“Well, I don’t seem to get well yet, and feel pretty weak. It is really a most tedious and exasperating disease. At any moment its end may come and I may take up my bed and walk, but it doesn’t seem to happen…. My intellect is going steadily downhill; I don’t read much, and the books I do read seem vulgar and trite, except a large 2-volume account of Indian architecture, which is heavy on the chest.
I think there is a lot in what you say about the Evangelical distrust of public schools. Zachary Macaulay felt it so much that he sent T.B.M.1 to a small school near Cambridge, which was probably not nearly so good for him, as he was so easily cock of the walk there; but [he] no doubt found his level at Cambridge, where he failed to the end to pass the Mathematical Tripos then necessary for a degree—or did he at the end just scrape through? Perhaps he did.2 I forget when the absurd anomaly was abolished—that men had to take both the mathematical] and classical tripos. So many brilliant classics can’t do Maths, and vice versa. One of my uncles (later Vice-Provost of King’s)3 was regarded at Winchester as a kind of idiot because he couldn’t learn Latin and Greek—and he turned out the most brilliant mathematician. But no doubt (returning to schools) the Evangelical distrust had good basis; they were, and are, full of vice and temptations. Much less so now than then—I wonder if Lord Shaftesbury sent his sons to a public school? I wouldn’t be surprised if not.4
The newspapers are awful reading now—Russian brutality in shooting at passenger planes, murderers escaping from Broadmoor and murdering children, bloody doings everywhere. Libera nos indeed—ab omni perturbatione securi1—what a hope! Thank you for your concluding prayer for me; it sustains and strengthens—in fidei luce et in mentis pace.2 My writing is so shocking that I fear it may strain your eyes, and hope you wont try and decipher it. But I do send my love, dear Father.
R.M.
20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1
6th May, 1952 †
My dear Hamilton,
Thank you for your two most welcome letters (letter and paper) posted 30th April and 2nd May. I hope this too will be welcome, as it is partly to say I am much better, have begun the new Aureomycin treatment … and really for the first time feel on the way to health. I am normal in temp., can sit up and take notice, and feel I am climbing up. Last week I felt slipping down, to an extent I never mentioned to you: my doctor was going to give me a blood transfusion to arrest the process; but I suddenly turned a corner, and he is only giving me liver injections. It is quite absurd, the way this disease has affected me, but I suppose my resistance is low, and things get me down where they wouldn’t a stronger (or younger) person. Anyhow I now feel I am really getting the better of it….
Don’t be vexed with poor M[ary] B[arham] J[ohnson], She did nothing amiss. The arrangement was quite vague—if she came to London (and had time) she was to let me know. I suppose she didn’t come, or hadn’t time—and perhaps she will sometime later. I do hope you won’t tell her she should have let me know, because she really wasn’t bound to at all, and it was such a very conditional engagement. I should have done just as she did. I am sorry about your cousin Gertrude.3 Such deaths make deep gaps—and she does seem to have been a fine and central person in her family. One likes “those 2 little girls lie side by side again.” … [sic] Eliz. Myers, who married L. Powys, was a very clever, interesting writer: I liked her books. They were very much the books of a consumptive (if you know what I mean—K. Mansfield was another). It was very right of your Aunt Katie to be named after St. Catherine of Siena. She was our patron saint (of Varazze, my home town) and her procession was the noblest of the year, even better than Corpus Christi. How I remember it, winding all through the town and along that sea road, St. C. carried in front and all the bells clanging, and ending where it started, in her pink-washed patronal Church just outside our house, at the foot of the hillpath. Why don’t we have religious processions? Weather, or just stupid Protestant prejudice and apathy? …
I sit very loose now to “intellectual difficulties,” and don’t feel they matter. As you say, it is a personal relationship. I like Tyrrell’s External Religion,1 pp. 31-35: about how the Incarnation and Passion and Resurrection present for us in concrete terms the eternal age-old struggle of God in our souls, because men are too gross to realise the God within them unless He was externalised thus, so that His Passion and our sin and the final victory are shewn before our eyes, an eternal thing and a moment-to-moment battle to which we are committed and to which He has committed Himself. And [He] has “assembled” the sacramental rites for our strengthening. Yes; I like “assemble” in that collect. As to “Pro uno defuncto”2 (how good a prayer!) the woman would seem to be more in need of purging from sin than the man, which is, indeed, the ancient and time-honoured view, both ecclesiastical and secular. Based, do you think, on anything more than the masculine-made view of humanity? These papers are very small and come to an abrupt end. But my love is not, and does not.
R.M.
20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1
12th May, 1952 †
My dear Hamilton,
Thank you so much for your air paper of 5th May. By now you will have got mine of 6th, saying I was much better, and also that M[ary] B[arham] J[ohnson]’s conduct was perfectly right and reasonable and I should have done the same myself, in the very conditioned engagement we made, so don’t let it vex you. Since I wrote, I had a slight return of fever, but it is now subsided, and I really am (I hope) in the way of recovery. I am interested to hear of the prevalence of the disease on American farms. Never again shall I touch that unwholesome drink wherewith Nature, that malicious harridan, has seen fit to nourish the mammal creation. (Unless it is boiled, that is.) “With milk and honey blest,” indeed! I hope they boil it all there; if not, I shall stick firmly to the honey when (or if) I arrive in the golden city. I am practising all the sapientiam available, and going very slow and suaviter, in order to get entirely well.
I felt well enough yesterday (Sunday) to write a review of a very malicious and inaccurate little book by Sir Henry Slesser (judge, P.C., etc.) called The Anglican Dilemma. He was, as you probably know, a prominent Anglo-Catholic for years, and went R.C. a year or two ago, since when he has been a violent Angli-canophobe, and has now produced this contemptuous and ignorant book, proving how “Calvinist,” etc., the Church has always been—I gather the “dilemma” is that no A.C. should stay in it. The Church is also Erastian (too true), impotent, immoral, ignorant, and without any roots in Catholic Tradition. I will send you sometime a copy of my review—perhaps the book too if you would like to see it as a curiosity….
Oh yes, indeed—veritatis tuae lumen ostendis1—I have been saying that (in English) all last week, with thankfulness that I can now be shown it (progressively, dimly, but really). By the way (and returning to Slesser’s book), am I right in saying [that] the 28th Article, in saying what it does about “given, taken and eaten, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner” and by [saying that] Faith [is the “mean whereby the body of Christ is received”], accepts the Real Presence? And does the mention of Faith imply a “receptionist” view, any more than the words of the Missal “ut nobis corpus et sanguis fiat dilectissimi Filii tui.”1 Sir H.S., who insists on judging the whole Church and P[rayer] B[ook] by the Articles (cf. the admirable commentator of the American P.B. who says we must interpret the Articles in the light of the whole P.B.), declares that the Articles, and therefore the Anglican Church, deny the Real Presence, which was never accepted till the Oxford Movement. He seems to have read none of the 17th and 18th century Anglican devotional writers. Particularly he should study Wm. Law’s mystical writings. But of course he is a … propagandist, and they won’t see straight….
Did you finish Where Angels?2 A queer, young, interesting book. E.M. F[orster] is coming to see me to-morrow.
Much love,
R. M.
20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.I
16th May, 1952 †
My dear Hamilton,
T
hank you so much for (a) air paper posted 10th (b) air letter posted 13th, which came to-day (brisk work!). Both full of interest. I hope both left you as they find me, in the rudest (or almost the rudest) of health. I stroll the streets, I shop, and this morning I drove to 8.15 Mass! Flow is that for a person who a week ago was prostrate and undulating? I am delighted with myself. Now I am bidden to put on weight; I am now 7 stone, which is too light for my height (5 ft. 8) and normally I am nearly 8 stone. So I try and stoke up, but don’t feel any very hearty appetite yet. I suspect that thinness and under-weight may be a physical quality that you and I share; but I fear it may be the only one; I should like to think there were more (as you suggest) but I believe I take entirely after my father’s family, and look very like him, and still more (I was always told) like his mother, who was a Ferguson, and had no relationship to the Roses. More chance of a family likeness in one of my sisters; they both took after my mother rather, and my sister Jean is a little like our maternal grandmother, Eliza Rose, who (I can see from his portrait) was very like her father Joseph. But I fear no one is going to find that side of the family in me; though, of course, there are odd fleeting looks, that it usually takes people outside a family to observe. For instance I am very like one of my brothers1 (as children we could deceive our parents for a moment by wearing one another’s clothes) but he was a little like my mother, and her uncle Edward Rose. So you never know.
I admired the Latin story you wrote to me (I mean, its Latin!). I expect one ought to practise writing in Latin, as our forbears did; but time lacks. By the way, did I tell you I have now read a lot of the Beeson, with great interest and profit? How terribly moral—and limited—those Dark Age writers and monks were! All those Physiologus allegories2—every animal having to be a moral image, or to represent Christ, or something. I suppose it was a stage in the evolution of a more enlightened Christianity that had to be worked through: like the eremitical stage, and extremes of desert asceticism and mortification of the senses which meant a lop-sided spiritual life and culture.
I’m glad Christianity has emerged into a fuller and better thing—lumen veritatis. After struggling, too, through Puritanic Calvinism, that deadly miasma—though of course it only affected part of the Christian church. But our Low ancestors! Yes indeed. Though I suppose they did practise the action of Prayer, going to church, and were sometimes sacramental. Didn’t they at all believe in sacramental action on the soul— I mean, that Christ is (as Article 28 and the Catechism have it) truly and indeed present in it, though only in a spiritual manner?
By the way, Collect. The O[xford] Dictionary] (referring back to the Latin collecta) says “in late Latin (Jerome) an assembly or meeting. In Med[ieval] Latin in the Liturgical sense (which was the first in English).” The Gregorian Sacramentary (late 6th century: I suppose), it goes on, has “oratio ad collectam,”1 and sometimes merely “collecta,” as the title of any prayer said at a station where the people were collected in order to proceed together to church for Mass. It meant simply a prayer at the collection or gathering of people. Earlier than this, in the Gallican liturgies, “collecta” was used as the title of a prayer (after the Mass) [which was a] collecting or summing up of thoughts suggested by the capitula2 for the day. Thence the word, as an equivalent for oratio, passed into medieval French and English missals and breviaries, and thence again into our P.B. The odd thing is that in Jerome’s “late Latin” it seems only to have meant assembly, so what docs one make of that passage from Jerome? Could it mean “no other words he was wont to give the assembled people but …” etc.? But then surely proferre would cause collectas to take the dative case? I suppose the Breviary couldn’t have altered Jerome, using collectas where he hadn’t? Or needn’t proferre govern the dative? I see we need further information about this. One should consult some Late Latinist —or see some good translation of Jerome’s Commentaries….
Virginia Woolf—yes, I was devoted to her, and am a great admirer. Orlando is nonsense, of course, but rather lovely and fascinating nonsense, don’t you think? Orlando him-her-self was taken from Vita Sackville-West, who is coming to see me in a day or two; I am v. fond of her, she is v. beautiful and nice (Mrs. Harold Nicolson). I shall read Littleton Powys’s autobiography3. I was greatly interested in J[ohn] Cfowper] Powys’s.
I told you, I think, that I had been reviewing Sir Henry Slesser’s anglophobe polemic The Anglican Dilemma. I had to condense a draft of over 1000 words into 550, which is difficult. This morning the literary editor of the Observer (a young man) rang me up to suggest a few alterations, as he thought one or two things I had written might “provoke a correspondence.” One was my calling the Articles about predestination, election, Pelagians vainly talking, etc., “tribal cries from some far Scholastic jungle” which he thought might annoy some people. Then he asked “What are Pelagians, and how do they vainly talk?”1 It did demonstrate the gulf between our generations, that he had, I think, never even read the Articles. Also, I was not to talk of the 1928 P[rayer] B[ook] having been “howled down by Parsee and PresbyterianM.P.s.” So I cut that out. Then I said “Of course you don’t remember that”—and of course he didn’t—he was probably under 10 at the time.
I like that American addition to the “Church Militant,” and always add it to myself—I wish it was in our Cowley Altar Book. I must get hold sometime of those books of Fr. Martindale’s—it was annoying that I only just missed The Words of the Missal. But I expect they’ll turn up sometime. By the way, I was interested in 2 numbers of the Cowley magazine that came for me, one with your Abbot Daniel trans, in it.2
I hope you don’t mind these written letters. I don’t feel up to typing yet, except for short business communications—but can you read me? Anyhow, I must now go to bed: I am trying to retire early at present.
Much love from your most affectionate and obliged cousin.
R.M.
Just found Mind of Missal in a little bookshop, and received some lovely flowers from your 2 nieces! Did you suggest this? I fear you must have!3
20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1
23rd May [1952] †
My dear Hamilton,
Is not this grand, that I am typing to you again? I am sure you must have got very tired of trying to decipher my handwriting. Since I last wrote (17th) I have had your air paper of 14th and a[ir] l[etter] posted 20th. I must ask for that Pittenger book1 at the London Library…. [Those] American-Oxford books are sometimes hard to get here; but the L.L. ought to have it, or get it on request. That translation of his of the B[lessed] Sac[rament] collect is a familiar one, I suppose; but, as you say, not good. “Experience” would be better (for sentiamus; “perceive” of course is obsolete English) than “perceive”; and of course “fruition” rather than “fruit”; and “continually” rather than “evermore.” But it does sound a book I should much like to read, and shall. What you say about Res [is] interesting. I suppose one would translate it “substance,” wouldn’t one? “Grant me not only to receive the Sacrament, but its substance and virtue.” It seems rather interesting that St. Thom[as] Aq[uinas] prayed that; for surely it amounts to saying that it does depend, as Article 28 has it, on our faith? I mean, that we don’t necessarily receive the substance with the species. I am interested too to see in one of St. Ambrose’s prayers (Feria Sexta—the one beginning “Rogamus etiam te”2) that it asks the Holy Spirit to make our offering into the Body and Blood. Is this the Epiclesis,3 that they tried to put into the 1928 P[rayer] B[ook]? More and more one sees that there isn’t really so very much difference of view—-only perhaps of emphasis; after all, they speak continually of memorial of His Passion— “recolitur memoria passionis ejus,”4—as in the collect you quote. Of course not the same as “reminder.” I don’t mean that the Roman view isn’t rather more objective than ours—but not much, surely? So the Slessers have no call to dismiss Anglicans as “receptionists.” But the whole business is so tangled up with metaphysical and theological changing hairbreadth shades of meaning that
one can’t (and doesn’t really want to) fully understand what it may have meant to different sections and ages of churchmen. I find myself more and more occupied in finding out a little of what it may mean to me and to Christians now. I naturally haven’t got hold of much of it yet; but one explores it. And such books as the one you mention are a help. Meanwhile, what a glorious territory to explore daily! I am now back in the Chapel again, though I don’t go except I feel up to it. Nor am I yet exploring the Serpentine afterwards; this will come in time. The weather now is delightful, on the whole. I am very busy, trying to catch up on arrears, and to get on with my Ruins. When more free I do hope to see your nieces, if they will. They may spell my name just as they prefer: they have probably never seen it written, except in connection with the historian, to whom they have no reason to think me related. I find in shops people always write it down wrong, tho’ to me “Macaulay” seems the most obvious way. But Macauley is more liked, and better still McColley, or other oddities. In Italy they called it Macolai; our house they called the Villa Macolai. So we are all quite used to being mis-spelt. Alas, my chariot won’t make for Tarentum this year; the time for that excursion has gone by and my doctor says (fortiter) no. At least not in June; and July and August I can’t well go. Anyhow, I must now get on with finishing that book, from which I have been held so long. I hope Mother Rose1 got to, and liked, the Chapel. Is she one who would be shocked at seeing communicants at High Mass? There have always been those there, I gather; and “spikes” don’t like it. I think it is Christian and right, tho’ I don’t do it myself, from no principle but simply that I like early much better. I hope Mrs. Paine enjoys her English visit….
Letters to a Friend Page 31