Love. Yours affectionately,
R.M.
20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1
Michaelmas Day, 1951
(And St. Michael is the Patron of the Clan Macaulay, by the way)
Dear Father,
Lovely to get this morning your letter of 23rd; and to be bidden to expect a sea letter written during the tray period. I am sorry you were laid up; but trays brought in by someone else are certainly a rest, after getting them oneself—and in your case, getting other people’s meals too. My poor old aunt1 (now 84) has got so that she loves her trays coming in so much that she asks for another directly she has finished with one. I suppose they must be nice events in the rather dull days of those who can’t get about.
Not getting about: you know, that was all I meant when I said I had been a little “discouraged” by your remarks on Religion-in-the-Flat. Not, for a moment, by your references to age; I am indeed extremely ancient, and should never think of claiming to be anything else, nor, I am sure, would anyone take me for anything else. But what I meant was that one can be old and vigorous, getting about as well as one used to, and enjoying active pursuits, such as swimming, going to Mass, etc. If ever the time comes when I shall have (more than temporarily) to stay in and give up these things, I shall be much disconcerted and frustrated; though I suppose one would have to adapt oneself and make the best of it. But I should hate it! And I see no reason why I shouldn’t “die in my boots,” or swimming, or travelling, or whatever. Even as I wrote these words, a negro voice broke out in my ear, from my radio, singing with great gusto,
” Let me run, run, run round this great and fertile land,
For the world ain’t big enough for me;
No, no,
The world ain’t big enough for me!”
Them’s my sentiments, exactly. I expect I shall feel the same when I am 90. Indeed you weren’t “rude”; only solicitous for my well-being, and kind. Time’s winged chariot hurries much too fast, that is the fact. But I hope it will not hurl me into my bed or arm-chair for a long long time. “While we have time”: yes indeed. But how little, really, we have. And heavens, how I have wasted much of my brief hour. I hate to think of that, and of how little remains.
I have been thinking lately of all those great Victorians. I have to review, for The Times Literary Supplement, Noel Annan’s book on Leslie Stephen and his life and times.1 He was born in 1832—a generation before my parents, two generations before you and me. And took Orders for the sake of his Trinity Hall Fellowship, and a very odd parson he must have been, and, indeed, was thought. I suppose he never actually believed very much. Later, of course, he formally renounced his Orders, and was for most of his life an agnostic rationalist. An austerely virtuous man, like so many of his generation. Unlike Edward VIII, whose autobiography is also just out, he never “lived for pleasure,” as so many of us do. The book has interesting chapters on Victorian Evangelicalism and Rationalism. How seriously they took their Doubt! It seems to hinge often on such oddly unimportant and trivial things—beginning by loss of belief in the Flood, or some other Old Testament tale, tales that we were only told as Hebrew legends. And that led on to loss of belief in God, which seems so irrelevant and odd. Our generation was much more wisely brought up.
I have just come to a sentence in his book which is much the same as one in your letter—” He was clear that a writer cannot be expected to preach …” Not “oracular utterance, but a vision of life so deeply perceived that all the writer’s faculties were co-ordinated to express it.” That should be, as you suggest, the idea. How I hope it may one day animate a book of mine.
I shall certainly get some book about the Liturgical movement; it would greatly interest me. I might ask Maisie Sheed about it. I seldom meet her, but like her very much.
I enclose a cutting from to-day’s Sunday Times (for it is now Sunday) … which I like. I have read that book [it] … mentions, in French, and it is excellent. I think I shall get it; hitherto I only had it from the Library, and copied some of it into my scrap book. It is very good on waiting on each moment and meeting God in it. I wonder if you know it.
It is very late at night; I have been out most of the day, and only sat down at my typewriter in the evening, first writing part of a review, then I thought I would finish this letter, but it is now 12.30 and I am falling asleep, so I will stop it and go to bed. Then I can post it early, on my way to church. I have read all Fr. Andrew’s letters, and have found a lot of admirable things in them, very useful, and I shall go on reading them again. Thank you for pointing out those verses in Rom. v. Yes: they are true, thank heaven. “Access by faith into this grace …” It sometimes seems too good to be true.
Good-night, dear Father. I look forward to the sea letter.
Love,
R.M.
I hope that wedding wasn’t too exhausting.
October
20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1
2nd October, 1951
My dear Father,
I posted a letter to you yesterday, but to-day have your sea letter of 20th Sept. (a lovely long letter—thank you so much for it), so will add a kind of postscript. I didn’t gather from your air paper that I answered yesterday that you had been so really unwell—you made nothing of it. But now I see that you were much worse than I care to think—turning queer at Mass, and a temperature, and a murmur. I don’t like all this at all, and think you should have rested much longer, had more trays, more Religion-in-the-cell, or even in-the-bed. Do, do, (is this comma correct?) take immense care.
An attack of flue is one thing, one must have that now and then; but your attack seems to have been apropos of nothing, except (no doubt) over-fatigue and strain. Don’t forget that murmur—even if it is (like a bat’s squeak) something that only doctors (and angels) can hear.
I like your account of Mrs. Paine.1 How delightful, and how kind and good and charming, she sounds. I’m glad she liked The World my Wilderness. If she did “put me in her prayers,” it seems to have worked. (Or perhaps you put me into yours, and that worked.) I like the thought of perhaps having got into hers too. I hope you told her that I am now Well In.
To-morrow I am going to hear the Bp. of Oxford at All Saints, and then on to a Buffet Lunch, to hear about Canon Hood’s Anglo-Catholic Ordinations Fund. I should be interested to know how our clergy are at present divided—how many could be called A.C., how many middle, how many Broad, how many Low. I wonder if there are any figures about this. Perhaps Canon Hood knows. The Anglo-Catholic Progress Campaign (i3th-2ist Oct.) has rather collided with the election, and I am afraid will get small audiences. As to the election, I am prophesying an increased Labour majority, but may be entirely confounded.
Interesting about Fr. Benson. That extraordinary power of concentration on prayer—it must be very rare, surely. Do you think it’s a natural gift, like music, or mathematics, or that it can be developed by practice in anyone, up to a point? Only up to a point, I’m sure. Fr. B. must have had it in a high degree. And I expect your Mrs. Paine has it, from what you say. I wish I had! But I know I never could have—I should have always to fill my hour of prayer largely with reading. “Meditation” could never come easily to me. Will you promise to let me know when you aren’t well, or I shall be thinking you aren’t when you are and worrying.
My love and concern.
Your affectionate
R.M.
ps. I am interested to learn, in a letter from the head of the Flood family (Scottish) that Fr. Henry Flood, S.J. (this, it seems, was the correct spelling) is a many-times-great-uncle of mine; he was a grandson of my ancestor Aulay Macaulay of Ardincaple. My informant also tells me that he was very busy in the 1590’s (before his Lisbon days) in fomenting pro-Spanish plots in Scotland. In fact, as our Lisbon Consul found, a very busy priest all his life! Not a quiet or a dull moment. It must all have been very stimulating, and our modern Jesuits must miss it rather. One is reminded of this by such books as John Gerard, of which I wr
ote to you earlier.
20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1
9th October, 1951
Dear Father,
I was so glad to have your air letter posted 1st Oct., and to learn that you are “all right” again; I hope this is really so. But I’m glad you aren’t (or weren’t when you wrote) going to Craigie St.1 early. And also that you are, as I trust, going to bed earlier. I know the temptation to sit up late and write things; it seems such a nice quiet time (uninterrupted) to finish things off, or anyhow to get on with them. But it is tiring, there is no doubt, and perhaps we ancients shouldn’t do it much. Anyhow, I do hope you’ll have no more of these attacks of faintness.
Your letter much interested me. When I read this enclosed article in The Times Literary Supplement2, it occurred to me that it might possibly be from your cousin3, who is writing the book about Johnny. The extracts from his journal are very interesting. You may have seen the T.L.S. already, but I send it in case it doesn’t come your way. Your cousin’s ought to be a most interesting book. And how fascinating to see all those old letters brought by your Powys cousin. Those old Evangelicals were such nice people—I mean the grandparents, who wrote about “walking with God”. “Oh for a closer walk with God”—is that an Evangelical hymn? I see Dean Inge has been criticizing “Rock of Ages,” which has roused a lot of protest from elderly Evangelicals who say it expresses the faith in which they were reared. Inge, of course, doesn’t like that form of theology. I don’t know that I do very much myself; but look what fruits it bore. It freed slaves, reclaimed heathen, preached the Gospel abroad and at home, reformed prison and factory conditions, invented District Visiting and Ragged Schools, abolished suttee, communed with God. Later it did fall into excesses, of course (the ones that so annoyed my Conybeare grandfather), but it was a fine godly affair on the whole. And all that coming and going between the families in the rectories—it must be fascinating reading for their descendants. I think my sister has somewhere a lot of my grandmother’s1 old letters which I should like to read if ever time allows. She touched a very wide circle; many of them come into this Leslie Stephen book; the Stephens themselves were family friends both of the Conybeares and Macaulays; and of course there was the usual wide spreading out of relations and friends, in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Westmorland, Leicestershire, all about. My grandmother wrote very racy, packed letters always, and seemed to be always on the move, visiting relations and friends. Then we have too a number of letters written by my great-grandmother, the daughter of Thomas Babington of Rothley Temple (a great Evangelical himself, and a friend of Wilberforce). So much high-mindedness was about. Heavens, what would they have thought of George Orwell’s book!2 I do agree with you about that; I hated it. It is fantastically horrible, and so improbable. Poor Orwell was dying of consumption when he wrote it (he died, I think, before it was published). So he took a morbid and almost hysterical view of life. No, I don’t think he was a believer in God at all. A high-minded man, in many ways, and with a horror (which obsessed and warped him) of cruelty and tyranny. His only gospel was freedom and kindness and the good of humanity. He saw a possible future hell on earth, and described it obscenely. “My hope is in Thy word” would have no meaning for him; and the darkness he saw as comprehending (in the sense of mastering) the light. Poor man. Many of his friends (and his young wife) were devoted to him. But that book is really dreadful. The kind of nightmare that sick people dream. I think I disliked it so much that I didn’t read it all; but I remember its horrible end.
I shall certainly get and read The English Inheritance, and shall tell you how it strikes me. It is the kind of book I should like, I know. I will try the London L[ibrary] for it; or the Times L[ibrary] might have it. I have just been reading an address by Professor Marcel Simon, of Strasbourg, delivered to the annual conference of Modern Churchmen, about the Church of England and its function, seen of course from the French point of view. He admires it greatly, and particularly the P[rayer] B[ook]. He is not now (he says) a practising Catholic, but is Christian, and intensely interested in the progress of the Churches towards unity; he was bitterly disappointed by the breakdown, 25 years ago, of the Malines talks.1 The narrowness and bigotry of the R.C. church are obviously repellent to him; he seems to think the Anglican church has a great mission to the world. A puzzling church, he admits, “where broad and high and lowly
All meet to disagree.”
He doesn’t approve all this aping of Rome; he thinks it destroys the true Anglican quality. He quotes Duchesne2 on this —” the attempt to introduce into the Church of England all that I wish to eliminate from the R.C. church.” He also quotes Tyrrell, on the problem of combining freedom and authority, science and revelation, respect for tradition and respect for conscience (moral and intellectual). “The church which solves it first will sweep the world into its net. … It is perhaps the C. of E. which seems most likely to win the race.” He ends by begging the church not to “exchange the precious values imparted to her for some illusory jewels borrowed from elsewhere.” The whole address is interesting.
I wish I could remember where I was reading the other day something about that Trin. 19 collect, and Cranmer’s reasons for altering the order of the words; the writer thought it an improvement and I think it is; it strengthens the sound of it. The alteration of the mkerationis operatio1 to “thy Holy Spirit” is odder. It comes back to me that the book I was looking at (probably in the library) was partly about ancient Greek and other prayers, and pointed out how Cranmer (and our other collect-makers) sometimes took them over, or mixed them with the Roman ones, in the same collect. Perhaps this was an example of that; I will see if I can trace this book; it was interesting and instructive. I like the meaning that God’s pity may work in our hearts. I find I have lots of old photographs (duplicates) so send a few to amuse you and help you to know me when we meet. I have some later ones, I think, too, that I might send sometime. The nun with me is my eldest sister; she died in ‘41. She was an East End Deaconess (Community of All Saints). I loved her very dearly. I think the gardening ones and the reading one were taken by some newspaper. I don’t know which of them will go in this letter—I will see. I must try and see Fr. Pedersen again before he leaves; but I expect he is very busy. My car is out of sorts for a few days, and I go to Mass on my bicycle, and then ride on to the Serpentine. Rather cool.
My love always, dear Father. Say how you are.
R.M.
20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1
15th October, 1951
Dear Father,
I am really shocked that my letter posted 22nd Sept. didn’t reach you till 9th Oct. It is reminiscent of the bad old days of last December, when they took about a month. This is 17 days, which is much too long. Yours posted 9th (air) came on the 12th, to my great pleasure. I am sorry you were worried by fearing your letter about health precautions and increasing age might have vexed me. Indeed it didn’t; by now you will have got the letter in which I explained what I meant by calling it “discouraging”—nothing to do with age, but only with my reluctance to lead an invalid life until I have to. You know that it would be impossible for me ever to think anything you wrote to me “inconsiderate.” All I would think is that you probably under-rate my toughness and vigour, and this would be from affection, so I really value it. I am very well at present. The ending of summer has stopped my Serpentine bathing after Mass, which I miss, but it really was getting a little too chilly. I have just been writing a BBC talk about “Swimming for Pleasure”; I began with the Assyrians, Greeks and Romans, then ourselves from the 16th century on, in rivers and sea, and so to to-day. I give the talk next Monday, on the Third Programme. A rather incongruous topic in this foggy weather; but one on which I like to muse. Islands in a blue sea, smelling of thyme and myrtle in a hot sun. Green water swaying and murmuring in rocky creeks. Etc., etc. I like those pagan religions which included a bathe in sea or pool as part of their initiation. Baptism once did, I suppose, and it was more beautifully symbo
lic actually than the modern rite, though less convenient. I like symbolism. At Mass this morning there was a densish mist outside; it brooded beyond the clear window above the chapel altar, among the trees; and inside was the candle-lit altar and the lit chapel, and the darkness comprehended it not (in the old sense of mastered) and I prayed “Lucem tuam, Domine, nobis concede: ut, depulsis cordium tenebris, pervenire possimus ad lumen, quod est Christus”1 Thank you for telling me of that.
I am sorry And no man’s wit is put under lock and key! I am pretty sure that would be owing to R.C. influence, as they always exercise a lot of censorship over books over there, and, if they suspect the faintest taint of anti-Romanism (as they might from my book, though wrongly, as I was merely being objective and speaking through my characters, giving various types and their views) they suggest that it shouldn’t be freely given out at libraries. I have heard of so many such cases. It is one of the many reasons why I couldn’t possibly ever be R.C. They are so frightened of adverse opinions. Do you know Simone Weil’s book, just translated from the French L’Attente de Dieu, that I think I have mentioned to you before?1 Simone, in her letters to Père Perrin (a Dominican priest who befriended her) gives reasons why she won’t, though really a Christian, be baptized into the Church; one reason is the intolerance of the Church, and her horror of the word “anathema,” and of the Inquisition, etc. Father Perrin, in the French edition, published her letters after her early death with a long and interesting introduction by himself. In the translation this introduction is replaced by a short one by someone else, and it seems that the Vatican forbade Father Perrin to introduce so heretic a book. And it is such an interesting and truly religious book. That is the kind of thing that drives some R.C. converts out of the church; as it drove (I mean, intolerance and bigotry did) Kathleen Raine, a young poet, who joined it a few years ago, out of unhappiness and loneliness. She told me the other day that she came out after 6 months, because she couldn’t bear the intolerant attitude.2 I wish she would now become an Anglican and come to Grosvenor Chapel! I must lend her Marcel Simon’s address to the Modern Churchmen, that I think I wrote to you about last time.
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