Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946)

[From A Writer’s Notebook, Doubleday & Company, 1949, “1941”, p. 341:]

I have been reading Santayana again. It is a very pleasant exercise, but after you have finished a chapter and stop to ask yourself whether you are the better or the wiser for having read it you hardly know what to answer. He is commonly praised for his fine phrases, but a phrase is fine when it elucidates a meaning; his too often obscure it. He has great gifts, gifts of imagery, of metaphor, of apt simile and of brilliant illustration; but I do not know that philosophy needs the decoration of a luxuriance so lush. It distracts the reader’s attention from the argument and he may well be left with an uneasy feeling that if that were more cogent it would have been stated in a manner less elaborate.

I think Santayana has acquired his reputation in America owing to the pathetically diffident persuasion of Americans that what is foreign must have a value greater than what is native. So they will offer you with pride French Camembert regardless of the fact that their own home-made product is just as good, and generally much better, than the imported. To my mind Santayana is a man who took the wrong turning. With his irony, his sharp tongue, common-sense and worldly wisdom, his sensitive understanding, I have a notion that he could have written semi-philosophical romances after the manner of Anatole France which it would have been an enduring delight to read. He had a wider culture than the Frenchman, a wit as keen, a less circumscribed horizon and an intelligence of a more delicate calibre. It was a loss to American literature when Santayana decided to become a philosopher rather than a novelist. As it is he is most profitably read in the little essays which Pearsall Smith extracted from his works.… (altro)