ABSTRACT
Reflecting on his departure from Spain in 1872 for Boston in his father's charge, Santayana wrote of "the terrible moral disinheritance involved" in the adventure. In New England he found "a pettiness and practicality of outlook and ambition" that would not have existed "amid the complex passions and intrigues" of Spanish life. The Santayana-Sturgis household in Boston never became a gregarious American menage. One of the rare visitors told Santayana that the family lived as in a boardinghouse, assembling only for meals and then disappearing into their own quarters. Differences in age, education, and habit, colonial Spanish against Bostonian, explained but did not resolve the condition. Much has been made of Santayana's youthful pessimism, in statements justified by his early verse and his autobiography. Santayana complained in later life that his education was deficient. His affection for British society and institutions suggests that he would have preferred an English public school, then Cambridge or Oxford.
