The $5,000 from the Book-of-the-Month Club arrived some time ago and are now duly credited to my London bank-account, which can now safely supply your allowance for two years. Other reverberations of the novel have been reaching me from America, pleasant enough in themselves but rather an impediment to work on other subjects, as if the afterglow of that sunset were keeping the stars from shining clearly.
America has swallowed the novel whole without a qualm. The other day I got a fresh invitation from the President of Harvard College, by cable, to come and get a degree of Doctor of Letters: this, I say, to show that even after my novel they were not ashamed of me. And Mr. Scribner (in the absence of Mr. Wheelock whose health demanded a rest) wrote, on sending me the cheque for $5000, that “no novel published in the twenty odd years that I have been in the business has had such an enthusiastic reception from the press, which has showered it with praise without a dissenting note.” In the reviews I have seen, however, besides fault-finding in this or that,–one person says that the last hundred pages are poor stuff, and should merely be skimmed over; I must have been tired when I wrote them–besides such hap-hazard fault-finding there is a general timidity or perplexity. It is more than they dare to tackle, at least before knowing what other people will say. The letters from my friends, too, are a bit disappointing. They seem to be thinking of me, or of their own views on the same themes, without taking the book on its face value, and letting it speak for itself. Some letters from strangers, however, are fresher and more genuine. For instance, a man named Hamilton Bosso writes from North Carolina that he has “never read so wise and lovely and witty a book.” I like the choice of those three adjectives: the fun, especially, seems to have been missed by most readers. For me it is everything, or at least the sauce without which the rest wouldn’t go down.
P.S. Your question about “spiritual freedom” makes me wonder what direction your mind is taking now that you are comparatively free from pressure from Strong and me. Is your Catholic tendency dormant or reviving or outgrown? Have you some other lights, drawn perhaps from Bergson? I don’t expect that you will always agree with me simply because at the age of twenty your fancy was caught by my Scepticism & Animal Faith. You then had less knowledge of rival doctrines, and were perhaps more impressed by the texture of my thought (as now by the texture of Bergson’s) than by the general conception of things which I represent. Your natural sympathies, after all, may go elsewhere; but even in that case I should be sorry if you didn’t understand my views. Now, as to the matter of “spiritual freedom”, I don”t remember where I have used the words: the context would indicate what I had in mind. But in any case, the thing has nothing to do with the physical question of determinism or indeterminism in the genesis of events. . . . When we can act and grow as our nature demands, we are morally free. When things or people or fatal commitments impede us, we are morally constrained, and not morally free agents. And “Spiritual freedom”, if distinguished from moral freedom, would mean liberation from all allegiance to what is private to each psyche, and love in perfect sympathy with the truth. Moral freedom is freedom from others, spiritual freedom is freedom from oneself.
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
