To Justus Buchler and Benjamin P. Schwartz
Hotel Bristol
Rome. February 7, 1936
There is something of Hamlet in Oliver, no doubt: but he has been so long in my mind, and has developed there so much as a natural fungus or other growth, that I am not sure myself exactly what he represents. The nearest I can come to it is to say that he shows the tragedy of being, as you put it, on the outskirts of society, at least in America. There society is all: and a poet or mystic or essentially spiritual man, when he tries to look beyond the busy but empty social life that is pressed upon him–beyond the conscription to which he is subjected–finds nothing else: so that in that vacuum he collapses and peters out, not having enough substance in himself to make a spiritual universe.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Five, 1933-1936. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Brooklyn College Library, Brooklyn NY.