To Charles Scribner’s Sons
Charles Scribner’s Sons. New York
60 Brattle Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts. [c. 25 June 1901]
Gentlemen:
I was glad to get your letter of the other day and to know the view you took of the poems as a whole and of the occasional pieces in particular. The royalty of 10% you suggest is all I should have expected if I had thought of the matter at all. Of course my interest in publishing verses consists entirely in the desire to see them in my friends’ hands and to be rid of that feeling of prolonged pregnancy which comes from having old things in MS when new things are in one’s mind asking for their turn to be hatched. I only hope you will not suffer any loss by venturing to undertake their publication.
What you say about the title is very true, although it had not struck me before. I will try to think of a better one, at least for the volume. Several suggest themselves to my mind, in view of what you say about a certain doctrinal and spiritualistic tendency in the first two poems: but I dislike too poetical and pretentious a title as would be “The lessons of love”, “The penances of love” or anything of that kind. “Christian Episodes” would perhaps be better, and would have the advantage of indicating the “objective” way in which I look, and should like the reader to look, at those little studies. But as the publication is not to be until the autumn, there is time for happier thoughts, as well as for some changes and corrections which begin to occur to me—most of them, however, slight enough to be made in the proof.
Yours very truly
G Santayana
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book One, [1868]–1909. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript:Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton university Libraries, Princeton NJ.