Category: LETTERS Page 180 of 274

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol.
Rome. November 11, 1932

Dear Cory,

I was going to send you your cheque today or tomorrow, so that you should have it by the 15th, although you are likely to be harder up just before the 1st than in the middle of the month: but next month you shall have a Christmas present to help you square your accounts. I don’t disapprove of your lunch-party: at your age I used to spend all my income on being beautiful and surrounding myself as far as possible with beautiful people and beautiful things: that was in the 1890’s. I don’t regret those little extravagances: the dinner I gave to seven young friends on my 29th birthday is one of the pleasantest memories of my life. I remember it vividly: those present were Bangs & Barlow, Warwick Potter, Boylston Beal, Jay Burden, Julian Codman, and Gordon Bell. You would not have such a clear sky if you invited seven ladies: they would be jealous and peck at one another: but you could have seven happy parties with each alone.
. . . .

As soon as I can, I want to return to the novel. I think I should be happier, and perhaps, freer for other things, if I felt that the novel was done, and secure. There is no need of publishing it: but other people might do my philosophy—you, for instance.as well or better, whereas absolutely nobody could do Oliver and Mario.

Yours affectionatly,

G.S.

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
45 Chesterton Road
Cambridge, England. November 10, 1913

This place seems to me this year to have a new beauty. For one thing we have had a wonderful spell of golden autumn weather, with the most beautiful afternoons, like landscapes by Poussin, and the lower River, with the trial eights and the fours has been gay and amusing in the way you know very well. I walk sometimes with Dickinson (fuller than ever of Chinese sweet-reasonableness) or with Lapsley, in whose rooms I sometimes meet the flowering undergraduate of the period—very smiling, as they didn’t use to be, half stifled with little emphatic bursts of enthusiasm, and vaguely earnest about socialism, Ulster, land-reform, his next essay, or his next match. It is all a little flighty and girlish, and one has to let it blow past like a gust in a garden. I somehow feel more foreign in England than I did fifteen years ago or even ten years before that, when I was first here. It seems rather an unseizable life, without ideas or achievements clear and notable enough to appeal to the outsider. It is a chaos of half-measures and immediate aims; and even the philosophers are casual, personal, intense only in spots, and essentially heretical. All roads still lead to Rome and unless you place yourself there you will never be in the heart of the world or see it in the right perspective. To be a Protestant is to be cross-eyed. In America that doesn’t matter, because there is nothing to look at there, but here, where every thing has depth and is historical, it makes priggish limping scholars, and funny squeaking one-eyed philosophers. To make amends, I see there is really a little poetry being written in England; it is amiable, sincere, tender, manly. Read the collection “Georgian Poetry, 1911-1912. published by the ‘Poetry Bookshop’”.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

To George Sturgis
Hotel Bristol
Rome. November 9, 1930

I see by the papers that the result of the elections has had a depressing effect on shares, but an exhilarating effect on the hearts of the bibulous. If this is not a false dawn, I may yet return to America. A grandson of Mark Twain set me up the other day to a cocktail: it was excellent, and revived the sensations of my youth.

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

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hôtel de Milan
Rome. November 8, 1912

Yesterday I received Holt & Co’s “New Realism”, and I have read Holt’s contribution to it (the vile diction and tone of which set my teeth on edge) because, odious as he is personally, Holt has always seemed to me more able and clear-headed than the rest of his school. He is very hard on our nice little friend Drake—calls him an idiot, ignoramus, or some thing of that sort. However, we are almost all of us in that class, according to Holt, so that it is no wonder. This article actually makes me understand a little better how the realists can get on without any mind at all. Except the universal one which they assume but won’t for worlds admit that they assume. “Objects” are enlarged to include their external relations and effects—and it is part of the atmosphere of an object, in action and reaction with other objects, that various groups or apperceptions of its elements are formed about it. These are our perceptions of it—the cotton-wool, so to speak, in which it is wrapped, like planets in clouds. That seems all very well: but I wonder how objects are individuated in such a world.

Perhaps they aren’t individuated at all; and then the new realism would be as mystical as Bergson.—I will write again in a few days.

Yours ever, G.S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY

To Richard Colton Lyon
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. November 7, 1948

Dear Dick—or Reincarnation of Oliver,

It had never occurred to me while you were here that you are like Oliver; but now that you suggest it, with your introspective letter to back you up, I see it clearly. I didn’t know you had so much psychological atmosphere—“vapours”—in your mental landscape. It is very romantic, northern, and you must be of Scandinavian descent; but don’t let the delicate mists thicken into fog. Spiritual pride and independence are like Oliver and the American transcendentalist of a hundred years ago; and in your letter you are more like Oliver than he was like himself in my book; because it would have been impossible in a novel to reproduce the actual flux of half-formed thoughts and images that floats down through the mind. Even in the two places where I pretend to quote Oliver’s compositions—the “thesis” on Platonic love and the verses about Rose Darnley—I make his style more terse and mature than it could have been, even when he was older: for he had the same difficulty in landing his fish than/t you complain of. But don’t worry about it. Angling is a sport; you don’t go fishing for the fish, but for a healthy foolish game in the fresh woods and the stream full of lovely reflections. It is a bit cruel—unintentionally, but nature always is so by the way. I don’t think there is anything mysterious or defective in images and thoughts being elusive and dissolving before they are quite formed. Nature, again, is everywhere wasteful, and breeds a hundred seeds for one that ever flowers. You mustn’t mind that. A choice selection of lucky ideas, that actually could take shape, will be enough to show what you were after.

Now as to “solipsism” and the “transcendental ego”, these are not wellchosen words for what is probably meant, or ought to be meant if we mean to be scientific in regard to the facts. There is a transcendental function or relation between any witness and what it or he perceives; it should not, however, be called transcendental, but ciscendental (as I used to say to my classes) because the relation or function signified is that of any and every spectator, in the dark on this hither side of the footlights, seeing only the phenomenal play on the lighted stage. If the play is not a dream, but one actually written by a playwright and acted by players who are not at all, in real life, the characters in the play, then the author and the performers, and the theatre and audience, are transcendent (not transcendental, .i.e.or ciscendental) realities, conditioning the spectacle, but rooted in a much larger “real” (or dynamic) world.

Now, as a matter of fact, the transcendental function or relation of the witness is exercised by a material man, part of the same transcendent world in which the author and the actors have their dynamic places. If, then, I say that “I” or the “ego” am something dynamic and self-existent, but that the play is all make-believe or a dream in me (which view would be real solipsism) I am contradicting myself; because my natural person and power are a part of nature transcending all phenomenal presence to thought or dream; and it is absurd that a part of the material world, by going to a material theatre and seeing real actors perform fictitious parts, turns them and himself, as a man, into a mere phenomenon in his mind. Solipsism, then, understood strictly, is absurd; even “solipsism of the present moment”, because the visioned scene is not a self, and if there is a self that has that vision, this self is part of a transcendent world, and not alone in existence.

What I think a more correct way of speaking is to say that “transcendental” is only spirit (or attention) in anybody: a spirit (or attention) which can arise only in animated bodies, as they receive impressions and prepare reactions on other bodies or natural agents. Spirit (or attention) can never be disembodied: therefore it is never solipsistic in fact; yet it is, in each intuition or feeling, a focus, transcendental and invisible, for whatever it sees. The Germans confuse this transcendental function with dynamic mythical “spirits” existing in a void.

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