Category: LETTERS Page 167 of 274

To Manuel Komroff
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123 Pall Mall, London
Rome. January 12, 1928

Dear Mr Komroff,
It is very kind of you to send me your new book. It introduces me to a kind of world rather different from the one I live in. If vice in the Eighteenth century lost half its evil by losing all its grossness, in recovering now-a-days all its grossness it seems to have lost the other half: it has ceased to be evil at all, in the old moral sense, and has become simply an unpleasant fatality. I am not quite sure that I understand your philosophy; but I suppose you wouldn’t suggest that apart from the love of life or the Juggler’s Kiss, existence would be satisfactory. If your hero had stayed at home and had married the girl he had been “petting” so assiduously, would that have been better in the end?

But I daresay this is beside the point. Art is not moral philosophy, you will say: and yet it is as poignant reality, not as art, that your book, and most recent books, can arrest attention. They are a horrid picture of fate.
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY

To Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller
ANGLO-AMERICAN NILE STEAMER & HOTEL COMPANY
CHIEF OFFICE, SHARIA BOULAC, CAIRO,
(GRAND CONTINENTAL HOTEL BUILDINGS)
Luxor, Egypt. January 11, [1905]

Dear Fuller,
. . . .

I am at this moment going up the Nile with an impossible party of tourists, conscious of being no less grotesque myself than the rest of them. So many labour-saving-machines have left us no time for anything, else I should like to travel long in the East and yield for a time to its fascinations. People here seem to realise something of Faust’s dream, to be young in body and old in spirit. What an amusing place the world would be to such a creature. We sometimes speak of regretting lost illusions. What a silly idea! We may well regret lost powers, but the loss of illusions is an unmixed benefit. It leaves you free face to face with the facts and authorizes you to profit by every real opportunity. The trouble is that, the Life of Reason being so largely in abeyance, people do not ordinarily lose their illusions till they have lost their passions, and then the real world, when they see it for the first time as it is, seems to them stale, not because it is real but because they are played out.

I may perhaps go to Jerusalem and Damascus before returning to Europe. The donkey is losing its terrors for me and I now generally ride at the head of the party. Think what a party it must be! Yours

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

To Horace Meyer Kallen
Colonial Club
Cambridge, Massachusetts. January 10, 1908

London and Toynbee Hall will make you ultra-socialistic. As I am a socialist myself, I have no objection to that in theory; but in practice—let me warn you—I don’t like other socialists, and in the case of Molière’s Misanthrope whose opinions were blamed by himself, so soon as he heard them from other people. But that, while it may raise a laugh at his expense or at mine, is really a proof of honesty on our part: for in socialism, as in logic, the intent is all. And a man may be a socialist, like Plato, for the love of aristocracy and to spread a greater pedestal for the perfect man, or he may be a socialist out of pity and vicarious ambition for the common man. In the ideal, at least, we should begin by cleansing the inside of the cup.

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 Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol
Rome. January 9, 1933

Mrs. Van Meter Ames, wife of a young prof. of phil. in Cincinnati, has sent me an account of my conversations with them at lunch at the Castello dei Cesari and elsewhere: a sort of Boswell to this Johnson. It makes me out rather like a red-faced old Major in Bath spluttering his damn-mes and don’t-you-knows about things in general: but I have no objection, and have only corrected the English which good innocent Mrs. Ames imagines that I speak.

I have received, from an objectionable friend in Boston, an objectionable book by Bernard Shaw, called A Black Girl in Search of a God. There are amusing turns, but as a whole it is trash. Do you care to have it?

The novel is advancing slowly but solidly. I feel that I have solved the greatest difficulty in the earlier part, viz., the yacht episodes. . . . I feel greatly encouraged in my own mind, and have hopes of really finishing it. I have rewritten a few pages of the Prologue, making more marked the difference between my talk and Mario’s. This was one of Strong’s objections, which I thought well grounded. Fas est ab hoste doceri.

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

To Robert Seymour Bridges
Hotel Bristol
Rome. January 8, 1925

Through the more and more frankly confessed mythical character of exact science, I . . . have been recognizing of late that the church is a normal habitation for the mind, as impertinent free thought never is. But there remains the old misunderstanding, the forcing of literature into dogma, and the intolerable intolerance of other symbols, where symbols are all. Here in Rome, in the Pincio and the Villa Borghese, I often watch with amazement the troops of theological students of all nations, so vigorous and modern in their persons, and I ask myself whether these young men can truly understand and accept the antique religion which they profess—especially the Americans (very numerous) with their defiant vulgar airs and horrible aggressive twang. Could the monks of Iona and the Venerable Bede have been like this? Was it perhaps after some ages of chastening that the barbarians could really become Christian and could produce a Saint Francis?

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: The Bodleian Library, Oxford University, England