it is not because their separate characteristics have been absorbed by
John Bullism. Scotland and Ireland are no more England than Holland or
Belgium. It may be doubted whether, if the three countries had never
been politically united, their existing unlikeness would have been any
greater than it is. It is a most accentuated unlikeness. Scotland has
her own prevailing religion. Mr. Arnold recognised this when he
observed, in that manner of his which did not always give pleasure, that
Dr. Chalmers reminded him of a Scotch thistle valorously trying to look
as much like the rose of Sharon as possible. This distorted view of Mr.
Arnold's at all events recognises a fact. Then there is Scotch law. If
there is one legal proposition which John Bull--poor attorney-ridden
John Bull--has grasped for himself, it is that a promise made without a
monetary or otherwise valuable consideration, is in its legal aspect a
thing of nought, which may be safely disregarded. Bull's views about the
necessity of writing and sixpenny stamps are vague, but he is quite
sound and certain about promises going for nothing unless something
passed between the parties. Thus, if an Englishman, moved, let us say,
by the death of his father, says hastily to a maiden aunt who has made
the last days of his progenitor easy, 'I will give you fifty pounds a
year,' and then repents him of his promise, he is under no legal
obligation to make it good. If he is a gentleman he will send her a
ten-pound note at Christmas and a fat goose at Michaelmas, and the
matter drops as being but the babble of the sick-room. But in Scotland
the maiden aunt, provided she can prove her promise, can secure her
annuity and live merrily in Peebles for the rest of a voluptuous life.
Here is a difference indeed!
Then, Scotland has a history of her own. The late Dr. Hill Burton wrote
it in nine comfortable volumes. She has a thousand traditions, foreign
connections, feelings to which the English breast must always remain an
absolute stranger. Scottish fields are different from English fields;
her farms, roads, walls, buildings, flowers, are different; her schools,
universities, churches, household ways, songs, foods, drinks, are all as
different as may be. Boswell's Johnson, Lockhart's Scott! What a host of
dissimilarities, what an Iliad of unlikenesses, do the two names of
Johnson and Scott call up from the vasty deep of national differences!
One great note of a nation is possessed to the full by Scotland. I mean
the power of blending into one state of national feeling all those who
call what is contained within her geographical boundaries by the sacred
name of 'Home.' The Lowlander from Dumfries is more at home at Inverness
than in York. Why is this? Because Scotland is a nation. The great
Smollett, who challenges Dickens for the foremost place amongst British
comic writers, had no Celtic blood in his veins. He was neither a Papist
nor a Jacobite, yet how did his Scottish blood boil whilst listening in
London to the cowardly exultations of the cockneys over the brutalities
that followed the English victory at Colloden! and how bitterly--almost
savagely--did he contrast that cowardly exultation with the depression
and alarm that had prevailed in London when but a little while before
the Scotch had reached Derby.
What patriotic feeling breathes through Smollett's noble lines, _The
Tears of Caledonia_, and with what delightful enthusiasm, with what
affectionate admiration, does Sir Walter Scott tell us how the last
stanza came to be written! 'He (Smollett) accordingly read them the
first sketch of the _Tears of Scotland_ consisting only of six stanzas,
and on their remarking that the termination of the poem, being too
strongly expressed, might give offence to persons whose political
opinions were different, he sat down without reply, and with an air of
great indignation, subjoined the concluding stanza:
'"While the warm blood bedews my veins,
And unimpaired remembrance reigns,
Resentment of my country's fate
Within my filial breast shall beat.
Yes, spite of thine insulting foe,
My sympathising verse shall flow,
Mourn, hopeless Caledonia, mourn,
Thy banished peace, thy laurels torn."'
In the same sense is the story told by Mr. R. L. Stevenson, how, when
the famous Celtic regiment, the Black Watch, which then drew its
recruits from the now unpeopled glens of Ross-shire and Sutherland,
returned to Scotland after years of foreign service, veterans leaped out
of the boats and kissed the shore of Galloway.
The notes of Irish nationality have been, by conquest and ill-usage,
driven deeper in. Her laws were taken from her, and her religion
brutally proscribed. In the great matter of national education she has
not been allowed her natural and proper development. Her children have
been driven abroad to foreign seminaries to get the religious education
Protestant England denied them at home. Her nationality has thus been
checked and mutilated, but that it exists in spirit and in fact can
hardly be questioned by any impartial traveller. Englishmen have many
gifts, but one gift they have not--that of making Scotsmen and Irishmen
forget their native land.
The attitude of some Englishmen towards Scotch and Irish national
feelings requires correction. The Scotsman's feelings are laughed at.
The Irishman's insulted. So far as the laughter is concerned, it must be
admitted that it is good-humoured. Burns, Scott, and Carlyle, Scotch
moors and Scotch whisky, the royal game of golf, all have mollified and
beautified English feelings. In candour, too, it must be admitted that
Scotsmen are not conciliatory. They do not meet people half-way. I do
not think the laughter does much harm. Insults are different....
Mr. Arnold, in a now scarce pamphlet published in 1859, on the Italian
Question, with the motto prefixed, '_Sed nondum est finis_,' makes the
following interesting observations:--
'Let an Englishman or a Frenchman, who respectively represent the two
greatest nationalities of modern Europe, sincerely ask himself what it
is that makes him take pride in his nationality, what it is which would
make it intolerable to his feelings to pass, or to see any part of his
country pass, under foreign dominion. He will find that it is the sense
of self-esteem generated by knowing the figure which his nation makes in
history; by considering the achievements of his nation in war,
government, arts, literature, or industry. It is the sense that his
people, which have done such great things, merits to exist in freedom
and dignity, and to enjoy the luxury of self-respect.'
This is admirable, but not, nor does it pretend to be, exhaustive. The
love of country is something a little more than mere _amour propre_. You
may love your mother, and wish to make a home for her, even though she
never dwelt in kings' palaces, and is clad in rags. The children of
misery and misfortune are not all illegitimate. Sometimes you may
discern amongst them high hope and pious endeavour. There may be,
indeed, there is, a Niobe amongst the nations, but tears are not always
of despair.
'The luxury of self-respect.' It is a wise phrase. To make Ireland and
Irishmen self-respectful is the task of statesmen.
THE REFORMATION
Long ago an eminent Professor of International Law, at the University of
Cambridge, lecturing his class, spoke somewhat disparagingly of the
Reformation as compared with the Renaissance, and regretted there was no
adequate history of the glorious events called by the latter name. So
keenly indeed did the Professor feel this gap in his library, that he
proceeded to say that inconvenient as it had been to him to lecture at
Cambridge that afternoon, still if what he had said should induce any
member of the class to write a history of the Renaissance worthy to be
mentioned with the masterpiece of Gibbon, he (the Professor) would never
again think it right to refer to the inconvenience he had personally
been put to in the matter.
It must be twenty years since these words were uttered. The class to
whom they were addressed is scattered far and wide, even as the
household referred to in the touching poem of Mrs. Hemans. No one of
them has written a history of the Renaissance. It is now well-nigh
certain no one of them ever will. Looking back over those twenty years
it seems a pity it was never attempted. As Owen Meredith sweetly sings--
'And it all seems now in the waste of life
Such a very little thing.'
But it has remained undone. Regrets are vain.
For my part, I will make bold to say that the Professor was all wrong.
Professors do not stand where they did. They have been blown upon. The
ugliest gap in an Englishman's library is in the shelf which ought to
contain, but does not, a history of the Reformation of Religion in his
own country. It is a subject made for an Englishman's hand. At present
it is but (to employ some old-fashioned words) a hotch-potch, a
gallimaufry, a confused mingle-mangle of divers things jumbled or put
together. Puritan and Papist, Anglican and Erastian, pull out what they
choose, and drop whatever they do not like with a grimace of humorous
disgust. What faces the early Tractarians used to pull over Bishop
Jewel! How Dr. Maitland delighted in exhibiting the boundless vulgarity
of the Puritan party! Lord Macaulay had only a paragraph or two to spare
for the Reformation; but as we note amongst the contents of his first
chapter the following heads: 'The Reformation and its Effects,' 'Origin
of the Church of England,' 'Her Peculiar Character,' we do not need to
be further reminded of the views of that arch-Erastian.
It is time someone put a stop to this 'help yourself' procedure. What is
needed to do this is a long, luminous, leisurely history, written by
somebody who, though wholly engrossed by his subject, is yet absolutely
indifferent to it.
The great want at present is of common knowledge; common, that is, to
all parties. The Catholic tells his story, which is much the most
interesting one, sure of his audience. The Protestant falls back upon
his Fox, and relights the fires of Smithfield with entire
self-satisfaction. The Erastian flourishes his Acts of Parliament in the
face of the Anglican, who burrows like a cony in the rolls of
Convocation. Each is familiar with one set of facts, and shrinks
nervously from the honour of an introduction to a totally new set. We
are not going to change our old '_mumpsimus_' for anybody's new
'_sumpsimus_.' But we must some day, and we shall when this new history
gets itself written.
The subject cannot be said to lack charm. Border lands, marshes, passes
are always romantic. No bagman can cross the Tweed without emotion. The
wanderer on the Malvern Hills soon learns to turn his eyes from the dull
eastward plain to where they can be feasted on the dim outlines of wild
Wales. Border periods of history have something of the same charm. How
the old thing ceased to be? How the new thing became what it is? How the
old colours faded, and the old learning disappeared, and the Church of
Edward the Confessor, and St. Thomas of Canterbury, and William of
Wykeham, became the Church of George the Third, Archbishop Tait, and
Dean Stanley? There is surely a tale to be told. Something must have
happened at the Reformation. Somebody was dispossessed. The common
people no longer heard 'the blessed mutter of the mass,' nor saw 'God
made and eaten all day long.' Ancient services ceased, old customs were
disregarded, familiar words began to go out of fashion. The Reformation
meant something. On these points the Catholics entertain no kind of
doubt. That they suffered ejectment they tearfully admit. Nor, to do
them justice, have they ever acquiesced in the wrong they allege was
then done them, or exhibited the faintest admiration for the intruder.
'Have ye beheld the young God of the Seas,
My dispossessor? Have ye seen his face?
Have ye beheld his chariot foam'd along
By noble wing'd creatures he hath made?
I saw him on the calmed waters scud,
With such a glow of beauty in his eyes
That it enforced me to bid sad farewell
To all my empire.'
This has never been the attitude or the language of the Roman Church
towards the Anglican. 'Canterbury has gone its way, and York is gone,
and Durham is gone, and Winchester is gone. It was sore to part with
them.' So spoke Dr. Newman on a memorable occasion. His distress would
have been no greater had the venerable buildings to which he alluded
been in the possession of the Baptists.
But against this view must be set the one represented by the somewhat
boisterous Church of Englandism of Dean Hook, who ever maintained that
all the Church did at the Reformation was to wash her dirty face, and
that consequently she underwent only an external and not a corporate
change during the process.
There are thousands of pious souls to whom the question, What happened
at the Reformation? is of supreme importance; and yet there is no
history of the period written by a 'kinless loon,' whose own personal
indifference to Church Authority shall be as great as his passion for
facts, his love of adventures and biography, and his taste for theology.
In the meantime, and pending the production of the immortal work, it is
pleasant to notice that annually the historian's task is being made
easier. Books are being published, and old manuscripts edited and
printed, which will greatly assist the good man, and enable him to write
his book by his own fireside. The Catholics have been very active of
late years. They have shaken off their shyness and reserve, and however
reluctant they still may be to allow their creeds to be overhauled and
their rites curtailed by strangers, they have at least come with their
histories in their hands and invited criticism. The labours of Father
Morris of the Society of Jesus, and of the late Father Knox of the
London Oratory, greatly lighten and adorn the path of the student who
loves to be told what happened long ago, not in order that he may know
how to cast his vote at the next election, but simply because it so
happened, and for no other reason whatsoever.
Father Knox's name has just been brought before the world, not, it is to
be hoped, for the last time, by the publication of a small book, partly
his, but chiefly the work of the Rev. T. E. Bridgett, entitled _The True
Story of the Catholic Hierarchy deposed by Queen Elizabeth, with
Fuller Memoirs of its Two Last Survivors_ (Burns and Oates).
The book was much wanted. When Queen Mary died, on the 17th of November,
1558, the dioceses of Oxford, Salisbury, Bangor, Gloucester, and
Hereford were vacant. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Reginald Pole, died
a few hours after his royal relative; and the Bishops of Rochester,
Norwich, Chichester, and Bristol did not long survive her. It thus
happened that at the opening of 1559 there were only sixteen bishops on
the bench. What became of them? The book I have just mentioned answers
this deeply interesting question.
One of them, Oglethorpe of Carlisle, was induced to crown the Queen,
which service was, however, performed according to the Roman ceremonial,
and included the Unction, the Pontifical Mass, and the Communion; but
when the oath prescribed by the Act of Supremacy was tendered to the
bishops, they all, with one exception, Kitchen of Llandaff, declined to
take it, and their depositions followed in due course, though at
different dates, during the year 1559. They were, in plain English,
turned out, and their places given to others.
A whole hierarchy turned a-begging like this might have been a very
startling thing--but it does not seem to have been so. There was no
Ambrose amongst the bishops. The mob showed no disposition to rescue
Bonner from the Marshalsea. The Queen called them 'a set of lazy
scamps.' This was hard measure. The reverend authors of the book before
me call them 'confessors,' which they certainly were. But there is
something disappointing and non-apostolic about them. They none of them
came to violent ends. What did happen to them?
The classical passage recording their fortunes occurs in Lord Burghley's
_Execution of Justice in England_, which appeared in 1583. His lordship
in a good-tempered vein runs through the list of the deposed bishops one
by one, and says in substance, and in a style not unlike Lord Russell's,
that the only hardship put upon them was their removal 'from their
ecclesiastical offices, which they would not exercise according to
law.' For the rest, they were 'for a great time retained in bishops'
houses in very civil and courteous manner, without charge to themselves
or their friends, until the time the Pope began, by his Bulls and
messages, to offer trouble to the realm by stirring of rebellion;' then
Burghley admits, some of them were removed to more quiet places, but
still without being 'called to any capital or bloody question.'
In this view historians have pretty generally acquiesced. Camden speaks
of Tunstall of Durham dying at Lambeth 'in free custody'--a happy phrase
which may be recommended to those of Her Majesty's subjects in Ireland
who find themselves in prison under a statute of Edward III., not for
doing anything, but for refusing to say they will not do it again. Even
that most erudite and delightful of English Catholics, Charles Butler,
who is one of the pleasantest memories of Lincoln's Inn, made but little
of the sufferings of these bishops, whilst some Protestant writers have
thought it quite amazing they were not all burnt as heretics. 'There
were no retaliatory burnings,' says Canon Perry regretfully. But this
surely is carrying Anglican assurance to an extraordinary pitch. What
were they to be burnt for? You are burnt for heresy. That is right
enough. No one would complain of that. But who in the year 1559 would
have been bold enough to declare that the Archbishop of York was a
heretic for refusing an oath prescribed by an Act of the Queen of the
same year? Why, even now, after three centuries and a quarter of
possession, I suppose Lord Selborne would hesitate before burning the
Archbishop of Westminster as a heretic. Hanging is a different matter.
It is very easy to get hung--but to be burnt requires a combination of
circumstances not always forthcoming. Canon Perry should have remembered
this.
These deposed bishops were neither burnt nor hung. The aged Tunstall of
Durham, who had played a very shabby part in Henry's time, died, where
he was bound to die, in his bed, very shortly after his deposition; so
also did the Bishops of Lichfield and Coventry, St. David's, Carlisle,
and Winchester. Dr. Scott of Chester, after four years in the Fleet
prison, managed to escape to Belgium, where he died in 1565. Dr. Pate of
Worcester, who was a Council of Trent man, spent three years in the
Tower, and then contrived to slip away unobserved. Dr. Poole of
Peterborough was never in prison at all, but was allowed to live in
retirement in the neighbourhood of London till his death in 1568. Bishop
Bonner was kept a close prisoner in the Marshalsea till his death in
1569. He was not popular in London. As he had burnt about one hundred
and twenty persons, this need not surprise us. Bishop Bourne of Bath and
Wells was lodged in the Tower from June, 1560, to the autumn of 1563,
when the plague breaking out, he was quartered on the new Bishop of
Lincoln, who had to provide him with bed and board till May, 1566, after
which date the ex-bishop was allowed to be at large till his death in
1569. The Bishop of Exeter was kept in the Tower for three years. What
subsequently became of him is not known. He is supposed to have lived in
the country. Bishop Thirlby of Ely, after three years in the Tower,
lived for eleven years with Archbishop Parker, uncomfortably enough,
without confession or mass. Then he died. It is not to be supposed that
Parker ever told his prisoner that they both belonged to the same
Church. Dr. Heath, the Archbishop of York, survived his deprivation
twenty years, three only of which were spent in prison. He was a man of
more mark than most of his brethren, and had defended the Papal
supremacy with power and dignity in his place in Parliament. The Queen,
who had a liking for him, was very anxious to secure his presence at
some of the new offices, but he would never go, summing up his
objections thus:--'Whatever is contrary to the Catholic faith is heresy,
whatever is contrary to Unity is schism.' On getting out of the Tower,
Dr. Heath, who had a private estate, lived upon it till his death. Dr.
Watson of Lincoln was the most learned and the worst treated of the
deposed bishops. He was in the Tower and the Marshalsea, with short
intervals, from 1559 to 1577, when he was handed over to the custody of
the Bishop of Winchester, who passed him on, after eighteen months, to
his brother of Rochester, from whose charge he was removed to join other
prisoners in Wisbeach Castle, where very queer things happened. Watson
died at Wisbeach in 1584. There was now but one bishop left, the by no
means heroic Goldwell of St. Asaph's, who in June, 1559, proceeded in
disguise to the sea-coast, and crossed over to the Continent without
being recognised. He continued to live abroad for the rest of his days,
which ended on the 3rd of April, 1585. With him the ancient hierarchy
ceased to exist. That, at least, is the assertion of the reverend
authors of the book referred to. There are those who maintain the
contrary.
SAINTE-BEUVE
The vivacious, the in fact far too vivacious, Abbé Galiani, writing to
Madame d'Épinay, observes with unwonted seriousness: 'Je remarque que le
caractère dominant des Français perce toujours. Ils sont causeurs,
raisonneurs, badins par essence; un mauvais tableau enfante une bonne
brochure; ainsi, vous parlerez mieux des arts que vous n'en ferez
jamais. Il se trouvera, au bout du compte, dans quelques siècles, que
vous aurez le mieux raisonné, le mieux discuté ce que toutes les autres
nations auront fait de mieux.' To affect to foretell the final balance
of an account which is not to be closed for centuries demands either
celestial assurance or Neapolitan impudence; but, regarded as a guess,
the Abbé's was a shrewd one. The _post-mortem_ may prove him wrong, but
can hardly prove him absurdly wrong.
We owe much to the French--enlightenment, pleasure, variety, surprise;
they have helped us in a great many ways: amongst others, to play an
occasional game of hide-and-seek with Puritanism, a distraction in which
there is no manner of harm; unless, indeed, the demure damsel were to
turn huffy, and after we had hidden ourselves, refuse to find us again.
Then, indeed--to use a colloquial expression--there would be the devil
to pay.
But nowhere have the French been so helpful, in nothing else has the
change from the native to the foreign article been so delightful, as in
this very matter of criticism upon which the Abbé Galiani had seized
more than a hundred years ago. Mr. David Stott has lately published two
small volumes of translations from the writings of Sainte-Beuve, the
famous critic, who so long has been accepted as the type of all that is
excellent in French criticism. French turned into English is always a
woful spectacle--the pale, smileless corpse of what was once rare and
radiant; but it is a thousand times better to read Sainte-Beuve or any
other good foreign author in English than not to read him at all.
Everybody has not time to emulate the poet Rowe, who learned Spanish in
order to qualify himself, as he fondly thought, for a snug berth at
Madrid, only to be told by his scholarly patron that now he could read
_Don Quixote_ in the original.