BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, [4 DEC. 1916]
BRACERS 19084. ALS. McMaster. SLBR 2: #282
Edited by S. Turcon and N. Griffin. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

<London?>
Monday aft.1

My Beloved

Your little letter2 came this morning and was a comfort to me.  Dearest, I love you far more deeply and irrevocably than ever before. In all that I do or think, in all that I hope and all that I suffer, I am with you in spirit.  I have faith in you — chiefly because your courage is infinite and inexhaustible.  I want a kind of union with you which goes deeper than happiness — a comradeship in all great things — in suffering as well as in joy, in absence as much as when we are together, in slow labour as well as in desperate ventures and great enterprises.

I was very unhappy when you said the Cat and Fiddle3 might as well have been a dream.4 I do not feel that at all.  The thought of it is always with me — it makes me always feel a very profound union with you, which nothing can take away.  It was the perfection of personal union.  But on the basis of that I want something more — something to include that, but to be also an impersonal union — that we should be as much one in what concerns the world as in what concerns each other.  And that means letting in pain, because the world at this time is one great cry of pain.

There have been moments when I have doubted whether you really wanted that — whether you were willing to admit pain and doubt to a sufficient share in your inner life.  You said once that it was not in your nature to live “nobly” — I don't know quite what you meant, but I had a chill fear in my heart when you said it; and something of the same fear came to me à propos of my letter to Wilson,5 though in that case I think it was irrational.  You remember our talk in Richmond Park,6 about how one can’t live by shibboleths but only by active love.  Active love, and a kind of tenderness — a realization that it is hard to see into another soul, that when one most thinks one understands one is really furthest from understanding — and out of this, a kind of reverence towards all. This all sounds stupid I am afraid, but it lies so deep in me that I want to call it forth in you, and I know it is in your nature.

But then I have another feeling — I do love your joy — it is quite dreadful to me to see you unhappy — I would rather vanish out of your life than take away your instinctive joy of life — and selfishly too, I love it, because I catch it from you, and feel gay and jolly and young — but then when I am away from you that fades away, and the burden of the world comes over me again.  And so a lot of complicated contradictory feelings grow up in me.

Dearest loved one, I don’t know whether I shall be able to bear such a long long time of absence as we spoke of — it seems awful in prospect. I hope something will happen to shorten it.  My heart, my soul, my life, I love you absolutely and utterly.

B

• 1

  [document] Document 200052.

• 2

  Your little letter Of 4 December 1916 (BRACERS 112972).

• 3

  Cat and Fiddle An isolated pub on the moors near Buxton, Derbyshire where they stayed from 14 to 17 November 1916. For further information on the pub, see BRACERS 19065.

• 4

  well have been a dream She retracts this remark in her letter of 10 December 1916 (BRACERS 112978).

• 5

  my letter to Wilson Unlike his comment on the Cat and Fiddle, she responds to this the next day: “Please don’t pass judgement on me about your letter to President Wilson. It isn’t any particular view I had, only an instinctive feeling” (BRACERS 112973). BR’s letter to President Woodrow Wilson is dated 4 December, the same date that this letter was written, although BR’s use of the past tense makes it appear that the Wilson letter was written earlier. (The manuscript is not contemporaneously dated.) To Ottoline, BRACERS 18633 [18 Dec. 1916], BR wrote that “Philip helped me with it a great deal”. The Wilson letter (B&R C16.31; 2 in Papers 14) was not published until 23 December 1916. It is hard to understand why his letter to Woodrow Wilson should have occasioned such feelings.

• 6

  Richmond Park The park near London where BR grew up in Pembroke Lodge. Their talk took place on 24 October 1916.