In Search of Catholic England

Well, I've been reading H. V. Morton again and have a strong desire to go and do likewise. It really is a sadness that his work is nearly forgotten now, after so many decades of enormous popularity. His writing always strikes me as originating in a great spiritual generosity. He writes about the people he meets, even the less pleasant ones, in a way that shows he likes and appreciates them. He pokes quite a bit of fun at the American tourists he encounters, but there is no trace of the sneering modern anti-Americanism that we hear so much of in European and British writing now. He quite clearly loves to meet and talk to people and has the old fashioned un-neurotic confidence to allow them to be odd and different. Indeed, finding out what makes people different, and yet still English (or Cornish, Northumbrian, Welsh, Saxon or whathaveyou) is the point of the whole exercise. He is also, if not a Catholic, clearly a believing man.

Anyway, here at last is a writer completely worth emulating. Not high faluting; not 'scholarly' to the point of obscurity; cares not a whit for anything but the ordinary rules of civility and grammar. People have accused him of purpleness but to that I say 'tchah!' Piffle. His prose simply glows and he does not bow to the modern minimalist conventions. He is not a Victorian scholar writing dull incomprehensible treatises on linguistic origins, nor is does he aim to write like a political journalist. He's a man in love; of course he would write glowing poetry. And often subtly funny, in a lovely unstrained way.

Wouldn't it be lovely to write something like this? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to drop, just for once, the hardened cynical glare we usually turn on everything? Lovely, just for a change, to write only about the glories of pointed arches, fan vaulting, pubs, gardens and sea ports and turn a kinder eye on the people inhabiting them?

I think I would like to give it a go. I'm collecting a list of things to go see in England that constitute Catholic England. I'm in Search of Catholic England, it's ancient ruins and whatever survivals I can find. Tentatively scheduled a trip for early September, though have not yet actually bought the ticket, and am taking submissions for itinerary items.