THE LETTERS OF RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

The White Gates,
Dorking.

Aug 24 [?1946]

Dear Fritz

I was very glad to get your last letter though I was a long time answering it. I wonder if things are mentally so very different now to what they were when we were young. I believe the things we talked about at Wilkins¹ were much the same as what our followers at the modern equivalent of Wilkins say now. & that the clever young men who write in modern journals are saying exactly the same clever foolish things that the young men said in l896 and old B. Shaw says exactly what he said in the “Saturday Review” in the 90’s.
One thing however I do believe – the world (or at all events England) is not less prosperous in essential things and indeed more prosperous than in the so called “prosperous” ‘80’s and 90’s – the rich people are not so rich but the poor people are not so poor – And if the present slump (like that of 1931) means that a few millionaires are ruined and a few stock-exchange-gamblers commit suicide so much the better for us all.
My love to Marvel
Yrs
RVW

1.  A café near the Royal College of Music where VW and his friends, including Holst, Ireland and Fritz Hart, used to gather. See Kennedy, Works of Vaughan Williams, p.20, and also John Ireland’s short memoire in the Musical Times for October 1958 (See VWL3502): ‘We used to frequent a teashop in High Street Kensington, then known as Wilkins’, where we could sit for hours in animated discussions’.