Author: David Spiech Page 249 of 283

To Carlotta Russell Lowell
King’s College
Cambridge, England. November 11 1896

Many thanks for both your notes. When I got the first I never expected a second, as it is the part of prudence to thank an author for his book before reading it, so as to avoid the necessity of lying about it afterwards. That you should have written both before and after is very gratifying, as it seems to mean that you liked the book better than you expected, and at any rate well enough to say something nice about it when this was no longer necessary. I am delighted that you found most of the book intelligible and interesting, and that you agreed with most of it. That is all I can now say for it myself, as there are already several things I should like to see put otherwise in it.
My life here is very pleasant and interesting, and perhaps a little luxurious. I try to chasten myself, however, with some tough Greek—the Parmenides and Philebus of Plato, which I am reading carefully—and with long walks among the clouds, which in this country come down to the surface of the land and especially of the water. The afternoons are very lovely, and the river with its many boats, blazers, bicycles, and coaches on horseback is a gay and pretty sight. My friends at King’s have the flavour of their Port, sweet, mellow, and with lots of body, and it will be hard not to get so fond of them as to miss them when I go. . . .
Haven’t the Russells turned up? I should have been glad to have you meet, they are such nice people. He is mathematical and she humanitarian, but both are human at the same time.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

To Horace Meyer Kallen
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall, London
Cambridge, England. November 10, 1913

I should sympathize heartily with such revolutionary yearnings if it was only a question of destroying the snug and limping conventions under which we live. But I dread what might be substituted for them. One of the fatalities of my life has always been that the people with whom I agree frighten me, and I frighten those with whom I naturally sympathize. No: that isn’t it exactly, because I don’t sympathize with the old fogueys as they now are, nor with any stale convention; but I love the sentiment and impulse out of which these now stale conventions once arose, far better than the impulse and sentiment out of which springs the rebellion against them. Life, yes, but not this life. My eye has just fallen, by chance, on an article by the Infanta Eulalia of Spain about her childhood. It is full of hatred of Spain of Catholicism and of virtue, and slips into positive lies: it is a horrible expression of impiety, in every sense of that word. Well, the things the Infanta hates are, I agree, tyrannical conventions, and a straight-jacket for sanity—not to speak of the eroticism from which the lady evidently suffers. But imagine the treble horror of the tyrannical conventions which an inhuman impiety and low-mindedness, such as hers and that of her free-thinking circle is, would impose on mankind! I should rather have the Inquisition back again. I have also just finished a book, interesting to one of my generation, on the “Eighteen Nineties” by one Holbrook Jackson. It brings to a focus the rebellious, conceited, pessimistic aestheticism that was fashionable in my youth; I can see now that I was not unaffected by it, although the elements which these aesthetes added when, at the end, they were converted (most of them died Catholics) was always present in my background, and besides I was not clever enough to be nothing else. It is very interesting to compare with that spirit of the Eighteen Nineties that of the ‘Teens of the new century. It is a very different spirit—the Infanta Eulalia, thank Heaven, is an old woman now—and in Paris especially one feels it in every wind. It is unintellectual, virtuous, athletic, patriotic, cooperative; it accepts conventions with respect but without illusion, and it takes pains to find means to its ends, without giving to these ends a universal or exaggerated value. I like it. It is the spirit of an honest, modest, vigourous young artisan.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati OH

To Robert Silliman Hillyer
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Fiesole, Italy. November 9, 1923

My dear Mr Hillyer
That anyone should resent a change in one of my sonnets is in itself such exquisite flattery that I can’t resist telling you why that change was made. “Garden rear” has a ridiculous familiar sense—and only one—to an English mind, and as my new collection was made for the English edition (Scribner’s is only a reprint) it was imperative to avoid such a snag. Certainly the original, if the double entendre is not suggested, was better.  Nor is this the only case where I have been forced to make unwelcome changes in order to avoid comic effects.
Yours very truly,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Syracuse University Library, Syracuse NY

To Richard Colton Lyon
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome, November 8, 1949

The most interesting thing in your letter is what you say about love, which seems singularly mature for your age. But I think, in regard to marriage, that what you say does not preclude true love or true happiness in that relation. Love, in English, is a very wide term. What poets and philosophers, at least of the classic school, talk about is the passion of love, the madness, divine madness, of Plato. But attraction, confidence, mutual delight, and complete devotion to a chosen mate is not madness at all: it is a phase, a settlement, of the sane affections of one human being to another, where all sane possible bonds, physical, domestic, social, intellectual, and religious bind the two together for life—common material interests and children being strong material buttresses to such a complete union in after years. More than once, at friends’ houses in England or in hotels, I have found myself divided only by a frail closed door from the bed in which an elderly pair were exchanging confidential judgments and ideas; and I have been impressed by the perfection of friendship and sympathy in such a union. The only advantage—for me important—that the ideal friendship has over such a happy wedlock is liberty. Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendship of the same intimacy. On the contrary, in friendship union is more about ideal things: and in that sense it is more ideal and less subject to trouble than marriage is. But I am not a lover of life; I prefer it at a distance, or in the distances pictured in it. When it is actually tumbling over itself I feel that it is spoiling its own treasures.
I too, by chance, have been just rereading the whole of Byron’s Don Juan. Some parts bored me, the invectives especially; but as you say, he is witty and his rhymes sometimes surprisingly clever. But he did not respect himself or his art as much as they deserved.

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 Daniel MacGhie Cory
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. November 7, 1946

I have . . . Bertie Russell’s “Amberley Papers”, the biography letters and journals of his parents, Lord and Lady Amberley.  Amberley was a soft sentimental ultra-consciencious youth, but egotistic and even cruel on occasion. The way he carried on and then abandoned a very nice middleclass girl, saying he “trusted that time would make her stronger” and that they “parted with the same trust, clinging to one another, the same pure loyalty to our sacred friendship”—she died a year or two later, while he married another girl–reminded me of my friend his son with his various lady-loves. But of course the book is rich in pungent foot-notes in the Voltarian or Gibbons-like tone that Bertie delights in: yet I feel how inhuman these high-principled self-righteous people are, and how troubled was their life in spite of their advantages—the greatest of which they didn’t appreciate. I have finished—that is, I have got to the end—of Sitwell’s book, after being cloyed with too much landscape and too much absurdity in the way of living described. This aristocracy deserved to disappear more than did the French, which didn’t go in so much for nominal virtue and superior judgement. Sitwell is an extreme example of the rich liberal who despises everything in his world except himself and the scent of flowers. But as you say they often write very well.

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