half in jest and half in earnest to this dependence on vision, and to his reserve,
Henry James once said that Sargent "neither penetrates nor is penetrated." (JSS 12-13)
Sargent was a man whom the Germans might have called an Augenmensch. It was his
reliance on sight and visibility, the premium he placed on details and exactitude —
"facts, not ideas" as Bimbaum says — that characterizes his enterprise as a whole. It
was also these traits that exasperated Santayana. Santayana goes on to query
Bimbaum, and implicitly James, if they are perhaps mistaken in their representation of
Sargent as a strictly "objective" painter. "I had always thought that, perhaps unawares
he betrayed analytic and satirical powers of a high order, so that his portraits were
1 Martin Bimbaum, John Singer Sargent, January 12, 1856: April 15, 1925, A Conversation
Piece (New York: William E. Rudge's Sons, 1941); hereafter cited as JSS. Sargent was a close
friend of Bimbaum* s, leaving him many works when he died in 1925. When researching his next
book, Jacovleffand Other Artists (New York: P. A. Struck, 1946), Bimbaum wrote to Santayana
in Rome asking about his relations with artists he might have known at Harvard in the 1890s. The
Sargent book was sent in exchange for these inquiries.