no more than a painter’s stunt, painting for a little all red or all blue, to make a “period” with. Rymer like scores of thousands of others, had had his “pink period”. It shocked all the aunts of the time terribly, and scandalized his clergyman-father. It was revolt—it symbolized Youth —his most glamorous moments had been pink.
Youth past, these redmen of the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges forgot all about it—real life began, dressing-up was at an end, the minarets of Moscow faded on the horizon. And in any case Soviet Russia had proved a somewhat tough and embarrassing comrade to “travel” with. On the other hand, because Rymer had been buried in the depths of the country ever since Oxford he lived in the past a lot, and continued to potter around with Karl Marx, like a mascot of his youth rather, and he still got a kick out of it. That was part of the story of Rymer and the Kremlin. The rest of it was traceable to professional religion: the frivolous sizar and the fakir must be mixed.
When I asked him what he was going to say next week to the crowd of clergymen he said he would point out that in the contemporary world communism, or marxism, was, because of the huge development of Soviet Russia, too great a factor in world-affairs for the Church to ignore, as it had been disposed to do up to now. “Let us put aside our prejudices,” he would invite them, “let us examine this controversial theory of the state, and let us ask ourselves if there is anything in it which we as Christians should endorse.” He and Herbert Stoner the “red” Storby parson, had succeeded in “winning over” several of their colleagues. He named others who would have nothing to do with it—who asserted that the Church should set its face against “this atheistic creed” and all its works. These were he told me the “place-seekers”, clergymen on the climb, who dreamed of deaneries and bishoprics. The only imaginable consideration which would impel clergymen to feel other than sympathetic towards communism was self-interest. Such was his extraordinary view. As this was absurd I thought I would help him to dispel from his mind so foolish an error.
“Ordinary people,” I explained to him, “find it difficult to reconcile with their conscience anything short of censure of the methods employed by the Russian leaders. I do for instance. I see what is good in the theory, but I cannot swallow the practice.”
To this he made no reply. He could have argued, for instance (for even the worst cause is polemically defensible), that barbarity had marked the regimes which the revolutionary governments had supplanted, in Russia and elsewhere. He even could have instanced the cruelties still inflicted upon people daily by the operation of the capitalist economy, or any existing economy, or spoken of “poverty in the midst of plenty”: to which of course there are answers, too, for a good debater. There are plenty of answers to the criticism of any policy. He is not interested in being an advocate however. He just enjoys pushing under people’s noses something they detest. He does not want to find himself in the role of selling it to them, of being too serious about it. And, as I have said, he is genuinely no Red.
Where politics are concerned Rymer is not, as I have also said, merely what-is-left of a ’twenties undergraduate fellow-traveller. What does conspicuously remain, it must be confessed, is the juvenile impulse to épater le bourgeois. But behind the exhibitionism is an authentic issue, that of the priest inheriting a rotted religion from his laodicean fox-hunting ancestors which he would naturally desire to reinvigorate. That he should borrow a little reality from politics and pump it into the decayed tissues of the Church is an obvious proceeding, more especially as his instinct must inform him that what he would be borrowing had, in the first instance, been stolen from his
Youth past, these redmen of the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges forgot all about it—real life began, dressing-up was at an end, the minarets of Moscow faded on the horizon. And in any case Soviet Russia had proved a somewhat tough and embarrassing comrade to “travel” with. On the other hand, because Rymer had been buried in the depths of the country ever since Oxford he lived in the past a lot, and continued to potter around with Karl Marx, like a mascot of his youth rather, and he still got a kick out of it. That was part of the story of Rymer and the Kremlin. The rest of it was traceable to professional religion: the frivolous sizar and the fakir must be mixed.
When I asked him what he was going to say next week to the crowd of clergymen he said he would point out that in the contemporary world communism, or marxism, was, because of the huge development of Soviet Russia, too great a factor in world-affairs for the Church to ignore, as it had been disposed to do up to now. “Let us put aside our prejudices,” he would invite them, “let us examine this controversial theory of the state, and let us ask ourselves if there is anything in it which we as Christians should endorse.” He and Herbert Stoner the “red” Storby parson, had succeeded in “winning over” several of their colleagues. He named others who would have nothing to do with it—who asserted that the Church should set its face against “this atheistic creed” and all its works. These were he told me the “place-seekers”, clergymen on the climb, who dreamed of deaneries and bishoprics. The only imaginable consideration which would impel clergymen to feel other than sympathetic towards communism was self-interest. Such was his extraordinary view. As this was absurd I thought I would help him to dispel from his mind so foolish an error.
“Ordinary people,” I explained to him, “find it difficult to reconcile with their conscience anything short of censure of the methods employed by the Russian leaders. I do for instance. I see what is good in the theory, but I cannot swallow the practice.”
To this he made no reply. He could have argued, for instance (for even the worst cause is polemically defensible), that barbarity had marked the regimes which the revolutionary governments had supplanted, in Russia and elsewhere. He even could have instanced the cruelties still inflicted upon people daily by the operation of the capitalist economy, or any existing economy, or spoken of “poverty in the midst of plenty”: to which of course there are answers, too, for a good debater. There are plenty of answers to the criticism of any policy. He is not interested in being an advocate however. He just enjoys pushing under people’s noses something they detest. He does not want to find himself in the role of selling it to them, of being too serious about it. And, as I have said, he is genuinely no Red.
Where politics are concerned Rymer is not, as I have also said, merely what-is-left of a ’twenties undergraduate fellow-traveller. What does conspicuously remain, it must be confessed, is the juvenile impulse to épater le bourgeois. But behind the exhibitionism is an authentic issue, that of the priest inheriting a rotted religion from his laodicean fox-hunting ancestors which he would naturally desire to reinvigorate. That he should borrow a little reality from politics and pump it into the decayed tissues of the Church is an obvious proceeding, more especially as his instinct must inform him that what he would be borrowing had, in the first instance, been stolen from his
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