Author: David Spiech Page 67 of 283

To George Sturgis
Hotel Bristol
Rome. April 1, 1927

It happens that the Harvard Lampoon has been sending me specimen numbers in the hope that I may subscribe. I want to do so for the sake of Auld Lang Syne and in order to show goodwill to the younger generation, but I find that I can’t understand a word of it, and the pictures are not modern enough for my taste. . . . It occurs to me that you might subscribe in my name (and at my expense) but have the copies sent to you for the boys. They will some day go to Harvard, I suppose, and they might as well begin early to understand the secrets of the place.

There is no change here. Randolph Chetwynd staid with me for the whole month of January, my friend Lawrence Butler was here for a few days, and lately Strong has made a long visit to Rome, and I have lunched and driven with him daily about Rome and the Campagna. In May I expect an unknown disciple named Cory, who is coming on a pilgrimage on purpose to make my acquaintance—fancy that! Apart from these distractions, I have been doing nothing but my usual reading and writing and strolling in the Pincio—and have been twice to the Zoo, remembering our visit there when you and Rosamond were here.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
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, Edinburgh.

To Charles Scribner’s Sons
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123 Pall Mall
London
Athens. March 30, 1905

It is arranged that I shall be in Paris next winter, to give the Hyde lectures which Mr Wendell has inaugurated this season, and which you have doubtless heard of. Paris, however, is a good deal nearer than Egypt, and the circumstances may have this advantage for the sale of my book, that my name will probably be in the American papers more than it would have been for more glorious but less notorious achievements.

Your notice of “The Life of Reason” in the “Book Buyer” seems to me splendid—most flattering, naturally, but at the same time, even if it be not becoming in me to say so, essentially just. At least the critic has quite understood my intentions.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.

To Horace Meyer Kallen
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. London
Seville. March 29, 1914

I came to this attractive town of Seville in January, after a delightful term spent at Cambridge—where I found that Russell has relapsed into a most British state of intellect—nominalism, atomism, practically empirical idealism, with minima sensibilia for metaphysical elements.

Seville is like a provincial Rome, with three personalities in one carcass, one Moorish, one Spanish, and one modern. The people are very attractive, and the one park is a paradise.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati OH.

To David Page
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. March 28, 1946

Vice is common, but not a spontaneous expression of nature: rather a deviation caused by suppressing nature or overworking it.

For genuine naturalism, which has a tragic side, I should look to Homer rather than to Petronius; or on the social side, with town life, to Terence, whom I have been reading lately with great pleasure. His old men are so savoury, each with his private philosophy, and his young men so young, so helplessly in love, and so loyal. And the outlook is truly (not sentimentally) naturalistic: contented with limitations, bourgeois life, fixed principles, a fixed income, and parents who were just like their children and children who expect to be just like their parents, and respect them and themselves all the more on that account.

The “liberal” ill-will doesn’t matter: they have to be like that.

I am reading “Leninism” by Stalin, in an excellent Italian translation by the leader of the Communists here. Isn’t that a genuine form of naturalism? Of course the roots are not everything in nature: the flowers are just as natural: and for that reason levellers and anticlericals are not good naturalists. Don’t be the enemy of anything, nor the dupe of anything!

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.