Category: LETTERS Page 57 of 274

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Le Balze
Fiesole, Italy. June 25, 1934

So far existence here has been quite tolerable, the heat is not (as yet) oppressive, and I have managed, with some slight difficulty, to establish a sufficient independence of movement. But I am devoured by mosquitoes, and it seems hardly practicable to go down to Florence on foot or in the tram, except on favourable occasions. I shall have to go down with S. at 6 p.m.: but I have already knocked off tea, so as not to be interrupted in the afternoon, and have established the habit of being dropped in passing through the town, so that I have an hour to myself for walking about a bit, shopping, and having an apéritif before, at 7.20, we meet for dinner. The food is simple but suits me admirably, and S. encourages me to drink!

It is natural and, I think, right-minded of you to like the Catholic philosophy-books. They have improved immensely of late in their knowledge and understanding of modern views: not so much in their historical criticism, e.g. of Aristotle, Plato, & the Neo-Platonists. They are therefore able to present and defend common-sense—which is what Scholasticism is, apart from the theology—in an enlightened way. Formerly the same soundness was buried in an arid repetition of formulas, without much understanding either of the facts or of the theories of other people. Today, it seems that the Catholics are really the best critics everywhere, and the best informed. My Spanish review, Cruz y Raya, is admirable: and I am reading masterly Catholic critiques of Bergson’s latest book. But, as you say, the trouble is that all this is a human dream: it is a beautiful product, like music or architecture, of a long human tradition and art: but it isn’t true. It is a product of the fonction fabulatrice.

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 Robert Traill Spence Lowell Jr.
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. June 24, 1948

Dear Lowell,

Today, to honour la festa della Natività di San Giovanni Battista, your generous box of food has arrived. I am at this moment munching the chocolate, but feel that on the whole you are taking at Washington too tragic and charitable a view of the state of things in Italy, at least in establishments like this of the “Blue Sisters”. We have everything we need to eat, not always (the bread, for instance) of the best quality, but no scarcity of the stock things like butter and sugar. It is true that at my age I don’t ask for much in the way of meat, which is not of good quality always; so that I feel the shortage less than would a normal person. What I feel is the disorder of international policy and the absence of competent leaders in all the nations. But I won’t go into this because my information is not good and I don’t want to antagonize anybody. Let them boil in their own broth.

Is your engagement at Washington coming to an end? What are your plans? And when shall we see more poems? Don’t send me any more boxes but come yourself if you can and want a change of air.

Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Charles William Eliot
Grenoble, France. June 23, 1906

Dear Mr Eliot,

The series of lectures which I have been giving in France, ended here yesterday. The year has been a delightful one for me personally,—except that my health has not been quite so good as usual; together with the previous twelvemonth of travel, it has given me a very refreshing change of scenes and of companionships. Even in respect to my philosophic interests, I have found a great deal that is new to me, and interesting, in the movement of French speculation, which is very active at present and is carried on in a most critical and open-minded spirit, as well as with a solid foundation in scholarship.

My impressions about the value of the Hyde lectureship are rather too complex to be expressed in a letter; I have accordingly written the accompanying memorandum. It represents my sincere opinion upon this undertaking, when reflected on in cold blood. It might give a wrong impression, however, of my personal satisfaction at the reception I have met with both from officials and from the public. The post I have held is a delightful one; the question is whether the general advantages of maintaining such a lectureship are not largely factitious.

Mr Hyde has seen this memorandum and, I believe, has kept a copy of it.

With sincere regards. Yours very truly, G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Harvard Archives, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Robert Shaw Barlow
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Paris. June 22, 1936

I have just finished Faulkner’s “Sanctuary” and I think I have understood all the pornographic part, corncob, etc, and the character of Popeye which is like any villain in melodrama, just as Miss Reba and her establishment and her genteel friends entertained after the funeral; all this being very well done, so as to seem . . . life-like, at least to the uninitiated. I found myself also absorbed in the story as a whole, without exactly following the thread of it, which it would have taken me a second reading to disentangle. But frankly I don’t think it worth bothering about. Like all these recent writers, the author is too lazy and self-indulgent and throws off what comes to him in a sort of dream, expecting the devoted reader to run about after him, sniffing at all the droppings of his mind. I am not a psychological dog, and require my dog-biscuit to be clearly set down for me in a decent plate with proper ceremony. But Faulkner, apart from those competent melodramatic or comic bits, has a poetic vein that at times I liked extremely; in describing landscape or sheer images. This matter of images is very interesting, but confused. The image-without-thought poets often jump from the images supposed to appear to a particular observer, as in a dream, to images visible only to another observer, to the author in his omniscient capacity, as if they were the substance of the physical world common to all sane people. But there are no common images; there are only common objects of belief: and confusion in this matter of psychological analysis renders these modern writers bewildering, because they are themselves bewildered.

Faulkner’s language I like well enough when it is frank dialect, or unintended poetry: but I wish he wouldn’t, in his own person, say “like” for “as”, “like they do down South”. And the trick of being brutally simple and rectilinear in describing what people do, or rather their bodily movements, becomes tiresome after a while; especially when these bodily movements have no great significance but again are mere images strung along because they happen to appear to the author’s undirected fancy.

The absence of moral judgements or sentiments helps to produce this impression of conscious automata, wound up, and running round and round in their cages. I think there is biological truth in that view, but we have also a third, a vertical, dimension. We can think: and it is in that dimension that experience becomes human.

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

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Savoia
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. June 21, 1937

Capital that you should have come to know so characteristic a man as Ezra Pound at close quarters. Will you tell me, or can you draw from him, how he connects his sympathy with Eliot and with Mussolini with his otherwise extreme romantic anarchism?

My journey had uncomfortable features: it rained hard in Venice, and during the first day they had no suitable room for me at Danieli’s; but I got one in the evening, and no unpleasant consequences followed. The motorbus coming here was absolutely full up, complete, and I was so squeezed next to another fat old man that I had to have my clothes pressed, something which as you know I don’t ordinarily do. However, the weather that day was lovely, and the ‘bus was able to pull us up the steep hills on good time.

Here I am tolerably well settled, have an electric stove in case of cold weather, and a pleasant enough outlook. My books from Blackwell’s have arrived and I am in harness; working on Dom. & P.rs; but nothing prevents me from thinking or writing about Spirit if the spirit itself should prompt. I have also brought from Rome The Marble Faun and The House of the Seven Gables, cut up for the pocket, to read when I have my coffee or tea in the town. Have nearly finished the first, and am disappointed. Hawthorne has moments of dramatic intuition. There is a scene at the Capuchins’ in Rome which I wish Shakespeare had written and not Hawthorne: but his mind in general is weak and helplessly secondary: more a slave of his time than Poe.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.