Lightness again with Sydney Smith’s 20 witty tips for Lady Georgiana Morpeth who is out of spirits (‘Try cool baths’) and the sweet fresh-air of Kilvert’s Diary where he describes in ‘A Pleasant Day’ the sort of day when nothing really happens but you remember it as perfect (‘There was a ceaseless singing of larks’). And Charles Wesley’s triumphant hymn, ‘Forth in Thy Name, O Lord, I Go’ which makes you feel unconquerable.
Are we self-indulgent in wanting comfort? ‘No, we are right to look for it,’ says kind Thomas à Kempis, simply translated by Helen Waddell of Mediaeval Latin Lyrics. ‘We are delighted to be comforted by something. Man finds it hard to doff the garment of himself.’ It’s surprising that Howse hasn’t used more of the words of Christ on the subject.
Howse seems to have grown tired at the end of his learned introduction to this book. He says that finally literature and art can’t give comfort unless the spirit of them is right. Yet, higher up the page he has quoted the poet P. J. Kavanagh as saying that good writing is a consolation in itself. And if it is true literature and truly art, surely the spirit is always right?
And, though Howse doesn’t say so, delicious comfort can come from the trivial and the daft. Is it in Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings that the tired mother says, ‘Sometimes you just gotta go to the pictures’?
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