Author: David Spiech Page 214 of 283

To John Hall Wheelock
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. May 11th 1951

Your letter of May 7th with the first three reviews of Dominations & Powers arrived yesterday; Cory has received his three copies of the book and I am expecting mine at any moment. The reviews are inadequate but satisfactory in spirit. The critics had no time for really taking in so complicated a treatment of things which are habitually judged by one’s feelings, not by any analysis of their origin or interplay. The best compliment I have got so far came from Cardiff at Yakima, Wash, who says: “You have produced a monumental work.” Sidney Hook, whose early books about the Russian Revolution instructed and pleased me, disappoints me a little by developing his own current opinions instead of considering mine. The other two reviews are what was to be expected, and contain good quotations. I do not care, as you are right in thinking, to see all the notices in the press; but I should like to see any notable ones, whether favourable or hostile, more to feel the pulse of America than to read my own doom. . . . I expect that my book will be better appreciated in Europe, and I include certain British circles, than in the United States, where there is naturally a strong current of patriotic emotion that cannot help disliking unattached opinions. I am quite content with merely being tolerated as a curiosity.

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 Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. May 10, 1933

I have now read Loisy’s little book. As you would suppose I agree with him in his criticism of Bergson; but I was disappointed in his own positive position—quite irreligious—to the effect that Humanity is the true God and the League of Nations his holy temple. It is the old French Comtist positivism, and hardly expected after Loisy’s demonstration of insight into Greek mysteries and St. Paul. In contrast, I revert with more sympathy to the Deux Sources. After all there is a mystical religion which is not an enlarged selfishness, as is the religion of humanity: you may remember what Benda says about this. Only it is not Bergson’s dynamic biological Messianism: it is something Platonic, poetic, ascetic, and ultra-human. The mystics are influential, and may even revolutionize society (without perhaps improving it in the end) but that is precisely because repentance, like falling in love, can liberate mankind from old worldly habits and introduce, in the next age, a fresh naiveté and greenness into life. This renewal is not due to the mysticism directly, since mysticism is merely negative from the worldly point of view: but it may follow the decay of an out-worn civilization, as a new Spring naturally follows winter.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY

To George Sturgis
Hotel Bristol
Rome. May 8, 1935

My plans are still somewhat uncertain, but probably I shall go straight to Cortina about June 1–The war-rumours seem to have died down, and perhaps it is reasonable to believe the Germans will not attack anybody until there is a good prospect of doing so with safety. Events in Austria or Russia or Poland, however, might at any moment precipitate a conflict; only that things will be so mixed that even if the armies held out (which is doubtful) the governments themselves would hardly have the constancy which they showed—most of them—in 1914–18. Anyhow, I am acting as if all would remain normal; and probably we should have timely warning before the Germans could get at us in Italy.

President Conant of Harvard, and the Tercentenary committee, have been writing to me in a somewhat queer way. First they asked me to come to Commencement this year, and get a degree of Doctor of Letters. (I mean, Lit.D. not Ll.D.). When I declined this honour, which I got 24 years ago from the U. of Wisconsin, they wrote asking me to come next year, read an essay at the Summer School, and get a degree, not Specified, together with 60 other distinguished Scholars—no politicians or even Presidents of Colleges being in the list. I have a feeling that they wanted to get me out of the way as inconspicuously as possible, without actually overlooking me altogether. But in any case, I should have declined, partly because I don’t want to go to America at all, much less to an academic congress, and partly because when my novel comes out there may be more or less offence taken at it, and it is better that nobody should be placed in the embarrassing position of countenancing naughtiness. All novels are naughtier now than they used to be: but how shocking that an ex-professor of philosophy at Harvard should write a novel at all, and call a spade a spade! At least, they won’t be seeing me, and finding they have unwittingly given me an honorary degree—almost of Divinity—at the very moment when I was unmasking my essential wickedness. With 3000 miles of salt water between us, I shall feel safer and less hypocritical.

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