Author: David Spiech Page 104 of 283

To John Hall Wheelock
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. September 20, 1948

Dear Mr. Wheelock,

“Dialogues in Limbo” arrived the day before yesterday—one copy—and simultaneously I had letters from Cory and from Robert Lowell saying they had received their copies. Cory and I are much pleased with the carefully designed front page of the jacket. The colours are particularly well chosen, and the Greek border not too pretentiously Greek. I have a lingering prejudice against large lettering, especially for the author’s name: but the letters in themselves a very nicely drawn and edged, and I cannot really find fault with them. No more can I find fault with the laudatory judgments quoted on the rest of the cover: they sound fulsome, but they will have a salutary effect on shy critics who might not dare to take the Dialogues seriously without some reputable pace-maker. I am glad this time there is no portrait of me. Do you know of any of Alcibiades? A Socrates could be easily found, and there is probably some spurious Democritus that could be rigged out in a long white beard. I like to imagine this book illustrated. Alcibiades gazing at his image in the fountain, with Socrates coming up behind would make a lovely one. Also Avicenna sitting in the Suk on the saddler’s doorstep, and reading by a lamp.

. . . As to anticipating the publication of chapters of Dominations and Powers, I see the justice of your view. We must not take the wind out of the sails by prematurely satisfying the public appetite by a family dinner before the banquet. But perhaps a bite—at the cocktail hour—may keep the illusion up. Anyhow, I am having a few selected chapters recopied, to send to Cory for his consideration. I know that he is not interested in the book on its own account, but think there is a chance of his waking up when he sees what it is like. He has become suddenly an admirer of the Dialogues. These lazy intuitive-fellows have to be allowed to take their time. . . .

Yours sincerely G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.

To Lawrence Smith Butler
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. September 19, 1946

Dear Lawrence,

The parcel from you arrived this morning, full of just the right things. The jars of marmalade were safe, only a little had leaked out of one of them through a crack in the cover. I have not yet tasted the contents, but they look inviting, and please thank the lady who sent them; it will be a treat. The only objection is that I get used to luxuries, and the memory becomes a sort of temptation of Saint Antony when I find myself in the wilderness again without even the wild honey that St. John the Baptist allowed himself. Perhaps the same pious ladies supplied it. The Gospels don’t tell us everything, but they do somewhere mention this charitable practice of good ladies in all ages and countries, in compliment to hermits. By the way, I have read a most charming story, written by St. Jerome about the visit of St. Antony to St. Paul the Hermit in the Thebaid: and I have found a photograph of a magnificent picture by Velazquez—his most beautiful one, I think; for his subjects don’t often lend themselves to poetic treatment, which I have the vulgar taste to like in painting—representing the scene. I remember the original, with the most lovely landscape, a raven bringing a loaf from heaven, and a tame lion digging the grave for St. Paul, more than a hundred years old, to occupy when he has finished the sublime prayer which he is evidently saying. Look up this picture, and tell me if you don’t like it. I have it in a book on Velazquez, which I will give you as a memento if you will come to see it and me.

Thank you especially for the black tie, which is splendid and will last me—if I live—for years. I feel very young and well, and buoyed up by the thought of perhaps finishing my book on Politics, which will be more useful than any of mine hitherto, usefulness never having been a dominant trait in your affectionate old friend

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: The University Club, New York NY.

To Robert Seymour Bridges
9 Av. de l’Observatoire
Paris. September 18, 1919

I won’t attempt to answer your letter seriatim, although each of the things you tell me prompts me to say something, but I can’t let Plotinus lie under the imputation you throw on him of not being a “good philosopher”. If you mean that his system of the universe is not a map of it, is not scientifically correct or in scale, of course I agree. But it seems to me a very great system, very “good philosophy”, and I am glad that the mystics in Oxford are taking him up, rather than pretending to find comfort in Hegel or in the meretricious psychology of Bergson. The doctrines of Plotinus are flights in the same direction as the doctrines of Christianity: they are not hypotheses intended to explain facts, but expressions invented for sentiment and aspiration. The world, he feels, is full of the suggestion of beauty and goodness, but of the suggestion only. In fact, it betrays and obliterates everything it tries to express, like an inscription in invisible ink that should become luminous only for a moment. And his question is: What does the world say, what does life mean, what is there beyond, . . . that might lend significance and a worthy origin and end to this wonderful apparition and to our passionate love and passionate dissatisfaction in its presence?

His system is an elaborate answer to this question. It is not a hypothesis but an intuition, and such rightness as it has is merely fidelity and fineness in rendering moral experience. Of course all those things he describes do not exist; of course he is not describing this world, he is describing the other world, that is, deciphering the good, just beyond it or above it, which each actual thing suggests. Even this rendering of moral aspiration is arbitrary, because nature really does not aspire to anything, and each living thing aspires to something different, in divergent ways. But this arbitrary aspiration, which Plotinus reads into the world, sincerely expresses his own aspiration and that of his age. That is why I say he is decidedly a “good philosopher”. It is the Byzantine architecture of the mind, just as good or better than the Gothic. It seems to me better than Christian theology in this respect, that it isn.t mixed up with history, it isn.t half Jewish, half worldly. It is the Greek side of Christian theology isolated and made pure; and that is the side of it which seems to me truly spiritual, truly sacrificial and penitentially joyful. That it is terribly superstitious and turns all physics into magic is an integral part of its poetic and expressive virtue. Every passion, every force, must be a devil or an angel, because it is agreed to begin with we are looking for the spirit in things.

I didn’t mean to go on in this way, especially as really I know Plotinus very little; but I feel a great power in him, a sublime illusion, as if some plant or some pensive animal had laboriously spun the moral dialectic of its own experience round itself, and called it the universe. . . .

Do you ever see the Athenaeum? I have kept on writing for it, although to be quite frank I don’t like the review as a whole, and don’t read it; but there is no other that I know of that would publish my effusions, and it is a great relief to have them in print. What is once out is done for, and one doesn’t have to think of it any more.

Are you going to America? If your society for the purification of the language is going to cleanse those Augean stables, I don’t envy it its labours. Why shouldn’t the English language of a hundred years hence be as different from ours as ours is from Shakespeare’s? I know you say he pronounced as we do: but we don’t write like him. The Americans have a great love of language for its own sake, and will develop new effects, if not new beauties. As one of them used to say whenever anything was censured: Let them have their fun!

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Bodleian Library, Oxford University, England

To Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller
22 Beaumont St. Oxford
Sunninghill, Berkshire, England. September 10, 1918.

It is a real pleasure to hear from you. I knew that you were in France officiating in some useful capacity, but had no definite address. Some six months ago I sent a pamphlet to you at Sherborn but I daresay it never reached you. The Harvard world seems far away and not very enticing: Heraclitus was right, I think, in believing that Dike presides over the lapse of things, and that when they pass away, it is high time they should do so. If you go round the world after the war, I hope it will not be at a hurried or an even pace, and that you will spend three quarters of the time of your journey in the places which after all are most interesting and where there is most (for us, at least) to discover—in western Europe. Then I shall hope to come across your path and perhaps even to make some excursion in your good company: this long confinement in England; though pleasant in itself, is beginning to grow oppressive, and I often think with envy of those in Paris or beyond. At the same time, I hate to face suspicious officials, and any unusual difficulties and complications in the machinery of travel; so I have remained in my Oxford headquarters now for three years, and expect not to abandon them until the war ends.

. . . My good friend Strong has had a bad time—laid up with a paralysis of the legs—and is still hardly able to walk. The attack fortunately came on when he was at Val Mont above the lake of Geneva, a place he likes and where the doctors inspire him with confidence. He hopes soon to return to Fiesole: meantime I have been separated from him and have missed him, for in his quiet dull way he is the best of friends and the soundest of philosophers—good ballast for my cockleshell. . . . I am . . . deep in a book to be called Dominations & Powers,–a sort of psychology of politics and attempt to explain how it happens that governments and religions, with so little to recommend them, secure such a measure of popular allegiance. Of course, behind all this, is the shadow of the Realms of Being, still (I am sorry to say) rather nebulous, although the cloud of manuscript is already ponderous and charged with some electricity in the potential state. I don’t know if any lightning or thunder will ever reach mortals from it.

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

To William Morton Fullerton
Address:
Care of C. A. Strong, Schiffbauerdamm 3II, Berlin.
Dresden, Germany. September 9, 1886

My dear Fullerton.

I was lounging on the soft and luxurious brown flowered damask sofa of one of the pleasant apartments on the first floor of a Dresden boarding house or “pension”, as people call such an abode in this eastern and more anciently civilized part of the earth—the seat of a riper and more aesthetically developed culture than that of even that noblest of American institutions, our beloved and but recently relinquished Alma Mater, dear old grassy, elm-shaded Harvard University—and I was suffering my summer noontide fancies to be dissipated into the thin and fleecy flakes of a disintegrating and dissolving mist of lazy and listlessly vagrant day-dream phantasy, when, by what happy and opportune inspiration of Providence I scarcely venture to conjecture, our common friend Lyman, with whom, by the way, I am now relishing the sweets of European existence, read me, with that unobtrusive and neverfailing thoughtfulness and solicitude for others’ pleasure which characterizes him in so remarkable a degree, a delightfully easy and charmingly artistic composition of yours—a letter you addressed to him not long ago, whose beauties produced such a vivid and lively impression upon me, and so irresistably brought to my mind the recollection of those happy college days, which, to be sure, are not yet lost in the pink and purple glory of the western sky, and of such of them in particular as furnished me an opportunity of enjoying your graceful and abundant erudition, that I could not withstand the impulse to send you a word of greeting across the restless billows of the blue-green Atlantic Ocean, although I knew beforehand that the rustic vulgarity of my coarse and plebeian mental idiosyncrasies would render it hopeless and utterly impracticable for me to rival the elegance and refined, and copious, and Ciceronian flow of your composition, because I hoped that you would forgive the shortcomings of such poor imitation as I could pretend to produce in view of the always flattering evidence of the attempt; and furthermore that you might be interested to hear about the wanderings of two of your whilome friends and classmates, to whom your epistle had furnished so much instruction and entertainment, and who would willingly induce you to take up the pen once more and to commit to the invaluable and humanizing agency of ink and paper some of the stray thoughts of your less busily and productively occupied hours, for the delectation and exuberation of both, but especially of

Your sincerely admiring friend

George Santayana.

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.