The Same to the Same
15a, Whittington Terrace, Bayswater 22.10.28
Hullo, Bungie, darling ! My God, but I’m played-out! I’ve been sticking to the accursed Life like a leech, and have finished the religious outlook. Having ground it out with incredible sweat and travail, I read it through and thought it so awful that I was in two minds about chucking the whole thing into the fire. However, I didn’t, but instead went over and joined Jim in Paris for a week, on his way home, as you saw by my postcard. We had a mildly riotous time in that cheerful city, restraining each other in a brotherly way from the more perilous kinds of exuberance, and reached home feeling fit for anything. I took up the infernal religious outlook, read it through again, and came to the conclusion that it was bloody good stuff, after all! So now I am pressing forward with shouts of joy and encouragement to the critical estimate, which is the only part of the thing I really want to write at all. Dilkes, the dear old man, to whom I explained my troubles, talked to me like fifty fathers, and said extraordinarily nice things. He thinks, by the way, that the flippant and imaginative kind of biography has had its day, having been too much imitated, and that the time has come round again for solid facts and research. “The great humility of science, in face of the infinite and valuable variety of Truth.” Isn’t that an exquisite Victorian remark? “We should pray,” said he, making me feel like a very grubby fourth-form infant, “to be delivered from cleverness, because very clever people end by finding that nothing is worth while.” So I said, rather ungraciously, that probably nothing was worth while, and he gave the funniest twinkle from under his thick eyebrows and replied: “You must not think that, or you will become a bore.”