Collected Letters Volume One: Family Letters 1905–1931

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

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

Hoping the results of the accident are disappearing, I am

your loving,

son,

Jack

TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 33-4):

[Gastons]

Postmark: 24 November 1915

My dear Papy,

I am sorry if my intentional silence on this subject in my last letter has proved, as it well might, rather provoking. You will readily understand however my motives for not wishing to take any unnecessary responsibility in so delicate a point. My position, like that of Gilbert’s policeman, ‘is not a happy one’.125 While really anxious not to add in the least to your worries, at the same time I have no wish to do anything that Warnie would afterwards consider mean or unpleasant. Since however you ask my opinion, I reply that the new point of this being the last leave he is likely to get certainly makes a considerable difference from our point of view as well as from that of K. It is no business of mine to sit in judgement on Warnie’s actions, and from that it seems to me to be hard luck that he should not get a few days at home with us both before settling down to–an indefinite period. Of course, as you say, he may be exaggerating, but I can only go upon the information that we get.

You will understand I am sure that it is almost entirely for his sake that I should suggest such an arrangement. A few rather breathless days at home are not such a prize that I should make much exertion to secure them on my own account. In the absence of any authority from you I have judged it better not to make any mention of the matter to K. I hope this was right as I was not at all sure what I ought to do.

Believe me Papy I am very sorry indeed that we are all worrying you in this way. I have told you what I feel about it, but it remains really a question between you and him. I wish only to act, if possible, in a manner agreeable to you both, or failing that, to help you as far as I can and fall in with your wishes. I am not at all sure that I have said exactly what I wanted in this letter, or made my position perfectly clear. The post with your letter came in very late, just as I was going to bed, and I am writing this rather hastily. It cannot be posted till tomorrow morning (Wednesday). I hope your side is getting better, as also the teeth.

your loving

son Jack.

P.S. I need not of course point out to you that I should hardly like to have any of this letter quoted to Warnie–but of course you understand that. J.126

TO HIS FATHER (LP V: 36-7):

[Gastons]

Postmark: 4 December 1915

My dear Papy,

This has been a week of surprises. As Chaucer says,

‘One might a book make of it in a story’ 127

On Thursday, having a faint suspicion that things wouldn’t pan out as we expected, like Dido ‘Omnia tuta timens’128 I made no preparation beyond walking down to the station to meet what I judged a likely train (excuse the ‘ation’ jingle in that sentence). Today however, being convinced that Warnie would really turn up, I clothed myself in glad rags, packed my handbag and was just putting on my shoes preparatory to a second walk to the station when your telegram arrived. So we must expect him on Sunday week!

Kirk advised me to make an arrangement about meeting him in town, since it will be a Sunday and the trains therefore different, he might not find time to come down here between his arrival in London and the departure of the boat train. Entre nous I don’t think such a plan desirable–I hate meeting people in strange places, and especially W., as we always manage to bungle things in between us. Nor indeed should it be necessary: on the last occasion, as you will remember, he crossed on a Sunday and found no difficulty. Moreover, even if you wrote to arrange it with him as soon as you get this, your letter would scarcely reach him in time, and he would certainly have no time in which to reply. If you think otherwise, of course you will arrange accordingly and let me know.

It has rained steadily for several days now, and in spite of the unsettled conditions I have been reading a lot. I have now finished the first volume of the Faerie Queene and am going through an English Literature of Kirk’s by Andrew Lang.129 Lang is always charming whatever he does–or ‘did’ as we must unfortunately say, and this book is very good. More a rambling record of personal tastes than a set handbook, but all the better for that reason. There has also been from the London Library a book called ‘Springs of Helicon’ by Mackail130–you know, Professor of Poetry at Oxford and the man on Wm. Morris. This is a study on Chaucer, Spenser and Milton and I enjoyed it immensely. He has quite infected me with his enthusiasm for the former, whom I must begin to read. He talks of other works, ‘the legend of good women’, ‘Troilus and Cresseide’ as being better than the tales.131 It is from Troilus and Cresseide that he quotes that priceless line to which I treated you on the first page: I think it is rather great, don’t you?

There is also a ‘Greek Literature’ by Gilbert Murray,132 the bad verse-translator, which I have read with dire anger, as he degrades Homer from a poet into a ‘question’ and prefers that snivelling metaphysician Euripides to Aeschylus.

I suppose the great wedding is over by now? Or shall W. and I be let in for it? I hope you have not let the news of the coming visit trickle through to the ears of the sociable άγοραοι?133 Thanks for the ‘crowns for convoy’, which I am sure will be quite sufficient.

your loving son,

Jack

Jack was home from 21 December 1915 until he returned to Great Bookham on 21 January 1916. Warnie was on leave from France, and Mr Lewis had both his sons home together.

1 Albert Lewis, like so many others, had for some months previously feared that England would be invaded by the Germans, and this explains why his son was not allowed to return to Great Bookham until 16 January 1915.

2 Mark 3:26: ‘If Satan rise up against himself, and be divided, he cannot stand, but hath an end.’

3 Homer, Iliad, Books I-XII, with an introduction, a brief Homeric grammar, and notes by D.B. Monro (1884).

4 Homer, Odyssey, Books I-XII, with an introduction, notes, etc. by W.W. Merry (1870).

5 Cornelius Tacitus (c. AD 55-117), the greatest historian of ancient Rome, in AD 98 published Agricola, a biography of his father-in-law, Julius Agricola.

6 Charlotte Brontë, Villette (1853).

7 Henry Seton Merriman, The Grey Lady (1895); With Edged Tools (1894).

8 Paul Emanuel and Mme Beck are characters in Villette.

9 There were, in fact, a good many German submarines operating in the Irish Sea at this time. Lewis’s father was particularly upset over the raid near Fleetwood on 30 January 1915 when the Germans sank the Kilcoan, a collier designed by his brother Joseph.

10 William Makepeace Thackeray, Henry Esmond (1852).

11 George Henty (1832-1902), while serving with the army in the Crimea, became a war correspondent. Following this career in many countries, he became successful as the author of stories for boys mainly based on military history Out in the Pampas (1868) was followed by some 35 other titles.

12 A family of Belgian refugees were evacuated to Great Bookham in the autumn of 1914. Lewis began visiting them with Mrs Kirkpatrick, and became infatuated with one of the young girls in the family He doubtless discussed his feelings for her with Arthur Greeves during the Christmas holidays. As to how much truth there was in what he wrote and said about the Belgian girl, see Lewis’s letter of 1 October 1931.

13 Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1901), The Jungle Book (1894); The Second Jungle Book (1895); Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906).

14 Albert Lewis had just acquired Kipling’s The Seven Seas (1896), which contains ‘The Story of Ung’.

15 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), Book IV, Canto xii, 1.

16 Helena, a play by the Greek poet Euripides, was produced in 412 BC.

17 Lewis is mocking his cousin Robert Heard Ewart.

18 Mr Kirkpatrick and Lord Balfour (1848-1930), were born in 1848, making them 67.

19 Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Study of Shakespeare (1880).

20 1 Samuel 16:23: ‘The evil spirit from God was upon Saul.’

21 Warren had only just returned from France, and having a week’s leave, he and Jack spent part of it together at home. Jack returned to Great Bookham on 9 February.

22 Presumably the Belgian girl he had written about in his previous letter.

23 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais (1821), XLV, 397.

24 Lord Kitchener (1850-1916) was Secretary of State for War.

25 Walter Savage Landor, Pericles and Aspasia (1836-7).

26 Sir Walter Scott, Kenilworth (1821).

27 David Lloyd George (1863-1945), Minister of Munitions, gave a speech on 28 February in which he appealed for an end to labour disputes. ‘We laugh at things in Germany,’ he said, ‘that ought to terrify us. We say, “Look at the way they are making their bread–out of potatoes, ha, ha.” Aye, that potato bread spirit is something which is more to dread than to mock at. I fear that more than I do even von Hindenburg’s strategy, efficient as it may be. That is the spirit in which a country should meet a great emergency, and instead of mocking at it we ought to emulate it.’ The Times (1 March 1915), p. 10.

28 Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems and Ballads, Second Series (1878). The poem entitled ‘A Forsaken Garden’ begins ‘In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland’.

29 Publius Vergili Maronis Aeneidos: Liber VII, edited by Arthur Sidgwick (1879); The Aeneid of Vergil: Book VIII, edited with notes and vocabulary by Arthur Sidgwick (1879).

30 Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822).

31 i.e. the Belgian girl.

32 Lewis has borrowed the name from Malory. In Le Morte d’Arthur Galahad is the son of Launcelot and Elaine, and destined because of his immaculate purity to achieve the Holy Grail.

33 John Rutherford, The Bread of the Treshams (1903).

34 William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew (1623).

35 Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin was first performed in 1850.

36 The title Richard Warner had chosen for his opera was The Venusberg, but he changed it to Tannhäuser when he learned that certain wits were making a joke of it. The opera was first performed in 1845.

37 Franz Schubert’s Rosamund was first performed in 1823.

38 The ‘Fire Music’ is the Interlude to Act III, scene 3 of Richard Wagner’s opera Die Walküre, or The Valkyrie, first performed in 1870 and part of his Ring of the Nibelung cycle.

39 For information on music recorded on gramophone records see Francis F. Clough and G.J. Cuming, The World’s Encyclopaedia of Recorded Music (1952).

40 Arthur Clutton-Brock, William Morris: His Work and Influence (1914).

41 Jane (‘Janie’) Agnes McNeill (1889-1959) was the daughter of James Adams McNeill (1853-1907), headmaster of Campbell College 1890-1907, and Margaret Cunningham McNeill. Mr McNeill had at one time been Flora Lewis’s teacher, and he and his wife and daughter lived near the Lewises in ‘Lisnadene’, 191 Belmont Road, Strandtown. When he was young Jack Lewis both liked and disliked Janie. As time went on he realized that Jane, who would have liked to have gone to university, had remained home to look after her mother. He came to admire her much, and in time they became devoted friends. He was also close to Mrs McNeill, whose company he greatly enjoyed. That Hideous Strength is dedicated to Janie. See her biography in CG.

42 Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (1849); Jane Eyre (1847).

43 Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, an opera by Richard Wagner, was first performed in 1868.

44 Arthur did not seem entirely sure what this ‘Galloping Horse’ piece was. In Lewis’s next letter of 11 May, he said to Arthur, ‘Why didn’t you give me the number of the Polonaise: and what cheek to say “I think it is in A Flat”–when a journey downstairs would make sure.’ If he had looked carefully Arthur might have discovered that it was not one of Chopin’s Polonaises, but one of his Mazurkas.

45 William Morris, The Roots of the Mountains (1890). The Longman’s Pocket Library edition was published in two volumes in 1913.

46 Hans Christian Andersen, The Mermaid and Other Fairy Tales, translated by Mrs Edgar Lucas, with coloured illustrations by Maxwell Armfield, Everyman’s Library [1914].

47 Albert and his sons were delighted with the new rector of St Mark’s. This was the Reverend Arthur William Barton (1881-1962) who was born in Dublin and had gone, like Warnie and Jack, to Wynyard School. He took his BA from Trinity College, Dublin in 1903, and his BD in 1906. He was ordained in 1905 and was curate at St George’s, Dublin, from 1904 until 1905, and curate of Howth from 1905 to 1913. From 1912 to 1914 he was head of the university settlement at Trinity College Mission in Belfast. He was instituted as rector of St Mark’s, Dundela, on 6 April 1914, and remained there until 1925 when he became rector of Bangor. In 1927 he was made Archdeacon of Down, and in 1930 he became Bishop of Kilmore, Elphin and Ardagh. In 1939 Barton became Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland, which post he held until his retirement in 1956. In his description of Barton Warnie said, ‘There must have been few who met him and did not like him, and he was soon to become a constant and welcome visitor at Little Lea. He was a man of sunny temperament, with a great sense of fun, and a caressing voice; he brought into the rather narrow air of a Belfast suburb the breath of a wider culture and a more humane outlook; his society was refreshing. What was of more importance, he was an excellent and conscientious Priest, who found the religion of his parish sunk into mere formalism under the regime of his slothful predecessor, and who set on foot a renaissance’ (LP IV: 178).

48 Purdysburn was a lunatic asylum.

49 ‘But enough of these toys’, Francis Bacon said in ‘Of Masques and Triumphs’, Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral (1625).

50 Revelation 4:4-10.

51 Roots of the Mountains, op. cit, vol. I, ch. 3, pp. 24-5: ‘Therein are Kobbolds, and Wights that love not men, things unto whom the grief of men is as the sound of the fiddle-bow unto us. And there abide the ghosts of those that may not rest; and there wander the dwarfs and the mountain-dwellers, the dealers in marvels, the givers of gifts that destroy Houses.’

52 The painter and sculptor George Frederic Watts (1817-1904) who lived for some years at ‘Limneslease’ near Compton in Surrey

53 Presumably a reference to the notorious Victorian children’s lesson book Little Arthur’s England (1835) by Lady Calcott.

54 Several generations of the Greeves family had been members of the Society of Friends (Quakers). However, Arthur Greeves’s grandparents had been converts to the Plymouth Brethren and it was in this denomination that Arthur had been brought up. The family retained its connection to the Friends.

55 John Milton, Sonnet 16, ‘When I consider how my light is spent’ (1673): ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’

56 The letters columns of the papers had been filled with talk of the pros and cons of conscription. However, the Military Service Act, which brought in conscription, did not come into being until 10 February 1916.

57 Roots of the Mountains, op cit, vol. I, ch. 1, p. 13.

58 Laxdaela Saga, translated by M.A.C. Press, Temple Classics (1899). This 13th century Icelandic saga is the tragic story of several generations of an Iceland family, and in particular of Gudrun who causes the death of a man she loves but fails to marry.

59 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814).

60 He had in mind Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 1, first performed in 1851.

61 Charles Gordon Ewart (1885-1936) was the second son of Sir William Quartus Ewart. See The Ewart Family in the Biographical Appendix.

62 He means her character was like Wagner’s Die Walküre.

63 Gundreda Ewart (1888-1975) was one of the daughters of Sir William Quartus Ewart. See The Ewart Family in the Biographical Appendix.

64 From Edvard Grieg’s Lyriske Smaastykker (1867).

65 i.e. ‘A British Roman Song’.

66 He is referring to Plato’s Phaedrus, 278a

67 The Whip, a play by Cecil Raleigh and Henry Hamilton, had been performed for the first time in 1909 and was having a revival.

68 Willie Carr, Albert’s managing clerk, apparently after being rejected for the army on account of his teeth in the earlier days of the war, had now been accepted.

69 William Shakespeare, Othello, The Moor of Venice (1622).

70 These are the central characters in William Shakespeare’s plays King Lear (1608), Macbeth (1623), Hamlet (1603) and Othello.

71 This was Jack’s maternal grandmother, Mrs Mary Hamilton, then living at Archburn, Knock. See The Hamilton Family in the Biographical Appendix.

72 The Open Road, compiled by E.V. Lucas (1905).

73 Maurice Hewlett, Pan and the Young Shepherd (1898).

74 Maurice Hewlett, Lore of Proserpine (1913); Forest Lovers (1898).

75 Charlotte Brontë, The Professor (1857).

76 Genesis 3:19.

77 Demosthenes (383-322 BC) was a great Athenian orator and statesman, and Cicero (106-43 BC) a great Roman orator and statesman. Neither, however, attracted Lewis, who writing years later in SBJ IX said: ‘Kirk did not, of course, make me read nothing but Homer. The Two Great Bores (Demosthenes and Cicero) could not be avoided.’

78 Henry Seton Merriman, The Sowers (1896).

79 George Eliot (1819-80), the English novelist whose real name was Mary Ann Evans.

80 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Christabel and Other Poems (1816); The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798).

81 i.e. Lewis’s cousin, Mrs George Harding (née Charlotte Hope Ewart, 1882-1934).

82 Lewis loved all Richard Wagner’s music, especially the Ring of the Nibelung cycle comprising Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold) first performed in 1869; Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), first performed in 1870; Siegfried and Götterdämmerung (The Dusk of the Gods), both performed for the first time in 1876.

83 Parsifal, an opera by Wagner, first performed in 1882.

84 William Jaffé, a friend of Albert Lewis, was the son of Sir Otto Jaffé who was twice Lord Mayor of Belfast.

85 Chaliapin was Fyodor Ivanovich Shalyalpin (1873-1938) who was generally considered the greatest singer of his day

86 Robert le Diable, an opera by Giacomo Meyerbeer, was first performed in 1831.

87 ‘“Boldness and ever more boldness” from G. J. Danton in Le Moniteur (4 September 1792).’

88 The fellow pupil was Terence Forde (1899-?), the ward of Mrs Howard Ferguson. He had been brought up in Manchester, and after moving to Ireland he attended Campbell College, from which school he was sent to Mr Kirkpatrick.

89 This is Jack’s cousin, Joseph ‘Joey’ Tegart Lewis. See note 21 to letter of 27 November 1908. Joey entered Campbell College, Belfast, in 1906, and was still a pupil there. See The Lewis Family in the Biographical Appendix.

90 i.e. Terence Forde.

91 i.e. the opera by Charles Gounod.

92 The comparison is between Louis and Shirley, characters in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, and Gordon Ewart and Lily Greeves who were to be married on 14 December 1915.

93 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 2 vols., Everyman’s Library [1910].

94 Swinburne, Poems and Ballads, op. cit. ‘At Parting’ begins: ‘For a day and a night Love sang to us, played with us.’

95 The lines from ‘At a Month’s End’ are: ‘Who snares and tames with fear and danger/ A bright beast of a fiery kin.’

96 Dr Lawrence Walker of Belfast was a teacher of music.

97 Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931), the Belgian violinist and conductor whose style of playing was considered unconventional and highly original.

98 Madame Butterfly, an opera by Giacomo Puccini, was first performed in 1904.

99 Thucydides (c. 460-c. 400 BC) wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War which is one of the greatest historical works of all time. One of its most noteworthy passages is Pericles’s Funeral Oration over the Athenians who had died in the war.

100 Sappho (b. c. mid-7th cent. BC), a poetess born in Lesbos. Only 12 of her poems have survived.

101 Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84-c. 54 BC), one of the most versatile of Roman poets, who wrote love poems, elegies and satirical epigrams with equal success.

102 Jack London, The Jacket (1915).

103 This is from the essay by Francis Bacon referred to in the letter of 13 May 1915. Bacon was the Baron of Verulam.

104 See The Times (21 October 1915), p. 4 and (22 October 1915), p. 5.

105 ‘Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small.’ Friedrich von Logau, Sinnegedichte (1654), ‘Desz Dritten Tausend, Andres Hundert’ no. 24 (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow).

106 William H.F. ‘Bill’ Patterson, the son of William Hugh Patterson (1835-1918) who wrote A Glossary of Words in Use in the Counties of Antrim and Down (1880), was addicted to puns and was a recognized Strandtown wit. He published a volume of verse under the initials W.H.F., Songs of a Port (Belfast, 1920).

107 Included in The Times of 3 November 1915 was The Times Recruiting Supplement, on page 16 of which was a poem Rudyard Kipling composed for the occasion. The first verse of the poem, ‘For All We Have and Are’, is as follows:

For all we have and are,

For all our children’s fate,

Stand up and meet the war,

The Hun is at the gate!

Our world has passed away

In wantonness o’erthrown.

There is nothing left today

But steel and fire and stone.

108 Rudyard Kipling, Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses (1892).

109 ‘The Brushwood Boy’ is one of the stories in Kipling’s The Day’s Work (1908).

110 The ‘dedication piece’ which refers to ‘my brother’s spirit’ and ‘gentlemen unafraid’ is the dedication poem to Wolcott Balestier in Barrack-Room Ballads; ‘The Last Rhyme of True Thomas’, ‘The First Chantey’ and ‘The Last Chantey’ are found in The Seven Seas.

111 Sir Henry John Newbolt (1862-1938) was educated at Clifton College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is remembered particularly for his nautical ballads published in Admirals All and Other Verses (1897).

112 Thomas Love Peacock, Headlong Hall (1816).