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Jack was at Little Lea when, on 8 January, The Times published the Military Service Act, which was expected to come into effect soon. In a section concerning the ‘Obligation of unmarried men to serve’ it stated that included among those who would have to serve were: ‘Every male British subject who, on the fifteenth day of August nineteen hundred and fifteen–(a) was ordinarily resident in Great Britain; and (b) had attained the age of eighteen years and had not attained the age of forty-one years; and (c) was unmarried or was a widower without children dependent on him’ (p. 8).

In a ‘Service Act Proclamation published in The Times on 4 February 1916 King George V ordered that the Military Service Act come into operation on 10 February 1916. Even then, Jack had reason at this time to think he might not be required to serve. The Times of 8 January had published, along with the Military Service Act, notification of ‘A Bill to make provisions with respect to Military Service in connection with the present war’ (p. 8). ‘Exemptions,’ it declared, would include ‘Men who are resident in Great Britain for the purpose only of their education or for some other purpose.’

While the Military Service Act went into effect on 10 February, the question of exemptions for Irishmen was debated by the Government for many months, during which time Jack did not know whether he would qualify for exemption or not. By the time it was clear that exemption would apply to him, and that he was not required to serve, he had decided that he should serve nevertheless.

TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 48-9):

[Gastons]

Postmark: 31 January 1916

My dear Papy,

One of the small consolations that a long experience of the continual change from term to holidays and vice versa brings, is the ability to settle down at once. I feel now as if I had been here for several months and have quite got into the old routine again. Everything at Bookham is of course in statu quo–I believe it would still be a hundred years hence. It is beautiful spring weather, as it was at home when I left you, and if only one could have that matutinal cup of tea, life would have nothing more to offer.

I spent the afternoon last Saturday in town, at the Shaftesbury, where there was a matinée of Carmen:¹ the singing was very poor, especially our friend the bass, whose rendition–I fancy that is the correct term–of the Toreador song was a thing to make the angels weep. Carmen herself however was quite good, and the tenor tolerable, so that on the whole I might have fared worse. With the opera itself, apart from the performance, I was very pleased. Just about the right percentage of the tunes was (it ought to be ‘was’ not ‘were’ oughtn’t it?) familiar to me, and the ones which I had not heard before ‘discoveries’.

This afternoon I have been a long walk to a perfectly delightful village² that I had never found out before, and I wish you could see it. It is rather like some of the places described in the ‘Upton Letters’ only more so. One old house–a thing as thick as a cottage and a good deal longer than Leeborough, all built on different levels, bears the legend ‘1666’. The best things however are the dragons and other monsters on the roof. Another most excellent codotta is the White Horse where you can drink tea, and a parlour that was used in the coaching days, and has not, by the look of it, been furnished since. If only they would dust the butter it would be quite ideal.

The ‘Faerie Queen’ which I told Mullens to send here as soon as it came has now arrived, and I am very pleased with it. If a bill comes from Osbornes for those records, please send it on at once as I have a cheque of W’s. made out (or whatever the phrase is) to T.E. Osborne to pay it withal. However, no bill ought to arrive as I am asking Arthur to tell the ‘young person’ to send it here. And by the by, talking about cheques, I am not sure whether I asked you to take the cheque out of my cash box in the little end room and turn it into money some time before next holidays. Would you please do this? Hoping you are carrying on all right.

your loving

son Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (LP V: 50-1):

[Gastons

1 February 1916]

Dear little Archie,

Oh Gods of friendship, has such devotion ever been witnessed as mine! I am just at the beginning of a heavenly new book, I am just at the end of a long day’s work, and yet I spend my spare time in writing letters. I hope you duly appreciate the sacrifice of a fresh young heart offered up on the savage altar of³–well to get on.

On the Saturday⁴ in London I wasted 7/6 on going to a matinee of Carmen. There was no one in the cast of whom I had heard before and no one whom I want to hear again. Carmen herself was tolerable, but the rest, especially the Toreador, were fiendish. With the opera too I was awfully disappointed, although there is certainly a lot of beautiful music in it–particularly in the preludes to the acts (oh, one thing was good–the orchestra: they played that intermezzo that I have exquisitely) and in the scene among the mountains. But one does get so sick of all the tedious melodrama, all the blustering orchestration, and sticky tunes of good old fashioned operas. Then too there are a pair of villains in it who have a ghastly resemblance in their clownings to that other pair in Fra Diavolo–do you remember those awful creatures? So on the whole I was very fed up with this world by the time I reached dear Bookham. I find–of course–my beloved fellow pupil.

Since then I have been cheered up by the arrival of my new ‘Faerie Queen’ in the red leather Everyman. I can’t see why you so dislike this edition: and if you have noticed the effect that their backs have when two or three are together in a shelf I am sure you do really appreciate them. I have read a good chunk of this and have also re-read Jane Eyre from beginning to end–it is a magnificent novel. Some of those long, long dialogues between her and Rochester are really like duets from a splendid opera, aren’t they? And do you remember the description of the night she slept on the moor and of the dawn? You really lose a lot by never reading books again.

The other book–which I am denying myself to write to YOU, yes YOU of all people–is from the library by Blackwood called ‘Uncle Paul’.⁵ Oh, I have never read anything like it, except perhaps the ‘Lore of Proserpine’. When you have got it out of your library and read how Nixie and Uncle Paul get into a dream together and went to a primaeval forest at dawn to ‘see the winds awake’ and how they went to the ‘Crack between yesterday and tomorrow’⁶ you will agree with me.

It was most annoying not getting my new records before I came back, wasn’t it? Tell the girlinosbornes–the next time you go to see Olive–to send the bill for them to my address here at once. I do hope my Caruso⁷ ‘E lucevan e stella’⁸ is going to be a success. Talking about that thing, does it convey anything to you? To me it seems to be just abstract melody. The actual scene I believe is a man on the battlement of a castle writing a letter–but you have probably read Tosca in that beastly potted opera book.

I was interested in what you said about the ‘Brut’.⁹ You ought to get it in Everyman.

Yours

Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 51-2):

[Gastons

6? February 1916]

My dear Papy,

Thanks very much for the cheque, which I enclose, signed as you told me. I am afraid however that I must trouble you again: one of my pairs of shoes has finally given out ‘beyond the hope of uttermost recall’ and I want you please to get me a new pair, or else tell Annie to do so. The mysterious piece of paper which I am sending is a map of my foot so that the knave in the shop will know what size to give you. I am very sorry if this is a nuisance, and will take care next term to set out well equipped with hats, coats, shoes and other garments, like the men in the furnace.

That business about Warnie’s commission, though of course important in itself, is as you say a nice example of war office methods. If big things are managed in the same way as these small ones, it promises well for the success of the war doesn’t it? Another thing also struck me: we have often wondered and laughed at some of the people who have commissions. It becomes even funnier when one reads the formula, ‘reposing special trust and confidence in your loyalty, courage, and good conduct’: we remember that the Jarvey¹⁰ who drove the Colonel up to the office last time was one of those who hoped soon to enjoy this ‘special trust and confidence.’

By the way, you should get that ‘Spirit of Man’, Bridge’s anthology,¹¹ that everyone is talking about. Mrs. K. has it from the library at present: it is one of the prettiest little books I have seen for a long time, and there is a lot of good stuff in it. One ‘nice point’ is that the names of the authors are printed at the end of the volume and not under each piece: it is very amusing–and somewhat humiliating–to see how many you know.

This business about matriculation and enlisting is ‘very tiresome’, as the Mikado said.¹² Are you [sure] that it applies to those who are under age, and who are also Irish? If so, as you say, we must think it over together. Of course in dealing with such a point we must always remember that a period of something more than a year elapses between the time of joining up and one’s getting any where near the front.¹³ However, it can wait until we are together at Easter.

And now my dear parent, as the time alloted to correspondence is drawing to its close, I fear I must relinquish–or in other words it is time for Church. You will observe that this is one of those houses where we rise so early on Sundays that there is a long interval between breakfast and our Calvinistic exercises.

your loving son,

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (LP V: 53-4):

[Gastons

8 February 1916]

My dear Arthur,

You lucky devil! It makes me very envious to hear of all these good things going on at home while I am languishing in the wilds of Surrey.

I am surprised to hear that you never heard of Barkworth,¹⁴ as I have seen his name in the musical part of the Times and other papers: I believe he is one of the promising musicians of the day–that is if there are ever going to be English musicians and an English school of opera. Personally I should have been very much interested to hear his ‘Romeo and Juliet’. If the only fault is that it is blustering, you might say the same of the ‘Flying Dutchman’¹⁵ or the ‘Valkyrie’, mightn’t you? What did poor Willie Jaffe think of it? (I suppose you mean him by W.J.–) Hardly in his line I should fancy. I am sure ‘Pagliaci’ and ‘Cavalleria’ were lovely, and I would especially like to have seen ‘Rigoletto’, because I know the plot.¹⁶

I quite agree with you that a gramophone spoils one for hearing opera: the real difficulty is to find for what a gramophone does not spoil one. True, it improves your musical taste and gives you opportunities of hearing things that you might otherwise never know: but what is the use of that when immediately afterwards it teaches you to expect a standard of performance which you can’t get, or else satiates you with all the best things so that they are stale before you have heard them once on the stage? Or in other words, like everything else it is a disappointment, like every other pleasure it just slips out of your hand when you think you’ve got it. The most striking example of this is the holiday which one looks forward to all the term and which is over and gone while one is still thinking how best to enjoy it.

By all this you will gather that I am in a bad temper: well, so I am–that bloody little beast my fellow pupil has sneaked upstairs for a bath and I can now hear him enjoying it and I know there will be no hot water left for me. They only raise hot water here about once a month.

However. Let us proceed: do you read Ruskin at all? I am sure you don’t. Well I am reading a book of his at present called ‘A joy for ever’,¹⁷ which is charming, though I am not sure you would care for it. I also still employ the week ends with the Faerie Queene. I am now in the last three books, which, though not much read as a rule, are full of good things. When I have finished it, I am going to get another of Morris’ romances, or his translation of one of the sagas–perhaps that of Grettir the Strong.¹⁸ This can be got either for 5/-in the Library edition (my ‘Sigurd the Volsung’¹⁹ one) or for 3/6 in the ‘Silver Library’ (like my ‘Pearl Maiden’).²⁰ Which would you advise?

By the way, why is your letter dated Wednesday? It has arrived here this evening–Tuesday–am I to understand that you posted it tomorrow, or that you have been carrying it about in your pocket for a week?

Isn’t it awful about Harding? I hear from my father that Hope is going out.²¹ I suppose that by this time the jeunes mariés have got into Schomberg.²² Why are your letters always so much shorter than mine? Therefore I stop.

Yours,

Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 56-7):

[Gastons]

Postmark: 26 February 1916

My dear Papy,

‘Well I calls it ’ard’ as your friend used to say of the ’alf hour: I am accustomed, nay I am hardened to missing opera companies: but that I should be exiled in the wilds of England while Robin W. Gribbon and Lucius O’Brien²³ are visiting Belfast–this is too utterly all but. But why might I ask are these nonconformist canals reciting in the school house of Saint Mark?²⁴ What have they to do with us? Let them get behind us. Joking apart, one might get a ‘running river of innocent merriment’ out of their efforts, ‘extremely stretched and conned with cruel pains’. Perhaps however you have your own reasons for reverencing the school house. Is it not the theatre of an immortal rendition of that ‘powerful’ role of Gesler,²⁵ and also of an immortal brick-dropping re an immortal preacher? There too the honey tongued tenor of Garranard–but we will draw a veil over the painful scene.

There is a certain symmetry of design in your list of books, a curiosa felicitas, a chaste eloquence and sombre pathos in the comments, ‘See no. 40’ and ‘see no. 2’ which I cannot but admire. I don’t know how they have bungled it, but so long as I actually have two copies of the ‘Helena’ it will be all right, as Mullen’s will make no difficulty about exchanging the unused one. If however the second copy exist (not exists) only on paper–why there we have the sombre pathos.

I am rather surprised at your criticism on ‘The Spirit of man’, and consider the reference to ‘rescuing’ both otiose and in doubtful taste. Of course it must be read, not merely as an anthology, but in the light of its title and avowed purpose, and we must not be disappointed when we find certain favourites left out because they could not rightly claim a place in such a scheme. In this sense indeed the book is rather an original work than a collection of poems: for just as the musician may weave together a symphony by using the melodies of others arranged to express himself, so I take it Bridges is here working out an idea of his own: and the medium he chooses–as one might choose marble and another chalk (which you know is deteriorating terribly)–is the collective poetry of his predecessors. Or indeed, if I am reading too much into him, this would be a plan for a better anthology than has yet been written. One thing in the book I admit is indefensible–the detestable translation from Homer, which, though you may hardly recognise it, is meant to be in the metre of ‘Oh! let us try’. For this Bridges ought to get ‘something with boiling oil’.²⁶

After a January so warm and mild that one could almost have sat in the garden, we have suddenly been whisked back to winter. It has snowed all day today, and is freezing hard tonight on top of it. I am very sorry to hear what you tell me about Hope: as you say, it must be terribly lonely and trying for her out there, and I am afraid the patient brings a very second rate constitution to the struggle.

your loving son,

Jack

P.S. I forgot to say the list of books, with one exception, is correct. J.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

[Gastons

28 February 1916]

Monday

My dear Galahad,

I suppose that by this time there is wrath and fury against me: however, there is no excuse, and you must just thole, as they say.

I don’t know what it is like with you, but for this last week we have had the most lovely snow here. There is no wind, so where the snow ‘falleth, there shall it lie’:²⁷ which means that when you walk through the woods every branch is laden like a Christmas tree, and the mass of white arranged in every fantastic shape and grouping on the trees is really wonderful. Don’t you love to walk while it is actually snowing? I love to feel the soft, little touches on your face and see the country through a sort of haze: it is so exquisitly desolate. It reminds one of that scene in ‘The Lore of Proserpine’.

Poor thing! I do like the way, because a fellow asks you to join a corps, that you complain about ‘your troubles’. May you never do worse! It reminds me of the story of Wellesly and his rich friend: W. had been going on one of his preaching tours round the country, riding alone in all weather, being put in the stocks, insulted, & stoned by the mob, in the course of all which he stayed for a night at the luxurious mansion of the friend. During the evening, a puff of smoke blew out of the grate, whereupon the host exclaimed ‘You see, Sir, these are some of the crosses which I have to bear!’²⁸ Indeed, however, I ‘can’t talk’ as you would say, for of course I am an inveterate grumbler myself–as you, of all people have best reason to know.

By the way, do you know a series of rather commonplace little volumes at 1/6 each called the Walter Scott Library? I have just run across them: they are not particularly nice–though tolerable–but the point is that they sell some things I have often wanted to get: among others Morris’ translation of the ‘Volsunga Saga’ (not the poem, you know, that I have, but a translation of the old Icelandic prose saga) which cannot be got in any other edition except the twelve guinea ‘Works’, of which you can’t get the volumes separately.²⁹ If only the edition were a little decenter I’d certainly get it.

Perhaps you laugh at my everlasting talk about buying books which I never really get: the real reason is that I have so little time here–indeed only the week-ends as I spend all the spare time on week-days in reading French books, which I want to get more fluent in. However, I am now nearing the end of the ‘Faerie Queene’, and when that is done the Saturdays & Sundays will be free for something else. Really, whatever you say, you have much more time than I.

I wonder why Osborne’s have sent no bill to me yet? I am not sure whether I asked you to give them my adress and tell them to send in the account or not: anyway, be a sport, and do so–AT ONCE. I have had a grisly dissapointment this week: Mrs K. said she was going away for a fortnight & I was gloating in the prospect of privacy & peace. But it has turned out a mare’s nest. Ochone!

be good,

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (LP V: 58-9):

[Gastons

7 March 1916]

Tuesday

My dear Galahad,

I was very glad to get your interesting letter–which was fortunately longer than some of them–as I was beginning to wonder what had become of you; I think your ‘lapse’ this term puts you on a level with mine last, so that we can cry quits and admit that we are both sinners.

I have had a great literary experience this week. I have discovered yet another author to add to our circle–our very own set: never since I first read ‘The well at the world’s end’ have I enjoyed a book so much–and indeed I think my new ‘find’ is quite as good as Malory or Morris himself. The book, to get to the point, is George Macdonald’s ‘Faerie Romance’, Phantastes,³⁰ which I picked up by hazard in a rather tired Everyman copy–by the way isn’t it funny, they cost 1/1d. now–on our station bookstall last Saturday. Have you read it? I suppose not, as if you had, you could not have helped telling me about it. At any rate, whatever the book you are reading now, you simply MUST get this at once: and it is quite worth getting in a superior Everyman binding too.

Of course it is hopeless for me to try and describe it, but when you have followed the hero Anodos along that little stream to the faery wood, have heard about the terrible ash tree and how the shadow of his gnarled, knotted hand falls upon the book the hero is reading, when you have read about the faery palace–just like that picture in the Dulac book–and heard the episode of Cosmo, I know that you will quite agree with me. You must not be disappointed at the first chapter which is rather conventional faery tale style, and after it you won’t be able to stop until you have finished. There are one or two poems in the tale–as in the Morris tales you know–which, with one or two exceptions are shockingly bad, so don’t TRY to appreciate them: it is just a sign, isn’t it, of how some geniuses can’t work in metrical forms–another example being the Brontes.

I quite agree with what you say about buying books, and love all the planning and scheming beforehand, and if they come by post, finding the neat little parcel waiting for you on the hall table and rushing upstairs to open it in the privacy of your own room. Some people–my father for instance–laugh at us for being so serious over our pleasures, but I think a thing can’t be properly enjoyed unless you take it in earnest, don’t you? What I can’t understand about you though is how you can get a nice new book and still go on stolidly with the one you are at: I always like to be able to start the new one on the day I get it, and for that reason wait to buy it until the old one is done But then of course you have so much more money to throw about than I.

Talking about finishing books, I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say ‘at last’, I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he hoped to do–so much have I enjoyed it. The two cantos of ‘Mutabilitie’ with which it ends are perhaps the finest thing in it, and if you have not done so already, you should read them whenever you have the time to spare.

I am now–by the same post–writing for a book called ‘British Ballads’ (Everyman)³¹ in the chocolate binding of which I used to disapprove: so you see I am gradually becoming converted to all your views. Perhaps one of these days you may even make a Christian of me. Yes: I have at last heard from the girlinosbornes: but like the minstrel in Scott,

‘Perhaps he wished the boon denied’ ³²

as the bill is rather a staggerer and my finances are not very blooming at present–I am thinking of sending it out to my brother to pay.

I well remember the glorious walk of which you speak, how we lay drenched with sunshine on the ‘moss’ and were for a short time perfectly happy–which is a rare enough condition, God knows. As Keats says ‘Rarely, rarely comest thou, spirit of Delight’.³³ I do hope we shall have many more pleasant hours such as that the days are running in so fast now, and it makes me so sad to think that I shall have only two more sets of holidays of the good old type, for in November comes my 18th birthday, military age, and the ‘vasty fields’³⁴ of France, which I have no ambition to face. If there is good weather and you get some days off next hols., we should go for some walks before breakfast–the feel of the air is so exquisite. I don’t know when I can expect to come home.

Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 60-1):

[Gastons]

Postmark: 10 March 1916

My dear Papy,

‘I wonder’ said Demetrius, and so do I. You know it is a terrible thing for a young boy to get into the hands of a rascally old firm of solicitors to be cajoled into signing all sorts of mysterious documents. How do I know to what I have committed myself? Perhaps my three moors are being made over, or you are putting an entail on my little place in Rome. (What is an entail) Ha! Ha! The missing heir. Indeed the whole proceeding savours of the novelette: you must cut your moustache shorter and call yourself Richard or Rupert. However, I herewith enclose the enigmatic slip of paper, with the forged signature inked over ‘avec d’empresment’ (French language). By the way, I see that I have acknowledged £16-13-10. Well what became of this…this…business…this tea business?

I hope you have read your Times Literary Supplement this week: do you see that the commonwealth of letters is the richer by a great new poet? Now let the stars retire for the sun has risen: let Hemans and M’Kitrick Ros³⁵ be silent, for Mr. Little has come! It is really too good to be missed. I love the fine impassioned address to the sea, as much greater than Tennyson’s ‘Break, break, break’³⁶ as that is than the one in the Prometheus, the one you will have noticed beginning

‘Oh, wave! Thy clemency is open

To shrewd suspicion’.³⁷

What melody! What masterly phrazing and gorgeous imagery! We may pass over such minor beauties as the lioness which becomes the ‘formidable sultaness’ and go on to the last piece which contains the gems about the ‘golden brawn’ of the sunrise, the ‘various viands of the rainbow’ and nature ‘gorgeous, great, gratuitous’. Why this is a more exquisite song than the other about ‘Presumption, pride, pomposity’, though there is a certain likeness. This I suppose is the modern school that has got beyond Tennyson. Well perhaps they have: but I for one had sooner walk on the earth than soar on any Pegasus which bears such a disquieting resemblance to a rocking horse.

St. John’s, the school at Leatherhead whither my fellow pupil is wont daily to repair for gentlemanly and vertuous discipline and schooling in the humane letters, has got an epidemic of influenza and is breaking up for the term. So I suppose we shall have our well beloved Ford more in evidence now. Tell Arthur to write. I am sorry to hear what you say about Grandmother: I feel that we ought to have seen more of her, but it was not easy.³⁸ Your loving,

son,

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (LP V: 63-4):

[Gastons

14 March 1916]

(You ought to know the date.)

My dear Galahad,

It must have been a very old Everyman list on which you found ‘Phantastes’ as one of the new ones, since, to my knowledge, the copy I got had been on the bookstall for weeks. Everymans with us have gone up 1d. in the shilling: I suppose it is just the same at home? By the time you get this you will probably have finished Phantastes, so you must give me your verdict on it as a whole: when one has read a book, I think there is nothing so nice as discussing it with some one else–even though it sometimes produces rather fierce arguments.

I too am rather disappointed. The ‘British Ballads’ has come, and though I am awfully bucked with the edition–I can’t think why I didn’t appreciate it before. This must be a triumph for you–the reading matter is not nearly so good as I expected. For one thing, instead of being all made up of real old ballads as I hoped, it is half full of silly modern imitations and even funny ones. Don’t you loathe ‘funny’ poetry? However, as it is not your style of book, I suppose I am boring you.

All the same, when you begin to write a letter you just go on babbling–at least I do–without thinking whether the person at the other end is interested or not, till you come to the last page and find that you haven’t really said what you wanted to. But perhaps that sort of rambling is the right kind of letter. I don’t know whether you personally write that way or not, but the result is charming, and you can’t think how eager I am to see the atrocious but familiar scroll waiting for me on the hall table. And yet, every letter is a disappointment: for a minute or two I was carried back to your room at Bernagh–don’t you remember rooms by their smells? Each one has its own–and seem to be talking to you, and then suddenly I come to the end and it’s all only a little bit of paper in my hand and Gastons again. But come. We are being mawkish. I think you and I ought to publish our letters (they’d be a jolly interesting book by the way) under the title of lamentations, as we are always jawing about our sorrows. I gather it was that beastly girl in Mayne’s who ‘flared up’ as you say. Aren’t they rude in that place? I think we ought to start a movement in the neighbourhood to boycott them. Only we’d have to join in it ourselves, which would be a pity.

No: I have never yet seen Kelsie’s book. I daresay she doesn’t know that I take an interest in such things, and you are lucky in having a reputation as a connoisseur which makes you free of every library in Belmont–tho’ there aren’t very many to be sure. I am afraid our Galahad will be growing a very stodgy mind if he reads nothing but Trollope and Goldsmith and Austen. Of course they are all very good, but I don’t think myself I could stand such a dose of stolidity. I suppose you will reply that I am too much the other way, and will grow a very unbalanced mind if I read nothing but lyrics and fairy tales. I believe you are right, but I find it so hard to start a fresh novel: I have a lazy desire to dally with the old favourites again. I think you’ll have to take me in hand and set me a ‘course’ when I come home.

By the way what about the piano and the gramophone these days? We don’t seem to talk of music so much now as we did: of course your knowledge on that subject is so much greater than mine that I can really only express a philistine’s taste. Are you still going to Walker? For my part, I have found my musical soul again–you will be relieved to hear–this time in the preludes of Chopin. I suppose you must have played them to me, but I never noticed them before. Aren’t they wonderful? Although Mrs K. doesn’t play them well, they are so passionate, so hopeless, I could almost cry over them: they are unbearable. I will find out the numbers of the ones I mean and we will have a feast next holidays.

By the way, you speak in your last letter of the difference between music and books: I think (to get back to an old argument) it is just the same difference as between friendship and love. The one is a calm and easy going satisfaction, the other a sort of madness: we take possession of one, the other takes possession of us: the one is always pleasant the other in its greatest moments of joy is painful. But perhaps I am rating books and friendship too low, because poetry and great novels do sometimes rouse you almost as much as music: the great love scenes in Shirley for instance, or the best parts of Swinburne etc.

I am sorry I always make the mistake about your address. Hullo–I’ve done it again.

Yours,

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (LP V: 64-5):

[Gastons

21 March 1916]

My dear Galahad,

So here we are at the weekly letter, and very glad I am too; but Heavens!–how the weeks run on don’t they? While I was at Malvern I used to count the days and long for the end of term, so of course time crawled; now-a-days when I am quite comfortable the whole thing goes on far too quickly. And it’s all so many days, months etc., not of the term or the year, but of one’s life–which is tiresome. ‘Help!’ I hear you muttering, ‘Is he going to moralize for four pages?’ (Cheer up, I’ll try to hold it in.)

I’m awfully bucked to hear that you think the same about Phantastes as I, though if you only began to enjoy it in the eleventh chapter, you must have missed what I thought were the best parts–that is to say the forest scene and the faery palace–or does that come after chapter XI? You will gather that the book is upstairs and that I am too lazy to go and get it. I hope that by this time you have bought ‘Sir Gibbie’³⁹ and will be able to advise me on it. Some of the titles of his other books are, to me at least, even more alluring than the one you quote: for instance ‘At the back of the north wind’.⁴⁰

Isn’t it funny the way some combinations of words can give you–almost apart from their meaning–a thrill like music? It is because I know that you can feel this magic of words AS words that I do not despair of teaching you to appreciate poetry: or rather to appreciate all good poetry, as you now appreciate some. This is however off the point: what I meant to say was that lots of his titles give me that feeling. I wish there were more in Everymans, don’t you?

Talking about Everymans, do you know what their 1/6 binding is like? I can’t remember whether you have anything in it or not, but I have been thinking of trying it, so tell me what you know on the subject. What? you ask, still new books? Well really the length of the Faerie Queene was a godsend, because so long as I turned to it every week-end with the regularity of clockwork I could keep my money in my pockets: now however the temptation to get a nice new book for the longed for Sunday rest is overwhelming.

I am glad to hear that you have moved into Lily’s room as I think you–or ‘we’ shall I say in selfishness–will be more comfortable there: at the same time I have a sort of affection for the old one where we have had such good times: we should call it ‘joyous garde’.⁴¹ Still, I am longing to find myself in your new quarters with all the old talk, the old music, and the old fingering of rich, friendly books.

You know, Galahad, that though I try to hide it with silly jokes that annoy you, I am very conscious of how unfair our friendship is, and how you ask me over continually and give me an awfully good time, while I hardly ever bring you to us: indeed though he is a good father to me, I must confess that he–my father–is an obstacle. I do hope you understand? You know how I would love if I could have you any time I liked up in my little room with the gramophone and a fire of our own, to be merry and foolish to our hearts content: or even if I could always readily accept your invitations without feeling a rotter for leaving him alone. I don’t know why I’ve gone off into this discussion, but perhaps it is just as well. Indeed the only thing to be done is to get my father married as quickly as may be–say to Mary Bradley. Or lets poison old Stokes and give him the widow. In which case of course our imagined snuggery in the little end room would be brightened up by a charming circle of brothers and sisters in law.

I know quite well that feeling of something strange and wonderful that ought to happen, and wish I could think like you that this hope will some day be fulfilled. And yet I don’t know: suppose that when you had opened the door the Ash had REALLY confronted you and turning to fly, you had found the house melting into a haunted wood–mightn’t you have wished for the old ‘dull’ world again? Perhaps indeed the chance of a change into some world of Terreauty (a word I’ve coined to mean terror and beauty) is in reality in some allegorical way daily offered to us if we had the courage to take it. I mean one has occasionally felt that this cowardice, this human loathing of spirits just because they are such may be keeping doors shut? Who knows? Of course this is all nonsense and the explanation is that through reading Maeterlink,⁴² to improve my French, too late at night, I have developed a penchant for mystical philosophy–greatly doubtless to the discomfort of my long suffering reader.

By the way, is the girlinosbornes beginning to ask about my bill yet–which is not paid? Write soon AND LONG mon vieux, to,

yours,

Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 70):

[Gastons]

Postmark: 1 April 1916

My dear Papy,

The little plans of mice and men, it would seem, must a gang aft aglee.⁴³ You ask me when I am thinking of going home. Well I was thinking of the 15th, as instructed by the Colonel, so that his next leave would fall nicely at the end of my holydays. Mrs. K. suddenly turns up with the pleasing news that Terry is going on Tuesday the 4th., and Osbert Smythe with mother is coming down on the same date to convalesce from a wound, and–ah–when was I thinking of going home? Or in other words, after a little pow-pow, I have been ‘kicked out’ (Perhaps they were right to dissemble their love, but why–).⁴⁴ So I fear me Tuesday it must be. I hardly think a letter from you can reach me before that, so I shall borrow from K. By the way, Terry tells me that all the Belfast boats are off; if this is so, will you please wire and tell me, as in that case I shall have to go by Larne: I suppose the same ticket and payment of difference will do–or is the fare by Larne just the same? Of course if Liverpool and Fleetwood are still running, I will go by either–whichever is running on Tuesday night. In any case please wire and tell me. I am sorry to be such a nuisance, but it is quite as annoying for me, and more so for W. Sunt lacrimae rerum.⁴⁵

your loving son,

Jack

P.S. On second thoughts, Monday would be better if you get this in time; if I go on Tuesday I shall have to travel with Terry and a lot of his friends, which would be terrible–for one thing I know they don’t want me. So Monday be it: please wire. J.

Lewis was at home from 5 April to 11 May 1916. Writing to Albert about him on 7 April 1916, Mr Kirkpatrick said:

The very idea of urging or stimulating him to increased exertion makes me remind him that it is inadvisable for him to read after 11 p.m. If he were not blessed with such a store of physical health and strength, he wd. surely grow weary now and then. But he never does. He hardly realizes–how could he at his age–with what a liberal hand nature has bestowed her bounties on him…I notice that you feel adverse at present to let him enter the university at the close of next Autumn…But as far as preparation is concerned, it is difficult to conceive of any candidate who ought to be in better position to face the ordeal. He has read more classics than any boy I ever had–or indeed I might add than any I ever heard of, unless it be an Addison or Landor or Macaulay. These are people we read of, but I have never met any. (LP V: 74)

Mr Kirkpatrick wrote again on 5 May 1916:

The case of Clive is very perplexing, but let us make a few points clear. I think he ought to be able to gain a classical scholarship or exhibition at entrance in any of the Oxford Colleges next Novr. or Dec, when the exams are held. But suppose I gave my opinion that he could with advantage do another years work with me. Do you not see what you are in for? Clive will be 18 in Dec, and if he remains in this country after that date, strictly speaking one month after that date, he will be liable for military service. There is no escape from that now…Ireland is exempt from the Act. Will it be brought in, as Carson⁴⁶ before, and now Captain Craig have asked? I find it hard to believe it. But we shall see. At any rate we may give up the idea that the war may be over before Jany. 1917…What is to become of the Eng. Universities under this new Conscription Act? I cannot say, but I do not see how they are to go on. Suppose Clive gained an entrance exhibn. next Decr. He would not be able to attend lectures. At the end of one month he would be liable to conscription. (LP V: 78-9)

Albert replied on 8 May 1916: ‘Clive has decided to serve, but he also wishes to try his fortune at Oxford’ (LP V: 79).

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (LP V: 80-1):

[Gastons

16 May 1916]

My dear Galahad,

I wonder what you are doing tonight? It is nearly ten o’clock and I suppose you are thinking of bed: perhaps you are at this moment staring into the good old bookcase and gloating over your treasures. How well I can see it all, exactly as we arranged it a few days ago: it is rather consoling for me to be able to follow you in imagination like this and feel as if I were back in the well-known places.

Now let us get on with what you really want to hear; no, I did not go to the ‘Starlight Express’⁴⁷ nor could I see it in the ‘Times’ list of entertainments. Perhaps after all it is not an opera but a cantata or something. What I did go to see was a play called ‘Disraeli’⁴⁸ which I liked immensely, though I am not sure the Meccecaplex would have cared for it. It’s about the real Disraeli⁴⁹ you know, the part being taken by Dennis Eadie–whom you saw in ‘Milestones’⁵⁰ didn’t you; he looks exactly like the pictures of the said politician in the old Punches. However, it is a thoroughly interesting play and I shall never repent of having seen it:

I think you agree with me that a good sensible play is far better than a second rate opera, don’t you?

By the way, you have really no right to this letter, old man: that one of yours which you have been talking about all the holidays is not here, and Mrs K. says that nothing came for me while I was away. So now I shall be no longer content with your continual ‘as I said in my letter’, but will expect it all over again–especially the remarks about ‘The Back of the Northwind’ (by the way doesn’t it sound much better if you pronounce that last word ‘Northwind’ as one word, with the accent slightly on the first syllable?).

Talking of books–you might ask, when do I talk of anything else–I have read and finished ‘The Green Knight’,⁵¹ which is absolutely top-hole: in fact the only fault I have to find with it is that it is too short–in itself a compliment. It never wearies you from first to last, and considering the time when it was written, some things about it, the writer’s power of getting up atmosphere for instance, quite in the Bronte manner, are little short of marvellous: the descriptions of the winter landscapes around the old castle, and the contrast between them and the blazing hearth inside, are splendid. The last scene too, in the valley where the terrible knight comes to claim his wager, is very impressive.

Since finishing it I have started–don’t be surprised–‘Rob Roy’,⁵² which I suppose you have read long ago. I really don’t know how I came to open it: I was just looking for a book in the horribly scanty library of Gastons, and this caught my eye. I must admit that it was a very lucky choice, as I am now revelling in it. Isn’t Die Vernon a good heroine–almost as good as Shirley? And the hero’s approach through the wild country round his Uncle’s hall in Northumberland is awfully good too.

In fact, taking all things round, the world is smiling for me quite pleasantly just at present. The country round here is looking absolutely lovely: not with the stern beauty we like of course: but still, the sunny fields full of buttercups and nice clean cows, the great century old shady trees, and the quaint steeples and tiled roofs of the villages peeping up in their little valleys–all these are nice too, in their humble way. I imagine (am I right?) that ‘Our Village’⁵³ gives one that kind of feeling. Tell me all about your own ‘estate’ as Spenser would say, when you write.

Have you finished ‘Persuasion’⁵⁴ and has the De Quincy come yet, and what do you think of both? Have there been any particular beauties of sun and sky since I left? I know all that sounds as though I were trying to talk like a book, but you will understand that I can’t put it any other way and that I really do want to hear about those kind of things.

This letter brings you the first instalment of my romance: I expect you’ll find it deadly dull: of course the first chapter or so must be in any case, and it’ll probably never get beyond them. By the way it is headed as you see ‘The Quest of Bleheris’. That’s a rotten title of course, and I don’t mean it to be permanent: when it’s got on a bit, I must try to think of another, really poetic and suggestive: perhaps you can help me in this when you know a bit more what the story is about.

Now I really must shut up. (That’s the paper equivalent of ‘Arthur, I’m afraid I shall have to go in a minute’.) Oh, I was forgetting all about Frankenstein.⁵⁵ What’s it like? ‘Really Horrid’?, as they say in ‘Northanger Abbey’.⁵⁶ Write soon before I have time to feel lonely.

Yours,

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (LP V: 82-4):

[Gastons 22

May 1916]

Monday. 10 o’clock.

My dear Arthur,

Many, many thanks for the nice long letter, which I hope you will keep up for the rest of the term, in length. I see that it has taken four days to reach me, as it came only this morning, so I don’t know when you will be reading this.

I am rather surprised at your remark about ‘Persuasion’, as it seemed to me very good–though not quite in her usual manner. I mean it is more romantic and less humorous than the others, while the inevitable love interest, instead of being perfunctory as in ‘Emma’⁵⁷ and ‘Mansfield Park’ is the real point of the story. Of course I admit that’s not quite the style we have learned to expect from Jane Austen, but still don’t you think it is rather interesting to see an author trying his–or her–hand at something outside their own ‘line of business’? Just as it is interesting to see Verdi in ‘Aida’⁵⁸ rising above himself–though I suppose I have no right to talk musical criticism to you–or indeed to anybody.

I am glad that you are bucked with your De Quincy, and am eager to see the paper. By the way I suppose you notice that the same series can be got in leather for 5/-. I wonder what that would be like. I am thinking of getting the two volumes of Milton in it, as soon as I am flush or have a present of any sort due to me: one wants to get a person like Milton in a really worthy edition you know. Tell me what you think about this.

On Wednesday I had a great joy: I went up to town with the old woman⁵⁹ (by the way I have just seen the point of your joke about ‘byre’ and liar. Ha! Ha!) to see the Academy.⁶⁰ I have never been to one before, and therefore cannot say whether this year’s was good as they go: but anyway I enjoyed it immensely and only one thing–your company–was lacking to make it perfect. How I wish we could have been there to enjoy some things together–for there were ones that would have sent you into raptures. Particularly there was a picture called ‘Nature groaning’ that exactly reminded me of that wet walk of ours, although the scene was different: it represented a dull, gloomy pool in a wood in autumn, with a fierce scudding rain blown slantways across it, dashing withered leaves from the branches and beating the sedge at the sides. I don’t suppose that makes you realize it at all, but there was a beautiful dreariness about it that would have appealed to you. But of course it is really no good trying to describe them: I wish you would get that Academy book which one always finds in a dentist’s waiting room so that we could compare notes. If you do, you must particularly notice ‘The Egyptian Dancers’ [‘A Dancer of Ancient Egypt’], ‘The Valley of the Weugh or Sleugh’ or something like that [‘The Valley of the Feugh’] (a glorious snow Scene), ‘The deep places of the earth’, ‘The watcher’ and a lovely faery scene from Christina Rosetti’s ‘Goblin Market’. It costs only a shilling I think and tho’ of course the black and white reproductions lose a lot, still they are quite enjoyable.⁶¹

Talking about pictures etc., I was very pleased with your description of the mist and the night sky: you are by no means such a contemptable artist in words as you would like people to believe–in fact to be honest, if you weren’t lazy you could do big things–and you have brought a very clear picture to my mind: one does get topping effects over the Lough sometimes, doesn’t one? Really, after all, for sheer beauty of nearly every kind, there is no place I know like our own good county Down.

I am still at ‘Rob Roy’ which I like immensely, and am writing by this post for the first volume of Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ in the Everyman 2/2 edition:⁶² am I wise? I have dipped into them very often latterly in the Kirk’s horrible old copy, and think I shall like them, while, as I told you before, the paper of that Everyman is especially nice. I have also got a French prose romance of ‘Tristan and Iseut’⁶³ which promises very well as far as I can see: in the meantime however since like all French firms’ books it is paper back, I have sent it away to be bound in a very tasty binding of my own choice. Tell me more about ‘Frankenstein’ in your next letter so that I may decide whether to buy it or no. Any new records? I imagine that the success of your late venture may buck up your taste for your gramophone may it not?

This brings you the next chapter of my infliction. By the way I don’t know how I actually wrote it, but I certainly meant to say ‘The quest of Bleheris’ and [not] ‘of THE Bleheris’, since Bleheris is a man’s name. However, as I wrote to you before, that title is only waiting until I can get another better one. Your advice as to fighting and brasting exactly falls in with my own ideas since like Milton I am,

‘Not sedulous by nature to indite

Wars………’ ⁶⁴

I am afraid indeed that like ‘Westward Ho’⁶⁵ my tale will have to dawdle about a bit in the ‘City of Nesses’ before I can get poor Bleheris off on his adventures: still you must do your best.

Oh vanity! vanity! to think that I can waste all this time jawing about my own work. Oh, one thing: I can’t agree with you that Kelsie is at all like Diana Vernon: for if–to talk like Rashleigh,⁶⁶ ‘My fair cousin’ has a fault, it is a certain deadly propriety and matter-of-factness that will creep in even when she’s at her best, don’t you think so.

And now I’ve scrawled for a whole hour (it’s just striking) so good night.

Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 81-2):

Gastons,

Great Bookham.

28/5/16.

My dear Papy,

I hear from the colonel that you are expecting a letter:⁶⁷ so, as they say of a sheep in a picture book, ‘here it is’, although, to be exact, I don’t see why I should owe you one–the score so far this term being exactly equal on both sides.

Well, how have things been since I left home? I hope the laurels are coming on nicely. Everything here is of course very much the same, and the weather is glorious. On my way back I went to a play that would have appealed to you–‘Disraeli’, which you will remember to have seen reviewed in Punch’s ‘At the play’.⁶⁸ If the real man was at all like the character in the piece he certainly must have been a prince of cards. I suppose that most of the bon mots that I heard at the Royalty are actual historic ones, preserved in his letters and so forth. I wonder too whether it be true to life when, having said good thing, he is represented as making his secretary take a note of it ‘For Manchester next week: that’ll just about suit Manchester’. Which reminds me how are you getting on with the fourteenth–or is the twentieth volume of his life?⁶⁹

The only other excitement I can think of was a jaunt up to town with Mrs. K. to see the Academy, last Saturday. I had never been to one before, and therefore cannot say whether this was good, as they go, or not. At any rate it seemed to me that there were a lot of very nice things there, while even watching the other watchers was a great amusement.

My reading at present is very sober and old fashioned–‘Rob Roy’ and the ‘Canterbury Tales’, both of which are most satisfactory. The former I suppose you have read years ago: at least I have tracked to its lair one of your favourite quotations, ‘Do not mister or Campbell me: my foot is on my native heath and my name is MacGregor’.⁷⁰ But what a pity it is to see such good ‘yarning’ as Scott’s spoilt and tripped up at every turn by his intolerably stilted and pedantic English. I suppose we must thank Dr. Johnson and ‘Glorious John’⁷¹ for first making such prose possible.

I met Warnie on Friday, according to instructions, and saw him go off by his 4.0 troop train. I am sorry to hear from him that you are bothered with some sort of rheumatism, and hope that it is now on the mend.

your loving

son Jack

P.S. I am one up in letter now: so don’t forget to write soon. J.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (LP XI: 259-60):

[Gastons

30 May 1916]

My dear Galahad,

I don’t know whether you quite realized how mysterious your last letter was: on page III I read ‘have just begun a tale called “Alice for short”’. Very good, say I, remembering William de Morgan’s novel of that name:⁷² but you are ‘doubtful whether you’ll finish it’: remembering the size of the volume on our landing book case I am not surprised: then I read on a bit and see that you ‘daren’t let it out of your hands, even to me’. Ah! Ce devient interèssant (is there an accent on that word?), I think something tremendously improper. But imagine my even greater confusion on learning that de Morgan’s long and heavy looking novel is a continuation of Alice in Wonderland!⁷³ Of course as soon as I turned the page I saw that you meant ‘began to write’ and not ‘began to read’ as I had naturally thought, being as you know cracked absolutely.

Well as to the information itself: I cannot urge you too strongly to go on and write something, anything, but at any rate WRITE. Of course everyone knows his own strength best, but if I may give any advice, I would say as I did before, that humour is a dangerous thing to try: as well, there are so many funny books in the world that it seems a shame to make any more, while the army of weird and beautiful or homely and passionate works could well do with recruits. But perhaps your ‘Alice’ is not so much humorous as lyric and fantastic? Anyway, you might as well send me along what you have done and let me have a look at it: at the worst it can’t be more boring than ‘Bleheris’ and of course it’s much easier to criticise each other’s things on paper than viva voce: at least I think so.

And by the way, while I’m on this subject, there’s one thing I want to say: I do hope that in things like this you’ll always tell me the absolute truth about my work, just as if it were by someone else whom we did not know: I will promise to do the same for you. Because otherwise there is no point in sending them, and I have sometimes thought that you are inclined not to. (Not to be candid I mean). So I shall expect your MS–‘Alice’ or anything else you have done–next week.

‘Rob Roy’ is done now, and (to pay you out for your remarks about ‘Persuasion’) I must admit that I only skimmed the last three or four chapters: the worst of a book with a plot is that when the plot is over, the obvious ‘fixing up’ is desperately tedious. On the whole however it was jolly good, and some of the scenery passages, as you say, are gorgeous: particularly where Frank is riding ‘near the line’ with the Bailey and the latter points out the Highland Hills–do you remember? That bit is almost as good as the scene where Clement Chapman shows Ralph the Wall of the World. But I suppose you would think it sacriledge to compare Morris to Scott. So would I for that matter, only the other way round.

You ask about the binding of my ‘Tristram’: well of course, apart from the binding itself, all French books are far poorer than ours: this one for instance cost 2/- (2fr.50) although it was only a paper back, of about the same size as my Gawain: the binding will come to another 2/- or perhaps 2/6. That sounds a lot: but after all if you saw a nice leather bound book in a shop of that size and were told it cost 4/-, I don’t think it would seem very dear. Of course it is true I may very likely be disappointed in it, but then, not being a prudent youth like you, I have to take risks occasionally.

With the Chaucer I am most awfully bucked: it is in the very best Everyman style–lovely paper, strong boards, and–aren’t you envious–not one but two bits of tissue paper. When I’ve collected enough in that way, I shall be able to put tissue in all my better class Everymans. As to the contents, although I looked forward to them immensely, they have proved even better than I hoped: I have only had time so far to read the ‘Prologue’ and ‘The Knight’s Tale’ (that’s Palamon and Arcite you know), but I adore them. The tale is a perfect poem of chivalry, isn’t it? And the pathos of Arcite’s death is really wonderful, with the last broken appeal,

‘Forget nat Palamon that gentil man⁷⁴

and the cry of ‘Mercy Emelye’.⁷⁵

But God! there I go on talking like a book again, and you a poor invalid who ought to be consoled. Seriously though, I hope you’ll be quite alright by the time you read this: I don’t like to hear of your being in bed so often, especially as it affects your spirits so. However, cheer up, and whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.

I quite appreciate what you say about my father, to whom I wrote on Sunday: but after all he hasn’t written to me, and as he had Warnie with him I thought he could ‘thole’. Still you are quite right in what you say and I must be more regular in future.

I thought you would like De Quincy, and hope you will go on reading him: it is always nice to feel that one has got a new friend among the book world, isn’t it? What an old miser you are though. I suppose I shall have to buy the Academy book myself now: and rest assured that you will never see one page of it. It is strange that ‘Frankenstein’ should be badly written: one would expect the wife of Shelley to be a woman of taste, wouldn’t one?

As to my brother’s talk about another ‘E Lucevan le Stelle’ I’m afraid the front must have turned the poor boy’s brain: considering how I pined after your copy for over a year it wasn’t very likely that I should have forgotten one if I had it. What put the idea into his head I can’t think.

Have been to Leatherhead baths for a swim today and am terribly stiff, as I always am after the first bathe of the year. Sorry this is not much of a letter this week, old man, but it’s after 11, and everyone is going to bed. This brings you the next instalment of Bleheris–criticise freely.

Yours,

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (LP V: 84-6):

[Gastons

6 June 1916]

My dear Arthur,

I was rather surprised to see the note paper of your last letter, and certainly wish that I could have been with you: I have some vague memories of the cliffs round there and of Dunluce Castle, and some memories which are not vague at all of the same coast a little further on at Castle-rock, where we used to go in the old days. Don’t you love a windy day at a place like that? Waves make one kind of music on rocks and another on sand, and I don’t know which of the two I would rather have.

As to your remarks about my ‘promise’ to join you on some future holiday, I must call your attention to the fact that all I promised was not to contract any engagement with my Aunt that could stand in the way of it, always warning you that I might not go anywhere. However I hope to do so, and will certainly try my best.

By the way, in future, if possible, don’t write your letter on so many different ‘levels’, so to speak: I keep them all on a pin now, and so far, all being written the same way up, I have been able to turn to any one I wanted, like a book: the latest one is a hard nut to crack. Always grumbling you see.

You may well ask ‘when’ my ‘Tristan’ is coming: I have asked the same question myself more than once, and it’s beginning to be like those famous Columbia records the holydays before last. As to the binding, if it is what the girl in the shop told me, it will be boards with leather back, and those little triangular pieces of leather on the corners. I don’t know if you understand this description, so I have drawn it for you: though perhaps indeed you find the picture quite as hard. In other words it is a glorified edition of the 2/- Everyman. The reason I’m not quite certain is that the girl showed me a much larger book done in the same style, only red. As I didn’t care for the colour, she said she thought it could be done like that in brown; so I’m still waiting the result.

With my last parcel–the Canterbury Tales–I got Macmillan’s and Dent’s catalogues, where I find much of interest: I suppose you know it all already however. For instance I never knew before that Macmillans would send you–through a bookseller–books on approval. Of course when things are so out of joint as you’re only allowed to keep them for a week, perhaps you could hardly manage it over in Ireland. Being so near town myself, I think I shall try it, wouldn’t you? I also notice that Dents have a series of ‘Classiques Francaises’ corresponding to the English Everymans Library. Does that mean that they’d be bound the same way? Among them I’m very pleased to find a rendering of the ‘Chanson de Roland’ into modern French:⁷⁶ this, as you probably know, is the old French epic, equivalent to our Beowulf,⁷⁷ and for years I have been wondering how to get it. Now, as things sometimes do, it just turns up. Of course talking about Beowulf reminds me again what hundreds of things there still are to buy: if you remember it has been ‘the next book I’ll get’ ever since you have known me.

I know very well what you mean by books getting tiresome half way through, but don’t think it always happens: for instance ‘Phantastes’, ‘Jane Eyre’, ‘Shirley’ (which in fact only begins to get interesting about then) might be cited–good word that–as examples. Tell me more about ‘John Silence’⁷⁸ when you write, and also let me know the publisher and price, as I have forgotten again and may want it one of these days.

I don’t like the way you say ‘don’t tell anyone’ that you thought ‘Frankenstein’ badly written, and at once draw in your critical horns with the ‘of course I’m no judge’ theory. Rot! You are a very good judge for me because our tastes run in the same direction. And you ought to rely more on yourself than on anyone else in matters of books–that is if you’re out for enjoyment and not for improvement or any nonsense of that sort. Which reminds me, I came on a phrase in Maeterlinck the other day which just suits my views about youth and silly scientific learning. ‘L’ignorance lumineuse de la jeunesse’,⁷⁹ the luminous ignorance of youth is exactly our strong point, isn’t it?

Great God, how I must be boring you! But you ought to know by now that your friend Chubs with a pen in his hand is a very dangerous object: that extemporising goes a bit far at times: though seriously, to harp back to the eternal subject of self–I think Bleheris has killed my muse–always rather a sickly child. At any rate my verse, both in quality and in quantity for the last three weeks is deplorable!! Before you get any further in the aforesaid romance, let me hasten to warn you that when I said [of] the first chapter, that Bleheris was like you, I hadn’t really thought of what I should make him. However I take that back, so that in future when my poor hero does anything mean you won’t think I am covertly preaching at you.

In odd moments last week I read an excellent novel by–you’d never guess–Bernard Shaw. It is called ‘Love among the Artists’, and is published in Constable’s shilling series.⁸⁰ I want you to get it: there are one or two extraordinary characters in it, and I think the whole gist of the thing, all about music, art etc. would appeal to you very strongly. Tell me if you do. I wonder what the good author who takes his own works so seriously would think if he knew that he was read for pleasure to fill up the odd moments of a schoolboy. If you do get the book, don’t forget to read the preface which is very amusing.

I can’t understand why you are willing to let me see your tale in the holydays, but are unwilling to send it by post. I refuse point blank to read it in your presence: that means that you spend your time thinking of what the other person is thinking and have no attention left to give to the work itself. So you may as well send it along.

Since I last wrote to you I have found the thought of a book done and yet not done intolerable, and therefore gone back and finished ‘Rob Roy’. I am very glad I did so, as otherwise I should have missed the very vigorous scene in the library, and the equally satisfactory death of Rashleigh.

I have written from 10 to quarter past 11 and the others are going up; so good night my Galahad,

from yours,

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (LP V: 89-90):

[Gastons

14 June 1916]

My dear Arthur,

I must begin by apologizing for being a day late this week: I suppose by this time you have worked up quite a flourishing grievance. However, you will be glad to know that there is a genuine excuse this time–not just laziness. The reason is that there were visitors here last night, and tho I don’t usually turn up on these occasions, I was so warmly urged ‘just to come into the drawing room for a minute or two when I had finished my work’ that I really couldn’t refuse. So the hour between 10 and 11 which on Tuesday nights is usually taken up with your letter was lost.

The reason why Mrs K. pressed me was that the visitors were some neighbours of ours and with them a girl who is staying with them–that’s an elegantly arranged sentence for a literary man–who has a voice and is being trained for opera. Well I am certainly glad I didn’t miss it, as she has a very fine contralto and sang two good songs–your record from ‘Orfeo’⁸¹ and a very queer thing of Debussy’s which I would like to hear again. Of course with that exception she sang rubbish, as the fools asked for it: horrible old ballads like ‘Annie Laurie’ etc. Still it was worth sitting talking about the war and wasting my time even for two good things. Why are singers always so plain I wonder?

I can’t help smiling at the thought of your sitting in the garden on Sunday morning, as we have had nothing but thunderstorms for the last week and it has just now turned so cold that we’ve gone back to fires. There, I’m talking about the weather! By the way I don’t know if you ever noticed how topping it is to see a fire again suddenly in the middle of June: it is so homely and cozy and is like having a bit of the good old Winter back again.

The remark about the cows with which you credit me really comes from your newly made friend De Quincy. I think it is just before the description of the flood–the ‘Bore’ as he calls it. Look it up and see if I’m right.⁸² Anyway I quite agree with it: but perhaps even nicer is a humorous looking old horse, living contentedly in a field by himself, it’s those little things that keep one from being lonely on a walk–there is one horse here that I have got to know quite well by giving him sugar. Perhaps he may save me from a witch some day or lead me home in a fog?

You will be amused to hear that my Tristen’ has not YET come: that is nearly three weeks now, and I am beginning to get angry. You ask at what shop it’s being done: well you see it’s being worked indirectly through the village stationer here who will send books to be bound for you in London, I don’t know where. The reason for its taking so long, I imagine is that the wretch really waits until he has several to do and then makes one parcel of them so as to save himself the postage. In any case I shall not give him another opportunity, as there are people in the neighbouring town of Leatherhead who bind books themselves.

I am glad you like ‘John Silence’ and must get it too. I have now read all the tales of Chaucer which I ever expected to read, and feel that I may consider the book as finished: some of them are quite impossible. On the whole, with one or two splendid exceptions such as the Knight’s and the Franklin’s tales, he is disappointing when you get to know him. He has most of the faults of the Middle Ages–garrulity and coarseness–without their romantic charm which we find in the ‘Green Knight’ or in Malory. Still, I only really expected to enjoy some of the Tales, and feel that the book was worth getting for their sake. I am not sure whether you would like him or not, but you should certainly not start poetry with him.

Which reminds me, have you ever carried out your plans of reading ‘Jason’?⁸³I am wondering what I ought to get next, or whether I ought to save money and read some of the Gastons books–perhaps finish the Brontes or take up another Scott. I have found that Sidney’s romance the Arcadia’⁸⁴ is published at 4/6 by the Cambridge University Press (what are they like?) and am strongly tempted to get it. One thing that interests me is that Sidney wrote it for his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, sending it to her chapter by chapter as he wrote it as I send you ‘Bleheris’. Perhaps we were those two in a former state of existence–and that is why your handwriting is so like a girl’s. Though even my self conceit will hardly go as far as to compare myself with Sidney.

What a queer compound you are. You talk about your shyness and won’t send me the MS of ‘Alice’, yet say that you are willing to read it to me–as if reading your own work aloud wasn’t far more of an ordeal. By the way I hope that you are either going on with ‘Alice’ or starting something else: you have plenty of imagination, and what you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we write (at least this is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it’s thrown into the fire next minute, I am so much further on. And you too who have been so disappointed at the technical difficulties of composing, won’t you find it a relief to turn to writing where you can splash about, so to speak, as you like, and gradually get better and better by experience? Or in other words, I shall expect an MS of some sort with your next week’s letter: if I don’t get it, I may have recourse to serious measures.

I like the way you say ‘why don’t’ I ‘take’ a day in town! As if I could just stroll down one morning and say that I wasn’t going to do any work today: no Galahad, that sort of thing may do in Franklin Street, but where people WORK–note that word, you may not have met it before–it can’t be did.

I am being fearfully lacerated at present: thinking that Pindar is a difficult author whom we haven’t time to read properly, Kirk has made me get it in the Loeb library–nice little books that have the translation as well as the text.⁸⁵ I have now the pleasure of seeing a pretty, 5/-volume ruined by a reader who bends the boards back and won’t wash his filthy hands: while, without being rude, I can’t do anything to save it. Of course it is a very little thing I suppose, but I must say it makes me quite sick whenever I think of it.

In case you despair of ever getting rid of the ‘City of the Nesses’, I promise you that in the next chapter after this one Bleheris actually does get away. Don’t forget the MS when you write, and tell me everything about yourself. Isn’t this writing damnable?

Yours,

Jack

The time had come for Lewis to apply to an Oxford college, and it was to this end that Mr Kirkpatrick had been preparing him. Seventeen colleges then made up the University of Oxford, and the question before Lewis was which to apply for. The practice at the time was to list at least three on the entry form, stating one’s order of preference. The ‘big group’ of colleges mentioned in the following letter to his father included New College, Corpus Christi, Christ Church, Oriel, Trinity and Wadham, and of these New College became Lewis’s first choice. Before being accepted by a college, Jack had to sit a scholarship examination in the subject he wished to read, Literae Humaniores, or Classics, to be given in December 1917. If accepted by an Oxford college, this would not make him a member of Oxford University. For that he would need to pass Responsions, the entrance examination administered by the University. Meanwhile, in preparation for the scholarship examination, Mr Kirkpatrick obtained some of the examination questions used in previous years so that he and Jack would have a better idea of how to prepare.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (LP V: 93-5):

[Gastons

20 June 1916]

My dear Arthur,

I do wish you would be serious about ‘Alice’: whatever else is a matter for joking, work–in this particular sense of the word–certainly is not. I do really want to see something of yours, and you must know that it is impossible to write one’s best if nobody else ever has a look at the result.

However, I told you I would proceed to serious measures, so here is my manifesto. I, Clive Staples Lewis, student, do hereby give notice that unless some literary composition of Arthur Greeves be in my possession on or before midnight on the last night of June in the year nineteen hundred and sixteen, I shall discontinue from that date forward, all communication to the said Arthur Greeves of every kind, manner, and description whatsoever, until such composition or compositions be forwarded. ‘So there’ as the children say. Now let us go on.

‘Oh rage, Oh desespoir’! Alas I am undone. All men are liars. Never, never get a book bound. You will gather from this that ‘Tristan’ has arrived and is a complete and absolute failure. When I told them to bind it in brown leather, with corner pieces etc., I imagined that it would look something like Kelsie’s Dickens or like a 2/- Everyman. Wouldn’t you have thought so? Well as a matter of fact, though in a sense they have done what I told them, yet the total effect, instead of being booky and library like, is somehow exactly like a bank book or a ledger. For one thing the leather–though I must say excellent in quality–is very dark and commercial looking, and the cloth between the back and triangular bits is the absolute abomination of desolation. As if this wasn’t enough–the edges of the paper were before nice, and artistically rough. Well what do you think the brutes have done? They have smoothed them down and coloured them a horrible speckled red colour, such as you see in account books. You can imagine my absolute fury.

True, it is some consolation to find the book itself good beyond what I had expected: it gets the romantic note (which the French don’t usually understand) very well indeed. One or two little descriptions are full of atmosphere. In particular, what could be better for Lyonesse–glorious name–as we imagine it, than this simple sentence: ‘Climbing to the top of the cliff he saw a land full of vallies where forest stretched itself without end.’ I don’t know whether you will agree with me, but that gives me a perfect impression of loneliness and mystery. Besides its other good points, it is very, very simple French, so that if you think of starting to read that language this would make a very good beginning.

I am sorry to hear about the ‘Beowulf, and if it is at all like what I imagine, surprised as well. Of course you were always less patient of the old fashioned things than I, and perhaps it is not a good translation. However (seriously) I may buy it from you at a reasonable price, if I like the look of it, just to match my ‘Gawaine’–that is unless I get Morris’s ‘Beowulf’⁸⁶ instead, which is rather too dear at 5/-.

Your remarks about music would seem to lead back to my old idea about a face being always a true index of character: for in that case, if you imagined from the music of the soul either of Gordon or of this mysterious ‘fille aux cheveux de lin’⁸⁷ one would be bound to imagine the face too–not of course exactly, but its general tone. What type of person is this girl of whom Debussy has been talking to you? As to your other suggestions about old composers like Schubert or Beethoven, I imagine that, while modern music expresses both feeling, thought and imagination, they expressed pure feeling. And you know all day sitting at work, eating, walking etc., you have hundreds of feelings that can’t (as you say) be put into words or even into thought, but which would naturally come out in music. And that is why I think that in a sense music is the highest of the arts, because it really begins where the others leave off. Painting can only express visible beauty, poetry can only express feeling that can be analysed–conscious feeling in fact: but music–however if I let myself go on such a fruitful subject I should take up the rest of this letter, whereas I have other things to tell you.

What is nicer than to get a book–doubtful both about reading matter and edition, and then to find both are topping? By way of balancing my disappointment in ‘Tristan’ I have just had this pleasure in Sidney’s Arcadia’. Oh Arthur, you simply must get it–though indeed I have so often disappointed you that I oughtn’t to advise. Still, when you see the book yourself, you will be green with envy. To begin with, it is exactly the sort of edition you describe in your last letter–strong, plain, scholarly looking and delightfully–what shall I say–solid: that word doesn’t really do, but I mean it is the exact opposite of the ‘little book’ type we’re beginning to get tired of. The paper is beautiful, and the type also.

The book itself is a glorious feast: I don’t know how to explain its particular charm, because it is not at all like anything I ever read before: and yet in places like all of them. Sometimes it is like Malory, often like Spenser, and yet different from either. For one thing, there is a fine description of scenery in it (only one so far, but I hope for more) which neither of them could have done. Then again the figure of the shepherd boy, ‘piping as though he would never be old’⁸⁸ rather reminds me of the ‘Crock of Gold’.⁸⁹ But all this comes to is that Sidney is not like anyone else, but is just himself. The story is much more connected than Malory: there is a great deal of love making, and just enough ‘brasting and fighting’ to give a sort of impression of all the old doings of chivalry in the background without becoming tedious: there is a definite set of characters all the time instead of a huge drifting mass, and some of them really alive. Comic relief is supplied by the fussy old king of Arcadia–rather like Mr Woodhouse in Emma–and his boor, Dametas. The only real fault is that all the people talk too much and with a tendency to rhetoric, and the author insists on making bad puns from time to time, such as ‘Alas, that that word last should so long last’.⁹⁰ But these are only small things: true, there is a good deal of poetry scattered through it which is all detestable, but then that has nothing to do with the story and can be skipped. I’m afraid this description won’t help much, but I am just longing for Saturday when I can plunge into it again. (I mean the book, not the description.)

So much have I chattered that I have hardly any more room left. No, I have never yet read any of Christina Rosetti’s poems, though, as you have heard me say, I love her brother Gabriel Rosetti. I believe she is very good, and a faery picture illustrating the ‘Goblin market’⁹¹ which I saw in the Academy attracted me very much. That is certainly a lovely edition of Lily’s, though of course not worth [getting], unless somebody presented it to you. A nice sentiment truly! But you understand.

I see that I have scribbled a note about illustrations on this week’s instalment (of course each is written a fortnight before you get it). Well do have a try: or rather that is a patronizing thing to say: I mean, do exert yourself. I am afraid my poor description won’t inspire you much. I wonder do you really know what Cloudy Pass⁹² looks like?

Well, they’re going to bed now. It is eleven o’clock so I suppose you yourself are already in that happy place. Don’t forget my manifesto.

Yours,

Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 86-7):

[Gastons

23 June 1916]

My dear Papy,

There is certainly something mysterious about the ‘machinations of the Knock’, as one might put it in the title of a novel; because, though I had not thought of it before, his success with Warnie is an unanswerable point against him. As to the Smythe business, however, I understand that mathematics were taught by him at some school in Manchester to which he went every day. But still, we are not flying so high as Woolwich. Tell me what Kirk says in answer to your letter. I do not think that there is anyone at Malvern whose advice I should prefer to Kirk’s on the question of Oxford: unless indeed I were to amuse myself by writing to Smugy and asking in an off-hand way whether it was Oxford or Cambridge he was at!

No; to be serious, I think we must rely chiefly on K. and on our own judgement. There is of course a considerable temptation to risk it and try for a Balliol: it was Balliol we always thought of, before we knew as much as we do now, and I must admit there is still a glamour about the name. On the other hand, Dodds says in his letter that the prestige of Balliol is on the decline, and quotes as Colleges in the big group, New, Corpus, Christ Church, Oriel, Trinity, and Wadham. Of course these are all merely names to us both, but the first three and Trinity are generally admitted to be in the first rank, while Dodds speaks with particular admiration of New, and Kirk assures me that now-a-days Christ Church is little if at all inferior to Balliol in scholarship. Bearing all this in mind I am afraid we should hardly be well advised in following,

‘The desire of the moth for the star’⁹³

when the star in this case is so perilous, and perhaps after all does not differ from another in glory so much as we have been led to expect. A further point to remember is that New College–of which Kirk has got a prospectus–substitutes for verse a paper of French and German translation instead of prose; which of course is far better from our point of view.

If then we decide to enter the big group, as I think we must, it remains to consider in what order we shall put down our Colleges. I should suggest Christ Church first, as undoubtedly the biggest name of the six, and after it perhaps New: and then the others in any order, keeping Wadham to the last.

It is a great relief to hear your news about the exact terms of the Military Service Act, as in this case I ought to be able to get a commission of some sort at home, or even a nomination from Oxford. At any rate, since there is no hurry–detestable expression, but let it pass–we can leave the matter to be discussed at ease in the seclusion of Leeborough.

If you have had even two hot days at home, you need not complain of the weather. We have had,

‘Clouds instead an ever during dark’⁹⁴

continual rain, and such bitter cold that on one or two evenings we have been obliged to light the fire: I believe it is just as bad all over England.

I am at present enjoying a new literary find in the shape of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia’, which I got at a venture and found better than I expected: though like De Quincy’s and Southey’s epics, ‘I expect that I enjoy the priveledge of being the sole reader of this work’. Talking about books, I hope you noticed the leader in this week’s Literary Supplement–on Edgar Allen Poe?⁹⁵ I never heard such affectation and preciosity; the man who thinks the ‘Raven’ tawdry just because it is easily appreciated, and says that in ‘The choice of words Poe has touched greater heights than De Quincy’ ought–well, what can we say of him?

I am sorry to hear what you say about Cousin Quartus:⁹⁶ he seemed to be as brave and cheerful as usual last holydays.

By the way I have had to expend 6/6 on a Pindar and a Lucan which K. wanted me to get from London, thinking that Mullan’s would be too slow. If a kind parent would like to refund–!

your loving son,

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (LP V: 97-8):

[Gastons

28 June 1916]

My dear Arthur,

For some reason your letter didn’t reach me until this morning (Wednesday) so I am afraid that this will be a day late. I have been longing to get to my answer all day: and now that the time is come I hardly know how to collect my thoughts–they have been buzzing so in my head ever since breakfast.

First, ten thousand thanks for the enclosure. You know that I never flatter my friends–in fact my faults are in the other direction: so you may accept as a truth how this first sample of your work has knocked me all of a heap. Really, Galahad, I had no idea you could do anything like this: it is splendid. The only fault I have to find is that there is not enough of it. The idea of all the things round the river being in love with your hero–and I suppose the river too–showing their affection–is beautifully suggestive: I am longing to see it worked out–for by the way, on no account must you think of giving up after so happy a beginning. What I like particularly is the way which–according to the advice of friend Horace–you get straight into the middle of your theme right away, without any such dull descriptions as open Bleheris. The whole description of the river, etc., is done (in my poor opinion) with great skill: it sort of carries you away from the world into a dim, summery dream in some landscape more lovely than reality. Isn’t the very word ‘punt’ very descriptive of summer and cool green reaches?

And now I am going to be so bold as to make a few suggestions: not that I think I am better ‘up’ in such things than you, but because it is good for both parties to be criticised, and I wish you would do the same to me. Well then, I don’t know if it be true with other people, but in my own case, I have always found that if you are in at all good form when you write, corrections made afterwards are usually for the worse. Certainly most of yours are not improvements: for instance in several cases you have changed the word ‘that’ to which, as

that) happened long ago.

which)

Of course it is a small point, but don’t you think ‘that’ is more simple, natural, and dignified than ‘which’? The latter is indeed rather business like. Nor do I see why ‘extremely old’ should be written over the plain ‘very old’. The second point is this: does your own judgement approve the sentence, ‘shook her silvery sheen’? The alliteration, I think, would be a bit daring even in verse, and I am sure cannot be allowed in prose.

Now, I suppose you think me meddlesome and impudent. Well, though perhaps I am given to finding spots in the sun, I still appreciate its brightness: I repeat, though my opinion of you as a friend could not be higher than it was, my opinion of you as an author has risen by leaps and bounds since this morning. You MUST go on with this exquisite tale: you have it in you, and only laziness–yes, Sir, laziness–can keep you from doing something good, really good. By the way, before we go any further, I must say in fairness, that when you find those roses playing a more prominent part in the life of my Bleheris, it is not cribbed from your willow tree! I had thought out my plot–what there is of it–before I left home.

I am very glad to hear that you have bought C. Rossetti’s poems: partly because I want to be able to look at it myself in the comfort of your sofa–mind the springs–and also I am glad you are beginning to read poetry. Which reminds me, a propos of your tale, you should read the bit in Morris’s ‘Jason’ about Hylas and the water nymphs. I think it is in Book II–at any rate you can see from the headings–and it would not take you more than half an hour. As to the illustrated edition of his early poems, I believe we once saw it together in Mullen’s, but so far as I remember, weren’t greatly impressed; or am I thinking of something else? You don’t tell me what you are actually reading at present, for you can’t be living entirely on lyrics: have you finished ‘John Silence’ yet, and what is your final verdict on it?

In the mean time the ‘Arcadia’ continues beautiful: in fact it gets better and better. There has been one part that Charlotte Bronte could not have bettered: where Philoclea the heroine, or rather one of the heroines, is beginning to fall in love unconsciously with a man disguised as a girl: and she does not know the secret: the delicacy and pathos of her wrestlings with a feeling which of course she can’t understand, as told by Sidney are–well I can’t explain what they are like: there is one scene where she goes out by moonlight to an old grove, an haunted place, where there is an altar to ‘the wood gods of old’,⁹⁷ and lies looking up at the stars and puzzling about things, that is equal to if not better than the scene where Jane Eyre wakes up on the moor–do you remember? On the other hand, of course there are parts YOU might not have patience with: in the old style, where people relate their own adventures with no direct bearing on the main story: yet even this, to me, is interesting–so quaint and so suggestive of the old romantic world.

Besides this, I have read nothing lately, except a foolish modern novel which I read at one sitting–or rather one lying on the sofa, this afternoon in the middle of a terrible thunderstorm. I think, that if modern novels are to be read at all, they should be taken like this, at one gulp, and then thrown away–preferably into the fire (that is if they are not in one’s own edition). Not that I despise them because they are modern, but really most of them are pretty sickly with their everlasting problems.

I am glad to hear that you have started illustrating my tale: your criticism about not making long conversations is a very sound one, though I fear I can’t keep up to it. For instance, after this chapter the next two are, I am afraid, taken up with a conversation between Bleheris and the people he meets at an inn. Still, as it is necessary to what follows, you must try and get through it. This chapter is a failure: I particularly wanted to show what sort of a person he is and how he develops, but have only made him ridiculous.

I am interested in what you tell me of the Bronte country. Fancy a real living original of Heathcliffe?⁹⁸ What must he have been like.

Now it is time for bed, so good night mon vieux, and don’t forget another instalment in your next letter.

Yours,

Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 91-2):

[Gastons

30? June 1916]

My dear Papy,

I can’t understand why Kirk has not answered your letter. He never mentioned it to me, and until I heard from you I did not know that you had written: perhaps it has gone astray–like your subscription to the chocolate fund!

At any rate, after reading what you said, I asked him whether a modern language could be substituted as you suggest: he replied that he thought this was so, but pointed out that of course this did not include mathematics, and that the latter would consist of a good deal of graphical work and other things which he–though goodness only knows why–does not feel fit to teach. If the worst comes to the worst, I suppose I could grind mathematics in the holidays: but all things considered I think we should look on the Sandhurst scheme as a “pis aller”⁹⁹ if it be found impossible to get a commission by influence or any other way.

You see the difficulties of entrance, though not insurmountable, are still serious, and it is well to remember that, as Harding told us, if I get a permanent commission, it may not be easy to leave the army immediately after the war. Do you think we could manage to work the business through our political friends? Kirk assures me that even now this is not difficult, and if it could be done, it would certainly be far the best plan. Failing this, I should suggest some volunteer institution from Ulster if any of these are still in existence.

Since we last wrote, I have been in communication with Oxford: missives have been elicited from Balliol, and I was glad to hear that if you go in for a scholarship, you are not expected to matriculate as well. It is rather a question however whether Balliol should be our mark: in order to prevent it getting the pick of the candidates, there is an arrangement by which Balliol and one or two insignificant colleges stand in a group by themselves outside the ‘big group’ which, like ‘Pooh-Bah’¹⁰⁰ comprises ‘everything else’ worth talking about. Now in each of these two groups you put down the Colleges in the order you wish, and are put into one of them according to your place in the exam. You are of course ‘stuck’ in the group for which you enter. Under these circumstances, unless you are absolutely sure of success, it might be better to leave Balliol alone, seeing that if I miss it I have only a very few fall-backs, and those not of the first water. Tell me what you think? At any rate it is one comfort that Kirk’s talk about matriculation was all moonshine: the scholarship exams take place in December. What between Oxford and the Army I am beginning to think that we would be better advised to sell all we have, take a cottage in Donegal, and cultivate potatoes for the good of the nation. Still, I suppose we really have very little to grumble at.

If it is not strange to say so, I am glad to hear that Dick is safely wounded:¹⁰¹ it is by far the best thing that can happen to a man in the trenches, and the really unlucky ones are those who ‘bear the labour and heat of the day’¹⁰² unhurt for over a year–always it would seem in the long run to be killed after returning from a leave.

Things look pretty black at present, don’t they? The North Sea battle, though perhaps not so bad as we thought at first, is certainly a very serious business, and our attitude towards the ‘rats’ was rather that of friend Tim than of the sportsman ‘digging them out’. What exactly will the loss of Kitchener mean?¹⁰³ ‘De mortuis…’¹⁰⁴ now of course, and for my own part I never approved of arm chair criticism.

How noble of poor Bob to give up his sister to the war!

your loving

son Jack

As we have seen, for some time now letters had been passing between father and son, and father and Mr Kirkpatrick, regarding Jack’s future. All were agreed that he should try for a place at Oxford, and Jack was due to sit for a scholarship examination there on 5 December. However, with one son already in the army, and the war growing worse every day, Albert Lewis was very anxious to keep Jack out of the service. According to the Military Service Act ‘every male British subject who had attained the age of eighteen and ordinarily resident in Great Britain was liable for enlistment in the army. On the other hand, the exemption mentioned at the beginning of this chapter–that of a man resident in Great Britain ‘for the purposes of his education only’ was now in effect. Jack was Irish, and the exemption applied to him. But contrary to his fathers wishes, Jack insisted that he would not apply for the exemption, and he was determined not to be talked out of it by either father or tutor.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (LP V: 103-5):

[Gastons

4 July 1916]

My dear Arthur,

So you feel hurt that I should think you worth talking to only about books, music, etc.: in other words that I keep my friendship with you only for the highest plane of life: that I leave to others all the sordid and uninteresting worries about so-called practical life, and share with you those joys and experiences which make that life desirable: that–but now I am getting rhetorical. It must be the influence of dear Sidney and his euphuism I suppose. But seriously, what can you have been thinking about when you said ‘only’ books, music, etc., just as if these weren’t the real things!

However, if I had thought for a moment that it would interest you, of course you are perfectly welcome to a full knowledge of my plans–such as they are. Indeed I imagined that you had a pretty clear idea about them: well, ‘let us go forward’, to quote from a certain romance: being Irish, I hear from my father that the fact of my being educated in England will not bring me under the new act. I am therefore going to remain as I am until December when my Oxford exam comes off. After that, I shall of course join the army: but in what exact way, I don’t at present know any more than you do. So there you have the whole yarn.

I may just remark in passing that you should by this time know better than to waste pity on your friend Chubs for ‘worrying’ about it: did you ever see him worrying about anything? I have learnt by now that whatever plans you make in this world, everything always turns out quite differently, so what is the use of bothering? To be honest, the question has hardly crossed my mind once this term. Now I don’t mind in the least telling you all this, and if you wanted to know I don’t see why you never asked before. But then I am a coarse-grained creature who never could follow the feelings of refined–might I say super-refined?–natures like my Galahad’s.

The annoying part is that you have taken up your letter (and here am I taking up mine!!) with this, to the exclusion of all sorts of interesting things that I wanted to hear: for instance, you must tell me more about Hardy. We have all heard of him till we are sick of it, and so I should like to hear the opinion of someone I know. What sort of a novel is it? Would I like it?

But of course the first thing I looked for in this evening’s letter was to see if there was an instalment there. I have now read it over again with last week’s to get the continuous narrative, and with the same pleasure. Did you quite realise what a splendid touch it was for Dennis to hope ‘nobody would steal his clothes’? Somehow the practical, commonsense realism of that, increases the fairy-like effect of what follows enormously. I don’t know if I can explain it, but it sort of brings the thing just enough in touch with reality to make it convincing, without spoiling its dreaminess. Also the idea of his seeing her face not directly, but in the water, is somehow very romantic. By the way, I hope you don’t really think that I hinted for a moment that your willow was borrowed from my roses: how could you know what my roses were going to do about five chapters ahead? Above all, don’t change anything in the plan of your tale on that account. Perhaps, as you say, we both took it unconsciously from ‘Phantastes’, who in his turn borrowed it from the dryads, etc. of classical mythology, who are a development of the primitive savage idea that everything has a spirit (just as your precious Jehovah is an old Hebrew thunder spirit): so we needn’t be ashamed of borrowing our trees, since they are really common property.

Your reply to my criticism is typically Galahadian: but though in your case I am sure it is more sincere than it looks, still this excessive modesty is rather absurd. You may be dissatisfied with it (though I don’t see why), you may be uncertain of yourself, but still in your heart of hearts you don’t think of ‘The Water Sprite’ as ‘that rubbish of mine’, now do you?

Do you know what your tale has done? It has made me sorry that I began Bleheris in the old style: I see now that though it is harder to work some effects in modern English, yet on the whole my way of writing is a sort of jargon: however, we must do the best we can. I was very glad to hear that you liked the Sunken Wood, especially as the next two chapters are stodgy conversation. I am afraid Bleheris never gets into the wood: but you ought to know that the ‘little, hobbling shadow’ doesn’t live more in that wood than anywhere else. It follows nervous children upstairs to bed, when they daren’t look over their shoulders, and comes and sits on your grandfather’s summer seat beside two friends when they have talked too much nonsense in the dark. I hope you have an illustration ready for this chapter?

I am still at the ‘Arcadia’, which you will gather from this is a long book, though not a bit too long. I won’t make you sick of it before you see it by starting to sing its praises again: I only promise you that I am still as keen on it as when I began. By the way, now that we are both writing, and know how much work there is in a short instalment that can be read in a few minutes, you begin to realize the labour of writing a thing say like the ‘Morte D’Arthur’.

I gather from your silence that you are doing nothing in the gramophone way? Ask the Girlinosbornes whether my new record of ‘Is not His word like a fire’¹⁰⁵ (ordered last holidays) has come yet or not. I hope it will be waiting for me when I get home: which event–do you realize–will happen in about a month. This term has gone terribly quickly and been very pleasant, but all the same I shall not be sorry to take up my other life again.

What new books are there of yours to see? I am longing to have a look at your De Quincey and ‘Rossetti’. By the way, I suppose you never looked up the passage about the ‘bore’ nor the one in William Morris about Hylas and the nymphs? I have now finished my Tristan, which is really delightful: it is the saddest story on earth I think, don’t you? I have written for the French Everyman translation of ‘Roland’ which ought to have come by now, but hasn’t. I am interested to see what the binding is like, aren’t you?

You will see by the scrawl that I am trying to write about a million miles an hour as everyone has gone to bed. So goodnight old man: send another instalment next week, I am so interested in your adorable fairy.

Yrs.,

Jack

P.S. By the way, one criticism just to keep you from getting your head turned. Don’t talk about Dennis as ‘our young friend’ or ‘our hero’–the last is like a newspaper: at least you may take it as a suggestion just for what it is worth.–J.

TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 102-3):

[Gastons

7 July 1916]

My dear Papy,

Your ‘essay’ and letter arrived, and Kirk read me a great part of the former. I think what you say about Christ Church is probably right, although Kirk tells me that there is most certainly a reading set, which one could live in. However, Dod[d]s specially recommends New, and as you say yourself, both it and Oriel are in the first rank. On the other hand, I am afraid that there will be no more ‘Guards Regiments’ anywhere by the time I reach Oxford: the old ‘bloods’ have mostly been shot, and the atmosphere of an after-war England will not be conductive to the birth of a new generation. Fortunately, there is no hurry about the question, and we can talk it over together in comfort next holidays.

Yes! It would be true irony if we ran upon something of the James or Capron type again; our little portrait gallery for that never-written novel is already getting crowded. By the way, what do you think of the new arrangement about Ulster? Kirk has talked about it for nearly a week: not that he has any views on either side, but he seems to find a pleasure in balancing off all the arguments for and against the proposal: so well has he succeeded that I am beginning to think ‘That way lies madness.’¹⁰⁶ No sooner have we made up our minds on one side, than we are immediately floored by a new point that he brings up on the other. What do you think about it?

I must deprecate those very questionable references to my unfortunate last term’s exodus from Gastons: if I saw that the goodwife of the house was, like Martha ‘careful over many things,’¹⁰⁷ and then tactfully suggested that I might go home, what do you find extraordinary in such an action? At any rate, though we have our faults, we don’t make ourselves ridiculous in an open carriage, nor lose our way in a country we have known from childhood. To be sensible, I suppose the term will end, as you say, at the end of July.

Many thanks for both your enclosures. The letter was from my old Malvern study companion Hardman: he is going to be conscripted at Christmas, and wants to know what I am going to do. I am writing to say that I don’t know yet, but will tell him as soon as our plans are settled. Of course if it turned out to be convenient, I should like to have a friend with me in the army, but it is hardly worth while making any special provisions for so small a matter. We shall see how it all works out.

Your reference to the two books is tantalizing. I quite agree with you that they should be put in a safe place: and the safest place in Leeborough is a certain ‘little end room’ where all the footsteps point one way. I for my part am still at my ‘Arcadia’ which I find excellent.

The weather here is ridiculous: wintry colds alternating with hot, close fogs, and an occasional thunder shower. I don’t know what the farmers will do.

your loving

son Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (LP V: 106-8):

[Gastons

11 July 1916]

My dear Arthur,

I am very glad to hear that you are getting to like Jason: I agree with you that the whole description of Medea–glorious character–going out by night, and of her sorceries in the wood is absolutely wonderful, and there are other bits later on, such as the description of the ‘Winter by the Northern River’ and the garden of the Hesperides, which I think quite as good. Curiously enough I have just started the Argonautica’¹⁰⁸ the Greek poem on the same subject, and though I haven’t got very far–only in fact to the launching of Argo–it is shaping very well. It will be interesting to compare this version with Morris’s, although indeed the story of the Golden Fleece is so perfect in itself that it really can’t be spoiled in the telling. Don’t you find the very names Argo’ and ‘Argonauts’ somehow stirring?

I thought a person like you would sooner or later come to like poetry: by the way, of course you are quite right when you talk about thinking more of the matter than of the form. All I meant when I talked about the importance of form was to carry a little further what you already feel in prose–that is how some phrases such as the Wall of the World, or at the Back of the North Wind affect you, partly by sound partly by association, more than the same meaning would if otherwise expressed. The only difference is that poetry makes use of that sort of feeling much more than prose and produces those effects by metre as well as by phrase. In fact, the metre and the magic of the words should be like the orchestration of a Wagnerian opera–should sort of fill the matter by expressing things that can’t be directly told–that is, it expresses feeling while the matter expresses thought. But I daresay I have given you my views on the subject before. I am very flattered that you remember that old line about the ‘garden where the west wind’ all these months, and will certainly copy out anything that is worth it if you can find me a shop in dear Belfast where I can buy a decent MS book: I have failed in that endeavour so far.

So we are to be treated to more and more modesty? Indeed Arthur if I could get a little of your diffidence, and you a little of my conceit we should both be very fine fellows. This week’s instalment is quite worthy of the other two, and I was quite disappointed when it broke off. The reeds ‘frightened out of their senses’ and shouting in ‘their loudest whisper’ are delightful. ‘Our Lady of the Leaf might be kept in mind as a possible title if you don’t care for the present one.

You are rather naive in telling me that you ‘have to sit for a minute thinking’ and ‘find the same word coming in again’ as if these weren’t the common experiences of everyone who has ever written. I haven’t noticed any smallness in the vocabulary you employ for your tale, and anyway that’s just a matter of practice. By the way, even if you didn’t mean it, I hope you see now what I am driving at about the remark of Dennis as to his clothes. As to the ‘sitting for ten minutes’, I don’t believe that good work is ever done in a hurry: even if one does write quickly in a burst of good form, it always has to be tamed down afterwards. I usually make up my instalment in my head on a walk because I find that my imagination only works when I am exercising.

Can you guess what I have been reading this week? Of all things in the world ‘Pendennis’!¹⁰⁹ Isn’t this the one you find too much for you? I am nearly through the first volume and like it well so far: of course one gets rather sick of Pen’s everlasting misbehaviour and the inevitable repentance going round and round like a mill wheel and there doesn’t seem much connection between one episode and another. All the same, it has a sort of way with it.

That feast the ‘Arcadia’ is nearly ended: in some ways the last book is the best (though a little spoiled I admit by brasting) and here the story is so like the part of Ivanhoe where they are all in Front-de-Boeuf’s castle, that I think Scott must have borrowed it.¹¹⁰ Your remarks about C. Rosetti’s poems are very tantalizing and I am longing to see them. How I do love expensive books if only I could afford them. Apropos of which, do you know anything of the artist Beardesley?¹¹¹ I fancy he was the man who started the modern school of ‘queer’ illustrations and the like: well I see you can get for £1.5s. a 1 vol. edition of Malory with his illustrations, published by Dent. What do you think it would be like? I only wish it was Macmillan and so we could have it on approval.

You are quite wrong old man in saying I can draw ‘when I like’. On the contrary, if I ever can draw, it is exactly when I don’t like. If I sit down solemnly with the purpose of drawing, it is a sight to make me ‘ridiculous to the pedestrian population of the etc.’. The only decent things I do are scribbled in the margins of my dictionary–like Shirley–or the backs of old envelopes, when I ought to be attending to something else.

I am quite as sorry as you that I can’t see my way to working Bleheris back into the Sunken Wood, for I think the idea might be worked a bit more: but don’t see how it is to be done without changing the whole plan of the story.

The immediate prospects of my getting married ‘agreeably or otherwise’ as you kindly suggest, are not very numerous: but if you are getting uneasy about an invitation, rest assured, when the event comes off, if you behave you shall have one.

It was strange that Mrs K. should get Hardy’s ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’¹¹² out of the library last week, though I never got a chance of looking into it: somehow I don’t fancy Hardy is in my line, but then I always have a prejudice against people whom you’re always hearing about.

You say nothing about music now-a-days, and I am afraid I scarcely think of it: it annoys me hugely to think of the whole world of pleasures that I used to have and can’t enjoy now. Did you see a long article in the Times Literary Supplement¹¹³ about the ‘Magic Flute’¹¹⁴ which is on at the Shaftesbury? How I wish I could go up and hear it and also ‘Tristan and Isolde’¹¹⁵–though if I did it would be a disappointment in all probability.

I am furious because in answer to my order for the ‘Chanson de Roland’ I am told it is out of print, which is very tiresome. Here I enclose another chapter, really all conversation this time, but can promise you a move next week. Don’t forget your own instalment which I look forward to very eagerly. Good night.

Yours,

Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 105-6):

[Gastons

14? July 1916]

My dear Papy,

This must be nipped in the bud: there can be no question of that. Get your lady friend’s visit over before the end of this month, at all costs, or else bid them avaunt till the winter.¹¹⁶ What should I do, left alone all day to face a situation of that sort? As well, the whole thing is tyranny, extortion, infliction, profligacy and arrogance of the worst sort, and therefore not to be borne. Have they not already taken more than their fair share of reprisals for our own visit so long ago? This ‘breakfast is a charming meal’ business can be overdone: however, a man can but die once, so I suppose destiny must take its course.

This is big news from the front, though whether it will have any permanent effect or not, of course we can’t say. The Ulster Division–what there are of them now–must have silenced the yapping politicians for ever.¹¹⁷ I suppose the losses are felt very heavily in Belfast: here, nobody seems to have noticed anything.

Yes, that wheeze about ‘pulled through’ ought to ‘supply a long felt want’: it can be used on every occasion and ought to live for a very long time. I am sorry if any obscurity on my part gave rise to the ‘savage emphasis,’ but then his ordinary style of conversation is so–I think the word is ‘nervous’ in its 18th Century sense, that best describes it–that we must not pay too much attention to such things. I think, as you say, that things point to New, but of course we will keep an open mind in the meantime.

The literary event of the week is our respected laureate’s ode in the Times Literary Supplement:¹¹⁸ truly a most remarkable production, though I am afraid like the honest Major in ‘Patience,’ I must confess that ‘it seems to me nonsense’.¹¹⁹ To do the man justice, the lines about Homer, the ones about the birds, the beginning of the vision, and a few other passages, are rather fine. But the habit of throwing in an odd rhyme here and there is rather uncomfortable: still, if you can lay your hand upon it (the Pattersonian pun is quite a mistake, owing to haste, as it is getting late and the others are going up) you might keep this number.

I am at present in the middle of a book called ‘Pendennis’ which I should advise you to read unless I knew your prejudice against the author: however, one of these days you will come round and ‘see my point.’

your loving,

son,

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (LP V: 111-13):

[Gastons]

Tuesday evening, the I

don’t know whath,

18] July /16.

My dear Arthur,

I can’t understand why you should want to know the dates on which these gems of wit were written: if you should ever happen to look at them in the future, a date is a meaningless thing and it won’t really help you to see a few numbers written on the top. For my part, when I read your old letters, I don’t think about such nonsense. I classify them not by time but by the stage in our thoughts at which they were written: I say ‘Ah, that was when we were talking about Loki, this was when we talked much about music and little about books, we didn’t know each other so well when this was written’ and so on. Which is far more sensible than saying, ‘This was September 1914, that was August 1915.’ As well, the fact that everyone else puts a date on their letters is to me an excellent reason for not doing so. Still, if you are really concerned about it, I suppose I must ‘bow myself in the house of Rimmon’.¹²⁰ Since I have gone so far as to put a date however, you can’t be so unreasonable as to suggest that it should be the right one.

I am awfully bucked about ‘Twelfth Night’:¹²¹ I thought at the time you remember, that Heath Robinson’s illustrations were absolutely perfect–quite as good as Rackham’s, though of course in a different style. If I remember aright there is a splendid one on the line ‘How full of shapes is fancy’¹²² and also some fine evening cloud effects–not to mention the jester in the rain and the delightfully ‘old English’ garden scenes.

I am longing, as you say, to be at home and to go over all our treasures both old and new:–so of course we shall be disappointed in some way. As you say, you are extravagant, but I too at present buy one book as soon as I have finished another.

The Arcadia’ is finished: or rather I have read all there is of it, for unfortunately it breaks off at a most exciting passage in the middle of a sentence. I will not praise it again, beyond saying that this last 3rd. book, though it has no such fine love passages as the 2nd., yet (despite the brasting), for really tip-top narrative working the interest up and up as it goes along, is quite worthy of Scott.

This week’s new purchase consisted of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’–in the same edition as my Mandeville¹²³–and ‘John Silence’ in the 7d. edition. Just as one sometimes has a spell of being disappointed in new books, so at other times you keep on getting one treat after another. For the first few pages of John Silence I was hardly in the right mood: but after that it fairly swept me off my feet, so that on Saturday night I hardly dared to go upstairs. I left off-until next week end–in the middle of the ‘Nemesis of Fire’–Oh, Arthur, aren’t they priceless? Particularly the ‘Ancient Sorceries’ one, which I think I shall remember all my life. Oh, that evil dance, and the ‘muttering the old, old incantation’! The feeling of it all chimed with a lovely bit of ‘Paradise Lost’ which I read the same evening where it talked of the hounds that,

’…Follow the night hag, when, called In secret riding through the air she comes Lured with the smell of infant blood, to dance With Leopard witches, while the labouring moon Eclipses at their charms.’¹²⁴

Don’t you like the Leopard witches? How you will love Milton some day! By the way we may remark in passing that John Silence is one of the nicest 7d’s in paper and so forth that I have ever seen. I wonder how people would laugh if they could hear us smacking our lips over our 7d’s and Everymans just as others gloat over rare folios and an Editio Princeps? But after all, we are surely right to get all the pleasure we can, and even in the cheapest books there is a difference between coarse and nice get up. I wonder what a book called ‘Letters from Hell’ published at 1/-by Macmillan would be like?’¹²⁵

This week’s instalment I enjoyed especially: the idea of the hair so beautiful to the eye so coarse to the touch is very suggestive, and you keep us in fine doubt as to whether your faery is going to turn out good and benevolent or terrible. You complain that your tale is commonplace, but I don’t know anything that you think is like it, and I hope that you will really never think of giving it up unfinished–all the same, if you do–for which I can see no earthly reason–don’t be discouraged, because we very rarely succeed in finishing a first work. If you saw the number of ‘beginnings’ I have made! By the by, there is one little point I must grouse at this week. You say that the faery resumed her ‘normal’ size. What was her normal size? We saw her first as a little figure on a leaf, and she hasn’t changed since. Do you mean that she took on human size? Of course a few trifling changes when you revise will make this quite clear. The point of names is rather difficult: ‘Dennis’ I like, but the old Irish attractions of ‘Desmond’ are very strong. I really don’t know what I should advise.

I am sorry you disapprove of my remarks in the romance. But you must remember that it is not Christianity itself I am sneering at, but Christianity as taught by a formal old priest like Ulfin, and accepted by a rather priggish young man like Bleheris.¹²⁶ Still, I fear you will like the main gist of the story even less when you grasp it–if you ever do, for as is proper in romance, the inner meaning is carefully hidden.

I am really very sorry to hear about your new record, but so many of your Odeons have been successful that I cannot reasonably have the pleasure of saying ‘I told you so’. Talking about music, I have at last found out the exact number of the Chopin piece I like so well–it is the 21st Prelude. Look it out, and tell me if it is not the best music in the world?

I am afraid it is mere foolishness to praise that rhyme of mine as you do. Remember, you know exactly the occasion that gave rise to it, and can read between the lines, while to others it would perhaps be scarcely intelligible: still it is nice to be able to please even one reader–as you do too, for all your talk. In a way that sort of double-meaning in the title ‘Lady of the Leaf would be rather fascinating I think.

I am glad to hear your remarks about the different pleasures of painting, writing etc. I quite agree with you, ‘work’ of this kind, though it worries and tortures us, tho’ we get sick of it and dissatisfied with it and angry, after all it is the greatest pleasure in life–there is nothing like it. Good night old man.

Jack

P.S. Is Dennis in bathing things all this time, or ‘au naturel’? The point is not without interest.

P.P.S. Up in my room I have just read over the whole ‘Watersprite’ again. I have not done it justice in this letter, the whole story is topping and the air of mystery that hangs about Her makes one very keen to go on. I am not putting this in because I want to pleasure you, but because it just strikes me at the moment and must come out. Go on and prosper–there goes half past. So gute nacht du lieber kamarad, bon soir mon vieux.

J.

TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 114-15):

[Gastons]

21st July 1916.

My dear Papy,

I was just beginning to get up what I considered a very legitimate ‘grouse’, but must admit that you offer the best of reasons for the offence. I am glad that you enjoyed their visit,¹²⁷ and wish that I could have been one of the party:–at least so I may now say with safety when ‘the tyrranny is over past’.¹²⁸ Many thanks for your indulgent permission to take a Scotch trip–never fear, we’ll keep your place in order.

Kirk tells me he has sent you a list of the Scholarships and Exhibitions at colleges in the big group, which we will be able to go over together in the holidays. It is cheering to see that we have some fifteen to come and go over, most of them in the first rank.

My fellow sojourner at Gastons is going home this day (Friday) week, so I think it would be best for me to choose the following Monday. I forget what state the cross-channel routes are in at present, but if Fleetwood is going I had sooner travel by it: failing that by Liverpool with Larne as a pis aller. So if you could book a stateroom for the 31st, and forward a few ‘crowns for convoy’ I shall do myself the honour of waiting on you at Leeborough on Tuesday morning the first. (You may notice the phrasing of the last sentence, the insidious influence of that excellent man, Major Pendennis.)¹²⁹

I had not heard before about Dick¹³⁰ and was very glad and proud of the news. As you say, he has plenty of ‘guts’ if only he has the luck to stick out. Things look a little brighter at the front now, though I am afraid it will need many such successes to bring the business to an end. Kirk went up to London on Wednesday to see the elder Smythe boy, who is at home wounded, for the third time.

‘Summer is a-cummen in’¹³¹ here at last, and we have actually had no rain since Saturday.

your loving

son Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (LP V: 115-17):

[Gastons]

July 25 1916 and be d-d to you.

My dear Arthur,

That thrice accursed fellow pupil of mine is at present sitting up in the work room so I cannot go and steal a page from his exercise book to write on, as I have been doing all the term–you must be content therefore with these odd scraps: indeed I don’t see why I should write at all, as by writing both the first and the last letter of this term I have treated you to two more than you deserve; however, I will make a note that it is your turn to begin after the holidays.

You are quite mistaken if you suppose that in asking about Dennis’ bathing things I suggested that he OUGHT to have them on–I only wanted to get a perfectly clear picture: still I don’t see any parallel between him and Bleheris in knickerbockers (a very funny word–that or Bickerknocker would be a good name for a dwarf if either of us should want one), because I take it your story is modern. But of course I quite agree that your hero is far better without them. It seems rather unnatural though to pass over any question of embarrassment in absolute silence: the fey of course, as a non-human being, may be excused, but poor Dennis might at least be allowed to blush when he comes round. Handled delicately and without any foolish humour–I am quite serious–the point might be worked a little more: what think you? Morris–who I always think manages to be as good as gold and at the same time beautifully sensuous, would have revelled in it. This week’s instalment is excellent, and your references to the Sea and the sea gods give me great anticipation of what may happen next: that next number which I am longing to get–from your own hand.

You must be easily satisfied if you think that I flatter you–when I scarcely let a sentence go past without pricking holes in it: you must also have funny ideas about my rate of composition if you think I have already finished Bleheris. As a matter of fact I write one chapter every Sunday afternoon, and having started before I came back, am always two instalments ahead of the one you get: the general course of the story was mapped out from the start, but of course is changed pretty freely whenever I like. When I said that you wouldn’t like the ‘gist’ of the thing, I meant nothing to do with what you call ‘shocked’ or ‘immodest’ (though I admit that when the heroine turns up she is in fairly sharp contrast to Alice the Saint), but that the meaning of it all is somewhat anti-Christian: however, the story and not the allegory is the important part.

I have now finished that adorable (to quote our friend Ch-anie)¹³² ‘John Silence’: I still think ‘Ancient Sorceries’ the best, though indeed all, particularly the ‘Fire’ one, are glorious. In the last one the opening part, all about those lovely Northern Islands and the camp life–wouldn’t you love to go there?–is so very beautiful that you feel almost sorry to have the supernatural dragged in. Though the idea of the were-wolf is splendid. At what point of the story did you begin to guess the truth?

My last budget of books includes a French Everyman copy of a poet called Chenier¹³³ (a poet you might perhaps like some day, when you come to read French verse) and a 13d. Macmillan copy of Walter Pater’s ‘Renaissance’,¹³⁴ in the same edition as the ‘Letters from Hell’ I suppose. That book (Hell) by the way is not by Dostoevsky I think, because I fancy I read somewhere that it is translated not from the Russian but from the Swedish: I have noticed too (did I tell you before) that this edition has a preface by our friend Macdonald, the author of Phantastes. We must certainly get it, as the Macmillan 1/-series are, to my mind, very nicely got up. The French Everyman is quite different from the English one–I am not sure yet whether I like it more, or less–you must judge for yourself.

It is a terrible responsibility to have to guide my Galahad in poetry: a false step might turn you away altogether! I don’t think I should advise Milton: while there are lots of things in him you would love–the descriptions of Hell and Chaos and Paradise and Adam and Eve and Satan’s flight down through the stars, on the other hand his classical allusions, his rather crooked style of English, and his long speeches, might be tedious. Besides it is written in blank verse (without rhymes) and people who are beginning to read poetry don’t usually care for that. But of course you are different, and for all I know you might. You must have a good look at it in my copy and see what you think.

Endymion¹³⁵ is top-hole in places, in fact nearly all the time, though somewhat ‘sticky’: it would be a very good thing to try, I think, if you would not scruple to skip whenever you found it dull: the third book especially, where he wanders at the bottom of the sea, would appeal to you strongly. The only other poems I can suggest are Arnold’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’ or ‘Balder Dead’¹³⁶ (though this is in blank verse) or some of the stories in Morris’ ‘Earthly Paradise’¹³⁷ or perhaps some of the other Rossetti’s pieces; these of course you could finish in a few hours, and some of them are not really very good. If you get an edition of Keats perhaps you would like ‘St Agnes Eve’¹³⁸–it is shorter than Endymion, written in Spenser’s metre, and very romantic–though perhaps rather ‘sticky’ also. In sympathy with your new investment, having finished ‘Pendennis’ of which I am heartily sick by now, I have begun to read ‘Twelfth Night’ which is a charming little romance, don’t you think? The opening speech about the music is the best.

Can’t understand it being ‘too hot to practise’ as it is absolute winter here. Bah, there you see I am talking about the weather, like any fool! If I can get away–I haven’t promised, mind–I should be pleased with all my heart to go to Portsalon: indeed whenever (correctly used in this sentence) I have thought of a holiday with you, that place has come into my mind: however, we can discuss all this when we meet–next week. Can you realize? I am so looking forward to seeing you again old man, and I do hope and pray that nothing will turn up to disappoint us. I expect to arrive home on Tuesday: there is some faint danger of my father’s staying at home, but if not, perhaps you could get a day off? Oh, how we will look over all these new books together: I have something ravishing to show you in the way of paper, but that can wait.

I am writing at present a rather lengthy (for me that is) poem about Hylas, which you shall see if it is a success: but perhaps it will never be finished. By the way, I have come to the Hylas part in the Greek Argonautica. He doesn’t go into it nearly as fully as Morris, but in some ways it is better. In this version the various nymphs–mountains, Oreads, wood nymphs etc., are dancing by moonlight when they hear a mortal blundering through the wood. So they all scatter to their various trees, streams etc., and this particular one, as Hylas bent down to fill his pitcher, caught him round the neck and pulled him down; and so to bed, bon soir tu excessivement pudibonde.

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (LP V: 121-2):

[Little Lea,

Strandtown,

Belfast]

18/9/16.¹³⁹

My Dear Galahad,

It seems a mockery to think that we were talking so lately about how much better we were in our letters than in conversation–I don’t feel like that when I actually sit down to write for the first time. Somehow my being at home instead of at Bookham makes it seem strange to be away from you: it is only so few days ago that we were ragging about together in your bedroom. And now you must brush your teeth alone!

But first of all I will answer your questions. The journey home was absolutely damnable: I had to wait an hour at Letterkenny, and an hour and a quarter at Strabane. You may judge of my boredom when I tell you that I was reduced to buying a ‘Novel’ magazine¹⁴⁰–because everything else on the bookstall was even more impossible. My father seemed in very poor form when I got home, and fussed a lot about my cold: so everything is beastly, and I have decided–of course–to commit suicide again.

This morning I visited Mullans on your little job, but their copy of the Kaleva¹⁴¹ was much too old and shop-soiled to satisfy you, while I couldn’t find one in Maynes at all: this being so I didn’t know quite whether you meant me to order one or not–at any rate I did NOT. I am sending you–as a peace offering–a little present, which may arrive by the end of this week: change it if you don’t care for it–or when you have read it.