Author: David Spiech Page 247 of 283

To Bernard Berenson
Hotel Bristol
Rome. November 22, 1925

It is pleasant to hear that the Dialogues have entertained you. Why don’t you cut yourself a fresh quill and give us again a little of your own wisdom? There is a subject which I should be tempted to attack if people would listen to me, as they would to you, I mean aesthetic arrogance. We are living in an age of emancipated specialists, or of people who give out that they are specialists; and the public is not served, but bidden to believe and obey. These specialists, in other matters, are often persons of no culture or judgement, but one in physics, another in logic, another in economics, another in art, assure us that they are each of them infallible. . . . The liberty of craftsmen to amuse themselves and invent what toys they will, is one thing; the function of adorning a civilized city with the monuments and elegances which express its instinct, is quite another. But the result of anarchy in our society seems to be a crop of small persons who, by sheer effrontery, make themselves tyrants in their respective fields.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Villa I Tatti, Settignano, Italy

To Henry Ward Abbot
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Hotel Bristol
Rome. November 21, 1932

Dear Harry,
The porter of this hotel has just come up in some agitation, holding a letter of yours in his trembling hand, his whitening Jewish beard shaking in tempo; and he protests that he never rejected any book of yours addressed to me. I often send books to myself during the summer, to get rid of encumbrances, and the porter has orders to keep them till my return. But he may have a holiday in mid-summer, or one of the underlings may have been officiating, and may have told the postman–what was quite true–that I was not living in the hotel at that time.
I am sorry this matter has caused you so much annoyance, and am not sure whether, in telling me all about it, your idea was that I should send you the $1.11 required to rescue that book from limbo. I don’t venture to do so, until I get my yearly account, and see how near you come to the truth in suggesting that George Sturgis may have lost most of my savings for me. Last year I inherited enough from my sister Josephine to double the amount of my property: but as the nominal value of the whole had shrunk by about one half, I stood on January 1st just where I stood a year or two before: better, in respect to income, which had not shrunk as much as the nominal capital. I don’t know what has happened since: but if I am completely ruined, it might be an occasion for a fresh spurt in my literary life. I have a lot of unpublished stuff that might do for articles, and I might hurry up with the novel! Yours
G. S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY

To Guy Murchie
Cambridge, Massachusetts. November 20, 1894

Dear Murchie,
Here is a bad consequence of our talk of the other night. However, being “the only begetter of this ensuing sonnet,” you should be presented with the child. Yours ever,
GS

You thought: “The vapourous world on which I gaze
Why is it beautiful? Why in the dome
Of silent heaven do the planets roam
In patient reckoning of the hallowed days?
Why do the resinous pine woods, the bays
Grey ’twixt the islets, or the pregnant loam
With keen sweet voices speak to me of home?
’Tis God within them hearkens to my praise.”
To yours he may: to me the frozen sod
And barren stars are piteous, and no God
Called to me ever from the sullen sea.
Yet have I known him, in my soul apart
Worshiped him long, and found him in your heart.
What higher heaven should his dwelling be?

—November 20. ’94.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Collection of Guy Murchie, Jr.

To Ezra Loomis Pound
Grande Albergo
Rome. November 19, 1940

Dear E. P.

You see where I am, and when you return to Rome I hope to be established in a little apartment, larger than the one I had in Venice, and promised to me for mañana three weeks ago, and it will be interesting to hear what the sequence of your mental planets has been since last winter. Mine hardly move, except that I lose sight of them when asleep or distracted by Care (about getting money) and Clouds (about getting MS safely to America, for publication at Evanston, Illinois). Both Care & Clouds are now gone, and I am writing a sort of autobiography to while away the time and turn old memories into compositions.

If the sequence to which Mencius reduced causation was physical, like that of the position of planets, it would be a different reduction from that of Hume, who reduced causes to sequence in ideas. If the sequence remains physical, it does not remove derivation from the total cosmos. [Interrupted by telephone. New apartment ready at last. Removal effected.]. Day and night follow one another; but they do so for a physical reason, namely, that the earth, constantly bathed by the light of the Sun, constantly turns on its axis. Would Mencius have acknowledged sequence in this case to be a result, and not a primary fact? Hume, if consistent, would have had to say that the sequence of day and night had no possible explanation, the astromical one being due to a tendency to feign (a cause?) innate in astronomers.

How much pleasanter this war, seen from Italy than the other useless one seen, as I saw it, from England! I feel as if I were living in great days, and witnessing something important. Or is it a mere sequence with no causes and no promise?

G. Santayana

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 Charles Augustus Strong
45 Chesterton Road
Cambridge, England. November 18, 1913

[Bertrand] Russell says there are some things that it is a fallacy even to mention!  They can be only predicates. I understand numbers are among them. Poor infallible arithmetic thus turns out to be guilty of original sin and to have committed a fallacy before it begins to speak. Perhaps the Pope is alone infallible after all. Russell is more English, atomistic, and nominalistic than I had supposed.

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