Category: LETTERS Page 68 of 274

To Paul Arthur Schilpp
Hotel Danieli,
Venice. May 1, 1940

People who are much younger naturally don’t know how unlike the present the intellectual world was fifty years ago, when I wrote my verses. For instance, I had hardly heard of the “metaphysical” poets, and have not read them even now, except in quotations here and there. Rice is perfectly right in his conclusion that when my mind became poetical, I ceased to write in verse. My verse was youthful effusion, not art. Latin facility, not depth.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937–1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

To Henry Ward Abbot
Oxford, England.  April 30, 1887

Dear Harry,

I have read Royce’s book, which I received a few days ago. I am glad to have it, and read it with interest if hardly with pleasure. It is indeed linked dulness long drawn out. It is intolerably diffuse. When a man has something to say he begins by telling you what the situation is, what objects he has in view in speaking to you, and what he proposes to say. He then says it. When he is through he informs you of what he has said, and of his reasons for saying it, and concludes with a hopeful review of the whole matter.

Apart from this and from the vileness of some of the words and phrases (e.g. “lonesome”, “I don’t just perceive why”) I like the style. The absence of cleverness is a praiseworthy self abnegation on the part of a clever man. I honor his desire to see books solidly and honestly written, although I must deplore his attempt at writing one himself.

As you will doubtless have anticipated, I disapprove of the moral, at least of the doctrines involved in it. What business has anyone to call the rather weak affection a wife retains for her husband unworthy? Aren’t husbands & wives to love each other after they cease to think each other perfect? There is, too, a ludicrous inadequacy in the “crime” the unfortunate little fool committed, to bring about such dreadful tragedies.

Royce shows his inexperience. One must laugh at the notion of what’s her name’s chastity on the ground that her husband had once got entangled with a girl foolish enough to go mad of disappointment. If at least he had seduced the creature, or made love to her after he was married, or been engaged to both at once—but as it was the hullabaloo is absurd. Nothing is really so immoral as an extravagant morality. Royce’s theories of love and marriage disgust me. They show what nonsense we talk when we lose respect for experience, tradition, and authority.

. . . I am being entertained with breakfasts and lunches here, thanks to my introductions from his lordship. I find it up hill work to talk to the English fellows, although they are remarkably at home in all sorts of things. They won’t say what they are thinking about, but keep always thinking about what they shall say. The result is that with my love of laying down the law, I do most of the talking and doubtless appear an intolerable damned fool. By the way, Catholicism is in high favor in these parts, and conversions are continual. All this, according to you, would be impossible if they had only taken N.H.4.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]–1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Charles Augustus Strong
22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England.  April 29, 1917

Dear Strong,

I have selected passages out of the preface and the first two chapters of your book and arranged them in what seems to me a very lucid essay, which I suggest might be called an Analysis of Perception . . . I have just read the whole thing over, to correct typewriter’s errors: and my impression is that it is admirable: sober, simple, good-tempered, solid, clear, and unanswerable. Without meritricious ornaments, it gives one more pleasure than a more simpering work would give—Aristotle gives more pleasure than Cicero—at least to me. So that when you ask, Is it as good as Russell, I say, it is not so brilliant, but it is more delightful—not to mention the obvious fact that it is more correct. Not merely because I agree with it; I don’t agree with it all; but because, in spirit, it is science, and Russell’s is private speculation.

The first part of the French translation of Egotism has arrived, and I have had a sad disappointment. No charm of style whatever, no lightness, no smile! The man is interested only in abusing the Germans, and where I try to give the devil his due and retire like Hindenburg according to plan, . . . my good translator misunderstands the text, so as to turn my concessions into a solid blind phalanx of attack. In places he is exact, if not happy: and his knowledge of English is sufficient: what he misses is, I now see, rather subtly and inadequately expressed. I hope he won’t object to my objections, and that we sha’n’t quarrell.

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.

To Robert Traill Spence Lowell Jr.
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. April 28, 1951

My father—thinking of painting—used to say: “Imitate and you will be imitated.” This may now be true of the artists of each decade, but not on the grand historical scale. Greece, Santa Sofia, and all south and east of Rome, is a ruin, so that it can no longer be imitated, or even weighed in the same balance with what we can attempt.

. . . Ezra Pound has written me quite intelligibly and in a placid mood, on receiving my book. I am very glad I sent it to him.

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 John W. Yolton
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. April 27, 1952

Dear Mr. Yolton

You were very good to send me the number of the Columbia Philosophical Journal chiefly devoted to comments on my recent book, including your own article. I have at once read this, and most of the others, and my general impression is of the great difference in interest and taste that separates American feeling now from me, due doubtless to my advanced age and to the excited and absorbing sentiment that the political anxiety of the moment naturally produces in the United States. You are less affected (as I gathered long ago from your letters) than most of the others by this preoccupation, and yet I seem to see traces of it, not so much in what you say as in the omission of a point in my view of rational government which I regard as important: the idea of “moral societies”. Individual psyches are surely the only seat of synthesis for political ideas; but these ideas are largely diffused and borrowed in their expression and especially in the emotion or allegiance that they inspire. Religion, especially, is traditional. In conceiving of a Scientific Universal Economy, with exclusive military control of trade, I expressly limited its field of action to those enterprises in which only economic interests and possibilities were concerned. Education, local government, religion, and laws regarding private property, marriage and divorce, as well as language and the arts, were to be in the control of “moral societies” possessed of specific territories. These would be governed in everything not economic, by their own constitutions and customs. Of course sentiment and habits would be social in these societies. Children would all be brought up to expect and normally to approve them; but any individuals rebelling against their tribe would be at liberty to migrate, and to join any more congenial society that would take them in, or remain in the proletariat, without membership in any “moral society”. My view is that civilizations should be allowed to be different in different places, and the degree of uniformity or variety allowed in each would be a part, in each, of its constitutional character. It would by no means be expected that every person would lead a separate life. What I wish to prevent is the choking of human genius by social pressure.

Yours sincerely,

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948–1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.