Author: David Spiech Page 1 of 283

To Abbott Lawrence Lowell
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123 Pall Mall, London.
Paris. June 6, 1912.

Dear Mr. Lowell:

Your letter about the proposed lectures at some French Universities reaches me when I was about to write to you in a wholly different sense. The death of my mother, which occurred shortly after I left America, has made a great change in my personal situation, leaving me without a home in Boston and with most of my close friends and relations living in Europe. It seems clearly to mark the moment when I should carry out the plan I have always had of giving up teaching, returning to live in Europe, and devoting myself to literary work. Each of these things is an object in itself sufficient to determine me, and the three conspire together. The plan which you kindly proposed and we agreed upon last winter, that I should continue to spend four months of each year at Harvard, certainly had many advantages; but it was a compromise. I hardly think we could have been faithful to it long. I should not have attained my object of a change of life, and I should not have left the field open for you to choose my successor. In any case, under the changed circumstances, I could not bring myself to return to Cambridge. I therefore enclose a formal resignation of my professorship, and I hope you will not ask me to reconsider it. This is a step I have meditated on all my life, and always meant to take when it became possible; but I am sorry the time coincides so nearly with the beginning of your Presidency, when things at Harvard are taking a direction with which I am so heartily in sympathy, and when personally I had begun to receive marks of greater appreciation both from above and from below. But although fond of books and of young men, I was never altogether fit to be a professor, and in the department of philosophy you will now have a better chance to make a fresh start, and see if Harvard can secure the leadership of the next generation, as it had that of the last.

As to the lectureship in France, it is not proper that I should now be a candidate for it; but having some experience of the matter I should say that, unless the study of English here has made great strides since 1906, audiences really able to understand English lectures cannot be found except in Lyons, Bordeaux, and possibly Caen. There is danger that, for the listeners, the courses should degenerate into exercises in pronunciation or exercises of patience. The fee of 500 francs seems small. It would cover expenses for the fortnight, but it would offer no compensation for the work of preparation nor for the other energies which such an undertaking uses up. I found the provincial capitals usually delightful and the officials kind; but a second visit might be less stimulating, and I think a new and younger person might profit by it more, and might arouse more interest in the place he visited.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910–1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Harvard Archives, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To George Sturgis
Savoy-Hotel, Rue de Rivoli,
Paris. June 5, 1936

Dear George,

I arrived here yesterday from Rome, and though the hotel is dingy and evidently has known better days, the view from my windows, over the Tuileries Gardens and the river is magnificent, and the breakfast (the only meal I have had here so far) very good, so that I shall probably stay here the whole summer. Politically and in general aspect, Paris at this moment seems far more unhappy and stricken than Italy, where everything is buzzing. There were no regular papers published yesterday, and the restaurants I went to–the Régence & Poccardi’s–seemed deserted. But I daresay nothing tragic will occur for the present.

You are held up in regard to my domicile. No domicile is indicated in my passport, but I have a separate Certificado de nacionalidad in which I am described as residing at the Hotel Bristol in Rome, which is the truth, in so far as the question is relevant to a fox that hasn’t a hole or a bird that hasn’t a nest. When Onderdonk years ago made investigations about my legal status–he is a timid and fussy person about legalities–he decided that my domicile was Avila, because that had been my father’s residence and I was still in possession of the house he had lived in, although it was let. Now that house has been “sold” to the Sastres. Perhaps my last regular domicile was my mother’s house in Longwood. I forget the name of the Street–was it 75 Monmouth Street? I know I called that my domicile and not my rooms in Cambridge, when it was a question of town taxes.

Perhaps, if that holds over after 25 years residence nowhere else in particular, the fact would facilate making an American will.

You send me the latest reports about the sale of my novel, also reaching me from Scribner’s directly, to the effect that it is still selling well—after being first for 3 months and a half–and having reached 148,500 copies. The English sales have been nothing in comparison, about 7,000 up to April 1^st including about 2,000 for Canada. Mr. Kyllmann of Constable’s says he hoped for much more. On the other hand, it is being printed in raised letters for the blind which seems to put it on a par with the Bible in soul-saving power. The blind shall read it!

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933–1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Cyril Coniston Clemens
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo. 6,
Rome. June 4, 1951

Dear Clemens,

No, thank you, I think you had better give the Duke of Windsor’s Memoirs to some one else.

My article on Tom Sawyer and Don Quixote (not Mark Twain, except indirectly) was today left to be typed and will probably reach you within a fortnight.

I return the review of my book in Newsweek, which I had already seen; but I have no scrap-book and candidates for such a mausoleum have to choose between my head and the waste-paper basket. There has not been, as far as I know, any serious or adequate review of my book, and that circumstance is intelligible, because it is not a book to read at one sitting or to place at once in the school-master’s list of graded praise and blame, which seems to be what critic’s think their vocation.

Yours sincerely,

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948–1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham NC.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Rome. June 3, 1937

Dear Strong

Cory also wrote me that you had told him about the Fellowship, but without enlarging on his own feelings about it. He is not a Harvard man, and his philosophical friends in America–Edman and the rest–are at Columbia. His father, brother, and beloved aunt (a very important influence, I suspect) are New Yorkers. And academic shades, if such can be attributed to Harvard now, leave him indifferent. I can never get him to go, even for a day, to see Oxford or Cambridge. All this makes me think, a priori, that if his Fellowship involved residence at Harvard, he might not like it very much; and even if it does not involve residence, the Harvard authorities might expect some sort of co-operation or insertion (as Bergson would call it) of his work in theirs, something that Cory, with his independence, might not supply. I mention these circumstances, because I feel that perhaps the working out of your plan might encounter obstacles. It is not so clear a favour done to Cory as a direct legacy would be, although it may conceivably be better for him to have to meet these possible obstacles to the free enjoyment of the Fellowship.

I have been reading old American authors, and about them, Poe, Thoreau, Emerson. I find Emerson more definite than my memory painted him, also more human and almost light, but philosophically feeble. He is a fanatic faded white, but not really emancipated.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937–1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To Cyril Coniston Clemens
Via S. Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. June 2, 1952

It is quite true that I am a materialist in cosmology: my taste need not be materialistic on that account. Every naturalist must assume that spirit has arisen naturally in the world of nature and astronomy; and I have settled convictions, and have had them since I was 20, on that point. But religions have always appealed to me as myths more or less expressing the fortunes of spirit in the world that generates it, as in theology the Holy Ghost “proceeds” from the Father (Matter) and from the Son (Form) but suffers a good deal (as Christ did by being incarnate.) Cf. my book on The Idea of Christ. It is only through having roots in the natural world that such ideas have, for me, any truth or beauty.

As to Mark Twain’s “The Prince and the Pauper.” It is evidently a sentimental tale, perfectly false, set at a moment when England was being debauched by Henry V and all the bishops but one, and when Mark Twain could not possibly feel what was at stake. I could never bring myself to read it. Shall I send it back?

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948–1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham NC.