taste has begun to be formed. He may read the “Vicar of Wakefield” after
that without a yawn, and learn to enjoy the quiet humor of Charles Lamb.
He finds himself raised into pure air, above the malaria of exaggeration
and sensationalism. His style in writing insensibly improves; he becomes
critical of the slang and careless English of his every-day speech; and
surely these things are worth all the trouble spent in gaining them.
Besides, he has secured a perpetual solace for those long nights—and
perhaps days—of loneliness which must come to nearly every man when he
begins to grow old. After religion, there is no comfort in life, when
the links of love begin to break, like a love for great literature. But
this love must be genuine; pretence will not avail; nor will mere
“top-dressing” be of any use.
Literature used to be considered in the light of a “polite
accomplishment.” A book of “elegant extracts” skimmed through was the
only means deemed necessary for the acquirement of an education in
letters. It means a very different thing now, and the establishment of
the reading circles has emphasized its meaning for Catholic Americans.
It means, first of all, some knowledge of philology; it means a critical
understanding of the value of the stones that make up the great mosaic
of literature, and these stones are words.
A bit of Addison, a chunk of Gibbon, a taste of Macaulay, no longer
reach the ideal of what a student of English literature should read. We
first form our taste, and then read for ourselves. We do not even accept
Cardinal Newman’s estimate of “The Vision of Mirza” or “Thalaba” without
inquiry; nor do we throw up our hats for Browning merely because
Browning has become fashionable. A healthy sign of a robuster taste is
the return to Pope, the poet of common-sense, and to Walter Scott. But
we accept neither of these writers on a cut-and-dried judgment made by
somebody else. It is better to give two months to the reading of Pope
and about Pope than to fill two months with desultory reading and take
an opinion of Pope at second hand.
In spite of the ordinary text-book of literature, the serious student
discovers that Dryden is a poet and prose-writer of the first rank, that
Newman is the greatest thinker and stylist of modern times, that no
dramatic writer of the last two centuries has come so near Shakspere as
Aubrey de Vere, and that Coventry Patmore’s prose is delightful. If all
the students of literature that read “A GENTLEMAN” have not discovered
these things for themselves, let them take up any one of these writers
seriously, perseveringly, and contradict me if they think I am wrong.
Matthew Arnold showed long ago that, if the basis of English literature
was Saxon, its curves, its form, its symmetry, its beauty, were derived
from the qualities of that other race which the Saxons drove out.
Similarly, if the author of that Saxon epic, the “_Beowulf_,” if Cædmon
and the Venerable Bede uttered high thoughts, it was reserved for
Chaucer to wed high thoughts to a form borrowed from the French and
Italians. Chaucer saved the English language from remaining a collection
of inadequate dialects. The Teutonic element supplied his strength; the
Celtic element his lightness and elegance. Now this Chaucer was a very
humble and devout Catholic. “Ah! but he pointed out abuses—he was the
Lollard, enlightened by the morning-star of the Reformation,” the
text-books of English literature have been saying for many years. “See
what he insinuates about the levity of his pilgrims to Canterbury!” All
of which has nothing to do with his firm faith in the Catholic Church.
Chaucer was inspired by the intensely Christian Dante and the exquisite
Petrarch, but, unfortunately, he took too much from another master-the
greatest master of Italian prose, Boccaccio. When I use the word
Christian, I mean Catholic—the words are interchangeable; and Dante is
the most Christian of all poets.
But Boccaccio was a Christian; he had faith; he could be serious; he
loved Dante; his collection of stories, which no man is justified in
reading, unless it is for their Italian style, has attracted every
English poet of narrative verse, from Chaucer to Tennyson; and yet,
though these stories have moments of pathos and elevation, they are full
of the fetid breath of paganism. A pope suppressed them; but their style
saved them—for art was a passion in Italy—and they were revived,
somewhat expurgated. In his old age he lamented the effects of his early
book.
The occasional coarseness in Chaucer we owe to the manners of the times;
for the English, far behind the Italians, were just awakening from
semi-barbarism. Dante had crystallized the Italian language long before
Chaucer was born. Italy had produced the precursor of Dante, St. Francis
of Assisi, and a host of other great men, whose fame that of St. Francis
and Dante dimmed by comparison, long before the magnificent English
language came out of chaos. The few lapses in morality in Chaucer are
due both to the influence of Boccaccio and to the paganism latent in a
people who were gradually becoming fully converted. But the power of
Christianity protected Chaucer; the teaching of the Church was part of
his very life, and nothing could be more pathetic, more honest than his
plea for pardon. The Church had taught him to love chastity; if he
sinned in word, he sinned against light. The Church gave him the
safeguards for his genius; the dross he gathered from the earthiness
around him. Of the latter, there is little enough.
Chaucer was born in 1340; Dante in 1265; and Dante helped to create the
English poet. Italy was the home of the greatest and noblest men of all
the world, and these men had revived pagan art in order to baptize it
and make it a child of Christ. Chaucer has suffered more than any other
poet at the hands of the text-book makers, who have conspired for over
three hundred years against the truth. We have been made to see him
through a false medium. We have been told that he was in revolt against
the religion which he loved as his life. He loved the Mother of God with
a childlike fervor; a modern Presbyterian would have been as much of a
heretic to him as a Moslem; he was as loyal a child of the Church as
ever lived, and to regard him as anything else is to stamp one as of
that old and ignorant school of Philistines which all cultivated
Americans have learned to detest.
The best book for the study of this poet is Cowden Clarke’s “Riches of
Chaucer” (London: Crosby, Lockwood & Co.), the knowledge of which I owe
to the kindness of Mr. Aubrey de Vere. And his works will repay study;
Mr. Cowden Clarke arranged them so that they can be read with ease and,
after a short time, with pleasure. To see Chaucer through anybody’s eyes
is to see him through a darkened glass. Why should not we, so much
nearer to him than any of the commentators who have assumed to explain
him to us, take possession of him? He should not be an alien to us; the
form of the inkhorn he held has changed; but the rosary that fell from
his fingers was the same as our rosary.
English literature began with Chaucer. He loved God and he loved
humanity; he could laugh like a child because he had the faith of a
child. His strength lay in his faith; and, as faith weakened, English
poets looked back more and more regretfully at the “merrie” meads
sprinkled with the daisies he loved. He is as cheerful as Sir Thomas
More; as gay, yet as sympathetic with human pleasure and pain, as the
Dominican monks whom he loved. If he jibed at abuses—if he saw that
luxury and avarice were beginning to creep into monasteries and
palaces—he knew well that the remedy lay in greater union with Rome.
Like Francis of Assisi, he was a poet, but a poet who loved even the
defects of humanity, and who preferred to laugh at them rather than to
reform them. Unlike Francis of Assisi, he was not a saint. He was
intensely interested in the world around him; he was of it and in it;
and he belongs doubly to us—the _Alma Redemptoris_, one of his favorite
hymns, which he mentions in “Tale of the Prioress,” we hear at vespers
as he heard it. The faith in which he died in 1400 is our faith to-day.
In no age have been the written masterpieces of genius within such easy
reach of all readers. But it is true that older people, living at a time
when books were dearer and libraries fewer than they are now, read
better books; not _more_ books, but _better_ books. Probably in those
days people amused themselves less outside their own homes. Some tell us
that the tone of thought was more solid and serious. At any rate, the
English classics had more influence on the American reader fifty years
ago than they have to-day. The time had its drawbacks, to be sure. An
old gentleman often told me of a visit to a Pennsylvania farm in the
thirties, when the man of the house gave him, as a precious thing, a
copy of _The Catholic Herald_ two years old! Now the paper of yesterday
seems almost a century old; then the paper of last year was new.
Unhappily, the book of last year suffers the same fate as the paper of
yesterday. The best way to counteract this unhappy condition of affairs
is to clasp a good book to one with “hoops of steel” when such a book is
found.
In considering the subject of literature, there is one great book which
is seldom mentioned. This is Denis Florence MacCarthy’s translations
from Calderon.
Calderon ought not to be a stranger to us. He approaches very near to
Dante in deep religious feeling, and he is not far behind him in genius.
If no good translation of some of his most representative works existed,
there might be an excuse for the general neglect of this great author by
English-speaking readers. And MacCarthy has done justice to those
sublime, sacred dramas, called “autos,” in which all the resources of
faith and genius are laid at the feet of God. It is to be hoped that in
a few years both MacCarthy and Mangan may be recognized. Those who know
the former only by his “Waiting for the May” will broaden their field of
literary knowledge and gain a higher respect for him through his
translations of Calderon. The names of Calderon, the greatest of the
Spanish poets, and of MacCarthy, his chief translator, suggest that of
another author too little known to the general reader. This is Kenelm
Henry Digby, whose “Mores Catholici” is a magazine of ammunition for the
Christian reader.
There is an amusing scene in one of Thackeray’s novels, where a
journalist acknowledges that he finds all the classical quotations which
garnish his articles in Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy;” and, indeed,
many other things besides bits of Latin have been appropriated from
Burton and Montaigne, in our time, by ready writers. Many a sparkling
thought put into the crisp English of the nineteenth century may be
traced back to Boethius. And who shall condemn this? Has not Shakspere
set us an example of how gold, half buried in ore, may be polished until
it is an inestimable jewel? Kenelm Digby’s “Mores Catholici” is a great
magazine from which a thousand facts may be gathered, each fact pregnant
with suggestion and stimulus. Sharp-pointed arrows against calumny are
here: all they need is a light shaft and feather and a strong hand to
send them home. Is an illustration for a sermon wanted? Is a fact on
which to found an essay demanded? One has only to open the “Mores.” It
is not a book which one reads with intense interest; one cannot gallop
through the three large volumes—one must walk, laboriously stowing away
every treasure. It is, in fact, a book through which one saunters,
picking something at long intervals, perhaps. You may dip into it, as a
boy dives for a cent, and come up with a pearl-oyster in your hand. It
is a book to be kept on the lowest shelf, within reach at all times; at
any rate, to be one of the books to which you go when you are in search
of a fact or an illustration.
One of the few sonnets written by Denis Florence MacCarthy was addressed
to Digby. Digby had painted a picture of Calderon and sent it to the
Irish poet; hence the sonnet—
“Thou who hast left, as in a sacred shrine,—
What shrine more pure than thy unspotted page?—
The priceless relics of a heritage
Of loftiest thoughts and lessons most divine.”
And so the names of Calderon and MacCarthy and Digby come naturally
together; and they are the names of men each great in his way. They are
not found in the newspapers; they are seldom seen in the great
magazines; those societies of the cultivated which are—thank
Heaven!—multiplying everywhere for the better understanding of books
know very little about them. Let us hope that Miss Imogene Guiney, who
wrote so well of Mangan in one of the numbers of the _Atlantic Monthly_,
will do a similar kind office for MacCarthy.
As to Calderon, he can be read but in parts. Like Milton, he travelled
over many a barren stretch of prose thinking it poetry; and so we will
be wise to follow MacCarthy’s lead in choosing from his dramas. He is so
little known among us for the reason that we have permitted the English
taste—which became Protestantized—to separate us from him. It is to the
German Goethe that we owe the revival of the taste for Dante. Before
Goethe rediscovered him, the English-speaking people of the world held
that there were only two great poets—Shakspere and Milton.
To reclaim our heritage, we must know something of Calderon. There is no
reason why our horizon should be limited to that which English
Protestantism has uncovered for us. Calderon represents the literature
of Catholic Spain at its highest point; and even the most narrow-minded
man, having read a fair number of the pages of Calderon, can deny
neither his ardent devotion to the Church nor his high genius, nor can
he disprove that they existed together, free and untrammelled. We have
been told that the outbreak of literary genius in the reign of Elizabeth
was but the outcome of the liberty of the Reformation. How did it happen
that Spain, in which there was no Reformation, produced Columbus,
Calderon, Cervantes, and Italy illustrious names by the legion?
Knowledge, after all, is the only antidote to the miasma of ignorance
and arrogance which has clouded the judgment of so many writers on
literature and art.
VIII. The Home Book-shelf.
It ought not to be so much our practice to denounce bad books as to
point out good ones. To say that a book is immoral is to increase its
sale. But the more good books we put into the hands of our boys, the
greater preservative powers we give them against evil. Here is a bit
from the Kansas City _Star_ which expresses tersely what we have all
been thinking:
“The truth is that it is not the boys who read ‘bad books’ who swell
the roll of youthful criminality; it is the boys who do not read
anything. Let any one look over the police court of a busy morning,
and he will see that the style of youth gathered there have not
fallen into evil ways through their depraved literary tendencies.
They were not brought there by books, but more probably by ignorance
of books combined with a genuine hatred of books of all kinds. There
is not a more perfect picture of innocence in the world than a boy
buried in his favorite book, oblivious to all earthly sights and
sounds, scarcely breathing as he follows the fortunes of the heroes
and heroines of the story.”
It depends, of course, on what kind of a story it is. A boy may be a
picture of innocence; but we all know that many a canvas on which is a
picture of innocence is much worm-eaten at the back. If the book be a
good one, a boy is safe while he is reading it—he can be no safer. If it
is a mere story of adventure, without any dangerous sentiment, a boy is
not likely to get harm out of it. It is the sentimental—not the honest
sentiment of Sir Walter or Thackeray—that does harm to the boy of a
certain age, but more harm to the girl. A boy’s preoccupation with his
book may not be always innocent. It is a father’s or mother’s duty to
see that it is innocent, by supplying the boy with the right kind of
books. This, in our atmosphere, is almost as much of a duty as the
supplying him with bread and butter. A father may take the lowest view
of his duties; he maybe content with having his son taught the Little
Catechism and with feeding and clothing him. However sufficient this may
be among the peasants of the Tyrol, it does not answer in our country.
The boy who cares to read nothing except the daily paper or the
theatrical poster has more chances against him than the devourer of
books. The police courts show that.
The parish library, as a help to religious and moral education, comes
next to the parish school; it supplements it; it amplifies its
instruction: it carries its influence deeper; it cultivates both the
logical powers and the imagination. Give a boy a taste for books, and he
has a consolation which neither sickness nor poverty nor age itself can
take from him. But he must not be left to ramble through a library at
his own sweet will. There are probably no stricter Catholics among our
acquaintance than were the parents of Alexander Pope, the “poet of
common-sense” and bad philosophy; and yet their carelessness, or rather
faith in books merely as books, led him into many an ethical error.
There is no use in trying to restrict the reading of a clever American
boy to professedly Catholic books in the English language. He will ask
for stories, and there are not enough stories of the right sort to last
him very long. He will want stories with plenty of action in
them—stirring stories, stories of adventure, stories of school life, of
life in his own country; and we have too few of them. And it requires
some discrimination to square his wants with what he ought to want. But
that discrimination must be used by somebody, or there will be danger.
Nevertheless, the boy who rushes through Oliver Optic’s stories, and
Henty’s and Bolderwood’s, is not likely to be injured. They are not
ideal books, from our point of view. He may even read Charles Kingsley’s
boisterous, stupid stuff; but if he is a well-instructed boy, he will be
in a state of hot indignation all through “Hypatia” and the other
underdone-roast-beefy things of that bigot. Kingsley, with all his
prejudice, though, is better for a boy than Rider Haggard. There is a
nasty trail over Haggard’s stories.
There is some comfort in the fact that the average boy is too eagerly
intent on his story to mind the moralizing. What does he care for Lord
Lytton’s talk about the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in “The Last
Days of Pompeii”? He wants to know how everything “turns out.” And in
Kingsley’s “Hypatia”—which is so often in Catholic libraries—he pays
very little attention to the historical lies, for the sake of the
action. Nevertheless, he should be guarded against the historical lies.
Personally—I hope this intrusion of the _ego_ will be forgiven—I had,
when I was a boy and waded through all sorts of books, so strong a
conviction that Catholics were always right and every one else wrong,
that “Hypatia” and Bulwer’s “Harold” and the rest were mere incentives
to zeal; I thought that if the Lady Abbess walled up Constance at the
end of “Marmion,” that young person deserved her fate.
This state of mind, however, ought not to be generally cultivated; a
discriminating taste for reading should. Do not let us cry out so loudly
about bad books; let us seek out the good ones; and remember that it is
not the reading boy that fills the criminal ranks, but the boy that
lives in the streets and does not read.
There should be a few books on the family shelf—books which are meant to
be daily companions—the Bible, the “Imitation of Christ,” something of
Father Faber’s, “Fabiola” and “Dion and the Sibyls,” and some great
novels.
People of to-day do not realize how much the greatest of all the
romancers owes to the Catholic Dryden. Sir Walter Scott, in spite of
frequent change in public taste, still holds his own. Cardinal Newman,
in one of his letters, regrets that young people have ceased to be
interested in so admirable a writer. But there is only partial reason
for this regret. Sir Walter’s long introductions and some of his
elaborate descriptions of natural scenery are no longer read with
interest. Still, it is evident that people do not care to have his works
changed in any way. Not long ago, Miss Braddon, the indefatigable
novelist, “edited” Sir Walter Scott’s novels. She cut out all those
passages which seemed dull to her. But the public refused to read the
improved edition. It remained unsold.
It is safe to predict that neither Sir Walter Scott nor Miss Austen will
ever go entirely out of fashion. Sir Walter’s muse is to Miss Austen’s
as the Queen of Sheba to a very prim modern gentlewoman: one is attired
in splendid apparel, wreathed with jewels, sparkling; the other is
neutral-tinted, timid, shy. But of all novelists, Sir Walter Scott
admired Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen. He said, with almost a sigh of
regret, that he could do the big “bow-wow” business, but that they
pictured real life.
Nevertheless, while Miss Austen is not forgotten—in fact, interest has
increased in her delightful books of late years—Sir Walter Scott’s
novels are found everywhere. Not to have read the most notable of the
Waverley Novels is to give one’s acquaintances just reason for lamenting
one’s illiberal education.
The name of Sir Walter Scott naturally suggests that of Dryden, from
whom the “Wizard” borrowed some of the best things in “Ivanhoe”—and
“Ivanhoe” is without doubt the most popular of Sir Walter Scott’s
novels. That picturesque humbug Macaulay, who could sacrifice anything
for a brilliant antithesis, has done much harm to the reputation of
Dryden. He gives us the impression that Dryden was a mere timeserver, if
a brilliant satirist and a third-rate poet. Some years will pass before
the superficial criticism of Macaulay shall be taken at its full value.
Dryden was honest—honest in his changes of opinion, and entirely
consistent in his change of faith. No church but that of his ancestors
could have satisfied the mind of a man to whom the mutilated doctrine
and bald services of the Anglican sect were naturally obnoxious. Of the
charge that Dryden changed his religious opinions for gain, Mr. John
Amphlett Evans, a sympathetic critic, says that, if Dryden gained the
approval of King James II., he lost that of the English people. Dryden
understood this, for he wrote:
“If joys hereafter must be purchased here
With loss of all that mortals hold so dear,
Then welcome infamy and public shame,
And last, a long farewell to worldly fame.”
If Scott, through ignorance or carelessness, misrepresented certain
Catholic practices, he never consciously misrepresented Catholic ideas;
and, as a recent writer in the _Dublin Review_ remarks, he showed that
all that was best and heroic in the Middle Ages was the result of
Catholic teaching. This was his attraction for Cardinal Newman. This
made him so fascinating to another convert, James A. McMaster, who had
an inherited Calvinistic horror of most other novels. Scott, robust and
broad-minded as he was, could understand the mighty genius and the great
heart of Dryden. He was the ablest defender of the poet who abjured the
licentiousness of the Restoration—mirrored in his earlier dramas—to
adopt a purer mode of thought. Although Dryden was really Scott’s master
in art, Sir Walter did not fully understand how very great was Dryden’s
poem, “Almanzor and Almahide.” If Tasso’s “Jerusalem Delivered,” or
Ariosto’s “Orlando Furioso,” or Milton’s “Paradise Regained,” or
Fénelon’s “Telemachus” is an epic, this splendid poem of Dryden’s is an
epic, and greater than them all. It is from this poem, founded on
episodes of the siege of Granada, that Sir Walter Scott borrows so
liberally in “Ivanhoe.”
One cannot altogether pardon the greatest fault of all Sir Walter made,
the punishment of Constance in “Marmion.” But his theory of artistic
effect was something like Macaulay’s idea of rhetorical effect. If
picturesqueness or dramatic effect interfered with historical truth, the
latter suffered the necessary carving to make it fit. It must be
remembered, too, that Sir Walter Scott was not in a position to profit
by modern discoveries which have forced all honorable men to revise many
pages of the falsified histories of their youth and to do justice to the
spirit of the Church.