Philosopher's Quest

MY HOST THE WORLD: PERSONS AND PLACES, Vol. Ill (149 pp.)--George Santayana-- Scrlbner ($3).

"My orbit has become narrower and narrower . . . somewhat as the ball at the gaming-table runs round in smaller and smaller circles ... and then finally flops down and settles comfortably into the predestined resting place." When he wrote these lines George Santayana was close to 80, and he had been comfortably lodged in his predestined resting place, Rome, for some two decades. In My Host the World the posthumously published third and final volume of his autobiography Persons and Places, Santayana telescopes these 20-odd years in Rome into a few pages. For the rest, he reaches back to the period of his 40s and 50s, before he took himself "out of circulation" with quasi-monastic finality. This last fragmentary excursion into the past lacks the solid interest of the first two volumes and adds little to the reputation of the philosopher or the por trait of the man, but it underscores Santayana s subtle command of the English language, to which he brought a novelist's eye and a poet's tongue.

Avila, Oxford, Paris, Rome. By 1912 when a bequest enabled Santayana to quit his academic chores as a Harvard professor, persons and places had begun to cloy for the fastidious and finicky philosopher. The man who once wrote, "I ... love the earth, and hate the world," set out methodically to find a "retreat." Briefly he settled in Spain at his birthplace Avila, and in Madrid, but 27 overattentive females (his sisters' friends) scared him away. World War I found him in England and kept him there, mostly at Oxford and Cambridge, living (quite cheerfully) the life of a superannuated graduate student. When peace brought changes--including "troops of young women on bicycles" charging through Oxford's quiet lanes in caps and gowns--the ultra-conservative Santayana decided that Eng land could not stem the tide of Socialism. He left it to sink without him in "the tyrant flood of democracy."

He tried Paris, but found "no finality no sense of home." His French acquaintances repelled him. "In the most charming of them I felt something false, as if . . . they were feigning all their amiability for an ulterior reason." Inevitably, he tried Greece, but found that the Greece he sought was "dead, pulverized, irrecoverable." Finally, in Rome, he found the "mother and head of my moral world. . .central enough even today . . . full of ancient and modern and even of recent beauties, and inhabited by a people that more than any other resembles the civilized ancients."

Caricatures & Capacities. But before he reaches home in the Eternal City, Santayana digs his verbal spikes into some of the persons and places he collided with on the paths of his life. Among them:

P: "Harvard ... was utter confusion; yet this chaos itself was welcome to the dilettante, the parasite ... It enabled him to pick sweets out of the grab bag at will and to indulge all his impulses for the moment, yet sadly in the end: an intellectual brothel."

P: "Lytton Strachey . . . looked like a caricature of Christ; a limp cadaverous creature, moving feebly, with lank long brown hair and the beginnings of a beard much paler in color, and spasmodic treble murmurs of a voice utterly weary and contemptuous. Obscene was the character written all over him."

P: "Bertrand Russell . . . was small, dark, brisk, with a lively air and a hyena laugh. According to some people he was the ugliest man they had ever seen ... He had birth, genius, learning, indefatigable zeal and energy, brilliant intelligence and absolute honesty and courage ... Yet on the whole, relative to his capacities, he was a failure. He petered out."

"Things Have Their Day." In summing up his time, Santayana judged it no more charitably than he had judged persons and places: "The contemporary world has turned its back on the attempt and even on the desire to live reasonably . . . The peculiar malady of my times . . . was . . . vacant freedom and indeterminate progress: Vorwaerts! Avanti! Onward! Full speed ahead! without asking whether directly before you was not a bottomless pit."

That modern civilization was headed straight for the pit, Santayana had few doubts. From his contemplative seat on the sidelines of life, he issued a mixture of cool wisdom and cold comfort on the subject: "Things have their day, and their beauties in that day . . . Ruins give ground for hope; for although nothing can last forever, now and then good seasons may return."

With the publication of My Host the World, only a set of poems which Santayana once described as "pagan" has yet to join his 27 other books on the printed shelf. When it does so (probably next fall), Santayana's name, like his life, will have settled down into its narrow,' and perhaps predestined, niche.

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