Category: LETTERS Page 165 of 274

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

To Robert Traill Spence Lowell Jr.
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. January 21, 1951

In one sense you evidently belong, like them, to the modern, hard, native, and contemptuous of convention and genteel hypocrisy. But while also thoroughly American in your mise-en-scène and images, you do not fall back, as Berryman says that Crane did, on savage lusts and adventures, but on the contrary show a civilized sensibility and even learning, for instance, about the Catholic Church. The wonder is how you can do so while preserving the atmosphere of early American independence and sense of the virgin woods and the sea. Only your women, although not drawn like Crane’s from the slums, have a sort of despairing passion that is somewhat like his. Classic heroines can also have reversions into savagery, like Medea; and in reading Racine, I have sometimes had a vision of what Phaedra might have been if allowed to become furious, as some of Racine’s lines suggest, although the French actresses I have seen in that rôle, including Sarah Bernhard, always stood like statues reciting by rote. A pre-historic Phaedra and a truly Greek priestly Hippolytus would make a magnificent pair, if anyone could lend them the right words.

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 Andrew Joseph Onderdonk
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. January 20, 1945

Perhaps the years since we last saw each other, and the many since we saw each other often–34!–have made me more inhuman than ever; but public and private tragedies move me now much less than they did. I think of all the empires reduced to filthy little heaps of ruins; of all the battles and sieges in the histories, and all the horrible fates of potentates, tyrants, patriots, and saints; and what now happens to us seems almost a matter of course. But the advance of the U.S. to the full glare of the footlights, and the corresponding moral and intellectual effects to be expected in the American character, interest me very much. I almost wish I were young and could live to see this development. But no: I am glad I am old, very old; and I hope to leave the scene with gentle emotions and good will towards everybody.

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 Sylvia Hortense Bliss
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.. 123, Pall Mall, London
Rome. January 19. 1935

My dear Miss Bliss,
I should have thanked you sooner for “Sea Level” if I hadn’t followed your injunction to read it by bits; after which I have reread it more or less as a whole, in search of your philosophy. You must have felt that I should sympathize with this, else you wouldn’t have thought of sending me the book. Your perfect freedom from religious or mock-religious presumptions and also from hostility to religion—your clear view of truth, and your sound naturalism do appeal to me very much. I have always felt, what you express in regard to trees especially, that our relation to the rest of nature is fraternal, and that the possession of consciousness or (if we possess it) of reason doesn’t justify us in regarding plants, animals, or stars as unreal, or as made for our express benefit. And the sea, though you speak little of it, has always been a great object lesson to me, a monitor of the fundamental flux, of the loom of nature not being on the human scale. So far, if I don’t misrepresent you, we agree. But I am ill conditioned to appreciate your knowledge and love of flowers and of the countryside generally; and I have been so immersed all my life in religious speculation, in literature, in history, and in travel; I have lived so exclusively in towns and universities, and amid political revolutions and wars, that your simple idyllic world, and your intense individualism, leave me rather with a sense of emptiness. And haven’t you that sensation yourself? I don’t know what trials you may have had to endure or what misfortunes; your individualism is wholly philosophical, it touches the Ego in its transcendental capacity, and you tell us nothing of your own person; but your tone in speaking of death, of cities, and of the mediation of other minds between you and nature, seems to me overcharged with distaste and melancholy. Aren’t men also a part of nature? And if we could really penetrate into the life of matter, shouldn’t we find it everywhere essentially as wasteful, groping, and self-tormented as is the life of mankind? And on this fundamental irrationality, human society builds so many charming things—music, for one, which you appreciate—but also material and moral splendours of every description. The refraction of truth in human philosophies, for instance, is no mere scandal: it composes a work of human art, and partakes of the force both of truth and of imagination. It seems to me a pity, therefore, to leave it out of one’s field of interest.

Let me add that I appreciate the level dignity of your style and diction. You are doubtless aware that you often lapse into blank verse, and that, if you chose, you could print your book in that form with very little alteration. You have preferred a more modern arrangement, doubtless for good reasons; but you will deceive nobody into mistaking you for a real modern, like Mr. Ezra Pound, for instance, whose Quia Pauper Amavi I had been reading immediately before receiving your book. But though your restrained voice may not attract attention so scandalously, I am sure that you will give more pleasure to those who do hear you, and will be more gratefully remembered.
Yours sincerely
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Marini
Rome. January 18, 1922

You change my thought slightly, yet profoundly, when you represent me as expecting that “philosophy” will soon become scientific. I said I hoped that a scientific philosophy might soon appear: I didn’t conceive that it would unite everybody for ever. In philosophy there is always a moral element, a view of life, which will make the scientific element subordinate.–I have been to hear the Meistersinger, and liked it very much–shed romantic German tears over it in my poltrona, thinking of 1886 in Dresden when I heard it first. That sort of thing gives me inspiration for the Realms, because it shows how breadth lifts up a work and make the details memorable.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY