It is one of the ‘painful mysteries’ of history that all languages progress from being very particular to being very general. In the first stage they are bursting with meaning, but very cryptic because they are not general enough to show the common element in different things: e.g. you can talk (and therefore think) about all the different kinds of trees but not about Trees. In fact you can’t really reason at all. In their final stage they are admirably clear but are so far away from real things that they really say nothing. As we learn to talk we forget what we have to say. Humanity, from this point of view, is rather like a man coming gradually awake and trying to describe his dreams: as soon as his mind is sufficiently awake for clear description, the thing which was to be described is gone. You see the origin of journalese and of the style in which you write army letters.
Religion and poetry are about the only languages in modern Europe—if you can regard them as ‘languages’ which still have traces of the dream in them, still having something to say. Compare ‘Our Father which art in Heaven’ with ‘The supreme being transcends space and time’. The first goes to pieces if you begin to apply the literal meaning to it. How can anything but a sexual animal really be a father? How can it be in the sky? The second falls into no such traps. On the other hand the first really means something, really represents a concrete experience in the minds of those who use it: the second is mere dexterous playing with counters, and once a man has learned the rules he can go on that way for two volumes without really using the words to refer to any concrete fact at all. But perhaps I have let the subject run away with me. Your point about children always finding their nurses language the easiest is, I take it, a complete answer to your author on that score.
I suppose Minto has already told you of the outrage in the topwood—the two new Scotch firs planted nearest the lane both stolen, and the rascals have neatly levelled in the holes where they were. Clearly to plant two saplings so eminently suitable for Christmas trees so near the road at that time of the year was asking for trouble. But one somehow does not (or did not) think of trees as things in danger of theft. You who have not put your sweat into the actual planting of them can hardly imagine my fury: though there is a funny side to it. I smile when I remember myself moving along towards the top gate—then pausing to contemplate my latest achievement—then thinking I was looking in the wrong place—then wondering if I was bewitched—finally the very gradual dawn of the truth. We must really get on with some wiring as soon as possible.
I suppose you heard that Mrs. Kreyer
(#ulink_d6891466-82ec-5dd1-8fbe-44ce78129867) has now planted a few shrubs on our side of the frontier? And further—most exasperating of all—during the Christmas holiday I hardly ever went in or out by our stile on that side without meeting one or both of her whelps in the very article of trespass, and acknowledging the situation no more than to throw me a patronising ‘good afternoon’. What should one do at such a rencontre?
But perhaps the offence itself hardly annoys me more than F.K.’s reaction which consists in chuckling and saying, ‘Ah you Irish! I love to listen to dear Mrs. Moore—wouldn’t be happy without a grievance. Its really most remarkable’. He is, I think, in every mental characteristic (not moral, for of course he is no pessimist) the most complete P’daita that ever walked: in some respects he surpasses his original. What a magnificent conversation they could have had, say, in politics!
I was out with him this afternoon and he was quite grieved to hear your unfavourable verdict on Tristram Shandy
(#ulink_e0cbf955-7172-5ced-a1ab-b41b700ba617) re-read. I certainly did not get very far with my re-reading of it, but that was due to other causes. I still have hopes that I may enjoy it again in toto; and I rather fancy that a long immersion in English Literature has made me more tolerant of that kind of humour by now than you. Oddly enough Barfield has just made your experiment with exactly your result: he agrees with you in excepting Uncle Toby, but thinks most of the book, specially the Wadman parts, revolting.
And talking of the revolting, you will hardly believe the following. The junior parrot (you remember) has just got engaged. As soon as the news was out, his friends and owners, in other words the rest of the junto, all made a raid on his rooms—placed copies of ‘Married Love’ and ‘Lasting Passion’ under every cushion—put a large nude india rubber doll in his bed—plastered his walls with lewd good wishes—finished his whisky and beer—and retired. Such is his senility that it was left to him to spread this story as an excellent joke with his own mouth. I should like to be able to argue ‘If the fellows of a college behave like this, how much more will the rest of the world’, but I’m afraid things are so topsy-turvey—or ‘arsie-versy’ as the Elizabethans say—that it is the other way round, and for sheer blockheaded vulgarity our common room is just the place to look. Would a jeu d’esprit of this sort be tolerated in barracks?
The reservoir to the West of thee top wood is finished. It has been covered with earth so that the total effect is now that of a big plateau jutting out from the hillside, at present of brown mud, but soon, I hope, of smooth bright grass; and there is a little tile-roofed building on it-I suppose protecting a man hole into the interior. The silhouette which I see every evening against the sunset is therefore roughly as drawn, and on the whole I think it is agreeable. It often gives me an odd sensation as I progress homewards to tea along the cliff edge to look at this very distinctive shape in all its novelty and to reflect that, if God pleases, it will someday be as immemorially familiar to you and me as the contour of the Cave Hill. On such occasions you must picture me equipped with both axe and spade for the standard public work at present is ‘the extraction of roots’—I admit I have been making slow progress, but that is not because the work is turning out impracticable, but because of many interruptions.
Thus every Monday there is F.K. Last Saturday (by the way this is now Jan 24th—in fact the following Sunday) I was out for a walk with Lings. I have also missed some afternoons when the state of my health would not support the exertion. But I have little doubt that we shall have every single elder out of it before we have done. Another of my interruptions was a miniature walking tour with Barfield and Harwood just before term—so miniature indeed that it should be called a strolling tour: we just dithered along to Abingdon one day, and then Harwood and I alone (Barfield having had to leave us by bus) sauntered to Oxford all the way by river bank. The jaunt is worth mentioning because you and I have hitherto entirely underrated Abingdon. Their [sic] is a church standing in a quadrangle of almshouses right down on one of those little fresh water wharves on the river wh. is excellent. Also, on our saunter back to Oxford, we saw so many ‘abandoned lashers’ and silver falls that a man who followed the same route in July could ‘make one long bathing of a summer day’
(#ulink_daa1b9bd-3973-504b-bfd3-32cedf45f24f) And talking about Wordsworth, pray Sir, did you ever read the White Doe of Rylstone?
(#ulink_75bbb945-02f9-5e5f-a7c3-beeb14ba2f5c) I read the first canto last night and recommend it strongly.
I don’t remember what I said about Law’s Serious Call. It is not a book which I would advise anyone to read with great urgency. There is a severity, even a grimness about it which strikes me as excessive. I must also go far to revise the favourable account I gave of The Appeal.
(#ulink_de74d99e-e925-5ff9-82a8-157bd1e57052) It did not fulfill the promise of its first passages. An XVIIIth century critic would have complained that it was ‘infected with Enthusiasm’, and would have been right in this sense that the ideas—very valuable ones—which it contains are held by the author with a rather feverish insistence to the exclusion of many other sides of religion. There is a great deal of repetition, and neither the good will which the author won from me at the outset, nor the charm of a delightful edition, nor the literary beauty of many passages (for Law can be really eloquent) prevented me from feeling in the end a sort of discomfort and desire for escape into the open air-as if I had been in a small hot room with a man of genius and piety who was not absolutely sane. It is the same quality that moved Johnson to say of Boehme—Law’s master in these later books—‘If Jacob had seen the unutterable, Jacob should not have tried to utter it’.
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Most of my recent reading, before term, has been of rather a simple and boyish kind. I re-read The People of the Mist-a tip-top yarn of the sort. If someone would start re-issuing all Rider Haggard at 1/-a volume I would get them all, as a permanent fall-back for purely recreational reading. Then I read The Wood Beyond the World-with some regret that this leaves me no more Wm Morris prose romances to read (except Child Christopher
(#ulink_dd95a53a-54a0-5267-bfe9-7c34f43027aa) wh. is an adaptation of a mediaeval poem already known to me and therefore hardly counts). I wish he had written a hundred of them! I should like to have the knowledge of a new romance always waiting for me the next time I am sick or sorry and want a real treat.
Then I read Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake, largely for a naif reason—that I had been wondering all my life who Hereward was and had a special reason in my work for wanting to know. The distinguishing feature of Kingsley’s novel is that the ‘manners and sentiments’ are nowhere near so glaringly anachronistic as they are in most novels of the kind—even in Scott whenever he goes further back than the ’45. It has, however, the opposite fault of sticking too close to history and therefore giving us (what is unpardonable in a tale of adventure) an unhappy ending. The hero betrays the heroine, deserts his followers, and dies miserably. You would want to vet it as you vetted the Life and Death of Jason,
(#ulink_46d59681-21f7-571d-864f-f5080f38aa93) and for the same reason.
While at Cambridge (staying, as I foretold you in a posh hotel, at the expense of the Board. Four of us had to hold an examiners meeting one evening, and accordingly, just like the heroes of a romance, called for fire, lights, and a bottle of claret in a private room. All that was Jacking was to have prefaced the order by tweaking the landlord’s nose with a ‘Hark’ee, rascal!’ This was in the University Arms which perhaps you know)-while in Cambridge or rather on my long, slow, solitary, first class journey there and back through fields white with frost—I read Pater’s Marius the Epicurean. This is the best specimen extant of the Epicurean-aesthetic business: which one wrongs by reading it in its inferior practitioners such as George Moore and Oscar Wilde. As you probably know it is a novel—or, since the story is so slight, a faintly narrative causerie-laid in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. The interesting thing is, that being a really consistent aesthete, he has to bring in the early Christians favourably because the flavour of the early Church-the new music, the humility, the chastity, the sense of order and quiet decorum—appeal to him aesthetically. It is doubtful if he sees that he can only have it in by blowing to bits the whole Epicurean basis of his outlook—so that aestheticism, honestly followed, refutes itself by leading him to something that will put aestheticism in its place—and Pater’s position is therefore, in the long run, all nonsense. But it is [a] very beautiful book—much enriched by a full prose translation of the Cupid and Psyche story from Apuleius who first told it and who is one of the minor characters. I should try it if it is in your library. Gad!—how it would have bowled one over if one had read it at eighteen. One would be only just beginning to recover now.
But all these books fade into insignificance beside my really great discovery, Barbour’s Bruce
(#ulink_c1ab3a31-eeb0-5f70-a4ab-0dbb4fe2ba7c) (XlVth century). This is ‘The’ modern epic: all that Scott’s poems try to recover: chivalrous sentiment, pawky humour, smell of heather, and all the rest of it—only all real, all done while that world was still there, not a ‘revival’. I am afraid the language is just beyond that thin unmistakable line which divides the readable from the unreadable for those who haven’t learned ‘Middle English’ as a school language. A very little ‘modernising’ would make it alright. I wonder could I persuade Dents to let me modernise it for an Everyman. You would think Scotch patriotism would give it a sale: till quite modern times every ‘cottar’ had a copy of it. (Do Scotch patriots buy books?). It contains, among other things, an account of Bruce landing at Rathlin which suggests that the bathing would not be good there. There seems to be some terrific current
‘Like the straight of Morrak in Spaine’
–if that conveys anything to you, which it doesn’t to me. (From Rathlin, Bruce went on to Carrick Fergus).
If your idea of reading Descartes holds, begin with the Discourse on Method.
(#ulink_ebf2c461-2d88-51b5-b855-a94998a98a46) This is in biographical form and is on the border-land between philosophy proper and what might be called the ‘history of intellectual manners’. But I’m not at all sure that a man so steeped in the XVIIth century as you would not find his natural starting point in Boethius-I suppose ‘Boece’ is as common in France at that time as he was in England? As he was translated about once a century into every civilised language, you would have no difficulty in finding a well flavoured version. In England he had the remarkable adventure of being rendered successively by K. Alfred, Chaucer, and Q. Elizabeth.
As to Thomas’ rap over the knuckles about going out during the hymn—my case is this. Complete neglect of communicating is not tolerated by any Church nor practised by me. But is it within his rights to make it impossible for you to hear a sermon without communicating? Has anyone laid down the exact proportion of the intellectual and ritual elements—roughly symbolised by sermons and sacraments—which is necessary to membership of the Church of England. That is my ‘case’ as a controversialist: but I bear no malice.
By the bye, what are your views, now, on the question of sacraments? To me that is the most puzzling side of the whole thing. I need hardly say I feel none of the materialistic difficulties: but I feel strongly just the opposite ones—i.e. I see (or think I see) so well a sense in which all wine is the blood of God—or all matter, even, the body of God, that I stumble at the apparently special sense in which this is claimed for the Host when consecrated. George Macdonald observes that the good man should aim at reaching the state of mind in which all meals are sacraments. Now that is the sort of thing I can understand: but I find no connection between it and the explicit ‘sacrament’ proprement dit. The Presbyterian method of sitting at tables munching actual slices of bread is clearly absurd under ordinary conditions: but one can conceive a state of society in which a real meal might be shared by a congregation in such a way as to be a sacrament without ceasing to be also their actual dinner for that day. Possibly this was so in the very early Church. Don’t bother about this if you are not inclined to discuss the question. I trotted it out because it seemed artificial to mention it at all without saying what I was thinking.
How ones range of interests grows! Do you find a sort of double process going on with relation to books—that while the number of subjects one wants to read is increasing, the number of books on each which you find worth reading steadily decreases. Already in your own corner of French history you have reached the point at which you know that most of the books published will be merely re-hashes, but in revenge you are reading Vaughan and thinking of reading Taylor. Ten years ago you would have read eight books on your period (getting only what the one book behind those eight would have given you) and left Vaughan and Taylor out of account. In the same way, on the subject of sacraments, a few years ago I should not have wanted any information, but if I had, shd. have read book after book about it. Now—one knows [in] advance that here in Oxford there are probably 4000 books dealing exclusively with that subject, and that at least 3990 of them would advance your understanding of it precisely nothing. Once the world was full of books that seemed boring because they gave answers to questions one hadn’t asked: every day I find one of these boring books to be really boring for the opposite reason—for failing to answer some question I have asked. Even in things like Anglo Saxon Grammar! ‘Why Sir, the quantity to be known is larger than I supposed; but the quantity of knowledge is less than I had conceived possible.’
Your Cathedral sounds mildly good-architecturally. Now that Maureen is away my week is quite differently arranged in order to give Minto as few solitary nights as possible. I lie here on Sunday and Wednesday: Maureen on Friday and Saturday. I still have the schoolboy’s pleasure in any change of routine and particularly relish the division of my two out nights. I suppose I told you that we have a good maid who really cooks? She doesn’t cook as well as Minto, but that is a bagatelle. What is more serious is the steady reduction in the quantity of meals which she seems to be effecting. If it goes on at the present rate, when you come back it will be a case of ‘I suppose there’s some sort of pot-house in this village where a man could get a biscuit, huh?’
(#ulink_a276a783-c5a2-5452-9ebf-0b9732b1260a) (This had better not be mentioned in your next letter to Minto. I daresay we shall pull through). I have fewer tutorials this term—the Junto is quiet—my lecture is well attended—and all shapes for a much pleasanter term than usual: the second of the nine, as it is pleasing to note. Why don’t you write that paper on Thomas Browne yourself? I’ve no time for it.
Yours
Jack.
P.S. Minto tells me to tell you I like Troddles the puppy because she says if I don’t mention him you’ll think I don’t like him but I say that is not the masculine way of reading letters nor of writing them but she is not quite convinced so here goes;-I like Troddles. So does Papworth. Cham can’t abide him and cuffs him whenever they meet.
Jack was very afraid that Warnie, who had been in Shanghai since 17 November 1931, was in danger from a Japanese attack on the Chinese part of that city. On 18 September 1931, in violation of its treaty obligations, Japan occupied Manchuria. On 21 September China appealed to the Council of the League of Nations, and on 30 September the Counciladopted unanimously a resolution taking note of the Japanese representative’s statement that his Government would continue as rapidly as possible the withdrawal of its troops.
The Japanese Government failed to carry out the assurances given the Council, but adopted the attitude that a preliminary agreement, binding China to recognize Japan’s treaty rights in Manchuria, was an essential element of security and must be a condition precedent to evacuation. After being rebuffed by the League of Nations, Japan announced its withdrawal from the League to take effect in 1935. To consolidate its gains, Japan landed troops in Shanghai on 28 January 1932 to quell an effective Chinese boycott of Japanese goods. By 5 February the whole of the three provinces of Manchuria were occupied. China was unable to resist the superior Japanese forces and in May 1933 it recognized the Japanese conquest by signing a truce.
Writing about it later, Warnie said the Army Service Corps was ‘not involved, but there was thought to be a grave risk that the Japanese, in an endeavour to outflank the Chinese, might violate the International Settlement. Consequently the Settlement garrison had been put on an active service basis, with manned trenches, strong points etc, round our perimeter’.
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TO HIS BROTHER:
Feb 15th 1932
The Kilns
My dear Warnie–
This will be a shortish letter, partly because I am still a convalescent from flu—this being not my first day but my first afternoon up-partly because we don’t really care to bank on the security of any letter reaching you in the present state of Shanghai.
Anxiety is of all troubles the one that lends itself least to description. Of course we have been and are infernally bothered about you—probably not more than you have been bothered about yourself! I suppose that about as often as I have stopped myself from repeating the infuriating question ‘Why was he such a fool’ etc, you have abstained from the parallel ‘Why was I such a fool as ever to come out here’. I will refrain from asking you any particular questions because I remember from war experiences that questions from home are always based on a misunderstanding of the whole situation.
It will be more useful as a guide to your reply to tell you that we have (from the Times) a map of Shanghai large enough to mark Gt. Western Road, so we should be able to follow your news in some detail. As for the printed news, it is plainly nonsense: the almost daily story being that fierce fighting raged all day in Chapei and the Japanese had one man killed and three wounded. In other parts of the paper the ‘fierce fighting’, I admit, usually turns out to be a heavy Japanese barrage replied to by two trench mortars. You will see at any rate that it is impossible from here to form any idea of the only aspect of the thing that concerns me: viz: the actual and probable distance between the A.P.B. and the firing. It is true that I have to my hand the axiom that the distance will be as great as the A.P.B. has been able to contrive-but that carries me only a very little way. The result is that my fancy plays me every kind of trick. At one time I feel as if the danger was very slight and begin reckoning when your first account of the troubles will reach us: at another I am—exceedingly depressed. All the news is of the sort that one re-interprets over and over again with new results in each new mood. A beastly state of affairs.
The last letter we had from you was the one you wrote to Minto immediately after your flu’. I had written to you a few days before that arrived. Since then I don’t know that much to record has happened. I was going on steadily with the ‘extraction of roots’ in the wood: but you’d hardly believe how the doubt about your situation takes the relish out of public works.
My term was continuing in a pretty good course. Segar
(#ulink_6c85a137-8245-5b40-89f9-39285308a8a4) has been specially attentive in inquiries about you and in his characteristic half comical attempts to put the situation in as favourable a light as possible. I must say I am a little surprised that he is the only person in College who has done so.
I have now been in my room for precisely a week. It has been an ideal illness. My little east room, as you know, gives one two views-one over to Philips an t’other up to the top wood—and the grate does not smoke. Most of the week there has been snow falling during some part of the day—wh. is just the finishing touch to a comfortable day’s reading in bed. I have re-read three Scotts. 1. The Monastery
