Author: David Spiech Page 62 of 283

To Monica Waterhouse Bridges
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123, Pall Mall, S.W.
Rome. April 26, 1930

Dear Mrs Bridges,

Let me add my word of sympathy to the many that must be coming to you from every quarter. This inevitable separation can hardly help leaving all the greater void in your life, in that happily it has been put off for so many years. But you have many satisfactions to balance against this sadness, and not the least, which is a satisfaction to all of us also, is that Mr Bridges should have crowned his last years with such a magnificent performance as his Testament of Beauty. I don’t know what judgement posterity may pass—or may drift into—in regard to this poem, and to the rest of your husband’s work, but in any case it is a noble portrait of his mind, so sensitive, brave, open, and healthy; and it must remain a monument to the sentiment of cultivated English people in his time, and in this modern predicament of the human spirit. You doubtless saw a long letter which I wrote to him about it, dwelling (at his request) on the doctrinal side of it, in so far as I could make it out; but that letter didn’t do justice to what I think is the chief merit of the work—its deep sense of citizenship in nature, and its courage and good humour at a moment when the future seems so dubious for England and for the world.

You know better than anyone—for I suspect you had a hand in it—that I owe Mr Bridges a particular debt for his generous recognition of my early writings, when they were quite unknown in England and not much respected in America. His kindness and friendship went even further, and I think he would have liked to domesticate me in England altogether. I too would have liked nothing better when I was a young man; but at the time when the thing might have been possible—during the war and after— it was too late. Neither my health nor my spirits were then fit for beginning life afresh, as it were, in a new circle. The best I could do then was to retire into a mild solitude, and complete as far as possible the writing that I had planned. It is now more than half done.

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
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. April 25, 1947

Dear Cory—

The German book by Alfred Weber on saying goodbye to history as hitherto written is the best thing I have seen about the present state of the world. I have suspended all other work for a few days in order to read it, devour it rather. Unfortunately, towards the end, as happens with things written in haste, it peters out into a debased Platonism—debased because it keeps the mythological taint of Platonism while discarding its moral definiteness and inspiration. But the historical part, and the honest sentiment in the whole are superior to anything I have seen in English or Italian or French.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941–1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Ward Thoron
Oxford, England. April 24, 1887

At last, dear Ward, I take a rhyming quill:
From its cleft point there springs an inky rill
Whose twisted stream, with intersecting flow,
Shall trace the ways my feet & fancies go.
They do not go together, for my feet
Wear the gray flagstones of an Oxford street
And wake the ivy-muffled echoes thrown
From great walls’ crumbling honeycomb of stone,
Or press the rich moist fields that sweep between
Long hedgerows budding into joyous green.
But what can Oxford’s halls or hedgerows be,
Or outraged lingering sanctities, to me?
Not of this one more another springtime have I need
Nor of this cradle of a still-born creed,
But of bold spirit kindred to the powers
That reared these cloisters & that piled these towers.
With charm to captivate and strength to kill.
Of Some splendid wide vision and determined will
With charm to captivate and strength to kill.
The world is rich: wide: it is not flesh and bone
And sun and moon, and thunderbolt alone.
It is imagination swift and high Creating in a dream its earth & sky—
Why then gape idly at external laws
When we ourselves have faculty to cause?
Build rather on your nature, when you can,
And bid the human spirit rule the man,
Nay, not the man, but all the world as well,
Till man be god of heaven & of hell.
Come, mad ambition, come, divine conceit,
That bringest nature down at fancy’s feet,
Alone creative, capable alone
Of giving mind the sceptre, man the throne
Build us more pyramids & minsters still
On thine own regal cornerstone: I will!

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]–1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Alderman Library, University of Virginia at Charlottesville VA.

To Josiah Royce
Florence, Italy.  April 23, 1897

I was very glad this morning to get your letter and to hear what the arrangements are for next year. The change from Phil I to Phil II is a gain for me, and gives me a more interesting and less exhausting task. The change of hour, however, in my morning course is very inconvenient, as I am never very fit in the early morning, and next winter, when I expect not to be living in Cambridge, it will involve getting up at an absurd hour. I don’t see the justice of the argument that eleven o’clock is filled up. Who fills it up, and why shouldn’t I be one of these, when that is the hour I have lectured at for seven years? I am sorry you have allowed yourself to be brow-beaten by the official sophistry, but I suppose there is no help for it now.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Harvard Archives, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Nancy Saunders Toy
Hotel Danieli,
Venice. April 22, 1940

I hope you won’t be altogether displeased if I tell you what I think. You know perfectly well what sort of . . . mind and conscience Russell has: those of a rebel or reformer. He feels no loyalty to dominant things but enthusiasm for possible ideal contrary things. Now this seems to me legitimate in a pure philosopher. There is no reason why “spirit” (I am full of this now, re-reading the proofs of my new book on that subject) should be human; there is no reason, even when it is human, that it should be attached to one age, religion, or moral code rather than to another. Plato proposed community of wives and children: there was a theoretical excuse, if not reason, for that idea; and in the same way Bertie proposes his trial marriages in colleges, etc. It is an excursus into mere possibilities, made vital for him by his hatred and contempt for convention. Perhaps what he proposes might do very well, if it could be established. But nothing can be established in this world merely because it is ideally possible: it must flow from what precedes, it must be derivable from physical forces actually afoot. This is what idealists overlook; and it is only by a happy chance that sometimes they propose something feasible and capable of forming a living morality. Generally, by proposing only that which is underivable from the real state of things, they waste their enthusiasm, and merely irritate practical people and deceive and demoralize other idealists like themselves. And here the rightness of the conventional moralists comes in. It is a political, not a philosophical or ideal rightness. Society is established: its morality may be modified in some, not in any, directions; and good reforms must not disconnect the future from the past. Society therefore is right in defending its morality. This does not imply that Plato & Bertie, or even their books, ought to be publicly burned. Possibly, in a very well-settled civilization, idealists may be allowed to lecture, and be laughed at. Or they may be wept over: Bertie (and his brother) certainly have had dreadful lives: heroic in their way, but misguided and tragic; and it seems unnecessary to persecute them, when they have so conspicuously discredited the principles which they preach, by living up to them.

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.