[No surviving envelope]
Youtravels, trips and plansEH's 1934–5 year in Europe;b4TSE's Campden birthday weekend;e4 madeHale, Emilyvisited at Campden for TSE's birthday;g8 me happier last night – standing shivering in the mist in our mackintoshes in the dark garden – than ever before, and I am wondering how I can speak it. Your hair was blown over my mouth.1 WhatHale, EmilyTSE's love for;x2a pain of sorts;b2 a variety of feelings for a variety of people the word ‘happiness’ has to cover. Happiness in the ordinary sense is something I know nothing about; and happiness as I experienced it last night is a very queer thing. It is exquisitely painful, and one is made externally dumb and stupid by it; and the happier you make me, the more it hurts, and I cry for more pain. I was suffering in three ways at once: for myself, and more for you, and also for us, which is something different from the sum of yours and mine. So when I say I was happy and my heart sang and is still singing, IHale, Emilytakes lodgings in Oxford;g9 want you to know just what I mean by ‘happy’: becauseEnglandOxford, Oxfordshire;i2EH takes lodgings in;a3 at the moment I am aware of you sitting in cold Oxford lodgings over a feeble fire of six cool lumps of coal, pumpingHale, Irene (née Baumgras)shares EH's Oxford lodgings;a9 out your energy into Mrs. Hale who is feeling very miserable and sorry for herself, and probably with a feeling of heaviness inside and darkness in front, and a fearful weariness of the future.2 I think of all of these things, as well as of myself grinding on, and yet tonight I am still exalted.
OnHale, Emilyrelationship with TSE;w9EH strokes TSE's face;e2 Thursday night, before bedtime, when you stroked my face, it was so lovely that I could hardly endure it. And I waked in the middle of the night in that queer wideawakeness which is not like being awake in the daytime, and was restless for a long time. I had an odd sort of vision of you, which was less a vision of the moment than an explanation (though not one that can be put into words) of why you have always affected me as you have. SomeHale, EmilyTSE's love for;x2defined by TSE;c5 other women are beautiful, in various degrees, and you could be compared with them and found more beautiful, but that didn’t explain much; because you never affected me more than others merely, but quite differently. And that night I saw that theirs was from the outside in, and yours was from the inside out, and I saw your face as a kind of transparency, a materialisation of the spirit inside; and I felt that I had, from the beginning, had some kind of intuitive awareness of the spirit within, and saw not what men usually see, a picture or a statue, but a spirit made flesh. And to see this is a kind of recognition, a coming home, in which desire is modified by adoration and stillness and contentment. Now do not think that what you may please to call my ‘idealisation’ of you is something wholly remote from what you feel yourself to be. It is not at all disconnected from ordinary reality. I see you also as a perfectly human person, with a rare sense of humour (wherever you allow it to range), an unusual sensibility, an acute (not bookish or studious) intelligence – not what is ordinarily called ‘intellectual’ – held in leash by an excessive modesty which I would not really diminish, becauseChristianityvirtues heavenly and capital;e1TSE compares himself to EH in;d1 it enshrines an extraordinary humility, and that is the greatest of virtues, which I struggle fitfully to attain (being myself frightfully arrogant, disdainful, and contemptuous by nature). I see you also as a person with a sure instinct for what is morally right, and for what is in good taste. I see you as the perfect companion, quick to pass from great matters to small, and small to great, and from serious to comic and back again. So that you cannot say that I see in you the things that you do not see, instead of seeing the real human you: because I see them all. And I see, and would wish to emulate, in you, the real patrician who is not only superior to the common people, but superior to the only slightly superior people like myself who are damnably aware of being superior. For the perfect patrician doesn’t even know how much better he is than others.
I did feel, last night, more nearly united to you, the best of me with you, than ever before. I have gone through all sorts of waves and of silly phases – I know that the first thing is to understand ones faults and until one fully understands them it is of no use trying to remove them. I am bitterly sorry, if, in any letter that I wrote last year, there is really any phrase of bitterness; because I know that there is not the slightest justification for it. You always humble me. As for ‘making you conceited’ – it is only and very right that I should make you know, if I can, how one man’s life and work has been formed about you. I don’t mean that I want you to take pride in my work, because that would be to assume that my work was something to take pride in; I only mean that if you realise what you have done to me, you may realise better what you are. I wish that I could remember word for word all the wise words that you said last night. I remember my own emotion; and I remember another emotion in which I was not aware of being a separate individual from yourself.
And if I do not stop now I shall miss the post; and very likely I shall in any case.
And I am not forgetting your troubles in my own exaltation: and I do not imagine that I am helping you by saying all this. I shall write on Thursday in a more moderate vein.
1.‘Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown’—(Ash-Wednesday).
2.EH and her aunt Irene Hale were lodging at 13 Wellington Square, Oxford.
3.IreneHale, Irene (née Baumgras) Hale, née Baumgras, widow of Philip Hale, celebrated as the prolific and influential music critic of the Boston Herald. Irene Hale, who was herself an accomplished pianist, had studied at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, where she gained the Springer Gold Medal 1881, and continued with her studies in Europe under Raif and Moritz Mosckowski: she later wrote music under the name Victor Rene.