Author: David Spiech Page 59 of 283

To Robert Seymour Bridges
Hotel Bristol,
Rome. May 10, 1928

My dear Bridges

How can you doubt that I shouldn’t read with the greatest eagerness the advanced sheets of your Poem, if you will send them? This, even if you didn’t heighten my curiosity and pleasant expectations by saying that I shall find in it a philosophy akin to my own. I see by what you say, and gather from various quarters, the “The Realm of Essence” has been more kindly received than I should have expected. The professors persist in thinking me an amateur, and the literary people are not really interested, because the subject eludes them; yet some impression seems to be produced—more than by my “Dialogues in Limbo”, which seems to me so much better written a book, with more colour, than “The Realm of Essence”. But there is a tide in these matters of criticism which sometimes is found rising and sometimes ebbing or at the low-water of indifference and fatigue. We mustn’t quarrel with the moods of our critics.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Bodleian Library, Oxford University, England.

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol
Rome. May 9, 1939

Spiritual union cannot be union with another spirit, but union between spirit in one instance, at one moment, and all things as felt from that point. These “all things” may of course include other spirits; but in conceiving them there is already a sense of separation, such as I feel at this moment, between you and me; and agreement even in everything would not remove that duality, because it would have to be an agreement by confluence, an agreed agreement, and might lapse at any time, or discover itself to be illusory, since two real persons were concerned. So that it seems to me that utter and perfect union has to be momentary and internal to the life of a single soul. It is then not properly union but unification. One becomes really one.

I am sending you Dewey (hope he won’t make you more unhappy, as he might if you believed what he says) and I will not send you Guignebert, though he is not a sentimentalist, like Middleton Murry, for instance, who tries to retain the emotions of Christianity without the dogmas. He is simply a historian; and I can make a cynical laughing philosophy out of his reports. I have always liked understanding views with which I did not agree—how else could one like the study of philosophy? But the emotions incident to that study are not those of the persons or beliefs described; far from it. They are dramatic, tragic, or comic emotions at seeing their fate.

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 Richard Colton Lyon
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. May 8, 1949

The trouble will be at the end, when all the tolerant and sympathetic appreciation of each religion will be in great danger of one of two disasters: either, a quick emotional proof that one of the religions is absolutely sound, if you don’t remember the others; or else a sweeping conclusion that the history of religion itself is the true religion to end religion. I leave it to you to suggest here, as if it were well known, that salvation lies in the fact that religion is poetry and poetry is truer, in a Pickwickian sense, than science: for in regard to matter it is not more symbolic or metaphorical, and in regard to moral allegiance it is superior to worldliness.

My old friend and secretary, Daniel Cory, of whom I believe I spoke to you, is now in Rome and has been cramming me on the subject of modern concentrated poetry, especially T. S. Eliot; and I have reread, or read for the first (5 or 6) times all his poems except the plays. I think I have made progress, and if my great but yet unmet friend, Robert Lowell, (like you before you came to Rome) makes me a visit in the autumn, as I hope, I shall be better able to get a C in my examination. Pray for me when the time comes. There is a special patron for people passing examinations, Saint Expeditus, a young martyr.

Don’t overwork: it’s like overeating.

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.

To George Sturgis
Hotel Bristol
Rome. May 7, 1928

The vagueness of the bequest to Harvard was intentional. It may be hard to find just the right man for the Fellowship even in the wide field of poetry, philosophy, theology, and the Harvard Lampoon: and when you remember that I hope to die a novelist, almost anyone not a chimney-sweep can hope for my legacy.

You are right about the reason for a Spanish child not having the same last name, although he has the same surname, as his father: the last is his mother’s family name. As to the middle name, as in the case of Manuela Ruiz de Santayana y Zabalgoitia, it is not necessary. Ruiz was originally our family name, Santayana being a place; but my father and his brothers got into the habit of using Santayana exclusively, for the sake of brevity. But the addition of the mother’s surname, now usually without the “y” prefixed, is legal, and necessary in a document. So you will find that your aunt’s will is signed “Susana Sturgis Borrás”. The Parkman is optional, and the husband’s name is not, in Spain, a wife’s name at all. She may be described as the wife, or politely, the lady, of so-and-so: but her name remains what it was originally. Calling your aunt, as she liked to be called, Susana Sturgis de Sastre, is not strictly correct; she was Doña Susana Sturgis y Borrás, señora de Sastre. The last words are a title or description, not a part of her name, as if you called me G. S, wedded to Metaphysics.

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

To Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell
22 Beaumont Street
Oxford, England. May 6th, [1916]

Dear Lady Ottoline,

How stupid of me to take for granted that you meant this week and not to notice the day of the month, which you mentioned. I am very sorry to have given you the trouble of writing again.

As to next week, so large and distinguished a party positively terrifies me. Let me drop in some day for a cup of tea simply with you. I should enjoy that so much more. It is flattering to think that you haven’t yet perceived it, or at least are giving me the benefit of the doubt, but the fact is I am a dreadful boor and unfit for general human society—especially in these days when people are so deeply divided in feeling—Please don’t think that I don’t appreciate your kindness in asking me, the fact is I feel it all the more in having to say no.

Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.