No thank you, my char isn’t going to get any of those books; however much they might enlarge her mind. I want them all myself.
Your letter is full of interesting things. I’m glad Fr. Pedersen liked our lunch together; I did too, immensely. We are to meet again on 28th, for which night I have,, at his request, got seats for a play, which I was to select. I chose Waters of the Moon, said to be v.g. and with a brilliant cast, including Edith Evans and Sybil Thorndike, so I hope we shall enjoy it. I wanted to find something Fr. P. would like; though, as to that, I fancy he would be prepared to enjoy anything, he seems full of zest. I wonder how he enjoyed A Sleep of Prisoners, the Christopher Fry play at St. Thomas’s that he was going to. I must ask him. He is now at Oxford….
By the way, the kind man has sent me such a very good book—the Oxford American P[rayer] B[ook] Commentary; most interesting. I haven’t read much of it yet, but it is packed with information about the sources of prayers, dates of their adoption into the various P.B.s, etc.—just what I always like to know (as you know). It is good of him. We got talking about the American P.B., and this arose out of it.
I expect you are right about the swimming jeep as transport; anyhow, I see no chance of getting such a trip at present. Though, as to my occupation as auctor historiarum commenticiarum,1 such an experience would help me in that, and might produce a good story about it, without those false touches that betray the romancer, and in which they said that Pythias indulged in his travel tales of the Outer Ocean and Ultima Thule, such as jelly in the sea, ice, slush, etc. (All quite true, in his case.) Still, I shall visit the I. of Wight in a steam packet this week, my car (strictly monobious) in the hold. I go on Friday 17th till 24th, with my sister,1 who is spending a fortnight of her holiday there. If the weather is tolerable, it will be nice. I like the Island, with its air of Victorian gentility, its conservatory houses at Ryde (where I shall be), its beaches and bays on the north side, its lovely interior, full of history. I must take my book with me and my typewriter and do a little work in the evenings.
I am interested in your quotation from Erasmus about Colet and his possible reasons for infrequent Masses. I suppose it is true that different practices about it suit different people; and also the same person at different times. At present I am not doing very well with it. I went this morning (Sunday) to St. Thomas’s, for the rather ignoble reason that it was at 9, but wished I hadn’t, and shan’t go again I think. I don’t follow the service really, and missed the moment to go up to the altar; there was only one other person, and I wasn’t noticing him, and I am used to the priest turning round and saying clearly “Behold the Lamb of God,” then one knows, but at St. T. they do nothing of the sort, and perhaps don’t really mean people to communicate. And they have too many Hail Marys and other prayers to the B.V.M., and I’m not really very Mariolatrous. The church I like best, after Grosvenor, is All Saints, where the service is very beautiful and dignified, and much more P.B., tho’ the chairs are not adequately anchored, and slide about. But I shall go to it in future till my chapel re-opens.
About Mary Lavelle again—I suppose it is difficult for a novelist not to be, so to speak, overset by love, the strongest emotion that most people ever feel in their lives. So they are apt to lose sight of the other considerations that war against it; as in actual life we lose sight of these. To them it seems that everything must take a back place beside it, when it bursts on them in its full strength; and they visualise a future in which it will always be the strongest thing. For, of course, it does last a long time sometimes, even a wrong love; and its very strength blinds those who feel it to its wrongness, often, and might do so for many years. Everything else pales in its light, and it seems its own justification. Of course novelists should get outside this and look at it with detachment, in its right perspective against the standards of right and wrong that are really the ultimate thing and the eternal thing. But the Marys and the Juanitos don’t do this in the first rapture of their love, and the creator of them and their situation throws him or herself into their feelings and writes of them as from the inside, instead of as the philosopher assessing from other standards their predicament. If she followed them down the years, she would presumably follow their changing feelings (so far as they did change)—only they don’t always. And, as someone says somewhere, each wrong act brings with it its own anaesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years. I am not defending Kate O’Brien … I am only trying to explain the sort of way such situations may work on the minds of those who imagine and describe them in novels. It is, I think, partly a lack of objectiveness. I never myself, I think, represented such things in a triumphantly favourable light in a novel… and this, I suppose, was how Mary Lavelle, and Juanito, and perhaps Kate O’Brien, saw it. Human passions against eternal laws—that is the everlasting conflict. And human passions use every device to get the best of it, and set themselves above the laws. All very tragic and pitiful; but writers about it should be on the right side—if they can. You know, I sometimes wonder why, knowing what you do about me, you care to know me at all. But I have long since accepted that, with gratitude. I suppose 45 years of going about in long clothing teaches tolerance and understanding, as well as the other things, such as handing on the word of God.
I have been looking again at the American P.B. Commentary, which is full of interesting information. I read that the collect for nth Sunday after Trin[ity] was a Gelasian collect that ran “that we, running to thy promises, may be made partakers of thy heavenly treasure,” and was altered by the 1662 revisers to “that we, running the way of thy commandments, may obtain thy [gracious] promises.” I like “running to thy promises.” I wonder how it goes in the original Latin. There is a similar change in Trin. 13. I hadn’t realised how extensively the 1662 revisers revised the words of the 1549 P.B. Often, I think, improving them; sometimes the opposite. I see it says “the popular English name for Epiphany is Twelfth Day”; but actually of course it is never this, always Twelfth Night, surely.1 In Trin. 4 finally “was added to the Latin “that we lose not the things eternal.” That seems a pity, as this commentary says; the eternal things are now. You see how interesting this book is.
I think I shall airmail this, and write by sea later from the Island. I wanted to tell you that your books arrived safely and give satisfaction, without delay. But I really will seamail the next. (Where are my good epistolary resolutions going to? I keep getting seduced by this so expeditious air.) With love.
Yours affectionately,
R.M.
20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.I
15th August [1951]
Dear Father,
I want to write soon after posting my last air letter, as this will be sea, and I don’t want it to lag too far behind. That is the worst of mixing the two. Also I want to answer your air paper posted nth, which arrived yesterday. I am glad you put the case for these A[nglo-]C[atholic] Irregulars; I do see their point of view, tho’ I think they make a mistake. They should, I think, be glad to differ from R.C. usage, which is UNREFORMED, backward, less enlightened, less civilised, more primitive. But of course they are afraid of the C. of E. being despised and thought of as of no account, so abandon what should be its very strength. And how interesting if they were ever cured by a R.C. liturgical movement towards P[rayer] Bookery! I am interested in your interpolation with regard to this movement towards greater intelligibility (surely this word looks all wrong —what have I done with it?)— “very unwise, I think!” Do you mean it might set the congregation thinking and therefore criticizing? By the way, looking through Fr. Andrew’s letters at Mowbrays—what excellent letters they are—I saw that he told someone (I think a priest) that he was glad All Saints used the P.B. mass, and wished all Catholic priests would do the same. So he agreed with us. But of course it is as you say—the treasure is the same (only slightly more difficult of access) and we must try and be lively stones, entering into what we can of it and tolerating wha
t seems irrelevant, and helping to build up the spirit of the whole. And what seems affected and unnatural to old P[rayer] B[ook] fogies like me isn’t really, of course, to those who use it: but I should like it if they said more of the prayers aloud. Never mind: I like my solitary praying in my Chapel. What a number of prayers I owe to your suggestions; some in your Scrap Book, others that you have pointed out, or copied out, for me. I like All Saints very much, and can go there with satisfaction (tho’ in the wrong direction). I went there this morning at 9. I can’t really take the Assumption; but it doesn’t matter to the service. (Do we accept it in our church? I can’t remember.) It seems to me entirely unnecessary.
Such a good sermon on the radio the other Sunday from George MacLeod, the minister (Presbyterian, but rather a lone hand) of the community of Iona. He called it “The Moving God,” and it was about the gradual enlightenment down the ages of the spirit of man, from our animal days up—fresh convictions about right and wrong all the time; he referred to Drake setting out in his ship the Jesus to seize black slaves off the coasts of New Guinea, applauded by the whole Christian world; to the massacre of Huguenots approved by all R. Catholics, headed by the Pope, to the persecutions and tortures of heretics, to the ghastly public executions to which every one flocked with joy, to the savage treatment of lunatics and beggars and prisoners, to slavery, condoned by all until so late, and the gradual convictions dawning that these tilings were wrong. The thesis being that the spirit of God never lets man alone, but is for ever trying to pull him upward and on and out of his primitive nature. I found it inspiring: so much more hopeful than the theory that we were better once than we are now. Who first intruded the Fall into Christianity? Certainly not our Lord. And I can’t find it in St. Paul. I must look this up in some theological encyclopaedia; it is ignorant of me not to know.
My ruins lie heavy on me. I have just done Babylon, and now have got to Mycenae. I love the fantastic ruin-pictures painted by the Jewish prophets—Babylon a desolation, full of owls, dancing satyrs in the pleasant palaces, bitterns crying in the lintels, a hissing of serpents, dragons all about. A gross overstatement, of course, like Tyre; but they liked to see it so, and piled it on. As to Mycenae, what a family life was led there, by Agamemnon, Atreus, and all the princes in succession! No wonder it inspired D’Annunzio with an idea for a novel about murder and incest. I must get on with my writing in the I. of Wight; but can’t take many of the requisite books. However, I shan’t have time there for much work. When I come back my Chapel will very soon be functioning again. I feel better with a daily Mass; it sees one through the day, ties things together, gives a meaning and horizons.
16th. No time to finish this letter, I have to go and get the car ready for to-morrow, and a hundred other jobs attendant on even a week of being away, and should like to post this before I go.
My love always. I shall write from the Island.
R.M.
Ryde, Isle of Wight,
21st August, 1951
Dear Father,
Being on this charming island, I take pen in hand (not having the typewriter out with me in this woody creek where we have just devoured a picnic lunch and I have bathed), to write to you a holiday line, in continuation of my short sea letter of the 15th. It is very nice here, and the weather good, though I could do with more hot sun, also with a sea that is more often at hand, instead of the time being mile away across wet and shingly and shelly and seaweedy sands, and when you reach it is so shallow that you may wade for miles and not get more than waist-deep in it. But of course normally I bathe only when it is high, and that is very nice: our hotel has steps that go straight down to it beyond a garden gate. My sister (who is a nurse, did I tell you?) and I have endless discussions on this and on that—politics, church, books, the future of the human race. She is a voracious reader, but gets little time for it. She is a district nurse, and how they do work them! She does much too much, of course, but never gives up. We (and a friend of hers1) drive round the island in my car, and see good places. Yesterday we went to Quarr Abbey (the monks were having Vespers, and we looked into the church for it)—a great red-brick building, built late 19th century, occupied by French monks in flight from France in 1901, but now has other nationalities.2 But the interesting thing there, of course, is the ruins of the ancient, demolished Cistercian Abbey, which stand in fragments about the fields, some built into a farm-house, most separate; fragments of the choir, broken arches with trees growing through the stones, the refectory turned into a barn, here and there a window (blocked or open), in a wall, and the great wall running fitfully round the whole enclosure, which must have been enormous. And woods all round it, and, from the end of the field, a wedge of the blue bay. Really a haunting and haunted place, and quite, of course, up my present street.
25th Aug. I never finished this, but put it away to finish when I had a moment of leisure, and now (last night) have come home (lovely voyage across the Solent) and what should I find but a letter from you, posted 19th, and the most exciting packets. It takes me back to last August, when I also came home (from Italy) at the end of the month, and found a letter from you, and how pleased I was, and how right I was to be pleased! And now I am still pleased, and even more than then. I have just looked up that letter. I see it refers (which I had forgotten) to the changes the 1662 revisers made in the collects—I suppose they are in most cases a pity—and anyhow should not get away from the Latin. Yes: “dirigere et sanctificare” is in the Manuale; I have just found it. What a good set of prayers that book has, for so many occasions. I often use them. And now I have looked up “Homiliae et Orationes”1 in the Breviary—and read the “ad tua promissa currentes”2 collect—and put a marker in that section, so that I shan’t lose it again. I must say the Breviary is a little like a jungle, till one is really used to tracking one’s path about it. So I blaze the trails to what I want.
All these lovely books! Unpacking your parcels is like opening those Chinese toys, one thing inside another—paper, stout envelope, soft packing, more paper (green, with elastic bands round it) and finally the book, always a lovely surprise. This time I have (1) a fine green wallet (the first was red), and in it a very choice blank note book, and 2 dear little American Bible Society paper booklets, the Appian Way decorating the Epistles, the River Jordan Proverbs—how very nice and compendious and pretty! (2) Statius (the Achilleis) (3) Rutilius Namatianus, with bits of Hadrian, Florus, and others—what a very attractive selection. I took Desert Fathers out of the shelf (H[elen] W[addell] gave me all her books in ‘41, after I had. been bombed) and read that introduction again with interest, and her account of Rutilius N. How good she is (H.W., I mean). One does sympathise with Rutilius’s view (and Lecky’s) about the Desert Fathers; it is too easy to lose sight of the other side of the case (the Fathers’ side, I mean). I don’t know Statius’s Achilleis, only the Sylvae, which has lovely things in it; probably actually more what he could do well than a long heroic poem. I like to have Florus’s skit on Hadrian— “ego nolo Caesar esse,
amhulare per Britannos,”1 etc., and
Hadrian’s repartee— “ego nolo Florus esse,
ambulare per tabernas”2 …
(4) the Martial (what an excellent collection of Roman poets I am building up, from your library) and (5) that extremely nice 2-vol. Tacitus, v. good to have. Thank you immensely for all these; it is good of you indeed, and I hope you can really spare them.
Your letter, as usual, v. interesting to me (and forgive my continuing mine as I began it, with a pen; it seemed easier). An interesting point about have. I see in Poole’s Parnassus?quot;3 which includes lists of rhyming words (1657 is the date) that he puts have in a list of rhymes with brave, cave, grave, etc., so obviously it did rhyme then. I think the explanation of its having developed the short a (but when? I don’t know) is that it was a quickly-uttered, often auxiliary, verb, apt to be lightly slurred over, and would easily become “hev” (as it is in much dialect speech), and then have. None of the o
ther ave words are of this kind; and the tendency is always to shorten the sound of those light words. As “master” (maister) became “mister” when a title, but remained maister or master when not. This seems to me a likely development of have, don’t you agree? What I would like to know is when it happened; unfortunately Johnson’s Dictionary] doesn’t give pronunciations (I think). (Or does it? I will look it up: mine, a 1st edition, was burnt.) One would like to know what is the latest example in poetry of the have-grave rhyme; I must look out for it. I will look out too for Priscilla Sellon.1
Yes, that is the right Irvine: he was in the Potteries before S. Thomas’s. A clever young prophet; Canon Hood knew him at Oxford and said he was so, and one can see he is. Very good company, too…. He introduced me to his mother when she was up here; “like you, she doesn’t care much for Mariology,” he said. A nice, cheerful lady: she comes up to see her son, “just to see how far he has now got,” she told me. Too far, if you ask me. But I like him v. much. Fr. Ross too (tho’ I’ve only once talked to him) … There is no company that interests me more (just now) than that of the intelligent clergy; and I like to discuss things with them when we meet, and they are interested, I think, to do this, both with one another and with the laity such as me.
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