(#ulink_90535cf5-4376-550c-be60-9381c564e97f) He is the sort of preacher who calls God ‘gudd’, and soars off into great emotion cadenzas. The matter was good enough, the manner detestable. This morning was the commemoration of the dedication of the church, and why they saw fit to let (or even get) Clark to preach I don’t know: Bathtowel and Thomas being both there.
I had to set a paper for School Certificate the other day on the Clarendon Press selections from Cowper—a ridiculous book for schoolboys.
(#ulink_c0caeee0-4808-58b3-b257-4f270669e3e3) It includes a large chunk of Bagehot’s Essay on Cowper which makes me think I must read all Bagehot. We have him, haven’t we? Not that I ‘hold with him’, he is too much of a pudaita by half: but he has great fun. ‘Boy—the small pomivorous animal so called.’
How delicious Cowper himself is—the letters even more than the poetry. Under every disadvantage—presented to me as raw material for a paper and filling with a job an evening wh. I had hoped to have free—even so he charmed me. He is the very essence of what Arthur calls ‘the homely’ which is Arthur’s favourite genre. All these cucumbers, books, parcels, tea-parties, parish affairs. It is wonderful what he makes of them.
I suppose we may expect a Colombo letter from you soon. I will vary the usual ‘must stop now’ by saying ‘I am going to stop now’. I am writing in the common room (Kilns) at 8.30 of a Sunday evening: a moon shining through a fog outside and a bitter cold night.
Yours
Jack
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):
[The Kilns]
Dec 6th 1931
My dear Arthur,
Hurrah! I was beginning to feel the want of a word from you. I envy you your stay at Ballycastle, or rather I wish I had been there: I feel I can do so without selfishness because I should have enjoyed the storms better than Reid who doubtless lost through them most of the pleasure he expected to get out of his jaunt.
That is a thing you and I have to be thankful for—the fact that we do not only don’t dislike but positively enjoy almost every kind of weather. We had about three days of dense fog here lately. That was enough to tax even my powers of doing without the sun, but though it became oppressive in the end I felt that it was a cheap price to pay [for] its beauties. There was one evening of mist about three feet deep lying on the fields under the moon—like the mist in the first chapter of Phantastes.
(#ulink_966443e5-9ef9-55c2-8eab-0266230284bc) There was a morning (up in the top wood) of mist pouring along the ground through the fir trees, so thick and visible that it looked tangible as treacle. Then there were afternoons of fairly thin, but universal fog, blotting out colour but leaving shapes distinct enough to become generalised—silhouettes revealing (owing to the suppression of detail) all sorts of beauties of grouping that one does not notice on a coloured day. Finally there were days of real fog: days of chaos come again: specially fine at the pond, when the water was only a darker tinge in the fog and the wood on the far side only the ghostliest suggestion: and to hear the skurry of the waterfowl but not to see them. Not only was it an exciting time in itself but by the contrast has made to day even more beautiful than it would have been—a clear, stinging, winter sunshine.
As to Lucius
(#ulink_6f621d9b-f961-5013-80f2-1d8db67ce62e) about the atonement not being in the Gospels, I think he is very probably right. But then nearly everyone seems to think that the Gospels are much later than the Epistles, written for people who had already accepted the doctrines and naturally wanted the story. I certainly don’t think it is historical to regard the Gospels as the original and the rest of the New Testament as later elaboration or accretion-though I constantly find myself doing so. But really I feel more and more of a child in the whole matter.
I begin to see how much Puritanism counts in your make up—that both the revulsion from it and the attraction back to it are strong elements. I hardly feel either myself and perhaps am apt to forget in talking to you how different your experience and therefore your feeling is. All I feel that I can say with absolute certainty is this: that if you ever feel that the whole spirit and system in which you were brought up was, after all, right and good, then you may be quite sure that that feeling is a mistake (tho’ of course it might, at a given moment—say, of temptation, be present as the alternative to some far bigger mistake).
My reasons for this are 1. That the system denied pleasures to others as well as to the votaries themselves: whatever the merits of self-denial, this is unpardonable interference. 2. It inconsistently kept some worldly pleasures, and always selected the worst ones—gluttony, avarice, etc. 3. It was ignorant. It could give no ‘reason for the faith that was in it’.
(#ulink_6f23473d-1926-5d55-95c7-b6c19ec82215) Your relations have been found very ill grounded in the Bible itself and as ignorant as savages of the historical and theological reading needed to make the Bible more than a superstition. 4. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’
(#ulink_e34e93a8-544e-5811-b378-f8da6d820fdd) Have they the marks of peace, love, wisdom and humility
(#ulink_f8a39cde-8982-5290-bce3-10a9c6317f40) on their faces or in their conversation? Really, you need not bother about that kind of Puritanism. It is simply the form which the memory of Christianity takes just before it finally dies away altogether, in a commercial community: just as extreme emotional ritualism is the form it takes on just before it dies in a fashionable community.
Like you I can get very little out of the Imitation?
(#ulink_29ccbf51-1a01-5e9f-be74-b69c39ec13b7) Since last writing I have read Carlyle’s Past and Present. One gets rather tired of a certain monotonous stridency, as in Sartor
(#ulink_84c487c3-f481-584e-8cda-33801ac71099) but more so, but it is tremendously exciting (often wrong-headed) and very well worth reading, specially the mediaeval part in the middle.
I also read the Dream of John Ball, perhaps the most serious of W. Morris’s works, except Love is Enough and the fullest exposition of his whole philosophy of life and The Wood Beyond the World wh. is neither better nor worse than any other of the prose romances.
(#ulink_e954a123-b5cd-50d3-b58c-537a92833499) What an achievement his treatment of love is: so undisguisedly physical and yet so perfectly sane and healthy—real paganism at its best, which is the next best thing to Christianity, and so utterly different from the nonsense that passes under the name of paganism in, say, Swinburne or Aldous Huxley.
I wish you knew my two pupils. Lings
(#ulink_a69e49d1-b9d3-5413-8092-980a468baf02) and Paterson.
(#ulink_4cfa7486-1156-54ce-a28f-3bd113f10c7a) Both are poets (quite promising I think) and fast friends of each other. They are just in the state you and I remember so well—the whole world of beauty opening upon them-and as they share the same digs they must have a glorious time. One or other of them often accompanies me on my afternoon walk. Paterson is the wild, and Lings the steady one. Paterson looks very southern, almost an Italian face, and is all moods, and a little effeminate, and is at present in the throes of a terrific quarrel with his father which he poured into my sympathetic ear the other day. Lings is about five feet nothing, very ugly, very dark, and looks a hundred years old, and moves and sits as stiffly as an old man. Paterson truly says that Lings hurrying noiselessly along the cloisters is like nothing so much as a furtive mouse. This doesn’t sound like a poet, does it? But he is the better poet and the better man of the two. What times you and I could have had if we had been up here together as undergraduates! Neither of them knows many other people in College and they only discovered each other after they had been up some time. Paterson spent most of his first two terms sitting in his rooms listening to the feet of people on the staircase, always hoping that it was someone coming to call on him, but it never was.
You can imagine how I enjoy them both. Indeed this is the best part of my job. In every given year the pupils I really like are in a minority; but there is hardly a year in which I do not make some real friend. I am glad to find that people become more and more one of the sources of pleasure as I grow older.
Not that I agree for a moment about books & music being ‘vanity and vexation’. Really imaginative (or intellectual) pleasure is neither the one or the other: the bad element is the miserly pleasure of possession, the delight in this book because it is mine.
Of course it was entirely my own fault about the pyjamas—I only hope that your mother was not worried when you asked about them. Give her my love and if her mind needs setting at rest on the subject—why Sir, set it.
Try to write soon again.
Yours
Jack
TO HIS BROTHER (W):
[The Kilns]
Christmas Day 1931
My dear W–
I believe that for the first time I shall be really gravelled for matter in this letter to you, simply because what with examining and lecture writing I have done, read, and heard nothing for a long time that could possibly interest you. Minto has had a letter from you dated from your ‘improved’ hotel in Shanghai, and we were surprised that you found none of ours awaiting you. No doubt you have had several by this [time].
The afforestation programme 1931 has been carried out, successfully, but not according to plan. What I am more pleased to record is that in the wood four new trees have replaced (instead of being added to) four elder stumps. I think I told you before that the uprooting of these is practicable, and I shall make it a rule never to plant a new tree without getting rid of a stump. I hope also, if I am energetic enough, to be able to do a little buckshee uprooting during the rest of the year. What interfered with the design of my afforestation was water. I dug one hole far on the Eastern frontier (‘in the parts over against Phillips-land’) and found it half full of water next day. This I attributed to rain and set to with gum boots and bucket to bail it out. Next morning, although there had been no rain it was fuller than before, so I concluded I had struck a spring. I shifted my ground and dug another a little to the West. This time was even worse. It was not a question of water ‘collecting’—water leaped round my spade as if I had struck a pipe. I hastily filled in what I had dug and tried again. This time my excavation remained dry for a day or so and then began to fill with water. The upshot of it all is that the afforestation this year has been entirely lop sided. I have only managed to plant two at the east end, and the West is overweighted. Next autumn, if we have had a drier summer, the eastern frontier may be practicable again and I shall then restore the balance. If, on the other hand, these springs are permanent, we shall just be unable to plant that side (‘there won’t be any wood there’). After all, regularity is not our aim, and an irregularity, not devised for ornament, but dictated by the nature of the ground, is an honest sort of beauty.
Except for the afforestation there have naturally been no public works so far this Vac. An examiner can hardly be expected to occupy his scanty hours off in such a vigorous way. I hope to do a little now that I am free and shall begin this afternoon by finishing off with the sickle the evacuated (at least I hope it is evacuated) strongpoint of the wasps and the piece of nettle and briar which we left—I can’t think why-along the Philipian boundary.
The only social diversion I have had lately was the binge of the English ‘Cave’—the anti-junto which, as I said in an earlier letter, is in danger of becoming simply the regular junto.
(#ulink_4add47e6-ce23-5564-80a8-7da86ca48464) I mention this because I heard recited there a bawdy ballad which was quite new to me, and which seems to me in its conclusion so ludicrous that I can’t resist handing it on. Perhaps you know it already. (The rimes seem to have degenerated during the process of oral tradition and now are mere assonances—if that). The early stanzas don’t matter: we will begin with the one that ends–
Never a word the damsel saidBut roared with laughter when the fun was over.(Rum-ti-iddle-ey etc)
Then comes the good part:
Hark! I hear a step on the stair!Sounds to me like an angry father, With a pistol in either hand, Looking for the man who screwed his daughter(Rum-ti-iddle-ey etc)
I have seized him by the hair of his headAnd shoved it into a bucket of water, And I screwed his pistol up his arseA dam sight harder than I screwed his daughter(Rum-ti-iddle-ey etc)
With the rôle of the heavy father properly cast—stumping up the stairs with a desperate expression and his two pistols—this anticlimax, this adding of injury to insult, seems to me irresistible.
I also heard at the same binge a very interesting piece of literary history from an unexceptionable source—that the hackneyed ‘A German officer crossed the Rhine’ was being sung at undergraduate blinds
