href="#ulink_83c98062-bcdc-5063-ae94-c9c769752534">51 came to spend a night with me. When I was his tutor he had been a curiously naïf, almost neurotic youth, who was always in love and other troubles, and so childish that he once asked me (as if I were his father!) whether one fell in love less often as one grew older, because he hoped so. Altogether an appealing, but somewhat ridiculous young man. When he went down he was compelled against his will to go into his father’s business: and for a year [or] so I got letters from him, and accounts of him from common friends, which seemed to show that he was settling down into a permanent state of self-pity.
You can imagine how pleased I was to find that he had got over this: but above all—that is why I am telling the story-to find that his whole support is romantic reading in those precious evening hours ‘after business’ which you remember so well. He quoted bits of Middle English poems which he had read with me for the exam. They were mere drudgery to him at the time, but now, in memory, they delight him. He has just re-read the whole of Malory with more delight than ever, and has bought, but not yet begun, The High History of the Holy Graal. He also writes a bit—in those same precious evenings, and Saturday afternoons.
In fact as I sat talking to him, hearing his not very articulate, but unmistakable, attempts to express his pleasure, I really felt as if I were meeting our former selves. He is just in the stage that we were in when you worked with Tom and I was at Bookham.52 Of course there was an element of vanity on my side—one lilted to feel that one had been the means of starting him on things that now are standing him in such good stead. There was also a less contemptible, and, so to speak, professional, pleasure in thus seeing a proof that the English School here does really do some good. But in the main the pleasure was a spiritual one—a kind of love. It is difficult, without being sentimental, to say how extraordinarily beautiful- ravishing-I found the sight of some one just at that point which you and I remember so well. I suppose it is this pleasure which fathers always are hoping to get, and very seldom do get, from their sons.
Do you think a good deal of parental cruelty results from the disappointment of this hope? I mean, it takes a man of some tolerance to resign himself to the fact that his sons are not going to follow the paths that he followed and not going to give him this pleasure. What it all comes to, anyway, is that this pleasure, like everything else worth having, must not be reckoned on, or demanded as a right. If I had thought of it for a moment in the old days when I was teaching Wood, this pleasant evening would probably never have happened.
By the way he left a book with me, as a result of which I have lately read, or partially read, one modern novel—The Fountain, by Charles Morgan.53 It is about a mystic, or would-be mystic, who was interned in Holland. I thought I was going to like it very much, but soon got disappointed. I was just going to say ‘it soon degenerates into an ordinary novel’, but realised only just in time that this wd. show an absurd point of view—as if one blamed an egg for degenerating into a chicken, forgetting that nature intended it for precisely that purpose. Still the fact remains that I personally enjoy a novel only in so far as it fails to be a novel pure and simple and escapes from the eternal love business into some philosophical, religious, fantastic, or farcical region.
By the way how did the Macdonald historical novel turn out? I shd. imagine it might suit him better than his modern ones.
I had meant to tell you all about my work in the wood these days, and how nice it looked and smelled and sounded: but I am suffering from a disease, rare with me, but deserving your sympathy-namely an extreme reluctance to write, even to my oldest friend about the things I like best. You see I have struggled with this reluctance for three pages. It is your turn now to reply soon and wake me from my lethargy as I have often tried to do you
Yrs
Jack
P.S. I think being up very late last night and up for the early ‘celebrrrration’ this morning may be the cause of my dulness.
TO HIS BROTHER (W):
[The Kilns]
April 8th 1932
My dear W–
I have your excellent letter of Feb. 14th. You are right in supposing that this Sino-Japanese war provides us at last with a political subject in which we are on the same side: but in suggesting that it is the law of chances which thus brings me into the line of archipigibotian orthodoxy, you are surely forgetting that, if that is true, you can claim no credit for predicting the fact, since if the phenomenon (my opinion) is purely irrational, there can be no rational prediction of it—you can foretell it only by luck. Indeed your hitting it would, by the rule of chances, be so unlikely, that it is clear there is no chance in the business at all. The truth being that you, having at last, and indeed by chance, found your own prejudices coincident with the dictates of justice and humanity—and feeling something unusual, not to say distressing, in this situation—you foresaw that this time I would be on the same side.
To be serious, my main feeling, and yours too, I expect, is an uneasy balance between indignation and the restraining knowledge that we English have of all people most deprived ourself, by our own imperial history, of the right to be indignant. But I don’t know why I have let the whole dam thing waste even this much of my letter.
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 things that every one has liked since they were written. I agree with all you say about it, except about the distinctions of character. 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 had no characters) was all nonsense.
I notice that great men are overshadowed by their own qualities: because Johnson talked so well, it gets about that his writings are poor: because Cowper is ‘homely’ it is assumed that he cannot be anything else. The doctrines of Crabbe’s unbroken gloom, of, Jane Austen’s pure comedy, of Tennyson’s ‘sweetness’ etc etc belong to the same illusion. So very likely it is the same with Spenser. 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)54 or social history, or something of the kind, not poetry.
To go back to Spenser—the battles are a bore. I thought I could trace a difference in that point between him and Tasso.55 Tasso’s battles—specially the single combats-always sounded real to me, and I had the feeling that if one knew anything about sword-technique one would be able to follow them in detail. Talking of that, if we had money to spare on whims, I should like to have a fencing-master when you come home. Wouldn’t it be a very fine occupation on wet days for the two pigibudda to ‘take their exercise’ in the bam? It would also make many passages in literature, which at present are mere words, start into light. But now that I come to think of it, I suppose ‘singlestick’ is the exercise proper to our humble rank.56