No. 37 Fall 2019 Bulletin of the George Santayana Society No. 37 2019 (For electronic distribution) TABLE OF CONTENTS • Announcement of 2020 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, page 2 • Announcement of session at APA Pacific Meeting in San Francisco, page 3 • Editor’s Notes, page 4 • Bibliographical Checklist Thirty-Fourth Update, page 161 • Some Abbreviations for Santayana’s Works, page 165 • Critical Editions of Santayana’s Works, page 166 • Overheard in Seville Submission Guidelines, page 168 • Announcement of the Angus Kerr-Lawson Prize, page 171 • Contributors, page 172 • Overheard in Seville Publication Information, page 173 James Ballowe, 5 Santayana 75, 100, and 125 Years Ago Charles Padrón, Richard M Rubin Editorial introduction 21 New Letters from Santayana Ruth Derham and Sarah Green 22 A Winchester Letter of Santayana: A New Letter to Lionel Johnson Katarzyna Kremplewska 30 Santayana on Communism in the Light of His Correspondence Martin Coleman 42 Review of Kremplewska’s Life as Insinuation Lydia Amir 49 The Special Case of Laughter James Ballowe 77 My Visit to Daniel Cory Nóra Horváth 84 Humanism in the Works of George Santayana Brita Stoneman 92 Forming Harmony: Santayana’s Rhetoric Phillip L Beard 105 Grammars of Understanding in Emerson, Santayana, and Cavell Glenn Tiller 119 Two Phases of Transcendentalism: Comments on Beard David Dilworth 125 Santayana's Critique of Modernity and His Repression of Emerson Richard M Rubin 146 Exchange on Propositions and Truth Glenn Tiller Richard K Atkins Overheard in Seville, which appears annually, is edited, published, and distributed by the George Santayana Society and is archived by the Santayana Edition at Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis. Archived issues are availa- ble at https://www.iupui.edu/~santedit/sant/santayana-society/bulletin/. The George Santayana Society 2020 ANNUAL MEETING The Society holds its annual meeting in conjunction with the January meetings of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division) in Philadelphia. Chair Richard M Rubin George Santayana Society Speaker Katarzyna Kremplewska Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw Ideal Allegiances and Practical Wisdom: Elements of Santayana’s Political Philosophy Chair Glenn Tiller Texas A&M University—Corpus Christi Lydia Amir Tufts University Santayana, Nietzsche, Montaigne 11:15 AM–1:10 PM, Saturday, 11 January 2020 The Philadelphia 201 Hotel 201 N 17th St, Philadelphia, PA The George Santayana Society 2020 PACIFIC MEETING The Society holds a session on the topic Harmony & Well-Being: Santayana on the Good Life at the April meetings of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in San Francisco. Chair Richard M Rubin George Santayana Society Speaker Hector Galván Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi Philosophy as a Path to Well-Being Speaker Diana Heney Vanderbilt University Santayana in Conversation: Guiding Normative Notions in American Pragmatism Speaker Hasko von Kriegstein Ryerson University Well-Being as Harmony 6:00 PM–9:00 PM, Thursday, 9 April 2020 The Westin St. Francis on Union Square 335 Powell Street, San Francisco, California Editor’s Notes The 2019 Annual Meeting of the George Santayana Society last January in New York attracted a good-sized audience though two speakers were not present: Brita Stoneman, the winner of the Angus Kerr-Lawson Prize, and Phillip L. Beard de- livered their papers and answered questions by telephone. Glenn Tiller, who was physically present, commented on Beard’s paper. Both papers and Tiller’s com- mentary appear in this issue. (Hector Galván, the third speaker, did not submit his paper for publication, but he will present again at the George Santayana Society meeting in San Francisco at 6:00 pm on 9 April 2020 at the APA Pacific Division) This thirty-seventh issue of Overheard in Seville, our largest yet, covers a wide range of topics including our third series of biographical sketches of Santayana 75, 100, and 125 years ago. James Ballowe, who writes about 1894, also describes his visit to Santayana’s literary executor Daniel Cory in an essay with an accompany- ing poem and color photograph. This introduction of photography to the Bulletin is augmented by pictures of a recently discovered letter from Santayana to the poet and essayist Lionel Johnson. Ruth Derham (whose article “Ideal Sympathy? The Unlikely Friendship of George Santayana and Frank, 2nd Earl Russell” was in last year’s issue) and her fellow researcher Sarah Green report how they found this letter at Winchester College in England inserted in a book of Johnson’s poetry next to a poem dedicated to Santayana. Scholarly use of Santayana’s letters comes to the fore in Katarzyna Kremplew- ska’s article on Santayana and communism. Kremplewska, who will be speaking at our Annual Meeting in Philadelphia at 11:15 am on 11 January 2020 at the APA Eastern Division, has recently published a book, Life as Insinuation: George Santayana’s Hermeneutics of Finite Life and Human Self. Martin Coleman re- views it for us. Lydia Amir, the founder of the International Association for the Philosophy of Humor, also will be speaking at our meeting in Philadelphia. In this issue she gives a comprehensive account of laughter in Santayana’s writings and why it is special. Phillip Beard’s article, along with Tiller’s amplifying commentary, defends Santayana’s take on Emerson against Stanley Cavell. David Dilworth, in the sec- ond of three articles on Santayana and romanticism, does exactly the opposite. Brita Stoneman’s prize-winning essay, “Forming Harmony,” constructs a theo- ry of rhetoric derived from Santayana’s ideas. Nóra Horváth’s article, based on her presentation at the World Congress of Philosophy in Beijing in August 2018, traces the legacy of humanism in Santay- ana’s work. Richard K Atkins’s 2018 Bulletin article, “Santayana on Propositions” gener- ated an email exchange. As this animated discussion should be of interest to our readers, we present a lightly edited version. This issue also includes the regular Bibliographic Checklist Update compiled by Daniel Moreno with additional contributions from Guido Tamponi. The volunteer efforts of many people go into making an issue of the Bulletin. Thanks to the authors for their contributions and their patience throughout the revision process and to the editorial board for their hours of editing and proofread- ing. I especially want to thank Glenn Tiller, Michael Brodrick, and Matt Flamm, who pitched in to help with the final preparation and copy editing. RICHARD MARC RUBIN Editor and President, George Santayana Society Santayana 75, 100, and 125 Years Ago Santayana in 1894: The Poet n the year following 1893, the year of his metanoia1, Santayana had been an instructor at Harvard in philosophy for five years. After returning from his I Walker Fellowship at the University of Berlin during 1896 and 1897, he wrote his dissertation under Josiah Royce on the philosopher Hermann Lotze. Upon graduation in 1889, he was hired as an instructor in the department. But he spent the early part of his teaching career writing poetry rather than publishing in philosophy. His colleagues (including William James ) had been his professors at Harvard, and he team-taught introductory courses to philosophy with James, Royce, and George Herbert Palmer. Although his colleagues continued to acknowledge his keen intelligence, they and the Harvard administration had some concern about his concentration on poetry. Even though he taught courses during 1894 that concentrated on Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, a course in aesthetics, one in the history of English philosophy from Hobbes to Hume, and another in scholastic philosophy, his first published work, which came in 1894 was Sonnets and Other Poems . It was to be followed two other poetic works: Lucifer: A Theo- logical Tragedy (1899) and The Hermit of Carmel and Other Poems (1901). Nev- ertheless, his teaching and reading during his early years led to two books of phi- losophy, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory (1896) and Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), both engaging philosophical issues while emphasizing art as a way of knowing. It was not until Santayana had pub- lished his first major philosophical work, the five-volume Life of Reason: or the Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), that he was promoted, after his own insistence, to a professorship in 1907. As William Holzberger notes in his biographical introduction to The Complete Poems of George Santayana: A Critical Edition (1979), Santayana became interest- ed in poetry early on at the Boston Latin School, an interest that he pursued as a poet and commentator on poetry throughout the rest of his life (POEMS 43). At Harvard, he often entertained his peers at the O.K. Club, the Hasty Pudding, and other student organizations to which he belonged with verses that appealed to their interests. Many of the often humorous and sometimes bawdy poems show a side of Santayana that allows the reader to understand that he was not the complete outsider in American society that he is often characterized as being. But those poems do not have the philosophical intent exhibited in his first book of poetry, which was pub- lished in 1894, just after his metanoia. Some of the latter poems in Sonnets and Other Verses were written before and during the deaths of his father and his young friend Warwick Potter and the marriage and departure to Spain of his beloved half- sister Susana in 1893. Hannibal Kimball and Herbert Stone, two young Harvard graduates, started a publishing house in Cambridge and Chicago with the expectation of publishing poets associated with Harvard. Santayana wrote a letter to Kimball and Stone 1 See Herman J Saatkamp, Jr., “Santayana in 1893: the Metanoia, “Overheard in Seville 36 (Fall 2018): 4-5. 6 OVERHEARD IN SEVILLE saying that he would be able to offer them a manuscript of twenty sonnets, other verses, and a longer poem that he suggested to the editors “may not be wise to print” (LGS 11 December 1893).