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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 is worth mentioning only because the handiest edition I could get was a school edition, & it was rather delightful to renew ones acquaintance with that highly specialised form of composition-a preface to a school text. You know. ‘Plato, the celebrated Gk. philosopher (500–400 B.C.) thought—’ and then a clear, dogmatic, and misleading sentence. No half lights.

Wuthering Heights⁸⁹ which I re-read the other day is, I believe, one of your biblia abiblia.⁹⁰ I should not like to make it my constant fare, but I still like it very much. R. Macaulay’s Mystery at Geneva⁹¹ I also re-read recently: much the poorest she has written, and a mere repetition of all her favourite tricks. I feel P’daytesque and ask ‘Will she live?’

I have bought The Brothers Karamazov⁹² but not yet read it with the exception of some special detachable pieces (of which there are many). Thus read, it is certainly a great religious and poetical work: whether, as a whole, it will turn out a good, or even a tolerable novel I don’t know. I have not forgotten your admirable Russian novel ‘Alexey Poldorovna lived on a hill. He cried a great deal.’

      It is pleasant to reflect that one of the nine terms of your exile is now over.

      Yrs

      Jack

1 The Rev. Wilfrid Savage Thomas (1879–1959) took a BA from Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 1900. Ordained in 1903 after a year at Wells Theological College, he was Curate of Great Marlow until 1906 and spent the next two years in Australia as Domestic Chaplain to the Bishop of Adelaide. He returned to Great Marlow, 1909–11, and was assigned Banbury with Grimsbury, 1911–13. After a further spell in Australia in 1915 as priest-in-charge of Mallala Mission, he was Curate of Amersham, 1916–18, Vicar of Holy Trinity, Lambeth, and Chaplain of St Thomas’s Hospital, London, 1918–23. Thomas became Vicar of Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, in 1924 and remained there until 1935. He was subsequently Vicar of Adderbury with Milton, 1935–9.

2 The grounds of The Kilns covered nine acres, and the Lewis brothers began planting trees and clearing pathways immediately after moving there.

3 The Rev. Edward Foord-Kelcey (1859–1934) matriculated at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1884. He read Theology at Cuddesdon College and was ordained in 1888. He was Curate of St Saviour, Leicester, 1887–92, Vicar of Quorn (or Quorndon), Leicestershire, 1892–1909, and Rector of Great Kimble, Buckinghamshire, 1909–26. He officiated in the Diocese of Oxford from 1927 until his death. His wife died shortly before the First World War. In a short biography of Foord-Kelcey (LP XI: 24–5), Lewis wrote; ‘A common love of Scott and Johnson was the ground on which we met…These, with Shakespeare and Carlyle, were the constant themes of his talk… As a man of letters his range was not very wide—of poetry, for example, he knew little—nor was his judgement above the ordinary: but he was always worth listening to for the intensity of his gusto, and his chuckles and ecstatic repetition.’

4 There had been a footpath running across a field from Headington to Headington Quarry since 1804. The Oxford City Corporation wished to divert it, but many people who had been using the footpath for the whole of their lives, including Mr J. Snow, managed to have the City’s plan altered. See the letter from Mr Thomas, ‘Closing the Quarry Field Footpath’ in the Oxford Times (7 August 1931), p. 10.

5 Maureen Moore, the daughter of Janie King Moore, taught music at the Monmouth School for Girls, Monmouthshire, 1930–3. See Dame Maureen Dunbar of Hempriggs (1906–97) in the Biographical Appendix to CL I.

6 The nickname of Mrs Janie King Moore (1872–1951). See the Biographical Appendix to CL I.

7 George Robert Sabine Snow (1897–1969) was a Fellow of Magdalen College, 1922–60.

8 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 6 vols. (1934), 18 April 1783, vol. IV, p. 205. slightly misquoted.

9 Jeremy Taylor, СКАЧАТЬ