Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 10 Fall 1992

              Santayana's Whitman Revisited
Santayana thought that "the imagination of our time has relapsed into barbarism"
(IPR 107), because he saw "the power of idealization" steadily declining in
Western literature—and this, even though "our poets have more ... tragedies to
depict...and have the...marvellous conception which... science has given us" (IPR 104).
Or if, perhaps their inspiration is comic, they have...the long comedy of modern social
revolutions, so illusory in their aims and so productive in their aimlessness.
Given that the motivating intellectual content of Santayana's life was, precisely the
pursuit, in life and history, of what he called ideal meanings (IPR 72), he took the
phenomenon very seriously. He found, paradoxically, that while comparatively
barbarous ages had a poetry of the ideal and held to a vision of beauty, order and
perfection, our age of material elaboration "has no sense for these things" (IPR 104).
Our age finds strength in blind vehemence, its ideals are negative and partial, and "its
poetry..is the poetry of barbarism."
But, as the verbal echo of a general moral crisis and imaginative disintegration, this
poetry is not insignificant and needs to be understood. The Western imagination, for
Santayana, has been formed both in the school of classical literature and polity and in
the school of Christian piety. Subject to a double discipline and a duality of
inspiration, its methods of rationalizing the world have, therefore, always suffered from
a certain contradiction or incoherence. Santayana already ascribed the "romantic
indistinctness and imperfection" which he found in the modern arts to the impossibility
of being either wholly Classical or wholly Christian. In "these latter times," as he saw
them, the quantum leap in the materiality and the diffusiveness of our lives, along with
the new faith in technology, has caused "a kind of return to the inexperience and self-
assurance of youth." The two traditional disciplines have been rejected by the new
inspiration.
... for the reason, excellent from [its] own point of view, that no discipline whatever is
needed .... Ignorance of the past has bred contempt for the lessons which the past might
teach. Men prefer to repeat the old experiment without knowing that they repeat it. (IPR
105)
Nor has the development of historical studies helped.  This is because the habit of
regarding the past as a stepping-stone to the present or future is unfavourable to the
capturing of "that element in the past which was vital and which remains eternal." The
moral similarities among all ages are lost to us by the insistence of modern historians
upon "the mechanical derivation of one age from another" (IPR 106).  A given age
seems alien to other ages because it is the product of new and different conditions:
existences that cause one another, Santayana says, exclude one another.
(i) Anti-conventionalism as Barbarism
As systems of ideas both the Classical and Christian traditions "attempt[ed] to seize
the eternal morphology of reality and describe its unchanging constitution." In this
contemplation of the essence of things, of the highest objects, mechanical science —
the science of causes as opposed to the science of values — was neglected.
The reverse has now occurred and the spirit of life, innocent of any rationalizing discipline
and deprived of an authoritative and adequate method of expression, has relapsed into
miscellaneous and shallow exuberance. Religion and art have become short-winded... [and]
the multiplicity of... incoherent efforts seems to many a compensation for their ill success
or... a ground for asserting their... superiority. Incompetence, when it flatters the passions,