Author: David Spiech Page 228 of 283

To Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. February 28, 1949

Your letter of a week ago brings unexpected news and it has taken me a few days to digest it. I see what a completely new and actively social life your marriage will open before you ….

More important than the setting is to have some idea of your future family circle. As to Mr. Little himself, being master of a House in Cambridge and being Secretary to the University are both positions of which I have no first-hand knowledge, but they suggest administrative and executive duties rather than teaching, and you don’t tell me what Mr. Little was before there were Houses at Harvard. Garrick and the 18th century sound like a specialty in English history or literature. And then of his four children, which are boys or men and which girls or women? That must make a great difference in the ease with which you can slip into your new position. I have some experience of this sort of problem, as my sister Susana had six step-children as well as a middle-aged husband with fixed habits. Anyhow, give him my compliments and congratulations; and I can understand how you too can feel a fresh glow of youth and excitement at the prospect of this new life. What I cannot sincerely congratulate you on is the procession of visitors and official functions which will demand your time and attention. But I am an old bear, and could never feel the charm of society where it went beyond real friendship or a real feast to the eye and to the gullet.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

To John Hall Wheelock
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. February 27, 1951

In clearing away an accumulation of papers in my desk, I have come upon a letter of yours about the painter Wood’s portrait of me. I had forgotten this letter, and hope I did not leave it unanswered in my preoccupied state of mind. I agree with you entirely about that portrait. It represents me as you might come upon me on a sultry day, and is painted in a realistic way, but coarsely. I much prefer the drawing by Lipinsky, which I believe has been submitted to you with the same commercial hopes. I won’t say that it looks like (although Cory says it does) but it gives an intellectual version of me that perhaps comes nearer to the reality than to the appearance. Only it makes the escape from the flesh more difficult and painful than my philosophy absolutely finds it. I am more Epicurean than that, although not piggish, perhaps, as Epicureans are supposed to be. Besides, spiritual things entertain me, and the quarrels men have about them seem to me needless.

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
22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England. Feb. 26. 1918

Your dislike of essences seems to me very curious: I can’t attribute it to anything but a sort of traditional dread of Platonism as if it were Popery. My essences are akin to Platonic ideas, certainly: but when you say that you don’t understand the principle by which they are selected, you assimilate them to Platonic ideas just in the respect in which they are opposed to them. Essences are not selected in their own being: to select is evidently to leave something out: but what is left out must differ in character from what is chosen: therefore, it too has a character, or is an essence.

Platonic Ideas were selected ab extra by an inversion: natural types and moral ideals were projected into powers: and these essences, having alleged power over the world, were the Ideas. But that is physics or metaphysics or cosmology: essences are absolutely infinite and packed close, like points in space. A selection among them is a matter of partial survey, not of exclusive being in what is selected. Exclusive being would be existence: but among essences no one has any inherent emphasis not found in others.

On the other hand no essence is self-contradictory. A round square is not an essence–at least not in the sphere of geometry. If you say the phrase has a certain import and character–it is a typical self-contradiction–that proves that “round square” is the essence of a sort of accident in human discourse, viz. the use of words with divergent meanings as if they were compatible, until the connotations are felt to clash and the effort collapses. There is no self-contradiction in this experience of contradiction in terms or of diversity of essences; which is what the attempt to intuit a round square amounts to.

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

1. Ralph Barton Perry (1876-1957) edited The Thought and Character of William James: As Revealed in Unpublished Correspondence and Notes, Together with His Published Writings (2 vols., [Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1935]). Santayana refers to the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

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 George Sturgis
Hotel Bristol
Rome. Feb. 24, 1937

Your British news is certainly interesting, but I am afraid not impartial. Everybody who knows anything about the world or about psychology can guess that there is something shady and abnormal about the case of Edward VIII.1 What the exact facts are it is very hard for the public to gather, and your friend’s father’s god mother who has a servant who is in communication with the father of one of the King’s footmen does not seen a reliable witness.

As to your trip in May and June, it is likely that until about June 15 I shall still be in Rome and then at Cortina, at the Hotel Savoy, in the village. I am afraid this is too far out of your way. My stay in Paris last summer did not leave a very pleasant impression, and I doubt that I shall ever go there again, except possibly in transit. Rafael (who has now also written) invites me to come and see them and the glorious new Spain when it is firmly established, but of course I shall do no such thing. Old people are always a nuisance. Jacques Bainville says: “Old men repeat themselves and young men have nothing to say, so that both are bored”.

1. The public reason given for Edward VIII’s abdication of his throne was his wish to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson; however, there were no doubt political motives involved, such as the belief that Simpson (and, therefore, Edward) held extremely pro-German sympathies. Wallis Warfield Simpson (1896-1986), of the United States, divorced her second husband to marry Edward VIII (1894-1972). Edward, the eldest son of King George V, was the only British monarch to abdicate the throne voluntarily and married Simpson in 1937. They lived in exile as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, mainly in Paris. Simpson was the first woman chosen as Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year” (1936).

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