Collected Letters Volume One: Family Letters 1905–1931

(#ulink_8db5dc32-bf90-5dc3-9f96-cf8ead368fb2) in the chocolate binding of which I used to disapprove: so you see I am gradually becoming converted to all your views. Perhaps one of these days you may even make a Christian of me. Yes: I have at last heard from the girlinosbornes: but like the minstrel in Scott,

‘Perhaps he wished the boon denied’

(#ulink_703c1c75-4bdf-5069-8af7-2a52f4415922)

as the bill is rather a staggerer and my finances are not very blooming at present–I am thinking of sending it out to my brother to pay.

I well remember the glorious walk of which you speak, how we lay drenched with sunshine on the ‘moss’ and were for a short time perfectly happy–which is a rare enough condition, God knows. As Keats says ‘Rarely, rarely comest thou, spirit of Delight’.

(#ulink_3441cae5-28a7-50c3-a5e7-5a42be1a2667) I do hope we shall have many more pleasant hours such as that the days are running in so fast now, and it makes me so sad to think that I shall have only two more sets of holidays of the good old type, for in November comes my 18th birthday, military age, and the ‘vasty fields’

(#ulink_546ba6d2-4e1a-593e-bca5-7e4079bf9209) of France, which I have no ambition to face. If there is good weather and you get some days off next hols., we should go for some walks before breakfast–the feel of the air is so exquisite. I don’t know when I can expect to come home.

Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 60-1):

[Gastons]

Postmark: 10 March 1916

My dear Papy,

‘I wonder’ said Demetrius, and so do I. You know it is a terrible thing for a young boy to get into the hands of a rascally old firm of solicitors to be cajoled into signing all sorts of mysterious documents. How do I know to what I have committed myself? Perhaps my three moors are being made over, or you are putting an entail on my little place in Rome. (What is an entail) Ha! Ha! The missing heir. Indeed the whole proceeding savours of the novelette: you must cut your moustache shorter and call yourself Richard or Rupert. However, I herewith enclose the enigmatic slip of paper, with the forged signature inked over ‘avec d’empresment’ (French language). By the way, I see that I have acknowledged £16-13-10. Well what became of this…this…business…this tea business?

I hope you have read your Times Literary Supplement this week: do you see that the commonwealth of letters is the richer by a great new poet? Now let the stars retire for the sun has risen: let Hemans and M’Kitrick Ros

(#ulink_9d538fe6-8a22-557b-b15b-0295bf748fe8) be silent, for Mr. Little has come! It is really too good to be missed. I love the fine impassioned address to the sea, as much greater than Tennyson’s ‘Break, break, break’

(#ulink_08f7022c-a7e5-557e-9e5f-73c0e1ea9459) as that is than the one in the Prometheus, the one you will have noticed beginning

‘Oh, wave! Thy clemency is open

To shrewd suspicion’.

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What melody! What masterly phrazing and gorgeous imagery! We may pass over such minor beauties as the lioness which becomes the ‘formidable sultaness’ and go on to the last piece which contains the gems about the ‘golden brawn’ of the sunrise, the ‘various viands of the rainbow’ and nature ‘gorgeous, great, gratuitous’. Why this is a more exquisite song than the other about ‘Presumption, pride, pomposity’, though there is a certain likeness. This I suppose is the modern school that has got beyond Tennyson. Well perhaps they have: but I for one had sooner walk on the earth than soar on any Pegasus which bears such a disquieting resemblance to a rocking horse.

St. John’s, the school at Leatherhead whither my fellow pupil is wont daily to repair for gentlemanly and vertuous discipline and schooling in the humane letters, has got an epidemic of influenza and is breaking up for the term. So I suppose we shall have our well beloved Ford more in evidence now. Tell Arthur to write. I am sorry to hear what you say about Grandmother: I feel that we ought to have seen more of her, but it was not easy.

(#ulink_d945dbc8-67ce-55a0-adf7-0fbea9b91541) Your loving,

son,

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (LP V: 63-4):

[Gastons

14 March 1916]

(You ought to know the date.)

My dear Galahad,

It must have been a very old Everyman list on which you found ‘Phantastes’ as one of the new ones, since, to my knowledge, the copy I got had been on the bookstall for weeks. Everymans with us have gone up 1d. in the shilling: I suppose it is just the same at home? By the time you get this you will probably have finished Phantastes, so you must give me your verdict on it as a whole: when one has read a book, I think there is nothing so nice as discussing it with some one else–even though it sometimes produces rather fierce arguments.

I too am rather disappointed. The ‘British Ballads’ has come, and though I am awfully bucked with the edition–I can’t think why I didn’t appreciate it before. This must be a triumph for you–the reading matter is not nearly so good as I expected. For one thing, instead of being all made up of real old ballads as I hoped, it is half full of silly modern imitations and even funny ones. Don’t you loathe ‘funny’ poetry? However, as it is not your style of book, I suppose I am boring you.

All the same, when you begin to write a letter you just go on babbling–at least I do–without thinking whether the person at the other end is interested or not, till you come to the last page and find that you haven’t really said what you wanted to. But perhaps that sort of rambling is the right kind of letter. I don’t know whether you personally write that way or not, but the result is charming, and you can’t think how eager I am to see the atrocious but familiar scroll waiting for me on the hall table. And yet, every letter is a disappointment: for a minute or two I was carried back to your room at Bernagh–don’t you remember rooms by their smells? Each one has its own–and seem to be talking to you, and then suddenly I come to the end and it’s all only a little bit of paper in my hand and Gastons again. But come. We are being mawkish. I think you and I ought to publish our letters (they’d be a jolly interesting book by the way) under the title of lamentations, as we are always jawing about our sorrows. I gather it was that beastly girl in Mayne’s who ‘flared up’ as you say. Aren’t they rude in that place? I think we ought to start a movement in the neighbourhood to boycott them. Only we’d have to join in it ourselves, which would be a pity.

No: I have never yet seen Kelsie’s book. I daresay she doesn’t know that I take an interest in such things, and you are lucky in having a reputation as a connoisseur which makes you free of every library in Belmont–tho’ there aren’t very many to be sure. I am afraid our Galahad will be growing a very stodgy mind if he reads nothing but Trollope and Goldsmith and Austen. Of course they are all very good, but I don’t think myself I could stand such a dose of stolidity. I suppose you will reply that I am too much the other way, and will grow a very unbalanced mind if I read nothing but lyrics and fairy tales. I believe you are right, but I find it so hard to start a fresh novel: I have a lazy desire to dally with the old favourites again. I think you’ll have to take me in hand and set me a ‘course’ when I come home.

By the way what about the piano and the gramophone these days? We don’t seem to talk of music so much now as we did: of course your knowledge on that subject is so much greater than mine that I can really only express a philistine’s taste. Are you still going to Walker? For my part, I have found my musical soul again–you will be relieved to hear–this time in the preludes of Chopin. I suppose you must have played them to me, but I never noticed them before. Aren’t they wonderful? Although Mrs K. doesn’t play them well, they are so passionate, so hopeless, I could almost cry over them: they are unbearable. I will find out the numbers of the ones I mean and we will have a feast next holidays.

By the way, you speak in your last letter of the difference between music and books: I think (to get back to an old argument) it is just the same difference as between friendship and love. The one is a calm and easy going satisfaction, the other a sort of madness: we take possession of one, the other takes possession of us: the one is always pleasant the other in its greatest moments of joy is painful. But perhaps I am rating books and friendship too low, because poetry and great novels do sometimes rouse you almost as much as music: the great love scenes in Shirley for instance, or the best parts of Swinburne etc.

I am sorry I always make the mistake about your address. Hullo–I’ve done it again.

Yours,

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (LP V: 64-5):

[Gastons

21 March 1916]

My dear Galahad,

So here we are at the weekly letter, and very glad I am too; but Heavens!–how the weeks run on don’t they? While I was at Malvern I used to count the days and long for the end of term, so of course time crawled; now-a-days when I am quite comfortable the whole thing goes on far too quickly. And it’s all so many days, months etc., not of the term or the year, but of one’s life–which is tiresome. ‘Help!’ I hear you muttering, ‘Is he going to moralize for four pages?’ (Cheer up, I’ll try to hold it in.)

I’m awfully bucked to hear that you think the same about Phantastes as I, though if you only began to enjoy it in the eleventh chapter, you must have missed what I thought were the best parts–that is to say the forest scene and the faery palace–or does that come after chapter XI? You will gather that the book is upstairs and that I am too lazy to go and get it. I hope that by this time you have bought ‘Sir Gibbie’

(#ulink_408b0160-8e6d-58ff-a3dc-899b95d36ef4) and will be able to advise me on it. Some of the titles of his other books are, to me at least, even more alluring than the one you quote: for instance ‘At the back of the north wind’.

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Isn’t it funny the way some combinations of words can give you–almost apart from their meaning–a thrill like music? It is because I know that you can feel this magic of words AS words that I do not despair of teaching you to appreciate poetry: or rather to appreciate all good poetry, as you now appreciate some. This is however off the point: what I meant to say was that lots of his titles give me that feeling. I wish there were more in Everymans, don’t you?

Talking about Everymans, do you know what their 1/6 binding is like? I can’t remember whether you have anything in it or not, but I have been thinking of trying it, so tell me what you know on the subject. What? you ask, still new books? Well really the length of the Faerie Queene was a godsend, because so long as I turned to it every week-end with the regularity of clockwork I could keep my money in my pockets: now however the temptation to get a nice new book for the longed for Sunday rest is overwhelming.

I am glad to hear that you have moved into Lily’s room as I think you–or ‘we’ shall I say in selfishness–will be more comfortable there: at the same time I have a sort of affection for the old one where we have had such good times: we should call it ‘joyous garde’.

(#ulink_40f6315b-5e10-5dba-86cc-3493de0f008b) Still, I am longing to find myself in your new quarters with all the old talk, the old music, and the old fingering of rich, friendly books.