Category: LETTERS Page 25 of 274

To Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien
3 Prescott Hall
Cambridge, Massachusetts. December 26, 1910

Poetry in words, like fiction in life, is something which has ceased to be natural to me…. No doubt the faculty of dreams may be as precious as waking, and less wearisome than insomnia; but when one falls into prose, it is hard to rise again out of it. Another fiction which you amiably weave is the “quia multum amavit”  which you apply to me. Any love while we have it seems great; but we must, in retrospect, reduce things to some proportion.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Rome. Christmas Day, 1933

What you say about Eliot’s lectures is exactly what I felt. He wasn’t inspired. He didn’t make the subject personal enough. If he had explained why Ezra Pound is “magnificent,” and why he himself would prefer an illiterate public for his poetry, it might have been enlightening: and he would have had plenty of occasions to show how this newly discovered essence of living poetry, which had been running underground from Guido Cavalcanti to Ezra Pound, was suppressed or possibly occasionally burst out unintentionally even in the interval. But Eliot is entangled in his own coils. How can he publish such an indecent article as that of Ezra Pound in this number of the Criterion, which I send today? And how can he suffer the crudities and absurdities of the article by Hoffman Nickeson to pass uncorrected? This article is interesting as a picture of Babbit; but grotesque as an exhibition of critical judgement.

Fourteen more chapters of The Last Puritan are finished and being typed. Shall I send you one copy to Bournemouth, or will the MS merely encumber your luggage, which must already be rather a nuisance? When the whole is done, I count on reading it all over with you, or asking you to send me your notes on it, before finally sending it to Constable and getting his opinion about immediate publication. There is therefore no need that you should bother about it now, if other things are on your mind I haven’t forgotten your comment on my “whiskered” phrases, like “acquatic exercise.” I am trying to humanize them: but sometimes they are meant humorously, [across ] and sometimes justified (when the author is speaking) for the sake of variety, rhythm, or colour. After all every word has a proper use sometimes.

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 Cyril Coniston Clemens
Hotel Bristol
Rome. Christmas Eve, 1938

My dear Clemens,

All you do and say seems to illustrate a theory which, in my intention, applies only to the last and highest reaches of the Spiritual life, and which I myself am incapable of practising. The truth no longer interests you unless you can turn it into a pleasing fiction. This interview with me I suppose is the same of which, years ago, you sent me a rough draft, where I suggested some corrections in view of that lower and servile criterion, truth. But probably in the interval the force of inspiration has been again at work, and you have produced a sheer poem . . .

I return your Foreword, as I keep no files, the extreme modesty of my apartment (it’s not very cheap) precludes anything but a waste-paper basket.

I am at work on my last volume of formal philosophy, The Realm of Spirit; but if life lasts even longer, I daresay I shall find it impossible not to keep on writing something or other.

Yours sincerely,

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham NC.

To Susan Sturgis de Sastre
Colonial Club
Cambridge, Massachusetts. December 23, 1910

My impression is that Catholicism in France—as elsewhere—may well gain in intensity what it loses in extension. Ceasing to be a matter of course for everybody, it becomes, for those who adopt it expressly, a personal conviction and affection; also a matter of party, a thing to be defended and propagated with zeal. This, however, is only the compensation for a very real and permanent loss—the loss of a dominant and pervasive influence over society. In a word, the Church is tending to acquire everywhere the sort of relation to the State and to society which it has in non-Catholic countries; and you know very well that this position, while it has its advantages in the way of fostering strictness and zeal among the faithful minority, is not at all the position which the Church claims, and would like to preserve.

My object in writing today is to tell you that I have just accepted an invitation to lecture for six weeks next Summer at the University of California. This invitation comes, probably, in the very latest year when I could have accepted it, and the chance to see the Far West, and what lies between (although I don’t care for it particularly) ought, I suppose, not to be missed. The lectures will be mere shortened versions of those I give here, and will involve no preparation, while the fee ($500) will almost cover my expenses, and I shall save all I should have spent in going to Europe.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Alderman Library, University of Virginia at Charlottesville.

To [Sara or Grace] Norton
60 Brattle Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts. December 22. 1899

Dear Miss Norton,

I am very sorry that I have another engagement for Sunday evening. It would have been a privilege—I don’t say to help you entertain your strangers—but to be entertained so Christianly in their company.

Yours sincerely,

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.