The Letters of Baron von Hugel

Extract

The writings that Baron von Hugel gave himself to the public were, no doubt, more important, but they were surely in many ways less interesting, than the volume which has been made up by others from his private letters. The short memoir of sixty pages prefixed to them by the late Mr. Bernard Holland is interesting enough, but it is a commonplace that a man is best known from his letters, and certainly the Baron’s letters here given reveal the man, and the revelation is of absorbing interest.

It is interesting, first of all, for the view it gives of his limitations, both the limitations he outgrew and the limitations that limited him to the end. The letters begin in December, 1896, when he was forty-four years old, and the last one is dated December 29th, 1924-he died at the end of January, 1925. Most of the letters of the first half of this period are addressed to his Modernist friends, and are concerned, more or less, with the Modernist movement. And how sadly out of proportion he saw both the men and the movement! One gets the impression that for him the group to which he belonged were the only hope for the future of Catholicism. What he says in 1899 of Tyrrell-and to Tyrrell-in England he would have said of a few others on the Continent.

‘ I have, thank God,’ he wrote, ‘ a fair number of English Catholic scholar friends, and amongst non-Catholics I have, also on this side of the Channel, several good and much-cared-for friends : but there is, amongst the Catholic Englishmen I know, somehow no other one whom I feel and see to be one of those self-spending children of the dawn and of Christ’s ampler day ’ (p. 76).