8 St Aldates, Oxford
My dear Gerald
Your sad news, alas, was not unexpected after your last letter.1 I felt very unsympathetic, not writing to you about it before; but I followed your instructions. I’m afraid you have had a very grim time and will feel very isolated now; but I hope that you are better and that you have friends to see and books to read (and write) to distract and stimulate you. I hope that one day I may visit you again—I always intend to return to Spain—but meanwhile can I send you a book? It is a book which was published three years ago, but possibly you have not yet read it: Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno. It is one of the books—I think it is the book—which has most excited me in the last few years. It opens a new window on the whole intellectual history of the 16th century. If you don’t know it, do tell me, and I will post it to you: I feel sure that you would be as interested in it as I was, and am. In fact, I don’t think that I could have written my essay on witches if I had not read—irrelevant though it seems—Miss Yates on Giordano Bruno.1
Do you know her other work? She is a wonderful woman. She has written nothing which is not fascinating, and she writes on such different subjects (but always within the field of intellectual history). She is one of the Warburg Institute scholars, who knows all about the symbolism of the Renaissance and can extract hidden, but convincing significance from arcane emblems. She wrote a marvellous study of the Valois Tapestries re-creating, from their symbolism, ‘a lost moment of history’, an attempt, which failed, by Catherine de Medicis and William of Orange to settle the Netherlands on an ‘Erasmian’ basis. She has also written on Paolo Sarpi2 and on John Florio3 and—another wonderful work—on the French academies of the 16th century, the world of Baïf and Ronsard4 and Love’s Labours Lost. Now she works mainly on neo-platonism and that ‘hermetic core of Renaissance platonism’ out of which—as she more than anyone else has shown—the new science of the 17th century was born. A few months ago I heard her read a wonderful paper on John Dee, which brings out her argument with perfect clarity. Of course she is not alone in bringing out these ideas—in fact I first got interested in the subject by reading (on the recommendation of Bernard Berenson) a German book by Moritz Carrière, written a century ago—but she does it better than anyone else.1
Like you, I love the 4th and 5th centuries AD, and especially St Augustine (I have read his Confessions three times) and St Jerome. St Jerome’s letters are wonderfully comic: I particularly like the one in which he urges one of his devout ladies to use her squealing infant to convert her obstinate old pagan father: ‘cum avum viderit, in pectus eius transiliat, e collo pendeat, nolenti alleluia decantet’;2 and all those scenes of Roman high life: great ladies with their trains of eunuchs and tame, avaricious, dependent clergy. Also St Jerome’s gourmandise which struggles with his Puritanism, his love of literature which struggles with his hatred of music, etc. It is very odd that Erasmus liked him. But I have not read the Vulgate—perhaps I must.
I think that Peter Brown’s book on St Augustine is excellent.3 I selected it as my book of last year for the Sunday Times and I am trying to get a literary prize for it from the Arts Council. It is—apart from being scholarly and intelligent—so well written; and so few scholars even try to write well in England now. (In America, of course, they are worse).
I shall venture to defend Gibbon to you. I don’t find him smug. It seems to me that, behind the genuine belief in progress (far less smug than in, say, Macaulay), there is always, in Gibbon, a subtlety, a sensitivity, occasionally a melancholy, which is totally absent from (say) Voltaire. I suppose I have, by now, got so used to the formal style that I hardly notice it, and I enjoy all the more the urbanity, the irony, the humanity, which underlies it. Also I love the marvellous precision of his language, the exact choice of words in order to convey such delicate shades and ambiguities of meaning. I think I would rather be thought to write like Gibbon than any other writer of English (because nobody could write like Sir Thomas Browne or Doughty1); but then I recall a remark made to me, in 1940, by Frank Pakenham. He said, ‘I have been reading your book on Archbishop Laud. It reminded me of Gibbon …’ and then, just as I was inwardly purring at this undeserved compliment, ‘I mean, it made my gorge rise!’
I haven’t read Schonfield’s Jesus as Messiah.2 I will do so. I admire Guignebert;3 but Loisy4 has been destroyed for me by a devastating biography of him—very scholarly and exact—by a disillusioned disciple, which I read in Paris a few years ago.5 It proves that Loisy was a most disreputable hypocrite, and I can never respect him again. I’m afraid that my respect for Renan6 has shrunk too, after reading some of his purely social opinions. Do you know the writings of Gershom Scholem, of Jerusalem?7 He writes about Jewish intellectual traditions—e.g. Messianism—and I have greatly enjoyed his works. The foundation of the state of Israel may have convulsed the Middle East but it has certainly done a lot for Christian scholarship: the Jews are no longer either assimilated as Christians or stuck in the Jewish ghetto: they have contrived, thanks to Israeli national consciousness, to look, with gentile objectivity, at their Jewish selves.
You are far too flattering about my book Religion, the Reformation and Social Change: but I love flattery (I suppose all writers do) and flattery from you is indeed intoxicating. Ever since I read The Spanish Labyrinth, I have looked upon you as my ideal historian—you see the past in the present, and the present in the past, imaginatively, and yet with corrective scholarship, and you express it in perfect prose—and I would rather write for you than anyone else. But I share one weakness with you. I too ‘find so many people and periods interest me that I am unable to choose, but go continually from one thing to another’. I used, in my marxisant phase, to think I was interested in economic history; but then I realised that the only thing which raises humanity above the other animals, and makes its history worth studying, is its independence of mere conditioning economic, sociological or ecological facts: i.e. intellectual history, literature, philosophy. For this reason I am glad now that I was trained as a classical scholar: I find more pleasure in good literature than in dull (even if true) history!
I meant to tell you about Formosa, but it is late, and I will spare you.1 In a fortnight I am supposed to be going to America, but I think that I shall run out and go to Europe instead.
Do write again: I love your letters, and I long to hear of you, and from you. Do keep well. I wish I could see you.
yours ever
Hugh