I like the idea of blank verse for your Gunnar play, but then also I should like to see how you would do prose to that extent.
I don’t know why de la Mare should not like you, by the way.
Yes; I only smoke about 1½ pipes of tobacco a day. Perhaps I am a little hungrier, but I am neither more joyful nor more wise.
It is past 8 and almost too dark and there is little more time.
I use a stylographic pen now — hence my handwriting.
I introduced Guthrie’s landscape to a very clever acquaintance of mine who has money and spends it and most of his time in learning to draw. He likes Guthrie’s feeling immensely but says he ought to try working with a fine fountain pen on smooth paper and give up his ‘mezzy’ methods! But I imagine Guthrie will have to be satisfied with his results now, won’t he?
Our love to Emily and you
Ever yours
Edward Thomas
Index of Letters
To C. F. Cazenove
Berryfield Cottage
Ashford
Petersfield
6 December 1907
My dear Cazenove,
Thanks for your letter and receipts. I have not found a Barnes yet — the difficulty is to get one out of copyright, published about 1859 and not later than 1862 or 3.
I can’t say I have any very practicable proposals to make. But I should like to do a big book giving a history of the attitudes towards Nature, sport, and country life in English literature from the earliest times, largely by means of extracts.
Then I had thought of a book of extracts from prose and verse from Welsh writers — viz translations from those who wrote in Latin and Welsh, and the originals of those who wrote in English. This would mean a quite attractive book from a popular point of view as it would include Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gerald of Wales, the Mabinogion, the medieval Welsh poets and romances, some fairy tales, three out of the four greatest religious poets (Herbert, Vaughan, and Traherne), some great preachers and theologians, etc etc. I should only include those who had at least one Welsh parent or whose families had been resident for at least two generations. — I did make a proposal of the kind to Unwin (in answer to one from him) a few days ago, but he was so vague and silly that I would rather not deal with him. The book ought to be about 60,0 — words long and at present I don’t see how I could do more than an introduction to it. For the next 3 months I shall be quite full up with Jefferies.
Yours ever
Edward Thomas
Index of Letters
To Walter de la Mare
Ashford
16 December 1907
My dear de la Mare,
I liked reading the poems you sent me. The first poem — the one on top, ‘The Puppet Master’ — showed at once that he could write and had a special individual feeling for words. Then ‘Prayer to my Lord’ seemed to me very fine; ‘Waterpools’ also and in the main ‘After Flight’; ‘The Men who loved the cause that never died’; and everything of ‘Happy Death’ except the title. But I find I am going through them all except the last long one—’The Plighted Queen’ and that had an untransmuted allegorical feeling that disagreed with me. Often the writing is admirable — I mean that I feel in reading, quite suddenly and with a thrill, that here are words arranged in a foreordained manner which I can’t explain. You must be annoyed at my only making these very vague and general remarks, for I am terribly busy trying to get rid of a lot of trivial work before I leave home. That will be on the 27th of this month most likely. If so, can we meet for tea? I will let you know positively as soon as I can. I have just filled a small box with roots and am sending them to you by rail, carriage paid. They aren’t as much as I meant but the Michaelmas daisies and other big things are so clotted with moist earth that they would weigh too much. I will send some more in the Spring perhaps. The feathery stuff here and there is a kind of saxifrage, green all the year round with a beautiful ivory flower, and it spreads rapidly. Plant it in loose earth so that it is covered up all but the green tops and it will soon be right. In the bit of newspaper — and I hope not crushed — are some big African poppy roots. At the bottom is one piece of Michaelmas daisy and one piece of a big knapweed. Then there are several pieces of pink, I think some Canterbury bell, some forget-me-not, and at the top several roots of Japanese anemone which I don’t feel very certain about, and in any case they will be diffident at first. Also there are 4 roots of hollyhock. In the spring there ought to be many seedlings I could send. Here is a packet of Columbine seeds from our garden at the Weald.
With good wishes to you all
Ever yours
Edward Thomas
PS. I now find the box won’t go till Wednesday which is a nuisance, but it might be all right.
Index of Letters
To Gordon Bottomley
Berryfield Cottage
26 December 1907
My dear Gordon,
I don’t know when I shall next get a chance to write to you and even now it nears dinner time, I expect Guthrie, and I have still to pack, for tomorrow I leave here for Minsmere, nr Dunwich, Suffolk where I hope to write about Jefferies. I brim over with little things but have no notion of a good movement and sweep yet. Could you send me the Wilde books there as I understand the new edition is coming early in the year?
— Isn’t Nietzsche magnificent? and so necessary these days? Yet he damns me to deeper perdition than I have yet bestowed myself.
I am glad to hear I was enjoying life. Perhaps my melancholy is a delusion of the surface, a term mistakenly applied by one who is after all only a id critic. I did enjoy yesterday though because Bronwen excelled herself in joy and expressions of joy and even Merfyn was never peevish. We did not over eat, touched no alcohol and I actually laughed as I was getting to bed. The other night I went into the children’s bedroom, by the way, and awakened Bronwen by accident — she burst out laughing and fell asleep again. Fancy laughing in bed and at night and on just waking up. I ought to bend all my efforts to live up to her as the Superman.
I was sorry Emily ran off so gaily, but it was all a hurry and it does not rankle.
You are right about Yeats and I felt the same even when I praised Deirdre but if he does it again I shall administer an emetic for the laudanum with which he is always drugging big hearty people. But it was so perfect in its kind I couldn’t throw stones, though glass houses are really meant for stones. Trench has a better spirit in his Deirdre and the ravishment of Naois is well done; there is a most beautiful comparison in it (I forget where now) of Deirdre’s astonishment at sight of Naois — to the astonishment of a man who comes suddenly out of woods upon a vast quiet estuary and his horse’s hoofs startle the seafowl that were glassed — with sky and cloud — in the ebb. Oh, glorious. Yet I know I like it because with great good luck I might have done it myself.
Adieu Sylvanus with love to Sylvana from your loving
Urbanus.
Have you any book that touches well on the mystic trance — its origin — typical visions etc? I ain’t a mystic myself and I want to know what is possible before coming to The Story of my Heart in which there are some trance-visions or experiences. I know Inge’s Christian Mysticism and Edward Carpenter’s chapters in Adam’s Peak to Elephants.
Index of Letters
To Harry Hooton
Minsmere
30 January 1908
My dear Harry,
I am not cursed at all. I didn’t stop work because she went, but I simply found that as a matter of fact my work went rather to pieces. Of course I am greedy. You might as well blame me for not being grateful that I get my meals daily when some starve, you aged moralist. As to the other children, I see their merits but they do not touch me very closely. So I must console myself with you, aged and masculine as you are. I am very much better for being here and for having a good doctor but I can’t lose sight of the plain fact that the world is not made for me.
I wish you luck and Wolff confusion. Let me know that it is all well.
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I have now reached The Story of My Heart in Jefferies and it is every way the most difficult part. But I look forward to finishing the first draft by the end of February and then Helen wants to spend the last weekend (Feb. 21-5 or Feb. 29-March 2) here — May she if she can? She blesses you for doing me this turn.
I sent Hope (through Mrs. Webb, decorously) my Pocket Book but have not even had an indirect word in reply.
My love to you and Janet and Joan and Patsy.
Ever yours
Edwy
Index of Letters
To Walter de la Mare
Minsmere
19 February 1908
Dear de la Mare,
...I don’t think I really have any imagination, certainly not enough to distinguish between it and reality. But I feel sure it is beyond what is called reality, and that is something fit for and even aware of infinite and eternal things. Jefferies and Maeterlinck believe that it is so weak — they call it the soul — simply because we do not as yet admit its existence and have never tried to nourish it and let it have its way. I think it may be found to be life itself to which flesh, mind etc are only aids, that it is what enables us to feel and know the divine in all things, is itself the divine to which the rest of the universe responds according as we have or have not cut off our communication by pampering flesh and mind: (which is not very clear and may be pure metaphor, I mean bad, metaphor) so that only by imagination can we see things flesh and spirit as they are, only by it understand the life of things, and take images of them above with us for ever. That is the only hypothesis to suit my own experience. You ought to read Jefferies’s ‘Story of My Heart’. Will you if I lend it to you? I have had nobody to discuss it with so that I have come only to my customary rhetorical and general conclusions about it. When you have read it you will not think of water and wine in the relations you suggest.
I am so glad you have got Energy even if congested. My case is just the opposite, lack of Energy expanded. And so the Jefferies is getting to an end — . I wish you would write more now, and yet when I think of it it is wonderful you write at all after your long days every day in Town. — I would gladly lend you parts of my ‘Jefferies’ but you have no idea what my MSS are like — something like a lawn intersected with mole runs and dotted with mole heaps and worm casts. I continually add in the margin, on top and between lines: I only indicate the pages of my quotations and I alter the order of paragraphs etc very often. It will be quite hard work for me to follow all the signposts.
My health began by improving rapidly, but then I began to get very fond of one of the children of my neighbours (they are retired Anglo Indians, friends of friends of mine), and she left a month ago to go to school and the place has become chiefly superficies ever since. She is 17, a particularly lovely age to me because when I was that age I knew only two of my coevals, one I married and the other is in South Africa, and in the presence of this new one I had the sharpest pains and pleasures of retrospection, longing and — I am now making absurd attempts to return to that period by means of letters! You see I have a young head on my decrepit shoulders.
I expect to leave here on March 2 or 3
With best wishes to you all
Ever yours
Edward Thomas
Index of Letters
To Walter de la Mare
Ashford
February or March 1908
My dear de la Mare,
Thanks for the MS and your letter. I made use of your suggestions as a rule, e g putting in a few words about Jefferies’ unpopularity at school and suggesting that it was the result of that something repellant in him which you (and Sir Edward Grey to Hudson) see in his writing at times. It can’t be defined except by comparing it with a trick of voice or manner that offends. Of course he is emphatic and he is capable of a certain viciousness which one dislikes particularly in a man so pathetically unworldly and alone. A snarl, perhaps you haven’t noticed it. Nobody has a really kindly thing to say of him personally. But it may have been the awkwardness of an unsocial animal.
You ask me to define Nature. I used it vulgarly for all that is not man, perhaps because man contemplates it so, as outside himself, and has a sort of belief that Nature is only a house, furniture etc round about him. It is not my belief, and I don’t oppose Nature to Man. Quite the contrary. Man seems to me a very little part of Nature and the part I enjoy least. But civilization has estranged us superficially from Nature, and towns make it possible for a man to live as if a millionaire could really produce all the necessities of life — food, drink, clothes, vehicles etc and then a tombstone. I believe some do live so. But I can’t write about this being specially busy after walking to Goodwood races and back yesterday and getting overtired and behind with my work.
Yours ever
Edward Thomas
Index of Letters
To Edward Garnett
Berryfield Cottage
Ashford
11 February 1909
My dear Garnett,
Have you time to look at another sketch of mine? I don’t like troubling you again especially with manuscript but I am strongly impelled to because I have now had about six weeks of unusual energy and have written about a score of tales and sketches real and imaginary such as I have never attempted before, and though I feel a little more confident than I used to I am not at all sure that I am on a wise path — far less a profitable one — and you are the only man I can turn to for an opinion. I have been working so fast that I have only copied out one or two of these things and those only the shortest, or else I should have sent you something of a more elaborate and realistic kind. Perhaps you are very busy — I know you must be about now engaged in arranging for your Icelandic play — and if so I hope you will return this piece at once and let me show it to you another time perhaps.
Yours
Edward Thomas
Index of Letters
To Edward Garnett
Ashford
13 March 1909
My dear Garnett,
Your letter that came this morning was too flattering but entirely pleasant to me, for I am not exaggerating when I say that I have long hoped to please you and that I now feel glad of whatever praise the book wins largely because it is some return to you for all your direct and indirect criticism of me and my work. You have been my chief guide to such knowledge as I have of the relationship between life and literature. — But I am too confused with pleasure and shyness to say what I am feeling even on paper. I will only offer affectionate homage. I hope I shall have a chance of talking to you soon — won’t you come down here some time before as well as after the new house is built? They are only just digging out the foundations and bringing up the bricks. I am to have a little room right away from the house to work ip and that may be finished soon after the beginning of Spring I hope — it looks through trees to a magnificent road winding up and round a coombe among beeches, and to the Downs four miles away south. But I wish and so do we all that you would come before. You can have a bed-sitting room with a fire and work when you want to. But unless you could perhaps come down next week don’t trouble to write about this as I shall see you on the 22nd or 23rd I expect.
Thank you for sending my sketch to Country Life, but it would look very odd there, I think.
I shall not forget what you say about going forward still more into contact with the world at my gate and over the hills. You mean the world of men, I think. I should like to, equally as a man and as a writer, but the ability grows slowly; I am still very much afraid of men and too easily repulsed from them into myself; and I feel very humble when I think how seldom I can be myself and enter into them at the same time — either I remain sullenly self-centred or I lose myself on the stream of their usually stronger or more active characters.
Yours
Edward Thomas
Merfyn is often asking about David Garnett now as he is a ‘Scout’ and just beginning to enjoy what he vividly remembers seeing David in ful
l possession of years ago.
Index of Letters
To Gordon Bottomley
Ashford
15 March 1909
My dear Gordon,
I was afraid that you were not well as you were silent rather longer than usual and am sorry to know I was right. But I think perhaps you are feeling not uneasy as you are making such big and charming plans for Spring. Don’t worry another second about the South Country. Dent wants to delay. He says the season is very bad for his trade; but I think the fact is he wants to organise and advertise a series in which my book shall appear. When the proofs do come, be sure I shall very gladly ask you to look at them. I have very little else to tell you about myself. Here is nearly ¼ of the year gone and I seem to have been sitting close up to the fire all the time writing all sorts of things which you shall see some day only I don’t like to trouble you with M.S. and the typescript is being thrust upon editors. I have done a great deal at first under a real impulse but latterly (the long frost having quite undermined me) by force of daily custom as much as anything. I can do almost anything if once I can start doing it every day at a certain hour. And as reviewing has been scarce I have had few interruptions. I feel sure it is better work or in a better direction than all but the best of the old but it is even less profitable and quite impossible to palm off on a publisher as part of a guinea guide book. A difficulty will soon arise unless Jefferies brings me offers of work — which it has failed to do except from the Editor of a new magazine who asked me for a short ‘semi-poetical’ article on ‘why I love an out of door life’! I don’t live an out of door life and can’t be semi-poetical to order so I asked a prohibitive price and so got out of it. Meantime I get articles returned on every hand. The New Age printed a thing last week. Did you see it? But it was written a year ago nearly. — Evidently I am developed into a worse kind of bore at any rate. Put it down to the big fires which I have to sit close up to in this weather.
Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas Page 35