Author: David Spiech Page 98 of 283

To Nancy Saunders Toy
Hotel Danieli
Venice. January 24, 1940

My old friend Strong died yesterday at the “Blue Sisters'” nursing home in Florence. No member of his family and no friend was with him at the end, only his two servants, Aldo the chauffeur and Dino, the cameriere, besides doctors and nurses. He was well looked after, but only by professional persons: a very significant fate. He was strictly professional himself, although without professional duties. He regarded himself as a philosopher whose duty it was to philosophize and to discover truth along the lines laid down by his science. All else, his daughter, his country, his friends came in either as subordinate regrettable commitments, or as possible helps. I had come in for years as a possible help; then I became a possible field for propanganda, and finally a sad disappointment. The person with whom he got on best of late years was Cory, and it was Cory who was with him during the first part of his long last illness. At the time when war began to threaten, last Spring he fled from Fiesole to Switzerland, to Vevey on the Lake of Geneva. It was there that Cory joined him, and used to have luncheon with him every day, followed by a long philosophical discussion, for which Strong prepared the agenda, sometimes on paper. Then he fell ill, with persistent fever, which added to his partial paralysis, brought on bed-sores and other troubles of the sick-room and of extreme old age. He had to move to Valmont, above the Lake, a hospital where he had staid for long periods in former years. Then a change came over his sentiments; he reconciled himself, in his mind to Italy, decided to return to Fiesole, and (as he wrote to me) never to leave the country again. He found even the chicory we now have instead of coffee remarkably good. And in his joy at finding himself again in his own house he wrote in a few weeks a complete new exposition of his system of philosophy. But alas, he had a relapse, more bed-sores, more difficulties of every physical sort; until specialists had to be called, and an operation was declared urgent. I am not sure whether it took place or not: but in any case, he had to be removed to the nursing-home, where the end soon overtook him. Requiescat in pace….

The four destroyers and the two full-rigged training-ships, that you speak of as if they would be hideous reminders of war, now seen through a veil of snow-flakes look decidedly like painted ships upon a painted ocean. No scene could be more silent and peaceful. The war itself, seen from here, only through the newspapers (which here are of moderate size, without sensational features) looks unreal: most interesting and novel; a war that nobody wanted, and in which for the most part, nobody fights. It may be an effect of old age and of being in Italy instead of in England, but the atmosphere of daily anxiety and daily bereavement that we breathed in 1914-18 no longer surrounds us. It is rather like the plot of some intricate novel, where the issues and even the characters are not yet made out, and keep surprises in store for us. The appearance of Russia was one coup-de-théâtre, the appearance of Findland as a David slaying Goliath is another. Meantime, All Quiet in the West.

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 Martin Birnbaum
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. January 22, 1947

But there is a semi-philosophical point that kept coming into my head as I read what you say about Aubrey Beardsley and also about Behmer (whom I had never heard of!). You seem to be troubled about the impropriety actual and suggested of their compositions. Now I see that it would be shocking to exhibit an obscene drawing in Church or in a lady’s drawing-room; but I do not see anything painful in an obscene drawing because it is obscene; if it is seen at a suitable time and place, and is not a bad composition in itself. Now I think in Aubrey Beardsley there often is bad taste, like bad taste in the mouth, because his lascivious figures are ugly and socially corrupt. The obscene should be merry and hilarious, as it is in Petronius: it belongs to comedy, not to sour or revolutionary morals. It is the mixture of corrupt sneers and hypocrisy with vice that is unpleasant to see, unless it is itself the subject of satire, as for instance in old English caricatures. But in Beardsley the charm of the design and the elegance of the costumes and of the ballet character of all the movement seem to recommend the vice represented: and that is immoral. But licentiousness is natural in its place, and the fun of impropriety is also not vicious; and I don’t see why the books or pictures illustrating these things should be regrettable. The Arabian Nights, in Mardrus, seem to me purely delightful. Robert Bridges, who was a good friend of mine, used to deplore the sensuality in Shakespeare, and say he was the greatest of poets and dramatists, but not an artist. I think that some of the jokes in Shakespeare are out of place; for instance what Hamlet says to Ophelia in the play scene; but in a frank comedy, the same and much broader things would be excellent, as in Aristophanes: and the public would soon select itself that patronized such shows. But I am afraid I am a hopeless pagan. Aubrey Beardsley, converted to Catholicism, might beg to have his naughty drawings destroyed, and perhaps they were not all in themselves beautiful or comic: but I should not destroy anything aesthetically good. The beautiful is a part of the moral; and the truly moral is a part of the beautiful: only they must not be mixed wrong, any more than sweets and savouries.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. January 21, 1945

Dear Cory:

I am distressed to find, by your letter of Dec. 28, that you have received none of my letters. I have not written you many, but they covered all the essential points about the book and the royalties and also congratulated you on your marriage. I said, I remember, that long ago when I heard that your books were at Mrs. Batten’s, I foresaw that your future was there also. But will it eventually be in England or in New York? I see you are faithful to the shadow of Columbia. Is there any substance in that shadow?

As to George Sturgis, it is one of those numerous blows not to my heart but to my peace and sense of security which events have inflicted on me in these last years. I tell the Sisters that I was never happier than in their house, and this is true in the sense that I was never more at peace with myself and with the world, speculatively considered. But in action, dynamically, the world has inflicted some rebuffs on me that I hardly expected, making me trouble about money, trouble about politics, forbidding me my little comforts and indulgences: sitting in the sun, asking people to luncheon, getting interesting books, and living in a well-ordered country. Having George Sturgis to look after my money was a feature in this little garden of Epicurus; a hedge that cut off the vista over the dung-hills and the cabbages. All that is sadly fallen, and I hardly expect to live to see it restored: perhaps that sort of thing is not destined to return to earth for a thousand years. That is a bit sad, but good for me. It forces me to lift my eyes a little higher, to a more distant horizon. Incidently, it has made me thin, and very much older. You may have seen some of the photographs that these Army men have been taking. They have come to see me in great numbers, most of them very simple and kind, some real treasures, like Freidenberg, who got vol. II of Persons & Places to Scribner; and that is not the only favour he has done. He has made me presents of good things to eat, and of tea! And the religious book (very insidious!) that I have been writing also has raised my spirits. We must see heaven in the midst of earth, just above it, accompanying earth as beauty accompanies it. We must not try to get heaven pure, afterwards, or instead. Christ is essentially a spirit of the earth. He is a tragic hero. Basta.

Yours affly,
G Santayana

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 Ezra Loomis Pound
Hotel Danieli
Venice. January 20, 1940

Dear E. P.
This mustn’t go on for ever, but I have a word to say, in the direction of fathoming your potential philosophy.

When is a thing not static? When it jumps or when it makes you jump? Evidently the latter, in the case of Chinese ideograms, you being your thoughts. And these jumps are to particulars, not regressive, to general terms. Classifications are not poetry. I grant that, but think that classifications may be important practically; e.g. poisons; how much? What number? There is another kind of regression towards materials, causes, genealogies. Pudding may not suggest pie, but plums, cook, fire. These are generalities that classify not data but conditions for producing the data. When you ask for jumps to other particulars, you don’t mean (I suppose) any other particulars, although your tendency to jump is so irresistible that the bond between the particulars jumped to is not always apparent. It is a mental grab-bag. A latent classification or a latent genetic connection would seem to be required, if utter miscellaneousness is to be avoided.

As to the Jews, I too like the Greek element in Christendom better than the Jewish; yet the Jews, egotistically and fantastically, were after a kind of good, milk and honey and money. That gives them a hold on reality that can’t be denied. Reality is not miscellaneous sensations, but matter generating everything else under specific conditions. The Jews made a mistake in putting Jehovah instead of matter at the top: but now they have corrected that.
Yours, G.S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT.