Category: LETTERS Page 33 of 274

To Llewelyn Powys
Hotel Bristol
Rome. October. 25, 1938

It is a problem that sometimes puzzles me why Anglo-Saxons, who hate lies, love shams. I think in nice Englishmen it may be for the sake of the protective colouring so secured. People have delicate unhatched feelings, that must not be exposed to the bleak air; and sham religion, friendship, patriotism, etc., help to screen those feelings conveniently, or even to express them in an impersonal figurative way that is not so embarrassing as the truth would be. But in Americans the cultivation of shams is a form of ambition. They must make believe they are well, happy, cordial, witty, optimistic, and music-loving because that is what they think they ought to be: and they insist that other people should help them to keep up the illusion. You succumbed, and helped them to do so. Isn’t it for that reason that the eclipse gave you such pause? It was proof that reality existed. But even cocktails, which foster illusion, are themselves realities, working mechanically and, said Lowes Dickinson once when we were drinking one, “the only good thing in America.” No: not the only good thing, but a great help to the goodness of other things.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT

To Carl Sadakichi Hartmann
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. October 24, 1931

Dear Mr. Hartmann,

Your Mohammed didn’t shock me, much less offend me. Certainly your taste, your diction, and your whole literary atmosphere are very remote from mine, but that is not in itself a reason for disregarding you in your ill-fortune, and I have not disregarded it. In spite of the fact that I have never seen you and that there isn’t much artistic or philosophic sympathy between us, your figure appealed to me by virtue of its composite character—somewhat like my own, but running deeper, since it concerned blood as well as circumstances. And I am really sorry for you, not only because you are not well or rich or famous, but because in one sense you couldn’t be well: because the divine curse of seeing more than one side of things had pursued you. But, having yielded more than once to that impulse of imaginative sympathy, I don’t like to be dunned. You must have friends and acquaintances who know your case and—in generous America—will come to your assistance. I must therefore ask you to excuse me from helping you further: because the distance between us, material and moral, makes me feel that it is not for me, in this instance, to be more than an occasional and fantastic helper, coming out of nowhere and disappearing into nothing.

Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Baker Memorial Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH

To Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien
Villa Medici
Rome. October 23, 1912

Sadness overwhelms me at the thought of a “Magazine of American and Foreign Verse”, at a reduced rate for poets.—No: this is not the way to do it. Get a thousand miles away from all magazines and many thousand miles away from America, in your island off the West Coast of Ireland at least—and even then!

Your disillusioned friend, G Santayana

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 Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell
22 Beaumont Street Sunday
Oxford, England. Sunday [Autumn 1916?]

Dear Lady Ottoline,

If you have an instinctive antipathy to German philosophy, you ought to find my new book agreeable. However, I don’t expect you to read it all, and you must feel quite free to give it away or lend it to anyone who you think is ripe for sound doctrine, and not an incorrigible admirer of Lord Haldane.

I should have been to see you long ago if I hadn’t been far from well; in fact I am so seedy that at Mrs Morrell’s suggestion I am off tomorrow to Harrogate. If I return from there as light as a bird, I shall soon fly to Garsington.

I haven’t got so far as to read book about Dostoevsky, having scarcely read one of his own—only “Crime and Punishment”: but I liked the spirit of it, though the letter didn’t seem to me very beautiful.

Yours sincerely, G Santayana

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 Charles Augustus Strong
22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England. October 21, 1917

A copy of Drake’s paper reached me yesterday morning. I presume you have received one two, otherwise I can send you this one. It is poor stuff, both in form and in substance, and if our book is to open with it, it will be stamped from the first page with indecision and mediocrity. He says nothing that you have not said infinitely better, and introduces the “ideas” of British psychology—a swarm of conscious will-o-the-wisps, of which it is impossible to say whether they are known by anything else, or know themselves, or know other things, or simply abolish all knowledge. He misunderstands what you mean by the psyche and a psychic state: but in this I don’t think you are wholly blameless, because you used to believe that psychic states were conscious (I suppose of their own “content”) and in keeping the name, which in modern psychology rather suggests the conscious as distinct from the substantial, you obscure the fact that the psyche is now, in your doctrine, an organic substance, and the psychic state not a datum, as Drake supposes. Doubtless you have already set them right on these points, but it must be annoying to see such inertia in minds that are well-disposed, and on some subjects so sensible. Drake on religion was capital and in psychology his spirit is still good, although his wit is dull. I am venting my irritation upon you, but to Drake himself I have written with all the courtesy and moderation that I could muster. As I hardly share your hopes of converting the whole sect, it really doesn’t matter to me what they say: but of course the worse it is the less inclined I should be to make concessions to their vocabulary; on the contrary, it would become more urgent to stand altogether on one’s own ground and let it be obvious that our association is merely circumstantial, as if we were contributing a the same review.

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