LAST DITCH OF DEMOCRACY - Majority Rights

England were anything like as intelligent as Robert Grosseteste, it would
look as if the standards of English episcopacy have declined. I’ll say
DEclined since that date. Of course Bird wouldn’t be my only or even
chief correspondent, I am just taking the point most recently come up in
my personal business. Wars interrupt this sort of thing. They mostly
lower the level of livin’, of the good life. Now as far as I am concerned,
you have lost some of my contributions. I don’t say that matters much,
but the sum of such European contributions to the good life, or the life of
the American mind does matter. You got to lump ’em in with the
deterioration of some of the American human material. My edition of the
Great Learning is in Italian, not in American, as was my first edition.
And it has the Chinese text facin’ it. And I know a good deal more now
than when Glenn Hughes printed my first version in his University
books. And you haven’t got my translation of Pea’s novel Moscardino.
Carta da Visita is written in Italian. I believe something special was done
about Geo. Santayana’s manuscript or proofs of something or other. But
other voices are silent.
You say I also am losin’ something, I don’t deny it. I don’t hear from Mr.
Eliot or Mr. Cummings. If they write anything, we got to wait for it.
You’ve got to multiply that. After all immediate contacts probably count
less for a man of my age than for a young man. One understands ’em
more, but they probably incommode one less in one’s mental business.
Eighteen or however many years ago S. Putnam was askin’ me about
Italian writers, livin’ writers: and I knew considerably less. I finally got
round to mentioning [Morelli?] (I mean of writers not known like
Pirandello. And Basil Bunting). Wanted to translate Tozzi, but no
English or American publisher had sense to let him. I now see some sort
of clearance: clearin’ up in Italian style. Carlo Scarfoglio whose political
notes you sometimes hear on this radio, did a preface that pretty well
coincides with my views on writin’ (no collusion). Two men headin’
from different quarters, come to the same main conclusion. He startin’
with translatin’ Aeschylus, and doin’ it beautifully. Clear like a piece of
glass. And his version of the Hymn to Demeter, homeric Hymn to