Author: David Spiech Page 27 of 283

To Charles Augustus Strong
7 Park Place, St. James’s
London, S.W.1. September 27, 1932

Dear Strong,

Your letter about Cory came at an unlucky moment when he was laid up with a touch of the “flu”, and had received a nice letter from the Journal of Philosophy, saying that his paper on Whitehead was accepted and that Whittredge had read it and liked it very much. Thus, for the moment, two of the points of your dissatisfaction were a little blunted, in that he seems to be really delicate, and to have advanced one step towards establishing himself in the public eye as a philosopher.

I feel hardly competent to advise you, from your point of view, about the wisdom of continuing to support Cory. If you regard him merely as a philosophical investment, I am not at all confident that he will ultimately justify your confidence: he has perception and an occasional intense spurt of industry, but on the whole his temperament is Irish and poetical, he is self-indulgent and capricious, and resents any attitude towards himself that is not one of complete disinterested sympathy and trust. For my own part, I feel perfectly willing to take him at his own valuation, and run the risk of wasting my sympathy—not entirely in any case, since I find him a pleasant companion, and a link with the younger intellectual generation. It seems to me that, in your place, I should wish to continue to encourage him, in the hope that, as the years go by, he may prove more and more valuable to you as a disciple and friend. But I think, in that case, the experiment is more likely to be satisfactory if you leave him free to choose his residence and way of living, and above all the tone of his opinions, as his own temperament dictates. A check-rein is the worst possible harness for a colt of his mettle. Of course you should expect him to come and see you frequently, and to continue studying philosophy with a serious mind. But beyond that, I think pressure will be rather wasted on him. For instance, he might go on living in England, but remain shut up in his bedroom, reading Proust and Pater and T. S. Eliot: evidently he might as well have read them sitting in the sun in the Riviera. I myself have always wished that he should mingle with refined English people of the intellectual type—like old Bridges, for instance, or Bertie Russell But it has to be, if at all, in his own way: and you and I are too old, and too much out of the world, to expect him to choose his best friends in our small circle.

As to his returning to New York—that too was originally my idea of what might be best for him. But isn’t it rather too late now? If you drop him, and he has to do that, it might be the making of him: but I certainly should still feel responsible for his future after having tempted him to remain so long out of his country and almost idle. Yours ever G.S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To Sterling Power Lamprecht
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Venice, Italy. September 26, 1935

Dear Mr. Lamprecht

Thank you for your letter of Sept. 17 and for the copies of my Hague address. These will still be useful to distribute on occasion, although I believe Obiter Scripta are to appear shortly after all, instead of Edman’s Selections, postponed until next year. These things are disposed by a sort of higher providence or professional soviet, without my knowledge or consent: but usually, I believe, for good reasons which I acquiesce in gladly after the fact. The novel, too, has suddenly been transported to the third heaven of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and I understand that a shower of gold is to fall upon me later from that quarter. Very nice, but how surprising!

Yours sincerely G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Baker Memorial Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH.

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Danieli
Venice. September 25, 1934

Strong has been here for ten days, feeling rather dull. He now doesn’t go down to Florence for his dinner, but has every thing done at home by Dino and Dino’s sister. I showed him your photo in the postcard and he was greatly impressed. “How strong he looks!” “What nice friends he has!” I’m not so sure myself about the superior quality of your friends; but it is nice to have friends, especially young friends, with whom one can be natural. Poor S. has never had any; but his thoughts are now dwelling upon his earliest lady-loves, all from Rochester, N.Y. He was more confidential on this subject than he had ever been before in all our years of friendship and of living together. I could see that he wasn’t telling me anything; he was merely unbosoming himself to a vague other, to listening space.

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

To Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien
Colonial Club
Cambridge, MA. [September 1908–January 1912]

Dear Mr. O’Brien: We are besieged at this moment by soi-disant philosophers from all over the country, and I shall not be my own master until Saturday. If you could come to tea then or on Sunday, at about four o’clock, I should be delighted to see you.

Perhaps you would explain to me then some of the things you refer to in your letter, which I don’t quite understand. The tempests of the Olympians to not reach my catacomb.

Yours very truly,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Collection of Alan Denson, Aberdeenshire, Scotland

To Rosamond Thomas [Sturgis] Little
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. September 23, 1949

Dear Rosamond,

Two letters, a box of provisions, a magic bird’s eye view of the Harvard Yard in two parts, and numbers of Life and Time full of innumerable coloured pictures of happiness, abundance, youth, travel, and laughter have transported me to a sort of dream-world where everything is a merry-go-round. Is America really like that? No: I know it can’t be. But you are having a splendid holiday after a good many years of comparative seclusion, and there is really a sort of youthful gaiety, as if everybody were dressed in brand new clothes, and rushing from one “delightful” thing to another. Is this really so, or are people putting on a public smile as soon as they come in sight of anybody else, and do public prints reproduce the same appearance of joy as a professional duty?

I am perfectly happy myself in the absence of any gaiety or variety; but I feel that the world is very shaky indeed and morally lost and drifting among shams which it doesn’t believe in, but can’t give up. And I think most Europeans feel as if the end of the world were at hand. Even the late Mr. Whitehead, the mathematical philosopher who was for years professor at Harvard, but was an Englishman (I knew him in 1897 at Trinity College, Cambridge) one of whose books I happen to be reading is full of this feeling, although, writing in America, he veils it in a haze of cordiality and religious hope. He is an excellent philosopher in spots but there seems to me to be a contradiction between his physical science, which is straightforward, and his philosophical and moral reflections, which are all subjective: history, for instance, or the past, when he speaks of them, do not signify the “concrete” events but the feeling, memory, or imaginative view of them that people have taken or now take. The social world is a novel, like Balzac’s; and the scientific world seems to disappear. However, he does recognise that this century, so far, has been catastrophic: which would seem to me to show that the philosophy of the nineteenth century was fatal sophistry; yet that is just the substitution of a novel for a science as the truer picture of the world.

Excuse me for running into these depths, or shallows; if you don’t see what I mean, you might show this letter to your husband, and give him my best regards and congratulations. I was surprised at seeing him looking so young, sturdy, and solid in his picture. He will perhaps tell you that I am all wrong, which may turn out true, because of America

Yours affectionately G Santayana

P.S. Don’t bother about my needing anything. Supplies of everything reach me, and I don’t need very much now-a-days.

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.