Author: David Spiech Page 251 of 283

To Lawrence Smith Butler
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall, London, S.W.l
Venice, Italy. October 9, 1926

Your business address and the neat appearance of your type-written letter, involving an animate as well as an inanimate typewriter, open vistas of you in a new atmosphere. Are you working really hard and building Babylonian skyscrapers? I hope this will not prevent you from coming to see me—you will need a rest—and please don’t bring either the animate or the inanimate typewriter with you.

No, I have not seen “The Story of Philosophy” and have forgotten if they ever asked me for a photo. I now have been reproduced especially for reproduction by Swain & Co, New Bond Street, London, W. to which your friends the publishers can send for a portrait of me in my 60th year; it is not good, too much touched up, but will serve for the public. My real portrait is the drawing by Andreas Andersen.

P.S. Like a lady, I forgot the object of this letter until it was finished. Of course I shall be glad to read your journal of the trip round the world, but why should I, who am not a circumnavigator, write a preface for it? What should I say in it? However, if on seeing it I should be inspired, the thing might be done. This summer I have written a whole book—a little one—on the spur of the moment, thinking it would be merely a review of Dean Inge on “The Platonic tradition in English religious thought,” but it grew into an independent treatise of my own on how to become a saint without letting anybody know it. It is to be called “Platonism and the Spiritual life” and is very Indian. You may not like it all, because it is not specifically Christian, but I will send you a marked copy, where the orthodox pages shall have a little red cross at the top.

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

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Danieli
Venice, Italy. October 8, 1926

Yesterday I went sight seeing, on foot, to the Findecca and the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, crossing by the ferry, and I was surprised at the small size of the Tintorettos which I remembered as vast epical designs.

The interior of Italian churches is cold, and leaves me cold: these festive buildings are better as distant features or backgrounds in the landscape. San Giorgio as I see it at this moment from my window through a slight haze is certainly a poetical object: near to, and inside, it seems only an architect’s model in an old curiosity shop.

Mrs. Toy has sent me some newspaper cuttings about the philosophical congress at Harvard: it seems even less interesting than I should have expected.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY

To William Elton
Rome. Oct. 7, 1947

Dear Mr. Elton,

It would not have occurred to me spontaneously that there was any affinity between Montaigne’s way of thinking and mine;¹ but when you say you feel that there is, perhaps I can see where it might lie. We are both Mediterranean-blooded Menschen, and we take a low familiar view of human nature. It does not shock us, but we do not respect it or ask much of it. Where we certainly part company is in the inner reaction to those observations. Montaigne has no ideals, except a sort of anticipation of Rousseau and moral democracy. I am not a democrat in my affections, but interested in perfect even if simple things. As to influence, I don’t think Montaigne ever had any on me. I have never studied or read him much; what I like best in his Essays is the Latin quotations. The sixteenth century had vulgar tastes, and they satisfied him, although he was fair-minded enough to know that there was something better, and kept a door open for others in religion and for himself in friendship. Perhaps I am really a little like him in that last respect. One can hardly judge oneself; one looks through one’s prejudices.
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Unknown

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel de Londres
Naples, Italy. October 6, 1931

Dear Cory,

I am sending you £5 more this month in order to make up for the depreciation of sterling—a strange sign of the times to a person of my generation, accustomed to think of British credit as the bed-rock of all finance. My nephew George Sturgis writes that the nominal value of our property is terribly diminished, although the income, so far, has suffered little. In all . . . events, I have such a large margin that I hardly think I shall suffer any inconvenience. Twenty per cent of my London bank account has suddenly evaporated, however: as yet this doesn’t trouble me because I still have enough for my uses, and the American cheques coming in in future will replenish the fund faster, in £, than when British money was at par.

You quoted, with approval, in your last letter a dictum of Whitehead’s about only “experience” being knowable. Does his “experience” include what is posited (not really “given”) in the mode of causal efficacy? This positing is no doubt experienced: we do it and trust it implicitly: but the objects posited are substances assumed to act upon us. Our actual experience is only the description we make of these substances and their accidents. How literally true this description may be is another question.

Yours affectly,
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 Victor Francis Calverton
C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Venice, Italy. October 5, 1934

Dear Mr. Calverton,

Your book has interested me so much that I have read it in its entirety. If you had begun with the last complete sentence on p. 306, you would have saved me some moments of bewilderment. All mind is individual; but an individual mind, in its interests and thoughts, may range all the way from perfect subjection to tribal tyranny to a morbid rebelliousness and self-worship. That point cleared up, I think your analyses and descriptions, while partisan, throw an instructive light upon things, so complicated and various, that we are always imperfectly informed about them, and in danger of rash generalizations.

What has most interested me, and given me most new light, is your chapter on Religion and American Culture. I don’t know the “frontier”, but I do know Boston; and I should say that the Puritan tradition there, preserved on its moral side among old-fashioned Unitarians, had become lay and merely respectable: be respectable, be upright, and some day you will be cultured and rich. But where a religious sentiment was mixed in with this morality, it was Evangelical: so that Puritanism and Evangelicalism actually merged in many instances.

With many thanks, Yours sincerely G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The New York Public Library, New York City