Collected Letters Volume Two: Books, Broadcasts and War, 1931–1949. Walter Hooper

Harwood’s first suggested to me that God might be defined as ‘a Being who spends his time having his existence proved and disproved’.)²⁰ The particular one you quote (‘I have the idea of a perfect being’)²¹ seems to me to be valid or invalid according to the meaning you give the words ‘have an idea of’. I used to work it out by the analogy of a machine. If I have the idea of a machine which I, being unmechanical, couldn’t have invented on my own, does this prove that I have received the idea from some really mechanical source—e.g. a talk with the real inventor? To which I answer ‘Yes, if you mean a really detailed idea’: but of course there is another sense in which e.g. a lady novelist ‘has an idea’ of a new airship invented by her hero—in the sense that she attached some vague meaning to her words, which proves nothing of the sort. So that if anyone asks me whether the idea of God in human minds proves His existence, I can only ask ‘Whose idea?’ The Thistle-Bird’s²² idea, for instance, clearly not, for it contains nothing whereof his own pride, fear, and malevolence could not easily provide the materials (cf. McAndrew’s Hymn ‘Yer mother’s God’s a grasping deil, the image of yourself’).²³

On the other hand it is arguable that the ‘idea of God’ in some minds does contain, not a mere abstract definition, but a real imaginative perception of goodness and beauty, beyond their own resources: and this not only in minds which already believe in God. It certainly seems to me that the ‘vague something’ which has been suggested to ones mind as desirable, all ones life, in experiences of nature and music and poetry, even in such ostensibly irreligious forms as ‘The land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ in Morris,²⁴ and which rouses desires that no finite object even pretends to satisfy, can be argued not to be any product of our own minds. Of course I am not suggesting that these vague ideas of something we want and haven’t got, wh. occur in the Pagan period of individuals and of races (hence mythology) are anything more than the first and most rudimentary forms of the ‘idea of God’.

      This subject has drawn me into a longer digression (if indeed digression is possible in my type of letter!) than I had intended. I do wish you could see the Kilns now. We have had very cold weather (the last few mornings have been white with frost) and little wind: most of the leaves have become yellow and red without dropping from their branch, and those that have fallen lie in smooth circular carpets at the foot of their tree. The firs in the top wood are getting slowly barer, and working these afternoons in the high countries I begin to get the real autumn beauties.

Meanwhile you have been having very different beauties. I was intrigued by your account of the Portugal coast, which sounds both scenically and socially an admirable place: well worthy to be added (it costs nothing) to the lengthening list of places the Pigibudda²⁵ must visit some day. I resent more and more these impertinent three years which still divide us from the beginning of a joint rational life.

I am at present writing this on a Sunday afternoon in the Common Room, having begun it yesterday in College. Maureen has her usual week end guest, a harmless girl whom we carried to [the] sermon this morning. Our pew felt a little awkward when Thomas, before the text, said ‘We shall be glad if members of the congregation who are absolutely unable to stay for the whole service, will go out during the hymn: but it is very much to be preferred that they should wait till the service is over.’ We went out during the hymn according to our usual practice. I think myself he is a little unfair to try and make it a rule that you must communicate if you want to hear a sermon. Of these (since you mention them among items of news) I have heard two, having skipped on the first Sunday after you left in order to correct my collection papers. This morning’s was on the ‘armour of God’²⁶ and not one of his best.

Last week’s was on St Luke’s day,²⁷ from which I learned that St Luke was a painter as well as a doctor and that there is at Rome a painting of the Good Shepherd traditionally attributed to him. The attribution is probably wrong, said Thomas, but the tradition of his being a painter was interesting if we considered the specially artistic character of the 3rd gospel, as against the purely facty nature of the other two synoptics, or the mystical nature of the 4th.²⁸ I have so many different departments of news, what with sermons and swans, that I could well adopt the different datings of the Tatler ‘fashion from White’s coffee house, politics from Wills’ etc.

This is a great feather in my cap, specially as next year is the first exam held under the syllabus which my party and I have forced upon the junto after much hard fighting: so that if I get a good colleague we shall be able to some extent to mould the new tradition. In fact, in English School politics, the anti-junto is in the ascendant—perhaps, from a prejudiced point of view, might be said to have become the junto. How long will it take us to become corrupt in our turn?²⁹

The General Election takes place on Tuesday next, and the results will be stale long before this reaches you. I had a wonderful conversation about it last Sunday with a Dr Lees whom Kathleen Whitty³⁰ brought here (or rather he drove her) to tea in the course of a motor drive from Bristol. I said ‘Politics have really become unintelligible to the amateur now. In the old days when it was about votes for women or home rule for Ireland one could have an opinion: now I feel one’s opinion, and therefore one’s vote, is quite worthless’—He replied with emotion ‘I’m so glad to hear you say that, because that is exactly how I feel. What is the good of all these ignorant opinions? That is why we must leave it to the government who really understand, and that is why it is so all important to vote against Labour.’ I tried again. ‘One is rather sickened to see the way the papers are buttering up Macdonald³¹ and Snowden³² now, while a month ago they couldn’t find anything bad enough to say for them’—‘Yes, indeed. Very sickened’—‘And it is such nonsense all this about Macdonald having “done the big thing”’—‘Ah well there I don’t agree with you. You see no man likes to desert his old friends, but this chap, when he saw the good of the country demanded it etc’—then followed verbatim the whole of the Daily Mail stuff about the big thing. All this from an old blether in a black city coat and streaked trousers and spats introduced by Kathleen as ‘the cleverest doctor in Bristol’. Alas, this description may well be perfectly true! An essay on the conception of ‘cleverness’ would be worth writing.

I finished the Wodehouse the day after you left. It is not the best (I think) of his that I have read, but very well worth reading indeed. I also re-read Northanger Abbey³³ about the same time. Christie well describes it as ‘Jane Austen in high spirits’. It is much nearer farce (or burlesque) than the others, but none the worse on that account.

I enclose a formal letter to you on the mortgage. If you will write one to me, the same except for the necessary changes, and return both with your next letter, I will send them to be taken care of by Barfield.³⁴ He has not been to see me yet so your will has not yet been regularised. Minto was—to use a trite phrase in its genuine sense—‘overcome’ by your kind provision for Maureen.

As I look up (3.30) I see those obscene birds advancing across