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The Gypsy   1   Issue:: 1  1935  Page: 12
 
 Some Letters of Richard Middleton
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Some Letters of Richard Middleton

7 Blackfriars Road.

DEAR,

After leaving you I met three of my dear dreamy creatures and we had a pleasant walk. . . . My garland of Lily’s1 proceeds apace and contains, I know, some good lines. But I wonder whether I love Lily or youth, or is it only compassion for the
little boy I never was that moves me? The doubt does not prevent me from writing good verses. I want to love something or other anyhow: love kills the ego with a surfeit of egoism, and I appreciate but do not like mine. Elegy on an ego, dead of the springtime. Yet I was sorry when I sought to bury it kittenwise under the vine. It is no use muddling our egos—we must try and hatch them into little bare-bottomed Cupids by means of the incubator of love. Columbus cracked his at one end and so they named America after somebody else, a circumstance which on reflection seems fortunate for Columbus.

As you see I am cheerful and I rejoice that it takes as little to make me happy as it does to make me suicidal. It is not everyone who can say that, remarked Dorothy Wesley,2 and agreeing with that wise lady, I can afford to ignore Dolly Shaw’s observations about to-morrow and the future of the race. . . .

Yrs,

Richard Middleton
(Amateur of Love).

______


1 In 1908, when this letter was written, M. had in contemplation a volume of poems, inspired mainly by a young actress and to be called Dust of Dreams. Most of the pieces are incorporated in the published Poems and Songs.

2 It was a favourite joke of his that Dorothy Wordsworth wrote the little that is good of her father’s poetry; subsequently other writers had “Dorothy” daughters invented for them. Apropos of Shaw a parody of M.’s is extant:

“Bernard, Bernard, laugh your girlish laughter,
Then the moment after, sneer your girlish sneer.”
The Gypsy   1   Issue:: 1  1935  Page: 13
 
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Wimbledon, Thursday, Dec. 16th, 1909.

Dear,
It’s a long time since I wrote you a letter, but to-day’s a grey day and I’m alone at home, and I can’t work or read or sleep, so I must e’en fall to an art for which I am little suited. Conceive me if you will, the most bloodless of entymologists chasing an unhappy beetle in order to transfix it with a pin. Allow that my pen is the pin, and that it is possible for a man to double the parts of beetle and entymologist (which I doubt!). “My God,” said the archbishop, hastily unbuttoning his gaiters, “the man must be mad!” " There or thereabouts,” replied the Bible- chewer calmly. “But God made me, your grace.” “Tut,” said the archbishop testily. “Tut!” And I for one consider that the archbishop was justified. God has no patience with people who chew their own Bibles. None the less I betake me to the pin. . . .

Not that there is anything to be said. You and I have said all the wise things possible about ourselves years ago! But it is possible though not probable that your mood may extend to Friday morning and in that case my letter may serve to initiate you into another. Of course what is the matter with both you and myself is that we are selfish almost to genius (that’s why we get on so well together), and therefore when our tragic moments come, we feel that both their causes and their manifestations are annoyingly disproportionate to life as a whole. . . . And the drawback of being selfish, individual is a prettier word, lies in this: that the person of individuality(=selfishness) derives no pleasure from his own defeats because he realises that after all they are only trumpery affairs. Christ could endure his crucifixion because all humanity was crucified with him. You and I must suffer alone; it is the price of our super-humanity. This may explain the degree but not the cause of your torments, but even for that I can see a reason. Up to the spring of this year your life has been that of a contemplative man. . . . Then, suddenly, you fling yourself into a life that presented you with a series of emotional climaxes of every kind and degree. You are now suffering from the consequent emotional anti-climax, and not unnaturally you turn longing eyes on the old contemplative life, and again not unnaturally you find it difficult to get back to. I have never been a contemplative man myself and I don’t know whether that manner
The Gypsy   1   Issue:: 1  1935  Page: 14
 
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of life is possible for the man who has learnt to like violent emotional stimulants or not. For my part I am content to accept my destiny and curse it. You may fare better.
Yours ever,

Richard.

10 Rue de Joncker,
Brussels,
Friday, 28-4-11.

Dear,

. . . For £1.50 I buy half-a-kilogramme or eighteen ounces of Appleterre, which is a Belgian tobacco and better for pipes than Semois. I store this up in Waverley Mixture tins and regard the result with simple pride. I still live in our palatial room, and as I think a change of environment is good for artists, I write at all the different tables in turn. On the same principle I try experiments with different kinds of paper and penholders, and if I only had the necessary dexterity I believe I could write a fine article with my toes.

The Academy have sent me Benson’s book on Ruskin, and " Contemporary Belgian Poetry” in the Canterbury Poets. The former is mere Benson, but if you want a thrill for a shilling I I advise you to procure the latter book. The translator is like all other translators of lyric poetry, but at least he has not tried to spare our blushes, and the poems of Paul Gerardy, of Iwan Gilkin and of Verhaeren made a Puritan-bound poet of England sick with envy. ... I should think Verhaeren has said all you feel about Flemish art, but I have doubts as to the greatness of his poetry qua poetry.

I think I have done a pretty good article on Stevenson, though I shall return to the charge when the letters are published. He is an elusive person to write about which makes it interesting.

The Book is quite simply

The Autobiography of a Young Man1

Sections 1, 2, 3. My childhood compiled from articles already written for different papers.
Section 4. The Drama of Youth.
Section 5. The New Boy (half written); and
Section 6. The Choice of a Career, wholly conceived, will deal with my life and development at school.
_____

1 The book was not finished.” The New Boy” and “A Drama of Youth” are to be found in “The Ghost Ship.”
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Section 7. The Office, which nobody has done properly before. After that there are a few sections of Blackfriars, Raynes Park, St Albans, doing the life of an artist from within, and a final section at Brussels with philosophies on the whole business and a prophecy of my new birth. And of course there will be a Preface!
Here’s a book I think I can write, and I mean to take my time over it, and make it as good as The Drama of Youth, which is good whatever the damned critics are saying. Two or three at least of the sections should do for Harrison, if he cares to have them, as they will all be more or less complete in themselves, but the artist business done quite frankly will be great fun anyhow. Love I mean to leave out altogether if I possibly can, because I won’t accept their damned convention. It has helped me to make a mess of things sometimes but I don’t know that it has had any great spiritual influence on my life. I shall find out as I go whether it is possible to ignore it. It will make the book stronger if I can. Although I myself am to be the only villain of the piece, I shall curl up the bourgeois somewhere in it. We must all do that when we have a chance. . . .

Go on and prosper, but don’t pay too heavily for your lyrics, young man. . . . Yours ever,
Richard.

Bruxelles,
Wednesday Night, Nov. 15, 1911.1

Dear,

Thank you for your letter which was a good one. I liked Ellis’s poem too, though after all I wish he would tidy up his metres. You are quite right to dance in the sun while it lasts, that is the only philosophy for a rational hedonist. “No Arcadia is ever wholly lost,” I wrote in the hours of my pride, and I believe it still. But mine has suffered a sea-change and I can no longer recognise it as being an Arcadia. I am busy seeing my life in perspective and I don’t like it; the moments may have sometimes been good, but the years are so many crimes. I have waited too much and acted too little. I have not the pluck to start work when I think how little I have done. But this is no new mood, it is only a recurrence, and it seems to be part of the mockery of life that our very moments of despair are only echoes of other moments that have gone before and that we have almost forgotten. When
_____

1 This letter was written a fortnight before M. died.
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I think of these things I do not wish that I were dead: I wish that I had never lived.

I, I, I, sixteen times says the arithmetician. Indeed it is not hard to put a name to my disease: but one man is an egoist just as another is a negro, and the Ethiopian changes his skin more easily than the egoist gets rid of his heavy bundle of eggs. We shall continue our cackling till the day of judgment. But it is in revulsion from this task that I have lately developed the Dickensian sentimentality that you refer to in your letter. I feel drawn to young children, and people who are simple and kindly and not too clever. They give me a glimpse of the life that I have missed in my passionate search for enjoyment. ... It is strange how my sorrows have always been more creditable than my joys. And now I will not or perhaps cannot move my little finger to rise above the mud that chokes me. . . .

You must not think that I afflict humanity with these sombre visions. You are the only person to whom I write, I have left letters unanswered from and and . . . because

they all expect me to be cheerful and I have not the energy to send them fictions. To the folk about me I turn a cheerful countenance, although I feel like a man who is laughing in the mouth of a well. They are shadows, and sometimes I could murder a few of them for believing that I am a shadow too. God Almighty, they talked of socialism to-day at lunch, till I broke out and told them it was the dirtiest and meanest creed that man had hit on; as they were all defending it they thought I was rude. Yet what is it but a crawling scheme to outwit Darwinism and the survival of the fittest? I ought to feel compassion for these affronted ghosts, but they drive me to arrogance just when I want to feel humble. Madmen all. . . .

As for England I don’t know what to say.1 I daren’t look a day ahead for everything seems absolutely hopeless unless I can get back to work. I have a story in my head called " The Flapper” for Austin Harrison—it’s about Lily—but when shall I be able to write it? And what shall I do meanwhile if I can’t get back the trick of writing articles. The Noise of Life isn’t it? When the Academy sends their cheque I can struggle on somehow to the tenth of next month, if nothing terrible happens in the meanwhile. After that all is a blank like the mind of

Yours ever,

Silas Taylor Comberbatch.
_____

1 Alarmed by the gloom of his letters at this period, I had written begging him to come back to England.