Author: David Spiech Page 5 of 283

To Charles Augustus Strong
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. London
Cambridge, England. April 4, 1915

Dear Strong

It is ages since I got your last letter, but as we both seem to be caught by the war, like flies in fly-paper, there seemed to be no probable change to report in the situation. I hope you and Margaret are enjoying the Spring in your new garden, and that the Germans won’t come to bombard Florence from your terrace. As for me, I have been doing nothing in particular except read, write, and walk, without much idea of getting anywhere by any of the three operations. The war is a daily, and now monotonous, obsession. Sometimes I feel angry with all concerned and think—“It serves you right; do go on shelling and torpedoing one another, until there is nobody left! Good riddance!” The military I see here— Cambridge is full of troops—rather stir my feelings of martial sympathy, and I wish them immense victories, without in the least believing that they will achieve them. But then I read some interview by that ponderous ass Lord Haldane, and I think a country that can have such a humbug for Lord Chancellor ought to be torpedoed as a whole, and sunk like Atlantis in the Channel. As you may imagine, my sentiments about the Germans are even more ferocious; but as I naturally hate the Germans and love the English, the case for Germany is what I try to represent to myself by day and by night.—I suppose you have seen my pro-German (if subtly insidious) article in the Whited Sepulchre.

. . . I have given up all thoughts of leaving England for the present, and rather expect to take some small flat in London for the summer, so as to satisfy my taste for crowds, for sitting in the park, and for eating in Italian restaurants. Let me know if you are really venturing to cross France—and the Channel!—in spite of the War-Lord-War-Zone. Must you go to America this Summer? After your prolonged stay there last year I should think you might skip it; why not go to Switzerland, to some German-speaking place, in lieu of the visit to Germany which you had planned before the Catastrophe?

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910–1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To Charles P. Davis
Hotel Bristol,
Rome. April 3, 1936

Dear Davis

I didn’t send you my novel because I felt that you wouldn’t like it. It’s not Catholic enough—really quite pagan and desolating in its background—and then the moral problem for poor Oliver is quite different from what I expect troubled you when you were young. Your difficulties were plain human difficulties and choices between clear-cut contrasted whereas Oliver is a born (and bred) transcendentalist, thinks always from the pure ego outwards, and never can get outwards very far. Then his feelings and passions are mixed up horribly, and helpless: I was going to say “impotent”, but that would be misleading, because he was far from impotent physically, only emotionally and morally inhibited, and without the courage of his inclinations. He was too tied up ever to find out clearly what these inclinations were. That was why he petered out. Meantime he behaved very well, was loyal and generous (as all my American friends have been) and had a great many noble thoughts: but even his thoughts didn’t cohere into anything specific.   . . . Perhaps there are other incidental things in the book that rub you the wrong way, or leave you cold. But I assure you that the texture of the book is good, and that you would like it if you weren’t expecting something else. It certainly is remarkable how people have taken to it in America. I suppose in part it is curiousity to see how “high-brow” experience expresses itself: but in part it must be that they, or some of them, see the fun in the book, and are really entertained. It isn’t a professional novel, with the events arranged to make a story. It is just a rambling biography, tossed along from one incomplete situation to another, as in real life. I meant it to be that. The world is not a tragedy or a comedy: it is a flux.

I am thinking of going to Paris in the summer . . . unless there is a war. But I think not. The talkers will continue to talk and the doers to do, and we outsiders will be allowed to look on and amuse ourselves.

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 Nancy Saunders Toy
Hotel Danieli,
Venice. April 2, 1940

William Lyon Phelps says that I don’t love life; and here I am enjoying life almost uninterruptedly, in spite of old age with its little ailments, in spite of solitude, and in spite of the alarms and inconveniences of the troubled times. I ought to love life and you ought to hate it, but la raison n’est pas ce qui règle l’amour whether of life or of anything else. And we have to suffer for loving. I say in my new book (I am now correcting the proofs) that the spirit prefers to suffer rather than not to care; and that happens to you for having too much spirit—I mean more than can nestle comfortably in our mediocre world.

. . . My whim in spending the winter in Venice couldn’t have been more ill-timed; the winter has been horrible. . . . The sun has hardly shown its face: and what is Venice without sun-light? However, I have stuck it out and on the whole have done pretty well: better than last summer. I have finished The Realm of Spirit, written a . . . good part of my contribution to Schilpp’s book (about my philosophy) and also scribbled away at my autobiography, describing the Sturgis family in the old days. But this entertainment is now interrupted by proof-reading and the gradual arrival of the critical articles that I must reply to in Schilpp’s symposium. I have also not had much to read: little but war books announced in the Times Literary Supplement; but in the shop windows here, although Venice is such a non-literary place I have spied and fished out Montaigne and Nietzsche’s Gaia Scienza (this in a French translation), both excellent stop-gaps. Montaigne is of course a capital rogue: prose still decorative and eloquent; but Nietzsche on the whole inspires more respect: more incisive, braver, more unhappy.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937–1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To William James
60 Brattle Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts. [Easter 1900]

I see that you have discovered me in the Poetry & Religion more than in my verses or the Sense of Beauty although I fancy there is no less of me in those other books. But there is more to come, and although I daresay you won’t like the Life of Reason much better than you like my attitude hitherto, I think you will find that, apart from temperament, I am nearer to you than you now believe. What you say, for instance, about the value of the good lying in its existence, and about the continuity of the world of values with that of fact, is not different from what I should admit. Ideals would be irrelevant if they were not natural entelechies, if they were not called for by something that exists and if consequently their realization would not be a present and actual good. And the point in insisting that all the eggs at breakfast are rotten is nothing at all except the consequent possibility and endeavour to find good eggs for the morrow. The only thing I object to and absolutely abhor is the assertion that all the eggs indiscriminately are good because the hen has laid them.

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 William Soutar
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123, Pall Mall. London. S.W.1.
Rome. March 31, 1931

Your title “Conflict”, and the sentence you quote from me as a motto, suggest love vs. dissatisfaction with love. Is that the end? Your powers of spiritual reaction and recuperation are evident: you have doubtless found, or will find, that which you seek in turning away from love with dissatisfaction: the light of “Dawn”. I myself have found it in a rather humdrum, intellectual, old man’s philosophy: your temperament will discover, I expect, something more vehement and sublime.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: National Library of Scotland.