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

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СКАЧАТЬ English for ‘publicans and sinners’) who seem to have made up the background of Our Lord’s circle. Still, we would reply that some Pharisees (e.g. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus) did come in: and, on the other hand, none of the riff-raff came in for money, because there ‘was no money in the thing’.

So that for this absolute cleavage in the East (if it really is so absolute as you say) we still need an explanation. Sometimes, relying on his remark, ‘Other sheep I have that are not of this fold’⁵⁹ I have played with the idea that Christianity was never intended for Asia—even that Buddha is the form in which Christ appears to the Eastern mind. But I don’t think this will really work. When I have tried to rule out all my prejudices I still can’t help thinking that the Christian world is (partially) ‘saved’ in a sense in which the East is not. We may be hypocrites, but there is a sort of unashamed and reigning iniquity of temple prostitution and infanticide and torture and political corruption and obscene imagination in the East, which really does suggest that they are off the rails—that some necessary part of the human machine, restored to us, is still missing with them. (My friend’s story about the I.C.S.⁶⁰ regulation ‘No pornographic books or pictures shall be imported except for bona fide religious purposes’ is relevant here).

      On the whole, my present conclusion is that the difficulty about the Oriental present is really the same as the difficulty about the years B.C. For some reason that we cannot find out they are still living in the B.C. period (as there are African tribes still living in the stone-age) and it is apparently not intended that they should yet emerge from it. I admit that I have myself fallen into an Orientalism, and am giving instead of an explanation, the true eastern platitude ‘God is great’. In fact, like Nettleship, ‘I don’t know, you know, I don’t know, you know.’ (Mind you, there is this to be said for my view, that you wd. hardly expect time to be quite as important to God as it is to us.)

Since last writing I have had my usual Easter walk. It was in every way an abnormal one. First of all, Harwood was to bring anew Anthro-posophical member (not v. happily phrased!) and I was bringing a new Christian one to balance him, in the person of my ex-pupil Griffiths. Then Harwood and his satellite ratted, and the walk finally consisted of Beckett,⁶¹ Barfield, Griffiths, and me. As Harwood never missed before, and Beckett seldom comes, and Griffiths was new, the atmosphere I usually look for on these jaunts was Jacking. At least that is how I explain a sort of disappointment I have been feeling ever since. Then, owing to some affairs of Barfield’s, we had to alter at the last minute our idea of going to Wales, and start (of all places!) from Eastbourne instead. All the same, I wd. not have you think it was a bad walk: it was rather like Hodge who, though nowhere in a competition of Johnsonian cats, was, you will remember, ‘a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.’⁶²

      The first day we made Lewes, walking over the bare chalky South Downs all day. The country, except for an occasional gleam of the distant sea—we were avoiding the coast for fear of hikers—is almost exactly the same as the Berkshire downs or the higher parts of Salisbury Plain. The descent into Lewes offered a view of the kind I had hitherto seen only on posters—rounded hill with woods on the top, and one side quarried into a chalk cliff: sticking up dark and heavy against this a little town climbing up to a central Norman castle. We had a very poor inn here, but I was fortunate in sharing a room with Griffiths who carried his asceticism so far as to fling off his eiderdown—greatly to my comfort.

      Next day we had a delicious morning-just such a day as downs are made for, with endless round green slopes in the sunshine, crossed by cloud shadows. The landscape was less like the Plain now. The sides of the hill—we were on a ridgeway—were steep and wooded, giving rather the same effect as the narrower parts of Malvern hills beyond the Wych. We had a fine outlook over variegated blue country to the North Downs. After we had dropped into a village for lunch and climbed onto the ridge again for the afternoon, our troubles began.

      The sun disappeared: an icy wind took us in the flank: and soon there came a torrent of the sort of rain that feels as if ones face were being tattooed and turns the mackintosh on the weather side into a sort of wet suit of tights. At the same time Griffiths began to show his teeth (as I learned afterwards) having engaged Barfield in a metaphysico-religious conversation of such appalling severity and egotism that it included the speaker’s life history and a statement that most of us were infallibly damned. As Beckett and I, half a mile ahead, looked back over that rain beaten ridgeway we could always see the figures in close discussion. Griffiths very tall, thin, high-shouldered, stickless, with enormous pack: arrayed in perfectly cylindrical knickerbockers, very tight in the crutch. Barfield, as you know, with that peculiarly blowsy air, and an ever more expressive droop and shuffle.

For two mortal hours we walked nearly blind in the rain, our shoes full of water, and finally limped into the ill omened village of Bramber. Here, as we crowded to the fire in our inn, I tried to make room for us by shoving back a little miniature billiard table which stood in our way. I was in that state of mind in which I discovered without the least surprise, a moment too late, that it was only a board supported on trestles. The trestles, of course, collapsed, and the board crashed to the ground. Slate broken right across. I haven’t had the bill yet, but I suppose it will equal the whole expences of the tour. Griffiths gave me a surprise equal to that which the Quakers gave Lamb in another inn⁶³ —indeed the two stories are closely parallel—by refusing to see that there was any claim against me at all for the damage.

      From Bramber we ascended again in a lovely evening after rain, through lovely scenes—the downs here assuming rather the character of moors. But it very soon began to drizzle again, and an error in map reading involved us in hours of stumbling and circling up there in the twilight. We lay at Findon. Griffiths was quite intolerable after dinner. Don’t mistake me. I don’t mean that he was rude. But he displayed a perversity and disingenuousness in argument and a cold blooded brutality—religious brutality is the worst kind-which quite revolted us. To expound his position wd. carry us too far: but you would be getting near it if you imagined a Calvinist Jesuit with strong leanings to the doctrine that the elect cannot sin, who had borrowed from metaphysics the view that ‘love’ cannot be predicated of God, and from economics the doctrine that it is no real charity to give anything to the poor. In fact if you mix together all the harshest aspects of every form of religion and irreligion which you know and imagine them delivered with the dryness of a scientist and the intolerance of a verminous monk of the fourth century, you have the recipe. Barfield and I slept in one room and consoled ourselves with chaff and chat in our old manner, recalling happier walking tours. We were very footsore.

      The next day made amends. We had good weather all day long. Griffiths improved surprisingly. In fact we have all forgiven him, and shall ask him again. His exhibition of the previous day was really, I believe, only the reaction of a solitary on finding himself suddenly at bay among people all older than himself and all disagreeing with him. We refused to let conversation become serious. We laughed away his monstrous positions. Before lunchtime we had him laughing himself and making jokes, even bawdy jokes.

      We were in quite a different kind of country today: still the Sussex downs, but not like any ‘downs’ you or I have known, being heavily wooded. It is very pleasant to combine the damp, mysterious delights of a forest walk with the hill-feeling which is called up every now and then by a few open fields revealing the real contours.

We got to Arundel for tea, where Beckett left us by train. Coddling ourselves after the hardships of the previous day, we went no further. Arundel impressed me as much as any place I have ever seen. The castle⁶⁴ has been greatly added to in the XIXth century so that the original Norman СКАЧАТЬ