2110-4-10-25

[ST - Gordon Bottomely Play wright & poet.]

The Sheiling, Silverdale, Carnforth.

Telephone, Silverdale 11.

1st November 1926

Dear Colonel Buchan,

I had the keenest kind of pleasure in receiving your book, which I value; and I am sorry I have been so ungraciously long in acknowledging it. I have been away from home, and I have been hampered by one of the periodic earthquakes with which my perverse lung provides me, and I was resolute that I would read "Homilies and Recreations" first: so I hope you can regard me indulgently, and that you will believe I thank you sincerely for the book and its inscription.

The days I have spent on it have been happy ones, and the pleasures of reading it have also been keen and various too. I remembered the T.L.S. leader on Lord Balfour

[margin] Mannering is good enough for Jane Austen to have done.

and I was pleased to know it yours: "Mombasa and Quiloa and Melind" brought back July and the New Schools at Oxford agreeably: but, more than my enjoyment of every essay, I enjoyed your way of applying the sense of the great world of affairs to the cultural and aesthetic questions which always tend to monopolise my waking thoughts. Unless the poets and painters and other creators justify themselves by that standard which is outside of them they will not be permanently endurable (in either sense); and it is good and illuminating (and personally, I have found it pleasurable too) for such people as I to be faced with it, as you have faced us, and to have it take it into account.

I come back with real affection, however, to your most admirable valuation of Scott and your rebuttal of Carlyle's unjust judgment which express my feelings for me; and to your literally entrancing account of the literature of Tweeddale. I had a Scots grandfather; and, though his stock came somewhere from the Back o'Bennachie (as you may have guessed from my Christian name), such a piece of writing as your "Tweed-dale" essay, with its sense everywhere of song and story rooted in a county-side, can give me unmistakeable nostalgia.

And another pleasure you have given me - which is to find the supreme enchanters of my youth, Morris and Rossetti, judged from your point of view as my affection longs to have them judged.

Morris, especially, is very much under a cloud with the moderns (whose standpoint you have assessed deliciously in another essay). He seems to me to have hampered his poetry with disproportioned narrative which in the end he recognised could be carried out better in prose.

and I believe that if his complete poems of all classes except narrative could be issued in a single volume he would emerge as a very considerable lyric and elegiac poet (and dramatic poet, too, if we consider Sir Peter Harpdon and that amazing half-finished series of "Scenes From The Fall of Troy", which seems to me to be pretty near the high-water mark of Victorian poetry), and would soon be rehabilitated.

I urged this on Miss Morris some years ago, and she agreed: but she said she was sure the sales of the present volumes were not good enough to encourage Messrs. Longmans to such a new venture. I believe, though, that such a single volume of the Shorter Poems of W.M. would stimulate the sales of the older volumes.

I did not mean to run on like this: you will be bored by now. Excuse me and believe me to be, with sincere thanks and very kind regards,

Yours most truly

Gordon Bottomley

P.S. I am sorry: but I cannot stop here! I wanted to say that I feel Scott has been underrated as a novelist of manners. My wife and I were reading Guy Mannering aloud a while ago, and we agreed that Julia