[1418 East 63d St., Seattle]
Of course, my dear cherub, that is by no means all there is to say – from my point of view; but I wanted first to take your point of view, and try to show you that even if you are right about yourself you are not particularly right – for anyone with enough sensibility might feel the same way – and that even if you are right, you are wrong in your way of taking it. And again, your sense of failure is not unique. ToHale, Emilypresents herself as cossetted;a8 others, certainly to me, it seems that your picture of yourself as a person who has always been protected and coddled, is grotesque. It seems to me that you have had a very difficult and lonely life, that everything has gone against you, and that you have made the very best of what was possible. Oh, I know that some relatives and friends have been very kind to you, no doubt; but that merely mitigates the hardness of circumstances against you.
FRIDAY 14 August. It is a great relief to me to get your letter of the 3d this morning; a wonderful week for me – to have two letters within five days! … Yes, it seems to me that you have been making the most of your opportunities, and that you have kept on with a solitary pride which I very much admire; and what is more, you have not just got to one point and staid [sic] there, like most people, who cease very early to try to be anything more. AsHale, Emilyblames herself for an unfulfilled life;a9 for the promise of youth as shown in photographs, not being fulfilled, it is not your fault, my poor child; but who knows what kind of fulfilment of personality you may yet have? You are going on growing, and that is the main thing; and it is very rare. I should love to have more early photographs of you, however sad they would be to me. When I look over my own, of which I have a good many, I feel the same way, up to a point; but with me, there is a long period of delayed adolescence the photographs of which I loathe – here is one, a passport taken about 1921 – doesn’t it look a weak, silly, undeveloped youth – and yet I was of quite mature years, and had been through all sorts of hell, there is nothing in the portrait to show it. You cannot imagine how dissatisfied with myself I still am: I hope I may have arrived somewhere by the age of 60!
YouChristianitysins, vices, faults;d5the sense of sin;a2 see, I didn’t, of all things, want to give you the impression that I wished to ‘jolly’ you into thinking that a sense of sin (for you, anyway) is all nonsense.1 On the contrary, I believe it to be most valuable and important, when properly handled, and I rejoice that you have it. I have been attacked – or rather sneered at – in print, sometimes for being a ‘Puritan’ and sometimes for being a ‘Catholic’, but both sides have assumed that the two were antithetical. But I have found that the more Catholic I become the more ‘Puritanical’ I am also; only I have, I hope, learned a little humility, which is the foundation of all morals. IndeedChristianityvirtues heavenly and capital;e1propinquitous to humour;b9, there is nothing nearer to Humility than the Sense of Humour – for surely the person with a real sense of humour is the person who can laugh at himself – and that is a form of humility. So you see, the wish expressed at the end of my last letter was not so flippant as it may have sounded.
But don’t say that you ‘will not let such a flood of intensity break over me again’; because I do not want you to decide beforehand how you are going to be, with me; I want you just to let yourself go as you feel at the moment. Will you please promise that again? For this last letter but one has meant, I think, one more stage in mutual understanding; and that is the most exciting adventure of my life: to explore and to get to know you as I never have and never shall know anyone else.
But I shall have much more to say in reply to your letters. Meanwhile, my dear Dove, I hope that having had two letters this week I may still hope for one next week – and I am waiting for your answer to my answer to a question of yours which troubled me – and thank you for your news, to which I shall reply on Monday.
1.Cf. The Cocktail Party:
——REILLY
You suffer from a sense of sin, Miss Coplestone?
This is most unusual.
——CELIA
—————————It seemed to me abnormal.
——REILLY
We have yet to find what would be normal————540
For you, before we use the term ‘abnormal’.
Tell me what you mean by a sense of sin.
——CELIA
It’s much easier to tell you what I don’t mean:
I don’t mean sin in the ordinary sense.
——REILLY
And what, in your opinion, is the ordinary sense?
——CELIA
Well … I suppose it’s being immoral –
And I don’t feel as if I was immoral:
In fact, aren’t the people one thinks of as immoral
Just the people who we say have no moral sense?
I’ve never noticed that immorality———————550
Was accompanied by a sense of sin:
At least, I have never come across it.