Lady Craye's motives
Sir: I fear that Christopher Howse misrep- resents P.G. Wodehouse's assessment of 19th-century German philosophy in his review of A Book of Consolations (18 Jan- uary). It was Nietzche [sic], not Schopen- hauer, whom Jeeves condemned as 'funda- mentally unsound', a very understandable analysis in the light of the misuse to which his works were put in events subsequent to the 1923 publication of Carry On, Jeeves, and Wodehouse's strongly felt opinions.
Incidentally, Jeeves Takes Charge, where this remark occurs, also includes, so far as I know, the only other item of Wodehousian philosophical criticism: Bertie Wooster's justified bafflement in the face of James Martineau's Types of Ethical Theory. I think we must suspect a hint of cruelty in Lady Florence Craye's motives in advocating such a grisly volume, especially as G.E. Moore's eminently more approachable (and philosophically much more signifi- cant) Principia Ethica was then so much en vogue in the intellectual circles of which she was a part.
Andrew Aberdein
Grey College, Durham
Previous page
