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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, since the story is so slight, a faintly narrative causerie-laid in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. The interesting thing is, that being a really consistent aesthete, he has to bring in the early Christians favourably because the flavour of the early Church-the new music, the humility, the chastity, the sense of order and quiet decorum—appeal to him aesthetically. It is doubtful if he sees that he can only have it in by blowing to bits the whole Epicurean basis of his outlook—so that aestheticism, honestly followed, refutes itself by leading him to something that will put aestheticism in its place—and Pater’s position is therefore, in the long run, all nonsense. But it is [a] very beautiful book—much enriched by a full prose translation of the Cupid and Psyche story from Apuleius who first told it and who is one of the minor characters. I should try it if it is in your library. Gad!—how it would have bowled one over if one had read it at eighteen. One would be only just beginning to recover now.

But all these books fade into insignificance beside my really great discovery, Barbour’s Bruce¹⁵ (XlVth century). This is ‘The’ modern epic: all that Scott’s poems try to recover: chivalrous sentiment, pawky humour, smell of heather, and all the rest of it—only all real, all done while that world was still there, not a ‘revival’. I am afraid the language is just beyond that thin unmistakable line which divides the readable from the unreadable for those who haven’t learned ‘Middle English’ as a school language. A very little ‘modernising’ would make it alright. I wonder could I persuade Dents to let me modernise it for an Everyman. You would think Scotch patriotism would give it a sale: till quite modern times every ‘cottar’ had a copy of it. (Do Scotch patriots buy books?). It contains, among other things, an account of Bruce landing at Rathlin which suggests that the bathing would not be good there. There seems to be some terrific current

       ‘Like the straight of Morrak in Spaine’

      –if that conveys anything to you, which it doesn’t to me. (From Rathlin, Bruce went on to Carrick Fergus).

If your idea of reading Descartes holds, begin with the Discourse on Method.¹⁶ This is in biographical form and is on the border-land between philosophy proper and what might be called the ‘history of intellectual manners’. But I’m not at all sure that a man so steeped in the XVIIth century as you would not find his natural starting point in Boethius-I suppose ‘Boece’ is as common in France at that time as he was in England? As he was translated about once a century into every civilised language, you would have no difficulty in finding a well flavoured version. In England he had the remarkable adventure of being rendered successively by K. Alfred, Chaucer, and Q. Elizabeth.

      As to Thomas’ rap over the knuckles about going out during the hymn—my case is this. Complete neglect of communicating is not tolerated by any Church nor practised by me. But is it within his rights to make it impossible for you to hear a sermon without communicating? Has anyone laid down the exact proportion of the intellectual and ritual elements—roughly symbolised by sermons and sacraments—which is necessary to membership of the Church of England. That is my ‘case’ as a controversialist: but I bear no malice.

      By the bye, what are your views, now, on the question of sacraments? To me that is the most puzzling side of the whole thing. I need hardly say I feel none of the materialistic difficulties: but I feel strongly just the opposite ones—i.e. I see (or think I see) so well a sense in which all wine is the blood of God—or all matter, even, the body of God, that I stumble at the apparently special sense in which this is claimed for the Host when consecrated. George Macdonald observes that the good man should aim at reaching the state of mind in which all meals are sacraments. Now that is the sort of thing I can understand: but I find no connection between it and the explicit ‘sacrament’ proprement dit. The Presbyterian method of sitting at tables munching actual slices of bread is clearly absurd under ordinary conditions: but one can conceive a state of society in which a real meal might be shared by a congregation in such a way as to be a sacrament without ceasing to be also their actual dinner for that day. Possibly this was so in the very early Church. Don’t bother about this if you are not inclined to discuss the question. I trotted it out because it seemed artificial to mention it at all without saying what I was thinking.

      How ones range of interests grows! СКАЧАТЬ