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

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We do not know how long Westenholz stayed at Harvard, nor whether he ever graduated. But after he left Cambridge, Santayana visited him three times in Hamburg, where he met his invalid mother and his older sister Mathilde; the two friends also met in London, Amsterdam and Brussels, but never in Italy, despite Santayana’s numerous attempts to lure Westenholz to a country «where we should have found so many themes for enthusiastic discussion.»²⁹

Santayana considered Westenholz one of the three best educated persons he had known,³⁰ none of whom, as he remarks, had ever gone to school. He can best be described as a Privatgelehrter (private scholar) who wrote and translated poetry (notably Santayana’s sonnets) and, who, like Loeser, was an avid collector.³¹ The admiration and affection Santayana expresses towards his German friend in Persons and Places are fully corroborated by the newly found letters, amply confirming the statement with which Santayana begins the section dedicated to this relationship: «Westenholz was one of my truest friends. Personal affection and intellectual sympathies were better balanced and fused between him and me than between me and any other person.»³² In passing, they provide a stinging rebuttal to Bertrand Russell’s impression that Santayana was «a cold fish».³³ The tone of Santayana’s letters is uniformly affectionate, sometimes confessional, with frequent and delightful humorous touches. Santayana’s concern for the Baron’s mental condition is a recurring theme, which he addresses with profound empathy and admirable tact. The topics range freely from personal, occasionally intimate, matters to extensive and always lively discussions of philosophy, religion, culture, politics and literature. This is one of those cases where one can only regret not having at one’s disposal the letters that make up the other half of the correspondence.