John Munting to Elizabeth Drake
15a, Whittington Terrace 19.10.28
Damn it all, yes, Bungie—I suppose you are right. Our ideas are always ahead of our actions, or rather, askew to them, and we move lopsided, like a knight on a chessboard. We get somewhere, even if it isn’t the place we thought we were aiming for. By the time the next generation has come along, the ideas which were new and strange to us have become part of its habitual commonplace. It goes straight along them, even when it imagines it is rebelling against them.
And after all, this business of imagining that one is one kind of thing and being actually another—we all do it, all the time, so why shouldn’t whole nations and periods do it? Have you read J. D. Beresford’s Writing Aloud , by the way? It is enormously fascinating, and I delight in the bit where he tells how, in his callow youth, he had a “passionate impulse” to “save” a young prostitute he had talked to, and then prayed desperately to be delivered from the sin of hypocrisy and be made single-hearted and all that—only to be delighted, later on in life, with the discovery that he was “not one person but fifty.” One imagines—one dramatises oneself into the belief that one is going one way, and lo and behold! the path “gives itself a little shake” like the one in Alice and one finds oneself walking at the front door again.
Our friend Mrs. Harrison is a perfect example of this dramatisation business—and is quite capable of dramatising herself in two totally inconsistent directions at once, rather like the Victorian age. Any attitude that appeals to her sense of the picturesque she appropriates instantly, and, I really believe, with perfect sincerity. If she reads a “piece