You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
ROBIN No woman, even one as sensitive as Alice, will understand that life cannot be the same for a man who has been in fighting. I remember the night when the enemy front was red with fire. I couldn't believe it was the enemy destroying their ammunition. Retreat and disaster I was familiar with; victory not – and it came too late. I had changed.
PAUL The ‘Church’ itself has changed. I am thinking of people who hold beliefs with religious intensity.
ROBIN Homer's Greeks, for example?
PAUL Probably, though I don't know those beliefs; I can conjecture only. When I speak of the Iliad I refer to a description of religious beliefs, or a dramatic story, or again –
ROBIN A particularly loathsome and difficult language that I hated, but which was alleged by my teacher to be very beautiful.
ROLAND Don't you think it is? I think so now, but I daresay I would have agreed with you when I was learning Greek.
PAUL Today members of, say, the Christian Church might consider the Iliad was a horrid religion – if they thought it a religion at all.
ROLAND Yet people still read the Iliad.
P.A. What do we mean by a simple word like ‘read‘? As Ruskin pointed out, one could have a knowledge of the alphabet, vocabulary and grammatical discipline and yet might not think thought through.
ROLAND There was once a game in which if you combined certain musical elements in accordance with the stated rules, in obedience to the fall of a throw of dice, the result when recorded through musical notation was a ‘Bach’, or ‘Mozart’, or ‘Beethoven’ air.