Author: David Spiech Page 90 of 283

To Thomas Munro
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123, Pall Mall, London
Rome. December 13, 1928

There is [a] . . . quality in discussion now, not in your book only, which has fallen upon the world since the days of my youth. You must remember that we were not very much later than Ruskin, Pater, Swinburne, and Matthew Arnold: our atmosphere was that of poets and persons touched with religious enthusiasm or religious sadness. Beauty (which mustn’t be mentioned now) was then a living presence, or an aching absence, day and night: history was always singing in our ears: and not even psychology or the analysis of works of art could take away from art its human implications. It was the great memorial to us, the great revelation, of what the soul had lived on, and had lived with, in her better days. But now analysis and psychology seem to stand alone: there is no spiritual interest, no spiritual need. The mind, in this direction, has been desiccated: art has become an abstract object in itself, to be studied scientifically as a caput mortuum: and the living side of the subject, the tabulation of people’s feelings and comments, is no less dead. You are yourself enormously intelligent and appreciative, and so is Dr. Barnes, but like a conservator of the fine arts, as if everything had been made to be placed and studied in a museum. And in your theory of taste (do you mention taste?) you (like Dewey) seem to me to confuse the liberty and variability of human nature, which the naturalist must allow, with absence of integration in each man or age or society: for if you felt the need of integration, you would understand that fidelity to the good or the beautiful is like health, not a regimen to be imposed, by the same masters, upon men of different constitutions, but a perfection to be jealously guarded at home, and in one’s own arts: and you will never have any arts that are not pitiful until you have an integrated and exclusive life. However, I am far from denying you the possibility of happiness, and wish it for you and Mrs. Munro, with all my heart, even if it be happiness in a museum.

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

To Nancy Saunders Toy
Hotel Bristol
Rome. December 12, 1938

As to depositing the Cardoza book in the library—in the Inferno, I suppose, with my old copies of Royce, etc—of course I am flattered and amused. Do as you think. In time the librarian himself will remove superfluous deposits to the cellar or the top shelves, and meantime some candidate for an A.M. or Ph.D may do “research” work by getting down the volume and copying a pencil note of your humble servant’s! How small and accidental the learned world seems when one catches it, like this, in its witches’ kitchen!

I am reading a ponderous Anthology of American Literature. . . . It is called an Oxford Anthology, but it has nothing Oxonian about it, only it is published by the Oxford University Press in New York. It is modern, and therefore, to me, instructive, and it may actually lead me to reconcile myself with some authors that I could never stomach, Melville for instance. The recent poets at the end, however, still baffle me, and I don’t know whether to blame my old age and prejudice, or to suspect that after all there is a lot of mystification and bluff about these geniuses without a back-ground, a principle, or an audience. The book has short critical & biographical notices at the end, too favourable usually, in my opinion, except in the case of Longfellow, treated too much as if being old-fashioned were not a merely fashionable imputation. I appear, and am well treated. The anonymous critic says I perfectly represent the genteel tradition in my own person and writings. Is he right? I think Lewis Mumford came nearer the truth when he spoke of the “Pillage of Europe”, except that in my case it was more the driftwood of Europe, I didn’t go about buying museum pieces, but expressed, as soon as I became at all my own master, my native affinities to European things. Pity, when some right judgment is passed, that it shouldn’t be accepted, but that fresh critics should feel obliged to think up something different and wrong.

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 Charles P. Davis
Hotel Bristol
Rome. December 11, 1937

My approaching birthday (74th.) finds me still at it, but my present book will be the last of my “System,” and anything more, if it should come, would be a work of supererogation. I find old age far more agreeable in itself than youth or manhood; and I make it as little disagreeable as possible to others, by not intruding. They also do not intrude so tutti contenti.
A happy New Year from G.S.

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 Horace Meyer Kallen
Colonial Club
Cambridge, Massachusetts. December 10, 1908

Perhaps when you get this you will already have left Oxford, unless you are staying there during the holiday’s to work on your thesis. The excitements of term-time will probaby have left you little freedom of mind to plod contentedly at an appointed task—and yet those are our happiest days. Jours de travail, says Musset, seuls jours où j’ai vécu.—I am a little sorry, though not surprised, that your impressions of Oxford are so censorious. It is getting to seem as if no one liked Oxford except me—and I don’t. You talk as if you had expected to find free learning and philosophy there. You forget that it is a Christian place, founded by pious Queens and Bishops to save their own souls and those of other people. The quality of the salvation required has changed somewhat in five hundred years, but the tradition has not been broken, and the place is still scholastic on principle. They assume that they have long since possessed the Truth and the Way. Now, that may be an illusion; but what makes Oxford the best, if not the only, place in which an ideal of education can be acquired, is that, if we don’t possess the Truth and the Way, we need to possess them. Until we do, and become ourselves what Oxford thinks it is, we can have no peace, no balance, no tradition, and no culture. It is inevitable, I know, and it is right, to be impatient at a premature or too narrow harmony: but how much more horrible is the disease we suffer from in America where the very idea of harmony and discipline are lost, and every ideal is discredited a priori!

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati OH.

To George Sturgis
Hotel Bristol
Rome. December 9, 1924

The Society (or League) of Nations is now sitting here, and it is supposed to be an “Anno Santo” or sort of Jubilee Year in religious circles; but I observe no great change in Rome in consequence. I usually go to lunch at a small restaurant in a side street, where there are usually the same people every day. English, for the most part; and everything is very cosy and familiar, including Beppino, the proprietor’s son and chief waiter, who turns down my coat-collar and chooses a good pear for me out of pure affection; but yesterday we were startled by an invasion of American reporters who talked so loud that they set all the other tables shouting too in rivalry in French and German (the British remained inaudible) and the general hubbub became frightful, so that Beppino, noticing my distress, explained apologetically that this was all due to the League of Nations, which he called La Conferenza della Discordia.

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.