c/o Conte Umberto Morra di Lavriano, Villa Metelliano, Cortona, prov. di Arezzo, Italy. - He and [Umberto] Morra send best wishes for the New Year. Has been here a week after a fortnight at I Tatt; Mary [Berenson] was 'very ill', but seems to be recovering; it will however be a 'long illness'. Only saw her twice, for a couple of minutes; she was 'very charming' and asked after Julian. B.B. [Bernard Berenson] was 'subdued, but very sympathetic'. There were no dinner guests, so most nights Nicky [Mariano] read aloud "Anna Karenina", which he found very fine and much 'more subtle' than he, or B.B., remembered. Aubrey and Lina [Waterfield] were 'a bit tired out by their two pupils'; they and [their daughter] Kinta all asked after Julian and seemed to have enjoyed his visit. Hears from Bessie that Julian's show opens on 15 January; if he stays in England until the end of the month Bob will be sure to be back at home. If C.A. [Clifford Allen] goes to Paris, will try to meet him there. Expects he will stop for two or three days at I Tatti when B.B. returns around the 20th, then come back home. Though it is very cold, has been out in the hills every afternoon trying to start a long poem. The "Nation" have at last published his 'blasphemous poem'. He and Morra read Shakespeare, Ariosto and Tasso in the evening; Makalé [the dog] barks on these moonlit nights, which makes him 'open the window and shout at him in English and Italian'. Sends love to [Maria] Germanova, [Alexandr] Kalitinski and Andr[usha Kalitinski] if Julian sees them. Is going to Florence to celebrate the new year with Alda [Anrep], Nicky etc. Glad Julian is seeing Millet; John Walker will probably be in Paris for a few days so Bob has given him Julian's address, but explained he is likely to be very busy; got to like Walker, who will probably stay at the [Hotel] Londres, 'very much this time'.
20 Somerset Terrace (Duke’s Road, W.C.).—Encloses a report of a lecture by Professor Herron and a book by Richard Jefferies, and expresses her admiration of Wagner. Commends Cope’s personality, and refers to South African affairs.
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20 Somerset Terrace.
- Feb. 1901
Dear Mr Lawrence.
The books arrived but—where is the MSS. {1}? Have you let it fall by mistake into the waste paper basket—or what? If you can find it, I should be glad to have it for association’s sake.
The other day I had the enclosed report from my friend Professor Herron {2} of one of his Sunday lectures, and it seemed to me to offer a common (because comprehensive) ground to our two standpoints in regarding this subject. I refer specially to the last three paragraphs of the report. I would like to have it back, for these lectures are parts of a book that Professor Herron is writing and he likes me to talk things over with him. If I did as I “oughter” I should try at any rate to write a Paper he has asked for his International Socialist Review {3} on “the relation of the socialist movement to the religion of the future”.
I am glad that you liked the Wagner book, and went and picked out the very part that I most desire to hear all through in opera. I hope I may be able to hear and see at least “The Walküre” in June at Covent Garden. The Bayreuth plan is perforce postponed. It is just what you say, “the whole of life seems set out before me”. Wagner seems to me the man whose conception of life is adequate to the mental conception of, say, the solar systems. He conceives life immense in passion, pulse and power commensurate with knowledge. Here at last we have an intensity to match our conceptions of space and time—intensity to infuse eternity itself with living warmth and the vital beauty of everlasting youth. Here then lies it seems to me the contrast between Wagner and Tolstoi. To the one belong youth and force and complexity, to the other old age, insensibility and the reduction of life to a rational abstraction. One is the universe of the solar systems, the other a world of extinct fires like the moon.
I have come to the conclusion that bitterness is the warp of the noblest or almost noblest natures. (Though of course there are cheap sham imitations of cynicism as there are of everything.) But one so often finds underneath it the ardently idealistic temperament; it is the recoil of the heart from pitiless circumstance.
I think I never knew anyone of so passionately chivalrous a temperament as Mr Cope, or anyone with such self-reckless pity for weak things. I know what it has been to keep him “chained-up” when any wrong or injustice was being done to one of the girls, or to any little child. You cannot possibly have any idea of what the suffering of women and children has meant to him. I don’t say that this capacity for pity is (standing by itself) a strength to a man or a good thing to have, but God only knows what the oppressed would do without it, or where their champions would come from, if there were not these uncalculating natures. Yes I think you could be of use to him. I have always thought so. Do try.
I thought the letter on Wednesday a very good one, just the right thing said in the best way. Did you notice a very pathetic account of Kruger in Tuesday’s paper, an interview with an Englishwoman? I was interested very in Graydon’s letter today. What do you think of its suggestions?
And now I am sending this with another book {4}, quite a different sort of book from anything else written—not because now or at any time you should read anything but what suits you, but because it is as easy for me to send or for you to return as not, n’est-ce-pas? Jeffreys†, as you probably know, was a naturalist and his other books are written in a different vein, but none without the quality of “mind-fire”, which does not invariably go with the scientific spirit. There are two or three pages from p. 111 especially which I always find very beautiful and touching.
Yours sincerely,
Emmeline Pethick
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{1} Probably the MS sent with PETH 7/68.
{2} George Davis Herron, an American clergyman and Christian Socialist. Emmeline’s ‘talks’ with him were presumably by letter.
{3} The International Socialist Review was a monthly journal published at Chicago by the Marxist publishers Charles H. Kerr & Co. from July 1900. It was not in fact Herron’s journal—it was edited till 1908 by A. M. Simons—but Herron contributed ‘A Plea for Unity of American Socialists’ to the December number (vol. i, no. 6, pp. 321–8) and, from January 1901, a regular section entitled ‘Socialism and Religion’.
{4} Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart (1883).
20 Somerset Terrace (Duke’s Road, W.C.).—Offers to criticise his article, and suggests he talk with Norman Franks. Is disgusted by the sentimental reaction to the death of Queen Victoria. Refers to their guests for dinner.
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20 Somerset Terr.
28 Jan. 1901
Dear Mr Lawrence,
We must try to bear up! We are quite used to seeing our bulwarks (against old ladies and other enemies) walking off in all directions! And yet we manage somehow to hold the fort! Seriously, we are not discouraged—neither are we optimistic; while we are alive we go on, voila tout!
I am glad about the book; yes, do send the article when it is ready and I will criticize unmercifully. I know what you mean; we don’t want something merely academic but something dynamic. This is your subject. I think you ought to have a talk with Norman Franks. He knows a great deal experimentally. He nearly lost his life sticking on for 3 years in Rothwell Bgs: {1} and is most keen on the subject. I am sure he would be delighted to see you any time at 59 Eastcheap.
I cannot help being disgusted by the sentimentalism run riot amongst us. {2} There is something real, as you say, something great in the way the ends of the earth have been united in their loyalty to one woman, {3} who was personally worthy of the great ideal which she represented, but it reminds me of Alice in Wonderland, who found herself growing so small that she began to be drowned in her own tears and had to swim through to dry land. Besides, sentimentalism is the death of real feeling and we lose everything including our own self-respect.
Thanks for the little book that you sent me; it is full of the sweet reasonableness and light of the writer, but I always miss the battle-cry:
“Fall battle-axe & clash brand!
Let the King reign.”! {4}
I am going to send you one of my books, one of which I never tire, that never loses its absolute fascination for me. I don’t expect you to like it, so don’t go against the grain to read it. But if you do read it perhaps I might be able to tell you why I accept Wagner and reject Tolstoi.
Shall I tell you for whom we are cooking the dinner today: Mr Pett Ridge, Mr Dunbar Smith {5} and Mac, and the Lady Katherine Thynne (or “Miss Bath”) {6}.
The wife May has a Boys’ Club, so we have to do dishing up and all. She is still as great a source of pleasure and amusement as ever. Her latest is in reference to Mr MacIlwaine coming while we were out:
(Sister Mary, soliloquy) “I suppose he went back to his work”
(May (in her most clucking style)) “Didn’t look much like work!—the way he flopped ’isself down!”
By the way, you have a principle against answering invitations, nicht wahr? Und der Herr ist auch in Deutschland gewesen, und er spricht wohl Deutsch. Also, leben Sie recht wohl.
Ihre höchst, etc.
Emmeline Pethick
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{1} Rothwell Buildings, in Whitfield Street, St Pancras.
{2} The reference is to the national mood following death of Queen Victoria on the 22nd.
{3} Above ‘human being’ struck through.
{4} A conflation of two lines repeated several times in Tennyson’s ‘The Coming of Arthur’ (one of the Idylls of the King): ‘Fall battleaxe, and flash brand! Let the King reign’, and ‘Clash battleaxe, and clash brand! Let the King reign.’
{5} Arnold Dunbar Smith, who, together with Cecil Claude Brewer, had designed the Passmore Edwards Settlement. He was later employed by the Pethick-Lawrences to build a cottage near their house in Surrey as a guest-house for London children. See My Part in a Changing World, p. 132.
{6} Lady Katherine Thynne was the second daughter of the 4th Marquess of Bath. She married the Earl of Cromer on 22 October this year.
Welcombe, Stratford on Avon. - Has sent back the Chekhov; "Three Years" gives a better picture of the Russia 'of a semi-barbarous state' than anything else he has read: Dostoevesky does too much of this, and 'no nation of such a people as he draws them could have got on even as they did', while Tolstoy remains the aristocrat and Turgenev 'a sweet-natured gentleman'. Is sending a 'short correspondence' and cutting from the London "Guardian" telling of a pleasant thing which will has happened to him; younger people cannot understand 'what an Oriel [College, Oxford] fellowship used to mean'.
Welcombe, Stratford on Avon. - Robert's letter has brought 'a breath of Italy'; wishes he could be there; asks to be remembered kindly to Robert's hosts and wishes he could see Berenson's library. Books now his 'medium for everything': foreign countries, past times, 'vanished friends and opponents'. Has now read the elegiac and iambic fragments in Bergk, and will go on to read the '"Melic poets" as one reads Keats and Shelley'. Has also finished Plautus's "Casina"; a great coincidence 'utterly unimportant in itself' like all great coincidences, that the last time he did so, in 1916, Morton and Kate Philips came to stay as they are doing tonight for the first time since then. Is reading Robert's Tchernov [sic: Chekhov] and thinks the stories may give even 'more vivid and real' a picture of Russian life than Turgenev and Tolstoy, while being 'far less repulsive' than Dostoevsky; though he does not approve of the 'sordid little pictures of conjugal infidelity', which is better done in many French novels and he is 'many years too old for it in any language'.
Casa di Boccaccio, Settignano, Firenze, Italy [on headed notepaper for I Tatti, Settignano]. - Thanks his mother for her letter. Bessie says she will be with his mother until Saturday, so this letter may come while she is there. Is 'very glad she is going to Holland'; is sure she will enjoy it and that it will 'do her good'. Julian seems well again now. The weather here is 'very changeable', but he has done 'a fair amount of work'. Is 'quite comfortable' in his lodgings, and has meals with the Waterfields in the Casa di Boccaccio. Usually works in the Berensons' library in the morning, then goes 'out on the hills in the afternoon, unless the weather is impossible, as it often is'. Glad his mother had a 'pleasant visit from Audrey [Trevelyan]'; hopes Hilda is now better.
Prefers the English translation of War and Peace by [Constance] Garnett to the French, as it is 'more accurate, and does not leave things out'; however, he 'like[s] reading Turgeneff best in French'. The 'postage for letters abroad' is now three pence, not two and a half; it is a lira from Italy to England, which is just over two pence. Asks her to thank his father for his letter [12/349?]; will write to him soon. [Bernard] Berenson sends his 'kind regards'; he and his wife are going to Greece next month, about the time Robert will start home.
Palace Hôtel, Rome. - Has not been reading "The Brothers Karamazov"; was amused by the first two chapters, but they support Robert's observations about 'the hysterical character'; Caroline was also 'stuck' for the same reason. Has seen much of the 'unusually clever and well read American Secretary of Legation' [Arthur Frazier, acting Secretary?], who says the 'three great epochs in foreign novels' are that of Balzac, the Russian epoch (especially 'Tolstoi and Turgenieff') and the Jean Christophe [by Romain Rolland] epoch. The American ambassador, Page, is also a 'man of letters and means', of the same family as the American ambassador in England. Caroline has now been in bed with bronchitis for almost five weeks, and the doctors cannot say when she will be better; she is 'wonderfully patient'.
c/o Kidder, Peabody & Co., 56 Wall Street, New York; on printed notepaper for Tuxedo Park, P.)., New York. - Has read "Sisyphus" in print with 'much interest & some pleasure'; thinks this is the best thing Trevy has yet done, that he has attained an 'expressive' verse form, and from now on it will be 'a question of temperament and mind'. Has given his copy to the poet George Cabot Lodge, son of the Senator [Henry Cabot Lodge]: Trevy can have no idea how 'far away one is here from everything but the most sensational products of Europe', and even a 'cultivated fellow like Lodge' knows little of modern poetry in England, having 'never read a word of Sturge Moore's, or even Noyes'; 'happily' they agreed about those Lodge had read, such as 'Yates [sic: Yeats] etc'. Lodge had heard about Trevy and was 'eager' to read him, having himself recently published a 'quasi-drama', "Herakles", which Berenson will send Trevy in a couple of days. Following Trevy's advice, has got the Tolstoi edition published in England, and expects he will enjoy it; meanwhile is spending any 'serious time... for reading' in American history, particularly by Henry Adams, which he praises; Trevy must read Adams' autobiography, of which his father has a copy, one day. Saw [Hamilton Easter] Field two days ago in his 'watchtower' looking out over 'one of the most fascinatingly fantastically picturesque' views possible, 'New York in all its sublime monstrosity'; not surprising that Field loves it'. Hard to find a 'better cell' if one wanted a 'hermit's life', but as Berenson cares for 'contact [with his] fellow creatures' will not settle here: [Goldsworthy Lowes] Dickinson probably more right than he knew when he said 'the one thing Americans lived for was "acceleration" and as Berenson though no longer wants to get to places half as much as he enjoys getting to them, this can 'never again be [his] home'. Is longing to return; expects they will be back in March and will let Trevy know in case there is a chance of meeting.
Welcombe, Stratford on Avon. - Glad to have Elizabeth's letter, though sorry not to see her and Julian, even more so for Caroline's sake. Understands how tired she must have been by her first visit to the Netherlands in so long, and looks forward to seeing her at Wallington when she is 'really well' and able to come; travelling is very difficult at the moment. Sends back the two volumes of 'Tchekof's stories': "Three Years" tells as much about 'that strange people, and that loosely constituted semi oriental society' as anything he has read, even more than Turgenev and Tolstoy, though Tchekoff is 'not a genius of their calibre'.
Welcombe, Stratford on Avon. - Describes the date as being that of 'a certain famous event, since which England has never prospered' [the execution of Charles I]. Glad to hear news of Julian, and that Elizabeth has Tolstoy's "The Cossacks"; he read it many years ago in English and thought it 'wonderfully romantic and charming'; has re-read it since more than once in French, but has read the three pieces ["Sevastopol Sketches"] which usually accompany it even more often. They are his own experience, the "raw material" for the battle scenes in "War and Peace", and 'the best accounts of war ever written'. The frosty weather suits him and Caroline well.
4, Rue Nungesser et Coli, Paris XVI. - Thanks 'Elisaveta Ivanovna' for showing such concern about her own 'poor naughty heart'. Reksuchka [the dog] was 'so mad with joy' when she got back that it was 'imposssible' for her husband to hug her; then when she had to go to a rehearsal he 'put his paw on her foot, as if to stop [her]'. The theatre did not mind her absence [for a performance in London]; they have had a dress rehearsal already, and the costumes are 'very pretty, but rather heavy'; everyone is nervous about the play ["Crime and Punishment?"] so rehearsals are long. Does not know what she would do without her husband; he asks her to send his thanks to the Trevelyans for their kindness to her. She would be very happy to rest at the Shiffolds, which is 'a dream'; hopes God will let her do that. Managed to avoid sea-sickness on her crossing by praying. Thinks "Anna Karenina" is the 'best of Tolstoi's novels'. She acted the part of Anna for the cinema in Russia in 1914, and was 'so wrapped in the part' she 'studied all the smallest movements of her [Anna's] heart'; they wanted to put it on in the theatre, but Tolstoy, unlike Dostoevsky, is hard to transfer to the stage without losing his 'charm'. Very glad to know the Shiffolds and be able to picture them all there; asks to be remembered to 'Robert Egoritch' and Julian - who 'as usually' was right about the train. Looks forward to Elizabeth visiting her in Paris.
10 Broad Walk, Buxton.—Comments on the presentation of spiritual union between men and women in fiction.
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10. Broad Walk | Buxton
Oct 10. 1917.
Dear Mrs. Pethick Lawrence
Thank you for your fine letter. It’s a most awfully intricate and difficult subject, and maddening to make clear by letter. Poetry is such a different medium that I think it does not serve for analogy; and Rolland I don’t care for (unfashionable as that is). Do you know of any figure in fiction stretched to full spiritual growth, in any setting but that of tragedy. The nearest approach I know to the presentation of full spiritual union between man & woman in real art is Pierre & Natasha in Tolstoi’s War & Peace; and how very flat the ending of that great book is! The same may be said of Levin & Kitty in ‘Anna Karenin’! {1}
Henry James tried it in ‘A Portrait of a Lady’ but he left an ending which may be read either way; &, whichever way you read, it tells us nothing. Full spiritual development in happiness seems fated to be anti-climaxic, I suppose because it means Nirvana of which nothing can be said.
Some day we’ll talk about it perhaps.
Yours very sincerely
John Galsworthy
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{1} Closing inverted comma supplied.
3 Via Camerata, Florence. - Does not think he can get to the Hague except around eleven at night because of the trains, so she is not bound to come and meet him. Can go straight to his hotel, probably the Angleterre as he cannot remember how to address the people at the Twee Steden, then come to see her early next day. Glad to hear good news of her aunt again. Knows a Miss Crommelin, 'half or whole Dutch', who lives with Isabel Fry; expects she is the same family [as Bessie's friend, see 9/31]; likes her 'well enough, though she is rather flagrantly "New womanly"'. Weather bad; is reading some interesting books; not inclined to work. Berenson has been telling him about old Italian and Russian books; has been reading Tolstoy's "Katia" ["Family Happiness"; hopes their marriage will turn out better; thinks it 'an interesting book, but rather unsatisfactory'.