[Reviewed by John McCormick, author of George Santayana: a biography (Knopf, 1987)]

    I must first declare an interest: Mr. Kirby-Smith has such generous words about my own writing on Santayana that it appeared unseemly for me to review his work. Unseemly or not, I concluded after reading and re-reading his book that I distinctly wanted to review it, and if I were not experienced enough to do so objectively, it was time to turn in my suit. Reader, be warned.

    George Santayana's work encompasses philosophy, theology, poetry, poetic drama, political and social theory; the meditative, general essay; aesthetics; criticism, autobiography and fiction. He was a witty epigrammatist and one of the finest letter- writers in English. Even his enemies grant that he was a superb stylist (and hold it against him as a philosopher). He was skeptical, amused at the passing show, and he disdained the band of self-announced "philosophers" who merely taught, or taught at, some branch of philosophy. Accordingly, his work is a bog for the commentator, but a bog in which Mr. Kirby-Smith moves with confidence, putting hardly one foot wrong along his route. Professionals in philosophy now, with a few honorable exceptions, either do not read Santayana, or if they read him, they appear ill-equipped by their training to cope with him. The same applies to those whose subject is some form of literature: an increasingly ideological training ignores foreign languages, literary or any other history, and the connections that once were assumed as valid between literature, history and philosophy.

    Mr. Kirby-Smith is a welcome exception to all that. Although he professes English, he has read widely and well in traditional philosophy, he knows French and probably other languages, and his range of comparison and allusion extends profitably to literatures other than English. His immersion in all Santayana's writings gives depth and solidity to his analyses. Central to any comprehension of Santayana's thought is his theory of essences. We may observe Kirby-Smith's method at work in his chapter, "The Realm of Essence":
 

What we see in Santayana's discussion of essence is the work of a mind that operates not in a void or in a realm of abstractions, but one that attempted to engage, at each moment, as many fugitive impressions as possible [... ] The philosophy of essence is the philosophy of the isolated consciousness, awake, attentive, keenly aware of its immediate intuitions and of its own identity [ . . . Such aloofness] of the point of view, puts Santayana as a philosopher in company with his contemporaries in the arts and sciences who have concerned themselves with the acts of cognition in their own specialties.

One thinks of Paul Valéry's poem, 'Le Cimitière Marin,' where Olympian detachment combines with sensuous immediacy in a work that explores the grounds of its own creation. [pp. 60-61]

    One virtue, I think, of the non-professional at work in philosophy is that he can explore afresh ideas that the professionals take for granted and allude to, if at all, in the shorthand of their enclosed band. The treatment of Spinoza's influence on Santayana in the works even of the finest professional commentators: John Lachs, Timothy Sprigge, or Henry Samuel Levinson contrasts with Kirby-Smith's; he has read Spinoza in great detail and brings to the discussion a needed perspective upon the dimension of that intellectual (and limited) affinity. The fact that Kirby-Smith places Santayana's late work, Realms of Being (1927-1940) front and center is also welcome, for it defies the widely-held opinion that the earlier and far less complex The Life of Reason (1905-06) was his finest work.

    Until Kirby-Smith's penultimate chapter, "The Realm of Spirit:," references to the novel are scanty, and one could be forgiven for wondering about the title of the book as a whole. Now the methodology of the work nay become a bit suspect, and the literary analysis more scattered, less consistent than the preceding chapters on philosophy. I take exception to Kirby-Smith's typically American effort to analyze an imaginative work in terms of the author's experiences in childhood. Kirby-Smith does so without a deadening Freudian intonation, while he frankly writes that he will "attempt to tell the truth about The Last Puritan in terms of its author." [p. p. 114-115] That attempt leads to efforts to identify the originals of characters in the novel and to determine characterization according to the alleged originals. That is the stuff of biography rather than literary apprehension, I suggest. Oliver Alden, the central figure, is in part modeled on aspects of Santayana himself, but how a writer moves from an autobiographical impulse to a genuinely aesthetic and imaginative construction remains a mystery, one which defies rational analysis. Kirby-Smith finally finds TheLast Puritan a flawed work, yet he also finds that Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy a better work "as art" [p. 115], an extraordinary judgment, in my view. Where rational analysis does apply, however, as in Kirby-Smith's work on Santayana's idea of Spirit in the novel, the analysis excels.

    It is possible to claim too much for Santayana's accomplishment, as when Kirby-Smith sees his subject as unique in his knowledge of languages, of cosmopolitan life and detachment of attitude; who else, he asks, was so equipped? Among others, one might list Conrad, Malraux, Musil, Broch, Montherlant, and possibly Nabokov. A final, minor complaint is that Thackeray is misspelled on p. 120. In the main, A Philosophical Novelist is a subtle, far-ranging, brief but dense work, of a kind that Santayana's achievement demands, deserves, and here receives.