Word: puritanly
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PROFESSOR SANTAYANA, publishing his first novel at seventy-two, has electrified the literary world. In feature reviews in the New York Times, Herald-Tribune, the New Yorker and Time, his book The Last Puritan, was fervently acclaimed as one of the greatest accomplishments of the contemporary era. For a fuller and more authoritative criticism than the Bookshelf can possibly provide the reader is referred to these reviews,--especially to Ellen Glasgow's-in the Herald-Tribune...
...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...
Whether novel-readers could enjoy all parts of The Last Puritan, whether they could understand its full significance without some knowledge of Santayana's background and philosophical studies, seemed questionable. They might feel that the rippling, intellectual talk, full of subtle dialectical twists and adroit insight, which the philosopher puts into the mouths of his characters, was never heard on earth-or at least never in pre-War New England. They may feel also that the central character of a philosophical football player, a young millionaire who sickens and fades because his moral standards cannot be reconciled with...
Since The Last Puritan is complex, ironic, puzzling, there are likely to be as many interpretations of Santayana's long fable as there are readers of it. Although most of these readers may interpret Oliver's unwillingness to accept the world and its pleasures as evidence of some lack of physical passion, the author makes it clear that for Oliver puritanism did not mean chastity or priggishness. "It is a popular error," says he, ''to suppose that puritanism has anything to do with purity." Nor was it ''mere timidity or fanaticism or calculated hardness...
...characteristic of all Santayana's writing that the weightiest subjects are handled with lightness and grace. The Last Puritan, no exception, contains amusing portraits of crabbed New Englanders. sophisticated New Yorkers, self-important Englishmen, sentimental Germans, to temper the gravity of the tale. It also contains extended digressions, discussions of German philosophy, of Shakespeare, Goethe, English education, yachting, sports, war, rises in its record of Oliver's last decision to some of the most eloquent prose that Santayana has written. Yet critics are likely to disagree for a long time to come over the question of whether...