79891-004-AAF05591To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. October 23, 1935

Cannes may . . . be a relief to you politically, if the condition of things in Italy now makes you uncomfortable. I am troubled, of course, but interested, and in full sympathy with this side of the quarrel. Not that, being a Pantoffelheld¹  (if that is the way to spell it) I didn’t deprecate the expedition to Ethiopia and feel in my bones that it might be a disaster; but that, once human life and human enterprise are condoned, I see the whole élan vital of the universe behind our friends here: whereas I loathe the League of Nations. To bolster up the decay of parlaimentarism by convoking a still bigger and more mob-like parlaiment, composed of pedants and ideologues, was a work worthy of Wilson, Clemenceau, & Lloyd George: and now to see it run by Eden reminds me of Eliot running the Harvard Faculty.²  What an odious tyrant he is! The English bully is traditional and the English prig is familiar; but the union of the two was never achieved before Mr. Anthony Eden. With these sentiments, I don’t mind waiting for events in this heated atmosphere: we may soon see clearer weather, and I am not sure that this egregious Mr. Eden will not disappear ignominiously from the scene.

I hope this sfogo³  of mine won’t irritate you, if you sympathize with the other side. I might tear up this letter, and write a colourless one; but perhaps it may entertain you to see how anti-English I have become.

  1. Big talker (German).
  2. Charles William Eliot (1834–1926) was appointed president of Harvard in 1869. By 1909, at the end of his tenure, Harvard had become one of the great universities of the world. Characteristic of his curricular reform was advocacy of the elective system and abolition of a required curriculum. Santayana viewed Eliot’s reform program as a movement away from traditional liberal education toward mere “preparation for professional life” and “service in the world of business” (Persons, 396).
  3. Outburst (Italian).

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY