Now I have given your poems the priority which is their due, I must tell you that I have been in somedistress to think that my poem had occasioned doubt in you. A securefaith - a true prayerfulness - is a beautiful and a true thing - however we must nowadays construeit - and not to be disturbed by the meanderings and queryings of the finite brain ofR. H. Ash or any other puzzled student of our Century. Ragnarôk was written in all honesty in the days when I did not myself question Biblical certainties - or the faith handed down by my fathers and theirs before them. It was read differently by some- the lady who was to become my wife was included in these readers - and I was at the time startled and surprisedthat my Poem should have been construed as any kind of infidelity - -for I meant it rather as a reassertion of the Universal Truth of the living presence of Allfather(under whatever Name) and of the hope of Resurrection from whatever whelming disaster in whatever form. When Odin, disguised as the Wanderer, Gan-grader, in my Poem, asks the Giant Wafthrudnir what was the word whispered by the Father of the gods in the ear of his dead son, Baldur, on hisfuneral pyre - the young man I was - most devoutly - meant the word to be -Resurrection. And he, that young poet, who is and is not myself, saw no difficulty in supposing that the dead Norse God of Light might prefigure - or figure - the dead Son of the God Who is the Father of Christendom. But, as you perceived, this is a two-handed engine, a slicing weapon that cuts both ways, this of figuration - to say that the Truth of the Tale is in the meaning, that the Tale but symbolises an eternal verity, is one step on the road to the parity of all tales… And the existence of the same Truths in all Religions is a great argument both for and against the paramount Truthfulness of One.
Now -I must make confession. I have written and destroyed an earlier answer to your letter in which -not disingenuously -I urged you to hold fast by yourfaith - not to involve yourself in the "ambages andsinuosities" of the Critical Philosophy - and wrote, what may not be nonsense, that women's minds, more intuitive and purer and less beset with torsions and stresses than those of mere males - may hold on to truths securely that we men may lose by much questioning, much of that mechanicalfutility; "A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a City, and yet be forced to surrender it" - this was the wise saying of Sir Thomas Browne - and I would not be instrumental in demanding the keys of that city from you in pursuit of a false claim.
But I thought - and I was right in thinking, was I not? - that you would not be best pleased to be exempted from argument by an appeal to your superior Intuition and an abandoning of the field by me?
I do not know why - or how - but I do know wholeheartedly that it is so - so I cannot prevaricate with you, and worse, cannot leave decently undiscussed matters of such import. So you will have remarked - you so sharply intelligent - that I have nowhere in this letter claimed that I now hold the simple or innocent views of the young Poet of Ragnarok. And if I tell you what views I do hold - what will you think of me? Will you continue to communicate your thoughts to me? I do not know -I only know that I am under some compulsion of truthfulness. I am not become any kind of an Atheist, nor yet positivist, at least,not as to the extreme religious position of those who make a religion out of Humanity - for although I wish myfellow men well, and find them endlessly interesting, yet there are more things in Heaven and Earth than were created for their, that is our, benefit. The impulses to religion might be the need to trust - or the capacity for wonder - and my own religious feelings have always been inspired more by the latter. I find it hard to shift without the Creator - the more we see and understand, the more amazement there is in this strangely interrelated Heap of things - which is yet not disordered. But I go toofast. And I cannot, I must not, burden you with a complete confession of what are in any case a very confused, very incoherent, indeed inchoate set of ideas, perceptions, half-truths, useful fictions, struggled for and not pos sessed.
The truth is - my dear Miss LaMotte - that we live in an old world - a tired world - a world thathas gone on piling up speculation and observations until truths that might have been graspable in the brightDayspring ofhuman morning - by the young Plotinus or the ecstatic John on Patmos - are now obscured by palimpsest on palimpsest, by thick horny growths over that clear vision - as moulting serpents, before they burstforth with their new flexiblebrilliant skins, are blinded by the crusts of their old one - or, we might say, as the lovely lines of faith that sprung up in the aspiring towersof the ancient ministers and abbeys are both worn away by time and grime, softly shrouded by the smutty accretions of our industrial cities, our wealth, our discoveries themselves, our Progress. Now, I cannot believe, being no Manichee, that He, the Creator, if he exists, did not make us and our world that which we are. He made us curious, did he not? - he made us questioning - and the Scribe of Genesis did well to locate the source of all our misery in thatgreed for knowledge which has also been our greatest spur - in some sense - to good. To good and evil. We have more of both those, I must believe, than our primitive parents.
Now, my great question is, has He withdrawn Himself/row our vision so that by diligence of our own matured minds we might find out His Ways - now sofar awayfrom us - or have we by sin, or by some necessary thickening of our skins before the new stages of the metamorphosis - have we reached some stage which necessitates our consciousness of our ignorance and distance - andis this necessity health or sickness?
I was in Ragnarôk- where Odin, the Almighty, becomes a mere wan dering Questioner in Middle-Earth - and is necessarily destroyed with all his works on the last battlefield at the end of the last terrible Winter -I was feeling towards some such question - unknowing -
And then there is the whole question of what kind of Truth may be conveyed in a wonder-tale, as you rightly named it - but I trespass terribly on your patience - which may by now be at an end with me -I may have put myself beyond the pale of your keen and discerning attention -
And I have not answeredwhat you said of your Epic. Well - if you still care for my views - as why should you? You are a Poet and in the end must care only for your own views - why not an Epic? Why not a mythic drama in twelve books? I can see no reason in Nature why a woman might not write such a poem as well as a man - if she but set her mind to it.
Does this sound brusque? It is because it distressesme that you should even - with your gifts - suppose an apology of any kind was neededfor the Project -
I am very well aware that an Apology is neededfor my tone throughout this letter, which I shall not re-read, for it is out of my power to recast it again. So it comes to you rough, unhouseled, unannealed - and I shall wait - resigned but anxious - to see if you feel any response is possible -
Yours,
R. H. Ash
Dear Mr Ash,
If I held Silence - too long - forgive me. I deliberated indeed not whether but what-I might Reply - since you do me the honour -I had almost writ, the painful honour - but indeed it is not - that is not so - of trusting me with your true opinions. I am no Miss in an evangelical novel to fly into a fine frenzy of -elevated- Rebuff or Rebuttal at expressions of honest doubt - and am partially in accord with you - Doubt, doubt is endemic to our life in this world at this time. I do not Dispute your vision of our historicalSituation - we are far from the Source of Light - and we know Things - that make a Simple Faith - hard to hold, hard tograsp, hard to wrestle.