‘If the churches would give religion a rest and concentrate on ethics, who knows what odd results might follow.’ Photo: Detail of book cover of Personal Pleasurers by Rose Macauley
Wit to witness: Rose Macauley goes to Meeting. Kate Macdonald recalls.
‘I shall not be ill-pleased should the Spirit move no one this morning.’
In 1935 the British novelist Rose Macaulay published a second collection of essays and journalism, called Personal Pleasures. She had begun her journalistic career in the 1920s, and had made herself a name for her wit, her intellectual curiosity and her feminism. She was an Anglo-Catholic, yet had withdrawn herself from communion.Very few people knew that this was because she was in a relationship with a married man, which would not end until his death in 1942. But she continued going to church, and also attended other services of other denominations. In Personal Pleasures she wrote four essays on ‘Church-Going’, describing her experiences at an Anglican church, a Roman Catholic service, a Unitarian service, and a Quaker Meeting. Here she was probably writing about a Meeting for Worship at Jordans in Buckinghamshire, which she occasionally visited.
‘The seventeenth century meeting-house stands in a dell in a beech-wood; it is built of mellowed, lichened brick, with latticed windows and whitewashed walls and a gallery running round. Outside the clear glass windows green beech waves, and dark green holly sharply twinkles. The door stands open, and through it sounds the singing of birds, the call of a cuckoo, and the running, leaping, and chattering of squirrels. The Friends sit in stillness, waiting on the Spirit, who will presently move some one to rise and speak. For my part, I shall not be ill-pleased should the Spirit move no one this morning, except the squirrels and the birds and that distant hen who would appear to have produced an egg.
But the Spirit is, as usual, stirring. The caretaker of the meeting-house gets up; he speaks about the happy birds, mentioning also the more agreeable among the insects, such as butterflies, who, says he, are also happy. He refers to the cuckoo, who so soon must fly, with that intelligence bestowed on him so amply by the Lord and so profitably used throughout his English trip, to warmer lands. Happiness: taking no care: this appears, perhaps naturally, to be the caretaker’s ambition; his view is that happiness is widely experienced among the feathered and the winged, and that the reason for this is that they take no care, but trust in the Lord. He even appears to be interpreting the piping parliament among the trees as a meeting for worship. Can he be right? And do birds believe, and tell one another, that human beings are happy? And do we perhaps exaggerate the carefreedom of our plumy fellow-creatures, who obviously have their troubles, some of them more troublesome than those which normally visit man? Squirrels, for example… Still, it gives pleasure to the caretaker, a generous and unenvious man, to think that birds are happy and take no care.
He resumes his seat, having left with us these interesting speculations, over which we meditate for a while, until the Spirit moves again. This time we have a little talk about the importance of making our wills, lest we be cut off intestate, thus causing trouble and confusion among our survivors. The speaker must, I think, be a solicitor. He speaks well: we make mental notes: Will: make it at once. He is a more practical man than the caretaker. The caretaker cannot, surely, much approve his advice, for his own was to live like the birds, looking not ahead, but trusting that the Lord would arrange. The birds do not make wills. That is one of the points about Meeting – you get all points of view. The next is that of a kind-faced woman, who has been sitting surrounded by children, whom she has been successfully pacifying and rendering innocuous for half an hour and has now led out and set free. Returning to her place, she speaks about children. One wonders again, why do children, so attractive in life, become in discourse so uninteresting? Perhaps people say the wrong things about them… They become, on the tongue of this kind woman, strangely like the birds of the caretaker – happy, care-free, trusting, very religious. In another moment, one feels, she will be saying that those cheerful voices receding through the woods are raised in the praise of God. But no; she does not go so far as that. She is either a mother or a school teacher, and knows children better than the caretaker knows birds. Still, the children of her discourse are shadowy little cherubs, simple-minded, almost winged; by no means the stormy, questioning, imagination-haunted, earthy, ingenious, gluttonous, perverse, exciting and excited little creatures that we know. Those who thus think of children set one wondering at what point the Great Change occurs which turns them into the so different adults that they become. The children they envisage would have been approved by Pelagius, for they have no original sin; they seem ready to die straight away, like a child by Charles Dickens, and wing their way to heaven.
After this, a speaker is moved to talk of living by conscience. He is practical, idealistic, spiritual, ethical, stirring. He makes it seem, while he speaks, almost possible that humanity should live in such a strange, unusual manner. He brings righteousness into the foreground… Is this where most churches fail? If they would give religion a rest and concentrate on ethics, who knows what odd results might follow? When the Friends, as they frequently do, speak thus, one understands the disturbing and unwelcome emotions of dislike that they used, in less tolerant centuries, to arouse, so that all the warring churches, Anglican, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Anabaptist, and the rest, were united when they saw, heard of, or thought of Quakers, by a common and fervent desire to whip them, to set them in stocks, to brand them with hot irons, to fling them into dark cells for life.
How many a meeting, in this very house, has been held in the shadow of these fearful intentions! They seem still to lurk in the beech woods, to be creeping along the deep lane, the constable with his posse of men coming to catch the Quakers red-handed at their damned conventicling blasphemy, to arrest them and hale them off in chains to the magistrate, there to be sentenced to the whip, the stocks and the gaol. The rustling squirrels, the leaping rabbits in the undergrowth, they are the steps of spies, the tramping of armed men, coming to seize us in the name of the King, the Church, and the Laws.
Still, if we live according to the implanted light of conscience… that is what the quiet-voiced speaker is saying… Even in gaol and the stocks we could, we suppose, do that – if indeed we could ever do such an extraordinary thing… But, anyhow, what an idea! Much better sing psalms, hymns, anthems, swing censers, praise the Lord. It is time that I slipped out of this meeting, into the woods.’
A new edition of Rose Macaulay’s Personal Pleasures, which provides this week’s cover image, will be published on 10 August, by Handheld Press.
