[Stamford House, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire]
First, I have found that the cheap day is Thursday after all (and Saturday) and dear enough at that: 11s. return instead of 16s. Second, you have an appointment with Dr Crowe for 12.15; or so Miss O’Donovan says. Sotravels, trips and plansEH's 1934–5 year in Europe;b4L'Escargot lunch on EH's return;d4 I suppose 1.15 is the earliest possible, but I shall be at the Escargot a little before that. You need not have called this arranging an appointment for you a ‘great favour’! and if it had turned out to be Wednesday I should have cut my committee most cheerfully – for as a matter of fact I am cutting another committee (unless they alter the date) on Thursday. And so I have said not a word about being pleased to see you? Well, perhaps I haven’t; perhaps I was ungraciously and woefully thinking instead, how little I was likely to see of you. But indeed, I question whether ‘being pleased’ is a very satisfactory description of my feelings: please ’m, don’t deliberately misconstrue my words. I feel that it is a very long time since I have seen you, and that last November is years ago, and that it is all very strange, and that I shall as always (now don’t be vexed with me, please) feel a little shy again at first.
I was a little afraid that the words of mine to which you allude in your letter of the 28th might have sounded unctuous and preachy. They were not meant so; but when I speak so I am apt to feel guilty afterwards of a kind of Olympian hypocrisy – as if I had been pretending to be either above or beyond these troubles myself. Whenever I preach however I am very conscious of falling far short of practising successfully; and I most certainly was not criticising: I was merely taking your words and generalising a little. And I didn’t mean ‘presumption’ in the ordinary sense, either. In any case, I was generalising from other observations. IChristianityamong the Eliot family;a5 thinkEliot family, theand God;a5 that my own family have sometimes set themselves high standards, largely because they believed that Eliots somehow were better than other people, and therefore had to behave better. It was not of course overtly indicated, but it was in the atmosphere, that God took more notice of us than of ordinary people, and we must behave accordingly. People who were richer obviously did not find favour with the Almighty, and were common people: they either were wicked to have made so much money, or wicked having made it not to have given it away to public causes. This is all perfectly irrelevant, except in so far as you and I were brought up in the same sort of society and tradition. WhenAmericaNew England;f9TSE and EH's common inheritance;a8 I offer counsel – and I don’t think I often do so without a kind of invitation – please think of me as a person having some of the same problems (partly because of similarity of background and temperament) and some different (partly because of different occupations and environment); a person who has not got any bit nearer a solution of them than you have. That ‘seeking for the unseen sources of life’ which is taking you ‘such a time’, it will probably take me the rest of my life! It is as great a help to me to have you share the problem of living, as it comes to you, with me, as it is to me to be able to share mine with you. ForChristianityresignation, reconciliation, peace;c8;a8 myself, I find it difficult to shed the illusion of an imaginary state of composure, equilibrium, coming to terms with life, love of God etc. which, once attained, somehow, shall make all the rest of life easy. It is not like that; one just goes on trying and doing, and at rare moments tranquillity comes and goes again, and I don’t believe one can or should ever really know in this life what one has made of oneself. ItChristianitysainthood;d4the paradoxes of;a2 suggests the paradox that if one were a Saint, and became aware that one was a Saint, one would cease to be a saint: the real saints never have the satisfaction of being satisfied with themselves to the extent of knowing themselves to be saints. On the contrary, they have the lowest opinions of themselves; and get less self-satisfaction out of life than any successful company promoter, or indeed than most quite ordinary people. IGoethe, Johann Wolfgang vonquoted on serenity;a2 also like the reply of Goethe when someone complimented him on his serenity. ‘Yes, but it is a serenity which I have to struggle to regain, every morning.’1
DoWard, Mary Augusta (née Arnold);a1 you know, I have never read a single book by Mrs. Humphrey Ward.2 But then, there is so much that is more important than that, that I have not read. You have not begun to understand the extent of my ignorance. I am very ill-read indeed, and I cannot make people grasp that.
ItHale, Emilyfamily;w4EH's unity with parents;a5 must be, I think, wonderful to feel oneself so united to one’s father and mother. I never felt just like what I imagine you feel. It may be partly a difference in circumstance. What I feel about my parents I have told you several years ago. To me my mother’s side means one thing to me, and my father’s another. (What is perhaps more important is your being an only child, and my being the youngest of seven). TheEliot, Charlotte Champe Stearns (TSE's mother)and TSE's poetic inheritance;b1 poetry attaches me to my mother: yet I didn’t care much for her poetry, and she never cared much for mine3 (and neither, I suspect, does Ada, or you, and I don’t mind in the least, and I am usually made irritated and suspicious by women who say they do like it). Otherwise, I was only one among several children; andEliot, William Greenleaf (TSE's grandfather)the Eliot family Napoleon;a3 you have no conception of the extent to which our world was dominated by Grandfather Eliot. That man must have had the personality of a Napoleon; he died before I was born; but he forces me to serve on committees and councils and make speeches and be a churchwarden and muddle with politics – butEliot, Henry Ware (TSE's father)as person and parent;a8 itChristianityretreat and solitude;c9and TSE's mother;a6 is my mother, or some shadowy personality behind her, who wants me to make retreats and keep vigils. Sometimes one is just oneself, but for the most part one is being hustled about (as well as such a lazy idle fuddler as myself can be hustled) by one or another of a crowd of shadows. Then again, so far as my mother and father as individuals are concerned, I think of them as very lovely persons, whom I very much admire, but who I know to have been, poor souls, very inefficient parents.
This letter has turned out very egotistical. It might not be if I had time to write three or four more pages. Any of your paragraphs starts me off on a whole letter – to say nothing of all the things I would say myself – any letter I write is really doing duty for a dozen or more letters. And it is not a letter of greeting and welcome, becauseTandys, theTSE's Hampton weekends with;a1 I shall write that later in the week – not Sunday – as I shall be at the Tandys. But shall I not be pleased to see you? Dire si je ne suis pas joyeux / Tonnerre et rubis aux moyeux.4
TheMurder in the Cathedraltitle settled on;b1 title is
Murder in the Cathedral.
1.TSE to Spender, 1 July 1935 (Letters 7, 672–3): ‘As for “calmness”, I often refer to a phrase of Goethe’s which you no doubt know. Someone complimented him on his serenity. Yes, he said, but it is a serenity which has to be composed afresh every morning.’ TSE is giving a version of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902), lectures VI & VII: ‘The Sick Soul’: ‘“I will say nothing,” writes Goethe in 1824, “against the course of my existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever.”’ (The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Martin E. Marty [Harmondsworth, Middx., 1982], 137).
2.MaryWard, Mary Augusta (née Arnold) Augusta Ward, née Arnold (1851–1920) – her grandfather was Thomas Arnold; her uncle Matthew Arnold – noted British novelist who wrote under her married name as Mrs Humphry Ward; teacher, journalist, anti-suffragist (founding president of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League, she also edited the Anti-Suffrage Review). Author of several well-regarded novels including Robert Elsmere (1888) and Lady Rose’s Daughter (1903).
3.See TSE’s introduction to Charlotte Eliot, Savonarola: A Dramatic Poem (1926).
4.See Poems, ed. Ricks and McCue, I, 913, on Burnt Norton: Stéphane Mallarmé’s sonnet:
M’introduire dans ton histoire
C’est en héros effarouché
S’il a du talon nu touché
Quelque gazon de territoire
À des glaciers attentatoire
Je ne sais le naïf péché
Que tu n’auras pas empêché
De rire très haut sa victoire
Dis si je ne suis pas joyeux
Tonnerre et rubis aux moyeux
De voir en l’air que ce feu troue
Avec des royaumes épars
Comme mourir pourpre la roue
Du seul vespéral de mes chars.
6.CharlotteEliot, Charlotte Champe Stearns (TSE's mother) Champe Stearns Eliot (1843–1929): see Biographical Register.
2.Washington University 1857–1932: Seventy-fifth Anniversary of the Inauguration (Washington University Press, Apr. 1932) saluted WilliamEliot, William Greenleaf (TSE's grandfather) Greenleaf Eliot (1811–87), one of the founders and third Chancellor of the university. ‘He was graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1834, and one year later was ordained as a minister. Desiring to identify himself with the West, he accepted an invitation from a group in St Louis, and organized the First Congregational Society, which later became the Church of the Messiah (Unitarian) … In 1853 he became the first president of the Board of Directors of Eliot Seminary, a position which he continued to hold after the change of name to Washington University, until 1870, when he became also acting chancellor. In 1872 he was elevated to the chancellorship’ (6). In an address given on 22 Apr. 1957, the Revd Dr W. G. Eliot proclaimed, ‘The charter under which we act is unexceptionable, – broad and comprehensive, – containing no limitation nor condition, except one introduced by our own request, as an amendment to the original act, namely, the prohibition of all sectarian and party tests and uses, in all departments of the institution, forever’ (11).
2.MaryWard, Mary Augusta (née Arnold) Augusta Ward, née Arnold (1851–1920) – her grandfather was Thomas Arnold; her uncle Matthew Arnold – noted British novelist who wrote under her married name as Mrs Humphry Ward; teacher, journalist, anti-suffragist (founding president of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League, she also edited the Anti-Suffrage Review). Author of several well-regarded novels including Robert Elsmere (1888) and Lady Rose’s Daughter (1903).