I recast, I re-live, I entirely transform the characters.
They are creatures of imagination.

S ANTAYANA ALWAYS INSISTED that the characters in The Last Puritan spoke a
language that was close to the normal conversation between educated
people -- that they conversed in a manner that he had often heard when he was
growing up. He anticipated, and perhaps attempted to disarm in advance, those
reviewers of his novel who felt that the dialogue was stilted, contrived, artificial,
and overburdened with intellectual issues when he makes Mario Van der Weyer
complain in the epilogue:

You put in my mouth a lot of good things of your own, or of Howard Sturgis's,
or of other friends of yours. Moreover, in general, you make us all talk in your
own philosophical style, and not in the least as we actually jabber. (600 [570])

And he lets himself answer in the next paragraph:

I have made you all speak the lingo natural to myself, as Homer made all his heroes
talk in Ionian hexameters. Fiction is fiction, poetry is inspiration, and every word
should come from the poet's heart, not out of the mouths of other people.... So
with the characters themselves, I am not photographing real people and changing
their names. On the contrary, where discretion permits, I keep the real names and
the real places, just as Homer does. Real names have a wonderful atmosphere. But
I recast, I re-live, I entirely transform the characters. They are creatures of imagi-
nation. (600-601 [570-71])

His insistence -- that the entire novel is a projection of his own spiritual ad-
ventures -- surfaces at the end, where once more he introduces himself as a char-
acter. He did not push this device to Sterne-like absurdities; his only appearance
in the body of the narrative occurs about midway, when he mentions himself

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