April 8th 1932
My dear W–
I have your excellent letter of Feb. 14th. You are right in supposing that this Sino-Japanese war provides us at last with a political subject in which we are on the same side: but in suggesting that it is the law of chances which thus brings me into the line of archipigibotian orthodoxy, you are surely forgetting that, if that is true, you can claim no credit for predicting the fact, since if the phenomenon (my opinion) is purely irrational, there can be no rational prediction of it—you can foretell it only by luck. Indeed your hitting it would, by the rule of chances, be so unlikely, that it is clear there is no chance in the business at all. The truth being that you, having at last, and indeed by chance, found your own prejudices coincident with the dictates of justice and humanity—and feeling something unusual, not to say distressing, in this situation—you foresaw that this time I would be on the same side.
To be serious, my main feeling, and yours too, I expect, is an uneasy balance between indignation and the restraining knowledge that we English have of all people most deprived ourself, by our own imperial history, of the right to be indignant. But I don’t know why I have let the whole dam thing waste even this much of my letter.
I wonder can you imagine how reassuring your bit about Spenser is to me who spend my time trying to get unwilling hobble-de-hoys to read poetry at all? One begins to wonder whether literature is not, after all, a failure. Then comes your account of the Faerie Queene on your office table, and one remembers that all the professed ‘students of literature’ don’t matter a rap, and that the whole thing goes on, unconcerned by the fluctuations of the kind of ‘taste’ that gets itself printed, living from generation to generation in the minds of the few disinterested people who sit down alone and read what they like and find that it turns out to be just the things that every one has liked since they were written. I agree with all you say about it, except about the distinctions of character. The next time I dip in it I shall keep my weather eye on them. It would be quite in accord with all ones experience to find out one day that the usual critical view (i.e. that Spenser had no characters) was all nonsense.
I notice that great men are overshadowed by their own qualities: because Johnson talked so well, it gets about that his writings are poor: because Cowper is ‘homely’ it is assumed that he cannot be anything else. The doctrines of Crabbe’s unbroken gloom, of, Jane Austen’s pure comedy, of Tennyson’s ‘sweetness’ etc etc belong to the same illusion. So very likely it is the same with Spenser. By the way, I most fully agree with you about ‘the lips being invited to share the banquet’ in poetry, and always ‘mouth’ it while I read, though not in a way that would be audible to other people in the room. (Hence the excellent habit which I once formed, but have since lost, of not smoking while reading a poem). I look upon this ‘mouthing’ as an infallible mark of those who really like poetry. Depend upon it, the man who reads verses in any other way, is after ‘noble thoughts’ or ‘philosophy’ (in the revolting sense given to that word by Browning societies and Aunt Lily)
(#ulink_8674cdf9-3cb1-548b-bd76-a33a6b2ea42a) or social history, or something of the kind, not poetry.
To go back to Spenser—the battles are a bore. I thought I could trace a difference in that point between him and Tasso.
(#ulink_2f3a05fb-f18a-5998-a89a-26203a9e2bda) Tasso’s battles—specially the single combats-always sounded real to me, and I had the feeling that if one knew anything about sword-technique one would be able to follow them in detail. Talking of that, if we had money to spare on whims, I should like to have a fencing-master when you come home. Wouldn’t it be a very fine occupation on wet days for the two pigibudda to ‘take their exercise’ in the bam? It would also make many passages in literature, which at present are mere words, start into light. But now that I come to think of it, I suppose ‘singlestick’ is the exercise proper to our humble rank.
(#ulink_e835688f-89d9-5869-8485-73de2ece4cc4) (You know the hearty passages about it in books ‘Ralph made his stave ring and rebound again on the bald head of his opponent’). And singlestick would be intolerable-except the sort we used to play with copies of—was it the Spectator or the Law Journal Report?
The novel you mention—The Good Earth
(#ulink_b7bcc061-df19-5b0f-a605-fea1ac000610)-I think I saw reviewed, and will certainly read if it is in the Union. As for The Countryman (by the way my Malaprop friend was Robson not Robertson-Scott),
(#ulink_e78c8c17-efed-5da5-84b2-86cc77b88a22) I have not received [a] specimen copy, but I did happen to see a copy in the Barley Mow during the week end walk I recorded. I thought it a rather praiseworthy undertaking, but was rather disappointed at a later copy I saw on the spring walk last week (of which more anon) in which there was such an increase of advertisement that the text seemed in danger of vanishing altogether.
The whole puzzle about Christianity in non-European countries is very difficult. To the statement that only the riff-raff are converted, I suppose the enthusiastic missionary would reply that if you had lived under the Roman empire, at the period of the first conversions of all, you would have said exactly the same. (He could quote St Paul, [l] Cor. 1:26 ‘Not many clever people in the ordinary sense, nor many in important positions, nor many people of quality’). This is a very cold, uncomfortable reflection! I take it we could answer it by saying that, at all events, the same kind of riff-raff which now lives on the missions could not have been attracted by a poor and persecuted Church: so that that explanation is ruled out.
Of course one sees, from all history and from ones own circle, that the people who already have a high intellectual and moral tradition of their own, are, of all people, the least likely to embrace Christianity. Fancy converting a man like J. S. Mill! Or again, the really good Stoic emperors of Rome were the most anti-Christian. Even in the Gospels—does one suppose that the Pharisees, the ‘High Church party’ of Judaism, did not contain most of the refined, educated, enlightened population of Palestine—people, by ordinary standards very much nicer than the women of the town and little tax-farmers (that is modern English for ‘publicans and sinners’) who seem to have made up the background of Our Lord’s circle. Still, we would reply that some Pharisees (e.g. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus) did come in: and, on the other hand, none of the riff-raff came in for money, because there ‘was no money in the thing’.
So that for this absolute cleavage in the East (if it really is so absolute as you say) we still need an explanation. Sometimes, relying on his remark, ‘Other sheep I have that are not of this fold’
(#ulink_d968ec50-9877-5055-b293-04764623be7a) I have played with the idea that Christianity was never intended for Asia—even that Buddha is the form in which Christ appears to the Eastern mind. But I don’t think this will really work. When I have tried to rule out all my prejudices I still can’t help thinking that the Christian world is (partially) ‘saved’ in a sense in which the East is not. We may be hypocrites, but there is a sort of unashamed and reigning iniquity of temple prostitution and infanticide and torture and political corruption and obscene imagination in the East, which really does suggest that they are off the rails—that some necessary part of the human machine, restored to us, is still missing with them. (My friend’s story about the I.C.S.
(#ulink_0601fd61-c340-5e76-9794-1e2c3f0dccd3) regulation ‘No pornographic books or pictures shall be imported except for bona fide religious purposes’ is relevant here).
On the whole, my present conclusion is that the difficulty about the Oriental present is really the same as the difficulty about the years B.C. For some reason that we cannot find out they are still living in the B.C. period (as there are African tribes still living in the stone-age) and it is apparently not intended that they should yet emerge from it. I admit that I have myself fallen into an Orientalism, and am giving instead of an explanation, the true eastern platitude ‘God is great’. In fact, like Nettleship, ‘I don’t know, you know, I don’t know, you know.’ (Mind you, there is this to be said for my view, that you wd. hardly expect time to be quite as important to God as it is to us.)
Since last writing I have had my usual Easter walk. It was in every way an abnormal one. First of all, Harwood was to bring anew Anthro-posophical member (not v. happily phrased!) and I was bringing a new Christian one to balance him, in the person of my ex-pupil Griffiths. Then Harwood and his satellite ratted, and the walk finally consisted of Beckett,
(#ulink_e4be84b8-3c88-500a-bcde-d26e06e24a75) Barfield, Griffiths, and me. As Harwood never missed before, and Beckett seldom comes, and Griffiths was new, the atmosphere I usually look for on these jaunts was Jacking. At least that is how I explain a sort of disappointment I have been feeling ever since. Then, owing to some affairs of Barfield’s, we had to alter at the last minute our idea of going to Wales, and start (of all places!) from Eastbourne instead. All the same, I wd. not have you think it was a bad walk: it was rather like Hodge who, though nowhere in a competition of Johnsonian cats, was, you will remember, ‘a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.’
(#ulink_fc2067ae-1069-5fc2-a959-4570fc19da26)
The first day we made Lewes, walking over the bare chalky South Downs all day. The country, except for an occasional gleam of the distant sea—we were avoiding the coast for fear of hikers—is almost exactly the same as the Berkshire downs or the higher parts of Salisbury Plain. The descent into Lewes offered a view of the kind I had hitherto seen only on posters—rounded hill with woods on the top, and one side quarried into a chalk cliff: sticking up dark and heavy against this a little town climbing up to a central Norman castle. We had a very poor inn here, but I was fortunate in sharing a room with Griffiths who carried his asceticism so far as to fling off his eiderdown—greatly to my comfort.
Next day we had a delicious morning-just such a day as downs are made for, with endless round green slopes in the sunshine, crossed by cloud shadows. The landscape was less like the Plain now. The sides of the hill—we were on a ridgeway—were steep and wooded, giving rather the same effect as the narrower parts of Malvern hills beyond the Wych. We had a fine outlook over variegated blue country to the North Downs. After we had dropped into a village for lunch and climbed onto the ridge again for the afternoon, our troubles began.
The sun disappeared: an icy wind took us in the flank: and soon there came a torrent of the sort of rain that feels as if ones face were being tattooed and turns the mackintosh on the weather side into a sort of wet suit of tights. At the same time Griffiths began to show his teeth (as I learned afterwards) having engaged Barfield in a metaphysico-religious conversation of such appalling severity and egotism that it included the speaker’s life history and a statement that most of us were infallibly damned. As Beckett and I, half a mile ahead, looked back over that rain beaten ridgeway we could always see the figures in close discussion. Griffiths very tall, thin, high-shouldered, stickless, with enormous pack: arrayed in perfectly cylindrical knickerbockers, very tight in the crutch. Barfield, as you know, with that peculiarly blowsy air, and an ever more expressive droop and shuffle.
For two mortal hours we walked nearly blind in the rain, our shoes full of water, and finally limped into the ill omened village of Bramber. Here, as we crowded to the fire in our inn, I tried to make room for us by shoving back a little miniature billiard table which stood in our way. I was in that state of mind in which I discovered without the least surprise, a moment too late, that it was only a board supported on trestles. The trestles, of course, collapsed, and the board crashed to the ground. Slate broken right across. I haven’t had the bill yet, but I suppose it will equal the whole expences of the tour. Griffiths gave me a surprise equal to that which the Quakers gave Lamb in another inn
(#ulink_e3a2c3c4-782a-5497-a415-364fb11dbfa0) —indeed the two stories are closely parallel—by refusing to see that there was any claim against me at all for the damage.
From Bramber we ascended again in a lovely evening after rain, through lovely scenes—the downs here assuming rather the character of moors. But it very soon began to drizzle again, and an error in map reading involved us in hours of stumbling and circling up there in the twilight. We lay at Findon. Griffiths was quite intolerable after dinner. Don’t mistake me. I don’t mean that he was rude. But he displayed a perversity and disingenuousness in argument and a cold blooded brutality—religious brutality is the worst kind-which quite revolted us. To expound his position wd. carry us too far: but you would be getting near it if you imagined a Calvinist Jesuit with strong leanings to the doctrine that the elect cannot sin, who had borrowed from metaphysics the view that ‘love’ cannot be predicated of God, and from economics the doctrine that it is no real charity to give anything to the poor. In fact if you mix together all the harshest aspects of every form of religion and irreligion which you know and imagine them delivered with the dryness of a scientist and the intolerance of a verminous monk of the fourth century, you have the recipe. Barfield and I slept in one room and consoled ourselves with chaff and chat in our old manner, recalling happier walking tours. We were very footsore.
The next day made amends. We had good weather all day long. Griffiths improved surprisingly. In fact we have all forgiven him, and shall ask him again. His exhibition of the previous day was really, I believe, only the reaction of a solitary on finding himself suddenly at bay among people all older than himself and all disagreeing with him. We refused to let conversation become serious. We laughed away his monstrous positions. Before lunchtime we had him laughing himself and making jokes, even bawdy jokes.
We were in quite a different kind of country today: still the Sussex downs, but not like any ‘downs’ you or I have known, being heavily wooded. It is very pleasant to combine the damp, mysterious delights of a forest walk with the hill-feeling which is called up every now and then by a few open fields revealing the real contours.
We got to Arundel for tea, where Beckett left us by train. Coddling ourselves after the hardships of the previous day, we went no further. Arundel impressed me as much as any place I have ever seen. The castle
(#ulink_2f0cf8b5-49da-5329-9cc8-a42b712ca9d2) has been greatly added to in the XIXth century so that the original Norman kernel is hardly visible: but, provided a castle is big enough and set high enough above the town, it can hardly help being impressive. But it is the surroundings that are the chief beauty, and specially the park. The Magdalen stags are dwarfs compared with the Arundel stags. It contains some of the finest beeches I have ever seen, and hill and dale for miles, and a sheet of water echoing with exotic birds. (There were also some swans to remind me that ‘the rich have their own troubles’) We passed a very pleasant evening here, a great contrast to the night before. Next day we walked to Midhurst, and having slept there, broke up the party after breakfast.
I find that the account I have written gives quite an exaggerated idea of the less pleasant aspects of this jaunt (Memo: to read all collections of letters in the light of the fact that a letter writer tends to pick out what is piquant, or unusual. He may tell no lies: but his life is never as odd, either for good or ill, as it sounds in the letters.) We had at least some of the rare fine days of this spring while walking. As you know, I do not hold with the undue importance now attached to weather: but I confess that spring—‘being a thing so comfortable and necessary’ can still disappoint me when day after day is ushered in with driving rain or black east winds, and the primroses are battered into the mud as soon as they show their faces. There are signs of budding on all (I think) the new trees, but of course one cannot say what they will come to.
About Miracle Plays—I agree with you. Is it not all part of the perverse modern attempt to behave as if we were younger, simpler, and more ignorant than we really are? It was natural for the populace in the middle ages to accept a man in a gilt mask appearing as God the Father—who sends Gabriel to the Virgin, who tells her to hurry up and agree to the scheme ‘For they (i.e. the Trinity) think long till I come again.’ It is equally natural, I think, for us, reading the old plays, to find this naiveté touching and delightful—as a grown man likes to watch, or to remember childhood. But a grown man getting into pinafores and going off to play red Indians in the shrubbery is intolerable. Nor will he in that way really recover the pleasures of childhood half so well as he can by reminiscence: nor is there any way in which he can be more utterly unlike a real child. For a child surely wants to be as grown up and sophisticated as it can manage: the enjoyment of naiveté for its own sake is the most hopelessly adult enjoyment there is. I suppose the don reading Edgar Wallace, and the civilised man dancing negro dances, are examples of the same thing. I have read very little but middle english texts since I last wrote: specially the Owl and the Nightingale which you must read in Tolkien’s translation some day.
I asked old Mr. Taylor (the aged deaf man who once played croquet with us at Hillsborough)
(#ulink_1af3d667-9d6b-505e-ba07-6b43e54aea3c) up to supper one night, and went there in return. This, you know, I reckon almost among charities, as he is old, poor, friendless, and surrounded by a beastly family. I mention him here in order to record a super P’daitism, when after an hour or so of talk about life on the other planets, education, Einstein, and other oddments, he suddenly explained ‘Ah, I see you know all about this universe business.’ Further than that one can’t possibly go in that particular kind of P’daitism.
I have been reading Tylor’s Anthropology
(#ulink_9e3ac984-96a8-50b2-addd-10ac02c05aad) over my morning tea lately having bought it to read in the train. Kirk’s
(#ulink_7c613359-0b03-5301-8406-7d1abd4d5702) old friends the Rationalist Press Association are bringing out a series at a 1/-each of works which they conceive to be anti-religious, and which are to be found on every station bookstall. One has no sympathy with the design—nor does one like to read books in an edition called The Thinker’s Library with a picture on the jacket of a male nude sitting thinking. (The whole thing reminds me of Butler’s remark that a priest is a man who disseminates little lies in defence of a great truth, and a scientist is a man who disseminates little truths in defence of a great lie.) Still it is rather nice to be able to pick up on a railway journey a real classic of medium-popular science. I find I am enjoying the Tylor very much: the chapters on Language and Writing particularly. Still no news of the Henry instalment from Condlin. I confess I am worried about it. Isn’t the Everyman Molière
(#ulink_f489778c-2b4c-5f21-bbf1-f8e35f89129b) one of the very small print Everyman’s?
Yours
J.
P.S. Old Brightman is dead—a great loss.
(#ulink_c0d5cd84-e198-5a1f-b33e-b96f11af74b6) When shall we see such a figure again?
This reminds me of a conversation I had lately when a very courtly old man was condoling with a certain professor on the death of his brother ‘A charming man your poor brother was—such a dear modest fellow—no speech making or anything of that kind about him—in fact I never remember his saying anything.’ A beautiful epitaph. HIC JACET/N OR M/WHO NEVER SAID ANYTHING./I SAID I WILL TAKE HEED TO MY TONGUE/.
Just to fill up the page I add J.A.’s latest;–
To all the fowls that wing the airThe Goose is much preferred;There is so much of nourishmentOn that sagacious bird.
TO OWEN BARFIELD (W):
[The Kilns]
May 6 1932
