Sophie Cat 56 - Sophie Dupre

Clive Farahar & Sophie Dupré, XV The Green, Calne, Wilts, SN1 8DQ, Tel: (01249) 821121 40
301. LIVINGSTONE (David, 1813-1873, Scottish
Missionary & Explorer)
The final four sides of a superb ALS to the Rev. Edwin
SIDNEY (1798-1872), “But after all it is not the false or
even true philosophers whose sympathies well up to all this
world of woe. It is the men in whose hearts the love of
Christ is the controlling motive that feel for all the lost ... of
our race whether at home and abroad ...”, he continues
about his plans to “experiment with the tame buffaloes of
India - they are so like the wild ones of Africa which are not
killed by the poison of the Tsetse that I have sent over 14
which I propose to use as beasts of burden - and if they
withstand the evil effects of the bite of this insect we shall
confer a greater boon on Africa than you will on England
by ... At present no beast of burden exists there. I have also
nine Africans who were recaptured and educated at a
Government school near Bombay. They are all young, have
acquired a knowledge of some trade & are Christians. They
understand that hard work is meant ... I regret that I
neglected to send you a copy of my last work ...” but he will
find it in the Library, “My present attempt is to the North ...
away from all Portuguese ...”, 4 sides 8vo., n.p., n.d. 1866
[SD26570]£2,750
Apparently Unpublished.
Livingstone left London on 13th Aug. 1865 and arrived in
Bombay on 11th September. Here he sold his boat the Lady
Nyassa and invested the money in shares in an Indian bank which
failed a year or two afterwards. He stayed in India until January
1866. Sir Bartle Frere, governor of Bombay, gave him a passage
to Zanzibar in the Thule, a government vessel, which was to be
presented to the sultan of Zanzibar as a gift from the Bombay
government. He had brought with him from India some boys from
the Nassick Mission, and thirteen sepoys, as a nucleus for his
expedition. At Zanzibar he engaged ten Johanna men and four
natives of Nyasaland, and bought camels, buffaloes, mules, and
donkeys to experiment on their resistance to the effect of the tsetse
fly. He arrived off the Rovuma in H.M.S. Penguin on 22nd
March, but owing to difficulties of entering, landed in Mikindani
Bay on 4th April. The animals were overloaded and maltreated by
the sepoys, and bitten by the tsetse fly.
302. LIVINGSTONE (David, 1813-1873, Scottish
Missionary & Explorer)
Fine ALS to the Rev. Edwin SIDNEY (1798-1872),
thanking him for his “kindness in sending me your life of
Lord Hill. Unfortunately however it has not yet come to
hand. I could not call on you for the magnesium wire but it
can easily be got ...” apologising for his late reply as “I was
in labour bringing forth a mouse of a speech at the British
Association here ...” 2 sides 8vo., Bath, 20th September
1864, together with a fine original carte de visite photo
by H. N. King of Bath, showing him seated with his legs
crossed, next to a table with books on it, 4” x 2.5”, laid
down on conjugate blank, n.d., c. 1864 [SD26571]£1,500
Apparently Unpublished.
Livingstone’s Zambesi expedition had ended with his arrival in
England on 23 July 1864. His wife had died of fever during the
trip.
After a week of fêting in London he visited his aged mother and
his children in Scotland. In September he attended the meeting of
the British Association at Bath and read a paper on Africa. He
then went with his daughter Agnes to stay at Newstead Abbey,
where heremained there for eight months writing ‘The Zambesi
and its Tributaries’.
303. LEWIS (C. S., 1898-1963, Writer & Scholar, Author
of ‘The Screwtape Letters’)
Important unpublished ALS (‘C. S. Lewis’) to the poet Alan
Rooke, replying to a dissertation on poetry which Rook has sent
him (typed copy of pages 2 and 3 present), Lewis says that the
letter he is replying to is “the kind I like best ...” and continues to
give his opinions of various poets including Auden and
Wordsworth and his general philosophy on the art of the poet,
“The difference between Banfield and Richards is not
terminological but depends on the difference of their philosophies
which are mutually exclusive. For Banfield the mind is
immaterial and the pleasure is that of transition to new life,
closely analogous on the mental plane to sexual pleasure on the
bodily. For Richard mind means nerves, its pleasures are ...
physiological ...The suggestion that the young ought to
understand modern poetry best was really an argumentum ad
nominem or a calling of the bluff; for I have often heard the
difficulty of this poetry justified on the ground that it was born of,
and dealt with, an entirely new situation which no one over a
certain age could understand. I do not myself accept this ... I
agree that Auden at first showed poetical genius of the highest
order, which has been progressively vitiated by nonsense. This is
one of my chief grievances against modern poetolatry; when we
do get poets we corrupt them ... The attempt to use words in a
purely sensuous or emotive sequence is certainly one cause of the
obscurity ... The private senses are another and quite illegitimate
cause. Often the key to a passage in modern poetry depends on
something which only the poets friends can know ... If this goes
on it will destroy not poetry, but this poetry. Poetry itself, I
trust, will break out again from some unexpected sources ... I
don’t think it can be establishes that the poet has supernormal
‘vision’. Some have this who are not poets - Socrates, St. John of
the Cross ... Some are poets who have it not - Homer, Horace,
Dunbar, Pope, Byron, Housman ...I don’t think Wordsworth
compounded for gold ... I don’t think we know under what
conditions a man loses genius ... the only kind of poetry his talent
enabled him to write wasn’t much good for expressing the view he
now held. My chief suspected disagreement with you might be
expressed by saying ‘you do not sufficiently think of poetry as an
art or skill ... I agree that as prose takes over more and more of the
things once done by verse there will be a likelihood of poet’s
dealing less and less with anything but their own inner
experiences ... I don’t think it is the differentia of the poet that he
is ‘trying to know the unknowable’; that is the differentia of
Man. The failure is Man’s tragedy. [cf Tolkien on Beowulf. The
Monsters & the Critics ... the poet’s only business as poet is to
make poems. Poems about the failure might be quite successful
poems ... I know you are not really a poetolator, but aren’t you
infected in so far as you think of the poet as a special kind of man
instead of a man who can do a special thing ... It all began when
Wordsworth v. foolishly transferred critical attention from the
fruitful enquiry, ‘what kind of art is poetry?’ to the silly enquiry
‘what kind of man is a poet’ - silly, because the only true answer
(a poet is a man who makes poetry) throws one back on the first
question ... If Shakespeare’s late plays are bad, there may be
several simpler reasons than you suggest ...” ending by inviting
him to continue the discussion if he wishes, 4 sides 4to., n.p., 23rd
November 1937, lacking top left hand corner of second sheet
without affecting the text, [SD26072] SOLD
An extraordinary and revealing letter. Unpublished
304. LONGFELLOW (Henry Wadsworth, 1807-1882,
American Poet)
ALS toJoseph Grun in England regretting that he does not
have either “of the autographs you most desire. Insttead I
send you a few others, which perhaps may have some
interest for you ...”, 1 side 8vo, with envelope in another
hand, Cambridge, 28th November 1879 [SD26590]£325