Category: LETTERS Page 31 of 274

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.

To Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. November 23, 1946

A magnificent bouquet arrived from you this morning, intended for Christmas. It serves just as well now, and I am sure that your good wishes are not confined to feast days any more than my leisure. Every day is a holiday and a birthday and a possible last day for a philosopher.

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

To Amy Maud Bodkin
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1.
Rome. November 22, 1934

Dear Madam,

It was very kind of you to send me your book, and you would be surprised if you knew the feeling of strangeness, as if I had forgotten my way about, with which I have read it. Not that you are not perfectly lucid, everywhere delicately perceptive and sympathetic, yet wonderfully sober, in your judgements. But you move in an enchanted world which I am afraid I never inhabited, even when I was young and felt more at home in poetry than I do now. You make me feel afresh that I was never a poet; or rather, to speak with entire frankness, that my sense for poetry has always been immersed in rhetoric, playing on the surface with rhyme, rhythm, assonance, and expressible sentiment, but grossly unaware of these haunting images and profound “experiences” of which you speak. So much so, that even after reading your book with extreme attention and a desire to understand, I am not yet sure what these archetypal patterns are: I mean, what they are ontologically. Everything in my old-fashioned mind seems to be covered by what was called “human nature” and “the passions”. We are all much alike in our capacities for feeling, as in our bodily structure. The doctors find, almost always, every organic detail in each of us exactly in its allotted place; and so the various sensuous phenomena that strike the imagination are bathed in each of us in exactly similar emotions. Do you think that these phenomena owe their power to the fact that they have occurred before in the experience of our ancestors? Do they operate telepathetically from one instance to another? I suspect that our historical knowledge now-a-days sophisticates our passions. When I hear the words: fidelium animæ per Dei misericordiam requiescant in pace, the magic of the chant lies no doubt in the universal (occasional) longing of mortal creatures to return to their mothers’ bosom or to that of Abraham but I may cloud or complicate that human emotion with a touch of the pathos of distance, at the thought that the same plaintive cry may have reechoed long ago in the catacombs. But this effect seems to me adventitious and unnecessary.

I mention these doubts only as a proof of the intense interest with which I have followed your analysis.

Yours sincerely,

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Bodleian Library, Oxford University, England.