I came back to London on Monday. I asked Housman to dinner with me and
told him that he had much better get Mrs Housman back. He said he quite
agreed that it was the only thing to do. Things were now worse than
ever. Mrs Park was impossible. Poor little "Bert"! The worst of it is,
that directly this is over there is quite certain to be someone else and
perhaps someone worse. However, let us hope for the best. George came
to the office yesterday. He said he had been staying with his sister; he
said nothing about Florence. He is in low spirits.
I shall certainly go abroad at Easter and spend a few days in Paris in
any case. Lady Jarvis is back in London, and the Shamiers. I dined there
last night. Lavroff was there and Louise is just as fond of him as ever.
Poor Godfrey Mellor is terribly melancholy. He has got a friend staying
with him now and I don't see much of him.
Yrs.
G.
_From the Diary of Godfrey Mellor_
_Tuesday, February_ 15_th_, 1910.
Alfred Riley arrived last night. He is now professor at Shelborough
University and is editing _Propertius_. He has come to consult some
books at the British Museum.
_Wednesday, February_ 16_th_.
Sat up very late last night talking with Riley. He was amused by a
conversation he had overheard at a Club. Two men were talking about
someone who had become a Roman Catholic. Someone he didn't know. One of
them said to the other that it was a very pleasant solution if you could
do it. The other one said: "Certainly; no bother, no responsibility ...
everything settled for you." I said that I did think the Confessional
must be the negation of responsibility. Riley said that by becoming a
Catholic you became responsible for all your actions. He said that
before he was a Catholic he felt no responsibility at all to anything or
anyone, but that the moment you were a Catholic everything you did and
said counted. Every time you went to Confession you acknowledged and
confirmed your assumption of responsibility. I mentioned a common friend
of ours, O'Neil, who had been a Catholic all his life and who, though he
was married, had never ceased to live with a Miss Silvia Thorpe, whom I
had known as an artist. He didn't hide it, neither did she. Riley said
that this proved his point. O'Neil never dreamt of going to Confession;
he knew it would be useless, because he had no intention of giving up
Miss Thorpe, and that being so, he knew he couldn't get Absolution, It
was a sacrifice to him, a very great sacrifice, as he Was a believing
Catholic. "That shows," he went on, "that you don't understand how the
thing works. You and all Protestants think that one can stroll into the
Confessional, wipe the slate clean and go on with what you are doing,
however bad it is, with the implied sanction of the Church. But the fact
remains that practising Catholics who are living in a way which the
Church condemned do not go to Confession. Going to Confession entails
facing responsibility instead of evading it." He said that if what I
thought was true, people like O'Neil would go to Confession. I must face
the fact that he did not go to Confession and was extremely unhappy on
that account. He would like to go to the Sacraments but he had made this
great sacrifice with his eyes open. I said that I had always thought the
Church was lax about such matters. He said individuals might be lax. The
Church was not responsible for the conduct of individuals, but the rule
of the Church was absolutely uncompromising. I said O'Neil might be an
extreme case, but supposing a devout Catholic married woman had a great
man friend, supposing he was very much in love with her, but she was a
virtuous woman, faithful to her husband, she could go on seeing the
other man as much as she liked? Would the Church forbid it? Riley said
the Church would forbid _sin_. Any priest would tell her that if she
thought it might lead to sin, she must cut it out of her life. I said
that was quite clear, but he was not telling me what I wanted to know.
He said: "What is it that you want to know?" I said I must give it up. I
couldn't put it into words. I said Roman Catholics were always so
matter-of-fact. They handed one opinions and ideas like chocolates
wrapped up in silver paper. He said: "You think that, because you would
sooner walk naked in the streets than think things out, or call things
by their names. You like leaving them vague. 'Le vague,' Renan said,
'est pire que le faux.'"
I said, going back to the question of responsibility, that I had often
heard Catholics themselves complain of the want of responsibility of
Catholics. Riley said that might very well be; they might lack a sense
of responsibility, just as they might lack a sense of charity or
honesty. "You think," he said, "that the Church is perpetually arranging
comfortable compromises. Nothing is further from the truth. Nothing is
harder on the individual than certain of the commandments of the Church
with regard to marriage: for instance, divorce, and the bearing of
children. Some of the Church's views were just as hard on the individual
as it was hard on a man, who is going to catch a train to see his dying
child, to be delayed by a policeman holding up the traffic, but in order
to make traffic possible, you had to have a policeman, and the
individual couldn't complain however much he might suffer.
"I know a much harder case than O'Neil's," he said: "a colleague of mine
who is married and has been completely neglected by his wife. On the
other hand, he has been looked after devotedly for years by another
woman, who nursed him when he was ill and saved his life. He wants to
become a Catholic, but he knows quite well that the Church will not
receive him unless he were to give up this woman, whom he adores, and go
back to his wife, who is indifferent to him. What you don't understand,"
he said, "is that the Church is not an air cushion but a rock."
He said I accused the Church of being lax, but many people that he knew
found fault with what they called the _hardness_ of the Church. But as a
matter of fact they had generally to admit that as far as the human race
was concerned the Church in such matters of morals was always right. He
cited instances of what the Church was right in condemning. I said that
one did not need to be Roman Catholic to know that immorality was bad
for the State, and that vice was noxious to the individual. The
ordinary laymen reach the same conclusions merely by common-sense.
Riley said there were only two points of view in the world: the Catholic
point of view or the non-Catholic point of view. All so-called religions
which I could mention, including my layman's common-sense view, were
either lopped-off branches of Catholicism or shadows of it, or a blind
aspiration towards it, or a misguided parallel of it, as of a train that
had gone off the rails, or a travesty of it, sometimes serious, and
sometimes grotesque: a distortion. The other point of view was the
materialist point of view, which he could perfectly well understand
anyone holding. It depends, he said, whether you think human life is
casual or divine.
I said I could quite well conceive a philosophy which would be neither
materialist nor Catholic. He quoted Dr Johnson about everyone having a
right to his opinion, and martyrdom being the test. Catholicism, he
said, had survived the test; would my philosophy?
As far as I was concerned I admitted that I held no opinion for which I
was ready to go to the stake, except, possibly, that _Jane Eyre_ was an
interesting book.
_Monday, February_ 21_st_.