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10 Broad Walk, Buxton.—Comments on the presentation of spiritual union between men and women in fiction.

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Transcript

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.

Royal Observatory Greenwich - As far as GA remembers, WW quoted accurately from him concerning the old eclipses: 'and I was certainly correct: the only point on which change could be suspected (a point of no interest to the chronology) being that in the first paper I had left open the passage of Agathocles to the North or South of Sicily, inclining however to the North, but in the second paper I decide on the South'. There was some quibbling about another eclipse 'computed only from [Buachkardt's] elements, and is so stated in my first paper. It has since been computed with Hansen's elements (nearly as was described for Buackhardt's) far north of the sea of Azores. If this is the matter of which you were thinking I will send a note on it to the Athenaeum'. Were the quarrels at the BAAS meeting of 1857 or 1856?.