To Charles Augustus Strong
22 Beaumont Street
Oxford, England. June 19, 1915
After I wrote to you I read Salaandra’s great speech in justification of his policy, and gathered from it an answer to my questions. It is the same that you suggest, namely that Italy feared to be choked in her ambitions and in her independence by a dominant German coalition. And the fear, I think, was well justified. Let us hope that, in the end, we may all escape the danger of being crushed by the German juggernaut, political and moral. Sometimes, when things look very dark, I try to console myself with the thought that if we were subdued, we still should vanquish the victor and make him thoroughly ashamed of being German. In the days when I still wrote verses I tried to describe what happened to barbarians when they conquered Spain: “The Semite became noble unawares”; and perhaps the German might become a gentleman in the same way.
I have been driven into new lodgings in Oxford, which are more spatious and genteel, and I may stay until the Summer begins to wane, when I hope (submarines consenting) to cross the Channel. I should like and yet should not like to go to Spain—vorrei e non vorrei, as Zerlina says to Don Giovanni—because I want to get away from the war, but fear to fall into embittered controversies about it, my sister (and her people I suppose) being pro-German because clerical. What you suggest about joining you on your return to Fiesole sounds most attractive: I should prefer that to a pro-German, even if neutral, atmosphere, apart from the pleasure of being with you and in your villa, and in delightful Italy.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY