Category: LETTERS Page 14 of 274

To Susan Sturgis de Sastre
La Peninsular.
Seville. January 28, 1914.

Dear Susie

By this time I feel quite settled and happy here. My cough has disappeared with the cold and rainy weather, and I have come to find the hotel quite tolerable. The food is good enough if one makes a judicious selection of dishes, and I rather like monotony in food, e.g. I have an omelette and fried fish and a bit of guisado or rice and two or three oranges for lunch every day, and no wine It seems to agree with me; and if I went to a better hotel I fear I should find many worse things, tourists, for instance. This is a small place, with some old German women and business men living permanently and a very moderate tide of Spanish people coming and going. Not a single English or American person yet! Then my room is quite delightful, with so much sun that I already have to close the blinds not to be dazzled. I am in the principal, looking out on the main square, and almost in it, as I hear and see everything that is going on. I get up and have my chocolate at 9, and dress at 12. After lunch I go to a café, always the same one, and the same table, if possible, where the waiters are now my friends and bring me the illustrated papers, and then, with a note-book in my pocket, in case of inspiration, I start on my walk, through the Delicias into the country. On the way I watch the steamers loading and unloading, and if it is warm I sit in the gardens for a while. Tea I take on my return to the city, this at quite a different and more fashionable coffeehouse, where there are ladies and foreigners. Then I usually come to my room again, and read or write until dinner, which I have about 7:30. There is a good electric light over my table, by which I am writing now. In the evening, I return to my first café, in the Sierpes, overhear and sometimes join in conversation with some of the habitués, and then go to the theatre. I have seen a lot of things, good, bad, and indifferent, with and without local colour; but half the amusement is in seeing the people. I affect the dias de moda, tonight it will be at the cine in the teatro de San Fernando, the largest and best in Seville. In this way I see the beauty and fashion of the place, better than in their carriages and autos in the Delicias. Seville is a true and homogeneous capital city, like ancient towns, with its aristocracy just as native as its lower classes. I find it very simpático. Tomorrow we shall have the novelty of the arrival of the court. I suppose they will drive by my window in the morning, there is hardly another possible route, and I shall have other opportunities of seeing them during their sojourn, which I understand is to be for less than a fortnight. As you see, I dawdle and amuse myself a good deal, but at the same time I manage to work every day for two or three hours; and this is enough to keep my mind engaged and give me the resource of a settled occupation in the background, to which I can always return.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Alderman Library, University of Virginia at Charlottesville.

To Sidney Hook
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1.
Rome. January 27, 1930

Dear Mr Hook

It is very kind of you to send me these three articles of yours, and I have been reading them with much interest and (I hope) some profit. As I said in a post-card which I sent you some time since, I should feel a very general agreement with you, if you put things differently! For instance, on p. 124 of the Marx-Lenin article, you seem to contrast “human needs” with material forces. But what efficacy of any sort could a “need,” more than a thought or a prayer, have in the world, if it were not a material impulse in an animal body? So the “ideas” whose power you exalt on p. 142, might find some difficulty in making themselves felt if nobody had them.

Yours sincerely

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

To Robert Traill Spence Lowell Jr.
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. January 26, 1949.

If when already a man of experience and an accomplished poet you come to Europe for the first time and land in England, your sense for that country will be that it is odd, small, somewhat annoying in being different from the United States; and it will take time, which perhaps you will not care to spend there, for you to feel its charm If on the contrary you sail into the Strait of Gibraltar (and your steamer will probably touch there, so that you could “take in” the Rock, the port, and the Spanish coast, as well as the spurs of the Atlas on the African shore) you would receive an impression of grandeur with details in the foreground of an original simple ancient truly human civilization. This would be increased, if you stopped at Gibraltar, in order to go from there to Tangiers and perhaps inland into Morocco. I don’t know how profoundly things may have changed since I was at Tangiers in 1893; but then Tangiers was barbaric beyond words, the Moors thoroughly Moorish, camels, donkeys, and sheep resting on the bare ground of the vast market amid pools of urine, and on a rock that emerged in one corner, a minstrel, looking like Homer, reciting at intervals to a sparse audience, all sitting on the ground. He was repeating, I was told, old tales of chivalry, like The Romance of the Cid. I won’t say more: but everything was as remote non-Christian, savage, and yet tightly established and dignified as the Old Testament. If instead of going to Morocco you made a short trip into Spain, the scene say in Ronda, Cadiz, and Seville, would be less antique but just as incomparable with anything in America as Africa itself. You might not like what you saw, but you would not think it, like England, an irrational variant of things at home, and annoying. Even if you came straight to Genoa or Naples your first impression would be of the Mediterranean, blue and tideless, with streets and houses down to the water’s edge, and the manners and colours of a beautiful world. As you went on to Rome, Florence, Milan and Venice your comfort would increase with your appreciation of the glories of art and nature, and nowa-days you would hardly feel that you were socially among barbarians. At certain moments, in certain places, you would feel the opposite. If then from Italy made your way to Switzerland, Paris, and perhaps Flanders, you might be fascinated by the order and justness of things, and their pleasing quality, like well-cooked food and refinements of art and manners. If from this then you finally reached England, you would cry at Dover: Almost like home! England then would have to make no apologies for not being American enough, and might seem, especially if you went into the country, the most perfectly home-like of places, more than anything since ancient Greece on the human scale clement, quiet, and friendly. By all means come if you can by the Pillars of Hercules, let Europe sink into you in chronological order, without comparisons with America, as it grew and as it was gradually overpowered by modernity.

I don’t understand what Eliot’s selection of your poems is for, if he doesn’t tell us why he has made it and is not thereby going to introduce you to the British as well as to the genteel American public: which I supposed involved a vast sale. I am sorry if I was wrong. I have perhaps not studied Eliot’s poetry or criticism as thoroughly as they deserve. I have not even seen his “Family Quarrel” which I only learned the other day, by chance, was a pendant to Oedipus. I agree with you in admiring his sensibility. He has caught that from the French critics who almost by heredity seem to voir juste. But I think he is timid, mincing, too content with non-radical views. All views should be radical, but not absolute; an opposite radical insight should redress the balance. But he is refined and safe in his indecision. Eliot was once in one of my classes, and perhaps it was I that gave him his first start in Dante; but he has gone far beyond me in studying him and using him. It is his approach to Catholicism, which I didn’t need. Perhaps because his Catholicism was so blameless and purified, he decided to sing on that perch. You and I know better, don’t we? the entrails of that angel.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino CA.

To Charles Scribner’s Sons
Messrs Charles Scribner’s Sons
New York
Kasr-el-Doubarah
Cairo. January 25, 1905

Gentlemen:

Your letter of the 6th has just reached me here. I am rather sorry that the publication of the “Life of Reason” has been put off so long, although I quite understand that the trouble came from my being so far away. As to the independent title of each volume, that is not of any consequence from my point of view. Apart from the common heading “The Life of Reason” which I understand you have retained, the volumes will be kept together well enough by their individual titles, which are obviously meant to go together—“Reason in Common Sense”, “in Society” etc. Merely leaving out the number of the volume or of the book will make no difference in the continuity of the work, especially as in the three later books I am still able to put in a phrase or two pointing to the next one in order. This reference forward happens to exist already in the first two books. That each book may be read apart from the others, as you say, was part of my original plan and I am glad you are taking steps to bring this result about.

Yours very truly

G Santayana

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 Daniel MacGhie Cory
Rome. January 24, 1935

Certainly you should see this new Hamlet. When I saw the portrait—there is no name to it—I said to myself: “This is Hamlet himself. Where did they get the picture?” Then after a moment I wondered if it could be you: the face is very like yours: only the hair looked too natural for a wig. Then I read reasonably and learned the facts. I am quite ready to believe that he is better than Forbes Robertson, who was simply inoffensive, not an actor of any native power. He is also likely to be better than Irving, who was fundamentally absurd, although with a certain suggestion of poetry à la Merideth: affected, pre-Raphaelite and Bohemian. John Gielgud seems to be natural, young, pensive, and deep: but there is one thing he probably is not, namely, princely. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is princely: in those days it was a quality people had before their eyes, and understood inwardly; but now we all live intellectually in Bloomsbury.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.