Word: puritanism
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Santayana's Spark Sirs: As TIME's review of copious The Last Puritan (Feb. 3, p. 75) was characteristically pithy and succinct, so TIME-worthy were the picture-cover of the author and the intimate comments anent his banker-build and the routine of his days on that philosophers' Olympus where years ago he found his peace...
Thence to the Tower to read "The Last Puritan" which is probably exceedingly good; but my mind soon did wonder of other things. If truth be only to see things as they are-which be its business I am told-and hath no care for how things ought to be, then the poet doth err: Truth is ugly; common; dust. It be no pursuit for one who hath in his heart the improvement of man. Indeed, if this be true, what doth one gain to seek the truth if it doth not lead to more than the impassive real. Better...
...Last Puritan is called a "memoir in the form of a novel." That is enough of a disclaimer to protect it from the accusation that it is not a novel at all but a profound and beautiful question-mark. It transcends, certainly, any pat classification into which you might try to slip it. The plot, except as a mere framework or skeleton on which the study of character hangs, is completely inconsequential. It could have developed a dozen different ways in a dozen different places without affecting the story's main interest, and this is its weakness as the plot...
...mere compilation of chromosomes--and chose to be a male, is the protagonist of Santayana's story. Born of Epicurean Dr. Peter Alden and hypocritical, timidly tyrannical Mrs. Alden of Great Falls, Conn., he denies himself the easier road all through his life. He is a real Puritan, as Santayana explains in his "Prologue." "He kept himself for what was best.... His puritanism had never been mere timidity or fanaticism or calculated hardness; it was a deep and speculative thing: hatred of all shams, scorn of all mummeries, a bitter merciless pleasure in the hard facts...
...virtue of this extremely vivid impression of his character that Santayana shows his real insight. It would have been easy to draw a caricature of Oliver--not one novelist in a thousand could have resisted the temptation. But Santayana, despite his innate antipathy to the Puritan ideal, draws "The Last Puritan's" character fairly...