Author: David Spiech Page 5 of 283

To Robert Traill Spence Lowell Jr.
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. April 28, 1951

My father—thinking of painting—used to say: “Imitate and you will be imitated.” This may now be true of the artists of each decade, but not on the grand historical scale. Greece, Santa Sofia, and all south and east of Rome, is a ruin, so that it can no longer be imitated, or even weighed in the same balance with what we can attempt.

. . . Ezra Pound has written me quite intelligibly and in a placid mood, on receiving my book. I am very glad I sent it to him.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948–1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To John W. Yolton
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. April 27, 1952

Dear Mr. Yolton

You were very good to send me the number of the Columbia Philosophical Journal chiefly devoted to comments on my recent book, including your own article. I have at once read this, and most of the others, and my general impression is of the great difference in interest and taste that separates American feeling now from me, due doubtless to my advanced age and to the excited and absorbing sentiment that the political anxiety of the moment naturally produces in the United States. You are less affected (as I gathered long ago from your letters) than most of the others by this preoccupation, and yet I seem to see traces of it, not so much in what you say as in the omission of a point in my view of rational government which I regard as important: the idea of “moral societies”. Individual psyches are surely the only seat of synthesis for political ideas; but these ideas are largely diffused and borrowed in their expression and especially in the emotion or allegiance that they inspire. Religion, especially, is traditional. In conceiving of a Scientific Universal Economy, with exclusive military control of trade, I expressly limited its field of action to those enterprises in which only economic interests and possibilities were concerned. Education, local government, religion, and laws regarding private property, marriage and divorce, as well as language and the arts, were to be in the control of “moral societies” possessed of specific territories. These would be governed in everything not economic, by their own constitutions and customs. Of course sentiment and habits would be social in these societies. Children would all be brought up to expect and normally to approve them; but any individuals rebelling against their tribe would be at liberty to migrate, and to join any more congenial society that would take them in, or remain in the proletariat, without membership in any “moral society”. My view is that civilizations should be allowed to be different in different places, and the degree of uniformity or variety allowed in each would be a part, in each, of its constitutional character. It would by no means be expected that every person would lead a separate life. What I wish to prevent is the choking of human genius by social pressure.

Yours sincerely,

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948–1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.

To Monica Waterhouse Bridges
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123, Pall Mall, S.W.
Rome. April 26, 1930

Dear Mrs Bridges,

Let me add my word of sympathy to the many that must be coming to you from every quarter. This inevitable separation can hardly help leaving all the greater void in your life, in that happily it has been put off for so many years. But you have many satisfactions to balance against this sadness, and not the least, which is a satisfaction to all of us also, is that Mr Bridges should have crowned his last years with such a magnificent performance as his Testament of Beauty. I don’t know what judgement posterity may pass—or may drift into—in regard to this poem, and to the rest of your husband’s work, but in any case it is a noble portrait of his mind, so sensitive, brave, open, and healthy; and it must remain a monument to the sentiment of cultivated English people in his time, and in this modern predicament of the human spirit. You doubtless saw a long letter which I wrote to him about it, dwelling (at his request) on the doctrinal side of it, in so far as I could make it out; but that letter didn’t do justice to what I think is the chief merit of the work—its deep sense of citizenship in nature, and its courage and good humour at a moment when the future seems so dubious for England and for the world.

You know better than anyone—for I suspect you had a hand in it—that I owe Mr Bridges a particular debt for his generous recognition of my early writings, when they were quite unknown in England and not much respected in America. His kindness and friendship went even further, and I think he would have liked to domesticate me in England altogether. I too would have liked nothing better when I was a young man; but at the time when the thing might have been possible—during the war and after— it was too late. Neither my health nor my spirits were then fit for beginning life afresh, as it were, in a new circle. The best I could do then was to retire into a mild solitude, and complete as far as possible the writing that I had planned. It is now more than half done.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Bodleian Library, Oxford University, England.

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. April 25, 1947

Dear Cory—

The German book by Alfred Weber on saying goodbye to history as hitherto written is the best thing I have seen about the present state of the world. I have suspended all other work for a few days in order to read it, devour it rather. Unfortunately, towards the end, as happens with things written in haste, it peters out into a debased Platonism—debased because it keeps the mythological taint of Platonism while discarding its moral definiteness and inspiration. But the historical part, and the honest sentiment in the whole are superior to anything I have seen in English or Italian or French.

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.

To Ward Thoron
Oxford, England. April 24, 1887

At last, dear Ward, I take a rhyming quill:
From its cleft point there springs an inky rill
Whose twisted stream, with intersecting flow,
Shall trace the ways my feet & fancies go.
They do not go together, for my feet
Wear the gray flagstones of an Oxford street
And wake the ivy-muffled echoes thrown
From great walls’ crumbling honeycomb of stone,
Or press the rich moist fields that sweep between
Long hedgerows budding into joyous green.
But what can Oxford’s halls or hedgerows be,
Or outraged lingering sanctities, to me?
Not of this one more another springtime have I need
Nor of this cradle of a still-born creed,
But of bold spirit kindred to the powers
That reared these cloisters & that piled these towers.
With charm to captivate and strength to kill.
Of Some splendid wide vision and determined will
With charm to captivate and strength to kill.
The world is rich: wide: it is not flesh and bone
And sun and moon, and thunderbolt alone.
It is imagination swift and high Creating in a dream its earth & sky—
Why then gape idly at external laws
When we ourselves have faculty to cause?
Build rather on your nature, when you can,
And bid the human spirit rule the man,
Nay, not the man, but all the world as well,
Till man be god of heaven & of hell.
Come, mad ambition, come, divine conceit,
That bringest nature down at fancy’s feet,
Alone creative, capable alone
Of giving mind the sceptre, man the throne
Build us more pyramids & minsters still
On thine own regal cornerstone: I will!

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]–1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Alderman Library, University of Virginia at Charlottesville VA.