9) “To an Old Philosopher in Rome”
“VIII. Some Authorities for this Conclusion” & “IX. The Discovery of Essence”
“To an Old Philosopher in Rome,” Wallace Stevens’ poetic tribute to George Santayana, was written in the summer of 1952.¹ The title, especially with its initial preposition, suggests the poem was meant for or directed to Stevens’ old professor. In any event, if Stevens hoped Santayana might see it, that would not be the case: The poem appeared the same month (September 1952) that the 88-year-old philosopher died.² The strange thing is that Stevens seems to have anticipated that fateful synchronicity; the tone of “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” resembles that of a eulogy.
Santayana moved to Rome in 1925 and then in 1941, growing aged, settled in the Calvary Hospital, then under the supervision of the Sisters of the Little Company of Mary (also called the “Blue Sisters”) who lived in the adjoining convent. After U.S. forces liberated Rome in June of 1944, American journalists and soldiers began to regularly visit the celebrity author and former Harvard philosopher who had otherwise seemed marooned in the Eternal City during the war years.
Edmund Wilson was one of those visitor and in 1946 described his meeting with the octogenerian for The New Yorker.³ As Santayana pointed out to others, Wilson made a number of errors in his article, among them that Santayana was residing in the convent of the Blue Nuns rather than in the hospital attached to it.⁴ Since Stevens repeated some of those same errors, we can be reasonably certain that the poet (who never traveled to Europe) used Wilson’s article when he came to write about Santayana.
Stevens made use of Wilson’s essay to supply “particulars” for his poem: information (both accurate and inaccurate) about the attending nuns, the domes of a nearby chapel, Santayana’s ascetic or monastic style (with very little in his frugal room but books, a bed, and chair), etc.⁵ And Stevens takes note of Wilson’s observation that Santayana seemed unafraid of death because he lived in a world of ideas (69), within his philosophic system where the word “essence” has special import (65).
But while Wilson’s essay provided the “particulars” for Stevens’ poem, its ideas came from elsewhere. “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” presents an admirable portrait of Santayana in his later years, but at the same time it is a skillful presentation of central ideas from Scepticism and Animal Faith. The first four stanzas of Stevens’ poems draw on Chapter VIII where Santayana consolidates his principles of scepticism; and the next twelve stanzas draw on Chapter IX where Santayana introduces his doctrine of “essences,” the cornerstone of his system of animal faith that he subsequently develops.
The resulting poem is a genuine tour de force where Stevens converts Santayana’s philosophical statements into biography. He sees Santayana behind the words and takes the philosopher’s ideas as revelations of the man; so when, for example, Santayana speaks of the narrowed world of objects to which the sceptic is confined after practicing his reductiveness, Stevens exemplifies this idea in a portrait of Santayana in his frugal room in Rome. In other words, Stevens uses biographical details to “particularize” the philosopher’s ideas. But in this particular poem, it can also be said that Stevens “personalizes” the ideas he found in Scepticism and Animal Faith: when, for example, Santayana says a sceptic should be both proud and chary of his profession, Stevens describes Santayana, himself, as both impenitent and penitent. In this way, “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” specifically gives honor not just to Santayana’s ideas but to the man himself.
“Nothing Given Exists” (The First Four Stanzas)
The first four stanzas of “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” rely on Chapter VIII of Scepticism and Animal Faith where Santayana finds support (in Indian philosophy, idealism, and natural science) for his assertion that “nothing given exists.” By that phrase, Santayana means that belief in an external world is questionable and all supposed knowledge about such a world is dubious (49). The life of the honest sceptic amounts to witnessing a dreamy spectacle, a parade of insubstantial images.
Santayana first finds corroboration for his contention that “nothing given exists” in Indian philosophy and its assertion that life is an illusion. But Santayana goes on to say that he disagrees with the vehemence with which Indians condemn that illusion as deception. On his part, life is more like watching a spectacle in a theater; “and if no one came to the theater, the actors would soon flit away like ghosts . . . and the very walls disappear” (52).
That tolerance extends to Indian beliefs in reincarnation and an after-life. Santayana sympathetically understands these as, really, a projection of something within: “I [am not] out of sympathy with their hope of escaping from the universal hurly-burly into some haven of peace. A philosopher has a haven in himself, of which I suspect the fabled bliss to follow in other lives, or after total emancipation from living, is only a poetic symbol” (54). In any event, their fanciful cosmology and notion of an “ulterior refuge” is no more an illusion than the material world itself: the one “no more decidedly out of scale than the other” (54). Indeed, for “the poet, the disinterested philosopher, the lover of things distilled into purity,” mankind’s extravagant mythmaking evokes compassion: “How infinite, how helpless, how deserving of forgiveness creative error becomes to the eye of understanding” (53).
It is with this notion of an “ulterior refuge” that Stevens’ poem begins:
On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street
Become the figures of heaven, the majestic movement
Of men growing small in the distances of space,
Singing, with smaller and still smaller sound,
Unintelligible absolution and an end –The threshold, Rome, and that more merciful Rome
Beyond, the two alike in the make of the mind.
It is as if in a human dignity
Two parallels become one, a perspective, of which
Men are part both in the inch and in the mile.
The gradual disappearance of the figures recalls what happens when Santayana says the existing world is regarded as an illusion or as a spectacle in a theater (“the actors . . . soon flit away like ghosts”). Santayana had said that for “the poet, the disinterested philosopher, the lover of things distilled into purity,” these illusions are “deserving of forgiveness”; so, as these men are dissolved into purity, they receive from Stevens’ philosopher his “absolution.” Santayana had said, too, that the macrocosmic myth of heaven is an extrapolation writ large of something microcosmic and within (“a philosopher has a haven within himself . . .”) and that the myth of an “ulterior refuge” is “no more decidedly out of scale” than the myth of an existing world; so, Stevens adds that the world (“Rome”) and heaven (“that more merciful Rome / Beyond”) are “alike in the make of the mind” of his philosopher, and that neither is more out of scale than the other since “men are both in the inch and in the mile.”
Santayana also finds support for his contentions in the conclusions of idealists. The absolute idealist is only attentive to an internal parade of images, with “mere appearance, fluctuating, intermittent, never twice the same, and dependent for its specious actuality on the movement of attention and the shuffling of confused images in the fancy” (56). In the idealist’s assertion that “whatever is pictorial is non-existent” (58), Santayana’s finds confirmation of his thesis that “nothing given exists.” The idealist is only interested in the evocations of fancy that arise from the “spirit”–and by that word, Santayana means something special: “Spirit is here only a name for absolute law, for the fatality or chance one set of appearances instead of another insists upon arising” (62).
Stevens’ redaction of these ideas is found in the poem’s next complete sentence:
How easily the blown banners change to wings…
Things dark on the horizons of perception
Become accompaniments of fortune, but
Of the fortune of the spirit, beyond the eye,
Not of its sphere, and yet not far beyond,The human end in the spirit’s greatest reach,
The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme
Of the unknown. [. . .]
The idealist, Santayana had said, is concerned with “perception . . . a mere appearance, fluctuating, intermittent, never twice the same, . . . the shuffling of confused images in the fancy”; so, Stevens’ philosopher discovers “things dark on the horizons of perception” and “how easily blown banners change to wings.” These appearances, Stevens adds, are “the accompaniments . . . Of a fortune of the spirit” because Santayana has said that “spirit” is only a name “for the fatality or chance” that these images should appear and not some others. And Stevens adds, too, that these appearances are “beyond the eye, / Not of its sphere” because, as Santayana noted, idealists insist “whatever is pictorial is nonexistent.” And when Stevens speaks of this liberation as “the human end in the spirit’s greatest reach, / The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme / Of the unknown,” he does so because that is how Santayana had spoken of the freedom the transcendental idealist achieves through his disbelief in an external world and supposed knowledge about it:
Transcendentalists are sure that knowledge is everything, not because they presume that everything is known, but precisely because they see that there is nothing to know. If anything existed actually, or if there was any independent truth, it would be unknowable, as these voracious thinkers conceive knowledge. The glorious thing about knowledge, in their eyes, is that, as there is nothing to know, knowledge is a free and a sure creation, new and self-grounded forever. (60)
This is the freedom Stevens speaks of when he refers to “the extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme / Of the unknown.”
Santayana finds his third and final confirmation that “nothing given exists” in natural history. Animal behavior does not express belief in an external world. Animals are not concerned with the world per se but with their perceptions of it, attentive not to separately existing objects but to their feelings. Rephrasing this, we might say that a dog perceives “small” instead of “far,” two parallel lines intersecting instead of “perspective,” “red” but not “redness,” “friendly” but not “friend,” “edible” but not “tasty,” and so on (64).
Stevens picks this up in the last part of the fourth stanza:
[. . .] The newsboys’ muttering
Becomes another murmuring; the smell
Of medicine, a fragrantness not to be spoiled…
We see here Stevens reducing externals to their interior sensations so that the specific of the newsboy’s muttering becomes a disassociated and generalized “murmuring,” the smell of the medicine becomes a more generalized and Platonic elemental fragrance. But Stevens had also taken up these same ideas earlier in the poem when he spoke of the philosopher watching “men grow smaller in the distances of space” and (noting the opposite) how “two parallels become one, a perspective.”
Indian philosophy, the tenets of idealists, and the evidence of animal behavior offer Santayana corroboration of his thesis “nothing given exists.” By means of this tenet, he subtracts belief in an external world and renders dubious any supposed knowledge about it. This leaves the sceptic in an aesthetic middle ground where all he might ever witness are the pure, unattached images that float into his ken. Santayana calls these “essences” in his next chapter.
The Discovery of Essence (Stanzas 5 and 6)
If the sceptic confines himself to the given, he sees only appearances, non-deceptive illusions, pure images–what Santayana calls “essences” and introduces in Chapter IX of Scepticism and Animal Faith. An “essence” is to be found at the bottom of every image when the sceptic can see the image in its purity. But the images is often “overlooked or confused” when it remains entwined with beliefs that they refer to existing things, or is regarded as a sign proffering knowledge, or seems “veiled in its own swiftness” due to our fleeting attention. Remove these contaminants, however, and the pure image can be found: “If I can renounce for the moment [these distractions which transport images from what they are into something else], I shall have a much richer as well as clearer collection of terms and relations before me” (67).
Stevens presents such a “collection” in the next complete sentence of his poem:
The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns,
The candle as it evades the sight, these are
The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome,
A shape within the ancient circles of shapes,
And these beneath the shadow of a shapeIn a confusion on bed and books, a portent
On the chair, a moving transparence on the nuns,
A light on the candle tearing against the wick
To join a hovering excellence, to escape
From fire and be part only of that whichFire is the symbol: the celestial possible.
The bed, books, chair, moving nuns, candle–these are simply what they are. They are essences found at the bottom, “within” and “beneath.” Echoing Santayana, they are pure images to be separated from a confusion on bed and books, from a portent on the chair, from a veiled swiftness or a moving transparence upon the moving nuns.
To be sure, it might seem that Santayana’s sceptic is confined to a shrunken life once he comes to inhabit a world of pure images stripped of their gratuitous additions; just as it might seem that Stevens’ philosopher inhabits a reduced and impoverished life in his monk-like cell. But that is not the case. Bed, books, chair, moving nuns–these are “the sources of happiness” for Stevens’ philosopher. Santayana explains why:
To this mirage of the non-existent, or intuition of essence, the pure sceptic is confined; and confined is hardly the word; because this plane . . . is infinite; and there is nothing possible elsewhere that, as a shadow and a pattern, is not prefigured there. (75)
Attentive only to pure images, the sceptic gains admittance to a Platonic realm of infinite possibilities where everything is prefigured “as a shadow and a pattern.” So, likewise, the philosopher in Stevens’ poem (attentive to bed, books, chair, nuns, candle) is admitted to a Platonic realm of shapes:
[. . . ] these are
The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome,
A shape within the ancient circles of shapes,
And these beneath the shadow of a shape
The tearing of the candle’s light against the wick then becomes Stevens’ splendid metaphor of the sceptic’s effort to dematerialize and remove everything adventitious so that he encounters only the pure image, an essence liberated from existence, “the celestial possible.” This last phrase is Stevens’ own term for an “essence,” and to coin it he draws on Santayana’s description of the realm of essence (above) as a plane that is “infinite” where everything is “possible.”
Mastery and Pity (Stanzas 7 and 8)
Throughout the poem, one of Stevens’ major techniques is to convert Santayana’s arguments couched in visual terms into metaphors of speech. This becomes most evident as the poem continues:
Speak to your pillow as if it was yourself.
Be orator but with an accurate tongue
And without eloquence, O, half-asleep,
Of the pity that is the memorial of this room,So that we feel, in this illumined large,
The veritable small, so that each of us
Beholds himself in you, and hears his voice
In yours, master and commiserable man
Santayana had said that the sceptic who pushes his scepticism as far as he can soon views the realm of essences as Plato did “but more accurately” (69). He sees things as they are, as do cubist painters but without their sense of self-aggrandizement when “they pretend to be the first and only masters of anatomy and topography” (69). So, Stevens, converting Santayana’s visual arguments into metaphors of spoken discourse–enjoins his philosopher to speak “but with an accurate tongue / And without eloquence.”
The sceptic who pushes his scepticism as far as he can, Santayana observes:
finds himself in the presence of more luminous and less equivocal objects than does the working and believing mind; only these objects are without meaning, they are only what they are obviously, all surface. They show him everything thinkable with the greatest clearness and force; but he can no longer imagine that he sees in these objects anything save their instant presence and their face-value. (70)
It is for this reason that Stevens exhorts his philosopher to make us feel “in the illumined large / The veritable small” or in Santayana’s words “in the presence of more luminous and less equivocal objects . . . their face-value.” Santayana had done that in the previous chapter when he discussed the Indian notion of heaven and linked the macrocosmic creation of an after-life or heaven to something within the individual (“the philosopher has a haven within himself of which the fabled bliss . . . is only a poetic symbol”). So, with a similar sense of scale and a similar reductiveness, Stevens exhorts his philosopher to speak “so that each of us/ Beholds himself in you, and hears his voice / In yours.”
In the previous chapter as well, Santayana had insisted that the notion of heaven and other mythic creations need not be condemned: “How infinite, how helpless, how deserving of forgiveness creative error becomes to the eye of understanding , that loves only in pity”; and Stevens commends this sentiment when he refers to “the pity that is the memorial of this room.” Stevens’ philosopher is, consequently like Santayana: both “master and commiserable man.” “Master” because he sees illusions at “face-value.” “Commiserable” because his pity encompasses them.
Penitent, Impenitent, Impatient (Stanza 9)
[. . . ] Intent on your particles of nether-do,
Your dozing in the depths of wakefulness,
In the warmth of your bed, at the edge of your chair, alive
Yet living in two world, impenitent
As to one, and, as to one, most penitent,
Impatient for the grandeur that you need
The sceptic lives, then, in a theatrical world where dissociated appearances pass by. But isn’t that the life of an aesthetic dilettante? Wouldn’t it be better to abandon this aimless profession and simply adopt the conventional working mind? Santayana is sensitive to this criticism:
Conscience no less than business may blame the sceptic for a sort of luxurious idleness; he may call himself a lotus-eater, may heave a sigh of fatigue at doing nothing, and may even feel a touch of the vertigo and wish to close the eyes on all these images that entertain him to no purpose. (69)
It is surely this sentiment which leads Stevens to picture his philosopher as someone not quite asleep (“O, half-asleep”), snoring yet alert (“intent on your particles of nether-do”), and “dozing in the depths of wakefulness.”
But Santayana goes on to say that this sleepiness and failure of nerve on the part of the sceptic is unnecessary. Scepticism is a preamble to life, not life itself:
Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through a long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness. But the philosopher, when he is speculative only, is a sort of perpetual celibate; he is bent on not being betrayed, rather than on being annexed or inspired; and although if he is at all wise he must see that the true marriage of the mind is with nature and science and the practical arts, yet in his special theoretic vocation, it will be a boon to him to view all experience simply. (69–70)
This is Santayana’s two-edged apologia for scepticism. Santayana had been troubled in his Life of Reason series with the speculative philosopher’s lack of involvement with life, and he concedes here that the sceptic has not yet entered into “the true marriage of the mind . . . with nature and science and the practical arts.” But while he makes this concession, he also argues that the sceptic’s detachment is the boon which allows him to see things clearly and simply.
Stevens detected the two-edge quality of this apologia and rephrased it in his own fashion: “living in two worlds, impenitent / As to one, and, as to one, most penitent.” “Impenitent” because detachment is the sceptic’s boon but, in so far as this detachment results in lack of involvement in the practicalities of the world, “most penitent.”
It is important to remember that Santayana saw scepticism as only an initial detachment, an initial chastity “until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can safely be exchanged for fidelity and happiness.” In the phrase “until at last,” Stevens seems to have detected an eagerness in Santayana to make this exchange, and he shares that observation with the subject of his poem: “Impatient for the grandeur that you need.” In any event, Stevens’ philosopher, in the remaining parts of the poem, is intent on finding this “grandeur” just as Santayana, in the remaining parts of his chapter, is bent on finding something honest and indubitable for which he can exchange his scepticism.
Three Ways to Dispel Illusion (Stanzas 10 & 11)
It is the fear of illusion that drives the mind in the direction of scepticism, and Santayana finds three ways that fear may be dispelled. The first is death, but here no solution is offered; illusion simply vanishes. The second is to embrace a dogma which is given empire over doubt, but that does not answer the fear of illusion. The third method is the one Santayana chooses: “to entertain the illusion without succumbing to it, accepting it openly as an illusion, and forbidding it to claim any sort of being but that which it obviously has” (72–73).
Stevens refers to these three methods when his poem continues its discussion of the grandeur the old philosopher seeks “in so much misery”:
[. . .] and yet finding it
Only in misery, the afflatus of ruin,
Profound poetry of the poor and of the dead,
As in the last drop of the deepest blood,
As it falls from the heart and lies there to be seen,Even as the blood of an empire, it might be,
For a citizen of heaven though still of Rome.
It is poverty’s speech that seeks us out the most.
It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.
This is the tragic accent of the scene.
Stevens refers to Santayana’s first method of ending the fear of illusion when he speaks of the “profound poetry of the poor and the dead.” Then the fear is dissipated in death: “as in the last drop of the deepest blood, /As it falls from the heart and lies there to be seen.”
As he continues, Stevens refers to Santayana’s second method of addressing the fear of illusion by embracing some overriding dogma: “Even as the blood an empire, it might be, / For a citizen of heaven though still of Rome.” In other words, the fear of illusion would be quashed if Stevens’ philosopher, who stands on the threshold of heaven in the first stanza, were to cross over and become a citizen of heaven though still living in Rome. In terms of biography, it would be like Santayana embracing the dogmas of Roman Catholicism to silence his doubts.
But it is Santayana’s third method (“to entertain illusion without succumbing to it”) that Stevens’ philosopher is drawn to. “It is poverty’s speech” because Santayana says the sceptic sees everything at “face-value” (70). And “it is older than the oldest speech” because there is something “preternatural,” Santayana observes, in the calmness and lucidity of such a mind (70).
To avoid the calamities of illusion, the sceptic severs the connection between images and existence; as far as he is concerned, “The little word is has its tragedies” (71). But the result, Santayana concedes, is a ghostly realm of essences unconnected to things — like, he says by way of metaphor, a store full of rack after rack of uninhabited clothes. “Imagine a child accustomed to see clothes only on living persons” carried into such a shop: “The spectacle of all these gaunt clothes without bodies might make the child cry” (70–71). The same might be true for someone encountering the disembodied realm of essences. “This is the tragic accent of the scene,” Stevens says.
Ideas are to Things as Clothes are to Wearers (Stanza 12)
Santayana observes that the connection between ideas and things is no more necessary than the connection of clothes to wearers. Of course, in unconscious moments we can regard things without ideas, just as we can in more natural moments do without clothes–in fact, in a jocular and personal aside, Santayana adds, “I am not so remote from nature as not to revert on occasion to that nakedness” (72). But just as there as there is no connection between the two in unconscious moments, there need be no connection in conscious moments: the sceptic can entertain ideas without things, just as we can regard clothes without wearers since, like the fig leaves in Eden, they are only clothes accidentally (71–72).
Here, again, is Santayana’s third method to dissipate the fear of illusion: to entertain an image without succumbing to it. To consider an idea without a corresponding thing, an illusion without deception. A mere appearance. An essence.
An essence is an image that is simply what it inherently, logically, and inalienably is. It “requires no explanation,” Santayana notes. And it does not answer the question why this particular image “should have occurred to me” (Santayana’s emphasis; 73). All that can be said is that it does. If you can strip from the image all that is dubious and added by a wild propensity to belief, you can see as Santayana says the sceptic does:
If you eliminate your anxiety, deceit itself becomes entertainment, and every illusion but so much added acquaintance with the realm of form. For the unintelligible accident of existence will cease to appear to lurk in this manifest being, weighting and crowding it, and threatening it with being swallowed up by nondescript neighbours. It will appear dwelling in its own world. [. . .] It will be an ESSENCE. (Santayana’s emphasis; 73–74)
Stevens addresses this discovery of essence in his twelfth stanza, as he continues to comment on “poverty’s speech”:
And you — it is you that speak it, without speech,
The loftiest syllable among loftiest things,
The one invulnerable man among
Crude captains, the naked majesty, if you like,
Of bird-nest arches and of rain-stained-vaults. [sic]
Santayana had said there is nothing in the image which suggests why it “should have occurred to me”; it just does. So, referring to poverty’s speech, Stevens states something as a matter-of-fact: “And you–it is you that speak it.” Santayana had also said that the pure image “requires no explanation”; so, Stevens (continuing his poem’s exchange of visual metaphors for verbal ones) adds, “It is you that speak it without speech.” And Stevens’ philosopher speaks “the loftiest syllables among the loftiest things” because Stevens associates Santayana’s essences with altitude, having referred to them earlier as “celestial” possibles.
Stevens then goes on describing his Old Philosopher. He is the “one invulnerable man among / Crude captains” because he has followed Santayana’s instructions to the would-be sceptics to “eliminate anxiety” free of the entanglements of belief that are always “threatening it with being swallowed up by nondescript neighbours.” But Stevens allows him something more. He is also the Emperor in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” “the naked majesty, if you like” because when talking about things without the garments of ideas, Santayana had added his personal aside: “I am not so remote from nature as not to revert on occasion to that nakedness.”
The Threshold of Heaven (Stanzas 13–16)
As “To an Old Philosopher” arcs to its conclusion, we ultimately return to the imagery with which the poem began and its vision of Santayana on “the threshold of heaven.” Chapter X likewise ends with a vista of “heaven,” as Santayana describes a paradisaical vision that follows the Discovery of Essence.
With the doctrine of essences, Santayana finds a fidelity and happiness for which he can exchange his initial chastity of scepticism:
Retrenchment has its rewards. When by a difficult suspension of judgement I have deprived a given image of all adventitious significance, when it is taken . . . simply if a colour for that colour and if music for that music, and if a face for that face, then an immense cognitive certitude comes to compensate me for so much cognitive abstention. My scepticism at last has touched bottom, and my doubt has found honourable rest in the absolutely indubitable. Whatever essence I find and note, that essence and no other is established before me. (74)
Picking up Santayana’s example of music, Stevens writes:
The sounds drift in. The buildings are remembered.
The life of the city never lets go, nor do you
Ever want it to. It is part of the life in your room.
Its domes are the architecture of your bed.
The bells keep on repeating solemn namesIn choruses and choirs of choruses,
Unwilling that mercy should be a mystery
Of silence, that any solitude of sense
Should give you more than their peculiar chords
And reverberations clinging to whisper still.
If the image is deprived of all adventitious significance, Santayana had said, it will appear just as it is. So, continuing his conversion of visual metaphors into their aural equivalents, Stevens notes his philosopher hears music but is unwilling that it should give him anything “more than their peculiar chords/ And reverberations.” Moreover, for Stevens’ philosopher, “The life of the city never lets go, do you / Ever want it to” because, as we noted before, Santayana had observed:
To this mirage of the non-existent, or intuition of essence, the pure sceptic is confined; and confined is hardly the word; because this plane . . . is infinite; and there is nothing possible elsewhere that, as a shadow and a pattern, is not prefigured there. (75)
Stevens had pictured this confinement earlier in the poem (in terms of the bed, books, chair, moving nuns, and flickering candle), and he hearkens back to that now as his poem concludes:
It is a kind of total grandeur at the end,
With every visible thing enlarged and yet
No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns,
The immensest theatre, and pillared porch,
The book and candle in your ambered room,Total grandeur of a total edifice,
Chosen by an inquisitor of structures
For himself. He stops upon this threshold,
As if the design of all his words takes form
And frame from thinking and is realized.
The “total grandeur” that Stevens’ philosopher achieves is that honorable and indubitable compensation that Santayana attains with the doctrine of essences. To be acquainted with an essence, we have seen Santayana saying, is to recognize an image in its eternality (since any essence that is considered has just that character forever) and it is to see the image in its logical clarity. So, in the room of Stevens’ philosopher, “every visible thing enlarged and yet / No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns.” Here, on the one hand, is Santayana’s “immensest theater” of Platonic forms, “the pillared porch” of the attic philosophers. Here, too, are only the old philosopher’s modest circumstances (“the book and candle in your ambered room”).
Incidentally, why Stevens should be so preoccupied with the old philosopher’s room and with his city becomes clear when Santayana explains what fascinates us in other men’s lives:
The only thing that can ultimately interest me in other men’s experience, or . . . in my own, is just this character of the essences which at any time have swum into our ken; not at all the length of time through which we may have beheld them, nor the circumstances that produced that vision; unless these circumstances in turn, when considered, place before the mind the essences which it delights to entertain. [my emphasis] Of course, the choice and interest of essences comes entirely from the bent of the animal. . . . Good essences are such as accompany and express a good life. (75)
This is Santayana’s own variation on the old saw “You know someone by the company he chooses.” This is something more like: “You know someone by the places chooses.” And Stevens emphasizes that his old philosopher has “chosen” his circumstances.
This is something that struck Stevens about Santayana. The visiting journalists and poets who came to visit the man in the residential wing of Rome’s Calvary Hospital made much hay about Harvard’s notorious atheist — who memorably said, “There is no God and Mary is his mother” — living in the company of nuns.⁶ But Stevens found no anomaly. On the contrary, in his essay “Imagination as Value” (written some four years before “To an Old Philosopher in Rome”), Stevens singles out Santayana as an example of someone who has deliberately chosen his circumstances:
There can be lives, nonetheless, which exist by deliberate choice of those that live them. To use a single illustration: it may be assumed that the life of Professor Santayana is a life in which the function of the imagination has had a function similar to its function in any deliberate work of art or letters. We have only to think of this present phase of it, in which, in his old age, he dwells in the head of the world, in the company of devoted women, in their convent, and in the company of familiar saints, whose presence does so much to make any convent an appropriate refuge for a generous and human philosopher. (NA 147–148)
So, in his poem, Stevens refers to a “total grandeur of total edifice, / Chosen by an inquisitor of structures / For himself.”
Stevens’ philosopher achieves here the “total grandeur” that he had been impatient for earlier in the poem. Santayana explains this paradisiacal reward. In the doctrine of essences, as we have seen, he finds the fidelity and happiness for which he can exchange his scepticism:
Thus a mind enlightened by scepticism and cured of noisy dogma, a mind discounting all reports, and free from all tormenting anxiety about its own fortunes or existence, finds in the wilderness of essence a very sweet and marvellous solitude. (76)
The poem’s philosopher seems, likewise, arrested at the entrance to these Elysian fields since he “stops at the threshold” identified in the poem’s first line as “the threshold of heaven.”
Santayana brings his chapter to a close with the prospect seen from this threshold, with a description of this heavenly vision that follows upon the Discovery of Essence:
The ultimate reaches of doubt and renunciation open out for it, by an easy transition, into fields of endless variety and peace, as if through the gorges of death it had passed into a paradise where all things are crystallised into the image of themselves, and have lost their urgency and their venom. (76)
Stevens’ concluding echo is unmistakable:
[. . .] He stops upon this threshold,
As if the design of all his words takes form
And frame from thinking and is realized.
Notes.
1. Samuel French Morse, Wallace Stevens: Life as Poetry (New York, 1970), 56.
2. The poem was published in Hudson Review, V (Autumn 1952).
3. “A Reporter at Large: Santayana at the Convent of the Blue Nuns,” The New Yorker (6 April 1946), pp. 55–62. The essay later appeared in Wilson’s Europe Without Baedeker (London, 1948). Lea Baechler details links between Wilson’s essay and the poem in “Pre-Elegiac Affirmation in ‘To an Old Philosopher in Rome,’” Wallace Stevens Journal XIV, 2 (Fall 1990), 141–152.
4. In conversation, Santayana complained about the errors in Wilson’s essay: Richard Butler, The Life and World of George Santayana (Chicago, 1960), 178.
5. Santayana and, later, his acquaintances would dispute Wilson’s description of the philosopher’s monk-like existence. Instead, the bookish aesthete seems to have enjoyed a full and social life.
6. Robert Lowell’s “For George Santayana, 1863–1952” in his Life Studies (London, 1959), 65–66 is the perfect example of this, and I am grateful to David Dilworth for pointing out Lowell’s poem. An interesting overview of this subject is T.D. Armstrong’s “An Old Philosopher in Rome: George Santayana and his Visitors,” Journal of American Studies, 19 (1985), 3, 349–368.
