To David Page
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. March 28, 1946
Vice is common, but not a spontaneous expression of nature: rather a deviation caused by suppressing nature or overworking it.
For genuine naturalism, which has a tragic side, I should look to Homer rather than to Petronius; or on the social side, with town life, to Terence, whom I have been reading lately with great pleasure. His old men are so savoury, each with his private philosophy, and his young men so young, so helplessly in love, and so loyal. And the outlook is truly (not sentimentally) naturalistic: contented with limitations, bourgeois life, fixed principles, a fixed income, and parents who were just like their children and children who expect to be just like their parents, and respect them and themselves all the more on that account.
The “liberal” ill-will doesn’t matter: they have to be like that.
I am reading “Leninism” by Stalin, in an excellent Italian translation by the leader of the Communists here. Isn’t that a genuine form of naturalism? Of course the roots are not everything in nature: the flowers are just as natural: and for that reason levellers and anticlericals are not good naturalists. Don’t be the enemy of anything, nor the dupe of anything!
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Seven, 1941-1947. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.