To Henry Seidel Canby
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. January 16, 1930
Dear Canby,
That opiferous cheque for $100 which you said you had directed your secretary to send me has never arrived. Isn’t it yet ripe, or has it gone astray?
I was a little surprised at the tone of Lippmann’s reply to my article. I thought he would be pleased, and certainly I had liked his book very much; but apparently he requires us all to share his vague hopes of “high religious” worldly organization, and is angry if we are attached to some different political ideal. I am sorry. And I was also a little vexed at the preliminary anecdote, not for the tone of it this time, but because it was historically inaccurate and missed the point of the story. I remember the incident very well: it must have been in 1907-8, when I had the beard which you have immortalized in your Review, but which was shaved off some 20 years ago. I enclose my official portrait, in case you wish to exhibit me again when I die, or before. But to return: I said in my lecture that if some angel without a carnal body appeared to me and assured me that he was perfectly happy on prayer and music, I should congratulate him, but shouldn’t care to imitate him. Some of the class laughed: and at the end of the hour, Lee Simonson (what has become of him?) showed me a caricature of myself, looking very dissipated and very French, repeating those words to a vast female angel of a very insipid sentimentality in the heavens. These particular youths seem to have found it comic that I should always carry a stick and gloves, and no coat: but I was a good pedestrian in those days and that was natural to me. The point of my lecture was not, as Lippmann says, absorbtion in pure Being, but the relativity of ethical ideals: which I wish he had taken more to heart. But Simonson’s sketch was amusing, and has made me remember the incident.
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Four, 1928–1932. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT.