Author: David Spiech Page 29 of 283

To Benjamin de Casseres
Hotel Bristol,
Rome. Sept. 17, 1938

Dear Mr. De Casseres

My “friends”, who said I was no poet—and I agreed with them—were exquisites of the 1890’s. Perhaps you are too young to remember that “aesthetic” age. I am not ashamed of my compositions in verse—not all published—but I feel that they are not English poetry. They are Latin eloquence. The recipe for the dish is, first, to have a clear thought expressible in prose, which carries with it, in your mind, a definite emotion, and 2^nd to heighten or leaven it with meter, alliteration, and allusions to kindred matters, so that an educated man (like the author) can vibrate largely and sympathetically to the whole thing. When well done, this is a splendid production, like a mature beautiful woman sumptuously dressed for a ball. Now, personally, that is the kind of woman I would rather look at and talk with. She is imposing, she is rational, she says true and wise things, she has the fragrance of good society, and no nonsense, about her. And accordingly, for my own satisfaction, I like to say over to myself at night, when not sleepy, long fragments of Horace, Racine, and Leopardi, that delight me as the ideal great lady would—I know love is something else, less satisfying in the end, but sweeter in the beginning.

I am very well, in spite of being near the end of my 75^th year, and hope soon to finish the last volume of my system of philosophy. I have other things half done, to entertain me, if I should still live on, but they are not parts of the programme, so that I shall feel at liberty to indulge my mood or my laziness. The world at this moment is so interesting, that there is some difficulty in getting well out of it mentally, so as to describe it from outside, which is what my kind of philosophy aspires to do.

Thank you for your generous letter. If I didn’t know from your little books—for which also many thanks—that you are an enthusiast by nature, I should be tempted to write verses again. But I have sworn off. I did so after the 1890’s. Yeats was one of the “friends”—I have seen him once only—that liked my “Interpretations of Poetry & Religion” but said the trouble with me was that I thought I was a poet.

Yours sincerely

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.

To Robert Shaw Barlow
Glion-sur-Montreux, Switzerland. September 16, 1936

As to my letter, my memory for recent minor events is wretched, and I hardly remember what I said in it; but if you think it would interest the public, I am willing to have it published; we get at last to a point where we see how little it matters what we have said or done. Only, as this letter was private, and meant only for you, I may have used some terms that might offend Faulkner. I should be sorry for that, because besides being discourteous, it would misrepresent my feeling which on the whole is one of sympathy with him and his experiments in style. So expunge, please, any phrase that may seem too strong.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Horace Meyer Kallen
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall, London, S.W.1.
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. September 15, 1926

I am delighted at this prospect of seeing you, and of hearing the many things which you will be able to tell me about unknown America. Of course, I live surrounded by Americans who have all more or less recent tidings to give of the Happy Land; but your point of view is more speculative and you will better understand my questions.

I have fallen out of the habit of going to England. The climate, material and moral, no longer suits my aged temperament. I am not much even in Paris, although I expect to be there late next summer, on returning from Spain—possibly for a few days in June also, on my way to Avila, where I have my only blood-relations and a true refuge from the world of snobs. I mean, intellectual snobs, because naturally the others don’t fall in my way. In Avila nobody has heard of anything, and it is a great relief.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati OH.

To Mary Whitall Smith Berenson
22 Beaumont St. Oxford
Oxford, England. Saturday, [September or October 1918]

Last night a mouse got into my bed, in which I have an ascetic preference for remaining alone, and it crossed my mind that perhaps the time was coming for a change of quarters: but I am somehow so anchored here, that it will take at least a second attack on the part of this rodent to part my cables.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Villa I Tatti, Settignano, Italy.

To Llewelyn Powys
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Glion-sur-Montreux, Switzerland. September 13, 1936

You have written the history of the cosmos in 120 pages, and naturally there has not been room to put in everything. As you know, I am in hearty agreement with your naturalism and with your affection for Epicurus. You are tender to “country-matters”, in every sense of these words; that is so much to the good; but perhaps it throws the intellectual and political sides of the life of reason too much into the shade. What you seem to leave out is expressed in one phrase by that free lance, Mr. De Casseres, in a booklet which, since it is dedicated to you, I suppose you must have seen. He says: (p. 49) “Repulsion, hatred, opposition—Room for me, or thou diest”—are the conditions of individuality! And I think that in history the power of words and doctrines is nothing to the power of circumstances and of biological impulses. For instance, in all ages some people have seen the fabulous character of religion: Giordano Bruno,

Machiavelli, Erasmus, and Bacon, not to speak of Montaigne and Rabelais, saw it, whereas Luther and Calvin were stone-blind: but society was not ready for light, and wanted to satisfy its national and economic ambitions under the cloak of superstition, suitably modified. At least, that is my diagnosis.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT.