Author: David Spiech Page 13 of 283

To Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. February 27, 1946

Dear Rosamond: Today I drove to the post office and got your gift of four books on sublime politics. You ask whether they are what I want. Yes, exactly, at least three of them. I am less sure about Churchill’s war speeches, although they may be what I need, even if I don’t like them, in order to give me a victorious thrill and a sense of being a good fellow surrounded by a nation of other good fellows, guaranteed to beat any other set of good or bad fellows on earth. Being in doubt about the possibility of getting my organism, at its age, to react properly on this alcoholic stimulant, I have for the moment lent this one book to Mother Hilda, acting head of this establishment (the Mother General being on travels of inspection in foreign parts), who is an ardent Englishwoman and speaks of “Mr. Churchill” with a hush of reverence. She sends word that she is much obliged, and will take great care of the precious volume and return it soon for my improvement. Meantime I have begun on “The Anatomy of Peace” by Emery Reves, which attracted me most; and I began with the last chapter to see what he was after: for the “jacket”, if that is what you call the paper cover, gave me no clear idea of the author, who didn’t proclaim himself to be a professor or even a Ph.D, and was not described in any of the comments quoted by the editor as belonging to any party. That fact encouraged me; and indeed I have found the last chapter splendid. Just what I think myself! Only, of course, I should add a word or two that might materially transform the issue. We must have law or suffer conquest: agreed; but if we have law, somebody must enforce it, and we should have to submit just as if we had been conquered. Apparently the establishment of this control is to be left to circumstances, as it always has been hitherto. I may get more light on that point when I have read the book properly, beginning at the beginning.

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

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Rome. February 26, 1950

My portrait was finished on Saturday and, as far as I can judge, it is rather good. I showed Wood my only previous portrait by an artist, Andreas Andersen’s carbon of 1896, and he looked at it intently for a long time and seemed to appreciate it. He said it still looked like me, which was a compliment to Andersen as well as to me.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Horace Meyer Kallen
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. February 25, 1937.

Dear Kallen,

Perry’s mind is more conventional than yours, and he has undoubtedly presented a William James painted, as it were, by a member of the Royal Academy. He has done it very nicely, much better than I had thought him capable of doing anything. But there are at least two fatal handicaps under which such a biographer suffers—an official biographer. He can’t tell, he can’t even wish to know, everything, not the misères, physical and moral that really beset and largely direct the lives of all of us. That is one handicap. The other is that he is still interested in the questions that agitated his hero, they are still living questions to the biographer too, so that he will necessary pull and stretch the man’s thoughts to agree with his own, and will give a disproportionate emphasis and finality to those thoughts so surviving in himself. This is the trouble with your corrections and interpretations. Wm James is still living within you, and in vindicating him (as you think) you are vindicating yourself. That is honourable enough, but not biography. I therefore entirely agree with you that it would be better if Wm James’s Nachlass had been published almost without comments, leaving it for a future age, if it is interested in him, to review the maximum of his ipsissima verba and then perhaps draw a portrait of him as he appears to that remote posterity, to whom his problems will be a dead as himself, though both perhaps memorable in their by-gone virtues and humanity. If I were younger, and my planned work quite finished, I might be tempted to work out a notion I have, not about James especially, but about the old mind of the New World in general. It looks to me (I have been reading Jonathan Edwards) as if America had started life with an official mentality of the most alien and artificial character, and that these three hundred years have not sufficed to allow a native mentality to grow up (like a weed, at first) and crowd out the traditional imported principles. Wm James would illustrate the bravest possible struggle of the young and native growth against the old roots and stumps still encumbering and empoverishing the ground. And I am not sure that, for all his vitality and courage, he too was not, on the whole, stifled. Neither Emerson nor Walt Whitman seem to me to have escaped altogether, especially not on the political side. In any case, the discrimination between tradition and nativism would be tempting to make in every American yet on exhibition.—With best wishes from

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York NY.

To Charles Augustus Strong
22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England. February 24, 1918

Your article on free will arrived in due course; naturally I agree: but I am not satisfied with the degree of distinctness which your theory－or your expression of it－has attained. Of course our acts, deliberations, and passions, taken in their concrete biological context, are efficacious effected causes: I mean that the process of nature runs through them. But the questions that people will wish to have answered regard 1st the relation of consciousness taken historically to the other elements in these concrete processes, 2nd the relation of intention and desire takens morally to the direction of those total processes, and 3rd the determination or indetermination of the same. On this last point your answer is definite: but what is your attitude about the other two?

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To Andrew Joseph Onderdonk
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. February 23, 1946

Dear Onderdonk: I have to thank you for your Christmas card and now for the large size calendar with views of old Harvard. Le Christ de Dijon is not like my “idea” of Christ, because it is resisting suffering, while my Christ is choosing and transcending it, like the Christ rising from the tomb by Piero della Francesca which you may remember I used to have in my room. However, many sides are to be found in the idea of Christ, as in the reality of Old Harvard. But as to Harvard, I think the album of photographs you sent me of the new Harvard is more attractive than old Harvard ever was: I mean to the eye. Harvard was terribly ugly; but we could be tolerably happy there notwithstanding. I am afraid, if you come back to live in Europe you will find it uncomfortable as well as ugly. Things seem destined to be brought down to a lower level all round, as at the fall of the Roman Empire. Better stay in Chicago. I read in the paper yesterday of a person asked if he came from Austria. He did, but his reply was: Vengo dal Purgatorio. Don’t gather from this that I wish I were not here. I am quite happy here, and cheerful. But I have given up demanding luxuries.

Yours sincerely G Santayana

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