1930–1939

TO HIS BROTHER: from ‘Hillsboro’

12 January 1930

Do you find that the present state of affairs produces a permanent condition of—so to speak—comfortless excitement? Every thing is unsettled: all the old structure of things has collapsed and the complete liberty of making plans exactly as we choose, which one would once have sighed for, turns out to be in practice merely a bewildering impossibility of envisaging the future at all.

For the moment however, you will be most anxious to hear about the present, or, as it will be for you, the past. Well up to date Leeboro has not been sold. It will become very anxious as the time draws nearer your return. If a really good offer, plus a demand for immediate possession turns up, say, a fortnight before you are due at Liverpool, I really think I shall go out of my mind . . . It is not ‘Can we afford to keep it three—or ten—months longer before selling it’ but ‘Can we afford to refuse any good offer for a thing that may turn out to be unsaleable?’ Can we afford to gamble on the off chance of there being a second good offer at all? (Remember, there hasn’t been one yet.) That is, we are not in the position of an impoverished Victorian Colonel wondering whether he can afford to go on hunting for one season more, but rather in that of a middle aged Victorian spinster wondering if she can safely refuse any proposal.

This infernal ‘two presents’ system—which began by being a joke and has ended by being an incubus—has naturally reduced most of your logical divisions and subdivisions of alternative possibilities to matchwood. To take the points that survive . . .

The trunk in the attic [containing the Boxen toys]. I entirely agree with you. Our only model for dealing with our world is the heavenly P’daita’s method of dealing with this: and as he has long since announced his intention of ending the universe with a general conflagration, we will follow suit . . . I should not like to make an exception even in favour of Benjamin. After all these characters (like all others) can, in the long run, live only in ‘the literature of the period’: and I fancy that when we look at the actual toys again (a process from which I anticipate no pleasure at all), we shall find the discrepancy between the symbol (remember the outwards and visible form of Hedges, the Beetle—or Bar or even Hawki) and the character, rather acute. No, Brother. The toys in the trunk are quite plainly corpses. We will resolve them into their elements, as nature will do to us . . .

The New little end room. The most jarring comment on this proposal reached me before the proposal itself, in the form of a rather offensive letter from that old harridan Aunt Mary, to the following effect—that she had heard that ‘Little Lea’ was going to be sold: that she supposed I knew about the two book cases of Uncle Joe’s that P. has ‘stored’ for him: that she very much wanted to have them: could she send and have them taken away at once: she had expected to see me at Christmas etc. etc. The minute I read it I knew in my bones that it was our little end room bookcases . . . Well that is the first and great comment on your plan of a new little end room.

The second is that to my mind the question largely turns on another: if we can succeed in getting another and larger house than Hillsboro, and you (as I hope—but this comes in a later paragraph) are with us, should such a room be there or in College. Thirdly, apart from these questions, your proposal is one that I partly agree with and partly disagree with. It runs in your letter ‘A place where we can always meet on the common ground of the past and ipso facto a museum of the Leeborough we want to preserve.’ Now my view would run ‘A place where we can always meet on the common ground of the past and present and ipso facto a continuation and development of the Leeborough etc.’ You see, Pigiebuddie, a museum is preciously like a mausoleum. An attempt at exact reconstruction (supposing it could succeed—wh. it can’t in a room of quite different size and shape—) would fix the externals of a certain period for ever. But if you and I had gone home and lived at Leeborough, that is precisely what wouldn’t have happened. Sooner or later we should have substituted good prints for the groups. As our library grew, new bookcases would have come. In the mere course of time the long thin table would have finished the process which it had already made a good start on, of falling to pieces. A thing fixed in imitation of the little end room as it is, can only be a perpetual reminder that that whole life is not going on. If it were going on, it would gradually change . . . I [think] that an attempt to imitate the little end room in detail would be a mistake. A mistake in sentiment, for it could only mean that we were embalming the corpse of something that isn’t really dead, and needn’t die at all. An aesthetic mistake—because we don’t really want to have the taste of our schooldays established as a boundary for our whole lives . . .

What I am chiefly talking against in all this is the faint implication that the past is the only ‘common ground’ on which we can meet. I think, perhaps this is an occasion for frankness—a virtue which should be very sparingly used, but not never. I have no doubt that there have been times when you have felt that, shall we call it, Pigiebotianism was in danger of being swallowed up by, shall we say, Hillsborovianism: at such moments you may even have felt that the past was the only common ground—that wearing the national costume had become, as in Wales, an archaic revival. I am very sorry to have been the cause of such a period (this is not an apology but a statement)—but isn’t that period itself passed? We have both changed since the real old days, but, on the whole, we have changed in the same direction. We are really much nearer together now than in the days when I was writing ridiculous epic poems at Cherbourg and you were wearing scarcely less ridiculous patent leathers at the Coll.

Now, as to your own plans. If you decide to become a full and permanent member of the household, you will be very welcome to all of us: and I must confess that it doesn’t seem good enough that the two Piggiebudda should spend so much of their life divided by the whole breadth of the planet. Having laid this down as a starting pont, you won’t I hope think that I am trying to dissuade you if I put up certain signposts. e.g. I suppose you do realize that to exchange an institutional for a domestic life is a pretty big change. (I take it for granted obviously that as a permanent member you neither could nor would wish to have, even remotely, the guest status.) Both kinds of life have their discomforts: and all discomforts are in a sense intolerable. The great thing is to choose with one’s eyes open. Can you stand as a permanency our cuisine—Maureen’s practising—Maureen’s sulks—Minto’s burnettodesmondism—Minto’s mare’s nests—the perpetual interruptions of family life—the partial loss of liberty? This sounds as if I were either sick of it myself or else trying to make you sick of it: but neither is the case. I have definitely chosen and don’t regret the choice. What I hope—very much hope—is that you, after consideration, may make the same choice, and not regret it: what I can’t risk is your just floating in on the swell of a mood and then feeling trapped and fed up. Of course to weigh it fairly one must compare the best of this sort of life with the best of the other, and the worst of this with the worst of the other. What one is tempted to do is just the opposite—when one is exasperated in a home, to compare it with one of those splendid evenings one had in a mess or common room. Of course what one ought to do is to weigh it against the evening with the mess bore. On the whole my judgement would be that domestic life denies me a great many pleasures and saves me a great many pains.

There is also this further point. I spoke above of Pigiebotianism and Hillsborovianism. I presume that if you join us you are prepared for a certain amount of compromise in this matter. I shall never be prepared to abandon Pigiebotianism to Hillsborovianism. On the other hand there are the others to whom I have given the right to expect that I shall not abandon Hillsborovianism to Pigiebotianism. Whether I was right or wrong, wise or foolish, to have done so originally, is now only an historical question: once having created expectations, one naturally fulfills them . . .

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from Magdalen College

[3? February 1930]

Terrible things are happening to me. The ‘Spirit’ or ‘Real I’ is showing an alarming tendency to become much more personal and is taking the offensive, and behaving just like God. You’d better come on Monday at the latest or I may have entered a monastery . . .

[Warren arrived back in England on 16 April 1930, having been away a little over three years. On the 17th he met Jack in London and they took a holiday with Mrs Moore and Maureen in Southbourne, Dorset. On 22 April the brothers set off for Belfast, arriving there on the 23rd. After visiting their father’s grave they went to ‘Little Lea’ for their last stay there together. On the afternoon of the 23rd they carried the tin trunk containing the Boxen toys into the garden and, by mutual consent, buried it unopened. On 24 April they returned to Oxford and Warren stayed at ‘Hillsboro’ until he reported for duty at Bulford in Wiltshire on 15 May. Warren paid one last visit to ‘Little Lea’, 1–3 June, before it was sold.]

TO OWEN BARFIELD: from Magdalen College

10 June 1930

I have just finished the Angel in the House. Amazing poet!¹³⁸ How all of a piece it is—how the rivetted metre both expresses and illustrates his almost fanatical love of incarnation. What particularly impressed me was his taking—what one expects to find mentioned only in anti-feminists—the Lilithian desire to be admired and making it his chief point—the lover as primarily the mechanism by wh. the woman’s beauty apprehends itself.

I see now why Janet saw female breasts on the dog collars, and have at last brought into consciousness the important truth: Venus is a female deity, not ‘because men invented the mythology’ but because she is. The idea of female beauty is the erotic stimulus for women as well as men . . . i.e. a lascivious man thinks about women’s bodies, a lascivious woman thinks about her own. What a world we live in! . . .

TO A PUPIL: from Magdalen College (This is an early example of the innumerable painstaking and courteous letters Jack wrote to pupils and ex-pupils.)

18 June 1931

Now as to work. If you are staying up over the week-end and could call on me on Saturday morning we could discuss this. If this is impossible, my present advice is this:

Doing Chaucer and Shakespeare in the same term seems to me a hazardous experiment, unless there is some special reason which I don’t know yet. Our usual plan here is to spend a term on Chaucer and his contemporaries. As regards reading for the Vac., my general view is that the Vac. should be given chiefly to reading the actual literary texts, without much attention to problems, getting thoroughly familiar with stories, situation, and style, and so having all the data for aesthetic judgement ready; then the term can be kept for more scholarly reading. Thus, if you were doing Chaucer and contemporaries next term, I shd advise you to read Chaucer himself, Langland (if you can get Skeat’s edtn, the selection is not much good), Gower (again Macaulay’s big edtn if possible, not so that you may read every word of the Confessio but so that you may select yourself—not forgetting the end which is one of the best bits), Gawain (Tolkien and Gordon’s edtn), Sisam’s XIV century prose and verse (all the pieces of any literary significance). If you can borrow Ritson’s Metrical Romance so much the better.

But perhaps you have read all these before. If so, and if there are other special circumstances, we must try to meet. If Saturday is impossible, ring me up on Friday and I will squeeze in a time somehow or other.

[Warren discovered almost as soon as he arrived back in England that Jack and Mrs Moore were thinking of building their own home. On 25 May 1930 he covered in his diary the reasons why he chose to become a member of their household. Then, on 6 June they went to see a house called The Kilns in Headington Quarry which was coming up for sale. They liked the house, with its eight acres of woodlands, so much that in the end Jack, Warren and Mrs Moore bought it together. They moved there on 11 October 1930.

The following Autumn Warren was posted for the second time to Shanghai. He sailed from Southampton on 9 October 1931.]

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from The Kilns, Kiln Lane, Headington Quarry

22 September 1931

I couldn’t write to you last Sunday because I had a week-end guest—a man called Dyson who teaches English at Reading University.¹³⁹ I meet him I suppose about four or five times a year and am beginning to regard him as one of my friends of the 2nd class—i.e. Not in the same rank as yourself or Barfield, but on a level with Tolkien¹⁴⁰ or Macfarlane.¹⁴¹

He stayed the night with me in College—I sleeping in in order to be able to talk far into the night as one cd hardly do out here. Tolkien came too, and did not leave till 3 in the morning: and after seeing him out by the little postern on Magdalen bridge Dyson and I found still more to say to one another, strolling up and down the cloister of New Building, so that we did not get to bed till 4. It was really a memorable talk. We began (in Addison’s walk just after dinner) on metaphor and myth—interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We all held our breath, the other two appreciating the ecstasy of such a thing almost as you would. We continued (in my room) on Christianity: a good long satisfying talk in which I learned a lot . . .

I am so glad you have really enjoyed a Morris again. I had the same feeling about it as you, in a way, with this proviso—that I don’t think Morris was conscious of the meaning either here or in any of his works, except Love Is Enough where the flame actually breaks through the smoke so to speak. I feel more and more that Morris has taught me things he did not understand himself. These hauntingly beautiful lands which somehow never satisfy—this passion to escape from death plus the certainty that life owes all its charm to mortality—these push you on to the real thing because they fill you with desire and yet prove absolutely clearly that in Morris’s world that desire cannot be satisfied.

The Macdonald conception of death—or, to speak more correctly, St Paul’s—is really the answer to Morris: but I don’t think I should have understood it without going through Morris. He is an unwilling witness to the truth. He shows you just how far you can go without knowing God, and that is far enough to force you (tho’ not poor Morris himself) to go further. If ever you feel inclined to relapse into the mundane point of view—to feel that your book and pipe and chair are enough for happiness—it only needs a page or two of Morris to sting you wide awake into uncontrollable longing and to make you feel that everything is worthless except the hope of finding one of his countries. But if you read any of his romances through you will find the country dull before the end. All he has done is to rouse the desire: but so strongly that you must find the real satisfaction. And then you realise that death is at the root of the whole matter, and why he chose the subject of the Earthly Paradise, and how the true solution is one he never saw . . .

TO ARTHUR GREEVES: from The Kilns (on his conversion to Christianity)

18 October 1931

What has been holding me back (at any rate for the last year or so) has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine meant: you can’t believe a thing while you are ignorant what the thing is. My puzzle was the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense the life and death of Christ ‘saved’ or ‘opened salvation to’ the world. I could see how miraculous salvation might be necessary: one could see from ordinary experience how sin (e.g. the case of a drunkard) could get a man to such a point that he was bound to reach Hell (i.e. complete degradation and misery) in this life unless something quite beyond mere natural help or effort stepped in. And I could well imagine a whole world being in the same state and similarly in need of miracle. What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) two thousand years ago could help us here and now—except in so far as his example helped us. And the example business, tho’ true and important, is not Christianity: right in the centre of Christianity, in the Gospels and St Paul, you keep on getting something quite different and very mysterious expressed in those phrases I have so often ridiculed (‘propitiation’—‘sacrifice’—‘the blood of the Lamb’)—expressions wh. I cd only interpret in senses that seemed to me either silly or shocking.

Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself (cf. the quotation opposite the title page of Dymer) I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant’.

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’. Therefore it is true, not in the sense of being a ‘description’ of God (that no finite mind could take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to (or can) appear to our faculties. The ‘doctrines’ we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that wh. God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach the other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from Magdalen College

24 October 1931

I hasten to tell you of a stroke of good luck for us both—I now have the 15 volume in Jeremy Taylor, in perfect condition, and have paid the same price of 20/-. My old pupil Griffiths spent a night with me last Monday and told me that Saunders the bookseller, who is a friend of his, had a copy.¹⁴² He went round next day, got the book reserved and arranged the price . . .

On the same visit Griffiths presented me with a poorly bound but otherwise delightful copy (1742) of Law’s An Appeal/ To all that doubt, or disbelieve/ The Truths of the Gospel/ Whether they be Deists, Arians/ Socinians or Nominal Christians/. It bears the book plate of Lord Rivers. I like it much better than the same author’s Serious Call, and indeed like it as well as any religious work I have ever read. The prose of the Serious Call has here all been melted away, and the book is saturated with delight, and the sense of wonder: one of those rare works which make you say of Christianity ‘Here is the very thing you like in poetry and the romances, only this time it’s true’ . . .

I am glad you liked Browne as far as you got when your letter was written. Your query ‘Was there anything he didn’t love?’ hits the nail on the head. It seems to me that his peculiar strength lies in liking everything both in the serious sense (Christian charity and so forth) and in the Lambian sense of natural gusto: he is thus at once sane and whimsical, and sweet and pungent in the same sentence—as indeed Lamb is. I imagine that I get a sort of double pleasure out of Thomas Browne, one from the author himself and one reflected from Lamb. I always feel Lamb, as it were, reading the book over my shoulder. A lot of nonsense is talked about the society of books, but ‘theres more in it than you boys think’ in a case of this sort: it is almost like getting into a club . . .

Yes, indeed: how many essays I have heard read to me on Descartes’ proofs (there are more than one) of the existence of God. (It was a remark of Harwood’s first suggested to me that God might be defined as ‘a being who spends his time having his existence proved and disproved’.) The particular one you quote (‘I have the idea of a perfect being’) seems to me to be valid or invalid according to the meaning you give the words ‘have an idea of’. I used to work it out by the analogy of a machine. If I have the idea of a machine which I, being unmechanical, couldn’t have invented on my own, does this prove that I have received the idea from some really mechanical source—e.g. a talk with the real inventor? To which I answer ‘Yes, if you mean a really detailed idea’: but of course there is another sense in which e.g. a lady novelist ‘has an idea’ of a new airship invented by her hero—in the sense that she attaches some vague meaning to her words, which proves nothing of the sort. So that if anyone asks me whether the idea of God in human minds proves His existence, I can only ask ‘Whose idea?’ The Thistle-Bird’s idea, for instance, clearly not, for it contains nothing whereof his own pride, fear, and malevolence could not easily provide the materials . . .

On the other hand it is arguable that the ‘idea of God’ in some minds does contain, not a mere abstract definition, but a real imaginative perception of goodness and beauty, beyond their own resources: and this not only in minds which already believe in God. It certainly seems to me that the ‘vague something’ which has been suggested to ones mind as desirable, all ones life, in experiences of nature and music and poetry, even in such ostensibly irreligious forms as ‘The land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ in Morris, and which rouses desires that no finite object even pretends to satisfy, can be argued not to be any product of our own minds. Of course I am not suggesting that these vague ideas of something we want and haven’t got, wh. occur in the Pagan period of individuals and of races (hence mythology) are anything more than the first and most rudimentary forms of the ‘idea of God’ . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

22 November 1931

I am sorry I have not been able to write for some weeks. During the week it is out of the question. My ordinary day is as follows. Called (with tea) 7.15. After bath and shave I usually have time for a dozen paces or so in Addison’s walk (at this time of year my stroll exactly hits the sunrise) before chapel at 8. ‘Dean’s Prayers’—which I have before described to you—lasts about quarter of an hour. I then breakfast in common room with the Dean’s Prayers party (i.e. Adam Fox, the chaplain, Benecke and Christie)¹⁴³ which is joined punctually by J. A. Smith at about 8.25. I have usually left the room at about 8.40, and then saunter . . . answer notes etc till 9. From 9 till 1 is all pupils—an unconscionable long stretch for a man to act the gramaphone in. At one Lyddiatt or Maureen is waiting for me with the car and I am carried home.

My afternoons you know. Almost every afternoon as I set out hillwards with my spade, this place gives me all the thrill of novelty. The scurry of the waterfowl as you pass the pond, and the rich smell of autumnal litter as you leave the drive and strike into the little path, are always just as good as new. At 4.45 I am usually driven into College again, to be a gramaphone for two more hours, 5 till 7. At 7.15 comes dinner.

On Tuesday, which is my really shocking day, pupils come to me to read Beowulf at 8.30 and usually stay till about 11, so that when they have gone and I have glanced round the empty glasses and coffee cups and the chairs in the wrong places, I am glad enough to crawl to bed. Other standing engagements are on Thursday when a man called Horwood (another English don)¹⁴⁴ comes and reads Dante with me, every second Monday when the College literary society meets. When you have thrown in the usual irregular dinner engagements you will see that I am lucky when I have two evenings free after dinner.

The only exception to this programme (except of course Saturday when I have no pupils after tea) is Monday when I have no pupils at all. I have to employ a good deal of it in correcting transcripts done by B. Litt. pupils, and other odd jobs. It has also become a regular custom that Tolkien should drop in on me of a Monday morning and drink a glass. This is one of the pleasantest spots in the week. Sometimes we talk English school politics: sometimes we criticise one another’s poems: other days we drift into theology or ‘the state of the nation’: rarely we fly no higher than bawdy and ‘puns’.

What began as an excuse for not writing has developed into a typical diary or hebdomadal compendium. As to the last two week ends, they have both been occupied. The one before last I went to spend a night at Reading with a man called Hugo Dyson—now that I come to think of it, you heard all about him before you left. We had a grand evening. Rare luck to stay with a friend whose wife is so nice that one almost (I can’t say quite) almost regrets the change when he takes you up to his study for serious smoking and for the real midnight talking. You would enjoy Dyson very much for his special period is the late 17th century: he was much intrigued by your library when he was last in our room. He is a most fastidious bookman and made me (that same ocasion) take out one of the big folios from the bottom shelf of the Leeboro bookcase because they were too tightly packed . . .

At the same time he is far from being a dilettante as anyone can be: a burly man, both in mind and body, with the stamp of the war on him, which begins to be a pleasing rarity, at any rate in civilian life. Lest anything should be lacking, he is a Christian and a lover of cats. The Dyson cat is called Mirralls, and is a Viscount . . .

Tutorial necessities have spurred me into reading another Carlyle Past and Present which I recommend: specially the central part about Abbot Samson. Like all Carlyle it gets a little wearisome before the end—as all listening to these shouting authors does. But the pungency and humour and frequent sublimity is tip-top. It is very amusing to read the 19th century editor’s preface (in our Leeborough edition), obviously by a P’daita: pointing out that, of course, the matter of the book is out of date, but it ‘lives by its style’. ‘We can afford to smile at the pessimism with which the sage approached problems that have since vanished like a dream before the onward march etc. etc.’ Actually the book is an indictment of the industrial revolution pointing out precisely the problems we have not solved and prophesying most of the things that have happened since.

I get rather annoyed at this endless talk about books ‘living by the style’. Jeremy Taylor ‘lives by the style in spite of his obsolete theology’; Thos. Browne does the same, in spite of ‘the obsolete cast of his mind’: Ruskin and Carlyle do the same in spite of their ‘obsolete social and political philosophy’. To read histories of literature, one would suppose that the great authors of the past were a sort of chorus of melodious idiots who said, in beautifully cadenced language that black was white and that two and two made five. When one turns to the books themselves—well I, at any rate, find nothing obsolete. The silly things these great men say, were as silly then as they are now: the wise ones are as wise now as they were then . . .

I had to set a paper for School Certificate the other day on the Clarendon Press selections from Cowper—a ridiculous book for schoolboys. 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 . . . 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.

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

Christmas Day 1931

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 in 1912. What do you make of that? Can it date from the Franco Prussian war? Or is it a German student song made in anticipation of Der Tag about 1910? The latter would be an interesting fact for the historian. I never heard the ballad as a whole, but think it is poor—in fact, nasty. Bawdy ought to be outrageous and extravagant . . . must have nothing cruel about it . . . it must not approach anywhere near the pornographic . . .

We had a poorish discourse from Thomas at Matins, but otherwise he has been keeping his end up very well.¹⁴⁵ In one sermon on foreign missions lately he gave an ingenious turn to an old objection. ‘Many of us’ he said ‘have friends who used to live abroad, and had a native Christian as a cook who was unsatisfactory. Well, after all there are a great many unsatisfactory Christians in England too. In fact I’m one myself.’ Another interesting point (in a different sermon) was that we should be glad that the early Christians expected the second coming and the end of the world quite soon: for if they had known that they were founding an organisation for centuries they would certainly have organised it to death: believing that they were merely making provisional arrangements for a year or so, they left it free to live.

How odd it is to turn from Thomas to F. K.¹⁴⁶ He really surpassed himself the other day when he said that he objected to the early chapters of St Luke (the Annunciation particularly) on the ground that they were—indelicate. This leaves one gasping. One goes on re-acting against the conventional modern re-action against nineteenth century prudery, and then suddenly one is held up by a thing like this, and almost pardons all the followers of Lytton Strachey. If you turn up the passage in St Luke the thing becomes even more grotesque. The Middle Ages had a different way with these things. Did I tell you that in one of the Miracle Plays, Joseph is introduced as a typical comic jealous husband, and enters saying ‘This is what comes of marrying a young woman’ . . .

I have bought The Brothers Karamazov but not yet read it with the exception of some special detachable pieces (of which there are many). Thus read it is certainly a great religious and poetical work: whether, as a whole, it will turn out a good, or even a tolerable novel I don’t know. I have not forgotten your admirable Russian novel ‘Alexey Poldorovna lived on a hill. He cried a great deal’ . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from Magdalen College

17 January 1932

It is one of the ‘painful mysteries’ of history that all languages progress from being very particular to being very general. In the first stage they are bursting with meaning, but very cryptic because they are not general enough to show the common element in different things: e.g. you can talk (and therefore think) about all the different kinds of trees but not about Trees. In fact you can’t really reason at all. In their final stage they are admirably clear but are so far away from real things that they really say nothing. As we learn to talk we forget what we have to say. Humanity, from this point of view, is rather like a man coming gradually awake and trying to describe his dreams: as soon as his mind is sufficiently awake for clear description, the thing which was to be described is gone. You see the origin of journalese and of the style in which you write army letters.

Religion and poetry are about the only language in modern Europe—if you can regard them as ‘languages’—which still have traces of the dream in them, still have something to say. Compare ‘Our Father which art in Heaven’ with ‘The supreme being transcends space and time’. The first goes to pieces if you begin to apply the literal meaning to it. How can anything but a sexual animal really be a father? How can it be in the sky? The second falls into no such traps. On the other hand the first really means something, really represents a concrete experience in the minds of those who use it: the second is mere dexterous playing with counters, and once a man has learned the rule he can go on that way for two volumes without really using the words to refer to any concrete fact at all . . .

Most of my recent reading, before term, has been of rather a simple and boyish kind. I re-read The People of the Mist—a tip-top yarn of the sort. If someone would start re-issuing all Rider Haggard at 1/-a volume I would get them all, as a permanent fall-back for purely recreational reading. Then I read The Wood Beyond the World—with some regret that this leaves me no more Wm Morris prose romances to read (except Child Christopher wh. is an adaptation of a mediaeval poem already known to me and therefore hardly counts). I wish he had written a hundred of them! I should like to have the knowledge of a new romance always waiting for me the next time I am sick or sorry and want a real treat . . .

While at Cambridge (staying, as I foretold you in a posh hotel, at the expense of the Board. Four of us had to hold an examiners meeting one evening, and accordingly, just like the heroes of a romance, called for fire, lights, and a bottle of claret in a private room. All that was lacking was to have prefaced the order by tweaking the landlord’s nose with a ‘Hark’ee, rascal!’ This was in the University Arms which perhaps you know)—while in Cambridge, or rather on my long, slow, solitary, first class journey there and back through fields white with frost—I read Pater’s Marius the Epicurean. This is the best specimen extant of the Epicurean-aesthetic business: which one wrongs by reading it in its inferior practitioners such as George Moore and Oscar Wilde. As you probably know it is a novel—or, since the story is so slight, a faintly narrative causerie—laid in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. The interesting thing is, that being a really consistent aesthete, he has to bring in the early Christians favourably because the flavour of the early Church—the new music, the humility, the chastity, the sense of order and quiet decorum—appeal to him aesthetically. It is doubtful if he sees that he can only have it in by blowing to bits the whole Epicurean basis of his outlook—so that aestheticism, honestly followed, refutes itself by leading him to something that will put aestheticism in its place—and Pater’s position is therefore, in the long run, all nonsense. But it is [a] very beautiful book . . . I should try it if it is in your library. Gad! How it would have bowled one over at eighteen. One would be only just beginning to recover now . . .

If your idea of reading Descartes holds, begin with the Discourse on Method. This is in biographical form and is on the border-land between philosophy proper and what might be called the ‘history of intellectual manners’. But I’m not at all sure that a man so steeped in the XVIIth century as you would not find his natural starting point in Boethius—I suppose ‘Boece’ is as common in France at that time as he was in England? As he was translated about once a century into every civilised language, you would have no difficulty in finding a well flavoured version . . .

How ones range of interests grows! Do you find a sort of double process going on with relation to books—that while the number of subjects one wants to read is increasing, the number of books on each which you find worth reading steadily decreases. Already in your own corner of French history you have reached the point at which you know that most of the books published will be merely re-hashes, but in revenge you are reading Vaughan and thinking of reading Taylor. Ten years ago you would have read eight books on your period (getting only what the one book behind those eight would have given you) and left Vaughan and Taylor out of account . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from Magdalen College (Warren was in Shanghai and possibly in danger from the Japanese attack on the Chinese part of that city.)

21 February 1932

I have had your cheering letter of Jan 14th—‘cheering’ for giving one some conversation with you, though of course it bears not at all on the source of anxiety. I must confess I have imbibed enough of that rather specially shabby superstition which cries ‘Touch wood’ etc, to shudder when I read your proposals about walks in Ulster etc. In fact I have two unpleasantly contrasted pictures in my mind. One ‘features’ the two Pigibudda with packs and sticks de-training into the sudden stillness of the moors at Parkmore: the other is of you progressing from the Bund to Gt Western Rd with an eye cocked skyward, just in the old French manner, curse it, and ducking at the old Who-o-o-o-p—Bang!

Like Boswell, on that perilous crossing in the Hebrides, I ‘at last took refuge in piety: but was much embarrassed by the various objections which have been raised against the doctrine of special providences’. Unfortunately I have not at hand the work of Dr Ogden in which Boswell found this difficulty solved.

I suppose the solution lies in pointing out that the efficacy of prayer is, at any rate no more of a problem then the efficacy of all human acts. i.e. if you say ‘It is useless to pray because Providence already knows what is best and will certainly do it’, then why is it not equally useless (and for the same reason) to try to alter the course of events in any way whatever—to ask for the salt or book your seat in a train? . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from The Kilns

20 March 1932

Next to the good news from China, the best thing that has happened to me lately is to have assisted at such a scene in the Magdalen smoking room as rarely falls one’s way. The Senior Parrot—that perfectly ape-faced man whom I have probably pointed out to you—was seated on the padded fender with his back to the fire, bending down to read a paper, and thus leaving a tunnel shaped aperture between his collar and the nape of his neck [designated ‘P’ in a drawing of the man]. A few yards in front of him stood MacFarlane. Let MacFarlane now light a cigarette and wave the match to and fro in the air to extinguish it. And let the match be either not wholly extinguished or so recently extinguished that no fall of temperature in the wood has occurred. Let M. then fling the match towards the fire in such a way that it follows the dotted line and enters the aperture at P with the most unerring accuracy. For a space of time which must have been infinitesimal, but which seemed long to us as we watched in the perfect silence which this very interesting experiment so naturally demanded, the Senior Parrot, alone ignorant of his fate, continued absorbed in the football results. His body then rose in a vertical line from the fender, without apparent muscular effort, as though propelled by a powerful spring under his bottom. Re-alighting on his feet he betook himself to a rapid movement of the hands with the apparent intention of applying them to every part of his back and buttock in the quickest possible succession: accompanying this exercise with the distention of the cheeks and a blowing noise. After which, exclaiming (to me) in a very heightened voice ‘It isn’t so bloody funny’ he darted from the room.

The learned Dr Hope (that little dark, mentally dull, but very decent demi-butty who breakfasted with you and me)¹⁴⁷ who alone had watched the experiment with perfect gravity, at this stage, remarked placidly to the company in general, ‘Well, well, the match will have gone out by now’, and returned to his periodical—But the luck of it! How many shots would a man have taken before he succeeded in throwing a match into that tiny aperture if he had been trying?

You asked Minto in a recent letter about this Kenchew man. As a suitor he shows deplorable tendency to hang fire, and I fancy the whole thing will come to nothing. (Ah there won’t be any proposal): as a character, however, he is worth describing, or seems so to me because I had to go for a walk with him. He is a ladylike little man of about fifty, and is toa-tee that ‘sensible, well-informed man’ with whom Lamb dreaded to be left alone.

My troubles began at once. It seemed good to him to take a bus to the Station and start our walk along a sort of scrubby path between a factory and a greasy strip of water—a walk, in fact, which was as good a reproduction as Oxford could afford of our old Sunday morning ‘around the river bank’. I blundered at once by referring to the water as a canal. ‘Oh—could it be possible that I didn’t know it was the Thames? I must be joking. Perhaps I was not a walker?’ I foolishly said that I was. He gave me an account of his favourite walks; with a liberal use of the word ‘picturesque’. He then called my attention to the fact that the river was unusually low (how the devil did he know that?) and would like to know how I explained it. I scored a complete Plough, and was told how he explained it.

By this time we were out in Port Meadow, and a wide prospect opened before him. A number of hills and church spires required to be identified, together with their ‘picturesque’, mineral, or chronological details. A good many problems arose, and again I did very badly. As his map, though constantly brought out, was a geological map, it did not help us much. A conversation on weather followed, and seemed to offer an escape from unmitigated fact. The escape, however, was quite illusory, and my claim to be rather fond of nearly all sorts of weather was received with the stunning information that psychologists detected the same trait in children and lunatics.

Anxious to turn my attention from this unpleasing fact, he begged my opinion of various changes which had recently been made in the river: indeed every single lock, bridge, and stile for three mortal miles had apparently been radically altered in the last few months. As I had never seen any of the places before (‘But I thought you said you were a walker . . .’) this bowled me middle stump again. The removal of a weir gave us particular trouble. He could not conceive how it had been done. What did I think? And then, just as I was recovering from this fresh disgrace, and hoping that the infernal weir was done with, I found that the problem of how it had been removed was being raised only as the preliminary to the still more intricate problem of why it had been removed. (My feelings were those expressed by Macfarlane at dinner one night last term, in an answer to someone’s question. ‘Yes. He is studying the rhythms of mediaeval Latin prose, and it is a very curious and interesting subject, but it doesn’t interest me.’) For a mile or so after the weir we got on famously, for Kenchew began ‘I was once passing this very spot or, no, let me see—perhaps it was a little further on—no! It was exactly here—I remember that very tree—when a very remarkable experience, really remarkable in a small way, happened to me.’ The experience remarkable in a small way, with the aid of a judicious question or two on my part, was bidding fair to last out the length of the walk, when we had the horrible misfortune of passing a paper mill (You see, by the bye, what a jolly walk it was even apart from the company!). Not only a paper mill but the paper mill of the Clarendon Press. ‘Of course I had been over it. No? Really etc.’ (The great attraction was that you could get an electric shock.)

But I must stop my account of this deplorable walk somewhere. It was the same all through—sheer information. Time after time I attempted to get away from the torrent of isolated, particular facts: but anything tending to opinion, or discussion, to fancy, to ideas, even to putting some of his infernal facts together and making something out of them—anything like that was received in blank silence. Once, while he was telling me the legendary foundation of a church, I had a faint hope that we might get onto history: but it turned out that his knowledge was derived from an Edwardian Oxford pageant. Need I add that he is a scientist? A geographer, to be exact. And now that I come to think of it he is exactly what one would have expected a geographer to be. But I mustn’t give you too black an impression of him. He is kind, and really courteous (you know the rare quality I mean) and a gentleman. I imagine he is what women call ‘Such an interesting man. And so clever’ . . .

TO HIS BROTHER: from Magdalen College

8 April 1932

I wonder can you imagine how reassuring your bit about Spenser is to me who spend my time trying to get unwilling hobble-de-hoys to read poetry at all? One begins to wonder whether literature is not, after all, a failure. Then comes your account of the Faerie Queene on your office table, and one remembers that all the professed ‘students of literature’ don’t matter a rap, and that the whole thing goes on, unconcerned by the fluctuations of the kind of ‘taste’ that gets itself printed, living from generation to generation in the minds of the few disinterested people who sit down alone and read what they like and find that it turns out to be just the thing that every one has liked since they were written. I agree with all you say about it, except about the distinctions of characters. The next time I dip in it I shall keep my weather eye on them. It would be quite in accord with all ones experience to find out one day that the usual critical view (i.e. that Spenser has no characters) was all nonsense . . .

By the way, I most fully agree with you about ‘the lips being invited to share the banquet’ in poetry, and always ‘mouth’ it while I read, though not in a way that would be audible to other people in the room. (Hence the excellent habit which I once formed but have since lost, of not smoking while reading a poem.) I look upon this ‘mouthing’ as an infallible mark of those who really like poetry. Depend upon it, the man who reads verses in any other way, is after ‘noble thoughts’ or ‘philosophy’ (in the revolting sense given to that word by Browning societies and Aunt Lily) or social history, or something of the kind, not poetry.

To go back to Spenser—the battles are a bore . . .

The whole puzzle about Christianity in non-European countries is very difficult . . . Sometimes, relying on his remark ‘Other sheep I have that are not of this fold’ I have played with the idea that Christianity was never intended for Asia—even that Buddha is the form in which Christ appears to the Eastern mind. But I don’t think this will really work. When I have tried to rule out all my prejudices I still can’t help thinking that the Christian world is (partially) ‘saved’ in a sense in which the East is not. We may be hypocrites, but there is a sort of unashamed and reigning iniquity of temple prostitution and infanticide and torture and political corruption and obscene imagination in the East, which really does suggest that they are off the rails—that some necessary part of the human machine, restored to us, is still missing with them . . . For some reason which we cannot find out they are still living in the B.C. period (as there are African tribes still living in the stone-age) and it is apparently not intended that they should yet emerge from it . . .