To John Hall Wheelock
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. January 23, 1934
Dear Mr. Wheelock,
The list of your publications in the Modern Student’s Library, in respect to philosophers, seems to include only the most distinguished dead; and it seems a too great honour to be already numbered among them. However, the honour won’t crush me, and I should be very glad to have such a book published. When it comes to entrusting the selection to Prof. Ralph Barton Perry, I confess it seems to me a strange choice. No doubt, you have your reasons: but couldn’t you find some one with a more poetic temperament and more feeling and subtlety? He will select all the safe, second-hand, moralistic things that I said in my earlier books: whereas it is from Soliloquies in England and Dialogues in Limbo that a temperamentally sympathetic critic would gather most of his passages. There is Prof. Irwin Edman of Columbia (to take a young man) or Prof. John Irskine, if an older one is willing to take up such a work. Wouldn’t they be better? There is also Mr. Daniel Cory, who has sometimes acted as my secretary; but that would be almost like asking me to make the selection myself, which I quite understand would not be desirable, because the taste of the public, and especially the interests of the young, have to be considered.
In fine, go on as you wish.
Yours sincerely, G Santayana
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Five, 1933-1936. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ