ABSTRACT

Few literary friendships can have been as unlikely as that between George Santayana and Ezra Pound. Their difference in age was considerable; their difference in temperament ranged from the amusing to the alarming. Santayana replied that it was Capital that you should have come to know so characteristic a man as Ezra Pound. The allegation of Santayana's "Fascism" and anti-Semitism is comprehensible but finally unjust, for it is too simple-minded to account for the many factors involved. He was never politically active; his attitudes were philosophical, aristocratic, and completely illiberal by any modern definition of the word. Santayana himself took up the matter of his "Fascism" in a letter of 1950 to Professor Corliss Lamont. Although Santayana's rationale for Fascism in Italy may still offend the liberal mind, it is far from Pound's rant, and further to be understood according to Santayana's theory of naturalism.