The Dean of Balliol sleeps with men Sleeps with men, sleeps with men. The Dean of Balliol sleeps with men Till three o’clock in the morning.
But any parts I have ever heard of the ‘German Officer’ relate quite possible happenings that have really nothing funny about them. Again, bawdy must have nothing cruel about it, like ‘Old Mother Riley’: it must not approach anywhere near the pornographic like the poem in which every line begins ‘A little’. Within these limits I think it is a good and wholesome genre: though I can’t help feeling sorry that it should be the only living folk-art left to us. If our English binge had been held in a mediaeval university we should have had, mixed with the bawdy songs, tragical and even devotional pieces, equally authorless and handed on from mouth to mouth in the same way, with the same individual variations.
I go to Cambridge on New Years Eve for a couple of day’s awarding, not this time to be lodged in Queen’s but in the University Arms: with—would you believe it—the same carte blanche. So, at least, I gather from Hugh-Jones of Keble,81 who stayed there on the same job some years ago and wondered till the last night, when he discovered (almost but not quite too late) the explanation—wondered at the lavish orders of his colleagues and concluded them all to be rich men.
This same Hugh-Jones has been one of my disappointments. I met him in Cambridge at the Award last year: we discovered a common enthusiasm for Shaw and Chesterton and just an interesting amount of disagreement on the subjects they led on to: sat till after midnight: and parted with a strong desire to continue the acquaintance. A few weeks ago he asked me to dine, not in Keble but at his house. That was the first shock—married! I arrived and got the second shock—not only a wife present, but a sister in law—an Anglo-Indian sister in law. Still I consoled myself with the expectation that he would carry me off to his study after dinner for some talk. Not a bit of it. Not even a temporary separation from the ladies over our wine. He had asked me, apparently, to sit solidly with his wife and sister in law till ten o’clock when I could endure it no longer and went.
The sister in law was the sort of woman who, when the talk drifted towards education, remarked that it was astonishing how badly children were taught now a days: she had met a boy of fourteen who didn’t know the principal export of Burma. ‘He thought it was fruit’ she said, and laid down her needles and gazed at me. In fact I was like Lamb, left alone with his sensible, well-informed man. (I could have told her the chief export of Anglo-India all right). The wife was not so bad, and I had seen her a few days before acting the part of the maid in Tartuffe (in English)82 given by the Magdalen dramatic society. She had ‘done very well’ wh. is surprising, for my pupil Lings (I think you met him) who was producer, as well as playing Organ, had given me an amusing account of her behaviour at rehearsals. In his scene with her he had a speech ending ‘His only care is religion,’83 which he inadvertently altered to ‘Religion is his only care.’ After a long pause she said dreamily ‘Are you waiting for me? I haven’t got to say my speech until you get to “is religion”, you know.’
Tartuffe was really excellently done. I had neither read nor seen it before and enjoyed it thoroughly. To a reader I daresay the savagery is the most striking thing, but on the stage it made me laugh ‘consumedly’. The final scene between Organ and his wife is as funny as anything I know (‘But I tell you, Mother, I saw him with my own eyes. I saw the rascal embracing my wife’—‘Ah, my son, beware of tale-bearers. Without doubt the worthy man has been slandered’—‘I shall go mad! I saw it myself’—‘Ah tongues will wag, to be sure’ etc.) A most maddening type of female P’dayta. By the way doesn’t Tartuffe, specially in the opening scenes, bring out very strongly that Latin dominance of the familia which you have often spoken of?—except that in Tartuffe’s household it is not so much patria potestas as materna potestas: which possibly is very French too.
It is now after tea and I have put in a very tolerable afternoon’s walk on the nettles and brambles. A civil gamekeepery kind of man walked up on the Philips side of the boundary—I think he lives in the other house on Philips land—and had a chat about trees.84 He knows the place very well having originally ploughed up what is now the grass platform before the top wood when Mrs Goodman got rid of the hawthorns. I regretted the loss of the hawthorns less when this man told me that before he ploughed it that part was a mass of undergrowth so that you couldn’t walk through it. I was not so pleased to learn that our new holly is, after all our instructions to Suttons, the bush type and not the tree. He promised to find out for me the real name of the tree kind, which he will be able to do as one of his employers is a Forestry tutor. He also remarked that elder and bramble are the two strongest growing things there are and that, left a free field, each will defeat everything except the other.
It was a foggy afternoon, but very warm: really springlike early this morning as I went to ‘the early celebbbrrration’.85 We had a poorish discourse from Thomas at Matins, but otherwise he has been keeping his end up very well. In one sermon on foreign missions lately he gave an ingenious turn to an old objection. ‘Many of us’ he said ‘have friends who used to live abroad, and had a native Christian as a cook who was unsatisfactory. Well, after all there are a great many unsatisfactory Christians in England too. In fact I’m one myself.’ Another interesting point (in a different sermon) was that we should be glad that the early Christians expected the second coming and the end of the world quite soon: for if they had known that they were founding an organisation for centuries they would certainly have organised it to death: believing that they were merely making provisional arrangements for a year or so, they left it free to live.
How odd it is to turn from Thomas to F.K.86 He really surpassed himself the other day when he said that he objected to the early chapters of St Luke (the Annunciation particularly) on the ground that they were—indelicate. This leaves one gasping. One goes on reacting against the conventional modern reaction against nineteenth century prudery, and then suddenly one is held up by a thing like this, and almost pardons all the followers of Lytton Strachey. If you turn up the passage in St Luke the thing becomes even more grotesque. The Middle Ages had a different way with these things. Did I tell you that in one of the Miracle Plays, Joseph is introduced as a typical comic jealous husband, and enters saying ‘This is what comes of marrying a young woman.’
F.K., however, gave me a treat last week by showing a treasure which I never would have guessed that he had—a letter in Johnson’s own hand to Mrs Thrale. He talks of giving it to Pembroke but as he has had it for many years I guess that he will never part with it.87
Minto has probably told you that we are at present revelling in the unaccustomed luxury of a good maid. (What an ambiguous sentence!) You will hardly imagine the Kilns under the regime of a maid who not only can cook (that is odd enough) but who is actually allowed to cook by Minto—a state of affairs I had long since given up hoping for. Esto perpetua!
As I said at the outset I have been able to read very little: and nothing in your line. The Somnium Scipionis88