TO HIS FATHER (LP IX: 260–2):

[Magdalen College]

July 29th. [1927]

My dear Papy,

I was glad to hear from you. A letter from Arthur some time ago had let me know that you were still suffering from the old complaint and I was therefore more pleased to hear that there was at least some relief than disappointed to hear it was not greater. ⁵⁵ I am a little surprised at your response to the programme of being ‘boiled in mud’. Neither of us of course would choose Harrogate or any similar place for pleasure: that may be taken as a starting point to any discussion on the subject–tho’, I repeat, the unpleasantness must not be exaggerated. (Damme Sir, are we to be frightened of some retired colonels and rich old maids?) I suggested it purely and simply on medical grounds and your reply strikes me rather as if I had said to a man with toothache ‘Why not go to a dentist?’ and he had answered ‘You’re quite right–I will go out. But I won’t go to a dentist. I’ll go and get fitted for a new pair of boots.’ However, I am so pleased at your agreement on the main issue, that of going away, that I must not press the other too hard. It would be only reasonable to be guided by Joey in this matter. If he has any faith in mud baths etc., surely we can manage to combine the business with pleasure, even on the site of the mud baths. I am delighted to hear that you have changed your Doctor at last. ⁵⁶ As for Joey–after all I may as well be frank. As a matter of cool judgement, no doubt, I do disapprove his behaviour during the war: on the other hand, like all us Celts, I am a born rhetorician, one who finds pleasure in the forcible emotions independently of their grounds and even to the extent to which they are felt at any time save the moment of speaking. Like the obscure poet whom I saw mentioned in the local newspaper at Caerleon, I love to ‘ride like a cork on the ocean of eloquence’: and whenever you hear me inveighgling in ‘Ercles vein’ you must take this into account. A tirade against war shirkers is an exhilarating after dinner exercise: but while not wholly unreal it implies no such heartfelt animosity as would jibb at Joey’s attendance even on myself. Certainly if the choice is between Squeaky and Joey one can’t hesitate. I hope you will commit yourself to the ‘blood specialist’s’ hands from this day forth and profit by it.

I am just in the few days lull between my two ‘fittes’ of summer examining. I have finished reading the boys’ answers in Oxford, and next week I go to Cambridge for the pleasanter (and more profitable) business of awarding. I had rather a heavy dose of it this time, and the strain took the form of giving me neuralgia. At least my dentist, after striking probes into me, punching me in the face, and knocking my teeth with small hammers–accompanied with the blatantly impertinent question ‘Does that hurt?’ (to which the proper reply seems to be a sharp return blow at his jaw with the words ‘Yes, just like that’)–my dentist I say, assured me that there was nothing wrong with my teeth and therefore it must be neuralgia. I managed in spite of it to sleep pretty well by dint of soaking my feet in water as hot as I could stand, immediately before going to bed. This is an excellent plan if you have to work right up to bedtime and your head is in a whirl, as it draws the blood away to the extremities and makes you stop thinking.

My labours were rewarded by some good things from the candidates (who are school boys under sixteen). The definition of a Genie as ‘an oriental spirit inhabiting bottles and buttons and rings’ is a rather rare example of a correct answer which is funny. ‘A Censer is one who incenses people’ is more of the familiar type. In answer to a question from a paper on Guy Mannering ‘Would you have liked Colonel Mannering as a father? Support your answer by an account of his behaviour to Julia’, one youth sagely replied that he would. It is true that Mannering was cold, suspicious, autocratic etc., ‘but he was very rich and I think he would have made an excellent father’. That boy should be sent to the City at once: he has the single eye. But the best of all came from a paper (set by me) on Macbeth.

Question: Give the context of, ‘Throw physic to the dogs, I’ll none of it.’ ⁵⁷

Answer: ‘Macbeth said these words near the end of the play. He was feeling uneasy before the battle and Seyton told him he ought to take some medicine.’

It is very interesting to speculate what would have happened if Seyton had done this. Would the line have run ‘Throw Seyton to the dogs, I’ll none of him.’ Yet, incredible as the mistake may seem, it was repeated (of course with small variations) in some fifteen or twenty papers. In one, Seyton suggested the dose not only for Macbeth but for his soldiers as well.

As I have spent ten days or so glued to my table at this task I have naturally not much news. Sambo, after asking for Dymer and being sent a copy, has made neither comment on it or acknowledgment of the gift. I suppose he is waiting to read it in his holidays, or else has forgotten all about [it]. The other hypothesis–that his feelings about it were ‘too deep for words’ is rendered improbable because I have dined with the Warrens since: so at least he has decided not to cut the acquaintance over the head of it.

Now let me see if anything else has a curious, but quite independant parallel to your ‘but there are other reasons’ story. A Scotchman, formerly a Fellow of this College, came to dine, and rallied old Brightman (with whom I suppose he had had theological arguments in the old days) by saying ‘Well Brightman, I suppose ye’re still as ready to bur-r-rn me as ye always were’. To which Brightman, ignoring the main question as too obvious for an explicit answer, replied meditatively ‘You’re a Scotchman amongst other things’.

My only other recent adventure was a purely literary one–that of quite accidentally picking up The Woman in White ⁵⁸ and reading it: a book of course now practically unknown to anyone under forty. I thought it extremely good of its kind, and not a bad kind. But what spacious days those were! The characters, or at least all the wicked ones, flame in jewels and the hero is so poor in one place that he actually travels second class on the railway. I have decided to model my behaviour for the future (socially I mean, not morally) on that of Count Fosco, but without the canaries and the white mice.

Another curious thing is the elaborate descriptions of male beauty, which I hardly remember to have seen since Elizabethan poetry: or do the ‘noble brow, the silky beard’ and the ‘Manly beauty’ still flourish in fiction which I don’t happen to have read? Of course only third rate people write that kind of novel now, whereas Wilkie Collins was clearly a man of genius: and there is a good deal to be said for his point of view (expressed in the preface) that the first business of a novel is to tell a story, and that characters etc. come second. Aristotle thought the same about tragedy.

Warnie seems to be having a rotten time. ⁵⁹ The only consolation seems to be that (as far as one can judge from the papers) things look like clearing up in China and he may be sent back sooner than we expected. I shall be pretty busy all August, but will get across as soon as I can in September. I hope we shall have a famous jaunt. I am going bald at a prodigious rate and in a few years time you will have a better head of hair than either of your sons. What sort of a wig would you recommend?

your loving son,

Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP IX: 264–5):

Magdalen.

Aug. 12th [1927]

My dear P.,

So sorry–I find I forgot to send the enclosed with my last letter. I am back from Cambridge, where I had the usual unwholesome combination of high living (we are fed splendidly, both food and drink being free) and sedentary occupation.

I heard a rather impressive thing while I was there. While we were at work one morning, some one came in and informed my Cambridge colleague of the death of a common friend. When the other had gone, my friend told me the story. Mr—(I forget the name) was a Fellow of a Cambridge College. Shortly before the war his pancreas went badly out of order, and finally ceased to work at all. The ordinary doctors could do little for him: but as he was a rather distinguished bio-chemist, and lived among bio-chemists, he managed to get along somehow on the experiments that he and his circle tried on him: but he was subject to frequent attacks and (what worried him the most) could never do more than about two hours work a day. Three weeks ago one of his bad turns came on. Whereupon he said to his doctor, ‘Look here doctor, would it make any difference to you professionally if a patient of yours chose to die of starvation?’ The Doctor (who must have been an unusual man) said it would not. The patient immediately put his plan into action and from that moment no food passed his lips. He was constantly visited by his friends and refused to discuss his own situation, while indulging with all his former spirit in science, politics, and banter–banter of the rather schoolboyish quite unintellectual type which is so common in England. My colleague’s informant had been to see him a few days ago: and the last words of the patient (now almost a skeleton) had been ‘Well bye bye–thank the Lord I shall never have to be your partner at Bridge again!’ There is a story in Pliny’s letters of a Roman ⁶⁰ who chose exactly the same plan in similar circumstances: but he seems to have spent his last hours in rhetorical ‘last words’ and Stoic platitudes about contempt of death. Perhaps I shouldn’t say ‘platitudes’: the Roman was probably quite sincere. But the difference of temperament strikes one.

The other story I heard at Cambridge was very funny tho’ very blasphemous. However, as it was told to me in the presence of an Archdeacon by a B.D., two laymen may be excused for enjoying it. It is told of Phelps the Provost of Oriel, ⁶¹ but will do equally well for anyone who ‘has a good conceit of himself’. Phelps dreamed that he had died and reached the gate of heaven. Here a resplendent being, bowing obsequiously, said ‘Very pleased to see you, Mr Provost I’m sure. Right straight on up the stairs.’ At the top of the stairs a much more resplendent being, respectful rather than obsequious, met him. ‘Ah, Provost, delighted to see you. Just turn to your right.’ Following these directions he suddenly found himself in front of a throne in a blaze of light. ‘Why my dear Phelps’ exclaimed the Occupant. ‘This is delightful’, then rising ‘Why–bless me–I beg your pardon–I’m afraid I’ve got your chair!’

Have you any views as to where you and I shd. go, if we don’t get boiled in mud? I had thought of N. Wales, some of the mountainous places. But possibly that wd. be too relaxing, and too wet in September.

your loving son,

Jack

 

P.S. The blots on this page are not my tears–it rained on to my table while I was away at lunch.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

The Folly,

Perranporth,

Cornwall.

Aug 24th [1927]

My dear Arthur,

A thousand apologies. We have come down here for a bit to set us all up, specially Minto, and you can imagine that the almost nomadic grandeur of family packing and family travelling, combined with the pleasant, yet crowding, picnic life we are now leading, has left me little liesure for writing. Still, I certainly ought to have let you have a line if only to acknowledge the cheque, and am very sorry that I did not. Very many thanks: but I still protest that it is an excessive gift from poor you to me. However, if you are going to challenge me to a duel in case I return it again, I will see what I can do towards spending it. Again, many many thanks.

As to showing my father the play. I think his criticism, tho’ formal, is valuable on questions of style for a speech or essay or the narrative parts of a novel. Whether it wd. be much use for dialogue, I am hardly prepared to say. The general philosophy and meaning and all that, would not, I think, interest him, nor would he take very much trouble to understand it. He would assure you that he knew exactly what you meant and then substitute something of his own: probably identifying your view with some very superficially similar view expressed in some book he had read, in the words ‘Sure this is the old business of so-and-so.’ I fancy, however, he wd. have a pretty good eye for theatrical effect, specially on the humorous side. I am afraid I cannot be much more conclusive, and you must decide for yourself. After all you know his literary conversation nearly as well as I do. One thing you must be warned of. If he thinks the whole thing bosh he will be much too kind to tell you so: and at the same time he is habitually rather contemptuous of local literary endeavours. It would be hard for you to excite his admiration, and yet he will be determined not to hurt you.

I expect to be home on the 5th of September–leaving the others here. The doctor thought Minto ought to get away–she is much better and really (but touch wood!) has made a remarkable escape from the trouble that threatened her. We are having a delightful time and the best surf bathing I’ve had since our old days at Portsalon. As I write I look out on a deep blue sea and a golden sand, divided by twenty yards of pure white foam. Of course you won’t mention at home that I am not in Oxford.

I am busy all morning at rather dull and mechanical work, and fit in more at odd times when I can. Looking forward to seeing you again, & with many thanks.

Yrs

Jack

 

In his letter of 7 July 1927 (LP IX: 248–52) Warnie told his brother that since he’d been in China Colonel Badcock had

succeeded in ‘breaking’ two Majors, a Captain, and a Subaltern: when I say ‘breaking’ I do not mean that they have been cashiered, but that they are being sent home with reports that they are inefficient…This reign of terror under which we live does not make existence in the tropics any pleasanter. I personally am sufficiently convinced of the reality of our danger to intend warning the O.A.B. that I do not think I can last out the year and that I expect to be home and workless by December.

Jack and Mr Lewis did not know it yet, but Warnie left the hospital in Kowloon on 1 September after being transferred to the convalescent camp at Wei-Hei-Wei in northern China. He and other patients sailed to Shanghai, arriving there on 4 September and from there they travelled on to Wei-Hei-Wei which they reached on 7 September.

A serious consideration for Warnie was that if he remained and did foreign service for three years he would not have to go abroad for another six years. On the other hand, if he returned home now his stay in China would not count as part of the necessary period abroad, and it would all have to be done again some other time. Before he went to Wei-Hei-Wei, Colonel Badcock told him of a vacancy coming up in the Army Service Corps in Hong Kong. Offered the post, Warnie accepted it, to discover later that while he was convalescing in the north, the 15th Infantry Brigade broke up and Colonel Badcock and one of the regiments returned to England.

TO HIS BROTHER (LP IX: 270–6):

[Perranporth,

Cornwall]

3 September [1927]

My dear W.,

Many thanks for your letter describing the beastliness of the Colonel and the missionary’s wife, the beauty of bathing, and the demonology of the Chinese. ⁶² I think it is always very difficult to ‘evaluate’ these superstitions–I mean to gauge the amount of barbarism and stupidity which they imply in those who believe in them. What exactly does the fact that English dinner parties have been ruined by having thirteen at table prove about English civilization? The idea however of running across in front of a car in order to get your follower squashed, is certainly immense: I cannot decide whether it argues a great sense of humour or a great absence of humour. The colonel nuisance has all my sympathy: that sort of thing, or the more or less constant danger of it, is the snag which wd. make a military life intolerable to me, and it is chiefly for the escape from that that I congratulate myself on having ceased to be a boy.

I confess I can’t look at the prospect you suggest (I hope not very seriously) without complete dismay. A recrudescence in middle life of the ‘What are you going to be’ menace, continued through months of residence at Leeborough–a continual urgence of the desirability of ‘going into’ anything that would remove you to that undiscovered country ‘the colonies’–this would be extremely unpleasant. Still, with your ‘little bit of savings’ to spend on luxuries, you could always hope to grow a Leeborough skin (as we did in the old days) wh. would render you insensible to diatribes. The old expedient of just sitting there with ‘that wooden face’ and going on with your books would have to come into play again: and perhaps the new expedient of replying (to the dear old question) ‘a pudaita’ might now be actually put into practice. One pictures the problem of a career ceasing to be a practical problem at all and becoming merely a periodical outlet for the OAB’s spleen–a storm at whose appearance one philosophically buttoned up the collar and raised the umbrella. (Another possible repartee that occurs is ‘What are you going to be?’–‘A blue gentleman’).

Or perhaps it would be better for you to put the whole thing on a different footing from the start and take up the position of the dominant and adult son to the oppressed ‘Pa’ and always to anticipate the storm by taking your place on the hearthrug with legs astride and hands in pockets and bellowing ‘Pa! You and I had better understand one another’.

It is true that the financial framework of the scene does not at once adapt itself to such treatment: but as Johnson says of Pastoral Poetry, the artist must use his skill in keeping out of sight those parts of his subject which are mean and disgusting. ⁶³ However I had better beware as you say of the ‘selection of two presents’ and not joke too long about a subject which may (tho’ I trust the possibility is very remote) have become more serious by the time this letter reaches you.

Now for my own history. My period of examining passed over with its usual accompaniment of neuralgia and oaths, relieved by the one excellent boy who defined ‘a genie’ correctly, yet more than correctly, as ‘an eastern spirit inhabiting bottles and buttons and rings’. Pretty good for a boy. I was also pleased with a youth who, being asked to write a letter to a friend recommending Guy Mannering, wrote to his brother recommending it and saying ‘I think you wd. be interested in the character of Colonel Mannering, he is so like our father’: and then later in a paper on Guy Mannering in which I had set the question ‘Would you have liked Colonel Mannering as a father?’–illustrate your answer etc.–began decisively ‘I would not have liked Colonel Mannering as a father in the least’.

Then came my usual week at Cambridge, where, despite long hours I revisited King’s College Chapel, sauntered round the Backs, and bathed in the Cam, under a pearl-coloured sky simmering with summer river haze from morning till twilight. Even the hours of work passed not disagreeably in the company of my very vulgar and uneducated but not unpleasant and amusing Cambridge colleague. You shd. have heard us going over the work of a female examiner called Helen Laybourne who was v. bad and gave us a lot of trouble, chanting with one voice full of meaning ‘I would I were where Helen lies’. ⁶⁴

I returned from Cambridge and almost immediately set out with Minto, Maureen, Florence de Forest and Baron Papworth, for Perranporth (Cornwall) where I am now writing. On Sunday (it is now Friday) I set out for P’daitaheim: whether to spend my days interminably strolling in the cemetery-like walks of a hydro garden or drinking two o’clock buckets of sherry in the study, I don’t yet know: for of course it is still quite uncertain whether he can be got to move or not.

In the mean time I sit looking out on a tawny strip of sand (four miles of it in length but I can’t see all from here) and the bluest shiningest sea that a home dweller like me has ever seen–the one divided from the other by about twenty yards of Chinese white varied with something like champagne–row after row of full Atlantic rollers. Beyond them the sea is unstained with a single fleck of foam, except on the point (about three miles half right from where I sit) and there one sees the white go perpendicularly up the rocks. Except the fishing fleet which comes and goes in the offing every three days there is hardly a boat to be seen from this place: once or twice from the highest cliffs I have seen a steamer, usually at sunset, sitting apparently immovable against the end of the world.

Of course there is a drawback to Cornwall. All along this coast the bathing is a death trap except at full tide, which means that we are reduced to one bathe a day (for who, in real life, can bathe at 6 a.m. and 6.20 p.m.) when, for the excellence of it, one would willing (like Wordsworth) ‘make one long bathing of a summer’s day’. ⁶⁵ I have never had such surf bathing in my life: not so much here as at St. Agnes’ Cove, a few miles S.W., where we go nearly every day. When you have got in up to your belly you get the waves already broken–a solid wall of foam about a foot and a half high (above the level water this side) and about ten feet broad. Then when you have put down your head with a smack, and spluttered through this, you get to business. They come in at places, where you’re in your depth between the waves, far higher than a man. They are kindly creatures if taken the right way, and I daily slide up into hollowing breakers which, at first, I would have thought dangerous. The excitement is to guess when they will break. You see the bright bottle green mass of water before you and you bob over it like a floating gull and it keeps its thunders till it is behind you. Usually it crashes just before you reach the top and then you go hurtling back, kicking and spitting, and stand up finally far inland with spent water swimming round your ankles. But when you actually get it in the break, anything may happen. Usually you go far under and if you try to swim your arms are worked rapidly round and round–the movements in the root of a wave being apparently circular. The other day however, turning my back rapidly to the breaking wave, I had the rather remarkable experience of having my head actually in the hollow cave under the curl (which has been seen so often from the outside): so that I saw a second of shining water before my still unwetted face, much like a tourist passing between rock and water under Niagara.

My pen has run away with me thus far before I recall that you also have been bathing, and that you even take the wind out of my sails in advance by observing that a falling wave is the same all the world over. We have therefore studiously described to each other the one element in our experiences which is common to us both. However I think the interest of any description is great in proportion to the extent to wh. (Lord–what a sentence) one already knows the thing described: i.e. the less it is needed the more one is prepared to listen to it.

Baron Papworth by the sea has removed for ever the reproach of cowardice. As long as only the girls and I are in he contents himself with galloping to and fro in the inch of water where the waves have retreated, barking at the top of his voice. Then when Minto goes in a moment later, he is to be seen steadily swimming after her, ploughing through every wave like a tramp, his hair all back from his nose, showing how thin and rapier muzzled he is and indeed making him look rather like a torpedo or an ocean going ant eater. Nothing will stop him, tho’ swamped and scuttled times without number. This heroic practice makes him much sweeter than your nose will remember him: except when its beneficial effects are frustrated by the fact that he finds sea water acts on him as a violent purgative. The only other things I have to say about the sea proper are (1) That I quite agree that to lose the sound of a sea bathe wd. be to lose a great deal of the delight, (b) that Florence, in her bathing things, is an almost perfect figure of the plumper type.

As to Cornwall itself: the basic formula is ‘The County Down country plus the Antrim Coast’. The resemblance of the interior to Co. Down is quite remarkable: the same white cottages, the crumbling dry stone walls, the patchy fields, small and rather oddly shaped, and the bleak colouring. But when you have got this well into your mind’s eye you must proceed to moderate it a bit. First of all, magnify the hills to about the Antrim size, while keeping them in the main strictly to the Co. Down quality. That is, tho’ big, they are not long gaunt bluish hogbacks, but all criss cross, rounded, and higgledypiggildy. If Co. Down was described (Kelsie says it was) as ‘eggs in a basket’, this is turkey’s eggs in a basket. Then you must add (what is rare in Down) masses of heather and gorse, not crowning the hills which would give them the mountain look, but most often on the sides of valleys where they are steep: and when you reach the valleys themselves, specially the narrower ones, you may give up the Co. Down idea altogether.

Here an utterly different country meets you, a richness like the Devonshire combes, a hot labyrinth of lanes beside streams that flow glass clear over red and yellow stones, lanes very deep sunken and full of ferns, with occasional sub-tropical things (I have not seen a palm but they grow here) lanes that go through absolute tunnels of vegetation, dank and green, buzzing with bees and darted through by huge dragon flies. The grasshoppers are noisier than I ever heard them, and sing long after sunset. If you can picture these winding valley-strips of a more luxurious and exotic world inconsequently trickling (each with a lovely stream) though the bottom of a Co. Down landscape you will get some idea of this wonderful place.

Yet the most characteristic feature is still untold–and one wh. I am afraid will go far to render the rest unpicturable. I have been speaking of the narrower valleys–those shaped like the human anal cavity. But now suppose you have just come to the brink of a broader, more saucer like depression. Here you are almost sure to find heathery sides sloping down to a floor of flat grey stones and clay (just what one imagines lava ground like) with here and there a very old slag heap: a sort of great raw gash of abandoned industrialism with the engine house of a mine (always like this but of course in very various stages of decay) brooding over an odd litter of miscellaneous buildings that have long been quarries to the neighborhood, of things like mill wheels idly suspended, of artificial oblong pools with a last green stagnant trickle on the floor of–Lord knows what! You can’t walk a mile without coming to a mine: there are rather more in the valleys than on the hills: but every hill-horizon too, shows three to six variations of the engine house theme, the high tower like building and the slightly higher stumpy chimney. Silhouetted against the sky far off, as I see it every night, it has the exact appearance of a giant’s armchair. The deserted mines outnumber those at work almost as the dead outnumber the living. Of course it is only the comparatively modern ones that are marked by engine house, or still unvegetated slag.

One comes across other relics that may be Elizabethan, Saxon, Roman, or even British: sometimes a shaggy low lintelled doorway opening inconsequently into the side of a hill, where only one man cd. enter at a time, and, frankly, nothing would induce me to be that one: often, miles from anywhere, one finds a reddish stream coming out of such a doorway and perhaps very old timbers still making the door posts. Or else, you are plodding along on the heathery slope of a valley and suddenly see a place, about the size of Hillsboro’s drawing room, fenced (or stone walled) about. Go nearer and you see a plain round hole: its sides, of green or red and usually dripping rock, are visible for twenty feet or so and then disappear into darkness. If you throw a fair sized stone down you hear it go ‘BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-bang-bang’ with decreasing noise from side to side on its journey down: but you never hear any final noise to that journey. The ‘bangs’ just get less and less and fade insensibly to nothing. Few ideas give me (as the 18th century wd. have said) such ‘pleasing horror’ as that of the bottom of the shaft in a mine abandoned, say, about the year the Armada was defeated. A working mine would be bad enough.

By the bye there is one more modification in the original ‘Down-and-Antrim’ scheme–namely that, owing to mineral wealth the sea cliffs are nearly all red: solid rock of course and beaten into every spire and arch of ruinous architecture, but red as garden clay. If you take all this that I have tried to describe and put over it a bluer sky, and round it a bluer ‘poster’ sea than Ireland ever dreamt of, you will have the best I can do for you about Cornwall: but nothing can describe the feeling with which, from brooding over the deserted mine shaft and throwing your stone down it, you suddenly return (as if you yourself had been in a deadly place) to the riot of sunshine and gorse and birds and wind about you. I think even the Baron feels those holes in the ground to be rather awful.

The only Cornish city I have been to is Truro. The town is an ordinary little market town, much less pleasing than any in the ‘homely’ counties between Morlockheim and the West Country: in fact so true is the Co. Down element in my Cornish recipe that Truro has more than a flavour of Newtownards about it. The Cathedral is the poorest, almost, that I have ever seen. This is a rough idea of it: a very tall square central tower supporting a spire, and four narrow towers or pinnacles of the same sort at the four corners, but all so thin in proportion to their height that it gives the impression of one of those buildings that figure on the lid of a child’s box of bricks and for the construction of wh., no sensible child has ever used the bricks.

The history of this abortion is a painful mystery to me. The West Front is adorned with statues of Edward VII and of obviously Victorian and Edwardian prelates, and it appears to be of exactly the same date as the rest–the whole thing being of one texture, a rather ugly and very new looking pale stone, cut small, and the joinings between the blocks aggressively black and staring. On the other hand the interior contains a 16th century monument (none earlier so far as I could see). Do you suppose the monument is the sole survivor of a small old cathedral which was replaced wholesale by a contractor in the reign of the late King? Anyway, the whole thing is a deplorable business (except the height of the interior which has a fine effect) and it is made worse by the fact that one of the cupolas is bright green copper coloured–the rest all pale stone.

The main object of my visit was to get a book, having finished Martin Chuzzlewit which I brought down. And here let me digress for a moment to advise you v. strongly to make one more effort with Dickens and make it on Martin Chuzzlewit if only for the sake of an account of 19th century America. In loathing for America you will at last find what you and Dickens have in common. For sheer cruelty and uproarious farce with a horrid essential truth (every American without exception whom Martin meets is first introduced to him as ‘one of the most remarkable men in our country, sir’) ⁶⁶ it beats everything. Of course to enjoy it, or any other Dickens, you must get rid of all idea of realism–as much as in approaching William Morris or the music hall. In fact I should say he is the good thing of which the grand Xmas panto. is the degeneration and abuse: broadly typical sentiment, only rarely intolerable if taken in a jolly after dinner pantomime mood, and broadly effective ‘comics’: only all done by a genius, so that they become mythological. Just try Mr Tigg, the blue gentleman in Martin Chuzzlewit. You will never meet a blue gentleman like him: and certainly Turner’s mot ‘Don’t you wish you could?’ wd. here be answered by a very decided ‘No’. But he is what every blue gentlemen is trying to be–a sort of eternal Platonic form of blue gentleman. But this is all by the way.

I had assumed that as Truro was a cathedral city, it must have at least a clerical intelligentsia: and if that, a decent bookshop. It appeared to have only a Smith’s and a faded looking place that seemed half a news agents. At the door of this I stopped an elderly parson and asked him whether this and Smith were the only two booksellers. He said they were: then a few moments later came back walking on tip toes as some parsons do, and buzzed softly in my ear (he had a beard) ‘There is an S.P.C.K. depot further down this street’. This almost adds a new character to my world: henceforth among my terms of abuse none shall rank lower than ‘he’s the sort of man who’d call an S.P.C.K. depot a bookshop’.

I discovered however that my unpromising bookshop had a second hand quarter upstairs. This at first was depressing as it appeared to consist entirely of two sections: one labeled ‘books on Cornwall’, the other ‘Second hand rewards’. That also is a valuable new idea. I suppose a Truro child, after having spent a sufficient number of year’s study of the S.P.C.K. depot, may be examined by a beard-buzzing clergyman on tiptoe and then, if successful, receive a ‘second hand reward’ (the second hand rewards ranged from Paley’s evidences ⁶⁷ to the ‘Queen of the upper Fourth’, so he has no need to complain). However in the end I discovered an upper garret where there were at last some books. I had v. little money and the selection was poor. I got inter alia the poetical work of ‘Armstrong, Dyer, and Green’ with lives and prefaces to all three by the Rev. Gilfillan. ⁶⁸ He lived in the early 19th century and wrote lives and prefaces to everyone in the ‘British Poets’ ⁶⁹–those long thin greyish backed volumes (‘Of which I have an hondred in my celle’) with fine large type of the period when they still had generosity and elegance and were only just beginning to lose beauty. Gilfillan is incredible. Here is a little passage from his preface to Dyer. ‘The painter himself too, becomes one of the finest objects in the landscapes of earth as seen sitting motionless under the rainbow, and perchance in his reverie dropping his pencil into the bubbling stream, or copying with severe sympathy the cataract with a rain of bright berries and green leaves descending on him…thus at the young Dyer etc.’ ⁷⁰

As for my poets, Dyer you will remember as the author of ‘The Fleece’, ⁷¹ perhaps the best example of that curious 18th century growth, the commercial epic–cf. Also ‘Cyder’ ⁷² and ‘The Sugar Cane’. ⁷³ Armstrong wrote a similar poem in Miltonic blank verse on ‘The Art of preserving Health’. ⁷⁴ I have read it with huge enjoyment. It is beyond all parody as the specimen of the noble art of making poetry by translating ordinary sentences into ‘Miltonic’ diction. Thus ‘some people can’t eat eggs’ is rendered,

Some even the generous nutriment detest

Which, in the shell, the sleeping embryo rears. ⁷⁵

(Where ‘rears’ I suspect is a misprint for ‘bears.’) If one eats too much fat,

The irresoluable oil

So gentle late and blandishing, in floods

Of rancid bile o’erflows: what tumults hence

What horrors rise, were nauseous to relate. ⁷⁶

One is surprised to learn that even then some people took cold baths,

To fortify their bodies, some frequent

The gelid cistern: and, where nought forbids

I praise their dauntless heart. ⁷⁷

Is ‘cistern’ merely poetical for a bathtub?–or did they really bathe in cisterns? If so, I agree about their dauntless hearts. I can’t imagine anything nastier than a dip in the cistern off the Leeborough attic. Green, I confess, I had never heard of. He wrote a poem on ‘The Spleen’. ⁷⁸

While I am on this subject I should mention the even stranger bookshop at Newquay. It bore the legend ‘New and Second Hand Bookseller’. But when I went in, the following dialogue occurred. ‘Where are your second hand books?’ ‘They’re all in private rooms’. ‘Well can I see them?’ ‘No. They’re all locked up.’ ‘Aren’t they for sale?’ ‘No.’ What do you make of that? The other great disadvantage of Cornwall is the beer. It costs 4d a half pint and (though draught) tastes like Bass–the lowest level surely that beer can attain. Draught cider seems to be unknown. I wonder what the miners drink–‘metheglin’ ⁷⁹ or ‘majogony’ do you suppose?

I hope you will continue your admirable letters on the same scale as long as you are abroad: they also deserve Johnson’s praise–but we must not degenerate into admiration of each other’s epistolary style or the thing will become self conscious. My next will be sodden and stuffy with the fumes of Leeborough: and can hope, at best, for a fine P’dayta-crop. I enclose some photos and good wishes from all.

Yours,

Jack

TO HIS BROTHER (LP IX: 290–1): ⁸⁰

Belfast Steamship Company Limited

S.S. Patriotic.

Oct. 5th 1927

My dear W.,

Tho’ I am uncertain when my next proper letter to you will be written, I should be unpardonable if I failed to salute you on an occasion over which your spirit so emphatically presides. (You will perceive that at the moment of writing I am not absolutely sober). The cry of ‘Any more for the shore’ has gone round. Arthur, who saw me off and drank with me (nay! at his expense) has just gone. The ‘flip, flip’ of the boots of Belfastians on the rubber floor of the saloon deck is heard on all sides. In a moment we shall shove off. I gave the P’daytabird four solid weeks and a day: tomorrow I shall be in Oxford.

Of course it proved impossible to get him away. He had just put himself under the injection treatment of our cousin the ‘blood specialist’: and his first line of defence thus turned on the necessity of ‘giving this serum business a fair trial’. He couldn’t go away and break it for a few weeks. (‘These serums are a funny business Jacks. You know there’re made of–’ ‘Yes, yes, I remember you told me the other night.’ ‘Well, you know it’s really very funny. They take a swab of your throat–’ ‘Yes, I know, very funny.’ ‘Aye, but that’s not the cream of the joke. The other two ingredients are your own urine and your own excrement.’) These details I have heard at least twice a week for the last month.

His second defence was a pure windfall. A letter from Uncle Dick gave it him. Eileen was coming over to stay at Sandycroft.⁸¹ That provided his second defence. ‘Well you know, I couldn’t go away now. Uncle Dick will expect me to [do] my little bit of manners–I’ll have to have that girl up to dinner and all that sort of thing’–a suggestion wh. was converted in a few days to ‘I tell you what I’ll do. I’ll ask her to tea some day.’ So the attempt to get him boiled in mud, which I made sincerely and even importunately, was a complete failure. A usual Leeborough holiday took its place, with an inordinate number of P’dayta Days. It is cruelest of all when he comes home on Monday at 11.30. To be given just enough time to decant the brisk liquour of Monday morning and then to have the cup dashed from your hand.

It was specially annoying this time because I wanted to be very busy putting into action my project of an Encyclopedia Boxoniana. I have worked through the texts down to The Locked Door ⁸² and at Christmas hope to be able to begin the actual encyclopedia. Big 4 (the one you know best) will be by far the largest article and B the longest letter (Bob, Bar, Bradley, Bradshaw, Bublish, Bumregis, Brus (vin de), Bears, Benjamin I, Benjamin VI, Benjamin VII, Boj, Bojaren, Borata, Boys, the, Big I, Big II, Big III, Big IV–all lengthy). I find the work fascinating: the consistency between the very early texts and the ones we usually read is much greater than I dared to hope for: and an odd sentence in the Locked Door or the Life of Big will fit into a narrative written in Wynyard or pre-Wynyard days in the most startling way. I suppose it is only accident, but it is hard to resist the conviction that one is dealing with a sort of reality. At least so it seems to me, alone in the little end room. How it will appear tomorrow in Magdalen Common Room or a month hence to you in How Kow is another matter.

We’re off. The screw turns. I had stewed steak for lunch today and boiled mutton for supper dinner. I am going to eat some supper. Can you forget the flavour of one’s first non-P’dayta meal. (I was mistaken. The screw has stopped again.)

TO HIS FATHER (LP XI: 266–8):

[Magdalen College,

Oxford

29? November 1927]

My dear Papy,

Many thanks for your letter. ⁸³ My own long silence has the cause (I wish it were also the excuse) which you suggest. I have got my evenings nearly full up this term. On Monday nights I entertain as many of my own pupils and other undergraduates as care to come and join in the reading of an Elizabethan play: I was driven to institute this because I saw no other way of persuading them to get through the enormous number of plays they are supposed to read (I am often tempted to curse the fertility of our Elizabethans). On Wednesdays some of the junior pupils come to read Anglo-Saxon with me. ⁸⁴ The actual work is usually done by half past ten: but they are comfortably by the fire and like to sit on and talk–and after all, it is part of ones job to get to know them–so that evening is usually full up till midnight. Then there are functions which occur fortnightly: the Kolbitar or Icelandic Society, and a fortnightly philosophical supper with Hardie ⁸⁵ and some others.

None of these engagements is onerous in itself, indeed they are all agreeable: but when you add to them the inevitable interchange of invitations to dinner, an occasional visit, and an odd night when one is tired and goes to bed early, it leaves few evenings free in term time. My mornings are of course occupied with tutoring or preparation for it: and even my afternoons are sometimes invaded by a college meeting. a meeting of the Tutorial Board, or a meeting of the English Faculty. This is not to say that I am overworked: a labourer or a tram driver might justly describe all that I have enumerated as a round of strenuous idleness. But if I am as free as any man can hope to be from ‘work’ in the original and proper sense of drudgery (the curse of Adam), in revenge, I have as little leisure, in the sense of vacant time, as I can well have.

I do not think the accounts of Hogarth in the newspapers were exaggerated–except in so far as a natural feeling about the newly dead, a wish to do the best you can for a man, affects all obituary notices and funeral orations whatsoever. ⁸⁶ Most of his work lay rather outside my own sphere: though I read the ‘Ancient History of the Near East’ ⁸⁷ when I was doing Greats (a work of immense learning which includes much of the best results of Assyriology, Egyptology, and Babylonian, Greek and Hittite archaeology, while remaining fairly short and almost popular). I also read his ‘Wanderer in the Levant’ ⁸⁸ which is purely popular and gives you a sort of essay like account of his experiences in the Near East, not as a scholar, but as a traveller.

He did not dine in very often and I seldom talked to him–only once had a real conversation with him and that was about Doughty’s poetry. ⁸⁹ He was a very fine looking soldier like man: straight as a ramrod: but there was something which I at least found a little uninviting in his face–a tinge of that haughtiness, almost cruelty, which you see so often in the faces of people who have got into the habit of lording it among coloured races east of Suez. (You can trace the thing I am referring to in many of the episodes and reflections, even in the style, of Kinglake’s Eothen). ⁹⁰ Still it is no doubt easier to wear kid gloves and think of the brotherhood of man when we are in Little Lea or Oxford than it would be in Arabia. That is the excuse which W. would certainly urge for all those Anglo-Indian officers, sea captains, and others in whom I find this disturbing element. And I allow it. But wouldn’t you agree (tho’ I find it constantly forgotten) that there is all the difference in the world between saying that a thing is excusable and saying that it needs no excuse? As if ‘the driver couldn’t prevent the train leaving the rails’ means the same as ‘the train is still on the rails’.

They had great fun at the Union last week. Birkenhead came to speak. ⁹¹ The first thing that worried him was the private business in which two gentlemen got up and discussed the library list–additions to the library of the Union being a subject which naturally comes up in private business. On this occasion the merits of Smith in Journalism ⁹² by P. G. Wodehouse, That Ass Smith ⁹³ by the same author, and The Wreck of the Birkenhead ⁹⁴ were hotly canvassed. The noble lord was understood to make some observations to those around him in which the word ‘schoolboys’ figured.

Then the debate began. The first speaker produced the good old ancient Wadham story of how Smith and Simon ⁹⁵ had decided what parties they were to follow in their political careers by the toss of a coin the night before they took schools. You will hardly believe me when I tell you that Smith jumped up: ‘baseless fabrication’–‘silly, stale story’–‘hoped that even the home of lost causes had abandoned that chestnut, etc. etc.’–and allowed himself to be sidetracked and leg pulled to such an extent that he never reached his real subject at all. It seems to me impossible that a man of his experience could fall to such frivolous tactics: unless we accept the accompanying story that he was drunk at the time, or the even subtler explanation that he was not.

Many thanks for the birthday wishes and the birthday present. I will select the latter in the next few days and let you know. I am not sure that I shall not get a picture instead of the books. I am sorry to hear that the electrical treatment is not more permanent in its results: but I still stick to my original theory that a change of air and diet must be at least the first step towards a cure. The weather of course is very much against you at present: at least if ours is at all like yours. We have had no sight of the sun now for these four days, and fogs more dense and more frequent than I ever remember. Most of these mornings it has been so damp that the door handles are wet to the touch.

your loving son,

Jack

 

Warnie left the convalescent camp at Wei-Hei-Wei at the end of September and travelled to Shanghai en route to Hong Kong to rejoin his unit. While awaiting passage headquarters decided to leave him in Shanghai for the next 18 months in command of the Shanghai Supply Depot. This was much to his liking because he was told that his foreign service would be completed in 18 months, after which he could return home. However, there was a sudden change of plans and on 18 October he was posted to Hong Kong. Upon his arrival there on 21 October, Colonel Badcock ordered him straight back to Shanghai. Apart from his delight in returning to Shanghai, Warnie soon had the pleasure of learning that he was finally free of Colonel Badcock who on 14 November returned to England to become training instructor at the Royal Army Service Corps Training College at Aldershot.

TO HIS BROTHER (LP IX: 320–5):

[Magdalen College]

Dec. 12th. [1927]

I enclose a fragment written when and how, you will see. I had hoped to continue it in reasonable time: but the monthly letter has proved an impossibility during the term. My evenings for the fortnight in term run thus. Mon. Play reading with undergraduates (till Midnight). Tue. Mermaid club. ⁹⁶ Wedn. Anglo-Saxon with undergraduates. Thurs.–Frid.–Sat.–Sunday. Common room till late. Mon. Play reading. Tue. Icelandic Society. Wedn. Anglo-Saxon. Thurs. Philosophical supper. Fri.–Sat.–Sunday.

As you will see this gives at the very best only three free evenings in the even weeks, and two in the odd. And into these two everything in the way of casual entertaining, correspondence and what we used to call ‘A-h-h-h!’ has to be crammed. Without increasing the Ah-h-h to any tolerable proportions I can well find myself at the end of eight such weeks with my letter still unwritten. Even if this fails to convince you, you will be satisfied with the ironical vengeance which now falls upon me–when I find myself sending off to you that note from the Liverpool boat within a few days of my revisiting the same boat again, this time with a nasty error in the direction of her bows. ⁹⁷ How loathsome now are all those details with which I tried to create the atmosphere for you! The smells and sounds will all be there again next week: but the one fatal error of direction dashes them all. Before leaving this now ancient subject, perhaps I should give you some account of my stay in P’daytaheim.

I have already mentioned your father’s refusal to move and his frivolous reasons. For the rest, he suffered a good deal from his complaint while I was there. It is always difficult with him to estimate the exact amount: but it was I think fairly bad, tho’ a little improved. I cannot understand what his doctors are up to. In England one always hears drastic dieting prescribed for rheumatic complaints–with a special reduction (or complete prohibition) of animal foods. I asked him if they had said nothing on that subject: to which he very characteristically replied ‘No. I asked Joey if I ought to give up my little drop of whiskey and he said it didn’t matter.’ It was quite useless to point out that diet (even his) did not consist exclusively of whiskey. As regards his ‘parts’ he was often agreeable and cheerful. The chief change I notice in him with advancing years is a very rapidly ‘increased rate of increase’ in the coarseness of his conversation. With some such prelude as ‘It’s not a nice subject but–’ or, more ominous still, ‘You’re a man now and we can talk–’ night after night he launches forth on what for its blueness and its salacity may well be called an ocean of stories. There was one about a man who had to empty his bowels in a Co. Down Railway carriage: and when I had been told (with illustrative gestures) how ‘these fellows’ spread a newspaper on the floor and how ‘this chap got down’ on his hunkers and ‘did the best he could’, I discovered that that–the mere fact–was the whole point of the story.

There were also occasions on which he appeared in his earlier manner. One morning I had gone down to the hall early to get a morning cigarette (that will conjure up in your mind the whole quality of a day in mid-holidays when you have let yourself run out of non-P’dayta cigarettes). I saw a letter from Barfield for me: but didn’t take it, knowing that it would be a long piece of argument not suited for reading in bed. I returned to bed and in due course was summoned to the bath room. Before I had locked the door I heard him shouting up from the hall, ‘Here’s a letter for you.’ I shouted ‘Thanks’ and banged the door. In an incredibly short time he was rattling at the door (he must have wolfed his breakfast abominably). Admitted to wash his teeth, he repeated in an aggrieved voice ‘You’ve got a letter waiting for you. D’you not want it?’ I continued drying myself as soon as he was gone and after dressing came down stairs. As I reached the lowest step a voice from the cloakroom boomed out ‘You’ll find that letter on the hall table.’ As I was perfectly easy in my mind about this particular letter, I could not refrain from leaving it where it lay while I went to ring the dining room bell. In a moment he was after me (now hatted and coated) with the letter in his hand. That episode was pure fun: this that follows was of the kind that is funny in memory but was insufferable at the time.

One afternoon Arthur and I went for a long walk over the hills round Divis. I said ‘I don’t know when we shall be back.’ He said ‘That’s all right, my son, I’ll wait dinner till you come.’ I explained ‘very loud and clear’ that he was not to wait: if I didn’t turn up at the right time, would he please go on and I would have some cold supper with tea whenever I got back. To my surprise he actually consented: the arrangement was most distinct and I set off with my mind at ease. At 8.30, after a glorious afternoon I came in: my feet sore, my cheeks cool, my mind full of heather and sky, with not a care in the world. That mood does not live long after you have crossed the threshold of Leeborough. I found him in the hall. ‘I waited as long as I could,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry.’ I explained with some heat that I thought we had arranged he was not to wait. To which he returned in a low voice, ‘Well get your boots off and take your bit of dinner’–then, opening the glass door, ‘Mary! Master Jacks is in now.’ I was then brought to the dining room and given a disgusting meal of soup, joint, vegetables and pudding, which had been kept hot for me. The O.A.B. standing in the room in various attitudes of resignation until I had finished. I resolved that night that once and for all I would put an end to this tomfoolery and repeated a few days later the experiment of saying I would be late for dinner and should prefer a cold meal when I came in. His preference for a grievance was apparently not proof against a second night’s abstinence and this time the scheme worked to admiration. I had cold supper with tea, alone, in almost non-Leeburian comfort.

Emboldened by this I actually took the unprecedented step of dining in town with Arthur and an Oxford man called Bryson ⁹⁸ one night! No objection was raised: indeed he entered into the project so keenly and discussed how we should ‘handle the thing’ so often that I was heartily sick of the affair long before it came off. It became such an affair. The whole point was an evening’s escape into the haphazardness and absence of fussiness which one longs for so at home. But (he always has an unsuspected trump card) he contrived, without raising a finger in objection, to banish all that. Where would we go? Would we dress? How would we arrange about meeting? It would be a bad business if–and here a thousand perverse hypotheses which he contrived to make real for the moment. Still–to be seated in a hotel, eating an ordinary dinner and drinking your wine, indulging in ordinary chat, and then to reflect that Belfast is outside the window, is a marvellous sensation. I discovered to my surprise that Bryson (whom I always regarded as an imposing junior Don) was in just the same state at home as Arthur and myself.

During my month in Ireland I had the most glorious jaunts. You can walk nearly all the way from Craigantlet to Helen’s tower through thick woods, crossing the road only once. You can drive out to Hannah’s Town (at the Western extremity of Divis range) and then spend all afternoon coming over the mountains to Ligoniel. We did it on an afternoon when there were some moving clouds overhead, but all the more distant sky towards the horizon was a pale transparent blue: and the distant objects very clear. At our first halt we could see, (1) Half left–a rolling blue green plain stretching out to the Mournes: the Mournes, as you know, jagged like mountains in a romance, and of such a pure blue colour that you felt, if a bird flew behind them, you could have seen it through them. (2) Straight ahead–the heather sloping down in big folds to the road we had left: beyond that a deep narrow valley filled with woods. Beyond the valley the ground rose, studded with white cottages and crossed with hedges, to a well peaked conical hill–one side wooded with steeply perpendicular pines. (3) Half right–the expanse of Lough Neagh, shining like the roof of a greenhouse, and more mountains beyond it. (4) Full right: like this, over the shoulder of our own slope a very remote rocky looking slice of Antrim for the first time–where I think you have preceded me. That valley with the rock rampart on one side and the woods below and the open spaces on the high moors at the head of the valley, with their glimpses of the Scotch coast, are among the best things I have seen.

At the moment of writing I have forgotten the order of places and distances: I remember working out at the time that a walking tour in those parts, starting from Larne or perhaps from Belfast would be quite possible. Shall we make a resolution to do it together when we are next both at home? My dinner in town has proved that the pleasant things of life can be carried out during a P’daytaholiday. Do not let us put off all these projects for amelioration of the Irish visit which we have so often discussed. By the way the O.A.B. was with us on our ride to the Glens: and said, ‘The last time I was in Cushendun was on a Boxing day–bitterly cold, and I had to set off for here and leave you boys: a miserable business it was.’ It is odd that the memory of that occasion has entirely faded from my mind. Yet it must have been epic. The house to ourselves all day in the Wynyard period and Christmas food! Possibly we should date there the memorable artillery engagement with mince pies.

It comes into my head for no reason at this point to tell you that I have read Coningsby: having been informed that his grandfather (drawn by the way from the same original as Thackeray’s Lord Steyne ⁹⁹) has found a very suitable seat in the house for him, he objects that his principles will not allow him to support the ministry: and receives from the old man the reply ‘You’ll go with your family, boy, like a gentleman, and not start talking about principles as if you were an adventurer.’ But apart from this you, who have always been a Tory, and yet felt some uneasiness at finding yourself in the same boat as all the canting and comfortable exploiters of sweated labour, will find just what you want in Dizzy: Toryism at its extreme of opposition to the ‘Manchester School’ and anxious to restore (as he calls it) ‘the estate of the peasantry’ in the place of the Whig created ‘class of the poor’. ¹⁰⁰

And while we are on ‘estates’, you will probably be surprised to hear (as I was to read) that King Alfred, translating Boethius and interpolating a passage of his own, says that a king must have as tools for his work ‘the three estates’ (tha threo gerferscipu), prayer men, money men and work men’. (A moment later he comfortingly mentions beer as another essential.) This seems to show that the conception goes back pretty far in mediaeval theory: Alfred came to the throne in 871. But possibly to you–more acquainted than I with European history–this may be stale news.

I also (while at home) bought a capital Montaigne in three very large quartos with magnificent type: printed (oddly enough) in London cum privilegio regis in the early XVIII century–1712 I think. ¹⁰¹ I found the French more difficult than I expected: also the matter at once more seriously valuable as thought (in some parts) and more deliciously absurd (in others) than I had ventured to hope. Some of his ‘facts’ go beyond anything in Burton. ¹⁰² Do you remember the story of the man who could break wind in time with a tune, and the other who broke wind continuously for forty years and then died? The only thing one gets rather bored with is the endless succession of stories from Plutarch–‘Agesilaus being besieged by the Epirotes–’ ‘Scruma Nonius, being made aedile etc.’ Plutarch is one of those unhappy authors whom we are bored with years before we read him. Shakespeare is almost another: and you may add Blake, Pascal and Montaigne himself. It is curious the boredom which broods over certain things. Why is ‘The Empire’ such a dull subject?

I have done very little reading outside my work these last months. In Oman’s ‘Dark Ages’ ¹⁰³ I have come up against a thing I had almost forgotten since my school days–the boundless self assurance of the pure text book. ‘The four brothers were all worthy sons of their wicked father–destitute of natural affection, cruel, lustful, and treacherous.’ Lewis the Pious was ‘a man of blameless and virtuous habits’–tho’ every other sentence in the chapter makes it plain that he was a sh-t. ‘Charles had one lamentable failing–he was too careless of the teaching of Christianity about the relations of the sexes.’ It is so nice too, to be told without a hint of doubt who was in the right and who was in the wrong in every controversy, and exactly why every one did what he did. Yet Oman is quite right: that is the way–I suppose–to write an introduction to a subject. Indeed I have confessed this in turning to him because Gibbon, however delightful to read, simply won’t do, if, starting from scratch, you want to get a clear skeleton outline which you can afterwards colour in at leisure. There is also this advantage in Oman, that you can see when he is being silly: with Gibbon one is up against a really clever man and I expect that much besides ‘infidelity’ is ‘artfully intermixed’.

I am almost coming to the conclusion that all histories are bad. Whenever one turns from the historian to the writings of the people he deals with there is always such a difference. What is in my mind at present is (on the one hand) Beowulf and Alfred and the Sagas, and (on the other) Gibbon and Oman about ‘the barbarians’. What common measure is there between ‘Odoacer had alienated the sympathies of his Italian subjects by seizing a third of the land to reward his veterans’ and ‘Oft Scyld Scefing overthrew the mead benches of many a kindred. The dwellers round had to obey him across the whale’s way. That was a good king…So shall a young hero do good and give lordly gifts, that his retainers may repay him when war comes.’ ¹⁰⁴ The implication (always present) in the first version that Odoacer oughtn’t to have given the land to his men, or that any choice in the matter could have occurred to him, as against the perfectly untroubled sincerity with which the other describes the hero as ‘doing good’ in scattering the ‘lordly gifts’ (acquired no doubt at the cost of ‘alienating the sympathy’ of someone) makes one despair. Then ‘his veterans’–memories of Chelsea Hospital! Of course one can see in some sense that the two passages refer to the same sort of fact. But what is left of the ‘fact’ if you take away both its two ‘appearances’? And if you plump for one of them, is that historical truth? I wish there was a good translation of Beowulf. Isn’t this good? (The funeral of Scyld Scefing). ‘They bore him down to the brim of the sea: there rode in harbour–with rings at her bows–ice-hung, eager, the atheling galley. They laid in her their beloved lord, their giver of rings, in the galley’s waist…They let the sea carry him away. No one knew who took in that cargo.’ ¹⁰⁵

I hear with pleasure of your separation from the unpleasant Colonel, of your sea voyagings, and that you think to spend on 18 months in ‘furrin parts’. The Shanghai news looms very formidable in the papers at this distance: but I comfort myself by the reflection that the state of Belfast when we have been there, would often have read much the same.

I was delighted with your account of the American. You remember Carritt’s mot concerning them–‘they lisp in numbers for the numbers come’. ¹⁰⁶ If you cast back your mind, when we were at Wynyard we were in exactly that phase: it gave us a pleasure at which I still blush to din into peoples ears the fact that Belfast had the largest gantry in the British isles or had launched the largest ship afloat. But we have outgrown it: it would now give me no appreciable thrill to convince the fellows of Magdalen that my father was the largest batata in Europe. If the analogy between peoples and individuals were sound, I suppose we should have to forgive the Americans for being in a state which we once passed through ourselves. But the analogy is nonsense. I never can see why a fat middle aged American whose ancestry (in the purely biological sense of course) must stretch back as far as any one else’s, and whose nation started with all the history of European culture as a jumping off point, should be excused any of his vulgarity on the score of youth. Incidentally they didn’t start the business about being ‘young’ and shouting, hallooing, and indulging in horseplay until the earlier stages of their career were well over.

There is none of the breezy and laborious rawness of Whitman ¹⁰⁷ in Hawthorne ¹⁰⁸ or Lowell–of whom I have received from the O.A.B. the handsome complete set that has languished in ‘my’ dressing room for so many years. ¹⁰⁹ I read most of the essays before crossing back to England. His hatred of his fellow countrymen is far from being the only endearing characteristic about him. In addition to the literary essays–always worth reading–there is one on winter which need not be ashamed to show its face in any collection. Lowell, sir, is a book that a man may be proud to have stand on his shelves. And Hawthorn I admire beyond words: and ‘I have a sneaking affection’ for Longfellow. But in none of these is there the faintest trace of this abominable ‘youth’. Longfellow is never happy unless he is in the dark ages: Hawthorne takes some old building dating from the New England times and weaves out of the very few centuries at his disposal an air of antiquity which is not often attained even in Europe where we have so much arithmetically greater a past to conjure with. (By the by, what a wonderful conceit of Thomas Browne’s referring to the age of the long lived antediluvians–‘an age when living men might be antiquities’. ¹¹⁰ Query: Would a living man a thousand years old give you the same feeling that an old building does? I think there is a good deal to be said for Alice Meynell’s theory that one’s idea of antiquity and the standard one measures it by, is derived entirely from one’s own life. ¹¹¹ Certainly ‘Balbec and Tadmor’ ¹¹² (whoever they may be) could hardly give one a more weird sense of ‘ages and ages ago’ than some early relic discovered in the drawers of the little end room often does.

One has one’s own ‘dark ages’. But I daresay this is not so for everyone: it may be that you and I have a specially historical sense of our own lives. Are you often struck, when you become sufficiently intimate with other people to know something of their development, how late their lives begin so to speak? I mean these men you meet who seem to have read everything, done everything, and yet they were pure barbarians until they left school, and had turned twenty perhaps before they began to be interested in the things that interest them now?

When I was at home I committed the unpardonable folly of telling your father that a man called Hogarth was one of the ‘possibles’ for our new President. Two results follow. (a) That his election was henceforth treated as absolutely certain. (b) His powers as infinite. (c) His name became Hogg-arth (to rime with ‘Sogarth’ in ‘Sogarth Aroon’). By the end of the month I was pretty tired of ‘Well is this new President of yours, this Hogg-arth, an able chap?’ and ‘Well, I suppose Hogg-arth will put a stop to all that’. But since then Hogarth has died. I have already had a letter observing ‘So Hogarth is not going to be the new President at all.’ Can’t you already see the career of ‘poor Hogarth’ as one of the stock figures of Leeborough conversation henceforth–forever linked with ‘John Burnett’ and ‘Prendergast’. ¹¹³ The crop of P’daytaisms was poor: all his energies have now been thrown into pronunciation and philology. This time, in answer to his ‘his–to use a word I hate–mentality’ I ventured to tell him that he used the word mentality more often than anyone I knew.

You will be seriously alarmed to hear that so far this winter I have followed my hot bath every morning by a cold shower. I mention it, not because I think the fact can give you any pleasure, but because of the happy turn given to it by my friend Harwood who visited me for a few days this term. ‘Ah yes’ he said, ‘the hardening treatment. I used to do it too. Then I realised that one ought to be hardened to all extremes of temperature: so I harden myself now by living in overheated rooms.’

Well, there is no good in prolonging the agony. I must send off by this post a letter to Coast Lines for a berth. Unless your life at present is much nastier than I suppose it to be, I have a claim on your sympathies.

yrs,

Jack