Author: David Spiech Page 107 of 283

To Horace Meyer Kallen
Colonial Club
Cambridge, Massachusetts. December 10, 1908

Perhaps when you get this you will already have left Oxford, unless you are staying there during the holiday’s to work on your thesis. The excitements of term-time will probaby have left you little freedom of mind to plod contentedly at an appointed task—and yet those are our happiest days. Jours de travail, says Musset, seuls jours où j’ai vécu.—I am a little sorry, though not surprised, that your impressions of Oxford are so censorious. It is getting to seem as if no one liked Oxford except me—and I don’t. You talk as if you had expected to find free learning and philosophy there. You forget that it is a Christian place, founded by pious Queens and Bishops to save their own souls and those of other people. The quality of the salvation required has changed somewhat in five hundred years, but the tradition has not been broken, and the place is still scholastic on principle. They assume that they have long since possessed the Truth and the Way. Now, that may be an illusion; but what makes Oxford the best, if not the only, place in which an ideal of education can be acquired, is that, if we don’t possess the Truth and the Way, we need to possess them. Until we do, and become ourselves what Oxford thinks it is, we can have no peace, no balance, no tradition, and no culture. It is inevitable, I know, and it is right, to be impatient at a premature or too narrow harmony: but how much more horrible is the disease we suffer from in America where the very idea of harmony and discipline are lost, and every ideal is discredited a priori!

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati OH.

To George Sturgis
Hotel Bristol
Rome. December 9, 1924

The Society (or League) of Nations is now sitting here, and it is supposed to be an “Anno Santo” or sort of Jubilee Year in religious circles; but I observe no great change in Rome in consequence. I usually go to lunch at a small restaurant in a side street, where there are usually the same people every day. English, for the most part; and everything is very cosy and familiar, including Beppino, the proprietor’s son and chief waiter, who turns down my coat-collar and chooses a good pear for me out of pure affection; but yesterday we were startled by an invasion of American reporters who talked so loud that they set all the other tables shouting too in rivalry in French and German (the British remained inaudible) and the general hubbub became frightful, so that Beppino, noticing my distress, explained apologetically that this was all due to the League of Nations, which he called La Conferenza della Discordia.

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Grand Hotel
Rome. December 8, 1940

Wheelock has sent me Edman’s review of the R[ealm] of S[pirit]. It is warm; he was evidently impressed; but he has no speculative intelligence and misses the logic of the System. Dewey’s philosophy is a part of that America which, as Caleb Wetherbee* said, is “the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences”.

* Caleb Wetherbee is a character in The Last Puritan (see page 186).

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To George Sturgis
Hotel Danieli
Venice, Italy. December 7, 1939

I was very glad to hear that Bob had got home again after an unconventional voyage that probably will make a pleasant memory. I remember with pleasure a voyage I once made in 16 days from London to New York in an empty cattle-ship. My money had given out, or nearly, and I went to some agency to ask which was the cheapest 1st. class accommodation to be had for America, and they suggested this, price £10. So I took it, was never sea-sick, and had to walk all day on deck, because there were no deck chairs, and I had neglected to bring one. I also made an interesting acquaintance with a man who had been before the mast but was a nice person and knew French. Something of him and of his experience of the sea went into The Last Puritan.

Scribner, by the way, has today exploded a bomb under me, most unexpectedly. Two young Jews, a few years ago, got out a collection of articles and lectures of mine called Obiter Scripta; and most of these were included in the big edition of my works. Now they have sued Scribner for reproducing their book without leave; and Scribner, fearing “considerable damages”, has settled the matter out of court by paying the Jews $690.00 Very well; but now comes the explosion. Scribner says that I am to pay those $690.00 or whatever I think “proper”. But there is a seamy side to this matter. Being pleased with the care and diligence of those two students, I asked Scribner to pay them whatever royalties might come to me from the book: but, according to them, Scribner never did so! That, I suppose, is why Scribner settled out of court. And now, I am to pay to get them out of the scrape! I have today answered Mr. Scribner as politely as I could, saying that while I do not, frankly, think it “proper” that I should pay for any part of that settlement, if I am legally in debt for the whole or a part of that sum of $690.00, will he please ask you for it. I hardly think he will have the face to do so, but if he does please pay whatever sum he names. There is a particular reason (besides putting him to shame) for doing it in this way, but too complicated to explain here.

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Mary Williams Winslow
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall, London.
Florence, Italy. December 6, 1912

My chief trouble has been the bronchitis, of which I had an attack in Madrid in April, and another in Paris during the summer—a very cold rainy summer it was—which lasted so long that I gave up going to England for the autumn and went to Naples to sun myself instead. I got well at once; but in Rome last month the cough came on again, and although I am free from it now, I begin to feel that it is necessary to think of it as a chronic affair, and to choose my winter habitat accordingly. It will make Madrid or Ávila impossible; and I don’t mean to go back there until the middle or end of March. From here I shall go to the Riviera and to Andalusia, and then join my sisters and the excellent Mercedes for a season, before returning “home” to Paris. There, at Strong’s, 9 avenue de l’Observatoire, I am delightfully established, with the books I have retained; we have a very nice apartment, a sunny large study, a dining-room and a nice room for each of us, including one—always empty—for Strong’s daughter Margaret. Francoise the bonne, gives us such meals as we wish to have at home, and she is an excellent cook; but I try to entice Strong to the boulevard and its restaurants, so as to vary the scene a little, and be entertained by the cinematograph of real life, and sometimes by the other cinematograph also; and when I am alone (Strong left me in July to go to America, so that his daughter might visit her grandparents during her long vacation: she is at school in England) I take both lunch and dinner out, enjoying that daily episode, even if the scene is not more gorgeous or novel than an établissement Duval in the boulevard Saint Michel. The only trouble with the situation in Paris is that the avenue de l’Observatoire is far from central, and that even the bus and the underground are not very convenient, and to get a cab it is necessary to send Francoise out in the rain, or else to go wading oneself until one can be found at some street-corner. Otherwise, the apartment is ideal, and so long as Strong keeps it, it will be my head-quarters. If he gives it up, when his villa in Fiesole is finished, I shall doubtless take a small apartment for myself in some more central place. Paris is, I am convinced, the point of stable equilibrium for my pendulum.

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.