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

(#ulink_c677f892-c389-5b5c-8365-e4c79d3893e2) seems to me to be valid or invalid according to the meaning you give the words ‘have an idea of’. I used to work it out by the analogy of a machine. If I have the idea of a machine which I, being unmechanical, couldn’t have invented on my own, does this prove that I have received the idea from some really mechanical source—e.g. a talk with the real inventor? To which I answer ‘Yes, if you mean a really detailed idea’: but of course there is another sense in which e.g. a lady novelist ‘has an idea’ of a new airship invented by her hero—in the sense that she attached some vague meaning to her words, which proves nothing of the sort. So that if anyone asks me whether the idea of God in human minds proves His existence, I can only ask ‘Whose idea?’ The Thistle-Bird’s

(#ulink_2c9a8248-d919-594f-9b8a-84aee5cc69cf) idea, for instance, clearly not, for it contains nothing whereof his own pride, fear, and malevolence could not easily provide the materials (cf. McAndrew’s Hymn ‘Yer mother’s God’s a grasping deil, the image of yourself’).

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On the other hand it is arguable that the ‘idea of God’ in some minds does contain, not a mere abstract definition, but a real imaginative perception of goodness and beauty, beyond their own resources: and this not only in minds which already believe in God. It certainly seems to me that the ‘vague something’ which has been suggested to ones mind as desirable, all ones life, in experiences of nature and music and poetry, even in such ostensibly irreligious forms as ‘The land East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ in Morris,

(#ulink_a5701045-cc3d-5d5e-acdb-2e54659bad43) and which rouses desires that no finite object even pretends to satisfy, can be argued not to be any product of our own minds. Of course I am not suggesting that these vague ideas of something we want and haven’t got, wh. occur in the Pagan period of individuals and of races (hence mythology) are anything more than the first and most rudimentary forms of the ‘idea of God’.

This subject has drawn me into a longer digression (if indeed digression is possible in my type of letter!) than I had intended. I do wish you could see the Kilns now. We have had very cold weather (the last few mornings have been white with frost) and little wind: most of the leaves have become yellow and red without dropping from their branch, and those that have fallen lie in smooth circular carpets at the foot of their tree. The firs in the top wood are getting slowly barer, and working these afternoons in the high countries I begin to get the real autumn beauties.

Meanwhile you have been having very different beauties. I was intrigued by your account of the Portugal coast, which sounds both scenically and socially an admirable place: well worthy to be added (it costs nothing) to the lengthening list of places the Pigibudda

(#ulink_32779e4e-e89b-57ca-9505-374b6a3ae9d5) must visit some day. I resent more and more these impertinent three years which still divide us from the beginning of a joint rational life.

I am at present writing this on a Sunday afternoon in the Common Room, having begun it yesterday in College. Maureen has her usual week end guest, a harmless girl whom we carried to [the] sermon this morning. Our pew felt a little awkward when Thomas, before the text, said ‘We shall be glad if members of the congregation who are absolutely unable to stay for the whole service, will go out during the hymn: but it is very much to be preferred that they should wait till the service is over.’ We went out during the hymn according to our usual practice. I think myself he is a little unfair to try and make it a rule that you must communicate if you want to hear a sermon. Of these (since you mention them among items of news) I have heard two, having skipped on the first Sunday after you left in order to correct my collection papers. This morning’s was on the ‘armour of God’

(#ulink_86fc4038-f24b-5bc3-8873-5040d0e38a48) and not one of his best.

Last week’s was on St Luke’s day,

(#ulink_cceaf5b4-dc26-51d9-a0fe-0c1cf2b7b99b) from which I learned that St Luke was a painter as well as a doctor and that there is at Rome a painting of the Good Shepherd traditionally attributed to him. The attribution is probably wrong, said Thomas, but the tradition of his being a painter was interesting if we considered the specially artistic character of the 3rd gospel, as against the purely facty nature of the other two synoptics, or the mystical nature of the 4th.

(#ulink_07c77afb-6aa3-5a6b-88d0-b9f73cb1730d) I have so many different departments of news, what with sermons and swans, that I could well adopt the different datings of the Tatler ‘fashion from White’s coffee house, politics from Wills’ etc.

This is a great feather in my cap, specially as next year is the first exam held under the syllabus which my party and I have forced upon the junto after much hard fighting: so that if I get a good colleague we shall be able to some extent to mould the new tradition. In fact, in English School politics, the anti-junto is in the ascendant—perhaps, from a prejudiced point of view, might be said to have become the junto. How long will it take us to become corrupt in our turn?

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The General Election takes place on Tuesday next, and the results will be stale long before this reaches you. I had a wonderful conversation about it last Sunday with a Dr Lees whom Kathleen Whitty

(#ulink_b8053303-5dbb-58ac-826f-530cd839b041) brought here (or rather he drove her) to tea in the course of a motor drive from Bristol. I said ‘Politics have really become unintelligible to the amateur now. In the old days when it was about votes for women or home rule for Ireland one could have an opinion: now I feel one’s opinion, and therefore one’s vote, is quite worthless’—He replied with emotion ‘I’m so glad to hear you say that, because that is exactly how I feel. What is the good of all these ignorant opinions? That is why we must leave it to the government who really understand, and that is why it is so all important to vote against Labour.’ I tried again. ‘One is rather sickened to see the way the papers are buttering up Macdonald

(#ulink_43bfa173-786a-5d03-a2c3-364c5a353ed8) and Snowden

(#ulink_f2454ac7-9c8a-598c-a63b-e705482ecf6e) now, while a month ago they couldn’t find anything bad enough to say for them’—‘Yes, indeed. Very sickened’—‘And it is such nonsense all this about Macdonald having “done the big thing”’—‘Ah well there I don’t agree with you. You see no man likes to desert his old friends, but this chap, when he saw the good of the country demanded it etc’—then followed verbatim the whole of the Daily Mail stuff about the big thing. All this from an old blether in a black city coat and streaked trousers and spats introduced by Kathleen as ‘the cleverest doctor in Bristol’. Alas, this description may well be perfectly true! An essay on the conception of ‘cleverness’ would be worth writing.

I finished the Wodehouse the day after you left. It is not the best (I think) of his that I have read, but very well worth reading indeed. I also re-read Northanger Abbey

(#ulink_273ac6bc-f243-5747-b6eb-cd1f017de3c2) about the same time. Christie well describes it as ‘Jane Austen in high spirits’. It is much nearer farce (or burlesque) than the others, but none the worse on that account.

I enclose a formal letter to you on the mortgage. If you will write one to me, the same except for the necessary changes, and return both with your next letter, I will send them to be taken care of by Barfield.

(#ulink_e02645ff-4c10-5861-b02a-1094128eb48f) He has not been to see me yet so your will has not yet been regularised. Minto was—to use a trite phrase in its genuine sense—‘overcome’ by your kind provision for Maureen.

As I look up (3.30) I see those obscene birds advancing across the lawn, turning their infernal conning towers this way and that.

(#ulink_4cdcb0e5-5729-5cdf-b57d-f4f342bcab6c) They are unfed, Tykes unwalked, and I must go out. I suppose this will cross your next letter and so produce a mal-adjustment of question and answer which we shall not right for the whole three years. Meanwhile one quarter of first term of the nine Non-APB terms is gone.

Yours

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (W):

[The Kilns]

Nov 8, 1931

My dear Arthur,

I was sorry to hear of your cold and of your musical disappointment, though I must confess that your beginning your letter with an (unfavourable) account of a concert was pleasantly remeniscent of old times.

It is delightful to hear of your reading Endymion

(#ulink_bc5e29c4-41ba-5a7e-9118-cff756bd06ce) Funnily enough I had been re-dipping into it the last week end too. I don’t think you can say that either it or Hyperion

(#ulink_25f5013d-fb98-5ef1-8e1a-d52c9fe84090) is the better for they are different in kind. The one is a sweet, the other a dry, flavour. It is like comparing Spenser & Milton, or Wagner (at his richest) with Bach (at his most classical). People will tell you that Hyperion is more Greek, but I doubt if that is a good description. As to why the goddess takes on the form of a mortal at the end, he may mean that the mystical love does not complete itself until it has appeared as a human love also, and that the soul, when this happens, may dread as an infidelity to the spiritual what is really its completion. But I am inclined to think that when Keats wrote Endymion he was not v. certain of his own intention: that he faltered between the myth as his imagination set it before him (full of meaning, but not meaning necessarily decipherable by Keats’ intellect) and between various ideas of conscious meanings of his own invention, wh., considering his age and education, were possibly confused and even shallow. There is thus some confusion throughout: and this, along with another fault, prevents it from being a perfect poem.

The other fault is the Jack of spiritual experience. He knows about the hunting for ‘it’

(#ulink_9e3bebac-8edc-541f-9ee0-c5495b2c0195) and longing and wandering: but he has, as yet, no real idea of what it wd. be if you found it. Hence while Endymion’s description to Peona of his unrest, and Endymion’s journeying under earth and sea, are wonderful, his actual meetings with Cynthia are (to me) failures: not because they are erotic but because they are erotic in a rather commonplace way—all gasps and exclamations and a sort of suburban flirtatious air. It is horrible to use such words of Keats, but I think he would be the first to agree.

My memories of the Phaedrus

(#ulink_42d011a2-5da8-5a0c-a1f2-50b7f960accb) are vague—mainly of the beautiful scene in which the discussion takes place and of the procession of the gods round the sky. You must be enjoying yourself no end. I don’t know any greater pleasure than returning to a world of the imagination which one has long forsaken and feeling ‘After all this is my own.’ Be careful of Reid.

(#ulink_c2129b38-d08e-577e-b65e-07e3b7e70e5a) I am sure he is in danger of stopping at the purely sensuous side of the Greek stories and of encouraging you to do the same. You, on the other hand, if you are in for a new Greek period, will be able to do him some good.

I, like you, am worried by the fact that the spontaneous appeal of the Christian story is so much less to me than that of Paganism. Both the things you suggest (unfavourable associations from early upbringing and the corruption of one’s nature) probably are causes: but I have a sort of feeling that the cause must be elsewhere, and I have not yet discovered it. I think the thrill of the Pagan stories and of romance may be due to the fact that they are mere beginnings—the first, faint whisper of the wind from beyond the world—while Christianity is the thing itself: and no thing, when you have really started on it, can have for you then and there just the same thrill as the first hint. For example, the experience of being married and bringing up a family, cannot have the old bittersweet of first falling in love. But it is futile (and, I think, wicked) to go on trying to get the old thrill again: you must go forward and not backward. Any real advance will in its turn be ushered in by a new thrill, different from the old: doomed in its turn to disappear and to become in its turn a temptation to retrogression. Delight is a bell that rings as you set your foot on the first step of a new flight of stairs leading upwards. Once you have started climbing you will notice only the hard work: it is when you have reached the landing and catch sight of the new stair that you may expect the bell again. This is only an idea, and may be all rot: but it seems to fit in pretty well with the general law (thrills also must die to live) of autumn & spring, sleep and waking, death and resurrection, and ‘Whosoever loseth his life, shall save it.’

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On the other hand, it may be simply part of our probation—one needs the sweetness to start one on the spiritual life but, once started, one must learn to obey God for his own sake, not for the pleasure. Perhaps we are in the stage Endymion went through on the bottom of the sea.

I saw a most attractive review of Uncle Stephen in the T.L.S.

(#ulink_5527ab35-d21a-5c45-beaf-e6f445ea7dea) I am glad he stuck to that name after all, though surprised, for I thought he had definitely turned it down.

Did I tell you I had bought the complete works of Jeremy Taylor in 15 volumes—half leather (not v. nice—the rather pimply, nearly black, office-looking type of leather but excellent paper and print) for 20/-. I have also been presented by an old pupil with what I think must be a frst editn of Law’s Appeal: much better than the Serious Call, but it will need a letter to itself.

I wish you could see the Kilns at present in the autumn colours

Yours

Jack

P.S. Minto says I must have left a suit of pyjamas at Bernagh, and I seem to remember your saying something about it (wh. I didn’t heed) in a previous letter. If so ‘woooo-d’ you please send them. Really Arthur, I am awfully sorry, honestly, really Yrs J.