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[G.M. Trevelyan]
Hallington Hall, Newcastle-on-Tyne.
Jan. 7. 1937
Dear John
It was extraordinarily good of you to send me such a nice long letter in the middle of all your work. I was delighted to have it. It gave to Janet & me a real picture of your new life and the success you are making of it as we all knew you would. Also your family news interested us much. I do hope John's change of continent will turn out all for the good in the end, tho I am sorry at the cause of it.
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My Humphrey's New England wife is a charmer and the very best type of American. We are all in love with her. They have come to live this side and he is on the look out for a job as German literature lecturer in a British University. They have been here for Xmas and are now back to Germany for his Goethe studies. He is writing a book on Goethe and the Ancients.
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I was deeply interested in what you wrote about the Imperial Cabinet sitting together tho' at the different ends of the earth.
Yes, the Crisis has ended to the advantage of all, as we feel. It was indeed a tooth to have out, but it is out.
I am so glad you feel as you do about the hopeful future of Canada, and what you write of it interests me greatly.
Here, we are doing well enough in most ways, but we live under the oppressive cloud of fear of European explosion. The cloud of anxiety is worse than it was before 1914; let us pray that if hopes were dupes, fears may be liars.
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2.
Hallington Hall, Newcastle-on-Tyne.
Telephone: Whittington 15. Station: Corbridge, 8 Miles.
I enjoyed your Island of Sheep immensely—we all did. It is the best of those that you have written for some years. I enjoyed every word and was sorry when it was over. I have also been rereading your Walter Scott—how very good it is. I have beeen rereading it because I have undertaken to give the address as President of the Scott Club at Edinburgh next November, so I am soaking in him again. I shall stick to the theme of his revolutionary
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effect on the world's conception of history and the past, eschewing literary and biographical criticism.
I wish his bad stuff covered a smaller area. was not so spacious and so bad. I feel it more than I did, and admire Stevenson's avoidance of those longueurs the more. But Scott fished the moon up and his best is the best. But O how Flora bores me in Waverley, how bad half even of Redgauntlet is. But all you have written of him is perfectly and abundantly true.
My Grey is coming out on March 1. I have told them to send you a copy. I don't know whether Ll G. will do battle on it. He is a formidable antagonist but his case v. Grey is very bad
[written in left margin]
much worse than his case against the soldiers. Yrs ever, G.M. Trevelyan
