Santayana's Schooldays

RUDOLPH ELLENBOGEN

GEORGE SANTAYANA in his autobiograpliy. Persons
- and Places, says that flowers and butterflies come into
the world perfectly formed, but men are born like un¬
baked dough, half-shapeless and not yet what they are meant to
be. The elementary education that helped shape Santayana into a
leading twentieth century philosopher and poet took place in
Spain and America; it included fist fights and satires on his teachers
and culminated in his admittance to Harvard.

Josephina Borras, George Santayana's mother, was born in Scot¬
land to Spanish exiles whose changing fortunes took them to Vir¬
ginia, Spain and then to the Philippines. It was there that Josephina
met and married an American from Boston, George Sturgis, with
whom she had five children. Ten years later, Sturgis died and the
widow, fulfilling a promise made to her husband, took licr chil¬
dren to Boston. During the American Civil War, she returned to
Spain to visit childhood friends. There she married Augustin Ruiz
de Santayana y Reboiro. In 1863 the couple had a child, Jorge
Augustin Nicholas Ruiz de Santayana. We know him as George
Santayana.

Civilization had left a faded but abiding mark on the Spanish
city of Avila in which Santayana's education began. At the end of
the nineteenth century, it was a neglected, cool, walled city that
looked out to the Castillian Sierras across a broad valley of
ploughed fields intersected with long straight roads, some lined
with poplars and oaks. The sun turned golden the gray stones of
the battlements, the ruined buildings, the nondescript huts and the
piles of rubble left from the sixteenth century when Avila ceased
being one of Spain's most wealthy and flourishing cities. Avila re¬
tained an ancient dignity; custom prevailed; there were markets

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