Letters to a Friend Read online

  You are right about everything being “rum”; that is a great thing to hold to. So one can select what one likes, out of the extraordinary possibilities. Thank you for reminding me of those Lucretius lines; I have been looking them up; they are beautiful, and apt to us; indeed, he so often is.

  I liked the celluloid prayers1: he must have been (be) a nice candle merchant; because one can’t see how celluloid prayers can be part of his business, or profitable. I shall keep them by me. I believe you would think my approaches to religion far too subjective. (But I should find it difficult to explain in a letter what I mean by this.) Here is a world perishing from lack of goodness, and we want a God who can help us to this. And we want to be sure that God wants us to be good. And that he is there at all.

  I don’t think I could go and talk to Fr. Wilkins2; I have no claim on him, and he would wonder what I was at. And he would rightly think, if this woman has lived so long without making up her mind about God, she isn’t likely to do so now. He even might induce me to think I had, but it would be a delusion. But, if ever I should find myself in Memorial Drive, Cambridge, Mass., I should telephone to you, and would like to talk about all kinds of things (I don’t mean over the telephone!). The changes in the collects, Latin and English, the Anglican Church, heaven and hell, books, God, the American liturgy, everything. By the way, I hope you will receive safely The World my Wilderness that I sent you. Tell me sometime anything that strikes you about it, if you have time to read it. And, if it doesn’t reach you, say in the next month, do let me know, and I will look into it. I’m not sure how long books take; it was sent at the time I wrote before, or a few days after.

  I am struggling with my book on “The Pleasure of Ruins.” It is a vast subject, and difficult rather, but fun. I am now tackling the artificial ruins of the 18th century, an enchanting fashion, nonsensical, but charming. I would have liked to lay out my garden with ruined temples and grottos and fragments of an ancient abbey and a model of a Roman arch.

  “O how charming the walks to my fancy appear,

  “What a number of temples and grottos are here!”

  as a contemporary of Pope’s wrote. It was a lovely fad.

  The people I love most have died. I wish they had not. But there is nothing to be done about it. Not only my parents —that was to be expected, of course—but my favourite sister, two brothers, and the man I loved. This seems one of the many reasons for wanting, so to speak, a link with another sphere of life. But I mustn’t bother you with this. One should consume one’s own smoke. But it was so nice to hear from you that I got led on. Thank you for writing so kindly.

  Yours very sincerely,

  Rose Macaulay

  October

  20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1

  20th October, 1950

  Dear Father Johnson,

  I am writing in the train, on the way to the christening of an infant cousin at Eton, so please forgive my shocking handwriting: as you know, I usually spare my friends this by typing. (Train not moved yet: if it becomes too bad, I will stop writing.) Your handwriting is so clear—and with it so nice to look at— that it is better than type: mine, alas, not.

  Thank you for your two letters—one at Michaelmas, the other 12th Oct. Both full of interest. I look up all your references that I can find. I looked up Mr. Dunstan1 (who, I think, was quoting—or I was—Boehme) and that Roman missal collect (you say the Ist Xmas Mass—in my missal, the 3rd) and the Hebrews verse you wrote under poor Isie’s O’Shaughnessy2; but I don’t remember where is “Cum de minis damnosisque”3 etc., and would like to. I like to pick up and follow your trails, in hope. If (when) we meet “coram”4 I shall pick up some more. What, too sadly likely, I may not pick up, is the power to believe those things—I mean, the actual facts, (as you put it, what God has done). How I wish I could get there. Partly my difficulties are intellectual—I just can’t make the grade—partly, I sometimes think, the blindness that comes from the selfish and deplorable life I’ve led. Who knows? It’s all a kind of vicious circle—badness keeps one from the realisation of God; perhaps nothing but that could cure badness—well, so there one is. “Quos sub peccati jugo vetusta servitus tenet.”5 And I expect one has to find a way through by some other road, that one can more easily accept. Who knows? Now this train is really too mobile; I must stop, and continue later.

  Hinde House. Back on terra firma again. I like the Deposited Book baptism service,6 which seems always used now. And I like Eton College chapel. And I like babies; this one is called Michael Conybeare, and is, so far, an agnostic, and doesn’t much care for holy water or Holy Church (or so he seemed to indicate).7 He makes a mistake: it is a glorious service—all those tremendous promises his godparents make for him (I was not one), and that are so seldom kept.

  Of course Fr. Palmer1 is quite right. I think, when you are on the Gulf of Mexico, I shall voyage there—I have felt for some? years (how many?) that I should like to talk to you again. Don’t you preach missions too, as well as household chores, and services near home? If not, I don’t know why not.

  They have just re-published a novel I wrote in 1920— Potterism—and I am sending you a copy, as you seem to have a kindly toleration for my books. This one is very old, rather “dated,” and I expect rather crude—I think it preaches, too! Still, I send it.

  Thank you for “remembrancing” me sometimes, and please go on.

  Yours very sincerely,

  Rose Macaulay

  November

  20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1

  20th November, 1950 [probably by airmail]

  Dear Father Johnson,

  Now I have two letters from you, which is lovely. Yes, I got that of 9th Nov. the other day; how sorry I should have been if it had failed to be collected, because it is so stuffed with good things of different kinds, all of which I want to talk about, sacred and profane. I see I was stupid about the Horace. I have now looked it up; I might well have included the 2nd stanza; I suppose I felt that the one about how each generation is worse than the one before was more precisely to my point in that section of my book. It is interesting how religious Horace and so many Romans were: polytheists like J. C. Powys (so they are your cousins) and with how stern a sense of the Gods’ commands—like the Greeks. Yes, that letter from Rufus would do for my Ruin book—“ quum uno loco tot oppid[or]um cadavera projecta jacent…1 it is such an awful picture. Thank you for reminding me of it, for I shall certainly quote some of it, to illustrate one of the ruin-pleasures. But what a letter of condolence to get on the death of a beloved child! I have always thought how Cicero must have resented it. I think Rufus had never lost any one very dear. By the way, Cassell’s Latin Diet, says Hem! is “an exclamation of surprise, wonder, joy, grief, etc. Ah! well! only see! just look!” (Latin words nearly always seem to have so many meanings, some of them of opposite sense; this makes one’s Latin lessons at school so difficult). As you say “my hat!” would often do. We might well re-introduce it; also ne and num might be useful. The trouble with “hem” is, people might think you were just clearing your throat.

  As to the child St. Augustine heard, I don’t think, do you, that he was necessarily indoors. Doesn’t domus mean, besides a house, a house and garden, as the vast palaces and courts and grounds of the Roman emperors were called “domus Tiberiana” “domus Augustana” “domus aurea” etc. I expect the child was picking figs or grapes, saying “take, gather.” This does seem more likely than “read.”2

  I am afraid you may be right about Fr. Jacinto.3 I liked him myself, and put him in for a joke, never meaning to be offensive, but I do hope R.C.s didn’t mind, or feel I was being offensive. I believe there are some pretty odd ladino priests in South and Central America; but also so many good ones, and, as you say, it may well be that the Jacintos would not be allowed long. In pursuing a joke, one should remember the point of view of those who may resent it. I should hate to offend R.C.s, very many of whom are my friends, or even relations. What do they feel about G
raham Greene’s drunken priest in The Power and the Glory? That was Mexico, of course, and a persecuted, hunted church, which makes it different.

  I like looking up your collects. Would you say “whose mysteries of light,” or “the mysteries of whose light”? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. But surely not “of which light.” I shall say your collect, “Per hujus, Domine, operationem Mysterii, et vitia nostra purgentur …”1 I like it.

  You ask about the Conybeares. I am half one; I mean, my mother was one. The Dr. Conybeare in They were Defeated was the son of an Elizabethan schoolmaster who was my ancestor; we have the line of descent, and a little Latin book he wrote; it was edited and reprinted by my mother’s cousin F. C. Conybeare, an atheistical Oxford don, who wrote a book called Myth, Magic, and Morals (the Latin book2 was by the schoolmaster, not by Dr. C). I invented Dr. Conybeare in a sense, but I made him as like as I could to my cousin Fred of Oxford, atheism, appearance and all. But I have no reason for thinking that he ever existed in the 17th c, or Julian either. Possibly he may have! Did you ever chance to come across W. J. Conybeare, late Provost of Southwell, now retired? He is my cousin, and wrote two years ago a little book of his reminiscences, called Here’s a Church—Let’s Go In. Thinking that, as you are interested in family histories and the past, it might please you to see

  [The next page of this letter was missing when the correspondence was received from Father Johnson.]

  December

  20, Hinde House, Hinde St., W.1

  9th December, 1950

  Dear Father Johnson,

  Thank you much for your letter posted on 22nd Nov. For a moment I thought, when I saw the envelope, that a miracle had been wrought for me, and that it might be answering one I wrote you on 28th Nov.,1 and that I dare say you haven’t even yet received, posts between Hinde Street and Memorial Drive being what they are. But of course it wasn’t, and I am glad to have it as an interim letter, pending your possible reply to mine, in which I put up to you a problem for solution and asked your advice. Whatever it is, I shall take it. Meanwhile, thank you for many good things in two languages in this last letter.

  Yes, I suppose I am grounded in religious knowledge more or less, having been brought up that way; and also, perhaps, inheriting an interest in theology and church literature from a thousand (or so) clerical ancestors, who, I presume, had it all at their fingertips. Of late years I’m afraid it has got rather rusty; but I still do know days and psalms and creeds and even most of the major heresies! I am much better instructed than Rome Garden,2 who didn’t know the connection between ceremonies and doctrine. But the way you put it is much more illuminating than anything I had really grasped about the history of the High Church connection with ritual, or anyhow you express it better. I think the excitement of the new spirit, the beginning of Anglo-Catholicism, in the 17th century, especially in the universities, must have been extraordinarily moving; the return (tentative) of ornament and crosses, etc., and decency of worship in the churches and college chapels (as in St. John’s under Dr. Beale) and in Cosin’s diocese—but I think I have said all this in that book I wrote1; it has always held my imagination. All my researches while I was writing that book failed to discover a clear instance of the Crucifix (as a separate object, not a picture) in churches. I think those Dr. Cosin was accused of having were all in paintings; though in one account it is not altogether clear. How far, I wonder, did William Law go in ritual? The times were against him; but such clergy as he and Dr. Cole (Horace Walpole’s antiquarian friend) were very much inclined that way. I gather that the Tractarians were rather austere about ritual, weren’t they? My father’s father was a High Church rector; but there was no adornment in his church, and I think my father always said that he preached in a black gown. I suppose it was Fr. Stanton2 and his contemporaries who really got all that going. I remember reading that Tyrrell didn’t like it, when he worked in the East End under that ritualistic vicar, before his conversion3; too much “millinery,” he thought. I have always liked it myself.

  It is interesting, that ancient belief in blood as the sealer of covenants. Doesn’t it go back beyond the Jews, to the Greek mysteries, and the Egyptian? It means something very profoundly deep in human religion, I suppose. I can’t quite get at it ever; I mean, just why. But there must be something, and it has gone on and on, not only in Christianity, but in childish agreements, sealed with a drop of blood squeezed out by a prick of a needle, as I remember. It seems fundamental.

  Later. In a train. As you were (unlike some of my correspondents) quite tolerant of my last train-letter, I am taking this one to go on with on a week-end journey. If it gets too shakey, I will stop. I wish I wrote like you, who are legible even with a blue stilus.

  That question about knowing, I have often asked it of believing friends and relations. They say it depends on what you mean by “know.” They feel certain. Or, in some cases, are putting their shirts on a hope, because if it’s not true, they feel they might as well lose the shirt along with everything else of value to them—they are quite right, of course. I wish I had as much guts.

  I believe I like the English of that “chain of our sins” prayer even better than the Latin—the beautiful monosyllabic run of “though we be tied and bound by the chain of our sins”—and “loose us” at the end. It is one of the very best collects, I think, both for sound and sense. Is the other (“absolve, quaesumus”1 …) perhaps better in Latin? I don’t know. I like both—and the “liberemur”2 at the end. They are prayers to use.

  Thank you for writing, and for letting me write to you. I value it very much. It is a wonderful revenance from the far past, which I never supposed would cross my orbit again. It gives me a lot to consider—— But I wrote of all that in my last, which you will be getting sometime soon.

  I am approaching my goal, so will stop.

  R.M.

  20, Hinde House, Hinde St, W.1

  15th December, 1950

  Dear Father Johnson,

  Thank you so very much for your letter (air) of 9th and 10th, which came yesterday, by the same post as your letter of 27th and 28th, and the two numbers of Cowley, which interest me much. I find in them, inter alia, two pictures of you, which I like; one reading in the Refectory; I wonder what book.

  Thank you for everything you say, and for being so immeasurably wise, good and understanding. I am relieved that you can say “nequaquam miror”1 I might have known that, of course. But when I wrote that rather difficult letter, I wasn’t sure.

  I suppose I too have lived “well in” a treacle well,2 another kind of treacle, I mean, a climate of opinion and attitude in which the people one knows—and often likes or loves—do that kind of thing often, and don’t think badly of it in themselves or others. So gradually, if one is doing it oneself, one sinks more and more well in, and can’t even see clearly what it really is. One gets clogged about; treacle is so clinging. No doubt I am still partly in; though it is over, one can’t struggle right out. To change the metaphor, long years of wrong-doing build a kind of blank—or nearly blank—wall between oneself and God, and the task is to break it down, or at least to make holes in it large enough to see through. It isn’t, of course, God who puts up the wall; it is one’s own actions and rejections. So blank is the wall—though less so than a few weeks ago, and this is your doing —that even communion might be barren and almost meaningless—not seeing through a window, but from far off, through a telescope with a very murky glass. As to absolution, I suppose this would make holes in the wall. Absolution from Memorial Drive, which I feel I have (however undeservedly), has already made some.

  If I go to confession, hadn’t I better go to some chance priest, in some church where I could join an anonymous queue, not to someone I should have to make an appointment with and give my name, such as Fr. Wilkins? It would seem easier. Or is it better to go to someone whom one has reason to believe might be helpful? I don’t know. And I shouldn’t know what priest, being well out of that world. Meanwhile, as you say, I c
an go to church, and hope to get at something in that way.

  Well, I think this is quite enough about me, anyhow for the moment. There are, as usual, a lot of interesting things in your letters. Dear Fr. Waggett:3 he was a great friend of ours at Cambridge, before 1914. Wasn’t he sent there to counteract the influence of Hugh Benson at the R.C. cathedral, who was making converts? Every one loved him (Fr. Waggett, I mean). He was the most brilliant and enchanting person. We used sometimes to sit under him at St. Giles’s; he could, by the turn of a phrase, set the whole congregation laughing (which he once said he deplored, but I think can’t have). I remember his bicycling out in a snow-storm to stay the night with us, to take a Lent service at a church two or three miles outside Cambridge, and how we enjoyed having him. He used to call me “the hockey girl,” because of sometimes meeting me coming in with my hockey stick after some match. We had that little book of Holy Week addresses1; I don’t know where it is now. I recognise the passages you quote. How vivid they are, and how good. “Theft and envy”; that was so like him. He was, wasn’t he, rather broken down by his war chaplain time, and later returned to Cambridge (we had left it then, after my father’s death) in poor health and form. He was a unique person.

  I must read that “English Reformation” book. Oh dear, if only the Ref. had happened differently, under the leadership of More, Colet, Erasmus, if only Somerset hadn’t been as he was, if only they hadn’t had that orgy of smashing and spoiling, if only the Marian persecutions hadn’t sent Protestants fleeing to Amsterdam to be infected with Calvinism, or if only they hadn’t come back. Then the Anglican Church might have developed differently from the first, been from the first more lovely, fine and learned, without puritanism, Sabbatarianism or fundamentalism. Still, we could scarcely have had a better prayerbook and liturgy. I wonder if any R.C.s deplore the Counter-Reformation. In some ways, one could; and obviously (as we think of our own) it could have been much better done. I like those Tridentine sentences. I have never been enough into the Council of Trent to know how many of its declarations said something fresh (e.g. about the Mass) or how many were merely reaffirmations. And I wonder what ex-R.C.s, such as your Canadian priest, feel about the differences between the two churches….