Money
Belloc, Hilaire
May 7, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL LETTERS FROM OXFORD IF WE must admit as a general truth that the great letter writers, like the great saints, are chiefly to be found in ages past, is it not the...
...I must say it gives poor me a scandalous "character": crawling in in June, and wriggling out in the very next January...
...I believe you know what a time my poor aunt had for two months in Devon...
...Italics fail me...
...I fell into temptation last week at a bookstall, and carried off a little book which will enchant you, if it be new to you as it was to me: G. S. Street's Quales Ego...
...They want him edited from the originals, for a devotional series of Frowde's, price one shilling...
...For all this urban and academic paradise, including linen, dishes, gas, etc., we pay six shillings each a week...
...I also lassoed three supercharming Dent volumes belonging to the Temple Classics, each a fifty-center and beautiful as a dream, a complete Dante, with notes, diagrams, pedigrees, and even a decent running translation into English...
...September 8, 1901...
...the latter applied to my position as instructress...
...I go up usually for a grind...
...to be the thorn against which this bedraggled nightingale sets a very proud breast...
...May 7, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL LETTERS FROM OXFORD IF WE must admit as a general truth that the great letter writers, like the great saints, are chiefly to be found in ages past, is it not the more refreshing to come upon an occasional modern exception ? When the gentle art flourished at its highest it is to be remembered, moreover, that it was also a distinctly formal art, practised more or less consciously by the writers of the time along with other literary forms...
...I fancy we feel alike on this knotty subject...
...It's a dear thing, dretful useful, timely to a degree, and extra-beloved by reason of your all-too-appropriate motto...
...But The Madness of Philip was even better...
...Now it seems to me that a Catholic Philistine, of all Philistines, is the most maddeningly misplaced...
...It makes one hang the head to think such things happen often in a republic...
...Know you anyone who was, and is, an admirer of Adelaide Neilson, a really faithful lover of the seventies...
...Another delicious eldress living here is Miss Keddie, Sarah Fraser Tytler...
...But you adore it somehow...
...Tell the there are none...
...Akin to these in character, self-revealing but not in the least self-conscious, are these letters of Miss Guiney...
...Mushrooms of all sorts abound now, and poppies and blackberries...
...It is to you, isn't it...
...The Commonweal believes that, quite apart from their intrinsic charm, these treasured letters are important because they reflect one of the finest personalities in American Catholic literature...
...a far more mediaeval thing to look at than Keble is, and a magnificent library it is...
...It seems certain, for example, that By LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY Katherine Maynard has edited a new collection of Miss Guinea's letters, the first of two sections of which appears herewith...
...But I never footed it beside a creature (save only my dear Tom Meteyard at Scituate) who went too fast for me, until I met said Lucy...
...handsome...
...His old halfmonastic quarters are there, and his study has fallen to a poor woman who at least knows it was his ("Oh, yes, Miss, me 'usband used to say 'e 'ad 'is desk 'ere...
...Here we have the best cuckoo's nest I ever hoped for: three rooms and a little square hall or lobby entirely our own, with the use at any or all times of the drawing-room, dining-room and kitchen...
...Aunty is newly out of the woods, after a most terrible second battle with Pallida M. . . . I stay on here to be near her, and work on Appleton manuscripts and proofs, and have even done a couple of reviews: on the Goupils Charles II, for one...
...What of your vacation...
...The magazines gave me much joy...
...As for the catalogue, words fail me...
...I send you some lavender and $1.12, which doesn't in the least look the size of the much-appreciated favor you did me...
...That Perfect Woman is, of course, the dodo, cherished and uninterred, albeit the extinct smell of her has been over the land for at least a generation...
...Next Wednesday I am to initiate on the "Char" (a weedy, sulky little stream it is, these days) a pleasant damsel, learned in the black art: videlicet, high German...
...My dear---------, What you must think of me, truly I know not...
...My study looks on the garden, and that September garden is full of them, bonnie in every leaf, and rich as peonies...
...They're great fun, the wimmen...
...I have walked with many women and men who fear not to put their best foot forward...
...Andrew Lang also says, in print, that I am all right, descended from C. Lamb, and "untouched by the modern spirit...
...Swift, and all the dear and dust-choked company at B. P. L., ground floor...
...that she has "a heart which is an abyss of love," and looks to usband for light and leading...
...Everyone I would give tuppence for, hereabouts, is a Radical and a pro-Boer...
...I thanked him, but I also looked the incredible gift horse frankly and intimately in the mouth...
...can crack and eat Gower, Lydgate, and Caedmon...
...Not a modern blemish anywhere, if you except the peculiarly placed organ, and the round window punched in the west front...
...All this out of an American-born pound note, with a trip to Lunnon and back yet to come...
...Know her...
...Yes, intact and ecstatic...
...also the current Poet Lore, wanted for the same base purpose of drugging with never-earned praise a pen which went out of business three years ago, and which, though dead, still squirmeth...
...only a week...
...It may be added that Miss Guiney, who was born in 1861 and who died in 1920, spent the later years of her life at Oxford, England, whence these letters were sent...
...yet as much as ever, Yours deliberately, L. I. G...
...Your ancient, L. I. G. January 3, 1902...
...I grub much at the Bodleian...
...or a Lady-pig of a critical turn, you'll know 's me...
...My best thanks to whomsoever...
...I sometimes mount the iron steed...
...But she is the placid indoor sort, with a shawl...
...and there doth my jelly-maker putter to her domestic heart's content...
...nobody is even dead...
...You may, with reason, chief that when I send him catalogues, it is as if I sent me heart...
...Marlier is a Catholic publisher, or at least wears that label...
...I feel free to write because the paper will not smell dismal: I think our daisy picnic of the last five months is fully and finally over...
...I help either, as I am needed...
...And even more was this probably true of Walpole's polished gossip...
...what do I in that galley...
...My loving compliments to my quondam fellow-slaveys...
...Usband, being a man, follows "ideas," and she (not as the uneducated remnant, but as Perfect Woman) follows "persons...
...Nothing can exceed the kindness of everyone in Oxford whom I know or don't know...
...The big Vaughan crawls, rather more on my colleague's account than on mine, as her chore is biography, and cryptic enough...
...it's huge fun when I have one of my deaf days, and yet would accost him...
...They reflect a temperament as brave as it was gay, and afford such a glimpse of their gifted author (who was praised by Stevenson and compared to Lamb) as to make one envious of the friendship that inspired them...
...She made no sort of a recovery...
...My very dear ---------, You have a way of hitting nails Lady Mary's keen sallies were put forth with at least A;!ant* f,or Mav j-1 thjnk) ^ich has, so I hear, a paper by half an eye to publication...
...The publisher Marlier has just sent me a work called The Perfect Woman, translated from one Charles de Sainte Foie by one Zephyrine Brown...
...For the first time in my life, I have plenty of female society...
...Gilman's school...
...A nice one used to live next door, on Ship Street...
...but lacking such external stimulus, his practised pen took refuge in phrases of such deliberate quotability as: "News envy me one thing: my heavenly cool weather...
...I have two here, very efficient, one for day, one for night, to each of whom I pay (or rather, shall, in some rose-colored future, pay) a guinea square on their doomed heads...
...it's very homey...
...I have the book as partial wages, and am thinking of building a house for it...
...I have hardly seen a tree since March...
...I feel even as a Carnegie might, if he were a pig...
...As this is a pig's bulletin, I must put it in that within a fortnight I have begun to go afield, for hours at a time, carefree...
...Given an event such as the coronation or the funeral of a king, he could write brilliantly and at length...
...And therefore one can suffer fools of all sorts far more gladly than in 42 ° no...
...Probably by the time decent folk flee indoors from storm and wind, I shall get a chance to take to the open road...
...Kill 'em in one fell holocaust with the lynchers, the imperialists . . . and then come over and help me slay the obstructionists of these isles...
...which is more than a distinguished Fellow of Oriel knew of Newman's Oriel rooms, until I told him, to his evident joy and amusement...
...In that Bodleian, by the way, where I now can work by scattering half-hours, I Have found some new (unsigned) bits by Henry Vaughan...
...My wardrobe is in tatters, and so must remain this year of grace...
...It is a big house, and there's no one in it but the two owners, their inaudible son of fifteen, and ourselves...
...This last is of a size...
...Born in Roxbury, she tells me...
...You may believe all good Yankees over here are concerned, too, for the poor President...
...lat., so I find...
...She is librarian at Manchester, the Unitarian post-graduate college here...
...He would become a popular hero forever, and imperialism, especially imperialism as taken up and fattened by that honorable but dangerous Teddy, would get a sanction that generations of protest couldn't abrogate...
...We quitted our quarters on Ship Street because it was a University lodging, and ere term-time approaches we have found (thanks to the former landlord and his dame) a bully foothold a bit farther away from the middle of things...
...No maid profanes the place...
...The one I like best stammers furiously...
...I have an American neighbor I like, Miss Florence Warren, once one of Mr...
...For though he professes to like a hot day, he is linguistically capable of dealing with it when it oversteps a certain limit...
...Nurses have been my only intimates for three months, and any sort of literary work, or open-air enjoyment, have been put out of the question...
...Exclude Mr...
...Excellent Wench: (accent on the Peanut...
...They ought to go to someone who remembers her, poor beauty, as a Juliet or a Rosalind unparalleled Fare you well, for the night and the year...
...I felt amused over one article, and abashed at the approval of the other: you may guess which was which...
...Written from a single region (Oxford) addressed to but one person, and without any of the usual traveler's chatter about persons or places, they hold the reader's interest because they are as fluent and personal as good talk between friends...
...They are the workaday communications of a poet...
...I never look at the rather prim and scared two who are at the helm of the late Sir T. Bodley's glorious ship without thinking what a very bloomin' breeze would spring up under and around them if one or two of our B. P. L. men appeared on THE COMMONWEAL 7. r93<> deck...
...I wish, meanwhile, that you would manage to let me owe you a dollar, after this fashion: Do buy me, and bring or post me, the Miss Daskam on American Minor Poetry, wherein she doth somewhat commend, incidentally, this nigger...
...Henry Clapp, because I gave him one already...
...And can recall by some more ideal token, dear shepherdess of Ward n, Your always affectionate, Louise I. Guiney...
...that she is willing her daughters should paint and play pianner, but that she would save them from "giving all their time to these" or other "rash researches...
...P.O., of excessive anti-protectionist tendencies, I should have besought you to attach the bonnie thing to the middle rib of a newspaper...
...I hope mightily that the President won't die...
...The weather is of course perfection...
...The fact that the scoundrels and stoopids are foreign anarchists is neither here nor there...
...And of the Carte Manuscripts, a vast and valuable collection, supplied with a printed list which kindly informs you that Volume XI (say of two hundred and forty pages) relates in part to the Earl of Ormonde and affairs in Ireland, with "miscellaneous matter...
...this time I go for clo', my aunt's clo', moreover...
...Just now I am starting in on a little prose Vaughan for the University Press...
...I let Hurrell Froude hang...
...that is, I dare not ask Brother Hunt...
...Gilman's dominae at Cambridge...
...I dare not ask for details of what it has been at home...
...But the ideal letters have always been those written with a fine sincerity and spontaneity, which depended for effect upon neither news value nor pointed conceit...
...You should know Toulmin Smith, Lucy...
...Nice beings at the Press...
...Page 146: "As soon as [woman's mind] exceeds the limits traced for it by Providence and determined by the aim to which it should aspire, Woman loses," etc., etc., Lord, O Lord...
...My love and remembrance to the other deskholders...
...I wonder some person of discernment doesn't marry the whole of 'em...
...Great, as poor H. C. Bunner once said, are the three perspicuous classes of the English: the Scotch, the Irish, and the dead...
...They pay you down, and turn you out...
...My dear Pal:—"Over seas and o'er mountains that Neptune obey," that jewelry arrove...
...As time passes, and you glance at the Contributors' Club of the Atlantic, and see flippant nothings about Lying, or Herrick, or Actors, or Tom, the Big Bell of Christ Church ("Ch...
...Thank you so much for that agreeable parcel of magazines...
...We shall see...
...Maynard.—The Editors...
...I help her as I can...
...all to the unmitigated amazement of two clever medicine-men...
...On an Iffley walk, I always manage to take in Sandford, or Newman's Littlemore...
...I say to it: Serus in humum redeas...
...As a retired galley-slave of U.S...
...Thank you true...
...Never did I appreciate till now what an unspoiled Norman jewel that is: every molding of the old work traceable under, or beside, the E. E. and perpendicular additions...
...but we keep doves, we do, and grow roses...
...It is maddening, is the Bod...
...the thing shows that we have failed somewhere, that our air is not the germ-killer we mean it to be...
...It is violent mental gymnastics, I find, to remember to turn to the left...
...but I bought one dud, a fine, cool, brown holland suit I wish you had the like of, for eleven shillings sixpence, here in this home of lost causes...
...She is little, thin, shining fair, infinitely keen, quick, affable, full of despatch, forgets nothing, perfectly unaffected...
...But I have been an unfit comrade ever since I came away, with only enough decency left to hide in a hole, and say little to anyone...
...Your profane and joy-giving script of Juy 28, dealing with 'ellish eats, sea swims in thunderstorms, and fumes of mingled High Church incense and Lucretian cigarettes, shall at last be answered after a fashion...
...Are you truly coming over...
...Mine aunt is a graduate eater and sleeper, looks rosy, walks well, and has fallen into her ancient habits of housekeeping...
...Florence Warren, once of Mr...
...Would you be like her, know that "artless ignorance" is her charm...
...July 2, 1901...
...I went to Iffley for the hundredth time, and thought of you...
...If you do, I'd like to dispose of three little and very early photographs of her, legitimately come into my grasp...
...Good luck to it, if it be yet to come...
...They keep the big sixteenth-century windows always open, so there's a wind from heaven blowing gaily at that end, and a good stiff wintry wind it generally is, too...
...Meanwhile, there's Merton Fields and the moldings at Iffley...
...I miss your worship most when I want to swear...
...The introduction was written by Mrs...
...and under him do we sit every day, to drink boiled cocoa after months of pious resignation to the unspeakable substitute dear to the British heart...
...Though I may not be able to hold on to our dream of joint exploration of natural and architectural beauty any longer, I long to see you, and must somehow make out to do it...
...Cowper was thus content to "scribble away as usual" for no better reason than that his friends liked to hear from him, and Lamb, declaring genially, "Opinions is a species of property that I am always desirous of sharing with my friends," found "Things come crowding in to say, and no room for 'em...
...Shade of Eve...
...rather large and serene...
...I shall write A. Jordan tomorrow...
...You'll know where to place us: between Worcester College and the University Press...
...Salt Archaeological Society and the Tracts for the Times...
...I have my own tools spread all about...
...I am a lost soul, with one all-grey temple, and a record of nine-stone-nine...
...Rememberest it...
...And commend me to Miss Stuart, Mr...
...that I owe the latest B. P. L. catalogue, though it didn't come addressed in your handwriting...
...That killing dandy and heroic knight, Van Dyck's Earl of Carnarvon, presides on the wall in a new frame I have just had made...
...The librarian and sub-librarian both look scared to death if you speak to them...
...A chance paddle, or a leg, is still the best motor...
...If you love me, kill him, Zephyrine Brown, and the Frenchy, source of evil...
...What think you of Rhys or Rees, John David: See Rhoesus, John David and Rhoesus or Rees, John David, see Rhys with scattered entries of the same book under both...
...Intrinsic evidence is the best of all games of hazard, methinks...
...Your little letter preceded it, and the big one has been satisfactory (like the giant Christmas turkey whose ultimate pickings we have only just achieved) for many a day past...
...So I begin to 'old me 'ead up...
...twenty years old, and let calendars be hanged...
...Bicycling gives me but a chaste non-Uranian delight...
...and of hundreds of magazines, each called some sort or other of review, all run under the catch-title, "Review," and arranged, not alphabetically, but chronologically...
...She's an adorable duck, is Gwenllian Morgan...
...I hope you have seen the last of the Wm...
...People here are awfully kind...
...we became great friends, and do foregather much...
...Ever yours, L. I. G. August 4, 1901...
...This is a dismal, newsless letter...
Vol. 12 • May 1930 • No. 1
