England at Close Range, Seen by a Spaniard
What does a foreigner see in England after years inside it that the English themselves do not? A Spanish-born philosopher sets down its landscape, people and manners with affection and a stranger’s eye.
Most of the book is quiet: English landscape, English buildings, English character and the English habit of liberty, observed by a man who had spent the war years there with Oxford as his base. Santayana admires a people whose freedom is a matter of temperament rather than theory, and who seem at ease in their own nature. He also sees the limits of that ease. The portrait is personal rather than systematic, a record of what pleased and puzzled a philosopher who happened to be living there.
- national character
- nature
- architecture
- liberalism
- freedom
- happiness
- aesthetics
- empiricism
- self-knowledge
Enter a dialogue
- How does a people at ease in its own nature differ from one merely too comfortable to question itself?
- The Englishman, you write, keeps a citadel of inner rightness and stops short of following thought to its end. Is that wisdom or timidity?
- Even if Christendom lost everything, you write, life would stay as absurd and charming as Dickens's characters. Why does his world make you so sure?
- British satirists scorn snobbery, you write, yet adore romantic love, a passion just as full of illusion. Why is the snob's illusion the one they cannot forgive?
- Every nice Englishman, you write, hides a poet who speaks only in silent or religious moments. Why is his religion only a restful backdrop, like a pale sky?