Item 3 - Letter from W. K. Clifford to Frederick Pollock

1 folded sheet

St John’s College, Cambridge.—Discusses Pollock’s review of Morris (Part III of The Earthly Paradise). Huxley has been at Cambridge, stirring up the young Christian men. The Society voted against the extension of the ‘Cont. dis.’(?) Acts last night. Suggests that divorce should be made as easy as marriage, and that polyandry should be made respectable.

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Transcript

St John’s College, Cambridge
Sunday Mar 28/70

My dear Fred—You see I am an emigrant at last: I came to the conclusion that Trinity was played out, that John’s was to be miles a head† in both Triposes, that the chapel was much nicer, and generally that my doll is stuffed wi sawdust and I would like to go into a nunnery; {1} on all which accounts I have come here, and—as you will readily imagine—it was just the trouble and bustle and anxiety of migrating that caused my long and (under any other circumstances) disgraceful silence. I have here adopted an entirely new pen, in the hope of writing smaller (’ίδετε πηλίκοις γράμμασιν κ.τ.λ. {2}—Μεγα Βιβλιον, μ. κ.) and saying more. In particular I want to congratulate you and thank you extremely for reviewing Morris; I got a Spectator in the union, and was never so pleased, I think, with a periodical. {3} Crotch, who has read the other review, says you are the only person that has spotted the great beauty of the gradual realization in the Land East of the Sun. Only I think I like both that and the man who never laughed again rather better than you do: though this is rather for the truth of that universal story than for the beauty of its presentment. One hates interpretations, of course; but I think it means this. That a future more perfect state of mind, elysium compared with the present, is always being elaborated in the unconscious part of the brain. That sometimes this crops up into consciousness, and we live in the next century for a season, to our great and endless comfort. Then it drops back again into the great workshop, where nature goes on perfecting it until the appointed time, which may be in our day or in our childrens’, poco mi importo. {4} Only the first vision is mostly so shadowy, that we know it only by our sympathy with those who have seen it, until we are in the position of the wanderer toiling towards the final resolution.

Huxley has been here stirring up the Xtian young men. He did it very well, explaining that he was an old Pagan who could not take the trouble to affirm or deny their Xtian idea, but nevertheless was not going so perpendicularly downwards as they seemed to suppose. The Society all but unanimously voted against the extension of the Cont. dis. Acts {5} last night. I have at last got a definite line to take up: divorce must be made as easy as marriage, and polyandry respectable. Herein I speak not as a legislator but only as a prophet. Thine ever

W.K.C.

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{1} A similar phrase occurs at the end of Louisa May Alcott’s story ‘Debby’s Debut’, first published in the Atlantic Monthly, August 1863: ‘Grandma, the world is hollow; my doll is stuffed with sawdust; and I should like to go into a convent, if you please.’ But the expression may be proverbial.

{2} Cf. Galatians vi. 11: ‘Ἴδετε πηλίκοις ὑμῖν γράμμασιν ἔγραψα τῇ ἐμῇ χειρί’ (‘Ye see how large a letter I have written unto you with mine own hand’).

{3} The reference is to Pollock’s unsigned review of the third part of William Morris's Earthly Paradise (1870), in the Spectator, No. 2176 (w/e 12 March 1870), pp. 332–4. The following extract (p. 333) will explain some of the subsequent allusions:

'Certainly the path Mr. Morris has chosen has dangers as well as delights peculiar to itself; it is difficult in avoiding sharpness, excess of speed, and concentration, not to fall at times into a strain that wearies by very softness. We confess to certain misgivings about “The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon.” It is a region almost too dreamy and misty for living men to walk in; we lose ourselves in rambling melodies, and are oppressed with the vagueness of everlasting twilight. Yet Mr. Morris has to a great extent foreseen and disarmed this objection; for with a true instinct he has set forth this tale, and this alone, in the fashion of a dream; so that what might have been otherwise reproached as extravagant becomes in this place just and artistic. Whether or not this visionary show is exactly what we like best, we must admit that it is what we had to expect. A gradual change in the dream is finely conceived; the sleeper twice wakes and sleeps again, and whereas he began with dreaming of the tale as told by another, he dreams next that he is telling it himself, and in his third sleep it is no more a tale, but his own life. A singularly beautiful Christmas Carol is introduced (p. 86), and pleasantly relieves the rather monotonous flow of the story. It is too long to extract, and moreover we have no mind to save readers the trouble, or rather deprive them of the pleasure, of looking for it in the book. We know not if the shepherds’ “news of a fair and a marvellous thing” has been retold by any modern poet with such a sweet antique simplicity.
Another comparatively weak portion of this volume is the story of “The Man who never laughed again.” It fails to satisfy us much in the same way as the dream-piece; there is a similar want of substance and variety; a strange feeling, after we have heard the story out, that we cannot tell what it was all about. It is curious that the themes of these two poems are very much alike, though they seem to have come from sources widely apart, and differ in local colouring and catastrophe. In each case we have a dweller on the earth born away to a cloudland of love and pleasure, and driven back to the common world, and losing his love, by his own perversity; and in each case we grow rather impatient of his selfish longings. Mr. Morris’s characters, as we have said, are not capable of enlisting any strong or exclusive personal sympathy; rather it is essential to his method to prevent them from doing so. These solitary transports of desire and despair, relieved by no other interest, are too much for a shadow, and too little for a living soul.'

{4} ‘It matters little to me’ (Italian).

{5} ‘Cont. dis.’: reading and meaning uncertain.

† Sic.