THE SAINT OF LITTLE GLDDING
The Ferrar Papers. Edited by B. Blackstone. (Cambridge University Press. 2 I S.) NICHOLAS FERRAR of Little Gidding is accounted one of the saints of the Anglican Church ; yet he was a saintly man rather than a saint in action. His virtue spent itself in a backwater, among a household of forty people, and his work did not long outlast his death. Had he lived to hear Parlia- mentary troops thudding down the Huntingdonshire lanes, had he seen that day in 1646 when they tore down the blue velvet hangings in Little Gidding Church and roasted their dinners over the glowing embers of what had been his organ, then we might have known whether he was indeed made of the heroic stuff of the saints. But he died in 1637.
Through this selection of documents, which Doctor Blackstone has edited with faultless scholarship and an understanding which makes us regret that he has confined his notes and introduction to so small a compass, Nicholas Ferrar and the community of Little Gidding are presented anew to the world. First comes the Life by his brother John, whose somewhat staccato writing shows the saint's progress from the delusions of London and the Court to the peace of Little Gidding. Personal deductions must be left to the reader ; John was a hagiographer and little more. Next follows Ferrar's lengthy dialogue, The Winding Sheet, which throws more light on his character than the whole of the biography ; here is revealed a cultured and sensitive mind, concentrating all its power on the realisation of physical mortality with all that it implies. It is Ferrar's personal variation on the great theme of the seventeenth century. On
the other hand his Short Moral Histories, intended for the scholars of his Little Academy, exemplify rather that sub- missive and unquestioning attitude which is perhaps the weakest point in Ferrar's saintly armour. In that. age of fanatics and reformers, he sought and achieved "perfect quiescence of spirit." It was unique, but did it contribute very much to the progress of his time ?
By far the most interesting section of the book is the group of private letters with which it concludes. Here the Skeleton of Little Gidding comes rattling out of its cupboard in the person of Bathsheba, wife of John Fertar. The mother, sister and nieces of the saint were well content to spend their lives in prayer and good works, in tending the- sick, teaching pocir children the Psalms, embroidering hangings for- their church and compiling concordances of the Gospels. -Not so Bathsheba. She controlled her irritation for a space, --and would then burst forth with loud reproaches and fling out of her husband's room in a fit of the sulks. Called in to reason with' -her, Nicholas Ferrar displayed a certain want -of tact ;•• he was ill-advised to inforfn her; as she indignantly-complained-to her brother, that "not the Cote of my Backe is not myne owne but my. husbands."_. There was a touch of the autocrat even in the-- faultleis -Nicholas Ferrar ; however humbly he tried to wear the crown which the admiration of his family thrust upon him, it was a crown nevertheless. - He had Material' responsibilities as .well as spiritual. He went to London to shop and, the man here -lending support to the saint,- he . bought his womenfolk several yards of a material different from the one they had ordered. "Because it is not in fashion," he explains, "the mercer partes with it at halfe the Price yett with you I suppose it will bee in that regard nothing at all the worse." Even at Little Gidding were women so false to their nature ?
If here and there the letters throw a homely or even, as with Bathsheba, a comic light on the household at Little Gidding, yet the reputation of Nicholas can but be enhanced by the general impression. Against a European background of disastrous conflict and in the rising shadow of the storm
which was soon to burst over England, his house was a r, whence men and women could raise their eyes, unfaltenr God. The summary on the wrapper suggests that we inay find in Ferrar's life "something intrinsic which comes home today, three hundred years after his death." It does indeed
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