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, while all the time he is under the impression that it is a
logical clue which he is following. And what logic! leaping lightly
over difficult places, taking flowery by-paths among the fields,
the very stairs on which he treads based on all kinds of wide
assumptions and unverifiable hypotheses. Then it is distressing to
see his horror of Liberalism, of speculation, of development, of
all the things that constitute the primal essence of the very