BR TO OTTOLINE MORRELL, [2 MAY 1911]
BRACERS 17118. ALS. Morrell papers #50, Texas, SLBR 1: #167
Edited by N. Griffin. Proofread by K. Blackwell et al.

<Letterhead>
Trinity College,
Cambridge.1^, 2
Tuesday evg.

My Dearest

I dare say you will have heard by this time that Mrs Smith died yesterday. I found a telegram and a letter from Alys waiting for me when I arrived. Later. I was interrupted at this point, and now I have your letter with Logan’s. I wired to Alys to say I would come to Iffley3 unless she wished otherwise, but she sent the enclosed reply, so I am here. I sent word I would not dine out, as it seemed more proper. I believe Mrs Smith improved greatly her last years — I only saw her about twice a year latterly. But when she was more vigorous she was terrible. I have never seen Logan so upset as he was by her heartlessness at her husband’s funeral. His last wish was that £5 should be given to the gardener, but she refused point blank, and the rest of us had to make up the sum — not a large one after all.

My brother did not come to breakfast, but at 9 o’clock chests of books from Bagley Wood began coming, and men like Jybus [?]ain the Arabian Nights kept bringing more and more, and spreading them on the floor till there was no room to move. So I went out into the town and bought a bookcase and began feverishly putting them in. The floor is still littered with them, but some order begins to appear. I am choosing out those I am keeping — the rest will go to Alys. Alys will be as well off as I am now, which solves all difficulties as to money. It is a comfort, for I could not help sympathizing with her in her refusal to take money from me now, and yet if she didn’t it was intolerable.

In the afternoon I had to go to Newnham to give help to my Danish lady Miss Lehmann4 who comes to my lectures and is a bit puzzled. I somehow missed her for a long time, which resulted in my having a talk with Miss Harrison meanwhile.

The very high person who lives above me, and is said to confess undergraduates, came in and offered to help with my books. I was much touched, but refused. Everybody I meet greets me with the question “why were you not at the meeting?” and each time it is a different meeting. Really the intellectual life here is something dreadful.

I have just had a long interruption from the senior tutor, who tells me the Council would like my rooms for A.E. Housman5 (the Shropshire Lad) but wished I would say I should not mind moving. However, I should mind, so I said so, and the Council will discuss the whole matter again. There is something curiously petty about life in a community. We all enjoy small advantages which others covet, and there is a tendency to petty spite, just because it is often people’s duty to be unpleasant. I think all forms of communism develop the competitive instinct in bad ways. This is a paradox, but true.

Tomorrow morning a Scotch pupil named Laird6 is coming to argue with me. He is very superior, and more apt to impart instruction than to receive it. But apart from his Scotchness he is all right.

My floor is still littered with books, which makes me uncomfortable. I can’t bear a piggery — it absorbs all my thoughts. The first interruption I had in writing this letter was from my Russian, Chrouschoff, who is clever but slack, and now thinks he has a bad heart and can’t work, tho’ his Tripos comes in a few weeks.7 He began a tale of woe, and I had to laugh at him just as much as I thought he could stand. He is a little afraid of me, which is as well. Then I had a visit from the Secretary of the “Heretics”,8 the body my brother was talking to last night — an energetic person who reads everything and has something mildly intelligent to say about everything, but has no real brains and no quality at all, tho’ he is nice and as good as gold. I talked to him about Shaw’s play,9 and he burst out against Amber Reeves10 — he is a Fabian, and feels the nuisance she has been. I tried to deflect his anger onto Wells, not wholly successfully. It is a funny world here — so unreal, and yet not unimportant. But all the topics are unreal. The other night I went to see Bevan, the Professor of Arabic,11 whom I like and who likes me. We talked about the Gnostics, St. John’s Gospel, Revelations, Apocalypses generally — all kinds of remote things; and not one word of reality did either of us breathe.

Darling, I don’t think you very dumb — I know your thoughts now often when you don’t speak, and feelings come out without words. Dearest, my spirit is very far from being pure gold, tho’ I think when I am with you it is pure gold — but that is because of what you are. Yes, I do feel what you do when we kiss — a merging of all our being. It is utterly untrue that you are small compared to me — you must not think it. It is only that I have a gift of words, which sometimes I am half ashamed of. It has sometimes abandoned me these last weeks — it did when I had just left Studland. I should be sorry if nothing could make me dumb.

My Dearest, I am already hungering for you — other things seem so trivial, and other people have no quality. One seems to see all round them so easily. And rest and peace are with you — I had not imagined there was such peace this side of the grave. I have longed for peace, and been driven on and on by my inward demon — always seeking, never finding — till now at last the demon turns out to have been a guardian angel, because he has led me to you, and now I have found what I sought through all the years of weariness and struggle. Peace is the inmost heart of my love — passion is not, tho’ it is necessary to the peace. I am thankful that my soul has remained pure and kept its fierce worship of the good through the years, because now I can give it all to you — every bit of good that I have preserved is something added to the strength and beauty of my love, and something to help in knowing your soul and loving it.

Dearest this must be posted or you won’t get it by the first post. I love you I love you I love you. There is nothing else — Goodnight.

Your
B.

• 1

  [document] Document 000050. Proofread against a colour scan of the original.

• 2

  [envelope] ??.

• 3

  Iffley Where Alys’s mother had lived with Logan.

• 4

  Miss Lehmann She was, presumably, a Newnham student, but can’t otherwise be identified.

• 5

  A.E. Housman A.E. Housman (1859–1936) the poet, best known for his early collection of poems, A Shropshire Lad (1896), was also a Fellow of Trinity and the Professor of Latin at Cambridge.

• 6

  Laird John Laird (1887–1946). He had quite a distinguished career as a philosopher, ending up as Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen. In 1910–11 BR regarded him as the most promising student in his class.

• 7

  Chrouschoff … his Tripos comes in a few weeks His fears may have been genuine, for his name does not appear on the Tripos list published later that year.

• 8

  Secretary of the “Heretics” Charles Kay Ogden (1889–1957), a linguist with diverse intellectual interests and accomplishments, at the time a classics student at Cambridge. He went on to edit the Cambridge Magazine (1912–23) but is best known as the originator of Basic English, to which he devoted most of his efforts after 1927. The Heretics were a Cambridge society for the discussion of religious topics.

• 9

  Shaw’s play Probably Fanny’s First Play, which had opened at the Adelphi in London two weeks earlier.

• 10

  Amber Reeves H.G. Wells’s affair with a young Fabian, Amber Reeves, had exercised the Fabians throughout the autumn of 1909. In April 1909, when he learnt that Reeves was pregnant, Wells had left his wife and gone with Reeves to France. He was unable to settle there, however, and returned to Britain with Reeves at the end of the summer. Neither Reeves nor Wells made much attempt to conceal the affair and the Fabians, fearing a public scandal, made strenuous efforts to get Wells to renounce Reeves. The public scandal broke when Wells published Ann Veronica in October 1909: the main character was modelled on Reeves and the book enraged the guardians of public morality, who wanted it banned. At last, after the harm was done, Wells agreed not to see Reeves for two years.

• 11

  Bevan, the Professor of Arabic Anthony Ashley Bevan (1859–1933), Professor of Arabic at Cambridge from 1893 to 1933. He was an important Arabist and got on well with BR.

Textual Notes

• a

  [?] BR's query.