Category: LETTERS Page 66 of 274

To George Sturgis
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123 Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Venice. May 13, 1924

Dear George

Thank you for your letter of April 28 with its enclosures. I am answering Scofield Thayer’s inquiries. I hardly think my autobiography would be interesting, as there have been no events in my life and I have known few distinguished people. My novel will contain most of my observations on human nature, freed from personalities; and besides I am writing something which I call “Persons and Places” in which I mean to give some account, historically accurate but selective, of some scenes and characters that have remained in my memory. I tremble to think what nonsense Miss Munsterberg may be writing about me and my father and mother: and Thayer will not be much nearer the mark. Perhaps I will after all follow your suggestion in composing if not an autobiography, at least a chronology of my life, with a few notes about the leading facts, so as to correct the inventions that may see the light in the impertinent press. I foresee that when I die there will be a crop of stories, most of them sentimentally benevolent and reminiscent, and some a little spiteful, about my supposed life and character: and although all this will blow over in a few weeks, it may be as well that there should be an authoritative document to which anyone may appeal who may be really interested in the facts. If I write such a chronology I will send you a copy, because (as this incident shows) you too are not very well informed about this branch of our family history.

I came to Venice from Rome about a week ago, accompanied by two of the Chetwynd children, a boy of eighteen and a girl of sixteen. Their mother, formerly Augusta Robinson of New York, and sister of a great friend of mine, was detained in Rome by the illness of another child, and was glad to have me take charge of the two elder ones, so that they might not miss seeing Venice. It is rather a curious experience to stand in this way in loco parentis to two young persons, and I find it pleasant enough, especially as they look after me much more than I look after them: but I shall not be sorry when, in two or three days, I regain my usual bachelor solitude.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921–1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To David Page
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. May 12, 1946

I am waiting expectantly to see the first number of The New Satyricon. If my article and letter about Many Nations in One Empire appear in it, they may serve as a second counter surprise to my friends and enemies, who think it so odd—(is it Conversion?) that I should write about Christ in my dotage! They little suspect that I am deep in the works of Stalin, and much impressed. It is a pity they should be cruel. If they were home-staying and peaceful, like Quakers or Boers, they (the Bolsheviks) would be admirable: so clear, so strong, so undazzled by finery!

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Cyril Coniston Clemens
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. May 11, 1951.

Dear Clemens

Many thanks for your letter of May 4th with the good-humoured review in Time, which is the best I have seen so far, much better than those by the Professors Hook and Krutch in the New York Times and Herald Tribune. My new book is too complicated for a hasty reader to take in at once, and people are accustomed to be guided in public affairs by their feelings, without considering origins or tendencies in the actual events. I am content, for the moment, to be regarded as a mere curiosity.

Tom Sawyer arrived in due time and has been religiously read from cover to cover. It is hardly as suggestive of Don Quixote as the latter part of Huckleberry Finn, but I will consider both books together and in that respect only in my paper, which is partly written but not quite finished even in the written part. You are not in a hurry and I am very slow now at everything. I have not had the “flu”, but only a recrudescence of my catarrh, and general fatigue, so that I have given up receiving visitors, except old friends. Please don’t send me cheques for $1. We are not in business. I will send Tom Sawyer back at once.

Yours sincerely

G.S.

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 Robert Seymour Bridges
Hotel Bristol,
Rome. May 10, 1928

My dear Bridges

How can you doubt that I shouldn’t read with the greatest eagerness the advanced sheets of your Poem, if you will send them? This, even if you didn’t heighten my curiosity and pleasant expectations by saying that I shall find in it a philosophy akin to my own. I see by what you say, and gather from various quarters, the “The Realm of Essence” has been more kindly received than I should have expected. The professors persist in thinking me an amateur, and the literary people are not really interested, because the subject eludes them; yet some impression seems to be produced—more than by my “Dialogues in Limbo”, which seems to me so much better written a book, with more colour, than “The Realm of Essence”. But there is a tide in these matters of criticism which sometimes is found rising and sometimes ebbing or at the low-water of indifference and fatigue. We mustn’t quarrel with the moods of our critics.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Bodleian Library, Oxford University, England.

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol
Rome. May 9, 1939

Spiritual union cannot be union with another spirit, but union between spirit in one instance, at one moment, and all things as felt from that point. These “all things” may of course include other spirits; but in conceiving them there is already a sense of separation, such as I feel at this moment, between you and me; and agreement even in everything would not remove that duality, because it would have to be an agreement by confluence, an agreed agreement, and might lapse at any time, or discover itself to be illusory, since two real persons were concerned. So that it seems to me that utter and perfect union has to be momentary and internal to the life of a single soul. It is then not properly union but unification. One becomes really one.

I am sending you Dewey (hope he won’t make you more unhappy, as he might if you believed what he says) and I will not send you Guignebert, though he is not a sentimentalist, like Middleton Murry, for instance, who tries to retain the emotions of Christianity without the dogmas. He is simply a historian; and I can make a cynical laughing philosophy out of his reports. I have always liked understanding views with which I did not agree—how else could one like the study of philosophy? But the emotions incident to that study are not those of the persons or beliefs described; far from it. They are dramatic, tragic, or comic emotions at seeing their fate.

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.