To Charles Augustus Strong
Serrano 7
Madrid. April 21, 1913
I hope to find you at home when I arrive, about May 15–, and that you will be willing to let me read over what you have written since the publication of your articles.—I myself have been very lazy since I got here, only being able to copy some 50 pages of manuscript which I had written during the winter, and I hope, before I leave Madrid, to copy all the rest; but somehow I have no space, no large horizons or solitude, for original composition here. I am leading a family life, with five women in the house, and though that has many advantages, and is a grateful change in many ways from hotels and solitary lodgings, it is very bad for continuous thought.
I feel rather inclined to read up the French nationalist and new-conservative writers— Maurras, etc—and to write something about them and the collapse of liberalism, in politics and philosophy. I am dissatisfied with the paragraph in my new book about patriotism—the subject was better treated in “The Life of Reason”—and should enjoy working out the other side of the question, namely, the need of specific, exclusive forms of life and of order among various groups of men. Living in Madrid, though not favourable to positive work, is very stimulating to the political imagination.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY