Interpretations of Poiesis and Religion:Santayana on Goethe and Emerson

with Stevens’ Postmodern High Romanticism as Guide

David A. DilworthState University of New York (SUNY), Stony Brook

Reality is an Activity of the Most August ImaginationLast Friday, in the big light of last Friday night,We drove home from Cornwall to Hartford, late.

It was not a night blown at a glassworks in ViennaOr Venice, motionless, gathering dust and time.

There was a crush of strength in a grinding going round,Under the front of a westward evening star,

The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins,As things emerged and moved and were dissolved,

Either in distance, change or nothingness,The visible transformations of summer night,

An argentine abstraction approaching formAnd suddenly denying itself away.

There was an insolid billowing of the solid. Night’s moonlight lake was neither water nor air. (OP 135-36)

1. SANTAYANA’S ANTI-ROMANTICISM AND WALLACE STEVENS’ POSTMODERN HIGH ROMANTICISM

In this paper I employ the phrase “postmodern high Romanticism” as a heuristic for appraising Santayana’s interpretation of the two major literary authors, Goethe and Emerson, as well as for determining —prior to that— his relation to Wallace Stevens, who is generally considered the United States’ greatest 20th-century poet.1 I construct the concept

1 Carroll, J.: ‘Stevens and Romanticism’, 2007, pp. 87-102. Carroll cites Stevens’ LWS, p. 350 (hereafter LWS stands for The Letters of Wallace Stevens, 1996) on the cycle from romanticism, to realism, to indifferentism, back to “romanticism which is the highest form of imaginative fulfullment,” indicating how this sheds light on Stevens’ view of the nature of poetry and his own mission as a poet. Citing Stevens’ words, “The major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God” (LWS, p. 378) in connection with his project of creating “a new

of “postmodern high Romanticism” from my reading of Stevens, who came to see himself as continuing the line of the high Romanticism of Emerson, and through Emerson, of Goethe.2 As is well known, the trajectory of Santayana’s writings moved in a contrary direction, impugning Romanticism and downgrading the reputations of Goethe and Emerson. Stevens, I will argue, synthesized the contrary directions of Emerson’s Romanticism and Santayana’s anti-Romanticism in his concept of “the supreme fiction,” while ultimately tilting in the direction of a visionary high poetry associated with Emerson.3

To put this in a nutshell, as a student at Harvard and in his early poetry Stevens was greatly impacted by Santayana’s personality and philosophy, and he celebrated “the old philosopher in Rome” at the end of his life with a famous poem of that title (CP 508). At the same time, in another late poem, “Looking Across the Field and Watching the Birds Fly” (CP 517), Stevens explicitly endorsed the cosmic idealism of Emerson. Stevens wrote many other late poems to the same effect. His gradual maturation as a high Romantic poet, I will argue, involved a conscious departure from Santayana. Such a turnabout provides much food for thought in itself, as well as furnishing the heuristic of the present paper’s reappraisal of Santayana’s all-purpose indictment of Romanticism and his specific downgrading of the stature of Goethe and Emerson.

In his early career Stevens wrote that “Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame” (“A High-Toned Old Christian Woman,” CP 59). Joel Porte among others has made a convincing case that the agenda of Stevens’ first collection of poetry, Harmonium (1924), was impacted by Santayana’s views communicated to him personally when he was a student at Harvard. Stevens also found these views articulated in Santayana’s contemporaneous publication, IPR, of 1900.4 In “Understanding, Imagination, and Mysticism” Santayana wrote that “the single idea” of the essays of IPR was that “religion and poetry are identical in essence, and differ merely in the way in which they are attached to practical affairs. Poetry is called religion when it intervenes in life, and religion, when it merely supervenes upon life, is seen to be nothing but poetry”.5

romanticism, a new belief,” i.e. “a poem equivalent to the idea of God” (LWS, pp. 369-70), Carroll argues that Stevens’ genius was neither social nor ethical in character, but “lyric, mythic, and metaphysical.” But for Stevens,“belief” itself is “fictive,” a matter of poiesis. The older romantics, such as Emerson, Wordsworth, and Shelley, believed in a Supreme Mind or Spirit, whereas Stevens held that “the divine mind does not fully exist, or at least is not fully realized, until it is depicted in the images of poets” (Carroll, ibid., p. 90). (But let us add that we do find instances of this more radical pantheism in Emerson, and before him in Goethe.) Carroll goes on to point out that Stevens’ poetry progresses through a dialectic of tonal opposites, between the “pure poetry” of the new romanticism and “common poetry”; in the latter mindset he sometimes disparages the ideal of “the romantic”; in the former, “The whole effect of the imagination is,” in Stevens’ own words, “ toward the production of the romantic” (‘Two or Three Ideas’, p. 849), and “The imagination is the romantic,” (“Adagia,” p. 903)—both citations from Stevens: Collected Poetry & Prose, 1997. The same oscillation between “pure poetry” and “common poetry” is noted by Helen Vendler in her review of Wallace Stevens: Selected Poems, Serio, N. (ed.).: 2009, in The New York Times, Sunday Book Review, August, 23, 20092 When a student at Harvard, his mother gave him a complete set of the works of Emerson. “This gift was perhaps the most important he ever received. Emerson exercizes a deeper conceptual influence on Stevens’ poetic cosmology than any other writer, and Emerson provides the most incisive formulations of the ideas that govern this cosmology” (Carroll, op.cit., p. 95).3 Porte, J.: ‘Santayana’s Interpretation of Poetry and Religion: An Introduction’, in Santayana, G.: Interpretations

of Poetry and Religion, 1989, pp. xiii-xxxi. (Hereafter cited as IPR.)4 Santayana, G.: ‘Preface’ to IPR, p. 3.5 Porte, J.: op. cit., pp. xxv-xxvii.

In the conclusion of IPR Santayana rearticulated his “aesthetic faith” which, as Joel Porte indicates, was redolent with the views of John Ruskin, Mathew Arnold, Walter Pater, Ernest Renan, and others.6 Thus, —Santayana held— “high poetry” was religion without practical efficacy or metaphysical illusion. “High poetry” and lofty religion were illuminations of ideal essences expressive of harmonies of the human spirit. Santayana brilliantly articulated this theme all the way to his late theoretical writing, The Realm of Spirit. But if we fast-forward a bit in his career, this humanistic conclusion in turn presupposed Santayana’s bottom line skeptical Platonism and materialism which undergirded his speculative articulations and also his closely aligned culture criticism. The young Stevens absorbed all of this directly from his mentor Santayana.

The impact of Santayana’s ideas can be traced to Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” and other early poems of his first collection, Harmonium (1923), which feature the life of the poetic imagination as replacing the fictions of heaven and hell and authorizing the poet to write a “poetry of the modern earth” in which “death is the mother of beauty.” Stevens’ Harmonium consisted of “earthy anecdotes” and “invectives against swans” (that is, against biblical orthodoxies), promoted the poetic life over the mentality of the unimaginative masses who “lack the quirks of imagery,” and satirized his own comic self in its realistic life after forty. In the main, Harmonium, with its word wizardry, comic irony, and gaiety of language remained within the orbit of “Peter Quinze at the Clavier,” “Sunday Morning,” “A High-toned Old Christian Woman,” “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “The Monocle of Mon Oncle,” ”The Comedian as the Letter C,” and other symbolic expressions of Santayana’s philosophy. Indeed, in Porte’s estimate, Stevens was “Santayana’s truest disciple, his most constant ephebe.”7

Unfortunately, however, Porte’s way of conjoining Emerson, Santayana, and Stevens stops with his discussion of Stevens’ early poetry. He does not account for Stevens’ trajectory of high visionary poetry in his later career.8 Stevens wrote to the latter effect in

6 Carroll, J., Wallace Stevens’ Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism, 1987, Chapter Two, ‘Evanescent Symmetries’, pp. 29-62, analyzes such key poems as ‘Peter Quinze at the Clavier’, ‘Sunday Morning’, ‘The Snow-Man’, ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’, ‘The Monocle of Mon Oncle’, and ‘The Comedian as the Lettter C’, while indicating that the Harmonium collection (published in 1924) does not go beyond the assumptions of Santayana’s hedonistic aestheticism. See Cook, E.: A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens, 2007: “The overall order [of Harmonium] conceals Stevens’s growing sense of frustrating and malaise, most evident in the long poem, ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’, which was rewritten and much expanded in the summer of 1922 (LWS, p. 229), but appears about a third of the way through Harmonium” (p. 29). See her related commentary on ‘The Snow Man’, pp. 35-36.7 Porte, J.: op. cit., p. xxix. At the same time, Porte discounts much of Santayana’s early polemical writing against Emerson. He concludes his Introduction to the MIT Press critical edition of IPR (pp. xxx-xxxi) by asserting that Emerson, Santayana, and Stevens shared the same project of naturalistic, skeptical idealism. All three, he says, promoted the “ideal harmonies” of imaginative interpretation of the world in which Santayana’s sense of “relevant fiction” became in effect Stevens’ “supreme fiction” that usurps the role of traditional religion and “makes widows wince” in ‘A High-Toned Old Christian Woman’. Daniel Fuchs, ‘Wallace Stevens and Santayana’, 1967, has a convincing analysis of Stevens’ ‘Sunday Morning’ as resonating with the diction and tone of Santayana’s early philosophic writings. But the issue here is whether Stevens remained a naturalistic, skeptical idealist ala Santayana; certainly Porte is way off in attrbuting that position to Emerson.8 Fuchs, D.: art. cit., 1967, attempts to stretch Santayana’s influence onto the later-phase Stevens; but arriving at ‘Esthetique du mal’ (1944), he acknowledges that the linkage between Santayana and Stevens breaks down; significantly, he makes no attempt to go into ‘The Auroras of Autumn’ (1947) or beyond that, the poems constituting the vintage phase of Stevens’ “new Romanticism.” Joseph Carroll, Wallace Stevens’ Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism, 1987, p. 30, lists studies of other Santayana-inspired interpreters of Stevens such as those of J. V. Cunningham, Yvor Winters, Louis L. Martz, Helen Vendler, Joseph Riddell, Alan Perlis, and Frank Doggett,

his poetry and Letters.9 Following a twelve year hiatus in which he did not publish any poetry, Stevens painfully resumed his career with “Ideas of Order” (1936), “The Man with the Blue Guitar” (1937), and “Parts of a World” (1942). It was a gradual metamorphosis in idealistic sensibility. Especially with “Credences of Summer” (1946) and “The Auroras of Autumn” (1947), —Stevens wrote— the scene had shifted to his envisioning an “enthroned imagination” (a superhuman cosmic imagination) that in the midst of summer can imagine winter, and in the midst of night can imagine day. In contemporaneously written “Adagia” he declared that “the exquisite pleasure” of the poetic imagination consisted “in believing in a fiction knowing that it is a fiction,” while associating such a “supreme fiction” with the idea of God.10 “Reality,” Stevens mused in one of his last poems, “is an Activity of the Most

who have attempted to see an unbroken poetics between Stevens’ Harmonium (1924) and his later poetry. Simon Critchley’s recent book on Stevens, Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, though not indebted to Santayana’s influence, is an example of a like tendency to prioritize Stevens’ early hedonistic “gaiety of language” (as in Harmonium) while egregiously misreading his later-phase poetry. Stevens himself, in a letter of 1935, indicated that he regarded Harmonium as something he had moved beyond: “when Harmonium was in the making there was a time I liked the idea of images and images alone, or images and the music of verse together. I then believed in pure poetry, as it was called” (LWS, p. 288.) Later in his career Stevens came to explore another, metaphysical, idea of pure poetry as he moved beyond the style and intellectual fare of Harmonium. Beginning with ‘Farewell to Florida’, Ideas of Order (1936), the next poetry collection he published after a twelve year hiatus, shows Stevens’ transitional struggle to achieve a post-Harmonium trajectory in the direction of his final-phase Emersonian cosmology.9 See Bates, M.: “Stevens and the Supreme Fiction,” 2007, pp. 48-61. In his prose essay ‘Two or Three Ideas’ (1951) Stevens speaks of “the loss of the gods dispelled in mid-air” (Stevens: Collected Poetry & Prose, p. 844). In his own final-phase project of writing high visionary poetry, “The idea of pure poetry, essential imagination, as the highest objective of the poet, appears to be, at least potentially, as great as the idea of God” (LWS, p. 369). “Essential imagination” has various synonyms in Stevens’ later poetry: these include “essential unity” (Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry & Prose, p. 195), “The essential poem at the center of things” (ibid., p. 377), “pure poetry, - “the pure idea” (ibid., p. 231), “pure principle” (ibid., p. 361), “the first idea” (ibid., p. 350), the “central heart and mind of mind” (ibid., p. 229), “the whiteness that is the ultimate intellect” (ibid., p. 372), “the imagination that sits enthroned” (ibid., 360), and the “supreme fiction”(ibid., p. 329). In ‘The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet’ (1942), “The idea of God is merely a poetic idea, even if the supreme poetic idea” (ibid., p. 674). In this Emersonian poetic cosmology, “The mind that in heaven created the earth and the mind that on earth created heaven were, as it happened, one” (‘Adagia’, ibid., p. 913). The “creator” is not a person but only a generative source; thus in ‘A Primitive Like an Orb’ (1948), “The essential poem at the center of things” produces all the phenomenal appearances —of sea, land, and sky— but this “essential poem” is itself “something seen and known in lesser poems,” meaning all actual poems. “The central poem” “is the poem of the whole, / The poem of the composition of the whole” (ibid., pp. 377-78). This “primitive” or archetypal “central poem” is an “orb” or planet, a “huge, high harmony,” a “miraculous multiplex of lesser poems,” a “vis,” a “principle,”a “nature,” a “patron of origins,” and a “skeleton of the ether” (ibid., pp. 377-80)10

See Bates, op. cit., 2007: In his poem ‘Of Modern Poetry’ (1940) Stevens describes the purpose and character of

his modern poetry as “The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice” (Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry & Prose, p. 218). This presages what will suffice finally stated in ‘Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour’ (1951)—“Out of this same light, out of the central mind, / We make a dwelling in the evening air, / In which being there together is enough” (ibid., p. 444). In LWS, p. 444, Stevens wrote: “It is not the individual alone that indulges in the pathetic fallacy. It is the race. God is the centre of the pathetic fallacy.” For Stevens, romantic visionary poetry was the highest form of imaginative achievement, the norm against which he measures all other forms of imaginative experience. His “new romanticism” left behind the historical experience of realism, aestheticism, symbolism, and modernism, and it incorporates the “modern belief that all metaphysical ideas are merely constructs of the imagination.” Stevens strove to fashion fictions of the imagination through which “the essential poem” becomes a living presence. He went the final step of embracing what he called “the nicer knowledge of / Belief, that what it believes in is not true” (ibid., p. 291). This became his notion of the“supreme fiction,” the central theme in the second half of his career. In a retrospective note on his Collected Poems in 1954, he wrote that poetry explores “the possibility of a supreme fiction, recognized as a fiction, in which men could propose to themselves a fulfillment” (LWS, p. 820). The “supreme fiction” involved not an object of belief but the

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August Imagination.” This poem also repised the theme of his major effort and “Kehre,” “The Auroras of Autumn,” that featured “the innocence” of an enthroned cosmic imagination.11 Stevens went on in his last years to ring the changes on this high visionary poetry which, breaking with Santayana’s worldview, indisputably situated his postmodern high Romanticism in the Emersonian tradition of the Romantic Sublime.12

The Emersonian trajectory of Stevens’ high visionary poetry, I suggest here, is a critical fulchrum for reevaluating Santayana’s vaunted “culture criticism” intertwined with his materialistic ontology, much of which centered on his denunciation of Romantic modernity. Santayana was decidely not a high Romantic. Santayana in fact always featured himself as a critic of Romanticism which he often indicted together with the other three Rs of

incessant process of poetic discovery.In his ‘Adagia’ (1930-1955?), there are any number of similar relevant musings of Stevens which he

converted into his poetry. “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption” (ibid., p. 901); “It is the belief and not the god that counts” (ibid., p. 902); “Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagined are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet” (ibid., p. 906); “Realism is a corruption of reality” (loc. cit.); “Poetry is a purging of the world’s poverty and change and evil and death. It is a present perfecting, a satisfaction in the irremediable poverty of life” (loc. cit.); “God is a symbol for something that can as well take other forms, for example, the form of high poetry” (ibid., p. 907); “The poet must not adapt his experience to that of the philosopher” (ibid., p. 909); “God is in me or not at all (does not exist)” (ibid., p. 911); “The imagination consumes & exhausts some element of reality” (loc.cit.); “The mind that in heaven created the earth and the mind that on earth created heaven were, as it happened, one” (ibid., p. 913).

Bates argues that after the war Stevens’ interest in a “supreme fiction” increased. He explored the notion of a “central poem” in a series of postwar lectures, namely, ‘Three Academic Pieces’ (1947), ‘Effects of Analogy’ (1948), ‘Imagination as Value’ (1948), and ‘The Relation Between Poetry and Painting’ (1951). In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Stevens speculated that “essential imagination,” the source of our fictions, may lie outside the consciousness of any individual. Canto VII of ‘The Auroras of Autumn’ (1948) raises the questions: “Is there an imagination that sits enthroned / As grim as it is benevolent . . . / . . . which in the midst of summer stops / To imagine winter? / When the leaves are dead, / Does it take the place of the north . . . ? / . . . And do these heavens adorn / And proclaim it . . . ?” (ibid., p. 360). Interrogatively it advances a daring, quasi-religious proposition, that a transcendent “crown and mystic cabala” is responsible for order and seasonal change in the universe. ‘Final Soliloquy of an Interior Paramour’ (1951) contains Stevens’ perhaps most famous line, “We say God and the imagination are one” (ibid., 444). (“We” refers to Stevens and his muse or “interior paramour.”) Stevens lifted it from his ‘Adagia’ notebook, the complete entry of which is:

Proposita:1. God and the imagination are one.2.The thing imagined is the imaginer.The second equals the thing imagined and the imaginer are one. Hence, I suppose, the imaginer is

God. (ibid., p. 914)In ‘Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour’ Stevens and his muse are both active and passive. In its reference

to “central mind,” this version of the “supreme fiction” most resembles the heavenly “imagination that sits enthroned” of ‘Auroras of Autumn’ of canto VII of ‘The Auroras of Autumn’. The “central mind” has arranged the rendevous, supplying Stevens with an encompassing vision of reality.

Another key poem of Stevens’ metaphysical idealism is “Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly’(1952). Bates interpretation of it is as follows. “Mr. Homburg,” who stands for Emerson, at first seems to correspond to Santayana’s description of romantic dreamers who thinks that reality may be like themselves, their own transcendental self and their own romantic dreams indefinitely extended. Hence Stevens first maintains an ironic distance from what seems to be the world’s “pensive nature, a mechanical / And slightly detestable operandum, free / From man’s ghost, larger and yet a little like, / Without his literature and without his gods. . .” Stevens finds it “irritating” rather than exhilarating because Mr. Homburg expresses it incautiously (excluding human agency and nature’s blunt laws). (The words “mechanical . . . operandum” appear to go back to ‘The Auroras of Auroras’, cited above, canto VII, “Is there an imagination that sits enthroned / As grim as it is benevolent . . . / . . . which in the midst of summer stops / To imagine winter?” As well, the world’s “pensive nature” appears also to reprise “the giant of the weather” (CP, p. 385) and “the pensive giant prone in violet space” (CP, p. 387) of ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ and similar allusions in other poems). Mr. Homburg gradually

Renaissance, Reformation, and Revolution. The evidence is that “modern” Romanticism, understood as somewhat inclusive of the other three Rs, rather became the overall target of his career-long “culture criticism.” Romanticism merged in his mind with “the genteel tradition” and other manifestations of the progressively striving “Protestant” voluntarism of modern Europe, as expressed paradigmatically in his interpretation of Goethe’s Faust and of the young Emerson as “the Puritan Goethe.”

Santayana opted out at an early age. To make a long story short, the trajectory of his career reveals him as a committed Epicurean sage in retirement from the world within the world; he lived an abstemious rational life, enjoying the pleasure of his writing and

warms to this notion of a “daily majesty of meditation, / That comes and goes in silences of its own” and speaks of “an element,” “A thing not planned for imagery or belief,” which is“The transparency through which the swallow weaves,” “Too much thinking to be less than thought, / Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch. / A daily majesty of meditation” (CP, p. 440). “A new scholar” (Stevens) finally seems prepared to accept Mr. Homburg’s idealism, amended so as to accommodate human agency and recognition of nature’s “blunt laws.”

To fine tune this a bit more, the basically Emersonian position expressed here might be labeled an objective idealism, the philosophic articulation of which is found in such authors as Schelling and Peirce. One of Stevens’ last poems collected posthumously, ‘Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination’, is a good example of such a form of objective idealism.11

Carroll, J.: Wallace Stevens’ Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism, Chapter Five, ‘A Landscape of the Mind,’

indicates that Stevens was developing various preliminary adumbrations, or “crystal hypotheses,” to his idea of God in poiesis as the supreme fiction” in ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ (1942). See also Leggett, B. J.: “Stevens Late Poetry,” 2007, pp. 63-75. Stevens himself set ‘The Auroras of Autumn’ following upon ‘Credences of Summer’ as a marker for the shift in orientation seen in his later poems. From Harmonium (1924) through ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ (1942) Stevens’ poetry tended to privilege the human imagination over external reality —the world as it is is not accessible to us as it is in itself, but as only as it is constructed by the imagination. ‘Credences of Summer’, however, signals a change in his attempt to depict a reality beyond the mind. “From the imaginative period of the ‘Notes’ I turned to the ideas of ‘Credences of Summer’, noting that “At the time when that poem was written my feelings for the necessity of a final accord with reality was at its strongest,” and explaining that “reality was the summer of the title of the book [Transport to Summer] in which the poem appeared” (LWS, pp. 636, 719).

‘Credences of Summer’ depicts a moment of accord with a reality independent of the mind: “Let’s see the very thing and nothing else. . . / Without evasion by a single metaphor” (Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry & Prose, p. 322). It attempts to describe a world in which the sound of a bird “is not part of the listener’s own sense” (ibid., p. 326), a world “complete in itself” that does not require the human imagination. It ends with the summer night as the fiction of an “inhuman author” (loc. cit., p. 326) —the meditation of a cosmic imagination— the theme he then pursued in ‘The Auroras of Autumn.’

While ‘Credences of Summer’ (1946) is a poem of stasis, the realization of a perfect moment “Beyond which there is nothing left of time” (ibid., p. 322), ‘The Auroras of Autumn’ (1947) breaks down such moments by its depicting the flux of the northern lights. It symbolizes the serpent of the aurora borealis as “the master of the maze / Of body and air and forms and images, / Relentlessly in possession of happiness” (ibid., p. 411) To the crucial next line, “This is his poison: that we should disbelieve / Even that,” Marianne Moore in 1954 delivered the acute commentary: “The poison in the meditations of the serpent in the ferns is ‘that we should disbelieve’ that there is a starry serpent in the heavens on which to fix the grateful mind.” It is ultimately a poem of Stevens’ Emersonian belief. Cantos II, III, and IV all begin with “Farewell to an idea,” recalling Stevens’ concept of the human idea of order in Ideas of Order and ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.’ The humanizing functions of the mother and father in canto V finally break down, degenerating into a “loud, disordered mooch” (ibid., p. 358), and by the end of canto VI all human ideas of order have been destroyed. The source of these orders, the human imagination, depicted in the poem as “a single candle,” is helpless in face of a destructive universe aflame, as depicted in the aurora borealis. “The scholar of one candle” looks up at “An Artic effulgence flaring on the frame / Of everything he is. And he feels afraid” (ibid., 359). But at this point the cosmic imagination of ‘Credences of Summer’ reappears. In canto VII, the auroras represent not only a universal destroying flux but also “an imagination that sits enthroned” in the northern skies “which in the midst of summer stops / to imagine winter” (ibid., p. 360). It “meditates”(ibid., p. 363) reality into and out of existence innocently, not maliciously, as Stevens takes great pains to emphasize in the poem’s finale. The cosmic imagination experiences all pleasures and all

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nurturing a spiritual tranquility of mind within and despite the material mutations of the “modern” times.13 And he acted out this Epicurean mindset at key junctures of his career, flouting the northern European establishments all the way down to his final years in Mussolini’s Italy. Like the Epicurus he described in TPP, “He defended free-will because he wished to exercise it in withdrawing from the world, and in not swimming with the current”.14 Or again, as he intimated in PP, he walked “the primrose path of Epicurean wisdom” all his life.15

In rejecting Romanticism, Santayana for a time became an unintential ally of American left-progressive and Marxist cultural critics in his day —and now, perhaps, of various multicultural critics of our day?— who defined themselves as “post-Romantics.” This trajectory, it goes without saying, involved his re-focusing the topic of aesthetic Romanticism into a discourse on cultural politics. In this regard Santayana and Stevens again parted company. Stevens understood himself to be a “new Romantic,” and concerned himself with writing a poetry of the American sublime. He commenced this project in the second phase of his career beginning with a second volume of poety, Ideas of Order (1936), then with The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937), Parts of a World (1942), and Transport to Summer (1947), (which includes “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (1942), “Esthetique du mal” (1944), and “Credences of Summer” (1946).) In Parts of a World, and especially “Owl’s Clover” and “The Man With the Blue Guitar,” he decisively rejected the political progressives’ reduction of poetry to realistic politics. Though Santayana came also to reject the progressivist agenda, he left on the table his anti-modernity brief with its own conflation of romantic aesthetics and politics.16

On the positive side of this ledger, Santayana’s career-long interests included a broader range of cultural and theoretical topics than the average practicioner of philosophy in his or our day. Together with his outstanding literary style, these interests can be appreciated as giving the lie to certain strains of “professional philosophy” in the contemporary academy that trade narrowly in the currency of logical and linguistic analyses, formalistic models of artificial intelligence, and the like. But on the negative side, he appears to have been one of the inventors of another unpropitious strain of 20th and now 21st c. philosophizing, which

pains; the aurora borealis symbolizes tragedy and desolation but also change and death as a part of “an innocent earth” (ibid., p. 361). “Earlier Stevens’ poems depict unreal gods as projections of the human imagination; now the situation is reversed; we and our world, it seems, are part of a larger imagination” (Leggett, B. J.: op. cit., p. 65).12 Carroll, J.: op cit., 1987, p. 213, indicates that the culminating poems of Stevens’ high visionary poetry came after the death of his best friend, Henry Church in April of 1947; they were expressed in ‘The Auroras of Autumn’, ‘The Owl in the Sarcophagus’, and ‘A Primitive Like an Orb’ in 1947 and early 1948. Leggett, B. J.’s ‘Stevens Later Poetry’, op.cit., pp. 65-75, discusses, in addition to ‘The Auroras of Autumn’ (1947), 23 shorter poems in Stevens’ collection The Auroras of Autumn (1950) and 17 poems of The Rock (1954) and the Opus Postumous in which Stevens thematized the cosmic imagination.13 Seaton, J.: ‘George Santayana as Culture Critic”, in Under Any Sky, 2007, pp. 111-120. 14 Santayana, G.: Three Philosophical Poets, 1910, p. 30.15 Santayana, G.: Persons and Places, 1986, p. 426: “At thirty . . . I had travelled. I had learned something of the pleasures and manners of mankind, and for myself I had made some progress in the primrose path of Epicurean wisdom. I had now for ever in my fancy a lovely picture of ancient Greece, and a lovely picture of modern England; and having begun by fully admitting that all was vanity, I could not be angry with the primroses for fading or with the path for being short. I accepted them as vain but beautiful, transitory but perfect; and I was no ready to enjoy them than to give them up.”16 See Fries, A.: “Stevens in the 1930s”, 2007, pp. 37-47. See also Santayana, G.: “The Genteel Tradition at Bay” (1931), pp. 153-96 in The Genteel Tradition: Nine Essays by George Santayana, 1967.

consists in labeling philosophies as to their national, even ethnocentric “differences.” In this respect I think we should acknowledge that Santayana’s culture criticism amounted to its own form of protopostmodern historicist psychologism —that is, cultural psychologism. Somewhat myopically and distortionally, he wielded his club of “literary psychology” against virtually all the literary and philosophical forms of “modernity,” while blatantly employing his own. I refer, for example, to his writing which traded in the coins of “German philosophy,” “French philosophy,” “British” or “American character and opinion,” the “genteel Tradition,” “English Liberty,” “Last Puritan,” and so on, —a long list of psycho-sociological labels which were the products of his own literary psychology (as perhaps typified by the subtitle of The Last Puritan, “A Memoir in the Form of a Novel.”)

Meanwhile of course, and paradoxically, Santayana cultivated —and justified— his own philosophic self-image as free of any of these cultural identifications. Even the Spanish were not Spanish enough for him. His detached culture criticism took the form of a skeptical aestheticism, expressive of a self-styled cosmopolitan image in terms of which he claimed to be able to live “under any sky” and to philosophize “in the light of eternity”.17

But here, I think, his writings simply reenacted his foundational Epicurean temperament—which he often expressed in bantering, ironic terms of disaffected cultural neutrality and narcissistic enjoyment of his own ataraxia of mind. He brought this “objective” Epicurean standpoint to bear on his wholesale rejection of the progressive trajectories of “Protestant modernity,” whether in philosophical or literary forms.

With specific regard to his myopic view of Protestant America, his self-proclaimed alienated sense of being “in Boston, but not of it” eventuated in a distinct cultural animus with respect to turn-of-the century New England. His early writings reveal him as consciously cultivating an iconoclastic image, designed to provoke his Yankee milieu—for example, with outrageous portraits of Shakespeare, Browning, Walt Whitman, and Emerson. In tilting with Emerson and Whitman he recklessly challenged the greatest exponents of democratic individualism in the annals of political theory.18 As he prepared to leave America in 1912, never to return for the next forty years, his “parting shot” was his California lecture, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” a theme featuring his

17 “In the past or in the future, my language and my borrowed knowledge would have been different, but under whatever sky I had been born, since it is the same sky, I should have the same philosophy” (Santayana, G.: Scepticism and Animal Faith, p. x) —cited as frontispiece in Flamm, M. and Skowronski, K. (eds.): Under Any Sky: Contemporary Readings of George Santayana, 2007. See the review of this conference volume by David A. Dilworth, ‘Santayana’s Place in World Philosophy’, Limbo, Number 28, 2008, pp. 159-173.18 Kateb, G.: “Democratic Individualism and the Claims of Politics,” in Political Theory, vol. 12, 1984, pp. 331-360; and Emerson and Self-Reliance, 1995. Kateb cogently analyzes Emerson’s ‘Politics,’ Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’ together with his prose work ‘Democratic Vistas,’ and Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’, as having achieved the most advanced theoretical framework for post-Revolutionary War “democratic individualism” in the 19th

century. According to Kateb, this theoretical framework, which involves a dialectic of political-democratic and transcendental individualism, has never been been eclipsed in modern political theory. Santayana’s laudable chapter on ‘English Liberty in America’ in Character and Opinion in the United States (1920), which distinguishes between “democratic” and “fierce” liberty, insightfully (but unoriginally) retails the essential terms of the same theoretical framework. However, having already neglected the transcendentalist political genius of Emerson and Whitman in his earlier writings, his analysis lacks the full sense of the dialectic Kateb elaborates. In Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies(1922), Santayana’s essay ‘Society and Solitude’ (pp.119-22) hews closer to Emerson’s position, as well as taking over the title of the latter’s own essay ‘Society and Solitude’ which appears in Emerson’s book of that same title, Society and Solitude (1870). See also Santayan’s 1915 essay ‘The Indomitable Individual’ appearing in Obiter Scripta (1936, pp. 88-93). In the main, the design and contents of Soliloquies in England, also seem imitative of Emerson’s English Traits of 1855.

four favorite “American Romantic” fetish dolls, Emerson, Whitman, William James, and Josiah Royce. (But it is telling that Santayana never took the measure of arguably the two greatest figures of the “genteel tradition”, Emily Dickinson and C. S. Peirce.) Sojourning in England and then on the Continent he rang the changes on these polemical themes for approving British readership. Significantly, they continued to preoccupy him into his old age, as for example in his projects of writing his autobiography and his novel, The Last Puritan, even when his actual years on American soil had receded into the distance.

In overall effect, Santayana made his bantering anti-Americanism a distinct part of his publishing career. His anti-Americanism was part of the wider front of his anti-modernity, his overall indictment of “Protestant” modernity. Although an ex-Catholic, he posed as a defender of the moral symbolism of the old faith of Dante; and he found a deeper layer than medieval Christendom in the pagan cultures of Greece and Rome.19 As we learn from TPP and DL, he considered the truest of the pagan philosophies to be the naturalism of Epicurus, with its background in Democritus and its poet in Lucretius. These classical materialistic philosophic predelictions were his strategic weapons against the northern European cultural symbolic of Protestant Romantic modernity.

Now, in this paper I will limit myself to the narrower band of focusing on two representative targets of his culture criticism, namely, his way of interpreting Goethe and Emerson, respectively. Santayana deliberately featured these two literary geniuses as major conduits of “modern Romanticism.” In EGP, he labeled them as “absolute egotists.”20 As late as PP, he described the young Emerson as “a sort of Puritan Goethe.”21 Strategically, they stood for the “German” and “American” varieties of Romantic modernity, against which he set his classical —Epicurean— worldview.

The crux of this consideration will be Santayana’s skeptical materialism. He seems to have remained on the same page with Goethe and Emerson in promoting his version of “the life of the spirit”, —namely, his valorization of the contemplative enjoyment of the realm of essences notwithstanding the psyche’s material weightedness in its “worldly” life.22 And in broader historical perspective, he appears to have shared this orientation with many other genuine Romantics such as Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Wordsworth, Emerson, even Nietzsche, the later Heidegger, and the poets such as Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens. In the final analysis, however, he was the anti-Romantic, or post-Romantic, par excellence. He departed from all these thinkers and writers in insisting on his materialism, in terms of

19 A discussion of Santayana’s bios theoretikos —which I am here identifying as falling within the parameters of the Epicurean paradigm— is found in Krzysztof Piotr Skowroñski, ‘Santayana Today: Problems and Hopes,’ in Under Any Sky: Contemporary Readings of George Santayana, op.cit., pp. 94-101. 20 Santayana, G.: Egotism in German Philosophy, 1971, p. 39. In a separate study this writer would like to analyze Santayana’s possible adherence to Nietzsche’s anti-Romanticism in The Birth of Tragedy (1870-71). The parallels between these two “laughing philosophers”are striking; however, they diverge with respect to Goethe: Nietzsche portrays Faust as breaking with the modern Romantic culture, whereas Santayana regards it as its paradigm. Santayana went on to portray Nietzsche as the über-Romantik in EGP.21 Santayana, G.: Persons and Places, p. 178: “the young Emerson, a sort of Puritan Goethe, the Emerson of Nature, before he slipped into transcendentalism and moralism and complacency in mediocrity, in order to flatter his countrymen and indirectly to flatter himself.” In the present writer’s opinion, sentences such as these, so many years removed from his earlier life in America, witness Santayana’s continued failure ever to come to terms with Emerson’s career-genius —namely, the full range of his prose and poetry articulated over 40 years.22 See Porte, J.: ‘Artifices of Eternity: The Ideal and the Real in Stevens, Williams and Santayana’, pp. 11-8, and Dilworth, D.: ‘The Life of the Spirit in Santayana, Stevens, and Williams’, pp. 16-22, both appearing in Overheard in Seville: Bulletin of the George Santayana Society, Number 23, 2005.

which his “life of the spirit” remained an epiphenomenal doctrine —spirit as “spasmadic and decidedly wind-blown.” Thus, as his career unfolded, he came to reveal himself as a Lucretian litterateur who took “pleasure” in his own ostensibly apolitical ataraxia, playing the role of a skeptical aesthete enjoying a narrow-banded “natural” life free from religious superstitions and the madding credulities of the secularizing modern world.

Needless to say, the many shades of differences among the above list of genuine philosophic and literary Romantics would have to be fine-tuned. Santayana shared something with Nietzsche, whose chief influences, however, were Emerson and Schopenhauer. He shared something with Proust, whose chief influences were Emerson, Schopenhauer, and Ruskin. And Stevens, I have suggested, though initially influenced by Santayana, evolved as a “high Romantic” visionary poet in his own unique way.

Stevens’ postmodern high Romanticism appears to contrast with that of Emerson who, in the standard account, was a Romantic Neoplatonist in a sense associated, for example, with Schelling and Wordsworth, while tapping into further resonances of Plotinus, Hinduism, and the Persian poets. But, on Santayana’s own analyses, it remains extremely difficult to pin Emerson’s polysemous sense of “the Unattainable, the Flying Perfect” down to any doctrinal tenet. He was essentially both a poet and a philosopher (not just a “philosophical poet”), and —precedent to Santayana after him— he rejected the monological significations of the mystics in favor of the polysemous variations of imaginative poiesis.23 A precedent to both Santayana and Wallace Stevens, Emerson’s exemplary declaration against the dogmatic mystics can be construed as “postmodern” in its emphasis on the poet’s role in providing endless “notes toward” “the Supreme Fiction.” At any rate, so elusive are the rhetorically and poetically brilliant writings of Emerson that it is impossible to straightjacket them within a single philosophical line.

In like manner, Goethe’s Romanticism, which traces back to Spinoza, is equally overwhelmed by his polymathic and lyrical genius, and resists a single philosophic summation. His vitalistic sense of natura naturans, —a clear precedent for Emerson’s— eludes any of its contemporary idealistic frameworks, exhibiting rather his own contention as to the primacy of poiesis over philosophical dialectics. If anything, Santayana, while sincerely appreciating their literary geniuses, appears in other passages to have made the mistake of pinning Goethe and Emerson down to doctrinal tenets, making “transcendentalists” and indeed “absolute egotists” out of them so as to fit his anti-romantic and anti-modernity cultural template.24

23 Emerson, R. W.: in “The Poet,” Essays and Lectures, 1983, pp. 363-64: “But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze. . . . Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead. Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one . . . And the mystic must be steadily told,—All that you say is as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric.—universal signs, instead of these village symbols,—and we shall both be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show, that all religious error consisted in making symbols too stark and solid, and, at last, nothing but an excess of the organ of language.” 24 Kromphout, G.: The Modernity of Emerson and the Example of Goethe, 1990, focuses precisely on the modernity of both authors, but without engaging Santayana’s cultural criticism.

Stevens, we saw, honored Santayana as one who lived the life of the imagination,25 and remembered him in his poem “To an Old Philosopher in Rome.” However, as Harold Bloom and others have pointed out, the key to his poetic “remembrance” of “the old philosopher in Rome” is Stevens’ identification with Santayana as a surrogate for expressing his own near-death condition. The relevant lines here are “So that we feel, in this illumined large, / The veritable small, so that each of us / Beholds himself in you, and hears his voice / In yours, master and commiserable man, / Intent on your particles of nethod-do, / Your dozing in the depths of wakefulness. / In the warmth of your bed, at the edge of your chair, alive / Yet living in two worlds.“ In such remarkable poetic lines, Stevens transformed Santayana’s professed materialism—“The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns”—into a symbol of Stevens’ own continued approach to writing “notes toward the supreme fiction,”—as in the poem’s further lines that declare, “The human end in the spirit’s greatest reach, / The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme / Of the unknown.”

In the end, therefore, Stevens must be seen here, and in his late poetry in general, as writing visionary idealistic poetry in departure from Santayana. His “belief in the supreme fictions of the imagination” rather recuperated the trajectory of Emerson’s idealism over against Santayana’s Epicurean materialism. We can say that Stevens accomplished this by combining Santayana’s avowal of the religious equivalence of “the highest poetry” with Emerson’s ubiquitously expressed idealistic sense of a connatural, co-creative, co-operative poetic ground of mind and reality. The final outcome of this “postmodern” synthesis of Emersonian poiesis Stevens expressed in the terms of “God and the imagination are one” in his poem “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” and in many other late poems devoted to the theme that “Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination.” And the precedent of Stevens’ return to Emerson’s poetic idealism traces back to Goethe, among others, so that in the final analysis Stevens’ career has to be seen as acknowledging Santayana’s early influence while eventually subsuming it into another trajectory altogether.

2. SANTAYANA AND EMERSON

While keeping in mind the question of the philosophic value of Santayana’s skeptical materialism, let us now take note of his ambivalent relation to Emerson. Though Goethe is the earlier figure —and a powerful influence on Emerson— I will start with Emerson in view of Santayana’s earlier treatment of him in IPR (1900) and in “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” (1911); his treatment of Goethe came later in TPP (1910) and again in EGP (1916).26 Santayana set out in IPR to dismiss Emerson’s as a “dilettantish mystic”

25 Stevens, I think, shed light on Santayana’s sublimated Epicurean aestheticism when he wrote in his prose essay, ‘Imagination as Value’ (1948): “Most men’s lives are thrust upon them. . . There can be lives, nevertheless, which exist by the deliberate choice of those that live them. To use a single illustration: it may be assumed that the life of Professor Santayana is a life in which the function of the imagination has had a function similar to its function in any deliberate work of art, or letters.” See Stevens, W.: The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, 1951, pp. 147-48; Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, op. cit., pp. 733-34.26 Santayana, who never saw Emerson, wrote on Emerson as early as 1886. Writing for a school essay competition under the pseudonym of “Victor Cousin,” his ‘The Optimism of Ralph Waldo Emerson’, already depicts Emerson as “champion of cheerfulness” and “prophet of a fair-weather religion”; this essay is the precedent for his treatment of Emerson in IPR, 1900, and in ‘The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy’ (1911). The 1886

and “cosmic optimist” —one lacking of course his own sense of what later became his “realm of matter.” The damaging effect of this “repression” of the protean Emerson has been noted by Stanley Cavell, among others, when he wrote:

Of all the moments in the history of what I am calling the repression of Emerson in American philosophy, none seems to me more decisive, apart from the professionalization of philosophy itself, than Santayana’s marking him as a pillar of the Genteel Tradition. . . . What interests me here is that when, in “The Genteel Tradition,” Santayana describes Emerson as “a cheery, childlike soul, impervious to the evidence of evil,” he does not show (there or anywhere else I know that mentions Emerson) any better understanding of Emerson’s so-called optimism than, say, his contemporary H. L. Mencken shows of Nietzsche’s so-called pessimism —he merely retails, beautifully, of course, but essentially without refinement, the most wholesale view there is of him.

In recent years this charge of cheeriness has been under attack by, among others, Stephen Whicher and Harold Bloom, and a more sophisticated picture has emerged according to which Emerson’s early optimism is tempered by a mature or more realistic acceptance of life’s limits and ravages, signaled most perfectly in “Fate,” the opening essay of The Conduct of Life, published two decades after his first volume of essays.27

Cavell’s charge against Santayana’s self-serving skulldudgery with respect to Emerson’s alleged cheery optimism is essentially correct, and, I suggest, can be supplemented on two scores. The first of these requires us to realize that the provenance of Santayana’s “retailing” interpretation of Emerson in IPR is traceable to Henry James Jr., who had his own self-serving agenda in impugning Emerson and the American Transcendentalists.28 A

essay, which shows the young 23-year-old Santayana working with Emerson’s ‘Compensation’ (1841), ‘Considerations By the Way’ (1860), ‘Experience’ (1844), and the poem ‘Brahma’(1857), appears in James Ballowe, George Santayana’s America, 1967, pp. 71-84. In May 1903 he delivered an address at Harvard during Emerson Memorial Week, ‘Emerson’s Poems Proclaim the Divinity of Nature, with Freedom as His Profoundest Ideal,’ which also appears in Ballowe, pp. 84-96.27 Cavell, S.: Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, 2003. (References to Whicher and Bloom on p. 254, fn. 8.)28

Porte, J., and Morris, S. (eds.): Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, 2001, p. 608. Extending the literary animus of The Bostonians, in which he characterized the American Transcendentalists in curmudgeon terms, Henry James went on directly to feature Emerson in a review article of James Eliott Cabot’s two volume Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1887). James’ piece, appearing in Critical Portraits (1888), effectively extended the theme of his novel. The review begins by featuring Emerson as the final —and perfect— “flower of seeds of patriarchal rigidity going back through the generations of his Puritan ancestry.” This heritage, James argues, transparently suffused Emerson’s character and his writings. And in this context James repeats a contemporary strain of criticism of Emerson’s supposed “optimism”: “There he could dwell with ripe unconsciousness of evil which is one of the most beautiful signs by which we know him. His early writings are full of quaint animadversion upon the vices of the place and time, but there is something charmingly vague, light and general in the arraignment.”

James disingenously goes on to say: “We feel that his first impressions were gathered in a community from which misery and extravagance, and either extreme, of any sort, were equally absent. What the life of New England fifty years ago offered to the observer was the common lot, in a kind of achromatic picture, without particular intensifications.” In such armchair-sketched “sociological” observations, James glossed over Emerson’s own literature of personal and philosophic grief as expressed in such essays as ‘The Tragic,’ ‘Experience,’ and ‘Fate,’ and in poems memorializing the death of his first wife (Ellen Tucker, 1831), his two younger brothers (Edward 1834, Charles 1836), and his five year old son Waldo (1842), as well as his commitments to abolition and other critical issues.

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decade later, in “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” Santayana praised Henry James’ for his“classical” understanding of Emerson and the genteel tradition, when in fact it was itself a polemical piece of his (Henry James’) own literary psychology; and the younger Santayana’s account, as Joel Porte has emphasized, seems very derivative from Henry James’.29

The second of these considerations of Santayana’s account of Emerson’s “cheery optimism” concerns his overlooking not only Emerson’s “Fate” (1860) —one of his most celebrated essays, the impact of which can even be traced to the first writings of Nietzsche— but of an earlier writing, “The Tragic,” of the early 1840s. “The Tragic” was Emerson’s “House of Pain” lecture that went through various redactions and formed the background not only of “Fate” but also of several of his key poems which dealt with the series of personal losses Emerson experienced in the death of his first wife Ellen (in 1831), his two younger brothers, Edward (in 1834) and Charles (in 1836), and his beloved son Waldo (in 1842). The evidence is that Emerson deeply encountered “the tragic sense of life” in the various stages of his career—and, moreover, philosophically addressed it more directly than any author after Schopenhauer and before Unamuno.30

Slightly to digress, Henry James’s attack on the American Transcendentalists came out in another context in his remarks on Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911), a minister and civil rights advocate who published a full-length biography of the feminist Margaret Fuller and who became the eventual editor of the first edition of the poems of Emily Dickinson in1890. In 1862 Higginson had taken command of the first battalion of black soldiers to do battle for the North. Henry James’s own brother Wilky fought in the 54th Massachusetts —the most famous black regiment— and was wounded in the massacre of Fort Wagner, in Charleston Bay. Yet Henry James, who sat out the carnage in Newport, Rhode Island, years later characterized Higginson’s activities as “agitations on behalf of everything, almost, but especially of the negroes and the ladies.”

According to Charles R. Anderson, “ Introduction” to Henry James: The Bostonians, Penguin English Library, 1984, 7-31, James disliked the feminists and that seems to be the reference to his dislike for the people around Emerson. Anderson provides readings of the novel’s characters’ resemblances in real life which caused a controversy at the time. Even his brother William James questioned the close resemblance of the characters of The Bostonians with real life persons.29 Santayana, G.: “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” lecture in California, August 25, 1911, published in Winds of Doctrine, 1913, p. 54: “Mr. Henry James has done it [freed himself from the genteel tradition] by adopting the point of view of the outer world, and by turning the genteel tradition, as he turns everything else, into a subject-matter for analysis. For him it is a curious habit of mind, intimately comprehended, to be compared with other habits of mind, also well known to him. Thus he has overcome the genteel tradtion in the classic way, by understanding it. William James. . . eluded the genteel tradtion in the romantic way, by continuing it into its opposite.” All this is disingenuous. Santayana’s first “literary” reference to the genteel tradition is: “The American Will inhabits the sky-scraper; the American Intellect inhabits the colonial mansion. The one is th sphere of the American man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American woman. The one is all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition.” Later the chief fountains of this tradition are “Calvinism and transcendentalism. Both were living fountains; but to keep them alive they required, one an agonised conscience, and the other a radical subjective criticism of knowledge.”. Santayana depicts these as opposites, but says he agrees with the second as a method. Earlier he stated that Emerson, Poe, and Hawthorne evaded the genteel tradition. He goes on to depict Emerson as in a “cheery, child-like soul, impervious to the evidence of evil,” and who had no system. 30

Taken by itself, ‘The Tragic’ (1844) can be read as a prescient rejoinder to the charges of Henry James and

Santayana against Emerson’s “cheery optimism.” It stemmed originally from his lecture course on ‘Human Life,’ read in Boston, 1839-40; it was published in the Dial (April 1844), and collected posthumously in The Natural History of Intellect and Other Papers (1893). Though originally “uncollected,” it was the obvious predecessor to his major essays ‘Experience’ (Essays: Second Series, 1844) and ‘Fate’ (from The Conduct of Life, 1860), in which he thematised the problem of human pain, evil, and fate in tension with the affirmation of life and energies of man, and reiterated it in his final philosophic works ‘The Natural History of Intellect’ (1870) and ‘Poetry and Imagination’ in Letters and Social Aims (1876).

30

In impugning Emerson’s philosophic credentials, by featuring him as an icon of both Puritanism and Transcendentalism, Henry James Jr. and his “disciple” Santayana had their own agendas. They repeated a strain of interpretation derivative from the critical refrain of Emerson’s Concord neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and of Emerson’s friend, Henry James Sr.—an interpretation later repeated by Santayana’s Harvard student T. S. Eliot who, also self-imagingly, sought to dismiss Emerson.31 As mentioned above, the left-progressives of the 1920s and 30s —such as Van Wyck Brooks who had also been Santayana’s student at Harvard— coopted his remarks on the “Genteel Tradition” for their own political purposes.

Both Henry James and Santayana ended up damning Emerson with feint praise, lauding his personal “post-Puritan piety” while downgrading him for not having a distinct literary

“The Tragic” begins with the sentences: “He has seen but half the universe who never has been shown the House of Pain. As the salt sea covers more than two thirds of the surface of the globe, so sorrow encroaches in man on felicity.” The first long paragraph is a veritable catalog of the cruel “cares” of human life. It ends with the remark that “no theory of life can have any right, which leaves out of account the values of vice, pain, disease, poverty, insecurity, disunion, fear, and death.”

In “The Tragic,” Emerson goes on to ask, What are the conspicuous tragic elements in human nature? The bitterest to be derived from an intellectual source is “the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny,” one in which the universe is indifferent if not also mal-adapted to human nature. This belief, he says, lays at the foundation of the old Greek tragedy, East Indian mythology, and the predestination of the Turk. It is a terror, however, that has been progressively superseded by civilization, and can no longer coexist given the rational accomplishments of higher civilization. The antique tragedy, founded on the belief in Destiny as an immense whim, can never be reproduced, Emerson says, in that it has been displaced by the long-civilized doctrine of “Philosophical Necessity,” or “Optimism,” which holds that “the suffering individual finds his good consulted in the good of all, of which he is a part.” He contends that historical reason and faith have introduced irreversibly better public and private traditions. But these traditions of rational reflection “continually thwart the will of ignorant individuals, and this in the particulars of disease, want, insecurity, and disunion.”

Emerson goes on to say that “the essence of tragedy” does not seem to him to live in any particular list of evils. After enumerating “famine, fever, inaptitude, mutilation, rack, madness, and the loss of friends,” he finds the proper tragic element in “Terror.” But Terror most appears to certain natures that are not clear, not of quick and steady perceptions, depressants, persons with “natures so doomed that no prosperity can soothe their ragged and disheveled desolation.” “Frankly then it is necessary to say that all sorrow dwells in a low region. It is superficial; for the most part fantastic, or in the appearance and not in things. Tragedy is in the eye of the observer, and not in the heart of the sufferer… it is always another person who is tormented.” Panic, or terror, then, is “full of illusion.” He supports this contention with an astute observation, namely, that “the most exposed classes, soldiers, sailors, paupers, are nowise destitute of animal spirits.” “The spirit is true to itself, and finds its own support in any condition, learns to live in what is called calamity, as easily as in what is called felicity, as the frailest glass-bell will support a weight of a thousand pounds of water at the bottom of a river or sea, if filled with the same.”

With this compensating thought and in keeping with his insistence on the progressive achievements of human civilization, Emerson segues to a series of historical reflections. He first cites “the countenances of sublime tranquility” of the Egyptian sphinxes as very old symbols of the higher register of the human mind. To this he adds “the ideal beauty” of the genius of Greek civilization, which, he says, “was true to human nature,” too. Learning these historical examples, our own lives demand of us “an equilibrium, a readiness, open eyes and ears, and free hands. Society asks this, and truth, and love, and the genius of our life.” Accordingly, we “must walk as guests of nature, —not impassioned, but cool and disengaged.” All melancholy, as all passion, to the contrary, “belongs to the exterior life,” where “a man is not grounded in the divine life by his proper roots.” “If a man is centred,” he discerns the impassable limits of “perversity and profligacy,” and can respond to deal with it: “He sees already in the ebullition of sin, the simultaneous redress.”

This pragmatic consideration is another application of Emerson’s logic of compensation. There are particular reliefs to human calamities, he says, “for the world will be in equilibrium, and hates all manner of exaggeration.” Time is the consoler, the rich carrier of all changes: it “dries the freshest tears by obtruding new figures, new costumes, new roads, on our eye, new voices on our ear.” Time, in the metamorphoses of Nature, “acts as a drying wind into the distressed seed-field of our thoughts.”

Again there is a positive aspect of the law of polarity that “Temperament resists the impression of pain.” He details how this is true in individual cases of sufferers. Most suffering is only apparent to the outside observer, who cannot see “the self-adapting strength,” “the mysterious counterbalance” Nature supplies in individual cases.

style (as Henry James charged!) nor a coherent worldview (Santayana). (But did they, or any of his other critics, have a more cogent philosophic resolution of “the problem of evil”?) But my point there is that Henry James and Santayana egregiously misreported Emerson, by way of failing to take note of Emerson’s “The Tragic” and “Fate” and his overall fundamental binary of “fate” and “power.” Neither writer dealt with the fact that the dialectic of “fate” and “power” subtended the considerable amount of Emerson’s mid- and late phase works such as The Conduct of Life (1860), Society and Solitude (1870), The Natural History of Intellect (1870), and Letters and Social Aims (1876), which, together with a second volume of poetry, amounted to an enormous literary and philosophic accomplishment on Emerson’s part.32

However, —as I have observed— the issue is Santayana’s own skeptical materialism. In his later theoretical career, Santayana articulated his own “ontological” categories of “existence” and “essence,” the “realms” of which stylistically involved his constant oscillation between the two poles of “matter” and “spirit.” His “realm of spirit” played the twin Epicurean roles of supplying the transcripts of animal action and of care-free flights of the contemplative imagination. But mutatis mutandis, these polarities corresponded to Emerson’s binary of power and fate. “Power” for Emerson connoted the active forces of intellect, of aesthetic and religious imagination, and of moral character, as these could play productive roles in counteracting and transforming the brutal resistances and contingencies of the physical world. In his later writings Emerson continued to develop this positive humanism set within the metamorphoses and polarities of Nature. “Power” for Emerson also connoted his central teaching of the connaturality, or affinity of mind and nature —therefore of the mind’s ability, thanks to its evolutionary past, to adapt to and co-operate with nature— which seems to subsume Santayana’s doctrine of animal faith in a wider framework. It can be said that Santayana’s full-blown doctrinal formulations —in his Realms of Being— established a like binary of fundamental concepts. His formulations even retained Emerson’s sense, articulated in the essay “Fate” (1860), of “the Beautiful Necessity” of both living in a contingent world and reverencing its gifts of possible human, rational and especially spiritual, prospects and prosperity. The crucial difference, however, is that Emerson framed this binary of fate and power in idealistic metaphysical terms, whereas Santayana did so in the terms of his epiphenomenalist epistemology.

Already in his maiden work, Nature (1836), Emerson framed the debate between Idealism and Materialism head-on. In “The Transcendentalist” (1842 ) and later in such other writings as “Nominalist and Realist” (1844 ), Emerson clarified that both idealistic and materialistic worldviews were natural human speculations, but concluded that the former is to be preferred for its valorization of the higher reaches of the imagination.

For his part, Santayana sought to impugn Idealism for its “pathetic fallacy,” namely, its imaginative projection of human consciousness and emotion onto the nature of things. But it should be noted that in TPP he also characterized the “naturalistic conception of things,” which he found paradigmatically expressed in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, as “a great work of imagination, —greater, I think, than any dramatic or moral mythology.”33 The issue then becomes one of kinds and degrees of imagination, and the relative merits of the idealistic and materialistic imaginations. Their relation, according to Emerson, is

31 Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, op. cit., p. 681.32 Arvin, N.: “The House of Pain: Emerson and the Tragic Sense,” The Hudson Review, vol. XII, 1959, pp. 37-58.33 Santayana, G.: Three Philosophical Poets, 1910, p. 21.

asymmetrical. The materialist —Santayana is the perfect example— can be on occasion an idealist, but the idealist cannot reciprocate. In Emerson’s words in “The Transcendentalist,” “Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.”34

In passing, it should be noted that Emerson’s later-phase poetic idealism embraced the evolutionary perspective that had its brilliant reformulation in the later metaphysical writings of C. S. Peirce, who acknowledged Emerson’s influence on his own objective idealism.35 In the final analysis, I suggest, Santayana’s “realm of matter,” essentially consisted in “the field of action” of “animal faith.” This doctrine did not, and could not, refute Emerson or Peirce. “Animal faith” and “animal action” remain phenomenological, or quasi-empirical descriptions that account for pragmatic behavior but fall short of satisfying the theoretical issues connected with Emerson’s and Peirce’s consideration of the scientific and aesthetic connaturalities of mind and nature.36

34 Emerson, R. W.: “The Transcendentalist,” in Essays and Lectures, 1983, p. 193.35

Charles Sanders Peirce, in one of his most significant metaphysical essays, “The Law of Mind’ (1892), referring

first to his theory of spontaneous variation in nature, which he classified under the phenomenological rubric of Firstness, wrote: “I have begun by showing that tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth, and to a Schelling-fashioned idealism which holds matter to be mere specialized and partially deadened mind.” Peirce went on to acknowledge that his system had its provenance in the atmosphere of Transcendentalism he had breathed as a young man:

I may mention, for the benefit of those who are curious in studying mental biographies that I was born and reared in the neighbourhood of Concord —I mean in Cambridge— at the time when Emerson, Hedge, and their friends were disseminating the ideas that they had caught from Schelling, and Schelling from Plotinus, from Boehm, and from God knows what minds stricken with the monstrous monism of the East. But the atmosphere of Cambridge held many an antiseptic against Concord transcendentalism; and I am not conscious of having contracted any of that virus. Nevertheless, it is probable that some cultured bacilli, some benignant form of the disease was implanted in my soul, unawares, and that now, after long incubation, it comes to the surface, modified by mathematical conceptions and by training in physical investigations. (The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 1-6 co-edited by Hartshore, C. and Weiss, P., Cambridge, Massachusetts, The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1931, 6.102.) On this passage his biographer Joseph Brent astutely comments: “Peirce left us to decide whether he was actually unaware of the long idealist (and realist) infection, or had simply been hiding it from the incredulous gaze of his nominalist and mechanist fellow scientists. The latter seems far more likely” (Brent, J.: Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life, p. 209).

The trail of transmission of metaphysical ideas from Emerson to Peirce goes back to 1870, when we can presume that Peirce was well apprised of the contents of Emerson’s ‘The Natural History of Intellect.’ As a step toward graduate education, the new young president of Harvard Charles Eliot took an existing program called University Lectures and reorganized it into two sequences of lectures, each running a full year, and costing one hundred fifty dollars, the equivalent of a year’s undergraduate education. These series of courses ran sequentially. There were seven lecture courses in the philosophy series; besides Emerson, the other lecturers were Francis Bowen, John Fiske, C. S. Peirce, James E. Cabot, Frederic Henry Hedge, and George Fisher. Emerson was next to last; he gave three lectures a week starting April 26, under the title ‘The Natural History of Intellect.’ The total enrollment was nine. The series was dropped after the first year. Four took the sequence through to the end. Emerson continued; lower fees were set for each separate course, and some thirty people came to hear him. (Richardson, R. D. JR.: Emerson: The Mind on Fire, 1995, pp. 562-63.) Emerson gave sixteen lectures between April 26 and June 3. Bowen led off on seventeenth-century philosophy, followed by John Fiske on Positivism, and Peirce on the British logicians. Cabot and Hedge came next with roughly concurrent lectures, Cabot’s on Kant, Hedge’s on theism, pantheism, and atheism. Fisher on Stoicism was the last. Emerson was paid $8.75 for each of his sixteen lectures. (Rusk, R. L.: The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1949, p. 442.)36 See Randall, J. H., JR.: ‘George Santayana—Naturalizing the Imagination’, in Lachs, J. (ed.): Animal Faith and the Spiritual Life, 1967. Lachs, J.: “Are We All Materialists or Idealists After All?” in Under Any Sky: Contemporary Readings of George Santayana, op. cit., pp. 9-13, revisits this issue in astute fashion. He parses the counterclaims of idealists and materialists, concluding, via his endorsement of Santayana’s doctrine of animal faith in the continuous field of action, that even Hegel was a materialist. In passing, he refers to the “steadfast realism”

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Indeed, to cut to the philosophic chase, a case can be made that Santayana was in fact no “materialist” at all, but added his own version of natura naturans to a time-honored metaphysical tradition going back to the Presocratics, Plato, and Aristotle. As a skeptical Platonist and Epicurean naturalist, he was certainly not a Democritean determinist; nor did he subscribe to the mechanistic postulate of Galileo and Newton (so exhaustively rejected by Goethe, Emerson and Peirce). His “realm of matter,” which perforce centered on the activity of the living animal, is rather replete with the characteristics of Aristotelian entelechy and Peircean “habits of nature” in the two forms of arrested and plastic “tropes” of animate psyches.37 Thus he was not aligned with any sense of “objective nature” presupposed in epistemologically reductive empiricism or in the factical empirical sciences; of the latter, Santayana said that he wishes them joy but they will never get to the bottom of things. His sense of the bottom of things —his “realm of matter”— turned out to be indistinguishable from that of Schopenhauer’s sense of the “inner nature of things,” namely the Will, as he himself came to acknowledge in his autobiography.38 But in that case his ”ontology” of the “realm of matter” fell considerably short of Schopenhauer’s grand theoretical system which combined Platonic, Kantian, and Eastern mystical concepts and issued forth in a metaphysics of art and metaphysical of morals quite at variance with Santayana’s skeptical aestheticism.

3. SANTAYANA AND GOETHE

A decade after IPR (1900), Santayana published TPP (1910), which featured the three “philosophical poets” Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. In a powerful conclusion he argued to the non-reducible insights of the three philosophical poets and the need for the arrival of a new poet who could synthesize the essential insights of all three. Dante’s supernaturalism, he concluded, proves to be chimerical; and Lucretius’ Epicurean worldview yields too few naturalistic palms other than a conservative hygiene of body and mind and freedom from supernaturalistic anxieties. For its part, Goethe’s Faust repesents a self-absorbed transcendental subjectivity associated with the errors of German idealistic philosophy and of Romanticism generally —an argument further developed in his chapter on Goethe in TTP (1910) as well as in EGP (1916, and repeated somewhat mechanically thereafter).

of Peirce’s system, one that “without his ever thinking that he had to give up his realism. . . [held] that on the last analysis everything . . . is mind” (p. 11). Lachs seems to suggest, from Santayana’s materialistic perspective, a criticism of Peirce here, but does not pursue the issue. For his part, Peirce, a committed Emersonian (and follower of Schelling) in his later-phase metaphysics,—and therefore a precedent for the later-phase Stevens,—developed a wider set of categories both embracive and rejective of Hegel’s idealism and of the principle of materialism as well. Santayana’s “plastic” version of materialism can be read as close to Peirce’s in certain respects, but ultimately his epiphenomenalism and skeptical Platonism are no match for the theoretic comprehensiveness of Peirce’s Emersonian objective idealism, especially on the big-ticket issues of the “poetic grounds” of science and art. (Cf. Ibri, I., ‘Reflections on a Poetic Ground in Peirce’s Philosophy’, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 45, 2009, pp. 273-307).37 Santayana, G.: The Realm of Matter: Book Second of Realms of Being, 1930, chapters six, Tropes,” seven, “Teleology,” and eight, “The Psyche.” 38 Santayana, G.: Persons and Places, 1986, p. 239: “The ‘Will’ of Schopenhauer was a transparent mythological symbol for the flux of matter. There was absolute equivalence between such a system, in its purport and sense for reality, and the systems of Spinoza and Lucretius. This was the element of the ancient sanity that kept me awake and conscious of the points of the compass in the subsequent wreck of psychologism.” But conversely, in many transparent respects, Santayana’s concept of the “realm of matter” retailed Schopenhauer’s concept of “Will.”

Here it can be noted that Santayana’s anti-modern instinct already expressed itself in his reaction against Goethe. As Gustaav Van Kromphout has cogently spelled out, Goethe was the first progenitor and the greatest embodiment of modernity itself, and it was his “example” that Emerson perceptively absorbed. In this respect Emerson was greatly influenced by his Transcendentalist colleague, Sarah Margaret Fuller, a leading translator and scholar of Goethe in 19th century New England before her tragic death by shipwreck in 1850 (another sumerged element in Emerson’s “Fate” of 1860).39

Santayana’s polemical interpretation of Goethe’s Faust took the form of his own literary-psychologistic fusion of the personality of the poetic genius of Goethe and of the hero of his “tragic-comedy.” (Santayana does not give much play to Mephistopheles, who presumably represented another aspect of Goethe’s creative imagination. Santayana, in fact, plays the Mephistophelean role of destructive ironist in his study.) In reality, of course, the polymathic and multi-tasking genius of Goethe contained so much more than even his career-long masterpiece, Faust, expressed. But here, as again in EGP, Santayana’s agenda is to conflateGoethe’s personality and career-work as evidence of “modern” Romanticism, and, with that, the degeneration of modern European culture. In both writings, IPR and TPP, he portrays Faust as a theory of “ radical experience,” “arrogant” and “egotistical” in its “endlessness and purposelessness” —and, of course, as the very mother of all Germanic “transcendental egotisms.” The problem here is that Santayana indulged in this overwrought description as a strawman for his own doctrinal promotions of his recently published The Life of Reason and other early writings. In net effect, he transformed, for his own polemical purposes, Goethe’s brilliant, timeless literary masterpiece into a piece of historicist prose doctrine. (This in contrast with Emerson’s account of Faust as a universally “representative” work of human civilization, about which more below).40

Santayana’s account, strategically limited to Faust, does not profess to take the measure of Goethe’s lyrical genius, his novelistic and dramatic power, wealth of aphoristic writings, and extensive nature studies, nor even the full range of subtleties of his conception of Faust as portrayed in Johann Peter Eckermann’s Conversations of Goethe, a work praised by Nietzsche as the greatest work of German prose. It was Goethe’s more far-ranging genius that exercised a powerful influence on the early phase of American Transcendentalism, through the studies of Margaret Fuller, co-editor of Emerson’s The Dial transcendentalist literary magazine, as well as through Emerson himself (who learned German to read Goethe in the original) and other early American Transcendentalists.41

Contrary to Santayana’s “radical empiricist” interpretation of Goethe’s Faust in TPP, a literary reading more faithful to the text should account for Faust’s spiritual development (Entwichlung) in Part Two, which involves his transcendence of the mundane adventures of Part One and his synthesis of the Gothic world and Greek classicism, and finally his rejection of the devil’s magic and his salvation by divine grace, in Part Two. A key passage

39 Kromphout, G.: Emerson’s Modernity and the Example of Goethe, Chapter One, ‘Goethe’s Modernity,’ is a comprehensive discussion of Goethe’s influence on Emerson. For his part, Emerson critiqued Goethe’s modernity and distinguished it from New England Transcendentalism, in ‘Thoughts on Modern Literature,’ in The Dial, October 1840 (Emerson, Essays and Lectures, pp. 1147-68), and again in ‘Goethe: OR, The Writer,’ in Representative Men of 1855 (ibid., 746-61). But Kromphout is cogent in showing how Goethe’s influence was ubiquitous and pervasive in Emerson’s career.40 Emerson, R. W.: ‘Goethe; Or, The Writer,’ ibid., pp. 746-61.41 Wayne, T. K.: Goethe,’ 129-30, and “Sarah Margaret Fuller,” 121-23, both in Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism, 2006, pp. 129-30 and pp. 121-23, respectively

presaging this effect already comes at the beginning of Part Two when Faust vows to pursue “the highest human existence” (zum höchsten Dasein).42

Part Two’s surprising ending which features, against the medieval tradition, Faust’s salvation, also symbolically expressed Goethe’s musings on his immortal entelechy which he propounded on various occasions to Eckermann.43 The theme dovetailed with Goethe’s central tenets concerning productive agency (die Tat). And the interpretive key to this poetically symbolized “final signified” is the mysterious Eternal-Feminine, itself the final form of the metamorphoses of many female avatars in the course of Faust’s birthing (Entstehen, genesis) into eternal life. By the end of Part Two the Eternal-Feminine (das Ewig-Weibliche) symbolizes the “supreme fiction” of the co-operating divine activity in its

42 Faust, Part Two, lines 4679-4685:

Des Lebens Pulse schlagen frisch lebendig,Ātherische Dämmerung milde zu begrüssen;Du, Erde, warst auch diese Nacht beständigUnd armest new erquickt zu meinen Füssen.Beginnest schon, mit Lust mich zu umgeben,Du regst und rührst ein kräftiges Beschleissen,Zum höchsten Dasein immerfort zu streben.

How strong and pure the pulse of life is beating!Dear Earth, this night has left you still unshaken,And at my feet you breathe refreshed, my greetingTo you, ethereal dawn! New joys awakenAll round me at your bidding, beckoning distance,New stirring strength, new resolution taken

To strive on still towards supreme existence. (transl. David Luke)43

To reinforce this interpretation of the ending of Faust, Part Two, which culminates in the concept of Faust’s

salvation by the Eternal-Feminine, we can draw upon Goethe’s own musements on his (Leibnizian) entelechy (that is, the soul’s incessant appetition for its own internal perfection by nature and grace).

This key passage should be correlated with the following passages from Conversations of Goethe which change the focus of our attention from the character of Faust to that of Goethe himself. Before commencing the Second Part of Faust, Goethe in 1813 described death as a natural process of dissolution in which the dominant monad releases its subordinate monads from this union. There is a natural hierarchy of monads, he opined, some having a stronger potential than others to participate in the creative process as well as to maintain themselves in existence. “I myself,” he added, “am sure that I have existed a thousand times already and may hope to return a thousand times again.” (Conversation with Falk, 25 January 1813, cited in David Luke, Faust, Part Two).

Then, well into the composition of Faust, Part Two, in 1828 Goethe spoke as follows to Eckermann: “Every Entelechy [soul] is a piece of eternity, and the few short years during which it is bound to an

earthly body do not make it old. If this entelechy is of a trivial sort, it will exert scarcely any influence during its period of bodily obscuration; on the contrary, the body will predominate, and when the body grows old, the entelechy will not hinder its decay. But if the entelechy is powerful, as it is in all men of natural genius, it will pervade and animate the body, and not only will it have a strengthening and ennobling effect on the physical organization, but its superior spiritual strength will also be such that it will constantly try to assert its privilege of perpetual youth. That is why fresh periods of unusual productivity may still be seen to occur in exceptionally gifted men even when they are old; they seem from time to time to undergo a temporary rejuvenation, which is what I should like to call a repetition of puberty.” (Eckermann, Conversations of Goethe, 249, entry for 11 March 1828.)

In the following year Goethe spoke in a similar self-referential vein to Eckermann, combining his Leibnizian sense of entelechy with his hero Faust’s philosophy of incessant striving for highest Dasein, and both rooted “in the nature of things”:

“Man should believe in immortality, he has a right to, it is natural for him, and he may rely on religious assurances. . . . For me, the conviction of our survival is derived from the concept of activity, for if I continue unceasingly active till the end of my life, nature is under an obligation to provide me

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productive, loving, forgiving, grace-conferring power over against and beyond Mephistopheles’s avowal to bring everything back to Eternal-Emptiness (das Ewig-Leere).44 Thus Faust’s incessantly “Romantic” strivings (Streben, Entstehen) and development (Entwichlung), —as well as those of his pre-human counterpart, the idiot savant Homunculus (symbolic of Goethe’s scientific proclivities and of mankind’s origins in the organic evolution of the world), —fuse with the generative love of the Eternal-Feminine. All this goes way beyond Santayana’s interpretation of “false endlessness.”

In Part One, the famous line 1238 contains Goethe’s hermeneutical principle, as he portrays Faust as tweaking the New Testament to his own purposes. Faust’s interpretation of the Bible boldly displaces any metaphysics of Logos, Sinn, or Kraft in the words: “In the

with another form of existence when my present form can no longer keep pace with my mind.” (Ibid., Conversations of Goethe, entry for 4 February 1829.)

(In passing, we can note that this conversation sheds light on Faust, Part Two, lines 11958 ff., where the angels describe Faust’s “spirit-energy” as an “entelechy” that captures the physical elements powerfully. Faust is still active in his 100th year).

Goethe then ramified the basic thought in conversation with Eckermann six months later: “I have no doubt of our survival, for the entelechy is indispensable to nature; but we are not all immortal in the same way, and in order to manifest oneself as a great entelechy in the future state, it is also necessary to be one.” (Ibid., p. 331, entry for the following 1 September 1829).

In passing, we can note that in a manuscript variant of Scene 23 of Part Two written at this time, Faust’s soul or “immortal part” is called “Faust’s entelechy.” In the finally published Scene 23, Faust’s entelechy detaches itself from its earthly substance and moves into a noumenal realm of transfiguration, accompanied by a Mystical Choir in excelsis.

There is another revealing conversation with Eckermann that speaks of his character Faust’s active striving for “highest Dasein” in contrast to the negative action of his counterpart Mephistopheles. Goethe often spoke of “daemonic powers” —powers of inspiration from “higher influences” evident in geniuses such as Dante, Raphael, Moliere, Shakespeare, and Mozart. The passage in question is remarkable for its imaginative alchemy and philosophical assertion. “The Daemonic,” Goethe said, “is that which cannot be explained by Reason or Understanding; it lies not in my nature, but I am subject to it. . .

“It manifests itself in the most varied manner throughout nature—in the invisible as in the visible. Many creatures are of a purely daemonic kind; in many, parts of it are effective.

“Has Mephistopheles,” said I [Eckermann], “demonic traits, too?“No, Mephistopheles is much too negative a being. The Daemonic manifests itself in a thoroughly active

power. Among artists it is found more among musicians —less among painters. In Paginini, it shows itself in a high degree; and it is thus he produces such great effects.” (Ibid., p. 392; entry for March 3, 1831; cf. pp. 394-95.)

I submit that all this is indispensable contemporary witness to Goethe’s own final sense-constituting purpose to bring Part Two to the religious and Leibnizian symbolisms that he did. At the same time he seems to have intertwined these religious and Leibnizian images with a broader sense of “Nature,” indicative of his long-standing adherence to the pantheism of Spinoza. At all events, to some extent Goethe distanced himself from his hero Faust in the course of the play. Faust’s burial scene, in which his grave is being laid out, unbeknownst to himself, by comical lemur-zombies, is witness to that. His salvation, wholly unexpected by himself, comes from on high —in a scene in which Mephistopheles is finally bested.44

In the first ‘Faust Study’ scene of Part One Mephistopheles introduces himself as “the spirit of perpetual

negation” whose only element is that of life-destroying fire (lines 1335-78), and Faust recognizes him as “the strange son of chaos,” the arch-enemy who raises in cold rage his clenched satanic fist against life (1379-85). To bring Faust’s soul down into the fires of hell, he takes him on all kinds of lowlife adventures. Fast-forwarding to the scene in which Faust is being laid in the grave prior to his soul’s redemption, Mephistopheles utters a triumphant repetition of his own philosophy:

Why bother to go on creating?Making, then endlessly annihilating! ‘Over and past!’ What’s that supposed to mean?It’s no more than if it had never been,Yet it goes bumbling round as if it were.The Eternal Void is what I’d much prefer. (11595-11164) (trans. David Luke)

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beginning was the Deed”.45 In the dramatic finale of Part Two we come to see that it too harbingered the Eternal-Feminine’s merciful power at work in the universe over and above but in co-operation with human activity. It works to save not only Faust’s “immortal part,” —his soul or “entelechy”— but Mephistopheles’ as well!

True to his own interpretive agenda, Santayana reductively underplayed the literary ingenuity and intuitional networking of these related scenes. He rather depicted the scene of Faust’s salvation as just another one of his “episodes” along a horizontal line of endlessly discontinuous experiences characteristic of the “modern” Romantic mind. Here is the case of the critic (Santayana) replacing the author (Goethe). Let us rather let Goethe have his own “last word” on the interpretation of Faust, Part Two. In Conversations with Goethe, Eckermann reports as follows: “We then spoke of the conclusion, and Goethe directed my attention to the passage:

Delivered is the noble spirit From the control of evil powers;Who ceaselessly doth strive will merit That we should save and make him ours:If Love celestial never cease To watch him from its upper sphere;The children of eternal peace Bear him to cordial welcome there. (lines 11934-11941)

‘In these lines,’ said he, ‘is contained the key to Faust’s salvation. In Faust himself there is an activity that becomes constantly higher and purer to the end, and from above there is eternal love coming to his aid. This harmonizes perfectly

Mephistopheles key lines concerning the Eternal-Void are expressed in the subjective case (Ich liebte mir dafür das Ewig-Leere). As we have seen, it is to be trumped by the last lines of the entire play, das Ewig-Weibliche / Zieht uns hinan (“Eternal-Womanhood / Draws us on high”). Goethe clearly intended this final confrontation of das Ewig-Leere (“The Eternal Void”) and das Ewig-Weibliche (“Eternal-Womanhood”) which, in logical form, represents the sublation of Mephistopheles’ negativity in the higher positivity of Faust’s salvation. But again, we must note that Faust, for all his incessant labors and magical adventures, did not achieve his own salvation. He is redeemed through the loving intercession of Gretchen, who personifies the Eternal-Feminine more decidedly than Helen of Troy and all the other human and mythological female characters of the play.45

Faust, Part One, lines 1224 ff. :

‘In the beginning was the Word’; why, now [das Wort]I’m stuck already! I must change that; how?Is then ‘the word’ so great and high a thing?There is some other rendering,Which with the spirit’s guidance I must find.We read: ‘In the beginning was the Mind.’ [der Sinn]Before you write the first phrase, think again; Good sense eludes the overhasty pen.Does ‘mind’ set worlds on their creative course?It means: ‘In the beginning was the Force’, [die Kraft]So it should be—but as I write this too,Some instinct warns me that it will not do.The spirit speaks! I see how it must read,

And boldly write: ‘In the beginning was the Deed’. [die Tat]. (trans. David Luke).

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with our religious views; according to which we can obtain heavenly bliss, not through our own strength alone, but with the assistance of divine grace.

You will confess that the conclusion, where the redeemed soul is carried up, was difficult to manage; and that, amid such supersensual matters about which we scarcely have even an intimation, I might easily have lost myself in the vague —if I had not, by means of sharply-drawn figures, and images from the Christian Church, given my poetical design a desirable form and substance.’46

These are Goethe’s own words in 1831 on the “final signified” of his Faust. And according to Goethe’s own paralipomena, his earliest plans for Faust, dating from 1770-75, already included a conception both of the Helena story and of Faust’s salvation, both of which became significant features of Part Two (which was only begun around 1816). Goethe’s plans here were unique, running against the grain of the received tradition. His salvation of Faust explicitly traversed the medieval chapbooks and puppet plays which featured Faust’s selling his soul to the Devil; it also reversed Thomas Marlowe’s similar portrayal of the perdition of Faust, a traditional denouement that was revived by Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus.

Santayana’s misreading of Goethe is no more apparent than here. But the bigger issue of interpretation becomes that of placing his Faust within the general framework of his idealism. According to Van Kromphout’s well documented analysis, Goethe’s way of thinking reversed Plotinian emanationism and Spinozan pantheism by considered nature as “completing” spirit; in Emerson’s analogous version, spirit achieves “natural embodiment” in the sense that “the world realizes the mind”. In ontological focus, both writers emphasized co-operative “ripeness” and “fruition”, a theme played out constantly in their respective poetics of the fullness of time in “the eternal moment” (Der Augenblick ist Ewigkeit). As Goethe said to Eckermann: “Every moment has infinite worth because it is representative (Repräsentant) of all eternity”. Similar passages occur in Emerson; the point governs one of his favorite poems, “Days.”47 Another mode of essential (ontological)

46 Eckermann, op. cit., p. 413.47 Kromphout, G.: op. cit., Ch. Three, ‘The Critique of Idealism’, is built on a preceding chapter which documents Emerson’s deep assimilation of Goethe’s nature pantheism, itself an “organic” rerendering of Spinoza. He shows that both Goethe and Emerson are on the same page in spelling out the implications of their “Idealism” which, while investing in Platonic and Neo-Platonic tropes, is ultimately not emanationistic in the traditional sense. Kromphout cites Goethe to the effect of “inverting the hierarchical order of Plotinian emanationism.” This interrpretation accounts for much that is most characteristic of Goethe—for instance, his identification of truth with fruitfulness (Was fruchtbar ist, allein is wahr); his claim that the essence of human nature requires productivity of expression; that the historical realization of an Idea is the only test of its truth or falsehood; his indifference to anything unlikely to advance (fördern) his development. Unlike Hegel, to Goethe nature is not a “defection” (Abfall) from the Idea, but rather its necessary incarnation. Spirit and matter are co-dependent. Kromphout says that Emerson’s text occasionally reflects Goethe’s influence in this regard, as when he speaks of the co-operation of Man and Nature. Cf. Emerson’s “Days creep by, each full of facts, dull, strange, despised things . . .” ending with a celebration of the arrival of “inconceivably remote purpose and laws”—of Spirit—“on the shores of Being and into the ripeness and domain of Nature” (cited in Kromphout, ibid., p. 47.). In his address “The Method of Nature” of 1841, Emerson, wrote: “The termination of the world in a man, appears to be the last victory of intelligence. . . An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen” (Emerson, Essays and Lecutres, p. 122). In “Nature” (1844), “Man carries the world in his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore is he the prophet and discoverer of her secrets” (ibid., p. 548); or again, “The world is mind precipitated, and the volitile essence is forever escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence the virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind, of natural objects, whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man crystallized,

productivity is action (die Tat), as in Faust’s struggle to translate St. John in lines 1224-37. Im Anfang war die Tat reaches fruition at the end of Part Two, where deficiency (das Unzulängliche) and ineffability (das Unbeschreibliche) find their culminating divine realization in event and deed (hier wird’s Ereignis . . . / Hier ist’s getan, lines 12106-9).48

As Emerson came to appreciate, the entirety of Faust, Parts One and Two, was Goethe’s self-expression of his own power of archetypal poiesis featuring the realization of essential Ideas in nature. Its fantastic characters (Chirons, Griffins, Sirens, Sea Nymphs, Phorcyads, Leda and her daughter Helena, Proteus, Nereus, Galatea, and a score of others), he wrote, “are eternal entities, as real today as in the first Olympiad”. Emerson goes on to praise Goethe’s productive imagination as follows: “Much revolving them he writes out freely his humour, and gives them body to his own imagination. And though that poem be as vague and fantastic as a dream, yet it is much more attractive than the more regular dramatic pieces of the same author, for the reason that it operates a wonderful relief to the mind from the routine of customary images,—awakens the reader’s invention and fancy by the wild freedom of the design, and by the unceasing succession of brisk shock of surprise”.49

But Faust was not only Goethe’s phantasmogoria of imagination, as he wrote in the Prelude; it also represented his basic philosophy. The ultimate surprise and “final signified” turn out to be Faust’s salvation through the intercession of Gretchen, signifying his central doctrine of the fruition of creative striving. But even there, it should be noted that just as Mephistopheles proclaims her eternal damnation in the closing scene of Part I, a surprising voice from on high —Ist gerettet! (“She is saved!” line 4612)— announces her salvation, preparing the way for Faust’s salvation at the end of Part II.

Faust, then, was not a “radical empiricist” endlessly episodic tragedy, but rather an expression of the metamorphoses and prosperous issues of productive activity. It evades the normal conventions of continuous plot and moral character-formation in its time-free profusion of symbolic correspondences, its multidimensionality of chthonic, terrestrial, and celestial horizons, and its kaleidoscopic free play of wit and irony. All of this Santayana, of course, could relate to as literary work, but the exigency of his portrayal of Goethe’s work as symbolic of modern Romanticism —in contrast with the “preferred” cultural symbolics

man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated” (ibid., p. 55).48

Faust, Part Two, final lines:

Alles Vergängliche,Ist nur ein Gleichnis;Das Unzulängliche,Hier wird’s Ereignis;Das Unbeschriebliche,Hier ist’s getan;Das Ewig-weibliche,Zieht uns hinan.

All that must disappearIs but a parable;What lay beyond us, hereAll is made visible;Here deeds have understoodWords they were darkened by;Eternal Womanhood

Draws us on high. (12104 ff.) (trans. David Luke)49 Emerson, R. W.: The Portable Emerson, ed. Carl Bode, p. 133.

48

of Lucretius and Dante in TPP— straightjacketed his interpretation. He reduced it to the terms of his cultural psychologism. And he misinterpreted the final signification of Faust as a whole, which consisted in the interplay of the terms of Streben, Entwicklung, Sehnsucht in the linkage between the lines of Im Anfang war die Tat of Part One and the final lines of Part Two, hier wird’s Ereignis . . . / Hier ist’s getan.

In EGP (1916), Santayana had a chance to do better with Goethe. However, his account of Goethe there begins with labeling him an “instinctive egotist” and ends with his grouping Goethe and Emerson together as “absolute egotists,”—both figures falling prey to his culturalistic mis-interpretations that converted literary genius into historicist, sociological categories.

4. CONCLUSION

Santayana’s mis-interpretation of Goethe’s Faust imposed a historicist straightjacket of “modern” Romanticism on a timeless literary masterpiece. Like his polemical account of Emerson, his interpretation of Goethe —and of both as symbols of his bête noire, northern European Protestant modernity— enacted his own anti- or post-Romantic philosophy —originally formulated in the terms and presuppositions of his Epicurean “life of reason,” an advocacy which later flowered in the production of his SAF and the four volumes of his Realms of Being.

But I have stressed above that his own account of human experience, comprised of the two factors of “skepticism and animal faith,” also apotheocizes the life of the imagination, though on an epiphenomenal ground. Santayana ostensibly agreed with Goethe’s and Emerson’s vitalistic conceptions of nature (natura naturans), their anti-dogmatism, anti-rationalism, anti-empiricism, and their attendant senses of spontaneity and open-ended play of the imagination, —and not in terms of a “progressive politics” of either a bourgeois or Marxist sort, but in pursuit of the ideals of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. His “naturalism” was a function of his synthesis of pragmatism, which he inherited from W. James, and idealism, which he inherited from Royce, and never an “extravagant” metaphysical doctrine. But Santayana went crucially beyond James and Royce in adding his skeptical Platonism to his naturalistic perspective. This combination of skeptical Platonism and materialistic naturalism converged in his bottomline Epicureanism. To be sure, it is a rare combination. My thesis has been that this rare philosophic combination allowed him consistently to advance both his “life of reason” and “life of the spirit” as strategic components of his anti-Romanticism.

But we have seen that these two trajectories —of “the life of reason” and of “the spiritual life”— the latter in the form of endorsing “the highest poetry” that takes the place of religion— were already the front and center idealistic contributions of Goethe and Emerson. In its own way Santayana’s philosophy shadowed their Romanticism of experience free of the dogmas of the past and grounded in a vital naturalism. In this respect Santayana can be regarded as a “proto-postmodern” who opened the door to Wallace Stevens, who certainly went on to write his share of “the highest poetry,” featuring the task of the “pure imagination” to write “the mythology of modern earth” which supplanted the exhausted traditional imaginations of heaven and hell. Stevens may even be regarded as the

poet Santayana hailed at the conclusion of TPP who would unite the idealism of Dante, the naturalism of Lucretius, and the romanticism of Goethe.

Stevens’ early-phase poetry was profoundly indebted to Santayana’s sublimated hedonistic aestheticism. But in the end Stevens parted company from Santayana. The final phase of Stevens’ poetic career rather has something in common with the “final signified” of Goethe’s Faust, Part Two. Stevens consciously re-rendered Goethe’s and Emerson’s Romanticism in the terms of “the exquisite truth of belief in a fiction knowing that it is a fiction”, —or again, of the life of “the pure and radiant imagination”— the sphere of poiesis that ambiguously aligns with the divine imagination, as in one of Stevens’s most potent poetic lines, “God and the imagination are one.”50 The redemption of Faust in Christian symbolism effected by the decidely un-Christian Goethe has much of the same postmodern high romantic flavor.

To summarize, my thesis has been that Santayana downplayed Emerson and Goethe for his own self-imaging purposes as a rising philosopher and cultural critic. He was hopelessly “not at home” in Boston and increasingly articulated an unheimlich anti-modern bias in a strange mixture of brilliant prose writing combined with nattering nabobs of negative cultural criticism. In so doing he contributed as much as any prominent figure of his day to the “nationalization of philosophy” which has the baneful effect of reducing philosophy to “culture studies” as multicultural identity politics. In this he appears to have taken a page out of Henry James Jr.’s own literary project at the expense of Emerson and the Transcendentalists of the generation before him.

On the positive side, however, Santayana played a significant transitional role in promoting, however unintentionally, the postmodern high Romanticism of Wallace Stevens. Stevens came to re-express Santayana’s teaching that “the highest poetry” is religion without practical efficacy and metaphysical illusion. But Stevens ended by endorsing Emerson’s idealism as he transformed Santayana’s equation of high poetry and religion in his depiction of the poetic imagination as consisting of “notes toward the supreme fiction.” The peculiarity of Stevens’ postmodern high Romanticism is that it expounds this radical “final signified,” namely, that “Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination,” not as an object of belief but as the activity of the co-operating divine and human imaginations. This was an idealistic expression of poiesis —or “Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame”— that goes in another direction than “the old philosopher in Rome”´s Epicurean worldview.Bibliography

50 Santayana, in Winds of Doctrine, op. cit., decisively expressed his anti-Romanticism when he wrote against the German idealists: “. . . it occurred to them to imagine that all reality might be a transcendental self and a romantic dreamer like themselves; nay, that it might be just their own transcendental self and their romantic dreams extended indefinitely” (p. 195). For his part Stevens, to the contrary, in the final phase of his career, wrote as follows in 1943: “We live in a place that is not our own and, much more, not ourselves. The first idea, then, was not our own. It is not the individual alone that indulges himself in the pathetic fallacy. It is the race. God is the centre of the pathetic fallacy” (LWS, p. 444). Increasingly after “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (1942) and other poems of Transport to Summer (1947), which contains many provisional “crystal hypotheses” of the “supreme fiction,” Stevens went on to ring the changes on “the idea of God” as the “central poem” in The Auroras of Autumn (1950) and The Rock (1954). Thus, for examples, in ‘Notes Toward the Supreme Fiction’, “The first idea is an imagined thing. / The pensive giant prone in violet space. . .” This theme reappears in ‘Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly’ (1952) as “A pensive nature. . . / . . . free / From man’s ghost, larger and a little like. . . / Too much like thinking to be less than thought, / Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch, / A daily majesty of meditation, / That comes and goes in silences of its own” (CP, pp. 517-18). Cf. note 12 above.

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