against which Englishmen may display anew the changeless virtues of Tootlebury.

Yet always, since the days when scholars went inevitably to study at Padua or Pisa, the British writer has gone abroad without thinking it necessary to excuse himself. Browning, Shelley, Borrow, or, today, Bennett, Maugham, Walpole-such men have always wandered; and for any pressman to demand their reasons would have been considered by everybody, including the uncomfortable pressman, as impertinence. It is nearly inconceivable, even with the present rapid Americanization of the British press, that a London daily should hold a debate on "Is it wholesome for British writers to live in Italy?" It is impossible that the standard sister of the standard Dorset vicar should on the high moment of meeting her favorite author, say Hichens or Locke or Oppenheim, inform him that his Duty toward her was to spend less time in Cannes.

Such magnificence of self-consciousness and dutymongering and hysterical bounding to extremes may in all its richness be found only in our sturdy land. To the question beloved of all Sunday newspapers and teachers' associations, "What is the Matter with America and How Shall We Do Something About It?" there is one final answer: There are too many people who ask "What is the Matter with America?" and then dash out and try to Do Something About It.

And there are idiots who will consider this philosophical inquiry an attack on our fair land! Ac

tually, to say that we are the most neurotic, most self-conscious folk in the world is to say that our provincial days of sockless statesmen, merchant princes pompous in broadcloth, and oratorical second-rate lawyers are over; that we are feverish with the pursuit of every wisdom and every agreeable silliness; and that overnight, without even ourselves perceiving it, we are changing from the world's dusty wheatfield to the world's hectic but incomparably fascinating capital.

G

SANTAYANA, THE POET1

By ARCHIBALD MACLEISH

EORGE SANTAYANA, the poet, disappeared from the world of polite letters a great

many years ago, leaving as the principal reminder of his existence a thin volume of sonnets. It was not understood at the time that his disappearance was to be permanent and the usual appreciations were omitted. There is a certain danger in appreciating poets who may return to outsell the appraiser. But the passage of time and certain intimations from what the Times would call "reliable sources" make the matter reasonably clear. Santayana is not to reappear. And it is a fair inference from the evidence that he was never expected to reappear; that his heir and executor, the philosopher, had dealt with him privily but effectively and acquired a very certain hold upon the inheritance. Not banishment from the Republic as became a poet, but death and determination were adjudged upon him. "Youth and aspiration," wrote the philosopher, "indulge in poetry; a mature and masterful mind will often despise it and prefer to express itself laconically in prose." And so that drug where1 From The Bookman, October, 1925.

with philosophers have a poisonous familiarity was administered, and the poet dreamed the forbidden dream and died.

It would be interesting to consider the motives of the deed in all their considerations of reason and intent. But failing an actual knowledge of the facts, presumptions are a necessity, and the fairest of presumptions puts the crime upon a generous ground, a basis of principle. George Santayana was removed because he was not a proper poet within the meaning of the philosophies. He had not, it would appear, grasped the poetic function. He did not understand that it was his, retaining an "innocence of the eye" to "repair to the material of experience, seizing hold of the reality of sensation and fancy beneath the surface of conventional ideas," quarrying from the sensuous world pictures and emotions wherewith the philosopher should construct the temple of divinity. On the contrary, he desired not only to hew stone but to build towers. He was no poet royal to the philosophical household, but his own king and philosopher. He did not propose to serve the religious sense by gesturing in inarticulate images toward the Almighty, but rather to find God out in his dark and difficult universe and close with his divinity. And if he had eyes, they were not the eyes of innocence. He saw nature with no embarrassed and Wordsworthian surprise, but mirrored at two or three reflections from herself in the unbreathed metal of his mind. He was not to be startled by daffodils but

To the fair reason of the Spring inclined
And to the Summer's tender argument.

And when he did capture in immediate words the taste and smell and feel of the natural world it was never for remembrance' sake, but to throw open windows of sense upon the brain's far faint discoveries

Out of the dust the queen of roses springs;
The brackish depths of the blown water bear
Blossoms of foam: the common mist and air
Weave Vesper's holy, pity-laden wings.

We may say that if this is not within the philosopher's conception of poetry, then the worse for philosophy. But we may not doubt that within the Interpretations of Poetry and Religion George Santayana was an altogether improper poet.

There are, however, various conceptions of the poetic method and the poetic function. There have been philosophies in rhyme since the De Rerum, and there had been poems of religious experience before the Sonnets of Santayana. And it is not the least of Santayana's triumphs that he was later justified out of the mouth of his traducer in the Three Philosophical Poets. Of the imagined most high poet the philosopher says: "He should live in the continual presence of all experience and respect it; he should at the same time understand nature, the ground of that experience; and he should also have a delicate sense for the ideal echoes of his