umM 1 iitftiiiiii .iSiflii.iuij-Mi-j-iiijjjMtiimjijiiiai^ ii " ^ ^^M, Wl.'! i I ¦M Ml filKII iliifl Hrttn Bought with the income of the Class of 1872 Fund >- vi.^-^-^''V'JV-??'g LIFE OF GEORGE TYRRELL uTT/i^uA AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND LIFE OF GEORGE TYRRELL IN TWO VOLUMES VOLUME II LIFE OF GEORGE TYRRELL FROM 1884 TO 1909 BY M, D. PETRE ILLUSTRATED SECOND IMPRESSION LONDON EDWARD ARNOLD 1912 [At! rights riservtd CONTENTS OF VOL. II. Character and Temperament CHAPTER I PAGE 1 CHAPTER II Mid-Jesuit Life and Writings 28 Section L Priesthood . 30 „ 2. Thomism 40 ,, .3. Early Writings 47 4. " Nova et Vetera "— " Hard Sayings "— " Ex ternal Religion " 62 ,, 5. Misgivings 70 ,, 6. " The Spiritual Exercises '' 77 CHAPTER III A Long Friendship 8-5 CHAPTER IV Mediating Liberalism 98 CHAPTER V "A Perverted Devotion" 112 vi CONTENTS CHAPTER VI PAGE Richmond 131 Section 1. Presbytery and Surroundings 131 „ 2. Repressed Activity 137 CHAPTER VII The Joint-Pastoral 146 CHAPTER VIII Last Works of the Jesuit Period - 162 Section 1. "The Faith of the Millions " 162 2. " Oil and Wine " 167 3. " Religion as a Factor of Life "— " Lex Orandi " 175 4. "The Church and the Future " 186 5. Month Articles 192 6. " Letter to a Professor " 193 7. "The Rights and Limits of Theology " 196 8. " A Plea for Candour," and other Articles 200 9. " Lex Credendi " 203 CHAPTER IX The Break with Newmanism - 207 CHAPTER X Rupture with the Society 224 Section 1. 1901-1904 225 „ 2. 1904 - 228 „ 3. 1905 236 „ 4. 1905-1906 239 „ 5. 1906 - 249 CONTENTS vii PAGE CHAPTER XI Inner History of the Parting 256 Section 1. Before Dismissal 256 „ 2. After Dismissal 264 CHAPTER XII His Relations with the Jesuits 271 CHAPTER XIII Militant Action 282 CHAPTER XIV Suspension 297 Section 1. Futile Negotiations - 297 2. " A Much Abused Letter " 307 3. Storrington 310 „ 4. " Through Scylla and Chary bdis " 315 ,, 5. Last Negotiations for the Celehret 322 CHAPTER XV Pius X. AND THE "PaSCENDI " 332 CHAPTER XVI Excommunication 341 CHAPTER XVII Modernism 346 Section 1. Watching the Movement 346 2. " Modernism " and " Modernists " 351 3. "Medievalism" 360 4. The " Remedies " of the " Pascendi " 363 Vlll CONTENTS CHAPTER XVIII "The Church of his Baptism" PAGE 366 CHAPTER XIX Old Catholic Sympathies - - 3/9 CHAPTER XX The Christological Problem 388 CHAPTER XXI The Church of thk Future 404 CHAPTER XXII The End of the Journey - 420 CHAPTER XXIII The Resting-Place - - 436 CHAPTER XXIV Conclusion 447 APPENDICES I. First Censor on "A Perverted Devotion" 451 II. Second Censor on " A Perverted Devotion " 455 III. "Letter tu the General of the Jesuits" 458 IV. Letter to the General, September 2nd, 1905 499 V. Letter to the Rev. Father Richard Sykes, Pro vincial of the Society of Jesus in Eingland, September 4th, 1905 .500 CONTENTS ix PAGE VI. Letter to the General, January 24th, 1906 501 VII. Dimissorial Letters - 502 VIII. Letter to His Eminence Cardinal Ferrata, April 7th, 1906 - - 503 IX. Letter to Cardinal Ferrata, May 4th, 1906 504 X. Official Communication of Cardinal Ferrata to THE Archbishop of Malines 504 XI. Letter to His Eminence Cardinal Merry del Val, July 20th, 1906 505 Index to Vols. I. and II. 507 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS TO VOL. II. PAGE Father Tyrrell at Richmond Frontispiece St. Beuno's, North Wales - - 31 St. Mary's Hall, Stonyhurst - 43 Richmond Market-Place 133 Church and Presbytery, Richmond 259 Cottage in the Garden of Mulberry House, Stor rington 343 Ivy House, Clapham 357 Father Tyrrell's Room at Mulberry House 425 Father Tyrhell at Storrington, 1908 lo face 420 Father Tyrrell's Grave - - - 445 LIFE OF GEORGE TYRRELL CHAPTER I CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT Before we take up the narrative which George Tyrrell too soon abandoned, it may be well to supplement the portrait which he gave us in the first volume by a further description of the man himself, as known to his friends, and as known also to his enemies or critics. Such description is chiefly authoritative as drawn from his own utterances, of which there are plenty available as frankly self- revealing as those of the autobiography. They may, indeed, possess even higher authority in the matter of portraiture than those of the former docu ment, being instantaneous photographs and not records of the past. From very opposite quarters a good deal of advice has been tendered to the compiler of this life by those chiefly interested in one or other aspect of the work and character of its subject. There are Catholics whose only desire is to justify him to their co-religion ists, as there are anti-clericals for whom his chief importance lies in the use that can be made of his name and writings in their particular campaign ; there are those who care only for his constructive, and those who care chiefly for his destructive work. A " protective " biography would indeed be a strange contradiction as succeeding to the autobiography we VOL. II. 1 2 LIFE OF GEORGE TYRRELL have before us, and with the first volume of this life to serve as a model, it has been the ambition of the com piler of the second that its subject should move through its pages just such as he was, with his strength and his weakness, his greatness and his littleness, his sweet ness and his bitterness, his utter truthfulness and what he himself calls his " duplicity," his generosity and his ruthlessness, his tenderness and his hardness, his faith and his scepticism. If the sum total be displeasing to a few his bio grapher may regret it, but I know that he would not. I seem [he wrote on September 3rd, 1 900, to one whom we will call throughout this volume V.] of late years to have got hard and cold, and I regret it exceedingly, for I had rather love, ever so hopelessly and thanklessly, than be loved by the whole world. The latter is valuable merely as a condition of the former, " it is more blessed to give than to receive." He then goes on to speak of people who had cared for him, but on a total misunderstanding of me ; loving me for what I was not, not loving me for what I am ; it was as though a letter intended for someone else had been directed to me ; I was not even flattered, rather irritated. . . . Also, there is a sort of affection which softens ordinary men by worship and attention, and makes them loom great in their own esteem. Therefore, he goes on to say, until he is known, "with all his fearful limitations and weaknesses, he could never rest in afiection as having a right to it." And again to the same he says : Who has known me long and not given me up as a hopeless tangle 1 I have not sought, but I have found many friends ; but I have kept how many 1 And, in another place, he speaks of the only kind of love worth having ; a love that may be pained, but not lessened, by the gradual revelation of what is worst in me (November 3rd, 1900.) CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT In these letters there is a certain amount of self- analysis, provoked, evidently, by the personal criticisms and questions of his correspondent ; whose letters, however, do not appear to be in existence. They are especially useful as bringing into relief what I believe to have been his dominating characteristic, in itself neither a virtue nor a vice, but a quality that accounts largely for the best and the worst that are to be found in him. This characteristic consisted in a strange and almost startling selflessness ; not to be confused with what we ordinarily call unselfishness. I hope [he writes to V., March 7th, 1901] you don't mistake psychological for moral selflessness. They are two different things and quite incompatible. And, in his next letter : I suppose by " moral selflessness " I mean that one has proper self-respect and self-love, whose object is one's own real moral worth laboriously won and soberly acknowledged ; and yet this self is sacrificed and put aside without hesitation and struggle, but as a matter of course, in the interest of others. As long as there is a struggle, however victorious, there is self-denial, but not selflessness. Psychological selflessness is not a good term, but a useful one for the state of him who, seeing no foundation for proper self-respect and self-love, entertains neither sentiment and cherishes no sanguine illusions. It is an indifiorent quality, a sort of knowledge such as the devils might possess, without a scrap of humility or love. (March 12th, 1901.) In an earlier letter he wrote : It seems to me that I have got into a chronic state of spiritual ansesthesia or dreaminess — the feeling I used to have when at the theatre in my boyish days — an eagerly interested witness of life, but with no part in it. (January 8th, 1901.) And on April 3rd, 1901, he writes : I am so far delighted with Recejacs' book on mysticism. . . . He is with me in finding the divine and specifying element of our nature in disinterestedness; i.e. in our love of what does not concern us as separate units, but only as identified with the All 4 LIFE OF GEORGE TYRRELL which lives in us ; in our desire for the existence of the good and the true and the fair — of the Kingdom of God, not as of something we want to have for ourselves but of something we want to exist, whether we exist or no to enjoy it. This is just what you find so inhuman in me or rather in my theory. Had I been Moses I don't think I should have felt not entering the Land of Promise one bit, so long as I knew that Israel would do so one day. I do not justify this, but I understand it ; just as I could understand a man committing a mortal sin rather than that one dear to him should do so. This example of Moses, moving ever forward with his people towards the land that he himself was not to enter, recurs often ; not in the sense of heroic self- sacrifice, but in that same sense of indifference, and lack of private self-interest. As far back as 1896 [he writes on January 19th, 1902] I wrote on the title-page of my breviary : " Thou shalt see from afar the land which the Lord God will give to the Children of Israel, but thou shalt not enter therein "... and from that conviction I have never swerved since long before that date. Still I am very satisfied with my destiny as a wheel in God's mill, and find sufficient reward in the interests of life, its ups and even its downs ; nor would I willingly purchase so dull a thing as personal safety at the sacrifice of such entertaining dangers. That I keep on the surface at all is hardly explicable, except through the subtle will-influence of those who try to buoy me up with their prayers and affection. A kindred thought may be found in " Nova et Vetera," under the heading " Mid-Life." This self-detachment was perhaps the chief source of that personal attractiveness, recognised bv most of those who came into immediate contact with him ; but it was also the cause of trouble with his friends, in so far as it made him very uncalculating of the weight of his own words. All my hfe [he once wrote to V.] I have been hurting people simply from not realising that they cared so much about me, or what I might say. CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 5 It also deprived him of one of the ordinary safe guards in times of difficulty; he did not, hke most men, watch himself from outside, with a view to his own consistency and reputation. We have sometimes to discount the influence of anger in things that he said ; we have not to discount the commoner influence of self-regard. Indeed, in times of desolation and weariness, when the spiritual landscape was blotted out, his self-indiffer ence became a danger of which he was aware. There was, at such times, a pathetic self-surrender to the guidance of friends, who, as he felt, cared more for his interests than he did himself. Thus he writes to one of them that a certain atmosphere would develop the Voltaire in me unless I could count on your being accessible. On the other hand, this same quality saved him from lapsing into that uncritical self-assurance which has often marred the noblest men, when they came to believe themselves all that their disciples thought them. Enclosed saddens me [he writes in May, 1902, referring to some utterance of a religious leader], especially in the light of his mental breakdown in the end. He seems to have yielded himself to the belief in his own mission without any sort of criticism or self- distrust ; without any fear of fanaticism or illusion. Of course, this self-belief is the secret of such success as he effected. But, dear me ! how strange it seems ! Perhaps if he had had moral difficulties and defects it might have awakened a wholesome self-criticism. To think oneself an instrument of God's designs — a privilege one shares with the devil* — is a reasonable reflection, if not very profitable; but to view oneself as a special instrument, as a sort of miraculous providence, seems to me the most dangerous sort of fanaticism, not to say pride. And yet half the saints have been full of it ! I am beginning, too, to dislike the very idea of "grace," as something " special " — as a bit of divine favouritism. . . . My * Compare with these lines Survivals of Grace in "Nova et Vetera " and Unwilling Belief in " Oil and Wine." 6 LIFE OF GEORGE TYRRELL moral sense bids me desire the minimum of grace allowed to the most abandoned sons of Adam. But obviously this whole concep tion of wanton favouritism has been foisted on God by men who fashioned him to their own notions of what an earthly father or ruler usually is. And now I am out of breath with my blaspheming and will conclude. (To V.) And again, to the same, December 12th, 1904 : I should be sorry to think I was " great," for of late, considering how N. and N. and dozens of other great figures were literally created out of nothing, I have been sadly wondering if nearly all the heroes of human worship might not be in a like case ; and if to themselves, and before God, they were not, even as I, poor, timid, will-less moles, burrowing about aimlessly in the darkness of the earth ; shamed by the contrast between themselves and other heroes as mythical as themselves. From the same fundamental characteristic sprang the ease with which he identified himself with the lives of others ; those others being sometimes quite fresh acquaintances. In the autobiography he has spoken of his "chameleon-like" temperament; now a chameleon does actually change colour, it does not dis guise itself, nor pose, nor wear the skin of another animal. In like manner Tyrrell took on the colour of his surroundings, accentuating the points he held in common with those around him, minimising the differ ences. In this way his works are a truer indication of his mind and abiding convictions than his conversation or his letters ; except those of the latter in which, as in some of those already quoted, he is obviously giving an account of himself Of course [he writes on one occasion to V.], N. speaks of "Tyrrell and I"; and so do twenty people who have little in common with one another ; N. and N. and N. (naming other friends). It only means that when I agree with people I say so ; and when I don't, I hold my tongue unless something is to be gained by a wrangle. (March 16th, 1901.) CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 7 For the same reason he preferred tete-a-tete to general conversation ; thus he writes in a short-lived diary on November 27th, 1904 : Called on N. and her sister. As usual, failed with two. As I speak to each, the subconsciousness of the other and her different standpoint, etc., baulk and distract. A result of this disposition was that friends or acquaintances who had not taken account of it ascribed undue importance to his expressions of agreement, and were sometimes disconcerted at contrary utterances which they met with afterwards. He had, in fact, as many ways of caring for his friends as there were friends to care for, and he gave himself so entirely to the one present as to seem almost identified with that one's views and interests. One could almost watch him while A. B. or C. D. became incarnate in him ; watch him and wait till G. T. once more surmounted the mixture and was himself again ; not by the total elimination of A. B. or C. D., but by their relegation to the place of subordinate and not dominant elements. For indeed, at such times he not only spoke as his friends would have him speak, but even felt as they would have him feel ; and this without any caution as to the use to which his words might be applied. Indeed, he was often guilty of a certain carelessness in his remarks, calculated to wound those to whom they might be repeated. Thus he wrote to a friend on one occasion : I should earnestly exhort you not to heed quoted remarks, especially of mine. It is part of my natural duplicity constantly to praise and dispraise simply to elicit the opinion of my interlocutor ; and I am sure many do the same. If A. said to me, e.g., that B. was inhuman, I should say to C. : " Don't you think that B. is just a trifle inhuman ?" simply to find if the impression were general or merely personal. (January 17th, 1901.) 8 LIFE OF GEORGE TYRRELL The " duplicity " of which he accuses himself in this place merits some consideration. If a man accuse him self of any form of insincerity, and one meet such accusation with frank unbelief, is not this to grant it while denying it ? While, on the other hand, confi dence in a man's fundamental sincerity will lead us to believe him even when he charges himself with ' ' du plicity." Father Tyrrell was not one of the men who would say of himself that " he never told a lie "; but the experience of life leads one to doubt whether the man " who has never told a lie " is always the most truthful man. Truth can be evaded in many ways without telling a lie ; and I think it would be possible for a mind more truthful in the ordinary conventional sense to be struck by a depth of sincerity in the character of Tyrrell to which itself had not attained. We may indeed occasionally find him giving, on the same sub ject, a different impression to two friends ; or slipping from one vantage-ground to another in the course of controversy ; or disappointing one friend by some reck less remark to another ; or grumbling at kindly meant endeavours ; or generally escaping and eluding at critical moments, to the detriment of his own cause. And yet few men would be capable of the ruthless self-revelation evinced in the autobiography ; and the course of his hfe will prove the same detachment in the facing of facts hostile to his most cherished positions. Such sincerity may be described as a sense of reality, of things as they are. He was quickly conscious of pose, whether in persons or in systems. For as there is a pose in persons which is revealed, to the sincere vision, by the inconsistency of one sentiment with another, so there is a pose in systems, betrayed by the incompatibility of one idea with another. It was this sense of reality which drove him, as he told us to CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 9 become good before he ventured to preach goodness ; it was the same sense which made him ruthlessly tear off the mask of pretence, even when he dreaded the disclosures that were to ensue. Perfect sincerity is probably a superhuman char acteristic ; and there is a colour and quality in each man's truthfulness, as in his virtue. Conventional sincerity is that with which we are for the most part satisfied ; and the untruthfulness of the major ity of mankind, who speak as though things did not exist because they will not open their eyes and look at them, is readily condoned. Men are not usually blamed as insincere because they refuse to face their own illusions ; yet the sincerity that penetrates thus far is deeper than ordinary truthfulness. Such honesty, however, contains an almost inhuman element, as though a certain measure of semi-wilful blindness were a necessary preservative of our weakness, as it is certainly conducive to our social success. Truth, served within rather than without, is a hard and un rewarding task-mistress. The sense of humour is a close ally of this funda mental sense of truth, and it was an insuppressible element of his temperament. It played over the most serious events of his life as irresistibly as over the lighter ones ; it was with him in joy and in sorrow, in rest and in work ; it flashed over his most strenuous efforts and flickered over his death-bed. He had, indeed, a fund of sheer merriment, but his was, in general, the humour of the tragic, and not of the cheerful temperament ; the humour that is associated with a sense of sin and sorrow, and that is not bestowed on the innocent and happy. God and His perfectly holy ones are without it ; faulty man is less faulty when he possesses it. It is associated with the 10 LIFE OF GEORGE TYRRELL pathos of wrong-doing and short -coming, with the sad clear vision of those who gauge the puny efforts of man in comparison with the vast universe in which he moves. After a meeting of the Synthetic Society,* to which he had been introduced by Mr. Wilfrid Ward, he writes to the latter, in 1899 : I confess I enjoyed the last meeting very much, though I was trembhng for my seriousness once or twice, owing to the haunting thought of the mirth there must be in heaven before the angels of God at the spectacle of a grave assembly of creatures discussing the existence of their Creator, and trying to make out a case for Him — not very successfully. But then there is no humour in heaven — doubtless because heaven is so largely the structure of theologians, a race void of all sense of the ridiculous. The Greek heaven rang with peals of celestial laughter ; but then it was the work of men's hands, a most human heaven with lust as well as laughter. This by the way. But Haldane's remarks and manner were fascinating in their seriousness. I should like to see an Hegelian at his prayers. A colloquy with the subject-object must be difficult to manage ; though a book of devotion to the angels, used here, chats freely with the " Thrones " — almost as difficult a feat, I should have thought. In a letter to Miss Dora Williams, of December 31st, 1904, he writes : In our sceptical, dilettante attitude in regard to learning and philosophy, the earnestness and unshaken faith of Fichte seem to belong to the days of anthropocentric vanity, when the divine dignity and destiny of man were unquestioned axioms ; and when we hear that he was horribly "ragged" by his pupils we cannot but suspect that he must have been lacking in that saving humour which prevents a man taking anything, least of all himself, too seriously ; and this not out of levity, but as the fruit of an outlook into those immensities in which our greatest philosophers seem less than chirping grasshoppers. * This Society was founded in 1896 ; the Right Hon. Arthur Balfour, Dr. Talbot (then Bishop of Rochester), Dr. Gore (then Bishop of Birmingham) and Mr. Wilfrid Ward, being its first promoters. CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 11 And to another he says : I begin to develop a horror of "earnestness," as of a subtle hypocrisy and a lack of humour and proportion quite fatal to truth and right perspective. Yet one does not want frivolity ; rather one views earnestness as the extremest frivolity. To take little things seriously is frivoHty ; and the world and life and man are so little. And again to Miss Dora Wilhams : As to the joke-aspect of life, I was only once briefly over the border, and I came back with two strange memories — one was that my judgment of myself in the Ewigkeit was just the inverse of what it is now and always was; the other was that of looking at the world through a sort of chink or keyhole, and screaming with the inextinguishable laughter of the gods as one laughs at folks per plexed and bewildered by some practical joke to which one is privy. Yet one would not wish to believe that the all pitiful could carry so painful a joke as life is so very far. It is the element of unfair ness that makes practical joking somewhat justly discredited. To lift the roof off an ant-hive is a poor sort of humour that only very little boys, usually cowards and bullies, can appreciate. But it may well be that the limitations of the infinite involve situations that are as supremely grotesque as are the first rude steps in the accomplish ment of some masterpiece of painting or sculpture. An embryo is an unintentional absurdity, but often very absurd. And I think that to the Immortals, who are face to face with the finished Ideal, mankind in the making ought to seem ludicrous as well as pitiable — a theme of both laughter and tears. That was my Apocalypse. (January 3rd, 1905.) Such humour is of the kind that calls forth a smile, but not a laugh ; a humour tinged with sadness, like that of Swift, but saved from the bitterness of this latter by religion and self-discipline. Tyrrell's fun was not that mockery which is " the fume of little minds " ; the laughter of those who deride and belittle all but themselves. He had the tragic smile of one who sees his own smallness and the smallness of all humanity in the face of immensity. Ridicule [he writes to Pfere Henri Bremond, March 25th, 1904] is God's fire for the burning of the stubble of humbug and solemn sham. 12 LIFE OF GEORGE TYRRELL He was sportsmanlike in the use of his formidable weapon of satire, and regarded wanton sarcasm as one of the worst forms of cruelty. I remember, indeed, how strongly he once expressed himself in regard to a master who boasted his power of controlling boys by means of a biting tongue. Yet he was also ruthless in the exposure of pet self-delusions ; and many a sharp quarrel occurred in the process of a friendship. He was also plentifully endowed with an almost madden ing perversity ; exercised, at times, to preserve his Uberty from the encroachments of solicitous friends. To really quarrel and really be friends at the same moment is the gift of an Irishman and not of an -.^Englishman. While he had no real taste for a bitter contest, he was a born fighter in the Celtic sense ; fighting for the sheer love of it, and not to defend his pride or his possessions ; ready to fight himself, or his own works, if it should prove convenient. Thus he threatened his publishers, on one occasion, that he would start a new series of works to "undermine the old ones and prove their worthlessness — no very difficult task !" At the end of a day's illness he writes in a diary, which he kept for a month or two for the sake of an absent friend, the one to whom he sent the auto biography : Odoler dth, 1904.— Dozed all day over "Esmond" and Well- hausen's "History of Israel "; managed office and visit. Felt horribly weak and much annoyed that nobody has asked how I am or if I want anything ; knowing all the while that they are afraid of having their noses bitten off, as they certainly would be. This is an impasse. One doesn't want sympathy, but only the chance of spurning it. And from the same journal, November 1st : Good for nothing . . . revived later. All this from another effort at " obedience unto death." [He had been ordered to drink milk, for which he had a great repugnance.] " Milk for babes," says the CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 13 Apostle most wisely, " but meat for the strong." Someone sent me to-day a sort of yellow gunpowder called "Plasmon," which, thrown into the fire, blew up with a loud report — no doubt some emissary from Rome ! The fate of the plasmon was only funny ; but in these moods of boyish mischief he sometimes threw more valuable offerings into the fire. And yet his perversity and combatiyeness were joined with an intense hunger for love, and a desire to be at one with those amongst whom he lived ; an almost tyrannical desire, leading to apparent contra dictions. In his spiritual life there was a characteristic which may be noted here, though it has perhaps been sufficiently manifested in the autobiography, and that was his realisation of the possibility of sin, a realisation by no means universal, even amongst spiritually minded persons. He once wrote to a friend : You remind me much of dear Father Hunter, who simply could not understand, could hardly believe that anyone could think a thing wrong and yet do it. His sense of sin was as dead as his ear for music. He did not possess the common liberty of right and wrong, but was the slave of his ethical judgments. What he said of Father Hunter might be said of a far greater number than is supposed. Not that such persons always do right, but that their wrong-doing somehow lacks the fulness of a .sinful action, while their regret, consistently, lacks the element of deep contrition characteristic of the converted sinner who is capable of becoming a saint. The ordinary soul is more conscious of its misery and weakness than of its sinfulness; and the lesson of increasing years brings rather a deepened sense of our wretchedness and helplessness than of our guilt. In fact, we some of 14 LIFE OF GEORGE TYRRELL us do not feel ourselves quite big enough to be capable of downright sin. Now it may be perplexing, but is it not true that we often find a richness and depth and pathos and humanity and meaning in the personality of one who has sinned, or apprehended what sin is, which is not to be found in those lacking the same sense ? The inno cent will sometimes, though rarely, possess this sense of sin ;* the fallen and faulty may be quite without it. That George Tyrrell firmly and actively recognised the possibility of deliberate wrong- doing, which is what we mean by sin, and that he realised such a capacity in himself, was a result at once of the entire unconven- tionality of his mind, and of that tragic or melancholy element which so largely qualified his character. He was good, not by custom, but by effort ; his mind questioned, before obeying, the dicta of morality as of faith ; he was, as he once said in a letter, " no bloodless Aloysius," but one who affronted the daily battle, and described his success, in his own ruthless fashion, as mere tight-rope balancing ; never a day's rest ; mind and body alike ever earthward. (To V., October 30th, 1900.) On June 29th, 1902, he writes to the same : As to my faith, I am not really unhappy at all. If I never was more confused as to " what is truth " I was never more deeply con fident that it is something infinitely better than we dream. . . I am content to be much in the dark ; perhaps I prefer it, as God seems nearer. My real unhappiness is the Widerspruch between my life and my ideals ; which is accentuated as the latter grow more clear and imperative. I am morally tired of the conflict, and seem to have lost all faith in myself. If I could live up to the best that I know, I should be absolutely happy. Without pretending, in this chapter, to fill in all the lines of the portrait, there are two points that must * There is a collect for the feast of St. Aloysius which commemor ates one of these rare instances — " innocentem non secuti poeniten- tem imitemur." CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 15 not be omitted, viz. : his peculiar sympathy for the animal world, and his love of Nature. He was not an animal lover in the manner of St. Francis ; he had too keen a sense of the bitterness of life, and the inevitable cruelty that prevails in the mutual relations of the brute-world, to accord with the gently loving spirit of Assisi. Indeed, he had an unmistakable sympathy with the naughtiness of animals, and a thieving dog would be furtively encouraged in his propensities, as his friends occasionally experienced. In some of his early articles he keenly derided the absurdity of Zoolatry, with its attempt to force on beasts the pleasures and privileges of man. Thus he describes in one of them the Zoophilist virtues of an imaginary race, who gloried in the scrupulous cleanliness and comfort of the mange hospital ; and in the monkey orphanages, where some two hundred poor little creatures were being taught to use napkins at table, to perform their toilet in private ; in a word, to be unselfish and pure, and honest, and to love their neighbours much more than themselves. In an article in the Weekly Register, September 16th, 1899, he reviews a little book, "L'Eglise et la Pi tie envers les Animaux," with its quaint and inconsequent legends. " Through the ' Zoophilist movement,' " he says, "we find a good cause made disreputable and ridicu lous." The very tales chosen, of which he gives an irresistibly humorous selection, bring us up full tilt against the hard wall of natural law. Thus : A hyena brings her blind cub to St. Macarius, and, having first politely knocked at the door with her head, enters and deposits it at his feet ; the Saint took it, spat upon its eyes and prayed ; and forthwith it saw. Next day the hyena presents the saint with a sheepskin rug to keep his feet warm, which he at first refuses — not, however, on the Zoophilist ground of the injury done to the sheep, 16 LIFE OF GEORGE TYRRELL which manifestly exists only to provide mutton and sheepskin rugs — but by reason of the injustice to its owners. " Whence did you get this if you have not been eating some poor man's sheep 1" says the Saint ; " I will not take it unless you swear that you will never wrong the poor any more by eating their sheep." To this the hyena swore ("capite suo annuit ut quae sancto assentiretur Macario"). Of a pet dog who had been removed from Richmond he wrote to V. : There is now a chance of the little quadruped coming back, as Father N. [rector of the mission where " Spy " now found himself] wants him to keep the three vows and all the rules of the Society. Yet if he regarded animals as animals, and not as men, he also evinced an extraordinary sense of kinship and equality with them ; they were his personal friends and even his personal enemies, and I have known him take offence with a favourite dog, and boycott it for a week, to the deep distress of the poor beast. This sense of kinship is shown in the following letter to V., May 30th, 1902 : Had you seen my articles on Zoophilism in the Mmtth and the Contemporary about Miss Frances Cobbe, you would not call me a Zoophilist without qualification. Both my religion as a Christian and my philosophy have, since then, gone far to justify my natural instincts in the matter. If God cares for the sparrows and the lilies it is because they are part of that same life which I live, whose several experiences will one day be the common posses sion of all; and I shall at last know what is going on behind " Jack's " grave-looking eyes, and reahse both the joys of rabbit- hunting and the terror of a hunted rabbit ; and shall feel what sun shine and rain mean to the roses. In some jottings, under the date February 10th, 1899, he writes : It would be strange, but surely not inconceivable, to discover at the last that dogs were the superior race on earth after all so abounding in sympathy, unresentfulness, humour, loyalty, fidelity- virtues Christians prate about while their dogs practise them. Also they have the wisdom of finding endless interest in the smallest CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 17 trifles — an art of life that we knew not till Wordsworth discovered it for us. Of Jack, his one-time dog, he writes to V., June 29th, 1902: All last week I was depressed, frankly, over the loss of Jack, whom I loved very absurdly, but not so absurdly as to sacrifice his prospects to my pleasure. This sounds childish ; but we are all childish, I particularly so. And to a friend whose dog was dead : Poor Chough ! what does he think of the Ewigkeit ? How hard to think of that boisterous afiectionateness put out like a farth ing dip ! And of another dog : Poor Tim* is making for the Ewigkeit with dropsy. It was a lesson in " sad mortality " to identify the gasping little wretch, with pain-puzzled eyes, with the scampering joy of a few days ago. " Quid enim mali fecit ! " (To V., September 3rd, 1905.) It was against the follies of Zoolatry that his satire was directed, but a Zoophilist he was, from the days of childhood, when he cherished snails under the dining- room table, to the last days at Storrington, where he was the playfellow of sheep-dog, spaniel and Pomer anian in the garden of Mulberry House. In his love of Nature there is the same note of self- identification ; perhaps Wordsworth would best have interpreted his feelings. Thus (September 12th, 1905, to V.) : Yesterday I was near Colesgarth in a glory of sun and shadow; and then by the beck in the plantation, where I watched a perch swishing his tail till I was almost a fish myself ; and the thud of the hydraulic ram hard by lost all its suggestion of mechanism, and seemed like the heart of Nature throbbing rhythmically for ever — and then I thought of London and I said "Bonum est nos hie esse," etc. * He belonged to a friend. Miss Sophy Lyall. VOL. II. 18 LIFE OF GEORGE TYRRELL From Tintagel he writes, January 25th, 1906 : We had two days of perfect calm and sunshine (bitterly cold) which was very lovely to the eye. Undoubtedly it is the calm sea that, combined with the sense of space, fills up the notion of eternity. The fussy waves belong to senseless maniac Time, and make the sea measurable ; they are a fieri, not a factum esse. Calm is what all came from and goes to. " Then shalt thou rest through us, even as now thou dost labour through us." And from Damgan in Brittany, July 12th, 1906, he writes to the same : A shabby little Irish village, a dingy cheap church. The beauty is in the interlocked arms of sea and barley fields ripe to the harvest, the mingling of lighthouses and windmills ; also in the archaic simplicity of manners that make one feel 3,000 years old, and look on the Church as a raw intruder who has extinguished the fires, and cast down the fetiches and altars that were the centres of now centreless mystic dances. This preliminary chapter would not be complete without some account of the physical scourge to which he was continually subject ; a scourge that was lighter, indeed, of late years, but never whoUy relaxed — his violent migraine headaches. The following are speci mens, picked out at random from the Diary of 1904, to give some idea of what the struggle was during a good part of his life : October 6th. — Storm all night and till about noon, but clear blue through rolling cloud masses. Sick. Two letters; tried to read but gave up at about 11 p.m. Half alive; tried to read and even to write a little. Finished the minor prophets (R. version) to-day. . . . October 8i!A.— Nausea all day; no Mass, no meals. Animation enough just for office and for Brand,* which I got through. October 9i!/t.— Nausea still. Heard Mass at 8, tried breakfast in vain; tried to write sermon after but had to give up. . . . Managed office and visit. . . . Went to dinner in despair from sheer starva tion. . . . * Ibsen. CHARACTER AND TEMPERAMENT 1 9 October 10th — Returning vitality, etc. October llth.—liioTmai. . . . October 17 th.— Woke bilious, most unjustly . . . after 11 a.m. went to bed in despair. Rose 5.30 p.m. Read various letters. . . . October 19