Review, who, in their hostility to the principle of dogmatic teaching,
seem obliged to maintain, because subject-matters are distinct, that
living opinions are distinct too, and that men are abstractions as well as
their respective sciences. “On the morning of the thirteenth of August, in
the year 1704,” says a justly celebrated author, in illustration and
defence of the anti-dogmatic principle in political and social matters,
“two great captains, equal in authority, united by close private and
public ties, but of different creeds, prepared for battle, on the event of
which were staked the liberties of Europe.… Marlborough gave orders for
public prayers; the English chaplains read the service at the head of the
English regiments; the Calvinistic chaplains of the Dutch army, with heads
on which hand of Bishop had never been laid, poured forth their
supplications in front of their countrymen. In the meantime the Danes
might listen to the Lutheran ministers; and Capuchins might encourage the
Austrian squadrons, and pray to the Virgin for a blessing on the arms of
the holy Roman Empire. The battle commences; these men of various
religions all act like members of one body: the Catholic and the
Protestant generals exert themselves to assist and to surpass each other;
before sunset the Empire is saved; France has lost in a day the fruits of
eight years of intrigue and of victory; and the allies, after conquering
together, return thanks to God separately, each after his own form of
worship.”(37)
The writer of this lively passage would be doubtless unwilling himself to
carry out the principle which it insinuates to those extreme conclusions
to which it is often pushed by others, in matters of education. Viewed in
itself, viewed in the abstract, that principle is simply, undeniably true;
and is only sophistical when it is carried out in practical matters at
all. A religious opinion, though not formally recognized, cannot fail of
influencing _in fact_ the school, or society, or polity in which it is
found; though in the abstract that opinion is one thing, and the school,
society, or polity, another. Here were Episcopalians, Lutherans,
Calvinists, and Catholics found all fighting on one side, it is true,
without any prejudice to their respective religious tenets: and,
certainly, I never heard that in a battle soldiers did do any thing else
but fight. I did not know they had time for going beyond the matter in
hand; yet, even as regards this very illustration which he has chosen, if
we were bound to decide by it the controversy, it does so happen that that
danger of interference and collision between opposite religionists
actually does occur upon a campaign, which could not be incurred in a
battle: and at this very time some jealousy or disgust has been shown in
English popular publications, when they have had to record that our ally,
the Emperor of the French, has sent his troops, who are serving with the
British against the Russians, to attend High Mass, or has presented his
sailors with a picture of the Madonna.
If, then, we could have Professors who were mere abstractions and
phantoms, marrowless in their bones, and without speculation in their
eyes; or if they could only open their mouths on their own special
subject, and in their scientific pedantry were dead to the world; if they
resembled the well known character in the Romance, who was so imprisoned
or fossilized in his erudition, that, though “he stirred the fire with
some address,” nevertheless, on attempting to snuff the candles, he “was
unsuccessful, and relinquished that ambitious post of courtesy, after
having twice reduced the parlour to total darkness,” then indeed Voltaire
himself might be admitted, not without scandal, but without risk, to
lecture on astronomy or galvanism in Catholic, or Protestant, or
Presbyterian Colleges, or in all of them at once; and we should have no
practical controversy with philosophers who, after the fashion of the
author I have been quoting, are so smart in proving that we, who differ
from them, must needs be so bigotted and puzzle-headed.
And in strict conformity with these obvious distinctions, it will be found
that, so far as we _are_ able to reduce scientific men of anti-Catholic
opinions to the type of the imaginary bookworm to whom I have been
alluding, we do actually use them in our schools. We allow our Catholic
student to use them, so far as he can surprise them (if I may use the
expression), in their formal treatises, and can keep them close prisoners
there.
Vix defessa senem passus componere membra,
Cum clamore ruit magno, manicisque jacentem
Occupat.
The fisherman, in the Arabian tale, took no harm from the genius, till he
let him out from the brass bottle in which he was confined. “He examined
the vessel and shook it, to see if what was within made any noise, but he
heard nothing.” All was safe till he had succeeded in opening it, and
“then came out a very thick smoke, which, ascending to the clouds and
extending itself along the sea shore in a thick mist, astonished him very
much. After a time the smoke collected, and was converted into a genius of
enormous height. At the sight of this monster, whose head appeared to
reach the clouds, the fisherman trembled with fear.” Such is the
difference between an unbelieving or heretical philosopher in person, and
in the mere disquisitions proper to his science. Porson was no edifying
companion for young men of eighteen, nor are his letters on the text of
the Three Heavenly Witnesses to be recommended; but that does not hinder
his being admitted into Catholic schools, while he is confined within the
limits of his Preface to the Hecuba. Franklin certainly would have been
intolerable in person, if he began to talk freely, and throw out, as I
think he did in private, that each solar system had its own god; but such
extravagances of so able a man do not interfere with the honour we justly
pay his name in the history of experimental science. Nay, the great Newton
himself would have been silenced in a Catholic University, when he got
upon the Apocalypse; yet is that any reason why we should not study his
Principia, or avail ourselves of the wonderful analysis which he,
Protestant as he was, originated, and which French infidels have
developed? We are glad, for their own sakes, that anti-Catholic writers
should, in their posthumous influence, do as much real service to the
human race as ever they can, and we have no wish to interfere with it.
3.
Returning, then, to the point from which we set out, I observe that, this
being the state of the case as regards abstract science, viz., that we
have no quarrel with its anti-Catholic commentators, till they thrust
their persons into our Chairs, or their popular writings into our
reading-rooms, it follows that, when we contemplate the formation of a
Catholic Literature, we do not consider scientific works as among our most
prominent _desiderata_. They are to be looked for, not so much for their
own sake, as because they are indications that we have able scientific men
in our communion; for if we have such, they will be certain to write, and
in proportion as they increase in number will there be the chance of
really profound, original, and standard books issuing from our
Lecture-rooms and Libraries. But, after all, there is no reason why these
should be better than those which we have already received from
Protestants; though it is at once more becoming and more agreeable to our
feelings to use books of our own, instead of being indebted to the books
of others.
Literature, then, is not synonymous with Science; nor does Catholic
education imply the exclusion of works of abstract reasoning, or of
physical experiment, or the like, though written by persons of another or
of no communion.
There is another consideration in point here, or rather prior to what I
have been saying; and that is, that, considering certain scientific works,
those on Criticism, for instance, are so often written in a technical
phraseology, and since others, as mathematical, deal so largely in signs,
symbols, and figures, which belong to all languages, these abstract
studies cannot properly be said to fall under English _Literature_ at
all;—for by Literature I understand Thought, conveyed under the forms of
some particular language. And this brings me to speak of Literature in its
highest and most genuine sense, viz., as an historical and national fact;
and I fear, in this sense of the word also, it is altogether beside or
beyond any object which a Catholic University can reasonably contemplate,
at least in any moderate term of years; but so large a subject here opens
upon us that I must postpone it to another Section.
§ 3.
In its relation to Classical Literature.
1.
I have been directing the reader’s attention, first to what we do not, and
next to what we need not contemplate, when we turn our thoughts to the
formation of an English Catholic Literature. I said that our object was
neither a library of theological nor of scientific knowledge, though
theology in its literary aspect, and abstract science as an exercise of
intellect, have both of course a place in the Catholic encyclopædia. One
undertaking, however, there is, which not merely does not, and need not,
but unhappily cannot, come into the reasonable contemplation of any set of
persons, whether members of a University or not, who are desirous of
Catholicizing the English language, as is very evident; and that is simply
the creation of an _English Classical Literature_, for that has been done
long ago, and would be a work beyond the powers of any body of men, even
if it had still to be done. If I insist on this point here, no one must
suppose I do not consider it to be self-evident; for I shall not be aiming
at proving it, so much as at bringing it home distinctly to the mind, that
we may, one and all, have a clearer perception of the state of things with
which we have to deal. There is many an undeniable truth which is not
practically felt and appreciated; and, unless we master our position in
the matter before us, we may be led off into various wild imaginations or
impossible schemes, which will, as a matter of course, end in
disappointment.
Were the Catholic Church acknowledged from this moment through the length
and breadth of these islands, and the English tongue henceforth baptized
into the Catholic faith, and sealed and consecrated to Catholic objects,
and were the present intellectual activity of the nation to continue, as
of course it would continue, we should at once have an abundance of
Catholic works, which would be English, and purely English, literature and
high literature; but still all these would not constitute “English
Literature,” as the words are commonly understood, nor even then could we
say that the “English Literature” was Catholic. Much less can we ever
aspire to affirm it, while we are but a portion of the vast
English-speaking world-wide race, and are but striving to create a current
in the direction of Catholic truth, when the waters are rapidly flowing
the other way. In no case can we, strictly speaking, form an English
Literature; for by the Literature of a Nation is meant its Classics, and
its Classics have been given to England, and have been recognized as such,
long since.
2.
A Literature, when it is formed, is a national and historical fact; it is
a matter of the past and the present, and can be as little ignored as the
present, as little undone as the past. We can deny, supersede, or change
it, then only, when we can do the same towards the race or language which
it represents. Every great people has a character of its own, which it
manifests and perpetuates in a variety of ways. It developes into a
monarchy or republic;—by means of commerce or in war, in agriculture or in
manufactures, or in all of these at once; in its cities, its public
edifices and works, bridges, canals, and harbours; in its laws,
traditions, customs, and manners; in its songs and its proverbs; in its
religion; in its line of policy, its bearing, its action towards foreign
nations; in its alliances, fortunes, and the whole course of its history.
All these are peculiar, and parts of a whole, and betoken the national
character, and savour of each other; and the case is the same with the
national language and literature. They are what they are, and cannot be
any thing else, whether they be good or bad or of a mixed nature; before
they are formed, we cannot prescribe them, and afterwards, we cannot
reverse them. We may feel great repugnance to Milton or Gibbon as men; we
may most seriously protest against the spirit which ever lives, and the
tendency which ever operates, in every page of their writings; but there
they are, an integral portion of English Literature; we cannot extinguish
them; we cannot deny their power; we cannot write a new Milton or a new
Gibbon; we cannot expurgate what needs to be exorcised. They are great
English authors, each breathing hatred to the Catholic Church in his own
way, each a proud and rebellious creature of God, each gifted with
incomparable gifts.
We must take things as they are, if we take them at all. We may refuse to
say a word to English literature, if we will; we may have recourse to
French or to Italian instead, if we think either of these less
exceptionable than our own; we may fall back upon the Classics of Greece
and Rome; we may have nothing whatever to do with literature, as such, of
any kind, and confine ourselves to purely amorphous or monstrous specimens
of language; but if we do once profess in our Universities the English
language and literature, if we think it allowable to know the state of
things we live in, and that national character which we share, if we think
it desirable to have a chance of writing what may be read after our day,
and praiseworthy to aim at providing for Catholics who speak English a
Catholic Literature then—I do not say that we must at once throw open
every sort of book to the young, the weak, or the untrained,—I do not say
that we may dispense with our ecclesiastical indexes and emendations,
but—we must not fancy ourselves creating what is already created in spite
of us, and which never could at a moment be created by means of us, and we
must recognize that historical literature, which is in occupation of the
language, both as a fact, nay, and as a standard for ourselves.
There is surely nothing either “temerarious” or paradoxical in a statement
like this. The growth of a nation is like that of an individual; its tone
of voice and subjects for speech vary with its age. Each age has its own
propriety and charm; as a boy’s beauty is not a man’s, and the sweetness
of a treble differs from the richness of a bass, so it is with a whole
people. The same period does not produce its most popular poet, its most
effective orator, and its most philosophic historian. Language changes
with the progress of thought and the events of history, and style changes
with it; and while in successive generations it passes through a series of
separate excellences, the respective deficiencies of all are supplied
alternately by each. Thus language and literature may be considered as
dependent on a process of nature, and admitting of subjection to her laws.
Father Hardouin indeed, who maintained that, with the exception of Pliny,
Cicero, Virgil’s Georgics, and Horace’s Satires and Epistles, Latin
literature was the work of the medieval monks, had the conception of a
literature neither national nor historical; but the rest of the world will
be apt to consider time and place as necessary conditions in its
formation, and will be unable to conceive of classical authors, except as
either the elaboration of centuries, or the rare and fitful accident of
genius.
First-rate excellence in literature, as in other matters, is either an
accident or the outcome of a process; and in either case demands a course
of years to secure. We cannot reckon on a Plato, we cannot force an
Aristotle, any more than we can command a fine harvest, or create a coal
field. If a literature be, as I have said, the voice of a particular
nation, it requires a territory and a period, as large as that nation’s
extent and history, to mature in. It is broader and deeper than the
capacity of any body of men, however gifted, or any system of teaching,
however true. It is the exponent, not of truth, but of nature, which is
true only in its elements. It is the result of the mutual action of a
hundred simultaneous influences and operations, and the issue of a hundred
strange accidents in independent places and times; it is the scanty
compensating produce of the wild discipline of the world and of life, so
fruitful in failures; and it is the concentration of those rare
manifestations of intellectual power, which no one can account for. It is
made up, in the particular language here under consideration, of human
beings as heterogeneous as Burns and Bunyan, De Foe and Johnson, Goldsmith
and Cowper, Law and Fielding, Scott and Byron. The remark has been made
that the history of an author is the history of his works; it is far more
exact to say that, at least in the case of great writers, the history of
their works is the history of their fortunes or their times. Each is, in
his turn, the man of his age, the type of a generation, or the interpreter
of a crisis. He is made for his day, and his day for him. Hooker would not
have been, but for the existence of Catholics and Puritans, the defeat of
the former and the rise of the latter; Clarendon would not have been
without the Great Rebellion; Hobbes is the prophet of the reaction to
scoffing infidelity; and Addison is the child of the Revolution and its
attendant changes. If there be any of our classical authors, who might at
first sight have been pronounced a University man, with the exception of
Johnson, Addison is he; yet even Addison, the son and brother of
clergymen, the fellow of an Oxford Society, the resident of a College
which still points to the walk which he planted, must be something more,
in order to take his place among the Classics of the language, and owed
the variety of his matter to his experience of life, and to the call made
on his resources by the exigencies of his day. The world he lived in made
him and used him. While his writings educated his own generation, they
have delineated it for all posterity after him.
3.
I have been speaking of the authors of a literature, in their relation to
the people and course of events to which they belong; but a prior
consideration, at which I have already glanced, is their connection with
the language itself, which has been their organ. If they are in great
measure the creatures of their times, they are on the other hand in a far
higher sense the creators of their language. It is indeed commonly called
their mother tongue, but virtually it did not exist till they gave it life
and form. All greater matters are carried on and perfected by a succession
of individual minds; what is true in the history of thought and of action
is true of language also. Certain masters of composition, as Shakespeare,
Milton, and Pope, the writers of the Protestant Bible and Prayer Book,
Hooker and Addison, Swift, Hume, and Goldsmith, have been the making of
the English language; and as that language is a fact, so is the literature
a fact, by which it is formed, and in which it lives. Men of great ability
have taken it in hand, each in his own day, and have done for it what the
master of a gymnasium does for the bodily frame. They have formed its
limbs, and developed its strength; they have endowed it with vigour,
exercised it in suppleness and dexterity, and taught it grace. They have
made it rich, harmonious, various, and precise. They have furnished it
with a variety of styles, which from their individuality may almost be
called dialects, and are monuments both of the powers of the language and
the genius of its cultivators.
How real a creation, how _sui generis_, is the style of Shakespeare, or of
the Protestant Bible and Prayer Book, or of Swift, or of Pope, or of
Gibbon, or of Johnson! Even were the subject-matter without meaning,
though in truth the style cannot really be abstracted from the sense,
still the style would, on that supposition, remain as perfect and original
a work as Euclid’s elements or a symphony of Beethoven. And, like music,
it has seized upon the public mind; and the literature of England is no
longer a mere letter, printed in books, and shut up in libraries, but it
is a living voice, which has gone forth in its expressions and its
sentiments into the world of men, which daily thrills upon our ears and
syllables our thoughts, which speaks to us through our correspondents, and
dictates when we put pen to paper. Whether we will or no, the phraseology
and diction of Shakespeare, of the Protestant formularies, of Milton, of
Pope, of Johnson’s Tabletalk, and of Walter Scott, have become a portion
of the vernacular tongue, the household words, of which perhaps we little
guess the origin, and the very idioms of our familiar conversation. The
man in the comedy spoke prose without knowing it; and we Catholics,
without consciousness and without offence, are ever repeating the half
sentences of dissolute playwrights and heretical partizans and preachers.
So tyrannous is the literature of a nation; it is too much for us. We
cannot destroy or reverse it; we may confront and encounter it, but we
cannot make it over again. It is a great work of man, when it is no work
of God’s.
I repeat, then, whatever we be able or unable to effect in the great
problem which lies before us, any how we cannot undo the past. English
Literature will ever _have been_ Protestant. Swift and Addison, the most
native and natural of our writers, Hooker and Milton, the most elaborate,
never can become our co-religionists; and, though this is but the
enunciation of a truism, it is not on that account an unprofitable
enunciation.
4.
I trust we are not the men to give up an undertaking because it is
perplexed or arduous; and to do nothing because we cannot do everything.
Much may be attempted, much attained, even granting English Literature is
not Catholic. Something indeed may be said even in alleviation of the
misfortune itself, on which I have been insisting; and with two remarks
bearing upon this latter point I will bring this Section to an end.