To Henry Ward Abbot
Hotel Miramonti
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. July 21, 1933
Dear Harry,
Your impatience is most flattering, and I am asking the English publisher of the Locke lecture to send you a copy. Scribner seems not to have brought out the American edition yet, I suppose waiting for good times to return. The English edition appeared in May.
As to the Spinoza paper, I am myself a trifle annoyed. Nijhoff, at The Hague, was to have issued the Septimana Spinozana (in which my paper appears) last November, then in January, then in the spring, and now in the autumn. I have not received any explanation, but probably the multitude of languages and of contributors have made a Babel of the editor’s mind, who was not well to begin with.
All this comes, not of my being mad à enfermer, but only weak enough to have accepted invitations to waste my sweetness in the lectureroom air, and surrender my MS to third parties. It won’t happen again.
It is most entertaining living in these times. This Roosevelt is more Caesarian than the spluttering Theodore; we are having Fascism under another name rising in France, in Germany, and in the U.S.! And the English Church—what a comedy that is too! I enjoy it immensely.
Yours sincerely, 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