Author: David Spiech Page 100 of 283

To Hugo Münsterberg
75 Monmouth Street
Brookline, Massachusetts. January 13, [1907 or 1908]

I have not thanked you for “Also Sprach Zarathustra”, which arrived safely, and which I have read with pleasure. The title is also good, although I don’t see that there is anything very new at bottom, or very philosophical, in the new ethics. Has it, for instance, any standard of value by which we can convince ourselves that the Uebermensch is a better being than ourselves? I should like some day to hear your own opinion of this ideal.

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

To Manuel Komroff
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall, London
Rome. January 12, 1928

Dear Mr Komroff

It is very kind of you to send me your new book. It introduces me to a kind of world rather different from the one I live in. If vice in the Eighteenth century lost half its evil by losing all its grossness, in recovering now-a-days all its grossness it seems to have lost the other half: it has ceased to be evil at all, in the old moral sense, and has become simply an unpleasant fatality. I am not quite sure that I understand your philosophy; but I suppose you wouldn’t suggest that apart from the love of life or the Juggler’s Kiss, existence would be satisfactory. If your hero had stayed at home and had married the girl he had been “petting” so assiduously, would that have been better in the end?

But I daresay this is beside the point. Art is not moral philosophy, you will say: and yet it is as poignant reality, not as art, that your book, and most recent books, can arrest attention. They are a horrid picture of fate.

Yours sincerely,

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller
Anglo-American Nile Steamer & Hotel Company
Chief Office, Sharia Boulac, Cairo
Luxor, Egypt. January 11, [1905]

Dear Fuller,

I am at this moment going up the Nile with an impossible party of tourists, conscious of being no less grotesque myself than the rest of them. So many labour-saving-machines have left us no time for anything, else I should like to travel long in the East and yield for a time to its fascinations. People here seem to realise something of Faust’s dream, to be young in body and old in spirit. What an amusing place the world would be to such a creature. We sometimes speak of regretting lost illusions. What a silly idea! We may well regret lost powers, but the loss of illusions is an unmixed benefit. It leaves you free face to face with the facts and authorizes you to profit by every real opportunity. The trouble is that, the Life of Reason being so largely in abeyance, people do not ordinarily lose their illusions till they have lost their passions, and then the real world, when they see it for the first time as it is, seems to them stale, not because it is real but because they are played out.

I may perhaps go to Jerusalem and Damascus before returning to Europe. The donkey is losing its terrors for me and I now generally ride at the head of the party. Think what a party it must be!

Yours,

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 Victor Francis Calverton
Hotel Bristol
Rome. January 10, 1935

We mustn’t prolong this discussion for ever, because while we agree about the facts (or should agree if I were better informed) we make a different diagnosis and have different expectations. You think the American baby was weak and puling for a hundred years because it had never cut its umbilical cord, when there were plenty of native green apples and native whisky on which it might have grown up healthy and vigorous; whereas I think that that umbilical cord (the genteel tradition) scarcely sufficed to keep its thin soul alive under the pressure of bleak winter and child labour. You speak of “American culture”: what is that? I have known American lack of culture, and American cultivated people: but they were Americans in their residence and in their persons, not in their culture. Their culture came in part through England, but ultimately rather from France, Italy, and ancient Greece: for there can’t be a native culture except where there are no known moral derivations or origins, as was practically the case in Greece, in Egypt, and in China. In the modern world, all nations have, and can’t help having, the same culture, communication and information being so permeating and relentless as they are.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The New York Public Library, New York City.

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol
Rome. January 9, 1933

Mrs. Van Meter Ames, wife of a young prof. of phil. in Cincinnati, has sent me an account of my conversations with them at lunch at the Castello dei Cesari and elsewhere: a sort of Boswell to this Johnson. It makes me out rather like a red-faced old Major in Bath spluttering his damn-mes and don’t-you-knows about things in general: but I have no objection, and have only corrected the English which good innocent Mrs. Ames imagines that I speak.

I have received, from an objectionable friend in Boston, an objectionable book by Bernard Shaw, called A Black Girl in Search of a God. There are amusing turns, but as a whole it is trash. Do you care to have it?

The novel is advancing slowly but solidly. I feel that I have solved the greatest difficulty in the earlier part, viz., the yacht episodes. . . . I feel greatly encouraged in my own mind, and have hopes of really finishing it. I have rewritten a few pages of the Prologue, making more marked the difference between my talk and Mario’s. This was one of Strong’s objections, which I thought well grounded. Fas est ab hoste doceri.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.