To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol
Rome. October 26, 1934
Dear Cory,
There is a marked change of tone in your letters, of Oct. 5 and 24, about Eliot’s proposal. Has something happened to change your view? Perhaps I ought to have acknowledged your first letter at once, but I was in the act of leaving Venice and settling down here, and I left it on purpose until I should write in any case at the end of the month. It doesn’t seem to me that Eliot was impertinent or is generally an ass. He is prim, as he himself has said; and it is probably quite true that I am ignored by the English critics, especially on the philosophical side, and quite intelligibly. I am a back number, partly in age, partly in manner. Philosophers now are expected to be thoroughly confused in general, and very scholastic in detail. This doesn’t matter: and I think it just as well that you shouldn’t trouble about introducing, or re-introducing my later philosophy to the public for the present. In ten years, or when the wind changes, will be time enough. But we oughtn’t to be rude to Eliot: and I will reply to his letter myself, and perhaps send him one of my Dominations & Powers articles.
. . . .
Poor Strong is laid up with a sore bottom, from too much sitting on it. I tell him this may be a blessing in disguise, if it accustoms him to lie down more. Flatness is as delicious physically as it is odious mentally.
Yours affly,
G.S.
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