Collected Letters Volume One: Family Letters 1905–1931

I am very sorry

I hope you understand. How’s that?

It may be true that it is easier to assign music to people we know, than to conjure up people to fit the music, but I deny that anyone’s character is really unlike their appearance. The physical appearance, to my mind, is the expression and result of the other thing–soul, ego, ψυχη, intellect–call it what you will. And this outward expression cannot really differ from the soul. If the correspondence between a soul & body is not obvious at first, then your conception either of that soul or that body must be wrong. Thus, I am ‘chubby’–to use your impertinent epithet, because I have a material side to me: because I like sleeping late, good food & clothes etc as well as sonnets & thunderstorms. The idealistic side of me must find an outlet somewhere, perhaps in my eye, my voice or anything else–you can judge better than I. And the other side of me exists in my countenance because it exists also in my character.

‘But’, I hear you saying, ‘this is all very well. Only what about the practised flirt with the innocent schoolgirl face & the murderer with a smile like an old woman?’ These are only seeming exceptions. The girl has or imagines she has that sort of disposition somewhere in her, or it wouldn’t be on her face: as a matter of fact, it is always ‘innocent’ (which means ignorant) people who do the most outrageous things. The murderer too, may be really a peaceful, kindly ‘crittur’, and if circumstances drive him to violence, the initial mould of the character and therefore of the face remain just the same.

I remember reading in a book called ‘The open Road’

(#ulink_f06177e6-f919-5702-9f37-d7fdc53f7996) an extract from Hewlet’s ‘Pan and the Young Shepherd’

(#ulink_1d0b9b54-a771-564a-995a-42dffe3feba5) which I thought splendid. Thanks to our Galahad’s detestable handwriting I can’t tell whether your book is the ‘Lore’ or the ‘Love’ of P. In any case I have never heard of it before, but, from your description, am very eager to read it. I also saw a copy of this author’s ‘Forest Lovers’

(#ulink_6e0f311b-aac5-5f73-8e30-a5a91a59c5ce) in Carson’s last hols, but it did not attract me much. Is this new one in a decent edition?

I am glad to hear that you are keeping up the ‘illustrative’ side of your art, and shall want you to do some for my lyric poems. You can begin a picture of my ‘dream garden’ where the ‘West winds blow’. As directions I inform you it is ‘girt about with mists’, and is in ‘the shadowy country neither life nor sleep’, and is the home of ‘faint dreams’. With this Bädekers guide to it, you can start a picture. You remember, I scribble at pen and ink sketches a bit, and have begun to practise female faces which have always been my difficulty. I am improving a very little I think, and the margins of my old Greek lexicon as well as my pocket book now swarm with ‘studies’.

Only four weeks now till I shall be home again! Isn’t that a buck, at least for me–and no one else in the world really counts of course. What nonsense you talk about that ‘poor man’, my father. I am afraid it is true that he must bore Lily, but there is no fear of her boring him. I sympathize however, with the havoc which he must have wrought with a serious musical evening.

How is your gramaphone progressing, by the way, and how many records have you listed up to date? I am so sorry if this Liliputian writing has blinded you for life, but we have run out of the other sort of note paper.

Well

(Farewel)

Jack

P.S. Have begun the ‘Proffessor’

(#ulink_aff5973c-df67-5e0b-9e3c-a12cf89881a1) and as read far as the heroe’s arrival at Brussels. It is shaping very well. I believe you have read it have you not–J.

Warnie arrived in Bookham from France on 4 July 1915 and Jack, after some resistance from Mr Kirkpatrick, was permitted to accompany him home. He returned to Bookham on 9 July.

TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 1-2):

[Gastons

10? July 1915]

My dear Papy,

In reply to your note which has just this minute been handed to me, I suggest to your notice the following considerations. In the first place you ask ‘why were you told £1-10s?’ I am not aware that I ever told you anything at all about the subject: the sum of money–whatever it was–was handed by Kirk to Warnie at the request of the latter, who took charge of it throughout, together with both tickets and every other arrangement. It never passed through my hands, and I am not prepared to say with any certainty what it amounted to. I do not remember mentioning the matter while at home. You have therefore applied to the wrong quarter.

Secondly, supposing for purposes of argument that I did tell you that it was £1-10s, what then? As I have already pointed out, I had nothing to do with the money, and Warnie not I, was responsible for its being borrowed. It follows that I could have had no conceivable motive for misrepresenting the amount. If there was to be any blame attached, it was not I who incurred it: I need never even have mentioned it. Accordingly, if I said anything untrue, it must have been through a mere error–and even at that an error by which I could gain nothing.

Thirdly, do not be annoyed if I descend to a rather crude, a fortiori line of argument. The tone of your letter, no less than the haste with which it was dispatched, suggests an ugly suspicion. This can of course be very easily answered. Setting aside all question of honour, I ask you to credit Warnie and myself with commonsense. Granted then, that for some inscrutable reason we wanted to conceal the amount he borrowed from Kirk, would we have been such fools as to have told a lie which must inevitably be detected as soon as the latter wrote to you? And of course, we would have known that K. must write to you to get his money back.

And so, it follows that either Kirk is wrong, or else if Warnie gave you the wrong figures it must have been by accident. That I knew nothing of it, and was not concerned in the transaction, has already been shown.

Last of all, if anything in this letter should seem to indicate that I am hurt or offended, I assure you it is not the case. I am perfectly convinced that your note was not meant to be insulting, though, from its nature, it could hardly help it. In any case it is as well to make things clear, even at the risk of some little superfluous violence. I am,

your loving son,

Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP IV: 321-2):

[Gastons

19? July 1915]

My dear Papy,

I sincerely hope this silence of yours doesn’t mean anything wrong with your health. Arthur says you didn’t seem very well the last time he was over at Leeborough, so I am not quite easy in my mind. If however anything is wrong, you might tell Aunt Annie to write to me with particulars, and also to forward W’s address, which since I wrote for it in my last letter has become even more necessary as he has now written to me. I should not like him to think that he is forgotten or that his letter has not reached me, but I cannot reply to him until I hear from you.

Not even in Bookham can one be safe from the hoi polloi; a stubborn refusal to learn tennis is no longer a protection among people who will inflict croquet instead. I was out on Wednesday for tea and croquet and again today (Saturday) for the same entertainment, plus a great deal of conversation. However, this I suppose is part of the curse inherited from our first parents: my private opinion is that after the words ‘In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread’

(#ulink_88f8b0f2-513f-5b3b-9801-ad94c1668966) another clause has dropped out from the original text, running ‘In the exasperation of thy souls shalt thou attend social functions’. On the whole, though I do not of course know anyone as well as at home, I like a good many of those I meet: the world indeed (as you have reminded me on innumerable occasions), is full of nice people. And if it must be full at all, I suppose it is as well that they should be nice.

Talk, of course, runs mostly on the war. I have always thought it ridiculous for people to talk so much on a subject of which, in the majority of cases, they are really very ignorant. Books, art, etc., passing trivialities and even gossip are topics on which everyone can speak with more or less authority. We prefer however to pass our time in criticism of politics, or at present the war–subjects on which only specialists should speak. This endless criticism by ignorant men and women of public men, whose positions they do not understand, I always hear with annoyance.

The Colonel writes to me cheerfully though briefly, and wants an answer. I suppose he tells me nothing that you don’t know already. Bathing and a sack of books seem to be his chief consolations in ‘this detestable country.’

I have been reading nothing since Othello but a translation from the Icelandic, and stray articles etc. In Greek we have begun Demosthenes. Of course oratory is not a sort of literature that I appreciate or understand in any language, so that I am hardly qualified to express an opinion on our friend with the mouthful of pebbles. However, compared with Cicero, he strikes me as a man with something to say, intent only upon saying it clearly and shortly. One misses the beautiful roll of the Ciceronian period, but on the other hand, he is not such a—blether.

(#ulink_fcf6c222-66dc-5652-8214-db92df70a283)

Do try and write soon, or, if the worst comes to the worst, get Aunt Annie to do so.

your loving,

son,

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W/LP IV: 299-300):

[Gastons

24 July 1915]

Dear Galahad,

I have debated more than once as to whether you would prefer a tired and perfunctory letter written in good time during the week, or a fresh and willing [one] a few days late on Saturday evening. Thinking that you would choose the latter, and knowing I would–here we are.

What on earth are you doing reading the Sowers?

(#ulink_50751ab6-2c2a-5926-a068-e02077a5b3ee) A Russian mystery-story full of wise diplomatists and impossible women–it ought to be clad in a bright red cover, with a crude picture of Steinmitz saying ‘The Moscow Doctor–and your prince!!!’ from the head of the stairs, and set on a railway bookstall. But, perhaps I am wrong. Of course it has points, but you are worthy of better things. Never read any George Eliot