Philosopher’s Friends

THE MIDDLE SPAN: VOLUME II, PERSONS AND PLACES — George Santayana —Scribner ($2.50).

As he grew old, writes George Santayana in this second volume of his autobiography, “persons yielded in interest to places.” But The Middle Span is mostly about the people the great Spanish-born philosopher knew during his years as a professor of philosophy at Harvard —somnambulistic years he calls them, when his progress was slow, his standing uncertain, and when President Eliot looked on him without approval.

It is less interesting and important than Volume I (TIME, Jan. 10, 1944), which described brilliantly the conflict between Latin and U.S. cultures as sensed by an uncommonly perceptive youth. But Santayana’s extraordinary mind and masterly prose could not produce a dull or unimportant book. He writes about the great figures of his time the way other biographers write about eccentric family servants. And he writes about friends unknown to the world—Andrew Green, “Swelly” Bangs, Bob Barlow, Howard Gushing, Howard Sturgis, Bob Potter, Lawrence Butler—as if they were philosophers whose minds he studied as he studied those of Hegel and Plato. Some of his portraits:

William Lyon Phelps. Learning of Santayana’s taste for “contemplating athletic contests,” Professor Phelps invited him to be his house guest during Harvard-Yale games. “Phelps was irresistible. His every word was a cocktail, or at least a temperance drink. He made you love everything. Even if you were not naturally genial, you found you were his friend, almost his intimate friend, without having in the least expected it.” At Yale, Santayana found that enthusiasm was cultivated as Phelps cultivated it, indiscriminately, but he found Yale “a most living, organic, distinctive, fortunate place.”

John D. Rockefeller. John D. Rockefeller Sr. was “still a dapper, youngish man with cordial American manners,” when Santayana watched Queen Victoria’s Jubilee procession with him. But when Santayana visited his friend Charles Augustus Strong (a Rockefeller son-in-law) at Rockefeller’s house in Lakewood, N.J., the tycoon had aged, lost his hair, eyebrows and eyelashes, and wore a pepper & salt wig decidedly too small for him. Rockefeller asked him the population of Spain. When Santayana replied 19 million, the old man said thoughtfully, “I must tell them at the office that they don’t sell enough oil in Spain.” When Strong bought a cord of wood, Rockefeller studied it in the basement, and said, “Charles . . . that isn’t a cord of wood. When I was a young fellow I used to cut a cord of wood and I know what it looks like.”

Lionel Johnson. Oscar Wilde said that any morning at eleven o’clock you might see Lionel Johnson come out very drunk from the Café Royal, and hail the first passing perambulator. Santayana met this young poet at Oxford. Johnson looked 16, was small, pale, with small, sunken, blinking eyes, sensitive mouth, pale brown hair, and rebellious ideas. He kept a jug of whiskey on the table between two books—Leaves of Grass and Les Fleurs du Mai—and planned to become a Catholic as soon as he was of age. He became an Irish rebel instead. When Santayana saw him ten years later, he was a tragic spectacle. Johnson still looked very young, “but pale, haggard and trembling. He stood by the fireplace, with a tall glass of whiskey and soda at his elbow and talked wildly of persecution. The police, he said, were after him everywhere. . . . He quivered with excitement, hatred and imagined terrors. . . . When at last he found his glass empty [he] left without saying goodnight. I never saw him again. . . .”

Andrew Green was one of Santayana’s students. He went into business in Chicago to make money quickly, made it, retired, went to China, hired a junk and sailed leisurely up & down the great rivers. Eventually he settled in the British West Indies as a fruit grower, and married a slight, wise, well-read Negro girl.

Cameron Forbes, football player. Harvard coach, farmer, financier and onetime Governor of the Philippines, was a model for Oliver, central character of Santayana’s novel The Last Puritan. He wrote somber poetry, which he showed to Santayana; it was not well composed “but the thought was so original, so wise and so courageous, that nothing in Emerson has ever pleased me more.” A grandson of Emerson, Forbes was like Santayana’s other Boston friends whose lives illustrated the decline of the age of great merchants. “They were in one sense its ripe fruits, but in another sense they marked the dissolution of that economy, its incapacity to maintain itself for more than three generations. Either their fortune was inadequate, or their virtue was inadequate, or their health and stamina were inadequate. Gently, or sadly, or cynically, they had to bow themselves off the stage.”

Eternal Friendship. In his refuge in the convent of the English blue nuns in Rome, where he is now finishing his autobiography and a treatise on Christ in the Gospels, and where he expects to spend the rest of his life, 81-year-old Philosopher Santayana writes:

“My old age judges more charitably and thinks better of mankind than my youth ever did. I discount idealizations, I forgive one-sidedness, I see that it is essential to perfection of any kind. And in each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful, and swear eternal friendship with that.”