I am very fond of Evelyn Waugh’s memoir, A Little Learning. I like its careful, measured tones, and its detachment. Two of my favourite passages in it, though, were not written by Waugh himself, but come from letters he received from his friend and mentor Francis Crease, an eccentric recluse who tutored him in calligraphy. The first passage that struck me is about the love of beauty in life as well as in art:
What I have in mind is the hope that you, like so many others of intelligence, may not run after definitions of Art and Beauty and the like, feeling the definition and failing to feel the Beauty itself as it approaches on an evening like this evening. I can think of an Oxford friend at this moment who feels nature described in a sonnet and sitting in his arm-chair, but seems to fail in the open air. And again I remember a Don at Oxford learned in Greek gems telling me how all the other Dons would be interested in curious knowledge and facts about any gem, but its beauty always, or nearly always escaped them.
No Flemish painter of the seventeenth century or English school of the nineteenth could hope to convey more than a suggestion of the visionary splendour of this evening.
Another passage from a letter by Mr Crease, on friendship, also made a strong impression on me; it was written in response to a complaint by Waugh that he lacked any sense of purpose in his life:
Since I first read that, I’ve tried to remind myself in moments of crisis with friends that I need a “thorn in my side” rather than an “echo”. Of course, it doesn’t do to turn it the other way around and think overmuch about ways to become a thorn in the side to one’s friends. Best to let this perception of you develop in them naturally, as it almost certainly will, over time.
By Alias Clio
This evening while you were in Chapel was one of extraordinary splendour, and I wished you also might have been touched by it. For myself, the shadows of the prison house have fallen long ago, but now and again some shape of beauty lifts the shadow for a time. It is so much easier to feel one could write “Resentment Poems” than “Songs of Exuberance”; I hope it may never be so with you.
What you ask today to have, no one has completely and indeed many of the best only have sufficient light for the day or the nearest duty. You will not be humble - humility seldom appeals to youth — but nothing less will do…You must have sufficient light to know of the day of small things that surround you when you are at School or at home. If you despise them darkness will come not light. It is only by doing them that more light will come that is any true light. Success and conceit close the windows. You have more light than most, far more. What is the matter is impatience nothing more or less — I can be as direct as you sometimes and you don’t like it so much in others as in yourself — but it is good for you. You want a friend who is a thorn in the flesh not an echo. I shall disappoint you in many things — Alas! that it must be so — but in this I will not disappoint you. [Emphasis mine]