Collected Letters Volume One: Family Letters 1905–1931. Walter Hooper

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      My Furious Galahad,

Horace has pointed out that if you buy an article after knowing all its defects, you have no right to quarrel with the seller if you are dissatisfied.¹¹⁸ In the present case, since I told you how slack I was, and openly admitted that I could not promise to keep up a regular correspondance, you have no ground for grumbling if you find that I was speaking the truth. Should you, however, show any disposition to a brief exercise in that fascinating art, I have another excellent excuse: your letters are always shorter than mine: so much so that if I remain silent for a week or so, my amount of letter-writing for the term will still be a good bit bigger than yours.

      As a matter of fact I have really had nothing to say, and thought it better to write nothing than to try and pump up ‘conversation’–in the philistine sense of the word. I have read nothing new and done nothing new for ages. I am still at the Faerie Queene, and in fact have finished the first volume, which contains the first three books. As I now think it far too good a book to get in ordinary Everyman’s I am very much wondering what edition would be the best. Of course I might get my father to give me that big edition we saw in Mullans’ for a birthday or Xmas present: but then I don’t really care for it much. The pictures are tolerable but the print, if I remember, rather coarse (you know what I mean) and the cover detestable. Your little edition is very nice, but rather too small, and not enough of a library-looking book. How much is it, and what publisher is it by? I believe I have heard you say that it can be got in the same edition as your ‘Odyssey’, but then that is rather risky, because the illustrations might be hopeless. Write, anyway, and tell me your advice.

By the way those catalogues have never come yet; you might wake the girlinosborne’s up. I hope you are right about my music not being a whim: could you imagine anything more awful than to have all your tastes gradually fade away? Not a bad subject for a certain sort of novel! And talking about music, how did you enjoy Ysaye:¹¹⁹ you don’t say in your letter. Yes: his brother did play when they were at Guildford: one of his things was a Liebestraum by Liszt, which I did appreciate to a certain extent. Mrs K. has got a new book of Grieg’s with a lot of things in it that I am just longing to hear you play: the best is ‘Auf den Bergen’,¹²⁰ do you know it? A lovely scene on mountains by the sea (I imagine) and belled cattle in the distance, and the snow and pines and blue sky, and blue, still, sad water. There’s a sort of little refrain in it that you would love. You must try and get hold of it.

      Since finishing the first volume of Spenser I have been reading again ‘The Well at the World’s End’, and it has completely ravished me. There is something awfully nice about reading a book again, with all the half-unconscious memories it brings back. ‘The Well’ always brings to mind our lovely hill-walk in the frost and fog–you remember–because I was reading it then. The very names of chapters and places make me happy: ‘Another adventure in the Wood Perilous’, ‘Ralph rides the Downs to Higham-on-the-Way’, ‘The Dry Tree’, ‘Ralp reads in a book concerning the Well at the World’s End’.

      Why is it that one can never think of the past without wanting to go back? We were neither of us better off last year than we are now, and yet I would love it to be last Xmas, wouldn’t you? Still I am longing for next holydays too: do you know they are only five weeks off.

      By the way, I hope you have read ‘your Swinburne’ by now: anyway, when you go up to night to the room I know so well you must go and have a look at the ‘Well at the W’s End’. Good-night.

      Yours

      Jacks

       TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 33):

      [Gastons]

      Postmark: 19 November 1915

      My dear Papy,

      By all accounts I have missed a treat by being lost in a Surrey village during these recent ‘elemental disturbances’ as the man in Bret Harte says–or was it Mark Twain? I love this sort of melodrama in weather, and a night when the cross-channel boats can’t put out is just in my line. Of course we never have any real wind here. The winter however has now set in for good, and ever since Monday there has been a hard frost with a little snow. They have been glorious days all the same, mostly without a cloud in the sky, and a blazing sun that is bright and dazzling but quite cold–grand weather for walking. I love the afternoons now, don’t you? There is something weird and desolate about the perfectly round orange coloured sun dropping down clear against a slatey grey sky seen through bare trees that pleases me better than all those cloud-cities and mountains that we used to see in summer over the Lough in the old days when the crows were going home. There never seem to be such sunsets latterly, do there?

Your friend Byron is not (I devoutly hope) immortal, though his poem about the Assyrians unfortunately is.¹²¹ It shares that rather deluding longevity with about half a dozen other nightmares such as ‘The village clock has just struck four’, ‘It was the schooner Hesperus’, ‘Under the spreading chestnut tree’¹²² etc.: to which list one might add the poems of Ovid, the novels of Dickens, and the complete works of Wordsworth.

Many thanks for the welcome postal order. Talking about money, when you next write to Warnie you might remind him of a business matter which seems to be rather hanging fire, and tell him that I am not only like Barkis, willing but also waiting.¹²³ I have acted upon your excellent advice and at last written to Arthur. There is, as yet, no answer, but in the meantime I am investing in a very good suit of sackcloth reach-me-downs and a dozen bottles of best quality ashes.

I am glad that you have been installed as a member of the permanent staff of St. Mark’s, and hope that ‘the management will continue to secure the services of this enterprising artist during the forthcoming season’ as the critics say in another department of life.¹²⁴ Yes: I am sure you will read the lesson as it has not been read in St. Mark’s for some time, although perhaps as you say, you appreciate it too well to do it justice.

      I am rather sorry to hear that I have missed an opera company at all, even if a bad one. I suppose it is useless to ask if you have patronized it–unless perhaps you have been compelled to by Uncle Hamilton on the look out for a free stall.

      Hoping the results of the accident are disappearing, I am

      your loving,

      son,

      Jack

       TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 33-4):

      [Gastons]

      Postmark: 24 November 1915

      My dear Papy,

I am sorry if my intentional silence on this subject in my last letter has proved, as it well might, rather provoking. You will readily understand however my motives for not wishing to take any unnecessary responsibility in so delicate a point. My position, like that of Gilbert’s policeman, ‘is not a happy one’.¹²⁵ While really anxious not to add in the least to your worries, at the same time I have no wish to do anything that Warnie would afterwards consider mean or unpleasant. Since however you ask my opinion, СКАЧАТЬ