What a good thing “Cowper and Emily”1 went into partnership! It is an odd thought that, without the particular union of two people, one could not have existed just as one is, that peculiar amalgam of millions of ancestors and drops of blood. “If you and Father hadn’t married,” we used to ask my mother, “which of your children should we be?” “Neither of us, of course,” my mother replied. “You would have been quite different people.” One gets giddy, remembering all one’s ancestors who have played their part in shaping one, even the cake-burner! And oh all those armies of clergymen for the past 400 years! And marauding Highland chieftains, and godly ministers of the Kirk, and Devonshire parsons, and university dons, and bishops and deans, and French Huguenots in flight, and Evangelicals, and a few squires, and kings down to Henry III, and Highlanders hanged for stealing sheep, and heaven knows who else. No wonder every one is so odd and mixed. When your cousin comes to see me, early next month, we shall, no doubt, have a great family gossip, and I must show her some Rose portraits and look up some of my great-grandmother Lydia Babington’s letters.
Do you think much about time? I do. I mean, from the point of view of the Christian scheme of salvation. I read somewhere lately, “the only gate to God is through the death of Christ.” Which means, I suppose, that His death is being taken as an eternal thing, which took place from the beginning of time, and that He lighteth every man who has come into the world. For example, the psalmists, who certainly achieved and groped after “the way to God,” more than almost anyone. And Job and even non-Christian mystics. So I suppose one can’t think of His earthly life and death as events at a precise time on this planet; at least, as only that; it must have been available to those who lived earlier. It is so obvious that they too had their “holy communion” with God; the psalms are full of it. I went to the first part of Evensong on Sunday at All Saints, Margaret St., just to hear the psalm for the 16th (Quam dilecta)1 which they sang very beautifully. I never know which I really like best, that, or 40 or 42 or 43, or, indeed countless others, including parts of 119. They had “the gate to God” all right, tho’ they didn’t know about Christ’s life on earth. I think it isn’t confusing if one tries to take the long, eternal view. But sometimes people are too concrete about it, and then I get puzzled and uncertain….
I am told that Von Hügel is very interesting, and mean to read it. I have also been told that the author makes too little of Von H.’s modernism and disagreements with the Vatican. As a devout R.C., he is likely to minimise these.
Now I must get back to my Ruins. I do hope your dentist is being nice and gentle. My love; and isn’t it nice being cousins!
R.M.
20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1
22nd March, 1952
Dear Hamilton,
This sea letter is to send you some papers—the two letters that I think you may be glad to have back to keep, and my review of Hugh Walpole. He was a complicated and fascinating character; not wholly admirable (who is, after all?) but loveable, for all his rather irritating petty faults. I hope I haven’t been disagreeable about him!
I was interested to see in one of these letters a mention of Mr. Jacomb-Hood, a lawyer. It was a Mr. Jacomb-Hood, a lawyer, who had, and lent me in 1943 or 4, the MS. account of the Lisbon earthquake by a Lisbon merchant ancestor of his, which I included in They went to Portugal. He was extremely old, even doddering, so the lawyer of the letter is probably his son or nephew or something.
I mean to send an air paper in answer to your letter of 15th, a particularly good one, but will divide my comments on it between that and this sea letter. Thank you for what you say about the development of man and his power to choose between right and wrong. No; of course we cant know the moment when this began; it is (to me) an eternally interesting speculation; so is the development of conscience in the infant mind. (And, come to that, the dog’s. I suspect that animals have more of it than we think—even those animals that, unlike domestic ones, don’t catch it from us.) Perhaps the strange creatures from whom we descend had it, in embryo, and really did know it was wrong to bash their wives on the head with clubs, or bite one another; perhaps they too, had they known the words, would have said “video meliora prohoque, deteriora sequor.”1 Perhaps even the very jelly fish who are, it is said, our very early ancestors, had some such vague jelly-fish feeling; indeed, perhaps they still have. I am reading a French book about the loves of animals for one another (their mates, I mean), and, since they feel love, why not conscience?
The response of the conscience to God—that they scarcely know, I suppose. After reading your letter, the very good part about God’s gifts of grace to us, which we are merely to accept, I was reading Wm. Law, “The Spirit of Prayer”, and came on passages which seem to apply to our response. “Here thou standest in the earnest, perpetual strife of good and evil … and wilt thou be asleep? … Heaven and hell divide the whole of our thoughts, words and actions. Stir which way thou wilt, do or design what thou wilt, thou must be an agent with the one or with the other. Thou canst not stand still … if thou workest not with the good, the evil that is in nature carries thee along with it: thou hast the height and depth of eternity in thee, and therefore be doing what thou wilt, either in the closet, the field, the shop or the church” (and of course the flat) “thou art sowing that which grows and must be reaped in eternity … The bells are daily calling us to church, our closets abound with manuals of devotion, yet how little fruit! … Your business is to give way to the heavenly working of the Spirit of God in your soul and turn from everything either within you or without you that may hinder the further awakening of all that is heavenly and holy within you.”
That premises the initiation by God of His work in us, “No man can come to me except,” etc.; the breaking in is His, and our mode of acceptance to try and work with it….
Yes: I think you are right about my Wilderness being largely an unconscious prayer. Well, it got answered all right— more than one could have dreamed. Looking back, I can’t think —I really cant think—how on earth I managed to get on for so long, turned away from it all, and not even realising, except at moments, how much I needed it and wanted it. Blind and deaf and choked with the vanities of time, turning away from the “riches of eternity.” Oh well. Of course I have missed a lot, from missing all those years; but I couldn’t value it more than I do now I have come to it at last. I can’t agree that the vessels it came to me in were earthen, though; I have come across plenty of earthen vessels in my time, but not at that time. In fact, such is my weak nature that I don’t believe I could have got hold of it if it had come in earthen vessels. It was regarding them as far from earthen that first persuaded me, and, I suppose, still persuades me. Even my Chapel, though crumbling (better now, by the way) is lovely and of heaven. I am afraid it is a real weakness, being so easily put off by a method of presentation that isn’t to my taste, that sounds to me trashy, stupid, or over lush, let alone ugly or common. So I have to be careful not to expose myself…. [sic] Yes, it is a weakness, but there it is. And now you have put me on to reading Isaiah again—how beautiful he is. “I will go before thee and make the crooked places straight”; “Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness.” … [sic] I think I shall read the prophets for the rest of Lent. I like them so much better than the O[ld] T[estament] narratives. I was listening to the manna in the wilderness the other day. I wonder how much of that light wafer stuff one would have to eat before feeling one had had a satisfying meal. A great deal, I suppose. Even then, one couldn’t do hard work, or walk very far, on it. I don’t wonder they got sick of it and wanted quails, a much better idea. The stuff didn’t even keep through the night, except on the Sabbath. I do think it’s rather odd to read these ancient Jewish tales aloud in church, intriguing though they are. I would like to revise the lectionary, and add to it a lot that isn’t Jewish at all—Philo, the Neo-Platonists, and a lot of wisdom from the east; and, I think, the Imitation. And Jakob Boehme and other mystics. Why
should the Jews be our meat year by year? I believe variety would make people prick up their ears and listen much more eagerly. But I would have the whole of Wisdom, Isaiah, Job, Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiasticus, a great deal from the prophets. But who will listen to my suggestions? No one.
Since writing thus far, I have written you an air paper, and am now going out to post both. They bring my love, dear Father.
Your affectionate cousin,
R.M.
20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1
22nd March, 1952 †
Dear Hamilton,
Your letter of 15th has come; thank you so much for it; it is full of things I want, and that no one but you can supply. I have answered it in a sea letter (to be posted with this; let me know the difference in times of arrival). I wrote a sea letter really in order to enclose some letters you sent, and my review of Hugh Walpole, and possibly, if it won’t make it too heavy, an article from the Spectator by Mervyn Stockwood that interested me, about the kind of services he thinks it right and seemly to have in his church, where the congregation are strongly fixed to Cranmer’s liturgy, unadulterated. I was interested in his idea for an evening service. Is he right that no one can understand the baptism service? Why not?
Thank you for your comments on the awakening of man’s conscience, and on the free gifts of God. I have talked about both those things in my sea letter. And about Isaiah, which you set me reading again.
That Primer isn’t yet to hand, but no doubt will be soon. I shall read it with great interest.
I have been asked to contribute to a discussion in The Author on the present cult in literature of violence and cruelty and obscenity. I agree that it is a contemporary fashion, and I don’t like it. I suppose it comes from backwardness; uncultivated minds, whose only romance is violence—no, violence and sex; very much sex. The mass mind, too uneducated to look for or find romance and excitement in beauty, landscape, architecture, art, poetry, music; it can only thrill to the obvious physical excitements of horror and sex love, and craves avidly for more and more detail in the description of these. It not only disgusts me but bores me; so perhaps really I shouldn’t join in such a discussion, I am not objective enough. American novels are much worse in this way than ours. I don’t read them, but I gather that huge novels pour out weekly, full of cruelty, obscenity, words not usually uttered, descriptions of what it isn’t seemly to describe (like in Mary Lavelle, but much worse) and general nastiness. Is it the effect of the growing influence of a tough, half-literate class of reader, who demands to sup of horrors? I hope that as we all grow better educated, this fashion will pass….
About Italy. I am hoping to start there in my car early in May. I shall write letters and cards to you, but don’t know when you will get them. I shall send them by air, of course; but don’t worry when there are longish gaps; it will be the fault of the posts, which aren’t very good from Italy. You can be sure all will be well; it always is when I gad abroad in my car. I was doing the same thing in 1950, if you remember, when I returned to find a letter from my as yet unrecognised cousin. This time I shall be going a little further south—Calabria. A lovely holiday, in splendid country, and set about with magnificent buildings, most exciting. How unfair, when I can have this kind of romance, to complain of those who can’t finding theirs in violence and sex. Don’t write me much, as letters may easily stray about and be wasted. I shall have a few points of call, where I shall enquire for letters, but haven’t thought them out yet, of course. I imagine that Rome will be one. I shall give you the same that I give to my sister and to the porter of these flats, who will forward a certain number of my letters. No, perhaps he had better not; there would be the difficulty of adding stamps to them, of course. My companion will be, if he can get leave of absence from the British Institute in Madrid, a friend of mine called David Ley, who is interested in the same kind of things I am, and is also v.g. at jobs needing strength, like changing wheels, etc. If he can’t come, I hope to take two cousins, a brother and sister. Oddly, all three of my possible companions are R.C. converts; so they will enjoy Rome, where they can spend their time while I am examining the Campagna (Horace’s farm, etc.).
[Here follows a line which R.M. has deleted, explaining her action thus:] (I began to tell you something that it suddenly struck me I had told you in my last air paper.) For the rest of my answer to your letter of 15th, see my ocean missive, I am now going out to post both that and this. I am glad you are getting to like the Schlegels. He [E.M. Forster] has such an attractive mind, hasn’t he. My love always.
Your affectionate Cousin,
R.M.
20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1
29th March, 1952 †
Dear Hamilton,
This is splendid! Two days ago Co-op1 produced Beeson— it looks fascinating. I’ve only glanced through it so far, being laid up with another tiresome attack of some noxious fever. The doctor thinks it may be Undulant Fever, which cows have, and which seems lately to have broken through from the cattle kind to ours. Symptoms are fever, up and down, but mostly up and up, dizziness, faintness, etc., etc. At least those are what I had for a week—but am now (to-day) so marvellously recovered, as you see, that I can sit up and write a letter, and in a day or so shall get up. It is a bore, going on like this, but such is life in winter-time. My doctor says this disease is carried by milk. “Milk,” says he, “is lousy stuff-” and how right he is! I can’t think why we pour it down the throats of helpless children! Still, never mind. My temperature rushed down last night, and I woke this morning below normal. Also woke to a white, blizzarded world—much like New England I guess. I listened to the Boat Race snugly in bed—obviously a v. fine race, neck to neck all the way till the end.
Besides Beeson (I wonder what Milton, who so loathed the sight and sound of Mjedieval] L[atin], would have thought of it? Of course he was v. stupid about it, as about much else. A humanist like him should have taken pleasure in the development of an ancient tongue. Only he hated monks and the middle ages too much for this)—what was I saying? Oh, yes; besides this attractive book, for which I am really extremely grateful, I have 2 letters from you—one a[ir] p[aper] of 21st, and an a[ir] l[etter] posted (I think) 24th—both full of interest. I will get Worship1 at Duckett—it will interest me greatly; and will tell how the article struck me. I think I agree with you they had better let things be; I can’t imagine Italian peasants following the service in the way they want.
I was extremely interested in your O[rthodox] C[hurch] priest. Of course I knew they were in communion with us, but didn’t know they were as near as that. I wish I knew some, I suppose there must be an O.C. church in London somewhere, and should like to go to it sometime. They, I suppose, are Greek Orthodox!
I’m glad you think there is a religious revival: I don’t know about this country. There are enormous numbers of young rationalists; but my Harvard cousin now at King’s tells me the religious drift, when coming, is towards Anglicanism, not the Pope. He puts this down largely to T. S. Eliot. But, when I was young wasn’t the drift stronger still? I don’t know, but think so. Of course when my father was young, the drift was the other way. He drifted right out of it, despite the restraining ancestral hands (more clergy than you knew of!). Should I try and influence my small god-daughter, I wonder? (whom I now see it was wrong and presumptuous to take on, in my then position). Coulton’s1 book sounds exciting, and I will get it. You will have primed me well in M[edieval] L[atin] before we have done.
My “travel-chum” will probably be one David Ley, a youngish man, long a friend, who works at the British Institute in Madrid. Very stalwart, intelligent, companionable: R.C. convert, but nicely. I mean, not the English self-conscious type, like G. Greene….
Remember I’ve driven on the Right (U.S. and about Europe) for 25 years, and find it, on the whole, more natural. And I’ve never had an accident—so far! Dominus custodiet me, super manum dexteram meam.2 Still—hi in curribus, hi in equis3— and hi in neither, put their trus
t. Dear Cousin—and how I like this Cousin-ship—you mustn’t worry about me in my chariot. Murmur a brief prayer for me occasionally, and it will bring me safely home. I shall write a better letter soon, this is a wretched one, and illegible. But it brings you much love and gratitude. I shall soon be quite well now.
Your affectionate
R.M.
April
20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1
1st April, 1952 †
Dear Hamilton,
I was about to write to you to report progress, when arrived yours of 26th; thank you so much. You had got my sea letter on 25th, so it took 17 days. I am much better than when I wrote my last air paper, in fact now practically all right, but don’t go out yet, nor shall, this vile winter weather. My arrangement with Mary B[arham] J[ohnson] was that I was to wait for her to let me know when she was in London “early in April”— she knows I want to see her, and I do hope we shall meet, and that I shall be feeling well. I am much interested in all you tell me of her. I too feel a great respect for her.
That is interesting, about the pictures on books. What a disconcerting thought, that They were Defeated might have a picture of Cleveland and Julian in some embrace, or of Cleveland and Francis fighting while Julian was knocked out on the floor, that might embark some youth on a life of crime! There is material for such pictures in almost any novel—including E.M. F[orster]’s. But can criminals really be moved by such slight stimuli? I don’t believe it, whatever they may say. It would be interesting to know the results of the Jesuit’s appeal, if any publishers consented; but I fear they are hard men, and wouldn’t; violent illustrations may or may not induce crime; but they very certainly sell books. I will send you my contribution to the discussion, when I have made it. I think I know the answer more or less. As to the other business [homosexuality], who does know the answer? I suppose those resisters of yours do, in the end, get out of it. What you say to them seems exactly right. … [these] people buffeted to and fro, failing and recovering, and still clinging on, instead of taking the easy way of non-resistance. Yes, I am sure it grows commoner all the time. I suppose there was a good deal of it in the M[iddle] A[ges] among the Religious Houses; all the contemporary social satirists spoke of it; and, of course, it was one of the counts against them at the Dissolution—not that that says much, when so much was pure fabrication for a purpose. But I suppose one can’t reject all the Visitors’ Reports. Of course the M[iddle] A[ges] laws against it were very severe—they could be burnt alive for it at one time.
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