AN OLD WAY OF MAKING A NEW DEPARTURE
Nor blame the Rock, whose slippery edge was splashed
Only by waves your frantic struggling washed.
E. P. MASON.
My political career did not survive my husband’s death. The Holroyd
ministry, it will be remembered, went out in ’63, and the sense of
loneliness and depression I then felt did not allow me to stand again.
Since, however, a certain misunderstanding has arisen about this, and it
is necessary for me to clear, not only my own character, but the august
memory of James Holroyd, I may be pardoned for printing here the letter
which I received from him on its being made known that I did not intend
to seek re-election:
AIX-LES-BAINS, _Oct. 12_.
DEAR LADY PORSTOCK,—
_I cannot tell you how sorry I am to hear that we are to lose your
help at the forthcoming election. It is just the moment when
splendid talents such as yours would be most useful to us. But I
must not, of course, ask you to reconsider your decision. My own
regret is shared, I need hardly tell you, in the fullest sense by my
colleagues. I had a wireless only yesterday from Lord Brede to say,
“Please express deep regret Lady Porstock very natural decision she
has taken none more sorry than self to see ranks of old comrades in
arms depleted tout lasse tout casse tout passe ac.ac.ac. Brede.” You
will be glad to hear that Sir Hugh ffynes has consented to fill the
Manchester N.W. (3) coupon, so that Liberalism in that constituency
will not be without its worthy representative._
_Yours sincerely_,
JAMES HOLROYD
About this time Francis and Gervase, who had both done very well at
Eton, got leaving scholarships into the Guards. It was not so much the
financial side of this that appealed to me (the scholarships had the
effect of reducing the premium to £500) as the consciousness that my
boys were well thought of by their masters and were worthy grandsons of
Herbert Blisworth. And now what was left for me but to retire into the
background? And what is left for me, you will ask, but to retire into
the background, and bring these inconsequent memoirs to a conclusion?
Well, I confess that I have finished with public affairs; and if any of
my readers goes beyond this point, he must do it on the clear
understanding that he has let himself be betrayed into taking an
interest in the private affairs of a talkative old woman who was not,
after all, much of a personage even in her day. Her private affairs,
nay, her very private affairs, for what is so personal to each of us as
his or her attitude towards religion? And that is all I have left to
speak of. It is what we older folk begin to worry about when the
interests of youth desert us and the friends of youth are taken from our
side, and we find ourselves no longer battling with the winds of
circumstance, but volplaning steadily towards the drome that waits for
all of us at the last.
I know I have figured in these pages as a careless sort of butterfly,
untroubled by any thought of my last end. Perhaps my readers will be
disappointed in me at finding such a reversal of my old ways of thought.
But, be that as it may, old age and bereavement and the lack of
absorbing occupations combined to drive me in upon myself, and make me
think about my last landing. It was natural that in this position I
should turn for guidance to one who from quite an early age had
manifested an interest in my spiritual affairs, who, indeed, had
laughingly described himself as my “father professor,” Canon Dives.
Canon Dives I have written, for so I shall always remember him, but
indeed by this time he had attained that preferment for which his
exceptional qualities had long marked him out, as Episcopal Bishop of
Norwich.[15] So long as the Established Church remained a single body
(only weakened by the secession of the Feminists in ’46, and the
Enthusiasts in ’53), the Westernizing party had still sufficient weight
to hinder the advancement of one who had always been so outspoken a
champion of “relativist” views. But, as those of my readers who are
interested in such subjects will remember, in 1964, only five years
after Disestablishment became an accomplished fact, the ecclesiastical
map was yet further complicated by a schism within the old Church of
England. The Westernizers succeeded in securing for themselves that
recognition by the Orthodox Churches of the East which remained theirs
till, on the outbreak of the Great War, they were solemnly anathematized
and cut off from Communion. But they secured this advantage at the price
of separating themselves from the whole relativist party, which
contained within itself so much that was most striking in the intellect
of contemporary Christianity. At West Mill, our parish church had
remained Anglican (it was only in the towns that the old churches were
divided up among the various denominations), and at the schism Mr.
Rowlands, after much hesitation, pronounced in favour of the
relativists—it would have cost him a divorce to do otherwise—so that, at
least for his lifetime, the position of the parish was defined. I was
not very much influenced by this fact; but old friendship and the
outstanding personality of the new Bishop of Norwich made me, as I say,
turn to him.
I wrote, then, to Bishop Dives asking him for an exposition of the
Christian religion suited to the beginner—to one who had been accustomed
to regard the supernatural as not real, or, if real, not vital. He was
kind enough to send me by return a record taken from one of his own
recent sermons, preached at Holy Trinity Church, Brompton. It was part
of a course, but he said it was exactly the thing for one in my state of
mind. I mean to print the relevant part of it here.
“Everything is relative to a thinker. That is clear from the mere force
of words; for what is a thing but a thought? When I think a thing I at
the same time thing it: I give it thingness by thinking it. Now, that
all thought is relative to a thinker has long been clear so far as the
process of thought, what we call nowadays the thinkage, is concerned. It
is the boast of modern philosophy, trained, and proud to have been
trained, in the school of relativist Science, that it has gone further
than this. It assures us (I trust I make my meaning clear) that it is
not only our thinkage but our thoughtage that is relative to a thinker.
If I think that two and two are four—allowing, for the sake of argument,
that this is so, though I know well that there are serious difficulties
about believing it to be so—if I think that two and two are four, then
the fourness, if I may so express myself, of the two and the two
combined is part of my thoughtage, and relative to me as a thinker.
“But not, let us hasten to add, of my thoughtage only. It is part of the
race-thoughtage, the thoughtage which rises like an upgushing stream
from the harmonious and simultaneous thinkage of the human species. I
think we may go further, and say that it upgushes equally from the
thinkage of all other spiritual beings, if there are any other spiritual
beings in existence, and in so far as they exist. Now, when a thing is
merely the thoughtage of my thinkage, what does that prove? Why, nothing
or next to nothing; merely that it is thinkable. But when it is the
thoughtage not only of my thinkage but of the world-thinkage, then we go
further; then we are not content to say, This is thinkable; we must
needs add, This is thinkworthy. More than that we do not know, and we
shall never know. The old confidence that objects exist, outside of and
apart from our thinkage, is gone. The old confidence that things are
true, outside of and apart from our thinkage, is gone. That confidence,
valuable as it has been in the training of our race, and powerfully as
it has contributed to the development of our history, is no longer ours.
It made the fatal mistake of distinguishing and abstracting our
thoughtage from our thinkage. To repeat that mistake to-day would be to
argue as if Mosenheim and Poschling had never existed—I mean, in so far
as they ever did exist.
“Well, when first we realize that there is no such thing, properly
speaking, as existence, and no such thing, as truth, we feel, for a
time, unmanned. We are like aviators plane-wrecked on some little island
far from all help, with nothing around us but sea and air. And we
naturally ask ourselves, do we not, what have we saved from the wreck?
If we are no longer allowed to say, ‘This exists,’ or ‘This is true’—or,
at any rate, not allowed to say it without a great deal of
qualification, a very great deal of qualification—what can we say? Oh,
it is all right, my dear sisters and brothers, we have just one little
plank saved to us from the wreck. And what is that plank? Why, we can
still say, ‘This is thinkworthy.’ Oh, beautiful word, thinkworthiness!
And beautiful thing, thoughtworthiness, I mean think—thoughtthinkiness,
no, I don’t mean that (here the record is somewhat blurred, and it would
appear as if Bishop Dives must have blown his nose). Oh, beautiful
thing, thinkworthiness! If indeed thinkworthiness can be called a thing,
and in so far as it is right to do so.
“It is thinkworthy, my dear sisters and brothers, that two and two make,
or rather, in a phrase of less apparent grammar but more spiritual
meaning, makes, four. It is thinkworthy that any two sides of a triangle
are greater than the third. It is thinkworthy that thinks which are
equal to the same think—I mean, things which are equal to the same
thing, are equal to one another.
“Now, it is plain that all this is going to have a great influence, a
very great influence indeed, upon the religious conceptions of our day.
We used to say, for example, ‘The soul exists after death.’ We can no
longer say that; we have to reduce our thought, that is our thinkage, to
simpler elements. We have to say, ‘It is thinkworthy that if that thing
which we call the soul is thinkworthy at all, then that thinkworthiness
is still thinkworthy after death.’ Try it over a few times, and you will
find it quite easy. And do not suppose that because such a formula as
that has a less absolute and a less defiant ring about it than our old
formula, ‘The soul exists after death,’ therefore we have lost
something, and are poorer than our forefathers. No, oh no, quite the
contrary. For we know now, what they did not know, that thingness and
thinkworthiness are one. It cannot be too often repeated; in thinking a
thing we thing it: our thinkage—wonderful thought! I mean, wonderful
thoughtage!—thinks thingness into the thing! It cannot be too often
repeated, the man who thinks things things things!
“And another great advantage arises, once we have mastered this salutary
doctrine. The old religious formulas were always trying to make our
thoughts correspond with realities conceived as real, truths conceived
as true, outside of and apart from ourselves. They were always saying, I
believe in this, I believe in that—oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! A
generation or so back, there was a slang phrase which was used to
express incredulity; when you meant, ‘That is not true,’ you said, ‘I
don’t think!’ My dear sisters and brothers, there was a vast deal of
profound philosophy in that simple piece of slang! Mosenheim himself
would not have had them express themselves otherwise. If there is no
such thing as truth, and you may take it from me that there is not,
except in a very special sense which it would take too long to explain
to you now—if there is no such thing as truth, then we are not going to
burn one another for denying that this or that is true. We are going to
abandon Truth, and go forward boldly, none knows whither.
“What, then, is religion? The best definition that has been given of it
is, I suppose, Poschling’s: ‘Religion is that realization of the Ego
under the stimulus, real or apparent, of the Non-ego, which finds its
hyper-egoization in de-egoization and its de-egoization in
hyper-egoization.’ Let it stand at that. We will now return to the
short-sighted policy of Baasha”—the rest of Bishop Dives’ sermon did not
bear upon my immediate difficulties.
I confess I was somewhat troubled by the tone of Bishop Dives’
utterance. It seemed to me to show all his old grasp of philosophical
subtleties, but less than his old confidence in the claims of the
supernatural. Could it be, I asked myself, that my oracle had himself
changed with the change of the years, and gave forth now a different
note? I was so troubled by this thought that I wrote again, asking him
quite frankly to tell me if he thought his views were the same as when I
knew him at Oxford, or different; and, if different, whether they had
now reached a standstill, or whether they were still developing, and if
so in what direction? His answer was a candid avowal:
DEAR LADY PORSTOCK—
_You have, with your usual directness and acumen, touched upon a
point over which I have often questioned myself. Looking back over
the years, it seems clear to me that my religious opinions have
modified with time, and that, like the Greek poet long ago, “I grow
old learning many things.” But, let it be observed, in these
successive modifications of my point of view I am only following the
example of what you and I recognize as being the Holy Catholic
Church, which has learnt much, and, I think we may say, learned to
forget much, since those early days when it seemed to dominate the
world in the positiveness and self-assuredness of its youth._
_Now, picture to yourself some acrobat who finds it necessary, in
the exercise of his profession, to walk every day, before an
audience of neck-craning yokels, from one point to another over a
tight-rope. He finds it easier to accomplish this (owing to a simple
but interesting law of physics) if he carries with him a heavy pole
that assures his balance. By degrees he finds that his skill is
becoming greater; habit has made his task light to him. What does he
do? He has six inches chopped off either end of his pole, so that
his performance becomes at once more hazardous and more remarkable.
Six months later, he finds that he can afford to shorten it once
more. And so on, my dear Lady Porstock, and so on, until the pole in
his hand is but a short stump, hardly more significant than the
staff with which Babylonian fancy pictured Jacob as having crossed
over Jordan._
_Is not that, if we will look into the facts closely, the position
of the Church? It sets before itself one paramount object, the
achievement of the Christian ideal; you and I will not quarrel, I
think, as to what we mean by that. It is a difficult and a delicate
task that it has set before itself; and it may well face the
prospect with not much less misgiving than the acrobat who sees
stretching before him the gossamer causeway of the tight-rope. And
it starts out with a burden of dogmas and beliefs which encumbers
it, and yet in encumbering it steadies its progress. And then, just
as the acrobat, growing more steady on his narrow bridge of rope,
finds himself capable of walking with less and less of pole to
balance him, so the Church finds that with less and less of dogma,
less and less of belief, it can walk along the narrow path
prescribed for it to tread. Until the Reformation, it was able to
steady itself by means of three things, tradition, the Bible, and
human reason; the Reformation was the moment at which it decided
that it could steady itself without tradition. In the nineteenth
century, faced with the important claims of the evolutionary
doctrine, it found that it could make a further advance still, and
it cast aside the Bible as it had cast aside tradition, content to
steady itself by human reason alone. It has been left to us in this
century to learn that the human reason itself is an untrustworthy
thing, on which it is fatal to repose any reliance; we are now
learning, consequently, to dispense with the human reason equally._
_What, then, is the end of this process, or has it an end at all?
For myself, I am content to believe that it has not. From century to
century, it seems to me, we learn to get on with less and less of
belief in supernatural things to encourage or to justify us, and I
see no limit to that development. I go further, and say that I do
not wish to see any limit to that development. The less we believe,
clearly, the more creditable it is in us to call ourselves
Christians still. Our object, therefore, at all times must be to
reduce belief to its irreducible minimum; we must believe as little
as we can, and be constantly on the lookout for some method by which
we may be enabled to believe even less. It is not easy, this search
of ours; like hill-climbers, we are bounded by our own horizon, and
cannot yet see the full possibilities of disbelief that lie ahead of
us. And just as, surely, we do not blame Luther because, with his
limited perspective, he failed to disbelieve in the Bible; just as
we do not blame Kant because he could not see how to disbelieve in
the human reason; so, let us hope, our descendants will not be too
hard on us because here and there we were guilty, through mere
shortsightedness, of setting limits to our incredulity._
_And thus we come down to the very interesting question, Is there a
vanishing-point? Will there come a time when we are able to call
ourselves Christians without believing anything at all? For myself,
I confess that I do not think so. It seems to me that it is an
integral part of our Christian probation, this perpetual struggle to
disbelieve; that, consequently, the residuum of belief must be
conceived, not as a difference which will sooner or later disappear
as the result of successive subtractions, but as a quotient with an
infinite divisibility. To the last end of time, it seems to me, we
shall be able to continue offering up the old prayer, that we may be
helped in our unbelief._
_There, dear Lady Porstock, you have my view of the case. I only
hope that these stumbling words of mine may help you to know your
own mind._
_Yours quite sincerely_,
AMPHIBOLUS NORVIC
I had just finished reading this remarkable letter, and was engaged in
considering whether it was exactly what I wanted or exactly what I did
not want, when the teletypewriter that connected with the front door
rang at my elbow, and told me that Cardinal Smith had called. It was not
much past five, but I knew his old-fashioned habits, so I whistled for
tea and went down to show him up. When I saw him I had a curious
experience. There is a certain smile one only sees (I think) on the
faces of Catholic ecclesiastics, a smile which their friends call
sanctified and their enemies cunning. To me it had always seemed to say,
“I can afford to wait,” and it had always irritated me rather, as if its
cocksureness indicated that sooner or later he was bound to make a
proselyte of me. To-day it still seemed to say, “I can afford to wait,”
only I found myself attaching a different significance to it. Well, he
came up, and we had a long talk. I do not propose to describe it; after
all, this is not a religious autobiography. But soon afterwards, when I
was at my Chiswick house, I began to go to the Oratory for instruction.
This is all twenty years ago now, but I do not feel that I need give any
description of the Oratory and its ways, for whoever goes there now will
find it almost exactly the same as it was then—and has been, I suppose,
from a very much earlier time. I could not, of course, penetrate beyond
the enclosure: no one of my sex, I was told, had ever done so except
once when “Buffalo Bill’s” Indians came to tea—there were still Red
Indians in existence down to my own day, and some of these used to be
shown off as a circus turn in England, most of them Catholics. At the
last moment it was discovered that the good Fathers could not
distinguish braves from squaws, and some of the latter had already been
admitted into the garden by mistake! “But that was before my time,” said
the old priest who had instructed me. The long brown house, with its
old-fashioned carriage-sweep, watching unwinking the ceaseless grinding
flow of the Brompton Road platform; the stone façade of the church,
thrust out like a rock for the daily tide to eddy round, half trapped,
half free; the Fathers themselves, still, for all their
man-of-the-modern-worldliness, dressed in the very manner of St. Philip,
and taking their supper at a quarter to seven after the manner of Father
Faber; the interior of the church, housing indeed Saints whom Father
Faber had never heard of, yet still the same in its outlines—the same
red hangings, the same cope on the Lady statue, spoils of some old South
American emperor, the same Corpo Santo, grimed now with London dust till
it might have passed for St. Philip himself—all spoke to me of a
changelessness which was not dullness, a peacefulness which was not
stagnation. Oh yes, I know there are plenty of Congregations which have
their roots deeper in the history of the Church, their place in the
story of England yet longer and yet more honourable: but it is the
Oratory, with the life of the sixteenth century thrown on to the screen
of the nineteenth century, and there fixed as if for all time, that
stood and stands to me for type of the eternal tradition.
Am I confusing the merely interminable with the eternal? No, it was at
High Mass at the Oratory that I realized what eternity meant. The
frivolous might find them simply interminable, those long Mozart masses
that the Protestants go to hear. But if you are in the right spirit to
catch the message of the place, then you find eternity. The three
ministers, dwarfed by the height of the building, seem like ants
crawling about in the presence of Something immeasurably greater than
themselves: the Kyrie and the _Miserere nobis_ of the Gloria sound like
what they are, tributes of abject servility to a King whose audience no
unclean thing may approach; the spaciousness of the whole setting,
music, and building, and ceremonies, stands for a poor sacrament of that
Infinitude towards which all this self-annihilating homage is directed:
you see the work of man’s hands as the little doll’s house it is. In one
breathless moment of the Credo the heart seems to stop still, and all
becomes an eternal moment, that silence which is kept before the throne
of God.
I do not know why I should have said all this, or centred it all about
the Oratory, if it be not that Miss Linthorpe’s warning was right, and
there comes a time when you grow old, and drop out of your generation,
and the mind, satiated with the ceaseless pageant of the interminable,
craves for some outward expression of the eternal. Anyhow, my conversion
was neither a hysterical nor a sensational one. I kept very quiet about
it beforehand—why, I do not know, unless it be from some vague,
inherited instinct. It is true that at the time of which I type it is
doubtful whether one-fifth of the population of England was Catholic,
and that the act of being received into the Church was not quite the
everyday thing it is to us. But already things were very different from
my young days, when the Catholic Church was still regarded as something
desperate and melodramatic, a conspiracy against the public peace. I
remember, for example, when I was about ten years old how the news
reached us that a family friend had made his submission, and Lady
Trecastle, who was staying with us, talked about it in a hushed, shocked
voice as if it were a thing one could hardly mention in front of
children, although Lady Trecastle herself had no religious beliefs and
never went near a church if she could help it. The day of all that was
long over, yet somehow I felt shy and awkward about my religious
intentions, and mentioned them to nobody—concealed them, I am afraid,
rather deliberately, from Juliet Savage, whose keen criticism I confess
that I dreaded.
Actually it was in coming away from the ceremony of my reception that I
met her in the street. “Come and have luncheon somewhere,” she said,
“I’ve got something to tell you.” When we were comfortably ensconced at
_Les Rossignols_, she turned to me and said, “Opal, my dear, I’ve just
become a Catholic.” I said in a stupefied way, “So have I.” Then we
giggled idiotically for a little; and cross-questioning proved that she
also had written to Bishop Dives, and had been sent identically the same
sermon-record! She then ordered a rather good Volnay, and when it
appeared, leaning over coquettishly in its basket, she said, “Let us
hope that this is drinkable, if not actually drinkworthy. Personally,
I’ve got a droughtage on me which will demand a good deal of drinkage.”