Author: David Spiech Page 3 of 283

To George Sturgis
Hotel Bristol,
Rome. April 14, 1934

I wrote not long ago to the new President of Harvard College about the legacy which I am leaving them, expressing the hope that if the sum given wasn’t enough for the intended purpose—to keep some impecunious genius alive—they would allow it to accumulate. He has replied very civilly, saying he had been a pupil of mine, and much impressed when a Freshman by the view I unrolled before him of the history of philosophy: so that there is no knowing how far I may not be responsible if he goes wrong. But as to the legacy, he said he hoped I had mentioned in the deed of gift that they might let the income accumulate, because otherwise they might feel bound to spend it all. I don’t remember the exact wording of the deed. Would it be easy for you to look it up and send me a copy of that passage? I don’t want to make any fuss: and if they don’t feel authorized, as things stand, to let the fund grow, I will suggest that they invite some other friend of Harvard to double it. After the present crisis passes, that ought to be easy. The trouble is that the income of $40,000 now wouldn’t keep even a poet from starving.

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 Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol,
Rome. April 13, 1938

Your review of “Truth” could not be improved as a manifestation of your talents, natural and acquired. The style and tone are mature and cultivated, without affectation, and your treatment of me and my book handsome and becoming. That you look at us from the outside is a timely variation from having seen us from the inside for ten years. My writings are tiresome. Their merits can become annoying and turn into defects. It is as well that now you can take a holiday; which doesn’t exclude the possibility of some day returning to them with freshness of apperception and judgment. Perhaps then you might not deprecate my purple passages, and might see (what is the historical fact) that they are not applied ornaments but natural growths and realizations of the thought previously moving in a limbo of verbal abstractions. And then too you might choose other words than “definitions” for my fundamental ideas, or than “neat” for the unity they compose. You know perfectly well that they are imaginative intuitions, and that they hang together, not by external adjustment, but because they are defined by analysis of an imaginative total, a single unsophisticated vision of the world. This vision, in my case, is chiefly of nature and history, subjects you have not studied very much; and you probably will get on better for preferring to dwell on detached arguments or feelings, such as the public relies on. You might find your surest convictions in the region of introspection or of religious feeling. That would legitimately alienate you from my naturalism, which is like that of Lucretius or Spinoza. Naturalism easily leads to purple passages, because nature is the genuine root of emotion. When emotion, on the contrary, is the root of a system, it naturally develops into arguments, proofs, and refutations, because, as in inspiration, then the question is what ought to be rather than what is.

Edman is here, and rather fatigues me with his proddings, where he fears that my feelings may not be quite American. We live in a fanatical age, an age of propaganda, when everybody wants the support of the whole herd in order to be quite at peace in his own conscience. I am reading the Upanishads, St. Augustine’s Confessions, and Spinoza’s Politics, to take the bad taste out of my mouth.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937–1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To John Hall Wheelock
Hotel Danieli,
Venice. April 12, 1940

I have had to suspend my reminiscences in order to prepare my reply to my critics in Prof. Schilpp’s volume. It is a terrible job; I believe they are to be 15 professors up in arms; but the six I have so far encountered have not been very combative, and I hope to escape alive.

Prof. Schilpp insists on having a new photograph of me, “as informal as possible”, and I shall have to have one taken here. If it is at all good, I will send you a copy. I wish you could think of something more spiritual and less psychical for the frontispiece of your Triton volume. There are too many portraits, and not very good ones, in that edition; but you might like a new photograph for general advertisement. I will try to look as much like Gandhi as I can, as to the forehead: but I am afraid the figure may rather resemble Chesterton.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937–1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.

Hotel du Parc
Cannes, France. April 11, 1906
April 11, 1906.

Dear Münsterberg,

I have come here to spend a part of my easter holiday with my friend Strong. My provincial lectures, of which I have given those at Nancy, and at Montpellier, has been very pleasant so far for myself, but as an audience who really understands English is not easy to find, I have been reduced rather to a phonetic machine, with the function of emitting interesting if unintelligible sounds. The audiences nevertheless have been large and religiously attentive, while the rectors and other professors have shown me every possible courtesy.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]–1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Boston Public Library, Boston MA.

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Rome. April 10, 1933

Logan Pearsall Smith has sent me some sugared hay of his own about “Reading Shakespeare”. It is pleasantly written, except where he feels impelled to speak in hushed superlatives about Shakespeare, as if he were speaking about God. The need of possessing the biggest poet in the world puffs him out; and there is over-interpretation in the wake of Coleridge and Lamb; but he mentions a naughty American professor Elmer Edgar Stoll who seems to have seen light by the Mississippi, and goes to the other extreme.

Part II (18 chapters) of the novel is now finished and typed, and I am busy revising the beginning of Part III in which your friend Mario makes his appearance, aged 16. I am beginning to feel encouraged about finishing this endless task. It is not as clever and amusing as I meant to make it, but it turns out deeper and more consistent than I had suspected. There is a hidden tragic structure in it which was hardly foreseen but belongs to the essence of the subject, the epoch, and the dissolution of Protestantism.

G. S.

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.