You will see by the scrawl that I am trying to write about a million miles an hour as everyone has gone to bed. So goodnight old man: send another instalment next week, I am so interested in your adorable fairy.
Yrs.,
Jack
P.S. By the way, one criticism just to keep you from getting your head turned. Don’t talk about Dennis as ‘our young friend’ or ‘our hero’–the last is like a newspaper: at least you may take it as a suggestion just for what it is worth.–J.
TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 102-3):
[Gastons
7 July 1916]
My dear Papy,
Your ‘essay’ and letter arrived, and Kirk read me a great part of the former. I think what you say about Christ Church is probably right, although Kirk tells me that there is most certainly a reading set, which one could live in. However, Dod[d]s specially recommends New, and as you say yourself, both it and Oriel are in the first rank. On the other hand, I am afraid that there will be no more ‘Guards Regiments’ anywhere by the time I reach Oxford: the old ‘bloods’ have mostly been shot, and the atmosphere of an after-war England will not be conductive to the birth of a new generation. Fortunately, there is no hurry about the question, and we can talk it over together in comfort next holidays.
Yes! It would be true irony if we ran upon something of the James or Capron type again; our little portrait gallery for that never-written novel is already getting crowded. By the way, what do you think of the new arrangement about Ulster? Kirk has talked about it for nearly a week: not that he has any views on either side, but he seems to find a pleasure in balancing off all the arguments for and against the proposal: so well has he succeeded that I am beginning to think ‘That way lies madness.’106 No sooner have we made up our minds on one side, than we are immediately floored by a new point that he brings up on the other. What do you think about it?
I must deprecate those very questionable references to my unfortunate last term’s exodus from Gastons: if I saw that the goodwife of the house was, like Martha ‘careful over many things,’107 and then tactfully suggested that I might go home, what do you find extraordinary in such an action? At any rate, though we have our faults, we don’t make ourselves ridiculous in an open carriage, nor lose our way in a country we have known from childhood. To be sensible, I suppose the term will end, as you say, at the end of July.
Many thanks for both your enclosures. The letter was from my old Malvern study companion Hardman: he is going to be conscripted at Christmas, and wants to know what I am going to do. I am writing to say that I don’t know yet, but will tell him as soon as our plans are settled. Of course if it turned out to be convenient, I should like to have a friend with me in the army, but it is hardly worth while making any special provisions for so small a matter. We shall see how it all works out.
Your reference to the two books is tantalizing. I quite agree with you that they should be put in a safe place: and the safest place in Leeborough is a certain ‘little end room’ where all the footsteps point one way. I for my part am still at my ‘Arcadia’ which I find excellent.
The weather here is ridiculous: wintry colds alternating with hot, close fogs, and an occasional thunder shower. I don’t know what the farmers will do.
your loving
son Jack
TO ARTHUR GREEVES (LP V: 106-8):
[Gastons
11 July 1916]
My dear Arthur,
I am very glad to hear that you are getting to like Jason: I agree with you that the whole description of Medea–glorious character–going out by night, and of her sorceries in the wood is absolutely wonderful, and there are other bits later on, such as the description of the ‘Winter by the Northern River’ and the garden of the Hesperides, which I think quite as good. Curiously enough I have just started the Argonautica’108 the Greek poem on the same subject, and though I haven’t got very far–only in fact to the launching of Argo–it is shaping very well. It will be interesting to compare this version with Morris’s, although indeed the story of the Golden Fleece is so perfect in itself that it really can’t be spoiled in the telling. Don’t you find the very names Argo’ and ‘Argonauts’ somehow stirring?
I thought a person like you would sooner or later come to like poetry: by the way, of course you are quite right when you talk about thinking more of the matter than of the form. All I meant when I talked about the importance of form was to carry a little further what you already feel in prose–that is how some phrases such as the Wall of the World, or at the Back of the North Wind affect you, partly by sound partly by association, more than the same meaning would if otherwise expressed. The only difference is that poetry makes use of that sort of feeling much more than prose and produces those effects by metre as well as by phrase. In fact, the metre and the magic of the words should be like the orchestration of a Wagnerian opera–should sort of fill the matter by expressing things that can’t be directly told–that is, it expresses feeling while the matter expresses thought. But I daresay I have given you my views on the subject before. I am very flattered that you remember that old line about the ‘garden where the west wind’ all these months, and will certainly copy out anything that is worth it if you can find me a shop in dear Belfast where I can buy a decent MS book: I have failed in that endeavour so far.
So we are to be treated to more and more modesty? Indeed Arthur if I could get a little of your diffidence, and you a little of my conceit we should both be very fine fellows. This week’s instalment is quite worthy of the other two, and I was quite disappointed when it broke off. The reeds ‘frightened out of their senses’ and shouting in ‘their loudest whisper’ are delightful. ‘Our Lady of the Leaf might be kept in mind as a possible title if you don’t care for the present one.
You are rather naive in telling me that you ‘have to sit for a minute thinking’ and ‘find the same word coming in again’ as if these weren’t the common experiences of everyone who has ever written. I haven’t noticed any smallness in the vocabulary you employ for your tale, and anyway that’s just a matter of practice. By the way, even if you didn’t mean it, I hope you see now what I am driving at about the remark of Dennis as to his clothes. As to the ‘sitting for ten minutes’, I don’t believe that good work is ever done in a hurry: even if one does write quickly in a burst of good form, it always has to be tamed down afterwards. I usually make up my instalment in my head on a walk because I find that my imagination only works when I am exercising.
Can you guess what I have been reading this week? Of all things in the world ‘Pendennis’!109 Isn’t this the one you find too much for you? I am nearly through the first volume and like it well so far: of course one gets rather sick of Pen’s everlasting misbehaviour and the inevitable repentance going round and round like a mill wheel and there doesn’t seem much connection between one episode and another. All the same, it has a sort of way with it.
That feast the ‘Arcadia’ is nearly ended: in some ways the last book is the best (though a little spoiled I admit by brasting) and here the story is so like the part of Ivanhoe where they are all in Front-de-Boeuf’s castle, that I think Scott must have borrowed it.110 Your remarks about C. Rosetti’s poems are very tantalizing and I am longing to see them. How I do love expensive books if only I could afford them. Apropos of which, do you know anything of the artist