The Upton Letters | Page 7

just as the kind of pride is
extinct against which the early Victorian books used to warn children,
and which was manifested by sitting in a carriage surveying a beggar
with a curling lip--a course of action which was invariably followed by
the breaking of a Bank, or by some mysterious financial operation
involving an entire loss of fortune and respectability.
Nowadays the parable of the Pharisee and the publican is reversed. The
Pharisee tells his friends that he is in reality far worse than the publican,
while the publican thanks God that he is not a Pharisee. It is only, after
all, a different kind of affectation, and perhaps even more dangerous,
because it passes under the disguise of a virtue. We are all miserable
sinners, of course; but it is no encouragement to goodness if we try to
reduce ourselves all to the same level of conscious corruption. The only
advantage would be if, by our humility, we avoided censoriousness. Let
us frankly admit that our virtues are inherited, and that any one who
had had our chances would have done as well or better than ourselves;
neither ought we to be afraid of expressing our admiration of virtue,
and, if necessary, our abhorrence of vice, so long as that abhorrence is
genuine. The cure for the present state of things is a greater naturalness.
Perhaps it would end in a certain increase of priggishness; but I
honestly confess that nowadays our horror of priggishness, and even of
seriousness, has grown out of all proportion; the command not to be a
prig has almost taken its place in the Decalogue. After all, priggishness
is often little more than a failure in tact, a breach of good manners; it is
priggish to be superior, and it is vulgar to let a consciousness of

superiority escape you. But it is not priggish to be virtuous, or to have a
high artistic standard, or to care more for masterpieces of literature than
for second-rate books, any more than it is priggish to be rich or
well-connected. The priggishness comes in when you begin to compare
yourself with others, and to draw distinctions. The Pharisee in the
parable was a prig; and just as I have known priggish hunting men, and
priggish golfers, and even priggish card-players, so I have known
people who were priggish about having a low standard of private virtue,
because they disapproved of people whose standard was higher. The
only cure is frankness and simplicity; and one should practise the art of
talking simply and directly among congenial people of what one
admires and believes in.
How I run on! But it is a comfort to write about these things to some
one who will understand; to "cleanse the stuff'd bosom of the perilous
stuff that weighs upon the heart." By the way, how careless the
repetition of "stuff'd" "stuff" is in that line! And yet it can't be
unintentional, I suppose?
I enjoy your letters very much; and I am glad to hear that you are
beginning to "take interest," and are already feeling better. Your views
of the unchangeableness of personality are very surprising; but I must
think them over for a little; I will write about them before long.
Meanwhile, my love to you all.--Ever yours,
T. B.

UPTON, Feb. 25, 1904.
DEAR HERBERT,--You ask what I have been reading. Well, I have
been going through Newman's Apologia for the twentieth time, and as
usual have fallen completely under the magical spell of that
incomparable style; its perfect lucidity, showing the very shape of the
thought within, its simplicity (not, in Newman's case, I think, the result
of labour, but of pure instinctive grace), its appositeness, its dignity, its
music. I oscillate between supreme contentment as a reader, and

envious despair as a writer; it fills one's mind up slowly and richly, as
honey fills a vase from some gently tilted bowl. There is no sense of
elaborateness about the book; it was written swiftly and easily out of a
full heart; then it is such a revelation of a human spirit, a spirit so
innocent and devoted and tender, and, moreover, charged with a sweet
naive egotism as of a child. It was written, as Newman himself said, IN
TEARS; but I do not think they were tears of bitterness, but a
half-luxurious sorrow, the pathos of the past and its heavinesses,
viewed from a quiet haven. I have no sympathy whatever with the
intellectual attitude it reveals, but as Roderick Hudson says, I don't
always heed the sense: it is indeed a somewhat melancholy spectacle of
a beautiful mind converted in reality by purely aesthetic considerations,
by the dignity, the far-off, holy, and venerable associations of the great
Church which drew him quietly in,