new type of book for pure relaxation: and perhaps re-reading of an old friend—a Scott with much skipping—is the best of all. I don’t think you re-read enough—I know I do it too much. Is it since I last wrote to you that I re-read Wuthering House?3 I thought it very great. Isn’t it (despite the improbability) an excellent stroke of art to tell it all through the mouth of a very homely, prosaic old servant, whose sanity and mother-wit thus provides a cooling medium through which the wild, horrible story becomes tolerable? I have also re-read Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution4 and find that I had forgotten it nearly all. It is, in the famous words, ‘too long drawn out’ and becomes mere scolding in the end.
What wd. perhaps interest you more is Pater’s Marius the Epicurean5 which I had twice before tried to read without success but have this time reached the end of-and reached it before my desire to punch Marius’ head had become quite unbearable. Do you know it? It is very well worth reading. You must give up all idea of reading a story and treat it simply as a vaguely narrative essay. It interests me as showing just how far the purely aesthetic attitude to life can go, in the hands of a master, and it certainly goes a good deal further than one would suppose from reading the inferior aesthetes like Oscar Wilde and George Moore. In Pater it seems almost to include the rest of the spiritual life: he has to bring in chastity, he nearly has to bring in Christianity, because they are so beautiful. And yet somehow there is a faint flavour of decay over it all. Perhaps it is his patronage of great things which is so offensive—condescending to add the Christian religion to his nosegay of spiritual flowers because it has a colour or a scent that he thinks would just give a finishing touch to the rest. It is all balls anyway-because one sees at a glance that if he really added it it would break up the whole nosegay view of life. In fact that is the refutation of aestheticism: for perfect beauty you need to include things which will at once show that mere beauty is not the sole end of life. If you don’t include them, you have given up aestheticism: if you do, you must give it up Q.E.D. But Pater is valuable just because, being a perfectly honest aesthete, he really tries to follow its theory to the bitter end, and therefore betrays its weakness. I didn’t mean to make this letter a mere catalogue of books read, but one thing has led on to another.
About Lucius’ argument that the evangelists would have put the doctrine of the atonement into the Gospel if they had had the slightest excuse, and, since they didn’t, therefore Our Lord didn’t teach it: surely, since we know from the Epistles that the Apostles (who had actually known him) did teach this doctrine in his name immediately after his death, it is clear that he did teach it: or else, that they allowed themselves a very free hand. But if people shortly after his death were so very free in interpreting his doctrine, why should people who wrote much later (when such freedom wd. be more excusable from lapse of memory in an honest writer, and more likely to escape detection in a dishonest one) become so very much more accurate? The accounts of a thing don’t usually get more and more accurate as time goes on. Anyway, if you take the sacrificial idea out of Christianity you deprive both Judaism and Paganism of all significance. Can one believe that there was just nothing in that persistent motif of blood, death, and resurrection, which runs like a black and scarlet cord through all the greater myths—thro’ Balder & Dionysus & Adonis and the Graal too? Surely the history of the human mind hangs together better if you suppose that all this was the first shadowy approach of something whose reality came with Christ—even if we can’t at present fully understand that something.
Try and write soon.
Yrs
Jack
TO HIS BROTHER (W):
[Magdalen College]
Jan 17th 1932.
My dear W–
Term began yesterday (Saturday) and I am seated this fine Sunday morning in our room in College having finished my collection papers and now about to allow myself an hour’s letter writing before setting out home where I shall be to night.
Through the window on my left I see a most beautiful, almost a springlike, sunshine on the pinnacles of the Tower and the delicious sound of Sunday morning bells has just stopped. On an ordinary Sunday morning I should of course be out at the house, or rather at Church, but as you know the first week end of term is sacred to collections, and having finished them rather earlier than I expected—here we are. I am so seldom in College on a Sunday morning that to be there and at leisure in the unaccustomed sounds and silences of Lord’s Day among all the pleasant Leeburiana6 is quite a holiday.
Your welcome letter of Dec 8th arrived a few days ago, and is so full of conversational openings that I shall hardly find room to inaugurate any subject of my own.
First, as to the Chinese. As to their language, it is pretty certain that its extreme simplicity is that of second childhood—the simplicity of a fossil and not of a seed. The essence of it is monosyllabic words each expressing an extremely general idea and given its particular meaning by the context and the position—in fact words approaching the function of the Arabic numerals, where it all depends whether you say 201, 102, 120 or 210. How far European language has already advanced towards this fossil condition you can well see if you compare Latin Amavisset with English He would have loved: though even amavisset is well away. A really primitive tongue would have special words for about twenty special kinds of love (sexual, gastronomic, parental, and what not) and no word for the more abstract ‘love’: as French, a stage nearer Chinese than we are, has now only one word for our ‘love’ and ‘like’. In fact I look upon Chinese as upon the Moon—a death’s head or memento mori to nations as the moon is to worlds.
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 languages in modern Europe—if you can regard them as ‘languages’ which still have traces of the dream in them, still having 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 rules he can go on that way for two volumes without really using the words to refer to any concrete fact at all. But perhaps I have let the subject run away with me. Your point about children always finding their nurses language the easiest is, I take it, a complete answer to your author on that score.
I suppose Minto has already told you of the outrage in the topwood—the two new Scotch firs planted nearest the lane both stolen, and the rascals have neatly levelled in the holes where they were. Clearly to plant two saplings so eminently suitable for Christmas trees so near the road at that time of the year was asking for trouble. But one somehow does not (or did not) think of trees as things in danger of theft. You who have not put your sweat into the actual planting of them can hardly imagine my fury: though there is a funny side to it. I smile