Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 17 Fall 1999

              Santayana and Valery
Tk ^"any pages have been written about Santayana's "Americanism" and many,
■ %/■ also, about his Spanishness.1 Yet the least inadequate characterization of
JL ▼ JL Santayana is perhaps that he was a cosmopolitan writer and thinker, a
gifted polyglot whose access to several linguistic worlds made it possible for him to
inhabit a rich variety of literary and philosophical spaces. (Whether he would have
liked being called "cosmopolitan" is quite another matter: we have ample textual
evidence for believing that he wouldn't.)
In what follows, I offer some remarks about the unmistakable presence of a
distinctly French strain in Santayana's writings. I broach some parallels between
Santayana and the French modern author he probably admired most, namely Paul
Valery, focusing upon two areas: the nature of philosophy and the nature of mind.
Talking of his younger days, Santayana points out that "French literature had
been [his] daily bread: it had taught [him] how to think, but had not given [him] much
to think about" (se 3). He also tells us ("A General Confession" in pgs) that as a
young man he used to read the Revue des Deux Mondes from cover to cover and that
he was acquainted with the works of Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan (pgs 9).
(Although Joel Porte in his introduction to Interpretations of Poetry and Religion
insists on the role played by Renan in shaping Santayana's "curious position with
regard to the Catholic Church,"2 the importance of Renan and even more of Taine,
that "professed naturalist," as intellectual models for Santayana, has not been
adequately assessed.)
What, then, is this art of thought — for surely it is no science — that Santayana
claims to have learned from French literature? McCormick provides a clue when he
observes that behind Soliloquies in England "are also Montaigne and the French
tradition of concision, lucidity and point."3 Santayana himself, in the opening
paragraph of his essay on 'The philosophy of M. Bergson," alludes to "the precision
of phrase and measured judgement traditional in French philosophy" (wt> 22), and in
a letter to Richard Lyon, dated July 1949, he reflects that "although there are not
many great French philosophers, they all write well, because they know how to see
and to judge the world. They are not so good in the heights and the depths, because
these can't be written about in good French, and they don't talk inflated nonsense
about those super- or infra-human things, because the French language will not
permit it."4 In any case, there is little doubt that what Santayana claims to have
learned from the French centers on two things, the quest for lucidity and the demands
of polished style. The quest for lucidity, in other words the endeavor not to deceive
oneself, including about one's own proclivity to self-deception, leads Inevitably to
Montaigne, to whom all the roads of modern scepticism and naturalism lead anyway.
1 This paper is a revised version of the paper presented to the Santayana Society in Boston on August
13 1998. I thank Morris Grossman, Angus Kerr-Lawson, Herman Saatkamp, and Irving Singer for
their comments and suggestions.
2 Joel Porte, Introduction to George Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (Cambridge,
Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1989), p. xxvii. To be cited as IPR.
3 John McCormick, George Santayana: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1987), p. 237. To be cited
asMCCORMICK.
4 The Letters of George Santayana, ed. Daniel Cory (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1955), p.
380. Whether recent French philosophy confirms Santayana's judgement about the impossibility of
"talking inflated nonsense" in French, 1 leave up to the reader.