“Yes, I know: I’m sure he’s a very good man, and that’s so trying, because he is such a prig, and always does his duty, and, my dear, that awful mouth, and the Beautiful sentiments that come out of it. Besides he’s so Very, Very Plain!”
No one was ever more beset with human frailties. She was afraid of getting stout, and in her diary recorded solemn vows that she would _not_ eat more than two dishes at dinner, nor take sugar. Then came an entry, “Soup, fish, pheasant and soufflé. What a Pig I am!”... Or again if she found herself in some difficulty, where a precise statement of what had really occurred would make things worse, she would say, “I shall have to be very diplomatic about it,” and a perfectly well justified chorus went up from her irreverent family, “That means that Ma’s going to tell a lie about it.” With all her intense spirituality, she had no use for conventional worship,
[Illustration: “HIS GRACE” (A DOMESTIC CARICATURE)
and I can hear her say, on an occasion when my father was out, “We won’t have prayers to-night for a treat.” Similarly she could never take any emotional interest (and I think gave up trying) in Synods and Pan-Anglican Conferences, and Bishops’ meetings, though she knew that her tepidity about these things that concerned my father so intimately was a distress to him. But while he drove on his fervent way along the roads of organization, tradition, ritual and ecclesiastical practice, her religion was on quite other lines: prayer and meditation were the solitary methods of it, and in the world which she delighted in, love and sympathy. And whatever she sought for and gathered there, with all her own temptations and fallings and new resolves, she brought with humble confident hands and laid them at the feet of Christ.
Though the beauty of living and sentient beings--whether in the region of the soul, the mind or the body--made so irresistible an appeal to her, she never really cared for the beauty of plants or trees or skies or scenery. Just there a firm frontier-line was drawn round the territory of her real sympathies, and it accorded very fitly with her lack of touch with mere organizations. Just as she cared not two straws for the Pan-Anglican Conference, yet delighted in the human members of it, so, when standing in front of the west façade of, say Rheims Cathedral, or looking across from the Riffel Alp to the Matterhorn, her real attention would not be devoted to these silent sublimities, but much rather to a cat blinking in the sun, or a sparrow building in the eaves. Things must move or think or form opinions or commit voluntary actions to enchant her, and in the Swiss holidays which often followed the end of the London season, I doubt if she ever looked with eagerness or wonder at the Matterhorn, except on the day when she knew that one of her sons was somewhere near the summit in the early morning. On such another day her eye was glued with enthusiasm on the Rothhorn because two of us were making the ascent, but towards the Rothhorn in itself, or towards the waving of poplars, or the flame of a sunset, she never felt the emotional heart-leap. Thus, when August in Switzerland or elsewhere was over, the ensuing five months or so at Addington, with its delights for us of shooting and riding and all the genial thrill of country life, made no appeal to her. As far as they affected us, she threw herself into them, but at any moment, she would have chosen to be in the swim and the thick of things again, and have taken those early morning walks down the Lambeth Road with the interest of fishshops and costermongers to enlighten her, rather than walk under the flaming autumn beech trees, or see the frail white children of the spring beginning to prick through the thawing earth of January. There had to be a beating heart in that which enchained her; she could not bother about primroses. That may have been a limitation, but such limitation as that merely stored her force of sympathy and discernment towards the rest. She did not attempt to let it dribble out in exiguous channels, but conserved the whole vigour of it for the supply of the mansions where her treasure and her heart lay. In the country also, she was a far more defenceless victim against the one strong foe of her triumphal banners, and that foe was fear.
