Author: David Spiech Page 88 of 283

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. December 23, 1936

I have now finished your book, except the French article which I remember pretty well and won’t re-read for the present. The total impression left on me is that you are to be congratulated on having turned out a compact volume, so well expressed, and that evidently satisfies you by the finality of its doctrine, and the conviction that the world, sooner or later, will have to accept it.

The book, however, is not easy reading, or very appealing to the imagination. You ought not to be disappointed if it is not widely read at first. You may exercise your influence perhaps indirectly through a few students who will adopt or adapt your doctrines and diffuse them in more popular forms.

You know that I am not inclined to discuss these matters any more. It would be useless, for both of us, and merely irritating. I agree with you in the view that there is a biological level beneath the psychological, and that all the dirty work is done below stairs, as it should be in any well-ordered household. But I see only confusion in using psychological terms for biological processes: except indeed when we do so, like Freud, with avowed figurative and mythological licence, because the biological detail is little understood, and it is only the large moral effects that interest us. My own thoughts, at present, are turned so decidedly in another direction that detailed psychological theory cannot hold my attention.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To [Sara or Grace] Norton
60 Brattle Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts. December 22, 1899

Dear Miss Norton,
I am very sorry that I have another engagement for Sunday evening. It would have been a privilege—I don’t say to help you entertain your strangers—but to be entertained so Christianly in their company.
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

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 Robert Burnside Potter
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Nice, France. December 21, 1922

It is very nice of you to take so much trouble about the yacht in my Novel, and your explanations after Pomeroy (whom I must thank also) come in places very near to the critical point, and will be useful. If the novel is ever done, the chapter on the “Black Swan” shall be sent to you for revision before I reveal my landsman’s ignorance to the ocean wide. But really, I have misled you about the importance of the yacht in the book: there is to be no cruise (except a trial trip for the engines in Massachusetts Bay) and no description of any voyage. The one important point is the “sailing master”, a character for which I have many adequate models in my English experience. The yacht and the owner (my hero’s father) are American: but the sailing-master is a young Englishman with a shady past, through whom my young hero, at the age of 16, when he first goes to the yacht (his mother ordinarily keeping him in leash) discovers all the family secrets and many unmentionable things about human nature and the ways of the world. The yacht is merely a background for that momentous episode, which itself has nothing to do with yachting: but I need the setting. The Black Swan is not a big yacht: not meant for social gatherings; rather a floating hermitage, in which to escape from society. I do not need to go into the question of the crew: but I want to have a picture of the facts in my own mind, and what you tell me of the Apache is far, far too elaborate. The story is conceived from the hero’s point of view, everything merely as it enters into his experience, and transforms his Puritanism into a Hamlet-like perplexity. He does not himself know anything about yachts: and his experience on that single occasion need not enlighten him more than I was enlightened by the day I spent on Mr. William Forbes’s yacht in Buzzard’s Bay, an occasion which is the more pertinent as Cam Forbes and his father are among the models for my personages. I once spent several weeks in a yacht, but it was a smaller one, a steam-yacht, and in inland waters.

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 Charles Augustus Strong
22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England. December 20, 1918

What a year this has been for wonderful events! I have often wished we might have been able to talk them over as they occurred, although for my own part I am hardly able to take them in, and all my attention seems to be absorbed by the passing moment, or the immediate future. The past will loom up, I suppose, when it begins to recede into the distance. Just now I am wondering what Mr. Wilson is up to: I rather think he is more to be trusted than the tendency of his political catchwords would suggest. He once told the Philosophical Association at Princeton (were you at that meeting too?) that in that college they had a radical purpose but not a radical manner in philosophizing: but it seems—and is to be hoped—that in politics he has not a radical purpose but only a radical manner. And I wonder what he has by way of manners! From what I hear—the papers can’t tell us what is most interesting—Mrs Wilson, not being able to make a fool of herself, because she is one already, is making a fool of her husband. My own feeling is, however, that he will yield to the experience and also to the fascinations of the European statesmen he is encountering, and that he won’t do any mischief.

Oxford seems to me more beautiful every day. I walked three times round Christ Church meadows this afternoon, under the most romantic of wintry skies and the softest of breezes, in a sort of trance; and I should certainly come to live and die in Oxford, if it weren’t for the Oxonians.

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 Christopher George Janus
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. December 19, 1946

Dear Janus,
Several inquisitorial reporters, disguised in the lamb’s clothing of soldiers, have inveigled me into “interviews” which I took at first for innocent conversation. No great harm came of it, as far as I know, except that my English was transformed into the dialect of day. You can’t catch me so easily in writing. If people really cared to know what I think about politics in America, they would read the last chapter of my old “Character & Opinion in the U.S.”. . . . But people only want “copy”, and I think I might make them wait until the book on “Dominations & Powers” which I am at work on sees the light. I may not live to finish it, but enough is already written to make my position clear. It is independent of all parties, nations, or epochs: and this is easier for me than for most philosophers because my native Spanish attachments are not close (although I have scrupulously retained my legal Spanish nationality) and speculatively I am a naturalist.
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Collection of the Santayana Edition, Indianapolis, IN.