1810: Right Reverend Lord John Mallard, Bishop of Ducks-on-Ponds
Private papers
I have often wondered whether the Almighty, being omniscient, shares with me the amusement of knowing how His creatures will misunderstand Him centuries hence. I, at least, can foresee my own resurrection in print. There will come a future age when some priggish antiquarian—perhaps a lady in spectacles smelling faintly of ink and moral superiority—will disinter these pages from the vault at Mallard and declare, with the calm cruelty of scholarship, “The Bishop, while eloquent, was clearly unsound.” She will footnote me to extinction, and I shall not be there to defend myself. But ah, the pleasure of imagining her labour!
It consoles me that I am one of those fortunate sinners whose faults are gilded by circumstance. I have land, position, and a temperamental immunity to poverty—advantages which, I must admit, train the eye admirably. Indeed, beauty reveals itself to wealth as naturally as fragrance to a rose. My gardener complains that I notice too much: the way his hedge lists slightly eastward, the blush of decay on a marble urn, the colour of the barley at Maundy harvest. But I have been well taught by circumstance. I was born into proportion. My love of it is not virtue; it is inheritance.
Still, I make no apology for being fastidious. Beauty, after all, is God’s least disputable commandment. The theologians endlessly debate mystery—predestination, redemption, and the precise number of angels that can fraternise upon a pin—but beauty needs no defence. It is its own theology, needing only an eye that has not been dulled by usefulness. As I remarked to the Archdeacon (who is both learned and upholstered), ugliness is not a sin but a sign of theological fatigue.
Take my drawing-room at the Palace. The curtains are a tincture of lapis, gathered by French hands before France became unfashionable to mention. Against them, the gilt of the candelabra glows like recanted sin. Some may call this luxury; I call it liturgy. For what is the Eucharist but the architecture of beauty in motion—the gold chalice, the folded linen, the tremulous choreography of belief? One cannot separate devotion from decoration any more than flavour from food.
Even the Protestant plainness I was bred to regard as moral feels to me like a nervous disorder of the English temperament. Simplicity becomes in us a kind of neurosis—a fear that the visible world might reveal too much of our inward desire. But I have ceased to be frightened by desire. I prefer to see it clearly dressed.
This, I suspect, will be taken down by posterity as proof of decadence. How dull their verdicts will be! I can all but see the future’s pious phrasing: He was more given to pleasure than to prayer—yet his syntax redeems him. They will not understand that faith and beauty are married by necessity; one becomes unbearable without the other. I never trust a man who worships an unattractive God.
If an angel were to appear to me today, I should first notice whether its wings were in proportion to its shoulders and what shade of white the feathers took in the afternoon light. Some might call that irreverence, but it is, in truth, a recognition of the divine: for beauty is merely God arranged to pleasure the senses.
My chapel, recently refurbished at what my steward calls “a ruinous expense,” has become a point of local irritation. Apparently, one must not employ Venetian glass in the sanctuary because it “casts distracting colours upon the vicar’s face.” I find the result rather improving. A vicar, properly illuminated, might yet remember heaven. The puritans of taste complain that I have “confused the sacred and the sensual.” I answer that I have reconciled them.
My life as a Bishop may appear to the jealous as an exercise in glorified comfort, yet I think it an experiment in cultivated honesty. Wealth, leisure, and the power to be disregarded are fine tutors. They liberate one from the false modesty of the mediocre. When a poor man admires beauty, he must plead excuse for vanity; when I do so, it is considered discernment. If the unfairness of this arrangement troubles the conscience, the conscience must learn better manners.
Earlier this evening I dined alone, accompanied by an unrepentant bottle of claret and a book of essays entitled On the Temperamental Influence of Colour in Sacred Space by Dr. Maurus Lyttleton, who was deposed for attempting to stain the walls of Trinity Chapel mauve. I admire him enormously. He observes that the soul requires ornament as the lungs require air—too little, and devotion collapses. The Synod called him heretic; I call him correct.
As the hour grows late and the snow thickens, I feel my life expanding outward, into time I shall not see. It delights me to imagine myself annotated. Let them find these pages, read them with curiosity and a whiff of scandal, and discover therein the true confession of an aesthete: that holiness, though frequently dull, need never be ugly. I have tried to prove it in sermon, house, and habit—even in the trimming of my waistcoat, which is dove-grey satin, polished like reason.
If there is any moral to be read after I have been disinterred by literary enthusiasts and their interminable societies, let it be this: A soul that cannot take pleasure in beauty cannot recognise God, only His shadow. I have trained my eye by advantage, yes—but also by gratitude. And all the better for it.
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