To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. July 31, 1948
Dear Cory:
It is a long time since we have written; probably we were both a bit uncertain about things in general and the tone to take about them. . . . [T]he confusion and threatening revolution in Italy and in Europe has “distracted” me a good deal. That, or other causes, have reduced the amount of work I could do and spoilt the result of most of it, so that although I have scrawled a lot of pages, and thrown away severely, a good deal of old stuff, the total result has been disappointing; so much so that during this last week I have deliberately stopped work, like a striking communist, partly to see if a recess would do me good and partly because I had an interesting new book on the Evolution of Mankind by Sir Arthur Keith an old Darwinian whom Strong used to swear by, and who is really a “sound naturalist” although a prosy writer, given to vain repetitions: would he were the only old man with that foible! However, I profit by that bad example and at least in reading him skip all the summings up and introductions to each “essay (as he calls his chapters) originally evidently lecture notes. But I have learned some thing important for Dom. & P.rs, namely, that inbreeding, in a healthy race, brings out all its potential virtues. This is something that Toynbee ought to have been told.
I infer from what you say in this last letter that the first and the last chapters of vol. III are really to appear in the Atlantic Monthly. I am glad of it for you, and to keep the ball rolling before the public eye. But I hate the vulgar aspect of the Atlantic Monthly now; and I hope they at least won’t re-publish that dreadful pen sketch from my dreadful photograph. . . .
As to coming to Rome, on the whole I think you had better not do so this autumn, unless there is a marked change for the better in the political outlook. I don’t think the Russians want a war; they think they can absorb the rest of continental Europe by underhand saturation and opportune advances. I dreamt last night that they had occupied Berlin in a night attack and published a proclamation, saying that they would advance no further, if the Allies did not attempt to retake it; but that, if they did attempt it, the Russian forces were ready to overwhelm them and to liberate the rest of Germany where every patriot was calling to them for help. On reading this proclamation, however, all the people of Berlin had risen and burnt the City; and the Russians had backed out. Not likely: yet who knows what will happen?
G.S.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Eight, 1948-1952. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY