I read the other day in the _Dublin Review_:—“We Catholic are apt to be
cowed and scared by the lordly oppression of public opinion, and not to
bear ourselves as men in the face of the anti-Catholic society of
England. It is good to have an habitual consciousness that the public
opinion of Catholic Europe looks upon Protestant England with a mixture
of impatience and compassion, which more than balances the arrogance of
the English people towards the Catholic Church in these countries.”
The Holy Catholic Church, Apostolic and Roman, can take very good care
of herself, and I am not going to defend her against the scorn of Exeter
Hall. Catholicism is not a great visible force in this country, and the
mass of mankind will always treat lightly even things the most
venerable, if they do not present themselves as visible forces before
its eyes. In Catholic countries, as the _Dublin Review_ itself says with
triumph, they make very little account of the greatness of Exeter Hall.
The majority has eyes only for the things of the majority, and in
England the immense majority is Protestant. And yet, in spite of all the
shocks which the feeling of a good Catholic, like the writer in the
_Dublin Review_, has in this Protestant country inevitably to undergo,
in spite of the contemptuous insensibility to the grandeur of Rome which
he finds so general and so hard to bear, how much has he to console him,
how many acts of homage to the greatness of his religion may he see if
he has his eyes open! I will tell him of one of them. Let him go in
London to that delightful spot, that Happy Island in Bloomsbury, the
reading-room of the British Museum. Let him visit its sacred quarter,
the region where its theological books are placed. I am almost afraid to
say what he will find there, for fear Mr. Spurgeon, like a second Caliph
Omar, should give the library to the flames. He will find an immense
Catholic work, the collection of the Abbé Migne, lording it over that
whole region, reducing to insignificance the feeble Protestant forces
which hang upon its skirts. Protestantism is duly represented, indeed:
the librarian knows his business too well to suffer it to be otherwise;
all the varieties of Protestantism are there; there is the Library of
Anglo-Catholic Theology, learned, decorous, exemplary, but a little
uninteresting; there are the works of Calvin, rigid, militant, menacing;
there are the works of Dr. Chalmers, the Scotch thistle valiantly doing
duty as the rose of Sharon, but keeping something very Scotch about it
all the time; there are the works of Dr. Channing, the last word of
religious philosophy in a land where every one has some culture, and
where superiorities are discountenanced,—the flower of moral and
intelligent mediocrity. But how are all these divided against one
another, and how, though they were all united, are they dwarfed by the
Catholic Leviathan, their neighbor! Majestic in its blue and gold unity,
this fills shelf after shelf and compartment after compartment, its
right mounting up into heaven among the white folios of the _Acta
Sanctorum_, its left plunging down into hell among the yellow octavos of
the _Law Digest_. Everything is there, in that immense _Patrologiæ
Cursus Completus_, in that _Encyclopédie Théologique_, that _Nouvelle
Encyclopédie Théologique_, that _Troisième Encyclopédie Théologique_;
religion, philosophy, history, biography, arts, sciences, bibliography,
gossip. The work embraces the whole range of human interests; like one
of the great Middle-Age Cathedrals, it is in itself a study for a life.
Like the net in Scripture, it drags everything to land, bad and good,
lay and ecclesiastical, sacred and profane, so that it be but matter of
human concern. Wide-embracing as the power whose product it is! a power,
for history at any rate, eminently _the Church_; not, perhaps, the
Church of the future, but indisputably the Church of the past and, in
the past, the Church of the multitude.
This is why the man of imagination—nay, and the philosopher too, in
spite of her propensity to burn him—will always have a weakness for the
Catholic Church; because of the rich treasures of human life which have
been stored within her pale. The mention of other religious bodies, or
of their leaders, at once calls up in our mind the thought of men of a
definite type as their adherents; the mention of Catholicism suggests no
such special following. Anglicanism suggests the English episcopate;
Calvin’s name suggests Dr. Candlish; Chalmers’s, the Duke of Argyll;
Channing’s, Boston society; but Catholicism suggests,—what shall I
say?—all the pell-mell of the men and women of Shakspeare’s plays. This
abundance the Abbé Migne’s collection faithfully reflects. People talk
of this or that work which they would choose, if they were to pass their
life with only one; for my part I think I would choose the Abbé Migne’s
collection. _Quicquid agunt homines_,—everything, as I have said, is
there. Do not seek in it splendor of form, perfection of editing; its
paper is common, its type ugly, its editing indifferent, its printing
careless. The greatest and most baffling crowd of misprints I ever met
in my life occurs in a very important page of the introduction to the
_Dictionnaire des Apocryphes_. But this is just what you have in the
world,—quantity rather than quality. Do not seek in it impartiality, the
critical spirit; in reading it you must do the criticism for yourself;
it loves criticism as little as the world loves it. Like the world, it
chooses to have things all its own way, to abuse its adversary, to back
its own notion through thick and thin, to put forward all the _pros_ for
its own notion, to suppress all the _contras_; it does just all that the
world does, and all that the critical shrinks from. Open the
_Dictionnaire des Erreurs Sociales_: “The religious persecutions of
Henry the Eighth’s and Edward the Sixth’s time abated a little in the
reign of Mary, to break out again with new fury in the reign of
Elizabeth.” There is a summary of the history of religious persecution
under the Tudors! But how unreasonable to reproach the Abbé Migne’s work
with wanting a criticism, which, by the very nature of things, it cannot
have, and not rather to be grateful to it for its abundance, its
variety, its infinite suggestiveness, its happy adoption, in many a
delicate circumstance, of the urbane tone and temper of the man of the
world, instead of the acrid tone and temper of the fanatic!
Still, in spite of their fascinations, the contents of this collection
sometimes rouse the critical spirit within one. It happened that lately,
after I had been thinking much of Marcus Aurelius and his times, I took
down the _Dictionnaire des Origines du Christianisme_, to see what it
had to say about paganism and pagans. I found much what I expected. I
read the article, _Révélation Évangélique, sa Nécessité_. There I found
what a sink of iniquity was the whole pagan world; how one Roman fed his
oysters on his slaves, how another put a slave to death that a curious
friend might see what dying was like; how Galen’s mother tore and bit
her waiting-women when she was in a passion with them. I found this
account of the religion of paganism: “Paganism invented a mob of
divinities with the most hateful character, and attributed to them the
most monstrous and abominable crimes. It personified in them
drunkenness, incest, kidnapping, adultery, sensuality, knavery, cruelty,
and rage.” And I found that from this religion there followed such
practice as was to be expected: “What must naturally have been the state
of morals under the influence of such a religion, which penetrated with
its own spirit the public life, the family life, and the individual life
of antiquity?”
The colors in this picture are laid on very thick, and I for my part
cannot believe that any human societies, with a religion and practice
such as those just described, could ever have endured as the societies
of Greece and Rome endured, still less have done what the societies of
Greece and Rome did. We are not brought far by descriptions of the vices
of great cities, or even of individuals driven mad by unbounded means of
self-indulgence. Feudal and aristocratic life in Christendom has
produced horrors of selfishness and cruelty not surpassed by the grandee
of pagan Rome; and then, again, in antiquity there is Marcus Aurelius’s
mother to set against Galen’s. Eminent examples of vice and virtue in
individuals prove little as to the state of societies. What, under the
first emperors, was the condition of the Roman poor upon the Aventine
compared with that of our poor in Spitalfields and Bethnal Green? What,
in comfort, morals, and happiness, were the rural population of the
Sabine country under Augustus’s rule, compared with the rural population
of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire under the rule of Queen Victoria?
But these great questions are not now for me. Without trying to answer
them, I ask myself, when I read such declamation as the foregoing, if I
can find anything that will give me a near, distinct sense of the real
difference in spirit and sentiment between paganism and Christianity,
and of the natural effect of this difference upon people in general. I
take a representative religious poem of paganism,—of the paganism which
all the world has in its mind when it speaks of paganism. To be a
representative poem, it must be one for popular use, one that the
multitude listens to. Such a religious poem may be at the end of one of
the best and happiest of Theocritus’s idylls, the fifteenth. In order
that the reader may the better go along with me in the line of thought I
am following, I will translate it; and, that he may see the medium in
which religious poetry of this sort is found existing, the society out
of which it grows, the people who form it and are formed by it, I will
translate the whole, or nearly the whole, of the idyll (it is not long)
in which the poem occurs.
The idyll is dramatic. Somewhere about two hundred and eighty years
before the Christian era, a couple of Syracusan women, staying at
Alexandria, agreed on the occasion of a great religious solemnity,—the
feast of Adonis,—to go together to the palace of King Ptolemy
Philadelphus, to see the image of Adonis, which the queen Arsinoe,
Ptolemy’s wife, had had decorated with peculiar magnificence. A hymn, by
a celebrated performer, was to be recited over the image. The names of
the two women are Gorgo and Praxinoe; their maids, who are mentioned in
the poem, are called Eunoe and Eutychis. Gorgo comes by appointment to
Praxinoe’s house to fetch her, and there the dialogue begins:—
_Gorgo._—Is Praxinoe at home?
_Praxinoe._—My dear Gorgo, at last! Yes, here I am. Eunoe, find a
chair,—get a cushion for it.
_Gorgo._—It will do beautifully as it is.
_Praxinoe._—Do sit down.
_Gorgo._—Oh, this gad-about spirit! I could hardly get to you, Praxinoe,
through all the crowd and all the carriages. Nothing but heavy boots,
nothing but men in uniform. And what a journey it is! My dear child, you
really live _too_ far off.
_Praxinoe._—It is all that insane husband of mine. He has chosen to come
out here to the end of the world, and take a hole of a place,—for a
house it is not,—on purpose that you and I might not be neighbors. He is
always just the same; anything to quarrel with one! anything for spite!
_Gorgo._—My dear, don’t talk so of your husband before the little
fellow. Just see how astonished he looks at you. Never mind, Zopyrio, my
pet, she is not talking about papa.
_Praxinoe._—Good heavens! the child does really understand.
_Gorgo._—Pretty papa!
_Praxinoe._—That pretty papa of his the other day (though I told him
beforehand to mind what he was about), when I sent him to a shop to buy
soap and rouge, brought me home salt instead;—stupid, great, big,
interminable animal!
_Gorgo._—Mine is just the fellow to him.... But never mind now, get on
your things and let us be off to the palace to see the Adonis. I hear
the Queen’s decorations are something splendid.
_Praxinoe._—In grand people’s houses everything is grand. What things
you have seen in Alexandria! What a deal you will have to tell to
anybody who has never been here!
_Gorgo._—Come, we ought to be going.
_Praxinoe._—Every day is holiday to people who have nothing to do.
Eunoe, pick up your work; and take care, lazy girl, how you leave it
lying about again; the cats find it just the bed they like. Come, stir
yourself, fetch me some water, quick! I wanted the water first, and the
girl brings me the soap. Never mind; give it me. Not all that,
extravagant! Now pour out the water;—stupid! why don’t you take care of
my dress? That will do. I have got my hands washed as it pleased God.
Where is the key of the large wardrobe? Bring it here;—quick!
_Gorgo._—Praxinoe, you can’t think how well that dress, made full, as
you have got it, suits you. Tell me, how much did it cost?—the dress by
itself, I mean.
_Praxinoe._—Don’t talk of it, Gorgo: more than eight guineas of good
hard money. And about the work on it I have almost worn my life out.
_Gorgo._—Well, you couldn’t have done better.
_Praxinoe._—Thank you. Bring me my shawl, and put my hat properly on my
head;—properly. No, child (_to her little boy_), I am not going to take
you; there’s a bogy on horseback, who bites. Cry as much as you like;
I’m not going to have you lamed for life. Now we’ll start. Nurse, take
the little one and amuse him; call the dog in, and shut the street-door.
(_They go out._) Good heavens! what a crowd of people! How on earth are
we ever to get through all this? They are like ants: you can’t count
them. My dearest Gorgo, what will become of us? here are the royal Horse
Guards. My good man, don’t ride over me! Look at that bay horse rearing
bolt upright; what a vicious one! Eunoe, you mad girl, do take
care!—that horse will certainly be the death of the man on his back. How
glad I am now, that I left the child safe at home!
_Gorgo._—All right, Praxinoe, we are safe behind them; and they have
gone on to where they are stationed.
_Praxinoe._—Well, yes, I begin to revive again. From the time I was a
little girl I have had more horror of horses and snakes than of anything
in the world. Let us get on; here’s a great crowd coming this way upon
us.
_Gorgo_ (_to an old woman_).—Mother, are you from the palace?
_Old Woman._—Yes, my dears.
_Gorgo._—Has one a tolerable chance of getting there?
_Old Woman._—My pretty young lady, the Greeks got to Troy by dint of
trying hard; trying will do anything in this world.
_Gorgo._—The old creature has delivered herself of an oracle and
departed.
_Praxinoe._—Women can tell you everything about everything, Jupiter’s
marriage with Juno not excepted.
_Gorgo._—Look, Praxinoe, what a squeeze at the palace gates!
_Praxinoe._—Tremendous! Take hold of me, Gorgo; and you, Eunoe, take
hold of Eutychis!—tight hold, or you’ll be lost. Here we go in all
together. Hold tight to us, Eunoe! Oh, dear! oh, dear! Gorgo, there’s my
scarf torn right in two. For heaven’s sake, my good man, as you hope to
be saved, take care of my dress!
_Stranger._—I’ll do what I can, but it doesn’t depend upon me.
_Praxinoe._—What heaps of people! They push like a drove of pigs.
_Stranger._—Don’t be frightened, ma’am, we are all right.
_Praxinoe._—May you be all right, my dear sir, to the last day you live,
for the care you have taken of us! What a kind, considerate man! There
is Eunoe jammed in a squeeze. Push, you goose, push! Capital! We are all
of us the right side of the door, as the bridegroom said when he had
locked himself in with the bride.
_Gorgo._—Praxinoe, come this way. Do but look at that work, how delicate
it is!—how exquisite! Why, they might wear it in heaven.
_Praxinoe._—Heavenly patroness of needlewomen, what hands were hired to
do that work? Who designed those beautiful patterns? They seem to stand
up and move about, as if they were real;—as if they were living things,
and not needlework. Well, man is a wonderful creature! And look, look,
how charming he lies there on his silver couch, with just a soft down on
his cheeks, that beloved Adonis,—Adonis, whom one loves even though he
is dead!
_Another Stranger._—You wretched women, do stop your incessant chatter!
Like turtles, you go on forever. They are enough to kill one with their
broad lingo—nothing but _a, a, a_.
_Gorgo._—Lord, where does the man come from? What is it to you if we
_are_ chatterboxes? Order about your own servants! Do you give orders to
Syracusan women? If you want to know, we came originally from Corinth,
as Bellerophon did; we speak Peloponnesian. I suppose Dorian women may
be allowed to have a Dorian accent.
_Praxinoe._—Oh, honey-sweet Proserpine, let us have no more masters than
the one we’ve got! We don’t the least care for _you_; pray don’t trouble
yourself for nothing.
_Gorgo._—Be quiet, Praxinoe! That first-rate singer, the Argive woman’s
daughter, is going to sing the _Adonis_ hymn. She is the same who was
chosen to sing the dirge last year. We are sure to have something
first-rate from _her_. She is going through her airs and graces ready to
begin.—
So far the dialogue; and, as it stands in the original, it can hardly be
praised too highly. It is a page torn fresh out of the book of human
life. What freedom! What animation! What gaiety! What naturalness! It is
said that Theocritus, in composing this poem, borrowed from a work of
Sophron, a poet of an earlier and better time; but, even if this is so,
the form is still Theocritus’s own, and how excellent is that form, how
masterly! And this in a Greek poem of the decadence!—for Theocritus’s
poetry, after all, is poetry of the decadence. When such is Greek poetry
of the decadence, what must be Greek poetry of the prime?