Читать книгу Recently Discovered Letters of George Santayana. Cartas recién descubiertas de George Santayana онлайн

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The editors of the critical edition of the Letters, however, did mention that none of Santayana’s letters to von Westenholz had been located, just as they comment on the relative scarcity of letters (only six) to John Francis Stanley («Frank»), the second Earl Russell, given the significance of this relationship to Santayana⁵. In retrospect, therefore, the absence of any letters addressed to Charles Loeser and Baron Albert von Westenholz in the critical edition points unequivocally to the possibility that such letters could exist somewhere. These are two persons to whom Santayana devoted several pages in his autobiography, leaving no doubt as to how much they had meant to him. Let us begin with Charles Loeser.

At the beginning of chapter XV («College Friends») of Persons and Places, Santayana recounts his first meeting with Loeser, at Harvard, in a passage that deserves to be quoted in full:

First in time, and very important, was my friendship with Charles Loeser. I came upon him by accident in another man’s room, and he immediately took me into his own, which was next door, to show me his books and pictures. Pictures and books! That strikes the keynote to our companionship. At once I found that he spoke French well, and German presumably better, since if hurt he would swear in German. He had been at a good international school in Switzerland. He at once told me that he was a Jew, a rare and blessed frankness that cleared away a thousand pitfalls and insincerities. What a privilege there is in that distinction and in that misfortune! If the Jews were not worldly it would raise them above the world; but most of them squirm and fawn and wish to pass for ordinary Christians or ordinary atheists. Not so Loeser: he had no ambition to manage things for other people, or to worm himself into fashionable society. His father was the proprietor of a vast «dry-goods store» in Brooklyn, and rich—how rich I never knew, but rich enough and generous enough for his son always to have plenty of money and not to think of a profitable profession. Another blessed simplification, rarely avowed in America. There was a commercial presumption that man is useless unless he makes money, and no vocation, only bad health, could excuse the son of a millionaire for not at least pretending to have an office or a studio. Loeser seemed unaware of this social duty. He showed me the nice books and pictures that he had already collected—the beginnings of that passion for possessing and even stroking objets-d’art that made the most unclouded joy of his life. Here was fresh subject-matter and fresh information for my starved aestheticism—starved sensuously and not supported by much reading: for this was in my Freshman year, before my first return to Europe.⁶