Author: David Spiech Page 1 of 283

To Henry Ward Abbot
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall, London
Rome. December 12, 1923

As to me, you know all that can be told and probably can guess the rest. My health is good, and I manage to avoid most of the troubles that most people bring upon one another, by keeping to the life of a wandering student, which has been my ideal from my earliest days. I do nothing that seriously disturbs my digestion or my agreeable isolation; and I read and write when the impulse comes, and not under pressure. Sometimes my literary projects become something of an incubus, and I ask myself whether I shall live to carry them out: but what does it matter? I have already had my say: although I confess that I am still young and enthusiastic enough to feel that what I have in petto is far better than anything I have yet done, and that it must see the light. You may be surprised to hear that the most lively of these embryos is a novel. I began it long, long ago, in the early ’90’s, as a story of college life: that part has now receded into a mere incident; not that my heroes have become much older, since on the contrary I have gone back to their childhood and parentage, but that the scene has widened, and the fable. it is all a fable, has become more organic, knit more closely around the central motif, which is Puritanism repenting, but unable to reform.

Haven’t you written any novels? It is the only living art, and now it seems possible to print what in earlier days we hardly ventured to whisper.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To John Middleton Murry
Hotel Bristol
Rome. December 11, 1929

As to your reconstruction of Christ, you know that I have no faith in such things. Like everybody else, I like to assimilate the sense of the Gospel to my own insights: and I have no objection to poetic interpretations of Jesus, if they continue his legend and are faithful to his sacred character as tradition preserves it, according to the maxim of Horace about fidelity to characters once established by the poets. But these reconstructions have no historical truth: documents are lacking, and the imagination of the modern poet is hopelessly transformed. On single abstracted points we may, of course, have reasons for forming particular judgements; and there are ideas which we may study and understand in themselves, apart from the biography of their author, who probably did nothing but adopt them. What you call Christ’s “amazing” idea of God seems to me to be one of these. In substance it is the commonplace of all Eastern religion: you say yourself that it is found also in India and China; yes, and in the Stoics and the Mohammedans: in fact in everybody except the unmitigated Jews. It is the universal “sursum corda . . . habeum ad Dominum”. If we ventured on hypotheses about the personal context in which this idea existed in Christ we might say that it was merged with that of Jehovah and (as you explain) with that of a Messiah: and there was also a good deal of assimilation of the divine Being to the governing principles of this world. For instance, besides your favourite text about the sun and rain, there are texts about the wheat and tares, the harvest, and the burning. Elevation above human interests did not exclude perception of what those interests required: they required conventional morality, and even an established church. I was glad to see you so bravely identifying genuine Christianity with Rome; but there is one point which, if I had the pleasure of talking with you, I would try to convince you of: and that is that the “supernatural” is the most harmless thing in the world, and not arbitrary. It is merely the ultra-mundane: it is governed by its own principles, of which there is a definite science, and it is the truly and fundamentally natural, of which our conventional or scientific nature is only a local, temporary, and superficial mode. Of course, the revelation of what this ultra-mundane sphere contains is “fishy” and itself inspired from below: it is like our modern Spiritualism; but that doesn’t prevent the general notion of an existing sphere beyond our sphere, but touching it and sometimes penetrating into it, from being legitimate, if only the evidence for it were not drawn from the wrong quarter.

You are a modern, an “intellectual”, and I am an old fogey; that is probably the reason why I balk at your emphasis on “newness”. Aren’t you confusing newness with freshness or spontaneity? True religion, true philosophy, like true love, must be spontaneous, it must be fresh: but why should it be new? There is no harm in a new species of rose, if nature drops into it, or horticulture succeeds in bringing it forth under electric reflectors, and by judicious grafting: but surely the beauty even of the new roses, if genuine, and not simply a vile worldly fashion, is independent of the accident that such a form was previously unknown. Evolution is a fact, and we must be grateful to it for the good things it brings forth: but the good in each of these things lies in their own perfection and harmony with themselves; and the date of them makes no difference in their happiness.

Am I wrong?

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Collection of Richard A. Macksey, Baltimore MD.

To Thomas Munro
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. December 10, 1944

My dear Munro:
Your letter came to me in the midst of an avalanche of Army visitors, most of them very young and raw, but characteristically looking for something they had heard of at home, or from home, very recently. Others came to photograph or to interview me, and some simply in search of a modest autograph. . . . In this society, I put away your letter to be answered when the rear guard of war had begun to pass on. It has now thinned a good deal (like me on rations) and I return to the pleasant memories of you in Paris, and your enthusiasm for African figurines. . . . I am glad you are approaching the vast subject of the arts from that side, rather than from that of precepts and taste. The philosophers have written a good deal of vague stuff about the beautiful, and the critics a good deal of accidental partisan stuff about right and wrong in art. If you will only discover why and when people develop such arts and such tastes you will be putting things on a sounder basis.

My seclusion here for three years, with few books and only meagre newspapers, has been good for my health and for my work. Besides Persons & Places, 3 volumes, of which the last will not be published for the present, I have written a Theological book, and am turning now, well instructed by two great wars and their effects, to my old Dominations & Powers which will, if I live, represent the wisdom of my old age. I have outlived most of my contemporaries, all my family and early friends: but I have not lost them. On the contrary, reliving my life has been pleasanter than living it. In hopes of some day seeing you again.

Yours sincerely, G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.

To William Cameron Forbes
Delta Phi Club.
Cambridge, Massachusetts. December 9, 1893.

Dear Cam

Next Saturday, December 16, is my thirtieth birthday, and I wish all my friends to come and console me at a beer night here at ten o’clock. If you have no more attractive engagement, won’t you come early and dine with me at half past six at the Colonial Club? I have been hoping to see you before this, but have been rather ill and full of engagements. I depend upon your coming, if not to dinner, at least afterwards, since nothing keeps up after twelve on Saturday night— Yours as ever

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To John Middleton Murry
Hotel Bristol
Rome. December 8, 1927

You are easily victorious in your article “Concerning Intelligence” in The New Criterion; at least a person who said long ago that religion is poetry can’t help thinking so. But it seems to me that you aren’t just to St. Thomas. Words had a precise meaning in his mind; “faith” excludes “reason” because it is a name for the supplement, beyond proof, in which our sensations are bathed: Praestet fides supplementum Sensuum defectui. 

Moreover, the whole world to him was like a children’s theatre, that could be delightfully pulled to pieces and put together again, not with a loss of illusion, but with a masterful knowledge of why and how the illusion came about, and was intended. The earthly and the heavenly, the rational and the miraculous made one tapestry: the distinctions were not arid, because they were internal to the work of God, and friendly.

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Three, 1921-1927. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Collection of Richard A. Macksey, Baltimore MD.