Abandoning, however, such vain and useless regrets, let us turn to the

immediate subject of our own article. The title, Novel, we here use in the

popular signification of the word, as comprising all works of fiction,

distinct from those that are purely satirical, and history as written by

such men as Mr. James Anthony Froude and Mr. John S. C. Abbott. Novelists,

we know, are apt to be nice on the question of titles. No lady of third‐

rate society, who with time on her hands to do good devoted it to the

study of the court balls and the pages of Debrett, was ever more so. Here

is your romance, which looks down upon your mere story; your novelette

which shrinks with awe from your psychological romance; your story of real

life, a republican sort of fellow often, who hustles and bustles and

shoulders them all and stands on his own legs; and a variety of others as

numerous as they are, to the public at large—which is, as it should be, a

poor respecter of titles—unnecessary. We purpose, in the name of the

public, dealing very summarily with these titled folk, throwing them, high

and low, in the same category, and designating one and all as novels pure

and simple, with the single distinction, which shall appear in due time,

of the sensational novel.

As we have arrived at this point, it may not be amiss to ask, What purpose

do novels serve; with what object are they written?

A hard question truly. We reply to the second part of the query first. It

may not be unnatural, nor dealing unfairly with their authors, to suppose

that novels are written, in the first place, with the very laudable desire

of earning one’s bread: so that “the root of all evil” lies at the bottom

of the “psychological romance,” as of far humbler things in this world. As

to what purpose, earthly or unearthly, they serve, the answer to that

depends, first of all, on the author’s secondary motive in writing them;

secondly, on the effect they produce on the reader—which are two very

different things. We have not the slightest doubt that the French

novelists, as popularly known, entertained the very loftiest ideas with

regard to morality, Christianity, the laws of God and man, the

conventional relations between husband and wife, and so on, before

ushering into the world the representatives of their—to put it

mildly—somewhat peculiar views on these questions. Well, if the world read

them wrongly, mistook faith for infidelity, a deep lesson in purity for

adultery, loyalty and obedience to the sovereign for rank outspoken

disturbance and rebellion, who was to blame? The world was simply stupid.

M. Dumas _fils_, for instance, has lately been good enough to enlighten us

with his ideas on the vexed questions of matrimony and women in general.

M. Dumas _fils_ is undoubtedly an excellent guide on such subjects. He is

an advanced man, a man of the age, of society, of the world. His

testimonies on such subjects ought, therefore, to be of value. He has

disposed of the whole question in, for a Dumas, a few words—a single

volume. The moral of his doctrine comes to this: if your wife is

faithless, kill her. We have not yet heard of any practical results

arising from this new gospel, as preached by M. Dumas _fils_; from which,

we have no doubt, he will draw the very agreeable inference that his

remedy for the regeneration of society, and the nice adjustment of the

marriage‐knot once for all, was altogether unnecessary. If his doctrine

should spread to any alarming extent, no doubt M. Dumas _fils_ will be

satisfied that at last the world is beginning a new era of advancement,

that there is still hope for it; and he will hold himself answerable for

all the consequences. By the bye, we believe he has omitted one little

thing: the course to be adopted by the wife in the event of the husband’s

infidelity. But probably such a high‐minded, virtuous man as M. Dumas

never contemplated the possibility of such a contingency arising.

Mr. Collins, Mr. Reade, Miss Braddon, and the rest hold, doubtless, the

same ideas with regard to the relative value of their productions. Whether

their praiseworthy efforts have been duly appreciated; whether they have

ever made man, woman, or child a whit better or sounder by the perusal of

any of their works, we do not know. We are inclined to think not. If any

reader would kindly come forward and show that we are wrong in this from

his or her own experience, we shall only be too happy to stand corrected.

At all events, the advantage derived must be in very small proportion to

the quantity of literary medicine and advice administered by those social

physicians to the craving multitude.

Laying aside, then, the invariably pure and lofty motives of the authors;

laying aside the cloak which novels serve for at times, as in the hands of

a Disraeli, to attack a policy or a system; and taking them as they affect

ourselves, the readers, one may safely say that they serve mainly to

amuse; to fill up those spare moments that nothing else can fill up. They

constitute the play‐ground of literature—a recreation and relief for the

mind. We gulp them down as we are whirled along in the railway train. We

take them with us on long voyages, as the Scotch patient took his weekly

sermon at the kirk, as an opiate—thus fulfilling to the letter the

traditional notion of the “Sabbath” being a day of rest. When the brain is

heavy and the body worn, when to talk is labor and to think is pain, then

we can seize the novel, loll on the sofa, or recline under the leafy shade

by the brink of the musical river, and float away, half asleep, half

awake, into dreamland. In a moment a new world, as real and living to the

mind’s eye as that in which we move, is conjured up before us. We are on

intimate terms with a villain whose dagger is as air‐drawn as Macbeth’s.

We can commit cold‐blooded murders that will never bring us to the dock;

or shocking improprieties that even the far‐reaching nose of Mrs. Grundy

will fail to catch scent of. Or we go over “the old, old story,” and are

bumped, jerked, and jolted along the delicious course that never _will_

run smooth; mapping it out if we have not yet had the fortune (or

misfortune) to traverse it; filling it in with many a well‐known form, if

we have. And if the never‐running‐smooth theory be true of love, this much

we ungrudgingly grant the novelists—they certainly hold to their tether.

The labyrinth of Dædalus was nothing to it; the twistings, the windings,

the sudden and unexpected meetings, the separations, the jiltings, the

halts by the way, the joy, the sorrow, the ecstasy, the despair, the

losings, the seekings, the findings, the torturing uncertainty, the

wanderings through hopeless mazes, to end, as we knew at the outset it

would and must end, according to “the eternal fitness of things,” in some

man marrying some woman—the most extraordinary phenomenon that the world

ever witnessed!

The novel invites us, as the noonday devil is supposed to do, at dangerous

moments—those moments that come to all of us when matter holds the mastery

over mind. Place in the hands of the reader at such a time a book which,

while it interests, while it soothes, lulls, and gently enwraps in its

kindly meshes the abstracted brain, never palls; containing at least what

is harmless; and good, not very great certainly, but at least of a kind,

is effected.

But let the novel be like the favorites of its class, a thing to fire the

imagination with impure thoughts clothed in the thinnest veil of mock

morality, at the very moment when the imagination of the reader is ready

to run riot; and evil, great, sometimes irreparable, is produced.

“All the wrong that I have ever done or sung has come from that confounded

book of yours,” writes Byron to Moore in a moment of bitterness. If the

accusation be well founded, what an intellectual wreck has Moore to answer

for; what a multitude of lesser disasters following in the train of a

great genius, so early led astray!

The novelist beats every other writer from the field. We all read him,

from the crop‐haired schoolboy to the octogenarian who has quite grown

through his hair; from the nearest approach to Mr. Darwin’s ideal man to

the philosopher “who would circumvent God”; from the artless maiden who

fondly dotes over those wicked but excessively handsome villains, those

athletic but ridiculously stupid lovers, those consumptive heroines with

the luminous eyes and rippling glories of golden hair; those lady

poisoners with the floating locks and sea‐green orbs—to the dyspeptic lady

who makes novel‐reading a science, who dawdles out her languid existence

in elegant nothingness, who looks to the production of a new story as men

look to a change in the constitution, or as astronomers lately looked to

the comet that would not come; who is, in a word, utterly useless for all

the purposes of life, of wifehood, of womanhood—novel‐struck, novel‐bred,

only fit to “resolve and thaw into a dew” of weak sentimentality and

essence of inanity. From this category of readers we must not omit the

typical old maid, who is continually telling us that she renounced such

things as love and other rubbish long ago; yet daily treats herself to her

spruce, strong, highly flavored dish of the purest, spiciest scandal, and

takes her diurnal dose of immorality as regularly as her “drops” or her

tea.

All the world lies open to the novelist. From no place is he excluded,

save from a few high and dry quarterlies; and even they are stirred from

their abstract regions into sledgehammer activity or solemn admiration by

him from time to time. Of monthlies, fortnightlies, weeklies, dailies, he

forms the chief ingredient. Even editors of metaphysical fortnightlies

find they must flavor their own romance with a spice, of the more regular

and orthodox in order to make it “go down with the public.”

What a field, then, is the novelist’s!—what ground for a high, pureminded

man or woman to sow seeds in that may sprout, and spread, and fill the

world with truth, with purity, with noble aspirations, with right

teachings set in the goodliest garb! The youth of the generations is their

own.

Who has forgotten those earlier days when we stood, fair‐haired, open‐

hearted children, on the threshold of life, steeped in the morning sun of

a future that looked all golden? A warm mist hung about us, shrouding all

in beautiful, mystical dimness. There was no storm, no darkness, no night.

Whisperings of soft voices stole out of the magic mist, and called us on

to do great things; to rift the mist and open up the glorious world of

God, as we saw it in our imaginings. The morning of life, like the morning

of the world, is all Eden. We walk with God, for we are innocent. But the

doom is on us; we must pluck the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The

moment we taste of it, the golden dream is no more; the mist is reft

asunder; and slowly the world opens on our saddened eyes in all its hard

reality, to be subjected by the labor of our hands and the sweat of our

brow. As we merge from that innocence, so we go on. Some great event may

change us; may make this one a saint, that a fiend. But, as a rule, the

sapling grows into the tree, weakly or strong, straight and tall and

looking heavenwards, or stunted, useless, and unsightly as it grew from

the grafting.

The grafting is the mother’s voice, the father’s example, the companions

around us, the guidance of our thoughts. And the great mass of our

thoughts, at a time when we are all imagination, springs from the books we

read. Here steps in the crying need of a series of story‐books for

Catholic children; for all children up to the age when study becomes a

more serious work.

One other glance back at the days of our childhood, and the manner in

which they were spent; for it is not the least important part of our

subject. What a round of acquaintance we had, necessitating a

corresponding round of visits! One day we dropped in on our best of

friends, _Robinson Crusoe_, on that lonely island of his, wishing that all

the world were islands and we were all Crusoes. All we wanted to live

happily was a boat, six or seven guns and pistols, a goat‐skin cap, a

parrot, a Man Friday, an umbrella, and an occasional savage to kill. After

taking a sail with him in his boat, helping him to build his castle,

tending the goats, running down to see if we could find that second

footprint on the sand, giving Friday a lesson in English, we bade him

good‐bye with the promise of calling again soon, and hurried off on that

expedition to the other end of the world with our old acquaintance Captain

Marryat, to search for our father, play our practical jokes, and fight our

triangular duels. Then we had to hunt up that Indian trail for Cooper, and

no redskin ever followed the track half so keenly as we, marking the way,

notching the giant trunks with our six‐bladed penknife, shooting the

buffalo with our pop‐guns, sleeping round the campfires in those limitless

prairies and thickest jungles of our imagination. Ha! by’r Lady! Here we

are at the gentle trial of spears at Ashby de la Zouch. How brave it was!

The glinting of the lances, and the clash of steel on helm and hauberk;

the gay plumes shorn and floating on the wind like thistledown. And out we

rushed, and called the friend of our bosom a caitiff knight and a false

knave, and plighted our troth to that imprisoned maiden—no matter who, and

no matter where—to do her right, and do our devoir as leal and belted

knight. That caitiff deals in leather now, and does a thriving business;

his knightly limbs are cased in the best of cloth, cut by the cleverest of

artists; his knightly stomach is naught the worse for wear, but quite

beyond the girth of steel armor; and he has a son who, at this moment, is

assisting at the joust as we did, spurring into the _mêlée_ and bearing

all down before us, to spur out again victor, and meet Charlie O’Malley

waiting for us outside; to ride with him for dear life into to‐day. What a

race it is; how the world spins past us; how our heart throbs, and our

eyes grow dim, and our hopes sink as we fall and dislocate our shoulder at

that last fence. By heaven! up again—on, and in a winner! And we sink to

the ground with the shouts of thousands ringing in our ears, to wake in a

darkened chamber with low voices breaking on us—the voices of our dear

Irish girls, who make “smithereens” of our hearts only to heal them the

next minute, and sit there wooing us back into life and love.

Such was the favorite mental food of our earlier days, our literary candy.

If the reading of youth were restricted to authors such as these, on the

whole we might consider them in safe hands. But books multiply and cheapen

day by day, and as usual “the cheap and nasty” carries everything before

it. The favorite stories of the mass of boys that we see consist of what

is known as the _Dime Novel_ and those blood‐and‐thunder weeklies with the

terrific titles and startling pictures. By some strange freak of nature,

boys are fond of blood; the warlike element prevails; the peaceful is

nowhere. We feel certain that, if Mr. Barnum possessed a real live

murderer among his collection of curiosities—though we fear he could

scarcely ticket such an animal “a curiosity” in these days—and caged him

up among the other wild beasts, he would prove a greater attraction to the

juvenile visitor than anything else in the famous exhibition. It were easy

enough to satisfy this morbid craving for muscular Christianity in a safe

and sound manner, if our writers of fiction took up systematically the

incidents of history; the great wars; the crusades, the parts played by

great Christian heroes, by the saints of God; the scenes of martyrdom, the

labors of the missionaries, and a thousand other subjects as entertaining

as they are instructive and strictly true. We know that there are many

such; but we want to be overloaded with them, as we are with those others

to which we referred. We can scarcely at the moment call to mind one

Catholic story to compete at all with a crowd of children’s books written

by Protestants. The production of children’s stories has grown into a

science among them. We frequently see pages of stately reviews and the

columns of the London _Times_ devoted to as critical an examination of

this class of books as to the works of the greatest writers. They

recognize the necessity and the advantage of giving their children

something to save them from the evil effects that must ensue from a

continual history of daring and impossible feats by young burglars,

detectives, spies, and the like. The best writers of this kind are, as

they should be, women, who know best how to interest children, who watch

them with an eye to their every want, that a man cannot attain. Here,

then, is a field for Catholic ladies—a field wide open, which cries to be

filled up.

But our article deals not alone with children and children’s books. We

purpose looking higher and looking deeper, at the mental recreation of the

day, of the age; at the literature that loads our tables, our shelves, our

public libraries, our bookstalls: the book “of the period”—the sensational

novel.

What is a sensational novel? Who has defined it? Who dare define it? It is

a pity the author of _Rasselas_ had not some faint conception of it. The

idea of calling _Rasselas_ a novel in these days! We might imagine him to

have dealt with it somewhat in the following style:

Sensational Novel: A complexity of improbabilities woven around a crowd of

nonentities, interspersed with fashionable filth, and relieved by sleek‐

coated beastliness; meaning nothing, and good for less.

What is this word that possesses us! Sensation!—as though we had not

enough of it. The age is so dreadfully prosaic, so workaday, so dull. We

must run off the track, out of the common groove, or we are ill at ease.

Where is the sensation in steam and electricity? We are whirled through a

continent in a week: but that is a thing done every day. It almost equals

the mantle of the genii in the _Arabian Nights_; we had only to step upon

it, and find ourselves at whatever point of the compass we wished. We

cross thousands of miles of ocean in a similar period, mastering the

elements with a clockwork regularity, fair weather or foul. We knit sea to

sea. We rise from foe‐encircled cities, and sail safe away into the air.

The whisper of what has been done in one quarter of the world has not had

time to pass abroad before it is discussed in the others. We have linked

the disjointed world by an electric flame that flashes knowledge

throughout its circle instantaneously. We build up vast empires and topple

down thrones every day, as though they were ninepins, and yet we want

sensation! We sigh for the cap and bells; the jousts and games and

junketings of old. Even the feast of horrors, crimes, and incidents, the

births, deaths, and marriages, and the scandals of the “fashionable

world,” served up to us at breakfast daily, with all the inventive genius

of the newspaper correspondent, pall upon our surfeited appetites. “We

have supped full of horrors. Time was when our fell of hair would have

uplifted to hear a night‐shriek. But now, how weary, stale, flat, and

unprofitable seem to us all the uses of this world of ours. Life is as

dreary as a twice‐told tale.” We are not satisfied; we feel a craving

after something. Our want, our craving, springs not from the desire for a

higher spirit in it all, not from an absence of faith and noble purpose,

of something greater than utility, not from a horror of a daily widening

infidelity and impurity that mocks the pagan; but simply and purely from a

lack of sensation! In the face of the dull routine of this age of marvels

that old Friar Bacon dimly saw in his dreams, and was deemed a madman for

his foresight; in the face of wars like our own rebellion and the

devastation of France; in the midst of fallen thrones and falling

peoples—we ask for sensation! as the philosopher, though perhaps with more

reason, took a lantern to look for a man. We find it not in these things;

we pass them by, and bury ourselves in the pages of Wilkie Collins, Miss

Braddon, and their kind. They are the wonder‐workers of the age.

Here we find what we are seeking; here is a response to our ravenous

craving, in those delicious, torturing plots that take our breath away.

Here we sit hob and nob with what the fourth‐rate newspaper is fond of

calling “the scions of nobility.” We get an animated description and

category of their articles of clothing, from their boots and who made

them, to their linen and where it was bought. What a pleasure it is to

know a count and a lord, and a lady and a duchess; to know how they eat

and drink, and the chronicle of all the fearful scandal that goes on in

what the newspaper man again knows as “certain circles”! What peeps we

have into the green‐room! Pages are devoted to the eyes of an opera‐

singer, the ankles of a _danseuse_, the charming slang of an actress. The

scene is varied by dips into the purlieus of society; into the bagnio and

the gin‐mill; the prize‐ring and the barracks; the dancing saloon and the

gaming‐table; the betting ring; into every place, every person, everything

the lowest, the meanest, the worst.

Is this exaggeration? Is it a false, outrageous libel on this age, so full

of great things, and still greater capabilities? Is it particularly false

of ourselves, the simple‐hearted, simple‐mannered republicans, who have

set our faces as sternly against the ungodly and the ways of sin as our

old crop‐haired, steeple‐crowned Puritans professed to do? We shall only

be too happy if somebody convinces us that such is the fact. In the

meanwhile; incidentally to our purpose appeared a few statistics the other

day from public libraries, bearing on this very question, showing that in

libraries, which, as a rule, a class of intelligent and sensible readers

are supposed to frequent, the books most in demand were of the style we

deplore, and complaints were laid at their doors because they failed

adequately to supply this demand.

There must be something very delicious in vice. Nothing else will satisfy

us. The novelists have sounded the depths of depravity; and in their

efforts to find a lower depth still, are driven to walking the hospitals,

diving into blue‐books, frequenting the asylums for the diseased, the

depraved, the insane. The repertory of evil seems almost used up. They

have so beaten the drawing‐room carpet, so sifted and shaken out for the

public gaze the smallest speck of fashionable filth that the most

delicately organized imagination of the refined lady could discern, that

there is nothing left on it. Titles even are growing common, and we want

some new type of a coroneted brow to bind our scandal on. Dickens and

Collins and Yates have overrun us with burglars and detectives. They did

good service in their day; but even they are growing unromantic. The

Krupp, the mitrailleuse, the needle‐gun, have killed off the slashing

cavalry heroes, who rode at everything, neck or nothing, in perfect

safety, and were as irresistible in love as in war. We must abandon these

higher regions with a sigh, and go down to the dirtiest columns of the

dirtiest newspapers in our efforts to find “something rich and strange.”

And to this men and women of “genius,” as it is called, bend their every

effort. The gifts that God has given them to ennoble man they devote to

stirring the puddle of filth which they take as the mirror of human

nature, and, holding before the admiring gaze of humanity whatever they

have fished up, say—Behold yourselves!

Are these the lessons society must look for in its gifted children? Is the

great book of nature narrowed down to these limits? Is there nothing in

human life, human thought, human activity, more worthy our attention, more

deeply interesting to man, than the chronicle of his vices? Is the

attractive in human nature confined to third or fourth hand glimpses of

“the scions of nobility,” the bywords of the barracks, the slang of the

gutter, the echoes of the footlights? Is vice alone captivating, and

morality such an everyday, humdrum affair that we are sick of excess of

it? Is love the thing they present to us?—love, the great passion, the

pure divine flame that God has set in our hearts to link together and

perpetuate the generations, and finally lead us up to him? Is this maudlin

rubbish that the writers of the day surfeit us with, love?—this weak,

puny, consumptive thing; inane, jejune, sickly, fleshly, sensual, impure,

inhuman? Love is a divine‐inspired passion of the soul, planted there by

God, to grow and flourish in its great, pure, single strength. They have

cut it, and hacked and torn it to shreds, and left nothing of divinity in

it. They set it in the flesh, and convert a heaven‐born gift into the

lowest of animal passions.

It requires no very powerful stretch of the imagination to draw from the

foul pens of these writers the germ of the question which to‐day threaten

to turn the world topsy‐turvy—the so‐called theory of _Woman’s

Rights_—which has for champions philosophers of the stamp of Stuart Mill

and Professor Fawcett, and for first‐born, _Free Love_.

We will suppose Mr. Stanley, of the _New York Herald_, to have brought

back with him a native of the countries he visited in his marvellously

successful search for Dr. Livingstone. The native has learned the English

language on his journey. He is suddenly thrown among a people whom he can

only look upon as gods, as the Indians first looked upon the Spaniards. He

is surrounded by the results of all the ages. He wishes to learn something

about these gods: how they live and move and have their being. A novel “of

the period”—any one by any of the thousand authors of the species—is put

into his hands as the faithful reflex of this society. What can we imagine

would be his feelings at the end of its perusal? A comparison rather in

favor of his own countrymen would be the most natural inference.

But it may be objected that we are pessimists. We attack a class whom no

decent person would defend. There are more schools of novelists than the

sensational school. There are Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer. Are these

all that we would wish, or do they also fall under our sweeping

condemnation?

As for Scott, we are still proud to acknowledge him by his old title—“The

Wizard of the North.” He was a man who, taking into account the times in

which he lived, the prejudices still rife, the people for whom he wrote,

the purpose of his writings, turned every faculty of his marvellously

gifted, richly stored mind to its best account. Even Livy’s “pictured

page” almost dims in our eyes before the range and variety of his. His

works are the illumination of history; his characters almost as true, as

rounded, as full as Shakespeare’s, and partaking of the great master’s

“infinite variety.” His plots are deeply interesting, his fidelity to

nature in character and scene sustained and equal, whether the subject be

Queen Bess or Queen Mary of Scotland, Louis XI. or King Jamie, a moss‐

trooper or a crusader, a free‐lance or a pirate, a bailie or a Poundtext;

whether the scene lie in Palestine or in the Trosachs, in mediæval France

or mediæval England, in the camp or the court, the prisons of Edinburgh or

the purlieus of Alsatia. He has laughed at us Catholics good‐naturedly

sometimes, but despite that, his novels did us a vast service at a time

when our road was very dark, and we were looked upon at best as something

utterly inhuman—something, in fact, like what the sailor conceived who,

when stranded somewhere with his mess‐mate in the neighborhood of the

North Pole, beheld for the first time a white bear squatted on its

haunches before them, and taking a contented survey.

“What’s that ’ere beggar, Jack?”

“Oh!” said the other, taking a solemn glance at the animal, between the

whiffs of his pipe, “I can’t say exactly, but I expect it’s one o’ them

there what they call Roman Cawtholics too.”

Scott first made us known to the mass of English readers in a fair way.

The barriers of anti‐Catholic prejudice, centuries old, which had resisted

stoutly and stubbornly every effort which reason, right, and common

humanity made against it, crumbled at once beneath the fairy wand of the

magician, and English Protestants came to know something of us and

recognize us, though still in a cautious manner, as fellow‐men.

From Scott all readers may undoubtedly derive much good. And now we turn

to the others, the leaders of modern fiction: the standard, though, as we

showed, not the most widely read authors of the day.

They are Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer; and though the men themselves, so far

as their lives are known to us, had little or no faith in any particular

church or any particular creed, and must therefore be wanting in a firm,

steadfast groundwork, absolutely necessary to impart a pure, high‐minded

spirit to their writings, we lay this aside, and look at them only through

their works. In Thackeray and Bulwer we have two eminently clever, highly

cultivated men—writers who cannot fail to grace everything that they

touch, who cannot fail to interest deeply and always. They were men of

much learning, of great insight into character, whose mode of life and

circle of acquaintances threw them into the heart of the world, their

world, and gave them every facility of knowing it thoroughly. They came

and saw. And what is the result of their investigation? They found it all

a great sham. The genius of both consists in thoroughly exposing this

great sham, in tearing off the gilded mask, and showing the hollow, empty,

grim death’s‐head beneath it; in leaving not a rag to cover its nakedness.

After reading Thackeray, there springs up in us an utter contempt for

ourselves and for the world in general. All human nature is false, rotten,

and utterly worthless. There is no religion in it, no faith, and as a

consequence no honesty and no law save the law of expediency. If there are

any characters to admire at all, they are certainly not his good men; for

they, and those of Dickens also—Tom Pinch, for instance—are the most

insipid numskulls that ever crossed our vision; the most wretched

caricatures of goodness that could possibly be conceived. Very truly might

he say that, “when he started a story, he was very dubious as to the

morality of his characters.” We respect his good men infinitely less than

his rogues. Among them he is at home: in his Lord Steynes, his Becky

Sharpes, his drunken parsons, his wicked gray‐hairs, his asses or black‐

legs among the young, his solemn humbugs, his tuft‐hunters, his silly,

useless, vain, untruthful women, his worldly mammas who hold up their

charming daughters at auction; those charming daughters who submit to it

with such good grace, who simper so chittishly under their pink bonnets

and look for soft places on the sofa to faint; his designing and

unprincipled adventuresses, to whom the world is as a market, a betting

ring, or a faro‐table, and the thing to be sold, the stake to be played

for, is the virtue they never possessed. Such is Thackeray’s world; and he

has done well to show it up so openly and unsparingly in all its

nakedness. But is it altogether a true portrait; could he do no more than

this? Is this the true world, after all—so utterly depraved and given over

to evil? Are there no such things as truth, honesty, morality, religion,

among us? Are there no men and women, no bodies, endowed with sense

enough, power enough, and wit enough to give the lie to this, and bring

this false world with shame to their feet? If there be, it is not to be

found in the pages of Thackeray.

In Bulwer, it is the same story told in Bulwer’s way, with less of heart

and more of licentiousness. Thackeray was, we believe, a virtuous man, as

the phrase goes; that is, he was contented with one wife, paid his bills,

kept his word, and very rarely woke with a headache. But Bulwer rather

glories, or was wont to do, in the opposite character. He used to be fond

of telling us that he knew the world; had mixed in, shared, felt its vices

and its follies. He comes out of this world of his, sits down, and tells

us all about it; what sort of men and women he found in it; what motives

actuate them; what they live for, what code of morality they follow. Taken

as a whole, their code of morality is fashion; their temple is the world;

their religion, worldliness; their god, themselves. Crime is only crime in

the humble; in the wealthy it is elevated into vice. Such is the doctrine

of the Bulwer world; the doctrine that our children imbibe unconsciously,

while only diverted momentarily by the interest of the story. So far,

then, notwithstanding grace of style, elegance of diction, happiness of

conception—all which may be found in a hundred writers infinitely

superior, essayists and historians—we have nothing but a very doubtful

negative gain.

And Dickens—who has made us weep over fireside virtues, the hardness and

quiet nobleness of humble struggle, and the greatness of spirit that beats

as strong in the cottage as on the throne—must we cast him into the same

category? Hard as it is to say, we find him wanting, though in a less

degree than the two above‐mentioned. He has fought sham, and fought it, as

few others have done, successfully. He did not take up the whole world and

fight it as one gigantic falsehood. This is useless. The world is large

enough and strong enough to withstand the mightiest single‐handed and hold

its own. It will not be put down in this way, and it only laughs at the

tooting tin whistles that are continually blowing such shrill but tiny

blasts of regeneration at it, till they crack and are silenced for ever.

Dickens fought it as the first Napoleon fought the combinations arrayed

against him; he cut them off in detachments. So with the world; you must

take it by pieces. Show it one sham, and all the other shams will cry

shame. The silks, and the satins, and the perfumed licentiousness of the

drawing‐room, Dickens left to other hands. But he opened up to the eyes of

these fine folk, who sinned so elegantly in their carriages and palaces, a

black, yawning, startling gulf right under their feet; with its hot

elements seething in corruption and danger beneath them, because they

would not look at it; because they would not recognize this other nation,

as Disraeli called it in _Sybil_; because that world was to them as far

off and unknown as Timbuctoo. He showed them the thieves’ and harlots’

dens, and how they were fed; by the innocent and pure, brutalized by the

system of the jail, school, and workhouse, presided over by such men as

have lately stood unabashed in the broad light of day before us, and

openly confessed to cruelties that Squeers would have blushed at; who

passed unharmed and triumphant from the court of justice, and found

lawyers and excellent “ministers of God’s Word” to uphold them, and

proclaimed in the press and elsewhere that they were honest, humane men

and maligned saints. Dickens showed us what these Squeerses and Stigginses

were made of. He showed us what the jails were made of, the asylums, the

workhouses, the schools; and undoubtedly aided in effecting many a reform.

He warmed our hearts towards each other, and towards the unfortunates to

whom all life was a bitter trial from birth to the grave. He undoubtedly

did great good; and many a book of his is a never‐ending, never‐wearying

sermon, preached to a broad humanity. As Catholics we owe him a deep debt

for never having systematically or seriously abused his talents by abusing

us, where abuse is ever welcome and well rewarded. But he has given us so

much that we look for more from him; for some great, broad, sound

principles to guide us through the hard battle of life; since his problem

was life, human nature, its difficulties and its dangers. While confessing

our debt to him for what he has done, we find a good deal in Dickens that

we do not like. His code of ethics is a very easy one, and a very

dangerous one, running into that indifferentism so prevalent and

demoralizing to‐day. We find, after reading him, that there is a great

amount of evil in the world counterbalanced by a tolerably fair amount of

good, and that it is useless to hope for anything more. That, so far as

religion goes, mankind may be divided into two classes—the humbugs and the

humbugged: the humbugs—the Chadbands, the Stigginses—getting decidedly the

better of the bargain. That, provided a man is not intolerably bad, he is

as good as the generality of his neighbors, and has a fair chance of

arriving safe at the end of life’s journey, wherever or whatever that end

may be, without being extraordinarily particular about it. That

drunkenness is not a vice unworthy of man, it is rather an amiable

weakness, a good joke, something funny, something to be laughed at;

something that you and ourselves might fall into now and again without

doing much harm. Nowhere in Dickens, as far as we recollect, does

drunkenness appear as what it is, a vice lower than the appetite of the

brute. As for our quarrel with him as Americans, though a grievous and a

just one, we will let that pass now. He endeavored to atone for it at the

end, so let it rest with him in his grave. In considering his works as a

whole, his almost unrivalled power of moving us to laughter or to tears,

we cannot help contrasting what he has done, great as it is, with what he

might have done had he been endowed with a clear religious belief, and not

a heart open only to mere human goodness.

To conclude, then: the point of our article is this. The novel is a power

among us to‐day: a new weapon thrown into the midst of the strife of good

and evil, to be taken up by either party. Those who would uproot all

morality, all law, all faith, the basis of humanity, have been quick to

see its efficacy, seize upon it, and turn it to a terrible account. It is

not so much the open direct teachings of heathen, pagan,

rationalistic—call it what you will, it means the same in the long

run—philosophy that we are to fear. The intellects that breathe in that

atmosphere are few and far between. But when this heathenism comes

filtered down to us through sources that meet us at every turn, and

impregnates and poisons the innocent streams that ought to beautify and

fertilize the intellect of the mass—when it comes to us half disguised in

the literature that we place in the hands of our sons and daughters, it is

time for us to purge this poison out.

Stop novels we cannot. Let preachers thunder as they may, they will be

written, and they will be read. It is for us to seize upon that weapon,

and turn it to our own purpose. We have already done so to a degree. Our

great thinkers, Wiseman, Newman, have recognized the necessity of this,

and themselves set us the example. But not to such men as these are we to

look for a Catholic school of novelists: their duties are higher, their

work more laborious, though not, and we may say it advisedly, from the

necessities of the day more important. We want a crowd of such writers as

Gerald Griffin, Bernard McCabe, Lady Fullerton, the authoress of _The

House of Yorke_. In France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Spain, we have

been more successful. The Countess of Hahn Hahn, Bolanden, Mrs. Craven,

Conscience, Manzoni, Fernan Caballero, show us that Catholic writers who

give themselves to this necessary and noble work can make the novel their

own, and compete successfully even in the matter of sale with the Dumases,

the Eugene Sues, George Sands, Wilkie Collinses, Charles Reades, Miss

Braddons. Their works are received with heartfelt approval by the critics

of the Protestant press. And we cannot refrain from thanking these

gentlemen for the very fair, honest and manly, and conscientious use they

make of their pens in this particular at least. Critics are heartily weary

of the mass of rubbish they are compelled to wade through week after week,

month after month. If anything, they are too mild. We lack something of

that hearty knock‐down criticism which prevailed in the palmy days of the

quarterlies; which killed or cured; which lashed Byron into savagery and

brought out his true genius; which crushed the weakly and the worthless.

Catholic novelists, and Protestant also, have a noble field before them

wherein to sow and reap. It is for them to show that vice and unchastity

are not the only subjects which can interest us; that godliness and _true_

love are not such dull, insipid, everyday things; that suffering and self‐

denial and sacrifice for a noble purpose, the soul‐conflict of human

passion against the eternal decrees, and its mastery after much struggle

and weary strife, are full of the profoundest interest for man; that

history is but the chronicle of this conflict, and when rightly read shows

it forth in every page; that our souls can be fired, our flagging senses

stimulated, our admiration aroused, by the well‐told story of the struggle

of right when we see a God moving and acting in it all, far more than by

the adoration of indecency deified.

Review Of Vaughan’s Life Of S. Thomas: Concluded.(114)

In our last number, we endeavored to give our readers some idea of Prior

Vaughan’s _Life of S. Thomas of Aquin_. We purposely omitted, however, to

say anything of his treatment of the personal history of the saint

himself. The name of Thomas of Aquin belongs to church history, to

theology and philosophy; but it also belongs to what is known by the

somewhat uncouth name of hagiography; and the story of the _saint_ is more

engaging to the greater number of readers, than the history of the

theologian or the philosopher. We have already hinted that some of Prior

Vaughan’s best pages are to be found in the narrative of the saint’s

personal story.

Biography is as old as the days of Confucius, or at least as the times of

his early disciples; and whilst its object has been, on the whole, the

same in all ages, its forms have undergone infinite variety. Men have

written Lives in order to cheat Death of his victims. They have tried to

keep heroes alive by embalming them in incorruptible and imperishable

speech, that all time might know them, and their influence might reach

from age to age. Biography has always had a moral purpose: to make men

patriotic, or brave, or virtuous—to make them better in heart, rather than

more subtle in intellect. Example being the great motive power in the

world, the images of men in books have done much to shape the world’s

course. But the books that have preserved the memory of heroic men have

been of many different sorts. In old times, they used to be books of

anecdote—books which were a threaded series of pithy sayings and generous

deeds, each with a point of its own, and altogether tending to form the

citizen, the soldier, or the virtuous man. And the style of Plutarch and

of Diogenes Laertius was continued by Ven. Bede, by William of Malmesbury,

by Froissart, and by the innumerable chroniclers of the middle ages. The

biographer speaks in his own person now and then, but his words are very

brief, and are often not so much an assistance to the tale, as a break in

it or a sort of private _aside_ with the reader. The personal features of

the hero, his mind or his body, are not made much of by the old

biographers. You hear about his height, his complexion, the color of his

hair, or the length of his chin; but you are never told when his eye

flashes or his lip curls. Dates are not matters of importance. You have

his birth and his death, but there is none of that curious comparative

chronology which modern readers know of. And as for any sense of the

picturesque, any idea of scene‐painting or putting in backgrounds, it need

not be said that the old biographies are as plain as the background of a

Greek theatre. They now and then give particulars of time, place, and

circumstance which their modern transcribers seize upon as a miner seizes

on the rare and welcome nugget; but these are entirely beyond their own

intention. The historical and the moral are the only two elements to be

found in lives from Xenophon down to Dr. Johnson. The latter biographer

suggests that, in his days, the _moralizing_ element had developed out of

the merely moral. But the life of Prior and the life of Alcibiades are not

very distantly related. The time was coming when lives began to be

picturesque. The growth of the propensity to the picturesque is a curious

problem. Why is it that Homer never describes Troy, that Herodotus never

gives us a picture of Marathon, that Cæsar has no eye for the Rhine, and

that Froissart does not paint St. Denis on the day of the Oriflamme,

whilst, on the other hand, Montalembert stops his story to describe the

Western Isles, De Broglie lets us see the Council of Nicea as it sat,

Stanley consecrates pages to paint Judæa and Carmel, and every writer of a

saint’s life at the present hour provides for a picture or two in every

chapter? Who began this? We do not mean who began the picturesque in

literature, for that question, though a curious one is not so difficult to

answer; but who began the picturesque in biography? It is Chateaubriand

who usually gets the credit of having initiated all the romance and

sentimentality that has crept into serious literature during the last

half‐century. Chateaubriand has only left, if we remember rightly, one

attempt at biography, and the _Vie de Rancé_ contains certainly sentiment

and romance enough, but it is not graphic in the way that modern

biographies are. The author dashes off brilliant sketches of society, he

recites imaginary scenes, or rather episodes, in which nature plays her

part, he makes incisive remarks, and utters beautiful poetry; but when he

comes face to face with De Rancé, the penitent and the monk, his hand

seems to falter, and he grows feeble and disappointing, just where a

modern writer would have seized the opportunity of powerful painting and

strong situation. For ourselves, whatever influence Chateaubriand had—and

he had much—in directing men’s thoughts to analogies that lie beneath the

surface of nature, of history, and of the human heart, we are inclined to

attribute the modern craving for the picturesque to the development of a

quality in which Chateaubriand did not especially excel; we mean,

earnestness and reality. Many causes, and most of all, perhaps, that

series of political and religious phenomena which is summed up in the word

_revolution_, have combined, during the present century, to take

literature out of the hands of merely professional writers, or to make

those only choose it as a profession who have something earnest to say.

Style and thought have come to be considered one thing. As De Quincey

observes, style is not the mere alien apparelling of a thought, but rather

its very incarnation.

It is easy to see how earnestness leads to the picturesque in biography.

In proportion as the writer is able to fix his mind upon his hero, in the

same proportion he comes to realize him, as the phrase is. Not only are

all the facts and circumstances collected with the care of a lawyer

getting up a brief, but words and names that look dead and speechless are

analyzed as with magnifying power, till they take significance and life.

Every name, as Aristotle saw, is itself a picture; but it is a picture

that only requires a more powerful imaginative lens to grow greater,

fuller, and more living. And therefore the earnest writer, because he

looks more intently at his subject, sees more in it to put upon his

canvas; and the reader, struck by the significance that he cannot gainsay,

and moved by the pictures, as pictures always move the human fancy, is

held in bonds by the writer, and remembers long and vividly what impressed

his thought so strongly at the first. He is like one who has seen the site

of a great battle, and has once for all fixed for himself, as he gazed,

the relative positions and movements of the fight; he will not easily

forget it. Something must, no doubt, be added to this; something must be

allowed to modern culture, to modern appreciation of art as art, to modern

love of landscape, and to the general _romanesque_ tendency begun by

Chateaubriand. But so far from the tendency to picturesque biography being

wholly attributable to sentiment, we hold that it is precisely our modern

earnestness that makes us demand to see things nearer and more real.

Doubtless the picturesque biographer is exposed to many dangers, and his

readers to many trials. He may “realize” what does not exist; he may

“analyze” out of his inner consciousness alone; he may usurp what is the

privilege of the poet and the romancer, and give names and habitations not

only to airy nothings, but, what is much more serious, to unsubstantial

mistakes. And therefore we do not wonder that many well‐meaning people,

with the results of romantic biography or history before their eyes, and

youthful remembrances of Lingard and Butler, have come to distrust every

account of a personage or of a fact which contains the smallest mixture of

imagination.

The length of these prefatory remarks may lead the reader to suppose that

Prior Vaughan has written picturesquely and sensationally about S. Thomas

of Aquin. Yet this, stated absolutely, would by no means be true. We shall

presently give one or two passages, in which a fine imaginative and

descriptive power, we think, is displayed. But the book bears no sign of a

straining after pictorial effect. Yet its whole idea is pre‐eminently

picturesque. Prior Vaughan has written with the idea of not merely giving

the history of his chosen saint, but of localizing it in time and in

space. It is with this view that he enters into descriptions of Aquino, of

Monte Cassino, of Paris and its University; it is for this that he brings

S. Dominic and S. Francis on the canvas, and sketches the figures of

Frederick II., of Abelard, of S. Bernard, of William of Paris. Each of

these names has some connection with Thomas of Aquin, and each throws

fresh light on the central object, when it is analyzed with care.

Here is the description, taken from the opening pages of the first volume,

of the town of Aquino, which was, if not the birthplace of the saint, at

least the principal seat of his family:

“The little town of Aquino occupies the centre of a vast and

fertile plain, commonly called Campagna Felice, in the ancient

Terra di Lavoro. This plain is nearly surrounded by bare and

rugged mountains, one of which pushes further than the rest into

the plain; and on its spur, which juts boldly out, and which was

called significantly Rocca Sicca, was situated the ancient

stronghold of the Aquinos. The remnants of this fortress, as seen

at this day, seem so bound up with the living rock, that they

appear more like the abrupt finish of the mountain than the ruins

of a mediæval fortress. Yet they are sufficient to attest the

ancient splendor and importance of the place; and the torrent of

Melfi, which, tumbling out of the gorges of the Alps, runs round

the castellated rock, marks it out as a fit habitation for the

chivalrous and adventurous lords of Aquino, Loreto, and

Belcastro.”—i. 3, 4.

Prior Vaughan, as a Benedictine, is naturally drawn to dwell upon the fact

of S. Thomas having lived as a boy for five or six years in the Abbey of

Monte Cassino. It certainly seems true that the child was placed by his

parents in the abbey with a view to his continuing there after he came to

years of discretion; just as so many children had been from the days of S.

Benedict downwards. “To all intents and purposes,” says the author, “S.

Thomas of Aquin was a Benedictine monk. Had he continued in the habit till

his death—without any further solemnity beyond the offering of his

parents—he would have been reckoned as much a Benedictine as S. Gregory,

S. Augustine, S. Anselm, or S. Bede” (i. 20). We do not think that this

can be denied. It was affirmed on oath, in the process of canonization, by

an exceedingly trustworthy witness, that the saint’s father “made him a

monk” at Monte Cassino. And a monk he was, no doubt, as much as a boy of

twelve can be a monk—and the Council of Trent, be it remembered, had not

then fixed the age of religious vows at sixteen. But the frightful

confusion of the times brought his Benedictine days to a premature close.

Monte Cassino was pillaged and nearly destroyed, the community was

scattered, and Thomas of Aquin went to Naples to study—and to find the

habit of S. Dominic.

The personal character which is drawn in this work is that of a large‐

minded, serene man, of powerful natural genius and winning character, who

steps forth from the ranks of mediæval nobility, and, turning his back on

sword and lance, and giving no heed to the tumult of war and rapine,

deliberately consecrated himself wholly to God, and, grace being added to

natural gifts, illuminates the world as a doctor and as a saint. It would

be interesting to dwell, if we had space, upon the circumstances of S.

Thomas joining the Order of S. Dominic. The opposition of his family, the

utter unscrupulousness with which they carried out their opposition, the

quiet yet fervent persistence of the saint—feudal violence, maternal

desperation, and ecclesiastical interference—all this makes up a scene of

wonderful reality and deep suggestiveness. But we must pass it over. S.

Thomas became a Dominican, and we follow him from Naples to Cologne, from

Cologne to Paris. We follow the course of his academical life, his

writings, his teaching, his promotion to the grade of bachelor, of

licentiate, of doctor. The first chapter of the second volume is entitled

“S. Thomas made doctor.” It contains a lively picture of the great

University of Paris and its life from day to day; and with it, moreover,

the author gives an eloquent summary of the character of his hero, part of

which we extract, because it is in some sort a key to the whole story of

his life.

“A man with the power possessed by the Angelical could afford to

be serene and tranquil. He lived, as it were, behind the veil; he

saw through, and valued at its intrinsic worth, this earth’s

stage, and took the measure of all the actors on it. Like Moses,

he came down from the mountain, into the turmoil of the chafing

world below, and, enlarged by the greatness of the vision in which

he habitually lived, it shrank into insignificance before his eye;

and those events or influences which excited the minds of others,

and disturbed their peace, were looked upon by him somewhat in the

same way as we may imagine some majestic, solitary eagle surveys

from his high crag, with half‐unconscious eye, the world of woods

below him. The Angelical himself had drawn his first lessons from

a mountain eyrie. His elastic mind, even as a boy, had expanded,

as he looked down from the mighty abbey, on teeming plain and

rugged mountain, with the far‐distant ranges of the snowy

Apennines standing up delicate and crisp against the sky. God, who

made all this, had drawn him to himself, and the fingers of a

heavenly hand, striking on his large, solitary heart, had sealed

him imperially, for all his life to come, as the great master of

the heavenly science, and as the gentle prince of peace....

Immense weight of character, surpassing grasp of mind, and

keenness of logical discernment, added to a sovereign benignity

and patience, and to a gentleness and grace which spoke from his

eyes and thrilled in the accents of his voice, made men conscious,

when in contact with him, that they were in presence of a man of

untold gifts, and yet of one so exquisitely noble as never to

display them, save for the benefit of others. Men knew that he had

the power to crush them; but since he was so great, they knew also

that he never would misuse it; they found him ever self‐forgetting

and self‐restrained. A character with such a capability of

asserting itself, and yet ever manifesting such gentle self‐

repression, must have acted with a singular fascination on any

generous mind that came into relation with it.... He was a vast

system in himself, and appears to have been specially created for

achieving such an end. He was one single, simple man—doubtless.

But he was a ‘system,’ or the representation of a system—the

highest type of what heroism can do in human heart and mind.

Christ, in choosing him, had chosen the most majestic of human

creations, converting it into a powerful exponent of the light,

peace, and splendor which strike out from the cross. He, if any

man, had rested on the bosom of his Lord. He, the great Angelical,

with the golden sun flashing from his breast, and the fire of

heaven scintillating round his massive brow—he, if any man, had

broken the bread of the strong, and had refreshed his lips with

the blood of the grape, and had been transfigured by the draught.

There is a largeness about him which, whilst it expands the heart,

seems almost to take away the breath. We look up at him, and say:

‘How great art thou! how gently courteous, and how tenderly true!

Sweet was the power of God, and the grace of Christ, which made

thee all thou art. O gentle mighty sun, shine on in thy sweet

radiance, spread thy pure invigorating rays amidst the deep sad

shadows of the earth!’... Such was his character. And, prescinding

from his natural gifts, how did he become so mighty? The cause has

been touched on and partially developed already. The reader,

adequately to realize it, would do well to study and master, with

his heart as well as with his head, the monastic theology of S.

Victor’s—the Benedictine science of the saints. Grasp the spirit

of S. Anselm, S. Bernard, and the Victorines, weigh it as a whole,

follow its drift, mark its salient points, learn to recognize the

aroma of that sweet mystic life of tough yet tender service and

self‐forgetfulness, and you will have discovered that spring of

living waters which ran into the heart and mind of the great

Angelical, and lent to all his faculties—aye, and even to his very

person and expression—a warmth and glow which seemed to have come

direct from heaven. From the rock, which was Christ, flowed

straight and swift into the paradise of his soul four crystal

waters: Love—fixing the entire being on the sovereign good, and

doing all for him alone; Reverence—that is, self‐distrust and

self‐forgetfulness, produced by the vision of God’s high majesty

awfully gazed on with the eye of faith; Purity—treading all

created things, and self first, under the feet, and, with entire

freedom of spirit, basking and feeding in the unseen world;

Adoration—love, reverence, and purity, combined in one act of

supreme worship, as the creature, with all he has and all he is,

bends prone to the earth, and with a feeling of dust and ashes

whispers to his soul: ‘The Lord he is God, he made us, and not we

ourselves!’ ” (ii. 31‐48.)

The mind and heart are both fond of dwelling on the heroic; and the heroic

is met with at every step in the life of S. Thomas. We are reminded, as we

read, of that Achilles on whose prowess hangs the fate of Troy and of the

Greeks,

“Full in the midst, high‐towering o’er the rest,”

his limbs encased in an armor that is more divine than that which the

father of fire forged for the son of Peleus, the gold upon his breast, the

sword of the Spirit by his side, the “broad refulgent shield” of heavenly

faith upon his arm, and in his hand the great paternal spear that none but

he can wield—not a “whole ash” felled upon Pelion by old Chiron; but the

seven gifts of the Christian doctorate wielded by the force of seraphic

love. His appearance in the lists of argument, in the contest of the

schools, in the field of intellectual strife, has all the _quelling_ power

that is ascribed to the greatest heroes of the battle‐field; and his place

in the records of mental and theological history is that of a discoverer,

a conqueror, and a king. Here is a scene which is perhaps more or less

familiar, but it is a type of many scenes in this wonderful life. It

occurred whilst Thomas was under Albertus Magnus, at Cologne:

“Master Albert had selected a very difficult question from the

writings of Denis the Areopagite, and had given it to some of his

scholars for solution. Whether in joke or in earnest, they passed

on the difficulty to Thomas, and begged him to write his opinion

upon it. Thomas took the paper to his cell, and, taking his pen,

first stated, with great lucidity, all the objections that could

be brought against the question; and then gave their solutions. As

he was going out of his cell, this paper accidentally fell near

the door. One of the brothers passing picked it up, and carried it

at once to Master Albert. Albert was excessively astonished at the

splendid talent which now, for the first time, by mere accident,

he discovered in that big, silent student. He determined to bring

out, in the most public manner, abilities which had been for so

long a time so modestly concealed. He desired Thomas to defend a

thesis before the assembled school, on the following day. The hour

arrived. The hall was filled. There sat Master Albert. Doubtless

the majority of those who were to witness the display imagined

that they were about to assist at an egregious failure. How could

that heavy, silent lad—who could not speak a word in

private—defend in public school, against the keenest of opponents,

the difficult niceties of theology? But they were soon undeceived,

for Thomas spoke with such clearness, established his thesis with

such remarkable dialectical skill, saw so far into the coming

difficulties of the case, and handled the whole subject in so

masterly a manner, that Albert himself was constrained to cry

aloud, ‘_Tu non videris tenere locum respondentis sed

determinantis_!’ ‘Master,’ replied Thomas with humility, ‘I know

not how to treat the question otherwise.’ Albert then thought to

puzzle him, and show him that he was still a disciple. So, one

after another, he started objections, created a hundred

labyrinths, weaving and interweaving all manner of subtle

arguments, but in vain. Thomas, with his calm spirit and keen

vision, saw through every complication, had the key to every

fallacy, the solution for every enigma, and the art to unravel the

most tangled skein—till, finally, Albert, no longer able to

withhold the expression of his admiration, cried out to his

disciples, who were almost stupefied with astonishment: ‘We call

this young man a dumb ox, but so loud will be his bellowing in

doctrine that it will resound throughout the whole world’ ” (i.

321, 322).

How exactly this prophecy was fulfilled need not be said. S. Thomas was

soon employed in speaking to the world what God had given him to say. He

spoke in the class‐hall and in the church; he wrote for young and for old;

and wherever his voice was heard men wondered as at a portent. The

students of Paris, the professors of France and of Italy, his fellow‐

religious, the intimate friend of his privacy, the rough people round his

pulpit, the pope himself as he sat and heard him preach, every one said

over again the wondering words that Albert the Great had used in the hall

at Cologne. And if we had no record of what men thought, we should still

be secure in saying that they were astonished; for we are astonished

ourselves. Many men who have made a great noise in their lifetime have

left posterity to wonder, not at themselves, but at their reputation. But

the writer of the _Summa_ _must_ have been great even in his lifetime.

That breadth of view, that keenness of analysis, that comprehensive reach

of thought, that enormous memory—we can see it for ourselves, and every

story of his prowess we can readily credit from what the imperishable

record of his written works attests to our own eye. Prior Vaughan relates

interesting anecdotes of his power of discussion, and of his influence

over the irreverent world of his scholastic compeers, filling up the

outlines of the annalist with no greater exercise of imagination than is

fairly permitted to the serious biographer.

But the heroic in the life of the Angel of the Schools would not be

perfect unless the giant strength had been joined to the gentleness of the

servant of Christ. There is nothing, perhaps, that will so strike a reader

of this Life as his mild, equal, and gentle spirit. It does not seem that

S. Thomas was naturally of a quick and impetuous nature, like S. Ignatius

or S. Francis of Sales. From his youth he had been a contemplative in the

cloisters of Monte Cassino; when but a child he had charmed his teachers

by asking with childish meditative face, “_What was God?_” His quiet

determination had conquered his mother when she opposed him being a

Dominican; his calm courage had converted his sisters and shamed his

brothers. And in the schools, his silence and his humility, virtues never

more difficult to be practised than in the field of intellectual combat,

had soon become the marvel of all who knew him. A great natural gift—the

gift of a changeless serenity of heart and temper—was perfected in him by

grace, until it became heroic. The contest he once had in the Paris

schools with Brother John of Pisa, a Franciscan friar who afterwards

became Archbishop of Canterbury, is typical of what always happened when

the Angelical discussed:

“John of Pisa, though a keen and a learned man, had no chance with

the Angelical. It would have been folly for any one, however

skilled—yes, for Bonaventure, or Rochelle, or even Albert the

Great himself—to attempt to cross rapiers with Br. Thomas. He was

to the manner born. Br. John did all that was in him, used his

utmost skill—but it was useless: the Angelical simply upset him

time after time. The Minorite grew warm; the Angelical, bent

simply on the truth, went on completing, with unmoved serenity,

the full discomfiture of the poor Franciscan. John of Pisa at

length could stand it no longer. In his heat he forgot his middle

term and forgot himself, and turned upon the saint with sarcasm

and invective. The Angelical in his own gentle, overpowering way,

giving not the slightest heed to these impertinences, went on

replying to him with inimitable tenderness and patience; and

whilst teaching a lesson which, after so many hundred years, men

can still learn, drew on himself, unconsciously, the surprise and

admiration of that vast assembly. Such was the way in which the

Angelical brought the influence of Benedictine _quies_ and

_benignitas_ into the boisterous litigations of the Paris schools.

And what is more, Frigerio tells us that the saint taught the

great lesson of self‐control, not only by the undeviating practice

of his life, but also by his writings; that he looked upon it as

an ‘ignominy’ (ignominia) to soil the mouth with angry words; and

contended that ‘quarrels,’ immoderate contentions, vain

ostentation of knowledge, and the trick of puzzling an adversary

with sophistical arguments—such as is often the practice of

dialecticians—should be banished from the schools” (ii. 57‐59).

The appearance of such a man as S. Thomas, in the midst of the scholastic

agitation of the XIIIth century, partakes of that providential character

which the eye of faith sees in the lives of all the great saints. We have

already, in a former notice, touched upon the marvellous way in which he

turned the current of thought against rationalism, heresy, and impiety.

But his personal influence was no less than what we may term his official.

At the moment when theology was beginning, with philosophy as her

handmaid, to enter on that course of development in which system, on the

one hand, advanced in equal steps with discovery on the other, it was the

will of God that a saint should show the world in his own person a perfect

model of the Catholic scholastic theologian. His powers were undeniable,

his genius imperial, his rights undoubted; and he used his privileges and

his grand position to enforce upon the noisy spirits of the time, and upon

all generations of students yet to be, that the true type of theological

discussion was “_humilis collatio, pacifica disputatio_.”

The theologian was to be no proud dogmatist, laying down the law as if he

had discovered all truth, but one who, taking the faith for his standing‐

point, humbly put forth and peacefully discussed the views that he thought

to be true. This was his great lesson; he taught it in the tone of his own

lectures and discussions, in the turn of his phrase when he wrote, in the

meekness of his answers, and in the moderation of his conclusions. And we

may thank the Providence that sent S. Thomas for that calm and judicial

serenity which has ever been the prevailing character of Catholic

theology. The great Dominican school that he founded carried on the

traditions of their master; and (to take an example not far from our own

days) the weighty and admirably clear pages of a Billuart are not

unworthy, in their broad, searching, yet tranquil argument, of the master

whom they follow. A troubled reach of time separates Paris in the XIIIth

century from Douay in the XVIIth; yet the spirit of S. Thomas had been

living over it all. Not only in his own religious family was his influence

strong. The Franciscan Order has its own tradition; but it is a tradition

that sprung up side by side with the Dominican. It was the seraphic

Bonaventure that sat beside Thomas of Aquin in the hall of the University

of Paris on the day when each of them received the insignia of the

doctorate. They were friends—more than friends, for each knew the other to

be a saint. Each heard the other speak, and the spirit of one was the

spirit of both. And in spite of divergences and varieties, such as our

Lord permits in order to draw unity from diversity or good from evil, the

two Orders have taught in harmonious spirit during all the long centuries

they have been before the world. S. Thomas, who reverenced S. Bonaventure,

has had the reverence of all S. Bonaventure’s children; and we have before

us as we write the _Cursus Theologiæ_ of a venerable bearded Capuchin,

considerably esteemed in the theological classes of the present day, who

stops in his enumeration of fathers and of doctors to add his emphatic

tribute of veneration to the Angelic Doctor, who, he reminds us, is, with

S. Augustine, “_præcipuus theologorum omnium temporum magister_”—the great

master of theologians of all ages. And what we say of the Franciscan Order

we may say of that great school which dates its traditions from that

Cardinal Toletus who was the pupil of the Dominican Soto. It is not that

the Jesuit theologians, even the many‐sided Suarez, have looked up to S.

Thomas as to their prince and teacher: this they have done; but even if

they had left his teaching, or where they have left his teaching, they

have followed his spirit. That spirit we might name the spirit of

_conciliation_. We do not mean the spirit of compromise, or of going only

half‐way in matters of truth. S. Thomas was as downright as Euclid. But

what we refer to is that readiness to admit all the good or the true in an

opposite view, the shrinking from forcing a vague word upon an adversary,

the impartial dissection of words and phrases which issues from the

scholastic and Thomistic method of _distinction_. The _distinguo_ of the

tyro or the sophist is a trick that is easily learned and easily laughed

at; but we claim for the scholastic method that its _distinguo_ is the

touchstone of truth and of falsehood; it requires acuteness and stored‐up

learning to make it and sustain it; but it requires, above all, that

perfect fairness of mind, that judicial impartiality of view, which calms

the promptings of ambitious originality; it requires that patience which

seeks only the truth and cares nothing for the victory, and that honesty

which is afraid of declamation, and sets its matter out in unadorned and

colorless simplicity. This is the true scholastic spirit, and it is pre‐

eminently the spirit of S. Thomas. If we might personify that grand

science which has been so high in this world, and seems now to have sunk

so low (yet, with the signs around us, we dare hardly say so now), it

would be under the figure of him who is its prince and lawgiver.

“See him, then, our great Angelical, as with calm and princely

bearing he advances, a mighty‐looking man, built on a larger scale

than those who stand around him, and takes the seat just vacated

by Bonaventure. His portrait as a boy has been sketched already.

Now he has grown into the maturity of a man, and his grand

physique has expanded into its perfect symmetry and manly

strength, manifesting, even in his frame, as Tocco says, that

exquisite combination of force with true proportion which gave so

majestic a balance to his mind. His countenance is pale with

suffering, and his head is bald from intense and sustained mental

application. Still, the placid serenity of his broad, lofty brow,

the deep gray light in his meditative eyes, his firm, well‐

chiselled lips, and fully defined jaw, the whole pose of that

large, splendid head—combining the manliness of the Roman with the

refinement and delicacy of the Greek—impress the imagination with

an indescribable sense of giant energy of intellect, of royal

gentleness of heart, and untold tenacity of purpose. That sweet

face reflects so exquisite a purity, that noble bust is cast in so

imperial a mould, that the sculptor or the painter would be struck

and arrested by it in a moment; the one would yearn to throw so

classical a type into imperishable marble, and the other to

transfer so much grandeur of contour, and such delicacy of

expression, so harmonious a fusion of spotlessness with majesty,

of southern loveliness with intellectual strength, to the enduring

canvas” (ii. 108, 109).

The angelic quality of the Angel of the Schools—his calmness and his power

over men—was not bought without a price. Like all the saints, he too had

to bear the cross, and like all the saints he was not content with

suffering the cross, but he sought it and courted it. We cannot quote much

more of Prior Vaughan’s narrative, or else we would fain draw attention to

the account he gives from authentic sources of Thomas’ holy distress of

mind, and his midnight prayer the night before he received the doctorate.

But the following paragraph must be transcribed:

“Let the carnal man, after looking on the sweet Angelical

fascinating the crowded schools, take the trouble to follow him,

as silently, after the day’s work, he retires to his cell,

seemingly to rest; let him watch him bent in prayer; see him take

from its hiding‐place, when all have gone to sleep, that hard iron

chain; see him—as he looks up to heaven and humbles himself to

earth—without mercy to his flesh, scourge himself with it,

striking blow upon blow, lacerating his body through the greater

portion of the sleepless night: let the carnal man look upon this

touching sight; let him shrink back in horror if he will—still let

him look on it, and he will learn how the saints labored to secure

a chaste and spotless life, and how a man can so far annihilate

self‐seeking as to be gentle with all the world, severe with

himself alone. If in human life there is anything mysteriously

adorable, it is a man of heroic mould and surpassing gifts showing

himself great enough to smite his own body, and to humble his

entire being in pretence of his Judge” (ii. 60, 61).

S. Thomas died in the prime of life—when scarcely forty‐eight years old.

He was called away a little before his great work, the _Summa_, was

completed, as if his Master wished to show the lamenting world that his

own claims were paramount to every other thing. But it was that divine

Master himself who had rendered it necessary to take away his servant when

he did; for S. Thomas could write no more. After that vision and ecstasy

which rapt his soul in the chapel of S. Nicholas at Naples, he ceased to

write, he ceased to dictate; his pen lay idle, and the _Summa_ stood still

in the middle of the questions on penance. It was, as he said to his

companion Reginald, _Non possum!_ “I cannot! Everything that I have

written appears to me as simply rubbish.” From that day of S. Nicholas he

lived in a continual trance: he wrote no more. As the new year (1274) came

in, he set out, at the pope’s call, to attend the general council at

Lyons: but he was never to get so far. He had not journeyed beyond

Campania—he was still travelling along the shores of that sunny region

which had given him birth, when mortal illness arrested him, and he was

taken to the Abbey of Fossa Nuova to die.

“The abbot conducts him through the church into the silent

cloister. Then the whole past seems to break in upon him like a

burst of overflowing sunlight; the calm and quiet abbey, the

meditative corridor, the gentle Benedictine monks; he seems as if

he were at Cassino once again, amidst the glorious visions of his

boyish days—amidst the tender friendships of his early youth,

close on the bones of ancient kings, near the solemn tomb of

Blessed Benedict, in the hallowed home of great traditions, and at

the very shrine of all that is fair and noble in monastic life. He

seemed completely overcome by the memories of the past, and,

turning to the monks who surrounded him, exclaimed ‘_This_ is the

place where I shall find repose!’ and then ecstatically to

Reginald in presence of them all: ‘_Hæc est requies mea in sæculum

sæculi, hic habitabo quoniam elegi eam_—This is my rest for ever

and ever; here will I dwell, for I have chosen it’ ” (ii. 921).

The whole of this last scene of the great saint’s pilgrimage is admirably

and most touchingly brought out by the author, and our readers must go to

it themselves. As we conclude the story, we are forced to agree with Prior

Vaughan when he exclaims, “It is but natural, it is but beautiful, that he

who in early boyhood had been stamped with the signet of S. Benedict,

should return to S. Benedict to die!”

We are sure that this life of S. Thomas of Aquin will do good. It is a

large book, but it deals with a large and a grand life. It is the work of

one who evidently has an interest in his subject far beyond that of the

mere compiler. The earnestness, the warmth, the very redundancy and

fulness of the author’s style, leave the impression of one whose heart is

strongly impressed by the glorious career which he has been following so

minutely, and there is little doubt that his readers will sympathize with

him. And there can be just as little doubt of the benefits which a

practical study of the life of the great doctor will confer upon students,

upon priests, and upon all serious men at the present day. Sanctity taught

by example is always an important lesson; but the saintliness of learning

and genius is still more important and still more rare. We live in an age

when there are numbers of men who are profoundly scientific and splendidly

accomplished in the different branches of knowledge which they profess;

and there is no one who is more sure of the world’s attention and

reverence than the man who can show that he knows something which other

men do not. The present time, therefore, is one at which we are to look

for and to hope for men who in theology and Catholic philosophy shall be

as able and as learned as are the leaders of profane science. Hard work

and unwearying devotedness are essential to this; and the example of S.

Thomas shows us what these things mean. But there is something which is

more necessary still; something which is especially necessary in sacred

science. “_In malevolam animam non intrabit Sapientia, nec habitabit in

corpore subdito peccatis._” There is no such thing as the highest wisdom

without the highest purity of heart. The perfection of the Christian

doctorate is the consequence of the perfect possession and exercise of the

Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost. And the holy fathers who have written on

Christian wisdom tell us repeatedly, using almost identical words, that a

man might as well try to study the sun with purblind eyes as to be perfect

in theology with a heart defiled. There has been no greater example in the

range of sanctity of what S. Augustine calls the “_mens purgatissima_”

than that of him who on account of his purity has been called the

Angelical. Leaving the world as a child, his heart hardly knew what

earthly concupiscence was. With his loins girded by angels’ hands, with

his body subdued by hard living, with his thought always ranging among

high and elevating things, the soul of S. Thomas lived in a region that

did not belong to the world. He learnt his wisdom of the crucifix, he

found his inspirations at the foot of the altar; and the same lips that

dictated the _Commentaries on Aristotle_ were ready to break forth with

the _Lauda Sion_ and the _Pange Lingua_. If he taught in the daytime, he

chastised his body during the watches of the night. Born to a gentle life,

with powerful friends, with the world and its attractions within his

reach, he lived in his narrow cell, cleaving to his desk and to his

breviary, walking the streets with a quick step and downcast eye, letting

the world go on its way. He wanted only one thing—not as a reward for his

labor, because his labor was only a means to a great end—he wanted only

that one object which he asked for when the figure spoke to him from the

Cross, “Thee, O Lord! and thee alone!”

Prior Vaughan has accomplished a task for which he will receive the thanks

of all English‐speaking Catholics. His book will be read, and will be

treasured; for it is a book with a large purpose, carried out with

unwearying labor, presenting the results of wide reading, and offering the

student and the general reader a large variety of solid information and of

suggestive thought. If the book were less honestly wrought out than it is,

we could excuse the author, in consideration of the heart and soul he has

thrown into it. S. Thomas of Aquin is evidently a very real, living being

with him. His hero is no abstraction of the past, no quintessence of a

scholastic that must be looked at as one looks at an Egyptian papyrus in a

museum. He is a man to _know_, not merely to know about; a man who taught

in Paris and who reigns in heaven; a man who led an angel’s life here

below, and who can help us to lead a life more or less angelic from his

place above. To have worked with such a spirit is to have worked in the

true spirit of the Catholic faith. The saints are our teachers and

masters; and, what is more, they are the trumpets that rouse us to battle,

the living voices that make our hearts burn to follow them. And therefore

a true life of a saint will live, and will do its work. Our wish is that

Prior Vaughan’s _S. Thomas_ may make its way into the hearts of earnest

men, and it is our conviction that it _will_ make its way, and that men

will be the better for it.

To S. Mary Magdalen.

’Mid the white spouses of the Sacred Heart,

After its Queen, the nearest, dearest, thou.

Yet the auréola around thy brow

Is not the virgins’. Thine a throne apart.

Nor yet, my Saint, does faith‐illumined art

Thy hand with palm of martyrdom endow:

And when thy hair is all it will allow

Of glory to thy head, we do not start.

O more than virgin in thy penitent love!

And more than martyr in thy passionate woe!

How should thy sisters equal thee above,

Who knelt not with thee on the gory sod?

Or where the crown our worship could bestow

Like that long gold which wiped the feet of God?

God’s Acre.

In all countries and in all creeds, the dead have claimed the affectionate

notice of the living. The idea of housing them, deifying them,

propitiating them, of remembering them in _some_ way, however diverse, has

always been a prominent one. The belief in the soul’s immortality seems to

have been even more clear to the ordinary mind of the natural man than

that of a Supreme and Almighty Being. When Christianity appeared, the

departed had a place assigned them among the members of the church, and

were commemorated as absent brethren gone before their fellows one stage

further on the last great journey; when the Reformation disfranchised

human nature in the XVIth century, and levelled all its hallowed

aspirations with the brute instincts of the animal kingdom, the dead,

though divorced from communion with the living, were yet remembered, and

placed in two categories—the elect, or the precondemned. Another life was

even then believed in, and later branches of the reforming sects all

condescended at least to theorize on the future state of disembodied

spirits. It remained for our times to foster the cruel _un_belief that

dooms our loved ones, not even to everlasting perdition, but to absolute

annihilation. It was hard enough in Puritan days for a pious though

mistaken mind to bring itself to the belief that possibly the loved

companion of childhood, the chosen mate of youth, the venerable parent,

the upright teacher, was one of those predestined to eternal torments, one

of the holocausts to the greater glory of God; but how far harder now for

a fond heart, a clinging nature, to see in those it loves so many

perishable puppets, without future and without hope! But happily there is

a haven to which these storm‐tossed souls may come with the precious

freight of their love and their unerring Catholic instincts. Their

companions and brethren are not gone into trackless chaos, they are not

absorbed into that monstrous “nothing” of which a false philosophy has

made a bewildering bugbear. Every year the church protests against such

revolting doctrines on the day which she publicly consecrates to prayers

for and remembrance of the departed. This festival is like a spiritual

harvest‐home; coming as it does just at the close of the ecclesiastical

year, it marks an epoch in the life of the church suffering; and various

“revelations” made to saints, as well as the collective belief of the

faithful, agree in considering it a day of liberation and rejoicing among

the souls in Purgatory. “God’s Acre” (according to the touching and

suggestive German idiom) is reaped on that auspicious day, though, like

Boaz, the Divine Reaper leaves yet a few ears of corn to be gleaned into

heavenly rest by the prayers of the faithful on earth.

Before we go further into our own beautiful view of the future life, let

us stop to see how other races and religions have treated the dead.

Of the Egyptians, it is difficult to speak except at too great a length,

and, not having at hand sufficient authority, we can only set down what

our recollection will supply. The readers of THE CATHOLIC WORLD will no

doubt remember some interesting articles published a few months since

regarding the ancient civilization of Egypt, in which copious reference

was made to the esteem and respect paid to the dead in that country. The

singular custom of pledging the embalmed body of a father or ancestor, on

the receipt of a loan, was noticed; also the dishonor attaching to the

non‐redemption of such a pledge. A learned English author, speaking

incidentally of Egyptian embalming, mentions that the word mummy is

derived from “mum,” which, he says, is Egyptian for _wax_. Representations

of the embalming process have been found on tombs and sarcophagi, in which

the men engaged in it are seen wearing masks with eagles’ beaks, probably

iron masks, thereby denoting of what a poisonous and dangerous nature this

absolutely incorruptible embalmment must have been. The Pyramids are

perhaps the most imposing funeral monuments ever raised to the memory of

mortals, and even the famous Mausoleum of Artemisia can have had no more

massive or _eternal_ an aspect.

To pass from the cradle of older civilization to the land whose original

peopling has sometimes been attributed, though we believe inaccurately, to

Egyptian enterprise, the America of the Aztec and the Red Indian, we find

in Parkman’s _Jesuits in America_ some lengthy details on the funereal

customs of the Huron tribe, now extinct. He says that “the primitive

Indian believed in the immortality of the soul, but not always in a state

of future punishment or reward. Nor was the good or evil to be rewarded or

punished (when such a belief _did_ exist) of a moral nature. Skilful

hunters, brave warriors, men of influence, went to the happy hunting‐

grounds, while the slothful, the weak, the cowardly, were doomed to eat

serpents and ashes in dreary regions of mist and darkness.... The spirits,

in form and feature, as they had been in life, wended their way through

dark forests to the villages of the dead, subsisting on bark and rotten

wood. On arriving, they sat all day in the crouching posture of the sick,

and when night came hunted the shades of animals, with the shades of bows

and arrows, among the shades of trees and rocks; for all things, animate

and inanimate, were alike immortal, and all passed together to the gloomy

country of the dead.” The public ceremony of exhuming the dead, of which

some interesting details are given further on, was supposed to be the

occasion of the beginning of the other life. The souls “took wing, as some

affirmed, in the shape of pigeons; while the greater number believed that

they journeyed on foot ... to the land of shades, ... but, as the spirits

of the old and of children are too feeble for the march, they are forced

to stay behind, lingering near their earthly homes, where the living often

hear the shutting of their invisible cabin doors, and the weak voices of

the disembodied children driving birds from their corn‐fields.... The

Indian land of souls is not always a region of shadows and gloom. The

Hurons sometimes represented the souls of their dead as dancing

joyously.... According to some Algonquin traditions, heaven was a scene of

endless festivity, ghosts dancing to the sound of the rattle and the

drum.... Most of the traditions agree, however, that the spirits were

beset with difficulties and perils. There was a swift river which must be

crossed on a log that shook beneath their feet, while a ferocious dog

opposed their passage, and drove many into the abyss. This river was full

of sturgeon and other fish, which the ghosts speared for their

subsistence. Beyond was a narrow path between moving rocks which each

instant crashed together, grinding to atoms the less nimble of the

pilgrims who endeavored to pass. The Hurons believed that a personage

named Oscotarach, or the Head‐Piercer, dwelt in a bark house beside the

path, and that it was his office to remove the brains from the heads of

all who went by, as a necessary preparation for immortality. This singular

idea is found also in some Algonquin traditions, according to which,

however, the brain is afterwards restored to its owner.”

Le Clerc, in his _Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie_, tells a curious

story, which is mentioned in a foot‐note by Parkman. It was current in his

(Le Clerc’s) time among the Algonquins of Gaspé and Northern New

Brunswick, and bears a remarkable likeness to the old myth of Orpheus and

Eurydice. “The favorite son of an old Indian died, whereupon the father,

with a party of friends, set out for the land of souls to recover him. It

was only necessary to wade through a shallow lake, several days’ journey

in extent. This they did, sleeping at night on platforms of poles which

supported them above the water. At length, they arrived and were met by

Papkootparout, the Indian Pluto, who rushed on them in a rage, with his

war‐club upraised, but, presently relenting, changed his mind and

challenged them to a game of ball. They proved the victors, and won the

stakes, consisting of corn, tobacco, and certain fruits, which thus became

known to mankind. The bereaved father now begged hard for his son’s soul,

and Papkootparout at last gave it to him in the form and size of a nut,

which, by pressing it hard between his hands, he forced into a small

leather bag. The delighted parent carried it back to earth, with

instructions to insert it into the body of his son, who would thereupon

return to life. When the adventurers reached home, and reported the happy

issue, of their journey, there was a dance of rejoicing; and the father,

wishing to take part in it, gave his son’s soul to the keeping of a squaw

who stood by. Being curious to see it, she opened the bag, upon which it

escaped at once, and took flight for the realms of Papkootparout,

preferring them to the abodes of the living.”

These superstitions, although they may make us smile, yet attest, through

their rude simplicity, the _natural_ and deep‐rooted existence in all

races of a belief not only in the immortality of the soul, but in the

possibility of communication with the departed. The Buddhist doctrine of

transmigration is but a distorted version of the truth we call purgatory,

that is, a state of temporary expiation and gradual cleansing. The

Egyptian practice of embalming the dead and often of preserving the bodies

of several generations of one’s forefathers in the family house, is

another consequence of the primeval belief in the soul’s immortality.

Everywhere reverence for the dead implied this belief and symbolized it,

and even the custom of placing in the mouth of the Roman dead the piece of

money, _denarius_, with which to pay their passage over the Styx, is

referable to the true doctrine of good works being laid up in heaven and

helping those who have performed them to gain the desired entrance into

eternal repose.

The following minute description of the Indian feast of the dead, of which

mention has already been made, is interesting, and is condensed from the

account given by Father Brebœuf: “The corpses were lowered from their

scaffolds and lifted from their graves. Each family claimed its own, and

forthwith addressed itself to the task of removing what remained of flesh

from the bones. These, after being tenderly caressed with tears and

lamentations, were wrapped in skins and pendent robes of beaver. These

relics, as also the recent corpses, which remained entire, but were

likewise carefully wrapped in furs, were carried to one of the largest

houses, and hung to the numerous cross poles which, rafterlike, supported

the roof. The concourse of mourners seated themselves at a funeral feast,

the squaws of the household distributed the food, and a chief harangued

the assembly, lamenting the loss of the deceased and praising their

virtues. This over, the mourners began their march for Ossonané, the scene

of the final rite. The bodies remaining entire were borne on litters,

while the bundles of bones were slung at the shoulders of the relatives,

like fagots. The procession thus defiled slowly through the forest

pathways, and as they passed beneath the shadow of the pines, the mourners

uttered at intervals and in unison a wailing cry, meant to imitate the

voices of disembodied souls, ... and believed to have a peculiarly

soothing effect on the conscious relics that each man carried. The place

prepared for the last rite was a cleared area in the forest, many acres in

extent. Around it was a high and strong scaffolding of upright poles, with

cross‐poles extended between, for hanging the funeral gifts and the

remains of the dead. The fathers lodged in a house where over a hundred of

these bundles of mortality hung from the rafters. Some were mere shapeless

rolls, others were made up into clumsy effigies, adorned with feathers,

beads, etc. In the morning (the procession having arrived over night at

Ossonané) the relics were taken down, opened again, and the bones fondled

anew by the women, amid paroxysms of grief. When the procession bearing

the dead reached the ground prepared for the last solemnity, the bundles

were laid on the ground, and the funeral gifts outspread for the

admiration of the beholders. Among them were many robes of beaver and

other rich furs, collected and preserved for years with a view to this

festival. Fires were lighted and kettles slung, and the scene became like

a fair or _caravanserai_. This continued till three o’clock in the

afternoon, when the gifts were repacked, and the bones shouldered afresh.

Suddenly, at a signal from the chiefs, the crowd ran forward from every

side towards the scaffolding, like soldiers to the assault of a town,

scaled it by the rude ladders with which it was furnished, and hung their

relics and their gifts to the forest of poles which surmounted it. The

chiefs then again harangued the people in praise of the departed, while

other functionaries lined the grave throughout with rich robes of beaver

skin. Three large copper kettles were next placed in the middle, and then

ensued a scene of hideous confusion. The bodies which had been left entire

were brought to the edge of the grave, flung in, and arranged in order at

the bottom by ten or twelve Indians, stationed there for the purpose, amid

the wildest excitement and the uproar of many hundred mingled voices.

Night was now fast closing in, and the concourse bivouacked around the

clearing.... One of the bundles of bones, tied to a pole on the scaffold,

chanced to fall into the grave. This accident precipitated the closing

act, and perhaps increased its frenzy. All around blazed countless fires,

and the air resounded with discordant cries. The naked multitude, on,

under, and around the scaffolding, were flinging the remains of their

dead, relieved from their wrappings of skins, pell‐mell into the pit,

where were discovered men who, as the ghastly shower fell around them,

arranged the bones in their places with long poles. All was soon over;

earth, logs, and stones were cast upon the grave, and the clamor subsided

into a funereal chant, so dreary and lugubrious that it seemed like the

wail of despairing souls from the abyss of perdition.”

These processions and ceremonies relating to the bones of the dead remind

us of the singular custom observed at the Capuchin Convent of the Piazza

Barberini in Rome. The skeletons of the dead monks are robed in the habit

of the order and seated in choir‐stalls round the crypt, until they fall

to pieces, or are displaced by a silent new‐comer to their ghostly

brotherhood. The bones which are thus yearly accumulating are formed into

patterns of stars and crosses on the walls of the crypt and surrounding

corridors, while the skulls are often heaped up in small mounds against

the partitions. The convent is strictly enclosed, and is only accessible

to men during the rest of the year, but on All Souls’ day and during the

octave, the public, men and women alike, are allowed to visit this strange

place of entombment. Crowds flock to see it, especially foreigners.

Hawthorne, in his _Marble Faun_, has described it in terms that make one

feel as if _his_ impression were vivid enough to supply the place of a

personal one on the part of each of his readers.

The ancient Roman customs and beliefs concerning the dead are well worth

noticing, as embodying the essence of the utmost civilization a heathen

land could boast. It is said that the Romans chose the cypress as

emblematic of death because that tree, when once cut, never grows again.

The facts of natural history are sometimes disregarded by the ancient

poets, but it is not with that that we now have to deal, but with the

false idea symbolized by this choice. The Romans, nevertheless, fully

believed in an after‐life, though one modelled much on the same principle

as their life on earth. The unburied and those whose bodies could not be

found were supposed to wander about, unable to cross the river Styx, and

their friends therefore generally built them an empty tomb, which they

believed served as a retreat to their restless spirits. Pliny ascribes the

Roman custom of burning the dead to the belief that was current amongst

the people, that their enemies dug up and insulted the bodies of their

soldiers killed in distant wars. During the earlier part of the Republic,

the dead were mostly buried in the natural way, in graves or vaults. Some

very strange ceremonies are recorded in Adams’ _Roman Antiquities_

concerning the funeral processions, which usually took place at night by

torch‐light. (This was chiefly done to avoid any chance of meeting a

priest or magistrate, who was supposed to be polluted by the sight of a

corpse, as in the Jewish dispensation.) After the musicians, who sang the

praises of the deceased to the accompaniment of flutes, came “players and

buffoons, one of whom, called _archimimus_ (the chief mimic), sustained

the character of the deceased, imitating his words or actions while alive.

These players sometimes introduced apt sayings from dramatic writers.”

Actors were also employed to personate the individual ancestors, and

Adams’ commentator adds in a foot‐note: “A Roman funeral must therefore

have presented a singular appearance, with a long line of ancestors

stalking gravely through the streets of the capital.” Pliny, Plautus,

Polybius, Suetonius, and others are the authorities quoted on this curious

point. It is said by some authors that, in very ancient times, the dead

were buried in their own houses; hence the origin of idolatry, the worship

of household gods, the fear of goblins, etc. Relations also consecrated

temples to the dead, which Pliny calls a very ancient custom, which had

its share in contributing to the establishment of idol‐worship. In the

Book of Wisdom(115) we find a reference to this in these words: “For a

father, being afflicted with bitter grief, made to himself the image of

his son, who was quickly taken away, and him who then had died as a man,

he began now to worship as a god, and appointed him rites and sacrifices

among his servants. Then in process of time, wicked custom prevailing,

this error was kept as a law.” Adams tells us that “the private places of

burial of the Romans were in fields or gardens, usually near the highway

(such as the Via Appia near Rome, the Via Campana near Pozzuoli, the

Street of Tombs at Pompeii), to be conspicuous and remind those who passed

of mortality. Hence the frequent inscriptions—_Siste, viator_,(116)

_Aspice, viator_.”(117) Games of gladiators were frequently held both on

the day and the anniversaries of great funerals; and on the pyre slaves

and clients were sometimes burnt with the body of their deceased master,

as also all manner of clothes and ornaments, and, “in short, whatever was

supposed to have been agreeable to him when alive.” As the funeral cortége

left the place where the body had been burnt, they “used to take a last

farewell, repeating several times _Vale_, or _Salve æternum_,”(118) also

wishing that the earth might lie light on the person buried, as Juvenal

relates, and which was found marked on several ancient monuments in these

letters, S.T.T.L.(119) “This is a very remarkable instance of the dead

being considered, in one sense, as conscious, sentient beings, and

evidently has an origin which can hardly be disconnected from some remote

or indistinct recollection of the true religion.”

Adams goes on to say that “oblations or sacrifices to the dead were

afterwards made at various times, both occasionally and at stated periods,

consisting of liquors, victims, and garlands, as Virgil, Tacitus, and

Suetonius tell us, and sometimes to appease their _manes_, or atone for

some injury offered them in life. The sepulchre was bespread with flowers,

and covered with crowns and fillets. Before it there was a little altar,

on which libations were made and incense burnt. A keeper was appointed to

watch the tomb, which was frequently illuminated with lamps. A feast was

generally added, both for the dead and the living. Certain things were

laid on the tomb, commonly beans, lettuce, bread, and eggs, or the like,

which it was supposed the ghosts would come and eat. What remained was

burnt. After the funeral of great men,... a distribution of raw meat was

made to the people.”

“Immoderate grief was thought to be offensive to the manes, according to

Tibullus, but during the shortened mourning that was customary, the

relations of the deceased abstained from entertainments or feasts of any

sort, wore no badge of rank or nobility, were not shaved, and dressed in

black, a custom borrowed (as was supposed) from the Egyptians. ‘No fire

was ever lighted, as it was considered an ornament to the house.’ ”

The common places of burial were called _columbaria_, from the likeness of

their arrangement to that of a pigeon‐house, each little niche scooped out

in the walls holding the small urn in which the ashes of the dead were

deposited. These _columbaria_, Adams tells us, were often below ground,

like a vault, but private tombs belonging to wealthy citizens were in

groves and gardens; as, for instance, that of Augustus, mentioned by

Strabo, who calls it a hanging garden supported on marble arches, with

shrubs planted round the base, and the Egyptian obelisks at the entrance.

The tomb of Adrian, now the Castel S. Angelo, was a perfect palace of

wealth and art, and supplied many a later building with ready‐made

adornment before it became what it now is, a fortress. The tomb of Cecilia

Metella, on the Via Appia, was also used as a mediæval stronghold, and

looks more fit for such a use than for its former funereal distinction.

From ancient and imperial, we now pass to modern and Christian Rome, so

undistinguishable in the chronology of their first blending, so widely

apart in the moral order of their succession.

The subject of the catacombs and the early inscriptions on Christian

graves is one so widely known and so copiously illustrated by many learned

works, both English and foreign, that it would be superfluous to say much

about it. Yet Cardinal Wiseman is so popular an author, and _Fabiola_ so

standard a novel, that we may be forgiven for drawing a little on

treasures so temptingly ready to our hand. There is in the first chapter

of the second part of _Fabiola_ an interesting reference to the old

established craft of the _fossores_, or excavators of the Christian

cemeteries. Cardinal Wiseman says that some modern antiquarians have based

upon the assertion of an anonymous writer, contemporary with S. Jerome, an

erroneous theory of the _fossores_ having formed a lesser ecclesiastical

order in the primitive church, like a _lector_ or reader. “But,” he adds,

“although this opinion is untenable, it is extremely probable that the

duties of this office were in the hands of persons appointed and

recognized by ecclesiastical authority.... It was not a cemetery or

necropolis company which made a speculation of burying the dead, but

rather a pious and recognized confraternity, which was associated for the

purpose.” Father Marchi, the great Jesuit authority on ancient

subterranean Rome, says that a series of interesting inscriptions, found

in the cemetery of S. Agnes, proves that this occupation was continued in

particular families, grandfather, father, and sons having carried it on in

the same place. The _fossores_ also transacted such rare bargains as were

known in those days of simplicity and brotherly love, when wealthy

Christians willingly made compensation for the privilege of being buried

near a martyr’s tomb. Such an arrangement is commemorated in an early

Christian inscription preserved in the Capitol. The translation runs thus:

“This is the grave for two bodies, bought by Artemisius, and the price was

given to the _fossor_ Hilarus—that is ... (the number, being in cipher, is

unintelligible.) In the presence of Severus the _fossor_, and Laurentius.”

Cardinal Wiseman, jealous of Christian traditions, particularly notes that

the theory of the subterranean crypts, now called catacombs, ever having

been heathen excavations for the extraction of sand, has been disproved by

Marchi’s careful and scientific examination. He then describes the manner

of entombment used in these underground cemeteries: “Their walls as well

as the sides of the staircases are honeycombed with graves, that is, rows

of excavations, large and small, of sufficient length to admit a human

body, from a child to a full‐grown man.... They are evidently made to

measure, and it is probable that the body was lying by the side of the

grave while this was being dug. When the corpse was laid in its narrow

cell, the front was hermetically closed either by a marble‐slab, or more

frequently by several broad tiles put edgeways in a groove or mortise, cut

for them in the rock, and cemented all round. The inscription was cut upon

the marble, or scratched in the wet mortar.... Two principles, as old as

Christianity, regulate this mode of burial. The first is the manner of

Christ’s entombment; he was laid in a grave in a cavern, wrapped up in

linen, embalmed with spices, and a stone, sealed up, closed his sepulchre.

As S. Paul so often proposes him for the model of our resurrection, and

speaks of our being buried with him in baptism, it was natural for his

disciples to wish to be buried after his example, so as to be ready to

rise with him. This lying in wait for the resurrection was the second

thought that regulated the formation of these cemeteries. Every expression

connected with them alluded to the rising again. The word to _bury_ is

unknown in Christian inscriptions: ‘_deposited_ in peace,’ ‘the

_deposition_ of ...’ are the expressions used; that is, the dead are left

there for a time, till called for again, as a pledge or precious thing,

entrusted to faithful but temporary keeping. The very name of cemetery

suggests that it is only a place where many lie, as in a dormitory,

slumbering for a while, till dawn come and the trumpet’s sound awake them.

Hence the grave is only called the ‘place,’ or more technically ‘the small

home,’(120) of the dead in Christ.”

The old Teutonic _Gottes‐Acker_, the acre or field of God, denotes the

same eminently Christian idea; the dead are thus likened to the seed

hidden in the ground for a while, to ripen into a glorious spiritual

harvest when the last call shall be heard. We have read somewhere, in an

English novel whose name has escaped our memory, the same beautiful idea

most poetically expressed. It was something to this effect: “We put up a

stone at the head of a grave, just as we write labels in the spring‐time

for the seeds we put into the earth, that we may remember what glorious

flower is to spring from the little gray, hidden handful that seems so

insignificant just now”—a Catholic thought found astray in a book that had

nothing Catholic about it save its beauty and poetry; for beauty is a ray

of truth, and truth is one and Catholic. One other remark is worth

remembering about the early Christian inscriptions on the tombs of the

departed. There is generally some anxiety to preserve a record of the

exact date of a person’s death, and, in modern days, if it happened that

there was no room for both the day and the year, no doubt the _day_, would

be left unnoticed, and the year carefully chronicled. “Yet,” says Cardinal

Wiseman, “while so few ancient Christian inscriptions supply the year of

people’s deaths, thousands give us the very day of it on which they died,

whether in the hopefulness of believers or in the assurance of martyrs. Of

both classes annual commemoration had to be made on the very day of their

departure, and accurate knowledge of this was necessary. Therefore it

alone was recorded.”

O ages of faith! when it was the ambition of Christians to be inscribed in

the Book of Life, instead of leaving names blazoned in gold in the annals

of an earthly empire!