To Henry Seidel Canby
C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Fiesole, Italy. June 25, 1934
Although you have been good enough to publish articles of mine occasionally, I am compelled to confess that I haven’t been a constant reader of The Saturday Review of Literature; and even lately, when you have been sending me the paper regularly—many thanks!—I find myself rather at sea in it. You must remember that it is 22 years since I have been in the U.S. and everything there is transformed, so that neither the books reviewed, nor the preoccupations of the reviewers are familiar to me. I see that you maintain a lively intelligent watch on the world in general; but I can hardly venture to say anything for publication that could pass for a characterization of your special work or its special quality. For instance, I hardly know what other reviews you could be compared with, or come to supplement, or whether you stand for any particular movement of opinion. I suppose you are not an organ of “Humanism” or you wouldn’t have published my “Genteel Tradition at Bay”; but are you “raddical” or “romantic” or “pragmatic” and Deweyfied? This last is what T. S. Eliot says the “Humanists” have become: but my ignorance of these contemporary currents leaves me incapable of testing or judging any such impressions.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Five, 1933-1936. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT