The Middle Span Vol Ii - Persons And Places

The MIDDLE SPAN VOL. II Persons ana Places BY GEORGE SANTAYANA NEW YORK CHARLBS SCRIBNERS SONS COPYRIGHT, 1945, BY CHARLES SCKIBNERS SONS Alt riffkfs reserved. A r o part of this book wsj be reproduced in any form without ike permission of Charles Scribmrs Sons THIS BOOK IS MANUFACTURED UNDER WARTIME CONDITIONS IN CONFORMITY WITH ALL GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS CONTROLLING THE USE OF PAPER AND OTHER MATERIALS GEORGE SANTAYANA CONTENTS CHAPTER L Germany i II. London 17 III. Russell 44 IV. Changes in Avila 76 V. Younger Harvard Friends 98 VI. Boston Society 1 1 2 VII. Americans in Europe 231 VIII. Official Career at Harvard 152 Index 183 Km 2 S-i THE MIDDLE SPAN CHAPTER I GERMANY i 4HE Impulse that sent me to study in Germany I America something for which America Is to be yet the failure of that adventure in my was with its origin. I was too much enveloped in my and afterwards in my English associations to lose myself in German scene, to leam German properly, and to tarn a German spiritual stream into my private channel. In nay Ger many there was, and there still is, too much of rue and too little of Germany. Some recommendation that I have forgotten led me in the early autumn of 1886 to Gottingen, with the idea of learning a little more German than the very little that I knew. I lived in a board ing-house kept by Frau Pastorin Schlote, whose elderly daughter not the Irma of The Last Puritan who is imaginary knew English and gave the foreign boarders lessons in German. I learned enough to understand lectures and formal conversation from the first but there was no one with whom I could begin to talk, and with my dislike of drudgery, I turned rather to decipher ing for myself, with the help of agrammar and a dictionary, texts that were worth reading on their own account D mtsche Ljrife, Heine and WUhelm Meister. I made good progress of a sort, for my own ends, but without thoroughness and my tongue remained torpid and my inflections inaccurate. ef Sie sprechen sekr nett the superior housekeeper said one day when I excused myself, Me Endungen dber feUen Two or three months later in Berlin my landlady and her friends one day were discussing me, when her daughter observed that I was in my room and could hear them 2 THE MIDDLB SPAN the thin door. Der ja nichts, her mother cried and went on wondering at my solitary life, that I went out for a walk and all the of the day sat working In my room. I understood every word perfectly but in conversation 1 was there were no people with whom I cared to talk my punishment was that I never learned to speak the language. From Gottingen I went to Dresden where Herbert Lyman had invited me to join him, I ay invited because although I paid for my lodging, breakfast and midday dinner, he paid everything else for both of us, our way of living being entirely beyond the means of a student on half a Fellowship. We took a daily German lesson, and a daily walk and in the evening, or rather in the afternoonfor the performances began at five or half-past five oclock we went to the Royal Theatre, hearing an opera or a play on alternate nights. The play often was Shakespeare, in the excellent German version, I remember Julius Caesar particularly, a play that is not often done in English, I suppose because it is hardly a play for a star, like Hamlet or Othello but the dutiful German State Company performed it with zeal and good judg ment. We had an amplefeast of Wagner, with Gudehus and Maker old stand-bys but still adequate, singing and acting with a devout enthusiasm that was contagious. And after the theatre we had another treat that must not go unrecorded an enormous delicious sweet omelette or Pfcrnnkucken y hot and crisp at the edges in its great pewter platter, followed by bread and cheese and a flagon of beer...