I suppose you heard that Mrs. Kreyer7 has now planted a few shrubs on our side of the frontier? And further—most exasperating of all—during the Christmas holiday I hardly ever went in or out by our stile on that side without meeting one or both of her whelps in the very article of trespass, and acknowledging the situation no more than to throw me a patronising ‘good afternoon’. What should one do at such a rencontre?
But perhaps the offence itself hardly annoys me more than F.K.’s reaction which consists in chuckling and saying, ‘Ah you Irish! I love to listen to dear Mrs. Moore—wouldn’t be happy without a grievance. Its really most remarkable’. He is, I think, in every mental characteristic (not moral, for of course he is no pessimist) the most complete P’daita that ever walked: in some respects he surpasses his original. What a magnificent conversation they could have had, say, in politics!
I was out with him this afternoon and he was quite grieved to hear your unfavourable verdict on Tristram Shandy8 re-read. I certainly did not get very far with my re-reading of it, but that was due to other causes. I still have hopes that I may enjoy it again in toto; and I rather fancy that a long immersion in English Literature has made me more tolerant of that kind of humour by now than you. Oddly enough Barfield has just made your experiment with exactly your result: he agrees with you in excepting Uncle Toby, but thinks most of the book, specially the Wadman parts, revolting.
And talking of the revolting, you will hardly believe the following. The junior parrot (you remember) has just got engaged. As soon as the news was out, his friends and owners, in other words the rest of the junto, all made a raid on his rooms—placed copies of ‘Married Love’ and ‘Lasting Passion’ under every cushion—put a large nude india rubber doll in his bed—plastered his walls with lewd good wishes—finished his whisky and beer—and retired. Such is his senility that it was left to him to spread this story as an excellent joke with his own mouth. I should like to be able to argue ‘If the fellows of a college behave like this, how much more will the rest of the world’, but I’m afraid things are so topsy-turvey—or ‘arsie-versy’ as the Elizabethans say—that it is the other way round, and for sheer blockheaded vulgarity our common room is just the place to look. Would a jeu d’esprit of this sort be tolerated in barracks?
The reservoir to the West of thee top wood is finished. It has been covered with earth so that the total effect is now that of a big plateau jutting out from the hillside, at present of brown mud, but soon, I hope, of smooth bright grass; and there is a little tile-roofed building on it-I suppose protecting a man hole into the interior. The silhouette which I see every evening against the sunset is therefore roughly as drawn, and on the whole I think it is agreeable. It often gives me an odd sensation as I progress homewards to tea along the cliff edge to look at this very distinctive shape in all its novelty and to reflect that, if God pleases, it will someday be as immemorially familiar to you and me as the contour of the Cave Hill. On such occasions you must picture me equipped with both axe and spade for the standard public work at present is ‘the extraction of roots’—I admit I have been making slow progress, but that is not because the work is turning out impracticable, but because of many interruptions.
Thus every Monday there is F.K. Last Saturday (by the way this is now Jan 24th—in fact the following Sunday) I was out for a walk with Lings. I have also missed some afternoons when the state of my health would not support the exertion. But I have little doubt that we shall have every single elder out of it before we have done. Another of my interruptions was a miniature walking tour with Barfield and Harwood just before term—so miniature indeed that it should be called a strolling tour: we just dithered along to Abingdon one day, and then Harwood and I alone (Barfield having had to leave us by bus) sauntered to Oxford all the way by river bank. The jaunt is worth mentioning because you and I have hitherto entirely underrated Abingdon. Their [sic] is a church standing in a quadrangle of almshouses right down on one of those little fresh water wharves on the river wh. is excellent. Also, on our saunter back to Oxford, we saw so many ‘abandoned lashers’ and silver falls that a man who followed the same route in July could ‘make one long bathing of a summer day’9 And talking about Wordsworth, pray Sir, did you ever read the White Doe of Rylstone?10 I read the first canto last night and recommend it strongly.
I don’t remember what I said about Law’s Serious Call. It is not a book which I would advise anyone to read with great urgency. There is a severity, even a grimness about it which strikes me as excessive. I must also go far to revise the favourable account I gave of The Appeal. 11 It did not fulfill the promise of its first passages. An XVIIIth century critic would have complained that it was ‘infected with Enthusiasm’, and would have been right in this sense that the ideas—very valuable ones—which it contains are held by the author with a rather feverish insistence to the exclusion of many other sides of religion. There is a great deal of repetition, and neither the good will which the author won from me at the outset, nor the charm of a delightful edition, nor the literary beauty of many passages (for Law can be really eloquent) prevented me from feeling in the end a sort of discomfort and desire for escape into the open air-as if I had been in a small hot room with a man of genius and piety who was not absolutely sane. It is the same quality that moved Johnson to say of Boehme—Law’s master in these later books—‘If Jacob had seen the unutterable, Jacob should not have tried to utter it’.12
Most of my recent reading, before term, has been of rather a simple and boyish kind. I re-read The People of the Mist-a tip-top yarn of the sort. If someone would start re-issuing all Rider Haggard at 1/-a volume I would get them all, as a permanent fall-back for purely recreational reading. Then I read The Wood Beyond the World-with some regret that this leaves me no more Wm Morris prose romances to read (except Child Christopher 13 wh. is an adaptation of a mediaeval poem already known to me and therefore hardly counts). I wish he had written a hundred of them! I should like to have the knowledge of a new romance always waiting for me the next time I am sick or sorry and want a real treat.
Then I read Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake, largely for a naif reason—that I had been wondering all my life who Hereward was and had a special reason in my work for wanting to know. The distinguishing feature of Kingsley’s novel is that the ‘manners and sentiments’ are nowhere near so glaringly anachronistic as they are in most novels of the kind—even in Scott whenever he goes further back than the ’45. It has, however, the opposite fault of sticking too close to history and therefore giving us (what is unpardonable in a tale of adventure) an unhappy ending. The hero betrays the heroine, deserts his followers, and dies miserably. You would want to vet it as you vetted the Life and Death of Jason,14 and for the same reason.
While at Cambridge (staying, as I foretold you in a posh hotel, at the expense of the Board. Four of us had to hold an examiners meeting one evening, and accordingly, just like the heroes of a romance, called for fire, lights, and a bottle of claret in a private room. All that was Jacking was to have prefaced the order by tweaking the landlord’s nose with a ‘Hark’ee, rascal!’ This was in the University Arms which perhaps you know)-while in Cambridge or rather on my long, slow, solitary, first class journey there and back through fields white with frost—I read Pater’s Marius the Epicurean. This is the best specimen extant of the Epicurean-aesthetic business: which one wrongs by reading it in its inferior practitioners such as George Moore and Oscar Wilde. As you probably know it is a novel—or,