Category: LETTERS Page 68 of 274

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. February 18, 1936

Dear Strong,

It will be very nice to see you once more at the Aragno and we can then talk over the possibilities for the summer. I wish there were a place in Paris where I could feel at home, as in the old apartment. It is quite possible that I may go there for the summer, to some hotel in the region of the Palais Royale where I could have my déjèûner and then trust to going out for tea and a light supper—such as a beef sandwich and glass of beer at the Règence or at the Café d’Angleterre. Cory, too, might come and see us there. I say us, because I foresee that you will be driven to France again by the warm weather.

As you see I feel no obligation to go to Cortina again. It is merely a safe place, where I know I can manage; but perhaps it is less suitable for a very old man, because there is only a continual shift of tourists and no suitable entertainments such as good music or resources such as doctors and hospitals.

I seem to be all right again, but am not frequenting the Roma any longer, partly so as not to be tempted to eat too much, and partly because there, too, I had begun to feel too old for the milieu. I now have lunch—one dish of pasta or rice with cooked fruit or an omelette with cheese—in my room, before going out for my walk, usually to the Pincio.

Yours ever,

G.S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. February 17, 1948

No wonder that Ryle riles you with his contemptuous repetitions of “pet dichotomy” “sham-question,” and “unsophisticated” “assumption.” Dons used to be old fogeys, but now at Magdalen they seem to be cultivating modernity. Father Benedict here keeps bringing me books by a certain lay theologian Lewis (a convert to Christianity, apparently) whom I should have never supposed Magdalen would tolerate. He has the same cheap way of summing things up in two words, and announcing that all else is effete. However, I find Ryles handwriting quite legible “semantically,” each word is a hieroglyphic to be recognised as a whole, not an aggregate of letters. This is good psychology; but I don’t know what “semantic” is intended to mean now. Is it anything like “Self-transcendence?”

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Charles William Eliot
75 Monmouth Street
Brookline, Massachusetts. February 16, 1907

Dear Mr Eliot,

At a meeting of the Philosophical Division held this afternoon a question came up about a proposed course of mine which it was agreed should be submitted to you for decision.

Some time ago Professor Schofield asked me if I would offer some course in his department. I answered “Yes”, and suggested one on “Three philosophical poets—Lucretius Dante, and Goethe”—a half-course in which the conception of the world and the moral sentiment of the three should be described and compared. Professor Schofield accepted this idea. Now the Philosophical Department seems to be of opinion that this half-course should be given under their auspices, and not in the department of comparative literature. They add that if a part of my work is to lie in another department, a part of my salary too should be regarded as coming from that quarter, and a corresponding sum should be set free for the uses of the philosophical division.

To me it is a matter of indifference in which part of the pamphlet my proposed course figures, except that it is meant for the student of literature rather than for the technical philosopher, and that the requirement of a previous course in philosophy (usually made in offering our philosophical courses) would be out of place in this instance. Should I withdraw my offer made to Professor Schofield and should the proposed course be announced under the head of philosophy?

At our meeting this afternoon it was voted, as Professor Perry will doubtless report to you, that the Corporation be asked to appoint a well-known professor to fill Professor James’s place. I concur heartily in this desire, but if such an appointment were made “over my head” and previous to my own promotion, I should not regard my position as satisfactory.

Yours sincerely,

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 George Washburne Howgate
Hotel Bristol
Rome. February 15, 1939

Your book about me is so appreciative—apart from the great compliment of writing a book about me at all—that I wonder you didn’t send it to me, and am a bit afraid that perhaps you sent it, and it went astray. This is one reason why I write, lest in that case you should think I was somehow displeased and refused to thank you. I am most highly pleased, and have to thank you not only for the boost you are giving to my reputation, but much more for your diligence and sympathy in reading everything, and doing such generous justice to everything I have written. I haven’t read every page of your long book: Narcissus himself couldn’t look at his image uninterruptedly without wishing to forget it; and your criticism is too objective and steadily just to be exciting or to reserve surprises to the subject of it. As far as I have seen there are absolutely no errors about matters of fact—none at least of your own. You quote some one who says I learned English at the age of thirteen: but as you indicate elsewhere, I was under nine when I began to learn it, and at ten went to a common school with boys of my age, and as far as I remember was not handicapped by the language. You also quote a ridiculous invention of Miss Münsterberg’s—or rather, it must have been, her mother’s—to the effect that I felt more at home at the Münsterbergs’ than at other Cambridge houses. I didn’t go about in Cambridge society, but more in Boston, except for one or two real friends; but the Münsterbergs took things sometimes into their own hands, and one had to go to their parties. Yet Miss Münsterberg herself has recorded, I believe, my consternation when I once found that I was in the same ship with them; and indeed, although I had another friend I had planned to sit with, Münsterberg came officiously to tell me that he had secured a place for me with them, at the Captain’s table. What was I to do? But this is stale gossip, and the matter is of no consequence.

As to your interpretation and criticism of my philosophy, I have nothing to object. What you say is not what I should say: if it were, why should you say it? But it is all reasonable and natural. If I were to demur at anything it would be at the excessive attention you give to my poetry. I am no poet in the English sense; and the function of my verses is simply to betray the under-currents of my mind in the formative period; or else, as in Lucifer (and some finished but unpublished plays of that period) to do fantastically what my novel has done realistically: study moral contrasts & possibilities. But as a whole, you are wonderfully intuitive and correct, and I don’t see how I could have had a better interpreter.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Collection of Mrs. George W. Howgate.