LANKESTER, Sir Edwin Ray (1847-1929). Zoologist.
Fine series of eight Autograph Letters Signed to Mrs Lucy Clifford (née Lane, 1846-1929, writer), 33 pages 8vo with two envelopes, 1905-?1927. The first letter is addressed to 'Dear Mrs Clifford' but the remainder, starting in 1916 are addresssed 'Dear P.L.'and are long and extremeley revealing.
In September 1916 Lankester discusses the cinema film coverage of the battle of the Somme, and derides the notion that such graphic moving images are in any way useful or educational.

'... I remember hearing Russell's account of the battle of the Alma - read to me in 1855 & being nearly sick with his description of a wounded man's brains oozing out of his head as he stooped to drink. No photograph - with its dull stupid brown tint over everything & want of effective light & shade as in all these cinema-pictures - can equal the intensity and if the writer is (as few are) both honest & capable - the veracity & presentation of truth. ...' [9 September 1916]
'... I do not believe that the supposed unimaginative crowd can be infused with any really sound or valuable feeling by the sight of life-true films of men being shot - of others dying from wounds & of heaps of dead bodies. If they are not stirred by such articles as I have read today by Philip Gibbs in the Chronicle - nothing can stir them. ...' [18 September 1916]
'... Our biggest hope is in America - and our only possible aim - the destruction of the military imperialism of German - still a tremendous task. ...' [7 March 1917]

Lankester also discusses literature, evidently having mistaken Mrs Clifford as the author of a recent book:

'I feel somehow that you ought to have written 'Christine' and that it does not really express 'Elizabeth' Lady Russell. ... as it contained no spiteful & malicious episodes it could not be by Elizabeth & must be by you. I can't imagine how union with that rather absurd person Earl Russell can have purged Elizabeth of her ill-natured tendency. ...' [7 March 1917]
'... H.G. Wells sent me his book & I have read it. It is I think splendid - a wonderful performance. It is of course not intended to be a novel, but just a few characters are brought in as 'types' to carry his wonderful effusion on human stupidity & the purpose of & necessity for education - of a far better & more serious kind than any ordinary person gets. ...' [24 September ?1918]

He is also remarkably frank about his own life:

'... You say a husband must be both affectionate & a pal. I agree & I could have been both. But for me (it seemed) that a wife must have both beauty and brains (including character) and I adore both and never found them united in one woman. I saw that I should be miserable with beauty without brains or with brains without beauty. I sought the impossible or at any rate the very rare - and so I fell between 'two stool' - rude to call them 'stools' - but you will understand. En attendant I saw & enjoyed both - in separate individuals. No right to do so, I know. Risky audacious ?program but so it was. ...' [26 September 1918]

Together with a few other letters to Mrs Clifford from Sir John Lubbock (1) and Lady Lubbock (2) ('There is a very large American spider addressed to John, lying at the New York post office & the officials won't send it! it is suppposed to be extremely poisonous').
[No: 21494]