Author: David Spiech Page 21 of 283

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol
Rome. October 26, 1934.

Dear Cory,

There is a marked change of tone in your letters, of Oct. 5 and 24, about Eliot’s proposal. Has something happened to change your view? Perhaps I ought to have acknowledged your first letter at once, but I was in the act of leaving Venice and settling down here, and I left it on purpose until I should write in any case at the end of the month. It doesn’t seem to me that Eliot was impertinent or is generally an ass. He is prim, as he himself has said; and it is probably quite true that I am ignored by the English critics, especially on the philosophical side, and quite intelligibly. I am a back number, partly in age, partly in manner. Philosophers now are expected to be thoroughly confused in general, and very scholastic in detail. This doesn’t matter: and I think it just as well that you shouldn’t trouble about introducing, or re-introducing my later philosophy to the public for the present. In ten years, or when the wind changes, will be time enough. But we oughtn’t to be rude to Eliot: and I will reply to his letter myself, and perhaps send him one of my Dominations & Powers articles.

. . . .

Poor Strong is laid up with a sore bottom, from too much sitting on it. I tell him this may be a blessing in disguise, if it accustoms him to lie down more. Flatness is as delicious physically as it is odious mentally.

Yours affly,
G.S.

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

To Llewelyn Powys
Hotel Bristol
Rome. October. 25, 1938

It is a problem that sometimes puzzles me why Anglo-Saxons, who hate lies, love shams. I think in nice Englishmen it may be for the sake of the protective colouring so secured. People have delicate unhatched feelings, that must not be exposed to the bleak air; and sham religion, friendship, patriotism, etc., help to screen those feelings conveniently, or even to express them in an impersonal figurative way that is not so embarrassing as the truth would be. But in Americans the cultivation of shams is a form of ambition. They must make believe they are well, happy, cordial, witty, optimistic, and music-loving because that is what they think they ought to be: and they insist that other people should help them to keep up the illusion. You succumbed, and helped them to do so. Isn’t it for that reason that the eclipse gave you such pause? It was proof that reality existed. But even cocktails, which foster illusion, are themselves realities, working mechanically and, said Lowes Dickinson once when we were drinking one, “the only good thing in America.” No: not the only good thing, but a great help to the goodness of other things.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT

To Carl Sadakichi Hartmann
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. October 24, 1931

Dear Mr. Hartmann,

Your Mohammed didn’t shock me, much less offend me. Certainly your taste, your diction, and your whole literary atmosphere are very remote from mine, but that is not in itself a reason for disregarding you in your ill-fortune, and I have not disregarded it. In spite of the fact that I have never seen you and that there isn’t much artistic or philosophic sympathy between us, your figure appealed to me by virtue of its composite character—somewhat like my own, but running deeper, since it concerned blood as well as circumstances. And I am really sorry for you, not only because you are not well or rich or famous, but because in one sense you couldn’t be well: because the divine curse of seeing more than one side of things had pursued you. But, having yielded more than once to that impulse of imaginative sympathy, I don’t like to be dunned. You must have friends and acquaintances who know your case and—in generous America—will come to your assistance. I must therefore ask you to excuse me from helping you further: because the distance between us, material and moral, makes me feel that it is not for me, in this instance, to be more than an occasional and fantastic helper, coming out of nowhere and disappearing into nothing.

Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Baker Memorial Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH

To Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien
Villa Medici
Rome. October 23, 1912

Sadness overwhelms me at the thought of a “Magazine of American and Foreign Verse”, at a reduced rate for poets.—No: this is not the way to do it. Get a thousand miles away from all magazines and many thousand miles away from America, in your island off the West Coast of Ireland at least—and even then!

Your disillusioned friend, G Santayana

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 Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell
22 Beaumont Street Sunday
Oxford, England. Sunday [Autumn 1916?]

Dear Lady Ottoline,

If you have an instinctive antipathy to German philosophy, you ought to find my new book agreeable. However, I don’t expect you to read it all, and you must feel quite free to give it away or lend it to anyone who you think is ripe for sound doctrine, and not an incorrigible admirer of Lord Haldane.

I should have been to see you long ago if I hadn’t been far from well; in fact I am so seedy that at Mrs Morrell’s suggestion I am off tomorrow to Harrogate. If I return from there as light as a bird, I shall soon fly to Garsington.

I haven’t got so far as to read book about Dostoevsky, having scarcely read one of his own—only “Crime and Punishment”: but I liked the spirit of it, though the letter didn’t seem to me very beautiful.

Yours sincerely, G Santayana

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