Category: LETTERS Page 2 of 274

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol.
Rome. April 13, 1938

Your review of “Truth” could not be improved as a manifestation of your talents, natural and acquired. The style and tone are mature and cultivated, without affectation, and your treatment of me and my book handsome and becoming. That you look at us from the outside is a timely variation from having seen us from the inside for ten years. My writings are tiresome. Their merits can become annoying and turn into defects. It is as well that now you can take a holiday; which doesn’t exclude the possibility of some day returning to them with freshness of apperception and judgment. Perhaps then you might not deprecate my purple passages, and might see (what is the historical fact) that they are not applied ornaments but natural growths and realizations of the thought previously moving in a limbo of verbal abstractions. And then too you might choose other words than “definitions” for my fundamental ideas, or than “neat” for the unity they compose. You know perfectly well that they are imaginative intuitions, and that they hang together, not by external adjustment, but because they are defined by analysis of an imaginative total, a single unsophisticated vision of the world. This vision, in my case, is chiefly of nature and history, subjects you have not studied very much; and you probably will get on better for preferring to dwell on detached arguments or feelings, such as the public relies on. You might find your surest convictions in the region of introspection or of religious feeling. That would legitimately alienate you from my naturalism, which is like that of Lucretius or Spinoza. Naturalism easily leads to purple passages, because nature is the genuine root of emotion. When emotion, on the contrary, is the root of a system, it naturally develops into arguments, proofs, and refutations, because, as in inspiration, then the question is what ought to be rather than what is.

Edman is here, and rather fatigues me with his proddings, where he fears that my feelings may not be quite American. We live in a fanatical age, an age of propaganda, when everybody wants the support of the whole herd in order to be quite at peace in his own conscience. I am reading the Upanishads, St. Augustine’s Confessions, and Spinoza’s Politics, to take the bad taste out of my mouth.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. April 12, 1927

I am sorry that Dewey should have been so much enraged by my article: I meant to be friendly and sympathetic, but magis amica veritas. Yet I am not sorry that he wrote his reply, because I have gathered something from it, partly from his denial that he thinks the immediate alone real, and partly from his assumption that by substance I understand something not in space and time and not distributed as things are distributed, in other words, that I don’t think it is matter but is some metaphysical being. Would you have got the same impression from my book (Scepticism) or is it merely Dewey’s extraordinary intellectual deafness and blindness? He can’t think: he can only see things move: and for that reason he wonders how I, who sometimes see things moving too, can also think about them and see the dialectical and eternal relations of their essences.

Cory, my unknown disciple, has turned up. He is tall, nice, and only 22, but not very clever—a sort of agreeable “grind”. He will come to see you in a month or so, when he goes north.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To Hugo Münsterberg
Cannes, France. April 11, 1906

I have come here to spend a part of my Easter holiday with my friend Strong. My provincial lectures, of which I have given those at Nancy, and at Montpellier, has been very pleasant so far for myself, but as an audience who really understands English is not easy to find, I have been reduced rather to a phonetic machine, with the function of emitting interesting if unintelligible sounds. The audiences nevertheless have been large and religiously attentive, while the rectors and other professors have shown me every possible courtesy.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001. Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Boston Public Library, Boston MA.

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Rome. April 10, 1933

Logan Pearsall Smith has sent me some sugared hay of his own about “Reading Shakespeare”. It is pleasantly written, except where he feels impelled to speak in hushed superlatives about Shakespeare, as if he were speaking about God. The need of possessing the biggest poet in the world puffs him out; and there is over-interpretation in the wake of Coleridge and Lamb; but he mentions a naughty American professor Elmer Edgar Stoll who seems to have seen light by the Mississippi, and goes to the other extreme.

Part II (18 chapters) of the novel is now finished and typed, and I am busy revising the beginning of Part III in which your friend Mario makes his appearance, aged 16. I am beginning to feel encouraged about finishing this endless task. It is not as clever and amusing as I meant to make it, but it turns out deeper and more consistent than I had suspected. There is a hidden tragic structure in it which was hardly foreseen but belongs to the essence of the subject, the epoch, and the dissolution of Protestantism.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Cyril Coniston Clemens
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. April 9, 1949

Dear Clemens,

No: I have no long-distance (or short-distance) radio, and no desire to listen to any broadcasting, which with my deafness I should not understand. It is not in my . . . power to regulate what people may say or publish about me, but I have repeatedly begged you not to busy yourself about me. I don’t think you are the right man to do so; but I suppose publicity is your profession and you are willing to take up any subject that seems to supply “copy”.

It is the same with visitors and interviews. People come to see me without asking leave or needing introductions, and between 5 and 7 p.m. I see them, and occasionally feel that perhaps it has been of some interest, and not merely a passtime, like going to see the oldest old woman in the village.

If you write me more letters and get no answer, please understand that, as far as my consent is required for any useless project, I do not give it, but that the thing may nevertheless be realized if the essor vital in the persons concerned is irresistible. I like to be quiet, but do not undertake to stop the steam-roller of modern enterprise.

Yours sincerely, G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham NC.