corrupts even in this world, and that the effects do not end in this
world. Shakspere, enlightened by the teaching of centuries since St.
Austin converted his forefathers, teaches a higher philosophy than that
of Æschylus or Euripides or Sophocles—he substitutes will for fate. It
is not fate that forces the keen Claudius to murder his brother; it is
not fate that obliges him to turn away from the reproaches of an
instructed mind and conscience: he chooses; it is his own will that
makes the crime; he does not confuse good with evil. The sin of the
Queen is not so great; she is ignorant of her husband’s crime; in fact,
from the usual modern point of view, she has committed no sin at all.
And, as the Danish method of choosing monarchs permitted the nobles to
name Claudius king, while her son was mooning at the Saxon university,
she had done him no material wrong. But as there is no mention of a
dispensation from Rome, and as Shakspere makes the Danes Catholic, the
people of Denmark must have looked on the alliance with doubt. The
demand made to Horatio to exorcise the spirit, as he was a scholar; the
expression, “I’ll cross it,” which Fechter, the actor, rightly
interpreted as meaning the sign of the cross; a hundred touches, in
fact, show that “Hamlet” can and ought to be studied with special profit
by Catholics.
Suppose that one begins with “Hamlet,” having cleared the ground, and
then takes the greatest of the tragi-comedies, “The Merchant of Venice.”
Here opens a new field. Before beginning this play, it would be well to
read Mgr. Seton’s paper on the Jews in Europe, in his excellent “Essays,
Chiefly Roman.” It will give one an excellent idea of the attitude of
the Church towards Shylock’s countrymen, and do away with the impression
that Antonio was acting in accordance with that attitude when he treated
Shylock as less than a human being. Portia not only offers a valuable
contrast to the weakness of Ophelia and the criminal weakness of
Gertrude, but she is a type of the ideal noblewoman of her time, whose
only weakness is love for a man of lesser nobility than herself, but who
holds his honor as greater than life or love.
Shakspere’s “Julius Cæsar,” for comparison with “Hamlet,” might come
next, and after that the most lyrical and poetical of all the comedies,
“As You Like It,” or perhaps “The Tempest,” with Prospero’s simple but
strong assertion of belief in immortality.
Having studied these four great works, with as much of the literature
they suggest as practicable, a distinct advance in cultivation will have
been made. The best college in the country can give one no more. But
they must be _studied_, not read. He who does not know these plays
misses part of his heritage; for the plays of Shakspere belong more to
the Catholic than to the non-Catholic. Shakspere was the fine flower of
culture nurtured under Catholic influences.
X. Of Talk, Work, and Amusement.
There are too many etiquette books—too much about the outward look of
things, and too little about the inward. Manners make a great difference
in this world—we all discover that sooner or later; but later we find
out that there are some principles which keep society together more than
manners. If manners are the flower, these principles are the roots which
intricately bind earth and crumbling rocks together and make a safe
footing. To-day the end of preaching seems to be to teach the outward
form, without the inward light that gives the form all its value. By
preaching I mean the talk and advice that permeate the newspapers and
books of social instruction.
Manners are only good, after all, when they represent something. What
does it matter whether Mr. Jupiter makes a charming host at his own
table or not, if he sit silent a few minutes after some of his guests
are gone, and listen to the horrors that one who stays behind tells of
them? And if Mrs. Juno, whose manners at her “at home” are perfect, sits
down and rips and tears at the characters of the acquaintances she has
just fed with coffee and whatever else answers to the fatted calf, shall
we believe that she is useful to society?
There is harmless gossip which has its place; in life it is like the
details in a novel; it is amusing and interesting, because it belongs to
humanity—and what that is human is alien to us? So far as gossip
concerns the lights and shades of character, the minor miseries and
amusing happenings of life, what honest man or woman has not a taste for
it? And who values a friend less because his peculiarities make us
smile?
But by and by there comes into the very corner of the fireside a guest
who disregards the crown of roses which every man likes to hang above
his door. The roses mean silence—or, at least, that all things that pass
under them shall be sweetened by the breath of hospitality; and he adds
a little to the smile of kindly tolerance, and he paints it as a sneer.
“You must forgive me for telling you,” he whispers, when he is safely
sheltered beneath your friend’s garland of roses; “but Theseus spoke of
you the other night in a way that made my blood boil.”
And then the friendship of years is snapped; and then the harmless jest,
in which Theseus’s friend would have delighted even at his own expense
if he had been present, becomes a jagged bullet in an ulcerated wound.
_Sub rosâ_ was a good phrase with the old Latins, but who minds it now?
It went out of fashion when the public began to pay newspaper reporters
for looking through keyholes, and for stabbing the hearts of the
innocent in trying to prove somebody guilty. It went out of fashion when
private letters became public property and a man might, without fear of
disgrace, print, or sell to be printed, any scrap of paper belonging to
another that had fallen into his hands.
A very wise man—a gentle man and a loyal man—once said, “A man may be
judged by what he believes.” If we could learn the truth of this early
in life, what harm could be done us by the creature who tears the thorns
out of our hospitable roses, and goes about lacerating hearts with them?
When we hear that Jason has called us a fool, we should not be so ready
to cry out with all our breath that he is a scoundrel—because we should
not be so ready to believe that Jason, who was a decent fellow
yesterday, should suddenly have become the hater of a good friend
to-day. And when, under stress of unrighteous indignation, we have
called Jason a scoundrel, the listener can hardly wait until he has
informed Jason of the enormity; “and thereby hangs a tale.”
But when we get older and wiser, we do not ask many people to sit under
our roses; and those whom we ask we trust implicitly. In time—so happily
is our experience—we believe no evil of any man with whom we have ever
cordially shaken hands. Then we begin to enjoy life; and we, too, choose
our acquaintances by their unwillingness to believe evil of others. And
as for the man who has eaten our salt, we become so optimistic about him
that we would not even believe that he could write a stupid book; and
that is the _nirvâna_ of belief in one’s friends.
Less manners, we pray—less talk about the handling of a fork and the
angle of a bow, and more respect for the roses. Of course, one of us may
have said yesterday, after dinner, that Jason ought not to talk so much
about his brand-new coat-of-arms; or that Ariadne, who was a widow, you
know, might cease to chant the praise of number one in the presence of
number two. But do we not admire the solid qualities of both Jason and
Ariadne? And yet who shall make them believe that when the little
serpent wriggles from our hearthstone to theirs?
It is a settled fact that young people must be amused. It is a settled
fact, or rather an accepted fact, that they must be amused much more
than their predecessors were amused. It is useless to ask why. Life in
the United States has become more complicated, more artificial, more
civilized, if you will; and that Jeffersonian simplicity which De
Tocqueville and De Bacourt noted has almost entirely disappeared. The
theatre has assumed more license than ever; it amuses—it does not
attempt to instruct; and spectacles are tolerated by decent people which
would have been frowned upon some years ago. There is no question that
the drama is purer than it ever was before; but the spectacle, the
idiotic farce, and the light opera are more silly and more indecent than
within the memory of man. The toleration of these things all shows that,
in the craving for amusement, high principle and reasonable rules of
conduct are forgotten.
A serious question of social importance is: How can the rage for
amusement be kept within proper bounds? How can it be regulated? How can
it be prevented from making the heart and the head empty and even
corrupt? In many ways our country and our time are serious enough. We
need, perhaps, a touch of that cheerful lightness which makes the life
of the Viennese and of the Parisian agreeable and bright—which enables
him to get color and interest into the most commonplace things. But our
lightness and cheerfulness are likely to be spasmodic and extravagant.
We are not pleased with little things; it takes a great deal to give us
delight; our children are men and women too early; we do not understand
simplicity—unless it is sold at a high price with an English label on
it. Luxuries have become necessities, and even the children demand
refinements of enjoyment of which their parents did not dream in the
days gone by.
And yet the essence of American social life ought to be simplicity. We
have no traditions to support; a merely rich man without a great family
name owes nothing to society, except to help those poorer than himself;
he has not inherited those great establishments which your English or
Spanish high lord must keep up or tarnish the family name. We have no
great families in America whose traditions are not those of simplicity
and honesty, and these are the only traditions they are bound to
cherish. In this way our aristocracy—if we have such a thing—ought to be
the purest in the world and the most simple. There is no reason why we
should pick up all the baubles that the effete folk of the Old World are
throwing away.
Whether we are to achieve simplicity, and consequently cheerfulness, in
every-day life depends entirely on the women. It is remarkable how many
Catholic women bred in good schools enter society and run a mad race in
search of frivolities. In St. Francis de Sales’s “Letters to People in
the World” there is a record of a lady “who had long remained in such
subjection to the humors of her husband, that in the very height of her
devotions and ardors she was obliged to wear a low dress, and was all
loaded with vanity outside; and, except at Easter, could never
communicate unless secretly and unknown to every one—and yet she rose
high in sanctity.”
But St. Francis de Sales had other words for those women of the world
who rushed into all the complications of luxury, and yet who defended
their frivolity by the phrase “duty to society.” The woman who serves
her children best serves society. And she best serves her children by
cultivating her heart and mind to the utmost; and by teaching them that
one of the best things in life is simplicity, and that it is much easier
to be a Christian when one is content with a little than when one is
constantly discontented with a great deal. If the old New England love
for simplicity in the ordinary way of life could be revived among
Catholics, and sanctified by the amiable spirit of St. Francis of
Assisi, the world would be a better place.
Father Faber tells us what even greater men have told us before—that
each human being has his vocation in life. And we nearly all accept it
as true, but the great difficulty is to realize it. Ruskin says that
work is not a curse; but that a man must like his work, feel that he can
do it well, and not have too much of it to do. The sum of all this means
that he shall be contented in his work, and find his chief satisfaction
in doing it well. It is not what we do, but _how_ we do it, that makes
success.
The greatest enemy to a full understanding of the word vocation among
Americans is the belief that it means solely the acquirement of money.
And the reason for this lies not in the character of the American—who is
no more mercenary than other people—but in the idea that wealth is
within the grasp of any man who works for it. The money standard,
therefore, is the standard of success. But success to the eyes of the
world is not always success to the man himself. The accumulation of
wealth often leaves him worn-out, dissatisfied, with a feeling that he
has somehow missed the best of life. That man has probably missed his
vocation and done the wrong thing, in spite of the opinion outside of
himself that he has succeeded.
The frequent missing of vocations in life is due to false ideas about
education. The parent tries to throw all the responsibility of education
on the teacher, and the teacher has no time for individual moulding. A
boy grows up learning to read and to write, like other boys. He may be
apt with his head or his hands, but how few parents see the aptitude in
the right light! It ought to be considered and seriously cultivated. The
tastes of youth may not always be indications of the future: they often
change with circumstances and surroundings. But they are just as often
unerring indications of the direction in which the child’s truest
success in the world will lie. If a boy play at swinging a censer when
he is little, or enjoy the sight of burning candles on a toy altar, it
is not an infallible sign that he will be a priest. And yet the rosary
that young Newman drew on his slate, when he was a boy, doubtless meant
something.
“The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,” Longfellow sings. He
who comprehends them gets near to the heart of youth. But who tries to
do it? The boy is as great an enigma to his father, as a rule, as the
old sphinx in the Egyptian desert is to passing travellers. And who but
his father ought to have the key to the boy’s mind, and find his way
into its recesses so gently and carefully that the question of his
child’s vocation would be an easy one for him to answer?
If the religious vocations in this country are not equal in number to
what they ought to be, we may attribute it to these two causes: the
general desire to make money, and the placid indifference of parents. A
boy is sent to “school”—school implying a sort of factory from which
human creatures are turned out polished and finished, but not ready for
any special work in a world which demands specialists. And what is
specialism but the industrious working out of a vocation?
God is very good to a man when that man is true to his vocation. To be
content in one’s work is almost happiness. To do one’s work for the eyes
of God is to be as near happiness as any creature can come to it in this
world. Fortunate are they who, like the old sculptors of the roof of
“the cathedral over sea,” learn early in life, as Miss Eleanor Donnelly
puts it,—
“That nothing avails us under the sun,
In word or in work, save that which is done
For the honor and glory of God alone.”
Direction and coercion are two different things. The parents who mistake
one for the other make a fatal error. Direction is the flower, coercion
the weed that grows beside it, and kills its strength and sweetness.
The true gospel of work begins with the consideration of vocation, and
the prayers and the appeals to the sacraments that ought to accompany
it. This is the genesis of that gospel. It is true that if a man can be
helped to take care of the first twenty years of his life, the last
twenty years will take care of him. Those who find their vocation are
blessed—
“And they are the sculptors whose works shall last,
Whose names shall shine as the stars on high,
When deep in the dust of a ruined past
The labors of selfish souls shall lie.”
XI. The Little Joys of Life.
Has enthusiasm gone out of fashion? Are the young no longer
hero-worshippers? A recent writer complains of the sadness of American
youth. “The absence of animal spirits among our well-to-do young people
is a striking contrast to the exuberance of that quality in most
European countries,” says this author, in the _Atlantic Monthly_.
Our young people laugh very much, but they are not, as a rule, cheerful;
and they are amiable only when they “feel like being amiable.” This is
the most fatal defect in American manners among the young. The
consideration for others shown only when a man is entirely at peace with
himself is not politeness at all: it is the most unrefined manifestation
of selfishness.
Before we condemn the proverbial artificiality of the French, let us
contrast it with the brutality of the average carper at this
artificiality. “A Frenchman,” he will say, “will lift his hat to you,
but he would not give you a sou if you were starving.” Let us take that
assertion for its full value. We are not starving; we do not want his
sou, but we do want to have our every-day life made as pleasant as
possible. And is your average brutal and bluff and uncivilized creature
the more anxious to give his substance to the needy because he is ready
on all occasions to tread on the toes of his neighbor? He holds all
uttered pleasant things to be lies, and the suppression of the brutal a
sin against truth. One sees this personage too often not to understand
him well. He is half civilized. King Henry VIII. was of this
kind—charming, bluff old fellow, bubbling over with truth and frankness,
slapping Sir Thomas More on the back, and full of delicious horseplay,
when his dinner agreed with him! It is easy to comprehend that the high
politeness of the best of the French is the result of the finest
civilization. No wonder Talleyrand looked back and said that no man
really enjoyed life who had not lived before the Revolution.
But why should enthusiasm have gone out? Why should the young have no
heroes? Have the newspaper joke, the levity of Ingersoll and the
irreverence of the stump-speakers, the cynicism of _Puck_ and the
insolence of _Judge_, driven out enthusiasm? George Washington is
mentioned—what inextinguishable laughter follows!—the cherry-tree, the
little hatchet! What novel wit that name suggests! One _must_ laugh, it
is so funny! And, then, the scriptural personages! The paragraphers have
made Job so very amusing; and Joseph and Daniel!—how stupid people must
be who do not roar with laughter at the mere mention of these august
names!
Cannot this odious, brutal laughter, which is not manly or womanly, be
stopped? Ridicule cannot kill it, but an appeal to all the best feelings
of the human heart might; for all the best feelings of the human heart
are outraged. How funny death has become! When shall we grow tired of
the joke about the servant who lighted the fire with kerosene, and went
above; or the quite too awfully comical _jeu d’esprit_ about the boy who
ate green apples, and is no more? These jokes are in the same taste that
would put the hair of a skeleton into curl-papers. Still we laugh.
A nation without reverence has begun to die: its feet are cold, though
it may still grin. A nation whose youth are without enthusiasm has no
future beyond the piling up of dollars. It is not so with our country
yet; but the fact remains: enthusiasm is dying, and hero-worship needs
revival.
One can easily understand why, among Catholics, there is not as much
hero-worship as there ought to be. It is because our greatest heroes are
not even mentioned in current literature, and because they are not well
presented to our young people. St. Francis Xavier was a greater hero
than Nelson; yet Nelson is popularly esteemed the more heroic, because
Southey wrote his life well. But St. Francis’s life is written for the
mystic, for the devotee. It is right, of course; but our young people
are not all mystics or devotees; consequently St. Francis seems afar
off—a saint to be vaguely remembered, but nothing more.
If the saints whose heroism appeals most to the young could be brought
nearer to the natural young person, they would soon be as friends, daily
companions—heroes, not distant beings whose halos guard them from
contact. One need only know St. Francis of Assisi to be very fond of
him. He had a sense of humor, too, but no sense of levity. And yet the
only readable life of this hero and friend has been written by a
Protestant. (I am not recommending it, for there are some things which
Mrs. Oliphant does not understand.) And there is St. Ignatius Loyola.
And there is St. Charles Borromeo—_that_ was a man! And St. Philip Neri,
who had a sense of humor, and was entirely civilized at the same time.
And St. Francis of Sales! His “Letters to Persons in the World” make one
wish that he had not died so soon. What tact, what knowledge of the
world! How well he persuades people without diplomacy, by the force of a
fine nature open to the grace of God!
Our young people need only know the saints—not out of Alban Butler’s
sketches, but illumined with reality—to be filled with an enthusiasm
which Carlyle would have had them waste on the wrong kind of heroes.
One of the most interesting pictures of a priest in American
literature—which of late abounds in pictures of good priests—is that of
Père Michaux, in Miss Woolson’s novel “Anne.” He believed that “all
should live their lives, and that one should not be a slave to others;
that the young should be young, and that some natural, simple pleasure
should be put into each twenty-four hours. They might be poor, but
children should be made happy; they might be poor, but youth should not
be overwhelmed by the elders’ cares; they might be poor, but they could
have family love around the poorest hearthstone; and there was always
time for a little pleasure, if they would seek it simply and
moderately.”
But Père Michaux was French: he had not been corrupted by that American
Puritanism which has, somehow or other, got into the blood of even the
Irish Celts on this side of the Atlantic. Pleasures are not spontaneous
or simple, and joy is only possible after a long period of worry. Simple
pleasures—the honest little wild flowers that peep up between the
every-day crevices of each twenty-four hours—are neglected because we
have not been taught to see them. Life may be serious without being sad;
but, influenced by the Puritan gloom, sadness and seriousness have come
to be confounded.
Man was not made to be sad. Unless something is wrong with him, he is
not sad by temperament. And sadness ought to be repressed in early
youth. The sad child in the stories is pathetic, but the authors
generally have the good sense to kill him when he is young. The sad
child in real life ought not to be tolerated. And if his parents have
made him sad by putting their burden of the trials of life on him so
early, they have done him irreparable wrong. Simple pleasures are the
sunlight of life; and the little plants struggle to the sunshine and
find light for themselves, darken their dwelling-place as you will. The
frown in the household, the scolding voice, the impatience with childish
folly—all these things are against the practice of the Church and her
saints. The Catholic sentiment is one of joy—not the Sabbath any more,
but the Sunday, the day of smiles, of rejoicing; the day on which, as
old Christian legends have it, the sun is supposed to dance in honor of
the first Easter.
How much the French and Germans, who have not lost the Catholic
traditions, make of the little joys of life! If the grandfather’s
name-day come, there is the pot of flowers, the little cake with its
ornaments. And how many other feasts are made by the poorest of them out
of what the Americans, rich by comparison, would look on but as a patch
upon his poverty! There should be no dark days for the young. It is so
easy to make them happy, if they have not been distorted by their
surroundings out of the capability of enjoying little pleasures. The
mother who teaches her daughters that poverty is not death to all joy,
and that the enjoyment of simple things makes life easier and keeps
people younger—such a mother is kinder to her girls, gives them a better
gift than the diamond necklace which the spoiled girl craves, and then
finds good only so far as it excites envy in others.
Children should not be made to bear a weight of sadness. That girl will
not long for an electric doll if she has been taught to get the poetry
of life out of a rag-baby. And the boy will not pine for an improved
bicycle, and sulk without it, if he has learned to swim. The greatest
pleasures are the easiest had—
“Each ounce of dross costs an ounce of gold;
For a cap and bells our lives we pay;
Bubbles we buy with a whole soul’s tasking:
’Tis Heaven alone that is given away,—
’Tis only God may be had for the asking.”