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1899-1919
O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise Him and magnify Him for ever.—Song of the Three Children.
Lo, these are but the outskirts of His ways; and how small a whisper do we hear of Him.-Job.
Hotels Schweizerhof and Luzernerhof, Lucerne.
March 28th [1899].
To HUBERT STUART MOORE.
I got your letter this morning; dearest I do hope you are not very lonely and are going to have a nice happy healthy time. Oh, do be careful of yourself. We have just heard of Mr. Pyke’s death, and it has made me so nervous. I’m quite sure the bar is getting to be a very dangerous profession. It seems awful the way quite youngish people die off. Do do, my sweetest boy, have all the fresh air and exercise you can, and avoid chills and being run down. I suppose Mr.
Pyke’s death is good for you in a way but how awful for his poor wife. I’m sure that nasty Admiralty Court isn’t healthy, I’m thankful to think you won’t sit in it all day now. Do have some nice walks in your holidays, and after you get home, go for some long bicycle rides. Please do.
I only wish you were here, I wish it all the day long. To-day has been exquisite. Very hot, sunshine like you never see in England, and yet brisk and refreshing. We have been nearly all day on the lake, going to Brunnen and back. It was so bright and clear we could see right across to the Bernese Oberland, even the Jungfrau which I had never seen before. The snow mountains and bright green lake and the quaint little square-sailed boats looked heavenly. I wanted you so much. You would just have enjoyed it. After tea we went up to the Glacier garden, where a real glacier once was, and you can see the deep holes in the rock and the boulders that fitted in and ground them out.
There is also a real Alpine Club hut, like you sleep in when you are climbing a mountain, from which it appears that mountaineering is a bit too uncomfortable for my taste, only a little hay to sleep on, and no head room worth mentioning.
I’m so anxious to get to Lugano and get my darling’s next letter. I wonder if you got my photograph before you went away. If so, tell me exactly what they are like, and if they are better than the proofs.
I am sure those proofs were printed on Matt P O P so you could tone and fix them if you wished. Our talk last Saturday has made me feel intensely that nothing matters very much to us except each other. It seems as if our two lives had rushed together and fused into one, and overshadow everything else. I feel as if all I say and do here was only a pleasant dream, and my real life was left behind in England for the boy to take care of till I come home to it and him.
Do you understand? And do you ever feel like that about your girl?
Tell me.
Chartres.
Tuesday night. [April 17, 1901.]
To THE SAME.
This is an absolutely heavenly place, far exceeding my expectations, and we have dropped into such a comfy old-fashioned inn with a sweet old landlady in a bag cap. Only fault, they overfeed us horribly.
The town is full of old houses with high gables and carved fronts, there are lots of quaint corners but no smells, and it is delightfully clean and airy. The day has been sun and shower with a high wind-something like my temper is occasionally. The Cathedral is a dream of beauty with nine magnificent doorways set in deep porches and crammed with sculpture. Nearly all the stained glass was put in before 1300. Nothing one can see in England can give you an idea of it. It is more like translucent enamel set with diamonds than anything else I can think of. I wish you were here, and I think you would like it, though the place swarms with priests who would set your Protestant teeth on edge.
Lengua da Ca, Alassio.
Saturday, March 26th [1904].
To THE SAME.
I meant to answer your letter this morning but it was such a lovely day that immediately after breakfast we went off for an expedition into the hills; first drove to the first village above here through the olive woods; then climbed up through delicious little waggly stony streets, so narrow that when we met a donkey with panniers it had to lean up against the wall to let us pass; then up through more olive woods and out on to the healthy part of the hills: then we popped through a narrow little gap in the cliffs, and came out suddenly on the north face of the hills, and were looking right across an immense valley, all blue and purple with little white towns, to the Maritime Alps which stretched right along east and west as far as you could see, and were simply shining with freshly fallen snow. Yesterday was very cold here with rain, so it must have been snow on the mountains. We devoted the wettest part of the day to bookbinding and in the afternoon went to two tea parties. Tea parties simply swarm in Alassio and our average has been two a day since I came out.
The people are intensely funny and a rather smart lady who told me that it was “the continental Cranford” about summed the whole thing up. There’s a funny little artist who talks a lot about the “reverent imitation of nature” but hasn’t quite managed it yet, and a parson who said the other day that “even some of the most distinguished Early Christians did at times fall into sin,” a remark which I am cherishing very fondly for future use.
Yacht Wulfruna, Helford, St. Martin.
23 September [1904].
To J. A. HERBERT.
Thank you so much for your kind letter. I am very glad indeed that you like the book.* I am sorry the phrase “Imaginative Life” seems wrong. It was used in rather a technical sense by Willie, the same sense in fact, as that intended by Blake in the quotation I have prefixed to the book, which is supposed to give the key note of such philosophy as it possesses. I can’t think at the moment of any locution which says just the same thing; and this one seemed to have the advantage of a respectable ancestry.
The Grey World. The quotation is the famous paragraph on “Imagination, the real and eternal world, of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow” from Jerusalem.
[Undated.]
To J. A. HERBERT.
Most worthy pard, my jaded wits refuse To reach the heights of your triumphant Muse.
I merely send these little rhymes to say I’m glad we’ve got the plate of Sainte Abbaye.
(And, by the way, I rather wonder when Our Magnum Opus goes to Methuen?) As to Abenteuer Gesammt-well!
Why can’t the wretch in French his legends tell, Or decent Latin? I don’t like to worry you To translate this. So many works to flurry you There are, with Titus Vesp. and all the rest.
Perhaps to wait a while would be the best.
Thanks many for the loan of Odo’s tale.
I hope my understanding will not fail To grasp the crabbed tongue in which it’s writ And make it for the British Public fit.
I also want to find a redaction Of Virgin’s Hand on lock, with detailed action.
(See Ward) a pretty tale, but rather terse: A virtue that does not infect my verse.
Farewell! I’ll write again to mention when I come to the Museum at stroke of ten.
Meanwhile, good wishes to you all I send, And am your feeble and exhausted friend.
E.U.
Explicit.
Ora pro me.
3 Campden Hill Place, W.
Nov. 29, 1904.
To M.R.
I must thank you very much for writing to me as kindly as you have done. I think it is so good of those who have read, and have cared for what they have read, to write and tell the author, who knows little of what her work is doing, once it has gone out into the world. As you say, the finding of reality is the one thing that matters, and that always mattered, though it has been called by many different names.
Of course, on this side the veil, the perfect accomplishment of the quest is impossible; we can only come to the edge of the sea that separates us from the City of Sarras. Few get so far: but for those who do, it seems that diere is a certain hope. It is of course quite difficult for me, from one letter, to judge of your position; so I hope you will forgive me if I say anything you do not like.
But you say in one place, that the more urgent the want of reality grows, the less you see how to effect it. Now, this state of “spiritual unrest” can never bring you to a state of vision, of which the essential is peace. And struggling to see does not help one to see. The light comes, when it does come, rather suddenly and strangely I think. It is just like falling in love; a thing that never happens to those who are always trying to do it.
You say also, as regards beauty, that you find its sensuous side dangerous and distracting. This is true at first: but when once it has happened to you to perceive that beauty is the “outward and visible sign” of the greatest of sacraments, I don’t think you can ever again get hopelessly entangled by its merely visible side. The real difficulty seems to me to come from the squalor and ugliness with which man tries to overlay the world in which he lives.
I have been so much interested by your letter and hope you will forgive this imperfect reply.
Perhaps you will write to me again when you are in the mood. Those who are on the same road can sometimes help one another.
Grand Hotel, Venice.
April 20th [1905].
To HUBERT STUART MOORE.
We arrived last night all right though rather late. It was funny to see all the stations full of soldiers and guards along the line, but otherwise I don’t think one could have told that anything was wrong.
The arrival here is perfectly beautiful. About’ ten miles away, the land begins to break up into marshy patches, tussocks of grass and pools of water; then more water and fewer patches of land, and then suddenly the last bit of land is all gone and the train runs over a great smooth grey sea, for 3 miles, on a bridge just raised above the surface of the water. For a bit you are “out of sight of land”
and then at last you see the towers of the city ahead of you. It’s just perfect arriving in the evening like that with everything very grey and dim. I did wish you were here. And then it was so exciting to step out of the station pop on to the canal and see all the usual station bustle being done by swarms of gondolas, all black and fringed, such long thin graceful creatures all shooting and twisting about. And there was a full moon and after dinner we went out on the Grand Canal, and saw Venice by moonlight. We have to-day secured our own gondola; such a nice man, named Vittorio, with whom I have to hold long conversations for the Commodore. We spent the morning in the gondola, going in and out among the canals, seeing the palaces etc. … There are a lot of English yachts here, and also heaps of lovely sort of Istrian boats rather like Dutch schools but painted the most splendid colours which come with cargoes of firewood. And people go off to them in gondolas and buy a bit when they want it.
It’s so nice everything being done by boat, and stepping out of the front door bang into the water. I spent the afternoon in St. Marco, and managed to get a slight first idea of it. But you can’t describe it.
Her father.
It’s like nothing you ever saw; but when the Westminster Cathedral is done, that will be a sort of parody of the interior. It is all mosaics with gold backgrounds. Five domes, with wonderful processions of figures circling round them: and all the arches, spandrils and lunettes mosaic-ed too, and the lower walls marbled.
And all the detail is so marvellous. Every minute you come on pierced marble screens, and lovely bas-relief panels set here and there in the walls, both inside and out, to vary the marble panelling: and all sorts of strange green and rose and purple marbles that one never sees anywhere else. The pavement is made with them too, and with jade and lapis, all in Byzantine patterns. But it isn’t a bit garish think, just a masterpiece of colouring. The Commodore however thought it horrid, and fled to the shops, where he bought paper knives made to imitate the prow of a gondola.
There’s one lovely mosaic of the body of St. Mark being brought by ship to Venice. The ship is all aback, the sailors are asleep, and St. Mark appears and wakes them up, very anxious, and evidently saying “Do, do take more care of my body.”
Grand Hotel, Venice.
Saturday night [April, 1905].
To THE SAME.
I do hope the cold weather has gone in England and you are having a nice sunny healthy holiday. It isn’t very hot here, a fresh sea breeze all the time but it has been nice and sunny to-day. At twelve o’clock the Easter feast began, and all the flags were hoisted on the flag staffs in front of St. Mark’s. Huge great banners about 50
feet I should think: three Italian ensigns, and two crimson and gold flags with the Lion of St. Mark. It makes the piazza look simply gorgeous, with these great things floating out, and all the mosaics and white domes of the cathedral behind, and the crowds of pigeons wheeling about, as thick almost as our birds at the Helford, only rather a different colour. Inside St. Mark’s, the gold altar front is unveiled for Easter: 11th century Greek work all set with jewels. I’m going to try and get a seat in the choir for High Mass tomorrow so as to gaze on it undisturbed.
We spent the morning at the picture gallery. A tremendous lot of big rambling Veronese and Tintoretto things to wade through, but also, to console one, a lot of lovely Cima and Bellini and Carpaccio: things rather in the style of our pet St. Jerome in his study at the National Gallery. There is the whole set of the story of St. Ursula by Carpaccio done to decorate the guild-room of the St. Ursula guild. The first one, where she is in bed asleep and the angel comes and warns her of what she is to do, is too sweet. Such a neat room, with her clothes neatly folded at the foot of the bed and her crown (she was a Princess) laid on the top! The Commodore liked Titian’s big fluffy Assumption (I’m sure he secretly agreed with the celebrated American who said she was “a remarkably fine young woman”) but he got a bit restless over the other things—kept asking patiently “Is this by a celebrated artist?”
In the afternoon we went a long gondola ride to a church on the far edge of the city looking out to the lagoon where we found several lovely pictures and a perfectly darling old sacristan who used to go about with Ruskin when he was here writing The Stones of Venice “two hours every morning, signora, for years and years and years.” He knew all about the pictures, knew Berensen, but said “he had always his own idea about who painted the pictures, that Signor Berensen: nevertheless, he loves art.” He had been attached to that church for 50 years: such a sweet old thing.
Grand Hotel, Venice.
May 1st [1905].
To THE SAME.
We’ve been pottering about seeing our pet things a seconl time, and digging out a few isolated pictures in different churches as tomorrow will be our last day in Venice. This afternoon roastingly hot so we took a steamer to the Lido and lay out on the sands looking at the Adriatic—so blue, just the colour turquoise: but it seemed very shadeless and dusty there after Venice, which has no dust, and heaps of shade in the narrow alleys and canals. We walked along to St. Niccolo di Lido, where my patron saint, St. Nicholas, is buried, quite forgotten now, poor dear, though he did such lots of nice miracles in the Middle Ages! His Church was locked so I couldn’t go and pay my respects to his tomb.
By way of a complete change from Tintoretto and St. Marco, last night a very smart professional palmist arrived here and proceeded to give a most absurd lecture with limelight illustrations of characteristic paws, in the hotel drawing-room. I learnt from it several curious things, chiefly that my affections are more sensual than platonic, that I have no self-confidence, am inconstant, but literary, and that people who sleep with their thumbs tucked inside their clenched hands are by nature maniacs. I hope you don’t do that. The lecturer pleasantly added, “All young infants clasp their thumbs in this manner.” So nice for fond mothers.
Grand Hotel de la Poste, Albi.
Tuesday night [24 April, 1906].
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