Category: LETTERS Page 4 of 274

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.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. April 8, 1931

I am glad you have put your theory of perception into its final shape, and shall be interested in seeing—and hearing—the terms in which you now express it. As to Relativity, I may not be able to follow your arguments and am, in a sense, less personally interested, because I have come to a quietus of my own on the subject. When you are here, if you still want to work, I can give you a book of Maritain’s in which Einstein is treated intelligibly and intelligently, though of course from a far distant point of view. I am, in my old age, acquiring the faculty which Leibniz said he had of agreeing with Everybody. I agree with Maritain, but I agree with Einstein also: it is only a question of the place which one assigns to certain sorts of science or speculation. Maritain thinks what I call “specious” absolute: and it is, for the moralist or the poet: it is the spiritual reality. But the test of material Existence is practical: so that the tables are turned when you approach cosmology. The cosmology of Maritain is pure myth, as that of Einstein is sheer mathematics.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To Otto Kyllmann
Hotel Bristol
Rome. April 7, 1935

At last yesterday I sent off the MS of The Last Puritan which I hope you will receive safely. . . . We have tried to polish it and make it as inoffensive as possible, without weakening the picturesque or the moral burden of it: but it has to be “burdened”; “burdened” was a favourite word with my old teacher Josiah Royce at Harvard: it signified all the inescapable oppression, nervous and imaginative, from which he and his people suffered. Cory thinks that the last part of the book is “inevitable”, and has dramatic interest. I see myself that it reads more like other novels than does the body of the story, but I haven’t attempted to practice “the art of fiction” according to Percy Lubbock or any other critic, but to write a documentary biography of an imaginary superior American, as it might be if distilled into its quintessence and expressed with complete frankness.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia PA.

To Horace Meyer Kallen
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1.
Rome. April 6, 1930

Dear Kallen,

Your publishers, no doubt at your request, have sent me your “Indecency and the Seven Arts”, which I have been reading with a good deal of pleasure and amusement. It happens that I had just finished “Humanism and America”, so that I could particularly relish your onslaught on the prigs. Sometimes my pleasure in reading you is modified by a qualm of conscience, when I wonder if the example of my early writings could have encouraged you in your intellectual impressionism. It is an inevitable method up to a certain point, since in one sense all our ideas and convictions must have been once intellectual impressions— notions that simply occurred to one; yet there are degrees in the lightness with which we may pick up these views, and propose them as serious representations of the true relations of things. Perhaps I have become too systematic and too much disinclined to take up fresh notions; it is a hardness proper to old age; but it seems to me that you are not systematic enough, or at least not conscious enough of your latent system, and that your contentions would carry more weight if the reader were told clearly on what principles they rested. Mere inspection of the alleged facts leaves accidental impressions: one is conscious that almost anything else might have been said instead. For instance, you blame Mussolini for the absence of fresh art in Italy; but you say elsewhere that it takes ages for a society to reach genuine expression in the arts; and you might have said—unless your undisclosed first principles forbid it—that a disciplined society, that has admirable and definite artistic traditions, will naturally continue them automatically, as it will continue to speak its old language, and will positively discourage innovations. There is always variation enough imposed by circumstances: new beginnings in the arts are signs either of a previous total ruin or of fashionable impudence. Modern “art” is a matter of one foolish fashion after another. Why have any “art”? What you say about Russia interested me especially: there you feel more at home; and although I know nothing about what is actually brewing there, or what we may hope for, I think it is a splendid experiment. Lenin is as good as Lycurgus or Pythagoras. Let him have his way! Hurrah for a Russian ballet without religion!

Yours sincerely, G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York NY.