To Susan Sturgis de Sastre
University Club
Madison, Wisconsin. April 18, 1910
Dear Susie,
This place is, as you supposed, very much like a small Boston. The only peculiarity of it is that it is situated between three small lakes, and built on several hills, so that it is picturesque at a distance, although the houses are of the usually American wooden, nondescript kind. The university has some good buildings, and lawns, but is of course only half-finished, and full of architectural incongruities—one building brick and Gothic, the next stone and classical, the next a wooden shed, or a concrete store-house. The professors are very presentable, their wives more provincial than themselves, for they marry too young, and then, by their studies and contact with the world, outgrow the class they belonged to in their youth, and to which their wives belong. The students seem to be good fellows, not essentially different from those at Harvard, except that the extremes of fashion and poverty are wanting here. My lectures are not such a success as they were in New York, because my ultra-modern, “superior-person” point of view, is not familiar here, as it is in that very cosmopolitan and ventilated place—New York. However, some of the professors who come to hear me are very appreciative. Tomorrow, I am going to meet a class of advanced students who have been studying one of my books! It makes me feel strangely famous—although the sales of my books rather indicate that nobody reads them.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910–1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Alderman Library, University of Virginia at Charlottesville, VA.