detested Froude’s brutal characterization of Mary Stuart, or Swinburne’s
vile travesty of her! If his friars are more jolly than respectable, it
is because he drew his pictures from popular ballads and old stories
never intended in Catholic times to be taken as serious or typical. His
Templars are horrible villains, but he never seems to regard them as
villanous because they are ecclesiastics; he does not intend to drag
their priesthood into disgrace; they are lawless and romantic figures,
loaded with horrible accusations by Philippe le Bel, and condemned by
the Pope—ready-made romantic scoundrels fit for purposes of fiction. He
does not look beyond this.
Scott shows much of the nobility of Dryden’s later work. He does not
confuse good with evil; he is always tender of good sentiments; he hates
vice and all meanness; in depicting so many fine characters who could
only have bloomed in a Catholic atmosphere, he shows a sympathy for the
“old Church” at once pathetic and admirable to a Catholic. There is no
novel of his in which the influence of the Church is not alluded to in
some way or other. And how delightful are his heroines when they are
Catholic! How charmingly he has drawn Mary Stuart! And the man that does
not love Di Vernon and Catherine Seton has no heart for Beatrice or
Portia. And then there is the grand figure of Edward Glendenning in “The
Abbot.”
Dryden and Scott both owed so much to the Church, were so naturally her
children, that one feels no ordinary satisfaction in the conversion of
the one, and some consolation in the fact that the last words of the
other were those of the “Dies Irae.”
Brownson and Newman are two authors more talked about than read in this
country. In England Newman’s most careful literary work is known;
Brownson’s work has only begun to receive attention. Newman has gained
much by being talked and written about by men who love the form of
things as much as the matter, and who, if Newman had taught Buddhism or
Schopenhauerism, would admire him just as much. As there is a large
class of these men, and as they help to form public opinion, it has come
to pass that he who would deny Newman’s mastery of style would be smiled
at in any assembly of men of letters. Brownson has not had such an
advantage. He gave his attention thoroughly to the matter in hand; style
was with him a secondary consideration. Besides, he wrote from the
American point of view, and sometimes—at least it would seem so—under
pressure from the printer. Newman was never hurried; Horace was not more
leisurely, Cicero more exact. It would be absurd to compare Newman and
Brownson. I simply put their names together to show that they should be
read, even if other writers must be neglected, by Catholic Americans. I
take the liberty of recommending three books as valuable additions to
the home shelf:—Brownson’s “Views,” and the “Characteristics” of Wiseman
and Newman.
Every young American who wants to understand the political position of
his country among the nations should read three books—Brownson’s
“American Republic,” De Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” and
Bryce’s “American Commonwealth.” But of these three writers the
greatest—incomparably the greatest—is Brownson: he defines principles;
he clarifies them until they are luminous; he shows the application of
them to a new condition of things. There have been Catholics—why
disguise the fact, since they are nearly all dead or imbecile?—who
fancied that our form of government was merely tolerated by the Church.
Brownson gave a death-blow to those ancient dragons of unbelief. Certain
parts of this great work ought to be a text-book in every school in the
country. And it will now be easier to build a monument to this profound
thinker, as there is a well-considered attempt to popularize such
portions of his books as must catch the general attention, for there are
many pages in Brownson’s works which are hidden only because they
suffered in their original method of publication.
Open a volume of his works at random, and you will find something to
suggest or stimulate thought, to define a term or to fortify a
principle. Read, for instance, those pages of his on the Catholic
American literature of his time and you will have a standard of judgment
for all time. And who to-day can say what he says as well as he said it?
As to those parts of his philosophy about which the doctors disagree,
let us leave that to the doctors. It does not concern the general
public, and indeed it might be left out of consideration with advantage.
Brownson’s works are mines of thought. In them lie the germs of mighty
sermons, of great books to come. Already he is a classic in American
literature, and there is every reason why he should be a classic, since
he was first in an untilled ground; and yet it is a sad thing to find
that of all the magnificent material Brownson has left, the “Spirit
Rapper,” that comparatively least worthy product of his pen, seems to be
the best known to the general reader.
If one of us would confine himself to the reading of four authors in
English—Shakspere, Newman, Webster, and Brownson—he could not fail to be
well educated. The “Idea of a University” of Newman is a pregnant book.
It goes to the root of the subtlest matters; its clearness enters our
minds and makes the shadows flee. It cannot be made our own at one
reading. There are passages which should be read over and over
again—notably that on literature and the definition of a classic. If any
man could make us grasp the intangible, Newman could. How sentimental
and thin Emerson appears after him! Professor Cook, of Yale, has done
the world a good turn by giving us the chapter on “Poetry and the
Poetics of Aristotle” in a little pamphlet; and John Lilly’s
“Characteristics” is a very valuable book. Any reader or active man who
dips into the chapter on the “Poetics” will long for more; and, if he
does, the “Characteristics” will not slake his thirst; he will desire
the volumes themselves and drink in new refreshments with every page.
I have known a young admirer of “Lead, Kindly Light”—which, by the way,
has only three stanzas of its own—to be repelled by the learned title of
“Apologia Pro Vita Sua,” but, in search of the circumstances that helped
to produce it, to turn to certain pages in this presumably uninteresting
work. The charm began to work; Newman was no longer a pedant to be
avoided, but a friend to be ever near.
“Callista” amounts to very little as a novel; it is valuable because
Newman studied its color from authentic sources. But “The Dream of
Gerontius” is only beginning in our country to receive the attention due
to it. It was a text-book in classes at Oxford long before people here
touched it at all, except in rare instances. It is a unique poem. There
is nothing like it in all literature. It is the record of the experience
of a soul during the instant it is liberated from the body. It touches
the sublime; it is colorless—if a pure white light can be said to be
colorless. It is the work of a great logician impelled to utter his
thoughts through the most fitting medium, and this medium he finds to be
verse. In Dante the symbols of earthly things represent to us the mystic
life of the other world. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, chief of the
Pre-Raphaelites, imitated the outer shell of the great Dante—the
sensuous shell—but he got no further. Newman soars above, beyond earth;
we are made to realize with awful force that the soul at death is at
once divorced from the body. Dante does not make us feel this. The
people that Virgil and he meet are not spirits, but men and women with
bodies and souls in torment. No painter on earth could put “The Dream of
Gerontius” into line and color. Flaxman, so exquisite in his
interpretation of Dante, would seem vulgar, and Doré brutal. None of us
should lack a knowledge of this truly wonderful poem, which must be
studied, not read. Philosophy and theology have found no flaws in it;
humanity may shiver in the whiteness of its light, and yet be consoled
by the fact that the comfort it offers is not merely imaginative, or
sentimental, or beautiful, but real.
It is impossible to suppress the love of the beautiful in human nature.
The early New Englanders, to whom beauty was an offence and art and
literature condemned things—who worshipped a God of their own invention,
clothed in sulphurous clouds and holding victims over eternal fire,
ready, with the ghastly pleasure described by their divines, to drop
these victims into the flame—were not Christians. Christians have never
accepted the Grecian _dictum_ that earthly beauty is the good and that
to be æsthetic is to be moral; but Christianity has always encouraged
the love of beauty and led the way to its use in the worship of God.
Among Americans, Longfellow had a most devout love of the beautiful. And
it was this love of beauty that drew him near to the Church. That
eloquent writer Ruskin has little sympathy with men who are drawn
towards the Church by the beauty she enshrines, and he constantly
protests against the enticements of a Spouse the hem of whose garment he
kisses. Still, judging from his ill-natured diatribe against Pugin, in
the “Stones of Venice,” he had no understanding of the sentiment that
caused Longfellow, when in search of inspiration, to turn to the Church.
Longfellow’s love of the melodious, of the beautiful, of the
symmetrical, led him into defects. He could not endure a discord, and
his motto was “_Non clamor, sed amor_,” which, as coming from him, may
be paraphrased in one word, “serenity.” His superabundant similes show
how he longed to carry one thing into another thing of even greater
beauty, and how this longing sometimes leads him to faults of taste.
But this lover of beauty—led by it to the very beauty of Ruskin’s Circe
and his forefathers’ “Scarlet Woman”—came of a race that hated beauty.
And yet he stretched out through the rocky soil of Puritan traditions
and training until we find him translating the sermon of St. Francis of
Assisi to the birds into English verse, and working lovingly at the most
Christian of all poems, the “Divine Comedy.” It was he—this descendant
of the Puritans—who described, as no other poet ever described, the
innocence of the young girl coming from confession. But it was his love
of beauty and his love of purity that made him do this. In Longfellow’s
eyes only the pure was beautiful. A canker in the rose made the rose
hateful to him. He was unlike his classmate and friend Hawthorne: the
stain on the lily did not make it more interesting. His love of purity
was, however, like his hatred of noise, a sentiment rather than a
conviction.
The love for the beautiful leads to Rome. Ruskin fights against it,
Longfellow yields to it, and even Whittier—whose lack of culture and
whose traditions held him doubly back—is drawn to the beauty of the
saints.
As culture in America broadens and deepens, respect for the things that
Protestantism cast out increases. James Russell Lowell’s paper on Dante,
in “Among My Books,” is an example of this. The comprehension he shows
of the divine poet is amazing in a son of the Puritans. But the human
mind and the human heart _will_ struggle towards the light.
Longfellow was too great an artist to try to lop off such Catholic
traditions as might displease his readers. In this he was greater than
Sir Walter Scott, and a hundred times greater than Spenser. Scott’s
mind, bending as a healthy tree bends to the light, stretched towards
the old Church. She fascinated his imagination, she drew his thoughts,
and her beauty won his heart; but he was afraid of the English people.
And yet, subservient as Scott was, Cardinal Newman avows that Sir
Walter’s novels drew him towards the Church; and there is a letter
written by the great cardinal in which he laments that the youth of the
nineteenth century no longer read the novels of the “Wizard of the
North.” Scott cannot get rid of the charm the Church throws about him.
He was not classical, he was romantic. He soon tired of mere form, as
any healthy mind will. The reticent and limited beauty of the Greek
temple made him yawn; but he was never weary of the Gothic church, with
its surprises, its splendor, its glow, its statues, its gargoyles—all
its reproductions of the life of the world in its relations to God.
Similarly, Longfellow was not a classicist. The coldness of Greek beauty
did not appeal to him; he could understand and love the pictures of
Giotto—the artist of St. Francis—better than the “Dying Gladiator.” When
Christianity had given life to the perfect form of Greek art, then
Longfellow understood and loved it. And he trusted the American people
sufficiently not to attempt to placate them by concealing or distorting
the source of his inspiration. No casual reader of “Evangeline” can
mistake the cause of the primitive virtues of the Acadians. A lesser
artist would have introduced the typical Jesuit of the romancers, or
hinted that a King James’s Bible read by Gabriel and Evangeline, under
the direction of a self-sacrificing colporteur, was at the root of all
the patience, purity, and constancy in the poem. But Longfellow knew
better than this, and the American people took “Evangeline” to their
heart without question, except from some carper, like Poe, who envied
the literary distinction of the poet. We must remember, too, that the
American people of 1847 were not the American people of to-day; they
were narrower, more provincial, less infused with new blood, and more
prejudiced against the traditions of the Church to which Longfellow
appealed when he wrote his greatest poem.
It is as impossible to eliminate the cross from the discovery of America
as to love art and literature without acknowledging the power that
preserved both.
IX. Of Shakspere.
The time has come when the Catholics of this country—who possess
unmutilated the seamless garment of Christ—should begin to understand
the real value of the inheritance of art and literature and music which
is especially theirs.
The Reformation made a gulf between art and religion; it declared that
the beautiful had no place in the service of God, and that a student of
æsthetics was a student of the devil’s lore. Of late a reaction has
taken place.
Fifty years ago the picture of a Madonna by Raphael or Filippo Lippi or
Botticelli in a popular magazine would have occasioned a howl of
condemnation from the densely ignorant average Protestant of that time.
But the taste for art has grown immensely in the last twenty years, and
now—I am ashamed to say it—non-Catholics have, in America, learned to
know and love the great masterpieces of our inheritance more than we
ourselves. It is we, English-speaking Catholics, who have suffered
unexpressibly from the deadening influence of the Reformation on
æsthetics. As a taste for art and literature grows, “orthodox” protest
against the Church must wane, for the essence of “orthodox” protest is
misunderstanding of the Church which made possible Dante and Cervantes,
Chaucer and Wolfram von Eschenbach, Fra Angelico and Murillo, Shakspere
and Dryden. And no cultivated man, loving them, can hate the Church
that, while guarding morality, likewise protected æsthetics as a
stretching out towards the immortal. Art and literature and music are
efforts of the spirit to approach God. And, as such, Christianity
cherishes them. Art and history are one; art and literature are history;
and nothing is grander in the panorama of events than the spectacle of
the fine arts, in Christian times, emptying their precious box of
ointment on the head of Our Lord to atone for the sins of the past.
The flower of all art is Christian art; it took the perfect form of the
Greeks and clothed it with luminous flesh and blood.
Miss Eliza Allen Starr has shown us some of the treasures of our
inheritance of art. It is easy to find them; good photographs of the
masters’ works—of the Sistine Madonna of Raphael, of the Immaculate
Conception of Murillo, of the Virgin of the Kiss by Hébert, and of the
beautiful pictures of Bouguereau are cheap everywhere. Why, then, with
all these lovely reflections of Catholic genius near us, should we fill
our houses with bad, cheap prints?
Similarly, why should we be content with flimsy modern books? The best
of all literature is ours—even Shakspere is ours.
If there is one fault to be found in Cardinal Newman’s lecture on
“Literature” in that great book, “The Idea of a University,” it is that
the most subtle master of English style took his view of Continental
literature from Hallam. When he speaks of English literature, he speaks
as a master of his subject; on the literature of the Greeks and Romans,
there is no uncertainty in his utterances; but he takes his impressions
of the literature of France and Spain from a non-Catholic critic, whose
opinions are tinctured with prejudice. One cannot help regretting that
the cardinal did not apply the same test to Montaigne that he applied to
Shakspere.
Similarly, most of us have been induced, by the Puritanism in the air
around us, to take our opinions of the great English classics from
text-books compiled by sciolists, who have not gone deep enough to
understand the course of the currents of literature. We accept Shakspere
at second hand; if we took our impressions of his works from Professor
Dowden or Herr Delius or men like George Saintsbury or Horace Furness,
or, better than all, from himself, it would be a different thing. But we
do not; if we read him at all, we read him hastily; we read “Hamlet” as
we would a novel, or we are content to nibble at little chunks from his
plays, which the compilers graciously present to us.
The text-book of literature has been an enemy to education, because it
has been generally compiled by persons who were incapable of fair
judgment. In this country, Father Jenkins’s compilation is the best we
have had. It is a brave attempt to remove misapprehensions; but a
text-book should be merely a guide to the works themselves. There is
more intellectual gain in six months’ close study of the text and
circumstances of “Hamlet” than in tripping through a dozen books of
“selections.” The Germans found this out long ago, and Dr. Gotthold
Böttcher puts it into fitting words in his introduction to Wolfram von
Eschenbach’s “Parcival.” The time will doubtless come when even in
parochial schools the higher “Reader” will be a complete book—not a
thing of shreds and patches, like the little dabs of meat and vegetables
the keepers of country hotels set before us on small plates. This book
will, of course, be intelligently annotated.
Some of us have a certain timidity about claiming Shakspere as our own
and about reading his plays to our young people. This is because we have
given in too much to the critical spirit, which finds purity in impure
things, and impurity where no impurity is intended. It is time we
realize the evil that the English speech has done us by unconsciously
impregnating us with alien prejudices.
Surely no man will accuse Cardinal Newman of condoning sensuality or
coarseness. His idea of propriety is good enough; it is broad enough and
narrow enough for us. That foreign code which would keep young people
within artificial barriers and then let them loose to wallow in literary
filth, that hypocritical American code which leaves the obscenities of
the daily newspaper open and closes Shakspere, is not ours.
Shakspere was the result of Catholic thought and training. There is no
Puritanism in him. His plays are Catholic literature in the widest
sense; he sees life from the Christian point of view, and, depicting it
as it is, his standard is a Catholic standard. There is no doubt that
there are coarse passages in Shakspere’s plays—it is easy to get rid of
them. But they are few. They seem immodest because the plainness of
language of the Elizabethan time and of the preceding times has happily
gone out of fashion. It would be well to revise our definition of
immorality, by comparing it with the more robust Catholic one, before we
condemn Shakspere or the Old Testament, though the scrupulous Tom Paine,
who has gone utterly out of fashion, found both immoral!
Hear Cardinal Newman (“Idea of a University,” page 319) speaking of
Shakspere: “Whatever passages may be gleaned from his dramas
disrespectful to ecclesiastical authority, still these are but passages;
on the other hand, there is in Shakspere neither contempt of religion
nor scepticism, and he upholds the broad laws of moral and divine truths
with the consistency and severity of an Æschylus, Sophocles, and Pindar.
There is no mistaking in his works on which side lies the right; Satan
is not made a hero, nor Cain a victim, but pride is pride, and vice is
vice, and, whatever indulgence he may allow himself in light thoughts or
unseemly words, yet his admiration is reserved for sanctity and
truth; ... but often as he may offend against modesty, he is clear of a
worse charge, sensuality, and hardly a passage can be instanced in all
that he has written to seduce the imagination or to excite the
passions.”
In arranging a course of reading for young people, it seems to me that
those books which _define_ principles should be put first. When a reader
has a good grasp of definitions, he is in a mathematical state of mind
and ready to assimilate truth and reject error. Books of literature
should not be recommended to him until he is sure of his principles;
for, unhappily, the tendency of American youth is to imagine that what
he cannot refute is irrefutable. If the young reader be thoroughly
grounded in the doctrines of his faith and armed with a few clear
definitions of the meaning of things, even Milton cannot persuade him
that Satan is a more admirable figure than Our Lord, or Byron seduce him
into the opinion that Cain was wronged, or Goethe that sin is merely a
more or less pleasing experience.
It is remarkable that the Puritanism which lauds Milton as a household
god turns its face from Shakspere; and yet Milton’s great epic is not
only the deification of intellectual pride, but it contemns
Christianity. There are very few men who can to-day say that they have
read “Paradise Lost” line after line with pleasure. There are long
stretches of aridity in it; and those who pretend to admire it as a
whole are no doubt tinctured with literary insincerity. But there are
glorious passages in the “Paradise Lost,” unexcelled in any literature;
and therefore the epic should be read in parts, and one cannot be blamed
if he “skip” many other parts. The great parts of “Paradise Lost,” ought
to be read and re-read. The comparative weakness of the “Paradise
Regained” shows that Milton had not that sympathy with the Redemption
which he had with the revolt of Satan. And yet, in some pious
households, where puritanized opinion reigns, Shakspere is locked up,
while “Paradise Lost” is put beside the family Bible!
It is not necessary that one should read all of Shakspere’s writings;
the early poems had better be omitted; but it is necessary for purposes
of culture that one should read what one does read with intelligence.
Before beginning “Hamlet”—which a thoughtful Catholic can appreciate
better than any other man—one should clear the ground by studying
Professor Dowden’s little “Primer” on Shakspere (Macmillan & Co.), and
Mr. Furnivall’s preface to the Leopold edition of Shakspere, and George
H. Miles’s study of “Hamlet.” Then, and not until then, will one be in a
position to get real benefit from his reading. To read “Hamlet” without
some preparation is like the inane practice of “going to Europe to
complete an education never begun at home.” I repeat that a Catholic can
better appreciate the marvels of Shakspere’s greatest play, because,
even if he know only the Little Catechism, he has the key to the play
and to Shakspere’s mind.