'The Letters of George Santayana'

To Robert Traill Spence Lowell Jr.
28 January 1948 Rome, Italy (MS: Houghton)

Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome, Jan. 28, 1948

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The bombing for the sake of "frightfulness" (an imitation of the Germans) and the insolent demand for unconditional surrender, and the blind policy with Russia were all blunders as well as wrongs, and have produced a stale-mate where materially there was a clear victory. If you had been a Catholic at that time your confesser would nevertheless have advised you to submit to the regulations of the established government of your country; but your refusal to do so marked the idealistic absolutism of the Protestant conscience which does not respect matter as much as the Church does, as I think, wisely. I had made inquiries about you in various quarters, and had heard that you had been in a "working camp" for "conscientious objectors", but not that you had been in prison or scrubbing floors; also that you had been to College at Kenyon, but not that you had been first for a year and a half at Harvard. Both these points are important in explaining what has puzzled me a little in your poems, a certain animosity (against King's Chapel, for instance). You have not merely found these things irrational (as I did) but you have been made to suffer by them, as I never did, because they didn't belong to me nor I really to them. You^r^ position, if not your independence, was not like mine. You were more deeply involved, and more rebellious by nature; for few things seem to me worth rebelling against. I say, "Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda e passa" The meanness of that additional day in your sentence shows how prepotent authorities have become even in America, and public opinion how intolerant. In my youth New England was horrified at anything "emancipated" in fact, but everybody was "liberal" in theory. But in general I feel that America has grown up and improved immensely in these last fifty years and deserves the leadership it has acquired in material things (which require human virtue to manage them): insight will come later.

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