Category: LETTERS Page 21 of 274

To Max Forrester Eastman
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1.
Rome. November 28, 1936

Dear Mr. Eastman,
Your letter reaches me when I had just written to your publishers saying I was ashamed to confess that I couldn’t understand a word of your book. If I had been writing to you I should have expressed the matter differently. I can understand your own words, and no doubt I should see a part, at least, of your reasons for making the distinctions you make in the kinds of the comic. My difficulty is with this comic universe itself. There is where everything eludes me in so far as it is supposed to be comic and in so far as the comic is supposed to be a part of the good. To me all these jokes seem rather ghastly. And the enjoyment of laughter, rather than a painful twist and a bit of heart-ache at having to laugh, perhaps, at such things at all, being your whole subject, I say I don’t understand a word of your book. That is, I am not able to share the happy experience that inspires you to write it.
Never mind. You are probably in the same case (although you don’t say so) about my “Realm of Essence.” Why trouble about it? No one is going to hell, or even to the stake, for being a victim, in some direction, of “invincible ignorance.”
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

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

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
27 November 1933 . Rome, Italy
Hotel Bristol, Rome.
Rome. November 27, 1933

Dear Cory

Eliot’s book hasn’t yet arrived, but I have read the two reviews of it with pleasure. They are written with feeling: I will send them back to you with the book, in case you might like to reread them. Especially this “Basil de Selincourt.” who is he? Very penetrating to say that Eliot’s poetry hasn’t been written: but doesn’t this show that Eliot, as a poet, belongs to that truly English tribe which dislikes explicitness? That from Chaucer to Robert Bridges English poets have felt an ineffable something in nature and in the heart which outran philosophy or religion, is very true: and it also outruns language, so that Eliot hasn’t been able to write his own poetry, nor has Robert Bridges. Chaucer is different: he did write his poetry: only it had a margin or penumbra of the inexpressible, as all true poetry has: or rather, a margin or penumbra to be expressed by music, by magic, not by logical articulation.

. . . My Spanish friends—I wish you could read them!—are youngish Catholics inclined to the modern, psychological, mystical, Bergsonian way of feeling; and this mystery in poetry, this miracle in every day life, is just the thing to excite their imagination. Why is La fille de Minos et de Pasiphaé a wonderful line, and ravishing poetry, whereas La fille de Pasiphaé et de Minos would be dull prose from a school-book? L’Abbé Bremond said that it was the Holy Ghost blowing where it listeth—or something to that effect: but I suspect there are tropes that let the current through in the brain, and tropes that don’t and that it is a matter of little orgasms in the nervous system.

Yours affly G.S.

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 Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
45 Chesterton Road
Cambridge, England. November 26, 1913

You ought not to be so dubious about the possibility of art and poetry in a peaceful world. The stress of war and suffering is not a needed element to stir the imagination or to give pungency to the representation of life. When life is turbulent, art has to make harmonies out of strife, but if life were placid, it would more easily make harmonies out of placidity. Think of all the distant poignant vistas, and all the profound renunciations, and all the exquisite charming fugitive moments that would fall to a soul living the life of reason in the midst of this world clearly understood. And think of all the amiable arts, both of the Greek and of the Dutch sort, that would be fostered by a well-ordered polity. No: the idea that horrors are required to give zest to life and interest to art is the idea of savages, men of no experience worth mentioning, and of merely servile, limited sensibilities. Don’t tolerate it.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To John Hall Wheelock
Hotel Bristol
Rome. November 25, 1936

The first two volumes of the Triton Edition arrived safely two or three days ago. I had already some notion of them, one friend having written that they were beautiful, another that they were discreet, and a third that he was overwhelmed by their external loveliness. I am hardly overwhelmed, but I feel that you have taken infinite pains, have shown exquisite taste, and have produced a monument which if not aere perennius certainly raises me to a higher level as a sort of standard author. All the details please me, with a pleasure that grows on acquaintance; and the pages tempt the eye to read; I have found myself doing so more than in one place where the text in itself was of no particular interest: a circumstance which tends to show that you have expertly combined paper, type, and arrangement of the page to perfection, so that reading becomes a physical pleasure. And this with the art that conceals art, because every feature seems natural and nothing is obtrusive. I noticed this with satisfaction (and relief) at once in respect to the Triton and the title of “Triton Edition”: these are inconspicuous, a bibliographical mark rather than of form of advertisement; and the cameo reproduced is small and charming. It is not, by the way, the particular Triton of the fountain in this square. I write on the hotel paper so that you may see what the Fontana del Tritone really is: but the design you have chosen is prettier and more suitable for a sort of seal for the Works.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.

To Dorothy Shakespear Pound
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. November 24, 1946

Dear Mrs. Pound,

I have much appreciated your husband’s letter telling me that p. 6 of my book had reconciled him to the frivolity of the rest. I know he is very selective and “subjective”; and a ray of mutual understanding is of value with such a person. I have also received his new Canto, and should have written to him about it if a ray of light from it had been able to pierce my thick skull. But really I can’t catch the drift of his allusions.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006. Location of manuscript: The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.