Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 07 Fall 1989

              George Santayana
and the Genteel Tradition
When George Santayana delivered his lecture The Genteel Tradition in
American Philosophy** to a California audience in 1911, the word "genteel" had
pretty well lost its original meaning. The adjective, a derivative of the French
"gentil,** was for a long time synonymous with "polite," "graceful," "decorous,**
"refined.** It distinguished the manners, dress, and tone of the well-born from
those of the commonality. That is the way Jane Austen, for example,
understood it. Mr. Darcy in her novel Pride and Prejudice is "genteel." The
smug and obsequious lower-class Mr. Collins is decidedly not But by the
middle of the nineteenth century, the term had become largely pejorative. "Do
you call those genteel litde creatures American poets?" Whitman rhetorically
asks in Democratic Vistas. "To prune, gather, trim, conform, and ever cram and
stuff, and be genteel and proper, is the pressure of our days.** (Whitman, 1982,
pp. 955, 961) Today "genteel** is an epithet contemptuously applied to persons
(I cite the OED) %ho are possessed with a dread of being taken for the
* common people*, who attach exaggerated importance to supposed marks of
social superiority.*' (Also see Tomsich, 1971, pp. 2-3) To be "genteel** now is
tantamount to being both ignoble and socially insecure.
Litde of this sense of the word is implicit in Santayana's usage. For him the
"genteel tradition*' was a descriptive, not an abusive term. It connoted
propriety, correctness, dogmatism, and conservatism (Howgate, 1938,
pp. 186-7) - and flaccidness, passivity, and complacence as welL "The subject,**
he wrote, "is complex, and calls for many an excursus and qualifying footnote."
(Santayana, 1913, p. 212), but he did sketch its oudines. Indeed, it's possible
to watch his conceptions of the "genteel tradition** taking shape in his
consciousness long before he gave it a name. In time he came to see it as a
kind of cultural malady that had afflicted the American mind since at least the
end of the Civil War. A consecutive story of its birth, dominion, and decline
could be pieced together from his random pieces and casual asides. If it had
been, the plot might have run something like this.
The genteel tradition originated abroad like so many other American
phenomena but became pandemic in Protestant America after Calvinism had
ceased to be a vital and dynamic faith and the transcendentalism of an
Emerson or Thoreau had atrophied. By mid-century, the citizens of the
republic were totally absorbed in building and expanding and accumulating
while at the same time internalizing a "hereditary philosophy** that no longer
bore any relation to their quotidian activities. The religious and secular priests
of a stale idealism represented one half of the national mentality. They were
This paper was presented at the "Frontiers of American Philosophy" conference at Texas A&M
University in June of 1988,