Part 7

Nevertheless, the boy who rushes through Oliver Optic’s stories, and Henty’s and Bolderwood’s, is not likely to be injured. They are not ideal books, from our point of view. He may even read Charles Kingsley’s boisterous, stupid stuff; but if he is a well-instructed boy, he will be in a state of hot indignation all through “Hypatia” and the other underdone-roast-beefy things of that bigot. Kingsley, with all his prejudice, though, is better for a boy than Rider Haggard. There is a nasty trail over Haggard’s stories.

There is some comfort in the fact that the average boy is too eagerly intent on his story to mind the moralizing. What does he care for Lord Lytton’s talk about the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in “The Last Days of Pompeii”? He wants to know how everything “turns out.” And in Kingsley’s “Hypatia”—which is so often in Catholic libraries—he pays very little attention to the historical lies, for the sake of the action. Nevertheless, he should be guarded against the historical lies. Personally—I hope this intrusion of the _ego_ will be forgiven—I had, when I was a boy and waded through all sorts of books, so strong a conviction that Catholics were always right and every one else wrong, that “Hypatia” and Bulwer’s “Harold” and the rest were mere incentives to zeal; I thought that if the Lady Abbess walled up Constance at the end of “Marmion,” that young person deserved her fate.

This state of mind, however, ought not to be generally cultivated; a discriminating taste for reading should. Do not let us cry out so loudly about bad books; let us seek out the good ones; and remember that it is not the reading boy that fills the criminal ranks, but the boy that lives in the streets and does not read.

There should be a few books on the family shelf—books which are meant to be daily companions—the Bible, the “Imitation of Christ,” something of Father Faber’s, “Fabiola” and “Dion and the Sibyls,” and some great novels.

People of to-day do not realize how much the greatest of all the romancers owes to the Catholic Dryden. Sir Walter Scott, in spite of frequent change in public taste, still holds his own. Cardinal Newman, in one of his letters, regrets that young people have ceased to be interested in so admirable a writer. But there is only partial reason for this regret. Sir Walter’s long introductions and some of his elaborate descriptions of natural scenery are no longer read with interest. Still, it is evident that people do not care to have his works changed in any way. Not long ago, Miss Braddon, the indefatigable novelist, “edited” Sir Walter Scott’s novels. She cut out all those passages which seemed dull to her. But the public refused to read the improved edition. It remained unsold.

It is safe to predict that neither Sir Walter Scott nor Miss Austen will ever go entirely out of fashion. Sir Walter’s muse is to Miss Austen’s as the Queen of Sheba to a very prim modern gentlewoman: one is attired in splendid apparel, wreathed with jewels, sparkling; the other is neutral-tinted, timid, shy. But of all novelists, Sir Walter Scott admired Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen. He said, with almost a sigh of regret, that he could do the big “bow-wow” business, but that they pictured real life.

Nevertheless, while Miss Austen is not forgotten—in fact, interest has increased in her delightful books of late years—Sir Walter Scott’s novels are found everywhere. Not to have read the most notable of the Waverley Novels is to give one’s acquaintances just reason for lamenting one’s illiberal education.

The name of Sir Walter Scott naturally suggests that of Dryden, from whom the “Wizard” borrowed some of the best things in “Ivanhoe”—and “Ivanhoe” is without doubt the most popular of Sir Walter Scott’s novels. That picturesque humbug Macaulay, who could sacrifice anything for a brilliant antithesis, has done much harm to the reputation of Dryden. He gives us the impression that Dryden was a mere timeserver, if a brilliant satirist and a third-rate poet. Some years will pass before the superficial criticism of Macaulay shall be taken at its full value. Dryden was honest—honest in his changes of opinion, and entirely consistent in his change of faith. No church but that of his ancestors could have satisfied the mind of a man to whom the mutilated doctrine and bald services of the Anglican sect were naturally obnoxious. Of the charge that Dryden changed his religious opinions for gain, Mr. John Amphlett Evans, a sympathetic critic, says that, if Dryden gained the approval of King James II., he lost that of the English people. Dryden understood this, for he wrote:

“If joys hereafter must be purchased here With loss of all that mortals hold so dear, Then welcome infamy and public shame, And last, a long farewell to worldly fame.”

If Scott, through ignorance or carelessness, misrepresented certain Catholic practices, he never consciously misrepresented Catholic ideas; and, as a recent writer in the _Dublin Review_ remarks, he showed that all that was best and heroic in the Middle Ages was the result of Catholic teaching. This was his attraction for Cardinal Newman. This made him so fascinating to another convert, James A. McMaster, who had an inherited Calvinistic horror of most other novels. Scott, robust and broad-minded as he was, could understand the mighty genius and the great heart of Dryden. He was the ablest defender of the poet who abjured the licentiousness of the Restoration—mirrored in his earlier dramas—to adopt a purer mode of thought. Although Dryden was really Scott’s master in art, Sir Walter did not fully understand how very great was Dryden’s poem, “Almanzor and Almahide.” If Tasso’s “Jerusalem Delivered,” or Ariosto’s “Orlando Furioso,” or Milton’s “Paradise Regained,” or Fénelon’s “Telemachus” is an epic, this splendid poem of Dryden’s is an epic, and greater than them all. It is from this poem, founded on episodes of the siege of Granada, that Sir Walter Scott borrows so liberally in “Ivanhoe.”

One cannot altogether pardon the greatest fault of all Sir Walter made, the punishment of Constance in “Marmion.” But his theory of artistic effect was something like Macaulay’s idea of rhetorical effect. If picturesqueness or dramatic effect interfered with historical truth, the latter suffered the necessary carving to make it fit. It must be remembered, too, that Sir Walter Scott was not in a position to profit by modern discoveries which have forced all honorable men to revise many pages of the falsified histories of their youth and to do justice to the spirit of the Church.

Sir Walter Scott is always chivalrous and pure-minded. How he would have detested Froude’s brutal characterization of Mary Stuart, or Swinburne’s vile travesty of her! If his friars are more jolly than respectable, it is because he drew his pictures from popular ballads and old stories never intended in Catholic times to be taken as serious or typical. His Templars are horrible villains, but he never seems to regard them as villanous because they are ecclesiastics; he does not intend to drag their priesthood into disgrace; they are lawless and romantic figures, loaded with horrible accusations by Philippe le Bel, and condemned by the Pope—ready-made romantic scoundrels fit for purposes of fiction. He does not look beyond this.

Scott shows much of the nobility of Dryden’s later work. He does not confuse good with evil; he is always tender of good sentiments; he hates vice and all meanness; in depicting so many fine characters who could only have bloomed in a Catholic atmosphere, he shows a sympathy for the “old Church” at once pathetic and admirable to a Catholic. There is no novel of his in which the influence of the Church is not alluded to in some way or other. And how delightful are his heroines when they are Catholic! How charmingly he has drawn Mary Stuart! And the man that does not love Di Vernon and Catherine Seton has no heart for Beatrice or Portia. And then there is the grand figure of Edward Glendenning in “The Abbot.”

Dryden and Scott both owed so much to the Church, were so naturally her children, that one feels no ordinary satisfaction in the conversion of the one, and some consolation in the fact that the last words of the other were those of the “Dies Irae.”

Brownson and Newman are two authors more talked about than read in this country. In England Newman’s most careful literary work is known; Brownson’s work has only begun to receive attention. Newman has gained much by being talked and written about by men who love the form of things as much as the matter, and who, if Newman had taught Buddhism or Schopenhauerism, would admire him just as much. As there is a large class of these men, and as they help to form public opinion, it has come to pass that he who would deny Newman’s mastery of style would be smiled at in any assembly of men of letters. Brownson has not had such an advantage. He gave his attention thoroughly to the matter in hand; style was with him a secondary consideration. Besides, he wrote from the American point of view, and sometimes—at least it would seem so—under pressure from the printer. Newman was never hurried; Horace was not more leisurely, Cicero more exact. It would be absurd to compare Newman and Brownson. I simply put their names together to show that they should be read, even if other writers must be neglected, by Catholic Americans. I take the liberty of recommending three books as valuable additions to the home shelf:—Brownson’s “Views,” and the “Characteristics” of Wiseman and Newman.

Every young American who wants to understand the political position of his country among the nations should read three books—Brownson’s “American Republic,” De Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” and Bryce’s “American Commonwealth.” But of these three writers the greatest—incomparably the greatest—is Brownson: he defines principles; he clarifies them until they are luminous; he shows the application of them to a new condition of things. There have been Catholics—why disguise the fact, since they are nearly all dead or imbecile?—who fancied that our form of government was merely tolerated by the Church. Brownson gave a death-blow to those ancient dragons of unbelief. Certain parts of this great work ought to be a text-book in every school in the country. And it will now be easier to build a monument to this profound thinker, as there is a well-considered attempt to popularize such portions of his books as must catch the general attention, for there are many pages in Brownson’s works which are hidden only because they suffered in their original method of publication.

Open a volume of his works at random, and you will find something to suggest or stimulate thought, to define a term or to fortify a principle. Read, for instance, those pages of his on the Catholic American literature of his time and you will have a standard of judgment for all time. And who to-day can say what he says as well as he said it? As to those parts of his philosophy about which the doctors disagree, let us leave that to the doctors. It does not concern the general public, and indeed it might be left out of consideration with advantage.

Brownson’s works are mines of thought. In them lie the germs of mighty sermons, of great books to come. Already he is a classic in American literature, and there is every reason why he should be a classic, since he was first in an untilled ground; and yet it is a sad thing to find that of all the magnificent material Brownson has left, the “Spirit Rapper,” that comparatively least worthy product of his pen, seems to be the best known to the general reader.

If one of us would confine himself to the reading of four authors in English—Shakspere, Newman, Webster, and Brownson—he could not fail to be well educated. The “Idea of a University” of Newman is a pregnant book. It goes to the root of the subtlest matters; its clearness enters our minds and makes the shadows flee. It cannot be made our own at one reading. There are passages which should be read over and over again—notably that on literature and the definition of a classic. If any man could make us grasp the intangible, Newman could. How sentimental and thin Emerson appears after him! Professor Cook, of Yale, has done the world a good turn by giving us the chapter on “Poetry and the Poetics of Aristotle” in a little pamphlet; and John Lilly’s “Characteristics” is a very valuable book. Any reader or active man who dips into the chapter on the “Poetics” will long for more; and, if he does, the “Characteristics” will not slake his thirst; he will desire the volumes themselves and drink in new refreshments with every page.

I have known a young admirer of “Lead, Kindly Light”—which, by the way, has only three stanzas of its own—to be repelled by the learned title of “Apologia Pro Vita Sua,” but, in search of the circumstances that helped to produce it, to turn to certain pages in this presumably uninteresting work. The charm began to work; Newman was no longer a pedant to be avoided, but a friend to be ever near.

“Callista” amounts to very little as a novel; it is valuable because Newman studied its color from authentic sources. But “The Dream of Gerontius” is only beginning in our country to receive the attention due to it. It was a text-book in classes at Oxford long before people here touched it at all, except in rare instances. It is a unique poem. There is nothing like it in all literature. It is the record of the experience of a soul during the instant it is liberated from the body. It touches the sublime; it is colorless—if a pure white light can be said to be colorless. It is the work of a great logician impelled to utter his thoughts through the most fitting medium, and this medium he finds to be verse. In Dante the symbols of earthly things represent to us the mystic life of the other world. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, chief of the Pre-Raphaelites, imitated the outer shell of the great Dante—the sensuous shell—but he got no further. Newman soars above, beyond earth; we are made to realize with awful force that the soul at death is at once divorced from the body. Dante does not make us feel this. The people that Virgil and he meet are not spirits, but men and women with bodies and souls in torment. No painter on earth could put “The Dream of Gerontius” into line and color. Flaxman, so exquisite in his interpretation of Dante, would seem vulgar, and Doré brutal. None of us should lack a knowledge of this truly wonderful poem, which must be studied, not read. Philosophy and theology have found no flaws in it; humanity may shiver in the whiteness of its light, and yet be consoled by the fact that the comfort it offers is not merely imaginative, or sentimental, or beautiful, but real.

It is impossible to suppress the love of the beautiful in human nature. The early New Englanders, to whom beauty was an offence and art and literature condemned things—who worshipped a God of their own invention, clothed in sulphurous clouds and holding victims over eternal fire, ready, with the ghastly pleasure described by their divines, to drop these victims into the flame—were not Christians. Christians have never accepted the Grecian _dictum_ that earthly beauty is the good and that to be æsthetic is to be moral; but Christianity has always encouraged the love of beauty and led the way to its use in the worship of God.

Among Americans, Longfellow had a most devout love of the beautiful. And it was this love of beauty that drew him near to the Church. That eloquent writer Ruskin has little sympathy with men who are drawn towards the Church by the beauty she enshrines, and he constantly protests against the enticements of a Spouse the hem of whose garment he kisses. Still, judging from his ill-natured diatribe against Pugin, in the “Stones of Venice,” he had no understanding of the sentiment that caused Longfellow, when in search of inspiration, to turn to the Church.

Longfellow’s love of the melodious, of the beautiful, of the symmetrical, led him into defects. He could not endure a discord, and his motto was “_Non clamor, sed amor_,” which, as coming from him, may be paraphrased in one word, “serenity.” His superabundant similes show how he longed to carry one thing into another thing of even greater beauty, and how this longing sometimes leads him to faults of taste.

But this lover of beauty—led by it to the very beauty of Ruskin’s Circe and his forefathers’ “Scarlet Woman”—came of a race that hated beauty. And yet he stretched out through the rocky soil of Puritan traditions and training until we find him translating the sermon of St. Francis of Assisi to the birds into English verse, and working lovingly at the most Christian of all poems, the “Divine Comedy.” It was he—this descendant of the Puritans—who described, as no other poet ever described, the innocence of the young girl coming from confession. But it was his love of beauty and his love of purity that made him do this. In Longfellow’s eyes only the pure was beautiful. A canker in the rose made the rose hateful to him. He was unlike his classmate and friend Hawthorne: the stain on the lily did not make it more interesting. His love of purity was, however, like his hatred of noise, a sentiment rather than a conviction.

The love for the beautiful leads to Rome. Ruskin fights against it, Longfellow yields to it, and even Whittier—whose lack of culture and whose traditions held him doubly back—is drawn to the beauty of the saints.

As culture in America broadens and deepens, respect for the things that Protestantism cast out increases. James Russell Lowell’s paper on Dante, in “Among My Books,” is an example of this. The comprehension he shows of the divine poet is amazing in a son of the Puritans. But the human mind and the human heart _will_ struggle towards the light.

Longfellow was too great an artist to try to lop off such Catholic traditions as might displease his readers. In this he was greater than Sir Walter Scott, and a hundred times greater than Spenser. Scott’s mind, bending as a healthy tree bends to the light, stretched towards the old Church. She fascinated his imagination, she drew his thoughts, and her beauty won his heart; but he was afraid of the English people. And yet, subservient as Scott was, Cardinal Newman avows that Sir Walter’s novels drew him towards the Church; and there is a letter written by the great cardinal in which he laments that the youth of the nineteenth century no longer read the novels of the “Wizard of the North.” Scott cannot get rid of the charm the Church throws about him. He was not classical, he was romantic. He soon tired of mere form, as any healthy mind will. The reticent and limited beauty of the Greek temple made him yawn; but he was never weary of the Gothic church, with its surprises, its splendor, its glow, its statues, its gargoyles—all its reproductions of the life of the world in its relations to God.

Similarly, Longfellow was not a classicist. The coldness of Greek beauty did not appeal to him; he could understand and love the pictures of Giotto—the artist of St. Francis—better than the “Dying Gladiator.” When Christianity had given life to the perfect form of Greek art, then Longfellow understood and loved it. And he trusted the American people sufficiently not to attempt to placate them by concealing or distorting the source of his inspiration. No casual reader of “Evangeline” can mistake the cause of the primitive virtues of the Acadians. A lesser artist would have introduced the typical Jesuit of the romancers, or hinted that a King James’s Bible read by Gabriel and Evangeline, under the direction of a self-sacrificing colporteur, was at the root of all the patience, purity, and constancy in the poem. But Longfellow knew better than this, and the American people took “Evangeline” to their heart without question, except from some carper, like Poe, who envied the literary distinction of the poet. We must remember, too, that the American people of 1847 were not the American people of to-day; they were narrower, more provincial, less infused with new blood, and more prejudiced against the traditions of the Church to which Longfellow appealed when he wrote his greatest poem.

It is as impossible to eliminate the cross from the discovery of America as to love art and literature without acknowledging the power that preserved both.

IX. Of Shakspere.

The time has come when the Catholics of this country—who possess unmutilated the seamless garment of Christ—should begin to understand the real value of the inheritance of art and literature and music which is especially theirs.

The Reformation made a gulf between art and religion; it declared that the beautiful had no place in the service of God, and that a student of æsthetics was a student of the devil’s lore. Of late a reaction has taken place.

Fifty years ago the picture of a Madonna by Raphael or Filippo Lippi or Botticelli in a popular magazine would have occasioned a howl of condemnation from the densely ignorant average Protestant of that time. But the taste for art has grown immensely in the last twenty years, and now—I am ashamed to say it—non-Catholics have, in America, learned to know and love the great masterpieces of our inheritance more than we ourselves. It is we, English-speaking Catholics, who have suffered unexpressibly from the deadening influence of the Reformation on æsthetics. As a taste for art and literature grows, “orthodox” protest against the Church must wane, for the essence of “orthodox” protest is misunderstanding of the Church which made possible Dante and Cervantes, Chaucer and Wolfram von Eschenbach, Fra Angelico and Murillo, Shakspere and Dryden. And no cultivated man, loving them, can hate the Church that, while guarding morality, likewise protected æsthetics as a stretching out towards the immortal. Art and literature and music are efforts of the spirit to approach God. And, as such, Christianity cherishes them. Art and history are one; art and literature are history; and nothing is grander in the panorama of events than the spectacle of the fine arts, in Christian times, emptying their precious box of ointment on the head of Our Lord to atone for the sins of the past.

The flower of all art is Christian art; it took the perfect form of the Greeks and clothed it with luminous flesh and blood.

Miss Eliza Allen Starr has shown us some of the treasures of our inheritance of art. It is easy to find them; good photographs of the masters’ works—of the Sistine Madonna of Raphael, of the Immaculate Conception of Murillo, of the Virgin of the Kiss by Hébert, and of the beautiful pictures of Bouguereau are cheap everywhere. Why, then, with all these lovely reflections of Catholic genius near us, should we fill our houses with bad, cheap prints?

Similarly, why should we be content with flimsy modern books? The best of all literature is ours—even Shakspere is ours.

If there is one fault to be found in Cardinal Newman’s lecture on “Literature” in that great book, “The Idea of a University,” it is that the most subtle master of English style took his view of Continental literature from Hallam. When he speaks of English literature, he speaks as a master of his subject; on the literature of the Greeks and Romans, there is no uncertainty in his utterances; but he takes his impressions of the literature of France and Spain from a non-Catholic critic, whose opinions are tinctured with prejudice. One cannot help regretting that the cardinal did not apply the same test to Montaigne that he applied to Shakspere.