Fed with wynde
“HE COMPLAYNETH moreouer very much, the preaching of Gods word to be omitted: and in stede therof, the vayne fables of Monkes and Friers to be preached & beleued of the people: and so the flocke of Christ to be fed not with the foode of the Gospell, but with wynde. . .”
I didn’t think I could let the Dante anniversary pass without turning to a real authority: in conversation with a clergy friend, I am pointed in the ever helpful direction of John Foxe and his Book of Martyrs, always reliable for a punchy quote.
“He refuteth the Donation of Costantine to be a forged and a fayned thyng, as which neither did stand with any law or right. For the which, he was taken of many for an hereticke. . . . In his canticle of purgatory, he declareth the Pope to be the whore of Babylon. . .”
Well, that saves me some trouble if I want to impress my parish priest with a little learning; for, in the days when public libraries had card catalogues and smelt of floor polish, I did find the Dorothy L. Sayers translation of the Divine Comedy so hard going that it was soon back on the shelves. (I wasn’t, at that age, ready for Wimsey, either, and DLS’s Dantesque sense of justice.)
Would I have got on any better with the first full-length English poetic translation? It is another feather in our Anglican cap: the work of the cleric H. F. Cary (1772-1844). Published in 1814, it became a bestseller, and was the version that the Romantic poets knew. Coleridge declared it “a great national work”.
Cary’s isn’t the name that first springs to mind at the mention of Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, but his mortal remains are there with the immortals, and his soul, I suppose, is now dwelling in the intermediate state that the Victorian high churchmen called paradise.
Since Dante Alighieri gets a cameo in Jewel’s Apology, too, perhaps one of the forthcoming new members of the General Synod will lighten the mood with a poetic agendum to add him as yet another commem. to Common Worship.
More literary notes
WHILE in literary vein, I have been bursting to tell someone that the Fr Cyril Barclay who returned home from the Oxford Anglo-Catholic Priests’ Conference of 1921 only to find that the diocese of Melbourne had sold his church (100 Years Ago, 10 September) — a Save the Parish nightmare of the first order — was the son of none other than the romantic novelist Florence Barclay.
Her centenary (she died on 10 March 1921) has got lost somewhere in the shadow of the Dante fireworks, I fear, along with scholarly reappraisal of such titles as Through the Postern Gate and The Golden Censer.
And I doubt that Holy Trinity, Hertford Heath, has had junketings on anything like the scale of those recorded in the Portugal Street Diary by my late colleague Sidesman in 1981 (9 October): there were ploughman’s lunches, morris men, and music.
Florence had been the wife of a long-serving, well-loved Rector, and had presented a copy of her 1909 bestseller The Rosary — it eventually sold in millions — to every man in the parish who went off to the Front.
A surviving daughter revealed a couple of weeks later to Sidesman that the profits from the novels were generally devoted to the needy.
I was introduced to The Rosary by Arthur Marshall many years ago, in one of his New Statesman pieces; but my copy of the book seems to have strayed. It was a story of a plain woman — the Hon. Jane Champion — getting her man in the tradition of Jane Eyre; and her spiritual rendition of the song “The Rosary” — “The hours I spend with thee, dear heart, Are as a string of pearls to me” — plays a key part. It would be well suited to a contralto of the Clara Butt variety.
But the romance does not end there. Fr Barclay of the spiky St John’s, La Trobe Street, “an expressed believer in the celibacy of the clergy”, seems, if contemporary press accounts now put online are true, to have gone on to astonish everyone by acquiring a pretty fiancée.
It was the gossip writers’ dream: she was, the Townsville Daily Bulletin reported, a tea waitress at the Criterion Café, who had been chosen to play the Madonna in a parish Passion play. And when, in 1923, a child was born to the now husband and wife on the Isle of Wight, the Perth Sunday Times felt the need to remind its readers: “It may be remembered that he took a friendly interest in a young couple who were engaged to be married. Eventually the couple parted and the girl followed Mr. Barclay to England, where they were married.”
I think I know innuendo when I see it.
Boxer rebellion
EVERY boxing parson (Faith, 27 August; Letters, 10 September) seems to beget another. For the Ven. Christopher Laurence, in Lincoln, the correspondence brings to mind “a happy memory of the late Canon Willy Leeke, a boxing blue from Cambridge, who when I arrived in this diocese was still Vicar of Boultham, having been instituted there by the saintly Bishop King in 1911.
“Once, back then, he was leaving his church, carrying the collection, when he was greeted by two lads who told him to give them the money or they would take it from him.
“‘You may try,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think you will.’
“At their first attempt. he knocked them both out, and, leaving one lying by the road, he carried the other to the police station. In his latter years, I admired him for his ability at meetiings to fall fast asleep whilst remaining bolt upright in his chair.”
Calendar of crime
MUCH ado is made about incorrect clerical vesture, and altar candles kept lit at all times, in TV dramas. But some things are easier to check, surely; or was it, in Endeavour the other night, a clue? The head of an Oxford college speaks of a memorial service to be held on “the Second Sunday after Septuagesima”. Put the cuffs on him now!