Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas

by Edward Thomas

  Maine stayed at home and ‘read strange volumes’ as he says. He was ready to greet me when I arrived home.

  Yesterday (Sunday) I had a short walk in the morning with Elsey. It was the finest day we have had this May and the country was exquisite and new, but he had even less to say than usual, while I was somewhat handicapped by effects of Saturday. He then returned to finish his paper on Miracle Plays which I have been helping him to write for the Davenant. In the afternoon I took a long walk with O’Brien and Curran to Godstow where there is a charming inn called The Trout, covered with blue periwinkle flowers: near by is the nunnery of fair Rosamonde and the river flows between. This time I did nearly all the talking; for Curran had been fearfully bad the night before.

  I am going to write a volume of ‘Mafeking Nights entertainments’ and really such of my adventures as I remember were much like the Arabian Nights.

  With kisses for Merfyn.

  Ever and wholly yours my own sweet little one

  Edwy

  Index of Letters

  To Ian MacAlister

  c/o Mrs Howells Pleasant View

  Tirydail Amanford S Wales

  30 August 1900

  My dear Mac,

  After many changes I came hither 10 days ago, and your letter following me about has just arrived. I am delighted to hear from you, and can easily ‘forgive’ your use of my ‘Christian’ name, notwithstanding that the somewhat solemn music was long ago reduced to the feeble but endearing term of Edwy. In turn, I will if I may adopt your synonym for George Ian MacAlister, though its rhymes with smack, etc., suggest a rude bonhomie which I never associate with you. I am glad too that you ‘have had nothing to say.’ Happy is the man that has no history. My own vainglorious epitaph is to convey, That I had nothing to say, and said it in the aptest terms — with which you will by no means agree!

  As to our villain’s handwriting, I have a curious specimen of it, in the shape of a pseudo-subtly dishonest letter to my wife, showing very well his way of going to work. If I had not been in Oxford at the time, he should have been answered in terms of the horsewhip.

  My Spanish trip was abandoned partly because I was kept waiting too long, and partly because I wrote an unanswerable hostile letter to Morgan. It was my first angry letter. The cause was a lady to whom our friend had made love under the pretence of giving her a higher education, viz., literary. Morgan made rather a bad figure in a final difference with her, which I witnessed in Berkshire during my viva visit. The girl had interested me, and as she had seemed to be really passionate, while M. was preoccupied, I wrote to her and sent her a copy of ‘Wuthering Heights’ to read. After encouraging my correspondence in an amused way, M. suddenly ordered me to bring it to an end, in a tone that convinced me that his attitude was one of patronage, maintained with some real friendliness because I had a certain ready sympathy with his vitals, e g liver. But let us agree that we were incompatible persons.

  After all, Wales is good for me. In spite of my accidentally Cockney nativity, the air here seems to hold in it some virtue essential to my well-being, and I always feel, in the profoundest sense, at home. Anyhow I am vastly better, though still unable to walk the three or four miles necessary to reach the nearest waterfall among trees, or the nearest Castle — Careg Cenen, which has a site as imposing as Edinburgh Castle, as I hear from those who know both. But the Castle is a fearful place, and glimpses through its shooting-gaps on to a plain about 400 feet sheer below, leave my body like a telegraph wire in a high wind. I still wait for a visit from my prosaic Muse; and have to fill up my hours of solitude with writing distasteful scraps of a novel, at which Haynes and I are collaborating. Perhaps when I write to you next, the Muse, or, if you think that too professional, some genial spirit of the place will breathe upon my letter.

  My wife and the child (who bears with some grace the names Philip Mervyn) are with me here and afford a constant undercurrent of deep joy, despite my weakness, irritability, anxiety, disappointment. But you will write soon, won’t you?

  Ever yours

  Edward Thomas.

  P.S. — I don’t know yet, how long I shall stay here.

  Index of Letters

  To Ian MacAlister

  7 Nightingale Parade

  Nightingale Lane

  Balham

  London SW

  12 — March 1901

  My dear Mac,

  There is nothing to say except that your letter was very welcome. Postman’s Knock is out of fashion just now especially on Monday mornings, so I was cheered by the event. But you don’t seem quite yourself. You make me anxious about your father. Perhaps you will tell me more next week. Better still, perhaps all will have turned out happily.

  Meantime my own affairs don’t change. I feel more and more helpless. I tried to get work from George Newnes on Thursday; but he didn’t think I should make either a merchant or a baronet, and dismissed me. He wondered I didn’t try his magazines! I allowed myself to have another venture with the C.O.S. and again unsuccessfully I think. Haynes (who is continually making suggestions) is sounding the librarian of the House of Lords on my behalf: I can’t be hopeful, however. You see, I have not yet gone to sleep, tho’ I might as well. A librarianship would suit me, and I am sure my interest and experience would make me not incompetent!

  So would a sub-editorship — on a weekly, for preference. The one I applied for came to nothing.

  There is no news yet from the Americans. Success there would be a boon indeed. The Malory scheme drags on slowly. I am hampered by the fearful ignorance of the publishers. They know nothing at all about Malory and are consequently very suspicious of everything I say. They suggest ‘Explanatory notes’ for the edition. Poor Malory was not clever enough to write anything that needed explanation: but what am I to do? However, my correspondent says there is no hurry and merely says now that the edition will be put in hand ‘within eighteen months.’ I may prepare it from the workhouse, therefore.

  I am very happy now and then with some old books of travel I have discovered. I am also still busy with your Elizabethan dramatists and have got almost a volume of notes, etc. There are a hundred things I could do — a dozen things I could do well — but I haven’t the pluck, when I know they won’t be read, far less be printed. So I just polish essays I wrote months ago, and day by day write a sentence or two as near perfection as is possible for me, to keep my hand in. I read Virgil daily: he is the best training for the ear that I know. (N.B. Have you got a Claudian?)

  Today (I mean yesterday: I write at 2 in the small hours) I have been carpentering. I began at 10.30 a in and at 8 p m. I had nearly finished the frame of a big lounge for my wife’s sitting room. It is to be a sofa, an alternative for 3 chairs, and in case of need an extra bed. I have now only to fit it with a mattress, and drape it. It is a great saving of cash and the making gave me a rest; it also amused Philip Mervyn.

  P.M. is now wonderfully well and develops apace. Nulla dies sine linea. You should see him saying ‘Hark!’

  What was C. P. Scott’s son like? I owe his father a grudge. He encouraged me to hope for work on his paper and then let me slide without any reason.

  I am glad to hear of your brekker with Cornish, whose performance I have been following. Did he talk much? I presume he has forgotten me: I hope at least he has forgotten my faults. Nobody from Lincoln writes to me now. Several wrote one effusive letter at the beginning of the term, promising more, and I wrote back, very happy to be remembered. My only refuge is to read ‘Thyrsis’ and ‘The Scholar Gipsy’ and enjoy my tears.

  A clock has just chimed two with a deep voice almost like ‘Tom’ and you must forgive me if I dedicate the night now to reading and Oxford dreams; nor shall I forget you. Write before you go down and fix a day to come and dine with me.

  Ever yours

  Edwy.

  P.S. If you do see Morgan or Maine remind them that I love them.

  Index of Letters

  To Ian MacAlister


  Rose Acre

  Bearsted nr Maidstone

  29 October 1901

  My dear Mac,

  Perhaps I am in the promised Land, as you say; but there are still the Canaanites, not to speak of Philistines. That is why I have not written before, in spite of your most welcome letter; I celebrated it, I assure you, like a prodigal’s return. I have had troubled times — no work and much expense. I have nevertheless stuck at it in a way that would show bravery in anyone else. Have sent out over 20 articles to journals and magazines. 12 have come back: the other 8 will stay longer because they are with magazines whose decisions take the length of an elephant’s pregnancy. I haven’t scored one success; yet, showing you how stubborn I have been, the ‘Globe’ and ‘Pall Mall’ between them have rejected 8 articles in a fortnight! And I go on smoking clay pipes and playing with Mervyn who is now going to sleep to the sound of the Bearsted bells. The country is exquisite: yet in a way it soothes me too much and encourages a mild despair which is my favourite vice. Helen and the heir and I have just spent the afternoon out of doors with deep enjoyment, he eating blackberries; I stealing young trees to plant in the garden. As to the garden, now is almost the busiest time. I have turned all the soil up; planted roots, shoots and bulbs; dug a ditch 540 feet long and thrown up a bank the same length; and weeding, etc., illimitable. I suppose you haven’t much garden; if you had, I should ask you to send me roots or cuttings.

  And you — I hope you will soon have something that will relieve you from ‘reading for the bar’. If only you could get a tutorship near here! But I fear the Oxford Appointments’ Committee will not help you much; they send me announcements about every 3 months’, they seem to enjoy a very long vacation.

  ‘Affec ly.’ — why do people abbreviate the most important part of a letter? I envy you yours from the Malvern boys. The only boys who write to me are grown-up boys at Oxford, and I find the nicest of them all the more foolish because they are old. Still, all Oxford letters are precious to me; and I glance at the post-mark like a philatelist who has got a treasure. You are partly mistaken when you say I valued Oxford more than the people there. It was only because the place acknowledged my love; the people so rarely did. Those that did are far more than the place to me; but a child could count them — 1, 2, I can’t go on! Now that I am far away, even acquaintances who were unkind or (worse) flippant seem like friends, and now and then I write them letters from my heart; they never reply. Why only lovers understand passion (of any kind) I shall never quite know. And older people — they are never tired of rebuking me. They put melancholy down to crumpets and the like and laugh; they fail to realise the simple fact that ‘there it is’. I know now, of course, that melancholy is largely due to physical causes; only it doesn’t seem to me any the less psychical for that.

  I shall be very glad if Blackie gives me work, and am most grateful to you for writing to him. I suppose you never meet Crossland of the ‘Outlook’? If you do, tell him he owes the price of a review done last March, and that he promised me more work. He won’t pay and he won’t give me work.

  It’s bad news of Fyfe, but I suppose Garrod was a better man, at any rate by his achievements.

  Write again soon especially if you have good news of yourself, With love from us all,

  Yours ever, Edwy.

  Index of Letters

  To Ian MacAlister

  Rose Acre

  5 April 1902

  My dear Mac,

  I wish I could send you news, facts instead of thoughts, as you ask. But I haven’t any, and I have always had an (unconscious) dislike of facts; or rather, I can’t handle them. You should see, for instance, my attempts at narrative on paper. I can’t progress at all. I simply jump from one picture to another. And so in my existence, what happens is soon lost in a mist of what I think about and around it. In fact I think so much about things that I forget very soon what set me thinking.

  The only events in my life now are the arrivals of envelopes from the ‘Chronicle,’ to announce that books are being sent for review. They come more often just now, but not often enough. For I have to live on the ‘Chronicle’ almost alone. I told you that I sent my things all round Fleet Street and elsewhere. I can do so no longer, because there remains no paper or magazine to which my much-travelled M.S. has not gone in vain. And I have nearly ceased to copy out fresh works for sending out. I have to depend on the two or three editors who know me, and they take my work very seldom indeed. I have had two papers in the Illustrated London News and one in The Academy this year. That is all. And yet it is more painful to write this down than the actual experience is, because I have learned to drift. Nevinson of the ‘Chronicle’ tells me that my position (or rather, he spoke of a position similar to mine) is ‘unendurable’. I believe it and ignore it.

  Haynes wants me to plan some critical or autobiographical work.

  7 — April

  I have already made plans, but today I feel as if I could never work them out. One is — to trace the element of ‘Nature’ from Chaucer to the present day in English poetry. I should like it; it would be fairly new; and perhaps in after years I could do it pretty well. But today, as I say, I feel quite hopeless. It is one of my mad days. I am unaccountably nervous and anxious, as if something were going to happen. (N.B. I know from endless experience, that nothing will happen). All the morning I worked hard at a review and at dinner I planned a walk to a quiet and distant pub. But I walked half a mile; turned back; emptied a brandy bottle left by last week’s guests; worked furiously in the garden most of the afternoon; and now inflict my transparent pessimism on you. The brandy, remember, was an afterthought; I am trying hard to think why I didn’t keep out of doors. I suppose the fact is that I must have a bad day now and then while my position is so precarious; for no calm, affected or real, under really anxious conditions, can be quite unbroken.

  9 April

  It is obviously time for me to put a stop to this letter. It is quite inexplicably damned. I have done a lot of work in the intervals, and now I am expecting the last visit of my oldest friend who is going out to South Africa after enlisting in the S.A. Constabulary. We shall just plant a tree and drink some whisky and leave unsaid the things that will occur to us when he is over the Equator.

  Just a word more. If you do go to Oxford next term — it will be my last possible term, too, — would you let me join you. I shouldn’t worry you because our ways would be different.

  I know I have left your letter quite unanswered, but as I have nevertheless left out everything else I wanted to say, you will forgive me, because my ineptness is so symmetrical.

  With love from all of us,

  Ever yours

  Edwy

  Index of Letters

  To Ian MacAlister

  Rose Acre

  Bearsted nr Maidstone

  25 December 1902

  My dear Mac,

  It was very great joy to have even a gloomy letter from you. And on Christmas Day, too. The feast never meant much to me as a child, except from the books and stomach-aches I received. But every year it becomes more and more a remembrancer, and I make up the books of friendship and thought with a sombre pleasure whatever the balance. So you have been with me all day, whether I was playing with Mervyn or drinking hot ale and ginger along with nuts. We had no frost, yet a great fire — and the logs were as idols.

  Since I wrote I have had a pretty continuous supply of books, enough to keep me almost continuously employed and to put a stop to original composition; and yet not enough to prevent the quarterly alarm about my rent. I had — but tell it not — Milton’s latest book, ‘Nova Solyma,’ to do for the ‘Chronicle.’ And that reminds me that I heard unofficially that I am now to get the review-books which used to go to Lionel Johnson who died last month. I don’t know whether to be elated or desperate; for he was a fine scholar and (tho I have only just found it out) a writer of the most beautiful prose.

  We are pretty well. Helen is at work now as usual. Rachel
Mary Bronwen (for that is her name) grows more agreeable in appearance. Her eyes are changing in the direction of brown, and her hair is to be dark brown, a constrast with Mervyn, who has conspicuous blue eyes and fair yellow hair in long waves. He is a nice boy at times, and by the way he sends you two kisses. He has already quite a store of knowledge — about animals, natural effects and colours, etc., and is a good talker, and most hearty lover of life, with just a tinge of reverie along with a short sharp temper. He runs and climbs and walks often 5 miles a day. He will be 3 next month. I know you would like to see how joyous we can be while he hears me ‘singing’ Welsh airs or ‘The Old Gray Fox’ or ‘Widdicombe Fair’ or ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher.’

  Still my progress towards the state of family man is not smooth or invariably pleasant. I often want to go away and walk and walk for a week anywhere so long as it is by an uncertain road. For the I like to stay in one piece of country I don’t like (as I have to, in England) to meet continually some respectable acquaintance with whom I must stop to bore and be bored. I am not a bit of a wanderer, but I like to be thought-free and fancy-free as I can’t be in this sweet domestic country. Also my melancholy ‘grows old along with me.’

  You don’t give me any notion of your work, and so I can only be sick at heart to think of your difficulties. Write to me oftener and talk before your heart gets too full.

  Everything you say to encourage me in my work encourages me, partly because I know you used to be unsympathetic. I don’t despair because my work is unrecognised. What makes me desperate is the little leisure (from reviewing and much thinking about money) left me to write my best in. In the last three months I have written about 1000 words exclusive of reviews. Yet my head has been so full that I might have done 10,000 much better than I did 1000, and tho’ some of that was at the rate of 40 words an hour. Moreover, when for a time I am free from all business, the my tendency then is to write, I am not always willing to. For I must have some time in which to be non literary, free to think or better still not to think at all, but to let the wind and the sun do my thinking for me, filling my brain. However, that is a trifle and will not be even that when I am part of a great calm under nettles and yews and grass.