Letters from Oxford, II
Guiney, Louise Imogen
May 14, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 47 LETTERS FROM OXFORD, II* By LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY BILITY to distil romance from the commonplace incidents of everyday life is, perhaps, the secret of the...
...No haste about those two objects of virtue...
...I find them superdelightful: I have just bought the Milton, and finished the new Wordsworth...
...I forgot to speak of this months ago, when I saw the spelling "Driden" queried in one of the library reports, in reference to some signature, probably genuine and unnecessarily questioned...
...It is like camping out, so far, as we have next to nothing to put in, and must go slowly in that charmed particular...
...The Bodleian is rich in early Americana (the Mather collection, for example, is unique) but has next to no American modern books of secondary importance...
...As to work, it has been simply at a prolonged standstill...
...for it is your own "trim figger" which could most gracefully wear that lovely bit of color...
...So long as meine Mutter clings to Auburndale, you are safe from applications for the custody of Johnny Keats and a beer-mug...
...Will Brother Hunt ask him...
...and it was curious to see the procession of boats, each with its overlords, turn in sight of IfHey Mill in a world all ocean, and race back to Oxford...
...The pome is about our long-nosed friend, Cleopatra, and a nice youth here wishes to try his hand at turning it into Latin elegiacs...
...Save you, my philosopher...
...I never saw anywhere such a fine choice lot of rare old English sixteenth- and seventeenth-century songbooks...
...Tone, style, sympathy, synthesis, are perfect...
...and if I danced over it, the enchanting Brussels lace collar (which I sport with pride and joy on deserving occasions) wasn't the primary cause...
...Would it not be a glorious good thing if you could ever effect 48 THE COMMONWEAL May 14, 1930 any sort of exchange...
...No'm: I'm not coming home at present...
...But her doctor orders the outing...
...Printed the manuscript catalogue, too, of 1,500 cards, with one lassie of seventeen to help...
...I have never smelled a smell in a theatre, a church (!) nor a library (save in the gross, democratic B.M.*) since I left my native shore...
...But the tenderest marble will always be cold to the man in the street...
...And therefore I want it lickety-split...
...I keep monotonously well, and am no sylph...
...My dear ---------, Nothing to beat you for an obstinate, tongue-tied hussy—except me...
...All sorts of things have happened, pleasant, middling and cursed: at the end of them, I emulate you, and move into a nouse (anglice) as its proud lessee...
...How are ye...
...The thermometer today is at 48 °. I suppose it is well to reflect that it is probably 88° in Copley Square, and that, after all, there are month-old yellow roses over every doorway...
...Do tell me how you do, what you do, and how your ordered days run on...
...Lastly, your Christmas letter came...
...I love built things, even (this is treason, I know...
...We might turn him over, in forty years or so, to B. P. L., with his former literary history appended...
...Well, I shall aspire to it, too, chiefly to please you, if I can but get up the courage...
...It is now half a year after, and I have not thanked you for your goodness in copying that Cleopatra poem for me...
...envy me...
...Is there no conspiracy afoot between you and Babbie Brown to visit these diggings...
...My toes freeze as I write...
...Whereas I have been without any idol since Stevenson died, or rather, since he ceased to write essays...
...But these letters speak for themselves—speak indeed, in such terms as must warm the heart of a newer world with glimpses of an older one...
...My very dear Sir:—[or Sis?] Your letter was almost equal to one of our old walks in the rain, across the garden, with vocal accompaniment...
...Sei gegrusst, du lieber Schwann...
...It is April...
...The most blissful circumstances of my present lot is that only two persons in all Oxford know I have ever loved a dog, or written a pome...
...Methinks this fivepence muslin thing was made to go with vos beaux yeux...
...it was that one heart-delighting word that the operation was successful...
...I offered to transmit this, a genuine communication...
...We had half a one before...
...has neither book...
...When are you and W. Pater his effigies, etc., coming...
...That will wear off...
...We hope to beg, borrow or steal, a pony and a trap, and drive for a week...
...August 10, 1902...
...Now do talk...
...George Santayana's Hermit of Carmel, a new book...
...duly delivered your beeyutiful gift, for which I am your bounden debtor forever...
...I started one day last week to take Mrs...
...Love to the elect...
...But as dear Bruce Porter said, with a critical sigh: "English landscape is so damned tidy...
...L. I. G. March 23, 1903...
...Dearest ---------, Tis a divil I am to ask it, but will you get somebody to copy for me, "I am dying, Egypt, dying," by, I think, a General Lyons, killed in our Civil War, who wrote, I believe, no other poetry...
...And, as you know, there are people and people: I don't always inherit a day with the latter sort...
...I don't like to quit the forge, though I dawdle and make no iron...
...And if some of the fun does conceal a heavy heart, or at least a hard-worked one, it is none the less genuine and estimable...
...they are the universal premise...
...She is a sweet baggage, excessively familiar in manner, who is at this writing perking her dainty head in the immediate juxtaposition of my ink pot...
...The spectacle greatly took our friend...
...The best way to export it would be to bring it...
...he has an exquisite little library of them, and a dozen or so of extremely beautiful old musical instruments: virginals, a recorder, etc., among them...
...How to get on without that selfless spirit always near, I do not know...
...Neat pun, hey...
...My very dear---------, I seem to have fallen silent a long, * The first instalment of this selection from the hitherto unpublished letters of Miss Guiney, edited by Katherine Maynard, appeared in The Commonweal last week...
...Seven unbroken weeks of excessive rain and bitter cold, after the enchanting first pageant of spring...
...In the epistles which follow there is little enough business of major importance, even though the suggestion that Boston might purchase a sizable collection of old bookish trifles must have seemed momentous to one so definitively a born collector as Miss Guiney...
...But he asked if the Boston Library, or rather, Mr...
...Why aren't ye under the lilac bushes here with me, or sopping along in a canoe by Bablockhithe ? (Admire the metaphorical wing of an aging fatty who does nothing, week in and week out, but grind and slog and peg here or at the Bod.: "both hat ome and forring," as Jeames says...
...we go on enchanting short "Dutch" excursions in this beautiful open weather (buds have begun, also linnets) and leap stiles and run down hills comme a douze ans...
...Ages ago I got your post-card from Bourges, and then no news at all, though I thought of you every day for weeks and weeks, and would have given anything to know where you were, and how it fared with those brown eyes which were dead fagged and never showed it...
...I feel pretty sure you will take to this second bearer of an approved name...
...and the kindness which never waits for answered letters is not lost on me...
...I am all ears...
...My affectionate remembrances to Brother Hunt, and tell him this for me: that at the time of the Tercentenary, Bodley's librarian (Nicholson) told me there were thousands and thousands of duplicates lying here uncatalogued and unhandled, for lack of money and of men...
...The Mother and I are going off to Bath and Bristol and the Somerset coast for some eighteen days...
...My dear ---------, The Jordanidae have come and gone, and all the little picters are grinning on the wall, until the sad hour of migration next month, when I must pack up and flee to 6 Winchester Road...
...C.--------- to Iffley...
...Yours affectionately, L. I. G. February 2, 1905...
...But I have sworn never to row about incidentals...
...I wonder if you have read any of Professor Walter Raleigh's books...
...But I am fatter than snails, and disintegrate as I spread...
...Louise Imogen Guiney could have enjoyed spending so very much...
...That money and its uses should occupy so much space in the poet's outlook is normal possibly, but regrettable enough for all that...
...I am so glad of people to play with, now my head is on a strike...
...how they ever dared pretend there was one hidden below, I know not, in that Noah's deluge...
...The Mam is under the weather just now, if I may, with all significance, employ that unphilosophic phrase...
...I believe someone, Mr...
...I pray that it may be changed soon...
...Yours in all elegance, and with much love, L. I. G. February 3, 1903...
...But I pull together as I can...
...It is a very grand sort of business to elect heirs, as if one's donations really could matter...
...One dares not breathe these fearful hopes in our demented letters of congratulation...
...May 14, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 47 LETTERS FROM OXFORD, II* By LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY BILITY to distil romance from the commonplace incidents of everyday life is, perhaps, the secret of the letter-writer's art...
...He says his family will be sure to sell them when he is gone, and he wants to keep them, if he can, undivided, by selling them himself...
...I hope for a few "wild and noble sights" to repay one for quitting the Bodleian...
...I am as quietly disrespectable as ever, and make next to no money, and spend it while it is hot...
...The emphasis is upon the needlework of existence...
...and then poor dear Lionel Johnson was always full of his friend's praises...
...As to the chief topic, I am sorry indeed to report that it is Bodley's librarian who balks...
...No matter about "the weariness, the fever and the fret" of nerves, accursed things, if the ultimate end be secured...
...G. S., like L. J., is what they call "cold...
...here is a Scot of another, but not so very different complexion, to make the weary days bright...
...There is a nice antiquary here whose name is Taphouse, at 3 Magdalen Street...
...I missed it in not setting out for Yorkshire with Mary and Alice...
...all of which is worrying...
...It was certainly a great sight to see Oxford and the environs under three feet of water...
...long while ago...
...I hope you have shaken off the mis'able colds, and do not starve for air...
...But housekeeping bores her, a good servant is not to be had, especially in term-time, and she sees nothing of all the things which are fair to see...
...The Bod...
...Chester London Marriage Licenses (Foster) will show that Dryden the poet signed his name "John Driden" to his own license in 1663...
...What said my Mam to make you think I didn't vehemently like (as I do) that silk of rose and azure, like an early evening aurora...
...I am pious and parochial in these supergenteel Catholic latitudes, and put in a deal of work, all lent, reorganizing their bloomin' Jesuit library...
...I don't get much play time, but I hope to reform that when Ralph Cram comes, he and hisn, to abide through May and June in a country rectory close by, where they are sure of sleep, and of rhubarb tart every day, and of Yessir and Thankeemim, and Quiteso, and Fan-cy...
...And as, thus unfeelingly, our device for getting a competent person (i.e., you) over here has been knocked upon the head, the powers may consequently look with a sceptical eye upon another well-intentioned remark which I will make at once...
...Felicita...
...I only wish you were here to have it wear off quicker . . . You know my Mother fled away in November, and is with my cousin—the one you saw—in Maine, where it is 42 ° below zero, and a bookless, playless, jokeless wilderness...
...To putter and fuss and whine, and absolutely no inch gained: that's my useful European existence...
...Ever yours, L. I. G. May 17, 1903...
...Affectionately, L. I. Guiney...
...What Mr...
...and let me know whenever I can serve you in great or in small...
...Guess the inclusions...
...She has had the "flu" as they frivolously call it here, though not severely, I am happy to add...
...and Ph.D...
...That is possibly a special demand, not universally popular...
...Commend me to dear Hunt (rex musilegorum) and to all cats...
...Greenslet's book, don't you...
...My housemate is restless for her own belongings, and is going to New York to fetch them over, and for her comfort has taken a wholly unfurnished domicile here, wherein to strew them unimpeded...
...Her last book is a sound apple, don't 'ee think...
...Their author once declared that "Stress must be laid upon heroes...
...We are much encouraged in that resolution by two dear Harvard fellows who are here reading at Bod., and with the long familiar M.A...
...You know Nicholson is not considered the most amenable person alive...
...From every pittance she extracts such a quantity of real joy that one's heart aches a little over the limitations...
...She seems to live indoors, and to prefer Sheol to Oxford...
...You are too good to me, and you have, for the first time in your life, missed the point...
...Fare you ever so well...
...As you have heard, my darling Aunt Betty, my oldest friend, is dead...
...For ever and ever more, amen...
...Ten to one it is also in the collection called Single Famous, or Famous Single Poems...
...This, at least, is hall-marked...
...I would thank you to tell our ex-chief that I have his February letter, and also this: that a glance at Col...
...He is a music-dealer by trade, and a great collector by genius...
...My Reverend Van Allen, of the Advent, seems the only American meteor pointing this way, so far...
...We laid her to rest in Wolvercote, just over the river from Godstow...
...I seem to get less and less poetical, and more and more papistical, in these parts...
...We pay quarterly, and are free to quit, any time, at a month's notice...
...I learned to admire him back in the eighties when I used to read the Harvard Monthly...
...No, ma'am...
...Mention of Pater brings me to say all over again how enormously I admire Mr...
...but the head coach, in every case, rode his horse along it, up to the stirrups in H2O, at a first-rate splashing pace, and the assistant, in bathing tights arrayed, half-ran, half-swam, in his wake...
...Yet it can be repeated without, so far as one sees, doing harm to anyone...
...but I do so now, toto corde...
...If you like good verses, look up Mr...
...I lost her three days after Christmas...
...C. --------- . . . * British Museum...
...There's never any reason but one for my sticking so obstinately to whatever hole I happen to be in, and that reason is not unconnected with la haute finance...
...Brown, would care to make any inquiries after his treasures...
...The tow-path, except just below Folly Bridge, was flooded the whole way...
...Who else would have thought of likening a MacLaren's Imperial Cheese jar to a flower revered by the poet Herbert, or of going into ecstasies over the prospect of digging into the works of Alabaster, the Elizabethan...
...We are both very well...
...Your uninterruptedly, L. I. G. April 16, 1904...
...I hope the plucky little soul may have struck gold in her sudden and unforeseen man...
...I won't prate about all .my delayed opscula, because I am taking everything up after a deadlock of over three years, and you shall yet see...
...and I did both understand and love her...
...When I wear clo' no more, nor pockets in clo', I mean to grow at least six wings, and shoot and dart and explore and travel like the divil...
...The fact is, I am not very well, and have lost my leverage...
...whereas you luckless oafs are hurled from an icicle to a mosquito, and back again...
...You were a blessed lass to buy me Christmas finery, though I am persuaded thereby that you will never wax wealthy, any more than will your unprotesting beneficiary...
...I wish you would tell me whether B. P. L. got a copy of the Bodleian Tercentary Book, for if not, I will turn over mine to that worthy institution...
...and (this is the goak) he turned out to be the son of a doctor in Buffalo, New May 14, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL 49 York, now a distinguished ornament, with his brother, of Lincoln College...
...The garden of it can't hold a candle to the garden here, nor is the outlook as good—nor nothink...
...A thousand thanks for your gift and endless good wishes...
...So the too sanguine construction was mea culpa...
...She tried, and I with her, to hear a nightingale ; but too much wet ailed their theorbos...
...And "style" is certainly a joy...
...so off we go, on Saturday next...
...Pray give me your news, in charity, and commend me to three, nay, four, in the catalogue room...
...Let me have your latest news...
...She will return to Boston, I think, in March...
...How long have I not been your debtor...
...Barnard or another, would foot expenses, if some two persons could but come over from our B. P. L., stay in Oxford two or three months, and make the inestimable exchange of books...
...This is off the Woodstock Road, and has a big garden, and six most convenient and wellcloseted rooms: twenty-two pounds per annum, mark...
...Put it down in your chivalrous head that I love it only second to you, and that adipose deposit alone has prevented my adorning myself with what our scraggy Somerset housekeeper called "so pretty a body's as he'd be," up to date...
...Yours to love 'ee, L. I. G. August 20, 1902...
...He says he can't think of selling or making exchanges, and that he didn't mean to complain of his duplicates, in the sense that he wants to get rid of them, as the vast majority of them belong to donation or deposit collections, and cannot be alienated...
...It has been unconscionably and most un-Britishly hot here...
...See if you don't...
...Esteemed wench:—Thanks for your sagacity in eliminating the New York Herald, and sending me the heart of the matter...
...Never have I known such weather, though last May was quite phenomenal for misbehavior...
...I wear no black, and I have already given my whole mind again to work, though with feeble results...
...I could have punched you for joy...
...My expansive soul has at last found the ideal ink pot, once a minister to other appetites as base...
...Instead, I have here a ring-dove, given by our late landlord...
...Do you know the small crockery jars which MacLaren's Imperial Cheese comes in ? They serve a double purpose, and are like Herbert's flower in the old lyric, "Fit while it lived, for smell or ornament, And after death, for cures...
...I wanted to go, bad...
...but reform is in the air at last...
...Dearest -----:—, What will you think of me for a graceless pig...
...and I am generally out of gear...
...She picked up for chief honors one blonde god as the perfect Saxon...
...I don't know the Mendip Hills, though I was once at Wells...
...There was no tow-path...
...I have a few small treasures of my own, which I am sometime going to send over, by any eligible emigrant, to B. P. L. I have given the Vaughan Thalia, 1678, to Bodley...
...Tout passe fors aymer Dieu...
...built poetry —sometimes...
...I was the only living person she cared greatly for...
...it is always April in the isle of no ideas...
...Live well . . . and goodnight, this third of February, 1903...
...He is in no rush, and he is not mercenary...
...And, for that matter, you might bring along the few pictures, etc., too: all but J. Keats, who, besides being "of a size," looks by far too indigenous to his pleasant corner in the pleasantest of little houses, to be disturbed until the Greek Kalends...
...Like me, she always wished to be buried where she died, and not to be carried home...
...and it "done me good...
...May it make some sort of amends for the oblique other...
...I can only hope that there is no commandment against coveting another man's climate...
...This is a fritillary, the last in all the land...
...Yours ever, L. I. G. July 18, 1905...
...Dooley nobly names as "litthrachoor" is green and growing, after all, if one only has eyes and feelers for it...
...I have a sort of remembrance of it as figuring in a schoolbook my father had when a boy, called Sargent's Standard Speaker: Epes Sargent is the gent...
...You will forgive me, in view of all the trouble I have been through...
...I have a perfectly fresh Elizabethan to edit some day: a sonneteer of almost the very first water, one Alabaster, known hitherto only as a Latinist: a nice, queer, lovable old magian he is...
...My best thanks for all your kindness expressed and contemplated...
...We should be the gainers, I can but think...
...My mother, I am thankful to say, keeps very well...
...My one comfort is to look back on our secluded days here in Oxford, and to know that she was really happier so, shut in with me, than she had been for a great many years...
...I keep driving busy at a dozen things, with not much to show for it, and have lately registered a vow to play on Saturdays...
...My very dear ---------, The comely Mrs...
...As the crews were all out in the driving rain, practising for Eights Week, the coaches were out too...
Vol. 12 • May 1930 • No. 2
