[No surviving envelope]
Various things in mind. Enclosed a letter from Maritain, which may amuse you if decipherable, and referring to Jean: all but a postscript about a musical composer he admires and wants me to promote in London. I don’t know why he refers to her as ‘Miss Jeanneth McPherrin’!1
The usual mixture of feelings, which I am en train de déméler2 and put in separate boxes; and the usual intensification of feeling in that the more I see you and the better – I think – I know you, and admire you – and the more gratitude I feel – no, not directly to you, but to God – for having something fixed, some person to admire. Also, as time goes on, you should realise that you have less and less excuse for supposing that what I admire is some imaginary picture of you in my own mind; and I get extreme pleasure from finding more and more confirmation that the image in my mind corresponds exactly to the reality.
IfChristianityvirtues heavenly and capital;e1greatest of the virtues;b8 you have realised that I do consider humility the highest of the virtues (charity next, and purity third), youChristianityvirtues heavenly and capital;e1possessed by EH;c8 must think that I am not talking about nothing when I grumble a little about you being too humble: I mean humility misapplied. YouMurder in the Cathedraltentatively critiqued by EH;b3 should know that you have not only far more dramatic experience than I (for instance) but a surer dramatic instinct; and what I was waiting for from you was the benefit of these: you needn’t have prefaced your quite important criticisms of my ‘play’ with éloges3 (though these seemed to me to be acute) when what I wanted was for you to tell me clearly in what ways it fell short of being a real play. And all that nonsense about it being an impertinence on your part etc etc. Don’t you realise that it made me ecstatically happy to be told that I was noisy in eating my soup!! But this is only an instance, and the easiest to adduce. MyEliot, Marion Cushing (TSE's sister)excessively humble;c6 sister Marion (mentioned before) hasn’t a fraction of your brain, but even more humility: but she is so humble that she simply hasn’t made the most of the mind she has. That is about average, after all. IfChristianitysins, vices, faults;d5when humility shades into;a8 one is too humble about one’s abilities one STOPS THINKING, always deferring to somebody else. Inreading (TSE's)book on French policing;e1 theChiappe, Jean Baptiste;a1 book about the French police which I was reading on the train (most interesting about Chiappe)4 therePascal, Blaisequoted on tyranny;a2 is an allusion to a sentence of Pascal which I had forgotten. Tyranny, Pascal says, consists in the desire for a domination, universal and hors de son ordre.5 I think that humility should be kept within its order, just as the desire for domination should, and that there is an abuse of humility comparable to ‘tyranny’. What I want you to do is to realise what a rare exceptional and superior person you are, and THEN be humble about it. Say: ‘I know I am a most beautiful, charming, intelligent and spiritual person, but I deserve no praise for it, this is merely as God has arranged things.’6
TheLawrence, Colonel Thomas Edward ('T. E.')TSE's personal verdict on;a1 newspapers are full of éloges of Shaw (Lawrence).7 Deserved, no doubt, but perhaps not quite for those reasons. I should not call him humble. His whole history seems to me that of a morbid person. He was not the simple, plain, matter of fact administrator like our Sanders of the River – that is a very different type of Englishman. I think it was a diseased mind. (Of course they said he was inverted, but I am not bothering about that). I have read things that ordinary British army men in the East said about him – that he messed up the whole thing through his desire for power and glory, that his entry into Damascus was something to satisfy his own self-dramatisation, not really advantageous to the campaign, that again and again he sacrificed the campaign to his love of the dramatic gesture. However this may be, he was not apparently loved by the British army: partly the jealousy of mediocrity for genius, no doubt, yet I suspect his egotism. Certainly, a man who shunned notoriety would not have sought the kind of privacy that he did. An ordinary man would have retired in an ordinary way; Lawrence retired in a spectacular way; the moment he changed his name and became a private all the newspapers proclaimed the fact. I don’t want to diminish any glory that might be due him: only to assert that he was not the normal simple English public servant, but a highly complex, morbid, self-conscious, Oxford scholar who sought some kind of refuge from thought in action. Possibly he was what is nowadays called an escapist. And I am prejudiced by my feeling that these damned Protestant Englishmen, who love the Arabs so, are the same people who have allowed the Arabs to massacre our fellow-Christians of Assyria – a permanent disgrace – one of many – to England. AtCurtis, Lionel;a1 the moment I am most incensed against Lionel Curtis8 – one of the most disintegrative powers we have – because of his advocacy of handing over the Negro Protectorates of Basutoland etc. to South Africa.9 Lionel Curtis has already done the Empire as much harm as anybody. The moment the South African negroes are put in the power of South Africa (which means ultimately the ignorant, fanatical and brutal Dutch) they will be exploited and demoralised. (ByHardinge, Charles, 1st Baron Hardinge of Penshurst;a1 the way, there is an excellent letter on the supersession of ambassadors, by Lord Hardinge, in this morning’s Times, with which I agree).10
IHale, Emilyand TSE attend The Gondoliers;f4 returned to a committee this morning, which adjourned at lunch time and met again and spent the whole afternoon, so I have had no time to see about the Gondoliers. ButHale, Emilyvisit to the Russian ballet;f5 meanwhile I heard (in committee, and relative to Adrian Stokes’s book) that the Russian Ballet opens on June 11th.11 So you must consider that date too. So could you come again that week for the Ballet; or alternatively could you come ahead, inHale, Emilyinvited to Murder in Canterbury;f6 Canterbury week, and spend Wednesday or Tuesday night in London and see a ballet? Then go on the next morning to Canterbury. Please keep an open mind until I can find out something about programmes. I want you to see the Ballet AT LEAST twice: one evening of classical ballet, and one of modern. I shall expect in any case to cede my rooms to you (and the foul bathroom) on the King’s Birthday (June 3d).
IClayton, Joseph ('Joe');a1 enjoyedClayton, Margaret;a1 having tea with you at the Claytons’.12 In exactly those circumstances, I am not sure how to behave. I behaved naturally. But would it have given more pleasure if I had harangued (as I might have done) all the time, instead of conversing? In which way can I give most pleasure to a man like that (who is very intelligent): by talking all the time, or by responding to questions?
IHale, Emilyappearance and characteristics;v7in charming black dress;c9 have one slight criticism to make of your charming black dress: but that will keep.
1.TheMaritain, Jacqueson The Use of Poetry;b2n letterCharles Eliot Norton Lectures (afterwards The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism)Maritain on;d1nUse of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, The
He made no error in writing the name ‘Jeanette’: TSE misread his tight handwriting.
2.‘in process of unravelling’.
3.Éloges (Fr.): praise.
4.JeanChiappe, Jean Baptiste Baptiste Chiappe (1878–1940), director of the Sûreté générale; subsequently rightist Préfet de police until removed from post in Feb. 1934 by Prime Minister Édouard Daladier.
5.‘La tyrannie consiste au désir de domination universel et hors de son ordre’ (Pensées, frag. 58). ‘Tyranny consists in the desire for universal domination, outside one’s jurisdiction.’
6.See too TSE to Jeanette McPherrin, 9 May 1935: ‘I shall start trying to do what I can to influence her arrangements for the winter – one has to be very careful with anyone so sensitive and proud [as EH] (but also, alas, much too humble – I have tried to suggest that there is a wrong way of being humble as well as a right way’ (Scripps).
TSE, ‘ShakespeareChristianityvirtues heavenly and capital;e1most difficult of the virtues;c7n and the Stoicism of Seneca’ (1927): ‘Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself.’
7.T. E. LawrenceLawrence, Colonel Thomas Edward ('T. E.') (b. 1888) – ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ – had died on 19 May, six days after a motorcycle accident. See The Times, 20 May 1935, which includes an obituary plus a long tribute by Capt. B. H. Liddell Hart: ‘Lawrence of Arabia: A Genius of War and Letters’, 15.
8.LionelCurtis, Lionel Curtis (1872–1955), administrator, author; lecturer; Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; proponent of a federal world government; founder in 1910 of the quarterly Round Table, he was instrumental in setting up the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) during the Paris Peace Conference, 1919. Appointed Companion of Honour in 1949.
9.See Margery Perham and Lionel Curtis, The Protectorates of South Africa: The Question of their Transfer to South Africa (1935), 36–55.
10.CharlesHardinge, Charles, 1st Baron Hardinge of Penshurst Hardinge, 1st Baron Hardinge of Penshurst (1858–1944), diplomat; ambassador at St Petersburg, 1904–6; Permanent Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 1906–10, 1916–20; Viceroy of India, 1910–16; Ambassador at Paris, 1920–2. See letter – ‘British Foreign Policy: The New Diplomacy: Waste of Ambassadors’ Experience’ – The Times, 20 May 1935, 15.
11.AdrianStokes, AdrianTSE's blurb for Russian Ballets;a2n Stokes, Russian Ballets (F&F, 1935). The blurb was possibly written by TSE: ‘The title of Mr Stokes’s new book is in the plural, because it is a descriptive interpretation of individual ballets, and not simply another book about the art of the ballet. It is meant to serve a double purpose: first, as a guide to the spectator, helping him to a fuller appreciation of the ballets described; and second, as a means of enabling him to recall the performances he has already witnessed.
‘These delightful descriptions are complete, each in itself, but they are so designed as to make a book with a consecutive argument. Mr Stokes is particularly interested in the relation between the music and the dancing; and he uses successive ballets to illustrate the development by the modern ballet of a more varied and plastic relation between its two principal elements. His theory throws a fresh light not only on the Russian ballet (especially Massine’s recent choreographic symphonies), but on musical drama in general, of which he regards Russian ballet as the finest flower.’
12.JosephClayton, Joseph ('Joe') ClaytonClayton, Margaret, FRHistS (1867–1943). Clayton was a journalist, author and historian; editor of The New Age, 1906–7; Catholic convert. Resident in later years in Chipping Campden, where he and his wife Margaret became friendly with the Perkinses.
See his obituary in Blackfriars 24: 285 (Dec. 1943), 452: ‘JOSEPH CLAYTON, who died on November 18th, was one of the earliest contributors to BLACKFRIARS. Together with Father Bede Jarrett, Father Vincent McNabb, Father Luke Walker and Mr Stanley Morison, he was a member of the original editorial board that watched over the earliest issues of this Review. His streams of interesting talk and vigorous argument, his own journalistic experience, his enthusiasm and optimism were all a welcome stimulus in those days of our difficult beginnings.
‘He was received into the Church before the last war, in 1910, and from his background of Anglicanism and Fabian Socialism he brought a knowledge of and a belief in our national institutions which were refreshing to his Catholic friends. A man of transparent honesty, outspoken and uncompromising, a champion of the working man, simple and vigorous of utterance, with more than a touch of pugnacity, he has left enduring proof of these qualities in twenty or so published books and scores and scores of newspaper and periodical articles. He was no revolutionary and, in his campaign for social justice – and how pungently militant he could be! – he believed in none but constitutional methods. Selfless and unambitious, he loved justice and hated iniquity. God rest his soul.’
See also Alan Clayton, ‘A Journey to Find Rolf Clayton’, Campden District Historical & Archæological Society: Notes & Queries VI: 3 (Aut. 2009), 38–41.
4.JeanChiappe, Jean Baptiste Baptiste Chiappe (1878–1940), director of the Sûreté générale; subsequently rightist Préfet de police until removed from post in Feb. 1934 by Prime Minister Édouard Daladier.
12.JosephClayton, Joseph ('Joe') ClaytonClayton, Margaret, FRHistS (1867–1943). Clayton was a journalist, author and historian; editor of The New Age, 1906–7; Catholic convert. Resident in later years in Chipping Campden, where he and his wife Margaret became friendly with the Perkinses.
12.JosephClayton, Joseph ('Joe') ClaytonClayton, Margaret, FRHistS (1867–1943). Clayton was a journalist, author and historian; editor of The New Age, 1906–7; Catholic convert. Resident in later years in Chipping Campden, where he and his wife Margaret became friendly with the Perkinses.
8.LionelCurtis, Lionel Curtis (1872–1955), administrator, author; lecturer; Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; proponent of a federal world government; founder in 1910 of the quarterly Round Table, he was instrumental in setting up the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) during the Paris Peace Conference, 1919. Appointed Companion of Honour in 1949.
1.Marian/MarionEliot, Marion Cushing (TSE's sister) Cushing Eliot (1877–1964), fourth child of Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Eliot: see Biographical Register.
10.CharlesHardinge, Charles, 1st Baron Hardinge of Penshurst Hardinge, 1st Baron Hardinge of Penshurst (1858–1944), diplomat; ambassador at St Petersburg, 1904–6; Permanent Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 1906–10, 1916–20; Viceroy of India, 1910–16; Ambassador at Paris, 1920–2. See letter – ‘British Foreign Policy: The New Diplomacy: Waste of Ambassadors’ Experience’ – The Times, 20 May 1935, 15.
7.T. E. LawrenceLawrence, Colonel Thomas Edward ('T. E.') (b. 1888) – ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ – had died on 19 May, six days after a motorcycle accident. See The Times, 20 May 1935, which includes an obituary plus a long tribute by Capt. B. H. Liddell Hart: ‘Lawrence of Arabia: A Genius of War and Letters’, 15.
5.JacquesMaritain, Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), philosopher and littérateur, was at first a disciple of Bergson, but revoked that allegiance (L’Evolutionnisme de M. Bergson, 1911; La Philosophie bergsonienne, 1914) and became a Roman Catholic and foremost exponent of Neo-Thomism. For a while in the 1920s he was associated with Action Française, but the connection ended in 1926. Works include Art et scolastique (1920); Saint Thomas d’Aquin apôtre des temps modernes (1923); Réflexions sur l’intelligence (1924); Trois Réformateurs (1925); Primauté du spirituel (1927), Humanisme intégral (1936), Scholasticism and Politics (1940), Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953). TSE told Ranjee Shahani (John O’London’s Weekly, 19 Aug. 1949, 497–8) that Maritain ‘filled an important role in our generation by uniting philosophy and theology, and also by enlarging the circle of readers who regard Christian philosophy seriously’. See Walter Raubicheck, ‘Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, and the Romantics’, Renascence 46:1 (Fall 1993), 71–9; Shun’ichi Takayanagi, ‘T. S. Eliot, Jacques Maritain, and Neo-Thomism’, The Modern Schoolman 73: 1 (Nov. 1995), 71–90; Jason Harding, ‘“The Just Impartiality of a Christian Philosopher”: Jacques Maritain and T. S. Eliot’, in The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism, ed. J. Heynickx and J. De Maeyer (Leuven, 2010), 180–91; James Matthew Wilson, ‘“I bought and praised but did not read Aquinas”: T. S. Eliot, Jacques Maritain, and the Ontology of the Sign’, Yeats Eliot Review 27: 1–2 (Spring–Summer 2010), 21; and Carter Wood, This Is Your Hour: Christian Intellectuals in Britain and the Crisis of Europe, 1937–40 (Manchester, 2019), 69–72.
3.AdrianStokes, Adrian Stokes (1902–72), gifted and influential author, art historian and critic, painter, and aficionado of the ballet; friend of Osbert Sitwell and Ezra Pound. Works include Stones of Rimini (1935), To-Night the Ballet (1934), Russian Ballets (1935), Colour and Form (1937), Greek Culture and the Ego (1958), and Painting and the Inner World (1963). The book to which TSE refers here was The Quattro Cento: Part 1: Florence and Verona (F&F, 1932).