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

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СКАЧАТЬ explained it. I scored a complete Plough, and was told how he explained it.

      By this time we were out in Port Meadow, and a wide prospect opened before him. A number of hills and church spires required to be identified, together with their ‘picturesque’, mineral, or chronological details. A good many problems arose, and again I did very badly. As his map, though constantly brought out, was a geological map, it did not help us much. A conversation on weather followed, and seemed to offer an escape from unmitigated fact. The escape, however, was quite illusory, and my claim to be rather fond of nearly all sorts of weather was received with the stunning information that psychologists detected the same trait in children and lunatics.

      Anxious to turn my attention from this unpleasing fact, he begged my opinion of various changes which had recently been made in the river: indeed every single lock, bridge, and stile for three mortal miles had apparently been radically altered in the last few months. As I had never seen any of the places before (‘But I thought you said you were a walker…’) this bowled me middle stump again. The removal of a weir gave us particular trouble. He could not conceive how it had been done. What did I think? And then, just as I was recovering from this fresh disgrace, and hoping that the infernal weir was done with, I found that the problem of haw it had been removed was being raised only as the preliminary to the still more intricate problem of why it had been removed. (My feelings were those expressed by Macfarlane at dinner one night last term, in an answer to someone’s question. ‘Yes. He is studying the rhythms of mediaeval Latin prose, and it is a very curious and interesting subject, but it doesn’t interest me.’)

      For a mile or so after the weir we got on famously, for Kenchew began ‘I was once passing this very spot or, no, let me see—perhaps it was a little further on—no! It was exactly here—I remember that very tree—when a very remarkable experience, really remarkable in a small way, happened to me.’ The experience remarkable in a small way, with the aid of a judicious question or two on my part, was bidding fair to last out the length of the walk, when we had the horrible misfortune of passing a paper mill (You see, by the bye, what a jolly walk it was even apart from the company!). Not only a paper mill but the paper mill of the Clarendon Press. ‘Of course I had been over it. No? Really etc’ (The great attraction was that you could get an electric shock.)

      But I must stop my account of this deplorable walk somewhere. It was the same all through—sheer information. Time after time I attempted to get away from the torrent of isolated, particular facts: but anything tending to opinion, or discussion, to fancy, to ideas, even to putting some of his infernal facts together and making something out of them—anything like that was received in blank silence. Once, while he was telling me the legendary foundation of a church, I had a faint hope that we might get onto history: but it turned out that his knowledge was derived from an Edwardian Oxford pageant. Need I add that he is a scientist? A geographer, to be exact. And now that I come to think of it he is exactly what one would have expected a geographer to be. But I mustn’t give you too black an impression of him. He is kind, and really courteous (you know the rare quality Id mean) and a gentleman. I imagine he is what women call ‘Such an interesting man. And so clever.’

One day in College lately I had a long browse over Lockhart,⁴⁴ using your pencilled index as a guide. It had almost the effect of having a conversation with you. What a good book it is, isn’t it? I must gradually browse through it all. Some baggage called Dame Una Pope-Henessy has just brought out (for the centenary) a real petty, chatty, Strachey-esque Life of Scott which begins by expressing a desire to ‘rescue’ Scott from ‘the solemn nine-volume tomb’ of Lockhart.⁴⁵ This kind of thing is insufferable. Christie reviewed it for the Oxford Magazine and, very happily in my opinion, ended up with the view that this chatty, impudent life was ‘bound to come’ and it was a good thing to have it over.⁴⁶

      Talking about Scott, I finished the Heart of Midlothian shortly after I last wrote to you. It seems to me on the whole one of the best. Dumbiedikes is one of the great lairds—almost as good as Ellangowans, though not quite. I suppose every one has already remarked how wonderfully Jennie escapes the common dulness of perfectly good characters in fiction. Do you think that the fact of her being uneducated helps? Is it that the reader wants to feel some superiority over the characters he reads about, and that a social or intellectual one will give him a sop and induce him to believe in the purely moral superiority? But this sounds rather too ‘modern’ and knowing to be true; I for one not beleiving that we are all such ticks as is at present supposed. I did not read the Georgics after all, but did read the Aeneid.

      The other day Foord-Kelsie succeeded in carrying out a project that he has been hammering away at for a long time, that of taking me over to see his old village of Kimble where he was rector. I mention it in order to say that you and I have unduly neglected the Chilterns. Of course you have been there, and noticed how completely different they are from the Cotswolds, but one forgets the beauty. We drove for hours through the finest old beech woods—a real forest country where the villages are only clearings. The local industry is chair making, and as beech, apparently, can be worked green, the old method of actually working in the wood, turning the newly felled timber with a primitive lathe, still goes on. At least F.-K.—come, I see for the first time that it won’t do on paper-Foord-Kelsie says so. Perhaps this is no more reliable than the consolations which he offered me when you were in danger at Shanghai, when he pointed out that the combatants were firing at each other not at the Settlement. I replied that shells, once fired, didn’t discriminate on whom they fell. To which he answered ‘Oh but you know modern artillery is a wonderful thing. They can place their shells with the greatest possible nicety.’ This from him to me, considering our relative experience, is worthy of the P’daitabird at his best.

      By the way, talking of shells, we had a conversation about the next war in College the other night, and the Senior Parrot (the hero of the match episode) who flies in the reserve was treating us to the usual business—modern weapons—capital cities wiped out in an hour-non-combatants decimated—whole thing over in a month. It suddenly occurred to me that after all, these statements are simply the advertisement of various new machines: and the next war will be precisely as like this as the real running of a new car is like the account of it in the catalogue. We had all, of course,—at least people of your and my way of thinking—been skeptical, but I never saw the ‘rationale’ of it before.

      To return to Foord-Kelsie. I had one magnificent score off him that drive. All the way along, whenever we passed a rash of bungalows or a clutch of petrol pumps, he was at his usual game. ‘How ridiculous to pretend that these things spoiled the beauty of the countryside etc’ Late in the day, and now in his own country, he waved his hand towards a fine hillside and remarked ‘My old friend Lee—a most remarkable man—bought all that and presented it to the nation to save it from being covered with bungalows.’ He saw the pit he had fallen into a moment too late.

      His old rectory at Kimble is one of the very best places I have ever seen. It is a huge garden sloping down one side and up the other of a little ravine: beyond that divided only by a fence from the almost miniature-mountain scenery of Chekkers park. In this little ravine is a good specimen of a kind of beauty we shall never, I fear, have at the Kilns—that of uneven ground evenly shaved by lawn-mowers. You know the effect (one sometimes gets it on golf links)—rather like the curves on a closely clipped race-horse: an almost sensuous beauty-one wants to stroke the hillside. If you add a few finely clipped yews you will have the picture complete.

I have done little reading other than work since the Aeneid, except, of course, the inevitable snippet of Boswell. I began the first epistle to the Corinthians but didn’t make much of it. Lately I have been skimming The Way of All Flesh.⁴⁷ СКАЧАТЬ