To Carl Sadakichi Hartmann
C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. May 21, 1927
I have not received any of your passports, nor do I know anyone who wants at present to cross that frontier—if you mean immortality in another world—or who cares a fig for it in this world, if the papers will only talk about him now.
[O]f course there ought to be provision made for genius without a market. The trouble is that if society supported the artist, it would expect to educate him in its own beliefs and tastes, and to see these honoured in his works. The heretic and the stranger would be starved out, if not stoned. There is perhaps more mercy in our anarchy.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Three, 1921-1927. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: University of Oregon Libraries, Eugene