Like you I can get very little out of the Imitation?74 Since last writing I have read Carlyle’s Past and Present. One gets rather tired of a certain monotonous stridency, as in Sartor75 but more so, but it is tremendously exciting (often wrong-headed) and very well worth reading, specially the mediaeval part in the middle.
I also read the Dream of John Ball, perhaps the most serious of W. Morris’s works, except Love is Enough and the fullest exposition of his whole philosophy of life and The Wood Beyond the World wh. is neither better nor worse than any other of the prose romances.76 What an achievement his treatment of love is: so undisguisedly physical and yet so perfectly sane and healthy—real paganism at its best, which is the next best thing to Christianity, and so utterly different from the nonsense that passes under the name of paganism in, say, Swinburne or Aldous Huxley.
I wish you knew my two pupils. Lings77 and Paterson.78 Both are poets (quite promising I think) and fast friends of each other. They are just in the state you and I remember so well—the whole world of beauty opening upon them-and as they share the same digs they must have a glorious time. One or other of them often accompanies me on my afternoon walk. Paterson is the wild, and Lings the steady one. Paterson looks very southern, almost an Italian face, and is all moods, and a little effeminate, and is at present in the throes of a terrific quarrel with his father which he poured into my sympathetic ear the other day. Lings is about five feet nothing, very ugly, very dark, and looks a hundred years old, and moves and sits as stiffly as an old man. Paterson truly says that Lings hurrying noiselessly along the cloisters is like nothing so much as a furtive mouse. This doesn’t sound like a poet, does it? But he is the better poet and the better man of the two. What times you and I could have had if we had been up here together as undergraduates! Neither of them knows many other people in College and they only discovered each other after they had been up some time. Paterson spent most of his first two terms sitting in his rooms listening to the feet of people on the staircase, always hoping that it was someone coming to call on him, but it never was.
You can imagine how I enjoy them both. Indeed this is the best part of my job. In every given year the pupils I really like are in a minority; but there is hardly a year in which I do not make some real friend. I am glad to find that people become more and more one of the sources of pleasure as I grow older.
Not that I agree for a moment about books & music being ‘vanity and vexation’. Really imaginative (or intellectual) pleasure is neither the one or the other: the bad element is the miserly pleasure of possession, the delight in this book because it is mine.
Of course it was entirely my own fault about the pyjamas—I only hope that your mother was not worried when you asked about them. Give her my love and if her mind needs setting at rest on the subject—why Sir, set it.
Try to write soon again.
Yours
Jack
TO HIS BROTHER (W):
[The Kilns]
Christmas Day 1931
My dear W–
I believe that for the first time I shall be really gravelled for matter in this letter to you, simply because what with examining and lecture writing I have done, read, and heard nothing for a long time that could possibly interest you. Minto has had a letter from you dated from your ‘improved’ hotel in Shanghai, and we were surprised that you found none of ours awaiting you. No doubt you have had several by this [time].
The afforestation programme 1931 has been carried out, successfully, but not according to plan. What I am more pleased to record is that in the wood four new trees have replaced (instead of being added to) four elder stumps. I think I told you before that the uprooting of these is practicable, and I shall make it a rule never to plant a new tree without getting rid of a stump. I hope also, if I am energetic enough, to be able to do a little buckshee uprooting during the rest of the year. What interfered with the design of my afforestation was water. I dug one hole far on the Eastern frontier (‘in the parts over against Phillips-land’) and found it half full of water next day. This I attributed to rain and set to with gum boots and bucket to bail it out. Next morning, although there had been no rain it was fuller than before, so I concluded I had struck a spring. I shifted my ground and dug another a little to the West. This time was even worse. It was not a question of water ‘collecting’—water leaped round my spade as if I had struck a pipe. I hastily filled in what I had dug and tried again. This time my excavation remained dry for a day or so and then began to fill with water. The upshot of it all is that the afforestation this year has been entirely lop sided. I have only managed to plant two at the east end, and the West is overweighted. Next autumn, if we have had a drier summer, the eastern frontier may be practicable again and I shall then restore the balance. If, on the other hand, these springs are permanent, we shall just be unable to plant that side (‘there won’t be any wood there’). After all, regularity is not our aim, and an irregularity, not devised for ornament, but dictated by the nature of the ground, is an honest sort of beauty.
Except for the afforestation there have naturally been no public works so far this Vac. An examiner can hardly be expected to occupy his scanty hours off in such a vigorous way. I hope to do a little now that I am free and shall begin this afternoon by finishing off with the sickle the evacuated (at least I hope it is evacuated) strongpoint of the wasps and the piece of nettle and briar which we left—I can’t think why-along the Philipian boundary.
The only social diversion I have had lately was the binge of the English ‘Cave’—the anti-junto which, as I said in an earlier letter, is in danger of becoming simply the regular junto.79 I mention this because I heard recited there a bawdy ballad which was quite new to me, and which seems to me in its conclusion so ludicrous that I can’t resist handing it on. Perhaps you know it already. (The rimes seem to have degenerated during the process of oral tradition and now are mere assonances—if that). The early stanzas don’t matter: we will begin with the one that ends–
Never a word the damsel said But roared with laughter when the fun was over. (Rum-ti-iddle-ey etc)
Then comes the good part:
Hark! I hear a step on the stair! Sounds to me like an angry father, With a pistol in either hand, Looking for the man who screwed his daughter (Rum-ti-iddle-ey etc)
I have seized him by the hair of his head And shoved it into a bucket of water, And I screwed his pistol up his arse A dam sight harder than I screwed his daughter (Rum-ti-iddle-ey etc)
With the rôle of the heavy father properly cast—stumping up the stairs with a desperate expression and his two pistols—this anticlimax, this adding of injury to insult, seems to me irresistible.
I also heard at the same binge a very interesting piece of literary history from an