Category: LETTERS Page 4 of 274

To John Hall Wheelock
Hotel Danieli,
Venice. April 12, 1940

I have had to suspend my reminiscences in order to prepare my reply to my critics in Prof. Schilpp’s volume. It is a terrible job; I believe they are to be 15 professors up in arms; but the six I have so far encountered have not been very combative, and I hope to escape alive.

Prof. Schilpp insists on having a new photograph of me, “as informal as possible”, and I shall have to have one taken here. If it is at all good, I will send you a copy. I wish you could think of something more spiritual and less psychical for the frontispiece of your Triton volume. There are too many portraits, and not very good ones, in that edition; but you might like a new photograph for general advertisement. I will try to look as much like Gandhi as I can, as to the forehead: but I am afraid the figure may rather resemble Chesterton.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937–1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.

Hotel du Parc
Cannes, France. April 11, 1906
April 11, 1906.

Dear Münsterberg,

I have come here to spend a part of my easter holiday with my friend Strong. My provincial lectures, of which I have given those at Nancy, and at Montpellier, has been very pleasant so far for myself, but as an audience who really understands English is not easy to find, I have been reduced rather to a phonetic machine, with the function of emitting interesting if unintelligible sounds. The audiences nevertheless have been large and religiously attentive, while the rectors and other professors have shown me every possible courtesy.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]–1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Boston Public Library, Boston MA.

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Rome. April 10, 1933

Logan Pearsall Smith has sent me some sugared hay of his own about “Reading Shakespeare”. It is pleasantly written, except where he feels impelled to speak in hushed superlatives about Shakespeare, as if he were speaking about God. The need of possessing the biggest poet in the world puffs him out; and there is over-interpretation in the wake of Coleridge and Lamb; but he mentions a naughty American professor Elmer Edgar Stoll who seems to have seen light by the Mississippi, and goes to the other extreme.

Part II (18 chapters) of the novel is now finished and typed, and I am busy revising the beginning of Part III in which your friend Mario makes his appearance, aged 16. I am beginning to feel encouraged about finishing this endless task. It is not as clever and amusing as I meant to make it, but it turns out deeper and more consistent than I had suspected. There is a hidden tragic structure in it which was hardly foreseen but belongs to the essence of the subject, the epoch, and the dissolution of Protestantism.

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 Cyril Coniston Clemens
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome, April 9, 1949

Dear Clemens,

No: I have no long-distance (or short-distance) radio, and no desire to listen to any broadcasting, which with my deafness I should not understand. It is not in my . . . power to regulate what people may say or publish about me, but I have repeatedly begged you not to busy yourself about me. I don’t think you are the right man to do so; but I suppose publicity is your profession and you are willing to take up any subject that seems to supply “copy”.

It is the same with visitors and interviews. People come to see me without asking leave or needing introductions, and between 5 and 7 p.m. I see them, and occasionally feel that perhaps it has been of some interest, and not merely a passtime, like going to see the oldest old woman in the village.

If you write me more letters and get no answer, please understand that, as far as my consent is required for any useless project, I do not give it, but that the thing may nevertheless be realized if the essor vital in the persons concerned is irresistible. I like to be quiet, but do not undertake to stop the steam-roller of modern enterprise.

Yours sincerely

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948–1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript:William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham NC.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. April 8, 1931

I am glad you have put your theory of perception into its final shape, and shall be interested in seeing—and hearing—the terms in which you now express it. As to Relativity, I may not be able to follow your arguments and am, in a sense, less personally interested, because I have come to a quietus of my own on the subject. When you are here, if you still want to work, I can give you a book of Maritain’s in which Einstein is treated intelligibly and intelligently, though of course from a far distant point of view. I am, in my old age, acquiring the faculty which Leibniz said he had of agreeing with Everybody. I agree with Maritain, but I agree with Einstein also: it is only a question of the place which one assigns to certain sorts of science or speculation. Maritain thinks what I call “specious” absolute: and it is, for the moralist or the poet: it is the spiritual reality. But the test of material Existence is practical: so that the tables are turned when you approach cosmology. The cosmology of Maritain is pure myth, as that of Einstein is sheer mathematics.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.