Category: LETTERS Page 164 of 274

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 nowadays 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 Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol
Rome. January 25, 1937

In saying Taine, you show great perception. … I came upon his books on Art in Greece, Art in the Renaissance, and afterwards, what is really splendid, his Ancien Régime. If you join that with Balzac, for the Restauration, you get precisely the method and the ideal of description and understanding that loomed before me when I wrote The Life of Reason. To see the thoughts and institutions of men in their natural historical and psychological background. To realize that man is an imaginative animal, that his ideas are biological products, that his genius and happiness are momentary harmonies reached between his organism and the world. I still think that is right, and shouldn’t call the presupposition of the Life of Reason superficial: but the style is, often, verbose and academic, satisfied with stock concepts “Experience”, “ideals”, etc. and I move too much on the plane of reported opinions or imagined feelings, without the actual documents sufficiently in mind. Of course, I was more ignorant and my thoughts less thoroughly digested than they are now. Your preference for my later books shows that you like red meat. When you say Spinoza, however, besides being too flattering, the comparison is not biographically so true. My Sponizism is in the Life of Reason, less obviously, perhaps, yet more dominantly, than in Realms of Being. These, as you know, are not at all like Spinoza’s attributes. They are not aspects or forms of the same reality, absolutely parallel and coextensive. My realms are layers: more as in Plotinus; and my moral or “spiritual” philosophy is again less Spinozistic than in the humanistic period. Spinoza’s moral sentiments were plebeian, Dutch, and Jewish: perfectly happy in his corner, polishing his lenses, and saying, Great is Allah. No art, no high politics, no sympathy with greatness, no understanding of courage or of despair.

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 Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. January 24, 1947

You know that I am reading hard about politics, and yesterday I received a book commemorating the 60th anniversary of our Harvard Class, 1886, with a pamphlet by my school friend Dick Smith; now Robert Dixon Weston, in which he pitches hard into the blessed memory of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, especially about the New Deal. I am curious to know how strong the reaction against state interference is in America. In Europe everything yields to it, and it makes little difference whether it is Fascism, Labour, or Communism that seizes the reins. I think reform was needed, but that the remedy is proving worse than the disease. What are your feelings about it?

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

To John Hall Wheelock
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. January 23, 1934

Dear Mr. Wheelock,

The list of your publications in the Modern Student’s Library, in respect to philosophers, seems to include only the most distinguished dead; and it seems a too great honour to be already numbered among them. However, the honour won’t crush me, and I should be very glad to have such a book published. When it comes to entrusting the selection to Prof. Ralph Barton Perry, I confess it seems to me a strange choice. No doubt, you have your reasons: but couldn’t you find some one with a more poetic temperament and more feeling and subtlety? He will select all the safe, second-hand, moralistic things that I said in my earlier books: whereas it is from Soliloquies in England and Dialogues in Limbo that a temperamentally sympathetic critic would gather most of his passages. There is Prof. Irwin Edman of Columbia (to take a young man) or Prof. John Irskine, if an older one is willing to take up such a work. Wouldn’t they be better? There is also Mr. Daniel Cory, who has sometimes acted as my secretary; but that would be almost like asking me to make the selection myself, which I quite understand would not be desirable, because the taste of the public, and especially the interests of the young, have to be considered.
In fine, go on as you wish.

Yours sincerely, G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ

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 drawingroom; 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