The Letters of George Santayana Book Three, 1921—1927 the Works of George Santayana Volume V 1921–1927 3:3
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The Letters of George Santayana Book Three, 1921—1927 The Works of George Santayana Volume V 1921–1927 3:3 To John Erskine 4 January 1921 • Madrid, Spain (MS: Columbia) C/o Brown Shipley & Co1 123 Pall Mall, London, S.W.1 Madrid, Jan. 4, 1921. My dear Mr Erskine2 It gives me much pleasure to write your niece’s name and mine on the sheet you send me, and I shall be glad it it contributes to the interest of her collection. Yours very truly GSantayana 1Santayana’s London bank, which he used as a permanent address. 2John Erskine (1879–1951) was a critic, novelist, musician, and English professor at Columbia University. His niece is unidentified. To Elizabeth Stephens Fish Potter 4 January 1921 • Madrid, Spain (MS: Houghton) C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, London Madrid, Jan. 4, 1921 Dear Mrs Potter1 I have before me not only your good letter of Dec. 14, but a photograph of the hall at Antietam Farm,2 and both make me wish that I could transfer myself by some miraculous process into your midst, even if was to remain incognito while there. This soothing idea has been suggested to me before, by my friend Apthorp Fuller, who also possesses a “farm”,3 and I think in an even more sav- age and remote region than yours: but it seems to follow that I should have to be incognito at both places, and also presumably at my brother’s;4 my old friend Mrs Toy5 would have to be let into the secret; and I might as well be interviewed in New York harbor on board the tooting steamer, and have my portrait in ^ ^ the next Sunday’s papers, with appropriate headlines: Cynic Santayana Sings Home Sweet Home; etc. Besides would my life be safe? My English friends seem to think not, although what I hear from America is all most dulcet and affectionate. Together with your letter I receive one from Cuningham Graham6 3:4 The Letters of George Santayana who says: “If you return again to the United States, you will find the new adap- tation by Colt of the Browning pistol,7 with the hair-trigger stop, the safest and quickest thing to have about you. Do not venture into the Middle West: there may be a feeling that may translate itself awkwardly.” On the other hand, by the same post, the wife of a professor of philosophy at Columbia writes “We have read with deep pleasure your last book8 . I delight in its justness . I am comforted by the ripeness and GOODNESS of its spirit. It makes me hope for things that had seemed lost.” And at the same time a professor of English literature begs me “to write my little niece’s name and yours in her copy.” Life is very complicated, especially if one tries to put two & two and together: it ^ ^ is simpler if one keeps things apart. I have been trying in Toledo, under the shadow of the magnificent Alcazar and of Cisneros,9 to understand conserva- tive Spain: it is not impossible: but only if you learn it all like a new language, and forget all the facts and all the feelings that it ignores. Bring the irreconcil- ^ able things face to face, and one, if not both, become incredible. ^ All you and Bob tell me about the boys10 interests me very much; and I don’t wonder that they are not “artistic” in their tastes. Young people nowadays have taken a new turn. They did not see the light (intellectually, I mean) in the eighteen nineties, as some of us did. That was an age that cried: Give me art or give me pessimism, or give me both. I see vestiges of it among my friends in Florence: they are still impressed with the thought of how beautiful things must once have been; and they yearn to live, at least privately, in that rarer and richer atmosphere. But they are a failure. Things are differently beautiful now, if one has eyes to see them; or rather, it is something different from “beauty” that makes up their interest and charm: it is perhaps their actuality, or their movement, or their humour. Perhaps the most loving and the most perceptive of men among us is not the artist but the humorist. Perhaps your boys won’t miss much if they don’t care for “art”. This is only a bow: another day I will write a letter more like a long visit. Yours sincerely GSantayana 1Robert “Bob” Burnside Potter (c. 1869–c. 1936), Harvard class of 1891, became an archi- tect. Santayana’s poem entitled “Dedication of the first sonnets to a friend on the eve of his marriage” was written in his honor. 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, spoke French and German, and learned Italian in preparation for a spring 1897 trip through Italy. See Persons, 379–81. 2The Potters’ home at Smithtown, Long Island, New York. 3Benjamin 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 1921–1927 3:5 to the Harvard faculty. “ ’Tween Waters” was Fuller’s country home at Sherborn, outside Boston. 4Robert Shaw Sturgis (c. 1854–1921) was the fourth of Santayana’s mother’s five children by her first husband, George Sturgis. Robert managed Santayana’s financial affairs. 5Nancy Saunders Toy (d. 1941) was married to Crawford Howell Toy (1836–1919), Hancock Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages at Harvard (1880–1909). 6Possibly R. Cunningham Graham (1852–1936). 7Samuel Colt (1814–62) invented a breech-loading pistol which became very popular. John Moses Browning (1812–1926) invented an automatic pistol, a machine gun, and an automatic rifle. 8Wendell 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 editor of The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods. Santayana had a copy of Character sent to Professor and Mrs. Mary Potter Bush. 9Alcazar is a type of palace in Spain, generally royal, built in the centuries of Moorish domination. Formed around large courts within strong walls, it stood in the streets of a city and was defensible but not fortresslike. There are alcazars at Seville, Toledo, Segovia, and Córdoba. Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1436–1517), statesman and archbishop of Toledo, formally created the Complutense University in 1499. 10The Potters’ sons, Warwick and Hamilton. To Henry James III 10 January 1921 • Madrid, Spain (MS: Houghton) C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, London. Madrid, Jan. 10, 1921 Dear Mr James It was a cause of regret to me not to have other and longer letters of your father’s, which I know I had received, to send to you when you were preparing the collection which you have now published.1 Those I was able to send were chiefly of documentary interest, and I think you had better keep them with your other documents. The reason that the most interesting letters I had were no longer in my pos- session was, I think, that I had lent or given them to other persons who wished to see them, and they may yet turn up. I suspect that my friend Mrs Toy may have one or two of them, but she naturally forgot the fact when looking for such as she or Mr Toy may have received from your father. She 3:6 The Letters of George Santayana probably has them among my letters, and though it is too late for your purposes, I am going to ask her if this is not the case. Believe me, with best wishes, Yours sincerely GSantayana 1William James (1842–1910) was a preeminent American philosopher and psychologist. He taught at Harvard (1872–1907), physiology and anatomy at first; later, psychology and philosophy. James’s relationship with his pupil, Santayana, was one of mutual respect for one another’s intellect, philosophical disagreement, and temperamental antithesis. James’s son, Henry, edited The Letters of William James in two volumes (Boston: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920). One letter (2 May 1905) to Santayana is included in volume II (228–29). To Charles Scribner’s Sons 23 January 1921 • Madrid, Spain (MS: Princeton) C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall, London S.W.1 Madrid, Jan. 23, 1921 Messrs Charles Scribner’s Sons1 New York Gentlemen In reply to your letter of Jan. 4, inclosing one from Mrs Turner, of Grand Rapids, Michigan,2 I can only say that I am more interested in finishing the books I have in hand than in correcting my old ones. There are certainly many things that I should put differently if I were now rewriting “The Sense of Beauty”; but, as you observe, I have supplemented what I said there with other considerations in “The Life of Reason”, and the “Soliloquies in England” now appearing in “The Athenaeum” will probably make a small book in which the whole nature of fiction, expression, and representation will be treated in a new fashion. Mrs Turner will find there, I hope, a sufficient sense of what Freud, if not Croce,3 has taught us. And I am at work—slowly—on a much more considerable book,4 in which I endeavour to clear up, as far as I can, all the fundamental questions concerned in these theories.