To Harry Slochower
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. February 27, 1929
Dear Mr Slochower,
May I, in acknowledgement of your kindness in sending me your book, tell you frankly the dominant impression which it has left in my mind? It is interest and curiosity about your own Lehrjahre in Germany. Dehmel himself is not a person with whom I have much in common temperamentally, and I don’t like his verses; even in the similarity of our systems of the universe there seems to be a profound divergence, since he identifies the human with the cosmic spirit, and I could hope at best to harmonize them. But the very strangeness and tumult of his mind, and the glimpses of the turbid currents of opinion in the midst of which he struggled, revives in me an impulse which I had when a young man: that of discovering, as a traveller and wandering student, like Ulysses, the ways of many divers men and cities. I, too, went to Germany; but circumstances prevented me from entering deeply and spontaneously into that society. I didn’t even learn the language thoroughly, but stopped at the point where German poetry and philosophy became intelligible to me for my own purposes, without (as in your case) proceeding to a hearty participation in them on their own terms. I have consequently remained all my life hungry for that intensive travel and moral adventure which a true student of the world should have passed through: and it is the glimpse your book gives me of what that might have been as far as Germany is concerned, that has most interested me. And I wonder what your “Goethe and America” will contain? Goethe was so mature, America is so raw: what is the point of comparison?
With many thanks, Yours sincerely
G Santayana
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Four, 1928–1932. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Brooklyn College Library, Brooklyn NY.