Collected Letters Volume One: Family Letters 1905–1931

I am sorry to hear of your being laid up, and even Arthur’s assurance that he is ‘going to call on my father some time soon’ does not quite make up for it. If the weather at home is the same medley that we have here, I am not surprised. It is alternately hot, damp and warm, or cold and windy. I wish we could settle down to good winter weather and habits.

I have finished ‘Lady Connie’ and though it does not end as well as it begins, it was good enough to make me determine to read some more of hers next holidays. Since then I have been dipping into Boswell, whom I grow to like better and better.

Thanks for the enclosure which was a letter from my old Malvern study companion, who is in some mysterious affair called the ‘Artist’s Rifle.’ Did you ever hear of it? I confess I don’t know what claim Hardman has to be an artist.

Hoping you are quite set up again by now,

I am,

your loving

son Jack.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

[Gastons]

(Forgotten the date) [18 October 1916]

My dear Arthur,

Frequently in arguing with you by letter I have had to ask you to read what I say carefully before you rush on to answer it. I distinctly said that there was once a Hebrew called Yeshua, I think on p. 2 (II!!) of my letter: when I say ‘Christ’ of course I mean the mythological being into whom he was afterwards converted by popular imagination, and I am thinking of the legends about his magic performances and resurrection etc. That the man Yeshua or Jesus did actually exist, is as certain as that the Buddha did actually exist: Tacitus mentions his execution in the Annals.

(#litres_trial_promo) But all the other tomfoolery about virgin birth, magic healings, apparitions and so forth is on exactly the same footing as any other mythology. After all even your namesake king Arthur really lived once (if we are to believe the latest theories) but it doesn’t follow that Malory’s old book is history. In the same way there was such a person as Alexander the Great, but the adventures which the Middle Ages related of him are nonsense. It is generally thought, too, that there was such a man as Odin, who was deified after his death: so you see most legends have a kernel of fact in them somewhere. Indeed, these distinctions are so very obvious, that if you were not my best friend I should almost suspect you of wilfully misunderstanding me through temper.

Later on you ask me why I am sad, and suggest that it is because I have no hope of a ‘happy life hereafter’. No; strange as it may appear I am quite content to live without beleiving in a bogey who is prepared to torture me forever and ever if I should fail in coming up to an almost impossible ideal (which is a part of the Christian mythology, however much you try to explain it away). In fact I should think it horrible to feel that if life got too bad, I daren’t escape for fear of a spirit more cruel and barbarous than any man. Then you are good enough to ask me why I don’t kill myself. Because–as I have said to you before–in spite of occasional fits of depression I am very well pleased with life and have a very happy time on the whole. The only reason I was sad was because I was dissapointed in my hope that you were gradually escaping from beleifs which, in my case, always considerably lessened my happiness: if, however, it has the opposite effect on you, tant mieux pour vous! As to the immortality of the soul, though it is a fascinating theme for day-dreaming, I neither beleive nor disbeleive: I simply don’t know anything at all, there is no evidence either way. Now let us take off our armour, hang up our swords and talk about things where there is no danger of coming to blows!

Yes, I quite agree that the metre of the Kalevala is tedious & the word ‘tame’ exactly describes it. It doesn’t sort of rise to the subject at all, but is always the same whatever is happening. If you give this up–and there is no point in going on unless it takes your fancy–don’t let it quench your rising taste for poetry. I must really fulfill my long standing purpose and settle down to some more books of the ‘Cranford’

(#litres_trial_promo) type: your description has made me quite enthusiastic, so without fail tell me the edition you have got it & all your Austens etc in? I finished ‘The Antiquary’ this afternoon, and it thoroughly denies our old wheeze about most books getting tiresome halfway through. It gets better and better as it goes on, and I have not enjoyed anything so much for a long time. I believe I shall soon become almost as devoted to Scott as you are: I begin to feel that sort of ‘repose’, which you like, in turning to him. Which of his should I try next? I shall be glad to hear your views on ‘Lavengro’

(#litres_trial_promo) when you have read it, also by whom this mysterious 1/-edition is published.

And now I must turn to ‘Letters of Hell’. I suppose I must have looked forward to it too much: at any rate–I will tell the truth–I have failed to read it, have not enjoyed it a bit and have put it away in my drawer unfinished. There! Am I fallen in your eyes forever? I don’t really know why I disliked it so much, because I could see all the time that there was good in it if only I could appreciate it–which makes it all the more annoying. For one thing I expected beauties of the phantastic type, and in reality it turns out only a novel. For the parts about Hell are after all only a setting for the story of his previous life–a story which seemed to me so far as I read it supremely commonplace. The characters are all absolutely crude–wicked rich men of the melodramatic type and miraculously innocent angels of heroines. The only part I liked was the vision of paradise, which struck me as good. Still, when both you and Macdonald praise the book, I am ready to beleive that the fault must be in me and not in it.

Thanks for the instalment: as the post only came in at 9 o’clock I can’t read it yet or I won’t get my letter to you done till bedtime–but you shall have my verdict (‘impudence’ say you) next week. Do either go on with this tale or start something new: I am trying to make out the plan of a short tale but nothing ‘comes’. That is an awful waste, that book W[arnie] gave my father: wouldn’t you love an edition with that binding and paper, only the size of my Kipling, say of the Brontës or James Stephens or Macdonald? Talking about Kipling it is time you began him: try ‘Rewards & Fairies’

(#litres_trial_promo) and if the first story in it ‘Cold Iron’ doesn’t knock you head over heels, I don’t know what will. Good night, they’re all gone up, and I have tired you by now ‘I do talk so.’

Jack

P.S. (In the bedroom) It is much more wintry to night, and when I came up the curtains were not drawn and the room was full of moonlight, bright bright as anything. It is too cold to sit looking at the glorious night but it is beautiful! I shake your hand. Goodnight. I wish you could come & ‘grind’ at Gastons. Ugh. Horrible cold sheets now

J.

TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 133-4):

[Gastons]

19/Oct./16.

My dear Papy,

Yes! That was a bad lapse of memory, and now that the mystery is solved, I wonder how I could possibly have forgotten it. Perhaps the fact of its being printed as 3 lines (the ‘God’ and ‘trod’ rhymes having lines to themselves) had something to do with it. Still, it was a nasty blunder, and I thought I knew my Kipling better than that. Like all quotations from good authors, it is much finer in its setting than when we read it alone: that whole poem ought to settle for good and all K’s question as to whether Kipling be a poet.

(#litres_trial_promo) He could be ‘spoken to’ as poor Uncle Bill was on a similar occasion.

Many thanks for the ‘Spectator’ which I shall certainly keep for the sake of the poem. It is, I quite agree with you, a really notable piece of work, quite above the average. The verse beginning ‘Life?–’Twas a little thing to give’ is glorious, and also the last two lines

‘Who bartered for Youth’s diadem

The dross of after years.’

(#litres_trial_promo)

I wonder is there any country outside these islands where about every 10th man is a poet, as seems to be the case with us? I wish somebody of real taste would collect all the verse that is appearing in the papers at present and make a selection–it would be the best anthology ever published. As to F.S. Boas I know him well from a book of his on Shakespeare

(#litres_trial_promo) that Kirk has, but it never struck me that there was any relationship. Perhaps it was he who ‘lectured on Herrick’? The nephew I don’t remember, though he must have been at Campbell in my time.

The other article has a lot of sense in it: the writer must be like K’s friend, of whom I told you, who could give anyone points in classical literature without knowing Latin or Greek. That Butcher and Lang translation of Homer

(#litres_trial_promo) is very good, and so is Bacon’s bit of Lucretius, tho’ not as beautiful as his own suggestion that ‘it be with pity’. Of course I suppose only the very greatest poetry will stand translation: fancy a French prose version of Swinburne.

I am at present reading a book which you would enjoy, ‘The letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In case you have forgotten who they were, you can turn to Macaulay’s essay on the latter.

(#litres_trial_promo) They lived in Cromwell’s time, and the letters are very quaint. In the notes the editor also quotes an account of the ‘remove these baubles’ scene by an eye-witness, who was apparently a member of the old aristocracy and tells us indignantly how the Lord Protector came into the House in ‘grey worsted stockings’.

(#litres_trial_promo) They had their own way of writing love letters in those days: Mistress Osborne begins hers ‘Sir’ like a letter to a newspaper, and ends up ‘your humble servant’ or ‘your faithful friend’. Almost a la Gordon.

your loving

son Jack.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

[Gastons]

25th Oct 1916

My dear Galahad,

As usually happens in these sort of things the violent controversy that we have been having for the last three weeks (& which I quite agree with you in giving up) has obscured the original subject of the discussion ‘exaltation’. I want to know if you understand that sort of ‘fey’ state of mind which I described, or tried to describe, as coming on when one is very drowzy. Say what you think of this in your next letter. The question arose out of the ‘Morte’ which I have now read from the beginning of the Quest of the Grael to the end, thus finishing the whole thing. I certainly enjoyed it much better than before, and wished that I had the first volume here as well. The quietness of the end, and the description of Arthur’s death are particularly good–you must give it another try sometime.

It was silly of me to ask you about ‘Cranford’ etc, as I have a MacMillan’s list here and could have looked them up myself if I had had the sense: but I suppose you regard that as a big ‘if! I can understand that it is not pleasing to have these in the same edition as the Jane Austens, tho’ for me of course it would make a nice change. I don’t know when I shall buy some new books, as I am at present suffering from a flash of poverty–poverty comes in flashes like dulness or pleasure. When I do it will be either ‘Our Village’, ‘Cranford’ or Chaucer’s ‘Troilus & Cressida’, if I can get a decent edition of it. By all accounts it is much more in my line than the ‘Canterbury Tales’, and anyway I can take no more interest in them since I have discovered that my Everyman edition is abridged & otherwise mutilated. I wish they wouldn’t do that (‘Lockhart’,

(#litres_trial_promo) you say, is another case) without telling you. I can’t bear to have anything but what a man really wrote.