Don’t feel you must write in answer to this; not till you have a little time. But when you do next write, would you tell me how long this letter took, I should rather like to get a kind of average on this; of course they vary immensely, according to what boats go when.
I have finished The Vision of God, which is enormous, and full of interesting things. Now reading the 1948 Bampton Lectures, by Dr. Austin Farrer—The Glass of Vision. Interesting, but I don’t quite always follow his thought. I shall try again for Fr. Andrew.
Did you mean by the S.S.J.E. Office Book, Hours of Prayer, which I bought? Yes, it is a little complicated to follow. But I use it.
I do hope you are well, and your eyes better.
Yours affectionately,
R.M.
20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1
16th April, 1951
Dear Father,
Such a lovely surprise to see your air paper on the mat this morning, all the nicer because I had with a noble gesture committed us both to the deep, and it felt some time since I had had a letter. And such a good letter, too. Further, by a coincidence arrived also on the mat at the same moment your large sea envelope posted 30th March; opening it was like unpacking a particularly nice hamper of assorted things. The Note Book: what a good idea! I have read it all, and shall give it more detailed attention later. I had already been compiling an office out of Matins and Evensong (P[rayer] B[ook]) on the scheme you suggested, and find it a good one. I don’t usually read the 1st lesson, only the 2nd. Do you think that a pity? Perhaps I should sometimes read the ist, when it is v.g. But one doesn’t always want the O[ld] T[estament] stories as part of one’s prayers, though some of the prophets and Wisdom and Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiasticus and Job and some other Books one does want. Do I miss things that shouldn’t be missed, do you think? I am reading the morning psalms this month—sometimes in English, sometimes in Latin. Always the collects, of course. I must go further into this business of the Breviary; I haven’t so far got one, though I have the Missal. I think I must get a Breviary. But I can get a good deal out of the Hours of Prayer; I think I shall take this to Fr. Wilkins when I go and see him, which I certainly mean to do. Having glanced at the Ordo1 pages you enclose, I sympathise with those who were so much worried by the Pie.2 It was complained of in the Preface to the 1549 P[rayer] B[ook] too, from which the 1662 preface [was] copied. Imagine the poor ploughman priests faced with such tangles. No wonder it was abolished under Edward VI. And the Ordo wears a rather Pie-ish look. How nice those P.B. prefaces are. I read them again. I like the piece about how the Liturgy stands “firm and unshaken, notwithstanding all the vain attempts and impetuous assaults made against it by such men as are given to change and have always discovered a greater regard to their own private fancies and interests than to that duty they owe to the publick.” I don’t know what altar book they use at Grosvenor; but … [the] extra prayers, prefaces and what-nots … all seem good, and to improve the occasion; would the P.B. preface-makers have classed them, I wonder, among the “impetuous assaults”? Also … [the service] always ends … with the Christmas Gospel from S. John, which sounds seemly at that point. I suppose it is a common practice. But I don’t know much about altar books…. The last few pp. of the Note Book—Ronald Knox’s fulminations against the doubting scholars, and your Galliambics against unintelligent reviewers— made me laugh a lot. I should think no one would have dared to mis-review Cybele when she drove out with her lions. Any more than they would dare attack the Sitwells, who also unleash ferocious beasts at their attackers. I must get some. R. A. K[nox] is very brilliant, and loveable when in that vein. I haven’t read his last book, Enthusiasm, but am told that, though amusing and good, it is too prejudiced in favour of his One and Only Church. No, I don’t think it does improve writers—converts, that is; the others are all right as a rule. Religious zeal doesn’t always have the effect it hopes. I hear to-day from an elderly, moderate-Anglican, religious relation whose parish church (evangelical) has been having a “Mission.” She writes, “I’m glad to say the Mission at the Good Shepherd ends to-morrow. I don’t believe they do any good. They have an impertinent loud-speaker van, which, as I was passing, shouted out, ‘Take care you’re not blown off your bicycle, madam. We hope to see you at the Mission Service this evening.’ I dislike those methods very much. They have a cinema show at the services, which of course draw crowds of children. I asked a neighbour if she was going to the mission; she said, ‘No, I don’t believe in going to church. I think my bed is the best place to ask for anything I want.’ I felt I ought to have set the missioners on to her.” Well, one can’t say that such missions do no good; but it doesn’t seem likely to be lasting in effect, and it does put off the more sensitive people. Like the Buchmanites. S. Paul had something better than that to hand people over to when he said “obedistis autem ex corde …”1
Thank you very much for those photographs. I particularly like to have the f one, which I am putting in a little frame, to stand among a few others in my bedroom. It will make me feel still more in touch with the S.S.J.E., which, as you remark, has so long dogged my steps. Do you believe that God has any hand in arranging these things? I mean, in putting it into my head to go to that retreat long ago, and into yours to write to me about a book? Or was it all just fortunate coincidence? And has God foreknowledge of what is to happen, and what one will need, and when? I suppose we can’t know. But one would like to think so. He must spend a lot of time in retrieving situations and salvaging people, or what is left of them.
How nice to have more books arriving for me! How could I be anything but pleased and grateful for them, for the books themselves and for your thought in sending them? You know I love to have them. I like the account of your Day Out—old African lady, coffee, and small ice; it all sounds very fast and dissipated, and not what Oblates would be encouraged to have.1 You should have had Mrs. Arthur with you; just what she would enjoy, and you would like each other; only she would have had, and wanted you to have, a large ice, and several cakes with it. She would have enjoyed Trimalchio’s Supper2; as I do when I read about it. I’m delighted to think of that on its way; and the Munro.3
Now I have sent you a book. It was put into my mind by two things you say in your letter; you ask which book the young Portuguese at Silves had read, and it was (mainly) this one— They went to Portugal, published 1946. You also say that you came into existence because of the Great Quake of 1755. So, as a great-great-grandson of that Quake, you may like to read the chapter of the book about it, which includes a very charming account of it by a young English nun in Lisbon, whose convent was destroyed; she writes home about it most graphically, in the most shocking spelling. There is also an account of it by an English merchant in Lisbon. This MS. was lent me by his descendant, an aged solicitor of slightly failing mind, who half thought the Quake had been 1855. My book is about English people who, for one reason or another, went to Portugal, from the time of the Crusades (when they behaved rather badly) down to recent times. Some of the chapters may amuse you. Our protestant missionaries there were pathetically eager and foolish. Borrow was unamiable; but there was (see end of book) a rather engagingly simple young officer of the Peninsular Wars who distributed Bibles to the Natives. There is a bit about J.M. Neale and his companion Dr. Oldknow, another about Whitefield, and there are Southey, Beckford, the Port Wine colony in Oporto, Queen Philippa of Lancaster who married King John of Portugal, Prince Rupert who took some ships to Lisbon bay to fight for Charles I, a Jesuit, a Scottish, humanist poet and heretic, some diplomatists, etc., etc. I don’t know if you’ll find anything in it you care for, but have ordered its despatch. It entailed a good deal of hard work and research. I was very unhappy just then, and had to deaden it by work; I couldn’t have done a novel possibly. I always talked over my novels with my companion, who stimulated my invention: when he died my mind seemed to go blank and dead. Oh why was there so much evil in what was in so many ways so good? Why did it have to be like that,
all snarled up and tangled in wrong, when if we had been free it would have been the almost perfect thing. Idiotic question; I am sorry. Sometimes one is jerked back into the past by some thought or memory, and it all comes back, the happiness that isn’t happiness any more to think of because of the wrong, and the whole awful mess it made of life, and yet it should have been so good. Forgive this maudlin whimpering. Remember to tell me sometime how the Great Quake affected your ancestors.
By the way, my aunt sent me the Quarterly Review for Oct. 1911, which has a rather interesting article by my father on English Bible translations. I already have a copy, so have cut out his article and am sending it to you, by this same pest, in case you might be interested in it. It is about the influence the various versions, from Tyndale and Coverdale on, had on one another, and the relation of the A.V. to its predecessors. A fascinating subject.
17th. Next morning. Let me know sometime if you would have any use for a v.g. translation of Herodotus—much better and more accurate than Rawlinson’s, who had the old-fashioned looseness and put things in on his own, and paraphrased. This one is by my father. Another copy was sent me, also by the aunt; of course I have one, and often read in it, it is such entertaining and good stuff But I don’t suppose you want any more books, or would have time for it. Books by the Macaulay family seen to bombard you. Now I have to go and broadcast on Travel. I rather like these sea letters, I can get such a lot into them!
Yours affectionately,
R.M.
20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1
24th April, 1951
Dear Father,
Remaining from a week-end (fine, for a change) in Worcestershire, yesterday, I found on my mat exciting packages, which, being opened, produced the four little Latin books, Munro’s Catullus, which looks very interesting, and (best) the Scraps, those from the walls, and those in the Scrap Book. A lovely rich collection; much of it supplements and adds to the book of R.M’s Private Devotions (a book I will leave you in my will). Looking thro’ your Scraps I am reminded of that passage from St. Augustine which you quote at the end of the Liber de Miraculis that came this morning—about memory and the thesauri innumerabilium imaginum1 that it hoarded up for use. (By the way, in my St. A. it isn’t hujusmodi, but cuiuscemodi, which of course does mean “of whatever sort”: I think yours must be a misprint.) Yes, it is just what one does when writing a novel. It is rather a lovely passage, all that chapter. I like the picture of reaching into the treasury for what one needs, and rejecting what one doesn’t. And now your Scraps have much enriched my treasury of what is written down ready for use—more reliable than the campos et lata praetoria memoriae.1 You will gather from this that I have received your Johannes Monachus—very nice stories, tho’ I think I like Abbot Daniel even more. Unhappy Mary: but she was better drowned, she would have come to no good. What a long time it took Christians to grow up to the ideas of Christ, in some respects. How differently he would have treated the affair. And how differently Ananias and Sapphira would have been dealt with, I was thinking the other day when I read the story. Did S. Peter strike them dead, or did they fall dead of shock at being discovered, or were they really perhaps only in a faint, and buried prematurely? S. Peter had a lot to learn about Christian methods. All your pages at the end of Johannes are full of interesting things—S. Augustine, S. Monica, Carthusian rites, the pre-Tractarian clergy, about whom I fully agree with you and Fr. Palmer. There is a great deal of evidence of devotion and care; letters and memoirs (some in my family, as in yours)—and did you ever read the letters of Parson Cole?2 But these are 18th cent. I am sure the neglect has been much exaggerated. It might be interesting to collect a good deal of evidence about this, and produce a book about it sometime. It is this tendency to see and present pictures in black or white that falsifies so much of history. I think I shall, when my present concern with Ruins is over, look round and collect pieces of evidence about this.
But the best thing I have had lately was your Air Letter of 18th and 19th, a delightful sight on my mat this morning, and better still when opened. How good of you. I’m glad my sea letter took so brief a time. I wonder what the next is doing, at present in transit on the seas, and what this one will do. How stupid I was not to recognise at once your Staying with Sanctimonials; of course I remember the Female Inebriate at the convent and the nuns’ perplexity about her; my mind must have had a black-out. Your comments on my use of “gotten” were made to me years ago by an American friend—she said, as you do, that it was only used in the perfect tense, and that you can’t say “I have gotten” meaning “I have got.” I can’t now think how I dared attempt American speech at all; one can never hope to get any speech right without long familiarity with it. Does Fr. Pedersen talk American? But of course he does. I shall like much to see him. The more he speaks of you the better pleased I shall be. I think I should have guessed that you were sensitive to apprehensions and anxieties and fears, especially for other people. Not “totus teres atque rotundus”1 I feel this is partly, perhaps, why you can do so much for people. There are no miseries, apprehensions, anxieties, weaknesses, that you couldn’t understand and enter into and care about, not as a professional job, but because you really do care. So perhaps it is all worth while, though it would be happier of course to be naturally phlegmatic and confident. I am not, at all; though I fear my apprehensions are apt to be selfish ones mostly. Fr. Waggett sometimes wrote (and talked, didn’t he?) as if he had been through, or was liable to go through, pretty difficult patches. I suppose every sensitive and imaginative person is.
Yes: the disciples did need the empty tomb to convince them; I quite see that. So I won’t let it worry me. They had to be convinced, beyond all shadow of doubt. So I will think it was probably so. I have lately come to think that anything may be true; my universe has expanded so much. The Expanding Universe, which is the name of a recent scientific book. Just as they had to be convinced that he had left them and had “ascended into heaven,” which they believed to be somewhere above the skies. Even as a child, the Ascension never bothered me, owing to sensible teaching from my mother, who told us that it merely meant that, when those 40 days were over, he stopped manifesting himself to them in that particular way. I believe it saves a good deal of painful disillusion and loss of faith to have been brought up in a liberal kind of theology—profoundly Christian, but liberal more or less. Not that one didn’t suffer painful loss of faith in one’s teens; I expect most adolescents do. I remember when I was being prepared for confirmation, the vicar of SS. Philip and James at Oxford1 had us each for private interviews, so that we could ask what we liked; what I wanted to ask was, “as I really can’t believe all this as I should, ought I to be confirmed?” but, being a shy child of 14, (nearly 15, I suppose) I could say nothing at all. I remember I had been reading John Stuart Mill, and rather absorbed his views. (The Thomas à Kempis period was then over.) I suppose most young creatures pass, each in his or her own way, through some such stages, cuiuscemodi.
That was a stupid review of Miss Goudge’s book.2 Not that it seems (I’ve not read it, nor shall) a good book, to judge from more intelligent and Christian reviews than that; it must, I think, be rather toshy and slushy and fictional; she speaks of “the tall Son of God”; as Wilson Harris points out in the Spectator (if I’ve still got that number I’ll send it you), his height is nowhere mentioned. I wouldn’t expect anything but a rather sentimental romance from this author of best-selling and rather sloppy fiction; but I may wrong her, as most certainly that Unitarian did. Imagine sending such a book to a Unitarian for review; his point of view disqualifies him at once. One must be open to belief in cosmic intervention.
Feast of St. Mark, in the evening
I have now acquired a very nicely bound little 4-volume 2nd hand Breviary, in which I shall root about among the days and seasons for treasures suitable for my collection and my needs. I am much pleased with it. I might take it to Fr. Wilkins for exposition, as I haven’t yet sorted out quite how i
t goes. I really have a lot of varied topics to approach him about. I shall much like to have Mamiale Sacerdotale,1 which you have sent. I shall learn some of the prayers by heart; narro memoriter,2 independent of having the book at hand. What good things you send me. I find your small Scrap Book immensely stimulating; inventaque flumina monstrat.3 I like the way you correlate the Latin poets with the Christian and Hebrew devotions. You do enrich everything, and light things up, and integrate them.
“Amor vincit omnia”4—doesn’t it here mean conquers? And in the Eclogues. I think it must. I expect the Prioress had read romances; but the motto has, surely, a religious meaning; would she have otherwise had it on her brooch? Or perhaps merely a moral meaning—love of one’s neighbours. A very good motto, whichever way you take it. I always like the Prioress, with her pretty manners, good breeding and table manners, and tender heart. She must have been charming.
Poor Dr. Macaulay and her two colleagues in the business— a poet and a critic—are being exposed to a lot of attack just now on account of the selection they made for the National Book League Exhibition of 100 books representative of English literature for the last 30 years. We didn’t really mean to say they were the best books, but of course a lot of people will have it that we did. I don’t myself think it a v.g. list …. and it has obvious omissions and inclusions that are debateable, so we stand to be shot at, but on the whole people shoot with good humour. So you see Dr.M. has had enough of English literature just now, and, thanking Fr. J. for his kind offer, won’t take his Manual of it. She scarcely even wants to receive an Hon. Doctorate of it. This should better go to Fr. J., whose letters are so admirable, whose Scraps so excellent, whose Latin so fluent. What a pity he can’t hear the Public Orator of Cambridge describing my career—fortunately in the decent obscurity of a dead and learned tongue. Good night. It is past one a.m. Thank you again so much for everything.
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