To Gertrude Stein
[Cambridge, Massachusetts?] [1895 or 1896]
My dear Miss Stein
Friday evening is perfectly convenient, and you may expect me at 7:45 at Miss Yerxa’s. If you don’t think the subject too vast I should like to talk about ‘Faith and Criticism’.
Yours very truly
G Santayana
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book One, [1868]-1909. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT.
To William Morton Fullerton
Berlin. December 28, 1887
I am astonished at your wanting me to send you more stuff à la Rabelais; I certainly can do no such thing professionally and on demand, but only at the call of nature, as it were, or when the spirit (or bowels) may move. But as to your prohibition to be serious, I consider it an insult to a philosopher. I am always serious. It is a great mistake to suppose I am ever in fun. It is the thing that jokes, not I. If this world, seriously and solemnly described, makes people laugh, is it my fault? I am not to blame for the absurdities of nature.
You want my opinion on the axiom that “in a world of squat things a toad would be beautiful”. Well, there is a fraction of an idea in it. It is not the shape or quality of things in itself that makes them beautiful, but the relation of this quality to something else. But to what? Your axiom says, to the quality of the real world—“If things were squat” it says. Now that is wrong. If all things were squat the flatness of the world would be neither a beauty nor a fault. If the world were accidentally less flat than the creative impulse or formative idea would naturally have made it, then things squat would be beautiful indeed. See what I mean? There is a certain ideal dwelling in each of us, which the growth of our minds and bodies under the most favorable circumstances would fulfil. But the circumstances are not favorable as a rule. Therefore the actual result differs from what it strives to be and naturally would be but for external obstacles. Hence ugliness and beauty, as well as all forms of good and bad. The difference between beauty and good in the general and all-inclusive sense, is that beauty is the excellence or perfection of the expression of a thing: It is the adequate presentation of the ideal impulse, whereas virtue is its adequate existence. Therefore virtue is beautiful when represented, but beauty is not virtuous. For beauty being in the image or expression of things, these things need not exist to produce beauty, but only their image need exist—Verbum sat.
Now, having expatiated sufficiently in answer to your question, let me put one to you in turn. What is one to do with one’s amatory instincts? Now, for heaven’s sake, don’t be conventional and hypocritical in the answer you give yourself and me. If you are, you won’t take me in. I know that you don’t really believe that the ordinary talk on such subjects is satisfactory. Let me describe the real situation. A boy lives to his twelfth or fifteenth year, if he is properly brought up, in a state of mental innocence—I don’t say he should not know where he came from when he reached this world, and on which track he travelled thither, nor that he should never have seen dogs stuck together; what I say is that, unless he has been currupted, these things have no meaning and no attraction for him. But soon it is otherwise. He grows more and more uncomfortable, his imagination is more and more occupied with obscene things. Every scrap of medical or other knowledge he hears on this subject he remembers. Some day he tries experiments with some girl, or with some other boy. This is, I say, supposing he has not been corrupted intentionally and taken to whorehouses in his boyhood, as some are, or fallen a victim to paiderastia, as is the lot of others. But in some way or other, sooner or later, the boy gets his first experience in the art of love. Now, I say, what is a man to do about it? It is no use saying that he should be an angel, because he isn’t. Even if he holds himself in, and only wet dreams violate his virginity, he is not an angel, because angels don’t have wet dreams. He must choose among the following
Amatory attitudes.
I don’t put a mistress as a separate heading because it really comes under 4, 5, or 6, as the case may be. A man who takes his mistress from among prostitutes, shares her with others, and leaves her soon, is practically whoring. A man whose mistress is supposed to be respectable is practically seducing her. A man who lives openly with his mistress and moves in her sphere is practically married. Now I see fearful objections to every one of these six amatory attitudes. 1 and 6 have the merit of being virtuous, but it is their only one. 2 has nothing in its favor. The discussion is therefore confined to 3, 4, & 5. 4 has the disavantage of ruining the health. 5 has the disadvantage of scenes and bad social complications—children, husbands at law, etc. One hardly wants to spend one’s youth enacting modern French dramas. 3 has therefore been often preferred by impartial judges, like the ancients and orientals, yet our prejudices against it are so strong that it hardly comes under the possibilities for us. What shall we do? Oh matrimony, truly thou art an inevitable evil!
As you perceive, I do not consider sentimental love at all in my pros and cons. It is only a disturbing force, as far as the true amatory instincts are concerned. Of course it has the same origin, but just as insanity may spring from religion, so sentimental love may spring from the Sexual instinct. The latter, however, being intermittent, which religion is not, the insanity produced is temporary. Here is a serious letter for you: now answer it like a man and a Christian—(in the better sense of the word, which is “a fellow such as I approve of”.)
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book One, [1868]-1909. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
To Shohig Sherry Terzian
Rome. December 27, 1937
I am overwhelmed by your unexpected birthday and Christmas present, not only a book, but a luxurious leather book-cover, such as I had never seen before, and other trappings. Have you perhaps left in your nature a feeling for Oriental ways? As I grow old, I feel reviving in myself an opposite instinct, a Castilian love of mended clothes, simple monotonous days, and a minimum of belongings. Having money makes no difference. If Don Quixote had been very rich he would have made magnificent gifts on occasion, but he would not have got a prancing horse or changed his linen any oftener. However, my aesthetic soul dotes on Oriental poetry and splendour, and on those total terrible changes of fortune that, among Orientals, can leave the soul so entirely detached and incorruptible.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Six, 1937-1940. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.
To Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien
3 Prescott Hall
Cambridge, Massachusetts. December 26, 1910
Poetry in words, like fiction in life, is something which has ceased to be natural to me. . . . No doubt the faculty of dreams may be as precious as waking, and less wearisome than insomnia; but when one falls into prose, it is hard to rise again out of it. Another fiction which you amiably weave is the “quia multum amavit” which you apply to me. Any love while we have it seems great; but we must, in retrospect, reduce things to some proportion.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
To George and Rosamond Sturgis
Hotel Bristol
Rome. Christmas, 1935
Since yesterday I am living in a garden of white roses and violets—also a pot of azalias from my landlord who is a member of Parlaiment and head of the Fascist organization of hotel-keepers—and I am feeling that a sort of Santayana boom is going on in various quarters at once. Scrutiny, an ultra-critical intellectualist quarterly published at Cambridge (in England) has suddenly taken me up: I have written (feeling very lively during my illness) an article for their next issue, also one for the American Mercury; and the Scrutiny people, the editor and his wife, are going to edit a book of my collected literary criticisms. The novel, except for the review I sent you, has hardly been squarely faced: that may come later; but the critics seem to be favourable, without daring to commit themselves to any judgement or even analysis. I think perhaps the book in length and in subject is rather too much for them. You will see, and hear, what people will say in America. I don’t want to bother: what is done is done, and I am going on, while life lasts, with other matters.
The political situation, though dangerous, is exciting and helps to keep one young, at least in Italy. Life was never pleasanter here, at least for me, than it is now, and I admire the Italians in their courage, as I did the English during the war. I don’t so much admire them now. They are a nice people, but their minds are silly. Phrases and crazes completely take them in.
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.
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