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

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СКАЧАТЬ Elia (1833), ‘Detatched Thoughts on Books and Reading’: ‘I can read anything which I call a book. There are things in that shape which [cannot allow for such. In this catalogue of books which are not books—Biblia A-Biblia—I reckon…all those volumes which “no gentleman’s library should be without.”’

91 Rose Macaulay, Mystery at Geneva (1922).

92 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880).

1932

       TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

      [The Kilns]

      Jan 10th 1932

      My dear Arthur,

      I was glad to hear from you again, and sorry you are so dull. Perhaps you are suffering from too much turkey and ‘plumb’ pudding—or too many late nights and dances! How did you manage to get your mother’s consent to the introduction of a dog—I thought she was the insuperable difficulty?

      I quite understand the mood in wh. you fall back upon detective stories, though I have never been able to understand how that mood could lead to detective stories. I mean, I know well from experience that state of mind in which one wants immediate and certain pleasure from a book, for nothing—i.e. without paying the price of that slight persistence, that almost imperceptible tendency not to go on, which, to be honest, nearly always accompanies the reading of [a] good book. Not only accompanies by the way, but (do you agree) actually makes part of the pleasure. A little sense of labour is necessary to all perfect pleasures I think: just as (to my palate at least) there is no really delicious taste without a touch of astringency—the ‘bite’ in alcoholic drinks, the resistance to the teeth in nuts or meat, the tartness of fruit, the bitterness of mint sauce. The apple must not be too sweet, the cheese must not be too mild. Still, I know the other mood, when one wants a book of sheer pleasure.

In fact I have been going through such a mood lately. I have had to work v. hard all day this Vac. and in the evenings I have wanted relaxation. I have accordingly read The Wood Beyond the World, Rider Haggard’s The People of the Mist,¹ and am now at Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake.² In fact when I am in that state of mind I want not so much a grown-up ‘light’ book (to me usually the hardest of all kinds of reading) as a boy’s book;—distant lands, strange adventures, mysteries not of the American but of the Egyptian kind. Of course what makes detective stories appeal to you is that they were one of your first loves in the days when you used to come round and borrow Sherlock Holmes from my father, and therefore in reading them now you have the sense of return, you step back as into an old easy shoe—and that certainly is one of the essentials for this kind of reading. One would never read a new type of book for pure relaxation: and perhaps re-reading of an old friend—a Scott with much skipping—is the best of all. I don’t think you re-read enough—I know I do it too much. Is it since I last wrote to you that I re-read Wuthering House?³ I thought it very great. Isn’t it (despite the improbability) an excellent stroke of art to tell it all through the mouth of a very homely, prosaic old servant, whose sanity and mother-wit thus provides a cooling medium through which the wild, horrible story becomes tolerable? I have also re-read Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution⁴ and find that I had forgotten it nearly all. It is, in the famous words, ‘too long drawn out’ and becomes mere scolding in the end.

What wd. perhaps interest you more is Pater’s Marius the Epicurean⁵ which I had twice before tried to read without success but have this time reached the end of-and reached it before my desire to punch Marius’ head had become quite unbearable. Do you know it? It is very well worth reading. You must give up all idea of reading a story and treat it simply as a vaguely narrative essay. It interests me as showing just how far the purely aesthetic attitude to life can go, in the hands of a master, and it certainly goes a good deal further than one would suppose from reading the inferior aesthetes like Oscar Wilde and George Moore. In Pater it seems almost to include the rest of the spiritual life: he has to bring in chastity, he nearly has to bring in Christianity, because they are so beautiful. And yet somehow there is a faint flavour of decay over it all. Perhaps it is his patronage of great things which is so offensive—condescending to add the Christian religion to his nosegay of spiritual flowers because it has a colour or a scent that he thinks would just give a finishing touch to the rest. It is all balls anyway-because one sees at a glance that if he really added it it would break up the whole nosegay view of life. In fact that is the refutation of aestheticism: for perfect beauty you need to include things which will at once show that mere beauty is not the sole end of life. If you don’t include them, you have given up aestheticism: if you do, you must give it up Q.E.D. But Pater is valuable just because, being a perfectly honest aesthete, he really tries to follow its theory to the bitter end, and therefore betrays its weakness. I didn’t mean to make this letter a mere catalogue of books read, but one thing has led on to another.

      About Lucius’ argument that the evangelists would have put the doctrine of the atonement into the Gospel if they had had the slightest excuse, and, since they didn’t, therefore Our Lord didn’t teach it: surely, since we know from the Epistles that the Apostles (who had actually known him) did teach this doctrine in his name immediately after his death, it is clear that he did teach it: or else, that they allowed themselves a very free hand. But if people shortly after his death were so very free in interpreting his doctrine, why should people who wrote much later (when such freedom wd. be more excusable from lapse of memory in an honest writer, and more likely to escape detection in a dishonest one) become so very much more accurate? The accounts of a thing don’t usually get more and more accurate as time goes on. Anyway, if you take the sacrificial idea out of Christianity you deprive both Judaism and Paganism of all significance. Can one believe that there was just nothing in that persistent motif of blood, death, and resurrection, which runs like a black and scarlet cord through all the greater myths—thro’ Balder & Dionysus & Adonis and the Graal too? Surely the history of the human mind hangs together better if you suppose that all this was the first shadowy approach of something whose reality came with Christ—even if we can’t at present fully understand that something.

      Try and write soon.

      Yrs

      Jack

       TO HIS BROTHER (W):

      [Magdalen College]

      Jan 17th 1932.

      My dear W–

      Term began yesterday (Saturday) and I am seated this fine Sunday morning in our room in College having finished my collection papers and now about to allow myself an hour’s letter writing before setting out home where I shall be to night.

Through the window on my left I see a most beautiful, almost a springlike, sunshine on the pinnacles of the Tower and the delicious sound of Sunday morning bells has just stopped. On an ordinary Sunday morning I should of course be out at the house, or rather at Church, but as you know the first week end of term is sacred to СКАЧАТЬ