George Santayanas Marginalia, A Critical Selection Book One, Abell Lucretius The Works of George Santayana Volume 6

The Works of George Santayana Volume VI, Book One

  

Marianne S. Wokeck, Editor

William G. Holzberger, Textual Editor

Kristine W. Frost, Associate Editor

Johanna E. Resler, Assistant Editor

  

David E. Spiech, Assistant Textual Editor

Herman J. Saatkamp Jr., Founding and Consulting Editor

  This volume is dedicated, with thanks, to Mairi

  

Santayana’s drawing from Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der Reinen Vernunft

Image used by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University

AC9 Sa591 Zz878k

  

George Santayana’s Marginalia

A Critical Selection

Book One: Abell — Lucretius

  Edited and with an Introduction by John McCormick

  Kristine Walters Frost, Associate Editor

  

The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

  

© 2011 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Introduction,” John McCormick.

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 consti-

tutes the only exception to this prohibition. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Santayana, George, 1863–1952.

George Santayana’s marginalia : a critical selection / edited and with an intro-

duction by John McCormick.

  2 v. — (The works of George Santayana ; v. 6) Includes bibliographical references. Contents: Bk. 1. Abell–Lucretius — bk. 2. McCord–Zeller.

  

ISBN 978-0-262-01629-2 (v. 1 : hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-262-01630-8

(v. 2 : hardcover : alk. paper)

  B945.S2 2011 191—dc22 2010052839

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

  

Marianne S. Wokeck Director and Editor

Kristine W. Frost Assistant Director and Associate Editor

Martin A. Coleman Associate Editor

Johanna E. Resler Assistant Editor

David E. Spiech Assistant Textual Editor

Elizabeth Garmen Graduate Intern

John Joachim Graduate Intern

Editorial Board

  Hugh J. Dawson Douglas M. MacDonald

Matthew C. Flamm John M. Michelsen

Morris Grossman Andrew J. Reck

Angus Kerr-Lawson Beth J. Singer

  

John Lachs Glen Tiller

Richard C. Lyon Henny Wenkart

Consultants

Herman J. Saatkamp Jr.

William G. Holzberger

  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: 1868–1909, 2001 Book Two: 1910–1920, 2002 Book Three: 1921–1927, 2002 Book Four: 1928–1932, 2003 Book Five: 1933–1936, 2003 Book Six: 1937–1940, 2004 Book Seven: 1941–1947, 2006 Book Eight: 1948–1952, 2008

  VI George Santayana’s Marginalia: A Critical Selection Book One: Abell — Lucretius, 2011 Book Two: McCord — Zeller, 2011

Contents

  Book One: Abell — Lucretius Introduction xi Editorial Practice xv List of Authors xix MARGINALIA

  3

  

Introduction

John McCormick

  In his essay “Imagination,” George Santayana wrote, “There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some ₁ reader’s hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text.” That remark might serve to define the quality of a great many of the thousands of marginalia that Santayana never scrawled, but neatly and legibly entered, in the hundreds of books he acquired over the course of a long lifetime. It is not that he was given to buying dull books, but that his com- ments serve to illuminate, to defy, to negate, or interestingly to expand his authors’ thought in routine or surprising or frequently delightful ways.

  At the same time, the marginalia offer a unique way into the processes of Santayana’s mind, a measure of his undoubted originality as philosopher, imaginative writer, critic, essayist, and as human being.

  We look to marginalia for indications of a writer’s development or changes of mind, for a relaxed statement in place of public formality, for unsuspected moods, passions, or enthusiasms, and for otherwise imper- ceptible traces of influence, prejudice, or omission. Santayana’s com- ments offer all that and more, even though he often insisted in letters that his thought did not develop; his claim is borne out for the most part when one pursues the marginalia over a period of years. The process at work is accretion resulting in changes of emphasis or definition of terms (see “essence,” early and late) rather than fundamental change. During his years at Harvard as student and lecturer, another kind of marginalia from the ruminative or critical occurs in passages clearly representing study or lecture notes. Such notes might be compared to a concert pianist’s inter- pretation of a familiar score, so that we hear it anew and vividly: thus the notes on Kant’s work. In another sense, the marginalia can be seen as Santayana’s stylebook; they show us his daily linguistic discipline, his practice in diction that salts his cogent prose.

  Santayana’s marginal notes are frequently surprising as his reactions change in the course of a long text. By turns he approves (although rarely), he is quirky, always critical, sometimes slangy, literary, frivolous, xii Introduction

  and sometimes bitchy: only that word will do. He shows full control of the American language despite his preference for British spellings. Often a generalized comment, thought, or meditation occurs on the page, set in motion by the subject at large: e.g., Bultmann, Die Geschichte der synoptis-

  

chen Tradition (The History of the Synoptic Tradition) 11 p 110 (1:121). The

  effort here, then, has been to list alphabetically by author all the books extant that belonged to Santayana; to indicate where each book is located and how extensively annotated; and to reproduce a sufficient number of annotations to be of use to the reader or student of Santayana’s thought, his art, and his life. The professional writer on Santayana will of course want to go directly to the sources listed: no simple task.

  The bibliographical listings, as complete as can be ascertained, can answer with reasonable certitude when Santayana read a given text, from date of publication, from changes in his penmanship as he aged, and from secondary sources. In maturity, his habit was to order books from Blackwell’s, Oxford, or from the United States through his nephew and business agent, George Sturgis, or through his publisher in the United States, Charles Scribner’s Sons. He read books so ordered at once. The many books sent by aspiring writers he acknowledged courteously upon reception, so that he would not necessarily have to read them. Santayana led a wandering life from 1911, when he determined to retire from Harvard, to 1940, when he settled in Rome and where he died in 1952. As he acquired books in those peripatetic years, he would deposit them with his lifelong friend Charles Augustus Strong, first in Strong’s quarters in Paris, then in his villa, Le Balze, in Fiesole, Italy. After Santayana’s death, his lit- erary executor, Daniel Cory, who had inherited the library, sold off many of the books in lots to various libraries in the United States, and one lot of some 300 to Blackwell’s, Oxford, which firm in turn sold them to the University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario. Because of the war and its after- math, however, Cory had no access to Santayana’s books in Strong’s villa. Strong died in 1939; the Germans were believed to have occupied the villa and to have destroyed the contents. In 1979 Augustus Strong’s daughter, Margaret de Cuevas de Larrain, presented the villa, its contents quite unde- stroyed, to Georgetown University, and Santayana’s part of the library, inso- far as it can be identified, has now been deposited in the Special Collections ₂ section of the Lauinger Library at Georgetown University. Santayana’s wit is apparent in all his many kinds of writing, but his humor, his occasional outcry at a writer’s folly, his concern as great for

  Introduction xiii

  the niceties of English prose as for the placing of Greek accent marks, these the marginalia indicate in abundance. Reputed to be isolated, anti- social, even a recluse, although he had no such attributes, Santayana nev- ertheless, living by choice in celibate solitude, spent a great deal of time talking to, and talking back to, a wonderful miscellany of writers, from Spinoza to Kant to J. S. Mill to Bertrand Russell and Ezra Pound.

  After retiring from his Harvard professorship in 1912 and moving back to Europe, Santayana persisted in his habit of marking up the books he was reviewing or texts on subjects he was writing about. Accordingly, the present compilation might well be entitled Santayana’s Critical

  

Marginalia. If only the flavor of those remarks registers as they deserve it

  should, the edition in hand will have succeeded in fulfilling the editor’s ambitions for it, and the volume will not appear as a mere compromise with the many volumes which would be necessary to publish Santayana’s marginalia in their entirety.

  Marginalia are customarily published in one of two ways: either in multivolume sets, faithful to every utterance and punctuation mark of the given writer; or in single volumes embracing all the marginalia of a given ₃ writer on a single work. The volume in hand, obviously, does neither. It is rather an attempt to accommodate the financial realities of the day, which rule out multivolume sets, without sacrificing a reasonably exten- sive and usable compilation. In the same vein, marginalia already pub- lished includes Paul Grimley Kuntz’s edition of Santayana’s Harvard dissertation, Lotze’s System of Philosophy, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1971, Appendix, 95105, and Kuntz, “Santayana and Lotze,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, Summer 1972, 115–21.

  In a long work occupying five years’ attention, the editor has commit- ted many an undetected error, for which he alone is responsible. He is more indebted than brief mention can adequately express to Santayana’s former literary executrix, Mrs. Margaret Cory, for permission to print the marginalia; to Mrs. Donna Hanna-Calvert, former Associate Editor of the Santayana Edition; Brenda Bridges, former Editorial Assistant; and Johanna E. Resler, Assistant Editor. Very particular thanks go to Nicholas Scheetz and his associates in the Special Collections Division, Lauinger Library, Georgetown University, and to Mrs. Susan Saunders Bellingham, Special Collections Librarian, University of Waterloo; to Susan Halpert, Reference Librarian, Houghton Library, Harvard University; to Mr. Bernard Crystal and his colleagues in the Rare Book xiv Introduction

  and Manuscript Collection, Butler Library, Columbia University; to the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin; to the librari- ans of the University of York, Yorkshire; to the founding General Editor of the Santayana Edition, Professor Herman J. Saatkamp Jr., and not least to the tireless and precise work of Kristine W. Frost, Associate Editor of this volume.

  York, U.K.

  September 2007.

  1 ₂ Soliloquies in England (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), 124.

  

Early lists of books in the villa presumably belonging to Santayana were in fact

Strong’s; such is the opinion of the librarians at the Lauinger Library, and the editor’s.

₃ E.g., George Remington Havens, Voltaire’s Marginalia on the Pages of Rousseau

Editorial Practice

  The following enumeration of pages does not reflect the relative importance of a given work sub specie aeternitatis; the numeration of mar- ginalia in each volume indicates only the degree of attention that Santayana paid to that specific work.

  The selected texts from Santayana’s personal library are listed in alphabetical order by author (or by title if the work is “edited by” rather than authored) and then, most often, by date of publication. Editions of standard writers are listed by that writer, not by the editor; e.g., Lucretius, but not Munro, editor of the edition in question. Pseudonymous works are listed by pseudonym, followed by the author’s authentic name. A work in two or more volumes is most often treated as one book; there are a few exceptions.

  A headnote for each text includes the author’s name in bold face type, the title of the work in italics, brief publication information (place and date), library location of the text, and the number of marginalia con- tained within the text (or by an indication of lack of importance in the editor’s view). Publisher or printer is not included in the headnote. Anonymous works are listed alphabetically by title.

  Not all marginalia within a given text have been selected for inclusion in this edition. Text is chosen for content and style. Paraphrase occurs to save space. Crucial phrases or entire passages are given in the original language other than English, followed by translation in a footnote. Translations, which are literal, not literary, are the editor’s, unless other- wise indicated.

  Each marginalia from a particular text is numbered consecutively, fol- lowed by the page number(s) and any other information regarding Santayana’s markings (‘marked’, ‘marked Z’, ‘underlined’, etc.) or place- ment (top, bottom).

  Santayana’s spelling and usage is maintained throughout; e.g., “every thing” (two words) for “everything.” He favored British spelling after his visit to Frank Russell’s establishment in 1887. Slips of the pencil are reproduced. His punctuation, which he knew to be uncertain in English, caused him to use colons where correctness would indicate semicolons. Single or double quotation marks are reproduced as Santayana wrote xvi Editorial Practice

  Flyleaf matter is indicated as such, but presentation messages are not considered to be marginalia. Marginalia within Santayana’s own works are not included here, since they are incorporated in the complete critical edition.

  Key to location of texts: Columbia

  Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York City

  Georgetown Special Collections, Lauinger Library, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

  Harvard Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

  Le Balze Georgetown University, Villa Le Balze, Fiesole, Italy

  Texas Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin

  Waterloo Rare Book and Manuscript Room, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario

  Key to symbols and typefaces within the edition: The reproduced text taken from a particular book is in regular ten- point typeface from margin to margin. It is not within quotation marks, but material quoted within the selected text is so marked.

  Literal translations (in place of reproduced text) from another language into English are in italic typeface from margin to margin. When the text is reproduced in its original language, a translation is given in a footnote, in italic.

  Text which has been paraphrased by the editor is placed within double vertical bars || … || and aligned from margin to margin. Editorial comments are a smaller, nine-point size text within square brackets [ … ] and block indented. Comments or clarifying words within the text or marginalia also are placed in square brackets and in the smaller font size.

  Santayana’s marginalia, which normally follow a block of text, are in bold ten-point typeface and block indented. In the marginalia the bracketed question mark [?] indicates a question- able reading of Santayana’s hand.

  Editorial Practice xvii

  Footnotes immediately follow the text to which they refer within each numbered entry. Any underlined text reflects underlining done by Santayana. A single slash through a character, as well as strikethroughs and insertions (marked by inferior carets) within the reproduced text or within the marginalia itself, reflect Santayana’s markings.

  The term ‘marked’ indicates that Santayana drew a vertical line in the margin next to the lines of text reproduced (‘doubly marked’ indicates two vertical lines). ‘Marked X’ indicates that Santayana wrote an ‘X’ in the margin next to the text. ‘Marked Z’ indicates that he drew a wavy vertical line (probably for emphasis) next to the lines of text. ‘Underlined Z’ indi- cates a wavy horizontal line drawn under a word or words.

  The “List of Authors” on the following pages informs the reader of authors of books in Santayana’s personal library which the editor has included in this volume, whether or not they contained marginalia. Authors of books in Santayana’s library which are not included in this vol- ume are noted at the end of the list. Book Two of George Santayana’s

  

Marginalia contains an appendix with a complete listing of all of the works

  known to have been in “George Santayana’s Library.”

List of Authors

  Abell, Walter Acton, Harold Adam, Antoine Adam, James Aiken, Conrad Ainger, Arthur Campbell Alain [Emile Auguste Chartier] Albert, Thomas Alonso, Dámaso Amery, L[eopold] S[tennett] Ames, Van Meter Archer-Hind, R. D. [Editor] Aristotle Asín Palacios, Miguel Atkinson, Brooks Babbitt, Irving Bacon, Francis Bailey, Cyril Bailly, Auguste Bainville, Jacques Balfour, Arthur James Barbusse, Henri Baring, Maurice Barnes, William Bartlett, Alice Hunt Bates, Ernest Sutherland Bede, Cuthbert Belgion, Montgomery Benda, Julien Benn, Gottfried Berenson, Bernard Bergson, Henri Berkeley, George Beruete, Aureliano de Bevan, Edwyn Robert Bewick, Thomas Birnbaum, Martin Bishop, Elizabeth xx List of Authors Blanshard, Brand [Editor] Bolaffio, Carlo Bolton, Isabel Bradley, F[rancis] H[erbert] Breasted, James Henry Buchheim, Karl A. [Editor] Buchler, Justus Bullett, Gerald William Bülow, Prince Bernhard von Bultmann, Rudolf Karl Burgard, Raymond

Burnett, Whit and Charles E. Slatkin [Editors]

Butcher, Samuel Henry Butler, Bishop Joseph Butler, Richard Caird, Edward Callimachus Calverton, V[ictor] F[rancis] Campbell, Lewis Campion, George C. Camus, Albert Carco, Francis Cardozo, Benjamin N. Carus, Paul Castelli, Enrico Castelnau, Jacques Thomas de Cavalcanti, Guido Céline, Louis-Ferdinand Chapman, John Jay Chaucer, Geoffrey Chénier, André Marie Churchill, Winston Clemens, Cyril Clifford, William Kingdon Coates, Adrian Cole, G[eorge] D[ouglas] H[oward] Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Collingwood, R[obin] G[eorge] Collis, John Stewart Colony, Horatio Confucius Corneille, Pierre Corwin, Norman Lewis Cramb, J[ohn] A[dam] Crisógono de Jesús Sacramentado

  List of Authors xxi Croce, Benedetto Crosfield, Thomas Cuneo, Niccolò Dante Alighieri Dasgupta, Surendranath Datta, Dhirendra Mohan Davenport, Russell W. Delphic Club Denifle, Henri Dewey, John Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes Dillaway, Newton Douglas, Norman Ducasse, C[urt] J[ohn] Dudley, Owen Francis du Maurier, Daphne Dunn, Robert Dunning, Ralph Cheever Durant, Will[iam] [James] Duron, Jacques Dyer, Louis Eastman, Max [Forrester] Eaton, Charles Edward Eddington, Arthur Stanley Edman, Irwin Edwards, Jonathan Einstein, Albert [Editor] Eliot, T[homas] S[tearns] English Institute Ewing, A[lfred] C[yril] Falconi, Carlo Fargue, Léon-Paul Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Ficke, Arthur Davison Fielding, Henry Fisch, Max H. [Editor] Fletcher, Phineas Foote, Henry Wilder Frank, Philipp Frazer, James George Freud, Sigmund Frost, Robert Fuller, Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fülöp-Miller, René Furon, Raymond xxii List of Authors Garbe, Richard von García Marruz, Fina Gavin, Frank Gibson, James Gide, André Gioberti, Vincenzo Giraudoux, Jean

Gobineau, Joseph Arthur (Comte de)

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Gollancz, Victor Goodman, J[ack] R[awlin] Gordon, Hirsch Loeb Gorer, Geoffrey Gray, Thomas Green, Thomas Hill Gregory, Alyse Groethuysen, Bernhard Guénon, René Gumpert, Martin Guzzo, Augusto Hadfield, James Arthur Hamilton, William Harcourt, Robert d’ Harnack, Adolf von Heard, Gerald Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Heidegger, Martin Hemingway, Ernest Henrich, Edith Herodotus Hersch, Jeanne Hertzberg, Gustav Friedrich Hilliard, A. L. Hirn, Yrjö Hispanic Society of America Hogg, James Holmes, Pauline Holt, Edwin Bissell Homer Hone, William [Editor] Hook, Sidney Housman, A. E. Hovelaque, Emile Husserl, Edmund Inge, William Ralph

  List of Authors xxiii Irazusta, Julio Jackson, Henry James, Alice James, William Jeans, James Hopwood Jeffers, Robinson Jerrold, Douglas Jiménez, Juan Ramón Johnson, Lionel Juan de la Cruz Kallen, Horace Meyer Kant, Immanuel Keith, Arthur Berriedale Kettner, Frederick Keynes, John Maynard Keyserling, Graf Hermann A. Kinney, Mary Cyril Edwin Knowles, David Knox, H. V. Korean American Cultural Association La Batut, Guy de [Editor] La Fontaine, Jean de Lamont, Corliss Langstaff, John Brett Lecky, William E. H. Le Dantec, Félix Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm Le Roy, Edouard Levy, Hermann Lietzmann, Hans Lindsay, A[lexander] D[unlop] Lippmann, Walter Locke, John Loisy, Alfred Firmin Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth Lotze, Hermann Lowell, Robert Lucian [Lucianus Samosatensis] Lucretius [Titus Lucretius Carus] McCord, David McCulloch, Hugh Machiavelli, Niccolo Macran, Frederick Walter Mallon, James J. and E. C. T. Lascelles Manacorda, Guido xxiv List of Authors Mann, Thomas Manning, Hugo Maraini, Fosco Marchant, James [Editor] Maritain, Jacques Marsh, Gerald Masson, John Maxwell, William Mayberry, George [Editor] Maycock, A. L. Medici, Lorenzo de’ Meissner, Erich Meyer, Kuno Michelangelo Buonarroti Mill, John Stuart Millevoye, Charles Hubert Mins, Henry F. Moncrieff, Malcolm M. Montague, William P. Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat More, Paul Elmer Morison, Samuel Eliot Morley, Christopher Motwani, Kewal Müller, Gustav Emil Mumford, Lewis Munitz, Milton Karl Munro, Thomas Murchie, Guy Murry, John Middleton Neilson, W. A. and A. H. Thorndike Nevill, Ralph Nicolas, Marius Paul Nock, Albert Jay Ortega y Gasset, José Otto, Emil Peers, E. Allison Péguy, Charles Pierre Perry, Ralph Barton Pestalozzi Foundation of America Petrie, William Matthew Flinders Phelps, William Lyon

Pilar, Princess of Bavaria and Desmond Chapman-Hutton

Pizá, Pedro Antonio Plato

  List of Authors xxv Pound, Ezra Loomis Powys, Llewelyn Prezzolini, Giuseppe Privitera, Joseph Frederic Prokosch, Frederic Proust, Marcel Quinn, David B. Read, Carveth Reid, Thomas Reves, Emery Richards, I[vor] A[rmstrong] Rickert, Heinrich Rideau, Emile Rimbaud, Arthur Roback, Abraham A. Rolland, Romain Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Royal Asiatic Society Royal Society of Literature of the United Kingdom Royce, Josiah Runes, Dagobert D. Rush, Benjamin Russell, Bertrand Russell, David Russell, John Francis Stanley Salter, William MacKintire Sankaracarya Santayana, George Sarolea, Charles Scheler, Max Schilpp, Paul Arthur [Editor] Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. Schneider, Herbert W. Schneider, Robert E. Schofield, William H. Schopenhauer, Arthur Sebastian, Fannie B. Seidenberg, Roderick Sellars, Wilfrid and John Hospers [Editors] Semon, Richard Shaw, George Bernard Sitwell, Osbert Slochower, Harry Smart, Charles Allen xxvi List of Authors Smith, Logan Pearsall Smith, Robinson Smith, Thomas V. Sophocles Soutar, William Spaulding, Edward G. Spencer, Herbert Spender, Stephen Spengler, Oswald Spinoza, Benedict Spinoza Society Spring, Henry Powell Stalin, Joseph Stanley, Carleton W. Stearns, Harold Sterne, Laurence Stevenson, Robert Louis Stickney, Trumbull Stone, Christopher Strachey, Giles Lytton Strong, Charles Augustus Sturt, Henry Cecil Sturzo, Luigi Surmelian, Leon Z. Swift, Jonathan Thalheimer, August Thomas, Lowell Jackson Thomas Aquinas Thompson, Anna Boynton Thompson, Francis Thompson, Samuel Martin Thoreau, Henry David Toy, Crawford Howell Toynbee, Arnold Joseph Twain, Mark Umfazi [Clara Urquhart] Urquhart, Clara [Editor] Vaihinger, Hans Valéry, Paul Valois, Georges Vercel, Roger

Vergil [Publius Vergilius Maro]

Vidal, Gore Viereck, Peter Vivante, Leone

  List of Authors xxvii von Hagen, Victor Wolfgang Walden, Selma Warren, Edward Perry [pseud. ALR] Waterman, Charles Watson, John Broadus Weber, Alfred Weyl, Hermann Wheelock, John Hall Whitehead, Alfred North Whitman, Walt Williams, Oscar [Editor] Williams, William Carlos Winchester College Archaeological Society Woodbridge, Frederick J. E. Woods, James Haughton Worth, Claud Alley Wycherley, William Young, George Malcolm Zeller, Eduard Authors not included in the volume: Alexander, Samuel Bonitz, Hermann Brooks, Van Wyck Drake, Durant Fadiman, Clifton Fairbanks, Arthur Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de Huysman, J.-K. Lutoslawski, Wincenty Manrique, Jorge Noli, Fan Stylian Owen, John

  Marginalia: Abell — Lucretius

  

Santayana’s marginalia from Immanuel Kant’s

Kritik der Reinen Vernunft

  

Image used by permission of the Houghton Library,

Harvard University

AC9 Sa591 Zz878k Walter Abell Representation and Form:

  A Study of Aesthetic Values in Representational Art New York: 1936. Waterloo. No marginalia.

  

[In his preface, Abell acknowledges “a debt of gratitude to Professor

Santayana,” who has influenced his point of view.]

  Harold Acton Memoirs of an Aesthete London: 1948. Waterloo. One marginale.

  [Acton quotes Santayana on pp. 384–85.]

  “Life is compelled to flow, and things must either flow with it, or like Lot’s ₁ wife, in the petrified gesture of refusal, remain to mock their own hope.” ₁ Soliloquies in England (Scribner’s, 1922), 16.

  Antoine Adam Le Vrai Verlaine: essai psychanalytique Paris: 1936. Waterloo. Nine marginalia.

  1 p 16, marked

  ||A mother’s love is necessary, but a father’s less so. The absence of a father is a catastrophe, for a son needs a father’s example. Thus lacking a father for a model, and|| brought up by a very tender mother, Baudelaire was a woman.

  

[A significant marking in light of Santayana’s cold relationship to his

mother and his warmer regard for his father.] 2 p 16, marked

  [Virtually the same comment as 1 p 16 above on Verlaine.] 3 p 36, marked

  ||Adam has shown how Verlaine could be obsessed by a woman’s body and at the same time homosexual or heterosexual.||

  4 pp 63–64, marked

  ||Regarding Verlaine’s two mistresses, Philomène Boudin and Eugenie Krantz: in the Odes in honor of Philomène, she betrays him, tells him of her lapses, and they weep together.|| Verlaine has religious admiration for this

  dirty woman, a wounded Amazon in her flagrant indiscretions.

  5 p 103, underlined and translated

  ||An image of the sea describes the mother,|| comme aux premiers jours du monde. ₁ Herrlich wie am ersten Tag.

  Also Childe Harold

  1:4 George Santayana’s Marginalia 6 p 105, marked

  [Verlaine’s irony:]

It is ambiguous, it cannot be simple, spontaneous, natural. At base it is dual. One

part of his being tries to live, to love, and to believe. But a quite different part refuses

to follow, and objectively observes efforts it knows to be in vain.

  You see the end before the beginning.

  7 p 108

  ||A despairing letter from Verlaine to his wife tries nevertheless to reassure her. Such phrases attest to Verlaine’s obscure awareness [ conscience] of being determined by exterior forces, superior to his will.||

  Is there anyone who is not?

  8 p 113

  ||It is universally accepted that the great artist is he who creates. The entirely healthy man does not have to create, because|| reality is given to him

  all complete. He sees it, and he lives it. He does not dream of re-ordering it.

  N.B.

  9 p 119

  ||The theory of art as healing to wounds or illness: Dostoievsky’s epilepsy and his use of it in The Idiot.|| No art would ensue if there were no positive gifts. The con- flict only renders the result more tragic.

  James Adam The Religious Teachers of Greece Edinburgh: 1908. Georgetown. No marginalia.

  Conrad Aiken

  The Kid [Edinburgh]: J. Lehmann, 1947. Waterloo. No marginalia.

  Conrad Aiken The Divine Pilgrim Athens, Georgia: 1949. Waterloo. Five marginalia.

  [Aiken writes two explanatory prefaces to his verse.] 1 p 41

  Spirit understands all but connives at nothing Witness but not accomplice—

  Confusion of transcendental spirit—equally ready for

  George Santayana’s Marginalia 1:5

  has a specific nature, sensuous and rational, which it must respect or else go mad with pain or contradiction—which is the “divine” pilgrim.

  2 p 101 [In the preface to “The House of Dust”:]

  ||Implicit is the theory|| that in the evolution of man’s consciousness, ever widening and deepening and subtilizing his awareness, and in his dedica- tion of himself to this supreme task, man possesses all that he could possi- bly require in the way of a religious credo: when the half-gods go, the gods arrive: he can, if he only will, become divine.

  [After “divine”:] dreaming. [In margin:] N.B. not clarifying or making truer.

  Arthur Campbell Ainger Memories of Eton Sixty Years Ago London: 1917. Waterloo. No marginalia.

  [Useful to Santayana for the Etonian passages in The Last Puritan.]

  Alain [Emile Auguste Chartier] Propos sur le Christianisme Paris: 1924. Waterloo. Eight marginalia.

  1 p 53 marked

  ||A quartet of Beethoven becomes clearer year by year, for the analyses of generations ensure that future glory.|| Rot

  2 p 113

  ||The idea that the dead pray for the living derives from the notion of dead heroes as wiser and better than the living.|| This is true only virtually: it is not historical.

  3 p 147

  ||Alain finds a kind of dualism in Pascal, no meeting of object and idea.|| ₁ This is the travers of Alain. He doesn’t see the harmony of mind with its ground in objects. ₁ Shortcoming.

  4 p 162

  ||One can aid others only through self-government, and only so.|| Quaker?

  1:6 George Santayana’s Marginalia

  Alain [E. A. Chartier] Le Citoyen contre les pouvoirs Paris: 1926. Waterloo. No marginalia.

  Alain [E. A. Chartier] Les Idées et les âges Paris: 1927. Volume II. Waterloo. Two marginalia.

  [Two surviving marginalia; others were erased.] 1 p 216 marked

  ||Liberty is hidden|| in the center of obedience, governing the inferior order instead of troubling it.

  

[Santayana agreed with that in Dominations and Powers (written over a

period of forty years).]

  Alain [E. A. Chartier] Propos de politique Paris: 1934 7th edition). Waterloo. Forty-three marginalia.

  (

  

[Virtually all Santayana’s comments on Alain’s politics underline his

extreme conservatism of the 1930s and duplicate views found in his letters

of the period.]

  1 pp 12–13

  ||Strong government displeases; weak but sufficient government pleases the citizen.|| Bad government the only salvation.

  2 p 14

  ||Alain’s citizen who wants few controls, but limited, weak government.|| This citizen is a ready-made unit, with ready-made interests.

  Are they “necessary”?

  3 p 115

  ||Alain writes about the nature of tyranny, then turns to the Dreyfus affair:||

  

Those who tyrannized over Dreyfus showed an impudent scorn for the judgment of

the majority.

  N.B. Paradise of anarchy

  4 p 128 ₁

  ||Alain debates Right versus Left with respect to Pilate, and to Dreyfus, using the phrase,|| héros de l’intelligence.

  Alain thinks only the Left can breathe the air of truth because he has never conceived any but common pleasures.

  George Santayana’s Marginalia 1:7 [Opposite “héros de l’intelligence”:]

  You confuse disillusion with disloyalty. The truth will never give you a desire: how then should it take away your loy- alty? It would be too cynical to say that the truth discour- aged all pursuit of the good. ₁ The marginalia on pages 115 and 128 are two of only three references to the

  

Dreyfus affair known to me in all Santayana’s writings. (See also marginalia

in Bergson, Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion, 36 p 75.) 5 p 131

  [On Comte’s idea of order in society:]

  Sound positivism: but look out for the sensualism that will slip in.

  6 p 134 [Concerning Rodin’s bronze, “The Thinker”:]

  ||Erase the inscription Thinker, write in Slave, and no one would be sur- prised.|| It is the slave who thinks, and the master who plays.

  This is plain falsehood: but you mean that the true thinker respects matter and art, and speaks by their leave.

  7 p 134 Thought awakens brighter from a hard bed.

  This is eloquent: but consider the artisan philosophers Socrates, Spinoza, and then the aristocrats Plato, Buddha, Descartes. More soundness in the humble, but no more thought.

  8 p 207, underlined [Alain quotes Stendhal:] ₁

  “La nation s’enivre de gloire; adieu la liberté!” What couldn’t a Parisian do under Napoleon (I or III)? ₁ The nation is drunk on glory; farewell liberty!

  9 p 252

The people is king; the general will is the law; and the general law is infallible,

because it implies that what is imposed on one is imposed on all […] but the gen-

eral will expresses itself in all justice in the moment of the vote.

  The ideal would be a daily vote in the agora by acclamation.

  10 p 254 [On the absence of radicals in Europe:]

  […] they are scorned, but they supply to politics a necessary ballast. A radical is one

  

who is highly sceptical, he believes in nothing, and he is certain that no matter how

agreeable a belief may be, it involves complete injustice and all possible evil.

  Quote. Paradise of anarchy.

  1:8 George Santayana’s Marginalia 11 p 290

  ||Alain would have rustics in wooden shoes to supervise the work of gov- ernment agents.|| This idea is fantastic: a chorus of censors instead of a pack of agents and arrivistes.

  12 p 339 In brief, the State is not a mystical being; its core is earth and rock.

  Yes: this is half the truth. There is moral unity to be con- sidered also. Alain [E. A. Chartier] Propos de littérature Paris: 1934. Waterloo. Twenty marginalia.

  1 p 31

  ||How great writers use metaphor. The purpose of comparison is to rule our thoughts, to cause them to march, in some fashion, in step with the world.|| There is relief—not comic relief, but relief in the indifference and hugeness of the background tragedy here: the march of things beyond.

  2 p 167 [Of La Fontaine’s vanity:] The master is too fond of himself.

  Thought must know its vanity, in order to be just and free.

  3 p 200 [About Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme : ]

  ||Alain says that Stendhal is|| a republican of the most dangerous species. But

  observe the misery; he doesn’t please the republicans at all? Whom then? ₁ Il n’aime pas la beaute, ni physique ni morale. He’s a cad. ₁ He doesn’t love beauty, neither physical nor moral.

  4 p 254 Proust’s death deprived us of two or three unique volumes.

  Why print this obituary error?

  5 p 256

  ||All men are capable of monstrosity, depending on the occasion and leadership.|| This is a question of degree. All monstrosities are not equally present or potential in everybody: but circum- stances develop them. There are physically effeminate men;

  George Santayana’s Marginalia 1:9

  there are masculine men fond of boys. Question of early fix- ture, taste, opportunity, contagion, etc.

  [This is one of Santayana’s rare comments about homosexuality.] 6 p 298

  ||In Tolstoi’s Anna Karenina, Alain sees love depicted as romantic passion, a terrifying natural force, as in The Odyssey.|| Penetrating analysis

  [Ironic underlining?]

  Alain [E. A. Chartier] Histoire de mes pensées Paris: 1936 (8th edition). Waterloo. Thirty-seven marginalia.

  1 p 14

  ||Alain describes how his mind works.|| Self-indulgence in accepting intuitions as decisions.

  2 pp 79–80, marked [Alain on his own literary style:]

  

I believed thus that I was entering into the great family of writers who really owe

their success to a mixture of genres, to a certain refusal to place on one side boring

and difficult ideas, and on the other, easy gossip.

  

[The mark is significant for Santayana’s own conception of literary style.]

3 p 98

  ||Alain cannot prevent himself from hunting out the most varied occasions on which to say something.|| Alas!

  4 p 109, marked [About attempts to describe the world:] […] cette transparence du monde qui aussitôt nous fait libres et heureux.

  C’est pourtant un monde sans espérance, c’est un monde qu’on ne peut ₁ pas prier.

  

[Although Santayana only marked this lovely passage, it precisely reflects

his own despairing serenity.] ₁ That transparency of the world which at once makes us free and happy. Moreover it is a world without hope, a world that one cannot pray for.

  5 pp 132–33

  ||There is a contradiction in Kant’s account of what the mind is and how it functions.|| Yes: but do you understand what you are saying?

  1:10 George Santayana’s Marginalia 6 p 135, underlined

In its development, Marxism has produced neither a doctrine of liberty, nor a doc-

trine of Humanity, nor a doctrine of war.

  “Marx is a naturalist: are you? That capital H is suspicious.”

  7 p 219, marked

  ||Prose-poetry, and the relationship between words and art. Idea matters in a poem,|| but the art of speaking and writing is always dominated by the law of

  

improvisation, which does not let us judge that which is already in place; thus it is

we speak. The signs the body makes do not exist for us, but for those to whom we

speak. One must express before one knows what one expresses […].

  8 p 224 [Alain quotes Comte:]

  

“In reproaching love for being blind, often we forget that hatred is better and in an

often disastrous degree.” ₁ Cf. King Edward and Mrs. Simpson ₁ Edward VIII, who renounced the British throne to marry the divorced American commoner, Mrs. Simpson, in 1936.

  9 p 252

  ||Alain translates Hegel’s term, “Geist” as “l’esprit de la terre.”|| ₁ Erdgeist is good for Hegel’s Geist. ₁ “Erdgeist” or earth-spirit, occurs in Goethe’s Faust.

  10 p 255

  ||The conclusion of his chapter on Descartes, in which Alain writes of the relationship between skepticism and belief.|| By doubting all you can entertain all.

  11 p 256 [Santayana’s note at the very end of the chapter on Descartes.] ₁ End of R. of T.

  Above belief, is thought Beyond truth is essence. Nearer than present passing events and stronger purer

  ^ ^ ^ ^

  than passions is the spirit that endures them. observes and survives perhaps survives them. ₁ Realm of Truth.

  12 p 275, top [In Alain’s chapter “Sentiments”:]

  The love of truth is involved in all the passions and is so much of each as settles the mind. Alain [E. A. Chartier] Les Dieux Paris: 1934. Waterloo. Thirty-three marginalia.

  1 p l0, underlined

  La vérité […] nous trompe sur nous-mêmes; ¹ […]. i.e. in normal thinking we do not realize the medium. ₁ The truth deceives us in ourselves.

  2 p 45

  ||Memory of infancy disappears.|| re memory: i.e. the past has no interest in itself. It is used up in producing present assurance.

  3 p 47, underlined

[Only one example of Santayana’s constant insistence on precision in

diction.]

  ||Concerning “recovering” the past. One must invent a dialectic of child- hood, otherwise called the steps of forgetfulness,|| de l’oubli, qui est la sub- stance des rêves, ¹ […].

  [At “substance”:]

  differentia Why not take pains to say what you mean? ₁ … forgetfulness, which is the substance of dreams.

  4 p 79

  ||Alain discusses perception.|| Has he read Scep. and An. F.? ¹ ₁ Scepticism and Animal Faith.

  5 p 86 [In section on “Work”:] He who fails to bite on the world ignores the world.

  Work may mean material process, derivation of one event materially from another. In that case, work = dynamic real- ity. Die Wirklichkeit = das Wirken. ¹ ₁ Reality = activity.

  6 p 116

The occult, that friend of religions, never makes an appearance. […] One may fully

understand that children at play never have visions.

  The interior disposition in mystics is the reality and visions of little moment.

  

[Santayana was deeply interested in the “interior disposition” of mystics;

see his marginalia to Aphorismes de Saint Jean de la Croix, among several

George Santayana’s Marginalia 1:11

  1:12 George Santayana’s Marginalia 7 p 124

  ||Motors run, men make motors; we must return to the mark of the human upon the machine.|| There is nothing of the occult in these matters. It all comes ₁

  

back to a circle of works, according to the law of equivalence, and again to its fuites

always explicable according to changes in adjacent conditions.