Primary tabs
Transcription
[Page 141]
December 1
and lively beauty: of sordidness made perfect by wounderful love, of terrible tragedy. It is neither a moral nor an immoral book: it is a superbly well written book of consummate art.
I will place it with Sadler's "Hyssop", and McKenzie's "Sinister Street": with Hardy's "Jude" and Meredith's "Ordeal of Richard Feveral".
157.
Mail today – from T.B.C., Tree's "Nothing Matters" and Joseph Conrad's The Shadow Line: two books for withdrawing from T.B.C. Library.
Posted "Sacrifice" & "Good Friday".
158.
Today I have been happy. .. Tommy B. out of emery paper, so no steelwork of harness to be polished…away then from the camp with Cecil Robert's "26 Poems" – to the hills and across the valleys.. to a quaint tiny cottaged village – strung closely by the wooding road, a doll house architecture, each individual cottage primitative two windowed and low door'd front of white, shuttered brown or green an..short stocky Picardian girls, brownly rich of colour, pleasant faced and smiling. And oh, the pagans: three estaminets and no church.
Coffee and curacao – though liquers sold against order of French government.. a long talk – sad French surely – with Myne Host, a peasant by de Chavannes.. two of his sons dead of the war, his admiration for the Frenchman, for the Australian and for all the Colonials, French and English… a proud Mother shewed me large framed enlargements of two sons.… and photograph of surely all the Picardian soldiers. Then more Coffee and Curacao – so to a second estaminet for [indecipherable] bread butter and lovely sweet apple jelly placed by my coffee with "Voila! Monsieur!" Back then to Isques, through thin haze wind-driven rain…all the mists of the world over the valley, greyness everywhere.
This afternoon yarning with Frank D. and from him Speed's 'Science of Drawing': a good book of theory and one to read later fully and sincerely… Frank shortly sending it home, copied from one of its illustrations