Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949. Walter Hooper. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Walter Hooper
Издательство: HarperCollins
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Жанр произведения: Биографии и Мемуары
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isbn: 9780007332663
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by Minto upsetting a tumbler, but was not otherwise so amusing as I had anticipated—tho’ Maureen dropped a brick at the outset by saying that ‘Of course, Co. Down isn’t real Ireland.’

      In a word, for varied pleasure (the scale runs from a mountain like a castle ten miles off to a silent harbour full of apparently dead schooners and one puffer half a mile off) this is just the best place I have struck for years. I very much wish we were not moving to Rostrevor tomorrow. I am strongly upholding this house as a place for a family holiday in August. It is a dingy, faded place with the indescribable smell of all Irish lodging houses, but all the important things are right, i.e. light that you can really read by, comfortable chairs, very good beds, hot baths, and a capital chapter house round the corner. The landlady was rather too talkative at the beginning but we see less of her now. (Memo—Canon Hayes was rector of Kilkeel before he went to St Marks ‘He was a very queer man. He did awfully crazy things’)

      Minto is frightfully sorry about Vera. It is not a practical joke nor was it intended.

      Yours

      Jack

      P.S. Leeboro’ garden is a paradise of daffodils: it has never looked so well before, I must confess

       TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS (W):

      Rostrevor,

      Co. Down

      [4 April 1934]

      My dear Griffiths,

      A wet day—and a cold—and this delightful sea and mountain village where I have been spending my holiday, seems a good occasion for answering your most welcome letter.

      I think our positions about Pantheism are exactly the same: for we both, in places, travelled the same road to Christianity, and the result of the arrival is certainly not any ingratitude or contempt to the various signposts or hostelries that helped on the journey. On the contrary, it is only since I have become a Christian that I have learned really to value the elements of truth in Paganism and Idealism. I wished to value them in the old days; now I really do. Don’t suppose that I ever thought myself that certain elements of pantheism were incompatible with Christianity or with Catholicism.

      I should rather like to attend your Greek class, for it is a perpetual puzzle to me how New Testament Greek got the reputation of being easy. St Luke I find particularly difficult. As regards matter—leaving the question of language—you will be glad to hear that I am at last beginning to get some small understanding of St Paul: hitherto an author quite opaque to me. I am speaking now, of course, of the general drift of whole epistles: short passages, treated devotionally, are of course another matter. And yet the distinction is not, for me, quite a happy one. Devotion is best raised when we intend something else. At least that is my experience. Sit down to meditate devotionally on a single verse, and nothing happens. Hammer your way through a continued argument, just as you would in a profane writer, and the heart will sometimes sing unbidden.

      I think I agree with you that ‘historical research’ as now understood, is no work for a monk,