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

and that.³⁵ 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 Endymion³⁶ 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 Hyperion³⁷ 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’³⁸ 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 Phaedrus³⁹ 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.⁴⁰ 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.’⁴¹

      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.⁴² 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.

      P.P.S. I chust wanted to say, Arthur, how very sorry I am.

       On 17 November 1931, Warnie arrived in Shanghai where he was to serve as the officer commanding the Royal Army Service Corps. He had been here in 1927–9 as officer in command of the Supply Depot. He wrote in his diary on 23 November:

I almost feel as I had never left Shanghai, a feeling accentuated by the fact that I have bought back from Bill Wilson the identical pieces of furniture which I sold him when I went home. I am writing this at the same old desk, and in front of me are my own old curtains and mosquito windows…Now that I have got my pictures up, and bought a $30 Japanese rush carpet, unpacked all my books and the gramophone, I feel I can sit back and breathe. ⁴³

       TO HIS BROTHER (W):

      [The Kilns]

      Nov. 22nd 1931

      My dear W,

I really think your recent editorial difficulties have impressed upon me the habit of dating my letters!⁴⁴ And talking of the Lewis papers, I looked into the editorial drawer the other day and made a correction, by adding to your note ‘Grace by A.J.L.’ the words ‘On the contrary, traditional Latin Grace translated by C.S.L.’ Such are the traps into which even a careful editor falls.

I am sorry I have not been able to write for some weeks. During the week it is out of the question. My ordinary day is as follows. Called (with tea) 7.15. After bath and shave I usually have time for a dozen paces or so in Addison’s walk⁴⁵