THE LETTERS OF
GEORGE SANTAYANA BOOK TWO 1910–1920 Edited and with an Introduction by William G. Holzberger
THE WORKS ...
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THE LETTERS OF
GEORGE SANTAYANA BOOK TWO 1910–1920 Edited and with an Introduction by William G. Holzberger
THE WORKS OF GEORGE SANTAYANA, Volume V Edited by William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp Jr.
The Works of George Santayana Volume V, Book Two Herman J. Saatkamp Jr., General Editor William G. Holzberger, Textual Editor Marianne S. Wokeck, Editor Kristine W. Frost, Associate Editor Joshua B. Garrison, Assistant Editor
To the memory of Daniel and Margot Cory
Photography Collection Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center The University of Texas at Austin
The Letters of George Santayana Book Two, 1910—1920
Edited and with an Introduction by William G. Holzberger
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England
This publication has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency which supports the study of such fields as history, philosophy, literature, and languages. Additional funding was provided by Corliss Lamont, Emil Ogden, and the Comité Conjunto Hispano-Norteamericano para la Cooperación Cultural y Educativa. The endpapers are facsimiles of a letter to Susan Sturgis de Sastre, dated 2 August 1914. Publication is by permission of the Clifton Waller Barrett Library, The Albert H. Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia Library (George Santayana Collection [#6947]).
A selected edition of The Letters of George Santayana was published by Scribner’s in 1955. Other letters written by Santayana have been published previously in books and periodicals. All information concerning previous publications is included in the textual notes. © 2002 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Introduction,” William G. Holzberger. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopy, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Santayana, George, 1863–1952. [Correspondence] The letters of George Santayana / G. Santayana; edited and with an introduction by William G. Holzberger,—Santayana ed. p. cm.—(The works of George Santayana; v.5) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-19466-X (bk.2: hc: alk. paper) 1. Santayana, George, 1863–1952—Correspondence. 2. Philosophers—United States— Correspondence. I. Holzberger, William G. II. Title. B945.S2 1986 vol. 5 [B945.S24 A4] 191—dc21
00—048978
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48 1984. ∞ ™
{
The Santayana Edition Herman J. Saatkamp Jr., General Editor William G. Holzberger, Textual Editor Marianne S. Wokeck, Editor Kristine W. Frost, Associate Editor Joshua B. Garrison, Assistant Editor Editorial Board Willard Arnett Hugh J. Dawson Morris Grossman Angus Kerr-Lawson John Lachs Richard C. Lyon
Douglas M. MacDonald John M. Michelsen Andrew J. Reck Beth J. Singer T. L. S. Sprigge Henny Wenkart
Consultants Jo Ann Boydston Irving Singer Robert S. Sturgis
The Works of George Santayana I Persons and Places: Fragments of Autobiography, 1986 II The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Æsthetic Theory, 1988 III Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 1989 IV The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel, 1994 V The Letters of George Santayana, Book One, 2001 The Letters of George Santayana, Book Two, 2002
Contents Book Two, 1910–1920 Preface Acknowledgments Introduction by William G. Holzberger List of Letters
xi xxiii xxxvii lxiii
LETTERS
3
EDITORIAL APPENDIX Textual Commentary Short-Title List Textual Notes Report of Line-End Hyphenation Chronology Addresses Manuscript Locations List of Recipients List of Unlocated Letters
423 437 441 503 505 523 537 541 545
INDEX
549
Preface Book Two, 1910—1920 The second book of Santayana’s correspondence contains all known extant letters for the period 1910–1920, written during his forty-seventh through his fifty-seventh years. Today, we would describe such a person as middle-aged, but by 1920, at the age of fifty-six, Santayana considered himself an elderly man. However, he remained vigorous, taking long walks daily, continuing his teaching at Harvard (until 1912), and writing articles, books, and letters. His health was generally good, except for occasional bouts of rheumatism and his ever-threatening chronic bronchitis. The principal events of this period for Santayana are the death of his mother, Josefina Borrás de Santayana, in 1912, retirement from his Harvard professorship and his permanent removal to Europe in that same year, and the outbreak of World War I in 1914. It is a period of great changes in Santayana’s life and in the world. By 1910 Santayana’s mother was in her eighty-sixth year and probably suffering from some form of dementia as she was continually growing weaker and was non compos mentis: Santayana and his half brother Robert spent time with her in her house in Longwood, Brookline, Massachusetts, but her care was the special project of her younger daughter, Josephine. (The older daughter, Susana, was married and living in Ávila, Spain.) By 1910 Santayana’s reputation as a Harvard intellectual and author was established, and he knew a number of prominent persons in the high society of Boston and New York. He was fond of the opera and ballet and often attended performances in these cities. He also was invited frequently to parties, balls, and dinners by members of the social elite. He describes a dinner party he attended at the home of Mrs. Clarence Mackay in New York where the “wonderful” food was served by men servants in red breeches and white silk stockings (letter to Susana of 1 March 1910). At the same time he was receiving recognition from the academic world, for in the spring of 1910 he was invited to visit the University of Wisconsin and deliver the six lectures on Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe that he had given at Columbia the previous month and which would that
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year be published in book form as Three Philosophical Poets by the Harvard University Press. He felt famous when he discovered that in a course at Wisconsin the students were studying one of his books. Santayana spent the summer of 1910 in Europe, visiting Oxford, Howard Sturgis (a cousin of his half brother and sisters) in Sturgis’s house near Windsor, and John Francis Stanley, the second earl Russell, at Russell’s “Telegraph House” (or “T.H.”) in Hampshire, near Petersfield, on the South Downs. In a letter to Russell (29 July 1910), he decries Russell’s apparent sympathy for the enemies of the Church in Spain, denounces those enemies as anarchists, and defends the “irrational, traditional civilization.” This animated defense of traditional Christianity—a religion in which Santayana had no literal belief—is a characteristic of his entire career. Yet, when during that same summer he stayed for a time with his sister Susana and her family in Ávila—where political conservatism and devout adherence to Church doctrine were the rule—he observed that, while his sympathies are with the Spanish conservatives, he at times finds the traditional Spanish and Catholic atmosphere oppressive. Toward the end of that summer, Santayana visited his friend and fellow philosopher, Charles Augustus Strong, in an apartment that Strong was renting in Paris, and stayed on for three weeks after Strong had left. In this way, Santayana began a pattern that would last for many years, spending periods of time—from several days or weeks to several months— living with Strong or staying in Strong’s apartment. Another characteristic of Santayana’s relationship with Strong was the perpetual debate between them regarding their individual philosophies of perception and knowledge. Throughout their rich correspondence over many years, Strong was forever attempting to convert Santayana to his own philosophical theory, and Santayana was forever attempting to maintain his own point of view, often observing that he and Strong would likely agree on the essentials of the philosophy of mind if they could only agree on a set of appropriate terms. While staying at Strong’s Paris apartment in September of 1910, Santayana learned of the death of William James. In a letter to Strong (who was then away from Paris) of 8 September 1910, Santayana expresses his appreciation of his former teacher and mentor but says that James never really knew him. Never regarding himself as cut out to be a teacher, by the beginning of the second decade of the new century Santayana had tired of what he considered the drudgery of university teaching, the perpetual reading of student themes, and the directing of doctoral dissertations. He decided to accept an offer from the University of California to teach there in the 1911
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six-week summer session for a stipend of five hundred dollars. His plan was to forego his usual summer sojourn in Europe and spend the summer in Berkeley, and then, in June 1912, either to resign from Harvard or at least take an indefinite leave of absence. He hoped by then to have savings and investments sufficient to provide an annual income of $2,500 on which to live in Europe. His sister Josephine had offered, out of her own money, to add a thousand dollars a year to his income if necessary. In an arrangement worked out with President Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who was reluctant to see Santayana retire, it was agreed that in future Santayana would teach only the first semester of each year, October through January, at half pay ($2,000). He was given a year’s leave for 1912–13 with leave pay of $1,000 and the understanding that he would return to Harvard for the autumn semester of 1913. In his letters of this time he is ambivalent about whether or not he plans to return to Harvard. In a letter to Strong (20 May 1911) he says that he means sincerely to return there in the fall of 1913 but doubts that he will do so in subsequent years. However, in his letter to Susana of 16 May 1911 it seems clear that he does not envision himself returning to Harvard in 1913. On his way to California, Santayana stopped at Madison where he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by the University of Wisconsin. Though never much interested in landscape (regarding it mainly as a background for human affairs), afterward, in the far west, he found the vistas west of the Rockies to be “fine and noble.” At first he was also favorably impressed by the western people, but he later revised that estimate. San Francisco he found interesting, if “absurdly hilly.” At Berkeley, in August 1911, he read a paper on “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” which was afterward printed in the University of California Chronicle (1911). Returning to Brookline, Massachusetts, and finding his mother continuing to fail, he went through her desk. Sorting through her papers, he found there his letters to her. After reading them and deciding that they “were very impersonal” and that he learned nothing from them that he didn’t perfectly remember, he most unfortunately burned the letters. Though he may have learned nothing from them, it is painful to think what we might have learned from them about Santayana’s relationship to one of the most important persons in his life. About this time, Santayana received an offer to join the faculty of Columbia University, an opportunity that he might earlier have seized upon but which he now declined as having come too late. On 24 January 1912 Santayana sailed for Plymouth, England, a voyage of six days. Though he didn’t realize it at the time, he was never again to
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return to America. It was at Queen’s Acre, Howard Sturgis’s house near Windsor, on 5 February 1912, that he received a telegram informing him that his mother had died. His most immediate concern was for his unmarried sister Josephine, whose life had revolved around their mother. He worried about where and with whom she would live. As it turned out, Josephine later traveled with their brother Robert to Spain and settled permanently into Susana’s household in Ávila. Santayana’s inheritance from his mother’s estate was a modest twentythousand dollars, but the addition of that sum to his savings convinced him that he was now in a position to retire from teaching and devote himself exclusively to writing. His letter of 6 June 1912 to President Lowell of Harvard, resigning his professorship, was written from Strong’s new Paris apartment, in the Avenue de l’Observatoire, where Santayana spent the late spring and summer of that year. He was only forty-eight years old and far from the usual retirement age, but the letter expresses unequivocally his dissatisfaction with teaching and his resolve to resign. He remained for the rest of his life in Europe. During the years 1912–13 Santayana moved about Europe continually, looking for a place in which to settle. Madrid and Ávila appealed to his Spanish side: he liked the Spanish people (though he considered them an “ugly race”), but Madrid was too bitterly cold in the winter, and in Ávila he had too many family connections and feared he would not get his work done. In Cambridge and Oxford he had several friends, enjoyed the beauty of the college buildings and gardens, and liked the academic atmosphere, but the rainy and often cold English climate was improvident for a man with chronic bronchitis. Nevertheless, at this time he believed that he would eventually settle in Oxford. In the meantime, he visited all of these places and in addition traveled about Italy and spent time in Paris, Monaco, and Monte Carlo and Nice on the Riviera. But he felt out of place in these fashionable resorts. In Florence he was put off by what he regarded as the oppressive Anglo-American expatriate establishment, and he resisted pressure to become part of the intellectual set gathered round the Bernard Berensons at Settignano. Despite their mutual connection to Harvard—Santayana was a member of the class of 1886; Berenson, of 1887—Santayana never trusted or liked Berenson, accusing him, in his letter to B. A. G. Fuller of 10 September 1918, of “abundant mendacity.” He seemed better disposed toward Berenson’s wife Mary, one of Logan Pearsall Smith’s sisters, to whom he wrote some charming and amusing letters.
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Paris, of course, was the traditional center for international intellectuals and artists, and it was very appealing to Santayana. Furthermore, he knew that he was always welcome to spend lengthy stays at Charles Strong’s apartment, which was conveniently situated for walks in the Luxembourg Garden. But Strong, Santayana believed, had no talent for interior decoration or for making himself comfortable, and he feared that in Strong’s apartment he would never feel truly at home. Early in August 1913 Santayana crossed the English Channel, traveling from Paris to Oxford, for an extended stay in England. But he did not realize that the outbreak of World War I would make a return to the Continent impossible and that he would remain in England for almost six years. Not long after his arrival in England, Santayana received a visit from his nephew, George Sturgis, with whom he spent a few days in London and in Oxford. He credited young Sturgis (then twenty-three years old and a recent Harvard graduate) with a pleasant disposition but otherwise considered him without breeding, ignorant, and young for his age. He believed (wrongly) that George would never be capable of looking after the family finances as his father currently was doing. Santayana also paid a visit to Earl Russell in Hampshire, who was then married to his second wife, Countess Mollie, but he found that the old intimacy between him and Russell was gone. While there, however, he conversed with the earl’s younger brother, the philosopher Bertrand Russell, and he looked forward to further conversations with “Bertie” in Cambridge, where he was a fellow of Trinity College. At this time Santayana was working on two books, Dialogues in Limbo and what he referred to as “The Four Realms.” The manuscript of the “Realms” project was continually expanding, and to the three realms of his developing conception, those of Matter, Essence, and Spirit, he had recently added a fourth, Truth. He still conceived of the “Realms” as constituting a single tome, whereas the work would eventually be published in four separate volumes. The autumn of 1913 he spent at Cambridge, where he found everything particularly beautiful and inspiring: “I want,” he wrote to Strong, “to write verses or to fall in love, but alas! I can’t manage either” (28 November 1913). He did, however, enjoy conversation with his friend Gaillard Lapsley, a fellow of Trinity College, and profited from frequent conversations with Bertrand Russell, who was then a leader of the neorealist movement in philosophy. Though Santayana and Russell differed widely in their respective philosophical positions, it was valuable to Santayana, while working out the intricacies of his system as defined in
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Realms of Being, to have at hand the benefit of Russell’s razor-sharp critical faculty. At this period, Santayana continued to write letters to Charles Strong discussing and debating intricate philosophical subjects, and these letters contain valuable insights into the development of Santayana’s mature philosophy as well as penetrating criticisms of other philosophical movements of the time, including pragmatism, critical realism, and neorealism. By 1914 he regarded the manuscript of the original single-volume project of the “Realms” as being nearly finished. He considered holding it back from publication in book form, issuing parts as articles, and continuing to develop and refine the work in an effort to make it as complete as possible. By August 1914 Santayana was living in England and simultaneously working on three books: Dialogues in Limbo, Egotism in German Philosophy, and Realms of Being. His plan was to return to Paris that month, a year after his arrival in England, but with the outbreak of war he feared the imminent German occupation of that city. At this time, Strong was ensconced in his new villa in Fiesole and would have been glad to have Santayana there with him, but Santayana was also fearful of attempting to travel to Italy. He therefore decided to spend the duration of the war in England, mainly at Oxford. He admired German competence, discipline, ability, and strength, but he feared Teutonic regimentation and regarded the “Germanization” of the world resulting from a German victory as a disaster second only to a possible “Americanization of the Universe” (letter to Susan of 11 October 1914). His sympathies during this war were therefore with England, Belgium, and France and against Germany and Austria, for the Allies and against the Central Powers. His sister Susana’s “rabid and relentless” pro-German position was for him a source of constant irritation and sadness. The letters that Santayana wrote during the years he lived in England (1914–18) express the great disillusionment and depression that overwhelmed him and others as a result of the previously unimaginable carnage and destruction caused by the great war. Publication of his book Egotism in German Philosophy (1915) occasioned charges by many critics that Santayana was engaging in sheer anti-German propaganda. However, during these war years he took comfort and satisfaction from his friendship with several distinguished persons in England. While living in Oxford during this period, he came to know the exotic Lady Ottoline Morrell and was occasionally a guest in her manor house at Garsington, about five miles from the city. His friendship with this unusual woman
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gave Santayana an opportunity to rub elbows with several of the rare spirits of the Bloomsbury Group, for which Lady Ottoline was an indefatigable hostess, patroness, and not always fully appreciated loyal friend and supporter. At Garsington, Santayana met biographer and essayist Lytton Strachey and the poet Siegfried Sassoon; he also encountered there his fellow philosopher and self-proclaimed notorious philanderer, Bertrand Russell, who was then having an affair with Lady Ottoline. While Santayana was living in Oxford (and nearby Iffley), his friend Robert Bridges, who appreciated Santayana’s understanding of England and was fascinated by his philosophical ideas, tried to persuade him to accept a fellowship that Bridges felt sure could be arranged at one of the colleges. Educated at Eton and Corpus Christi College, Bridges had considerable influence in several of the leading Oxford colleges and in the University itself. But, by the end of the war, Santayana had become disenchanted with England, lamenting the disappearance of the old Victorian Tory England that he had earlier so loved and admired. Englishmen themselves, who had once appeared to him as possessing something akin to Spartan virtue, now appeared merely rather stolid and dull. Though the sort of fellowship that Bridges might arrange would carry no teaching duties, Santayana, now free of Harvard, was shy of any sort of further official attachment. And again, he was fearful of the damp climate and cold winters. Living in England also made it convenient for Santayana to make visits to Earl Russell’s house (“T.H.”) in Hampshire. On a visit there early in June 1916, Santayana met the earl’s new (third) wife, Mary Annette Beauchamp, widow of the German Count Henning August von ArnimSchlagenthin, who, fifteen years older than his wife, had died in 1910. The Countess von Arnim, who had been born in Australia to English parents, was a very petite, youthful, and pretty forty-nine-year-old mother of five children. She was an accomplished novelist with a devoted following who published her books under the pen name “Elizabeth.” (Santayana sent one of her books—probably the autobiographical Elizabeth and Her German Garden [1898] in which she pokes gentle fun at the Germans—to his sister Susana. The evidently irate pro-German letter he received in response he attributed to the effect of Elizabeth’s book upon his sister.) Russell was fifty at this time and, as always, finicky, crotchety, difficult, and demanding. Santayana liked Elizabeth, finding her sophisticated, intelligent, disillusioned (except perhaps about the character of her new husband), and engaging: a truly superior woman of the world and very different from
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her predecessor, Countess Mollie. She and Santayana quickly established a lasting friendship. But knowing the character and history of her new husband, Santayana doubted that the marriage, which had commenced on 11 February 1916, could last. He was right about this, for in 1918 Elizabeth, exasperated by Russell’s tyranny, would leave him for good. In the autumn of 1916, while Santayana was still pondering issues in the manuscript of Realms and having trouble with rheumatism, his friend Charles Strong was having more serious health problems. The partial paralysis of the lower legs from which Strong had been suffering had progressed to the point that walking became very difficult. While travel on the European continent remained unsafe, Santayana was unable to visit his friend in Italy to offer help or consolation. A few months later, other disasters struck Santayana’s friend Robert Bridges when Chilswell, his house at Oxford, burned down. Also at this time, Bridges’s son, who was serving in the war, was wounded. To distract his mind from the general disaster of war and the personal disasters of his friends, Santayana undertook, beginning early in 1917, a plan of travel that took him to several places in England, including Bath, Bristol, Wells, and Exeter, seeing cathedrals (always of keen interest to him architecturally) and other sights. On this trip he also visited Cornwall and Torquay and in May spent a week in London. As travel helped to distract him from preoccupation with the war, so did his reading which included, in addition to philosophical writings, virtually all of Dickens, and, early in 1917, the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. Yet another distraction of this period was offered by Santayana’s friendship with Logan Pearsall Smith. Smith, who was from a Philadelphia Quaker family, was a wealthy expatriate American writer and editor living in England. He was, with Robert Bridges and other linguistic conservatives, a founder of the Society for Pure English. In the spring of 1917, Smith approached Santayana with a project for culling short, essay-like excerpts from Santayana’s various works and publishing them as a volume of “Little Essays.” Santayana was enthusiastic about this project as he himself had thought of one day compiling such a collection of pithy excerpts from his works. Smith was to make the selections and edit the volume, but, as it turned out, Santayana was not entirely satisfied with Smith’s selection and ended up contributing a great deal of editorial work to the volume himself. Santayana’s collaboration with Smith on this project provides for a substantial and important correspondence between the two men.
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Also in 1917, Santayana’s controversial Egotism in German Philosophy (1915) was being translated into French. The two French translators, Henri Quentin and Guillaume Lerolle (the latter a wounded officer), were assisted by the author, who was proficient in reading French and who went over their work, making necessary revisions. Santayana’s competency in reading French is also attested to by his reading Andre Gide’s L’Immoraliste (1902) in a single day. His letter of 11 June 1917 to Charles Raymond Bell Mortimer, who had sent him a copy of the novel, contains an insightful critique of the work. Early in the autumn of 1917, Santayana began to notice American soldiers (actually aviators) in and about Oxford. The event dreaded by the Central Powers, the entry of the United States into World War I, had occurred the previous April, and by the spring of 1918 the American troops would be heavily involved in the fighting. Their presence, and the symbol of tremendous industrial potential that it represented, would assure the imminent defeat of Germany and Austria and the ultimate victory of the war-weary allied forces. At this time (in 1917) Santayana was at work on two papers for a book of philosophical essays by many hands to be edited by the American philosopher, Durant Drake, called Essays in Critical Realism and published in 1920. Santayana’s essay “Three Proofs of Realism” was included in the volume, and the other piece, “Literal and Symbolic Knowledge,” was published in the Journal of Philosophy in 1918. In the spring of 1917, Pearsall Smith had completed preparation of the draft manuscript of Little Essays. By the autumn of that year, when Santayana was himself reading and working on the manuscript, he remarked how much his philosophy had changed over the period of about a decade since the publication of The Life of Reason (1905–6). The earlier work he thought “hopelessly lost in the subjective,” whereas his current emphasis was more appropriately upon “the natural or historical facts” (letter to Pearsall Smith of 9 October 1917). By the spring of 1918, Santayana was at work on Dominations and Powers, his big collection of essays on politics and government that would not be published until 1951, thirty-three years later. In 1918, the final year of the great war, Bertrand Russell was jailed for six months for publicly advocating pacifism and supporting conscientious objectors, positions for which Santayana, despite his detestation of the war, had little sympathy. He was, however, contrary to his political conservatism, sympathetic to the views of the Russian Bolsheviks in their sense for values, and their hostility to government founded on private
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property, inherited wealth, class, and privilege. At last, after four years of the most terrible carnage, the decimation of a generation of young men and the deaths of countless civilians throughout Europe, the Armistice ending World War I was signed on 11 November 1918. Observing the world at the conclusion of this war, Santayana believed that the end of “the liberal parliamentary capitalist age” was at hand and that a radical “transformation of society” was inevitable (letter to Fuller of 13 June 1919). Following upon the cessation of hostilities, Santayana, like other astute observers of the immediate post-war situation, knew that nothing in the way of an enduring peace had been achieved. With the end of the war, Santayana was free to move about at will, but he was comfortable and working well in his Beaumont Street rooms in Oxford on Realms and Dominations and Powers and was now in no hurry to leave. The Little Essays manuscript was completed and sent off to the publishers early in May 1919, and Santayana considered accepting an offer from the YMCA to undertake a lecture tour at the front “either explaining America to the British troops or England to the Americans” (letter to Strong of 2 April 1919). But when the offer failed to materialize (regulations stipulated that the lectures could be given only by British subjects), he decided, after four years’ residence, to give up his Oxford rooms. By 30 April 1919 he had left Oxford for good. After spending several days in London, and then a week at Windsor visiting Howard Sturgis, he traveled to Richmond, where he continued work on Character and Opinion in the United States. He intended to cross over to Paris on June 5th, but getting to Paris proved more difficult than Santayana supposed. The French immigration authorities in England were slow to permit Santayana to return to France, and he was shuffled from one official to another. Finally, after many days of frustrating interviews, he was given permission to travel to Paris, and he left Richmond on 26 June 1919. Arriving in Paris, Santayana moved into Strong’s apartment in the Avenue de l’Observatoire. Strong and his daughter Margaret had traveled to America, so Santayana had the place to himself, where he was looked after by the housemaid Françoise. In Paris Santayana enjoyed reunions with old friends like Conrad Slade, Moncure Robinson, and Gaillard Lapsley, who, now also free to travel, had come there. But Santayana’s pleasure at being once again in the great city was clouded by the fact that Françoise began acting strangely. She refused to accept the money that Strong had left for her shopping expense and her wages, and she refused to cook for Santayana or to make his bed or tidy his room. In his letters
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to Strong of this time, Santayana writes that all of his efforts to persuade Françoise to resume her duties came to naught, that she could not be brought round to reason. Despite this problem and the inconvenience and discomfort that came with it, Santayana managed to complete the manuscript of what he referred to as his “James-Royce” book, whose original title was “Two American Philosophers” and which was published in New York and London in 1920 as Character and Opinion in the United States. By late November of 1919 Strong had returned to Paris, while Margaret remained a little longer in the United States. Strong, who had had another operation (this time a failed attempt to remove a tumor on his spine), was now badly bent over, weak, and unable to walk unassisted. Eventually, Strong would be confined to a wheelchair. Santayana traveled with Strong to his villa in Fiesole, where he left him in the care of his servants while he himself went on to Rome and settled into the Hotel Minerva, thus beginning his practice of spending the winters in Rome, with summer sojourns in the north of Italy and in Switzerland. By the spring of 1920, Santayana had seen enough of post-war central Europe to be distressed by the transformation that had been wrought there by the war. To Boylston Beal (3 May 1920) he wrote: “we know what we have escaped, but not what we are in for.” In September he wrote a very interesting letter to Strong in which he straightforwardly exhorts him to loosen his paternal grip on Margaret, to allow her more freedom of movement, and, for the good of her personal development, to encourage her in any projects that appeal to her. Toward the end of the period covered by this second book of letters, Santayana left Paris for Ávila late in September 1920, where he stayed with his sister Susana. It is pleasant to learn in a letter to Strong (18 October 1920) how there, among Susana’s stepgrandchildren, Santayana manufactured and painted dolls for the children’s toy theatre, which he managed for them, and how he enjoyed the enterprise more than anyone. This reveals a side of Santayana not commonly known but occasionally glimpsed in the letters. As usual during these stays in Ávila, family life eventually overwhelmed Santayana’s efforts to progress in his writing projects, and he left Ávila for stays in Toledo and Madrid. He enjoyed his time in these cities, but he doubted that, afterward, he would ever again return to Spain. William G. Holzberger
Acknowledgments This comprehensive edition of Santayana’s personal and professional correspondence has been over thirty years in the making, and a great number of persons in many different walks of life have contributed to it. It was begun by Daniel Cory in the late 1960s as a two-volume sequel to his 1955 Scribner’s edition of two hundred ninety-six letters by Santayana. I began collaborating with Cory on the project in 1971. After his sudden death by heart attack on 16 June 1972, I worked on the letters with the assistance of his widow, Mrs. Margot Cory, who was his successor as the Santayana literary executor. I continued to work on the preparation of a comprehensive edition of Santayana’s letters until I joined the project to produce a multi-volume critical edition of Santayana’s works headed by Herman J. Saatkamp Jr., General Editor. As textual editor of The Works of George Santayana it was necessary to deflect my attention substantially from the letters in order to help prepare the first four volumes of the edition for publication.1 In 1988 Professor Saatkamp and I decided to incorporate the letters into the comprehensive edition of Santayana’s writings as the fifth volume, and work on the letters resumed. At that time, however, the staff of the Santayana Edition was concentrating on preparation of the text of Volume IV, Santayana’s novel, The Last Puritan, and the focus of attention and principal resources had to be directed toward completion of work on that volume, which was published in 1994. Since publication of the novel, however, the focus of the editorial staff has been on completion of the letters volume. Included in the host of persons who have, over an exceptionally long period of time, contributed in many different ways to this large and complicated project are both private individuals as well as representatives of libraries and other institutions. Many of these persons no longer occupy the positions they did when they contributed to this project, and others are no longer alive. While it is impossible to acknowledge here everyone who helped make this edition of Santayana’s letters a reality, we wish at least to mention those persons and institutions whose contributions were absolutely vital to the successful completion of the project. Foremost, perhaps, among these individuals is the late Margot Cory. Margaret Degen Batten Cory was born in England on 27 November 1900
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and, after many years’ residence in Italy, died in England on 30 March 1995. As the Santayana literary executrix and heir to her late husband’s ownership of Santayana’s literary properties, Margot Cory owned the copyright in Santayana’s letters. Not only did Mrs. Cory agree to the continuation of work on this edition after her husband’s death, but she aided and encouraged its realization in many significant ways. In the early stages she made typewritten transcriptions of hundreds of letters, both to her husband and to others. Indeed, many letters to various individuals could not have been included had not Mrs. Cory, in an age before photocopying machines, first made handwritten copies of letters lent to her husband which she later recopied on the typewriter. Mrs. Cory’s interest in this project was extremely keen, and it is our deep regret that she did not have the satisfaction of seeing the letters volume published during her lifetime. The names of private persons who possess letters by George Santayana are given in the list of Manuscript Locations, and we are very grateful to these individuals for providing, often as gifts, photocopies of their letters. I wish to thank especially those who also contributed valuable information and who aided this project in other ways as well. Foremost is Richard Colton Lyon. Not only has Professor Lyon supplied copies of his own substantial and valuable correspondence, but he has been of great assistance in locating other letters. It was through the kind cooperation of Professor Lyon that I learned the whereabouts of the late Mrs. David M. Little, formerly Mrs. George Sturgis, the wife of Santayana’s nephew. With help from Professor Lyon, Mrs. Little provided copies of letters that Santayana had written to her former husband, who had for many years served as Santayana’s financial manager. Mrs. Little, before her death on 17 February 1976, was of unique service to this project by supplying information about the Sturgis family, and a great many footnotes to the letters are the result of information that she provided. Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis Little was devoted to “Uncle George” both during and after his lifetime in a way that might be expected of few nieces by marriage. Mrs. Little’s son, Robert Sturgis, a Boston architect, is also warmly thanked for permitting inclusion of his letters from his granduncle, for arranging for the deposit of Santayana’s letters in the Sturgis Family Papers in Harvard’s Houghton Library, and for his interest in the comprehensive edition of Santayana’s writings and his continued helpfulness to the editors. The late Dr. Corliss Lamont, a distinguished humanist and author and a life-long admirer of Santayana, was, over the years, a constant friend to
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this project. His direct financial aid to the Santayana Edition, together with his concern and assistance with various problems, were always much appreciated. The extensive collection of Santayana manuscripts and other materials in Columbia University’s Butler Library constitute Dr. Lamont’s gift to Santayana scholarship. Other private owners who have been particularly helpful include Mr. Guy Murchie Jr., whose glosses on the letters to his father have provided information for footnotes to those letters. Professors Justus Buchler and Peter Viereck also supplied helpful information about their letters from Santayana. Several individuals have personally supported this project with generous financial gifts, professional advice, and scholarly research. These include Morris Grossman, Professor Emeritus, Fairfield University; John Lachs, Centennial Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University; Emil Ogden, Ogden Resources Corporation, College Station, Texas; John McCormick, Professor Emeritus, Rutgers University; Henny Wenkart, Professor and Editor, New York City; and Excmo. Sr. D. Francisco Javier Jiménez-Ugarte Hernandez, Spanish Ambassador to Greece, who helped arrange the grant from the Comité Conjunto Hispano-Norteamericana. Santayana Edition Board members who have continuously assisted the project in many and various ways are Willard Arnett, Hugh Dawson, Morris Grossman, Angus Kerr-Lawson, John Lachs, Richard C. Lyon, Douglas MacDonald, John Michelsen, Andrew Reck, Beth J. Singer, Timothy Sprigge, and Henny Wenkart. Many learned and distinguished scholars have contributed directly to the making of this edition. Among my Bucknell colleagues are several who have provided help with editorial tasks. Perhaps our greatest debt is due Professor Mills Fox Edgerton Jr., who has given most generously of his time, energy, and thoroughgoing knowledge of Romance languages. Not only has he translated the Spanish letters to José and Isabel Sastre, and provided numerous translations of words and phrases, but he has searched for Santayana letters during his travels through Spain. On one occasion he acted as my emissary to Santayana’s grandnephew, the late Don Eduardo Sastre Martín, of Madrid and Ávila, in an effort to learn the whereabouts of any Santayana manuscripts or other materials extant in Spain. We are grateful to Professor James M. Heath of the Bucknell Classics Department, who has continually and unstintingly given of his time and specialized knowledge in assisting the editors with the transcribing and translating of Greek and Latin words and phrases and the tracing to their origins of quotations in these ancient languages. Mark W. Padilla, Associate Professor of Classics and Associate Dean of the College
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of Arts and Sciences, has also helped with translations of Latin words and phrases. Professor John Gale of the Modern Languages and Linguistics Department has rendered much the same sort of assistance with French words and phrases, and Professor Marianna M. Archambault and her husband, Professor Paul Archambault of Syracuse University, have also been helpful with questions relating to the French and Italian languages. A friend and colleague in the Bucknell English Department, Professor James F. Carens, member of the Harvard class of 1949, has helped in a variety of ways: by discussing the edition with me, making valuable suggestions based upon his own experience as an editor of letters, by serving as a guide to and about Harvard University, and by reading drafts of the Introduction to this volume and making suggestions for revision that I not only adopted but believe have significantly improved the quality of the Introduction. Peter Hinks, Associate Editor with the Frederick Douglass Papers, Yale University, collated letters at the Beinecke Library. English Department chairmen who have aided in important ways are Harry R. Garvin, the late John W. Tilton, Michael D. Payne, Dennis Baumwoll, and John Rickard. Bucknell University officers who have supported this project by supplying funds for materials and travel, allowing me released time from teaching duties, and providing office space, equipment, and supplies specifically for work on the letters are Wendell I. Smith, former Provost, Larry Shinn, former Vice President for Academic Affairs, Daniel Little, current Vice President for Academic Affairs, Eugenia P. Gerdes, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and former Associate Deans Barbara A. Shailor and S. Jackson Hill. To all of these colleagues I extend deep and sincere gratitude. Texas A&M University officers and faculty who supported our work over many years include John J. McDermott, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, who directed the project during the transition from Texas to Indiana; Woodrow Jones, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts; Ben M. Crouch, Executive Associate Dean; Charles Stoup, Senior Academic Business Administrator; Robin Smith, Professor and Head, Department of Philosophy and Humanities; Kenneth M. Price, Professor of English; Robert A. Calvert, Professor of History, and Scott Austin, Professor of Philosophy. Special thanks to Sherman D. Frost for his ongoing support of the work of the Edition. His help with computer-related questions, development of the Santayana Edition web page, and assistance with the physical reloca-
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tion of the project have been a significant contribution to our progress toward publication of the letters. Since its move to Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), the Edition has had the unconditional support of the University and the School of Liberal Arts. In particular, we must acknowledge the diligent work of Marianne S. Wokeck, Editor, Joshua B. Garrison, Assistant Editor, Johanna E. Resler, and Kimberly A. O’Brien who have become completely involved with the final preparation of the letters for publication. Special thanks to the entire staff of the Dean’s office who have assisted with our day-to-day work since the decision to relocate. Noteworthy support has come from Gerald L. Bepko, Vice President for Long-Range Planning and Chancellor of IUPUI; William M. Plater, Executive Vice Chancellor and Dean of the Faculties; Mark Brenner, Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education; Curtis R. Simic, President, Indiana University Foundation; Nathan Houser, Director and General Editor, Peirce Edition Project; Paul R. Bippen, Dean, Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus; Janet Feldmann, Director, Library and Media Services, IUPU Columbus; and Steven J. Schmidt, University Library, IUPUI. An eminent textual scholar who has contributed to this edition in significant ways is G. Thomas Tanselle, Textual Editor of The Writings of Herman Melville (a critical edition in fifteen volumes) and a foremost authority on editorial scholarship. Professor Tanselle has been very helpful in responding to queries about editorial matters, and his writings on textual scholarship have served as a fundamental guide to the editors of the Santayana Edition. Thanks to David J. Nordloh for conducting the inspection of Book Two of the letters for the Committee on Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association of America, and to Robert H. Hirst, chair of this committee, for his guidance and support. Mr. Harold Kulungian has given me several useful hints and suggestions. He ascertained the correct date of Santayana’s letter to B. A. G. Fuller of 11 January 1905 (misdated in Cory’s 1955 edition as 1904). Hugh J. Dawson of the English Department of the University of San Francisco and a member of the Editorial Board of the Santayana Edition has been a valuable source of information on the location of letters and has made many other notable contributions to this project. His frequent travels and researches in Europe have resulted in the acquisition of copies of three letters to the late Professor Enrico Castelli, whom Professor Dawson interviewed at his home in Rome in 1976. Our thanks also to Professor R. W. B. Lewis, the
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distinguished biographer of Edith Wharton, and to Dr. Marion Mainwaring, a professional researcher, who attempted to locate additional letters to Santayana’s Harvard classmate William Morton Fullerton that—in addition to the four letters to Fullerton included in this edition— were believed to exist. I am very grateful to the late Richard Ellmann, the noted biographer and editor, Fellow of New College and Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature in Oxford University. During the sabbatical year I spent at Oxford working on the letters edition (1975–76), Professor Ellmann was particularly helpful in discussing the plan for the edition and making suggestions regarding every aspect of the project. Indeed, his edition of the letters of James Joyce, together with the edition of Oscar Wilde’s letters by Rupert Hart-Davis, were the earliest models for this edition of Santayana’s letters. A special note of thanks is due to Professor J. Albert Robbins of Indiana University, who served as Chairman of the Committee on Manuscript Holdings of the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association of America, in charge of gathering information for the updated edition of American Literary Manuscripts, an invaluable source of information regarding library manuscript holdings. Professor Robbins and his staff responded to my request, early in 1976, for additional information regarding the location of Santayana holograph letters in library collections, by undertaking a “hand search” of file data before their material was computerized sufficiently to make such a search less laborious. The result of their efforts was the locating and acquiring of a substantial number of letters, the existence of which had not previously been suspected. Yet another friend from the beginning is James Ballowe of Bradley University. An accomplished poet, critic, author, and a distinguished Santayana scholar and editor, Professor Ballowe is warmly acknowledged here for his continual interest in and encouragement of this project and for his willingness to be helpful in every way. We are grateful to the late Paul G. Kuntz, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Emory University, for the work he did in collating our transcriptions of Santayana’s letters to Mrs. Bernard Berenson against the originals in the Berensons’ Villa I Tatti (now owned by Harvard University) in Settignano, Italy. Special thanks are due individuals who sent copies or gave permission for their Santayana letters to be photocopied by the libraries in which they are held. These include Robert Lowell (Houghton Library, Harvard University); Robert Fitzgerald; Mrs. Ann P. Howgate (letters to her late
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husband, George Washburn Howgate, who, in 1938, became Santayana’s first biographer); Mrs. Christina M. Welch, daughter of John P. Marquand, and Mr. Carl D. Brandt (Houghton Library, Harvard University); Mrs. Arthur Davison Ficke (Beinecke Library, Yale University); Dr. Cecil Anrep, of Villa I Tatti, at Settignano, Italy, letters to Bernard and Mary Berenson; and Lino S. Lipinsky de Orlov. Max Schwartz, brother of the late Benjamin Schwartz, who, in 1936, with Justus Buchler, edited Obiter Scripta: Lectures, Essays and Reviews, searched through his brother’s papers in an effort to discover additional Santayana correspondence. Mrs. Max Eastman (Lilly Library, Indiana University); Horace M. Kallen (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City and the American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, Ohio); Lewis Mumford; Milton K. Munitz; and Paul Arthur Schilpp (founder and editor of The Library of Living Philosophers, the second volume of which was devoted to the philosophy of Santayana). Sidney Hook gave permission for the inclusion here of his Santayana letters published in The American Scholar (Winter 1976–77). George Knox helped locate the letters to Carl Sadakichi Hartmann (University of California, Riverside). Father Ceferino Santos Escudero, of the University of Madrid, who compiled a bibliography of Santayana’s writings, supplied copies of the two letters in Spanish to Miguel de Unamuno and J. L. Ochoa; the English translations of these letters were done for this edition by Mr. Henry C. Reed. I am particularly grateful to the late Spanish poet, Jorge Guillén, for permission to receive a copy of his letter from Santayana in the Houghton Library, and to Mary de Rachewilz, curator of the Ezra Pound Archive in Yale’s Beinecke Library, who allowed librarians to check our transcriptions of letters to her father against the original holograph letters before the Archive was officially opened. I wish also to thank Mme. de Rachewilz for her kindness and hospitality to my family and me during visits to Brunnenburg, at Tirolo di Merano, where, in the early stages of the letters edition, I conferred with Mrs. Cory on the project. I am grateful to the late Don Eduardo Sastre Martín, Santayana’s grandnephew, for the interviews in his home in Madrid that he gave to my colleague Professor Mills F. Edgerton Jr. and for his help in obtaining copies of letters in Spanish to his parents, José and Isabel Sastre. Thanks also to Pedro García Martín, Emilio Santos Sastre, and Ana Sastre Moyano, who provided copies of letters and postcards written to Santayana’s sister and brother-in-law and other members of the Sastre family. The late Mr. Hy Oppenheim, a retired lawyer and an avid student of Santayana’s writings,
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is remembered with thanks for his frequent informative communications and for his gifts of copies of Santayana’s works. Thanks, too, to Mr. David Wapinsky, a devoted student of Santayana’s writings, for sharing with us the fruits of his researches into the existence of undiscovered Santayana manuscript materials. Realization of a project of this magnitude would be impossible without the cooperation of a host of librarians, archivists, and technical members of the staffs of a great number of libraries. Many of the personnel who contributed remain anonymous to us. Still others were persons whose names we learned through our correspondence with them and their institutions twenty or thirty years ago. Doubtless many of these persons are no longer associated with the libraries with which they were once connected. For this reason, and because space is necessarily limited in an edition of this size, we are prevented from listing here the names of the scores of dedicated staff on whose conscientious and generous assistance this edition has been so utterly dependent. But I wish to express the profound thanks of the editors to each and every one of these colleagues. We must, however, acknowledge here individually a few persons upon whose cooperation and assistance this project has fundamentally depended. These are the principal librarians at libraries containing major collections of Santayana manuscript materials. Mr. Kenneth A. Lohf, Librarian for Rare Books and Manuscripts of the Butler Library at Columbia University, has had responsibility for the largest and most important collection of Santayana materials. Mr. Lohf and staff, including Bernard Crystal, Rudolph Ellenbogen, and Jean Ashton, have been a never-failing source of cooperation and assistance to the editors, for which we are very grateful. Harvard’s Houghton Library, as would be expected, is another treasure trove for Santayana scholars. I know that Daniel Cory counted the Librarian of the Houghton, Mr. William H. Bond, as a valued personal friend, and we deeply appreciate his kind assistance. Other persons at the Houghton who have been particularly helpful to us are Leslie A. Morris, Elizabeth A. Falsey, Rodney Dennis, Jennie Rathbun, Mrs. Richard B. Currier, and Ms. Deborah B. Kelley. The Charles Scribner’s Sons Archive, in the Princeton University Library, is a huge and invaluable collection of the correspondence of many prominent authors whose works have been published by the house of Scribner. The late Charles Scribner IV has the gratitude of scholars generally for continuing the policy of his company of preserving all correspondence with authors. I am personally in Mr. Scribner’s debt for his unfailingly kind
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attention to my questions and requests pertaining to publication by his company of Santayana’s writings, for permission to receive photocopies of letters from the Scribner Archive and to reproduce and publish them in this edition. Librarians at Princeton who so effectively assisted us in the acquisition of photocopies are Alexander P. Clark, Jean F. Preston, and Don C. Skemer, Curators of Manuscripts; Margaret M. Sherry, Archivist; and Mrs. Mardel Pacheco and Mrs. Michael Sherman of the Manuscripts Division. At the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia we wish to thank Michael Plunkett and Anne Freudenberg, Curators of Manuscripts, Adrienne Cannon, Special Collections, and assistants Elizabeth Ryall and Gregory A. Johnson. At the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin, Cathy Henderson, Barbara Smith-LaBorde, Mary M. Hirth, and June Moll, Librarians, have been particularly cooperative in aiding our work, as have Thomas F. Staley and Mr. F. W. Roberts, Directors of the Center, and staff including Sally Leach, David Farmer, and John R. Payne. Mr. Thomas M. Whitehead, Head of the Special Collections Department of the Samuel Paley Library at Temple University, was most cooperative in enabling us to acquire copies of the large collection of Santayana letters in the archive of the London publishing firm of Constable and Company, Ltd. Special thanks are also due to several librarians at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University for their continuous cooperation and valuable services over many years including, Ms. Dorothy Bridgewater, formerly Acting Head of the Reference Department; Ms. Carol Park of the Reference Department; Mr. Kenneth Nesheim, formerly Acting Curator, Collection of American Literature; Mr. Donald Gallup, Curator of American Literature; Mr. Peter Dzwonkowski, Assistant to the Curator, who very helpfully collated our transcriptions of Santayana’s letters to Ezra Pound against the originals in the thenunopened Pound Archive; and Mr. Robert O. Anthony, adviser to the Walter Lippmann Papers Collection. The Rockefeller Archive Center houses the majority of Santayana’s letters to Charles Augustus Strong (368). David Rockefeller, Alice Victor, Darwin Stapleton, and Thomas Rosenbaum were extremely generous in providing copies of these letters to the Edition on very short notice. Librarians of specialized collections who have been particularly helpful to us are Ms. Fanny Zelcer of the American Jewish Archives; Mr. James Lawton of the Boston Public Library; Mr. Monte Olenick of the Brooklyn Public Library; Mr. John C. Broderick, Chief, The Library of
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Congress; Mr. Andrew Berner and Ms. Susan Grant, the University Club Library, New York City; Doña Dolores Gomez Molleda, Director, CasaMuseo Unamuno, University of Salamanca, Spain; Mr. Ezekiel Lifschutz, Archivist, and Mr. Marek Web, Archives Department, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York City. Librarians of the Ellen Clarke Bertrand Library at Bucknell University have provided aid in several important ways, and I wish to thank especially Mr. George Jenks and Mrs. Ann de Klerk, former Directors of the Library who provided a room in the Library specifically for work on the letters edition. Other librarians of the Bertrand Library that must be acknowledged here for their special assistance are Mrs. Helena Rivoire, Head of Technical Services; Ms. Patricia J. Rom, Head of the Reference Department; and Mr. Ronald B. Daniels, Head of Public Services. I am also much obliged to the librarians and staff of the Bodleian Library and the English Faculty Library of Oxford University for allowing me the continued use of the resources of those fine institutions while working on the edition during my residence at Oxford from September 1975 to July 1976. We are very grateful to the institutions that have provided the financial support on which the completion of this project depended. First and foremost is the National Endowment for the Humanities. The award of a Research Fellowship for 1975–76 enabled me to devote a full year to getting the project underway. Since 1976 the Endowment has underwritten the comprehensive edition of Santayana’s Works, in which the letters edition is included. Officers and staff members to whom we are especially indebted for their indispensable support are James Herbert, Director, Division of Research Programs, Margot Backas, Michael Hall, George Lucas, Douglas Arnold, Stephen Veneziani, and Alice Hudgins. Other organizations that have contributed importantly to the completion of the letters edition are The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for granting a Fellowship for work on the letters edition to Daniel Cory in 1972; the American Council of Learned Societies for awarding me two separate grants for work on the project; and to the Committee on Scholarly Development of Bucknell University for the award of grants that allowed me to devote several summers to work on the letters edition. We wish also to acknowledge the student assistants who, over the many years of work on this collection of Santayana’s letters, have labored alongside the editors with much-appreciated dedication, performing tasks essential to the completion of this project. The first student editorial assistant to work on the letters project was Keith Washburn, a graduate student
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in English at Bucknell who helped during the initial stages in 1972. Mrs. Robin Hummel Kenner worked on the project from September 1972 until January 1978, beginning during her undergraduate years and continuing on after graduation. Mrs. Kenner, in a pre-computer era, made most of the original typewriter transcriptions of the letters. Kristine Dane worked on the project from July1991 through May 1997, beginning as an undergraduate and continuing to work on the project while pursuing graduate studies. Her contributions to the letters edition were many and various. The other Bucknell students who worked on this edition of Santayana’s letters are listed here in chronological order of their connection with the project, from earliest to latest: Laurie Russell, Karen Hoffnagle, Elizabeth Smith, Kathy Bittner, Afsaneh Bahar, Hugh Bailey, Roberta Visaggio, Jeanne Wiggers, Caroline Keller, Cherri Lee Smith, Beth Lynn Davis, Lori Fraind, Wendy Van Wyck, Michael Wardell, and Jennifer Beck. Let us thank here also Mrs. Ruth Snyder, formerly secretary to the Classics and History departments at Bucknell, who, in the mid-1980s, made our original typewritten transcriptions of the letters from Santayana to Scribner’s editor John Hall Wheelock of the period 1946–52 which had just then been made available. At Texas A&M University graduate assistants involved with the project include Karen Antell, Ann T. Butler, John Cavin, Matthew Caleb Flamm, Luis Guadaño, Kara Kellogg, Nakia S. Pope, Robert Renzetti, Wayne Riggs, Clay Davis Splawn, and James Dan Unger. Special thanks to Denise Johnston Barrychuck, Jodine Thomas, Lori Moore, Margaret B. Yergler, Anne Divita, and Connie Chavez, students and staff who worked with the Edition for extended periods of time. At the University of Tampa, special thanks are given to editorial assistants Shirley Cueto and John W. Jones, and to research assistants Austria M. Lavigne, Jodi Lerner, and Nina Mollica. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the persons with whom I have worked very closely for a long time on this edition of Santayana’s letters and whose collaboration has made possible its completion. First, I want to thank especially my friend and colleague of many years, the General Editor of The Works of George Santayana and Associate Editor of this edition of the letters, Herman J. Saatkamp Jr., with whom I have had the pleasure of coediting the four earlier volumes of the Critical Edition. Not only has Professor Saatkamp been responsible for overseeing and directing all phases of the Works edition, including this volume of letters, but in his frequent travels through this country and indeed all over the world he
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has sought everywhere and frequently found previously unknown or unlocated Santayana correspondence. During those travels he has also spent countless hours in numerous libraries making sight collations of our transcriptions (taken from Xerox copies of Santayana’s handwritten letters) against the original holograph letters. This edition of Santayana’s correspondence owes a very great deal to the boundless energy and enthusiasm for Santayana’s writings that Professor Saatkamp has brought to it, and I am sure that, like me, Santayanans everywhere are very grateful to him. Another person who made a very significant contribution to this letters edition is Donna Hanna-Calvert, who was for several years the Associate Editor of The Works of George Santayana at the Texas A&M University headquarters of the project. Ms. Hanna-Calvert was always a most astute, congenial, and helpful colleague, and I am indebted to her both for her assistance with the letters project as well as for her collaboration on earlier volumes of the edition. I owe her much for making my working visits to the editorial offices at Texas A&M very pleasant, comfortable, efficient, and productive. To the current Associate Editor of The Works of George Santayana (and also of this edition of the letters specifically), Kristine W. Frost, this letters volume and I are very heavily indebted. Ms. Frost has had the responsibility of coordinating and executing the multiple tasks of preparing the text of the letters edition for publication. She has assisted the General Editor and me in every conceivable aspect of the preparation of this letters edition while simultaneously organizing and carrying out collation schedules for future volumes of the Works edition that are currently in preparation, and directly supervising the activities of our student helpers and other editorial assistants. I wish also to express here to Kristine Frost what I know all of us on the edition especially appreciate in working with her: I mean her invariably equable temperament, her unshakable good nature. Working with her is always a pleasure. I want to thank especially my wife, Annegret, for her many years of service to this letters edition (as well as to earlier volumes of The Works of George Santayana) as editorial assistant. She has supported my work on this project in every conceivable way. The help and companionship she provided on the numerous and extensive travels that this work has entailed often transformed difficulty, inconvenience, and hard labor into achievement and adventure. I am grateful to her for all the effort, encourage-
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ment, and patience that she has contributed to the completion of this enterprise. Our other editorial assistant on the letters edition, Brenda Bridges, at Texas A&M, also richly deserves recognition here and the gratitude of the editors for effectively carrying out many important and demanding tasks, including researching the information for much of the footnote annotation to the letters. Thanks to Ms. Bridges’s astuteness and unflagging perseverance, the extensive and exceptionally valuable collection of letters by Santayana to Charles Augustus Strong—long believed lost or destroyed—were located and copies acquired for this edition. Therefore, to all these kind, cooperative, expert, and industrious persons and magnanimous institutions that have contributed so materially and indispensably to the production of this edition of Santayana’s letters, I extend my deep gratitude. William G. Holzberger Professor of English Emeritus Bucknell University 1 Volumes published to date: I Persons and Places: Fragments of Autobiography (1986); II The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory (1988); III Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1989); IV The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (1994).
Introduction William G. Holzberger George Santayana (1863–1952) was one of the most learned and cultivated men of his time. Born in Spain and educated in America, he taught philosophy at Harvard University for twenty-two years before returning permanently to Europe at age forty-eight to devote himself exclusively to writing. He knew several languages, including Latin and Greek. Besides his mastery of English, he was at home in Spanish and French (though he modestly down-played his knowledge of those languages). As a young man, Santayana studied Italian in order to read Dante, Cavalcanti, Michelangelo, and other Italian Platonizing poets in their own language; and, in later life, as a result of his long residence in Rome, he acquired facility in speaking Italian.1 While a graduate student in Germany during 1886–88, Santayana lived with Harvard friends in an English-speaking boardinghouse in Berlin, thereby missing an opportunity to learn to speak German properly. However, he could read the original versions of German literary and philosophical works. He also knew the world, having lived for protracted periods in Spain, America, Germany, England, France, and Italy. A true cosmopolitan, Santayana nevertheless always regarded himself as a Spaniard and kept his Spanish passport current. He possessed many talents and had a multifaceted personality, and each of those facets is reflected vividly in his letters. World famous as a philosopher, he was also a poet, essayist, dramatist, literary critic, autobiographer, and author of a best-selling novel. The numerous letters referring to The Last Puritan, his novel begun in 1889 and completed over a period of forty-five years on 31 August 1934,2 describe the way in which a modest story of college life evolved into a major study of American culture and modern civilization. The letters incorporate a thoroughgoing statement of Santayana’s own critical interpretation of The Last Puritan. Santayana’s letters represent the full range of his interests, knowledge, and achievements, and students of English prose style will encounter in them superb examples of epistolary writing. They are of supreme value to the biographer. Some letters are important for establishing dates of sig-
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nificant events in Santayana’s life and career. For instance, the 13 October 1933 letter to Daniel Cory describes Santayana’s discovery of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and the similarity of his own theory of essences to Heidegger’s ontology. Other letters illuminate Santayana’s philosophical system. The 1 March 1949 letter to Richard C. Lyon is an excellent example of the “philosophical” letters. In it Santayana states his views on matter, idea, the self, intuition, and other perennial philosophical issues, relative to the views of philosophers such as Plato, Descartes, Kant, Berkeley, Fichte, Kierkegaard, Bergson, and Russell. The second paragraph of the 21 September 1917 letter to Charles Augustus Strong constitutes a succinct and very clear expression of Santayana’s controversial theory of essences; and the huge collection of Santayana’s letters to Strong is in itself a treasure-trove of revelations of the development of Santayana’s philosophical system.3 In fact, we find in Santayana’s letters not only a distillation of his philosophy but also a multitude of new perspectives on the published work. The responses to his correspondents are filled with spontaneous comments on and restatements of his fundamental philosophical ideas and principles. Because Santayana’s philosophy was not for him a thing apart, but rather the foundation of his existence, the letters indicate the ways in which his entire life was permeated and directed by that philosophy. Essential to Santayana’s position is the Greek ideal of the “life of reason,” a conception of the good life as requiring a continual commitment to the pursuit of self-knowledge, discipline, and an unromantic determination to harmonize rather than indulge the passions. It is the ideal of sophrosune or moderation venerated by classical philosophers like Aristotle and despised by modern ones like Bertrand Russell. The fullest expression of Santayana’s philosophical system, which we may observe developing in his letters, is in the four volumes of Realms of Being, published over a period of fourteen years (1927 to 1940). Santayana devotes a volume to each of the four realms: essence, matter, truth, and spirit. These realms are not so much regions or elements of being as they are kinds or representations thereof. Santayana’s formulation of the realm of essence caused him, in the view of several of his critics, to be allied with Platonic idealism; however, Santayana’s essences, unlike those of Plato, are not the ultimate reality. For Santayana essences are merely an infinite number of real though non-existent passive forms. The unconscious and unformed realm of matter is the sole source of power and existence. In Santayana’s view, the embodiment of essences by matter results in the substantial physical world. Unlike Plato, for whom spirit or consciousness exists eternally and independently of matter, Santayana conceived of spir-
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it as conscious self-awareness generated by matter when the vital physical organism (or psyche, in Santayana’s terms) achieves a certain level of organization, as in a human being. Spirit, for Santayana, reluctantly shares the career of the body that has generated it. If it were free to do so, spirit would range impartially over the spectacle of existence. But, because of its ineluctable identification with the career of a specific individual organism, spirit is pulled away from its natural tendency to disinterested observation by the necessity of attending to the requirements of the organism to which it is bound. In Santayana’s letters we see dramatic representations of the predicament of the philosopher whose spirit, in its effort to seek and comprehend the truth of things, necessarily strives to transcend the confinements and limitations of particular perspectives, personal or national allegiances, or historical contexts and observe things impartially under the aspect of eternity. But, because the philosopher is nevertheless an individual and mortal person, subject to the conditions of his environment and physical organism, he must, however reluctantly, be called back to the never permanently escapable present personal, social, political, material reality. That Santayana was keenly aware of this dichotomy is made perfectly clear in his published writings, in his personal life, and in his letters. His striving for a transcendental perspective devoid of personal, national, or ideological bias is seen in his perennial effort to stand aloof from social, political, or professional organizations that would demand of him an allegiance to their particular agendas and make impossible, even intermittently, the perspective of eternity. At the same time, we can see his recognition of the limitations and obligations placed upon every human individual by one’s nationality, genetic inheritance, and psychological conditioning. This recognition is reflected in the fact that Santayana always identified himself as a Spanish citizen, and (despite the ultimately atheistic character of his philosophical principles) a Roman Catholic. It is reflected also in the record of loyalty and devotion to family and friends that we observe in the letters. Perhaps the greatest problem for Santayana, as manifested in the letters, was the life-long effort of the philosopher to reconcile his inclination to live in the eternal with the necessity of the individual human being to live in the here and now. A succinct statement of his positions on religion, science, and poetry is found in the 31 August 1951 letter to Ira D. Cardiff. In that letter Santayana attempts to explain his unbifurcated view of religion and naturalism, and he indicts positivism for unimaginativeness. Because Santayana’s philosophy is one of materialism and naturalism, wherein
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everything—including spirit or consciousness—has a material basis, there can be no personal immortality of the kind traditionally conceived of by religion. The individual spirit is contingent upon the continued existence of the physical organism or psyche that generated it. At the dissolution of that organism in death, the spirit, as a consequence of that disorganization of matter, is annihilated. Except, therefore, where consciousness is temporarily allied to some physical organism, nature is unconscious and indifferent to human interests. There are, therefore, no supernatural beings, no disembodied spirits, no gods. Thus religion does not describe an actual otherworldly realm but rather only this world idealized and represented mythopoetically. For Santayana religion—and even science—is a kind of poetry. Other letters tell us much about Santayana’s literary method and the achievement of his apparently effortless style. We learn from many letters that the effect of spontaneous flow in his published writing is actually the result of a method involving several drafts and much revision leading to the finished work. In the letter of 13 December 1949 to Rosamond Thomas (Sturgis) Little, he quotes the compositional principle of Boileau as representing his own method: “Polish it continually, and repolish it; add occasionally, and delete often.”4 He frequently had two or three compositions going forward simultaneously, moving from one to another as inspiration and interest guided him. Sometimes he used material pruned from one project for the substance of another (for example, the incorporation of the surplus of his Spinoza lecture, “Ultimate Religion,” in his book, The Realm of Spirit, as described in the 14 May 1932 letter to Cory). And, apropos of Cory, the detailed criticisms that Santayana makes of the drafts of essays that Cory sent to him for comment constitute a sort of concise manual for writers, and they reveal Santayana’s unremitting quest, through continuous review and revision, for perfection of diction and form in his own writing. Some letters (for instance, that to the literary scholar and critic William Bysshe Stein of 1 September 1949) reveal that Santayana conceived of the practice of literary criticism as stating the critic’s personal taste rather than making objective evaluations. The letters also document Santayana’s subordination of aesthetics to ethics and his view of the relativism of the latter. Still other letters, like the 15 March 1946 one to Rosamond Sturgis (later Mrs. Little), express Santayana’s traditionalist views on education and American education in particular. In addition to illuminating his ideas, views, and accomplishments as thinker and writer, Santayana’s let-
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ters are especially important in revealing the personal side of the famous author. Nowhere else—not even in his autobiography, Persons and Places— does he express so directly and succinctly his fundamental attitudes and convictions or reveal more intimately the characteristics of his complex personality. Each reader of the letters doubtless will relish in them what he or she is most interested in knowing about Santayana’s life and thought; and many persons will use this edition to consult specific letters as these pertain to certain ideas, persons, or historical events. But anyone who reads extensively in this collection will see emerge the distinctive personality of the writer, in a kind of verbal self-portrait. There are, to be sure, other documents available in which a portrait of Santayana may appear, including the many fine articles and books about him, especially John McCormick’s recent critical biography and Santayana’s inimitable autobiography.5 These descriptions of Santayana’s personality and experience are extremely valuable in fleshing out our image of him as a person and writer. Private letters usually represent the most spontaneous and unguarded form of written expression,6 and, by focussing on Santayana’s letters as illustrative of their author’s personality and character, we discover in them a concentrated and revealing self-portrait. This verbal selfportrait, produced partly by unconscious revelations, contributes significantly to our conception of the sort of individual that Santayana was and, therefore, to our understanding of his writings. That Santayana was a precocious genius is evident from even a cursory reading of his early letters. Among the most interesting are those written in 1886 to his Harvard classmate, Henry Ward Abbot, while Santayana was pursuing graduate studies in philosophy in Germany. The maturity of view, intellectual acuteness, and power of expression in these letters are remarkable. Santayana’s perennial emphasis on the crucial importance of the Socratic principle of self-knowledge and the ethical doctrine of moral relativism7 characteristic of his most mature writings are nowhere more perfectly expressed than in the 6 October 1886 letter to Abbot written from Berlin when Santayana was not quite twenty-three years old. In response to Abbot’s indecision about going into business—as his family evidently wanted—or pursuing instead some other career, Santayana wrote: To do right is to know what you want. Now when you are dissatisfied with yourself, it’s because you are after something you don’t want. What objects are you proposing to
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yourself? are they the objects you really value? If they are not, you are cheating yourself. I don’t mean that if you chose to pursue the objects you most value, you would attain them; of course not. Your experience will tell you that. … but success in getting after much labour what you really don’t care for is the bitterest and most ridiculous failure. Santayana had several other close friends among his Harvard classmates, and the fact that he was socially active during his undergraduate years (or at least as active as his very modest means would permit) is now well known. He had drawn cartoons for and served on the editorial board of the Harvard Lampoon; he was president of the Philosophical Club and took part in Hasty Pudding Club theatricals. But Santayana seems always to have been a rather formal person who resented what he considered undue familiarity. In the 21 August 1882 letter to John Galen Howard, written following their graduation from the Boston Public Latin School, Santayana expressed his unwillingness to be patronized even by the venerable headmaster, Dr. Moses Merrill: … I hope he has not had the impudence of addressing all the fellows by their first names, as he has done me. If he supposed I would be flattered by being treated with intimacy by him, he was greatly mistaken. If I did not deem it unwise to forfeit anyone’s good opinion merely for the pleasure of speaking out one’s mind plainly, I should have answered him and addressed him as “my dear Moses.” Forty-six years later, on 4 May 1928, Santayana wrote to his nephew and business manager, George Sturgis, that he had received a letter from a William C. Sturgis (a member of the prominent Boston family to which Santayana’s mother’s first husband had belonged) of whom Santayana had never heard: He calls me “George”, but I don’t know who he can be. Will you enlighten me? … When you reply please tell me whether he is habitually called William, Will, Willy, Billy, or Bill, so that I may live up to our relationship. Santayana was, of course, on a first-name basis with members of his immediate family, addressing his sister Susan as “Dear Susie,” and he was not so stiff as not to be on a first-name basis with other persons as well. In
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letters to the intimate friends of his youth—for instance, his Harvard classmates—he addressed Henry Ward Abbot, Boylston Adams Beal, and Robert Burnside Potter as “Harry,” “Boylston,” or “Bob.” In later letters written to close male friends usually the person is addressed by the last name only, in the manner more common among men in an earlier time than it is today. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Horace Meyer Kallen, and Logan Pearsall Smith are addressed as “Dickinson,” “Kallen,” or “Smith.” The Russell brothers ( John Francis Stanley, the second Earl Russell, and his younger brother, Bertrand) are each addressed simply as “Dear Russell.” Daniel Cory was undoubtedly Santayana’s closest friend during the last twenty-five years of his life, yet he is never addressed in any of the hundreds of pieces of correspondence that Santayana wrote to him in any way but as “Dear Cory.”8 In writing or speaking about Santayana, Cory referred to him simply as “Santayana” (though in conversation he sometimes referred to him as “the Master,” in the manner of Henry James’s disciples and scholars). In Santayana: The Later Years, Cory describes his arrival at Santayana’s bedside in Rome, shortly before the latter’s death, saying, “I’m here, Santayana,” so we may assume that once their friendship had been established Cory addressed his elderly friend simply as “Santayana.”9 (We do know that in Santayana’s last years his relationship with the young poet, Robert Lowell, became so friendly that Lowell, thanking Santayana for helping him financially, humorously addressed him in one letter as “My dear Uncle.”)10 Santayana’s editors at Constable and Scribner’s—Otto Kyllmann and John Hall Wheelock, respectively—are always addressed as Mr. Kyllmann and Mr. Wheelock, as is Mr. Scribner when Santayana writes directly to the head of the New York publishing house. Even close women friends of many years—like Nancy Saunders Toy, Elizabeth Stephens Fish Potter, and Mary Williams Winslow—are addressed in the letters as “Mrs. Toy,” “Mrs. Potter,” or “Mrs. Winslow.” The impression of Santayana as an essentially formal man is reinforced by the language of his letters, in which there is a notable absence of slang or obscenity. This is so much the case that one is a little startled to encounter in a few letters even such mild imprecations as “damn” or “damned.” As in his published writings, Santayana’s diction in the letters might be described the way critics have characterized that of Hawthorne and Henry James: “formal but alive.” Santayana’s formal style, however, in no way inhibited the expression of his formidable wit. There is little or no broad humor in Santayana’s let-
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ters, not much in the way of comedy or fun (except perhaps for the 31 August 1887 “Rabelaisian” letter to William Morton Fullerton and the 25 November and 10 December 1904 “Arabian Nights” letters to Mary Whitall Smith Berenson), but there is plenty of wit: dry, ironical commentary that is often paradoxical and ingenious and invariably in the service of some point that he is making. A typical example of Santayana’s irony and wit is found in the letter of 2 April 1923 to George Sturgis, in which Santayana comments on the recent appearance of the Scribner’s edition of his Poems: … a copy Scribner has sent me looks so mean and poverty-stricken that I am afraid they are doing it on the cheap, in order to make money. Money out of poems! I received $1.87 for the first two editions, and was thankful, the publisher having failed in the interval, as was to be expected.11 In another letter to George Sturgis two years later, Santayana comments on “the instability of the female will,” describing his own present dependence upon the decisions of several women friends and relatives as to where and when he may be traveling. He mentions that his friend Charles Augustus Strong is enjoying the electric heating that Strong’s daughter, Margaret, had installed in her father’s Paris apartment against his will, and writes: … probably I shall go to a hotel [instead of joining Strong in the Avenue de l’Observatoire apartment], as Margaret herself may turn up at any moment—another case of La donna è mobile, especially with an auto-mobile, if you will excuse an Italian pun. For Margaret has one of her own much better than her father’s.12 In the summer of 1928 Santayana’s friend, the Yale English professor and popular literary critic William Lyon Phelps, and his wife were planning a trip to Spain, about which Santayana wrote: I admire your courage and that of Mrs. Phelps in going to Madrid in August. We might apply to it a story Strong likes to tell about a delegate’s description of the summer breezes of Chicago: that not content with coming out of the very mouth of hell, they had first blown over the State of Texas. For Texas read the plains of La Mancha, and you will know what awaits you.13
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A final example of the mordant irony of which Santayana was capable is in the 27 March 1939 letter to George Sturgis regarding Bertrand Russell, who, Santayana believed, like Russell’s elder brother, had wasted his genius through personal and political folly: Not that his philosophy would have been sound: he is a born heretic or genial madman, like John Knox or Giordano Bruno: yet he is preternaturally intelligent, penetrating, and radical; so that the more wrong he is the clearer he makes the wrongness of his position; and what more can you expect a philosopher to prove except that the views he has adopted are radically and eternally impossible? If every philosopher had done that in the past, we should now be almost out of the wood. As we encounter Santayana’s wit in the letters, we may occasionally find ourselves laughing out loud, but more often our amused response is of a quieter kind. Santayana’s sense of humor—or, more precisely, his witty and ironic cast of mind—is much akin to that of Henry James (with whom he shares not only a formal style but also other qualities and characteristics)14 and not at all like that of Mark Twain. Concomitant with Santayana’s ironical view of the world was his own capacity for laughter. He likened himself to Democritus, “the laughing philosopher,” and said that his friends told him that he laughed too much. Yet most of the photographs of Santayana depict him as very grim. He did not like being photographed and thought the typical grinning snapshot a very inaccurate representation of someone. Thus, almost all of the extant photos of Santayana—with the exception of a group taken in the Blue Sisters’ nursing-home in Rome toward the end of his life—portray him as an unsmiling and somber man. The same is true of the drawings made from photographs to illustrate the dust jackets of several of his books, one of which, he complained to Scribner’s, made him look “cross-eyed and ferocious.”15 These somber or hostile-looking pictures, combined with his political conservatism and reputation for avoiding society, have contributed to a widespread notion that Santayana was remote and forbidding; “cold-blooded” is a term sometimes applied to him. It is true that the Santayana represented in the letters is unsentimental and toughminded, and his love of solitude and his philosophic resignation give the impression that he was more indifferent and detached from human life and feeling than are most people. But the letters provide considerable evidence that Santayana was capable of profound emotional attachments.
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So far as we know, Santayana never had a romantic relationship with a woman, though there were several women with whom he enjoyed close friendship and lifelong correspondence. Mrs. Toy, Mrs. Potter, and Mrs. Winslow fit this description. And, until her death in 1928, Santayana’s elder half sister Susan was, in complex ways, the beloved woman in his life. However, Santayana—like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche—saw women as fundamentally different from men, as is illustrated by a 17 February 1887 letter to Henry Ward Abbot: A woman, for example, is despised in so far as she is a human individual competing with others for life, especially because her methods of competing are small and mean; but she is loved and even worshiped as the complement of man, as something filling out his life without sharing his qualities. Feminists, with some justification, condemn Santayana as a sexist who characterized women as inferior. Santayana believed that, compared to men, women are generally not as intelligent, interesting, or physically fine; men are the superior gender. This exaltation of the masculine may be derived from Santayana’s own sexual nature. From his letters, from the events of The Last Puritan and his remarks about the novel in the letters, and from the conversation about A. E. Housman reported by Cory,16 it seems clear that Santayana’s sexual orientation was not conventional. The early letters to his Harvard classmate, Henry Ward Abbot, are particularly significant in this regard. On 23 April 1887 Santayana wrote: … I hate my own arrogance and would worship the man who should knock it out of me. Says a Spanish song: I am searching land & ocean For the man that I might love, And whenever my heart finds him Then he will have found his slave. Man or thing—it makes no difference—but heaven grant it be no woman. … Of course all girls aren’t foolish—some are charming and I am tender on two or three myself; but if I ever humbug a woman into marrying me, it will be a piece of selfishness on my part, depend upon it, and not a conquest on hers. The comments of the young Santayana in this letter about women and marriage are common in the banter of young men, but the general tone
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here is not heterosexual, and, for this reason and in light of Santayana’s other writings, we are disinclined to take seriously the statement about his being “tender” on two or three girls. A year earlier, in the spring of 1886 (his senior year at Harvard), Santayana had met the tall, athletic, good-looking, cultivated, and supremely self-confident Earl Russell and he evidently fell in love with the young aristocrat. His letters to Abbot of 1887 reveal his complete infatuation: … Russell is the ablest man, all round, that I have ever met. You have no idea what a splendid creature he is, no more had I till I had seen a great deal of him. He isn’t good, that is he is completely selfish and rather cruel, although I fancy I made too much of his heartlessness at first. But then both practically and intellectually he is really brilliant. … I know I am making a fool of myself in writing about him. … but I send a note of his so that you may judge for yourself and also have some idea of the men I am seeing here. Pass the note on to Herbert Lyman and let him keep it or send it back to me. I am going tomorrow to stay with Russell again, for he is laid up and wants company. … Don’t tell this round, I beg of you, but I tell you because I am telling you everything to-day. I make an exception of Herbert, because I should have to tell him sooner or later, and he won’t chuckle over it as if it were a joke merely, which it isn’t.17 In a letter to Abbot written a week later, Santayana reveals the abject character of his relationship with Russell: … what I call my “fall from grace and self-control” … is simply this. Russell has a way of treating people which is insufferably insolent and insulting. Never for a moment did I imagine I could allow anyone to treat me in such a way. But I find that instead of caring for my own dignity and independence … I find that I don’t care a rap for my interest in myself or my ways of doing things, but that I am quite willing to stand anything, however outrageous, that comes from a certain quarter. This is what has happened to me. I am a fool to say a word about it—especially when people think that I am talking about trifles. … don’t imagine I am referring to “country matters”.18
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The revelations of these letters to Abbot are franker expressions of Santayana’s willingness to abase himself and accept abuse from Russell than are found in Persons and Places, including the episode he relates there about accidentally pulling the young earl into the Thames and being violently abused verbally by him for clumsiness.19 And Santayana’s willingness to swallow his pride and suffer indignities from Russell seems to have been unending. In the autumn of 1923, when he was almost sixty and planning a trip to England to deliver the Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford, he wrote to Russell saying that he hoped there would be a chance to see him. Russell’s reply was: “Do as you like,” and Santayana responded as follows: If you leave it to me, I will certainly come [to Russell’s house in Hampshire]. I don’t believe that anything has really happened to alter our relations to one another which were always tacit and expressed in conduct rather than words. You now say more than you ever said to me, even in our young days, about being “attached to me”; you must have been, in some way which in spite of my cold-blooded psychology I don’t pretend to understand. In that case, why drop me now, when certainly there has been no change on my side except that involved in passing from twenty to sixty? Let me come, anyhow once, and we can judge better whether everything is as usual or whether the barrier you speak of—which certainly is not “Elizabeth” or her affairs—really exists. Shall it be next Tuesday, and if so, what train shall I take? Yours ever20 Santayana did visit Russell, who was indifferent, even frequently mistaking his name and calling him “Sargeaunt,” the name of another of Russell’s friends, a Latin master at Westminster.21 As in the cases of Henry James and A. E. Housman there is no evidence that Santayana was an active or practicing homosexual or that his youthful relationship with Russell (or anyone else, for that matter) was homosexual in a physical sense. Indeed, the Hamlet echo of his warning to Abbot not to construe his attachment to Russell as involving “country matters” might indicate that Santayana regarded his devotion as transcending the merely physical.22
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Only a deep emotional attachment could have enabled Santayana to continue for so many years to tolerate Russell’s unpleasantness and indifference; yet Santayana appears always to have been aware of Russell’s faults. This insuperable critical faculty doubtless sobered Santayana’s affections for other persons about whom he felt less strongly: he had no illusions about people. For instance, he appreciated his nephew, George Sturgis, for his able stewardship of his financial properties, as he had George’s father—Santayana’s half brother Robert—for performing the same service. He frequently closed letters to George Sturgis with “Yours affectionately,” and even signed one to him of 1927: “With much love.” But other letters reveal that he did not care for his nephew any more than he had for George’s father; he found both men lacking in sensitivity and sympathetic imagination.23 But the letters show that Santayana was genuinely affectionate toward several persons. He was very well disposed toward George Sturgis’s first wife, Rosamond, with whom he carried on a long correspondence. Santayana appreciated Rosamond’s thoughtfulness and kindness in sending him packages of food and clothing, after the war in Italy had ended and supplies in Rome remained short. He regularly signed his letters to her “Your affectionate Uncle George.” He was also very fond of George’s and Rosamond’s eldest son, Robert (“Bob”) Shaw Sturgis, who had visited him several times in Rome in 1944 when Bob was there in the U.S. Air Force. His letters to Bob after the war, when the latter was a Harvard undergraduate studying architecture (the field that Santayana had once thought seriously of making his profession), are full of unfeigned interest in the young man’s activities and plans. The grandfatherly affection that the octogenarian felt for his good-looking, intelligent, and artistic young grandnephew is unmistakable in both the letters Santayana wrote to Rosamond and those to Bob himself. If Santayana’s affection for young Bob Sturgis was grandfatherly, his feeling for the young Daniel Cory was fatherly. Santayana first met Cory in April 1927, when Cory was twenty-two and Santayana sixty-three, and a long, intimate friendship began. Cory, who first encountered Santayana’s writings at Columbia University, had left college before completing a degree and had gone to live and work in London. Impressed with an essay that the young man had written on his philosophy and sent to him, Santayana offered to pay Cory’s expenses for a visit to Rome. He was pleased by Cory’s critical acumen, his interest in and grasp of Santayana’s philosophy, and engaged the young man to assist him in
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arranging the manuscript of The Realm of Matter for publication. This was the beginning of a friendship and professional association that lasted for twenty-five years, until Santayana’s death in 1952. Initially, Santayana did not think of Cory’s position of literary assistant or secretary as becoming permanent.24 But Cory, while working for Santayana, made the acquaintance of Santayana’s friend, the American epistemologist Charles Augustus Strong, who also wanted someone to help him prepare his writings for publication, and Cory became Strong’s assistant or secretary as well. Both Strong and Santayana paid Cory a modest monthly allowance. This combined income enabled Cory to live separately, usually in England; but he spent protracted periods living near Strong, either in Paris or at Le Balze (“The Cliffs”), Strong’s villa at Fiesole, near Florence. Cory also made infrequent visits to Santayana in Rome, helping him with his writing projects. For the most part, during their long association, Cory lived far from Santayana, usually in another country, and sometimes several years passed without the two men seeing one another. Despite the separation, however, Santayana continued to send Cory his monthly allowance, with special supplements for medical bills, clothing, and travel. Though he never expected Cory’s dependency upon him to become permanent, Santayana eventually realized that it had and accepted responsibility for supporting Cory as long as he could do so. Before the mail between Italy and the United States was cut off by World War II, he arranged with Scribner’s for Cory to receive the royalties on his books, so that the latter might not be left without resources. In the beginning, Santayana’s appreciation of Daniel Cory was based largely upon Cory’s solid understanding and sincere advocacy of Santayana’s philosophy, as shown in the 21 May 1928 letter to Cory: … you understand the true inwardness of it, and your ways of expressing it are enough your own for me to feel sure that it is not a casual adoption of a technical theory, but a true participation in the Idea. Later, Santayana’s admiration and affection for Cory was increased by Cory’s considerable charm, his talent for reading aloud (a valuable skill in the revision of manuscripts and something that Santayana felt he himself could not do well), his enterprise in addressing himself to the task of propagating Santayana’s views by writing articles on his philosophy for publication in professional journals, and his representation of Santayana in communication with the editors of leading periodicals—such as T. S. Eliot
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of The Criterion and Henry Seidel Canby of The Saturday Review of Literature—about publication of Santayana’s writings in their magazines. He also believed that Cory was someone he could depend on in a personal emergency, someone who would assist him if he became seriously ill. And it was, indeed, Cory who traveled from England to Rome to be with Santayana during the final weeks of his life and who made the difficult arrangements for Santayana’s funeral and burial in the Campo Verano Cemetery in Rome.25 Despite his affection for Cory and his appreciation of Cory’s personal loyalty and devotion to his philosophy, Santayana did not hesitate to criticize him—both in letters to Cory and to others—on several counts: for being a spendthrift; lacking initiative; failing to complete independent literary projects that he had begun (such as Cory’s unfinished autobiographical novel, Michael ); repeating to him unpleasant things that C. A. Strong had said about him (Santayana), thereby exacerbating his always difficult relations with Strong;26 and for wasting “the best years of his life playing golf.”27 The affectionate side of Santayana revealed in the letters contrasts with the cold-bloodedness of which he has been accused (and of which he even accuses himself). This conception of Santayana—as lacking in human warmth and sympathy—may well derive, in part, from his political views and his tendency to perceive things sub specie aeternitatis. He was a true modern in terms of the bleakness of his outlook and in his chronic detachment. There is also something very Spanish in the essential starkness of his view of life. In 1917, during World War I, Santayana wrote a letter to Bertrand Russell that Russell quoted from in his autobiography to demonstrate Santayana’s lack of feeling: As for deaths and loss of capital, I don’t much care. The young men killed would grow older if they lived, and then they would be good for nothing; and after being good for nothing for a number of years they would die of catarrh or a bad kidney or the halter or old age—and would that be less horrible?28 This letter suggests that Santayana did not consider the anguish suffered by the families, sweethearts, and comrades of the soldiers killed in the war, or indeed the loss of life to the soldiers themselves. However it is evident from numerous other letters that Santayana wrote during the period 1914–18 that he was profoundly distressed by the terrible events of this war and especially by the appalling loss of life on all sides. The letters
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show, in fact, that he was so depressed by these events that he found it difficult to think or write. Twenty-seven years later, writing to Andrew J. Onderdonk on 20 January 1945, he was less discomfited by the horrific events of World War II: Perhaps the years since we last saw each other, and the many since we saw each other often—34!—have made me more inhuman than ever; but public and private tragedies move me now much less than they did. I think of all the empires reduced to filthy little heaps of ruins; of all the battles and sieges in the histories, and all the horrible fates of potentates, tyrants, patriots, and saints; and what now happens to us seems almost a matter of course. Santayana believed that, in order to understand the world, the observer must not be too closely attached to it or too actively engaged in it. The social activism of a Bertrand Russell or a Jean-Paul Sartre was anathema to him. His detachment could, on occasion—as in his comments on the two world wars—appear as sheer lack of interest in human well-being. In October 1928 Horace M. Kallen wrote asking Santayana to “sponsor” Kallen’s new book on “the Sacco and Vanzetti letters” or to join a committee that Kallen was forming to protest the way in which the case of the two Italian anarchists had been handled. In a 22 October 1928 letter Santayana refused Kallen’s request, making the following comment: I don’t know whether those men were condemned for what, morally, wasn’t a crime, or whether they were innocent altogether: in any case, it was a scandal to put off their execution so long, and then to execute them. It shows the weakness, confusion, and occasional cruelty of a democratic government: it is more merciful to the condemned, and more deterrent to others, to execute them at once, as do my friends the Bolsheviks and the Fascists. But that, I imagine, is not what your book is intended to prove. Santayana, somewhat chillingly, places the emphasis not upon the possibility that two innocent men were condemned and executed, but rather that they were not executed more quickly once the American court had pronounced them guilty. In several other letters he uniformly refuses requests to participate in public demonstrations to endorse or denounce either side of a particular moral or political issue.
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Santayana’s conservative politics—he described himself as a Tory29— sometimes caused him to take positions that seem mean-spirited. In 1940 Rosamond Sturgis was assisting a young working-class college student with his expenses. In a 10 October 1940 letter to her Santayana authorized Rosamond to have George Sturgis withdraw a hundred dollars from his account to be added to the fund for the student, but he included this comment: … to tell you the whole truth, I don’t like to give in charity to the deserving; it only encourages them to make greater demands on life, to strain, and to increase the half-educated proletariate [sic]; whereas the undeserving merely get a drink, are happy for half an hour, and no worse afterwards than they were before. However, it may be the American ideal to increase the half-educated proletariat until it includes everybody; but would that be a happy result? Again, the apparent callousness and cynicism of Santayana’s remarks in this letter are disconcerting: we wonder at the smug injustice of a social philosophy that accepts the accident of birth as the sole determinant of opportunity and privilege for some and denial and deprivation for others. Santayana frequently has been accused of anti-Semitism, and in several letters we do find unpalatable statements about Jews and Jewishness. On 12 August 1936 he wrote to George Sturgis that he was reconciled to the necessary transitoriness of things, that all conservatisms were doomed because nothing could be kept up permanently, and for example added: The Jews, for instance, aren’t in the least like Abraham or King Solomon: they are just sheenies. And in a 1 May 1938 letter to Mrs. Toy about Walter Lippmann, Sidney Hook, and Irwin Edman, he wrote: Are the Jews going to repent of being anti’s, for fear that soon there should be nothing left to be anti against? After all they have made themselves very comfortable in Christendom, and if nothing but an international proletariat remained, it would not offer them such brilliant careers as professors and prime minister and newspaper proprietors. Mrs. Toy’s response to this letter evidently recommended that Santayana avoid anti-Semitism, for in his 12 August 1938 letter to her he observed:
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I ought to love the Jews, as they seem to be my only friends intellectually, beginning with Edman—not to go back to Spinoza. These remarks of Santayana’s, though critical and contemptuous of what he perceived to be ancient and modern Jewish attitudes, did not prevent his appreciation of virtuous individual Jews. Ironically, Baruch Spinoza was Santayana’s acknowledged master, and there was no philosopher for whom he had greater respect. He appreciated the keen interest in his own philosophy taken by Morris Cohen and Irwin Edman, and he appears to have been fond of his former graduate assistant at Harvard, Horace M. Kallen, to whom, after his retirement from Harvard, he had given his doctoral cap and gown and to whom he wrote numerous warm, friendly letters,30 frequently complimenting Kallen on his publications. To George Sturgis on 31 January 1941 Santayana wrote that his doctor in Rome (Luigi Sabbatucci, who served as his physician from 1935 until Santayana’s death in 1952) had, like himself, never heard of lire miste (evidently a form of Italian wartime currency) “although he is a Jew, and a very nice person.” But Santayana’s most redeeming statement on the matter of racial prejudice is probably that found in his 23 September 1926 letter to John Jay Chapman, an American bigot who had offered Santayana the presidency of “The Aryan Society”: Against whom is the Aryan Society directed? Against the Arabians, the Jews, the Chinese, and the blameless Ethiopians? I confess that I don’t like the Jewish spirit, because it is worldly, seeing God in thrift and success, and I know nothing of the blacks; but the Arabs and the Chinese seem to me in some ways, apart from the costume, nearer to the Greeks than we are in Europe and America: they have taken the measure of life more sanely. Might it not turn out, then, that the Aryan Society, if it stood for the life of reason, was especially directed against the Aryans? Races, like nations, seem an unfortunate class of units to identify with moral ideas. If, therefore, Santayana’s comments in his letters and other writings are perceived by some readers as repugnantly anti-Semitic, others today— including a number of Jewish scholars—argue that such a view is an exaggeration and reject the charge that Santayana was truly anti-Semitic. At the very least, the quotation from the letter to Chapman indicates that he was not a racist.
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Charles Loeser, Santayana’s classmate at Harvard, was from a prosperous Jewish family. Santayana enjoyed Loeser’s company and admired his mastery of foreign languages and expert knowledge of art, which Santayana thought even greater than Bernard Berenson’s. The two young men traveled together and afterward remained friends for many years. The young Santayana also enjoyed the forays he made into Boston society, but most especially he relished the company of other sophisticated or cultivated young men. In some letters we find the elderly philosopher reminiscing about the bachelor dinner parties of the 1890s in Cambridge that had given him some of the most pleasant moments of his life. As he got older, however, Santayana more and more preferred to be alone, and a correlate of this love of solitude was his dislike of controversy, a rather surprising characteristic in a philosopher. On 6 June 1939 he wrote to Mrs. Toy: “I don’t like mental fierceness, even on my own side in philosophy”. Many years earlier, during the summer following his retirement from Harvard, Santayana had written (on 2 August 1912) to his former colleague and department chairman, George Herbert Palmer, that he expected to benefit from conversations in Cambridge, England, with his friends Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore: … whose views are near enough to mine to be stimulating to me, while the fact that they live in an atmosphere of controversy (which for myself I hate) renders them keenly alive to all sorts of objections and pitfalls which I need to be warned of, in my rather solitary and unchecked reasonings. If Santayana enjoyed occasionally discussing philosophical issues with friends (and, in the last part of his life, with many of the persons who visited him at the nursing home in Rome), he decidedly did not enjoy professional conferences. In the 23 September 1932 letter to Mrs. Toy in which he reported on his recent participation in the Domus Spinozana conference at The Hague (6–10 September 1932), Santayana described the meetings as being “like all meetings and international conferences, rather tiresome and futile”; “in the end”, he had written to his sister Susan on 1 October 1913, “every philosopher has to walk alone.” And in the 18 July 1913 letter to the poet Arthur Davison Ficke, Santayana echoed Socrates’ remark to Crito in Plato’s dialogue of the same name: … what does it matter what other people think? If we care too much about persuading them we may disturb
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their peaceful conventions to no good purpose, since they will never get anything straight, while we blunt the edge of truth in our own words. Santayana believed that if his auditors or readers could comprehend intuitively the truth of his views, they would accept them; but if they could not do so, there was no point in attempting to badger people into agreement. One must catch the spark if concurrence is to be genuine and meaningful. Agreement in intellectual matters, he felt, came about more through sympathetic understanding than through debate. Just as he did not like the gatherings of professors at professional meetings, neither did Santayana—with few exceptions—like individual professors; and he didn’t like being one himself. On 6 June 1912, at the time of his retirement from Harvard, he wrote to President Abbott Lawrence Lowell that “although fond of books and of young men, I was never altogether fit to be a professor”. Three years later, on 4 August 1915, he wrote to his former graduate student, B. A. G. Fuller, who was then on the Harvard philosophy faculty, about his disillusionment with teaching philosophy: … I can’t take the teaching of philosophy seriously in itself, either as a means of being a philosopher or of teaching the young anything solid: they merely flirt with that for a year or two instead of flirting with something else. Philosophy is not a science; it might be a life or a means of artistic expression, but it is not likely to be either at an American college. Contrary to the present-day practice of calling every college or university teacher of philosophy—from the greenest assistant professor to the hoariest veteran—a “philosopher,” Santayana made a significant distinction between a “philosopher” and what he referred to as a “mere professor” of philosophy.31 For Santayana the teaching of philosophy was a profession like any other; but, for the true philosopher, philosophy was not only a profession but also a vocation or way of life. In a humorous vein, he wrote to George Sturgis, his nephew and new financial manager, on 14 August 1921: In respect to money-matters, I am a true philosopher (not a mere professor of Phil. 10, 12, etc) and my one wish is not to hear about them, but to cash cheques and be happy.
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More seriously, he says in a 1926 letter to Lewis Mumford regarding Mumford’s discussion of him in The Golden Day: … I feel that you are thinking of me—quite naturally—as just a Harvard professor, author of a book called “The Life of Reason”. Your appreciation seems absolutely just, as directed upon that semi-public personage: but I never felt myself to be identical with that being, and now much less than ever.32 In a 16 June 1934 letter to Harry Austryn Wolfson, Santayana uses his favorite, Spinoza, to make clear his distinction between the philosopher and the “mere professor” of philosophy: I believe there is another reason also why Spinoza seems to me so pre-eminent: that in spite of being traditional, or because he was not distracted by side issues, he was an entire and majestic mind, a singularly consecrated soul. All these trite dogmas and problems lived in him and were the natural channels for his intuitions and emotions. That is what I feel to make a real philosopher and not, what we are condemned to be, professors of the philosophy of other people, or of our own opinions. Spinoza had been excommunicated by the rabbis in 1656 and banished from Amsterdam for his heretical ideas; living on the outskirts of the city, he earned a meager subsistence as a lens-grinder. Several years later, in order to maintain his intellectual independence, Spinoza turned down the offer of a chair of philosophy at Heidelberg. Santayana believed that, by retiring as soon as he could from Harvard, he had achieved a comparable independence. He expressed this idea of the necessary freedom of the philosopher in the 9 June 1937 letter to Cory saying: “you are now a recognised free lance in philosophy, as all philosophers ought to be.” While avowedly not fond of professors, Santayana nevertheless moved among them all his life, as many of his correspondents and many of his visitors during the years that he lived in hotels in Rome were professors. In fact, almost all of Santayana’s friends and associates were individuals of either social or intellectual stature, or both. In some of his letters he distinguishes between what he calls “nice” people (the well-bred, well-educated, and well-to-do) and common or ordinary people. His habit of choosing his friends from among socially prominent Americans and aristocratic Europeans led to accusations of sponging, social climbing, and
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snobbery. Santayana responds to the latter charge in the 8 September 1920 letter to William Lyon Phelps: I protest against being called a snob; what I love is what is simple, humble, easy, what ought to be common, and it is only the bombast of false ambitions and false superiority, that I abhor. There is no indication that Santayana, whatever his preferences for the well-born and well-bred, was ever anything but courteous to and considerate of persons in humble positions. In his letters, Santayana refers to the waiters in the restaurants he frequented as being his friends, and there are references to the servants in the hotels or private houses that he stayed in that express Santayana’s consideration of them and his desire to do the right thing and be thought well of by them. Perhaps Santayana received a certain satisfaction from the names distinguished by European aristocratic titles in some of the lists of persons he sent to his publishers to receive complimentary copies of his books, but there is no evidence of Santayana ever fawning on any Boston Brahmin or European aristocrat— not even Bertrand Russell’s elder brother, where the matter was complicated far beyond mere snobbery. One purpose of this introduction is to suggest the ways in which Santayana’s letters reveal various characteristics of his personality, how a self-portrait emerges from the letters. That portrait is both fascinating and invaluable in giving us a better understanding of the complex personality of someone who was a profound thinker, gifted artist, and sophisticated man of the world. By thus illuminating more subtly and fully Santayana’s personality and character, the letters can deepen our insight into his philosophical and literary works. (And many of the letters address directly the principal ideas and themes of those works.) But though remarkably interesting and informative, the letters make no sensational revelations about Santayana’s personal life. It is not at all the case with him—as it often is with celebrities—that the private individual differs dramatically from the public persona. On the contrary, the evidence of the letters is that Santayana was a person of exceptional integrity, a man with a clear conception of who and what he was and what he ought to be, and one who tried to live a life of reason in accord with this conception of himself. Nevertheless, the personality reflected in the letters is complicated and paradoxical. Some letters reveal Santayana as a political reactionary,
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complacent about arbitrary inequalities of opportunity in society, approving of ruthlessly repressive forces like Mussolini and the Italian and Spanish fascists, and—in terms of his remarks about the Jews—insensitive about racial slurs. Yet the letters also show him as someone who rejected totalitarianism on principle, disapproved of capitalism on moral grounds, advocated a kind of state socialism, and was sympathetic to Bolshevism.33 They depict a thinker who aided and abetted creative expression in others even when that expression clashed with his own opinions. They show a man tolerant of irritating traits in family and friends, who frequently suffered annoyance and inconvenience in order to accommodate persons to whom he felt a debt of loyalty. They show us an honest man, generous with his money and time, often contributing to the financial support of relatives, friends, and needy strangers, and taking the time and trouble to write conscientious appraisals of works sent to him by other writers. All in all, the portrait of Santayana that emerges from the letters is that of a man devoted to his work, one who valued friendship and loyalty highly, was considerate and polite, but who quickly comprehended a situation and was never reluctant to speak his mind. We invariably find him giving his correspondents his frank opinions, irrespective of their own views. There is nothing of the boor or bully in this candor, but rather only a desire to be truthful. Santayana’s letters depict a person of rare gifts and remarkable accomplishments, a very private individual, neither curmudgeonly nor arrogant. They reveal a man endowed with great intellectual powers, living detached from and “above” the world, who was nonetheless thoroughly human.
Endnotes 1
Most of Santayana’s correspondence is in English. However, he wrote in Spanish to relatives and friends in Spain, and the 29 Apr 1945 letter (to Dino Rigacci) is in Italian. 2 Per 6 Sep 1934 to Cory. 3 The collection of 373 pieces of correspondence from Santayana to his Harvard classmate, life-long friend, and fellow professional philosopher C. A. Strong (1862–1940), over the half-century from 1889 to 1939, is second only in size to the collection of correspondence from Santayana to Daniel Cory (over the quarter-century from 1927 to 1952) totaling 400 items. Until recently, only a few items of Santayana’s correspondence to Strong had been located, and it was feared that the rest had been destroyed when German soldiers occupied the latter’s Villa le Balze, at Fiesole, Italy, during the Second World War. Fortunately, however, the rest was discovered early in 1999, housed in the Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Strong’s wife, Elizabeth, was the daughter of John D. Rockefeller, and the letters were deposited in the Archive by Elizabeth Cuevas, Strong’s granddaughter, in 1994.
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4 The letter reads: “Polissez-le toujours, et le repolissez, / Ajoutez quelquefois et souvent effacez.” 5 See especially Margaret Münsterberg, “Santayana at Cambridge,” American Mercury 1 (1924): 69–74; George W. Howgate, George Santayana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1938); Dialogue on George Santayana, ed. Corliss Lamont (New York: Horizon Press, 1959); Bruno Lind, Vagabond Scholar: A Venture into the Privacy of George Santayana (New York: Bridgehead Books, 1962); John McCormick, George Santayana: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987); and George Santayana, Persons and Places: Fragments of Autobiography, Critical Edition, ed. William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp Jr. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986). (Further references to the autobiography are to the Critical Edition.) For a concise biography of Santayana as poet see Holzberger, “Introduction” to The Complete Poems of George Santayana (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1979), 23–82. Daniel Cory, in Santayana: The Later Years, A Portrait with Letters (New York: George Braziller, 1963), makes specific use of his letters from Santayana to illustrate aspects of Santayana’s character and personality. 6 Even in his personal correspondence, so careful and deliberate a writer as Santayana was never wholly spontaneous and unguarded. 7 “Moral relativism,” as Santayana uses the term, must be understood to include more than mere arbitrary choice of behavior. For Santayana, morals are relative to the individual and the specific situation, and the natural sanctions which determine acceptable behavior are immediate and absolute. 8 The letter of 18 Dec 1928 begins, without salutation: “Of course, dear Cory”; and within the letters to Cory of 21 May 1928, 1 Jul 1937, and 23 Jan 1940 we find the phrases “My dear Cory”, “For heaven’s sake, dear Cory”, and “Now, dear Cory”, respectively. But in the 352 letters to Cory that begin with a salutation it is uniformly “Dear Cory”. 9 The Later Years, 321. Cory’s part of the correspondence is unlocated; Santayana usually discarded letters after reading them. 10 Letter from Lowell to Santayana of 8 Jan [1950]. Santayana kept Lowell’s letters, which are in the Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. 11 The first book of Santayana’s poems was Sonnets and Other Verses (Cambridge: Stone and Kimball, 1894). A revised, expanded edition was published in 1896. 12 14 May 1925. 13 15 Jul 1928. 14 Grattan Freyer, the late Irish literary critic, said to me that The Last Puritan was “like the best of Henry James.” 15 “And why has my photo been redrawn so as to make me cross-eyed and ferocious? I know that self-knowledge is often self-deception, but I feel not at all as this personage looks.” (1 Feb 1936 to Wheelock) 16 “I suppose Housman was really what people nowadays call ‘homosexual,’ [said Santayana].” “Why do you say that?” I [Cory] protested at once. “Oh, the sentiment of his poems is unmistakable, [Santayana replied].” There was a pause, and then he added, as if he were primarily speaking to himself, “I think I must have been that way in my Harvard days—although I was unconscious of it at the time.” (The Later Years, 40) 17 20 May 1887. 18 27 May 1887. 19 Persons, 297–98.
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20 5 Sep 1923 and undated letter written between 20 Sep and 24 Oct 1923. “Elizabeth” refers to the Countess Russell, the earl’s third wife, who had left him in 1918. 21 Persons, 517. 22 There is no evidence that Santayana ever had a physical sexual relationship with either a man or a woman. This suggests perhaps that whatever sexual promptings he may have experienced were sublimated to his thought and art and found expression in his writings. It is also possible that Santayana deliberately embraced the tradition of celibacy advocated by the Roman Catholic Church for members of the clergy (and by the religions of India and China for holy-men and wisemen). He had a great respect for the traditions of the Church and frequently refers to himself in the letters as monklike, saying that he could live happily in a monastery. 23 In a 30 Sep 1938 letter to Cory, Santayana described George Sturgis as “a nice person, but not very perceptive”; and in a 31 Dec 1944 letter to Rosamond Sturgis, from whom George recently had been divorced before his sudden death on 20 Dec 1944, Santayana wrote: “George never gave me any explanation of the estrangement that had arisen between you, and of course I respected his discretion and asked no questions. But I could well imagine that, like his father, he might prove hard to live with in the long run. In fact, when you came to Rome, I couldn’t help wondering how you ever decided to marry him. He was very good, very useful, and very able in many ways, and for me he proved a treasure (literally) in the management of my affairs, as his father had been too. But there was never a resposive [sic ] chord.” 24 For example, in the 2 Aug 1944 letter to George Sturgis, Santayana wrote: “Cory has been a problem for Strong and me for many years. He too is not a business man, and between us three we managed to land him, at the age of nearly forty, in no man’s land. I feel a certain responsibility for him, as it was as my disciple and secretary that he first turned to philosophy: but I never meant to make our connection permanent.” 25 The Later Years, 325–27. 26 “… perhaps you would do better not to report to either of us any nasty thing that the other may say, or do, in regard to his good old friend. It makes it harder to keep up the amicable tone of our relations. … Do help us to remain friends.” (11 Nov 1931 to Cory) 27 5 Feb 1936 to Rosamond Sturgis. 28 [Dec 1917]. 29 In the 12 May 1946 letter to David Page, Santayana says, while he is well aware that others regard his political views as “Fascism and Phalangism,” that he regards them as “Toryism.” 30 See, for instance, 15 and 25 Sep 1926 to Kallen. 31 This attitude of Santayana’s was more common in an earlier time. I recall Paul Arthur Schilpp espousing this view in class at Northwestern University during the 1950s. Schilpp made a point of reserving the term “philosopher” for the great figures of the history of philosophy and for contemporary theorists of international reputation. 32 16 Dec 1926, Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926). 33 “Something in me tells me that the Russian Bolsheviks are right—not in their conduct, which has been scandalous and silly—but in their sense for values, in their equal hostility to every government founded on property and privilege.” (6 Apr 1918 to Mrs. Winslow); “I think [Soviet Russian communism] is a splendid experiment. Lenin is as good as Lycurgus or Pythagoras. Let him have his way!” (6 Apr 1930 to Kallen); “I am not a modern or liberal socialist: but I feel in my bones that our form of industrial society is very precarious, and that it will disappear, perhaps rather soon, as completely as
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the mediaeval or the Graeco-Roman civilizations have disappeared.” (4 Oct 1931 to George Sturgis); “I … agree with … [Karl Marx’s] low opinion of capitalism. … To my own mind, absurd as capitalism is—I live on invisible and unearned money myself, I don’t know why or how—it seems to be only a technical device accompanying industrialism: and the latter is the radical evil.” (15 Apr 1933 to Hook); “I prefer the Bolschies [to the current British government]; and perhaps everywhere, through one approach or another, it is to State socialism that we are bound” (19 Oct 1935 to R. S. Barlow); “But my ideal would be a communistic public life, as in the Spartan upper class or as in a monastery, if it went with perfect liberty in thought and in the arts, like painting or writing. And I should limit all the luxuries to public gardens, libraries, churches, theatres and clubs, where each member might satisfy his own taste and develop his own vocation. I have lived myself as far as possible on that plan, and found it satisfactory. But I dread uniformity imposed upon mankind; that is a waste of opportunities and a dull slavery. That is what I dislike in democracy and social pressure.” (9 May 1945 to Rosamond Sturgis)
List of Letters Book Two, 1910–1920 [1910 or 1911] [January 1910] 18 January 1910 17 February 1910 23 February 1910 1 March 1910 7 March 1910 16 March 1910 6 April 1910 15 April 1910 18 April 1910 12 June 1910 5 July 1910 16 July 1910 29 July 1910 3 August 1910 8 September 1910 24 October 1910 27 October 1910 18 November 1910 3 December 1910 5 December 1910 20 December 1910 23 December 1910 26 December 1910 [1911] 2 January 1911 15 January 1911 February 1911 12 February 1911 22 February 1911
Josephine Preston Peabody Marks William Bayard Cutting Sr. Charles Scribner’s Sons Wendell T. Bush William Morton Payne Susan Sturgis de Sastre William Morton Payne Charles Augustus Strong William Morton Payne Susan Sturgis de Sastre Susan Sturgis de Sastre Susan Sturgis de Sastre Charles Augustus Strong Susan Sturgis de Sastre John Francis Stanley Russell Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Arthur Davison Ficke William Roscoe Thayer Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien Abbott Lawrence Lowell [Sara or Grace] Norton Charles Augustus Strong Susan Sturgis de Sastre Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien Upton Beall Sinclair Wendell T. Bush Bertrand Arthur William Russell Andrew Joseph Onderdonk Charles Augustus Strong Mr. Young
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1 March [1911] 9 March 1911 10 March 1911 25 April [1911] 29 April 1911 16 May 1911 20 May 1911 23 May 1911 1 June 1911 24 June 1911 1 July 1911 2 August 1911 10 August 1911 15 August 1911 20 August 1911 22 August 1911 27 August 1911 6 September 1911 10 September 1911 13 September 1911 5 October 1911 14 October 1911 20 October 1911 7 November 1911 7 November 1911 16 November 1911 19 November 1911 24 November 1911 1 December 1911 6 December 1911 7 December 1911 7 December 1911 12 December 1911 25 December 1911 29 December 1911 2 January 1912 17 January 1912 21 January 1912 29 January 1912 6 February 1912
Mary Williams Winslow Cale Young Rice National Institute of Arts and Letters [Sara or Grace] Norton Charles Augustus Strong Susan Sturgis de Sastre Charles Augustus Strong Herbert Jacob Seligmann Conrad Hensler Slade Susan Sturgis de Sastre Horace Meyer Kallen Susan Sturgis de Sastre Charles Augustus Strong Porter Garnett Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Mary Potter Bush Henry James III Mr. Young Charles Augustus Strong Henry James III Sydney Allan Friede Mary Potter Bush Henry James III Susan Sturgis de Sastre Charles Augustus Strong Horace Meyer Kallen Mary Potter Bush Mary Potter Bush William Rothenstein [Cambridge Historical Society] Susan Sturgis de Sastre Horace Meyer Kallen Ellen, George, and Josephine Sturgis Horace Meyer Kallen John Francis Stanley Russell Mary Potter Bush Charles Augustus Strong Susan Sturgis de Sastre Susan Sturgis de Sastre
List of Letters 7 February 1912 8 February 1912 12 February 1912 14 February 1912 20 February 1912 23 February 1912 26 February 1912 28 February [1912] 29 February 1912 12 March 1912 20 March 1912 22 March 1912 29 March 1912 2 April 1912 8 April 1912 8 April 1912 24 April 1912 6 June 1912 10 June 1912 12 June 1912 19 June 1912 24 July 1912 2 August 1912 4 August 1912 3 September 1912 5 September 1912 9 September 1912 12 September 1912 24 September 1912 29 September 1912 30 September 1912 2 October 1912 22 October 1912 23 October 1912 8 November 1912 8 November 1912 11 November 1912 11 November 1912 17 November 1912 30 November 1912
Charles Augustus Strong Bertrand Arthur William Russell Charles Augustus Strong George Herbert Palmer Isabella Stewart Gardner George Herbert Palmer George Herbert Palmer Susan Sturgis de Sastre Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Susan Sturgis de Sastre George Herbert Palmer Susan Sturgis de Sastre Mary Williams Winslow Susan Sturgis de Sastre Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Abbott Lawrence Lowell George Edward Moore Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong George Herbert Palmer Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Robert Shaw Sturgis Susan Sturgis de Sastre Charles Augustus Strong Susan Sturgis de Sastre Charles Augustus Strong Susan Sturgis de Sastre Susan Sturgis de Sastre Susan Sturgis de Sastre Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien Susan Sturgis de Sastre Charles Augustus Strong Susan Sturgis de Sastre Charles Augustus Strong Susan Sturgis de Sastre Elizabeth Stephens Fish Potter
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6 December 1912 10 December 1912 31 December 1912 1 January 1913 10 January 1913 15 January 1913 15 January 1913 16 January 1913 22 January 1913 6 February 1913 10 February 1913 20 February 1913 6 March 1913 6 March 1913 12 March 1913 16 March 1913 16 March 1913 16 March 1913 7 April 1913 21 April 1913 22 April 1913 14 May 1913 21 May 1913 3 June 1913 3 July 1913 15 July 1913 18 July 1913 25 July 1913 8 August 1913 11 August 1913 [August 1913?] 14 August 1913 Monday [September] 191[3] 12 September 1913 27 September 1913 1 October 1913 9 October 1913 24 October 1913 28 October 1913
Mary Williams Winslow Horace Meyer Kallen Mary Williams Winslow Susan Sturgis de Sastre Susan Sturgis de Sastre Susan Sturgis de Sastre Charles Augustus Strong Susan Sturgis de Sastre Susan Sturgis de Sastre Susan Sturgis de Sastre John Galen Howard Charles Scribner’s Sons Charles Augustus Strong Mary Williams Winslow Susan Sturgis de Sastre Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller Jessie Belle Rittenhouse Charles Scribner’s Sons Horace Meyer Kallen Charles Augustus Strong Scofield Thayer Charles Augustus Strong Mary Potter Bush Susan Sturgis de Sastre Susan Sturgis de Sastre Charles Augustus Strong Arthur Davison Ficke Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Susan Sturgis de Sastre Harriet Ann Boyd Hawes Susan Sturgis de Sastre Charles Augustus Strong Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller Susan Sturgis de Sastre Susan Sturgis de Sastre Charles Augustus Strong Susan Sturgis de Sastre Susan Sturgis de Sastre
List of Letters 28 October 1913 2 November 1913 3 November 1913 10 November 1913 10 November 1913 18 November 1913 26 November 1913 28 November 1913 19 December 1913 [Late 1913] 28 December 1913 6 January 1914 20 January 1914 21 January 1914 21 January 1914 28 January 1914 [February 1914] 3 February 1914 7 February 1914 19 February 1914 22 February 1914 29 March 1914 5 April 1914 6 April 1914 20 April 1914 25 April 1914 2 May 1914 6 May 1914 12 May 1914 9 June 1914 22 June 1914 25 June 1914 4 July 1914 5 July 1914 12 July 1914 17 July 1914 27 July [1914] 2 August 1914 3 August 1914
Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller Horace Meyer Kallen Charles Augustus Strong Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Polly Winslow Miguel de Unamuno Charles Augustus Strong Susan Sturgis de Sastre Oliver Wendell Holmes Charles Augustus Strong Susan Sturgis de Sastre [Mary Williams Winslow] Susan Sturgis de Sastre Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller Charles Augustus Strong Susan Sturgis de Sastre Horace Meyer Kallen Charles Augustus Strong Susan Sturgis de Sastre Susan Sturgis de Sastre Susan Sturgis de Sastre Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Mary Potter Bush Charles Scribner’s Sons Susan Sturgis de Sastre Mary Potter Bush Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Bertrand Arthur William Russell Susan Sturgis de Sastre Susan Sturgis de Sastre
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5 August 1914 5 August 1914 9 August 1914 16 August 1914 24 August 1914 27 August 1914 1 October 1914 11 October 1914 23 October 1914 29 October 1914 1 November 1914 8 November 1914 13 November 1914 18 November 1914 1 December 1914 11 December 1914 14 December 1914 16 January 1915 23 February 1915 24 February 1915 28 March 1915 31 March 1915 4 April 1915 12 April 1915 21 April 1915 1 May 1915 5 May 1915 9 May 1915 25 May 1915 26 May 1915 13 June 1915 19 June 1915 29 June 1915 4 August 1915 11 August 1915 14 August 1915 27 August 1915 1 September 1915 14 September 1915
Susan Sturgis de Sastre Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Mary Williams Winslow Susan Sturgis de Sastre Upton Beall Sinclair Susan Sturgis de Sastre Susan Sturgis de Sastre Scofield Thayer Charles Augustus Strong Susan Sturgis de Sastre Wendell T. Bush Horace Meyer Kallen Wendell T. Bush Charles Augustus Strong Mary Williams Winslow Susan Sturgis de Sastre Charles Augustus Strong Andrew Joseph Onderdonk Scofield Thayer Susan Sturgis de Sastre Scofield Thayer Charles Augustus Strong Josephine Borrás Sturgis Charles Augustus Strong Celedonio Sastre Serrano Bertrand Arthur William Russell Susan Sturgis de Sastre Susan Sturgis de Sastre Charles Augustus Strong Wendell T. Bush Charles Augustus Strong Susan Sturgis de Sastre Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller Horace Meyer Kallen Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Robert Shaw Sturgis
List of Letters 15 September 1915 26 September 1915 9 October 1915 13 October 1915 17 October [1915] [October or November 1915] 4 November 1915 13 November 1915 5 January [1916] 28 January 1916 11 March 1916 28 April 1916 6 May [1916?] 20 May 1916 23 May 1916 [26 May 1916] 2 June 1916 22 June 1916 1 July 1916 25 August 1916 27 August 1916 Friday [Autumn 1916?] Saturday [Autumn 1916?] Sunday [Autumn 1916?] 3 October 1916 4 October 1916 2 November 1916 21 December 1916 23 December [1916] 13 January 1917 8 February 1917 26 February 1917 27 February 1917 15 March 1917 17 March 1917 19 March 1917 24 March 1917 26 March 1917 17 April 1917
Charles Augustus Strong Susan Sturgis de Sastre Charles Augustus Strong Susan Sturgis de Sastre Susan Sturgis de Sastre Charles Augustus Strong Mary Williams Winslow Lawrence Smith Butler Editor of The New Republic Wendell T. Bush Mary Potter Bush Charles Augustus Strong Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell Roy Wood Sellars Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Susan Sturgis de Sastre Charles Augustus Strong Horace Meyer Kallen Charles Augustus Strong Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong John Jay Chapman Robert Seymour Bridges Charles Augustus Strong Robert Seymour Bridges Charles Augustus Strong Charles Scribner’s Sons Horace Meyer Kallen Charles Augustus Strong Robert Seymour Bridges Mrs. William Warren Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong
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List of Letters
29 April 1917 9 May 1917 15 May 1917 11 June 1917 29 June 1917 30 June 1917 5 July 1917 8 July 1917 18 July 1917 21 July 1917 25 July 1917 20 August 1917 14 September 1917 21 September 1917 29 September 1917 3 October 1917 9 October 1917 10 October 1917 21 October 1917 26 October 1917 30 October 1917 30 October 1917 17 November 1917 25 November 1917 25 November 1917 26 November 1917 27 November 1917 [December 1917] 4 December 1917 4 December 1917 10 December 1917 [1918] 9 January 1918 24 February 1918 26 February 1918 2 March 1918 26 March 1918 26 March 1918 6 April 1918
Charles Augustus Strong Logan Pearsall Smith Logan Pearsall Smith Charles Raymond Bell Mortimer Charles Augustus Strong Logan Pearsall Smith Charles Scribner’s Sons Logan Pearsall Smith Max Forrester Eastman Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Logan Pearsall Smith Susan Sturgis de Sastre Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Roy Wood Sellars Charles Augustus Strong Wendell T. Bush Charles Scribner’s Sons Logan Pearsall Smith William Roscoe Thayer Logan Pearsall Smith Bertrand Arthur William Russell Arthur Davison Ficke Logan Pearsall Smith Charles Augustus Strong Logan Pearsall Smith Wendell T. Bush Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Mary Potter Bush Wendell T. Bush Charles Augustus Strong Mary Williams Winslow
List of Letters 10 April 1918 8 May 1918 24 May 1918 29 May 1918 11 July 1918 11 July 1918 13 July 1918 18 July 1918 10 September 1918 [September or October 1918] 19 October 1918 [1918] 6 December 1918 20 December 1918 22 December 1918 2 January 1919 12 January 1919 25 February 1919 9 March 1919 16 March 1919 2 April 1919 6 April 1919 9 April 1919 21 April 1919 30 April 1919 11 May 1919 22 May 1919 13 June 1919 Tuesday [17 June 1919] [17 June 1919] 18 June 1919 20 June 1919 24 June [1919] 25 June 1919 5 July 1919 5 July 1919 21 August 1919 7 September 1919 14 September 1919
Charles Raymond Bell Mortimer Charles Augustus Strong Logan Pearsall Smith Logan Pearsall Smith Robert Seymour Bridges Horace Meyer Kallen Charles Augustus Strong Robert Seymour Bridges Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller Mary Whitall Smith Berenson Unidentified Recipient Robert Seymour Bridges Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong James Bissett Pratt Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Logan Pearsall Smith Logan Pearsall Smith Charles Augustus Strong Logan Pearsall Smith Unidentified Recipient Logan Pearsall Smith Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Logan Pearsall Smith Charles Augustus Strong Monica Waterhouse Bridges Wendell T. Bush Logan Pearsall Smith Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Joseph Malaby Dent
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List of Letters
18 September 1919 19 September 1919 29 September 1919 9 October 1919 12 October 1919 16 October 1919 6 November 1919 23 November 1919 24 November 1919 25 November 1919 7 December 1919 15 December 1919 5 January 1920 10 January 1920 21 January 1920 2 February 1920 8 February 1920 21 February 1920 5 March 1920 12 March 1920 31 March 1920 23 April 1920 28 April 1920 3 May 1920 3 May 1920 23 May 1920 7 June 1920 2 July 1920 9 July 1920 12 July 1920 16 July 1920 21 July 1920 4 August 1920 29 August 1920 30 August 1920 6 September 1920 8 September 1920 20 September 1920 9 October 1920
Robert Seymour Bridges Joseph Malaby Dent Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien Charles Augustus Strong Mrs. Charles Fairchild Logan Pearsall Smith Constable and Co. Ltd. Wendell T. Bush Susan Sturgis de Sastre Constable and Co. Ltd. Charles Scribner’s Sons Constable and Co. Ltd. Constable and Co. Ltd. Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Mary Potter Bush Robert Seymour Bridges Charles Augustus Strong James Bissett Pratt Constable and Co. Ltd. Charles Augustus Strong Charles Augustus Strong Mary Williams Winslow Boylston Adams Beal Constable and Co. Ltd. Boylston Adams Beal Scofield Thayer Constable and Co. Ltd. Charles Scribner’s Sons Constable and Co. Ltd. Constable and Co. Ltd. John Middleton Murry Robert Seymour Bridges Logan Pearsall Smith Charles Augustus Strong William Lyon Phelps Charles Augustus Strong Constable and Co. Ltd.
List of Letters 18 October 1920 22 November 1920 29 November [1920] 10 December 1920 29 December 1920
Charles Augustus Strong John Calvin Metcalf and James Southall Wilson Susan Sturgis de Sastre Charles Augustus Strong Susan Sturgis de Sastre
lxxiii
Letters: 1910—1920
To Josephine Preston Peabody Marks [1910 or 1911] • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Houghton)
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Mrs Marks1 Do you believe in this “Poetry Society”? Poetry = solitude, Society = prose, witness my friend Mr. Reginald Robbins!2 I may still go to the dinner, if it comes during the holidays. In that case, I shall hope to see you there. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Josephine Preston Peabody (1874–1922) was a poet and dramatist whose plays kept alive the tradition of poetic drama in America. Her play, The Piper, was produced in 1909. She was married to Lionel Simeon Marks, a Harvard mechanical engineering professor. 2 Reginald Chauncey Robbins (1871–1955) was a writer who took his A.B. from Harvard in 1892 and then did graduate work there.
To William Bayard Cutting Sr. [January 1910] • [Cambridge, Massachusetts]
(MS: Unknown)
His intellectual life was, without question, the most intense, many-sided and sane that I have ever known in any young man,1 and his talk, when he was in college, brought out whatever corresponding vivacity there was in me in those days, before the routine of teaching had had time to dull it as much as it has now … I always felt I got more from him than I had to give, not only in enthusiasm—which goes without saying—but also in a sort of multitudinousness and quickness of ideas. [Unsigned ] 1
William Bayard Cutting Jr. (1878–1910) was a member of the Harvard class of 1900. He served as secretary of the vice consul in the American consulate in Milan (1908–9) and Secretary of the American Legation, Tangier, Morocco (1909). He died of tuberculosis in Egypt on board a boat on the Nile in January 1910. His father was William Bayard Cutting Sr. (d. 1912), a wealthy New Yorker, patron of the arts, and railroad magnate.
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To Charles Scribner’s Sons 18 January 1910 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Princeton) 3 Prescott Hall Cambridge Jan. 18, 1910
Messrs Charles Scribner’s Sons New York Gentlemen: My colleague Professor Schofield,1 who had more or less to do with my taking up the subject of my forth-coming lectures at Columbia, is going to edit a series of volumes on comparative literature and has asked me to let him have the MS. of these lectures for one of the series—I think it is to be the first. Under the circumstances I could not very well refuse, although I know the disadvantage of having different publishers for different books— it happens to me now, in a certain measure—and would gladly not enter into relations with any house but yours, which I have found invariably generous and obliging. But as Professor Schofield is to take all negotiations out of my hands, and promises me various advantages connected with publication in a series that will be kept continually before the public, I have agreed to let him have my new book.2 I am very sorry that you are not to be the publishers of the series, and that I cannot follow up your suggestion of adding this little book—it will be unpretentious—to those you have published of mine hitherto, so much to my satisfaction. By the way, if there is ever a reprint of my Life of Reason or Interpretations of Poetry & Religion, I should like to send a list of corrections—merely of misprints. There are, I am sorry to [across] say, a good many; but I don’t desire to make any great changes in the text. Yours ^ ^ very truly GSantayana. 1 William Henry Schofield (1870–1920) was a Canadian who received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895 and who, as a member of the faculty, introduced courses in the Scandinavian languages and originated the Department of Comparative Literature (Harvard, 374). 2 Poets is volume I of Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature, founded by William H. Schofield, general editor.
1910–1920
To Wendell T. Bush 17 February 1910 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
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(MS: Columbia) Feb. 17. 1910
3 Prescott Hall NIAL————— CLUB — ———— COLO ————— CAMBRIDGE
Dear Mr Bush1 In thanking you for your kind letter of the other day, I have to make a confession and an apology. The pamphlet of Heinze is lost, and unread!2 I left —— in it in the hotel at N.Y. and, although I have written for it, it has not been returned. Do you remember in what publication it appeared? Perhaps it is to be found in the library here, and I can then read and review it, as I promised. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Wendell T. Bush (1867–1941) received an M.A. from Harvard (1908) and a Ph.D. from Columbia. He was professor of philosophy at Columbia University and cofounder (with Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge) and editor of The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods. 2 Probably Max Heinze (1865–1909), who wrote a history of philosophy titled Gundriss der Geschicte der Philosophie (1886) with Friedrich Uberwegs. Philosophy announced Heinze’s pamphlet “Ethische Werthebei Aristotles” in its 3 Feb 1909 number. (His death was announced in the same journal, on 28 Oct 1909.) Santayana never reviewed this work, nor did any other writer for Philosophy.
To William Morton Payne 23 February 1910 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Virginia) 3 Prescott Hall Cambridge Mass Feb. 23, 1910
Dear Mr Payne1 I have a half-written paper on “American Ethics” out of which I might make a lecture for your club. It would be academic, but intelligible. And April 13, a Wednesday, would be a possible date, as I suppose I could get to Madison that evening or the next morning in time for my first lecture there, which is to be on Thursday, April 14.—I will write to the Wisconsin
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authorities to make quite sure, as I do not know whether my discourses are to be in the afternoon or evening. At what hour does your club meet? It would be well for me to know that, so as not to steer too close to the wind. If my engagements in Madison are in the afternoon, I might be in Chicago again on Thursday evening, April 21, and could address your nd th if you prefer this date to Wednesday the 13– club on Friday the 22– It will be a real pleasure to see in Chicago more than streets and buildings, and to have a chance to exchange impressions with you and other members of the Century Club. It is a great compliment to me that you should wish me to address you. Yours very truly GSantayana 1
William Morton Payne (1858–1919) was a teacher, translator, and literary critic. He taught at the University of Chicago and until 1915 was editor of The Dial. Payne served as secretary-treasurer of the Twentieth Century Club.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 1 March 1910 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Virginia) March 1, 1910
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Susie:1 Yesterday Josephine2 showed me a letter of yours in which you say you want me to give you news of “high life” in New York. My visit there this year, though longer than last, wasn’t so interesting, as I hardly saw any new people. Mrs. Astor (who has got a divorce from her husband) was not there, being in London presumably looking for a new spouse. I came across Jack Astor, however, at the Opera, and he did not assassinate me.3 My six lectures4 took up a good deal of my time and energy, and the lunches and dinners I went to were rather conventional. At Mrs. Clarence Mackay’s,5 however, the food was wonderful, and also the service. We were six people, four men and two ladies (no husband present) and we had a butler and four footmen, in red breeches and white silk stockings, pulled up very tight, to wait on us. Mrs. Mackay is a pronounced radical, weeps for the poor, and has a stamp with “Votes for Women” stuck on the back of her lavender and white note-paper. Her hair is disarranged and poetical, and she affects a lace mantle or shawl. I suspect she writes poetry.—The
1910–1920
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Potters6 were in town, in a hired house, looking for a place in the country in which to settle down, with all their ancestral belongings. I saw them a good deal. Also Mrs Ralph Ellis (sister-in-law of Ward Thoron)7 who is very gay and jolly, and rather handsome. Her husband also is a nice person.—Moncure Robinson8 was kind and friendly, getting me a great many invitations, and having me to breakfast, as all his lunches and dinners were taken up. He also talked of a motor-trip in France this summer, but that is very problematical.—In April I am going to repeat my six lectures (they are all written out and all I have to do is to read them) at the University of Wisconsin in Madison; and on the way I am going to read another lecture in Chicago. Madison will be a great contrast to New York, as it is a small place of 30 000 inhabitants (although the capital of Wisconsin) with a coeducational college. I shall be there about ten days, and it will be dull unless I can occasionally escape the attentions of the academic circle. In Chicago I may see amusing things, as the people who are to have me in tow seem to be semi-Bohemian, semi-rich, and semi-literary. As to next summer, I don’t exactly know what plans to make. Mother,9 as you know, is relatively well; but she is weaker every month, and it is impossible to say when the end may come. I have engaged my passages th th to Europe and back—for June 8– and September 17– —as if nothing were to be the matter. Robert10 (who —— had —— has persueded himself that mother could not live through the winter) will of course stay here, on the ground that she cannot live through the summer. It seems to me rather horrible to stay myself on that ground. Do you think I ought to? My presence might be of some use to Josephine, but also some trouble; and, if all went well, like last summer, it would be all trouble and no use. Robert in any case would manage everything, and I confess the impulse to go away is very strong in me, even when I consider that the end might come in my absence. Mother does not know the difference, and Robert and Josephine could have things in there own way without criticism from me. I feel like a fifth wheel to the ch/oach, that might as well roll off by itself. Mother gets up for a few hours every day, and has her food regularly. She does not speak coherently, and is too weak to walk. She sleeps and dozes most of the time, or amuses herself with picture-books, papers, and dolls. Sometimes, she seems amused and satisfied, usually rather listless. It is a strange sort of half-existence, but fortunately painless and without regrets.—Love to Celedonio and the family. Yours affecly George
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1 Susan, the second child of Josefina Borrás and her first husband, George Sturgis, was born in Manila, in the Philippine Islands, on 5 June 1851, and christened Susan Parkman Sturgis, after her father’s mother, Susan Parkman of Boston. The family, however, did not like the name Susan, and called her “Susana” or “Susie.” Her father, an American businessman in Manila, died in 1857, at the age of forty. She was then taken to Boston and remained there, with her mother and younger brother (Robert) and sister ( Josephine) until 1861, when her mother returned with the children to Madrid. There her mother married Agustín Ruiz de Santayana, father of George Santayana (who was born in Madrid on 16 Dec 1863). Several years later, about 1868, Josefina returned to Boston with her three living Sturgis children (two children, Pepín, the first, and Victor, the last by her first husband, had died in infancy). After spending her young adult life in Boston and leaving a convent in which she had been a novice, Susana returned to Ávila. On 26 Nov. 1892, at the age of forty-one, she married Celedonio Sastre Serrano (c. 1840–1930) of Ávila. A lawyer and small landowner, Serrano was a widower with six children. Susana’s relationship with Santayana remained very close; for years he was a summer guest in her Ávila home. She lived to be seventy-seven years of age and died on 10 Feb 1928. In a letter to Daniel Cory (24 Feb 1939) Santayana said Susana was “certainly the most important influence in my life.” 2 Santayana’s half sister, Josephine Sturgis (1853–1930). 3 See letter to Susan of 19 April 1909, third paragraph. John Jacob Astor (1864–1912), fourth of this name in the United States, drowned in the Titanic disaster. His second wife was Madeleine Talmage Force, and their son was the fifth of the name. 4 On Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe that Santayana had given during the previous month at Columbia. 5 Wife of Clarence Hungerford Mackay (1874–1938), who was a capitalist, philanthropist, and society leader. 6 Robert “Bob” Burnside Potter (c. 1869–c. 1936), Harvard class of 1891, became an architect. Santayana’s poem entitled “Dedication of the first sonnets to a friend on the eve of his marriage” was written in honor of him. See Complete Poems, 263. Elizabeth “Lily” Stephens Clare Fish married Potter in 1894. The daughter of Nicholas Fish (for years American minister at Brussels), she had been educated abroad, was charming, spoke French and German, and learned Italian in preparation for the spring 1897 trip through Italy. The Potters’ sons were Warwick and Hamilton. See Persons, 379–81. 7 Ward Thoron (1867–1938), “destined to be [Santayana’s] closest friend while [they] were undergraduates,” graduated with Harvard’s class of 1886. A business executive for nearly fifty years, he retired in 1932 and turned to literary work, including editing The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams (1936). See Persons, 221–24. 8 Moncure Robinson (d. 1920) was a member of the Harvard class of 1898 and a wealthy New Yorker. 9 Josefina Borrás y Carbonell de Santayana (1826–1912). 10 Robert Shaw Sturgis (c. 1854–1921) was the fourth of Santayana’s mother’s five children by her first husband, George Sturgis. Robert managed the financial affairs of Santayana and his sisters. He and Ellen Gardner Hodges (d. 1918) married in 1890. They were the parents of George and Josephine Sturgis.
1910–1920
To William Morton Payne 7 March 1910 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
2:9
(MS: Newberry) 3 Prescott Hall Cambridge Mass March 7. 1910
Dear Mr Payne They write me from Madison that I shall be easily able to get there in time for my lecture of the 14th of April, by leaving Chicago between eight and nine on the same morning. It will therefore be possible for me to th address your club on the 13– . At the same time, they say I must keep nd Friday the 22– disengaged, as they have some function at Madison on that day which they wish me to take part in. As I wish to see a little of Chicago on this occasion, not being sure that another will soon arise, I am planning th th to arrive on Monday or Tuesday the 11– or 12– , which I find will be possible by skipping only one more of my regular lectures here. If for any reath (Wedes son you should prefer the 12th (Tuesday) to the 13– —————^Wednes-^day) evening, for your reunion, I could therefore be on hand just as well. Yours very truly GSantayana
To Charles Augustus Strong 16 March 1910 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Rockefeller) March 16 1910
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Strong1 It is shameful that I should not have answered your two letters nor written to you all winter, but you would forgive me if you had “introspective” as well as “perceptual” cognition of my psychic substance. I have written out six lectures on Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe’s Faust,2 and read them at Columbia. In April I am to read them again at the University of Wisconsin. I am also going to read a paper at Chicago on “American th Ethics”. And I am sailing on June 8th to be in Europe until September 17– Will you be still in Paris in July? I suppose not; but in any case I hope to
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see you, and Margaret,3 in England or elsewhere. In August I expect to be in Avila. As to your analysis of the mind, I have nothing new to say. Your vocabulary and distinctions seem to me artificial; and consequently your expositions are extraordinarily hard to follow, and impossible to remember. When translated into my language, I dare say I should agree with them. Of course you admit the psychic nominally, because you call the “real being” of the brain psychic. But your psychic, I understand, is not conscious, and as far beneath and out of scale with our ordinary states of mind as any material mechanism could be; so that, your “psychic” being nonpsychical, the question whether you deny the existence of anything psychical remains open. To be sure, you speak also of “content”, “appearance”, and “cognition”; but as you say these do not exist, I hardly see where the existence of anything mental is admitted by you. It sometimes looks to me as if by existence you meant substance; in that case I should readily agree that appearances did not exist. They would, however, be appearances of substance, qualities rightly accruing to it in certain relations, as the appearances “crescent” or “Diana”4 are appearances, at different removes, of the substantial moon, and are rightly attached to it, are genuine manifestations of it, in particular sensuous or poetic media. These manifestations are notable historic and experimental facts; to say that, as sensuous and poetic manifestations, they do not exist seems to me a hopeless torturing of language. They are certainly not substances, but they exist as truly as your opinions and mine upon this subject exist: opinions which again are not substances, but mental phenomena the substance of which is something in our brains and in the mechanical world that plays upon our brains. Am I right in gathering that you have now reduced the three things you used to speak of in perception to two, in as much as the psychic substance in us and the object outside (the thing-in-itself) are parts of the same field of existence? Is there anything, besides these existences, except the “content” or “appearance”—which does not “exist”? Boutroux5 is here, giving us delightful talks, full of simplicity and finesse, but tending, I am afraid, to merely rhetorical and sentimental conclusions. He is the Parisian Palmer,6 or the Longfellow7 of philosophy. Yours ever G.S. 1 Charles Augustus Strong (1862–1940), an American philosopher and psychologist, was Santayana’s longtime friend from Harvard. They lived together off and on for
1910–1920
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many years. From 1887 to 1889 Strong taught philosophy part time at Cornell University. Later he taught psychology at the University of Chicago and at Columbia. See Persons, 239–42. 2 Published as Poets, 1910. 3 Margaret (1897–1985) was the only child of Elizabeth Rockefeller (1866–1906) and C. A. Strong. 4 An ancient Roman divinity, Diana was goddess of the moon. 5 Émile Boutroux (1845–1921) was a French philosopher of science. He taught at the University of Paris and was elected to the French Academy in 1914. He wrote the preface for the French translation of Egotism. 6 George Herbert Palmer (1842–1933) was an American philosopher and moralist. In 1870 he became a Greek instructor at Harvard and translated Homer’s Odyssey (1884). He taught philosophy at Harvard (1872–1913) and published fifteen books. In The Nature of Goodness (1903) Palmer distinguished extrinsic from intrinsic goodness and maintained that the identifying mark of a human being is self-consciousness, the moral aim of life being self-realization expressed through continuous self-development. See Persons, 246–4. 7 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82) was a poet best known for his works Hiawatha, Evangeline, The Children’s Hour, and The Courtship of Miles Standish. He graduated from Bowdoin College and began his teaching career there as a professor of modern languages. He later became a professor at Harvard and lived primarily in Cambridge for the remainder of his life.
To William Morton Payne 6 April 1910 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Newberry) 3 Prescott Hall Cambridge Mass April 6, 1910
Dear Mr Payne Thank you for the two cards announcing the meeting at Mrs Blackstone’s and the lunch with the “Cliff-Dwellers”.1 My friend Mr. C. M. Clark2 has promised to get me a room at the University Club: I shall therefore be there, instead of at a hotel, after Monday morning. Yours very truly GSantayana 1
Mrs. Blackstone is unidentified. The name of this club may be taken from Henry Fuller’s 1893 novel, The Cliff Dwellers, in which a Chicago skyscraper is the central locale. “Cliff dwellers” were the inhabitants of huge apartment houses and skyscrapers. 2 Possibly Charles Motley Clark, Harvard class of 1901.
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To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 15 April 1910 • Madison, Wisconsin
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
MAIN HALL UW
Madison, Wis. April 15. 1910. Your letter was awaiting me here when I arrived yesterday from Chicago. It is a pretty place, and very summerlike. All well here and at home. [Unsigned ]
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 18 April 1910 • Madison, Wisconsin
(MS: Virginia) April 18, 1910
UNIVERSITY CLUB MADISON, WIS.
Dear Susie This place is, as you supposed, very much like a small Boston. The only peculiarity of it is that it is situated between three small lakes, and built on several hills, so that it is picturesque at a distance, although the houses are of the usually —— American wooden, non-descript kind. The university has some good buildings, and lawns, but is of course only half-finished, and full of architectural incongruities—one building brick and Gothic, the next stone and classical, the next a wooden shed, or a concrete store-house. The professors are very presentable, their wives more provincial than themselves, for they marry too young, and then, by their studies and contact with the world, outgrow the class they belonged to in their youth, and to which their wives belong. The students seem to be good fellows, not essentially different from those at Harvard, except that the extremes of fashion and poverty are wanting here. My lectures are not such a success as they were in New York, because my ultra-modern, “superior-person” point of view, is not familiar here, as it is in that very cosmopolitan and ventilated place—New York. However, some of the professors who come to hear me are very appreciative. Tomorrow, I am going to meet a class of advanced students who have been studying one of my books! It makes me feel
1910–1920
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strangely famous—although the sales of my books rather indicate that nobody reads them. I am glad you think it is all right that I should go to Europe this summer as usual I certainly hope to get to Avila in August, and I shall be glad to find you all as I left you two years ago. With love to Celedonio and the G.S. family, and a great deal for yourself, Yours affty
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 12 June 1910 • At sea
(MS: Virginia) Sunday June 12, 1910 At Sea
THE CUNARD STEAMSHIP COMPANY LIMITED R.M.S.
“LUSITANIA”.
Dear Susie Although I don’t expect to land for thirty-six hours, I take this opportunity to write a line, which will let you know that I have reached this side of the Atlantic. It has been a voyage remarkable for good weather and good food, and for a dreadful collection of passengers. The very nouveaux riches—the Chicago stock-brokers and dry-goods millionaires,—have “caught on” to these vessels, so that all the horrors of New America (it is not the America you knew) are here in full force. I left mother pretty well, and had satisfactory news of her in New York, before I sailed. I stayed two days with the Potters at a house they have taken in Long Island for the summer. In the ship I have been reading Homer1 and Molière2, and pacing the deck indefatigably. As we shall reach Fishguard, the new port of landing in Wales, late Monday afternoon, I have decided to go on in the ship to Liverpool, from whence I can reach London at a more seasonable hour on Tuesday—1 p.m, instead of 2 a.m. On Friday I am going to Oxford for two or three days, and then, probably, to Howard’s and to Lord Russell’s.3 Soon after July 1–st I hope to reach Paris. Memorias to Celedonio and all the family from Your affectionate brother George
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1 Homer lived before 700 B.C. and was the first extant Greek poet. His poems The Iliad and The Odyssey are masterpieces. 2 Molière, pen name of Jean Baptiste Poquelin (1622–73), was a French comic dramatist. His unhappy marriage to Armande Béjart provided the experience that led to his writing Le Misanthrope (1666). 3 Howard Overing Sturgis (1855–1920), a novelist, was the son of Russell Sturgis (1805–87), a wealthy Bostonian living in London, and his third wife, Julia Overing Boit. Howard, a cousin to Santayana’s half brother and half sisters, was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. Santayana first met Howard in 1889 at the Cotuit house of Lucy Sturgis Codman. Afterwards, Santayana made almost yearly visits to Sturgis’s house, Queen’s Acre, near Windsor Park. John Francis Stanley, second earl Russell (1865–1931), was the grandson and heir of Lord John Russell, the reforming prime minister; son of Lord and Lady Amberley; and elder brother of Bertrand Russell.
To Charles Augustus Strong 5 July 1910 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller)
Oxford, July 5, 1910 Dear Strong I don’t see why I can’t manage to come to see you at Aix-les-Bains for a few days, before you leave it. I shall be on my way to Spain—although I hadn’t thought at first of starting so soon. I could either return to Paris (with you, perhaps) or go on by Toulouse and Bayonne, if the route is not too slow and complicated. I expect to reach Paris on Friday or Saturday of this week, and when I have looked up the trains, I will write again, fixing th 1 , I suppose, is not a day on which one should attempt to a date. The 14– travel—although possibly the through trains would be empty and more comfortable because every body fears the crowd on such a jour de fête. In th th th any case, I could come on the 15– or 16– —or on the 12th or 13– if you are th leaving before the 20– It is very good of you to want me to come, and it would have been a disappointment not to see you at all. Aix-les-Bains is unknown to me, but I have no doubt it is attractive. You might perhaps send me a line to the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire telling me what you think would be best as to trains and dates for my little journey. I have returned to Oxford, without letting any one know of my presence, in a desperate effort to finish my Introduction to Spinoza2, which I have been dawdling over for weeks, and which I want to give to Dent3 before I leave England.
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Thank you very much for your invitation to visit you, and for giving me this prospect of seeing you— Yours ever G.S. 1
July 14, Bastille Day, marks the outbreak of the French Revolution and is a French national holiday. 2 Baruch (or Benedict) Spinoza (1632–77) was a rationalist philosopher of Jewish descent. He was expelled from the synagogue for his unorthodoxy in 1656, and in 1673 he refused the chair of philosophy at Heidelberg because he was unwilling to give up his independence and tranquility. He earned his living by grinding lenses. Spinoza’s philosophy finds its fullest expression in his most famous work, Ethics (1677). Spinoza maintains one cannot understand the world without understanding it as a whole, a single system that has two names, God and Nature. Together with Plato and Aristotle, Spinoza is one of the chief sources of Santayana’s philosophic inspiration. At the time of his graduation, Santayana published his essay, “The Ethical Doctrine of Spinoza,” in The Harvard Monthly 2 ( June 1886): 144–52. He refers here to an introduction to Spinoza’s Ethics and “De intellectus emendatione” (London: Dent, 1910, vii–xxii). See Persons, 233–36. 3 Joseph Malaby Dent (1849–1926) founded Dent & Sons of London.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 16 July 1910 [postmark] • Aix-les-Bains, France 2203
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
BIS. AIX-LES-BAINS—LE GRAND CERCLE
Aix-les-Bains, July 16. I expect to be here until the 21–st when I go to Paris again for a few days, to help Strong look for a “home”. Here it is very warm, dull, & luxurious. S. takes the cure every morning. We sit in this “Cercle”. [Unsigned ]
To John Francis Stanley Russell 29 July 1910 • Ávila, Spain
(MS: Unknown)
Avila, July 29 1910 Dear Russell, The cuttings you enclose interest me only as justifying an old saying of Goethe’s: Die Engländer haben keine Intelligenz.”1 All this sort of gossip is worthless, and this sort of controversy ridiculous. The Catholic Church
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is intolerant on principle, and the expression of this intolerance is limited only by the influence she is able to exercise over the civil power. She would repress, and exterminate, all heresy and schism, if she were able. To talk about persecutions inspired by her as due to individual irritation or hot temper is pure nonsense; and if English Catholics indulge in it, it is because they must be ignoramuses, or cowards. As to the sympathy you betray, however, with Ferrer,2 and the present instigators and perpetrators of murder (who are naturally the defenders of Ferrer) I am separated from you toto coelo.3 The attempted assassination of Maura4 (the noblest figure we now have in Spain) was the direct consequence of the instigation to such an attempt uttered by Pablo Iglesias5 in the Chamber, and published—without liability to prosecution for it—by all the papers. Just so the attempted murder of the King and Queen at their wedding had been instigated by Ferrer, and carried out by his young pupil Moraes.6 The insurrection in Barcelona was cruel itself; the repression of it was mild and much less than was legally warranted or (as I think) politically useful. It is the presence of cowards in the Government now, that encourages continued outrages and the disgraceful tone, in the revolutionary press in Spain and abroad, which makes it appear that the anarchists, who throw bombs, burn convents, and shoot at old gentlemen in railway stations, are the martyrs, and their victims the tyrants. It would be incredible, if madness and ignorance had not, since the world began, been the chief impulses that keep men talking in public. The tyrants in Spain are the anarchists and the revolutionary press; it is they that carry things with a high hand, and defend—and do—murder. But what is the use of talking about anything, however patent the fact may be, when what guides events, and people’s opinions, is not justice or the facts in the case, but a certain party instinct, or sense for the direction in which they would wish things to move? Now, I am entirely able to feel that the whole society of Christendom (compared with that of Greece, or even with that of Islam) rests on a false and artificial basis; and I can share the hope of those anarchists, or other rebels, who dream of some future more naturalistic system of thought and life—say with free love, and without individual property. But it is one thing to see the arbitrary and ultimately unstable character of a civilization (every civilization is essentially unstable) and another to set about destroying it by blind force. This latter system is hateful, because inspired only by hate: it has no ideal of a positive sort to inspire it, nor, if it had, could it attain that ideal merely by destroying what now exists. The want of intelligence is immense, that does not see that everything we have
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that makes (or might make) life worth living is an incident to the irrational, traditional civilization in which we have been reared. All things are like language, which we must use, beautify, but not worship; and your anarchists are mere blundering dumb beasts, that sputter and howl, because they find the rules of grammar absurd and inconvenient. So they are, for people who are too stupid or too ill-bred to use them: but that does not make these people martyrs, or heralds of progress. It only makes them fit to be exhibited naked in cages, like other wild animals, and fed on raw meat through the bars. I didn’t mean to write a long letter, nor have I the least idea of modifying your opinion on these subjects. Only, I wanted to save you the trouble of sending me the chance thoughts of the provincial correspondents of the Daily News—Quakers or others. Yours ever, GSantayana 1
The English have no intelligence. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was a German poet, dramatist, novelist, and scientist. Sources for his work included Greek mythology and German legends. Goethe was, for Santayana, one of the great philosophical poets; that is, poets who effectively express the dominant world view of their era. See Poets, 139–99, and Egotism, 43–53. Goethe’s lifework was the drama Faust (1808, 1831). 2 Professor Francisco Ferrer Guardia (1859–1909) was a well-known anarchist who was accused of complicity in the attempt to murder Alfonso XIII (1886–1941) and Princess Victoria Eugenia of Battenberg. Later he was charged with having helped to instigate the insurrection in Barcelona in 1909 and executed. [D. C.] 3 By the whole heaven. 4 Antonio Maura (1859–1925) was the leader of the Conservative Party of Spain who quelled the insurrection and was responsible for Ferrer’s execution. 5 Pablo Iglesias (d. 1919) led the Spanish Socialist Party for over ten years. 6 Unidentified.
To Charles Augustus Strong 3 August 1910 • Ávila, Spain
(MS: Rockefeller) Avila, Aug. 3, 1910
Dear Strong, I have now been here almost a week, after an uneventful, pleasant journey, and have found my sister and her family much as usual. The weather is cool, and I am feeling perfectly well. From six to eight I take a long walk in the country, usually alone, and then refresh myself with iced lemonade,
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of a special snowy sort they have here, which I depute to be the sherbet of Mahommed’s1 paradise. All my vices—smoking, drinking, and gazing at painted matrons—have abandoned me here; I am very abstemious and venerable in my whole being; but frightfully lazy, and I am sure so much virtue is bad for the mind. Spanish politics are in an interesting phase; and the daily papers form the chief stimulus to conversation and emotion that penetrates to this desert. My sympathies are all with the conservatives; although I confess that at moments the traditional Spanish and Catholic atmosphere becomes a little oppressive, and I begin to understand the impulse to throw bombs. The points of our various conversations at Aix often run through my mind here, and I think we are not separated by any important disagreement as to the facts, even the difference between mind-stuff and matter not being, perhaps, absolute. I can’t help thinking that you would admit what I insist upon, regarding the overt, synthetic, intellectual, actual nature of consciousness, if this word didn’t suggest to you things which lie to the right or the left of what I mean by it—to the right, a metaphysical agent or substance, to the left a diffused, mechanical flux. What I can’t stomach is your saying that the synthetic view of this flux—which I call consciousness, the flux being its ground and, in practical thought, its object—does not exist. It seems to me clear, as I repeatedly urged, that it is the one thing that exists indubitably, both its ideal object (essence) and its ground and object in practical intent (matter) not existing in the same clear sense at ^ ^ all; essence being ideal form or possibility only, and matter potentiality, or potency; i.e. an existence inferred (and so critically secondary and merely functional, the ground for facts, if we want a ground) and, if it exists, obscure to us in its core. ^ ^ I am looking forward with pleasure to being again in Paris, and enjoying the luxury of your apartment. I expect to get there on Sunday evening, the 21st. I will write two or three days earlier to the concierge announcing my arrival. Please remember me to Margaret. I am sorry not to have seen her this summer; next year, as I shall probably not leave England, it may be possible to get a glimpse of her when she is passing through London to or from school. I hope you have both enjoyed your trip to America more than you expected.
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Write me a line when you feel like it, and tell me what you hear of James’s health.2 Yours ever G.S. 1
Mohammed (c. 570–632), the Prophet of Islam, founded one of the world’s great religions. His sayings are the law of Islam, together with the Koran. 2 William James (1842–1910) and his brother Henry were sons of Henry James Sr., wealthy American theologian. William studied art in Paris and pursued scientific studies in Germany. Harvard awarded him the M.D. in 1869. James began teaching at Harvard in 1873 as instructor in anatomy and physiology. In 1876 he began teaching psychology and set up the first American psychological laboratory. His search for a metaphysical basis for his speculations about human consciousness and behavior led him to study philosophy, which he began to teach in 1879. At his retirement in 1907 he was recognized as the foremost American philosopher. His books include Principles of Psychology (1890) and Pragmatism (1907). James’s relationship with his pupil, Santayana, was one of mutual respect for each another’s intellect, philosophical disagreement, and temperamental antithesis.
To Charles Augustus Strong 8 September 1910 • Paris, France
(MS: Rockefeller)
21 rue de Surène September 8, 1910. Dear Strong th , I expect to leave for The day after tomorrow, Saturday the 10– Hamburg, after three weeks spent most comfortably in your apartment. Louis and his wife have looked after me excellently, and I think I have been a tenant of regular and resonable requirements. Every morning at nine I have had my chocolate (in bed) and read the newspaper and a book after, until it was time to dress and go out to breakfast. For this purpose I have been patronizing the Duval1 establishments a good deal, and altogether have been less extravagantly joyful than three weeks in Paris might suggest. Slade and Roberts, also a young man named Jones,2 have turned up on several occasions, besides my sister-in-law and her spinter friends (one a daughter of old Professor Bowen)3 of whom I believe I wrote you before. It has been a most pleasant period, and I am truly grateful for the part of my pleasure and convenience which you have supplied by your hospitality—vicarious as in a sense it has been. Of James’s death4 I have heard only what by chance I have seen in the French papers. It was no surprise, yet I have hardly had the time, or the
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freedom of mind, to think his life and work over, and —— some ——— ^sum^ it up to myself—not even the part he has played in my own growth and career. I owe him more than I perhaps realize: he was all kindness, but of the sort, curiously enough, that excludes sympathy. It — is— was a motherly sort of kindness for a humanity of his own fancy and creation. He never [across] knew me.—I hope to hear from you before long. Yours ever G.S. 1
A chain of inexpensive restaurants in Paris. Conrad Hensler Slade (b. 1871), the most Nordic of Santayana’s American friends, was a member of the class of 1893 and a sculptor. He “was content to live in Paris among poor artists and working people, with none of the comforts or social pleasures among which he had been bred.” At Harvard, Slade had rowed with the varsity crew. Described by Santayana as “very good-looking in the expressionless, statuesque manner” and of a solitary, independent nature, Slade was one of the models for Oliver Alden in Puritan. Slade’s personality and adventures also contributed to Santayana’s conception of the Puritan character Mario Van de Weyer. See Persons, 383–84. Roberts is possibly Thornton Delano Roberts, a member of Harvard’s class of 1903. Jones is unidentified. 3 Francis “Fanny” Bowen (1811–90) was the Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity at Harvard (1853–89). See Persons, 236. His daughter is unidentified. 4 William James died 27 Aug 1910. 2
To Arthur Davison Ficke 24 October 1910 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Beinecke) 3 Prescott Hall Cambridge Oct. 24, 1910
Dear Ficke1 Your new book2 has interested me very much and I must thank you, not only for sending it to me, but for the unusual pleasure I have found in reading it. The form you have chosen justifies itself in the result, for although I sometimes felt that the unrhymed passages might as well have been frankly in prose, the interest in the thought was almost always sufficient to carry me in pleasant unconsciousness over the details of the forms. If you can attain perfect transparency and fitness of expression, and you are near attaining it, there will be nothing more to ask for in that direction. I have noticed two or three impurities of idiom (or what seemed such to me) of the sort that a reader of American writing can hardly fail to slip
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into. What is it “to seek … fulfilment of the days that were my shame”? Or what is “infinite divertness”? And why should “day” be feminine? You will think this hypercritical; but, when I read poetry, I expect “integros accedere fontes”,3 else I am not satisfied. As to your prophecy itself (which is of more moment) all is convincing except the end. To my unilluminated mind it seems impossible that mankind should all be free, in any full sense of this word. They cannot be free if they don’t exist; they can’t exist, if they don’t eat; and they can’t eat, if they don’t work. But to have to work, even if not to overwork, at definite tasks, hours, and places, is not freedom. It is compulsion, and living willy-nilly in a once-determined groove. You will forgive these frank observations, in view of the proof they are of the keen interest your book has aroused in me. It is splendid to find a real subject treated in the work of a young poet—or of any poet. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Arthur Davison Ficke (1883–1945), Harvard class of 1904, was a poet and regular contributor to the New York Times. 2 The Breaking of Bonds: A Drama of the Social Unrest (Boston: Sherman, French & Co., 1910). [D. C.] 3 Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), 1.927 and 4.2, invat integros accedere fontis / atque haurire: It is pleasant to approach pure springs and drink.
To William Roscoe Thayer 27 October 1910 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Houghton) October 27, 1910.
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Mr Thayer1 You are very good to ask me to hear Mr Chapman’s play.2 It would have been a pleasure to do so, and to see you and him again. Unfortunately, I am to be out of town for Sunday, and cannot join you. With many thanks and regrets Yours sincerely GSantayana
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1
William Roscoe Thayer (1859–1923) edited the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine. Probably John Jay Chapman (1862–1933), who graduated from Harvard in 1885 and became a controversial dramatist, writer, and critic. His play for a Greek theatre, The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold, was produced in 1910. 2
To Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien 18 November 1910 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Texas)
Cambridge, Nov. 18, 1910 Mr Edward J O’Brien1 Dear Sir: It will be a pleasure & an honour to me if you include any of verses in your collection.2 The choice you have made surprises and rather pleases me: I don’t know whether it would be of any interest to you to know that “Solipsism” was written in 1885, when I was twenty-one, and “Cathedrals by the Sea” in 1900.3 Yours very truly GSantayana 1 Born in Boston, Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien (1890–1941) was a poet, editor, anthologist, and critic. 2 O’Brien published The Masque of Poets: A Collection of New Poems (New York, 1918), but no poem by Santayana was included. 3 These two poems were published in Hermit and later in Complete Poems, 164 and 131.
To Abbott Lawrence Lowell 3 December 1910 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Harvard) December 3, 1910
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Mr Lowell1 Thank you very much for the information about comparative marking, which I am sending to my assistants in Phil. B. It seems to me quite natural, however, that the marks in this course should be much higher than in a group which contains several courses taken almost exclusively by Freshmen. It is also to be noted that Phil. B. contains a decidedly select body of students, comes at 1.30 (an hour avoided by the self-indulgent) and is one in which ability and intelligence, even without very much work,
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suffice to produce good results, so that B is more commonly attained than it might be by the same men in other courses, when these men are clever. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
A member of a distinguished Boston family, Abbott Lawrence Lowell (1856–1943) succeeded Charles William Eliot as president of Harvard University in 1909 and became “the greatest builder of any Harvard president” (Harvard, 440). Lowell took his bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1877 and graduated from the law school in 1880. While practicing law in Boston, he began teaching courses on government at his alma mater. He was promoted to full professor in 1900. Lowell retired from the presidency in 1933.
To [Sara or Grace] Norton 5 December 1910 [postmark] • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Houghton)
Dear Miss Norton1 Your kind invitation to meet Miss Irwin2 reached me on Sunday, when I went to my mother’s, unfortunately too late for me to avail myself of it. It was very good of you to remember me, and I wish I might have had the pleasure of seeing you and Miss Irwin on that occasion. With many thanks Yours sincerely GSantayana 3 Prescott Hall Cambridge Dec. 5. 1
Probably the daughter (Sara) but possibly the sister (Grace) of Charles Eliot Norton. Unidentified.
2
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To Charles Augustus Strong 20 December 1910 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Rockefeller) Dec. 1/20, 1910
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Strong This will probably reach you after New Year’s Day, but not too late to wish you all felicity during the rest of the twelve-month. I am anxious to know where you are, and what you have been doing and feeling. Here, there is no change. With best wishes to you and Margaret, Yours ever G.S.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 23 December 1910 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Virginia) December 23, 1910
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Susie A happy New Year to you and Celedonio, and the rest of the family. Here there is no change. Mrs. Pollard, the nurse mother had until a week ago, is probably coming back; the one we have now is not unsatisfactory, but was not meant to be permanent. I have read the article (largely from “La Croix”) which you inclosed for me in a recent letter. My impression is that Catholicism in France—as elsewhere—may well gain in intensity what it loses in extension. Ceasing to be a matter of course for everybody, it becomes, for those who adopt it expressly, a personal conviction and affection; also a matter of party, a thing to be defended and propagated with zeal. This, however, is only the compensation for a very real and permanent loss—the loss of a dominant and pervasive influence over society. In a word, the Church is tending to acquire everywhere the sort of relation to the State and to society which it has in non-Catholic countries; and you know very well that this position,
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while it has its advantages in the way of fostering strictness and zeal among the faithful minority, is not at all the position which the Church claims, and would like to preserve. My object in writing today is to tell you that I have just accepted an inviof the University of tation to lecture for six weeks next Summer at — ^ ^ California. This invitation comes, probably, in the very latest year when I could have accepted it, and the chance to see the Far West, and what lies between (although I don’t care for it particularly) ought, I suppose, not to be missed. The lectures will be mere shortened versions of those I give here, and will involve no preparation, while the fee ($500) will almost cover my expenses, and I shall save all I should have spent in going to Europe. I shall also be nearer Boston if there should be any need of my hastening back. This cuts off the possibility of seeing you next Summer; but I had hardly expected to get to Avila in any case, so that nothing is lost in that direction; and after one other winter, you may see only too much of me. [across] With love to all, Your affectionate brother George
To Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien 26 December 1910 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Texas) 3 Prescott Hall Cambridge Dec. 26, 1910
Dear Mr O’Brien I am much touched by your thinking of sending me your paper on Jones’s1 poetry, together with those of your friends, and particularly with the inscription you have prefixed to it. But why do you canonize Lionel Johnson? I remember him very well in his last days.2 Poetry in words, like fiction in life, is something which has ceased to be natural to me, and if I read Jones’s verses I doubt whether they would impress me very much. No doubt the faculty of dreams may be as precious as waking, and less wearisome than insomnia; but when one falls into prose, it is hard to rise again out of it. Another fiction which you amiably weave is the “quia multum amavit”3 which you apply to me. Any love while we have it seems great; but we must, in retrospect, reduce things to some proportion.
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It is a pleasure for me to see that there is a school of the poetically minded round the corner, which we do not suspect the existence of here. The Stickney-Moody-Lodge School,4 well known to me, was turbid and turgid beyond endurance, in spite of flashes of gun-powder—for I will not call it lightning or genius. How interesting, if in Catholic circles, something simpler, tenderer, and more truly lived should arise in America! Believe me, with best thanks and best wishes, Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Thomas Samuel Jones (1882–1932). Lionel Pigot Johnson (1867–1902) was a Welsh poet and critic whom Santayana met at New College, Oxford. See Persons, 304–5. 3 Because he much loved. 4 Joseph Trumbull Stickney (1874–1904), William Vaughn Moody (1869–1910), and George Cabot Lodge (1873–1909) were Harvard poets. A member of the class of 1895, Lodge published several books. His collected Poems and Dramas appeared in 1911. 2
To Upton Beall Sinclair [1911] • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Indiana)
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Mr. Sinclair:1 Let me thank you for your book, and for remembering the interest which I have always taken in your work. If the freedom of your descriptions in this book is attacked, you will be in the right in defending yourself; if the aesthetic value of them is denied, you can only wait and see if they do not find admirers. I will say frankly that I do not care for them myself. I prefer the Arabian Nights.2 Nor am I sure that the moral to be drawn from such a picture of strained and hideous situations would be always the one you would approve. They might seem an argument in favour of celibacy, or of convention. Yours truly GSantayana 1 Upton Beall Sinclair (1878–1968), the great muckraking novelist, was born in Baltimore. The book referred to in this undated letter is uncertain (‘1911’ is supplied by Sinclair in My Lifetime in Letters, 100); it may have been one of his novels published in 1908: The Moneychangers or The Metropolis. Sinclair produced over a hundred writings during the period 1901–40 and was active in his craft until his death.
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2 Santayana owned the sixteen-volume Le Livre des mille nuits et une nuit (A thousand and one nights), trans. J. C. Mardrus (Paris, 1908).
To Wendell T. Bush 2 January 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Columbia) Jan. 2. 1911.
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Mr. Bush Will you thank Mrs Bush1 for her card, and give her my best wishes for the New Year, which go also to yourself. In April I expect to be in New York and count upon seeing you in your new house. My second paper on Russell2 is, I find, terribly long, but it seemed impossible to cut out anything without reducing the clearness or fairness of the points I wished to make. I hope you won’t mind the malicious use I make of a phrase of yours; it was so good an example of the pragmatic manner that I couldn’t forbear quoting it. However, I haven’t given your name, so as not to seem to lay too much stress on a mere matter of language. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Mary Potter Bush. Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872–1970) was educated at Cambridge and held a variety of posts there. He reacted against idealism with realism, an expression of which is Principles of Mathematics (1903). His classic work Principia Mathematica was coauthored with A. N. Whitehead (1910–13). Later Russell became interested in social and political issues, publishing Marriage and Morals (1929), Education and the Social Order (1932), and New Hopes for a Changing World (1951). He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. He married four times, and his first wife was Alys Pearsall Smith (1867–1951), the daughter of Hannah Tatum Whitall and Robert Pearsall Smith. They were married from 1894 to 1921. See Persons, 285–89, 439–44, 475–76, and 485–86. The book referred to here is Our Knowledge of the External World (Chicago, 1914), which applies Russell’s logical constructionism to physical objects. 2
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To Bertrand Arthur William Russell 15 January 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: McMaster) Jan. 15, 1911.
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Mass. Dear Russell It is rather late to thank you for your “Philosophical Essays”, but you may soon see unmistakable evidence of the great interest I have taken in them, as I am writing an elaborate review—in three articles—for the Whited Sepulchre—which is what we call the Columbia “Journal of Philosophy, etc”.1 You will not expect me to agree with you in everything, but, whatever you may think of my ideas, I always feel that yours, and Moore’s2 too, make for the sort of reconstruction in philosophy which I should welcome. It is a great bond to dislike the same things, and dislike is perhaps a deeper indication of our real nature than explicit affections, since the latter may be effects of circumstances, while dislike is a reaction against them. I had hoped to go to Cambridge in June, but, now it is arranged that I shall go instead to California, where I have never been. I am both glad and sorry for this, but it seemed as well to see the Far West once in one’s life, especially as I hope soon to turn my face resolutely in the opposite direction. Thank you again very much for sending me the book. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Philosophical Essays (London and New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1910). Santayana’s articles (“Russell’s Philosophical Essays” 8 [1911]) were I. “The Study of Essence,” 57–63; II. “The Critique of Pragmatism,” 113–24; and III. “Hypostatic Ethics,” 421–32. 2 George Edward Moore (1873–1958) was a proponent of common sense who wrote Principia Ethica (1903). He began editing Mind in 1921 and was elected to a professorship of philosophy at Cambridge University in 1925. After his retirement from that post in 1939, he visited the United States, serving as visiting professor at various colleges and universities, including Smith, Princeton, and Columbia.
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To Andrew Joseph Onderdonk February 1911 • [Cambridge, Massachusetts]
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(MS: Unknown)
Andrew J. Onderdonk, Jr1 from his friend The Author. Falling untempered from the eternal blue, The light of truth would scorch the eyes, & blind; Wherefore these giant oaks their branches twined And betwixt earth & heaven the lattice drew Of their green labyrinth; Rare stars shone through Low, warm, & mild. The infinite, confined, Suffered the measure of the pensive mind, And what the heart devised, it painted true. Scant is that covert now in the merciless glare, Stripped all those leafy arches, riven that dome. Unhappy laggard he, whose rest is there! Some yet untrodden forest be my home, Where patient time and woven sun and air And streams the mansion of the soul prepare. February, 1911. 1 Santayana’s friendship with Andrew Joseph Onderdonk began when the latter was an undergraduate (Harvard, 1910). Onderdonk graduated from the Law School in 1913 and became a Wall Street lawyer and an expert in international law. Santayana had named Onderdonk his literary executor until 1928, when Daniel Cory assumed that role.
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To Charles Augustus Strong 12 February 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Rockefeller)
Feb. 12, 1911. COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Strong. It is very nice to hear from you, and to get so life-like a glimpse of your state of mind. Thank you very much for repeating your generous offers; my plans about retirement continue unchanged; that is, I expect to leave (either resigning formally or getting an indefinite leave of absence) a year from next June, i.e. in June 1912. This summer I am sorry to say I sha’n’t see you, because I am going to California to give some lectures at Berkeley; the proposal came just in time, for if they had waited another year, it would have been too late. As it is, it seemed too pat to be refused; it gives me a chance of seeing the West for nothing and making a sort of farewell tour of the country. By the time I retire I hope to have $2500 a year of my own; my unmarried sister1 (who is far better off) has offered to share her superfluities with me; so you see I shall be opulent according to my standards. Nevertheless I gladly accept your offers of a helping hand in spirit, and in fact also, if circumstances should require or justify it. You have eighteen months in which to make up your mind and experiment in places and houses; if you have settled down when I am free, I will come to make you a long visit, and we might (if your house was large enough) share it in a sense, if you would set aside a room for me where I might leave my books and other small belongings, and where I might come every year for a season. During my first winter—and you would probably be in Switzerland—I want to spend several months in Madrid, where I know I can be comfortable and amused at an old spinter friend’s.2 Then I am longing to revisit Italy; and my plan of writing a critical history of philosophy may take me to Oxford, London, & Paris, in order to have a large library to work in. But this consultation of books would (as you may well imagine) not be systematic, so that the greater part of my composition could be done in the wilderness, and would probably be all the better, as to tone and perspective, for being done there.
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I am glad to know that Margaret continues to be and to do well. If you try Oxford, why not try Cambridge also? It is damper and duller, but quieter and simpler. Yours ever G.S. 1
Josephine. Mercedes Ruiz de la Escalera was born about 1855. See Persons, 36–39.
2
To Mr. Young 22 February 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Virginia) 3 Prescott Hall Cambridge, Mass. Feb. 22, 1911
Dear Mr Young,1 It is a very long time since I got your letter and your copy of my “Three Poets”, and I have waited until today to return it, because I had in mind a Sonnet which I wanted to write for it. A Sonnet, though not the one I intended, is now written and duly inscribed in the book, and I hope you will excuse this late and middling performance in view of my good intentions. Believe me, with sincerely —— regard, Yours very truly GSantayana 1
Mr. Young of Minneapolis is unidentified but was a collector who sent authors copies of their own works and asked them to inscribe these with dedications. See 17 Nov 1917. About this time Santayana composed a sonnet entitled “On the Three Philosophical Poets”; however, the sonnet inscribed in Young’s copy of the book has not been identified.
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To Mary Williams Winslow 1 March [1911] • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Houghton) March 1.1
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Mrs Winslow—2 I shall be delighted to come next Tuesday, the 7th at half past seven. It is nice to know that you are well again, as your writing implies. As to your new son,3 I daresay he is a model of all a child should be, but for my part I am too prosaic and disillusioned to lavish any more unrequited affections upon objects unconscious of my regard. Besides, I am faithful to my Polly. It may be that in her young life she has sometimes forgotten me; but she has never refused to make eyes at me in my presence; while I am afraid I can expect nothing but stony indifference from her young brother, considering the disadvantage of his sex and age. By the way, if you are having a regular dinner party on Tuesday, I should think it very, very nice of you to let me come some other day instead—I have absolutely no engagements—when I could really see you and make up for this long interval since our last talks. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
‘(1911)’ was written here in a hand other than that of Santayana. Mary Williams Winslow and her husband, Frederick Winslow, were among Santayana’s best friends during his later years in Boston. Frederick Winslow graduated from the Harvard class of 1895 and became a prominent Boston physician. 3 Frederick. 2
To Cale Young Rice 9 March 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Bowling Green) March 9, 1911.
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Mr. Rice1 The praises of your poetry have reached me from various quarters, but I have seen only very short quotations, and I never suspected that the
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author was one who might, in France, have called me “cher maître”.2 If you care to send me one of your books, I shall value it very highly. Thank you very much for your letter. It is always a pleasure to be remembered by those to whom one has addressed one’s thoughts, even if somewhat impersonally, for hour after hour, and the pleasure is all the greater when it is a poet that listened. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 Cale Young Rice (1872–1943) was born in Dixon, Kentucky. After graduation from Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee, he entered Harvard, receiving the A.B. (1895) and A.M. (1896). He published several books of poems and poetic dramas, including Many Gods (1910). Despondent over the death of his wife, children’s writer Alice Hegan Rice, he committed suicide. 2 Dear teacher.
To the National Institute of Arts and Letters 10 March 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Academy) 3 Prescott Hall Cambridge, Mass. March 10. 1911
To the Secretary of the N. I. of A. & S. Dear Sir: I beg hereby to resign from the National Institute of Arts and Sciences. I find that I am not able to attend the meetings, or to take part otherwise in the affairs of the Institute; and the case will be even worse in a year or so, when I expect to go to live in Europe.1 Yours truly GSantayana 1 Santayana was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (later called the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters) on 5 Feb 1909. He was elected a foreign honorary member in 1943.
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To [Sara or Grace] Norton 25 April [1911] • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Houghton) 3 Prescott Hall April 251
Dear Miss Norton You are very good to ask me again, and I am strangely unfortunate in again having an engagement for the evening of your dinner. I am to be on Saturday at Williams College, to read a paper before a literary club there. It would have been a real pleasure to have dined with you, and seen Mr. & Mrs. Gardiner Lane also.2 Believe me, with grateful thanks, Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 Though ‘? 1909’ is written on the holograph in a hand other than that of Santayana, the editors date the letter 1911. Santayana visited Williams College in Massachusetts only once to lecture on Shelley (Persons, 175). This lecture took place by mid-May 1911. 2 Gardiner Martin Lane (d. 1914) graduated summa cum laude from Harvard (1881), majoring in Classics. He was a Fellow of the American Academy.
To Charles Augustus Strong 29 April 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Rockefeller) April 29, 1911.
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Strong Your letter, with the news about your new apartment in the avenue de l’Observatoire arrived in due season, and naturally interested me very much. I hope you will find the place satisfactory, and I feel sure that the choice of Paris as your head-quarters is wise, because really inevitable. If you had settled elsewhere you would have returned to Paris sooner or later; and having your house in Paris will not prevent you from escaping to Switzerland or England whenever you feel the need of a change of air or a quieter scene. Your generous offer of guaranteeing my income for me when I retire is very friendly, and I appreciate it as it deserves; but it is not necessary, as I
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could easily live on less than $2500, if by any chance my income fell short of that; and, as I told you, my sister Josephine has already offered to add considerably ($1000 more) to my annuity; and (although I do not expect to do so) I could avail myself of her aid, if it were necessary or even convenient, as she is sure never to spend what she has. So you must not regard yourself as pledged to anything in my case; but I welcome your suggestion, and thank you heartily for it; and if any thing should lead me into difficulties financially (we might all find ourselves poorer together, if my brother1 made some blunder in our investments) I should not hesitate to count on you to lend me a helping hand. But the way in which I really expect to avail myself of your generosity is by coming often to stay with you in Paris. That will be a pleasure in itself; we can continue our discussions; we can make little excursions together, as we did at Compiegne; and I can enjoy the stimulus and charm of Paris, —itself, ———— which I have grown very fond of.—As to my retiring in 1912, it is quite determined upon: if my mother should be still living, I might not retire formally; but I should take leave of absence, and doubtless never return. The form my departure will take is not settled, but my departure is. Every body here knows it now, and they have taken it more reasonably and sympathetically than I had expected. Of late I have been going about reading a paper on Shelley2—full of youthful enthusiasm for the poet—to Bowdoin, and Columbia, and Bryn Mawr, and (next week) to Williams. I was in New York for a week at Easter, and saw some old friends, and also the philosophers at Columbia, but without making much progress in mutual understanding. As Dewey3 said, we are all facing different problems when we seem to be discussing the same point. My journey to California has been slightly modified by the fact that I have to go by way of Madison,4 as they are going (mirabile dictu!)5 to give me an honorary degree of Litt.D. — [ This is a secret!]— at —— there ———— their ^ ^ c/Commencement, on June 21–st ; from there I shall have to hasten directly to San Francisco, without seeing the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, as I had intended. In one way, this is a relief, as I dreaded the heat and the crowd of tourists; but I am sorry to miss the sight, which some people say is so marvellous. Possibly, I may return by that route, instead of by the Canadian Pacific. If you are in New York in September there is no reason why we should not meet; let me know, when the time comes, just when you sail, and I will try to get back a few days before, so as to see you off.
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It will be perfectly convenient, as in any case I mean to spend the last weeks of the long vacation in the East. I have given a card of introduction to you to a young Frenchman, René Bosc,6 who has been Hyde Fellow here this year. I couldn’t give him your new address, as you did not mention the number of your house. I thought you might not mind seeing some one with whom you might talk philosophy in English. He says Bergson7 has turned Catholic and has a directeur!8 That is incredible; but he might easily have become a Christian Scientist or a Dancing Dervish. [across] Yours ever GSantayana 1
Robert Shaw Sturgis. Santayana admired Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792—1822), the English romantic poet. This paper became “Shelley: or the Poetic Value of Revolutionary Principles,” chapter V of Doctrine. 3 John Dewey (1859–1952) was an American philosopher and educator long associated with Columbia University. His philosophy (instrumentalism) is related to pragmatism. In education he argued for learning by experience, motivated by the student’s need. 4 University of Wisconsin. 5 Wonderful to relate. 6 René Bosc’s works include Le fort de Nîmes: de la citadelle à l’Université. 7 Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was a French philosopher who taught at the Collège de France. His philosophy is complex, but the basic premise of his intellectual system is a faith in direct intuition as a means of attaining knowledge. 8 Spiritual guide. 2
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 16 May 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Virginia) May 16, 1911.
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Susie, You have heard, of course, that there has been some change for the worse in mother’s condition; for a week she has had a slight fever, and has not rested so quietly as usual, and eaten less. When awake, however, she seems much as she did a month ago; she laughs occasionally and does not seem to have any pain or discomfort. I suppose this is simply one more stage in her slow decline; but it is remarkably/ e how slow this decline is, and how steadily her system runs on, even with its lessening vitality.
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I write today because I have had a very important interview with the President of the College,1 in which we have agreed upon a new arrangement for my future work. I had finally been obliged to write to him saying that I meant to resign at the end of the next year, twelve months from now; and he made a great ado about it, saying that it would never do, and that he would let me have all the free time I wanted if I would stay. After various suggestions it has been arranged that in future I shall be in Cambridge only four months, the first half of each year, from October 1–st to February ^ ^ 1–st , and that besides I shall have leave of absence for the whole of the year 1912–13. I am to have half my present pay, that is, $2000 a year, and half of that during the year I am away altogether. So that I shall be free for eighteen months after February 1–st next, my holiday being thus advanced to half a year earlier than I expected. On the other hand, I am pledged to return for four months on October 1–st 1913; but that is a long way off, and even if nothing intervenes to prevent it, there will be no need of repeating the experiment if I find it irksome. So that it seemed wiser and more accommodating to make this concession, rather than stick out for my original plan, especially as it makes my income larger and more assured. I am leaving for California about June 15, and can be back as early as September 1–st Should circumstances demand, I could stay on here after February 1–st , as I shall have my rooms for the whole season; but if it should not be necessary, I will sail then for Europe, and you may see me again before the winter is quite over. I have not been to any dinners or other parties this winter, but I was in New York at Easter for a week, and have also visited Bowdoin, Bryn Mawr, and Williams Colleges, reading in each a paper on Shelley, the product of the Shelley Club I have had this year—a group of young men who came on Wednesday afternoon s to have a cup of tea and read ^^ Shelley aloud. I am pretty tired of lecturing, but enjoy what reading I can do more than ever, and feel as if all the interesting things were still to be read and studied. I am writing a brand new system of philosophy to be called “Three realms of Being”2—not the mineral vegetable and animal, but something far more metaphysical, namely Essence, Matter, and Consciousness. It will not be a long book,3 but very technical. I continue to read La lectura dominical with pleasure, especially the Crónica. Spanish politics are extremely interesting, and I am pining for a season [across] at Madrid, to understand them better. Love to all from your affte brother George
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1
Abbott Lawrence Lowell. Santayana’s system of philosophy, Realms, was completed in 1940. With the addition of “Truth” and the changing of “Consciousness” to “Spirit,” the system now encompassed four realms of being. [D. C.] 3 Not counting the introductory volume (Scepticism ) or the various prefaces, the work ran to 854 printed pages. [D. C.] 2
To Charles Augustus Strong 20 May 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Rockefeller) May 20, 1911
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Strong, Since I last wrote, my plans for the future have been somewhat modified, owing to the pressure of circumstances, the President, and (perhaps) conscience; but I hope you will not disapprove of the new arrangement when you hear what it is. I am not to resign for the present, but am to come to Cambridge every year for four months, September to January; and I am to have leave of absence for the whole of 1912–13; so that my Vita Nuova will begin on February 1–st next, after which I shall have twenty months in Europe, on half pay, but with the engagement to come back in 1913 for the first half-year. As my pay is reduced for next year to $2000, my half pay (or quarter pay) for 1912—13 will be $1000, while I am enjoying a full ^ ^ holiday. Mr. Lowell has been very complimentary and sympathetic in the whole affair; he likes to seem to keep me while saving half my salary, and he seems to be ready to make this kind of arrangement with a number of other persons. The philosophers, on the other hand, are not overjoyed: although they do not say so, I suspect they would not have been displeased to have me quit altogether. In my own mind, the difference is not very great; while I sincerely mean to come back in 1913, I doubt whether I shall do so in subsequent years; and on the other hand, I get off next year in February instead of in June, as I expected. Of course financially I am far better off, as I have $2000, or $1000 at least, more than I had counted on. When we meet in September in New York, we will talk things over. My idea is to live in Europe, to have all my books and papers there, and to
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come back to Harvard only as a visitor with the lightest possible baggage. So that our plans for living often together need not be in the least disturbed. If you have room in your new apartment, I will despatch to you there, next winter, all my philosophical and other decent books which you do not happen to have already in your library—I will show you a list of what I propose to send beforehand, so that we need not have useless duplicates on our hands. These duplicates I will give to Emerson Hall,1 or to the Harvard Union,2 or (if not suitable for that) despatch them to Avila, where I now have a miscellaneous collection, mostly my father’s,3 more dusty than venerable. In my last letter I think I didn’t say anything in reply to the good news about your book.4 If the first chapters are firmly and finally set down, the rest will follow more easily and with less occasion for alternative methods of treatment, which are the torment of those who are trying to write down what they have long meditated on, and approached from different points of view on different occasions. I am looking forward to reading those chapters with great interest not merely to learn more clearly what your view is, but also to clarify my own, as I am trying to gather all the aspects in which “matter” is revealed to us, and all the legitimate inferences we can make as to its further probably/ e attributes. I have written nothing more on my ^ ^ “Three Realms of Being” (this is the title I think I shall choose) but have threshed out many of the points in lectures and discussions, and feel that I am pretty clear, at least as to the limits of possible clearness. Yours ever G.S. 1
Harvard’s philosophy department offices and library are in Emerson Hall. The Harvard Union on Quincy Street was erected in 1900–1902. It was intended to provide an attractive gathering place for students not wealthy enough to afford the luxuries of a club. Thus, an esprit de corps would be encouraged among the students at this common meeting place. 3 A retired colonial official, Agustín Ruiz de Santayana y Reboiro (1814–93), married Josefina Borrás y Carbonell about 1863; their son, Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás (“George”), was born later that year. See Persons, 11–50. 4 Strong’s books include Why the Mind Has a Body (1903), The Origin of Consciousness (1918), Essays in Critical Realism (1920), The Wisdom of the Beasts (1921), A Theory of Knowledge (1923), Essays on the Natural Origin of the Mind (1930), and A Creed for Sceptics (1936). 2
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To Herbert Jacob Seligmann 23 May 1911 [postmark] • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Morgan) 3 Prescott Hall May 23.
Dear Mr. Seligmann1 I notice you have n’t yet handed in your thesis in Phil. 10, nor even a brief, which seems strange after your good work in the first half-year. If there is any difficulty that I might help to clear up, I wish you would speak to me about it. Perhaps you might dine with me this evening—dinner time is my freest time now-a-days.—If you will come here—just as you are— between 6 and 6.30, I should in any case be glad to see you. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 Herbert Jacob Seligmann (b. 1891) graduated cum laude from Harvard (1912). He was an author and poet.
To Conrad Hensler Slade 1 June 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Unknown)
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
June 1st 1911 Dear Conrad I can’t say I am very sorry, nor even very much surprised, that you are “still free”. There was something a bit exotic about your proposed marriage, and your attachment was hardly violent enough to justify the step. Nevertheless, I am sorry there is to be no house to visit you in at Arles, and no little “nephews”. This summer, for a change, I am going to California! The University of California at Berkeley, has invited me to teach there for six weeks, and offered me $500, which will almost cover my expenses. It seemed a good chance to see the Pacific, like Cortes,1 before I die, and probably the last chance I should have, so I have accepted. So I shall not be in Oxford, or anywhere else within reach this summer, for which I am sorry. On the other hand, I have made an arrangement with the College here, by which
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in future I shall be here only for the first half of each year, from October 1st to the end of January. This arrangement begins at once, so that next February I shall turn up in Paris (or in Italy), and perhaps see you at once; or, in any case, before long, as I shall remain in Europe the whole of the following year, which is my “sabbatical”, not needing to return to Harvard until September, 1913, and then only for four months. Whether I shall ever return after that is very doubtful; but I thought it wiser to make this arrangement than to insist at once on resigning altogether, especially during the life-time of my mother. My friend Strong has taken an apartment in the Avenue de l’Observatoire, and has kindly invited me to stay there whenever I am in Paris. In fact, I am to have a room in his house with a place in which to keep my books and other belongings—almost a home! This will make it pleasant and economical for me to be often in Paris, and I count on seeing you constantly, for whatever your temporary impatience with the Parisian scene may be, you (like Strong) will never find another place in which you can really settle. The news about your neo-classical head is excellent. Send me a photo of it, if you have one. Your idea of coming to Oxford when I am there must be carried out some day—possibly next Spring. May and the early part of June are the best months there, unless you like, as I do, the place without the inhabitants. In mid-summer, however, you have the tourists instead, which is worse. Yours ever GSantayana 1
Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) was the Spanish conqueror of Mexico.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 24 June 1911 • Pueblo, Colorado
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
ROYAL GORGE, COLO., FROM BELOW.
Pueblo, Colord/ ado, June 24, 1911 — We are stopping here for two hours and waiting for a train to which our car will be attached. It has been very warm—like travelling in Spain in Summer, but I am feeling well. G. S.
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To Horace Meyer Kallen 1 July 1911 • San Francisco, California
(MS: American) July 1, 1911.
UNIVERSITY CLUB SAN FRANCISCO
Dear Kallen1 You have not yet received my congratulations on your appointment—so opportune!—to Wisconsin.2 I hope and believe you will like the place. It has a great deal of character. As I have just been there for a second time, and talked with many people, from the President down, I think I can speak for it with some confidence. The great idea there is that of civic progress. They don’t care how heterodox one’s ideas may be; but they want one’s heart to be set on the life and necessities of the community—especially the State of Wisconsin, for which they care a great deal specifically. Teaching must be adapted to the state of preparation and sentiment of the great wellwashed that flock to the University. You may guide them in whatever direction you think best, but for their own sake, and starting from their actual condition; it must not be a haughty display of your own sentiments such as might wound and perplex them. It is not their faith that you must be considerate of, but their innocence and their desire to work together and improve themselves in the process. And you must be prepared to find the female element predominant in the academic department. This last is shockingly true of my classes here. I have to put on my glasses3 to see whether I ought to say “Ladies—and Gentlemen”. But I am comfortably settled, and by escaping daily to San Francisco for dinner, I think I shall be able to spend the time pleasantly enough. Geographically the country west of the Rockies is infinitely superior to the other half of the U.S. It is not natural to be vulgar here; and the characteristic type is not vulgar. It is very frank, gentle, free, and—if it had a little encouragement— might be sincere. The University itself is in a half-built condition—not due to the earth-quake4 but merely to an architectural revolution which it is suffering. The architect, Howard, was a school-fellow of mine in Boston, when Moses Merrill was consul; and without undue flattery I think I may say his plan is good.5 The Greek theatre is really satisfactory; the rest is well-meaning and may look pretty well when the whole scheme is carried out, if it ever is.
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San Francisco is a n immensely extended place, and absurdly hilly. ^^ Walking about is painful and useless. It exhausts, and you do not arrive. But there are street cars every where, which you may take when you know the place a little; and the combination of sea mountains and parks is (generically) fine. Only the detail, the filling in, the impress of use, — is — are wanting. The new architecture in the burned area is very acceptable. There are Italian and French restaurants with fair food and bad music, and the Clubs I have seen, especially this one, are luxurious and comfortable. One has no sensation of being farther from Europe than in Boston. Perhaps it is impossible to be farther off, morally, than Boston is. The “wild” west is “wild” on purpose; that is, it is civilization on a holiday—one of the most civilized things possible. But barbarism trying to be “cultured”—that is the real horror. Write me to the Carlton Hotel, Berkeley. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Born in Germany, Horace Meyer Kallen (1882–1974) attended Harvard (A.B., 1903; Ph.D., 1908) and taught English at Princeton (1903–5). From 1908 to 1911 he taught philosophy at Harvard and worked closely with both William James and Santayana. Later he taught at the University of Wisconsin and Columbia. Kallen was one of the founders of the New School for Social Research in New York City. A leading Zionist, he wrote books on philosophy, politics, and education. 2 Santayana lectured at the University of Wisconsin in April 1910 and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters there in 1911. 3 This is a rare reference to Santayana’s wearing glasses. Though very nearsighted, Santayana did not wear them regularly. According to Harry Wood, who painted an oil portrait of Santayana in 1950, Santayana’s nose was off-center, making wearing glasses impractical. 4 Of 18 April 1906. 5 John Galen Howard (1864–1931) and Santayana were classmates at the Boston Public Latin School during the headmastership of Moses Merrill, Ph.D. (1833–1902). They graduated in the spring of 1882. Howard wrote poetry and became an architect. He later lived in the Berkeley area and worked on the University of California buildings.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 2 August 1911 • San Francisco, California UNIVERSITY GROUNDS
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
BERKELEY CALIF
This is nicer than Josephine’s back-park—and cooler.1 San Francisco; Aug. 2. 1911
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Josephine has just sent me your letter in which you say Boston must be one of the most beautiful cities “in the world”.—My last lecture2 is to-day, and I have already moved to the city from Berkeley. All well. [Unsigned ] 1
In Santayana’s hand, under photograph on front of card. “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” later published in the University of California Chronicle 13 (1911): 357–80, and reprinted in Doctrine. 2
To Charles Augustus Strong 10 August 1911 • San Francisco, California
(MS: Rockefeller) August 10 1911
UNIVERSITY CLUB SAN FRANCISCO
}
Address
Dear Strong: I am very glad to hear from you; I was just wondering where to address you, and find out whether we should really meet in September. My departure from here cannot be until Aug. 27; and as I am going by Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, the Grand Canyon, and Boston, I am afraid it will th be impossible for me to get to New York before the 7– of September. However, when my schedule of hours is made out I will write to you again: let me know also if, by chance, you are to be in Rochester1 just before you sail; for I could perhaps stop there, two or three days before I could reach New York, as I must go to Boston first. The Summer School at Berkeley (now over) has not been very agreeable on the whole—the farce of it is too marked. But there have been pleasant moments, and San Francisco has a delighted climate (better than Berkeley) and the Bay is comparable to Naples or Constantinople. I also like the air of the people—except the acamedic set, which is worse than at Cambridge. The whole country from the Rockies west is fine and noble, and ought eventually to have a chastening influence on the inhabitants. I am looking forward with delight and impatience to the 1st of February, when I shall turn my face towards Europe as towards a permanent abode. As to the details, I have no definite plans, and wish, among other things, to consult you. I shall probably make pretty straight for Madrid, and later, in the late Spring, return to Paris for a longer stay. ^ ^
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I am sending you my third Russell article,2 in case your own copy has not reached you in your [across] wanderings — Yours ever G.S. 1
Strong’s parents lived in Rochester, New York. See 15 Jan 1911.
2
To Porter Garnett 15 August 1911 • San Francisco, California
(MS: Unknown) August 15, 1911
UNIVERSITY CLUB SAN FRANCISCO 1
Dear Mr. Garnett. It has been a great pleasure, after seeing and hearing “The Green Knight,” to read the text at leisure, and the interesting introduction. As I told you, I am particularly pleased with the moral or “ritualistic” character of the whole, and now I appreciate better how many temptations you had to withstand in order to preserve it. In studying the text, which seemed to me very fine and well-sustained, I see that you have confined yourself to abstract or musical attitudes—the wood god simply invited, the Prince suffers, the Black Knight and Sathanas bluster and threaten, the Green Knight cheers, the King relieves. I mean that these attitudes are expressed without any indication of what circumstances may have produced them. They are abstract or absolute moods or sentiments. This may take away from the picturesqueness and fulness which your play might have had, if we had been told what cares Care stands for, say in the case of the Prince and the various prisoners, or what form the liberation from care takes in each case. But I quite understand that this universality is desirable in a rite to which each participant may bring his own interpretation, his own care, and his own hope of redemption. Or perhaps later Grove Plays, that may be modelled on the principles you have laid down and illustrated so impressively, may take up now one and now another instance in which care is relieved by nature and beauty; and that would open up an infinite vista of variations upon your general theme. Another point that seems to me very important is your sincerity. The pagan motive in Christian form is just what the spirit of the time can be expressed in. I am struck in California by the deep and almost religious affection which people have for nature, and by the sensitiveness they show
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to its influences; not merely poetically, but also athletically, because they like to live as nature lives. It is a relief from business and the genteel tradition. It is their spontaneous substitute for articulate art and articulate religion, and is perhaps the substance out of which these may some day be formed afresh. In conceiving a rite, carried on in the Bohemian Grove, that shall express this sense of “grace” coming from communion with nature, you seem to have hit on something wonderfully genuine and appealing and you ought to find a hearty response, and a general understanding of what you mean. Will you find it? It is not for me to say; but my impression is that it will be difficult, because rites and arts of this sort seem to require a nucleus of minstrels or hierophants that take them up as a sort of profession, and then diffuse them, by continual performances and settled forms of expression, to which the public gets accustomed. I am afraid our friends of the Bohemian Club are not quite ready to be the necessary chorus. I was sorry to run away yesterday without saying goodbye, and thanking you for all your kindness, and for the absolutely unmatched opportunities you have given me of seeing what is best in Californian life. I shall never forget the Grove, and The Green Knight, and I hope I may have other chances of discussing it with you before I leave, which will not be for a fortnight yet. Thank you also for the beautiful book of the play. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
While in San Francisco Santayana attended the Bohemian Grove play The Green Knight written by Porter Garnett (1871–1951). It was published by members of the Bohemian Club.
To Charles Augustus Strong 20 August 1911 • San Francisco, California
(MS: Rockefeller) August 20 1911
UNIVERSITY CLUB SAN FRANCISCO
Dear Strong: I am afraid it is going to be impossible for me to get to Cleveland before you leave. I should change my plans and go directly there, were my ticket not already taken by another route; I am to go to Southern California and then via the Grand Canyon, which I am going to look at so that people
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may not say I have come here and missed all the great sights. Landscape, however, especially sensational and merely strange landscape, leaves me personally pretty cold. I should like very much to hear the details of what you have been doing, how far your book has got, and how you have found your new apartment. By the way, what is the number? I lent a pupil1 who is in Paris some books which I am going to ask him to leave there, but I do not know the exact address. I am busy copying out my discourse, to be read next Saturday, at Berkeley, on “the genteel tradition in American philosophy” in which I tell people some home truths, I hope agreeably. It will be printed, and you shall see it. Remember me to Margaret, whom I am sorry not to get a glimpse of at once. I see you are going direct to Paris, so that she will find herself for a while in [across] her familiar French surroundings. I wonder if she ever Yours ever misses them at St. Felix? 2 Probably not. G.S. 1
Unidentified. Saint Felix School, Southwold (1897–1923), was in Suffolk East in England.
2
To Charles Augustus Strong 22 August 1911 • San Francisco, California
(MS: Rockefeller) Aug. 22, 1911
UNIVERSITY CLUB SAN FRANCISCO
Dear Strong, Your letter from New York reached me yesterday morning, and since then I have been thinking what it would be most sensible to do about the books, as well as about our general plans. As it turns out that I can’t see th you—I don’t get to Chicago until the 5– — I will write you my notions, although if I heard more details about your situation, these would very likely be changed. As you are not really settled at the ———— boulevard ————— ^Avenue^ de l’Observatoire, and besides there is hardly room for your books there, it is clearly not desirable that mine should be sent —— there ——— to that place. I will send them instead to Madrid or to Avila (where my father’s books are now, with some of my own) and if later we should ever find a place in which we
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were sure philosophical inspiration filled the air, there would still be time to take such of them there as might be useful in our literary labours. What I will do, then, is to go directly to Spain in February, probably by Gibraltar, and see how life and personal relations in Madrid suit me. If I feel that I can establish myself permanently with my friend Mercedes, I can unpack and arrange my books in my rooms at her house, and make that my legal residence. If I don’t like Madrid, my books and useless baggage can remain at my sister’s in Avila, until I have decided where I shall live. Possibly—would n’t this be amusing?—I might take an apartment of my own in Paris, and it might very well be a large one—a sort of studio in some remote place—where if you liked you might deposit your books, and come and stay when you passed through Paris, if you were living ordinarily somewhere else. But on the whole I think I should rather make Madrid or Avila my head-quarters, which doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t spend most of my time in other places. It is very desirable, I think, to have a fixed centre once for all, on which to fall back when the interest and stimulus of travel begin to fail. It would also be a needed place in which to do steady work, such as one feels like doing, without any interruptions, when the iron is hot. My plan (and habit) is to wander about and gather impressions somewhat idly most of the time, and then to settle down in solitude to intensive labour. As my health is steady, and I am not very much influenced by climates, it would be possible for me to have this “home” almost anywhere, provided I could shut myself up and live, for the time, absolutely regularly, with a daily routine, and no “engagements”.—I have been doing it in this club very successfully for the last week. I am very sorry indeed that we seem destined not to meet for a good many months; until you return to Paris from Italy, and I go there—and to England—from Spain, that is, until April or May of next year.—It is possible, however, that (for reasons connected with my family) I may go to ^ ^ Italy myself in February, instead of to Spain. In that case we should meet earlier. Bon voyage & au revoir, G.S.
1910–1920
To Mary Potter Bush 27 August 1911 • San Francisco, California
2:49
(MS: Columbia) August 27 1911
UNIVERSITY CLUB SAN FRANCISCO
Dear Mrs. Bush How good of you to want to show me your farm and the joys of rural Rochester! Unfortunately I am not able to stop there at all. I shall arrive too late to see my friend Strong, or to have time /f left for a visit to you, which would have given me so much pleasure. My lecture went off rather 1 cheerlessly. They say Professor Rei ——ieber behind me on the platform was visibly distressed at my attempted witticisms Several persons afterwards put their heads together and said it had been all rhetoric, and that, if you stripped the rhetoric off, what you found was a plain Atheist. However, last night when I dined with Dr Lewis2 and his wife in their sort of bungalow, their little boy—of three or four—kissed me and hugged me, and said he loved me better than Puppa and Mumma. So Mephistopheles—was Mephistopheles an atheist?—has his consolations. I am starting on Tuesday morning for the South, and meantime am going to Palo Alto—all I have courage for. The lecture and the receptions involved have left me rather limp. Thank you very much for your kind invitation, and Mr. Bush also for his letter. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 See 10 Oct 1908. Rieber was dean of the Summer Sessions at the University of California at Berkeley. 2 Gilbert Newton Lewis (1875–1946) received a Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard (1899). In 1912 he was appointed professor of chemistry and dean of the College of Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley. He was a member of the American Philosophical Society.
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To Henry James III 6 September 1911 • Chicago, Illinois
(MS: Houghton) Sept. 6, 1911
UNIVERSITY CLUB OF CHICAGO
Dear Mr. James1 Your letter has reached me here, after some delays, due m / to my having been this Summer in California. Although I am not now in the habit of keeping letters, I formerly did so, and I hope I may be able to find some of your father’s, which I will send you when I return to Boston, in about a week. Of late he had not written to me except some occasional note or post-card; but when I was a student in Germany I remember receiving most interesting letters from him; he was my director, so to speak, while I held a travelling Scholarship;2 but that was only an occasion for him to say many memorable things of all sorts, as he always did when he put pen to paper. If I find any of these letters, as I believe I shall, among some old sheafs at my mother’s, you shall have them at once. Your work in reading and arranging your father’s correspondance must be full of pleasure and satisfaction for you, in spite of its sad side; for your father’s letters were more like him than those of most people, and when brought together must give a very vivid impression of him / s kindness and of his genius. Yours sincerely G.Santayana 1 Henry James (1879–1947) was the son of Santayana’s teacher and colleague, William James. He edited The Letters of William James (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920). 2 Strong and Santayana shared the Walker Fellowship, which was awarded jointly for postgraduate study of philosophy in Germany.
1910–1920
To Mr. Young 10 September 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
2:51
(MS: Virginia) Sept. 10. 1911
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Mr. Young:1 I expect to go to Spain (where I haven’t lived since I was a boy) in February next, to remain for more than a year, at least. After that I shall be better able to reply to your question, which I suppose is not pressing. Yours sincerely G.Santayana 1
Unidentified.
To Charles Augustus Strong 13 September 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Rockefeller) Sept. 13, 1911
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Strong: On my arrival here I found your letter, written a few days before sailing. I hope your voyage was good, and that Paris and your apartment seemed to smile upon you on your return. I shall be interested to hear what your impression is when you see your books actually marshalled around you upon the walls. I should think it might make some difference both in the pleasantness and in the stimulating power of the scene. The books I was going to have left at —— you —— your house for the moment are only two small volumes—Renouvier’s Manuel de philosophie ancienne1—but you have still not told me the address. However, there is no special hurry about it. If you should feel encouraged about retaining this apartment as head-quarters, and find there was still room for my books—they might occupy one and a half meters of shelves from floor to ceiling—you might let me know, sending me the list I submitted to you, so that I should not despatch to you duplicates of books already in your possession. My feeling is that Paris—whether this apartment is satisfactory or not—will turn out
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to be the final centre of gravity for both of us, and that it will conduce very much to our comfort and convenience to have a permanent pied-à-terre2 there in some form. If you get disgusted with your present quarters, I might get a place of my own there later, as I suggested in my last letter. At the request of the department here I have written to Bergson, asking him to come to Harvard for the year 1912–13, or for a part of it. I mentioned you, in case he should have forgotten who I was, and if he is at all tempted to accept this invitation, perhaps he would be glad to talk with you about our manners and customs. In retrospect, my summer in California seems rather dismal; the people are too hopelessly commonplace and artificial. How I long for a little English simplicity, and a little English speech! I am off the day after tomorrow to Long Island to stay with the Potters, and then I am to visit Fuller,3 who has opened his house near Boston for six weeks, before going to Paris, where he is to study Greek philosophy for one or two years—so he avers. I am not sure whether you know Fuller: possibly you wouldn’t like him, because of his fashionable airs; but he is intelligent at bottom, and works hard in secret. He is also good company, and free from all the ordinary prejudices of these tribes. My mother is in much the same condition in which I left her in June; my sister Josephine, who takes care of her, is the one who seems somewhat less strong, and it is no wonder, as she leads a very dull and yet a very anxious life. She has not learned the modern scientific way of leaving invalides in the hands of doctors and nurses, and living one’s own life uninterruptedly in the world. What an ugly place Cambridge is! I can’t understand, sometimes, how I have endured it so placidly all these endless years. Kind regards to Margaret. Yours ever G.S. 1 Charles Bernard Renouvier (1815–1903), a French critical philosopher, wrote Manuel de philosophie ancienne (Paris, 1844). 2 Secondary lodging. 3 Benjamin Apthorp Gould “Bags” Fuller (1879–1956) was a member of the Harvard class of 1900. He pursued graduate study (Ph.D., 1906) with Santayana and later was appointed to the Harvard faculty.
1910–1920
To Henry James III 5 October 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
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(MS: Houghton) October 5, 1911
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Mr. James On looking over what files of old letters I have left, I can find only this single note from your father. He wrote me several other letters at about this same period, phrases of which I can remember distinctly, but I don’t know what has become of the originals. Before I leave for Europe in the middle of the coming winter, I shall have to turn over all my papers, and if any thing more of your father’s turns up, you shall have it. I am very sorry that for the moment I can contribute so little to your collection, which is sure to be of extraordinary interest. Yours sincerely GSantayana
To Sydney Allan Friede 14 October 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Columbia) Oct. 14, 1911
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Friede1 I am glad to hear from you and to see that you actually found something to do at Collier’s, even if it doesn’t satisfy you for life. Of course I should be glad to write as you suggest to the Harvard Club, except that as I am not a member and never go there (because I suffer from “too much Harvard” as it is) it might seem presumptuous to suppose that I had any influence with the committee on admission. However, if ^^ there is no one else about who can endorse your application more efficaciously than I, I shall be glad to do so. I am sailing from New York late in January, and hope to see you there or perhaps in Paris where my address is C/o C. A. Strong, 9 avenue de l’Observatoire. My London address is Brown Shipley, and I shall proba-
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bly haunt the new American Universities Club (at the Junior Oxford & Cambridge Club in Pall Mall) when I am there in February. Perhaps this is a club you might like to join; if so, let me know, and I will have an application-blank sent you. Yours sincerely G.Santayana P.S. I liked the Californian [across] country, but the people I saw seemed cheap. 1 Born in New York City, Friede (1890–1934) took his A.B. from Harvard in 1912. He worked for a time on the editorial staff of Collier’s, a weekly literary and critical journal. In 1913 he became a partner in his father’s firm, which specialized in international banking. He served as a major in the Military Intelligence Service during World War I. Later he became president of Hamilton Fish & Company.
To Mary Potter Bush 20 October 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Columbia) October 20 1911
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Mrs. Bush— Next week I am to read the Shelley paper again—in Ma/ontreal—and probably for the last time, so that it would be as well, perhaps, to publish it. But where? Meantime, I shall be very glad to send you the MS (if you don’t mind its unpresentable blots and scratches) as soon as I get back from my trip. If you are coming to Cambridge with Mr. Bush in December, I hope you will keep a day for lunching with me—and let me know which Yours sincerely G.Santayana P.S. My after-impressions of California and my trip are not so delightful that I shall regret overlaying them with others next winter and Spring. I want, as Mr. James Russell Lowell1 once said, “to forget I am a professor and feel I am something real”.
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1 James Russell Lowell (1819–91) was an American poet, editor, critic, and diplomat. Educated at Harvard (A.M., 1838; LL.B., 1840), he later was Smith Professor of French and Spanish and professor of belles lettres there.
To Henry James III 7 November 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Houghton) Nov. 7, 1911
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Mr. James: Here are three more notes from your father which I have found in preparing to make a holocaust of my papers. I am afraid I shall find no others now, although others existed which I am sure I didn’t intentionally destroy. Thank you very much for the collection of your father’s essays, all of which I had read before, but which it has been a pleasure to reread in this new form.1 Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 Memories and Studies, edited by James’s son Henry, was published in New York by Longmans, Green (1911).
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 7 November 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Virginia) Nov. 7, 1911.
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Susie In California, and again the other day in Montreal, I often wanted to write to you of the various things that I thought might interest you there or that suggested Spain and things un-American generally. But somehow the moment never came, as if some contrary impulse intervened. I felt as if you were not quite in sympathy with my present mood and plans, which mark a distinct and to me most welcome change in my life.
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Mother remains about the same. She sleeps the greater part of the day as well as all night. When I see her—at about seven in the evening—she is almost always awake, or rather half-awake. Only on her “bright” days does she look up when I speak to her, or turn her eyes away from the doll or the scrap of paper that she holds in her hand. Sometimes she smiles a little, but never says anything intelligible. The decline in her physical strength, if it exists, is almost imperceptible. Josephine, I think, has become a little hardened to this situation, and is more willing than some months ago to leave mother’s room, and to interest herself in something else. The Nurse is a bustling talkative creature, perfectly odious to me, and I avoid her as I should the plague. Josephine also suffers from her aggressive airs, but on the whole puts up with her for fear of a change for the worse, or of change itself, which in such a matter is always agitating. In her material business as a nurse, the woman is satisfactory and faithful. She is paid exorbitantly, so that she tries to please, as far as her bad breeding and tactlessness allow. Robert seems to like her. As the time for my departure approaches—I sail from N.Y. on January 27—I have considered what I could do to leave less to be done by others when the house is broken up, which I suppose will be before my return— if I return—in September 1912 / 3. My own things are almost all disposed of, or will be before I go: but thsse house is full of old truck that might as well be thrown away now as later. I have proposed to Josephine that she should let me do some clearing up; and with some hesitation she consented that I should look over Mother’s desk, full of old papers. In one day I did it, looking over every thing separately. In one envelope I found twenty four dollars in clean “bills”, but not the larger sum that was lost a few years ago. Many of the documents were interesting. I kept all letters from your uncles and aunts, and documents relating to your father and our grandfather, among the latter his U.S. (or rather Virginian) naturalization papers, his appointment as Consul, signed by Andrew Jackson, and a testimonial of affection from the townspeople of Winchester.1 These letters and papers— not bulky at all—I have left in Mother’s desk, for Robert to examine if he likes. My father’s letters, I have taken possession of myself and I have been reading them with almost unmingled pleasure. When I have finished—they are very numerous—I may write you something about the impressions and doubts they raise in my mind about the inner history of our family. In any case, I mean to take them to Avila, where the other half of the correspondence is, I suppose, in the large packages in my desk, which I have never opened. Your letters to mother I have, in agreement with Josephine, burnt
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unread. We thought that would be what you would prefer to have us do, unless you wished to see them yourself: but I don’t think you would care to. I read my own letters to Mother before burning them. They were very impersonal and I learned nothing from them that I didn’t perfectly remember. The other chief contents of Mother’s desk were thousands of paid bills and notices or coupons or yearly accounts. I found no letters at all from Da Victorina2 or Mercedes or any (except very old ones) from other friends. By the way, as I am going first to England and Paris, I shall stop in Avila—though only for a few days—before I go to Madrid. This will be in February. You can then tell me if you think Mercedes really wants me to go to her. [across] I can well imagine than/t, at close quarters, that project might please her less; and I might be freer in a hotel. But I want to spend some time in Madrid in any case. Love to Celedonio and all the family from your affectionate brother George P.S.3 I am sending you an address I delivered in California which I think will interest you, at least in parts. It does not say all I think and feel, because I had to be careful not to give offence to my audience. I went as far as I thought safe and pleasantly satirical. 1
See Persons, 7. Doña Victorina Iparraguirre, wife of Don Toribio de la Escalera, and her daughter, Mercedes, were Santayana’s family’s friends in Spain. 3 The postscript was written crosswise in the left-hand margin on page one of the letter. 2
To Charles Augustus Strong 16 November 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Rockefeller) Nov. 16, 1911.
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Strong: Your letter from Glion (written after you had been there a fortnight and written your difficult chapter victoriously, under the influence of coffee, etc) reached me in due time and gave me great pleasure, as I saw by it that you were satisfactorily settled for the moment, and that every thing
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seemed to promise well for the future for both of us. The three years for which you say you have taken the apartment in the Avenue de l’Observatoire are more than enough to give us an opportunity of testing it, and Paris, as a head-quarters; and they also justify any amount of unpacking and every attempt to make the place home-like and comfortable. I will therefore send those of my books which, you did not mark in my list (which came back at the same time as your last letter) to your apartment. They will probably arrive in February, when I shall myself pass through Paris on my way to Spain, since I have decided to go by way of England. But there will be no need of unpacking the boxes, which can remain in the cellar, until we join forces later in the Spring. I will also leave some luggage, and perhaps you might tell the concierge, if you write to him, that I am authorized to do so; although I suppose he would take my word for it in any case when I turned up bearing gifts, as it were. I have written to Bergson, in the name of our department, inviting to come here for 1912–1913, but he says he can’t. What do you think of his English lectures on the soul, and of the new simile of the despatch sent by wireless at the creation and caught at last by the nervous system of mankind? Did — it the despatch tend to make the receiving apparatus, I ^ ^ wonder, or did it have to wait until this arose independently? I haven’t read the thing in full, but it sounds very dualistic and Platonic,1 with the predispositions of matter left in the background but really forced to do all the work. But nothing succeeds like success, and Bergson is now at liberty to say any absurdity, however great, and to be listened to as to an oracle. The Columbia people have formally invited me to become a professor there; I told them it was too late; that I was not quite divorced from Harvard, and that the divorce, such as it was, was not for the sake of a second marriage, great as the new lady’s charms might be, but for the sake quiet and freedom. I am full of plans, like a young man. I feel as if I were going to begin a new career, that which I was really fitted for, and from which circumstances diverted me twenty five years ago. My sister Josephine and I have been looking over old papers; I have collected and reread all my father’s letters to my mother and to me. They have given me a new and vivid impression of our whole family history, and I seem to see the crises and turning points of my own life in a dramatic way which I was unconscious of before. ’83, ’88, and ’93 were the years in which I took the path of least resistance when, —by —— ^with^ a little more courage on my part, or sympathy on the part of my family, I might have turned to less arid courses. However, I had a good time at Harvard from ’89 to ’93; and since
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then I have written a great many books, such as they are. What consoles me is that I still may have time and inspiration to write two or three more, more nearly such as they should be. I am reading a little about Indian and Mohammedan philosophy; but my lectures interrupt me and the two subjects interfere with —one ——— each other. At the same time, I am turning over the “Three Realms of Being”— that is what I mean now to call my systematic book—in my mind, and in my class, which is going on to my satisfaction. Not so the thread-bare and vapid course on “Aesthetics”. Write again soon. Meantime may the gods grant you Health, [across] Wisdom, and Diligence! Yours ever G.S. P.S. My mother’s condition remains unchanged. 1 Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.) was a Greek philosopher who was the student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle. In the Republic the good life for the individual and the state is founded on action governed by knowledge of the Theory of Forms, a sense of both the ideal and the individual that influenced Santayana’s philosophy.
To Horace Meyer Kallen 19 November 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: American) Nov. 19, 1911
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Kallen Although I have only a few minutes to spare this morning, I don’t want to leave your welcome letter unanswered any longer. On the whole, your tone is not that of a person who has found Paradise at last. I make allowances, however, for the pessimistic vocabulary natural to an idealist (in the good sense of the word) and I hope to see you soon, like the dyer’s hand, subdued to what it works in, and bright cardinal in colour. Mr. Van Hise1 was here the other day. I went to hear his lecture, and approved whole-heartedly, but had no chance to do more than shake hands with him. As to me, the present is a blank like the Hinterland of Tripoli, with sniping going on desultorily, always in the same places. But the past and the future are both full of features. California, on the whole, disappointed me. The country is fine, the climate perfect; but the people are all—except the
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Italian restaurant-keepers and the Chinese—from Newton Centre, Mass. It was no relief morally. My notion of the U.S. now I have traversed the whole, is that it is a smaller place than I thought. The potential features are all marked, as in a child’s face, and there are no ideal surprises in store for us, as far as this country is concerned. It will be, for five hundred years, much the same thing, more congested. As to the future, I sail on January th , and am making in the first place for Madrid. In the late Spring I shall 24– return to Paris to stay with Strong, and catch whatever winds of doctrine or revolution may be blowing in that most ventilated of atmospheres. Beyond that nothing determinate except freedom, which for the moment is a very distinct thing in my eyes. When you write again, tell me something about Otto, who seems to be the rising star in those regions. And remember me to McGilvary and Sharp and also to Karl Young, if you see him.2—You will all receive before long copies of my California address, which is delayed by the negligence of the people at Berkeley (an ill-managed place) in not sending me the copies I asked for. Yours sincerely G.S. 1 Charles Richard Van Hise (1857–1918) was an American geologist and author who served as president of the University of Wisconsin. He received an honorary LL.D. from Harvard in 1908. 2 William Naill Otto received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1905. John Aloysius MacGilvrey was a member of Harvard’s class of 1903. William James Clyde Sharpe was a member of Harvard’s class of 1904, and John Alexander Sharp was a member of Harvard’s class of 1905. Karl Young (1879–1943) received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1907 and taught English at Wisconsin (1909–23).
To Mary Potter Bush 24 November 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Columbia) Nov. 24, 1911
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Mrs. Bush Thank you for the Shelley paper, which I was in no hurry for, and for your previous letter. I am delighted you are coming next week, and hope you will reserve Saturday, Dec. 2nd, for lunching with me. It happens, however, that both the Colonial Club and the Union are at present invaded by
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workmen and perfectly unendurable so that I shall have to ask you to come to the Touraine1 (down stairs in the German Keller,2 if you don’t mind, as that has more character). If you want to go to Cambridge anyway, that is not a bad place from which to start, and you could come to tea in my rooms afterwards. I say Saturday, as on Friday I have a lecture in the early afternoon. I am looking forward with much pleasure to seeing you again after California Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Hotel in Boston. Tavern.
2
To Mary Potter Bush 1 December 1911 [postmark] • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Columbia) Friday.
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Mrs. Bush I will ask for you at the Hotel tomorrow at one. If you would prefer to lunch earlier or later pray telephone to me here when you get this. All hours are equally convenient for me. Au revoir. Yours sincerely GSantayana
To William Rothenstein 6 December 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts 3 Prescott Hall
(MS: Houghton) Dec. 6. 1911
———— COLO ————— NIAL————— CLUB — CAMBRIDGE
Dear Sir:1 Will you dine with me on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday? I will come for you at the St Botolph Club2 at about half past six, and we will go to some
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restaurant in town, as this place is in the hands of workmen at present. It will be a great pleasure to see you, after having known you indirectly for so many years. Yours very truly GSantayana 1 Sir William Rothenstein (1872–1945) was a distinguished, British portrait painter who painted well-known society figures, writers, and artists. He was official artist to the British and Canadian forces in World War I and principal of the Royal College of Art. He also published books on art and artists, as well as an autobiography. 2 A distinguished mansion on Commonwealth Avenue in the Back Bay area of Boston with hotel and dining facilities for its members.
To [Cambridge Historical Society] 7 December 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Kentucky) December 7 1911
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Mr. G.Santayana regrets that he is not able to accept the kind invitation of the Cambridge Historical Society for December 21st [Unsigned ]
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 7 December 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Virginia) Dec. 7, 1911
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Susie: I am very sorry if you have been debanandote los sesos1 about what I could have meant by saying that I thought you were not in sympathy with my present mood. What I meant was (chiefly) that I am very sick of America and of professors and professoresses, and that I am pining for a sunny, quiet, remote, friendly, intellectual, obscure existence, with large
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horizons and no empty noise in the foreground. What I have seen in California and Canada—apart from the geography of those regions—has left no impression on my mind whatever. They are intellectually emptier than the Sahara, where I understand the Arabs have some idea of God or of Fate. Where did you get the impression that anything in California could have affected my opinions or sentiments? When there, in my Italian restaurant, or in Montreal among the ultra-British Scotch-Canadians I saw, I felt almost out of America, so much so that I once said inadvertantly to someone — that ——— in San Francisco that I soon had to go back to America. That is why, from those places, I felt like expressing myself; because when I am here in the midst of the dull round, a sort of instinct of courtesy makes me take it for granted, and I become almost unconscious of how much I hate it all: otherwise I couldn’t have stood it for forty years! As to your supposition that I am removing myself “farther from God”, apparently in some deliberate manner, I certainly have no consciousness of such a plan. My opinions in philosophy have not changed essentially for twenty years, although they may have settled and grown less plastic with time. In respect to the Church, I think I am in greater sympathy with it politically than I was previously, because the radical people I know are proving to be such Hottentots2 and so wholly ignorant of the art of living and of the art of thinking. The Church is an integral part of European civilization, as it has been for the last thousand years and more. The “Satanic” onslaught on it which you lament is a symptom of a general transformation, which will take hundreds of years to become definable in its results or ideals, and which is tending to destroy not the Church only but all institutions, including private property and national governments. The French Revolution3 was a first and violent shock of this earth-quake; others will follow from time to time, I suppose, until, long after we are dead, everything we know and care about has disappeared. Now, I sympathize with the self-preserving instinct of formed things more than with the destructive forces of nature, such as democratic envy, fury, and ignorance are. Therefore I sympathize with the Church more than with its enemies; but I think the latter must prevail more and more in the world in our time. I also think that after the deluge, life and order are bound to reassert themselves in some form—doubtless a wholly new one. I should not be hostile to that new order for not being Christian, as I am not hostile to ancient Greece. But we don’t know what that new order may someday be, and meantime the revolution is destroying everything noble and beautiful which actually exists, or which can exist in our day. It is producing noth-
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ing but vulgarity, shallowness, and a suicidal waywardness in the “emancipated souls”—like those of the Infanta Eulalia.4 These people are positively loathsome. They do not understand the creative and moral principle of anything, least of all of what they are themselves. They are silly traitors. Yet, without in the least knowing what they are about, they are ploughing up the ground in which the seeds of new things are to take root. For, as Hamlet says, “so runs the world away.”5 I will write to Mercedes before long. Would it simplify matters if I was a “lodger” and not a “boarder” at her house, do you think? I should rather like being free to explore the cafés and restaurants, and not be tied down to hours, [across] especially at a place so far from the centre of the town. I could have my chocolate in bed, and go out for lunch and dinner, as I did very pleasantly in Paris Love to all G.S. 1
Racking your brains. Hottentots are a south African people resembling the Bushmen, whose economy is based on herding. 3 This political upheaval began in France in 1789. It tore down the ancient structure of Europe, opened the path for nineteenth-century liberalism, and hastened the advent of nationalism and the era of modern, total warfare. 4 Doña Eulalia de Borbon, Infanta (Princess) de España (1864–1958). 5 Hamlet, III.ii.289–92: Why, let the stricken deer go weep, The hart ungalled play; For some must watch, while some must sleep: So runs the world away.– 2
To Horace Meyer Kallen 12 December 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: American) Dec. 12. 1911
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Kallen Thank you for your letter.—In looking over my goods and chattels, I find a doctor’s cap and gown which I don’t know what to do with. If you haven’t one and would like it, I should be very glad to have you take it off
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my hands.—They are not very ceremonious at Wisconsin, but you might Yours sincerely some day find it convenient.1 GSantayana 1
David J. Kallen, Horace’s son, has Santayana’s cap; the gown is unlocated.
To Ellen, George, and Josephine Sturgis 25 December 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Houghton) December 25, 1911.
Now in my bag, wheree’er I go, Order will reign, tho’ tempests blow, Or porters fling it to and fro; For thanks to Ellen, George, and Jo, Shirts ties and collars, cased in leather, In roughest hands or foulest weather, Can never get mixed up together. So in my thoughts your loves abide Each quite distinct, all side by side; No jolts of chance or rolling tide Shall e’er confuse them, n or divide. ^^ G.S.
To Horace Meyer Kallen 29 December 1911 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: American) Dec. 29, 1911
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Kallen: I have just sent off the cap and gown (in an old bag, which you may throw away, as I was on the point of doing.) McGilvary has been here with the other contributors to the new-realistic Babel. He spoke as if you might remain next year at Wisconsin, which I hope may be the case. Discounting your high standard, I gather from what you yourself also say, that you are getting on nicely. Yours sincerely GSantayana
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To John Francis Stanley Russell 2 January 1912 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Unknown) COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
January 2, 1912 Dear Russell Your letter of some months ago has somehow remained unanswered. Although I had several things to say in reply, and have been thinking about you especially, because in looking over my old papers I have come upon a lot of your letters and reread them all, being carried back to 1887 and the following years, when all that happened to you was so much a part of my life. I can see now how great an influence you had on me. It was an influence for good. It seems almost as if I had gathered the fruits of your courage and independance, while you have suffered the punishment which the world imposes always on those who refuse to conform to its ways. You may say you are content, but with your position and character you ought to have had a greater career. Isn’t it, at bottom, because you have tried to combine liberty with democracy, in your personal as well as political alliances, and liberty and democracy are really incompatible? I will explain what I mean by word of mouth (it would take up too much paper) if you are in England. I expect to reach London on February 1st. Send me a line C/o Brown, Shipley & Co 123, Pall Mall. Yours ever GSantayana
To Mary Potter Bush 17 January 1912 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Columbia) Jan. 17, 1912
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Mrs Bush Your letter of the 4th has been stranded somewhere and has only just reached me, but I replied to Miss Boughton1 that I would make an effort rd to reach her studio on the 23– , the only day I shall have in New York. I hope also to have the time to come and say good bye to you and Mr. Bush,
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but I shall be in the prestidigitating hands of my friend Moncure Robinson, and I am not sure in what direction I may not be spirited away. However, I hope to reach West Sixty-four street2 after lunch, when a walk through the Park will probably be imperative. I will try to get to Miss Boughton in the morning. I think your letter must have been in my box at the Colonial Club, which I don’t often look at, as the same postman serves that place and my room, and usually brings everything to Prescott Hall. I hope you will excuse this long delay in answering. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Unidentified. The Bushes lived at 1 West 64th Street in New York City.
2
To Charles Augustus Strong 21 January 1912 • Cambridge, Massachusetts
(MS: Rockefeller) Sunday, Jan. 21, 1912
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, SW.
COLONIAL CLUB CAMBRIDGE
Dear Strong Tomorrow I leave Cambridge, and sail from N. Y on the 24th in the “Olympic”. In London I shall probably have something more to do than go to the tailor’s as I have been commissioned by the College to try to get a man—Russell, James Ward, Stout, or Hobhouse,1—to come to Harvard for next year—Höffding,2 whom we have asked first, hardly being expected to accept. Bergson, whom we wooed first of all, has jilted us for Columbia, who probably dazzled him with its Oriental opulence, and the new Solomon3 hailed the new Zion. I don’t think this affair will delay me much, but it will doubtless involve a trip to Cambridge, which I am not sorry to make in term-time. It will remind me vividly of the delightful day’/s when I was at King’s,4 and I shall even, possibly, see the Lent races. Yesterday I sent off three cases of books (all I have retained) addressed to you at 9 avenue de l’Observatoire. They ought to arrive in Paris before me, and if you receive a notice to that effect — be please send it at once either
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to me or to your concierge, so that we may have all the documents in hand. I pre-paid the Express, but there may be some small incidental charges which (if you send the notice to the concierge) you might instruct him to pay for me. But very likely I shall arrive in time to attend to this myself.—The books need not be unpacked until I return from Spain. Perry5 tells me you are [across] in Florence, and that he hopes to see you.—My affectionate greetings to Margaret. Yours ever G.S. 1
James Ward (1843–1925) was an English philosopher and psychologist. In 1897 he was elected to the chair of logic and mental philosophy at Cambridge, which he held for the rest of his life. A pupil of Ward, George Frederick Stout (1860–1944) was an English philosopher and psychologist. He was a fellow of Saint John’s College at Cambridge, editor of Mind, and taught at Aberdeen, Oxford, and Saint Andrews. Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse (1864–1929) was a British socialist and philosopher whose main interest was the study of the evolution of the mind as the central factor in historical development. He was associated with the Manchester Guardian most of his life and taught at the University of London. 2 Harald Höffding (1843–1931), a liberal humanist, was professor of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen. His works were translated into many languages and widely used as textbooks. 3 Solomon (d. c. 932 B.C.), son of David, was king of the Hebrews (c. 972–932 B.C.). The bright side of his reign was characterized by peace, commercial expansion, and building. In popular legend, he was a wise man with many wives. Zion, part of Jerusalem, is defined in the Bible as the City of David. For Christians, it is symbolic of heaven and the hoped-for realm of religion on earth. 4 King’s College (established 1441) is part of Cambridge University in England. Santayana studied there in 1896. 5 Ralph Barton Perry (1876–1957) was an American realist philosopher. He attended Princeton University (B.A., 1896) and received his M.A. (1897) and Ph.D. (1899) from Harvard. He briefly taught at Williams College and Smith College, and from 1902 to 1946 at Harvard, where after 1930 he was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 29 January 1912 • At sea
(MS: Virginia) ON BOARD R•M•S•“OLYMPIC”
Jan. 29 1912 Dear Susie We expect to reach Plymoth —uth tomorrow at about noon, after a voyage of just six days. The weather has been wintry, with winds, rain, snow, hail, and rather rough seas, and the ship has rolled merrily, like the oldfashioned craft; nevertheless, size helps, for the motion is slow and majes-
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tic, and most of the passengers (I among them) have kept well and not missed a meal in the dining-room. In New York, the one day I was there, I went out to lunch, tea, dinner, a play, a musicale in a private house, and the ball given by the Whitelaw ^ ^ Reids to the Duke of Connaught and his family.1 I was in bed, however, by half past twelve, as we stayed only a short time at each place. I saw some agreeable people, and some striking costumes and jewels. It is probable that I shall have to go to Cambridge on an official mission from Harvard, to see if I can get someone there to go to America for next winter, in the capacity of a temporary professor. I have not been in the English Cambridge for years, and shall not be sorry of this occasion for revisiting the place, where I still have some friends. I will write again (or send a card) when my movements are decided upon. Leaving my rooms and disposing of all my possessions was very fatiguing; but I am now quite myself again, though I shall be glad to sleep in a motionless bed, with fresh air, and walk on terra firma. Yours affly G. S. [across] Memorias á toda la familia. 1
Whitelaw Reid (1837–1912), American journalist and diplomat, was editor of the New York Tribune. He served as minister to France (1889–92), was the Republican candidate for Vice President (1892), and was ambassador to England (1905–12). Arthur William Patrick Albert, duke of Connaught (1850–1942), was an English prince, the son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. From 1911 to 1916 he was governor general of Canada.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 6 February 1912 • Windsor, England
(MS: Virginia) February 6, 1912 QUEEN’S ACRE, WINDSOR.
Dear Susie I have just got a telegram, like one you must have received also, saying that Mother died yesterday. Josephine had written on Jan. 24, saying the doctor had been to see her twice, and found her better; but I can’t gather whether this means that she had been ill before that date, or whether the change for the worse came later. I am anxiously awaiting particulars,
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although, so far as mother herself is concerned, I imagine there was little except a decline into more complete unconsciousness. But the external circumstances must have affected Josephine and Robert, and I very much wish to know how Josephine has borne up—or rather is bearing up—under the shock and the immense change in her own life. If she has gone to Robert’s house, I am not at all confident that she will find it easier to fall into a new way of occupying her time. I have answered Robert by cable, asking whether Josephine will join me. The last day I saw Robert he said it would not be possible for him to leave Boston immediately after mother’s death, but would require a good many weeks in which to arrange all the matters of business involved, and he seemed to think too that it was not advisable to cross the Atlantic in March—why, I don’t know exactly, since the chances of bad weather are not so very much greater than in April or May. So that if poor Josephine is stranded and ill at ease, I think she might find a friend, or even mere acquaintances, to cross with, and I might meet her where ever she landed, and go with her to your house. If she decides to wait till Robert is ready, I should of course go to see her on the way, but I don’t think it would be well for Robert and me to go to Spain together. I will either go to see you before they come, or put it off till Robert has left you. I have written to him today that I will not leave England until I hear more fully from him and Josephine. I hope you will not harrow up your own feelings and make yourself ill over all the past and present horrors which this event brings to a head. We were certainly not unprepared for it; it was inevitable, and has been delayed longer than we could have hoped. Nothing remains but to heal the wound, especially in Josephine’s case, as best we may.—I confess I do not see any solution that is altogether promising, as to how and where she is to live. I suppose you will write to/me, or have already written, and then we can put our heads together and see what can be done. What a tremendous change this is! Mother was the absolutely dominating force in all our lives. Even her mere existence, in these last years, was a sort of centre around which we revolved, in thought if not in our actual ^ ^ movements. We shall be living henceforth in an essentially different world. I hope you and I may be nearer rather than farther from one another in consequence. I know Celedonio and all the family will be full of kind and sympathetic sentiments towards us all on this occasion; by your letter of Jan. 10, which
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Josephine has sent me, I know they are well, and send them my greetings. Your affectionate brother George
To Charles Augustus Strong 7 February 1912 • Windsor, England
(MS: Rockefeller) February 7, 1912 QUEEN’S ACRE, WINDSOR.
Dear Strong Thank you very much for your letter of the 2nd from Val-Mont. I heard yesterday by cable that my mother had died on Monday. My sister intends to come to Europe later, with my brother, but I shall naturally wish to see her, and until I know when they mean to sail, and whether to Gibraltar or to France, my plans must remain somewhat indefinite. If things go as I expect, I shall be in Paris about the 15th and in Avila and Madrid before the end of the month. But it is possible that I may not go to Spain at all for the present. I will wait and see what my other Sister, Susie, who is in Spain, has to propose. I will write more at length some other day. Yours ever G.Santayana
To Bertrand Arthur William Russell 8 February 1912 • Windsor, England
(MS: McMaster)
Feb. 8. 1912 QUEEN’S ACRE, WINDSOR.
Dear Russell Many thanks for your message, which came this morning in a letter from your brother. I am going to spend Sunday with him at Telegraph House, but expect to go up to Cambridge on Monday or Tuesday of next week, and count on seeing you. Meantime I have a proposal to make, or rather to renew, to you on behalf of Harvard College. Would it be possible for you to go there next year, from October 1912 to June 1913, in the
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capacity of professor of philosophy? Royce1 is to be taking a holiday, I shall be away, and Palmer will be there only for the first half of the academic year. Perry, Münsterberg,2 and two or three young psychologists will be alone on hand. What they have in mind is that you should give a course—three hours a week, of which one may be delegated to the assistant which would be provided for you, to read papers, etc.—in logic, and what we call a “seminary” or “seminar” in anything you liked. It would also be possible for you to give some more popular lectures if you liked, either at Harvard, or at the Lowell Institute in Boston.3 For the latter there are separate fees, and the salary of a professor is usually $4000 (£800). We hope you will consider this proposal favourably, as there is no one whom the younger school of philosophers in America are more eager to learn of than of you. You would bring new standards of precision and independence of thought which would open their eyes, and probably have the greatest influence on the rising generation of professional philosophers in that country. There is no particular urgency in receiving your answer, so that you needn’t write to me at all, but wait until I see you next week, unless your decision is absolutely clear and unalterable, in which case you might send me a line to Telegraph House. My permanent address is C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall. S.W. Yours sincerely GSantayana P.S. I didn’t mean to decline your kind offer to put me up, when I go to Cambridge, but as I am going in the middle of the week, I don’t know whether it would be equally convenient for you to do so. 1
Josiah Royce (1855–1916), Santayana’s dissertation director, was an English instructor at Berkeley (1878–82) and philosophy professor at Harvard (1882–1916). Influenced by the German idealists, Royce held that the world exists only insofar as beings with minds know it and the finite self knows truth only because the individual mind is part of the world-mind. Among his works are The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892), The World and the Individual (1900–1901), and The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908). 2 Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916) was a German-born psychologist and philosopher. At the instigation of William James, Münsterberg was persuaded to come from Germany to Harvard as professor of psychology in 1892 where he directed the psychological laboratory. His daughter, Margarete Anna Adelheid Münsterberg (b. 1889), wrote Hugo Münsterberg, His Life and Work (New York and London: D. Appleton and Co., 1922). 3 The Lowell Institute is an adult educational institution founded by John Lowell (1799–1836). The center provides free lectures on all subjects by outstanding scholars.
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To Charles Augustus Strong 12 February 1912 • London, England
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(MS: Rockefeller) Feb. 12, 1912
CAVENDISH HOTEL
81,
JERMYN S
T
.
S JAMES’S. S.W. T
Dear Strong, Your letters of Jan. 23 and Feb. 9 reach me today together. Thank you for both of them. I am glad to hear your book is actually done1 (I understand it is a sort of sketch, otherwise the book would be surprising short) and am looking forward with great interest to reading it. Indeed, I shall do so sympathetically, and what is more with a pre-disposition to change my mind on several points on which I used to hold out against you, as for instance that “appearances” do not “exist”. In my language the essence which appears does not exist; what exists is the intuition of it (a fact with different properties, but often homonymous with the essence it views). Even this intuition, however, does not exist as a substance; it is an expression of substance, a phenomenon; and though you may reject this way of putting the matter, I think you will have to say practically the same thing when you come to define the relation between mind-stuff and mind. As to the room you intend for me at the Avenue de l’Observatoire, I am sure it will be more than sufficient. If my books don’t all hold in the placard,2 they needn’t be unpacked, or some of them might perhaps find a place in the dining room, or in some passage. There are many corners in most houses where a book-case can be slipped in without intercepting the rightful uses of the place. One of my friends has book-shelves over the door of his bath-room! It is not likely that I shall get to Florence this year, but it is likely that I sha’n’t care to stay in Spain so long as I had intended. My brother and my sister Josephine have not yet written me of their plans—there has not been time—and when they do I shall see my way to rearranging my own. I expect to be in Paris for a few days next week, staying as usual at the Quai Voltaire, and visiting Françoise3 and the apartment. I go to Cambridge tomorrow to stay a day or two with Bertrand Russell. Yours ever G.S.
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1 The Origin of Consciousness: An Attempt to Conceive the Mind as a Product of Evolution was published in London in 1918 by Macmillan & Co. 2 Cupboard. 3 Strong’s housekeeper.
To George Herbert Palmer 14 February 1912 • Cambridge, England
(MS: Wellesley) Feb. 14, 1912
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall London, S.W.
TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.
Dear Professor Palmer I have just had a long interview with Professor James Ward, following upon a letter1 in which I had made the proposal with which the department has charged me (Russell having refused). He says he cannot go for the whole year; his health is precarious, and he cannot afford it. He explained that the salary offered is about the same that he receives here, where in addition he has many fees and perquisites, such as dinner in hall for himself or his guests, when he wishes it. He evidently is a good deal influenced by this consideration. On the other hand, he is pleased at the the idea of going to America again; and he says he could certainly do it ——— for one term. —This, [ I understand, would not oblige him to give up his salary here, as it is usual for professors to lecture for two terms only out of the three.]— I pointed out that one of their terms did not quite cover one of our half-years, so that he could hardly undertake to give any of our regular courses; but I added that occasional lectures were often given, and would be much valued, and that I would immediately write to you of his willingness to offer such a set of lectures, not a regular college course. Perhaps you will reply to him directly, as this is no longer the business I was /i entrusted with, and I have just written to Stout (our No 3) making the original proposal to him.2 Ward seems to me decidedly feeble: I hardly think he would have been a very efficient teacher, or a notable influence. I shouldn’t go out of my way to entice him, even for such occasional lectures as Boutroux gave; and even if they were arranged, I shouldn’t be surprised if at the last moment he found that his health or some other obstacle made the thing impossible.
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I am here staying with Russell, and renewing my [across] acquaintances of fifteen years ago.3 Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Unlocated. Unlocated. 3 Santayana spent the academic year 1896–97 on a leave of absence from Harvard, doing advanced study in philosophy at Cambridge University. 2
To Isabella Stewart Gardner 20 February 1912 • London, England
(MS: Gardner)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co London
7 Bennet Street, St. James’s Feb. 20 1912 Dear Mrs Gardner1 It was very good—and like you—to remember me at the moment of my loss. I was then at Windsor with Howard Sturgis, a most sympathetic person, who had learned to esteem my mother from his father,2 always a most devoted friend of hers. As you probably know, my mother had lost all her mental faculties long before the end, so that our loss has been gradual and the final part of it almost a relief, though not on that account less ^ ^ momentous to us in its finality. I didn’t attempt to say good-bye to you before my departure partly because it is supposed to be only temporary and partly because it is not natural to say good bye to a person whose charm and influence is always with her friends, wherever they may find themselves. You have always been the bright spot in my Boston. Your grateful friend GSantayana 1
Mrs. John “Jack” (Isabella Stewart) Gardner (1840–1924) was a wealthy woman of distinction and a leader in Boston society. She and her husband patronized artists and musicians and collected old masterpieces in their home, which today is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
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2 Russell Sturgis (1805–87), eldest sibling of George Sturgis (Santayana’s mother’s first husband), was a partner of Baring Brothers, London bankers. Santayana describes him in Persons, 51–53.
To George Herbert Palmer 23 February 1912 • London, England
(MS: Wellesley) February 23, 1912
CARE OF MESSRS. BROWN, SHIPLEY
&
CO.’S
TRAVELLERS’ OFFICE,
123,
PALL MALL, LONDON, S.W.
Dear Professor Palmer I wrote to Stout ten days ago, and have received no answer. Today I have made inquiries as to the address, and find that the one I gave ought to have been sufficient. However, I have written again today;1 but I fear the reply will not reach me before I leave for Paris which I am obliged to do next Monday. There may therefore be some delay in this business, but as you see it was beyond my control to prevent it. I should like to ask Hobhouse (who I think would be a better man for Harvard than any of them except Russell) but of course I cannot, while the invitation to Stout is in the air. At Cambridge I saw and talked with Moore,2 who is now a lecturer there. The countenance which such a position gives him seems to have improved him. He is thinner and less aggressive, and in some three-cornered talks I had with him and Russell, he agreed with me. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Unlocated. G. E. Moore.
2
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To George Herbert Palmer 26 February 1912 • London, England
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(MS: Wellesley) C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, London. Feb. 26, 1912
Dear Professor Palmer I am very sorry to see, by a cutting from a Boston paper which has been sent me, that Professor Royce has had a stroke of apoplexy. He had for many years disregarded himself, but I hope neither he nor the rest of us will be long the sufferers by it. Today at last I have received the enclosed reply from Stout.1 You see my diplomacy, however slow, has availed to conceal from him the fact that he was not our first choice. I telegraphed this morning to ———— Stou Hobhouse, and have had my telegram returned saying he is gone away, and present address unknown. I shall make further inquiries this afternoon; but I am afraid our communication will have to be by letter. If he refuses, as I foresee he will, I will telegraph to you as soon as I know. I think of starting for Spain tomorrow, my departure having been delayed already longer than I had expected. I will write again when I have further news, but I feel you might as well begin to bestir yourselves, and clutch at what people may be within reach for next year, and for the future generally. It is evident that the axe has fallen upon our department, and Harvard will have to rely on new sprouts. Get Lovejoy2 and get Fuller! Don’t get any pale, conventional mediocrities! Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Unlocated. Arthur Oncken Lovejoy (1873–1962), born in Germany, was an American philosopher and historian of ideas who taught at Johns Hopkins University. A critical realist, his works fall into two main groups–those on epistemology and those on intellectual history. In his major work, The Revolt Against Dualism (1930), he defended epistemological dualism against the reigning modes of monism. “Santayana always thought very highly of Lovejoy’s critique of Pragmatism.” (Years, 130) 2
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To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 28 February [1912] • Paris, France 1896
PARIS (XVI
E
).—L’ARC
(MS postcard: Sanchez) DE TRIOMPHE DE L’ÉTOILE
Paris, Hotel du Quai Voltaire Feb. 28. Your card reached me here this morning, where I arrived myself last night, one day late, after a rather rough crossing from Dover, weathered comfortably by help of pills.—Today I have seen the apartment where I am to live with Strong. It is quite nice, but needs brightening up. Strong himself is in Florence. Expect me Monday. [Unsigned ]
To Charles Augustus Strong 29 February 1912 • Paris, France
(MS: Rockefeller)
Paris, Feb. 29, 19121 Dear Strong: Your letter, addressed to the Quai Voltaire, reached me when I arrived on Tuesday evening, after a somewhat rough crossing of the Channel which (thanks to homoeopathic pills) I weathered successfully. I have taken my ticket for Avila for Sunday the 3rd arriving there the following day. Yesterday afternoon I went to see the apartment. It is very nice, and so is Françoise, with whom I had a heart to heart talk. She was busy making muslin skirts for Margaret’s dressing-table. The salon, or library is a charming room, and in bright weather (it was dull yesterday) must be very cheerful. I like the white walls in the bedrooms, which will not look cold when the personal effects of the occupier, and his personal touch, ——— has have been added. For my own room, I am sure it will be amply large enough both for my books (those I need, at least) and for a writing table, so that I shall not be necessarily established in the salon when I want to work, although often, no doubt, it will be pleasanter to sit or write there. The dining-room is the only part of the house that didn’t altogether please me—I mean, not the room itself, but the colour and texture of the walls. But we can do a
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great deal, in the way of pleasant touches here and there, and some gaiety, when we are living in the place. Paris is very mild and delightful. I have been walking about without a coat in summer clothes, and Spring seems to be in the air. No doubt in Italy this is even more the case. A book of Perry’s2 (I think) is waiting for you on your table. I got a copy from him this morning myself; but courage fails me to read it. I shall leave it at the apartment, as in Spain I want to devote my time to things Spanish, (apart from my own, if they are not Spanish) and Perry’s book has a flavour of academic American mustiness and awkwardness which is repellent. What a contrast to Russell’s “Problems of Philosophy”,/!3 I will send you this little book as soon as I have finished it, in case you haven’t come across it in Italy. It is delightfully clear, and sometimes very witty. The analysis, here and there, may not be satisfactory; logic is too linguistic, and Russell is a logician; but nevertheless, the tone of an enlightened person strikes you everywhere, whereas Perry’s tone is the tone of the dwellers in the Cave. There is a Herean philosophie and a Sclaven philosophie4— belonging respectively to those whom philosophy delights and to those ^ ^ whom she feeds and troubles. My three cases of books have arrived safely and are in the cellar, so I am told. I am leaving only one small trunk besides. Remember me to the Berenson’s5 if you still see them. What is the degree of their conjugal estrangement? Or has the trouble blown over? Russell, by the way, is rejuvenated by his grass-[across]widowerhood.6 Yours ever G.S. 1
This letter is written on black-bordered stationery. Present Philosophical Tendencies, A Critical Survey of Naturalism, Idealism, Pragmatism, and Realism Together with a Synopsis of the Philosophy of William James (1912). 3 This was published in London and New York in 1912. 4 Hera (or Here) was the chief female Olympian divinity, and Sklaven is German for slave: divinely inspired philosophy in contrast to uninspired or pedestrian philosophy. 5 Born in Lithuania, Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), who met Santayana at Boston Latin School, was a member of the Harvard class of 1887. He was an art critic and an authority on Italian art, especially of the Renaissance. Mary Whitall Smith Berenson (1865–1945), sister to Logan Pearsall Smith, lived with Bernard Berenson for ten years before their marriage in 1900. 6 Bertrand Russell and his wife, Alys Smith, separated in 1911 after seventeen years of marriage. They divorced in 1921. 2
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To Charles Augustus Strong 12 March 1912 • Ávila, Spain
(MS: Rockefeller) Avila, March 12, 19121
Dear Strong I am not sure if I have answered your last letter, but in any case I want to write a line to say that I am going to Madrid (address: Serrano 7) on th Saturday the 16– , and that I mean to stay there at least until Easter, probably a little longer, and then to stop here again at my sister’s for a few days on my way to Paris, so that it won’t be possible for me to get there much before the end of April. It occurs to me that perhaps Margaret would like to have a friend with her for a part or the whole of the time she is in Paris, and that it would make matters simpler if she knew my room was to be unoccupied. I certainly hope to get to Paris before she goes away, so as to have the pleasure of seeing her there, but it probably would be for two or three days only that our stay would coincide, and it would be a pity to have that interfere with other pleasant plans which she might make if she knew that my room was at her disposal. Tell her this, and make any arrangements you like, regarding my room as free during the month of April. You could let me know frankly how matters stood, and if the worst came to the worst I could perfectly well go to the Quai Voltaire for a few days, until the coast was clear. My brother and my sister Josephine sail from N. Y on April 2/ 30, and expect to be in Paris for a week in May, on —— there ——— their way here. This solves the problem which would have arisen if we had all three appeared in Spain at once, where our friends would hardly have [across] been able to lodge so many pilgrims. Remember me to the Berensons and to ^ ^ Loeser2, if you see him. Yours ever G.S. 1
This letter is written on black-bordered stationery. Charles Alexander Loeser (1864–1928), Santayana’s first college friend, was the son of a wealthy Jewish merchant in Brooklyn. He had been to school in Switzerland, knew French and German well, and was at home in Europe. Loeser, who lived in Florence, was a learned art critic, but he wrote nothing and thus attained no reputation. See Persons, 215–21. 2
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To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 20 March 1912 • Madrid, Spain
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(MS: Virginia) Serrano 7, Madrid. March 20, 1912
Dear Susie I was glad yesterday to hear from Celedonio; give him my love, as to the rest of the family. The “urgent” letter from London was not urgent at all, but about a paper of mine on Shelley which there is some talk of printing; it was from Dent the publisher. I shall probably leave it until I can put it in a book with some other articles. My impressions of Madrid, so far, are somewhat mixed. The town is smaller and most of it meaner than I expected; on the other hand there are some very pretty vistas, and there will soon be more. Contrary to what usually happens, the newest things here are the best. The people I see in the streets seem a pretty poor lot; I haven’t yet met anybody by whom I could judge what the better sort are like. I have been to see Esperanza and her brother1 (here for a few days) who is a sort of mad philosopher and bibliophile: he has tried to give me some hints as to what to read, but he is too confused and undiscriminating to be helpful. His mind is a mere catalogue. Mercedes herself is very nice, and leaves me alone all the morning and until eight in the evening when we have supper. But she talks too much, and unless she is quieter after the novelty of my presence has worn off, I shall not be able to stand her permanently.—I found Hermenegilda and her family less in the dumps than I had expected; Manuela especially looks rather youthful and rosy, and Juan young for his age.2 I gave Manuela your things (except the boa, which I couldn’t very well carry, but told her of). Juan is coming for me this evening, and I suppose we shall have to go to some café or show. I gave Hermenegilda $20 and Mercedes 60: Mercedes said (the next day) that this was much too much, but that she would keep it for me; I said if anything was left over she might devote it to her charities; and so the matter dropped for the present. If I am here five or six weeks, I don’t think $60 too much. Do you? Is it even enough? Yours affly G.S.
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1
Esperanza and her brother are unidentified. Hermenegilda Zabalgoitia de Santayana was Santayana’s cousin (wife of Manuel Santayana, Santayana’s father’s youngest brother). Manuela Ruiz de Santayana y Zabalgoitia (c. 1868–1936) and Juan were her children. See Persons, 206 and 210–11. 2
To George Herbert Palmer 22 March 1912 • Madrid, Spain
(MS: Wellesley)
Address C/o Brown Shipley & Co, London. Madrid, March 22, 1912 Dear Professor Palmer Thank you very much for your letter which for the most part contains welcome news. I am glad Royce is comparatively well, and that Fite seems to be a success. Perhaps he is man we were looking for. And I am not sorry that Adams is to go West again. I have no doubt, with or without Bosanquet or Bakewell, you will manage to bridge over next year prosperously.1 As to my own plans, everything has been thrown into the melting-pot by the death of my mother, which occurred soon after I left America. This has changed the spirit of my holiday somewhat, and may also seriously affect my movements in the future. I shall now have no natural centre or home in Boston, and I foresee that it will be harder and harder for me to turn my face in that direction. However, it is too soon at present to make any final decision; I wish to consult my brother, who is coming to Spain in the Spring, and to see how well I can work, and how content I can be, in my new surroundings, here or in Paris, where I am to spend a long season with my old friend Strong. When I have satisfied myself on these points, say towards the end of the summer, I will write to Mr. Lowell; meantime I can only say that you mustn’t count on me; and I see by the tone of your letter that you do not. Please give my best regards to the department, and believe me Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 A naturalist, Warner Fite (1867–1955), was an author and philosopher who taught at Harvard (1911–12) and Princeton (1915–35). George Plimpton Adams (1882–1961) (A.M., 1909; Ph.D., 1912) was a philosophy lecturer at Harvard (1911–12) who wrote many philosophical works. Charles Montague Bakewell (b. 1867) (A.M., 1892; Ph.D.,
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1894) taught philosophy at Yale and Harvard. Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923) was an English philosopher who taught at Oxford from 1871 to 1881.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 29 March 1912 [postmark] • Madrid, Spain MADRID
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
IGLESIA DE SAN JERÓNIMO.
March 29. Mercedes has shown me a card from you saying R. & J.1 will arrive in Avila, at the earliest, on May 10. Have they changed —— there ——— their plans? I should have thought May 20 the earliest.— Thanks also for your letter to me. I will try to see all I can next week. Madrid is already more agreeable, and I am getting on splendidly. Love to all the family, G. S. 1
Robert and Josephine.
To Mary Williams Winslow 2 April 1912 • Madrid, Spain
(MS: Houghton)
Madrid, April 2, 1912 Dear Mrs. Winslow: Does Mrs. Warren1 describe as “glimpses” the brief hours of rapt contemplation during which we gazed at each other across the tea-table, surrounded by Lady Lawrence, Miss Honor (not Beauty), Mrs. Osgood,2 and several semi-attached young women and emaciated young men? Es war ein Traum!3 I have followed—somewhat slowly—the general plan I had for the rest of the winter and Spring. In England I visited my usual hosts, and went besides to Cambridge where I slept in a medieval dungeon, in the Clock /t Tower of Trinity College, being the guest of Bertie Russell: I sentimentally evoked memories of the past by walking on the towpath and watching the college Eights practice;4 I dined in Hall, saw Dickinson,5 and other old acquaintances, and altogether drenched myself in diluted emotions. It was terribly cold, particularly in bed.—In Paris I was only a few days, and did nothing worth mentioning, except to visit the apartment where I am to live next month, and after, with my friend Strong. It is very suitable, but I could imagining something more luxurious and Byzantine, if I put my
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mind to it. Possibly, if I find Strong docile, I may add a few touches of frivolity to the solemn scene.—In Avila, while continuing to suffer from the cold, I found my sister and her family as usual, and stayed nearly a fortnight; whence, I came here, to begin life with my new mate, Mercedes. We get on beautifully, I eat a lot, (having had only one colic so far) walk a lot, and have even managed to do some real work, having had one or two ^ ^ spells of industry and absorption over my books and papers. I hope to get out a book of essays, including the Shelley, in the autumn. This is only by the way, not being one of the three post-professorial works which I have in petto.6—My native town7 is, for the most part, rather mean and ugly, and the people of a low type; but the newer parts are pretty, almost distinguished; the nice people have a great deal of charm and naturalness, as well as feeling: the amusements really amuse, the Churches are churches, and the sun and sky are like the Platonic Ideal of these things. The weather, though variable, is often delightful, and the Park and promenades are fine. So that I am quite happy here, and should be glad to return next winter, if my sister Josephine were here and wanted me to keep her company. As you perhaps have heard, she and my brother Robert are sailing at the end of the month. I shall see them in Paris, when they pass through, in May, on their way to Spain. The photograph of the little angel does not do him justice, but merely serves to remind me of how sleepy and metaphysical he looked when I saw him in his crib. As to Polly, she is not sufficiently in evidence, but here too my memory can supply the difficiencies of merely suggestive art. The figs, prunes, and ginger came in very well, and I observed no ill effects of indulging in them—with some moderation, to be sure. The voyage was not smooth nor very agreeable in other ways, but I wasn’t positively sea-sick, and went to all my meals like a veteran. It is one o’clock, and at any moment Mercedes, who is gadding all day, will knock at my door and cry ¡Jorge! so that I may not have many more minutes to finish this sheet in. We dine at one and sup at eight—call it lunch and dinner, and it would be quite English. The food, however, is very Spanish, and excellent; only I eat too much. There is a restaurant, called “The Ideal Room” (in English) which almost deserves its name, and where I usually have tea; the waiters have silk stockings and shoes with silver buckles, and at about six there is a great gathering of ladies with daughters, young swells, and foreigners. The bull-fighting element, with its many camp-followers, is excluded by the prices (tea is 15 cents!) but is to be found next door, at another café, and opposite in great numbers. It is very
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picturesque in appearance and even more so in language; the love of talk, and of a sort of constant play-acting in real life, is extraordinary here. It is as among the ancients, and explains the origin of Greek drama and eloquence—perhaps of all literature.—Mercedes must have found some particularly grievous wrong to right [across text] this morning; but my stomach wants to be given something to do, while my brain says basta!8 Thank you and Fred very much for both your kind messages. GS. 1
Possibly Mary Warren (Mrs. William Warren). These ladies are unidentified. 3 “It was a dream!” is from Heinrich Heine’s short poem, “In der Fremde,” in which the poet laments his exile from Germany, which is personified as a woman. 4 Santayana is referring to the crews of eight-oared racing boats. 5 Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1862–1932) was a fellow of King’s College (1887–1932) and lecturer in political science (1896–1920). An agnostic interested in mysticism, his favorite subjects were Plato and the Greeks. A pacifist during World War I, he became president of the Union for Democratic Control, which advocated “peace without victory.” His writings reflect both of these primary interests and include The Greek View of Life (1896) and essays dedicated to furthering the cause of peace. See Persons, 438. 6 The Italian phrase (literally “in the breast”) implies works that are in a developmental stage of composition. The works are Realms, Doctrine, and Dialogues. 7 Santayana was born in Madrid. 8 That’s enough! 2
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 8 April 1912 • Madrid, Spain
(MS: Virginia)
Madrid, April 8, 1912 Dear Susie: During Holy Week I tried to see the things you recommended, not always succeeding; but I got glimpses that were interesting of several functions. Mercedes got me a ticket, through the Duquesa de la Conquista,1 for the Lavatorio2 in the royal palace; but evidently they had been very lavish with them, for it proved impossible to get into the hall, and inside there were shrieks and fainting-fits. I saw the procession, however, in the gallery, very well; and I have of course seen the King and Queen, and other royalties, on many occasions. Yesterday I went (as you suggested) to San Francisco el Grande, and heard the music. It was a mass by Perosi,3 very nice in itself, but sung as I thought too furiously, and without taste. The
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organist was the most obstreperous, and the singers seemed to catch the infection. But they had fine voices.—The singing in the body of the Church seems to have been given up. The other day, when I was peacefully having tea outside the “Ideal Room” in the calle de Alcalá, I found before me, when I got up to leave, the spectre of a woman! It was Manuela, with a parcel wrapped in a newspaper under her arm, who suggested that we should go for a walk; and dragged me up and down the most solitary alleys of the Retiro,4 by the light of the full moon, before she thought it time to go home. Our conversation, however, was not sentimental. I have been a second time to see them and delivered your boa, which Mercedes did up scientifically in a very compact form. Juan comes sometimes in the evening and we go out to a café or small show. I think he wanted me to take him to the big bullfight yesterday, but I preferred to go alone; today I am going to the [across] primera de abono,5 to sit next to Mercedes’ cousins, the Manfredi boys,6 whom I have not yet seen, Don’t tell Celedonio that I have been to bullfights, if you think it would shock him. Yours affly G. S. [across page one ] P.S. I am thinking of staying here until the 22nd when I might go to you for a week.—Thank Celedonio for his card. 1
Unidentified. Ceremony of washing the feet on Holy Thursday. 3 Lorenzo Perosi (1872–1956). 4 The Retiro is a park. 5 Premiere for holders of season tickets. 6 Unidentified. 2
To Charles Augustus Strong 8 April 1912 [postmark] • Madrid, Spain
(MS: Rockefeller)
Serrano 7, Madrid, April 8.1 Dear Strong; I was just thinking of writing when your card arrived this morning. How amusing that you should be thinking of building a villa at Fiesole!2 Can’t you find an old one to do over? If you have seen Loeser, he can warn you of the expense and delays to which building is subject. I believe it is ten years since he began, and hasn’t yet moved in. Madrid is more pleasing on acquaintance, and I am getting on very well, having done some real work of late—essays on Modernism and on Bergson, to go with other papers into a volume which Dent is to publish
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in London.3 I am thinking of going to Avila in a fortnight, and expect to arrive in Paris on the evening of April 30. Let me know if you are to be there, and if my room is free. Otherwise I can go, perfectly well, to the Quai Voltaire for a few days. Yours ever G.S. Take as many of the copies of the California address as you like. I have two, which are all I need until it is republished. As to the book, you might open it and use your judgment, or send it to Paris. I don’t want it here in any case. 1
The first page of this letter was written on black-bordered stationery. The letter was mailed in a black-bordered envelope. 2 Villa Le Balze. 3 Doctrine.
To Charles Augustus Strong 24 April 1912 • Ávila, Spain
(MS: Rockefeller) Avila, April 24, 19121
Dear Strong th My plan is to reach Paris at 10.30 p.m. on Tuesday the 30– If anything happens to delay me I will telegraph, otherwise you may expect me then, and if you are to be away, please give orders to the concierge and to the bonne2 to be ready to receive me. I didn’t gather from your last card whether you were going to England with Margaret or not.—In any case, I am sorry not to have a glimpse of her. The six weeks I have just spent in Madrid have given me a very good impression of the place. It has the charms of an agreeable and affectionate woman who is not beautiful; my friend Mercedes made me feel at home at once; it was like living in the bosom of one’s own family, with somewhat greater freedom to the good. I should be quite content to spend most of the remainder of my life there, if circumstances made it advisable. This is just the conviction, one way or another, which I wished to acquire in my experimental visit this winter: so that I am quite happy about the result, especially as it is favourable, and leaves this pleasant possibility open for me in the future.
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Your decision to build at Fiesole is quite exciting. I hope you will not be disappointed in the architect or in the time he takes to finish the house. I shall be most interested in hearing about it, and seeing the plans if you have them. Florence and its neighbourhood are delightful, perhaps the most delightful place where a pensive stranger could pitch his tent; but just for that reason if you live there you will be swallowed up in the AngloAmerican colony, formed by the other pensive strangers who have come to the same conclusion as yourself. The moral climate, in consequence, is not so delightful as the landscape. That is why I should hardly choose Florence to live in permanently; but you may not feel the force of this objection, and in any case, it is a place anyone [across] would be glad to visit often. Yours ever G.S. 1
This letter was written on black-bordered stationery and mailed in a black-bordered envelope. 2 Maidservant.
To Abbott Lawrence Lowell 6 June 1912 • Paris, France
(MS: Harvard)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123 Pall Mall, London. Paris, June 6, 1912.
Dear Mr. Lowell: Your letter about the proposed lectures at some French Universities reaches me when I was about to write to you in a wholly different sense. The death of my mother, which occurred shortly after I left America, has made a great change in my personal situation, leaving me without a home in Boston and with most of my close friends and relations living in Europe. It seems clearly to mark the moment when I should carry out the plan I have always had of giving up teaching, returning to live in Europe, and devoting myself to literary work. Each of these things is an object in itself sufficient to determine me, and the three conspire together. The plan which you kindly proposed and we agreed upon last winter, that I should continue to spend four months of each year at Harvard, certainly had many advantages; but it was a compromise. I hardly think we could have been faithful to it long. I should not have attained my object of a change
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of life, and I should not have left the field open for you to choose my successor. In any case, under the changed circumstances, I could not bring myself to return to Cambridge. I therefore enclose a formal resignation of my professorship,1 and I hope you will not ask me to reconsider it. This is a step I have meditated on all my life, and always meant to take when it became possible; but I am sorry the time coincides so nearly with the beginning of your Presidency, when things at Harvard are taking a direction with which I am so heartily in sympathy, and when personally I had begun to receive marks of greater appreciation both from above and from below. But although fond of books and of young men, I was never altogether fit to be a professor, and in the department of philosophy you will now have a better chance to make a fresh start, and see if Harvard can secure the leadership of the next generation, as it had that of the last. As to the lectureship in France, it is not proper that I should now be a candidate for it; but having some experience of the matter2 I should say that, unless the study of English here has made great strides since 1906, audiences really able to understand English lectures cannot be found except in Lyons, Bordeaux, and possibly Caen. There is danger that, for the listeners, the courses should degenerate into exercises in pronunciation or exercises of patience. The fee of 500 francs seems small. It would cover expenses for the fortnight, but it would offer no compensation for the work of preparation nor for the other energies which such an undertaking uses up. I found the provincial capitals usually delightful and the officials kind; but a second visit might be less stimulating, and I think a new and younger person might profit by it more, and might arouse more interest in the place he visited. If there is anything connected with this or any other matter in which I can be of service, I hope you will call upon me. Believe me sincerely and gratefully yours GSantayana 1
Unlocated. Santayana had been the Hyde Lecturer at the Sorbonne and the provincial universities for 1905–6. 2
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To George Edward Moore 10 June 1912 • Paris, France
(MS: Cambridge) 9 Avenue de l’Observatoito ——re Paris, June 10, 1912
Dear Moore This is to introduce Professor R. B. Perry of Harvard, whom you know of, and who is going to spend a day or two in Cambridge. I wish I could go with him! Yours sincerely GSantayana
To Charles Augustus Strong 12 June 1912 • [Paris, France]
(MS: Rockefeller) June 12 19121
Dear Strong Your two cards arrived in due time, and ae/lso Perry, preceded by his telegram. He spent a day here which I think ought to have been pleasant, being his first glimpse of Paris. He tells me you have actually bought Ottonelli’s Field, and that the Sisters’ land is probably to be yours also. I am glad you have thus secured what you went to Florence for the sake of, and that work on the villa (whichever and where-ever it is) may be started by the time you return. I suppose, if you are obliged to go to Rome, that will hardly be this week. I have been very busy doing nothing with my friends. Besides Perry and the ever-assiduous Slade, and Fuller, my young friends Reeves and Abreu2 have turned up, while Moncure Robinson, although I have only seen him for five minutes, has been showering me with petits-blues.3 The ladies, however, are quiescent. Of course you will let us know when to expect you, and if you have time to send me a line about the villa-business and about your journeys, I should be much obliged and much interested.
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My cold still lingers, although it seems better this morning, on account of the nasty weather which we have been having. Yours ever G.S. 1
This letter was written on black-bordered stationery. Probably Harrison Sprague Reeves (Harvard class of 1910) or Henry Everett Reeves (1912). Pierre Sanchez Abreu graduated in 1911. 3 Telegrams. 2
To Charles Augustus Strong 19 June 1912 • Paris, France
(MS: Rockefeller) 9 av. de l’Observatoire1 June 19. 1912
Dear Strong Françoise and I were somewhat relieved to get your card, as we had been wondering if you hadn’t fallen ill or something. What a curious person the Mother Superior must be, with her obsession about Free Masons!2 Or does that piously disguise a passion for land and a shrewd aversion to letting anything substantial go? I hope Ottonelli’s Field and the newly planned house will prove satisfactory and give you as much pleasure and less anxiety both in prospect and in use. I shall be much interested in hearing of the details when you return I have been leading a useless life, having done no writing and no serious reading except James’s collected articles,3 which I have reread carefully. I think I see the first principle of objectivism or new realism somewhat more clearly. It starts with Berkeley4—the object of knowledge is the idea in the mind (the sense-datum) and this is the “thing” of common sense and non-metaphysical physics. That is the foundation—a big blunder—and what James adds is only a confusion of that hybrid with a sort of adumbration of essence, for he says that the “Experience” as psychical and as physical is numerically as well as qualitatively one; which could only be true of it as an essence apart from existence. For as existence is distinguished precisely by presence in a non-dialectical context, and the physical context of the datum and the psychical context, James admits, are two, therefore I say the Existences are two also, although the essence realized in each may be the same. A black pearl between two —— other black gray ———————— ^ ^
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pearls, and a black pearl between two white pearls may be one in essence but these are two black pearls in Existence, since there are two strings. Besides, it is not true that the physical table and the mental table even have the same essence, for the mental table has oblique angles and perhaps only two legs, and what the physical table is in itself is a problem for physics, only imperfectly solved as yet. I have been seeing my usual friends, and besides have dined and gone to the Opera with Abreu’s family, and have been to Versailles to lunch with Miss Elsie de Wolfe5 (formerly an actress) where I met Miss Anne Morgan,6 who gave me news of my family in Avila, where she had just been. So you see I have finally been seduced into gay society, but I mean not to be wedded to it. I /shaven’t been very well, as the cold and uneven weather made my bronchitis linger and grow worse; and now that it seems to have disappeared at last, I have had an ulcerated tooth again, the wicked root having been extracted this morning, and left me feeling like a ploughed field. I was so upset that I went to bed after lunch, and have now been revived by Françoise with some excellent tea, am dressed again, and feel much better—the soreness in the gums and the general lassitude having almost passed away. It is raining heavily—a thunder-storm following on two days of sudden and extreme heat. There are a lot of pamphlets and business communications awaiting you. Let us know when you wish us to stop forwarding the letters. Yours ever G.S. 1
This letter was written on black-bordered stationery. Freemasonry is the teaching and practices of the secret fraternal order of Free and Accepted Masons, an independent national group with adherents in many parts of the world. Custom is the supreme authority of the order; its teachings include obedience to the law of the land. 3 In 1912 both Essays in Radical Empiricism, edited by Perry, and Memories and Studies, edited by James’s son Henry, were published in New York. 4 George Berkeley (1685–1753) was an Irish-English philosopher credited with founding the philosophical doctrine of subjective idealism—the theory that all qualities are known only in the mind, that matter does not exist apart from its being perceived, and that the observing mind of God makes possible the continued apparent existence of material objects. 5 Elsie de Wolfe (1865–1950) was an actress, decorator, and hostess. America’s first female decorator, she based her work on eighteenth-century principles of unity, simplicity, and serenity, and a sense of vibrant color and airiness. With the publication of her The House in Good Taste (1913), she became an arbiter of decorative design in the 2
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United States. She was a hostess for international celebrities at innovative parties at her house in Versailles and married Sir Charles Mendl in 1926. 6 Anne Morgan (1873–1952), third daughter of J. Pierpont Morgan, was a war relief organizer. She was cofounder and president (1928–43) of the Working Girls Vacation Association, later the American Women’s Association. After World Wars I and II, she organized relief programs for France. She was awarded the Croix de Guerre (1917) and was the first American woman to be made a commander of the Legion of Honor (1932).
To Charles Augustus Strong 24 July 1912 [postmark] • Paris, France
(MS postcard: Rockefeller)
PARIS. LA FONTAINE DE MÉDICIS ( JARDIN DU LUXEMBOURG).
9 Ave de l’Observatoire, July 24.1 Two business letters have arrived for you, one from the Banker’s Trust Co and one from the Crédit Lyonnais— “Service des accrédités”. Shall I forward them to Rochester? All well in this hermitage. G.S. 1
This card was addressed to Strong in London.
To George Herbert Palmer 2 August 1912 • Paris, France
(MS: Wellesley) 9 Avenue de l’Observatoire, Paris. Aug. 2, 1912
Dear Mr. Palmer: I believe I have two kind letters of yours unanswered, one in which you advise me not to be “a floater”,—is this a fish, or is the fish a flounder?—and the other in which you wish me joy on having got adrift. You also give me interesting news of the department, which Perry has confirmed, for he has been here. Perhaps definite knowledge that I am not going back may help you to act somewhat more boldly, and to get Lovejoy or some other satisfactory person, by offering him a permanent place and an adequate salary. Delay and economy will never do, if you don’t want other American universities to pass you in the race for prestige. Strong has left me—he is on his annual visit to the U.S.—and I am busy giving the finishing touches to a book of essays on contemporary matters
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which is to appear shortly under the title: “Winds of Doctrine”. The California address will be in it, and there will be other things that may not be too wrong-headed not to be entertaining. My literary plans for the future are quite definite. I hope to produce three more books, besides the above. One is a short system of philosophy called “Three Realms of Being” (the three being Essence, Matter, and Consciousness) which will contain the correction of the misunderstanding to which “The Life of Reason” gave occasion, when some people took it for a system of the universe (!), which even my new book will not dream of being, and not merely for what it is; an account of the phases through which the human imagination may have passed in reaching its present posture. My second book is to be more laborious, and may not appear for many years, if at all in my lifetime. It is to be a critical history of philosophy, or rather a critical essay on the history of philosophy, on the plan that there is a thread of normal opinion, not unbroken yet traceable, from the Hindus on, and that a great number of heresies have branched off at this or that point, of which it will be interesting to analyse the nature and the plausibility. My third book—or books, since the subject is extensible ad infinitum—is a set of “Dialogues in Limbo”, of which three are written, in which criticism of modern ways and ideas is put into the mouth of Socrates1 and other ancient ghosts. This fancy is one in which I take great delight, and perhaps others may find such an exercise in self-criticism acceptable. With these projects (and some half-finished poetical plays2 left over from my younger days) I shall have enough to occupy my mind. For the rest, where I shall live, etc, it is a matter of less consequence. During some years I got on very well in America, and accomplished a good deal, though of very mixed quality, and tainted by the haste and want of solidity to which every thing invites one there; and I might have attempted to go on under the same conditions, except that the occasion for a change seemed to be marked, as it were, by Providence, and that the routine of lectures and the general tone of the place — was were wearing me out and getting on my nerves more and more. It seems as if with advancing years one’s nature asserts itself more markedly against one’s circumstances; and I never felt so much a foreigner in New England as I did of late. In Avila, where my two sisters are now, I have almost a home, and I was very happy in Madrid last winter, living with an old (female) friend, who is all piety, patriotism, and affection runs/ ning over for everybody. She and her servants made me very com^ ^ fortable; but I stipulated for a study to myself and perfect freedom, and got both. I expect to return there this next winter, with my unmarried sister;
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and that, with my other sister’s house in Avila, will doubtless remain my places of refuge, when I need a refuge. For the present, however, I am still eager for travel and variety of scene. At the end of August I am going to England, and think of spending the October term at Cambridge in order chiefly to talk over the “Three Realms of Being” with Russell and Moore, whose views are near enough to mine to be stimulating to me, while the fact that they live in an atmosphere of controversy (which for myself I hate) renders them keenly alive to all sorts of objections and pitfalls which I need to be warned of, in my rather solitary and unchecked reasonings. You are very good to offer me the hospitalities of Quincy Street, and if I am ever in Cambridge, Mass. again, I shall certainly make your house my first Mecca. You may not remember it, but it was your encouragement and advice that decided me to go on with philosophy, instead of architecture, which I had thought of first as a profession. Your personality, with that of my other Harvard teachers and colleagues, must naturally always loom large in my memory, and remain one of the chief influences and points of reference in my intellectual life. Of course, we were divided by many things; but those which united us were perhaps, on the whole, more fundamental and important. They would doubtless seem so to a remote observer, and to ourselves in the end. Please remember me to Royce and Münsterberg when you see them, or show them [across] this letter, if you think it would interest them. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Socrates (469–399 B.C.) was a Greek philosopher who regarded the pursuit of philosophy as essential to an intellectual and moral life. His method of inquiry was known as dialectic, the systematic examination of statements and their implications. 2 Probably The Marriage of Venus (written in 1896) and Philosophers at Court (written 1897–1901), later revised and published posthumously in Testament.
To Charles Augustus Strong 4 August 1912 • Paris, France
(MS: Rockefeller) Paris, Aug. 4, 1912
Dear Strong: Everything here is unchanged: autumnal weather, dead leaves, rain, not very consecutive or successful spurts of work. However, I have finished the “Modernism” paper, and hope to get the “Bergson” done this week.
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After a little revision of “Russell”, and the first essay, all will be over.1 Slade I see sometimes; and hardly anyone else. Thank you for your letter from Southwold. What made our discussions sometimes “acrimonious” was, I think, that we were disputing on “physics”, which is a subject to be advanced only by experiment and observation. Every one may present these in the language he chooses, but he should not quarrel with anyone for using a different language, if he admits the same facts. The thing for you to do is to work out your book; ^ ^ the presentation you will give there of the subject will interest every body, as to its substance; but the form and grammar of your system is not, I think, something you ought to insist on having the rest of us adopt, especially if we happen to have a simpler and more incisive terminology to which we are wedded. I may leave Paris earlier than I expected, if my book is finished soon, as I hope. But I may stay on, as I rather like the melancholy season, and have plenty of reading I should like to do. By the way, I have been reading the last volume of the Bible (the Epistles & Apocalypse) in your modern edition. I long for notes; but even half understood the stuff is extraordinary. What could be more remote from polite religion than this palpitating, —— eschto ———— eschatological, revolutionary delusion? And what fisticuffs—controversial and perhaps physical—among these new-born saints! Send me a line saying when you will reach England. If I am not at Cambridge already I will hasten there to see you and get a glimpse of Margaret, whom I haven’t seen for so long. Nothing has arrived from Florence; only business letters and notices. You remember that my English address is C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall. Yours ever G.S. 1 In Doctrine, chapter II is “Modernism and Christianity,” chapter III is “The Philosophy of M. Henri Bergson,” chapter IV is “A New Scholasticism,” and chapter I is “The Intellectual Temper of the Age.”
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To Charles Augustus Strong 3 September 1912 • Paris, France
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(MS: Rockefeller) 9 Ave. de l’Observatoire, Sept. 3, 1912
Dear Strong I know this letter will not reach you for a long time but I have no address of yours in England, and hardly know how to reach you. My plans have been upset by another bad attack of bronchitis, coming just when I was giving the last touches to my book—at last in the publisher’s hands—on which I had been working terribly hard (for me). The cough and other symptoms seem to be getting chronic, and I haven’t the courage to go to England and face more rain and chilliness, especially in such a swamp as Cambridge. Instead, I have yielded to an irresistible impulse to go to Italy, and start tomorrow morning for Naples. I mean to stay in that neighbourhood, probably at Sorrento, until October, and then go to Sicily, returning the same way, so as to stop at Rome and — N————— aples Florence in the early winter, when I count on seeing you. I am going to Bertolini’s while in Naples, and if you send a line there it will reach me. Here, Françoise has taken excellent care of me, and I have been very happy, especially when I felt the book was getting on. It certainly has cost me very great pains, and now we shall see what people say of it. I am sending Margaret a line—which you have probably seen long before this—repeating the substance of the above, so that you should not be surprised so long at my silence and non-appearance at Cambridge. During this Spring and Summer I have been fundamentally happier than ever before in my life, largely owing to the hospitable nest which you have provided for me. In health and in little things I have not been so lucky, and I feel rather tired; but a good sun-bath and being fancy-free will set me up, I am sure. Remember me [across] to the Cambridge philosophers, if you see them. I am very sorry that our own meeting should be postponed, but you will understand how it is, as you too have migratory instincts. Yours ever GSantayana
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To Robert Shaw Sturgis 5 September 1912 [postmark] • Milan, Italy
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
MILANO—DETTAGLIO DUOMO
Milan, Thursday. I arrived last night less tired than I started, and feel pretty well today. I am at the Hôtel Métropole, in the Piazza del Duomo, and like the feeling of the town. I shall probably stay two days more, and then stop at Bologna on my way to Naples. I was [across] glad to have a glimpse of you and Ellen. [Unsigned ]
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 9 September 1912 • Bologna, Italy
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
BOLOGNA—LE DUE TORRI
Bologna, 9th Sept. 1912 I came on here from Milan this morning, and go on to Rome tomorrow and to Naples the day after. After a day or two at Bertolini’s, on the hills above the town, my idea is to go to Sorrento or Capri for a fortnight, and then to Palermo—which is my objective point. My cough is almost gone, but I have had rheumatism (in the back) instead. That also is better now. [Unsigned ]
To Charles Augustus Strong 12 September 1912 • Naples, Italy
(MS: Rockefeller)
Sept. 12, 1912 BERTOLINI’S PALACE NAPLES
Dear Strong I am very glad to have your letter of Aug. 29th from Rochester, as now I can reach you on your arrival in England and explain my departure to these sunny climes (it happens to have been raining hard for twelve hours). You probably have not received a letter I sent to America lately, nor
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Margaret one I sent her to Southwold, saying that my cough had come on again rather severely just when I was starting for England, and that as I was otherwise weary and not inclined to face wet and chilly weather, I decided to come here as soon as possible. I left Paris on the 4th of September, stayed a few days in Milan (where rheumatism attacked me as well) one night in Rome, and arrived here yesterday, feeling much better, and indeed practically well of both my ailments. My plan is to stay here a week, meantime looking for a nice place at Sorrento or Capri for a further rest; and then to go on a trip to Sicily. In November I count on seeing you in Florence. My book is safe in Dent’s hands in London. What a relief! I am sorry not to join you in Cambridge; but I should not have been in the mood for discussion, and the idea of spending the autumn in that swamp no longer smiled on me.—That your villa is not yet begun is no surprise to me. The wonder will be when it is finished. However there is joy also in anticipation, and when we admire, in November or December, the preparations that may have been made for laying the foundations, we shall have the fun we had in Paris all over again, and who knows how many times more in the sequel. Remember me to Russell if you see him, and to my other friends. I have recast the article on him for my book, following Boileau’s maxim: ajouter quelques fois et souvent effacez.1 The more technical and futile parts have, I hope, disappeared. Some other day I may answer the part of your letter about psychology: today I am hardly in the mood. You are quite right in saying that we disagree about the existence of unfelt feeling. I am not sure, however, that an unfelt feeling is a fact and not a word. I agree that there is something in an animal before he is aware of it—a very great deal, in fact. This is what I meant by the fact on which we agreed and the words about which we disagreed. Remember me to Margaret, whom I am sorry not to see for the moment: perhaps it may be in Florence at Christmas instead. I don’t yet know how long I shall stay in Italy—it will be as long as the spirit moves me to stay. Yours ever G.Santayana 1 Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711), a French literary critic and poet, was the spokesman of classicism. Later regarded as a literary lawgiver, he was a master of epigram and a zealous polemicist. The maxim is “Add occasionally and delete often.”
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To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 24 September 1912 [postmark] • Cava dei Tirreni, Italy (MS postcard: Sanchez) CAVA DEI TIRRENI—PREGIATO E MONTECASTELLO DALL’ HÔTEL DE LONDRES
Cava dei Tirreni, Sept. 24. Thank you for your card, which reached me at Bertolini’s before I left this morning.—The weather has changed during the last few days, with much rain and wind. I made an attempt to go to Capri, but was getting sea-sick, so I stopped at Sorrento (this is the advantage of coasting) and waited for a day there; but as the weather got no better, I [companion card unlocated ]
To Charles Augustus Strong 29 September 1912 • Monreale, Italy
(MS postcard: Rockefeller)
MONREALE-DUOMO. CREAZIONE DI EVA.
(MOSAICI
SEC. XII.)
“L’Évolution Créatrice.” ——— Monreale, near Palermo, Sunday Sept. 29th, 1912.1 SUL LATO ANTERIORE DELLA PRESENTE SI SCRIVE SOLTANTO L’INDIRIZZO.
After a somewhat uncomfortable journey from Naples, I have made myself comfortable here and expect to stay a week or so longer, before starting on the tour in quest of Greek ruins—to Girgenti and Siracusa.2 I expect to reach Rome in a fortnight and shall be at the Hôtel de Milan, piazza Montecitorio. The architecture here is very Saracenic, and I don’t care for it; but the people are less semitic than I had expected and might almost be Irish or Polish, as far as looks go. Manner apart, there is really no division into national types in Europe.—I send this card in an envelope Yours ever G.S. for the sake of decency.—3 1
In Santayana’s hand, on front of postcard. Agrigento, birthplace of the philosopher Empedocles, is a city in southern Sicily, Italy, that was called Girgenti before 1927. Founded as Acragas about 580 B.C. by Greek colonists, it was one of the most splendid cities of the ancient Grecian world. The remains of Doric temples (6th–5th centuries B.C.) are there. Syracuse (“Siracusa” in Italian) is a port on the Ionian Sea in southeast Sicily. Founded by Greeks in 743 2
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B.C.,
it was a center of Greek culture. It was governed by Dionysius the Elder and then by Dionysius the Younger, among others. 3 The front of the postcard pictures God creating a nude Eve from the side of a nude, semi-reclining Adam.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 30 September 1912 • Palermo, Italy
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
MONREALE.—ABSIDE DELLA CATTEDRALE: XII SECOLO.
Palermo, Sept. 30, 1912. Yesterday I went on a trip (7 kilometers by electric tram and funiculaire;1 I walked back) to Monreale, to see the church in this photo, which is one of the most important architecturally in the world, as it shows a critical mixture of styles. The interior is all mosaics. I do not [companion card unlocated ] 1
A mountain cable railway.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 2 October 1912 • Palermo, Italy
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
CEFALÙ—PANORAMA
Palermo, Oct. 2, 1912. After much rain, the weather today has been very fine, and I have taken the opportunity to make a trip to this town.—The sights of Palermo being pretty nearly exhausted, I mean to start tomorrow for Girgenti. I will send you a card from there. [Unsigned ]
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 22 October 1912 • Rome, Italy
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
ROMA—BASILICA DI S. MARIA MAGGIORE th Rome, Oct. 22. 1912. This morning I receive your letter of the 16– . Thank you very much for it.—For the present you may address me here directly.—
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Why does Pepe’s marriage not seem a real boda1 to his father? Is there anything uncanonical about it?—I am very well, and leading an easy life. I have finished reading the first proof of my whole new book.2 Love to all. ROMA—BASILICA S. MARIA MAGGIORE
(FACCIATA
POSTERIORE )
Oct. 22 (continued from the other card). What you say about Josephine’s high spirits is delightful; only I have one fear.—I think she must be in love, or ready to fall in love. Perhaps she will surprise us all by marrying some young rascal in Madrid! Warn her against the whole sex in my name.— I am going to write to her quite seriously soon. [Unsigned ] 1 Wedding. José (Pepe) Sastre González married Isabel Martín; later they had at least two sons and three daughters. 2 Doctrine.
To Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien 23 October 1912 • Rome, Italy
(MS postcard: Texas)
ROMA—VILLA MEDICI
Rome, Oct. 23, 1912. Sadness overwhelms me at the thought of a “Magazine of American and Foreign Verse”, at a reduced rate for poets.—No: this is not the way to do it. Get a thousand miles away from all magazines and many thousand miles away from America, in your island off the West Coast of Ireland at least—and even then! [across] Your disillusioned friend GSantayana
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 8 November 1912 [postmark] • Rome, Italy
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
ROMA. PIAZZA S. PIETRO: UNA FONTANA.
Hôtel de Milan, Rome. Nov. 8.—Your letter of the 2nd reaches me today. I supposed you understood that I was staying here for some time. Mrs. Berenson has asked me to go and stay with them (near Florence) and Strong is also there, besides
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Loeser. But the trouble is now I have my old cough again—the weather having been vile. I am nursing myself [across] very carefully, & hope it will pass off. G. S.
To Charles Augustus Strong 8 November 1912 • Rome, Italy
(MS: Rockefeller)
Hôtel de Milan, Rome Nov. 8, 1912 Dear Strong: Mrs. Berenson has written and I have answered saying that if it is all the same to them we can arrange as to the moment of my visit when I appear in those parts in person. On re-reading your letter just now I notice that they are to go away in the middle of December; but no doubt I shall be in Florence long before that. The page-proof of my book, which I have been expecting daily for a fortnight, has not yet begun to arrive; I have written to ask what is the matter. If there should be a long delay for any reason, of course I could have the proofs sent to Florence just as well, even better, as it is nearer London. There is another circumstance, which I hope won’t amount to anything, but with the tremendous rains of the other day and the sudden fall in temperature and high winds since, I have got my bothersome cough again. I am taking every precaution I know of not to let it cling to me as it did in Paris. If it should stick, however, or return (as it seems to do on the least provocation) my first thought will have to be how to get rid of it—for with it I am not fit for society, physically or morally. Would the hôtel Aurore be a good place in which to nurse bronchitis? Isn’t Florence more cold and windy than Rome—and at this moment that is saying a good deal?—I suppose, if I was no better in Florence, the thing to do would be to go on to the Riviera, and try to get well there. Yesterday I received Holt1 & Co’s “New Realism”, and I have read Holt’s contribution to it (the vile diction and tone of which set my teeth on edge) because, odious as he is personally, Holt has always seemed to me more able and clear-headed than the rest of his school. He is very hard on our nice little friend Drake2—calls him an idiot, ignoramus, or some thing of that sort. However, we are almost all of us in that class, according to Holt, so that it is no wonder. This article actually makes me understand a little better how the realists can get on without any mind at all. Except the universal one which they assume but won’t for worlds admit that they
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assume. “Objects” are enlarged to include their external relations and effects—and it is part of the atmosphere of an object, in action and reaction with other objects, that various groups or apperceptions of its elements are formed about it. These are our perceptions of it—the cotton-wool, so to speak, in which —— they are ———— —— it is wrapped, like planets in clouds.—That seems all very well: but I wonder how objects are individuated in such a world. Perhaps they [across] aren’t individuated at all; and then the new realism would be as mystical as Bergson. — I will write again in a few days. Yours ever G.S. 1 Edwin Bissell Holt (1873–1946) was an American psychologist and philosopher noted for innovations in philosophical psychology. The New Realism: Cooperative Studies in Philosophy (1912). 2 Durant Drake (1878–1933) of Vassar.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 11 November 1912 [postmark] • Rome, Italy TIVOLI.
VILLA ADRIANA.
(MS postcard: Sanchez) PAESAGGIO.
Rome, Nov. 11. My cold is not at all bad and I hope to get rid of it entirely in a few days. The weather has become mild again, and helps. The American tide is rising rapidly, and my freedom is largely gone, as when I walk out I am hailed by one person or another. I am writing with the fountain-pen of one of them in a café where we have been for [across] hours.—My best wishes for the wedding [Unsigned ]
To Charles Augustus Strong 11 November 1912 • Rome, Italy
(MS: Rockefeller)
Hôtel de Milan, Rome Nov. 11, 1912 Dear Strong The bronchitis is not very bad—not a racking cough at all, and not frequent, and in a few days I hope it may have disappeared. The beautiful
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weather of the last two days has helped. Today it is cloudy, but not cold, and I shall be prudent. Suppose you let me go first to the Berensons, say on Dec 1–st , and then, if I am well, I can go to the Aurora, and if I am not well, we can both go to Portofino. It is very good and sweet of you to offer to go there with me. In your company, I should prefer it to even Monte Carlo, although if I ^ ^ were alone, unless absorbed in the Three Realms of Being (which I have been at work on) I am afraid I should find it dull after a day or two. And I should rather not go to a great many different places, but stay a long time in those I stop at, as I am doing here with great satisfaction. Before leaving Florence, by the way, if I am not pursued by the bronchial fiend, I must stay a few days in the city, to revisit the chief sites, and sights, and to see Loeser and his new spouse.1 But perhaps this could be done by descending from Fiesole for half a day now and then. I am quite absorbed in the “New Realism”—dreadful as the style of it all is—and as soon as I have finished it, in two or three days, I will send it on to you, as you say you have no copy at hand. I am glad you liked Benda’s book.2 When I began it, I thought he might be some excentric carping incompetent person; but on reading on, and especially on rereading, I saw how far that was from being the case.—I have changed one or two complimentary epithets, in my article (about Bergson’s style) into epithets of a sour-sweet quality, in deference to Benda’s criticism of the same, which opened my eyes. Russell’s article on Bergson I have not seen. The new realists, by the way, are very hostile to Bergson, too, which surprises me a little. If his theory of perception is like theirs, they detest his metaphysics. And, if it were not for kindly illusions and pious feelings, they would have to attack James as well. They do attack Dewey, for believing too much in the separately psychical. And poor Royce’s lordly sophistry is trailed in the dust. Schiller3 they ignore, you and me are also covered under a merciful silence, while Münsterberg schwebt4 over the whole scene like a huge grinning bat—the hideous and bloated Angel of Darkness. Americans are beginning to turn up in large numbers, and I have come across several friends and acquaintances of late. Yours ever G.S. 1 Charles Loeser at fifty married Olga Lebert, “a German Jewish pianist … [who] sometimes still performed, and with great power, in public or in private concerts.” (Persons, 217–18)
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2 Julien Benda (1867–1956) was a French philosopher, essayist, and novelist. A staunch defender of strict rationalism, he wrote Le Bergsonisme (1912), a controversial attack on Bergson’s philosophy. 3 Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller (1864–1937) was a British pragmatist philosopher who was influenced by James. But Schiller focused on the personal aspect of thinking and regarded knowledge as relatively subjective. Schiller felt the British school had forgotten the truth of Protagoras that man is the measure of all things. 4 Hovers.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 17 November 1912 [postmark] • Rome, Italy TIVOLI.
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
VILLA D’ ESTE: TERRAZZA.
Rome. Sunday, Nov. 17. In about a week I expect to go to Florence, where Mrs. Berenson says she will make me very comfortable—and I have no doubt of it, as their villa is most luxurious. Later, I shall go to the convent—Villa San Girolamo, Fiesole—where Strong is.—My cold is much better; in general I feel very well, and enjoy walking in the sun on the Pincio;1 but I still cough a little. The weather is pleasant at last. [Unsigned ] 1
The Pincio is a public park in Rome and the site of the Villa Borghese.
To Elizabeth Stephens Fish Potter 30 November 1912 • Florence, Italy
(MS: Houghton)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall.
Nov. 30, 1912 I TATTI SETTIGNANO (FLORENCE)
Dear Mrs. Potter It seems impossible that you shouldn’t have had any notion all this time of my doings. I have felt as if you knew everything, and—especially in Rome, where I have just been for six weeks—you were so present to my thoughts that I almost fancied that we were all travelling together, and that Warwick was still one year old.1 But, by some psychological accident, the
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moment for writing has never come till now, weeks after receiving your very nice letter. So I must go back to the beginning. You have not heard, perhaps, that my mother died soon after I left America. It was not an unexpected loss, and in one sense, as you know, it had really occurred long before, as my mother had not been herself for some years. Nevertheless, her death makes a tremendous difference in all our lives, as she had always been the ruling influence over us. She had a very strong will and a most steadfast character, and her mere presence, even in the decline of her faculties, was the central fact and bond of union for us. Now, everything seems to be dissolved. My sister Josephine (who was with my mother in Brookline) bore the blow very well, on the whole. She is now in Avila with my sister Susie and her family, and by all accounts is quite happy there, and (for her) very active and sprightly. Although she has not made definite plans as yet, it looks as if she would probably remain in Spain permanently. As for me, I was at Windsor, with my old friend and so-called cousin Howard Sturgis, when the news came. I went almost immediately to Avila, and spent two months afterwards, March and April, in Madrid, with our spinster friend Mercedes. It was a curious and very pleasant situation. The household consists of this lady, a sort of Spanish and Catholic “new woman”, full of charitable and social enthusiasms, her maid and friend Eugenia (who sat at table with us) a housemaid, a cook, and the cook’s son,2 a young man employed in some shop and at the same time studying music as a profession, so that every evening and all day Sunday we were entertained with his practice on the piano. I had two rooms to myself, and except for the occasional chilliness in the house—the soi-disant3 fires were not effectual—was very comfortable and happy. I did some work, saw the city, and talked Spanish by the hour with Mercedes, who is very intelligent and well-informed. Madrid is, save for a few new streets, a very ugly mean town, and the climate severe; nevertheless, it has a great charm and I should be happy living there, if my bronchitis (which recurs on the slightest provocation) allowed me to do so; but I am afraid it is not feasible, as I should have to be going away continually to warm myself at some healthresort. However, I am going there again in the Spring, when I expect to find my sister Josephine also at Mercedes’ house. I was in Paris, at my friends Strong’s (9 avenue de l’Observatoire) during all the late Spring and the whole summer, with him until the middle of July, and afterwards alone. There, by making a great effort (for I wasn’t very well) I finished my new book, and meant to go to England for a long
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stay; but when the time came I was suffering so much from my bronchial cold and occasional rheumatism (I have had to give up wine, like Bob) that I went to Naples instead. It was the first of September, and I found Bertolini’s hotel empty and very comfortable, the climate not a bit too warm, and just what I needed to rest and recover my good spirits. After a fortnight there, I made a trip in Sicily, seeing the regular sights. It rained a lot, and there were mosquitoes to make up for the absence of tourists, and perhaps I was not in a sufficiently admiring and enterprising mood, so that Sicily didn’t enchant me so much as I had expected: however, I saw many memorably things, Girgenti especially, and satisfied my curiosity. When I go again, I shall know where to look and where to make my longer stops. Palermo is a pleasant place to live in, and Siracusa has a very great charm. I could hide there, if I had some work that I didn’t wish to be disturbed in, very happily for months together. From Sicily I went straight to Rome, where I have been living contentedly, until the attraction of my friends in Florence prooved too great, and enticed me here. I am at the Berenson’s for the moment, very splendidly entertained in body and in mind, for here everybody knows everything, and rather more than everything. Strong is at Fiesole, watching the building of his villa there, next door to the Villa Medici, where Lady Sybil Cutting lives;4 I see him every day. In a few days I expect to go to Florence and settle down, perhaps for several months, if I can find a suitable room, with a fire, so as to be able to read or write comfortably in the evening. My friend Loeser has a young wife, a great musician, a distant cousin of his from Stuttgart. I haven’t yet seen them, in fact they have both been kept back by illness; but they are expected in Florence soon. Besides, I have other friends and acquaintances here, so that I expect to see much of my fellow-beings, after these last months of complete solitude. It will be very pleasant and stimulating, although really I am happier when alone. I was forgetting to tell you what is perhaps the only important fact—that I have resigned my professorship altogether, and don’t expect to go back to America at any fixed time. As you know, my situation at Harvard has never been to my liking altogether, and latterly much less so, because I began to be tired of teaching and too old for the society of young people, which is the only sort I found tolerable there. The arrangement I had made with Mr. Lowell for teaching during half of each year, I should have carried out had my mother lived; but it was never meant , in my own mind, ^ ^ to last for ever. Now, it seemed that the moment to make the change had come. My brother assures me that I shall have a little income that more
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than supplies my wants; Boston, with no home there, with no place to dine in night after night but that odious Colonial Club, is too distressing a prospect. Here, on the other hand, everything is alluring. My books (the only earthly chattels I retain) are at the avenue de l’Observatoire; that is my headquarters for the present. Meantime I am looking about, and if some place or some circle makes itself indispensable to my happiness, there I will stay. Intellectually, I have quite enough on hand and in mind, to employ all my energies for years. I should be very sorry—it would really make me hesitate—if I thought I was not to see you and Bob often in future; but Mr Wilson5 will lower the tariff on clothes, your house will become an old story, and you will be in Paris, I am sure, in the very near future. If not, I promise myself to go to America on purpose to visit you, even if it should not be in September next. My sister Josephine, too, may wish to go back, and in that case I have agreed to accompany her, so [across] that it is just possible that I may be in New York during the Summer.—I will write again soon. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 Santayana traveled in Italy with Mr. and Mrs. Potter in 1897, visiting Venice and Rome. Warwick was their son, named after Robert Potter’s younger brother who died suddenly of cholera in 1893 at the age of twenty-two. 2 These persons are unidentified. 3 So-called. 4 Lady Sybil Marjorie Cuffe (1879–1943) married William Bayard Cutting Jr. in 1901. She was later married to Geoffrey Scott (Bernard Berenson’s secretary) and to Percy Lubbock. 5 Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) became president of Princeton University in 1902 and twenty-eighth president of the United States in 1912.
To Mary Williams Winslow 6 December 1912 • Florence, Italy
(MS: Houghton)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, London. Dec. 6. 1912
Dear Mrs. Winslow Your kind letter reached me in Rome, where I have been for six weeks, after a trip to Sicily, and other , and I have kept it ever since to reread and answer, and to look at the two photographs, (of which I like one, Polly’s)
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but somehow the spirit has not been propitious until this morning. I am at the Berensons’, very handsomely entertained, and enjoying the contrast from the solitude of the tourist in a crowd, to the conversation of the ultralearned and all-judging aesthetes in a villa, and I shall enjoy the change back to solitude even more, perhaps, when it comes. Last night we even went to a dinner—at Lady Sybil Cutting’s, widow of my friend Bayard Cutting—and it was very pleasant getting home and going to bed after it. Berenson is full of esprit, and there is a stream of distilled culture flowing over us continually in the form of soulful tourists and weary dilettanti who frequent this place; but I really enjoy best talking with my friend Strong about things-in-themselves when we go for a walk together or to a café ^^ in the town of Florence. He is here, at Fiesole, overseeing the building of a villa, which is to be his “home” (he thinks); and I am expecting the arrival of Loeser also, who is married, and about to become a father. These friends will probably induce me to stay in Florence for some time, if it doesn’t prove too cold and bleak for me. Here I might as well introduce a paranthesis about my health, for the doctor’s especial benefit. My rheumatism has recurred at intervals—mine too has gone to the ribs, without deserting the knees, however—and I am glad Polly is going to associate me in idea with Bacchus, because in fact I have had to give up all association with that genial personage, and drink only mineral waters. But my chief trouble has been the bronchitis, of which I had an attack in Madrid in April, and another in Paris during the summer—a very cold rainy summer it was—which lasted so long that I gave up going to England for the autumn and went to Naples to sun myself instead. I got well at once; but in Rome last month the cough came on again, and although I am free from it now, I begin to feel that it is necessary to think of it as a chronic affair, and to choose my winter habitat accordingly. It will make Madrid or Avila impossible; and I don’t mean to go back there until the middle or end of March. From here I shall go to the Riviera and to Andalusia, and then join my sisters and the excellent Mercedes for a season, before returning “home” to Paris. There, at Strong’s, 9 avenue de l’Observatoire, I am delightfully established, with the books I have retained; we have a very nice apartment, a sunny large study, a dining-room and a nice room for each of us, including one—always empty—for Strong’s daughter Margaret. Francoise the bonne, gives us such meals as we wish to have at home, and she is an excellent cook; but I try to entice Strong to the boulevard and its restaurants, so as to vary the scene a little, and be entertained by the cinematograph of real life, and some-
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times by the other cinematograph also; and when I am alone (Strong left me in July to go to America, so that his daughter might visit her grandparents1 during her long vacation: she is at school in England) I take both lunch and dinner out, enjoying that daily episode, even if the scene is not more gorgeous or novel than an établissement Duval in the boulevard Saint Michel. The only trouble with the situation in Paris is that the avenue de l’Observatoire is far from central, and that even the bus and the underground are not very convenient, and to get a cab it is necessary to send Francoise out in the rain, or else to go wading oneself until one can be found at some street-corner. Otherwise, the apartment is ideal, and so long as Strong keeps it, it will be my head-quarters. If he gives it up, when his villa in Fiesole is finished, I shall doubtless take a small apartment for myself in some more central place. Paris is, I am convinced, the point of stable equilibrium for my pendulum. As to work, I have done a lot, though as yet I have nothing to show for it, as even “D / Winds of Doctrine” though in print, is not yet out. You shall have a copy as soon as it is published, which I hope will be in January or February. The Shelley paper2 is in it. It was a terrible piece of work getting it off, and took me all summer; the essay on Bergson is only a selection of reams that I had written about him, and the essay on modernism is also patch-work, and I am afraid it shows it; revising and rearranging old stuff is harder than composing afresh from the beginning; but on the other hand there is a loss if one doesn’t use what was written under the direct inspiration of one’s reading. In Rome, where I was absolutely free and happy, I did a good deal on both the “Three Realms of Being” and the “Dialogues”, and even burst into poetry,3 something that hadn’t happened to me for years: but both these undertakings are formidable and I cannot expect to finish either for two or three years. The system of philosophy, probably, will be ready first. Next year I hope to go to Cambridge to talk it over with Russell and Moore, with whom I agree and disagree just enough to make discussion profitable. My sister Josephine seems to be getting on splendidly in Spain, but her plans for the future are still unformed. I suppose she will remain there. My love to Fred and the young ones, and best wishes for you all for Christmas [across] and the New Year. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Margaret Strong’s paternal grandparents were the Baptist clergyman Augustus Hopkins Strong (1837–1921) and his wife (Harriet Louise Savage) of Rochester, New York; her maternal grandparents were John Davison and Laura Spelman Rockefeller.
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2
Chapter V, “Shelley: or The Poetic Value of Revolutionary Principles.” “A Minuet: On Reaching the Age of Fifty,” Poems, 130–32 and Complete Poems, 184–85. 3
To Horace Meyer Kallen 10 December 1912 • Florence, Italy
(MS postcard: American)
The Berensons’ VILLA I TATTI, SETTIGNANO, FLORENCE.
Florence, Dec. 10, 1912 Your letter—which I will answer at length before long—reached me while staying at the Berensons’; I am enjoying a season of talk after a long one of solitude. Strong is here, and I expect my old friend Loeser soon. As to my book, I have read all the proofs, but it is not yet out. The “Three Realms of Being” are making progress, but you mustn’t expect them for another year at least. I have had recurring colds, which have bothered me a good deal. [across] Have been in Sicily, etc. and am not yet settled. G.S.
To Mary Williams Winslow 31 December 1912 • Florence, Italy
(MS: Houghton)
Florence, Dec. 31. 1912 Dear Mrs Winslow Thank you very much for the pretty calendar with its kind message. It has found me still here—though rather restive—retained by my friends, Strong and his daughter, Loeser and his wife, the Berensons, etc, but driven on by the bad weather—London couldn’t be more wet and foggy—and by a certain dislike I have taken to the place and to the life of the aesthetical colony in it. Rome is far more to my taste—larger, nobler, more genuinely alive, and more appealing to wide reflection. In Florence it is rather the quaint, incidental, and hopelessly archaic that people feed their imagination upon. The landlord of my hotel complains that the stream of tourists has dwindled, and that people who came to spend the winter in Florence now go to Cairo instead. I can perfectly sympathize with this change of fashion, and though I am too lazy and fond of solitude to go to Egypt with the smart rabble, I am going for a while to the Riviera, to catch
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a glimpse of the sun and sea, on my way to Andalusia and thence to Madrid. My sister-in-law Ellen has written me a Christmas letter in which she speaks of you and says your children are splendidly healthy, which is all that can be required of them at their tender age; and I hope they will continue to look angelic and to behave accordingly. Nowadays, I daresay the angels play tennis and football, just as formerly they used to brandish flaming swords and to spear dragons. I have also heard from Mrs. Toy,1 your favourite Fuller, and the Schofields (this last on business, but with friendly and social frills) all of whom put together give me a vivid picture of Boston, with its old heart and its new subway vibrating merrily together. It doesn’t seem to me much more remote than when I was there; and I am surprised to see how much life everywhere is now like life in America. Except Boylston Beal,2 I hardly know anybody who seems to stop to consider what it all comes to—and he is a trifle captious in his judgments. It is a sort of tobbogan-slide; but I assure you it is far more comfortable and far more interesting to roll off as soon as possible into the soft snow by the way, shake oneself together, and look on. My friend Strong does the same thing and we sympathize entirely on every subject except mind-stuff (which I insist on calling by another name) but he doesn’t get as much fun out of it as I do. He is far more charitable and hasn’t an enormous sense of humour. And I am a little afraid, when his villa at Fiesole is built (a part of it was washed down by the rain the other day) he will find the moral atmosphere of the place less satisfactory than the Tuscan air. He will be roped into the Anglo-American aesthetic ring, and the sparring ladies will make him dizzy. On Christmas he actually had to go to Lady Sybil Cutting’s fancydress party, dressed like a decadent Roman, with a ridiculous —fake ——— false beard, a hired tunic with tinsel embroideries glued on, ——— and pink stockings, and a ———— sroll scroll in his hand (the plans for his villa, I suppose). Margaret went as an ancient Egyptian. He was ill the next day in consequence. Isn’t there any chance that you should come to Paris some summer? Fred didn’t seem to be overwhelmed with patients in Nahant; you might let your house, and take an outing without any additional expense. If you ever can manage this, it would be such a pleasure for me to show you my Parisian haunts (none of them, I warn you, very extraordinary, or even in Montmartre). When I get back from Spain, which will be about the ——— first— middle of May, I expect to settle down in the avenue de l’Observatoire for a long stay—perhaps for ever! I feel now as if I had sufficiently ^ ^ explored the ground, and that my future wanderings will be merely trips.
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My best wishes for you all for the new year. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Nancy Saunders Toy (d. 1941) was married to Crawford Howell Toy (1836–1919), Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages at Harvard (1880–1909). 2 Boylston Adams Beal (1865–1944) was a member of Santayana’s Harvard class of 1886 and one of his closest friends during the 1890s. Beal was one of the “pure and intense Bostonians of the old school.” (Persons, 224)
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 1 January 1913 • Florence, Italy
(MS: Virginia)
Florence, Jan. 1, 1913. Dear Susie: It is a long time since I have written, or since I have had any news from you, except the silent witness of the photograph representing the bridal pair in all their glory. I ought to have thank ed you (or ^ ^ them) for it before. There has been no change as far as I am concerned, except that I have made the acquaintance of the new Mrs. Loeser, and that Margaret Strong is here with her father. I have been to lunch with several literary English people—all very constrained, and I have avoided a fancydress party at Lady Sybil Cutting’s, to which Strong was obliged to go dressed as an ancient Roman in pink stockings! Has Mercedes turned up, and has Josephine gone to Madrid yet? I am curious, to ———— here hear how this comes about, and what impression Josephine receives from things there. My plan now is to leave Florence on Saturday the 11th for Genoa, to stop there for two or three nights, and then go on to Monte Carlo (which I have never seen in the season) and to Nice, where I may stay some time if I find suitable quarters, and if the place lends itself to a certain amount of regular work, relieved but good walks and an amusing mise-en-scène.1 I choose Nice because it is the largest place in the Riveria, and I like towns better than the country. After this episode I mean to wend my way Spain-wards. Ellen has written me a Christmas letter full of intentional satisfaction with everything. I wish I were sure that, in the midst of such a perfect state of things, she was really at all happy. She says they mean to come to Europe next summer en famille, with a friend of young Josephine’s in addition.2 In that case I can see them all in Paris, and if Josephine (our sis-
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ter, I mean) wants to go back to America, I suppose she will join them on their return voyage. However, if she preferred to go in mid-summer with me, I am perfectly ready to accompany her; only I should come back at once. My finances are in a good condition, as I have lived these eleven months, since I left Boston, on $1500, saving $1000, on the basis of what I allow myself, which is $2500 a year. It is far from my purpose to save money, but I am not sorry to do so at first, as I am not quite settled, and when I am, there may be regular expenses—for an apartment—which I have not had to meet as yet. It is doubtful whether Strong will keep his apartment in Paris after his villa is finished, and it is doubtful whether, even if he keeps it, I should ever feel quite at home in it. My best wishes for the New Year to you and Celedonio and all the family. Your affte brother George [across] P.S. My cold has not recurred, but I have had, now and then, a twitch of rheumatism. The weather here is cheerless. 1
Setting. Josephine and George were the children of Robert and Ellen Sturgis.
2
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 10 January 1913 • Florence, Italy
(MS postcard: Sanchez) FIRENZE
UFFIZI E PALAZZO VECCHIO
Address: Grand Hôtel, Nice, France. Florence, Jan. 10, 1913. I am leaving today for Genoa, one day earlier than I expected. Strong went away yesterday, and I had finished saying good by to the others, so I am off.—Your letter and J.’s from Madrid reached me on the same day. I could easily arrange to meet her in Barcelona (if she doesn’t prefer better company) if she will let me know when she is to be there. I could go to Seville later. Memorias. [Unsigned ]
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To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 15 January 1913 • Monte Carlo, Monaco MONACO.
—
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
VUE SUR LA CONDAMINE ET MONTE- CARLO PRISE DU PALAIS DU PRINCE.
Monte Carlo. Jan 15, 1913 I have just taken a room here—lodgings not in a hotel—as I like Monaco very much better than Nice, a real little Italian port, and very cheerful. I move the day after tomorrow. Address: 4 Ave de la Costa Monte Carlo. The arrow in the photo points to my window, marked. [Unsigned ]
To Charles Augustus Strong 15 January 1913 [postmark] • Monte Carlo, Monaco (MS postcard: Rockefeller) MONACO.— VUE SUR LA CONDAMINE ET MONTE- CARLO PRISE DU PALAIS DU PRINCE.
4 Ave de la Costa, Monte Carlo. Jan. 15. I have just taken a room, lodgings not in a hotel, at the place marked in the photo,1 and the address is as above.—I find Nice rather nasty, but this place very attractive & the temperature perfect. [Unsigned ] 1
The front of the postcard is marked with an arrow pointing to a building window.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 16 January 1913 • Monte Carlo, Monaco
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
NICE.—ENTRÉE DU PORT, VUE PRISE DU CHÂTEAU.
4 Ave de la Costa, Monte Carlo, Monaco. Jan. 16, 1913. Such extraordinary things about Spain are in the papers that I am quite puzzled to understand what is up. Could you send me some papers (to the address above), preferably two or three numbers of the Lectura
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Dominical? I should be much obliged.—I am waiting to hear from goes going to Barcelona. Josephine when she is — ^ ^ [Unsigned ]
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 22 January 1913 • Monte Carlo, Monaco COTE D’AZUR 1505—MONACO—PALAIS DU
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
PRINCE
Jan. 22. 1913 Thank you for the four papers and your card which arrived this morning. There is less clearness and force in the Crónica of Máxims than usual, and I don’t yet understand just what has happened.—I am well & the weather splendid. [Unsigned ]
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 6 February 1913 • Monte Carlo, Monaco
(MS postcard: Sastre)
Feb. 6, 1913. 4 Ave de la Costa, Monte Carlo. I am sending you a very moral and “bien-pensant”1 French book, in which there is a good deal that is true and amusing, although it is no work of genius.—My life here has become very agreeable and regular, and I do a good deal of work. My idea now is to stay until Josephine goes to Barcelona, and to join her and Mercedes there. I may give up going to Andalucia this year.—The weather [across] here and my health couldn’t be better. [Unsigned ] 1
Right-minded.
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To John Galen Howard 10 February 1913 • Monte Carlo, Monaco
(MS postcard: Berkeley)
MONTÉ- CARLO.—EFFET DE MER.
Monaco, February 10, 1913 Thank you so much for “Grasmere”, which is truly “a fructual stirp of that high dedicant,” W. W.1—The wetness (which you ‘render so vividly) frightens me, however, who have fled to the Riviera from the fog and mire of Florence to try to out-stirp a catarrh.—Without question, you have the afflatus and the courage of poetry: it is remarkable in these days. And I [across] like your rhyme better than your blank verse! G.Santayana 1 Howard’s verses, Grasmere: Three Letters, were read at the University Meeting on 15 Sep 1911 and printed in the University of California Chronicle 14 (Oct 1912). On page 379, line 15 refers to William Wordsworth (1780–1850), once poet laureate, who is buried at Grasmere, England. Lines 19–21 read “… Ay! And fruitful toil / That nurtured, train’d and husbanded the plant, / The fructual stirps of that high-dedicant!”
To Charles Scribner’s Sons 20 February 1913 • Monte Carlo, Monaco ROBERT S. STURGIS
27
(TS: Princeton) TELEPHONE
5515
MAIN
STATE STREET
Boston, Feb. 20th, 1913. Messrs. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, N. Y. Dear Sirs:I have yours of the 19th inst. with check for $21.78 in payment of royalties on my books to Feb. 1st. As I am no longer in Cambridge, please note that my address is now c/o R. S. Sturgis, Atty., 27 State St., Boston. Yours truly, George Santayana by Robert S. Sturgis/Atty
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To Charles Augustus Strong 6 March 1913 • Monte Carlo, Monaco
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(MS postcard: Rockefeller)
MONTE- CARLO. L’ENTRÉE DU CASINO.
Monte Carlo, March 6, 1913 How have you been all this time?—As for me, I have had touches of my cough (not persistent) and have done a little work (not much). I am starting for Madrid on Monday; my address there is Serrano 7.—I hope you got my book. The shape and size were a surprise to me—not altogether agreeable.—Best regards to Margaret. G.S.
To Mary Williams Winslow 6 March 1913 • Monte Carlo, Monaco
(MS: Houghton) C
/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123 Pall Mall, London Monte Carlo, March 6, 1913 Dear Mrs. Winslow Before I give you any account of my rapid descent from Cambridge to Florence and from Florence to Monte Carlo, and the corresponding deterioration of my moral character, I must correct one or two false impressions that I seem to have conveyed in my last letter. One is about the number of Fred’s patients, which I suggested was not enormous, so that perhaps an escapade to Paris might not be impossible. You seem to have thought this a reflection on Fred’s success and—with a wife’s logic—therefore false. Of course, I meant it as an evidence of how complete his succe[torn page] espe[torn page] now be entirely cured of all its ailments. If he ran away for two or three months, that might give Disease a chance to raise its head again, making possible a fresh victory of Medicine on his return, and perpetual health ever after, more conscious and therefore (according to Professor Palmer and Dr Cabot1) more real than if its reign had not been interrupted. So that, even if my suggestion about the phenomenal paucity of patients was not true superficially, it might — sho have been true, and it ought to have been true, and therefore, according to Mr Bradley2 (vide “Appearance and Reality” passim) it “really” is true. If you don’t follow this argument, [torn page], who [torn page]
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Talking of Professor Palmer and Dr Cabot, how insufficient the latter’s eulogy of the former seems to a true lover of sweetness and half-light, like myself! I can only compare its insufficiency—now that my mind is filled only with such lewd images as the effete society of Monte Carlo can supply—to the insufficiency of the gauze covering the old bones of some tin^ ^ panny music-hall star. The gauze is too thin, and the old bones show through. Dr Cabot says that Professor Palmer was a great teacher: this is the gauze; and what you see through it is that he was a little mind, etc. etc. If I had thought I had any chance of being chosen to write a eulogy of Professor Palmer myself, I should have staid in America just to do it; but they would have thought I was out of sympathy with the subject, and Dr Cabot would have been still chosen instead of me. A great injustice! I am sure I could have dressed up the dear old purring thing3 to much greater advantage; no gauze, but solid homespun; a poke-bonnet made in Boxford, lace-mittens from Wellesley, ethical pantalets, and Hegelian goggles. Quite seriously, I should have shown what a valuable influence Professor Palmer had; I should have compared him to Browning4. Browning was a middle-class mid-nineteenth-century Englishman who had discovered Italy and Passion; and he electrified all English-speaking spinsters and unsatisfied wives with that, oh, too exciting revelation of Life! Of course, neither he nor his readers ever got beyond the mere wish and programme to be Intense, Instinctive, and Rash, and to have a full, fresh, endless life. They never got—how could they?—to experience of life that can discriminate, or to the fine passion that chastens and disentangles the mind. But such was not their rôle; at least they broke through the ice of middle-class snobbery and stale Puritanism. They got out, or half out, of the genteel tradition. Now Professor Palmer was the Browning of the Grind. The Grind is a poor pale student with cold hands and feet who thinks it Duty to get A’s and Paradise to be some day a professor. Happy man if he ever took Phil. 4.! Culture, almost Passion, opened before him as not-forbidden. Professor Palmer even joked sometimes; sometimes (oh strange, rapturous revelation, that such a thing should be wise and good!) he used a slang word. He seemed to have heard of everything—even of Vice and Unbelief—and not to be spotted. How amiable the World became, if one might only come someday to see it as he saw it! How full of mind, and reason, and helpfulness, and even of refined pleasures! Yes, how pleasant books became, and how pleasant even Duty! As Browning revealed the Renaissance to the forlorn female, so Professor Palmer revealed polite learning to the forlorn male. If his pupils had been well-
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bred and well-educated to begin with, his teachings would indeed have been superfluous and even ridiculous; but his pupils seldom or never had those advantages, and he became their godfather in the religion good thoughts, their wet-nurse in the great democratic orphanage of spiritual ^ ^ America!—I submit that my eulogy of Professor Palmer is much warmer and more sincere than Dr Cabot’s—and without any gauze. I am sending you some lectures of Jean Richepin’s delivered to young ladies—the audience being a sort of insurance against the author, who as you know began by being an indecent follower of Baudelaire5 and writing blasphemous poems and ultra-pessimistic stories; but now he is old and an academician, he gives violet-scented lectures to the jeunes filles of the Faubourg!6 I send you the volumes because I happen to have them, and because they are entertaining and inspired by the love of a certain idea of Greece—not the true one—but one which stands for something good of its kind, namely, the pleasures of an irresponsible, lyrical sensualism. Of course, you mustn’t trust one word—not one word—he says about politics or philosophy; but he is a good sort of low-class enthusiast for poetry and liberty. The trouble is, with these low-class anti-clerical enthusiasts, that they can never feel what poetry and liberty, when they are worth anything, get there value from; I mean hard experience of the real world and a long moral discipline. If you have these things, which the Greeks acquired in the period before that which Richepin admires, you may afterwards, and on that basis, have a substance for your poetry, and know what to do with your freedom. But disinherited people, like Richepin, can never write poetry that is not mere mouthing or do anything with their liberty except drink absinthe. I am off for Madrid next week, where I expect to be for a month or two before I return to Paris. Here I have been nursing my bronchitis—which is always knocking at the door—and resting from the too aesthetic and too antiquarian (and too “disinherited”) society of Florence—of the Florence I saw, of course, for there is doubtless another. I hope by this time you have my book.7 With love to Fred and [across] the young ones, Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Probably Richard Clark Cabot, who received a philosophy degree (1889) and an (1892) from Harvard. 2 Francis Herbert Bradley (1846–1924) was an English philosopher and fellow of Merton College, Oxford. He was influential in making English thinkers aware of German philosophy, especially that of Hegel. M.D.
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3 Santayana recalls in Persons (237) that a Harvard friend used to call Palmer “Purring pussy Palmer.” When he married his second wife (Alice Freeman), she was president of Wellesley College. 4 Robert Browning (1812–89) was an English poet noted for psychological insight into character and motivations, his abrupt but forceful colloquial English, and his perfection of the dramatic monologue in which the speaker reveals something of himself and sometimes reveals more than he realizes. 5 Jean Richepin (1849–1926) was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist who was director of the Académie française at the time of his death. Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) was a French Symbolist poet. 6 Young women of the suburbs. 7 Doctrine.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 12 March 1913 • Barcelona, Spain
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
BARCELONA—DETALLE DEL PUERTO BARCELONETA
Barcelona, March 12, 1913 On arriving here last night, I found a letter from J. saying she had been to see you and that Antonia1 had gone back with her to Madrid. I am surprised at so much activity, and I shall be glad to find Antonia, if she is still there when I arrive, which I expect will be on Saturday at 11 a.m.—My journey so far has been pleasant, and I am very well. I mean to go to Montserrat2 tomorrow for the day. Memorias. Jorge 1
Antonia Sastre. Monasterio de Montserrat is a cultural institution northwest of Barcelona.
2
To Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller 16 March 1913 • Madrid, Spain
(MS: Houghton)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co, London
Madrid, March 18/ 6, 1913. Dear Fuller Yesterday, when I arrived here, after many wanderings, I found your good letter of Feb. 21. Many congratulations — for on your final appointment, consecration, and holy marriage with old mother Harvard. I suppose, after a year or two of your permanent instructorship and
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preceptorship (whatever this may be) you will rise automatically, like the souls in the Paradiso,1 to higher and higher spheres till you are lost in the exceeding light of the absolute focus—by which I don’t mean the ^ ^ Presidency of the College, for I am speaking of spiritual things. It is a very nice prospect for you: responsibility will keep you seriously at work, and you will have enough leisure—with the occasional leaves of absence which you can ask for—to write judiciously (don’t write too much, like me)—and to travel, while at ’Tween Waters2 and at Cambridge, even in term-time, you will not lack pleasant occupations of varied sorts to refresh your mind and keep you human. Let me congratulate you very sincerely, and your mother also, to whom this must be a great satisfaction. It is a satisfaction to me as well, because I feel as if you and I were members of the same party, stood for more or less the same things, so that you will be taking my place, now that I have decamped,—and you will be doing under far more ^ ^ favourable conditions what I should like to have done. The times have improved, for one thing, and people, if not more enlightened positively than they were twenty years ago, are at least less hide-bound and parochial, and I sometimes think American goodwill may shortly be extended even to people with ideas! It will be a great pleasure if, in a few years, I come to visit you and find everything so much improved and humanized as I believe it will be. The material improvements will be interesting to see too—the subway, the Freshman college, the new Library, the new bridge, etc. etc. I will bring a set of ultra-sublime lectures to read to the ladies in the New Lecture Hall, at 4.30, and then you will waft me in your motor—for you will have a motor then—to ’Tween Waters, to imbibe a cocktail (with a dividend) and discuss the Epicurean3 gods—with imitations! and, so to speak, demonstrations in the life. I have been so lazy about writing that I don’t know how far back to go in my account of my doings—if doings that ——ey can be called. After my trip in Sicily I was in Rome, quite preternaturally happy, for six weeks: but as this happiness was earthly after all it could not be complete, and I had a bad attack of my bronchitis. The depression which this caused, and the urgent missives of Strong and the Berensons, who wanted me to go to Florence, finally got the better of an instinct which told me that Rome was the place in which to stay for the winter. I went to Florence, staid ten days at the Berenson’s, moved to the town, and saw a lot of people, from Strong and his daughter, to rather grand people at Lady Sybil Cutting’s, who holds a sort of little court at the Villa Medici in Fiesole, close to Strong’s new house. It was not satisfactory on the — hole whole: the climate of
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Florence at that season—December—is beastly, and the expatriated anemic aesthetes and the Jews surprised to find that success is not happiness made a moral atmosphere not wholesome to breathe: so I fled to the comparative innocence and moral simplicity of Monte Carlo. I took a small room flooded with sunshine and overlooking the toy port of Monaco, and I established a routine of life, going always for the same walks and to the same restaurants, which enabled me to rest thoroughly, and to do some little work. The gilded hall of the Casino did not swallow me up: I went there only once, on the first day of my sojourn in the place, and never returned, as I found it crowded and dingy, full of uninteresting middle-aged people, not even fascinatingly ugly or obviously gnawed by all the vices. They were for the most part fat greasy Germans, millionaire sausage-makers in appearance and in smell. I went sometimes to the theatre, and saw several amusing ultra-Parisian things, to make up for the Teutonic real life about me. Above all, I delighted in the climate and in the old town of Monaco, to which I walked up every day, and where I sometimes read or wrote in the gardens. The only friend I came upon in all that time was Slade, who was living just beyond Nice, with a lady variously described as his wife, his bonne, his mistress, his model, his cook, and his mother. She might be any of these, as far as appearances went, and several at once, most probably: at any rate, she was very amiable, and the pair seemed quite happy.—The advancing season, and the fact that my unmarried Sister was to be alone here in Madrid for the rest of this month (the friend4 with whom we stay having been called away to Vigo) made me finally quit the Riviera and return to Madrid: and this is the end of my story for the present. I expect to be back in Paris, with Strong, by the middle of May. He tells me he ^ ^ has finally got everything in his system clear and straight, and I have made some progress also in mine—I mean, in my next book the “Three Realms of Being”—so that our discussions promise to have a new aliment, which they much needed. [across] Excuse this blot,5 and this briefness; but I am hardly settled here yet, and have many letters to answer. Yours ever G.S. 1
Part III of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Fuller’s country home at Sherborn, outside Boston. [D. C.] 3 A Greek, Epicurus (341–270 B.C.) defined philosophy as the art of making life happy, with intellectual pleasure or serenity the only kinds of good. His teachings (Epicureanism) were later debased to the “eat, drink, and be merry” formula of life, which was in opposition to his belief. 4 Mercedes de la Escalera. 5 Ink blot. 2
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To Jessie Belle Rittenhouse 16 March 1913 • Madrid, Spain
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(MS: Rollins) C
/o Brown Shipley & Co, London. Madrid, March 16, 1913
Dear Miss Rittenhouse You do me a great honour in wishing to include three of my sonnets in your collection,1 and naturally I can have no objection to your doing so, nor, I suppose, can Messrs. Duffield & Co2 They have literally nothing to lose, even if the whole book of sonnets were pirated, and something possibly to gain by such a delicate form of advertising as your collection will supply to the becalmed publications that you may quote from in it. Yours very truly GSantayana 1 This was a new edition of Rittenhouse’s The Younger American Poets (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1913), which originally was published in 1904. 2 Duffield & Company of New York published Sonnets in 1906.
To Charles Scribner’s Sons 16 March 1913 • Madrid, Spain
(MS: Princeton)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123 Pall Mall, London.
Madrid, March 16, 1913 Messrs. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York Dear Sirs: It was by my suggestion that Messrs. Dent & Sons approached you on the subject of the American edition of “Winds of Doctrine”, and I am much gratified that you should have found it possible to undertake it. In many ways, and considering only my own feelings, I should have preferred to have offerred you this book in the first place—as well as my previous one on the “Three Philosophical Poets”—but in each case circumstances made it impossible, and I am very glad that now you can at least have charge of the new book in America.
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I see that the sale of “The Life of Reason”, though small, is continued, and I wonder if the first edition is not now nearly exhausted. There are many misprints and ugly phrases which I should like to correct, if ever a reprint were made: and I might even like to make some more substantial changes, if you thought a second revised edition more advisable, or not more objectionable, than a mere reprint with verbal emendations. If you could let me know your views on this point, at your convenience, I should be much obliged. My place of residence now-a-days is rather variable, but my permanent address is as above—C/o Brown Shipley & C–o London. Very truly yours GSantayana
To Horace Meyer Kallen 7 April 1913 • Madrid, Spain
(MS: American)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co, London.
Madrid, April 7, 1913. Dear Kallen My book, which I hope has reached you, may have made some amends for my negligence in writing. I have been, and still am, somewhat unsettled; but, apart from England, I have now looked over all the places over which, in the future, I can hope to range, and taken note of what they afford for my purposes. The chief trouble is that so many regions attract me, and are most charming just at the same season; but on the whole my impression is confirmed that Paris is the most suitable place for my headquarters. I shall be back there in May, and my wanderings after that are to be regarded merely as trips. Holt sent me a copy of the “New Realism”, which I read with great care and, I think, some profit. I am not yet quite sure that I understand the doctrine: is it intelligible? What I had written referring, somewhat casually, to this school in “Winds of Doctrine” seemed not to need correction, although I might have corrected it in proof after reading the “New Realism”. The failure to recognize the spiritual distinctness of psychic life, its hypostatic existence and moral essence, seems simply wanton—a deliberate oversight and evasion, convenient in dashing off a tight little system that shall seem to be scientific and seem not to be idealistic but which, ^ ^ in its groundless postulate of “monism”1 is idealistic and not scientific in
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fact. All the explanations I have been able to find of how the imagination— and all mental existence is imagination of some sort, “fancy” as Hobbes2 calls it—is accounted for by the new realism [illegible] consist merely in finding the physical basis of imagination in the outer world—the aerial pro^ ^ jection of the table seen in perspective, the cerebral or traditional remnant of the past, etc. But such a projection or such a remnant is one of a thousand others that lie in nature without ever reaching mental actuality; the addition of this, the kindling of consciousness, is a fresh fact which it is very unphilosophical to ignore now simply because the idealists and psy^ ^ chologizers have abused it by trying to make a universe out of its substance, when it has no substance. And this leads me to make a slight complaint against you for having said that I am an “epiphenomenalist”3—I don’t complain of your calling me a “pragmatist” because I know that it is mere piety on your part. But the title of epiphenomenalist is better deserved, and I have only this objection to it: that it is based (like the new realism) on idealistic prejudices and presuppositions. An epiphenomenon must have some other phenomenon under it: but what underly/ ies the mind, according to my view, is not a phenomenon but a substance—the body, or nature at large. To call this is a phenomenon is to presuppose another thing in itself, which is chimerical. Therefore I am no epiphenomenalist, but a naturalist pure and simple, recognizing a material world, not a phenomenon but a substance, and a mental life struck off from it in its operation, like a spark from the flint and steel, having no other substance than that material world, but having a distinct existence of its own (as it is emitted continually out of bodily life as music is emitted from an ^ ^ instrument) and having a very different kind of being, since it is immaterial and moral and cognitive. This mental life may be called a phenomenon if you like, either in the platonic sense of being an instance of an essence (in which sense every fact, even substance, is a phenomenon) or in the modern sense of being an observable effect of latent forces; but it cannot be called an epiphenomenon, unless you use the word phenomenon in the one sense for substance and in the other sense for consciousness. Since these terms are so equivocal I should rather not use them at all; but I am ^ ^ willing to be called a dualist and a materialist (though the things might be called incompatible, if by dualism were meant a dualism as to substance); in fact I am pleased to be called so, because I am sick of having these terms considered equivalent to a reductio ad absurdum,4 which they cease to be when someone is declared to maintain them as truths.
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Holt’s essay seemed to me more enlightening than the rest, detestable as is his manner and his language—a mixture of the slang of the laboratory with that of the gutter. But his theory of streamers (as Strong calls it) i.e. that objects include all their effects and effluences, seems to show clearly what the new realists mean when they say they can account realistically for mental life and also shows how completely, in fact, they fail to do so. ^ ^ Have you read Benda’s capital book on Bergson? It releived me of all qualms about my essay, which I feared might seem too severe. When I read now some newspaper accounts of his visit to America (I have heard nothing of the substance of his lectures there) I begin to fear on the contrary that I have taken him too seriously. But the best way of discrediting a charlatan is perhaps not to call him one: witness the failure of Schopenhauer against Fichte5 and Hegel, with his “Wissenschaffts leere” m and his “Windbeuteleien”,6 and the success of Mill against Sir W– 7 Hamilton, with his ponderous tome. What you say about yourself at Madison is intelligible, but I think you overrate the superiority of the spirit you might find in other places. The whole world is very Western now, and clerical, industrial, or political preoccupations are dominant everywhere. One must tread the wine-press alone. I hope you will be patient and successful, and that the admirable civic qualities and incalculable future of those Western communities will appeal warmly to your imagination and make you accept the limitations of the times and the persons that you have fallen among. I like Wisconsin so much that I want you to like it. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 Monism, as opposed to dualism, is the metaphysical view that there is only one kind of substance or ultimate reality. 2 Thomas Hobbes (1588–1670) was an English philosopher who set forth a mechanistic, rationalistic materialism. His Leviathan (1651) made him the first of the great English political theorists. 3 Epiphenomenalism is the doctrine that consciousness or mental processes accompany and are determined by brain processes but cannot influence them. 4 This phrase literally means “reduced to absurdity.” In a philosophical context, it is a method of argument that rests on initial premises or assumptions that lead to an absurd conclusion. 5 Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), a German philosopher and political thinker, was an important influence in the development of German Romanticism. His philosophy was focused on the ethical. He wrote Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (Foundation of the complete theory of knowledge, 1794). He held that the essence of the universe is mind and that it posits the material world through a process called productive imagination.
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6 This is a play on Wissenschaftslehre, which means “theory of knowledge.” The suffix leere means “emptiness” or “inanity.” Windbeuteleien are arguments of no substance. 7 An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865). Sir William Hamilton (1788–1856) was a Scottish philosopher who argued that perception gives immediate, direct knowledge of objects. Yet this knowledge is not absolute but relative on account of three factors: the knowledge is purely phenomenal, the objects which we perceive are modified by the various senses, and thinking of something is necessarily thinking of it under certain conditions. The objects of our knowledge are always conditioned and therefore relative.
To Charles Augustus Strong 21 April 1913 • Madrid, Spain
(MS: Rockefeller)
Serrano 7, Madrid April 21, 1913 Dear Strong Margaret, I suppose, is returning to Saint Felix’s at about this time, and possibly you too may be preparing an escapade to Florence or Switzerland or Aix. However, I hope to find you at home when I arrive, about May th , and that you will be willing to let me read over what you have writ15– ten since the publication of your articles.—I myself have been very lazy since I got here, only being able to copy some 50 pages of manuscript which I had written during the winter, and I hope, before I leave Madrid, to copy all the rest; but somehow I have no space, no large horizons or solitude, for original composition here. I am leading a family life, with five women in the house, and though that has many advantages, and is a grateful change in many ways from hotels and solitary lodgings, it is very bad for continuous thought. It is very pleasant to know that you were pleased with “Winds of Doctrine”, and especially that you liked the first paper. I feel rather inclined to read up the French nationalist and new-conservative writers— Maurras,1 etc—and to write something about them and the collapse of liberalism, in politics and philosophy. I am dissatisfied with the paragraph in my new book about patriotism—the subject was better treated in “The ^ ^ Life of Reason”—and should enjoy working out the other side of the question, namely, the need of specific, exclusive forms of life and of order among various groups of men. Living in Madrid, though not favourable to positive work, is very stimulating to the political imagination.
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If you have decided to keep the apartment in Paris, I should certainly be very glad to fit up the petit salon; I think it better to do that than to follow the other plan you propose, and take you r bedroom for a study. It ^^ would be less cheerful, opening the door between our bedrooms would leave no room in mine for the washstand, and especially the advantage of throwing open the two salons would be lost. Of course, when we were working we could close the doors, and each bear could growl in his particular den; but in our more social moments the apartment could be made very much more attractive by the space and the variety which the two rooms seen together c/ would afford. If you care, by any chance, to read “The New Realism” now, you will find it among the books which I have directed to myself at the apartment.— The weather here is now delightful and I am very well. Yours ever G.Santayana 1 Editor of the Action française, Charles Maurras (1868–1952) was a French political writer and critic. He propounded his nationalistic and monarchial views in his book, Enquête sur la monarchie, translated as “Inquiry into Monarchy” (1909; definitive ed., Paris: Nouvelle librarie nationale, 1924). In 1938 he was elected to the French Academy. An active collaborator with the Germans, Maurras was sentenced in 1945 to life imprisonment.
To Scofield Thayer 22 April 1913 • Madrid, Spain
(MS: Beinecke)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co London. Madrid, April 22, 1913
r
1
Dear M Thayer It is an extraordinary tribute the Harvard Monthly has paid me in devoting a whole number to my new book,2 and it touches me deeply. It is a further satisfaction to find, on reading the several papers, that I have furnished the occasion rather than the subject of most of what you have written. There is a reassuring independence of view in most of them and a trick of wandering into personal by-paths and reminiscences of other reading which, if not altogether admirable in itself, at least saves me ^ ^ some blushes and the reader many yawns. What is most gratifying to me is to see that I have so many friends among the young wits at Harvard, that they read and talk over my books, and that some of them remember their
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old teacher with affection. Of all the essays, I find that yours on Shelley3 comes nearest to the spirit and intent of what I had myself written on the subject; but it is of no importance that you should reproduce or even criticize my views at close quarters: it is more than enough that you find in me a starting-point and stimulus for your own thinking and writing. This is a service which very modest authors or teachers can sometimes do, when they happen to come opportunely into contact with younger spirits or to strike a chord to which the times respond. When the truth and absolute value of one’s views are so doubtful as they naturally are in the case of a philosopher, it is a solid comfort to find proof that at least one’s wind of doctrine — is blows perceptibly and not unpleasantly in the world. Some people will doubtless tell you that this wind is too perfumed, and others that it is too sharp and blighting; but though it ill becomes me to say so, I am inwardly convinced that you will find it healthy. You may, and probably one or another of you will, disagree with each of my opinions; you may balk at “essence” (that most guileless of things!) or complain of the amateurishness of my technical philosophy. But meantime you will have found encouragement for what — is are the great virtues of young thinkers—sincerity and unworldliness. May you never lose them, or imagine that there is anything in the world for the sake of which they should be given up! It would give me great pleasure to see any of you who may come to Paris, where you will probably find me (especially during the [across] summer) at 9 Ave. de l’Observatoire. All good wishes to the Harvard Monthly from its grateful parent, GSantayana 1 Scofield Thayer (1889–1982) was an American writer and editor educated at Harvard and Magdalen College, Oxford University. In 1919 Thayer became editor of The Dial. He also was co-owner of the magazine and director of the Dial Publishing Company. Santayana had known Thayer in Oxford during World War I. 2 The Harvard Monthly devoted its entire April 1913 issue (56) to Doctrine. 3 “Shelley: Or the Poetic Value of Revolutionary Principles,” 62–65.
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To Charles Augustus Strong 14 May 1913 • Ávila, Spain
(MS: Rockefeller)
Avila, May 14, 1913 Dear Strong In order not to start at an inconvenient hour (in Spain people insist on seeing one off at the station) and not to travel at night, I have decided to take the slow trains and stop at Burgos and San Sebastian, as I did last year. In this way I sha’n’t be able to reach Paris before Monday, and I am telegraphing you to that effect. You needn’t expect me before 10 p.m. on that day, although if I can combine the trains so as to arrive earlier in the evening, I will. Everything here is normal and pleasant, and I am enjoying finding both my sisters together, and both happy. I feel more and more confident that my sister Josephine (the unmarried one) will remain in Spain and not return to America, except possibly on a visit. I am glad of this for her sake, as life is far simpler and easier for her here, and also for my own, as it will tend to centralize the attractions which members of one’s family always exercise, and to enable us to see each other more often. Talking of my family, my brother and his whole family are to be in Paris again this Summer, so that, for a week or so in July, I shall be distracted from our normal and philosophic existence. My book (The “Three Realms”) is making satisfactory progress. I am anxious to discuss several points in it with you, and also to hear what your Au revoir new inventum mirabile1 is. Yours ever G.S. 1
Remarkable discovery or invention.
1910–1920
To Mary Potter Bush 21 May 1913 • Paris, France
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(MS: Columbia)
9 Ave de l’Observatoire, Paris May 21, 1913 Dear Mrs. Bush It is very pleasant to hear from you at such a comparatively short distance, and I hope I may be in Paris when you come. It is my friend Mr Strong who has built a villa at Fiesole which I suppose may be dignified with the name of “home” when he has once settled down in it. As for me, I don’t expect to be there except for a short visit now and then. Florence, though it may shock you to hear it, doesn’t please me particularly, the climate is bad and there are too many fugitive aesthetes and Jewish antichità1 people for me there. Being a man rather without a country myself, I like places that have a distinct national flavour, and people who are simple and honest. I have just been for two months in Madrid, and I was very happy, though not very comfortable in that my native town. Next winter I am thinking of going to Seville for a long stay, to see how I like it. This apartment, however, will remain my headquarters for the present. The plan of going back to Harvard in the autumn has been given up, and I am no longer a professor at all! I hope your cure will be all that is promised, and that I may soon have the pleasure of seeing you and Mr Bush. At this moment I am at work on a review of Plotinus-Fuller for his journal.2 Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Antique. “Dr. Fuller, Plotinus, and the Nature of Evil,” Philosophy 10 (1913): 589–99 is a review of The Problem of Evil in Plotinus (Cambridge: University Press, 1912). 2
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To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 3 June 1913 • Paris, France PARIS
(MS postcard: Sanchez) (6
E
ARRT)
LE PALAIS DU LUXEMBOURG
Paris, June 3, 1913 All the letters and papers have arrived safely. Thank you very much for sending them.—Today Strong has left me and gone for a week to Florence to see his villa. The project of furnishing the study for me here is in suspense, as I see that my taste (and purse) don’t agree very well with Strong’s. I shall get on as I am for the present.—Love to all from Jorge
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 3 July 1913 [postmark] • Brussels, Belgium BRUXELLES.
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
HÒTEL DE VILLE
Brussels. July 3. I have just arrived here to spend three days with Westenholz1 (el baroncito).—We were much alarmed by exaggerated reports of the fire at Avila, and I should like to know all about it. Perhaps you could send me a paper. Love to all from Jorge 1 Santayana said Albert W. von Westenholz was “one of my truest friends. Personal affection and intellectual sympathies were better balanced and fused between him and me than between me and any other person.” (Persons, 261–65) Santayana met the German aristocrat at Harvard, where Westenholz was a student, in the early 1900s.
To Charles Augustus Strong 15 July 1913 • Paris, France
(MS: Rockefeller) 9 Av. de l’Observatoire July 15, 1913
Dear Strong This morning I went to the boulevard de Bercy and after some goings and comings and irritating two different officials, I arranged that the cases shall be called for on Thursday morning; but they refused to send more
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than one man or to come upstairs for the cases, and Françoise has undertaken to find the two needful drudges in the quartier to take the boxes down in time for the emissary of the P.L.M.1 to pick them up from the trottoir2—the only task not beneath his dignity. They also intructed me to give the papers—which I have filled up as well as I could, signing your name (with my initials below)—to this same emissary. I have specified that the customs examination shall be at Florence, and I have set down the value of the whole at 5000 francs, after calculating that there must be at least 2000 books. It has occurred to me that they might require the keys to the two trunks at the custom-house; I daresay you have thought of this and arranged it. The rent was paid this morning, and the receipt is in your desk. I gave Françoise her wages, and she promises to have the books ready tomorrow, when I will pay up whatever may be still due. By the way the emballeur3 charged 27 francs for his labours, which seems a trifle high. Torrents of rain drowned the national feast4 yesterday and it has rained at intervals today also. If it is dry when I go out presently (I am without an umbrella) I will go to the boulevard Raspail and see the candlesticks in question; but I don’t think I shall have the courage to get them unless their beauty quite carries me away, because you might not like them after all, and you should be free to get anything you may see that pleases you in England or America, and if you should put the thing off until you are in Florence you might not ultimately regret it. However, if I see any irresistable candlesticks, I should not hesitate to get them, and if you didn’t want them at Le Balze they could serve to adorn this apartment. Onderdonk is passing through Paris next week, so that my work (on which I have started nobly) may be somewhat interrupted. Best regards to Margaret. Yours ever G.S. 1
Paris à Lyon et à la Méditerranée. There was a P.L.M. railway. Sidewalk. 3 Packer. 4 Bastille Day. 2
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To Arthur Davison Ficke 18 July 1913 • Paris, France
(MS: Beinecke)
Address: C/o Brown Shipley & Co London 9 Av. de l’Observatoire, Paris July 18, 1913 Dear Ficke Your “Twelve Japanese Painters”1 and your article on “Winds of Doctrine” reached me long ago and both, in very different ways, gave me a great deal of pleasure. Perhaps you did yourself a little violence to praise or at least to condone everything in my book. It would have been right to blame anything that really seemed to you unreasonable; I am not sure that I shouldn’t have been even better pleased if you had blamed something, for then I should have felt that in most matters you had made observations and judgments similar to mine, and been confirmed in them myself by that. The warmth of your tone is very exhilarating—like liquor—but the ardours of bout-drinking friendship, even in philosophy, are short-lived. I am grateful to you for your evident wish that other people should appreciate me and see something good in what Wm James once called my “diabolisms”; but what does it matter what other people think? If we care too much about persuading them we may disturb their peaceful conventions to no good purpose, since they will never get anything straight, while we blunt the edge of truth in our own words. Your Japanese book has done something for me that I have long been praying for—given me a hint of how Japanese painting should be understood. I have asked several other people—Denman Ross,2 Berenson—to guide me in a matter very foreign and mysterious to me, and they have never said anything human and philosophical enough for me to understand it. They have merely said: this line is good, this design is beautiful, and left it at that. In your poems I find at last the first ray of light. It is the glimpse of life at some instant, of some ungrounded bird-note of life caught as it vibrates, we ask not why or in what a world; it is some shimmer of passion expressed economically, keenly, with wonderful dexterity, and without any comment; and it is (perhaps this is your personal addition to what the Oriental felt) a responding sentimental passion or moral comment inspired in ourselves. Tints, lines, attitudes, stuffs all have a certain hypnotic power, a sensuous magic that enthrals us if we gaze at them
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intently. This I have always known, and it is the fault of our Renaissance, (from the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, and even today among the academic and conventional artists) not to have felt this sensuous quality enough, to have had no natural idolatry, but to have been interested in a pompous completeness and discursive literary reports— Zolas on canvas.3 What you teach me is that the Japanese are not merely sensuous but lyric, that it is the charm, mood, unrecoverable secret of some “witching hour” that they sing to us; and that as they feel this function to be sufficient for the painter, they are led naturally to that wonderful simplification and wonderful proficiency which they exhibit. Is this at all right, or like what you feel? As English poems I also like your pieces; here and there, perhaps, you want to say things too elaborately [across] (unlike your Japs) and slip into prose; but often your touch is exquisite, like theirs. I keep your little book at hand, and swear by it. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 Twelve Japanese Painters (Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour Co. The Alderbrink Press, 1913). 2 Denman Waldo Ross (1853–1935) was an artist and educator who graduated from Harvard (A.B. in history, 1875; Ph.D., 1880). Shifting his field to art, he taught at Harvard after 1899 in architecture and in fine arts. Ross’s 1909 portrait of Santayana hangs in Emerson Hall at Harvard. 3 Émile Zola (1840–1902) was a French novelist and founder of the school of literary naturalism, a form of literary realism emphasizing the determinative force of heredity and environment on human existence.
To Charles Augustus Strong 25 July 1913 • Paris, France
(MS: Rockefeller)
9 Av. de l’Observatoire July 25 1913 Dear Strong I am sorry for you a whole week at the Russell, where I once looked in and fled in horror. Still, it probably has some conveniences, and I trust you will be in the mood for shopping, and find the things you need. Here, I have bought nothing. The candlesticks in the boulevard Raspail (which I have seen only in the window, but I am sure they were the ones) — is are perfectly harmless, and the two pairs would go well enough together on a
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table crowded with flowers, salt-cellars, wine-glasses, centre-pieces, and silver cornucopias spilling all the fruits of Covent Garden and all the sweets of Rumpelmayer’s; but as principal and solemn decoration I think they are not distinguished enough—they should be alike and a trifle ecclesiastical. Indeed, it occurs to me that four candles may not be enough for your dining room, unless you like the dim religious light for eating which you don’t like for thinking. We have been having wintry weather until yesterday and today, when something more seasonable has returned. My young friends Abreu and Onderdonk have turned up (separately) Abreu thin and languid after his residence in Cuba, and Onderdonk so fat that he can’t open his eyes. Slade has come too, but I was out, and I haven’t been yet to the Closerie des Lilas since you left, as I lunch at the Duval in the boulevard St. Michel and have coffee at one or other of the cafés opposite. For dinner I go half the time to Zucco’s and the other days to different odd places. I am very well, and have finished the Plotinus-Fuller paper, and when Onderdonk goes away next week I shall solemnly reopen the Three Realms of Being. The cases of books were spirited away at the appointed time and I should think they might be arriving by this time at Florence. I have heard nothing from the P.L.M. so I suppose the papers were filled out satisfactorily, and I have paid absolutely nothing. The charbonnier1 took the cases down alone, laid square on his b/ poor back, and Françoise gave him ten francs for his labour, with which she said he seemed très-content;2 she had two more francs ready in case he made a wry face, but she kept them, and her economical eye twinkled. I have moved the desk and sofa about, and I think the salon looks better than it ever did, spacious and summer-like [across] and comfortable enough.—My respects to your father and greetings also to Margaret. Yours ever G.S. [across page one] P.S. I have forwarded two or three letters to Cooks,3 and two this morning to the Hotel Russell. 1
Coal man. Very satisfied. 3 Thomas Cook & Son, the British agency. 2
1910–1920
To Charles Augustus Strong 8 August 1913 • Paris, France
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(MS: Rockefeller)
9 Av. de l’Observatoire Aug. 8, 1913. Dear Strong, I have decided, rather on Bergsonian than on rational grounds, to hasten my departure for England and am leaving the day after tomorrow, Sunday, for London and Oxford. The idea of walking through Mesopotamia1 and to Wood Eaton and to Bagley Wood2 has acquired irresistable attractions, while the dung-dust that fills the Paris air, although the weather is delightfully cool, seems unpleasantly stifling even to the only living materialist. My idea is to take lodgings in Oxford until the October term begins, and then to move to Cambridge—although it is conceivable that merely a visit to Cambridge should be sufficient. Write (C/o Brown Shipley & Co) when you are in London, and where, and I will go up to see you. My book has made some progress, but not so much as I had hoped. The material side of writing is rather fatiguing to me, and my thoughts have not been fixed exclusively and intensely enough on my work for it to become as exhilarating as it ought to be, and sometimes is. Onderdonk and his sister (who came from Vienna to join him) took up a good deal of time for a week, and then I seemed not to recover the abstracted mind very easily. I have bought an arm chair—blue and grey striped velour, walnut frame, warranted genuine Directoire3—which suits me very well for writing (although most people would find it too low). It doesn’t jar with the other furniture, I think, but it can always be relegated to the petit-salon if you think it de trop.4 Before I go I will pay up Françoise’s wages to Aug. 15. We have got on very nicely together, as we did last year, and I have been very comfortable. I have had tea here every day, but lunch and dinner out. She says she is going for ten days to visit a sister in the country. Yours ever G.S. 1 Mesopotamia is a region of Oxford named for the ancient territory (the “cradle of civilization”) in western Asia, around the lower Tigris and the lower Euphrates rivers, now in Iraq. 2 Bertrand Russell’s home in Oxford.
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3 Directoire style, in French interior decoration and costume, was the manner prevailing about the time of the Directory (1795–99). A style transitional between Louis XVI and the Empire, it is characterized by a departure from the sumptuousness of the aristocratic regime. Furniture was more massive, and fabrics were chintzes and printed cottons as opposed to rich fabrics. 4 Too much.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 11 August 1913 • London, England
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
LONDON BY NIGHT. BIG BEN
&
S MARGARETS CHURCH FROM WESTMINSTER ABBEY. T
London, Aug. 11. 1913 I had a good crossing yesterday and fine cool weather today when I have been all day shopping. On Wednesday I expect to go to Oxford and settle down. I will send you my address when I have taken rooms there. Jorge
To Harriet Ann Boyd Hawes [August 1913?] • Oxford, England
(MS: Smith) 16 Turl Street Monday
Dear Mrs Hawes1 I was so surprised by your present of this morning, and so dazed by the Greek hieroglyphics on the card, that you were flown by the time I got my wits together enough to go and thank you. It was very kind of you to remember me and to remind me so pleasantly of yourself and of Athens. As they tell me you are not gone very far,—(I was in your quasi-hotel this afternoon, looking for a childless lodging-house, where I needn’t have beef twice a day)—I hope I may still have a chance to thank you again in person. Yours very truly GSantayana 1
Harriet Ann Boyd Hawes (1871–1945) was an archeologist (Smith College, 1892; 1910) who was the first woman to have been responsible for the direction of an archeological excavation and the publication of its findings. Mrs. Hawes worked in Crete in 1901, 1903, and 1904.
L.H.D,
1910–1920
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 14 August 1913 • Oxford, England
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(MS postcard: Sanchez)
T.
DINING HALL, S JOHNS COLLEGE, OXFORD.
Aug. 14, 1913. 66 High Street Oxford I have taken rooms here and expect to stay for three weeks or more. After a day or two Oxford will be very nice, but for the moment it is rather crowded with University Extentionists—but their term is over. Love from Jorge
To Charles Augustus Strong Monday [September] 191[3] • London, England LONDON
&
NORTH WESTERN RAILWAY.
(MS: Rockefeller) 1
EUSTON HOTEL, LONDON, N.W.
9. p.m. Monday, 191
Dear Strong: I understand your ship is late and that you are not to arrive until 11 or 12 o’clock. I am very sorry as tomorrow I have to go back to Oxford on account of my nephew who is here and to whom I have promised to show the place—tomorrow being his only free day. If you should be here longer telegraph to 66 High St. Oxford and I will come up for the day to see you and Margaret. Otherwise I am afraid it must be au revoir in Paris in the Spring—it seems a very long time. Let me know how you find Venice and the Villa. Yours ever GSantayana 1 Letter was written on London & North Western Railway stationery. Listed beneath the logo are the names of the hotels that were under the company’s management.
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To Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller 12 September 1913 • Oxford, England
(MS: Houghton)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co London 66 High Street, Oxford Sept. 12. 1913.
Dear Fuller Thank you very much for you letter, which puts me au courant1 of your affairs. I was on the point of writing to warn you that I too have written a review—or an article under cover of a review—of your book. It is not so flattering as I should have made it if I had not been afraid of seeming to indulge in “mutual admiration”. However, I don’t correct your Greek, which seems to me perfect, and what I object to is really a sort of complementary after-image of Royce’s “optimism” which I find in your treatment of Plotinus and of the question of evil generally. Of course, you will write something more about this period some day, and then things will surely take on a more imaginative and historical aspect. I had written a great deal more—about matter and so forth—but cut it out, as the article was already too long. Since I came here a month ago I have been very industrious. The three realms of being have increased to four, and the work of composition and revision has advanced greatly. At intervals I have also worked at the Posthumous Dialogues,2 which are a source of infinite amusement to me, as I hope they may be of edification to others when I am no longer in need of amusement. I expect to go to Cambridge during the October term, and later to Spain for the winter. I wonder if you would be an angel and take out of what was my desk in the Committee Room at Emerson Hall two large note books and some loose lecture notes (Phil. B) and send them to me to Paris, 9 Av. de l’Observatoire? I don’t want the type written [across] notes in Phil. 12 which are in boxes, but only the pencil notes and the Phil 12 and Phil 10 note books. There is no hurry about this—the later the better. Yours ever G.S. 1
Up to date. These became Dialogues in Limbo (1925).
2
1910–1920
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 27 September 1913 • Oxford, England
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(MS: Virginia) Oxford, September 27, 1913
Dear Susie My last news of you is from Josephine’s letter of a fortnight ago or more, in which she said she had given up the idea of returning to America with Robert this year. Since then I have seen Robert and his family in London, for one day, and the next George1 came with me to Oxford, and stayed until the next morning. It was the first opportunity I had ever had of seeing him despacio.2 Of course, like all old people I did most of the talking and exhibited my own life and history in a way which was certainly news to him, although he may not have found it very interesting; but it is as well he should have some idea of his uncle, in case he hears me mentioned sometimes or is questioned about me. On my part I got a pleasant impression of his disposition. Of course one feels in every word and motion that he has not been bred at all, but simply allowed to grow up; and he is very ignorant (being a graduate of Harvard!) so much so that he can’t take in what he sees or hears in a country with a history. But all that isn’t his fault, but due to a slack environment and a complete want of training. What seems personal to him is that he is very young for his age. I should have thought him a Freshman rather than a Graduate. He wants to get married, apparently, and I am not sure that such a thing would suppress any great possibilities in him. But I am afraid the tendency to being common would be accentuated. However, looked at philosophically commonness is no misfortune: the great majority must and ought to be common. I don’t imagine he will ever be fit to take charge of property, as his father has done so ably. If the necessity should come we should have to look for professional brokers to look after our money. Howard Sturgis has been very ill and has had operations (four of them) performed on his lower intestine; he is nearly well, and has gone to a watering-place for a change. I haven’t yet seen him, but hope to before long. Since I came here I have been writing a lot; the weather of late has been rather oppressively warm, but though I am less energetic in my walks in consequence, my mind seems to work on just as well. In some ten days I expect to move, going to London, Windsor, and then to Cambridge, perhaps for a long stay. Love to all from your affectionate brother George
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1 George Sturgis (1891–1944) became an investments counselor and followed in his father’s footsteps as a very able business manager for the family. He married Rosamond Thomas Bennett in 1921. 2 At leisure.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 1 October 1913 • Oxford, England
(MS: Virginia)
Oxford, October 1, 1913. Dear Susie Your letter of the 27th which reached me yesterday evening, seems not to be a reply to mine, which I suppose arrived just after you sent off yours. I am very sorry to hear that your feet are worse; how do you manage about going twice a day upstairs? Or have you brought the dining-room down? I hope at least you do not find your impediment more painful. Robert told me what had given him un disgusto1 in regard to George: I think I am not at liberty to repeat it, especially not in writing, but it was nothing morally wrong nor offensive to Robert personally or to any body else: it was a misadventure, involving the loss of some money (which George will pay out of his own funds) and only regrettable because it showed a certain weakness or “greenness” in the boy. It is the sort of mishap that almost every young man might go through when he first started out to see the world—do not think it had anything to do with women, it was not that—and which goes to make up “experience”. Only, as I said in my letter, George is very young for his age, and it is really strange that he should have been so simple and careless as this incident showed he was. I too like him au fond;2 his temperament is engaging; but I dislike his breeding, his atmosphere, his accent, his clothes, and his ignorance. I don’t expect to stay in Paris when I leave England, but to go on directly to Spain, and of course my first stop will be with you. I hope you haven’t driven out any of the boys in order to give me a room upstairs. I shall miss the old quarters, and for the time I shall be with you it was hardly worth while to make the change. However I am grateful for your kind intention; if I had my cough (of which there is no sign) I daresay a sunny room would help me to keep it from becoming worse. As to the time of my return, I have no definite idea—perhaps in December, or earlier, if my visit to Cambridge does not turn out as I hope. Here I have been
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working very steadily; my book, however, hasn’t got all the benefit of it, as I have been writing other stuff—some half-poetical dialogues that I have long had in mind and one of which was actually written and published long ago in a review.3 When this spurt of inspiration is over, however, I shall go back to the solid work, and I count on being stimulated especially by talking with Bertie Russell in Cambridge. I saw him at his brother’s, but we didn’t have more than one or two opportunities for quiet discussion. He is a logician and mathematician, strong where I am weakest, so that it is not always easy for us to understand each other on these abstruse points. However, we feel sympathy even in our diversity, and that is why I am anxious to put my view on some subjects (not on all) before him and to learn his more accurately. However, in the end every philosopher has to walk alone. Oxford is beginning to take on its normal aspect, and I almost regret the idea of leaving as I like the place much better than its sister and rival, Cambridge; but I suppose the lodgings I have will soon be let, and I shall have to quit. My visit at the Russells was pleasant enough. I hardly talked with him4 at all. He no longer tells me his private affairs—the expansiveness and receptiveness of youth are naturally lost in both of us. But his funny wife5 is all confidences, and we talk by the hour about her incorrigible husband and her own (very crude) novels and plays. She is a good sort and a great fool in one, but I have grown to like her. There were other people there— a schoolmaster, and a non-conformist popular preacher and his wife, and some Irish actresses! Very mixed, as the saying is; but poor Lady Russell has [across] to put up with what she can get, as she has a triple past.6 Love to all. Your affectionate brother Jorge [across page two ] Don’t let Josephine read this: she might refer to it to Robert or Ellen.7 1
Displeasure. At bottom. 3 “The Two Idealisms: A Dialogue in Limbo,” The International Quarterly 6 (1902): 13–28. 4 John Francis Stanley, second earl Russell. 5 Countess “Mollie” (Marion Cooke Cumbermould) was Russell’s second wife (Mrs. Sommerville when he married her). Santayana describes her in Persons, 476–81, as “a fat, florid, coarse Irishwoman of forty [in 1895], with black curls, friendly manners and emotional opinions.” Their 1900 Nevada marriage was legal according to American but not English law, and Russell spent three months in jail as a bigamist. They legally 2
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married in England in October 1901. After fifteen years of marriage, he and Mollie divorced. 6 Mollie had been married twice before marrying Russell. 7 This sentence was written in the margin beside the second paragraph.
To Charles Augustus Strong 9 October 1913 • London, England
TE
R 610 L:
EG
(MS: Rockefeller) Oct. 9, 1913.
T. EN
7,
BENNETT STREET, S JAMES’ STREET, S.W. T
Dear Strong Your letter reaches me the very day that I have left Oxford. However, I didn’t see anybody there who give have given me much information about the women’s colleges, except old Higgs.1 I did ask him once about them, and he took me to see both Somerville and Lady Margaret’s.2 The latter is decidedly the more attractive place—like a large country place—but he said it was clerical and High Church, whereas Somerville is neutral in such matters. Lady Margaret’s looks like a pleasant retreat, and I should think friends might have a happy time there; but I agree with you, though without anything more definite than a vague feeling to go on, that Newnham3 is the more serious institution. I will ask any other people I may see and report their opinions if they seem to be of any importance. I go on Saturday to Windsor,4 I don’t know for how long, but perhaps for a week or more. Then I mean to settle down in Cambridge for a long stay. Bertrand Russell, in two long talks we had at his brother’s, gave me some new light on his own position, but it is too complicated for a letter, and I am not sure I yet understand it fully. In Cambridge we shall be able to reach clearness, I hope, if not agreement. I have been working very hard, but a large part of my energies have been deflected to the Dialogues5 in Limbo, of which five are now complete. The Four Realms —I [ have added a fourth —or [ rather second) realm, Truth]— have also got on materially and I am in hopes of finishing the book this winter. I am delighted that the villa and the servants are satisfactory. If the climate of Seville should prove bad I might possibly sail from G.’b to Genoa and drop on you in the Spring, but it is hardly probable. [across] Yours ever G.S.
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1 Arthur Hibble Higgs (1850–1915) was a private tutor in modern history at Oxford who “lived to observe.” His great service to Santayana was showing him all the walks about Oxford. See Persons, 487–89. 2 Somerville (1879) and Lady Margaret’s Hall (1878) are women’s colleges at Oxford University. Lady Margaret was the mother of Henry VII. 3 Newnham (1873) is a women’s college at Cambridge University in England. 4 To visit Howard Sturgis. 5 Dialogues was published by Scribner’s and Constable in 1925.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 24 October 1913 • Tintern, England
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
TINTERN ANBBEY. INTERIOR LOOKING E. INLAND P OSTA O NLY — — —GE — —
Tintern, Monmouthshire. Oct. 24. ’13. I came here today in Russell’s auto—150 miles in 6 hours from London—in very nice weather and I go back to Cambridge on Monday. Love to all from Jorge
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 28 October 1913 [postmark] • Cambridge, England
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
CAMBRIDGE, KING’S COLLEGE, THE BRIDGE.
[companion card unlocated ] but there is no “cathedral”, only King’s College Chapel, of which I send you an inside view in the other card. This represents the lawns behind. It is in this college that I spent the year 1896–7.—We were very lucky in our trip to Tintern, having good weather. Love to all from Jorge
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To Charles Augustus Strong 28 October 1913 • Cambridge, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 45 Chesterton R’d, Cambridge October 28, 1913
Dear Strong: I have made enquiries of every one who I thought might know anything about colleges for women; they all favour Newnham, as was perhaps to be expected in Cambridge. It seems that at Newnham there is a keener and m / freer intellectual atmosphere than at the other girls’ colleges; it is more closely identified with the university and more scholarly—more mannish and radicat/l, too, I suspect. Lady Margaret seems to be a place from which the young ladies issue quite as nice as if they had never been to college. If you want Margaret to be truly learned and academic that seems not to be the right place: but I can well understand that it should be preferred just for the reasons for which Russell and the others here condemn or despise it. If it is merely a question of spending three or four years in a pleasant harmless and cultivated atmosphere, I imagine Lady Margaret might be ideal. But then, why go to college at all, while one might be drinking in sweetness and light—and more sun light—at Fiesole? My trip to Tintern was blessed with good weather for two days; on the third it rained persistently, but we were already on our way back. My first week in Cambridge has produced just nil in the way of work; but I am settling down today and hope to accomplish something during the rest of my stay here, which may extend until the end of November, when I am thinking of going to Avila, stopping for a few days in Paris. I suppose Françoise is at the apartment and able to take me in. Let me — here hear more of your first impressions of the villa and of your new home life. Yours ever G.S.
1910–1920
To Charles Augustus Strong 2 November 1913 • Cambridge, England 45 Chesterton Road Cambridge.
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(MS: Rockefeller)
Nov. 2. ’13 Dear Strong In anticipation of your long letter about -ciousness I feel inclined to devote this Sabbath morn to answering it beforehand. By way of preface let me say that I am in a very sentimental hazy amber-coloured state of mind (if there are “states of mind”) due to the wonderful golden autumn weather we are having here, and to a general poignant consciousness (or -ciousness) of youth and age, antiquity and futurity, borne in upon me by everything I see and dream about in this encyclopedic place. Don’t be annoyed, then, if I am more lyrical than logical. I have actually written a sonnet, which I should send you as an excuse if it were not so bad. The word consciousness does not seem to me ambiguous. It means what Descartes1 called pensée, the fact that somebody is awake and having experiences that, as they differ from death, deep sleep, and psychic non-existence, constitute self-existing and indubitable facts, and have moral importance. Where there is consciousness there is a shade and beginning of happiness or unhappiness; and there is also a shade or beginning of cognition. In cognition, however, I do distinguish two strains or poles, which you may call -sciousness and perception; the first being mere intuition of any quality or essence, mere feeling, and the second implying a substan tia tion of that ideal object into a material or dynamic object, sit^ ^ uated in the environment, to be reckoned with in action, and to be treated as collateral and existing on the same plane as the body of the observer— this body being, of course, the first and most constant (though for an animal endowed with locomotion not always the most conspicuous or distinct) object of perception. A phrase in your letter makes me suspect that all this may seem to you perverse; for you say: “I wonder if you … mean that in being ‘scious’ … of other things we are ‘conscious’ of an essence which is an attribute of our minds.” This is full of divergences from my meaning. If to be “scious” is less than to be conscious of an essence, i.e. is simpler and more primitive, and yet is more, i.e. is a relation not to a disembodied ideal quality or essence but to a body, an influence, or a danger in the natural world, then I should say that your “sciousness” was not a psychic thing at all, ^ ^
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but evidently only the response of one part of matter to another affecting it. This is what the New Realists seem to mean by perception, and I admit that it is the material basis of perception; but it is removed toto caelo2 from perception itself, and is not only not consciousness (as you admit) but not even a part or element of consciousness, as you imply. Consciousness is not a thing with parts, but with objects, not a thing with elements, but with grounds. The grounds and the objects may be as complex as you like: the consciousness is a fluid and intensive spiritual act, a cognitive and moral energy, and the relations of bodies in space may — be elicit or entertain it, but can never be its constituents. Apart from this, however, it is a total misunderstanding of my position to suggest that an “essence” “is an attribute of our minds” when we perceive some external thing. Of course our mind then as always must have an essence; its essence will be that it is spiritual, cognitive, synthetic, imponderable, inefficacious, etc. But apparently what you suppose is that the qualities intuited by the mind when the body reacts on some stimulus, are regarded by me as qualities of the mind, which would then be often green, warm, dangerous, noisy, stinking, and whirling, like a motor. Essences—the immediate data of consciousness—are either just essences, ideal objects, or they are attributed to the environing powers, by the sense of which animal consciousness is always oppressed. As I have admitted to you many times, this sense of an oppressive environment is very early, doubtless primordial, in animals (though perhaps not in vegetables nor in angels) so that an animal will very likely never intuite a pure essence or a merely ideal quality; he will always tend to regard it as the quality of some thing with other, less obvious, qualities too. That is all I can see in what you seem to think so miraculous, namely, cognition of anything but the immediate. Of course, you may say that apprehension or fear of the unknown is itself an immediate feeling; yes, all feeling is immediate feeling, since it is the immediate object of consciousness that we call by that name; but apprehension or fear of the unknown is not cognition of the immediate but of the occult; and that is what I am willing to admit is the original condition of animal consciousness. It is essentially alarm; and then the clearer data which it may distinguish are attributed to the alarming demon as its proper qualities. This alarming demon — is has of course an essence, but since its essence is precisely to operate upon drowsy animals and compel them to wake up, it is what we call a thing.
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I will ask Russell your question, and report his reply. In some talks I have had with him I have gathered that his elementary terms are not my essences, but only such of them as are simple, his realm of essence containing no such lovely things as stained glass windows or college blazers. It contains only atomic sense data or logical terms; and compounds are manufactured by attaching various collections of these Anaxagorean3 atoms to “pegs” (that is his own word) or atomic existences, subjects, or souls. Of these monads he professes utter ignorance; only they supply the necessary existential and adhesive substance on which the flying predicates are stuck, so long as they do stick. I hope to learn something more about these views shortly: they seem rather fantastic and very inadequate. In fact Russell on further acquaintance seems to me like a very keen thin rapier, almost a wire, that transfixes every thing in every direction, leaving almost all of it untouched. Somerville College has just been enlarged: it looks not unlike Radcliffe.4 To my mind it would be no great harm if Margaret we not subjected to the most advanced of feminist influences, especially as she seems to prefer the eternal femine/ine to the merely modern; and Oxford has its advantages on other grounds also. However, I am just now under the spell of Cambridge, which I never felt so strongly before. Even the walks—the Grantchester Grind5 and the tow-path by the lower river—seem to me lovely, and there is a grandeur about the array of colleges here which Oxford cannot match. You say nothing about the villa or your health. I infer that both are satisfactory. Yours ever G.S. 1 René Descartes (Renatus Cartesius) (1596–1650) was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician often called the father of modern philosophy. He worked out the treatment of negative roots and a system of notation in algebra, originated Cartesian coordinates and curves, and founded analytic geometry. His methodology makes epistemology the starting point of philosophical inquiry, and his mind-body dualism is central to discussions in the philosophy of mind. 2 Entirely. 3 Believed to be the teacher of Socrates, Anaxagoras (c. 500–c. 428 B.C.) was a Greek philosopher of Clazomenae who is credited with having transferred the seat of philosophy to Athens. His contribution to philosophy was his postulation of an all-pervading mind. This caused the formation of the world and imposed order upon what was originally an infinite number of particles in an undifferentiated mass. These particles represented specific qualities, such as hair, water, flesh, and gold. Mind set the mass into motion, causing the infinitely small particles to combine, like with like, thus bringing into being the stuff of the perceptual world.
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4 The Harvard Annex, organized by an association for Private Collegiate Instruction for Women (CIW), was located at 15 Appian Way. It opened in 1879 with courses taught by Harvard professors in their spare time. In 1894 the CIW received a state charter as Radcliffe College (Harvard, 391–92). 5 The nickname for a path through the Cambridge Orchard Tea Garden that crosses the famous Grantchester Meadows.
To Charles Augustus Strong 3 November 1913 • Cambridge, England 45 Chesterton Road Cambridge —
(MS: Rockefeller)
Nov. 3, ’13.
Dear Strong: I have just seen Russell and read him the sentence in your letter referring to him and asking how, if sense-data are the only objects of knowledge we can ever know anything else. His answer is: 1–st We have an equally nd immediate apprehension of some psychic and logical realities. 2– We do ^ ^ not have acquaintance or certitude, in our knowledge of the external rd The “other things” we may be said to world, except about sense-data. 3– “know” (a most vague term) are inferred by virtue of causality, continuity, and other principles the value of which is problematical: Russell does not pretend to “know” anything at all in that field. If I may translate this answer, which I believe I agree with entirely, save for Russell’s excessive diffidence in physics, I should say: Essences alone are intuited so that error about them is impossible, since whatever quality the mind has before it is, in intuition, the only object we profess to know. But such pure and infallible intuition is an ultimate and practically unattainable clarification of the human mind. It would require the suspension of all practical reactions, interpretations, inferences, and presumptions; it would require a mind in no way confusing or overlapping its chosen object of attention. Therefore, in animal perception, we have faith or suspicion, fear of the unknown or vaguely apprehended, etc, rather than intuition of an essence we can clearly define and recognize. It is this animal faith that is the basis of our knowledge of things material and dynamic, as well as of divine or human minds and even of our own past and future in their independent subsistence. Such physical and psychological objects are credited and reputed to exist (inevitably in animal life) but they are not really “known” as essences are known, when immediately present; for discourse
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even about essences requires some animal faith, to enable us to identify past and present meanings. Vale. G.S.
To Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller 10 November 1913 • Cambridge, England
(MS: Houghton) 45 Chesterton Road Cambridge, Nov. 10, ’13
Dear Fuller This morning I have received the package of note-books, etc, which you were good enough to send me. As a thank-offering for your trouble I am despotching a book I have just read and found rather interesting “The — Nin Eighteen Nineties” by Holbrook Jackson. Perhaps, as you are so much younger, you will not be reminded of your own times, as I have been, by these reports, but it will do you no harm to be reminded of the preceding generation. I found the chapter on Francis Thompson particularly interesting.1 Since I settled down here I have not done so much work as I had been doing at Oxford, because I have had more distractions, seeing people and reading odds and ends, as well as making one or two escapades to London and beyond. Bertrand Russell, on the whole, is not a very trustworthy thinker; he has the fault common to the political radicals of being disproportionately annoyed at things only slightly wrong or weak in others, and of flaming up into quite temporary enthusiasms for one panacea after another. His theory of the natural world is Mill-ish2 and almost Humian;3 it is, in comparison with the reality of nature and even of experience, what the report of a battle might be in the mind of a telegraph wire through which a full /rdescription of it had been sent. There would be a perfectly adequate representation of everything in dots, dashes, and pauses, but no blood, no passions, no drama, no heroes, and no poor devils. On the other hand, Russell’s lectures on logic (one or two of which he has shown me) are very clear and enlightening. You will see what a delightful and witty creature he is personally; I hope Harvard and Boston will not weary and depress him. That is the danger. This place seems to me this year to have a new beauty. For one thing we have had a wonderful spell of golden autumn weather, with the most
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beautiful afternoons, like landscapes by Poussin,4 and the lower River,5 ^ ^ with the trial eights and the fours has been gay and amusing in the way you know very well. I walk sometimes with Dickinson (fuller than ever of Chinese sweet-reasonableness) or with Lapsley,6 in whose rooms I sometimes meet the flowering undergraduate of the period—very smiling, as they didn’t use to be, half stifled with little emphatic bursts of enthusiasm, and vaguely earnest about socialism, Ulster, land-reform, his next essay, or his next match. It is all a little flighty and girlish, and one has to let it blow past like a gust in a garden. I somehow feel more foreign in England than I did fifteen years ago or even ten years before that, when I was first here. It seems rather an unseizable life, without ideas or achievements clear and notable enough to appeal to the outsider. It is a chaos of half-measures and immediate aims; and even the philosophers are casual, personal, intense only in spots, and essentially heretical. All roads still lead to Rome7 and unless you place yourself there you will never be in the heart of the world or see it in the right perspective. To be a Protestant is to be cross-eyed. In America that doesn’t matter, because there is nothing to look at there, but here, where every thing has depth and is historical, it makes priggish limping scholars, and funny squeaking one-eyed philosophers. To make amends, I see there is really a little poetry being written in England; it is amiable, sincere, tender, manly. Read the collection “Georgian Poetry, 1911–1912” published by the “Poetry Bookshop”.8 [across] My best regards to the survivors of the Department. Yours ever GSantayana 1 Holbrook Jackson (1874–1948) was an English literary scholar and editor whose best-known work is The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (1913). Francis Thompson (1859–1907) was an English poet whose work shows the influence of Keats and Shelley and is akin to that of the metaphysical poets. A devout Roman Catholic, he presented ecstatic visions of heaven in his mystical poetry. 2 John Stuart Mill (1806–73) was an English philosopher and economist who formed the Unitarian Society. He was a member of Parliament who advocated women’s suffrage. System of Logic (1843) established his philosophical reputation. Utilitarianism (1863) expounds his alterations to Benthamism and includes his distinction between types of pleasure. Mill followed in the empiricist tradition but avoided the skepticism of Hume and theology of Berkeley by positing a theory about how knowledge of the external world is generated. This led him to conclude that matter is nothing more than a permanent possibility of sensation. 3 David Hume (1711–76) was an influential Scottish philosopher whose works include Treatise of Human Nature, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, and An Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding. An empiricist influenced by Newton, Hume wanted to apply the experiential method to the principles of human mind to develop
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a science of human nature. He thought only naturalism could avoid the skeptic’s argument and was an enemy of religion. 4 Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) was a French classical painter noted for his color, rhythm, and unity in his landscapes and other canvases. He painted commissioned works for both Louis XIII (“The Last Supper”) and for Cardinal Richelieu (“Triumph of Truth”). 5 The Cam. 6 Gaillard Thomas Lapsley (1871–1949), Harvard class of 1893 (Ph.D., 1897), was a Fellow of Trinity College. See Persons, 431–32. 7 In ancient Rome, roads radiated from the center of the city to all parts of the Empire. Figuratively, all intellectual efforts intersect at a common center. 8 Georgian Poetry, 1911–1912, ed. Sir Edward Howard Marsh (London, 1912).
To Horace Meyer Kallen 10 November 1913 • Cambridge, England
(MS: American)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, London
Cambridge. Nov. 10, ’13 Dear Kallen The moment has arrived at last for answering your good letter of I don’t know how long ago, in which you still expressed yourself in a bitter-sweet way about the U. of W. and things in general. I trust your {second third? ^ ^ year is proving more soothing and congenial, for that is what I think you need, although I can well imagine that your ideal is rather to be rejected by the things that be and carried on to some great rebellion and upheaval of everything. I should sympathize heartily with such revolutionary yearnings if it was only a question of destroying the snug and limping conventions under which we live. But I dread what might be substituted for them. One of the fatalities of my life has always been that the people with whom I agree frighten me, and I frighten those with whom I naturally sympathize. No: that isn’t it exactly, because I don’t sympathize with the old fogueys as they now are, nor with any stale convention; but I love the sentiment and impulse out of which these now stale conventions once arose, far better than the impulse and sentiment out of which springs the rebellion against them. Life, yes, but not this life. My eye has just fallen, by chance, on an article by the Infanta Eulalia of Spain about her childhood. It is full of hatred of Spain of Catholicism and of virtue, and slips into positive lies: it is a horrible expression of impiety, in every sense of that word.
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Well, the things the Infanta hates are, I agree, tyrannical conventions, and a straight-jacket for sanity—not to speak of the eroticism from which the lady evidently suffers. But imagine the treble horror of the tyrannical conventions which an inhuman impiety and low-mindedness, such as hers and that of her free-thinking circle is, would impose on mankind! I should rather have the Inquisition back again. I have also just finished a book, interesting to one of my generation, on the “Eighteen Nineties” by one Holbrook Jackson. It brings to a focus the rebellious, conceited, pessimistic aestheticism that was fashionable in my youth; I can see now that I was not unaffected by it, although the elements which these aesthetes added when, at the end, they were converted (most of them died Catholics) was always present in my background, and besides I was not clever enough to be nothing else. It is very interesting to compare with that spirit of the Eighteen Nineties — with that of the ’Teens of the new century. It is a very different spirit—the Infanta Eulalia, thank Heaven, is an old woman now— and in Paris especially one feels it in every wind. It is unintellectual, virtuous, — athe— leti— c, athletic, patriotic, cooperative; it accepts conventions with respect but without illusion, and it takes pains to find means to its ends, without giving to these ends a universal or exaggerated value. I like it. It is the spirit of an honest, modest, vigourous young artisan. Here my chief converst/ation is with Bertrand Russell. He has a theory of nature, or rather of the knowledge of nature, which is rather Mill-ish and almost Humean; it is artificial and accurate, and is related to the reality like a literal translation in Bohn’s library to the original Homer — of or 1 Aeschylus. But in logic I find him very clear and enlightening, and I hope to profit by his indications in my book.2 We are very far apart, however, farther than I had supposed, in outlook. He wants certainty, and the narrowest deepest possible foundations for thought; I want judicious opinions and a just balance in the imagination.—I am interrupted and will leave all else for another occasion. I am off for Spain in a few weeks. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 Henry George Bohn (1796–1884), publisher and bookseller, started a series (Standard Library, Classical Library, Antiquarian Library, etc.) which eventually numbered over six hundred volumes. Aeschylus (525–456 B.C.) was a Greek tragic dramatist, the author of Prometheus Bound. Seven of his ninety plays have survived. 2 Realms.
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To Charles Augustus Strong 18 November 1913 • Cambridge, England 45 Chesterton Road Cambridge.
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(MS: Rockefeller)
Nov. 18 1913 Dear Strong Your letter sounds as if you were not very well and as if little things about the Villa were annoying you. I hope this is a false impression, and that in any case you will not be made to suffer too much by Pinsent and Scott1 for being beautiful. I have discovered that Scott is a connection of mine. His brother is married to Mildred Minturn,2 one of my cousins by adoption. She was here not long ago to spend the day with Bertie Russell (she is above convention) and I was bidden to lunch. Then we took a walk together until they flew over a ditch full of sticky mud, and I turned back to pursue the artificial paths of civilization. The ditch was too broad for my short legs (Mrs. Scott is six feet tall) and her conversation a bit too high. It is a pure lie to say there are intellectual women; they are merely neuresthenic, and may talk the language of science in a trance: but they never understand anything. I hadn’t understood that Françoise was otherwise occupied, ———— other— wise or I shouldn’t have taken it for granted that the apartment was open ———— ^ ^ and ready. When did you think, or do you think now, that I meant to leave England? There seems to be some misunderstanding about that too. Actually, I expect to stay here until December 8th and then a few days in London and perhaps Windsor, getting to Paris about Dec. 15, and leaving two or three days later for Avila. This may coincide with Margaret’s passage through Paris on her way to you. The best plan, perhaps, will be this: let me go to the Voltaire, and simply leave my superflous luggage at the apartment, and get a book or two that I may want in Spain. I suppose Françoise still sleeps there, and if not I could get the key from her where she is at work. Please let me know how matters stand in this respect, for I don’t quite understand. Russell says there are some things that it is a fallacy even to mention! They can be only predicates. I understand numbers are among them. Poor [across] infallible arithmetic thus turns out to be guilty of original sin and to have committed a fallacy before it begins to speak. [across page one ] Perhaps
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the Pope is alone infallible after all. Russell is more English, atomistic, and nominalistic than I had supposed. Yours ever G.S. 1
Pinsent and Scott are unidentified. Unidentified.
2
To Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson 26 November 1913 • Cambridge, England
(MS: Columbia) 45 Chesterton Road Nov.26.1913.
Dear Dickinson It has been a great pleasure to read your reflections on America.1 I think you say very true and profound things about that land, and about the contemporary world. There is nothing, I think, that can justly give offence. No doubt Americans would take what you tell them more seriously if your tone was more jocular. What you say about advertisements—both the aspect and the psychology of it—could easily be made amusing; and it would then be a welcome criticism instead of a disagreeable and panic^ ^ stricken one. The reader in any case will smile, and it would improve your case if you could smile with him. It also occurs to me that a little redistribution of the parts might help to leave a stronger impression at the end. Of course there is and can be no art in America at present; and to speak of this at the end looks a little as if one’s attention had been drawn away from the living facts and forces in the case into private musings. There are also two small points on which I think you would seem to Americans not to have quite understood them. No one there is interested in the miracles in the Gospel. Of course, I know what you mean—the religion of James, Mrs. Eddy,2 etc.—but if you said that they ought to be interested in the miracles, wouldn’t you make your point even clearer, without asserting anything apparently contrary to fact? The element in the Gospel which Americans really care for is the teaching of “good-will” and “service”, with the necessary cheery self-abnegation and steadiness. It is what Matthew Arnold3 called the “method”, without the “secret”. The only thing to which they feel they ought to help others is material well-being; nevertheless there is a certain solemnity and tenderness in their sense that they ought to help, which is truly religious.—The other point is about
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Mollycoddles. The term, so far as I know, is purely Rooseveltian; you put into it a rather different and more positive element—genius, independence, spirituality.4 These elements are absent from the American meaning of the word, which on the other hand implies that a man is a coward and a “quitter” (perhaps a more usual slang synonym), so that your assertion that Voltaire is a Mollycoddle is not plausible. Shelley is one on his feminine side, but not because he was revolutionary; and Socrates is one only if you regard him merely as a fretful sophist. Professors (according to Roosevelt) are Mollycoddles, not because they are rebels but because they are not. Think of the American professor—mediocre, seedy, hungry, and henpecked—and you have the Mollycoddle in all his purity. I also think (though this would doubtless not occur to your American readers) that there is a parasitic “red-blood”, namely, the muscular Evangelical Christian of the school-master type. I shouldn’t wonder if some German “idealists” and Jewish historians of art were also parasitic red-bloods, because they defend or promote ideal interests by the methods and in the spirit of “hustlers”. Were not the Crusaders, when they took Constantinople, and some of the Popes, parasitic red-bloods too? Now that I am started upon my own hobbies, I can’t help adding that you ought not to be so dubious about the possibility of art and poetry in a peaceful world. The stress of war and suffering is not a needed element to stir the imagination or to give pungency to the representation of life. When life is turbulent, art has to make harmonies out of strife, but if life were placid, it would more easily make harmonies out of placidity. Think of all the distant poignant vistas, and all the profound renunciations, and all the exquisite charming fugitive moments that would fall to a soul living the life of reason in the midst of this world clearly understood. And think of all the amiable arts, both of the Greek and of the Dutch sort, that would be fostered by a well-ordered polity. No: the idea that horrors are required to give zest to life and interest to art is the idea of savages, men of no experience worth mentioning, and of merely servile, limited sensibilities. Don’t tolerate it. Thank you very much for sending me the letters, which I was sorry to have forgotten to ask for again at the last moment. ^ ^ Yours sincerely G Santayana 1
Unidentified.
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2 Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) was an American religious leader, editor, and author whose third husband was Asa Gilbert Eddy. The founder of the Christian Science Church, she was pastor of Mother Church in Boston. 3 Matthew Arnold (1822–88) was a Victorian English poet, writer, and educational reformer. 4 In 1895 Harvard students were involved in the pro- and anti-administration meetings as a result of the first war flurry in twenty years, with a notable exchange in the Crimson between Theodore Roosevelt and William James (Harvard, 412). Roosevelt served as President of the United States from 1901 to 1909.
To Charles Augustus Strong 28 November 1913 • Cambridge, England
(MS: Rockefeller)
45 Chesterton Road Cambridge, Nov. 28, 1913 Dear Strong Thank you for your letter (of the 24th) about the apartment. I am going to London on Dec. 8th and must stay until the 16th at least—so much is now settled. But it looks as if I might have rather an amusing time, and in that th case I might stay on until after the 19– . In any case, I shall have my letters send to the apartment and leave a part of my luggage there on my arrival, whenever it is. If I find that Margaret is expected, it will be no inconvenience to drive back to the Quai Voltaire, and then I could have a glimpse of her the next day, which would be very pleasant. However, if you will let me know (C/o B. S. & Co) whether it is really for the 19th that she will ^ ^ be in Paris, and there is no other reason why I should not profit by Françoise’s attentions, I will do so gladly for two nights either just before th or just after the 19– . I am sorry the effects of your industry during the Summer are still annoying you. You ought to sprawl and loll as they do here in long low wicker chairs, instead of meditating on a piano-stool in front of your typewriting machine. No wonder your tummy aches, and perhaps other parts of your anatomy. I have never in my life had such a delightful season as this in Cambridge in so far as the state of the soul is concerned. I am fermenting inside, and feeling drunk with the unutterable things. I don’t know whether it is softening of the brain or of the heart, but something is melting. The clouds, the river, the fields, the colleges intoxicate me—as if they were not an old old story: I want to write verses or to fall in love, but alas!
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I can’t manage either. What is the matter? Do you suppose that there could have been a sentimentalist frozen in me all these years by America and Professordom, which it has taken two years of sunshine and pleasant influences to begin to thaw out? I had moments like these at Rome, but now they are almost continual. I have neglected to answer your long philosophic letter, because to traverse all you say in detail would be too painful; at every step there are grating implications and an uncomfortable sense of misfit. We do not differ very much: why should we always revert to our divergences? You say at the very end that Russell should speak of “things as they appear” and not of “sense-data”. It may interest you to know that by “sense-data” he means just that, i.e. what I call objects of animal perception. He does not mean sensible qualities, but existences of that quality. He denies altogether (I have now discovered) essences of my sort; they are “things which it is a fallacy even to mention”, since — they predicates can be predicates only, ^ ^ never subjects. And they are all absolutely simple. Such “essences” as numbers do not exist (even in the realm of essence) but are mere qualities of things in couples, etc. This seems to be rather like what you maintain. I should be willing to say (if that will help to an understanding) that for animals (and I have discovered also that Bertie is rather a fierce little mathematical ferret, and not a contemplative mind, nice and delightfully witty and keen as he is) there is no intuition of pure essence, but always of supposed qualitative things, i.e. only animal perception. I feel more vividly than before that all of you—realists, panpsychists1 and idealists, and even Bertie the apostle of logistic—are interested only in physics; you are all blooming existence-hunters, and like the pre-Socratics,2 exclusively concerned with the material principle. It remains for me only, the sole “materialist”, to be something more as well. You will say this is arrogant or flippant, but I mean it absolutely. The sense of it is part of my new bouyancy. I think it is a real fact, and I want to make my book a proof and a monument of it.—I admit, then, that there is, in human experience, “logical coincidence” between intuition of an essence and perception of an alleged thing; essence comes in blows, not in visions. But alleged things, supposed existences directly intuited, may not exist in fact, as the mouse didn’t in the case of the “psychical” lady. These dreamt-of things (and perception is, I say, just a/ dream ing in itself) may not actually be those on ^ ^ which the bodily reaction ensues, they may be illusions. To show that some of them are not we need inference, argument, and above all art, mechanical practice. This faith in our intuition of nature, this chastened faith in per-
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ception, is science and common-sense; it is a rational form of thought and belief. It is not mere perception, or the animal sense (perhaps an illusion) that each particular essence intuited is a real thing. You must distinguish the sense of an existing object from the existence of an object such as is perceived. Otherwise your realism is sensualistic idealism under another name—as Bertie Russell’s system is. He hardly differs, in the end, from John Stuart Mill. I have been reading a beastly novel by Sudermann—Das hohe Lied3— which has Münsterberg’s sort of amplitude and competence, but is gross, heavy, vulgar, pedantic, and sentimental. It was [across] rather pleasant, however, to find oneself reading German again—charming, expressive, grotesque language! Yours ever G.S. 1 Panpsychism is the theory according to which all objects in the universe, not only human beings and animals but also plants and even objects usually classified as inanimate, have an inner or psychological being. 2 “Pre-Socratic” is a term that covers those Greek thinkers from approximately 600 to 400 B.C. who attempted to discover universal principles which would explain the whole of nature, from the origin and ultimate constituents of the universe to man’s place within it. 3 Hermann Sudermann (1857–1928) was a German dramatist and novelist whose works show the influence of Ibsen and Nietzsche. He exercised a searching social criticism, which caused him to be associated by critics with the movement of naturalism. His novel Das hohe Lied (1908; English translation, The Song of Songs, 1909), like his plays, deals with social questions.
To Charles Augustus Strong 19 December 1913 • London, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 3 Ryder Street St. James’s December 19, 1913
Dear Strong Thanks for your card. I am crossing to Paris tomorrow and have written to Françoise saying that if Margaret has already left when I arrive I will stay for three nights. I hope to reach Avila on Christmas Eve. London is very gay, but I shall not regret finding myself again in a quiet place like Avila, and may stay there several weeks if the cold does not drive me South.
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Address C/o Brown Shipley & Co. Best wishes to you and Margaret for Christmas and the new year— Yours ever G.S.
To Polly Winslow [Late 1913] • [Ávila, Spain]
(MS: Houghton)
[ … ] For to do great things with pea-green half-moons on a zebra skin, it is perhaps necessary not to know too much as yet about that dreadful thing which grown-up people call the world. The world is a very imperious, absorbing, jealous master: and the Kingdom of Post-Impressionist art is not of this world. Dear me, Polly, I have written you a very long letter;1 but as you have now reached a literary age, you won’t mind how long it takes you to read it. The worst of it is I haven’t said any of the things that I meant to say, such as to thank you for writing, and to thank your Mamma for the photos, and say the one of little Fred with you standing behind is the one that reminds me most of him in his crib, when he looked so much like the little Child in a crib which we see every where (at least in this Christian country) on Christmas Day. The others of him, and all yours, don’t seem to me good enough to be memories, and of course they are not very important as absolute forms in absolute colours which is the only “art” Mr. Roger Frye2 now allows me to like. I am very very cold in this southern climate, and am going farther south still (very illogically) to see if that will mend matters. I am going to a romantic thriftless old city called Seville, to see if (having past fifty) I can still write poetry and fall in love. You don’t think that is very likely, I know, and can almost see you laughing at me. The fact is I don’t think it very likely myself; but it is sometimes amusing to expose oneself to the dangers from which one is perfectly safe. If I find any Post Impressionist pictures in Seville I will send you one to see if you can be converted too. From your affectionate Spanish Uncle. 1
On this fragment, a note in a hand other than that of Santayana reads, “[To Polly Winslow—aged five years!! 1913].”
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2 Roger Fry (1866–1934) was a British painter, art historian, and critic associated with the Bloomsbury group. He was director of the Metropolitan Museum, New York (1905–10), but returned to London to edit the Burlington Magazine and organize a 1910 (and 1912) exhibition of post-Impressionism. He founded the Omega Workshops, producing objects of modern design. His paintings are less important than his lectures and his books.
To Miguel de Unamuno 28 December 1913 • Ávila, Spain
(MS: Salamanca) Avila, 28 de Diciembre, 19131
r
2
S Don Miguel de Unamuno
Muy Señor mio: Acaba de llegar á mis manos el tomo de su obra “El sentimiento trágico de la vida” que ha tenido V. la amabilidad de dedicarme. Estimo en lo que vale este obsequio inesperado, y me apresuro á darle las mas expresivas gracias. Basta con ojear el primer capitun/ lo para cerciorarse de que brilla en esta obra cómo siempre su conocido ingenio, y anticipo el mas exquisito gusto en saborearla, admirando detenidamente, los variados horizontes que descubre y la espontaneadad de pensamiento que la distingue. Hace dos años que dejé la Cátedra que ocupaba en América para renovar, despues de largo intérvalo, los Wanderjahre estudiantiles. Siendo español y encontrandome en este momento en ciudad tan puramente castellana cómo Avila, no he querido escribir á V. sinó en la lengua materna, aunque sea con la torpeza propria de quien se sirve habitualmente de otro idioma. Me es muy grata esta ocasión de enviarle un saludo respetuoso y de profesarme su atento y seguro servidor q.b.s.m3 Jorge Ruiz de Santayana 1 Translation: Dear Sir: I have just received a copy of your work “The Tragic Sense of Life” which you have had the kindness to dedicate to me. I know the worth of this unexpected gift, and I hasten to express my most sincere thanks. It is enough to glance through the first chapter to realize that as always your well-known talent shines in this work and I look forward to the greatest pleasure when I savor it, admiring at length the varied horizons it opens and the spontaneity of thought that distinguishes it. Two years have passed since I left the professorship that I had in America, to renew, after a long interval, my student years of travel. Being Spanish and finding myself at this time in a city so purely Castillian as Ávila, I have not wanted to write to you except
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in the mother-tongue, even though it be with the clumsiness of a person who usually uses another language. I take great pleasure in this opportunity to send you a respectful greeting as your faithful servant who kisses your hand 2 The distinguished Spanish poet, novelist, playwright, and critic Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1864–1936) was educated at the University of Madrid and was professor of Greek at the University of Salamanca. Del sentimiento trágico de la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos, his best-known work, was published in Madrid in 1913. 3 Que besa su mano.
To Charles Augustus Strong 6 January 1914 • Seville, Spain
(MS: Rockefeller)
Hotel “La Peninsular”, Seville, Jan. 6, 1914 Dear Strong Reeves has sent me the enclosed clippings1 (among others) which amused me and I hope may amuse you. I continue here in a beatific state, and working steadily, though not many hours a day, as there is too much to amuse me in the town. Yours ever G.S. 1 The clippings about Henri Bergson are headed, “Quelques mots sur … —Ce que j’ai entendu a la conference Bergson,” “On écoute aux fenêtres le cours de M. Bergson” [photos], “A cote du reportage—Un essai de ‘chahut’ au College de France,” “Le cours de M. Bergson,” “M. Bergson parle presque en plein air,” “Lecture by New ‘Immortal’,” “Le philosophe incompris,” “En attendant M. Bergson on chahute M. Leroy-Beaulieu—Et M. Bergson punit les perturbateurs,” and “A propos de Bergson.”
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 20 January 1914 • Seville, Spain
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
SEVILLA—TORRE DEL ORO Y CATEDRAL , VISTAS DESDE TRIANA
Hotel la Peninsular Sevilla. Jan. 20, 1914. You may safely send anything here that may come for me, as I sha’n’t move for the present. My room is very satisfactory, and I can put up with
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the food. The weather has been as bad as possible, nevertheless, my cough is better, and I am working well. Jorge
To Oliver Wendell Holmes 21 January 1914 • Seville, Spain
(MS: Houghton) C
/o Brown Shipley & Co London
Seville, Jan. 21, 1914. Dear Mr. Holmes1 I need hardly say that it is a great satisfaction to me to have your letter and to see that my book pleased you enough to make you write it. I think there is a sort of background of agreement among all men, especially those of the same generation, although publicists often obscure rather than represent it, being taken up with party controversies or special causes. I am not a great philosopher, but in my separation from the world of action, and now even from the academic world (for I have retired from teaching) I feel that I can distinguish the normal and inevitable lines of human opinion from the modish flourishes that overlay it. This is my solid standingground outside and around special systems, of which you speak with an insight which goes to my heart. In “Winds of Doctrine” this fund of human orthodoxy is assumed rather than formulated: but I am trying to give it a more explicit expression in a book on which I am now at work. I daresay you, and most judicious people, would have much to quarrel with and to correct in this systematization of common sense which I am attempting: but after all my training has been that of a technical philosopher, and I feel I owe it to my Fachgenossen2 to put my conclusions into their language, and not retain the unfair advantage of seeming reasonable by not admitting clearly the implications of my suave opinions. I am now a wanderer, almost without impedimenta of any sort, and fortune may take me any day to Washington or to Boston, where it would be a great pleasure to see you again. My centre is supposed to be in Paris, at No 9, avenue de l’Observatoire, where the few books are that I have not wished to part with. I am there regularly in the Spring and early summer— in case by any chance you should find yourself there.
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It was really very kind of you to write and to give me the encouragement of so much sympathy from so welcome a quarter. Yours sincerely G.Santayana 1
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841–1935), Harvard class of 1861, was appointed to the United States Supreme Court by President Theodore Roosevelt. He served there from 1902 until his death. He was a true liberal and greatly influenced many of the foremost lawyers and jurists. 2 Professional colleagues.
To Charles Augustus Strong 21 January 1914 • Seville, Spain
(MS: Rockefeller)
Seville, Jan. 21, 1914. Dear Strong Thank you for your new letter. I hope Val-Mont will suit you as well as ever, and that any effects of last summer’s strain and this winter’s cold will wholly disappear. It is hard to say everything at once, especially in letters. I heartily agree with you (as against Russell’s new position) that the object of “sense-perception” (meaning more than consciousness or intuition of any thing) is a vaguely defined real object, recognized practically and emotionally, and reached logically, as you say, by the intention of the mind—by what old philosophers called the intellect as distinguished from sense. Russell has relapsed into English Empiricism: the only point (besides the indepen^ dent existence of the subject) he seems to adhere to against them is the ^ connection of sense-data with a mind; for I understand that the new construction out of sense-data is not a subjective construction in Hume’s or Mill’s-fashion out of actual perceptions, but a mechanical or logical construction out of objective entities ——— or —qualities —————— ^such as those^ given in sense and defined exhaustively by their given qualities. This is a hopeless air-castle, and since I discovered that Russell is engaged in building it my interest in his philosophy has collapsed (prefiguring the collapse of the system itself). Of course, his critical and logical acumen remains matchless; but he has no judgment, no good sense, no familiar affection for the reality of nature. “The sense of ———— something ————— an oppressive environment” and the intellectual recognition of an operative object are of course mental expressions of
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the bodily response to the actual environment. They are therefore the beginning of that discovery of an environment which art and science proceed to. You seemed to me sometimes, like the Pragmatists, to recognize the physical response only, and to call it cognition; but if you admit the cognitive act of the mind as well, which expresses that response, I take back that accusation. What remains perhaps between us is my persuasion that “animal perception” is a complication or peculiarity of ————— active practi^ natural beginning minimal form of it: cal consciousness rather than the —— ————— — ——— —— ———— ^ ^ ^ and the aesthetic object or essence is known with a knowledge much less obnoxious to criticism. But I am mixing things up. [across] I expect to stay in Seville for a long time, if I continue to work as at present. Yours ever G.S.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 28 January 1914 • Seville, Spain
(MS: Virginia) La Peninsular—Sevilla Jan. 28, 1914.
Dear Susie By this time I feel quite settled and happy here. My cough has disappeared with the cold and rainy weather, and I have come to find the hotel quite tolerable. The food is good enough if one makes a judicious selection of dishes, and I rather like monotony in food, e.g. I have an omelette and fried fish and a bit of guisado1 or rice and two or three oranges for lunch every day, and no wine It seems to agree with me; and if I went to a better hotel I fear I should find many worse things—tourists, for instance. This is a small place, with some old German women and business men living permanently and a very moderate tide of Spanish people coming and going. Not a single English or American person yet! Then my room is quite delightful, with so much sun that I already have to close the blinds not to be dazzled. I am in the principal,2 looking out on the main square, and almost in it, as I hear and see everything that is going on. I get up and have my chocolate at 9, and dress at 12. After lunch I go to a café—always the same one, and the same table, if possible, where the waiters are now my friends and bring me the illustrated papers—and then, with a note-book in my pocket, in case of inspiration, I start on my walk, through the Delicias3 into the country. On the way I watch the steamers loading and unloading, and if it is warm I sit in the gardens for a while. Tea I take on
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my return to the city, this at quite a different and more fashionable coffeehouse, where there are ladies and foreigners. Then I usually come to my room again, and read or write until dinner, which I have about 7.30. There is a good electric light over my table, by which I am writing now. In the evening, I return to my first café, in the Sierpes, overhear and sometimes join in conversation with some of the habitués, and then go to the theatre. I have seen a lot of things, good, bad, and indifferent, with and without local colour; but half the amusement is in seeing the people. I affect the dias de moda4—tonight it will be at the cine in the teatro de San Fernando, the largest and best in Seville. In this way I see the beauty and fashion of the place, better than in their carriages and autos in the Delicias. Seville is a true and homogeneous capital city, like ancient towns, with its aristocracy just as native as its lower classes. I find it very simpático. Tomorrow we shall have the novelty of the arrival of the court. I suppose they will drive by my window in the morning—there is hardly another possible route—and I shall have other opportunities of seeing them during their sojourn, which I understand is to be for less than a fortnight. As you see, I dawdle and amuse myself a good deal, but at the same time I manage to work every day for two or three hours; and this is enough to keep my mind engaged and give me the resource of a settled occupation in the background, to which I can always return. I am in no hurry about my book,5 but if all goes on as it is going now, I might actually finish the first draught here. In Paris, later, I should still have much revising and curtailing to do: writing in so desultory a fashion, I repeat myself a great deal, and this has to be remedied afterwards. If I continue as well pleased as I am now, and the heat, flies, and mosquitoes don’t become intolerable—I have already killed three mosquitoes in my room, but there are arrangements for a mosquitoe netting over the bed—I may stay until after the Feria6 and bull-fights in April. I don’t expect to stop at all in Madrid, but to make straight for Avila and Paris. Love to Celedonio and the rest of the family from your affectionate brother Jorge 1
Stew. The main section of the hotel. 3 Public gardens. 4 Literally “fashion days.” 5 Realms. 6 Fair. 2
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To [Mary Williams Winslow] [February 1914] • [Seville, Spain]
(MS: Houghton)
[ … ] three theatres here with several pieces in one night: you take a ticket for each piece separately, which costs one franc, and lasts one hour. There is also a cine installed in the Opera House, which on the fashionable nights—Mondays and Thursdays—is crowded with very nice-looking people. The Sevillians are quite charming, in all ranks of life, and handsomer than other Spanish people—a singularly ugly race. To be sure, they would seem more beauteous if they were better washed; the idea of self-scrubbing has only just percolated into the upper strata of society. There is a magnificent shop with plate-glass windows full of bathroom things opposite the Cathedral:1 it attracts great admiration from the public returning from the Delicias; they stand in wondering family groups before it, as if it contained an exhibition of marbles for the drawing-room and the cemetery—indeed, it looks very much like that sort of thing. I too stop and marvel; on my right the Cathedral—the retreat of art and religion—on my left, the conquering advance of plumbing. Unless the heat drives me away, I mean to stay here until after the Fair and the bullfights in April, so that I shall have a chance of telling you more about my discoveries and inventions in Seville. When I first arrived I had a touch of my old enemy, the bronchial cough; but I manage to drive it off. It was fearfully cold in the house in Avila and Madrid, also here when I came; but now the sun has come out strong, and the dogs and the cabmen already seek the shade. Tell Polly I am too old to be worth loving a great deal, because I shall be dead by the time she is old enough to be engaged! Yours sincerely GSantayana2 1
This Gothic cathedral (1401–1519), one of the world’s largest, includes Giralda tower and Court of Oranges (parts of a former mosque) and contains the tomb of Columbus. 2 On this fragment a note in a hand other than that of Santayana reads, “[To M. W. Winslow. Feb 1914].”
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To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 3 February 1914 [postmark] • Seville, Spain
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(MS postcard: Sanchez)
SEVILLA—PLAZA DE SAN FERNANDO Y HÔTEL DE INGLATERRA
Sevilla, 3 de febrero.1 Acabo de recibir el kilométrico certificado, con sobre de tu letra. Muchas gracias. Sigo sin novedad. Muchos recuerdos á toda la familia, de Jorge 1
Translation: I have just received the lengthy certificate included with your letter. Things are the same here. Regards to all the family, from
To Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller 7 February 1914 • Seville, Spain
(MS: Houghton)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co, London Seville, February 7, 1914
Dear Fuller Your good letter, written the day after Christmas, has been stranded for three weeks at the first hotel I went to here, when I was with my sister. Yesterday I went to see if they had nothing for me, and I found five letters, yours among them, naturally to my great joy. They will persecute you, like all the Apostles of sweetness and light, and especially of liberty, that thing unknown to America; it was foretold of the Lord. I trust, however, that you will be victorious in the end and become one of the patriarchs of the orthodox church—I mean of the life of reason. I note with pleasure that you are to be in Paris in the Summer. You will find me there, and you will tell me, I hope, all about these physical and moral transformations which Harvard is undergoing. What I hear from time to time confirms me in the feeling that I quitted most opportunely. The wonder is that I endured and was endured so long. The only Harvard that in any measure held my affections and with which I could have almost identified myself was that of the “nineties” or rather, of 1890–1895; but the awful cloud of Eliot1 then overhung it, and made life impossible. Before and after that, Harvard was only an accident and a temporary necessity in my life; and especially since I became a professor I did nothing but save
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money so as to get out of it quam celerrime.2 It took a great many years, partly for other reasons, and I wrote a great many bad books in the interval; otherwise it seems a stretch of desert. However, I have still senses and life enough left to see, and perhaps to do, something; and I am perfectly happy. “Of course he is”, said an Italian scholar of peasant origin at the Berensons, when this confessed beatitude of mine was reported to him, “Of course, he has such a strong digestion!” As to the proposed course in Monsterberggery,3 Howard and Rand,4 with their perverted classical minds, must have misinterpreted the great idealist—that fountain of alles Reines.5 What our Self-Intoxicated colleague must have meant is what was crudely expressed by one of the wits of the class of 1891 (it had several) when he said that the three curses of Harvard College were Examinations, Masturbation, and Mud in the Yard. But let me not mention the foul disease without at once applying the spiritual remedy. Let nature and idealism come to their own. Let bar-maids reappear in the land. Let Jimmy’s become Jemima’s and Rammy’s become Ruth’s. Let the ban against youth and beauty in bedmakers be removed. Let the dangers of monasticism disappear from the Freshman Dormitories. Let the foul vision of negro waiters at Memorial Hall yield to an army of Gretchens, plump and blonde. And let a further “improvement”—SubFreshman Dormitories—be supplied for the foundlings. The life of the student at Harvard has not hitherto been complete. Russell knows America6 and goes there with his eyes open: I imagine he would be grateful to be left alone as much as possible. His philosophy seems to have taken a new turn—to construct the universe out of sensedata. If this be realism, it is marvellously like empirical idealism. It has the same minimizing and “nothing but” quality; it is a substitution of means /t for ends and of an analysis of knowledge for the object of it. Since I discovered this I have largely lost my interest in Russell as a thinker: but he is a very amusing person. There is a strange mixture in him, as in his brother, of great ability and great disability; prodigious capacity and brilliancy here—astonishing unconsciousness and want of perception there. They are like creatures of a species somewhat different from man. I spent a delightful autumn at Cambridge, staying on until the end of term. Besides Russell, I saw Lapsley often, and he was very friendly and sympathetic, lending me books, and asking me to feasts, both in Hall and in his rooms, where I saw some of the undergraduates of the period. The weather was extraordinary—a continual delight. I came to Spain for Christmas, when the cold set in; and very cold and uncomfortable it was
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(in the house) in Avila, and Madrid, and even here in Seville, when we first arrived. My sister and her friend left me after about a week, and I have ^ ^ established myself in a more modest hotel, where no tourists go, and where I can work very nicely in the morning, and sometimes for a while in the late afternoon. My book is getting on well: I have hopes of finishing the first draft here, and in that case I might have it ready for the press in the autumn. The rest of my day I spend in the most delightful saunterings and musings. I take a small note-book in my pocket, in case some pearl of thought needs to be strung as I walk the streets, or sit in the Delicias—truly delicious gardens, or even in the masculine atmosphere of the cafés. Spring has set in full, here, and everything is as human, simple, engaging, and warm as if one were living in antiquity. O blessed Meditarrean, where man is man! Yours ever G.S. 1 Charles William Eliot (1834–1926) began teaching at Harvard after his 1853 graduation. After study in Europe, he became chemistry professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1865. He was appointed president of Harvard in 1869. In 1909 at the end of his tenure, Harvard had become one of the great universities of the world. Characteristic of his curricular reform was advocacy of the elective system and abolition of a required curriculum. Santayana saw Eliot’s reform program as a movement away from traditional liberal education toward mere “preparation for professional life” and “service in the world of business.” (Persons, 396) 2 As fast as possible. 3 Hugo Münsterberg had been Santayana’s German colleague in the Harvard Philosophy Department. 4 Probably Albert Andrew Howard (d. 1925), Harvard class of 1882. In 1885 he received his Ph.D. in Philology from Harvard, where he later taught Latin. Benjamin Rand (1856–1934) received his A.B. from Harvard in 1879. He was a philosophy instructor there from 1897 to 1902; beginning in 1906 he served as librarian of the Philosophical Library. 5 Everything pure. 6 Bertrand Russell sailed from England on 7 Mar 1914 to teach at Harvard. He left Harvard 26 May 1914 and made a short lecture tour in the United States before returning to England.
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To Charles Augustus Strong 19 February 1914 • Seville, Spain
(MS: Rockefeller) Hotel “La Peninsular” Seville, Feb. 19, 1914.
Dear Strong— As you say the last clippings I sent you about Bergson amused you, here are some others1 I have just received from Reeves, which touch “the limit”. Fancy poor shivering Bergson a type for the “Vie Parisienne”! I don’t know whether you have ever read that journal: in other days I used to do so, and, especially in the longer articles, there — is — was often a certain subtlety and poetry mixed with the licentiousness, not altogether unworthy of Alfred de Musset, Byron,2 or Beaudelaire. I am glad of Margaret’s decision, as it will be satisfactory to you, and I don’t doubt to her also in the long run. I too wish I could be in Rome with you—not because I am not perfectly happy here, but because we might study Italian and clear up our last divergences together. Next year I hope to spend the winter in Italy—possibly with an excursion to Greece—and much of it, I trust, in your company. My book makes great progress, and it is not impossible I may finish it here—all but the revision. I live day and night with open windows and blinds half drawn—to keep out the excessive sunlight, and the violets and crocuses are already in bloom, and everything promises a Spring of an overpowering intensity. When it rains here, too, it is in a torrential fashion, as if Zeus3 were really venting his wrath. Yours ever G.S. 1
Not with letter. Alfred de Musset (1810–57) was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist. His early poetry probes introspectively into the ecstasies and despairs of love. His affair with George Sand [Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin Baronne Dudevant] ended disastrously; his subsequent life and work were darker. George Gordon Noel Byron, sixth baron Byron (1788–1824), was an English romantic poet. Handsome, athletic (despite a clubfoot), brilliant, and magnetic, Byron was himself the model for the ‘Byronic heroes’ of his verse narratives. He was Santayana’s first and lasting literary hero. Santayana relished Don Juan (1819–24), Byron’s epic satire, and many of Santayana’s early verses were written in imitation of Byron’s meter and manner. The detachment, humor, wit, and satiric character of Santayana’s mature style owes much to this early influence. 3 Zeus was king of the Greek gods and ruler of Olympus. He was the god of thunder, the weather, and the sky; his symbol is the thunderbolt. 2
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To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 22 February 1914 [postmark] • Seville, Spain SEVILLA
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(MS postcard: Sanchez)
FÁBRICA DE TABACOS
Hotel la Peninsular. Sevilla. Thursday Yesterday I got your letter inclosing a long one from Strong (who had run off to Paris with Margaret) and a letter from Robert, who has had a bad cold and says he will soon answer your various letters. From Josephine I also have a card, saying they have given up Gibraltar. It is as well. Jorge
To Horace Meyer Kallen 29 March 1914 • Seville, Spain
(MS: American) C
/o Brown Shipley & Co London Seville, March 29, 1914.
Dear Kallen They say it is the part of a bad correspondent to reply at once and not leave one with the easy conscience of w/ him who has written last; but your letter comes just when I have had my consciousness of things American revived by Holt’s book and a long article I have written about it,1 —and ——— which I suppose you will see before very long. Do I gather from your letter that you have lost your father? If so, that marks a solemn stage in your life, you become a senior, youth and the indefinite future of youth are over. Of course I know you have been independent, or rather burdened, for a long time; nevertheless these breaks in family existence seem to mark the stages in one’s own, and to be the black lines that cut the continuous spectrum of daily life into soberer and soberer colours. For the rest, I infer that your affairs are taking a normal course, and that you are remaining at Wisconsin for the present. By the way, I gladly accept the invitation to spend a month there which you convey to me, if the time may be left indefinite. I appreciate being asked, and it would be a real pleasure to see that vital circle again; only as yet I have nothing suitable to bring as a thank-offering. I have been working on my next book—the System—and in one sense, it is almost finished; there is more than enough MS. but it is not well ordered, consistent, nor
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all of one period. It will require much recasting, and prolonged troublesome revision. In fact, I think sometimes that I will let it lie (after it has come into a shape in which it could be printed) and publish chapters, perhaps, in the form of articles first, so as to make it, when it does appear, as mature and definitive as it can be made. In that case I should turn sooner to my next task (and here is where Wisconsin can come in) namely the “Essays on the History of Philosophy”.2 Some of these, written in the form of lectures, would be just the thing for an academic audience. Possibly, by the autumn of 15/ 915 I could have half a dozen of them ready and could undertake a lecture tour in lecture-loving America. I came to this attractive town of Seville in January, after a delightful term spent at Cambridge—where I found that Russell has relapsed into a most British state of intellect—nominalism, atomism, practically empirical idealism, with minima sensibilia3 for metaphysical elements.—Seville is like a provincial Rome, with three personalities in one carcase/s, one Moorish, one Spanish, and one modern. The people are very attractive, and the one park is a paradise; I lead a regular solitary life, working without any pressure four or five hours a day, and enjoying a sauntering, lazy existence for the rest of the time, among the most genial and least exacting of scenes and habits. I have made a few casual acquaintances—enough to exchange a few amenities with—and I read the newspapers to keep up with the times; but I find solitude the best company, especially where there are so many hints of beauty and nobleness about one. In May I expect to be in Paris again with Strong, then in England, and next winter in Italy once more, possibly with a trip to Greece, to see the victorious Hellenes pluming themselves with satisfaction.4 When your family cares are less pressing and the routine of academic life has become semi-conscious, I hope you will write something for us. ^ ^ Who, for instance, will undertake a study of James’s complete writings and opinions? If life were endless I should be tempted to attempt it myself, [across] but there are other things I like better, where selection is inevitable. Yours always GSantayana 1 “The Coming Philosophy,” Philosophy 11 (13 Aug 1914): 449–63; review of E. B. Holt, The Concept of Consciousness (London, 1914). 2 See 2 Aug 1912. 3 Fundamental sense data. 4 This may refer to the defeat of Turkey by the combined forces of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro in the first Balkan War of 1912–13.
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To Charles Augustus Strong 5 April 1914 • Seville, Spain
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(MS: Rockefeller)
Seville, April 5, 1914 Dear Strong Your letter came just when I was about to write to ask you when you expected to return to Paris, as I wanted to arrive at about the same time, so as not to prolong the very long time since we were last together. The fifteenth of May is a very convenient time for me to join you there. I expect to stay here until the end of this month, unless the heat and mosquitoes should drive me off sooner; and then I could spend a fortnight with my sisters in Avila, after which I could go straight to the Avenue de l’Observatoire. We may agree on the fifteenth of May, then, if nothing unexpected happens. If you must go to Aix you could do so just before— Aix is a hot place—or in June, if two consecutive month in Paris make you restless. You are very generous to wish to return to the absolute financial monarchy which you have practically always exercised at the apartment, and I am glad of it, as a sign that the villa hasn’t yet ruined you, and that the fall in American stocks has left you calm like a Stoic.1 It hasn’t affected me either in practice, and I am still saving money; but on paper it has swallowed up 12% of my capital, so that I feel poor, although I have just as much to spend as before.—We will talk this over when we meet. If you prefer to run the expenses of the house, I might perhaps use what I expected to contribute in getting the much discussed rugs that may be needed. Seville has proved an ideal refuge for me, and now that warm weather has come, it is even more luxuriously pleasant, but with Holy Week and the Fair upon us (today is Palm Sunday) I must say farewell to work for ^ ^ the present. My book is not finished, though well in sight of completion; b/ and I have written a long review of Holt’s book—so long that the passages I have had to cut out before sending it to Woodbridge2 will furnish material for one or two other articles. This of course has interrupted the Book; but I think it will prove good for it in sharpening my eyes to the very points which you have been so long intent upon. Have you read Samuel Butler?3 I see references to him here and there that seem to point to something good. Yours ever G.S.
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1 The Stoics were a group of pre-Socratic philosophers. Stoicism, practiced as a philosophy into the Roman era, sought to make the personal and political lives of people as orderly as nature. It was believed that this order could be achieved through the cultivation of virtue. 2 Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge (1867–1940) was a Canadian-born philosopher who, like his colleague John Dewey, was a professor at Columbia (1902–37). His influence is responsible for the revival in the United States of Aristotelian trends of thought. A self-described realist and naturalist, he argued that life and mind are products that develop in the natural world. Woodbridge cofounded (with Wendell T. Bush) the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods (later The Journal of Philosophy) in 1904. 3 Samuel Butler (1835–1902) was an English author. His novel, The Way of All Flesh, attacks Victorian family life.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 6 April 1914 • Seville, Spain
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
SEVILLA—ALCAZAR—PAVILLON DE CARLOS V.
La Peninsular Sevilla, — Ma April. 6, ’14. Today I receive a letter from Robert, of March 23, in which he says: “I am feeling much better … and I think when we get really Spring weather, I will (he means “shall”) feel as well as ever again”. Here it is full Summer, but not oppressive, and I am having a good time, in a new straw hat. [Unsigned ]
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 20 April 1914 • Seville, Spain SEVILLA—ALCAZAR.
(MS postcard: Sastre Martín) FACHADA PRINCIPAL
La Peninsular. Sevilla. April 20, 1914. La Feria here is the gayest sight I ever saw, although we are wearing winter clothes and carrying umbrellas, and there is some disappointment about the bull-fights—yet I have liked the three we have had so far very well. I am thinking of staying here at least till May 1–st . Memorias á toda la familia. Jorge.
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To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 25 April 1914 • Seville, Spain
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(MS postcard: Sanchez)
SEVILLA—CATEDRAL—PUERTA DE LA CAMPANILLA
La Peninsular. Sevilla April 25. 1914. I am sorry about your cough; I know how fatiguing that is. Have you tried passing salt water through the nose into the mouth? I find it a great relief; but it must be kept up for weeks.—Here the weather has become warm and sunny again, and I have returned to my normal life. Jorge.
To Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge 2 May 1914 • Seville, Spain
(MS: Columbia)
Address: C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, London. S.W. Seville, May 2, 1914. r
Dear M Woodbridge From this retreat, where I have been spending several months as nearly as possible in the Bagdad of the Arabian Nights, I send you this long article on Holt’s new book. Of course, you have already arranged for a review by some more expert hand; but perhaps, if the general subject is still in the order of the day, my reflections will serve to fill a number of your Journal in the dull Summer season. If you care to publish the paper but find it too long for a single number, you might divide it at p. 19 of the MS. into two articles. By the middle of this month I expect to be in Paris with Strong, who is the only philosopher with whom I now much discuss these questions, and we very nearly agree! Believe me, with my best wishes and regards, Yours sincerely GSantayana
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To Charles Augustus Strong 6 May 1914 • Ávila, Spain
(MS: Rockefeller) Novaliches 6, Avila
May 6, 1914. Dear Strong I have just arrived here from Seville and I should like very much to know if you are, or are to be at once, in Paris. I am ready to start almost at any time, but if you were delayed yourself for any reason, I might stay on a few days longer, and make the journey by stages, reaching Paris say th on Monday evening, May 18– Let me know if this is all right. If I don’t hear from you, I will send word to Françoise a day or two before my arrival. Seville has been delightful and I am almost as sentimental about it as I was about Cambridge in the autumn. I have written a long review of Holt’s book which I have sent to Woodbridge and which I should think would make two articles in his Journal. My book is not finished but I have some hopes of completing it in the Summer, at least in a form which would be printable if I had no opportunity or power to make a further revision later. Please write a line addressing me here directly where I shall remain th until the 15– unless something should carry me sooner to a better world. Yours ever G.S.
To Charles Augustus Strong 12 May 1914 • Ávila, Spain
(MS: Rockefeller)
Avila, May 12, 1914. Dear Strong Thank you very much for your telegram. If everything depended on me alone, I should start tomorrow and reach Paris on the same day as you; but my sister Susan wants me to stay a bit longer, and my sister Josephine talks of coming with me (accompanied by our step-niece) as far as San Sebastian, and that could not be until Friday. In any case I expect to arrive on Monday evening at 9.30; if not, I will telegraph. I shall have dined in
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the train, so that Françoise needn’t think of providing anything for my supper. We had a snow storm here the day before yesterday, and the weather remains rather chilly for the season, but the country is unusually green, flowery, and smiling. A bientôt.1 G.S. 1
See you soon.
To Mary Potter Bush 9 June 1914 • Paris, France
(MS: Columbia) 9 Ave de l’Observatoire Paris, June 9, 1914
Dear Mrs Bush Your note touches me deeply. I had no idea that you had been so ill, much less that you could take more than the most casual interest in what concerns me. There is no reason why we shouldn’t often meet again, in New York or here. As to happiness I find that it is of two kinds, one the kind we dream of when we are young and vague in our desires, and the other the kind we find possible and suitable to our capacities when we begin to be old and wise. I venture to say that I have attained this second kind of happiness more nearly than most people, and I shouldn’t now exchange it for the other more ideal sort even if it were possible. The secret of it, in my case, lies in the very old but forgotten maxim of not possessing things nor being possessed by them, more than is absolutely inevitable. On that principle, I have made my peace with things, and find my life very acceptable. Thank you very much for writing as you do and still more for not thinking my resigned philosophy and my selfish existence a blot on the landscape, as I sometimes suspect that most people do. Is it because they see more than we can see, or because they shut —there ———— their eyes to everything? With best wishes for Nauheim1 and the rest, Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 Bad Nauheim in Germany’s Taunus Mountains is a world-famous health resort for heart diseases.
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To Charles Scribner’s Sons 22 June 1914 • Paris, France
(MS: Princeton)
Address: C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123 Pall Mall, London. Paris, June 22, 1914 Messrs. Charles Scribner’s Sons New York. Dear Sirs: Some time ago, in answer to some inquiries of mine about a possible new edition of my “Life of Reason” you wrote that while you could not undertake to make any substantial revision of the work, you would be glad to make any small necessary corrections in any future reprint. I do not know whether any reprints are yet required, although many years have gone by in which a small but steady sale of the volumes has continued. In any case, I send you the inclosed list of such errata1 as I have discovered, all very slight, which I hope you will take any opportunity that presents itself to have corrected in the plates. Yours faithfully GSantayana 1
Unlocated.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 25 June 1914 [postmark] • Paris, France
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
PARIS.—LA PLACE VENDÔME ET LA COLONNE.
June 25. This morning I received the billete kilométrico1 for Robert, and will give it to him when he turns up. I haven’t yet had word of his arrival.—We are having the first summer day of the season.—Strong leaves on Sunday morning for Aix-les-Bains. Love to all from Jorge 1
Railway mileage book.
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To Mary Potter Bush 4 July 1914 • Paris, France
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(MS: Columbia) C
/o Brown Shipley & Co. London
Paris, July 4, 1914 Dear Mrs Bush Of course, your letter opens up a great subject, but I think the difficulties of it would be cleared up, though not removed, by separating what is due to nature in the aspirations of young people from what is verbal, and due to religious training. To live long, and to have something worth doing to accomplish, is a natural demand; yet the same instinct that makes it is modified by finding satisfaction; and I think this instinct would of itself be perfectly capable, in old age, of accepting death gladly, and of being ideally interested in the larger, but equally definite and terminable, career of the race after them. If we asked the animals I am sure they would say this; and the mathematical dream of living on and on through an infinite number of changes—which would ultimately involve the destruction of all their definite and chosen activities—would seem to them a horrible nightmare; an ideal very disloyal to that of their specific nature. But meantime, of course, they would like a chance to hunt and play after their instinctive fashion; and the way to keep them from discouragement would be to stimulate their natural instincts and to educate them, while giving them as far as possible a chance to be fully exercised. Don’t your young women really desire being loved, pleasantly busy, and well-dressed, rather than absolutely immortal? I know very well there is something sad in any reality accomplished— heaven would have a certain melancholy about it, as the mind of God surely must have—but there is nothing uninviting in reality untasted and dawning auspiciously upon us. As you say, ———— their there are obstacles in bad health and other abnormalities: but these would not be overcome by [across] any teaching. They could only be silenced or made to whine in a different key. Yours sincerely GSantayana
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To Charles Augustus Strong 5 July 1914 • Paris, France
(MS: Rockefeller)
9 Ave de l’Observatoire Sunday, July 5, 1914 Dear Strong. Here too we have had a pleasant change from the great heat of the previous days, and are luxuriating in cool breezes, grey skies, and threatening rains— Fuller remains for another week, but I can get no satisfaction out of him; whatever we talk of, he seems to be always thinking of something else. My brother stayed for six days—three of which I spent in his company. He says I am somewhat improved in character, and more like other people; also that when he visited Venice he saw, at the Lido,1 bathing-suits that he had never seen before. He is full of the milk of human kindness, and cannot take his eyes off the love-making he sometimes sees in the streets th of Paris.—I am expecting Reeves2 any day, and Onderdonk on the 18– Two families have come to look at the apartment, the second today. Françoise says the Moseses too are leaving, having taken their lease for a year only, so that when any one inquires for the apartment to let, the concierge replies that there are two—the third floor for 4600 francs and the fifth floor for 4000. That doesn’t sound very encouraging. The boxes of books are screwed down: otherwise we have made as yet no further preparations for the final departure. I have not done any work to speak of, save reading a German Protestant work on Duns Scotus.3 I think all the points made now-adays in the controversies about perception were clearly stated by the Scholastics; [across] whence their reputation for trifling and pedantry and unintelligible hairsplitting. Yours ever G.S. 1
Lido di Venezia is a beach resort near Venice. Unidentified. 3 John Duns Scotus (d. 1308) was a scholastic philosopher called the Subtle Doctor. He was a Franciscan who taught at Oxford, Paris, and Cologne. He wrote Four Questions on Mary (trans. Allan B. Wolter, New York: The Franciscan Institute, 2000), a book addressing such issues as the immaculate conception and maternity of the Mother of God. Duns Scotus followed Saint Bonaventure in putting Aristotelian thought to the service of Christian theology. He founded a school of scholasticism 2
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called Scotism and opposed the Thomism of the followers of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Scotism, which strongly influenced Catholic thought and Franciscan theology, emphasizes the nature of knowledge; Scotists deny that matter is the principle of individuality and insist that individuation of things is by formal, intelligible determination.
To Charles Augustus Strong 12 July 1914 • Paris, France
(MS: Rockefeller)
Paris, July 12, 1914 Dear Strong I am very sorry to hear of your loss; it would have been a satisfaction to your mother to have seen you and Margaret again. On the other hand you are all spared the parting, which under the circumstances would have been painful on both sides— I am curiously incapable of making up my mind about going to England with you or not. Besides my own vacillations, there is now the chance of combining my movements with those of — Von Westenholz who writes that he may go to London either this month or in October. Before your return, however, I expect to have a fresh and more definite message from him. My friends have been turning up in full numbers, and I have been doing no consecutive work. The six boxes for my books have been ordered, and when you arrive I shall be ready to move at short notice, if a tenant should appear. Onderdonk writes that he will be glad to relieve me of the chair, and Abreu says he likes the lamp, so that I mean to give it to him. That will relieve me of most of my remaining impedimenta. Excuse this paper and trembling hand-writing. I am writing with my elbow in the air, at the Café Mabíen, my note paper having given out just when these tiresome fêtes are beginning. I hope your cure is purging your system of all impurities and your mind of all worries. Yours ever G.S.
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To Charles Augustus Strong 17 July 1914 • Paris, France
(MS: Rockefeller) 9 Ave de l’Observatoire July 17, 1914
Dear Strong, I am glad you are to arrive on Thursday and to have two full days in which to rest here before your fresh journey. I say “yours” because it looks now as if after all I shouldn’t go with you. Westenholz hasn’t yet written again, but all the chances are against his screwing up his courage to the point of really embarking for England at short notice; and if he is to put it off until October or altogether, it would be better for me to stay on here as long as possible. Boylston Beal—a very old friend—is to arrive on the day you leave; and my brother writes that he isn’t very well, being sleepless and nervous at night, finding it hard to breathe at times, and that he would like to find me within call when he returns from Spain. All this makes me rather incline to stay here, or if I go to England to return at once and wait here for the season when it will be pleasant to go to Italy. Of course, you mustn’t put off having the furniture and linen packed and sent off whenever it ought to go (if the furniture is going): I can easily move to the Quai Voltaire at a day’s notice. If things remain as they are and the apartment is open, I think you ought to let me pay Françoise’ wages and the small incidental expenses while I am here alone. By the way, the Fénelon1 Society next door is building three new storeys to its house, so that now the painting is done, the filth and noise will be upon us worse than ever. Boylston Beal writes that he saw Bertie Russell in Boston, who seemed shy, and adds: “He is quite the plainest man I have ever seen” —I [ think Bertie looks like a genius— ] “but had a success with the high-brows. However, I doubt whether he enjoyed himself”. Thank you for the cutting about the other Russells. These letters are written with an eye to the public trial, and the tone of all of them is put on for effect. They are really flinging things at each other’s heads; and this is another reason why I want to keep out of the way at present, because if I went to England it would be hard for me to keep out of the fray. If I don’t hear to the contrary I will ask Françoise to have dinner ready for us on Thursday at half past seven. Yours ever G.S.
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1 François de Salignac de la Mothe Fènelon (1651–1715) was a French theologian, author, and archbishop of Cambrai. His most famous work is Télémaque (1699), though he also wrote a treatise on the education of young girls, as well as Lettre à l’Académie. He was banished to Cambrai for his defense of Quietism.
To Bertrand Arthur William Russell 27 July [1914] • London, England
(MS: McMaster)
London, July 27, Dear Russell Thank you very much for your note. We are thinking of going to Cambridge tomorrow afternoon, and Strong had already arranged to stay at the University Arms so that we won’t trouble you to get us rooms in College, but we shall be delighted to dine with you on Wednesday, if that is a convenient day for you Mrs. Toy and other friends of mine have written about having had great pleasure in seeing you in America. One sagacious person observes that you were (in Boston) “a great success among the high-brows” and adds “However, I doubt if he enjoyed himself.” We are at the Euston Hotel which Strong chooses as a stepping-stone to higher things. Yours sincerely GSantayana
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 2 August 1914 • Cambridge, England
(MS: Virginia)
LION HOTEL, CAMBRIDGE.
August 2nd 1914 Dear Susie I am much upset at the thought of this war breaking out suddenly all about us: I am not even sure that I shall go back to Paris next Sunday, as I intended. The Germans may be there in a fortnight, and I suppose it might be as well for me not to attempt to repulse them by force of philosophy, but to retire in time—perhaps Spain-wards, or to Italy, if Italy is neutral, as they say she is to be. Or I may remain in England until we can judge what is going to happen, and which way it is safe and possible to
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turn. What is Robert going to do about his return voyage? Half the steamships seem to be held up: only the British and American lines to New York are still sailing as announced, and they will doubtless be overcrowded. It is possible, however, that the war may be short, and that in six weeks we shall have returned—with bruised heads and bruised hearts—to our ordinary routine. How involuntary and uncanny it all is, as if the most responsible men were acting in a dream, giving bad reasons for doing what they are driven to do by a blind necessity. I am going to Howard’s at Windsor on Tuesday, and will send you word from there when I decide what to do. Strong sailed for America yesterday. Bertrand Russell is here and we talk much of politics and philosophy. Love to all from Jorge
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 3 August 1914 • Cambridge, England
(MS: Virginia)
LION HOTEL, CAMBRIDGE.
Aug. — July 3rd 1914 Dear Susie Will you send the enclosed1 to Robert, or give it to him if he is still with you? From the papers this morning I see that a return to Paris is out of the question for the moment. Indeed, it was lucky that I came to England when I did; only I left in Paris some clothes and other things—including my new letter of credit—which I should have brought with me if I had anticipated staying here into the winter. In fact, I shall probably not do so, but when we see which way things are going, and whether England is to remain neutral or not, I may go by sea to Gibraltar or to Italy. For the moment I have written to my old landlady2 in Oxford asking if she has rooms. I could spend the rest of the summer there with comfort, and should be able to accomplish a good deal in the way of reading and writing. The strain and excitement of these events is terrible. I don’t know what to expect nor even what to hope for. It is all a dark riddle, and the consequences will be hateful, whatever they are. Yours affly Jorge
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1
Unlocated. Miss Turner.
2
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 5 August 1914 • Windsor, England
(MS: Virginia) August 5, 1914 QUEEN’S ACRE, WINDSOR.
Dear Susie I don’t know whether you are getting the letters I am writing you: this is the third during the last few days. There is nothing new to say, but the stress of excitement somehow impels me to write; and if by chance one letter goes astray, you may get another. None from you or Robert or Josephine has reached me for some time, but I am hoping to have one soon. Howard and his household are as usual. He is less overcome by the war—of which he of course “disapproves” sadly—than I had expected: in fact everyone everywhere seems to take this prodigious outbreak very seriously and calmly, with a reasonable sense of how human and how inevitable unreason is. It reminds me of the mock phrase in Don Quixote: la razón de la sinrazón1 etc: only this is sober earnest. My sympathies are naturally with France and England, and with the blameless unfortunate Belgians; yet I feel no anger against the Germans. They are carrying out a brave and heroic determination to be the masters of Europe and to rule by force of arms, industry, and character. It is not very different from the principle that has animated strong aggressive nations in all ages; only it is more deliberate and conscious—a little rude and conceited as well. Per- haps the ^ ^ sense of power and of “duty” has turned their heads a little, and they may be rushing to their destruction—or rather to their discomfiture, because no great nationality can be destroyed until it dissolves inwardly. It is hard to say whether what is guiding them is infatuation or consciousness of their destiny. If they win, with all Europe against them, it will be because they deserved to win, being morally the stronger.—I am going on Friday to Oxford, and shall probably remain there [across] indefinitely, until we see how things are going. Love to all from your affectionate brother Jorge
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1 The phrase occurs at the beginning of chapter 1 of the First Part of Don Quixote (1605) in a passage used by the narrator to exemplify Don Quixote’s madness: “The reason of the unreason that afflicts my reason, in such a manner weakens my reason that I with reason lament me of your comeliness.” [Samuel Putnam’s translation]
To Charles Augustus Strong 5 August 1914 • Windsor, England C
/o B. S. & Co 123 Pall Mall S.W.
(MS: Rockefeller) August 5, 1914 QUEEN’S ACRE, WINDSOR.
Dear Strong What are we going to do? In vain Aristippus1 dwelt in foreign republics, to escape the cares of citizenship. They held him up and trounced him just the same when there was a row. How are you going to get back, and what of your father’s trip through France? As for me, I am stranded here, and mean to go to Oxford and stay there until the war is over, if I can find rooms. Mrs Bowler,2 at 66 the High, can take me only for a few days. The worst of it is that I left every thing at the apartment unpacked, my winter clothes and my new letter of credit: however, I have £50 left which will do until my brother can send me more from America, if he is able to get there. I haven’t had word from him for some time. I suppose you will write to Françoise and give here/ directions; I am sending her a line merely to tell her not to expect me for the present. At first this terrible situation in Europe made me quite sick and speechless, as if I had lost some dear friend; but now that the battle is well engaged my sporting blood is up, and I feel a pleasing horror at it all, and one seems to be living a greater life amid such fearful events and constant excitement. What is one to expect, and what is one to hope for? I hardly know; but it looks as if perhaps the Germans, in their sincerity and courage, had lost their heads, and become infatuated by the sense of duty and power. And I can’t help wishing the French well, and the poor blameless Belgians! It is fortunate that the Italians are out of it; but I see Captain Mahan3 thinks they will have to intervene, and [across] against their allies! God be with us all! Yours ever G.S.
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1 Aristippus (c. 435–386 B.C.), a pupil of Socrates, departed from his master’s philosophy by basing his ethics on the pursuit of pleasure (guided by prudence in order to avoid pain). A founder of the Cyrenaic school, Aristippus’s ethics is known as hedonism. 2 First name unknown. In Puritan Minnie Bowler is landlady of the King’s Arms. 3 Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914) was an American naval officer and historian who advocated the interdependence of military and commercial control of the seas. He maintained that control of seaborne commerce could influence the outcomes of wars. Mahan was president of Naval War College at Newport, R.I., from 1886 until 1889 and published his college lectures as The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (1890). He accurately predicted the defeat of the Central Powers and the German navy in World War I.
To Charles Augustus Strong 9 August 1914 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 66 High Street, Oxford Aug. 9, 1914.
Dear Strong It is useless to talk about the war, the subject is too vast, too absorbing, too imperfectly comprehensible. And yet we talk glibly about the universe, nous antres1 philosophers! It seems that the line to Paris via Boulogne is still running, and if in the next two weeks events are favourable to the allies, and the way remains open, I may go back to Paris after all, to gather my things together, pack my books, and migrate Southward—very likely to Spain rather than to Italy, because the emotions of the moment make me feel the need of being near my own, and it is in Avila, with my sister, that I have the oldest and tenderest ties of my old and untender being. I send you a note of Françoise’s.2 I have replied, but without sending her th her wages, due on the 15– , partly because it isn’t very safe and partly because—having left my new letter of credit in Paris—I fear to be short of ^ ^ cash. I have £45 left. [across] My kindest regards to Margaret. Yours ever G.S. 1
The like of us. The note sent to Santayana says: “Monsieur, Je suis depuis q.q. [abbreviation for “quelque”] jours chez ma Sœur, à la campagne je voudrais bien savoir si Monsieur rentre a Paris ces jours-ci; Monsieur m’écura s’il rentre, voici mon adresse; chez M–c Blard aux Chapelles. Bourbon par la Houssaye; Ses Maure Je n’ai pas osé resten seule à Paris. Agreez Monsieur, l’assurance de mon entier dévouement Françoise 9/8/14” 2
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Translation: Sir, I have been for a few days at my sister’s in the countryside. I would like to know if Sir will be back in Paris soon; Sir, excuse me if he is back, here is my address at McBlard aux Chapelles. Bourbon par la Houssaye; I didn’t dare staying alone in Paris. Receive, Sir, the assurance of my whole devotion. Françoise 9/8/14
To Mary Williams Winslow 16 August 1914 • Oxford, England
(MS: Houghton) C
/o Brown Shipley & Co London
Oxford, August 16, 1914. Dear Mrs Winslow The shock of wars seems to have been necessary to knock me out of my comatose state of mind and unconsciousness of the lapse of weeks and months since I received your last kind letter. I am now very restless, hardly knowing which way to turn, what to wish or to hope for or what to expect. My plans are upset and my sympathies lacerated. Happy the man with a country, and faith that it is of course always in the right, and will of course be victorious! To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography. If you are born east of this frontier—one religion, one language, one history, one dominating passion; if you are born —— on———— that———— side west of it—another religion, another language, another history, and a deep desire to knock the other man, and not yourself, on the head! You may say it is the difference in people’s racial soul that originally made that frontier, so that after all you are born on the side to which you belong. But that only turns the comedy into a tragedy; for why should ——— the my soul be racial at all, and why should mewing be a delight to it and barking an abomination? I try—in vain, I am afraid—to discount and transcend this sort of fatality and to consider fairly what is at stake and what would be the moral value of victory for the dogs or for the cats. I say to myself (not from the heart, perhaps) that France, though amiable, is played out and rotten (a sort of Anatole France,1 in fact); that the British Empire is a pious sham, and must soon go in any event; that Austria and Germany represent clericalism and discipline, and that if Christendom is capable of a new lease of life at all, it could only be by their victory and sobering influence; and that perhaps it is better that men should recognize sour duties than no duties at all. When I try to take that line I immediately feel the conviction rise that Christendom and clerical duty and discipline are pious shams and hopelessly plai/yed out too; and that those who work for them politically are
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inwardly more roten than the avowed anarchists. In fine, I don’t at all know how we can discover whether it would be better for the world that we should be all overawed by Germany and turned into pompous prigs, or that we should be allowed to go to the dogs in our own natural ways. I have come to Oxford in the fond hope of finding peace—but this war is too atmospheric, it pervades every retreat. By the merest chance the cataclysm found me in England; I had come from Paris to do some shopping, and see a few friends, intending to return in a fortnight: but now I don’t know at all when I shall get back, or whether I shall go to Italy for the winter, as I had intended. No place seems to beckon, and all to repel. During the last year I have had two happy perfect seasons—three months at Cambridge in the autumn and four months at Seville in the winter and Spring. Both places, in their different ways, afforded solitude and stimulation, and I could read and write and walk and feel alive and fit for great illuminations. I seemed there to be growing mellow, very mellow—“extra ripe”, as the man said to recommend his bananas; but since I left Seville, and began to feel the friction of more or less unsympathetic friends, I seem again the poor, uncultivated, shallow caged-squirrel-soul that the world makes us. My book has advanced—especially in my own mind, it has got more firmly knit together—but it is not finished, and the last smelting and recasting is yet to be done. Perhaps in Rome—if I get there this winter—the hills and the gods will favour the work! You must be at Nahant2 now, Fred playing tennis like a champion and you and Polly teaching the baby to know such things as he ought to know at his age—leaving him to find out the others for himself. I suppose the old rocks and the old fossils of Nahant surround you as usual, and everyone is concerned deeply to do as many uninteresting things as possible in the most competent way. Dear old Boston, what an unlovely place it is! Don’t you ever miss Buffalo, and wish to transplant Fred and the children there? Your friend Apthorp Fuller was in Paris not long ago and gave me the most dismal account of Harvard College and its philosophy. —By [ the way, I hear Münsterberg upbraids England for betraying the cause of Teutonic Kultur. But might not this be acquired by Englishmen, Frenchmen, and even Russians, seeing that its purest present champions may combine it with descent from other heroes than Siegfried?3 Isn’t Boston flooded with German music and German philosophy, without needing to be policed by German officials?]— My poor brother is in Spain, uncertain how to get back to State Street and Duty and to Bay State Road and Happiness. All because a Servian student shot the Archduke [across] Franz Ferdinand!4
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And people still say that Reason governs the world! Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 Anatole France (1844–1922) was the pseudonym of Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault, a French novelist whose writing incorporated social and political satire and who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1921. 2 Nahant is a resort town in eastern Massachusetts where Fred Winslow had his medical practice. Santayana first visited Nahant about 1873, staying at the home of “Uncle Robert” Sturgis. 3 Siegfried is the hero of the medieval epic, Das Nibelungenlied, upon which Wagner based his operatic tetrology, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Nibelung’s Ring). 4 The immediate cause of the war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia and the event touching off World War I was the assassination on 28 Jun 1914 of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand (1863–1914), heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. High-school student Gavrilo Princip (1895–1918), a Serbian nationalist, killed Francis Ferdinand and his wife, the Duchess Sophie Chotek.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 24 August 1914 • London, England
(MS: Virginia)
London, Aug. 24, 1914 Dear Susie This afternoon I receive at the same moment two numbers of the ABC,1 which you send me, and word from the bankers that Robert is sailing on Wednesday from Cadiz in the “Infanta Isabel”. I am glad he has taken this determination, for I think it is the simplest and safest way for him to get home. He will also get there sooner than if he had come north in order to embark. The Spanish papers, although of course they are belated, contain a more impartial view than the papers I see here, which even when they quote German reports, emphasize only what is obviously exaggerated or false in them, so as to make them seem absurd. The interview with a th German officer of the general staff, for instance, in the ABC of the 15– instant, is very illuminating. It shows how competent the Germans are, even when their vision is dense and their sentiment narrow. He gives out the exact plan which is being carried out, and I almost think he foresees what must be the result, at least of the campaign in Belgium. This sort of thing gives me more perspective, and helps me to prepare for the disappointments which are in store for us here—I say “us”, because it is impossible not to share the sentiment of people about one, when it is strong and steady and one has no contrary passion of one’s own. My natural sympa-
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thies are anti-German, but I can’t help admiring the sureness and the immense patient effort which characterizes their action. If they overpower “us”, I am not sure that the world will be ultimately the worse for it. I say this, I confess, partly to console myself for the news of the German victory—I don’t know yet how complete—which has been given out this afternoon. We are told — the that “Namur2 has fallen”—but we are not told if that is all, and I fear there is a lot more to tell. Perhaps the Avenue de l’Observatoire may be bombarded, and Strong be relieved of the trouble of deciding what to do with [across] his furniture, and I with my books! It would be rather amusing, and as far as that is concerned, I [across page one] shouldn’t weep over it. But how much anguish everywhere, and all for what? Yours affly Jorge 1
Spanish magazine published in Madrid. [D. C.] Namur is a Belgium province and town near the French border.
2
To Upton Beall Sinclair 27 August 1914 • London, England
(MS: Indiana)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, S.W. London, Aug. 27, 1914
Dear Sir Your project is an admirable one, and I should be proud to think that some chance word of mine should ever come to figure in such a new gospel.1 The war has separated me from my books, and I have to rely on a most inaccurate memory, but I think in vol. 2 of “The Life of Reason”, which is entitled “Reason in Society”, and particularly in the chapters on Government & War and on Democracy, some epigrams and sentences might be found that touch upon the ideal of a just society. If you are not in haste, I might in a few weeks (when I expect to be near a friend who—rare phenomenon!—has my books in his library) looks/ these Chapters over, and possibly submit a few extracts to your inspection. Otherwise it would be better, if you think the matter worth pursuing at all, to ask some person with a sense for such things, to read the Chapters I have indicated—they are not long—and see if he finds anything quotable in them. It is always safer not to let a parent judge of the relative beauty of his children, for he may prefer his ugly ducklings, as most truly resembling himself.
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Believe me, with best wishes for your enterprise, Yours truly, GSantayana 1
The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest (Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Co., 1915). Santayana’s work is not included.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 1 October 1914 • Oxford, England
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
OXFORD, QUEEN’S COLLEGE, FRONT. (FOUNDED A.D.
1340).
Oct. 1, 1914. Thank you for several A.B.C.’s and one “Universo”. I found several things I had not heard of and much general edification.— Very soon I will write at length to Josephine, whose letter I have recie —eived.—I am leaving Oxford in a week for Cambridge, as term will have begun. I have some hopes of getting rooms in a college. [Unsigned]
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 11 October 1914 • London, England
(MS: Virginia)
London, Sunday, Oct. 11, ’14. Dear Susie Your letter of the 3rd reached me yesterday, taking a week. Thank you for the notice about the direct line from Falmouth to Bilbao. For the moment I think I will stay here; I go to Cambridge tomorow, and if I don’t find suitable quarters there I can always return to Oxford or retire to Bournemouth or Torquay, to what they call the English Riviera, which they say is balmy and comparatively cloudless. As a matter of fact, since I have been in England, we have had hardly any rain. It would be very nice to get back to Spain—as you say, Italy had better be left out of the reckoning for the present—but if possible I should like to go via Paris, and I can easily wait until Christmas and see what the facilities for travel are at that time. When I said in my last long letter that England would be “strong at the finish” I didn’t quite mean that I feel sure her side will be victorious:
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Germany is materially and morally prodigiously strong. So far, while she has not taken Paris nor maintained her invasion of Russia from East Prussia, she has had the upper hand, both on land and sea, and now with the possession of Antwerp she may attempt the long premeditated attack on the English fleet and coasts by sea and air. If the Russian advance in Southern Poland should collapse, and the British fleet should be crippled (not impossible contingencies) Germany might become unconquerable, and the war might have to end in some arrangement not unfavourable to her, because she would be free to prepare even more thoroughly for the next war against weakened opponents. I shall be glad to see the Corzeo Español1 when it arrives. It is quite intelligible that the Catholic party should hail the decline of Masonic France, heretical England and schismatic Russia. A new Holy German Empire, even if the Emperor was nominally a Protestant and had to be tolerant to his 200,000,000 Moslem protégés, would give the Church a great backing. Politically and morally she would be countenanced and respected everywhere as she has not been since the Reformation. In other ways, too, a universal German ascendancy would not be without its splendours, and I am by no means sure that this development of things is not as desirable as any other. Things cannot remain as they are, and the Americanization of the Universe would be even a worse fate. But my heart, I confess, is with the French, English, and also with the Russians, because they all three, in various ways, make for individual freedom, and for the security and delightfulness of life. They are the peoples who wish to be left alone, because they know how to make themselves comfortable and happy. The German system is one of strain and of artificial aims: it is a sort of orderly night-mare. For this reason I can’t help thinking that the Mediterranean countries would obey their true instinct in sympathizing with the allies, as the liberal and paganized parties in them actually do. And that need not involve any disloyalty to Christianity. The German spirit is very antiChristian at bottom, although in its demand for order and discipline it may find an alliance with Christianity useful for the moment. The German spirit, however, is that of “Absolute Will”, as their philosopher call it. It is unregenerate. It trusts, like the heathen Northmen, in strength, will, and inward instinct or illumination. It has no consciousness of sin, or of the vanity of the world or the passions. The Cross never had, and never can have, any meaning for it. In its heart it never believed in another world, but always looked forward to a sort of heroic suicide or twilight of the gods”: for the very people who are now planning a great German era for
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the whole world are perfectly conscious that that era, too, must pass away in time. It will be merely a beau geste, lasting a thousand years ending in the tragic and romantic extinction of the race and its glorious “Kultur”. This is a heathen ideal, not a Christian nor even a pagan one, as the ^ ^ Greeks and Latins conceived paganism, which meant a modest and permanent alliance with the gods of nature, and a life as pleasant and intellectual as possible. I have sent you several books and will send you one or two more, concerning the crisis;2 if you don’t care to read them, please lay them aside anywhere and I will relieve you of them when I come and can rearrange my belongings. Love to Celedonio, Josephine, and all the family, Your affectionate brother Jorge 1
A Spanish journal. [D. C.] Though Spain remained neutral during World War I, the country was divided into two political groups, pro-French and pro-German. Three principal factors formented a political crisis: workers’ demands for better wages and working conditions, the formation of military juntas threatening increased influence of the military in government affairs, and a movement for home rule in Catalonia. 2
To Scofield Thayer 23 October 1914 • Cambridge, England
(MS: Beinecke)
45 Chesterton Road Cambridge, Oct. 23, ’14 Dear Thayer You are very good to remember my aspirations in the matter of lodgings and my interest in Rupert Brooke’s verses.1 I send these back because you may possibly have a scrap book or some other pleasing method of collecting odds and ends from which once dangled some vague tentacle of feeling. I should myself like to preserve a thousand things, but if I do I find that on reviewing them the golden cobwebs that once enmeshed them have totally vanished and I can find nothing but the little crumpled dead fly. For the moment I find myself quiet, comfortable, and happy here, in the lodgings I occupied last year. They are without the seemliness of a man-
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servant, but the good women look after me in a methodical unobtrusive way with which I am quite satisfied. Cambridge is sad and more than half-deserted, but if the spirit moves you to visit it during this term you will undoubtedly find me here, and very glad to see you. Yours sincerely GSantayana P.S. I have heard nothing of Onderdonk. Have you? Please remember me to Langstaff.2 1 Rupert Chawner Brooke (1887–1915) was educated at Rugby and King’s College, Cambridge. He was well known for his lyric poems and five “War Sonnets.” He died of blood poisoning while serving in the British Army in World War I. 2 John Brett Langstaff (1889–1985), member of the Harvard class of 1913 with a B.Litt. from Oxford, wrote Oxford—1914 (New York: Vantage Press, 1965), as well as other books. He was head of Magdalen College House and president of the Children’s Libraries Movement.
To Charles Augustus Strong 29 October 1914 • Cambridge, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 45 Chesterton Road, Cambridge October 29 1914
Dear Strong th and to hear that I was delighted yesterday to get your letter of the 16– you were on the point of sailing at last. You are probably now in Italy and if you and Margaret are not fascinated by Naples and Rome at this season and compelled to linger a little on your journey, you may well be at home before this reaches you—the mails are now so horribly slow. My existence here is that of a mere thermometer registering the warnews and boiling and freezing by turns, though my not very mercurial blood resents such oscillations and aches for the sluggish temperatures of peace. I see Russell (would you like his new book, which he has had published in America?1 I will gladly send you my copy if you are without one,) and Lapley and sometimes dine with them at Trinity; but Cambridge as a whole is sad and empty, the few undergraduates being either clad in Khaki and unrecognizable or seedy and “feeling a skunk”, as Russell expresses it. No eights on the River, and companies of singing recruits tramping along the towpath instead. However, I seem to be happier and more settled here
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than elsewhere since the storm burst, and for the present I expect to remain. My quarters are comfortable, my fire bright, there is hot water in the bathroom, and my food is palatable enough. I am reading a lot, and even trying to write—but with little power of prosecuting any given subject. Thank you for your suggestion that I should join you and Margaret at once—I hope it may be before long, but I should prefer to pass through Paris, if that were not too difficult a journey, on account of the things I left scattered there which I should like partly to gather up and partly to pack, so that they may be easily removed when (if ever) the apartment is sublet. Perhaps, too, it would be better that I should go this year to Spain, as the war may swoop down on you in Italy at any time, and it is anyhow — in to Spain that I meant to go in the summer. Thank you also for your previous offer of aid, but my straits were merely momentary: I got a fresh letter of credit at once and am now in a normal situation, except that my brother recommends economy. My income still, however, more than suffices for my ordinary expenses, without requiring any change in my way of living; and doubtless from this time on it will recover its ordinary slim but comfortable volume. The war is the only thing in my thoughts—painfully persistent, like a nightmare. I don’t want to enter on that; but I will report briefly what Russell says about it, as I feel somehow that his background and intelligence give his views some weight. He is quite confident of the issue because English ministers have a sense for facts and have never yet voluntarily entered upon a war in which they were going to be unsuccessful. The people, he adds, will be able and willing to carry on the war for twenty years if necessary; and he says that perhaps in time there may be a deadlock on the line of the Rhine in the west and the Oder in the east, beyond which the Allies may not be able to penetrate; but that would suffice to bring Germany to terms. I congratulate you on finding yourself again at Fiesole and with Margaret to brighten the scene. I hope the planting and the other improvements have progressed satisfactorily, and that mind and body will do their duty by you during this season. Unquestionably, I ought to break away and join you. Think what down-hill walks, what cups of coffee in Florence (not Gambrinno sandwiches for me!) and what circular discussions we might have together! But the rub is to choose the moment for starting—and the route. Yours ever G.S. 1
Unidentified.
1910–1920
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 1 November 1914 • Cambridge, England
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(MS postcard: Sanchez)
OXFORD, WORCESTER COLLEGE QUADRANGLE. (FOUNDED A.D.
1714).
Cambridge, Nov. 1, 1914. Thanks for two more ABC’s. Could you send me a “Lectura Dominical”? I am curious to see how they feel, especially about the Young Turks,1 who are not only Moslems but Free Masons!—I have got my abandoned letter of credit from Paris and expect my manuscript, thanks to a friend there.— Love to all from Jorge 1
The Young Turks were a reformist and nationalist movement which wished to restore the constitution in the Ottoman Empire.
To Wendell T. Bush 8 November 1914 • Cambridge, England
(MS: Columbia) 45 Chesterton Road, Cambridge Nov. 8, 1914
Dear Mr Bush If we are without the peace of mind which ought (though it does not) to surround philosophizing, we certainly have materials enough before us to make us wise, if we are able to reflect on what we see occurring. From what I hear, I judge that you are hardly freer, in America, from the war of words, and the constant hissing of hatred and recrimination. Otherwise, I might wish myself there. However, I am trying to deny the Will and harden myself for the worst. I am at work (or at play) upon a longish Essay on German Ambition and German Philosophy,1 a propos of which I am rereading Fichte: it is very fine and grand, and at the same time curiously childish. It seems as if Life, to him, meant Inexperience. I may send you, in a few days, a section or two of this essay, which are not too political. I also hope to receive from Paris, before long, the MS of my Four Realms of Being, and there is a chapter on “The_meanings_of_“Is”” which I should rather like to have you publish in advance of the work,2 so that I may profit by any criticisms which may be made upon it. I have questioned Russell here—a great
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authority on such a point—but I find that he has little more light to shed upon it than the blinking amateur. I neglected to ask for any copies of my Holt article when sending back the proof. May I have three or four, when it appears? Best regards to rs M Bush. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
“Philosophic Sanction of Ambition,” Philosophy 12 (4 Mar 1915): 113–16. “Some Meanings of the Word ‘Is’,” Philosophy 12 (4 Feb 1915): 66–68. Later revised and republished in Philosophy 21 (3 Jul 1924): 365–77, and Obiter. Brief passages from this essay are included in Essence. 2
To Horace Meyer Kallen 13 November 1914 • Cambridge, England
(MS: American)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co, London Cambridge, Nov. 13 ’14
Dear Kallen My unpaid debt—not counting more distant obligations—to you now amounts, I think, to two letters and a book. For the moment you can be paid with little more than thanks, as the war has suspended my activities almost entirely. It has hung upon me very heavily; now that I am becoming accustomed to the pressure I am beginning to write again—but about the war, or around it. You may see some bits of the result before long. I have read your book1 with interest, in some places with difficulty, in others with chucklings, in still others with lofty satisfaction. You give a clarified idea of James—as it is natural that a disciple should; you make him Christ instead of Jesus. I shouldn’t dispute for a moment that your view of his doctrine and tendency is correct; you seize the ultimate, the latest, the most radical, and interesting phase of his thought; but I can’t help feeling that the James I knew in the flesh was something quite different on the whole—more puzzled, more inconsistent, more infected with überwundenen Standpuncten.2 I shouldn’t say (though you and he perhaps would) that in reality he was richer. A junkshop isn’t richer than a palace; and what is consistent with one principle, and all in one style, makes to my mind the only true richness of that sort of thing: more, would be matter out of place. If James had been what you give us of him, and no more, I should have understood and liked him better—better as a thinker and even
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as a man, because his incalculableness and jumpiness sometimes made me uncomfortable. Now, in your clarified and consistent James you suggest a great philosophic system; like him, however, you only suggest it. At moments, in reading the latter parts of your book, I was carried into the seventh heaven of a world in which imagination should be all in all. Even will or activity (so much and so blindly invoked in similar doctrines) would be made volatile and sensible in the form of a rush of images and feelings: and the least tendency to hypostasize or slip in any background to anything should be perpetually “called down” and reduced to the images and the feelings which that tendency was “known as”. This system, but for the monarchical Will and the a priori3 grammar of thought, would be a perfect idealism of the romantic type: this romanticism being, to my mind, the uncriticized assumption in the whole; for you are hardly (are you) satisfied with the image and feeling of change and life: you believe candidly in a real mutation. But, for the imagination, your system of nothing but imagination is very exciting and liberating. If it is as imagination that all things come, why should we not say so, and touch — the bottom in our drifting fate? Of course, for my word imagination you use the word “experience” about which gather, I am convinced, the most serious and perpetual ambiguities; and you seem less subjective but in fact are only less clear. You are not clear, at least to me: to achieve clearness I have to rethink and restate your position, turning “experience” into absolute imagination. When you mention “the world of experience” the unwary reader relapses into vulgar hypostasis, and thinks of nature; but he ought to remember that nature “means” (in your system) the idea of nature somewhere given in imagination, so that “the world of experience” has no other structure than the stream of experience itself. Am I wrong? As to Bergson, your account shows intense and laborious thinking on your part; but it doesn’t seem to me to be either a clearer exposition nor an independent criticism: it is a sort of fermentation of his materials and— if you will forgive me for saying all I think—turbid. To be sure, the vintage is bad, and no treading of the winepress could make good wine of it. That there is a great and profound difference between him and James is certain; but it would be hard to demonstrate it fully and bring it out in its ulterior implications, without making havoc in Bergson’s system: and when a man is alive it seems unnecessary to tell him what he thinks when he says he thinks something quite different. But when he is safely dead—you will doubtless long survive him—you might go on with this re-christening of his changelings. You already venture to show how Plotinian and Spinozistic
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and (upside down) Platonic he is; but he is also Fichtean and Schellingite,4 and Schopenhauerian and Berkeleian; in fact, he is an immediatist and a temporalist (which is a contradiction) an evolutionist who wants to give a mystical ground and (what is worse) a mystical texture to evolution. He is a meliorist and an absolutist! Some days ago I replied to Jastrow still admitting the proposal to go to you next year.5 But, as I hope I made him understand, I regard this as a pleasant dream, hardly to be realized. If it was a question of reaching you by wireless, and not needing to reach Harvard as well, it would be different; but to return to Harvard now is a terrible obstacle to my resolution. Possibly, some years hence when all is quite different … . Yours sincerely G.S. 1
William James and Henri Bergson (University of Chicago Press, 1914). Antiquated views. 3 The phrase a priori is used in philosophy to mean knowledge which is independent of experience. 4 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854) was a German idealist philosopher known for his philosophy of nature and his existential leanings. He held that nature was just as important as the ego but that consciousness was the only thing about which we have firsthand knowledge. 5 Marcus Jastrow (1829–1903) was a rabbi and lexicographer educated in Poland and Germany. In 1866 he moved to America and helped organize Maimonides College, where he taught religion and Jewish history and made his synagogue a center of conservative Judaism. 2
To Wendell T. Bush 18 November 1914 • Cambridge, England Address
C
(MS: Columbia)
o
Shipley & C { /o Brown 123 Pall Mall, London.
Cambridge. Nov. 18, 1914 Dear Mr Bush Here are two articles. The one on German ambition is part of a longer essay1 on which I am at work; I have sent another portion2 (even less philosophical) to the new weekly paper “The New Republic”,3 and I shall soon have other portions ready. But I fully realize that something so political and untechnical may not seem suitable for your journal, and might call for the unphilosophic passions and just protests from those whose learning has nothing to do with what goes on in the world. Don’t hesitate to return the
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M.S. if you don’t want it: the other article (a chapter out of my big new book) will fill some gap in your columns well enough. Thank you for the copies of my Holt article, which have just come to hand. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Egotism. “Goethe and German Egotism,” The New Republic 1 (2 Jan 1915): 15–16. 3 The New Republic, founded in 1914 by Willard D. Straight, was a weekly journal of opinion and liberal views. 2
To Charles Augustus Strong 1 December 1914 • Cambridge, England
(MS: Rockefeller)
45 Chesterton Road Cambridge Dec. 1, 1914 Dear Strong It was a great pleasure to hear from you again after so long; I am sorry the cause was that insidious abdomen of yours. Let us hope domestic quiet and domestic cooking will set everything right again. No, on the whole, I can’t bring myself to undertake any long journey at present: I have grown a certain protective cuticle here, against the hideous influences of the hour, and it would be torn again by any serious déplacement. I may go to Brighton or even to Penzance, in search of sunshine and warmth, if Cambridge becomes too windy, bleak, and rainy: so far I am well and happy, and with a day in London now and then to see a crowd (I find I need that as a sop to the gregarious instinct) I get on very well. Reeves has sent me my MS and my letter of credit, so that I can eat and work for an indefinite time; and I do work a little; you may see some proof of it before long in the Columbia Journal (which I suppose you receive as usual, otherwise I should send you my Holt article, of which I have some extra copies). The war moves slowly, painfully, but is not agonizingly dangerous to the cause for which you and I can’t help caring—at least, not for the moment. The English are wonderful in their calm confidence and open-minded courage in receiving punishment; if I had half the stakes I should be terrified, for the danger is great and even if the chances are favourable danger, to me, is more intolerable than loss. Let us hope the sky
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will gradually clear and that the end will come before we expect it: there seem to be some hints of such a possibility of late. Have you heard of an Italian suicidal philosopher and poet named Michelstaetter?1 An acquaintance of mine here is quite enthusiastic about him, and the youth seems to have had a transcendental soul: but I haven’t yet got hold of his works.— Durant Drake has offered to send me a more [across] work of his: I have given him your address, as he is your pupil. If a book arrives, do open it and regard it [across page one] as your own. Yours ever G.S. 1 Carlo Michelstaedter (1887–1910), artist, poet, and philosopher, was born to a Jewish family in Gorizia, Austria. In 1905 he moved to Florence to study art, and later enrolled at the University of Florence to study philosophy. His dissertation, Persuasion and Rhetoric, a study of the concepts of persuasion and rhetoric in Plato and Aristotle, was published posthumously. He committed suicide in 1910.
To Mary Williams Winslow 11 December 1914 • Cambridge, England
(MS: Houghton)
Cambridge, Dec. 11, 1914 Dear Mrs Winslow It shocks me to see that Christmas is upon us and no answer yet sent to your last good letter. The War has destroyed my moral. At first it really quite upset me—more than I thought anything could—besides interfering somewhat with my material movements. I was caught in England, and here I remain, partly because all travelling is difficult and partly because this is the place where under the circumstances my feelings are least accerberated by daily contacts with hideous unreason. Of course the newspapers and the political speeches are full of cant, even here; but the living people, especially the young officers, are pure of all malice and intentional passion—really wonderful in their disillusioned courage and humble gallantry. No manufactured hatred here, no politics and philosophy per order. Germany was never more studied or better understood; and if the natural antagonism crops up here and there, it is less unjust than was the former sublime unconsciousness that there was a Germany at all. And Germany deserves to be opposed, because she pushes: she would deserve to be hated if anything could deserve that, because she cultivates hate. But whatever the military result will be, there is nothing to fear from German Kultur. Even if you and I and Polly and little Fred and Big Fred were con-
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quered and annexed by the Fatherland, it would make no difference, because we should conquer it. Every German in three weeks would be as much like us as he could make himself: and as to the Germans remaining (poor things!) in the Fatherland itself, as soon as they heard of my philosophy they would be so ashamed of ever having been Germans that I ^ ^ think they would all pretend—like so many of them I have found about—to be Swedes and Swiss, and not Germans at all. Germans elsewhere are as harmless as a snow storm in the tropics; they may do good but they will never remain snow flakes in doing it. Perhaps in America you are not quite so obsessed as we are here by this War: but I shouldn’t be able to shake off the consciousness merely because others were less preoccupied; on the contrary, it would become a worse thing—like a private sorrow. Here one can work it off, because everyone is thinking of nothing else. I have read and am reading all the German books I can find that throw light on their attitude, and I have begun to write about it1—not particularly because I want to, but because it is impossible to think seriously or consecutively on any other subject. And the whole world puts on a new face in view of this extraordinary present reality. The wars in Herodotus2 (I have been reading that) and all he says about those forgotten nations and tribes take on a strange naturalness and vivacity; of course, that was what they had to be doing. It is only the silly superficial chatter of busy people, perfectly unconscious that they live over an active volcano, that becomes remote and inconceivable. My landlady here makes me quite comfortable, but I am nevertheless somewhat restless. I am going to Brighton for the holidays, for a little change of scene and air, but expect to return here, where Bertrand Russell and other friends keep me from feeling too solitary. I ought now, according to a long layed plan, to be in Rome or at Fiesole, where my friend Strong is already inhabiting his villa, and was expecting me for a long visit. My instinct, however, since the war, is rather to go to Spain. But I fear the cold and the pro-Germans, and I don’t want to be disgusted with my own country. So here I shall stay for the present, until the sky clears a little and we see what is going to happen. My love to Polly and little Fred (if they are not pro-Germans) and best wishes for you all for many new years. Yours sincerely GSantayana P.S. The photographs you speak of of the children never arrived. The War again!
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1
The principal result was Egotism. Herodotus (484–425 B.C.) was a Greek historian, called the father of history. He was known for his nine-volume series that he called “a history of the wars between the Greeks and the barbarians,” which was actually an account of the Persian invasion of Greece. Herodotus’s account details the cultural development and powers of both empires. 2
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 14 December 1914 • Brighton, England
(MS: Virginia) Dec. 14, 1914
OLD SHIP HOTEL , BRIGHTON.
Dear Susie I wrote to Josephine, in answer to your joint letter, two days ago from Cambridge. I was surprised and sorry to realize how long I had been silent, but I hope you have put it down to carelessness (which it was) and not to ill health or any other accident, as I have been perfectly well. You, on the other hand, seem to have been more or less ill; what Josephine said was not clear to me, and your writing in pencil suggested that you might be in bed. I trust, whatever it has been, that you are picking up and feeling stronger. I came here today in just three hours from Cambridge, stopping in London to get some money at the banker’s. It was a rapid journey— Cambridge 12, noon, London, King’s Cross Station, 1.15 '' Victoria '' 1.55 Brighton, 3 o’clock. I kept my taxi waiting ten minutes at Brown Shipley & Co while I did my financial errand; but the close connection left me without any lunch. However, I had beef sandwiches with my tea at four, and feel particularly well—I have just dined!—so that going lunch-less in perhaps good for the health. One is apt to overeat in England, on account of the damp climate. My impression of this place—my room, the hotel, and the general aspect of Brighton, which I had never seen in winter—is rather agreeable and I may remain here a month or so. It is a great change from the scholastic and dowdy atmosphere of Cambridge. It is a haunt of pleasure seekers, and there is a sprinkling of convalescent officers with the devoted females of their family dancing ————— attendants ———— attendance. The “Parade” or street
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along the beach is four miles long—splendid for an uninterrupted walk; and the theatrical and other gay people make it amusing. In spite of the drizzle this afternoon, it reminded me of Nice! The war seems to affect the place only at night, when all bright lighting is forbidden, and the darkness (similar to that in which London is plunged) is rather impressive, and makes the surge of the breakers on the beach very much more impressive. On a clear night it must be very poetical. This compulsory darkness is supposed to be a precaution against Zeppelins or against a sudden landing of a German army: but I can’t think there is much danger of either here, as Brighton is no port, but a long shallow beach, where landing would be impossible and where Zeppelins would hardly waste their bombs: nor is it on the way to London from Germany or Belgium. Anyhow, every one here is perfectly cheerful and happy to take their chances. At the Station I saw some wounded Indians, just arrived from France, going to a camp for convalescents not far from here. They were rather fine-looking, with the true Oriental impassibility. The entrance of Turkey into the war has added very much to its geographical picturesqueness. I think it may also facilitate the issue, as Turkey may be made to pay the price, and satisfy the allies, in case Germany and Austria are not defeated decisively enough to be ^ ^ interfered with themselves. I enclose the stamps (some of which Pepe may not have) which came from Paris with the manuscript of my book, which is now in my possession, as well as the letter of credit I left in Paris. Strong writes from Fiesole that now he is reconsidering the question of the appartment in the Avenue de l’Observatoire and my not give it up after all, as next Spring it will be impossible for him and Margaret to go to Germany as he had planned. So that my books and clothes (which remain in Paris) can probably remain undisturbed [across] indefinitely! Strong wants me to go to Fiesole now, but I think I shall stay in England for the present. [across page five ] Love to Celedonio and all the family tionate brother Jorge
from your affec-
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To Charles Augustus Strong 16 January 1915 • Brighton, England
(MS: Rockefeller) Jan. 16, 1915 OLD SHIP HOTEL , BRIGHTON.
Dear Strong I was very sorry to hear that you have had to go back to Val-Mont and leave Margaret and the villa so soon. I suppose a well-tried cure is the safest offensive defence under the circumstances. I have stayed on here from mere inertia, being tolerably comfortable and having a spell of article-writing. I have asked “The New Republic” to send you a copy of my inculpation of Goethe as an accessory before the ^ ^ fact. There are other articles on Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer1—partly written, partly in petto—but they are too technical for the general public. I mean to send them to the Whited Sepulchre, where one, of a general introductory sort, is already in print. Also one chapter of the Four Realms of Being. You see I too am not idle. Lapsley lent me a history of Germany—two large volumes—which I have been reading, to reinforce my consciousness of what Kultur and German destiny are. Also, I have read both parts of Sinister Street2 and liked it. In a week or so I mean to return to Cambridge and probably stay for the whole winter term. Then, if the coast is clear, I hope to go to Paris at last, and to stay there (circumstances permitting, Deo Germanorum volente,3 until you arrive, when of course I will leave the apartment free for you and Margaret, but will stay on for a while so as to see you. Later my idea is to go to Spain. Of course the war may upset all this—and I suppose you too will be guided in your movements by the facility or danger of travel. Beastly weather for the most part, but with lovely atmospheric effects in the intervals. Yours ever G.S. 1 Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), German philosopher, is best known for his three Critiques. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Kant sets out to determine the cognitive powers of reason. His task is to ascertain what knowledge is possible through pure reason; i.e., reason independent of any other human faculty. His transcendental arguments as well as his distinction between appearances (phenomena) and things-in-themselves (noumena) are developed in this work. Kant’s ethical considerations are the subject of the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) in which he develops his
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conception of moral imperatives and human freedom. The Critique of Judgment (1790) focuses on the beautiful and sublime. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was a German philosopher and proponent of idealism. His system is presented in Phenomenology of Mind (1807), Science of Logic (1812–16), Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1817), and Philosophy of Right (1821). Hegel rejected the existence of finite objects in space and time, establishing instead a rational unity, the Absolute. The quest for understanding the Absolute proceeds according to the Hegelian dialectic in which positing something (thesis), denying it (antithesis), and combining the partial truths in each (synthesis) results in a new thesis. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher who condemned traditional Christian morality as the code of the slavish masses. The will of man must create the superman, who would be beyond good and evil (merely values created by the desires of the majority). Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was a German philosopher whose principle work is The World as Will and Idea (1818). His philosophy opposes the Cartesian primacy of intellect in man and the mechanistic model of nature. Following Kant, Schopenhauer rejected metaphysical theorizing based on rational deduction but claimed that humans cannot avoid metaphysical wonder. The will is an arational force without ultimate purpose or design. There is no dualism. 2 The widely popular Sinister Street (2 vols.), written by Sir Edward Morgan Compton MacKenzie, was published in 1913 and 1914. This book presents a Michael Fane, ‘handicapped by a public school and university education’, passing through school, Oxford, and low life in London. 3 God of the Germans willing.
To Andrew Joseph Onderdonk 23 February 1915 • Cambridge, England
(MS: Houghton)
45 Chesterton Road, Cambridge Feb. 23, 1915 Dear Onderdonk Here is a squib1 that may amuse you. I don’t know whether it ought to be published; if so, it must of course be anonymously. My friend Moncure Robinson, who was here,/ (I mean in London) lately, took away another skit of mine, which I believe he was to put into the Sun,2 of which he is some sort of underling. After you have read this, if you have no further use for it, you might send it to Robinson. I am not sure of his present address: he used to live — in at Sherry’s; but you could easily look him up in the telephone book. If you cared to make his acquaintance, this would be a good opportunity: tell him I sent you. He is a very kind good fellow, of the international American rich set, and very volatile for so big a creature. Yours ever G.S.
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1 “To German Americans,” a ten-page essay, is with the letter at Harvard’s Houghton Library. 2 Unidentified.
To Scofield Thayer 24 February 1915 • Cambridge, England
(MS: Beinecke)
45 Chesterton Road Cambridge Feb. 24, 1915 Dear Thayer I see you make at once for the philosophic marrow in one’s bones. It doesn’t seem to me necessary to take refuge in the somewhat obscurantistical doctrine that philosophy cannot pursue truth, but only orthodoxy. The self-evidence of the principle of contradiction is merely logical: if a thing is one thing (or essence as I should say) it cannot be another. But in nature, as distinct from the essences illustrated there, the principle of contradiction has no certain application. Change and motion, for instance, are opposed to it, and elude expression in thought. We need not assume that the world is rational when we see (just now, alas, better than ever) that it is not. They have made me a member of the Heretics (a way of becoming morganatically orthodox, so to speak) and I hope to drink in your Aesthetica when you pour them out upon us. Yours sincerely GSantayana
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 28 March 1915 • Cambridge, England
(MS: Virginia)
Cambridge, March 28, 1915 Dear Susie I addressed my last letter to Josephine, in answer to a joint one from you and her. Nothing has occurred since. I have been once or twice to London for the day and otherwise have continued my regular life here, writing a great deal of which only a small part, however, is ready or fit for
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the printer. Of course, reading the papers and thinking about the war takes up a large part of one’s time and energy. Until it is over I can’t expect to resume my ordinary manner of life. Nor is it much use to make plans. The path of least resistance is for me to stay in England—here, in London, or at Oxford, which are my old haunts. The spring—delayed by cold weather during the last week—will soon be on us—crocuses and cherry trees are already in bloom—and I foresee that I shall get restless and want to be in London. I have been looking for a nice place there in which to settle down for the Summer, but haven’t yet found anything ideal. There are bachelor flats—sitting-room, bedroom and bath-room, with attendance and meals if one wishes them; but those in Saint James’s (which is the region I like best) are too dear for me, and those that are more reasonable are in Bloomsbury (near the British Museum) a district I have never liked. But I daresay I shall end by taking a little flat there, and try to live down my prejudice. One advantage is that Soho is at hand, where there are many French and Italian restaurants where I can imagine that I am in Paris or Rome. Something Josephine said in her letter made me suspect that she is thinking of America again for the autumn. Unless the war is over (which is hardly likely) we might have some difficulty in coming through France, and might be torpedoed (although so far no good liner has suffered, partly because they are too fast to be caught and partly because the Germans don’t want to exasperate the U.S. by giving the tourists a salt bath) while if we sailed from Gibraltar, the ship would probably be inferior and we might both be very ill, which would be unpleasant. So that unless she feels a very strong pull towards Yankeeland I should suggest waiting until the dove of peace appears with the olive branch. On my own account, I have no intention of going to America for the present. Perhaps I may never screw up my courage to do such a thing again; yet as there are people I should like to see, especially the Potters, I shouldn’t regret the spur which Josephine’s desire to return might put upon me, to make me do it. I went to dinner with the Carlino Perkins’s1 the other night—my first dinner-party for years—and didn’t like it at all. Old frowsy people with nothing but conventional chit-chat and thread-bare sentiments about the war. Bessie Ward2 herself is animated and doesn’t look very old, but she talks of one thing and thinks of another—a horrid trick—and is always changing the subject and being facetious, which also is a bit tiresome. However, I should have forgiven it all if they had had champagne, but they didn’t. Lent, the seriousness of the times, and what they now call in America the “high-brows”, i.e. plain living and confused thinking.
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I have been remarkably well, not having had any return of my bronchial cough, even when not long ago I caught a slight cold in the head. This is very lucky, as the weather has been rather treacherous and uneven this winter, with cold snaps of late. Twice we have had slight snowstorms, everything melting away the next day. There is no doubt that the English climate and way of life suit me admirably. Perhaps, when I settle down, it will be here after all, although I no longer feel the same positive pleasure in being in England which I felt twenty years ago. The positive pleasure now is to be in the South—Rome, Seville, the Riviera, the bay of Naples. But England makes a good “home.”—Love to all and a great deal for yourself from Jorge 1
Unidentified. Unidentified.
2
To Scofield Thayer 31 March 1915 • Cambridge, England
(MS: Beinecke) 45 Chesterton Road Cambridge
March 31, 1915 Dear Thayer It was very good of you to send me Webb’s book.1 I have waited to thank you until I had read it, so as to be able to see first what I had to thank you for. My impression is that the style is charming and that very great skill is displayed in making transitions and in putting the chief points fairly and clearly. Any more trenchant or imaginative history would have been less impartial and would have raised objections in the quarters not treated sympathetically. Webb hardly betrays himself, except perhaps in making a little too much of the Trinity. I am beginning to be attacked by “Spring fever” and am getting restless. You may see me in Oxford before long, if I don’t find tempting quarters in London. Yours sincerely GSantayana
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1 Clement Charles Julian Webb (1865–1954) wrote on theological subjects. Two of his books, A History of Philosophy (London) and Studies in the History of Natural Theology (Oxford), were published in 1915.
To Charles Augustus Strong 4 April 1915 • Cambridge, England
(MS: Rockefeller) C
/o Brown Shipley & Co London
Cambridge, April 4, 1915 Dear Strong It is ages since I got your last letter, but as we both seem to be caught by the war, like flies in fly-paper, there seemed to be no probable change to report in the situation. I hope you and Margaret are enjoying the Spring in your new garden, and that the Germans won’t come to bombard Florence from your terrace. As for me, I have been doing nothing in particular except read, write, and walk, without much idea of getting anywhere by any of the three operations. The war is a daily, and now monotonous, obsession. Sometimes I feel angry with all concerned and think—“It serves you right; do go on shelling and torpedoing one another, until there is nobody left! Good riddance!” The military I see here— Cambridge is full of troops—rather stir my feelings of martial sympathy, and I wish them immense victories, without in the least believing that they will achieve them. T / But then I read some interview by that ponderous ass Lord Haldane,1 and I think a country that can have such a humbug for Lord Chancellor ought to be torpedoed as a whole, and sunk like Atlantis2 in the Channel. As you may imagine, my sentiments about the Germans are even more ferocious; but as I naturally hate the Germans and love the English, the case for Germany is what I try to represent to myself by day and by night.—I suppose you have seen my pro-German (if subtly insidious) article3 in the Whited Sepulchre, else I should send you a copy. I have given up all thoughts of leaving England for the present, and rather expect to take some small flat in London for the summer, so as to satisfy my taste for crowds, for sitting in the park, and for eating in Italian restaurants. Let me know if you are really venturing to cross France—and the Channel!—in spite of the War-Lord-War-Zone. Must you go to America this Summer? After your prolonged stay there last year I should think you might skip it; why not go to Switzerland, to some German-speaking place,
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in lieu of the visit to Germany which you had planned before the Catastrophe? There may be a ———— ressurre ———— resurrection of South Germanism after the war, and Berne or Zürick may become the centres of Cultur (as Nietzsche spells it), superseding Kultur. So that Margaret might lose nothing by getting her impression of things German from that quarter. However, I hope, for my sake, that you will turn up here. Yours ever G.S. 1
Richard Burdon Haldane (1856–1928) was a Scottish statesman and philosopher. Atlantis was an island supposed to have existed in the western sea in ancient times. It is mentioned by Plato; Solon was told of it by an Egyptian priest, who said that it had been overwhelmed by an earthquake and sunk beneath the sea 9,000 years before his time. 3 Possibly “German Philosophy and Politics” (Philosophy 12 [1915]: 645–49). 2
To Josephine Borrás Sturgis 12 April 1915 [postmark] • Cambridge, England
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
QUEENS’ COLLEGE, RIVER FRONT, CAMBRIDGE.
Cambridge. April 12 Thank you for the two numbers of A.B.C. which I received yesterday. I was glad to get a whiff of Spain. Please send me another number occasionally, or the Lectura Dominical. [across] Love to all from
Jorge
To Charles Augustus Strong 21 April 1915 • Cambridge, England
(MS: Rockefeller) Cambridge, April 21, 1915
Dear Strong th Apparently you hadn’t Some days ago I got your nice letter of the 8– yet received one of mine, written not long before. Possibly the censor purloined it, as it contained violent abuse of Lord Haldane. I regard that as abuse of the Germans, but the censor might not have understood. At any rate, I believe I said in it that I have rather given up the idea of leaving England for the present. I mean to go to London for a while, and if the war
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goes on, perhaps to return here. The idea of travelling now, and feeling the change, rather repels me. However, I may change again at any time. If you decide to keep the apartment in Paris of course it will be a great convenience to me, and my books shall remain there. It will be very nice if next year we can renew our peaceful ways there in peace. But who knows what may be going on then? [A page is blacked out here, probably by the censor.] I am getting very weary of this inconclusive warfare, and begin to fear an inconclusive peace. Horrible, if they all begin at once preparing for the next war. I am glad to know your health is so much better. But need you go to America this Summer? That h/ won’t be good for you. As for me, I have been wonderful ly well all winter, but morally restless and distressed, and ^ ^ I feel older. You [across] may perhaps say that it was time I did. Yours ever G.S.
To Celedonio Sastre Serrano 1 May 1915 [postmark] • Cambridge, England
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE, LIBRARY, CAMBRIDGE.
Cambridge 1ro de Mayo.1 He tenido mucho gusto en recibir tu tarjeta del 22 de Abril, que llegó el 27. Estoy en vísperas de trasladarme á Oxford. Recuerdos á todos. Jorge 1 Translation: I have had much joy in receiving your postcard of April 22, that arrived on the 27. It is the day before I move to Oxford. Remembrances to everyone.
To Bertrand Arthur William Russell 5 May 1915 [postmark] • Oxford, England
(MS postcard: McMaster)
IFFLEY MILL. th
Oxford, May 5
I read this about “war-babies” in a Spanish newspaper: “Kitchener,1 in creating an army, has created love. This is a great change in a country where only marriage was known before.” G.Santayana
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1 Horatio Herbert Kitchener (1850–1916), first earl of Khartoum and of Broome, was an Irish-born British soldier. After reorganizing the British military systems in Egypt, South Africa, and India, he was made an earl in 1914 and, with the outbreak of World War I, was made Secretary of State for War. He died when the ship in which he was traveling to Russia struck a mine.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 9 May 1915 • Oxford, England
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
OXFORD, HERTFORD COLLEGE BRIDGE.
Oxford, May 9th 1915 nd Thank you for the ABC of the 2– and the Lectura Dominical of the 1–st .— Oxford is very lovely at this season, but one’s mind is not in a state to enjoy the scene. The plot thickens, and life is becoming a nightmare. Jorge
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 25 May 1915 • Oxford, England
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
OXFORD, MERTON COLLEGE. (FOUNDED A.D.
66 High Street Oxford,
1264).
May 25, 1915
Thank you for your letter of the 20th and ABC’s of the 19th & 20th This year has seemed a long one and I am afraid we shall have a long drawn agony for another year at least.—I am having a nice time here, seeing more people than at Cambridge. [across] Love to all. Jorge
To Charles Augustus Strong 26 May 1915 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 66 High Street Oxford May 26, 1915
Dear Strong: Since the intervention of Italy became imminent I have often wondered if it would affect your plans, or whether the dangers of the Al/tlantic would not keep you this year from going to America. If you received my recent
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letter, you know that for the present I am not thinking of leaving England. In Oxford I am having a much more amusing time than in Cambridge. The place is also incomparably more beautiful and attractive. I dined the other day with Webb (author of a charming little history of philosophy) at Magdalen, and sat next to the President,1 a perfectly affable and delightful person, more like a sort of ambassador than like a Don. Several of my old pupils are here, and I am seeing a good deal of them and of their friends, so that I am for the moment quite happy in my old element of extreme youth. This evening I am to talk to a club of theirs, and on Sunday I read a paper to the Philosophical Society, in Schiller’s rooms. All this, with the splendid summer weather, does something to relieve one of the asphyxiating gases of the war. By the way, at the risk of having this letter stopped by the censor, I should like to ask you what you think, and what you hear, of the wisdom of Italy in intervening, when to the uninitiated observer the situation of Germany seems so dominant and unshakable. Are the Italians fools? Are they so conceited that they think they will turn the tables? Or are they in possession of secret information that gives them an assurance of success? Even in this case, I can’t help shuddering at the terrible losses, the lives, the wounds, the ruin that nothing adequate that I can see will make up for. Of course, in general I am very glad that Italy has come in, since it not only adds to the forces arrayed against Germany, but proves that persons who must be well-informed are sure that she can be defeated. But if I were an Italian, I should be terribly distressed—perhaps because I am naturally a coward. I understand Florence is to be the residence of the Court during the war. In that case you will have a lively scene before you—and more Red Cross2 work for Margaret than ever. The heat, if you avoid the sun, may be rather pleasant. Yours ever G.S. 1
The president of Magdalen College in 1915 was Sir Thomas Herbert Warren. The Red Cross, established at the Geneva convention of 1864, is an international organization for the alleviation of human suffering and the promotion of public health. A red cross on a white background (the Swiss flag with its colors reversed) is its symbol. The Red Cross is supported entirely by voluntary contributions. 2
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To Wendell T. Bush 13 June 1915 • Oxford, England
(MS: Columbia)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, London. Oxford, June 13, 1915
r
Dear M Bush Your last letter has remained too long without an answer. Here at last is a version of what was to have been my first lecture on Philosophical Heresies.1 Of course, you may print it in the Journal if you like, but I have undertaken so many subjects at once that I don’t know when the succeeding lectures will be written, if they ever are. All idea of going to America this year is given up, of course: I am even in doubt about leaving England at all. Restless and troubled as one’s life is here, I feel it might be worse elsewhere; and since I came from Cambridge to Oxford I have had the distractions of society in a much greater degree. I have even addressed an undergraduate club, and read the first part of this paper to the Ox. Phil. Soc. And I write away madly, although not to any good purpose. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 “Philosophical Heresy,” Philosophy 12 (1915): 561–68. Original manuscript is not housed with this letter.
To Charles Augustus Strong 19 June 1915 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont Street Oxford, June 19, 1915
Dear Strong Thank you very much for your interesting letter of the 6th (only just received and delayed, I suppose, by the censor). It is indeed good news that you are feeling so fit and hoping to have your book finished this summer. It will be particularly interesting and useful for me to see your clarified and decisive statement of your case for a psychic substance before my own description of the Realm of Matter is complete. I have been writing a
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great deal, but not on the big book; only articles and confused stuff about the Germans. After I wrote to you I read Salaandra’s1 great speech in justification of his policy, and gathered from it an answer to my questions. It is the same that you suggest, namely that Italy feared to be choked in her ambitions and in her independence by a dominant German coalition. And the fear, I think, was well justified. Let us hope that, in the end, we may all escape the danger of being crushed by the German juggernaut, political and moral. Sometimes, when things look very dark, I try to console myself with the thought that if we were subdued, we still should vanquish the victor and make him thorough ly ashamed of being German. In the days when ^ ^ I still wrote verses I tried to describe what happened to barbarians when they conquered Spain: “The Semite became noble unawares”;2 and perhaps the German might become a gentleman in the same way. I have been driven into new lodgings in Oxford, which are more spatious and genteel, and I may stay until the Summer begins to wane, when I hope (submarines consenting) to cross the Channel. I should like and yet should not like to go to Spain—vorrei e non vorrei, as Zerlina says to Don Giovanni3—because I want to get away from the war, but fear to fall into embittered controversies about it, my sister (and her people I suppose) being pro-German because clerical. What you suggest about joining you on your return to Fiesole sounds most attractive: I should per —refer that to a pro-German, even if neutral, atmosphere, apart from the pleasure of being with you and in your villa, and in delightful Italy. Even if I should decide to go to Spain first, I should like immensely to go to you later in the autumn. Perhaps I may wait for you in England, and we could make the whole journey south together. Yours ever G.S. 1
Antonio Salandra (1853–1931), an Italian statesman, succeeded Giolitti as premier in 1914. He immediately declared Italian neutrality in World War I. In 1915 he signed the Treaty of London with the Western powers, denounced the Triple Alliance, and declared war on Austria. He resigned in 1916. 2 From “Spain in America, written after the destruction of the Spanish fleet in the Battle of Santiago, in 1898.” See Complete Poems, 244. 3 “I would, and I would not.” Don Giovanni is Mozart’s opera about a lifelong profligate who seduces Donna Anna, the daughter of the commander of Seville, and then kills her father. Later, a statue of Donna’s father comes to life and drags Giovanni to hell. Zerlina is a peasant whom Giovanni unsuccessfully tries to lure from her fiancé, Masetto.
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To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 29 June 1915 • Oxford, England
(MS: Virginia) 22 Beaumont Street Oxford, June 29, 1915
Dear Susie This evening I receive your letter of the 22nd which I have read with some surprise. If I had known how you felt about the war I should never have written my previous letter or sent you those clippings. It is useless to irritate any one with things contrary to their settled convictions, especially when it makes no difference whether, in a matter so far beyond one’s personal control, one’s opinions happen to be right or wrong. I knew you were inclined to be pro-German, but supposed you might be agreeable/y interested in other views, especially those which prevail in the U.S. But in view of the intensity of your sympathies, I am very sorry to have expressed mine in so far as they are opposed to yours, which they are by no means in all respects. Of course I too am too old, and my feelings spring from too many deep and remote sources in the past, for me to change, or to be influenced by newspaper arguments. When I read them I form perhaps a new opinion of the newspaper but — simp seldom a new opinion on the subject discussed. We must put up with other people’s irrationalities, and with our own, which are far more troublesome. As I wrote to Josephine the other day, I have moved to new and better lodgings. You mustn’t count on seeing me in September; I may go to Fiesole with Strong instead, or even remain here. Much depends on the course of the war and on my feeling whether, by staying quiet, I could push forward my various literary “jobs”.—Love to all from Jorge
To Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller 4 August 1915 • Oxford, England
(MS: Houghton) 22 Beaumont Street Oxford, Aug. 4, 1915
Dear Fuller Are you sure that I haven’t written to you for so long? I think I remember penning an epistle from Cambridge, but it may have been longer ago
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than I think, or it may have been stopped by the Censor. However I will tell you today the little I have to tell. First, as to your letter. Without knowing the new people in the philosophical department at Harvard it is hard for me to judge whether you would be happy with them or they with you. I have preached to you by example; but example is really no maxim, since cases are different, and trying as I can well see that you might find professing for life, it would have the advantage of justifying your existence before Mrs Minerva Grundy,1 and of keeping you in contact with old habits and old amenities—for there are amenities at Harvard, at least while you are there. But I can’t take the teaching of philosophy seriously in itself, either as a means of being a philosopher ——— oneself ———— or of teaching the young anything solid: they merely flirt with that for a year or two instead of flirting with something else. Philosophy is not a science; it might be a life or a means of artistic expression, but it is not likely to be either at an American college. So that, substantially, I shouldn’t feel that you were missing anything if you abandoned the whole thing. You could still read and think and write, if you had anything to say; and you could still live with you r friends and be an ^^ ornament to Sherborn.2 When the war is over I may go on a visit to America, and then I will knock at your gate, and we can talk all this over at leisure. Is your “primer” to be a work of art—the first chapter on “What is philosophy” rather suggests that—or is it to be a hand-book for cramming on the day before an examination?3 In the latter case, I should n’t introduce any views of my own, for they will be learned by heart and deposited on the examination paper like a chemical precipitate of your best thoughts. I should begin with Thales and water which is refreshing, wholesome, and unforgettable.4 I too am writing a book—or rather three books, but the Realms of Being are in abeyance until the noise of explosives subsides—and bits of it are appearing in The New Republic; also other articles, for somehow the war, in making me very unhappy, has made me very prolific in a miscellaneous way. I have even attempted to write verses again, but in this I have failed. However, I spend my whole time over books and papers, hardly seeing anyone or opening my lips for weeks and weeks. I don’t suffer from solitude, but I have suffered a good deal—less lately—from the war. You may say, “why less lately, when things have been going from bad to worse?” Because I am weary of it all, my feelings blunted, and my mind resigned. The cries of this camp or that are folly: what does it mean to fight for “our
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very existence”, or what to “crush militarism?” That is all rot. Germany will annex more or less land; England will be safe enough at home with conscription and a lesson in the futility of liberalism and the shocking incompetence of politicians. Every body will be poorer—not a bad thing altogether—and we shall be able to travel about untorpedoed until the next scrimmage. Voilà.5 I send you, with comments, part of a letter6 I received today. Yours ever G.S. 1
Mrs. Grundy is the symbol of rigid conventional propriety which originated in Thomas Morton’s Speed the Plough (1798). 2 Fuller’s home,’Tween Waters, was at Sherborn, Massachusetts. 3 History of Greek Philosophy, Thales to Democritus (New York and London, 1923). 4 Thales (c. 624–546 B.C.), the earliest recorded Greek philosopher, taught that water, in all its forms, was the principle of everything. 5 There it is. 6 Unlocated.
To Horace Meyer Kallen 11 August 1915 • Oxford, England
(MS: YIVO)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, London.
Oxford, June 13, 1915 Dear Kallen Your address on Nationality,1 for which I am much obliged, seems to put its finger on the right spot. Nationality seems to be behind the restlessness, ambition, and obduracy that brought the war about, behind the endurance and zeal of the combatants, and also before their eyes (in every camp) in so far as they see anything at all before them to aim at. But in a popular address you naturally couldn’t broach the questions that arise in the analytic mind on such a subject. If ninetenths of a man’s individuality is are his nationality, nationality must cover a good deal that is common — to all men, and much that is common to very few. And I hardly see how nationality, in this moral and inward sense, is to find political expression. Such national movements as the Italian, Balkan, or Irish are movements to establish what you call nationhood; so is Zionism,2 I suppose. Yet you hardly look to seeing the various nationalities in the U.S. establish special governments; I am not sure (I am so ignorant) whether the Pale3 is a dis-
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trict so preponderantly Jewish that a Jewish local government could be hoped for there. In these cases Nationality would have to be a voluntary and hazy thing: the degree to which anyone possessed it, the intensity and scope of his nationalism would be impossible to fix. And surely — their there is an American nationality as definite and potent as any other, and on the same plane as the Irish, German, Jewish, etc. Every hyphenated American will therefore have two nationalities: and I don’t understand exactly what you think should be the relation between them. In other words, aren’t you hesitating between the idea of a universal government with all nationalities free under it, and the idea of one nationality one government? It is the difficulty of realizing either of these ideals that seems to me to make nationality a problem rather than a solution. There is no change in my life since I last described it to you. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 “Nationality and the Jewish State in the Great War: An Address Delivered at the Third Annual Menorah Convention, at the University of Cincinnati, in Cincinnati, Ohio, December 22, 1914” (New York, 1915). 2 Zionism is an international movement originally for the establishment of a Jewish national or religious community in Palestine and later for the support of modern Israel. 3 In Russia the Pale designated those regions in which Jews were allowed to live. The Jewish Pale was established at the first partition of Poland. Many of the restrictions of the system were in force until the Revolution of 1917.
To Charles Augustus Strong 14 August 1915 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller)
22 Beaumont Street Oxford. Aug 14, 1915 Dear Strong Your new plan for the autumn suits me just as well as the old, and we shall doubtless be able to arrange spending it together in one place or another, according to the political situation. For my own part I shouldn’t at all mind staying in Oxford (where I have never had such nice rooms before) until Christmas, or until the war is over; but of course, if the path is clear, I should prefer to go to Italy, or to Paris, if you think that is better under the circumstances. I don’t think I should want to stay in Paris all winter; but if you wanted to be near Margaret I could go to Spain or to the Riviera, and join you later at Fiesole, when you went home. However, I
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understand that our plans must be revised from time to time according to events. The Germans may yet get to Paris, in which case the best place for us all would be England, where one can be comfortable and safe all the year round. Let me know when you expect to arrive in London and I will go to meet you there. An old acquaintance, E. P. Warren1 (a Bostonian Oxford man) has asked me to go to spend the week Sept. 3–10 at his house in Lewes, near Brighton. A week seems a long time, and I may shorten the visit, but in any case I shall be about London, and on the move, during the first part of September. Then I expect to return here, where I shall stay until we find we can realize some other pilgrimage. I am glad your book is in such good shape and am anxious to hear your new exposition of the questions at issue. Yours ever G.S. 1
E. P. Warren (1860–1928) was an American art connoisseur and poet.
To Charles Augustus Strong 27 August 1915 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller)
22 Beaumont Street Oxford, Aug 27, 1915 Dear Strong It is very nice to think of you in Paris, that seems so near, and to expect th I you in London in a fortnight. If you are to arrive on Wednesday the 8– will make a point of being there to receive you; it will be a great pleasure and at the same time your arrival will give me a good excuse for shortenth ing a visit which I am expected to make at Lewes from the 3rd to the 10– . As E. P. Warren, my host, is a comparatively slight though old acquaintance of mine, I feel that a whole week may be too long: I will therefore th ask him not to expect me to stay after Tuesday the 7– , so as to be in London when you are due. If you are coming earlier or later, please let me know, and if I am not in town at the moment, I will come to greet you and Margaret as soon as possible. Moncure Robinson is expecting me at th After that, I shall be quite Stamford, in Rutlandshire, for Sunday the 12– free, with my headquarters still in Oxford, in these nice lodgings.
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As to hotels in London I have never found anything I liked. When I don’t take a flat (which involves having one’s meals out) I now go to the Grand Hotel in Trafalgar Square, which is clean, well-furnished, and not very large but of course commonplace, not to say vulgar. The Bushes were in a quiet hotel close to the National Gallery, in a cul-de-sac: it seemed attractive; when I go to London on Monday I will look up the street and name, and send you word, if my second impression of the place is as favourable as the first. I suppose you know the dingy old Bostonian Burlington Hotel in Cork Street, behind the Burlington Arcade. Brown’s, in Dover and Albermarle Streets, is a little smarter. These two are convenient for shopping. The Hyde Park Hotel, Albert Gate, Knightsbridge, is a high thing overlooking the Park and might be pleasant at this season. I have never seen the inside of it. Address C/o Brown Shipley & Co as I am not sure where I shall be myself. Yours ever G.S.
To Charles Augustus Strong 1 September 1915 • London, England
(MS: Rockefeller)
3 Ryder Street S.W. September 1st 1915 Dear Strong Here is the card1 of the Bushe’s little hotel in Suffolk Street, close to the foot of the Haymarket. It seems a quiet place, but perhaps the neighbourhood is not what you would like. September 16th will be a date on which I can easily be in London. Let me know if your plan should change Yours ever G.S. 1
Unlocated.
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To Robert Shaw Sturgis 14 September 1915 • North Luffenham, England (MS postcard: Sanchez) THE HALL N. LUFFENHAM.
Sept. 14, 1915 I have been away from Oxford for a fortnight, at Lewes and here with Moncure Robinson. Was in London on the night of the raid, but wasn’t hit. A lively time for ten minutes. I return to Oxford tomorrow. G.S.
To Charles Augustus Strong 15 September 1915 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller)
22 Beaumont St. Oxford Sept. 15, 1915 Dear Strong I hope you have had a pleasant journey and will find Garlant’s comfortable. Mrs Russell1 (with whom and Mrs Berenson I lunched on Monday to meet Henry James2—great occasion!) also recommends the place. If you will kindly telegraph to me here, I will come on Friday at 12.30 and stay until the evening, when you can tell me your plans and we can make arrangements for being together in the immediate future. I returned to Oxford the day before yesterday after a fortnight’s absens/ce, as here I ^ ^ am more comfortable, safer, and more disposed to work than in town. I th was in London on the night of the raid, the 8– , and it was a great sensation, but not one to be courted without necessity. I will tell you my experiences when we meet. I should think, when sleep is so likely to be disturbed, you wouldn’t care to stay long in London. Why not come here? You could always go to town for the day when it was necessary. There are good trains at 10.3 and 10.40 from Oxford, and (returning) at 4.55, 6.15 ^ ^ and 7.30, the last with a restaurant-car in which one can get a very decent dinner and while away the journey with no loss of time. This is what I usually do when I go to London, and I find that arrangement pleasanter, simpler, and cheaper than going for the night with luggage, cabs, etc. Also, one sleeps here with less fear of hell let loose in the heavens. ^ ^ I shall therefore expect a telegram on Friday morning, and come for the day, unless you have some new plan. Yours ever G.S.
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1 Bertrand Russell married four times. His first wife was Alys Pearsall Smith (1867–1951), the daughter of Hannah Tatum Whitall and Robert Pearsall Smith. They were married from 1894 to 1921. 2 The novelist Henry James (1843–1916), brother of philosopher William James, graduated from Harvard Law School and lived the remainder of his life in Europe. His notable works include The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Bostonians (1886).
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 26 September 1915 • Oxford, England
(MS: Virginia) 22 Beaumont Street, Oxford Sept. 26, 1915
Dear Susie Strong and his daughter Margaret arrived in England ten days ago. I went to London to see them and afterwards they came on here and established themselves in my old lodgings in the High, where Strong still is, while Margaret is visiting various friends in or near London. She is to go to Newnham, one of the girl’s colleges at Cambridge, although her ^ ^ father for a while seemed to be afraid that bombs and even licencious soldiery might burst upon her there, and endanger her life or at least her honour. His mind now seems to be reassured—although the danger from bombs is real, though of course the chances of being actually hit — is are infinitise esimal. I now come to the point, and my reason for writing all — this, which in itself can hardly interest you. Strong, while his daughter is in England, wants to remain here too, so as not to be separated from her by some possible interruption of travel between England and the Continent. Hence, as he will not return to Paris or Fiesole for the present, there is no incentive for me to go to either place. This, added to the difficulties of travel on account of passports and other formalities, points to the advisability of my remaining where I am—possibly until the end of the war. I am very well, and (but for the war) perfectly happy: I see interesting people, work enough, and live economically. The only reason for moving would be the desire to see you and all the others at Avila again: but on the other hand I don’t think if I went to Spain under the present circumstances my stay there would be long or altogether pleasant. Peace and neutrality ^ ^ there do not extend to the mind, while here, on account of the very excitements and griefs of the war, there is a sort of common understanding and even zest in the air which is not unpleasing; at least one knows what to expect in people, and can live without friction. My idea is to stay in Oxford
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till December and then to go to some watering place like Brighton, Bath, or Bournemouth, to spend the darker and colder months, returning here again in the Spring, when Oxford is at its best, materially and socially. I am going tomorrow once more to Moncure Robinson’s for three days. Lord Russell has returned from Rhodesia (where he went to inspect a gold mine of which he is chairman) and I shall probably go on a visit to him before long. They say he is about to marry (being just divorced for the second time) the Countess von Arnim,1 a novellist, English but formerly married to a German, and a lady with grown up daughters (a thing of evil omen, for any day Russell may elope with one of them). At least this third spouse is a person of more character and education than her predecessors, but I have no expectation that the marriage will be happy or lasting. Another person I have lately seen (for the first time) is Henry James. He is seventy three, and not very well in health; but he was entertaining, and greeted me in particular very effusively and even affectionately, giving me the delicious sensation of being a young man whom one’s respectable and distinguished elders wish to pat on the head. If he had done so materially as well as metaphorically he would have found as little hair there as on his own. You see I have been very gay of late: and I could tell of other curious people I have been seeing. Now that I am frankly and unmistakably an old gentleman, I find my place in the social world more congenial than formerly, especially in England where people exact nothing and do not pester one with forced conversation, as in the U.S. Both kindliness and malice seem to fall more gracefully and ripely from an old tree than from a stripling; besides as people are no longer interested in one’s person they take one for what one says: and that is a boon. Love to all from Jorge 1
In 1891 Mary Annette Beauchamp (1866–1941) had married Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin (d. 1910). Her most successful book was Elizabeth and Her German Garden (1898). Later she signed her writings “Elizabeth.” Russell divorced Mollie to marry Elizabeth in 1916. Elizabeth left Russell in 1918 and moved to France. Her novel, Vera (1921), is a characterization of her life with Russell, who is represented as a vindictive egomaniac. See Persons, 479–86.
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To Charles Augustus Strong 9 October 1915 • Bournemouth, England
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(MS: Rockefeller) Saturday October 9, 1915 GRAND HOTEL, BOURNEMOUTH.
Dear Strong I am settled here rather comfortably, and expect to stay for a fortnight, when I trust my cough will be quite gone, as it is already much better. Bournemouth is something like Cannes or Aix—a sort of garden city, much prettier than Brighton, but not so large, Brighton being relatively more like Nice. Most people here are lame ducks, but there is a good sprinkling of unwounded officers and people apparently well—mostly old women. The weather, so far, excellent and very mild. The promenade in the morning is on the pier, where there is a band; there are concerts (sometimes excellent) at an ugly green house called a winter garden, and there is one street with gay shops and a good deal of passing. Otherwise one is confined to communing with the sad sea waves or with the pines, or with oneself in one of the charming public gardens which are nestled among the slopes of the cliffs. This hotel is second class; the Ra/oyal Bath Hotel, where I spent my first night is better, but not for my purposes. But I sometimes go to have tea in their lounge where there is decent music and smarter people. I hope Margaret is satisfactorily settled and that you find London congenial. Yours ever G.S.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 13 October 1915 [postmark] • Bournemouth, England (MS postcards: Sanchez) PIER AND SANDS FROM EAST CLIFF, BOURNEMOUTH
Bournemouth Oct. 13 th which has just reached me here, where Thank you for your letter of the 9– I came from Oxford a few days ago to get rid of a touch of cough which I
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had caught, and which it was desirable to shake off quickly, lest it should cling to me all winter. INVALIDS WALK, BOURNEMOUTH.
2. I am already almost right, and expect to return to Oxford in a fortnight.— Strong has recovered his courage, deposited Margaret at Newnham, and gone himself to live in the very heart of London!—The Isle of Wight is visible from here; but I prefer large towns, where there are people and movement. [Unsigned ]
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 17 October [1915] • Bournemouth, England
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
DURLEY CHINE, BOURNEMOUTH.
Bournemouth Oct. 17, Strong, scared again by the actual sound of bombs, has left London and joined me here. We expect to return to Oxford in a week. My cough is almost gone and I am enjoying the beautiful weather and walks along the sea. As to the war, I am getting more callous and weary of it every day. Jorge
To Charles Augustus Strong [October or November 1915] • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller)
Beaumont Street Oxford. Friday evening1 Dear Strong A word to say the restaurant-car was a perfect oven and crowded this evening. If tomorrow is an equally warm day I should urge you to come ^ ^ if possible by the earlier train, 4.55–6.5, or else 6.15–7.32, when you could still dine here. Yours ever G.S.
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1 ‘October or November 1915’ is written on this letter in a hand other than that of Santayana.
To Mary Williams Winslow 4 November 1915 • Oxford, England
(MS: Houghton) C
/o Brown Shipley & Co London
Oxford, Nov. 4. 1915 Dear Mrs Winslow The children, and what you allow me incidentally to spy of you and your engaging husband, appear to less advantage in their photographs than in my memory. I especially resent seeing little Fred in goggles instead of a nimbus. However, disillusions rain upon us in these days from every ^ ^ side, and you know my philosophy has always been that disillusion is the only safe foundation for happiness. I am therefore waiting sadly for the end of the war; I wish I could go to sleep and wake up at the peace—whatever it may be, so that I might begin at once to readjust myself to fate. Now we don’t know what our fate is—although I have a shrewd suspicion—and the horror of life and the horror of death oppress us together. Extreme situations they say bring out one’s true character; and I am sorry to observe that these overwhelming events make me more selfish than ever. I find myself arguing with myself against my few remaining affections—not that for you and yours, which brings no remorse with it, but my affection for England, for instance, or for the life of reason. I say to myself: “Why do you care for that hopelessly dissolving and unrealizable thing? Why don’t you love the dear good Germans—such well-equipped animals—instead? Why don’t you reconcile yourself fundamentally to everything in this world being unjust, irrational, and ugly? You might then sleep peacefully, and not tremble every morning when you unfold your newspaper.” But it won’t do: I have suppressed the newspaper, as I gather quite enough from posters and conversation and the extras which I can’t always resist buying in the evening; but I can’t suppress the unrest. And what every fresh person tells you who returns from the front is so horrifying—I meet them everywhere—that one is not allowed to forget the troubles of others in one’s own comfortable and stupid routine of life. Some times, when I have written and sent off some article or had a drink (which is not more frequently) I have a moment of peace. Otherwise all is war, war in the world, in the
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mind, in the heart, in the family—because my sister, who is the nearest person to me now, is a rabid and relentless pro-German. Of course I don’t write to her about the matter, and she probably doesn’t suppose that her way of feeling makes me unhappy, but if I said what I think it would be this: “You imagine that my sympathetic way of tolerating absurdity and fiction in religion will extend to perversity and fiction in politics: but not at all. If one were not governed in religion by emotion and imagination one could have no religion at all—for imagination and emotion are the substance of it. It is to be tolerated and even respected nevertheless, because men have no adequate knowledge and no trained courage in respect to their destiny: they therefore have to make believe something or other, and that is their necessary religion. But politics is a matter of fact, of history, of morals: perversity in that is intolerable. See how people have to die because of it.” But if I said this to my sister she would think it wicked nonsense and be as much distressed about it as I am at the wicked nonsense which she luxuriates in about Germany and England. About my movements there is little to say. I have found nice lodgings here, I take long walks, often lunching on bread and cheese and a glass of “bitter” at some country inn. Strong is here, also other old and new friends. I don’t do much work, although I am supposed to be writing three separate books. Perhaps you have seen my articles in the “New Republic”. [across] They are my chief sign of life at present. I have also written a sonnet—such a bad, awkward sonnet—[across last page ] for Mrs Wharton’s war book.1—Thank you so much for writing. Yours sincerey G.Santayana 1
Edith Newbold Jones Wharton (1862–1937), American novelist and short-story writer, is known for her studies of the tragedies and ironies of life. A follower of Henry James, her work is marked by an interest in psychological characterization, preoccupation with manners and morals, and adherence to artistic form. During World War I, she received the Cross of the Legion of Honor for her relief work in Paris. Santayana’s sonnet,“The Undergraduate Killed in Battle,” appears in The Book of the Homeless, ed. Wharton (New York: Scribner’s, 1916). See Complete Poems, 134.
1910–1920
To Lawrence Smith Butler 13 November 1915 • Oxford, England
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(MS: University Club)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, London. Oxford, Nov. 13, 1915
1
Dear Lawrence Mrs Potter writes me that you have lost your mother, and I know what a great sorrow that must be for you. For almost anybody the death of a mother cuts deeper than any other bereavement, it strikes more at the roots of one’s life and seems to require a new beginning and almost a new character in oneself. One becomes a senior, a person of the older generation, whose past is buried out of sight of the world, and has become strange and mysterious to other people, and almost to oneself. But in your case there must be something more, because you all lived in such complete sympathy, like contemporaries, and all kept young together. Your mother was one of the most perfect and ideal mothers I have ever seen, absorbed in her children and living their lives without sentimentality and without interfering with their liberty. She deserved what she obtained, which is so rare, that you all remained about her after you were grown up, not from necessity, but by instinct and through affection. I am sure you must have made her as happy as she made you. More than once since I left America I have been on the point of writing, but put it off, perhaps expecting that you would turn up some day in Paris, where I have had my headquarter’s, at my friend Strong’s (once a professor at Columbia) at 9 Avenue de l’Observatoire. I have asked about you when I have come across any of our common friends, like Moncure Robinson—but never heard of any change in your way of living. Now perhaps you will get married at last, as we have all expected you to do these many years. No doubt for the present you are not thinking of that. If you feel lost and troubled by the foolish noise and flurry that you probably see about you, in that extraordinarily loud New York, it occurs to me that you might find something to do that would at once be worthy of your sorrow and help you to forget it if you came to France and did some work for the wounded. Mr Harjes (of Morgan Harjes) has an American ambulance in which some of my young friends have been employed; and if you had your own motor perhaps you might join some purely French ambulance
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corps, if you preferred that.2 I believe my friend Pierre Abreu has done so. Those who have helped in France all seem to be very much deepened and steadied by it, as are the French themselves by this war. I am not one of those who say that anything so fearful is good for people, better than what they might have seen and felt in times of peace: but it certainly contains compensations for all the hardening and suffering which it brings—that people live in the presence of the terrible realities of this world, instead of nursing their comfortable illusions. The war has made me very unhappy, and incidentally has upset all my plans. I have found nice lodgings in Oxford (where I have always liked to live) and am waiting for the storm to blow over. I may go to America for two months next year, if the war lasts; but I am longing, when peace returns, to go back to Paris, Spain, and Italy. Now the journey is troublesome, and I don’t want to be nearer the horrors of war (since I am useless) than I can help. Here we feel much bitterness and disappointment at the course things are taking, but the young people are splendid, and material life goes on much as usual.—How nice it would be if you should come here for a few days! You probably have no idea of how much affection—at least for me!—I have always felt for you, and what an unmixed pleasure it is to remember you, as I do very often. Yours affectionately GSantayana P.S. Excuse this scrawl in pencil. I am writing at a country inn, one of those to which I now walk out to lunch whenever the weather is fair—to lunch on bread and cheese and a glass of beer, which is all these places afford. But the skies and fields are very beautiful, and I like the solitude. 1 Santayana met Lawrence Smith Butler (1875–1954) during an 1895 Atlantic crossing. After graduation from Harvard in 1898, Butler studied at the Beaux Arts and became an architect. He cultivated his fine tenor voice, studying with Jean de Reszke in Paris. But, like Oliver Alden (of Puritan), he could only sing what he felt and, hence, failed to become an artist vocally. (See Persons, 381–82.) 2 See 9 Sep 1905 for Morgan Harges & Co. Mr. Harges is unidentified. Oliver Alden drove an ambulance in France in World War I. See Puritan, 515.
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To the editor of The New Republic 5 January [1916] • Oxford, England
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(MS: Unknown)
Sir:1 Protests against your “pro-Germanism” have already had this good effect, that they have made you speak out. May I add another protest, in the hope that it may provoke you to still greater clearness? I think greater clearness on your part is desirable. I have no objection to a German being a German, or a pro-German a pro-German. I read a violently Germanophile Spanish paper regularly and with pleasure. I know that honest men are passionate and that passion is blind. In a “clearing-house of opinion” I expect various principles, prejudices, and sympathies to find expression, and I am grateful that my own notions should be courteously admitted there, unshorn and unvarnished. My protest is directed exclusively against your editorial ambiguity. From the beginning the undercurrent of your writing has not been in keeping with your overt opinions. It has been impossible not to feel that if public opinion did not embarrass you you would be far more pro-German than you are. Many an article has begun with an insinuating friendliness towards the Allies that has had a pro-German sting in its tail. If you are really in favor of an inconclusive peace which requires some speedy check to German successes, why do you celebrate the last triumph of German diplomacy and the entry of Bulgaria into the war—somewhat sugaring the pill in another column? And why do you entitle this partisan article “The Debt of Bulgaria to the Allies?” The result can only be that the non-reader should suppose that the article was anti-German, and the confused reader, perhaps, that it was somehow impartial. Your recent explanations do not clear the air. You say you desire an inconclusive peace that shall teach Germany that aggression does not pay. A peace that did this would not be inconclusive; it would be “the destruction of Prussian militarism.” Militarism does not consist in having an army, but in the systematic abuse of an army and a people for the settled purpose of aggression; so that, for instance, it can be put forth as a marvel of forbearance (and of preparation) that after three successful wars fought in rapid succession, forty-three years should have been allowed to elapse before delivering the next blow. To renounce this hereditary policy would be for official Germany to be “crushed”; for the official politics, philosophy, patriotism and glory of the last hundred years to be entirely renounced and transformed. As to the remoter past and the future of the
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German people left to its unforced genius and idyllic emotions, no one who has lived among them can have anything but good-will. What terms of peace have you in mind that would suffice to teach Germany that aggression does not pay, while not inflicting any wound, such as the loss of properly German territory, which would rankle and call for revenge? Could these be less than an indemnity to Belgium, the loss of all the German colonies, the cession of Posen to a reconstituted Poland, and of Metz and the French-speaking districts in the Vosges to France, while the rest of Alsace became a sovereign state within the German Empire? To secure some such terms, if they could ever be secured—terms which would only just save the world from being dominated by terror—a fearful up-hill task, a campaign of months and perhaps years, confronts the Allies, for whose efforts and wrongs your heart does not seem to feel the least sympathy, although they are fighting for what you profess to desire, and for your benefit as well as for their own. As to an inconclusive peace, which I take to mean the restoration of the status quo ante bellum2 but with Turkey and the Balkans henceforth under German influence, that would not teach Germany that aggression does not pay, but only, as the Kaiser3 has said, that everything is not to be attained at one bound, and that something must be left for future generations to conquer. George Santayana. Oxford, January 5th. 1 Herbert David Croly (1869–1930), initial editor of The New Republic, conceived the purpose of the journal as being “less to inform or entertain its readers than to start little insurrections in the realm of their convictions.” (Oxford Companion to American Literature, 467) Robert Ward was the respondent to this published letter. 2 The situation prior to the war. 3 William (Wilhelm) II (1859–1941) was emperor of Germany. His intensive armament and lack of diplomacy were in part responsible for the outbreak of World War I. His abdication was a prerequisite of President Wilson’s for peace. Late in 1918 William fled to Holland and abdicated, then retired to Doorn.
1910–1920
To Wendell T. Bush 28 January 1916 • Cambridge, England
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(MS: Columbia)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, London. Cambridge, Jan. 28, 1916
r
Dear M Bush As you may judge by the enclosed article,1 Holt’s book arrived in due time. I read it with greater pleasure than his older one2 (written ten years ago, I believe, although not published till lately) and his style, too, is less uncouth, although still crabbed and common; common beyond words are his illustrations, they make one writhe. But my feeling is that Holt is a man of force and ability: I wish he were geniessbar.3 A propos of Holt I have been reading Freud;4 also common, and I can’t help thinking fantastic, but certainly very penetrating and unforgettable. I have come to Cambridge for a week to see some friends, but return at once to Oxford, where I hope to finish my book on Egotism in German philosophy before the Summer.—Thank you very much for complying with my shameless request for Holt. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 “Two Rational Moralists,” Philosophy 13 (25 May 1916): 290–96. Review of John Erskine, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, and Other Essays (1915), and Edwin Bissell Holt, The Freudian Wish and Its Place in Ethics (1915). 2 The New Realism: Cooperative Studies in Philosophy (1912). 3 Palatable. 4 Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was an Austrian psychologist and the originator of psychoanalysis. In 1916 he published Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious and Leonardo da Vinci: A Psychosexual Study of an Infantile Reminiscence. Santayana’s library included Freud’s Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) (4th ed., 1914).
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To Mary Potter Bush 11 March 1916 • Oxford, England
(MS: Columbia) C
/o Brown Shipley & Co London
Oxford, March 11, 1916 Dear Mrs Bush Although the battle of Verdun1 is still going on, I think the worst consequences which we feared at first are less threatening, whatever the issue may be. The French have defended themselves so efficaciously that even if they retire, it will probably not be without having inflicted paralysing losses on the enemy. It is all very horrible and very perilous; but I feel on the whole less depressed and oppressed than hitherto. It is partly a sense of Spring in the air—I mean metaphorically, for it is snowing at the moment—and partly that one’s capacity for anxiety has its limits. When one thinks that the greater part of mankind have always had war at their gates, and no certainty of food for the morrow, and yet have survived and been merry on every possible pretext, one understands how it is possible to get used to anything even to this war. As to The New Republic, I have long been despleased with it, and am not going to contribute to it any longer. They seem to be a set of disinherited Bohemians, clever and amiable enough, but without any solid affections or any solid instruction. I like some of them personally, and for that reason consented to write for them sometimes, but I don’t like their friends nor their principles. And I imagine they have not force enough to count for very much, even on the wrong side. You needn’t fear that I am stranded or in trouble of any material sort. I have a (Spanish) passport and might go to Spain or Italy if I chose but I ^ ^ prefer to wait until things are comparatively normal again—they will never be quite the same—and meantime I am quite comfortable here, leading a self-indulgent life, seeing some people (Strong daily) and finishing my book on Egotism in German philosophy. Within two or three weeks I hope to take it to the publishers, and go for a holiday to some watering place to throw, as they say in Spain, a gray hair to the winds.—It was very nice of you to write a propos of my letter in The New Republic, and I am pleased to see that the animus of it was felt. I sometimes am quite in doubt whether my writing is feeble and too smooth, or rash and too violent. If I conveyed
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the feeling that I think the mincing attitude of that paper captious and discreditable I accomplished my purpose. Since you wrote the attitude of Mr Wilson2 has been defined still better. What is going to come of it all? Yours always sincerely GSantayana 1 Verdun, in northeast France, was in 1916 the scene of the longest, bloodiest battle of World War I. Of two million men engaged, half were killed. Two outer fortresses were taken by the Germans, but Verdun repulsed all assaults. “They shall not pass” was the rallying phrase of the French. The city and battlefields, with huge military cemeteries, are a national sanctuary. 2 Woodrow Wilson.
To Charles Augustus Strong 28 April 1916 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont Street Oxford, April 28, 1916
Dear Strong I am glad to have news of you, as I was beginning to wonder if you really had got to Banff or were hiding elsewhere. Perils and dangers are so evenly spread nowadays that I hardly think Margaret will be more exposed at Cambridge than the rest of us elsewhere. As everything indicates that the Germans (having again lost a good many submarines) will comply with Mr Wilson’s demands, or as many as he may ultimately insist upon, you will at least be able to sail safely in the “New Amsterdam” in June, and can live safely for a while, if not deliciously, in America. It is extraordinary how soon and how humorously we become accustomed to danger. The young Irishman Esmonde,1 whom you may remember here, came up to me this afternoon at the George, and we had tea together. He was just fresh from Dublin, where his luggage had remained in the hands of the insurgents (great friends of his) and where he has, according to his accounts, perhaps mendacious, been walking the streets in perfect safety, although every corner house was in the hands of the Sinn Feiners:2 but only the stupid English were to be feared, as if you didn’t keep to the middle of the road they might think you were a rebel sneaking round the corner. He described with great gusto a street strewn with the fat bodies of
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elderly English volunteers who had blandly marched up a/ the street, the end of which was occupied by the rebels, and how Liberty Hall had been bombarded long after it had been evacuated, and how a gunboat had come up the Liffey and proudly demolished one empty mill. If he can recover his luggage he is hoping to go and join the Serbian army. Isn’t that a curious state of mind to be in? My excursion to London was not a great success, except that I left the MS with Dent, who agreed to print it in the same form as the Winds of Doctrine but at the same time complained of the difficulty of finding paper and printer’s devils. I have since written to him suggesting that if these difficulties are insuperable he might send the book to America to be printed by Scribner,3 and keep only the English edition himself. In London I took rooms near the South Kensington Museum but regretting —ed not having gone to Ryder Street as usual. The weather was unsettled, and I came back to Oxford before the week was up. I had a real holiday, however, a little later, going to Aston Tirrold, a few miles south of Didcot, where I found not only the four young men who had invited me, but the mother of one of them, Mrs Warren, a sister of Morrell, Lady Ottoline’s husband, and a sister-in-law of the President of Magdalen. The cottage turned out to be her house, and I her guest, which was not what I expected: but nevertheless I had a very nice informal time of it,—long walks, good talks, and even a little cooking in the kitchen. The bathroom was the passage, with two bains de siège4 set down in it side by side, and the W.C. was supplied with a palefull of ashes to take the place of water. Everything else was equally primitive, except the art of one of the youths, who is a cubist painter, and looks like an abbé très-mondain de l’encién régìme.5 His mother is actually French, his father was an American. Mrs Warren told me her whole fam^ ^ ily history and I told her mine; she said she had taken to housework because, with her elder son at the front, a captain not yet twenty, she could fix her mind on nothing except manual work. In short, I have become more entangled than ever with the Morrell tribe, and yesterday I had to go to see Mrs Warren’s daughter, who is an actress, do Olivia in Twelfth Night6 at the New Theatre in George Street, and afterwards had to go to tea in the garden of grandmother Morrell’s house in Saint Giles—a very pretty garden, extending to the back of Keble.7 Mrs Morrell was no less aggressively amiable than the ladies from whom you and I have so often fled. I am to be asked to dinner; in fine, I am caught and I don’t know if my reputation of being a recluse will save me, or whether before long living in Oxford will be made impossible for me.
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This mention of tea in a garden will show you how completely the weather has changed. The trees are green, the sun bright, my winter clothes put away, and the need of a straw hat is pressing. This sudden warmth has made me a little restless and lazy at the same time; I don’t feel like working, even in the evening: nevertheless I have the Realms of Being spread out on the table, and am intending to copy some of the older versions, so as to incorporate the parts of them I do not reject into the revised text. I have also had one or two ideas on minor points. Godstow is delightful, and I have lunched there twice out of doors, notebook and pencil in hand, trying luminously to refute final causes. Bridges8 left a card here while I was away, and I must try tomorrow, if the sun is not too hot, to climb to Chilswell, and have a laureate tea. Do write again and tell me—the subject is not taboo with me—whether science has probed your malady to the core and whether you have less disturbed nights. Yours ever G.S. 1
An Irish Catholic devoted to painting, Sir Osmond Thomas Grattan Esmonde (1896–1936) was later a Member of Dáil Éireann for County Wexford. See Persons, 498. 2 Sinn Fein, “we ourselves,” is an Irish nationalistic movement which triumphed in establishing the Irish Free State. Sinn Fein was founded in 1899 by Arthur Griffith, an advocate of an economically and politically self-sufficient Ireland. It aided Patrick Pearse in the Easter Rebellion in 1916. Then it set up the Irish assembly called Dáil Éireann which declared independence. 3 Charles Scribner (1821–71) founded the publishing firm of Baker & Scribner in 1846. After his partner’s death, the firm continued in Scribner’s name. His son, Charles Scribner (1854–1930), served as president of the firm (1879–1928) and then was chairman of the board. After 1878, the firm was known as Charles Scribner’s Sons, which published the majority of Santayana’s works. 4 Hip baths. 5 A mundane abbot from the old regime. 6 Twelfth Night; or What You Will (c. 1600) is a comedy by William Shakespeare. In this play Olivia is the rich young countess wooed by Orsino. 7 A college at Oxford University. 8 Santayana’s “most distinguished” Oxford friend (Persons, 489), Robert Seymour Bridges (1844–1930) was made poet laureate in 1913. The quintessential English gentleman, Bridges was educated at Eton and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He studied medicine in London but gave up practice in 1882. The philosophical poem The Testament of Beauty (1929) is his finest work. Chilswell is Bridges’s house on Boar’s Hill, Oxford.
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To Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell 6 May [1916?] • Oxford, England
(MS: Texas)
22 Beaumont Street May 6th Dear Lady Ottoline1 How stupid of me to take for granted that you meant this week and not to notice the day of the month, which you mentioned. I am very sorry to have given you the trouble of writing again. As to next week, so large and distinguished a party positively terrifies me. Let me drop in some day for a cup of tea simply with you. I should enjoy that so much more. It is flattering to think that you haven’t yet perceived it, or at least are giving me the benefit of the doubt, but the fact is I am a dreadful boor and unfit for general human society—especially in these days when people are so deeply divided in feeling— Please don’t think that I don’t appreciate your kindness in asking me, the fact is I feel it all the more in having to say no.2 Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
In 1902 Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish-Bentinck (1873–1938) married Philip Morrell, who became a Liberal member of Parliament. Lady Ottoline’s Manor House at Garsington, southeast of Oxford, was a gathering place for the intelligentsia. Unconventional, she was mocked and caricatured by writers whom she had befriended, including Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey, and D. H. Lawrence (who depicts her as the affected and stifling Hermione in Women in Love). 2 “Lady Ottoline was most kind to me and I liked her the better the better I knew her; yet I resisted her invitations to stay at Garsington, and was repelled by the idea of nibbling the edges of her social and political world. It was the antithesis and the scornful enemy of the Oxford I could love.” (See Persons, 500–503.)
To Roy Wood Sellars 20 May 1916 • Oxford, England
(MS: Michigan) C
/o Brown Shipley & Co London
Oxford, May 20, 1916 Dear Mr Sellars1 Let me thank you very much for the anonymous gift of your “Critical Realism” (which I suppose comes from you) and even more for the fact
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that you have written the book, thereby doing a great service to the cause of good sense and fair dealing among professional philosophers. In sending me your work, you probably foresaw that I should be in the heartiest sympathy with its spirit and its conclusions. Even where I might use different words—sometimes perhaps indicating a divergence from your analysis—I am rather glad to see you take the line you do, because it brings you nearer than I am to the prevalent ways of thought in academic America, so that you will make your influence felt there more readily and efficaciously. You are also more laborious and patient of detail, which is another reason why you should impress the solemn and the learned doctors of the age, and persuade them to take you seriously. If you were quite out of the wood, you would not be able to lead any of those who are wholly lost there towards the issue which you have found. I trust it may not be many years before your second volume comes out, so that we may have a complete picture of your philosophy. Perhaps by that time I too may have put in an oar; let us hope that between us, if we don’t win the race for a realism that makes room for the imagination, we shall at least not upset the boat. Yours very truly GSantayana 1
Roy Wood Sellars (1880–1973) taught philosophy at the University of Michigan. His books include Critical Realism: A Study of the Nature and Conditions of Knowledge (1916), and he was a major contributor to the composition of the Humanist Manifesto of 1933. His The Philosophy of Physical Realism was published in 1932.
To Charles Augustus Strong 23 May 1916 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford May 23, 1916
Dear Strong I hope your cure has progressed more rapidly after the first mistakes in treatment were corrected; and if the weather we have been having here has extended to Scotland you can’t complain any longer of cold or dampness. It has been so hot, that I have had no energy for walks, except round Christ Church meadow. Only for a few days, earlier in the month, did I feel inclined to long excursions: but they were delightful.
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However, I have been entertained and kept busy by a rapid and unexpected flow of proofs; even the second or page-proofs have begun to arrive. The book turns out to be very short, not 200 pages: and on the whole reading it in print makes a satisfactory impression. I think it is readable and moderate in tone, and yet more penetrating and damning than anything the idealists expected to hear about themselves. I wonder how they will take it. I am going to spend next Sunday — in at Chilswell with the Bridges’. On 1 Monday I dined with Stewart at Christ Church and tomorrow I dine with my undergraduates at Magdalen—the host being a wounded man with a soul who has returned from the front for this term. Russell (the elder) has also written asking me to come and make his new wife’s acquaintance: ^ ^ th of June: in but the date is not fixed yet. I hope it may be Sunday the 14– that case I hope to see you in London during the previous week; but in any case I will go up to see you when you return from the North. I should think there was now no danger, either in going to America or to France, so that you can take your choice. Of course, if you went to Paris, I should feel envious and almost tempted; but on the whole I would rather put off that pleasure until it can be enjoyed with a free mind. I have received and read of book by Sellars of Michigan (do you know him?) called “Critical Realism”. You are mentioned and slightly attacked in it. Would you care to see the book? It is not wholly unreadable. Yours ever G.S. 1
John Alexander Stewart (1846–1933), White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford (1897–1927), was a professorial fellow of Corpus Christi College. He is known for his Notes on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle (1892) and The Myths of Plato (1905).
To Charles Augustus Strong [26 May 1916] • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont Street Saturday
Dear Strong It happened to be very convenient to do your errand yesterday, as I was thinking of going to London one of these days to get some money for myself, and yesterday the weather was lovely, and I enjoyed the trip very much.
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There was no need of sending the French notes, as your solvency and honesty may be taken for granted (in spite of your doubts about hell fire) and the money will simply lie in my pocket book—dying of laughter, as they say in Spain—until they are returned to you. th so that I would rather put off I am to go to Telegraph House1 on the 10– going up to London until Thursday or Friday of the week after next. Why rd couldn’t you come to Oxford for Sunday the 3– ? I daresay either Mrs rs 2 Bowler or M Onion would put you up. And you could come to hear Clutton-Brock3 discourse to the philosophical society on “The Devil”. I am sorry you are not better. Oxford is now a paradise: perhaps you would find it medicinal. Yours ever G.S. 1
John Russell’s cottage near Hampshire downs, within sight of the sea, was called Telegraph House because it had once been a signal station by which messages went from Portsmouth to London. 2 Unidentified. 3 Arthur Clutton-Brock (1868–1924), English critic and essayist, was highly regarded for his style. A Fabian socialist, he wrote studies of Shelley and William Morris.
To Charles Augustus Strong 2 June 1916 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford June 2, 1916
Dear Strong I was beginning to wonder how you were getting on, and am sorry to hear you are no better. If you don’t come to Oxford next week, I will go th up on Thursday for two nights, so as to see you before Saturday the 10– when I go to Telegraph House. My last week-end at the poet laureate’s was pleasant although I was a little surprised at the commonness of the people who seem to frequent his distinguished society. From one or two semi-apologetic words Mrs Bridges1 dropped, I gather that they were not unconscious of that fact. However, I got my identity book signed, and am now ready to face the police in any forbidden area. I hope you will come to Oxford, which is charming at this season, but if you are going to Val-Mont I hardly see what you would gain by consulting Sir Wm Osler2 once more.
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There seems to be a lull in despatching my proofs, and I am reading Pascal’s Pensées3—they are very wrong-headed—and Mac Dougal’s stupid book on mind and body.4 McDougal loquitur: It would give me a pain To have merely a brain: I get all my stamina From having an anima G. S. respondet: Though that might be less trying When it comes to dying, When it comes to thinking Your anima’s stinking. The fact is he hasn’t the least idea what mind, spirit, or intelligence is. He looks for it in the wrong place, with the wrong categories, in a sort of psycho-physical materialistic way. It is as if a man trying to conceive beauty looked for it among the kinds of precious metals. If you come, let me know beforehand. Yours ever G.S. 1
Monica Waterhouse Bridges. See Persons, 489–90. Sir William Osler (1849–1919) was a Canadian physician, teacher, and medical historian. He was a professor at various universities, including Oxford. His works include The Principles and Practices of Medicine (1892) and A Concise History of Medicine (1919). 3 Blaise Pascal (1623–62) was a French scientist and religious philosopher. His religious writings, collected in Pensées (1670), are mystical and pure in literary style. He laid the foundation for the modern theory of probablilities, invented the mathematical triangle, discovered the properties of the cycloid, advanced differential calculus, and formulated Pascal’s law (pressure applied to confined fluid at any point is transmitted undiminished through fluid in all directions and acts upon every part of the confining vessel at right angles to its interior surfaces and equally on equal sides). 4 William McDougall (1871–1938) studied physiology, anatomy, and anthropology at Cambridge University (B.A., 1894) and went on to win medical degrees there. As a Harvard psychology professor (1920–27), he incurred the hostility of the press and of American psychologists by his lectures on national eugenics. He proclaimed the superiority of the Nordic race and made class distinctions in mental endowment. 2
1910–1920
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 22 June 1916 • Oxford, England
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(MS: Virginia) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford June 22, 1916
Dear Susie You shall certainly have my book as soon as it is out, which I hope will be soon, as the proofs are all corrected. It is a very small book, and I hope very clear. Meantime I am sending you another, on somewhat the same subject, written by the Countess von Arnim, now married to my much married friend Lord Russell. She has lived for eighteen years in Germany with her first husband, and her view of German egotism is more amusing than mine. Of course, it is a caricature: but my colleague at Harvard, Professor Münsterberg, could furnish episodes not less extravagant drawn from real life. For instance, once when I happened to be crossing the Atlantic in his company (much against my choice) he said to me with a great air of importance: “People don’t know it, but it is surprising how many people are sailing in this ship simply because I am here. For instance there is a young lady I have been successfully hypnotizing, to cure her of the obsession that she is—quite miraculously—to have a child” etc. etc. I shouldn’t wonder if to other people he said that I had taken the ship on his account too, though I suppose not quite for the same reason. I was at the Russell’s lately for three days, and made the new bride’s acquaintance. She must have been pretty, and is still slight, and of course much cleverer than any of her predecessors—except in venturing on this marriage which I hardly think will last more than a year or two longer— like the war.1 I expect to go to London again for a few days in a week or two. Strong has left England “Overjoyed to be again in France” he wrote me on a post card from Havre. By this time I dare say he is in Switzerland taking his cure. I am delighted to see that Celedonio is himself again. Thank him for his message. With love to [across] you all from Jorge 1
Both lasted until 1918.
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To Charles Augustus Strong 1 July 1916 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St., Oxford July 1, 1916
Dear Strong I had been waiting for a word from you, saying that you were safely in your chosen haven: not that I was particularly anxious, for after getting your card from Havre I felt that the worst was over. I hope now your recovery will be steady and rapid. Shall I begin to send you your book? Mine, for financial reasons, is not to appear until October. I have been to Telegraph House and made the new Lady Russell’s acquaintance. She is small and still rather pretty, and not at all fat: what she tells now and then about Germany is amusing, and very like her books: but she has no fond, no heart, and I hardly think the union (and hence my acquaintance with her) will be very long-lived. I was in London one day this week to say goodbye to Boylston Beal, who is going back to America. His office is in the basement of the deserted German embassy!1 Fancy us having tea in the very nest of the Prussian eagle! I hope you will persuade your conscience that it is not your duty to go to America this summer. Now that you are in the right place, and Margaret happy, you ought not to expose yourselves to new perils to life and good digestion. You are well situated for the summer, and in the autumn you can conveniently and quietly return home to Fiesole. I only wish there was some chance of my joining you there, but it will have to be put off, I am afraid, for at least another season. Oxford is breaking up for the vac. but materially is at its best. Yours ever GSantayana Love to Margaret. 1
Beal served as an officer in the American Embassies at Berlin and London.
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To Horace Meyer Kallen 25 August 1916 • Oxford, England
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(MS: American) Oxford, Aug. 25, 1916
Dear Kallen This is to introduce my young compatriot, Mr José Alemany,1 with whom I think you will find several points of contact, political and religious, and who would much appreciate any hints you could kindly give him about a possible career in America. All is much the same with me. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Unidentified.
To Charles Augustus Strong 27 August 1916 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Aug. 27, 1916
Dear Strong I am somewhat disturbed at not getting any news of you, since Margaret wrote sometime ago, but I suppose it only means that you have nothing in particular to tell and that your cure is going on normally. As to your book, if you are working on some other part of it, perhaps you wish me not to begin to send it until you are again at Fiesole. I have not had a very pleasant summer, largely because the weather has been sultry and oppressive, discouraging me from taking those long walks which keep me fit and in good spirits. Then when I went to the Russells, I found the moral atmosphere already heavily charged with matrimonial thunder, and the lady so largely took me into her confidence, when by rights I am his friend, that my position became a delicate and almost a false one. Furthermore, the days I have spent in London have not brought any special relief or amusement, the people I have seen, and the few friends I have come across, proving more depressing than amusing. The result is that I have done very little work, and have spent my evenings reading Montaigne,1 Venetian history, Gil Blas,2 and Macdougal’s “Body and Mind”3—this last in part only, as I find it utter rot. I have scribbled a little
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in various stray directions, but The Realms are not conquered, except potentially—for on many a point, in walking or musing, I think I have seen new rays of light. I mean to buckle down to serious work as soon as it is cool enough for hard exercise and an evening fire. Do let me know how you are, or ask Margaret to write me another nice letter. Yours ever G.S. 1
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–92) was a French essayist and sceptical philosopher. The first books of his most important work, the Essays, were published in 1580. The complete edition was published in 1588 in Paris. 2 Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715, 1724, 1735) is a picaresque novel in four volumes by Alain René Lesage. The hero is Gil Blas. 3 William McDougall’s Body and Mind: A History and a Defense of Animism was published by Macmillan in 1911.
To Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell Friday [Autumn 1916?] • Oxford, England
(MS: Texas)
22 Beaumont Street Friday Dear Lady Ottoline I am very sorry that the unsettled weather and my somewhat shaky condition hardly allow me to come this afternoon. It was very kind of you to suggest it. Pastor1 wouldn’t have been able to go today in any case, as he has something apparently very important on hand—I don’t know what—but he seems preoccupied and asks me to thank you in his name. I hope you received my discourse, and that you won’t feel obliged to read it—at least not all. What would reading be but for skipping! Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Unidentified.
1910–1920
To Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell Saturday [Autumn 1916?] • Oxford, England
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(MS: Texas)
22 Beaumont Street Saturday Dear Lady Ottoline I am so sorry that I can’t accompany our young ladies tomorrow—I have an engagement with a friend here—it would have been such a pleasure to see you again and continue my too short visit of the other day. With many thanks for your kind note Yours sincerely GSantayana
To Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell Sunday [Autumn 1916?] • Oxford, England
(MS: Texas) 22 Beaumont Street Sunday
Dear Lady Ottoline, If you have an instinctive antipathy to German philosophy, you ought to find my new book agreeable. However, I don’t expect you to read it all, and you must feel quite free to give it away or lend it to anyone who you think is ripe for sound doctrine, and not an incorrigible admirer of Lord Haldane. I should have been to see you long ago if I hadn’t been far from well; in fact I am so seedy that at Mrs Morrell’s suggestion I am off tomorrow to Harrogate.1 If I return from there as light as a bird, I shall soon fly to Garsington. I haven’t got so far as to read book about Dostoevsky, having scarcely read one of his own—only “Crime and Punishment”:2 but I liked the spirit of it, though the letter didn’t seem to me very beautiful. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 Harrogate, a town in Yorkshire, contains eighty-eight mineral springs for bathing and drinking purposes. It is the principal inland watering place in the north of England.
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2 Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski (Dostoyevsky) (1821–81), a Russian novelist, is one of the giants of modern literature. His novels are characterized by psychological insight, compassion for all men, and preoccupation with guilt and crime. His works include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80), and Notes from the Underground (1864).
To Charles Augustus Strong 3 October 1916 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford October 3, 1916
Dear Strong Before leaving Harrogate yesterday I received Margaret’s card of Sept. 22 saying you were getting on fairly well, and had composed an essay on architecture. I am curious to see it: I think your observations are sure to be well-grounded, although perhaps not buttressed by enough elasticity and complexity of view: I think in art, even more than in philosophy, all views are in danger of being too “abstract”, too partial, giving an occasional and partial aspect of things for their whole essence. However, I will reserve my comments for after the act. How distressing it is that you should be laid up in this way by a mysterious weakness, without any immediate prospect of relief! As I wrote to Margaret the other day, I have little faith in the diagnosis of doctors, or in their prescriptions. At Harrogate—a dreadfully dull place—I had a vivid sense of the fact that the practice of medicine is a ritual and not a science. My doctor,1 or rather Mrs Morrell’s, to whom she sent me, was a sort of fashionable clergyman who had missed his vocation—impudent, too. In the treatment he prescribed he was evidently guessing; and when I represented that sulphur-water was nasty, and seemed to swell me without doing any good, he replied that it was absolutely the right thing for my “membritis”, or ——— diesase ———— disease of the white membrane; and five minutes later he ordered me to take Kissingen water instead!2 Your doctors are undoubtedly better, but your trouble is also worse than mine has yet become, so that I do not envy you their ministrations. I hear that the difficulties about passports are worse than ever, and that there is no chance of getting through to Switzerland at present. I wish I could reach you by wireless, and explain to you my latest discovery, that the three vices of European philosophy are egotism, humanism, and
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worldliness. However, the chief thing now is that you [across] should get well soon, and be able to go to Fiesole. Lvoe to Margaret. Yours ever GSantayana 1
Unidentified. From the mineral springs at Bad Kissengen, Bavaria.
2
To Charles Augustus Strong 4 October 1916 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford, October 4, 1916
Dear Strong It is indeed a great pleasure to have your letter and to see that, even if you are laid up in bed, your wits are lively and your mood truly philosophical. You say nothing about suffering pain: I hope at least that discomfort which made you so restless at night has ceased in this new phase of your illness. I am delighted with what you say of my book. I think myself that it is fitted to do good work among the students of this generation, provided it is not overlooked altogether, or treated as a slight affair without authority. It has only the authority of truth, which beats no drums, and which only those who, like you, have found the truth for themselves, can discern. I find that, in spite of the wet and stormy weather we are having, my rheumatism is decidedly better, but in general the “cure” has left me rather weak and seedy, and I may go off for a different sort of trip before long— to Brighton, perhaps. Would you like any books to help you pass away the time? At Harrogate I read Pickwick1 and found it delightful. I hope soon again to have news, and good news, from you. Yours ever GSantayana 1
Pickwick Papers (1836–37) by Charles Dickens.
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To Charles Augustus Strong 2 November 1916 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Nov. 2, 1916
Dear Strong I have been hoping to hear from you or from Margaret for a long time. Her card of Oct. 6 is the last I have received. I trust the improvement that had then set in has continued, and that you are on the way to a complete recovery. There is no change here; I have been very lazy, and have done little but read novels, especially Dickens.1 By skipping the sentimental passages, when they are too cloying, I manage to enjoy him very much. What glorious farce, and what charming virility in all this — clo coaching, loving, fighting, and drinking! Please send me word (if you haven’t already done so) of your progress and of your plans. Yours ever GSantayana 1
Charles Dickens (1812–70) was a famous English novelist. His writing is noted for its direct style, remarkable descriptions of character, and sentimental crusades against social evils. Among his works are Oliver Twist (1837–39), Bleak House (1852–53), and A Tale of Two Cities (1859).
To John Jay Chapman 21 December 1916 • Oxford, England
(MS: Houghton) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Dec. 21. 1916
Dear Chapman1 I am proud to think that my little book has attracted your attention and that you think all those distinguished Frenchmen may be interested in it. At the same time as your letter I get a note from Boutroux2 thanking me for the volume. I have replied, setting him right: but at the same time I haven’t been able to resist asking him (most “egotistically”) whether he could suggest the name of any young student (one of his Fondation, per-
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haps) who might be willing and able to translate it into French! I have often had a vague regret that fortune hadn’t enabled me to write in French instead of in English; and in regard to this particular book I have a strong desire that those who read French (including most educated people in my native country) but not English might sometimes read something of mine: the war lends it in this case a more human interest. If this idea is ever realized, you shall have a French copy as a thank-offering for your sympathetic interest. How unequal are our forms of devotion and our sacrifices, even in the same cause!3 Here, surrounded by men in kakhi, I am filled with shame at the attenuated, impersonal, and futile nature of my cooperation. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 In 1914 Chapman published Deutschland über Alles; or, Germany Speaks, a shrilly toned collection of statements by eminent Germans. 2 Both men corresponded with Émile Boutroux. 3 An allusion to the death of Chapman’s son, Victor, of the Lafayette Escadrille (a group of American volunteer aviators in the French air service).
To Robert Seymour Bridges 23 December [1916] • Oxford, England
(MS: Bodleian)
22 Beaumont Street Dec. 23.1 Dear Bridges Your address2 is full of “wisdom” and I have read it with great pleasure keeping in mind what you said about not agreeing with me about “reason”. I see that you use it here as a synonym of “intelligence”: perhaps I tend to think of something else, when I use the word; but I don’t discover any material divergence between us as to the good, which is the root of all important differences between people. As to the machinery of reasoning instinct, etc. we are all in the dark, and our philosophies move in the region of rhetorical symbols. When we speak of reason governing an animal or governing the world, do we mean simply that the good is being realized somehow, or that abstract terms and discourse — is are running meantime through somebody’s head, or do we mean something further? It seems to me all a chaos of conventional phrases and verbal psychology, by which we describe variously the same undisputed facts.
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I hope you are all having a pleasant Christmas at Chilswell Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Date [1916] in another hand. “An Address to the Swindon Branch of the Workers Educational Association,” given on 28 Oct 1916, which included a passage about ‘reason’. [Per Sir Edward Bridges, son of the poet] [D. C.] 2
To Charles Augustus Strong 13 January 1917 • Megairssey, England
(MS: Rockefeller) Address: C/o Brown Shipley & Co Polstreath, Megairssey, Cornwall. Jan. 13, 1917
Dear Strong Since I wrote to Margaret, I have started on a little trip, to avoid the dull winter weather of Oxford, and have been in Bath, Bristol, Wells, and Exeter, seeing Cathedrals and other sights, and making the best of the wind and rain which have prevailed in a rather persistent fashion. Here I am staying with two of my young friends from Magdalen, one a wounded man and the other an American; it is a pretty, well-furnished villa on a hill by the sea, in which one maid-servant has remained to look after us; and we lead a quiet and somewhat Spartan life. However, in a few days I shall resume my pampered existence at Torquay, where I shall be for a day or two at a hotel, to see if the place tempts me to stay longer, in which case I should take lodgings. I am reading Beaumont and Fletcher,1 who seem to resemble the /s Spanish dramatist of the time more than Shakespeare does—which is not to say that they are better but rather that they are more European and less simply or absolutely human. I am also going on with Dickens, having still two or three novels of his to read. I wish I could talk with you about the war and the glimmerings of peace: apart from Boylston Beal (who is again at the American embassy in London) I am still pursued by the fatality of having only radical or proGerman friends, and it tries my patience sorely. Why will clever people be so frivolous, captious, and pert-minded? Hooker2 said “nothing is so mala-
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pert as a splenetic religion”, but nothing makes me so splenetic as a malapert judgment in politics. After all, religion is congenitally the sphere of fancy and passion: but people ought to be serious in their views of this world. Don’t you think the Allies have made most happy replies to the German and the American notes?—I hope to have good news from you soon, and [across] that you may be able to return to Fiesole for the Spring. Yours ever GSantayana 1
Francis Beaumont (c. 1584–1616) and John Fletcher (1579–1625) were English dramatists who influenced Restoration drama. They collaborated on many plays, including A King and No King (1916) and The Maid’s Tragedy. Fletcher is said to have collaborated with Shakespeare on Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. 2 Richard Hooker (c. 1554–1600) was an English theologian who attempted to clarify the position of the Church of England in his The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593–97). This work treats church government from a philosophical and logical point of view and anticipates the “common consent” grounds for government of Locke and Rosseau.
To Robert Seymour Bridges 8 February 1917 • Torquay, England
(MS: Bodleian) 6 Park Street, Torquay Feb. 8, 1917
Dear Bridges I am distressed to read in the morning paper that your house is burnt down. What a loss to you and to us all! I suppose it will be some time before it is rebuilt, and meantime perhaps you will not be at Oxford. Please tell Mrs Bridges and your daughter how sorry I am. I hope they haven’t lost all their things, and you your books; although, if what you really need is saved, this is a heroic and divine method of getting rid of all the rest. I came to Torquay some weeks ago, looking for warmth and sunshine, but need hardly say I haven’t found them yet. However, I know the season is exceptionally severe everywhere, and am willing to stay the bad weather out, and see it Torquay will redeem its reputation. Thank you for your letter, which reached me in due course. Yours sincerely GSantayana
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To Charles Augustus Strong 26 February 1917 • Torquay, England
(MS: Rockefeller)
6 Park Street, Torquay Feb. 26, 1917 Dear Strong I don’t know why so many days should have elapsed before I thank you for your letter of Jan. 30. It was a great pleasure to see your handwriting again, and to know by your own hand that you were no worse materially and in tolerably good spirits. As for me, you see I am still in Torquay. The weather, after being dry and cold for a month, has become (what one would expect it to be) mild and moist, and there have been spells of sunshine that have given me a foretaste of what the place might be at its best. I think of staying a few weeks more, until the winter is decidedly over, and I can return to Oxford with some assurance of finding it agreeable. Did you happen to see in the Times that Robert Bridges’ house had burnt down? Not a Zepp, but a neglected bedroom fire. The added horrors which we are supposed to be threatened with haven’t yet made themselves felt in any tangible way; there is plenty of food (at least where I go to get it) and it is not appreciably dearer. I dare say the poor feel the rise in prices, wages being slower to rise. On the other hand, I suppose there is no unemployment in these times. The matter of the intervention of the U. S. is too great and complicated to enter into in a letter: I wish we could talk it over. At least there is some satisfaction in an overt expression of estrangement between America and the German proceedings. If it comes to war—and I hardly see how it can fail to, sooner or later—the moral situation will be even more satisfactory, much as we may regret the personal and material losses involved. I did like Drake’s book on religion,1 especially the Chapters on the historical Jesus and on the problem of evil. His general attitude is frankly accommodating and conventional: but of course there is always something good in the attitude of the most benighted believer: and if we haven’t the wit or the courage to disentangle that good, we have to be content with patting the pious rogue on the back and saying he is quite right in his way. Yours ever G. Santayana 1
Problems of Religion: An Introductory Survey, Houghton Mifflin, 1916.
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To Charles Scribner’s Sons 27 February 1917 • Torquay, England
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(MS: Princeton) 6 Park Street, Torquay, Feb. 27, 1917
Dear Sirs: Will you please send a copy of my “Sense of Beauty” and of “Reason in Art” and of “Egotism in German Philosophy” to Mr Joseph Robinson, Librarian, Carson and Newman College, Jefferson City, Tennessee—and charge the three books to my account. Some of my friends in London tell me that it is impossible to get any copies of my old “Interpretations of Poetry and Religion”. Is this an accident due to difficulties of carriage, or is the book out of print? My own copy, from which I have been separated since the beginning of the war, had many sad misprints in it, which I believe I long ago asked you to correct — them when there should be an opportunity. I mention this, for fear ^ ^ that any reprint should appear uncorrected. I believe, however, that you expected to have the corrections made at that now distant time. You might perhaps send me a copy, if you have one, C/o of Brown Shipley & C o, 123 Pall Mall, London, and I will reread it and make sure that all is well, in case at any future time a new issue should be contemplated. Yours s/very truly GSantayana
To Horace Meyer Kallen 15 March 1917 • Torquay, England
(MS: American)
Address C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, London. S.W. 6 Park Street, Torquay March 15, 1917. Dear Kallen “Creative Intelligence”1—for which I am truly obliged to you—has come very agreeable/y to distract my thoughts from the events of the time and the persistence of bad weather, in this place to which one comes to bask and to cheat winter of its terrors. I have read the whole book, except some
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pages of Stuart’s and Tufts’2 for which life—my remaining life, at least—is not long enough, and my general impression is that pragmatism has become less paradoxical. I won’t say you have abandoned any of its tenets or essentially modified them—my memory and understanding of the writings of the school are not adequate to justify such an assertion. But I somehow feel less violence done to my spontaneous assumptions and less clearness in the specific doctrines put forward. I wish you would tell us what a “sit^ ^ uation” is and what “experience” is, prior to consciousness;—if I dared to translate these terms into my materialistic language I should be able to follow the argument with less feeling of insecurity. Nevertheless, I think I understand pretty well what “Creative Intelligence” professes to be. It is— the title, I mean—an emendation of Bergson:3 intelligence is no forced desiccation of life in the presence of matter, but the power which living matter has of modifying its career by foreseeing its probable issue, and preventing it from being realized. This, rather than of being attracted by a good foreseen. Dewey (whose paper I have in mind here) doesn’t maintain the miraculous power of an idea to realize dynamically what it presents pictorially: he seems to me to be on the point of saying what the mechanism of foresight and of the execution of plans is, but he doesn’t go into the subject—none of you do. At any rate, you agree that the creative foresight is not, at bottom, a design or a clear plan: is it more, I wonder, than the sense of abundant but suspended powers, with a vague inclination and premonition in one direction? Isn’t it after all Evolution that is creative, and intelligence merely a name—not without ambiguity—for a complex case of it?—But I mustn’t go into this further, or I should never end. Everything you say in your paper seems to me true; and as you know very well, it is very much in the line of my own reflections. Of course, there are some things I should have put differently: neither play, migration into the ideal, nor exertion of influence is intelligence: intelligence is the power of seeing things in the past, present, and future as they have been, are, and will be. But that is quarrelling about a word; and I agree that the three characteristics you describe belong to the functions of art, religion, and philosophy, considered in their organs, if not in their ideal messages. As I read your paper, I felt as if it were spoken, rather than written; and I wish it had been spoken, before some knot of kindred minds who might have enjoyed your lists and improvisations, and felt beneath them the steady glow of an enthusiasm for truth and defiance of prejudice which they would all wish to share. Written down, and printed in a book propa-
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gating a particular school of thought, I am not sure that it may not bewilder and offend some of your readers: there is a certain heat and recklessness about your manner which, especially in matters of religion, will make others fume too; and the smoke in h/ end may be greater than the light and may overpower it. I say this more in contrition than in criticism, since I am painfully conscious of having written a great deal too precipitately and egotistically, in the Life of Reason, for instance, to the evident prejudice of whatever sober truth or genuine humanity my views may have possessed at bottom. And if you are a little inclined to the same sort of eloquent selfindulgence, perhaps I am in part to blame for it: because you have heard and read me with such friendly perseverance that something of my faults, as well as my virtues, may have stuck to you. For the clearness of the deliverance, too, this way of writing with a loose rein, is unfortunate: there are too many things said or hinted by the way, too little economy of means, too little concentration in the argument. Herod and Blue Beard would have made excellent writers of philosophy: they would have killed all other people’s children and most of their own. Of course there is something else altogether on our minds which it seems hypocrisy to pass over in silence, but which it is impossible to speak of as one would—as if we were suffering from some great bereavement. I am simply waiting: I read in a French book the other day that it is better to wait than to hope. I think so, but I am afraid, in spite of your better opinion of me, I am no pragmatist. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1917) includes “Value and Existence in Philosophy, Art, and Religion” by Kallen; “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy” by John Dewey; and others. 2 Henry Waldgrave Stuart (b. 1871) taught at Leland Stanford Jr. University. His essay is “The Phases of the Economic Interest.” James Hayden Tufts (1862–1942) taught philosophy at the University of Chicago from 1892 to 1930. Active in civil and social reform, he made contributions to pragmatic moral theory. “The Moral Life and the Construction of Values and Standards” is his essay. 3 L’Évolution créatrice.
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To Charles Augustus Strong 17 March 1917 • Torquay, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 6 Park Street, Torquay. March 17, 1917
Dear Strong It is delightful to have the good news about your health confirmed by your own hand, and to call up again hopeful vistas of daily walks in Paris and down the hill from Fiesole to Florence, and to think of all the cups of coffee, and all the discussions of “feeling” and “essence” that peace is to bring with it. Let us hope both your condition and that of Europe will continue to mend and become normal again in not too remote a future. One comfort for our personal ailments is that those of society, unlike ours, can be followed by something better than recovery, and the news of so many sorts that has crowded the last few days makes me feel that perhaps we shall really see in our old age a better world than we knew in our youth. As you seem to be interested in Bridge’s troubles I send you the card1 I have received from him, which explains itself. I suppose Drake has written to you about collaborating in a book on true realism,2 to be a counterblast to the “New” realism and to “Creative E / Intelligence”. I have been reading this last, sent to me by Kallen, and find it rather anodine. The pragmatist have evidently been cowed by the criticisms they have provoked, and are making a “retreat according to plan” into the common stronghold of the Heraclitean3 flux, without paradoxes. Do you feel inclined to support Drake’s venture? I have agreed to write something for their volume, if they will tell me what they want and are willing to wait for it. It occurred to me that one or two of your chapters might serve, if you were willing to publish them in advance. I should be glad to undertake the [across] copying and proof-reading, if that was any help. Love to Margaret. Yours ever G. Santayana 1
Oxford. Mar. 10 My dear Santayana I thank you very much for your friendly letter of condolence. As we find it impossible to write replies to the many kind letters we have received, I beg you will accept this formal acknowledgement. We are thankful that everything was saved from the lower rooms; the detached library was not touched by the fire.
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Your letter was very sympathetic with my feeling. I [illegible ] some day. And are you still at this address. seriously I am at the Barton St for a short time. My plans very uncertain. Edward is “———— — severely wounded” but is I hope doing well—a smashed arm. Yours [illegible ] ^ ^ RBridges I am now in London. I have seen him. I hope he is doing well. 2 Essays in Critical Realism: A Cooperative Study of the Problem of Knowledge, edited by Durant Drake (Macmillan, 1920). Santayana contributed an essay entitled “Three Proofs of Realism,” 163–84. Other contributing authors were Arthur O. Lovejoy, James Bissett Pratt, Arthur K. Rodgers, Roy Wood Sellars, and C. A. Strong. 3 Heraclitus (c. 535–c. 475 B.C.) was the Greek philosopher Ephesus. He held that the only reality is change and that permanence is an illusion; he believed that fire was the underlying substance of the universe.
To Robert Seymour Bridges 19 March 1917 • Torquay, England
(MS: Bodleian) 3 Park Street, Torquay, March 19, 1917
Dear Bridges There is a Spanish proverb (I daresay not Spanish originally) that says: Bien vienes mal, si vienes solo,1 and I am afraid your second misfortune is worse than the first.2 However, if your son is doing well, even if his wound leaves sad traces, it will be some comfort to you and Mrs Bridges to know that the worst is over and to be relieved of the strain of anxiety, which must have been hard to bear during all these months. I think I shall stay here until after Easter, and then on my return to Oxford I will make enquiries at Merton Lane or at Corpus, in the hope of finding you still there. I shall also make a pilgrimage to Chilswell to view the ruins, which I am glad to know are not total. Events are so thick and so overwhelming of late, that I live in a sort of continual suspense, waiting for the next morning’s paper. Ought we, who are mere spectators, to be glad or sorry that we live at such a time? I think on the whole I am glad, although I could wish to be younger, so as to have borne some part in the struggle, and to have lived to see its fruits which I rather think will be good. The 1880’s and 1890’s, which were the years in which I began to look upon the world intelligently, left an impression on my mind which I should like to h/ feel had been wholly erased by experience of a better age. Yours sincerely
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GSantayana 1
Bien vengas mal, si vienes solo (Welcome evil, if thou comest alone). Bridges’s house had been partly destroyed by fire and his son, Edward Ettingdene Bridges (1892–1969), had been wounded in France. [D. C.] 2
To Mrs. William Warren 24 March 1917 • Torquay, England
(MS: Unknown) 6 Park Street, Torquay, March 24, 1917
Dear Mrs Warren You see the reason why I haven’t turned up is that I am still here, trying to outdo this strange winter in staying-power, and hoping for a little balmy weather before I return to Oxford for the summer. I have kept pretty well, but have been idle and given over to reading novels and newspapers. What you tell me about your change—perhaps after all not such a great change—in religious allegiance interests me very much. There are so many points of view from which such a step can be regarded that it is hard, if one wishes to be quite sincere and not merely polite, to say absolutely, “I congratulate you”, or “I am sorry”. I congratulate you, because I can see that you will have a new resource, a clearer and steadier hold on a supernatural life to explain the mysteries and fill in the dreadful blanks which this worldly life has for all of us. The Catholic Church has an immense heritage from all the ages, no part of which it is ashamed of or thinks obsolete; and you will find there many a belief and devout practice that is immensely congenial to the human heart. Of course, you know I am myself a sceptic, and if one’s object were to discover and embrace the truth, no religion seems to me much to the purpose, all of them being products of the human imagination. But in a moral and allegorical sense, one religion may still be said to be “truer” than another, if it brings us into greater harmony with the conditions of our life, and deli —velopes better our spiritual capacities: and from this point of view it is certain you are making a very wise exchange. The chief draw-back which my experience has shown me to attach to fervent belief in the Catholic Church is the conflict and division which it sometimes produces in states and in families. In England at the present
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time, and in your particular case, I think a little prudence can obviate that danger. Your mother has led the way, you say your husband is sympathetic, and your children are grown up, healthy and handsome, and have already plunged for themselves into the thick of life, so that your direct responsibility for them is over, and I daresay their chief feeling in the matter is satisfaction that you have found a faith that can make you happier. If they were small, the situation would be more delicate and painful; as it is, I don’t see why you should be less united than before—perhaps rather more so, in that your faith will give you a new form of tenderness and solicitude for them (also of understanding) to take the place of the more childlike dependence which they have outgrown. I hope the months of anxiety for your boys will not be many more, and that the very good news from them which you give me will continue to come until the war is over. When I go to town—even if only for the day—I will send you a line beforehand so as not to miss you. Yours sincerely GSantayana
To Charles Augustus Strong 26 March 1917 • Torquay, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 6 Park Street, Torquay. March 26, 1917
Dear Strong Lady Sybil had written about the new poem (composed in 1887!)1 which she wishes to reprint, and I have answered her directly, so that you are relieved of all responsibility in this weighty matter. Have I confessed that I have surreptitiously read the MS which you left in my hands? If this was a breach of confidence, I hope you will forgive me. I liked what I read very much, and have profited by your clear exposition of the elements involved, and I think one or two chapters might very well be published in advance. The MS is at Oxford, where I expect to return in a fortnight. If you like, I will reread the whole and make what suggestions I can about possible extracts for Drake’s book. In speaking of “dualism” I suspect they mean that between the organ of perception and the object (whatever this object may be) and I suppose we are all dualists in that respect. As to discriminating the essence sensuously
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given from the entire essence embodied in the external object—of which object the given essence is predicated, and predicated correctly, in so far as knowledge is true—I am afraid only you and I are in the secret. Being a discrimination, this might be called a further “dualism”; but as you say, there being only one intended object, described and —— known ———— ^signified^ more or less adequately or symbolically by the given essence, there is a “monism” in that respect. These dark and pedantic terms have always been odious to me: unity and variety are relative and omnipresent, as Plato showed long ago in the Parmenides.2 As to my own contribution to Drake’s venture, I find that no part of my book will do, but I have promised to write a special article, if they are willing to wait for it, and to suggest the particular point — mi they would like me to discuss, and the vocabulary they are adopting. What strange events! I wish I felt confidence in the power of the new Russian republic to hold Hindenburg3 if he attacks them “for all he is worth”. But I am pleased with what seems to be happening in America. That too is unexpected, or was so until lately. Yours ever GSantayana 1
A Book of the Sea by Lady Sybil Marjorie Cuffe Lubbock (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1918). Santayana’s poem “Prayer to the Ocean” was written in 1887. 2 Parmenides are Platonic dialogues. 3 Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Hindenburg und Beneckendorff (1847–1934) was a German field marshal who became chief of the general staff, assuming command of all the forces of the Central Powers in 1916. He stemmed the Allied advance in the West and consolidated the Hindenburg Line, running from Lens through Saint-Quentin into Rheims. Rumania was crushed, and Russia withdrew from the war in 1917. In 1925 he was elected president of the Reich. He defeated Hitler in the 1932 presidential elections but appointed Hitler chancellor in 1933.
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To Charles Augustus Strong 17 April 1917 • Oxford, England
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(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford April 17, 1917
Dear Strong I am very glad that you have decided to let me attempt to make a selection from your book for Drake’s volume. I returned here yesterday, and have already begun to reread your manuscript, and am confirmed in my impression that a very effectual presentation of our point of view can be easily gathered from it. Most of the preface ought to be included, I think, as it is particularly clear and concise. As soon as I have made the selection and it is copied, I will send it to you. It may be necessary to get special permission from the censor’s office: but I anticipate no great difficulty in that— especially now that you a belligerant! As to the degree of assent which I personally can give to your doctrine, I don’t think there is any change since our last oral discussion. I am willing to concede the use of the terms “psyche” and “psychical” for non-mental and unconscious processes in the self: but I don’t think what makes them psychical is the peculiar substance they are made of, or its “luminosity” (which I don’t understand in the absence of consciousness) but an arrangement, which makes those portions of matter fit organs for the functions of life—nutrition, reproduction, ———— sensation ———— ^material sensitiveness^, self-defence, and consciousness as well. Matter, I should say, becomes psychic, as it becomes organic, when it attains a certain complexity and equilibrium in its structure and movement. With this reservation, I should agree with your account of the relation of the psychic to the given essence (which needn’t be the essence of the psychic organ) and to consciousness and its unity. Why should you make it a condition of contributing to Drake’s volume that I should contribute also? I wish to contribute, but I am not sure that we shall agree upon a subject and a doctrine that would recommend itself to me sufficiently, or that they will be willing to put off publication till my paper reaches them. Besides, I think you would be a far more influential and respected exponent of the things we hold in common than I should, because you are on the whole nearer to the views seething in America at
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the present time, and have given closer attention to the problems and controversies involved. I am happy to be back in Oxford. Vale! Yours ever GSantayana
To Charles Augustus Strong 29 April 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford 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, and which is about the right length for a contribution to Drake’s book. I have obtained the censor’s permission, and it will be despatched tomorrow, although perhaps it may take longer than this letter to reach you. There are some imperfections in the typewritten copy due to haste, on my part or on that of the typewriter; but they are not serious. I don’t know whether you will be wholly pleased at the omissions you may detect: in one or two places there is an indirect reference (which I couldn’t leave out without changing your text, which of course I didn’t feel at liberty to do) to passages or developments of the argument which do not appear: if you think it matters, you can easily make all well by suppressing a few more words. Where it was absolutely necessary to modify the text I have done so in pencil, so that you can revise the revision without needing to have the page re-typed. 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 Cicero1—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 Egotism2 has arrived, and I have had a sad disappointment. No charm of style whatever, no lightness,
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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, pour mieux sauter,3 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. [across] I hope he won’t object to my objections, and that we sha’n’t quarrell.— Oxford is filling up, and I am almost gay! Yours ever G.Santayana 1 Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), born in the Ionian city of Stagira, entered Plato’s Academy about 367 B.C. and remained until Plato’s death in 347. For three years he supervised the education of Alexander the Great and eventually founded the Lyceum in 335. He combined brilliant intelligence with encyclopedic knowledge and was a prolific writer on logic, ethics, psychology, natural science, natural history, politics, metaphysics, and art. His naturalism led him to reject Plato’s Theory of Forms and postulate instead his hylomorphic conception of substance. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.) was a Roman orator, statesman, and man of letters. He created the smooth and rhetorically powerful Hellenized style of prose. A master of oratory, Cicero was also a student of literary criticism, an authority on Stoic philosophy, and a brilliant letter writer. 2 L’Erreur de la philosophie allemande, translated by Guillaume Lerolle and Henri Quentin, with a preface by Émile Boutroux. (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1917). 3 In order to jump better.
To Logan Pearsall Smith 9 May 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Congress) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford May 9, 1917
Dear Smith1 A collection of extracts:2 how wonderful! Loeser once had a statuette of Locke, which he meant to give to Wm James.3 When James heard of it, he exclaimed: “A statuette, that is fame indeed! Anybody can have a statue, but a statuette is true immortality.” So I say: any one can fill a shelf with his complete works; but a book of elegant extracts is for the few only, the few who, like Browning and me, have written wisely but too much. To be quite frank, I had—vaguely—thought of paying myself this compliment some day, when the ontology4 was finished, and I might find an egotistical pleasure in my old age in turning over the good things I had once been capable of saying. But by all odds, it is better that you should
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do it, if you are inexplicably so inclined. It is an overwhelming compliment to me, and a great service at the same time, because I think not only my style but my ideas will gain by being loosened from the academic and professorial mortar in which they have been set, because of the trade of system-building. I shall probably be much enlightened myself by beholding my naked little collection of ideas. As to the copyright it belongs to Scribner for the early volumes, to the Harvard University Press for the Three Philosophical Poets and to Dent for the last two books. I foresee no difficulty in making an arrangement with them, and will undertake the inquiry, if you wish me to do so. I shall be most curious to see your selections, and to know on what plan, if on any, you mean to arrange them. I can go to London at any time, for the day or for longer. Scribner says that there are copies of the Interpretations of Poetry and Religion in plenty in his possession: your London booksellers must have very little initiative if they think it is out of print. Egotism in German Philosophy is being translated into French—not by a man of very great wit, but by a worthy wounded officer5 interested in philosophy and solemnly convinced of the diabolical character of the German mind. I am revising his work, and so far we have not quarrelled. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 Born into a wealthy Quaker family, Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) was educated at Haverford College and Harvard University. After working in the family glassmanufacturing business, he went to England and entered Balliol College, Oxford University (B.A., 1893; M.A., 1906). He remained in England, where he took up a literary career. Smith’s sister Alys was Bertrand Russell’s first wife, and his sister Mary married Bernard Berenson. Robert Gathorne-Hardy’s Recollections of Logan Pearsall Smith describes the decline into insanity that occurred in his later years. 2 Essays. 3 See 29 Nov 1904. 4 Realms. 5 Lerolle was the officer. [D. C.]
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To Logan Pearsall Smith 15 May 1917 • Oxford, England
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(MS: Congress) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford May 15, 1917.
Dear Smith All my books—and most of my clothes—have lain neglected in Paris since the beginning of the war: I have only one or two copies—quite fresh— of my last book, and one of Poetry and Religion, just sent me by Scribner. Even in Paris I have, I think, only one copy of most of my volumes. And such things — are as proof sheets are eschewed by me the moment the corrected text appears. So that I can’t provide the corpus vile1 you require for your anatomical labours. Are pencil marks—which could be easily erased— incompatible with Chinese veneration for the printed page? If not, wouldn’t it be quite simple to have the sentences you choose and mark, type-written on small loose sheets or cards, which could be afterwards ^ ^ conveniently shuffe/led as much as we desired? And perhaps, being all of the same size and shape, they could go to the printer, when definitely arranged, without requiring to be recopied. I don’t think we need quarrel or have any conflict of generosity about the proceeds of the proposed selections. If your publisher bears all your expenses—as he surely will—I imagine you would be content; and so should I. As to the copyright, since it doesn’t belong to me in the case of the original, it can’t (I should think) belong to me for the reproduction. Mustn’t we simply ask the different publishers concerned to allow us to reprint passages in this particular case, while they retain their rights unimpaired in respect to further reproductions? As I said, I will make enquiries about this of the three publishers possibly concerned (I don’t know from how many volumes your extracts will be taken) if you wish me to do so. As to arrangement, I am glad you don’t intend that it should be chronological. I don’t evolve: we all have to grow up and to grow old, but what bears evident marks of immaturity or decay in our faculties ought charitably to be disregarded: the rest will have no other essential variety than that which is due to varying subjects and moods. The order should be the order of the subject-matter, or at the least (if the subject-matter is vague) of types of expression; it shouldn’t on any account follow the dates at which the fragments happen to have p / been penned or rather published—because many things written now may have been first conceived thirty years ago,
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as old scraps of paper sometimes prove to me in the most startling fashion. I sometimes think we all die at twenty-five and after that are nothing but walking corpses, with gramophones inside.—It is a comforting thought when one reads the “roll of honour”. I rather expect to go to London for a week or so in July. Will you still be there? If not, and there is any point to talk over, I will gladly go up at any time for the day. I like Of/xford better for an occasional change of scene and breath of the city. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 Worthless body: something felt to be of so little value that it may be experimented with or upon without concern for loss or damage.
To Charles Raymond Bell Mortimer 11 June 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Princeton) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford June 11, 1917
Dear Mortimer1 It was a pleasure to have your letter, especially as I like to attribute a certain dejection which you betray about the war to passing influences, because the situation is improved at bottom: but perhaps in your case there was always a certain exasperation or revolt at the intrusion of politics and war into the delicious sensations of life. If you sincerely wish I was with you—and I believe your wish is sincere—imagine how much more I ought to desire it; but politics and war at present have an opposite effect on me from what I fancy they have on you: they make other things seem indifferent, or rather impossible to enjoy, except with a sort of bad conscience and background of anxiety which would spoil the pleasure. But when the war is over, if I am still active, we must arrange a journey together, or a prolonged stay at some delightful place. You shall choose the time and place, because strangely enough, considering our respective ages,2 I am the freer and more irresponsible person, not having a future to think of. I spent yesterday—a very warm Sunday—reading “L’immoraliste”3 which had arrived in the morning, and finished it before going to bed. The texture of it is pleasant: but when it comes to the thought conveyed, I feel
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there is a Nietzschean confusion in it between freedom and anarchy. Anarchy is not more freedom; it lies in the other direction, it is a failure of instinct. What happens to Michel at the farm illustrates this perfectly: he couldn’t be both a landlord and a poacher on his own land. So there is no reason why, in order to satisfy a caprice for Arab society, he should have dragged his dying wife about till he killed her. We can’t have everything at once; but why should we want everything at once, or want everything at all? That is mere weakness, not independence—it is want of taste, not courage in asserting one’s taste. Apart from that, I like the expression of impatience with conventional society, the impulse to merge with the people, to see the naturalness of being disreputable, and especially the love of youth: the very light and volatile nature of this last passion is capitally expressed. What a lot of sudden fancies, ending in smoke! The thing never becomes a grande passion—as it might—the hero being apparently inca^ ^ pable of one, or the French public not being inclined to admit that sort of thing: but the surface-play of the impulse is well given. [across] Thank you for sending me the book, which I am very glad to have read. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 Charles Raymond Bell Mortimer (1895–1980) was an English journalist and author. See Persons, 498–99. 2 Santayana was 53 and Mortimer 22. 3 In The Immoralist (1902), a book by André Gide (1869–1951), Michel takes his bride to North Africa, where he develops tuberculosis and becomes hyperconscious of physical sensations, particularly his attraction to Arab boys. He is cured, but his wife falls ill. He neglects her demands, in order to keep himself free, since his doctrine demands that the weak be suppressed for the preservation of the strong. She dies, and he tries to justify his conduct to friends.
To Charles Augustus Strong 29 June 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford June 29, 1917
Dear Strong, How are you getting on? I was very glad to know that you found the compilation1 I had made from your book satisfactory, and I suppose it has long since started on its way to Drake. My own contribution has been delayed, but I hope to send it off next week. The fact is I have written two papers, the one growing out of the other, and it is the second that I have
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now finished and that is being type-written. The first is almost done too, and I mean to send it to Drake also, in case he finds it more suitable, either in quality, or because it may cover ground not preempted by the other contributors. The finished paper is on “Literal and Symbolic Knowledge”.2 The unfinished one on “Three Proofs of Realism”. What has chiefly occupied me of late (besides the inevitable obsession of the war) has been the French translation of Egotism, which I have had to revise, and in some passages actually to retranslate for the good Lerolle, who got lost in the intra/ icacies of my style and of German philosophy. It is all over now, and in the press: it may come out in July, or may be postponed for business reasons for two or three months. The great event, however, is that Boutroux is decorating it with a preface, in which he calls me sage antique and a great many other pretty names; and he swallows my view of German philosophy, hardly making a wry face at all. The preface has appeared as an article in the Journal des Débats, and I would send you a copy, except that the tiresome censor doesn’t allow clippings to be sent to nue —eutral countries. You shall get the book from Paris when it appears. I am feeling well, and although I walk much less than formerly (I don’t know why) I am thinner. Perhaps it is the diet of no bread and no sweets! However, I have the most delicious combinations of rice-with-everything, and I believe that is supposed to be just as fattening. I was in London for a week in May, but did and saw nothing to speak of. Lovely weather, sunshine uninterruptedly for weeks—now rain at last again— Yours ever GSantayana 1
“On the Nature of the Datum.” Published in Philosophy 15 (1918): 421–44.
2
To Logan Pearsall Smith 30 June 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Congress) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford June 30 1917
Dear Smith How diligent of you to have finished so soon! I wasn’t at all prepared, and haven’t yet written to the publishers whose consent I suppose is necessary not to make your volume a legal tort. The only trouble I anticipate
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is from Scribner, who is rather jealous of his proprietary rights: could you propitiate him by putting the American edition, or sale, in his hands? If you will arrange this with the publisher you have in mind (who is it?) or let me do so, I will write at once to New York about it. Your titles and arrangement seem most complete and systematic, and I wish, after this, I might be an Inquisitor and burn all my other volumes. Four hundred pages are certainly as much as anyone in this world has a right to have written. I am curious to see the selection you have made and no doubt can suggest some omissions if they are required. For instance, do you think people will care to hear what I have to say about love? That is not, as we said at Harvard, my “department”. I have been busy revising my French translator’s version of “Egotism”, which is now finished. Boutroux is decorating it with a kindly and complimentary preface. I never had (until you undertook to distill my essence) such an honour done me in my life. For the moment I am putting off going to town, as I wish to finish a paper which I have promised for an American book, written by a lot of professors in collaboration, which is to give the coup de grace to all philosophic errors.1 When this is done (it may take three or four weeks) I hope to find you still in London. Please let me know what I may say to Scribner, and believe me most gratefully yours. GSantayana 1
“Three Proofs of Realism” in Essays in Critical Realism: A Cooperative Study of the Problem of Knowledge, 163–84. [D. C.]
To Charles Scribner’s Sons 5 July 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Princeton) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford July 5. 1917
Messrs. Charles Scribner’s Sons New York Gentlemen, My friend Mr Logan Pearsall Smith, whose name at least you probably know,—he is brother-in-law to Mr Bertrand Russell and to Mr Bernhard
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Berenson,—has had the amiable idea of making a selection of short passages, or pensées,1 drawn from my various books, and of publishing them in a small volume. As I have written much too much, I can’t help welcoming this project, mixed as an author’s feelings might ordinarily be at such an invidious treatment of his progeny. I write to ask you if you have any objection to this project. I have not yet seen the proposed collection, but I have no doubt that it will be made with Mr Pearsall Smith’s good taste and competence in literary matters. His prospective publisher in London is to be Constable, and I understand that they are correspondents of yours, and well-disposed to make whatever arrangements you may think suitable. It may interest you to know—if you have not heard of it—that the French translation of my Egotism in German Philosophy, which is now finished, is to have a preface by M. Boutroux, which besides being very complimentary in its tone will, by its mere signature, do a great deal to attract attention to the book. Yours very truly GSantayana 1
Thoughts.
To Logan Pearsall Smith 8 July 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Congress) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford July 8, 1917
Dear Smith I have written to Scribner and to the Harvard University Press, also to Dent, whose reply I enclose.1 You see the result of concealing from him that you had chosen his enemy for a publisher. He smells a rat, and wants the cheese himself. I suppose you could easily leave out the passages from Dent’s books, if he is obdurate; that would be a way of reducing the selections, and limiting them to the books that are relegated to the higher shelf. You would not entertain the idea, I suppose, of letting Dent publish the thing. You are perhaps pledged to Constable. Of course Dent is crafty: but the outside of his books, in my experience, has not been unsatisfactory,
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and I have nothing serious to complain of in money-matters; so that to me the choice of publisher would be indifferent. Yesterday I despatched a philosophical essay to America; but I am finishing another, which I had half done, to send after it, in case —— either of ——————— —them ———— ^the first^ is lost at sea. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Unlocated.
To Max Forrester Eastman 18 July 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Indiana) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford July 18, 1917
Dear Mr Eastman1 It is a pleasure to know that you still remember me and to see, by the two numbers of “Masses” which arrived this morning, what interests occupy your thoughts and those of your friends. It would be an ill return on my part if I deceived you about my feelings. Let me say frankly, therefore, that you must not send me your review; it would be wasted on me, if you wish to do missionary work, and it would not increase the sympathy which I naturally feel for any effort to free human life from unnecessary trammels, and to let youth have its say. Theoretically I admit the right of every individual to make what experiments he will, and nothing seems to me sacred merely because it exists and is habitual. In that sense, I am as radical a revolutionist as any of you: but the question is, in any particular case: Is this possible; and if it is possible is it worth while? Human life is not a product of reason but of natural, biological forces: we have to accept and use the organisms that grow up, including our bodies and their various propensities; and we deceive ourselves if we imagine that our criticisms and rebellions are anything but the expression of partial natural movements within us, quite coordinate with those we oppose, and not one whit more authoritative. The question is simply what values our animal or social habit will create in comparison with another. And here my judgment probably differs entirely from yours. I am not sure whether The Masses represents one of the classes—the most numerous—or rather a few independent and excep-
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tional individuals. In either case it would not represent the principal values which life in our time can possess. Consciousness must not quarrel with its intruments: and as its intruments in other ages have been religious or family institutions, so today they are nations and corporations and scientific bodies—and the press too, no doubt: and if you cultivate ill-will and bitterness—as you do—towards the best things which are possible for us in these times—gallantry, disillusion, courage to face the real world and heartiness in enjoying what is to be enjoyed in it—you are wasting your only true opportunities. You are also closing your heart to the only sweet and voluminous human sympathies which you could have shared: you are spoiling life for others and for yourselves in the very ignorant and very factious pursuit of some inopportune ideal. Not that I blame anybody for having the passions he has: only, if these passions are narrow and hopeless, I am very sorry for him. I know as well as anyone what it is to tread the wine-press alone; but why should a man who suffers from injustice be himself unjust? If you are incapable of loving what other people love, why should you hate it [across] and hate them? It is an illusory revenge, by which nobody can gain anything. Yours very truly GSantayana 1 Max Forrester Eastman (1883–1969) graduated from Williams College (1905) and taught logic and psychology at Columbia University. His most successful book, The Enjoyment of Poetry, appeared in 1913. He became editor and manager of The Masses, a leftist-socialist literary and artistic magazine. Opposed to the United States’ involvement in World War I, Eastman was tried twice for sedition. At the second trial, the indictment was dismissed. In 1923 Eastman traveled to the Soviet Union to study the language and civilization and briefly joined the Communist Party.
To Charles Augustus Strong 21 July 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford July 21, 1917
Dear Strong Our last letters seem to have crossed. I am glad that your recovery continues, even if slowly: let us hope that you will be able to move to Fiesole in the autumn and to enjoy the air and the sunshine in your own garden, which I daresay you will find wonderfully improved. My first paper for Drake’s book went off long ago, but the second is not yet finished, not so much because it offers any insurmountable difficulties
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as because I have been feeling stale and disinclined to forced labour. A few cool and cloudy days—the summer here has been as un-English as the winter was—would probably enable me to complete it, as I have more than enough pages already written and copied: it is only the selection and shaping of the whole that is lacking. I think this (the three proofs) is a more mature version of our theory than the other (Literal and symbolic knowledge) but has fewer good things in it; and perhaps might make less impression on the hasty reader I have written to Drake, joining you in deprecating any tampering with the darling word Essence.1 I daresay “ideal object” or “inert idea” (Berkeley’s phrase) might convey the meaning even more readily to other people: but I feel that in the end it is better to impose a fresh term for a fresh concept: and the other meanings of “essence” are too remote and irrelevant to cause any permanent confusion. I dined at Corpus the other day with Bridges who has come back to Oxford to look after the rebuilding of his house. It is to have concrete walls, this time, covered with wood for the sake of a pleasing rusticity. Schiller was there, with his usual twaddle. The only other people I have seen lately are Mrs Morrell and her daughter Mrs Warren. I don’t know whether I told you that Peter Warren, her son, who was reported missing and given up for dead, is safe and unwounded and a prisoner at Scharmstedt in Hanover. He was brought down behind the German lines, his observer killed, his machine smashed, and even a bullet through his top-boot, but unscratched. I have been reading a book about the Koran2 (or Qurán, as the old pedant calls it) and also Le Vicomte de Bragelonne.3 That I should have taken refuge in the latter will show you my lax state of mind: but I have liked it and I think I should like now to read Saint Simon.4 Who is in charge of the apartment in Paris? Any body? I ask because if it were possible I should rather like to get my trunk—a small leather one— sent on to me before the winter. My great coats and other heavy garments are in it which I feel rather disinclined to replace and then find reduplicated. I suppose it could be sent to me to London, care of Brown Shipley & Co and I could go to see it through the customhouse there. Is Françoise ^ ^ definitely dotty? I have some thoughts of going to London for a few days soon, and later perhaps to Harrogate again. I didn’t like it very much last year, but I wasn’t very well, and now it seems to me as if the fresher air of that place would be a pleasant change from the closeness of Oxford.
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What does Margaret do to amuse herself or make herself useful—not incompatible pursuits—now that she is twenty and doesn’t have to think any more about growing up properly? Please give her my love. Have the doctors made out clearly what was the origin of your illness? The connection between indigestion and partial paralysis ought to give them a clue, I should think. Yours ever GSantayana 1
On 26 Jul 1917 Drake wrote Strong, in part: “I am sending Santayana a letter of Lovejoy’s in which he criticizes the use of ‘Essence’. S. will send it on to you. In due time you will receive the comments of us all on your paper. Personally, I feel it to be a great piece of work and I am sure all will welcome it heartily. But I fancy that two or three will not be convinced of the value of ‘Essence’ in the problem. I am not clear about the matter in my own mind yet, but hope to be before I get through. In fact, I have had no time to think about metaphysics yet, except when I read these papers of the others. I am busy with quite other matters. But I hope to get at it before the summer is over. I will send you a copy of my final draft.” Lovejoy’s 19 Jul 1917 letter says, in part: “The psychic state (as an existence—cf. ‘portrait & nature’) is not what is given. It is only the means by which an essence is given. This essence is not the essence of the psychic state. It is an entirely different essence. What is given is neither the psychic state as an existence, nor the essence of the psychic state. What is given is the (presumption) essence of the real thing. It is necessary to knowledge that this should be so. For (1) otherwise we couldn’t legitimately reach the real thing by inference. (2) Your assumption that the two data in reflection may have different logical values, i.e. meanings (the essence an intent of the mind), implies that one of these data—an imaged datum—does bring the real thing immediately before us or make it given: but in that case why shouldn’t the original sensational datum do the same? Can’t it be that the ability to transcend psychic states & have to do with external things begins with imagination, & must it not begin in sensation? The shying horse. The motor attitude has a share in determining the essence, & not the psychic state alone. Hence it is that the essence given is not the essence of the psychic state.” 2 The Koran, the sacred book of Islam, is the world’s most influential book, after the Bible. Moslems consider it a series of revelations by God to Mohammed. The canonical text, in Arabic, was established A.D. 651–52, and all variant texts were destroyed. Moslems memorize the Koran and consider all science a commentary on it. 3 Alexandre Dumas (1802–70) wrote Le vicomte de Bragelonne (Paris, 1895), a swashbuckling historical romance, which was colorful, dramatic, and popular. 4 Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon (1675–1755), was a French courtier and writer who sharply criticized bourgeois royal officialdom. His Mémoires, which present a vivid, candid picture of the court of Louis XIV, was not published until 1829.
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To Charles Augustus Strong 25 July 1917 • Oxford, England
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(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford July 25, 1917
Dear Strong I send on the enclosed letter.1 In a note to me Drake warmly praises your paper; but I suspect he is a little put out by your new position, which he calls “strategic”. How like a professional disputant that is! For my own part nothing is strategic, everything is intuitive. The reform of language only expresses a more accurate and closer perception of the facts. I think Drake is right in feeling that our position is a form of the “representative theory” and of “dualism”. Why mind that? Yours ever GSantayana 1
Enclosed is a 7 Jul 1917 letter from Drake to Strong which says, in part: “I am not sure that I like to throw aspersions upon the terms ‘representative theory’ and ‘epistemological dualism’, as you do.”
To Charles Augustus Strong 20 August 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Aug. 20, 1917
Dear Strong Do you think it is possible or worth while to bring Drake & Co into perfect agreement with our language and views? Drake’s article seemed to me hopeless in every way, and although perhaps his chapter, written after reading yours, may be more distinct and (I hope!) better written, my general feeling is that we shall have to be content with doing what we can, each for himself, without trying to be our brothers’ keepers. I have now received and read Rogers’ paper.1 There are points in it which I agree with, but much is perversely expressed and the whole blind. Have any of these men, except perhaps Lovejoy,2 any speculative insight to keep the details of their arguments in place and to give the whole a sense of direction? As to Lovejoy, a letter of his Drake has sent me sug-
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gests that he may back out altogether; and if he writes, it will be of course without making any concessions to our discoveries. You are far more competent than I to trace the exact meaning and antecedents of the phrases used by American philosophers: I therefore am willing to believe you are right about “dualism” and “the representative theory”. Yet, left to my insulated intelligence, I should have thought that even essence and object were two (if that is dualism) since error is possible, and the predicates assigned to the object (i.e. the given essence) may not be those it actually has (i.e. the essence of the object). Do our collaborators hold that no part of the essence of the object can ever be directly present in the “idea” of it? That would be a dogmatic and untenable assertion that substance is necessarily unknowable. I have dealt with it in my paper, which Drake says he agrees with: Drake at least, then, cannot mean by dualism or representation that the two terms are wholly irrelevant, and that no true representation is possible. I haven’t yet sent off my second paper, having been drawn into yet another side-issue—about the meanings of “existence”. As it is all work that will be useful for my book, and the paper I have already sent will do for the joint-volume, I am not worried, or hurried particularly by these complications. I have written to Françoise about my trunk. We shall see what happens. Are you still troubled by indigestion and do you have disturbed nights? And are you able to go about in a Bath chair? I see here how much the wounded who do so seem to be enlivened by the air and the sights of public places. I am expecting to go on a little motor-trip soon with Moncure Robinson. I was in London last Friday, and it seemed very nice. Yours ever GSantayana [across] Love to Margaret. 1
Arthur Kenyon Rogers (1868–1936) wrote “The Problem of Error.” Lovejoy’s paper was “Pragmatism Versus the Pragmatist.”
2
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To Charles Augustus Strong 14 September 1917 • Oxford, England
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(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Sept. 14, 1917
Dear Strong Here is Lovejoy’s letter,1 which I am sorry I didn’t send you sooner. Its complete insignificance made me forget that I was asked to forward it to you. Drake has since written again, repeating that Lovejoy and others are obdurate in their affection for “representation”, and “dualism”, Mackintosh2 (who is he?) being alone, apparently, on our side. In various journeys I have just made—to Bath, London, and Chichester—I have mislaid this letter of Drake’s: but I think I have given you the substance of it. No comments on your paper or on mine have yet reached me, but I believe they are to pass through my hands on their way to you. I have sent brief compliments and criticisms to Rogers and Pratt,3 but without going into detailed controversy. I feel it isn’t worth while: but of course if you think it is, and can convince them, so much the better. Yours ever GSantayana 1
Included is a 19 Jul 1917 letter from Lovejoy to Drake (with Drake’s handwritten note at the top). 2 Douglas Clyde Macintosh (1877–1948) was a Baptist clergyman who taught theology and the philosophy of religion at Yale (1919–42). An important modernist liberal theologian in American Protestantism, he tried to preserve the abiding essence of Christian belief by using contemporary scientific and philosophical methods, restructuring Christian doctrine to bring it into harmony with modern knowledge. His works include Theology as an Empirical Science (1919) and The Pilgrimage of Faith in the World of Modern Thought (1931). No paper by him is included in Drake’s book. 3 James Bissett Pratt (1875–1944), a student of Oriental religions, taught philosophy at Williams College (1905–43). He authored The Psychology of Religious Belief (1907), The Religious Consciousness (1920), Matter and Spirit (1922), and The Pilgrimage of Buddhism (1928). His paper was “Critical Realism and the Possibility of Knowledge.”
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To Charles Augustus Strong 21 September 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont Street, Oxford Sept. 21, 1917
Dear Strong I hope, The notes on your paper (which but for the Censor — — you ^ ^ would have already received) seem to me rather discouraging. Some of ^ ^ our prospective collaborators are evidently nomili —nalists of the dull-thingeating school; but Lovejoy is intelligent, and I imagine his opposition to “essence” is more a matter of bad temper and egotism (the doctrine is not his own!) than of incapacity to distinguish; he speaks of universals and of principles of individuation; and a person who is so scholastic as that is sure to be saved, or at least savable. Essence has made such a row that it almost seems as if I ought to plunge in with my whole exposition of the subject— a large part of my opus magnum. But, apart from the fact that the manuscript is not finished, there are two reasons for holding it back on this occasion: one, that it is impossible, and would seem presumptuous, to press a complete new ontology on a set of more or less mature—I mean aged—colleagues, and the other, that it is not necessary for the immediate subject of realism to distinguish essence very particularly. In my paper on Literal and Symbolic knowledge, for instance, although I use the word essence, I didn’t feel it necessary to explain or defend the concept in order to make my argument persuasive. Of course, fundamental clearness and soundness will not be achieved without it: but this volume is one of local and momentary importance only; it is merely controversial and instrumental. Both your theory and mine are to be set forth elsewhere in their true context and proportions. There are some points made in those notes with which I am in agreement. “Essence has nothing to do with existence”: “semi-existence” is not an ultimately acceptable phrase. As I told you long ago, I like the frankness and descriptiveness of that phrase: one sees what you mean, and that you are reporting the facts honestly; but these are literary merits, not implying necessarily a correct or ultimate analysis. Essences have not ^^ semi-existence when they are given: they, even then, have no existence at all: but the intuition of them exists, and with the intuition (since the animal mind expresses a reaction, a presumption, and therefore projects its data, and takes them for things) there is probably a belief in the existence of an
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object having the given essence. This object, or essence hypostasized, has an alleged or imputed existence: whether it exists or not is a matter of fact to be decided by further investigation. But what is obvious, patent, indubitable, and really given is not an existence at all: it is an essence; a homeless, dateless, qualitative, self-identical, self-sufficing theme or motif, a universal, in that there is no knowing how often or where it may not recur, how many things it may be predicable of or how many minds may be acquainted with it in the course of infinite time. Examples of essences are: nausea, jealousy, a particular shade of violet, any poem or musical composition, any noise, the multiplication-table, the straight line. These may, with literary propriety, be said to exist or, “as it were, exist”, whenever, and for as long as, they are felt, conceived, or embodied in material things: but in truth it is not they that exist, but the feeling, thought, or thing which in one case intuits, and in the other case embodies them. In the first case they are given, in the latter they are predicable: in neither case do they, in themselves, acquire any hypostatic or real existence. As to the definition of existence, that is a large question, involving the definition of matter (or psychic substance) and of consciousness. I approve (as you know) of the use of “object” for whatever is or becomes “correlative to an organism that perceives or desires”. “Object” is an egotistical and adventitious name given to things, and also to essences. It is proper to them only on occasion of their being noticed by us. Things become objects when somebody thinks of them; they are never objects in themselves. This is the equivocation on which idealism (in the Aesthetik of Kant’s Critique,1 for instance) is founded, since it is quite true that objects, “as such”, are relatively — to “subjects”, as such, which in turn are relative to objects “as such”: etc, etc. so that, if you imagine that things, essences, because sometimes called objects, are ^ ^ objects intrinsically, you are able to turn the universe into an “egocentric” whirpool and maze of relations in which all the terms are abstractions from the relations, and nothing exists except thinking, and that doesn’t. What is true of “object” is equally true of “datum”: and I fear our friends in America are not sure, when they say “datum”, whether they mean that which is, by chance, given, or that whose whole being and existence is to be given. If they mean the latter, the retort would be that there is no such thing. Things and essences, whose being is not to be given, become data. I am still working, in a desultory fashion, on my second realistic paper, with the excursus on “existence” which has grown out of it: but my mind is rather attracted to other subjects, nearer to the war, on which I am also
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writing more or less. I have been to Bath, to London, and to Chichester, to stay with the Russells. “Elizabeth” has returned from her Californian garden, and is having a second honeymoon with her wicked Earl. “Bertie” lives with them now in London but he was not at their place in the country when I was there. I have seen the first American soldiers in Oxford from an aviation camp not far off. Their uniforms seemed tight (they wear stiff white collars) and their smiles excessive, but [across] otherwise they seemed very fit. Yours ever GSantayana [across page one] P.S. I am writing to Drake, repeating (with the necessary changes of tone) what I say in this letter.
To Charles Augustus Strong 29 September 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St Oxford Sept. 29, 1917
Dear Strong I am sorry there has been such a long delay in sending you the comth thinking that ments on your paper, but I first despatched them on the 20– they would pass the censor as they were; but he sent them back, and I had to write to the chief postal censor for a permit, which didn’t arrive until this morning, when I despatched the notes a second time, I hope more successfully. I took a three-hours’ walk this afternoon, over hills and fields (to the foot of Boar’s Hill and back) in the most lovely warm sun. I have been lazy of late and this return to old habits was most enjoyable, and I feel first rate after my experiment. I have no rheumatism, but have often felt slack and a little tired when I prolonged my exercise. My so-called second paper has given birth to various excursuses on “existence”, “consciousness”, etc, and I have run up against points which have puzzled me and made me vacillate in my views. What you call “semiexistence”, and I was inclined to accept or to call “specious existence” has given me special trouble. My conclusion now is that it is a mistake to speak of the essence as existing at all. What exists substantially is the organic or mind-stuff process; what exists actually and historically is the passing per-
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ception or intuition—a fact, a cognition, something spiritual, having a date and duration, but no substantial or efficacious existence; while the essence (though it would be pedantic not to say that it existed, while it is given or embodied) exists only by a current figure of speech, the true existence not belonging to it, but to the mind that perceives or to the thing that embodies it. Do you agree with this? I should be glad to know. Yours ever GSantayana
To Charles Augustus Strong 3 October 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Oct. 3, 1917
Dear Strong I send on this strangely wrong-headed letter,1 addressed to you and me; your “psychic state” now seems to be giving as much trouble as my “essence”. I confess I agree with Drake about “representation” being a natural and harmless word to use for the relation say between a good digestion and the comfortable feeling that betrays it to consciousness. And I think your use of “psyche” and “psychic-state” for unconscious organic processes, though historically defensible and pleasing to my own ear, is too much of a paradox for the moderns. The psychic for them is the realm of consciousness and immediate data, not of substantial processes in the self which find expression in data and in consciousness. I have answered Drake briefly, but it is for you to try to dispel the horrible confusion which he seems to have fallen into, if you think such an effort on your part is worth the trouble. Yours ever G. Santayana 1
Unlocated.
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To Logan Pearsall Smith 9 October 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Congress) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Oct. 9, 1917
Dear Smith I have been looking over the product of your friendly labours, and have read some of the sections entire. My feelings are mixed. Now I am overcome by the ——— feelings ———— ^ecstasy^ of a doting parent, now by a sense of how ridiculously dead, old-fashioned, and thin all this argumentation and “viewiness” of my early days was or has become. I suppose both judgments are exaggerated, and that what I like is not much better than what I hate, and the wayward psychology not much worse than the epigrams. Perhaps on calmer consideration I shall reconcile myself to these inequalities. As to your selections, my impression is that they are too long, and that a great deal of dead wood could be plucked out of them. If you are not in a hurry, perhaps you will let me indicate in some way (say with a blue pencil) the parts that seem to me unnecessary. On the other hand, I had expected more single sentences and detached paragraphs: my impression is that what I have to say is better conveyed in these occasionally — epigrams than in any of my attempts at argument or system. I am glad you have not made a collection merely of pensées, because that is cloying and distracting: but perhaps short passages interspersed among the longer ones, when on the same subject, might relieve and give point to the whole. If you didn’t mind waiting six months or a year (so that without self-indigestion I could myself read over all my works) I might send you a small collection of these loose stones, to put into your edifice if you thought they would improve it. If these suggestions, especially the second, don’t appeal to you, there is nothing said: I am only telling you frankly what my impressions are. The only thing I should like to insist on is the omission here and there of arguments or opinions of which I no longer approve—and there is a whole family of them. I was hardly aware before how much my philosophy has changed since “The Life of Reason”. That book now seems to me hopelessly lost in the subjective, not that the subjective is not worth expressing, but that it should never be confused with the natural or historical facts. Yours sincerely GSantayana
1910–1920
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 10 October 1917 • Oxford, England
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(MS: Virginia) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Oct. 10, 1917
Dear Susie Some time has passed since I have written to you or Josephine and you may like to hear that I am sin novedad.1 My lodgings here and the routine of my life in Oxford suit me pretty well, and when I go away it is always to return with a sense of relief and freedom. Of course, it is well for me to have a little change occasionally, and see people. I went some time ago to Bath to meet my old friend Moncure Robinson, who is now a confirmed old bachelor of forty-two with luxurious habits. He took me in his motorcar to London where he has a house, and I spent one night there before going on to Lord Russell’s, whose wife No 3 has now come back to him, so that she is as good as if she were No 4. They were having a middle-aged second honey-moon—embarrassing and not very agreeable sight for the by-stander. The lady, however, is very nice to me, pretends to read my books, etc. I made attempts some time ago to send you one of her novels, but I suppose the censor intercepted it. I ought to have had it sent by the publisher; in that case they let books through, I believe, but I am not sure that you would really be amused by her not very amiable recollections of her life in Germany. In London I have seen Elsie Beal and her very plain daughter Betty, who is eighteen. They came with the idea of spending the winter in England, as Boylston is at the American embassy here: but Elsie is not amusing herself, and they are going back. Elsie is rather a wreck, looks like a Wigglesworth,2 and isn’t clever or kind enough to make up for her lost looks and manners, which last were never natural. The daughter is unaffected and robust, but deplorably ugly, except for a nice complexion. My chief preoccupation now is a book to which Strong and I are contributing:3 it is to be published in America, and there is a lot of sending manuscript and comments—we are trying to agree, at least in our vocabulary—to and fro, which often involves delays due to the necessity of getting permits from the censor, and the slowness of communications. We haven’t yet lost anything at sea, however, which I suppose is rather good luck under the circumstances. Strong writes from Switzerland: “Margaret has been in Zurich for a month, riding, going to the opera, & dancing the tango
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(with an Argentinian dancing-master named Fernandez!!!). She comes back on Sunday to lead a sober and I hope literary life at this institution. I am flourishing generally but disabled still as to my feet—half dead from the knees down. But the future is not unhopeful.”4 Oxford, which has been full of cadets for a year, now has a new species—the American Aviation Corps, with their strange appearance—yet so familiar to me that I sometimes fancy I am at Harvard going to a foot ball game. One has brought a letter to me, but I found [across] him rather dreadful.—I receive the Lectura Dominical regularly (on Saturdays). Love to all from Jorge Santayana 1
As usual. Jane “Jennie” Wigglesworth Grew was Elsie Beal’s mother. 3 See 30 Jun 1917. Strong’s article is “On the Nature of the Datum.” 4 Strong underwent treatment for paralysis of the legs at Valmont, near Glion-surMontreux. 2
To Charles Augustus Strong 21 October 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Oct. 21, 1917.
Dear Strong A copy of Drake’s paper reached me yesterday morning. I presume you have received one two, otherwise I can send you this one. It is poor stuff, both in form and in substance, and if our book is to open with it, it will be stamped from the first page with indecision and mediocrity. He says nothing that you have not said infinitely better, and introduces the “ideas” of British psychology—a swarm of conscious will-o-the-wisps, of which it is impossible to say whether they are known by anything else, or know themselves, or know other things, or simply abolish all knowledge. He misunderstands what you mean by the psyche and a psychic state: but in this I don’t think you are wholly blameless, because you used to believe that psychic states were conscious (I suppose of their own “content”) and in keeping the name, which in modern psychology rather suggests the conscious as distinct from the substantial, you obscure the fact that the psyche is now, in your doctrine, an organic substance, and the psychic state not a datum, as Drake supposes. Doubtless you have already set them right on
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these points, but it must be annoying to see such inertia in minds that are well-disposed, and on some subjects so sensible. Drake on religion was capital and in psychology his spirit is still good, although his wit is dull. I am venting my irritation upon you, but to Drake himself I have written with all the courtesy and moderation that I could muster. As I hardly share your hopes of converting the whole sect, it really doesn’t matter to me what they say: but of course the worse it is the less inclined I should be to make concessions to their vocabulary; on the contrary, it would become more urgent to stand altogether on one’s own ground and let it be obvious that our association is merely circumstantial, as if we were contributing a the same review. I have not yet received any comments on my first paper, and the ——— excur ———— — cuses excursuses to my second one are becoming so voluminous—exis————— tence, essence, consciousness being set forth according to my lights—that I doubt whether I shall dare to send them the whole when it is finished. But it will have been very useful to me in articulating my views for the Realms of Being. Françoise has not answered my letter. Yours ever GSantayana
To Charles Augustus Strong 26 October 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Oct. 26, 1917
Dear Strong Yesterday I received—and sent on—your reply to the criticisms on your paper. I have never read anything of yours that I liked so much, it seems as if your long illness had led you to concentrate and clarify your thoughts more than ever. It was particularly welcome to me to find what you say about essence so entirely what I think, because I will confess that until now I had some suspicions that your conception of essence tended in places to become too psychological, something like “img/ age”. My enthusiasm for your exposition is so great that I feel a fresh desire to come to an agreement with you on the chief point on which we still differ, namely, the difference between a “psychic state” and the “brain-state”; in other words, whether things-in-themselves (or substance, as I should
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prefer to call it) — is are material or psychic. I am not sure that we need disagree even on this point. The essence of a green-feeling, according to you, is not (or need not be?) the essence of green. Yet, in order to bring the essence of green before us, it must have, if I understand you, some affinity or intelligible relation to green. Does this affinity require any similarity? How is a green-feeling akin to the essence of green? Not (I understand) by intuiting green, for a green-feeling is not aware of anything. Is it that green, or something like green, can be truly predicated of it? But can a green-feeling be looked at? Can it look green?—and I don’t see how else anything could have green for its attribute. If you were willing to say that what made a green-feeling an intelligible ground for the intuition of the essence “green”, was its natural, normal, habitual sufficiency (as the world and life are constituted) to make green appear, just as this is what makes a greentree, or the spring-time, have an affinity to the essence “green”—then I should not feel any but a verbal reluctance to accept your doctrine. The ear has a natural affinity to sound, the eye to colour; and so (more minutely and intimately) the brain-state that immediately evokes any essence must have to that essence: but not by having that essence, or any similar essence, but by the laws of evolution and superfoetation—as marriage “evokes” children. If so much were granted, I should gladly call the central sensitive formative governing elements in the body the psyche, and the particular states of the psyche the “sensations”, “passions”, or “affections” productive of our sensible, passionate, or emotional data: it is an ancient and perhaps inevitable practice to call these things by the same name, as anger, according to Aristotle, means dialectically a desire for revenge, but physically a boiling of the humours. In other words, the ground of a given emotion is called by the name of that emotion, especially when its own essence is not at all known. Mind-stuff, or even feeling, would on this principle be a good or at least inevitable name for substance, so long as we know nothing about substance except that it is the organ of mind and feeling. However, we now do know something more about substance—especially its distribution and methodical, measurable transformations. Would you be willing to predicate of mind-stuff, not merely its affinity with mind, but the laws of physics? If so, it would not differ from what I call matter, which I don’t imagine to be exhaustively described by physical chemistry, nor even described from within at all: its external relations position, motions, fertilities are known to us, not its intrinsic nature: and as of these fertilities that in respect to mind is one of the most remarkable, and to us
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the important one, we might call it mind-stuff par excellence, although it is the stuff of everything else also. This is all old: we have discussed it often: yet I feel the impulse to put it to you again with a sort of new hope, because I think we ought not to allow words or old associations to blind us to what is, perhaps, a substantial agreement, even in this matter. I shall be curious to see what they make in America of your rebuttal: it wouldn’t surprise me if some were converted: but Drake is so entangled in the notion of “mental facts” or small living ideas breeding one another in the mind like mosquitoes, that I am afraid he will never come round. If they put our two contributions by themselves at the end, in a water-tight compartment, or in the quarter-deck, the ship will either sink or rise by the stern—I don’t know which, but certainly she won’t go on an even keel. However, I should be glad of the honourable isolation: and I should deprecate the use of “essence” by them, because they will twist it horribly and the whole doctrine, which is open enough to misunderstanding at best, will be hopelessly befogged. What do you think of Drake on O, Op, Op1, etc, etc.? He wants to call essence O, i.e. object! O?no!. I am afraid the censor may think this a code, so I will stop. Yours ever GSantayana
To Roy Wood Sellars 30 October 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Michigan) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford October 30, 1917.
Dear Mr Sellars It was a great pleasure to receive your essay,1 which I have just finished reading. After your book on “Critical Realism” I was prepared for a general agreement as to your results, in the wide sense in which they are naturalistic and admit a subjective sphere as well as a physical one. In analysis and in language, however, I find now that we differ more than I had believed. Indeed, I am afraid I have no right to figure as the critical realist for whom you speak: and perhaps, if my paper (and Strong’s) are included in the book at all they ought to be relegated to an appendix, with a note (which Strong might compose) explaining that our point of view differs in
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some /rimportant respects from that of the other contributors. In fact, it differs so much, and so pervasively, that it would be useless for me to send any specific comments on particular passages. You know what these differences are as well as I do. If I may make one suggestion, however, which does not concern my own views directly, it is that you should revise somewhat, or omit, your comments on Plato and Aristotle, and soften the tone of those you make on Kant. As they stand I am afraid they will arouse hostility and controversy, rather than help to clarify or to recommend the views you are advocating. Personally, I also feel some doubts about the advisability of making so much of abstracted philosophical disciplines— psychology, epistemology, ontology, metaphysics, etc. What a man thinks he thinks, and if it is true of its object, I can’t — think believe it makes much ^ ^ difference which ’ology we put it under. I am also—but this I know is wicked of me—sceptical about the “increased prestige of science” or the advance of everything in recent times. There are changes which doubtless involve improvements in some respects—even the war does that—but that the balance of recent change is for the good in philosophy does not seem to me plausible. For one thing there are no great men: and I wonder if a philosophy is substantially improved when its personal accent and symbolism are flattened out into scholastic technique. Strong (who I suppose has a separate copy of your essay: else I can send him mine) will doubtless send you detailed observations, to which you may regard me as subscribing beforehand. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
“Knowledge and Its Categories.”
To Charles Augustus Strong 30 October 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford October 30, 1917.
Dear Strong I saw Sir Wm Osler yesterday, and had a cup of tea with Lady Osler as well. They have lost their only son in the war. He gave me the notes which
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I enclose,1 and seemed very glad to have such comparatively goods/ news of you. As your reply to the criticisms of Drake, etc, was in the form of a letter I tried sending it on without a permit from the censor, and it apparently has gone through, as otherwise it would have come back to me. I took the precaution of registering it, to make doubly sure that it should return if the censor stopped it. Today I receive Sellars’ paper. It is dreadful, at least in form and quality, for I have read only a quarter of it so far. I feel almost ashamed of the company we have got into. What logic, what style, what text-book knowledge of the history of philosophy, crammed up to pass a Ph.D. examination! Sellars on Plato and Aristotle is enough to make one despair. Let us by all means have a compartment to ourselves, if we must travel in the same train; and you may denounce “representativism” (representationism?) for me as much as you will. Lovejoy, if he contributes, will raise the quality of the book, even if he doesn’t correct its errors. We are having a nice autumn here, and I have begun again to go to lunch often in the country, taking the train to help me out. I carry a note book, and write copiously by the inn fire. It is much more congenial to me than the summer sun. Have you received the French translation of my book? Yours ever GSantayana 1
Unlocated.
To Wendell T. Bush 17 November 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Columbia) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Nov. 17, 1917.
Dear Mr Bush I was about to answer your first letter when the second arrives. You overwhelm me by your kind interest in my various odd compositions. Apparently Mr Young of Minneapolis is dead and his library sold—or is he ruined?—since my books inscribed for his collection have found their way
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to the second-hand dealers. You may have heard of him: he had the hobby of sending people their own books to write dedications in; and he spared nobody.1 Of course, if you think people will be interested in these dedications you are free to publish as much of them as you like. —In [ the “Apollo th th – – in Love”, by the way, 4 stanza, 4 line, something has dropped out: probably “In thy form” should be “In thy one form”.]—2 All my books and papers are in Strong’s apartment in Paris, and the bonne3 in charge has gone mad and will not answer our letters. I am therefore ignominious ly ^ ^ precluded from consulting any manuscript or promising you the “Plato in Syracuse” or “Philosophers at Court” as I afterwards called it: it is more than a dialogue: it is a tragedy in five acts, and I still hope some day to revise it and publish it.4 But you might have some scenes, if I could get at them, for your publication. However, I have something more recent, in prose, which perhaps you might accept, either for your reformed Journal or for the poetical one (I suppose they are not the same): it is a set of rambling pieces which I call “Soliloquies in England” of which there are two or three ready, and any number in petto. I will send you the first when it y copied and I can get the censor’s leave. is — read — ^ ^ If the Journal is going in for belles lettres, won’t it need a new title? The present one has always seemed to me rather forbidding. “Egotism” has been translated into French, and M. Boutroux has been kind enough to honour the book with a nice preface. I have hopes that the French version will have a larger influence than the original—somewhat stifled, I fear, by the Hegelian — revi— ews aspersions which have appeared in ^ ^ English and American reviews. Only Mr Dewey’s has seemed to me at all just—too complimentary, perhaps—but I have seen only a few, by chance.5 Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
See 22 Feb 1911. Published as “Apollo in Love: or the Poet Lost in the Platonist” in Complete Poems, 351. 3 Françoise. 4 This play was published posthumously as Philosophers at Court in The Poet’s Testament: Poems and Two Plays. 5 Dewey reviewed Egotism in Philosophy 12 (1915): 645–49 and New Republic (9 Dec 1916): 155. 2
1910–1920
To Charles Scribner’s Sons 25 November 1917 • Oxford, England
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(MS: Princeton) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Nov. 25, 1917
Messrs Charles Scribner’s Sons New York Dear Sirs: M. Lerolle, who has translated my “Egotism in German Philosophy” is so much encouraged by the way his work has been received that he wishes to translate some of my essays contained in “Interpretations of Poetry & Religion”. As you kindly said in the case of the other book, that you left such matters in my hands, I suppose you would have no objection to this new project: but I should be much obliged for a formal expression of your consent. Yours very truly GSantayana
To Logan Pearsall Smith 25 November 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Congress) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Nov. 25, 1917
Dear Smith Having now read over all your selections, and meditated at length on the subject, I should like to propose this: that you let me rearrange and supplement (as well as curtail) these passages, with a view to making an orderly composition out of them, not as I had at first understood the project—a book of extracts—but a synthesis of all my books and ideas. It might be called “Vicissitudes of Human Belief”, or “Experiments in Faith and Criticism”, or “Episodes” in the same, or “Human Experiments” simply— all these being intended for paraphrases of the “Life of Reason”—a title which is apparently obscure and unfortunate, as no one seems to have understood exactly what I meant by it. We might begin by a chapter on “Human Endowment”, containing the passages from the beginning of Interpretations of Poetry & Religion, about the senses and imagination;
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and then one on “Stages of moral reflection”, with the “pre-rational”, rational, and “post-rational” passages; then the aesthetic analyses; finally the passages on government and religion, and criticism of particular poets or philosophers. This is not thought out in detail, and I have not yet dared to disturb your leaves in their respective envelopes, or to add anything: but I feel that a sort of cumulative and unitary effect—a picture of human ideas at work—might be produced. If you approve, I will (when I have finished a short but troublesome business I am now occupied in) devote my abundant leisure to this mosaic. It was very nice to see you and your sisters the other day—and I have received Mrs Stephen’s paper on Bergson,1 which I will thank her for when I can do so intelligently, as I have not yet found time to read and digest it as it deserves. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Karin Stephen’s The Misuse of Mind: A Study of Bergson’s Attack on Intellectualism was published in 1922.
To William Roscoe Thayer 26 November 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Houghton) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Nov. 26, 1917
Dear Thayer Your letter has encouraged me a good deal, both in respect to my book and to the war. The ill-grace with which the professors of philosophy have received my little exposition (or exposure) shows how much it was needed:1 the German educational-commercial-military trust was really undermining everything, and largely, perhaps, unconsciously in so far as most of its agents were concerned. On the surface, the situation is now very bad, and we seem to be threatened with its universal domination: but I think there has been too great an upheaval and awakening—probably in Germany as well—for the plot to succeed now: they will get the shadow of victory at best, and not the reality. Russian cooperation, which they have secured for the moment,2 might itself be their undoing. I don’t know how you feel; perhaps you are imaginatively more a conservative than I, but the Russian international socialism we are threatened with does not
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frighten me at all. Like Solon,3 I know that religions and nations and the most charming aristocracies are mortal; and I don’t dislike the joys of working people and their tap-room philosophies. It is not really very different from the plebs of the Middle Ages, and has possibilities. But we must begin by renouncing everything, and being patient for five hundred years. That the nineteenth century should die without leaving an heir doesn’t seem to me a real calamity. All this is on the hypothesis that things are not patched up, and that there is a great catastrophe. I don’t know what is really probable. I hear the Germans are not dismayed at the odium they have aroused, because as soon as the war is over they will “die Liebens würdigkeit rationell betreiben.”4 It is very pleasant to hear from my friends at Harvard where things probably have moved fast and will move faster: but the past and its good side are secure. I am full of projects and actually carry some of them out: and I lead a life of essential solitude with a little incidental society which suits me very well. The war has intercepted all my plans—even the literary ones, as I can’t fix my thoughts on remote things steadily—but it has stirred me up, and perhaps my thoughts may become truer in consequence.— Thank you many times for your letter. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Reviewers condemned Egotism as anti-German propaganda. This is a reference to the secret nonagression treaty between the Bolshevik revolution leaders and Germany in 1917. 3 Solon (c. 638 B.C.–c. 559 B.C.) was an Athenian poet, lawgiver, and reformer. 4 Pursue a policy of expedient amiability. 2
To Logan Pearsall Smith 27 November 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Congress) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Nov. 27, 1917
Dear Smith When you spoke the other day of sending me your copies of my books, it didn’t occur to me that you meant the mutilated corpses from which you have extracted the Eve-like ribs, or choice morsels. If I had thought that, I should have accepted your offer with alacrity, as then I need only go on,
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and extract the necessary bit of back-bone as well, without doing more murder. I had vaguely thought of merely marking and copying the (very short) fragments I expect to add: but by continuing your method I can save time and labour, and the result will have a more uniform aspect. If then you will send me the books, I shall be much obliged. How curious that Berenson should be a captain in the U.S. Army. We are living in an age of wonderful changes, and this one is typical. Do you think Lenin1 is going to set fire to all the world, and reduce us to brothers in ashes? I am resigned, almost willing. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) was aided by the German government in returning to Russia after the February 1917 outbreak of the Russian Revolution so that he could disrupt the Russian war effort. In November Lenin overthrew the Kerensky government, became chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, and established the dictatorship of the proletariat. He saw the revolution through to victory in the civil war of 1918–20; the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was founded.
To Bertrand Arthur William Russell [December 1917] • Oxford, England
(MS: Unknown)
The situation is certainly bad from a military point of view, or for those who are angry because the war interferes with their private or political machinations. It may last a long time yet; or else be renewed after a mock peace. But, looking at it all calmly, like a philosopher, I find nothing to be pessimistic about. When I go to Sandford to lunch,1 which is often, it does my heart good to see so many freshly ploughed fields: England is becoming a cultivated country, instead of being a land of moors and fens, like barbarous North Germany. That alone seems to me more than a compensation for all losses: it is setting the foundations right. As for Russia, I rather like Lenin, (not that fatuous Karensky!2); he has an ideal he is willing to fight for, and it is a profoundly anti-German ideal. If he remains in power, he may yet have to fight the Germans, and it will be with very poisonous gas indeed. Besides, I think their plans at Berlin have profoundly miscarried, and that the Prussian educational-industrial-military domination we were threatened with is undermined at home. Military victory would not
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now do, because the more peoples they rope in, the more explosives they will be exploding under their own establishment. As for deaths and loss of capital, I don’t much care. The young men killed would grow older if they lived, and then they would be good for nothing; and after being good for nothing for a number of years they would die of catarrh or a bad kidney or the halter or old age—and would that be less horrible? I am willing, almost glad, that the world should be poorer: I only wish the population too could become more sparse; and I am perfectly willing to live on a bread-ticket and a lodging-ticket and be known only by a number instead of a baptismal name, provided all this made an end of living on lies, and really cleared the political air. But I am afraid the catastrophe won’t be great enough for that, and that some false arrangement will be patched up—in spite of Lenin—so that we shall be very much as we were before. People are not intelligent. It is very unreasonable to expect them to be so, and that is a fate my philosophy reconciled me to long ago. How else could I have lived for forty years in America? All this won’t interest you, but since it is written I will let it go. [Unsigned ] 1
Sandford is a place of significance in Puritan. A revolutionist, Aleksandr Feodorovich Kerensky (1881–1970) was the provisional premier whose government was overthrown by the Bolsheviks in 1917. 2
To Arthur Davison Ficke 4 December 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Beinecke) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Dec. 4, 1917
Dear Ficke It is a pleasure to hear from you and to see that you are at close quarters, as well as at head quarters, with the army. You will doubtless be useful, and the experience will transform (I should think) your sense for human life and give all you write hereafter an added value. I myself am too old to improve very much: yet I think whatever I may find it possible to undertake in the future will be bronze instead of lead, or of gingerbread,—whatever you think has been my rather cheap material hitherto.
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The war happened to find me in England—I had come from Paris for a fortnight with a return ticket, which I still posses—and I have been waiting ever since to have it end. Probably I shall not have the pleasure of seeing you in Paris: you will be gone when I arrive; but if for any reason you should remain—perhaps the return of the American army and disposal of its effects—and law-suits—may detain you, it would be a great pleasure to see you there. I live at No 9, avenue de l’Observatoire—an extension, as you know, of the Luxembourg gardens.1 But the address you have—Brown, Shipley—is always safe. Oxford suits me very well. Its charm has so much of romantic Christian antiquitiy about it, so much of lovely nature, and so much of perennial youth (for instead of undergraduates we are flooded with cadets) that I am always happy to return to it, although I don’t much care for the Oxonians. What I want, and find, is a congenial setting for solitude. And I am working pretty hard. With many thanks for your letter Sincerely yours GSantayana 1 Luxembourg Palace was built 1615–20 for Marie de’ Medici. The adjacent gardens are famous.
To Logan Pearsall Smith 4 December 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Congress) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford December 4, 1917
Dear Smith The ten volumes have arrived and I have set to work with such ardour that I have already finished the first volume of the L. of R. and half of the S. of B. The latter is written in a very genteel style—only a few lapses into the jargon of American philosophy. But the L. of R. is really scandalous in its confusion, both in language and in thought. I feel strongly that, Deo volente,1 I must rewrite this whole book: it could easily be purified, shortened, strengthened, and filled out logically.2 I find two good things in it, which make it worth while to attempt a revision, one is the general idea— the doctrine as well as the subject—and the other a certain warmth and boldness in the description and interpretation of particular points and episodes. This last, of course, is what we are after for the present, and you
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have already selected the best passages: but there are some others that I think might be put in—I have made a great collection, subject to further selection—while in those you have taken there is a great deal of alloy—mere argumentation or psychological twaddle—that I want to cut out. As the worst passages in the L. of R. will be just those left when our excisions are all made, I should like to keep the mutilated volumes as a perpetual thorn in my conscience, and a stimulus to this necessary revision, if the book is to be rescued from the flames. As these books seem ^ ^ to have been the copies you possessed, may I have the pleasure of sending you a complete set—with the American binding to the S. of B, not this dreadful vegetative-aesthetical cover? I mention this before having the books sent to you, in case you have other copies or for some other reason don’t wish to be burdened with a fresh set. Yours sincerely GSantayana P.S. I reopen this note to thank you for the lists and the extra pages of the books which have come by this morning’s post. If my harvest, when piled up, makes to vast a hay-stack, I will send it back to you with a hope that you may take it in hand again, and choose out of what I have chosen the sections that seem to you most interesting. You might, for instance, take out the aesthetic and religious sections, and leave out all the technical philosophy. 1
God willing. Not until the last year of his life did Santayana accomplish this task in the one-volume edition of Reason. [D. C.] 2
To Charles Augustus Strong 10 December 1917 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Dec. 10, 1917
Dear Strong What a splendid compensation it would be for your long illness, if when you rose from it your book was in the press! I am truly delighted to hear that your work is going so fast and so surely, and hope you will keep it up. The matter of Drake’s book is of little consequence in comparison. Of course your present article must be withdrawn, since it is an integral part of your book. If you feel like writing them another, so much the better for
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them, but I shouldn’t allow that to interfere with your chief task. As for me, I am writing to Drake that, as far as my own feeling goes, your possible withdrawal makes no difference: I have never believed that uniformity was important. But if, with you out of it, they think the driving power of the volume would be increased by unity of doctrine and vocabulary, then indeed I must withdraw too; because, apart from mere words, I am not prepared to change anything. I hope you received the 4th Chapter of your manuscript; also my second paper for Drake, called “Three Proofs of Realism”. The first paper, entitled “Literal and Symbolic Knowledge” I have no spare copy of: and there is nothing in it (now especially) that it matters to you to see beforehand. The comments they sent me on it are perfectly futile. Yours ever GSantayana
To Logan Pearsall Smith [1918] • Oxford, England
(MS: Congress)
22 Beaumont St. Oxford Dear Smith I shall be delighted to come to lunch with you and Mrs Berenson, and as you give me a choice of days, I will say on Monday, which is a little more convenient for me. The poet laureate1 has just been here for a moment, as friendly, learned, and incoherent as ever. Thank you so much for writing and making your invitation definite. I know the little expedition will cheer me up. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Robert Bridges.
1910–1920
To Wendell T. Bush 9 January 1918 • Oxford, England
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(MS: Columbia) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Jan. 9, 1918
Dear Mr Bush Thank you very much for your interest and your offer to interest Mlle Guède1 also in the recovery of my manuscripts from the faithful but clenched hand of poor Françoise. The fact is Strong apparently doesn’t know exactly what has happened, and I certainly do not; and as he is busy with other thoughts, and I also, I think it is better to let the thing slide, perhaps until Miss Strong goes to Paris, which I suppose she will sooner or later. I got a friend (before Françoise was so dotty) to send me the ms. of the Four Realms, which is what I am supposed to be at work on. The rest is quiescent spiritually and might as well be so materially as/lso for the present. I have been preoccupied during the last month or two with another task—I won’t bother you to describe it—and have not opened the soliloquies: but when I can I will send you the two or three that are almost ready and you can do as you think best about publishing them. I should have sent them to the New Republic if I hadn’t become disgusted with their ambiguous attitude about the war.2 You doubtless have heard of a joint pronouncement on Realism in which Strong and I were to have a share—the volume being edited by Drake of Vassar. I have actually sent them two papers, for them to choose the one they like best, and asked them to transmit the other to you, for your Journal. It may be too long for one article, but it is de/ivided into parts, and could be published serially. Wish best wishes to you and Mrs Bush Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Unidentified. See 5 Jan 1916.
2
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To Charles Augustus Strong 24 February 1918 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford. Feb. 24, 1918
Dear Strong Your letter of the 13th has just arrived: I am glad to hear all these details about Margaret’s varied friends. She evidently sees some amusing people and her good sense can be relied upon to make the necessary discriminations. As to the doubt about your remove to Fiesole, I am sorry: but I understand life in Italy for the moment has a melancholy if not a dangerous side, and if you are not too impatient of your long confinement perhaps it will be as well if you decide to remain. Your article on free will arrived in due course; naturally I agree: but I am not satisfied with the degree of distinctness which your theory—or your expression of it—has attained. Of course our acts, deliberations, and passions, taken in their concrete biological context, are efficacious effected causes: I mean that the process of nature runs through them. But the questions that people will wish to have answered regard 1–st the relation of consciousness taken historically to the other elements in these concrete ^nd ^ processes, 2– the relation of intention and desire takens morally to the ^ ^ rd direction of those total processes, and 3– the determination or indetermination of the same. On this last point your answer is definite: but what is your attitude about the other two? I have heard nothing from Macmillan1 about your book, so I presume they have accepted or are still considering it. Do you want me to burn your MS. immediately? It is not in the least in my way, so long as I don’t travel, and keep these rooms, and it seemed to me needlessly precipitate to burn it before the other version is in print. However, it shall be as you wish. Did I tell you that I gave a lecture last month in London before the socalled “British Academy” on “Philosophical Opinion in America”?2 You shall have a copy when it is printed. [across] Yours ever GSantayana 1
Macmillan and Co., publishers. The third annual Henriette Hertz Trust philosophical lecture (30 Jan 1918) was published in Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 8 (London, 1918): 299–309. 2
1910–1920
To Charles Augustus Strong 26 February 1918 • Oxford, England
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(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Feb. 26. 1918
Dear Strong My last letter was not posted when I received a number of the Petit Temps and your reply to my notes. Thank you for both. Bergson’s speech begins characteristically, with a sort of cringing falsetto; but it grows firmer, and has one very French and very delightful passage about “le mari complaisant.” Doumic1 seems not to be taken in by Bergson, but with a wink pays him the inevitable compliments. Your dislike of essences seems to me very curious: I can’t attribute it to anything but a sort of traditional dread of Platonism as if it were Popery. My essences are akin to Platonic ideas, certainly: but when you say that you don’t understand the principle by which they are selected, you assimilate them to Platonic ideas just in the respect in which they are opposed to them. Essences are not selected in their own being; : to select is evi^ ^ dently to leave something out: but what is left out must differ in character from what is chosen: therefore, it too has a character, or is an essence. Platonic Ideas were selected ab extra 2 by an inversion: natural types ^ ^ and moral ideals were projected into powers: and these essences, having alleged power over the world, were the Ideas. But that is physics or metaphysics or cosmology: essences are absolutely infinite and packed close, like points in space. A selection among them is a matter of partial sur^ ^ vey, not of exclusive being in what is selected. . Exclusive being would ^ ^ be existence: but among essences no one has any inherent emphasis not ^ ^ found in others. On the other hand no essence is self-contradictory. A round square is not an essence—at least not in the sphere of geometry. If you say the phrase has a certain import and character—it is a typical self-contradiction—that proves that — it “round square” is the essence of a sort of accident in ^ ^ human discourse, viz. the use of words with divergent meanings as if they were compatible, until the connotations are felt to clash and the effort collapses. There is no self-contradiction in this experience of contradiction in terms or — in of diversity of essences; which is what the attempt to intuit a round square amounts to.
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As to the triviality of unimagined (not “pre-imaged”) lascivious pictures, how could you feel this contempt for them, or distinguish them from Fra Angelicos,3 if they had no essence and one which is so real that it provokes your strongest epithets? I never said essences were more real than existences: they are more fundamental, but far less urgent: their values (when they have them) being relative, like the evil of lasciviousness. As to your explanations of your own doctrine, I have studied them carefully, but am not sure that I always understand what you mean. There is some initial diversity in our categories. You expect me to agree, for instance, that matter is somehow psychical besides being hard and extended. Now, I am not going to limit the properties of matter: but the sense in which all matter (because directly or indirectly an organ of mind) may be called psychical or animate is not, to my mind, that it has another kind of substantial dimension besides hardness, motion, etc. but that it assumes a certain function in relation to existential modes and actual thoughts that supervene. Your insistence on a prior existence of the psychical seems to me obscure and groundless; obscure, because you seem to hedge when it comes to Aaaxagoras, who didn’t mean that “rapidly vibrating molecules” (not molecules intrinsically fiery) must have existed in the cold stone, but that no new quality could appear in compounds at all: and I hardly believe you would seriously maintain that. But if new relations, modes, appearances, species, and systems may evolve out of old ele^ ^ ments, why not consciousness with all its actual psychic dimensions? I suspect that I should agree with your theory of the origin of consciousness. This appears when cognition arises, that is, when a psychic change is used as a sign of something ulterior. “Used as a sign”, however, is ambiguous: for the organic change is “used” by the body to lead to some adjustment to the outer object, while the essence appearing to consciousness is “used” by the intellect to reveal that object and to describe it. The first sort of sign is a passive omen, the second a transitive symbol.—But I may understand all this better when your book appears. Yours ever G Santayana 1
A French literary critic, René Doumic (1860–1937) edited the Revue des Deux Mondes and from 1923 was secretary of the French Academy. His criticism was nonrelativistic in seeking to discriminate between the good and the bad in literature. Séance de l’Académie française du 24 janvier 1918. Discours de réception de M. Henri Bergson. Réponse de M. René Doumic was published in 1918 (Paris: Perrin et cie). 2 From without.
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3 Fra Giovanni Angelico [Guido di Pietro] (1387–1455) was an Italian painter and a Dominican friar of Fiesole. He completed a series of frescoes for the monastery of San Marco. At the pope’s request he painted scenes from the life of Saint Lawrence, which were to be hung in the Vatican in Rome. A religious painter of grace and simplicity coupled with purity and delicacy of color, he did not share his contemporaries’ enthusiasm for the new scientific naturalism.
To Mary Potter Bush 2 March 1918 • Oxford, England
(MS: Columbia) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford March 2, 1918
Dear Mrs Bush Your box à surprises was a surprise indeed and I am very grateful for the kind inspiration and ingenious contrivance of it all. I must invent a teaparty so as to be able to enjoy and display my treasures as they deserve. As a daily practice, I have my tea in shops, so as to see faces and hear bad music and come as near as is possible in England to sitting in a boulevard. I have got used to the worst of tea and no sugar, so that when your feast is spread I shall enjoy it as a true rarity. When I saw you last in London the war was in its beginnings, and it has rolled on since through such a series of great catastrophes that the wonder is that the feeling of it has changed so little. I have never inwardly believed—though at moments I have been almost over-persuaded—that the issue would be very exhili/arating or picturesque; and it still looks more like a confused disaster than like a clear achievement, even from the German point of view. It is a strange paradox, but the more they succeed, the more they seem to be undermined and to surrender their ideal. The truth is the world is not governed by men, but by God or by subterranean forces that are hardly represented in our consciousness, and not at all in our wills. I suppose in America you are all working with characteristic devotion. Here there is a wonderful cheerfulness, in spite of every disappointment and every little and great anxiety: war seems to be one of those diseases ^ ^ that human nature was made to bear without losing heart. I wonder at this coolness. Believe me, with the best of [across] thanks, Yours sincerely GSantayana
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To Wendell T. Bush 26 March 1918 • Oxford, England
(MS: Columbia) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford March 26 1918
Dear Mr Bush I owe you belated thanks for More’s book on Platonism.1 I began writing a sort of review of it, but got stuck, seeing that I was divided between a certain sympathy with his old-fogey attitudes (Plato was an old fogey in many ways) and a certain irritation at his perversions of ancient and pagan views, which are utterly foreign to him in spirit. However, I read the book with pleasure and am much obliged to you for sending it. Do I gather that you are not going to send me the proof of my article on Literal and Symbolic Knowledge?2 As it is very long and you will doubtless publish it by installments, may I ask to have a chance of changing some things in the latter part? In order to save time, I will reread the article (of which I still hold the MS) and send you my proposed changes in a letter. This will also obviate delays in asking the censor for his permit, which I always get in time, but which I am tired of asking for in respect to Strong’s contributions and my own to the book on Realism. I will send you before long three or four “Soliloquies in England”; they are far too light and poetical (I should think) for your journal, or for any other: but if you don’t get them published I sha’n’t mind; when there are more of them they might make a little book.3 You will also receive shortly my lecture on “Philosophical Opinion in America” which is now in the press.4 Yours sincerely GSantayana P.S. It is all right about giving me a temporal or rather spatial locus in Oxford: I am there, and the false implications that may be drawn from the fact cannot alter that fact. 1
Platonism (Princeton University Press, 1917). Paul Elmer More (1864–1937) was educated at Washington University and Harvard and taught Sanskrit and classics at Harvard and Bryn Mawr College. He was editor of The Nation (1909–14) and a literary critic. 2 “Literal and Symbolic Knowledge,” Philosophy 15 (August 1918): 421–44. 3 Though soliloquies appeared in various journals, the book was not published until 1922. 4 See 24 Feb 1918. This lecture was revised and reprinted in Character.
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To Charles Augustus Strong 26 March 1918 • Oxford, England
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(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford March 26, 1918
Dear Strong How prodigiously productive you are in these days! On account of the delay in getting the necessary permit from the Postal Censor, I haven’t sent your new contribution to Drake until today: just when I get your letter of th . Your new paper treads less on the heels of the other contributors, the 17– and is clear and persuasive in it’s doctrine; but I have been troubled here and there by the phraseology. “Real” and “ideal” I gather mean “self-existent or substantial” and “dependent on consciousness”. Is this right? And what do you mean by saying that “a round square is more concrete than virtue”? The chief divergence of which I am conscious, however, in reading your paper concerns the literalness which you seem to attribute to correct knowledge. You say repeatedly that the essence given is, in correct knowledge, the essence embodied in the object. But is this so? The essence given is not the essence affirmed. And I demur to your notion of a percept being incorrect in itself. The percept of a marble bust is not incorrect for being snow-white and truncated at the nipples: it would convey incorrect knowledge if it led me to assert this given essence of the original: but I should be an idiot to do so. For this reason signs, even when they are independent objects in themselves, like the bust, do not obstruct knowledge of their objects, if we are intelligent. I don’t fail to know the original because the given copy exists, any more than I fail to know the object because the psychic state exists: I should fail to know the original only if I asserted the essence of the copy, or of the psychic state, and not the essence it sug^ ^ gests, to be the essence of that original. In a word, the datum has to be interpreted, not merely projected and asserted, in order to yield true knowledge. If the given essence exists by chance (that is, if the symbol is a material object, say a word) that does not prevent me from assigning another essence to the object, and so passing to it from the datum, even when the datum and the object have very different essences.—I talk of this in my first paper on “Literal and Symbolic Knowledge” which is now to appear in the Columbia Journal, Drake & Co having preferred the Three Proofs No going to Paris this summer for any of us, I fear! Yours ever GSantayana
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To Mary Williams Winslow 6 April 1918 • Oxford, England
(MS: Houghton) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford April 6. 1918
Dear Mrs Winslow So poor dear Julia Robbins is no more! Although I was never (whatever she may have hinted) positively in love with her, I used to write her long literary letters in my callow days, when she was still a heathen—of the old Boston type. Of late she still preserved a place for me in her gallery of “geniuses I have known”, in the same line, but magno intervallo,1 with Cardinal Merry del Val2 and the young consumptive3 at Davos that she on the whole decided it was her duty to give up, on account of the disparity in their ages and his tragic state of health: although I always thought these two reasons balanced and cancelled one another, and that perhaps there were other obstacles. In fine, Julia and I were very good friends, and she never despaired of my salvation, and no doubt prayed for my re-conversion—when it was partly my unconscious influence that converted her, or prepared her to be converted. She and her sister were desperately brave: everything of theirs had to be felt and believed to be most superior and most beautiful: and when the bluff had to be dropped in one direction, it was put up all the more desperately in another. The Church was her last refuge, and I can’t help thinking a very suitable one, although the strain would have been less if she had had a more reasonable family and set of acquaintances.—I am really made sad and pensive by this news, which I had not heard—not that I am “sorry”, because at this date it is not an event to be particularly set down as unfortunate—but because her whole life and being were so pathetic, so hopelessly hopefully desirous of every thing that was not. As to myself, there is no change to speak of: I have been rather busy writing—in my lazy way—although as yet there is nothing in print to vouch for it. I gave a lecture in London this winter, facing an English audience for the first time: it was, at bottom, quite like the same type of audience in America. I am going to give another at the Cambridge summer session in August. Meantime besides my big book I am preparing another little one on the war, or rather on the psychological question, how governments and religions manage to dominate mankind, in spite or (as I shall show) because of their irrationality. I am thinking of calling it “Dominations and
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Powers”.4 In view of it I have been reading all sorts of things to fill the lacunae5 in my knowledge of which I am made aware as I write. For one thing, I am reading the Bible from cover to cover—something I had never done before—and Josephus6 as a commentary. I am well, and, in spite of everything, very happy in my thoughts and in my country rambles. I am now in love with a new walk and tea-garden—in the direction of Nuneham and the Harcourt’s park, which I often traverse, taking a local train back, filled with munition-workers. As to the war, I have grown a protective cuticle, and suffer less from it than during the first two years. I then expected a German victory; during the third year I began to have hopes that the Allies might get together, and even that the Russian revolution might help. Now that the opposite has happened—at least for the time being—and things look pretty black, I have fallen back on a sort of grey leaden sea of philosophy, where I find all human purposes and ambitions, all likes and dislikes, benevolently neutralized by the hidden forces that at once create and defeat them. My feeling is that, however things shape themselves in the immediate future, the world is going to take a new direction in which the “aims”—oh, vanity!—of both parties will be submerged. Something in me tells me that the Russian Bolsheviks7 are right—not in their conduct, which has been scandalous and silly—but in their sense for values, in their equal hostility to every government founded on property and privilege. At any rate, though I take up the paper every morning with a beating heart, I lay it down with a sort of inward smile, as if someone said to me (the Lord, as they have it in the Bible) “Never mind”. I can’t believe that you in America are really in this fray:8 it seems a drama in a different language. But I believe in American energy and power of cooperation. What is lamentably wanting all round is Intelligence! What little men, what helpless minds! Thank you for breaking this [across] long silence and giving me news of your domestic hearth Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
A great space between. Rafael Merry del Val (1865–1930) was educated for the priesthood and ordained at Rome (1888). In 1903 Pius X appointed him cardinal and made him papal secretary of state. He worked in the negotiations leading to the Lateran Treaty (signed in 1929). 3 Unidentified. 4 Dominations is a diversified collection of essays on social and political philosophy. These essays were organized with Daniel Cory’s assistance and published in New York 2
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by Scribner’s in 1951. This was the last “new book” published during Santayana’s lifetime. 5 Gaps. 6 Josephus Flavius (original name, Joseph ben Matthias) (A.D. 37–c. 95) was a historian and general who admired Rome. He wrote History of the Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews. 7 Bolshevism and Menshevism were the main branches of Marxist socialism in Russia from 1903 to 1918. The Bolsheviki (majority members), led by Lenin, advocated immediate revolution and establishment of dictatorship of the proletariat. Bolsheviks favored a small, disciplined party. Within the Social Democratic party, the Bolsheviks soon lost their numerical superiority. In the Russian Revolution of 1917 the Mensheviks cooperated with the Kerensky regime, which the Bolsheviks overthrew in November 1917. 8 The United States had entered World War I in April 1917. By the spring of 1918, American troops figured significantly in the fighting.
To Charles Raymond Bell Mortimer 10 April 1918 • Oxford, England
(MS: Princeton) 22 Beaumont St Oxford April 10, 1918
Dear Mortimer Benda’s book,1 which I have just finished, has many good things in it which are so detached and minute that one rather forgets them when one has finished. It is the sort of view I take, but I don’t know why I am not entirely pleased with it in his presentation. Is it perhaps that his manner is petty, and there is no Homeric breadth and security behind? It seemed to me too that he was unfair to Romain Rolland2 whose weakness for the Germans seems to me amiable. Will you be offended if I say that your weakness for the Church seems to me amiable in the same manner? Shall I like you the less for being a Catholic? I shall like you much more, and feel that I have a new avenue of approach to your feelings, and a sort of double insurance (besides instinctive sympathy) against misunderstanding you. The question is rather whether you will like me as well, or rather, whether you will feel as comfortable in my company as you did before you gave me this mortgage, so to speak, on your reactions. I shall insist on your being quite orthodox: if you hedge at anything I shall laugh at you, and put you down for an amateur. Amateur Christianity is what you ought to escape by the step you are taking: you ought to live hereafter in the settled belief that the world of the Catholic imagination (a very articulate and realistic world) sur-
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rounds us in deadly and sober fact. It is a hard belief to keep vivid and consistent in this age, and for the matter of that in any age: but it is not impossible, and I will go further and say that it is not impossible that that belief should be true; I mean, not inwardly or logically impossible. It is plainly contrary to fact, as it seems to me: but fact or truth, when it lies beyond the most immediate material realm, naturally interests most men very little: and nature has not given them either the wish or the power to discern it. By choice, when we can, we live histrionically, intent on the eloquent embroideries we make upon things and people; it is a sort of dream or play which we wrap our actual life in. And the Catholic Hypnosis is a very nice one, fitting the facts in a very acceptable wise way when one has decided that the facts themselves are not [across] decent, and can’t be allowed to go about naked. I like civilized artifices of this sort. [across page one] Thank you so much for the Benda. I assume you mean me to keep it, but if not say so, as I have finished with it. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Unidentified. Romain Rolland (1866–1944), a pacifist philosopher, was a French novelist, playwright, biographer, and musicologist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915. 2
To Charles Augustus Strong 8 May 1918 • Cambridge, England P.S. I return to Oxford tomorrow.
(MS: Rockefeller) 20 Trinity Street, Cambridge May 8, 1918
Dear Strong That your so-called little operation has taken place, that it involved a change of venue, and also your being placed in a sort of mild rack, is all ^ ^ a surprise to me. I hope it is for the best, and have in the abstract a great confidence in the doctors; yet your account of things makes me a little uneasy. Do write again at once and let me know how you are getting on. That Margaret was able to drive you (in a motor I suppose) to Lausanne is the one cheerful aspect of the matter: for since the operation was “suc-
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cessful” you will presumably not be the worse after it than ——— before, ———— and will at any rate be able to drive about, which will be a great relief, I should think, after such a long seclusion. I am not conscious of any new or late divergence in our ways of seeing things in regard to perception: what I spoke of was an old difference, and largely one of emphasis and use of terms. You forget, perhaps, that I have not seen your book, in which you doubtf/ less express yourself more fully than in your last paper for Drake & Co; and I can well believe that what you say about “the object being only an excerpt from the real thing” may coincide with what I call knowledge through symbols. As to the notion that a percept may be incorrect in itself, don’t you say this of the percept of a bent stick half in the water? Don’t you make an explicit point of the error being here one of perception and not of judgment or belief? And isn’t this one of your capital proofs of the diversity between the datum and the object? Of course, I don’t disagree with you — in — as to these facts at all: the question is rather at what level the correctness — and or incorrectness ^ ^ begins to be added to the innocent apprehension of an essence in our ^ immediate experience different from the essence of the object for which ^ it stands —— in ——— our—————— immediate experience —————————— ————. The mere difference—the symbolic character of the datum—does not seem to involve error: yet if the symbol is explicitly asserted to be literal knowledge it becomes one. Compare religion. I haven’t yet read Russell’s new book,1 being at the moment deep in the Bible, Josephus, and Goethes Italienische Reise2— He has only just gone to prison [across] and in the first division, which means comfort. Yours ever GSantayana 1
Russell published four books in 1918: Roads to Freedom, Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism; The German Peace Offer; The Philosophy of Logical Atomism; and Mysticism and Logic, and Other Essays. 2 Italienische Reise (Italian Journey, 1862) is a description of Goethe’s 1786–88 trip to Italy, which influenced his commitment to a classical view of art.
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To Logan Pearsall Smith 24 May 1918 • Oxford, England
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(MS: Congress) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford May 24, 1918
Dear Smith Trivia1 is hardly a book to be read consecutively and only once: nevertheless I have done so, and I need hardly say with the greatest pleasure. It is not only the style and tone, so familiar and at the same time so exquisite, that delights me, for you know I can’t very well separate style from thought: it seems to me that the form in which a thought is cast is a part of its quality, and that the quality of the idea itself is only a deeper sort of form or style of expression: it too, like verbal form, expresses a reaction of the mind and its habits upon objects, rather the objects themselves; for ideas are not objects at all, but only views of objects. In your manner, therefore, I find and relish your way of thinking. Where did your get your humility? I thought that was an extinct virtue. And I very much like your love of pleasure, and your humour and malice: it is so delightful to live in a world that is full of pictures, and incidental divertissements,2 and amiable absurdities. Why shouldn’t things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together. But I am afraid you don’t quite think so, are not quite reconciled to yourself and the world as you find them, and feel that it is ignominious to grow old and slant your umbrella against the wind. Now, if what is our inevitabls/e fate is ignominious, I understand what Bridges says of Trivia, that it is the most immoral book ever written, although every word of it can be read aloud. But I don’t think so: it is not immoral at all unless you take it to be complete and ultimate, which of course is the last thing you would think of pretending. Your point is to be incomplete, fugitive, incidental. Yet the devil of it that, if in being that you don’t suggest or keep in reserve a firm background, a religion or philosophy that enables you to face and to judge all these small delights, and say to them e)x / w ou)k e)x / omai,3 then the thing becomes ultimate and complete for you against your will. That is the danger and the trouble with Trivia: you must have a philosophy, even in fooling, or the fooling will be spoiled and made bitter by having to take the place of the philosophy that is wanting: and the sweet treble will crack. What I wish you would do is to write another Trivia,4 or two more (since Trivia had three faces) and make you r bow to Luna and Hecate also, ^^
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after having shown us Diana tripping across the flickering glades.5 Humility is not weak, it is just. Heraclitus said that justice presided over the flux, because such things didn’t deserve to last for ever. You see I take Trivia very [across] seriously, and I hope you will think it a compliment, and not mere ponderosity on my part. Yours G. S. 1 Trivia was Smith’s first book, originally published in 1902 at his own expense. In 1917 it was published in New York by Doubleday, Page. 2 Amusements. 3 I enjoy; I am not possessed. 4 All Trivia: Trivia, More Trivia, Afterthoughts, Last Words (London, 1933). 5 In Roman mythology Trivia corresponds with Hecate, one of the Titans of Greek mythology. Hecate taught witchcraft and sorcery and was a goddess of the dead. She was represented as a triple goddess, sometimes described as having three heads (one of a horse, one of a dog, and one of a lion). Offerings were sacrificed to her at crossroads. The ancient Romans worshiped Diana (a.k.a. Luna), the goddess of the moon, animals, and childbirth.
To Logan Pearsall Smith 29 May 1918 • Oxford, England
(MS: Congress) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford May 29, 1918
Dear Smith Please tell Mrs Berenson that I had been looking forward with pleasure to seeing her, but I can’t very well go to London this week, so that I hope you will let me know when she is again in town, as usually I am quite free, and always glad to come to see and hear what is going on in your hospitable circle, which to me represents the centre of the intellectual world. Oxford, very decidedly, does not. It is a sort of celestial epicycle—an eccentric and back-handed convolution suspected by some to have no real existence, except in the mind of the ancients. Physically, however, Oxford is really heavenly in these days: I have had today a most delightful day, walking in the morning: through Nuneham Park (where an ostrich made faces at me, and threatened hostilities) to lunch (very well) at the Harcourt Arms, and walk back to Littlemore through fields covered with flowers and made companiable by cuckoos, peewits, and larks. I wonder if the iteration of the cuckoo’s note ever really made husbands uncomfortable. I think it well might, because repetition can persuade us of anything.
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You are quite right in your defense of Trivia and her right to be as light and charming and irresponsible as she will. It was only here and there that I felt as if a touch of something else was needed for complete felicity; where the cadence, as it were, seemed incomplete. When we have a talk, I also want to protest against a technical heresy which my inquisitorial flair has detected in one place; it touches the separate existence of mind and body, which Aristotle and I do not admit in this world any more than in the other. However, that has nothing to do with what you wanted your pretty Trivia to be: only these darlings do turn out to have unsuspected depths in their natures sometimes, and to do tragic things much to the surprise of their fond parents. Thank you very much for writing. Yours sincerely GSantayana
To Robert Seymour Bridges 11 July 1918 • Oxford, England
(MS: Bodleian) 22 Beaumont Street July 11, 1918
Dear Bridges Many thanks for your kindness in enquiring after me this morning. I have not been positively ill, but struggling with the symptoms of my old bronchitis, and feeling generally slack. Obeying your prohibition I haven’t written to thank you for “The Necessity of Poetry”1 or to tell you how much I liked the goings on in the Marketplace of the Subconscious. That is more to my taste than “Concepts”, and I think you pay our friend Campion2 too great a compliment in calling him to witness in the matter. These “concepts” are mythological symbols. We don’t at all know what it is that develops a thought or a passion in us. It is not literally a concept, because that means only a static essence, one of the forms which our thought (if it were conscious) might fall into at one moment. The motif is more like a dramatic personage, or consecutive dream. That is why I like your Marketplace and its hubbub: that is frankly mythological and far more adequate.
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If the weather and the state of my inner man permit, I will come to Chilswell on Sunday afternoon in the hope of seeing you. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
This was an address given to the Tredger & District Cooperative Society in November 1917 (per Sir Edward Bridges). 2 George Goring Campion [D. C.] (b. 1862) wrote Elements in Thought and Emotion: An Essay on Education, Epistemology, and the Psycho-neural Problem (1923) and The Neural Basis of Thought (1934).
To Horace Meyer Kallen 11 July 1918 • Oxford, England
(MS: Columbia) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford July 11, 1918
Dear Kallen It has been a real pleasure to read your two books,1 coming in such quick succession, that they give one a dazzling sense of your moral and intellectual energy—truly admirable when one considers the perfection of these compositions and at the same time the thousand distractions and harassing cares that must traverse your mind and eat up your time while you execute these works. But I don’t want to write compliments: they are not needed when one feels that one has done oneself justice, and they are distasteful when one feels one has not. I should like to discuss both books at length; but what can one say in a letter? As to Job2, your Euripidean3 hypothesis belongs to that “higher criticism” which seems to me more valuable as a means of analysis—to give one fresh apperceptions of the extant work—than as a historical guess: something of the sort may be true; I am not convinced beyond that point. When it comes to your interpretation of the thought of the author, I am divided between an enthusiastic desire to agree with you (it would be so splendid to think that Job reached the same notion of God as Spinoza!) and some doubts as to the probability of so much enlightenment, and as to the compatibility of it with the text. I have long wished for light on this point: why is Job so brief at the end? Why is he suddenly silenced, when nothing new (that I can discover) has been said? Has something been suppressed here? On the other hand, as Job is evidently justified by God, and restored to prosperity, he cannot
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have said anything incompatible with God rewarding the just. That is where, as it seems to me, you are in danger of outrunning the thought of the poem: the logic of religion is so very slow in working itself out! I ought not to pit my own ignorant impression against your learning, your special fitness to judge, and your long meditation on the subject; yet if I could trust my instinct I should say the solution reached was this: Job’s friends say the thing that is not right because they suppose Job’s trial to be final misfortune: Job is right in knowing that his avenger liveth; God will reward him in the end. If the tables were never to be turned, Job’s friends would have been right; but as Job had not sinned, and as God is just, his vindication was bound to come, and ought to have been confidently prophesied to Job, if his friends had been true friends and true prophets. Now, you will say, of course, that it is not just in God to send even temporary misfortune to the blameless. No: but isn’t it still the feeling of all believers in the Hebraic tradition that the end justifies and obliterates the process? Doesn’t everybody assume that if we all get to heaven some day, we shall be so overjoyed, and our mouths so stuffed with sweets, that we shall be wholly incapable of asking why we were called upon to endure all those unnecessary torments and indignities on earth? That, I imagine, is the degree of moral philosophy attained in Job, or ever attained in theism. Your view of the moral neutrality of God is truer, of course, and infinitely nobler: but it is atheism, as the religious tradition we are attached to feels, and is justified in feeling, because its God must be its God. As to your book on Peace I have a somewhat similar feeling. You ought to be right: you are right ideally: but nothing of the sort is likely to come about. You demand a universal government; but for that you require a central organ, to assume the function. “Nil natum est in corpore ut uti possemus, sed quod natum est, id procreat usum”.4 So that you ought to hope rather for your second best issue—the triumph of Prussia because there is your ready made organ, if it can only get the inert mass to begin circling about it. A parlaiment of Chinese, Hindus, and Russians, (not to include [across] the Sudanese) will never govern anything, much less the world. But I can’t verderben more Papier.5 Yours sincerely G. Santayana 1 The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy (New York: Moffet, Yard, 1918) and The Structure of Lasting Peace (Boston: Marshall Jones Co., 1918). 2 Job is a book of the Bible that addresses the question, Why do the righteous suffer and the wicked flourish? The central figure, Job, is a morally upright man whom God
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permits Satan to test by means of a series of trials. God subsequently rewards Job’s faithfulness by restoring good fortune to his life. 3 Euripides (480 or 485–406 B.C.), a Greek tragic poet, was author of ninety-two plays. 4 A garbled version of Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 4: 834–35: “. . . nil ideo quoniam natum est in corpore ut uti possemus, sed quod natum est, id procreat usum.” (“. . . since nothing is born in [our] body so that we can use it, but what is born that creates a function.” This is a teleological point in Lucretius: there was no creator who made our body purposefully; we merely use what we have.) 5 Waste more paper.
To Charles Augustus Strong 13 July 1918 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford July 13, 1918
Dear Strong Schiller has been able to supply me with the numbers of the Journal in question and here are your references: vol IX No 21, Oct. 10, 1912 p. 566 My attention was first drawn to the fact of lateness by an article of Professor Montague’s,1 this Journal, vol. I, p. 296. vol IX. No 22, Oct 24, 1912 p 598. The sources to which I am indebted for this conception are Professor James’s article on “The function of cognition” in Mind,2 for 1885, pages 27–44, reprinted in his posthumous “Essays in Radical Empiricism,” and Professor Miller’s article on “The Confusion of Function and Content in Mental Analysis” in Psychological Review for 1895.3 I am very glad to hear that you are on your feet, even if not yet as swift-footed as Achilles.4 This looks as if in the autumn you might be able to get back to Fiesole at last, if nothing of a military nature happens to prevent it. I have just read Drake’s new paper for the book, and like it much better than his first one. The notion of essence, as you use it, has evidently had some effect on him— Yours ever GSantayana 1
William Pepperell Montague (1873–1953) was a Harvard-educated philosophy professor whose system was developed in relation to scientific discoveries. His works include The Ways of Knowing; or, The Methods of Philosophy (1925), Belief Unbound (1930), and The Ways of Things (1940).
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2 Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, originally published in London, later Edinburgh (now Oxford), was established in 1876 and is issued quarterly. Its editors have included George C. Robertson, G. F. Stout, G. E. Moore, and Gilbert Ryle. 3 Dickinson Sargeant Miller (1868–1963), at this time associated with Bryn Mawr, read this paper before the APA in 1893. It was acknowledged by James in his Presidential Address, and published in Psychological Review, vol. 2, 6 (November 1895): 535–50. Miller studied philosophy at Harvard (A.M., 1892) and earned a Ph.D. (1893) from Germany’s Halle-Wittenberg University. He taught in the Harvard philosophy department from 1899 to 1904. Miller wrote under the name R. E. Hobart. 4 Achilles is the prototype of manly valor and beauty in Greek mythology. He was the hero of Homer’s Iliad in which he took part in the Trojan War and slew the Trojan hero Hector. Santayana described Achilles in the three sonnets entitled “Before a Statue of Achilles,” published in The Harvard Monthly (October 1897), and later in Complete Poems, 128–29.
To Robert Seymour Bridges 18 July 1918 • Oxford, England
(MS: Bodleian) 22 Beaumont Street July 18, 1918
Dear Bridges Your objection to the word “consciousness” and even “conscious” which latter at least I use mente conscia recti,1 makes it hard to explain that I don’t assert that a thought cannot be thought about. The essence thought of once may of course be thought of again, and the fact that it has been thought of before may be thought of later. But attention itself doesn’t offer an objective to contemplation. If people chose to deny that attention existed or was diverted from one object to another, the only experimental evidence we could offer would be indirect. We might point out the way in which the eyes are turned or the brow knit; or we might point out that objects sometimes come into view at intervals and with such a variable intensity as can hardly be attributed to their own nature. But these arguments could be eluded by saying that neither of these facts is what we mean by attention. Attention is interpolated by us into our view of those facts in what we conceive to be their natural relations and their way of hanging together: but attention is not to be found among the observable facts themselves. This is all I meant to assert. I agree that “instinct” is more “intelligible” than thought, if we mean more pervasive, fundamental, and “natural”; because nature is, or should be, the standard of naturalness. But philosophers (Bergson included) do ^ ^
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not understand anything inwardly, they do not plunge downwards towards the depths. Their art is merely to reform or extend discourse on its own level: and those who are not judicious add that this level is the deepest or the only one that exists. I hope we may soon have a chance of talking about all this. Yours GSantayana 1 With a mind aware of what is right. (Variation on Vergil’s Aeneid, 1.604: mens sibi conscia recti: a mind aware of its own rightness.)
To Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller 10 September 1918 • Sunninghill, England
(MS: Houghton) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Sunninghill, Berk Sept. 10, 1918
Dear Fuller It is a real pleasure to hear from you. I knew that you were in France officiating in some useful capacity, but had no definite address. Some six months ago I sent a pamphlet to you at Sherborn but I daresay it never reached you. The Harvard world seems far away and not very enticing: Heraclitus was right, I think, in believing that Dike1 presides over the lapse of things, and that when they pass away, it is high time they should do so. If you go round the world after the war, I hope it will not be at a hurried or an even pace, and that you will spend three quarters of the time of your journey in the places which after all are most interesting and where there is most (for us, at least) to discover—in western Europe. Then I shall hope to come across your path and perhaps even to make some excursion in your good company: this long confinement in England; though pleasant in itself, is beginning to grow oppressive, and I often think with envy of those in Paris or beyond. At the same time, I hate to face suspicious officials, and any unusual difficulties and complications in the machinery of travel; so I have remained in my Oxford headquarters now for three years, and expect not to abandon them until the war ends. For the moment I am spending a few days with Moncure Robinson and his sister Mrs Chetwynd and her nice family;2 and expect to go to London to see the new Russian ballets. Do you remember our first night at the
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Châtelet and the sensation caused by L’Après midi d’un Faune?3 I haven’t seen that sort of thing since those distant days. The routine of my life has been broken only by some invitations to give lectures about things connected with philosophy or the U.S. I accept, and the obligation compels me to put pen to paper and give shape to floating memories and ideas. My good friend Strong has had a bad time—laid up with a parali/ysis of the legs—and is still hardly able to walk. The attack fortunately came on when he was at Val Mont above the lake of Geneva, a place he likes and where the doctors inspire him with confidence. He hopes soon to return to Fiesole: meantime I have been separated from him and have missed him, for in his quiet dull way he is the best of friends and the soundest of philosophers—good ballast for my cockleshell. We are both contributing to a volume that Durant Drake is getting together in defence of the Old Realism: it is to be a sort of competitor with the New Realism and the pragmatists’ Creative Intelligence. I am also deep in a book to be called Dominations & Powers,—a sort of psychology of politics and attempt to explain how it happens that governments and religions, with so little to recommend them, secure such a measure of popular allegiance. Of course, behind all this, is the shadow of the Realms of Being, still (I am sorry to say) rather nebulous, although the cloud of manuscript is already ponderous and charged with some electricity in the potential state. I don’t know if any lightning or thunder will ever reach mortals from it. I hope the translation of your Plotinus4 into French will materialize. There seems to be a wave of interest in him—and that is better than toying with Bergsonism. I suppose the motive is the same—a desire to escape from reality: but Plotinus is willing to migrate into the supernatural, whereas the enemies of the intellect only desire to feel their own pulse. They are valetudinarians scared at the sight of the doctor and taking comfort in keeping their eyes shut tight. Neo-Catholics and Neo Platonists at least have a world of fancy on which to exercise their faculties and train their hearts. Only the day before yesterday, at Oxford, I had an unexpected visit from Edgar Wells and Bronson Cutting.5 They were hardly recognizable, and seemed to me to belong to a foreign world. On the other hand Berenson, whom I have also seen lately, brought his usual stream of light and energy from the outer —— world; ———— ^air;^ his vigour and many-sidedness make me entirely forgive his mendacity, which is too abundant seriously to deceive. Keep the inner fires burning; it will be such happiness for me to feel [across] their genial warmth when we next meet. Yours ever GSantayana
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1
Personification of justice. Augusta Robinson was married to Philip Chetwynd. They had at least four children: Randolph (b. 1904); daughter (name unknown); Philip (1906–33), who committed suicide; and Betty (b. 1908). 3 “The Afternoon of a Faun,” Stephane Mallarmé’s 1876 poem, inspired a revolutionary ballet, Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune (1894). With music by Debussy and choreography by Waslaw Nijinsky and Léonide Massine, this ballet was performed by a Russian company managed by Serge Diaghilev at the Châtelet theatre in Paris in 1909. 4 The Problem of Evil in Plotinus. 5 Edgar Huidekoper Wells received an A.B. (1897) and a law degree (1903) from Harvard and went on to a career in finance. Bronson Murray Cutting (1888–1935) attended Harvard (1906–7, 1908–10) and afterward had a career in journalism and publishing. He also served as United States senator from New Mexico (1927–35). 2
To Mary Whitall Smith Berenson [September or October 1918] • Oxford, England
(MS: I Tatti) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Saturday
Dear Mrs Berenson After a journey with nine persons in one compartment designed for four, I decided to wait a day in London, and arrived here last night without further inconvenience. This morning I receive my forgotten shavingbrush (why does one leave things behind so persistently, I wonder?) and whom B. B.’s book,1 which I will write to —— ———— him about when I have read it. Thank you both for sending these unlike but equally welcome things. As a very inadequate return, I am sending my latest article. Please observe that I am not responsible for the spelling. It was a real pleasure to see you and to find you relatively so well. I shall retain the pleasantest memories of my little visit to Littlehampton. Last night a mouse got into my bed, in which I have an ascetic preference for remaining alone, and it crossed my mind that perhaps the time was coming for a change of quarters: but I am somehow so anchored here, that it will take at least a second attack on the part of this rodent to part my cables. In London I saw the Russian ballet again in “The good-humoured ladies”2 and liked it very much. Oh for a sight of Venice, even without such costumes! Yours sincerely GSantayana
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1 Possibly The Study and Criticism of Italian Art (1917) or Venetian Painting in America: The Fifteenth Century (1916). 2 The Good-Humored Ladies was a ballet arranged by Vincenzo Tommasini (1878–1950) and based on five harpsichord sonatas composed by Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757).
To Unidentified Recipient 19 October 1918 • Oxford, England
(MS: Loyola) 22 Beaumont St Oxford Oct. 19. 1918
Dear Sir The paper I read yesterday is to be published, I believe, in a new Journal of English-Speaking Peoples,1 and I hardly think extracts from it ought to be published previously. In the confusion at the end of the lecture, and the hurry to catch a train, I did not find time to send you an immediate verbal answer; I hope this delay will not put you to any inconvenience. Yours etc GSantayana 1 “Materialism and Idealism in America” was published in The Landmark: The Monthly Magazine of the English-Speaking Union 1 (London: January 1919): 28–38, and was reprinted in Character as chapter VI.
To Robert Seymour Bridges [1918] • Oxford, England
(MS: Bodleian) 22 Beaumont Street Sunday
Dear Bridges Your good impressions of the French translation of my book1 comfort and relieve me a good deal, because the sense that, do what I might, I couldn’t get the translators to understand certain passages has weighed upon me, and kept me from enjoying with a free mind the greater part of their work, which is indeed excellent. I shouldn’t at all wonder if the translation had a better fortune in the world than the original. At any rate it will not fall so much into the hands of the surviving academic idealists, whose philosophic home is in Germany.
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Of course, you mustn’t be bothered with Pearsall Smith’s selections: you have already made a contribution (which I will see is included) about the symptoms and the disease: if anything else occurs to you and you will let us know it shall be incorporated also: but only if it happens to come to mind. I tremble myself at the prospect of having to read over my opera omnia quae exstant2 (for the verses and the innumerable philosophic articles may be regarded as lost for good) in order to rescue my favourite bons mots.3 I think Pearsall Smith has made his selections too long: he consents that I should shorten them and add a sprinkling of loose sentences and maxims of my own choosing; and he kindly says he has had his fun, and will let me have my way and take my time with the matter. I am busy at the moment with something else, but will begin the process of cutting down what has been chosen already, leaving the additions until later. If such a book is to appear at all, it ought not to contain dead wood. I am sorry not to have been of the party on Thursday: I am going to Mrs Morrell’s today, when Mrs Warren will be there. I have copied what you say of the French translation and sent it to the author of it: he will be better pleased than by any compliment from me, which might be merely perfunctory. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Egotism. All works that are extant. 3 Witticisms. 2
To Charles Augustus Strong 6 December 1918 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Dec. 6, 1918
Dear Strong This business paper1 is in honour of your “Origin of Consciousness”, long awaited, to the careful reading of which I have devoted the last four days. I must congratulate you on having brought it successfully to birth, looking so fine and lusty: also on its style, which both by the qualities it has and those it does not have, will help to bring home to the reader the solidity of the arguments. It is relieved just enough here and there by something
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pungent, like mustard with roast beef; but on the whole it is unaffectedly dedicated to enforcing scientific truth. You have done two things: given a correct account of external perception and vehicular knowledge, and proposed a new conception of substance, a new metaphysics. The first is a real service and the second a distinguished accomplishment. For my part, I have learned where I misunderstood some points in your system. For instance, by unfelt feelings you mean (or am I still at Sea?) full honest scintillating feelings in the ordinary psychological sense of the word feelings: they possess attentive vividness. They feel: in denying that they are felt you merely intend to deny that they are felt by another feeling, like objects of transitive knowledge: that is you merely deny the monstros/us Roycian doctrine that minds can’t exist unless known and posited by a larger mind. But this is an outrageous contention, which to be hated needs but to be heard. Did you ever suppose that in balking at your “unfelt feelings” I was maintaining that feelings could not be self-subsistent? Of course, what I balked at was the notion that the essence of a feeling could exist without that feeling actually lending it attentive vividness. By “unconscious feelings” I supposed you meant feelings (so called) that did not contain attentive vividness. As it is, I see that your psychism is such in the ordinary modern sense of the psychical, that it is empirical idealism or ^ psychologism chopped up fine, and that I was on the wrong tack in ^ accepting your “psyche” for my own purposes as if it could stand for the pre-Socratic non-vivid and non-attentive substrate of life and mind. I shall now not use the word psyche at all systematically, but say “organic life” or something modern of that sort. The chief novelty (to me) in your book is the defence of the point and instant as the seat of feeling. It is a very fine conception, this of luminous point-instants in infinite multitudes composing the substance of the universe! Brahma2 multiplied by infinity! Psychic intensity constituting existence, even in atoms! You should institute a comparison and contrast between your hypothesis and that of Leibniz:3 your feelings are his monads in a real space and time. You may not care to discuss the points on which we differ. I will only say in general that I never realized before how much you belong to the party of the left, and how hostile you are to the ways and thoughts of the right. Not that you are wrong in what you see and mean, on your own side of the fence; but that you have little sympathetic understanding of the ways of the other party. E.g. you are not fair to Descartes. Certainly one’s per-
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sonal life is not a more certainly objective or independent fact than a material fact given in perception; but for a musing philosopher it is a less doubtful, less dubitable fact. He can say, with sincere assent, “life is a dream”; he can’t say, with the same degree of moral plausibility, “my memory and discourse have never existed”. Besides, Descartes really agreed with you, that attentive vividness is the essence of mind, which has no other substance than just this actuality. You are also unfair to the word intuition. You limit it to Bergson’s abuse of it for an alleged intuition of matters of fact, which can be objects only of a transitive vehicular knowledge. But the proper object of intuition is essence. And I can’t help feeling that you are prejudiced against intuition even in its proper field: you deny that awareness of essence is knowledge at all—mathematics would then not be knowledge—and perhaps even that it is consciousness?/! For you seem to use this word for consciousness-ofother-existences, transitive cognition: and the subject of your book is not the origin of what I should call consciousness (if I didn’t abjure the word, as I fear I must) but the origin of transitive knowledge: and your first assumption (as I should express it) is that transitive knowledge could only be evolved out of previous intuition, and that intuition must be the primary and universal substance of the world.—But I mustn’t go on, or I shall revert to old and tiresome points of controversy. How is Fiesole? I am hesitating whether to attempt to leave England before the formal peace. I suppose I could get to Spain, but how about Italy? And should I find the apartment in Paris open, at least so as to get my things out? Yours ever G.Santayana 1
This letter is written on lined paper. Brahma is a remote deity who created the universe and is equated with it. He, Siva the Destroyer, and Vishnu the Preserver form the triad at the center of modern Hinduism. 3 Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von Leibniz (1646–1716) was a German philosopher and mathematician who was learned in science, history, and law. 2
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To Charles Augustus Strong 20 December 1918 • Oxford, England
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(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Dec. 20, 1918
Dear Strong It is a strange thing, but now that travelling has become safe again, if not yet very easy, my impatience to leave England has diminished, and I feel I shall have some difficulty in pulling up my anchor. However, it shall be done before very long—certainly by the Spring. I have several pieces of work almost finished, and I don’t want to start while they are still pending, especially as two of them would involve carrying rather bulky papers. I shall be happier if I take wing with only the MS of the “Four Realms” and “Dominations and Powers” in my bag. All this will make you understand that Margaret’s friends at the apartment or at the villa—unless they stay for ever—will not in the least interfere with my incursions. I think if I am allowed to stay in Paris for a week or a fortnight—I understand the authorities are rather disobliging about permis de séjour1—I should rather find the apartment empty, even if I am not living there, because I could then be freer to look over my old clothes and papers, and make a new distribution of what I wished to take or to leave. However, this is a matter of small importance one way or the other, and the main point is to get to Fiesole somehow, if I can manage it. My sisters say I must go to Avila first; but Avila is habitable in mid-Summer, and I should like to get to see you first, if I can get a passport for Italy. But it is hardly likely to be before March or April. What a year this has been for wonderful events! I have often wished we might have been able to talk them over as they occurred, although for my own part I am hardly able to take them in, and all my attention seems to be absorbed by the passing moment, or the immediate future. The past will loom up, I suppose, when it begins to recede into the distance. Just now I am wondering what Mr Wilson is up to: I rather think he is more to be trusted than the tendency of his political catchwords would suggest. He once told the Philosophical Association at Princeton (were you at that meeting too?) that in that college they had a radical purpose but not a radical manner in philosophizing: but it seems—and is to be hoped—that in politics he has not a radical purpose but only a radical manner. And I wonder what he has by way of manners! From what I hear—the papers
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can’t tell us what is most interesting—Mrs Wilson,2 not being able to make a fool of herself, because she is one already, is making a fool of her husband. My own feeling is, however, that he will yield to the experience and also to the fascinations of the European statesmen he is encountering, and that he won’t do any mischief. Oxford seems to me more beautiful every day. I walked three times round Christ Church meadows this afternoon, under the most romantic of wintry skies and the softest of w/ breezes, in a sort of trance; and I should certainly come to live and die in Oxford, if it weren’t [across] for the Oxonians. Yours ever GSantayana 1
Permission to reside, communicated in the form of an official document. Ellen L. Axson married Woodrow Wilson in 1885. She was profoundly sympathetic with his ideals and influenced him strongly. 2
To Charles Augustus Strong 22 December 1918 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Dec. 22, 1918
Dear Strong Since you seem inclined to metaphysical discussion, I will answer the points in your letter as well as I can, although we shall probably come up against the same impasse as usual. Your book, while it has cleared up some troublesome misunderstandings, has convinced me that we do not agree in fundamentals as much as I had hoped when reading your Drake papers. We agree about perception and its elements, but we don’t agree about the nature of mind. Feeling of the most elementary kind seems to me as obviously an expression of the life and the plight of an animal as we agree that perception is: but you make feeling substantial. That seems to me possible only by denying substance, as the idealists do, and making all things surfaces or intuited essences. Your effort to have a feeling that is not an intuition of essence, but the existent object of a possible eventual perception or introspection seems to me radically incoherent. Felling must be the intuition of an essence—call it an “element of quality” if you like, that is just what an essence is. And it is impossible for a spiritual fact, which a feeling is quite as much as a thought, to be the object, in the sense of an obstacle
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or irritant which we come up against and instinctively clothe with such essences as are given in consequence of that shock. This sort of materialization of the psychical offends me altogether: I shall never desert the Aristotelian insight that sensibility is the act of a natural living being, an entelechy and not a substance. It is not only the artificiality of supposing that inorganic matter feels or is feeling that I recoil from: I quite agree that speculation may rightly be paradoxical on occasion, and that perhaps there is much more diffused feeling in the universe than our human egotism is inclined to allow, although on the other hand I should expect what exists elsewhere to be less like our feeling than we conceive it to be, when we consent to admit it at all. What I chiefly recoil from is the denaturalization of the psychical itself which seems to me involved in panpsychism: its meaning and essence vanish if you cease to regard it as expressive and supervening. Your old objection that if it didn’t preexist it never could arise seems to me stupid. Could the flame of a match never arise if it didn’t preexist, or the meaning of a sentence unless each letter and sound had a meaning from all eternity? But the psychical is that sort of ulterior thing, which by its essence could only be a resultant if it existed at all. To say that it cannot have arisen because it is different from its basis is equivalent to saying that it is an impossible thing altogether: because its essence is to be a supervening fact that a situation involves, according to the order of nature. This doesn’t have to be accepted as an inexplicable coincidence, except in the sense in which all facts and all laws are inexplicable. It is the most natural and plausible thing in the world, as much so as the law of gravity or the generation of children. And now I must make a criticism which I deliberately left out in my last letter, because I didn’t wish to make verbal objections; knowing how legitimately one sometime has to do violence to language in the effort to express a new thought. But your phrase “attentive vividness” is a solecism. Vividness can’t be attentive, it can only be attended to: and attention properly can’t be vivid, but can only bring vividness to some datum. In other words, this phrase only betrays the contradiction which you are labouring to avoid. When you say that intuition of essence involves an opposition between that which intuits and that which is intuited, of course I agree, since that is just what I have been urging above: it involves such an underlying opposition in rerum natura1 and expresses it. But it does not contain any given opposition: it need not be more than the deadest of feelings in its deliver-
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ance or afford more than an element of quality. This given essence is, as you say, not the essence of the event, but only of the datum, which is probably not — yet —— ^the image of^ an event: at least this event is much more complex, and is dated and located, which the given essence of course is not: nevertheless the core of this natural event is the fact that just such an element of quality is then given: so that the intuited essence figures in that of the natural event, though not vice versa. As to your belonging to the party of the left, what I mean is based on a lot of small indications, such as dislike of words like intuition and eternal, restriction of essence—or tendency to restrict essence—to essence given in perception, dedication to William James, confidence in causation and evolution as conceived by the scientific popularizers, a certain disinclination to feel the mind as discourse and as dream, de se recœuillir.2 In a word, you hardly give the mystical its due. But of course your business is to formulate things scientifically and expose the fallacies and omissions. of the dreamers: so that this bias is a condition of doing good work. Yours ever GSantayana P.S. Let me add that as to the possibility of a feeling that nobody feels there are two questions: Is there ever, in the actual world, a feeling not generated by an organic process? To this I reply No: for the same reason that you would assign in the case of intuitions of essence; and I maintain that feeling is such an intuition, otherwise it would not be psychical at all. The other question is: Does the nature of feeling, taken absolutely, involve the given contrast between subject and object, in other words, is it the perception of an existent object? To this I say No: the first feeling which a chick has in the egg may be just the feeling of strain, pain, life, or pure being. Nevertheless I shouldn’t wonder if the essence “Hullo there”—which is a sort of perception—were given before any of those static terms which the word essence perhaps suggests by preference. In other words the categories of transitive knowledge may actually present themselves first to the mind, before any distinct sense-data. The a priori people would then be right psychologically and autobiographically, though wrong logically. Feeling would then begin with perception, not lead to it! But I admit idealism to be possible about feeling: without internal contradiction a little feeling might exist in vacuo, like a cherub [across] without a stomach, but just eyes and wings. I should say it was you who ought to maintain that a point-instant intuited itself.
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1
On the nature of things. Commune with oneself.
2
To James Bissett Pratt 2 January 1919 • Oxford, England
(MS: Williams)
22 Beaumont St, Oxford, Jan. 2. 1919. Dear Mr Pratt Let me give you my best thanks for your article on Spauldings book.1 As I haven’t seen the latter, I am not able to corroborate your judgment on it, nor to disagree with it, but there are some incidental points in the review that have an interest of their own. I entirely agree with you that mental life—which you call consciousness— exists and that it is a “container” of the various mental activities or moments that make it up, as an inventory is the container of the items enumerated, or as a year is the container of its 365 days. But I should refuse altogether to regard that as an argument for saying that the objects given in dreams or illusions exist: they are the themes of that portion of our mental life, but no part of our mental life itself. The themes of discourse are not contained in discourse, but referred to in it: and the undoubted existence of the discourse does not lend, or tend to lend, existence to what is discoursed about. In my opinion all mental life is of the nature of discourse: so that the data or objects never exist simply because they are given to an existing mind: if they exist, it is because, over and above their presence to attention or intention, they have a place of their own, on their own level, in space and time, or at least in time and in association with an event in space. As to the description of existence which you report, would it be impossible that, for instance, a spirit not in our temporal series, like God, should exist? Existence seems to carry with it a certain inherent stress which makes it a centre for time, space, change, and external relations. These are certainly marks of existence; but I am not sure that they exhaust its essence. I haven’t heard for a long time of any progress made towards the publication of our united efforts. Meantime Strong’s book has appeared, after a gestation of fifteen years! What do people say of it?
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Believe me, with best wishes, Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Edward Gleason Spaulding (1873–1940) wrote The New Rationalism: The Development of a Constructive Realism upon the Basis of Modern Logic and Science, and Through the Criticism of Opposed Philosophical Systems (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1918). Pratt’s article is unidentified.
To Charles Augustus Strong 12 January 1919 • Oxford, England
(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford Jan. 12, 1919
Dear Strong It is quite true that in my comments on your book I haven’t come to close quarters with your arguments. I think your metaphysical system, as sketched in your last chapter, is very attractive, and that if I could grasp it, I should have no difficulty in embracing it as at least one of the possible accounts of substance, or perhaps as a part of the true account of it—for I suppose if “attentive vividness” were widely diffused in matter, your axiom that it could not arise by evolution would be less plausible. But the difficulty I find is not in believing but in conceiving your position, and I hark back to other conceptions because I can’t frame those you propose. You see that I can’t comprehend “attentive vividness”, nor “feeling”, nor “introspection”, and I am not sure that “sensation” is intelligible to me, because while you say it ought to be distinguished from the object (the sensibile?) you also say that you can see a sensation move. This drives me to distraction, and my only resource is to unknit my brow and try to see the thing for myself in my own terms. Sometimes I think I have caught your meaning: e.g. I flattered myself that “attentive vividness” was simply a new name for awareness, and therefore I went on to say that it must be intuition of an essence—since awareness of nothing would not be awareness, I suppose. But now you tell me this is wrong, that “attentive vividness” is an entirely different thing, and I confess I am simply lost again. I have reread your last chapter and carefully studied your letter, but I don’t feel able to make any pertinent comments at present, because I am too much in doubt about your meaning.
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Here is another point, however, where it may not be useless to make some answer to what you say in your letter. You say that if consciousness is not a datum (which is agreed) we can never be sure that it is necessary to the existence of a feeling. Would you extend this to thought or discourse or any elaborate episode of experience? Would a love-affair, for instance, ight exist without anyone being conscious of it? There is if not a datum, — m— a sense in which every essence ever referred to is a “datum”—not a sensedatum of course, but a notion present and understood. When you use the word consciousness, you understand something by it: in this sense consciousness is then a “datum” to you. I think the notion of consciousness (as I suggested in my British Academy lecture) is reached by reflexion or “introjection”. We remember various scenes or essences (series of data) which are not arranged in, or capable of being included in, the physical world, and we say they are our thoughts on sensations; and this includes the element of awareness, not as a part of the sense-data, but as a causa existendi and cognoscendi1 of the whole non-physical aspect and perspective in things. Can perspectives be data? They are the ways in which various views differ from their common object. So consciousness might be said to be the principle of difference between all data and all their objects. The moment we realize that a datum is a datum—that it is given to us or ^ to anybody —we realize consciousness. I should agree that no reason exists ^ why essences given should not also be embodied in facts when not given— unless we mean essences-in-so-far-as-they-are-given, i.e. ideas. This is a notion belonging to reflexion, and an idea, as such, is never given; only the essence is. Yet it is certainly true that an idea exists only when we are conscious of an essence, so that consciousness enters into the definition of an idea. I should say the same of a feeling. Of course both the essence of this feeling (in its own realm) and the possible object it may be used to sym^ ^ bolize and reveal (like the tooth or the brain) are independent of consciousness. But that there is a third thing, psychic ———— yet —given (?) —given ———— ————— ———— but not implying consciousness, I can’t understand. —I [ see that I may have blundered here, and that perhaps you would not say that the mind-stuff in introspection is given, since what is given is certainly the vague general quality, and not the infinitely diffused mind-stuff, which is only the object behind the essence. Is this right?]— I am particularly puzzled by your assertion that we may cognize a brain-event by means of itself, or of the next similar pulsation. I think of it in this way:
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Shaded figures closed '' dotted ''
= = =
Cerebral pain-process
realm of matter, '' '' consciousness, '' '' essence. Feeling of pain
Essence of this pain
Introjection or attribution of the given essence to the bodily organ. Now, I should think the machinery requisite to produce introjection would be very extensive, bringing in many organs, motions, and instincts; so that it would not be the cerebral pain-process merely but the whole man, that would cognize the pain-process by means of the pain. Your/ encourage me to attempt to get to see you before long, and it certainly would be a great pleasure. Perhaps in March I may come, and when you leave for America, wend my own way slowly to Spain. But I want to finish the tasks I told you of, and I am so well and happy here for the moment that I foresee some difficulty in bringing myself to weigh anchor and spread the adventurous sail. What is the name of the concierge at the Paris apartment? They say Paris is so full, that it would certainly be an inducement if I could put up at the avenue de l’Observatoire for a few days, say at the end of February. My brother in Boston has lost his wife,2 who was the youngest (except my youthful self) of our generation. Their boy is still in France, and writes very interesting accounts of his experiences as a soldier. My brother is naturally much affected and writes despondently about his own approaching end: but I believe there is no ground for this foreboding, Yours ever GSantayana 1
Reason for coming into being and for learning. Ellen Gardner (Hodges) Sturgis died in 1918.
2
1910–1920
To Charles Augustus Strong 25 February 1919 • Oxford, England
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(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St Oxford Feb. 25, 1919
Dear Strong March is almost upon us, when I had thought of leaving England, but I am beginning to see that it is not advisable. I am very sorry not to see you and Margaret and the villa this Spring, but it will be, if all goes well, in the autumn instead, when I presume you will return from America. My reasons for not attempting to move at present are the same that have kept me here so long—that I am well and happy, that there is no imperative reason for going away, that I haven’t finished the two books that I want to be clear of before I begin fresh wanderings, that travel is still made uncomfortable and annoying by bad connections and government exigences, that the season will be more favourable later, and that I don’t want to go to Spain for long, as the household of my sister in Avila is enlarged, and a prolonged visit there would not be the congenial thing it was formerly. My notion now is to go there for a week or two in September, then to Madrid and Teledo, and thence to Italy for the winter. As to leaving Oxford for Paris, that I can do at any time during the summer when peace has been made and the way is clear. It makes no difference about the apartment being occupied or not, as I could then (by writing beforehand) easily get a room at the Quai Voltaire or at the Foyot, where I should be comfortable for the few days that I should stay in any case. You don’t say anything more about your health, and don’t tell me by what route you are going to the United States. Are you sailing from the Mediterranean or from the north? If you were coming as far as Paris, it would be a great inducement for me to hasten my departure and catch a glimpse of you there. I await your explanations of the nature of the psychical with interest. This week I have written out for the first time that part of my account of the “realm of consciousness” which we once discussed at the George about the existence of the past and the future. I wa/ onder if you remember it. I am quite excited over it at this moment—but it is [across] an interruption to the other work immediately in hand. Oxford is flooded and very Dutch in appearance. The satisfaction [across page one] due to the result of the war seems to be rather dampened too by
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the Wilsonian peace and the revolutions that threaten us. However, America is booming! Yours ever GSantayana
To Logan Pearsall Smith 9 March 1919 • Oxford, England
(MS: Congress) 22 Beaumont Street Oxford, March 9, ’19
Dear Smith Your letter makes me rather ashamed of myself not only in the matter of the Selections—of which more anon—but for not having written or seen you for so long. The fact is I have spent the winter in a mentally comatose condition, doing very little but read the papers and a few odd books, and pottering away now and then at some one of my many half-written things. Inertia has also invaded me in respect to travel, and I have put off all attempts to get to Italy this Spring. I mean to go to Spain first—in the summer or autumn—and then to Fiesole, when Strong returns from America, where he is going for the Summer. What has contributed to my uselessness has been an illusion about my lectures on America: I thought they were practically ready to be sown together into a volume;1 but in filling out the paper on James and Royce I got into a terrible mess; and that one lecture has now expanded into four chapters. I believe I am out of the wood in this matter now: and as soon as it is done and sent to the publishers I am going to return to the Selections; you shall have them back, I assure you, before I leave England. It is of course not for lack of time or any material difficulty that I have neglected this matter. The reason is that I get sick of my old paragraphs, and of thinking of style apart from substance, and simply can’t keep my mind applied to the task. But when I am fresh I have great hopes that we may make a good book out of it, one fit to take the place of all I have written until lately. As to Constable, I have very favourable impressions and I should like to have them publish the American book and also — the Dominations and Powers; I have no engagement with Dent, but also no quarrel with him, and my idea has been to send him these two books to be issued in the same form as Winds of Doctrine and Egotism—a form which I like. Dominations and Powers in particular is a sort of sequel to those other books, before
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during and after the war, as it were, and I see no great advantage in changing publishers in the midst of the series. Do you think it would be better? My own unhappiness about the war disappeared on July 18, 1918, and indeed in a certain sense had disappeared earlier, because although I thought the Germans might win a nominal victory, the Russian revolution seemed to me to have sealed the fate of the German system and its essential ambitions; I felt we had passed into another theme in the symphony, and that Hegel and Bismarck2 were in the same category as Torquemada and Philip II.3 But in July, 1918, we saw that the German machine was already cracking, even in a military sense; and since then it has been all a matter of more or less delay, suffering, confusion, and muddle, but not a question of a new illustration of Dominations and Powers in the person of Deutschtum über Alles.4 That is what I had feared during the first two years of the war, and what made me very miserable: not that I couldn’t reconcile myself to a German Age—I could stand a Chinese, an American, or a Bolshevik Age perfectly—but that I was sorry for France and England, and very sorry at the thought that the Latin tradition might be cut off, or disfigured into a Teutonic classicism. Of course, as you say, we have no peace in prospect: but peace is in the grave. Existence is fundamentally in flux—that is a conviction and expectation to start with; and we are merely resuming the movement, perfectly sensible before the war, which is bringing about the dissolution of the age of luxury and respectability in which you and I were born. Let it dissolve! Of course much horror and injustice will be involved in the process—but much would have been involved also in maintaining the old order. I am not afraid of the people. It is their leaders that are odious, but they will either succumb and be discredited, or they will become fashionable tyrants and patrons of the arts like all the bosses that have preceded them. At least, that is my prophecy. I hope your pleasant convalescence will continue and that I may before long come to you, laden with the revised Selections. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Character. Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), called the Iron Chancellor, was Prussian Chancellor of the German Empire (1871–90), which he unified. 3 Tomás de Torquemada (1420–98) was a Spanish Dominican monk and first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. Philip II (1527–98) was king of Spain (1556–98) and (as Philip I) of Portugal (1580–98). He sent the Armada against England in 1588. 4 Germany over all (variation on Deutschland über Alles). 2
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To Logan Pearsall Smith 16 March 1919 • Oxford, England
(MS: Congress) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford March 16, ’19
Dear Smith What you say about the selections exactly expresses my own feeling. I have already rearranged the passages with a view to an architectural effect which a few titles, like mouldings, can help to bring out. I have looked up the pages you suggest for the first “essay”—if you think we can call the book “Little Essays”—and I think it will do, only the references to Spinoza must be cut out, and perhaps a sentence or to/ wo supplied from other sources. I mean to use the single sentences and epigrams which I have collected only in case they can be used in this way to give point to or to sum up longer passages. As you see, I take a great interest in this affair, in spite of my apparent apathy, and have hopes of making it a success. The arrangement is already far advanced; also the finding of titles. There are two other reasons why a synthetic view of my books in this form is desirable: that I have written too much and repeated myself in a way which only the bad habit of daily lecturing can explain, if not excuse; and that there is a real vacillation or incoherence in my expressions, because I take alternately and without warning now the transcendental and now the naturalistic point of view; i.e. I sometimes describe the perspectives of the senses and imagination, and sometimes the natural sequence or relations of facts. Of course both things are worth describing, and there is no inconsistency in the differences which exist between the two views; but it is a grave defect not to have made it clear how this difference arises, and why it is inevitable and indeed makes the chief interest in the drama of thought. I am thinking over the question of Dent vs. Constable, but have not decided. Yours ever GSantayana
1910–1920
To Charles Augustus Strong 2 April 1919 • Oxford, England
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(MS: Rockefeller) 22 Beaumont St. Oxford April 2, 1919
Dear Strong Your philosophical letter shall be answered another day. I write now only to say that I am giving up my rooms here (where I have been for four years!) on April 24th and expect to go then for a few days to London. Please let me know when you are to be in Paris, and for how long. I hope very much to be able to join you—I don’t mean at the apartment; if you and Margaret are there there won’t be much space, and I could come for meals, etc, and sleep out—but I am not absolutely sure that it will be possible. Several things are in the air. The Y.M.C.A,1 although I am not young or a Christian, has asked me to go on a lecture tour at the front—either explaining America to the British troops or England to the Americans. I should give the same lecture everywhere, only one, so that I should learn it practically by heart and not have to read it. There are difficulties and anomalies involved, because the lecture ought to be illustrated with moving pictures or at least lantern-slides, and you can imagine my difficulties. On the other hand the idea of seeing the armies of occupation is rather tempting. There is to be a meeting in London at which I can decide, when I see the people concerned, whether it is a feasible thing for me to accept. Apart from that, they say there are difficulties in getting passports; I suppose in time I g/ could get mine for Spain; but how long would they let me stop in Paris? I should like to spend most of the summer there, if it were possible. Why not, after the peace? I have suspended work on the American book and taken up the Selections, in hopes of despatching them and leaving them in the hands of Logan Pearsall Smith when I go to the continent. The “Soliloquies in England” six or seven of them, are going to appear in the Athenaeum, which begins a new life this week under new editors.2 They are friends of Lady Ottoline’s. I have been twice at Garsington lately, and seen Berty Russell there He cleared up for me the point about “data”. He doesn’t mean given essences, but facts or features in facts ultimately discoverable. So that curiously enough, his data are eventual data only and never given. They are things cut up fine. Yours ever GSantayana
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[across] P.S. Shall I send a box of books to the apartment, or had I better store them here, in view of bringing the others over which are in Paris? Is it likely that you will keep the apartment another year or two? 1
Founded in London in 1844, the Young Men’s Christian Association is an organization which seeks to improve conditions and opportunities of young men. The movement in the United States began in 1851. 2 The Athenaeum (1828–1921) was a literary review founded by J. S. Buckingham, who wished it to become an ‘Athenaeum’, the resort of thinkers, poets, orators, and writers. John Middleton Murry served as editor of The Athenaeum from 1919 to 1921. In 1921 it merged with the Nation, ran for ten years as Nation and Athenaeum, and in 1931 was purchased by the New Statesman.
To Logan Pearsall Smith 6 April 1919 • Oxford, England
(MS: Congress) 22 Beaumont St Oxford April 6, 1919
Dear Smith Both you and Mr Kyllmann1 are very good. Of course, a new and more manageable edition of the Life of Reason has been the dream of my life, but it must be a revised edition. I don’t mean that I think it worth while to rewrite the book: if I attempted it, I should spoil whatever may be good and fresh about it. But there are many small corrections, in style, vocabulary, and arrangement, without which I should be ashamed to reissue the book: and here and there I should like to omit or to add a few sentences. Most of these changes are already indicated in the margin of my copies; but one of these is in Paris, and not at hand for the moment. I have also composed a preface to the second edition2—so you see the idea is an old one with me, and falls in with my deliberate plans. If I can spend the summer in Paris (as I hope) I could send a copy with the proposed corrections to Constable before the autumn. I have looked up the passages you suggest and put them together with the one from the essay on Spinoza, to constitute the second selection in the first part. This first part is finished and I am sending it to you in advance, so that you may look it over and tell me what you think. My notion is to have three or four parts besides this, one on religion, one on poetry & fine art, and one (if it doesn’t make the book too long) on poets and philosophers. You understand that I don’t mean to take over the responsibility for
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the selection—except for omissions—but that what I have put in that was not in your original collection is only submitted as a suggestion. You will probably in any case have to leave out some of these little essays. I am giving up my rooms here and going to London for a few days on th but my plans are in the air, as there is some possibility of my April 24– going to France to give lectures—one lecture repeated—to the troops. Strong expects to be in Paris, on his way to America, next month, and if possible I want to join him there. But I may decide to remain in England most of the summer. Do you know of lodgings that in that case might suit me? I have engaged a room for a few days at a hotel, simply to have where to lay my head while things are decided. Yours sincerely GSantayana My permanent address is, /o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall. S.W.1
C
1
Otto Kyllmann was director of Constable Publishers in London. The second edition of The Life of Reason was published in 1922 with a new preface but no major revisions. 2
To Unidentified Recipient 9 April 1919 • Oxford, England
(MS: Virginia)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, S.W.1. Oxford, April 9. 1919
Dear Sir I beg to thank you for your letter. At present I am afraid I have nothing to offer you, as such publications as I have in view are already arranged with other publishers, but I will keep your kind offer in mind for the future Yours faithfully GSantayana
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To Logan Pearsall Smith 21 April 1919 • Oxford, England
(MS: Congress)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, S.W.1. Oxford, April 21, 19
Dear Smith th Before the 28– it is impracticable for me to go to Big Chilling,1 as I am th to be at a meeting in London on the 25– after which my plans will be formed and I shall have to look for rooms for a longer or shorter period, as it may chance. But if you are going back to the country later and still want me to come I shall be delighted to do so. Meantime I am sending you gradually the remaining parts of the Selections, as I get them ready. An index such as you suggest seeems to me better than any reference at the beginning of each fragment, as I should like to maintain as far as possible the illusion that each little essay is complete in itself. If you are willing to undertake the job, I think it will be easy before the whole is reprinted, as the page number and the style of print show where each passage has been drawn from. I should be glad to do it myself if you don’t mind some further delay, but I don’t like to undertake any more odds and ends for the moment, as I am rather distracted as it is by the multitude of things to be finished. I have been making a holocaust of old dusty papers, and binding the few saved from the fire into sheafs: it is appalling to see how many projects I have had, and how many times I have said the same thing, as if I had never thought of it before. Thank you very much for the address in Derby Street, but I am afraid it is too fashionable a place for me and will have been picked up before I have a chance to see it. I shouldn’t mind its being a little dear (as I suppose it must be) but what I really fear is the contempt of the servants when they become aware of my habits and my wardrobe! It really makes one [across] uncomfortable to be off the key, as it were. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Smith’s Elizabethan manor house at Warsash on the Hampshire coast of England.
1910–1920
To Charles Augustus Strong 30 April 1919 • Windsor, England
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(MS: Rockefeller) C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, S.W.1 Windsor April 30, ’19
Dear Strong The affair of my Y.M.C.A. lectures has advanced to a stage when it seems likely that it may be realized. It is proposed to give the addresses only to the U.S. troops in the region of Coblenz, and my turn is to come th from June 9 to July 5. I shall be taken to Paris about the 6– of June: but if you are to be there, and can find room for me in the apartment, I will try to arrange to go a few days earlier, so as to see you before starting for th I could return and remain until you Germany. In any case, after July 5– and Margaret left for America. The Y.M.C.A. people seemed sensible and not at all mystically inclined: rather imperialistic and with a sort of missionary spirit, but all quite political, so that I don’t feel any incongruity in working with them. I have got my passport and filled out the “Demande de Visa” and the Y.M.C.A. officials promise to take all the steps necessary. I am asking, for the moment for permission to resume permanent residence in Paris; my proposed journeys later to Spain and Italy will then figure only as trips, from which I shall return to Paris as to my head-quarters. If they refuse to admit this arrangement, I shall be forced to ask for an exeat1 to Spain; and then manage to return to Paris or go straight to Italy from there. It is a great lapse from our old liberty. And how foolish! What conspiracies are you or I forging? I have left Oxford for good and am looking for a quiet place in which to spend the month of May near London, while all these matters are being settled. Yours ever G.Santayana. [across] I have sent a box of books to Paris, and warned both Françoise and Germond that it is coming. 1
Permission to leave (literally, “let him go out”).
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To Charles Augustus Strong 11 May 1919 • Richmond, England
(MS: Rockefeller)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, S.W.1 May 11, 1919
Dear Strong Since I wrote last I have left Oxford, been four days in London, a week at Windsor with my old friend Howard Sturgis, and another week at the Richmond Hill Hotel at Richmond (well-known to you, I believe) from which I write. I have a rather nice room at the Wick House across the road, and go to the hotel proper only for my meals. The place suits me pretty nd well and I expect to remain here until June 2– when I go again to London, in preparation for the crossing to Paris, which, according to plan, would be th th on the 5– or 6– of June. But the whole plan is in the air: they have written saying that there is some difficulty in getting permission for any but British subjects to give the Y.M.C.A. lectures in question, that they will do their best to obtain it in my case, etc, but I don’t know their ways well enough to be sure whether this is an excuse for getting rid of me, or a mere hitch, or a real and final obstacle. Meantime, I am writing my lecture so as to be ready in any case, and I shall really be much relei —ieved if the thing falls through, — and as I don’t foresee much pleasure in it, nor very agreeable society; whereas if it is given up, I might be with you in Paris uninterruptedly for a much longer time—that is, if the French authorities give me leave to stay. I have made out my demande de visa not only for the Y.M.C.A. business (which I thought definitely settled) but also for remaining in Paris indefinitely—saying nothing for the present about going to Spain or Italy later. I have followed your suggestion in saying that we “shared” the apartment—although I wasn’t sure of the French way of expressing just that, and merely said I had had a room in your apartment since 1912, and had no other domicile. I shall follow up these démarches1 when the Y.M.C.A. question is settled and I go to interview the French visa office in person. One of my books—the Selections—is finished and in the publisher’s hands! I have some hopes of also despatching the book on James Royce etc. during the three weeks I shall have here. In that case, I should feel as light as a bird for taking flight across the Channel.
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Please let me know when, [across] exactly, you expect to reach Paris, and when you will be able to put me up. I am afraid I shall be crowding Margaret into a corner, but I accept your invitation none the less, [across page one] because I think it would be really nicer for us all, especially for Yours me, and perhaps better for the purpose of my permis de séjour. ever GSantayana 1
Proceedings.
To Charles Augustus Strong 22 May 1919 • Richmond, England
(MS: Rockefeller) Richmond Hill Hotel May 22, 1919
Dear Strong I learn this morning that I am definitely released from the proposed lectures at Coblenz, which is partly a disappointment (it would have been such a curious experience) but chiefly a great relief. Now we can arrange matters quite at our convenience. A friend1 who is in the Naval intelligence department tells me that after June 1–st all regulations will be much relaxed; and if it is true that they are to have anticipated peace celebrations in Paris th (so that Mrs Wilson may see them) I suppose after that the preson June 6– sure for rooms and for everything in Paris will begin to decrease. In any case I will wait until you are there and can either receive me in the apartment or give me hopes of getting a room at some hotel not far away. Anything, no matter if not respectable, say in the Boulevard Saint Michel, would do perfectly for the time being. Meantime I will stay here, where I am comfortable, and devote myself to finishing the book about America, to which my rejected lecture, in a duly concentrated and distilled form, can be added as a last chapter under the title “Cooperative Liberty”.2 I was in London yesterday and never saw the Park look better or more animated by riders, ladies’ costumes, and flowers as it did at noon in the summer sunshine. Richmond too is delightful just now, as we have been having uninterrupted warm and bright weather. th so as to I will engage a room in London for the days following June 16– be ready to start from there for Paris during that week, if you are ready for me.
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I trust your new apparatus will be a success. Yours ever GSantayana 1
Unidentified. Chapter VII of Character is titled “English Liberty in America.”
2
To Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller 13 June 1919 • Richmond, England
(MS: Houghton)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, S.W.1 Dear Fuller It is I who ought to apologize for never acknowledging your Christmas present of that martial-academic effigy of yourself;1 but as you accompanied it with the promise of a letter, I put off writing till I received it—which is today. Your plans and your apprehensions are intelligible to me: but perhaps you are too near to the incidents of the moment to judge of their relative significance, and my own feeling is that while a transformation of society is inevitable, and we are at the end of the liberal parlaimentary capitalist age, the revolution will be abortive from the point of view of those who desire it. There have been industrial revolts before; plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.2 I left my lodgings in Oxford at the beginning of this term,3 expecting to go to Paris to join Strong at the apartment where you have visited us; but he has been putting of his journey, and I don’t want to arrive until he is there and quite settled, as it is not for me to deal with several delicate matters of that ménage4 which will have to be decided. My passport is ready, and even the visa asked for and promised: and any day I expect to hear that I am awaited in Paris, and if nothing prevents I shall then go over— whether to make that my head-quarters for good, or to bring my things to England and establish myself here, I can’t yet tell. Fortunately I travel lightly, and it makes little difference to me or to my work where I happen to be. But it is harder for me to move, for the very reason that I am comfortable anywhere—here at Richmond now, for instance—and I foresee that after my present spell of travel I shall drop four anchors in some port— probably Oxford—and lie there honourably like those dismantled frigates— the Victory of Nelson, etc—which one sees in the calm waters of certain
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arsenals. But I hope my movements will not cause me to miss you. I shall be in London next week, June 16–23, after that, perhaps here again, at any rate not far away, and a line sent to Brown Shipley will soon reach me. I am sorry to hear this news about your brother. But here is a vocation for you to play the wonderful distinguished uncle and [across] start your four young nephews in the way they should go.—I will write again when my movements are decided on. Yours ever GSantayana 1
In 1919 Fuller was a captain with the Supreme War Command. The more things change, the more they remain the same. 3 The academic year at Oxford is divided into three terms: Michelmas (mid-October to about the first week of December); Hilary (mid-January to about mid-March); and Trinity (approximately the fourth week in April to roughly the third week of June). 4 Household. 2
To Charles Augustus Strong Tuesday [17 June 1919] • [Southampton, England?]
(MS: Rockefeller)
Tuesday CARE OF MESSRS. BROWN, SHIPLEY
123,
&
CO.,
PALL MALL, LONDON, S.W.
1.
Dear Strong Very glad to receive your letter, and see that the coast is clear. Difficulties are inconceivable (e.g. after promising me a visa the French consulate has lost my demande and I have had to make a new one). Besides I am not allowed to go by Boulogne but only by Le Hâvre. However I hope to get off on Friday night and reach Paris on Saturday.—I am looking forward to seeing you, and to being again in Paris. Sed quantum mutatus ab illo Paris!1 Yours ever G. Santayana 1
But how much I [have been] changed by that Paris!
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To Charles Augustus Strong [17 June 1919] • [Southampton, England?]
(MS: Rockefeller)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, London. S.W.1
Dear Strong Since I wrote this morning, more difficulties! I have spent the whole day at the French pass-port office, sent from one man, softened and informed of my case, to another who knew nothing about it, and once or twice (if I hadn’t protested) back to the man from whom I had been sent forward. I now understand why the war lasted five years, and the Conference six months. One person makes the inquiries, and begins to understand; then another person, with a sense of his own importance but no information, makes the decision. The upshot is that the top man will not let me go to Paris at all (Qu’estce que vous allez faire à Paris?)1 unless I obtain a note from the Concierge, or other responsible person, VISÈD2 by the commissaire of the quartier, to the effect that I really resided at the Avenue de l’Observatoire before the war. It will be necessary to give dates; I am not absolutely sure myself just when I first arrived and made that my headquarters, but it was perhaps in Jan. or Feb. 1912. We left, as you know, in July 1914. If you and the Concierge can send me such a document, I may possibly be able to start next week; but I am not sure that I may not be sent to somebody else, who will make different conditions. If I were not really desirous of seeing you, and reverting to the old life, I should chuck the whole thing, and go back to Oxford—for life. I know that my irritation of today—it is very hot and I am very tired— will not last for ever, but you will understand my feelings and their transitory causes— Yours ever GSantayana. I am going back to Richmond to [across] wait for the issue. 1
What are you going to do in Paris? Endorsed.
2
1910–1920
To Charles Augustus Strong 18 June 1919 • [Richmond, England]
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(MS: Rockefeller)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall. S.W.1 June 18, 1919.
Dear Strong Consulting my pillow last night, after the experiences of the day, I think I see things in a better perspective. I didn’t mention that I have had a hypothetical invitation to give a course or half-course next winter at Columbia, in case, that is, of Dewey’s absence. If it should be impossible for me to get to Paris, we might still meet in America! What a strange thing that would be! Of course, the idea of the voyages and of the social obligations of a lecturer appals me: on the other hand, there would be much stimulation, to make up for the waste of time, I should see many old friends, and perhaps I might do some good. What do you think? If I get to Paris, I foresee another struggle to get a permis de séjour, and what is worse, a possible difficulty in getting back to England eventually. I have made inquiries on this point, and received an official intimation that my passport should be endorsed to return to England. But as that is inconsistent with the contention that I live with you in Paris, I shall have to run the risk of new difficulties if I wanted to get back here. And if I fled to Spain, I might never be able to get out again. That would be worse than the other eventualities. The war, as far as the traveller is concerned, is certainly not over, and the most sensible thing for a person in my position is perhaps to continue to lie low. I send you these incoherent lucubrations, in order that you may see what is running through my mind. If you can send me the endorsed certificate that I wrote about yesterday, of course I will try again to get the visa and to join you now; but half the pleasure of that prospect is spoiled by this sense of having lost all liberty of movement. Yours ever GSantayana
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To Logan Pearsall Smith 20 June 1919 • Richmond, England
(MS: Congress) Richmond Hill Hotel June 20—19
Dear Smith You see, I am still where you last saw me—or rather, very nearly in the same place, because after going away to town in the hope of getting my passport properly endorsed, I have returned to a still better room on the top floor of Wick House, with a really magnificent view on two sides and the feeling of being in a castle tower overlooking some smiling cha m paign.1 It is quite delightful as a retreat for working: only marred ^ ^ by the necessity of descending to the dining room two or three times a day. The reason for my return here, as you may conjecture, is the obduracy of the French authorities who will not give a visa for one’s beaux yeux,2 but require all sorts of proofs of business activities, services during the war, living to earn, wife to rescue from starvation or dishonour, or some other work of moral or national importance. It is still possible that I may get away next week, if Cerberus3 is satisfied with a sop (which he has asked for and promised to be appeased by—but what are promises to Cerberus?) in the form of an affidavit that I really lived in Paris before the war. I wonder how Berenson manages to travel so like a lord or an Irish emissary: is it his business or his fame that propitiates people, or his American nationality? I should be sorry not to see Strong, who has been philosophically rather lonely as well as laid up physically for the last year: otherwise I should be really glad to give up all thought of travel and return to peace and happiness at Oxford. You are very generous in wishing me to have all the profit of the Little Essays, if profit there is to be: let us not have a quarrel of disinterestedness about it. But it would really be simpler for me if you took half the royalties, let us say, to invest in the beautiful book which should serve as a memento of your labours. I am not a connaisseur in books; but it occurs to me that the right thing would be a copy of the great Essays of Bacon4 or Montaigne, with an inscription witnessing that seeing thou hast been faithful over little essays, thou shalt be made master — of over great essays. If I return to Oxford, I will ask Blackwell5 if he has an attractive edition of either of these, and send it to you so inscribed.
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Thank you very much for wanting me to come to Big Chilling. Of course I should like to, but can make no plans at present. [across] Thank you, too, for Mrs Berenson’s card, from which I am happy to infer that she is quite well again. Yours G. S. 1
Campagne: country estate. Beautiful eyes. 3 Three-headed dog guarding the entrance to Hades. 4 Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was an English statesman distinguished in politics, law, literature, philosophy, and science. His Essays, edited by Storr and Gibson, was published in London in 1918. 5 Proprietor of the Oxford bookstore, B. H. Blackwell Ltd. 2
To Charles Augustus Strong 24 June [1919] • Richmond, England
(MS: Rockefeller)
Richmond Hill Hotel June 24. Dear Strong My best thanks for your two letters and card, including the certificate, and the note from Madame de Fontenay1 for which I am truly obliged to her; it will have a decisive effect, I am sure. It was also very kind of Margaret to see to the certificate and I have no doubt her good graces helped to obviate any difficulties which might otherwise have arisen. I went to the consulate this afternoon, but was able to arrive only an hour before the time the passport office is closed, and the queue was such in both quality and quantity that I thought it better to decamp. M. Dallas2 (I think that is his name) is irascible; and more irascible doubtless after five or six hours of haggling than when fresh from sleep and other forms of refreshment: so that I will try him early tomorrow morning, when I too shall have the whole day before me to get tickets, etc, if I get the visa, as I rather expect I shall. When I have interviewed Cook’s people about passage and boats I will write again or telegraph the exact date and hour of my probable arrival. I don’t know whether the celebration of peace will increase or decrease the pressure of travel. One of the Southampton-Havre boats is being overhauled, and a smaller one has been put in its place; so that to avoid the bad boat one is confined to alternate days: I think it is Thurs, Saturday & Monday that the good boat runs.
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I am glad Françoise is compos mentis et rei culinariae.3 Yours ever GSantayana 1
Wife of the French minister to Copenhagen. Unidentified. 3 Sound of mind and in the culinary arts. 2
To Monica Waterhouse Bridges 25 June 1919 • Richmond, England
(MS: Bodleian) Richmond Hill Hotel June 25, 1919
Dear Mrs Bridges This is to say goodbye, as I am off at last for Paris tomorrow. I have had some trouble in getting leave to go, and expect much more in getting leave to stay; but in any case I shall see my friend Strong (with whom I am supposed to live) and recover my lost goods and chattels, so that when I return to England it will be with all my earthly possessions and literary odds and ends in my luggage, and the firm purpose of never leaving this hospitable and habitable island again. I assure you I shall cast many a look in the direction of Oxford and of Chilswell and I doubt very much if it will be possible for me now to be as happy anywhere else as I have been there. During the wonderful Summer weather that we have been having, I have been at Windsor and in London, as well as here, but restless and idle, on account of the delays and uncertainty now involved in travelling abroad—a thing which was so simple formerly. What a dreadful thing officialdom is! One man looks up some matter, and when he has begun to understand it, he sends you to the man above him, who knows nothing about it and blindly asks you a different set of questions: and when mollified in turn, he sends you to the man above him—a person so important that he can’t trust anybody else’s judgment, but must decide for himself without any information, since after all the responsibility rests with him. I hear that Oxford has restored all its old ways and aspects down to the last button. Quite right! Perhaps the war has changed the world less than we thought it would. There have been great wars before: let us hope we
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may have a long [across] peace. My address, if you ever feel like sending me a line, is C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123 Pall Mall. Yours sincerely GSantayana
To Wendell T. Bush 5 July 1919 • Paris, France
(MS: Unknown) 9 Avenue de l’Observatoire, Paris, July 5, 1919.
Dear Mr. Bush: After some delays and difficulties due to the reluctance of the French authorities to let anyone invade their territory, I finally got here a week ago, and have been settling down in the midst of all my recovered possessions, with the satisfaction which you may conceive. Strong and his daughter are not to be here more than a month more, but I expect to remain indefinitely, and the sense that I have three books under way, and a clear time for working on them, with enough incidental amusement to prevent me from getting stale, makes me certain that I cannot accept your suggestion of going to New York for the present. It tempts me in many ways, but I feel that I had better clear away some at least of my present undertakings before attempting anything else. Two of my three aforesaid books are within a measurable distance of completion. When they are done—perhaps in a year or two—if you should have another opportunity of fitting me somewhere into your programme at Columbia I should be very much pleased to come and to carry out a project that several times has opened up, and never—except for those six lectures on philosophical poets—been realized as I could have wished. You said something about an old skit of mine on Plato in Sicily, which you called a dialogue. It is really a play in verse, and too long and otherwise unsuitable for your Journal. It is finished, however, and when I have time to read it over and get a new impression of what it amounts to, I may possibly publish it in the form of a little book by itself. But I have some dialogues too—I call them Dialogues in Limbo, because they bring in ancient worthies as speakers. If on examination I think it at all possible, I will send you one as a sample.
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Thank you once more for your wish to include me for a time among your colleagues: I am truly sorry that the circumstances deprive me for the present of that honour and pleasure. Yours sincerely, G. Santayana.
To Logan Pearsall Smith 5 July 1919 • Paris, France
(MS: Congress) 9 Avenue de l’Observatoire Paris, July 5. 1919
Dear Smith Just a line to say that finally—through diplomatic pressure—I have been able to get here, and once in Paris find that there are no obstacles placed in the way of staying on indefinitely. For some months, at any rate, I shall remain here. My friend Strong, poor man, is rather a cripple and hobbles about with difficulty, bent over like a decrepit old man. His daughter Margaret, on the contrary, is blooming and gay, and very much adds to the pleasure of existence here. However, they are off to America in a month, and I shall have solitude and leisure for work, without any such feeling of restlessness as pursued me of late in England. When the proofs of the Little Essays begin to come you might have them sent to me here: although perhaps it would be less confusing, and safer in the long run, if you would give Constable only my London address—C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, S.W.1.—by which only a few hours would be lost, and which is good no matter where I may be. I am sorry not to have the chance to return this summer to Big Chilling. Please give Mrs Berenson my best regards, and tell her how much I appreciated her card, and her appreciation of Spain. Yours sincerely GSantayana
1910–1920
To Charles Augustus Strong 21 August 1919 • Paris, France
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(MS: Rockefeller) 9 Av. de l’Observatoire Aug. 21, 1919
Dear Strong Besides the enclosed1 I have only forwarded one set of letters in a single envelope and one letter for Margaret by itself. The Whited Sepulchre has brought two criticisms of your book, which you have doubtless seen in New York, one by Drake. I have paid your tax bills, 535.97 francs in all, but the bill for the electric light has not yet come in. When it does, I will pay it and let you know, and you can send me a cheque for the whole if you like, as I am in no hurry and it would save me going twice to the bank. It seems to be the presence of a cheque that puts off Françoise from taking her money. I suggested to her very plainly that she should take the bank-notes and leave the cheque alone, but although she said “Nous verrons”2 she has not taken anything yet. I will try her again when I see a good opening. She is giving me my lunch, as she seemed to prefer that arrangement, but I see little of her and don’t know what she does or eats during the rest of the day. Everything is very well looked after and I am most comfortable and working steadily in spite of the warm weather, so that for my part I should be glad to have this arrangement continue indefinitely. But Françoise must need more money than what I give her for the dépense3— which is very moderate—and I think, unless you object, that I ought to pay her at least her old wages of 75 francs a month from September 1. She says she has no idea what she wants to do eventually. Reeves finally found me in one day, but things have ended there; on the other hand Slade and I had a very pleasant dinner one day at La Pérouse, looking out on the river and the statue of Henri IV.4 I have not yet seen his Gabrielle or his paintings. Moncure Robinson is here, as large as life, and I have declined an invitation (from Lapsley) to go to Mrs Wharton’s in the country where he and Percy Lubbock5 are staying. I hope soon to hear from you and to know what sort of voyage and landing you have had. With love to Margaret [across] Yours ever GSantayana 1
Unlocated. We’ll see.
2
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3
Expenses. Henry IV (1367–1413) was king of England from 1399 to 1413. He founded the Lancastrian dynasty, and his son was Henry V. 5 Percy Lubbock (1879–1965) was an English essayist, literary critic, and biographer best known for The Craft of Fiction (1921). 4
To Charles Augustus Strong 7 September 1919 • Paris, France
(MS: Rockefeller) 9 Av. de l’Observatoire Sept. 7, 1919
Dear Strong I am much pleased to have your letter and to know that all has gone well so far and that the doctors hold out agreeable prospects. You say nothing of your plans for returning, and I daresay they will not be finally settled until your treatment has been decided upon, or even until it is over. Here there is no change. I am now at work on the book about American philosophers, and hope to finish it before your return, or my departure for other climes, where I should never enjoy the absolute freedom and quiet that I am enjoying here. Françoise is just as usual. I told her you had had a good voyage and that you were in hopes of a complete recovery, and she only made a monkey face and said absolutely nothing. She continues to give me an excellent lunch every day, and hands in the book from time to time with the items of the dépense clearly set down and correctly added. The expense is very moderate—six or seven francs a day—and she refuses to take any other money. All you left is still in the drawer. The concerts in the Tuileries1 gardens, to which I have been going almost every evening on my way back from dinner, end today, and I expect to get back earlier in future and do a little pleasant reading before going to bed. I haven’t yet bought any more books to speak of, but I have plans, and lots of spare money. Would you object if I got a second-hand carpet for the salon? Moncure Robinson is expecting to break up his Paris establishment and says he has one that would go well there, but I haven’t yet seen it. It is perfectly comfortable here as it is now, but I am thinking of colder weather to come. Yours ever GSantayana
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1 Tuileries, formerly a palace in Paris, was burned down in 1871. It was planned by Catherine de’ Medici and begun in 1564. It occupied part of the present Tuileries gardens, which were laid out by Le Nôtre, between the Louvre and the Place de la Concorde.
To Joseph Malaby Dent 14 September 1919 • Paris, France
(MS: North Carolina) 9, Av. de l’Observatoire Paris. O / Sept. 14, 1919
Dear Mr Dent I wonder what you wrote to this poor Mr Zampa1 that he is in such trouble. I am writing to him directly, saying I knew nothing of the matter, and that I have the greatest confidence (which I have, having seen a printed paraphrase by his colleague Muri,2 of some passages, very well done) in his ability to make a faithful rendering, but that nevertheless I should be glad to see the manuscript or the proofs before the book actually comes out. They are very trustworthy people intellectually, although they may not be punctual or very accurate in matters of business. I have no plans as yet about the articles in the Athenaeum.3 There are not enough for a book, nor are they all connected enough to fall into a book readily. But we shall see later. I have been back in Paris since June and expect to remain for the present. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Luciano Zampa translated Egotism in 1920. (L’io nella filosofia germanica, Lanciano: R. Carabba). 2 Unidentified. 3 The Athenaeum published thirteen articles by Santayana in 1919, when John Middleton Murry became editor. These articles were included in Soliloquies.
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To Robert Seymour Bridges 18 September 1919 • Paris, France
(MS: Bodleian) 9 Av. de l’Observatoire, Paris Sept. 18, 1919
Dear Bridges Your letters make me a little homesick for Oxford, although I am having a very nice time (in my own way) here among all my books and papers, and under the stimulous of such delightful scenes as meet one wherever one goes in this place—more normal, more Roman and human, than what is man-made at Oxford,—because the fields and trees and skies, and that mesh of little streams, are another matter. I am confirmed in the intention to return to Oxford for good—but it will not be for the present, because I don’t want to go until I am ready to shift my head-quarters, which is not yet the case. I won’t attempt to answer your letter seriatim,1 although each of the things you tell me prompts me to say something, but I can’t let Plotinus lie under the imputation you throw on him of not being a “good philosopher”. If you mean that his system of the universe is not a map of it, is not scientifically correct or in scale, of course I agree. But it seems to me a very great system, very “good philosophy”, and I am glad that the mystics in Oxford are taking him up, rather than pretending to find comfort in Hegel or in the meretricious psychology of Bergson. The doctrines of Plotinus are flights in the same direction as the doctrines of Christianity: they are not hypotheses intended to explain facts, but expressions invented for sentiment and aspiration. The world, he feels, is full of the suggestion of beauty and goodness, but of the suggestion only. In fact, it betrays and obliterates everything it tries to express, like an inscription in invisible ink that should become luminous only for a moment. And his question is: What does the world say, what does life mean, what is there beyond, e)kei=,2 that might lend significance and a worthy origin and end to this wonderful apparition and to our passionate love and passionate dissatisfaction in its presence? His system is an elaborate answer to this question. It is not a hypothesis but an intuition, and such rightness as it has is merely fidelity and fineness in rendering moral experience. Of course all those things he describes do not exist; of course he is not describing this world, he is describing the other world, that is, deciphering the good, just beyond it or above it, which each actual thing suggests. Even this rendering of moral aspiration is arbi-
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trary, because nature really does not aspire to anything, and each living thing aspires to something different, in divergent ways. But this arbitrary aspiration, which Plotinus reads into the world, sincerely expresses his own aspiration and that of his age. That is why I say he is decidedly a “good philosopher”. It is the Byzantine architecture of the mind, just as good or better than the Gothic. It seems to me better than Christian theology in this respect, that it isn’t mixed up with history, it isn’t half Jewish, half worldly. It is the Greek side of Christian theology isolated and made pure; and that is the side of it which seems to me truly spiritual, truly sacrificial and penitentially joyful. That it is terribly superstitious and turns all physics into magic is an integral part of its poetic and expressive virtue. Every passion, every force, must be a devil or an angel, because it is agreed to begin with we are looking for the spirit in things. I didn’t mean to go on in this way, especially as really I know Plotinus very little; but I feel a great power in him, a sublime illusion, as if some plant or some pensive animal had laboriously spun the moral dialectic of its own experience round itself, and called it the universe. I have actually seen, and read, that first volume of the translation to be published by the “Medici press”;3 of course, except in the extracts at the end, it doesn’t th th come to the core of the matter, which is in the V– and VI– Enneads.4 The translator has eccentric notions of what the vocabulary of philosophy should be: he doesn’t stick to the traditional renderings and leave it to the reader to put new life into them, which after all is the safest course. He tries various paraphrases of his own, which of course bias and distort the meaning, even if they have a certain value of their own as interpretations. Do you ever see the Athenaeum? I have kept on writing for it, although to be quite frank I don’t like the review as a whole, and don’t read it; but there is no other that I know of that would publish my effusions, and it is a great relief to have them in print. What is once out is done for, and one doesn’t have to think of it any more. Are you going to America? If your society for the purification of the language is going to cleanse those Augean stables, I don’t envy it its labours.5 Why shouldn’t the English language of a hundred years hence be as different from ours as ours is from Shakespeare’s? I know you say he pronounced as we do: but we don’t write like him. The Americans have a great love of language for its own sake, and will develope new effects, if not new beauties. As one of them used to say whenever anything was censured: Let them have their fun! Yours ever GSantayana
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1
In series. Yonder. 3 Stephen MacKenna (1872–1934) translated the works of Plotinus, which were published in London by the Medici Society in 1917. 4 The title given to the works of Plotinus; each of the six books contains nine chapters. 5 Augeas was a king of Elis whose immense stable, left uncleaned for thirty years, was cleaned by Hercules. 2
To Joseph Malaby Dent 19 September 1919 • Paris, France
(MS: North Carolina) 9 Av. de l’Observatoire, Paris Sept. 19, 1919
Dear Mr Dent Don’t trouble to look up your letter to Zampa, as I think he will be satisfied with what I have said to him, and that we shall be able to report progress. When I receive the manuscript or proofs I will let you know what my impressions are, but of course it is too late to do more than, if necessary, offer suggestions in matters of detail. I don’t expect to return to England for the present as my headquarters are here, as they were before the war, and if I move during the winter it will be in the direction of Spain or Italy. If young Rees1 is here in Paris (I don’t quite understand whether you mean that he is here or at Oxford) won’t you ask him to come and see me, or — to send me his address, as I should be glad to talk over possible publications—I have a good deal of old as well as new stuff on hand—and also to hear a little English that is not American. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Unidentified.
1910–1920
To Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien 29 September 1919 • Paris, France
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(MS: Texas)
9 Av. de l’Observatoire, Paris Sept 29. 1919 Dear Mr O’Brien Whether these “Soliloquies” will make a book or not I hardly know; although I am no longer in England I am still full of English impressions, gathered insensibly in the din of war, and am still writing on in the same vein; probably there will be enough for a small volume in the end. But I am afraid I had better stick to my old publishers—I have too many of them as it is—and that for the American edition Scribner should be given the first choice. One of the effects of advancing years is that the centre of vision goes farther and farther back. I remember seeing you at the moment when my Guardian Angel persuaded me to leave Harvard at last; but although I suspect that I have seen you or heard of you since, perhaps at Oxford, I am not quite sure of it. Also I feel a dreamful sense of having heard that you were in some religious order, or a priest. Is this the case? I mention it, in case I am not addressing you in the correct form, as an anticipated apology. Yours sincerely GSantayana
To Charles Augustus Strong 9 October 1919 • Paris, France
(MS: Rockefeller)
9 Av. de l’Observatoire Oct. 9, 1919 Dear Strong I have been hoping to hear from you again, but I suppose you are waiting to write until the date of your sailing is fixed. Probably I shall hear something in a few days, but I wish to report at once a domestic revolution which has occurred here. Françoise is gone on strike! A week or so ago, when everything had been going on as usual, one day she gave me only potatoes and spinach for lunch, and explained that she had not gone to the butcher’s because the day before she had had a fall in the street. As
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she seemed not to be lame, but only a little scared, I thought no more about it. But the next morning, when I rang for my first breakfast, there was no answer, and I found she was not in the apartment. As soon as I could dress, I went down and got Mme Germont to go up with me to Françoise’s room, to see what was the matter. She seemed to be in bed, but didn’t open the door, and refused all offers of food, doctor, etc. The next day, she still kept close and refused assistance, but on the third, I found her in the kitchen, and she said she was better, and gave me my tea as usual on the tray (I had taken care to get myself some petits pains the day before). We had a talk, of which I didn’t understand everything, but she seemed disinclined to go to market or cook my lunch, so that I went out for it. This went on for a day or two more, but gradually she left off answering the bell, or being on hand, or even making my bed. During the last few days she has avoided me systematically. I believe she comes in when she knows I am out, but she not only does nothing for me, but doesn’t reply when I go up to her room to try to get some explanation of her intentions. Yesterday, in despair, I left a note under her door, asking her for the second key to the kitchen door, so that “on” (i.e. Mme Germont, whom I didn’t mention) might come in to do my room, and also for the key to the cellar, as they are going to put in some wood for me. (The cellar has not been occupied). This afternoon, on coming back from lunch, I have found these keys on the kitchen table, and another pair of keys (apparently her own) left in the inside of the lock on the kitchen door. I don’t know whether this means that she is not coming in any more, even in my absence; but I notice she has left her aprons, little knives, chairs, etc; so I suppose she doesn’t mean to quit altogether. For myself, I am just as well off; almost better, because I like the feeling of being alone, and don’t at all mind going out to lunch, especially now that the quartier has revived with the opening of the lycées and the university, and the Boule Miche is very gay with young people of all nations. But I don’t know at all what Françoise is doing with herself. She refused her wages for the first month after your departure, which I offered her; and she hasn’t touched the money you left. M. Lacroix1 was here one morning recently, and had some talk with her, but I don’t know to what effect. I hope you will tell me what you wish me to do; and if you wish any arrangements to be made in view of your arrival. It is possible, if you don’t return soon, that I may go away to Nice, where Slade is going in a few days, and thinks he could get me a nice room. I have finished the last chapter of my James-Royce book, and hope to send the M.S. off to London
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before long. This will make me feel readier to make a move, if the weather (which is charming just now) should become less balmy. I have seen one or two friends, and bought a few second hand books, but not enough to change the general aspect of the shelves. I have also written a new set of Soliloquies in England, which are appearing in the Athenaeum. Of course, your silence makes me wonder if you have been under treatment, although I suppose that would not physically keep you from putting pen to paper. But you might want to wait until you could announce a happy issue of [across] the operation, and that is what I am hoping to hear of soon. Yours ever GSantayana 1
Unidentified.
To Mrs. Charles Fairchild 12 October 1919 • Paris, France
(MS: Columbia) 9 Av. de l’Observatoire, Paris, Oct. 12. 1919
Dear Mrs Fairchild1 I am very sorry and very much ashamed to have let the days slip by until you were actually gone—I have no idea of time or the date of anything at present. It was a real pleasure to have seen you and your daughter again, and so unchanged after ten years. The fact is we are eternal beings, characters, and events are only like looking-glasses, moving about, in which first one aspect of us and then another happens to be reflected. I suppose that is why characters in fiction and poetry, of which we often have only a few words or a single appearance, sometimes seem so complete and so thoroughly individual. I saw Moncure Robinson yesterday and he said Mrs Blair’s health continued much the same, and that the operation had not yet taken place. I am very sorry Blair and the rest of you are having so long a period of anxiety.2 Thank you very much for sending me a farewell greeting. I hope it may not be long before our paths cross again. I am always on the point of going
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to America, but am beginning to doubt whether the day will ever come; I find it harder and harder to pull up my anchor. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
Mrs. Charles Fairchild is unidentified. Santayana sent this letter to her at Saint Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. 2 Unidentified.
To Logan Pearsall Smith 16 October 1919 • Paris, France
(MS: Congress) 9 Av. de l’Observatoire Paris Oct. 16, 1919
Dear Smith I was beginning to wonder if the revolution had stopped the publication of anything so aristocratic as our works, separate or joint; and I am relieved to hear that the printing is about to begin. The proofs had better be sent, as you propose, care of Brown Shipley & Co because although I have no immediate plans it isn’t unlikely that I may leave Paris before many weeks, in search of warmer climates. I am here quite alone, under conditions ideally favourable for work; but although I do something, it is less than I could wish, and my book about America & James & Royce is not yet finished—i.e. the revision of it is not—although I flatter myself that I have been improving it very much in substance and form by the additions I have been making to it. Do you think it is advisable that when it is done, say in two months, I should send it to Constable? Would they like to have two books of mine on hand at once? Dent is willing and anxious to have it, and in some ways I am inclined to send it to him. If the Little Essays had appeared, I should be better able to judge which aspect pleased me better for the proposed book. As to business matters, you know I don’t connect them at all with writing, and of course the 15% royalty Mr Kyllman suggests is most satisfactory. I am used to 10% only: but in this case I hope you will take half, as you have had more than half the work. It is all right about the passage you are quoting about fossil words (isn’t it) which I had rejected on the double ground that it is false and that it is rhetorical. If you like it, naturally I [illegible] can only be all the more
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pleased; and probably your judgment will be that of the judicious reader: an author has too private a perspective in such matters. Besides, it is an advantage that the passage you quote should be one not included in the Little Essays: it suggests in the most flattering manner that there are still good morsels left in the pot. As you say, England is the best of countries to live in, and I fully mean, if life lasts, to settle there for a serene old age; but when I go back it will be with all my belongings and with the intention of never leaving the tight little island again; so that I may put off my return for a year or more, in order to look about here once more, and go to Spain and Italy again. I hope your Anthology will arrive soon. Yours ever GSantayana
To Constable and Co. Ltd. 6 November 1919 • Paris, France Permanent address:
(MS: Temple)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, S.W.1 9 Av. de l’Observatoire, Paris. Nov. 6. 1919
Messrs. Constable & Company London Gentlemen, I have received your letter of the 31–st of October, inclosing the contract for “Little Essays”. It is perfectly satisfactory and I will sign and return it in a day or two: for the moment there is no one here to witness my signature. My movements and to some extent my leisure for work at this moment depend on a friend with whom I live here, who is partly paralysed, and whom I may be accompanying to Italy in a few days. For this reason I can’t promise to send you the MS of my other book “Two American Philosophers”1 at any precise date; but it is nearly ready, and if I can remain here, you shall have it certainly in a fortnight. Or I may send you all but one chapter, before I leave, and let that follow later. When you see this book you may think that it had better be published in the United States, where the chief sale will probably be. If so, I hope you will not hes-
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itate to say so frankly. I have no doubt Scribner would undertake it: but on account of proof-reading and for other less material—I mean, mechanical— reasons, I should prefer that you should publish it, if you think it advisable. Yours faithfully GSantayana 1
This became Character, published in 1920 by Constable and Scribner’s.
To Wendell T. Bush 23 November 1919 • Paris, France
(MS: Columbia) 9 Av de l’Observatoire Paris Nov. 23, 1919
Dear Mr Bush— Your letter reaches me just when Strong, who has just returned from America, and I are starting for Fiesole, where he will remain until the Summer. As for me, I shall probably travel a little in Italy, if political circumstances are favourable, and later go to Spain; in the Summer I hope to be here again with Strong. I don’t expect to return to England for the present. I am a little afraid we are playing hide and seek; but if you are in Paris at this moment, you will give me great pleasure by letting me know when I can see you before Thursday, when we start for Italy. We are without a servant, so that we go out to all meals, and Strong is not able to walk without assistance, so that I am not free to make ordinary engagements; but we are almost all the afternoon, weather permitting, in front of the Café de la Régence, opposite the Théâtre Français: if you are passing, do look for us: or tell me where (not for a meal) we might meet, and you might tell me something more about philosophy and life at Columbia. You do not mention Mrs Bush, so that I infer I shall not have the pleasure of seeing her also. Yours sincerely GSantayana
1910–1920
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 24 November 1919 • Paris, France
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(MS: Virginia) 9 Av de l’Observatoire Paris Nov. 24, 1919
Dear Susie th Your letter of the 19– reaches me just when I was about to write announcing that I was going to Italy with Strong who has just returned— after a voyage of 18 days!—without Margaret, who remains in New York until December, and is expected at Fiesole about New Year’s. Poor Strong has had an operation to remove a tumor in his spinal column: the surgeons however found that it could not be removed (who knows if it was there?) and only cut away more of the bone in order to relieve the pressure, and they hold out hopes that in a year Strong may be walking erect. For the present, however, he is a little more bent than before, and much weaker, so that he can’t walk alone at all. It was consequently indispensable that I should go with him, and we start on Thursday, hoping to arrive on Friday evening at the villa. I will write to you from there as soon as we arrive, and tell you my first impressions of the place. I shall doubtless stay until Margaret returns; then I may go to Rome (if the difficulties are not too great) and eventually work my way round to Spain, whence I can return directly here for the summer. Françoise, the bonne à tout faire1 (she was not the concierge) took a bad turn a month or more ago, and began to refuse to do anything for me (saying she was ill, that the market people charged her too much, that she had not enough work in the apartment, and other inconsistent pretexts), ^ ^ finally she left even my bed unmade, and didn’t put in an appearance at all, her room being upstairs in the seventh floor. After making my own bed and breakfast for a few days, and writing her several notes which she did not answer, I was obliged to ask her for her keys to the back stairs, so that the concierge’s wife might come in and attend to me. These Françoise did give up, and after that I at least had the bedmaking and dusting attended ^ ^ to by the concierge’s wife: : but I have been less comfortable, having to ^ ^ go out to all meals in the cold, wet, and heavy snow that we have been having. Then came telegrams from Strong asking me to meet him at Havre, which of course I hastened to do; but his ship put in at Halifax for coal (not having been able to get enough in New York on account of strikes) and had to wait 10 days there before the requisite quantity was
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obtained. In brief, I went twice to Havre and back and spent a lot of days there: but at least I was able to finish the book I was at work upon, and the manuscript will be sent to London tomorrow; so that I leave Paris with a comparatively light heart. —My warmest congratulations to Rafael and Adela on the birth of their child:2 I hope all the [across] other vicissitudes in the health of the family may have ended no less happily— With love to all, your affectionate brother Jorge [across page one] The address in Italy is—Villa Le Balze, Fiesole, Firenze or Florencia.
{
1
Maid-of-all-work. Adelaida “Adela” Hernández was Mrs. Rafael Sastre. Their children included Rafael, María Josefa, Adelaida, and Juan Antonio (who was stillborn). 2
To Constable and Co. Ltd. 25 November 1919 • Paris, France Address:
(MS: Temple)
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/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, S.W.1 Paris, Nov. 25, 1919
Messrs. Constable & Company London Gentlemen Let me thank you for the memorandum of the agreement about the “Little Essays”, which has duly arrived. I am sending you today the manuscript of “Two American Philosophers”. It is complete, but I am afraid presents rather a confused and untidy appearance. In the haste of my departure—I leave tomorrow for Italy—I have not had time to rewrite some pages, as I should have wished, and have left them as they stood, when they did not seem too illegible. I shall be for some time at Villa Le Balze, Fiesole, Florence, and anything about which there might be haste could be addressed to me directly there for the present. The address at the top is my permanent one. Yours faithfully GSantayana
1910–1920
To Charles Scribner’s Sons 7 December 1919 • Fiesole, Italy
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(MS: Princeton)
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/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, London, S.W.1 Fiesole, Dec. 7. 1919
Gentlemen It is not impossible that my “Soliloquies in England” may eventually make up a book: although I left that country six months ago, one or two more are simmering in my mind that I want to put on paper before I regard the series as complete. Then we shall see what sort of a volume they could make up, and, if one materializes, it would of course be my hope that you would take charge of the American edition. Constable & Co have one book of mine “Little Essays” in the press and another “Two American Philosophers” under consideration. I believe they have written, or mean to write, to you about them. Yours very truly GSantayana
To Constable and Co. Ltd. 15 December 1919 • Fiesole, Italy
(MS: Temple) Le Balze, Fiesole, Florence Dec. 15, 1919
Messrs Constable & Company London Gentlemen— I am naturally very much pleased that you should be ready to publish my American book, and the terms are entirely satisfactory. If you will make such arrangements as you think best with Scribner for the American edition, I should be glad, as I have always had excellent relations with them. As to the title, I was myself in some doubt, not being able to think of anything that would not overemphasize or overlook some part of what the book contains. I enclose a new title page,1 in which I have simply inverted the title and subtitle, as I had originally planned them—the title page I sent you being itself a second thought. Perhaps it will be better, in this instance,
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to tempt a larger public by not warning them that they will find some philosophical discussion in the book: they may like to be carried beyond their depth a little. I shall be glad to see the proofs of the “Little Essays” when they come through. Yours faithfully GSantayana 1
Unlocated.
To Constable and Co. Ltd. 5 January 1920 • Fiesole, Italy
(MS: Temple) Le Balze, Fiesole, Florence Jan. 5. 1920
Messrs Constable & Company London. Gentlemen— I am sending back the proofs of “Little Essays”, in which I have made some corrections, including those suggested to me by Mr. Pearsall Smith. The post, here at least, is slow and uncertain, and perhaps it will not be necessary to send me a second proof, if you can charge somebody to read for me the proof of the corrections I have made, most of which are slight and obvious. In one or two places I found repetitions or plain incongruities which obliged me to make some changes in the language. Reading the proof has encouraged me very much about the general success of the attempt to make such a book. I think many of the pieces really seem little essays, not betraying the fact that they are extracts; and the whole seems to march tolerably in step and to leave a clear general impression of a moral philosophy. I expect to leave Fiesole in about a fortnight. Perhaps it will be safer to address me for the moment C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, S.W.1. Yours faithfully GSantayana
1910–1920
To Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller 10 January 1920 • Fiesole, Italy
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(MS: Houghton) Le Balze, Fiesole, Jan. 10, 1920
Dear Fuller It is never too late for good wishes or for letters from you, and it has been a real pleasure to get this missive of yours, which has arrived together with renewed sunshine—I am writing in an open loggia, quite warm, and squinting at the paper on which Apollo is pouring all his rays and dazzling me even in reflexion—and at the moment when I am planning to start for Rome, and spend three months there in solitude and enchantment. I staid at the Avenue de l’Observatoire until the end of November, when Strong came back alone from America—his daughter Margaret remained in New York, to get a taste of winter gaieties with her rich relations. She is returning here in a day or two; and Strong will no longer miss me if I run away. He is not able, poor man, to do more than crawl about unsteadily with the help of a stick, and as he doesn’t like driving, he becomes at times rather depressed with sitting in the stuffy library, reading the literary supplement1 to the Times. When the sun is out, he feels more cheerful, and in fact is perfectly well as to his inner man, eats, sleeps, and looks like a young man, and is deeply interested in his improvements in this villa, which is getting to be rather grand on a small scale, since it is condemned to cling to a ledge, like those of the Purgatorio,2 on the steep side of the hills of Fiesole. When Rome becomes too hot, I expect to return to Paris, and to leave Spain for next winter. I miss England, but don’t mean to go back there until I go for good, taking my goods and chattels from Paris, and settling down, probably in Oxford, for the rest of my days. You hint—and we all feel it—that the disturbance of the war and the deterioration of man which it has brought to light have lost little of their horror by the advent of a nominal peace: nevertheless personally I am reconciled to the end of the world—the Christian genteel world—and not afraid of futurity, even if it should take the form of Bolshevism. Heaven and hell are relative and essentially prospective: by the time we get to either we begin to see that each of them has its other side. I think to be born under Bolshevism would not be worse than to be born in Boston: it would have its virtues, although not always those which we may personally be most inclined to practise. Your picture of Harvard and its back-
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stairs philosophy is indeed horrible: but it was not very satisfying even in the consulate of James & Royce, when we were younger. In England philosophy seems to be tolerably unprejudiced and varied at present. There is no commanding intellect, but for that very reason, perhaps, there is a sense of movement and of opening vistas which I think rather encouraging. I am so much absorbed, however, in thinking out my own ideas that, being too old to take up with new things, I am not at all troubled by the shifts of persons and notions in the academic world: and as for Harvard philosophy, it seems not to exist. Does it? Here I have been reading various books that Strong has in his library, for he buys books; one is by Broad3 of Trinity, Cambridge, groping but right-minded; and of course I read what Bertie Russell writes, although, as you know, I think he has relapsed into the British original sin of empiricism, and all his intelligence and keenness will not help him out of the consequent impotence and artificiality. I am glad you are leaving Harvard; you are old and ballasted enough by this time not to be upset by the silliness of Mrs Grundy: devote yourself to your garden and books and horses, come to see us often in Europe, and write what the spirit moves you to write, not in self-defence or in protest against anybody, but for the love of picturing what there is to picture. You will “do” infinitely more “good” by assuming such an attitude and performing such a function than by joining any tug-of-war team that may want you to pull hard on one side—no matter on which—because it is theirs—or yours. Here, good living and the presence of other persons have rather kept me from doing anything but reading; but I have had the proof of my “Little Essays” (selections from my books made by Logan Pearsall Smith) and written one or two “Soliloquies”. These may make another incidental book before long. My book on James & Royce,—to be called “Character and Opinion in the United States”, for it spreads out a great deal over things American in general,—is in the press. You will see these three books, I expect, within a year. Strong has persuaded me to work at once, with all the energy I have, on the “Realms of Being”, and I am resolved to do so, for fear that I may die (although I am in perfect health at present) before it is finished. There may therefore be a pause in my apparent fertility after these little triplets are born— Yours ever GSantayana
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1 The Times Literary Supplement, a weekly periodical, first appeared with The Times in 1902 and became a separate publication in 1914. Reviews were anonymous until 1974. This highly influential journal covers the important works of literature and scholarship. 2 In Dante’s Divine Comedy the narrator is led through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. 3 Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971) was an English philosopher who was elected to a fellowship at Trinity (1911). His works include Euclid, Newton, and Einstein (1920) and Perception, Physics and Reality: An Enquiry into the Information that Physical Science can Supply about the Real (1914).
To Charles Augustus Strong 21 January 1920 • Rome, Italy
(MS: Rockefeller)
Hotel Minerva, Rome Wednesday, Jan. 21, 1920 Dear Strong My journey was without accident, and the train even made up one half of the thirty or forty minutes that it was behindhand in leaving Florence; but it was very crowded, and I was lucky in getting a seat and finding room—partly in the passage—for my sundry bags. Here I am established on the fourth floor, in a small room, for which they charge only 8 lire, plus 4 lire for calefaction; but I have a fine view of the dome of the Pantheon from my bed, and a very comfortable chair and table, with an electric lamp, and plenty of steam-heat, in fact, too much. I went yesterday to get my permiesso di sogiorno, about which there was no difficulty; and then tine Capitoline, visited the cafés, dined at the San walked about the — Pala— Carlo, and lunched at a little Neapolitan restaurant that I remembered near the Fontana di Trevi. Today, in bright sunshine I have been to Saint Peter’s1 and to the Pincio, where I found people sitting in chairs as in Summer; but there was no music and I was without a coat, so that I didn’t stop. These details will serve to convince you that I am properly settled and enjoying myself in the way you and I affect. I haven’t yet looked up Zampa nor done any serious work; but that may follow later, when I get my stride. It may be days before you get this, as one sciopero2 seems to follow another, to prevent us from relapsing into a feeling of ease and safety. I am glad I got here just in time; had I staid on, heaven knows when it would have seemed possible and safe to travel. The attitude of people in Rome seems cheerful enough; apparently they do not apprehend serious conse-
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quences. The papers I read are also rather optimistic, but I am not sure how much they are to be trusted My love to Margaret, and appropriate salutations to all my other friends. I am particularly sorry to have altogether missed seeing Loeser. When you write let me know how the grand staircase is looking, what you have decided about further building, and whether you — cnt continue to gain strength and straightness in your lower members. Your trouble might be likened to another sciopero, one proclaimed in your spinal column. How much what is going on resembles the secession of the plebs which we used to read of in early Roman history! And have we any better philosophy to meet the case than that of Menenius Agrippa?3 Yours ever GSantayana 1 Capitoline Hill, the highest of the seven hills of ancient Rome, is the historic and religious center of Rome. In ancient times it could be approached only from the Forum. On it were the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, the citadel, and the senatorial palace. The temple was last rebuilt by Domitian. The fountain of Trevi, one of Rome’s most famous water fountains, was designed by Bernini and completed in 1762. Saint Peter’s Basilica, the largest church in Christendom, can accommodate fifty thousand people. Donato Bramante laid out the plan in the form of a Greek cross, though the dome was Michelangelo’s work. Bernini designed the colonnades of the piazza and the baldacchino over the high altar. 2 Strike. 3 In Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, which was inspired by a biographical account in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, Menenius Agrippa is an aged counselor and friend to Coriolanus. He represents the judicious attitude of the Roman nobility, aware of their own superiority and yet aware that the people must be flattered to maintain peace.
To Charles Augustus Strong 2 February 1920 • Rome, Italy
(MS: Rockefeller)
Hotel Minerva, Feb. 2. 1920 Dear Strong A great many letters forwarded by you—for which many thanks—have reached me here—I should think more than half a dozen; and I don’t believe any have been lost. Of course, there have been great delays, and perhaps Macmillan’s answers have not yet been sent, or have been stranded and may be started again on their journey now that the scioperi ^ ^ are over. As to alterations in the villa, you know my instinct is to say Don’t! But if you don’t find the end room (which I understand is to be square in the
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first instance, consisting merely of the book-room and toilet-room thrown in together) promising as a study for your own habitation and comfort, and if then you decide to take a piece of the library, I think you should go further, and throw in the corridor into the end room, making it really large and square; for otherwise you would find yourself with three rooms like the dining room—which would be monotonous, dull, and not festive, as I think any alterations in the villa ought to tend to make it. On the other hand, I rather think that the library, cut down, might be better as a study, and even as a sitting-room, than it is now. You could have your desk against the new wall, near the window, with the light over your left shoulder, and a feeling of not being too far from the centre of the room and the fire-place. It would be the same arrangement that you now have in Paris, and which I, at least, have found excellent for work. If this notion pleases you, however, I repeat that you should make the end room an altogether different, much larger, and much more festive appartment: as it might be if it took up the whole end of the house, and led out to the cortile as to its own private balcony or garden. If this is ruled out, because it involves too much reconstruction or sacrifices the vista down the passage, I should decidedly not cut down the library, but make the best of the new square little room at the end: and I think it might be a very pleasant study, if warm in colour and full of books. I am very happy here, and all goes well, including work. I [across] have actually made Zampa’s acquaintance and see him often. He is a good soul, like a German school-master, and not a priest. Love to Margaret. Yours ever G.S.
To Mary Potter Bush 8 February 1920 • Rome, Italy
(MS: Columbia)
Hotel Minerva, Rome, Feb. 8, ’20 Dear Mrs Bush Your kind letter reaches me here, in a hotel which you may know, as it is rather of the sort that you and Mr Bush affect—comfortable enough, and in the oldest quarter of the town. I look as I write on the broad brown dome of the Pantheon, and the noise of the electric cars, thundering lorries, and other signs of the times, do not seriously disturb me in my garret. I left Strong at Fiesole some weeks ago, his daughter Margaret having
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arrived, and the life there, after a month or two, making me a little restless and eager for the freedom of movement and the solitude to which I have grown accustomed. We had roses at Christmas (as your Mother has recorded it) and warm shining fully half the time; on those days we could bask in the open loggias, and I could walk coatless about the surrounding hills with the greatest sense of exhilaration. Strong is very well except for his legs, and bears up very cheerfully under the confinement and monotony which that impediment involves, especially as he is not fond of driving or motoring, in which he might otherwise indulge ad livitam As to the state of the world, moral and political, I live so much out of it that perhaps I don’t feel, as much as you and Kallen do, the tragedy of the times. The war did distress me, especially for two reasons: that I thought the Germans would win, and that I suffered at the thought of so much suffering, waste, insecurity, and perversity let loose again among peoples whom we had grown to think of as friendly and harmless. The fiasco of the peace, the revolution in Russia, the failure of the league of nations, and the state of international finance are not things that distress me very much; and while I don’t desire a universal Bolshevist régime, I do not fear it, if it is destined to come. Of course it will never come because people love or desire it (as I perfectly understand that some people should) but only if, as has perhaps happened in Russia, the average man finds his interests and comfort rather in affiliating himself to that order — rath— er than in maintaining some other organization in opposition to it. I wrote to Kallen some time ago about what I conceive to be the philosophy of new institutions: they cannot be established merely because some one wants them, or can show with considerable eloquence that they might be admirable; Plato’s Republic,1 and many another, would have long been a fact, if that were enough. Organs have to be found, interests have to be enlisted, before any institution can establish itself: and these organs and interests must preexist, or must arise of themselves. They cannot be spirited into existence, or voted to exist. The league of nations has been voted to exist, and therefore does not do so; and I don’t regret, as much as you seem to regret, the obsta/ inacy of the American Senate, because their vote would only have added one more to the nugatory votes that create nothing: I am not sure that their obstinacy, in a stupid way does not express their sense for reality, their experience of what is actually at work in the world. The question is: Can you enlist the interests and efforts of actual people, and actual organs of action, in your new undertaking? If not, the system will fall to
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pieces at the first touch: it will be still-born. I saw the other day an Italian version of a play by Benavente, “Los Intereses Creados”,2 which reminded me of Kallen, and of our correspondence. It is an admirably wise fable, although indifferent as a stage-play. It represents two adventures/rs—one well-intentioned and the other disillusioned and knavish,—who make their way in the world without apparent resources, and by deceiving every body, because they manage to enlist the interests of their dupes in maintaining the illusion. That is the secret, I think, of all reforms and revolutions: nobody, or hardly anybody, would want them, or could lend himself to them, if he were not caught unawares; but little by little he falls in with the new methods or new hopes—because some one of his old habits or interests has led him into them—until he finds it easier to surrender, or seem to surrender, all that is incompatible with the new order, rather than go back on the plans, or break up the new interests, which this order has created for him. The league of nations,3 communism, pacificism, etc, must n/ know how to enlist and create private, natural interests on their side (as Christianity or Protestantism did, for instance) or they cannot subsist for one moment. Here is a treatise, rather than a letter: but you must forgive me, since you have led me on by your stimulating letter. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 Plato’s Republic is a dialogue which begins with an attempt at the definition of justice. Socrates remarks that before justice can be found in the individual, it must be sought in the state. Democracy and tyranny are both rejected in the ideal state. 2 Jacinto Benavente y Martínez (1866–1954) was a Spanish playwright whose works stress social satire or rural life. Los intereses creados (Vested Interests, 1907) is considered to be his masterpiece. In 1922 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. 3 Founded in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference and headquartered in Geneva, the League of Nations was an assembly composed of England, France, Italy, Japan, Germany, and the USSR. It provided for treaties, mandate system of colonial administration, international cooperation in labor, and humanitarian enterprises. It failed because powerful nations could not be coerced into mutual compromise or acceptance of its decisions. The League dissolved itself in 1946 and transferred its services and real estate to the United Nations.
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To Robert Seymour Bridges 21 February 1920 • Rome, Italy
(MS: Bodleian)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, S.W.1 Rome, Feb. 21, 1920
Dear Bridges I wrote you a long letter yesterday about your sonnet on Democritus and about Roman façades;1 but on reading it over I hated it all, and felt you would hate it, so I tore it up. This morning, with a cooler head, I will only say that the publisher of the Little Essays is Constable; but who is Squire?2 You have been very good to take so much interest and so much trouble about this book: I believe it is tolerable, considering the difficulties. P. S.3 made for passages that sounded well to his ear, and were about Life with a capital L; while I pulled instinctively in the direction of a compendium of doctrine. The result is a compromise; it contains some weak parts, dallying with conventional surfaces; but I believe I have succeeded in at least suggesting a moral philosophy. But the whole thing belongs to the past, and I really don’t care very much whether people like it or not. Some people, of course, will say they adore it, and it may conceivably appear, with gilt edges, on American parlour tables, a gift from an emancipated aunt; but I am more interested, and more hopeful, about the fate of my new books. Constable will soon bring out the one about America, and I am now trying to round out the Soliloquies in England and make a book of them with a connected argument. It is great sport. I have always liked composition, in the sense of drawing and designing; and these Soliloquies ought to make a beautiful interlaced design in two colours—one the atmospheric-geological-descriptive and the other Platonizing-moralsatirical. It is a marvel to me how much I love England, and how much at home I feel there, in spite of being profoundly foreign and not respecting England very much, as even her enemies often do. My sentiment is the reverse of yours about Rome; you despise and fear the sneaking Roman, with his rhetorical pretenses; while I despise and love the inarticulate Englishman, with his dull manly delusions. Will the labour party acquire English traditions, or will they destroy them? Yours sincerely GSantayana
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1 A materialist, Democritus (c. 460–c. 370 B.C.) was a Greek philosopher who held that the world was made up of tiny particles, imperceptible to the sense but indivisible and indestructible. The true nature of things can be discovered only by thought, for sense perceptions are confusing. Bridges’s sonnet, “Democritus,” was written in 1919 and published in Poetical Works of Robert Seymour Bridges: excluding the eight dramas (Oxford University Press, 1936). 2 John Collings “J. C.” Squire (1884–1958), a highly influential literary journalist and essayist, established the London Mercury in 1919. He was knighted in 1933. 3 Pearsall Smith.
To Charles Augustus Strong 5 March 1920 • Rome, Italy
(MS: Rockefeller)
Hotel Minerva Rome March 5 1920 Dear Strong I hardly know what to say in reply to your request for my opinion in respect to Mrs Berenson’s proposal. My spontaneous feeling is decided enough, but I am aware that I have a prejudice against the set to which Mrs Russell belongs and against her ideas: whether I like them, however, is not the question, but whether it would not be a good thing for Margaret to see London society even at that angle, and whether she would dislike it or find it amusing. After all, it would be temporary, and she could always run away if she got tired of it. As to positive facts about Mrs Russell, that you don’t know, I doubt if I am in possession of any. The Sidney Webbs1 were staying there last summer; they know Ponsonby the radical M.P.2 and in general I think move in the emancipated literary revolutions/ary circle; but London is not exclusive, there is a good deal of circulation from set to set, and every body knows the public characters, even if a little shady; and probably Margaret would soon find her own level and affinities, if once she got a start. On the whole, then, I should think the proposal worth accepting, especially if Margaret herself takes kindly to it. Summer is in full blast here, at least in the middle of the day, and I go almost every afternoon to sit on some bench in the Villa Borghese.3 Last night I went to the Russian Ballet. I am reading the proof of my American book. Otherwise there is no change. I hardly know when I shall leave: don’t consider me at all in arranging about dates and guests; if your villa was full when I pass again through Florence, I could perfectly well go to a hotel, or to the Berensons, if I wanted to stay more than a day or two,
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which is not likely. There is a possibility that I may have to go to Spain after all this Spring; my brother in Boston has been ailing, and my sister Josephine has some idea of going there to keep him company. If so, I should have to go with her as far as the ship, as [across] she is not used to travelling alone. Yours ever GSantayana 1 Sidney James Webb (1858–1947) was a civil servant and a contributor to Fabian Essays (1890). In 1892 he married Beatrice Potter (1858–1943), an English socialist economist and the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. Her Cooperative Movement in Great Britain was published in 1891. The Webbs were important in the Fabian Society and in the building up of the British Labour party. They produced several books together. In 1922 he was elected a Member of Parliament; in 1929 he was appointed secretary of state and was created Baron Passfield. 2 Probably Arthur Ponsonby (1871–1946). 3 Villa Borghese, now a repository for paintings, was the Roman summer palace built at the beginning of the seventeenth century by Scipione Cardinal Borghese, of the noble Borghese family.
To James Bissett Pratt 12 March 1920 • Rome, Italy
(MS: Williams)
Permanent address: C/o Brown Shipley & C–o 123 Pall Mall, London. S.W. Rome, March 12, 1920 Dear Mr Pratt It is now almost a year since I left England; Oxford was then just recovering its old aspect, and I am told has been extraordinarily full, as many new sorts of students are now admitted. When I was there, prices for food and in shops were high, but rents had not risen. I managed to live on much the same amount in dollars as before the war, but I hardly know what the scale would be at present, especially for such an arrangement as would be involved for a whole family. A single man could live comfortably on five dollars a day (all expenses, even small purchases, included). The greatest difficulty I foresee in your case is to find lodgings at all; my landlady, Miss Turner, at 22 Beaumont Street, now wants nothing but undergraduates again; she might, however, know of some fair lodgings in that neighbourhood. Perhaps I should add that five years without any painting, renovating, or refurnishing has made Oxford look shabbier than ever, and I fear you and Mrs Pratt might not like the look of such “apartments” as would be
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offerred you; and I suppose you know the quality—the inexorable quality— of English cooking. On the whole, I shoud not encourage you to go to Oxford, unless you can go experimentally, with the idea of spending only a few days, unless you find something that attracts you for a long stay. I expect to return there myself eventually, and perhaps settle down there: but I foresee that I may be driven into some adjoining hamlet—there are very pretty ones all about—or to taking a cottage of my own— Italy, on the other hand, with the present rate of exchange, is a cheap place to live in, and very comfortable, in spite of the nominally high prices. I staid for some time with Strong at Fiesole; he is well as a whole, but his impediment in walking is not removed. He writes me that the trial page of the book is satisfactory, and I suppose the proofs will be soon arriving. Yours sincerely GSantayana
To Constable and Co. Ltd. 31 March 1920 • Rome, Italy
(MS: Temple)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, S.W.1 Hotel Minerva, Rome, March 31, 1920
Messrs Constable & Company London Gentlemen, I am sending you the last pages of the second proof of my “Character & Opinion in the U.S.” (in which there is nothing to correct) but I have not received as yet pp. 161–192 — in of the second proof. I don’t know whether it was the first proof returned by me or the second sent by you that has miscarried: in case it was the first, I enclose a list of the corrections I had made in these pages, so that you may send me the second proof without much delay. Your proof-reader if very accurate and all the changes I have made have been corrections in my own composition, not in the printing. I also enclose a list of persons to whom I should like this book—and in some cases also the “Little Essays”—to be sent with my compliments. I do not include people in America, because I have found that if I send them
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the English edition, they have to pay duty on it: and it seems a strange present for which you impose a tax on the person who receives it. It therefore seems better to wait until Scribner has his copies bound, and can send them to my American friends from New York. If either of the books, or both, appear during the next month or two, I should be much obliged if you would send me only one copy for the moment; the others which I suppose fall to my share, I would rather have you send to me later, when I have returned to Paris, where my books are. I expect to remain in Rome until about the first of May, and anything addressed to me here, to the Hotel Minerva, will reach me directly until that date Yours faithfully GSantayana Corrections1 made in 1–st Proof, p.p. 161–192
Character & Opinion. Page 162, line 6–7, line 8, p. 166,
l. 21 l. 22,
for after
“to be thought” read “but” insert
regarded as as
for
“is what” read “precious”
in turn requisite
''
''
''
''
“actual society” “materialists” “the”
''
civilized life crude realists one
''
“idealism”
''
insight
p. 179, next to the last line,
''
“insulate d ” ^^
''
axiomatic
p. 182,
''
“but” “But”
'' ''
only Yet
“and”
insert
now
“the present” “also —”
read
another great
p. 177,
p. 178,
l. 9–10 l. 12 l. 17
''
line 1,
l. 1. l. 3
''
''
th p. 187, 4– line after from the bottom '' '' for rd 3– '' '' omit
p. 189,
line 4,
for
''
''
,
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Please send a copy of “Character & Opinion in the United States”, with the compliments of the Author, to the following persons: Lord Milner2 (I don’t know his present address, which you can easily find) Robert Bridges, Esq. Chilswell, Oxford. E. P. Warren, Esq. Corpus Christi College, Oxford Professor Stewart, Christ Church, Oxford Professor Gollancz,3 King’s College, Strand, London, W.C. L. Pearsall Smith, Esq. 11 St. Leonard’s Terrace, Chelsea, London, S.W. G. T. Lapsley, Esq. Trinity College, Cambridge Mrs Warren, 20 Bedford Square, London, W.C. Doña Susana Sturgis de Sastre, Novaliches 6, Avila, Spain Also copies of both “Character & Opinion in the United States” and “Little Essays” to the following: Earl Russell, 57 Gordon Square, London, W.C. Hon. Bertrand Russell, [same address]. The Countess Russell, 2 Whitehall Court, '' S.W. Lady Ottoline Morrell, Garsington, Oxford Captain Roger Wright,4 White’s Club, London. W. Howard Sturgis, Esq. Queen’s Acre, Windsor C. A. Strong, Esq. 9 Av. de l’Observatoire, Paris. Monsieur Pierre Abreu, 68, rue de Bellechasse, Paris. Monsieur Guillaume Lerolle, 20, Avenue Duquesne, Paris. Monsieur Emile Boutroux, 5, Rond-Point Bugeaud, Paris. Lady Sybil Scott,5 Villa Medici, Fiesole, Florence. Dr Luciano Zampa, Petroia, Gubbio, Italy. G.S. 1 These corrections (marked by Santayana in red) were made and appear in the published text. 2 Alfred Milner, first viscount Milner (1854–1925), was an Oxford-educated English statesman and colonial administrator. 3 Hermann Gollancz (1852–1930) was an English rabbi and authority on Hebrew language and literature who was knighted in 1923. 4 Unidentified. 5 Before her marriage to Geoffrey Scott, Lady Sybil Scott was married to William Bayard Cutting Jr. She was later married to Percy Lubbock.
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To Charles Augustus Strong 23 April 1920 • Rome, Italy
(MS: Rockefeller) Hotel Minerva, Rome April 23, 1920
Dear Strong I am very glad to hear at last that you are thinking of coming to Rome, but it is a pity it couldn’t have been earlier, as now the weather is less steady—now “muggy” and now hot—and the hotels are horribly full. I know this, as I have been going all over the place looking for three beds for three ladies—our old family friend Mercedes from Madrid with two young th . But everywhere it is the friends—who had expected to arrive on April 30– same story: “We are all full, we can promise nothing. Perhaps, if the ladies will present themselves …” etc The worst of it is that in May vast caravans of pilgrims are expected, and people talk of putting six beds in a room. This, however, probably will not affect the fashionable hotels in the region of the Pincian Gate.1 If you were willing to go there, I have no doubt that a room could be found; also probably in this hotel or this neighbourhood for a single night or two. If you wanted to go elsewhere, I should be very glad to move there with you. Possibly, by giving up my little room here, I might be able to find a place for my three ladies—there are connecting rooms on both sides—if they actually turn up next week. The delays in the mails and telegraph—a telegram from Madrid reached me yesterday after five days—complicate everything: and I am not sure when this letter or the return telegram I am sending will reach you. You are well, I suppose, since you are ready for a journey and an outing. I have been working a good deal lately, but in somewhat scattered directions, and the book has not made much progress. Yours ever GSantayana Love to Margaret. 1
The Pincian Gate (Porta Pinciana) is part of the Aurelian wall in Rome. It consists of an intricate arrangement of ancient archways, walls, and ornamental façades.
1910–1920
To Charles Augustus Strong 28 April 1920 • Rome, Italy
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(MS: Rockefeller) Hotel Minerva Rome Wed. April 28 1920
Dear Strong At the Hôtel de Russie they say they have absolutely nothing until after the end of May; there seemed to be no chance of a clearing in their dark frowns. They are tired of inquiries. Nevertheless, I have found something. At the Hôtel Excelsior (said to be at present the best in Rome) they said that, although not absolutely pledging themselves, they thought they could arrange to give you two rooms for three persons (three single rooms would rd be more difficult) on Monday, May 3– , but would you please telegraph on Saturday confirming your intention. They took note of your name and address. The price of the rooms would be in all about 100 lire a day. I ^ ^ think, if you and Margaret and Miss Patten1 really want to come, you had better take this chance. In the more modest hotels they are absolutely vague and unaccommodating, being sure that they can get the house full every night. I have come across the most pathetic married couples on their honey-moon, praying for a room for the night, and evidently travel-worn and sick with wandering from one hotel to another. Your father had bet^ ter also, I think, attempt nothing except at the very best hotels, which are ^ too dear for the crowds of pilgrims. I am still uncertain whether Mercedes and her two young ladies are going to turn up or not. I shall try to have three beds for them somewhere on their arrival, and let them see for themselves afterwards where they wish to go. Zampa also has written to me that he is returning, dressed in ecclesiastical robes, but hasn’t turned up yet. Two young English friends of mine been here; they took me to a very nice little old trattoria; perhaps you know it, Ranieri’s, via Monte dei Fiori. [across] Good luck with the sponge-stone! Yours ever GSantayana 1
Unidentified.
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To Mary Williams Winslow 3 May 1920 • Rome, Italy
(MS: Houghton)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, London, S.W. Rome, May 3, 1920
rs
Dear M Winslow At last this straw has broken the camel’s back of my laziness—it is not the right word, but my auto-psychology breaks down in trying to say what it is—and I am writing you a letter, a very long letter possibly, in answer to one or two letters, messages, photos of the children, and I don’t know what other marks of kindness and remembrance that ought long ago to have been gratefully acknowledged. And I can’t say that nothing has happened or that I have nothing to tell: only it is all such a medley of small matters, involving one another, and resting on some momentary sight or sound (which I can’t transmit to you) or on the morning paper (which is not worth transmitting); and the result is that one doesn’t know where to begin, or how to pick up a conversation interrupted almost ten years ago! Yes, I will write to Boylston Beal: but here is another unsolved problem of auto-psychology: I like B. A. B. and agree with him profoundly and love him as the best and finest of souls born at the wrong time (and married to the wrong woman); and yet some obstacle has kept me for years from frequenting his society very much, or writing him anything but telegraphic notes. It’s more than Elsie: it is, I think, a sense that (at least in the modern world) friendship is an apanage1 of youth, and that it takes us back to youth or else limps: and as to get back to youth is not easy, except occasionally in a country walk or by dint of cocktails (what can life be in America now without them?) one prefers to rest in the profound consciousness that the friendship is there, as the potential youth is also, and not to try to dig it up prematurely, lest like Lazarus after three days it should prove a little hard to unbandage—and should have a musty smell! I say prematurely: because, my dear Mrs Winslow, there is a time coming, or a day beyond all time, when everything will return to us without being dug up: or to put my mysticism differently; when we shall cease to be irrationally concentrated and absorbed in the passing moment, and shall spread ourselves out, justly and veraciously, over the whole of our lives. I am old enough to be almost doing that already; and it is wonderful how
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much I live in things long past. I can’t understand now what I remember so well repeating over and over when I was a boy—that line of Shelley’s which says “There is regret, almost remorse, for time long past.”2 He must have been very young when he wrote it, as I was when I liked it: because there is (as I now find) no remorse for time long past, even for what may have mortified us or made us ashamed of ourselves when it was happening: there is a pleasant panoramic sense of what it all was, and how it all had to be. Why, if we are not vain or snobbish, need we desire that it should have been different? The better things we missed may yet be enjoyed or attained by someone else somewhere; why isn’t that just as good? And there is no regret, either, in the sense of wishing the past to return, of missing it: it is quite real enough as it is, there at its own date and place; we may like to remember it, in so far as the same potentialities are in us still, and we may be glad that it should have existed; but how unnecessary and how impossible it would be to begin it all over again! I have been thinking at times of the Boston Latin School, and of my undergraduate days: poor, thin, crude, all of it; and yet very pleasant and sunny in its triviality and vulgarity. When Bolshevism triumphs all life everywhere will be exactly like that. It will still be human. —Interruption [ for lunch. This is a long affair, as it involves in the first place dressing (which I put off as long as possible in the morning, having had a first breakfast (and washed) in privacy); and crossing the Piazza della Minerva (I chose the Hotel Minerva, remembering I came from Boston); and buying the Messagero, (which /I like all Italian papers contains little, ^ ^ and that little venemous); and walking to the restaurant di San Carlo, to my usual corner; and having my usual food (and drink); and going to a café for coffee; and returning here, carefully keeping to the narrow margin of shade along one side of the narrow bits of street (without side-walks) through which I thread my way in this season, already pretty hot; and looking at the Pantheon, with its shaggy old walls, as I skirt the back of it; and reestablishing myself in the comparitive coolness and silence, and agreeable light of my attic, after removing such garments—beginning with hat, boots, coat, and trousers—as one wears no/m% and not fu/sei3 (Fred, if he remembers any Greek, will explain that this is Democritus) and as unnecessarily remind a philosopher of the sad fact that he has a body. My spirit thus fed, refreshed, and liberated, I resume my epistle.]— Strong and his daughter Margaret, with a school friend4 of hers who is a doctor of medicine, are arriving this evening; so that my solitary stay in Rome is practically at an end; and in fact, it would have come to an end
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soon in any case, as the warm weather will presently drive us all northwards. I may stop at Perugia and Assisi and possibly at Gubbio, as I have an Italian friend, the translator of my Egotism, who is a native of those regions and who has kindly volunteered (I pay for all the drinks) to show me the beauties of the country. During the summer I shall doubtless be in Paris again: and I must go to Spain sooner or later, before returning to Oxford, where ultimately I expect to establish myself for the rest of my days. My various literary labours progress slowly: the spirit bloweth where (and when) it listeth, and I feel tolerably confident that I shall carry out most of my plans in this direction, if fate doesn’t snap the thread unexpectedly. So far, fate has been very gentle with me, and I was never better, nor happier, nor (in my own estimation) younger. Robert writes now-a-days at considerable length, often mentioning you (I think you have been a real comfort to him in his loneliness and insecurity about his health) and of course telling me of the approaching wedding.5 I don’t know how far his ailments are constitutional and serious, not having heard of any definite trouble except a chronic cold which, in some measure, he has always suffered from. If he is well enough, I wish you and Fred would advise him to come to Spain either this Summer or next: the winter would in some ways be even better; he could go to Malaga or Alicante or Seville to sun himself; but I suppose he would prefer to remain, if Josephine and Arthur are going to live with him. But otherwise, it would be a satis[faction] to our sisters and to me to see him, and also a pleasure to him, I think, as he is very full of kindly interest in our whole Spanish connection. Strong’s father, who is 85 years of age, and recently married again, has just arrived in Naples, and is going on a jaunt all over the Continent; there is an example to Robert: not, I beg of you, in the matter of marrying again. I was a little afraid that might happen; but Robert’s preoccupation about his health seems to have banished that amorous possibility from his mind. I think of you often and of course I see you all, including the children, as you were ten years ago: and they—though probably not you—must have changed a good deal in the interval. Polly always had a vigorous mind, in a vigorous body, and if I may judge by her photograph, she has lived up well to that ideal: young Fred, who was nothing but a cherub, is more of an enigma to me; and if I ever see him again, I am prepared to behold a gigantic undergraduate in a blazer, and perhaps glasses, whose acquaintance I should have to make afresh, although I should doubtless make it easily. Of course, he is no gigantic undergraduate yet: he may never be
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more gigantic than his father; but as I hear nothing of any immediate plan on your part to revisit the old world, I give the picture a certain perspective, so as to be prepared for all eventualities. It is not likely that I shall turn up in Boston soon; but for the war, you should have seen me darkening your door long ago; but that terrible interruption to everything has rather cast me up on the shore, like an old hulk, and I don’t feel very fit for the sea. I mean this materially in a measure; I dread the voyages, the forced existence they imply; but much more the sea of streets and cars and telephones and people and engagements into which I should be plunged. I should have to live no/m% and not fu/sei with a vengeance: and I have become terribly naturalistic and unconventional in my old age. Europe is so simple, so easy, so free in comparison: one is half way back to antiquity. Oh, if one could only get back all the way! Well, here is a letter of a sort at last! However empty otherwise, it carries a great deal of affection from your old friend GSantayana 1
A rightful endowment. From “Time Long Past” in The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelly, edited by Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford University Press, 1904). 3 By convention and not by nature. 4 Unidentified. 5 Santayana’s half brother, Robert Sturgis, was a widower in poor health. He died on 31 July the following year at the age of 67. Robert’s daughter, Josephine, married Arthur S. Eldredge (d. 1923). 2
To Boylston Adams Beal 3 May 1920 • Rome, Italy
(MS: Houghton)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Hotel Minerva Rome, May 3, ’20 Dear Boylston Mrs Winslow has written to me expressly to tell me that you have lost your mother,1 so that I might not, through ignorance, seem to forget you at such a moment. Of course, at our age, and at that which your mother must have reached, these separations and endings of chapters and of books are familiar and expected: but ends are ends and solemn nevertheless. When one looks back even on a happy life, what a terrible dissatisfaction
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and emptiness one feels! It is not that we have a clear notion of any different course that we should have preferred our own life to have taken, or that of any one else we care for; it is rather the essential finitude, and limitations, and subjection to accidents, that are sad. Your mother, besides all her virtues as a mother and as a woman, virtues which in a sense we should have expected in her, had something in relation to you which is exceptional, at least exceptional in America: she was the persuasive voice of a long tradition, she made it amiable; one felt that in her it was right and beautiful; and I have no doubt that it was her influence that, in spite of all your tastes that might have enticed you to break away, kept you true to your lares and penates.2 Of course it ought to be so everywhere and always; but I think in America, even in Boston, we usually see something different: either an unamiable tradition, such as Herbert Lyman,3 for instance, is the victim of, which simply harnesses and dries up human nature; or else, more often, no tradition at all, and simply a plate at table and a small allowance and off you go. But your mother’s feelings and influence were like old lace and old silver and old holy days and pleasant usages; they typified and encouraged a feeling for the sanctities of life more than they confined this feeling. I think I can see how you came to appreciate and love other traditions—the English ones especially4—in sympathy, rather than in opposition to your own; because what you had at home, although it was something local in comparatively narrow, was the right sort of tradition: it had love of fineness in it, rather than tyrannical prejudice. It was an extensible loyalty; and you extended it. I wonder how much of what you would like to incorporate into the life of the better sort of Americans will really pass into it. I think there will be great things in America hereafter: but I doubt whether they will continue what your Mother represented, or what you and I should like best. I have been in Rome for three months, quite alone for the most part. It makes little difference in my life now where I happen to be; I have a regular routine, and I do enough reading and writing to string my days together on a consistent thread. You will soon get, I hope, two books of mine: one new, on America: the other, Logan Pearsall Smith’s selections from my books, so rearranged by me, however, that I think they amount to a fresh production, and may produce a clearer total impression than anything I have written before. Before very long, too, I hope to make a book out of the Soliloquies in England. This, with the more substantial work I have in the background (The Realms of Being) is, as you may imagine, quite enough to keep my mind employed.
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I shall probably be in Paris all summer, and next winter in Spain. After that, my expectation is to return to England and settle down, doubtless at Oxford, for the rest of my days. Of course, you will often be in London; and we must find occasions, more peaceful and normal than during the war, to look before and after and pine (a little) for what is not. I am sorry not to have seen you oftener during these last years. It has been my fault; but the war, even to discuss it, filled me with a kind of terror. It went so badly, it ended so late, so imperfectly, leaving such a confused prospect, that one hardly seems to feel the immensity of the victory which, after all, it brought: never did I expect such a transformation of central Europe; but it is not for the better, perhaps; and we know what we have escaped, but not what we are in for. Yours ever GSantayana 1
Louisa Adams Beal (Mrs. James H. Beal) of Boston. This term is used as an expression for home and those personal belongings that make it individual. In ancient Rome lares were the household gods, usually deified ancestors or heroes. The penates were gods of the storeroom and guardian deities whose duty was to protect and ward off dangers. 3 Herbert Lyman (1864–1941) was a member of the Harvard class of 1886 and of a prominent Boston family. See Persons, 224–25 and 254–56. 4 During World War I and afterwards, Beal was Honorary Counsellor to the American Embassy in London (Persons, 226–27). 2
To Constable and Co. Ltd. 23 May 1920 • Florence, Italy
(MS: Temple)
Florence, May 23, 1920 Messrs Constable & Company London Gentlemen I suppose that you are aware that the Italian post-office has suspended the delivery of all printed matter for some time past, so that of the third proof of “Character & Opinion in the United States” I have received only two instalments, which I returned. The others, if you sent them, are doubtless sleeping in the frontier post-office. I am now on my way to Paris, where I hope to arrive in a week or two—even personal movements being rather dependent now-a-days on strikes and other accidents—and if you
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have not proceeded with the issue of the book and wish me still to see a final proof, you might send it to me at 9 Avenue de l’Observatoire, Paris, where I expect to be during the summer. But the third proof that I saw seemed to require no correction, and I almost hope you have not waited for the return of it, as I think the second proof was almost fit to go to the press as it stood. Of course, my permanent address, C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, S.W. is always good, and it would not involve much delay to continue to address me there. I only tell you where I shall actually be living in case you wish to communicate with me in haste on any subject. Yours faithfully GSantayana
To Boylston Adams Beal 7 June 1920 • Paris, France
(MS: Houghton)
9 Av de l’Observatoire, Paris June 7, 1920 Dear Boylston Your letter was awaiting me here, where I have just returned from Italy, and where I expect to spend the summer. It makes me feel, in one way, how much I am cut off from what used to be our common circle; you tell me things, and imply others, that I had no notion of. That I mentioned Herbert in writing to you was a pure accident as I had heard nothing of his breaking down or disappearing from the world—I suppose at Pawtucket or whatever the name of the place is where his wife’s family spent the summer—nor did I know that Elsie’s mother was dead. I am very sorry to hear it; especially about Herbert, since that is the less inevitable misfortune. I have always felt that he was a sacrifice offered on the altar of Bostonian superstition about work—a sort of Isaac that Abraham was ordered to slay, and no opportune angel or sheep came in at the last moment to save him.1 If he had had a little more courage, he might have become one of those disaffected and homeless Americans of whom I see so much in these parts: and perhaps that, too, would not have been satisfactory. What a curious tragedy Puritanism is! When you come to Europe again I hope you will not stay in England, as I hardly expect to return there for a year or more; when it gets too cold
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here (we can get no coal and very little wood) I shall probably go to Spain (where I haven’t been since before the war) or to Italy, where I had a very pleasant and not wholly idle winter this year. The routine of life for me is everywhere much the same, but I like to drink in congenial sights and sounds, and to haunt congenial places; and Rome is a most congenial place to me in every way. Do write again whenever [across] your plans make it at all possible that our paths should cross. Yours ever GSantayana 1
Abraham, patriarch of the Jewish peoples, made a pact with God whereby he would follow God’s commands and in turn would become the father of nations. When Abraham and his wife were very old, their son Isaac was born. God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Abraham built an altar, placed the bound boy upon the firewood, and took up the knife. At this moment the voice of an angel said: “Do not lay your hand on the lad … for now I know that you fear God.” (Gen. 22:12) Abraham saw a ram caught by the horns in a nearby thicket; it was sacrificed instead of the boy. This symbolized the rejection in the Hebrew faith of child-sacrifice practiced by pagan cults.
To Scofield Thayer 2 July 1920 • Paris, France
(MS: Beinecke)
C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, London Paris, July 2, 1920
Dear Thayer In Italy, two or three months ago, I received a copy of The Dial1 together with a letter, which in the confusion of travel I am afraid I did not answer. Now I receive two separate copies of the June number, with your new letter of June 17. It is now nearly ten years since I have been in America, and I can’t think even of one name with which to begin the list which you ask me to make out, of persons who might be interested in The Dial, and whom you do not know much better than I do. Your idea of bringing the old and the new together is interesting: but if you find that the public prefer their meat apart from their vegetables, why should you earnestly desire to serve them both up on the same plate? I think the vicissitudes of art at present, and of the faint though eager echoes that spread over America, like wireless vibrations, are not of much importance. It is all too voulu:2 something will gather head of itself some day when people least expect it.
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Opffner3 has ideas, but he does not economize his means; he makes blotches. I should not have recognized Copeland, Fuller, or Coolidge4 at all, and hardly the others: but they may have changed since my day. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 Under Scofield Thayer as editor after 1920, The Dial became the most distinguished literary monthly in the United States to champion modern artistic movements. 2 Deliberate. 3 Ivan Opffner was an artist whose work was published in The Dial. His cartoons, “Six Harvard Worthies,” and his caricature of Le Baron Russell Briggs caused some controversy, for which The Dial apologized. 4 Charles Townsend Copeland (1860–1952), Harvard’s class of 1882, became Boylston Professor of English at Harvard. See Persons, 407, and Harvard, 402–3. Fuller is B. A. G. Fuller. Archibald Cary Coolidge (1866–1928), Harvard class of 1887, taught history at Harvard (1893–1928) and served as director of the Harvard University Library (1910–28).
To Constable and Co. Ltd. 9 July 1920 • Paris, France
(MS: Temple) 9 Av. de l’Observatoire Paris July 9, 1920
Messrs Constable and Company London. Gentlemen Is it true that a new edition of The Life of Reason, in a single volume, is already announced? Mr Pearsall Smith had spoken to me of such a project, but I — sh had heard nothing definite. If you contemplate such a reprint, I am anxious to make a number of corrections in the text, most of them verbal, and to add a preface and an occasional note. Please let me know how the matter stands. When are the Little Essays and Character & Opinion in the U.S. to appear? I have been hoping for a long time to see at least the first of them. Will you please add the following to the list of addresses to which both these books are to be sent, with the author’s compliments:
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Mrs Miller,1 Bennington House, Newstead Grove, Nottingham. Faithfully yours GSantayana 1
Unidentified.
To Charles Scribner’s Sons 12 July 1920 • Paris, France
(MS: Princeton) C
/o Brown Shipley & Co, 123 Pall Mall, London, S.W. Paris, July 12, 1920
Gentlemen, I understand—and it is a satisfaction to me that it should be so—that Constable & Company have made an arrangement with you by which you are to publish the American edition of my two new books. As I find that if I ask that books should be sent from England to my friends in the United States, they have to pay duty on the present they receive, I am inclosing a short list of addresses to which I should be much obliged if you would send copies, as soon as they are ready, charging them to my account. Yours very truly GSantayana Please send a copy of “Little Essays” and one of “Character & Opinion in the United States” to the following addresses, with the compliments of the author, to whom they are to be charged G. Santayana Prof. & Mrs. W. T. Bush th Street, New York City. 1 West 64– r rs M & M R. B. Potter, Antietam Farm, Smithtown, Long Island, N.Y. B. A. Beal, Esq. 108 Beacon St. Boston, Mass. R. S. Sturgis, Esq.
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133 Bay State Road, '' '' Dr & Mrs Frederick Winslow, 275 Clarendon St. '' '' B. A. G. Fuller, Esq. Sherborn, Mass. Robbins Library, Emerson Hall, Cambridge, Mass. Delphic Club, '' '' 7 Linden Street,
To Constable and Co. Ltd. 16 July 1920 • Paris, France
(MS: Temple) 9 Av. de l’Observatoire, Paris. July 16, 1920
Messrs Constable & Company London Gentlemen A copy of my Little Essays arrived for my friend Mr Strong (with whom I live here) but the one you sent addressed to me care of Brown Shipley & Co has not yet reached me. I am writing to them to make inquiries. The other copies which you were sending to me here directly, when th have also not yet arrived. you wrote on July 12– The aspect of the book seems to me satisfactory, and if the vividness of the blue binding surprised me a little at first, I think it is perhaps as well that there should be something distinctive about it. I suppose — the that Character & Opinion in the U.S. will be similar in appearance. As to the idea of reprinting the Life of Reason, I quite understand that it is inopportune, and I only mentioned it because an officious and inaccurate friend assured me he had seen it announced in the papers. Will you please — has have a copy of Little Essays sent to Mrs C. H. Toy C /o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall; and charge it to my account? Yours faithfully GSantayana
1910–1920
To Constable and Co. Ltd. 21 July 1920 • Paris, France
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(MS: Temple) 9 Av de l’Observatoire, Paris. July 21, 1920
Messrs Constable & Company London Thank you for the six copies of my Little Essays which have now arrived safely. The delay has been of no consequence, as my curiosity to see the book had been satisfied, and I was only afraid that the copies intended for me might have gone astray. Yours faithfully GSantayana
To John Middleton Murry 4 August 1920 • Paris, France
(MS: Macksey) 9 Av. de l’Observatoire, Paris Aug. 4, 1920
Dear Mr Murry1 I have a new set of “Soliloquies in England” written abroad but founded on notes and impressions that belong to those four years of war which I spent at Oxford. I am sending you two and will send more soon if you want them. My idea is, before very long, to arrange and fill them out a little so as to make a book of them. I see The Athenaeum regularly, as my friend with whom I live here takes it in, & I have seen a nice review of my “Little Essays” in the last ^ ^ number. I am a little curious to know who wrote it. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1 John Middleton Murry (1889–1957) was educated at Brasenose College, Oxford. He was literary critic for The Times of London (1914–19), and editor of both The Athenaeum (1919–21) and The Adelphi (1923–47). An intimate of many writers, including T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf, he wrote numerous books on literature, politics, and religion. His autobiographical Between Two Worlds appeared in 1935.
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To Robert Seymour Bridges 29 August 1920 • Paris, France
(MS: Unknown)
Address C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123 Pall Mall, S.W.1. Paris, Aug. 29, 1920 Dear Bridges, Logan Pearsall Smith has just sent me a copy of your paper in the London Mercury about the Little Essays.1 I don’t subscribe to the presscutting agencies, so that I remain for the most part in blessed ignorance of what people say or don’t say about my books, and in rare cases, like the present one, where I should have been truly sorry to miss the evidence of understanding and friendship which a review contains, it usually reaches me sooner or later in some round-about way. I hope the delay in the expression of my appreciation of your so warm, so sympathetic, and in itself so pleasant paper has not made you think for a moment that I could be indifferent to it. The mere fact of your taking the trouble to write it at all is a great honour to me, and of course the publisher has already seized on your flattering phrases to put into his advertisements: but what in my own mind is most precious and interesting in your criticism is precisely the indication of your own views where they diverge from mine: I hadn’t understood so clearly before exactly why you seemed to regard some of my opinions about poetry and about Christianity with a certain kindly wonder, as if they were strange and excentric or at least amusing paradoxes. But now I think I see better, both what your view is and what you suppose mine to be, and consequently why you find a certain perversity in me at those points. I won’t say that the differences between us are wholly verbal, because I suspect there is some (perfectly legitimate) diversity of temperament and allegiance behind them: but I think they are, so to speak, semi-verbal. I mean that such words as materialism or Christianity or religion or poetry, besides being used for many different definable objects, carry an opprobious or eulogistic connotation which often drowns and hides all their other meanings. For instance, if Christianity is used eulogistically, to mean whatever is best or truest in the belief and sentiment of people calling themselves Christians, I should agree with you that London in the nineteenth century, or that the social ethics of the future, may be more Christian than Rome in the fifteenth or any other century: because I should be inclined
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to admit that what is best and truest in Christianity is that tender humanity which it borrowed from late Judaeism and which, touched with poetry and disenchantment, shines so beautifully in the maxims of our Lord: but I submit that if that had been the sole or the chief inspiration of the Gospel, there never would have been anything called Christianity in the world. In other words, the feeling you or I may have as to what is best and truest in this religion, does not determine its actual essence, or what distinguishes it from other religions or from the absence of religion altogether. To get at this essence or anything approaching it, we must add to that Jewish philanthropy and tenderness a particular historical and supernaturalistic philosophy, intended to buttress that sentiment, and actually qualifying it and transforming it into specifically Christian charity such as in itself it is not: there must be not only love of men but love of sinners for the love of God. This would be no better than a cant phrase unless it was inspired by such eschatology and such supernaturalistic hygiene for saving the soul as the Christian Churches have developed: and it is these doctrines and forms of discipline that I am thinking of when I talk of Christianity. Otherwise one might have to admit that Socrates was a better Christian than Saint Paul, and Buddha than Saint Dominic: and perhaps one would have to deny that Luther and Calvin were Christians at all,2 which (on account of their theology) I should hesitate to do. Much the same misunderstandings arise in the matter of poetry and its relation with philosophy. By philosophy I don’t mean true philosophy—far from it. And it would not occur to me that if totality of view and a sense for the ultimate raised Dante to the highest level of poetry, he would descend from it because we afterwards decided that his conception of the world and of man’s place in it was not correct: correctness has nothing to do with it. Homer and Virgil3 are just as comprehensive—if not perhaps so earnest or consecrated—as Dante: and as the geography of Homer and the agriculture of Virgil lose nothing by being scientifically obsolete, so the astronomy and theology of Dante lose nothing by being so. My contention is only that their dignity as poets would fall immeasurably if they had had no geography, astronomy, theology, or agriculture: in other words, if they had not attuned their minds to the world as they conceived it, but had conceived no world and—to be frank—had had no mind. I like what you say about matter and the capacities of the atom: and I have laughed aloud, like an idiot, at your final story and the capacity of the Sphinx to “be there” when it no longer appears in the bill. I should admit the fair impeachment if you boldly called me a platonist, and a materialist
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as well. This contradiction disappears if we take seriously the profoundly platonic doctrine that natural philosophy and theology (in the Platonic system) are necessarily mythical. This does not preclude a scientific analysis of phenomenal nature, although Socrates and his pupils did not attempt it. Their despair about science was premature, as is that of Bergson: but a student of physics (which is the true metaphysics) may perfectly lend himself to platonism in the poetic and discursive expression of his own mind, and in his moral philosophy. Only he must beware of supposing, as the dogmatic platonists do, that in his platonizing he is going deeper, as well as higher, than in his natural science. He is not going deeper: he is mythologizing. In a few weeks I am off to Spain, where I expect to spend the coming winter. Often a longing comes over me to walk round Christ Church Meadows,4 and I ask myself why I put off returning to England. On the other hand, all those scenes are so vividly before me that they could hardly be more so if I revisited them, and I am still writing “Soliloquies in England” abroad! It would be a great pleasure to hear from you and know how Chilswell and all its inhabitants are faring. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
“George Santayana” 2 (August 1920): 411–19. See 21 Feb 1920. Buddha, meaning “the enlightened one” in Sanskrit, title of Siddhartha Gautama (c. 563–483 B.C.), was an Indian religious leader and founder of Buddhism. Dominic Guzmán (c. 1170–1221) was a Castilian churchman and founder of the Dominicans, a Catholic order devoted to study and preaching. Martin Luther (1483–1546) was a German religious reformer. His critique of the Roman Catholic church’s practices is regarded as the original document of the Reformation. He contended that man is justified by faith alone, not by works. He favored the abolition of church rituals and challenged the supreme authority of the pope. John ( Jean Cauvin) Calvin (1509–64) was a French Protestant reformer whose theological doctrines had tremendous influence, particularly in the Puritan religion of England, Scotland, and later America. Calvinism as a religious system recognized only the Bible as a source of knowledge and authority in questions of belief. 3 Vergil (Publius Vergilius Maro) (70 B.C.–19 B.C.), the son of a farmer, was the dominant figure in Latin literature whose poetry idealized rural life. His major work is the Aeneid. 4 Oxford. 2
1910–1920
To Logan Pearsall Smith 30 August 1920 • Paris, France
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(MS: Congress)
Address C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, S.W.1 Paris, Aug. 30, 1920 Dear Smith Thank you very much for your kind letter, received a few days ago, and for the cuttings about Little Essays, which arrived this morning. I am very glad to see Bridges’ charming paper; quite apart from what it says about us that is flattering and useful (to Constable) I like the good humour and kind feeling running through it all. I am writing to him about it, explaining that I hadn’t seen it until this day. I agree with you that the book makes a nice appearance and, in dipping into it now and then, it has seemed to me that it struck its notes clearly and pleasantly, and that people might like it, if they only could be brought to read it. This is perhaps true of most books of poetry, or of prose that has been digested and distilled like poetry. I feel that I owe you a debt of gratitude for having persisted in the plan of disengaging these passages from their original—too professorial—context. My early books were written too much under the pressure of American public sentiment—I don’t mean that this influenced my opinions, or even my style, very much, but that it made me write to justify my existence and make sure to myself that I did have an intellect: but I should have had more, perhaps, if I hadn’t been in such haste to exhibit it. My comfort is that you have saved these fragments from the wilderness of the top shelf, and that I am not yet too old to recast the more theoretic parts of my reflexion into a system that may be better articulated and more closely n/ knit than my old divagations. I am afraid my shameful carelessness about writing letters has caused me not to thank you as yet for your Stories from the Bible,1 which I see you have greatly expurgated and reduced in bulk from your original manuscript, parts of which you read to us some time ago. As I told you then, I think the satirical strain is so much better in it than the farcical strain, that it is almost a pity to have the latter in it at all; I mean that your parody of the commentators and your suggestions (as in the case of Jezabel’s kindly feelings towards the religion of the peasants)2 of what the facts may have really been, are far too witty to require the introduction of modern slang
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or other anachronisms. But this was probably your original joke in the matter, and the higher flights suggested themselves afterwards. I am sorry that my inertia has proved too great to suffer me to go to England this summer. Strong leaves me the day after tomorrow for Aixles-Bains, and I shall probably stay here until Margaret returns, so as to see her and act as official guardian while she is in Paris: then I am going to Spain for the winter. In the Summer I count on going to England, at least for a few weeks, when I may have the pleasure of seeing you. Yours sincerely GSantayana P.S. The translator of my “Egotism in German Philosophy” into French, Lerolle, writes asking if you and I have any objection to his undertaking a translation of “Little Essays”. It is only fair to add that he is a person of various employments and uncertain ways; but (under careful watching) a competent translator. His French, at least, can’t be very bad, since the Academy3 gave him a prize for his version. I suppose you have no objection to letting him make the attempt if he likes, although we must not count on his perseverance.4 What say you? 1
Stories from the Old Testament (Richmond, England: The Hogarth Press, 1920). Jezebel (c. ninth century B.C.), Phoenician wife of King Ahab of Israel, fostered the worship of Melkart and the goddess of fertility. She maintained priests of Baal, as well as shrines to native gods. Those who resisted the ancestral faith were driven into hiding. Elijah led the resistance. 3 Académie française. 4 Apparently this work was never completed. 2
To Charles Augustus Strong 6 September 1920 • Paris, France
(MS: Rockefeller) 9 Av. de l’Observatoire Sept. 6, 1920
Dear Strong Your card arrived in due time, also the one I enclose,1 and this morning Lovejoy’s proof which I have re-directed, as well as another pamphlet or circular. By mistake I opened an envelope from Columbia college, as it had the familiar Bush look, and was astonished to find that I was being thanked for a vast sum of money to keep the sepulchre whited. I think you
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were extraordinary/ ily generous, and hope you don’t mind my having discovered it. Madame de Fontenay came in yesterday morning, evidently fresh from mass, and somewhat flurried and querulous: I recognized the temper my sisters used to be in when they returned from early Church—especially if they had been to Communion—and it made me wonder if too much living in the other world doesn’t make one unfit to live in this. Earthly accidents all then seem perverse impediments to the free course of one’s spiritual progress, and blots on the landscape of paradise. However, all Madame de Fontenay wanted was that I should send a telegram to Margaret asking if th as Madame de Fontenay has she could not return to Paris before the 12– th – to leave on the 15 and is most anxious to see her. I gathered that she has an eye on a person that she thinks suitable for Margaret’s dame de compagnie. She also seems to think Italy a very bad, dangerous, unhealthy place, and wishes you would return to Paris, or go anywhere else, rather than risk life and happiness amongst those socialists and fortune-hunters. I accordingly left my work—I have been very steadily at it, and made good progress—and went to the telegraph office in the rue de Grenelle, which is open on Sunday, and sent the required telegram to Margaret. Do you suppose Madame de Fontenay didn’t feel authorized to send such a message to Margaret herself, or that she wanted to save the six francs that it might cost? She says, by the way, that her husband is not very well, and that they are to remain in Paris until December. The weather here is still cloudy and very autumnal. Marie treats me very handsomely, and I have got a few more—not important—books. Let me know how your cure works. Yours ever GSantayana 1
Unlocated.
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To William Lyon Phelps 8 September 1920 • Paris, France
(MS: Beinecke) C
/o Brown Shipley & Co, 123 Pall Mall London, S.W.1. Paris, Sept. 8, 1920
1
Dear Phelps I am much pleased to have your letter and your review of the Little Essays. All the first part of it makes me feel as if I were reading an obituary notice by anticipation, and I can almost imagine some Phi Beta Kappa orator, in the not very distant future, spreading this sort of roseate sunset glow over my uneventful history and limping personality. I don’t object to the headlines; Harvard in the 1890’s being me, and America Today being you; and I think the view of the Yard has much the same quality of cautious idealization. Yours is not a cubist portrait of your humble servant, nor yet a Dutch inventory of his features and circumstances. I think it is very good and fair, if one allows for the friendly partiality you do not disguise, and also for a certain glamour or pathos of distance that already bathes our memories of youth. The only fact that is wrong is your saying that my mother was an American; she was Spanish—we never spoke English together—but had been first married (in Manila) to one of the Boston Sturgis’s, so that my half-sisters and half-brother belonged to that once prosperous and always agreeable tribe: and it was in consequence of this ^ ^ connection, and money matters concerned in it, that we went to live in America. A point of interpretation where I feel you are also somewhat misled, or at least reticent, is in regard to my reasons for leaving Harvard. Weariness had something to do with it, but weariness with lectures and with the “problems” of technical philosophy rather than with college committees, on which I seldom appeared. They knew I was no good at business! But my chief motive was a life-long desire to live in Europe and—which is only possible here—to be left alone. In respect to higher things, most of what you say pleases and satisfies me greatly, especially your mention of Schopenhauer: that is to hit the nail on the head. There are only two points in which perhaps you don’t understand me: it seems to me unfair to suggest that, unlike the wizzened Morley,2 I am not frank about immortality; a scholar like you ought to know that the platonizing or Spinozistic things I say about it, taken in an ideal sense, are the original
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motif of this doctrine in the European tradition: the notion of ghosts or of resurrection has been merely confused with it, and it is no compromise or hedging on my part to separate the two views once more. The other point is about liking life, and the poets who relish it. My disgust at Browning is not because he loves life or has it abundantly, but because he doesn’t love it (as Dickens does, for instance) for what is good in it, but for what is bad, tawdry, and pretentious. I protest against being called a snob; what I love is what is simple, humble, easy, what ought to be common, and it is only the bombast of false ambitions and false superiority, that I abhor. Before the war I was on the point of going to give some lectures at the University of Wisconsin, and at Columbia,3 but I doubt now, whether I shall ever cross the Atlantic again. I have my [across] head-quarters here, and go away at intervals. Last winter I was in Italy, now I go to Spain, and I was in England throughout the war. All [across page one] places, where there is an arm-chair within and something human to see without, are much the same, and I lead the same life everywhere. You will find me somewhere on the beaten track whenever you next come to these parts. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1
William “Billy” Lyon Phelps (1865–1943) graduated from Yale (B.A., 1887; Ph.D., 1891) and Harvard (A.M., 1891). A popular teacher (Yale, 1892–1933), he was among the first Americans to specialize in modern literature. Phelps established the first college courses in contemporary drama and the novel and introduced Russian novelists to his students. He wrote books on modern literature and “As I Like It,” a book column for Scribner’s Magazine. His Autobiography With Letters was published in 1939. Phelps’s review of Little Essays was published in the New York Times Book Review (22 Aug 1920). 2 Sylvanus Griswold Morley (1883–1948), Harvard graduate and Romance languages and literatures instructor there (1901–6), was an archeologist who specialized in Middle American and Mayan archeology. His works include An Introduction to the Study of Maya Hieroglyphs (1915) and The Inscriptions at Copan (1920). 3 See 5 Jul 1919.
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To Charles Augustus Strong 20 September 1920 • Paris, France
(MS: Rockefeller)
9 Av. de l’Observatoire Sept. 20, 1920 Dear Strong Your card reaches me this morning, and I am not sure whether it was meant to encourage Margaret to stay on here, without going to Aix at all. In that case it arrived too late, which is a pity, since otherwise it might have saved her the trouble, expense, and unsettled feeling of undertaking this trip and returning to Paris, in order to repeat the same journey a fortnight later. However, you will now have the pleasure of seeing her at once—and I think she never looked better—and then perhaps she may feel authorized to stay in Paris somewhat longer, before joining you again at Fiesole. She will no longer find me here, to be a curious combination of a resource and a nuisance, a source of amusement and a wet blanket. I — feel felt I was both these sorts of thing, and enjoyed the little evening outings very much which we had together, while at the same time wondering if, in the apartment, I wasn’t in the way. Margaret is not a person with whom it is easy to lead a life in common; she doesn’t seem to have fixed tastes or interests, and it is hard to foresee what she will find pleasant when it turns up. She doesn’t, apparently, foresee it at all clearly herself, else by this time she would have chosen her own occupations and surroundings more definitely than she has. I understand perfectly the difficulty you have had in finding these suitable surroundings and occupations for her, because her own reaction on suggestions or experiments is not sharp enough: she seems to accept anything suggested, and yet is not satisfied with anything at bottom. It is only, as far, as I have observed, in such matters as clothes and fur^ ^ niture that her preferences are decided; and I am afraid neither the villa at Fiesole nor this apartment are much to her taste. Even if this apartment were furnished more completely, and in her own way, it would be too small and not in the right quarter of Paris; while the villa at Fiesole, besides not having been heretofore well arranged for a young lady to live in, is inaccessible, and I am sure she finds living there lonely and inconvenient, even for such purposes as her music or painting lessons. My feeling—which I know you will not think it impertinent in me to express—is that you would do well to encourage any marked desire or propensity which she may manifest, even at the sacrifice of being often separated from her; and even
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to make an effort to discover what her half-formed wishes may be, instead of letting things drift as hitherto; and I think she would not only be happier and develope more by having her own way, even if she made some mistakes at first, but that in the end you would profit by it yourself, because she would be more of a companion when she was with you, and even, in spirit, when she was away: for instance, she would write to you oftener and more confidentially. The trouble with her is a certain vagueness and emptiness of mind. Of course love, marriage, and children are the obvious and natural remedy for this: but meantime any friendships or surroundings by which she finds herself carried along, and pleasantly interested, will do her good, form her character, and help her to choose a husband wisely and with an awakened interest in all that such a choice means: for I feel as if she hardly had that interest as yet, even in the abstract, as so many very young girls have. This winter, for instance, if she wants to go back to America, or to England, I should urge her to do so, far from standing in the way. You would not be much more lonely for that; you could go to Rome or to Val-Mont, as you often feel like doing, and she would love you more for looking at things from her angle, and I can’t help thinking you would be happier too. I enclose a telegram1 which has just arrived for her. I mean to start in the direction of Spain on Sunday next and hope to be in Avila (where my address is Novaliches, 6,—but Avila is enough) early in October, from where I will write again. The Soliloquies grow at one end as I finish and lop them off at another, so that I am still far from the end of them: but I will take a goodly portion of the Realms with me, in the hope of being able to report substantial progress at the end of the winter. Let me know how you find the Villa and the scioperi. Yours ever GSantayana 1
Unlocated.
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To Constable and Co. Ltd. 9 October 1920 • Ávila, Spain C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall. S.W.1
}
(MS: Temple) Address Avila, Oct. 9, 1920.
essrs
M Constable & Company London. Will you please send a copy of my Little Essays to the address below, as well as a copy of my Character & Opinion in the United States, when this appears, and charge both to my account. I thought I had already sent you Mrs Miller’s address1 with this object, but she seems not to have received the book. Yours faithfully G Santayana Mrs Miller,
Homewood Tavistock Drive, Mapperley Park, Nottingham
1
See 9 Jul 1920.
To Charles Augustus Strong 18 October 1920 • Ávila, Spain
(MS: Rockefeller)
Avila, Oct. 18, 1920 Dear Strong I got here a fortnight ago, after a rather tedious but comfortable journey, with halts at Poitiers, Bordeaux, San Sebastian, Vitoria, Valladolid, and Segovia, from which last interesting town (which I hadn’t seen before) I came here by motor’bus, in four hours, and found the whole tribe of my sister’s family well, and much as usual, except for the existence of five new babies, since my last visit. These children have taken up a good deal of my time, as I have been managing a toy theatre for them, and drawing and painting dolls for their amusement—all of which, though I enjoy it much
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more than they do, is not compatible with Soliloquies nor with the Realms of Being. I expect to stay here some ten days longer and then go to Toledo, stopping only one day in Madrid, to make the connection and see my only surviving cousin1—an old maid in reduced circumstances. In Toledo, if I can find tolerable quarters, I mean to remain for some time, and to work steadily, as there I shall be absolutely alone, yet in the midst of interesting re hear how I fare when I am once scenes, as in a little Rome. You shall — he— settled there. If I should find the place uncomfortable, however, I will return as quickly as possible (which means very slowly) to France. Travelling has become very inconvenient and Spain is in a curious condition, crowded and prosperous, yet in want of many things—like rollingstock for the railways—and politically and socially rather disturbed, like the rest of the world at present; and everything is absolutely, not relatively, very dear. In San Sebastian, for instance, they charged me 20 pesetas (= 45 francs) simply for my room for one night, and that without a bathroom. On the other hand I feel as much as ever the charm of the people and the sunlight and the churches, and find myself perfectly fluent in the language, so that I should very much enjoy staying on until the Summer, if I could be materially comfortable enough to work. Margaret has doubtless told you of our few days together in Paris, which I again enjoyed very much. Let me know how she is going to spend the winter, and also how you have been getting on with the villa. I have had a long letter from Westenholz, my German friend, with nothing very particular in it about Germany or the war, but with a philosophical passage (in German) which is in perfect agreement with your views. He says the sub-conscious or psychic facts become conscious only in reflection or memory, but owe their existence and character to what they are in the sub-conscious phase. I told him in answer that my difficulty with this lay only in the first term, the sub-conscious or psychic one, which I suspect is merely a material, dynamic process. My American book is out in America but apparently not yet in England, as I have had no copy. Have you? Yours ever GSantayana 1
Manuela.
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To John Calvin Metcalf and James Southall Wilson 22 November 1920 • Toledo, Spain (MS: Virginia) C
/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, London
Toledo, Nov. 22, 1920 Dear Professors Metcalf and Wilson1 What you ask of me I shall have to ask in turn of a Higher Power, and I am not confident that my prayer will be granted. My verses in their day were the product of youth and literature, and I have long since given up the practice. However, if a belated ray of inspiration should come, I should be most happy to join you in your Centennial Volume, and in any case you have my best wishes for it and for the cause which it is to celebrate Yours very truly G Santayana 1
John Calvin Metcalf (1865–1949) and James Southall Wilson (1880–1963) edited The Enchanted Years: A Book of Contemporary Verse, Dedicated by Poets of Great Britain and America to the University of Virginia on the Occasion of Its One-Hundredth Anniversary (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1921). Santayana is not represented in this anthology.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 29 November [1920] • Toledo, Spain
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
TOLEDO (ESPAÑA)—UN APOSTOL
Cuadro del Greco.1 Hotel Castilla, Toledo, Nov. 29. Thank you for your letter, also Robert’s, and one other—from the poet laureate. Don’t send me my own book: I have already read it.—I am very comfortable here, now that I have got into a regular routine, and find plenty to do. If later the weather becomes colder, I may feel more like moving.—The Athenaeums have also come safely. Love to all from Jorge 1 In Santayana’s hand, on front of postcard, “Painting by El Greco.” El Greco was Kyriakos Theotocopoulos (c. 1541–1614), a Greek-born Spanish painter who settled in Toledo, Spain. He painted intense portraits, mystic saints, and religious scenes.
1910–1920
To Charles Augustus Strong 10 December 1920 • Toledo, Spain Address
}
until Jan 1 Novaliches 6 after '' 1, Serrano 7
2:417
(MS: Rockefeller) Avila Madrid
Toledo, Dec. 10, 1920 Dear Strong rd Your letter of the 3– reaches me here today, and I am delighted to hear that you are so well pleased with the improvements in the Villa. Lady Sybil also tells me that you are much better—I suppose she refers to your legs, and what you say about being less fit refers only to the organs of intellect. When you return from Rome and find everything in working order in the house perhaps ideas too will begin to flow more freely. I got an advertisement yesterday from an English clipping agency announcing “Critical Realism”, so I suppose it is out. I believe I wrote to you from Avila, describing my life there. After some weeks I found the subjection to so much family life a little trying, especially as it made any spurts of work, which I might have, practically ineffectual, because the momentum I acquired one day would be dissipated before I could return to that train of thought. The political and religious undertone of the place also got a little on my nerves. So I decided to come here, but not with the idea of going on to Granada, but rather of staying until Mercedes, our friend in Madrid, returned and opened her house, where you know we are in the habit of going as paying guests. It happens that this year her apostolic labours in Galicia are detaining her longer than usual; but before Newyears I hope to be established there. My sister Josephine will also join us. There I expect to stay for some time—according to circumstances—and then, with a short stop at Avila, to return to Paris. Is there any objection to my writing to Marie—whose address I have— and asking her to return to look after me at the apartment? If I get there by April 1–st I may be able to do some good work, and to present you with several chapters of Realms of Being, if you are willing to read them in manuscript. Toledo is a delightful place from my point of view: ancient, most picturesque, with a river like the Thames at Oxford, except that in places it runs through a wild gorge overlooked by ruinous castles and spanned by beautiful, romantic bridges; there is a good modern hotel, expensive but
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comfortable, in which I am the only permanent guest; and there are sunny gardens (when the sun shines) in which one may sit and read in perfect comfort; there is a café, much frequented, and—welcome detail—there is a military academy with more than a thousand cadets, studying for their commissions in the infantry, who with their gay uniorms and lively manners lend a touch of young life to the stony scene—for you never saw so much stone as there is here. In Spain the world is coming to an end by petrifaction. I have been completely alone except for a few days, when I was joined by an Englishman1 who came by chance to this hotel: he had seen me at Oxford, knew most of my friends there, and took me back to England, morally, for the time being. I should add that there has been a theatrical company, now gone, which gave some interesting performances. Naturally under these conditions, and with hardly any books to read, I have been forced to write a great deal, and I spend regularly a good many hours a day at my desk; but I regret to say that the net result has not been considerable. The Soliloquies have grown and advanced: but as I thought in Paris that I was already in sight of the end, this hardly seems any gain towards getting rid of them; which is my chief desire. I have done something on Realms of Being: but until the Soliloquies are in shape I can’t actually lay out that other book, begin at the beginning, and revise and arrange the whole for publication. That work requires a different atmosphere from that of travel; I must feel that I need never move; and I am hoping that in Paris, in April, I may have that feeling. I am glad I came to Spain, I want to stay on now that I am here, but secretly—though of course I don’t say this to my family—hardly expect to come back. The song in the Gondoliers2 sometimes runs through my head with a variation—“If ever ever ever I get out of Spain, I shall never never never come to Spain again.” But that is only a mood: at times everything here, especially the people, seem to me charming. I don’t feel that it is at all important that we should agree about the psychical. We agree enough to have our influence, such as it may be, pull in the same direction; and the fact that you call substance psychical and I call it material may even help to bring persons of opposed habits of thought to converge more nearly towards our position. You will see, when Realms of Being appears, that I don’t by any means close the door to substance being psychical, in the sense in which you use the word: only I don’t see any cogent reason for asserting that view positively, since neither of the two ^ ^ approaches to substance which I have found—the epistemological and the cosmological—involves that conclusion. As I have often said in our discus-
1910–1920
2:419
sions, the fact that substance is the substance of things seen and also of the organs of seeing, does not involve any assimilation of it, in quality, to seeing or to visibility. What the inner nature of substance may be (if it has an “inner” nature distinct from the nexus of its discoverable attributes) has to be left to conjecture or myth: I am not sure that it is a serious speculation; what is important is that the place, movement, manifestations, and continuity of substance should be made out scientifically, so that the natural roots of things moral should not be overlooked. That, at least, is my sole interest in the matter: and if you can prove by other arguments that such a substance must be psychical, I am quite willing. But why should I too have to make that discovery? As you see by this whole letter, I have no thought of going to Italy this year. Next year. Travelling, at least in Spain and to Spain, is a great nuisance, and I want to do as little of it as possible. The immense journey from here to Rome is not worth undertaking for what remains of the season. And another nine months will be soon—too soon—past. You say nothing about Margaret. I should be glad to hear of her goings on, and of her movements. Did you find a dame de compagnie? Is she going to Belgrade, or to America, or is she warbling merrily in the new drawing-room? Yours ever GSantayana 1
Unidentified. From Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera, The Gondoliers, or The King of Barataria (1889). The title of the song is “From the Sunny Spanish Shore.” 2
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 29 December 1920 • Toledo, Spain
(MS: Virginia)
Hotel Castilla Toledo Dec. 29, 1920 Dear Susie I am going to Madrid on Monday next, Jan. 3rd. Mercedes wrote saying nd , but as the second is Sunday (when she could receive me on the 1st or 2– things are always a little off the normal) I thought it better to give her one more day, and call it Monday.
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I have written to Brown Shipley at last giving them a new address; and if I had known, on coming here, that I was to remain nine weeks, you would not have had the trouble of readdressing and sending so many letters. Everything, I believe, has arrived safely; except the Athenaeum for th rd th . I have those for Dec. 3– and 17– but the intervening one has not Dec. 10– arrived. I suspect, however, that you have a second copy of it, which I wish you would keep for me until I return to Avila. I don’t care to see the review as a whole, but there is probably an article of my own in it of which I should like to have a copy eventually.1 As to the money for Manuela I think what you propose is very well: it makes very little difference how it reaches her, except that it should be as little trouble to you as possible. I quite understand our nei —iece Josephine’s desire to have a house of her own, and I have heard of Weston;2 I believe there is a colony of young married people there among whom she would prefer to have her “home” rather than in the impersonal rows of numbered houses in a city street. Next winter, she might come and stay with her father for a part of the winter, if he hasn’t made other arrangements. His plan, I should think, must be either marriage, or some other way of annexing the Lassomandis,3 or else a journey to Europe to see you. It is a pity the Sud-Express is not running, as it made a journey to Avila very much easier. I am sorry the children (if they got wind that I was to send them some present) have had to wait so long for it; but now as soon as I get to Madrid I will see if the objects in question (unless you now suggest something different) can be sent on at once, without waiting for my personal return. In any case I should have had some difficulty in packing the objects, unless I got a new valise. I wish you and all the family, especially Celedonio, a happy new year. I suppose Josephine will be in Madrid very soon, if indeed she does not arrive simultaneously with me. Your affectionate brother Jorge 1
“Queen Mab” (10 Dec 1920): 800–802. Massachusetts. 3 Unidentified. 2
EDITORIAL APPENDIX
Textual Commentary I. Summary Statement of Textual Principles and Procedures for The Works of George Santayana A. The Works of George Santayana and Editorial Scholarship The volumes of The Works of George Santayana are unmodernized, critical editions of George Santayana’s writings. This scholarly edition is “unmodernized” because it retains original and idiosyncratic punctuation, spelling, capitalization, and word division in order to reflect the full intent of the author as well as the initial texture of the work; it is “critical” because it allows the exercise of editorial judgment in making corrections, changes, and choices among authoritative readings. The editors’ goals are to produce texts that accurately represent Santayana’s final intentions regarding his works and to record all evidence on which editorial decisions have been based. Except for the Letters and Marginalia volumes, The Works of George Santayana pertain typically to materials composed by Santayana that he intended for publication and dissemination in a printed form. For these writings there may exist a holograph manuscript, a typescript, printers’ proofs, two or more editions, and multiple impressions of editions. In such cases the term “critical edition” indicates the task of comparing these various forms of the text in order to ascertain and perpetuate the author’s “final intentions” regarding his work.
B. Transcribing, Editing, and Typesetting The Works of George Santayana Transcribing, editing, and typesetting The Works of George Santayana is done electronically and, beginning with Volume Five, the books are produced with QuarkXPress, a commercial electronic typesetting program. The initial transcription of a copy-text (the document on which the critical text is based) differentiates among chapter headings, subheadings, marginal headings, standard paragraphs, extracts, poetry lines, footnotes, and the like. Each transcription receives at least two independent sight collations against the copy-text to assure its accuracy. In addition to the copy-text, the front matter, the textual notes, appendixes, references, and index are proofed twice. Various software programs aid the editors in locating, counting, and compiling material needed in making editorial decisions. Together with a “Word Book” indicating Santayana’s usage and
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spelling of problematic words they are used to identify patterns of punctuation and spelling and all line-end hyphens in the copy-text. The QuarkXPress publishing program uses style sheets to format the various aspects of the letters text (headings, dates, signatures, footnotes, etc.), or the textual notes, or appendixes. The pages are set up to match the font style and size of the volumes already published in The Works of George Santayana. These are printed and checked to ensure that all stylistic changes (italics, superscript, strikeouts) were made correctly. Use of the QuarkXPress program enables the editors to send proofed pages to MIT Press for printing. Before the book is printed, a thorough check of the blueprints (contact prints of the negatives) is made, focusing principally on line and page endings. The desktop typesetting employed in The Works of George Santayana greatly facilitates the editing and publication process. Significantly the integrity of the text is maintained throughout the editing process. Except for the incorporated emendations, the final critical edition text is identical to the original copy-text transcription. Hence, not only do the editors of The Works of George Santayana have direct control over the printing process, but also the integrity of the critical edition text is safeguarded by this technology.
II. Publication History of the Letters Santayana probably never intended his correspondence to be published, and did not write letters as he wrote works for publication. The intent of this volume is to present the letters in a form that will give the reader an experience close to reading the original letter. Therefore, these published letters are, as much as possible, exact copies of the handwritten master. That is, they are diplomatic (or “noncritical”) transcriptions, reproducing all of the characteristics of the autograph letters, including misspellings, mispunctuation, grammatical errors, slips of the pen, and such alterations as cancellations and insertions. The printed form of the letters adheres to the characteristics of the originals in all of these particulars. The exceptions to this practice of exact transcription and reproduction are the lineation, pagination, and nonsemantic features of the letter which Santayana did not intend to carry any meaning. The editors subscribe to the view of modern epistolary scholarship that “a scholarly edition should not contain a text which has editorially been corrected, made consistent, or otherwise smoothed out. Errors and inconsistencies are part of the total texture of the document and are part of the evidence which the document preserves relating to the writer’s habits, temperament, and mood.”1
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A. Earliest Publications A few hundred of Santayana’s letters have appeared, in whole or in part, in a number of periodicals and books. In the January 1924 issue of The American Mercury, in her article “Santayana at Cambridge,” Margaret Münsterberg included a letter from Santayana to her father, Hugo Münsterberg, Santayana’s colleague in the Harvard philosophy department. A letter to the editor of The Harvard Monthly appeared in the June 1937 issue of that periodical of whose editorial board Santayana had been a founding member. In his popular column of literary criticism, “As I Like It,” in Scribner’s Magazine of June 1936, Yale English professor William Lyon Phelps included letters he had received from Santayana. The 7 March 1936 issue of The Saturday Review of Literature contains a letter by Santayana commenting on The Last Puritan. Other periodicals containing letters include Commonweal (October 1952 to Cyril Clemens) and The Atlantic Monthly (August 1955, a selection made by Daniel Cory of letters not included in his 1955 Scribner’s edition). Several letters also appeared in various books, including those to William James in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (1938), and in the autobiographies of William Lyon Phelps, Autobiography with Letters, and Logan Pearsall Smith, Unforgotten Years, both published in 1939. Earlier biographical books about Santayana containing letters are George Washburne Howgate, George Santayana (1938), Mossie May Wadington Kirkwood, George Santayana: Saint of the Imagination (1961), and Bruno Lind, Vagabond Scholar (1962). Daniel Cory’s Santayana: The Later Years: A Portrait with Letters (1963) makes effective use of many letters to Cory in describing important events in Santayana’s life and the history of their friendship. Recipients of the letters, editors of periodicals, and authors of books on Santayana recognized the quality and interest of the letters and were desirous of putting them before the public, but it was not until 1955 that a book-length collection of Santayana’s letters became available.
B. The 1955 Scribner’s Edition of The Letters of George Santayana The first volume of Santayana’s letters was collected and edited by Daniel Cory and published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1955. The project for a collection of Santayana’s letters began in the autumn of 1952 when, in a 21 October letter to Daniel Cory, Scribner’s editor John Hall Wheelock suggested the undertaking of such a project.2 Cory agreed to edit the collection and write an introduction for it, and he and Wheelock worked together at the task of gathering the letters. The Scribner’s edition of The Letters of George Santayana is a handsome and well-made volume and an excellent selection of Santayana’s letters. Cory and Wheelock made every effort to present the 296
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Editorial Appendix
letters to 86 recipients (constituting a wide variety of persons) as Santayana wrote them. A deliberate effort was made to preserve Santayana’s spellings (American in the earlier letters and British in the later ones) and punctuation. Except for a few mistranscriptions from the holographs, the text of the 1955 edition is accurate (for a more detailed description of the Scribner’s edition of The Letters of George Santayana, see Letters, Book One, [MIT], 424–25).
C. The Comprehensive Edition of Santayana’s Letters: Origins and Development The project for a comprehensive edition of Santayana’s letters was originated by Daniel Cory (for a more detailed version of this section, see Letters, Book One, 426–28). His association with Santayana began in 1927, when the philosopher engaged the young man to serve as a literary secretary or assistant, reading his manuscripts and advising him on technical and compositional elements. This relationship—with many separations and interruptions—lasted until Santayana’s death, on 26 September 1952. Santayana bequeathed to Cory his remaining unpublished manuscripts—and the rights to his literary properties generally—and named him his literary executor. Cory placed Santayana’s manuscripts in four university libraries that were to become principal centers for Santayana manuscript materials: the Butler Library at Columbia University, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia. He also began editing and publishing the essays, poems, and plays not published during Santayana’s lifetime. In July 1971 Cory began to make arrangements with an American university press for a new and enlarged edition of Santayana’s correspondence. He then had on hand about 700 letters not included in the Scribner’s volume, and a new two-volume edition was envisaged. At the same time William Holzberger was working on a critical edition of Santayana’s poetry (published as The Complete Poems of George Santayana by the Bucknell University Press in 1979), and, while doing his research, he located and collected copies of approximately four hundred unpublished Santayana letters in twenty-one libraries. In 1972 Cory entered into a collaboration with Holzberger to produce the new edition. After Cory’s sudden and unexpected death later that year Margot Cory succeeded her husband as literary executor and approved the idea of continuing work on the letters edition. Early in 1977 Holzberger joined the project initiated by members of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy to produce a critical edition of all of Santayana’s writings. Subsequently, it was
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decided to incorporate the letters edition into the Critical Edition of The Works of George Santayana.
III. Textual Principles and Editorial Procedures for The Letters of George Santayana A. Collection of the Letters The goal of the editors has been to identify and collect all of George Santayana’s correspondence for publication in The Works of George Santayana. Although substantial numbers of his letters have been found, many more are missing, some known to be destroyed, and others unlocated (for a list of unlocated letters, see pages 545–48). The search for Santayana’s letters, begun by Daniel Cory in the early 1950s and ongoing by the present editors, has resulted in the location of more than three thousand pieces of correspondence. These include letters, notes, postcards, and a few telegrams and cablegrams; the texts of all of these are contained in this edition. Daniel Cory’s method of locating and collecting the letters was to publish advertisements in leading journals and reviews, to visit libraries known to contain principal collections of Santayana manuscript materials, and to write to individuals who he believed might have corresponded with Santayana. Later, in the 1970s, William Holzberger consulted both the first and second editions of American Literary Manuscripts: A Checklist of Holdings in Academic, Historical, and Public Libraries, Museums, and Authors’ Homes in the United States 3 to generate a list of institutions reported as holding Santayana manuscripts. Letters of inquiry were sent to libraries at sixty-three institutions. In addition, fresh advertisements for Santayana letters were run in a number of leading literary publications, including The Times Literary Supplement (London), The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and American Literature. Letters of inquiry were sent to more than fifty individuals believed to have received correspondence from Santayana. Also, scholars familiar with this project have kept an eye out for Santayana letters in the course of their researches, and this has resulted in the acquisition of several valuable pieces of correspondence that otherwise might not have been acquired. This continuous effort to locate Santayana letters in the libraries or files of institutions and in the possession of private individuals has resulted in the location and acquisition of over two thousand more letters than the original thousand that Daniel Cory and John Hall Wheelock had accumulated at the time the selection was made for the 1955 Scribner’s edition. The title of the present edition, The Letters of George Santayana, is the same as that of Cory’s selected edition. It is the best title for such a collection because it suggests comprehensiveness without implying absolute completeness.
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Although every effort has been made to locate and acquire all of Santayana’s letters, that remains a goal impossible to achieve. We know that Santayana himself destroyed the letters he had written to his mother, and he made references to other letters that remain unlocated. However, this comprehensive edition is as complete as many years of work can make it, and it certainly represents the principal corpus of Santayana’s correspondence.
B. Arrangement of the Letters The letters are arranged chronologically, from earliest (to Susan and Josephine in 1868) to latest (to Daniel Cory, 3 August 1952), a period of about eighty-three years. This chronological progression, together with division of the letters into books of approximately equal size, constitutes the sole organizing principle for the edition. Except for the period covered in the first two books (1868–1920), Santayana’s history is not clearly marked either by a sequence of periodic residences or dominating events. Therefore, any division of Santayana’s life and letters into episodes seemed artificial and undesirable. Because of the gap between the earliest extant letter and the next earliest one (21 August 1882) and the fact that, as would be expected, fewer of the early letters have survived, the first book covers a much longer period than subsequent books. The organization of the letters in Volume V of The Works of George Santayana is as follows: Book One, [1868]–1909; Book Two, 1910–1920; Book Three, 1921–1927; Book Four, 1928–1932; Book Five, 1933–1936; Book Six, 1937–1940; Book Seven, 1941–1947; and Book Eight, 1948–1952.
C. Transcription of the Letters 1. Transcribing the Texts from Photocopies of the Original Holograph Letters In the case of correspondence the original handwritten document (holograph manuscript) is generally the only form of the text (the boards of this book provide a typical example of Santayana’s letters). Since the editors aim to provide the reader with a literal, or diplomatic, text their task lies in correctly reading and transcribing this copy-text first and then in assembling and reproducing the letters critically in printed form. Wherever possible, exact transcriptions were made from photocopies of the original holograph manuscripts. Excepting 155 letters for which no photocopies of Santayana’s holograph could be found, all transcriptions were made by members of the editorial staff of the critical edition. The letters for which original holographs have not been located are noted as ‘(MS: Unknown)’ in the headnote.4 The textual notes contain more specific information about the actual source for the letter.
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The essential principle guiding transcription was to record everything that Santayana wrote on the holograph. This meant that any revisions that Santayana made—cancellations and insertions—were noted.
2. Plain-Text Transcription This edition of Santayana’s correspondence is a “plain text” edition. As the editors of Mark Twain’s letters (1988–) explain, “plain text” stands in contrast to the two principal types of transcriptions of texts: “clear text” and “genetic text.”5 Transcriptions in “clear text” are devoid of editorial symbols; information regarding authorial revisions is provided in footnotes or in appropriate sections of the editorial appendix. Transcriptions in “genetic text,” however, through the use of arbitrary symbols (such as angle brackets and arrows), profess to show any and all revisions that the author made on the holograph. The concept of “plain text” is to represent authorial revisions by signs more natural and less arbitrary, thus making a clearer and more immediately intelligible text for the reader. The editors, by means of plain-text transcriptions, have attempted to represent the original holograph letters as nearly as an efficient printed format will allow. The goal has been to enable the reader to approximate the experience of reading the original holograph letters. To this end, the texts of the letters have not been altered: misspelled words are left uncorrected; no changes are made in grammar; and (except in rare instances, where meaning would otherwise be obscured) punctuation is neither altered, added, nor deleted. These occurrences are listed in the textual notes and marked ‘[sic ] ’. A “plain-text” transcription uses “type-identical” signs which are essentially identical with their handwritten counterparts. Cancellations: single-character words, or single characters within words, cancelled on the holograph letter are indicated by slash marks. See 20 May 1911 to Charles Augustus Strong (‘probably/ e’) where Santayana wrote the ‘e’ Nin over the ‘y’, or 10 November 1913 to Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller (‘— Eighteen’) where ‘Eigh’ was written over ‘Nin’. Cancellation of two or more characters as words, word fragments, or within words is indicated by a horizontal rule through the cancelled matter. See examples at 31 December 1912 fake false’) where ‘lse’ was written over ‘ke’, at 11 to Mary Williams Winslow (‘— August 1915 to Horace Meyer Kallen (‘their — there’) where the ‘re’ was written over the ‘ir’, and at 27 August 1911 to Mary Potter Bush (‘Rei —ieber’) where ‘ie’ was written over ‘ei’. Insertions: single characters, word fragments, words, or phrases inserted on the letter are indicated by the use of inferior carets. See for example the letter of 29 January 1912 to Susan Sturgis de Sastre (‘dinner, a play, a musicale’), ^ ^ or 4 August 1915 to Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller (‘with you r friends’), or ^^ that of 18 January 1910 to Charles Scribner’s Sons (‘make any great ^ ^
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changes’). Both linear and marginal insertions are indicated in this way, with marginal insertions noted in the textual note. Insertions above cancellations: words written above cancellations are indicated by a combination of the horizontal rule and the inferior carets (‘think — believe ’, 30 October 1917 to Roy Wood Sellars) and this is indicated in the ^ ^ textual note. Cancellations within Insertions: are indicated by the combined use of slashes or horizontal rules and inferior carets (27 February 1917 to Charles them ’). Scribner’s Sons, ‘to correct — ^ ^ It should be remembered that although plain-text transcriptions, through the employment of type-identical signs, bear a greater resemblance to the original handwritten letters than do transcriptions using the traditional editorial symbols, they are not in fact type facsimiles of the holograph letters. Plain-text transcriptions do not reproduce the original lineation, pagination, or any nonverbal characteristics of the manuscript unless the author intended them to bear meaning. (The purpose of plain text is not to reproduce the holograph letters pictorially, in the way of facsimiles.) The plain-text transcriptions of Santayana’s letters in this edition are intended to represent the original holograph letters in type in such a way that any revisions are immediately identifiable and the texts completely legible. Other signs used in this edition for transcribing Santayana’s correspondence include: —[ —] Broken brackets: indicate matter bracketed by Santayana on the holograph. [ ] Editorial brackets: supply text the editors think necessary for sense or describe textual conditions (the latter signaled by italic type). * or x Asterisks or superscript ‘x’: designate Santayana’s footnotes. 1 Superscript numerals: indicate editorial footnotes.
D. Editing the Letters All of Santayana’s letters that could be located are included in this edition and the texts are represented in their original form. Transcriptions of the letters’ texts received two initial collations against photocopies of the holograph originals to insure that the text of Santayana’s letter had been duplicated exactly, including any errors (in spelling or punctuation) or omissions. Although the editors’ aim is to publish the original document unchanged, some emendations are made in the copy-text. With certain exceptions all corrections and alterations of words or spelling or puctuation are recorded in the textual notes. The standardizations that were introduced during the editorial process following the exact transcription of the letters’ texts reflect attempts to recreate unusual arrangements of handwritten text such as vertically added lines in the left margins of letters (see, for example, the letters of 16 May 1911 to Susan Sturgis de
Textual Commentary
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Sastre, ‘I am pining for a season [across] at Madrid,’ and 1 December 1914 to Charles Augustus Strong, ‘do open it and regard it [across page one] as your own.’), and also pertain to those described below. Accidentally repeated words are removed from the text, and this emendation is noted in the textual notes. Santayana very often did not close a paragraph with final punctuation, particularly at the end of a letter. This has not been altered, and since it is so common, the editors chose not to note every instance in the textual notes.
1. Santayana’s Spelling Santayana generally preferred British spelling forms, although American spellings are common in his early letters and manuscripts. No effort has been made to standardize spelling; words are reproduced as Santayana wrote them. He was a good speller, and only rarely misspelled a word. (A curious exception is his repeated misspelling of the word ‘parliament’, in which he regularly metathesizes the ‘ia’ to ‘parlaiment’.) Notwithstanding Santayana’s competency in spelling, one of the idiosyncracies of his handwriting makes it generaly impossible to distinguish between ‘s’ and ‘z’ in words that contain the letter sequence ‘is’ or ‘iz’. Whenever the editors could not ascertain from his hand whether Santayana meant ‘s’ or ‘z’, they rendered the spelling of the word as he would have intended it. The spelling they provide reflects Santayana’s unambiguous use of the same word elsewhere and the rules that British scholarly presses observed at the time (Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford, by Horace Hart, nineteenth edition, 1905, and thirtieth edition, 1936).
2. Santayana’s Punctuation The letters are generally conscientiously punctuated. But certain marks of punctuation used by Santayana have always troubled his editors, partly because of the difficulty of determining the specific mark of punctuation represented in his handwriting, and also because of certain idiosyncratic usages. For instance, Santayana’s colon and semicolon are frequently indistinguishable. That, of course, is characteristic of many writers’ handwritten manuscripts; but sometimes Santayana also used the colon where the semicolon is generally called for (as shown in his published writings for which he had read and approved proofs). Daniel Cory said that Santayana once told him that this unorthodox use of the colon was due to a habit of “thinking in opposition.” The procedure of the present editors has been to read a colon where clearly indicated on the holograph letter and commensurate with Santayana’s habitual usage; but where the punctuation mark is unclear on the holograph and is situated where a semicolon would be standard usage, we have read the mark as a semicolon. (Thus, our practice sometimes differs from Cory’s, in Letters
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[1955] and The Later Years [1963], where he has in certain instances read colon and we have read semicolon.) One or two other punctuation problems have bedeviled Santayana’s editors. Santayana’s period frequently resembles a hyphen, and it has been read, by Daniel Cory and Bruno Lind, as a dash. Santayana’s dashes, however, are generally longer than this “sliding period,” which perhaps resulted from writing rapidly with an old-fashioned holder-and-nib-type pen. Santayana also appears to vacillate in the letters between the British custom of placing on-line punctuation either inside or outside of quotation marks depending upon whether or not the on-line punctuation is part of the meaning of the matter quoted, and the American practice of uniformly placing it inside except for semicolons and colons, which are always placed outside the quotation marks. In every clear instance, we place the on-line punctuation either inside or outside the quotation marks, according to where it occurs on the holograph letter. However, when—as often happens—the on-line punctuation falls directly beneath the quotation marks, we place it inside the quotation marks. Except for this practice, no effort has been made to standardize the form.
3. Letters in Languages Other than English The comprehensive edition of Santayana’s letters contains forty-six items of correspondence by Santayana written in a language other than English. Santayana wrote in Spanish to members of the family of his half sister, Susan (her husband, and her stepsons and their wives in Ávila). There is also a formal letter in Spanish to Miguel de Unamuno. There is one letter in Italian to Dino Rigacci of 29 April 1945. Letters written in a language other than English appear in the original language of composition in the letters text, with a fairly literal English translation given in a footnote.
4. Recipients, Provenances, Addresses, and Dates A headnote is added to each letter, indicating the recipient, date and place of composition, and manuscript location (typically giving the name of the institution of higher learning if it houses one collection with correspondence by Santayana; but giving the name of a particular library or collection if the institution serves as repository of Santayana materials in more than one place):
To Mary Williams Winslow 2 April 1912 • Madrid, Spain
(MS: Houghton)
A key to the manuscript location is found in the List of Manuscript Locations. ‘MS: Houghton’ means that the original holograph letter is in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. The textual notes give more information about
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particular collections. If the correspondence is a postcard or telegram, that will be indicated following ‘MS’.
To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 15 April 1910 • Madison, Wisconsin
(MS postcard: Sanchez)
Also, an effort has been made to identify many, if not all, recipients with short biographical footnotes. Dates editorially supplied are placed in square brackets, uncertain dates being followed by a question mark. When the letter is written on printed stationery, the printed address is included in small capitals. Printed postcard captions are handled the same as printed stationery (SMALL CAPITALS) with no distinction being made. No account is taken of envelopes, except when used to establish the date of a letter, the recipient thereof, or Santayana’s address. If a letter is dated by a postmark that date is given in the header followed by ‘[postmark]’.
5. Signatures The usual signature on the letters is the writer’s standard ‘GSantayana’. The early form of his signature was ‘G. Santayana’ (as found, for instance, on the holograph of the letter to C. A. Strong of 26 February 1917). Later, he dropped the period following the first initial, carrying the stroke from the G to join the first letter of his last name.
E. Editorial Footnotes to the Letters The policy of the comprehensive edition of Santayana’s letters regarding annotation is essentially to limit explanatory footnotes to supplying factual information likely to make the letter more intelligible or meaningful to the reader. However, some effort has been made in the case of letters dealing with events of great historical importance (e.g., the First and Second World Wars, or the Spanish civil war) to provide historical information that will help the reader place the letter in the historical context and for that reason perhaps better understand it. This principle of a fuller understanding has also informed our practice in regard to providing translations of foreign words or expressions in footnotes. Santayana read and spoke several languages, and he makes frequent use of words, phrases, or quotations in the letters from these languages, including Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. In order to facilitate the fullest possible understanding of the letters, we have included translations of foreign terms and phrases in the footnotes except in those instances where the foreign term or phrase is very commonplace or its meaning com-
434
Editorial Appendix
pletely obvious. English translations of titles of books or articles in foreign languages are also provided in the footnotes if the work was translated. Footnotes composed by Daniel Cory that provide special information are included, followed by his bracketed initials ‘[D. C.]’. We have made fairly extensive use of information about Santayana’s life supplied by Daniel Cory in his book, Santayana: The Later Years: A Portrait With Letters (New York: George Braziller, 1963), frequently quoting directly from the book in footnotes. The procedures for identifying persons mentioned in Santayana’s letters follow a standard routine. Full identification in the footnotes occurs at the first mention of the name. Subsequent occurrences of the name are noted in the index which allows for cross-referencing. Names are first checked in authoritative dictionaries and encyclopedias (including the Dictionary of American Biography, the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Oxford Companion to American Literature, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, and the Quinquennial Catalogue of the Officers and Graduates of Harvard University, 1636–1925) and also in the “WorldCat” database of “FirstSearch” in the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). Leads to more specialized literature are followed, which in turn provide the bases for the identification in the footnotes to the letters. In some instances no reference could be found, which is noted as “unidentified” in the footnotes and index. Lists of errata in Santayana’s published works, included by him in, or with, letters to his publishers, are included in the text of the letter. Such information may be useful to the reader of these letters in correcting his or her own copies of Santayana’s works. W.G.H. H.J.S. M.S.W.
Notes 1
G. Thomas Tanselle, “The Editing of Historical Documents,” Studies in Bibliography 31 (1978): 48. 2 Wheelock to Cory, 21 October 1952, Scribner Archives, Princeton University Library. 3 Edited by Professor J. Albert Robbins, Chairman of the Committee on Manuscript Holdings, American Literature Section, Modern Language Association of America (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1977). The editors are grateful for the kind assistance provided by Professor Robbins in 1977 before the second edition of American Literary Manuscripts had gone to press. 4 Among the letters for which no photocopies of the holograph could be located are twelve letters to Daniel Cory which Margot Cory copied by hand but the holograph originals of which are not among the rest of Santayana’s letters to Cory in Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. These are dated 18 Nov 1927, 13 Jun 1933, 2 Sep 1933, 5 Dec 1934, 7 Dec 1934, 9 Jun 1935, 26 Sep 1935, 20 Sep 1936, 14 Oct 1937, 30 Apr 1938, 11 May 1938, and 18 May 1938. Similarly, we have not been
Textual Commentary
435
able to locate the original holograph of the letter to Cory of 13 Sep 1950 and have had to transcribe the extract from it printed in Santayana: The Later Years (1963). 5 Mark Twain’s Letters, ed. Edgar Marquess Branch, Michael B. Frank, and Kenneth M. Sanderson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), Vol. 1, xxvi-xxvii, and xlv, footnote 1.
Short-Title List The following short-title list includes the works most frequently cited in the footnotes. Primary Sources Beauty The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: A. and C. Black, 1896. Critical edition edited by William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp Jr. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988. (Footnotes refer to critical edition page numbers.) Character Character and Opinion in the United States: With Reminiscences of William James and Josiah Royce and Academic Life in America. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Constable and Co. Ltd.; Toronto: McLeod, 1920. Complete Poems The Complete Poems of George Santayana: A Critical Edition. Edited by William G. Holzberger. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1979. Dialogues Dialogues in Limbo. London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1925; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926. Doctrine Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: J. M. Dent & Sons Limited, 1913. Dominations Dominations and Powers: Reflections on Liberty, Society, and Government. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Constable and Co. Ltd, 1951. Egotism Egotism in German Philosophy. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915; London and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons Limited, 1916. Essays Little Essays: Drawn From the Writings of George Santayana by Logan Pearsall Smith, With the Collaboration of the Author. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1920. Genteel The Genteel Tradition at Bay. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: “The Adelphi,” 1931. Gospels The Idea of Christ in the Gospels; or, God in Man: A Critical Essay. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; Toronto: Saunders, 1946. Hermit A Hermit of Carmel and Other Poems. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901; London: R. Brimley Johnson, 1902. Interpretations Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Black, 1900. Critical edition edited by William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp Jr. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989. (Footnotes refer to critical edition page numbers.)
438
Editorial Appendix
Letters The Letters of George Santayana. Edited by Daniel Cory. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1955. Lucifer “Lucifer, A Prelude.” In Sonnets and Other Verses. Cambridge and Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1894. With changes becomes Act I of Lucifer: A Theological Tragedy. Chicago and New York: Herbert S. Stone, 1899. Obiter Obiter Scripta: Lectures, Essays and Reviews. Edited by Justus Buchler and Benjamin Schwartz. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1936. Persons Persons and Places: Fragments of Autobiography. Critical edition edited by William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp Jr. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986. Background Span Host
Persons and Places: The Background of My Life. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1944. The Middle Span. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1945; London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1947. My Host the World. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Cresset Press, 1953.
Platonism Platonism and the Spiritual Life. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1927. Poems Poems: Selected by the Author and Revised. London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1922; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923. Poets Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1910. Puritan The Last Puritan. London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1935; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936; Critical edition edited by William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp Jr. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994. (Footnotes refer to critical edition page numbers.) Realms Realms of Being. Four volumes. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1927-1940. Essence Matter Truth Spirit
The Realm of Essence: Book First of Realms of Being, 1927. The Realm of Matter: Book Second of Realms of Being, 1930. The Realm of Truth: Book Third of Realms of Being. Scribner’s, 1938; Constable and Toronto: Macmillan Company, 1937. The Realm of Spirit: Book Fourth of Realms of Being, 1940.
Realms (1 vol.) Realms of Being. One-volume edition, with a new introduction by the author. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942.
Short-Title List
439
Reason The Life of Reason: or, the Phases of Human Progress. Five volumes. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Constable and Co. Ltd, 1905–1906. Common Sense Society Religion Art Science
Introduction and Reason in Common Sense. Volume 1, 1905. Reason in Society. Volume 2, 1905. Reason in Religion. Volume 3, 1905. Reason in Art. Volume 4, 1905. Reason in Science. Volume 5, 1906.
Scepticism Scepticism and Animal Faith: Introduction to a System of Philosophy. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1923. Soliloquies Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1922. Sonnets Kimball, 1894.
Sonnets and Other Verses. Cambridge and Chicago: Stone and
Testament The Poet’s Testament: Poems and Two Plays. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953. Truce Revised limited second edition published as Lucifer, or the Heavenly Truce: A Theological Tragedy. Cambridge, MA: Dunster House; London: W. Jackson, 1924. Turns Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy: Five Essays. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933.
Other Works Harvard Morison, Samuel Eliot. Three Centuries of Harvard 1636–1936. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1936. Philosophy Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods (later The Journal of Philosophy). New York: Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Santayana McCormick, John. George Santayana: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. Shakespeare The Works of William Shakespeare. Edited by William A. Wright, 9 vols. New York: AMS Press, 1968 rpt. of 1891–1893 edition. Years Cory, Daniel. Santayana: The Later Years: A Portrait with Letters. New York: George Braziller, 1963.
Textual Notes Numbers on the left (i.e. 5.8) refer to Critical Edition pages and lines (Volume V, Book Two). Line numbers refer to the text of the letters themselves. No heading or editorial footnotes are included in the count. The virgule ( / ) between words on the right of the bullet indicates a line break in the copytext.
[1910 or 1911] • Josephine Preston Peabody Marks • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, Josephine Preston Peabody Papers, by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
[January 1910] • William Bayard Cutting Sr. • [Cambridge, MA]
Copy-text: MS unlocated. Published version is copy-text. Previous publication: Iris Origo, Images and Shadows: Part of a Life (London: John Murray Ltd.), 72, excerpt. Emendations and textual notes: none.
18 January 1910 • Charles Scribner’s Sons • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, Author Files I, Box 130 of the Scribner Archives, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
17 February 1910 • Wendell T. Bush • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, Journal of Philosophy Records, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
5.8
in it • [‘t’ over ‘n’] ——
23 February 1910 • William Morton Payne • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, William James Collection (#6964), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
5.18 6.4
half-written • half- / written afternoon • after- / noon
2:442
Editorial Appendix
1 March 1910 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: Letters, 94–96. Emendations and textual notes:
7.16 7.21 7.21 7.30 7.31 7.34
semi-rich • semi- / rich had has • [‘s’ over ‘d’] — persueded • [sic] there • [sic] ch/oach • [‘o’ over ‘h’] Sometimes • Some- / times
7 March 1910 • William Morton Payne • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, The Newberry Library, Chicago. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
9.14
(—— Wednes Wednes ————— Wednes- day) • [‘Wednes-’ above ‘—— —————’]
^
^
16 March 1910 • Charles Augustus Strong • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 91, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
10.6 10.30 10.31
dare say • dare / say outside • out- / side anything • any- / thing
6 April 1910 • William Morton Payne • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, The Newberry Library, Chicago. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
15 April 1910 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Madison, Wisconsin
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
12.5
summerlike • summer- / like
18 April 1910 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Madison, Wisconsin
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: Letters, 96–97. Emendations and textual notes:
12.17 13.4
store-house • store- / house usual I • usual / I [sic]
Textual Notes
2:443
12 June 1910 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • At sea
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
5 July 1910 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 91, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
14.3
Aix-les-Bains • Aix-les- / Bains
16 July 1910 [postmark] • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Aix-les-Bains, France
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
29 July 1910 • John Francis Stanley Russell • Ávila, Spain
Copy-text: MS unlocated. Published version is copy-text. Previous publication: Letters, 97–99. Emendations and textual notes:
15.14 16.9 17.15
Die … Intelligenz.” • Die … Intelligenz.” [sic] toto coelo • toto coelo GSantayana • [not present]
3 August 1910 • Charles Augustus Strong • Ávila, Spain
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 91, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
18.2 18.27
Mahommed’s • [sic] to us • [in margin]
^
^
8 September 1910 • Charles Augustus Strong • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 91, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
19.17 20.1 20.4
spinter • [sic] some some —— ———’] —— ——— sum • [‘sum’ above ‘s ^ ^ is— was • [‘wa’ over ‘is] —
2:444
Editorial Appendix
24 October 1910 • Arthur Davison Ficke • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Previous publication: Letters, 99–100. Emendations and textual notes:
21.3
hypercritical • hyper- / critical
27 October 1910 • William Roscoe Thayer • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, The Papers of William Roscoe Thayer (bMS Am 1081), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
18 November 1910 • Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien • Cambridge, MA Copy-text: MS, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. Original in envelope pasted in O’Brien’s copy of Hermit. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
22.4
of verses • [sic]
3 December 1910 • Abbott Lawrence Lowell • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, Lowell Papers, courtesy of the Harvard University Archives. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
22.17 22.20 22.21
however • how- / ever self-indulgent • self- / indulgent without • with- / out
5 December 1910 [postmark] • [Sara or Grace] Norton • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, Norton Family Papers (bMS Am 1088.1), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
20 December 1910 • Charles Augustus Strong • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 91, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
24.1
Dec. 1/20 • [‘2’ over ‘1’]
23 December 1910 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: Letters, 100–101. Emendations and textual notes: none.
Textual Notes 26
2:445
December 1910 • Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. Original in envelope pasted in O’Brien’s copy of Hermit. Previous publication: Letters, 101–2. Emendations and textual notes:
26.3 26.4
Stickney-Moody-Lodge • Stickney-Moody- / Lodge gun-powder • gun- / powder
[1911] • Upton Beall Sinclair • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, Sinclair Manuscripts, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. Previous publication: Sinclair, My Lifetime in Letters (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1960), 100. Emendations and textual notes: none.
2 January 1911 • Wendell T. Bush • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
27.9
anything • any- / thing
15 January 1911 • Bertrand Arthur William Russell • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, The Bertrand Russell Archives, McMaster University Library. Previous publication: The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, vol. 1 (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1971), 330. Emendations and textual notes: none.
February 1911 • Andrew Joseph Onderdonk • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS unlocated. Photocopy at the University of Kentucky Library is copy-text. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
12 February 1911 • Charles Augustus Strong • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 91, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
30.27 30.27
spinter • [sic] revisit • re- / visit
22 February 1911 • Mr. Young • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
2:446
Editorial Appendix
1 March [1911] • Mary Williams Winslow • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (MS Am 1352), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: Letters, 102–3. Emendations and textual notes: none.
9 March 1911 • Cale Young Rice • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, Department of Library Special Collections, Manuscripts, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
10 March 1911 • The National Institute of Arts and Letters • Cambridge, MA Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers, Archives of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
25 April [1911] • [Sara or Grace] Norton • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, Norton Family Papers (bMS Am 1088.1), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
29 April 1911 • Charles Augustus Strong • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 91, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
35.30 35.30 35.31
—This [ is a secret! —] • [in margin] ^ ^ there —— ———— their • [‘ir’ over ‘re’] c/Commencement • [‘C’ over ‘c’]
16 May 1911 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: Letters, 103–4. Emendations and textual notes:
36.20 37.20 37.32
remarkably/ e • [‘e’ over ‘y’] 1–st Should • [sic] mineral vegetable • [sic]
20 May 1911 • Charles Augustus Strong • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 91, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
Textual Notes 39.6 39.11 39.20
2:447
beforehand • before- / hand anything • any- / thing probably/ e • [‘e’ over ‘y’]
23 May 1911 [postmark] • Herbert Jacob Seligmann • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. MA 4478. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
40.4 40.5
have n’t • have / n’t [sic] half-year • half- / year
1 June 1911 • Conrad Hensler Slade • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS unlocated. Published version is copy-text. Previous publication: Letters, 105–6. Emendations and textual notes:
40.14 41.1–2 41.26
June 1st • June 1st October 1st • October 1st GSantayana • [not present]
24 June 1911 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Pueblo, CO
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
41.28
Colord/ ado • [‘a’ over ‘d’]
1 July 1911 • Horace Meyer Kallen • San Francisco, CA
Copy-text: MS, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
43.4 43.5
sea mountains and parks • [sic] is are • [‘are’ over ‘is’] —
2 August 1911 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • San Francisco, CA
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
10 August 1911 • Charles Augustus Strong • San Francisco, CA
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 91, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
44.21 44.23
delighted climate • [sic] acamedic • [sic]
2:448
Editorial Appendix
15 August 1911 • Porter Garnett • San Francisco, CA
Copy-text: MS unlocated. Typed transcription (Banc Mss C-H 118) reproduced courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, is copy-text. Previous publication: Letters, 106–7. Emendations and textual notes:
45.14 45.15 45.25 46.8–9 46.22 46.23
Black Knight and • Black and cheers • cheers in which • is which understanding • under- / standing sincerely • sincerely, GSantayana • G. Santayana
20 August 1911 • Charles Augustus Strong • San Francisco, CA
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 91, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
22 August 1911 • Charles Augustus Strong • San Francisco, CA
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 91, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
47.27 47.29 48.9
boulevard boulevard —————’] ———— ————— Avenue • [‘Avenue’ above ‘———— ^ ^ there — ———— to that • [‘to that’ over ‘there’] would n’t • would / n’t [sic]
27 August 1911 • Mary Potter Bush • San Francisco, CA
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
49.7 49.9 49.10 49.12 49.17
/f left • [‘l’ over ‘f’] Rei ——ieber • [‘ie’ over ‘ei’] witticisms Several • witticisms / Several [sic] However • How- / ever meantime • mean- / time
6 September 1911 • Henry James III • Chicago, IL
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (bMS Am 1092.10), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
50.4 50.15–16 50.19
m / to • [‘to’ over ‘m’] correspondance • [sic] him / s • [‘s’ over ‘m’]
Textual Notes
2:449
10 September 1911 • Mr. Young • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
13 September 1911 • Charles Augustus Strong • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 91, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
51.22
However • How- / ever
5 October 1911 • Henry James III • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (bMS Am 1092.10), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
14 October 1911 • Sydney Allan Friede • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
20 October 1911 • Mary Potter Bush • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
54.13 54.15 54.23
Ma/ontreal • [‘o’ over ‘a’] Meantime • Mean- / time overlaying • over- / laying
7 November 1911 • Henry James III • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (bMS Am 1092.10), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
7 November 1911 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: Letters, 108–10. Emendations and textual notes:
56.17–18 56.20
January 27 • [sic] 1912 / 3 • [‘3’ over ‘2’]
2:450
Editorial Appendix
56.25–26 56.28 56.35 57.1 57.12
twenty four dollars • twenty / four dollars [sic] grandfather • grand- / father something • some- / thing unread • un- / read than/t • [‘t’ over ‘n’]
16 November 1911 • Charles Augustus Strong • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 91, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
58.4 58.5 58.15 58.19 58.24 58.28–29 58.31 58.37
head-quarters • head- / quarters home-like • home- / like inviting to • [sic] it the despatch • [‘the despatch’ above ‘it — —’] ^ ^ however • how- / ever sake quiet • sake / quiet [sic] twenty five years • [sic] —by —— with • [‘with’ above ‘by ———’]
^
^
19 November 1911 • Horace Meyer Kallen • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
59.24 60.13 60.16
whole-heartedly • whole- / heartedly McGilvary • [sic] ill-managed • ill- / managed
24 November 1911 • Mary Potter Bush • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
61.3
anyway • any- / way
1 December 1911 [postmark] • Mary Potter Bush • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
6 December 1911 • William Rothenstein • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, Papers of Sir William Rothenstein (bMS Eng 1148), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
Textual Notes
2:451
7 December 1911 • [Cambridge Historical Society] • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers in the Radin Collection, Library of W. Hugh Peal, University of Kentucky Libraries, Lexington. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
7 December 1911 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: Letters, 110–12. Emendations and textual notes:
62.17 63.5 63.7 63.13 63.27 63.30 63.38 64.3 64.4
debanandote • [sic] anything • any- / thing ultra-British • ultra- / British otherwise • other- / wise earth-quake • earth- / quake self-preserving • self- / preserving everything • every- / thing loathsome • loath- / some anything • any- / thing
12 December 1911 • Horace Meyer Kallen • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
25 December 1911 • Ellen, George, and Josephine Sturgis • Cambridge, MA Copy-text: MS, Sturgis Family Papers, by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
65.5
wheree’er • [sic]
29 December 1911 • Horace Meyer Kallen • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
65.21
McGilvary • [sic]
2 January 1912 • John Francis Stanley Russell • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS unlocated. Published version is copy-text. Previous publication: Letters, 112. Emendations and textual notes:
66.1–2
COLONIAL CLUB
/ CAMBRIDGE • COLONIAL CLUB, /
CAMBRIDGE.
66.4 66.12
Russell • Russell, independance • [sic]
2:452 66.17 66.19 66.20 66.20 66.21 66.22
Editorial Appendix liberty … compatible? • liberty … compatible? February 1st • February 1st C /o • c/o Co • Co. ever • ever, GSantayana • [not present]
17 January 1912 • Mary Potter Bush • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
66.27
somewhere • some- / where
21 January 1912 • Charles Augustus Strong • Cambridge, MA
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 92, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
67.22 67.31 68.2
Höffding • [sic] be please • [‘pl’ over ‘be’] — pre-paid • pre- / paid
29 January 1912 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • At sea
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: Letters, 113. Emendations and textual notes:
68.11 69.9
Plymoth —uth • [‘uth’ over ‘th’] someone • some- / one
6 February 1912 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Windsor, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: Letters, 114–15. Emendations and textual notes: none.
7 February 1912 • Charles Augustus Strong • Windsor, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 92, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
71.11
somewhat • some- / what
Textual Notes
2:453
8 February 1912 • Bertrand Arthur William Russell • Windsor, England
Copy-text: MS, The Bertrand Russell Archives, McMaster University Library. Previous publication: The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, vol. 2 (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1971), 54–55. Emendations and textual notes: none.
12 February 1912 • Charles Augustus Strong • London, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 92, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
73.8 73.10 73.25 73.29
surprising short • [sic] pre-disposition • pre- / disposition bath-room • bath- / room rearranging • re- / arranging
14 February 1912 • George Herbert Palmer • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, Special Collections, Wellesley College Library, Wellesley, Massachusetts. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
74.18 74.23
half-years • half- / years
/i entrusted • [‘e’ over ‘i’]
20 February 1912 • Isabella Stewart Gardner • London, England
Copy-text: MS, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archives, Boston. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
23 February 1912 • George Herbert Palmer • London, England
Copy-text: MS, Special Collections, Wellesley College Library, Wellesley, Massachusetts. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
26 February 1912 • George Herbert Palmer • London, England
Copy-text: MS, Special Collections, Wellesley College Library, Wellesley, Massachusetts. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
28 February [1912] • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
2:454
Editorial Appendix
29 February 1912 • Charles Augustus Strong • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 92, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
78.21 79.11 79.13 79.17 79.22 79.24
has have • [‘v’ over ‘s’] ——— Philosophy”,/! • [‘!’ over ‘,’] sometimes • some- / times Sclaven • [sic] Berenson’s • [sic] grass-widowerhood • grass- / widowerhood
12 March 1912 • Charles Augustus Strong • Ávila, Spain
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 92, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
80.20 80.21
April /230 • [‘3’ over ‘2’] there —— ——— their • [‘ir’ over ‘re’]
20 March 1912 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Madrid, Spain
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
81.30
anything • any- / thing
22 March 1912 • George Herbert Palmer • Madrid, Spain
Copy-text: MS, Special Collections, Wellesley College Library, Wellesley, Massachusetts. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
82.6 82.10
is man • [sic] melting-pot • melting- / pot
29 March 1912 [postmark] • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Madrid, Spain
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
83.3
there —— ——— their • [‘ir’ over ‘re’]
2 April 1912 • Mary Williams Winslow • Madrid, Spain
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (MS Am 1352), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: Letters, 115–17. Emendations and textual notes:
83.17 83.18
/t Tower • [‘T’ over ‘t’] towpath • tow- / path
Textual Notes 83.24 84.24 84.38
2:455
imagining • [sic] difficiencies • [sic] camp-followers • camp- / followers
8 April 1912 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Madrid, Spain
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: Letters, 117–18. Emendations and textual notes:
85.16 86.14 86.16
however • how- / ever today • to- / day seen, Don’t • [sic]
8 April 1912 [postmark] • Charles Augustus Strong • Madrid, Spain
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 92, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
24 April 1912 • Charles Augustus Strong • Ávila, Spain
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 92, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
6 June 1912 • Abbott Lawrence Lowell • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Lowell Papers, courtesy of the Harvard University Archives. Previous publication: Letters, 119–20. Emendations and textual notes: none.
10 June 1912 • George Edward Moore • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, University Library, Cambridge University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
90.1
l’Observatoito —re • [‘re’ over ‘to’]
12 June 1912 • Charles Augustus Strong • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 92, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
90.11 90.23
ae/ lso • [‘l’ over ‘e’] petits-blues • [sic]
2:456
Editorial Appendix
19 June 1912 • Charles Augustus Strong • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 92, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
91.25 91.29 92.13
For as existence • For as / as existence other black ’] other black gray • [‘gray’ above ‘—— ———————— —— ———————— ^ ^ /shaven’t • [‘h’ over ‘s’]
24 July 1912 [postmark] • Charles Augustus Strong • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS postcard, Box 6, Folder 92, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
2 August 1912 • George Herbert Palmer • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Special Collections, Wellesley College Library, Wellesley, Massachusetts. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
94.31 94.37
was were • [‘ere’ over ‘as’] — runs/ ning • [‘ning’ over ‘s’]
4 August 1912 • Charles Augustus Strong • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 92, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
3 September 1912 • Charles Augustus Strong • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 92, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
5 September 1912 [postmark] • Robert Shaw Sturgis • Milan, Italy
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
9 September 1912 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Bologna, Italy
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
98.13
fortnight • fort- / night
Textual Notes
2:457
12 September 1912 • Charles Augustus Strong • Naples, Italy
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 92, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
24 September 1912 [postmark] • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Cava dei Tirreni, Italy
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
29 September 1912 • Charles Augustus Strong • Monreale, Italy
Copy-text: MS postcard, Box 6, Folder 92, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
30 September 1912 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Palermo, Italy
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
2 October 1912 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Palermo, Italy
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
101.12
tomorrow • to- / morrow
22 October 1912 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Rome, Italy
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
23 October 1912 • Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien • Rome, Italy
Copy-text: MS postcard, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. Original pasted in O’Brien’s copy of Hermit. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
8 November 1912 [postmark] • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Rome, Italy
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
102.22
understood • under- / stood
2:458
Editorial Appendix
8 November 1912 • Charles Augustus Strong • Rome, Italy
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 92, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
103.19 103.22 103.30
however • how- / ever Aurore • [sic] some thing • some / thing
11 November 1912 [postmark] • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Rome, Italy
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
11 November 1912 • Charles Augustus Strong • Rome, Italy
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 92, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
105.1 105.18
Today • To- / day excentric • [sic]
17 November 1912 [postmark] • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Rome, Italy
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
30 November 1912 • Elizabeth Stephens Fish Potter • Florence, Italy
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (Autograph file), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
107.36 108.10 108.16 108.16 108.18
friends • [sic] memorably • [sic] prooved • [sic] Berenson’s • [sic] everything • every- / thing
6 December 1912 • Mary Williams Winslow • Florence, Italy
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (MS Am 1352), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: Letters, 120–22. Emendations and textual notes:
110.17 111.16
paranthesis • [sic] D / Winds • [‘W’ over ‘D’]
Textual Notes
2:459
10 December 1912 • Horace Meyer Kallen • Florence, Italy
Copy-text: MS postcard, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
31 December 1912 • Mary Williams Winslow • Florence, Italy
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (MS Am 1352) by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: Letters, 122–23. Emendations and textual notes:
113.7 113.16 113.27 113.36
football • foot- / ball tobbogan-slide • [sic] —fake ——— false • [‘lse’ over ‘ke’] Montmartre • Mont- / martre
1 January 1913 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Florence, Italy
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
114.15 114.21 114.21
here hear • [‘ar’ over ‘re’] ———— relieved but • [sic] mis-en-scène • [sic]
10 January 1913 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Florence, Italy
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
15 January 1913 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Monte Carlo, Monaco
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
15 January 1913 [postmark] • Charles Augustus Strong • Monte Carlo, Monaco Copy-text: MS postcard, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
16 January 1913 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Monte Carlo, Monaco
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
117.2
goes going • [‘ing’ over ‘es’] —
2:460
Editorial Appendix
22 January 1913 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Monte Carlo, Monaco
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
6 February 1913 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Monte Carlo, Monaco
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Adelaida Sastre, Ávila, Spain. Previous publication: Azafea 1 (University of Salamanca, 1985): 360. Emendations and textual notes: none.
10 February 1913 • John Galen Howard • Monte Carlo, Monaco
Copy-text: MS postcard, Banc Mss 67/35 c, reproduced courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
118.4 118.6
‘render • [sic] out-stirp • out- / stirp
20 February 1913 • Charles Scribner’s Sons • Monte Carlo, Monaco
Copy-text: Typescript signed for Santayana by Robert S. Sturgis, Author Files I, Box 130 of the Scribner Archives, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
6 March 1913 • Charles Augustus Strong • Monte Carlo, Monaco
Copy-text: MS postcard, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
6 March 1913 • Mary Williams Winslow • Monte Carlo, Monaco
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (bMS Am 1542), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
120.14 120.18 120.26 121.3 121.3 121.6 121.19 121.20
homespun • home- / spun mid-nineteenth-century • mid-nineteenth- / century middle-class • middle- / class godfather • god- / father religion good • [sic] without • with- / out anything • any- / thing there • [sic]
Textual Notes
2:461
12 March 1913 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Barcelona, Spain
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
16 March 1913 • Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller • Madrid, Spain
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (bMS Am 1542), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: Letters, 124–26. Emendations and textual notes:
122.11 123.8 123.29 123.36 124.5
March 18/ 6 • [‘6’ over ‘8’] term-time • term- / time that ——ey • [‘ey’ over ‘at’] Berenson’s • [sic] sunshine • sun- / shine
16 March 1913 • Jessie Belle Rittenhouse • Madrid, Spain
Copy-text: MS, Rittenhouse Collection, Department of Archives & Special Collections, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
16 March 1913 • Charles Scribner’s Sons • Madrid, Spain
Copy-text: MS, Author Files I, Box 130 of the Scribner Archives, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
125.22 126.8
offerred • [sic] now-a-days • now- / a-days
7 April 1913 • Horace Meyer Kallen • Madrid, Spain
Copy-text: MS, American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati, Ohio. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
126.16 127.17 127.19 128.7 128.13 128.19
somewhat • some- / what underly/ ies • [‘i’ over ‘y’] this is a • [sic] releived • [sic] Wissenschafts leere • Wissen- / schafts leere [sic] everywhere • every- / where
21 April 1913 • Charles Augustus Strong • Madrid, Spain
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
2:462 130.10
Editorial Appendix c/ would • [‘w’ over ‘c’]
22 April 1913 • Scofield Thayer • Madrid, Spain
Copy-text: MS, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
131.11 131.18
is blows • [‘bl’ over ‘is’] — is are • [‘are’ over ‘is’] —
14 May 1913 • Charles Augustus Strong • Ávila, Spain
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
21 May 1913 • Mary Potter Bush • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
133.21
Plotinus-Fuller • Plotinus- / Fuller
3 June 1913 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
3 July 1913 [postmark] • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Brussels, Belgium
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
15 July 1913 • Charles Augustus Strong • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
135.1–2 135.4 135.11 135.23
undertaken • under- / taken intructed • [sic] custom-house • custom- / house However • How- / ever
Textual Notes
2:463
18 July 1913 • Arthur Davison Ficke • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Previous publication: Letters, 126–27. Emendations and textual notes: none.
25 July 1913 • Charles Augustus Strong • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
137.25 138.22
is are • [‘ar’ over ‘is’] — b/poor • [‘p’ over ‘b’]
8 August 1913 • Charles Augustus Strong • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
139.18
sometimes • some- / times
11 August 1913 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • London, England
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
[August 1913?] • Harriet Ann Boyd Hawes • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Smith College Archives. Emendations and textual notes: none.
Previous publication: none known.
14 August 1913 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
Monday [September] 191[3] • Charles Augustus Strong • London, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
12 September 1913 • Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (bMS Am 1542), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
142.11
after-image • after- / image
2:464
Editorial Appendix
27 September 1913 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
143.3
fortnight • fort- / night
1 October 1913 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: Letters, 128, excerpt. Emendations and textual notes:
145.2
half-poetical • half- / poetical
9 October 1913 • Charles Augustus Strong • London, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
146.6 146.10 146.13 146.24
give have given • [sic] whereas • where- / as anything • any- / thing —or [ rather second) • [sic]
24 October 1913 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Tintern, England
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
28 October 1913 [postmark] • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
28 October 1913 • Charles Augustus Strong • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
148.7 148.9 148.25
m / freer • [‘free’ over ‘m’] radicat/ l • [‘l’ over ‘t’] here hear • [‘ar’ over ‘re’] —
2 November 1913 • Charles Augustus Strong • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
Textual Notes 149.35 150.23 150.34 151.16 151.18 151.19
2:465
then • [in margin] ^ ^ intuite • [sic] is has • [‘ha’ over ‘i’] — we not • [sic] femine/ ine • [‘i’ over ‘e’] However • How- / ever
3 November 1913 • Charles Augustus Strong • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
152.15
whatever • what- / ever
10 November 1913 • Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller • Cambridge, England Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (bMS Am 1542), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: Letters, 129–30. Emendations and textual notes:
153.6 153.8 153.8–9 153.18 153.25 154.6 154.16
note-books • note- / books despotching • [sic] Nin • [‘Eigh’ over ‘Nin’] —Eighteen trustworthy • trust- / worthy r/description • [‘d’ over ‘r’] use to be • [sic] cross-eyed • cross- / eyed
10 November 1913 • Horace Meyer Kallen • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
155.6 155.7 155.17 156.4 156.13 156.20 156.21 156.26
bitter-sweet • bitter- / sweet your {second third? • [‘third?’ above ‘second’] ^ ^ fogueys • [sic] low-mindedness • low- / mindedness nothing • [sic] vigourous • [sic] converst/ation • [‘a’ over ‘t’] however • how- / ever
18 November 1913 • Charles Augustus Strong • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
157.25
superflous • [sic]
2:466
Editorial Appendix
26 November 1913 • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: Letters, 131–32. Emendations and textual notes:
159.15
red-bloods • red- / bloods
28 November 1913 • Charles Augustus Strong • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
160.7–8 161.26 161.26 161.30 162.5
letters send • [sic] existence-hunters • existence- / hunters pre-Socratics • pre- / Socratics bouyancy • [sic] Otherwise • Other- / wise
19 December 1913 • Charles Augustus Strong • London, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
162.18
tomorrow • to- / morrow
[Late 1913] • Polly Winslow • [Ávila, Spain]
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers, by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
163.5 163.20 163.23
pea-green • pea- / green Roger Frye • [sic] past fifty • [sic]
28 December 1913 • Miguel de Unamuno • Ávila, Spain
Copy-text: MS, Universidad de Salamanca, Casa Museo Unamuno. Previous publication: José María Alonso Gamo, Un Español en el mundo: Santayana; poesía y poética (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1966), in facsimile. Translation by Henry C. Reed and Mills F. Edgerton Jr. Emendations and textual notes:
164.3–4 164.6 164.15
“El sentimiento • [sic] capitun/ lo • [‘l’ over ‘n’] propria • [sic]
Textual Notes
2:467
6 January 1914 • Charles Augustus Strong • Seville, Spain
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
20 January 1914 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Seville, Spain
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
21 January 1914 • Oliver Wendell Holmes • Seville, Spain
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (bMS Am 1542), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: Letters, 133. Emendations and textual notes: none.
21 January 1914 • Charles Augustus Strong • Seville, Spain
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
167.21 168.7–8 168.8
or —— qualities ——— ————— such as those • [‘such as those’ above ^ ^ ‘or qualities ————— —————’] active practical • [‘practical’ above ‘activ e ’] ————— —— ^ ^ natural ————— —beginning ————————— minimal form • [‘minimal form’ above —— ^ ^ natural ————— —beginning —————————’] ——
28 January 1914 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Seville, Spain
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: Letters, 134–35. Emendations and textual notes:
168.21 169.17 169.28
wine It • wine / It [sic] understand • under- / stand mosquitoe • [sic]
[February 1914] • [Mary Williams Winslow] • [Seville, Spain]
Copy-text: partial MS, George Santayana Papers (MS Am 1352), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
170.19
manage • [sic]
3 February 1914 [postmark] • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Seville, Spain
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
2:468
Editorial Appendix
7 February 1914 • Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller • Seville, Spain
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (bMS Am 1542), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: Letters, 136–37. Emendations and textual notes:
172.28 173.8 173.12
/t for • [‘f’ over ‘t’] note-book • note- / book Meditarrean • [sic]
19 February 1914 • Charles Augustus Strong • Seville, Spain
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
174.8 174.10
is — — was • [‘wa’ over ‘i’] Beaudelaire • [sic]
22 February 1914 [postmark] • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Seville, Spain
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
29 March 1914 • Horace Meyer Kallen • Seville, Spain
Copy-text: MS, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
176.9 176.15 176.28
15/ 915 • [‘9’ over ‘5’] carcase/ s • [‘s’ over ‘e’] semi-conscious • semi- / conscious
5 April 1914 • Charles Augustus Strong • Seville, Spain
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
177.12 177.27
month • [sic] b/ and • [‘a’ over ‘b’]
6 April 1914 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Seville, Spain
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
178.3
Ma April • [‘Ap’ over ‘Ma’] —
20 April 1914 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Seville, Spain
Copy-text: MS postcard, Señora Eduardo Sastre Martín, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
Textual Notes 178.13
2:469
bullfights • bull- / fights
25 April 1914 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Seville, Spain
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
2 May 1914 • Frederick James Eugene Woodbridge • Seville, Spain
Copy-text: MS, Journal of Philosophy Records, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
6 May 1914 • Charles Augustus Strong • Ávila, Spain
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
12 May 1914 • Charles Augustus Strong • Ávila, Spain
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
9 June 1914 • Mary Potter Bush • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
181.27
—there ———— their • [‘ir’ over ‘re’]
22 June 1914 • Charles Scribner’s Sons • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Author Files I, Box 130 of the Scribner Archives, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
25 June 1914 [postmark] • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
4 July 1914 • Mary Potter Bush • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
2:470 183.26
Editorial Appendix their there • [‘re’ over ‘ir’] ————
5 July 1914 • Charles Augustus Strong • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
184.7 184.22
something • some- / thing now-adays • [sic]
12 July 1914 • Charles Augustus Strong • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
185.9
• [‘Wes’ over ‘Von’] Von —Westenholz
17 July 1914 • Charles Augustus Strong • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
186.14 186.19 186.20
rather incline • [sic] Françoise’ wages • [sic] Fénelon • [sic]
27 July [1914] • Bertrand Arthur William Russell • London, England
Copy-text: MS, The Bertrand Russell Archives, McMaster University Library. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
187.7 187.10
you Mrs. • you / Mrs. [sic] However • How- / ever
2 August 1914 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
3 August 1914 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
188.32
whatever • what- / ever
Textual Notes
2:471
5 August 1914 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Windsor, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: Letters, 138. Emendations and textual notes:
189.11
household • house- / hold
5 August 1914 • Charles Augustus Strong • Windsor, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
190.6 190.12
citizenship • citizen- / ship however • how- / ever
9 August 1914 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
16 August 1914 • Mary Williams Winslow • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (MS Am 1352), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: Letters, 139–41. Emendations and textual notes:
192.12–13 192.17 192.30 193.1 193.8 193.33 193.39 193.39
on that———— side west • [‘west’ over ‘on’] —— ———— the my • [‘my’ over ‘the’] — plai/yed • [‘ye’ over ‘i’] roten • [sic] fortnight • fort- / night Englishmen • English- / men Servian • [sic] Franz Ferdinand • [sic]
24 August 1914 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • London, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: Letters, 141–42. Emendations and textual notes:
195.5–6 195.6
afternoon • after- / noon the that • [‘at’ over ‘e’] —
27 August 1914 • Upton Beall Sinclair • London, England
Copy-text: MS, Sinclair Manuscripts, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. Previous publication: Sinclair, My Lifetime in Letters, (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1960), 100–101. Emendations and textual notes: none.
2:472
Editorial Appendix
1 October 1914 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
196.8
recie —eived • [‘ei’ over ‘ie’]
11 October 1914 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • London, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: Letters, 142–44. Emendations and textual notes:
196.15 197.22 197.30–31 197.33 197.38–39
tomorow • [sic] because they all • because they / they all anti-Christian • anti- / Christian philosopher call • [sic] twilight of the gods”: • [sic]
23 October 1914 • Scofield Thayer • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
29 October 1914 • Charles Augustus Strong • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
199.23 200.26–27
Lapley • [sic] deadlock • dead- / lock
1 November 1914 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
8 November 1914 • Wendell T. Bush • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
201.16 201.25
Otherwise • Other- / wise
“The_meanings_of_“Is”” • [sic]
13 November 1914 • Horace Meyer Kallen • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
Textual Notes 202.24
2:473
Standpuncten • [sic]
18 November 1914 • Wendell T. Bush • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, Journal of Philosophy Records, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
1 December 1914 • Charles Augustus Strong • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 93, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
205.12 205.13 206.4 206.6
everything • every- / thing undertake • under- / take Michelstaetter • Michel- / staetter [sic] me a more • [sic]
11 December 1914 • Mary Williams Winslow • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (MS Am 1352), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: Letters, 154–56. Emendations and textual notes:
206.13 206.14 206.17–18 207.5 207.28
my moral. • [sic] anything • any- / thing accerberated • [sic] they • [in margin] ^ ^ long layed • long / layed [sic]
14 December 1914 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Brighton, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: Letters, 146–47. Emendations and textual notes:
208.22 209.16 209.24 209.25
in perhaps • [sic] impassibility • [sic] appartment • [sic] and my not • [sic]
16 January 1915 • Charles Augustus Strong • Brighton, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 94, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
2:474
Editorial Appendix
23 February 1915 • Andrew Joseph Onderdonk • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (bMS Am 1542), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
211.6 211.10
here,/ (I • [‘(’ over ‘,’] in at • [‘at’ over ‘in’] —
24 February 1915 • Scofield Thayer • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
28 March 1915 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
213.10 213.31
attendance • [sic] Perkins’s • [sic]
31 March 1915 • Scofield Thayer • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
4 April 1915 • Charles Augustus Strong • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 94, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
215.16 215.17 215.23 215.29 215.31 216.3
without • with- / out T / But • [‘B’ over ‘T’] pro-German • pro- / German War-Lord-War-Zone • War-Lord-War- / Zone German-speaking • German- / speaking Zürick • [sic]
12 April 1915 [postmark] • Josephine Borrás Sturgis • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
Textual Notes
2:475
21 April 1915 • Charles Augustus Strong • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 94, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
1 May 1915 [postmark] • Celedonio Sastre Serrano • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
5 May 1915 [postmark] • Bertrand Arthur William Russell • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS postcard, The Bertrand Russell Archives, McMaster University Library. Previous publication: The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, vol. 2, (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1971), 56. Emendations and textual notes:
217.22
“war-babies” • “war- / babies”
9 May 1915 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
25 May 1915 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
26 May 1915 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 94, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
218.17 219.23
Al/tlantic • [‘t’ over ‘l’] well-informed • well- / iniformed
13 June 1915 • Wendell T. Bush • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
19 June 1915 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 94, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
2:476
Editorial Appendix
221.3 221.15–16 221.22
Salaandra’s • [sic] spatious • [sic] per —refer • [‘re’ over ‘er’]
29 June 1915 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
222.10
agreeable/y • [‘y’ over ‘e’]
4 August 1915 • Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (bMS Am 1542), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: Letters, 148–49. Emendations and textual notes:
223.16 223.24 223.27
anything • any- / thing should n’t • should / n’t [sic] wholesome • whole- / some
11 August 1915 • Horace Meyer Kallen • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York City. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
224.19 224.20 225.4
ninetenths • [sic] is— are • [‘are’ over ‘is’] — their there • [‘re’ over ‘ir’] —
14 August 1915 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 94, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
27 August 1915 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 94, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
226.30
headquarters • head- / quarters
1 September 1915 • Charles Augustus Strong • London, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 94, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
227.22
Bushe’s • [sic]
Textual Notes
2:477
14 September 1915 • Robert Shaw Sturgis • North Luffenham, England
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
228.5
tomorrow • to- / morrow
15 September 1915 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 94, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
228.15
absens/ce • [‘c’ over ‘s’]
26 September 1915 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: Letters, 149–51. Emendations and textual notes:
229.8 229.8 229.9 229.12 229.13 229.25 230.8 230.14 230.22
one of • [in margin] ^ ^ girl’s • [sic] licencious • [sic] is are • [‘are’ over ‘is’] — infinitise —esimal • [‘esi’ over ‘ise’] be • [in margin] ^ ^ novellist • [sic] seventy three • seventy / three [sic] gentleman • gentle- / man
9 October 1915 • Charles Augustus Strong • Bournemouth, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 94, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
231.6 231.8 231.19
fortnight • fort- / night something • some- / thing Ra/ oyal • [‘o’ over ‘a’]
13 October 1915 [postmark] • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Bournemouth, England
Copy-text: MS postcards, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
17 October [1915] • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Bournemouth, England
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
2:478
Editorial Appendix
[October or November 1915] • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 94, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
4 November 1915 • Mary Williams Winslow • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (MS Am 1352), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: Letters, 151–53. Emendations and textual notes:
233.7 233.7 233.29 233.31 234.2 234.14–15 234.24
However • How- / ever upon • up- / on Some times • Some / times Otherwise • Other- / wise pro-German • pro- / German nonsense • non- / sense sincerey • [sic]
13 November 1915 • Lawrence Smith Butler • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, The University Club Library, New York. Previous publication: Letters, 153–55. Emendations and textual notes:
235.22 235.32
headquarter’s • head- / quarter’s [sic] Harjes (of Morgan Harjes) • [sic]
5 January [1916] • Editor of The New Republic • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS unlocated. Published version is copy-text. Previous publication: The New Republic 6 (26 Feb 1916): 99–100. Emendations and textual notes:
237.5 238.17
pro-German. • pro- / German. status quo ante bellum • status quo ante bellum
28 January 1916 • Wendell T. Bush • Cambridge, England
Copy-text: MS, Journal of Philosophy Records, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
11 March 1916 • Mary Potter Bush • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
240.16
despleased • [sic]
Textual Notes
2:479
28 April 1916 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 94, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
241.18 242.1 242.13 242.23–24 242.26 242.28 243.5
extraordinary • extra- / ordinary a/ the • [‘the’ over ‘a’] regretting —ed • [‘ed’ over ‘ing’] pale-full • [sic] l’encien • [sic] housework • house- / work nevertheless • never- / theless
6 May [1916?] • Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
20 May 1916 • Roy Wood Sellars • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Roy Sellars Papers, Bentley Historical Library, The University of Michigan. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
23 May 1916 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 94, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
246.8 246.8 246.20
in — — at • [‘at’ over ‘in’] Bridges’. • [sic] of book • [sic]
[26 May 1916] • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 94, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
247.2
hell fire • hell / fire
2 June 1916 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 94, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
248.2 248.4
MacDougal’s • [sic] McDougal • [sic]
2:480
Editorial Appendix
22 June 1916 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: Letters, 155–56. Emendations and textual notes:
249.20
Russell’s • [sic]
1 July 1916 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 94, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
25 August 1916 • Horace Meyer Kallen • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
27 August 1916 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 94, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
251.27
Macdougal’s • [sic]
Friday [Autumn 1916?] • Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
252.12
afternoon • after- / noon
Saturday [Autumn 1916?] • Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell • Oxford, England Copy-text: MS, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
Sunday [Autumn 1916?] • Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck Morrell • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
253.22 253.22
read book • [sic] Dostoevsky • [sic]
Textual Notes
2:481
3 October 1916 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 94, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
254.18 254.22 255.1 255.3
clergyman • clergy- / man disease ——— ———— disease • [‘se’ over ‘es’] you [across] should • you [across] you should Lvoe • [sic]
4 October 1916 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 94, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
2 November 1916 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 94, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
21 December 1916 • John Jay Chapman • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (bMS Am 1854.1), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
257.10
kakhi • [sic]
23 December [1916] • Robert Seymour Bridges • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Dep. Bridges 115, fols. 44–45, Bodleian Library, Oxford University. Previous publication: Letters, 157. Emendations and textual notes:
257.26 257.26 257.27
somehow • some- / how is— are • [‘are’ over ‘is’] — something • some- / thing
13 January 1917 • Charles Augustus Strong • Megairssey, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 95, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
258.15 258.21
maid-servant • maid- / servant s/ Spanish • [‘S’ over ‘s’]
2:482
Editorial Appendix
8 February 1917 • Robert Seymour Bridges • Torquay, England
Copy-text: MS, Dep. Bridges 115, fols. 46–47, Bodleian Library, Oxford University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
259.18 259.21
sunshine • sun- / shine it Torquay • [sic]
26 February 1917 • Charles Augustus Strong • Torquay, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 95, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
260.15
bedroom • bed- / room
27 February 1917 • Charles Scribner’s Sons • Torquay, England
Copy-text: MS, Author Files I, Box 130 of the Scribner Archives, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
261.16 261.19
C
/o of • [sic]
/s very • [‘v’ over ‘s’]
15 March 1917 • Horace Meyer Kallen • Torquay, England
Copy-text: MS, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
261.27 262.11 262.14 262.20 263.4 263.15
agreeable/ y • [‘y’ over ‘e’] understand • under- / stand foreseeing • fore- / seeing foresight • fore- / sight in h/ end • [‘end’ over ‘h’] [sic] Blue Beard • [sic]
17 March 1917 • Charles Augustus Strong • Torquay, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 95, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
264.14 264.18 264.19
Bridge’s • [sic] E/ Intelligence” • [‘I’ over ‘E’] pragmatist • [sic]
19 March 1917 • Robert Seymour Bridges • Torquay, England
Copy-text: MS, Dep. Bridges 115, fols. 48–49, Bodleian Library, Oxford University Previous publication: Letters, 157. Emendations and textual notes:
265.5
vienes mal • [sic]
Textual Notes 265.21
2:483
h/ feel • [‘f’ over ‘h’]
24 March 1917 • Mrs. William Warren • Torquay, England
Copy-text: MS unlocated. Photocopy of original from Harriett Fitzgerald, Washington, D.C., is copy-text. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
266.7–8 266.24 267.10 267.11
newspapers • news- / papers deli —velopes • [‘v’ over ‘li’] [sic] understanding • under / standing childlike • child- / like
26 March 1917 • Charles Augustus Strong • Torquay, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 95, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
267.23 268.5
reprint • re- / print known known ————’] —— ———— signified • [‘signified’ above ‘——
^
^
17 April 1917 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 95, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
269.12 269.20 269.21
a belligerant • [sic] tion material sensitiveness • [‘material sensitiveness’ sensa — — ^ ^ above ‘sensa tion ’] — — self-defence • self- / defence
29 April 1917 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 95, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
271.7
quarrell • [sic]
9 May 1917 • Logan Pearsall Smith • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Logan Pearsall Smith Papers, Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress. Previous publication: Letters, 158. Emendations and textual notes: none.
15 May 1917 • Logan Pearsall Smith • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Logan Pearsall Smith Papers, Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress. Previous publication: Letters, 159–60. Emendations and textual notes:
273.8
are as • [‘s’ over ‘re’] —
2:484 273.14 274.7
Editorial Appendix shuffe/ led • [‘l’ over ‘e’] Of/xford • [‘x’ over ‘f’]
11 June 1917 • Charles Raymond Bell Mortimer • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Raymond Mortimer Correspondence, Princeton University Libraries. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
274.23 275.6
background • back- / ground everything • every- / thing
29 June 1917 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 95, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
276.5 276.9 276.17
The unfinished … Realism”. • [sic] intra/ icacies • [‘i’ over ‘a’] nue —eutral • [‘eu’ over ‘ue’[
30 June 1917 • Logan Pearsall Smith • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Logan Pearsall Smith Papers, Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress. Previous publication: Letters, 160. Emendations and textual notes: none.
5 July 1917 • Charles Scribner’s Sons • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Author Files I, Box 130 of the Scribner Archives, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
278.10
understand • under- / stand
8 July 1917 • Logan Pearsall Smith • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Logan Pearsall Smith Papers, Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
279.1 279.4–5
money-matters • money- / matters either either o—— f————— them the first • [‘the first’ above ‘ —— ———— —’] ————— ——— ^ ^
18 July 1917 • Max Forrester Eastman • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Eastman Manuscripts, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. Previous publication: Eastman, Love and Revolution: My Journey through an Epic (Random House, 1964), 17–18. Emendations and textual notes:
280.3
intruments • [sic]
Textual Notes
2:485
21 July 1917 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 95, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
280.24 281.8 281.21
sunshine • sun- / shine reader I • reader / I [sic] unwounded • un- / wounded
25 July 1917 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 95, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
20 August 1917 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 95, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
14 September 1917 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 95, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
285.8
Mackintosh • [sic]
21 September 1917 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 95, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
286.24 286.34 287.10 287.30
elsewhere • else- / where therefore • there- / fore multiplication-table • multiplication- / table whirpool • [sic]
29 September 1917 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 95, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
289.1
something • some- / thing
2:486
Editorial Appendix
3 October 1917 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 95, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
289.17
psychic-state • psychic- / state
9 October 1917 • Logan Pearsall Smith • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Logan Pearsall Smith Papers, Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress. Previous publication: Letters, 161–62. Emendations and textual notes: none.
10 October 1917 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
292.1
dancing-master • dancing- / master
21 October 1917 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 95, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
292.15 292.19 293.10–11
one two • [sic] will-o-the-wisps • will- / o-the-wisps a the same • [sic]
26 October 1917 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 95, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
293.29 294.1 294.6 294.9 294.11 294.34
“img/ age” • [‘a’ over ‘g’] is are • [‘are’ over ‘is’] — green-feeling • green- / feeling anything • any- / thing green-feeling • green- / feeling mind-stuff • mind- / stuff
30 October 1917 • Roy Wood Sellars • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Roy Sellars Papers, Bentley Historical Library, The University of Michigan. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
296.1 296.4 296.5–6
/r important • [‘i’ over ‘r’]
however • how- / ever somewhat • some- / what
Textual Notes 296.12
2:487
think believe • [‘believe’ above ‘think — —’]
^
^
30 October 1917 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 95, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
17 November 1917 • Wendell T. Bush • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Erskine Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
298.18 298.24
————’] —ready ———— ^copied^ • [‘copied’ above ‘—ready reviews reviews ——— ———— ^aspersions^ • [‘aspersions’ above ‘——— ————’]
25 November 1917 • Charles Scribner’s Sons • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Author Files I, Box 130 of the Scribner Archives, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
25 November 1917 • Logan Pearsall Smith • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Logan Pearsall Smith Papers, Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
300.2
“post-rational” • “post- / rational”
26 November 1917 • William Roscoe Thayer • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, The Papers of William Roscoe Thayer (bMS Am 1081), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
301.11
Liebens würdigkeit • [sic]
27 November 1917 • Logan Pearsall Smith • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Logan Pearsall Smith Papers, Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
301.27
Eve-like • Eve- / like
[December 1917] • Bertrand Arthur William Russell • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS unlocated. A typescript in The Bertrand Russell Archives, McMaster University Library, is copy-text. Previous publication: Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, vol. 2 (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1971), 56–57. Emendations and textual notes: a note in Bertrand Russell’s hand at the top of the first of two pages reads “From Santayana, Dec. ’17.”
2:488
Editorial Appendix
302.21 302.25
Karensky • [sic] educational-industrial-military • educational- / industrial-military
4 December 1917 • Arthur Davison Ficke • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
303.27–28 304.2
gingerbread • ginger- / bread posses • [sic]
4 December 1917 • Logan Pearsall Smith • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Logan Pearsall Smith Papers, Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress. Previous publication: Letters, 162–63. Emendations and textual notes:
304.26 305.17
rewrite • re- / write to vast • [sic]
10 December 1917 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 95, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
[1918] • Logan Pearsall Smith • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Logan Pearsall Smith Papers, Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: the bracketed date was written on the letter in a hand other than that of Santayana.
9 January 1918 • Wendell T. Bush • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Journal of Philosophy Records, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
307.12 307.14 307.24
as/ lso • [‘l’ over ‘s’] preoccupied • pre- / occupied de/ ivided • [‘i’ over ‘e’]
24 February 1918 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 96, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
308.18 308.27–28
takens morally • [sic] ^ ^ so-called • so- / called
Textual Notes
2:489
26 February 1918 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 96, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
309.15 309.23 309.33 310.10 310.18
being; : • [sic] ^ selected. . • [sic] ^ in — — of • [‘of’ over ‘in’] somehow • some- / how Aaaxagoras • [sic]
2 March 1918 • Mary Potter Bush • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
311.15
exhili/arating • [‘a’ over ‘i’]
26 March 1918 • Wendell T. Bush • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Journal of Philosophy Records, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
26 March 1918 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 96, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
313.8 313.9–10
it’s doctrine • [sic] self-existent • self- / existent
6 April 1918 • Mary Williams Winslow • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (MS Am 1352), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: Letters, 163–65. Emendations and textual notes:
314.4 314.17 314.34 315.3
Robbins • [sic] theirs • [sic] mankind • man- / kind something • some- / thing
10 April 1918 • Charles Raymond Bell Mortimer • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Raymond Mortimer Correspondence, Princeton University Libraries. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
2:490
Editorial Appendix
8 May 1918 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 96, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
318.6 318.7 318.15 318.16 318.19 318.24
use of terms. • use of of terms. doubtf/ less • [‘l’ over ‘f’] in — — as to • [‘as’ over ‘in’] and ——— or • [‘or’ above ‘and ———’] ^ ^ in ——— our—————— immediate experience —— —————————— ———— • [transposition marked by Santayana] Goethes • [sic]
24 May 1918 • Logan Pearsall Smith • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Logan Pearsall Smith Papers, Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress. Previous publication: Letters, 165–66. Emendations and textual notes:
319.21 319.27
inevitabls/e • [‘e’ over ‘s’] it that • [sic]
29 May 1918 • Logan Pearsall Smith • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Logan Pearsall Smith Papers, Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress. Previous publication: Letters, 167. Emendations and textual notes:
321.10
sometimes • some- / times
11 July 1918 • Robert Seymour Bridges • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Dep. Bridges 115, fols. 50–51, Bodleian Library, Oxford University. Previous publication: Letters, 168. Emendations and textual notes: none.
11 July 1918 • Horace Meyer Kallen • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
322.27 323.2 323.31
something • some- / thing outrunning • out- / running parlaiment • [sic]
13 July 1918 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 96, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
Textual Notes
2:491
18 July 1918 • Robert Seymour Bridges • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Dep. Bridges 115, fols. 52–53, Bodleian Library, Oxford University. Previous publication: Letters, 169. Emendations and textual notes:
326.1
anything • any- / thing
10 September 1918 • Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller • Sunninghill, England Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (bMS Am 1542), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: Letters, 170–71. Emendations and textual notes:
326.26 327.6 327.29 327.29
headquarters • head- / quarters parali/ysis • [‘y’ over ‘i’] Neo-Catholics • Neo- / Catholics Neo Platonists • [sic]
[September or October 1918] • Mary Whitall Smith Berenson • Oxford, England Copy-text: MS, Bernard Berenson Archive, Villa I Tatti, Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence, Italy. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
328.19
good-humoured • good- / humoured
19 October 1918 • Unidentified Recipient • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Loyola University Chicago: SJ Theatre Collection. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
329.5
English-Speaking • English- / Speaking
[1918] • Robert Seymour Bridges • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Dep. Bridges 115, fols. 58–59, Bodleian Library, Oxford University. Previous publication: Letters, 172–73. Emendations and textual notes: none.
6 December 1918 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 96, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
331.12 331.13 331.24 332.14
monstros/ us • [‘u’ over ‘s’] Roycian • [sic] non-attentive • non- / attentive consciousness?/ ! • [‘!’ over ‘?’]
2:492
Editorial Appendix
20 December 1918 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 96, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
333.21 334.8
mid-Summer • mid- / Summer w/ breezes • [‘b’ over ‘w’]
22 December 1918 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 96, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
334.27 336.3 336.13 336.15
Felling • [sic] yet ———’] — —— the image of • [‘the image of’ above ‘yet ^ ^ recœuillir • [sic] omissions. of • [sic]
2 January 1919 • James Bissett Pratt • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, James B. Pratt Papers, Williams College Archives and Special Collections. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
337.3
Spauldings book • [sic]
12 January 1919 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 96, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
339.1 339.32
however • how- / ever mind-stuff • mind- / stuff
25 February 1919 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 96, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
341.17 341.31
Teledo • [sic] wa/ onder • [‘o’ over ‘a’]
9 March 1919 • Logan Pearsall Smith • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Logan Pearsall Smith Papers, Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress. Previous publication: Letters, 173–74. Emendations and textual notes:
342.17
sown • [sic]
Textual Notes
2:493
16 March 1919 • Logan Pearsall Smith • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Logan Pearsall Smith Papers, Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress. Previous publication: Letters, 175. Emendations and textual notes:
344.9
to/ wo • [‘w’ over ‘o’]
2 April 1919 • Charles Augustus Strong • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 96, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
345.22 345.31
g/ could • [‘c’ over ‘g’] there He • there / He [sic]
6 April 1919 • Logan Pearsall Smith • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Logan Pearsall Smith Papers, Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
9 April 1919 • Unidentified Recipient • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
21 April 1919 • Logan Pearsall Smith • Oxford, England
Copy-text: MS, Logan Pearsall Smith Papers, Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
348.14
reprinted • re- / printed
30 April 1919 • Charles Augustus Strong • Windsor, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 96, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
11 May 1919 • Charles Augustus Strong • Richmond, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 96, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
350.18 350.19 350.31–32
relei —ieved • [‘ie’ over ‘ei’] and —— —— as • [‘as’ over ‘and’] James Royce etc. • James / Royce etc. [sic]
2:494
Editorial Appendix
22 May 1919 • Charles Augustus Strong • Richmond, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 96, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
13 June 1919 • Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller • Richmond, England
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (bMS Am 1542), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
352.13 352.19
parlaimentary • [sic] putting of • [sic]
Tuesday [17 June 1919] • Charles Augustus Strong • [Southampton, England?]
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 96, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
[17 June 1919] • Charles Augustus Strong • [Southampton, England?]
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 96, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
354.17
headquarters • head- / quarters
18 June 1919 • Charles Augustus Strong • [Richmond, England]
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 96, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
355.16
foresee • fore- / see
20 June 1919 • Logan Pearsall Smith • Richmond, England
Copy-text: MS, Logan Pearsall Smith Papers, Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress. Previous publication: Letters, 176–77. Emendations and textual notes:
356.9 356.29
cha m paign • [sic] ^ ^ connaisseur • [sic]
24 June [1919] • Charles Augustus Strong • Richmond, England
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 96, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
Textual Notes
2:495
25 June 1919 • Monica Waterhouse Bridges • Richmond, England
Copy-text: MS, Dep. Bridges 119, fols. 137–38, Bodleian Library, Oxford University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
358.7 358.24
goodbye • good- / bye anybody • any- / body
5 July 1919 • Wendell T. Bush • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS unlocated. A typescript in the George Santayana Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, is copy-text. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
5 July 1919 • Logan Pearsall Smith • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Logan Pearsall Smith Papers, Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
21 August 1919 • Charles Augustus Strong • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 96, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
361.17
Everything • Every- / thing
7 September 1919 • Charles Augustus Strong • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 96, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
14 September 1919 • Joseph Malaby Dent • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, J. M. Dent Papers in the Southern Historical Collection, Manuscripts Department, Wilson Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
363.2
O / Sept. • [‘S’ over ‘O’]
18 September 1919 • Robert Seymour Bridges • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Dep. Bridges 115, fols. 54–57, Bodleian Library, Oxford University. Previous publication: Letters, 177–79. Emendations and textual notes:
364.6
stimulous • [sic]
2:496
Editorial Appendix
19 September 1919 • Joseph Malaby Dent • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, J. M. Dent Papers in the Southern Historical Collection, Manuscripts Department, Wilson Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
366.12
understand • under- / stand
29 September 1919 • Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. Original in envelope pasted in O’Brien’s copy of Hermit. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
9 October 1919 • Charles Augustus Strong • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 96, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
368.2 368.4 368.10 368.18
breakfast • break- / fast Germont • [sic] everything • every- / thing Germont • [sic]
12 October 1919 • Mrs. Charles Fairchild • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
369.28
farewell • fare- / well
16 October 1919 • Logan Pearsall Smith • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Logan Pearsall Smith Papers, Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
370.25 370.30
Kyllman • [sic] [illegible] can • [‘can’ over unrecovered characters ]
6 November 1919 • Constable and Co. Ltd. • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Special Collections, Temple University Libraries. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
23 November 1919 • Wendell T. Bush • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
Textual Notes
2:497
24 November 1919 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
373.12 373.26 373.30
however • how- / ever breakfast • break- / fast wife: : • [sic]
^
25 November 1919 • Constable and Co. Ltd. • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Special Collections, Temple University Libraries. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
7 December 1919 • Charles Scribner’s Sons • Fiesole, Italy
Copy-text: MS, Author Files I, Box 130 of the Scribner Archives, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
15 December 1919 • Constable and Co. Ltd. • Fiesole, Italy
Copy-text: MS, Special Collections, Temple University Libraries. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
375.28
subtitle • sub- / title
5 January 1920 • Constable and Co. Ltd. • Fiesole, Italy
Copy-text: MS, Special Collections, Temple University Libraries. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
10 January 1920 • Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller • Fiesole, Italy
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (bMS Am 1542), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: Letters, 179–81. Emendations and textual notes: none.
21 January 1920 • Charles Augustus Strong • Rome, Italy
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 97, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
379.12
permiesso di sogiorno • [sic]
2:498
Editorial Appendix
2 February 1920 • Charles Augustus Strong • Rome, Italy
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 97, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
380.20 381.14 381.15
now • [in margin] ^ ^ however • how- / ever appartment • ap- / partment [sic]
8 February 1920 • Mary Potter Bush • Rome, Italy
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
382.4 382.29–30 382.33 383.4 383.16
shining • [sic] pre-exist • pre- / exist obsta/ inacy • [‘i’ over ‘a’] adventures/ rs • [‘rs’ over ‘s’] n/ know • [‘k’ over ‘n’]
21 February 1920 • Robert Seymour Bridges • Rome, Italy
Copy-text: MS, Dep. Bridges 115, fols. 60–61, Bodleian Library, Oxford University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
5 March 1920 • Charles Augustus Strong • Rome, Italy
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 97, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
385.14
revolutions/ary • [‘a’ over ‘s’]
12 March 1920 • James Bissett Pratt • Rome, Italy
Copy-text: MS, James B. Pratt Papers, Williams College Archives and Special Collections. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
387.1 387.2
offerred • [sic] shoud • [sic]
31 March 1920 • Constable and Co. Ltd. • Rome, Italy
Copy-text: MS, Special Collections, Temple University Libraries. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
387.23 387.28
in — — of • [‘of’ over ‘in’] if very • [sic]
Textual Notes
2:499
23 April 1920 • Charles Augustus Strong • Rome, Italy
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 97, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
390.11
etc The • etc / The [sic]
28 April 1920 • Charles Augustus Strong • Rome, Italy
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 97, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
391.27
mine been • [sic]
3 May 1920 • Mary Williams Winslow • Rome, Italy
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (bMS Am 1542), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
392.24 393.24 393.25 393.31 394.23
cocktails • cock- / tails I/ like • [‘l’ over ‘I’] ^ ^ venemous • [sic] comparitive • [sic] satis[faction] • satis- / [not present ]
3 May 1920 • Boylston Adams Beal • Rome, Italy
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (MS Am 1371.8), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
396.11 396.22
everywhere • every- / where local in • [sic]
23 May 1920 • Constable and Co. Ltd. • Florence, Italy
Copy-text: MS, Special Collections, Temple University Libraries. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
397.25
now-a-days • now- / a-days
7 June 1920 • Boylston Adams Beal • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Papers (MS Am 1371.8), by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
2:500
Editorial Appendix
2 July 1920 • Scofield Thayer • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
399.24
something • some- / thing
9 July 1920 • Constable and Co. Ltd. • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Special Collections, Temple University Libraries. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
12 July 1920 • Charles Scribner’s Sons • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Author Files I, Box 130 of the Scribner Archives, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
16 July 1920 • Constable and Co. Ltd. • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Special Collections, Temple University Libraries. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
402.23 402.28
the — —— that • [‘at’ over ‘e’] has — —— have • [‘ve’ over ‘s’]
21 July 1920 • Constable and Co. Ltd. • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Special Collections, Temple University Libraries. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
4 August 1920 • John Middleton Murry • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, collection of Dr. Richard A. Macksey, Baltimore, Maryland. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
29 August 1920 • Robert Seymour Bridges • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS unlocated. A typescript in Dep. Bridges 115, fols. 93–95, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, is copy-text. Previous publication: Letters, 182–84. Emendations and textual notes:
404.21 404.29–30 405.9 405.28 and 30 406.20 406.21
excentric • [sic] opprobious • [sic] anything • any- / thing Virgil • [sic] sincerely • sincerely, GSantayana • G. Santayana
Textual Notes
2:501
30 August 1920 • Logan Pearsall Smith • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Logan Pearsall Smith Papers, Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress. Previous publication: Letters, 184–86. Emendations and textual notes:
407.7 407.10 407.25 407.32
Bridges’ • [sic] this day • [sic] n/ knit • [‘k’ over ‘n’] Jezabel’s • [sic]
6 September 1920 • Charles Augustus Strong • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 97, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
409.1
extraordinary / ily • [‘ily’ over ‘y’]
8 September 1920 • William Lyon Phelps • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Previous publication: Phelps, Autobiography with Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), 341–42; Letters, 186–87. Emendations and textual notes:
410.19 410.22 410.32
Sturgis’s • [sic] somewhat • some- / what wizzened • [sic]
20 September 1920 • Charles Augustus Strong • Paris, France
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 97, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
412.13 412.14 412.19
feel —— —— felt • [‘lt’ over ‘el’] sorts of thing, • [sic] foresee • fore- / see
9 October 1920 • Constable and Co. Ltd. • Ávila, Spain
Copy-text: MS, Special Collections, Temple University Libraries. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
18 October 1920 • Charles Augustus Strong • Ávila, Spain
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 97, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
415.7 415.26
here —— —— hear • [‘ar’ over ‘re’] sub-conscious • sub- / conscious
2:502
Editorial Appendix
22 November 1920 • John Calvin Metcalf and James Southall Wilson • Toledo, Spain Copy-text: MS, James Southall Wilson Collection (#7436), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
29 November [1920] • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Toledo, Spain
Copy-text: MS postcard, collection of Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes: none.
10 December 1920 • Charles Augustus Strong • Toledo, Spain
Copy-text: MS, Box 6, Folder 97, The Papers of Charles Augustus Strong, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
417.9 417.23 419.8
everything • every- / thing Newyears • [sic] overlooked • over- / looked
29 December 1920 • Susan Sturgis de Sastre • Toledo, Spain
Copy-text: MS, George Santayana Collection (#6947), Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library. Previous publication: none known. Emendations and textual notes:
420.13
nei —iece • [‘ie’ over ‘ei’]
Report of Line-End Hyphenation In quotations from the present Critical Edition, no line-end hyphens are to be retained except the following.
7.12–13
co-educational
198.27–199.1
man-servant
10.10–11
non-psychical
199.18–19
war-news
42.13–14
well-washed
242.23–24
pale-full
68.13–14
old-fashioned
258.27–28
pro-German
86.16–17
bull-fights
263.9–10
self-indulgence
88.6–7
Anglo-American
286.6–7
dull-thing-eating
107.33–34
health-resort
288.29–30
“semi-existence”
110.3–4
ultra-learned
291.10–11
motor-car
113.26–27
fancy-dress
294.13–14
green-tree
114.11–12
fancy-dress
308.27–28
so-called
120.5–6
tin-panny
311.5–6
tea-party
120.39–121.1
well-bred
328.6–7
shaving-brush
126.21–22
head-quarters
332.14–15
158.13–14
panic-stricken
consciousness-ofother-existences
159.10–11
hen-pecked
339.7–8
sense-datum
160.18–19
type-writing
354.12–13
Qu’est-ce
166.14–15
standing-ground
377.34–378.1
back-stairs
169.1–2
coffee-house
382.29–30
pre-exist
172.20–21
Sub-Freshman
384.25–26
172.25–26
sense-data
Platonizing-moralsatirical
184.24–25
hair-splitting
404.6–7
press-cutting
185.20–21
el-bow
408.4–5
Aix-les-Bains
197.30–31
anti-Christian
415.11–12
rolling-stock
Chronology William G. Holzberger This chronology is based upon various sources of information about Santayana’s life and work, including his autobiography, entitled Persons and Places: Fragments of Autobiography, originally published in three volumes as Persons and Places, The Middle Span, and My Host the World (in 1944, 1945, and 1953 respectively); his letters; the biography by Daniel Cory, entitled Santayana: The Later Years; and my conversations with Cory. It is also indebted, however, for its dating of Santayana’s transatlantic journeys and other travels, to a large printed map of Europe sent to me by Santayana’s grandnephew, Don Eduardo Sastre Martín, on which, in the early years of the twentieth century, Santayana carefully inscribed, in red ink, the dates of his voyages, the names of the transatlantic steamships on which he travelled, and the routes that he followed. 1847 or 1848 Agustín Ruiz de Santayana (c. 1814–93), George Santayana’s father, is appointed Governor of Batang in the Philippines. 1849 On 22 August Josefina Borrás (c. 1826–1912), George Santayana’s mother, marries George Sturgis (1817–57) of Boston, aboard a British warship at anchor in Manila Bay. They have five children, but only three survive to adulthood (Susan Parkman, 5 June 1851; Josephine Borrás, in 1853; and Robert Shaw, in 1854). The other two ( Joseph Borrás, who was called Pepín, born in 1850, and James Victor, in 1856) die in infancy. 1856 Josefina and George Sturgis, with their surviving children, visit America. They sail from Manila to Boston aboard the Fearless, a journey of ninety days. Agustín Santayana is also aboard, on leave from his post at Batang and bound for Spain via America and England. 1857 George Sturgis dies in Manila at the age of forty. His brother, Robert Sturgis, gives Josefina ten thousand dollars.
506
Editorial Appendix
1858 Josefina Sturgis sails for Boston from Manila. Her youngest child, James Victor, aged one year and seven months, dies on the journey, in London. Josefina and her three surviving children remain in Boston for three years. 1861 or 1862 Josefina and her children return to Spain. They live in Madrid with the parents and family of Mercedes de la Escalera y Iparraguirre. 1862 In Madrid Josefina Borrás Sturgis marries Agustín Santayana (whom she had known during their years in the Philippines). 1863 On 16 December, at No. 69, Calle Ancha de San Bernardo, Madrid, George Santayana is born. (He retains his Spanish citizenship throughout his life.) 1864 Santayana is christened Jorge Agustín Nicolás, on 1 January, in the parish church of San Marcos, Madrid. The first name is given by the godmother, his twelve-year-old half sister, Susan (Susana), who chooses the first name of her own father, George Sturgis. 1866 Santayana’s parents and the four children move from Madrid to Ávila. Afterwards, Santayana’s half brother, Robert, is sent to live in Boston. 1868 or 1869 Santayana’s mother, with Susan and Josephine, leaves Ávila for Boston, in obedience to her first husband’s wish that his children be brought up in America. George Santayana, age five, is left with his father in Spain. 1872 In his ninth year, Santayana and his father leave Spain in June, bound for America where the boy is to be raised and educated. They sail from Liverpool on 4 July on the Cunard steamer Samaria. Santayana’s first American residence is his mother’s house at No. 302 Beacon Street, where his father remained for several months before returning permanently to Ávila. Santayana attends his first American school, Miss Welchman’s Kindergarten on Chestnut Street. 1873–74 During the winter of 1873–74, Santayana is at the Brimmer School, the public grammar school of the district. In the autumn of 1874, he transfers to the Boston Public Latin School, where he spends eight school years.
Chronology
507
1876 Santayana travels to Philadelphia with his half brother, Robert, to see the Centennial Exhibition. 1880 In June Santayana, age sixteen, is awarded the Poetry Prize at the Boston Latin School for his poem “Day and Night.” He regards the event as his “emergence into public notice.” During the ’80s Santayana regularly attends mass at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Boston. 1881–82 Santayana’s senior year at the Boston Latin School. He becomes founding editor of the Latin School Register, the student paper, in which he anonymously publishes poems. In the autumn of 1882, he matriculates at Harvard College. Throughout his undergraduate years, he lives in room No. 19, Hollis Hall, the Harvard Yard. On weekends he visits his mother, who now lives in Roxbury, Massachusetts. During this freshman year, he discovers Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, which he studies in Latin, but he fails algebra and does poorly in his course in Greek, taught by Louis Dyer, whose book, The Gods in Greece, is to influence him considerably. In the Greek course, he reads the Bacchae of Euripides, from which he takes his personal motto: To\ sofo\n ou) sofi/a which, in translation, becomes the second line of his famous Sonnet III: “It is not wisdom to be only wise.” He becomes cartoonist for the Harvard Lampoon. 1883–84 Santayana’s sophomore year at Harvard. In June 1883, at the age of nineteen, he makes his first return to Spain to visit his father, sailing alone from New York to Antwerp and travelling from there to Ávila by train. He also visits relatives in Catalonia, where, at Tarragona, he contracts a mild case of smallpox. Nevertheless, he manages to see a number of major Spanish cities and also visits Lyons and Paris. Returning to America in October, from Antwerp, he resumes his studies at Harvard. At first he is advised by a skeptical William James against going in for philosophy. At the Church of the Immaculate Conception, he meets Ward Thoron, who becomes his closest friend during their undergraduate years. 1884–85 Santayana’s junior year at Harvard. He is initiated into two undergraduate societies, the O.K. (on 22 April 1885) and the Hasty Pudding. 1885 He becomes a founding member of the editorial board of The Harvard Monthly, the avant-garde college literary magazine founded by classmate Alanson Bigelow Houghton. The first issue of October 1885 carries a sonnet by Santayana, and he continues to publish poems in the Monthly until 1903.
508
Editorial Appendix
1885–86 Santayana’s senior year at Harvard. He meets Charles Augustus Strong, who had come from the University of Rochester to study philosophy for a year at Harvard. Together they found the Harvard Philosophical Club. They are awarded jointly, by the Harvard Philosophy Department, the Walker Fellowship for graduate study in Germany. The stipend of five hundred dollars is to be divided between them. The issue of The Harvard Monthly for April 1886 contains what is to be Santayana’s most anthologized poem, his Sonnet III, beginning, “O World, thou choosest not the better part!” He is introduced to John Francis Stanley, 2d Earl Russell (“Frank”), age twenty, who is visiting America after being “sent down” from Balliol College, Oxford, in May 1885 for an alleged misdemeanor. Russell, elder brother of philosopher Bertrand Russell, becomes Santayana’s most admired friend and the model for Jim Darnley of Santayana’s novel, The Last Puritan (1935). Santayana’s Bachelor of Arts degree is awarded summa cum laude and in absentia, Santayana having sailed for Cherbourg after taking his last examination. In July 1886 he returns for the second time to Ávila, where he spends the summer with his father. In mid-August he is at Göttingen, Germany, and later that autumn (September) spends four to six weeks at Dresden. He also journeys to London, visiting that city for the first time, in company with Strong. They sail from the port of Bremen in northern Germany. In October 1886 Santayana is in Berlin for the start of the winter semester. 1887 In late March (at the close of the winter semester at Berlin) Santayana and Strong travel to England for a holiday. Santayana spends two days with Earl Russell aboard the latter’s steam yacht Royal, sailing down the Thames from Reading to London. In April Santayana first visits Oxford, where, through Earl Russell, he meets poet Lionel Johnson, then a student at New College. On 18 June Santayana is in London. He visits Winchester, Russell’s school, in company with the young nobleman. On 20 June he views the procession for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee (the fiftieth anniversary of her reign) from a room in Buckingham Palace Road engaged for the occasion by John D. Rockefeller. The company includes Rockefeller’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth (“Bessie”), and Charles Augustus Strong, to whom she had become engaged that spring. During the summer, Santayana makes his third return to Spain. He is in Ávila July and August. On 2 September he takes a ship from Malaga to meet his sister, Susana, on Gibraltar for a few weeks to tour southern Spain before returning to Germany. From that autumn until the following spring, Santayana continues his graduate studies at Berlin. (His December address in Berlin is Pottsdamerstrasse 123III.) The current German psycho-physiological approach to the study of philosophy is uncongenial to Santayana; also he is apprehen-
Chronology
509
sive about writing a doctoral dissertation in German. He decides to return to Harvard to complete his doctoral program. 1888 He joins Earl Russell at Valence, France, on 2 June for a seventeen-day canal journey through Burgundy aboard the Royal. On 18 June they reach Paris, where Santayana leaves Russell. In August, following his summer stay in Ávila, he visits Russell at his house, Broom Hall, situated at Teddington. After over two years abroad, Santayana returns to America, sailing from Liverpool to Boston on the Catalonia. Josiah Royce rejects the suggestion of Schopenhauer as the subject of Santayana’s dissertation, recommending Lotze instead. Until the following autumn (1889), Santayana lives with his mother in her house in Roxbury, Massachusetts, working on his doctoral dissertation. 1889 Santayana completes his dissertation on Lotze’s System of Philosophy and is awarded Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees by Harvard University. During the summer he stays with Julian Codman and his family at Cotuit, on Cape Cod, where he meets the novelist Howard Sturgis, cousin to his relations. That autumn, at the rank of instructor in philosophy, he begins his twenty-two-year teaching career at Harvard. During the academic year 1889–90, Santayana lives in rooms in Thayer Hall in the Harvard Yard. He becomes an honorary member of several college clubs, including the Delta Phi or “Gas House” (later the Delphic), the Zeta Psi (called “The Spee”), and the Signet Society. He meets Henry Adams at the historian’s home in Washington, D.C., where he is taken by Ward Thoron. 1890 In June Santayana sails from New York for Liverpool. During the summer he first visits Queen’s Acre, novelist Howard Sturgis’s home near Windsor Park, England, which he is to visit almost yearly until Sturgis’s death in 1920. He spends part of July and August in Ávila. Sailing from Liverpool on 3 September on the Teutonic, Santayana returns to America and moves into rooms at No. 7, Stoughton Hall, the Harvard Yard, where he will spend six winters. About this time he begins his “Poetry Bees”: regular meetings held in his rooms with a group of student friends for the purpose of reading aloud from the celebrated poets. This practice is continued for several years before being discontinued and is revived in 1910–11, with Conrad Aiken as the leading light among the student members. Also, at about this time, Santayana, William Vaughn Moody, Norman Hapgood, Boylston Beal, and others, as a lark, found the Laodicean Club at Harvard, and Santayana is elected “Pope” by the membership.
510
Editorial Appendix
1891 Santayana sails from Boston to Liverpool in June aboard the Cephalonia. He makes his first visit to Telegraph House (or “T.H.”), Earl Russell’s estate on the South Downs in Hampshire, England, where Santayana is to be a regular visitor until 1923. He visits Ávila in August and returns to Boston in September. 1892 Santayana spends the summer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the autumn he makes his first visit to Yale, where he is invited by William Lyon Phelps to watch the Harvard-Yale football game. Santayana is writing “nothing but poetry” at this time. On 26 November his half sister, Susana, then forty-one, marries Celedonio Sastre of Ávila, a widower with six children. On 16 December, Santayana’s twenty-ninth birthday, he gives a dinner party for a group of Harvard friends: “one of the pleasantest memories of my life.”1 1893 On 10 June Santayana sails from New York for Gibraltar on the Fulda.2 Crossing to Tangiers, he meets the American painter John Singer Sargent on board ship. During the summer, he is in Ávila, where he witnesses his father’s death at seventy-nine. He leaves Ávila on 22 August for London and returns to New York, sailing from Southampton on 3 September. He spends two weeks with Strong in New York on his arrival. Back in Cambridge in October, he learns of the death of the closest of his younger friends, Warwick Potter (who had graduated from Harvard that spring), from cholera in the harbor of Brest during a voyage aboard a friend’s yacht. The body is returned to New York, where Santayana attends the funeral. He writes the four “To W. P.” sonnets. About this time he is approached by Herbert S. Stone and Hannibal Ingalls Kimball, young Harvard men who offer to publish a collection of his poems. He also attends the New York wedding of Robert Burnside Potter, Warwick’s elder brother. At the end of this year Santayana undergoes his metanoia, or fundamental change of heart, resulting in a renunciation of the world. This is brought about by a combination of disconcerting events, including Susana’s marriage, his father’s pathetic death, Warwick Potter’s death, the end of youth (signaled by his thirtieth birthday), and the prospect of an undistinguished career and life in Protestant America. 1894 Santayana remains in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the summer. Earl Russell, en route to San Francisco, spends a week with him in Cambridge. Santayana’s first book, Sonnets and Other Verses, is published by Stone and Kimball in Cambridge and Chicago.
Chronology
511
1895 In Cambridge, Massachusetts, until June, Santayana again sails from New York to Gibraltar on the Werra. During the summer, he visits Earl Russell at his “ugly villa” at Maidenhead, England, and meets Mrs. Marion Sommerville, who is later to divorce her husband and become Russell’s second wife (“Countess Mollie”). During this summer, Santayana also travels in Italy with Charles Loeser and makes a one-hundred-fifty-mile walking tour through France to Switzerland with Guy Murchie. He returns to Cambridge in late September, sailing from London to New York on a cattle steamer. 1896 Santayana’s first book-length prose work is published by Scribner’s: The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory. The second edition of Sonnets, containing the thirty new sonnets of the Second Sonnet Series, also is published by Stone and Kimball in this year. Andreas Martin Andersen makes his charcoal drawing, which becomes Santayana’s favorite portrait of himself. On 28 June Santayana sails from Quebec on the Parisian, bound for Liverpool and a year’s leave of absence from Harvard. He plans to spend a year in advanced study at Cambridge University. Late July through early September, he is in Oxford. Early in October he visits Bertrand Russell at Haslemere, England; in September he begins a four-week stay in Maidenhead, England. He also appears in court in Winchester on 9 or 10 October to testify on behalf of Frank Russell against whom charges were brought by the Earl’s estranged first wife, Mabel Edith, and her mother, Lady Lena Scott. Afterwards, Santayana goes immediately from Winchester to Cambridge, where he is admitted as an advanced student to King’s College, with the standing of Master of Arts. His Cambridge friends include Nathaniel Wedd, G. Lowes Dickinson, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and J. M. E. McTaggart. He studies Plato under the direction of Henry Jackson of Trinity College. That December Santayana testifies on behalf of the “wicked Earl,” as Russell’s notorious courtroom adventures caused him to be designated by the journalists, at the trial of Lady Scott and her codefendants for libel, held at the Old Bailey in London. They are convicted and sentenced to eight months at hard labor, but Russell intercedes to reduce the severity of Lady Scott’s punishment. Santayana spends the Christmas holidays in Paris with club acquaintances at Harvard, who are studying at the Beaux Arts. 1897 In January Santayana returns to King’s College, Cambridge, England. He spends April and May travelling in Italy with Mr. and Mrs. Robert Burnside Potter, visiting Florence, Venice, and Rome. On 22 June, in company with the Rockefellers (as in 1887), Santayana views Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession (the sixtieth anniversary of her reign) from a room in Picadilly
512
Editorial Appendix
taken by John D. Rockefeller for the occasion. During the summer, Santayana sees Lionel Johnson again, in Earl Russell’s London rooms in Temple Gardens. His study at King’s College is finished during July and August, and, after fifteen months abroad, he returns on 2 September 1897 to Boston from Liverpool in the Gallia. He resumes his teaching duties at Harvard and lives with his mother in her house in Longwood, Brookline, Massachusetts, walking to classes. 1898 Despite Harvard President Charles William Eliot’s disapproval, early in the year Santayana is promoted from instructor to assistant professor for a five-year period at an annual salary of two thousand dollars. The promotion is endorsed by William James, Hugo Münsterberg, and Santayana’s other colleagues in the philosophy department. He takes up permanent residence on Brattle Street in Cambridge to “do one’s share in maintaining or establishing the academic traditions of the place.”3 In June he sails to England for his summer holiday abroad, but he is dismayed by the ignominious defeat of the Spanish fleet at Manila Harbor and Santiago in the Spanish-American War. He returns in September, sailing from Liverpool to New York. 1899 Santayana’s Lucifer, a mythological tragedy, is published in Chicago and New York by H. S. Stone. Santayana sails from New York to Southampton in June and spends the summer at Oxford completing work on the manuscript of Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. He visits the Robert B. Potters at Sainte Marguerite and then spends two weeks with Susana and her family in Ávila before sailing to Quebec from Liverpool in September. 1900 Santayana spends the summer abroad, sailing in June from New York to London. He visits a number of cities in France, including Chartres, Orleans, and Toulouse, and then settles in Oxford for most of the time. Returning to America from Southampton in September, he moves into rooms at No. 60, Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he continues to live until mid1904. He meets Baron Albert von Westenholz (“one of my truest friends” [Persons, 261]) when the young German aristocrat appears at Harvard. Interpretations is published by Scribner’s in New York and A. & C. Black in London. Late this year or early in 1901, Santayana submits his resignation from Harvard, but he remains on the faculty until his actual retirement in 1912. 1901 Publication of the last collection of new poems by Santayana, A Hermit of Carmel and Other Poems, in New York by Scribner’s (and in London by R. B. Johnson in 1902). Henceforth, Santayana writes little poetry, concentrating
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instead on philosophy. He spends the summer abroad, sailing for England in July and returning in September. 1902 Santayana again spends the summer abroad, sailing in June from New York to Southampton and returning from London in September. 1903 Santayana is reappointed assistant professor for a second five-year period, at the same annual salary of two thousand dollars. Again the summer is spent abroad, with Santayana sailing from New York to Southampton in June. In mid-August he leaves Oxford for Portsmouth, to visit Earl Russell. He returns to Cambridge, Massachusetts, from Hamburg in September. 1904–6 Santayana spends twenty-seven months abroad, including his only sabbatical leave (1904–5), travelling in Europe and the Middle East. In mid-July 1904 he sails from New York to Plymouth, England. That September, he sends the last batch of manuscript for The Life of Reason to the publishers and then sets out from Paris for his “first real travels.” He visits Rome and Venice with Charles Loeser. After spending a few weeks at Naples in December, he visits Pompeii; then goes on to Sicily, where, at Syracuse, he reads the first proofs of The Life of Reason. He returns from Sicily to Naples and sails for Greece. He is in Egypt in January 1905 and travels by boat up and down the Nile. From Egypt he travels to Palestine and Tel Aviv, spending three weeks at Jerusalem. He visits Damascus and Baalbeck, then travels from Beirut to Athens and through Greece, which, in its modern form, disappoints him. He sails from Piraeus to Constantinople, concluding his odyssey with Budapest and Vienna. Never again will he travel “for the sake of travelling.” (Persons, 467) While still in the East in 1905, Santayana is invited by Harvard to become Hyde Lecturer at the Sorbonne for 1905–6; he accepts, thus extending his holiday for a second year. During this period he lectures on philosophical subjects at Paris and the provincial universities. The five volumes of The Life of Reason; or, the Phases of Human Progress are published during 1905–6 by Scribner’s in New York and Constable in London. Santayana rejects an offer of a position on the philosophical faculty of Columbia University. He returns to America in September 1906, sailing from Southampton to New York, and resumes his teaching duties at Harvard. 1907 Santayana is promoted from assistant professor to full professor, and his salary is doubled to four thousand dollars per year. In June he sails from New York to Hamburg and returns to Boston from Liverpool in September.
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1908 Santayana sails from Boston to Plymouth in June and spends time in England and France before returning to Boston from Cherbourg in September. 1909 Santayana is elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters (later the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters). He spends the summer in Europe, sailing in July, from Boston to Liverpool, on the Lusitania, and returning from Liverpool in September aboard the Mauretania. 1910 In February Santayana delivers a course of lectures, on “Three Philosophical Poets,” at Columbia University. On 13 April he addresses the Century Club in Chicago, and from 14 April to about 24 April, he repeats his course of six lectures on the “Three Philosophical Poets” at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. These lectures constitute the book Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe published later in the year by Harvard University Press, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and by the Oxford University Press, in London. Santayana sails from Boston to Liverpool aboard the Lusitania in June, and he makes his penultimate transatlantic crossing in September, sailing from Hamburg on the Kaiserin Augusta Victoria. 1911 In April Santayana delivers his final lecture at Harvard. He receives an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Wisconsin. From Madison, he travels to the University of California at Berkeley, where, beginning in June, he teaches in the six-week summer session and has his only experience of the American West. 1912 Santayana makes his final transatlantic crossing (thirty-eighth), sailing aboard the Olympic from Boston on 24 January, bound for Plymouth and a holiday in Europe. He plans to return to Harvard in September 1913, but in fact he has left America for good. On 5 February Santayana’s mother dies. His share of the inheritance, coupled with his savings, enables him to resign his professorship, which he does with a letter to Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell of 6 June. In February he visits Cambridge University, where, as Bertrand Russell’s guest, he sleeps in the clock tower of Trinity College. During the spring he lives in Spain with Mercedes de la Escalera (an old family friend) in her home in Madrid. At this time, Santayana’s bronchitis becomes chronic, and he suffers from it periodically during the rest of his life. In May, he moves into C. A. Strong’s Paris apartment at No. 9, Avenue de l’Observatoire, which, until his settlement in Rome in 1928, becomes his prin-
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cipal residence. At this time, his sister Josephine Sturgis is taken to Spain by her brother Robert, where she will remain permanently. 1913–14 Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion is published by Scribner’s in New York and Dent in London. Santayana is in Ávila during December 1913 and spends the period January through May 1914 in Seville. He is back at Strong’s Paris apartment in June. In July Santayana crosses the English Channel “to do some shopping, and see a few friends,”4 travels to London, and early in August, to Cambridge. World War I breaks out, and Santayana returns to Oxford, where he remains essentially throughout the war, until the end of April 1919. During this period he often visits Earl Russell at Telegraph House. At Oxford Santayana also becomes friends with Robert Bridges, the poet laureate, and, through Bertrand Russell, with Lady Ottoline Morrell, whose Manor House at Garsington (near Oxford) is at this time a gathering place for the British literati. 1915 The controversial Egotism in German Philosophy is published by Scribner’s in New York (and, in 1916, by Dent in London). Santayana is accused by his critics of writing propaganda. 1918 During the winter Santayana gives the Third Annual Henriette Hertz Lecture, before the British Academy in London. The lecture is published as “Philosophical Opinion in America,” in the Proceedings of the British Academy for 1917–18, and later appears, in 1920, as chapter five of Character and Opinion in the United States. 1919 Robert Bridges tries unsuccessfully to persuade Santayana to remain in England. He wishes to arrange a lifetime membership for him in one of the Oxford colleges with which Bridges is affiliated, Corpus Christi or New College. Santayana is still considering a permanent residency in Oxford, but wants to travel for at least a year. At the end of June, after considerable difficulties obtaining a French visa, Santayana returns to Strong’s Paris apartment to write. He declines an offer from Professor Wendell T. Bush to lecture at Columbia. In late November he accompanies a crippled Strong to his Villa Le Balze at Fiesole near Florence. 1920 During this year Santayana begins his practice of passing the winters in Rome, but continues to spend the summers in Paris, Ávila, Glion, at Lake Geneva, or Cortina d’Ampezzo. Little Essays: Drawn From the Writings of George
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Santayana by Logan Pearsall Smith, With the Collaboration of the Author is published by Constable in London and Scribner’s in New York. Character and Opinion in the United States: with Reminiscences of William James, and Josiah Royce, and Academic Life in America is published by Constable in London, Scribner’s in New York, and McLeod in Toronto. His work continues on Soliloquies and Realms of Being. 1921 Santayana spends the winter months in Spain (Toledo and Madrid) concentrating on his writing. Several of the English soliloquies are published separately in the The Dial, the The Athenaeum, and the Journal of Philosophy. At the end of March he returns to Paris, and in October travels to Rome. 1922 After a winter in Rome organizing the Realms of Being, Santayana spends the summer in Paris working on the manuscript of Scepticism and Animal Faith. Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies and the revised second edition of the five volumes of The Life of Reason are published by Constable and Scribner’s (Life of Reason by Constable in 1923). 1923 The introduction to Santayana’s system of philosophy, Scepticism and Animal Faith, and the last collection of Santayana’s poetry to appear during his lifetime, Poems: Selected by the Author and Revised, are published by Scribner’s and Constable. Santayana has by now changed his mind about retiring permanently in England, partly because of the winter climate and partly because of his dissatisfaction with the current tone of life there. On his penultimate visit to England, Santayana delivers the Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford (entitled The Unknowable and published by the Clarendon Press). He makes final visits to Cambridge and to “T.H.,” where Earl Russell is now alone, his third wife, the novelist “Elizabeth” (Mary Annette Beauchamp, widow of the German Count von Arnim) having left him in 1918. 1924 Santayana declines Professor George Herbert Palmer’s invitation to read the Phi Beta Kappa poem at the Harvard Commencement exercises. A revised version of his tragedy (originally published in 1900) is published as Lucifer; or the Heavenly Truce: A Theological Tragedy, by Dunster House, at Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1925 Publication of Dialogues in Limbo, by Constable in London (and by Scribner’s in New York in 1926).
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1926 Santayana writes a short preface to the 1926 reprint of Winds of Doctrine (New York: Scribner’s; London: Dent). During the summer, in a room in the Hotel Cristallo, in Cortina d’Ampezzo, he composes, “at one stretch,” (Persons, 529) Platonism and the Spiritual Life. That autumn Santayana begins the annual practice of spending all or part of the months of September and October in Venice, staying at the Hotel Danieli, en route back to Rome from Cortina. 1927 Early in April, Santayana meets Daniel Cory, age twenty-two, who has come from England at Santayana’s invitation to meet the philosopher in Rome. In August Santayana officiates as a “substitute papa”5 at the wedding of Margaret Strong (daughter of C. A. Strong and Elizabeth Rockefeller) to George Cuevas, in Paris, by giving the bride away. Publication of the first volume of Santayana’s system of philosophy: The Realm of Essence: Book First of Realms of Being, by Scribner’s in New York and Constable in London. 1928 Early in January Santayana declines the offer, from President Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, of the Norton Chair of Poetry for 1928–29. His half sister Susana dies in Ávila, on 10 February, in her seventy-seventh year. At the end of August, Strong gives up his Paris apartment, in which, for many years, Santayana has lived as Strong’s guest. Early in September, Santayana makes a penultimate visit to Spain. Avoiding Ávila, he goes to Mercedes de la Escalera in Galicia to ascertain the state of mental and physical health of his sister Josephine, who is living with Mercedes, and to advise her regarding her will. About this time, at a suggestion from his nephew, George Sturgis, Santayana begins composing his autobiography. 1929 By the first of September Santayana has finished work on the manuscript of The Realm of Matter. Again settled at the Hotel Bristol in Rome, in October he begins work on The Realm of Truth. 1930 Celedonio Sastre Serrano, husband of the late Susana, dies in Ávila on 12 May. At the end of May Santayana makes his final visit to Spain, in order to settle the affairs of his surviving sister, Josephine, as well as his own. He gives his father’s house in Ávila to the Sastre brothers, Celedonio’s sons. After his return to Rome, Josephine dies in Ávila, on October 15, at the age of seventy-seven. The Realm of Matter: Book Second of Realms of Being is published, by Scribner’s in New York and Constable in London, and “A Brief History of My Opinions” appears in volume two of Contemporary American Philosophy: Personal
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Statements, edited by George P. Adams and William P. Montague, and published by Macmillan in New York. 1931 John Francis Stanley, 2d Earl Russell, dies at Marseilles on 3 March at the age of sixty-five. Santayana reverses his intention to visit Ávila in the spring or summer, both because of disinclination and the worsening political unrest in Spain, presaging the impending civil war. The Genteel Tradition at Bay is published by Scribner’s in New York and by the Adelphi in London. In December Santayana receives and declines the offer to become William James Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. 1932 Santayana attends the philosophical congress commemorating the tercentenary of Spinoza’s birth, held at The Hague on September 6–10, where he delivers a lecture on Ultimate Religion (published in Septimana Spinozana, by Martinus Nijhoff, at The Hague, in 1933). He also goes to London, where he attends a meeting held there to commemorate the tercentenary of the birth of John Locke. On 19 October he gives an address on “Locke and the Frontiers of Common Sense” which becomes the first of five essays constituting Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy (published in England by the Cambridge University Press and in New York by Scribner’s in 1933). 1933 Evelyn Tindall, an Englishwoman who is secretary for the British Legation to the Holy See in Rome, is first mentioned as typing Santayana’s manuscripts. Beginning with The Last Puritan, she continues her work with Santayana for almost twenty years. 1934 On 31 August Santayana completes work on his novel, The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel. Begun in the early 1890s as a story of college life, the work has been in progress for more than forty years. 1935 In the spring Santayana declines the invitation of President James Bryant Conant and the Harvard Tercentenary Committee to attend the Commencement exercises in June and receive an honorary Doctor of Letters degree. He also declines the subsequent offer to receive, together with sixty other scholars, an unspecified honorary degree to be presented at Harvard during the summer. He regards these offers as merely grudging recognition of his achievement by official Harvard. The Last Puritan is published by Constable in London (on 17 October) and by Macmillan in Toronto. The
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Scribner’s edition, published in New York in 1936, becomes a Book-of-the-Month Club bestseller. 1936 The first six volumes of the Triton Edition of The Works of George Santayana, Scribner’s deluxe limited edition of the collected writings in fifteen volumes, are published in New York. Santayana writes a general preface and autographs sheets which are placed at the front in volume one. (The remaining nine volumes are published during the period 1937–40.) Obiter Scripta: Lectures, Essays and Reviews, edited by Justus Buchler and Benjamin Schwartz, and Philosophy of Santayana: Selections From the Works of George Santayana, edited by Irwin Edman, are published by Scribner’s (Obiter is also published by Constable). During June and July, Santayana makes a final visit to Paris. 1937 On 29 May Santayana’s favorite grandnephew, Roberto Sastre (son of José [“Pepe”] and Isabel Sastre) is killed while fighting on the Falangist side in the Spanish civil war. The Realm of Truth: Book Third of Realms of Being is published in London by Constable (and in New York by Scribner’s in 1938). 1938 The first book-length biography, George Santayana, by George Washburne Howgate is published in Philadelphia by the University of Pennsylvania Press. 1939 World War II breaks out in Europe. Santayana is refused a regular long-term visa by the Swiss officials and decides to remain in Italy. Daniel Cory stays with him at Cortina d’Ampezzo until the end of August. (Their next meeting will be at the Blue Sisters’ nursing home in Rome, early in September 1947, eight years later.) In the autumn, the Hotel Bristol in Rome, Santayana’s home for many years, is closed for reconstruction. Santayana decides to spend the winter of 1939–40 in Venice, a decision that, because of the severe cold and dampness of Venice in winter, he afterward regrets. In September he learns of the suicide of his friend Baron Albert von Westenholz. 1940 On 23 January, at Florence, Charles Augustus Strong dies at the age of seventy-seven. The Realm of Spirit: Book Fourth of Realms of Being is published by Scribner’s in New York and Constable in London. The Philosophy of George Santayana, volume two of The Library of Living Philosophers, Paul Arthur Schilpp, Editor, is published in Evanston by the Northwestern University Press. The book, composed of critical essays by several hands, contains also Santayana’s rejoinder entitled “Apologia pro Mente Sua.”
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1941 Santayana spends the summer at Fiuggi, returning to Rome in the Autumn. The Hotel Bristol being closed, he lives for a time in the Grand Hotel. Now seventy-seven years old, he finds looking after himself more difficult and, on 14 October, moves into a nursing home operated by the Blue Sisters of the Little Company of Mary, an order of Roman Catholic Irish nuns. The large establishment is situated in the Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, atop the Celius (Monte Celio), one of Rome’s seven hills. This is to be Santayana’s last home, where he will live for almost eleven years. 1942–43 The manuscript of Persons and Places, the first volume of Santayana’s autobiography, is refused by the Italian postal authorities. Scribner’s editor John Hall Wheelock, and Irish poet Padraic Collum, with the cooperation of American and Vatican diplomatic officials, succeed in spiriting the manuscript across national lines and ultimately to New York. Cut off by the war from correspondence with America and England, Santayana continues to write his autobiography and works on the manuscript of Dominations and Powers, a book composed of essays written over a great many years. 1944 Like The Last Puritan, in 1936, Persons and Places becomes a Book-ofthe-Month Club bestseller. On 20 December George Sturgis, Santayana’s nephew and financial manager, dies of a heart attack. 1945 The second volume of Santayana’s autobiography is published as The Middle Span, the title being supplied by editor Wheelock of Scribner’s. Santayana is awarded the Nicholas Murray Butler Medal by Columbia University. 1946 The Idea of Christ in the Gospels; or, God in Man: A Critical Essay is published by Scribner’s in New York and Saunders in Toronto. 1947 Daniel Cory spends nearly two months with Santayana in Rome, living in a room opposite Santayana’s in the Blue Sisters’ establishment. He finds Santayana completely deaf in one ear. On 13 October Santayana gives Cory the manuscript of his Posthumous Poems, inscribing a personal dedication. These unpublished poems and translations, which Santayana had begun revising and transcribing at the end of the war, are published in The Poet’s Testament, in 1953, edited by Cory and John Hall Wheelock.
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1948 Dialogues in Limbo, With Three New Dialogues is published in New York by Scribner’s. 1949 Cory spends the months of April and May helping Santayana with his work on the manuscript of Dominations and Powers. They agree that henceforth Cory should spend the winters in Rome. Cory returns to Rome at the end of October and remains there until the end of April 1950. In December 1949 Cory consults Santayana’s physician, Dr. Luigi Sabbatucci about Santayana’s persistent cough and recent loss of appetite. He interprets the doctor’s circumspect answers as suspicion of serious illness. 1950 Artist Lino S. Lipinsky de Orlov does his series of pencil portraits of Santayana in August 1950. Cory returns to Rome from England in early October 1950 and remains there until early May the following year. He assists Santayana with the final checking and correction of the proofs of Dominations and Powers, and they complete this labor by the beginning of the New Year. In mid-October 1950 Robert Lowell and his wife, novelist Elizabeth Hardwick, visit Santayana in Rome. 1951 Dominations and Powers: Reflections on Liberty, Society, and Government, Santayana’s last book published during his lifetime, is issued by Scribner’s in New York and Constable in London. Santayana receives another visit from Robert Lowell early in the year, and Cory spends about nine months [c. September 1951–May 1952] with Santayana in Rome. They spend the autumn collaborating on the revised one-volume edition of The Life of Reason (originally published in five volumes in 1905–6, the new edition is published by Constable in London and Scribner’s in New York in 1954). Cory observes that Santayana’s deafness is increasing and that his vision, never good, is impaired by cataracts. 1952 On 4 June Santayana falls on the steps of the Spanish Consulate in Rome, where he had gone to renew his passport. He is taken to the nursing home in a taxi by officials of the Consulate. The effects of the fall include three broken ribs, a bleeding head wound, and patches of pneumonia on the lungs. Cory, hastily summoned from England by the Sisters, remains with Santayana until the end of June. Dr. Sabbatucci is amazed by Santayana’s recovery. While recuperating, Santayana receives, as a present from George Salerno (a young American journalist, who had met Santayana while a soldier in the occupation forces), a copy of the poems of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Santayana decides to
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spend the summer translating Lorenzo’s lengthy pastoral Ombron and Ambra, and he works at this task into the summer, until increasing blindness and illness make further labor impossible. By the third week of August, Santayana becomes desperately ill. Cory arrives in Rome on 8 September and is told by Dr. Sabbatucci that Santayana is dying of stomach cancer. On 26 September, after much suffering, Santayana dies. His wish to be buried in unconsecrated ground in a Catholic cemetery is frustrated by the lack of such a section in Rome’s Campo Verano. The Spanish officials intercede and, on 30 September Santayana’s body is interred in the Tomb of the Spaniards. At the graveside, Daniel Cory reads aloud Santayana’s poem, “The Poet’s Testament.” 1953 The third volume of Santayana’s autobiography, entitled (by the publisher) My Host the World, is published in London by the Cresset Press, and in New York by Scribner’s. The Posthumous Poems, together with two early plays, are published by Scribner’s as The Poet’s Testament: Poems and Two Plays. 1955 The Letters of George Santayana, a selection of two hundred and ninety-six letters to eighty-six recipients, edited by Daniel Cory, is published by Scribner’s.
Notes 1
Letter to Daniel Cory of 11 November 1932. On page 36 of volume 3 of Scribner’s edition of Persons and Places, entitled My Host the World (1953) (and also on the holograph manuscript itself), Santayana’s second visit to Gibraltar is described as follows “… I returned there in 1891, this time from America, and crossed to Tangiers. …” On page 37, he observes that he was again at Gibraltar “two years later.” Evidently, the date of 1891 is a slip, for on the map referred to above in the headnote to this chronology Santayana has indicated that in June of 1893, and again in June of 1895, he sailed from New York to Gibraltar, on the Fulda and the Werra, respectively. The map also indicates that in June 1891 he sailed from Boston to Liverpool aboard the Cephalonia. Santayana had left the map in Spain many years before, and therefore did not have it by him while composing his autobiography in Rome during the ’Forties. 3 Letter to Guy Murchie of 17 July 1897. 4 Letter to Mary Williams Winslow of 16 August 1914. 5 Letter to Boylston Adams Beal of 21 November 1927. 2
Addresses The following list of addresses is drawn from the place and date-lines and from the contents of Santayana’s letters, from information provided in his autobiography, Persons and Places, and from other biographical sources. The list includes addresses where Santayana stayed for long and short periods, and it includes trips and visits to various places. Santayana’s habit of changing residence with the seasons, however, complicates the task of accounting for his addresses, and this list, containing estimations as well as gaps and omissions, does not pretend to be complete. It is, nevertheless, reasonably accurate, and used in conjunction with the Chronology serves to inform the reader as to where Santayana was and what he was doing at a given time. The names of clubs at which Santayana dined and from which he wrote letters, but at which he did not actually reside (e.g., the Colonial and Delta Phi Clubs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or the National Liberal Club in London, England) are not included in this list. Indented dates indicate temporary absence from a permanent address. 1863–66 69 Calle Ancha de San Bernardo, Madrid, Spain 1866–72 ( June) Ávila, Spain (father’s house) 1872
(15 July)–1881–82 (Winter) 302 Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts (mother’s house)
1881–82 (Winter)–1882 (September) 26 Millmont Street, Roxbury, Massachusetts (mother’s house) 1882
(September)–1886 (May) Room no. 19, Hollis Hall, Harvard Yard, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1883 ( June–September) Visit to Spain; trips to Lyons and Paris, France
1886–1912 Spends each summer in Europe 1886
( July–early August)
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Ávila (father’s house) (early August) Visits to Paris and Cologne en route to Göttingen, Germany (12 August to end of August) c/o Fräulein Schlote, 16 D Obere Karspüle, Göttingen (September) c/o Frau Sturm, Werder Strasse 6, Dresden, Germany (Autumn 1886) Visit to London 1886
(October)–1887 (February) Schiffbauerdamm, 3II, Berlin, Germany
1887
(late March) Two-day boat trip down Thames, from Reading to London, visits to Windsor, Eton, and Winchester, England (21 April–May) Oxford, England ( June) 87 Jermyn Street, St. James, London, England ( July–August) Ávila (father’s house) (early September) Trip to Gibraltar and tour of southern Spain
1887
(1 November)–1888 (mid-March) Potsdamerstrasse 123III, Berlin
1888
( June) Canal journey through Burgundy, visit to Paris ( July–August) Ávila (father’s house)
1888
(August)–1889 (August) 26 Millmont Street, Roxbury, Massachusetts (mother’s house)
1889
(September)–1890 (Spring) Room no. 29, Thayer Hall, Harvard Yard
1890
(Summer) Visit to Queen’s Acre, Windsor, England (Howard Sturgis’s house), and Ávila
1890
(Autumn)–1896 (June)
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Room no. 7, Stoughton Hall, Harvard Yard 1893 (Summer) Visit to Gibraltar and Ávila, Spain 1895 (22 June–late September) Summer abroad: Spain, Italy, France, Switzerland, England 1895 (December) Naushon Island, Buzzard’s Bay, Cape Cod, Massachusetts ( John Forbes’s house) 1896
(27 June) Chateau Frontenac, Quebec, Canada ( July–September) 26 Banbury Road, Oxford, England (September) Visit to Amberley Cottage, Maidenhead, England (villa of John Francis Stanley, 2d Earl Russell) (October–December) King’s College (1 Silver Street), Cambridge, England (December) Trip to Paris
1897
( January–June) King’s College (2 Free School Lane), Cambridge, England ( July–August) Gibbs Hall (Fellows’ Building), King’s College, Cambridge, England (Nathaniel Wedd’s rooms)
1897
(September)–1898 (Spring) 75 Monmouth Street, Longwood, Brookline, Massachusetts (mother’s house)
1898
(Spring)–1899 (Spring) 52 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts
1899
( June–August) Summer at Oxford, visits to France and Spain
1899
(Autumn)–1904 ( June) 60 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1900 (Summer) France, 108 Jermyn Street, London, England, and Oxford 1901 ( July–September) Oxford, England (5 Grove Street, now Magpie Lane) 1902 and 1903
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Summers in Europe 1904
( July)–1906 (September) Twenty-seven months abroad: sabbatical leave and Hyde Lecture program 1904 ( July–September) Travels in England, Belgium, Holland, Germany, and France (24 September–October) Ávila (sister Susana’s house) (November) Villa I Tatti, Settignano, Florence, Italy (the Bernard Berensons’ villa) (25 November–8 December) Grand Hôtel de Russie et des Iles Britanniques, Rome, Italy 1905 ( January–August) Traveling in the Middle East and Europe ( January) Egypt (February) Israel and Lebanon (March and April) Greece (May) Turkey, Hungary, and Germany ( June and July) England (August) Germany (visits Baron Albert von Westenholz) 1905 (September)–1906 ( June) Hyde Lecturer at the Sorbonne and at French provincial universities, Paris address: Hôtel Foyot, Rue de Tournon (September) Compiègne (October–mid-November) Ávila (Susana’s house) (April) Lyons, Montpellier, Cannes, Nîmes, and Orange (29 April–5 May) Toulouse (May) Pau, Bordeaux, Arcachon, La Rochelle, and Caen ( June) Dijon, Morez, Lyons, and Grenoble
1906
(mid-September)–1908 (mid-June) 75 Monmouth Street, Longwood, Brookline (mother’s house) 1907 ( January) Lectures in New York City 1907 (mid-June–mid-September) Summer abroad: Germany, Switzerland, Spain (18 September)
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Arrival from Europe in New York City: Hotel Manhattan 1908
(mid-June–mid-September) Summer abroad: England, France; visit to Queen’s Acre, Windsor, in July (Howard Sturgis’s house)
1908
(mid-September)–1912 ( January) Room no. 3, Prescott Hall, Harvard Yard 1909 (mid-July–mid-September) Summer in England; visit in August to Telegraph House (“T.H.”), Chichester, Hampshire, England ( John Francis Stanley, Second Earl Russell’s house) 1910 (February) New York City (April) Visits Chicago, Illinois, and lectures at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (8 June–17 September) Summer abroad; visit to Ávila 1911 (mid-June–end of August) University Club, San Francisco, California
1912
(29 January) On board the R.M.S. Olympic (February) Visits to Queen’s Acre, Windsor, and to Trinity College, Cambridge (20 February) 7 Bennet Street, St. James, London (28 February) Hotel du Quai Voltaire, Paris (March and early April) Serrano 7, Madrid, Spain (Mercedes de la Escalera’s house) (May–August) 9, Avenue de l’Observatoire, Paris (Charles Augustus Strong’s apartment becomes Santayana’s principal residence [except during the period July 1914–August 1919] until the end of August 1928.) (September–November) Travels in Italy (Milan, Bologna, Naples, Palermo) with an extend ed stay in Rome
1912
(30 November)–1913 (early January)
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Editorial Appendix
Villa I Tatti, Settignano, Florence 1913
(February–mid-March) French Riviera: Nice and Monte Carlo (mid-March–April) Serrano 7, Madrid (May–mid-July) 9, Avenue de l’Observatoire, Paris (3 July) Hotel de Ville, Brussels, Belgium (mid-August–October) 66 High Street, Oxford (November) 45 Chesterton Road, Cambridge, England (December) Ávila (Susana’s house)
1914
(January–mid-May) Hotel la Peninsular, Seville, Spain (mid-May–June) 9, Avenue de l’Observatoire, Paris (27 July) Euston Hotel, London (2–3 August) Red Lion Hotel, Cambridge, England (5 August) Visit to Queen’s Acre, Windsor (16 August) Oxford, England (late August–11 October) 3 Ryder Street, London (12 October–14 December) 45 Chesterton Road, Cambridge
1914
(14 December)–1915 January) Old Ship Hotel, Brighton, England
1915
(February–April) 45 Chesterton Road, Cambridge (May)
Addresses
529
66 High Street, Oxford 1915
( June)–1919 (April) 22 Beaumont Street, Oxford (main residence during World War I) 1915 (September) Visits London, Lewes, and North Luffenham, England 1915 (October) Visit to Bournemouth, England 1917 (February–March) 6 Park Street, Torquay, Cornwall, England 1918 (Winter) Trip to London
1919
(end of April) Trip to London (13–16 and 20–25 June) Richmond Hill Hotel, Richmond, Surrey, England (16–20 June) Trip to London ( July–November) 9, Avenue de l’Observatoire, Paris
1919
(December)–1920 (20 January) Villa Le Balze, Fiesole, Florence, Italy (Charles Augustus Strong’s villa)
1920
(20 January–early May) Hotel Minerva, Rome (during 1920) Final visit to Queen’s Acre, Windsor (May 1920) Florence (early June–September) 9, Avenue de l’Observatoire, Paris (October) Ávila, Spain (Susana’s house)
1920
(late October)–1921 (3 January) Hotel Castilla, Toledo, Spain
1921
(3 January–7 March)
530
Editorial Appendix
Serrano 7, Madrid, Spain (end of March–end of October) 9, Avenue de l’Observatoire, Paris (early November) Villa Le Balze, Fiesole, and afterwards the Hotel Royal, Rome 1921
(15 November)–1922 (22 April) Hotel Marini, Rome
1922
(24 April–11 October) 9, Avenue de l’Observatoire, Paris (part of June and early October spent in the Hôtel du Palais Royal)
1922
(25 October)–1923 (8 May) New York Hotel, Nice, France
1923
(mid-May–mid-September) 9, Avenue de l’Observatoire, Paris (mid-September–31 October) Penultimate visit to England: London, Cambridge, Chichester, Oxford, Bath, and Dover (6 November–mid-November) Villa Le Balze, Fiesole, Florence
1923
(mid-November)–1924 (6 May) Hotel Bristol, Rome
1924
(6 May–mid-June) Hotel Bauer-Grünwald, Venice, Italy (mid-June–29 September) Hotel Cristallo, Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy (30 September–mid-October) Villa Le Balze, Fiesole, Florence
1924
(late October)–1925 (1 June) Hotel Bristol, Rome
1925
(1–22 June) Paris (23 June–mid-July) Ávila (Susana’s house) (mid-July–September)
Addresses
531
9, Avenue de 1’Observatoire, Paris 1925
(October)–1926 ( June) Hotel Bristol, Rome
1926
(end of June–1 October) Hotel Cristallo, Cortina d’Ampezzo (1–10 October) Hôtel Royal Danieli, Venice
1926
(10 October)–1927 (5 June) Hotel Bristol, Rome
1927
(6 June–mid-September) 9, Avenue de 1’Observatoire, Paris (mid-September to mid-October) Hôtel Royal Danieli, Venice (except for four days in Padua)
1927
(17 October)–1928 (10 June) Hotel Bristol, Rome
1928
(11 June–end of August) 9, Avenue de l’Observatoire, Paris (Strong gives up the apartment at the end of August 1928.) (early September) Trip to Oporto, Portugal, and Bayona, Spain (6–21 September) Hotel Continental, Vigo, Spain (22 September) Santiago de Compostela, Spain (early October) Grand Hotel Miramare & de la Ville, Genoa, Italy (3–16 October) Villa Le Balze, Fiesole, Florence
1928
(16 October)–1929 (May) Hotel Bristol, Rome
1929
(early June–mid-September) Hôtel Victoria, Glion-sur-Territet, Switzerland (mid-September–20 October) Villa Le Balze, Fiesole, Florence
1929
(November)–1930 (20 May)
532
Editorial Appendix
Hotel Bristol, Rome 1930
(22 May–15 June) A brief stay at the Hôtel Royal Haussmann, Paris. After final visit to Ávila, a return to the Royal Haussmann. (16–22 June) Pavillon Henri IV, Saint Germain-en-Laye, France (early July) Hôtel Foyot, Paris (11 July–23 September) Hôtel Vouillemont, 15, rue Boissy d’Anglas, Paris (end of September–21 October) Villa Le Balze, Fiesole, Florence
1930
(21 October)–1931 (10 June) Hotel Bristol, Rome
1931
(11–22 June) Hôtel Royal Danieli, Venice (22 June–11 September) Hotel Miramonti, Cortina d’Ampezzo (12–17 September) Hôtel Royal Danieli, Venice (18 September–23 October) Hôtel de Londres, Naples, Italy (23 October–end of December) Hotel Bristol, Rome (except during the first week of December in the Anglo-American Nursing Home, 311 via Nomentana)
1931
(1 January)–1932 (22 June) Hotel Bristol, Rome
1932
(23 June–early July) Hôtel Royal Haussmann, Paris ( July–August) Hôtel des Réservoirs, Versailles, France (1–5 September) Hôtel Royal Haussmann, Paris (6–10 September)
Addresses
Hôtel des Indes, The Hague, Netherlands (11 September–20 October) 7 Park Place, St. James, London (final visit to England) (21–24 October) Dover, England (25 October–early November) Paris 1932
(8 November)–1933 (20 June) Hotel Bristol, Rome
1933
(22 June–early September) Hotel Miramonti, Cortina d’Ampezzo (6 September–20 October) Hôtel Royal Danieli, Venice
1933
(20 October)–1934 (19 June) Hotel Bristol, Rome
1934
(20 June–16 July) Villa Le Balze, Fiesole, Florence (18 July–11 September) Miramonti-Majestic Hotel, Cortina d’Ampezzo (12 September–17 October) Hôtel Royal Danieli, Venice
1934
(20 October)–1935 (28 May) Hotel Bristol, Rome
1935
(29 May–17 June) Hôtel Royal Danieli, Venice (18 June–10 September) Grand Hotel Savoia, Cortina d’Ampezzo (10 September–15 October) Hôtel Royal Danieli, Venice
1935
(16 October)–1936 (3 June) Hotel Bristol, Rome
1936
(4 June–11 August) Savoy-Hotel, rue de Rivoli, Paris (12 August–21 September)
533
534
Editorial Appendix
Hôtel Victoria, Glion-sur-Montreux, Switzerland 1936
(22 September)–1937 (14 June) Hotel Bristol, Rome
1937
(15–16 June) Hôtel Royal Danieli, Venice (17 June–13 September) Grand Hotel Savoia, Cortina d’Ampezzo
1937
(14 September)–1938 (17 June) Hotel Bristol, Rome
1938
(18–20 June) Hôtel Royal Danieli, Venice (20 June–13 September) Grand Hotel Savoia, Cortina d’Ampezzo
1938
(14 September)–1939 (18 June) Hotel Bristol, Rome (Autumn 1939: Hotel Bristol closed for reconstruction)
1939
(19–21 June) Milan and Venice (22 June–3 September) Grand Hotel Savoia, Cortina d’Ampezzo
1939
(4 September)–1940 (19 June) Hôtel Royal Danieli, Venice
1940
(9 June–6 July) Hotel Ampezzo, Cortina d’Ampezzo (6 July–11 September) Grand Hotel Savoia, Cortina d’Ampezzo (11 September–end of September) Hôtel Royal Danieli, Venice
1940
(end of September)–1941 (c. 20 June) Grand Hôtel, Rome
1941
(c. 20 June–12 September) Palazzo della Fonte, Fiuggi, Italy (12 September–14 October)
Addresses
Grand Hotel, Rome 1941
(14 October)–1952 (26 September) Calvary Hospital, Clinic of the Little Company of Mary, 6, Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, Rome
535
Manuscript Locations Academy
American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York NY
American
American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati OH
Amherst
Amherst College Library, Amherst MA
Antiquarian
American Antiquarian Society, Worcester MA
Barnes
Catherine Barnes, Philadelphia PA
Beinecke
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT
Berkeley
The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley
Bidwell
David Bidwell, Geneva, Switzerland
Bodleian
The Bodleian Library, Oxford University, England
Boston
Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Boston Public Library, Boston MA
Bowdoin
Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick ME
Bowling Green
Western Kentucky University, Department of Library Special Collections, Bowling Green
British
The British Library of the British Museum, London, England
Brooklyn
Brooklyn College Library, Brooklyn NY
Brown
The John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence RI
Cambridge
University Library, Cambridge University, England
Castelli
Enrico Castelli Gattinara di Zubiena
Chicago
The Modern Poetry Library, University of Chicago Library, Chicago IL
Columbia
Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY
Congress
The Library of Congress, Washington DC
Constable
Constable and Co. Ltd., London, England
Consulate
Spanish Consulate, Rome, Italy
Cornell
Cornell University Library, Ithaca NY
Dartmouth
Baker Memorial Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover NH
538
Editorial Appendix
DeKalb
The University Libraries, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb
Denson
Alan Denson, Aberdeenshire, Scotland
Dickson
Mr. Carl Byron Dickson, Doswell VA
Duke
William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham NC
Dykeman
King Dykeman, Fairfield University, Fairfield CT
Fales
Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, Fales Library, New York University, New York City
Fitzgerald
Robert Stuart Fitzgerald
Florida
University of Florida Library, Gainesville
Gardner
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston MA
Georgetown
Lauinger Library, Georgetown University, Washington DC
Gerber
William Gerber, Washington DC
Gilmour
Mervyn D. Gilmour, Portadown, Northern Ireland
Harvard
Harvard Archives, Harvard University, Cambridge MA
Houghton
The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA
Howgate
Mrs. George W. Howgate
Huntington
The Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino CA
Indiana
The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington
I Tatti
Villa I Tatti, Settignano, Italy
Kansas
University of Kansas Libraries, Lawrence
Kentucky
University of Kentucky, Lexington
King’s
King’s College Library, Cambridge University, England
Lamont
Collection of Lamont family papers
Lango
John W. Lango, New York NY
Leeds
Leeds University Library, The Brotherton Collection, Leeds, England
Lipinsky
Lino S. Lipinsky de Orlov
Lockwood
Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York at Buffalo
Loyola
Loyola University Library, Chicago IL
Macksey
Richard A. Macksey, Baltimore MD
McMaster
Mills Memorial Library, Bertrand Russell Archives, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Merriam
John McKinstry Merriam
Manuscript Locations
539
Michigan
Bentley Historical Library, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Minnesota
University of Minnesota Libraries, St. Paul
Morgan
The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York NY
Mumford
Lewis Mumford
Munitz
Milton Karl Munitz
Murchie
Guy Murchie Jr.
Newberry
The Newberry Library, Chicago IL
New York
The New York Public Library, New York City
North Carolina
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Northwestern
Northwestern University Library, Evanston IL
Ohio
Ohio Historical Society, Columbus
Oregon
University of Oregon Libraries, Eugene
Penn
The Charles Patterson Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
The Pennsylvania State University Libraries, University Park
Princeton
Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ
Provincial
Provincial Archives, Province of St. Albert the Great, Chicago IL
Radcliffe
The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge MA
Reading
The Library, University of Reading, England
Redwood
The Redwood Library and Athenaeum, Newport RI
Rigacci
Dino Rigacci
Riverside
Rivera Library, University of California, Riverside
Rockefeller
Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY
Rollins
Rollins College, Winter Park FL
Salamanca
University of Salamanca, Casa Museo Unamuno, Salamanca, Spain
Sanchez
Paloma Sanchez Sastre, Madrid, Spain
Santayana
Santayana Edition, Indianapolis IN
Sastre
Sra. Rafael (Adelaida Hernandez) Sastre, Ávila, Spain
Sastre Martín
Sra. Eduardo Sastre Martín, Madrid, Spain
Scotland
National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh
Smith
Smith College Archives, Northampton MA
540
Editorial Appendix
Smithsonian
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC
Sommer
Melvin L. Sommer
Sorbonne
Universites de Paris, Bibliotheque de la Sorbonne, France
Southern
Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
Spiegler
Mrs. Charles (Evelyn) Spiegler, Forest Hill NY
Stanford
Stanford University Libraries, Stanford CA
Stroup
Timothy Stroup, Annandale NY
Sturgis
Robert Shaw Sturgis, Weston MA
Syracuse
Syracuse University Library, Syracuse NY
Temple
Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia PA
Texas
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin
Thompson
Samuel Martin Thompson
Tisch
Arthur Tisch, Palm Beach Gardens FL
Trinity
Trinity College Library, Cambridge University, England
UCLA
University of California at Los Angeles
Union
Union College Library, Schenectady NY
University Club
The University Club, New York NY
USC
University of Southern California Library, Los Angeles
Vermont
University of Vermont Libraries, Burlington
Viereck
Peter Robert Edwin Viereck, South Hadley MA
Virginia
Alderman Library, University of Virginia at Charlottesville
Wellesley
Wellesley College Library, Wellesley MA
Wheeler
Samuel Wheeler, Storrs CT
Williams
Williams College Archives and Special Collections, Williamstown MA
Yale
Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven CT
YIVO
YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York NY
List of Recipients Book Two, 1910–1920 Beal, Boylston Adams Berenson, Mary Whitall Smith (Mrs. Bernard Berenson) Bridges, Monica Waterhouse (Mrs. Robert Bridges) Bridges, Robert Seymour Bush, Mary Potter (Mrs. Wendell Bush) Bush, Wendell T. Butler, Lawrence Smith [Cambridge Historical Society] Chapman, John Jay Charles Scribner’s Sons Constable and Co. Ltd. Cutting Sr., William Bayard Dent, Joseph Malaby Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes Eastman, Max Forrester Fairchild, Mrs. Charles Ficke, Arthur Davison Friede, Sydney Allan Fuller, Benjamin Apthorp Gould Gardner, Isabella Stewart (Mrs. John Gardner) Garnett, Porter Hawes, Harriet Ann Boyd Holmes, Oliver Wendell Howard, John Galen James III, Henry Kallen, Horace Meyer Lowell, Abbott Lawrence
2:542
Editorial Appendix
Marks, Josephine Preston Peabody (Mrs. Lionel Marks) Metcalf, John Calvin Moore, George Edward Morrell, Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck (Mrs. Philip Morrell) Mortimer, Charles Raymond Bell Murry, John Middleton National Institute of Arts and Letters The New Republic, Editor of Norton, [Sara or Grace] O’Brien, Edward Joseph Harrington Onderdonk, Andrew Joseph Palmer, George Herbert Payne, William Morton Phelps, William Lyon Potter, Elizabeth Stephens Fish (Mrs. Robert Potter) Pratt, James Bissett Rice, Cale Young Rittenhouse, Jessie Belle Rothenstein, William Russell, Bertrand Arthur William Russell, John Francis Stanley Sastre Serrano, Celedonio Sastre, Susan Sturgis de (Mrs. Celedonio Sastre) Seligmann, Herbert Jacob Sellars, Roy Wood Sinclair, Upton Beall Slade, Conrad Hensler Smith, Logan Pearsall Strong, Charles Augustus Sturgis, Ellen Gardner (Mrs. Robert Sturgis) Sturgis, George Sturgis, Josephine (sister) Sturgis, Josephine (niece) Sturgis, Robert Shaw (brother)
List of Recipients Thayer, Scofield Thayer, William Roscoe Unamuno y Jugo, Miguel de Unidentified Recipients (2) Warren, Mrs. William Wilson, James Southall Winslow, Mary Williams (Mrs. Frederick Winslow) Winslow, Polly Woodbridge, Frederick James Eugene Young, Mr.
2:543
List of Unlocated Letters The following is a list of letters by George Santayana which were known to exist, but have not been located by the editors. To Mr. and Mrs. Jack Ames Prior to 12 Jun 1936 In 21 Jun 1936 to George Sturgis To Sarah Ripley (Mrs. Jack) Ames c. 23 Jul 1936 In 23 Jul 1936 to George Sturgis To Henri Bergson Prior to 13 Sep 1911 In 13 Sep 1911 to Charles Augustus Strong To John Berryman c. 21 Jan 1951 In 21 Jan 1951 to Robert Lowell To David and Carol Bidwell 10 Feb 1950 In 11 Feb 1950 to Raymond Bidwell To Josephine Sturgis Bidwell January 1945 In 13 Jan 1945 to Rosamond Sturgis 7 Jun 1945 In 7 Jun 1945 to Raymond Bidwell c. 20 Mar 1946 In 22 Mar 1946 to Raymond Bidwell To Emile Boutroux Prior to 21 Dec 1916 In 21 Dec 1916 to John Jay Chapman To Wendell T. Bush 8 Nov 1914 Mentioned in letter from Bush of 23 Nov 1914 4 Jul 1915 Mentioned in letter from Bush of 23 Aug 1915 To Lawrence Smith Butler September 1941 Mentioned in Sturgis Family Papers, Houghton Library To James McKeen Cattell c. April 1906 In 11 Apr 1906 to Hugo Münsterberg c. May 1906 In 10 May 1906 to Hugo Münsterberg To James Bryant Conant Prior to 14 Apr 1934 In 14 Apr 1934 to George Sturgis To Daniel MacGhie Cory 9 Sep 1933 (In a letter to William G. Holzberger, Mrs. Cory asked that this letter not be included, the editors never received copy, and it is not at Columbia.)
546
Editorial Appendix
To George and Margaret de Cuevas Dates unknown Two mentioned in 11 Mar 1940 to Cory To Durant Drake c. 21 Jul 1917 In 21 Jul 1917 to Charles Augustus Strong c. 21 Sep 1917 In 21 Sep 1917 to Charles Augustus Strong c. 3 Oct 1917 In 3 Oct 1917 to Charles Augustus Strong c. 21 Oct 1917 In 21 Oct 1917 to Charles Augustus Strong c. 10 Dec 1917 In 10 Dec 1917 to Charles Augustus Strong To Mr. Hoppin Duffield & Co. Date unknown In 21 Mar 1922 and 13 May 1922 to Constable & Company To Jacques Duron 20 Sep 1933 Cited in Duron’s La Pensée de George Santayana, 87 6 Feb 1939 Cited in Duron’s La Pensée de George Santayana, 518 To Josephine Sturgis Eldridge Prior to 3 Nov 1922 In 3 Nov 1922 to George Sturgis To Françoise c. 5 Aug 1914 In 5 Aug 1914 to Charles Augustus Strong c. 9 Aug 1914 In 9 Aug 1914 to Charles Augustus Strong c. 20 Aug 1917 In 20 Aug 1917 to Charles Augustus Strong c. 30 Apr 1919 In 30 Apr 1919 to Charles Augustus Strong To George Grady Date unknown (A letter to George Grady of 25 Jul 1949 is in Special Collections/Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, and the librarian knew of the existence of a second letter to Grady which was sold to a private collector.) To Carl Sadakichi Hartmann c. 3 Nov 1922 In 3 Nov 1922 to George Sturgis To Leslie W. Hopkinson c. 2 Apr 1940 In 2 Apr 1940 to Nancy Saunders Toy To Alanson Bigelow Houghton Two mentioned in 31 Aug 1887 to William Morton Fullerton To John Galen Howard Prior to 21 Aug 1882 In 21 Aug 1882 to Howard To the editor of the Hudson Review Date unknown. In 17 Apr 1952 to John Hall Wheelock To Otto Kyllmann Telegraph of 26 Aug 1935 Mentioned in letter to Kyllmann of same date To Pierre de Chaignon la Rose c. 8 Mar 1929 In 8 Mar 1929 to Maurice Firuski After 10 Mar 1930 In 10 Mar 1930 to Maurice Firuski
Unlocated Letters
547
To Bruno Lind (Robert C. Hahnel) c. 31 Jul 1951 In 3 Oct 1951 to Lind To Herbert Lyman 16 Aug 1940 Mentioned in Sturgis Family Papers, Houghton Library To Manageress of St. James’s Prior to 25 Aug 1932 In 25 Aug 1932 to Daniel MacGhie Cory To Marie c. 10 Dec 1920 In 10 Dec 1920 to Charles Augustus Strong c. 10 Apr 1922 In 10 Apr 1922 to Charles Augustus Strong To Dickinson Miller c. 1 Feb 1934 In 4 Feb 1934 to Charles Augustus Strong To William Pepperell Montague c. 28 Mar 1921 In 28 Mar 1921 to Charles Augustus Strong To Samuel Eliot Morison c. 10 Mar 1930 In 10 Mar 1930 to Maurice Firuski To Andrew Joseph Onderdonk 10 Jan 1940 Mentioned in Sturgis Family Papers, Houghton Library To James Bissett Pratt c. 14 Sep 1917 In 14 Sep 1917 to Charles Augustus Strong To Thornton Delano Roberts Date unknown In 3 Oct 1951 to Bruno Lind (Robert C. Hahnel) To José Rodriguez Feo Date unknown Mentioned in biographies of Wallace Stevens To Mr. Roelker c. 10 Apr 1931 In 10 Apr 1931 to Curt John Ducasse To Arthur Kenyon Rogers c. 14 Sep 1917 In 14 Sep 1917 to Charles Augustus Strong To Celedonio Sastre Serrano 3 Dec 1928 In 4 Dec 1928 to George Sturgis To George Frederick Stout 13 Feb 1912 In 14 Feb 1912 to George Herbert Palmer 23 Feb 1912 In 23 Feb 1912 to George Herbert Palmer To Charles Augustus Strong c. 23 Apr 1920 [telegram] In 23 April 1920 to Strong c. 8 Jan 1929 In 19 Jan 1929 to Daniel MacGhie Cory To Margaret Strong c. 3 Sep 1912 In 3 Sep 1912 to Charles Augustus Strong c. 3 Oct 1916 In 3 Oct 1916 to Charles Augustus Strong c. 13 Jan 1917 In 13 Jan 1917 to Charles Augustus Strong To Carol Sturgis (2d wife of George Sturgis) Date unknown In 10 Mar 1945 to Raymond Bidwell (Written shortly after
548
Editorial Appendix
the death of George Sturgis, probably early 1945.) To George Sturgis Postcard between 8 Jun and 17 Jul 1939 In 17 Jul 1939 to George Sturgis To Josephine Sturgis (sister) 12 Dec 1914 In 14 Dec 1914 to Susan Sturgis de Sastre Prior to 28 Mar 1915 In 28 Mar 1915 to Susan Sturgis de Sastre Prior to 29 Jun 1915 In 29 Jun 1915 to Susan Sturgis de Sastre To Maud Sturgis Prior to 16 Jan 1924 In 16 Jan 1924 to George Sturgis To Susan Sturgis de Sastre 13 Aug 1903 13 Aug 1903 to Susan mentions another postcard sent on this date 24 Apr 1906 25 Apr 1906 to Susan mentions two postcards sent on 24 Apr 1906 24 Sep 1912 Companion to another postcard of 24 Sep 1912 30 Sep 1912 Companion to another postcard of 30 Sep 1912 28 Oct 1913 Companion to another postcard of 28 Oct 1913 To Norman Tweddle c. 17 Jan 1936 In 17 Jan 1936 to Charles Augustus Strong To Unidentified Recipients Prior to 7 Feb 1934 In 7 Feb 1934 to Charles P. Davis Prior to 1 Jan 1936 In 1 Jan 1936 to Otto Kyllmann To James Ward January or early February 1912 In 14 Feb 1912 to George Herbert Palmer To Bentley Wirt Warren Correspondence mentioned in 31 May 1933 to George Washburne Howgate To Luciano Zampa c. 14 Sep 1919 In 14 Sep 1919 to Joseph Malaby Dent
INDEX ABC (journal) identified, 195n mentioned, 194, 201, 218 Abreu, Pierre Sanchez identified, 91n in Paris, 90, 92, 138 in the war, 236 mentioned, 185, 389 Adams, George Plimpton identified, 82n mentioned, 82 Aeschylus identified, 156n mentioned, 156 “The Afternoon of a Faun” (Mallarmé), 327, 328n Albert, Arthur William Patrick identified, 69n mentioned, 69 Alderman Library (University of Virginia), 544 Alemany, José (unidentified), 251 America(n) no art in, 158 economy, 177 ethics, Santayana’s paper on, 5 goodwill, 123 the horrors of, 13 lack of intelligence in, 303, 315 and language, 365 no liberty in, 171 nationality, 225 philosophers, and B. Russell, 72 philosophers, language of, 284 philosophical opinion in, 308 politics, 382 professors, 159 in Rome, 104, 105 and Santayana his mother not an, 410 not likely to return to, xiii, 108, 213, 220, 359, 369–70, 395, 411 recovers from, 161 thoughts on, 60, 62–63, 154 his time in, reflections on, 94 soldiers, in Oxford, xix, 288, 292, 315, 316n and the war, 260
war-time rhetoric in, 201 mentioned, 3, 113, 115, 164, 164n, 268 Americanization, 197 American Universities Club, 54 Anarchists, Santayana on, 16–17, 193 Anarchy, Santayana on, 275 Anaxagoras identified, 151n mentioned, 151, 310 Angelico, Fra Giovanni identified, 311n mentioned, 310 Arabian Nights. See A Thousand and One Nights Architecture in Italy, 100, 101 in San Francisco, 43 Santayana’s interest in, 88, 95 Strong writes on, 254 at the University of Wisconsin, 12 Aristippus identified, 191n mentioned, 190 Aristotle identified, 271n mentioned, 270, 294, 296, 321, 335 Arnim, Mary Annette Beauchamp von. See Russell, Mary Annette Beauchamp [von Arnim] Arnold, Matthew identified, 160n mentioned, 158 Art in America, 158 Santayana on, 159 mentioned, 254 Astor, John Jacob identified, 8n mentioned, 6 Astor, Mrs. John Jacob, 6 Athenaeum (journal), 345, 346n, 363n, 365, 369, 403 Atheism, Santayana and, 49 Audiences French, 89 at the University of California, 49, 57
550
The Letters of George Santayana
Austria, Santayana on, 192 Ávila (Spain) as a refuge, 95 Santayana to be his headquarters, 48 library at, 39, 48 visits, xxi, 17, 84, 94, 107, 132, 180–81, 417 mentioned, xi, xii, xiv, 191
B. H. Blackwell Ltd. (bookstore), 357n Bacon, Francis identified, 357n mentioned, 356 Bakewell, Charles Montague identified, 82–83n mentioned, 82 Barbarism, on the west coast, 43 Bath (England), Santayana in, xviii Baudelaire, Charles identified, 122n mentioned, 121, 174 Beal, Betty (daughter of Boylston Beal) Santayana on, 291 Beal, Boylston Adams identified, 114n letter(s) to, 395, 398 in London, 250n, 258, 291 in Paris, 186 on B. Russell, 186 Santayana on, 392 mentioned, xxi, 113, 250, 291, 401 Beal, Elsie Grew (Mrs. Boylston Beal) her mother, death of, 398 Santayana on, 291 mentioned, 392 Beal, Louisa Adams (Mrs. James Beal) death of, 398 Beauchamp, Mary Annette. See Russell, Mary Annette Beauchamp [von Arnim] Beaumont, Francis identified, 259n Santayana reads, xviii, 258 Belgium, and World War I, 189, 190 Benavente y Martínez, Jacinto identified, 383n mentioned, 383
Benda, Julien Le Bergsonisme, 105, 106n, 128 identified, 106n his writings, Santayana on, 316 Berenson, Bernard in the Army, 302 identified, 79n Santayana on, 327 his writings, 328, 329n mentioned, xiv, 79, 80, 105, 136, 172, 277–78, 356, 385 Berenson, Mary Whitall Smith (Mrs. Bernard Berenson) identified, 79n letter(s) to, 328 Margaret Strong to visit, 385 Santayana visits, 103, 106, 108, 110, 112, 123 mentioned, xiv, 79, 80, 102, 105, 306, 320, 360 Bergson, Henri in America, 128 articles on, 165, 174 Benda’s book on, 105, 128 and Columbia, 67 and Harvard, 52, 58 identified, 36n Kallen on, 203–4 the new realists are hostile towards, 105 Santayana on, 58, 203–4 Santayana writes on, 86, 95, 96n, 105, 111, 128 Stephen’s paper on, 300n mentioned, 36, 104, 139, 262, 309, 325, 327, 332, 364, 406 Le Bergsonisme (Benda) Santayana on, 105, 128 mentioned, 106n Berkeley, George identified, 92n mentioned, 91, 281 Bible, Santayana reads the, 96, 315, 318 Bismarck, Otto von identified, 343n mentioned, 343 Blackstone, Mrs. (unidentified), 11 Blackwell, Mr., 356, 357n Blair, Mrs. (unidentified), 369 Body and Mind (McDougall) Santayana reads, 248, 251
Index Bohemian Club, 46 Bohn, Henry George identified, 156n mentioned, 156 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas identified, 99n Santayana quotes, 99 Bolshevism Santayana on, xix, 315, 316n, 343, 377, 382, 393 The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy (Kallen) Santayana reads, 322 mentioned, 323n A Book of the Sea (S. Lubbock), 268n Bosanquet, Bernard identified, 83n mentioned, 82 Bosc, René identified, 36n mentioned, 36 Boston German influence in, 193 home, no longer Santayana’s, 82, 88, 109 is unlovely, 193 mentioned, 12, 43, 113, 377 Boston Public Latin School, 393 Boughton, Miss (unidentified), 66 Bournemouth (England) environment, 231 Santayana in, 230 Boutroux, Émile identified, 11n Santayana on, 10 writes preface for Egotism, 276, 277, 278 298 mentioned, 256, 389 Bowdoin College (Maine), 35, 37 Bowen, Francis (“Fanny”) identified, 20n mentioned, 19 Bowen, Miss (unidentified), 19 Bowler, Minnie (landlady in Puritan), 191n Bowler, Mrs. (unidentified), 190, 247 Bradley, Francis Herbert identified, 121n mentioned, 119 The Breaking of Bonds (Ficke) Santayana on, 20–21, 21n Bridges, Edward Ettingdene (son of Robert
551
Bridges), is wounded, 265n Bridges, Monica Waterhouse (Mrs. Robert Bridges) letter(s) to, 358 Bridges, Robert Seymour education in England, xvii his house burns down, xviii, 259, 260, 264n identified, 243n letter(s) to, 257, 259, 265, 321, 325, 329, 364, 384, 404 reviews Little Essays, 404, 407 on Rome, 384 Santayana on, 306 Santayana visits, 247 his son is wounded, xviii, 265 on Trivia, 319 mentioned, xvii, 243, 246, 281 Brighton (England), Santayana in, 208–9 Bristol (England), Santayana in, xviii British Academy, Santayana lectures at, 308 British Empire, is a sham, 192 Broad, Charlie Dunbar identified, 379n Santayana reads, 378 Brooke, Rupert Chawner identified, 199n mentioned, 198 Browning, Robert identified, 122n Palmer compared to, 120 mentioned, 271, 411 Bryn Mawr College (Pennsylvania), 35, 37 Buddha, 405, 406n Bullfighting, 84, 86, 169, 170, 178 Bush, Mary Potter (Mrs. Wendell Bush) her health, 181 letter(s) to, 49, 54, 60, 61, 66, 133, 181, 183, 240, 311, 381 Bush, Wendell T. identified, 5n letter(s) to, 5, 27, 201, 204, 220, 239, 297, 307, 312, 359, 372 mentioned, 227, 401 Butler, Lawrence Smith death of his mother, Santayana on, 235 identified, 236n letter(s) to, 235 and marriage, 235 Santayana’s affection for, 236
552
The Letters of George Santayana
Butler, Samuel identified, 178n mentioned, 177 Butler Library (Columbia University), 544 Byron, George Gordon Noel, Lord identified, 174n mentioned, 174
Cabot, Richard Clark identified, 121n on Palmer, 120 mentioned, 119 California people in, 45–46, 52, 54, 59–60 Santayana on, 54, 59–60, 63 California, University of (Berkeley) Santayana teaches at, xii, 40, 44 Calvin, John identified, 406n mentioned, 405 Cambridge (England) Santayana in, 83, 147, 153–54, 160–61, 172, 193, 199, 215 Santayana on, 31, 69, 145, 151, 208 Santayana’s friends in, 99 Cambridge (Massachusetts) Santayana in, 37 Santayana on, 52 Cambridge Historical Society letter(s) to, 62 Cambridge University Santayana at, 76 students at, 154 Campion, George Goring identified, 322n mentioned, 321 Canada, Santayana on, 63 Catholic Church Santayana on, 15–16, 24, 63, 266 Catholicism the enemies of, 63 in France, 24 Santayana on, 24–25 Century Club Santayana to speak at, 5–6 Chapman, John Jay identified, 22n letter(s) to, 256 mentioned, 21
Character and Opinion in the United States (Santayana) Constable and, 342, 370, 371, 372n, 374, 375–76 design, 402 editorial matters, 374, 385, 387, 397–98 publication of, 378, 384, 415 Santayana finishes, xxi, 368, 374 Santayana on, 342 Santayana requests copies of, 387–88, 389, 400–401, 401–2, 414 Scribner’s and, 372, 375 mentioned, xx, 312, 345, 350, 351, 362, 370, 384, 396, 400–401 Charles Scribner’s Sons (publishers) and Egotism, 240 holds copyright to early works, 273 letter(s) to, 4, 118, 125, 182, 261, 277, 299, 375, 401 and Little Essays, 278 is Santayana’s primary publisher, 367 will not publish Poets, 4 and Winds of Doctrine, 125 Chetwynd, Augusta Robinson, 326, 328n Children Santayana and, 32 mentioned, 113 Christ Church (Oxford), 245, 246, 334 Christendom, 16, 192 Christianity its doctrines similar to Plotinus, 364 and the German spirit, 197 Santayana on, xii, 404–5 Cicero, Marcus Tullius identified, 271n mentioned, 270 Clark, Charles Motley identified, 11n mentioned, 11 Clutton-Brock, Arthur identified, 247n mentioned, 247 Cognition, Santayana defines, 149 College(s) American, philosophy in, 223 Bowdoin, 35, 37 Bryn Mawr, 35, 37 Lady Margaret’s Hall, 146, 147n Magdalen, 219, 246 Newnham, 146, 147n, 229
Index Radcliffe, 151 Somerville, 146, 147n, 151 Williams, 34, 35, 37 Collier’s (journal), 53 Colonial Club (Boston), 109 Columbia University Bergson at, 67 offers Santayana a job, xiii, 58, 355 philosophers at, 35 Santayana lectures at, xi, 4, 9, 35, 411 mentioned, 359 The Complete Poems of George Santayana (Holzberger), 544 Consciousness animal, 150 Santayana defines, 149 Santayana on, 37, 149–50, 310, 325, 332, 337, 339 Constable and Co. Ltd. (publishers) letter(s) to, 371, 374, 375, 376, 387, 397, 401, 402, 403, 414 and Little Essays, 278, 344 mentioned, 278, 342, 370 Contradiction, the principle of, 212 Coolidge, Archibald Cary identified, 400n mentioned, 400 Copeland, Charles Townsend identified, 400n mentioned, 400 Cornwall (England), Santayana in, xviii Cory, Daniel MacGhie death of, 544 and The Letters of George Santayana (Scribner’s), 543–44 and Santayana, 544 mentioned, 29n Cory, Margot (Mrs. Daniel Cory) is Santayana’s literary executor, 544 Corzeo Español (journal), 197 Creative Intelligence (Dewey, Moore, et al.) Essays in Critical Realism, a response to, 264 Santayana on, 261–63 Critical Realism (Sellars) Santayana on, 244–45, 246 Croly, Herbert David identified, 238n The Cry for Justice (Sinclair), 196n Cumbermould, Marion Cooke. See Russell,
553
Marion Cutting, Bronson Murray identified, 328n mentioned, 327 Cutting, Sybil Marjorie Cuffe (Mrs. William Cutting). See also Lubbock, Sybil, and Scott, Sybil identified, 109n her parties, 113, 114 her poetry, 267 is Strong’s neighbor, 108, 123 Cutting, William Bayard, Jr. identified, 3n mentioned, 3, 110 Cutting, William Bayard, Sr. identified, 3n letter(s) to, 3
Daily News, 17 Das Nibelungenlied, 194n Death, 175, 183, 233, 235, 303 Delphic Club, 402 Democracy, 66 Democritus Bridges’s poem on, 384, 385n identified, 385n mentioned, 393 Dent, Joseph Malaby See also J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd. identified, 15n letter(s) to, 363, 366 mentioned, 14, 81, 86, 99, 342, 370 Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Nibelung’s Ring), 194n Descartes, René identified, 151n mentioned, 149, 331 Dewey, John and Creative Intelligence, 262 identified, 36n the new realists and, 105 reviews Egotism, 298 mentioned, 35, 355 Dial (journal) Santayana on, 399–400 Scofield Thayer and, 399, 400n Dialogues in Limbo (Santayana) publication of, 147n mentioned, xv, xvi, 85n, 94, 111, 142, 145, 146, 359
554
The Letters of George Santayana
Dickens, Charles identified, 256n Santayana reads, xviii, 255, 256, 258 mentioned, 411 Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes in Cambridge, 154 identified, 85n letter(s) to, 158 mentioned, 83 Dominations and Powers (Santayana) Constable and, 342 Santayana on, 327 mentioned, xix, xx, 314–15, 333, 342, 343 Don Giovanni (Mozart), 221n Don Quixote (Cervantes), 189 Dostoevski, Feodor Mikhailovich identified, 254n Santayana reads, 253 Doumic, René identified, 310n mentioned, 309 Drake, Durant edits Essays in Critical Realism, xix, 264, 265n, 282n, 284, 291, 305–6, 307 his essay for Essays in Critical Realism, 283, 292–93 identified, 104 letter to Strong, 281, 282n, 283 Problems of Religion, 260n reviews Strong’s book, 361 mentioned, 103, 206 Dreams, 161, 337 Dualism Drake and, 283, 284, 285 Santayana on, 127, 267–68 Strong and Santayana on, 283 Duffield & Company (publishers), 125 Dumas, Alexandre identified, 282n Santayana reads, 281 Duval (restaurant), 19, 111, 138
Eastmen, Max Forrester identified, 280n letter(s) to, 279 Santayana’s criticism of, 279–80 Eddy, Mary Baker identified, 160n
mentioned, 158 Egotism, in European philosophy, 254 Egotism in German Philosophy (Santayana) French translation of, xix, 256–57, 270–71, 272, 276, 277, 278, 298, 329 Italian translation of, 363, 366 professors of philosophy and, 300 proofs, 248, 249 publication of, 250 reviews of, 298 Santayana on, 246, 255 Santayana requests copies of, 261 will shame Germans, 207 mentioned, xvi, 204, 238, 239, 240, 249, 254, 272, 342 1880s and 1890s, 265 The Eighteen Nineties ( Jackson) Santayana reads, 153, 156 mentioned, 154n Eldredge, Arthur S., 394, 395n Eliot, Charles William identified, 173n mentioned, 23n, 171 Elizabeth. See Russell, Mary Annette Beauchamp Ellis, Mrs. Ralph, 7 Emerson Hall (Harvard), 39, 39n, 137n, 142 England atmosphere, 229 is home, 214 philosophy in, 378 politics in, 384 Santayana feels foreign in, 154 no longer enjoys, xvii, 214 to remain in, xv, xvi, 206, 213, 216–17, 219, 220, 229, 347 to settle in, 358, 371 thoughts on, 192, 206, 208, 367, 384 travels in during the war, xviii visits, 83 and the war, 196–97, 224 English, the Catholics, 16 intellect, 176 people, 384 poetry, 154 Santayana loves, 215 ways, Santayana longs for, 52 and World War I, 205
Index Epicurus identified, 124n mentioned, 123 Epiphenomenalism defined, 128n Santayana and, 127 Escalera, Mercedes de la identified, 31n Santayana visits, 64, 81, 107, 124n, 419 mentioned, 30, 48, 57, 57n, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 94, 110, 114, 117, 124, 390, 391, 417 Esmonde, Osmond Thomas Grattan identified, 243n and Santayana, 241 Esperanza (unidentified), 81 Essays in Critical Realism (Drake) Drake’s essay in, 292–93 publication of, 417 Santayana to contribute to, 264, 268, 269, 275–76, 277, 280–81, 284, 291, 306, 307, 327 Sellars’s essay in, 295–96 Strong and Santayana disagree with other contributors, 295 Strong to contribute to, 267, 269–70, 275, 285, 292, 293–95, 305–6, 307 “Three Proofs of Realism” (Santayana), xix, 265n, 276, 277n, 306 mentioned, 313 Essays in Radical Empiricism (Perry) Santayana reads, 91, 92n Essence and dualism, 284 and existence, 18, 286–87, 288–89 idealists and, 334 and intuition, 73, 149, 152, 162, 286–87, 288–89, 294, 332, 335–36, 338 Lovejoy’s opposition to, 282, 285 not a substance, 73 and objects, 284, 287, 318 Russell rejects the idea of, 161 Santayana on, 37, 91–92, 131, 149–50, 309–10, 313 Strong dislikes, 309 Strong’s conception of, 293–94, 324 mentioned, 212, 264, 281 Ethics, American, Santayana’s paper on, 5 Eulalia de Borbon, Princess of Spain, 64n,
555
155–56 Euripides identified, 324n Europe is like America, 113 nationalities in, 100 Santayana on, 395 Santayana to live in, xi, xiii, xiv, 38–39, 44, 48 Exeter (England), Santayana in, xviii Existence and essence, 286–87, 288–89 is in flux, 343 and perception, 161–62 Santayana on, 91–92, 337 of unfelt feelings, 99, 331 Experience, James on, 91
Fairchild, Mrs. Charles (unidentified) letter(s) to, 369 Family, 175 Fènelon, François identified, 187n Fènelon Society, 186 Ferrer, Francisco Guardia identified, 17n mentioned, 16 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb identified, 128n Santayana reads, 201 Santayana writes on, 210 mentioned, 128 Ficke, Arthur Davison The Breaking of Bonds, 20–21, 21n identified, 21n letter(s) to, 20, 136, 303 reviews Winds of Doctrine, 136 Twelve Japanese Painters, 136–37, 137n Fiesole, Santayana visits, 374, 382 Fite, Warner identified, 82n mentioned, 82 Flavius, Josephus identified, 316n Santayana reads, 315, 318 Fletcher, John identified, 259n Santayana reads, xviii, 258
556
The Letters of George Santayana
Florence moral atmosphere in, 124 people in, xiv, 123–24, 133 Santayana in, 123 Santayana on, 88, 112, 133 Fontenay, Madame de identified, 358n mentioned, 357 France Catholicism in, 24 lecturing in, 89 people in, 89 Santayana on, 89, 192 at Verdun, 240 and World War I, Santayana on, 189, 190, 236 France, Anatole identified, 194n mentioned, 192 Francis Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria assassination of, 193, 194n Françoise (Strong’s housekeeper) money and, 139, 361, 362 neglects her duties, xx–xxi, 281, 298, 307, 367–68, 373 Santayana visits, 73, 74n, 78 mentioned, 91, 92, 110, 111, 358 Freedom countries supporting, 197 Santayana on, 21 Free will, 308 French Revolution, 63 Freud, Sigmund identified, 239n Santayana reads, 239 The Freudian Wish (Holt), 239n Friede, Sydney Allan identified, 54n letter(s) to, 53 “From the Sunny Spanish Shore,” 419n Fry, Roger identified, 164n mentioned, 163 Fuller, Benjamin Apthorp Gould and Harvard, 77, 122–23 identified, 52n leaves Harvard, 378 letter(s) to, 122, 142, 153, 171, 222, 326, 352, 377 in Paris, 90, 184, 193
Santayana his article on, 133, 133n, 134, 138, 142 his assessment of, 52 is similar to, 123 visits, 52 travel plans, 326 mentioned, xiv, 113, 400, 402
Gardner, Isabella Stewart (Mrs. John Gardner) letter(s) to, 75 Santayana’s friendship with, 75 Garnett, Porter identified, 46n letter(s) to, 45 his plays, Santayana on, 45–46 Genteel tradition, 46, 47, 120 The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (Santayana), xiii, 44n German(s) Empire, Santayana contemplates, 197 idealists, 159 in Monte Carlo, 124 philosophers, 210 philosophy, Santayana writes on, 201 Santayana hates, 215 Santayana writes on, 221 spirit, is anti-Christian, 197 war effort, Santayana on, xvi, 189, 190, 194–95, 196–97, 206–7, 219, 221, 224, 241n, 301, 311, 343 Germany Santayana on, 192 Santayana writes on, 215 Santayana’s student days in, 50 Germont, Madame, 368 Gide, André, Santayana reads, 274–75 God(s) the mind of, 183 Santayana and, 63 the world governed by, 311 mentioned, 322 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von identified, 17n Santayana reads, 318 Santayana’s article on, 210 mentioned, 15
Index Gollancz, Hermann identified, 389n mentioned, 389 The Gondoliers, 418, 419n The Good-Humored Ladies, 328, 329n Government nationality and, 225 world, 323 Grasmere: Three Letters (Howard) Santayana reads, 118 Greece Richepin on, 121 mentioned, 16, 63 Grundy, Mrs., 223, 224n, 378 Guède, Mademoiselle (unidentified), 307 Guzmán, Dominic (Saint Dominic) identified, 406n mentioned, 405
Haldane, Richard Burdon identified, 216n Santayana on, 215 Hamilton, William identified, 129n mentioned, 128 Hamlet (Shakespeare) Santayana quotes, 64 Harjes, Mr. (unidentified), 235 Harvard Club, 53 The Harvard Monthly devotes issue to Winds of Doctrine, 130–31 Harvard Union, 39, 39n Harvard University class of 1891, 172 department of philosophy, 52, 71–72, 74, 77, 89, 93, 223 Eliot’s tenure, 171 Santayana and classes taught at, 142 his friends at, 301 his future at, xiii, 30, 35, 37, 38, 40–41, 58, 82 as intellectual and author, xi not likely to return to, 204 his papers at, 142 recruits new philosopher, 52, 67, 69, 71–72, 74, 76, 77 his resignation from, xiv, 37, 88–89,
557
93, 108 his retirement from, xi, xiv, 35, 133, 367 his salary, 37, 38 his students at, 219 teaching responsibilities, xi, 22 his tenure at, 58 thoughts on, xiii, 89, 171–72 mentioned, 292, 393 student life at, 172 students, Palmer’s, 120–21 the three curses of, 172 mentioned, xiv, 53, 193, 377 Harvard University Press and Little Essays, 278 and Three Philosophical Poets, xi, 272 Havre, Le (France), Santayana in, 374 Heaven, 323 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich identified, 211n Santayana writes on, 210 mentioned, 120, 128, 343, 364 Heinze, Max identified, 5n mentioned, 5 Heraclitus identified, 265n on justice, 320 mentioned, 264, 326 Herodotus identified, 208n Santayana reads, 207 Higgs, Arthur Hibble identified, 147n mentioned, 146 Hindenburg, Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von identified, 268n mentioned, 268 Hindus, 94 History German, Santayana reads, 210 of philosophy, Santayana to write, 94, 176 and politics, 234 Venetian, Santayana reads, 251 mentioned, 380 History of Greek Philosophy (Fuller), 224n Hobbes, Thomas identified, 128n mentioned, 127
558
The Letters of George Santayana
Hobhouse, Leonard Trelawney and Harvard, 76, 77 identified, 68n mentioned, 67 Höffding, Harald identified, 68n mentioned, 67 Holmes, Oliver Wendell identified, 167n letter(s) to, 166 Holt, Edwin Bissell The Freudian Wish, 239n identified, 104n The New Realism, 103, 105, 126–27, 130, 175, 177, 179, 239 Holzberger, William G., and The Letters of George Santayana (MIT), 544–46 Homer identified, 14n Santayana reads, 13 mentioned, 156, 405 Hooker, Richard identified, 259n Santayana quotes, 258–59 Hotels, in London, 227 Houghton Library (Harvard), 544 Howard, Albert Andrew identified, 173n mentioned, 172 Howard, John Galen identified, 43n letter(s) to, 118 his poetry, Santayana on, 118 and the University of California, 42 Human nature, 311 Humanism, in European philosophy, 254 Humanities Research Center (University of Texas, Austin), 544 Hume, David identified, 154n Russell compared to, 153, 156 Humility, 319 Hyde Fellowship, Bosc and, 36 Hyde Lectures, Santayana and, 89
Idealism and essence, 334 German, 159 in Kant’s critique, 287 Russell and, 162, 176
sensualistic, 162 mentioned, 161 Iglesias, Pablo identified, 17n mentioned, 16 L’Immoraliste (The Immoralist) (Gide) Santayana reads, xix, 274–75 Infanta Eulalia. See Eulalia de Borbon Infanta Isabel (ship), 194 Instinct, 325 Intelligence, Santayana defines, 262 Interpretation, 313 Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (Santayana) editorial matters, 4, 261 Lerolle to translate, 299 in Little Essays, 299 reprint, 261 mentioned, 272 Intuition essence and, 149, 152, 161, 286–87, 288–89, 332, 334–36 essence as, 73 of nature, 161 Iparraguirre, Victorina, 57 Irwin, Miss (unidentified), 23 Islam, 16 Italy intervenes in the war, 218 people in, 100 Santayana in, xiv, xxi, 108–9 Santayana on, 385 and World War I, Santayana on, 191, 221
J. M. Dent & Sons (publishers) and Egotism, 242 holds copyright to later works, 272 and Little Essays, 278, 344 and Winds of Doctrine, 125 Jackson, Holbrook The Eighteen Nineties, 153, 156 identified, 154n James, Henry identified, 229n Santayana meets, 228, 230 James, Henry, III edits The Letters of William James, 50, 53, 55 identified, 50n
Index letter(s) to, 50, 53, 55 Memories and Studies, 91, 92n James, William death of, xii, 19–20 on experience, 91–92 his health, 19 identified, 19n Kallen on, 202–3 his letters to Santayana, 50, 53, 55 on Santayana, 136 Santayana on, xii, 19–20, 50, 202–3 Santayana’s paper on, 342 writings of, 176, 324 mentioned, 106n, 158, 271, 336 Japanese, Santayana on the, 136–37 Jastrow, Marcus identified, 204n mentioned, 204 Jews in Florence, 124, 133 mentioned, 159 Job (from the Bible) identified, 323–24n Santayana on, 322–23 Johnson, Lionel identified, 26n mentioned, 25 Jones, Mr. (unidentified), 19 Jones, Thomas Samuel O’Brien’s paper on, 25 Journal des Débats, 276 Journal of Philosophy (Columbia) articles for, 204, 210, 215, 220, 298, 307, 312 “Literal and Symbolic Knowledge” (Santayana), xix, 276, 281, 286, 306, 312, 312n, 313 reviews Holt’s book, 179 reviews Strong’s book, 361 mentioned, 204 Judaism, 405
Kallen, Horace Meyer his address on nationality, 224 The Book of Job as a Greek Tragedy, 322–23, 323n essay in Creative Intelligence, 261–63 his father, death of, 175 identified, 43n
559
letter(s) to, 42, 59, 64, 65, 112, 126, 155, 175, 202, 224, 251, 261, 322 Santayana’s influence on, 262 The Structure of Lasting Peace, 323n at the University of Wisconsin, 42, 65, 155 William James and Henri Bergson, 202–4, 204n his writing, Santayana on, 261–63 mentioned, 264, 382 Kant, Immanuel identified, 210–11n Santayana writes on, 210 mentioned, 287 Kerensky, Aleksandr Feodorovich identified, 303n mentioned, 302 King’s College (Cambridge) Santayana at, 67, 68n, 147 Kitchener, Horatio Herbert identified, 218n mentioned, 217 Knowledge, and animal faith, 152 Koran, Santayana reads on the, 281 Kyllmann, Otto identified, 347n mentioned, 346
Lacroix, Monsieur (unidentified), 368 Lady Margaret’s Hall (Oxford), 146, 147n Landscape, Santayana on, 47 Lane, Gardiner Martin identified, 34n mentioned, 34 Langstaff, John Brett identified, 199n mentioned, 199 Language(s) of American philosopers, 284 Americans and, 365 English, 365, 550 French, 257 German, 162 Italian, 174, 550 in Madrid, 85 materialistic, 262 philosophical, 96 Spanish, 107, 164–65, 165n, 410, 550
560
The Letters of George Santayana
Lapsley, Gaillard Thomas in Cambridge, 154, 172, 199 identified, 155n in Paris, xx mentioned, xv, 210, 361, 389 League of Nations, 382 Lebert, Olga identified, 105n marries Loeser, 105, 108 mentioned, 114 Lectura Dominical (journal), 36, 116–17, 201, 216, 218, 292 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm Freiherr von identified, 332n mentioned, 331 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich identified, 302n Santayana likes, 302 Lerolle, Guillaume interested in translating Little Essays, 408 Santayana on, 408 to translate Interpretations, 299 translates Egotism, xix, 270–71, 272, 276 mentioned, 389, 394 The Letters of George Santayana (Cory) Daniel Cory and, 543–44 The Letters of George Santayana (MIT) editorial policy, 541–42, 545–52 Holzberger and, 544–46 Margot Cory and, 544 origins and development, 544–45 The Letters of William James (H. James III) H. James and, 50 Santayana to contribute to, 50, 53, 55 mentioned, 50n Lewis, Gilbert Newton identified, 49n mentioned, 49 Liberalism, Santayana to write on, 129 Liberty in post-war Europe, 349 Santayana on Russell and, 66 is unknown in America, 171 The Life of Reason (Santayana) abridged edition, 304, 305, 400 editorial matters, 4, 126, 182 sales of, 126 Santayana on, 263, 305 second edition, 126, 182, 346, 402 mentioned, xix, 94, 129, 171, 195, 290
“Literal and Symbolic Knowledge” (Santayana), xix, 276, 286, 306, 312n, 313 Little Essays: Drawn from the Writings of George Santayana (Santayana and Smith) is complete, 350 Constable and, 371, 374, 375 copyright matters, 272, 277, 278 design, 402 editorial matters, 360, 376 French translation of, 408 the index for, 348 proofs, 370, 376 publication of, 277, 278, 344 reviews of, 403, 404, 407, 410 royalties from, 356, 370 Santayana on, 273, 290, 299–300, 301–2, 329–30, 342, 344, 346–47, 348, 376, 384 Santayana requests copies of, 389, 400–401, 401–2, 414 Scribner’s and, 277, 401 Smith edits, xviii, 290 Smith proposes, xviii, 271–72 mentioned, xix, xx, 278, 344, 374, 378, 396, 400, 403 Lodge, George Cabot identified, 26n mentioned, 26 Loeser, Charles Alexander identified, 80n marriage of, 105, 105n, 108 mentioned, 80, 86, 103, 110, 271, 380 Logic of religion, 323 Russell and, 79, 153, 156 London air-raids in, 228 hotels in, 227 people in, 251 Santayana in, 205 society, 385 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth identified, 11n mentioned, 10 Lovejoy, Arthur Oncken and Essays in Critical Realism, 283, 285 on essence, 282n identified, 77n
Index letter to Drake, 282n Santayana on, 286 mentioned, 77, 93, 265n, 285, 297 Lowell, Abbott Lawrence identified, 23n letter(s) to, 22, 88 proposes lectureship for Santayana, 89 mentioned, xiii, xiv, 37, 38, 82, 108 Lowell, James Russell identified, 55n Santayana quotes, 54 Lowell Institute (Boston), 72, 72n Lubbock, Percy identified, 362n mentioned, 361 Lubbock, Sybil Marjorie Cuffe (Mrs. Percy Lubbock), 268n. See also Cutting, Sybil, and Scott, Sybil Lusitania (ship), Santayana aboard, 13 Luther, Martin identified 406n mentioned, 405 Lyman, Herbert identified, 397n Santayana on, 398 mentioned, 396
MacGilvrey, John Aloysius identified, 60n mentioned, 60, 65 Macintosh, Douglas Clyde identified, 285n mentioned, 285 Mackay, Mrs. Clarence Hungerford Santayana on, 6 mentioned, xi MacKenna, Stephen identified, 366n MacKenzie, Edward Morgan Compton identified, 211n Santayana reads, 210 Macmillan and Company (publishers) Strong and, 308, 380 Madison (Wisconsin), Santayana in, xi, 12 Madrid people in, 81, 84 Santayana in, xxi, 81, 83, 84, 87, 94, 107, 129, 133 Santayana on, xiv, 84, 86, 87
561
Magazine of American and Foreign Verse, 102 Mahan, Alfred Thayer identified, 191n mentioned, 190 Manuel de philosophie ancienne (Renouvier), 51, 52n Marks, Josephine Preston Peabody identified, 3n letter(s) to, 3 The Marriage of Venus (Santayana), 94, 95n Masses (journal) Santayana criticizes, 279–80 Materialism prevents happiness, 181 Santayana and, 127, 139 mentioned, 161, 262 Matter Santayana interested in, 39 Santayana on, 309 and “Three Realms of Being,” 37 Maura, Antonio identified, 17n mentioned, 16 Maurras, Charles identified, 130n mentioned, 129 McDougall, William identified, 248n Santayana on, 248 Santayana reads, 248, 251 mentioned, 252n Megairssey (England), Santayana in, 258 Memories and Studies (H. James III) Santayana reads, 55, 55n, 91, 92n Mephistopheles, 49 Merrill, Moses identified, 43n mentioned, 42 Messagero (newspaper), 393 Metcalf, John Calvin identified, 416n letter(s) to, 416 Michelstaedter, Carlo identified, 206n mentioned, 206 Militarism, Santayana on, 237 Mill, John Stuart identified, 154n Russell compared to, 153, 156, 162 mentioned, 129
562
The Letters of George Santayana
Miller, Dickinson Sargeant identified, 325n writings of, 324 Miller, Mrs. (unidentified), 401, 414 Milner, Alfred identified, 389n mentioned, 389 Mind animal, 286 nature of, 334 Santayana on, 10, 127 virtue and, 18 Mind (journal), 324 Mind-stuff, Santayana and Strong disagree about, 113 mentioned, 288 Minturn, Mildred (unidentified), 157 Modernism, Santayana writes on, 86, 95, 111 Molière. See Poquelin, Jean Baptiste Mollycoddles, 159 Monaco, Santayana in, xiv Monism, 126, 128n Montague, William Pepperell identified, 324n writings of, 324 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de identified, 252n Santayana reads, 251 mentioned, 356 Monte Carlo Germans in, 124 Santayana in, xiv, 124 society in, 120 Moody, William Vaughn, 26, 26n Moore, George Edward in Cambridge, 76 identified, 28n letter(s) to, 90 mentioned, 28, 95, 111 Morality in Florence, 88, 124 and politics, 234 More, Paul Elmer identified, 312n Santayana reads, 312 Morgan, Anne identified, 93n mentioned, 92
Morley, Sylvanus Griswold identified, 411n mentioned, 410 Morrell, Ottoline Cavendish-Bentinck identified, 244n letter(s) to, 244, 252, 253 Santayana on, 244 mentioned, xvi, xvii, 242, 281, 330, 345, 389 Mortimer, Charles Raymond Bell identified, 275n letter(s) to, 274, 316 mentioned, xix Münsterberg, Hugo his ego, Santayana on, 249 and German culture, 193 identified, 72n mentioned, 72, 95, 105, 162, 173n Muri (unidentified), 363 Murry, John Middleton identified, 403n letter(s) to, 403 mentioned, 363 Music, 85 Musset, Alfred de identified, 174n mentioned, 174
Nahant (Massachusetts), 193, 194n National Institute of Arts and Letters letter(s) to, 33 Santayana resigns from, 33 Nationalism, 192 Nationality, Santayana’s response to Kallen on, 224–25 Naturalism, Santayana and, 127, 344, 395 Nature animal, 183 human life a product of, 279 intuition of, 161 of mind, 334 the standard of naturalness, 325 western appreciation for, xiii, 45–46 mentioned, 212 Neo-Catholics, 327 Neo-Platonists, 327 New realism the first principle of, 91 Santayana on, 104, 127
Index The New Realism (Holt) Essays in Critical Realism a response to, 264 Santayana on, 103, 105, 126–27 Santayana reviews, 175, 177, 179 mentioned, 130, 239 New realists and perception, 150 Santayana on, 103–4, 105, 128 New Republic (journal) letter(s) to, 237 Santayana on, 240, 307 Santayana’s articles in, 204, 210, 234 stance on the war, Santayana on, 237–38, 307 New York Santayana in, 6–7, 35, 37, 69 Santayana on, 12 Santayana visits, 53 Newnham College (Cambridge) Margaret Strong attends, 229 mentioned, 146, 147n, 148 Nice (France), Santayana in, xiv Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm identified, 211n Santayana writes on, 210 mentioned, 216 Norton, Grace identified, 23n letter(s) to, 23, 34 Norton, Sara identified, 23n letter(s) to, 23, 34 Nuneham Park (Oxford), 320
Objectivism, 91 Objects, Santayana on, 286–87 O’Brien, Edward Joseph Harrington identified, 22n letter(s) to, 22, 25, 102, 367 Olympic (ship), 67, 68–69 Onderdonk, Andrew Joseph identified, 29n letter(s) to, 29, 211 in Paris, 135, 138, 139, 184 mentioned, 185, 199 Onion, Mrs. (unidentified), 247 Opffner, Ivan identified, 400n
563
mentioned, 400 Opinions newspapers don’t affect, 222 Santayana on, 10, 222 The Origin of Consciousness (Strong) reviews of, 361 Santayana on, 310, 330–31, 332, 338–40 mentioned, 73, 337 Osler, William identified, 248n mentioned, 247, 296 Otto, William Naill identified, 60n mentioned, 60 Oxford (England) American soldiers in, 288, 292 is a paradise, 247 Santayana homesick for, 364 Santayana in, xii, xvii, 14, 140, 141, 145, 193, 219, 221, 228, 242, 291, 320 Santayana is happy in, 358 Santayana leaves, xx, 146, 345, 350, 352 Santayana on, 41, 145, 151, 304, 334, 386 Santayana to remain in during the war, 190, 326 Santayana to settle in, 352, 354, 364, 377, 386, 394, 397 Santayana’s living expenses in, 386 after the war, 341–42
Paganism, 198 Palmer, George Herbert compared to Browning, 120 identified, 11n influenced Santayana, 95 letter(s) to, 74, 76, 82, 93 Santayana on, 120–21 his students, 120–21 mentioned, 10, 72, 119 Panpsychism, 161, 162n, 335 Paris friends in, 90, 185 German invasion of, 187 Santayana in, xiv, 18, 19, 78, 79, 83, 97, 111, 166, 364 Santayana on, 156 Santayana to settle in, 51–52, 58, 126, 349
564
The Letters of George Santayana
Paris (continued) Santayana’s return to, 358, 359 Strong and Santayana’s apartment in, xv, 78–79, 83, 110, 130, 209, 217, 333 Parmenides (Plato), 268, 268n Pascal, Blaise identified, 248n Santayana reads, 248 Pastor, Mr. (unidentified), 252 Patriotism, 129 Patten, Miss (unidentified), 391 Payne, William Morton identified, 6n letter(s) to, 5, 9, 11 Pensées (Pascal), Santayana reads, 248 Perception animal, 152, 161 and dreaming, 161 the new realists and, 150 Santayana and Strong on, 318, 334 the Scholastics and, 184 Perkins, Carlino (unidentified), 213 Perry, Ralph Barton Essays in Radical Empiricism, 92n identified, 68n in Paris, 90, 93 Present Philosophical Tendencies, Santayana on, 79 mentioned, 68, 72, 90 Petit Temps, 309 Phelps, William Lyon identified, 411n letter(s) to, 410 Philip II, King of Spain identified, 343n mentioned, 343 Philosopher(s) American, and Russell, 72 American, language of, 284 at Cambridge University, 154 at Columbia University, 35 German, 210 at Harvard University, 38 Santayana as a, 166 and solitude, 145 and understanding, 325–26 and winds of doctrine, 131 mentioned, 191 Philosophers at Court (Santayana), 94, 95n, 298
Philosophical Essays (Russell) Santayana on, 28 “Philosophical Opinion in America” (lecture), 308, 312 Philosophical Society (Oxford), 219, 220 Philosophy collapse of liberalism in, 129 disciplines, 296 eastern, Santayana reads, 59 in England, 378 European, the vices of, 254 German, Santayana writes on, 201 at Harvard, 378 history of, Santayana to write a, 30, 94, 176 the language of, 96 not a science, 223 and poetry, 405 relation to science, 296 Santayana and Strong disagree on terms, xii, 96, 99 Santayana on, 315 the teaching of, 223 mentioned, 254 Pickwick Papers (Dickens) Santayana reads, 255 Pietro, Guido di. See Angelico, Fra Giovanni Pincian Gate (Rome), 390, 390n Plato identified, 59n the Parmenides, 268, 268n Republic, 382, 383n Santayana on, 312 mentioned, 359 Platonic ideals, 309 Platonism, 406 Platonism (More), Santayana reads, 312 Plotinus and Fuller, Santayana’s article on, 133, 138, 142 Fuller translates, 327 his philosophy, Santayana on, 364–65 Santayana on, 327 Poetry disinherited people cannot write, 121 English, 154 Ficke’s, 20–21 Howard’s, 118 and philosophy, 405
Index Richepin’s, 121 Santayana on, 25 mentioned, 3, 369 The Poet’s Testament (Santayana), 95n, 298n Politics collapse of liberalism in, 129 Santayana on, 234, 259 in Spain, 16, 18, 37 mentioned, 274, 352 Pollard, Mrs. (nurse), 24 Ponsonby, Arthur, 385, 386n Poquelin, Jean Baptiste (pseud. Molière) identified, 14n Santayana reads, 13 Potter, Elizabeth Stephens Fish (Mrs. Robert Potter) identified, 8n letter(s) to, 106 Santayana travels with, 109n mentioned, 213, 401 Potter, Robert Burnside identified, 8n in New York, 6–7 Santayana travels with, 109 Santayana visits, 13, 52 mentioned, 213, 401 Potter, Warwick (son of R. B. Potter), 106, 109n Poussin, Nicolas identified, 155n mentioned, 154 Pragmatism Santayana and, 127 Santayana on, 262, 264 mentioned, 27 Pragmatist, Santayana not a, 263 Pratt, James Bissett identified, 285n letter(s) to, 337, 386 mentioned, 265n, 285 Present Philosophical Tendencies (Perry) Santayana on, 79 Pre-Socratics, 161, 162n Problems of Philosophy (Russell) Santayana on, 79 Problems of Religion (Drake) Santayana reads, 260 Professor(s) American, 159 react to Egotism, 300, 301n Santayana as a, 54, 171
565
Santayana is sick of, 62 Santayana not fit to be a, 89 Santayana recovers from being a, 161 at the University of Wisconsin, 12 Protestantism, 154 Puritanism is a tragedy, 398 mentioned, 120
Queen’s Acre (Windsor) described, 14n, Santayana visits, xiv, 189 Quentin, Henri translates Egotism, xix mentioned, 271n
Race, 192 Radcliffe College, 151 Rand, Benjamin identified, 173n mentioned, 172 Realism Santayana critiques Strong’s, 162 Santayana on, 245 Realists, Santayana on, 161 Realm of consciousness, 341 Realms of Being (Santayana) and essence, 286 manuscript is in Paris, 201 publication of, 175–76 published in The New Republic, 223 Santayana on, 37, 39, 327 mentioned, xv, xvi, xviii, xx, 38, 59, 84, 94–95, 105, 111, 112, 124, 132, 138, 139, 142, 146, 156, 169, 173, 174, 177, 180, 193, 201, 210, 221, 223, 243, 252, 271, 293, 307, 333, 378, 396, 413, 415, 417, 418 Reason Santayana on, 257 versus nature, 279 Reason in Art (Santayana), 261 Rees (unidentified), 366 Reeves (unidentified), 165, 174, 184, 205, 361 Reeves, Harrison Sprague identified, 91n mentioned, 90
566
The Letters of George Santayana
Reeves, Henry Everett identified, 91n mentioned, 90 Reid, Whitelaw identified, 69n mentioned, 69 Religion the logic of, 323 Santayana and, 345 Santayana on, 63–64, 96, 259, 266 Renaissance Santayana on, 137 mentioned, 120 Renouvier, Charles Bernard identified, 52n mentioned, 51 Rice, Cale Young identified, 33n letter(s) to, 32 his poetry, 32–33 Richepin, Jean identified, 122n his writing, Santayana on, 121 Rieber, Henry, 49, 49n Rittenhouse, Jessie Belle letter(s) to, 125 to publish Santayana’s poetry, 125 Riviera, 214 Robbins, Julia (unidentified) death of, 314 Santayana on, 314 Robbins, Reginald identified, 3n mentioned, 3 Roberts, Thornton Delano identified, 20n in Paris, 19 Robinson, Joseph (librarian), 261 Robinson, Moncure identified, 8n in Oxford, 228 in Paris, xx, 90, 361 Santayana on, 211 Santayana visits, 230, 291 mentioned, 7, 67, 226, 235, 284, 326, 361, 369 Rogers, Arthur Kenyon and Essays in Critical Realism, 283, 284n, 285
Rolland, Romain identified, 317n mentioned, 316 Rome Americans in, 104, 105 people in, 379–80 Santayana in, xxi, 123, 161, 377, 381, 396 Santayana on, 112, 399 mentioned, 213 Roosevelt, Theodore identified, 160n and Mollycoddles, 159 Ross, Denman Waldo identified, 137n mentioned, 136 Rothenstein, William identified, 62n letter(s) to, 61 Royce, Josiah his health, 77, 82 identified, 72n Santayana’s paper on, 342 mentioned, 72, 95, 105, 142, 331 Russell, Bertrand Arthur William in America, 172, 173n, 186 animal faith, 152 Beal on, 186, 187 discusses Realms with Santayana, 95, 111 is divorced, 79 and Harvard, 67, 71–72, 74, 76 and idealism, 162 identified, 27n letter(s) to, 28, 71, 187, 217, 302 logic, 153, 156 is a mathematical ferret, 161 Philosophical Essays, 28, 28n his philosophy, Santayana on, 151 in prison, xix, 318 Santayana on, 153, 156, 157, 172, 176, 186 Santayana visits, 73, 83, 139, 207 Santayana’s paper on, 27, 45, 95, 99 on sense-data, 152, 161 his theory of nature, 156 on the war, 200 writings of, 105, 318, 318n mentioned, xv, xvii, 146, 148, 157, 188, 201–2, 270, 278, 288, 345, 389
Index Russell, Mary Annette Beauchamp [von Arnim] (pseud. Elizabeth) her books, 249 Elizabeth and her German Garden, xvii friendship with Santayana, xvii–xviii identified, 231n leaves Russell, xviii married to Russell xvii, 249, 250, 291 Santayana on, 230, 249, 250, 251, 385 mentioned, 228, 288, 389 Russell, John Francis Stanley and bigamy, 145 identified, 14n his influence on Santayana, 66 letter(s) to, 15, 66 his letters to Santayana, 66 his marriage, 186, 230, 251 in Rhodesia, 230 Santayana on, 145 Santayana visits, xii, xv, 71, 72, 75, 145, 230, 247, 249, 251, 288, 291 mentioned, xvii, 13, 145, 389 Russell, Marion (“Mollie”) Cooke Cumbermould ( J. F. Russell’s second wife) identified, 145–46n Santayana on, 145 mentioned, xv, xviii Russia(n) Revolution, 343, 382 Santayana on, 302 and the war, 300 mentioned, 268
Saint Felix School (England), 47, 47n Saint Paul, 405 Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, duc de identified, 282n mentioned, 281 Salandra, Antonio identified, 221n mentioned, 221 San Francisco people in, 44 Santayana on, xiii, 43, 44 Santayana, Agustín Ruiz de (father of Santayana) identified, 39n his letters to Josefina, 58
567
his letters to Santayana, 56, 58 mentioned, 39 Santayana, George ( Jorge Agustín Nicolás) is abstemious, 18 affected by the American economy, 177 on aging, 94, 108, 112n, 163, 170, 181, 183, 217, 222, 230, 264, 265, 271, 273–74, 303, 367, 369, 392–93, 394, 395 his books are bad, 172 early, 407 his library, 39, 48, 51, 58, 67–68, 73, 78, 79, 109, 110, 135, 138, 297–98 reviews of, 403 sales of, 13 writing, xiv, 59, 342–43 mentioned, 261, 272, 356 is a boor, 244 on bureaucracy, 356, 358 his childhood, 51 not a Christian, 345 controversy, his dislike of, 95 is a coward, 219 his daily routine, 124, 138, 168–69, 173, 327 on death, 170, 183, 235, 274, 303, 378, 395–96 his diet, 276 on doctors, 254 in England, 314 his family, 58, 107, 132, 191, 374, 410, 417 finances book royalties, 118, 356, 370 during the war, 190, 191, 200 fees from speaking engagements, 25 Harvard salary, 37, 38 inheritance, xiv Oxford living expenses, 386 retirement income, 30, 34–35, 108–9, 115 savings, xiii, 38, 171–72 sister Josephine contributes to income, xiii, 35 mentioned, 81, 361 and food, 168 as a foreigner, 94 on free will, 308
568
The Letters of George Santayana
Santayana, George (continued) and freedom, 58, 60, 104, 111 friends American, 105 at Cambridge, xiv, 69, 239 are in Europe, 88 at Harvard, 301 in Italy, 108, 109–10 at Oxford, xiv in Paris, 92, 185 pro-German, 258 radical, 258 Strong is the best of, 327 on friendship, 392 his future, 28, 30, 33, 34–35, 37, 38–39, 40–41, 44, 48, 57–58, 60, 82, 94, 113, 126, 303 his habits, 17–18, 19, 48, 288 and happiness, 97, 108, 111, 123, 124, 172, 181, 233, 356 his health, xiv, xviii, 48, 91, 92, 97, 98, 99, 103, 104, 108, 110, 119, 121, 214, 255, 288, 321 home, 48, 214, 384 honorary degree, receives, xiii his intellectual life, 95, 109 is lazy, 18 lectures in America, 176 lectures in London, 308 lecturing, is tired of, xii, xiv, 37 his letters doesn’t keep, 50 from his father, 56 lost or destroyed, xiii, 53, 56–57, 546 to his mother, xiii, 57 publication of, 543–44 tampered with by the war censors, 216–17, 219, 220, 223, 276 mentioned, 66 and love, 160, 163, 277 his nationality, 133 is naturalistic, 395 his papers, 142, 348 his philosophy an acrimonious debate with Strong, 96 changes in, 290 discusses with Strong, xvi of happiness, 233
remains unchanged, 63 and Strong disagree on terms, xii, 96, 99 mentioned, 124, 181 his poetry poems written by, 29, 31, 65, 111, 149, 234 publication of, 22, 125 mentioned, 160, 163, 223, 416 prefers large towns, 232 problems with his passport after the war, xx, 354, 355, 356, 357 publications articles, 28n, 44n, 47, 48, 201, 204–5, 210, 215, 220, 234, 275–76, 279, 306, 307, 312, 328, 329 book reviews, 5, 28, 28n, 45, 133, 142, 174, 175, 177, 180, 239, 312 letters, 543–44 reading ABC, 194 Arabian Nights, 179 Beaumont, xviii, 258 Benda, 105, 316 Berenson, 324 Bergson, 58 the Bible, 96, 315, 318 Bridges, 257 Broad, 378 Dewey, 262 Dickens, xviii, 255, 256, 258 Dostoevski, 253 Drake, 260 Dumas, 281 eastern philosophy, 59 Fichte, 201 Ficke, 20–21, 136–37 Fletcher, xviii, 258 Freud, 239 Garnett, 45 German, 162, 207 German history, 210 Gide, xix, 274–75 Goethe, 318 Heinze, 5n Herodotus, 207 Holt, 103, 105, 239 Homer, 13 Howard, 118
Index Jackson, 156 James, 55, 91 Josephus, 315, 318 Kallen, 261–62, 322–23 on the Koran, 281 Lesage, 252n MacKenzie, 210 McDougall, 248, 251 Molière, 13 Montaigne, 251 More, 312 newspapers, 18, 19, 116–17, 176, 194, 213, 217, 222, 233, 265, 266, 380 novels, 256, 266 Pascal, 248 poetry, 21 Russell, 378 Saint-Simon, 281 Shelley, 37 Smith, 319–20 Strong, 39, 73, 267, 330–32 Sudermann, 162 Unamuno, 164 Venetian history, 251 Webb, 214 mentioned, 30, 37, 91, 108, 129, 169, 184, 193, 200, 223, 342, 362, 378 his reputation as a recluse, 242 Russian ballet, 326, 328, 385 is sedentary, 205 is a sentimentalist, 161 his signature, 551 is a skeptic, 266 his social life, 6–7, 32, 37, 69, 83, 92, 213, 230, 244, 301 enjoys solitude, 48, 108, 110, 112, 176, 223, 236, 301, 304, 368 speaking engagements Bowdoin College, 35, 37 at the British Academy, 308 Bryn Mawr College, 35, 37 the Century Club, 6 in Chicago, 7, 9 Columbia University, xi, 4, 9, 35, 411 in Montreal, 54 University of California at Berkeley, xii, xiii, 25, 30, 44, 47, 49, 57, 60 University of Wisconsin in Madison,
569
xi, 5–6, 7, 9, 12, 411 Williams College, 34, 35, 37 for the Y.M.C.A., xx, 345, 347, 349, 350, 351 mentioned, 327 tourists, his dislike of, 35, 41, 108, 168 travel plans America, 109, 115, 236 Ávila, xxi, 10, 13, 25, 57, 71, 78, 80, 87, 144, 148, 157, 169, 177, 333, 341, 413 California, xiii, 28, 30, 35, 37, 40 Cambridge (England), xiv, 69, 71, 72, 95, 111, 139, 142, 145, 187, 196, 210 Chicago, 6, 7, 9, 47 England, 30, 48, 57, 66, 95, 99, 107, 139, 176, 185, 397 Europe, 7, 9, 13, 33, 37, 44 Fiesole, xxi Germany, 19 Grand Canyon, 44, 46 Greece, 174, 176 Italy, xiv, xxi, 30, 41, 48, 97, 98–99 105, 174, 176, 221, 332, 341, 366, 371, 372, 398, 419 London, 160, 345 Monaco, xiv Monte Carlo, xiv Nice, xiv New York, 27, 53, 66, 69 Oxford, xii, xiv, 13, 139, 140, 394 Paris, xii, xiv, 14, 15, 18, 30, 41, 44, 48, 52, 57, 58, 60, 71, 73, 76, 79, 80, 87, 88, 121, 124, 148, 169, 176, 179, 210, 332, 345, 350, 351, 377, 394, 397 Rome, xxi, 377 Seville, 133 Spain, xxi, 14, 30, 44, 47, 48, 51, 56, 57, 58, 60, 71, 78, 80, 113, 115, 119, 121, 122, 142, 144, 210, 221, 340, 341, 366, 371, 372, 386, 394, 397, 399, 406 Switzerland, xxi Wisconsin, 5, 7 travel, is eager for, 95, 164 travel, is not eager for, 341, 395 is unconventional, 395 his vices, 18
570
The Letters of George Santayana
Santayana, George (continued) enjoys walking, 17, 106, 139, 151, 168, 193, 234, 236, 251, 288, 315, 320 is a wanderer, xii, xiv, 48, 166 and wine, abstains from, 108 writing articles, 176n, 264, 312 a history of philosophy, 30, 176 in French, 257 on liberalism, 129 poetry, 111, 223 his puncutation, 549–50 on Russell, 27 Santayana enjoys, 384 his spelling, 549 on Spinoza, 14 mentioned, 91, 108, 123, 129, 139, 143, 144, 169, 193, 200, 212, 220–21, 240, 314, 366, 418 and young people, xxi, 219 on youth, 392 Santayana, Hermenegilda Zabalgoitia de identified, 82n mentioned, 81 Santayana, Josefina Borrás y Carbonell [Sturgis] de (mother of Santayana) death of, xi, xiv, 69–70, 71, 75, 82, 88, 107 her health, xi, xiii, 7, 36, 52, 56 identified, 8n letters from Santayana, 57 her nurse, 56 her papers, 56 Santayana on, 70, 107 Sturgis family, 410 mentioned, 13, 24, 35, 41, 410 Santayana: The Later Years: A Portrait with Letters (Cory), 543 Santayana y Zabalgoitia, Manuela Ruiz de identified, 82n Santayana to visit, 415 mentioned, 86, 420 Sassoon, Siegfried, xvii Sastre, Adelaida Hernández de (Mrs. Rafael Sastre), 374n Sastre, Antonia, 122 Sastre, Susan (“Susana”) Parkman (Sturgis) de (half sister and godmother of Santayana) in Ávila, xi, xxi
identified, 8n letter(s) to, 6, 12, 13, 15, 24, 36, 41, 43, 55, 62, 68, 69, 78, 81, 83, 85, 98, 100, 101, 102, 104, 106, 114, 115, 116, 117, 122, 134, 140, 141, 143, 144, 147, 165, 168, 171, 175, 178, 179, 182, 187, 188, 189, 194, 196, 201, 208, 212, 218, 222, 229, 231, 232, 249, 291, 373, 416, 419 her letters to her mother, 56–57 is pro-German, xvi, xvii, 221, 222, 234 mentioned, xii, xiii, xiv, xvii, 48, 71, 84, 191, 389 Sastre González, José (“Pepe”) marriage of, 102, 114 letter(s) to, 217 mentioned, 86 Sastre González, Rafael, 374 Sastre Serrano, Celedonio identified, 8n Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von identified, 204n Schiller, Ferdinand Canning Scott identified, 106n mentioned, 105, 219, 281 Schofield, William Henry identified, 4n and the publication of Poets, 4n mentioned, 113 Scholastics, the, 184 Schopenhauer, Arthur identified, 211n Santayana writes on, 210 mentioned, 128, 410 Science philosophy not a, 223 relation to philosophy, 296 Scott, Sybil Marjorie Cuffe (Mrs. Geoffrey Scott), 389 See also Cutting, Sybil, and Lubbock, Sybil Scott, Mr. (unidentified), 157 Scotus, John Duns identified, 184n Santayana reads about, 184 Scribner, Charles identified, 243n Santayana on, 277 Seligmann, Herbert Jacob identified, 40n letter(s) to, 40
Index Sellars, Roy Wood Critical Realism, 244–45, 246 his essay for Essays in Critical Realism, 295–96 identified, 245n letter(s) to, 244, 295 Santayana criticizes, 295–96 mentioned, 265 The Sense of Beauty (Santayana), 261, 304 Seville (Spain) people in, 170 Santayana in, 168–69, 170, 176, 193 mentioned, 214 Shakespeare, William the language of, 365 Santayana quotes, 64 mentioned, 258 Sharp, John Alexander identified, 60n mentioned, 60 Sharpe, William James Clyde identified, 60n mentioned, 60 Shelley, Percy Bysshe identified, 36n Santayana quotes, 393 Santayana’s paper on, 34n, 35, 36n, 37, 54, 60, 81, 84, 111 Thayer’s essay on, 131n mentioned, 154n, 159 Shelley Club, 37 Sinclair, Upton Beal The Cry for Justice, 196n identified, 26n letter(s) to, 26, 195 his writing, Santayana on, 26 Sinister Street (MacKenzie) Santayana reads, 210 Sinn Fein identified, 243n mentioned, 241 Slade, Conrad Hensler identified, 20n letter(s) to, 40 and marriage, 40 in Paris, xx, 19, 90, 95, 138, 361 his wife, 124 mentioned, 124, 368 Smith, Logan Pearsall identified, 272n letter(s) to, 271, 273, 276, 278, 290, 299,
571
301, 304, 306, 319, 320, 342, 344, 346, 348, 356, 360, 370, 407 and Little Essays, xix, 290, 299–300, 305, 329–30, 346–47 proposes Little Essays, 271–72 Santayana on, 277–78 Trivia, 319–20, 321 mentioned, xiv, xviii, 389, 400 Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, 544 Society for Pure English, xviii Society, transformation of, 352 Socrates, 59n, 94, 95n, 159, 405, 406 Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (Santayana), 298, 307, 312, 345, 363, 367, 369, 375, 378, 384, 396, 403, 406, 413, 418 Solitude, 3 Solon identified, 301n mentioned, 216n, 301 Somerville College (Oxford), 146, 147n, 151 The Song of Songs (Sudermann) Santayana reads, 162, 162n Sonnets and Other Verses (Santayana), 125 Spain during the war, 229 people in, xiv politics in, 16, 18, 37 pro-Germans in, 207 Santayana in, xxi, 172–73, 418 “Spain in America” (Santayana), 221n Spaulding, Edward Gleason identified, 338n mentioned, 337 Speed the Plough (Morton), 223, 224n Spinoza identified, 15n and Little Essays, 344, 346 Santayana writes on, 14, 15n mentioned, 322, 410 Squire, John Collings identified, 385n mentioned, 384 Stephen, Karin The Misuse of Mind, 300n mentioned, 300 Stewart, John Alexander identified, 246n mentioned, 246, 389
572
The Letters of George Santayana
Stickney, Joseph Trumbull, 26n Stout, George Frederick and Harvard, 74, 76, 77 identified, 68n mentioned, 67, 325n Strachey, Lytton, xvii, 244n Strong, Charles Augustus his father, 394 in Fiesole, xvi, xxi, 86, 88, 90, 106, 108, 110, 111, 113, 123, 133 in Florence, 78 his health, xviii, xxi, 160, 205, 247, 250, 254, 255, 264, 280, 282, 293, 317–18, 327, 360, 372, 377, 380 identified, 10–11n letter(s) to, 9, 14, 17, 19, 24, 30, 34, 38, 44, 46, 47, 51, 57, 67, 71, 73, 78, 80, 86, 87, 90, 91, 93, 95, 97, 98, 100, 103, 104, 116, 119, 129, 132, 134, 137, 139, 141, 146, 148, 149, 152, 157, 160, 162, 165, 167, 174, 177, 180, 184, 185, 186, 190, 191, 199, 205, 210, 215, 216, 218, 220, 225, 226, 227, 228, 231, 232, 241, 245, 246, 247, 250, 251, 254, 255, 256, 258, 260, 264, 267, 269, 270, 275, 280, 283, 285, 286, 288, 289, 292, 293, 296, 305, 308, 309, 313, 317, 324, 330, 333, 334, 338, 341, 345, 349, 350, 351, 353, 354, 355, 357, 361, 367, 379, 380, 385, 390, 391, 408, 412, 414, 417 his mother, death of, 185 offers finanacial aid to Santayana, 34–35 The Origin of Consciousness, 39, 73, 74n, 310, 330, 332, 334, 337, 338–40, 361 in Paris, 34 his philosophy, 124 and Santayana disagree on terms, xii, 96, 99 and Santayana discuss philosophy, xvi Santayana on, 113, 179, 327, 360 Santayana reads, 330–32 Santayana to live with, xx, 30, 35, 39, 41, 51–52, 58, 60, 78, 83–84 Santayana visits, xii his social life, 114 travel plans, 215 his villa, 99, 113, 380, 380–81 his writings, 39n, 129, 220, 226, 250, 254, 264, 265n, 267, 275–76, 305–6, 308, 313, 318, 387
mentioned, xv, xx, 15, 82, 93, 102, 112, 113, 115, 356, 371, 372, 389 Strong, Margaret to visit the Berensons, 385 her education, 146, 148, 151, 174, 229 her friends, 308 identified, 11n in Italy, 114 in New York, 373, 377 and the Red Cross, 219 Santayana advises Strong on, xxi, 412–13 Santayana on, 360 in Switzerland, 291–92 mentioned, xx, xxi, 9–10, 18, 80, 111, 129, 282, 419 The Structure of Lasting Peace (Kallen) Santayana reads, 322, 323n Stuart, Henry Waldgrave identified, 263n mentioned, 262 Students, at the University of Wisconsin, xii, 12 Sturgis, Ellen Gardner (Hodges) (Mrs. Robert Sturgis) letter(s) to, 65 in Paris, 19 mentioned, 8n, 98, 114, 115n, 145, 340n Sturgis, George (nephew of Santayana) identified, 144n letter(s) to, 65 Santayana on, xv, 143, 144 Sturgis, Howard Overing his health, 143 identified, 14n Queen’s Acre (house near Windsor), described, 14n Santayana visits, xiv, xx, 188 on the war, 189 mentioned, 13, 75, 107, 389 Sturgis, Josephine (niece of Santayana) letter(s) to, 65 marriage of, 395n mentioned, 394 Sturgis, Josephine Borrás (half sister of Santayana) Ávila, moves to, xiv identified, 8n letter(s) to, 216 relationship with her mother, xiv mentioned, xi, xiii, 7, 30, 35, 43–44, 52,
Index 56, 58, 69–70, 71, 73, 80, 83, 84, 94, 102, 107, 111, 114, 114–15, 115, 122, 124, 132, 143, 180, 213, 386, 417, 420 Sturgis, Robert Shaw (half brother of Santayana) his health, 186, 394 identified, 8n letter(s) to, 98, 228 in Paris, 184 returns to America, 194 Santayana on, 184 mentioned, xi, xiv, 7, 35, 56, 70, 71, 73, 80, 82, 83, 84, 132, 143, 175, 178, 193, 340, 386, 395, 401 Sturgis, Russell identified, 76n mentioned, 75 Substance and existence, 10 and mind, 127 and the psychical, 418–19 Sudermann, Hermann identified, 162n The Song of Songs, 162 Switzerland, Santayana in, xxi
Telegraph House ( J. Russell’s house in Hampshire) identified, 247n Santayana visits, xii, xvii, 71, 72, 247, 250 Thales, 223 Thayer, Scofield his essay on Shelley, 131n identified, 131n letter(s) to, 130, 198, 212, 214, 399 mentioned, 400n Thayer, William Roscoe identified, 22n letter(s) to, 21, 300 Theater Santayana on, 169, 170 mentioned, 242 Thompson, Francis identified, 154n mentioned, 153 Thoron, Ward identified, 8n mentioned, 7
573
A Thousand and One Nights, 27n, 179 Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe (Santayana) publication of, xi–xii, 4n Santayana lectures on, 6 and Scribner’s, 125 mentioned, 7, 9, 31 “Three Proofs of Realism” (Santayana), xix, 265n, 276, 277n, 306 Toledo (Spain), Santayana in, xxi, 417–18 Torquay (England), Santayana in, xviii, 259, 260, 265, 266, 267 Torquemada, Tomás de identified, 343n mentioned, 343 Toy, Nancy Saunders (Mrs. Crawford Toy) identified, 114n mentioned, 113, 187, 402 The Tragic Sense of Life (Unamuno) Santayana reads, 164–65n Transcendentalism, 344 Trevi, fountain of, 380n Trinity College (Cambridge) G. Lapsley a fellow at, xv B. Russell a fellow at, xv mentioned, 83 Trivia (Smith) Bridges on, 319 described, 320n Santayana reads, 319–20 Truth religion and, 266 Santayana on, 255 Tufts, James Hayden identified, 263n mentioned, 262 Turkey, enters the war, 209 Turner, Miss (landlady), 188, 189n, 386 Twelve Japanese Painters (Ficke) Santayana on, 136–37
Unamuno, Miguel de identified, 165n letter(s) to, 164 The Tragic Sense of Life, 164n Unidentified Recipient letter(s) to, 329, 347 University(ies) Cambridge, 76
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Columbia, xi, 4, 9, 35, 58, 67, 411 of California (Berkeley), xii, 25, 42, 60 of Wisconsin (Madison), xi, xiii, 7, 9, 35, 42, 411 University Club, 11 University of California Chronicle, xiii, 44n Universo (journal), 196
Valera, Diego de, 38n Van Hise, Charles Richard identified, 60n mentioned, 59 Verdun, Battle, of 240 Vergil, 405, 406n Vices, of European philosophy, 254 Le Vicomte de Bragelonne (Dumas) described, 282n Santayana reads, 281 Vie Parisienne (journal), 174 Villa Le Balze (Fiesole), 86, 87n, 374 Virtue, 18 Voltaire, Françoise Marie Arouet de, 159
Walker Fellowship, 50 War and art, 159 Santayana on, 240 Ward, Bessie (unidentified), 213 Ward, James and Harvard, 74 identified, 68n Santayana on, 74 mentioned, 67 Warren, E. P. identified, 226n Santayana to visit, 226, 389 Warren, Mary (Mrs. William Warren) converts to Catholicism, 266–67 letter(s) to, 266 mentioned, 83, 85n Warren, Mrs., 242, 281, 330, 389 Warren, Peter, 281 Warren, Thomas Herbert, 219n Webb, Clement Charles Julian identified, 215n at Oxford, 219 Santayana reads, 214 Webb, Sidney James identified, 386n
mentioned, 385 Wells (England), Santayana in, xviii Wells, Edgar Huidekoper identified, 328n mentioned, 327 Westenholz, Albert W. von identified, 134n Santayana visits, 134 mentioned, 185, 186, 415 Western United States people’s affection for nature, 45–46 Santayana on, 42, 43, 44 Westernization of the world, 128 Wharton, Edith The Book of the Homeless, Santayana writes poem for, 234 identified, 234n mentioned, 361 Wheelock, John Hall and The Letters of George Santayana (Scribner’s), 543-44 Whited Sepulchre (Columbia Journal of Philosophy) reviews Strong’s book, 361 Santayana’s article in, 215 Santayana defines, 28 mentioned, 210 William (Wilhelm) II, Emperor of Germany identified, 238n mentioned, 238 William James and Henri Bergson (Kallen) Santayana on, 202 Williams College, 34, 35, 37 Wilson, Ellen Axson (Mrs. Woodrow Wilson), 334 Wilson, James Southall identified, 416n letter(s) to, 416 Wilson, Woodrow identified, 109n Santayana on, 333–34 mentioned, 241, 351 Winds of Doctrine (Santayana) essay on Bergson, 86, 95, 96n, 105, 111 essay on modernism, 86, 95, 111 essay on Russell, 95, 99 essay on Shelley, 54, 81, 111 Ficke reviews, 136 reviewed by the Harvard Monthly, 130–31 Santayana on, 166
Index Scribner’s and, 125 mentioned, 60, 84, 86, 93, 95, 96, 96n, 97, 99, 102, 103, 107, 111, 112, 119, 126, 129, 242, 343 Winslow, Frederick identified, 32n his medical practice, Santayana on, 119 mentioned, 402 Winslow, Frederick (son), 32, 84, 393, 394–95 Winslow, Mary Williams (Mrs. Frederick Winslow) identified, 32n letter(s) to, 32, 83, 109, 112, 119, 170, 192, 206, 233, 314, 392 mentioned, 402 Winslow, Polly letter(s) to, 163 Santayana on, 394 mentioned, 32, 84 Wisconsin, Santayana likes, 128 Wisconsin, University of (Madison) professors at, 12 Santayana at, 12 Santayana lectures at, xi, 9, 411 Santayana on, 42, 65 Santayana receives honorary degree from, 35, 43n Wolfe, Elsie de identified, 92–93n mentioned, 92 Women desires of, 183 education, 148 the intellectual abilities of, 157 Madrid compared to, 87 at the University of Wisconsin, 42 mentioned, 18 Woodbridge, Frederick James Eugene identified, 178n letter(s) to, 179 mentioned, 5n, 177 Wordsworth, William identified, 118n mentioned, 118 Work, Santayana on, 21 The Works of George Santayana (MIT) editorial policy, 541–42
575
World is not rational, 212 Santayana on, 163 will improve, 264 Worldliness, in European philosophy, 254–55 World War I affects Santayana, xvi, 202, 206, 213, 223, 236, 301 affects Santayana’s travel plans, xv, xvi, 210, 216–17, 225–26, 229 America and, xix, 201, 260, 315 blackouts, 209 the censors, 291, 298, 312, 313 the end of, xx, 264, 333, 355 the English and, 205, 224 Germans and, xvi, 206–7, 219, 221, 224, 300–301, 311, 343 Italy and, 219, 221 post-war plans, 236 privations, 260 B. Russell on, 200 Santayana on, xx, 187–88, 188, 189, 190, 191, 196–97, 205–6, 217, 218, 223–24, 232, 233–34, 236, 237–38, 267, 274, 303, 311, 315, 343, 358–59, 382, 397 Santayana supports the allies, xvi, 197 Santayana too old for, 265 Susana’s position on, 194–95, 221, 222, 234 Turkey and, 209 Verdun, Battle of, 240 Zeppelins, 209 mentioned, xi, xxi, 259, 395 Wright, Roger, 389
Y.M.C.A. lecture series sponsored by, xx, 345, 347, 349, 350 people at, Santayana on, 349 The Young Turks, 201 Young, Karl identified, 60n mentioned, 60 Young, Mr. letter(s) to, 31, 51 mentioned, 297
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The Younger American Poets (Rittenhouse), 125n Youth, the end of, 175
Zampa, Luciano Santayana meets, 381 translates Egotism, 363n mentioned, 363, 366, 379, 389, 391 Zionism, 224, 225n Zola, Émile identified, 137n mentioned, 137
Colophon
This book was designed and set in Baskerville. It was printed on 50-pound acid-free recycled paper and bound in ICG/Holliston Arrestox B 48650 cloth by Edwards Brothers Incorporated.