Category: LETTERS Page 168 of 274

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

To Boylston Adams Beal
Hotel Bristol
Rome. January 7, 1934

Thank you for your letter of Dec. 7 and for the cutting from the Harvard Register. Please don’t trouble about looking up those other birthday tributes: they are too much like obituary notices. Unless my “novel” should ever be finished and published, which might make a real flame burst out one way or the other, I can imagined the kindly sunset glow in which, at least in public, I shall be allowed to sink into oblivion. But I still have a string or two to my bow, which not all my American friends are aware of; I don’t mean only the “novel”, but fresh philosophic criticism and exposition. It all depends on my powers of work not failing too fast.

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 Corliss Lamont
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. January 6, 1950

Without bothering you with technical arguments, let me suggest this natural status of immaterial forms and systems of relations in the case of music. Music accompanies savage life as well as that of some birds, being a spontaneous exercise of motions producing aerial but exciting sounds, with the art of making them, which is one of the useless but beloved effusions of vital energy in animals. And from the beginning this liberal accompaniment adds harmony and goodwill to dancing and war; and gradually it becomes in itself an object of attention, as in popular or love songs. In religion it also peeps out, although here it ordinarily remains a subservient element, inducing a mood and a means of unifying a crowd in feeling or action, rather than a separate art. Yet it is precisely as a separate art, not as an accompaniment to anything practical, that music is at its best, purest and most elaborate. And certainly the sensibility and gift of music is a human possession, although not descriptive of any other natural thing.
Apply this analogy to mathematics, logic, aesthetics, and religion, and you have the naturalistic status of ideal things in my philosophy.

“Humanism” has this moral defect in my opinion that it seems to make all mankind an authority and a compulsory object of affection for every individual. I see no reason for that. The limits of the society that we find congenial and desirable is determined by our own condition, not by the extent of it in the world. This is doubtless the point in which I depart most from your view and from modern feeling generally. Democracy is very well when it is natural, not forced. But the natural virtue of each age, place, and person is what a good democracy would secure—not uniformity.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Unknown

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Rome. January 5, 1939

Yesterday evening I had a visit from—Ezra Pound!

He is taller, younger, better-looking than I expected. Reminded me of several old friends (young, when I knew them) who were spasmodic rebels, but decent by tradition, emulators of Thoreau, full of scraps of culture but lost, lost, lost in the intellectual world. He talked rather little (my fault, and that of my deaf ear, that makes me not like listening when I am not sure what has been said), and he made no breaks, such as he indulges in in print. Was he afraid of me? How odd! Such a dare-devil as he poses as! I had just been reading his article, and the one about him, in the Criterion, so that I felt no chasm between us—“us” being my sensation of myself and my idea of him.

. . . .

His beard is like a painter’s and his head of hair (is it a wig?) like a musician’s. On the whole, we got on very well, but nothing was said except commonplaces.

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 Elizabeth Stephens Fish Potter
C/o Brown Shipley
123 Pall Mall
London. January 4, 1921

I have before me not only your good letter of Dec. 14, but a photograph of the hall at Antietam Farm, and both make me wish that I could transfer myself by some miraculous process into your midst, even if was to remain incognito while there. This soothing idea has been suggested to me before, by my friend Apthorp Fuller, who also possesses a “farm”, and I think in an even more savage and remote region than yours: but it seems to follow that I should have to be incognito at both places, and also presumably at my brother’s; my old friend Mrs Toy would have to be let into the secret; and I might as well be interviewed in New York harbor on board the tooting steamer, and have my portrait in the next Sunday’s papers, with appropriate headlines: Cynic Santayana Sings Home Sweet Home; etc. Besides would my life be safe? My English friends seem to think not, although what I hear from America is all most dulcet and affectionate.

Together with your letter I receive one from Cuningham Graham who says: “If you return again to the United States, you will find the new adaptation by Colt of the Browning pistol, with the hair-trigger stop, the safest and quickest thing to have about you. Do not venture into the Middle West: there may be a feeling that may translate itself awkwardly.”

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