Category: LETTERS Page 174 of 274

Letters in Limbo ~ December 10, 1908

On December 10, 2022

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

Perhaps when you get this you will already have left Oxford, unless you are staying there during the holiday’s to work on your thesis. The excitements of term-time will probaby have left you little freedom of mind to plod contentedly at an appointed task—and yet those are our happiest days. Jours de travail, [illegible ] says Musset, seuls jours où j’ai vécu. —I am a little sorry, though not surprised, that your impressions of Oxford are so censorious. It is getting to seem as if no one liked Oxford except me—and I don’t. You talk as if you had expected to find free learning and philosophy there. You forget that it is a Christian place, founded by pious Queens and Bishops to save their own souls and those of other people. The quality of the salvation required has changed somewhat in five hundred years, but the tradition has not been broken, and the place is still scholastic on principle. They assume that they have long since possessed the Truth and the Way. Now, that may be an illusion; but what makes Oxford the best, if not the only, place in which an ideal of education can be acquired, is that, if we don’t possess the Truth and the Way, we need to possess them. Until we do, and become ourselves what Oxford thinks it is, we can have no peace, no balance, no tradition, and no culture. It is inevitable, I know, and it is right, to be impatient at a premature or too narrow harmony: but how much more horrible is the disease we suffer from in America where the very idea of harmony and discipline are lost, and every ideal is discredited a priori!

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

Letters in Limbo ~ December 9, 1929

By David Spiech

On December 9, 2022

In LETTERS

To George Sturgis
Hotel Bristol
Rome. December 9, 1929

Please observe . . . my protest and disproof of all you say about my books being unintelligible. Of course, if you choose the wrong passages, and don’t know the vocabulary nor the context, you may sometimes feel a certain cerebral emptiness for a moment: but that would happen if you were reading an infantile writer like Miss Gertrude Stein, and it happens to me when I read newspaper headings. That my books are pellucid is no boast of my own. Here is what Professor Whitehead says of them in his last book, arrived this morning. “He [that is, me] is only distinguished [from other great philosophers] by his clarity of thought—a characteristic which he shares with the men of genius of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”. . . . I blush, but I quote, because I don’t want you to lose any more money betting that I can’t be made out.

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Four, 1928–1932. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Letters in Limbo ~ December 8, 1928

By David Spiech

On December 8, 2022

In LETTERS

To Charles Scribner’s Sons
C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123, Pall Mall, London
Rome. December 8, 1928

Dear Sirs,

I hope you won’t think it impertinent if I consult you about a private matter that is puzzling me a little. Most of my modest property is in a trust which provides for the disposal of it in the event of my death; but there are some odds and ends which (having reached the age of 65) I ought perhaps to dispose of by will: and among these the only American item is such author’s rights as I may have in consequence of contracts with you. Now, the matter is complicated by the fact that I am (as I have always been) a Spanish subject; and it would seem proper that my will should be Spanish, and registered in Spain, especially as I have a small house there, inherited from my father. Experience, in the case of some members of my family deceased, has shown me how much trouble foreign wills can give: and now I come to the question which I wish to submit to you. What is the simplest way in which I can bequeath my author’s rights? The person to whom I wish to leave them is Mr Daniel MacGhie Cory, whose father lives at 133 East 73rd St. New York, but who for some years has lived himself in Europe, and who is to be my literary executor. Need I make an American will for this purpose, or would the Spanish will do just as well? Forgive me for troubling you with this matter, and believe me Very truly yours
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Six, 1937-1940. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ

Letters in Limbo ~ December 7, 1939

By David Spiech

On December 7, 2022

In LETTERS

To Charles Scribner
Hotel Daniel
Venice, Italy. December 7, 1939

I have never seen Mr. Buchler or Mr. Schartz and know them only as the very diligent and accurate compilers of Obiter Scripta and of the Bibliography attached. I supposed them to be poor young students and naturally wished to do what I could to help them. The phrase Obiter Scripta was used by me in the letter I wrote them when they sent me the MS of their proposed book, but it was itself an obiter scriptum and the idea of taking it for the title was their own. Before Mr. Wheelock had written to me about the suit they were bringing against you, one of them had written to me on the subject, not making any complaint against me, but alleging that you had, in your contract with them, promised not to reproduce the matter in their collection. I replied that whatever might be the legal state of the case it seemed to me farfetched to object to the reproduction of papers that they themselves had merely reproduced, with a trifling note or two, and some omissions. If it had been a question of reproducing their Bibliography, which must have cost much labour, it would have been another matter. It had never occurred to me, in welcoming their collection, that I was debarred by it from using those essays again. Can a composition be copyrighed that has already been published without copyright? You say you think there was no fault on the part of either of us. I certainly think there was no fault on my part, and Buchler and Schwartz have not, to my knowledge, made any complaint against me or shown any ingratitude. They do, however, make a further complaint against you which, however groundless or explicable it may be, might have a marked effect on a jury; and perhaps it was this complaint that led your counsel to fear considerable damages. Now, if I understand the purport of your letter, which is not very clear to me, in order to avoid this danger of damages, you have agreed to settle the matter by paying them $690.00 and suggest that this sum should be deducted from the royalties of about $1,600.00 that I was to receive this month. I confess that this suggestion surprises me, and since you say that you will be governed by what I think proper, I will say frankly that I do not think it proper that I should be charged with any amount whatever in consequence of this litigation, in which I already feel that I have been a victim rather than an offender.

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

Letters in Limbo ~ December 6, 1905

By David Spiech

On December 6, 2022

In LETTERS

To William James
Hôtel Foyot
Paris. December 6, 1905

Now that I am launched I will say a word about some of the criticisms in your letter. You are very generous; I feel that you want to give me credit for everything good that can possibly be found in my book. But you don’t yet see my philosophy nor my temper from the inside; your praise, like your blame touches only the periphery, accidental aspects presented to this or that preconceived and disparate interest. The style is good, the tone is supercilious, here is a shrewd passage, etc, etc. And you say I am less hospitable than Emerson. Of course. Emerson might pipe his wood-notes and chirp at the universe most blandly his genius might be tender and profound and Hamlet-like, and that is all beyond my range and contrary to my purpose. I am a Latin, and nothing seems serious to me except politics, except the sort of men that your ideas will involve and the sort of happiness they will be capable of. The rest is exquisite moonshine. Religion in particular was found out more than too hundred years ago, and it seems to me intolerable that we should still be condemned to ignore the fact and to give the parsons and the “idealists” a monopoly of indignation and of contemptuous dogmatism. It is they, not we, that are the pest; and while I wish to be just and to understand people’s feelings, whereever they are at all significant, I am deliberately minded to be contemptuous toward what seems to me contemptible, and not to have any share in the conspiracy of mock respect by which intellectual ignominy and moral stagnation are kept up in our society. What did Emerson know or care about the passionate insanities and political disasters which religion, for instance, has so often been another name for? He could give that name to his last personal intuition, and ignore what it stands for and what it expresses in the world. It is the latter that absorbs me; and I care too much about mortal happiness to be interested in the charming vegetation of cancer-microbes in the system—except with the idea of suppressing it.

I have read practically no reviews of my book so that I don’t know if any one has felt in it something which, I am sure, is there. I mean the tears. “Sunt lachrimae rerum, ac mentem mortalia tangunt.” Not that I care to moan over the gods of Greece, turned into the law of gravity, or over the stained-glass of cathedrals broken to let in the sunlight and the air. It is not the past that seems to me affecting, entrancing, or pitiful to lose. It is the ideal. It is that vision of perfection that we just catch, or for a moment embody in some work of art, or in some idealised reality: it is the concomitant inspiration of life, always various, always beautiful, hardly ever expressible in its fulness. And it is my adoration of this real and familiar good, this love often embraced but always elusive, that makes me detest the Absolutes and the dragooned myths by which people try to cancel the passing ideal, or to denaturalise it. That is an inhumanity, an impiety, that I can’t bear. And much of the irritation which I may betray and which, I assure you is much greater than I let it seem, comes of affection. It comes of exasperation at seeing the only things that are beautiful or worth having treated as if they were of no account.

I seldom write to anyone so frankly as I have here. But I know you are human, and tolerant to anything, however alien, that smells of blood.

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.