CATHOLIC WORLD.
AP
2.
A C3
v.17
MONTHLY MAGAZINE
OF
GENERAL LITERATURE AND SCIENCE
PUBLISHED BY THE PAULIST FATHERS.
VOL. XCVIL
APRIL, 1913, TO SEPTEMBER, 1913.
NEW YORK:
THE OFFICE OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD
120 WEST 6oTH STREET.
CONTENTS.
Albania, Light and Shade in.
Elisabeth Christitch, . . . 497
Alfred Noyes, Who is? Elbridge
Colby, 289
Amateur Bargee, The. Louise
Imogen Guiney, . . .769
Anglican Benedictines, The Con-
version of the. W. H. Watts. 331
Assent to Socialism, The. William
J. Kerby, Ph.D., . .145
Bergson and the Divine Fecundity.
Thomas J. Gerrard, . .631
Bergson and Finalism. Thomas J.
Gerrard, . . . . -374
Bergson and Freedom. Thomas J.
Gerrard. ..... 222
Catholic Church, Why the, Can-
not Accept Socialism. George
M. Scarle, C.S.P., . . . 4 44
Centenary of Frederic Ozanam, The.
William. P. H. Kitchin, Ph.D., 758
Challenge to the Time-Spirit, A.
Thomas J. Gerrard, . . -736
Charm of Florence, The. Joseph
Francis Wickham, . . .613
Chatterton, The Mock. Louise
Imogen Guiney, . . .16
Christendom, The Shepherd of All.
Joseph Francis Wickham, . Si
Church, The Edict of Milan and the
Peace of the. William P. H. Kit-
chin, Ph.D., .... 305
Conversion of the Anglican Bene-
dictines, The. W. H. Watts, . 331
Crusade, Lady Aberdeen's. Kath-
arine Tynan, .... 188
Divine Fecundity, Bergson and the.
Thomas J. Gerrard, . .631
Divorce, The English Royal Com-
mission on. W. H. Kent, O.S.C., i
English Royal Commission on Di-
vorce, The. W. H. Kent, O.S.C.. i
Finalism, Bergson and. Thomas J.
Gerrard, . . . . -374
Florence, The Charm of. Joseph
Francis Wickham, . . .613
Flowers of Carmel, Two. William
Vowles, ..... 802
Frederic Ozanam, The Centenary
of. William P. H. Kitchin, Ph.D., 758
Freedom, Bergson and. Thomas J.
Gerrard, . . . . . 222
Foreign Periodicals,
119, 260, 412, 552, 694, 838
French Literature, The New Move-
ment in. Joseph L. O'Brien,
M.A., ..... 597
Glimpses of a Great Catholic Soul.
F. Drouet, CM., . . .472
Hassard, John R. G. James J.
Walsh. M.D., Ph.D., . . .349
Hinkson, Katharine Tynan, The
Poetry of. Katherine Bregy, . 208
Johnson, Lionel, The Poetry and
Prose of. Elbridge Colby, . 52
Lady Aberdeen's Crusade. Kath-
arine Tynan, . . . .188
Laughter of the Saints, The. F.
Drouet, CM., . . . . 197
Lavington of Manning, The.
Louise Imogen Guiney, . . 587
Light and Shade in Albania.
Elisabeth Christitch, . . 497
Manning, The Lavington of.
Louise Imogen Guiney, , .587
Meynell, Mrs., and Her Poetry.
Katharine Tynan, . . . 668
Milan, The Edict of, and the Peace
of the Church William P. H.
Kitchin. Ph.D., . . . .305
Mock Chatterton, The. Louise
Imogen Guiney, . . .16
More, Sir Thomas, and His Time.
W. E. Campbell, . 64, 383, 485
Mullakons, With the, of Siberia
Richardson L. Wright, . .657
Nations Have Knelt, Where the.
Joseph Francis Wickham, . . 161
New Movement in French Litera-
ture, The. Joseph L. O'Brien,
M.A., 577
Poetry of Katharine Tynan Hink-
son, The. Katherine Bregy. . 208
Recent Discoveries and a Review:
Shakespeare. Appleton Morgan, 721
Recent Events,
129, 269, 416, 560, 704, 847
Renaissance, The Spiritual Note in
the. Evelyn March Phillipps, 314, 649
Rome, The Spell of. Joseph Fran-
cis Wickham, . . . .321
Saints, The Laughter of the. F.
Drouet, CM., . . . .197
Shakespeare : Recent Discoveries
and a Review. Appleton Mor-
gan, . . . . .721
Shepherd of All Christendom, The.
Joseph Francis Wickham, . 81
Siberia, With the Mullakons of.
Richardson L. Wright, . .657
Socialism, The Assent to. William
J. Kerby, Ph.D., . . .145
Socialism, Why the Catholic Church
Cannot Accept. George M.
Searle. C.S.P., . . . . 444
Soul of Tuscany, The. Joseph
Francis Wickham, . . -433
Spell of Rome, The. Joseph Fran-
cis Wickham, . . . .321
Spiritual Note in the Renaissance,
The. Evelyn March Phillipps, 314, 649
Who is Alfred Noyes? Elbridge
Colby, ..... 289
Time-Spirit, A Challenge to the.
Thomas J. Gerrard, . . . 736
Tuscany, The Soul of. Joseph
Francis Wickham, . . -433
Two Flowers of Carmel. William
Vowles, . . . . . 802
With Our Readers,
141, 280, 428, 571, 716, 860
CONTENTS
ni
STORIES.
Green Bags and Green Ribbons.
Katherine G. Kennedy, . . 232
Lead Us Not Into Temptation.
Pia Robinson, . . .74
The Image of Our Lady. Jane
Hall, . . . . .812
The Rainbow Crystal. Jeanie
Drake, 360
The Rector's Restitution. Grace V .
Christmas, . . . .781
The Red Ascent. Esther W. Neill,
92, 173, 336, 454, 594, 746
The Song. T. B. Reilly, . , 623
POEMS.
An Appeal. Eleanor Doivning,
A Painter's Vision. Caroline D.
Swan, . .
Canon for the Repose of the Mother
of God. Translated from St.
John Damascene,
Co'imbra of the Hills. Thomas
Walsh, . .
799
172
45
622
Encompassed. Charles L. O'Don-
nell, C.S.C., ....
If Youth Could Only Know. Emily
Rickey,
In Memoriam : Father Doyle.
Maurice Francis Egan,
Poets. Joyce Kilmer, .
Stars. Joyce Kilmer, .
The Ballad of the Judas Tree.
Emily Hickey, ....
335
80
744
506
196
469
NEW PUBLICATIONS.
A Child's Rule of Life, . .257
A Guide Book to Colorado, . 401
A Hundredfold, . . . 551
A Hundred Years of Irish History, 834
Alma Mater, or the Georgetown
Centennial, and Other Stories, 549
A New Variorum Edition of
Shakespeare, .... 828
A Pilgrim of Eternity, . . 398
A Primer of Social Science, . 835
A Textbook in the History of Mod-
ern Elementary Education, . 108
A White-Handed Saint, . .550
Betrothment and Marriage, . . 398
Bossuet, ..... 836
Confessions of a Convert, . . 392
Callista, 688
Cardinal Manning ; The Decay of
Idealism in France ; The Institute
of France, .... 406
Cease Firing, .... 686
Christology : A Dogmatic Treatise
on the Incarnation, . . . 686
Columbanus the Celt, . . 250
Come Rack ! Come Rope ! . . 399
Curly and Others, . . .116
Dictionnaire Apologetique de la Foi
Catholique, . . . .410
Did the Emperor Alexander I. Die
a Catholic? . . . . 837
Eucharistic Lilies, or Youthful
Lovers of Jesus in the Blessed
Sacrament, . . . . .551
Eucharistica : Verse and Prose in
Honour of the Hidden God, . 252
European Cities at Work, . .541
Famous Foreign Writers, . . 837
Five Centuries of English Poetry, 827
Folk Tales of East and West, . 690
Fountains of Our Savior, . .551
Francis Bacon, .... 837
From Hussar to Priest, . . 539
Guide to the United States for the
Jewish Immigrant, . . .115
Harnack et Le Miracle, . . 117
Heart of Revelation, . . 551
Hindrances to Conversion to the
Catholic Church and Their Re-
moval, ..... 684
History of Rome and the Popes in
the Middle Ages, . . .821
History of the Society of Jesus in
France from Its Origin to Its
Suppression (1528-1762), . . 255
In God's Nursery, . . . 536
In the Lean Years, . . . 410
In the Service of the King, . 115
Islam, , 837
Jeunesse et Ideal, . . . 694
John Wesley's Last Love, . . 682
Lacordaire, , -' . . 829
La Foi, . . . . 693
Lances Hurled at the Sun, . . 249
La Predication Contemporaine, . 693
Le Prin Evangelique, . . 694
Levia-Pondera, . .. ^ . . 395
Les Fous, ... . 694
Les Quinze Etapes ou Pas Spirit-
uels dans la voie des Exercises
de Saint Ignace, . ' . . 694
Les Semeurs de Vent, . . 694
L'Objet Integral d 1'Apologetique, 694
Life and Times of Calvin, . 685
Luther, 528
Man, .... .837
Manual of Christian Epigraphy, . 837
Matutinaud Reads the Bible, . 837
Memory and the Executive Mind, 551
Mishnah ; a Digest of the Basic
Principles of the Early Jewish
Jurisprudence, . . . 105
Mizraim ; Souvenirs of Egypt, . 550
CONTENTS
Mystical Contemplation, or the
Principles of Mystical Theology, 825
My Unknown Chum, "Aquecheek," 254
Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 680
Notes of the True Church, . 117
Old China and Young America, 411
Old Time Makers of Medicine, . 114
Our Book of Memories, . . 396
Our Lady in the Church, and Other
Essays, . . . .';. 248
Our Neighbors: The Japanese, . 411
Philosophers and Thinkers, . . 694
Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby, and
Other Stories, .... 399
Questions de Moral, de Droit Can-
onique et de Liturgie, . . 694
Religious History of the French
Revolution, .... 408
Sentiment de Napoleon I. sur le
Christianisme, .... 694
Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great
Unknown, . . . 405
Sing Ye to the Lord, . . .-58
Social Environment and Moral Pro-
gress . 545
Songs for Sinners, . . . 253
Stanmore Hall and Its Inmates, 112
St. Anne of the Mountains, . 117
The Amateur Gentleman, . .401
The Apostle of Ceylon Father
Joseph Vaz, 1651 to 1711, . 83'2
The Book of the Foundations of St.
Teresa of Jesus, . . . 823
The Catechist's Manual, . . 549
The Catholic Church in the First
Centuries, .... 837
The Complete Works of John
Tauler, Religious of the Four-
teenth Century, . . .112
The Cult of Mary, . . .681
The Deciding Voice of the Monu-
ments in Biblical Criticism, . 402
The Distribution of Incomes in the
United States 548
The Doctrine of the Assumption, 837
The Dominican Revival in the
Nineteenth Century, . .831
The Drift of Romanticism, . 543
The Era of the Drama, . . 694
The Foundations of the Faith, . 694
The History of the Popes, from the
Close of the Middle Ages, . 532
The Honourable Mrs. Garry, . 251
The Invaders, , . . . . 403
The Kingdom, . ; ' '. , . . .259
The King's Table, . . .551
The Life and Letters of John Paul
Jones, .-,?" .... 679
The Madonna of Sacrifice, . 411
The Meaning of God in Human
Experience, .... 689
The Mighty Friend, . . . 111
The Missal, . . . .118
The Names of God, . . . 536
The New ''Testament Manuscripts
in the Freer Collection, . .104
The Princess and the Goblin, . 411
The Psalms, . . . .118
The Reign of Jesus, . . .117
The Right of the Strongest, . 411
The Road of Living Men, . 551
The Roman Curia, . . . . 836
The Sacred Shrine, . . . 246
The Stock Exchange from Within, 256
The " Summa Theologica " of St.
Thomas Aquinas, . . . 107
The Theory of Evolution in the
Light of Facts, . . . 833
The Theory of the Mass, . . 837
Their Choice, . . . .116
Theological and Canonical Ques-
tions, ..... 837
This, That, and the Other, . .no
Three Years in the Libyan Desert, 538
Tolerance, ..... 690
Two and Two Makes Four, . 403
Up in Ardmuirland, . . .109
Vendeenne, ..... 694
Verses and Reverses, . . . 409
Vocations for Girls, . . .251
V. V.'s Eyes, . . . .687
Wild Birds of New York, . .116
William George Ward and the
Catholic Revival, . . . 827
Winds of Doctrine, . . . 534
With the Victorious Bulgarians, 106
THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XCVII. APRIL, 1913. No. 577.
THE ENGLISH ROYAL COMMISSION ON DIVORCE.
BY W. H. KENT, O.S.C.
T first sight it might seem that a discussion of the
recent Report* of the (English) Royal Commission
on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes must be doubly
out of place in the pages of an American Catholic
journal. For, on the one hand, this official docu-
ment is concerned solely with possible suggested legislation which
could only affect British subjects, or, to speak more precisely, those
who are inhabitants of England and of certain British possessions
overseas. And, on the other hand, Catholics who are opposed on
principle to any divorce, in the sense in which the word is under-
stood in this Report, cannot, it would seem, be in a position to
appreciate or discuss the arguments and evidence in regard to
proposals for granting further facilities for divorce, and extending
its dubious advantages to new classes of the community. For this
reason, it may be presumed, no Catholic is found among the mem-
bers of the Commission, though some representative Catholics, it is
true, gave evidence in the course of the inquiry.
None the less it will be found, on further reflection, that there
are good reasons why the Catholics, and the non-Catholics also,
of the United States should give this document their serious
attention. For though directly and more immediately it may affect
*Report of the Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes:
presented to Parliament by command of His Majesty. London : Eyre and Spot-
tiswoode, 1912.
Copyright. 1913. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
VOL. XCVII. I.
2 THE ENGLISH COMMISSION ON DIVORCE [April,
British subjects only, in such matters as matrimonial legislation
what is done in one land cannot fail to have some effect, whether
for good or evil, among other nations.
And Americans, it may be added, have a more special reason to
be interested in the proposals set forth in this English Official
Report. For they will find that what may be called the American
argument fills a conspicuous place in its pages. To put this in a
few words, it may be said that the Commissioners who sign the
Majority Report recommend such further facilities for divorce
as would make the English law on this matter approximately the
same as that already in force in many States of the Union. And
though they do not follow it in every respect, and look for some
light and leading elsewhere, it is hardly too much to say that
American divorce law is their great example and source of inspira-
tion.
On the other hand, it will be found that the three distinguished
signatories of the Minority Report, who offer a strenuous opposi-
tion to the proposed changes, make a powerful and effective appeal
to American experience in this matter. They point to the out-
standing fact " that in the case of the great English-speaking
American people, which has, and for many years has had, a Divorce
Law largely similar to that which our colleagues would see estab-
lished in this country, the number of divorces has grown rapidly
year by year."
This moral is further enforced by a reference to the formation
of the " American National League for the Protection of the
Family," and the minority cite some emphatic words of its Cor-
responding Secretary, Dr. Samuel Dike, on the evils resulting from
easy divorce. And after noticing and discussing the argument
that the increase in American divorces was due to the independence
of the several States and the facility of immigration, etc., they
go on to say:
After making all allowances for differences of national tem-
perament, climate, and circumstances between England and
the United States, we are bound to recognize that the two
countries have too much in common to make it probable that
if we in England adopt what are substantially the American
grounds for divorce, we shall escape the grave disasters which
have admittedly followed their adoption in the United States.
American readers, we imagine, can scarcely remain indifferent
1913-] THE ENGLISH COMMISSION ON DIVORCE 3
to this spectacle of English legislators and social reformers, drawn
one way by the example of American laws, and in the opposite
direction by the lessons of American experience. But comment
on this aspect of the divided Report of the Royal Commission had
better be left in the safe hands of American Catholic critics.
In much the same way, it may be said, that while Catholics
would not be directly affected by any of the suggested changes in the
Divorce Laws, such a document as the present Report undoubtedly
challenges criticism from ,a Catholic standpoint. We cannot well
be content to let it pass as something in no wise concerning our
own people. For in any case the Catholic objection to divorce
is not a mere matter of domestic discipline, like clerical celibacy,
for example. Our defense of this latter rule need not imply
any censure on those without the Church and free from any such
obligation. On the contrary, the Catholic belief in the absolute
indissolubility of marriage applies in principle to the marriages
of those who are not Catholics. And even if it were the case
that divorce laws had no effect on our own people, we must needs
regard the growing tendency to relax the bond of Christian mar-
riage as a grave national evil, and do all in our power, whether
by word or political action, to arrest its fatal progress.
But here, again, there are further and more special reasons
why Catholics should take an active part in this struggle. For it
is clear to all who understand the influence of evil example and
environment that the disastrous effect of increased facilities for
divorce among Protestants must carry with it some danger to the
morality of their Catholic neighbors and fellow citizens. And what
is more, many of the arguments here brought together to make
out a case for these further facilities, constitute, however uncon-
sciously and indirectly, an indictment of the Catholic system; and
naturally challenge some answering defense of our own position.
It is true that the Report, as becomes its official character, is free
from anything like religious controversy. We can notice nothing
in the nature of offensive language, unless it be one passage quoted
from an old Protestant bishop of the seventeenth century.* And
if the evidence of the Catholic witnesses examined by the Com-
" The distinction betwixt bed and board and the bond is new, never mentioned
in the Scripture, and unknown to the ancient Church ; devised only by the
canonists and schoolmen in the Latin Church (for the Greek Church knows it not),
to serve the Pope's turn the better, till he got it established in the Council of Trent,
at which time, and never before, he laid his anathema upon all them that were
of another mind; forbidding all men to marry, and not to make any use of
Christ's concession." These are the words used by Bishop Cozens in Lord Ross' case.
4 THE ENGLISH COMMISSION ON DIVORCE [April,
missioners has unfortunately had little effect on the conclusions set
forth in the Report, their views are treated with becoming respect.
But this very freedom from polemical prejudice, and the gen-
erally impartial tone of the Report, will only serve to make any
incidental misrepresentation of Catholic teaching, or any dispar-
agement of Catholic principles, and practice doubly dangerous.
For a discerning reader, who would make a large allowance for
ignorance or bias if he found these things in a no Popery tract,
might more easily be led astray by the strangely misleading lan-
guage of the Commissioners who were conducting an official in-
quiry, and had taken evidence from competent Catholic witnesses.
For this reason it will be well to enter an emphatic protest against
the account of Catholic practice given in the following passage of
the Report :
The only divorce which the pre-Reformation Church recog-
nized, and its courts granted, was a divorce a mensd et thoro
(equivalent to what is now termed a judicial separation), as the
Church held that a valid marriage between Christians was in-
dissoluble. The hardships which result from holding marriage
indissoluble were, however, mitigated by a system of effecting
complete divorce by means of decrees of nullity, the grounds
of which were numerous. [Referring to the rules as to the
forbidden degrees of consanguinity and affinity, Sir Lewis Dib-
den says] : " These elaborate, and highly artificial rules produced
a system under which marriages theoretically indissoluble, if
originally valid, could practically be got rid of by being declared
null ab initio on account of the impediment of relationship. This
relationship might consist in some remote or fanciful connection
between the parties or their godparents, unknown to either of
them until the desire to find a way out of an irksome union
suggested minute research into pedigrees for obstacles a search
which somehow seems to have been generally successful."
The grounds still recognized by the Roman Catholic Church
for declaring a marriage null are given by Monseigneur (sic.)
Moyes as fifteen in number.
Now it is scarcely necessary to say that this passage, which
has a conspicuous place in the early pages of the Report, is a
ludicrous misrepresentation of the Catholic position. This is
obvious to anyone who is really familiar with Catholic history in
the past and Catholic practice in the present day. But we fear
1913.] THE ENGLISH COMMISSION ON DIVORCE 5
that too many readers may be unaware of this, and may readily
accept this as a faithful account of the facts. They may fail to
observe that this curious description of the Catholic system is taken
from a Protestant authority; and that the Catholic witnesses (who
would certainly have repudiated this perversion of facts) is merely
cited for a simple figure. And as few who read the Report will
also study the voluminous evidence for themselves, it is probable
that many will remain unaware that some of the aforesaid fifteen
grounds of dissolution would also hold good in English law (which,
on the other hand, has several grounds not admitted by the Church).
It is, withal, some relief to note that the misrepresentation
is certainly not malicious. For though it may be thought an ab-
surdity, the alleged system of annulling marriages theoretically indis-
soluble is really regarded as mitigating the hardships otherwise
involved in the Catholic doctrine of the indissolubility of marriage.
But however honest and well-meaning they may be, these inter-
preters of the Catholic " system " are strangely at fault in their
account of its purpose and mode of operation.
It is hardly necessary to say that we have no desire to dispute
or minimize the true facts on which this strange statement is,
apparently, founded. It is certainly true that while the Catholic
Church resolutely refuses to acknowledge divorce, in the sense in
which the word is here understood (i. e. } the complete dissolution
of a marriage originally valid), she allows such separation with
liberty to remarry in cases where the original contract is proved
to have been null and void ab initio, by reason of some diriment
impediment, and, indeed, it could not well be otherwise.
For the most rigid, consistent, and absolute doctrine of the
indissolubility of the marriage bond could not have the effect of
holding together those who, ex hypothesi, were not married.
It is also true that before the time of Innocent III. (1216),
and not as the Report implies in the whole period before the Ref-
ormation, the forbidden degrees were numerous, and presented
considerable difficulty which was the great Pope's main reason
for reducing them.
And it is, further, the fact, that in this matter, as elsewhere,
the law has occasionally been abused by evil-minded men, by false
evidence, or by intimidating bishops subservient to their authority.
But the serious student of Church history may well be filled with
wonder when he reads the above .account of the Catholic system, and
learns how easy it was to be successful in the search for satisfactory
6 THE ENGLISH COMMISSION ON DIVORCE [April,
evidence of nullity, and thus dissolve a bond "theoretically indis-
soluble."
For if this were really the case, how came it that so many
powerful princes, from Lothaire in the ninth century to Henry
of England in the sixteenth, found the bond so hard to break, and
even whole kingdoms were shaken by their unavailing efforts?
The divorce of Lothaire might be sanctioned by local bishops and
subservient councils, but the Pope annulled the iniquitous sentence.
Philip Augustus of France could persuade the Archbishop of
Rheims to divorce him from his Danish bride on a pretense
of affinity, but Innocent III., by laying his kingdom under an
interdict, compelled the king to take back his true wife. King
John, it is true, was more successful in getting free from his union
with Avice of Gloucester on the plea of consanguinity, in spite of
the Pope's remonstrance that the impediment had been removed by
a dispensation. But if wrong was done in that case, the success
assuredly brought its own punishment in its train. And it may
be remarked that it was the same great Pontiff who, after rebuking
these lawless kings, took steps to reduce and simplify the forbidden
degrees of consanguinity and affinity (c. 8 X. de consanguinitate
et affinitate).
The repeated failure of powerful princes, in corrupt and law-
less times, should suffice to show that the average sensual man
could have little hope of success without genuine and convincing
evidence. And a little knowledge of the facts would serve to
dissipate this illusion of a systematic use of decrees of nullity as a
working substitute for divorce in the case of Catholics who have
contracted unhappy marriages. For these decrees are only granted
on real grounds, which are by no means so numerous and fanciful
as these writers imagine. And in the case of most Catholics
afflicted with those matrimonial troubles, for which Protestants
seek a dubious remedy in the divorce courts, there is no possibility
of getting a decree of nullity. This is really a plain question of
fact, not a disputable opinion. And the candid and impartial
Protestant, who will examine the evidence for himself, will cer-
tainly find that our Catholic marriages are really indissoluble in
practice as well as in theory.
This explanation, it may be hoped, will be enough to dispose
of this initial misrepresentation of the Catholic system. But when
once the notion of this illusory mitigation is out of the way, we
find ourselves left to bear the full force of all the arguments and
1913-] THE ENGLISH COMMISSION ON DIVORCE 7
evidence gathered together in this Report, to show the necessity
of a simple and facile system of divorce, and to oppress us with a
painful picture of the terrible sufferings and immorality that must
almost inevitably follow where no such remedy is available.
It is true, as we have said, that these well-meaning Commis-
sioners are not assailing Catholics or writing and arguing against
them. And although they briefly notice other and divergent views
on this question, in the main they seem to make the present English
law their point of departure, and, declining to discuss the opinion
of those who would fain do away with divorce altogether, they
proceed to consider the advisability of increasing the grounds on
which divorce may be granted, and bringing the remedy, now mo-
nopolized by the rich, within easy reach of the poorer classes. Thus,
for the most part, their arguments seem to be directly addressed
to those who agree on the common ground that divorce is a rightful
and a real remedy. And it may be freely allowed that when once
this fundamental principle is granted, their arguments hang together
with a logical sequence, and their practical conclusions are by no
means unreasonable.
Certainly if divorce be, as they suppose, a rightful and real
remedy for evils, so very real and so very common, it is obviously
unfair that it should be confined to the rich, or to only a small sec-
tion of the victims of unhappy marriages. And it is idle to deny
that as the Act of 1857 was the logical sequel of the system of
divorce by act of Parliament, which was a privilege of the very rich,
so is this further extension of facilities for divorce a logical sequel
of the Act of 1857. But we may be permitted to remark that we
can easily see that the same logical sequence will eventually carry
the reformers yet further on their path of destruction.
But while the underlying argument of this Report is thus
directly addressed to those who admit this common ground that
divorce a vinculo is a real and rightful remedy, all that is said
concerning the evils that follow from its inaccessibility to the
poorer classes of the community, must needs hit those who would
refuse this remedy altogether.
And if the reader accepts what is said, and blames the system
which puts a prohibitive price on divorce, he must also blame the
Catholic system which will not allow it at any price. Thus, we
are given an imposing array of facts and authoritative opinions,
all tending to warrant the conclusion of the Commissioners that
" the remedy of judicial separation is an unnatural and unsatis-
8 THE ENGLISH COMMISSION ON DIVORCE [April,
factory remedy, leading to evil consequences (i. e., to immorality),
and that it is inadequate in cases where married life has become
practically impossible." And the further conclusion is drawn that
by the extension of grounds for divorce, and by improved and less
costly methods of procedure, such parties should be enabled to
obtain what is, apparently, a more natural and more satisfactory
remedy in a complete dissolution of their marriage.
Yet, elsewhere in the Report, in an earlier stage of the dis-
cussion, the reader is warned that the aforesaid judicial separations
must still be retained, not only as a protection for the very poor,
but also " because these orders afford a remedy for Roman Catholics
and persons disapproving of divorce." And thus he is reminded
that for Catholics there can, as it would seem, be nothing but an
inadequate and unnatural remedy.
It is on this very matter, moreover, that Bishop Cozens was
speaking when he condemns the distinction "betwixt bed and
board and the bond " as something devised by canonists and school-
men to serve the turn of the Pope, who is accused of " forbidding
all men to marry, and not to make any use of Christ's concession."
(Cf. above p. 3.)
It is obvious, as we have said, that many readers may well be
moved by such passages to form a very unfavorable opinion of the
Catholic system. And though the Commissioners themselves re-
frain from any such controversial recrimination, some readers, we
fear, may be tempted to go farther, and make the Pope and his
hard, inexorable law the fons et origo mall.
For it is certainly the case that many advanced advocates of
marriage-law reform do regard the indissoluble marriage bond as
part of an obsolete or antiquated ecclesiastical system, from which
the Protestant Churches have been but partly emancipated, while
Rome still maintains it in full rigor.
The old Protestant bishop would probably find many to agree
with him in throwing the chief blame on the Pope, since this
troublesome doctrine of indissolubility comes down to us in a well-
knit system of dogmas and laws, finding their main sanction and
support in Papal authority.
It would obviously be out of place to attempt any vindication
of the Pope's authority on the present occasion, for the problem
of divorce and marriage-law reform is quite enough by itself ; and
there is no need to perplex the reader with an incidental discussion
on Papal supremacy and infallibility. Yet it may not be amiss
1913-] THE ENGLISH COMMISSION ON DIVORCE g
to remark that a right appreciation of the Pope's position in this
question of divorce should be enough to upset most Protestant
or Rationalist theories on the origin and growth of the Papal
power and authority.
For all who do not accept the Catholic belief as to the origin
of the Papacy, must needs hold that the Pope claims high powers
which are not really his. And some are prepared to explain how
these pretensions have grown and developed in the course of time;
how favorable circumstances have been turned to account; what
use has been made of political changes; what part has been played
by the Donation of Constantine or the forged Decretals.
There is, indeed, a large literature of historical controversy, or
controversial history, wherein the Papacy appears as an ever-in-
creasing and encroaching power, ever on the alert in its own
interest, strengthening and consolidating old claims or advancing
others in new directions. And it may be admitted that even in
unskilled hands the argument may sometimes be plausible and
imposing. But there is one plain fact that cannot by any ingenuity
be reconciled with this reading of Papal history; and this is the
attitude of the Popes in this matter of divorce and marriage. For
what would that attitude have been on the Protestant hypothesis of
arrogant ambition and ever-increasing claims? The Pope would
surely claim the most absolute and extensive power over the bond
of marriage. And it is easy to see what a far-reaching influence
it would give him in his dealings with kings and princes if he claimed
a paramount and exclusive power of dissolving the bond of a
valid marriage.
Yet with all the plausible arguments that might be used to
support this claim, and all the motives that might recommend it
to crafty or ambitious Pontiffs, there is the one plain luminous
fact in all the dark history of political intrigues and matrimonial
troubles, that they never arrogated to themselves the power of
putting asunder those whom God had joined together. Even in
the case of the decrees of nullity, the Popes only claimed the right
of judging as to the facts and interpreting the law. And all that
they risked and suffered in resisting the imperious demands of
mighty princes, shows how strictly they acted according to law and
justice in this matter. For when they resolutely refused to annul
a marriage not really void ab initio, they were not denying a grace
they might have granted if they would. Here, as in many other
io THE ENGLISH COMMISSION ON DIVORCE [April,
matters, the Papal refusal is a non possumus. Like the great rebel
in a later age, each one of the medieval Popes who refused to dis-
solve the bond of a royal marriage said, in effect, I cannot do
otherwise (Ich kann nlcht anders).
In the case of Henry VIII., it is true that powerful interests
were at work on both sides, and the fear of England was balanced
by the fear of the imperial power. But in other cases the Popes
risked everything for the cause of justice alone. Thus in the
case of Lothaire, the injured wife herself joined in the prayer
for a dissolution, and the Pope, though driven from his palace,
would never consent to annul the marriage. And when we turn
to a later page of history, after the lapse of a thousand years, we
find another Roman Pontiff resisting the power of Napoleon, and
firmly refusing to dissolve the bond of marriage between Jerome
Bonaparte and his Protestant American bride. The letter of Pius
VII. to Napoleon on the Bonaparte-Patterson case makes the
Pope's position in this matter perfectly clear, and plainly shows
that he disclaims any power or right of dissolving a full and valid
Christian marriage.*
Protestant controversialists have much to tell us of the arro-
gance of the Roman Pontiffs, who set themselves, as it would
seem, above the law of God. Yet, here we find the Popes consist-
ently disclaiming the possession of a power which is now freely
claimed by the meanest mushroom state in Christendom.
It may seem that we have been led away from the question of
divorce, considered in itself, to the perennial discussion of Papal
authority. Yet, as a matter of fact, it will be found that the prin-
ciple involved in the Roman non possumus contains the key of the
problem. As we turn the pages of this Report we find the words of
witnesses, or of the Commissioners themselves, enlarging on the
evils that follow from the want of divorce, and arguing that this
saving remedy should be granted with greater facility, and not
only for adultery, but for a variety of other reasons. And as
we read of the widespread immorality and suffering ensuing in a
society under the present limitations and difficulties, we might be
tempted to think it right and reasonable to give these further facili-
ties and this bold extension of the grounds of divorce.
But before proceeding to discuss the advisability of the sug-
gested reforms, it would be well to ask by what authority it is
*See the letter in Artaud de Mentor's Lives of the Popes, English translation.
1913-] THE ENGLISH COMMISSION ON DIVORCE n
proposed to dissolve the bond of marriage in these cases? The
Popes, as we have seen in the plentitude of their power, felt that
this was beyond their competence. Modern Parliaments, rushing in
where the Pontiffs feared to tread, freely pass bills of divorce, or
erect courts empowered to grant decrees of dissolution. But does
it follow that they really have this power, and that the parties
thus divorced are really free? Bishop Cozens, in the forcible
passage quoted above, boldly talks of " Christ's concession." But,
of course, he is only thinking of divorce for adultery, then de-
fended primarily by appeal to the excepting clause in Matthew a
text which is variously interpreted by Catholic commentators, and
is now apparently regarded by some Protestant critics as an inter-
polation.* But divorce for other grounds, at any rate, cannot be
defended in this manner. And the authority on which this can be
granted is still to seek. Are we to suppose that the power of the
state, unlike that of the Pope, had absolutely no limit in these
matters, and that Blackstone's "omnipotence of Parliament" is
to be taken literally, and holds good in the domain of morals?
Will it be competent for some future Commission to recommend,
and some future Parliament to pass, a law allowing a Christian
people the practice of polygamy?
For a Catholic (may we say, for a Christian?) these questions
should answer themselves. And the only answer is that there is no
power really competent to put asunder those whom God hath
joined together. In the light of this plain principle, it will be
readily seen that most of the arguments of our Report proceed
upon a false assumption. Thus one of the strongest and most
effective arguments is that drawn from the immorality resulting
from the impossibility or inaccessibility of divorce. The parties
who get separation orders, because divorce is out of their reach,
very frequently form other and irregular unions. And the same
thing often happens with those whose partners have become perma-
nent inmates of prisons or lunatic asylums. And it is suggested
that if divorce were only given with greater facility, and granted
on these additional grounds, most of these irregular unions might
be converted into legal marriages. But, apart from some practical
objections which may be urged against the expediency of the pro-
*Thus one of the witnesses, the Rev. J. Cooper, Professor of Ecclesiastical
History in the University of Glasglow, and a minister of the Church of Scotland,
considers it doubtful whether the clause, " Except for fornication," was ever
spoken by our Lord.
12
THE ENGLISH COMMISSION ON DIVORCE [April,
posed remedy, it may be remarked that the reasoning of these
reformers is somewhat superficial. It is, apparently, agreed on all
sides that these irregular unions are immoral. But it remains to
ask wherein this deplorable immorality consists, and whether it
can be removed by any mere legal proceedings. To us, at any
rate, it is clear that the immorality lies in living with one who is
the 'wife or husband of another; that this is something wrong
in itself, and that will be just as immoral however much it may be
declared legal. Ardent social reformers, in questions of tem-
perance, for example, are often reminded that we cannot make
people moral by act of Parliament. And though this is certainly
true as it stands, it is often used to suggest the false idea that
nothing can be done in these matters by Legislative measures.
But be this as it may, it is at any rate entirely true that immorality
can never be made moral by act of Parliament.
It may be difficult to get men of the modern world, with its
loose ideas of marriage, to understand how Catholics view such
plausible proposals of removing the immorality of the aforesaid
irregular unions by a legal dissolution of the existing but dis-
regarded bonds of marriage with others. But it may be possible
to illustrate our position by an analogous suggestion in regard to
something which the modern world still considers sacred. The
analogy is naturally suggested by the juxtaposition of the Ninth
and Tenth Commandments, in which the sin of coveting a neighbor's
wife is associated with the sin of coveting his possessions. This
may remind us that sexual sin is not the only form of immorality,
and that offences resulting from the violation of the last command-
ment are still unhappily common.
And, certainly, if many are unhappily living with wives or
husbands who rightfully belong to others, there are also many
who are wrongfully in the enjoyment of their neighbor's goods
and chattels. But what would be thought of a modest suggestion
that this wholesale dishonesty might be healed by an act of ex-
prohibition, annulling all previous rights in such property, and
transferring it to those who now hold it in their hands without legal
warrant? Would such a measure really make the wrongful pos-
sessors a whit more honest? Yet in reality there is really more to
be said for such measures in questions of this kind: for the state
might really take over private property, and in certain exceptional
circumstances it may interfere with the rights of the original
1913-] THE ENGLISH COMMISSION ON DIVORCE 13
owner, for the sake of peace and in the interest of the whole com-
munity. But there is no room for the right of eminent domain
in the case of a man with his wife.
It may be thought that Catholics only take this ground on
ecclesiastical principles, because marriage is a Sacrament, and
the Church which has all Sacraments in her keeping has declared
the bond to be indissoluble. And, no doubt the sacred nature of
a Sacrament adds a higher sanction and a higher force to the
human contract of marriage, and the Papal decrees on this matter
give greater certainty and security to our belief in the doctrine of
indissolubility. But it would be a great mistake to suppose that the
indissolubility in this matter is only something sacramental or eccle-
siastical. That this is not the case is very clearly shown by the
marked difference which the Church herself makes between matri-
monium ratum and matrimonium consummatum. When nothing has
taken place but the contract and ceremony in the church, the Sacra-
ment of Matrimony has already been received. But this matrimon-
ium ratum, as it is called, though valid and binding, can still be
dissolved by Papal authority, or by religious profession. And it
is only when the parties have actually lived together as husband and
wife that the Church feels that she no longer has any power to
dissolve their bond of union.
On the other hand, a marriage contracted by pagans is not a
sacrament. Yet though this may be dissolved in the exceptional cir-
cumstances known as the case of the Apostle, it is otherwise regarded
as indissoluble. And, indeed, it is abundantly clear from the action
of the Popes, and from the language of Catholic divines, on this
question of indissolubility, that it is something really belonging
to the natural institution of marriage. Happily there are still
moralists and deep thinkers, even among those who are outside
the Church, who can see this natural necessity of the unity and
indissolubility of marriage as maintained by Catholics. And what-
ever reckless new writers may say on this matter, their own extreme
proposals only serve to show us the logical issue of the principles
adopted by such comparatively moderate men as these Commis-
sioners, and we may add, to illustrate the fallacy of much that they
say, of the hardships suffered under the present system.
Here let us add that, for our part, we have no wish to over-
look these hardships and evils ; or to treat them lightly. Perhaps
such a course might be possible in the case of a writer whose only
14 THE ENGLISH COMMISSION ON DIVORCE [April,
knowledge of this subject came from books, who was more at home
in theory than practice, and knew no matrimonial cases but those
of some imaginary Tituses and Berthas. But it is otherwise with
the present writer, who has been working for years among the poor,
and knows many who suffer from all the matrimonial troubles
that are considered in this Report. But the greater our sympathy
with such sufferers, the stronger must be our opposition to measures
that would bring them no real relief, and must inevitably add to the
evil that is, in most cases, the cause of their trouble.
As a writer in the Times remarked sometime ago, the extreme
advocates of marriage-law reform make the mistake of ascribing
to the existing laws of Christian marriage evils which would be
present under any system. And, certainly, a little reflection would
suffice to show that if the extremists had their way, or, in other
words, if the principles adopted by all advocates of divorce were
carried on to their logical issue, the sin and suffering that now
fill our hearts with sorrow would be multiplied a hundredfold.
With all that is now done by the laws of Church and State to keep
them together, there are yet many homes broken up by unfaithful-
ness, and many wives left desolate and forsaken. But what would
it be if the marriage union were generally recognized as something
terminable at pleasure? If it were not so painful, it would be
amusing to see how easily some of these reformers assume that
all might be made better with the panacea of divorce. The victims
of unfortunate marriages are to be set free, and find new and better
helpmates, and live happily ever afterwards. These amiable opti-
mists forget how many have really given their hearts to the first
faithless lover, and have no wish to look elsewhere; how many
again may never find any other to ask their hand ; and how many
may find a second partner worse than the first. The relief, were
it possible, must still remain doubtful and precarious. But the
harm done by loosing the marriage bond, and weakening that found-
ation of all human society fidelity to the spoken word must
surely follow.
In taking leave of this Report, it may be well to say that
there are many points of detail in which a Catholic critic must
find himself in agreement with the signatories, for example, in their
suggestions of a drastic restraint over the publication of journalistic
reports of cases in the Divorce Courts. Yet even here we cannot
help feeling that the real remedy for this evil had far better be
1913-] THE ENGLISH COMMISSION ON DIVORCE 15
sought in the more drastic measure of abolishing divorce and Divorce
Courts altogether. On this point it may be well to recall the wise
words of one so free from conservative and ecclesiastical prejudice
as Matthew Arnold :
When one looks, for instance at the English Divorce Court
an institution which perhaps has its practical conveniences, but
which in the ideal sphere is so hideous; an institution which
neither makes divorce impossible, nor makes it decent, which
allows a man to get rid of his wife, or a wife of her husband,
but makes them drag one another, first, for the public edifica-
tion, through a mire of unutterable infamy when one looks
at this charming institution, I say, with its crowded trials, its
newspaper reports, and its money compensations, this institution
in which the gross, unregenerated British Philistine has indeed
stamped an image of himself, one may be permitted to find the
marriage theory of Catholicism refreshing and elevating.*
It may be hoped that the same reflection may be suggested
to some readers of the present Report of the Royal Commission on
Divorce and Matrimonial Causes.
*Cf. Essay on the Function of Criticism.
THE MOCK CHATTERTON.
BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY.
I.
HE late Mr. Churton Collins was an English literary
scholar whose like we shall not soon see again.
One of his greatest pleasures was to dig out buried
merit from the rubbish-heap of time; and in his
published anthology figures more than one exquisite
poet, thus first restored to his rights and the homage of posterity.
In these pages the reader falls across a bard, otherwise unknown,
named Dermody. Mr. Collins editorially alludes to him as "a
hapless child of genius," who might easily have beconie "the
Burns of Ireland." Such praise is interesting to a degree, and
piques every lover of modern verse who is ignorant in the particular
instance, yet eager to be enlightened. How considered, or how
hasty and untrue is this verdict of one of the most competent of
critics? Let us prick up our ears, and approach the untrodden
Dermodian shrine.
Thomas Dermody appeared on this planet in January, 1775,
selecting for his birthplace Ennis in the County of Clare, Ireland,
and for his father the local schoolmaster, a well-educated, good-
for-nothing ex-tutor. The family were above the peasant class.
Also, they were Protestant: whether by ancient conviction or
recent compromise, is not stated. The nameless mother seems
never to have counted. Nicholas Dermody had opportunity, the
respect of good men, some share in the goods of this world, and
even a certain repute of his own, until he fouled the gifts of the
gods by drink and low company. His unlucky son Tom, the eldest
of three, gathered the fruit of the days of his decadence. From the
day he was four years old, Tom seems to have been crammed with
all the learning which his most accommodating head could contain.
Only Evelyn's little Richard, or the lisping Pico della Mirandola,
could hold a candle to him! Aged eight, and very small for his
age, he was promoted not only to be usher in the parental school-
room, but assistant instructor there in the Greek and Latin Ian-
1913.] THE MOCK CHATTERTON 17
guages: entering, in fact, upon that career of pedantry which is
pregnant of such peculiar dangers and unlovely results to the
Gaelic temperament. To balance his dizzy professional eminence,
he began at once to consort with naughty grown-ups (probably his
father's circle), and to pick up, in the green pastures of County
Clare, so much of the trickery of the wicked world as could fall
in a small child's way. He is said to have felt remorse, even at
the time; but remorse is an adult condition, and would have been
affected, were it not felt. Much poetry, well-worded, well-metred,
and well-derived, could already be laid to his infant account.
In 1785, died of small-pox a little brother of seven, and
Thomas, in orchestral measures, mourned at length his Corydon,
" Fond Corydon, scarce ripen'd into boy," who, being " a shepherd
Swain like me, of harmless guise," did all the usual things, such
as feeding his kine and tuning his pipe in lays
Yet unprofaned with trick of city art,
Pure from the head, and glowing from the heart.
The survivor reproves the " healing Powers " at large for not
doing their duty by the other literary babe, who is described as a
starry shade by this time, flourishing a " lyre of gratulations loud."
Tom strews upon the " hillock green " much myrtle and laurel, and
beholds in air a vision on which the lyrical curtain falls : not,
however, before he works in a truly classical allusion to himself as
the " rude youth " who ends his " pastoral strain " by making
off through the woods in most approved fashion, "brushing the
dewdrops from the glittering spray." The Cowleian, Miltonian,
Virgilian opulence of all this is staggering in a perpetrator aged
ten.
Corydon's companionship may have meant a good deal
to his elegist, for their academic sire was by now in a sad way.
Tom's biographer remarks, in that large placating manner of the
late eighteenth century, that " Mr. Dermody did not at all times
pay a strict regard to the rules of prudence," and that " his habits
growing too powerful to be conquered by ordinary means, the
sacrifice of domestic felicity appeared unavoidable." In other
words, Nicholas was going to the devil at a hot pace. When
deadly poverty stared him in the face, he planned to do what he had
done once before: leave Ennis, and try his luck elsewhere. Just
then his wife died (variously egged on, perhaps, to that singular
VOL. XCVII. 2.
i8 THE MOCK CHATTERTON [April,
display of practical intelligence), and for one at least of the family,
all problems got solved.
On the heels of this sad event, Nicholas, with his remaining
boy and girl, was invited by a kindly neighboring squire, a Mr.
Hickman, to visit his estate of Newpark: which forethought of
Mr. Hickman may be supposed to have built up the learned and
threadbare Nicholas, and sent him home with many new, though
brittle resolutions in his widowed breast. His small son, like
Hazlitt at the same age, and almost at the same hour, was mean-
while curled up on a window sill reading Tom Jones, and drawing
from it one glorious over-mastering ambition: that of seeing for
himself the great world. " The domestic scene was too confined for
his expanding ideas." So wrote a certain sympathetic Mr. Samuel
White, long after and in sober earnest, of Tom. With his book,
two shillings, and one clean shirt stuffed into the pocket of his
nankeen trousers, the embryo " Burns of Ireland," giving neither
to his host nor to his parent any warning, ran away from Newpark,
and made a bee line for Dublin. Before midnight, he had two
adventures. Footsore, and thinking to lodge there, he came to a
solitary cabin in a wood. The occupants turned out to be five
miserable-looking children, an aged woman dumb with grief, and a
younger woman's corpse, stretched out on a board in the middle of
the floor. Tom went in, sat a moment by the fire, spoke a condol-
ing word, and in his new role of rich tourist, bestowed on the
grandam one of his shillings. Having gone his way, he presently
returned, nominally to fetch his walking-stick left behind, but really
to press upon the sorrowing creatures the only money he had left.
Apparently, there was a sweet action, " all conscience and tendre
herte," as dear Father Chaucer says!
But a knowledge of Dermody's character, which was all of
a piece from childhood, brushes the bloom clean off the deed. He
could not by the law of his being have held on an hour longer
to those slippery coins. He was never charitable, he was simply
non-prehensile: the prime moral necessity for him was not to
share nor even to spend, but to shed and to scatter. Back to the
road went the pilgrim, and stumbling into some wind-swept me-
diaeval ruins, there abode, not indeed with intent to sleep, but in
order to think out a poem, which, in its own nervous language,
should
lend a venerable dread
To the lone Abbey's rocking head.
1913.] THE MOCK CHATTERTON 19
The experienced author's pity flowed forthwith over the ad-
jacent graves of the victims of
Superstition, fiend deform.
We get through him a glimpse of the " fat Abbot," the " friar's
secret glee," and (interesting addendum !) white-veiled shades " dul-
ling their bright eyes in the dread abode," all the funny old un-
historic paraphernalia dear to tradition. Out of these monastic
Gothic shadows suddenly sprang a grotesque figure, flourishing a
cudgel by the light of the moon, and, in appropriate extension of
the mood of the small Orangeman who was startled by the stave,
loudly singing Lillabullero. It was the parish clerk, returning from
a neighboring fair, and cutting across country in no dejected tem-
per. Tom ran after him. The conversation was voluble, and
turned on politics and religion: for were they not in Ireland?
Presently the parish clerk vanished down a lane; total darkness
supervened, providentially relieved by the sound of wheels, and
of a human voice, this time that of a carrier with whom the child
was well acquainted, and who offered him a ride and a crust of
bread. That carrier, moved by what representations we know not,
seconded the runaway to such good purpose that he conveyed him
practically the whole distance from Ennis to Dublin, one hundred
and forty English miles. Creation viewed on such an extensive
scale, and for several days on end, again provoked the bardling's
poetic fire; it burst into some decasyllabic couplets, smooth
as Pope's, on the benefits of travel.
Who like a Worm in one dull spot would crawl ?
and so forth and so on, exclaims the soaring Muse imparadised on
the van. Dublin, in the shadow of her enchanting hills being
reached, Tom promptly and successfully lost the benevolent carrier.
Now for life ! The clean shirt, with its frilled ruffles, is made
into merchandise; and on the proceeds, three blissful days float by.
Presently Tom remembers that he somehow provided himself, ere
leaving home, with a letter to an eminent apothecary in College-
Green ; and thither he goes, only to be received by that worthy with
chilly skepticism, and cast anew upon the tide of street-life. The
Dublin bookstalls are almost as enchanting as those on the Quais
in Paris, and inevitably and strongly did they attract the doctorcule
sine libris. Once, when he put forth a small grimy hand towards
20 THE MOCK CHATTERTON [April,
a Greek dramatist, the alarmed owner, suspicious of so much lore
in a hungry-looking gamin, hurried up from a cellar entrance to
rescue his property. Having come to scoff, the man remained to
pray: for he ended by inviting the accomplished infant to dinner,
and by then engaging him as tutor for his son! This pleasing
appointment, however, presently came to grief. Pupil and master,
exact contemporaries, fell out most unphilosophically over subjects
probably only remotely connected with the accidence; and the
parent-patron, called in to arbitrate, let the wild hawk from Ennis
shake off his jesses. Mindful, however, of Tom's friendless con-
dition, the good man recommended the young stranger to a neigh-
boring tradesman, one Lynch, who stood in need of an attendant in
his little second-hand shop. Here, too, were books, books by the
hundred, and hither came all Trinity College, in search of bargains
and exchanges. The shop-boy, with his beauty and his big black
eyes, his thin little frame, his now tattered attire, became an object
of instant attention. One youth borrowed over-night the manu-
script of Tom's poems, and whispered that he would send him
a pretty shirt. Next day, the loan was returned: the parcel held
nothing else, and was provocative of scowls and kicks and a foun-
tain-flow of words from the disappointed clerk. The proprietor
intervened to save the repute of his customer, and the shirtless
one, silenced and driven to bay, grabbed pencil and paper to jot
down a four-line epigram. This was deemed by the shopman's
kind soul so clever and convincing, that it was forwarded to the
forgetful undergraduate. Needless to add, the present was sent.
Tom had scored : he always scored.
His next inspiration was to quit the employ of the excellent
Lynch. Once more a freeman of Dublin streets, he came imme-
diately to a halt at another of the innumerable old booths where
books were stacked up: and seeing a Longinus, and seeing an
amiable gentleman somewhat contiguous to the Longinus, he popped
his young designing nose into the thorny text. The gentleman,
Dr. Houlton, was instantly limed. He opened conversation, tested
the boy's Greek, found it prodigious, and took him home, learning
many autobiographical particulars, mostly accurate, upon the way.
By poetic license, however, he was told that Tom had begged his
way to Dublin! There followed a generous meal, much Homer
and Horace, and great edification over the guest, " a little being
composed entirely of mind." In fact, Dr. Houlton opened his house
and heart to the boy, who, nothing loath, took possession of both, to
1913-] THE MOCK CHATTERTON 21
the ineffable satisfaction of the benefactor. The two talked of the
Georgics, and of the annotations of Scaliger and of Madame Dacier,
Dr. Houlton all the while wondering delightedly at Tom, at his
archness, his gestures, his adroit and correct speech. One day
the elder scholar gently challenged a couple of false quantities, and
was met by scowls and peevish subterfuges, things which had not
been looked for. An acquaintance of the Doctor's, a Mr. French,
was a ripe classical scholar, and to him was the eleven-year-old
paragon introduced, looking so extremely babyish with his long hair,
his little frilled old-fashioned collar, his delicate build, and his
grave face, that the newcomer thought some joke was being played
upon him. However, he was induced to tender the Elzevir Horace
he carried in his pocket. Tom had never seen an Elzevir: his
enthusiasm rose at finding it complete : he construed, he translated,
he argued, he collated, in grand prancing style; and he made such
droll knowing remarks about Leuconoe that Mr. French, doubled
up with laughter, and quite won over, rapturously shook him by
the hand. Of course, he gave him the Elzevir, also a handful of
silver coins, envied Dr. Houlton the guardianship of such a ward,
and affectionately took his leave.
Tom seems to have read by day and by night while at Dr.
Houlton's. One morning at breakfast he announced a presenti-
ment that the beginning of the Epitaph in Gray's Elegy (a poem, so
he said, which he had often perused with tears) would be " not
unsuitable for my own humble tombstone." This appears to be the
first outward expression of Dermody's excessive preoccupation with
his own genius and his own fate. He had contracted the habit of
reading in bed, by the light of tapers, which he did not always re-
member to blow out. Dr. Houlton objected to the practice as dan-
gerous, and shortened the supply of candles, but Tom outwitted him,
and bought more for the same purpose. He was found out, and re-
proved, and sulked all day. More : from that time he showed a rad-
ical and growing restlessness. It ended in a declared wish to quit
the house, in which he had spent but ten weeks. Dr. Houlton gave
him money, and wished him a successful future. Tom was un-
perturbed, and expressed no regrets, either for material loss, or
for the forfeit of so much friendship and chivalrous care. The
good Doctor, in short, was an episode, an old love : and it was time
to be on with a new !
Within a few days the boy had squandered every penny, and
went about needing food and shelter, and, in the nick of time,
22 THE MOCK CHATTERTON [April,
getting both. A certain scene-painter at the Dublin Theatre, one
Coyle, had been employed on a piece of work at Dr. Houlton's,
and into his ravished ear Tom had poured ere now much imposing
historical lore. On this good-hearted creature, whose house was
in Dorset Street, the elfin diplomat now began to call, and even
as he foresaw that it would, that large and poor family expanded,
to welcome yet another member. There was no servant, and Mrs.
Coyle sent the guest on divers errands : one of these was to carry
his morning meal to her husband, then too busy to step home from
his work. Haughty, Tom took most unwillingly to his new avoca-
tion, but eventually he settled down not only as commissary, but as
superintendent of glue, oil, and color-pots. Here in the greenroom
he wrote a pasquinade on Astley's circus feats which greatly excited
the performers, bringing them in a drove to behold the wonderful
author. There he stood, without shirt or waistcoat, in an enor-
mous pair of trousers never cut down to fit him, encasing him
from his armpits to his loose-slippered feet; in his hands were a
hairbrush and a pot of size, and his tiny naked chest was grotes-
quely smeared with paint of every hue, like a native Briton's. Thus
did the poet, subdued to what he worked in, turn what was dis-
coverable of his intensely intelligent countenance upon the irruption
of the actors, thus suddenly become his ardent admirers. One of
them was Mr. Robert Owenson, an accomplished, helpful, disin-
terested man, self-made, as the phrase goes, whom Goldsmith had
taken pride in introducing to Garrick. Mr. Owenson fell madly
in love on the instant, and led young Thomas Dermody home, to be
washed and fed.
II.
As for Mrs. Owenson, she played up to her lord in the most
maternal way, and wept over the waif and his rags. Tom was at
once given a task: to turn out some impromptu verses on Dublin
University. Results were such as to fix in the new protector his
purpose to bring the boy to the notice of that sacrosanct institu-
tion. One of the dons was a distant relative of Mr. Owenson's:
the celebrated Dr. Matthew Young, then Professor of Natural
Philosophy, afterwards Bishop of Clonfert; and that very day
he was privileged to hear in his drawing-room the charms of Tom,
and to discover the prodigy on his own doorstep, where Tom had
advisedly been left in the rain, until eloquence indoors should have
1913-] THE MOCK CHATTERTON 23
put in its work. Small and wet and ridiculous and shivering, the
object of interest was hurried into the house, and planted in its
lordliest armchair next the fire. " By Jove ! " said Dr. Young, in
his playfullest mood, thereby doing no great good to Tom's soul,
" by Jove ! you are fit to sit by the side of the King." He instantly
arranged that the child should come thrice a week to be coached
for entrance examinations. Murray's Logic was one of the books :
the donor of it fell into a somewhat immoderate fit of laughter
on being told by Tom that it was a work of supererogation, as
almost anybody can quibble, without studying to quibble.
Kind Mr. Owenson now took little Dermody into his family,
thanking heaven for this seeming substitute for the only son he
had but lately lost. There were two little daughters, growing up
to be both lovely and clever. (The elder became well-known in
later life as Lady Morgan, wrote novels which were considered
brilliant, and verses of a sentimental cast, now forgotten, held
liberal and patriotic views, and made distinguished friends. ) There
was a mother worth having in the person of Mrs. Owenson, who
was a perfect reservoir of what our ancestors would call the noblest
feelings of humanity : by all three Tom was petted and worshipped,
and looked upon with awe. His first act, on receiving new attire
such as befitted his improved condition, was to make a solemn
bonfire of the old upon the biggest domestic hearth, apostrophizing
in highly humorous and Hudibrastic strain the youthful breeches
thus offered to the gods. He and that extraordinary person, Dr.
Young, however, did not pull well together. Mental discipline
was hardly in the line of the inspirational Tom, and he revolted
from what was to him sheer drudgery. The day came when he
turned truant, and with adroit and prolonged duplicity fooled
both Mr. Owenson and Dr. Young. The former forgave him as
soon as the fault, once found out, was confessed, with the ingenious
rider to the confession that the bent of Tom's mind was towards
other studies : forgave him not without a grave reminder of the
violation of honor which such conduct implied.
At this very time, there called at the benevolent actor's house a
schoolmaster-clergyman, the Rev. Gilbert Austin. He, need it be
said? was suddenly transported with joy on meeting the resident
phenomenon; and Mr. Owenson, ever generous, let no word of
his diminish the dazzling impression his foster-son had made. Mr.
Austin desired the latter to attend his own very select academy,
without fee, while still residing at home. Tom was pleased to try
24 THE MOCK CHATTERTON [April,
the experiment, but the distance was considerable between his desk,
and his meals and bed. Mr. Austin therefore, transferred him,
bag and baggage, to his own house; introduced him, as Mr. Owen-
son had previously done, to all his friends, opened a successful
subscription for his education and support, and during the Spring
of 1789 printed in a private issue, and at his own expense, a volume
of Poems of Thomas Dermody. The boy-author, at the date of
this publication, was some two months past his fourteenth birthday ;
but good Mr. Austin, being somehow misled, announced in the pref-
ace that Tom had not yet attained his thirteenth year, which must
have been taken by everybody to mean that he was not yet twelve !
In this preface it is stated that the contents are selected, but un-
edited and unaltered; and a strong and well- worded appeal is made
for the interesting genius so much in need of future protection and
furtherance. The book starts off with a pre-Byronic exposition of
the past miseries which by now were beginning to be Tom's most
precious stock-in-trade. The faultless numbers are addressed
to Mr. Austin, and do not fail to invoke their originator,
Ah, doom'd to suffer all that Man can bear,
Far from a soothing father's anxious care !
This abrupt reappearance of Nicholas Dermody in his son's
visions is instructive; the soothing father, left behind and never
yet communicated with, seems to have sat in Ennis unprotesting,
while Tom, loose upon the great world, was making, after his
own fashion, such extraordinary headway. One is glad to hear
the lyrist express his intention to sing Mr. Austin's praises " to
the verge of life." Nor does he quite forget to hail Mr. Owenson,
though
Long has my Muse, devoid of wonted fire,
Her song neglected, and unstrung her lyre.
The scribe, in fact, is ever in the forefront of his own mental
landscape: a more personal and concrete poet does not adorn the
very personal and concrete eighteenth century. The charming,
animated, informal Owenson girls, Sydney and Olivia, come in for
a share of their foster-brother's maturest admonition. They are to
avoid " idiot suitors," a " tinsel race " armed with " pleasing lies;"
they are to " look round " for an " honest face " like the incom-
parable Tom's !
1913.] THE MOCK CHATTERTON 25
The boy was now living in the full atmosphere of that humane,
cultured, extremely animated society which was to be found in
Dublin before the Union. He studied literature by day, and be-
stowed himself on parties and " symposiums " in the evening.
This was a course of life then thought to be the thing for " little
poets," in order to instill into them the true principles of knowledge
and virtue. One of his schoolfellows at Mr. Austin's was the eldest
son of that admirable Irishman, Lord Charlemont : whereby Lady
Charlemont, the Duke of Leinster, and other exalted personages,
all fell captive to Tom's attractions. They busied themselves over
him to so much avail that Mr. Austin was at one time able to place
in the bank no less than 1,500 towards the maintenance of his
ward, and with promises of yearly renewal. Tom, however, re-
fused, according to his biographer Mr. Raymond, to be " formed
into greatness." Daily teas, in a fresh collar, with peers and
dowagers, were well enough for a week or a month; but his real
taste, from first to last, were Tony Lumpkin's, and many an ele-
gant invitation went to the wall unanswered, in order that alehouse
cronies, tinkers, gypsies, and other unmentionable offshoots of city
life might sport in the tangles of Mr. T. Dermody's delighted hair.
Somewhere, somehow, when he had small innocence left to lose,
the boy met a certain disreputable Martin, by profession a drawing-
master; this person aimed at getting a foothold in Mr. Austin's
aristocratic academy. Tom was what is called good-natured, the
term, in. his case, connoting the absence of any moral backbone
whatever: so the man found him an easy accomplice to bribe.
The bibulous Martin drew a flower, a very personable flower
it seems to have been, and Tom agreed to show it to Mr. Austin
as his own work, accomplished, as by magic, after three lessons.
Any instructor so miraculously successful as that, might well
be promoted to a position worthy of his powers! The party of
the second part duly exhibited the specimen to his friend and patron,
told the tale he had agreed to tell, strongly recommended Martin
as uniquely expert, and was disconcerted to find that Mr. Austin
was not taken in at all. On the contrary, he quietly accused Tom,
who vigorously attempted to brazen it out, of the lie and the cheat.
Matters were clinched when Mr. Austin required him to copy the
incriminating flower. He was unable to do it, and he, the star of
intellectual assemblies, with fame at his beck and call, was sent in
disgrace to serve awhile in the kitchen. No one who knows boys
and boys' schools will suppose that his lot there was allowed to be
26 THE MOCK CHATTERTON [April,
one of heavenly calm. Tom, for some time, had been boarded out
on Graf ton Street with a zealous Methodist, Mr. Aickbome; and
with joy he flew nightly from the academy, now a penal cell, to his
luxurious lodgings. Across the street lived Mr. Samuel Whyte,
Sheridan's schoolmaster and relative by marriage. How the neigh-
boring rebel first caught his eye is not, and need not be, apparent.
" Suffice it is to say," as the orator remarked, that Mr. Whyte, as
if by incantation, arose upon the scene, to love, honor, and cherish
the indomitable Tom. So soon as he had listened to those lament-
able annals which lost nothing with each re-telling, so soon as he
had apprehended some features of that juvenile facility impressive
to warm-hearted Irish faith, Mr. Whyte (himself author of
many critical and educational books), invited to dinner a dozen
litterateurs and connoisseurs, that they might make acquaintance
with the Marvel, and be drawn to adore. The guests came, but not
the arch-guest; the viands were brought in, but not he! Servants
were dispatched to inquire. Word was presently forthcoming that
the bardling had strolled away with grimy persons unknown; the
company lingered on till midnight, but there was no apparition of
the expected one, and no apology in lieu of that apparition. Mr.
Whyte was of a forgiving nature, and despite this untoward reef
in the mouth of the social harbor, the two sailed amicably together
thenceforward. Meanwhile, Tom continued to dwell in Mr. Aus-
tin's reformatory, the kitchen. One luckless day, he reverted to
a kind of revenge he always favored. He satirized, not the sit-
uation nor himself (as the young Villon would have done) but his
benefactor, and all the Austin family. The quatrain was accident-
ally dropped upon the floor at Mr. Aickbome's, and was discovered
by that functionary himself, who, contrary to the usual run of
mankind, had conceived no passion for Master Dermody's mind
and manners. Mr. Austin was shown the manuscript. The result
was that he tore up those poems of the boy's which he had collected
for future publication, returned to the subscribers the whole of the
money given for his education and support, and refused, in pardon-
able indignation, even to admit him to his presence. And thus
was Tom once more not undeservedly, thrust upon the same old
step-mothering world.
Mr. Austin was, perhaps in his finality, too disciplinary; but
a good man cannot be a headmaster without paying for it by some
psychic deterioration. His resentment created a new Dublin for
the young outcast, who was not only unpitied, but shunned as a
1913.] THE MOCK CHATTERTON 27
moral monster, on all sides. Then, with his usual resource, Tom
bethought him of the Owensons, with whom he had had no lasting
quarrel. Alas, Mr. Owenson was absent, Mrs. Owenson was
dead. As a next move he wrote a maturely dignified letter to the
Secretary of War, and took it over himself to Dublin Castle. This
gentleman, Mr. Sackville Hamilton, had previously given Tom
money; he now did so again, and in larger measure. The boy
began to write for a daily paper: any daily paper in the land
would print poetry, circa 1789-1790. It may be taken for granted
that he rhapsodized, in many moods, on his recent woes, and his
injured sensibilities. One of these effusions may be worth quoting
for its vigor, and its signs of acquaintance with the biographies of
great men ; incidentally, for its mendacities and audacities.
Scarce fourteen summers crown my age,
And yet on life's oft- varied stage
(Such are the hapless poet's losses),
I've met with fourteen thousand crosses:
Debts, duns, proud patrons all so squeamish,
Who damn one for a single blemish,
Full many a bitter pinch ye gave me,
From which, O god Apollo ! save me.
That I have never seen the child
Of injur'd merit weep, and smiled;
That I have never heard the poor
Sigh out their plaints, and closed the door ;
That I have never wished to wrong
The good man in satiric song,
Bear witness, Heaven that know'st my heart!
And now, Oh, take thy minstrel's part.
Like sad Darius, bruised and beaten
'Mong those by whom his goods were eaten;
Like Belisarius, poor fellow,
Dressed up in rags black, blue, and yellow;
Like grave Cervantes in a jail;
Like Butler, without soothing ale ;
Like Tasso, praying, in the night,
His cat's clear eyes to lend him light;
Like Chatterton who sung so sweet ;
Like princely Theodore in the Fleet;
28 THE MOCK CHATTERTON [April,
Like Tippoo Saib by strangers plundered;
Like like (ah me, Sirs! like a hundred)
Behold Tom Dermody quite humbled
From Fortune's wheel (the gypsy!) tumbled:
Petitioning, in paltry verses,
Great George's head-piece from long purses.
The moment Mr. Owenson returned to town, the local press
lost its most accomplished junior contributor. It might be thought
difficult by this time to extend the circle of Tom's believers. But
Mr. Owenson again took the field, and captured a fresh Maecenas
in Mr. Atkinson, Judge Advocate for Ireland, the author of some
comic operas and comedies which have had their day; and Mr.
Atkinson and the Rev. Edward Berwick, in their turn, succeeding
in engaging as Tom's principal and most powerful patroness, the
Lady Elizabeth Hastings, widow of the first Earl of Moira,
one made up
Of loveliness alone:
A woman, of her gentler sex
The seeming paragon.
This lady, daughter of the celebrated Selina, Countess of Hunting-
don, the Methodist light, furnished him with every necessity, and
placed him at her own expense under the care of the Rev. Henry
Boyd, the translator of Dante, in the Rectory at Killeagh, near
Tullamore.
How it came about is indeed " rop in mistry :" but in Killeagh
Rectory did Thomas Dermody abide for two mortal years! Not,
however, in the peace of the saints. Despite the Countess* wise and
bountiful solicitude; despite the very literary Mr. Boyd's extraor-
dinarily tender forbearance ; despite his own new interests and very
great mental prowess in his changed condition, the nearest public
house took on a glamor superior to that of all the mountain lawns
of Parnassus. ' 'Twixt quill and can " is one of his own phrases
about himself. He could always reinforce his badness by ample
rhetoric.
Censures are liberally bestowed on the children of the
Muse, [he says magisterially], by those phlegmatical block-
heads, who, wanting warmth themselves, decry its possessors.
; ! do not fear to assert that relaxation and corporeal
indulgence are both grateful and necessary to the overlabored
1913.] THE MOCK CHATTERTON 29
intellect; and it is certain that Addison's humor was most in-
imitable after a sprightly libation to the social powers
Examples are sufficient without going back to the time of
Anacreon, Pindar, and Horace, the professed bons vivants of
antiquity.
However, he kept Lady Moira well in the dark regarding his less
starry propensities, and Mr. Boyd was no Aickbome, to report on
them and him. The Triumph of Gratitude, the title of a pastoral
written at this time, aimed with cunning art directly at the sen-
sibilities of the elderly patroness. In his dedicatory humor Tom,
as we say in vulgar parlance, " laid it on thick." Euphranor, the
chief shepherd, stands for the author. The blank verse balances it-
self most neatly, with an adjective (and generally the quite inevit-
able adjective, too!) apportioned to every other noun, and plays
about
Ether-mantled Truth and oliv'd Peace.
It is a matter of astonishment both how faultless it manages
to be, and how it says absolutely nothing. It is all the kind of
thing which nowadays men simply cannot read, and which shall be
remembered by them no more at all for ever. The variety of
Tom's poetic output addressed to, or intended for, his kind Dowager
Countess, was immense: one begins to sniff in the underwoods
for the reason of it, and the reason is not long in forthcoming. One
fine April morning, he writes her a letter in which he reminds her
ineffably well how " God has endowed you with the capacity to
relieve the son of sorrow," and he proceeds to add : " I know I
shall never rest till I try the grand theatre of literature, London,
and would wish then to have my own free-will ! " He asks for
introductory letters, and proceeds in a bold burst of not unex-
pected eloquence:
How soon might you, from the well-deserved wealth you
possess, bestow some untransitory possession on the humblest
of your creatures, and smooth the road of life for ever! How
soon by only your recommendation might you cheer a heart long
broken, and enliven your soul with the thought of freeing one
of your dependants from future worldly mischance !
Lady Moira was less a sayer than a doer: she did not at once
answer this epistle of the fifteen-year-old heart " long broken,"
30 THE MOCK CHATTERTON [April,
but her wish, then and ever, was to advance Tom in all his legitimate
desires.
That caged eaglet was by no means unhappy in Killeagh. His
antennae of sociability touched the whole circumference of the place.
His rhymes, ever controlled by the subject immediately under
his nose, expended themselves on everything within range, begin-
ning with the Dean, and not ending with the weaver and the piper.
Essays, too, of a Maginnis-like texture, were produced about
Woman, " that fair seductive female Satan," and a Widow, " the
most tremendous Wild Beast in creation," and the " rigorous but
salutary " genius of Oliver Protector. The uppish little boy has
his say, too, about Shakespeare, considered by him " a vineyard
of plenty, where many of the finest branches are ruined for want of
a pruning-knife;" or he is a poet (counter to the philosophical
soarings of the preferred Milton) " whose ecstasies are the flights
of an invisible being." Again, he is " a cataract at one time rush-
ing through rocks and caverns, foaming and terrifying, then sink-
ing into a sluggish calm, with nothing but the bubbles of his former
sublimity. Milton is a full, not overflowing, river; and like the
river to the sea, hastening towards his illustrious design, never
pausing, and seldom dangerous to the passengers ( !)" And once
more : " The wild scenery of Shakespeare is the unconnected magic
of Merlin, variously diverting: that of Milton is like Plato's Ely-
sium, enchanting, yet built on the basis of an opinion which bears
the air of probability."
All this is in strict accord with the old-fashioned ideas of
" Fancy's child " and his accidental, indeliberate artistry, but it is
historically interesting, as a late eighteenth-century attempt at
criticism on the subject, and it has never been gathered into any
appendix of Shakespeare's Century of Praise. One of Dermody's
treatises written in the country rectory gives a playful and prob-
ably allegorical account of a tramp dog, but it betrays no gleam
of the loving fun which would flow from the true animalier. An-
other paper is entitled A Mad World, My Masters! or, Remarks on
the Present State of Affairs in a Letter Just Arrived from John
Bull, Esq., to Mr. Paddy Whack. Its usefulness is that it gives one
a first inkling into the heartless and thoroughly servile attitude on
national questions, of one who grew up in the rashly heroic gen-
eration of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and of Robert Emmet.
Very many, and among the earliest of their kind in point of
date, are Dermody's imitations of Burns. Dialect and all, he follows
1913.] THE MOCK CHATTERTON 31
his robust model, and talks to himself as to a very wicked blade
indeed.
Gude faith ! with all thy roguish trick,
Thy Pegasus has got a kick;
Flat as a tombstone, dumb as stick
Thou liest at last :
God send thou gang'st not to auld Nick
For frolicks past!
At Judgment-Day, when strong-lung'd cherub
Shall pipe all hands, frae silence here up,
He'll know thee, Tom, to be a queer cub,
And gie thee quarters :
Wouns ! What a sicht to see thy knee rub
'Gainst saints and martyrs!
After which, hear this:
" By many wrong'd, Gay Bloom of Song,
Thou yet art innocent of wrong!
Virtue and Truth to thee belong,
Virtue and Truth,
Though Pleasure led thy step along,
And trapp'd thy youth."
Now the vindications of this last stanza are by no means
ironic. This dreadful young person was sincere in one thing: his
colossal self-love. With such an unparalleled record of profaned
friendships and wasted benefits and favors strewing his way, he
could quite calmly allude to himself as one who had been
Unnoticed for talents he had, and forgot;
But most famously noticed for faults he had not !
One of his several self-enamored elegies and epitaphs has
seriousness and some beauty, though it is manifestly an echo of
Collins' lyrical sigh over Thomson's grave at Richmond. What
vitiates it is its false characterization. Take this quatrain :
The graceful tear of pity spare,
(To him the bright drop once belong'd!)
For well his doom deserves thy care:
Much, much he suffer'd, much was wrong'd.
32 THE MOCK CHATTERTON [April,
Place beside it the similar utterance of a poet also Irish, also ulti-
mately a wreck, born the year after Dermody died.
Him grant a grave to, ye pitying noble;
Deep in your bosoms there let him dwell.
He too, had tears for all souls in trouble
Here, and in Hell.
The difference is not so much literary as moral. Clarence Mangan
said what was true.
III.
The Dowager Countess of Moira, in most motherly fashion,
tried again and again to correct the foibles which, as she could
not but learn in time, sullied Tom's character. But seated on the
unreachable eminence of his pride, he bewailed that "you seem
determined to misunderstand every good sentiment of my heart:"
this chiefly by way of answer to her gentle and quite authentic
reproach that he had flattered her, and that she did not wish flattery
from him. Eventually, he commits to her ladyship's "humane
disposal " his future career : " whether Dublin College, or Glasgow,
or Oxford is to receive me, is equally indifferent." Two months
later, he is " sorry," by post, that
the only person in the world whom I can call a real friend and
patron should conceive ideas so horrid of my disposition
My last and most sincere petition is that you will remove me
from Killeagh. I confess that when pressed down by mis-
fortunes either real or imaginary, being of a melancholy turn,
I soon proceed to desperation, and do that which I afterwards
view with perfect abhorrence.
From Moira House in town there came presently a letter
signed " E. M. H. [astings]," so well thought out, so kind, so
salutary, that nothing could exceed its value, had it been but ac-
cepted and applied. Lady Moira reminds the boy, who a week
before had attained the age of sixteen, that he had yet time to study,
to form his mind, and to acquire from Mr. Boyd "that classic
knowledge which is the foundation of every other science, (so
our pre-scientific ancestors all thought it was!) and the duty and
respectability of moral virtue." She goes on to say that she is
aware he thinks he knows everything, but that humility belongs
1913.] THE MOCK CHATTERTON 33
to the largest minds, even in youth; that he never can be a great
poet without great themes; that such a fuss would not have been
made over him had he been a mere English boy over in England;
that she thanks him for his recently sent verses, -but cares very
little for their reiterated compliments and flatteries; and that so
long as he acts with integrity, she promises to remain his friend.
In his answer, Tom (as he was to do how often thereafter,
with futile unspoken comparisons in mind!) lays stress upon the
fate of his boyish forerunner, upon the fate of Chatterton; Lady
Moira, indeed, who had a great love for the dead poet, having
warningly spoken of him first. Chatterton, says that far other
Thomas, was one who, when neglected and spurned, flew to the
bosom of the " Almighty Patron ! " But he, the writer, is made
of more enduring stuff : he can struggle through life, and calmly die.
" No thoughts of death, in defiance and rebellion to my Omnipotent
Creator, shall ever enter my head ! " It is quite staggering how
religious Tom can be on paper. He continues : " How can I
improve my taste, or embellish my natural parts in Killeagh, a sor-
did village with no one of any literary intelligence or even common-
sense, that I know of, resident in it?" Here he suddenly recalls
the Rector : " but Mr. Boyd is only one, and not very talkative."
This is a rather human touch. Tom next unfolds his desire to get
Lady Moira, as dedicatee, to lend her name to the title-page of his
forthcoming book of verse; he also suggests the advisability of
proceeding at once to London, where, duly introduced and enthu-
siastically welcomed, he means to found a weekly periodical to be
called The Inquisitor. The new prospect does not seem to have
fired his venerable correspondent. About this time his clerical
friend Mr. Berwick turned from his busy biographies of dead
Greeks and Romans, to communicate with Tom, and tell him how
sorry he is to hear that he has not yet entered college, and how he
fears that he never will do so. He affectionately warns him to take
good care of his health, and assures him that he may count on
" all our attention," and that nothing can make that forfeit but
" a previous forfeiture of character."
If it can be believed, the rusticated young poet pursued more
and more violently his course of actual hectoring of the lady upon
whom his security depended. The day came when he intimated his
desire to free himself altogether from her guardianship. Lady
Moira was therefore driven to write a letter in the third person,
commenting sadly on " that ill-founded degree of self-conceit Der-
VOL. xcvii. 3.
34
THE MOCK CHATTERTON [April,
mody indulges himself in, respecting his genius, [which] will pre-
vent his ever having friends, or arriving at success, unless he alters
his conduct and his sentiments." The letter enclosed a note for
ten guineas. " As Dermody has thought proper to withdraw from
her direction and protection in a manner equally ungracious and
absurd, this is the last attention he is to expect from Lady Moira
or any of her family/' Thus, by an act of unparalleled folly, as
even his indulgent biographer calls it, the lad's scene was cleared
again, as if by a general slaughter, and the limelight falls upon his
solitary and perverse figure, attitudinizing in the middle of an
emptied stage!
Tom hastened back to Dublin, spent freely, and exhausted his
purse. Reduced, after his fashion, to hunger and rags, he looked
up Mr. Whyte, his benignant ex-neighbor of Grafton Street, with
whom he had not been of late in touch: looked him up with a
view to procuring a theatrical engagement under Richard
Brinsley Sheridan, then the patentee of Drury Lane Theatre.
Mr. Whyte dissuaded Tom, and Tom was huffed. Fail-
ing to realize his latest scheme, he turned paragraphs, as before, for
a Dublin newspaper, and that expedient again falling short, took
up begging as a regular profession! sometimes walking thirty-
two Irish miles in a day, and wearing out his shoes and his feet.
Mr. Whyte tracked him to his flock pallet, and fed him; Mr.
Owenson, with infinite goodness, rallied again to his cause, and by
hard, dogged, and fruitful exertion (he was greatly respected in
the town) actually got Tom's second volume of poems published
and circulated. More: he extended his credit at all the shops
to his prodigal, as of old. Mr. Boyd also wrote fondly to " dear
Tom," urging him to matriculate at Trinity College, and bespeak-
ing for him, through Lord Donoughmore, the Provost's very special
interest.
Dear Tom could dispense with such advice, as he had by now
acquired in full perfection his best-beloved art: that of writing
begging letters. He pointed at high game : such as Bishop Percy
of the Reliques; the great Mr. Grattan; Joseph Cooper Walker,
the author of An Historical Memoir on Italian Tragedy, and of
much else worth reading; and the Rt. Hon. Monck Mason. In these
precious documents, the scribe neatly alludes to himself as the
Child of the Muse and of Misfortune; lies about his age; almost
invariably mentions Chatterton as his twin in sorrow ; and expresses
his poetic willingness to exchange the thorns of misery for the
1913.] THE MOCK CHATTERTON 35
olives of quiet, through the agency of that potential deliverer
whom he is at the moment addressing. Grattan, never at fault
where something chivalrous was called for, quoted Dermody in the
House of Commons, and brought him to the notice of his own dis-
tinguished colleague, Henry Flood. Once more funds and invita-
tions poured into Tom's unfathomable lap. Once more he wand-
ered off to alehouses while his elegant friends were expecting him
to dinner, sent no excuses, and never called on them again!
His encounter with Mr. Edward Tighe was ludicrous, and
proves how excessively juvenile was Dermody 's appearance in his
seventeenth year. He had brought a letter of introduction to Mr.
Tighe's house, but the owner had gone out. Shortly afterwards,
Tom guessed at, and began to accost his gentleman (a very choleric
gentleman, with a supply of wrath like Landor's!) in a bookshop,
and was promptly told to go about his business. But when Mr.
Tighe reached his own door, the ragged lad, anxious to prove the
truth of his story, was close behind him. Mr. Tighe turned and
raised his stick, the door was opened by the man-servant, and the
follower fled away. On reading the letter left for him, a moment
later, Mr. Tighe repented of his rashness, and dispatched the porter
after the poet, who was by this time far down the street. Tom,
looking over his shoulder, and seeing a man in hot pursuit, with
heated eye upon himself, and evidently bent on giving him the
bastinado for his impudence, took to his heels in earnest, and
was run down only after a terrific chase ! Mr. Tighe and himself,
on acquaintance, managed to enrage each other at once. But the
love-quarrel ended in five guineas for Tom, and a remarkable
grown-up suit of snuff-colored small-clothes, with coat-skirts, and
a cocked hat, both infinitely too large for him : which solemn and
sufficient habit he was requested, nay, commanded, to wear without
alteration. Mr. Tighe rode two darling hobbies: one was the
abolition of spirituous liquors, and the other the rearing by the
State of orphan children who were to become the parents of an
uncontaminated race. On these two godly and rocky subjects, as
also upon the Lakes of Killarney, Tom was vainly urged to exercise
his epic pen.
Meanwhile, Nicholas Dermody awoke from an unbroken and
protracted silence, and posted to his son a letter, which, for its
triumphant avoidance of all real points at issue, beats Mrs. Nickleby.
In it, "my dear Child" appears as "unprotected Youth far from sin-
cere counsel," who is to guard against " the wiles of the Designing
36 THE MOCK CHATTERTON [April,
and the profuse promises of the Exalted," and look on College, in
the most modern utilitarian spirit, as " a good way for future
Bread." How could he have deserved such cruelty at Mr. Austin's ?
How it will raise him in the opinion of County Clare that the
famous Mr. Grattan is among his subscribers! Lastly, may the
Lord protect the Child from the jaundice-eyed Malice of all his
enemies ! In this Hebraic outburst there is one phrase which seems
to ring true. Tom had written that he hoped to revisit Ennis.
" Five years, which have been five thousand to me," says Nicholas,
" have now nearly elapsed since you left me." (It was really
nearly seven years. What an unchronological family!) But so
far as one can make out, the two, alike in their mental conceit and
their moral futility, never met again.
Tom, on the slippery off-slope of Mr. Tighe's favor, bethought
him anew of Rev. Mr. Berwick, chaplain at Moira House. An im-
pending marriage in the Berwick family had been announced in the
Dublin journals, and on the strength of it, Tom committed an
epithalamium. On addressing it to those most interested, he did not
fail to drop a sizable hint, also in verse, that a restoration of Lady
Moira's patronage would not be unwelcomed. Letters of the in-
visible fish-hook order were cast simultaneously at another old
friend, Mr. Whyte, and at a new one, Mr. James Grant Raymond,
afterwards Dermody 's observing but placating biographer. About
this time appeared a poem of light-heeled optimism, beginning:
How vile to me this guilty Globe appears!
Vile, verily: for as the poem goes on to remind us, it was rude
to Otway, to Dry den, to Savage, and (inevitable item!) to
Sweet Chatterton, by felons spurned.
Lastly, as the culminating reproach, you are to understand that a
certain nameless person,
In dauntless infancy a finish'd Bard,
is being wasted upon contemporary Europe. However, this same
person makes up his mind to appeal, ere he perishes, to Lady Moira,
acting against her express prohibition. With great magnanimity,
she tells her bookseller to print at her expense whatever Mr.
Dermody may send him. Mr. Dermody, unsatisfied, informs her
that he is in extreme distress, but "still laboring to perfect his
studies for college examination (!), assured that his permanent
1913.] THE MOCK CHATTERTON 37
happiness can arise from that quarter alone." As he gets no
answer, he writes again, and yet again. The last echo of the
correspondence is instructive, and has a quite ineffable dignity.
He " cannot but wonder at receiving half a crown from that hand
which has bestowed so many guineas ! " He is distressed at Lady
Moira's uneasiness, " more than at Dermody's disappointment."
Suddenly comes a brand new inspiration. The bookseller at his
service receives and prints a pamphlet, entitled The Rights of Jus-
tice, or, Rational Liberty, and a poem, The Reform. In these
that " narrow self-ended soul " steps forth for one brief amazing
moment as a glorifier of France, and a home revolutionary.
Shall the sons of Erin droop,
Slaves, slaves alone, amid the unfetter'd World?
and all that : a torrent of it ! It is sad, indeed, when young hearts
of the purest idealism were beginning to beat for Ireland's freedom,
that any poet of hers should utter what he never felt, and abandon
instantly what he had uttered. This game of nationalism for a
purpose failed. Letters spent upon new patrons in high places came
back unopened. Tom was sunk to the very lowest depths of
physical misery consistent with life, when the Attorney-General,
Kilwarden, later Lord Chief Justice, (a man dearly loved up to,
and long after, his tragic death), found him out, and visited the
attic where he lay. Despite the fact that Tom's clothing fluttered
from his body, as he moved, like pennons from the mast, he was
immediately carried off to dine. That old winning diffidence and
modesty of his, every bit of it pure sham, charmed Lord Kilwarden
as it had charmed many another humane gentleman, oh! in what
an endless single file!
But wine, long foregone from necessity, worked on the
bardic brain, and the guest had to be sent home, dreamy and dumb,
in a carriage, with a filled purse in his pocket. Of all Dermody's
illustrious backers, there was hardly one so loyal, so persistent, as
Lord Kilwarden. His major move was to engage rooms for Tom
in the much-talked-of college, promising to furnish them, to defray
the whole of his expenses there, and to allow him 30 a year for
pocket money. Enough was never as good as a feast to our young
gentleman. He does not quite say so, but 30 strikes him as an
impossible pittance. He sings at large to Lord Kilwarden of
his " embarrassments," and his " unavoidable distresses," and his
" strange fatalities;" he cannot " study amid misfortune;" he thanks
3 8 THE MOCK CHATTERTON [April,
his benefactor, but is " forced to forego the generous offer, so
honorable to me, and so worthy of yourself," at least until " the
obstructions to my happiness are removed ! " And back went " the
Muses' boy " (as he chose to call himself at the time) from the
hilltop of final opportunity into the cesspools of his foolishness.
He was over seventeen. The real Chatterton, unfriended, was
at that age in his pauper's grave.
Needless to add, Tom plied his pen during the next two years in
begging from men of note, and he won patron after patron, slipping
in turn from between their caressing fingers. But his annals can be
summarized. He wandered to every door; he aroused villages with
mystery and window smashings, or lay sunk in long stupors by the
wayside; he produced a hideous poem on his own country, where
he had received a kindness almost incredible, a consideration far
too high; and he enriched his variegated career by enlisting as a
recruit in the army of His Majesty King George the Third. A ser-
geant of nineteen, he set sail for England. He saw service in France,
Holland, and Germany, and, strange to say, behaved decently except
for frequent drunks; moreover, he was several times wounded.
His happy star, or his own plots, had given him for superior officer
the Earl of Moira, the son of his lost Egeria, who had won his
soldier's laurels in the American war. The Earl, after Dermody
had been discharged on half-pay, helped him to settle in London,
and forgave him, and furthered him to seventy times seven, until
his entirely angelic hopefulness slowly gave out, thereby causing
Dermody, as one is relieved to hear, " excessive pain." Never-
theless, though Lord Moira had to withdraw the light of his counte-
nance, he continued sending money! The ex-sergeant sank into a
Westminster slum, where he concocted an Ode to Frenzy full of
personalities, and posted it to Mr. Raymond in Dublin. The latter
rushed enthusiastically across the Irish Sea, took coach to the
metropolis, and ran into a pallid threadbare fellow in St. James'
Park who proved to be the bard. " Once more, O ye Muses ! yet
once more," all went merrily as a marriage bell.
IV.
After his thrilling rescue by Mr. Raymond, Dermody had " a
tremendous fit of poetizing." His topics, for almost the first time
in his life, were objective and large in scope, thanks to the sights he
had seen a-soldiering. Mr. C. Allingham, member of an interesting
1913.] THE MOCK CHATTERTON 39
English family long settled in Ireland, found a willing firm of pub-
lishers, and poured into their, ears the praises of the young author.
Actuated by that hearsay alone, the firm paid down a liberal sum
in advance for the book. They appear not to have brought it out.
The manuscripts bore a dedication to the Rt. Hon. the Dowager
Countess of Moira : so much reward attended Dermody's obstinate
courtship of the great! The free-stepping sonnet on the fly-leaf
beautifully exemplifies the definition that gratitude is a lively sense
of future favors:
Deem'st thou ingrate or dead the shepherd boy
Erewhile who sung thee to the listening plain?
Still pausing on thy deeds with pensive joy,
Ingratitude nor death has hush'd the strain.
Still drest in all her captivating hues
Smiling in tears, will languishingly steal
O'er my fantastic dream the well-lov'd Muse,
Like Morn dim-blushing through its dewy veil.
Her wildflowers, bound into a simple wreath
Meekly she proffers to thy partial sight:
Oh, softly on their tender foliage breathe!
Oh, save them from the critic's cruel blight !
Nurse the unfolding blooms with care benign,
And 'mid them weave one laurel leaf of thine.
In The Pursuit of Patronage we have Marlowe, Spenser, Dry-
den, and Butler, together with numerous others, in the exhibition
window, and, needless to say, we get Chatterton again, and plenty
of him, inclusive of a slap at " the listless peer," Lord Orford
(Horace Walpole) who himself had been most kind to Dermody
on more than one occasion. Mr. Raymond thinks it a fine trait
in Dermody that the latter never courted patronage until he was
in desperate straits, and deems it creditable that he had no arts to
keep it ! The faith of these Dermodians is a sight to see.
Mr. Allingham painted the admired one's interesting gypsyish
portrait, and introduced his sitter to one Mr. Johnson, a bookish
ex-military personage of influence and originality. Feeling quite
unable to put up with his new protege's persistent choice of ill
lodgings and soiled clothing, at a time when " the world was so
full of a number of things," Mr. Johnson on one occasion beguiled
Dermody to his own rooms. They were near Sadler's Wells, on
the banks of that New River pleasantly familiar to lovers of Elia
and of George Dyer. There, under much verbal compulsion, John-
40 THE MOCK CHATTERTON [April,
son the disciplinarian got Mr. Thomas Dermody to pass through
the terrors of the cold tub, next to be shaved and barbered, and
finally folded and buttoned and buckled into the numerous elegant
habiliments of a Georgian dandy. The discarded costume was
with small ceremony pitched out of window! and lay in a heap
beside the stream while the two friends, high above, sat down to-
gether in all gentility to a toothsome repast. Later, moonlight
drew them to the casement, and they perceived several figures wan-
dering up and down the riverside, evidently in a distressed state
of mind. Presently, torches were stuck in the ground at even
distances, and boatmen appeared with a drag-net and grappling
irons. Long and earnest was the search in the deeps for that
corpse which had thus left its mortal sheathings conspicuous on the
brink. Night wore on; the business increased. In the hubbub
of the gathering crowd, many gave testimony. By one, the late
unfortunate had been seen to wander up and down; by another,
to plunge; by a third, to float; by a fourth, to sink to the bottom;
by a fifth, to have been fished up, dripping, and dead. The sym-
pathetic populace dispersed only in the small hours, bathed in
apprehensive tears. Dermody and the ex-officer, who watched the
farce from their sill, thought it well never to interrupt it. Admire
a dramatic detachment possible to the Celt alone !
Despite Mr. Johnson and his salutary comradeship, Tom re-
lapsed into lowest Bohemia. One must not be unjust to him : this
time it was partly owing to disappointment caused by the depriva-
tion, without cause, of his regimental pay. While he was under the
passing cloud, he was inspired to write to Sir James Bland Burges,
Bart, (who afterwards changed his name to Lamb), describing him-
self as a youth " indigent and unpatronized," but dear to the
Muses. Sir James was likewise, it seems, a poet, and had paid a
tribute in metre to Richard Lionheart. Our cunning scribe alludes
to the circumstance, and salutes his unknown correspondent as
That soaring spirit which disdains to creep
Round the smooth base of the Parnassian steep,
But hurried with the whirlwind's force along,
Grasps the rough summit of sublimest Song!
The blushing baronet must have grasped the rung of his
chair as he read. One can almost hear the comment : " Whew !
How well said !" wrung from him. The unerring marksman had
bagged his bird: Sir James turned out to be a most believing
1913-] THE MOCK CHATTERTON 41
and relieving creature. A discussion over a draft for ten pounds,
lost, and repaid checkered the first days of the acquaintance; another
draft of like magnitude served to clothe the unclothable in the
resumed hues of the fashionable world. But within a week of
that metamorphosis, the convert, very ragged, very muddy, very
drunk, escaped from a " spunging-house " to Sir James' library
door, with one of his best poems, the Extravaganza, fresh-laid, in
his pocket. Reproof was administered; debts were paid. The
episode was only a prelude to a lively duet, of a fiscal nature,
between the two. Mildly but firmly the poet solicited more money,
and ended by drawing on his patron's bank for an alehouse score.
The baronet very properly resented such usage, and, uttering tem-
pered maledictions, dropped communication with his fellow-minstrel.
The latter, however, was not daunted; not he! He brought up
the heavy guns of prose, and bombarded the closed citadel of income
with his " not uninteresting applications :" ten of these did Der-
mody fire off during the spring and early summer of 1801. They
are masterpieces of their kind; the temptation to quote from them
is acute. But one bonne bouche will do. Mr. Dermody laments
that the age which leaves him bobbing up and down precariously
in the trough of time, had already shown signs of taking to
" the vulgar puerilites of Wordsworth."
One might digress here to say that Sir James should be an
interesting figure to posterity, as the undoubted original of " young
Jamie " in Auld Robin Gray. As a youth he fell in love with a
lovely girl, Lady Margaret Lindsay. Opposition arose; the sweet-
hearts were parted, he being sent abroad, and she forced to marry
the banker Alexander Fordyce. The poem about them, dear to
many hearts, was written by Margaret Lindsay's sister, Lady Anne
Barnard. The romance had a happy but curious sequel some forty
years later, when the widowed Lady Margaret Fordyce became
Sir James Bland Burges' third wife! Sir James had a lively and
honorable career as Member of Parliament for Helston, and in the
Foreign Office; but letters were dearer to him than statecraft, and
in his later years, when Tom Dermody profited by him, he was
all for books and the Muses.
It was not Thomas' habit to have but one iron in the fire. All
along, as counter plot to the bounty of Sir James, he had been
gathering in private subsidies from the Literary Fund, the trustees
of which were wont
To bless the hapless bard, unseen by vulgar eyes.
42 THE MOCK CHATTERTON [April,
This, according to their charter, was what they were bound to do;
it was also exactly what the hapless bard in question had instructed
them to do. Had they only existed a while before, he artfully
tells them, Collins, aye, and Chatterton, would have escaped their
disastrous fates. Not fewer, but more frequent donations thence-
forward rained upon his path. One of the cultivated and benevo-
lent group who came forward to finance Dermody even burst into
poetry on the occasion. It begins:
Like Chatterton, a gifted youth,
and goes on and on. Poor Chatterton ! Flank attacks were being
made by " the Muses' Child," meanwhile, upon Henry Addington,
Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Hilary Addington, his brother,
two Right Honorables of wonderfully wise practical kindness.
Messrs. Allingham and Raymond continued unintermittently de-
voted.
The gutter gentry with whom Dermody chose to lodge had
by this time, as was natural, scented some advantage to themselves,
and turned extortionists without further ado ; his fine new garments,
deciduous as forest leaves, hung continuously under the eaves of the
pawnbrokers. Then he fell ill of asthma, and got his first scare,
and bethought him to purge and live cleanly, but, of course, with-
out reference to such a trifle as his soul's salvation. In an un-
wonted fit of industry, he wrote in the course of one day a satire
in two cantos on a subject made to his hand in the altercation be-
tween Peter Pindar and Giffard of the Bairad; also a really ex-
cellent essay on Browne and other poets little prized by that genera-
tion. It was one of Dermody's illusions to think of himself as
like Spenser in his day, Chatterton in his, and William Morris in
ours, a native of a past age, wearing " the coronals of that for-
gotten time :" whereas, of course, Dermody's mind is parti-colored,
and has no one recognizable ancestry. At his best as at his worst,
he bears everywhere the hall mark of the eighteenth century. He
had sense enough, however, to appreciate the sixteenth and seven-
teenth: a merit he shares with hardly anyone else of that day,
save the busy pioneer, Sir Egerton Brydges, whom, indeed, Der-
mody anticipated.
Time wore on. Mr. Addington in 1801 got Dermody's post-
poned book of poems published by Hatchard, and Hatchard swal-
lowed the profits. The author was not unnaturally much dis-
tressed: he was capable of a great depth of feeling on such truly
1913.] THE MOCK CHATTERTON 43
afflicting occasions. To add to his wretchedness, he had become
consumptive. Ill as he was, he managed to dictate to Mr. Raymond
his last applications for help to two former friends whom he had
justly offended, Sir James Burges and the Earl of Moira: both
men responded liberally, and the Hon. Baron Smith sent not only
a check, but a long, affectionate message. Early in July, 1802,
after some months of alternate suffering and convalescence, during
which he fell into a prolonged dejection, and was importuned for
many old debts, Dermody fled from a lane near Gray's Inn to a
cottage on the outskirts of Sydenham. It was a ruinous hovel,
exposed to wind and weather in an unusually stormy season.
There, racked with coughing, alone, without food or care, he was
at last found by Mr. Allingham and Mr. Raymond, and their faith-
ful friendship quickly did all that it could. They procured a nurse,
and hired a lodging on Sydenham Common, whither Dermody was
to be moved the next morning. But he died during the night. He
was twenty-seven years old. They buried him all those patient
people who had so unselfishly tended what Sir James Burges calls
his " transcendent genius " in Lewisham Churchyard. His grave
was chosen in what was considered a peculiarly romantic nook.
It is not romantic now. They had one of his own self -caressing
poems graven upon Dermody's tomb: and there it is yet, on a
monument twice renewed by public subscription.
The biographer, Grant Raymond, whose indulgence goes to
all lengths in all directions, yet remarks that " had Dermody's
ambition kept pace with the encouragement he received, had he
studied and pursued moral, with the same ardor as poetical pro-
priety, posterity with delight would have recorded his name." No :
the upshot is not even matter for guesswork. The flaw is funda-
mental. Dermody had it in him to become a really perceiving and
independent critic, had he also had it in him to do one stroke of
work. But his kind of poetry has it not had its day? Its
striking perfection of manner, a perfection as of very best whale-
bone or crinoline, will not save it. It has no space, no infinity;
no visions, such as belong by right to the Gael ; no love, neither for
beings human, sub-human, or super-human. The Elizabethan
roisterers, Marlowe, Nash, Greene, had a sense of unf olio wed ideals,
and the sincere torments born of it; the like had Villon, Rochester,
Burns, Poe, Verlaine. Not a splinter of aspiration, so far as man
can judge, ever pricked Dermody's " brass-hard guts " of pride.
Can poets be made of hogs? We trow not.
44 THE MOCK CHATTERTON [April,
In Dermody's scribbling youth the old long-blessed patronal
system had its field day. That system, with its abuses and indig-
nities (which gave a transient wound and a lasting armor to
Samuel Johnson), came practically to an end with the dawn of the
nineteenth century. Wordsworth and Coleridge, however, both
poor men, were saved from want and worry, throughout their
productive period, by patrons. But never was there such an aided
and abetted career as Dermody's. One-twentieth part of the heap-
ed-up abundance of the means of liberty which we so grudge
to his diffused intelligence and concentrated worthlessness, would
have saved the glory of Bristol, who in personal relationships had
honor and a heart. That the case of material succor lies as it does
between the mock Chatterton and the real one, is the most bitter
irony in the history of English letters. Dermody must have been
born for something better than to amuse us. Let us say it was
his office radically and expressly to show forth in long detail two
impressive facts : one, the touching ubiquity of human charity ; the
other, the readiness of this silly world to take a man at his own
value. No outstanding use, beyond this, has the " transcendent
genius " who now
With sparkless ashes loads an unlamented urn.
Surely, his wages have been excessive. His posthumous cult
has produced a biography, and a sepulchre erected and re-erected,
inscribed and re-inscribed, at the public cost. Modern Lewisham,
now part of London S. E., is perhaps yet grateful that to her it is
given to guard some very unheroic Irish Protestant dust. When
Dermody's poetical works were gathered together in 1807, the
editor, Mr. Raymond, gave them for general title: The Harp of
Erin. It was a sad misnomer. The Harp of Erin is eminently
not Thomas Dermody's instrument, either in fact, or by intention.
Ireland has no need of him; England can do without him. Mr.
Churton Collins has only wasted time in twining bays for that
cheap precocious brow.
CANON FOR THE REPOSE OF THE MOTHER OF GOD
(AUGUST 15).
St. John Damascene: Died Circa A. D. 780.
Taken from an Anthologia Grceca Carminum Christianorum, edited
by W. Christ and M. Paranikas. (Teubner, Leipzig,
MDCCCLXXL, pp. 229-232.)
Done into English verse by G. R. Woodward, M.A., sometime
Scholar of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
NOTE. Dr. John Mason Neale, one of the earliest and most accomplished of
the translators of the sacred verse of the Orthodox Communion, in his Hymns
of the Eastern Church (1863, second edition), gives some account of the poetical
Canons which are used in the Office for Lauds, and explains the omission of a
Second Ode in the present version of the Canon on our Lady's Assumption. In a
passage which is here somewhat shortened, Dr. Neale says that a Canon consists
of nine Odes, each one of which contains any number of Troparia, or Stanzas,
from three to beyond twenty. The reason for the number nine is this: that
there are nine Scriptural Canticles employed at Lauds, on the model of which
the Odes in every Canon are formed. The first is that of Moses, after the passage
of the Red Sea; the second is that in which Moses blessed the Children of Israel
before his death; and third and following ones are those of Hannah, of Habakkuk,
of Isaiah, of Jonah, of the Three Children, of the Benedicite, and, lastly, of the
Magnificat and Benedictus. From this arrangement, Dr. Neale adds: it follows
that, as the Second Canticle is never recited except in Lent, the Canons never
have any Second Ode. Dr. Neale's valuable estimate of the composition and con-
tents of the Odes, as well as of their style and manner, is too long to be quoted.
But one sentence, in regard to the author's history, whom he considers to be
the greatest of the poets of the Eastern Church, may perhaps be permitted. It is
surprising, he tells us, how little is known of the life of St. John Damascene :
that he was born of a good family in Damascus ; that he made great progress in
philosophy ; that he administered some charge under the Caliph ; that he retired
to the monastery of St. Sabas in Palestine; that he was the most learned and
eloquent with whom the Iconoclasts had to contend; that at a comparatively late
period of life he was ordained a Priest of the Church of Jerusalem; and that he
died after A. D. 754, and before A. D. 787 these facts seem to comprise all that
has reached us of his biography.
To this it may be added, that the Canon of St. John Damascene is an early
and valuable tribute in verse, from the Greek Office Books, of the position held by
our Blessed Lady in the divine scheme of the Christian Revelation ; that the present
version was generously made by the translator on behalf of the Third Series of
Carmina Mariana, which is now in course of compilation; that the translation was
made upwards of seven years ago, and was made again at the close of last year;
and that a preliminary and wider introduction to American Catholics has been
accorded to the Odes, before their addition to the Anthology, by the courtesy
of the Editor of THE CATHOLIC WORLD. O. S.
46 REPOSE OF THE MOTHER OF GOD [April,
ODE I.
I WILL ope this mouth of mine,
To be fraught with breath divine,
Anthem loud that I may raise
To the Royal Mother's praise,
Whom, and that in glorious wise,
Openly I eulogize,
And the wonders of the same
Readily herewith proclaim.
Virgin damsels, more and less,
With the Songster-prophetess,
Miriam, exalt with us
Greater Mary's Exodus;
For the Maiden, whom alone
Mother unto God we own,
Meriteth to journey o'er
Jordan to the heavenly shore.
Sooth, 'twas very meet that thou,
Seen as " Heaven on earth " till now,
Shouldest be, most holy Maid,
Into heavenly courts convey'd;
That thou shouldest, on this day,
Glorious and in bright array,
Take thy stand, a spotless Bride,
By thy God and Sovran's side.
[This Canon has no Second Ode.]
ODE III.
Goddes Mother, Fountain rife
With abundant streams of life,
Stablish us who hymn thy worth,
In concent of holy mirth ;
Think on us ; and, more than this,
Win us crowns of heavenly bliss.
Born of mortal womb, fair Maid,
Debt to Nature thou hast paid,
Hast accomplish'd thy decease,
And hast pass'd, by glad release
1913.] REPOSE OF THE MOTHER OF GOD 47
(Not till thou hadst given birth
To the Life of all the earth)
To that Life which is divine,
Real, true, and hath no fine.
From the North, South, East, and West,
Sped the Twelve Apostles, prest :
Thither drew there, from on high,
Flocks of winged Angels, nigh;
Urged by God's Almighty will,
Bound were all for Syon's hill;
Lady, straining every nerve,
At thy grave-side thee to serve.
ODE IV.
This unfathomed godly plan
Of the Word in Flesh of Man,
Offspring of a Virgin-womb,
Was foreseen by Ambakoum,*
When he cried in olden days,
" Mighty Lord, be thine the praise."
'Twas a wonder-sight to see
Soaring over lake and lea
Her that was the lively Shrine,
Palace of the King-Divine.
Marvellous are thy works and ways ;
Mighty Lord, be thine the praise.
Mother of thy God, to-day
Upward as thou went'st away,
Angel-hosts, in joy and dread,
Snow-white wings around thee spread,
O'er that body, which could fold
Him, whom heaven can no-way hold.
If the Infinite, her Child,
(Whereby " Heaven " she is styled),
If the Fruit of Mary's womb
Fain endured a mortal tomb,
Why should be the Mother spared
Sepulture, whereof He shared?
**. e., Habakkuk, or Habacuc.
48 REPOSE OF THE MOTHER OF GOD [April,
ODE V.
All Creation with amaze
Eyed thy glorious heavenly rays ;
When, unwedded Maiden clear,
Thou didst quit this earthly sphere
For abodes, that last for ever,
And the life that endeth never,
Granting life with ceaseless days
To the hymners of thy praise.
Let th' Apostles wake the morn
With the winding of the horn;
Let the anthem now be sung
By the men of many a tongue;
With unbounded light ablaze
Let the welkin ring her praise,
While the Angels, all of them,
Chaunt our Lady's Requiem.
In thy praises, Maiden blest,
One by far out- ran the rest :
'Twas that " chosen vessel/' Paul,
Wrapt in ecstasy withal,
One that had himself been caught
Into bliss exceeding thought,
'Fore his fellows, truth to own,
Consecrate to God alone.
He to-day, beyond all other,
Magnified thee, Goddes Mother.
ODE VI.
Come, good Christens, West and East,
Keep to-day a solemn feast;
Clap the hand, with one accord,
For the Mother of our Lord,
Praising God, who did indeed
From her blissful womb proceed.
From thee sprung the Life-Divine,
Nor unbarr'd thy Virgin-shrine:
How, then, did that stainless Tent
Which to Life once shelter lent,
1913-] REPOSE OF THE MOTHER OF GOD
Share the death, that doth befall
Eva's sons and daughters all?
Life's own Temple heretofore,
Life thou gainest evermore:
Through the gate of death thou hast
Unto Life eternal past
Thou who erst didst clothe and wind
Life itself in human kind.
ODE VII.
Sooner far than disobey
Their Creator's law, and pay
Worship to the Image, see
How the Holy Children Three
Trod the fire, and play'd the man
Gladly, while their anthem ran;
" Thou, our fathers' God and Lord,
Alway art to be adored."
Come, young men, with maiden-kind,
Bear this Maiden well in mind,
Goddes Mother, mild and meek.
Come, old men, and rulers eke,
With the judges of the earth :
Come, ye kings, make solemn mirth :
" Thou, our fathers' God and Lord,
Alway art to be adored."
With the Spirit's trump around
Let the heavenly heights resound ;
Let the mountains merry be,
And th' Apostles leap for glee.
Mary's feast it is to-day :
Raise we then the mystick lay.
Lord, thy Mother's pure decease,
Her departure in thy peace,
Gath'red beatifick legions
From aloft to earthly regions,
To rejoice with men who cry,
" God, thou art extoll'd on high."
VOL. xcvn. 4.
50 REPOSE OF THE MOTHER OF GOD [April,
ODE VIII.
Holy Childer Three were freed
In mid-fire by Mary's Seed:
There the shadow, dimly shown,
By the substance here is known ;
And it setteth all and some
Carolling through Christendome :
" All thy works, above, below,
Bless thee, Lord, for evermo."
Maiden clean, thy fame is sung
By Angelick trumpet-tongue :
Theme of Archangelick zones,
Virtues, Princedoms, Powers, and Thrones,
Dominations, Cherubim,
Yea, of awe-full Seraphim:
And with these we men below
Magnify thee evermo.
Maiden, in unheard-of way,
God in thy clear cloister lay,
Borrowing pure flesh and breath,
Born as mortal, prone to death;
Wherefore, Mother, we below
Magnify thee evermo.
Oh, the wonder passing thought
Of that humble Maid that brought,
From her ever-Virgin shrine,
Unto birth the Son Divine:
See, her grave is, in our eyes,
Turned into Paradise;
Whereby standing, we, to-day,
Full of joyaunce, sing and say,
" All thy works, above, below,
Bless thee, Lord, for evermo."
ODE IX.
Let us, every child of clay,
In the Spirit leap to-day,
Holding each his lighted lamp :
Next, let yon supernal camp
1913-] REPOSE OF THE MOTHER OF GOD 51
Of unbodied beings bright
Celebrate this heavenly flight,
By a path, as yet untrod
By the Bearer of our God;
Hailing Mary, blest o'er other,
Holy, ever- Virgin Mother.
Come, on Syon's Olive-hill,
Of the living God the Rill,
Make we joy; as in a glass,
Viewing what is come to pass.
Christ, to far more worthy station,
And more sacred habitation
Doth convoy his Mother lowly
To the Holiest of the Holy.
Come, ye faithful, haste away
To the tomb where Mary lay:
It salute we, e'er we part,
With true homage of the heart,
Of the forehead, lip, and eye,
Drawing thence full free supply
Of the healing balms, that mount
From this everlasting Fount.
Take of us, thou blest Abode
Of the Living God, this Ode
On thine Exodus from hence ;
And, of thy beneficence,
By the bright and heavenly grace
Streaming from thy blissful face,
Neath the shadow of thy wing,
Give the victory to the King ;
To good Christen people, peace;
To thy Quiristers, release
From their sins, that they may thrive,
Yea, and save their souls alive.
THE POETRY AND PROSE OF LIONEL JOHNSON.
BY ELBRIDGE COLBY.
II.
HE prose writings of Lionel Johnson consist of an
early volume on The Art of Thomas Hardy (1894),
and a large number of reviews and critical papers
written for the London literary columns between the
years 1891-1901, which have been but recently edited
by Mr. Thomas Whittemore (1911), and published under the Latin
title Post Liminium, alluding to " the right of a man, after a
lapse of time, to enter again into his own, over his former thres-
hold."* From the time when he came up to London with an
Oxford degree, prepared, as many other literary men before him,
to win fame and fortune with his pen, until the beginning of " the
long spell of enforced idleness," as he termed it, which ended with
his death during these ten years he wrote articles for The Daily
Chronicle, The Anti- Jacobin, The Spectator, The Academy, The
Speaker, The Outlook, The Fortnightly Review, and the West-
minster Gazette. In his Clifford's Inn chambers, Lionel Johnson
lived and worked, quietly, unostentatiously, persistently. When
he was not penning in his small, fine hand sheet after sheet of
pertinent criticism, he was making and confirming friendships,
for he always loved a friend, and there was in his heart a sincere
man-to-man worship for his fellows, so well expressed in the lines
to A Friend.
In the preface to The Art of Thomas Hardy, he said, " It
amply contents me to dream, that some gentle scholar of an hundred
years hence, turning over the worn volumes upon bookstalls yet
unmade, may give his pence for my book, may read it at his leisure
and may feel kindly toward me." By Lionel Johnson each of his
acquaintances was received as though the newcomer were perhaps
a present personification of that " gentle scholar of an hundred
years hence." He always had a certain scholarly attitude, and
loved to discuss with his friends the various aspects of literature
^Preface to Post Liminium, page xi.
1913.] POETRY AND PROSE OF LIONEL JOHNSON 53
and of life in which he was interested. Mr. Victor Plarr, who
roomed near him, has given us the following picture :
It was wonderful to be present when he built up a scene out
of the past. He would slip about, a slim, active figure with
dark expressive eyes, and pale intellectual face, playing a
kind of tune among bells, the bells being books, which he drew
from shelves high and low, till they littered tables and chairs
on every side. But the books, annotated, conned, inscribed
with favorite excerpts, were so many voices in his support.
Never did he take one down but it was to show you some
beautiful passage, some illuminating description, generally un-
familiar to his breathless interlocutor, but always appropriate
in the discussion. One can imagine Sir Walter Scott excelling
long ago in similar bouts.
Well could we wish to have been among those who " sat in
his beautiful rooms, so symbolic of his mind, among the choice
carefully-collected drawings and prints, the literary mementos,
and the countless shelves crammed with rare volumes, with large
paper editions hundreds of well-conned, well-loved books lis-
tening to his delightful flow of cordial talk, and noting the deep
glow of his poet's dark eyes as he read or recited verse in his tense
inimitable way."*
A perusal of The Art of Thomas Hardy leads us to the opinion
that the idea stated by Mr. Plarr can be reversed, that Lionel
Johnson may be said to have addressed his literary audience the
gentle scholar of an hundred years hence if you will with the same
tone, in the same fashion, and through the same materials as he
addressed his personal friends at Clifford's Inn. He seems to have
subscribed to the Wordworthian theory preached by Matthew
Arnold,
There is
One great society alone on earth,
The noble Living and the noble Dead.f
In the opening paragraph of The 'Art of Thomas Hardy, and
on pages 71 and 72, he has declared that there is no distinction
of time, " the great books and utterances tell all one story under
diverse forms," we can pass from epoch to epoch " with no sensible
discomfort or surprise of complete change," and " the good of all
*The Poetry Review, June, 1912. tPrelude n: 393.
54 POETRY AND PROSE OF LIONEL JOHNSON [April,
ages and of all kinds are more like each other than they are like
their bad contemporaries." On this basis Lionel Johnson dis-
cussed each writer under consideration as a postulant who was
seeking admission into the " one great society," and examined his
qualifications by a touchstone comparison, by reference to the high-
est of high ideals, and by deep and scholarly study of technique and
style. Indeed, in this first critical book he falls somewhat into
the usual error of erudite young men who have but recently been
idlers among academic bowers. He thinks of the subject matter
of which he is talking, in terms of the rigid conventions of the
ideal-intellectual society which he has constructed for his purpose,
and not in terms of the reactions which the subject matter produces
within himself. Constructive criticism may be academic or per-
sonal; and it seems that that of Lionel Johnson is academic. He
does not study the psychological effects of the novels of Thomas
Hardy upon himself. He compares them with " the fair human-
ities," with " the best that has been thought and said in the world."
As Mr. Victor Plarr has told us that " books were so many
voices in his support " in the Clifford's Inn discussions, so in the
written discussions on The Art of Thomas Hardy Lionel Johnson
calls many quotations to speak in his support. Where he does not
actually quote, he often mentions writer after writer in what might
seem either feigned or unnecessary erudition of manner. It would
be unwise to accuse him of a feigned erudition : he was an extra-
ordinarily widely and deeply read man; he came to his task rich
with the intellectual legacy of past years. As for the unnecessary
phase of this scintillating eruditeness, a quotation and a short
demonstration will best explain. Lionel Johnson is speaking of his
favorite period, the eighteenth century, as follows :
Experience, verified facts, the ascertained contents of life,
the clear principles and powers of human nature: these were
the plain arguments and matters for the consideration of reason-
able men. The roll of moralists, or of metaphysicians, illustrates
this reliance of thought upon common sense in very various
ways: there were the elegant Shaftesbury, with his character-
istic of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times; Mandeville, with his
Private Vices, Public Benefits; the rhetorical commonplaces,
uttered in no commonplace rhetoric, of St. John; the mixed
depravity and charm of Chesterfield; Johnson's golden mean
of wisdom ; the composed and Attic reasonings of Berkeley ; the
Gallicized Scotch skeptic, Hume; the moral father of political
1913-] POETRY AND PROSE OF LIONEL JOHNSON 55
economy, Smith; Butler, the champion of probability; Burke,
the Hooker of statesmen, upon whom at last fell the moral
horror of the French Revolution in all its lawlessness. Here
is no lack of variety; here are prelates and professors, states-
men and politicians, lights of the court and oracles of the coffee
house : but in all we note a desire to be sensible and reasonable ;
to present, each his own views of truth, as the plain, sane state-
ment of facts; demanding, doubtless, care and labor from the
student of truth; yet not exceeding the grasp of any honest
and educated man.
Then, when we consider that this is merely a " critical pre-
liminary," we wonder what does all this have to do with The Art
of Thomas Hardy? He deals with the whole history of the novel,
with the truth that lies in artistic expression, with the ideal of obe-
dience to fine traditions and the worth of the humanists, with the
various elements mixed into the literary crucible of the eighteenth
century, and excellently with the characteristics of the modern
novel as compared with its predecessors all by the way. We
read two pages on the awakening of the romantic spirit two
splendid pages, in which with singular felicity our author has hit
off the traits of a small battalion of writers and relegated each to
an appropriate niche we read these two, and other, pages and
begin to wonder if to give nearly the whole history of English
literature is not over-stepping even the license which Lionel Johnson
takes of approaching Thomas Hardy " in a leisurely way." In
fact, so much irrelevant or slightly relevant material is included and
detailed at length, that the temptation is very strong to turn against
our poet-critic a quotation which he himself was very fond of using,
" A very pretty book, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer."
This has been a question of rambling and diverse subject
matter strung on a single slender thread. There is the more serious
matter of style. It really becomes almost tiresome to read through
an excellent criticism of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and to find that,
from the Goethe statement about Faustus, " How largely it is all
planned," to the quotation from Bishop Blougram, it is not the work
of Lionel Johnson but the combined work of Lucretius, Lovelace,
Burke, the Doge of Genoa, Emerson, Renan, Alciphron, Shakes-
peare, ^Eschylus, Browning, Plato, George Herbert, Pope Leo XIII.,
Abelard, Cotter Morison, Hume, Moliere, Mansel, Hartmann, Dr.
Johnson, Prior, Ezechiel, Chaucer, Boethius, Samuel Butler, Cud-
56 POETRY AND PROSE OF LIONEL JOHNSON [April,
worth, Pascal, Newman, Christina Rossetti, and Carlyle all in
twenty-five pages. It may be well to have " so many voices in his
support," but it seems that this is a little too labored. Yet, these
one or two instances of stylistic transgression mentioned are the
exception rather than the rule. In the great majority of cases
the citations are exceptionally appropriate and excellently illuminat-
ing. The conclusion to which we must come, with reference to
this fault, is that the book was written by a rather young man of
distinct genius who had accumulated more than the ordinary quota
of knowledge; had gathered facts without giving his mind time to
mature; had not yet come to a realization of his own immense in-
nate power of thought. It is a youthful effort, marked with all
the reliance on the opinions of others, usually found in one who
is yet an earnest searcher after truth.
Lionel Johnson has been termed a disciple of Walter Pater;
and their relationship is nowhere more evident than in the subtleties,
in the richness, in the variety of his style; in the carefulness of
balance and the solemnity of movement. A short quotation will
illustrate the evident care taken in the construction:
I confess that the tragic novels contain purely idyllic passages ;
that the idyllic pair are not without their unhappy or satiric
touches ; that the remaining books, among their engaging medley,
exhibit simple tragedies and simple idylls. But the dominant
tone and nature of the fifteen volumes warrant their careful
reader in making this triple division: a touch of innocent
joy does but deepen the prevailing tragedy; a stroke of grim
ragedy does but add fresh zest to the sad laughter of the
satirist; a ripple of mockery, a breath from gloomier places,
best serve to embrace the charm of idyllic scenes.
Lionel Johnson is more varied, more brilliant, more rapid
than his Oxford master " who gave of his welcome and of his
praise." Walter Pater seems to present the " delicate dawning of
a new desire ;" while Lionel Johnson was more positive in his con-
victions. When we think of the influence of one man upon another,
we must preface our reflections with the axiomatic assumption that
as time goes on the pupil will develop his own individuality; he
will show less and less trace of the master's guidance, and that
the earlier work is the place where we must look for the delicate
traceries, for the vague hints, for the unconscious emulation and
fleeting similarity in attitude and manner which may be taken
IQI3-] POETRY AND PROSE OF LIONEL JOHNSON 57
as fast fading indications of the instructor's personality. In the
light of this, we had best remember that The Art of Thomas Hardy
was an early volume, and that in it, if anywhere, we must look for
the marks of his education, and for the characteristics derived from
him whom he called a " classic saint."
Usually, as Poe has remarked and demonstrated, a piece
of literature, be it poem or novel, creates in the mind of the reader
a certain impression. The Fall of the House of Usher, for instance,
represents an " all-pervading sense of insufferable gloom." Lionel
Johnson, with true and keen insight, has typified the effect of the
Hardy novels as that of a landscape, a landscape of open country,
rolling hills, a few relics of the cruder fiercer civilization of other
years, and a solitary laboring man watching on the moors at night-
fall. Only to one who has read and appreciated Thomas Hardy,
is it given to know how extra-ordinarily profound, and yet how
marvelously simple, is this piece of enlightenment. It is the trans-
lation of a broad and complex impression into a single definite mood
the mood of Thomas Hardy. In other places, Lionel Johnson
may be academic, but it cannot be charged against him that this
interpretation is bookish it is introspective and humanitarian to
the last degree.
But, to lay aside the mere incidentals of an academic or an
unacademic manner of procedure, the allusive tendencies of his
phraseology, and the appropriateness or the inappropriateness of
any particular passage or citation, to lay them aside for a mo-
ment and briefly to summarize, The Art of Thomas Hardy is the
effort of a young man who had not yet served his critical appren-
ticeship in the smaller and less pretentious things which should
ripen his powers for the larger tasks of the future. In matter,
he still depended, possibly too much, on the opinions of those who
had gone before; in manner, he still depended, possibly too much,
on the instructions of his teacher Walter Pater. Yet, with Lionel
Johnson, in substance and in style, it was reverence and emu-
lation, not dependence and imitation. Although he used quota-
tions profusely, he was far more than a mere compiler of the ideas
and opinions of others; he wrote with restraint and dignity, with
acute insight and apt illustration, and his work deserves no mean
position among the critical writings of this and other ages.
We all have to go through the process of becoming educated,
and until the richness of real maturity comes of its own accord,
we must fall somewhat short in true constructive criticism, and
58 POETRY AND PROSE OF LIONEL JOHNSON [April,
merely handle our material as best we can with our yet unordered
feeling for perspective and our yet unordered capacity for reflec-
tion. The result is that a young critic is either inordinately sus-
ceptible or is inordinately severe. The book on The Art of Thomas
Hardy represents a stage in the critical education of a mind of
genius well-trained in academic conventions. Post Liminium gives
us glimpses of the various stages in this education from the first
beginnings to the end.
A perusal of the critical pieces in Post Liminium and such of
the periodical contributions not therein included as are accessible
on this side of the water, a perusal of these year by year, shows
a fine strengthening of powers without loss of the high idealism,
the gradual development of an individual taste free from bare
traditional dictates, the slow acquisition of an incomparable finesse
in apperception, appreciation and expression, and the blossoming
of a broad humanitarian sympathy which comes only with the
confidence and the discretion of age. As we note the rare ripening
of genius with the passing of the years, and that which is more
than genius, as we think of what the future might have held in
store, there steals hauntingly into our memories the old, old saying,
" Whom the gods love, die young " true, all too true in the case
of Lionel Johnson. To restrict ourselves in our investigation to
his opinions on somewhat kindred topics, there is a very real and
a very evident difference between the early paper on Newman and
the later one on Savonarola. The former has the fault of the
mere piling up of names and the weakness of depending on quota-
tion; the latter has an inherent strength and an intrinsic worth
of its own. Witness the intensity, the power, the grandeur of the
following :
An age of luxurious corruption, renascent paganism, hideous
crime and moral laxity; Christian upon the surface, indifferent
or superstitious within; resplendent with gorgeous vanities and
cunning inventions and exquisite arts such to Savonarola
seemed the enemy assigned to the sword of his word. " Thun-
ders of thought and flames of fierce desire " surged through
his soul; after a time, and for a time, he triumphed. Sacred
oratory, able to inspire Michelangelo at work upon the Sistine
Chapel, thrilled Florence, and threw multitudes prostrate at his
feet; he found himself ruling where Lorenzo de' Medici had
ruled His earlier preaching was full of fiery apocalyptic
warning, of vehement appeals to Church and State, of sternest
1913-] POETRY AND PROSE OF LIONEL JOHNSON 59
denunciation and pathetic entreaty; but from that he passed
to a perilous conviction of his prophetic insight into the
immediate politics of the day, his divinely-given right to inspire
and direct the policy of Florence, to defy authority in the name
of higher authority.
Writing in 1893 of Walter Pater, we see him penning words
in the style of his master, long, involved sentences, evenly-balanced
clauses, and studied alternations of periodic and loose constructions.
Then, if we turn over a few pages and look at the paper on Vergil,
written in 1900, the distinction is obvious. The idea of balance
remains; but the whole impression is so much less mechanistic
there is less of the unnecessary punctuation of early days there
seems a live interest stronger than that of the cold technician :
For in the melancholy majesty of his mighty line we com-
mune with the " white soul " which, at the height of Rome's
magnificence, was not of that age, but of all ages, by virtue of
an intense humanity. If he did not, in man's service, control
the powers of nature, none has more profoundly expressed
and praised them, the august workings amid which man lives.
If he did not with high authority go about doing good to men,
none has more fully and perfectly given a voice to the infinite
longing of their souls, nor spoken with a tenderer austerity.
As there was in the end but one inspiration to the poetry of
Lionel Johnson, there was one moulding motive behind his prose
criticism. He seems to have had always in mind that " one great
society alone on earth," in the light of which he had considered
The Art of Thomas Hardy. And, naturally, to him the Catholic
heritage was the present manifestation of the quondam spiritual
dignity of classicism. In poetry he could be tense with present
faith; in prose he must be restrained in harmony with ancient
dignity.
It is interesting to look over the papers in the volume entitled
Post Liminium, with a view to constructing a synthesis of his opin-
ions on ancient civilization and culture, on Ireland and on the
Catholic Church. A paper on Friends That Fail Not tells of his
love for companionable books, for the quaint old-fashioned writings
of the past, and especially for the classics. With respect to the
last, we may recall the lines in the poem to Walter Pater, which says
that " deep within the liturgies lie hid the mysteries." He thought
that we should look on the wisdom of old with a reverence that
60 POETRY AND PROSE OF LIONEL JOHNSON [April,
should be a religion, and that with the lamps of our intelligence
we should strive to penetrate the dimness. He loved Ireland, and
lauds the various Irish politicians for their devotion to their ideals.
Clarence Mangan he praises as a brilliant Irishman, who from de-
jection, defeat, and deception " rose and rang the very glory
and rapture of Irish song to his dark Rosaleen." Then, for him-
self, in a paper on Poetry and Patriotism in Ireland, he shows his
own deep reverence for the true idealism: not particularly as ex-
pressed in the practical, political, propagandist poetry, but rather
in poetry written in the Irish spirit in any form, so long as it is
good and fine in itself. He would " welcome all who write for the
love of Ireland, even if they write in fashions less familiar," and
let the subject be what it will, so long as the spirit is brave and
optimistic.
Humble Saint Francis of Assisi, austere Dante, lovable Thomas
a Kempis these have come in for their full share of eulogy from
the man who was a strong believer in their Faith. Lionel Johnson
loved English literature because of its mysticism, because of its
strangeness and propensity, because of the dimly discernible under-
lying subtleties in its movements. He wrote on The Soul of Sacred
Poetry } and wrote well, unconsciously characterizing his own poetry
very nicely when he said, " Sacred poets must feel towards the
contents of their creed as lovers towards the separate and single
beauties of their mistress : a personal devotion to each gracious
detail, with a comprehension of their place and office in the gra-
cious whole. There must be a reverent familiarity, no less than an
awed veiling of the eyes." The genius that was not sufficiently
developed to write a book about Thomas Hardy, was fully capable
of making one of the finest judgments that have ever been made
of the whole inspiration of sacred poetry. And, of course, there
was an excellent reason for his insight on this subject, for Lionel
Johnson himself must be ranked as one of the foremost of all those
sacred men who have poured out their fervid souls in poetry. The
gorgeous glorious ecstasy of Te Martyrum Candidatus is as won-
derful as the intensity of The Dream of Gerontius and the stirring
chants of the choir angelical. It is " more than imagination ; it is
nothing less than vision." Lionel Johnson said and proved it
himself that it is necessary to believe before writing sacred poetry.
The little snap-shots of life and letters* which have been
* Short essays and criticisms, included in " With Our Readers," on St. Vincent
de Paul, on Two Early English Mystics, on The Ambitious Church, etc., etc., etc.
1913-] POETRY AND PROSE OF LIONEL JOHNSON 61
reprinted in THE CATHOLIC WORLD would that they could be
collected and published in even more permanent form seem to
merit separate consideration. There are many on this side of the
water who know Lionel Johnson chiefly, if not solely, in the delight-
ful attitude therein revealed. Whether he deals with matters of
literature or of religion, he is ever inspiring and instructive. He
always has a high ideal to which he would have humanity attain;
he always sees the better side of life, even when correcting faults;
he always holds lofty and noble hopes for the future. Just to
mention a few : his gentle contempt for the fin de siecle " flowery
Paganism such as no Pagan ever had:" his appreciation of Irish
Poets Writing English Verse, whose poetry " will not pass away
till the passing away of Ireland," and his keen insight into the mind
of Gibbon are in his best literary mood; he is most intensely and
ideally enthusiastic when he writes of " the sacred purple of Rome,"
of old-time visionaries and mediaeval dreamers, and of the ambitious
Church and Catholic duty; and with modern subjects he can do
as well, hitting off with remarkable felicity of phrase splendid
Fenelon, kindly Cardinal Manning, and the noble Reverend William
Lockhart, or poking fun at Alfred Austin's first discovery of Ire-
land, and at the Laureate's unsympathetic and unnatural attempts at
" wearing of the Green."
But let us dismiss the subject of mere facts and mere con-
struction, and contemplate the spirit which actuated the worker.
In poetry Lionel Johnson is intense; in critical vein he is large,
broad, and kindly. Whether we read his early effusion on The
Fools of Shakespeare, whether we entertain ourselves with the
essay which revolves about The Art of Thomas Hardy; whether
we assist at a review of the credentials of a newly-published volume ;
whether we read the poetic eulogy to Walter Pater; whether we
dip into his work at an early or a late period; whatever the style,
the spirit is the same. And that spirit is one of fine nobility, vast
scope, and gentle thoughtfulness. There is always a feeling for
humanity, a dignified respect for a sympathetic interpretation of
men and of man. It is a critical attitude, and it is a critical manner,
infinitely desirable though rarely found.
Lionel Johnson enjoyed a limited reputation as a critic; he
won recognition as a poet; and his fame has not only persisted since
his death: it has increased. Previous to 1902 he had published
only three books: The Art of Thomas Hardy in 1894, Poems in
62 POETRY AND PROSE OF LIONEL JOHNSON [April,
1895, and Ireland with Other Poems in 1897. Each of these was
almost immediately re-issued in either New York or Boston, and
all were reviewed by almost all of the periodicals then publishing
critical notices of new books. Most of the comments were very
favorable, except for occasional mention of unnecessary scholarli-
ness in the poems, of unnecessary display of learning in the Hardy
volume. It is very interesting to notice how he has come into
his own since his death.
Selections from his poems were published in London in 1908;
in 1904 Mr. Yeats picked out XXL Poems to be printed by the
Dun Emer Press of Dublin, and Mr. Thomas B. Mosher, maker
of fine books, reprinted these in 1908, with seven additional ones
of his own choice at Portland, Maine; in 1911 Mr. Thomas Whitte-
more edited Post Liminium, which appeared in New York in 1912,
and which met a hearty reception among the critics on both sides
of the Atlantic; and in 1912 Mr. Elkin Mathews published another
selection entitled Some Poems, with a biographical sketch by Louise
Imogen Guiney. Aside from the notices of these books, which were
published almost as a matter of course, there have been an amazing
number of papers written about him. It seems from the tenor
of these that the spirit of the man lives and obtains influence aside
from any specific item 'of his writing. Since 1902 there have
been no less than ten critical articles, all of considerable length,
and dignified, sober, serious articles in reputable magazines, or as
parts of more pretentious essay collections not the dashed-off,
hasty-and-shallow- judgment, book-review type. Ten articles, one
for each year! These fall naturally and immediately into two
groups, those occasioned by his death, and the very recent ones.
The number of appreciations of Lionel Johnson which have
been printed since the beginning of 1912 would seem to augur that
our poet is at last coming into his own, that the brave optimism is
beginning to win the general recognition it deserves, and that the
future will see his renown steadily grow greater and greater as the
world comes to know more and more of the acute little thinker
and high idealist of Clifford's Inn.
Be it prose or be it poetry, the chief inspiration of Lionel
Johnson can be generalized into a reverence for the " best that has
been thought and said in the world." In literature he turned to
1913-] POETRY AND PROSE OF LIONEL JOHNSON 63
classicism; in religion he turned to Catholicism. His boundless
optimism lived for Ireland in the Church. In the words of Poe,
poetry was to him not a purpose but a passion and the passions
should be held in reverence. Criticism was a purpose by it he
earned his living. It is when the dreamer dreams that he is at his
greatest, and Lionel Johnson is most truly inspired when he, appre-
hending as by mystical intuition, breaks into poetry poetry kindled
from deep experience and based on the wonder and greatness of
existence. In verse he writes not for a periodical or for an editor,
not for a day, a decade, or a century; but for his God and for all
time:
A gleam of Heaven ; the passion of a star
Held captive in the clasp of harmony :
A silence, shell-like breathing from afar
The rapture of the deep eternity.*
He will be known in the future, not as the kindly friend of
a few callers at Clifford's Inn, not as a worshipper and singer of
the praises of Kathleen ni Houlihan, not as an austere, dignified
critic with a classical spirit and a careful style, but as one who, in
the strength of his Faith, saw with his eyes, and sang for joy
of the sight, saw with his eyes, the Eyes of the Crucified.
*Poem by Father John Banister Tabb, entitled Poetry.
SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME.
BY W. E. CAMPBELL.
VII.
ORE was now, at last, to be drawn into the vortex
of Court life in spite of himself. At the earnest
request of the English Merchants he was, by the
King's consent, twice made ambassador in important
matters. This was in 1516. A little later his bril-
liant defense of the Pope's right to a vessel claimed in forfeiture
by the King, made further resistance to the royal wishes impossible.
The Court at this time was not without its attractions even for
a man like More. Henry VIIL, at twenty-six, was in the first
freshness of his manhood. His father had laid the foundations
upon which he was eminently fitted to build a stately edifice of
kingly authority. The power of the old nobility had been destroyed
both by the ravages of civil war and by the deliberate policy of
Henry VII. " Feudal society has been described as a pyramid ;
the upper slopes were now. washed away, leaving an unscaleable
precipice, at the top of which stood the Tudor monarch alone in
his glory." And Henry VIIL came to this great position richly
endowed with mental and physical gifts. His unusual excellence
at all kinds of sport and martial exercise made him the idol of
ordinary folk. He could draw a bow, tame a horse, shiver a lance,
wrestle, joust, hunt or play with the best. " Love for the King,"
writes a foreign chronicler, " is universal with all who see him ; for
his Highness does not seem a person of this world, but descended
from heaven." Giustiniani, the Venetian ambassador, to whom
we owe so many delightful pictures of the English Court, describes
him as so handsome that Nature could not have done more for him.
Wolsey was of course the great political figure of the Court,
and to him, in these earlier years of the reign, Henry left the whole
management of state affairs. " Wolsey," says Giustiniani, " rules
both the King and the entire kingdom." On the ambassador's
first arrival in England, Wolsey used to say, " His Majesty will do
so and so;" subsequently, by degrees, forgetting himself, he com-
menced saying, " We shall do so and so," at this present he has
1913-] SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME 65
reached such a pitch that he says, " I shall do so and so." He is
about forty-six years old, very handsome, learned, extremely elo-
quent, of vast ability and indefatigable. He alone transacts the
same business as that which occupies all the magistracies, offices,
and councils of Venice, both civil and criminal ; and all state affairs
are likewise managed by him, let their nature be what it may. He
is pensive, and has the reputation of being extremely just; he favors
the people exceedingly, especially the poor, hearing their suits, and
seeking to dispatch them instantly. He also makes the lawyers
plead gratis for all poor suitors. He is in very great repute, seven
times more so than if he were Pope. He has a very fine palace,
where one traverses eight rooms before reaching his audience cham-
ber, and they are all hung with tapestry, which is changed once a
week. His sideboard of plate is worth twenty-five thousand ducats.
In his own chamber there is always a cupboard with vessels to
the amount of thirty thousand ducats, according to the custom of
the English nobility. He lived in fact in a style of unparalleled
magnificence and splendor. Everything about him was conceived
in the handsomest manner, his palaces and colleges, his pictures,
his minstrels and singing-boys, his attendants with their crimson
liveries were the envy not of nobles but of kings. " He kept a
noble house," says Cavendish, his secretary and faithful biogra-
pher, " and plenty both of meat and drink for all comers, both
for rich and poor, and much alms given at his gates." Probably
no subject of the crown in the whole course of English history
left upon his contemporaries so deep an impression of wealth,
power, and magnificence.
Wolsey was the greatest statesman of his age, but his state-
craft lay almost wholly in the direction of foreign affairs; and
we should not pay too much attention to those historical enthu-
siasts who claim for him as well the title of educator, religious
and domestic reformer.
" The bent of his genius," writes Brewer, " was exclusively
political ; but it leaned more to foreign than domestic politics
But throughout the whole period of his long administration, and
through all his correspondence, it is remarkable how small a por-
tion of his thoughts is occupied with domestic affairs; and with
religious matters still less"*
Henry VIII. was as richly endowed in mind as in body, and
there was an intellectual side to his Court which reflected his mental
*Brewer, i., pp. 58, 59.
VOL. XCVII. 5-
66 SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME [April,
quality. He had been carefully educated, at first with a view to
the ecclesiastical life, and had shown signs of great intellectual
precocity. But the development of his mind must have been much
unsteadied by his youthful zeal for pleasure and sport of every kind.
Even as late as 1520, Pace writes to Wolsey complaining of his
excessive devotion to hunting. " The King rises daily, except on
holy days, at four or five, and hunts till nine or ten at night. He
spares no pains to convert the sport of hunting into a martyrdom."*
His mind, not to speak of his moral nature, must have developed
very slowly during the brilliant and pleasure-loving years of his
early married life Queen Katherine spoke of it as one of continual
feasting. In the winter evenings there were masks and plays and
revels, in which Henry himself, Bessie Blount, and other young
ladies of the Court took part. In the spring and summer there was
archery and tennis. Music was practiced by day and night, and
there were, of course, the more serious athletic displays. It is
not to be wondered at that the King paid so little attention to State
business ; whatever time was left over for mental pursuits was given
to an easy patronage of the intellectual members of his Court, and to
discussions theological and otherwise. Henry, himself, complained
to Mount joy that he was still so ignorant. There is no doubt,
however, that Henry was the most accomplished monarch of his
time. Erasmus speaks of him with great, if rather exaggerated,
respect.
His book against Luther, for there is little doubt that he was
mainly responsible for it, gives evidence of fairly extensive theo-
logical learning, though "it does not rank so high in the realm of
theology as do some of Henry's compositions in that of music." At
a later date, indeed, he inspired Cardinal Campeggio with profound
respect for the soundness of his theological knowledge. A monarch
who could surround himself with such courtiers as Mount joy,
Linacre, Pace, Colet, Stokesley, Latimer, Tunstal, Clerk, and More
must have had very sound intellectual predilections. f
At the time of More's entry into political life, Henry had not
assumed personal control of state affairs; but there are many evi-
dences that he was feeling his way towards it. Wolsey had not quite
prepared the great position which his master was so soon to occupy
at the cost of his own downfall. The lion, as More said, had not yet
realized his own strength ; but it would be hard for any man to rule
him when that time should arrive.
*State Papers, vol. iii., no. 950. tC/. Erasmus, State Papers, vol. ii., no. 4340.
1913-] SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME 67
The sweating sickness was now very prevalent. More writes
to Erasmus in 1517, " We are in the greatest sorrow and danger.
Multitudes are dying all around us: almost everyone in Oxford,
Cambridge, and London has been ill lately, and we have lost many
of our best and most honoured friends." One of its results was to
drive the King and his Court from London, and indirectly it had
a very bad effect on business. Much discontent arose in the city,
especially on account of the foreign merchants who were swarming
into England and taking away the Court patronage. The municipal
authorities, in the absence of the Court, were unequal to the pres-
ervation of order.
Matters were brought to a head by a sermon preached by a
certain Franciscan, who denounced the numbers and doings of the
foreigners. The prentices and others to the number of two thou-
sand attacked the French, Flemish, and Italian quarters, and were
only quelled by means of the troops whom Wolsey had ordered to
march into London from the outlying districts. More did his best
to calm the rioters, and was afterwards appointed to inquire into
the causes of the disturbance, as he himself tells us in his Apology
(E. W./p. 930 sq.). But the trouble did not end here, as we learn
from a dispatch of the Venetian ambassador, who speaks of another
conspiracy to murder strangers and sack their houses in the fol-
lowing September the King and his Court being still absent from
London.*
A letter from More to Erasmus about this time shows how
busily he was occupied with Court business, while his mind occa-
sionally took relaxation in Utopian imaginations.
I am in the clouds [he writes] with the dream of government
offered me by my Utopians. I fancy myself a grand potentate,
with a crown and a Franciscan cloak, followed by a magnificent
procession of the Amaurai. Should it please heaven to exalt
me to this high dignity where I shall be too exalted to think
of commonplace acquaintances, I will still keep a corner in my
heart for Erasmus and Tunstal ; and should you pay me a visit,
I will make my subjects honor you as is befitting the friends of
majesty. But, alas, my dream is dispelled: I am stripped of
my royalty, and am plunged once more down into the old mill-
round of the court.
More was now to be drawn into the web of foreign diplomacy.
*State Papers, vol. ii., no. 3697.
68 SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME [April,
In August he was appointed on a Commission to adjudicate between
the English and French merchants, at Calais, in order to save both
sides the expense of litigation. The business was long and tedious,
especially so to More. " What a thing it is," writes Erasmus with
reference to his friend, " to be blessed by kings and loved by Car-
dinals." In spite of his aversion to this kind of life, More's in-
fluence with the King was evidently very strong, for we have a
letter of his written to Warham, congratulating that prelate on his
retirement from the Chancellorship. He speaks of the difficulty
he had in persuading the King to allow Warham's resignation, and
envies him for his new-found leisure, while he himself is so dis-
tracted with business that he can hardly find time to write this letter.
More returned from this uncongenial mission in November.
In 1518 he was appointed Master of Requests, a post which in-
volved constant attendance upon the King, and the examination of
all petitions presented on the royal progresses through the country.
It must have given him a new insight into the problems of the
countryside, and we also know that it gave him many opportunities
of helping the poor. No doubt it was at his suggestion that in
1521 the Council revived the statutes against unauthorized en-
closures.
In the early spring of 1518, while the Court was at Abingdon,
one of the select preachers was unwise enough to rail against the
study of Greek and the new interpreters of the Scripture before
the King. The unfortunate theologian was afterwards summoned
to the royal presence, and commanded to argue out his contention
with Mr. More. More spoke first, and put his case so forcibly that
his opponent, instead of making a reply, fell on his knees and
sought the King's pardon. This sermon was only an indication
of a bitter controversy which was raging at Oxford at the time.
So fierce did it become that the King, anxious to protect the growing
zeal for sound knowledge, instructed More to address a letter of
warning to the university authorities.
This oration, for it is nothing less, is too long for quotation,
but its general purport may be given. When in London More had
heard that certain scholars of the university had banded themselves
together under the name of Trojans, in order to show their contempt
for Greek studies. This might be all very well as a joke, but he
understood it was leading to serious evil when a preacher, in
the holy season of Lent, could allow himself in a sermon to inveigh
against learning itself. For what purpose, indeed, did the univer-
1913-
SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME
69
sity exist, if not for the spread of knowledge? He could under-
stand that a holy man, long withdrawn from the world and given
to watching, to fasting, and to prayer, might come out of his
seclusion in order to warn men to leave study for that which was
more excellent and spiritual; but such was not the case with the
preacher mentioned, who loved comfort and ignorance rather than
true piety. Who could deem this anything but malice and envy?
" How came it into his head to preach about the Latin tongue,
of which he knows so little ; or the liberal sciences of which he knows
still less; or about Greek, of which he understands not one iota?
Had he not matter enough in the seven deadly sins, matter indeed,
in which he had far greater skill ? " In any case what does the
university exist for except to teach knowledge and that alone?
Not only theology, which is only necessary for some of the stu-
dents, but a knowledge of human affairs, which can nowhere be
found so abundantly as in the works of poets, orators, and his-
torians. Even theology itself is difficult of thorough attainment
without the help of Latin, of Greek, and of Hebrew. There is
little need in these times to warn people against learning: they
are not so anxious after all to devote themselves to it, even with
great persuasion. In conclusion, More addresses himself to the
university authorities, urging the advantages of Greek studies,
and pointing them to Cambridge for a good example. He apolo-
gizes for presuming to address himself to people so much more
learned than himself, and warns them to put a stop to the factions
which were a disgrace to the university, lest their Chancellor or
the Cardinal of York be forced to intervene. Lastly , he gives
them to understand and this is the point of the whole letter
that the King will tolerate nothing contrary to the intellectual
interests of a place so favorably cherished by himself and his
ancestors.
While More was cudgelling the Oxford dons on behalf of
sound knowledge, his fellow-courtiers were otherwise engaged.
Considering the holiness of the season, they had abandoned their
usual " carding and dicing " for the less exciting diversion of
"picking of arrows over the screen in the hall." More was evi-
dently " the friend at court " of all followers of the New Learning.
It was he who brought Holbein to England, and secured the King's
favor and patronage for any distinguished or promising scholars
from abroad, or from our own universities. Fisher, the Bishop
of Rochester, for instance, sends him a young theologian for pre-
70 SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME [April,
sentation to the King with a letter of introduction, which shows
how strong his influence must have been.
Let some ray of favor shine from the throne, by your means,
upon our Cambridge alumni, in order to quicken and spur on
our youth to the love of good letters, by the hope of sharing
in the liberalities of so flourishing a prince. We have but a
few friends at Court, who are both able and willing to recom-
mend our affairs to the King's Highness, and of these we reckon
you the first, who hitherto and while in a lower sphere have
ever proved yourself our kind protector. Now that you are
assumed to the order of knighthood (1521) and are so close
to the King show how much you favor us.
A further annuity of 100 was granted to More in 1518
out of the little customs of London; and although he is called a
Councillor as early as 1516, he does not appear to have been ad-
mitted to the deliberations of the Privy Council till 1518. His
correspondence with Erasmus during this period was chiefly con-
cerned with the publication of his own Utopia, his Epigrammata,
and the various works of Erasmus himself; also to the soliciting
of influence and substantial patronage for his impecunious friend.
One letter of his on the subject of Erasmus' version of the New
Testament is of considerable importance, especially in view of his
own later controversy with Tyndale. In it More tells of Latimer's
delight over Erasmus* version, and warns the latter against the
designs of certain enemies to catch him in a trap.
The saintly Bishop of Rochester also approved of Erasmus*
New Testament. "The New Testament, translated by you," he
writes in 1517, " for the common benefit of all, cannot give offence
to any wise person ; when you have not only cleared up innumerable
passages by your erudition, but have also supplied a very complete
commentary on the whole work." More, in a letter to his friend,
also mentions that Fox, after Fisher the most devout and influential
member of the English episcopacy, preaching before a large con-
course of people, affirmed that Erasmus* version of the New Testa-
ment was worth more to him than ten commentaries.
In the important letter of More to Erasmus, just mentioned,
More spoke very favorably of Hutten's Epistle of Obscure Men.
His commendation was passed on to Hutten himself by Erasmus
in a letter which will always remain as one of the most finished,
complete, and beautiful descriptions of More ever written. It is a
1913-] SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME 71
difficult task, says Erasmus, to describe More, but he will do his
best. He is somewhat below middle height, but well-proportioned
in all his limbs; his complexion is fair rather than pale, with as
much red as to give it the bloom of health. His hair is inclined
to black or brown; he has a thin beard and gray eyes dotted with
specks, which, as a mark of genius, is much admired in England,
and indicates a generous nature. His inside corresponds to his out
He has a pleasant smiling look, and, to say the truth, is more
inclined to pleasantry than seriousness. His right shoulder is a
little higher than his left, especially when he walks, but this is not
a natural defect, but an acquired imperfection. As compared with
the rest of his person, his hands are a little clumsy. He has always
been careless in the matter of dress. Erasmus became acquainted
with him when he was twenty-three, and he is now a little past
forty. Hutten may therefore guess how handsome More was in
his youth. He has good health but not robust, and is likely to
live long, as his father is a very hale old man. He is careless
as to his food; generally drinks water, and sometimes, to please
others, beer, little better than water, out of a tin cup. As it is
customary to drink healths in England, More pledges his guests
ore simmo. His favorite diet is beef, salt meats, and coarse
brown bread well fermented; he prefers milk and vegetable diet,
and is fond of eggs. His voice is penetrating and clear, but not
musical, although he is fond of music; his speech is plain and
distinct. He wears no silk, purple or gold chains, except when
he cannot avoid it, and dislikes all ceremony.
At first he was averse to a Court life through hatred of
tyranny and love for equality, and could not be induced to take
service with Henry VIII. except after great solicitations. He
likes liberty and ease, but no one is more active or more patient
than he when occasion requires it. He is friendly, accessible, and
fond of conversation, hating tennis, dice, and similar games. He
is very much given to jesting; wrote and acted little comedies when
a lad, and loves a jest even at his own expense. He is equally
at home with the wise and the foolish, and in female society is full
of jokes. No one is less led by the judgment of the vulgar, and
yet no man has more common sense. His chief pleasure is in
watching animals, and he has a variety of them, for instance, an
ape, a ferret, a fox, etc. Any rarity or exotic he purchases readily,
and his house is well furnished with curiosities. He has always
been fond of female society and female friendships. As a young
72 SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME [April,
man he devoted himself to Greek, for which he was nearly disin-
herited by his father, who wished to bring him up to the law a
profession which, above all others, in England leads to honor and
emolument, but requires many years of hard study.
I* Erasmus then gives a number of the well-known facts of
More's earlier life, including his lectures on St. Augustine, his wish
for the religious life, his first marriage and his second. Nothing,
he proceeds, can show his influence over (his second wife) more
completely than that, though advanced in life and very attentive to
housekeeping, More persuaded her to learn various musical instru-
ments. He manages his whole household in an admirable way;
there is no noise or contention ; no vice, no bad repute ; and perhaps
no family can be found where father and step-mother and son live
together on such excellent terms. Moreover, his father had just
married a third wife, and More swears he has never seen a better
one.
When he lived entirely by his profession, he gave every man
true and faithful advice, urging them to make up their differences,
though it was against his own interests. When that was not pos-
sible, as some persons take pleasure in litigation, he showed them
how to proceed at the smallest cost. He was for some time a
judge of civil suits in London, an easy and honorable post, as he
only sat on Thursdays till dinner time.
After that he was sent on various embassies by Henry VIII. ,
who takes great delight in his company and conversation. With
all this favor he is neither proud nor boastful, nor forgetful of his
friends, but always obliging and charitable.
Then follows an account of More's literary undertakings. His
Utopia was written to show the perils to which governments are
exposed, but was especially aimed at his own country. He is
a good extempore speaker, has a ready wit and a well-stored
memory, so that he speaks without hesitation. Colet was accus-
tomed to say of him that " He was the only genius in England."
In his devotions he prays from the heart, and he talks with his
friends on the future life with perfect sincerity and hope.*
More had evidently all the diplomatic gifts, for we find Giustin-
iani writing to the Doge of Venice that he had " contrived a con-
ference with Thomas More, newly made Councillor," with a view
to gaining information on the new French alliance. Our diplomatic
novice, however, pretended to know nothing, saying that not even
*State Papers, vol. iii., no. 394.
SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME
73
the King knew anything of the matter, much less any of the am-
bassadors. In July, 1518, Cardinal Campeggio came to England
as a legate a latere ostensibly to discuss the eternal question of the
Turks. He was received with great pomp, being met at Blackheath
by the Duke of Norfolk and a large retinue. On arriving in Lon-
don, he was welcomed at Cheapside by the Mayor and Aldermen,
and a brief Latin oration was delivered by " Mr. More." He then
proceeded to St. Paul's, where he was met by the Bishop of London
and conducted to the High Altar. We notice More's name on the
Commission of Peace for Kent. On October 2d he was one of
the signatories to a Treaty of Universal Peace (with France), and
to a Treaty of Marriage between the Dauphin and the Princess
Mary on October 4th. In the following month Queen Katherine
gave birth to a daughter, causing much disappointment to all, as it
was feared the English crown might now pass to France.
On June i, 1519, More was presented with a corrody or pen-
sion in Galstonbury. On July 23d he resigned his office of Under-
Sheriff to the City of London, and from this event we may date his
complete absorption by the royal service. We notice that from
this time his name occurs among those of officials who breakfast
at Court, and we may gather from this that even when the King
was in London, More could have spent little time in his own home.
Roper confirms this inference when he tells us that
because he was of a pleasant disposition, it pleased the King
and the Queen, after the Council had supped, at the time of
their supper, for their pleasure commonly, to call for him, and
to be merry with them. When he (More) perceived so much
in his talk to delight, that he could not once in a month get
leave to go home to his wife and children (whose company he
most desired), and to be absent from the Court two days
together, but that he should be thither sent for again, he much
misliking this restraint of liberty, began thereupon somewhat
to dissemble his nature, and so by little and little from his
former mirth disuse himself, that he was of them from thence-
forth no more so ordinarily sent for.
LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION.
BY PIA ROBINSON.
[THIN my grasp " Yes, it was so. For years
it had scarcely been more than a longing, cruel at
times, an ardent wish full of many possibilities, but
wrapped in a hazy, cloudy atmosphere which soft-
ened its outlines, hid its defects, dulled its ruddy
glow. And now, it had unexpectedly come to me ; the letter, which
I unknowingly crushed in my hand, had told it. There was this
thing, for which a keen desire had followed me through life, step
by step, and which had remained so far as intangible, as impalpable,
as my own shadow standing suddenly at hand. Real, materialized
so to speak ; at least as far as such things can be. It was mine for
the mere taking for the stretching out of my hand.
My heart was beating loudly ; I felt my eyes burning, my face
drawn and pale. To eat was sheer impossibility: with some pre-
text I left the breakfast table, gained the terrace, and through pure
instinct turned towards the thick, shadowy wood. An intense
June sun colored it brilliantly, shooting here and there its arrows
of fire to the very depth of the cool, restful gloom. Up and up
the hill I went. Through masses of huge ferns, fragments of
rocks, thorny briars, over-creeping gray lichen, shining under the
dew as under diamond dust, higher and higher I climbed, absently,
hurriedly, until, stopped by a range of jutting pieces of granite,
I could climb no further.
And there, on a big mossy slab, reached only by dancing shafts
of yellow light through the thick trees, I sat down. Vaguely, me-
chanically, I seemed to take in the panorama of beauty before which
pure chance appeared to have brought me.
Through the tops of long branches, spread like lace before my
eyes, I could make out a golden stretch of sand, a space of blue
motionless sea, sharply cut, at the other side of the bay, by heathery
pink and brown hills. And behind these higher ranges of deep
blue mountains, repeating themselves again and again, paler and
grayer, till the last melted against the soft sky. Around me the
fern tips curved gracefully, everywhere under my feet ivy spread
its glossy carpet; here and there countless grasses and wild plants
1913.] LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION 75
balanced their dainty stems under the weight of the thousand-
colored flies; tiny living rainbows flashing side by side with those
of the dewdrops. As I leant back against the cold rock, breathing
with a strange effort, I closed my eyes. As I did so, I caught
the faint rustling of the paper in my hand; my heart seemed to
leap to my throat with sheer joy. At long last !
So dreams do become realities! So the cup can be occasion-
ally filled to the brim for human lips to drink! So there are
times in this short life when the sky is intensely blue, the sea
offering no limit; when throbbing nature, in her delight, wraps
her mantle of golden green around human shoulders, when the air,
full of perfume, of harmony, becomes intoxicating, when the
only pain, intense perhaps, is because of the sensation of one's
heart being too small, one's lungs too narrow, one's bodily prison
too closely walled for such joy. But one can beat against the
bars; the harsh tingling left by the blows is but a keener joy; one
can tear open the small heart; its warm trickling blood is but added
pleasure. And this was all mine, all ! as I remained silent, absorbed,
vibrating.
" Was " ! did I say, but had it really been? For
the fraction of a second it seemed to exist, no more.
When it had reached its greatest size, its most intense coloring,
the bubble I might have called "happiness," had it lasted long
enough, had burst noiselessly in a tiny shower of sparkling drops.
It was gone, gone in a pang of crushing pain. I opened my eyes and
looked steadily before me. What had happened? In an instant
the blue of the sky, the peace of the sea, the caressing shadow of
the wood had died away; or had I merely lost touch with them?
The dying perfume of a little sprig of bruised lavender alone
reached my nostrils, and with an effort I took a deep breath. It
had been as a loving thought sent from afar to hover round me.
And so it was; the dream becoming reality, the reality within
reach, were still in some way facing me, stretching arms to me,
calling my name aloud; I was to stand back, to turn from my
real dream, to leave it useless, tumbled, forgotten on the roadway
behind me. I was to ask for it no more, to think of it no more, to
wish for it never more. Because when I had run to meet it,
when I had drawn it to me, I had scattered its clouding veils.
Its outlines had appeared sharp and cutting as steel; its warm glow
had thrown a lurid light; its brilliant flowers had exhaled an acrid,
bitter scent.
;6 LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION [April,
I knew then what it truly meant. But could I, would I, let
it slip away without a protest, without a struggle? Danger was
there, clearly, unmistakably, but what matter?
One can cope with dangers of all kinds; why not face it and
hold it down? Should every hope, pleasure, sunshine be sacrificed
because of a mere threatening? True, whosoever seeks danger
shall perish in it; but did I seek it? The dream of a life-
time had come to me unasked, was I to trample on it because pru-
dence called out to me? Let prudence call; forewarned is fore-
armed. No, I refused to stand away!
I blindly bent forward, my hands tightly clasped under my
chin, and somewhere in me an agonized voice sobbed fiercely,
" My God ! oh, God ! " But no one answered.
The beating of my pulse hammered heavily, repeatedly, the
same words : " He who seeks danger "
As if danger was not ever and always before us! Is life
itself free from a hundred pitfalls? Yet we must cling to it.
Why then should I dash away the only thing I found worth having
in this miserable little world?
Surely, obviously, God did not would not ask it of me
I said this over and over again, burying my rings in my
bruised fingers, but I knew, I knew! And yet I could not yield;
misery, revolt, pain, united to strengthen my will.
This strange thing happened once more, that the Supreme
Will saw and waited, refraining from crushing the freedom of
the puny, foolish, ungrateful thing which is called a human being.
I ceased in some strange way to think; I became aware by
degrees of the clearness of all sounds in the heated atmosphere, of
the activity of the insect world, of the slow breaking of lazy waves
on the shore; and of a rustling through the wood. The dead
branches broke under somebody's foot, a glimmer of white became,
now and then, visible through the trees, and presently a figure stood
at a few steps from me.
It was a slight woman's figure in a white serge costume. The
soft lines of the very intelligent face gave an impression of deep
latent power rather than of quick action ; the eyes in spite of extreme
gentleness were strangely intent and observing. It was her smile,
and her smile alone, which could give the key to that somewhat
complex personality. At such a moment she was laughing mis-
chievously.
"And so I have found you, have I? Do you feel as if you
1913.] LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION 77
could abuse me soundly for breaking in on your meditations? As
a matter of fact it was more by good luck than otherwise ; I should
scarcely have succeeded if "
She was now quite close to me.
"If what? "I asked.
" If I had not been bent on charitable deeds. Just think,
those horrid boys have set rabbit traps all through the wood. I
was only just in time to save a poor little wretch from being caught."
She was looking for a comfortable stone on which to sit near
me. I placed my jacket on the slab where I rested my feet.
" Come here," said I, " that is, unless you prefer to add, by
way of ornament, a touch of green to your immaculate frock."
She obeyed leisurely, rested one of her elbows on my knees, and
glanced around.
" What a delightful little corner," she remarked. " How did
you find it? "
" As you found me, I suppose, by chance." Whether or no
there was something unusual in my tone, she looked up. For a
second her eyes plunged to my very soul, but she was hardly aware
of it, being intent on her own thoughts, not mine.
" I wonder how it is," she began, " that boys, who for the most
part turn into fairly decent men, are so brutal and unfeeling in their
early youth. Do you know, that not only have they set up as many
traps as they could get, but they have taken the trouble to place
large clumps of wild thyme near them. Is there not a distinctly
refined cruelty in tempting the poor little beasts to their horrid fate
through something they like so much ? "
" My dear," I said cynically, " if we are to be tempted at all, it
must be through some thing we like."
This time, when she turned her very blue eyes on me, there was
a half -searching expression in their depths.
" Yes, of course," she replied, slowly, hesitatingly; "but it is
not quite the same, is it? For instance, all that the poor rabbits
have to keep them safe is a certain amount of instinctive distrust,
which does not necessarily prevent their being deceived. Now, on
the contrary, we "
"Yes? "
'' We are never really placed in the same position so far as
temptation alone is concerned. Wherever we see an extra luxuriant
clump of thyme, we know pretty clearly that it spells 'traps/ don't
we?"
78 LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION [April,
" We might take it for granted at any rate."
" If we are wise, we do."
"Do we?"
For the shortest possible period, there was a pause. But she
went on.
" Put it any way you like," she continued ; " no animal is
taught by Nature that there are such things as traps, while we all
know what happens if we deliberately yield to temptation."
" Represented by the clump of thyme ? "
" If you like. And again "
She colored slightly.
"Well?"
"We can always pray for help."
" Oh, quite so," I said dryly. " And as we are all very good
little children we kneel down at once, and feel very dutiful; and a
little bit ill-used, but resigned. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem!
Is that it ? " This time she had flushed to the roots of her dark
hair ; her eyes had a challenge in them, and her lips were firmly set.
" I dare say we don't do it," she admitted ; " but neverthe-
less the fact remains. We are told to do so, and we have the power
to obey if we choose."
" I quite agree, only it seems to be in the very choosing that
the difficulty lies."
" Is it not because we keep looking and looking at the forbidden
thing? It stands to reason that the more we look at it, the more
we wish for it."
" Like that unfortunate rabbit staring at the thyme ; or
does he smell it, do you think? If I was a rabbit "
" I wish you would not jest," she said gently. " I know very
well, of course, that you think me awfully conceited, telling you
things that you know as well, if not better, than myself, only "
" Oh, nonsense," I interrupted.
(But she was quite right; she had thoroughly expressed my
mean bitter thought of the moment.)
" Only," she continued, with a touch of resolution, " I am
nevertheless certain that if we would turn our minds away from
what you call thyme (which is, by the way, the first thing prayer
makes us do), it would be half the battle."
" I see," said I, with deliberate, affected meekness. " If, for
instance, when you came here just now, you had found me battling
with a fierce temptation; if the intoxicating sweetness of a very
\
1913.] LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION 79
special 'thyme' had kept me from even the wish to ask God's help, it
would have been sufficient for you to turn my thoughts on
let us say crabbing, to bring me figuratively on to my feet, ready
to look out for nets and sticks, and to forget every other attraction."
She had been studying me silently, a little sadly. When I
stopped, she shook her head.
" I don't think it is of any use talking to you at present," she
said, " you are in a horrid, teasing mood ; and besides I have
no business to preach to you, have I? By the way, I was pre-
cisely sent to ask you to come crabbing, and pearl fishing, per-
haps. The tide is low, and there seems to be quite a number of
large mussels. Will you come ? "
I looked at the expressive, slightly wistful face, and for an
instant I felt tempted to bend forward and kiss the generous little
lips ; but instead I stretched my arms with affected laziness.
" I wonder if you could persuade me," I said.
Her expression brightened at once; she stood up.
" Now you really are getting good," she exclaimed ; " you know
what pleasure it gives me to have you with us, and remember that
in a few days I shall be gone. Come; only let me first snap the
rest of the traps. I must know that those poor little creatures
are out of harm's way, or I should feel absolutely miserable about
them. Shall I give you a hand ? "
She helped me down from my slippery perch, and I picked up
my jacket.
" Oh ! " she exclaimed suddenly, " I am so sorry, dear, but
see what I have done. It was under my foot, you know."
She had picked up a soiled, crumpled piece of paper. I recog-
nized it, but something seemed to clutch at my throat, and I turned
away.
" I am afraid it looks like a letter," she continued; "what is
to be done with it ? "
"Oh! never mind; tear it in little bits," I replied (my
voice sounded rather oddly) ; " I don't fancy that that it needs
any answer."
Climbing slowly through the tall ferns, I heard the tearing of
the paper; when I turned again, I saw the white fragments scat-
tered on the warm summer breeze.
* * * *
A few days later we were standing in the hall of the old house.
Her luggage was lifted on a car below the broad stone steps; she
80 IF YOUTH COULD ONLY KNOW [April,
came to me, her hat in one hand, an autograph book in the
other.
" Please write something," she asked, " and the date."
When I handed back the book, she' glanced at the writing.
" To-day is not the twenty-ninth," she began, "it is "
But she stopped as she read the rest: Et ne nos inducas!
Our eyes met.
For a second she hesitated, then her two arms slipped round my
neck, and I felt her heart beating near mine, while I held her close
to me
Neither of us spoke.
* * * *
Yesterday I came across her Christian name. It means
" grace;" the " grace of God."
IF YOUTH COULD ONLY KNOW.
BY EMILY HICKEY.
IF Youth could only know!
If Age could only do!
Alas that Youth and Age,
Who are the strong, the sage,
Apart awhile must go,
Imperfect two.
O strong for the world's need !
For the world's need O wise !
One day will surely be
When perfect harmony
Up to God's ear shall rise,
Wisdom and deed.
Yea, Sapience then and Power
For ever shall unite;
When the short Now is done,
And God's Forever won,
To make that glorious dower,
Wisdom and Might.
THE SHEPHERD OF ALL CHRISTENDOM.
BY JOSEPH FRANCIS WICKHAM.
HE low murmur of a gentle voice comes out from
the inner room, and the hush of silence is over us
all, as we stand expectant in the ante-chamber. In
a moment across that threshold will come the most
august personage on earth, the Shepherd of all
Christendom. We have ascended the broad marble stairway from
Portone di Bronzo, passing the Swiss Guard with the halberds, on
duty at the gateway, through the chamber beyond the anti-camera,
where the Palatine Guard is stationed, and finally, with the officers
of the Noble Guard, we are waiting in the room next to the cham-
ber where His Holiness is now speaking in soft accents of benedic-
tion. We have seen many go by, on their way to the throne room,
accompanied by the major-domos of the Papal court, a varied pro-
cession of humanity. A bishop wearing pectoral cross, tall and
strongly featured, with an attendant monsignor in purple, passes
in to be received in private council. A group of missionaries,
brown-clad, tonsured, and sandal-shod, their faces bronzed from
tropic suns, hurry by, a group that makes you think of Assisi and the
Poor Man of God and his goodly company. Two madames of the
Sacred Heart from the convent at Trinita de' Monti are bringing
in twenty little girls in happy community. In double file, fair and
lovely in white dresses and flowing veils, the girls quietly march in,
all eagerness and all reverence for their meeting with the Sovereign
Pontiff.
In the audience halls, through which we have already ad-
vanced, there is a throng of men and women and youths, mostly
Catholic, but not a few of those that walk in other ways. Every
Catholic in the world wishes to behold before he dies the person of
his spiritual leader, firmly believed to be God's regent on earth;
and rare is the Protestant visiting the Eternal City who does not
desire to enter, with deepest respect, the presence of him who repre-
sents the oldest Christian institution. Time has been when all the
world, the nations shoulder to shoulder, would kneel at his feet
and beg his blessing. The forefathers of the very Protestants
that enter before him were the stanchest friends of the Papacy in
VOL. XCVII. 6.
82 THE SHEPHERD OF ALL CHRISTENDOM [April,
the years of the by-gone centuries ; and it may be that the Golden
Age will return, and their children and their children's children
will come back to the old allegiance, and there will be again one
fold under one shepherd.
But we are still waiting in the ante-chamber. The chamber-
lain holds the list in his hand, and tells us that we are to see the
Holy Father in a brief moment. The bishop has just passed out, his
countenance set in the lines of a Crusader that has just renewed
his vows in the presence of his king, and is bade to press on valiantly,
since God wills it. The Franciscan priests have returned, a light
almost pentecostal shining on their faces, and seeing in their vis-
ioning new worlds for their holy conquering. The little girls with
the nuns are alone in the Papal presence. From where we stand
we can see the little band kneeling in half-circle, each carrying a
prayer-book or a rosary beads or a silver cross for the Pope to
bless. He is speaking to them in Italian, and we can catch the soft
tones as we stand there in silent watching. " Si, Santita," responds
trustingly some very tiny maiden in reply to a question from the
kindly voice. And then in slightly louder accents comes his bless-
ing, Benedicat vos omnipotent Dens, Pater et Films et Spiritus
Sanctus and the voice is still.
The chamberlain is motioning us to kneel. We need no second
bidding most of us already are on our knees and with an awe
close akin to fear we watch the open doorway through which the
ruler of the mightiest Church in the world will enter. And there
he appears : and that figure in white is the successor of the Prince
of the Apostles, the Vicar of Christ on earth, the spiritual leader
of two hundred and fifty millions of Catholics, Pope Pius the Tenth.
But when your eyes rest on that form slightly bent, and you
gaze up into that face crowned with white hair, and look into his
eyes, there sweeps over you a surging wave of unexpected emotion.
You have forgotten altogether that he is a ruler of religion whose
every word travels even to farthest distance; your only realization
is that you are in the presence of a soul burning with intensest love
for God. If the petty souls outside that write of him whom they
have never seen, pen-picturing him as the implacable enemy of the
rights of mankind, as the reactionary stifler of thought and the
crusher of high aims, as the czar glorying in the power of the
sceptre, if these had only the boon of admission into the presence
of Pius the Tenth, a far different portrait would they sketch, a
much-changed judgment would they bear through the future time.
1913-] THE SHEPHERD OF ALL CHRISTENDOM 83
The pity of it is that they never know that they are libeling with
cruelest sentence a man of purest holiness, if ever there were holy
man on earth. You understand now the trustfulness of the little
children, the wrapt expression on the brows of the missionaries,
the re-kindling of knightly ardor in the bishop. Any fear that
possessed you before has been changed by a mystic alchemy into
a love that will throb in you all your years.
It is not difficult to read the soul of Pius the Tenth mirrored
on the quiet face that looks down on you. Goodness, kindliness,
sympathy, humility are intermingled with most gracious dignity of
manner. Goodness the goodness of one that has loved purity and
truth from childhood ; the goodness that comes from gazing on the
Eternal Hills; the goodness that comes from the constant union
in the silent sanctuary of his soul with the will of his Master
this the Holy Father has in rare measure. Spirituality radiates
from every feature, insistently, compellingly. On his entrance to
the pontifical place, he announced his policy: to restore all things
in Christ. In all his rescripts and encyclicals this note has sounded,
clear and sustained, and even his enemies for Pius the Tenth has
enemies, as have all good men have to admit the sincerity of
his endeavors. He imparts his benediction on non-Catholics no less
earnestly than on those who keep near to him more intimately, for
he truly believes that God has raised him to be a common father
to all men, and a defender of their souls.
The piety of Pius the Tenth is not the forbidding kind. There
is a kindliness about him that wins you instantly. You feel that in
his breast beats a heart in touch with human nature and human
needs. With an absolute certainty you know that you are before
one who understands you; who appreciates what heights of per-
fection you would fain reach, and how far short you fall in your
achieving; who is aware of your aspirations and your resolves and
your upward strivings, and the discouragement that mayhap comes
in your determination to battle on in the fight. This sympathy with
all that you are and would be, and the unspoken wish to assist you,
are clearly read in his kindly eyes, and for this, if for nothing more,
your heart goes out to him when first you see the gentle, down-
drooping face.
There is a humility in the personality of Pius bidding all to
remember that he is fully aware of his unworthiness to represent
Christ on earth. When the conclave was in assembly in those
August days nine years ago, and the Cardinals were balloting for
84 THE SHEPHERD OF ALL CHRISTENDOM [April,
the successor of Leo the Thirteenth, after repeated trials it became
evident that the election would fall upon the patriarchal Arch-
bishop of Venice. With eyes dimmed with tears, Cardinal Sarto
besought them to cast their suffrages for someone else: he was
far from worthy to be ambassador of God and guardian of His
universal Church. But they knew him as parish priest, as Canon
of Treviso, as Bishop of Mantua, as Archbishop of Venice; they
knew his zeal, his humility, his integrity, and, surest test of all, the
love that the people bore him. So they prevailed; and in the
Sistine Chapel he was crowned. He is Supreme Pontiff, lord
spiritual of the world; but the humility is still there in all its perfect
flowering, never to pass away.
The Holy Father in a gracious manner extended his hand to
us, on the fourth finger gleaming the ring of Saint Peter. Rever-
ently we placed lips on the golden signet, as he spoke his quiet
greetings. For a little while he remained in conversation, and then
slowly raised his hand and pronounced over our bent heads his
benediction. And while the words were still trembling in the air, he
passed to the outer sala.
Humility and sympathy and kindliness and goodness are in-
delibly written on the countenance of the figure that had just been
present. But another quality there is, which shares ascendancy
with them. The beholder is impressed instantly with the sense of
latent power in the face of the Holy Father. His gentleness of
mien is genuine, but it is the gentleness of a strong man. Fire
could flash from beneath that brow, and that quiet voice could
ring in tones of command. There was never a Pope who realized
more fully the responsibilities and the duties of the pontificial office.
From the very hour of incumbency it demands unwearying steward-
ship. Pius the Tenth can never idle and never rest and never
wait a to-morrow. For ever in his ears are echoing the words
spoken in the quarters of Csesarea Philippi : " Thou art Peter,
and upon this rock I will build My Church." Christ, the Son of
the Living God, solemnly uttered this declaration to a disciple con-
fessing the divinity : and this word has been the basis of the doc-
trine of the Papacy. Every Pope since that day of pronounce-
ment has had the intensest conviction that he is the visible repre-
sentative of Christ, and that on him lies the stupendous burden of
guarding the Gospel from any enemy, and of giving its truth to the
nations. This is the explanation of the idea of the Papacy in its
ages-long wars and rumors of wars. There can be no giving to
1913]. THE SHEPHERD OF ALL CHRISTENDOM 85
Caesar of what belongs to God; there can be no compromising
with error ; no lowering of any standard in surrender of truth.
And as I was losing myself in these thoughts within the peace-
ful Vatican walls, suddenly in imagination I heard the clashing of
arms and the tramp of soldiers and the notes of the trumpet call;
I saw the tossing of countless war pennons and far-flung lines of
battle; and as the whole panorama of nineteen centuries opened
wide, in clearest of vision I beheld the historic figure of the Papacy.
I saw the first Pope crucified, head downward, on the very Vatican
hill where rises now the great cathedral. I saw the reddening of
the white sands of the Flavian amphitheatre as, one by one, the
pontiffs passed into martyrdom, faithful unto death. Thirty of
the first thirty-one Popes wear martyrs' palm because of their be-
lieving of the word of the Nazarene. I could see in fancy the
terrified flock gathered in the secret recesses of the catacombs, and
the shepherd standing on guard, encouraging and strengthening
and keeping alive the sacred fire of their faith. The imperial city
might fling the might of ten persecutions against the infant Church,
but the sleepless sentinels, on duty for the King, showed no fal-
tering. I saw the measured lances of those long centuries when
Europe was semi-barbaric, and the Popes fought with doughtiest
vigor against barons and emperors for the rights of God and the
weal of the individual. I beheld the Papacy, with splendid audacity,
casting defiance into the chancellories of many a state, forecasting
well the temporal loss of possible defeat, but willing to endure any
pain rather than be unfaithful to doctrine that she held was Gospel.
Passing down the centuries I saw a Hildebrand crossing swords
with a Henry the Fourth of Germany; a Gregory the Ninth with
a King Frederick; an Innocent the Third with a Philip Augustus;
a Pius the Seventh with a mighty Napoleon. And looking into
the face of the Pope that had just passed by, I had seen the un-
mistakable consciousness that election to the Papal place had com-
missioned him with a divinely-spoken obligation to defend Christ.
France, attempting to blot out the Light in Heaven, found in that
white-haired Pontiff foeman worthy of her steel. Concordats
might be broken, convents closed, nuns exiled : there would be no
capitulation. Better that every cathedral in France Chartres,
Rheims, Orleans, even mighty Notre Dame of Paris be beaten flat
to the ground, with not a stone left upon a stone, than abandon
truth. The City of God will never seek peace by selling her birth-
right.
86 ' THE SHEPHERD OF ALL CHRISTENDOM [April,
A Papal audience is not merely the physical act of being ad-
mitted to the presence of His Holiness and receiving his blessing,
though it might well stop there. Since Peter first took residence
in Rome there have been pilgrimages to the Eternal City. Once a
year the Mussulman yearns toward Mecca: never has morning
sun during the nineteen Christian centuries failed to discover some
faithful Christians journeying toward the City of the Popes. So
to have become a member of that great uncounted army of pilgrims
who have constantly worn smooth the Roman roads ; to have been
admitted to that noble company that includes kings and queens and
knights and scholars, tender maids, and gentle saints and sinless
children, is no unwelcome distinction. But an audience with Pius
the Tenth is vastly more than that. It is a coming into direct
communication with the Roman Papacy, the great agency of cul-
ture that has preserved the continuity of the civilization of Augustus
with the civilization of the present day.
If the Papacy had not existed, it were an impossible task to
dream a European history for the last fifteen centuries. When
the legions crumbled, and the Goths and Huns and Vandals poured
like a swollen torrent into the fair plains of Italy, the Papacy was
the only power that could save civilization and the half -lost arts
and sciences. The Popes gathered up the broken fragments of
civic institutions and literature, and treasured them for generations
yet unborn. During the long centuries of transition that began
with Alaric's entrance into Rome, the only unshaken rock in the
tempest was the Papacy. Every condition was chaotic; old stand-
ards had been swept away ; Europe was one great battlefield. Com-
merce was prostrate; letters were despised; brigands were on
thrones ; lawlessness was law. As time went on, nation after nation
accepted the Savior. Men who once had hoped to be chosen of the
Valkyries for the golden halls of Valhalla, were becoming allied in
allegiance with those whose forbears had sworn by Mars and Juno.
Odin and Thor were abandoned ; Balder was dead with Pan. The
Rhine-gods crept farther and farther back into the deepening twi-
light. Pirate Viking became peer of France. But through all this
seething sea of confusion the Canon Law of the Church was being
disseminated from one end of Christendom to another, and men
were obeying this body of law which the Papacy had built upon
Roman legislation and the Gospel of Christ.
And obedience to the law is the essence of civilization. Rude
peasant and rude lord alike heard the message of the Gospel, bidding
1913]. THE SHEPHERD OF ALL CHRISTENDOM 87
them to chasten their passions and forget the strain that was
calling in their blood. The great monasteries looking down from
the beauteous hillsides of Prussia, and everywhere from the fjords
of Norway to the sunny Mediterranean shores, fostered in the heart
the spirit of prayer, and taught the hand the art of cultivating the
soil. And these monastic foundations breathed their life and
claimed their being from the Roman Papacy. Finally the con-
solidation of the monarchies was effected, and rest from war gave
leisure for higher things. Then the Papacy looked about her to
see the fruits of her labor. The literature of Cicero and Horace
was safe, to be linked to that of Dante; the old hard conditions of
slavery had been ameliorated; the exigencies of poverty had been
met ; and the battle for the high estate of womanhood and the inviol-
ability of the marriage bond had been fought and won on a hundred
different fields. A new Rome had been built, a new Italy, a new
Europe.
In the matter of education the story of culture in its relation
to the Papacy is as fascinating as romance. The schools attached to
the cathedrals, and the schools of the monasteries, taught the prin-
ciples of all the sciences. Men like Bede and Alcuin made thou-
sands of young hearts grow warm in zeal for the refinements of
letters, and developed thousands of minds in the training that was
to guide them in the varied experience of daily life. Education
was ever, indeed, tenderly nurtured, but the full blossoming of its
flower came with the establishment of nigh two score universities
under the confirmation of Papal charter.
The Papacy has always been the patron of the arts, and no more
convincing proof of this may be adduced than a study of the Vati-
can, the most wondrous palace on earth. The vast collection of
buildings embraced under the name of the Vatican palace was begun
by Pope Symmachus in the early sixth century, and completed in
the erection of the Scala Pia by Pius the Ninth of present memory.
Its chapels, museums, library, and archives, from the artistic and
scientific viewpoint, are priceless in the value of their content.
The most famous of the chapels, and that in which all the Papal
ceremonies and functions are held, is the one familiarly known as
the Sistine. Built between 1473 and 1481, it is a gem of archi-
tecture. The side walls from high altar to entrance door were
decorated by Perugino, Botticelli, Pinturicchio, Salviati, and Ghir-
landajo, among others. Mino da Fiesole and his assistants carved
the tracery on the marble barriers and balustrade of the choir box.
88 THE SHEPHERD OF ALL CHRISTENDOM [April,
But Michelangelo overshadows them all with his ceilings and his
" Last Judgment " that sweeps across the rear wall. Any of the
treasures of the Sistine Chapel would glorify a gallery into endur-
ing worth.
t But the museums proper are no less the delight of art lovers.
It is no extravagance to say that were all the other collections of
Europe destroyed, the Papal museums would suffice for an under-
standing of the genius of the ages. The Popes were the first to
establish museums, and their work in the perpetuation of master-
pieces gave incentive to all the governments of the continent to like
endeavor. The Museo Pio-Clementino, with the " Laocoon," the
" Torso of Heracles," the " Barberini Hera," the " Hermes," the
"Belvedere Apollo," and the finest "Bust of Zeus" in existence;
the Galleria Chiaramonti, with the sitting figure of Tiberius and
the "Head of Neptune;" the Braccio Nuovo, with the majestic
statue of Augustus and the colossal reclining figure of " The Nile;"
the Egyptian Museum, with its ten halls of statues, sarcophagi and
reliques, and its cases of papyrus manuscripts; the Etruscan Mu-
seum, with its mosaics, lamps, and red-figured vases; all these are
known to every visitor to the Vatican.
The Pinacoteca takes rank among the world collections of
paintings, not because of the number of subjects, but through the
merit of quality. Small wonder it is that Napoleon would con-
fiscate the treasures that now hang on its walls; to enumerate the
artists represented would be to call the bead-roll of the masters.
It is here that one sees Raphael's " Transfiguration," a work which
has few rivals among the oil paintings of the world. The Gallery
of Modern Paintings, more interesting, perhaps, from the view-
point of religious values than of art worth, tells the achievements of
the artists of recent years.
When Julius the Second wished to adorn his suite on the
second floor of the palace, he desired a comparatively simple decora-
tion, and commissioned five painters to undertake the task. But
the architect Bramante had a nephew in Florence who was winning a
reputation, and persuaded the Pope to summon him to assist in the
embellishing. So it was that Raffaelle Sanzio came to the Vatican.
One of the rooms was assigned to the youth, who painted there
between 1508 and 1511 the " Disputa," the "School of Athens,"
and the " Parnassus." Julius was in rapture, and when the " Dis-
puta " was completed, he entrusted the decoration of the entire
apartment to the new master. As a result the Vatican possesses
1913]- THE SHEPHERD OF ALL CHRISTENDOM 89
the incomparable treasures of the " Stanze " and the " Loggie."
They represent, in their brilliant coloring, rich imagination, strength
of line, and figure composition, the supremest expression of the
genius of the great Florentine. For the inspiration that comes
from Raphael's works in the Vatican, the artist has ever considered
the journey to Rome worth the making.
The Vatican palace, viewed as a scientific institute, cannot be
surpassed. Sources of the highest order, not only in philosophy
and theology, but in history, jurisprudence, literature, philology,
ethnology, and geography, are stored up in the palace, and the fullest
academic hospitality is afforded to investigators. In 1879 Pope
Leo the Thirteenth opened the doors of the archives to the scholars
of the world, irrespective of religion and nationality, and every
facility for the pursuit of study and research is afforded. There are
many libraries in Europe with more printed books, some few with
greater number of manuscripts, but in the importance of content
the Vatican ranks first among the great libraries of the world. It
was founded by the great Renaissance Pope, Nicholas the Fifth, in
the fifteenth century, with the remains of the imperial library of
fallen Constantinople as a nucleus, and it represents his endeavor
to make the capital of Christendom the capital also of classical
literature, and the centre of science and art.
Great men have worn the triple tiara. In the long line of two
hundred and sixty-one pontiffs, very many of surpassing intellectual
powers, amounting often to positive genius, it is difficult to deter-
mine on figures that loom large in Papal annals. Gregory the
First is regarded as the father of the mediaeval Papacy. Prefect
of the city before his entrance into orders, a patrician by birth,
famed as the best dialectician in Rome, he brought to his pontificate
rich gifts of mind and heart. Abbot of the monastery of Saint An-
drew's, against his will he was elected Pope in the year 590. Into
the space of the fourteen years of his reign he crowded works
stupendous in their magnitude. He originated the simple popular
exposition of Scripture; he reformed the liturgy; he codified the
teachings of the Fathers; he believed in the one entity of Church
and State; he converted heathendom. And perhaps, when one
thinks of him at this remote time, one calls to mind first that day
in the Forum when he saw the blue-eyed slaves and declared them
not angles, but angels. The world might well mourn when Gre-
gory the Great laid him down to die.
Four hundred and fifty years later rose another Gregory, the
go THE SHEPHERD OF ALL CHRISTENDOM [April,
valiant Hildebrand, a monk, as was his great predecessor. Lay
investiture and simony were the two evils afflicting the Church
grievously, and these evils Gregory the Seventh undertook to extir-
pate. It was a long and hard battle, but it was finally won. When
at the last, the persecuted Pontiff, wearied and broken-hearted,
yielded up his spirit down at Salerno by the sea, it was with the
consciousness that all his life he had fought iniquity, had striven
to drive the buyers and sellers from the temple. He did not quite
know, perhaps, the fullness of his triumph.
Passing by Innocent the Third, maker and breaker of kings,
ruling by legates and letters from Constantinople to England, whose
reign was lighted by the coming of the gentle Saint of Assisi, the
student of Papal history will pause before the name of the great
Pope, Paul the Third, who came to the throne of the Fisherman in
1534. Many w r ere his acts in the restoration work of this period
of the religious revolt of the northern nations, but his greatest
accomplishment was the calling of the church council in the Tyrol-
ese town of Trent, where the doctrines of faith delivered to the
Apostles were discussed and formulated. When Paul died at the
age of eighty-two, in the sixteenth year of his pontificate, he was
entombed in the great cathedral, in the one place most fitting,
directly under Peter's chair.
It is such goodly traditions that the Popes of more modern
times have received, such a mighty treasury of holy endeavoring and
sainted courage in the defense of morality and faith, and when the
much-loved Leo the Thirteenth was no more, it was this heritage
that he bequeathed to his successor. It is this gift that Pius the
Tenth will pass on, when his gentle spirit will no more linger in
the Vatican halls, and his voice will be a memory of sweet recalling.
It is this patrimony that he will bestow, pure and undefiled, bright-
ened by the whiteness of his own blameless life, upon the Popes that
will be, in never-ending succession, to the end of created things.
But now all the voices that had been speaking were silent, and
I was kneeling in the Papal chamber again, while His Holiness, with
the monsignori, passed by to the room where the maidens from
Trinita were waiting his return. It was the noon-time, and the
silvery tones of a sweet bell were sounding softly through the
Vatican stillness, breathing the message of the Angelus hour. As
we knelt, we listened to Pius the Tenth recite the old, old salutation
first heard by the maid of Nazareth from the lips of the Archangel,
" Hail, full of grace." And we, and the convent children, and all
1913]- THE SHEPHERD OF ALL CHRISTENDOM 91
who were there, responded in the prayer of the Church that has
brought joy to millions of hearts since the Mother of the Christ
ascended to heaven. As we rose and walked away, I wondered if
the humble Pius did not sometimes wistfully yearn to stand near the
Piazzetta in the Venice of his heart's love, and listen to the bells
from Maria della Salute ringing across the waters of the Grand
Canal, or long to watch the summer moon bathing in soft radiance
the massive campanile of San Marco, which stands in guard over
his old cathedral church.
Slowly through the halls we retraced our steps into the open
air; again we passed the Swiss Guard dressed in ancient costume,
and descended to the great piazza in front of Saint Peter's. Then we
drove away from the Vatican hill, and into the Borgo Nuovo, and
on past the Castel Sant' Angelo, but the clatter from the streets
of busy Rome never reached our ears, for we were still dreaming
of the gentle soul that we had seen a few brief minutes before, and
were thinking of the kindly light that had shone in his eyes. For
precious are the memories of sweet hours that human hearts cling
to, and golden the moments of rare fulfillment when one glimpses
the soul's aspiring; and we held it truth that of the many bright
pearls in Time's treasury of jewels, the purest was the remembrance
of the hour ago when the Dweller of the Vatican had raised his
hand above us in the grateful benediction of heaven.
THE RED ASCENT.
BY ESTHER W. NEILL.
CHAPTER III.
HE Colonel sat dozing before the fading embers of
a fire. His wooden leg, with its neatly fitting shoe,
was propped up on a carpet-covered ottoman. The
table beside him held a motley array of riding crops,
bridles, dog collars, sporting journals, and a cigar
box nearly empty; and the floor was littered with newspapers and
muddy riding boots.
Betty walked noisily into the room. She had long ago learned
the safest way to wake the Colonel. He did not want to acknowl-
edge that he had fallen into the senile habit of sleeping in his chair.
" Company, Colonel," she said. The word held a certain
magic. " Hospitality without murmuring " was the only phrase
in the Bible with which the Colonel was familiar. He let down
his wooden leg, half lifting it so that the weight would not strain
the strappings; and, rising, he turned to welcome his unknown
visitor.
"Oh, it's you?" he said, without much warmth of feeling,
holding out his hand. " I thought you had decided to give us up."
" Never," said Richard clasping the old man in his arms.
" I've come home this time to stay."
" God have mercy," said the Colonel. " Another bear-hug like
that and you'll knock me off my wooden pins outright. If you
expect to keep up your psalm-singing here
" Now, Colonel," interrupted Richard determinedly good hu-
mored, " I never, by any stretch of the imagination, thought I could
sing. I've got a voice like yours. It croaks like a raven's."
The old man laughed approvingly. " Believe on my soul
you've improved. Poke up that fire, Betty. Light the lamp.
Where are those good-for-nothing niggers gone? Dick, how you've
filled out! Must weigh close on to two-hundred, and got the
height to stand it. You look like the portrait of your grandfather.
They tell me that he was the handsomest man in the United States
Senate. Women went wild over him; but your grandmother led
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 93
him a dance. She was the toast of six counties. Betty, child, call
Ephram to bring some wood."
" He's gone, Colonel. I told you that Ephram had gone."
" Gone ? gone where ? "
" He won't work when we have no money to pay him."
" Impudence," stormed the Colonel. " What does he expect ?
Aren't the quarters comfortable? Hasn't he got plenty to eat and
to drink? Hasn't he stolen nearly every shirt I had to my back? "
Richard was down on his knees replenishing the fire. " Seems
to me he's a good riddance, then," he said, hoping to preserve the
calm.
" Not at all, not at all. I'd rather keep a nigger that had a
good supply of my shirts than hire another who needed some. This
temporary embarrassment is d inconvenient. Money seems es-
sential since Abe Lincoln's fool proclamation. That bank failure
hit me pretty hard, Dick. I had a few outstanding debts that had
to be paid, and that left me nothing at all. You can't sell a crop
that isn't planted. I hope some of your book learning will help
us out of this hole."
" I think Mr. Tom Brent was terrible," said Betty, seating her-
self on the table and swinging her muddy boots in the flashing
firelight.
" Betty," thundered the Colonel, " I told you not to say that
asrain."
"But I think it," she insisted. "He was president of that
bank, and he ought to have given us our money first. Dividing
the little left over with so many people didn't do anybody any good."
" Tom Brent is my friend," said the Colonel. " He lost his
entire fortune. You don't understand business matters, Betty, and
neither do I ; but if Tom Brent was to start another bank to-morrow,
I would desposit all I had."
"Not if I could help it," added his daughter. " I'm so tired
of being poor I don't know what to do. My only party dress
is a rag. If we could only establish our claim to the Fielding's oil
wells."
" What's that? " Rkhard looked up with some degree of in-
terest. He was lying outstretched on the dusty rug before the fire
as he had so often done when a boy. The dogs had grouped them-
selves about him, and he was smoothing their pliant backs. As the
fire brightened, the disorder of the room became more apparent, and
seemed to augment the hopelessness of his task.
94 THE RED ASCENT [April,
" It was a steal," declared the Colonel emphatically, propping
up his wooden leg once more ; " I've always said so. The Fieldings
are as common as mud. Old Mike Fielding was overseer on your
grandfather's plantation. He says that my father sold him that
land in Texas. I say his signature was a forgery. But since every-
body is dead we'll have to wait until Judgment Day to prove it."
" And we may be thinking of other things then," said Richard
dreamily.
" I reckon you're right," agreed the Colonel in a strangely
softened mood. " I reckon the recording angel doesn't take any
stock in oil wells a little too inflammable seem to belong to the
other party." He laughed at his own pleasantry. He was ex-
periencing a great sense of relief in having his son to lean upon,
but he would not have acknowledged so much.
" The Fieldings must have been born lucky," said Richard.
" Striking oil in these days is like finding a gold mine."
"I know it," said the Colonel, his face flaming; "and it all
belongs to us. You see I was only seven when your grandfather
died, and mother never knew anything about that Texas land,
though it seems she had paid out a lot of money hiring people to
scare off the squatters. After Appomattox I wanted to go there
and run a ranch and breed racing stock. Then along comes old
Mike Fielding with his papers proving the land belongs to him.
Fact didn't seem to matter much then. They told me it wasn't
even good grazing land. Oil wasn't discovered there until about
ten years ago. Now young Mike's worth a million. He's come
back here to live, because Texas is too hot for him in summer.
He's buying coal mines, railroads, and the Lord knows what. I
remember him when he only had one patched jacket, and wore his
trousers hitched to his suspenders with a tenpenny nail. Mother
was too shiftless to sew his buttons on. Now well what's the
use of talking about it? It makes me red-hot to think we didn't
have the gumption to fight it out in the courts."
A faint hope stole into Richard's mind. " Is it too late ? "
he asked.
"Late! About fifty years too late. Betty, child, aren't
you going to give us any supper ? "
" Come on," said Betty, jumping down from the table, " I hear
Aunt Dinah bringing in the tea things now. If Aunt Dinah leaves
us it will be the last straw, because I don't know how to cook.
We would have to live on cans."
.1913.] THE RED ASCENT 95
" Then we'll chloroform Aunt Dinah," laughed Richard, " until
we have some sort of a crop planted." He offered the Colonel his
arm, and the Colonel, putting aside his heavy hickory cane, actually
smiled as he leaned upon the strength of his son. Never before
in all Richard's life had his father seemed to derive any pleasure
from his presence. As they entered the dining room Richard gave
a sigh of relief. Here was a familiar place unchanged. The great
sideboard glittered with well-polished silver; the Colonel's chair
and footstool were pulled out at the well-remembered angle; the
table was set with care and lighted by candles in antique silver
sconces. Old Giles, the butler, had been dead many years, but Aunt
Dinah, his wife, still lingered; she was indifferent to wages; Mat-
terson Hall was her home, and she struggled bravely to keep up
the traditions of the house, trying to deceive even herself as to the
actual conditions in the impoverished larder. When she saw Dick
she threw her gingham apron over her head and cried out : " Bress
de Lord; Marse Dick, Marse Dick! De good ole days hab come
agin."
" Dinah." The Colonel's shaggy eyebrows closed together
ominously.
Dick held out his hand to the faithful old woman. " You're
the best cook in the world," he said fervently. " I've been to Paris
since I've seen you, and no French chef can beat you."
Dinah wiped her claw-like fingers before holding them out to
receive the honor of a greeting. Even the Colonel's beetling brows
could not repress her hysterical chuckle of joy.
" I knowed you would come," she said. " You always favored
your ma, and when folks wuz in trouble she was bound to be thar."
"Dinah" the Colonel said again. He had no patience with
anything that savored of familiarity with servants. Old Giles,
who had accompanied him to the war as a body servant, had had
his natural volubility so suppressed during his long years of service
that he had acquired a habit of silence equal to a Trappist's.
Now Aunt Dinah shut her lips resignedly, and stood at Betty's
right hand waiting to pass the plates; the meal was a simple one,
but skillfully prepared. Hash, an artful combination of left-overs,
was served on a silver platter with a well-seasoned gravy, the bis-
cuits were baked to an appetizing brown, the tea was weak, but the
dessert of peaches, canned last season, was delicious, and the thick
cream that Betty poured over them made Richard forget for the
moment that the days of plenty were passed.
9 6 THE RED ASCENT [April,
After supper was over, Betty retired to the pantry to plan the
meals for the morrow. The last few days had taxed Aunt Dinah's
intelligence at contriving, and Richard's appetite had made the
problem more complex. The Colonel returned to the library, and,
taking a black bottle from the shelf of the corner cupboard, he
promptly began his nightly potations.
Richard sat down under the swinging lamp, and idly picked up
one of the sporting journals. It was a pink paper full of smeary
black portraits of famous baseball players, and held many important
items of news of the coming season. But Richard had no clear
idea of the page in front of him. He w r as wondering what topic
would interest the Colonel; how he could keep this tippling from
developing into a spree.
" I saw a friend of yours to-day," he began hopefully. " You
remember Jeb Jackson ? "
" No friend of mine," snapped the Colonel, holding his glass up
to the light with the approving eyes of a connoiseur.
" He's a great admirer of yours."
" He's an old idiot," said the Colonel.
" He was talking about war times."
" No good talking."
" Doesn't seem to be," said Richard with a wan smile.
The Colonel put down his empty glass. " What do you mean
by that?" he asked.
" I believe I was trying to make myself agreeable."
" Don't try," said the Colonel shortly. " I like this hour to
myself. I'll read the paper and go to bed. You go talk to Betty."
" I think I would rather stay with you."
Two drinks had made the Colonel fretful. " I don't want you."
Dick put his hand upon the long-necked bottle. " I wish you
wouldn't take any more of this to-night," he said gently.
" I'll take what I please. If you think you can come home
and dictate to me you're mistaken I'll do what I please; drink
what I please in my own house, and I'll be d grateful if you will
attend to your own business."
Richard's lips shut in a determined line. He pushed back the
armchair in which he had been seated. It jolted the table, and the
bottle was upset, sending a thin stream of liquor trickling to the
floor.
The Colonel hastily set the bottle upright. That's d careless
of you, Dick," he said, " or perhaps you did it on purpose. Thank
1913-] THE RED ASCENT 97
the Lord the bottle was nearly empty, and I restocked my cellar
just before the bank failed. I have some port, Dick, vintage '53.
Have a drink and go to bed. You're getting altogether too sanc-
timonious to suit me."
" No, thank you," said Richard. " Perhaps I had better go
and talk to Betty."
He left the room with an exaggerated sense of his own failure,
and going out upon the front porch, which was flooded with moon-
light, he stood a moment in silent prayer. The old feeling that he
was an alien in his own home had returned to him with renewed
force. The heavens stretched above him starless in the white
moon rays. The noises of the night that strange chorus of living-
things seemed to mock him in his desolation. A fresh breeze,
chilled with the dampness of the woods, sent him shivering close
to one of the fluted columns of the door to escape its cold breath.
He put his hands in his pockets for greater warmth, and finding
his rosary, he took it out and began telling the beads.
The rosary was a long one lacking all ornament. The big
beads had been cut by some pious, unskilled hand. It had been
given to him by an old missionary, who had carried it on every
dangerous journey he had undertaken, regarding it as a companion
and comforter on his perilous way.
The missionary, when dying, had tried to explain something
of this to Richard, but his voice had failed, and he passed away
clinging desperately to the hand of his favorite student. The im-
print of his fingers upon the boy's hand seemed a last assertion
of a body that had been subdued through a lifetime, a final pro-
test against absolute dissolution from its passionless spirit.
Betty came out upon the porch. "What are you doing?"
she asked.
He stopped his pacing to and fro. His little sister seemed
very close to him to-night. "I was saying my rosary," he answered.
"What's that?"
He put the black beads in her hand. " Did you never see a
rosary, you little heretic ? " he said affectionately.
She examined the beads critically. " How funny."
" Funny," he repeated tolerantly. " I don't think so. Don't
you want me to teach you how to say them, too, Betty, dear? "
" Indeed I don't," she laughed, " and I wish you wouldn't."
"Wouldn't? Why?"
" I don't like praying men ; they seem so so "
VOL. XCVII. 7.
9 8
THE RED ASCENT [April,
"What?"
" Unnatural."
" But, Betty, men have souls to save."
" But most men don't think about them."
" But why shouldn't they? "
" I don't know."
His face looked stern and ascetic in the moonlight. " Neither
do I," he said.
" Oh, please don't be serious," she pleaded, " and please don't
pray on beads any more. I don't like them," and, as she spoke,
she flung the rosary over the railing of the porch into the tangled
bushes.
He was angry and he showed it, but the next moment he had
gained control of himself. " I'll find it in the morning," he said
quietly, and turning he went into the house.
CHAPTER IV.
Richard was accustomed to rising early, but the birds twittering
on his window sill roused him at dawn on that first morning. As
soon as he was up he looked for water. Bathing was a bodily
necessity to which he had never been indifferent, but the old blue
pitcher on the washstand was empty. There were no towels.
There had been no blanket on his bed, and he remembered that he
had been half -conscious of the cold all night. Betty had said she was
not " dependable " this first day seemed to prove it.
Slipping on an old moth-eaten dressing-gown that he found
hanging in the big wardrobe, he went down stairs and brought
water from the well, using one of the starched pillow cases for a
towel.
The room, which had been his as a boy, had not been occupied
for a long time; a gray dust lay thick on everything; a provident
little mouse had built a nest out of the feathers that had drifted
through a wide rip in the bolster case. The nest had been pushed
up close to the roller of the washstand for greater strength and
safety; now the terrifying splashing of the water from the wash-
basin seemed a veritable deluge, and the mother mouse went scurry-
ing under the high four-poster seeking safer quarters.
When Richard had finished his ablutions, he fell upon his
1913-] THE RED ASCENT 99
knees and gave himself up to a half hour of silent prayer, but
his meditations were distracted. A hundred unaccustomed tasks
seemed waiting for him. He must begin somewhere, somehow,
without delay.
He went first to the stable. Unbarring the door without
effort he went in. The floor was in a filthy condition. Two horses
lifted their heads hungrily as the morning sunlight fell across their
stalls. The first one was an old plug gaunt, lean, rawboned;
the other Richard remembered well was Spangles, the Colonel's
favorite mount, and the Colonel's one topic of conversation when he
had bought her two years ago Spangles, whose purchase Richard
had so resented, for the Colonel had paid for her the price of his
whole college course ; Spangles, whose record on the race track had
made a whole county famous; Spangles, whose strange name had
been derived from the fact that her jockey had chosen to ride in a
shirt glittering with tin tobacco tags " for luck."
Now as the horse raised her high-arched neck and looked at
Richard, his old resentment towards her was lost in enthusiasm
for her beauty. Standing in the filth of the poorly- ventilated stable,
she seemed to be appealing to him for explanation and assistance.
He led her out into the sunshine, and then putting on a pair of
mud-stiffened overalls that he found on a nail behind the door, he
began to clean the stable. His real work had begun.
It was a most discouraging day. Every place he turned the
need of ready money was so apparent. Tools were rusty ; handles
fell away. The feed for the horses had dwindled to a small
quantity of corn; the hay loft was empty; the roof of the barn
leaked. There were no shingles ready-made, and when Richard
undertook to make temporary substitutes, he could find no nails,
no hammer. The Colonel's head ached, and he would not be
bothered with questions. The niggers knew where things were.
If the niggers had gone, then, no doubt, they had taken everything
with them. He had promised Judge Armes that he would ride
over and spend the morning with him. The judge was the logical
candidate for the United States Senate at the next election. The
Colonel meant to make several speeches urging his fellow-townsmen
to this viewpoint. Meanwhile the judge must be set right on
several political matters. If Richard would saddle Spangles and
bring him to the door, the Colonel would leave him to run the farm
for the day.
Run the farm! when every machine was clogged with rust
100
THE RED ASCENT [April,
when labor was reduced to one pair of unskilled hands. It would
seem easier to start at the beginning and build afresh, than to accept
the ruin that the deserting servants had wrought; to decide what
things were useable, what were entirely worthless, to know where
to begin, what work was most essential. He knew that it was time
to plan for a kitchen garden to supply their daily needs, but the
plow handles were broken; the horse half- fed. There were no
seeds, even if the plowing had been done. ^
" Betty," he said at lunch time, " we must have some ready
money to begin. Don't you think the Colonel would be willing to
sell Spangles?"
" Sell Spangles ! " Betty's cup fell from her hand, and was
shattered against the edge of the table. " Why, Dick Matterson,
he would rather sell you or me."
" I'm sure he would rather sell me," said Richard with a
resigned smile, " but since I am not saleable, and since we must sell
something, perhaps we could mortgage the house."
" The house ! Why it's already mortgaged, and the interest
falls due next month. I forgot to tell you that."
"How much?"
" Oh, about three or four hundred dollars."
" It's worse than I thought," he said, " and the Colonel won't
sell Spangles?"
" Ask him."
"Have you?"
" Once. He didn't speak to me for a week, and when he did
speak well, I was sorry he had spoken."
" He has wine in the cellar."
" Not much."
" Too much I guess."
"Not enough to sell."
" Then let's sell the silver."
" That belongs to you," said Betty.
"To me?"
"It was grandmother's, and she left it to you. You were
the last representative of the name."
" Then we'll sell it."
"How?"
" I'll advertise it in some of the big city papers. Why, Betty,
child, some women grow fanatical over antiques. I was coaching a
boy some years ago whose mother kept us running to all kinds of
1913-] THE RED ASCENT 101
junk shops in Europe looking up platters and pots. She got me to
study up the history of some of the old silversmiths. I I believe
these are very valuable."
He was standing at the old sideboard examining the Matterson
heirlooms that Dinah had polished every week for years. It had
been old Giles' work, and his faithful spouse felt that this continua-
tion of his labors preserved her in some occult way from his
" haunt," which she feared would return to upbraid her if she
failed in any of his more conspicuous duties.
And so it happened that Jefferson Wilcox, seated in his new
ornate office, saw an advertisement that attracted his attention.
He was not in the habit of reading advertisements; but this morn-
ing he felt particularly idle. Having exhausted the sporting page
and the political news, he started reading the miscellaneous column,
wondering at the strange things that people offer for sale old
magazines, shoes, half-worn evening dress, baby carriage, canaries,
rubber plant, antique silver. The initials R. M. and the post
office address made Jefferson suspect at once. He pushed the ivory
button on his desk for his stenographer.
She came patting her elaborate coiffure with that unmistakable
feminine gesture born of fear that false puffs may fall away; she
was chewing gum, and that fact, added to her general look of
stolidity, made even that optimist Jefferson Wilcox pause before
addressing her. Heretofore he had not demanded a vast intel-
ligence from his secretary. He had engaged her because she had
been his first applicant, and because it had been the easiest and most
obvious way of terminating the interview.
"Didn't you ring?" she asked, storing her gum somewhere
above her front teeth so that her jaw projected.
" Yes," said Jeff. " Sit down, please." He had been well
trained in small acts of courtesy, and his little stenographer, who
was unused to deference of any sort, could not quite understand
him. Sometimes she vaguely hoped that his politeness predicted
a lively interest in her. She had even gone so far as to write " Mrs.
Jefferson Wilcox " several times on her typewriter, just to see how
it looked. The spasmodic work of her employer left her much
time for dreaming.
" I want to write a letter," said Jeff, " and I want you to sign
your name to it. You you see I want to answer an advertisement."
" What kind? " said the girl suspiciously.
102
THE RED ASCENT [April,
" This kind," said Jeff, handing over the paper.
" Half-worn evening dress," read the girl incredulously.
" No, Lord, no ! This antique silver. I don't know any-
thing about silver, do you? "
The girl's face grew pathetic. " Never had any," she said.
" But you can inquire about some," said Jeff hopefully. " I
want to buy some antiques you know, the kind this person has for
sale. I'll pay any price. Fact is I want to pay a big price. If a
person were buying antiques, what kind would be most expensive ? "
She stared at him in bewilderment. The frugality of her life
made his announcement seem preposterous. "Why should you want
to pay such a lot? Are are you going to be married? "
" Lord, no," said Jefferson, " I've done many a fool thing in
my life, but that's not one of them. You write me the letter and
sign it."
"But what shall I say?"
His broad tolerance encouraged this confession of incom-
petence.
" Say? Can't you work it out? What do you women want
when you buy silver ? "
She sucked the rubber on her pencil meditatively. " Coffee
pots I reckon," she said at last.
" That's it, but you call them urns. Urns, tea service, platters,
waiters, everything he has for sale."
" You're going to buy them without seeing them ? "
" How can I see them when they are a thousand miles away ? "
" But how will you know they are genuine ? " she cautiously
suggested.
" I won't know it. Yes I will know it if if Dick is adver-
tising them as solid, they will be as heavy as bricks."
" Is is he a friend of yours? "
" His initials sound like it."
" And you don't want to sign your name."
Jefferson was losing patience. After all there are some rudi-
mentary qualities that a private secretary ought to possess. He
turned in his revolving chair. " No, I said no. If you can't
write a short note of inquiry, what can you do? "
" I can I can," she said nervously bending over her notebook,
" but but you must acknowledge that this is not quite usual."
" Of course it's not," he agreed, relenting a little as he saw the
girl's eyes fill. " Men don't buy silver every day. Why should
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 103
they? Stock up once in a lifetime and pass it on to your grand-
children."
" And if this R. M. is your friend? "
" I don't know whether he is or not."
" Couldn't he wouldn't he let you look at the silver before
you bought it ? "
" I don't want to look at it. I tell you I don't want my best
friend's ancestral forks and spoons lying around taking my appetite
away."
" But if he's your best friend." , H '. f
" I tell you he wouldn't sell it to me." ' : ; * n ,t
Her eyes widened : " Why not? " she asked.
" Why because he would know I didn't want it."
She turned to her notebook again with a puzzled frown. It
was all incomprehensible to her. She had lived always in a world
which could not afford to cultivate its keener sensibilities. Col-
lectors, installment men, loan sharks, broke down all proud ful bar-
riers. Pianos came and went in her neighborhood with magical
rapidity; rugs were whisked off dusty floors and resold to more
prosperous neighbors; men bargained and wrangled and parted
with their possessions openly, and when there were no possessions
left, friends and relatives came forward and fed and clothed and
housed them with that generous improvidence that keeps them
forever poor.
The letter was at last finished, and she brought it to Jefferson
for inspection.
" Won't do," he said. " It sounds like a fake."
" Well it is one," she said defensively.
Jefferson ran his long fingers through his yellow hair. " Here,
give me another pen, I'll see what my imagination is worth.
Suppose that I'm a rich woman with a passion for antiques. Hand
me that encyclopaedia, and I'll trump up the names of some old
silversmiths that will put Dick off my track. I am particularly
anxious to buy an urn for my daughter's debut, also a silver platter
gravy dish. Jove! that won't do. They don't serve gravy at
afternoon teas, but they do have plates silver plates. Let me see
I am desirous of purchasing any odd pieces that will decorate a
table. Send description and prices to ' He pushed the paper
from him, exhausted by his efforts. " I'm afraid Dick Matterson
would call that a lie," he said.
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
IRew Boohs.
THE NEW TESTAMENT MANUSCRIPTS IN THE FREER
COLLECTION. Part I. The Washington Manuscript of the
Four Gospels (with five plates). By Henry A. Sanders, Uni-
versity of Michigan. New York: The Macmillan Co. $2.00.
There is no field of investigation that requires such an unusual
amount of labor and patience as does the search after the original
text of the Bible. The number of the existing old biblical manu-
scripts goes into the thousands, and the number of the variants,
for the New Testament alone, has been judged one hundred and
fifty thousand. Only a comparatively small part of this vast mass
of material has been thoroughly sifted, compared, and classified.
It is likewise well-known that the older Latin, Syriac, Coptic, etc.,
versions are often witnesses to forms of the text that antedate our
oldest existing Greek manuscripts. However, the few Greek
uncials of the fourth and fifth centuries are the most precious
witnesses that we possess.
In 1906 another fourth-century Greek Bible came to light in
Egypt, the land where archaeologists and enterprising Arabs are
busy unburying from the conserving desert sands the relics of a
past age. The find consisted in the books of Psalter, Deuteronomy
and Joshua, the Four Gospels, and the Epistles of St. Paul.
These four manuscripts were purchased by Mr. Charles L. Freer,
of Detroit, Michigan, and will eventually be deposited in the Smith-
sonian Institution in Washington, D. C. They have since their
appearance raised a great deal of discussion and curiosity among
experts. The delay in the appearance of the present publication
was necessitated, according to the explanation in the preface, by
the need of acquiring a working knowledge of Syriac, Coptic, and
Gothic.
Professor Sanders gives a very careful and detailed description
of the palaeography of the MS. He dates it as belonging to the
fourth or the beginning of the fifth century. Its Egyptian origin
and its early date he finds confirmed by characteristics which are
parallel to those of the early papyri and the oldest uncials of
Egyptian origin. The order of the Gospels is that known as the
Western: Matthew, John, Luke, Mark. The main object of the
1913.] NEW BOOKS 105
present publication is to solve the text-problem of the MS., and to
learn the degree of its relationship to other MSS. Six to eight
separate parts, or rather sources, from which these parts were copied
are distinguished. Two of these parent-manuscripts had been pre-
viously corrected to agree with the Antioch recension, two with the
Hesychian recension, one came from a Greek-Latin bilingual of
Northern Africa, and one from a trilingual with decided Latin,
Syriac, and less Coptic tendencies. In a number of passages where
the Washington MS. stands almost alone with its readings, these
find their only support in Scriptural quotations of the early Church
Fathers, especially in Clement of Alexandria and Origen. All the
variants of the MS. are given in a collation (of over one hundred
pages) which is based upon the Oxford 1880 edition of the textus
receptus.
The origin and history of the MS., as it is given by Professor
Sanders, rests on slender evidence. The Arabs who found the
MSS. had told conflicting stories about the place of their discovery,
in order to lead astray the foreign excavators, and to retain for
themselves the exploitation of what is to them a valuable mine.
A little prayer at the end of the MS. : " Holy Christ, be Thou
with Thy servant Timothy and all of his," is the only internal
evidence. The name " Timothy " here is a later addition, written
with a different ink, and upon an erasure. Professor Sanders sees
in this Timothy the head of a monastery. In Abu Salih's treatise
on The Churches and Monasteries of Egypt, only one church of
Timothy is mentioned. It stood in the Monastery of the Vine-
dresser near Gizeh, and was burned together with it by the Melchites
probably in the fifth or early sixth century.
Professor Sanders intimates that the investigations which are
carried on at the present time, in order to determine the exact
spot where the MSS. were found, have met with success. The
result of the investigations will be published in time, and it remains
to be seen in how far the author's opinion about the history and
early date of the MSS. will prove to be correct.
MISHNAH; A DIGEST OF THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF THE
EARLY JEWISH JURISPRUDENCE. Translated and An-
notated by Hyman E. Goldin, LL.B. New York: G. P. Put-
nam's Sons. $1.50.
The " Fourth Order " of the Mishna contains the civil and
criminal law of the Hebre^.vs. It is that portion of Jewish legal
I0 6 NEW BOOKS [April,
literature which is of most interest to the student of comparative
jurisprudence. This present volume contains only one of the ten
treatises of the Fourth Section. It treats of laws concerning found
property (Deut. xxii. 1-4); concerning bailments (Exod. xxii.
6-14) ; concerning bargains and sales (Lev. xv. 14) ; usury and
usurious contracts (Exod. xxii. 24-26; Lev. xxv. 35-37) ; hiring and
renting. The work presents an important phase of the cultural
and social life of the Jewish nation during the first centuries of our
Christian era. While a reader, who is unacquainted with the term-
inology and legal antiquities of the Jews, may find it difficult to
appreciate the existing translations of the Talmud on account of
the great amount of disturbing and bewildering by work and long
digressions from the main subject, the present author has given
us a work which sets forth the principles of the Jewish law clearly
and in the terms of our modern common law language.
WITH THE VICTORIOUS BULGARIANS. By Lieutenant Her-
menegild Wagner. Boston: Houghton, MifHin Co. $3.00
net.
No great war for a long time has been waged so secretly as
has been that which the Allied States of the Balkans have carried
on against Turkey. On its outbreak scores of newspaper corre-
spondents betook themselves to the seat of action, but were all turned
back by the Bulgarians, with a single exception. That exception
is the author of the present volume, who was the correspondent of
the Reichspost, a newspaper published in Vienna, and of the Lon-
don Daily Mail. During the first campaign the world was indebted
to him alone for all of the first-hand news which it received con-
cerning the operations of the Bulgarian Army. The Turks were
more considerate, and several correspondents were allowed to pro-
ceed to the front.
This volume is not a mere reprint of the letters written by
Lieutenant Wagner, but an amplification of the letters re-arranged
in the form of chapters, with corrections and various additions, deal-
ing with the events which led up to the war. Little light, however, is
thrown upon the exact way in which the Balkan League was
formed. A chapter is devoted to the history of the Bulgarian
people. The Premier of Bulgaria furnishes a brief introduction.
Forty-five illustrations and portraits add to the interest of the
narrative, while six maps enable the reader to follow the details of
the battles.
1913-] NEW BOOKS 107
THE "SUMMA THEOLOGICA" OF ST. THOMAS AQUINAS.
Part I. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican
Province. New York: Benziger Brothers.
At a time when empiricism is a dominant philosophy, when
agnosticism is trying to take the place of faith, it is but suitable that
the English-speaking world should be made to hear the metaphysics,
the theology, and the common sense of St. Thomas of Aquin.
Nowhere in the literature of the past can a better antidote to the
poisonous errors of the day be sought than in the theological master-
piece of a master mind the Summa of Theology. All that was
best in the great philosophies of paganism was distilled into the
great work that is being translated through the generous pains
of the Dominican Fathers. With the ancient philosophers St.
Thomas was intimately acquainted, and he sifted their writings;
he eliminated their errors; and the quintessence of their truthful
contributions to knowledge he made his own. In this way the
genius of Socrates, of Plato, and of Aristotle, especially of Aristotle,
the master mind of antiquity, is latent in the pregnant sentences
of the Summa. Not alone profane knowledge, but also sacred
tradition is accumulated in his works. To read him is to read
all the Fathers. For to Jerome, the giant of Scriptural erudition,
to Augustine, the Doctor of grace, to the gold-tongued eloquence
of Chrysostom, to Ambrose of Milan, and to the two great Greg-
ories, as well as to the other Fathers, St. Thomas made himself
a debtor.
All this gigantic erudition is couched in a style equally remark-
able. The style of St. Thomas is distinguished by a manifold
brevity, and its qualities will be seen in the valuable English
translation. There is a brevity in his word, in his phrase, in his
paragraphs, in his article. All this goes to show that St. Thomas
was a master stylist as well as a master thinker. In this respect
of simplicity of language, in the choice of the smallest word, he
resembles Shakespeare; and by reason of this characteristic St.
Thomas is clearer than his commentators. The polysyllabic phil-
osophers of the present day may here learn a valuable lesson those
who give the impression that " clear " and " non-scientific " must be
synonymous terms. Indeed it is not the leaders of science, but
the camp followers; not the great scholars, but the little sciolists,
that befog minds with their obscure words, the offspring of obscure
thoughts.
Nor must it be believed that St. Thomas is too conservative
io8 NEW BOOKS [April,
a mind for these progressive days. St. Thomas, indeed, is old at
present, but in his own day he had a startling, yet always a safe,
novelty. His biographer tells us that he introduced new articles,
new reasons, and new solutions for old doubts. He was the wise
householder of the Faith, who drew forth from the treasure house
of experience and revelation new and old things. How they can
be done successfully, and not disastrously, as in recent times, can
best be learned from the science and sanctity of St. Thomas. The
placing of such a model before a wider public will, we hope, be met
with encouragement and blessed with results.
A TEXTBOOK IN THE HISTORY OF MODERN ELEMEN-
TARY EDUCATION. By Samuel Chester Parker. Boston:
Ginn&Co. $1.50.
In this book of some five hundred pages, Professor Parker
places emphasis on the part played by the Church and religion in the
development of our modern elementary schools.
After a short introduction, the other parts of the work are
entitled respectively: Elementary Schools on a Religious Basis,
Transition to Secular Basis for Elementary Education, and, finally,
Secularized Elementary Education.
The author points out that the Church enjoyed a practical
monopoly of education during the Middle Ages, but is careful to
show that she did not check the founding of schools under lay
control which communities thought essential. Sometimes, it is
true, the local cathedral authorities did oppose the efforts to es-
tablish independent vernacular schools, but when the cities appealed
to the Pope they received the requisite permission.
While it is stated that the Protestant Reformation introduced a
new basis for elementary vernacular education, namely, the neces-
sity of personal study of the Scriptures in order to secure salvation,
yet attention is called to the fact that in Protestant Germany there
was no great immediate increase in the provision for elementary
schools, while in England neither Church nor State made any ex-
tensive provision for elementary schools until the nineteenth cen-
tury.
In common with most educational historians, the author is
probably unaware of the vast system of Catholic parish schools
which js being maintained at the present time in the United States.
Due attention is paid to descriptions of social conditions, state-
ments of educational theory, and descriptions of school practice.
1913-] NEW BOOKS 109
While the works of educational theorists are considered at length,
the author is careful to estimate the extent of their influence on the
schools. The one man whom he emphasizes as the fountain head
of our modern educational theory, and to some extent our practice,
is Rousseau. Rousseau gathered in himself the results of the work
of Locke and other innovators, and to him may be traced the larger
parts of the streams of thought which found expression in Basedow,
Pestalozzi, Herbart, Froebel, Col. Parker, and which to-day char-
acterizes much of the work of Professor Dewey.
Professor Parker notes the present unrest in educational circles,
and believes that the next quarter of a century will see the follow-
ing factors effectually provided for in the ordinary elementary
schools :
1. .The introduction into the elementary school of industrial
and prevocational courses, organized as definite preparation for
specific vocations.
2. The endeavor to organize effective moral and civic instruc-
tion.
3. The provision made for varying instruction so as to meet
the varying needs of pupils that are due to individual differences
in capacities, in economic status, and in plans for a career.
4. The tendency to measure accurately the results of instruc-
tion by precise, objective, scientific methods as a means of testing
its value, instead of relying on the vague and unproved opinions
of theorists or of untrained observers.
The work is an excellent one. It is well written, the matter
is well selected, and for the most part is treated in an impartial
manner. It is hoped that in future editions the term " Popery "
on page 124 will be omitted.
UP IN ARDMUIRLAND. By Rev. Michael Barrett, O.S.B. New
York: Benziger Brothers. $1.25.
All our novels, short stories, and plays that deal with Scotland
are so predominantly Protestant in tone, that we are glad to
welcome these sketches of Father Barrett that open up to us the
life of a Catholic Scottish village.
These short stories are full of humor and pathos, and point
a moral without being prosy or tiresome. " Dominie Dick " tells
us about the old-fashioned schoolmaster who did not scruple occa-
sionally " to break a slate on a laddie's heid ;" " Smugglers " de-
scribes a gauger's search for an illicit still and his absolute discom-
no
NEW BOOKS [April,
fiture ; " A Rustic Pastor " portrays the stern austerity of the old
type country priest. The best stories in the book are those which
tell of the life-long repentance of Archie, and the sad marriage
experience of Penny.
The author is new to us. but his work shows nothing of the
novice's hand. We trust this, his first book, will not be his last.
THIS, THAT, AND THE OTHER. By Hilaire Belloc. New
York: Dodd, Mead & Co. $1.25 net.
That generous Mr. Belloc has given us another book. The
Green Overcoat, which, plus Mr. Chesterton's unholy illustrations,
was a double joy, has probably only just been returned by your third
or fourth borrowing friend. And, behold, here is another little joy
dropped from the knees of the gods. This, That, and the Other is
the name of it, and it certainly is good. If its author were not
Mr. Chesterton's chum, we might venture to call it brilliant. We
have no hesitation in predicting (to use a journalese phrase that
Mr. Max Beerbohm would pounce upon with fiendish glee!) that
you will grin over it from cover to cover.
You will certainly chuckle over the paper on " Omens," which
points out the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon mind in explaining
them as coincidences. But alas ! " That which the enlightened
person easily discovers to be a coincidence, the Native, that is,
the person living in a place, thinks to be in some way due to a
Superior Power. It is a way Natives have. Nothing warps
the mind like being a Native."
When you come to the essay on " Lying," you will first drop a
tear sacred to the memory of Oscar Wilde, but reading you will be
consoled. And affected, too, by Mr. Belloc's sweet humility in
treating of the lie feminine : " But if any man," he observes,
" think to explain that sort of lie, he is an ass for his pains; and if
any man seek to copy it he is an ass sublimate or compound, for
he attempts the mastery of women. Which no man yet has had
of God, or will. Amen." Then when you have read the paper on
" Inns," you will read it over again. Twice at the least. You will
probably get the most pleasure when reading the remarks on " Pe-
dants," during the course of which Mr. Belloc touches on those
non-existent things, the Anglo-Saxon race, alcohol, and the conflict
between religion and science. After reading them you will be
drawn by an irresistible impulse to a certain lurid red shelf of your
bookcase (h'm! where did I hear that thought before?), and you
1913.] NEW BOOKS in
will consult Mr. B.'s alter ego, G. K. C. Not that they are " two
souls with but a single thought;" on the contrary, alas! they have
cornered so many million thoughts that the rest of us poor mortals
may be left destitute ! Let them beware of imitating intellectually
the mighty financiers who are their especial hatred.
Even if you have to do it over the shoulder of the man next
you in the street-car, be sure to read This, That, and The Other.
" The second cleverest man in London " Mr. Belloc has been called.
Well, he can easily be first in any little Iberian village we have met
this side the Atlantic!
THE MIGHTY FRIEND. By Pierre L'Ermite. Translated by
John Hannon. New York: Benziger Brothers. $1.50.
Those of us who have learned to be grateful for many of the
modern French novels which have recently been given us in trans-
lation, particularly those of M. Rene Bazin, will be promptly inter-
ested in The Mighty Friend, a story written by Pierre L'Ermite,
and crowned by the French Academy. It is a book worth reading,
serious and suggestive, as well as enlightening. The economic and
social conditions of France, more especially of rural France, form
its basis. The Mighty Friend means, little as you expect it, the
land, the country, the " nation's pride," to quote poor Goldsmith,
whose belief, in The Deserted Village, is that of our present author.
He champions through his hero, Jacques de la Ferlandiere, the
rights of the land and the landowners against the invading com-
mercialism.
The Vale of Api, quiet and peaceful, if not financially prosper-
ous, gives itself over to the erection of factories of Jewish owner-
ship, and to the intrusion of railway lines, and Jacques' prophecy of
resultant trouble is speedily fulfilled. Labor warfare, strikes, plot-
tings, and worse follow in the wake of " progress." What is com-
mercial enterprise doing for France? It is a very pretty question,
and worth studying out.
As a novel The Mighty Friend is well constructed; it is
nowhere permitted to change into a treatise. The figure of Jac-
ques himself is splendidly outlined, and the family of Harmmsters,
the intruding Jews, are shown just as cleverly, if a bit cruelly.
There is a conventional but pretty love story, later lifted to the
dramatic by the intervention of Alberta, the slightly too passionate
Jewess. Altogether it is a book worth reading and worth recom-
mending.
II2 NEW BOOKS [April,
STANMORE HALL AND ITS INMATES. By the Author of
By the Grey Sea, etc. St. Louis: B. Herder. $1.25.
Stanmore Hall and Its Inmates, signed namelessly by the
author of By the Grey Sea, An Old Marquise, Mere Gilette, etc.,
is a novel of English life of the present day. Its heroine, little
curly-haired Georgie, is a devout Anglican, who loves to call herself
an " English Catholic," and who very scornfully refers to Roman
Catholicism in England as the " Italian Mission." She visits the
Stanmores of Stanmore Hall, who have always kept the Faith, and
through them becomes interested in the relative claims of Catholics
and Anglicans. Incidentally she falls in love with Gerald, the big
brother of the family, but it is only incidentally. She refuses the
folly of an emotional conversion, and sets herself the task of deter-
mining the rights of the question. Accordingly she worries her
poor curly head with the Ecclesiastical News and Dr. Littledale's
Plain Reasons, and similar noble productions, besides discussing
unity and continuity (a little too learnedly) with clergymen and
friends on both sides. At last she sees the truth clearly, but, as
Canon Sheehan tells, faith is a kind of sixth sense, and not to be
reached by a purely intellectual process. Georgie waits for it, and
it soon comes, helped, perhaps, by the little old rosary that Gerald
used at Stonyhurst.
There are doubtless many more pages of solid controversy
than should be included in fiction, but the arguments are excellently
presented, and will be relished by anyone interested in the topic.
Otherwise they may be judiciously neglected, and the story enjoyed
for its own sake. It is very human and very pleasant, with several
clever character-drawings. Especially good is the kindly old Aunt
Kate, who converses always of edibles or the Peerage, insists on
giving Georgie soup twice a day, and bewails what she calls her
" Puseyite " tendencies.
THE COMPLETE WORKS OF JOHN TAULER, RELIGIOUS
OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. A Literal Translation
into French from the Chartreuse Latin Version by Pierre Noel,
O.P. Four Volumes. Paris: A. Tralin.
John Tauler's advocates and clients waited for two years for
this French version of their revered master, and for two years
they have welcomed volume by volume of Pere Noel's learned,
painstaking labors.
This is, of course, not the first French translation of the illu-
1913.] NEW BOOKS 113
minated Doctor, but it is the first entirely complete one. Indeed,
it overflows in the measure of its fullness, for Pere Noel includes in
his translations certain works attributed to Tauler, not so much
from bibliographic evidence as from close resemblance of style and
spirit, such as the book of Meditations bearing his name, and the
little work known as the Institutions of Tauler. In the fourth and
last volumes are also given certain sermons of Tauler's confreres,
Eckhardt and Blessed Henry Suso, which are embodied by Surius
in his Latin version. Although they are not Tauler's, they have
gained a prescriptive right to his companionship, and are worthy
of his name.
Father Elliott's English translation embraces all the sermons
of Tauler that have come down to us rightly claiming his author-
ship, barring a few short poems and letters not easily accessible
and of no great interest.
The French translation of Sainte Foi, published over half a
century ago, was incomplete. It is now out of print and listed
among rare books. Pere Noel, in his introduction, praises his
predecessor's work, while taking exception to his timidity in ren-
dering various passages with less than literal accuracy. Sainte
Foi, being a layman, felt justified in looking to Tauler's purpose
in certain delicate doctrinal matters rather than to the exact
words of a confessedly imperfect original. Nor is Surius himself
free from the same pardonable fault. Pere Noel's present great
work will be the standard French version of the future, offering
for all time a spiritual feast to all Christians seriously and sanely
devout.
Lawrence Surius, whose Latin translation Pere Noel has used,
was a countryman of Tauler, a Rhineland Carthusian of the middle
sixteenth century. Surius was an uncritical but most conscientious
compiler, and the editor of numerous holy lives and ancient writings.
It was the Latinized Tauler of Surius that first placed our great
mystic in the hands and hearts of the devout men and women of
Europe. This was even true of German readers.
Surius was a true translator and a judicious paraphraser,
where the latter quality was needed. A literal translation of the
Carthusian's Tauler is, therefore, a boon, especially when pre-
sented by so thoroughly competent a writer as Pere Noel, and in a
tongue so plastic as the French, and so very generally used by the
educated public.
Pere Noel is evidently a kindred spirit with his great confrere.
VOL. xcvn. 8.
II4 NEW BOOKS [April,
He loves those silent sanctuaries of God in the human soul which
Tauler usually calls the depths of our nature, a term used also by St.
Teresa. In this, the remotest seat of life and the holiest, is the scene
of that divine generation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity
into our life, treated of so powerfully by Tauler in the sermons ap-
pearing in the first volume of the French version. Within the essence
of the soul do we find the Father begetting the Son, the Father and
Son producing the Holy Spirit. Here is the inner region of
mystical consciousness, the ever-flowing spring of all divine graces,
of which devout persons are too often ignorant, The scope, aim,
and value of Tauler is that he casts the Christian soul back into
this hidden hermitage, and explains how one may, by penance and
prayer and wise direction, come into a union with God so perfect
that it has no sensible or perceptible medium.
No lesson of experience is more plainly taught than that devout
Christians are with difficulty made really interior spirits. Herein
is the justification of Tauler's constant return to the fundamental
principles of virtue. This difficulty drew from the great Apostle
the explanation of his own habit of iteration: "To write the
same things to you, to me indeed is not wearisome, but to you is
necessary" (Phil. iii. i).
OLD TIME MAKERS OF MEDICINE. By James J. Walsh.
New York: Fordham University Press. $2.00.
This truly noble and praiseworthy work of Dr. Walsh intro-
duces us to the many distinguished men and women who prac-
ticed and experimented in the healing of human ills during the ages
that are called " dark " and " ignorant " by self-esteemed modern
sciolists. The " darkness " and " retrogression " of these early
days have been so dinned into our ears, it is good to hear from
a competent authority of the advancement made in mathe-
matics, engineering, architecture, logic, and the medical sciences
in these same " dark " times. Great surgeons developed their art
then to a high degree, and successfully performed hard and delicate
operations.
Anaesthesia was freely used, and antisepsis was known and
practiced. And leprosy, a then common disease, was completely
checked and eradicated by these great physicians. The whole story,
of course, shows the Catholic Church as the patron and encourager
of legitimate science, and not its persecutor, as the lying modern
" historians " would wish us to believe.
1913.] NEW BOOKS 115
Dr. Walsh gives in detail the lives of several of the early
Christian medical practitioners and writers; and also several of
Jewish and Arab race and persuasion. The celebrated medical
school of Salerno, and its most illustrious representative, Constantine
Africanus, receive special notice. The " mediaeval women physi-
cians;" the Medical School of Bologna; the great surgeons of the
mediaeval universities, and mediaeval dentistry are exhaustively
treated. It is something of a shock to modern self-complacency to
learn that in the beginning of the sixteenth century, John de Vigo,
a Papal physician, filled teeth as well as it is done to-day. This
dentist of the Pope writes : " By means of a drill or file the putri-
fied or corroded part of the teeth should be completely removed.
The cavity left should then be filled with gold leaf." Dr. Walsh
has taken for his special field the early and middle ages of the
world's history, a favorite camping-ground of calumniators and
quasi-historians. His lance of scholarship is levelled fair
and square against any and all who would enter the lists with him.
We are pleased to note the promise of another volume on an
analogous subject from his able pen.
'PHE Connecticut Daughters of the American Revolution have
^ had the present guide book, Guide to the United States for the
Jewish Immigrant, written by Mr. John Foster Carr to help the
Jewish immigrant adjust himself quickly to the living conditions and
social customs of the United States. He is told about the geog-
raphy and climate of the country; our method of government; how
to become a citizen; where to obtain work; the special laws that
affect him; our educational advantages; our saving banks, postal
rates, telegrams, passports, etc.
A special appeal is made to the Jew not to remain in New
York City, but to engage in agriculture. A list of all the Jewish
agricultural colonies in the United States, embracing about thirty
thousand souls, is given in detail, and those interested are referred
to the Jewish Agricultural Society, 174 Second Avenue, New York.
A book of the kind for the Catholic immigrant is badly needed.
IN THE SERVICE OF THE KING (St. Louis: B. Herder.
-*- 60 cents) is a pleasant little story of English life by Genevieve
Irons, who wrote The Mystery of the Priest's Parlour. It tells
of four young Catholic girls who try, each in her own way, to do
noble work in the service of the King. One of the number attempts
ii6 NEW BOOKS [April,
Catholic fiction, and her financial failure, as explained feelingly
by the author, points to a condition of things in England similar
to that deplored, we remember, by Father Talbot Smith in America.
The old question: Are Catholic readers averse to Catholicity in
their fiction ? Be fair. Is it not possible that they wish the Catho-
lic spirit for its foundation, the Catholic philosophy, and the Catho-
lic atmosphere, but that they do rationally object to controversy in
fiction, theology in fiction, and the sickly, sentimental piety so often
supposed to conceal a literary mediocrity? In fairness to the good
taste of Catholic readers, we might mention, even confining our-
selves to the British Isles, that My New Curate is a household
favorite, that the name of " John Ayscough " is everywhere spoken
in appreciative admiration, and that a new book from Monsignor
Benson is distinctly an Event in capital letters. And so on through
a long and lengthening list. Let us beware of a rash pessimism.
CEVEN charming short stories are included in the book called
^ Curly and Others, by Winifred M. Reynolds. (Concord, N.
H. : The Rumford Press.) Very simple they are, but sweet and
human. Probably the best tells of old Tom, the pumper of
the church organ, of his grief when superseded by an electric
motor, and of his recompensing triumph of the great Confirmation
Sunday that sees the motor disconnected by accident, and himself
coming gloriously to the rescue.
HTHEIR CHOICE is the name of a sweet, sentimental little story
^ by Henrietta Dana Skinner (New York: Benziger Brothers.
$1.00), best known probably as the author of Espiritu Santo.
An American woman of thirty-five, spending the summer in Hol-
land, meets an elderly German widower and his son. The eternal
triangle thus forms itself, but the angles are not acute, and the lines
soon fall in pleasant places. The story lacks the scope and the
strength we expect from the author, but remains nevertheless very
charming.
WILD BIRDS OF NEW YORK, by Chester A. Reed, S.B.
(Lake Mohonk, N. Y. : Mohonk Salesrooms. 50 cents.)
The readers of Wild Flowers of New York will have pleasant antic-
ipations upon seeing the announcement of Mr. Reed's later book,
and they will not be disappointed. In his attractive and careful
presentation of our most interesting fauna, will be found a color-
1913.] NEW BOOKS 117
gravure and a satisfactory description of every one of the common
birds of this state. A very good feature of the volume is the
classification tabk, which will enable the teacher to review at a
glance the most frequently-sought and least easily- found details
necessary for the planning of work outlined in the syllabus of
nature study. The purchase of the book will be a small investment,
and the return a sure one.
r PHE REIGN OF JESUS. By Blessed Jean Eudes. Translated
by R. M. Harding. (New York: Benziger Brothers. $1.25
net.) It would be not only superfluous but presumptuous to com-
ment on the work of a Saint. It will suffice, therefore, to indicate
the scope of this work in which one finds a treatise on the Christian
life, a method of spiritual life, a rule of life, and a selection of
meditations and prayers; in fact, it is a compendium of the teach-
ing of Blessed Jean on the spiritual life, and of his method and
rules for spiritual direction. " To the friends of the Sacred
Heart who would render love for love to the God Who loved them
first; who long to make His heart their centre, their refuge, their
paradise, their life, their all, The Reign of Jesus will be truly a
Golden Book, a Manual of Perfect Love."
CT. ANNE OF THE MOUNTAINS, by Effie Bignell (Boston:
V Richard G. Badger. $1.25 net), a "romance of the Cana-
dian borders," is written in a pleasing and attractive style. The
scene is laid in " the beautiful vale of Andorra." The book cannot
fail to interest Canadians, and arouse in the general reader an ardent
desire to view the scenes so graphically depicted.
TJARNACK maintains that Christianity only became Catholic
in the second century. His study of the first Epistle of St.
Clement was written to bolster up this arbitrary theory. Father
Van Laak, in Harnack et Le Miracle (Paris : Bloud et Cie), refutes
the learned professor's imaginings by a detailed study of every pas-
sage in the Epistle referring to the Old Testament miracles and
that of the Resurrection of Christ.
1DROM the press of Bloud et Cie, Paris, comes also Bellarmine's
Notes of the True Church, Abbe Cristiani's translation of the
fourth book of the Cardinal's famous work. In the excellent
introduction we find a brief sketch of the life and writings of
iiS NEW BOOKS [April,
Cardinal Bellarmine, and a comparison drawn with the more com-
plete works of Le Bachelet and de la Serviere.
THE fact that the recitation of the Psalter is practically a weekly
obligation for every priest, makes particularly timely a new
edition of The Psalms, translated by the late Archbishop Kenrick.
The translation is, of course, well-known. It would have been well
to have made use of the work of later Catholic commentators in
editing the notes. But priests and religious, and the laity also,
will find the present volume a handy and useful one. It is pub-
lished by John Murphy Company, of Baltimore. Price, 75 cents
net.
TI7E wish that every Catholic were acquainted with The Missal,
' ' and used it regularly as his prayer book at Mass. Whatever
complaint may heretofore have been justified on account of the
lack of a suitable Missal, has now been removed by the publication of
The Missal, by B. Herder of St. Louis. The volume meets the
recent changes and rulings made by Pius X. It gives both the Latin
and English text, is well printed, and although it contains over
1,100 pages, is really of pocket size. It is a most useful and handy
volume, and the publishers are to be congratulated on its produc-
tion. The price is $1.50.
jperiobicals.
England, Ireland, and Rome. By Richard Fitz water. No
settlement of the Irish question can ever be arrived at, save through
the Catholic Church. If England is to solve that question, she
must work in harmony and accord with Rome. Such a quasi-alli-
ance, dictated by policy, if not by fear, is actually coming to pass,
and England's interests are fast beginning to be bound up with
those of Rome. Only now, when their own existence is threatened,
the Protestants of Ireland begin to entertain a fellow-feeling for
the Catholic Church. The author's argument is that England and
the more intelligent of the Protestants of Ireland are beginning to
see that it is absolutely necessary for all Christian forces to stand
together against the oncoming wave of atheism and anarchy. He
sees the disastrous work which these forces have accomplished
in France, Italy, and Portugal.
The Catholic Church is the Church of the people, the Church
of the poor; but it is also the Church of constituted authority, of
that truest Socialism that thinks of service, rule, obedience. Ire-
land will obey her Church, and Ireland is well assured that her
Church will never lend its authority to persecution or oppression,
and that if the hierarchy and priesthood are become the channel
of English action England means well by Ireland.
Only those who know the Irish well can realize how any
lessening of Rome's authority would be a gain to the forces of
disloyalty and disruption.
But the help that can come from England must come through
the Catholic Church, for otherwise it will not reach the Irish.
The Catholic Church in Ireland, more by far than in any other
country, rules a people responsive to her teaching. Whether Home
Rule comes or does not come, the Catholic Church must stay.
In that sense it is true that Home Rule would be Rome Rule; but
it rests with England to make it Rome Rule hand-in-glove with
her own. England cannot with impunity either ignore or oppose
the Church. The Church is there and will remain. British Review,
March.
Fasting in Ireland. By Dom L. Gougaud, O.S.B. Fasting
was practiced to a unique degree in Ireland during the Middle Ages.
In many monasteries it was perpetual. The laity fasted on Wed-
I20 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [April,
nesday and Friday not by precept, but out of simple devotion.
Fasting was sometimes made a means of supplication ; "I will
not break my fast until I receive from my God these three peti-
tions," said the Abbot St. Enna. Compare with this the legal pro-
cedure of fasting in order to force a creditor to pay his debts;
if the debtor should die from the fast the creditor would have to
pay a heavy fine to his family. Irish Ecclesiastical Record, March.
Ozanam as an Apologist. By Monsignor A. Baudrillart. This
paper shows the influences which determined Ozanam' s apologetic.
From Chateaubriand he learned the beauty of Christianity; its
benefits to civilization; its affinity with the deepest instincts of the
soul. From Ballanche he drew the same ideas, and especially the
conviction that to build the future city safely one must know
the ruins of the past; like Ballanche, but with calmer mind, Ozanam
gloried in being a mystical historian, the former attempting to
give the general formula of the ancient world, the latter that of
the Middle Ages. From Lamennais, upon whom the mantle of
Bossuet then seemed to have fallen, he learned how the history of
revelation agrees with the normal progress of humanity.
Lamennais made universal consent the criterion of truth in
religion as in philosophy. " Whatever is universal in idolatry is
true; only the particular is false; the creed of humanity does not
differ from the Christian creed, which is only its development."
This seductive but dangerous theory he carried to extremes after
leaving the Church. But Ozanam was saved from this excess
by his perfect good sense and his invincible attachment to ortho-
doxy. Wisely, as a layman, he left to theologians the defense
of dogma, taking as his task the unfolding of the benefits of Chris-
tianity. Revue Pratique d'Apologetique, March i.
The Boy Scouts. By Henri Caye. Sir Baden-Powell, in
his manual Scouting for Boys, proposed the method to all directors
of youths in 1898. By 1907 the Boy Scout movement had attained
great popularity in England, the colonies, and America. In Latin-
America and in Japan the organizers have had little success, but in
the Protestant countries of Europe the organization has been re-
markably prosperous. There have been accusations of anti-Catho-
lic tendencies in the movement.
In Belgium there is a Catholic Boy Scouts organization,
while France has the " Christian Union of the Young Men of
1913.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 121
France." The bishops in the latter country have pronounced
against the " League of the Scouts of France," because of its dis-
tinctly Protestant atmosphere; Protestantism in France is anti-
Catholic. Etudes, February 20.
The Doctrine of Communion According to Tauler and Suso.
By Louis Delplace. John Tauler and Henry Suso were celebrated
mystics of the Order of St. Dominic in the fourteenth century.
Both were advocates of frequent Communion. Tauler taught that
the more frequent our Communions, the greater would be our pro-
gress in the love of God. If one is worthy to receive on certain
feasts, he says, why will he not be worthy to receive every day?
To all who aspired to greater perfection he most earnestly recom-
mended frequent Communion. Henry Suso said Christ's infinite
love constrained Him to offer Himself to His chosen ones every day.
The efforts of these Dominicans to encourage frequent Com-
munion encountered great difficulties because of the conditions of
the times, but it is important to see that the doctrine of the Gospel
and of the Church never changes, though there may be obstacles
to hinder its full realization. Etudes, February 20.
Ancient and Modern Prayer. By P. Ubald d'Alenqon. The
difference between ancient and modern prayer is not, as Father
Antoine de Serent says, that the former is based on the liturgy
of the Church and the latter on passages from pious authors; for
both sources have always been employed. Nor that since the six-
teenth century prayer and meditation, in addition to the recitation
of the Divine Office, have become obligatory, for it was always
practiced. But the two differ rather in method. The former
employed all the faculties of the soul at once; the latter sets in
motion first the imagination, then the understanding, then the will,
then the affections. The former led to contemplation which is
ordinarily accessible to all; the latter considers contemplation not
part of God's ordinary way of dealing with souls, and, therefore,
not something to be prayed for. It is to be noticed that St.
Ignatius himself abandoned his own method in later life. It is
more suitable for beginners than for the proficient. Etudes Fran-
ciscaines, March.
Workingmen's Dwellings and Their Responsibilities Towards
Childhood. By Maurice Deslaudres. Everyone knows the difft-
I2 2 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [April,
culty workingmen with families have in obtaining lodgings ; the ex-
cessive prices asked; the objections made by landlords. Everyone
can see the dangers to health where persons are crowded together
and hygienic facilities few; and the greater dangers to morals
from the indiscriminate mingling, the lack of privacy, and the im-
possibility of supervision. Much has been done by the Rothschild
Foundation and the society for cheap lodgings for large families;
infant mortality has decreased, morality has improved. A begin-
ning has been made to house young people separated from their
families. But along all these lines much remains to be done.
Revue du Clerge Frangais, February 15.
The Month (March) : Under the caption The Ancient Church
of Wales, the Rev. Herbert Thurston refutes the claims of the
Anglican Bishop Edwards. Henry VIII. robbed " not the Church,
but various communities of alien appropriators of Church property"
when he dissolved the monasteries, and also that the Church of
Wales in the Middle Ages was independent of Rome. The latter
is disproved by the well-known historians, Mr. Lloyd and Dr. Hart-
well Jones. The Basilica of Fourviere, Lyons, by M. D. Stenson,
is a minute and careful description, both from an artistic and a
devotional standpoint, of the famous Basilica consecrated in 1896.
The ancient sanctuary of Our Lady of Good Counsel still remains
and continues to evoke faith and devotion from many pilgrims.
The article entitled Loyal Songs, by James Britten, shows the atti-
tude adopted by the Orange Societies toward the great majority of
their fellow-countrymen. This is especially shown by their
demonstrations against the Home Rule Bill. The author gives
several specimens of songs anti-Catholic in the extreme which
they consider as loyal. This violent rancor is due, he says, to the
unscrupulous encouragement of certain politicians. Was There
Divorce in the Middle Ages? by Rev. Sidney Smith, is an answer to
the insinuation made by the recent Divorce Commission, that the
Catholic Church, by resorting to subterfuge, always granted divorce.
Father Smith refutes this, showing how the Church has always
defended the indissolubility of marriage, refusing decrees of di-
vorce, and even when monarchs, as Henry VIII. and Napoleon,
demanded them. He also proves the diriment impediments to be
not open to the charge of artificiality, but rather to have been useful
and necessary, and, moreover, that declarations of nullity were
really few.
1913.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 123
The Tablet (February 8) : The Passing of the Welsh Bill
by the House of Commons, whereby the Welsh branch of the Church
of England is to be cut off from the control of Parliament and
stand on its own feet, supporting and governing itself. More
Republican Defence. The Radicals of France are again attacking
the Catholic schools, this time under the pretence of protecting
the lay schools. The bill they wish passed seems to contain a threat
against the priests who refuse absolution to those penitents
who are forced by this and other laws to educate their offspring
atheistically. The Carbouri Case: A fifteen-year old Arab girl,
committed by her own and her father's request to the care of
Catholic Sisters during the father's imprisonment for theft, desired
to remain with the Sisters, having embraced Catholicism. Her father
by process of law attempted to obtain custody of the child, but the
Judge decided against the father. The decision of the court showing
that the interests of the child are considered paramount to parental
rights is carefully expounded. Notes: Mr. Balfour in a speech
said that the real difficulty with regard to Ireland is not one of race,
but of England's treatment of Ireland in the past. The new
anticlerical ministry of Portugal has issued a circular ordering the
strictest interpretation of the Separation Law throughout the pro-
vinces. The sermon of Father Vincent McNabb, O.P., at the
funeral of Father Albert Buckler, O.P.
(February 15) : Syndicalism: His Eminence Cardinal Bourne
delivered at Leicester an address on this system, originating in
France, to solve the problem of fair treatment for the laboring
classes. It is not Socialism, but rather trade-unionism, the scope
of which is to spread, so that all wage earners, including govern-
ment employees, are to be in one or another trade union, these
trade unions to enter into a confederation, and through this con-
federation all dealings with capitalism and the state to be con-
ducted. Pere Vanden G. Heyn, S.J.: The Bishop of Salford
reviews briefly the life and work of the recently deceased Jesuit
philologist. The Oriental Rite: In a letter to the Editor, M. P.
Snell enters into detailed explanation of the Oriental and Eastern
Rites of the Catholic Church, and distinguishes those Churches
united with the Holy See from the so-called " orthodox " Churches.
(February 22) : The Government and Temperance: A com-
ment on the position of the Liberal Government in refusing to per-
mit the adoption of an amendment to a local option bill for Scot-
land, whereby, in addition to choosing between prohibition and
124 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [April,
public-houses as they are now conducted, the people of a district
might chose a plan of disinterested management. Father Puller's
Visit to Russia: This clergyman went last year on a mis-
sion, which had for its object the union of the Anglican
and Russian Orthodox Churches. The reasons why he
failed are here stated. The Archbishop of Liverpool,
in discussing the great increase in church attendance among Catho-
lics and the great decrease among Protestants, as shown by a recent
" Church Census," says the secret of success lies in educating the
child (as is done in Catholic schools) from earliest years along
religious lines. The Roman Correspondent writes that in the
refusal of the Italian Government officially to recognize Monsignor
Caron, appointed nearly a year ago Archbishop of Genoa, is form-
ally asserted the right of the Government practically to veto arbi-
trarily episcopal appointments of the Pope in Italy. It is hoped
that in the coming elections the influence of Catholic voters will
cause the election of those more favorably disposed to religious
liberty.
(March i): Things Portuguese: The writer calls attention
to the inefficiency of the month-old Radical Ministry of Senhor
Costa, and the sad outlook for the people of this so-called republic.
Churches are being closed; bishops are in exile, priests in prisons,
thousands of innocent persons languishing in foul cells without
trial simply because of their fidelity to the old religion. Notes:
" The Diocesan Congress of Paris " held recently supplies a " strik-
ing illustration of the vitality of the Church " in France. A pro-
gramme of opposition to radical educational proposals was decided
on. The financial support given by Catholics to their own schools in
the past is adduced as proof of the loyalty of Catholics in heart and
deed. -Literary Notes: The Oxford University Press is about
to issue a new addition of Cardinal Newman's Apologia, prefaced
by Newman's and Kingsley's pamphlets, and furnished with an
introduction by Mr. Wilfrid Ward. Constantine and the Peace
of the Church, by Bishop Hedley, O.S.B., of Newport. The cele-
bration this year in Rome of the sixteenth centenary of the Edict
of Milan is the subject treated. Medieval Democracy: A lec-
ture by Mr. F. F. Urquhart of Oxford on what is usually meant
by this term. In the Middle Ages, looked upon by William Morris
as the " Golden Age " of democracy, " everywhere one found bodies
of men managing their own affairs.' 5 Corporate independence was
the rule, and its one necessary condition was that each corporation
1913.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 125
had to keep to its own field. Subject to kings, princes, and lords
as they were, all had rights which they guarded jealously. " There
were no glaring differences of wealth " within the classes, and the
" Church organization opened up the way to the highest places in
Church and State, and acted as a bond between the classes."
Roman Correspondent: A delegation of over two hundred Genoese
at an audience with the Holy Father offered to supply from their
private purses the means necessary for Monsignor Caron's dignity
and the government of the See if the Holy Father would send
Monsignor Caron to Genoa, despite the Italian Government's op-
position. The Holy Father's reply is given at length. For ob-
vious reasons he cannot accept the offer, but asks the prayers of
all that the souls of the people may not suffer from the evil inflicted.
: The exemption from Spanish military service, hitherto enjoyed
by clergy in sacris and members of religious orders and congre-
gations, has been abolished by the Spanish government. Mission-
aries, however, will have their labors counted as military sendee.
The National Review: Special interest is given to the March
issue of this Review, because of the prominent part played by its
Editor in a recent libel suit brought about by criticisms, published
by him, with regard to unworthy participation by certain Govern-
ment officials in the new Marconi Company. The Editor, himself,
treats the question under the title, The Fight for Clean Government.
Post-impressionists, according to a writer, who signs himself
" Montpelier," are " Literary parasites who talk pretentious and
futile nonsense."
British Reviezv (March) : The new science of Aerial Defense
is treated by G. H. Mair. Professor G. Henslow shows the in-
adequacy of Darwinian evolution by dwelling upon the axiom,
No Force Can Direct Itself. F. E. Smith maintains that the
Woman's Suffrage Movement has recently sustained a mortal blow.
Edwin Pugh writes a very silly paper on the Soul of the
Drunkard. Albert A. Cock discusses the poetry of Alice Mey-
nell.
Biblische Zeitschrift (January) : Dr. P. S. Landersdorfer,
O.S.B., in an article, The Serpent in Babylon, has collected the evi-
dences found only in recent times in cuneiform inscriptions as to the
existence of a systematic serpent worship among the Babylonians.
126 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [April,
The form which this worship assumed is not very clear, but it
seems that living serpents were kept in the temple. It is to be hoped
that further discoveries may give still more evidence for the cred-
ibility of the Deuterocanonical passages in Daniel. Dr. H. J.
Vogels, writing on The Parents of Jesus, shows how an elaborate
comparative study of the passages in St. Luke ii. 33 ff. in all the old
versions has led him to conclude that the terms " father " and
" parents " were in very early times considered objectionable by
some compilers. Many old Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Irish codices
substituted for those terms the name " Joseph " respecting " Jo-
seph and His (Jesus') mother " or " Joseph and Mary." It seems
that it was Tatian who began this " purging " of the text. Through
the later authoritative influence of the Vulgate these changed texts
were again superseded, except among the Syrians, by a wording
according with the original of St. Luke.
Etudes (February 5) : Personal Religion, by Leonce de Grand-
maison. Religion must consist of both a public worship and
private piety. Religion entirely individualistic is the logical out-
come of Protestantism; at the other extreme is the sociological
theory of religion, formulated by M. Guyau. Personal religion,
i. e., piety, is the heart of true religion; it is familiar and filial
sentiment which unites the soul to God. True piety holds the
middle course between Puritan disdain of ceremony and soulless
externalism. Paul Bernard laments the decadence of theatrical
and literary art due to the modern cult of self-advertisement, and of
trying to please the lower and less critical public.
(February 20) : Revolutionary Syndicalism: George Sorel and
the Radical Anti-Democrats, by Henri du Passage, shows how these
two opponents of the present political system seem to be drawing
together.
Revue Thomiste (January-February) : The Crisis of Trans-
formism: What is to be rejected, what retained in this evolution-
ary system is the trend of C. L. Melizan's study on Transformism;
a criticism at once both constructive and destructive of the theory.
The present article, however, is but a preparatory introduction,
a clearing of the ground, a defining of the discussion. Formerly
biologists held absolutely to an integral progressive evolution from
one or many common stocks ; facts have appeared which challenge
that view. What shall we believe? The first installment of a
1913-] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 127
supplement to be devoted to the publication of texts and documents,
for the most part as yet unedited, relating to the life of St. Thomas
Aquinas. In the present number is found a brief resume of the
early life of the Saint; his birth which was foretold; incidents of
his early childhood; his stay at Monte Cassino; his entrance into
the Order of St. Dominic.- The philosophy of M. fimile Bou-
troux, recently elected to the French Academy, is, says R. P. Mon-
tagne, an encouraging reaction against " scientific " and atheistic
determinism. It places liberty at the source of things, and insists
upon the contingence of the laws of the universe. Unfortunately,
he claims the speculative reason cannot know God, but only the
practical reason.
Revue du Clerge Frangais (February 15) : L. Hays appeals
for the teaching of church history with the catechism in
order to give a basis for doctrine. It should mark out the great
lines of religious history, and not be a mere collection of stories;
and it should furnish answers to present-day objections and mis-
representations of the Faith drawn from history. One question,
for instance, which should be treated is the age of man. For this
we need new manuals, more complete, and better printed and
illustrated. Ch. Quenet describes the apathetic condition of re-
ligion in Russia, the country priest devoting himself, when of the
better type, to the development of cooperative societies rather than
to the spiritual improvement of the people. He never reads re-
ligious papers ; he never preaches on dogma. The people are ignor-
ant, down-trodden, starving, but the younger generation are learn-
ing the songs of the Revolution.
(March i): G. Vannenfville describes the lamentable moral
and religious condition of workingmen's families. Irreligious prop-
aganda, unfavorable home and working conditions, open advocacy
of race suicide, the socialist assertion that Socialism alone is the
friend of the workingman have been to blame. The Church must
favor organizations for the material improvement of her members,
and imbue them with Catholic principles, and she must show herself,
as she is, the only satisfying answer to the deepest needs of the soul.
G. Planque contributes a long and sympathetic description
of the life and work of General Booth, late head of the Salvation
Army, describing his efforts in the East End of London, and em-
phasizing the constant Christian spirit which sustained and guided
him. L. Cl. Fillion concludes his study of The Truceless War
128 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [April,
Against the Gospel and Jesus Christ, as carried on largely by ration-
alistic German and English critics.
Revue Pratique d'Apologetique (February 15) : Joseph Dedien
summarizes the conclusions reached by M. de Guichen in two recent
and carefully documented studies on the anti-religious forces in
France from 1815 to 1830. J. Verdier asks whether private
property is an individual right or a social function, and concludes
from a study of the Scriptures, the Fathers, and the needs of human
nature that it is both, but primarily the first. It is an individual
right, and it has a social function. Jean Didier describes the
spread of a mechanistic philosophy among the universities of
France. It means materialism and atheism. In biology, psychol-
ogy, sociology, the aim is to gather facts, suppressing or denying
all else; finality, free-will, miracles, personality are excluded.
(March i) : A. de Boysson describes the preparation necessary
for an accurate understanding of the human nature of our Lord, and
shows what conclusions regarding His human knowledge and holi-
ness will be obtained by the application of the legitimate method of
studying the unique Personality. Jean Bainvel shows that relig-
ion is not mere sentiment or subjective feeling, but intellectual, and
objectively true, and that that religion alone is true and good which
contains all truth, and counsels only what is good, which respects
the nature of things and corresponds with the desires of God.
Revue des Deux Mondes (February 15) : The Conte d'Haus-
sonville, of the Academic Franchise, begins a series of articles
based on the letters of Mme. Stael and Necker. Through this un-
published correspondence, we see Necker and his celebrated
daughter in quite a new light. In this first article, Mme. de Stael
appears to be monumentally selfish and cold, yet passionately de-
voted to her father. In the Lesson of Canada is shown how the
French government was wholly to blame in the loss of Canada to
France.
IRecent Events.
The installation of M. Poincare as ninth
France. President of the Republic took place with a
simplicity as great as that which character-
izes the inauguration of our own President. Perhaps it was even
greater; for there seems to have been no oath of office, at least no
mention is made of it in the accounts seen by the writer of these
notes. There was certainly no Bible, and no address was made
by the incoming President. A few compliments were exchanged
between the outgoing and the incoming holder of the office; they
then shook each other's hand, and the ceremony was over. No
Presidential election has been so generally endorsed by the people at
large as has been that of M. Poincare, and as it took place in spite
of the most earnest opposition of the party in the Assembly to
which the anti-religious legislation is chiefly due, it may perhaps be
inferred that the great body of the nation is not so opposed to
religion as is this the largest party in the Assembly.
The former President, M. Fallieres, retires with every mark of
respect and esteem. Some have characterized him as a President
faineant j but those who have a real knowledge of events recognize
the fact that, behind an unassuming exterior, he has been a great
power for peace in Europe and of concord among Frenchmen. He
at all times inspired confidence through the way in which he dealt
with the many questions which arose during his term of office,
especially the difficulty with reference to Morocco.
* In the address sent to the Assembly by the new President
two days after his installation, Electoral Reform, in order, that
the public will might find expression in the most genuine and exact
way, was put in the forefront of the programme. Means to lighten
the burdens of the people were to be sought. For the national
defense every sacrifice was to be made. No effort was to be spared
to strengthen a r d to consolidate the army and the navy. It is to
the last-named object that the French nation is now called upon to
devote itself in the first place; the great increase which Germany
is making of her army has forced France to corresponding efforts.
The one thing in the Gospel which meets with the unqualified
approval of the civilization of Europe at the present time is the
VOL. xcvu. 9.
130
RECENT EVENTS [April,
conduct of the strong man who kept himself fully armed, and on
the watch, and in this way kept the peaceful possession of his goods.
As between France and Germany, the plain facts of the situa-
tion are that Germany has a population of sixty-seven millions,
while Franoe' has only thirty-eight millions ; that the peace strength
of the German army will be raised by the new scheme just pub-
lished to a total of between eight hundred thousand and nine hun-
dred thousand men, while the peace strength of the army of France
is only five hundred and twenty-five thousand. Hence it is easily
seen that France is called upon to put forth her utmost efforts to
bring her army to something like an equality with that of Germany.
The first step that has been taken by the government is to propose
a return to three years service with the colors for all arms of the
army, reverting to the state of things before 1905, when the period
<of service was reduced from three years to two, but with various
exemptions. All these exemptions it is now proposed to abolish.
The Bill when introduced received the support of the large majority
of the Chambers; the Socialists and a few Radicals alone offering
opposition. Other measures are to follow which will involve
a large addition to the burden of taxation. And so, without any
fault on his part, the new President's proposal to alleviate the bur-
dens of the people seem far from likely to be realized.
The appointment of M. Delcasse as Ambassador to St. Peters-
burg has excited great attention, because in 1905 he was considered
so hostile to Germany that, for the sake of peace, he was forced by
the French Premier to retire from the office of Foreign Minister.
He was accused of aiming at the encirclement of Germany by
a ring of foes. No other Foreign Minister since M. Guizot has
held that office so long, and he did more to give to France a firm and
stable foreign policy than any other living man. It is to his efforts
that the Entente Cordiale with Great Britain is chiefly due. Had it
not been for this Entente with France, that between Russia and
Great Britain would never have been made, nor would there have
been any Triple Entente to stand face to face with the Triple
Alliance. These two groups now form the basis of the European
situation, the two hinges upon which everything turns. The ap-
pointment of M. Delcasse has given great satisfaction not only in
Russia, but also in Great Britain; it is taken as an indubitable
indication of France's unswerving loyalty to the alliance with
Russia. The Tsar's letter to M. Poincare makes it clear that on
her side Russia is equally loyal.
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 131
M. Jaures, the Socialist leader, is alarmed at the efforts which
the Catholics of France are making, at their own expense, to give
religious education to the children of the people, and has brought
before the Chamber a proposal to levy additional taxation to the
amount of one hundred millions, in order to render the icole laique
more efficient. So poor are these schools, and so bad is the attend-
ance, that thirty-six per cent of the conscripts have to receive
elementary instruction when they enter the army. Successive gov-
ernments, M. Jaures asserted, had not even endeavored to carry
out the Education Laws. The religious schools had entered into
dangerous competition with the State schools; a large section of
the people of France were indifferent; they even mistrusted these
schools. The Catholics had been so wicked as to defend themselves.
They even said that the motor bandits were a legitimate product of
secular education, and a large section of the Republican middle
class was getting frightened by the practical results of the recent
change. They were beginning to think that the national school
was providing recruits for the prison and the scaffold. These
declarations of M. Jaures produced considerable tumult in the
Chamber, and led to its voting an additional sum of over ten
millions for an increase of the salaries of the teachers in the national
schools.
The large increase of the army which has
: .f Germany. been determined upon by the government
is, of course, the most important event which
has taken place in Germany. The proposal was quite unexpected,
for the increase made two years ago was, it was thought, sufficient
for five years at least. Various reasons are suggested, but no one
knows the true reasons. The rise of the Slav Power, owing to the
success of the Allies in the Balkans, has an appearance of prob-
ability. What is certain, however, is that a further burden will
be placed upon the German people, and not upon them only, but
also upon all the nations who may think themselves threatened
by German armaments. Estimates made by the well-informed
place the initial and non-recurring expenditure at no less a sum
than two hundred and fifty millions, while for each year some fifty
millions more will have to be raised.
Loans will have again to be issued. In fact, preparations
have been made already for one of about one hundred millions.
How all this money is to be raised is now for German statesmen
the most anxious of problems. The landed classes are the most
I 3 2 RECENT EVENTS [April,
eager in support of the policy which involves this expenditure, but,
at the same time, the least willing themselves to bear even a part
of the burden; this was proved a few years ago. But it is unlikely
that they will now be able to escape. It is, in fact, stated that
the government proposes to levy a non-recurring duty on fortunes.
Whatever may be the proposals which the government may make,
they are certain to be hotly contested in the Reichstag. With the
Centre it has already had several conflicts; these proposals will
give that party yet another opportunity.
This year it is not proposed to make any additions to the navy.
A statement of Admiral von Tirpitz, made before the Budget Com-
mittee, was interpreted as meaning that Germany had accepted the
British idea that the naval strength of their respective navies
should stand at sixteen to ten. Some doubts, however, exist as to
the exact meaning of the Admiral, but it seems clear that he did
not enter into a definite agreement.
The Emperor has made several speeches which have excited
a good deal of attention. At Konigsberg, on the occasion of the
celebration of the rising of East Prussia against Napoleon, he
attributed the successful result to the moral strength which is
inherent in the people. " The roots of that strength lie/' he
declared, " in the fear of God, the sense of duty, and devotion
to King and country." In a speech made a few days later, he
attributed the disasters which in 1806 befell Prussia in its wars
with Napoleon, to the fact that the Prussian people had lost the
faith of their fathers. It was a judgment of God in punishment
of the foreign ways that had gained ground among them. When
it recovered its faith the nation was reborn. " This present genera-
tion which is inclined to believe principally in what can be seen,
proved, or touched with the hands, and, on the other hand, shows
less respect for what is transcendental this present generation may
well learn how to get back to the faith of its fathers. In the
facts of the past we have sure proofs of the governance of God."
A recent trial in the Civil Court of Elbing shows that not
only is the Emperor subject to the laws of the Empire, but that
judges exist in Germany who apply the laws without fear or favor.
His Majesty brought before the Court a tenant on one of his estates,
of whom he wished to get rid, " since he had no longer any use
for him." So far, however, from executing the will of the Kaiser,
the Court found the defendant's case to be sound, and dismissed the
action with costs.
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 133
As is usually the case, the weak has had again to yield to the
strong. The son of the King of Hanover, who in 1866 was de-
prived of his kingdom, has found it necessary to come to terms
with the German Emperor. Of the exact details we are not
informed. But as a consequence of the reconciliation, the Duke of
Cumberland's only surviving son, Prince Ernest Augustus, is to
wed the only daughter of the Emperor, Princess Victoria Louisa.
The Prince is to enter the German army.
Through the death of the Archduke Rainer
Austria-Hungary, the Habsburg Family has been deprived of
its most popular member, with the exception
of the Emperor himself. He was looked upon as a Liberal, having
taken a firm stand against the reactionary tendencies which mani-
fested themselves from time to time in Austria, being always a
champion of elementary popular rights. To him was due the re-
organization of the Austrian Landwehr. He was related not only
to the Emperor Francis Joseph, but also to the King of Italy,
being a cousin of the former, and great-uncle of the latter.
Almost the whole attention of the country has been absorbed
in the prospect of becoming involved in a war with Russia. This
seems to have been averted, but no one can yet be sure. The
Emperor Francis Joseph sent a Special Envoy with an autograph
letter to the Tsar. The envoy was, of course, graciously received,
and to him was given a reply. But no one yet knows the exact
contents of the two letters, nor even the precise results. The last
rumors, however, are to the effect that the two Powers have
begun to disarm.
At the time that this is being written, the
The Balkan War. Balkan War is still going on, although so
successful have been the efforts to suppress
news that almost nothing more is known than that Yanina has
fallen, that Adrianople is once more said to be on the point of
falling, and that Skutari is almost as far as ever from falling.
Rumania and Bulgaria have agreed to refer their differences to the
arbitration of Russia and Italy. Turkey has made an appeal to the
good offices of the Powers for the purpose of securing terms of peace
from the Allies. This appeal has not, however, been successful,
for the Powers could not prevail upon the Allies to consent to such
terms as they were willing to recommend to Turkey for acceptance.
I34 RECENT EVENTS [April,
No one can say what effect the assassination of the King of
the Hellenes may have upon the situation. He proved himself
a wise statesman in the management of Greek affairs during the
military dictatorship a few years ago. The great man of Greece,
M. Venezelos, is still left at the helm. Hence in the complications
that are likely to arise after the war is over between the Allies,
Greece will not be without a capable leader in him.
The internal situation in Russia excites little
Russia. attention, and may, therefore, be presumed
to be fairly satisfactory, so far as this is
impossible in a country where arbitrary rule is still predominant.
The character of this rule may be judged from the fact that not
infrequently members of the police force, the chief instru-
ment of that rule, take the place of their victims, and are themselves
thrown, for their own misdeeds, into the prisons to which they have
been the means of sending so many of their fellow-citizens or
rather subjects. This has recently happened to the former Chief
of the Political Police at Kieff, who was in charge of the secret
police at the time of the assassination of M. Stolypin. He has
been sentenced to sixteen months' detention in a fortress for
neglect in the administration of funds, and the forgery of vouchers.
The charge that he was culpably careless in not preventing the
assassination of the Premier was withdrawn.
The Ministry of M. Kokovtsoff still remains in power with no
change, except that for reasons of health the former Minister of
the Interior has resigned, and his place has been given to M. Makla-
koff, who is married to a granddaughter of Count Leo Tolstoy.
The Ministry and the Fourth Duma, which opened its session last
December, are working together harmoniously. Both it and the
Tsar seem to be animated with the desire to realize in their action
the principles proclaimed in the Imperial Manifesto of October
30, 1905. The government is accused of endeavoring to secure
this cooperation by exerting undue influence upon the election
last autumn.
The illness of the Tsarevitch last year caused no little anxiety,
as he is the only son, and his death would have involved a change
of the succession. The health of the heir to the throne seems
now to be quite restored. It was rumored that during the period
of anxiety a cousin of the Tsar would be designated as the heir.
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 135
Notable progress has been made in improving the condition of
the peasants since the change of governmental methods. M. Stoly-
pin's Agrarian Law effected a great change in their position. The
new year was signalized by the abolition of temporary servitudes
which the peasantry living in certain Caucasion districts still owed.
This measure was promoted and carried out by the government in
spite of the opposition of the landowning interests, and is a further
indication of its desire to promote the well-being of the mass of
the population.
The Sickness and Accident Insurance Law passed last June
is another indication of the same policy. This law makes the
insurance against sickness and accident compulsory. The exact
details of this measure have not reached us, nor would the space
at our disposal permit the publication of them. The government
at the present time is engaged in establishing the local insurance
offices throughout the Empire, and in drawing up the regulations
for the carrying the law into effect. Delegates of the workingmen
are entitled to seats in the Insurance Councils. The Socialists are
said to be by no means enchanted with the Law as a whole, one of
their organs declaring it to be " an insurance of capital at the
expense of labor."
Industrial conditions are now very prosperous in Russia, and
new enterprises are numerous. The migration, so common in other
countries, of the agricultural population to the towns is beginning
to be felt in Russia, with the prospect of that agitation which
follows in its train.
The nationalities subject to Russia do not, however, share
in the satisfaction so widely felt. The legislation which
was passed through the Duma in regard to Finland is looked
upon by many of the wiser and saner part of its population as
unconstitutional. Many judges and municipal authorities have
refused to comply with these provisions. In consequence no fewer
than twenty-three members of the Court of Appeal at Viborg, as
well as two municipalities, have been transported by force to St.
Petersburg, and sentenced to terms of imprisonment in Russian
prisons. All other judges and legal officers in Finland, to the
number of several thousand, are under threat of the same proceed-
ings, unless they consent to violate what they look upon as their
sworn duty. This action of the Russian government has called
forth a protest from a large number of distinguished jurists in
England. Rumors were current during the recent crisis that in
136 RECENT EVENTS [April,
the event of war breaking out between Russia and Austria-Hungary,
the Poles would have taken the opportunity, and would have risen
in arms to secure their independence.
The three hundredth anniversary of the accession of the
Romanoffs has just been celebrated throughout Russia. When
Michael Romanoff was called by the people to rule over them,
the Russians were under the dominion of the same Mongols who
are now rejoicing in having obtained the protection of their former
subjects. This Mongolian domination had the effect of degrading
the subjected race. What Russia is to-day, and what she has been
in the interval, is due to the ability of the ruling family, and to the
autocratic power with which it was entrusted. The most ardent
defenders of self-government are not concerned to deny that in
certain stages of a nation's development, and if by good fortune
really able rulers are found, an autocratic rule may produce the
best results. At all events, all Russia is now engaged in lauding the
Tsars as the authors of its well-being. The celebrations were
almost entirely religious. Thanksgiving services were held in all
the churches of the Empire, the Tsar going in a solemn procession
to a Special Service held in Kazan Cathedral. By an Imperial
Ukase various classes of prisoners received either full remission of
their punishment, or large reductions; large sums of money were
appropriated for the benefit of the tillers of the soil, and for other
purposes; and measures were ordered to be taken for the care of
the orphans of the agricultural classes irrespective of religion.
The conclusion of the Treaty with Mongolia, by which a vast
extent of new territory has been brought within Russia's sphere
of influence, has been followed by a Special Mission from the
Regent of Mongolia to the Tsar, and subsequently by the dispatch of
military officers for the purpose of training the National Army
of the Mongolians, by means of which the invasion by Chinese
troops may be prevented. Mongolia is not to become at least for
the present a part of the Russian Empire : it is to remain an auton-
omous state.
In the Agreement between Russia and Mongolia, by which
the new arrangement has been brought about, Mongolia is pre-
cluded from entering into any such agreement with China, " or any
other Foreign State," as would traverse or modify the recently-made
treaty, except with the assent of the Imperial Russian Government
It is denied that Russia's action in this matter has constituted any
interference with China's internal affairs. Mongolia, it is held,
1913-] RECENT EVENTS 137
always stood apart from China politically and ethnographically.
The sole bond between the two was the dynastic. As the Manchu
dynasty has fallen, the only tie has been broken. By such political
casuistry it is sought to justify the taking from China of more than
a fourth of her territory. The example of Mongolia having been
followed by Tibet, a country of about seven hundred and fifty
thousand square miles, China is being shorn of something like
half her territory. Russia, however, has had nothing to do with
the action of Tibet, and, in fact, is precluded by the Agreement
with Great Britain from any interference in its foreign affairs.
An agent, however, of the Dalai Lama has made his appearance at
St. Petersburg; but no apprehension is felt in Great Britain that
the Russian government will act otherwise than in accordance with
its engagements. China at present is too weak and disorganized
to be able to maintain her rights. She has, however, by no means
renounced them, and her voice may be heard later on.
A Bill has been introduced into the Duma to secure freedom
for religious beliefs, and equality for all creeds before the law.
The Procurator of the Holy Synod, in its name, is acting to secure
its rejection. Orthodoxy, he declares, is the State religion, and,
therefore, religion in Russia cannot be made a matter of conscience.
He is afraid, too, that in the event of such a Bill becoming law,
the governing power might falj into the hands of the Jews or
Mussulmans. He is willing, however, that the present toleration
given in various degrees to different religious bodies should be
continued.
The tension between Russia and Austria-Hungary seems at
last on the point of being relaxed. In fact, it is said that orders
have been given to dismiss the troops that had been summoned
to arms, or at least a part of them. How far the armament had
gone is not known. For the most stringent orders were issued that
no intelligence should be published, and it is wonderful how strictly
has been the observance of those orders. The power of the press,
not only in the expression of opinion, but even in the dissemination
of news, has proved not to be so great as it was thought. Not
only the Balkan Allies, but the Powers still at peace, have proved
themselves able to suppress almost everything which seemed desir-
able. A few months, however, will suffice to bring the facts to
light. Hence the real relations of the Powers, one to another during
the recent critical period, remains more or less a matter of surmise.
The Triple Alliance, on the one hand, and the Dual Alliance and
138 RECENT EVENTS [April,
the Entente, on the other, are supposed to be facing one another,
yet to have acted in concord for the preservation of peace. But the
line is not altogether clearly drawn; for Italy has an agreement
with Russia on the Balkan situation, at least in some of its aspects ;
while a large party in Austria is by no means friendly to Italy.
But for exact information on these points we shall have to wait
and see.
Elections have been taking place in China
China. for the Assembly which is to settle the defi-
nite form of its Constitution. It cannot,
however, be said that the prospects of the future are bright. The
political energy of the nation seems to have been exhausted by the
effort put forth in establishing the Republic. The members of
the National Council, which in the interim forms the Legislature of
the Empire, are so remiss in attending its meetings that twenty
times in succession no session could be held for lack of a quorum.
For two months the work of this provisional Parliament was in
this way brought to a standstill. Necessary laws have had to be
made by the government's proclamation alone, and the question
may arise as to their legality. This apathy of the legislators is
hard to explain. Rumors, however, are in circulation that the
President is acting after the manner of a dictator, and that it is
through fear that the legislators abstain from the exercise of their
powers. It is, at all events, a fact that whenever there has been a
divergence of views between the government and the Council, the
wishes of the latter have never prevailed.
A statement has appeared that after months of negotiation the
Loan from the Six Powers has at last been secured. The negotia-
tions were protracted so long, and were so many times broken off,
that the Chinese authorities were becoming, and not without reason,
cynically indifferent not only as to it, but also as to all their foreign
liabilities. Default has been made in the Boxer indemnity, and
in several other of the charges upon the nation. The country was
without funds to meet its debts. It was willing to borrow, the
Powers were willing to lend, but could not agree among themselves
as to the persons to be appointed to watch over the revenue. If at
last things have been arranged, a small but absolutely necessary step
towards a settlement has been taken. A thing that tends to alleviate
the situation is that trade and commerce are prosperous. The
Maritime Customs Revenue for 1912 show that the collection last
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 139
year was the largest on record, whether estimated in silver or
in gold.
The death of the Empress-Dowager Lung Yii, niece of the
more famous Empress-Dowager Tzii Hsi, serves to call to
mind the depths of degradation to which had sunk the Court
of the oldest civilization in the world, one or two thousand years
of age. Both of the two Empresses-Dowager made themselves
practically supreme. Thereupon the warring of parties in the
palace became incessant. No thought was taken of the higher
interests of the nation, or even of the family. The collapse of the
Manchus may be chiefly attributed to the intrigues and personal
rivalries which had become the sole occupation of the Court. Two
eunuchs in succession became the wielders of such powers as the
Empresses did not choose to exercise, and these, in their turn,
were guilty of such shameful corruption and insolent behavior
that their names became bywords in the capital; and yet for a
long time there was no one strong or brave enough to interfere.
Their traffic in high offices was open and notorious. Wonderful
are the ways of Divine Providence which thus left the destinies
of some four hundred millions of people in the hands of the lowest
of the race; still more wonderful perhaps is it that for so many
years four hundred millions of people submitted to such a rule.
It is, therefore, no matter for surprise that, after having suffered
so long, difficulties should arise when emancipation has been se-
cured; that the people of China are not able all at once to realize
and to make use of the blessings of the freedom to which they
have at last attained.
It is to be feared that Mongolia is lost irretrievably to the
Empire. What is the exact extent of the territory affected
by the recent Agreement with Russia is uncertain. As
to Tibet the prospect is not so dark. On the part of Great
Britain, there is no disposition to give any further support to the
Tibetans than that China should relinquish the recent claim to
sovereignty which she has made, and be content with the suzerainty
which she has possessed so long. No opposition will be offered
to China's asserting her long-established rights.
Japan has been passing through a somewhat
Japan. trying crisis. Although the nation possesses
a constitution, the executive power is in the
hands of the Emperor, while he is advised by a Cabinet It is fc>
140 RECENT EVENTS [April,
him that the Cabinet hitherto has been responsible, and not to
Parliament; therefore the practical government is essentially bu-
reaucratic. This state of things is proving itself unsatisfactory to a
growing number of the members of the Chamber of Representatives.
These, when Prince Katsura returned to power as Premier a
few weeks ago, offered so determined an opposition to him that
he was forced to resign. He was looked upon as the chief oppo-
nent of the movement for increasing the power of the Legislature.
He had, indeed, given in his adhesion to this principle, but little
faith was placed in the sincerity of his convictions. At all events,
the opposition of the most numerous party forced him to resign
within a few weeks after his having taken office. The whole
country has been affected by the movement, and Tokyo has been
the scene of a series of riots. It is not merely the irresponsible
character of the Cabinet that has been attacked. The part hitherto
taken by the Elder Statesmen in the government of the country
is also declared to be unconstitutional.
After a great deal of negotiation a Ministry has been formed
under the Premiership of Admiral Yamamoto, which rests for
support upon the coalition of two parties in the Parliament. Its
formation is the first explicit recognition that Japan is at length
ripe for the parliament's control of the executive, and that no gov-
ernment should exist which is without a majority.
What led to the crisis was the urgent necessity felt by the
Japanese for a great reduction in the national expenditure on the
navy and army. In proportion to income, Japan is the most heavily
taxed land in the world. The Cabinet which preceded that of
Prince Katsura had, in accordance with the wishes of the majority
of the Chambers, determined to reduce this expenditure, but its
purpose was frustrated by the opposition of the army. The War
Minister resigned, and no other War Minister could be found.
This was the immediate occasion of the recent movement for secur-
ing the people's control of their own affairs ; it was a conflict between
the army and the nation. The new Ministry has promised to pur-
sue the work of retrenchment on the lines laid down by Prince
Katsura's predecessor. As Admiral Yamamoto is without expe-
rience in parliamentary proceeding, some doubt is felt as to his
eventual success.
With Our Readers.
A FURTHER happy evidence that there are some Americans
determined to remove the curse of easy divorce, which is
undermining the moral tone of the nation, and which, as Father
Kent shows in his article in this issue of THE CATHOLIC WORLD, was
cited as "the horrible example" by the Minority Report of the
British Commission on Divorce, is the recent defeat by the New York
State Senate of a bill which sought to add insanity to the present
statutory ground for absolute divorce in that State.
New York State acknowledges only one cause for absolute divorce,
and that is adultery. Senator Foley, in opposing the bill, said "To
weaken even in the smallest particular our present divorce laws would
in reality be a step towards legalizing polygamy."
OUR readers will be pleased to know that His Holiness, Pope Pius
X., has recently decorated one who frequently contributes to
THE CATHOLIC WORLD Miss Emily Hickey with the gold cross
Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice.
exhaustive study of the origins of Newman's Lead Kindly
Light which we published in the January CATHOLIC WORLD, and
the two recent papers on The Poetry and Prose of Lionel Johnson,
recall the verses, not widely known, written on the great Cardinal
by the great Catholic poet. The poem is entitled Falmouth Harbour,
and its second half is as follows. The first line refers to Newman's
sailing from Falmouth :
Hence, by stern thoughts and strong winds borne,
Voyaged, with faith that could not fail,
Who cried: Lead, kindly Light! forlorn
Beneath a stranger sail.
Becalmed upon a classic sea;
Wandering through eternal Rome;
Fighting with Death in Sicily;
He hungered for his home.
These northern waves, these island airs!
Dreams of these haunted his full heart:
Their love inspired his songs and prayers,
Bidding him play his part.
I4 2 WITH OUR READERS [April,
The freedom of the living dead;
The service of a living pain;
He chose between them, bowed his head,
And counted sorrow, gain.
Ah, sweetest soul of all ! whose choice
Was golden with the light of lights;
But us doubt's melancholy voice,
Wandering in gloom, unites.
Ah, sweetest soul of all! whose voice
Hailed morning, and the sun's increase:
We of the restless night rejoice,
We also, at thy peace.
IT is a very hopeful sign to note the almost unanimous protest of
the secular press of our country against the insolent proceedings
of the Social Vice Investigating Committees now at work throughout
the land. The great dailies, which are surely, if for no other reason
than that of circulation, on the side of every movement making for
popular welfare, have emphatically said that the methods and the rul-
ings of these Vice Committees are making a mockery of social reform.
They have not hesitated to call " minimum minded " many of these so-
called reformers who ignorantly discuss a minimum wage.
* * * * *
NO man of Christian heart will fail to protest against such condi-
tions as, for example, are known by Legislative Report to exist
among the textile workers of the Mohawk Valley, New York. The
average weekly wage among them is, for men, $9.00 per week, and for
women, $7.50. The conditions of their dwellings ; the inhuman crowd-
ing that makes " family privacy a thing largely unknown," demand the
active interest and protest of every man who loves his fellows. This
investigation at Little Falls ; the numerous Government and State Re-
ports ; the Reports of Civic Commissions that have made it known that
we are by no means the "land of the free and the home of the brave,"
are welcomed because no community can face them unashamed or per-
mit them to go uncorrected. And no matter how much it costs ; no mat-
ter whom it hurts, these evil and unjust conditions ought to be made
known, that justice may be done.
" Rights must be religiously respected wherever they exist ; and it
is the duty of the public authority to prevent and to punish injury,
and to protect every one in the possession of his own. Still when there
is a question of defending the rights of individuals, the poor and help-
less have a claim to especial consideration Wage earners, who are
undoubtedly among the weak and necessitous, should be specially cared
for and protected by the Government."
1913] WITH OUR READERS 143
Justice, as Leo XIII. wrote, must be done first to the poor, because
the poor, not being the mighty and powerful of this world, are the
least able to protect themselves. They are not able to protect them-
selves in their property rights ; they seem less able to protect themselves
just now in their moral rights. A poor man has just as keen a sease
of his good name as the rich man. His sense of dignity and personal
worth are just as great. He is no more willing to sell himself than
the rich man is. Indeed the reports of the committees that have in-
vestigated bribery in high legislatures, or of corruption in cities, point
to the fact that it is not the poor but the rich who must bear the guilt
and the shame. Apart, therefore, from the ridiculous assertion that
high wages in themselves make a man moral and low wages are the
cause of sin and crime, . or as a brazen woman " reformer," and the
head of a Committee on Safety, has stated, " it is an open moral ques-
tion whether or not a woman who receives a low wage may give herself
to a life of sin " apart from all this, which is enough to nauseate
tke right thinking we protest against the manner in which the poor,
as a class, are ruthlessly used for experimental purposes in the clinics
of these investigating committees. In the name of reform, and with
a paternalism that rouses the wrath of an honest man, the members
of the committee make the poor and the wage earner the pitiable sub-
jects of their questionings. No incident or circumstance of their life
is left unexposed to the public.
*****
IN their name wretched criminals and sinners who are such not
because they were poor but because they were, as we all are, weak
are brought to the witness stand, and actually urged to state that
poverty was the cause of their downfall. It is one tribute of respect
at least, to poverty because poverty is considered to be a respectable
excuse. And the sins of all these are shouldered upon the poor; and
we are told that the poor are, if not the most sinful, at least likely to be
the most sinful of all classes of modern society.
Better to have no reforms than to have such reforms as these.
Better never to have a just wage than to do man the injustice of say-
ing that he puts wages above virtue, and that the one great value
with him is a money value. No more debasing and hopeless message
could be read to man's soul.
Through the ballot; through the platform; in society meetings;
in daily conversation at business or in the sitting room or in the
street, there is desperate need that every man raise his voice against
this most un-American and tyrannical proceeding by which legally
constituted Commissions are making the poor the reason and the excuse
for crime, and leading the young to believe that sin is not sin, but only
an economic necessity.
BOOKS RECEIVED.
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The Mighty Friend. By Pierre L'Ermite. $1.50 net. The Ordinary of the
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A Hundredfold. By the Author of " From a Garden Jungle." 75 cents net.
P. J. KENEDY & SONS, New York :
The Cause of Beatification of the Little Flower of Jesus. By Monsignor R.
de Teil. Translated by Rev. L. Basevi. 75 cents net. Holy Communion.
By Monsignor de Gibergues. 75 cents.
LONGMANS, GREEN & Co., New York:
Good Friday to Easter Sunday. By Robert Kane, SJ. 90 cents net. In God's
Nursery. By C. C. Martindale, SJ. $1.25 net. Levia-Pondera. By John
Ayscough. $1.75 net. Confessions of a Convert. By Robert Hugh Benson.
$1.20 net.
THE MACMILLAN Co., New York:
The ^Fitness of the Environment. By L. J. Henderson. $1.50 net. The New
Testament Manuscripts in the Freer Collection. Part I. The Washington
Manuscript of the Four Gospels. By Henry A. Sanders. $2.00.
THE SENTINEL PRESS, New York :
"Father Carson Explains." By Rev. Edward F. Garesche", SJ. 5 cents.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN Co., Boston :
With the Victorious Bulgarians. By Lieutenant Hermenegild Wagner. $3.00
net. The Drift of Romanticism. By P. E. More. $1.25 net. The Invaders.
By Frances Allen. $1.30 net.
LITTLE, BROWN & Co., Boston:
The Amateur Gentleman. By Jeffery Farnol. $1.40 net.
J. B. LIPPINCOTT Co., Philadelphia:
George Macdonald Stories for Little Folks The Princess and the Goblin.
Simplified by Elizabeth Lewis. 50 cents net.
B. HERDER, St. Louis :
P. Wilhelm Judge, SJ. History of Missions in Alaskan Gold Fields. Trans-
lated into German by Friedrich Ritter V. Lama. 90 cents net. Grace. By
Heinrich Hansjakob. Adapted into English by Rev. Joseph McSorley, C.S.P.
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in the Liturgy. By Dom Michael Barrett, O.S.B. $1.10. Sing Ye to the
Lord. By Robert Eaton. $1.50. The Practical Catechist. From the German
of Rev. James Nist. Edited by Rev. F. Girardey, C.SS.R. $1.75.
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & Co., LTD., London:
From Hussar to Priest: A Memoir of Charles Rose Chase. By H. P. Russell.
5 s. net.
GARY & Co., London:
Mass of St. Anthony. Composed by Alphonse Gary, i s. 6 d . net.
PIERRE TEQUI, Paris :
Lettre a une Superieure Religieuse au sujet D'un Decret Pontifical. Par
1'Abbe A. E. Gautier. La Doctrine de L'Assomption de la T. S. Vierge.
Par D. Paul Renaudin. Sermons et Panegyriques. Tomes I. and II. Par E.
Jarossay. 7 frs. each.
LIBRAIRIE HACHETTE ET CIE, Paris :
Bossuet. Par Ferdinand Brunetiere. 3 frs. 50.
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LIBRERIA EDITRICE FIORENTINA, Firenzi:
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CHEMIN DU CRAMPON, Tournai, Belgium :
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Par Le R. P. Louis Carlier.
THE
CATHOLIC WORLD
VOL. XCVII.
MAY, 1913.
No. 578.
THE ASSENT TO SOCIALISM.*
BY WILLIAM J. KERBY, PH.D.
LJR attitudes, as well as men and books, have pedi-
gree. That a man thinks as he does to-day ; that he
is Democrat, Republican, Labor Unionist or Social-
ist is the outcome of the inter-play of many forces
which are, in only a secondary way, under his con-
trol. That a man knows these facts and not those; that he views
them in one light and not in another; that he argues well or
badly; that he is intense or apathetic, will enter vitally into the
attitudes which he takes on questions as they present themselves
to him. The manner of one's education, the place in life from
which one looks out on life, aspirations which have been fostered,
and illusions which have been removed, must be explored and cata-
logued before we may understand a man's thinking and feeling.
One who takes an acute interest in governmental questions will
take aggressive attitudes toward them. One who takes little in-
terest in such questions will escape such attitudes. In each case
the whole range of life will be affected. " A great many of our
assents are merely expressions of our personal likings, tastes, prin-
ciples, motives, and opinions, as dictated by nature, or resulting
from habit; in other words, they are acts and manifestations of
self. Now what is more rare than self-knowledge? In proportion
then to our ignorance of self, is our unconsciousness of those in-
*Quotations are taken from Newman's Grammar of Assent. See also The
Dolphin, November, 1903, and THE CATHOLIC WORLD, February, April, May, 1911,
for related articles on Socialism and Private Property.
Copyright. 1913. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
VOL. XCVIT. 10.
I 4 6 THE ASSENT TO SOCIALISM [May,
numerable acts of assent which we are incessantly making."
Hence it is that assent or dissent in respect of current social move-
ments will be governed very largely by personal history, experience,
and imagination; by the mental processes of the individual; by the
outfit of existing thoughts, principles, likings, desires, and hopes
which make men what they are. We gravitate toward what is
mentally clear, and away from what is obscure. We are intolerant,
sometimes because we understand and sometimes because we do
not understand. Defense against argument is simple, but pro-
tection against impressions is almost beyond us. Social move-
ments which appeal to the imagination and to personal or class
experience, which deal boldly and confidently with profound aspira-
tions, and abandon the reserves born of accuracy and caution, are
clothed with all but unconquerable power. Argument is of little
avail against them. Bacon was not in error in attributing much
influence to the idols of the Tribe, the Cave, the Market Place, and
the Theatre which beset men's minds and sway them.
Social movements are not of arbitrary origin. They are rather
the products of forces at work in national life. The extent to
which any popular movement succeeds, indicates the general readi-
ness of the people to accept it, which readiness is neither produced
at will nor suppressed by command. A popular movement must be
viewed in the background of its own history. In the thirteenth
century, even economic movements took on the color of spiritual
rebellion, because the authority of the Church touched all sides
of life. In the twentieth century, all social rebellion takes on the
color of the defense against capital, because of its widely-estab-
lished ascendancy. What, then, is the national background in which
we should judge Socialism? How can we account for the assent
to it, when that assent involves an apparent departure from the
standards of our civilization and its ideals, from the political prin-
ciples and historical wisdom on which the framework of national
life is based?
I.
I am aware that the Socialist movement is not as fixed and
definite as the words which describe it. Just as the wedge has point
and head, likewise Socialism has its narrow, starved, economic
meaning, and also its wider and deeper phases which include many
ugly affinities and hideous implications. On its own repeated ad-
missions, Socialism cannot prevent itself from becoming something
other than Socialism. Its attempted repudiation of atheism and
1913-] THE ASSENT TO SOCIALISM 147
free love is a striking admission of its own inability to control
the mental processes of its votaries. We know thoroughly well that
Socialism cannot account for its own origin. Forces other than
Socialism prepare the way for it. If, then, on the one hand, it
cannot account for its own origin, and, on the other, it cannot
confine itself to its professed limitations, we are forced to the con-
clusion that it simply cannot account for itself. Making allowance
for all of this, we may endeavor to discuss it in its least offensive
sense, in the sense in which it is willing to make its own apology.
Thus restricted, Socialism may be regarded as resting on the fol-
lowing three fundamental assumptions:
The present social order is bankrupt.
The private ownership of capital is the cause of this bank-
ruptcy.
The collective ownership of capital is the sole adequate remedy.
An individual's mind which accepts these three assumptions
embraces Socialism. Up to a certain point, all antecedent prob-
abilities hinder these assumptions from entering his mind. Grad-
ually, and probably unconsciously, they insinuate themselves until
all antecedent probabilities were overturned. After that experi-
ence, assumptions, views, preferences, interpretations, associations,
arrange themselves in an orderly manner, re-enforcing the assump-
tions of Socialism until they become solid as axioms and undoubting
as consciousness itself. One sees electric fans, which automatically
reverse themselves by the throwing of a lever which is effected by
the contrary motion of itself. All operations of mind are reversed
once the antecedent probabilities are turned toward Socialism in-
stead of against it. There is in the assent to Socialism a " sur-
plusage of assurance " much as there is in Marx's economic theory
a surplusage of value back of capitalistic accumulation. " Some-
times our mind changes so quickly, so unaccountably, so dispro-
portionately to any tangible arguments to which the change can be
referred, and with such abiding recognition of the forces of the old
arguments, as to suggest the suspicion that moral causes, arising
out of our condition, age, company, occupations, fortunes, are
at the bottom." We should not forget " How little syllogisms
have to do with the formation of opinion; how little depends upon
the inferential proofs, and how much upon those pre-existing
beliefs and views in which men either already agree with each
other or hopelessly differ, before they begin to dispute, and which
are hidden deep in our nature, or, it may be, in our personal
peculiarities."
148 THE ASSENT TO SOCIALISM [May,
If Socialism had without aid established its three fundamental
assumptions in the minds of its believers, the achievement would be
a marvel in human history. Socialism did not do it and could
not do it. The transition from one social philosophy to another,
from one interpretation to another, is gradual and not abrupt.
It is effected by the likeness or identity of the two systems, and
not by differences between them. The foundations of Socialism lie
deep in our social life. Marx himself took the most orthodox
economic doctrine of his time to construct his theory of revolution-
ary Socialism.
The first assumption the present social order is bankrupt
expresses unqualified despair of our leaders, of the administration
of our laws and their enactment, of the institutions on which the
social order rests, and of the constitution itself, under whose spirit
and warrant the feeling, thinking, and judgment of the people are
guided. Despair is the single gateway to Socialism. Confidence
is the angel with flaming sword which drives Socialism from our
gates. The process of disturbing confidence in the elements of
our social order has operated, and it operates to-day, independent
of Socialism. We are all familiar with the vocabulary of current
abuse and criticism. All of us indulge indiscriminately in the joy
of denunciation. If a conservative scholar proclaims that society
is ethically bankrupt without shocking us; if not a few proclaim
that our public school system is bankrupt, and our own experience
tends to prove the charge; if very conservative religious leaders
tell us that society is near to spiritual bankruptcy; if conservatives
in most exalted stations tell us that the administration of our crim-
inal law is bankrupt and a disgrace to civilization; if vilification,
incrimination, and complaint are practically universal in political,
literary, and journalistic circles, we must admit that minds and ears
are well prepared to hear without shock or recoil the declaration
that the political and industrial order is bankrupt. When this
last assumption is established in a mind, it has taken its first step
toward Socialism.
That is, however, only a first step. The second assumption
the private ownership of capital is the cause of this bankruptcy
definitely indicates that capital is the rock on which the hopes
of society have been shipwrecked. The third assumption the
collective ownership of capital is the sole adequate remedy pro-
poses the single remedy through which it is alleged social justice may
be secured. Any of us might agree with the first assumption,
while at the same time dissenting fundamentally as to the second
1913.] THE ASSENT TO SOCIALISM 149
and the third. We might allow, for instance, that to a great extent
there is truth in the first two assumptions of Socialism. We might
find them partly true, but largely false. We might propose that
sin, passion, unconquerable ignorance, love of power, inability to
coordinate social effort and control it while allowing human liberty
its play, and the inherent limitations of human nature must be
associated through and with capital in explaining social disorder,
and that provision must be made against these as well as against
abuse of capital in the social reform toward which our aspirations
drive us.
If it requires much knowledge, trained judgment, mental re-
straint, and tedious effort at interpretation, to discover and asso-
ciate in right proportion the causes of social injustice, we are at
a disadvantage in attempting to hinder the general acceptance of
Socialism's assumptions. The average experience of the multitude
unfortunately tends to corroborate the socialistic indictment of
capital. The undeniable abuses to which the laboring classes have
been subjected are due primarily to capital and to the capitalistic
view of life, of human rights and progress. The undeniable horrors
that have dogged the footsteps of millions have shown that, in
the case of many of these, the social order is bankrupt, and that
the private ownership of capital is the cause of that bankruptcy.
These facts place us conservatives at a marked disadvantage in
attempting to hinder the propaganda of Socialism from establish-
ing its two assumptions. Since most of the reforms which we are
accomplishing rest directly on the curbing of capital, it is not un-
natural that the impetuous imagination of the people would in-
cline toward the assumption that all social injustice may be ended
by taking over the control of capital entirely in the interests of the
people themselves. Unless established social order can retain the
confidence of the masses, nothing can hinder the ultimate triumph
of Socialism. It is attempting to rob the people of that confidence.
We conservatives endeavor to maintain it in undiminished force.
All other issues are secondary to this one. All of the processes
on which we depend derive their efficiency , from their power to
protect popular Confidence in the institutions of industry and
government.
II.
The prudent janitor of a certain public building once nailed its
outside windows in order to prevent the opening of them during
the winter. He believed that if the windows were opened, coal
i S o THE ASSENT TO SOCIALISM [May,
would be wasted in heating the fresh, cool air as it entered. He
was under the impression that only space, and not air, was necessary
for breathing. Confidence is the atmosphere in which practically
all social institutions and relations thrive. Mere establishment
means as little to the social order as space without air means to
respiration. No institution can survive the withdrawal of con-
fidence, unless it be supported by an army.
Confidence between man and wife makes marriage possible,
while suspicion, distrust, and accusation destroy happiness and
unity. Confidence makes possible normal relations between parents
and children. It is the essence of friendship. It is the foundation
of business, of all forms of credit, of all systems of currency.
It enters into the very heart of our industrial operations. Con-
fidence is the source of the power of the priesthood, although not,
of course, its sanction. Confidence of man in man makes possible
communication, language, social life. Normal social relations de-
pend, therefore, on the capacity and willingness of men and women
to believe one another, to trust one another, to cooperate with one
another. Suspicion and distrust, vilification and scorn, failure
to merit confidence and receive it, failure to give confidence and
inability to maintain it, disintegrate social relations with unfailing
power. Jails and penitentiaries show us the type of social relation
which results when man may not trust his fellowman.
Democratic philosophy teaches us that the stability of govern-
ment rests immediately on the intelligence and moral integrity of
its citizens. Democracy rests on confidence in the people, just as
the limitations of democracy indicate the restrictions of that same
confidence. Government fears bad men because they will betray
confidence which is bestowed upon them. Government fears ignor-
ant men because these lack the open-eyed discretion which places
expected reservation on the giving of confidence. Government fos-
ters education, religion, and culture, and cultivates noble heroes and
heroines, because these aid powerfully in producing types of char-
acter and intelligence which make stable the social order.
The constitution under which the people are governed will
be powerful to the extent to which it is believed in. The institu-
tions, through which national life is directed, will be effective in
proportion as they merit confidence and receive it. Laws which
are enacted in obedience to the limitations and the spirit of the
institutions, will accomplish their end only when reenforced by
the mighty confidence of a trusting people. The administration
of laws will be wise and faithful in proportion as leaders bring
1913-] THE ASSENT TO SOCIALISM 151
to the performance of their duties the intelligence and integrity
of character which invites and holds popular confidence.
Of course, political confidence may not be without its reserves.
Lack of intelligence and lack of integrity will occur at times every-
where. Institutions will require modification from time to time,
and constitutions themselves must be amended. Provision for
change in leadership by limited terms of office, for repeal of laws,
for modifying institutions, and amending constitutions belongs
essentially to all accepted patterns of democratic government.
Hence, we may and we will surrender confidence from time to time
in this or in that leader, in this or in that legislature, in this or
in that feature of an institution. But, on the whole, our talent
for giving confidence will not be impaired ; our habit of trusting in
the essential elements of social order will not be interrupted by these
occasional, sporadic, and superficial incursions of distrust, doubt,
and demand for change. Nature works with a high factor of
safety. She stores her deep reservoirs with unmeasured social
confidence, slowly, painfully, and with uninterrupted determina-
tion. She protects those reservoirs at every point. She is quick
and nervous, watchful and wakeful in hindering losses of it. When
she discovers that confidence is being disturbed at a rapid rate, and
that the storehouses from which she draws it are being closed
to her, she stands, if not hopeless, at least helpless, in the face of
disaster which her instincts foretell. In proof of this one might
cite the gloomy foreboding of many a non-Catholic conservative,
who believes that only the Catholic Church is equipped to prevent
the nation from rushing headlong into Socialism.
Indiscriminate abuse of our public leaders has been for years
robbing the people of the will and of the capacity to trust any
leadership which represents past establishment. Indiscriminate
criticism, reenforced by the discovery of many unhappy facts, has
robbed multitudes of all wholesome confidence in the administra-
tion of laws and in the process of their enactment. Abuse, denun-
ciation, and ridicule, supported by cartoons, statistics, and oratory,
have led many, many thousands into an attitude of serious doubt,
if not repudiation, of the fundamental institutions on which our
civilization rests. Private property, competition, the courts, indus-
trial liberty, the ballot, and the institutions of representation stand
out under a plausible indictment which many hundreds of thousands
believe.
The Democratic press, the Republican press, the Progressive
press, the labor press, the muckraking press; campaign literature,
i 5 2 THE ASSENT TO SOCIALISM [May,
campaign methods, and speeches; tons of literature pouring
forth from publishing houses, and even government committees,
maintain a course of searching indictment of the foundations of the
social order, each from its own standpoint, and for its own purpose,
yet all of them concurring in their adverse influence on popular con-
fidence in our institutions. It is commonplace to observe that our
masses do not trust our culture, that laborers do not trust employers,
that the public looks upon financial leaders as pirates.* A strong
mental effort is necessary to enable us to believe in the good inten-
tions of a rich man who enters politics. Legislatures are not
trusted, executives are suspected, courts are reviled ; the bar receives
credit for cunning, but not for honesty, and for the betrayal of
popular welfare in the interest of predatory wealth. Wit, humor,
and caricature, scholarship and oratory, art, music, and poetry,
history and science, are brought into the campaign of despair, and
they do their work well.
We need not, for a moment, consider how much there is of
truth and how much of falsehood in this volume of criticism, de-
nunciation, and distrust. Impressions do not depend on the truth
for their origin or their power. If we take the first fundamental
assumption of Socialism, namely, that the present social order
is bankrupt, and view it in this background, we must admit that
it appears to be the simple, logical, and expected outcome of the
alleged conditions. From unquestioning confidence in our insti-
tutions and undisturbed acceptance of them, easy transition may
be experienced into an attitude of disturbed and hesitating alle-
giance. From this point the transition to simple repudiation is
not complicated nor unexpected. When one loses one's " unim-
paired certainties," one may drift in any direction. When the
propaganda of Socialism takes its place in the present scheme
of things, it finds the ground well prepared. The natural mental
processes of large numbers meet it half way, and they gladly accept
its undoubting guidance in the search for social peace. Only as
confidence in the established order is disturbed or destroyed, is it
possible for Socialism to make headway.
III.
Parallel with this diminishing confidence in government and
law, there is found an increasing dependence on them in even our
* Senator Root called attention to this aspect of our national life in a striking
speech before the New York Chamber of Commerce, November 21, 1912.
1913.] THE ASSENT TO SOCIALISM 153
simplest industrial and social relations. We have ceased to depend
on character and intelligence in nearly all of our commercial trans-
actions. We depend on law to get pure milk. Law regulates
almost every detail in factory and mine. Law enters homes, meas-
ures windows and the cubic air space to be provided. A public
officer removes the drinking glass from our sleeping cars; gives
or withholds permission to widen our back porches ; sends children
from the streets in the evening. Law controls, in last detail, the
labeling, weighing, and measuring, and regulates the quality of
practically everything that we consume. We are so habituated
to this experience that we have recourse to law habitually, as a
first remedy instead of as a last one. Government, law, public
officers have entered so extensively and so minutely into every
phase of our lives, that we are losing the instinct for personal liberty,
and settling down to a civilization built on the hollow foundations
of legal enactment.
A simple country shoemaker obeyed a very elementary pro-
cess of mind and experience when he suggested to the writer, not
long since, that there is no more hope for the workingman. He
added that our salvation w r ill come only when the government takes
hold and fixes the prices at which all necessaries of life may be
sold. The man was not, to his own way of thinking, a Socialist,
but the preparatory work had been done. The paternalistic expe-
rience of government, through which we are going, does its own
work in simplifying the way for the omnipresent and omnipotent
state into which Socialism would drift. I do not pause to attempt
to resolve the paradox which this description involves.
IV.
There is another factor in the background of Socialism. The
process of life is ironing out into flat and unrelieved monotony
the experience of multitudes. Men and women are ceasing to think
as individuals. They think and feel, nowadays, in battalions.
Class consciousness is strong. The attempt to build up movements
on class consciousness is far more profoundly justified than the legal
fictions which condemn it. The distress through which working-
men and workmen's families pass, the tyranny which they have ex-
perienced, and the crude injustice to which they have been subjected;
the forces which throw them hither and thither in our social and
economic life; the environment in which they have been compelled
to live insulated from the vitalizing streams of culture, joy, and
I 54 THE ASSENT TO SOCIALISM [May,
hope which flow past them have been so nearly alike in origin,
in operation, and in outcome that these classes have been welded
together to an extent into a solid consciousness which dominates
both thought and speech.
We can easily perceive in the mass what we miss in the unit.
Class experience, class observation, class feeling, class aspirations,
class ideals have prepared the multitude for unified thinking and
unified feeling. In this way great numbers have been prepared
admirably for the propaganda of Socialism. Its fundamental as-
sumptions take on strength as we widen the social surface to
which they are applied. Few men who think and feel strongly as
individuals, and who shut out the larger sympathies from the
circle of their thinking and feeling, will be profoundly impressed
by the fundamental assumptions of Socialism. On the other hand,
few men who are governed by the outlook, the feeling, the history,
and the consciousness of class, can fail to be impressed by those
assumptions. We, conservatives, in our defense of institutions
are compelled to be individualistic, fragmentary, and unsystematic,
while our reforms are, when most successful, only palliative. We
are compelled to talk against the deeper feeling and the experience
of laboring men, when we attempt to make out a case against
Socialism.
The more clear we are in feeling and thinking, the less toler-
ant we are. The multitude craves finality and simplicity. Axioms
are liked better than problems. The people dislike hesitation, qual-
ification, reserve. They can withdraw confidence, but they cannot
retain it. They must give it to some thing or to some one. They
will trust a formula just as readily as a genius. It requires far
less mental effort to believe that everything has gone wrong, than
to hold that many things have gone wrong, that many are going
right, and that in a hundred tedious ways something can be done
to improve conditions. It requires less mental effort to blame
everything that is wrong upon one single force or agency, than to
believe that many complex forces, acting in highly complex relations,
cause the evils which we deplore. It requires far less energy of
mind and reservation of thought, far less self-control and discipline
of intellect, to believe in one simple formula as a remedy, than to
repose confidence in the doubtful coordination of a hundred un-
certain social forces. Hence, assuming that the multitude is
aroused and thinking, assuming further that it is shaping certain
standards of social justice and judging life by them, the assump-
tions of Socialism appeal to their experience, to their mental con-
1913-] THE ASSENT TO SOCIALISM 155
stitution and preferences, and to their class consciousness. We
conservatives can weaken the appeal only by elaborate reasoning,
much knowledge, and endless qualifications in our statements. The
progress of Socialism is not surprising.
V.
He who gives little thought to fundamental questions of gov-
ernment, and who is fortunate in his career, is undoubtedly shocked
on meeting for the first time the Socialist claim that the present
social order is bankrupt. His every faculty revolts against the
form and spirit of the claim. It appears ridiculous, fantastic,
unworthy of attention, and therefore self -refuting.
One who has had severe experience in life, who has been com-
pelled to struggle and to live through hardships, uncertainties, and
unrelieved dependence on the orders of unsympathetic employers,
is not shocked on hearing for the first time these assumptions of
Socialism. While one may not be drawn toward it, one is not
conscious of any particular recoil against it. If in addition to
the distressing and bitter experience in life, one have the habit of
observing, discussing, and reflecting seriously on the bitterness, all
of the distress, all of the injustice, all of the helpless misery that
the life about us holds, one is undoubtedly disposed to find very
much truth in the initial assumptions of Socialism.
Once the minds of great numbers of citizens are aroused, and
their imagination is seized by the realization of the tragedy, the
injustice, and the disappointments of life as a whole, those minds
are driven by the law of their nature to find an explanation and a
remedy. If we conservatives can offer an explanation which catches
the imagination and satisfies it, and if we can offer a remedy which
is reasonable, definite, and not too difficult of introduction, we
can satisfy those aroused minds, and they will remain relatively
conservative. But if we fail either to impress our explanation
of social injustice on popular imagination, or if we remain idle
while the more zealous radical is busy, or if we present our mes-
sage in a form, or in a tone, which does not ring true to the
disturbed minds that we aim to serve, we labor in vain. The
field of battle to-day is here. The masses are thinking on funda-
mental problems. Their confidence in the social order is genuinely
disturbed. The growth of Socialism seems to indicate that large
numbers prefer to go on in the easier direction of despair than
to return by the difficult, painful, and self -renouncing method of
156 THE ASSENT TO SOCIALISM [May,
undoubting trust in the leaders, the laws, and the institutions which
appear to have brought them much more of sadness than of the joy
of living, much more of struggle than of peace. I do not intend
exaggeration, nor am I conscious of it, in stating the problem in
this manner. Its implication is that we conservatives are at a
great disadvantage due to the temper, the experience, and the pref-
erences of the large numbers for whose guidance we are con-
tending against Socialism.
Fortunately the description of the situation exaggerates the
imminence of the issue, if not its quality. There are very power-
ful checks at work which automatically hinder the masses from
drifting into the despair which is the novitiate of Socialism. These
checks act directly to the advantage of the conservatives' defense.
Large numbers have the impression that Socialism threatens
seriously their personal liberty. They are unwilling to sacrifice
it for any assurance that Socialism has heretofore been able to
give. This same attitude has hindered large numbers of laboring
men from entering labor unions. Numbers are saved by a healthy
skepticism from believing that Socialism's three assumptions can
bring the social peace and justice which are promised with indis-
criminate assurance. Large numbers are deterred, by the need
of earning to-day's and to-morrow's income, from entering seriously
into the speculative attitude and theoretical propaganda which are
so intimately identified with the Socialist movement. The experience
of definite and measurable progress reassures large numbers, and
restores their confidence in the present social order. Increases in
wages, improved conditions of labor, a healthy understanding of
the large movement which is ameliorating conditions generally,
and personal observation of the gradually improved type of em-
ployer, who is doing splendid work to humanize industry and pro-
tect the elementary decencies of life, are bringing to many laboring
men an attitude of mind which hinders them effectively from accept-
ing Socialism's first assumption. They know that the present social
order is not bankrupt.
The affinities of Socialism have helped to prevent its wider
acceptance. Laboring men and women, in whose hearts a reverent
Christian faith still abides, recoil by a sure spiritual instinct from
the Socialism which denounces all religion, scorns belief in the
divinity of Christ, and delights in the scornful denunciation of
organized Christianity. After allowing in fairness for repeated
assurances that Socialism has nothing to do with religion, the
Christian laboring men find facts enough, literature enough, and
1913.] THE ASSENT TO SOCIALISM 157
tendencies enough in the Socialist movement to frighten them away
from it. They prefer their sufferings, relieved by faith, to the
verbal assurances that Socialism will not disturb their faith, or,
having disturbed it, that it will give them ample compensation for
what it takes from them. I do not overlook the number that
think they can reconcile the profession of Socialism with the
profession of definite Christianity, nor do I attempt to show their
success. I wish for the moment merely to state the point that the
undeniable sympathy that Socialism displays for irreligion and
hatred for the Christian Church, hinders large numbers of devout
Christians from entering the movement. There is undoubtedly a
fundamental antagonism in the views of human nature, of human
imperfection, passion, and sin, of idealism and its function, of
personal responsibility, held by Socialism and by religion. Prob-
ably this antagonism is much more clearly perceived by scholarly
men of wide reading than by those to whom opportunity for this
has been denied.
Partisanship is another highly efficient check on the tendency
to accept the fundamental assumptions of Socialism. The political
party is inherent in American life, institutions, and imagination.
The thinking and the interpreting of the rock-ribbed American
partisan is limited and directed by his party. While the Repub-
lican Party is in ascendancy, no good Republican can believe that
any one of the three assumptions of Socialism is true. In his
mind the present social order is not only not bankrupt, but, on the
contrary, is highly effective. He thinks and feels in the terms
of the President's annual Thanksgiving proclamation. Hence, to
his way of thinking the three fundamental assumptions of Socialism
are nonsense. During a time of Democratic ascendancy, the good
Democrat feels and thinks in the same manner. He is therefore
amply protected against the most subtle and effective propaganda
that Socialism can command. If either party man is compelled to
admit that some things are going badly, he will contrive to find some
manner of blaming the other party for much of what is wrong,
and he will allow the imperfection of human nature and the limita-
tion of all human achievement to bear the remainder of blame.
Where genuine conviction may not account for the zeal of the
American partisan, the prospect of holding office, and of furthering
self-interest may be invoked in accounting for his zeal in action
and certainty in conviction.
The force of the partisan type of mind is a varying quantity.
I 5 8 THE ASSENT TO SOCIALISM [May,
The constant recurrence of the third party in our history shows
that there is always a margin of feeling and of thought which
the two great parties fail to absorb and satisfy. The gradual
absorption of what is vital in the third party into the other two
helps to account for the disappearance of these third parties. Un-
doubtedly the partisan mind is not as strong to-day as our parties
would like to see it. The scratched ballot is the symbol of the
emancipation of the party slave. Three processes in our current
life show that we are in a period of transition whose issue is doubt-
ful : the rise of the Progressive Party which may indicate a funda-
mental change in our political history; the entry of Socialism into
our life as a political party, and, finally, the rise and development
of organized labor.*
Organized labor arose and developed gigantic strength because
laboring men believed that our political parties either would not,
or could not, secure industrial justice for the masses. The labor
unions have generally preferred to confine themselves to economic
action to the exclusion of politics. From time to time the unions
*The following from President Wilson's Chicago speech, January nth, bears
on the point in mind:
" The hope of America is in the changing attitude of the business men of this
country towards the things which they have to handle in the future. If thought
and temper had not changed, the things could not have happened which have
happened in recent months. For what you have witnessed within the last two
months is not merely a political change; it is a change in the attitude and judg-
ment of the American people. One of the reasons why there were not two
parties contending for the supremacy at the recent election ; one reason why the field
of choice was varied and multiplied, was that the old lines are breaking up where
they are oldest, and that men are no longer to be catalogued."
And Mr. Roosevelt's words in his letter to the Progressives in Congress,
dated April $th, are equally relevant :
" We cannot amalgamate with either of the old boss-ridden, privilege-con-
trolled parties. We stand for the rights of the people. Where the rights of the
people can only be secured through the exercise of the national power, then we
are committed to the doctrine of using the national power to any extent that the
rights of the people demand.
" This of itself sunders us from the Democratic Party, for the Democratic
Party must either be false to its pledges and you can trust no party that is false
to its pledges or else it is irrevocably committed to the doctrine of some fifty
separate sovereignties, a doctrine which in practice means that the powers of
privilege can nullify every effort of the plain people to take possession of their
own government.
" As for the Republicans, their present position is the exact negation of the
attitude of Abraham Lincoln and the men of Lincoln's day. Lincoln declared the
people were masters over both Congress and the courts ; not, as he phrased it, to
destroy the Constitution, but to overthrow those who perverted the Constitu-
tion. We stand for the right of the people to have their well-determined wish be-
come part of the fundamental law of the land without permitting either court, leg-
islature, or executive to debar them from this right."
1913.] THE ASSENT TO SOCIALISM 159
have doubted their own wisdom, and they have made excursions
into politics with doubtful results. At present there is a marked
demand for political action by them. Their leaders endeavor to
satisfy it by asking the old parties to incorporate into platforms,
and promote before legislatures, measures in favor of laboring
classes. That even this attitude, which is fundamentally wise and
increasingly effective, fails to satisfy the aroused laboring men is
shown by the fact that very large numbers of them are becoming
Socialists. The frankly Socialist element must be counted on
nowadays in many of our labor conventions. This would seem
to indicate the regrettable truth that organized labor is losing some
of its power to stem the development of Socialism.
Socialism itself as an economic power, aside from economic
theory, may not appeal profoundly to large numbers of laboring
men. But when it is organized as a political party ; when it adopts
the methods, the vocabulary, and the processes of a political party,
it does appeal to many laboring men. It appears to express their
political aspirations in a more satisfactory manner than any other
party. Since the good American must have a party, he will look
with favor on the Socialist party if it answers the longings of his
heart with more assurance than that offered by the conservative
parties.
The sudden rise of the Progressive Party in the United States
has made the situation highly complicated and extremely interesting.
Whether or not its leadership shows a political sagacity, worthy
of its prestige and scholarship, remains to be seen. The party is
remarkable in that it professedly aims to secure industrial justice
for the weaker classes. It has drawn together high types of men
and women by whom ideals are genuinely respected, and whose
sympathies lead them to work earnestly for industrial justice. It
has drawn into its ranks men and women eminent in philanthropy,
in scholarship, in statesmanship, and in political experience. That
the new party has disturbed the stability of old-time partisanship
is beyond question. That it has been able to absorb the confidence
which was withdrawn from the old parties may well be doubted.
That it may have called back to fundamental confidence in the
established order many who were drifting toward Socialism, seems
to be implied in the claim that the Progressive vote reduced mater-
ially the Socialist vote in 1912.
The work which conservatism must do in order to hinder
the development of Socialism, must bear in converging lines directly
160 THE ASSENT TO SOCIALISM [May,
or indirectly, actually or by implication, on the three fundamental
assumptions to which reference has been made. We must hinder
the process of undermining confidence in the social order, the logical
issue of which process is experienced in the first assumption, which
declares that the present social order is bankrupt. We must make
clear, to the aroused minds of the people, the extent to which modern
capital is actually and specifically the cause of the massive social
injustice which all right-minded men deplore. If we succeed in
impressing on the popular imagination the extent to which capital
is to blame, our work in showing the other factors involved will
be more telling, and it will hinder these assumptions of Socialism
from general acceptance. If we can bring home to the minds
of the people in unmistakable terms the splendid progress which
has been made, the healthy processes of thought, feeling, and estab-
lishment by which we are daily making creditable amends for inex-
cusable delay, we shall materially weaken the charm of Socialism's
third assumption. Our work in doing this must take account of the
checks that are to be found in American life, and we should neither
underrate or overrate the absolute and the relative value of them
in our work.
Conservatism enjoys social, industrial, and political prestige. It
possesses most of the wealth, most of the scholarship, and most of
the political experience of the nation. If in spite of its disadvantage,
Socialism succeeds in making progress, it will be necessary to take
stock of our wisdom, and to revise our methods in order to explain
the mystery. Whatever of truth, of justice, of reasonable aspira-
tions and genuine human sympathy there is in Socialism, to that
extent Socialism will defy our opposition. Whatever of insincerity,
of mistaken reading of history, of erroneous interpretation of our
problems, of mistaken emphasis on human values, and of triumphant
selfishness and spiritual apathy there may be in conservative circles,
to that extent we scatter the seeds of peril with our own hands.
The victory will go with the conquest of the imagination and con-
fidence of the people. Not to logic, not to argument, not to
righteousness and truth necessarily, will voters flock and give their
trust. Least of all may we expect triumph when so much in our
thoughtless national life, in our short-sighted politics, in our com-
plicated adjustment of warring social forces, lends seeming con-
firmation to the assumptions on which Socialism builds with so
much insight, and w r hich it proclaims with so much power.
WHERE THE NATIONS HAVE KNELT.
BY JOSEPH FRANCIS WICKHAM.
jHE leathern curtain has fallen behind you, and at last
you stand within the greatest temple of the world.
You have no words to tell the thrill, no language
to translate the emotions of the soul, no power of
speech to render the sweep and current of sensation
that enthrall the heart. For this is not Westminster Abbey, nor
Notre Dame, nor the lovely cathedral in old Cologne, but it is
the vast living majesty within the gates of Saint Peter's.
As you drove clatteringly along the streets past the Piazza di
Spagna and on by the Piazza Colonna, you were not observing
the morning life of Rome, and had no admiring glances for church
fagade or ancient staircase, or any of the things of joyous beauty,
for you were dreaming of the queenly dome of Michelangelo
that every now and then was gleaming in the distance. Hadrian's
Tomb across the yellow Tiber, with the thoughts of eighteen
centuries buried in its mighty heart, held your vision only as a
symbol of the nearness of the goal, for this Castel Sant' Angelo
is close to the journey's end. A little while and you were before
the Piazza di San Pietro, looking in wonderment at Bernini's huge
colonnades that curve in graceful ellipse about the great space,
and lead the way to the quadrangle before the church steps.
Perhaps you looked up and read over the portico of the church
the name of Paul the Fifth. But perhaps, as is more probable,
you observed very few details, and your imagination and feelings
registered more impressions than you were actively conscious of,
for the immensity of it all is stupendous, and appalling to the
sight accustomed to things less gigantic.
But you are now within the church itself. Those who have
visited great Cathedrals are usually somewhat prepared for the first
view, and are ready to admire after the mental adjustment to the
new scene. But here no previous dream wakes into life, no pre-
conceived notions are born into fulfillment. You stand near the
bronze door of the central entrance, and look up the nave and
see the splendor of a vision of paradise extending for one-eighth
of a mile. And as you walk up that long space, you are awed in
VOL. xcvn. ii.
1 62 WHERE THE NATIONS HAVE KNELT [May,
wonderment of the grand arches, and your mind is surcharged by
the grace of Corinthian pillars, the richness of the color of marble
pavement, the perfect symmetry of the Latin cross that forms the
plan of the temple, and above all, perhaps, by the matchless beauty
of the dome, a sky of gold dazzling four hundred feet above your
head. You behold statues of saints in purest marble, mosaic rep-
resentations that glow in a warmth of color, chapels that are
churches. Everything is colossal, everything grand, everything
in fullest harmony. You can no more measure distance or height
here than you can judge the strength of an ocean wave or the
depth of a passing cloud. Everything is in such exquisite pro-
portion a pen eight feet long seems ready for your own hand.
Perhaps it is well in Saint Peter's to walk up the nave to
the apse and over the transepts before attempting to study anything
in leisurely analysis. Then you will come down the aisle to the
bronze door of Filarete, and be somewhat prepared to spend your
hours in less hurried admiring. And when you have done this,
and have caught the spell of the majestic aisles and the fascination
of the vaulted dome, you will pause longer near that round slab
of porphyry which is close to the central door. For eleven hun-
dred years this has justly been a spot of interest, for it was upon
this stone that the mighty Charlemagne knelt in the year 800 when
Leo the Third placed on his head the heavy crown of royalty, and
so made a Holy Roman Empire. Many another emperor received
the blessing here, too, when the world was younger and Europe
wore a less changed face.
But Charlemagne knelt on the porphyry disk in the year 800,
while the Saint Peter's you are visiting is of another age, of a
later building. So here at the threshold of the central fane of
Christendom you will allow your memory to search its gathered
spoil of chronicle for the origins of the cathedral. And back
you must turn the pages, back you must go to the very lifetime
of the Saint whose name is so worthily commemorated.
For it was on this Vatican hill, where Nero's circus used to be,
that Peter was crucified during Nero's persecution. Here he died
in the year 67. The little Christian group which, not far away,
had been watching and waiting in prayer, took the body and placed
it in a tomb on the Via Cornelia, close to the walls of the circus.
And they often came back to pray; and multitudes of other Roman
Christians visited the sacred spot in the years that followed.
Anacletus became the third Bishop and Pope of Rome, having
1913.] WHERE THE NATIONS HAVE KNELT 163
received his ordination to the priesthood from Peter himself. Now
thirty years or more after the Apostle had gone to heaven, Anacletus
erected a little oratory or memoria over the tomb, where Mass
could be said, and a handful of Christians could come and pray in
the presence of the grave of Christ's chosen one. Hither Chris-
tians came from all over the city, some already within call of martyr-
dom. Hither they came from all the Christian world, in reverent
pilgrimage to the little oratory. So began Saint Peter's Church.
Then two centuries later came Milvian Bridge and the celestial
sign that won victory. Then the Edict of Milan, and the Chris-
tians had a friend in the Emperor Constantine; so good a friend
that he placed a cross of gold on the tomb of Peter, and over the
tomb erected a beauteous altar overlaid with gold and silver and
studded with gleaming jewels. Then he tore down the temple
of Apollo, the old sun-god that he used to worship, and in the year
323 commenced a mighty basilica over the sacred relics of the
Apostle. In short season it was completed, and in the year 324,
in the presence of the emperor and all his court, was consecrated
by Pope Sylvester.
A magnificent structure was Constantine's basilica, the old
Saint Peter's. In the form of a cross, it was nearly four hundred
feet in length, and somewhat over two hundred feet wide. A long
colonnade led up to a flight of marble and porphyry steps to the
doors of the vestibule. From the vestibule the atrium was reached,
a large court in which palms and cypresses and olives in early times
grew in green beauty, though later the trees gave way to a marble
paving. In the centre of the atrium was a great fountain, near
whose cooling waters a visitor to the church would ofttimes wish to
linger. From the atrium five large doors opened into the basilica.
Five great aisles were formed by four rows of columns, and these
led the way to the choir just in front of the high altar, the first
stone altar of Christian worship. Time came when threescore and
more of altars graced the nave and aisles, but in the beginning
there was one only, the altar Constantine placed in the new basilica.
In time, too, beautiful paintings and mosaics and monuments bor-
dered the aisles and the wide spaces of the transepts.
Time, indeed, is needed to bring any object to full-blown
beauty. But time, unfortunately, brings, as well, decline and decay,
and so it dealt with Constantine's church. For over eleven hun-
dred years it lasted, the central church of Christendom, but in 1450
the walls began to settle down on one side, and Pope Nicholas the
164 WHERE THE NATIONS HAVE KNELT [May,
Fifth was sadly obliged to take steps toward its destruction. But
it was a costly matter to unbuild a great cathedral and to erect
another, and the times were troublous. So it was that next to
nothing had been done on the plans which Alberti and Rossellino had
made, when the Pope passed away.
For fifty years things lay in abeyance, until the great Julius
the Second came to the pontifical throne. He called to his service
the architect Bramante d'Urbino, who made new plans. The cor-
ner stone of the new Saint Peter's was laid by the Pope's hands
in 1506. Bramante conceived as his design a Greek cross, but
there were many shiftings between Greek and Latin before Michel-
angelo, the greatest architect of the several who worked on the
church, in his own design confirmed Bramante's judgment. Event-
ually, however, the Latin cross became the shape of the cathedral.
In the year 1626, almost precisely thirteen hundred years after Pope
Sylvester had consecrated the Basilica of Constantine, the present
Saint Peter's was consecrated by Urban the Eighth.
While the new Saint Peter's was rising, the old basilica was
being dismantled. In their hurry the architects and workmen often
destroyed many of the fine mosaics and mediaeval monuments and
memorials of early Christian days. Not all, however, for there are
a goodly number of various adornments from the old" church pre-
served in the present structure. Still had Michelangelo's plan
been adhered to, we should have to-day the beautiful atrium of
Constantine's cathedral, with the graceful porticoes on the four
sides. But the lengthening of the nave necessitated the destruction
of this last remnant of the old basilica, which had been the heart
of the worship of the world for twelve centuries.
So one may trace back the history of Saint Peter's as one
stands near the red disk of porphyry from the old church. The
slab, indeed, is a voice of the early Christian days, a voice that
speaks in the words of youthtime, or springtime.
Not far away, a little distance up the nave, is the bronze
figure of Saint Peter on a marble throne. Of the sixth century,
this monument is a magnificent work of art to the memory of
the first Bishop of Rome. But there is little need to linger long
at the statue of the Saint when the tomb, with all that remains of
the Apostle, are so close by. For in the centre of the church in a
sunken space, directly beneath the noble dome of Michelangelo,
rests the tomb of the first Pope. You approach it by walking
up the nave to an oval space encircled by a marble balustrade, and
1913-] WHERE THE NATIONS HAVE KNELT 165
made brilliant by numerous clusters of never-paling lamps. When
you have gone down the marble steps, past Canova's beautiful
statue of Pius the Sixth, in wonderment at the precious stones that
deck the walls and floor about you, you stand just without the
bronze doors leading to the niche, the floor of which rests above
Peter's tomb. Here the body of the Apostle was buried when
Saint Peter's was undreamed, and the place of entombment lay
against the wall of the circus of Nero. Here the tomb remained
when Anacletus built the memorial oratory. Here the tomb lay
when Constantine built over it an altar, and, later, on ground em-
bracing part of Nero's circus, a mighty basilica not less famed
than its successor. And here the tomb still lies, unmoved in the
nineteen centuries, the centre of Christian interest in the year 67,
the focus of Christian pilgrimage in this twentieth century. In one
single spot has the tomb reposed, while the revolution of wearied
years journeyed on in unrelenting succession, changing the things
that claim their life from time and their fame from the vicissitudes
of mortal desires. Peter's tomb has lain in the same spot since the
beginning, and for all those centuries, save for the brief time
it reposed in the catacombs, transferred thither for safety, the
body of the Apostle has rested in the same sarcophagus.
When you ascend into the nave again, you will proceed a short
distance to where the high altar stands forth in glory beneath
Bernini's soaring canopy. Here in days not far gone, it was the
custom for the Pope to celebrate Mass on the grand festivals of
the Church. Viewed as a spectacle, wondrous it must have been
to behold, bordering the great nave on either side, the files of
Swiss guards in glitter and gold; the ranks of countless priests in
black cassock and white surplice; a half a hundred monsignori and
bishops in purple mantle; a score of cardinals radiant in scarlet;
and in purest of white robes, the reigning Pope, a Gregory the
Sixteenth, perhaps, or a Pius the Ninth. The fragrant incense ris-
ing in clouds from swinging censers ; a thousand lights glowing on
priceless altars ; the liquid melody of an incomparable choir; the sun-
beams of heaven streaming through beauteous windows; and the
dome of a master builder hanging like a mother's protection over
a multitude of sixty thousand, the residents of Rome and the visitors
of the world: nothing on earth could surpass all this. Then
suddenly the movement through that multitude would cease; the
stir of expectation would subside; and the great temple would be
calm and still.
i66 WHERE THE NATIONS HAVE KNELT [May,
Under the vast dome-halo which encircled them the throng
would drop to their knees cardinals, bishops, monsignori, priests ;
princes, generals, ambassadors; men of Rome and men of England
and from every sun; humble mothers with babes in their arms,
and women of fashion's choosing. And while they knelt there, with
heads bowed in adoration, a gentle bell would tinkle in soft herald-
ing, and the Vicar of Christ would raise high in the air the white
Body of the Lord. Then the great organ would burst out again
into wonderful music, and a hundred voices would chant God's
praises in happy unison, and the immense volume of sound would
sweep down the aisles, and would gather resonance among the
chapels, and would tremble about columns and capitals, and would
rise in grand triumph amid lofty arches even to the inmost circle of
the wondrous dome. Rarely nowadays may one see those splendid
pageants at Saint Peter's. But the glorious memories cling to its
aisles and its altars, radiant and undimmed, like the remembrance
of a well-loved friend.
From the high altar one passes to the apse at the end of the
church, where stands Bernini's colossal chair of gilded bronze, in-
closing the chair Saint Peter used as Bishop of Rome. This is
a fitting point from which to begin a visit to the various chapels
that are built along the aisles and transepts. Twenty-seven chapels
there are in all, some of surpassing interest. It is indeed well-nigh
impossible to make selection here in this vast assemblage of beau-
teous tombs and well-modeled statues and exquisitely executed
mosaics.
Of the mosaics the two generally conceded to be the best are
the " Transfiguration," after Raphael's painting in the Vatican, and
the " Burial of Saint Petronilla," after Guercino. They are mar-
velously wrought, and, from one's viewpoint along the church aisle,
resemble for all the world superior oil paintings rich in every
merit of tone and color. And if they are lesser things in order
of creation, in any event they will last forever, a splendid triumph
of mechanical art.
Among the tombs, that of Sixtus the Fourth is one of the most
noteworthy. It stands in the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament.
Pollajuolo executed the work in bronze, and to his artistry is due
the quietude and calm of the figure of the first Rovere Pope recum-
bent on the sarcophagus. Sharing the tomb with him lies the dust
of the resolute Julius the Second, who laid the foundation stone
of the church, and called Bramante to build it. Scarcely less ex-
1913-] WHERE THE NATIONS HAVE KNELT 167
quisite, perhaps, in design and execution is Canova's masterpiece,
the tomb of Clement the Thirteenth. Between the figures of Death
and Religion the Pope is seen praying, while below the figures
of two lions complete the grouping.
By far the most excellent of the many statues in the cathedral
is the " Pieta " of Michelangelo. The great sculptor took as his
theme the sorrow of our Lady for her divine Son's Crucifixion.
The body of the dead Christ is lying in her arms, a human form
resting after much labor, at peace after much pain. The Virgin
gazes upon her dead Son lovingly and tenderly, with the look of
a mother's compassion in her quiet face, and the dolorous woe of
a world's weeping lying beneath her drooping eyes. The " Pieta "
is one of the most exquisite conceptions of the ages, and one of
the most beautiful creations of art in the world.
So the visitor wanders through the massive edifice, admiring
here a fine mosaic or here a delicately carved altar-rail, or over
yonder a beauteously chiseled tomb above the sainted dust of cen-
turies agone. He will be glad of the many treasures preserved
from old Saint Peter's, the monuments and tombs and brazen
doors reaching in spirit across the ages. He has seen the apse
where the canonizations are determined in solemn procedure; he
has walked through the right transept, where the (Ecumenical Coun-
cil was assembled in 1870, and where Papal infallibility was pro-
claimed to the nations; and into the left transept where the penitent
pilgrims of every clime may tell in the language of home their tales
of regretted folly, and may seek surcease from the weariness of sin.
And when he has seen and felt what a single visit to Saint Peter's
will let him see and feel, he will walk down the nave again toward
the door, and perhaps pause in rest a moment near the Porta Santa
on the other side from the baptistery font which claims birth from
Hadrian's mausoleum.
The Porta Santa swings not to the coming and going of visitors
as do the other doors, but opens only once in twenty-five years, in the
years of jubilee. But as you stand here, leaning against a great
column, with eyes half-closed in reverie, you can see in the joy-land
of imagination this door swing open, and all the bronze doors of
the church, and the ages of the past file by you, century after cen-
tury, straight up the nave to the tomb of Peter. Watch them
you will, in their long procession, in their varied mien: slender
little centuries, the weak, starveling centuries of early Christianity;
then stronger figures; then ages still stronger and sterner, with the
i68 WHERE THE NATIONS HAVE KNELT [May,
mark of holiness on their brows and the stamp of vigor sealed in
the set lines of their eyes ; then the wraith-like figures come in con-
fidence and power; three pitiful centuries, with ranks only half-
filled; and after them again the prayerful hosts of the years that
are. It is all very strange, but wonderfully clear the vision becomes
as you stand by the Porta Santa.
Now the procession is returning and marching down the
nave, after the visit of veneration to the Apostle's tomb. But this
time it is not the mere impersonal ghosts of the years that you see,
but with a lucid sight you catch the features of the personages
in the marching, and distinguish them marvelously, as if they are
old friends. In the procession are the people from every country
and every clime, people of every rank and every age. Martyrs are
there, Saint Maurus and Saint Simplician, and a host more; and
their fellow-saints, Athansius and Ambrose and Jerome, Patrick
and Boniface and Anselm, and Dominic and the one of Assisi
and Ignatius Loyola; kings are there, Csedwalla the West-Saxon,
Conrad the Mercian, Ceowulf the Northumbrian, Ethelwulf and
Alfred and Canute, and many another from France and Germany.
All these are in the front ranks, while after them come many
another holy man, and many another king and queen, and many a
mild- faced nun, and many a widowed matron, and many a boy
and girl in years all tender. Down the long aisle they glide in
the softness of silence, slowly and steadily, one long, uninterrupted,
unbroken legion of loyalty. Still they are coming on, in the motley
dress of Spain and France and England and Germany, and Asia
and Africa; prince and knight and page, goldsmith and painter and
soldier, poet and merchant and legate, man of law and doctor of
physic, and the hopeful alchemist, the scholar from Oxford and
from Paris and from Salamanca, and a thousand, thousand more.
Then the people of a new continent are distinguished, and they are
mingled with the others, and come marching past you.
So the mighty procession passes through the open doors to the
end, while you stand aside a stranger soul, yet feeling in your
breast a comradeship born of the thought that you, too, are of
them and of their guild. You have been resting here for ten min-
utes, perhaps, yet in that time all the world from the first century
to the twentieth has passed in review as a mighty army. For so
visions will come in Saint Peter's; it is easy to thrust aside the
film-curtain that clouds the imagination, and sweep away the cob-
web of Time.
1913.] WHERE THE NATIONS HAVE KNELT 169
Saint Peter's is indeed the focus of the earth's citizens. If
one could remain on its portals for half a lifetime, one would see
every well-known being of the world climb the steps, and a hun-
dred different types of all the rest. Distinction of religion makes
no one hesitant of visiting the great cathedral. There is reason
enough for the coming of all, Catholic or Protestant, Hebrew or
Mohammedan, or the Brahmin from sacred Delhi. Some come to
admire, some to study, and some to pray. And ever the stream of
visitors will flow on, inexhaustible, unwavering, in steady volume,
till the end of everything.
But now that your day-dream is over, and all is as it was
before, you will wish to leave the Porta Santa and ascend to the
galleries in the cupola to view the vastness of the edifice from
the higher level. The effect is very wonderful as you look down
on the pavement from this height; everything below seems so very
minute, so exceedingly atomic indeed. Bernini's canopy is ninety-
five feet from the pavement, but it is small, very small, now. You
can see human beings flitting about the church, hundreds of them,
and they seem no different from infinitesimal checkers moving
mechanically over the flat surface.
While the tiny figures are shifting beneath you, it is hard for
you up here so high to realize that below that floor down in the
crypts, or under the chapel altars, lie the dust of the great beings
of the earth. The Apostle is not alone in death. With him is
Leo the First, who stayed the hand of Attila and Genseric; here is
Gregory the Great, who loved England and her conversion ; Adrian
the Fourth, who came out of England, and who crowned Frederick
Barbarossa; Nicholas the Fifth, the patron of the Renaissance;
Paul the Second, who came from Venice like Pius the Tenth;
Julius the Second, to whom the present Saint Peter's is largely due;
Pius the Ninth, of recent memory; and many more. Saint John
Chrysostom waits here in silence; Otho the Second dreams here
of misty empires and the sceptre; and here lie the last of the
Stuarts, James and Prince Charles and Henry, Cardinal Duke
of York, together communing on the golden days when their
house was a house of kings and glory was in flower.
From this contemplation of death you will turn, to climb still
higher and emerge into the open air. Rome lies before you, the
wonderful deathless city, stretching from the Tiber far and away
toward the roses and cypresses of Tivoli. You can see on one
side the road that leads to San Paolo fuori le Mura, and on the
i ;o WHERE THE NATIONS HAVE KNELT [May,
other the gardens of the Pincio not far from the broad Corso,
and between them the network of streets and palaces and ancient
churches of modern Rome. It is easy to read Rome's history
up here. Servius Tullius seems qui^2 close, and Cincinnatus, and
Tiberius Gracchus, and Sulla, and Julius Caesar, and Augustus.
You can see the flash of the western sun on helmet and spear as
the legions swing into the city over the Via Appia; you can see
the crowds gathered at the circus from all the seven hills of the
city, watching famished lions tear the pale Christians to make an
autumn holiday; you can see Peter toiling under his cross on the
ground beneath you; you can see Leo fearlessly going out to
challenge Attila with the name of the unknown God; you can
see Hildebrand leaving the Castel Sant' Angelo for the Lateran
with Robert Guiscard; you can see the vain and heroic Rienzi,
last of the tribunes, calling on Rome to follow him; you can see
the German savages of the Constable de Bourbon rushing into
the avenues of Rome and making a helldom of a sacred city. All
the panorama passes rapidly before you as the sun dissolves each
picture and creates another. And this is what Rome is, this is
what draws us to her, this is why we cling to her welcome. With-
out her Caesars, without her Popes, Rome would be as another
European city, much like Berlin or Madrid or Paris or London.
With her Caesars, with her Popes, she is Rome.
Now you descend, and into the church again, and, before you
leave, once more you will go up to the altar before which the red
lamp glows, and make your prayer to the unseen God; to the
Supreme Maker Who breathed the fire of genius into all who made
His temple worthy as creatures could frame it of His divine glory;
to the kind Lord Who has watched the peoples of Christendom
kneel before His abode behind the golden door, and, watching, has
been glad. Saint Peter's is the noblest monument of human
artistic achievement; but it is, as well, the house of worship of all
the world.
Once more you look about you, at the high dome and the
transepts and the tribunes and the tombs and the monuments and
the altars, and you reflect on what it all means. For it is the
greatest single structure in the world, the undying voice of the most
artistic period since the days of Pericles, the glorification of the
foremost worker of his time, Michelangelo, the expression of the
Church's never-failing patronage of the arts, the embodiment of
man's eternal seeking for the victory of the spirit, the beauteous
1913-] WHERE THE NATIONS HAVE KNELT 171
symbol of the living faith of two hundred and fifty millions of
Christian souls. It is the most interesting thing in Rome. The
Forum gives tongue to the old republic, but the republic died, never
to revive; the Colosseum speaks the manners of the empirje, but
the empire fell, tottering in its own decay, a tired and worn-out
thing; Saint Peter's is the voice of the Church of God, and the
Church has lived, though torn and scourged and trodden by foes
within and without the lines, and the Church will ever live till the
angel's calling is heard in the sky and the song of the world is still.
But while the world lasts, while the Church lasts, Saint Peter's,
perhaps in a thousand newer plannings and a thousand finer build-
ings, will continue to draw to its threshold the pathways of the
earth and the countless millions who will ask the peace of its
shrines. When the palaces of now proud dynasties of kings
will have fallen, and wondrous buildings of marble stateliness will
have long lain shattered, and the gardens of present loveliness
will have become a dreary waste, there will be pilgrims from the
forbidden valleys of old Cathay gazing in gladness on the beauty
of a Saint Peter's in Rome, and worshippers from the isles of the
tropic seas kneeling at its altars.
While the spell is still on you, and the resolution to come
again and again and again, you walk softly down the long aisle,
push back the leathern curtain once more, and quietly descend the
steps into the Piazza. The old obelisk from Heliopolis looks down
upon you, counting you as one more on the ever-lengthening roll
of pilgrims to the cathedral of Christendom. The fountains play-
ing gracefully on either side are cooling the summer air, and
whispering across the court the memories of the years. Past them
you go, your mind trembling under the burden of a myriad thoughts,
and your heart charged to overflowing with the emotions that beg
in turn for the mastery. Behind you stands the church of the
world, the church where all the nations of the earth have knelt,
where the mingled prayers of a hundred stranger tongues have
ascended to Heaven, where the congregated worship of an army
throng has risen as a cloud of incense to the mighty Father.
Behind you lie the sainted bones of martyred pontiffs and the holy
remains of many a Christian hero, and amid them all, waiting
with them the promised day yet to dawn from the time-land, lies
the hallowed dust of the one who saw in life the Master face to
face, Saint Peter.
Such thoughts will be yours as you walk along in silence.
172 A PAINTER'S VISION [May,
Such thoughts were ours one summer day as we crossed the
Piazza and were nearing the end of the lovely colonnades. It
had been all gladsome during the hours, and we were happy, and
we were going home to rest. And while we waited for our car-
riage to drive up, we looked back once more on Saint Peter's
massive dome; once more we viewed the splendid fagade and the
balcony where Pius the Ninth used to appear and raise his hand
in benediction to the city and to the world, while all the city,
assembled in silent reverence below, stood sponsor for the world;
once again we let our eyes sweep across the mighty ellipse where
a nation's chivalry might camp. We had penetrated more deeply
into the secret of Rome's fascination; we had approached a little
closer to her ever-elusive charm; we had been granted a juster
meaning of her mystery, and had found a new reason of her life
eternal.
A PAINTER'S VISION.
BY CAROLINE D. SWAN.
CLOSE by the sea a carven ruin stands,
Of old, a church. Its arches, splendid yet
With red and blue and gold, are sunk and wet
About their bases. Weeds and yellow sands
Block up the chancel, though with out-stretched hands
A strange, forsaken Christ above is set
In gold-rimmed fresco. Calm o'er force or fret,
The curved wall of the apse it still commands.
Is this symbolic? Sea-waves, creeping in,
Have new-baptized its pillars; flaking off,
Broken mosaics mar its pulpit's grace.
Neglect, the willful world, its woe and sin,
Are in it all! Yet strong, above its scoff,
The Changeless One presides with loving Face.
THE RED ASCENT.
BY ESTHER W. NEILL.
CHAPTER V.
HEN the imaginary lady with the "passion for
antiques " had completed her purchase of the Mat-
terson plate, Richard received five hundred dollars
by express. Four hundred of this paid the interest
on the mortgage, the remaining hundred was ex-
pended with infinitesimal care, every cent so carefully guarded
that the Colonel was openly disgusted. Economy was an abstract
virtue that he condoned only in the abstract. Penuriousness had
never been practiced under his roof before.
For three long evenings from supper until bedtime, Richard
sat with pencil and paper planning how he could spread out that
hundred dollars to cover his immediate needs, trying to decide
which of all his necessities were most essential.
The list read : " Horse, plow, harness, seed, bricks, shingles,
fence wire, lumber." Then, halting for a moment in his work, he
would go to the bookcase, and getting out a number of farm
journals, begin to study the cheapest and best fertilizers to add
to his compact heaps. True to his habit of concentration, he
would spend hours poring over these old magazines, his scientific
instinct roused by new methods, modern devices. Then he would
begin another list of necessities : " Incubator, rubber roofing, tool
grinder, gasoline engine, fruit sprayer." But smiling at the im-
possibility of securing these desirable appliances, he would throw
that list in the fire, and begin again with the most rudimentary
tools : " Spade, hoe, ax, hammer."
" Betty," he said one night, " I don't believe I am very prac-
tical after all."
The Colonel, who was half -dozing in his chair, roused at the
words. "Has that fact just dawned upon you?" he asked.
" It's dawning," replied Richard good-naturedly. " I am just
trying to decide what we had better do with that hundred dollars."
" God have mercy," said the Colonel. " Haven't you spent
that hundred dollars yet, with the house falling about our ears?
174 THE RED ASCENT [May,
Send for Joe Brown and have him fix that chimney ; that last storm
blew the bricks into the kitchen yard, and hire a nigger or two.
Your hands begin to look like a plowman's."
Richard regarded his offending members with smiling uncon-
cern. The palms had blistered and then grown hard; the nails
were broken. The Colonel's hands were as soft and smooth as
a woman's; the nails pink and polished; attention to them had
always been his one feminine weakness.
" Yes, we must have that chimney repaired," said Richard
reflectively. " It's dangerous as it is."
" And I need a pair of slippers dreadfully" said Betty.
" Satin slippers here they are advertised in this department store
catalogue; French heels, chiffon bows, five dollars! Oh, Dick!
I must have a pair."
" All right, Betty," he said, and to his credit he did not
for a moment consider what that five dollars would buy. " I
believe it's one of our traditions to dance when our fortunes have
failed us."
" It is, sir," said the Colonel. " Your great-aunts who lived in
Richmond were impoverished by the war. They gave away all
their money and clothes to help the cause; they had nothing left
but their ball gowns. I found them dressed in white satin sitting
in the drawing-room, playing their guitars, and, by heaven, sir, they
hadn't a crumb in the larder."
" I suppose it's in the blood," said Richard a little wearily.
" Now we have a race horse "
" I'll not sell her at any price," said the Colonel on the defen-
sive at once. " If we can't get a living off five hundred acres
of land, then we don't deserve to live, sir we don't deserve to live."
" Perhaps I don't," said Richard humorously.
The discussion had ended there. After a few evenings of
filial consideration of the Colonel's wishes, Richard found that all
the old gentleman's ideas, with the exception of the chimney, were
impractical. If he could wrest a bare living off the farm this
first year, it must be by his own initiative and by his own manual
labor. The small debt that he was obliged to contract for dry
groceries and feed for the horses worried him. He could not agree
to hire hands when he had no money to pay them for their time.
Meanwhile he sought advice from the old farmers who worked
their truck gardens in his vicinity, and he listened eagerly to any
suggestions offered by the loungers at the village store; he read
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 175
all the books he could borrow on horticulture, and he sent to
Washington for the bulletins that are issued there from the Bureau
of Soils. When he spent his hundred dollars the items read:
" One pair of satin slippers, repairing chimney, plow, seeds, spade,
hoe, hammer, nails, hinges, window glass."
After two months of untiring effort, Matterson Hall began to
recover some appearance of past prosperity; the shutters swung on
strong new hinges; the windowpanes had been puttied into place;
the pillar of the porch had been repaired; the chimney bricked
to its normal height; the roses bloomed with wild profusion in
the carefully bordered garden beds; in the kitchen garden some of
the earlier vegetables were ready for the picking, and the green
blades of corn in the moist, brown fields promised an abundant
harvest but Richard had paid.
He was tired, physically exhausted by the unaccustomed la-
bors of a day. Too tired for anything but a hurried prayer at
night as he sank into a dreamless sleep ; too tired for any intellectual
relief that he might have found in books; too tired to think, to
reason about anything except the clamoring work for the morrow
currying the horses, milking the cow, plowing, digging, planting,
grubbing up stumps, blasting away rocks, chopping wood, drawing
water, working with old tools that broke in his energetic grasp,
working, working feverishly like a prisoner trying to file his way
out to liberty. He thought of the old monks following the plow
in prayerful meditation, but he was not like them he told himself.
He could not work with the ease and distraction of long-accustomed
habit. His mind was focused on the tasks he had to do, and the
tasks were unremitting. One pair of unpracticed hands trying to
perform the work of ten, and hampered at every turn by the need
of ready money.
The Colonel was of no assistance. He viewed the changes
in his home with some satisfaction, but disapproved entirely of
Richard's methods. A gentleman did not plow his own fields when
the country was full of worthless niggers; a gentleman did not
clean his own stable; a gentleman did not do his own milking;
a gentleman gave up some time to social intercourse with his
neighbors.
Richard found it wiser not to take the Colonel too seriously.
' You have to do the social stunt for both of us," he said.
" I'm too busy, and I haven't any clothes."
The lack of fresh clothes was a real trial to him. He did not
1 76 THE RED ASCENT [May,
mind cheapness or shabbiness, but the few suits he owned were all
mud-stained, and he had always craved cleanliness. It seemed to
him that he was ahvays in the dirt. A grime had crept under
his finger nails that he could not remove; the pores of his face
seemed clogged with dust. It was when he realized that he was
growing half -indifferent to these facts that he took his first real
recreation.
About half a mile from the Hall there was a small stream that
bubbled briskly over rocks and roots, and emptied itself into a
hollow. In this cool-shaded swimming pool Richard had spent
many hot afternoons as a boy, but the pool had become shallow
with the years, or perhaps the difference was in his own height.
He determined to widen and deepen it. Whenever he could spare
an hour out of his busy day, he worked like a beaver scooping
out the dead leaves, dredging out the stones and mud, digging away
the bank on one side, and building a dam with the refuse on the
other. When the work was finished and the water had cleared,
the pool seemed a priceless luxury.
Anxious to share it with someone, he improvised a little bath
house on the fern-grown bank, and, garbed in a bathing suit that
he had left over from one of his summer outings, he brought
Betty out to watch him disport himself in the water. She was
enthusiastic about the place, and she ran home to hunt a bathing
dress for herself, making him promise that he would teach her
to swim.
After she had gone he finished his bath, dressed himself, and
then lay for a few moments outstretched in the shade, his body
so still that some inquisitive robins fluttered over him unafraid of
the big sunburned hand that seemed so impotent in its stillness.
A dozen duties left undone came into his mind to plague him,
and destroy the perfect peace of this brief interim of rest. Perhaps
next year the farm would pay and permit a breathing space;
perhaps he could introduce some of the modern time-saving devices;
perhaps he might dare to go into debt if a crop was assured. Now
his farming was all experimental. He had no faith in the outcome.
His seminary life seemed drifting from him into a dim back-
ground. He had put all thought of it away from him purposely.
He never could go back. The Colonel needed him; Betty needed
him, and, believing that he was facing the inevitable, the keenness
of his disappointment lessened, and even his desire to return seemed
dulled. After all if the grind of the work could be lifted, he could
1913-] THE RED ASCENT 177
find vast satisfaction in the life of a scholar. He could supervise
the farm with an intelligence that would make it a paying proposi-
tion; he could live the calm peaceful life of the old-time planter,
and he could write. It might be possible that his pen would prove
more powerful than his preaching. His day dream was interrupted
by someone lifting his hand, and a woman's voice said:
" I thought you were dead or hurt. You always were pro-
voking."
He looked up lazily. A girl stood leaning against one of the
tree trunks, dressed in a black riding habit, which was covered with
mud. She wore no hat; her hair plaited in two thick braids fell
across her shoulders; her riding boots were muddy to the ankles.
One cheek bore a daub of dirt that made the rest of her face look
all the fairer by contrast. Her appearance was so startling that
Richard rose hastily, oblivious to any conventional greeting.
" Where did you come from ? " he asked.
She laughed with no trace of embarrassment. " I came over
my horse's head into that mud puddle, if you must know."
" And where is the horse ? "
" He has run away."
"Which way?"
" I'm sure I don't care. Please don't think of catching him. I
never want to see him again."
"But why didn't I hear him breaking through the bushes?"
" I'm sure I don't know that either."
"Are you hurt?"
"Now isn't that a foolish question? Do you suppose if
I had been hurt that I would have been so solicitous about you ? "
" Oh, I didn't know you were solicitous."
" Didn't I cross that stream on stepping-stones, and climb up
that slippery bank, to discover if you were dead or not?"
" And having discovered that I was alive, you said, 'How
provoking.' '
" Of course don't you know who I am? "
" A friend of the coroner's, I should suppose," he said humor-
ously.
She met this remark by pulling off her mud-caked gloves,
and shutting her eyes until they were mere slits, she pulled down
the corners of her mouth, " Now don't I look more familiar ? "
He laughed at the absurdity of the grimace. " I don't think
I ever saw you before," he said frankly, " unless "
VOL. XCVIL 12.
i 7 8 THE RED ASCENT [May,
" Go on."
" Unless you're Jess Fielding."
" I am. I thought you would remember. I used to make
faces at you over the fence. I was poor white trash
dressed in a gingham apron, and a sun bonnet, snub nose, freckle
face, now "
" You don't look like that now," he said awkwardly.
"Think I've improved?"
" Why, yes, I suppose so."
"And I suppose that's a compliment," she said teasingly.
" I never contradict compliments. People ought to be encouraged
to say pleasant things in this uncomfortable world."
"Is it uncomfortable?"
" I think so."
"Why?"
" Because well people seldom get what they want, and when
they do they don't want it. Isn't that lucid? "
" Very," he smiled.
" Now, you haven't got what you want."
"How do you know?"
" I heard you wanted to be a priest."
He was a trifle annoyed at this discussion of his private affairs.
" I've given up that idea," he said quietly.
She sat down beside him, and began to scrape the mud off
her riding boots. " So have I," she said.
He looked bewildered. " I don't exactly see," he began.
"Of course you don't. Men always want to see everything.
That's one reason they are so unsatisfactory. They never feel their
way round corners like women do. You thought of being a priest,
gave it up no disgrace in that. I thought of being a nun. Is
that more startling? It was only a mood with me; I didn't have
any vocation; I didn't even go to the convent to try; I couldn't
stand the monotony of the life; I'm too turbulent, impulsive, im-
pious; I'm just tired."
" Tired," the word sunk deep in his heart, and roused him to
sympathy and confidences. " So am I," he said.
" Oh, I'm tired of being useless, and you're tired because
you have to work so hard. I'd like to come over and help you
dig."
*' I haven't any tools," he said. He did not realize the hope-
lessness that had crept into his tones; he did not know that with
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 179
her quick intuition she had comprehended the struggle he was
making.
" I'll send you some."
" I'll have to pay for them with radishes."
" Why, haven't you any money? "
The question would have seemed preposterous in a drawing-
room. Here in the woods, in the strangeness of their meeting, the
conventions did not seem to count.
" No," he said.
" And I have too much."
"Too much?" he repeated. "I did not know anyone ever
had too much."
" But they can. We have too much now. We used to have
too little. You remember how poor we were. I had to go to bed
when mother washed my dress. I only had one. Poor mother
died in the struggle; then father struck oil. Now he has silver
mines, coal mines, oil wells, railroads; I've been everywhere. I
went to school in Paris, Germany, Italy. I've been around the
world three times; I've studied art and music and the languages.
I haven't a particle of talent for anything. I've motored, and
driven and ridden on camels and elephants ; I've climbed mountains,
crossed deserts, met all kinds of people. Now I've come back.
I know you will laugh, but I wanted to come back here where
everybody snubbed me in the old days back here to make good."
But Richard did not smile, and she went on : " Father has
bought the old Hedricks' coal mines, five miles from here. You
remember old Mr. Hedricks had so much trouble with negro labor ?
Father has brought all sorts of foreigners down. Such a con-
glomerate mass, and they live like pigs."
" I know," he said, " I was over there yesterday; but I think
that is partly your fault."
"My fault?"
" You own the mines. You could build them decent houses,
give them higher wages; I think the owner ought to help."
" Hm," she said reflectively. " Suppose you were the owner ?
I hear the Colonel declares you are; he's going around the county
telling people that my grandfather forged the papers giving him
the title to the Texas land. Without the Texas lands we would be
nowhere. I'd still be wearing my sun-bonnet and my outgrown
gingham dress."
" What does your father say? "
i8o THE RED ASCENT [May,
" Father ? He's not here. He's out west looking into copper
mines. I shouldn't think it would be his mission to go to work to
prove himself a pauper, and your father well, please pardon me,
but everybody knows that the Colonel is too lazy to work for
anything." She got up and tried to beat some of the mud off her
skirt with her riding crop. " I must be going," she said. " Miss
Prunesy Prisms will see my horse and get worried about me."
" And who is she ? " he asked.
Miss Fielding laughed. " Haven't we asked each other a lot
of questions? Very bad form to ask questions. Miss Prunesy
would be scandalized, but being polite is one of the things I'm tired
of. Miss Prunesy is a pet name I have for my old governess.
She lives with me. She comes from New England, and is very
punctilious. I call her Prunesy Prisms partly on that account, and
partly because I found her in a cheap boarding house in Boston,
the kind of boarding house that has one prismatic chandelier in
the parlor, and that feeds you on prunes three times a day. I'm
very fond of Prunesy; she chaperones me, and I mother her. She's
not very practical; she's spooky."
"Spooky?"
" Believes in ghosts. Hopes to see one some day. Makes a
study of the occult. If it weren't for her religion and her rheuma-
tism I believe she would go live in a graveyard and try to chum
with disembodied spirits, but since I've adopted her she's grown
quite cheerful and normal. Now I'm really going. Come and
see me, won't you? "
He shook his head. " I won't have the time," he answered.
She held out her hand to him : " Why that's the only reason
I want you," she smiled.
CHAPTER VI.
When Richard reached home it was four o'clock. He had
wasted two hours of a precious day. It had been so long since
he allowed himself any leisure, that he felt conscious-stricken when
Betty met him at the door and asked:
*" Where have you been all this time ? "
" I've been talking to Miss Fielding."
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 181
"Why, where did you meet her?"
" Down by the swimming pool. Her horse threw her into
a mud puddle, but fortunately she was not hurt."
"How did she look?" *
" Well, she looked rather muddy."
" Oh, Dick Dick, you know what I mean? Is she as beautiful
as people say she is ? "
He looked perplexed. " I don't know."
"Didn't you look at her?"
"Why, yes."
"And you don't know whether she is pretty or not? "
"Why, I suppose she is; I never thought about it."
" Well, you are funny," said Betty with a hopeless shake of her
head. " Most men think of that the first thing. I've been crazy
to see her. They say she has traveled everywhere, and that she
was presented at court in a white satin dress with a train four yards
long."
" Must have been dreadfully in the way," he interrupted.
" Oh, I suppose it was, but think of being rich enough to trail
four yards of satin over a dusty floor, and not care whether it gets
dirty or not."
" Let us hope the floor wasn't dusty."
" You are never serious," said Betty. " Don't you know that
all women adore clothes? I'm getting dreadfully tired of being
shabby;" she sat down on the top step, and, leaning her curly
head against one of the porch pillars, she looked ruefully down
at her soiled linen skirt. " I don't suppose I'll ever have anything,"
she sighed. " I came home to see if I could find something
to cut into a bathing suit, and there's nothing. Jess Fielding
seems to have everything. You know they have come to live in
the old Hedricks' house. People say they've turned it into a
palace; brocade covered walls; all kinds of hand-carved furniture
they bought in Europe; electric lights; five landscape gardeners
fixing the grounds, and we we have nothing."
" I don't know," he said cheerfully, " I think we have a
great deal."
" We have a roof above our heads and a bed to sleep on; what
else ? We have no money, and I don't see how we are going to get
on any longer without it. Bonny has a calf, that means no milk
or butter for us; the cow shed is leaking; there's some kind of
a bug eating the beans you planted in the garden ; the chickens need
182 THE RED ASCENT [May,
feed; the cornmeal bin is empty, and the Colonel has ordered a
new bridle for Spangles I don't know how he expects to pay for
it and Jess Fielding has invited us to a masquerade party, and
and I haven't a thing to wear."
It was a climax. Betty buried her face in her hands and
sobbed. Richard sat down beside her. He felt weak with a sense
of failure. From his normal point of view, Betty's lack of a ball
gown would have seemed a small tragedy, but he was not normal.
Exhausted by overwork in the fields, beset continually by the in-
numerable demands of the household, fearing to go in debt himself,
yet having to struggle to keep down the Colonel's luxurious ex-
penditures, Betty's tears made him feel powerless, mercenary, des-
perate. But his long-practiced efforts at self-control now made his
voice fall calm and unafraid.
" If it's a masquerade, any kind of fancy fixing will do. I'm
sure we can find something in the attic."
Her tears were like a sudden rainfall. She wiped them hur-
riedly away, reassured by his suggestion.
" What will you wear? " she asked.
"Me?"
" Why, you're invited too, and where can you get a costume? "
"That's easy," he answered. "I'll be delighted to stay at
home."
" But you can't," she said with great finality. " You will
have to take me. I can't drive five miles through the woods at
midnight, and have one of those fearful foreign miners murder
me on the way."
" Do you want to go so very much ? "
" Why, Dick, I'd be broken-hearted if I had to stay at home.
I'd go if I had to walk all the distance. You will have to take me.
You surely wouldn't be cruel enough to deprive me of a pleasure
like this."
" But, Betty, dear, I don't know what to do at parties."
"Why you dance?"
" I don't know how."
" Then you'll have to sit around and talk to the girls."
" I don't know how to do that either."
" Why, Dick ! Didn't you ever go to parties when you were
at college?"
"' Not if I could help it."
" But you wouldn't disappoint me, Dick ? " Her voice was
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 183
very appealing, and she looked so woebegone that he put his arm
affectionately around her. " I'll do anything you say, Betty, dear,
but if we haven't anything to wear, I suppose that you will agree
that we will have to stay at home."
"But we'll find something," she said, her natural optimism
fully restored. " Come with me and lift down the trunks, they
are piled high on top of one another. I never thought of it before,
but there must be all kinds of dead people's clothes in the attic."
Richard followed her with heavy steps. His sensibilities were
finer than Betty's. Her words : " dead people's clothes " had made
him regret his suggestion. To go rummaging among the belongings
of the departed for a masquerade costume seemed to belittle their
memories. But the fancy was a foolish one, he told himself,
and the situation worthy of another interpretation. After all, if
Betty's mother and grandmother had been alive, they would have
offered their wearing apparel willingly to aid the child. And if he
was obliged to escort Betty, he determined not to destroy her
pleasure by going grudgingly.
The attic was a creepy place, dimly lighted, full of odd-shaped
bundles that required little imagination to transform them into
ghostly shapes. One of the Colonel's old suits hung from the
rafters, looking like the body of a successful suicide; a rag bag
lying prone in one corner resembled a fat old woman, who had
fallen in a hopeless heap waiting for someone to help her to her
legs again. Richard opened one of the creaking shutters, the
summer sunshine dispelled the illusions, and forced these cast-
away possessions back into a world of reality again.
It had been years since Richard had been in the attic. He had
romped here when he was a boy, but now to his maturer mind
the place seemed sacred with memories of his mother. A little
wooden rocking cradle stood empty in one corner, a withered
spray of roses on the ruffled pillow. As he lifted the dried flowers
they fell to dust in his hands. He guessed that his mother had
put them there, intentionally bringing them from the garden in
all their beauty, and placing them where the pink baby faces
had rested, marking a grief to motherhood that comes when cradles
are outgrown and children emerge from that state of absolute
helplessness so precious with the privilege of service.
In one trunk Richard's toys were treasured, and in a box were
the curls that the Colonel had insisted upon cropping off when
his son was six. Richard remembered that when the scissors
184 THE RED ASCENT [May,
had begun their work of destruction, his mother had cried, and
the Colonel had sneered at her for being a sentimentalist. And
Richard's joy at getting rid of his hated hair had been tempered
by a vague feeling of indignation towards his father.
His mother had died when he was nine; if she had lived she
would have given him the sympathy that the Colonel had denied
him. If she had lived his boyhood would have been brightened,
his struggle to gain an education would have been lessened, and,
in some wise woman's way, she might have made even this last
sacrifice unnecessary. She would have fostered his idealism, and
he could have gone on somehow in the life he had elected to lead.
He banished these thoughts from his mind and turned to
Betty. "Do you want that big trunk lifted down?" In these
last few months he had schooled himself, when he began to have
regrets, to seize upon the first practical work that presented itself.
" Let's explore this camphor chest first," she said, falling on
her knees to fumble with the rusty lock. " Oh, Dick ! Dick ! Look
here. The very thing. It's grandfather's uniform Mexican war
uniform not a hole gold plated buttons. If they had been brass
they would have tarnished long ago. Look at the breadth of the
shoulders. Look at the epaulettes. Try it on, Dick. Oh, try
it on."
Richard obligingly threw off his coat, and thrust his arms in
the uniform that Betty held out to him. " Oh, it fits like it was
made for you," she cried, clapping her hands. " You couldn't
get in the Colonel's clothes, but grandfather was a big man like you.
Oh, it's the best kind of a masquerade costume, Dick. Dick, you
look like an angel."
He ran his fingers over the smooth cloth with some satisfaction.
" A brass-buttoned angel ! " he exclaimed.
" It's just splendid," said Betty. " Such a lot of buttons, and
the fit. Oh, Dick, you really ought to join the army. You're
you're just superb. Now if I can only find something as good."
He knelt down beside her to aid her in her search. " Nothing
here but men's clothes," she said at last in a tone of disappointment.
" Shirts," said Richard triumphantly. " Ruffled shirts, I'm
going to replenish my wardrobe; they may be a hundred years
behind the times, but they are clean, Betty, they are clean. I'll
lift down this other trunk for you. Surely we can find something
for you among so many boxes."
" Take off that coat," commanded Betty. " I wouldn't have
1913-] THE RED ASCENT 185
you tear it for the world. It's too beautiful. You can't miss
the masquerade now that you have something so fine to wear."
He threw the coat obediently into the cradle, and exerting his
great strength he lifted a heavily-packed trunk from the pile that
reached to the ceiling. As he did so a thin box clattered to his feet,
and a heap of old letters were scattered on the floor. As he stooped
to pick them up, mechanically, the yellow papers suggested a
thought to him.
" Betty," he said, " did you ever hear anyone besides the
Colonel talk about our claim to that Texas land ? "
" No," said Betty, busy with the refractory lid of the trunk.
"Did you?"
" Miss Fielding mentioned it to-day," he answered.
"Jess Fielding?"
" She said they might belong to us."
" Then why doesn't she give them back ? "
"Why should she? We can't prove it."
" But why couldn't we? "
" I've been thinking that," he said slowly, and his eyes were
fixed upon the papers in his hand. " These papers are my grand-
father's. This seems to be a love letter."
" Oh, let me see," said Betty jumping up. She leaned against
her brother's shoulder, and for a time they stood in silence, both
intent upon this romance of long ago.
" I don't call that a love letter," she said at last. " It's too
stilted."
"I don't know," said Richard. "I don't believe I'm an
authority on the subject."
" Why, didn't you ever get one ? Didn't you know any girls
when you were at college?"
"They didn't write me letters."
" Dear me ! I don't see why, but they will after they see you
in that gorgeous uniform."
He smiled a little wearily. "Don't frighten me, Betty,"
he said.
" Pooh! " said Betty. " Everybody gets love letters; I've got
a band-box full myself."
"You?"
" Of course. I may live out here in the wild woods, but we
occasionally have visitors in the county. No girl could live this
far South without getting love letters."
i86 THE RED ASCENT [May,
" I'll take your word for it," he agreed. He was turning over
the papers with more interest. " Betty," he said, " if there is
any truth in what the Colonel believes that the title was forged,
well, here we have grandfather's signature dozens of times on these
letters. I'm going to take this box to my room. I'm going to sit
up nights. I'm going to see if there's any truth, or law, or justice
in that Fielding claim. How would you like to have a million
dollars, Betty, dear?"
" A million ! I would die of joy," she said.
" Then we had better not try to get it if the effect is to be so
deplorable."
" It would be delightful," said Betty, pausing for a moment in
her foraging. " Then we would have everything that Jess Fielding
has now."
" Well, I don't know that that phase of it especially appeals to
me. If we only had something."
"If we only had," said Betty shaking her head. "Oh! I
want a good riding horse. The Colonel won't let me ride Spangles.
I have stolen her twice on the sly."
" Betty, Betty," he said disapprovingly. " You had no right to
do that. Spangles is no fit horse for a woman to ride. She will
kill you."
" I don't care if she does," said Betty, with a willful toss of
her head.
Richard forced her to look straight into his face. " Betty,"
he began, " I hate to hear you talk like that. Promise me that
you won't ride Spangles any more. Promise me."
" Well, I won't if we get the Fielding's money. Then we
can have the finest stables in the state. Oh! I do love blooded
horses, Dick."
" So do I," he admitted.
"And we could travel, Dick, travel everywhere Europe
Asia and we could go to India and shoot tigers, Dick."
" Well that's about the last of my ambitions."
" Oh, I'd dote on shooting tigers, Dick, and I could, too ; I'm
a good shot. The Colonel and I have been shooting at targets
ever since I was big enough to hold a pistol, but what's the use?
No fun shooting rabbits here."
" Well you can leave me out of the India expedition; I'll go to
Italy, buy myself a gondola, and lie on my back for six months
and rest."
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 187
" What's the use of talking," said Betty, " we'll never have
anything. Oh, yes, we will ! Look here. Oh, look here ! "
From the bottom of the trunk she brought a white satin dress
festooned in lace and orange blossoms. " Oh, Dick Dick ! " she
cried in an ecstasy. " It's my grandmother's wedding gown. Big
as a balloon, and here here is the hoop skirt to go with it."
" Why, Betty, child, you can't wear that, that's some sort
of a cage."
" It's a hoop skirt, Dick, and isn't it funny, and won't I
look fine! You and I will be the greatest things at the party."
She gathered up the old-fashioned dress and the white wedding
veil. " I'm going to my room to try them on."
Richard shut the window and followed her. " Have you your
uniform?" she asked.
But he had forgotten it. In one arm he carried a dozen of his
grandfather's shirts, in the other hand he held the tin box of
papers. It beat against the banisters as he descended the narrow
stairs.
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
LADY ABERDEEN'S CRUSADE.*
BY KATHARINE TYNAN.
N the Ireland of my young days doubtless in the
Ireland of to-day to a somewhat less extent there
was an extraordinary laissez faire where matters of
health and sanitation were concerned, which one
might better describe as fatalism.
The terrible holocaust of the young in Ireland, mainly pre-
ventible, was brought home to me recently when I was writing
a volume of Reminiscences which covered the period of my youth.
One after another of the friends of mygirlhood slips out of the circle
of life and vanishes from my pages, with half the song unsung, with
half the story untold, silently, mysteriously, passing away to join
their fellows in the mists and shadows. Preventible deaths, nearly
all of them a neglected cold, insufficient clothing, stuffy houses,
unsuitable food, and stewed tea, turned many a young creature from
the destiny of life its Creator had allotted to it.
All these causes operate still in Ireland to swell the death-rate,
but not, I must believe, to the appalling extent which they did in my
girlhood : at least, people do not now, or need not, cast away their
lives through ignorance, since the work of Lady Aberdeen and
the Women's National Health Association has become so wide-
spread in Ireland.
I will tell you how the poor lived in my young days in Ireland,
as I knew it from personal experience. A family of a husband and
wife and eight or nine children lived at my father's gates. The
cottage was a two-roomed one, with a clay floor, which in wet
weather became as much puddled as the road outside. The kitchen
was the family sitting-room. There was no grate, but an open
hearth on which green twigs burned for a fire, filling the throat
and eyes with acrid smoke. There was a table, a long stool,
and a dresser covered with cheap crockery. There was a little
square window high in the wall filled with geraniums: these
windows were not made to open; but it mattered less since the
*This article will be of special interest to our readers because of the share
many prorAinent Irish-Americans have taken in the anti-tuberculosis crusade in
Ireland. His Eminence Cardinal Farley was among the first to contribute gener-
ously to the movement. [ED. C. W.]
1913.] LADY ABERDEEN'S CRUSADE 189
door stood always open. There was no ceiling but the bare rafters,
on which a few hens roosted.
The bedroom was divided by a partition wall, which went only
half-way to the ceiling. It contained one bed, covered with a mis-
cellaneous assortment of rags of one kind or another. I never
knew how they slept, the father and mother and eight children,
but in that room children were brought into the world, and sick
children nursed, and mysteries of life there were, but none of
death, for in my memory of them the children lived and flourished,
as the better-housed, better- fed children in the English villages never
seem to me to do.
It must have been somewhat thick at night, with the father
and mother and eight children, and the hens, and perhaps a cat or
a dog. But perhaps the door let in the wind. They had one or
two priceless advantages: the babies were always nursed by their
mothers, and the Irish knew nothing of patent medicines. Nor
were the children in danger of being fed on cheese and beer and
pickled onions, as I have seen them in an English village, for
their parents had no such dainties. The children were a living
proof that over-feeding is a more deadly thing than under-feeding,
as the Irish peasant proved at all ages compared with his English
brother.
Sanitation or water supply these cabins had none. This was
so much a typical case that no one ever thought an improvement
in the standard of living possible : it did not enter into one's pur-
view at all. It was so and it would always be so : as in the Irish
houses, even very pretentious houses, the servants slept in dark
holes, windowless, fire-placeless, off the kitchen, and spent their
days and nights underground.
The poor never complained. The Irish servants were cheerful
and attached. If the poor were only half-fed, their masters were
only half-fed too. They were all happy together with a gaiety
unknown to an over-fed nation. The spiritual virtues throve.
They had never heard of " cleanliness being next to godliness ;"
or if they had it was a counsel of perfection beyond them, clean-
liness being a chilly thing and dirt comfortable and warm. But
perhaps it was worse in the town than the country the number of
the young who got up and left the firesides somewhere between their
twentieth and thirtieth year, going out with veiled heads into the
darkness, was terrible. A spell of cold winds in Dublin in the old
days an East wind on a Fairyhouse or Punchestown day brought
the reckless young tumbling to earth like leaves in a gale from an
IQO LADY ABERDEEN'S CRUSADE [May,
autumnal tree. It was always lungs, pneumonia or consumption
following on a chill. The last thing an Irishman or woman troubles
about is a meal. He will take a meal whenever he is ready for it,
or it is ready for him. She won't take it at all : a cup of tea and
a bun will keep her going all day. My father, I remember, used
to go abroad in his fields after a slight breakfast, and if there was
anything special going on would not come back till evening. I
suppose that adaptable creature, the stomach, had ceased to com-
plain. It was a curious matter of pride with the Irish in those
days, that they did not care for their food. They were a spiritual
people, unlike the English meat-eaters.
At that time no one apparently thought that things could be
helped. There were all manner of philanthropies going on in
Dublin, which is immensely charitable. Of alleviation of sickness
and suffering there was much. But as for segregation, disinfection,
sanitary measures, there was little knowledge of them.
I came back to Ireland, after an absence of nearly a
score of years, with a very open mind about the things
I had heard Lady Aberdeen and her Women's National Health
Association were doing. The whole laisscz faire section in Ireland
was up in arms. There was one very thin argument, which you
may hear still in the mouths of Lady Aberdeen's opponents : the
thinness becomes more apparent by repetition: it is, that Lady
Aberdeen's movement for fighting consumption has given Ireland
a bad name; if you ask for instances you are told that English
tourists are afraid to come to Ireland, and that Irish servants will
not obtain situations in England because we are all supposed to be
tuberculous. Well, these effects, if they are true, do not touch
the root of the matter. I do not believe that the English tourist
keeps away from Ireland because of the fight against consumption.
He is far more likely to be kept away by bad and dear hotels.
The Irish servant, in my knowledge of her, does not want to go
to England. She is much more likely, unfortunately, to go to
America. I should be very glad of anything that would keep her
at home.
The malcontents in Ireland are, I believe, to be found rather
among the Anglo-Irish than the Celtic-Irish. These are the ladies
who ask why the Viceroy should not be content to do as his
predecessors did, to entertain, and show himself at rare intervals
on some occasion of sufficient importance to warrant the display.
They ask the question still more concerning Lady Aberdeen.
Well, this gracious lady is one of those whom Ireland has
1913-] LADY ABERDEEN'S CRUSADE 191
captured, who has become more Irish than the Irish. Endowed
with the love of her kind, with enormous energy, great administra-
tive powers, the faculty of selecting those best fitted to do her
work the qualities of generalship with a spirit incapable of being
daunted, Lady Aberdeen set out on her task of saving Ireland, so
far as in her lay, from the terrible consumption; incidentally from
many ills as well. Poor Ireland, bleeding to death from the emigra-
tion which has steadily continued since the famine of 1846-47,
needed all the help that could be given to her, else the Celt would
soon be " gone with a vengeance," as the Times wrote, gloating
over the fleeing multitudes in those long-dead days of the Victorian
forties.
Lady Aberdeen has a very charming personality. She has
dignity, and yet she is very warm and kind. She has humor, with-
out which the gods themselves would be worsted if they undertook
reforms in Ireland. She can make herself all things to all men.
All over Ireland she has gathered into the Women's National Health
Association, and into various subsidiary committees, a great num-
ber of women, many of whom would otherwise lead very stagnant
lives.
She carries out her work with a great spirit. She has the
invaluable faculty of going straight to her object, looking neither
to right nor left. When she meets with what would be to another
person a check or a disaster, her spirit carries her triumphantly
through it. It takes something of the fanatic to make a reformer.
Fanaticism plus humor they are not irreconcilable go to make
up Lady Aberdeen's equipment for the task she has undertaken.
Well, having heard Lady Aberdeen's work decried by those
who thought the function of viceroyalty to be only that of enter-
taining the elite it is one of the charges against the most amiable
and high-minded of Viceroys, as against his wife, that he is too
accessible, conies too close to the common people I thought I
would look into Lady Aberdeen's work for myself. Being a very
busy person, I have had to do my learning on a small scale. Lady
Aberdeen has a specially tender heart for children, a motherly
heart which loves to make them happy : therefore, I began with one
of the Babies' Clubs, of which Her Excellency has opened and is
opening so many.
There was nothing cold about the charity of this Babies' Club.
It was run by a most efficient and sympathetic trained nurse. It
has its meetings in a little two-roomed cottage in the centre of a
crowded and very poor district. Usually the nurse has one or
192 LADY ABERDEEN'S CRUSADE [May,
other of her " ladies " to help her with the business of the club,
but as it was July, and a good many of the ladies were scattered,
I volunteered to help for that afternoon.
The club feeds and clothes the babies. It provides Pasteurized
milk for the babies at a very small payment per week there is no
pauperizing and it supplies garments made by the ladies. The
mothers come in with the babies to receive their milk tickets and an
article of clothing. The baby is weighed perhaps. A few quiet words
of advice are given : the nurse in no way usurps the position of the
doctors who are always ready to give their services free to the
Babies' Club. The maternity outfits are another form of the club's
many beneficences; and it will board out or find a holiday home
for delicate children.
Our first visit that day was to the Collier Dispensary for
tuberculosis in Charles Street, a slummy street running down from
the Quays of Dublin. The Collier Dispensary has been endowed
and equipped by the son of the late Mr. P. F. Collier of Collier's
Weekly, New York, as a memorial of his father. Lady Aberdeen
has a wonderful way of ingratiating herself with the rich for
the advantage of the poor. The Collier Dispensary is fitted with
all the latest appliances. Everything is washable; and the white
tiled walls are rounded at the floor, so that there may be no dust
lurking in corners to harbor germs. In the waiting-room were
many patients. Everything was sterilized of course, and the
atmosphere of the place was one of busy usefulness. There was
hope there for those gaunt-eyed and hollow-cheeked men and women
and children whose cases were so carefully watched and treated,
who, if the case was too advanced for home-treatment, had still
the chance of the sanatorium. While the poor patients wait they
are given hot milk and Plasmon biscuits, and in fine weather they
can wait their turn in the roof-garden bordered with flowers and
plants, with comfortable deck chairs and awnings, where one is
high above the squalor and ugliness of the slum, and can see the
beautiful surrounding hills beyond the network of Dublin streets.
Doctors and nurses visit, when necessary, patients in their own
homes. And, oh dear, in those dreadfully sad slums of Dublin
which have only this to be said for them, that God is not forgotten
in them: they are innocent slums as compared with the slums
of other cities it may well be that the happiest and brightest
spots in many a poor life may be the visit to the Collier Dis-
pensary, with the hot milk and the Plasmon biscuits, and the rest,
if the weather allows, among the flowers of the roof garden.
1913.] LADY ABERDEEN'S CRUSADE 193
Another American Mr. Strauss has equipped the Pasteur-
ized Milk Depot with the most up-to-date sterilizing arrangement.
The milk for a baby costs one-and-sixpence a week : and with the
Pasteurized milk the baby is safe.
Having explained the Pasteurizing to us, and given us a taste
of the milk and it would be an exacting baby who would ask
for better the bright young nurse takes us up to see another
roof garden, in this case for the use of the nurses. She takes
us to the parapet to look over. All around are crazy and miser-
able dwellings, right in the midst of them a cow-shed, with a
filthy yard. Close by the nurse indicates a wretched dwelling.
" One of my patients is there," she says. " She has three young
children. She is in consumption, and at eleven o'clock this morning
she has had an operation for cancer. I don't suppose she will
live through it."
Cancer and consumption in one body, and three young
children born of that body! And there are people all round
about sullenly disapproving of anyone trying to help, because for-
sooth English tourists may be kept out and the English market
closed to Irish domestic servants, who are a thousand times better
and happier at home.
I have said that Irish poverty shows itself more than any
other poverty. Barefooted children, clad in a few flying rags
when there is frost in winter you will see the poor feet tied up in
filthy rags where they are chapped and bleeding. Many of these
children are homeless, and sleep in open halls and staircases
at night. The little newsboys, match-sellers, etc., of the Dublin
streets become, in a manner of speaking, gypsies. The restraints
of houses are not for them. You may feed and clothe and shelter
one of these boys for a certain time : then he will go out, " on gur "
that is their own phrase that is to say he will run wild a bit
before the flesh-pots of civilization have any call for him again.
The towzle-headed, shawled woman of the Dublin streets must be
an amazement to the visitor from a better-clad world. The Irish
poor have an incredibly low standard of comfort.
The woman who brings you vegetables and fruit to your door,
or fresh herrings, or some such thing, in enormous baskets which
she is helped to carry by a stunted child, will shock you when
she comes to you on a wet and cold winter day. You shall hear
the water squelching in her broken boots. Her petticoats drip-
drip about her as she stands on your doorstep. The child is in
VOL. xcvu. 13.
194 LADY ABERDEEN'S CRUSADE [May,
like evil case. Both will be blue with cold, their teeth chattering,
so that they can scarcely take the first sip of the hot drink which
you may be moved to give them. Yet this wretched object will be
a good and respectable woman.
It may be imagined how these conditions make for consump-
tion. Well, you cannot lift a whole impoverished city and country
out of its poverty: but you can meet and frustrate the effects
of these wretched conditions; and that the Women's National
Health Association of Ireland is doing, with a courage, an energy,
a whole-heartedness which shows that there is the one compelling
mind and heart behind it.
Another American Mr. Allan Ryan has equipped a Home
for Consumptives at the North Wall, Dublin, well away from the
city at the edge of a stony spit of land that runs out into the sea at
the river's mouth. There is a Preventive Holiday Home at Sutton,
also by the sea, to which patients are sent who seem in danger of
developing tuberculosis.
The big sanatorium at Peamount I have not yet seen. Already
there are sixty-three patients, and further buildings are being
erected to accommodate those for whom application have been sent.
At Crooksling on the side of the mountains, about seventy miles
from Dublin, the Corporation of Dublin has already a sanatorium
for consumptives. I saw it stated at a meeting of some adminis-
trative board the other day that there were three thousand cases
of consumption in the County of Dublin; and that Crooksling
was going to extend its accommodation.
I speak only of what I have seen myself. All these different
manifestations of the Women's National Health Association have
each their off-shoots, their ramifications, their thousand benevo-
lences for which I have not space. But I must touch on some of the
open-air institutions. There is the Ormond Market open-space.
Ormond Market was a meat market, famous in the eighteenth cen-
tury for the prowess of its butchers' boys, who use to come
out and fight the law of the land of peaceable citizens on any or no
provocation a sort of Mohocks in low life. Some time ago,
Ormond Market was a derelict heap of ruins. Lady Aberdeen
acquired the site at a pepper-corn rent from its owner, pending
the development of the corporation plans of re-building. Part of
it is to be turned into a garden for the dwellers in the dreadful
slums about it. The remaining portion is now a boys' camp. It
was being prepared for its purpose when I was there. All round
I9I3-] LADY ABERDEEN'S CRUSADE 195
are open-air sleeping sheds. There is a kitchen to provide the
boys with their meals ; bath and wash-houses, and a good open
space in the midst. It is designed primarily for boys living amid
unhealthy surroundings, where there are tuberculous cases, and
so on.
Also there are the babies' playgrounds. Dublin is sadly defi-
cient in open spaces, at least such as are available for the poor.
That the Dublin poor may be trusted is abundantly evident in St.
Stephen's Green, which the munificence of Lord Ardilaun has turned
from a dusty enclosed space, only to be entered by the holders of
a private key, into a place of green pastures and flowing waters
a real paradise for the Dublin poor. But St. Augustine Street,
for example, where the St. Monica's Babies' Playground has been
made, is a world away from St. Stephen's Green; and the babies
have no place to play but the streets, and the chance of being
crushed to death by a passing vehicle at any moment of their play.
Lady Aberdeen acquired a plot of land where some more totter-
ing houses had been demolished. She had it enclosed, and laid out
by two of her ladies who are professional gardeners. She put up
sheds for the babies to sleep in their prams. A sand heap was
provided for the children to dig in. Skipping-ropes, balls, all sorts
of games to be played in the open air, were provided. A superin-
tendent was chosen. Then the children came in.
I am bound to say that when I saw the garden the landscape
gardening was a little gone to seed. What would you have ? The
place was almost densely crowded with children. One thought of
Blake.
Oh, what a multitude they seem, these flowers of London Town.
Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own.
The hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs,
Thousands of little boys and girls raising their innocent hands.
The sheds were full of babies in all stages of sleeping and
waking, some rising up after refreshing sleep, with the amazing
independence of the babies of the poor, and stretching out their
hands for their discarded toys or their bottles. Other babies were
enjoying the ministrations of their small guardians, dreadfully
responsible little girls, sometimes not so big as their better-fed
charges. All sorts of games were in progress in the garden out-
side, and there were plenty of seats in shade and out of it for
the children to rest if they will. But what a mercy, what a charity,
196 STARS [May,
to keep the children safe from the streets and in the open air,
away from the crowded, unwholesome dwellings.
I have skimmed only very lightly over some of the activities
of Lady Aberdeen and the Women's National Health Association of
Ireland. Ireland is as busy as a hive of bees with those new activi-
ties which have organized and directed a great mass of feminine
energy, hitherto unused, scarcely realized. Ireland is very con-
servative, and she is only beginning to send her daughters, of the
gentler class, out into the world. What a number of empty hands
such work as this must have filled to overflowing! And that is
not the least of its beneficences.
STARS.
BY JOYCE KILMER.
BRIGHT stars, yellow stars, flashing through the air,
Are you errant strands of Lady Mary's hair?
As she slits the cloudy veil and bends down through,
Do you fall across her cheeks and over heaven too?
Gay stars, little stars, you are little eyes,
Eyes of baby angels playing in the skies.
Now and then a winged child turns his merry face
Down toward the spinning world what a funny place!
Jesus Christ came from the Cross (Christ receive my soul!),
In each perfect hand and foot there was a bloody hole,
Four great iron spikes there were, red and never dry,
Michael plucked them from the Cross and set them in the sky.
Christ's Troop, Mary's Guard, God's own men,
Draw your swords and strike at hell and strike again.
Every steel-born spark that flies where God's battles are,
Flashes past the face of God, and is a star.
THE LAUGHTER OF THE SAINTS.
BY F. DROUET, C.M.
HE above title will, no doubt, give a mild shock to
many a timorous soul, and I feel quite sure that
if my dear old grandmother had ever come across
it in the pages of a Catholic magazine, she would
have rubbed her glasses energetically, to make sure
that she was not the victim of some illusion. This simply shows
that her notion of sanctity needed revision. If she could have
read that second chapter of Joly's volume, The Psychology of the
Saints, she would have learned a few things that would have made
her open her eyes big and wide. This chapter, entitled " Human
Nature in the Saints," is a most enjoyable bit of hagiography
and, withal, of psychology.
For too long a time, readers of Saints' lives (pusillus grex,
even among Catholics) gained the impression that these holy per-
sons were as stiff as their cold statues standing under the porches
of our Gothic cathedrals.
And, of course, this is why that immense department of Catho-
lic literature was so carefully shunned by ordinary readers. The
famous letter of Bishop Dupanloup on The Method of Writing
Saints' Lives brought about a great change, and we now hear
regularly of sacred biographies reaching their fifteenth or twentieth
edition within a year. What a delightful surprise to find out that
those holy persons, whom many of us had pictured living on a
plane altogether apart, almost out of reach, were after all human
beings like ourselves, made of the fragile clay, with a true human
heart beating in a true human breast; to discover that they were
capable of the same emotions, passing in turn from sadness to joy,
from hope to fear, from enthusiasm to discouragement; that their
soul like our own was to-day visited by sunshine and to-morrow
by darkness. What a surprise to hear of a Saint Francis of
Assisi pretending to play the violin with a piece of wood and a
ruler to amuse his brethren; of a Saint Teresa playing the flute
on feast days; of a Saint Philip Neri, whom Professor Joly does
not hesitate to call a " humoristic Saint," two words forsooth
198 THE LAUGHTER OF THE SAINTS [May,
which we are not accustomed to find so close together; of a Saint
Crispino of Viterbo, a most worthy son of the poverello of Assisi,
and a most decided enemy of sadness in any shape, so much so that
he was always laughing or smiling; of a Saint , but I am
anticipating, and I had better, perhaps, in order to make my readers
agree with me, tell first what I mean by laughter; for, just as,
according to the French, there are fagots and fagots, so also un-
doubtedly, there is laughter and laughter.
Whole treatises, very learned, too, have been written on the
subject by specialists, and you may, some fine day, stumble upon one
of these alluring titles, such as " On the Psychology of Laughter,"
or " On the Psychology of Smiles." You would learn, among a
thousand equally interesting novelties, that " Laughter is a peculiar
movement of the muscles of the face and eyes, usually accompanied
by the emission of explosive and chuckling sounds from the chest
and throat." Or you may, perhaps, prefer this definition:
" Laughter is the reaction of our aesthetic faculty, wounded
by the spectacle of some disorder in surrounding objects."
If you do not laugh at that, you must have lost all
sense of humor. Perhaps you may, with the gentle skeptic,
tell me that you do not care to fathom the psychological or physi-
ological mysteries of human laughter as long as you have a chance,
once in a while, to enjoy a good hearty laugh. And perhaps you are
right ; so without more ado I will, with a Jesuit Father, the lamented
Father Delaporte, who has written many a choice bit of smiling
literature, make a distinction between physical and psychological
laughter : the former being a mere nervous phenomenon, the latter
rather an emotion of the soul. They may resemble each other in
some of their external manifestations, they differ certainly as to
their cause and meaning.
It would be false to maintain, absolutely at least, that laughter
is necessarily a sign of human intelligence. For, there is a stupid
laughter; also a shrill laughter of the insane, and the almost
mechanical laughter of the little child who is tickled.
The list of intelligent, therefore truly human, laughters would
be quite long, and, sad to say, reprehensible laughter, perhaps,
would be found to be most common. There is the scornful,
the ironical, sarcastic laughter; the cruel and ferocious laughter;
the sad and bitter one ; the laughter of the well-bred and of the ill-
bred, oi the witty and of the fool. The fool, the Scripture re-
marks, always laughs with a loud noise, and in another passage
1913.] THE LAUGHTER OF THE SAINTS 199
of holy Writ we find this picturesque description of the same:
" As the crackling of thorns burning under a pot, so is the laughter
of the fool." Some laugh at everything, and some laugh without
apparent cause. There is an artificial, or, as the term goes, a
" forced " laughter ; such was the laughter of Julian the Apostate,
"that vulgar maker of puns," as St. Gregory calls him.
The laughter of the Saints is healthy, frank, and true; it rings
like honest metal; it has the pure sound of a soul at peace with
God and man; it is natural and spontaneous, like the rustling
of the golden leaves on a clear autumn day, like the song of the
brook on the polished pebbles, or like the musical thrill of the
lark soaring and quivering with sheer delight in the glory of the
rising sun. Their laughter is a manifestation of mental health
sympathetic and contagious, which means that it is simply and
wholly human.
The Saints seldom, if ever, indulged in that loud expression
of joy, which was totally unknown to the Saint of Saints, our
Lord Jesus Christ. Their happiness usually found its expression
in that most human of human attributes, of which nobody would
ever dream of depriving Christ Himself, the smile; the smile, that
is to say, as a modern writer has it, " The light of the soul upon
the countenance; the outward manifestation of the highest human
feelings tenderness, love, understanding of the truth, admiration
for the beautiful. It is something more than a variety of laughter,
it is laughter transformed, spiritualized, raised above itself."
Nothing could be more worthy of man, and to this variety of
merriment be it said to the relief of those timorous souls whom
my title may have disturbed belongs for the most part the laughter
of the Saints.
It was evidently of that class of laughter that Emile Faguet,
the French academician, was thinking when, in a speech he was to
deliver on a certain Commencement day, he said : " Laughter is
nature taking a holiday; that sort of joy is an act of gratitude to-
wards the Creator, and, I dare say, a kind of prayer. I hope you
will make in that way a morning and evening prayer, and say
grace around twelve o'clock. Be not scandalized; in speaking as
I do, I am more of a churchman than you may think me. Religious,
men and women, not only indulge in external happiness, but go so
far as to make it an obligation; it is a part of their rule."
It would be hard for M. Faguet to produce a copy of any
monastic rule in which laughter is expressly commanded. There is
200 THE LAUGHTER OF THE SAINTS [May,
no doubt, however, that founders of Religious Communities have
insisted on the spiritual value of joy. St. Ignatius of Loyola,
meeting one day one of his novices who was apparently in the
darkest of moods, said to him : " My son, I want you to laugh ;
I want you to be happy in the Lord; a religious has no reason to
be sad, and he has many reasons to be cheerful." That most
amiable of all Saints, Francis de Sales, wrote : " A sad saint who
is sad is a very poor saint." Visitors to monasteries or religious
houses at recreation time have been able to catch an unmistakable
echo of that particular kind of happiness, which, if it is not
imposed by the rules, is none the less a fact, a carefully-preserved
tradition.
Spiritual writers tell us, not that all virtue consists in cheer-
fulness, but that cheerfulness is a powerful help to the practice
of all virtues. Does not the word " happiness " occur in almost
every page of the holy Scriptures ? " The book of eternal truths,"
says Father Delaporte, " is an almost uninterrupted series of
cheerful hymns : Gaude et Lcetare! " The Gospel is the announce-
ment of the most happy news : " I bring you tidings of great
joy," declares the messenger of God. Our Blessed Lord, after
preaching and sanctifying poverty, sorrow, tears, and persecutions,
thus sums up His teaching, " Be glad and rejoice ! " A short time
before His death, He told His disciples : " Your sorrow shall be
turned into joy, and your joy no man shall take from you." These
divine words have been re-echoed times without number in the
lives of the Saints. That consolation has been the secret of their
happiness.
St. Peter bids the Christians rejoice and be glad with exceed-
ing joy. St. Paul might be called the Doctor of Happiness, as
well as the Doctor of Grace. " Rejoice in the Lord always, again
I say rejoice ! " "I am filled with comfort, I exceedingly abound
with joy in all our tribulation."
Joy! Comfort! Happiness! This is the authentic teaching
of the Saints, and this is the constant teaching of the Church, and
the burden of her liturgy in which the " alleluia " of the Resur-
rection sounds far more frequently than the Dies Ira of the Last
Judgment. It is impossible not to be struck by the lively
tunes of some of the hymns of the Church, like the Adeste
Fideles, or Filii et Files. Do they not breathe forth a childlike
cheerfulness, and sound like popular songs, made by the Mother
Church for the merry hearts and merry lips of her children?
1913.] THE LAUGHTER OF THE SAINTS 201
The most genuine and most complete representatives of the
Church's spirit, the Saints, could not fail to heed such an invita-
tion. Moreover, were not the Saints themselves responsible for the
making and development of that spirit of decided optimism, of
that buoyant cheerfulness so noticeable throughout our liturgical
books, bursting forth occasionally into the merry, catching notes of
the Iste Confessor, or the Exultet jam Angelica? The martyrs
themselves preserved that smiling optimism, that peace and cheer-
fulness in the midst of the most refined tortures. Whoever reads
for the first time the passion of St. Lawrence must experience
a strange surprise and emotion at hearing the triumphant pleasantry
thrown by the holy martyr into his tormentor's face : " This side is
now well done ! Turn me over, and eat."
The martyrs were not saddened by the overhanging shadow
of death. There are no sad Saints; I mean, of course, habitually
sad; such would be a living contradiction. Even that most tame
and timid of all hagiographers, the honest Godescard, agrees that
a Saint may show occasionally his good humor or display his wit.
This valuable concession he makes apropos of a Saint whose name
does not hold out any promise of humor Sulpitius Severus, whose
character and temper, however, gave happily the lie to his family
name. " His piety," admits Godescard, " was in no way austere
or repulsive." He sometimes indulged in innocent jokes. Read,
for instance, the beginning of his letter to Bassula, his mother-in-
law; or the one he wrote to St. Paulinus of Nola, in sending him
a new cook, Victor. This is one of the strangest and most piquant
letters of recommendation ever written to a friend already disap-
pointed by half a dozen chefs:
I am told that all your cooks leave you. The reason probably
is that the meagerness of your menu does not give them a
chance to make a good showing. Now, I send you a boy
from my own kitchen. He is pretty good in cooking the
white beans, in making the insipid beet tasty with a sharp
vinegar sauce, or at concocting a bad porridge for hungry
monks; as to the use of pepper and other spices he knows
nothing at all, but he has no equal in crushing fragrant herbs
in a noisy mortar. He has only one defect. He is an un-
scrupulous foe of all gardens; and if allowed to enter one,
will cut right and left, and play terrible havoc with all flower-
beds. But you do not need to worry about furnishing him
with fuel: he burns everything and anything that he can lay
202 THE LAUGHTER OF THE SAINTS [May,
his hands on, including the beams and boards of the roof.
With all his habits and propensities I beg you to receive him
as a son.
Victor, as history shows, proved to be a gem. He surpassed
himself in making broths in season and out of season, to the intense
delight of an old peasant who came regularly to the convent kit-
chen to feast on the remnants of the meals. As this faithful guest
had not a single tooth left, the new regime suited him admirably,
and Victor represented in his eyes the ne plus ultra of culinary art.
St. Paulinus relaxed more than once his episcopal dignity.
When he writes the praise of his dear St. Felix of Nola, he laughs
without scruple at the simplicity, and the noisy and somewhat
boisterous devotion, of the Campanian peasants who came every
year to the Saint's tomb, with their whole families, the cattle some-
times included. He congratulates one of his parishioners on having
escaped the need of a physician, " more cruel than illness itself."
One of Paulinus* contemporaries, the pride of Christian Latin
literature, St. Jerome, would, if time and space permitted, furnish
us with most abundant and unique material. We must confess,
however, that his laughter is not always of the same innocent
variety. The pen of the solitary of Bethlehem was sometimes
dipped in vinegar; his reputation on that score was quite well
established, for good Sulpitius Severus thinking he had, one day,
overstepped the bounds of Christian charity in his description
of a conceited monk, stops abruptly with this significant remark:
" But this is too caustic ; we must leave that sort of description
to the Blessed Jerome." Caustic he surely was, and sarcastic in
abundant measure. In the recesses of his distant solitude he is
still haunted by the vivid memories of the wicked Roman society,
by the pictures of the worldly clerics at whose hands he had
suffered so much. He cannot resist the temptation of poking fun
at them once in a while. His terrible laughter wakes up the echoes
of the surrounding hills, travels to Rome on the wings of the Eurus,
and warns those unworthy members of the Church that the old lion
is still alive and roaring at them. "Anyone who sees them,"
he writes to Eustochium, " would take them for bridegrooms rather
than for clerics; their only care is to perfume their garments, and
their hair still bears the marks of the curling iron; lest they should
wet their feet, they seem afraid of walking, even on tip-toe.
He continues with a vivid, although not altogether edify-
ing, description of one whom he calls a princeps, a past
1913-] THE LAUGHTER OF THE SAINTS 203
master in the art of obtaining presents from the rich : " He
gets up with the sun, and carefully maps out the round of his daily
visits. The importunate old man always takes a short cut, and
almost routs his victims out of bed. Does he notice a nice cushion,
a pretty table-cloth, some elegant piece of furniture? He admires
and praises it aloud ; he fingers and caresses it ; he says he needs it,
of course, but in such plaintive and querulous tones that he appears
to extort it rather than to ask for it. No one would dare to
offend the gazetter of the town; and he seems to be ubiquitous; no
matter what way you turn, you are sure he is the first you will
stumble against ! "
Be it said in justice to the great old fighter, that his wrinkled
face can be lit up once in a while with a really tender smile.
Take, for instance, that choice morsel of epistolary literature, the
letter to Eustochium entitled De munusculis, in which he thanks her,
among other things, for the gift of a basket of cherries, " and such
cherries, too, red with such a virginal blush that I think they have
been just brought over by Lucullus himself."
Who would have thought that the sweet St. Bernard, Doctor
Mellifluus, could have indulged in the same satirical vein, and re-
echoed, after many centuries, the ironical outbursts of Jerome?
Yet he did; and some of his letters are models of quiet, but none
the less pungent satire, just as they are models of fluent, harmo-
nious, and well-balanced Latinity. Read in the ninth chapter of
his Apologia ad Guillielmiim, the long and amusing description of
the " menu " of a single meal among the lax monks of Cluny,
and you will see how the holiest of abbots can laugh heartily.
" What about the drinking of pure water ? " asks the Saint.
" Why, not even wine mixed with water is admitted on the table.
All of us since we became monks have developed weak stomachs;
we do not forget the very valuable advice of the Apostle concerning
the use of wine, but we fail to notice, I do not know why, the
words, a little, which immediately precede In some convents
I am told that on feast days the wine is mixed with honey and
sweet spices : shall we maintain that this is also propter infirmitatem
stomachi? "
In the next chapter he draws with the same witty pen the
portrait of the monk who runs from town to town, from market to
market, from store to store, to buy the best available cloth for his
brethren's habits. He depicts him eagerly searching every corner
of the merchant's house, upsetting every piece of furniture, unfold-
204 THE LAUGHTER OF THE SAINTS [May,
ing immense piles of stuffs, fingering them with a connoisseur's
hand, examining them closely in the sunlight with a critical eye,
rejecting contemptuously any piece that falls short of the standard
of perfection, and selecting finally the very, very best, regardless
of price.
Among the modern Saints, the great Spanish mystic, St.
Teresa, and the dear St. Francis de Sales would easily supply us
with an abundant harvest of smiles. St. Francis de Sales, of
whom his latest biographer has said : " His style was truly the
style of Christian France: transparent and simple, both delicate
and resolute, both strong and tender, with a little point of amiable
cheerfulness that never goes beyond the bounds of propriety, and
of quiet playfulness which never inflicts a wound."
The pen of St. Teresa often wrote such expressions as, " I had
to laugh; " " I laughed heartily;" " you make me laugh." Of St.
Teresa another Saint has said : " God be blessed ! Here is a Saint
whom we can all imitate. She eats, sleeps, and laughs like other
people, without affectation, without ceremonies; and yet, with all
that, it is visible that she is filled with the Spirit of God."
As a matter of fact, the great Spanish mystic could not con-
ceal her dislike of those religious who mistake affected gravity
and unbending rigidity for spiritual perfection, and walk as though
they were clad in armor plate. " What would become of our little
community," she used to say, " if everyone of us endeavored to
bury the little bit of humor and wit that she has? Nobody can
have too much of it. Let everyone show, in all simplicity, what-
ever amount she has of it, for the common joy and pleasure. Do
not imitate those poor unfortunate people who, as soon as they
have acquired a little piety, put on a gloomy and peevish air, and
seem to be afraid of speaking or breathing, lest their piety should
fly away."
During her somewhat rough career as a reformer, she needed
to draw freely from that store of good humor, apparently inexhaus-
tible, with which, fortunately, a kind Providence had provided her.
For, besides meeting violent opposition and abuse, she had to deal
with all sorts of people, to endure all sorts of hardships, and
more than once her happy faculty of seeing the bright, and we
may say the humorous, side of things helped her to redeem the
situation.
A 1 good brother, who thought himself a painter, and who
answered to the attractive name of John Misery, undertook to
1913-] THE LAUGHTER OF THE SAINTS 205
draw her portrait. Teresa who, in her youth had been told she
was pretty and (she confessed later on) had believed it, was not
altogether pleased with the artistic endeavors of the self-appointed
portrait-maker, for no sooner had she been admitted to contemplate
the completed masterpiece than she exclaimed : " May God forgive
you, brother, for having made me so ugly ! "
It is no surprise then to hear her latest biographer declare
that cheerfulness was in her eyes one of the surest signs of a relig-
ious vocation. She never missed a chance to give good example in
this, and to show her Sisters that even a most familiar type of
joy was perfectly compatible with the perfection of their state;
for many a Carmelite house in Spain has preserved, among other
treasured relics, little drums and tambourines that were used in
her time. She used to sum up her teachings on the subject in
this brief but significant formula : " No melancholy sanctity."
" Please," she said in a letter, " please narrate to others all the
misfortunes we have had with that kind of saintly people It
would be better to abstain from opening new houses than to put
in them melancholy subjects. Religious of that stamp are the ruin
of monasteries."
Who is the modern critic who has said that " Saints are
usually ill-tempered persons ? " Evidently he was little acquainted
with St. Teresa, and he probably had never heard of that contem-
porary Saint, Mother Barat, of whom it is said that the recreations
over which she presided were extremely cheerful. She confessed
frankly she had little use for those religious who, probably through
fear of blundering, keep resolutely silent. " The first rule of the
house," she used to say, " is to bore nobody."
St. Francis de Sales was, as we have said, a most resolute
enemy of sadness in every form, and declared that it was
incompatible with devotion. In his delightful Spirit of St. Francis
de Sales, Monsignor Camus thus characterizes the happy disposi-
tions of the Saint : " This Samson gathered honey out of the
mouth of lions and found peace in war. Like the three children,
he found dew in the midst of flames, roses amongst thorns, oil in
the rocks, and sweetness in the most bitter bitterness."
No one ever possessed to the same degree the invaluable gift
of " spreading the sweetness of Christ over the sorrows of life."
He wrote to an afflicted person : " Live happy among the thorns
of the Savior's crown ; like a nightingale in a bush, sing : Long live
Jesus!"
206 THE LAUGHTER OF THE SAINTS [May,
In this gallery of cheerful Saints, a particularly honorable
mention is due to St. Philip Neri, whom Goethe justly calls the
" humoristic Saint." He was fond of playing some rather mean
tricks on his novices, and if he saw one of them a bit proud of
his new habit, he would send him out on some errand, with a
ridiculous appendage, like, for instance, a fox tail, hanging over
his back. The following anecdote, the authenticity of which is
guaranteed by the best authorities, will suffice to illustrate this
amusing feature of his character. One day he was sent by the
Pope himself to some neighboring convent to inquire into the
life of a nun who had the reputation of a Saint. The weather
was horrible, and when Philip dismounted he was bespattered with
mud from head to foot. The good Sister was brought before
him, and judging at a glance that her air of compunction was rather
overdone, Philip said abruptly while stretching out his leg : " Pull
off my boots, won't you ? " The would-be Saint assumed at once
an air of offended dignity, and without any further inquiry the
Pope's envoy put on his hat, went straight to his master, and
told him that a religious so devoid of humility had no claim what-
ever to the saints' aureole.
Many of the readers of this magazine have heard, no doubt,
of Sister Teresa of the Infant Jesus, the little Carmelite nun who
died some years ago in the odor of sanctity at Lisieux in France,
and whose biography attracted, at least in her native country, such
sympathetic attention. Frail and delicate, as she always was,
she knew she was destined for an early death. Yet, how she could
smile! There was in the convent an old infirm sister who had
become very childish. Every evening, at ten minutes of six, some-
body had to leave the chapel in order to take the dear old soul
to the refectory. Knowing it was next to impossible to please
the sick lady, Sister Teresa hesitated a long time before she dared
to propose her good services. They were accepted, with some mis-
givings, however; and every day at the appointed time, the com-
munity could witness this delightful little comedy :
The old Sister shook her apron [writes Sister Teresa herself],
and I knew it meant : " time to go ! let us start ! " Summoning
all my courage, I would arise ; and then a very peculiar ceremony
began. I had to move and carry the bench in a certain way,
and in no other. It was most important that I should be
extremely slow in starting. My role consisted in following the
1913-] THE LAUGHTER OF THE SAINTS 207
good Sister while holding her by her cincture. This I did
with all the care and kindness of which I was capable; but if,
by chance, my charge made a single false step, she immediately
thought that she was going to collapse, and cried out: "Mon
Dieu! You walk too fast! I'll be broken to pieces!" If I
tried to walk more slowly she would ask : " Why, you don't
follow me. I don't feel your hand at all; I am going to fall!
Ah! I was right in saying that you were much too young for
this office ! " Finally we would reach the refectory without
any serious mishap. Then new difficulties arose. In order
not to hurt my patient's old suffering frame, I had to install her
in her place with all the skill I could master. Then, I must roll
up her sleeves, always in a certain definite manner; and then
at last I was free to go In a short while, however, I
discovered that she was cutting her bread with extreme difficulty,
and henceforth I never left her without rendering her this
last service ; and before parting I never failed to look at
her with my best smile.
It would seem that the smile was the most appreciated part
of the performance, for if anyone else was designated to help
her, the old Sister invariably protested and said : " No, send me
the little one who has such a beautiful smile."
THE POETRY OF KATHARINE TYNAN HINKSON.
BY KATHERINE BREGY.
HERE is something of the sweet prodigality of
Nature in all that Mrs. Hinkson gives us: in her
prose, alike critical and romantic, and not less in
that poetic utterance which would seem to have
gathered up and concentrated the beauty of her
message. She differs as radically as may be from the abstinent,
definitive speech of her long-time friend, Mrs. Meynell; there is
nothing in her song of the silver remoteness, the classicism, the
restraint of her well-loved Lionel Johnson. Like a torrent of
sunshine falls her lyric speech, large and sweet and spontaneous;
lighting up things great and humble with equal diligence. About
her pages there is the lush and innocent luxuriance of summer
fields and blowing wild flowers.
If it be not " to consider too curiously," the simile may be
carried a step farther. In the garden of Mrs. Hinkson's poetry
it is quite possible to sort and sift the flowers even to trace by
their sequence the progress of her own seasons. First of all,
back in 1885, came Louise de la Valliere, a first volume as like
as possible to the pale sweet crocus of earliest springtime. Every-
one was writing narrative verse just then Tennyson, Swinburne,
Aubrey de Vere, William Morris so, of course, it contained nar-
ratives. It was colorful, too, with something of the irised imagery
of the Brotherhood; for was not the flame of Rossetti's genius but
a few years extinguished, and still a vital thing to all the younger
poets? The great day of Victorian poetry was just wearing to
its sunset when this little Irish maiden stepped across the horizon
of London town, her heart full of dreams, her lips of songs.
Like most youthful songs they were shy, romantic, idealistic; ten-
derly but not fastidiously wrought, and preoccupied with the minor
music of life. The title poem was a monologue of much grace
and pathos a midnight episode in the Carmelite convent where
Louise,
( a broken reed that He
Hath bound with His strong fingers tenderly),
1913.] POETRY OF KATHARINE TYNAN HINKSON 209
has sought her penitential peace. Joan of Arc again takes the
monologue form, and the book holds a charming tale of King
Cophetua's Beggar-Queen. A poem upon Thoreau gave prophecy
of the Franciscan sympathies which have dominated so much of
Katharine Tynan's later work: and there was already, in more
than one poem, touches of that sweet and altogether reconciling
comprehension of death which has given largeness and serenity
to her pages.
Two years after Louise came Shamrocks, a sister volume very
like its predecessor, but greener and gladder; in a word, more
Celtic. There was a charming legend of The Sick Princess
with ardent pre-Raphaelite coloring: there were Irish narra-
tives, somewhat in de Vere's manner, of Aibhric and the Swans,
Diarmind and Grainne, et cetera. But along with reminiscence
there was the forward leap. In its Angel of the Annunciation
one discerns the golden germ later to develop into the First Book
of Miracle Plays; just as The Heart of a Mother anticipates
that whole group of poems which one shall find clustering about
the thought of the little dead child. And it is much to be doubted
if any other than Katharine Tynan could have put into the gentle
Franciscan sermon these characteristic bird stanzas:
Little flowers of air,
With your feathers soft and sleek,
And your bright brown eyes and meek,
He hath made you fair !
He hath taught to you
Skill to weave in tree and thatch
Nests where happy mothers hatch
Speckled eggs of blue.
The garden had even more emphatically found itself when
Ballads and Lyrics blossomed three years later, and to the early
crocus and shamrock there was added a hedge of hawthorne,
blithe and sweet. It gave us the last of the long Irish narra-
tives in the stirring tales of the Children of Lir and Connla
of the Golden Hair. And it gave us the first of those delicious
verse apologias which Mrs. Hinkson's readers have learned, to
expect by way of introduction as also that little trick of the
refrain which she has used so repeatedly and so refreshingly.
Nowhere is it more refreshing nor more persistent than in the
now familiar 'April lyric:
VOL. XCVIT. 14.
210 POETRY OF KATHARINE TYNAN HINKSON [May,
All in the April evening,
April airs were abroad:
The sheep with their little lambs
Passed by me on the road.
The sheep with their little lambs
Passed by me on the road:
All in an April evening,
I thought on the Lamb of God.
The lambs were weary, and crying
With a weak human cry;
I thought on the Lamb of God,
Going meekly to die.
Up in the blue, blue mountains,
Dewy pastures are sweet;
Rest for the little bodies,
Rest for the little feet.
But for the Lamb of God,
Up on the hill top green,
Only a cross of shame,
Two stark crosses between.
All in the April evening,
April airs were abroad,
I saw the sheep with their lambs,
And thought on the Lamb of God.
In that we come upon the strain which Mrs. Hinkson's friends
will like to label the essential Katharinian!
So much for the lyrics, which indeed were beginning to take
major hold upon this garden of verse. Of very different tenor was
the Countess Cathleen, a ballad upon that curious and poignant
legend which William Butler Yeats has since put into dramatic
form. To handle with any sort of vraisemblance this tale of
the woman who sells her own soul to the demon merchants, that
her people may be saved from famine, would seem a work of
peculiar difficulty. It is a far more mystical version of the Monna
Vanna problem with something of Faust to boot. But there is
no doubt that it has proved immensely stimulating to the poets.
When Katharine Tynan pictured her Cathleen going forth from
the palace,
With her white soul in her hand,
Fair beyond desires,
And her eyes like those who stand
In eternal fires,
1913-] POETRY OF KATHARINE TYNAN HINKSON 211
she achieved one of her most beautiful passages. And it is inter-
esting to note how many of Mr. Yeats' really great lines have
been called into being by the same theme.
The first age of the garden was done when the hawthorne of
Ballads and Lyrics had blossomed white and pink. For with
Cuckoo Songs (1894) the warm sweetness of the lilac is felt
the lilac flowers which link together the late virginity of spring
and the fresh motherhood of early summer. There were lovely
bird notes here also: one cuckoo song so piercingly sweet that
Katharine Tynan ought never to have written of the cuckoo again.
There were charming renderings of the legends of Brother Ronan
and his Birds, of Blessed Columba and his Horse; there was a
brave ballad of Geoffrey Barron, and a tragically beautiful legend
of Our Lady of Pity; really at root the same legend which Heine
has used so arrestingly in his Pilgrimage of Kevlaar. A lovely
little miracle play of the Resurrection proved exceedingly pro-
phetic in matter and metre of the volume next to come. And with
all this, there was a noticeable deepening of the personal note.
To Katharine Tynan (or as she had now become, Mrs. Henry
Albert Hinkson) there had come a new power of self-expression
and of soul-expression.
In the main, and all along, this has been most successful in
concrete forms. God's Bird is both noble and tender; but most
readers will recognize in House and Home a rather unique com-
bination of " the dream and the business," and withal a very con-
vincing piece of feminine (if not "feminist") psychology:
Where is the house, the house we love?
By field or river, square or street,
The house our hearts go dreaming of,
That lonely waits our hurrying feet;
The house to which we come, we come,
To make that happy house our home.
Is it under grey London skies?
Or somewhere hid, in fields and trees,
With gardens where a musk wind sighs,
Or one brown plot to grow heartsease ?
*****
O dear dream-house, for you I store
A medley of such curious things
As a wise thrush goes counting o'er,
Ere the glad moon of songs and wings,
212 POETRY OF KATHARINE TYNAN HINKSON [May,
When a small nest makes all her heaven,
And a true mate that sings at even.
Up those dim stairs my heart will steal,
And quietly through the listening rooms,
And long in prayerful love will kneel,
And in the sweet-aired twilight glooms
Will set a curtain straight, or chair,
And dust and order and make fair.
*****
O dear dream-house, for which we pray,
Our feet come slowly up your way !
Close upon the echo of Cuckoo Songs came the Miracle Plays
of 1895 Mary lilies for the garden first, and then for Mary's
own altar. Here was a most lovesome recasting of the mediaeval
strain, a series of little poetic plays upon our Lord's Birth and
Childhood, very devout, very naive, very artistic; and full (as
the best mediaeval ones were also full) of a vital and simple
humanism. Although cast in dialogue form, their strength
is mainly lyrical; and at the beginning and end of all six parts
there are lyrics of extremely quotable beauty. Here is a fragment
of one upon the Annunciation :
Lilies in our garden
Take the light, pure and white ;
Lilies in the moonlight
Like a silver flame.
Lilies in our garden
Shed perfume, all a bloom.
Bearing then a white lily
Blessed Gabriel came.
Silver pale his lily
Like a sword flashed and stirred;
Scimitar of Heaven
To lay Satan low.
Shining like his lily
Mary went, sweet, content,
Walking in her garden
Flower of gold and snow.
THe dramatic sense is nowise deficient, for all this lyricism:
one meets it in the characterization of the three kings, in the
1913-] POETRY OF KATHARINE TYNAN HINKSON 213
exquisite little scene with Simeon at the Presentation, in the song
of Dimas' Mother. St. Joseph was to take on personality later,
in that poem of glorified domesticity, The Man of the House, and
was but slightly defined in the Miracle Plays. But the Virgin
moves like a pearl across the pages
Hidden and draped from head to feet
In veils of holiness, yet meet
For human joy and pain.
It is a mystical, childlike Mary in the early scenes, bowered among
her blossoms and her birds; a very woman in the hours of stress;
a very mother in her sweetly fearful dominance of the final epi-
sodes.
Love and motherhood and then death had laid their seal
upon Katharine Tynan's life perhaps, indeed, they must needs
have laid their seal, every one of them before she could conceiv-
ably have given us her Lover's Breast Knot. She herself has
named the flowers it brought into the garden heartsease and love-
lies-bleeding : heartsease for the "marriage of true minds," a
woman's love songs, infinitely tender, scarcely passionate; and
love-lies-bleeding to rest, like a sprig of rosemary, on the grave
of the little lost son, Godfrey. Here, in truth, was passion enough;
no passion of ineffectual tears, but the agony of motherhood made
barren, the surpassing wistfulness of eyes which must look all
the way into eternity before the heart's delight be found.
His face was sweeter than a rose
But O Love's rose is thorny!
He nestled in my breast so close
Before he went his journey.
It is a note less of tragedy than of consummate, quintessential
pathos, and without it Mrs. Hinkson's poetry could never have at-
tained its most piercing loveliness. For are not the poet's lips
made sweet by sorrow, even as the prophet's by a burning coal?
Two years later, in 1898, The Wind in the Trees, a new volume
of Nature pieces, came from the poet's hand. It had the distinc-
tion of being an exhibition without one single " interior." Songs
of the regal chestnut were here; of the ever- favorite lamb and
cuckoo ; of young trees shooting upright like " soft flames of
green;" of brisk chanticleer who "whistles back the day." There
214 POETRY OF KATHARINE TYNAN HINKSON [May,
were a thousand felicities, many of them to be returned to and
developed even more felicitously later on; meanwhile they brought
into the garden a wealth of green and glossy grasses, tall, shadowy,
woodsy things con jur ings of bird and red deer, of orchards and
meadows, of the colleen milking her cow at dawn.
For three years then the Muse spoke but rarely; and the
garden waited, after the wise, brooding way of gardens, until
sun and rain should bring their riot of roses. In 1901 they came
red roses and white, pink and golden the Collected Poems, with
a whole sheaf of pages never seen before. The promise of spring
had been fulfilled : the flag of midsummer was floating over Kath-
arine Tynan's garden of verse. Her second poetic period had
reached its culmination.
This is not to imply, in all later work, decadence. In July
there is not decadence; but there is, every gardener knows, a vast
difference from June. There is maturity. The aggressive eager-
ness and radiance of early creation has merged into a something
warm, serene, enveloping a something sweetly humble, which
has laid aside the novelty, the exoticism of youth.
I sing of children and of folk on wings,
Of faith, of love, of quiet country things ;
Of death that is but lying down at night,
And waking with the birds at morning light;
And of the Love of God encompassing;
And of the seasons round from spring to spring ;
I sing of gardens, fields, and flowers and trees:
Therefore I call my love-songs Innocencies.
So sang Mrs. Hinkson in the very opening stanza of her
Innocencies (1905). Looking through the slim volume, one gets
the impression of a white field of daisies; white and sunny and
gentle, with here and there a blue gentian for the laughter of child
eyes. Very similar were the Experiences of 1908. For, in truth,
Katharine Tynan's experiences are all innocencies : praises to God
for the beauty of earth, for the serviceable senses, for sweet memor-
ies and sad, for friends and gardens and the quiet of meadow-
paths, for sunlight and shadow, and all the comfortable and com-
mon things of life.
There has been but one subsequent volume, the New Poems
of 1911*; lavender flowers, pungent yet strangely placid, with the
one flaming poppy of that much discussed lyric, Maternity. The
1913.] POETRY OF KATHARINE TYNAN HINKSON 215
sun was nearing midheaven; more and more was stillness resting
like a veil of August haze upon the garden. The glad birds, made
by the good God " in a moment merry," and loved by our poet
with a particular and symbolic tenderness, chirp triumphantly;
the golden bee whispers his amorous secrets; the little lambs lie
quiet beside contented ewes; men come and go and love and build
and sleep at last in peace. And over the " flying wheel of time "
rests the Thought of God, immanent, unchangeable,
O'er whom Eternity will pass
But as an image in a glass.
Has the poet's heart grown a little weary of the conflict, the
drama of life, when it creeps into an ideal refuge such as this?
Or has the poet's heart risen above the dualism of the body into
a trance of bright and true contemplation? Or both? The
reader must decide: and his judgment pro or con will be largely
colored by the way he is able to accept such a simple yet amazing
poem as Good Friday:
Good Friday is a heavenly day,
So bright, so fair, so still,
They slay the King of all the world
On a high hill.
* * * *
Sweetly it rose and fell,
So calm, so light, so grave.
Christ Jesus, sacrificed for men,
Died and forgave.
Meanwhile the gold and purple of seedtime comes on apace. The
garden waits once more and its autumn song shall not be wanting.
Already it is promised; nay, we know it in fragments. And we
shall know it soon in the fulfillment of Irish Poems.
It would be very easy to over-accentuate this note of serenity
in Mrs. Hinkson's work. It is always easy to overstress the ob-
vious, and to hear only the loudest music. But there are many
distinct "motives" in these songs of the seasons, and it is not
alone in the most joyous that she has proved a true poet. Her
love of Nature has indeed been rapturously felt and sung. She
has been, as it were, inebriated by the beauty and peace of the
sunlit earth; over and over again has she praised the golden coun-
216 POETRY OF KATHARINE TYNAN HINKSON [May,
try and lamented the grey ness, the conflict, the heartache of the
town. No one has sung more enchantingly of the birds : very few
more sympathetically of the beasts. But Francis himself was
scarcely joyous when he looked upon the burdens of Brother Ox
or Brother Ass. In Katharine Tynan's Shamrocks there was a
version of that old, sweet legend of Christ and the " pitiful dead
dog " lying in the streets of Jerusalem : and soon, in the volume
not yet published, her readers will come upon a lyric, The Ass
Speaks, in her best manner and of tear-compelling potency. We
quote but a few stanzas :
I am the little Ass of Christ
I carried Him ere He was born,
And bore Him to His bitter tryst
Unwilling, that Palm Sunday morn.
I was His Mother's servant, I,
I carried her from Nazareth,
Up to the shining hill-country,
To see the Lady Elizabeth.
The stones were many in my road.
By valleys steeper than a cup,
I, trembling for my heavenly load,
Went cat-foot since I held It up.
* # # #
I knelt beside my brother Ox,
And saw the very Birth! O Love,
And awe and wonder! little folks
May see such sights nor die thereof.
The chilly Babe we breathed upon,
Warmed with our breath the frozen air,
Kneeling beside Our Lady's gown,
His only comfort saving Her.
I am beaten, weary foot, ill-fed;
Men curse me: yet I bear withal
Christ's Cross betwixt my shoulders laid,
So I am honored though I'm small.
I bore Christ Jesus, and I bear
His Cross upon my rough, grey back.
Dear Christian people, pray you, spare
The whip, for Jesus' Christ, His sake.
1913.] POETRY OF KATHARINE TYNAN HINKSON 217
Something of this tender, colloquial note goes into all of
Katharine Tynan's devotional poetry. It was the charm of the
Miracle Plays and the Man of the House, and it gave sincerity
to the more ornate pre-Raphaelite pieces. By temperament, Mrs.
Hinkson would seem less mystical than Crashaw or Francis Thomp-
son or even Dante Rossetti ; but in the best of her religious pieces
she becomes mystical, precisely because of the definite intimacy
with which she handles Uranian themes. There is a beautiful
youthfulness in the sharp sweet music of her Garden; a lyric breath,
it might be, from the unspoiled hills of Oberammergau :
Our Lord, Christ Jesus, Son of God,
Loved gardens while on earth He abode.
There was a garden where He took
His pleasures oft, by Kedron's brook.
There in His uttermost agony
He found a pillow whereon to lie
And anguish while His disciples slept.
Be sure the little grass-blades kept
Vigil with Him, and the grey olives
Shivered and sighed like one that grieves,
And the flowers hid their eyes for fear!
His garden was His comforter.
There to the quiet heart He made,
He came, and it upheld His head
Before the angel did. Therefore
Blessed be gardens evermore!
The song gathers up then the story of another garden, wherein
" He lay, stabbed through, one wound," the quiet earth holding Him
close for His three-days' sleep. And it is here, where the " wid-
owed flowers " are bowed low with watching, that the dawn of
Easter breaks:
O! in the beautiful rose-red day
Who comes a-walking down this way?
Why's Magdalen weeping? Ah, sweet lady,
She knows not where is her Lord's Body!
Sweet Magdalen, see! here is your Love!
Whom Solomon's seal and the sweet-clove
Brush with their lips as He goes by.
Now bid His disciples haste ! Bring hither
His Mother and St. John together!
218 POETRY OF KATHARINE TYNAN HINKSON [May,
But t'was the Garden saw Him rise.
Wherefore she flaunts her peacocks eyes;
Wherefore her birds sing low and loud,
The heart that bare His sleep is proud.
It was not in the nature of Mrs. Hinkson's poetry to fall into
the snare of didacticism; if she teaches, we do not know it; and she
is wise enough to seem ignorant of it herself. Yet we cannot
ignore the peculiar nobility with which, from almost every angle,
she has treated the subject of death. It is not merely in the
religious pieces; nor in that spirited and singing bit of symbolism,
Planting Bulbs; it is the pervading message of her song. From
that early recognition of Azrael (little-loved yet much-loving
angel!) in the very youth of her work, our poet has simply dis-
missed the traditional fear of death. La Fontaine's fable seems
thin and poor beside her bravely gentle Death and the Man. She
has found a stronger thing Love which casts out fear; and she
carries it unhesitatingly into every human relationship. Hence
we find the constantly recurring motive of the return of the dead :
the motive of the dead child (surely one of the saddest in all
literature!) remembering and comforting the mother still "under
sentence of life." More insistent still is the theme of the dead
mother, who returns to watch over her little ones upon earth.
Shamrocks gave us the first of these valiant, piteous women : then
came The Widowed House of Cuckoo Songs, a brief piece of haunt-
ing power and pathos:
Within your house that's widowed Love's nest is bitter cold,
Love goes with drooping pinions, his pulses slow and old ;
Your baby cries all night long for you he never knew,
The dust is over all things : the grave dust over you.
********
'T were liker you to hasten, putting the glory by,
To kiss your love's cold forehead and still your baby's cry.
'T were liker you'd come stealing, a little ghost in white,
To rock a tiny cradle all in the hushed moonlight,
To whisper to a sleeper till he should dream and wake,
And find the strange new comfort and lose the old heart-break.
********
But there we have the strongest motive in all Mrs. Hinkson's
poetry-^the note of her essential motherhood. It has been as
varied as maternity itself: first a thing of promise, of wistful-
1913-] POETRY OF KATHARINE TYNAN HINKSON 219
ness ; then in the whole multitude of child pieces a thing of sunny
joy, of vigilance, at once of queenliness and humility. In the
Lover's Breast Knot there is the other story: a story too sacred
and too sorrowful to tell in broken fragments. But even there
love, the mother's love, manifestly triumphs. It is so much stronger
than death! Katharine Tynan does not doubt that it is stronger
also than hell ; and she has said so in one of the* most striking
poems ever written on the subject. Humanly speaking, Maternity
is really the last word:
There is no height, no depth, my own, could set us apart,
Body of mine and soul of mine : heart of my heart !
There is no sea so deep, my own, no mountain so high,
That I should not come to you if I heard ,you cry.
There is no hell so sunken, no heaven so steep,
Where I should not seek my own, find you and keep.
Now you are round and soft to see, sweet as a rose,
Not a stain on my spotless one, white as the snows.
If some day you came to me heavy with sin,
I, your mother, would run to the door and let you in.
I would wash you white again with my tears and grief,
Body of mine and soul of mine, till you found relief.
*******
Child, if I were in heaven one day and you were in hell
Angels white as my spotless one stumbled and fell
I would leave for you the fields of God and Queen Mary's feet,
Straight to the heart of hell would go, seeking my sweet.
God mayhap would turn Him around at sound of the door:
" Who is it goes out from Me to come back no more? "
Then the blessed Mother of God would say from her throne:
" Son, 'tis a mother goes to hell, seeking her own.
Body of mine, and soul of mine, born of me,
Thou Who wert once little Jesus beside my knee,
It is like to that all mothers are made : Thou madest them so.
Body of mine and soul of mine, do I not know ? "
If poetry must be haled before the bar of theology, these
bold stanzas will, indeed, be found wanting. There is not much
" detachment " in them : the divine mercy and justice are scarcely
apparent. The white light of perfect wisdom is broken into fac-
ets of vibrating color. But in this palpitating purple, this crim-
son of the heart's own blood, is there not some passionate reflec-
tion of the love which surpasseth woman's the Love which, when
220 POETRY OF KATHARINE TYNAN HINKSON [May,
sacrifice and burnt offering might no longer avail, cried out to
His Eternal Father, Lo, I come?
There is nothing in all the love poems of Katharine Tynan
to equal the passion of Maternity. Yet, although romantic love
has scarcely been a favorite theme with her, and although it has
been a theme treated with reticence, she has given us authentic
love songs none the less. In the early poems there was often
a note of wistfulness; but in all the mature work it is calm and
sweet fruition, a deep but scarcely ruffled music. Once again
domesticity dominates; as in House and Home and the Country
Lover the sea surges toward harbor lights. For sundered lovers,
staggering separately the long Via Crucis till paths converge
at last for lovers who must needs do battle in the dust and heat
and darkness for lovers bruised and broken by the pitiless waves
of life our poet has no word. But the True Marriage of hidden
grace and manifest love, the union grown purer by long use and
daily sacrifice, she has interpreted with delicate and exquisite
fervor. As the song of sorrows borne together, Any Wife, a
recent poem, is fitting complement to the earlier Breast Knot.
There is indeed one poem in which a note of compelling passion
rings; but this is a poem of death also, The Ghost. Once again the
loved one is called back from the grave back from the cold and
darkness, into the firelit home. And the final stanza is magnificently
dramatic
Fear! Is it fear of you,
And on my breast your head?
I shall but fear the dawning new,
And the cocks both white and red!
The garden is primitive always, a sweet and childlike thing,
with the lineaments of Eden still upon its face. That is why
we have so insistently kept to the figure of the garden in dealing
with Mrs. Hinkson's poetry. It, also, is fragrant and childlike:
in style and viewpoint, too, it has become more artless with the
years. It has the beautiful ingenuousness of maturity, not ques-
tioning but satisfied. Its music is determinately simple and na'ive:
deliciously simple in the better pieces, which, by-the-by, are almost
always just more masterful, more spontaneous, more concentrated
versions of the weaker ones. But simplicity, as Wordsworth
proved, is a difficult grace to manage. The " simple life," save
when exquisite choice has created simplicity, tends to become
1913-] POETRY OF KATHARINE TYNAN HINKSON 221
the meager life; the professedly simple verse trembles upon the
verge of crudity or commonplace. There is nothing inherently
wrong about such phrases as " Everyone knew you, everyone loved
you " " The longer I've lost you the more I miss you :" but it
is hard to render them poetic, because they are saturated and
blurred with the breath of everyday usage. There are other ex-
pressions, like the " nurseries of heaven," which fail of effect
because they have become identified with another and a master
voice. Mrs. Hinkson has written eleven volumes of verse, along
with an enormous production of prose work. It would be in-
credible, within such space, if she had not proved at moments
reminiscent, both of herself and others. Gardens also are repe-
titional; gardens are over-productive; and left to themselves create
a magnificent harvest of weeds. All this is merely pointing out
that the richer the soil, the more certain is the garden to have need
of a pruning fork.
And Katharine Tynan's garden has, in all truth, been rich:
in sympathy, in variety, in those rarer virtues of sincerity and
idealized realism. Her poetry is highly emotional, but not, for the
most part, stirred by the profundities of passion or conviction. It
knows little of conflict. It is gentle, gracious, intensely personal.
When it reaches out to experiences as old and as large as humanity,
it does so by the simple right of having lived and felt one life sensi-
tively. There is no effort of the poet to "project" her soul to speak
oracularly or vicariously. Indeed, she is no lover of abstractions
in divine or human things. There is little in her work of what
we are fond of calling Celtic other-worldliness : a thing beloved
of poet and dreamer, not unknown, perhaps, to peasant or beggar;
but no whit more real, and not one-tenth as general as Celtic
domesticity. There is no more home-making race on earth than
the Irish, and the Irishman as lover (not in any precise sense
mystical!) has become a fable to the nations. In this engaging
sense Mrs. Hinkson's poetry is Celtic enough ! One of its dominat-
ing notes has been the love of Ireland another has been the love
of motherhood a third the love of God. It is a very good tri-
angle: almost as good and fair and comforting as the little,
immortal shamrock itself. And everyone with a flash of Celtic
fire will cry out upon the critic that we shall be hard put to better
that!
BERGSON AND FREEDOM.
BY THOMAS J. GERRARD.
ETHERTO the upholders and the opponents of free
will have understood each other fairly well. There
has been no doubt as to the point at issue.
But in M. Bergson's philosophy, as we have
seen, the intellect is not considered the supreme
judge and guide in conduct. Bergson's conceptions of space and
time and flow and intuition have changed all this.
Before coming to real grips with M. Bergson it will be neces-
sary to say a word or two on the universally accepted doctrine
of free will. Free will implies two things: an intellectual light,
and a volition freely exerted by the agent, which is not a
necessary result of his nature or environment.
The function of his intelligence is to weigh evidence. And
since there are two sides to every question, there must be motives
drawing him to either side. But the weightier motive is not
sufficient to force his will in any one way. Probably he will
follow the weightier motive, and an outsider knowing all the
circumstances, might foretell with probability which course he
would take. But he could not foretell with certainty, because the
freedom inherent in the will defies exact calculation.
M. Bergson's first mistake is in supposing that the question
of freedom confines itself either to determination by necessary
causes or to an entire absence of motives. There is a middle course.
The will is influenced to a certain extent by evidence duly
weighed by the intellect, but it is not absolutely determined by it.
The primary testimony of freedom is a strict intuition. If
we look into ourselves, and place ourselves between two alternatives,
say to take up one book or another, or to take up a book or leave
it alone, we see immediately without discursive reasoning that we
are able to choose. Moreover, this consciousness of being able to
choose freely is present before, during, and after the act.
This consciousness of freedom, so universal in mankind, and
the responsibility universally attached to human acts, prove con-
clusively that freedom must be considered one of the essential
features of human nature.
1913.] BERGSON AND FREEDOM 223
We are, now, in a position to approach M. Bergson's treatment
of it. The determinists say that intellectual light destroys freedom,
since it acts as a determining motive. M. Bergson says that they
are right if we allow the intellect to be a motive at all. Therefore,
to save freedom from the hands of the determinists, we must,
according to Bergson, seek for it elsewhere than in the choice
between two alternatives apprehended by the intellect. He proposes
to find it in the very rare creative acts which are the expression
of man's whole personality. And this is how he arrives at his,
conclusion.
The great bugbear which bars the way to a solution of the
problem is space. Psychic states pertain to real time, the all-
important flowing " now," whereas space does not. Time flown
may be represented by spatial pictures, but not time flowing. An
act of freedom is a supreme psychic state; therefore it cannot be
measured, nor compared with alternative courses proposed by the
intellect.*
About two-thirds of the volume treating particularly of this
subject, is devoted to the attempt to show that psychic states are
not subject to the laws of mathematics and geometry, or, in other
words, that if they can be said to be greater or less, the difference
is one of intensity and not of extensity. When I am sorry my
sorrow is neither square nor round, and when I am glad my glad-
ness is neither seven nor eight. If we attach magnitude to psychic
states, it is only because the intellect, being normally at home
with solids, uses analogies of spatial magnitude to represent that
which has no space and no measurement. Psychic states simply
endure in an unceasing flow, and consequently any intellectual or
pictorial representation of them is entirely inadequate to the reality,
and is but an artificial device for the practical purposes of life.
We should, therefore, distinguish two forms of multiplicity;
two very different ways of regarding duration; two aspects
of conscious life. Below homogeneous duration, which is the
extensive symbol of true duration, a close psychological analysis
distinguishes a duration whose heterogeneous moments per-
meate one another; below the self with well-defined states, a
self in which succeeding each other means melting into one
another and forming an organic whole. But we are generally
content with the first, i. e., with the shadow of the self projected
into homogeneous space. Consciousness goaded by an insa-
tiable desire to separate, substitutes the symbol for the reality,
*Time and Free Will, xix.
224 BERGSON AND FREEDOM [May,
or perceives the reality only through the symbol. As the self
thus refracted, and thereby broken to pieces, is much better
adapted to the requirements of social life in general and lan-
guage in particular, consciousness prefers it, and gradually
loses sight of the fundamental self.*
If we are to observe where freedom lies, so it is contended,
we must ever turn our eye on these two aspects of self. The
surface self which is intellectual and static must be subject to
the laws of science, and consequently cannot be free. Whereas
the fundamental self, being independent of space, independent
of laws, independent of intellect, must be free. In this fluid,
fundamental self lies the kinetic action of the whole soul: the
gathering up of the whole of the life force.
It is not necessary to associate a number of conscious states
in order to rebuild the person, for, according to M. Bergson, the
whole personality is in a single one of them, provided that we
know how to choose it. Such a manifestation of this inner state
will be a free act, since the self alone has been the author of it,
and since it will express the whole of the self. Freedom, thus
understood, is not absolute, as a radically libertarian philosophy
would have it; it admits of degrees. Many people, M. Bergson
asserts, do not allow all their experiences to sink down into this
fundamental self. In fact the chosen ones are very few. " Free
acts are exceptional even on the part of those who are most given
to controlling and reasoning out what they do." M. Bergson goes
so far as to say that an act which is the result of this bubbling
up of what he calls the inner life, even though the same be unreason-
able, may be a free act. In fact it would be difficult to exaggerate
the extent to which in Bergson's philosophy reason is prostituted.f
With Bergson the force which is supposed to rise up and
burst into freedom is composed indiscriminately of feelings and
ideas. He states that we have two selves at variance with each
other. And most important of all he gives the palm of freedom
to blind inclination in preference to intellectual vision. All this,
it is calmly assumed, is our highest and noblest life, the very
quintessence of a life spent in forming a happy and honorable
character.
When intellect and space have been excluded from the process,
when the free act has been placed in the fluid " now," when the
faculty by which it is perceived is declared to be only feeling,
*Time and Free Will. p. 128. *Ibid., p. 167.
1913.] BERGSON AND FREEDOM 225
there must necessarily arise some difficulty in defining what free-
dom is. M. Bergson says quite frankly that it is indefinable.
If he attempted to define it, he would crystallize it, and at
once thereby concede the whole case to the determinists. He
must, therefore, keep the concept nebulous. Clearness is static,
whilst nebulosity is always shifting.
A very strange and significant admission on the part of a
philosopher to say he is unable to define his terms. It is an
admission that he is cornered. We must retrace his steps to see
where he went wrong, and how he became thus cornered.
According to evolutionary philosophy, the initial thrust of
creative evolution has evolved man as we know him. Various
branches of life have bifurcated. Intellect is but a development
of sensation. Intellect and sensation, therefore, are always radi-
cally the same thing. Intellect is always extended. Hence M.
Bergson is beset with the difficulty of trying to escape extension.
If he had admitted at the beginning, as the schoolmen do,
that there is an essential difference between intellect and sensation,
he would not thus have impaled himself. St. Thomas states this
position so delicately and clearly that we cannot do better than
repeat his words. He seems almost to have foreseen the specula-
tions of M. Bergson.
Distance in place ordinarily affects sense, not intellect, except
incidentally, where intellect has to gather its data from sense.
For while there is a definite law of distance, according to which
sensible objects affect sense, terms of intellect, as they impress
the intellect, are not in place, but are separate from bodily
matter Terms of intellect are as independent of time
as they are of place. Time follows upon local motion, and
measures such things only as are in some manner placed
in space Time is a condition of our intellectual activity,
since we receive knowledge from phantasms that regard a fixed
time. Hence to its judgments, affirmative and negative, our
intelligence always appends a fixed time, except when it under-
stands the essence of a thing. It understands essence by ab-
stracting terms of understanding from the conditions of sensible
things: hence in that operation it understands irrespectively
of time and other conditions of sensible things.*
Here St. Thomas puts the operations of the intellect beyond
both space and time. Had M. Bergson not been obsessed by
radical evolutionism, he need not have written the first two long
*Contra Gentiles, Lib. II., Cap. XCVI.
VOL. XCVII. 15.
226 BERGSON AND FREEDOM [May,
chapters of his Time and Free Will. The free act is essentially
independent of time and space. We grant him that, not because
fluid time is not space, but because the acts of the intellect are simple,
spiritual, unextended acts, and, therefore, essentially beyond time
and space.
The intellect thus rescued from the necessitous bonds of sensa-
tion is rescued from all determinist danger. When M. Bergson
confuses intellect with sensation, he first concedes with the right
hand to the determinist that which he afterwards tries to take
away with the left. There is no need for these contortions. The
intellect is essentially distinct from sense. Our consciousness tells
us that we are able to think universal concepts which are beyond the
limitations of sense. We can picture, for instance, with the imagi-
nation an individual man, and such an individual must have a definite
size and shape. But we can also think of the universal concept "man"
which has no definite size or shape. If the intellect is essentially
independent of time and space, it can provide a spiritual motive
for the will which can influence the will without forcing it.
Even those of us who hold the traditional doctrine of free
will, need to be constantly on our guard against misunderstanding
the use of the word " motive." We need constantly to remind
ourselves that when we speak of the spirit we must needs do so in
terms of the flesh. These terms are analogical, and are not quite
adequate for their purpose. When we speak of motive power
applied by one spiritual faculty to another, it is not the same kind
of motive power as that which is applied by a sledge hammer
to a wedge. One is vital and spiritual, whilst the other is me-
chanical and material. The latter is of its nature necessitous,
whilst the former of its nature is free.
This confusion has constrained M. Bergson to deny freedom
to acts which hitherto have been considered free, and to attribute
freedom to acts which may or may not be free.
His continued attempt to obscure the intellectual life by an
appeal to life as a whole, really an appeal to the whole life minus
intellect, reaches the height of the picturesque when M. Bergson
tries to explain away our deliberation between two courses of action.
In reality there are not two tendencies, or even two direc-
tions, but a self which lives and develops by means of its very
.hesitations, until the free action drops from it like an over-
ripe fruit.*
*Time and Free Will, p. 176.
1913.] BERGSON AND FREEDOM 227
Our first criticism of the foregoing doctrine will be an appeal
to that very consciousness of living upon which M. Bergson
depends so much. He appeals to that consciousness, and rightly
so too, for evidence that some of our acts are free. But does not
consciousness announce the possibility of choosing an alternative?
Does not consciousness announce the same thing equally before,
during, and after the act which is in fact chosen? If consciousness
does not announce this, it announces nothing at all.
Nor is M. Bergson any better off if we appeal to discursive
reasoning. To what sort of acts are praise and blame attached?
For what acts is a person held responsible, for the deliberate ones
or the impulsive ones?
Take a prisoner who is charged with the capital offence.
Let time and space enter very much into his deed. Let him be
known to have traversed continents, to have taken weeks and
months to mature his crime. Let him pass through all those acts
which are indicative of intellectual deliberation. Let all this be
proved against him, and any jury will find him guilty without any
recommendation to mercy. On the other hand, let him be known
to have acted on the impulse of passion. Let him be known to be
subject to brain-storms, those sudden outbursts of elemental pas-
sion, jealousy, anger, and the like. Let it be proved that he acted
without deliberation. Let it be shown that the beginning and the
end of the process was in the fluid "now" (or "then"). The
jury would undoubtedly hesitate to pronounce him guilty. It would
declare rather that he was devoid of the intellectual light neces-
sary for freedom.
Or take a case of a great act, done at a crisis in a man's
life, which the world praises; let us say the conversion of Newman.
Undoubtedly that act was the sum total of his past life, surface
life as well as fundamental. Undoubtedly influences were at work
which he had forgotten. But then his mind was able to summarize
his past thought. His will had formed volitional habits ever
tending Godwards. And long years after the act he was able to
go back on his past life and record the chief of the reasons which
had urged him onward. He was able to write a whole book,
which was in the strictest sense of the word an Apologia pro Vita
Sua. And who shall say that reason does not predominate in
every line of it? Yet it is not for the reasons which he gives
that the world admires him. There are thousands upon thousands
who admire his act whilst profoundly disagreeing with its reasons.
228 BERGSON AND FREEDOM [May,
It is because he acted in deference to conscience, because he could
have remained where he was, but freely preferred to follow the
" kindly light."
Then what shall we say of those whose past life has been
one of sin, and who suddenly become converted. Sin implies a
direction away from God, whilst conversion implies the very oppo-
site. We may take either St. Paul or St. Augustine or some of
those non-Catholic varieties quoted by Professor William James.
Are the free actions of these men to be compared with the fall of
an over-ripe fruit? The whole trend and growth of the character
of Paul had been towards the persecution of others. Then when
the light suddenly came, he was able to turn right about and begin
an entirely new life. Self -development along the old lines would
only have taken him further and further away from the free life
which was afterwards to be such a joy to him.
St. Augustine has left us an account* of passions tending to
determine him one way and of freely fighting against them. But
he requires time and space and something else. An outside free
Power must raise and accentuate his own freedom.
Then outside Catholicism there is the case which Newman
describes as " the almost miraculous conversion and subsequent
life of Colonel Gardiner."f Professor James speaks of it as
" the classic case of Colonel Gardiner," the man who was cured
of sexual temptation in a single hour. To Mr. Spears the Colonel
said : "I was effectually cured of all inclination to that sin I was
so strongly addicted to, that I thought nothing but shooting me
through the head could have cured me of it; and all desire and
inclination to it was removed, as entirely as if I had been a suckling
child; nor did the temptation return to this day."J Mr. Webster's
words on the same subject are these : " One thing I have heard
the Colonel frequently say, that he was much addicted to impurity
before his acquaintance with religion; but that so soon as he was
enlightened from above, he felt the power of the Holy Ghost
changing his nature so wonderfully that his sanctification in this
respect seemed more remarkable than in any other. "
In presenting these examples, let us beware of a possible
Bergsonian retort that these lives were one continuous flow, and
that conversion was but a curve in the direction. The question we
are dealing with at present is not the flow but the freedom. M.
* Confessions, Book VI., ch. xi. t Difficulties of Anglicans, vol. i., p. 91.
^Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 269. Ibid.
1913.] BERGSON AND FREEDOM 229
Bergson places freedom in the gathering up and bursting of a par-
ticular kind of life. But if this were true, then a sinful course
of life ought to fructify in sin, and the free act should be a sinful
act falling from the sinner like over-ripe fruit. But in the cases
just quoted, it is precisely the contrary which happens. The act
of conversion, instead of being the ripe fruit of past conduct, is
the beginning of a new life. The continuum is broken. The new
life is discontinuous from the old, being of an entirely different
order. Nay it is the very discontinuity which is counted as meri-
torious. The freedom and responsibility was present, for the world
does not praise where there is no responsibility. Nor does the
presence of grace, admitted in all three cases, lessen the respon-
sibility or deprive the agents of merit.
It remains for us now to do for M. Bergson that which he has
declined to do for himself, namely, to define his so-called freedom.
The only vestige of freedom which he has retained is the
name. The thing itself he has utterly sponged out from his method.
The thing which he calls freedom is the act which is the result
of all the powers of the soul. This might possibly be a free act if all
the powers of the soul were reviewed by the intelligence, and
under intellectual light found expression through the will. But
then, on the other hand, M. Bergson excludes the intellectual light.
On one page he asks for the activity of the whole soul, whilst
on the next page it is the whole soul minus intelligence which he
requires.
The difference between the Bergsonian crisis and the old deter-
minist crisis is like that between the crisis of the modern motor
car and the old stagecoach. If the old stagecoach went smash,
why there you were. But if the modern motor car goes smash,
why where are you? The brute beasts act in response to their
whole souls. When the tiger is enraged, the whole gamut of his
feelings are actuated, and his resolve falls from his individuality
like over-ripe fruit. And if we exclude the deliberations of the
intellect from resolutions of man, the " whole soul " which is left
is precisely similar to that of the tiger. So this is the definition
which we must impose on Bergsonian freedom sheer animal im-
pulse.
Indeed, in his later work he seems to accept this conclusion:
We have already said that animals and vegetables must have
separated soon from their common stock, the vegetable falling
230 BERGSON AND FREEDOM [May,
asleep in immobility, the animal, on the contrary, becoming
more and more awake, and marching on to the conquest of
a nervous system. Probably the effort of the animal kingdom
resulted in creating organisms still very simple, but endowed
with a certain freedom of action, and, above all, with a shape
so undecided that it could lend itself to any future determina-
tion. These animals may have resembled some of our
worms *
In this case there is no difference whatever between freedom and
necessity. Determinism triumphs, but in the name of freedom.
It is not difficult to see the effect of this philosophy, on other
manifestations of the time-spirit of which it is itself the outcome.
If this new concept of freedom be true, then the doctrine of man's
self-perfectibility is absolute and final, mere sensation is the norm
of morality, and man is locked up for ever in pure subjectivism.
The new thing does not show itself under these ugly names, but
clothes itself with such terms as "self-realization;" "enhancement
of life;" " living out one's own nature."
Looked at more closely, the new thing is found to be com-
posed chiefly of the three appetites : for gold, sex, and independence,
respectively. When the elan vital appears as the lust for gold, it
sets up the banner of freedom of contract. If it can only play
upon, or rather prey upon, the poor man's need of bread, it ignores
all sense of the real thing, freedom. Lust determines the signature
of the contract on the one part, and hunger determines the signa-
ture of the contract on the other.
When the vital impulse thrusts itself onward under the form of
sexual appetite, it does so in the name of love. It even counts
as immoral any attempt to keep this love within any constraining
limits of law. " He who feels strongly enough," writes Ellen
Key, " does not ask himself whether he has a right to that feeling
he is so enlarged by his love that he feels the life of humanity
is enlarged by him." The-pity is that those who adopt such teach-
ing find out their mistake when it is too late. The surrender
to erotic excitement is the passing from personal liberty into abject
slavery, and there is no need to describe further the lamentable
results of it.
When the creative evolution expands as the lust for inde-
pendgice, there is no sphere of life that it may not vitiate. Every-
where law is needed to protect personal freedom from the intrusion
^Creative Evolution, p. 136.
1913.] BERGSON AND FREEDOM 231
of undue determining forces. But the lust for independence is
impatient of all law. Independence, therefore, is the great enemy
of freedom. If freedom is to reign, the lust for independence
must be kept within the bounds of reason. And this must be done
immediately and constantly, for the more the passion is allowed
independence the more it grows in intensity, and the less reason
and will are exercised in controlling it so much the weaker do
these faculties become. The appetites for gold, sex, and inde-
pendence are not bad things in themselves. They are the spon-
taneous motor forces which are designed to carry on the existence
of the race. But lest they should be dissipated in aimless diffusion,
laws are needed to economize them.
We cordially agree, therefore, with M. Bergson that the whole
problem of free will harks back to the question: Is time space?
We agree with him that time is not space. But we profoundly
disagree with him in divorcing time from space as he does. They
are indissolubly wedded together. And I speak here not merely
of space and time-flown, but of space and time-flowing. Flowing
time has no meaning unless there be moving bodies with which to
measure it. But space is an essential quality of moving bodies.
Space, therefore, is wanted to give definition to what would other-
wise be a vague and nebulous idea of flowing time.
Nay the problem rather harks further back to the most ele-
mentary question of all: Is "being" identical with "becoming?"
It is not. But " being " is needed for " becoming." Before we
can treat of " becoming " as a reality at all, we must first satisfy
ourselves that it is.
Similarly must we run this metaphysical principle through
the whole course of our reasoning. As " being " is wanted for
"becoming," so is the static wanted for the kinetic, so is space
wanted for time, so is reason wanted for will, so is authority
wanted for autonomy, and so is law wanted for freedom. Yes,
even in the simplest acts of free will some laws must be observed.
Even if it be such a simple choice as to whether I shall stand up
or sit down, law must be taken into account. It will not do for
me to yield to any inclination whatsoever and tumble about any-
where. I must reckon with the law of gravity, for instance, and
the equilibrium of forces. Otherwise I might sit down to my
unexpected discomfiture.
GREEN BAGS AND GREEN RIBBONS.
BY KATHERINE G. KENNEDY.
ROM England, eh?" said Mr. Joseph Carney; his
appraising eye noting the weathered state of Willett's
clothes. " You're a long way from home then."
" It seems a longer way than it is, since I've
been walking about trying to find a place. It's very
difficult for a stranger."
" I suppose so." Mr. Carney's tone indicated that he hoped
it might be difficult for such a trampish-looking fellow to find a
place in a law firm.
" I've had the best of training, sir, and experience too, both
in chambers and at the bar. I can be of use to you I know."
Mr. Joseph Carney grunted as he strained his vigorous mind
to a point of decision. Heaven knows he needed help, Parker
down with pneumonia, and the Brandon case coming to trial in
a week's time, but he did not want a vagabond Englishman. The
fellow had no recommendations, and he looked like a tramp ; besides
Mr. Joseph Carney did not like an Englishman. Mr. Joseph Car-
ney was an Irishman; not, be it noted, the Irishman one finds in
books. There was not the least likelihood of Mr. Joseph Carney
slapping the back of a shabby coat or striking palms fraternally
with its humble occupant. Mr. Carney, the attorney, was a man of
standing in his profession, and he displayed his warmest favor
toward good tailoring and clean linen.
For a moment he stood hesitating, his tall figure silhouetted
against the snowstorm beyond the window. Then he turned to
Willett, thin-lipped, stern-browed, and grudgingly surrendered. "I'll
try you for a week," he said, and rang the bell. Craig gravely
responded. He hung Willett's hat in the corner closet, unearthed
a load of papers from the files for his benefit, and laid them on
Parker's desk.
Kate Desmond, returning a half hour later from the luncheon
she had enjoyed on the eleventh floor of a neighboring department
stora, found Willett working as busily and tranquilly at Parker's
desk as though it had been his accustomed location for years.
She regarded him with silent interest, while she shook the snow
1913.] GREEN BAGS AND GREEN RIBBONS 233
from her hat and coat and hung them up. As she opened the
little gate to enter the part of the large room which was railed
off from the clerks, she caught Craig's eye. He nodded toward
Willett with a whimsical smile, which seemed to say, " See what
I got for you while you were gone." Kate puckered her brow
into an expressive half inquiry, half surprise, and hurried to her
place. She inserted a sheet of paper into the typewriter with a
click and a slide, and immediately a shower of taps filled the room
with its monotonous song.
Outside the fall of wet sodden snow had been followed
by rain, and a rising wind that blew it in sheets down the channels
of streets.
Mr. Joseph Carney pushed open the door of the inner sanctum,
and gladdened his sight for a moment with the picture of industry
which his little group of drones presented. He waited until Willett
looked up, and then called him in. As he disappeared Craig turned
in his chair and whistled; Kate trailed a glance over her shoulder,
and the typewriter song slowed up and stopped.
" Woman, dear," cried Craig in a voice comically husky,
" d'ye r'alize what's befallen us ? "
" Who is he ? " she asked ignoring his broad humor.
Craig assumed a lofty tone. " Tis he the enemy," he asserted,
summoning all his dramatic powers to enliven the speech he had
spent the last half hour composing. " He who spilt your sires'
blood at Drogheda and Wexford, and who tried to stifle freedom
at Bunker Hill and Lexington, is even now amongst us."
"An Englishman, but how did he come in here?"
" That," answered Craig still using the heroic style, " is a
story of discovery, adventure, and conquest. The beginning of it
is that the old man received word an hour ago that Parker's cold
had developed into pneumonia, and the news threw him into a fit;
the suits against the foundry being already on the calendar, and
a call to the Court of Appeals expected in the near future. He
called me in, and briefly gave me the job of finding a first-class
man to fill Parker's place immediately. There was no use to
reason with him. He was beyond such treatment, so I started out
to find the impossible. I went first to the law school, but as I met
the jostling, gibbering crowd coming out, I turned back in despair.
I happened to think that the law librarian might know someone, and
went speedily over to the library. I almost knocked a man down
when I opened the door suddenly, and as I turned to apologize he
234 GREEN BAGS AND GREEN RIBBONS [May,
button-holed me. He was an experienced barrister, he explained,
lately from England, and was looking for a position in this land of
free opportunity. I did not notice that he looked like a member
of the bread line, or the snow shovellers' union, until I got out
on the street with him. Then I would have been glad to lose him,
but he hung close to me, and talked cheerfully while he splashed
along in a leaky pair of shoes.
" Probably he isn't a lawyer at all," said Kate.
" You are wrong there, Katherine," returned Craig gravely.
" He is all he claims, and more yet."
"How can you tell?"
" By the look of him, or rather by the look he wore when
he went in to see Carney. You see before I reached the office
door, I had concluded that he would look a mighty foolish propo-
sition to the old man, so I decided to defer explaining until after
he had been ejected. I pushed open the door, announced him
by name, and then turned to tell my shabby discovery to walk in.
It was then I realized his size and quality, and as he stepped in
I distinctly felt that he would not come out until he chose. He
wore an expression that was as cheerful as it was compelling, and
seemed to assert that wearing shabby clothes was his own chosen
peculiarity a thing to be smiled at in a man of manner and
bearing."
" It must have been a strong expression to induce Carney
to accept such a shabby looking fellow." Kate was not entirely
satisfied by Craig's explanation of the miracle that had taken place
in her absence.
" Well, it might not have succeeded another time," reflected
Craig more coolly, " but you see this morning the old man was
worried, and in his perplexity he lost sight of the fact that he was
counselor for the diocese."
" He was so sunk in the blues that he forgot the purple,"
laughed Kate.
" Exactly, and yet more, for he forgot the green as well.
No officer in the Irish League should be found hobnobbing with
an Englishman, but that's the dramatic point," he chuckled. "Think
of it ! A copy of the resolutions endorsing John Redmond reposes
in the very desk the Briton uses."
The entrance of a couple of black-shirted moulders, who had
come Mp to give evidence in the Brandon case, interrupted the
laugh which Craig had provoked. As they passed in to see Carney,
. 1913-] GREEN BAGS AND GREEN RIBBONS 235
the new clerk came out, and Kate gave him her unmeasured atten-
tion in an effort to see what had reconciled the chief to any thing
so dishevelled in appearance. She saw a slender figure that was
not tall, and a pair of masterful blue eyes filled with eager interest.
He unloaded an armful of books on to his desk, and spoke to Craig.
" There's nothing better than the chance to handle a nice bit of
law." His English voice was pleasantly modulated, and he enun-
ciated well, cutting his t's out clear and sharp.
Craig responded with a glance of approval that was almost
paternal, and turned to introduce him to Kate, but she, in a mood
pf feminine perversity, had turned her back, and descended on
the keys before her with two swift strong hands that drowned
his voice in a crescendo of taps.
Craig shook his head over his lost opportunity. Kate shook
hers later, for when she was leaving the office she came upon him
talking to the Englishman in a corner of the corridor, and burrow-
ing in his pockets as he talked. " The usual way," she mused
bitterly. " The English have always made the Irish pay for the
unsought privilege of their society." She decided then that Craig
had fallen into the hands of an adventurer, and she would make
that fact plain to him on the morrow. But the following morning
was filled with feverish haste, pressing work, and the confusing
element of many clients coming and going through the office.
In the afternoon, when things were quieter, an incident occurred
which changed her purpose in a peculiar way. She had been work-
ing with Craig on a case for appeal, and Willett had been con-
tinually in the room ; curiously, however, he had not as yet addressed
a word to her, although he seemed sufficiently sociable to Craig.
After a time Carney called him, and when he returned he summoned
Kate in the following words, " Mr. Carney wishes to see the typist."
Kate blazed a look at him which swept the length of his pitiful
attire, from his half-soiled collar to his cracked boots, but his
honest innocence saved him from withering. It was Craig who
reddened and looked embarrassed, and it was Craig who became
confused in his effort to present to him the enviable standing of
the business woman in America. The Englishman in turn was
pathetically humble in his apologies, for it was plain to one of
far duller perception that Craig had arrived at a state of mind
where Kate's approval was a necessity in all things from briefs
to button-hole bouquets.
They both looked up a bit nervously as that young lady re-
236 GREEN BAGS AND GREEN RIBBONS [May,
turned to the room. But one glance restored content where it
should have awakened suspicion. For the fact that a nature of
uncommon honesty is apt to descend to duplicity under the strain of
sentimental relations, was well proved by the expression of cheer-
ful unconcern with which Kate covered her indignation. For the
first time since his advent, she chose to be sociable toward Willett.
Indeed she became quite chatty, and led him to describe the
splendor of the English courts, while she sat a solemn picture
of mocking attention. " And you used to wear a gown, too, and
have your papers carried to court for you in a green bag?" she
asked artlessly. " And here's Jimmie who often carries the sacred
things in his pockets." But Jimmie did not join in the laugh.
Somehow he did not enjoy Kate in the role she was playing of
the ignorant little typist; besides he was intensely interested in
Willett. He found himself constantly speculating about him.
Why had he left England? Why, when so well-equipped for
success in a profession, was he here a penniless stranger? Delicacy
forbade inquiry, but from his few irrelevant remarks Jimmie got
the idea Willett had already tasted success and prestige.
England became the topic of the day ; and as Willett gradually
progressed from impersonal subjects like London, cabs, and the
English elective system to more human interests, Desdemona giv-
ing ear to the More was a pattern of inattention beside Craig.
" If he says ' when I was at Oxford or at the Temple,' Jimmie drops
his jaw and goes into a trance," grumbled Kate. Her imagination
seldom strayed across the Irish Channel. What mattered Oxford
to one who was studying Gaelic, and who could fit half the people
of her parish to their proper Irish counties? What mattered
England at all to a Desmond; humble though the relic be of the
proud Geraldines and Earls of Desmond? Such romantic attach-
ments naturally hindered Kate from developing complete sympathy
toward a shabby English lawyer; and she was therefore wickedly
pleased when the Little Corporal's visit revealed Willett in a new
and unpleasant light to Craig. This happened a week later, and
on a day uncommonly fair for Willett's future.
It was the morning after a free and independent jury had
awarded a splendid sum of money to Joseph Carney's client in
the Brandon suit, and accordingly that distinguished and successful
lawyer left the remote and exalted region back of the ground glass
door, and came forth to receive the congratulations of his em-
ployees.
1913.] GREEN BAGS AND GREEN RIBBONS 237
With hands thrust deep in his pockets, and eyes that beamed
through his gold-rimmed glasses, he lounged contentedly against
a table while he recalled the fine points he had made in examination
or summing up. The light of his countenance was reflected in
the faces around him, for all had worked uncommonly hard, and,
besides, Willett and Craig had assisted in court. And to good
purpose too, for it was a question scribbled eagerly by Willett,
and sent to the old man at a crucial moment, which ripped open
the breach and sent the defense to a disastrous defeat. After
Carney had done sufficient honor to himself, he acknowledged
this benefit quite handsomely. " And the paper you sent up held
a charge of dynamite, Willett. I half believe it did the trick."
Even Kate was warmed for a moment by the glance of deep-eyed
appreciation which accompanied Willett's words of acknowledg-
ment. The flush which spread above his wide-set eyes dispelled the
look of caution he usually wore, and for this moment he seemed
boyish.
Kate, however, was not the sort that parted weakly with a
prejudice, and she turned with a feeling of relief toward the little
group that entered the door just then. Carney's fashionable
daughter and small son were but a step in front of the oddest
little figure in the forty-six States of the Union. A silk hat that
had grown on a primeval block, and an old frock coat attired
a little wizened, bright-eyed man, who displayed a shining row
of false teeth as he greeted Carney.
" Good morning, counselor. Rejoicing you are, I see, at
the fine lot of money the court gave you yesterday."
" Rejoicing's the word, Jerry O', and good cause to rejoice
at the sight of yourself coming in with your pocket full of interest
money." The little old man laughed, and waved a deprecating
hand toward the Carney family as they retreated toward the inner
room. He then seated himself beside Kate, who had been appointed
guardian of his monthly business. He removed a package of
receipted bills from the crown of his old hat, and a bulging
envelope from his breast pocket, and transferred them cautiously
to her care. The social part of his visit was interrupted by the
little boy, who ran rapturously out to tell Kate that his mother
had permitted him to stay awhile, and could he " play " on her
typewriter.
Gathering up the papers as the old man left, she laid them
in the right-hand drawer of her table, and turned a smiling face
238 GREEN BAGS AND GREEN RIBBONS [May,
toward the child. The Little Corporal he was called in recognition
of his Napoleonic face. He stood now a picture of fair-haired
grace in his belted suit of blue cloth, and watched Kate as she
fed the typewriter a clean sheet of paper, and placed a book on
the seat of the chair. He then scrambled up, elated at the chance
to try this new and wonderful machine. Craig jibed at him happily,
as he gravely and timidly tapped the keys with his little fingers;
and Kate stood about and waited upon him, removing the paper
for examination every time he requested it. But he ignored them
both when the " letter " he was writing was finished. Wriggling
off the chair he took it straight to Willett, who had paid not
the slightest attention to his presence. With the sweet fearlessness
of a child who has known naught but smiles, he stationed himself
between the stranger's knees and chattered about the " letter."
It was to his father who had gone to " Noo Ork," and it was
about " the wat they hatched' in their wat trap." " Let me up,"
he demanded, " and I'll read it to you," and forthwith attempted
to climb on Willett's knee. " Dear daddy," he commenced, when
a rude hand thrust him down, and Willett stood up with wild
eyes and ashen face. He stood for a moment hesitating, then
quickly seized his hat and left the room.
" The man is crazy," stammered Craig, standing up by his
chair from sheer force of reflected excitement. But Kate did not
answer; the pain-filled eyes and trembling lip of the little boy
engrossed her attention. She proved the worth of her sympathy
by not showing it, but instead said the cheering word that pre-
vented the flood of tears he was trying to withstand. " I believe
you scared that man, Corporal. Did you see him run away?"
The gaiety of her tone was contagious. But a moment the little
fellow hesitated between sunshine and rain, and then his baby
laugh rang out. " I chased him," he boasted, and returned to
Kate, who reseated him at the typewriter before she even looked
at Craig.
" Well, what do you think of that? " ejaculated that astonished
individual.
" What's the use of trying to think about it," she answered
with irritating calmness. " If we are going to take in common
vagrants, we ought to expect surprises and mysteries too."
" A common vagrant," repeated Craig with hostile emphasis.
" Anyone can see that the man is a gentleman."
Kate's approval was necessary for Craig's happiness it is
1913.] GREEN BAGS AND GREEN RIBBONS 239
true, but it is also true that he was not the grasping sort that
demanded happiness at all times.
Joseph Carney at this point interrupted, what promised to be
a spirited quarrel, by appearing and carrying off his small grand-
child to luncheon. A moment later Willett returned. He ap-
peared quite restored to his usual good humor by his absence,
and tactfully began to discuss the wonders of their great country.
" Fancy," he began, " a country where carpets are laid in a laboring
man's cottage! I was in such a one yesterday, and I can't get
over it." Craig answered him pleasantly enough, but what he said
was of no importance, in fact nothing anybody said was of the
least importance, until Kate discovered that Jerry O's money was
gone. And then she did not say anything. No, indeed, she was
too breathless in her effort to find the precious envelope. She
tore the contents of her desk apart, hysterically at first, and then
calming down by sheer force of will, she went over the contents
with deliberate leisure. She made several trips to the safe besides,
and pulled apart boxes she had not been near in weeks, before
Craig noticed that something had gone wrong.
"Are you exercising for health or recreation?" he asked
dryly, as Kate made her third dash for the safe ; but the smile died
on his face as he encountered her wild eyes.
" Jerry O's money is gone," she gasped. Craig stared and
Willett swung around in his chair. Silence reigned for the space
of a moment, and then Willett begged with trembling eagerness,
" You look for it, Craig. She has lost her head."
I do not know whether to blame the irritation of the moment,
or to go deeper and blame the centuries of oppression her people
had endured from his, for Kate's hard words that follow:
( 'Twould do better for you to look, Mr. Willett. Suppose you
begin at your breast pocket," she said.
The hot blood surged through his face as he grasped the
arms of his chair, and partly rose. Then he settled back again,
pallid and spent. He still grasped the chair with tight fingers,
but the blazing light of challenge had died out of his eyes when
he again stood up.
" I'll do better. I'll let you look, Miss Desmond," he said
almost amiably. Then when he saw her turn away, he pulled his
pockets inside out and spoke to Craig. " If I'm suspected I can't
afford to stay. I'm a stranger and penniless, and the best way
is to be off again."
240 GREEN BAGS AND GREEN RIBBONS [May,
Before Craig could finds words to reply he was at the door.
" There'll be snow to shovel to-morrow," he announced bitterly
as he passed out.
Craig and Kate stood looking intently at the door long after
it shut. And many weary hours they were destined to spend
looking at that door in the future, for the money was found in the
morning, but Willett did not come back. Joseph Carney returned
it with the blandest of smiles. His daughter had found it in
the Little Corporal's breeches pocket when she put him to bed.
" The little rascal needed an envelope for his daddy's letter, and
he took a good one," he explained with a proud chuckle.
But Kate did not chuckle. She turned her humiliated face
toward Craig. " You have his address, haven't you, Jimmie ? "
she asked gravely.
" No, I haven't his address."
" You haven't? " she echoed, " then how will we find him? "
" I don't know," said Craig sadly. " I don't suppose we can
find him, and its inhuman weather too."
Kate turned gloomy eyes toward the street, where the people
cowered under the double lash of an icy wind and snow. The
sight stirred her to action. She must find him. She had driven
him out and branded him a thief, and it was her most pressing duty
to bring him back. At noon she inserted an advertisement in the
evening paper, and on the morn she watched the office door with
dog-like intentness. It seemed to her that the weather was never
so dreary, the winds more bitingly cold than in the days that
followed Willett's departure.
Day after day she watched the door open and shut, but
the shabby young man with the blue, bevel-looking eyes did not
come back. Then she began to call the rescue missions on the
telephone, and to leave a graphic description of Willett with
them; to take her noontime walk in different unlovely sections
of the city where signs of " rooms to let " spotted the windows ; to
increase daily her zeal in the effort to undo the wrong she had
done. At this time the sight of piled-up food in restaurant win-
dows gave her a sickening sense of guilt, and the touch of warm
blankets on her own bed filled her with self-loathing.
The rush of work being disposed of, Joseph Carney had
lost interest in the recovery of his clever clerk, and was placidly
existing without him; Craig had accepted the inevitable, and had
become a mere agent in the execution of Kate's orders. She alone
1913.] GREEN BAGS AND GREEN RIBBONS 241
persevered in the effort to find Willett in those last wretched
days of February. The earth was still fast in the grip of a winter
famous for its bitterness, when one day she stood at the office
window looking down at the opposite sidewalk. Its outer edge
was piled waist high with a bank of snow, upon which the icy
sleet was falling. A gang of laborers with picks and shovels
came around the corner and fell to work. A small wiry man
with yellow hair attracted Kate's attentive sight, and she called
Jimmie, with a little tremble of anxiety in her voice.
" He wouldn't have the good luck to be among those fellows,"
explained Craig. " They belong to the Department of Public
Works, and draw a steady salary." But he waited until he could
get a look at the man in question, who turned out to be a hard-
handed young Swede.
" Don't worry about him, Kate," he consoled her, " there
was something bad in his life or he would not be adrift. Anyway
he can blame his own rudeness to the Little Corporal for his
trouble here. You had a good reason to dislike him."
" No, Jimmie, my cheap grade of patriotism is to blame.
From the first I hated the idea of your taking in an Englishman.
I kept asking myself what chance a penniless young Irishman with
shabby clothes and a Dublin brogue would have in a London law
office, and I thought I knew the answer. As if it mattered what
the answer is! As if the Irish ever learned their manners out
of English books! As if they were ever more Irish than when
they held out hands to some poor defeated vagabond! Sure any
weak-kneed idiot can be kind to the prosperous." Kate finished
with a gesture toward her eyes, and Jimmie sat down in front of
his calf-skin book with a distressed expression.
Life in the office had become as gray and drear as the wretched
streets outside. Time was when the hours spent there were too
few. When the conflicts waged in court were full of spirit.
When the arriving client was delightfully absurd, and the depart-
ing left smiles and chuckles bubbling in his wake. But ten more
such dismal days passed, and then in an hour of hopeless inactivity
the spell was broken. The telephone emitted a halting call, and
Kate reached for the receiver. " It's for Lawyer Craig," she said
with a little mocking grimace. The message was one which often
comes into a law office, and Craig reported it to Kate quite dis-
interestedly. A sick man at the corner of Water and Elm Streets
wanted him in a hurry. But Kate was not disinterested.
VOL. xcvii. 16.
242 GREEN BAGS AND GREEN RIBBONS [May,
" Do you suppose," she asked quickly, " that it might be his
Lordship?"
" No, I do not suppose so. I suppose it's some sick sailor who
wants to make his will," he replied impatiently as he started out.
He had trouble in finding the house, which was in the dis-
orderly region of the harbor; a place full of saloons and sailor's
lodgings. It was, as he thought, a sailor who had called him,
but not for himself. No, he had called him for Willett; for
Willett, desperately ill and tossing in partial delirium on the
nasty little lodging house bed. The discovery stupefied Craig for
a moment, and then slowly he reached the conclusion that he must
get him out of this miserable place at once. He hurried out to
call one of the hospitals, and order its ambulance. This seemed
the most practical thing to do for a friendless stranger, and would
have relieved the situation simply and at once if he had not
encountered Kate Desmond as he stepped outside the door.
" I just couldn't wait till you got back," she explained.
" It's Willett all right," said he, " but the sickest man you
ever saw. I'm going to call the ambulance, and get him into
a hospital if I can."
" A hospital ! " ejaculated Kate with horrified eyes. " O don't
send him to a hospital, Jimmie."
"Then where shall I send him?" asked Craig.
The directness of the question disconcerted her for a mere
moment. " Send him to our house. He'll die if he goes to a
hospital."
Craig protested, and for several minutes they wrangled stub-
bornly, but in the end he called a carriage instead of an ambulance.
And that was why the scene of Willett's battle with death was
Kate's own square little room instead of the long hospital ward.
There was a moment of uncertainty when they faced Kate's
bewildered mother. But that capable young woman cleared the
situation speedily. She explained that her charge was " one of Car-
ney's clerks," which opened up a channel of deep and friendly
concern; that she wanted to save him from the dreaded hospital
was perfectly reasonable to the mother, who shared Kate's opinion
of such institutions. With surprising readiness she hurried to
make ready the sick man's room. They carried him in, the driver
and Craig, and laid him in a state of moaning stupor on the
cool white bed.
" In heaven's name who is he ? " It was the mother who
1913.] GREEN BAGS AND GREEN RIBBONS 243
spoke, and Craig giving a lingering look at the features, which
were handsome in spite of the feverish flush, and at the coat
now horribly soiled and tattered, answered, " I wonder," as he
tiptoed from the room.
And he found yet more reason to wonder. For Kate arriving
late at the office in the morning was a far different person than
the dispirited being he had known for weeks. She was filled with
solicitude and generous concern; her eyes shone and her face
glowed with a new warmth. " Willett had a fighting chance,"
the doctor said. " Horribly sick of course, but he was young, and
his heart was all right. And they had been able to get such a
splendid nurse; one who had been taking care of pneumonia all
winter."
Jimmie appeared mildly interested. There was something
disquieting, if not quite uncomfortable, in the thought of Willett
in Kate's home. Her pity was so fully and so frequently expressed ;
and pity he well knew often developed into a thing dearer and
more dangerous. She noticed his lack of concern, and gave him a
quizzical glance as she drew his attention to a packet of letters
she was putting away. " The doctor took them from Willett's
pocket. He said I might find an address to let his people know
if anything should happen." The quizzical expression deepened
into a look of apprehension a moment later. She recalled Craig's
former friendly interest in Willett, his satisfaction in the success
he had made of Carney's work, and her spirits succumbed to
a fit of profound depression. Jimmie realized how wicked she
had been; how cruel; and his approval had turned to dislike.
It was this conclusion that first caused the wall of gloomy reserve
which daily increased between them. Conversation languished.
To Craig's inquiries for Willett's condition she gave curt answers.
" He was barely holding his own. There was danger of further
complications. He did not respond to the treatment as they had
hoped. They were having a consultation. No, he could do nothing
to help." The days crept by like so many dirt-hued snails; and
the time of the crisis for Willett at last arrived.
That wretched day Kate spent quite alone trying nervously
to get a scrap or two of information through the telephone. Craig
was out subpoenaing witnesses in a distant section of the city, and
when he came back at three o'clock he was startled to find her
dressed for the street. Her eyes were red from weeping, and her
manner plainly excited. She had been sent for, she explained,
244 GREEN BAGS AND GREEN RIBBONS [May,
and in reply Craig struggled to express sympathy. For a moment
jealousy was strangled by love; but it was only for a moment,
for Kate's few words, as she picked up her purse with a trembling
hand, restored the fiend to power. " Jimmy," she said, "pray
that he doesn't die."
Craig did not reply, but opened the door for her with studied
politeness, and she passed out. " Gone " was the one word he
said as he closed it. He turned away overcome by discouragement
and distaste. The sight had been too much for him. Kate the
dependable, the practical, the direct, lovesick and hysterical over
a vagabond she knew nothing about. " Gone " he again snorted,
and kicked a book that had fallen to the floor. Carney calling
him in to consult him could get no good of him, and was not slow
to say so. He went home to eat no dinner, to toss sleeplessly
about during most of the night, and then to over-sleep and be
late in getting to work in the morning. When he reached the
office door he stood a moment with his hand on the knob, the
thought of seeing Kate again gave him a sickening sense of dread.
That she would be unable to get away from home reassured him,
and he pushed open the door.
But Kate was there. She sat near the window where a
virile young sunbeam warmed the piled-up masses of her hair. A
dress he had never before seen of a rich dark-blue drew out the
warm tints of her face, and deepened the color of her eyes. She
summoned him in her familiar tone of calm authority. " Come
here. I've been waiting ages for you," she said. As he approached
her she extended a shapely hand toward him, and her face wore
the expression of smiling candor that belonged to the long ago.
He smiled weakly as he asked, " What is it all about, please? "
" It's about me. I'm not a murderer, Jimmie," she announced
solemnly. " Willett is going to recover. And, Jimmie," she con-
tinued eagerly, " I know why he was so 'rude 1 to the Little Cor-
poral? " With a swift movement of her hand she laid two papers
on the table, one below the other. The first was a card lined off
in little squares, and marked in tens and nines. It took but an
instant for Craig to recognize a former companion. It was a
scholar's report card, and below it lay a letter in the large round
handwriting of a little child. It was dated three months back,
and from one of the smaller cities in England. Craig's eyes grasped
but two words of the message. They were, " Dear daddy." And
then in surprise too great for words he turned to Kate. She
1913-] GREEN BAGS AND GREEN RIBBONS 245
returned his astounded stare with a placid smile. " From his own
little boy," she said.
" I thought he was dying yesterday, and I opened the packet
of letters while you were away. Of course, I didn't read them,
but in looking for a complete address I came across one from his
wife, and, Jimmie, I could not help but see that she is still proud
of him. And to think that he might have died ! " Kate struggled
with emotion and Craig succumbed to it. His voice sounded
strange and tremulous as he said pleadingly, " I'd like to take your
hand again, Katherine." She gave it to him readily, but tried
speedily to withdraw it when she felt his left arm about her
shoulders. She threw her hand protestingly against the breast
of his overcoat, and as she did so she noticed the knot of green
ribbon with which it was adorned. " What are you wearing this
for ? " she asked in a voice almost childish in its frank astonishment.
Jimmie distracted for a moment lost his hold, and Kate escaped.
When he turned to look he found her struggling into her coat.
" To think I forgot it, I was so taken up with the English,"
she grumbled.
" Where are you going? " demanded Craig.
" To church," she asserted boldly. " And if Carney needs
me tell him to look for me at the cathedral. I'll be singing 'St.
Patrick's Day' with the choir."
Craig picked up the little report card, and sinking to his chair
examined it with a whimsical smile.
" And he's every bit as smart as his daddy," he said.
flew Boohs.
THE SACRED SHRINE. A Study of the Poetry and Art of
the Catholic Church. By Yrjo Him, Professor of ^Esthetic
and Modern Literature at the University of Finland, Helsing-
fors. New York: The Macmillan Co. $5.00.
The Sacred Shrine is a rigidly impartial examination of Catho-
lic art and ceremonial by a non-Catholic professor, with a view
to ascertaining " the state of mind which, unaltered in its main
features, has laid the foundation of the aesthetic life of believing
Catholics."
Modern art, he tells us, is mainly non-religious; primitive art,
on the other hand, was almost wholly religious; but Catholic art
is a something between the two, " a middle age which has survived
into the twentieth century," which avoids alike the bald intellectual-
ism of the puritan religions and the animistic materialism of those
religions which were earlier and more primitive. " The Catholic,"
he says, " is a form of religion which unites in itself elements from
the lowest and highest forms of belief." The charge of materialism
advanced against it by Protestants, he thinks invalid, for it is a fact
" that the material and visible comprises only one side of a Catholic
ceremony. However closely this religion may connect itself with
what is earthly, yet it does not become absorbed in the phenomena
of sense. The divine is not subjected, as is the case to a certain
extent among savage peoples, to being jumbled together with the
natural; on the contrary, the transcendence of the Supreme Being
is insisted upon in the Catholic dogmas as emphatically as in the
most intellectualistic of the Protestant confessions." It is by
the doctrine of the Incarnation, he tells us, that the Catholic cult
achieves its characteristic quality ; " and it is by reason of the same
doctrine that Catholic art is more aesthetic than Protestant art,
and more religious than heathen art."
Many reasons, he adds, could be given to account for the
popularity of the Church with people of aesthetic temperament,
but the most weighty of all he considers the fact
* that the Catholic Church, through its ceremonies, connects itself
so nearly with the existence of its individual members. Every
event in their lives is distinguished and sanctified by a special
1913.] NEW BOOKS 247
sacrament. The believer feels bound to the Church, and in all
his troubles is aware of the support of its authority. The fact
that the ceremonies thus push their way into life with Baptism
in the Church, public Confirmation, Marriage, Confession and
Absolution, Extreme Unction and Communion on the deathbed
must naturally give rich nourishment to the religious-aesthetic
feelings One can assert quite literally that for pious
Catholics the whole of life takes the form of an external
visible service of God.
The doctrine of the Incarnation lies at the centre of all Catho-
lic worship and veneration. The author, clearly grasping this truth,
divides his book into two parts, which deal respectively with the
Sacrament of the Altar and the Divine Motherhood of our Blessed
Lady. In the first part, the Real Presence and all its artistic impli-
cations are treated of in so far as they are expressed by the archi-
tecture, the decorative art, and the ceremonial which surround the
service of the Blessed Sacrament the central fact, the intellectual
and emotional stimulus being the Host, " that little material object "
in which " pious people see with the eyes of faith the greatest
and loftiest thing that their minds can grasp, He, 'for Whom
the whole world was too narrow/ shows Himself to them in a
limited and tangible shape. The fact that the sensuous vision could
thus embrace a small impression, sustaining the richest and widest
association of ideas, and serving as a meeting point for the deepest
feelings, could not fail to influence powerfully both intellectual
and emotional life."
In the first nine chapters we have a very full and scholarly
treatment of the Altar, Relics, the Reliquary, the Mass, Altar Fur-
niture, the Host, the Monstrance, and the Tabernacle, with the
whole history of their aesthetic use and development. In the twelve
chapters following we have a very careful study of the growth,
both artistic and dogmatic, of devotion to our Lady under the
following headings: The Dogma of Mary, The Gospel of Mary,
The Conception, Her Childhood, Annunciation, The Incarnation,
The Visitation, The Virginal Birth, The Manger, The Sorrowing
Mother, Mary's Death and Assumption, and The Symbols of Mary.
A chapter entitled The Sacred Shrine then concludes the book.
In this second part of the book, which treats of our Lady, we
cannot expect to find the phraseology altogether pleasant to Catholic
ears, but in spite of this the author has clearly grasped the Catholic
point of view, and has profoundly mastered all that the best theo-
248 NEW BOOKS [May,
logians and historians could tell him about it. The logical neces-
sity of such a devotion is admitted, and we are inclined to believe
that no better book could be placed in the hands of anyone brought
up in an atmosphere of anti-Catholic prejudice. The mysteries
of Faith cannot be comprehended by unassisted reason, but the
unreasonable prejudices with which they are so often surrounded
are best cleared away by cold logic; and all those who, like the
present author, are doing such a good work are clearing away the
mists of prejudice, sending broadcast some rays of truth, and they
will have their reward.
OUR LADY IN THE CHURCH, AND OTHER ESSAYS. By
M. Nesbitt. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $1.50 net.
This book is a collection of essays on religious subjects which
have already appeared in the Ave Maria. As the Right Reverend
Dr. Casartelli states in the preface, the author has selected " topics
of historical and antiquarian character connected with the life and
work of the Church, and, therefore, of particular interest to Catho-
lic readers."
The book is divided into three parts as follows: Part I.,
Our Lady and Some Saints; Part II., Feasts of the Church; Part
III., Miscellaneous.
The style of these essays has been characterized as " chatty
and instructive." The author makes frequent references to pious
customs which obtained in Catholic countries during the Ages of
Faith, when all, both gentle and simple, lived a life of almost con-
tinual prayer and uninterrupted union with God. In every diffi-
culty recourse was had to Almighty God and our Blessed Lady,
and there were prayers even for such small ailments as toothache
and slight burns.
In the years when England bore the glorious title of " The
Dowry of Mary," the land was dotted with chapels dedicated to
our Blessed Lady, and our author gives many interesting accounts
of these beautiful shrines. Amongst others, mention is made of
a celebrated chapel of our Lady in Norwich, which, in 1272, was
miraculously preserved from fire, although the cathedral church in
which it was built was entirely destroyed by flames.
Lovers of St. Anthony of Padua and is not their name
"legiqn?" will find chapter nine exceedingly interesting. Here
Miss Nesbitt describes briefly St. Anthony's renunciation of the
world; his ordination to the Priesthood, and his ardent desire of
1913.] NEW BOOKS 249
suffering a martyr's death for the love of Christ our Lord. As
time went on St. Anthony found himself called to lead a yet more
perfect life; he, therefore, entered the Order of the Friars Minor,
and, as an eloquent preacher and enlightened director, rendered
signal services to the cause of holy Church. Even during his
lifetime, St. Anthony worked numerous miracles, and as thousands
of grateful clients testify, similar marvels are still obtained through
his intercession before the Throne of God. Such was St. Anthony's
sanctity and purity that he merited to receive the visits of the
Sweet Infant Jesus, and Catholic art loves to represent him clad
in the brown habit and clasping the Divine Child. Miss Nesbitt
truly says, " We turn to it (his statue) as we turn to the well-known
form of a cherished friend."
Other Saints mentioned are St. Columban ; St. Edmund, King ;
St. Edmund, Archbishop of Canterbury; St. Leonard of Port
Maurice; and the great St. Vincent de Paul.
To conclude, we echo the words of Right Reverend Dr.
Casartelli : " I feel sure that these interesting essays will be
read with pleasure and profit I should say that Miss Nesbitt's
book would make a specially appropriate volume for school libraries
and school prizes."
LANCES HURLED AT THE SUN. By Rev. James H. Cotter,
LL.D. Buffalo : The Buffalo Catholic Publication Co. $1.00.
The Reverend Doctor James H. Cotter, known as the author
of Shakespeare's Art, and as the very able editorial writer for
the Catholic Union and Times of Buffalo, New York, has selected
a number of those editorials and woven them together into a volume
of essays. He chooses for them the title Lances Hurled at the Sun,
a Tennysonian quotation to be interpreted, of course, as attacks,
theoretical or practical, upon the Catholic Church.
In resisting such attacks, and in turning them back upon them-
selves, Dr. Cotter displays always a masterly use of argument,
an unfailing clarity, and a wit that is sometimes genial, but more
often turns to brilliant and stinging sarcasm. Socialism, Modern-
ism, the system of secular university education, infidelity in France
these are among the lances he teaches us to dodge and to hurl
back. To railing and to illogical abuse he never descends, but
ridicule he uses cleverly and pitilessly. " It is to smile " when
he calls the Boston Transcript, hitherto sacred to contradiction, the
"Delphian Oracle of Bostonese logic;" and again when he
250 NEW BOOKS [May,
refers to the learned editor of one of our best magazines of secular
culture as " a big, generous fellow who, in his love for the
religious life, would annihilate such a nothing as belief."
It is difficult to particularize among essays so uniformly bril-
liant, but those dealing with Socialism and Modernism will prob-
ably attract attention most promptly. Dr. Cotter's arguments
against socialistic theories are forceful and well presented. Our
criticism takes the form of a regret that he has given so few pages
to the subject. His thought simply aims at being destructive of
Socialism; he presents no constructive argument. He might profit-
ably have offered some statements of the Church's attitude on
economic questions, as incorporating the best ideals, while con-
demning the false notions and the methods of the Socialist Party.
In treating of Modernism, Dr. Cotter is wonderfully lucid and
definite for so difficult a theme. Two of the essays are particularly
fine one which gently but firmly robs the Modernists of their
claim to any originality, thus again emphasizing the absurdity
of their chosen name, and recalling Mr. Chesterton's dictum that
he would just as soon be called a " Thursdayite ;" and another
which disposes very definitely of the oft-repeated statement that
Newman was a Modernist.
The volume includes a preface by Rt. Rev. Charles H.
Col ton, Bishop of Buffalo, who hopes that it will "find many
readers to profit by its contents."
COLUMBANUS THE CELT. By Walter T. Leahy. Philadel-
phia: H. L. Kilner & Co. $1.50.
Saint Columbanus, the great Irish abbot and missionary
preacher of the sixth century, is not so distinctly and proudly
remembered as he should be by the present-day members of his
Faith and nationality.
One of that noble band of apostles inspired by the life and
labor of Saint Patrick, Columbanus was sent from the monastery
of Bangor on foreign missions, first in Wales and Britain, and
later on the continent. His was a life of adventure, of heroism,
and of sanctity, a life of far-reaching results. It is told for us
very graphically and vividly in the new historical novel, Colum-
banus the Celt, by Walter T. Leahy. Father Leahy begins with
the childhood of the Saint, and following to a certain extent the
method of " John Ayscough " in his beautiful San Celestino, traces
the spiritual development and formation of the schoolboy at
1913.] NEW BOOKS 251
Bangor, and then of the novice in the monastery there. Later he
makes us follow him, not as a name in a vague history, not as a
pictured face on a canvas, but as a living, struggling man, through
a career difficult, courageous, saintly, and always efficient. Effi-
cient is a word from which we moderns have sapped the strength
by frequent use, and at any rate a pale word for one who helped to
change the ways of Europe, but let it pass. It will only emphasize
the contrast between our achievements and those of the " Dark
Ages." Father Leahy in Columbanus the Celt has given us a book
that is as interesting and exciting as any fiction, and that has at
the same time the dignity of a biography. It should surely be
appreciated by all Catholic readers, especially by those who are
also Celts.
THE HONOURABLE MRS. GARRY. By Mrs. Henry de la
Pasture (Lady Clifford). New York: E. P. Button & Co.
$1.35 net.
We have learned to expect of Mrs. de la Pasture well-told
stories and clever character drawings, and her latest book, The
Honourable Mrs. Garry, is no disappointment. Those of us who
met the fair Erica with her china-blue eyes, her extra-decollete
gowns, and her catlike love of physical comfort, when she first
appeared as the mercenary, heartless, Helen-of-Troy heroine in
the novel called Master Christopher, have been wondering much as
to her subsequent career. We get it in this present story, and
follow it with the vivid interest that the author so well knows how
to arouse. Erica really attempts to play fair with the young
husband whose good looks and adoration almost atone for his
comparative poverty. But alas for reformation ! a string of pearls
plays havoc with her good resolutions, and she cannot resist,
later on, the temptation of a legacy from the dead Christopher.
In her cold-blooded greed, her complacency, and most of all, in
her very real, if only occasional, struggles for reform, Erica is
surely one of the cleverest character sketches that the author has
yet given us.
VOCATIONS FOR GIRLS. By Mary A. Laselle and Katherine
Wiley. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 85 cents.
Two teachers in the Technical High School of Newton, Massa-
chusetts, have written a little manual that, for sound common
sense and for practical helpfulness, cannot be too heartily recom-
252 NEW BOOKS [May,
mended. Its subject is Vocations for Girls, and its purpose "to
give to young girls, and those responsible for the guidance of girls,
some definite information as to conditions of work in the more com-
mon vocations." Thirteen vocations or rather avocations the
authors take, and, devoting a chapter to each, point out what it re-
quires in physique, in character, and in education; what scale of
wages it offers; what are its attractions, and what its drawbacks.
Then after treating of the salesgirl, the cook, and the kindergartner,
the book remembers to deal with the girl who stays at home, who
can be a wage-earner just as surely as her more enterprising sisters.
All the information given is clear and definite, and the advice most
sensible. Moreover, there follows an appendix, consisting of quo-
tations from great authors, in definition and in praise of work.
The book might profitably be placed in the hands of every "sweet
girl graduate " of our convents, high schools, and grammar schools.
EUCHARISTICA: VERSE AND PROSE IN HONOUR OF THE
HIDDEN GOD. By Rev. H. T. Henry, Litt.D. Philadel-
phia: The Dolphin Press. $1.50.
The manifest need of a volume of Eucharistic poems in Eng-
lish has long been felt: not merely Eucharistic verse (in which
our minor Catholic songsters are nowise abstinent), but worthy
English renderings of the classic Latin hymns as also original
work of devout purpose and poetic purity. There is still remark-
ably little true poetry on this subject in English literature. Gerard
Hopkins' Barn floor and Winepress -is one of the conspicuous ex-
ceptions, but it is too exotic for general appreciation.
Now comes this collected work of Dr. Henry (Professor of
Poetry and Ecclesiastical Music at Overbrook Seminary), sonorous,
lucidly clear, and bearing the hallmark of dignity and distinction.
More than all this, it shines at its best with fine poetic fervor.
Christ in the Blessed Eucharist is the regnant theme of the entire
volume. Its translations open with the immortal hymns of St.
Thomas (the Lauda, Sion and Pange, Lingua), and close with
English versions of certain prayers from the Rituale and Pontificate
for the blessing of Eucharistic vestments. In all cases, except of
these liturgical prayers, the Latin original is placed beside the
English translation a not too common virtue. Everyone knows
how comparatively easy it is for a scholar to transpose ecclesiastical
Latin into a ponderous but rhythmic vernacular how difficult to
achieve the dramatic strength, the spontaneity of Doctor Henry's
1913.] NEW BOOKS 253
versions. The Twelfth Psalm is an instance in point; while
surely the refinement, grace, and directness of his Anima Christi
prayer should give it the precedence among existing English ver-
sions.
Doctor Henry's original poems are so good that one longs
for more of them. They abound in single lines of striking subtlety,
and in an imaginative fervor at once vivid and controlled. At
least one poem, " The Love of God," shakes the soul with all of
Francis Thompson's mysticism, and much of Francis Thompson's
music; while in "A Visit" there is the calmer but scarcely less
poignant atmosphere of " twilight silences " in some ancient Gothic
shrine of the Captive King. It is too great a gift for merely
occasional or translational uses this poetic gift of Doctor Henry's.
The world has need of it for solace, for stimulus, for the " sweet-
ness and light " which it holds in stewardship.
SONGS FOR SINNERS. By Rev. Hugh Francis Blunt. New
York: The Devin-Adair Co. $1.00.
A volume of professedly religious verse does not usually
awaken high expectations in a reviewer's breast. The very great-
ness of the theme leads him to expect either philosophical specula-
tions arranged in metrical feet, abstract, passionless, laborious,
or else perfervid raptures over the hackneyed correct enough in
theology, but lacking in that ring of personal experience or that
intellectual dignity which would lift it out of the ranks of mere
Sunday-school verse.
A reader approaching Father Blunt's Songs for Sinners in
this frame of mind will be pleasantly disappointed. For here he
will find the old and fundamental religious truths the deceitf ulness
of sin; the misery consequent even in this life upon the rejection
of Christ's yoke; the blessedness of Christ's peace; the purifying
power of pain; the torments of hell; the sorrows and intercessory
office of our Lady treated with a dignity, a beauty, and a sin-
cerity which cannot fail to command respect. Here is real poetry :
musical voicing of strong emotion, vivid picturing of nature skill-
fully employed to mirror or to contrast with the tragic experiences
of man. The imagery is always graceful and sometimes splendid;
the rhythm always easy and sufficiently varied; the thought serious,
sane and impressive. Nowhere is there suspicion of verse-made-
to-order. To mention only a few numbers where all are good
there is genuine intensity in " What No Man Knoweth " and " The
254 NEW BOOKS [May,
Desert of the Soul;" genuine passion in "A Health " and " Blood
Brotherhood ;" genuine beauty in " The Three Home Comings "
and " Love Watcheth." The titles of the separate songs are par-
ticularly apt and appealing.
In material, make up, and general appearance the volume is
extremely successful. If the Devin-Adair Co. can continue to
produce such excellent works, so beautifully printed, they will
do much to remove an ancient complaint against those who have
published books for Catholics.
" > ':
MY UNKNOWN CHUM, AGUECHEEK." With a foreword by
Henry Garrity. New York: The Devin-Adair Co. $1.50 net.
In this foreword, Mr. Garrity tells us that the volume bearing
the above title is a reprint of the work of an " unknown author, who
saw in travel, in art, in literature, in life, and humanity much that
travelers and other writers and scholars have failed to observe."
The original publication is now a rarity, found only in the libraries
of book collectors and bibliophiles. Mr. Garrity had experienced
so much pleasure and profit from the book, that he felt that he
ought to give the world an opportunity to enjoy the work with him.
Accordingly he has republished it, changing only the title from the
original Aguecheek to the more significant one of My Unknown
Chum.
We learn that the reputed author was one Charles B. Fair-
banks, who died in 1859 at the early age of thirty- two, an age which,
we agree with Mr. Garrity, is disputed by the text, for it is in-
credible that a man of that age should have had the wide scholar-
ship possessed by the author, a scholarship having its foundation
in the best teaching of the schools, but widened and deepened
by years of travel and loving study of great authors.
The first part of the book, entitled " Sketches of Foreign
Travel," is a graphic descriptive narrative of the great cities of
Western Europe and Italy; but it is no mere diary or letter re-
cording the passing impression of the chance tourist, with his
Baedeker in hand, that is presented to us. Instead we have a
traveler who dwells lovingly upon the great monuments of antiq-
uity, to whom the Forum of Rome recalls the place " where Cicero
pleaded, gazing upon that mount where captive kings did homage
to the masters of the world." But if our unknown author gazes
with veneration upon all " those dusty memorials of the brilliance
of the past," he has little patience with the antiquarian, who with
1913.] NEW BOOKS 255
microscope and chisel seeks to ascertain from what quarry the
marble of each column or arch was obtained.
There is much that is reminiscent of Irving in this volume.
If we miss at times the urbanity of the Master of Sunnyside, we
must yield the palm of wide culture and scholarship to My Un-
known Chum.
In the second part of the volume, entitled " Essays," we come
into what is, if possible, a still more intimate touch with our travel-
er-author. We seem to be sitting by his side before some cheerful
hearth fire, and listening to the happy outpourings of a mind
enriched with the spoils of the best of all literature, and what an
outpouring we have! Shrewd, witty, sententious criticisms of life;
made with all in so kindly and humorous fashion as to take away
the sting of the satire.
The literary world owes a debt of gratitude to Mr. Garrity
for restoring to it a volume capable of giving so much profit and
pleasure. Let the young read it that they may realize, ere it be too
late, the value of these studies that charmed and enriched far
beyond the power of wealth; studies that "age cannot wither nor
custome stale."
HISTORY OF THE SOCIETY OF JESUS IN FRANCE FROM
ITS ORIGIN TO ITS SUPPRESSION (1528-1762). Vol. II.
(1575-1604). By Henri Fouqueray,' S.J. Paris: Librairie
Alphonse Picard. 12 frs.
Father Fouqueray, in the second volume of his History of the
Society of Jesus in France, deals with a complex and thrilling
period. Tracing the interior life and the new progress of the
Society under Henry III., and its efforts to restore the kingdom
of Mary Stuart to the Faith, he begins his real theme with
the accession of Henry of Navarre and the formation of the
League. The Jesuits were of no political party, but they could
not preach submission to a King excommunicated by Sixtus V.;
after his abjuration, they were the first to rally to his side,
and aided, especially through Cardinal Toletus, his reconciliation
with Clement VIII. The opposition of the University and Par-
liament of Paris and of the Huguenots; the attempt on the life
of the King by the half-crazed Jean Chastel, in which the Society
was declared to be implicated because the lad had studied philos-
ophy in one of its colleges, led to a decree of banishment and
of confiscation of property. But the Parliaments of Bordeaux
256 NEW BOOKS [May,
and Toulouse refused to imitate Paris in this act; Lorraine received
many of the Society ; some cities, not affected by the decree, offered
new foundations; those from which the Jesuits were expelled
protested openly. The King, gradually reconciled with the Pope,
learned to know the society better, and finally re-established them
by the Edict of Rouen, proving afterwards a generous protector.
When we note that Father Fouqueray has devoted over seven
hundred pages to these thirty years (1575-1604), we can form
some understanding of the detail involved, but so interesting is
the style that the detail does not weary. The tone is calm and
objective, a most important requirement in the treatment of such
a theme. The strife of parties and the faults of individuals are
clearly pictured, but above them the religious, self-sacrificing policy
and practice of the Society as a whole presents itself with con-
vincing force.
A description of the apostolic work of the Jesuits and their
success as educators; quotations from the rules laid down by P.
Maggis for the College in Paris, 1587; a historical and analytical
discussion of the Ratio Studiorum, 1599, serve to balance the polit-
ical aspect of the picture. We heartily recommend this volume to
all serious students.
THE STOCK EXCHANGE FROM WITHIN. By William C. Van
Antwerp. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. $1.50 net.
A volume in defense of the Stock Exchange has at least the
merit of novelty. And this one has the two additional pleas
in its favor, that it is written in an enthusiastic, and at times even
brilliant, style, sprinkled with apt literary allusions, and amusing
stories and epigrams, and also that it is a challenge to the sweeping
indictments against this institution made at times without sufficient
proof.
That its author is a member of the Exchange is a guarantee
of his knowledge of the subject; to many it will, however, at once
suggest a fear of bias. Readers will suspect that difficulties are
glossed over or entirely ignored, and that to the quotations from
economists opposing government interference, for instance, quota-
tions from other economists equally important might be opposed.
That some sort of Exchange is inevitable and necessary, all will
agree ; that the present one is quite the model here pictured we must
beg leave to doubt. But we echo Mr. Van Antwerp's condemna-
tion of rash judgments; and we trust that the improved methods
1913.] NEW BOOKS 257
herein recorded may so increase as to leave the critic without
defense. Descriptions of the Bourses in London and Paris close
the book.
A CHILD'S RULE OF LIFE. By Robert Hugh Benson. New
York : Longmans, Green & Co. 75 cents net.
A book which we heartily recommend to all parents, and
which will have a great charm for all Catholic children, is A Child's
Rule of Life, by Father Robert Hugh Benson. The author has
left the field of psychological research, forgotten the problems and
the tragedies of history, and allowed himself to be a child again.
It is not every one that can keep his childhood. Father Benson
has, and speaks to children about the great, big eternal things in
a child's way. The little ones will be delighted to learn these verses
by heart, and thus almost unconsciously gain a deep knowledge of
Christian doctrine, and a love and habit of Catholic practice. Equal
credit must be given to the illustrator, Mr. Gabriel Pippet, for his
fine work. Father Benson says:
Mr. Pippet and I
Have thought we would try
To make up a Rule for you all.
A Rule to keep straight by,
Be in time and not late by
(And e'en meditate by!)
A Rule for big children and small.
I've made up these rhymes;
Rather feeble sometimes,
But better than no rhymes at all.
The Rule takes the little child from the moment it awakes
When I wake bright at morning light,
And new begins the day,
I put away the dreams of night,
Sit up, and then with all my might
I bless myself, and say,
O God, I offer up to Thee
My soul and heart Thine own to be.
And all I do or hear or see
And all my work and play
through his morning prayers; going to church; hearing Mass;
saying grace; reciting lessons; practicing obedience; confessing his
VOL. xcvii. 17.
258 NEW BOOKS [May,
sins ; receiving Holy Communion ; evening prayers, and bed. Round
them all Father Benson has put the fragrance of verse that will
make them sweet and delightful to the child mind.
SING YE TO THE LORD. Second Series. By Father Robert
Eaton. New York : Benziger Brothers.
Sometime ago we recommended to our readers Father Eaton's
Sing Ye to the Lord, expositions of fifty of the Psalms. Father
Eaton has issued a second series under the same title, which also
merits our praise. These volumes ought to succeed in making the
Psalms, so rich a treasure of spiritual wealth, practical prayers,
subjects of meditation, and efficient means of consolation and of
help to our people. Father Eaton's work is one of devotional
exposition which will appeal to every soul, howsoever simple, that
has any spiritual taste at all. His work is practical, that is, he shows
the immediate usefulness of the Psalms in our present day duties
and needs. To his commentary he brings a fund of practical
experience, and a knowledge of Scripture in general. Never
does he leave us without a pointed lesson. He brings out most
effectively the superlative worth of the Psalms, and how
the light and grace that the New Law has shed upon them lend
might to their wisdom, hope to their sorrow, and joy to their
aspirations. Our human nature is still subject to the same weak-
ness as it was in the Psalmist's days. His warning must be heeded ;
his cry has found its echo in our own hearts; his hope-to-be has
become our hope-that-is in Christ, the Light and the Way.
We will quote part of Father Eaton's commentary on the
Twenty-sixth Psalm, which he has entitled " God Alone." After
repeating from the twelfth to the seventeenth verse he writes:
How beautiful a prayer, made up of short, broken petitions,
but all so direct, so earnest, so full of trust! It goes straight
to God, who will be entreated by His servants. We pray
to ears that are attentive, and our prayer is after God's own
heart, being framed from first to last in the spirit of the words :
" One thing I have asked of the Lord, and this will I seek
after: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days
of my life, that I may see the delight of the Lord and may
visit His temple."
% Such is the spirit of the saints, of all who are loyal and in
earnest. It is the foundation on which to build securely: it
is the spirit that makes life interesting and precious, and a very
1913.] NEW BOOKS 259
prelude to eternity. It is the spirit that makes us careful over
every detail, brave in every sorrow, regular and exact in the
performance of all duties, humble in our esteem of ourselves,
generous in our esteem of others, full of joy, of peace, of
calm. By it life is buoyed up with hope of eternity, and lit by
the encouraging light that streams from that distant but most
certain shore, enabling us to arise to our task day by day in the
strength of the sublime verses with which the Psalm concludes :
" I believe to see the good things of the Lord in the land of the
living. Expect the Lord, O my soul, do manfully, let thy heart
take courage, and wait thou for the Lord ! "
Sing Ye to the Lord is a book that will be an illumination and
a delight to many souls.
THE KINGDOM. By Harold Elsdale Goad. New York: Fred-
erick A. Stokes Co. $1.25 net.
The author of this volume has undoubtedly endeavored to do
an honest and consistent piece of work. With the old convent of
San Damiano and the Umbrian hills as a setting, he has told the
story of a man who had his difficulties of mind and heart, difficulties
keen and long-sustained, yet from which he emerges, or at least
the author would have him emerge, triumphant. The story is told
with attractive sympathy, and the analytical work is at times admir-
ably done. But the character of Bernardo, his progress and his
triumph, are unreal and inconsistent. Though a story of a monk,
and done, as we have said, with evident good intent, it is not at
all Catholic. It seems to us like a grafting of amateurish mysticism
upon modern pragmatism. If difficulties can be solved as they
were solved with Bernardo, faith is purely emotional and subjective.
The author has apparently tried to be all things to all men both
of the Catholic faith and of James' philosophy. But there is only
one way, and that is Christ, Who did not deny nor neglect reason,
but Who built upon it. There is a harmony in the whole universe
of God, and he who shatters it only invites chaos. The saints had
a rational faith, and the traditional steps and experiences by which
they were made still hold good. They have been tried and have
not been found wanting.
jfordcjri periobtcals.
Anglican Points of View. By A. H. Nankivell. In the
Anglican Church there are many who are asking, " May we stay
where we are ?" or " Must we go to Rome ? " Some are " sound on
the Holy Father;" behind them are the " Guild of the Love of God,"
and the " Catholic Literature Association," who are non-Papal
rather than anti-Papal, who do not think it safe to reject any
Roman Catholic doctrine, and who are very devout to our Blessed
Lady; behind these the main body of the English Church Union,
willing to allow a Roman Primacy of ecclesiastical institution,
but considering Rome too unreasonable to compel allegiance.
The best plan for converting these people is to influence first
those nearest to the Church ; to show them that the undoubted
spiritual revival among some Anglicans does not justify schism
or the toleration of heresy by authority; and to keep before them
the central question, "Where is the Church?" They should be
impressed with the fact that they are separated from the main
body of Christendom, to whose judgment their Church refuses to
submit; that, if they reject the Pope, they are rejecting the Church,
for where Peter is, there is the Church; that the defense based
on the history of the Meletian schism utterly breaks down; that
Anglican Christianity is essentially geographical and national, with-
out authority in faith or morals; that it is only the High Church
party that supposes the Anglican Church to have a priesthood.
But especially intimate and frequent contact with Catholics, and
experience of the practical worth and power of our Faith, are
necessary to complete the intellectual arguments. The Month,
April.
Familiar Prayers. Father Thurston in this paper discusses
an overlooked composition which confirms his former conclusions
on the origin of the Hail Mary. It is a rhythmical composition
in prose, probably written by Gottschalk, Monk of Limburg and
Canon of Aachen, who died in 1098. It is prefaced by an exact
transcription of the salutation of the Angel to our Lady, without
the greeting of St. Elizabeth ; and it clearly foreshadows the direct
petition with which our actual form of the Hail Mary concludes.
St. Bernardine of Siena, who died in 1444, knew this supplementary
1913.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 261
petition. In the Sarum Breviary of 1531 we have the entire Hail
Mary to all intents and purposes as we have it now, except that
Christus was inserted after Jesus, and the word nostrae is not
found. However, memories of a truncated form survived even
after the full form was adopted in the Roman Breviary of Pope
Pius V. In Ireland, and in the diocese of Toul, down to the
time of Calmet, who died in 1757, and probably much later,
an Ave was used at the beginning of Office, consisting only of the
words Ave Maria gratia plena. This custom, curiously enough,
is said to have been introduced by Bishop Henri de Ville in the
fifteenth century, at which date nobody disputes that the whole
of the " first part," down to Jesus Christus, Amen, was commonly
recited by all.
As for the Regina Cceli, it is much younger in date than the
other three antiphons of our Lady, " and the so-called tradition
connecting it with St. Gregory is an historically worthless fable,
which cannot be traced further back than the Legenda Aurea of
James de Voragine, compiled about the year 1275." It should
probably be assigned to the early thirteenth century, and is not
an original hymn, but only an adaptation of a Christmas hymn in
honor of our Lady. Its adoption by the Church is due to Fran-
ciscan influence; its use during paschal time, in place of the Angelus,
seems to have originated with an instruction issued by Pope Benedict
XIV. in 1743. The Month, April.
The Land of Francis of Assist. By Henry Joly. This article
is the first in a series of social studies of the provinces of Italy.
The subject for this study is Umbria. The author describes its
beautiful and healthy location; its entrancing scenery; but the
inhabitants themselves are his chief concern. As regards labor
they seem indifferent. Their sickness and mortality lists are very
low, and the numbers of their emigrants the smallest in the king-
dom. The people of Umbria are strong in faith, and on the whole
may be considered the happiest of mortals. Le Correspondant,
January 25.
T A Late Historian. By Marquis de Vogue. Paul Thureau-
Dangin died at Cannes, France, at the age of seventy-five years.
His name was well known and highly venerated throughout the
length and breadth of France. Early in his life, he sacrificed his
ambitions for political honors, and devoted his years to literary
2 62 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [May,
labors, especially history. Politically his preferences were for the
constitutional monarchy, and in religious matters he was the pupil
of Lacordaire, Dupanloup, Montalembert, and de Broglie.
In his writings on political history, he dealt with the thirty-
four years of the constitutional monarchy. In religious history
with the Catholic Renaissance or Oxford Movement in England,
this latter being his chief work.
No greater tribute could have been given to his memory than
the mixed gathering at his funeral in the Church of St. Sulpice.
The Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, the representative of the Presi-
dent of the Republic, mourned at his bier, together with scholars,
politicians, religious orders, people of wealth and fashion, and
those whom M. Dangin truly loved the poor. Le Correspondent,
March 10.
The "Approaching Celebration at Rome. By Pierre Battifol.
During the present year the six-hundredth anniversary of the Edict
of Milan will be celebrated in the city of Rome. In the first two
centuries of the Christian era, Catholicity was considered an illicit
religion, because it was opposed to the state religion Paganism.
The writer narrates the difficulties and persecutions endured from
Nero down to the granting of the Edict of Milan. He then
describes the various legislative acts which were in a manner fore-
runners of the famous Edict of Milan. A description is given of
the contents of this Edict. Le Correspondant, March 10.
Tolerance and Intolerance. By Rev. P. Coffey. This is
an enthusiastic summary of the recent volume entitled Tolerance,
by Father Vermeersch, S.J., which deals with both facts and
principles in the Church's dealings, past and present, with heresy
and heretics. Nowadays tolerance is proclaimed as always a bless-
ing; but since tolerance really means the endurance of what, rightly
or wrongly, we conceive to be an evil, tolerance can only be justified
when it avoids a greater evil. Intolerance is denounced as a crime.
Is it a crime in a Church with a divine mission, with a divine doc-
trine, with divine authority? Besides "the name of intolerance is
unjustly applied to the coercive action which the Church allows.
The intention of tyrannizing or forcing the conscience is absent.
Excesses have been committed, and some men, acting in
the Cmirch's name, have been carried away, and gone beyond the
limits she has prescribed ; but then the voice of her faithful children
1913.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 263
has been raised in compassion for the victims Normally and
traditionally, they (Catholics) are the oppressed, and not the op-
pressors." The volume is praised for its timeliness, the calm and
objective temper, and the wealth of information afforded. The
Irish Ecclesiastical Record, April. > >.->,
Sanctity 'According to William James. In this chapter of
his book on Religious Experience, William James studies "Sanctity."
At first he criticizes the method of the Catholic theologians, which
he calls "apriori," and declares that he has adopted the empiric
method.
In his description of a great Saint he says, " I call 'Saint'
the man in whom religious emotion constitutes an habitual focus
of personal energy." Therefore saints are found in every religion,
true or false, so we are told. In this description we find no purity
nor charity which, according to our Lord, are the essence of
perfection.
What characterizes a Saint is a profound conviction, not only
rational but intuitive of the existence of an immaterial Power, thus
James continues, and the sentiment of leading a higher life, in
virtue of a bond sweet and strong, which joins the saintly soul to
that same Power to which it abandons itself. Thus dilated, and
so to say melted in it, the soul is free from selfish cares. Prof.
James forgets that God is personal !
His idea of mortification, which he calls asceticism, is very
strange. To a derangement of her nervous system, he ascribes the
thirst for sufferings which characterized Blessed Margaret Mary's
life. This practically means that the Saints, St. Peter and St. Paul,
and all the Apostles who were glad to suffer for the name of Christ
included, were suffering from neurasthenia.
The American philosopher shows his utter ignorance of the
virtue of obedience, which, according to him, denotes absence of
will, one of the most frequent symptoms of nervous fatigue.
To sum up: James' method is arbitrary and illogical; arbi-
trary too the religion he professes; arbitrary the sanctity he
teaches. La Civilta Cattolica, February.
The Month (April) : In the Eve of Catholic Emancipation,
Father Pollen pays a tribute of praise to Monsignor Bernard Ward's
volumes on the above subject for their just, scholarly, and sin-
gularly impartial treatment of a dark and entangled problem.
264 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [May,
E. M. Walker contributes a sympathetic study of the life and
character of Hans Christian Andersen.
The Tablet (April 5) : Ministers and Marconi's: The conduct
of the government ministers in profiting in a transaction in stocks of
the American Marconi Company, while the government was closing
a contract with the English company, is declared strangely indiscrete,
although not dishonest. Reminiscences of Malta: John Hobson
Mathews describes the isle of this year's Eucharistic Congress
its cites, the country districts, the Catholic spirit, and great devo-
tion and the charity of the people. His residence there was from
1876 to 1883.
Irish Theological Quarterly (January) : Rev. D. O'Keeffe
discusses at length the philosophy of Bergson. In Law Reform,
Rev. J. Killeher maintains that the state cannot dispose of land
simply as it wishes, just as if it were its own. It must first decide
about the claims of the landowners. The primary land problem
is that of ownership. The Ethics of Insurance, by Rev.
D. Barry, S.T.L. A discussion of the principles that should guide
the conduct of those who may be parties to a contract of insurance.
The nature and character of this contract is taken up; and then
in detail the duties and obligations of the insured and the insurers
respectively.
The Irish Ecclesiastical Record (April) : In The Footprints
of History in Ireland, Professor R. A. S. Macalister shows that
Ireland is to-day the great archaeological museum of Northern
Europe. The article is to be continued. E. Boyd Barrett, S.J.,
discusses the science of character, and P. M. MacSweeney treats of
Jorgensen's St. Francis.
Le Correspondant (February 10) : H. Joly continues his series
on the Provinces of Italy, dealing here with Rome and the Roman
Campagna. An unsigned article, entitled, After the Victory,
What? states that now the Balkan War is over, serious trouble
threatens the victors. The trouble arises from these questions : ( i )
what will be the new boundaries of the States, and (2) what
amounts of money will be contributed by each of these States to help
defra*y the indemnity incurred by the war. Germany vs. The
Catholic Church, by Georges Goyau, reviews the great struggle
1913.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 265
for Catholic education in Germany, and the lessons to be derived
from it.
(February 25) : Spanish Politics, by Salvador Canals, deals
with the situation in Spain to-day, which is concerned with the
Budget of 1913 and Suppression of Church Institutions.
An English Novelist, by M. de Teincey, considers G. K. Chesterton,
his life, and a brief resume of his works.
Annales de Philosophie Chretienne (March) : History as a
Moral Science, by Maurice Legendre. The great historical works
of antiquity show a marked practical and moral character. His-
tory is to-day less moral. The practice of M. Seignbos, accord-
ing to which " history, in order to become a science, has to elaborate
brute facts," to condense them in formulas like chemical and bio-
logical facts, is false and non-historical. Historical facts cannot
be treated like phenomena of nature. History must obey the
conditions not of the sciences of nature, but of our moral activity.
A Philosophy of Religion, by Emile Beauregard. A posthu-
mous work with this title by J. J. Gourd, late professor at the
University of Geneva, has just been presented to the public. God,
according to the author, is " that which is outside of law." As
for moral ends, need replaces excellence. In art the " lawless "
is the sublime ; in social realities it is revolt. To conceive God as the
principle of order is the greatest heresy. The reviewer calls it a
philosophy of religion without religion, a sterile freak, the fruit
of an outworn method answering the need of neither scholar nor
believer.
Revue du Clerge Frangais (April i): A long article by J.
Laurentie on " Saint " Charlemagne is quoted. The author claims
that there has been nothing proved against Charlemagne's moral
character sufficient to prevent a formal canonization, and that his
cultus, dating from 1166 at least, has never ceased to be celebrated
in a certain number of churches and dioceses. It has always had
the tacit permission of the Holy See. The University of Paris,
considering Charlemagne as its founder and heavenly patron, cele-
brated his feast yearly from 1480 onwards; in the eighteenth cen-
tury the office was abandoned, but the Mass was continued; since
the Revolution his office has not been said in any church in Paris,
but until the Law of Separation posters placed on the Church
of the Sorbonne announced that the feast of " Saint " Charlemagne
266 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [May,
was celebrated on January 28th in that church by a French pane-
gyric. The Reform of the Calendar, by Ad. Bertrand, says it
would be desirable to have the date for Easter calculated inde-
pendently of the mean, and to have Easter and Christmas always
celebrated on Sunday. The best method to secure this end would
be to repeat for the ordinary year the name of the preceding week
day, with the added word " second ;" to give February thirty days
and March thirty-one, repeating on one day in leap year the name of
the preceding week day. The division into twelve months should be
retained. An agreement between the Church and civil powers,
like the initiative of Gregory XIIL, would be necessary.
Etudes (March 5) : Devotion and Works of Devotion, by
Leonce de Grandmaison. Saint Thomas defines devotion as a
certain will to give oneself up promptly to that which concerns the
service of God. What is the value of acts of devotion compared
with the motives of faith which dictate them? The texts of St.
Paul used by Luther and his followers to discredit good works and
exalt faith, manifestly refer to the first fundamental grace of man.
Works of devotion may be divided into worship, and spiritual and
temporal works of mercy. That these possess merit we know from
the words of Christ our Lord : " As long as you did it to one of
these My least brethren, you did it to Me."
(March 20) : The Role of the Church in Questions of Faith,
by Stephane Harent. Our Faith is founded on the Word of God
Himself on Revelation. The role of the Church is to conserve
this ancient revelation, the deposit of faith, to interpret it, to apply
it to the needs of successive ages. The Church's infallibility is a
Divine institution, wise and reasonable. Protestantism rejected
infallibility, and now finds itself helpless in the face of the fact
that truths, formerly held as revealed, and often even inscribed
on the official confessions of faith, are being abandoned and lost.
Revue Pratique d'Apologetique (March 15) : The Christian
Meaning of the Psalms, by H. Lesetre. It is evident that many
ideas expressed in the Psalms are inferior to or even in conflict
with those expressed in the Gospel. For instance, the views therein
found concerning the future life are very incomplete. The Israel-
ites looked for rewards of goodness and of evil in this life; they
heaped t fierce invectives on their enemies. In what sense can a
Christian recite these prayers? He can thank God for his own
1913.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 267
greater light. He can be sure that eternity will justify God's pres-
ent dealings with men. He can understand that true happiness
comes only from a conscience at peace with God, and that not even
sinful nations will be allowed long to prosper. He can legitimately
interpret what seem to be curses as being really prophecies ; yet he
may also, with the Church, beg God to deprive the wicked, even
at the cost of pain, of the power of doing evil. Many dogmas,
hinted at in the Psalms, can be made clear only by their fuller
statement in the New Testament. A. Pons contributes a com-
ment on and excerpts from A Dramatic Meditation on the Passion,
composed by Gerson for one of his sisters. Gerson's works on
the Passion won him while still alive the title of " Doctor of Con-
solation and Hope."
(April i): Was Bernadette Soubirous Insane f by Dr. de
Grandmaison de Bruno. The charge is frequently made that the
girl to whom the Blessed Virgin appeared at Lourdes was hysterical,
and suffering from an hallucination. Though doctors are not
agreed on a definition of hysteria, it is clear from her actions that
her case does not exhibit the characteristics of hysteria proposed
by P. Janet. The apparition was not with her a " fixed idea/'
presenting itself in an exaggerated manner during abnormal con-
scious states. The visions did not appear regularly, nor were her
words or actions regularly the same. She was open to impressions
not connected with the vision; and afterwards she remembered
clearly all that had occurred. There was no stage of preparation
for the ecstasy. The lighting up of her face was not a grimace,
and did not suggest hypnosis but the supernatural. Her ecstasy
was not necessarily produced, being lacking in the ninth apparition.
She did not suffer from anaesthesia, from hyper-suggestibility, from
exaggerated indifference and abstraction. Doctors during her life-
time declared that she did not suffer from hysteria.
Etudes Franciscaines (April) : Epitaphs on His Grey Emi-
nence, by F. Collaey, O.M.C., contains two long, satirical Latin
epitaphs on the Capuchin friend of Richelieu. The author says it
is clearly proved that Father Joseph, though thrice dispensed, con-
formed to his Rule as far as possible ; that he was an extraordinary
spiritual director and a master dialectician, persuasive and peace-
able, during the anti-Calvinistic controversies under Louis XIII.
His foreign policy aimed at the pacification of Christendom, and
the union of Christian nations under the presidency of France
268 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [May,
against the infidels. To do this he had to accept alliances with
non-Catholic powers, and to declare war on Catholic powers, a
policy which he hated, but felt compelled to adopt.
Revue des Deux Mondes (March 13) : President Wilson, his
career and opinions, are discussed by Mr. Theodore Stanton. One
point on which the writer lays great stress is that Wilson's ideas
on constitutional government have been much influenced by his
admiration for English statesmen ; Burke and Bagehot in particular.
La Civilta Cattolica (February) : The Gospel 'According to
St. Mark: Second answer of the Biblical Commission to modern
writers who pretend that the end of the Gospel of St. Mark has not
been composed by St. Peter's disciple. After having studied the
reasons given by the opponents, reasons taken from manuscripts,
and mistranslated texts of the Fathers, the Commission answers that
the conclusion of St. Mark's Gospel is inspired, and has been written
by that same disciple. A Strange Statement Against Teaching
of Religion in the Schools: To those who launched a protest
against the suppression of all religious teaching of the schools
on the ground that Italy is, according to the Statute " a Catholic
State," the Committee answered that this first article of the Con-
stitution was, in fact, abolished by the evolution of the consciences,
and that the State, in its rule, was to be led by positivist ideas which
are exclusive of all religious dogmas.
IRecent Events,
M. Briand's third Ministry remained in
France. office only eight weeks. It staked its exist-
ence upon the Senate's accepting the Elec-
toral Reform Bill in the precise form in which it had been passed
by the Chamber of Deputies. This the Senate refused to do. It
accepted the substitution of scrutin de liste for scrutin d'arrondisse-
ment, but refused to pass the method of proportional representation
by means of the electoral quotient, which had for its object the
securing to minorities a voice in legislation. This proposal, if
carried, would have given to the Right, on the one hand, and to
the Collective Socialists, on the other, greater power and influence.
The Socialist-Radicals, the strongest of the Republican Parties, look
upon both as the enemies of the Republic. Their opinion was
shared by M. Clemenceau, and he made himself the special expo-
nent of this view, and both wrote and spoke in opposition to the
proposal. He was so successful that M. Briand's Cabinet added
one more to the long list which have fallen as victims to his attacks
a success so marked that it has earned for him the name of the
" Old Tiger."
The Senate in France has more power than for a very long
period the House of Lords has possessed in England. No British
ministry has ever been in the least dependent upon the good will
of the Upper House. Strange to say, the French Senate is more
radical than the Chamber of Deputies, and yet it is not elected
directly by the people. The mode of election is remotely analo-
gous to that hitherto existing in this country. The Munic-
ipal Councils and the Senators, Deputies, Councillors-General,
and District Councillors of each Department choose delegates, and
these in their turn elect the Senator of the Department for a nine
years' term of office. This is the body that has rejected the bill
passed by the more popular House, and supported by the govern-
ment. The new President, it was known, was an ardent supporter
of the bill. He is credited with being a strong man, willing to use
all his powers. These include the right, with the Senate's consent,
to dissolve the Chamber of Deputies. It was at first thought
this course might have been taken. Better counsels prevailed.
270 RECENT EVENTS [May,
Only once has a President exercised this power (on the celebrated
seize Mai), and then with disastrous results to himself.
After the usual consultations, M. Barthou undertook the form-
ation of a Ministry. Although never before Prime Minister, M.
Barthou has for many years filled important offices in various
governments. Four members who had served with M. Briand
retain office in the new Ministry, which includes only two repre-
sentatives of the party which was responsible for the defeat of
M. Briand.
The programme of M. Barthou coincides with that of the
defeated government in demanding three years' service for the
army, and in the other measures for defense which M. Briand had
proposed. As to Electoral Reform, as both branches of the Legis-
lature have accepted scrutin de liste, that will be proceeded with.
It is hoped to find a method for the representation of minorities
different from that which led to the defeat of the former govern-
ment. There are said to have been proposed in various countries
something like three hundred ways in which representation may be
given to the minority of electors. On some one of these the
French government will fall back.
A third proposal of the new government is the
defense of the secular school (I'ecole laique). The Cath-
olics of France have proved themselves so wicked as to
defend their own schools with great success. This is treated by
the government as an attack upon those established by the State.
It accordingly promises the inauguration of vigorous measures in
defense of the secular schools. Such is the government's pro-
gramme. These programmes, however, are often strangely frus-
trated. In fact, on the first vote of confidence, the support the gov-
ernment received was so equivocal that the expectation was formed
of an immediate resignation. Although this was avoided, the
general opinion is that it will not be very long-lived, and that
France may look forward to a swift succession of ministries.
With regard to the Army Bill, M. Barthou's Ministry pledges
itself to take the same practical measures in defense of France
against the projected increase of the German army as those upon
which M. Briand had decided. Three years' service for all arms
is to be revived, with no exemptions of any kind, although for
young men preparing for professional careers certain alleviations
have 'been admitted. The first instalment of the cost of the
large increase, necessitated by their lengthening of the army service,
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 271
was passed by the Budget Committee with very little hesitation.
The anti-militarist movement, which was strong enough to bring
about the shortening of the term of service in 1905, has yielded
to urgent necessity.
It is true that the motive alleged for the German increase of
its army, when it was first announced, was the great strength
given to the Slavs by the success of the Balkan States a success
which at once greatly weakened Austria, and added to the power of
Russia. A leading paper in Germany, the Cologne Gazette, was
however, so maladroit as to reveal, we will not say the true reason,
but what will be one of the results of German action. According
to this journal, the necessity for the new Army Bill was to be
explained by the fact that Germany was menaced by France.
" When sacrifices are demanded, as they are demanded to-day,
the finger must be pointed plainly to the point whence the most
immediate peril threatens us. That is France. Never has the
relationship to our Western neighbor been so strained as to-day,
never has the idea of revenge been exhibited there so nakedly."
So untrue were these statements that they were disavowed by high
authority within a few days. But they served well the purpose of
the French government in giving support to its demands. Not
that it stood in need of much support, for the nation as a whole
was ready enough to make any sacrifice in defense of its territory.
The Socialists, however, led by M. Jaures, criticized the proposal
made by the government. Their object is to disband the regular
army, and to substitute for it a national militia, formed upon the
model of that which exists in Switzerland. Nor do a few of the
Radicals see quite eye to eye with the government, even the repre-
sentatives of the party who have entered the ministry having criti-
cized certain features. There is no doubt that hardship will be en-
tailed by the devotion of so long a period to the military service.
For example, the classes devoted to skilled labor, such as the making
of watches, in which delicate manipulation is required, will suffer
from the heavy-handed toil demanded during army service. Stu-
dents in the university too are affected : they feel that the measure
is likely to exert a profound influence upon the intellectual and
economic life of the country, and that it may even cause a setback
to French civilization, and also that it is open to serious technical
objection. Among these critics are M. Anatole France and M.
Ernest Lavisse. It is, therefore, desired that for students the
military service may be postponed to the age of twenty-seven.
272 RECENT EVENTS [May,
There are some who see in the proposal an attempt of the Reac-
tionaries to saddle the country with a large military force, to be
used as a means for securing their return to power. There seems
however, to be no reason to doubt the determination of the nation
to make all the sacrifices required, and not to carp at any measures
proposed for this object. The opposition, however, to three years'
service has proved itself strong enough to prevent the proposal
being rushed through so quickly as to deny due consideration
and discussion.
It is not merely upon the army that France proposes to spend
money for the purpose of securing greater efficiency. To the in-
crease of the navy no less than one hundred millions is asked
for by the new government. Three additional battleships are
to be constructed, the existing programme is to be accelerated,
and the aeronautical service is to be largely extended. To form
a just judgment of the sacrifices which these proposals entail
upon the French people, it must be remembered that the burden
of taxation in France is already far heavier than that which is
borne by the German people. Those who are interested in this
matter will find it discussed in detail in an article on " La Force
Financiere des Etats" in the Revue des Deux Monde s for May,
1912.
Although a matter of no international interest, M. Lepine,
Prefect of the Paris Police since 1893, has been so con-
spicuous a figure in Paris, and so efficient a public servant, that
any account of French affairs which made no mention of his retire-
ment would be very incomplete. He has chosen the present time,
when he thinks the era of turbulent manifestations is closed,
especially those promoted by the Confederation Generate du Travail,
to seek the rest he has so well deserved. He is, however, willing,
in the event of his services being needed, to return to the post of
danger at the shortest notice. " I have a telephone in the flat
which I have just taken" is his last message to the nation. So
important is the Post of Prefect of the Police of Paris that M.
Lepine resigned the Governor-Generalship of Algeria in order to
take upon himself its duties.
The relations of France with all her neighbors, except Ger-
many, have undergone no change. Considerable discussion has
taken place in Great Britain as to the true meaning of the Entente
Cordistle with France, whether or no it involved an undisclosed
obligation in certain contingencies to dispatch a military force for
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 273
operations on the Continent. This question has been settled by
the statement of Mr. Asquith, that Great Britain is not under
any obligation, which is not public and known to Parliament, to
compel it to take part in any war. There are, he said, no un-
published agreements which restrict or hamper Great Britain's
freedom. It is at the same time fully recognized that in the event
of the existent balance of power being endangered, by the aggres-
sive action of any nation, England would range herself, by force
of arms if necessary, in defense of the maintenance of the European
equilibrium. It has always been the policy of Great Britain to
resist the undue predominance of any one Power. A well-in-
formed French journalist, M. Tardieu, vouches for the statement
that England spontaneously offered to place one hundred and fifty
thousand men at the disposal of France in 1905, 1908, and 1911.
France is proceeding with her w r ork in Morocco in a way
which is said to be satisfactory, although there are tribes which
have been offering resistance, and which have been fighting with the
French forces. There is no longer, however, any general uprising.
A loan is being raised for the various purposes which the advance
of civilization requires.
The various bills for the increase of the
Germany. Germany Army, and of the naval and mili-
tary expenditure, which have been so long
talked about, were presented to the Reichstag at the end of March.
The increase demanded by the government is even greater than was
expected. Four thousand ofiicers are to be added to the existing
forces, one hundred and thirty-two thousand non-commissioned
ofiicers and men, and twenty-seven thousand horses. About sixty-
three thousand new recruits will be required annually. Between
now and the end of 1915 the cost of this increase will be something
between three hundred and three hundred and twenty-five millions.
The government proposes to raise two hundred and fifty millions
of this amount by a method which recalls the proceedings of the
rulers during the Middle Ages. Capital and large incomes are
to be subjected to a levy of one-half per cent on all fortunes above
two thousand five hundred dollars. It is said that one of the
Krupps expects to be called upon to pay some three millions and
a half as his share. New taxes will have to be imposed in addition
to this levy. The exact character of these has not yet been dis-
closed. A fierce contest is expected to take place in the Reichstag,
VOL. xcvu. 18.
274 RECENT EVENTS [May,
for no one class will be willing to shoulder the additional burdens.
In fact, to judge by recent experience, every class will be most
anxious to throw it off upon the rest.
It is looked upon as practically certain that while the desired
increase of the army will be voted, a large majority in the Reich-
stag will insist upon important amendments of the government's
financial proposals. It is worthy of notice that it is not proposed
to issue a loan to cover any part of the expense. The reason given
by the government is that the service of such a loan would have
serious consequences in the present state of the money market.
The real reason seems to be that the government thinks
itself unable to raise a loan of so vast an amount. A short time
ago treasury bonds, which were issued for the sum of a hun-
dred millions, were only subscribed for to half that amount, and
of the amount taken the private subscriptions were infinitesimal.
The British First Lord of the Admiralty, in a speech in the
House of Commons, made an eloquent appeal for what he called a
" naval holiday." Having pointed out that further competition
would have the effect of increasing the burdens of the people
both of Germany and Great Britain, without altering their relative
positions, he declared that if Germany would reduce her squadrons,
Great Britain would make a frank and loyal response. He added,
however, that pending such an arrangement, British development
would proceed with all dispatch. Nor would she be content with a
small margin, for a margin which was not sufficient to secure
victory would be insufficient to maintain peace. Mr. Churchill's
" naval holiday " for a year, however, met with somewhat scorn-
ful treatment in Germany. Those who looked upon it as sincere,
thought it to be Utopian, and many doubted its sincerity. It
was taken to mean that England wanted a breathing space during
the present activity in ship building, as this involves a shortage
of labor, and a consequential increase of expense.
The martial feelings of Germany, as well as her animosity
against France, have been fostered by the celebrations of the War of
Liberation in 1813, which have been taking place throughout
the Empire. One of the chief events was the commemoration of
King Frederick William the Third's appeal, "An mein Volk."
Religious services were held in many places; in fact the appeal
to religious motives was most marked. On one of the wreaths
placed by the Emperor on the sarcophagus of King Frederick
William was the inscription : " I believe firmly in God, and, there-
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 275
fore, in a moral ordering of the world." In the address made
to the troops by his Imperial Majesty, the same appeal was em-
phasized. It was through God's Providence that the King had
made his appeal to his people. It was to God's blessing that
the victory was due. " Fear of God, loyalty to the King, love of
the Fatherland, as perfect as was shown in the great times, must
make the army unconquerable. But victory comes from God.
Therefore, let the motto of the heroes of the Wars of Liberation
be ours now and for ever 'God with us.' '
Almost all the energies of the Dual Mon-
Austria-Hungary. archy have been engrossed in the prepara-
tions for war, of which the struggle in the
Balkans has been the occasion. Time, however, has been found in
Hungary for the Franchise Reform Bill, which has been promised
for so many years. The third reading of the bill was carried in the
early part of March, and it was then considered certain that it would
be adopted by the House of Magnates, and receive the sanction
of the Crown. The Bill is a very complicated measure, and no
one can say how it will work.
The one hundred and sixty-eight clauses of which it consists
are said to constitute such a maze of definitions, restrictions, and
specifications that no clear idea even of its meaning can be obtained,
even if no account is taken of the influence of returning officers
and electoral commissions. The electors are divided into two cate-
gories. Those who have passed the sixth standard of a primary
school, or the highest class of a secondary school, and pay some-
thing like seven dollars a year in direct taxation, are entitled to vote
on the completion of their twenty-fourth year. Others can vote
only after the completion of their thirtieth year, but must have
at least five years of Hungarian citizenship, and at least one year's
residential qualification, unless they be officials, professors, pastors,
or priests. The bill is looked upon as a mere caricature of Electoral
Reform. Every detail is inspired with the determination to main-
tain at all costs that supremacy of the Magyar element over the
Slav to which that element has no rightful claim.
At the moment that these lines are being
The Balkan War. written, no peace has as yet been concluded
between the Balkan Allies and Turkey.
Adrianople having fallen, as well as Yanina, and every effort of
276 RECENT EVENTS [May,
the Turks to advance beyond the Tchataldja lines having been
frustrated, no hopes can be entertained, even by the most zealous
Turcophil, that anything can be gained for that Power by a
continuance of the war. In fact she put herself some time ago
in the hands of the Powers. After a considerable delay the Allies
accepted their mediation, although they made important res-
ervations. The boundary proposed by the Powers would
be treated as a basis for negotiation, not as a definite settlement.
The Allies would insist on an indemnity, but its amount might be
settled by a commission appointed for that purpose. The JEgean
Islands were to be ceded to the Allies. If, as is reported, an
armistice has been concluded between the States and Turkey, in
a few days the war may be expected to end upon the lines laid
down in these conditions.
The differences between Rumania and Bulgaria, which at one
time it was feared would lead to war, have been settled. At a
conference held in St. Petersburg of the representatives of the two
countries, an agreement was reached, and the questions at issue
definitely arranged. The precise terms have not, however, been
published.
The outstanding question is the possession of Skutari. Monte-
negro was the first of the Allies to declare war, and also the first
to meet with successes. These successes, however, were of no great
value, and in the object to which she attached supreme importance
the taking of Skutari she has been unsuccessful. The town has
resisted every effort, and still remains in the possession of the Turk.
The Powers, in settling the boundary of the Albanian State, which,
in their inscrutable wisdom, they have determined to form, have
decided that Skutari is to be included in the new Albania. Other
towns have been given, either to Montenegro or to Servia, as a
compensation. Montenegro, however, insists upon her claim.
The population of Skutari is undoubtedly Albanian. There-
fore, this claim is without foundation. However, she would not
yield, and the people of Russia sympathized with her. The spectacle
has, therefore, been seen of the Great Powers of Europe, if such
they can any longer be called Austria-Hungary, Germany, France,
Italy, and Great Britain forming a combined fleet to coerce the
minute state of Montenegro. It is said that they have seized
the Royal Yacht.
The whole course of the present war is, indeed, an instance of
the fact that little things of the world are often chosen to confound
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 277
the great. Before the war began the Great Powers solemnly warned
the Allied States that they would not be allowed, whatever might
be the result of the war, to add a foot of ground to their respective
territories. From this position, however, they at once receded
after the first victories of the Allies. It has been given to these
small states, who have a population of two or three hundred thou-
sand more than ten millions, and scarcely any financial means,
to drive out of Europe the Turk, who has defied for centuries
all the Powers of Europe with their tens of millions of inhabitants
and unlimited resources.
It is hard to realize how great are the events of which we are
the witnesses. Years before Columbus came to this country the
Turk has been in possession of the districts from which he has
just been driven out. Adrianople became his capital in 1361. All
the power of Europe has for centuries proved itself unable to
expel him. For the whole of this long period, he has been a con-
tinuous blight and curse to the land and to its inhabitants. Only
a short time ago the prospect was but slight that an end would
ever be put to his hateful domination. That this, the unexpected
destruction of his power, has been effected by the least expected
of means, is a reason for being hopeful for the overturn of the
other tyrannies under which various parts of the world seem
to be hopelessly groaning.
The prospect of an improvement of the
Persia. state of things in Persia is not very bright.
The government has proved itself quite in-
capable of preserving order in the South, while in the North
that two roads are being kept open for commerce is due to the
presence of sixteen thousand Russian troops.
The downfall of the old regime was caused not only by the
intolerable tyranny and unbridled rapacity of the rulers, but also
by the practice of the same vices by the aristocracy as a whole.
The constitutional movement failed to bring to the front any men
of talent belonging to the middle class, or anyone capable of taking
charge of affairs. The former princes, nobles, and governors
succeeded in maintaining their former position, and in imposing
themselves and their methods upon the state. According to a well-
informed correspondent : " Intrigue was their only art. Their
sole inspiring motive was greed, and the embezzlement of public
funds from a stricken treasury was their principal pursuit
278 RECENT EVENTS [May,
The great men of Teheran combined to form a corn ring, and not
all the miseries of the population from the famine price of bread
could make them forego a single kran of their ill-gotten gains."
This procedure is so habitual, so much the common doctrine and
practice, that it excited no surprise, and met with no condemnation.
This canker, which came from above, has spread downwards
through all classes, the nomad tribes being the only communities in
which honesty of any kind is practiced. The bulk of the people
are cowardly, and easily become the prey of a few warlike tribes,
which the government is unable to control, and who are continually,
when not at war one with another, engaged in the pillaging of
caravans, or in promiscuous marauding.
It was to this state that the despotism of the Kajar family
reduced the country, and it is little to be wondered at that in the
midst of such universal corruption and disorganization, the con-
stitutional movement has so far been unable to effect any marked
improvement. The fact, however, that the attempt was made, and
indeed is still being made, shows that not every spark of energy
has been crushed out or suppressed.
The Mejliss was made up of men, who, while they were in
need of experience, were generally men of integrity. It recognized,
too, its own limitations, that it stood in need of a guidance which no
one in the country was willing to give, not even the Cabinet, from
whom such guidance was to have been expected. When Mr. Shuster
was appointed Treasurer-General, it showed itself willing to do all
he required. Had it not been for the interference of Russia,
in which Great Britain so culpably concurred, there was a good
prospect that a great step towards real reform would have been
taken. The fact that foreign nations have, or at least claim to
have, the right to interfere in the internal affairs of the country
adds, of course, enormously to the difficulty of the situation. This
interference proved fatal to Mr. Shuster's plans. Since their
abandonment no improvement has been made. The partition of
Persia by Russia and Great Britain has, however, not taken place,
nor in fact does it seem to be likely. So far at all events as the
last-named Power is concerned, a solemn disclaimer of any such
desire has recently been made by Sir Edward Grey. The number
of those in England who wish to add to the extent of the British
Empire, and to its cares and responsibilities, is very small.
It is not so easy to learn the intentions of Russia. Where one
man is the ruler, he is subject to so many various influences that
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 279
no event is calculable, as his hand may be forced by those who
are powerful behind the scenes. But so far as is known, Russia
shares with Great Britain the intention to maintain the integrity
of Persian territory, at least for the time being. The two countries
have, in fact, recently made small loans to the government in order
to enable it to suppress disorder, and this has been done without
requiring that the external control of the expenditure should be left
in their own hands. This was done in order to manifest their desire
of not further interfering in internal affairs. While the Russian
forces still remain in Northern Persia, the British force, which had
until lately been at Shiraz in the South, has been sent back to India.
The Gendarmerie which is under the command of Swedish officers,
will, it is hoped, be able to maintain order in the South at least
a further experiment is to be made.
The Regent is still absent from his post, recuperating in
Europe. On the occasion of the Persian New Year, in telegraphing
the customary congratulations, he added that he blessed the day
which was now approaching when the child Shah would .take the
reins of government into his own hands, and thereby bring increased
strength to the country. The Shah's reply conveyed a gentle re-
buke to the absentee regent. After expressing his thanks, his
majesty said that, until he was able to assume the reins of gov-
ernment, the interests of the country would be best served by
the Regent's return. The Regent, however, still keeps away. The
ex-Shah, who is in exile, is, it is said, anxious to become the
savior of his country. The Mejliss continues in abeyance, while
the government, so far as its personnel is concerned, is, in Sir
Edward Grey's opinion, the best it is possible to obtain.
Concessions have been granted to Russian firms, which, of
course, receive the support of their government, for railways
from Julfa to Tabriz, and from the latter place to Kazvin. Nego-
tiations are proceeding for a similar concession to British firms
for a railway in the part of Persia which British interests pre-
dominate. The project of a railway to connect the Russian system
with that of India is still under the consideration of the Council
appointed to study the matter.
With Our Readers.
AT the root of the agitation for a change of name of the Protestant
Episcopal Qiurch, lies the desire on the part of many members
of that Church to be more Catholic. Some seek a closer resemblance
merely in externals; some in doctrine and in spirit. Some honestly
comfort themselves with the thought that their Church really answers
the claims of Scripture and tradition; that a majority are in possession
who, because they are Protestants, prevent a true expression of the
real Catholic spirit of the Church. It is strange that, knowing the
past and present history of their Church as they do, they can so think.
But even if a wide experience were lacking a work like Father
Maturin's Price of Unity would suffice to show how many can for years
honestly deceive themselves. Members of Ihe Protestant Episcopal
Church who are so minded clearly see that their Church, as it is to-day,
is not Catholic. The very evident contradictions, both of doctrine
and practice, in different churches of that supposedly one Church;
the questioning and the denial of fundamental dogmas ; inability after
repeated discussions and conventions to agree on fundamental and
vital points of dogma and morality; the absence of definite authority
without which unity and true life cannot be, have aroused the more
serious and earnest souls to a keen realization of the situation.
Something must be done, ere their Church is swept away by doctrinal
indifference and moral laxity. " Change the name," is their cry. " Do
away with the word Protestant. Make our Church more like that
other Church that stands preeminently in doctrine and practice for the
definite teachings of Christ."
Many who have been so aroused, and who have lent their voices
to such a cry, have eventually seen that even if the label is changed,
the contents remain the same.
The Protestant Episcopal Church has a true name : it is essentially
Protestant. In its origin and its continued life, it is a protest against
the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church owns the Bishop of Rome,
the Pope, as its head. It believes him to be the Vicar of Christ
upon earth: the supreme authority in all matters spiritual. The
Protestant Episcopal Church does not believe this; has never believed
it, and its genesis was owing to a protest against this very belief.
The Protestant Episcopal Church believes in no visible power as an
ultimate authority, infallibly protected by the power of the Holy
Spirit, which we are obliged to accept and believe.
The Protestant Episcopal Church practically teaches the right of
every individual to his own private judgment. The Scripture alone
as the sole rule of faith is the teaching that makes it essentially
1913.] WITH OUR READERS 281
Protestant. For example, the Chicago-Lambeth Articles, adopted by
the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Chicago
in 1886, were an attempt at a summary of the fundamental doctrines
of Christianity. In 1888 these same articles were adopted by the
Lambeth Conference, presided over by the late Archbishop Benson,
and attended by one hundred and forty-five Bishops of the Anglican
Church. These articles read:
"The Holy Scripture of the Old and New Testaments as containing all
things necessary to salvation, and as being the rule and ultimate standard
of faith; the Apostles' Creed as the baptismal symbol, and the Nicene Creed
as the sufficient statement of the Christian faith; the two sacraments ordained
by Christ Himself baptism and the Supper of the Lord ministered with
unfailing use of Christ's words of institution and of the elements ordained
by Him; the historic episcopate locally adapted in the methods of its adminis-
tration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of God into
the unity of His Church."
The fifteen Protestant Episcopal rectors of New York City who
addressed an emphatic protest against a change of name to Bishop
Tuttle of Missouri, were, therefore, historically consistent. They are
Protestants, and they politely veil their antagonism to the Catholic
Church by speaking of it as the Church whose name suggests tyranny.
It may of course if one is not a Catholic, for its claims are absolute.
And Thomas Nelson Page is also consistent when he writes, in some
temper and bias, it must he said, " What we request with great firm-
ness is that they (who desire a change of name) keep their hands off
the Protestant principle of this Church." " This Church got its
Christianity as Protestant at the hands of the great Protestant
body of Europe The Episcopal portion of its name was descrip-
tive, the Protestant portion was fundamental. It was called Prot-
estant by the bishops and the writers because it was protestant."
It is difficult in the face of these statements, official and unofficial,
to understand the position of Dr. Manning, the head of Trinity Church,
New York. Dr. Manning calls the word " Protestant " ugly. The
Protestant Episcopal Church he says is " a part of the ancient historic
Catholic Church." Of course if it is, one must forget the word
" Protestant." If one wishes to be Catholic there is but one way,
and that there is but one way is attested by nineteen hundred years
of history.
1T)ELIGIOUS indifferentism the open door to secularism is un-
-^ doubtedly the greatest evil of our day. When a definite and real
Christianity goes out, the world comes in. Latitudinarianism, liberal-
ism, modernism, are disintegrating forces that eat away the very found-
ations of any organization into which they gain entrance. In the
non-Catholic religious bodies they have worked so successfully that
2&z WITH OUR READERS [May,
it is not an uncommon thing to hear dogmatic Christianity decried from
their pulpits ; and a creedless religion and a merely humanitarian Christ
preached as the essence of Christianity.
The earnest lover of our Blessed Lord and of His Church longs
to see the light of His Truth spread through all the world, to enlighten
those who sit in darkness. As their darkness becomes more and more
intense, so much the more is he exercised and " pressed on by a
charity " that hastens fastest where the need is greatest.
It is easier to bring to the true Fold a Christian who conscien-
tiously believes in dogmatic religion than one who has no definite
belief. In truth the stronger his convictions, the more ardent his
positive belief, the more likely is it that he may be led to accept
the whole of Christ's revelation.
But for the indifferentist, the man who answers that one re-
ligion is as good as another, that we are all going to heaven by
different roads, there is really little hope. He has no convictions,
and he has not the strength to see that he should have convictions.
Compromise has taken out his backbone, and he cannot see that anyone
should be obliged to sit up straight.
Our missionary labor may well be extended, therefore, not only in
striving directly to bring into the Church all who may be led by God's
grace to come; but also in doing all that we can to fight the spirit of
indifferentism and of agnosticism; the spirit of irreligion and secular-
ism. By arousing others to a declaration of a positive religious creed ;
of their own belief in that creed ; by making the leaders of the denom-
inations and their followers realize that they must admit the necessity
of dogmatic truth unless the world is to be dechristianized, much good
work may be done. If side by side with this there is presented,
without animus or antagonism, the positive truth of the Catholic
Faith with its harmony and unity, that very presentation will lead
many to see what they have never seen before; perhaps lead them to
accept that Beauty of Truth which is ever ancient and yet ever new.
" We should make all possible endeavor," wrote Leo XIII., " that
the men of every race and clime should be called and moved to
embrace the unity of divine faith." We should all be united by the
bond of mutual charity, even though perfect charity cannot reign
where minds do not agree in faith. Yet to all who differ from us,
our hearts may send the appeal, " Let us all meet in the unity of faith
and of the knowledge of the Son of God. Suffer that we should
invite you to the unity which has ever existed in the Catholic Church
and can never fail; suffer that we should lovingly hold out our hand
to you. The Church, as the common Mother of all, has long been
calling you back to her; the Catholics of the world await you with
brotherly love, that you may render holy worship to God together
1913.] WITH OUR READERS 283
with us, united in perfect charity by the profession of one Gospel,
one faith, and one hope."
And in this spirit, we extend to a new magazine, entitled The
Constructive Quarterly, our cordial good wishes. Its object is to strive
to have all Christians make common warfare against the common
enemy of the day. It seeks to promote a wider mutual knowledge
and fellowship. It does not seek through compromise to work out
a meaningless unity. It champions dogmatic conviction ; and demands
that the teaching and doctrine of every denomination discussed shall be
stated with absolute integrity. It is therefore constructive; hopeful,
and a welcome antagonist of such a destructive and agnostic organ
as the Hibbert Journal. The venture is necessarily experimental, and
the history of The Constructive Quarterly can be the only answer
to its success or failure. But the spirit that prompts it is one that
should receive our good will and our cooperation. For again we
recall to mind the words of that prophetical leader, Leo XIII., " In
order to bring about this concord," he wrote speaking of the Reunion
of Christendom, " and spread abroad the benefits of the Christian
revelation, the present is the most seasonable time; for never before
have the sentiments of human brotherhood penetrated so deeply into
the souls of men, and never in any age has man been seen to seek
out his fellowmen more eagerly in order to know them better and
to help them."
Perhaps this Constructive Quarterly will never do all that we hope
it will do. Perhaps, as Leo XIII. said, " There are those who consider
that we are far too sanguine, and look for things rather to be wished
for than expected." And our answer is, Leo's further words, " If
only a portion of the looked-for results should come about, it will be
no inconsiderable improvement considering the general decadence,
when the intolerable evils of the present day bring with them the
dread of further evils in days to come."
The Editor of The Constructive Quarterly is Dr. Silas McBee.
The first issue has among its contributors the following Catholics
of note: The Reverend John J. Wynne, S.J., Wilfrid Ward, and
Georges Goyau. Among the associates of the Editorial Board are:
Monsignor Thomas Shahan, Rector of the Catholic University;
Doctor Edward A. Pace, Andrew Shipman, Father Wynne, Father
Thurston, and Father Sydney Smith.
THE coming celebration of the battle of Gettysburg recalls the famous
address of President Lincoln at the dedication of the National
Gettysburg Cemetery. It may not be well known that the correct
reading of this address has been the occasion of considerable contro-
versy. The friendly debate may be said to have started almost imme-
284 WITH OUR READERS [May,
diately after the delivery of the address. Mr. Nicolay, secretary
to President Lincoln, and co-author with Mr. Hay of a Life of the
President, sums up as follows the three versions that have given
rise to the dispute :
" (i) The original autograph MS. draft, written by Mr. Lincoln partly
at Washington, and partly at Gettysburg.
"(2) The version made by the shorthand reporter on the stand at Gettys-
burg when the President delivered it, which was telegraphed, and was printed
in the leading newspapers of the country on the following morning.
" (3) The revised copy made by the President a few days after his
return to Washington, upon a careful comparison of his original draft and the
printed newspaper version, with his own recollection of the exact form in
which he delivered it."
Mr. Nicolay was of the opinion that the last of these "is the regular
outgrowth of the two which preceded it, and is the perfected product
of the President's rhetorical and literary mastery."
General Aleshire, who had charge of the National Gettysburg
Park, gave the following summary in his official report on the question :
" (i) The final revision published in Autograph Leaves of Our Country's
Authors, prepared by President Lincoln five months after the address for the
soldiers' and sailors' fair at Baltimore. This is the version desired by both
Col. Nicholson and Robert T. Lincoln. The latter regarded it as representing
his father's last and best thought as to the address.
" (2) The version stipulated to be used by the act of February n, 1895,
appropriating $5,000 for the bronze tablet containing the address to be erected
in the Gettysburg National Park. This differs slightly from the Baltimore
version.
" (3) The John Hay version, from a photographic facsimile of the orig-
inal manuscript, as written and corrected by President Lincoln four days after
he had delivered the address, and presented it to John Hay. This differs
in several particulars from either of the above versions.
Robert T. Lincoln, the son of the President, in a letter to General
Aleshire, gave his views as follows:
"As I wrote you before, the Baltimore fair version represents my father's
last and best thought as to the address, and the corrections in it were legitimate
for an author, and I think there is no doubt they improve the version as written
out for Col. Hay. And, as I said to you before, I earnestly hope that the
Baltimore fair version will be used.
"It differs, as you indicate, very slightly from your Exhibit A, which,
as you say, is given in the statutes-at-large, making an appropriation for the
tablet at Gettysburg National Cemetery. But the statute version was not
made, of course, by any responsible person, and I think its incorrections should
not be perpetuated when we have, as I have indicated, an exact thing to go by.
"I am quite sure as a lawyer that there is no obligation upon you, in the
new tablets you are making, to follow the errors in the text in his old statue,
and I trust that you will not do so. I have before me, as I write, the book
published by the Baltimore sanitary fair, which contains a full-sized lithographic
1913-] WITH OUR READERS 285
reproduction of the address as my father sent it to the fair to be sold for its
benefit."
In 1909, as a result of an investigation by the War Department,
the Baltimore version was officially adopted by that Department. Very
recently the United States Senate authorized the Committee on Library
to ascertain the correct version. There is little doubt from the history
of the matter that the Committee will adopt the Baltimore version.
As the speech is a classic of the English language we reprint that
version here:
" Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent,
a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that
all men are created equal.
" Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation,
or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met
on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion
of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that
'that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
" But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate we can not consecrate
we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who
struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or
detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,
but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather,
to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have
thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great
task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased
devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion
that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain
that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that
government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from
the earth."
r PHE anniversary last month of the Titanic disaster brought forth
J- a number of memorial poems. One of them stands out prominent
for its singular strength and its depth of feeling. It is from the pen
of Katharine Tynan, and was published in the British Review. The
critique by Katherine Bregy of Mrs. Hinkson's work in this issue
of THE CATHOLIC WORLD, makes its reprinting here particularly ap-
propriate.
THE PARABLE OF THE RICH MAN.
Lord Jesus stood at Paradise gate
And saw a myriad worlds and stars.
Oh, what is this so desolate
Clinging to the gold bars?
The salt spume on its eyes and lips,
The seaweed tangled in its hair.
Oh, scourged with bitter thorns and whips,
What seas have stripped thee bare?
286 WITH OUR READERS [May,
Lord Jesus bowed His comely head
With: What art thou, thou thing forlorn?
Oh, I am a rich man's soul, it said,
That died ere I was born.
By Thine own lips was judgment given,
Yea, judgment sharper than a sword.
How shall a rich man enter heaven?
Yea, Thou hast said it, Lord.
It was the dead oped lips to cry
How should I save my soul, alas !
Since easier through the needle's eye
The camel's shape should pass?
Lord Jesus, Who hath ruth for all,
Had pity on the rich man's doom :
I can do all things great and small,
Yea, give the camel room.
But who is it has hurt thee, say,
Made thee one gaping wound and marred
Out of immortal likeness, yea
As I was marred and scarred?
And knowest Thou not, Lord Christ, this hour,
Who knowest all has been, shall be,
That the great ship, new Babel's Tower,
Is sunk beneath the sea?
The iceberg pierced her monstrous side,
As frail as any cockleshell,
With a great sob she plunged and died.
Oh, Lord, what need of hell?
The rich men now that went so brave
Drift 'twixt Cape Race and Labrador.
Not such as these Thou diedst to save,
Thou Saviour of the poor.
Not these, not these, Thou diedst to win:
Thy Passion was not spent for them.
Have I not purged me from my sin
Who heard the women scream?
Son, I was there and saw thee die.
The unstable waters bore me up
Whose hollowed hand can hold the sky,
Sun, stars, as in a cup.
I, Shepherd of the Ocean, passed;
Gathered My lambs, gathered My sheep:
Saw rich men greatly die at last.
Yea, what they lost they keep.
That was the door I opened,
Narrow and high in Paradise wall,
That they should die in another's stead,
For Mine, the meek and small.
1913.] WITH OUR READERS 287
That which they cast away they save,
They paid their debt in full. One breath:
Smiled on the innumerable grave,
Leaped, and found Life, not Death.
Not through the needle's eye may fare
The camel: by a straiter gate,
Naked and scourged, made clean and bare,
The rich man enters late.
THE NEWMAN MEMORIAL CHURCH.
IT is now eleven years since the Fathers of the Birmingham Oratory
made their first appeal for funds to build a new church as a mem-
orial of their venerated founder, Cardinal Newman. That undertaking
was nowhere more generously furthered than in the United States.
The church has been built and partly decorated; it now waits to be
made quite free from debt, in order to be consecrated next summer,
if possible. The contributions amounted to 41,200; the total outlay
is 43,700. A sum of 2,500 ($12,500) is still, therefore, with God's
blessing, to be raised.
Well, is this amount very formidable? Are the Fathers too bold
in feeling that many of those who gave their subscriptions to Father
Eaton in 1905, as well as others to whom the genius and name of
John Henry Newman are dear, will rally to their aid, now that the
memorial exists, and only its last handicap needs to be removed?
May not the finishing of so good a work be entrusted to the loyalty
of their kind American friends? With a little leadership, the thing
would be done quickly. Or should a few come forward at once with
good-will offerings, sufficient to make up the whole $12,500, the Fathers
will promise to signalize and perpetuate the memory of the American
contribution by a tablet in the church recording the gift. But they
will be most grateful for any sums, large or small, sent to the Rever-
end Father Superior, The Oratory, Edgbaston, Birmingham, England,
or to the Editor of this magazine, if specified as being for the Newman
Memorial Church Fund.
THE Religion of America, by Dr. William Barry, in the April
Atlantic Monthly, is an article of exceptional interest, and
one that will furnish much in the way of suggestion, and also of debate,
for all who are interested in the growth of the Church in America,
and in our religious progress as a nation.
BOOKS RECEIVED.
BENZIGER BROTHERS, New York:
Manual of Self -Knowledge and Christian Perfection. Compiled by Rev. John
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the Foundations of St. Teresa of Jesus. Written by herself. Translated
from the Spanish by David Lewis. New and Revised Edition by Very Rev.
Benedict Zimmerman. $2.25 net. The Cult of Alary. By Rev. T. J. Gerrard.
40 cents net. The " Praise of Glory." Translated from the French by
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The Dominican Revival in the Nineteenth Century. By Father Raymond
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CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, New York:
The Right of the Strongest. By F. Green. $1.35 net. The Life and Letters
of John Paul Jones. By Mrs. Reginald de Koven. Vols. I. and II. $5.00
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THE MACMILLAN Co., New York:
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FR. PUSTET & Co., New York:
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Noldin, S.J., a Carolo Telch. 95 cents.
FUNK & WAGNALLS Co., New York :
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THE CATHEDRAL LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, New York :
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THE
CATHOLIC WORLD,
VOL. XCVII.
JUNE, 1913.
No. 579.
WHO IS ALFRED NOYES?
BY ELBRIDGE COLBY.
HERE has recently come to America a young English
poet by the name of Alfred Noyes. He has lectured
at Columbia University, at Yale, and at New York
University. He has appeared before certain of the
New York Clubs. He has been interviewed by the
journalists and commented upon editorially. One paper has said
that he does not well explain his own work ; another that he " has
a vision of a new religion of poetry expressive of the harmony
of life not unlike that toward which Tennyson groped
in an age when men were wondering whether the new discoveries
of science had not sounded the death-knell both of poetry and of
religion ;" one magazine has attacked him with notoriously bad
taste; another has praised him as "an unusual poet."
Who is this Alfred Noyes?
He is a young man, a particularly vigorous, healthy sort of
a young man. He was born September 16, 1880 ridiculously
recent date! and in course of time was educated at Exeter Col-
lege, Oxford. He pulled an oar in the College " boat " and wrote
poems, aside from his ordinary academic duties as an under-
graduate. At the first publication of his verse, in the London Times,
he was still in residence at Oxford. Leaving college, he came
to the conclusion that he wished to write poetry, and that he would
devote himself to poetry exclusively. Difficult and daring as the
Copyright. 1913. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
ix THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
VOL. XCVII. IQ.
290 WHO IS ALFRED NOYESf [June,
course might appear to be for a person without a substantial
income, he was convinced that it was the right one.
A little reflection will show the wisdom of his decision.
Though certainly not all, yet many of the great poets have had but
the one purpose in life. Poetry is not easy to write, it takes
practice and experience to deliver a worthy and sustained effort.
A person to whom the writing of verse is only incidental will be
inclined to give mere glimpses and phases of life, rather than broad
conceptions and fundamental meanings: ideals would seem occa-
sionally to be admired, not to be followed. Thus, it would appear
wise that poetry should be for the poet a vocation rather than
an avocation.
With the intention of showing young men of to-day, who have
poetic genius, that they need not waste their energies writing
book reviews for London literary columns, Mr. Noyes set about
proving that poetry has a certain real place in the world. In the
words of Shelley, " Poets not otherwise than philosophers, painters,
sculptors, and musicians are, in one sense, the creators, and, in
another, the creations of their age." Theirs is a function which
has legitimate standing in the social system. And so Mr. Noyes
has made poetry his business. He has contributed to the London
Daily Mail, the Pall Mall Magazine, The Spectator, Speaker, Black-
wood's Magazine, Outlook, Fortnightly Review, Atlantic Monthly,
the London Nation, Standard, The Bookman, McClure's Magazine,
North American Revie-w, and the Forum. His poems have been
collected and published in book form in England, as follows :
The Loom of Years 1902
The Flower of Old Japan 1903
Poems 1904
Forest of Wild Thyme 1905
Drake, An English Epic 1906-8
Forty Singing Seamen 1907
The Enchanted Island 1909
Collected Poems 1910
Robin Hood 1912
American impressions have been as follows:
Poems 1906
The Flower of Old Japan 1907
Golden Hynde 1908
Drake, An English Epic 1909
The Enchanted Island 1910
Sherwood 1911
Tales of the Mermaid Tavern 1913
1913.] WHO IS ALFRED NOYES? 291
The seven American editions of Mr. Noyes, as they stand
before me on the table seven of them, a book for each year, save
one the seven represent an enormous amount of work, and they
cover a multiplicity of subjects. Poems contains the rich and
gorgeous painting of the ode on The Passing of Summer; a sweet,
sad love tale, Silk o } the Kine; a strong and powerful Napoleonic
study, A Night at St. Helena; a romantic glimmering through
the depths of " Sherwood in the twilight ;" a pure " stunt " piece
of varying metres on The Barrel-Organ that recalls Kipling's
attempts with The Banjo; a fine narrative work in The Highway-
man, and much fantastic humor in Forty Singing Seamen. So
we could go on and on, characterizing each poem in the book,
for each is of a different character. All are done with the same
even facility, except that narration, pure description, and the singing
of little songs are types in which Mr. Noyes excells. Where the
emphasis is shifted from emotion to thought the poems are weak.
The Flower of Old Japan and the Forest of Wild Thyme,
published under the one title, represent Mr. Noyes at his best.
Here he has an opportunity to sing ; here is the world of fairyland
and the world of dreams ; here can be much description of peculiar
things; here can be narration; and here in the child's world all
is emotion rather than thought.
The book The Golden Hynde, like the vessel after which it
is named, is rich in various kinds of precious freight,
With the fruit of Aladdin's Garden clustering thick in her hold,
With rubies awash in her scuppers and her bilge ablaze with gold.
To the present writer it represents very nearly the present " high
watermark " of Mr. Noyes' achievement.
The next volume was Drake, a long, blank-verse epic, studded
with exquisite lyrics. The piece is after the style and tone of
Marlowe, both in blank verse grandeur and in pretty lyric outburst.
It tells of England and the fight against Spain at the height of
her proud glory. It is an interesting patriotic piece, a difficult
work to do well; but, as Andrew Lang said, it is " good in parts,"
and in those parts very good indeed. Read at random, occasionally,
it is inspiring: read consistently, at a sitting, it is tiring. Yet
who ever tries to read Paradise Lost at a sitting? In Drake there
are many gems among the metals, and they are worth discovering.
The Enchanted Island and Sherwood represent nothing very
292 WHO IS ALFRED NOYESf [June,
different from the sort of thing that might have been expected from
Mr. Noyes. The first is a collection much like the previous collec-
tions, except that Mr. Noyes seems more serious and less inter-
esting; and Sherwood is less serious and more interesting. Sher-
wood in execution is very similar to Drake. Mr. Noyes has brought
all the skill of his art, the sum of his versatility, to bear on
the various lights and shadows of English woodland. In some
places in the play he has succeeded, in others he has not. The
newly-published Tales of the Mermaid Tavern is the finest single
work of any length which Mr. Noyes has produced; and this
advance in worth is not a matter of poetic improvement, but rather
of skillful adjustment. In a succession of tales heard by
A leather-jerkined pot-boy to these gods,
A prentice Ganymede to the Mermaid Inn,
narrative and pure description predominate ; there is no moralizing ;
there is room for gorgeous description and for light-hearted song;
there is opportunity for short passages vigorous and rolling, or
swift and telling blank verse.
Mr. Noyes has lapsed a few times into prose. On one occa-
sion it was to write for the English Men of Letters Series a biog-
raphy of William Morris, for whom he professed great admiration ;
on another it was to prepare a lecture on The Future of Poetry for
American delivery;* on another it was to make a statement of his
faith in the Fortnightly Review, in an article entitled Acceptances;^'
on another it was to put together a short prefatory note for the
Everyman edition of the early romances of William Morris; on
another it was to point out, in a review, that Thomas Hardy,
through poetry, had been stirred up to reject his dread fatalistic
spirit ;J on another it was to express his liking for the poems of his
friend Edmund Gosse, to whom he has dedicated his latest
volume. But, in the main, Mr. Noyes has persisted in writing
poetry ; and, as a poet, he has succeeded both in " making his living
by writing poetry " and in gaining the good opinions of the critics.
When Mr. James Douglass referred to Mr. Noyes as an " old-
fashioned confectioner," 1 1 he was merely taking an unnecessarily
abrupt and uncomplimentary way of saying that Mr. Noyes is a
*Printed in New York Times, March 30, 1913.
^Fortnightly Review, July, 1911, v. 96, p. 86.
tNorth American Review, v. 194, p. 96.
^Fortnightly Reveiw, August, 1912, v. 98, p. 297.
\\Public Opinion, quoted in New York Evening Post, October 19, 1911.
1913.] WHO IS ALFRED NOYES? 293
traditional poet. He has been repeatedly spoken of as such. Just
for example, the New York Nation* has referred to his " eternal
nostalgia of the past," and the Review of Reviews has said that he
is " destined to be of the greatest service in the re-establishment of
the great traditions of English song."
We recall that Shelley said : " One great poet is a master-
piece of nature which another not only ought to study, but must
study."t So we find Mr. Noyes saying : " There are certain pos-
sessions for us, certain inheritances that we must accept from the
past or perish." He then cites several things as " only symptoms
of a widespread evil, arising almost always from a rejection of
the grand labors of bygone centuries. "J In a review of some poems
by Edmund Gosse, he says that we " cannot break away from the
past." In the preface to one of his volumes || Mr. Noyes has men-
tioned Tennyson. In his own reading of these seven volumes, the
present writer was continually reminded of Tennyson. Twice in
notices in various magazines which have come to the eye of the
present writer, Tennyson's name was used. Three other persons,^
reviewing the biography of William Morris, noted the very obvious
fact that Mr. Noyes seemed to prefer Tennyson to Morris. We
recently re-read the William Morris volume, looking for such ten-
dencies, and the result was striking. Every outburst of enthu-
siasm, every piece of really inspired criticism, is for Tennyson
rather than for Morris; the two are balanced over against one
another all through the book to the continual disadvantage of
Morris. Tennyson seems to have been Mr. Noyes' model, almost
admittedly so.
The fact that we shall call him a traditional poet, will throw
some light on the references by critics to " hackneyed conceptions,"
and on statements like " importing little when all is said." The
whole tone of the article in the Fortnightly Review, called- Accept-
ances, is an admonition, and a charge to retain the past rather
than go questing new sensations. We must accomplish, according
to Mr. Noyes, " the reconciliation of an open and eager outlook
for the new, with a vital love and real reverence for the old."**
A friend of the present writer offered the suggestion that Mr.
*87 : 34, July 9, 1908. t Preface to Prometheus.
^Acceptances, Fortnightly Review, 96:86, July, 1911.
^Fortnightly Review, 98:297, August, 1912.
\\The Flower of Old Japan, American edition, New York, 1907.
^Saturday Review, 107:629, May 15, 1909; The Spectator, 102:265, February
13. 1909; The Dial, 46: 141, March i, 1909.
**From lecture delivered at Columbia University, March 7, 1913.
294 WHO IS ALFRED NOYESf [June,
Noyes has gone away from London, down into Sussex, and is
" starting a little Romantic Revival all his own." The closing
words of Acceptances would seem to bear out this tentative sug-
gestion :
The lonely idealists, the lonely rebels, at the present day,
are not to be found among the crowds of self-styled " rebels "
who drift before every wind of fashion and every puff of opinion
The real rebels, in the great and honorable sense, are to
be found accepting to the astonishment of their " ad-
yanced " friends, and, from a lonely point of view, a solitary
height accepting the gifts of their fathers, and sometimes,
not without a need for courage, kneeling to their fathers' God.
bear closer scrutiny. Mr. Noyes writes in a fashion and mood of
verse in which few men are writing to-day, in which the litterateurs
of London at least are not writing. In an interview with an
American journalist,* he quoted the phrase " Give us our gods
again," and said that, with the present diffusion of interest in
the pursuit of scientific facts, we have lost sight of our ideals.
From the morbid erotic materialism of Symons and Dowson, he
wishes poetry to turn to a fine spiritual faith. His is a spirit of
high idealism founded on the greatness of the past.
Subjects for poems drawn out of the past can be vested
with the glamor of old romance; they are often narrative subjects;
they usually give a certain amount of free play to the imagination ;
and they are transfigured with lofty ideals. Mr. Noyes is a very
enthusiastic patriotic poet. Drake, Robin Hood, and Admiral
Nelson have been the subjects of some of his best pieces. There
was a poem that appeared in Blackwood's, The Sailor King,^
worthy of our attention a fine poem about " The beacon-
fire of an Empire's soul," which combines very well hopes for
the future with praise for the past. In the Tales of the Mermaid
Tavern there stirs an intense patriotism, equalled only in intensity
by the hatred against " the pomp and pride of old Castile," and
by his love for England's most sentimental hero Nelson,
With the patch on his eye and the pinned-up sleeve,
And a soul like a North Sea storm.
A recent paragraph in The Bookman^, referred to
*Mr. M. J. Moses, of the New York Times.
fi88:i, July, 1910. $37 : i, March, 1913.
1913.] WHO IS ALFRED NOYES? 295
Mr. Noyes as a possible laureate and said, " Others may
do as they please, he will be the poet of England, of her greatness,
her history, her destiny." In no other writer does there appear such
concern for the past and future glory of Britain, or is there one
who writes so consistently of it. The island people are essentially
a patriotic people; and Mr. Noyes, somewhat as Tennyson did,
seems to express the sentiment of the whole people in vigorous
rhythms when occasion demands. As yet he has done nothing com-
parable to The Charge of the Light Brigade, or the wonderful
Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington. But, then, he has
scarcely had opportunity.
Drake is a great monument to the British nationality ; and the
Tales of the Mermaid Tavern express very well the spirit of Eng-
land in a period of great expansion, when seamen were " out to
seek a realm of gold, beyond the Spanish Main." In mingled
legends of various types, we see the many phases of England's
might and England's heroism. We will quote from a song which
Made the old timbers of the Mermaid Inn
Shake as a galleon shakes in a gale of wind,
When she rolls glorying through the Ocean-Sea,
a song which well illustrates how splendidly Mr. Noyes has caught
the spirit of the Elizabethan seamen.
Marchaunt Adventurers, chanting at the windlass,
Early in the morning, we slipped from Plymouth Sound,
All for Adventure in the great New Regions,
All for Eldorado and to sail the world around!
Sing! the red of sun-rise ripples round the bows again.
Marchaunt Adventurers, 6 sing, we're outward bound,
All to stuff the sunset in our old black galleon,
All to seek the merchandise that no man ever found.
Chorus: Marchaunt Adventurers!
Marchaunt Adventurers!
Marchaunt Adventurers, O whither are ye bound?
All for Eldorado and the great new Sky-line,
All to seek the merchandise that no man ever found.
And in the chorus to the second stanza we find:
What shall be your profit in the mighty days to be ?
Englande ! Englande ! Englande ! Englande !
Glory everlasting and the lordship of the sea.
296 WHO IS ALFRED NOYES? [June,
When Mr. Noyes turns from the Renaissance to modern
times, his message of conquest is of peace and not of war. A stanza
or so from a piece which appeared in 1911* shows rather well how
he has combined his nationality with his hopes for international
conciliation :
Dare we know that this great hour
Dawning on thy long renown,
Marks the purpose of thy power,
Crowns thee with a mightier crown,
Know that to this purpose climb
All the blood-red wars of Time?
If, indeed, thou hast a goal,
Beaconing to thy warrior soul,
Britain, kneel!
Kneel, imperial Commonweal!
Dare we cast our pride away?
Dare we tread where Lincoln trod ?
All the Future by this day
Waits to judge us and our God !
Set the struggling peoples free:
Crown with Law their Liberty!
Proud with an immortal pride
Kneel we at our sister's side!
Britain, kneel!
Kneel, imperial Commonweal!
In his own words : " Patriotism is not dead because it is
emancipating itself from the mere trapping of slaughter The
spirit of patriotism, like the spirit of religion, has moved onward,
broadening, developing, passing beyond the old borders of nation-
ality Our God is not a lesser God, but a greater than of old"f
Mingled with the patriotic spirit, and with the desire for inter-
national conciliation, running through many of his later poems,
we find what Mr. Brian Hooker called his " didactic religiosity. "J
The mystic religious spirit of Mr. Noyes, a feeling for the deep
and important things of life, was a great asset when it presented
with the naive simplicity of The Flower of Old Japan " a certain
seriousness behind its fantasy " with the strong faith and cer-
t
^Fortnightly Review, 95:724, April, 1911.
flnterview, New York Times. %Bookman, 31:484, July, 1910.
Preface to American edition, 1907.
I
1913.] WHO IS ALFRED NOYESf 297
tainty of Mount Ida, and with the proper humility before the
face of God in Creation, the Creator speaking of man remarks :
And oft forget Me as he plays
With swords and childish merchandise,
Or with his elfin balance weighs,
Or with his foot-rule metes the skies ;
Or builds his castles by the deep,
Or tunnels through the rocks, and then
Turn to Me as he falls asleep,
And, in his dreams, feel for My hand again.
In one or two stanzas of the Forest of Wild Thyme, he dwells
on the everlasting simplicity and the eternal strength of a faith
in a pure soul, the metaphysical truths of themselves immanent
in the heart of a child. It is the world of children to be sure;
it is the world of dreams, but the children speak truth and the
dreams are true.
Little Boy Blue, you are gallant and brave,
There was never a doubt in those clear bright eyes ;
Come, challenge the grim dark Gates of the Grave
As the skylark sings to those infinite skies h
The world is a dream, say the old and wise,
And its rainbows arise o'er the false and the true;
But the mists of the morning are made of our sighs
Ah, shatter them, scatter them, Little Boy Blue!
Little Boy Blue, if the child-heart knows,
Sound but a note as a little one may,
And the thorns of the desert shall bloom with the rose,
And the Healer shall wipe all tears away;
Little Boy Blue, we are all astray,
The sheep's in the meadow, the cow's in the corn
Ah, set the world right, as a little one may:
Little Boy Blue, come blow up your horn.
And the child's is the essence of Truth at hand for the earnest
seeker :
What is there hid in the heart of a rose,
Mother-mine ?
Ah, who knows, who knows, who knows?
A Man that died on a lonely hill
May tell you perhaps, but none other will,
Little Child,
298 WHO IS ALFRED NOYES f [June,
What does it take to make a rose,
Mother-mine ?
The God that died to make it knows.
It takes the world's eternal wars,
It takes the moon and all the stars,
It takes the might of heaven and hell,
And the everlasting Love as well,
* Little Child.
We cannot understand why Mr. Noyes should turn aside from
so definite and fervent a belief to the vague, shifting, intangible
groping toward truth which he has put into most of his later
poems. It was this inconclusive attitude which preceded the com-
ment on " didactic religiosity." Truth may be apprehended emo-
tionally as well as reasonably; the sentiment instilled is of more
value than the thought conveyed; and so when Mr. Noyes turns
from lyrism to didacticism he mars his poetry. He complicates and
confuses his beliefs when he tries to make them more intricate
and more extensive. The pure beauty of truth has only to be seen
to be appreciated and generally appreciated. All the fantastic
moral conceits and ethical systems shrink to insignificance before
the simplicity of the truth that is all about us in the heart of
nature, dominating the thoughts of our lives, inspiring our very
souls. What does it take to make a rose?
This complicated system is the sober philosophy of " hack-
neyed conceptions " to which reviewers referred with dislike. The
Saturday Review, for instance, spoke in favor of the philosophy
of the fairy Mustard Seed : " We wish that Mr. Noyes would
continue to hunt fairy gleams and not 'run in straiter lines of
chiselled speech. 5 ' We would agree with this critic, and turn
against our poet a few lines from his own pen (the " grown-ups "
may stand for the egotistical, self-sufficient, rational moralists) :
Oh, grown-ups cannot understand,
And grown-ups never will,
How short is the way to fairyland
Across the purple hill.
They smile: their smile is very bland,
Their eyes are wise and chill;
And yet at just a child's command
The world's an Eden still.
Another reason why the Saturday Review might have wished
1913.] WHO IS ALFRED NOYES? 299
though it did not mention it that Mr. Noyes should continue to
write fairy tales, is that Mr. Noyes is at his best at imaginative
lyric and at free narrative. This is the secret of the success
of the Tales of the Mermaid Tavern, a collection of fine songs,
most of them narrative songs a notable recital of the death of
Sir Humphrey Gilbert ; a rollicking tale of a pirate and some honey
and some bees and a bear; a rhyme of one who danced the mor-
rice-dance across England, and a tale of " A Coiner of Angels."
Here is song and here is action, and songs are the things Mr.
Noyes does best. His is clearly a lyric genius ; and, where his
blank verse rises to real worth, it is because there is at that
point in the story an emotional impulse which gives to the lines
an almost " lyric cry."
The lyrics have an inimitable " singing quality," they have an
indefinable charm; they have the proper touch of sentiment; they
are developments of emotional impulses. Through his various
volumes are scattered many lyrics, but none so good as those the
mariners sing in Drake to relieve the monotony of the sea voyage.
In some of the lyrics, in Lavender, for instance, and The Electric
Tram, fine as they are, we can detect an ulterior motive that
detracts but not in these. These are sung for the pure joy of the
singing, and the result is pure beauty. Those beginning " Sweet,
what is love?" and "The moon is up, the stars are bright," have
scarcely been equalled since the Elizabethan outburst of lyric song
of which they remind us. We quote from one of the finest:
Now the purple night is past,
Now the moon more faintly glows,
Dawn has through thy casement cast
Roses on thy breast, a rose;
Now the kisses are all done,
Now the world awakes anew,
Now the charmed hour is gone,
Let not love go, too.
When old winter, creeping nigh,
Sprinkles raven hair with white,
Dims the brightly glancing eye,
Laughs away the dancing light,
Roses may forget their sun,
Lilies may forget their dew,
Beauties perish, one by one,
Let not love go, too.
300 WHO IS ALFRED NOYES? [June,
Palaces and towers of pride
Crumble year by year away;
Creeds like robes are laid aside,
Even our very tombs decay!
When the all-conquering moth and rust
Gnaw the goodly garment through,
When the dust returns to dust,
Let not love go, too.
There are also one or two quite worthy songs in Sherwood, but
none quite comparable to those in Drake.
In pieces too long for the single lyric impulse, Mr. Noyes
is at his best when telling a tale. He is a balladist of high rank.
Thus it is that The Admiral's Ghost, the fairy tales already men-
tioned, Orpheus and Eurydice, The Cottage of the Kindly Light,
Forty Singing Seamen, Bacchus and the Pirates, The Two Painters,
and The Highwayman are to be ranked among his finest poems.
In the Mermaid tales, and in the pirate narratives, where oppor-
tunity is offered, as in The Flower of Old Japan, for fantastic
descriptions of incidentals, we swing along with the metre, held
by the charm of the verse and the intense interest of the story,
curious to learn how the whole thing comes out.
His chief fault is repetition. We find :
His head bowed down, he sank upon his knees,
Down on his knees he sank before her feet,
Before her feet he sank, with one low moan,
One passionate moan of worship and of love.*
but, on the other hand, in Rank and File, in The Barrel Organ,
and in The Trumpet-Call, the trick of repetition is used very effec-
tively to legitimate ends. In " Locking the ranks as they form and
form " the very repetition gives the intended ideas of numbers
and of hesitancy. Then, too, in many of his narrative pieces the
refrain is cleverly used, in some, as in Black Bill's Honeymoon, as
a mere altered echo.
The descriptions by the way, while he is telling his story,
are a very distinctive part of Mr. Noyes' best work. The opening
lines of the Tales of the Mermaid Tavern contain a view of London
in the sunset, idealized, from which the transition to other years
is very easy. He wrote of Edinburgh:
*The Statue, Forum, 43:478, May, 1910.
1913.] WHO IS ALFRED NOYES? 301
City of mist and rain and blown gray spaces,
Dashed with wild wet color and gleam of tears,
Dreaming in Holyrood Halls of the passionate faces
Lifted to one Queen's face that has conquered the years,
Are not the halls of thy memory haunted places?
This is not from a narrative piece, but it indicates pretty well the
manner of Mr. Noyes, his manner of throwing a glamor of
romance over things he has to depict. We refer our readers to
the narrative parts of The Flower of Old Japan, which will serve
as a good illustration of this style. A reference to Black Bill's
Honeymoon, and a reading of half a dozen of the first stanzas,
will indicate pretty nearly the fashion of Mr. Noyes' ability in
this direction.
He is a very facile writer, with apt felicity of phrase, and as
a metrist he is hard to surpass. There is scarcely a rhyme-scheme,
or a style of metre he has not tried with success. His Muse seems
adaptable to any subject. The number of different metres as-
sembled in the single volume, Tales of the Mermaid Tavern, is
positively astounding. The clever variations in Drake from blank
verse to Spenserians have often been noted. This sort of variation
is of course commendable, both because it obviates possibility of
monotony, and because each variant metre suits its own variant
subject.
In all these things he has written boldly in the light of high
ideals; and yet we dare not try and forecast what he will do.
:t Young Alfred Noyes," as one writer has familiarly characterized
him,* is still young. He has as yet but tried his wings and
they have not been found wanting. That we may not appear
alone in this sentiment, we will quote the figurative statement by a
certain well-known critic of modern poetry, of thoughts which
have often come to our own mind when reading these volumes:
" Mr. Noyes has the instrument, the lute, in tune, but has not met
the revealing hour which shall give him a message for its strings.
He plays as yet but a wandering prelude, through which at times
one catches hints of a vaster theme."t There are two things
against which he must guard.
' There is the fear that he may diffuse or squander on the
present that power which he will surely need one day for greater
work yet undreamed of."$ There would seem to be some reason
*Nat ion, 83 : 439. tMiss Rittenhouse, Putnam's, 3:364, December, 1907.
tBrian Hooker, in the Forum, 39 : 528, April, 1908.
302 WHO IS ALFRED NOYES? [June,
for this warning to Mr. Noyes, though he has done so well in
such a short time. But, then, to be sure, Tennyson at his age had
written as much zvritten as much, mind you, not published as
much. The writing and the practice are very valuable for the
improvement of natural powers. But when Tennyson was about
the age of Mr. Noyes, he had published but a few fine poems.
The danger for Mr. Noyes lies in the fact that he prints much
and represses little. He does not criticize, correct, alter, and
re-alter, and then perhaps reject entirely. He cannot. He has
set about " making his living by writing poetry," and he must pro-
duce and publish a certain amount each year in order to meet the
demands of the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker.
It is unfortunate for Mr. Noyes' reputation as a poet that he
must be judged by all he writes, and not by the best. It is un-
fortunate for Mr Noyes' development as an artist that he must
publish most of his work immediately, and not lay it away to
be corrected and re-written five years hence.
We have stated that his is essentially a lyric gift. In two ways
he is doing grave injustice to this gift. It has been said that he is
" full of golden promises, but no single promise becomes a perfect
poem." This all-exclusive statement is not admissible, but it bears
a certain amount of truth concerning a dangerous tendency. When
the initial lyric impulse fails him, he does not seem to wait for
another; but rather, in order to satisfy his publishers, writes on
without inspiration. The present writer has recently quoted Poe's
statement that poetry is a passion and the passions should be held
in reverence. Mr. Noyes should not urge his Muse, but should
wait upon her. His haste to turn out a poem and to finish a
work, though on scanty inspiration, has resulted too often in a weak-
ening of the poems. All of Mr. Noyes' poems start splendidly;
but along about the second or third stanzas most of them begin to
lag. He usually does not seem to have laid the piece aside and
awaited a new impulse, but rather to have waded right on through
several verses, which become poorer and poorer with weak moral-
izing. Then, for a strong conclusion, in order to end with a
flourish, he does not compose a strong closing stanza, but often
repeats the sense, many of the phrases, or sometimes even the
whole of the splendid first stanza. This is a tendency very notice-
able in his work, especially in the later volumes of short poems. We
have only to point to a few to indicate what we mean: Rank and
File, Lavender, Act aeon, The Call of the Spring, In Memory of
1913.] WHO IS ALFRED NOYESf 303
Francis Thompson, and The Island Hawk. Mr. Noyes need only
have taken a bit more time and expended a bit more care, and these
splendid promises might have been perfect poems. The many
excellent changes made in the text of the Tales of the Mermaid
Tavern, between their appearance in the pages of Blackzvood's
Magazine, and their more recent publication in book form in Amer-
ica, gave some small indication of the degree of improvement Mr.
Noyes might work upon his other pieces, if they did not have to
be rushed so quickly to the press. With the richness of maturity,
we might expect this fine spirit to develop self -correction.
The other danger to which the genius of Mr. Noyes has
subjected itself is due, not to external circumstances, but to internal
conditions within his own mind. He has said:
To see that we are ruled from the centre and not from the
circumference, to find and maintain our hold on that central
principle of unity, is the whole salvation of man. All social
work and material progress are without foundation if they be
not inspired and directed from thence. There was a time when
that central position was safely left to the keeping of a great
historical religion ; but at the present day the historical religions
cannot possibly embrace the vast worlds that are opening out
before us on every side.*
He has quoted Thomas a Kempis : " The strongest part of our
religion to-day is in its unconscious poetry." Then he went
further and said, " that all great art brings us into touch, into
relation, with that harmony which is the basis of the universe."
On the other hand he has declared concerning the present : " Analy-
sis has gone so far that we are in danger of intellectual disintegra-
tion. It is time to make some synthesis, or we ourselves shall be
wandering through a world without meaning."
The next step was for him to draw these scattered threads
together, and to claim for his art, the art of poetry, the position
of unifying spiritual agent and to say : " Poetry is the strongest
part of what is called religion, because in the very broadest and
grandest sense that can be given to the words, Poetry is Religion."
Here is where we disagree with Mr. Noyes. Poetry is not
and cannot be Religion. Religion has both an emotional and a
reasonable appeal poetry appeals only to the emotions, and so may
supplement only a part of religion; and since human emotions must
*Lecture delivered at Columbia University, March 7, 1913.
304 WHO IS ALFRED NOYESf [June,
be guided by reason to some extent or invariably run wrong,
we must retain this other part. Religion may be one of the fine
arts but it is something in addition. It derives from God. Mr.
Noyes' poetry is merely an art of expression, and it derives from
man. The " didactic religiosity " of Mr. Noyes is a shifting
incoherent sort of a thing. It does not obtain the pure beauty
which a white flame of sacred song should because Mr. Noyes
does not believe. It has been said that before one can write
sacred poetry, one must believe. Mr. Noyes does not seem to
believe, except in his own ability to reach the truth through a
mildly romantic groping towards vastness, and scarcely in that.
His religious verse lacks definiteness and strength, because he
obtrudes his own ideas into the context. He merely speaks for an
undefinable, and attempts to express concretely an inexpressible
and unconcrete yearning. In his lectures, and in his poems in
the religious tone, Mr. Noyes has impressed the present writer
as being filled with a big enthusiasm which he could not compress.
He did better as a mystic in fairyland, as an interpreter of Ghosts
who " creep in by candle-light " as Little Boy Blue than as a
theologian in the pulpit: There he was lyric, rather than didactic ;
there he looked at Truth and learned, rather than constructed
a Truth of his own ; there he was most truly inspired.
Lyric genius gives forth strange music in didactic measures,
and we believe it would be best that Mr. Noyes should abandon his
peace propaganda and his " religion of poetry " ideas. He should
confine himself in publication, for the present at least, to the
wonderful lyrics, the gorgeous descriptions, the splendid narratives,
and the patriotic songs of which he is capable. Truth of itself,
once seen, will spread without urgings. In the lyric fashion, more
effectively than in any other, he can stir the good that lurks within
our souls, and can teach us to know beauty and to be made purer
by it. Mr. Noyes has wonderful abilities and vast capabilities.
An idealist such as he has a work to do in England. We shall
be disappointed if he abandons his inspiration and sows his genius
in barren fields.
THE EDICT OF MILAN AND THE PEACE OF THE CHURCH.
BY WILLIAM P. H. KITCHIN, PH.D.
HE jubilee published by our Holy Father for the
spring and summer of 1913, commemorates an anni-
versary of interest not only to the Catholic Church,
but to every Christian sect as well. It is now just
sixteen hundred years since the faith of Christ was
publicly recognized by the civil power, and men were allowed to
worship God according to the dictates of their conscience. This
wonderful revolution was accomplished by Constantine the Great,
in his so-called Edict of Milan, March, 313, which ordinance
restored peace to the Roman Empire, and while it conceded toler-
ation, paved the way for the spread and ascendancy of Christian
dogmas.
According as the territories of Rome spread out on all sides
and absorbed every other state, the empire became too vast for a
single head to govern, too tin wieldly for a single arm to defend.
Gradually, then, the custom grew for an emperor to associate some
colleague with himself on the throne, a younger man preferably on
whom he might lean, and to whom he might teach the subtle art of
statecraft. As far back as the second century after Christ, Hadrian
had adopted the elder Verus. On the latter's death he selected as
his successor Antoninus Pius, who in turn adopted Marcus Aurelius.
Towards the end of the third century, Diocletian, advancing still
further in the way of dismemberment, added to the two elder
Emperors, or Augusti, two inferior princes or Ccesars, and thus
divided the empire into four parts; for himself he reserved Thrace,
Egypt, and Asia Minor; to his life-long friend Maximian he en-
trusted Italy, Africa, and perhaps Spain; Galerius was stationed
on the Danube, and ruled the Illyrian provinces; while Gaul and
Britain were in charge of Constantius.
Already the beginnings of modern nations were leavening
the gigantic empire, for when to various peoples with languages,
customs, and traditions of their own, with different and often clash-
ing interests, a prince of their own was given to rule over them,
the cohesion of the state became slender indeed, and but little was
required to sunder it into many warring camps. As a matter of
VOL. XCVII. 20.
306 THE EDICT OF MILAN [June,
fact appeals to arms were frequent, nearly all the Roman emperors
died violent deaths, and scarcely any held their giddy power for
long. In 305 Diocletian, the dean of the imperial college, after
a remarkable reign of twenty-one years, resigned the purple, and
retired to a luxurious villa at Salona; while on the same day, as
previously concerted between them, Maximian also descended from
the throne. Constantius and Galerius now became Augusti, while
Severus and Maximin Daza were promoted to the rank of Caesars.
The latter managed to maintain himself in the East about six
years; the former was defeated and slain eighteen months after
his elevation by Maxentius, son of Maximian; while Constantine,
in spite of the opposition of Galerius, succeeded to the dominions
of his father Constantius, and ruled over Gaul, Spain, and Britain.
Maximian now resumed power for a short time, and by marrying
his daughter Fausta to Constantine (307), he sought to ally his
fortunes indissolubly with those of the rising sun. But within
a few years he became embroiled with his son-in-law, who ordered
him without remorse to execution (310). Within the next two
years Maxentius, ruler of Africa and Italy and brother-in-law to
Constantine, plotted to overthrow his colleague, and thus be un-
disputed master of the West. The sorcerers, whom he consulted,
promised him certain victory; the demons, conjured up before him,
confirmed him in his desires; he read in the entrails of slain lions
his coming greatness; and even human sacrifices, women and chil-
dren, were offered and interpreted to make assurance doubly sure.*
But Maxentius did not trust himself entirely to his clairvoyants
and soothsayers; he had sense enough to understand that victory
usually inclines towards the heaviest battalions, and so he made
great efforts to increase his army. Forty thousand Moors were
levied in Africa, enormous military stores were accumulated
throughout Italy, and an alliance was negotiated with Maximin
Daza. Constantine with his usual impetuosity did not wait for the
storm to burst upon him, and the opportune arrival of an embassy
from Rome asking him to come and deliver the Romans from
Maxentius' tyranny, gave him the excuse he wanted to strike
the first blow and carry the war into Italy. f
In the summer, then, of 312, Constantine started from Gaul
and descended into Italy by the Great St. Bernard Pass. March-
ing a^ the head of his legions along the precipices of the Alps, he
realized what a desperate undertaking he was engaged in ; that his
*Eusebius, Hist. EccL, 8, 14, 5. fGibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. xiv.
1913.] THE EDICT OF MILAN 307
opponent, Maxentius, had an army four times as great ; the hitherto
impregnable city of Rome to fall back upon; the immortal prestige
of the Roman name, and the furious loyalty of the Pretorian guard
to rely upon. Constantine remarked, too, that his officers and sol-
diers were depressed and uneasy; that they felt in lifting their
arms against the sacred city of Rome, they were vowing themselves
to certain defeat; that they were terrified and overwrought by the
incantations which Maxentius was known to have employed.
Constantine was not yet a Christian, but Christian influences
were in the air; he probably believed in one God, and rejected
the innumerable company of abominable phantoms with which
the pagans peopled their Pantheon; he realized that the powers of
evil were leagued in favor of Maxentius, and that unless he could
interest some higher power in his own favor, his doom was sealed;
and in his uncertainty, in his vague terror and pressing need, like
Clovis on the field of Tolbiac, he appealed to that God, whom he
scarcely knew, to uphold him in the day of battle.
The emperor began then [says Eusebius] to implore the help
of this God, praying and beseeching Him to reveal Himself
to him, and in the present crisis to give him help. Now while
he was thus earnestly praying a wonderful sign was vouchsafed
him from God. If another told this story the hearers would
hardly believe him. But since the victorious Augustus told
me himself many years afterwards, when I was admitted to his
intimacy, and even confirmed his assertion by oath, who can
doubt it? He declares that he saw with his own eyes in
the afternoon, when the sun was sinking on the horizon, a lumi-
nous cross appear in the heavens above the sun with this
inscription: Conquer by this. This apparition astounded both
himself and the soldiers of his entourage, who also witnessed it.
And he began to ask himself, so he told me, what this wonder
might mean. He pondered over the matter a long time; then
night came on, and as he slept Christ appeared to him with the
sign he had just seen in the sky, and commanded him to make
a military standard after the pattern of the apparition, and to
use this standard as a protection and safeguard in his battles.*
Constantine alone had the dream or vision explaining to him
the significance of the celestial sign; but the sign itself had been
seen by many, and while it gave the Christians unbounded confi-
dence, it inspired the greatest dread among the pagans, more espe-
*Eusebius, Vita Constantini, i., 28.
3o8 THE EDICT OF MILAN [June,
daily when the augurs present with the army pronounced it a sinister
omen (adversum omen)* and urged the discontinuance of the expe-
dition. But Constantine was not to be terrified by any make-believe
prophecies, he felt sure he was now under the protection of heaven,
and he caused a standard to be made according to the pattern that
had been shown him. This standard was the famous labarumrf
which he subsequently imposed on all his armies. Eusebius de-
scribes it thus :
It was a long spear overlaid with gold, and provided with
a traverse piece in the form of a cross. The top bore a crown of
gold and precious stones. In the centre of the crown appeared
the sign of the saving name (of Jesus Christ), namely, a mona-
gram signifying this sacred name by its two first (Greek) letters
entwined, the P in the middle of the X. From the traverse
piece hung a purple veil enriched with precious stones artis-
tically arranged, so that they dazzled the eyes with their splen-
dor, and with golden embroideries of indescribable beauty.
The veil attached to the cross-piece was of equal width and
length, and had on its upper portion the portraits of the
emperor beloved of God and of his children done in gold. Con-
stantine ever afterwards used this saving standard, and had a
similar one made for each of his armies.:}:
The standard thus fashioned differed very little in form from
the cavalry standard previously in use ; but no doubt the monagram
of our Lord, which appeared on it, was a tremendous innovation;
and if on the one hand it alarmed little the religious susceptibilities
of the pagans, to the Christians it must have been the harbinger of a
new spring. And when they saw the initials of their long-decried
Master carried proudly at the head of a victorious army, they must
have realized, with feelings beyond the power of words to describe,
that at last "the Sun of Justice had arisen for them with healing in
His wings," and that the black night of heathen darkness was now
vanishing before a purer and holier dawn.
Once in Italy, a few weeks were sufficient for Constantine
to conquer all the north of the country. Verona offered some re-
sistance, but the defeat and death of its able leader, Pompeianus,
*Paneg. Vet., 6.
fhe origin of this word is unknown. Many explanations are given in the
Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, s. v., p. 909.
+Eusebius, Vita Constantini, i., 31. Cf. also Prudentius, Contra Symmachum,
i., 464-466, 487-489-
1913.] THE EDICT OF MILAN 309
left the city at the mercy of the invader. Constantine, flushed with
victory, and taking the tide at its flood, swept on to Rome, to
overthrow definitely his rival, and obtain the empire of the world
at one blow. Maxentius, if he wished to save himself, had only to
stand on the defensive. The impregnable fortifications of the
imperial city, the devotion of the Pretorian cohorts, the enormous
supplies accumulated, formed the surest protection, and Constan-
tine's army was not strong enough to take Rome, fully manned and
garrisoned, by assault.
But Providence decreed otherwise, and as on another occasion
the stars in their courses fought against Sisera, so on this one
they fought against Maxentius. Instead of covering the Tiber,
and disputing its passage with his enemy, Maxentius marched his
army along the Flaminian Way to meet Constantine; their orders
were to cross the river and rest their rear guard on its right bank,
with no other line of retreat in case of disaster than the Milvian
Bridge, and a narrow causeway of boats hastily fastened together.
Constantine came in touch with their outposts about two hours'
march below the Tiber, at a place called Saxa Rubra, near the old
villa of the Empress Livia. He recognized at once, with the eye
of a consummate general, that the opposing army had delivered
itself into his hands. The next morning, October 28, 312, Con-
stantine marched towards the river and began his attack. He dis-
posed his army with admirable skill, and selected for himself the
post of honor and danger at the head of a chosen body of Gallic
horse. Meanwhile Maxentius in Rome surveyed calmly the games
of the Circus, while his soldiers were pouring out their blood for
him. At last the hisses and imprecations of the mob shamed
liim into some show of manliness. He sent to consult the Sibylline
books, and he was assured the enemy of Rome would perish. En-
couraged by this noncommittal reply, he set out for the combat
surrounded by his bodyguards. At his appearance the battle
raged more furiously,* but his soldiers, driven back by the irre-
sistible elan of Constantine's troops, were flung into the river.
The disorder soon degenerated into panic; hundreds were crushed
to death on the Milvian Bridge, or fell through the open spaces of
the half-broken bridge of boats. Maxentius himself also fell into
the water, and weighted down by his armor, he sank like lead.
Eusebius bursts into a paean of joy over the victory, and uses
the ardent strophes of the canticle of Moses to express his thank-
*Eo viso pugna crudescit. Lactantius. De Mort. Pers., 44.
3 io THE EDICT OF MILAN [June,
fulness to Almighty God. Such was the battle of the Milvian
Bridge, October 28, 312, a battle, which in its age-long conse-
quences, in the total revolution it accomplished in ideals, morals,
customs, and everything that the heart of man most clings to, was
no doubt the most decisive ever fought on the face of our
globe. Most battles contribute only to elevate one country at the
expense of another; to enrich one dynasty and depress another;
to remedy some temporary wrongs, or give gratification to some
private or national resentment. But this battle caused the public
recognition of the Christian religion, and sounded the death-knell
of pagan ideals and methods of life. Within a hundred years
from that time pagan temples would be closed by imperial edict,
and the brutal and debasing games of the Circus forbidden. Within
two centuries Justinian dispersed the last embers of a dying pagan-
ism by closing the effete schools of Athens.
Constantine remained about three months in Rome to reap
the spoils of his victory, and regulate the affairs of the city. His
statue was erected in one of the public squares, and by his order
the figure held in its hand a lance in the form of a cross, while
on the pedestal was engraved the following remarkable inscription,
which is found in Eusebius, Hist. Ecd. ix., 9, 10, n: "By
this saving sign, emblem of true courage, I have delivered your
city from the yoke of the tyrant. To the Senate and to the People
of Rome restored to liberty, I have given back their pristine glory,
and the eclat due to their nobility."
On January i, 313, Constantine received at Rome the investi-
ture of his third consulship, and shortly after moved on to Milan,
where Licinius, his Eastern colleague, met him, and where their
alliance was re-cemented in the usual inefficacious way by a royal
marriage Licinius espoused Constantia, the sister of Constantine.
But the new conqueror had more serious work in view than mar-
riage festivities. He was determined to give religious peace to his
states, and he also wanted to discharge his obligations to the God
Who had helped him so unexpectedly and so marvelously in his
hour of need. From Milan, then, sometime during the month of
March, 313, acting in concert with Licinius, he published his famous
edict of toleration. This state paper, preserved partly by Eusebius
and partly by Lactantius, now well on to its second millenium, is
most curious, and it fully deserves reproduction, for it was the
Magna Charta not of one people or of one nation, but of the whole
known world.
1913.] THE EDICT OF MILAN 311
We have already recognized for a long time past, that re-
ligious liberty ought not to be restrained, but everyone should
be allowed to follow in divine things his own conscience. There-
fore we had allowed all, not excepting even the Christians,*
to follow out their own creed and practices of worship. Now
whereas, in the edict where such permission was accorded them,
very many restrictions were laid down, it may have happened
that in course of time some renounced their liberty.f There-
fore when I, Constantine Augustus and I, Licinius Augustus,
happily met at Milan to promote the different interests, that
tend to public peace, we considered that the most important
matter, and the one which ought to be first of all regulated,
was -that of the respect due to the Divinity, and that to the
Christians and all others should be granted full liberty to follow
the religion of their choice : may this thought please the Divin-
ity! Who dwells in the heavens, and render Him favorable
to us and to all our subjects. We have therefore judged it
advantageous and reasonable to refuse no one the permission
of adhering to the religion of the Christians, in order that the
supreme Divinity, Whose religion we follow freely, may grant
us in everything His accustomed favor and mercy. Your Ex-
cellency (Dicatio tua) will take notice then, that it has pleased
us to suppress all the conditions which existed with regard to
the Christians in the orders formerly transmitted to you. At
present it is our will that anyone may follow the Christian
religion without the slightest fear of annoyance. Such are the
orders we confide to your loyalty, so that you may thoroughly
understand that we have given to the Christians full liberty
to practice their religion. Your Excellency will of course re-
member that what we grant them, we grant others also, who too
are to have the liberty of selecting whatever creed they prefer,
as is suitable for the peace of ^our times, in order that no one
may be injured in his honor or in his religion.
Furthermore, as regards the Christians, we have decided
that if their meeting-places concerning which you received in-
structions before have been previously seized by the Govern-
*Allusion apparently to some decree anterior to the Edict of Milan. The
existence of such a decree is admitted by many writers, but denied by others.
tEnd of the preamble of the Edict, as given by Eusebius.
$The vague expression " Divinity " occurs several times in the course of
the Edict, and certain writers have attributed it to some pagan secretary of the
imperial legislators. May not Constantine himself have purposely chosen this
elastic and non-committal term that his Edict might be equally welcomed by all
classes and creeds of his huge dominions? Again, it must be remembered that in
the early centuries the Christians themselves were accustomed to refer to God in a
veiled and indefinite way. An inscription of the cemetery of Callixtus bears the
curious words, Quod Summit as dedit.
312 THE EDICT OF MILAN [June,
ment or by any private individuals, they are to be restored
to the Christians without any repayment, without any delay or
lawsuits. Those who received such properties as gifts, and
even those who paid for them, will be obliged to restore them
as soon as possible. If, however, they think that they have a
right to some proof of our clemency, let them put in a claim
for compensation. In the meantime, all these properties must
be handed over at once to the corporation of the Christians.
And as these same Christians owned not only places of meeting,
but also other properties, which belonged not to individuals,
but to the corporation, you will order by virtue of this present
Edict, that without any excuses or discussions these properties
be restored at once to their corporations and communities
in which matter you will follow the procedure already laid
down, namely, that those who restore promptly may expect
some indemnity from our clemency. On all these points you
are to lend your assistance to the Christian community that
our orders may be quickly executed, because they are favorable
to public tranquility. May the divine favor, as was said above,
which we have already experienced in such important matters,
procure us always success, and at the same time obtain the happi-
ness of all.
In order that this act of our clemency may be known to all,
you will take care to publish it officially everywhere.*
Such was the Edict of Milan, which proclaimed with no
uncertain sound the emancipation of Christendom. In every sen-
tence of the Edict rings the tone of a master a master who
knows his power, is accustomed" to unquestioned submission, and
has no intention of brooking disobedience to his orders. But apart
from the imperious tone of the document, what gives the highest
notion of Constantine's power is the law of expropriation embodied
in his decree. Not only must the State disgorge its ill-gotten
plunder, but private individuals as well every vile informer, every
unjust judge, every rapacious proconsul or provincial governor,
must restore to the Christians, without excuse and without delay,
what formerly they filched from their unoffending victims. Even
the great Napoleon, who was not a man to stop at a trifle, did not
feel strong enough to restore to the re-established Church of France
*Prolata programmate tuo hcsc scripta et ubique proponere et omnium scientiam
te perferre conveniet. Lactant. 1. c. The prefect of the Pretorium was charged
with publishing the emperor's orders, either integrally or in resume. Such publica-
tion received the name of edict, because it was addressed to all. Cf. Post edictum
mown quo secundiim mandata tua hceterias esse vetueram, Pliny to Trajan, x., 97.
1913.] THE EDICT OF MILAN 313
the properties robbed from her during the Revolution, nor did Pius
VII. ask him to do so. Such a wholesale act of restitution gives
the highest idea of the autocratic power of the masterful emperor,
and also of the sense of justice in a soul that was as yet scarcely
Christian.
To the mind that loves to muse, the Edict of Milan opens
up interminable trains of thought. Sixteen centuries have passed
since Constantine gathered the reins of power into his eager and
ambitious hands; sixteen centuries since with a stroke of the pen
he removed the sentence of outlawry from millions of loyal sub-
jects. The world has been made over a dozen times in that long
period. Constantine has passed away; his dynasty; his empire;
the palaces he built; the monuments he reared; the language he
spoke, are all things of the past; on the ruins of the empire he
founded other kingdoms sprang up; they too have completed their
cycle; they weakened and died. One thing alone survives, which
flourished when Constantine lived and walked this earth the
Catholic Church. There was a Pope in Rome in 313, he was
called Sylvester I.; there is a Pope in Rome to-day, Pius X., and
an unbroken succession links Sylvester of the fourth century with
Pius of the twentieth. Sylvester was known only in a few places
in Italy, Gaul, Roman Africa, Asia Minor, and the islands" of the
Mediterranean, perhaps forty million subjects acknowledged his
sway; even in his own city thousands did not know him, he was
merely the chief of a small and despised sect. Pius X. is the spiritual
head of three hundred million devoted children; his name is on
every tongue ; his portrait is in countless homes. From the farthest
ends of the earth innumerable pilgrims journey every year to Rome
to honor and reverence the Vicar of Christ on earth. And so the
changing kaleidoscope of the world and of history ever passes on;
one thing alone remains unchanged amidst the ruins of time, the
Catholic Church and its Vicar, against whom the powers of dark-
ness have ever contended and shall ever contend in vain.
THE SPIRITUAL NOTE IN THE RENAISSANCE.
BY EVELYN MARCH PHILLIPPS.
HE Renaissance is accepted as the second great crea-
tive period of the world, and from it date the chief
origins of modern thought and art and social life.
It has been spoken of as the emancipation of the
modern world, as the rise of the consciousness of
freedom in the reason of mankind, and it is perhaps even more
full of things suggested than of things achieved. This awaken-
ing is not to be measured by any short space of time, and though
the period preceding it is obscure, and the contrast between mediaeval
darkness and the light of the Revival is one of the most dramatic
in history, the effect is not so absolute as at first appears. Yet while
the elements can be traced, striving dimly as the human mind
emerged out of darkness, there is unmistakably a moment when
light is triumphant, and in which all those tendencies which had been
gathering intensity concentrate and constitute a vital force. A
moment compared to which all the preceding indications were but
as the ripening of the wood, which culminates at length in flower
and fruit.
This time of fruition was signalized in two ways: by an
outburst of intellectual activity, and by an outburst of artistic
activity. The second was the inevitable outcome of the first,
conceived and dictated by it, and the intellectual awakening was
from a very early date formed and fostered consciously and en-
thusiastically upon lines bequeathed by the classic tradition. For
in spite of all the misfortunes which had befallen Italy, and the
degeneration and destruction which had been the inevitable result
of the long dominion of barbarism, her old classic past was inerad-
icable. The Latin nature still had within it those attributes and
inclinations which had long before drawn the Romans to appreciate
and, as far as they were able, to assimilate the spirit of classic
Greece. Society had been broken up, reduced to separate and
impotent particles ; the classic communities had been shattered into
fragments; the few signs which emerge from the darkness con-
stitute no more than a blind groping after a tradition which had
lost its significance. Nevertheless as isolation and stagnation at
1913-] THE SPIRITUAL NOTE IN THE RENAISSANCE 315
last began to yield to social consciousness, it became apparent
that the old mature Latin element still formed the basis of popula-
tion, and in every aspect of its revival the country went back to
classic forms.
The desire for learning was from the first directed by this
Latin bias. Already in Dante the ripeness of a race that has never
been barbarian is to be recognized, and long before the fall of
Constantinople poured a flood of professors into Europe, the study
of the classics had reached a kind of maturity. At first, indeed,
the Latin authors were read from a feeling of reverence, and as
affording illustrations and allegories for mediaeval modes of thought,
rather than with any idea of assimilating the culture of the past,
or of throwing light on present conditions. It is with Petrarch
that the idea first takes shape, that within the literature of ancient
Rome was to be found the secret which w r ould re-create the Golden
Age, which would lead his own world back to the arts, refinements,
and graces of life. After having rescued every scrap of Latin liter-
ature which still survived, he discovered that behind that influence
lay another, still more potent, in the inspiration of the Greeks. A
mind afire with a passionate attraction to the Old World, soon
divined the forces that lay hid in Greek form and Hellenic literature,
and at his suggestion Boccaccio set himself to do for the Greeks
what his master had done for the Latins.
Largely by the efforts of these two great men of letters was
it established (as Sir R. C. Yelf says) that " there had been a time
when men had used all their faculties and minds without fear or
reproof freely seeking for knowledge in every field of specu-
lation, and for beauty in all the realms of fancy The pagan
view was once more proclaimed, that man was made not only to
toil and suffer, but also to enjoy." It was thus that Humanism
first appeared, bringing a claim for the mental freedom of man, and
for the full development of his being. Both Italy and Greece were
ransacked for classical manuscripts. Hundreds of works were
discovered, sometimes in the most obscure hiding places, long
forgotten in remote monasteries, and by the middle of the fifteenth
century almost the full range of classical literature was open to
investigation. Enthusiasm was at first indiscriminate and undis-
cerning, but to Florence, which from the beginning took control
of the movement, and in Florence especially to Cosimo de' Medici,
was owing the establishment of professorships, the endowment of
academies, and the introduction of eminent Greek savants, so that
316 THE SPIRITUAL NOTE IN THE RENAISSANCE [June,
instruction was insured, and that critical faculty developed which
secured form and coherency to the movement The spirit of free
inquiry ; the determination to assimilate and incorporate all that was
best in the civilization of the past; the creed that all learning is
ultimately valuable as it bears upon life, were convictions with
which the leaders of Renaissance thought set themselves to build
up life afresh.
Looking back across a wide chasm of barren centuries, the
men of the Florentine Revival beheld a system of civilization sin-
gularly complete, with an art, a philosophy, a form of government,
a literature, even an ideal of conduct, all formed by and answering
to the intellectual standard. Intellectualists themselves, they set
the classic achievement before them as an attainable goal, or bent all
their energies, all the newly-aroused forces of the mind, to recap-
ture that particular kind of wisdom, and that particular kind
of beauty, which had been the attributes of the Greeks. They
exalted the pagan plan of life, and were ready to follow it whither-
soever it led. " To the Florentine mind nothing is arduous," was
a proverb of the time. Mental effort was welcomed rather than
shirked. The happiness which we recognize as belonging to the
Renaissance, springs not so much from results achieved as from
the sensation of the activity of the mind itself. The cast of
Florentine thought was scientific and realistic, yet alone among
Italian states Florence had captured not only the old studious
spirit, but also the warm, living, human side of paganism. En-
joyment above all was the distinctive note, but it was no ordinary
conception of enjoyment. Physical pleasure had its place, but it
was leavened by a high ideal of the mind. Delight in learning;
in art; in treasures of the ancient and modern world; in the gay
and easy society of friends; in intercourse with the learned and
cultured; in leisure, combined with a strong and conscious love
of nature; a keen and thrilling zest for small as well as great
pleasures; go to make up that wonderfully stimulating and intense
existence which we recognize in the springtime of the Renaissance.
It was in the person of Lorenzo de' Medici that we may almost say
this spirit was incarnated. He is the type of his generation;
the leading influence in this vital, pulsating city; the centre of a
brilliant concourse, alive with discussion and wit and social fas-
cination. " A being endowed with fire and radiance, and the
power of drawing all men to him."
Nevertheless an exclusive demand for the rational, combined
1913-] THE SPIRITUAL NOTE IN THE RENAISSANCE 317
with deliberate adherence to the joy of life, must be naturally
calculated to undermine the spiritual faculty in man and the religion
it had nourished. Though the revival of learning was not at
first anti-Christian, or certainly not anti-ecclesiastical (for two
of the most famous Humanists of their day became Popes), yet
it afforded a powerful incentive to men to break loose from the
trammels which Christianity, as expressed in the Middle Ages,
had thrown around thought and conduct. The more spiritual
forms of religion could hardly go far among a people who refused
to read the Bible for fear that its archaic Latin should injure
their style.
The Academy of the Renaissance meant a concourse of select
and sympathetic souls, who met together to give free play to the
intellectual fancy and the critical faculty, and to probe into and
play with the problems of life and philosophy suggested by the
study of the ancient writers. The leaders of society, in short,
were impressed with the belief that thought and intellect were con-
fined to classic sources, and that Christian writings were to be
associated with the barbaric centuries.
And in this faith the men of the Renaissance had no uncertain
guide. Greek culture is remarkable for the very perfect intellectual
ideal it holds up. Beauty, broad and clear, knowledge, joyousness,
repose, and constancy had made up the Hellenic plan. The Greek
was self-reliant, free with the freedom of understanding, making
a deliberate selection from the elements of human life, calmly re-
signed to the inevitable, and distrusting every thought and assertion
which could not give a clear account of itself. " Wealth of
thought not wealth of learning" was the thing they coveted; it is
the striking saying of Democritus. Handed clown by letters to
Rome, this became the note of classic culture. When we speak
to-day of " the classic," it is not so much a special or particular
knowledge we mean, as the capacity for seeing things in their
relation to life. We imply that enlargement of the mind, that
mental completeness which is capable of a wide survey, and we
also imply the manner which corresponds; the moderation, calm-
ness, and lucidity which are characteristic of the classic type. And
just as Greek poetry, more than that of any other nation, is the
expression of the people's collective life, so Greek learning draws its
inspiration not so much from solitary study, as from noble com-
panionship and ideal human intercourse. Learning was not to
be enjoyed in seclusion. Greek culture was not estranged from the
318 THE SPIRITUAL NOTE IN THE RENAISSANCE [June,
life of the community, but became a link with citizenship. We
see in the Greek men of genius an extraordinary union of contrasted
qualities, so that the scientific discoverer is also a poet, and the mer-
chant is a profound physicist, or, like Pythagoras, a mystical
theologian, an astronomer, a musician, an original mathematician.
" We see in them the conjunction of a rich, an inexhaustible imag-
ination with a keen critical faculty, a restless, wondering, question-
ing spirit, fearless of consequences, bringing all things to the test
of reason." A people observedly practical, yet sternly idealistic,
endowed with such diverse and varied qualities as insured success
in every field of human activity.
Such was the perfect scheme, perfect in the intellectual sense,
which the men of the Renaissance aspired to make their own,
and for a short time, at least in Florence, it seemed as if environ-
ment and personalities were combining to lead them to success,
and if Florence had been more truly the centre of Italy, that success
might have been deeper and more lasting. What then were the
detrimental forces at work, and in what forms do we become
aware of their presence?
The problems which met mankind on the eve of the Renais-
sance could not be solved after mere study of ancient art. A whole
inner life had risen upon the ruins of classic life, created by Chris-
tianity, with its remorse, its humiliations, its sufferings, and had
altered and multiplied the faculties, and thrust new sorrows and
uncertainties upon the consciousness of the human mind. Under
the seeming triumphs of Italian intellectualism, a spirit was at
work by which the Greek philosophy had remained untroubled. A
half-dead Christendom was awaiting an awakening. The twelfth
century was a time when too many, totally enslaved by things tem-
poral, were unduly covetous of honor and wealth, or merely spend-
ing their lives in pleasure. Power was in the hands of a few,
who used it for little else than to oppress the poor. The infection
of the common vices had even spread to those who, by their calling,
ought to have given example to all* But ere the first springs stirred
of the intellectual life, they were forestalled by that spiritual Ren-
aissance with which it may be compared.
St. Francis stands for that very thing which classic culture,
with all its noble attainment, did not contain; for that which the
Renaissance itself disavowed and despised; for the strong spiritual
note which had been the dominant aim all through early mediaeval
^Encyclical letter of Leo XIII. on centenary of St. Francis.
'1913.] THE SPIRITUAL NOTE IN THE RENAISSANCE 319
life. Mediaeval life had suffered because the spiritual faculty had
not been sufficiently sustained by the light of reason. Classic life
liad suffered because the intellectual faculty had not been completed
by the spiritual faculty. Both lives had, as it were, been lopsided.
The Renaissance and the two master faculties of the human mind
(which it should be the aim of all thought to reconcile) were pitted
against one another.
St. Francis is in perfect sympathy with the great monastics
of the Middle Ages. His own realization of spiritual peace and
rapture echoes the note of St. Anselm and his contemporaries, so
eloquent of the delight of the inward vision; so full of unearthly
love for souls; so alive with a very melody of hope. The point
of view of the Saint of Assisi is absolutely opposed to all those ten-
dencies which went to make up the Renaissance. To the delight
in amassing rare and costly treasures of art, to making life
exquisite, he opposed the freedom of utter poverty. To set against
the joie de vivre of worldly circles, he brought the joy of the spirit,
the " perfect blitheness " afforded by the shaking off of every
trammel of the senses. Instead of the delight of reason and
intellectual culture, he possessed the inward vision of those who live
by faith. The joys of companionship belonged to him as much as
they did to the circle of Lorenzo, but there were no bounds to that
fellowship. The souls of all men were embraced by his affection,
and beyond all that had ever yet been attempted, he had the vision of
man's union with nature through its Creator. Instead of the scien-
tific investigation of natural laws, the theories of Copernicus and
Galileo, he is awake to every detail in the world of nature. His
love and joy in it is something apart from learning. It has the
sharp, keen note of spiritual affinity. The vision of a poet is his,
He " hears the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat." " Our
little sisters, the larks;" "our little brothers, the lambs;" "our
brother, the wind;" "our sister, the water;" "our noble brother,
the sun " were personalities in that life, half -childlike, half -angelic,
and his extraordinary sympathy for all created things had a mag-
netic effect on all natures with which he came in contact.
The attitude and character of St. Francis of Assisi, the stretch-
ing forth of his whole being in self-forgetfulness, is the secret of
his vast influence. Welded with a magnetic personality, it was a
power which never failed him. It accounts for the entire grasp
which he had on the minds and hearts of his associates. He re-
flected and evoked what was in the heart of the people, and they
320 THE SPIRITUAL NOTE IN THE RENAISSANCE [June,
learned from him to live in the hope of immortality. The great
men of the Renaissance loved success and genius and prosperity,
but St. Francis was the idol of the poor and weak and wretched,
whose lot he shared and understood, as with unfeigned joy he
welcomed as his spouse the Poverty of the Lord Christ.
So with astonishing rapidity the Franciscan movement made its
"way, and in the course of a very few years a network of religious
houses was established in the name and spirit of St. Francis all
over central Italy. The foundation of the Tertiary Order, unlike
anything that had ever been attempted before, drawing laymen
within the magic circle, had an effect which cannot be over-esti-
mated in securing a hereditary adherence to his principles. For two
hundred years St. Francis was the greatest power at work in the
growing civilization of Europe, and though by the end of the
fourteenth century the force and spring of the movement seemed
to have spent its strength, the visible effects had given way to those
influences less salient, but as tenacious, which in their subtle, silent
fashion asserted the survival of demands which are never far
away from the heart of man.
Such, in brief outline, seem to have been the two currents of
thought, the one intellectual, the other spiritual, which acted upon
the Renaissance. Of these the former is most on the surface
and most in evidence, and has, therefore, monopolized the larger
share of attention. Nevertheless, felt rather than seen, and often
to be detected in its effects where not directly apparent, the spiritual
influence constantly operates. Attracted by the militant exploits
of the intellectual faculty, historians of that epoch are prone to
concentrate upon it their attention and eloquence. But there
is a kind of record more trustworthy than historical re-
search, which suffers from no such exclusiveness. Art is an
expression of life, which overlooks no factor that has contributed
essential elements to that life which it records, and the art of the
Renaissance throughout its course faithfully registers the action
of the spiritual influences which were at work in the heart of
society. Such a testimony, however, is not of a kind that can be
summarized in a sentence or two, and to that part of the subject
I hope to return on a future occasion.
THE SPELL OF ROME.
BY JOSEPH FRANCIS WICKHAM.
N Rome a man might wish to live a lifetime, and
wisely, I think, would he choose if he elected this
city as his home. But the traveler, whose time is
limited by the brief span of weeks or months, will
all too soon behold the shadow of departure hanging
over him; will all too early hear the voice calling the hours and
bidding him go. So it will come to pass that in the late hours
of some golden afternoon you will find yourself enjoying your
last drive through the Pincio, those beautiful gardens of dream
by the Villa Medici. You are not alone, for all Rome is here,
gentle and simple, throngs of the humbler on bench or walk, a
splendid procession of the city's proud in crested coach. And
perhaps the band is playing music ever so sweet, melody that
sweeps your soul's memories and searches out the tender corners
of your heart, so that you cannot escape the gentle challenge and
cannot forget. Indeed you came not to the Pincio to forget Rome
and the sadness of your departing, for the exquisite pain at the
leaving is, too, of the city's gifting and of the subtle fragrance of
her charm. And there is no forgetting Rome, any more than
there is the forgetting your first view of the sea, or the crimson
glow of sunrise over snowy hills, or the last dear smile on a loved
one's face. But the music, perhaps, is in the proper modulation
for your sorrow, and its tender melancholy chimes full wonderfully
with your farewell emotions, and there is never a cadence or a phrase
that blends not with some passion within you, and that does not
touch a responsive motive in the depths of your throbbing heart.
So it is that as you drive about the beautiful garden you begin
to think of all you are losing when you lose Rome.
It seems very long ago since you came up from gay Naples to
this old city ; some of Rome's eternity seems to have detached itself
and become allied in fragment to your stay. For Rome is so old,
so full of history, so like a pyramid in her layer upon layer of
chronicle, that your sojourn has made you feel that all the school-
learned pages are with you again, with all the years of their some-
times weary pondering. But there is no weariness engendered
VOL. XCVII. 21.
322 THE SPELL OF ROME [June,
in reading history in the stones of Rome's monuments, no eloquence
lost upon unwilling hearts in the unceasing sermon of the yellow
Tiber. And it is a joy to think about it all as you drive along the
flower-bordered lanes, and look over toward the sunset.
You remember the morning you saw the Forum for the first
time, and called to life the dead days of the republic and the
empire, and the thoughts that were yours as you rested your hand
against remnant marble that once felt the burning veins of Cicero.
You think of the stately ruins on every side, where so many plead-
ing tears have been wasted and so much red blood has flown, all the
desolate relics of palaces and temples that once told the story of
Roman greatness. Then you think of the Colosseum, the boding
name that you learned in childhood and knew so well, that your
heart scarcely lost a pulsation when you looked upon it. Perhaps
it was when you stood on the bare arena one lovely night, with
a summer moon streaming over all those lonely tiers, that you
caught the romance of the huge pile, the tragic romance that broke
off when the monk Telemachus rushed in and protested and was
stoned to death. The Mamertine prison, where Saint Peter waited
for his death day ; the Arch of Titus and the Arch of Constantine ;
the Palatine Hill, where Romulus lived, if he lived at all, and the
great Augustus, too, and many another old Roman emperor; and
the Baths of Caracalla and Hadrian's Mausoleum, and the Theatre
of Marcellus and the Circus Maximus : all these and twice as
many more have given you fitful glimpses of Rome's early days,
the old, old days that only the Tiber knows. But the Tiber flows
on, and he mocks you in your frail and slender gleanings from his
youth day, and pities you that you have not seen what he has seen,
and congratulates you that much of it has never fallen before your
eyes.
Day has succeeded day, and often you have thought that you
have solved the mystery of the centuries, the elusive mystery that
has always fallen about Rome,. But every solution has been met
with a newer problem, and ever a fresh voyage of discovery has
been yours. Finally you have found out, and have been glad
that at last you knew the truth, that Rome has no facile way
of giving herself up, but charms you and fascinates you, and throws
her witchery and mysterious spell around you, and woos you, and
captivates you, in a hundred varied ways, before you have won
the tenth of her heart. She is a fair creature of infinite variety,
but no coquette is Rome. For when you have caught the all-coy
1913.] THE SPELL OF ROME 323
spirit of the ever-changing years that reckon themselves by twenty-
seven centuries, or when you have attained only a part, then so
much is yours, to have and to hold, even until the very end.
Republican and imperial ruins have satisfied your hunger for
classic lore. You have also visited the famous churches, and the
others, as beautiful, if not quite so famous. Saint Peter's claimed
you first, grand Saint Peter's, that you see even now through the
foliage, with Michelangelo's dome holding reception with every
ray of the western sun dancing and sparkling on its convex face,
all-gleaming in royal splendor. The next day took you to the
church of Santa Maria Maggiori. There are fourscore churches in
Rome dedicated to the Mother of God, and this is the largest.
The legend tells you that on a certain August night in the year
358, the Blessed Virgin appeared in a dream to the Roman patrician,
John, and to Pope Liberius, and asked them to build a church
to her on that part of the Esquiline Hill where on the morrow
they should find snow. Going out the following day, they found
the plan of the church outlined in the glistening white snow. The
church was built, and was named Santa Maria ad Nives. It was
rebuilt a century later by Sixtus the Third, and was added to
from time to time, until to-day it is large, and takes precedence
among all the churches dedicated to Mary in Rome. It is a very
beautiful edifice, with mosaics and other adornments from the fifth
century to the nineteenth in point of age, even the first gold from
America gilding the rich ceiling. Every year on August fifth, the
feast of our Lady of the Snow, a mass of white rose petals are show-
ered from the dome of the magnificent Borghese chapel in commem-
oration of the wonderful occurrence far back in the Christian dawn-
ing. The legend may be true, or it may lack foundation, but at any
rate none lovelier can be found in Roman annals.
Perhaps an hour later you found yourself within the vestibule
of San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, another of Constantine's gifts, built
over the tomb of the martyred Saint Lawrence. Here it is that
Pius the Ninth is laid away. From this church you did not journey
far to visit the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, founded
by Constantine's mother, Saint Helena, to receive the relic of the
true Cross, which she found in Jerusalem. This edifice, like others,
was consecrated by Pope Sylvester. Here it used to be the custom
to bless the golden rose which was to be sent as a mark of esteem
to a Catholic prince or princess, a ceremony which now takes place
in the Sistine Chapel.
324 THE SPELL OF ROME [June,
You passed then to the calm, peaceful atmosphere of San Gio-
vanni in Laterano, the mother and head of all the churches, in
urbe et orbe, as the inscription on the fagade proclaims. The
Lateran, and not Saint Peter's, is distinctively and peculiarly the
church of the Pope, in his office as Bishop of Rome, but since
the year 1870 no Pope has pontificated at the high altar. This
church is also due to the generous spirit of Constantine, and was
the first church in Rome consecrated in public, the consecration
taking place at the hands of Pope Sylvester on November ninth, in
the year 324. Many times this great cathedral has suffered from
fire or earthquake or plunder, and it has seen many restorations.
Interesting as the church itself is, one still has desire to see the
spiral columns of the thirteenth century cloisters, a part of the mon-
astery founded by the Benedictines from Monte Cassino toward the
end of the sixth century. The cloisters of the Lateran are the finest
in Rome, excelling even the beautiful courts at Saint Paul's.
After a visit to the church of San Sebastiano, the old church
of pilgrimage out on the Via Appia, you drove over to the basilica
of San Paolo fuori le Mura, to marvel at the wondrous nave that
led you through the gigantic forest of beautiful monolithic columns
to the high altar above the tomb of Saint Paul. Constantine built
this church, too, and it outlived his cathedral to Saint Peter
by three centuries. In the year 1823, on the night before Pius
the Seventh died, lightning ruined it almost completely, so to-day's
splendid edifice, more impressive in some ways than Saint Peter's
itself, is almost entirely modern. There are still mosaics of the
fifth century, and arches and columns and the western fagade that
come down from Constantine's time; and the tomb of Saint Paul
is ever here, resting not far from where he suffered martyrdom.
You then had been within all seven of the greater churches of
Rome, the five patriarchal basilicas, and the other two, all of which
have seen pilgrimages from every land of the western world. But
you remember many another splendid edifice beside the seven you
have just called to mind. There is the Church of Santa Maria del
Populo, founded in the year 1099, and the two-towered church of
Santissima Trinita dei Monti, neither of which is far away from
you; Santa Pudenziana, erected on the place where Saint Peter's
host, Saint Pudens, lived; San Pietro in Vincoli, where Michel-
angelo's gigantic " Moses " rests ; Santa Maria sopra Minerva,
the one mediaeval Gothic church of Rome, erected, as its name sug-
gests, over the ruins of Minerva's temple, and containing Michel-
1913.] THE SPELL OF ROME 325
angelo's "Risen Christ;" San Luigi de Francesi and Santa Maria
dell' Anima, the one the national church of the French, the other
the church of the Germans; Santa Maria della Pace, where Ra-
phael's " Sibyls " are worth a visit; Santi Cosma e Damiano, where
exquisite mosaics of the sixth century will hold one's attention;
Santa Maria in Trastevere built, the legend runs, where a spring
of oil gushed forth upon the birth of Christ; and the beauteous
Gesu, the central church of the Jesuit Society, the resting-place of
the order's founder, Saint Ignatius Loyola, and one of the most
splendid churches in the world.
Lest you forget it, before you in the distance is the level
dome of the Pantheon, the old building of the imperial age, intact as
nothing of the olden age is. Beautiful, indeed, is the effect when
the sun's rays pour through the mid-dome aperture and light the
tomb of him who did so much to give Rome beauty, the youthful
Raphael. And now your eyes take the direction of the capitol,
and dimly you discern the walls of the old church of Aracoeli en-
closing the altar that legend would have you believe Augustus
built, at the bidding of the Sibyl of Tivoli, to the Son of God.
But there are too many visions to evoke anew, too many happy
days to remember ; and there is so much of beauty here on the Pin-
cian Hill, so much life, and so much suggestion of wonders in the
view over the lower levels, that your dreams are broken at times,
and for the moment you forget that you are not to stay in Rome.
But soon again you will fall into reverie, when some lovely foun-
tain murmurs too sadly, or some cool palm seems to wave you good-
bye in the gently falling afternoon. Perhaps your thoughts journey
far down the Via Appia, where the tombs of once-proud Roman
patricians lie in ruins, and where the cold vaults of the catacombs
are eloquent as gospel- word or psalm of David; and then they
travel over toward the pyramid and tomb of Caestius to where the
shadow-laden Protestant cemetery shelters the relics of many a
foreign lover of Rome. Here the poet Keats lies at rest, and over
his grave are blossoming pretty pansies that some Ophelia, per-
haps, once planted to make our thoughts linger more lovingly when
we come. More than one sigh of tribute is due to the poet of
beauty's soul, who wrote in the deep and soft and silvery music
that is like a breath blown over the mortal world from across
the courts of Apollo. The name of him who could breathe into
an Attic urn the spirit of immortality will ever be written in colors
glowing and lasting, not in the flowing water, as the chiseled in-
326 THE SPELL OF ROME [June,
scription would have it. Not far away rests the heart of Shelley,
loving even in the cool vale of death beneath the cypress trees
the friend, the gentle Adonais. Together under the shadowed vesper
twilight they are dreaming the poet's dream, and silently waiting,
in tranquil sleep, the peaceful coming of the dawn.
You have been on the Via Sacra, where the thoughts of Horace
haunted you, and the unwelcome companion that once accompanied
him on his walk. Here, too, you remembered Roman triumphs
that filled the street with tumultuous salvo-cheers, and you thought
of the victorious legions, and the smiling face of the elated general,
and the drooping, shamed countenances of shackled captive slaves.
You have seen the famous fountains of the city, the graceful
Fontana della Tartarughe, the bronze group of youths and dolphins
and tortoises ; and Bernini's Fontana del Tritone ; and the Fontana
di Trevi, the finest of all, telling a charming story to whoever will
listen to the voice of the cold-flowing water. For the genius that
lives in the Trevi fountain bids you come some lovely Roman night,
when the moon is smiling down and making the little ripples play-
ful and gay. Then the water god wishes you to toss a coin out into
the midst of those tiny pirouetting waves, far out, and if you do,
promises that one day you will surely come back to Rome. You
remember how you came here on a song-swept moonlit night, and,
with someone you liked very much, made the offering; how you
stood a moment while the coins were finding their liquid paths
to the blithe genius of the fountain, and then laughingly went away.
You have visited the great palaces. The Villa Borghese has
given you to look upon its excellent old paintings ; the Rospigliosi
palace has been your seeking to admire Guido Reni's best work,
the noted ceiling-painting of "Aurora." You have seen the
Lateran, which stands where once was the house of the rich Roman
Lateranus. When this dwelling became imperial possession of
Constantine, he gave it to the Popes for perpetual domicile. It is
still church property, and it now contains a great museum founded
in 1843 by Gregory the Sixteenth, which is noted among other
things for the " Dancing Satyr," the excellent statue of Sophocles,
and the remarkable collection of early Christian sarcophagi. You
have seen also the Quirinal palace, built by Sixtus the Fifth because
the Lateran was becoming malarial.
There are still men and women in Rome, old now, but with
memories young and fresh, who remember the figure of Pius the
Ninth standing on the great balcony on that day in the year 1846,
1913.] THE SPELL OF ROME 327
and looking down upon the thick-crowding multitude. For upon
his election he had granted a general pardon to those imprisoned for
political offences, and this day all Rome, full wild with delight,
was come to the Quirinal cheering and singing in praise of his
generosity. When Pius appeared, a loud shout of welcome greeted
him from the thousands that filled the piazza and the lanes that
led to it. Then he raised his hand, and in a hush of silence they
received the benediction of the new Pontiff. And they went away,
happily chanting their love for the good Pia Nono. But the kings
of the Italy that was born in 1870 now dw r ell in the Quirinal, and
the Popes have since lived in the Vatican, never leaving its enclo-
sures, but remaining prisoners in mute protest of the usurpation.
The incomparable Vatican palace you have studied, too, and the
lovely gardens in which the gentle Pius the Tenth walks in recrea-
tion and dreams of less fettered days, and from which he can see
the fair-gleaming dome of Saint Peter's.
Still other palaces are there in Rome which you can remember.
There is the Palazzo Barberini, which Urban the Eighth built, and
which is now the seat of the Spanish embassy. Near the Piazza
Navona stands the Palazzo Doria, always reminding one of Genoa's
great family. The Palazzo Colonna rises near the spot where the
old Colonna fortress once stood. You do not forget the Palazzo
Venezia, the castellated structure which Pius the Fourth gave to
the Venetian republic, and where the Austrian ambassador now
resides; nor again the Palazzo Farnese, which was begun in the
early sixteenth century by Paul the Third when he was Cardinal
Farnese, and where to-day you may find the French ambassador.
Many more palaces of the early days you have likewise seen, so
many that it were impossible even to name them all.
Many an hour you have passed in the Roman museums. The
Vatican Museum, of course, is the most important in the city.
After it ranks the Capitoline Museum, which Sixtus the Fourth
founded in 1471. It is here you saw the famous "Dying Gaul,"
and the " Faun " that the New England novelist has given little
less than immortality. Nearby is the museum of the Palazzo
Conservatori, which has the noted " Bronze Wolf of the Capitol,"
and the familiar " Cumaean Sibyl " of Domenichino. A visit to
the Museo delle Terme, built on the site of the Baths of Diocletian,
disclosed sculptures recently found in the vicinity of Rome; among
other treasures Myron's " Discus-thrower," the " Ares Resting,"
and the " Juno Ludovisi " head, the most famous in existence.
328 THE SPELL OF ROME [June,
You recall the Greek antiques in the Museo Barrocco; and the
" Cista " and the collection of early Christian relics in the Museo
Kircheriano, which was founded by the learned German Jesuit
From your musings on the treasures of palace and museum
you turn to the contemplation of Roman vicissitudes, all the burn-
ings and sackings Rome has counted since the shepherds from Alba
Longa built on the sloping hills. First came the Gauls in the year
390 before Christ, and reduced the city to ashes; and then for
eight hundred years no foreign foe, not even the great Hannibal,
could force the Roman walls until the Goths swept in with Alaric in
the year 410. Truly Nero had burned the city, but if not a noble
Roman, he was at least of Rome, and no stranger foe. After
the Goths came the Vandals, and following them the Huns. But
it would be difficult to count the many distressful days Rome
suffered before the terrible year of 1527, when the atrocious ruffians
of the Constable de Bourbon ran mad through the city, while
their leader, in his white cloak, lay on his back outside the wall
with Bernardino Passeri's bullet in his heart. It is indeed a
long battle-story that Rome has written on her pavements and
palaces and tall, majestic statues. An Arch of Titus tells the
victory of the Roman over the Jew; an Arch of Constantine is
eloquent of the victory of the Roman Christian over the pagan
Roman; and the high figure of Victor Emanuel speaks the victory
of a new house of kings over the best rulers the Romans have
ever had.
But the day is waning now. The music has ceased its melody ;
the scarlet ranks of the German seminary students have long re-
turned homeward; the people for an hour have been streaming
through the pathways toward the gate; the procession of carriages
has dwindled into the sparse files of the belated few; and it is
time to depart, with a multitude of memories still crowding for
recognition. Before you go you look once more on the dome of
Saint Peter's, no longer glowing in the sun, but looming dark
and beautiful and serene in the gathering twilight; you see the
dark shadowed masses of the pines on the crest of the ancient
Janiculum; and on Monte Maria the tall cypresses in sad reverie
of the day that is gone, and of all the Roman days that have
silently ebbed away. You see the grim, brooding, battle-worn
Castel Sant' Angelo, the old tomb- fortress that has felt the missiles
of catapult and cannon, and has scorned the siege of many a
bafHed foe. Over the way you can see a dozen church towers
1913.] THE SPELL OF ROME 329
and the tops of high-soaring monuments, and the broad outlines of
a hundred palace-homes. The Palatine and the Quirinal are still
visible to your watching; night has not yet enwrapped the colon-
nade of the Victor Emanuel monument on the Capitol; and the
column of Marcus Aurelius, crowned with the figure of Saint
Paul, can still be seen looking down upon the ever-coursing throngs
in the Piazza Colonna. The Tiber is out of sight of your search-
ing vision, but you know it is there, slowly rolling on, the thought-
ful, chronicle-laden Tiber, full of the joy and the woe of the
twenty-seven centuries, carrying it all, even the breath of the
approaching night, to Ostia and the welcoming clasp of the sea.
So it was once on the evening before our departure from Rome.
Leaving the Pincio, we came down to our hotel close by, on the
Via Veneto. Not long after we were up in our balcony windows
looking out across the beauteous gardens of Margherita, the queen-
mother, just beneath us, while we thought the thoughts of farewell.
The stars were creeping along the edge of the distant hills, and
were advancing through the myriad pathways of the sky; the
moon was in lovely crescent, paling at intervals behind a scarflet
of fleecy cloud, and then smiling free and happy, as it touched the
green foliage below with the mystic white of its radiance; and
from some distant piazza the melody of sweet sounds was wooing
the coming night. For a long time I sat still, thinking of all the
good and evil, all the love and hate, all the life and death, that
the days and nights agone had known; thinking that on a night
like this had love vows been pledged by many an Octavius and Cor-
nelia; beneath a moon like this had been born the fond plightings
of many a Lorenzo and Maddalena, with ever the cool breezes from
the Sabines blowing over the eternal Rome ; thinking of the Roman
matrons of old, in the shade of the trees of the villa gardens along
the Tiber, watching the proud ships of their lords sail up the
deep river; thinking of all the little poppies in the fields beside
the Via Appia now tossing their crimson heads in mindful reverence
of the golden processions of long ago; thinking of the blue sky that
had watched the sainted files of men and maidens on the same fair
road in those pitiful days of the Christian dawn; thinking of the
countless pilgrims who had prayerfully ascended the Scala Santa
through the centuries and centuries of an undimmed faith; think-
ing of the nights when Rome had wept as the rallying cries of " Or-
sini " or " Colonna " echoed tempestuously along street and wide-
spreading piazza; thinking of the nights when Rome had laughed as
330 THE SPELL OF ROME [June,
the carnival gayety ran high, and every wind that swept over the
city was melody-laden and glad; thinking of all the art and the
poetry and the music that had been born of Rome's magic during
the years and years of her romantic life; thinking of the hearts
unnumbered that had loved Rome, and had felt the gentle thrall-
ing beneath the moons of the gladsome past; thinking of the thou-
sand, thousand nights to come that other hearts like ours would
sorrow for their parting and lament in welling grief for the dawn-
ing of the day. For long you can sit here, dreaming, dreaming,
dreaming, and sure that the dream is not vanity, but the wist-
ful, child-like proof that the love of Rome is in your heart, and the
passion for her never-cloying affection woven firmly in the fibres
of your soul.
Rome is all that you have wished her and believed her and
visioned her. All this she is and more. What singers have
chanted in metred music, and artists have wakened on breathing
canvas and in the meshes of now-mellow tapestry, and tellers of
tales have written in well-read tomes, all this she is and more.
For the spell of Rome is a most enduring one, and her charm the
most illimitable of fascinations this side of eternity.
But now no footsteps ever sounded beneath the windows ; only
occasionally did a carriage glide along between the rows of shad-
owing trees; even the gentle strains from the players down the
street had died away. Rome was closing her life for the night.
I looked once more upon the silent avenue and the moon-white
grasses and the palace of the queen and refused to say good-bye.
But from the face of Rome I turned away, a faithful lover, true
and leal to the lady of my choosing, with the love in my heart, alone.
And in my dreams I heard her calling me, and I saw myself again
tossing a coin into the Trevi fountain, and wondering how long
life would endure before the laughing waters kept their promise.
THE CONVERSION OF THE ANGLICAN BENEDICTINES.
BY W. H. WATTS.
GREAT. deal of sensation has been caused in Anglican
circles by the conversion of the Anglican Benedictine
communities of Caldey Island and St. Bride's
Abbey, Milford Haven, to the Catholic Church, and
it has been thought well that this remarkable event
should be brought before the notice of Catholics in America.
The two communities that have been received into the Catholic
Church consist of a community of men, under the rule of Abbot
Aelred Carlyle, living at Caldey Island near to the town of Tenby,
ancf a community of women following the same observance, form-
erly living at Mailing Abbey in Kent, and now installed at St.
Bride's Abbey, on the borders of Pill Creek, Milford Haven. Of
these two communities, all, save a very few, have made their sub-
mission to the Holy See.
Of the attempts in the Anglican Church made to revive the
Religious Life under the Holy Rule of St. Benedict, Caldey alone
may be said to have attained to any measure of success; and its
claim that it sought and obtained the highest ecclesiastical authority
in the Church of England, is in a marked contrast to the majority
of Anglican Religious Orders, which appear to have been founded
and conducted in the face of opposition from ecclesiastical superiors.
In 1898, the founder of the Caldey community obtained the license
of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Temple, for his profession
as a monk under the Rule of St. Benedict, and later, after being
elected to the office of Abbot by the community, the election was
confirmed by the same prelate, and with the permission of the late
Archbishop of York, Dr. Maclagan, Abbot Aelred Carlyle was
blessed and installed in his office by the late Dr. Grafton, Bishop
of Fond du Lac. Gradually the little community grew in num-
bers, and in 1906 the purchase of Caldey Island as a permanent
home was made possible. On St. Luke's Day of that year, the
monks moved to their new home, and from that time onwards there
has been a steady increase in numbers, while the work of erecting
a permanent monastery has also to a certain degree been made
possible. As the community increased and the number of novices
332 THE CONVERSION OF [June,
grew, it was felt that a more clearly defined official sanction by the
ecclesiastical authorities was necessary if the work was to become
a real and vital part of the spiritual economy of the Anglican
Church. Accordingly the Anglican authorities were approached,
with a view of clearly denning the position of the Abbot as a priest
of the Church of England.
It was about this time, Lent, 1912, that the members of the
community felt themselves bound to face the question of their
position with regard to the Catholic Church. The sacred season of
Lent was spent in much prayer, and a study of the difficulties that
divided them from the supreme Pastor and Teacher of all Chris-
tians. The monks went deeply into the matter, and the result was
that their belief in the Church of England as the true and historic
Church of Christ and the Gospel received what was destined to be
its deathblow. But, whether rightly or wrongly, they felt that
there were not sufficient indications that it was their duty to sever
their allegiance to the Church of England and to submit to the Holy
See. If the community was to continue, it must be brought more
clearly under the definite guidance and authority of the See of
Canterbury. The Archbishop of Canterbury was approached :
first, because Caldey is in no Anglican diocese or parish, and,
secondly, because the Archbishop represented to the monks the
supreme spiritual authority of the Anglican Church. At the sug-
gestion of the Archbishop, Bishop Gore of Oxford was selected as
prospective Episcopal Visitor, an office which his lordship expressed
himself quite willing to accept. The Bishop, quite naturally and
rightly, made inquiries as to the faith, practices, and devotions of
the community, and appointed two commissioners who were to
receive a full statement of all such matters, after which they were
to report to the Bishop. The result of the negotiations was that
Bishop Gore, acting upon the report made to him by the commis-
sioners, made certain demands upon the community as " prelimin-
aries that seem to be obvious and to lie outside all possibilities of
bargaining and concession." These preliminary demands were :
(1) That all property, buildings, etc., should legally be
secured to the Church of England.
(2) That the Communion Office of the Book of Common
Prayer alone should be used in place of the Latin Benedictine
"Rite, and that all priests in the community should be bound
to recite Morning and Evening Prayer.
1913-] THE ANGLICAN BENEDICTINES 333
(3) That the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, to-
gether with the doctrine (sic) of the Corporal Assumption of
the Blessed Virgin, should be eliminated from the Breviary
and Missal.
(4) That Exposition and Benediction of the Blessed Sacra-
ment, with the Exposition and Veneration of Sacred Relics,
should be abandoned.
The monks of Caldey had appealed to the authority of
the Church of England, and that authority acting in the person
of Bishop Gore as the representative of the Archbishop of Canter-
bury, had, as it had every right to do from the Anglican point of
view, made a sweeping condemnation of those things which the
monks of Caldey had always held to be vital to their conception of
the Catholic Faith. The demands of the Bishop were clear and
definite; the reply of the monks also had to be clear and definite.
A letter was dispatched to the Bishop of Oxford signed by twenty
professed brothers, four novices, and three oblates, declining to
receive official sanction at such a price. Thus the allegiance of
Caldey to the Church of England came to an end, and the eyes of
the brethren were turned to the seat of that Authority to whose
care our Blessed Lord has committed the sheep and the lambs of
His flock.
On February 22d, the Feast of St. Peter's Chair, Abbot Aelred
Carlyle sent an urgent letter to Dom Bede Camm, O.S.B., to come
and advise. Knowing nothing of what was required of him, the
good Father immediately laid aside all his most pressing engage-
ments, and set out on his unknown mission. On arriving at Caldey
he was soon shown how matters stood, and as a Benedictine and
a convert he was asked to advise. At Caldey Holy Mass was
offered by Dom Bede Camm. By the singular providence of God,
this first Mass was offered by a Benedictine and the champion
of the English martyrs, and on the Feast of the Five Holy Wounds ;
under whose banner our English fathers fought and died " for
God, our Lady, and the Catholic Faith." The last time Mass was
said on the island of Caldey, it was offered by a Benedictine monk
some three hundred or more years ago.
Under the guidance of Dom Bede Camm, the monks of Caldey
were prepared for their reception into the Catholic Church, and on
Wednesday, March 5th, the Feast of St. Aelred, the patron Saint
of the Abbot, his lordship the Bishop of Menevia, Dr. Mostyn,
334 THE ANGLICAN BENEDICTINES [June,
received the submission of the community, and then administered
conditional baptism. The ceremony of reception into the Church
was performed in the presence of the Benedictine Abbots of Down-
side, Maredsous, and Csermaria. After Terce had been sung, the
Bishop vested, and with his assistants entered the sanctuary. Abbot
Carlyle knelt at a prie-dieu at the entrance of the choir, and before
him was laid an open book of the Gospels. After the singing of
the Veni Creator, the whole community kneeling round their Abbot
made simultaneously their profession of faith, and received from
the Bishop absolution from censure. During the Mass which fol-
lowed this solemn ceremony, the newly-made Catholics received
Holy Communion. In the afternoon, by permission of the Bishop,
the Abbot of Maredsous sang Pontifical Vespers, and before Com-
pline, which was sung by the Abbot of Downside, the Bishop of the
diocese gave Pontifical Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. On
the Monday following this most solemn and eventful day, the
Bishop administered the Sacrament of Confirmation to the com-
munity of Caldey; while three days later his lordship and the Abbot
of Downside went to St. Bride's Abbey to gather into the Church the
rich harvest of souls that waited for the reaper. The number of
souls received into the Church both at Caldey and St. Bride's Abbey
is fifty-six, but there are more members of the Caldey community
who from stress of circumstances did not make their submission
at the same time. By the time these lines are read all the Caldey
brethren, with the exception of two or perhaps three, will have
been received into the Catholic Church.
At the time of writing, Abbot Carlyle is on his way to Rome,
in company with the Abbot of Maredsous. It is hoped to lay the
plans and aspirations of these two communities before the Holy
Father, and to seek his guidance for the future, whatever it may be.
Meanwhile the brethren have been admitted oblates regular of St.
Benedict by the Abbot of Maredsous, at whose abbey Abbot Aelred
will make his novitiate. During the absence of their superior, the
Caldey brethren will be under the rule of Dom John Chapman and
Dom Bede Camm, both of Maredsous.
The conversion of the Caldey monks to the Catholic Church
has involved them in serious financial loss, for they have lost the
sum of not less than f 20,000, which had been promised them by
various benefactors a short time ago, principally for the completion
of their monastery buildings, on condition of their remaining in
the Anglican Church. The Caldey Sustentation Fund has been
1913.] ENCOMPASSED 335
opened, and Catholics are asked to show their practical sympathy
for these good monks who have sacrificed so much. The students
of Maynooth College have offered to raise a subscription among
themselves, and have expressed their resolution that the Caldey
monks shall not want. A priest has most generously offered 500
as a nucleus of the Caldey Sustentation Fund.
The brethren of Caldey Abbey, together with their Sisters of
St. Bride's, earnestly request the prayers of all Catholics for per-
severance in their Holy Faith and Vocation.
ENCOMPASSED.
BY CHARLES L. o'DONNELL, C.S.C.
" In Whom we live and move and are."
THE least, most instant thoughts I think
Win to Thy mind;
Thou art most kind.
My feet with weariness may sink
Ere I can cry
Lo, Thou art by.
Yea, when upon the awful brink
Of death I stand
I hold Thy hand.
Only for this aghast I shrink
At deeps of hell,
" God lost," they spell.
And when of utter bliss I drink,
What shall it be
But Thee, but Thee.
THE RED ASCENT.
BY ESTHER W. NEILL.
CHAPTER VII.
ICHARD had expected that the Colonel would take
some interest in the papers that he had found in the
attic. He brought them downstairs next evening,
and spread them on the mahogany table that stood
under the library lamp.
The Colonel picked up one or two of the letters, carelessly
adjusted his eyeglasses, and after glancing at the faded pages,
he put them down and thumped upon the table to show his emphatic
disapproval.
" What rot! I didn't know my father could be such a fool/'
" My grandmother must have been very beautiful," said Rich-
ard reflectively.
" Beautiful," sputtered the Colonel, " of course she was beau-
tiful. In those days men weren't looking for some sour- faced,
intellectual, spectacled woman to put at the head of their table.
By heaven, sir, it's a woman's business to be beautiful."
" See, here are some verses," said Richard, " that seem to
prove it:
Such beauty I have ne'er beheld,
Your violet eyes, your raven hair,
If I could die to prove my love
I'd welcome death, my lady fair.
They do sound rather feverish. I wonder if men really feel
that way."
" Feel," repeated the Colonel, staring at his son in astonish-
ment. " Do you mean to say that you have never been in love ? "
" I can't say that I have."
" Then for the Lord's sake go and try it. Why you must
have the make-up of a fish, sir. When I was your age I had
courted half the girls in the county."
^he old look of weariness came into Richard's eyes. " I
suppose it was the fashion, then," he said. He put the letters
into the box and carried them back to his room. The Colonel was
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 337
willing to keep on swearing that the Fielding title was a forged one,
but he considered Richard's efforts to prove it practically useless.
He frankly said that he was not willing to strain his eyes going
through all that " mooning slush " to convince himself of a fact
he knew already.
" But we might convince the court," Richard had said.
" The courts are corrupt," reiterated the Colonel with a con-
viction that precluded argument. " What justice can you expect
from a Yankee judge that had his eye shot out at Manassas?"
" I believe that justice is supposed to be blind," Richard sug-
gested dryly.
" But not squint-eyed," said the Colonel, who always enjoyed
the last word in an argument.
Richard went to bed that night with the feeling that the
Fielding case was hopeless. There was no escape for him from
the grime of the fields, the uncongenial labor that began with every
dawn. Of what use was his college course, his university training?
He was a farm hand, ignorant of his work, deprived even of
meager wages. Where could he get money for the simple every-
day necessities? He thought of writing, teaching, translating,
but the ceaseless duties of the day seemed to preclude all further
effort his mind was hindered, his body heavy with sleep. He
must trust to the fruition of the fall. If he had had any confidence
in his achievements as a farmer, he would have gone to Jefferson
Wilcox for help, but he was too proud to borrow when payment
seemed so remote.
It was worry over his increasing indebtedness at the village
store that drove him again to the inspection of his grandfather's
love letters, and having once begun to wade through the "slush,"
his original intention was almost forgotten in the interest he began
to take in these human documents. He had not had time or inclina-
tion for love affairs of his own, but the psychology of this ancient
romance fascinated him.
He had never known his grandfather, but he had heard him
spoken of with vast respect as a brave soldier, a scholar, a statesman.
He had been sent to the United States Senate, and had served with
distinction; he had even been considered as a presidential pos-
sibility. These old letters showed another side of his life, as real
as and more vital than his public career.
With a systematizing spirit that comes from long training,
Richard sorted out the letters according to date. From the first
VOL. XCVII. 22.
338 THE RED ASCENT [June,
formal note asking a pretty girl to accept " a floral offering,"
" to walk home from church/' " to dance at the governor's ball,"
came the gradual unfolding of a strong man's passion. His first
proposal of marriage, a strange mixture of humility and faith in
his opportunities, followed later by desperate incoherent pages when
he feared the lady of his choice was in love with another. Then
came other vehement letters breathing such happiness and confes-
sions of unworthiness, full of ambitious day dreams, plans for
the wedding, plans for home building, plans for a long alluring
future.
Richard sat one night on the edge of his high four-poster
musing over these letters. What a tremendous power love had
always been in the world. Why had he never given it any thought ?
Since his mother's death, and his memory of her was made up of
trifling occurrences that a child's mind accentuates, he had never
demanded love from anyone. The Colonel had always been in-
different to him, Betty regarded him almost as a stranger; until
the last few months he had never entered into her life, now she
accepted his services as a matter of course. As long as she was
provided with food and shelter, she was oblivious to the tragedy
of his efforts. Poring over these old letters he began to speculate
about himself, and to wonder idly if he were capable of great love
for an individual. If he gave nothing how could he expect a
return? Was the fault his? If women roused men, wise, judi-
cial men like his grandfather, to such desperate states of mind,
to such foolish poems and prattle, why was he immune?
His thoughts were brought to an abrupt conclusion by Betty
knocking on his door. " Why aren't you ready, Dick ? "
" Ready ? " he repeated looking up bewildered.
Betty stood in the hallway dressed in her grandmother's wed-
ding gown, hoop skirt, lace veil, orange blossoms, white satin
slippers, her face flushed into beauty, her nervous fingers struggling
with the old-time silken mitts.
" Betty, child, I didn't know you."
"Isn't it great?" said Betty. "Don't I look look pretty?
I can't get in your door, these hoops won't let me. I'm going
down in the parlor and practice moving around in them while you
get ready, Dick."
" Ready for what? " he asked.
" Oh, Dick, don't say you're not going. It would just break
my heart to miss the Fielding's party to-night."
1913-] THE RED ASCENT 339
"Is it to-night?" he asked helplessly.
" Why, Dick, you can't have forgotten so soon."
" But I had, Betty. I had my mind seems so small that I
can't squeeze in more than one idea at a time. Here I am sitting
up nights trying to take the Fielding's money away from them, and
they invite me to a party."
" Pooh ! " said Betty, " of course they invite us. Jess Fielding
would rather have us than anybody in the county."
" I don't see why."
" There are times, Dick," she began smoothing her mitts over
her thin arms, " when I believe you are stupid in spite of all your
education."
" No doubt about it," he agreed good-naturedly.
" And this is one of the times," she continued. " Jess Fielding
wants us to come because well it gives her a boost socially
we are the bluest-blooded people in this county."
Richard smiled. " I don't believe she is such a fool," he said.
" But she is," repeated Betty knowingly. " Women are all
like that. We want the best people at our parties or none at all."
" And your definition of 'best,' Betty? "
" Grandfathers," she answered unhesitatingly, " great-grand-
fathers, great-great-grandfathers."
" Every man except Adam had those."
" Stupid ! " said Betty, " stupid again. You know the tradi-
tions of this county as well as I do. Get on that beautiful uniform
and come on. We'll make a stunning couple. See here are two
little curtain masks. I cut up one pincushion and one sachet bag
to make them ; black for you, white for me."
" But, Betty dear, upon my soul it hardly seems fair to accept
the Fielding's hospitality when I'm trying to get up a law case
against them."
" Fiddlesticks! " said Betty. " What have you found out? "
" Nothing."
" Have you any kind of proof ? "
" None."
" Have you the shadow of a chance of winning your case?"
" Not yet."
"Everybody is dead," said Betty with cheerful resignation,
" so you'll never find out anything."
" But I'm trying."
" That makes no difference."
" Do you think she expects us ? "
340 THE RED ASCENT [June,
"Of course she does. I sent my acceptance two weeks ago.
She'll be dreadfully disappointed if we don't come."
He was very tired. He longed for some loophole of escape.
" But why should she be disappointed ? " he persisted.
" I just told you," she said beginning to lose patience. " She
will think we want to snub her, and no girl enjoys being snubbed.
If you don't want to go I suppose I can stay at home."
Her eager little face looked so pathetic beneath the meshes of
the veil that he resolved to martyr himself at once. " Cheer up,
I'll get ready. It won't take me fifteen minutes to hitch old Pedro
to the buggy. I haven't had any plowing these last few days, so
he may travel along with a little spirit."
" But, Dick, you will have to dress ruffled shirt uniform."
" I'd forgotten that, too," he said, " but I'll go the whole gait
I promise you, even if I do feel like a second-class hero in a melo-
drama."
Betty went singing blithely down the stairs, and passed into the
blackness of the parlor. Once there she felt her way cautiously to
the mantel, and, having successfully located the match box, she
lighted all the candles that stood in the twisted silver sconces.
Two mirrors that hung between the windows at either end of the
long room reflected the flickering lights over and over again. Betty
seemed to walk in a labyrinth of rooms with twenty other hoop-
skirted brides pirouetting for their grooms.
At last Richard came. Betty gave a little scream of delight.
" Colonel, Colonel," she called, " come and see us ! Come and see !
Oh! Dick, look at yourself in the mirror. I believe you are the
handsomest man I ever saw. Your shoulders are so broad and
you are so tall so perfectly proportioned, and those gorgeous but-
tons. Oh, I don't wonder that girls go crazy over brass buttons."
" Betty," he said laughing, putting his hand over her mouth,
" you're trying to make amends for dragging me out to-night.
I feel like an idiot, don't make me look like one."
The Colonel came limping across the hall : " What's all this? "
he said. " What's all this commotion about? "
Betty dropped him a curtsey, her wide skirt spread out like an
inflated balloon. "We are going to the Fielding's masquerade
ball."
""Taking up with that trash, eh?"
" She invited us," said Betty defensively, the laughter dying
out of her eyes. " I'm sure she is an educated girl, and she's been
everywhere, seen everything, knows all kinds of nice people."
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 341
"Hm," said the Colonel, pulling at his gray goatee, "the
country's money mad. The Fieldings are as common as dirt."
" I feel quite at home in dirt," said Richard.
The Colonel turned, there was no mistaking the look of startled
wonder on his face. " Where where did you get those clothes ? "
Richard stood at attention and gave the military salute. " I
am the ghost of my grandfather," he said smiling.
The Colonel's deep set eyes filled with a suspicious moisture ; he
fumbled for his handkerchief and blew his nose with excited energy.
" You have on the uniform of an officer," he said at last. " You
should have a sword my sword. The only decent thing the
Yankees ever did was sending that sword back to me."
" Because 'of the brave fight you made and your valiant cour-
age in defeat when you were outnumbered.' I remember the
words of the message. Mother taught them to me before I was
eight years old."
" Did she ? " said the Colonel, and there was something youth-
ful in his eagerness. " I didn't know she cared so much as that.
You must wear the sword to-night, Dick. By heaven, sir, I would
have been proud to have had you in my regiment."
He reached for the sword that hung above the mantel, and
unsheathing it he stood for a moment forgetful of the years.
The cold impact of the steel seemed to revivify his youth, the
only part of his life that had seemed worth while to him, the life
that had called for endurance, decisiveness, self-denial, virtues that
he had not felt the necessity of practicing before or since. The
best that was in him had surrendered when a military victory
was lost.
Richard was keen enough to realize this. The sword was holy
in his eyes. " I don't believe I am fit to wear it," he said humbly.
The Colonel returned to the present, irritated with himself
for his useless dreaming. " And why not? " he demanded.
" It means so much."
"How can it to you?"
" I am your son."
' You were born long after the war was over. What do you
know about it?"
" But the sword ! It typifies so much. Somehow it seems
a sort of sacrilege to wear it to a masquerade."
" We are all maskers," said the Colonel cynically. " All the
world is masquerading. Your costume must be complete, my son,
I'm only arming you for the battle."
342
THE RED ASCENT [June,
As Richard took the sword he stooped and kissed the smooth
surrendering hand that held it out to him; this touch of reverence
displeased the Colonel. He had no taste for anything that seemed
to border on mediaeval ritualism.
" My Lord, boy," he said wiping his hand on hi$ rusty coat.
" I'm no potentate, and you're no knight, hysterical after an all
night vigil."
The atmosphere of idealism which had seemed to surround the
Colonel was pierced by the words. Richard turned away.
'* Perhaps I am hysterical," he said.
CHAPTER VIII.
The ancient Hedrick's mansion, which the Fieldings had bought
and remodelled, stood on a high hill far removed from the black
shaft of the coal mines. The grimy workers toiling in the low-
roofed chambers underground had built up this palace with their
products, but now, that the house was complete, the rich inmates
must not be offended by the sight of the dirty, sweating mass of
men who had supplied them with these luxuries. Close-branched
cedars had been planted to screen off this view of the valley, trel-
lises of roses walled in a sunken Italian-garden, which in the old
days had boasted only a few sombre box bushes; but now it was
riotously abloom. And to-night even the trees along the driveway
seemed to blossom forth miraculously, strung with tiny electric
bulbs of different colors.
Betty gasped with delight as the buggy wheels, scraping the
new iron gateway, passed into this wonderland.
" Did you ever see anything so beautiful in all your life? " she
said clasping her brother's arm in an ecstasy. " Look at the house,
Dick. Why, it's twice as big as it used to be. What can one girl
want with so many rooms ? "
" Why she doesn't live alone," he said quietly.
" Only a governess or chaperon, a little old lady by the name
of Miss White."
" Miss Fielding didn't call her that."
" Oh, I know Jess Fielding calls her Prunesy, or some such
pet name. I wish we had started earlier. I believe we are the last
to arrive."
As they neared the brilliantly-lighted house, a man in livery
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 343
came forward to take charge of old Pedro, who was wheezing from
his leisurely walk up the hill. Betty threw off the old linen duster
which she had worn over her voluminous dress, and, adjusting
her little curtain mask, she told Richard to do the same.
" We haven't any wraps/' she said, " so there is no use going
into the dressing room. Look at all the people on the porch. If
you don't put on your mask now everybody will know you."
" Since nobody knows me anyhow," began Richard.
" Oh, Dick, please, please act a little partified."
"My dear Betty, what's that?"
" Act like you were at a party. Be gay ; don't don't act
like a monk in a monastery."
He laughed. " Did you ever see a monk in a monastery ? "
But his question went unheeded. She ran lightly up the steps ;
a satin-coated courtier in a curly wig stood in the doorway.
" Who are you ? " he asked.
" A bride without a groom," answered Betty saucily.
" Then I'm the man you're looking for. Come dance with me.
You can't speak to your hostess because she's masked like the rest
of us. I'll propose to you if you'll tell me your name."
Betty whirled away into the maelstrom of dancers; Richard
followed her as far as the hall, uncertain of himself now that
he was no longer needed. This life was not foreign to Betty;
these young men and girls were her friends, her neighbors. She
slipped back into gayety, after the long tiresome winter, with an
ease and energy that showed Richard what the privation of it
meant to her.
For fully half an hour Richard stood half-hidden behind some
tall palms, forgetful of his awkwardness as he viewed the unusual
scene in front of him. All sorts and conditions of people seemed
gathered together in the big flower-decked room. Characters from
Mother Goose; characters from his favorite fairy tales; characters
from history and romance. Puritans wearing their pointed hats,
austere looking goddesses, cowboys, Indians, sailors, soldiers, devils,
mingled before him with the fascinating incongruity of a dream.
Mr. Pickwick balanced himself upon a window sill, while Red
Riding Hood regaled him with some cookies that she carried in a
splint bottomed basket. Robinson Crusoe was dancing blissfully
with Queen Elizabeth; George Washington was pulling Bo-Peep's
long wiggy curls, and Oliver Cromwell was laughing heartily at
something that Cinderella had just whispered in his ear.
When the music stopped for a brief interlude, Richard heard
344 THE RED ASCENT [June,
a hissing, crackling sound at his side. He looked down, a girl in a
strange red and yellow costume stood beside him. Her hair fell
about her shoulders, and seemed a part of the diaphanous gauze of
which her dress was made. Suddenly she threw up her arms, and
by some trick he could not understand, her long flowing sleeves
flew upward until she looked as if she were enveloped in a spiral
flame.
" I'm Fire Fire Fire," she said. " Come out on the porch.
I'll blaze the way."
He was a trifle resentful that his retreat had been discovered.
" You're too dangerous," he smiled, hoping to escape her.
" I am, I am. I want to be."
" But I am prudence," he said standing still.
" You're a soldier," she retorted. " The first duty of a soldier
is to obey, the next is to court danger."
He laughed and followed her, not knowing how to refuse.
" I am only the wraith of a soldier," he said.
The wide brick portico was crowded now with the merry com-
pany who had been dancing but a moment before. The spectral
moonlight seemed the one thing needed to make the phantasy com-
plete. Richard looked around him wonderingly ; he was surrounded
by familiar friends. The heroes and heroines of his boyhood had
conspired to meet him in this unexpected way. His strenuosity,
his weariness, his disappointment fell from him. He was young
again, care free; he was part of this delightful unreal world of
" make believe."
The unseen orchestra began another waltz; there was a quick
interchange of partners, and the porch was deserted. Richard
stood alone with the flaming girl beside him.
" I can't ask you to dance because I don't know how," he
began half apologetically.
" I'm glad you don't," she answered.
" Why I thought you liked dancing."
" I think it's silly for a man."
" Then why do you do it? "
" Why, because everybody does."
"Is that a reason?"
" I thought it was. Come sit down on this bench and tell me
who I am."
* I don't know."
"Don't you care?"
"How can I?"
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 345
" Dear me," she sighed, " I thought you were scientific."
"What has that to do with it?"
"Doesn't science necessitate curiosity?"
" We call it the spirit of investigation," he said.
" Have you always been indifferent to women? "
" I haven't known any."
" You are not telling the truth, now," she said.
" I thought I was."
" Don't you care to know any? "
" I thought I didn't."
Again her arms shot upward, the soft gauze waved above
her head, she spun around until she seemed a pillar of flame. " I'm
Fire Fire Fire," she said in a low rhymthic voice, " and you are
a man of ice. Suppose suppose that I should try and melt you."
The spirit of harlequin caught him at last. " I'm armed
against all dangers," he cried, and drawing his sword he pinned
her trailing dress to the floor. " Now you cannot get away until
you tell me who you are."
" I like my mask," she said.
He threw his from him. " Mine is infernally hot," he said.
She caught the bit of silk before it landed in the tangled jasa-
mine vine. " It was no disguise," she said crumpling it in her hand.
" Why I have been away so long I thought I had passed beyond
all remembrance."
" But not beyond mine," she whispered softly.
Her tone bewildered him. " If this is flirting," he said blun-
deringly, " I know nothing of the game. You will find me as
awkward as a Hottentot."
The girl laughed. " But don't you find me interesting? " she
asked.
" Take off your mask, and I'll tell you."
" I prefer to keep it on."
" Then you don't want your question answered ? "
" I have intuitions."
" And what do they amount to ? "
' They tell me that you will go home and think about me ; it
is a good beginning."
"The beginning of what?"
"Of your learning the game."
" But I don't want to learn it. I haven't the time."
" You think that now."
346 THE RED ASCENT [June,
" I'll think it always."
'' Your manners are not good," she admitted. " Try to forget
me and see if you can."
"Why shouldn't I?"
" Because you never had a woman talk to you this way before."
"Is that why you did it?"
" Perhaps because maybe," she said provokingly. " Don't
you like it?"
" Take off your mask."
" Never." There was a sound of tearing gauze, and she had
fled from him, leaving a portion of her train impaled on the point
of his sword. He watched her passing through the moonlight
waving her arms. " I'm Fire Fire Fire," she intoned. He saw
her cutting her way through the crowd that had again poured out
upon the porch. Red Riding Hood gave a little scream of mock
terror; Boy Blue huddled in a corner and begged her to go away;
Queen Elizabeth caught her in her arms, and cried, " Fire and blood-
shed, you are part of my reign. Yours is the most beautiful
costume in the room." Then Oliver Cromwell came forward and
claimed her for a dance.
Richard stood in front of the low window, still watching her as
she danced lightly in the arms of the smiling Roundhead. He had
to confess that she had piqued his curiosity, roused his interest.
For the first time in his life he was experiencing that world-old
charm that lies in the subtlety of womanhood. He had heard
someone say that there would be a general unmasking after the
next dance, and, as he waited, he was surprised at his own impa-
tience. But before the next dance began, Fire had disappeared,
Cromwell had sought another partner, and when the masks were
taken off, amid shouts of laughter and surprise, Fire was nowhere
to be seen.
Miss Fielding, dressed like several others in the room in the
trailing gown of a Greek goddess, greeted her guests. A little lady
with bobbing curls and spectacles followed her around, adding her
welcome to that of the young hostess.
Richard, remembering the conversation by the swimming pool,
recognized Miss Prunesy Prisms at once, but the whole scene had
suddenly lost interest for him. He did not want to acknowledge
his disappointment even to himself. He had wanted to identify
Fire, arid she had eluded him. Now that the young people had
unmasked, he felt himself to be more than ever an alien. In such
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 347
a throng his hostess would not miss him; he would steal away
somewhere into the garden, and lie down on one of the many
benches and watch the stars, then, when it was time for leave taking,
he would call for Betty, and they would go home.
As he moved from the shadow of the window shutter, he did
not see that little Miss White was standing in the doorway, looking
for scattered guests that she might invite them in to supper. As
the moonlight fell full upon his face, the old lady's eyes were
riveted upon him in a stare that seemed almost sightless, then,
with a half-hushed scream, she fell fainting to the floor.
He was beside her in a moment. Most of the merry makers
had passed through the hallway into the hospitable dining room
in the western wing of the house, but as Richard stooped over the
frail little lady he heard Miss Fielding say with a calm that proved
she was undismayed by the emergency:
" Can you lift her? Will you bring her up stairs? "
The old lady's frame was as spare as a sparrow's; her nerves
and her energy had burned up any surplus flesh that she might
have acquired in her late years of luxurious living. Richard lifted
her in his arms with that rare reverence that youth sometimes
offers old age, and carrying her easily up the broad stairs, he
placed her in her high four-poster.
" Now go ask the butler for the brandy and bring it here
yourself," commanded Miss Fielding, loosening the old lady's
dress. " Don't tell anyone. We don't want to cast a pall
over the party. Prunesy has fainted once or twice before."
Richard retraced his steps, and finding the grizzly-headed
butler gathering chairs from the hall, he ordered him to bring the
decanter at once. The butler was too well trained to exhibit either
surprise or hesitation. He had been brought up in a region where
a " gentleman's thirst " was to be regarded, not deplored.
Richard carried the heavy decanter back to the bedroom, and
helped Miss Fielding force some of the liquor between her old
friend's pale lips. Miss Prunesy gasped and opened her faded eyes.
" Jessica, Jessica, dear," she said feebly, clinging to the girl's
strong hand, " I I saw a ghost upon the porch."
" Nonsense," said the girl, kneeling beside the bed and gather-
ing the little lady in her arms until the bobbing curls were hidden
in her warm embrace. " Prunesy, you are dreaming."
" I saw him distinctly," said the old lady trembling now, " I
saw him in the moonlight."
348 THE RED ASCENT [June,
" Who ? " asked the girl stooping to kiss the wrinkled cheek.
" He he was once a soldier," said the old lady dreamily.
Jessica looked up at Richard as if she had suddenly remem-
bered his presence. " Of course he was," she said soothingly.
" Prunesy, I've always suspected that your lover was killed in the
war."
" But he was not killed."
" Then how can you see his ghost? "
" He died. He died many years afterwards."
" Prunesy ! Prunesy ! Your ghost was quite alive. I'll
show him to you some day. Here take another sip of brandy
you're better now. All these years you've been longing to see a
ghost, and when you come across a real substantial one, you haven't
strength to question him. Come. I'm going to send Martha
to undress you and put you to bed. You will be all right in the
morning. Sure you feel better now? Then I'll go downstairs,
back to my guests."
Richard had retreated as soon as he realized that he was the
direct cause of the old lady's fright; he stood in the hall outside
the bedroom door waiting to see if he could be of any further
service. As soon as Miss Fielding had summoned a neat negro
maid from one of the nearby dressing rooms, she joined him upon
the stairs.
" I believe Prunesy was in love with your grandfather," she
said. " I think I remember her hinting at it one day; and you
have borrowed his clothes, I know, for you look so different
from when I saw you last, or, perhaps, we are all dreaming dreams
to-night."
" I believe we are," he admitted slowly.
"What! You?"
" The whole thing has seemed very unreal," he said.
" And you care only for realities? "
The old look of weariness came into his eyes. " I'm tired of
realities."
She leaned slightly on his arm as they descended the wide
steps together. " Some realities are not to be despised. Food for
instance. Let us go and hunt for some ice cream together."
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
JOHN R. G. HASSARD.
BY JAMES J. WALSH, M.D., PH.D.
N the 1 8th of April, 1888, just about twenty-
five years ago, John R. G. Hassard, who had been for
nearly twenty-five years before that very prominent
in the literary and newspaper life of New York,
passed away. For something over twenty years
Hassard had been attached to the Tribune successively in the diverse
posts of special writer, reviewer, managing editor, musical and
literary critic, as well as in furnishing various special contributions
of other kinds to the Tribune of those days. This year I was asked
to lecture on him in the Summer School Extension Course, and was
rather surprised to find that it was by no means easy to secure
materials with regard to the details of his literary career, as well
as the influence of his personality.
He was entirely too important in the Catholic life of New
York, during the quarter of a century when this was becoming
the greatest Catholic city in the world, for us to allow him to find
a place so soon as this among forgotten worthies. He wrote a
life of Archbishop Hughes, that has all the qualities of a fine
literary biography composed on the strictest of modern lines, using
as far as possible the documents of the man himself to illustrate
and set forth his career. He was the author of a popular life of
Pius IX., in which his training as a newspaper man was particularly
valuable. Two of his series of letters to the Tribune, those in
which he followed the scenes of Dickens' novels, and those written
from Bayreuth on the occasion of the first performance of the
Nibelungen Ring there in 1876, were republished in book form.
He was one of the editors of THE CATHOLIC WORLD at its founda-
tion, and as Father Hecker wisely placed the greatest confidence
in his judgment, Hassard had undoubtedly much to do with making
THE CATHOLIC WORLD at once a distinctly literary periodical, in
the permanent value of its contributions very different from what
the religious magazine is sometimes supposed to be.
No better time than the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death
could well be found for gathering the materials that sum up his
career. A number of those who knew Hassard well, have written
350 JOHN R. G. HASSARD [June,
me very charming letters with regard to the personality of the man.
Many a man in newspaper work in New York, and many a promi-
nent writer of the literary world of the time, had imbibed the bitter-
est prejudices against Catholics. Most of them in the early sixties
could scarcely understand how any man with reasonable common
sense, and above all any man with a broad education, could possibly
remain a Catholic.
To such men Hassard was a revelation. He was thoroughly
well educated, a scholar, in the best sense of the word, who knew
and kept up his classics, and who also knew French and German
very well, and the literatures of both these languages. He had a
fine literary taste, and a rare musical culture. To come in contact
with him was to love him. To know him was to be made aware
that there was a depth to Catholicity, and* above all to Catholic
thinking, of which the American world had very little idea at that
time. It must not be forgotten that when Hassard graduated
at Fordham in the middle of the fifties, and began his
career as a newspaper man, the Know Nothing movement
was just at its climax. Well-known publishers in New York
were quite willing to take up the publication of vile books
in which a wild series of stories as to the abuses in convents were
told, and utterly groundless accusations made. Maria Monk was
the most popular book of that time the best seller which appealed
at once to the pruriency and the religious prejudice of the time.
To this generation the life and influence of such a Catholic scholar
as Hassard was quite literally a godsend. We can only think
of it now as providential.
John Rose Greene Hassard was born September 24, 1836, in
Houston Street, New York City, almost opposite the old Convent
of Mercy. His name Hassard was French, and the family was
probably of Huguenot origin. His mother was a granddaughter
of Commodore Nicholson of Revolutionary fame. His parents
were Episcopalians, and belonged to the Rev. Thomas
Preston's Church before he became a convert to Catholicity. At
the age of fifteen Hassard became a convert, and all his life re-
tained a most fervent affection for Monsignor Preston, who received
him into the Church. He was a boy of singular purity of heart
and life and thought, and this charming quality remained with him
all his life, and is emphasized by all his biographers.
H*e early gave signs of intellectual vigor and promise. After
his conversion he became persuaded that it was his vocation to be a
1913-] JOHN R. G. HASSARD 351
priest, and it was in pursuance of this idea that he went to Fordham
apparently just after his conversion. In 1850-51 he appears in the
Fordham catalogue as John Hassard, so that there would seem
to be some question as to whether he had not been there before his
conversion, whioh is set down as 1851.
As a consequence of his brilliant Freshman year apparently,
he was allowed to make his Sophomore and Junior years together.
His name does not occur in the prize lists in 1853 and 1854, though
it is in the catalogue, but he graduated in 1854-55 at the head of his
class. At the Commencement for the year 1856-57, he received his
degree of M. A.
After his graduation Hassard entered the Diocesan Seminary,
which was then also situated at Fordham, to study for the priest-
hood. His delicate health, however, soon made it clear that this
was not his place in life, and he gave it up, and gradually drifted
into journalistic work, at which he had dabbled as a student at
Fordham. He and James McMahon, who afterwards as Colonel
McMahon of the Sixty-ninth regiment of New York City, the
famous Irish regiment, served with such distinction in the Civil
War, and General Martin T. McMahon, afterwards the beloved
Judge McMahon, and Arthur Francis, a clever classmate at college,
founded and managed the first college paper published at Fordham.
It was known as the Goose Quill, doubtless because of the mode of
its publication. The first issue came out under the presidency of
Father Larkin, who was very much opposed to newspapers in gen-
eral, and refused to allow this one to be printed. It was circulated
in written copies, of which I think only one set remains. It was
published by being posted in the reading room, though even the
permission to do this was long withheld by Father Larkin, and only
grudgingly given.
After his withdrawal from the Seminary, young Hassard
was for sometime the secretary of Archbishop Hughes. He con-
tinued to occupy the post until the Archbishop's death in January,
1864. After the Archbishop's death, the task of writing the
prelate's life, for which his years of secretaryship had so well pre-
pared him, naturally fell to Hassard, and this was published in the
following year by D. Appleton and Company.
In the meantime Hassard had been writing a series of articles
for the first edition of the American Encyclopedia, and had been
helping in the editing of it. He impressed Dr. George Ripley, one
of the editors of the work, so much that when Ripley went to
352 JOHN R. G. HASSARD [June,
Europe, he engaged young Hassard to fill his post of Literary
Editor of the Tribune. This seems to have occurred in 1864 after
Archbishop Hughes' death. In 1865 Father Hecker, of the recently-
established Paulists, founded THE CATHOLIC WORLD, and Hassard
became the Editor. His experience on the American Encyclopedia,
and the many friendships that he had already made because of his
connection with the Tribune, were of great help to him in this
position. He was able to secure articles and interest literary folk
generally in the magazine, and as a consequence it began almost at
once to attract attention from those outside the Church.
In 1866 he left the editorship of THE CATHOLIC WORLD to go
to Chicago with Charles A. Dana, who had selected him as one
of his assistants for the editorship of the Chicago Republican,
which Dana was about to found. When that venture failed
the following year, Hassard returned to the Tribune, and con-
tinued to be connected with that paper practically until his death
more than twenty years later.
After the death of Horace Greeley in 1872, for sometime he
held the post of managing editor, and then became well-known as
the musical critic of the Tribune. Monsignor Preston once said of
him, and few men knew him better : " Although he never learned
music from a master, he could play almost any piece on the organ,
and follow with the score the most difficult symphonies. I have
heard Theodore Thomas express the greatest admiration for his
musical abilities, and say that he considered him the best critic
in that particular branch whom he had ever seen or known." His
musical library, one of the best private libraries in that department
in the country, went to the Cathedral library on his death.
He was the original Wagnerian among Americans who in-
fluenced others to appreciate properly the work that Wagner had
done for music, and the genius with which he had combined the two
great arts of music and the drama. When, in 1876, on the completion
of the great theatre and opera house at Bayreuth, the Nibelungen
Tetralogy was for the first time given in what the master con-
sidered a worthy manner in a worthy setting, Hassard made the
pilgrimage to what was to be for Wagner ians thereafter the musical
Mecca, and wrote a series of letters to the Tribune describing his
experience. These are sometimes said to have done more to make
" the music of the future," as Wagner loved to call it, better
known, and above all to secure a serious hearing for it in America,
than anything that had been done up to that time. The letters
1913.] JOHN R. G. HASSARD 353,
have the definite detail, the human sympathy, the picturesque
quality that came so naturally to Hassard from his newspaper ex-
perience, but above all they show rare insight into the music and
the drama, and are full of the spirit of the wonderful presenta-
tion and the magnificent stage setting so worthily given to the Wag-
nerian music dramas. Even at the present time there are few books
more likely to set one directly in sympathy with Wagner, and the
music movement originated by him, than Hassard's Ring of The
Nibelungs a description of its performance in August, 1876, at
Bayreuth.
Besides his musical criticisms, he wrote also many book reviews,
and not all in the conventional way. His reviews were often
looked for appreciatively by those who had no hint of the man him-
self. In his sketch of Hassard's life, published just after his death
in the Evening Post, Joseph Bucklin Bishop said : " He could put
the atmosphere of a book into his review of it, and the work always
bore the stamp of his personal character. His censure never carried
a sting with it, and though he could smite hard and strike home on
occasions, he always dealt his blows like a true man and a Christian
gentleman."
In the meantime Hassard had published other books besides
the Bayreuth letters, though it happened that this year, 1877, was
a crowded year of publications by him. A life of Pope Pius IX.
written just after the pontiff's death ; a history of the United States
for Catholic schools, besides the work on Wagner's performance,
were all issued in 1877. Some ten years before he had completed
a life of Archbishop Hughes, which has remained the standard life
of that great prelate.
For lovers of Dickens, Hassard's A Pickwickian Pilgrimage
will be very interesting. He followed faithfully through the scenes
described by Dickens. As the slums of London have since changed
very much, this record has now become a precious historical docu-
ment for the understanding of Dickens, and one of abiding value.
A very interesting incident in Hassard's life as a newspaper
man, was the translation of the cipher telegrams which had been
sent during the Tilden-Hayes post-election uncertainty, when a
single electoral vote stood between Mr. Tilden and the Presidency.
Unfortunately the incident was to have serious consequences for
Hassard, for all of his friends attribute the beginning of the serious
development of his consumption to the uninterrupted work for days
which he gave to this problem.
VOL. XCVII. 23.
354 JOHN R. G. HASSARD [June,
Unfortunately Hassard's absorption night and day in this
problem deprived him of sleep, and seriously impaired his health.
Great things were hoped for from him, however, but they were not
to be. It is interesting to know that in the early eighties,
when the circulation of the New York World, which was then con-
ducted very much on the lines of the Evening Post of the present
time, was rapidly decreasing. Monsignor Preston and Father
Dealy, S J., made a definite effort to secure sufficient money to pur-
chase and finance it, so as to make it a representative Catholic daily.
They were quite sure that the need was so great that it would
not be hard to make wealthy Catholics feel the necessity of having
not only a religious organ, but a great representative daily paper,
all of the writers for which would be men of Catholic principles.
Hassard was to have been the managing editor ; his long and varied
experience in newspaper work eminently fitted him for the position,
but it is doubtful whether his health, so seriously undermined, would
have permitted him to take it up. There proved to be no need for
him to make the decision, however, because in spite of the evident
necessity for such a paper, which has continued all during the thirty
years since, no Catholic daily has yet been founded, though almost
every phase of opinion and nationality has a daily paper in New
York.
For some years after this a good deal of Hassard's time was
spent in an unavailing search after health. During the time when
he was so much absorbed in the solution of the cipher telegrams,
a cold developed that hung on. Hassard spent a winter in Nassau,
a winter in the south of France, and spent his summer in a camp
in the Adirondacks Only one year did he venture to winter at
Saranac. The disease made progress in spite of every effort, and
Hassard faced the inevitable with calmness, working as well as he
could, and utterly uncomplaining. Sketches of him are full of this
unselfish trait. It was not realized until a few days before the end
that he was very seriously ill, and his passing was so quiet that Mon-
signor Preston, who stayed over night at the house, said that no one
could tell the moment of his death. He had faced eternity with the
quiet calmness that he had displayed towards an ever-advancing dis-
ease, and fortified by the sacraments of the Church, which had been .
such a source of consolation to him during his long and trying ill-
ness, he retained his consciousness almost to the end, dying sur-
roundeM by his wife and some near relatives.
Hassard's personal character was very charming, and produced
1913.] JOHN R. G. HASSARD 355
a deep impression on all those who came closely in contact with him.
Mr. Joseph Bucklin Bishop, now Secretary of the Isthmian Canal
Commission, said in a personal letter : " Hassard was my warm
personal friend for many years, and I have found no one since his
death to take his place. His was the most unselfish, gentle, pure
spirit I have ever known, and his love for me fell upon my life as
a benediction."
Men who are now old, and for whom the world has had many
experiences and disillusions, who knew him well years ago, speak
in this hearty, feeling, reverential way about him. At the time of
his death, William Winter expressed it very strikingly in his obit-
uary in the New York Tribune: " Mr. Hassard was always
thoughtful of others, always doing little acts of courtesy and kind-
ness." He had begun his obituary proper with the words : " The
duty of recording his death falls naturally upon one who in life,
and for many years, stood nearest his side, and was honored with
his affection and confidence. It is inexpressibly pathetic and
solemn to the friend who writes these words, for not alone is it
fitting that love should utter the sense of bereavement, but that
thought should express its conviction of public no less than per-
sonal loss."
Mr. Winter said of Mr. Hassard's career :
Mr. Hassard was a journalist, but he was also a man of
letters, and in both capacities exerted eminent talents in a pro-
foundly conscientious spirit, and with a passionate loyalty to the
highest standard of principle, learning, and taste.
As a journalist he knew that the first and most essential func-
tion of a newspaper is the presentation of news; but as a man
of letters he was aware that the pictorial facts, and the facts
of thought and feeling, are not less actual or less important
than the superficial aspects of the passing hour. [Italics are
ours; the expression seems so significant for our time, when
such journalism is more sadly needed than in the seventies.]
He treated many subjects, ranging over a period of many
years, during which he was in the continuous service of the
press, and writing in the different veins of narrative, descrip-
tion, criticism, satire, and desultory comment. But whatever
the subject might be, he never failed either to satisfy his read-
ers that every material fact of the matter had been stated,
or to impress their minds with his absolute sincerity, his breadth
of view, his wisdom, his pure moral principle, his fine and true
356 JOHN R. G. HASSARD [June,
taste, and his noble ideals of social order and personal comment.
It was this double power, this power of presenting the picture
of actual life, and at the same time of indicating its motive, its
interior spirit, its accessories, and its meaning that made him an
exceptional force in the profession which he dignified and
adorned, and which suffers in his death an irreparable loss.
No more touching tribute to an American newspaper man has
perhaps ever been written ; none that one could well wish to deserve
more than the paragraph of Mr. Winter's obituary, in which he
sums up Hassard's character:
The great public of miscellaneous readers cannot, perhaps,
rationally be supposed to cherish any very deep interest in such
a personality for any great length of time after its career has
ended. But it was a personality that blessed many who never
heard of it, while those whose privilege it was to know Mr.
Hassard well, and to know his labors and their value, will
eagerly and tenderly meditate now upon the rare qualities and
beautiful traits of his mind, and will be very slow to forget
the charm of his companionship, and the lesson of his pure,
blameless, devoted, and beneficent life.
The estimation in which he was held by his close friends can
be judged very well from the concluding paragraph of Bucklin
Bishop's obituary in the Evening Post:
All his work was in brief like himself, full of gentleness,
dignity, and sweetness. He put his personality into all that
he did, and he was a very keen observer ; had a delightful sense
of humor, and a quick insight into the motives and conduct of
his fellowman, yet he never said a word or wrote a line which
carried pain or left a wound. He was as full of charity and
helpfulness to others as he was absolutely lacking in the quality
of selfishness. It was a lifelong habit with him never to speak
of his own work or his own feelings. From the beginning to
the end of his long illness, not one word of impatience or of
complaint escaped him. A more unselfish, generous, noble soul
never lived. No man ever knew him but to become his friend,
and in all the world he had no enemies. He was a true man,
t a faithful friend, a good workman, a devout Christian, and the
world which is better because he lived in it is poorer to-day,
as it always is, when such a spirit departs from it.
1913.] JOHN R. G. HASSARD 357
Father Campbell, S.J., in his sermon at the funeral, described
that charm of Hassard's personal character of which we find echo
in the letters from those who knew him best :
What a beautiful life his was, what wonder is it Jesus loved
him! From the early days at school, where his memory still
lingers as a benediction, and where the mention of his name
calls up enthusiasm in the old professors who first guided his
eager footsteps in the ways of virtue afterwards through all
his eventful and full, but tranquil and alas! too brief career,
which seems as we look at it in retrospect as if bathed in
the soft radiance of the uninterrupted light of God's love
onward until it led to those nine weary years of suffering,
which were borne with a sweet resignation that disguised its
keenness and extent, and were made to perfect the exquisite
powers of the mind while the weak frame was wasting away,
down to that supreme moment when again like his beloved
namesake he fell asleep on the bosom of Christ, who can say
that there was anything in his singularly beautiful life to
repel the tenderness which the Redeemer of the world has for
souls that live in Him in purity and faith. He whose lips never
uttered words not tender and loving to the humblest that came
within the sphere of his gentle influence, whose heart never
harbored rancor or ill will, who, as one of his devoted friends
has written of him, has never lost a friend nor made an enemy,
could not be repellent or harsh or cold when the heart of
Christ was pleading.
That these tender expressions were not the result of the imme-
diate sense of loss alone, but the utterance of deep feelings never
to be forgotten, can be judged from Mr. Bucklin Bishop's letter
to me, already quoted, written twenty-five years after Hassard's
death. In his little volume, Old Shrines and Ivy, published years
afterwards, Mr. William Winter renews his appreciation of Has-
sard in terms that are not less hearty nor less affectionate.
Among the old-fashioned phrases of eulogy, there is one that
long usage has rendered conventional; but it is very expres-
sive : He was a gentleman and a scholar. It is much to deserve
those names. John Hassard entirely deserved them, and he
bore them with the sweet modesty, unconscious humility, and
native and winning gentleness of an unselfish nature. He was
always thoughtful for others; always doing acts of courtesy
358 JOHN R. G. HASSARD [June,
and kindness. He was ever to be found on the side of chivalry
toward women, and his active consideration for young people,
especially for working boys, and his sweet manner toward
children, much endeared him wherever he went.
While Hassard was an extremely quiet and peaceful man yet,
when aroused, he was well capable of fighting a question out very
thoroughly, especially when the question involved was one that
touched him deeply. This was particularly true of religious bigotry
and prejudice, and in his time there was, if possible, more oppor-
tunity either to bear grimly with ignorance and foolishness, or to
strike back, than there is in our own. On a number of occa-
sions Hassard's temper was aroused, and men learned that there was
a limit to his patience. A rather bigoted Protestant had insisted
in the public press on the abuse of State moneys in giving them
to Catholic charities, and had hinted that no proper accounting for
such moneys was ever rendered. Hassard set a board of ac-
countants at work, and after weeks of investigation the report
that he published showed every dollar of money spent at Catholic
institutions properly accounted for; that charity was accom-
plished without waste, and above all without the big administrative
expenses that characterized Protestant institutions. This pub-
lication created a sensation, and silenced carping critics for this
generation.
It would be idle to claim for Mr. Hassard merit and greatness,
that he would have been himself the first to repudiate. He was
eminently sane and properly modest, and his estimate of his own
qualities was always humble. He did fine work, however, in his in-
fluence on his own generation, and especially on the educated people
of New York in his day. His intense Catholicity made that influence
all the more precious for the Church. The admiration for his beau-
tiful character, together with the affection it evoked, his wide eru-
dition, his really deep scholarship in subjects with which he was ac-
quainted, and his unerring taste in matters literary and musical, all
attracted attention to him, while his unobtrusive but fervent Catho-
licity made those who knew him well feel very differently towards
the Church of which he thought so much. Example above all, when
it is close up, counts for ever so much more than precept, and the
life of a man of this kind has a far more potent influence than any
amount of controversy.
John R. G; Hassard was one of Fordham's contributions to the
1913-] JOHN R. G. HASSARD 359
better part of the life of New York City. There were many others
during the latter half of the nineteenth century, but perhaps none
that accomplished so well what beloved old St. John's would most
care to have her sons do. Hassard himself had the tenderest mem-
ories of his years there, and of the precious associations there
formed, and felt all his life the deep influence of her teaching. This
was one of the most charming recollections of the little communica-
tions that, as an editor of the Fordham Monthly, I had with him
in Father Dealy's time. It was a renewal of affection for
what was really Alma Mater to him, the fond mother of his young
manhood, to come back to Fordham. To the student for whom as
yet distance had not lent the enchantment of college days, it came
as a surprise to note the depth of that affection. It was an incentive
to higher things to see how the old life lived for him, and how
much he felt its influence a quarter of a century after his immersion
in the busy life of the metropolis. Fordham men at least will not
willingly let the memory of Hassard pass into oblivion, and it is
the memory of the old place and the old days that almost more than
anything else has led to the writing of this sketch, which I fondly
hope will renew for a third generation of New York Catholics the
memory of one of our dearest and venerated alumni.
THE RAINBOW CRYSTAL.
BY JEANIE DRAKE.
HEN Dr. Marbury excited the passing wonder of his
colleagues by inviting the young and, as yet, obscure
Dr. Norman Joyce to be his assistant, he explained
as much as he ever explained anything save some
novel, scientific theory.
" The young fellow shows promise. He need not hamper me;
can take considerable drudgery off my hands, and so afford me
more leisure for experiment."
Dr. Joyce himself was full of amazement when the proposition,
briefly but with flattering directness, was laid before him. He was
not aware that the distinguished surgeon had, for months, been
quietly but keenly observant of him at lecture, convention, clinic,
and all such occasions as assemble equally the great and small of
their profession.
" You overwhelm me, Dr. Marbury," he declared. " There
are many of twice my age and reputation who would feel honored,
as I do, by such a compliment; but "
" Yes."
" I should burden you. I have so little experience with the
wealthy and fanciful invalid class."
" That," with easy cynicism, " is quickly learned."
Then Norman Joyce found courage to confront the keen gaze
which watched him. "Perhaps. But you know Flint Street?"
" I have heard of it. Somewhere in the slums, isn't it? One
of the dirty, disease-breeding purlieus which disgrace the city."
The young man's face was very red ; but he continued stoutly :
" My office is there. I have practiced among those poor creatures
ever since graduation. I should find it hard, I might even say
they would, if I should abandon them entirely."
" Surely you would not let that sort of thing stand in the way
of such advancement as I offer? Besides" impressively "the
chance of studying such problems as interest the expert physician."
" Are these greater among the rich than among the poor? "
" No, but the renown and reward are greater. What," with
some impatience, " are you asking, Dr. Joyce? "
1913.] THE RAINBOW CRYSTAL 361
" This," said the young man, with deference, but firmly, " that
in accepting this great honor, I may have certain free hours
daily/'
" Do these," he had nearly said " vermin," but substituted
" people, pay you at all? "
" A little," flushing again, as a picture rose in his mind of his
one bare room over the office in Flint Street.
The great specialist's electric brougham was waiting for him,
and his moments were precious. " Have your way, then," he said.
" We will arrange as to hours and salary later."
As he rolled swiftly away from the hospital, Dr. Joyce boarded
a crowded trolley car. Hanging to a strap, he suddenly realized,
for the first time, this wonderful thing which had happened to him.
Dr. Marbury, whose lectures and clinics had been to him, in
student days, awe-inspiring, momentous events; whose printed
words in medical journals he had devoured; whose surgical work
he had watched in breathless admiration of the clear, comprehending
gaze; the deft and certain movements of the wrist; the amazingly
few and precise turns of the keen steel on its swift mission. He
had always regarded him as a bright, particular star, from whom
half a universe divided his own unknown and struggling self. That
he should be selected, among the juniors, to be such a man's partner,
even though salaried, it was stupendous ! " What will Mrs. RafTerty
say to this ? " he wondered, with a tremendous twist of his rather
plain features.
He was soon to know, for the trolley had wormed its way,
from the stately region where the great hospital stood, down into
streets where swarmed struggling and suffering thousands. At one
of the dingiest and noisiest corners, he swung himself off, and pres-
ently ran up the broken steps of a shabby house.
' You're behind your time," complained the stalwart, florid
woman who met him in a narrow hallway, full of the odors of
cookery. And little Johnny fair wailin' for ye."
He knew this for a touch of the Celtic imagination, so he only
smiled as he went in to pat the wistful, little cripple on the head.
He attended to the pitiful claims of those awaiting him with his
usual care and patience. And the beef and cabbage had been
warmed over twice before he tasted and left it.
" Sure," said the landlady, who mothered him, according to
warm heart and small means, "yer appetite's clean gone waitin'
till this hour! Anyhow, 'tis small good it'd do ye eatin' on the
jump."
362 THE RAINBOW CRYSTAL [June,
" I do give you a lot of trouble, Mrs. Rafferty. Now, how
would you like to be rid of me? "
" Rid of ye, is it? Now, what's that mane? "
He jumped, apprehensively, into an account of the impending
change; nor was he mistaken in its effect. For already was her
apron over her head, and her stout body rocking to and fro.
" Oh, wirra, wirra, him that's been like a child to me ! Him
that brung me from death's dure last year with the pneumony, an'
was that long sufferin' with a cranky old woman, an' wouldn't
take a cent from Tim "
" Now, see here, Mrs. Rafferty, if you go on that way, I'll
send you a bill that will make you sit up. Am I going to the
North Pole or to Africa? And and listen, Mrs. Rafferty"
desperately " I'm keeping my office here, and will be back every
day and straight to you if you get pneumonia again, which you'd
better not do. You ought," with reproach, " to be rejoicing in my
good fortune."
" Then, that's true for ye," wiping her eyes, and straightening
her combs. " I'll I'll just be packing your things."
" Not much of a job," he laughed, and went out to make
some neighborhood calls. " Frenchy, of coorse," muttered Mrs.
Rafferty, putting his slender belongings together.
" It's an ordeal," sighed Dr. Joyce, mounting the rickety
stairs of the swarming tenement, where existed the last of his
many poor patients. For each of these had shown feeling at the
prospect of his removal as deep, if not as boisterous, as Mrs.
Rafferty's. " Now, then, Aristide, how goes it? " he asked, reach-
ing the young Frenchman's squalid garret.
" 111 enough, my doctor," answered Aristide Remy. " It was
an evil day when I tempted the rigors of this climate for what?
For more money, if you please, which I shall never have. I should
have been content with a competence in my own land, for I was
not strong. There was health there, and wants were simple in my
Limoges, my own dear native France, which I shall see no more ! "
The doctor's conscience forbade a contradiction; but he said, with
gentle steadiness:
" There is a better land, my friend, native to us all, I hope.
Now you shall have this tonic, and I have brought a Petit Journal
to read you a page or two." Certainly it would have excited a
smile ;n Dr. Marbury to see the able young physician, selected
by him as of brilliant promise, so wasting valuable time.
The remove once made, the partners fell into their daily rou-
1913.] THE RAINBOW CRYSTAL 363
tine easily enough. For both men were gifted for their noble
profession. Both with mind alert to test with care, and use with
skill, each new discovery for suffering humanity's healing, both,
though widely differing, with manner and bearing which inspired
confidence.
" Rooms at the Sutherland would be convenient," suggested
the elder; and Dr. Joyce, in fairy-like transformation, found him-
self in an environment so artistic and luxurious as almost to oppress
so hard a student and worker. " A quiet, little electric will, of
course, be necessary to save time," was Dr. Marbury's next hint,
and the junior recognized the necessity for this, too, in his altered
position.
" It's just as well I'm a bachelor, though," he reflected, " for
my salary hardly covers all this." But he was caught up by the
larger range of opportunity he now had in his beloved profession,
practiced under every advantage of association with the learned
and most skillful.
" I am by way of being proud of my partner," complimented
Dr. Marbury, too sure of his own high place to grudge encourage-
ment to a junior. " The great Caswell spoke highly of your hand-
ling of that infantile paralysis case."
" Praise from Sir Hubert," murmured Joyce.
" He thinks your change of treatment at the critical moment
saved the child's life."
" Under God," said Joyce in lower murmur.
" Rather a pity," with something of mockery, " that this was
in one point true; otherwise a coal baron's daughter! Nothing
special in it for you. Whereas, if you properly utilized your free
hours "
. Strangely enough this swelled that undertone of incomplete-
ness mortals so often feel in moments of apparent success. " Noth-
ing possible," his soul said to him, "without God's blessing,"
and he went down to see Aristide Remy, now failing fast.
On his return from Flint Street, he found Dr. Marbury in
their offices. It 'could never be said that the great specialist was
seen to be perturbed. But his handsome and regular features
wore now a slight frown.
' That man, our assistant, whom I dismissed last week, as
you know, seemed a treasure, quick and intelligent. I had reason
to suspect him of using his intelligence badly, and find now he
has stolen some valuable notes of an experiment quite incomplete.
I will take steps to prevent its being let loose upon humanity for
364 THE RAINBOW CRYSTAL [June,
some quack's benefit. Meanwhile, the janitor proving insufficient,
I have engaged a girl, which seems safer on the whole. Out of a
mob of applicants, this one struck me as of quiet and sensible
appearance. Is the daughter of a college professor, who not being
pushing in these pushing days, left nothing to wife and child when
he died. The girl supports her mother by decorating china
or some such thing and pay for her two hours daily here will,
it seems, be helpful. One recommendation she dresses quietly,
and looks capable and unobtrusive."
From this business-like account, Dr. Joyce was hardly pre-
pared for the girl who presented herself next day, so unmistakable
was the atmosphere of refinement which marked her. Yet Dr.
Marbury's " capable and unobtrusive " were adjectives which fitted
her, and she was certainly quiet in dress. So quiet, indeed, that
one might see her many times before recognizing how becoming
a frame her simple draperies and white at neck and wrists were to
her wavy chestnut hair and dark-blue eyes.
" Yes, I see. Thank you, I understand," "said her clear, low
voice to such hints as Dr. Joyce thought necessary. And presently
he forgot her existence, until such moment as required service
found a woman instead of a man at his elbow.
"Wouldn't a trained nurse have fitted the place?" he asked
Dr. Marbury.
" In view of George's exploit, I wanted someone with no
knowledge of medicine. The laboratory is not always locked. But
if this Miss Wilmer annoys you with any fine lady airs of faint-
ness or such nonsense, send her off. There are plenty more. But
of nurses we get enough in the hospitals. This young woman
would, doubtless, under favorable circumstances, have been a so-
ciety butterfly, one of those who simply cumber the earth."
It came to Dr. Joyce vaguely that he had heard of inclination
towards the handsome, wealthy surgeon from such extremes as a
head nurse here or a society belle there, which, in the frost of
his contemptuous indifference, had not even budded.
"If this girl seems equal to the work, why let her be of use,"
the surgeon finished, indifferently.
But the hint which the more imaginative and sensitive junior
had dropped may have made him curious. Accustomed to all sorts
of experiment, he made a point of being oftener at the office,
and of constantly requiring Miss Wilmer 's services. The more
especially if such minor emergency cases as could be tended here
were of gory or revolting appearance.
1913.] THE RAINBOW CRYSTAL 365
She stood the test, bringing bandage or antiseptic as required
with quiet serviceableness. And when the ordeal was over, if he
gained sardonic pleasure from quickened breathing or paler cheek
which his practiced eye discerned, she was quite unconscious of it.
" She will do well enough," he told Dr. Joyce, carelessly.
" I would rather have them sensitive. It is the more intelligent
temperament, when they can control themselves."
Dr. Joyce was silent. His senior's tone about women gener-
ally had jarred upon him before now. Personally, he would have
preferred the office assistant to be of less fine clay. One whom
he could have forgotten in her absence, while valuing her during
the two hours' employ. But so swiftly and easily had Miss Wilmer
fallen into the necessary routine, that he recognized, with a touch
of gratitude, that her presence was not only indispensable, but pleas-
ant as well. A slender, girlish figure which moved gracefully
as noiselessly; a low voice which gave gentle courteous greeting
upon entrance, had certainly their soothing value for a conscientious,
sometimes overwrought, worker. He began, unconsciously, to as-
sociate her in his mind with the flowers always profuse in the
waiting-room.
And once, Dr. Marbury making one of his unexpected visits,
when a tiny glass of violets had somehow crept into the inner room,
it was with a little shock of sympathy that he saw him catch it up
and throw it out on the lawn.
" What confounded nonsense is this? " said the surgeon curtly,
and glanced severely at Constance Wilmer.
The girl, lowering her head over the work which engaged all
three, was unlucky enough to have a strand of hair catch on his
cuff-button. It was quickly disengaged, but when the patient,
duly bandaged, was sent away he remarked icily : " Flowers are
well enough in the waiting-room. Quite out of place here. Re-
member this, please, Miss Wilmer."
" Very well, sir."
" And if you could arrange your hair more closely, it might
not be in the way."
" Certainly, Dr. Marbury."
Dr. Joyce discerned no change in her expression, but, on
his senior's departure, he felt impelled to say : " Dr. Marbury is
sometimes a little abrupt; but you need not mind that."
" I do not."
" You look tired, however."
She hesitated; but touched by his tone of friendly interest,
366 THE RAINBOW CRYSTAL [June,
she said with a new confidence : " It is only that I have been
up for several nights with my mother. She is not strong, and
she is all I have. Then I cannot rest much, for in the daytime
my kiln keeps me busy when I am not here."
" You are devoted to your art?"
"Art! Oh, that is a great word. But, after all, ceramics
have been interwoven in every stage of civilization. I try my
hand at my own designing, and most days are too short."
" A kiln calls for night watching, too. You must not burn
the candle at both ends."
" Why not? " with a little note of gayety evoked by unwonted
kindliness. When the light burns for someone precious, it cannot
be better consumed. And then good-night ! "
The gaze wistful, but perfectly brave, gave him a sudden pang.
She was pinning her hat on the profusion of hair which had won her
a rebuke. He called her back : " One moment. You are, as I may
say, of our professional household here, and therefore entitled to
such wisdom as I dare claim. You will, I hope, call on me freely
at any time for your mother."
" How good you are ! I am rather ashamed of my lack of
confidence in her present adviser. If it should deepen "
She was gone, leaving him to ponder some of her words as he
sped down town. His dark-green electric was now a familiar
object in Flint Street, and such was the denizens' pride in it and
him, that woe would have betided any mischievous arab of them
all who should have injured it when left standing. He ended his
round, as usual, with Aristide Remy, always weaker and more
suffering, but ever with the faint smile in witness of comfort and
pleasure this true friend's presence bestowed.
" I have seen the priest you sent," he began, with a whim-
sical glance. " Little Sandy brought him, according to your orders.
Does that mean the end is near? "
" The end for me, for you-; for us all is in God's hands.
But, yes, it is likely He may call you soon; and you told me you
were once a practical Catholic."
" That was many years ago. I was so angry when ill-health
struck me down, just as I meant to make my fortune, that I prayed
no more. At Limoges, where I learned my art, and found the
secret, I was once an altar boy, and used to say the rosary every
day with the pious mother. Ah, well, I am very tired, now. And
that Father Reilly is a good little man; and works among the sick
souls, they say, as you do among the bodies. And he is trying to
1913.] THE RAINBOW CRYSTAL 367
send me back to the Lord, a little nearer to what I was when I came
from Him. To you, my good doctor, I am leaving what I had no
health or capital for the secret which I discovered by accident,
pottering away in the Limoges furnace. It is a formula for such
crystal as only old Egypt knew a knowledge long buried. But
you, my friend, my good, good friend, shall profit by it if I could
not. It holds all the rainbow's colors, and is tough, tough, so that
one can hardly break it." He pressed into the physician's hand
some sheets of paper taken from under his pillow. ' You will
reap fortune from this, and use it well I know, and think sometimes
of your poor Aristide."
" I will value it," said the doctor gravely, " but now you must
take this and rest. I have engaged Sandy to wait on you."
Some days later Father Reilly meeting him, mentioned the
potter's death. " Quite peaceful," he said. " I was with him by
means of Sandy. I hear, through my French colony here, that
he was accounted quite an artist in his native Limoges. Original
in his designs, and always experimenting, with every qualification
for success, but health, poor fellow ! May God be good to him ! "
Thinking of the young potter's early death while, with Dr.
Marbury, he was returning from the bedside of a little child also
passed away at the hospital, the lines : " Out, out, brief candle,"
were murmured unconsciously.
" Just so," said the other, dryly. " A puff of wind, and out
we go into dark nothingness. So, it behooves us to conserve and
exploit our time, talent, energy, that worldly success, which is all
there is, may be ours."
" I hold a different faith," said Dr. Joyce, steadily. " The
light extinguished here may be rekindled elsewhere, to burn more
purely, brightly, and eternally."
" My dear Joyce ! " in satiric amazement ; then raising his
eyebrows : " But we need not discuss fatalities. I have been wish-
ing to remonstrate with you on the way you squander yourself in
obscure corners during hours when you might be acquiring fame
and, incidentally, money. Also," deliberately, " when you might be
of service to me."
' You will remember when I was honored by your invitation,
that I stipulated for certain free hours."
' Yes, yes. I simply point out that in this pauper practice,
easily delegated to inferior practitioners, there is, what I abhor,
a waste of good material."
The two men's voices reached through the open door to where
368 THE RAINBOW CRYSTAL [June,
Constance stood, and as Dr. Marbury passed her, she felt the intent,
masterful gaze, lately more frequent, from which she shrank in-
teriorly. It was a relief to have Dr. Joyce's somewhat abstracted
greeting, and inquiry for her mother.
" Not so much improved as I had hoped. If she does not
seem better to-morrow, I had thought "
" Send for me at any hour available."
But when a telephone message came next morning to him,
it was Dr. Marbury who received it, and, to the girl's bewilderment,
carefully concealed, responded by several calls during the next
few days.
When she reappeared at her post, calm and self-possessed,
Dr. Joyce said to her, with some reproach : " Your mother is
better? I am so glad, but I had hoped that my offer perhaps
you hesitated to hurt your former attendant."
" It was Dr. Marbury who came on my telephoning. I couldn't
understand. But must admit he has helped her wonderfully."
" Oh, he is, of course, at the head."
" Yet, I should rather not feel under an obligation to him."
His heart bounded at what was implied. Then he remembered
an intention put aside for a time. " By the way, Miss Wilmer,"
taking some papers from his cabinet, " I have been wanting to
show you this. It might be of use to a worker in porcelain. It
was bequeathed me by a patient, a potter of artistic skill they
say, but, of course, I know nothing of such matters. If it has
any value, please keep it and use it."
She came to him later, full of eager interest. " Your potter's
formula promises largely something which has long been extinct
in ceramics, claiming to be the wonderful Rainbow Crystal of the
ancient Egyptians; of most beautiful tints, and so strong it can
hardly be broken."
" Try it then, by all means," he smiled.
It was difficult to secure a word with her these days, for
Dr. Marbury now appeared regularly at the office, and occasionally
at her mother's apartments as well. As masterful as ever in manner
towards all women, he was, perhaps, a little less regardless than
formerly of her well-being, and it was he who remarked one day:
' You are looking pale and hollow-eyed, Miss Wilmer. A woman's
bright eyes and clear skin are among her assets; she should guard
them. Are you not well ? "
" Quite well, thank you," and slipped away from his scrutiny
to encounter one solicitous from his partner.
1913.] THE RAINBOW CRYSTAL 369
That afternoon, as the two physicians came from a consulta-
tion in the older physician's motor, her name was introduced by Dr.
Marbury. " Having made further inquiry concerning our assistant
during the months she has been with us ; having also enlightened my-
self by several calls upon the mother and daughter, I find that we
were wonderfully fortunate in securing a lady of her birth, breeding,
and accomplishment. Everything in their modest surroundings
shows traditional culture and refinement. The mother is an older
edition of the daughter; and the daughter is a very pretty and
charming girl." He looked from the window of the car for a
few moments, not seeming to observe his junior's silence. Then he
resumed, deliberately : " I have never thought much about marriage,
neither society women nor our professional helpers appealing to my
taste. But when one grows middle-aged, the four walls of a house,
even though hung with art treasures, seem a bit empty. This,"
he ended with his ironic smile, " should enlist the interest of a
man of your great poetic sentiment, who cannot himself afford
to marry."
The next hour held need for entire concentration on critical
illness with both ; but when Dr. Joyce was once more alone, he felt
again the shock he had experienced in the motor. Why had a
man of Dr. Marbury's cold and inflexible reserve, as to his personal
feelings, more than suggested his present inclinations? Was it to
warn off one in whom he suspected dawning of a like feeling? A
like feeling ! No, never would Norman Joyce admit that the rever-
ent admiration, the respectful tenderness, which only now he rec-
ognized for entire devotion, could resemble in kind that which a
hard and avowed materialist might entertain for any woman. He
recalled the girl's refined loveliness, her grace, her sweet voice,
her admirable reticences, and felt that anything short of the highest
recognition was profanation. But from a man " who could not
afford to marry " for this barbed phrase was true enough with
more brilliant place and opportunity had come constantly increasing
expenses in every way, and the greater income hardly sufficed.
And there were always Dr. Marbury's name and wealth to tempt a
lonely girl of no means, and a delicate mother to care for. Dr.
Marbury himself gained a certain admiration from many women,
with his fine face and bearing, but, somehow, Norman could not
associate Constance's spiritual expression with these. And so went
the sleepless night.
But joy came with the morning, which brought him a request
VOL. XCVII. 24.
370 THE RAINBOW CRYSTAL [June,
that he would call later at the Wilmer apartment. Entering here,
for the first time, he was presented to the little mother, and greeted
by Constance herself with a scarcely restrained buoyancy.
" May I venture to say," he asked, " that you are looking
radiant after an eclipse of some duration ? "
" I I had been working and watching too much ; but it was
the fault of my own carelessness. I mislaid in some way the
formula for the Rainbow Crystal, and had to trust to my memory,
which was treacherous, and kept me experimenting and experiment-
ing. But, at last, I succeeded, and found the paper the same day."
" I must tell on her," said the mother, with affected severity.
" While she was so anxiously experimenting, she took but four
hours sleep in the twenty-four."
" Then," said the doctor, with real severity, " she was very
wrong, and must never do so again."
But the girl, unheeding both, came back from an inner room,
her cheeks rosy and eyes sparkling, and in her hand a tiny vase
of exquisite form and lovely hues. He exclaimed aloud when she
dropped it on the bare floor.
"It is not even cracked!" she showed him, triumphantly.
" The Rainbow Crystal is an assured thing. I choose to find it
symbolical. It gathers in the beauty and color of life about it,
yet is transparently pure and clear, and can withstand the blows
of fate."
" And what next? " he asked smilingly.
" Next I know you, too, are a Catholic next, a Mass of
thanksgiving. Then " with a pretty pose of the stern business
woman " to market our wares."
"Our wares?"
" Certainly," opening wide the blue eyes. " How else? "
" I shall end by fancying myself a potential Benvenuto Cellini !"
" Let us hope " radiantly " that we shall not be driven to
his expedient of melting everything fusible in the house to keep
the furnace going."
This was a Constance Wilmer he had not before seen. The
youth in her, long repressed by harsh circumstances, had given place
to the flow and sparkle of hopefulness; and he almost lost the sense
of her words in his admiration.
" Well," he said, rising, " as physician I prohibit any more
nights of watching. As friend, since I have drawn you into this
matter, you will permit me to advance "
" No, no," said the mother, in quick protest, " that will be
1913.] THE RAINBOW CRYSTAL 371
arranged between Constance and the jewellers and others. She
has not told you that already she is negotiating "
" Wait, wait, mother ! That will come later," gaily, " as a
surprise."
" Well, but I will thank Dr. Joyce now," with quiet dignity,
" for the courtesy and great consideration which have softened
for you a position which might easily become trying."
" Such women must," he reflected afterwards, " have been in
severe straits to have urged Constance to the application for a
place in the office." Apart from its daily painful and unpleasant
tasks, there was always Dr. Marbury. His exacting attitude at
first must have been more bearable than his later cynic interest,
and final approving masterfulness. Could so sweet and fine a nature
be so won; or had she yet failed to understand? Women were
sometimes unaccountable.
He had not much longer to torment himself, for soon the es-
sential, long-slumbering difference between the partners came to
a decisive issue.
" I find," said Dr. Marbury, coldly, " that one of your pauper
patients, just dead, presented in his case features of rare and un-
common interest. He should have been of value, living, for clinic
and operation."
" He should," returned Dr. Joyce, " but for the fact that he
clung to the privacy of his humble room, which efforts of his
family and friends preserved for him. The end was inevitable."
]( Yes, yes, certainly, with that trouble. But when science
chooses to interest itself, I have small patience with the prejudice
which blocks it. Such people have no right to whims."
" The spirit," said Dr. Joyce, slowly, " is surely master of
the house of clay which it tenants."
Dr. Marbury resumed his cool impassiveness. "With due
appreciation of your talent and skill, Dr. Joyce, there seems to
me a strain of sentimental weakness in your make-up which "
" I owe you thanks for your appreciation, Dr. Marbury. But,
as you say, we differ so widely on certain subjects " An interrup-
tion came here; but afterwards their parting was arranged, ami-
cably enough, but always with the sense of hidden discord. The
younger man was naturally unsettled. " Here is a promising
chapter closed," he thought, and wondered how Constance might
regard it. Finally his restlessness drove him that afternoon to
the Wilmer apartment. He found the girl making tea for her
372 THE RAINBOW CRYSTAL [June,
mother; and the little table and shining utensils, the fire glow, the
cosiness, appealed to his latent domesticity. Most of all, her frank
and friendly welcome relieved a certain discouragement.
" You must take this chair, it is the most comfortable. And
this cup, it is the prettiest."
" Here is royal reception for one lord of his name, and not
much besides."
She looked at him questioningly ; and having decided to make
his position quite clear to these, he explained, and ended jestingly :
" I think of returning to Flint Street and Mrs. Rafferty. For I
am, materially, about where I was when I joined Dr. Marbury;
and I have a horror of debt."
" Yes," said Constance, abstractedly, who had grown very
quiet and thoughtful during the recital.
He sighed when he left them, reflecting that many such calls
must be unwise and forbidden. Perhaps Dr. Marbury was already
Constance's permitted suitor, for the surgeon's opportunity was
now daily. Yet when he entered the inner office for a farewell
word, the two were alone together, but not in bearing friends.
There was rather a scornful light in the girl's eyes and an indignant
flush on her cheek, "thanking you, always, for the compliment,"
she was ending.
" Since you have heard so much," said Dr. Marbury, when
he would have retreated, " I will ask you to remain. Miss Wilmer
has just tendered her resignation, and I should like to inquire if
it is in consequence of the compliment of which she speaks."
" Not entirely. I have, for some time, had it in view."
" I am glad," ironically, " that your altered circumstances
this is a presumption permit it. But being of the analytic habit,
in favor of carrying every experiment to its logical conclusion,
would you mind telling me if your refusal to preside over my es-
tablishment in such affluence as my poor skill permits me to offer
a wife, had its origin in a leaning towards anyone of lesser place "
The girl's cheeks flamed again, but he proceeded : " If so,
I warn you both that your present existence of struggle and
hardship would be made worse, and even dragged down to condi-
tions not short of squalor. For the support of my name and good
word being withdrawn," he paused, significantly, " I can unmake
as easily as make, and a little dispraise sown here and there " he
shrugged his shoulders. " Take time to think this over. I will
not consider your answer final."
1913.] THE RAINBOW CRYSTAL 373
" The threat is most unworthy of you, Dr. Marbury," said
Norman Joyce. " Let me open that door, Miss Wilmer. And,
do," he jested to remove her consciousness, " let me take you
home in the electric, this once, before I pawn it."
" How worthless are brilliant achievements and impressive
personality," she said, presently, " when joined to a hard material-
ism ! His one god is success. When I have seen you two together
those lines have come to me about being unequally yoked with
unbelievers." At her door, she said to him, sweetly : " You will
come in, please." Any embarrassment born of the late interview
was swallowed up in a more engrossing thought : " I have been
waiting to tell you of the great, good luck the grand success of our
Rainbow Crystal! The art stores and jewellers in all the great
cities are enthusiastic. They tell me there is a fortune in it
Orders are pouring in. And the prices they are willing to pay!
You are a prospective millionaire.
"I?"
" Certainly. The secret is yours. I am simply your artist
and a part. You shall assign me what you think fair."
" My dearest friend ! When I give anything, I give it.
What sort of unscrupulous donor do you think me?"
" Then I return the gift, and will have nothing to do with it."
" And your engagements with the merchants ? You cannot,"
with pretended seriousness, " forfeit your business honor."
She faced him with a resolution he felt to be unalterable.
" Nothing on earth shall tempt me to retain the whole profit of
what should be yours."
" It was a free gift to you."
:< Which I now restore."
" My dear child," he began; then his playfulness fell from him,
and he grew a little pale. " There is one condition," he said, slowly,
" on which I will, in a sense, resume possession of my art secret.
That the artist gives me herself as well!"
Their eyes met. " Then take us both," she whispered.
After a while he said : " My wildest hope was to be permitted
to work for your beloved companionship later. But what a wonder-
ful thing if it should come soon; and all through the Rainbow
Crystal of Aristide Remy ! "
Her mother, entering, caught only this name : " God rest his
soul," she said.
BERGSON AND FINALISM.
BY THOMAS J. GERRARD.
NE of the characteristics of the time-spirit is that its
consciousness is centred on means without refer-
ence to their end.
M. Bergson's doctrine of finalism panders to
this abuse. We do not say it was designed for
this purpose. But we do say that it is the natural outcome of his
anti-intellectualism, which is but the formulation of the time-spirit's
disinclination to reflect.
The evolutionary progress, such as we have previously de-
scribed, is taken for granted by M. Bergson. But both mechanism
and finalism have failed to interpret the history of evolution to his
satisfaction, because neither has taken into account the fact that the
process is a flux incapable of intellectual representation. In the
finalist explanation M. Bergson finds just a grain of truth:
We try on the evolutionary progress [he says] two ready-
made garments that our understanding puts at our disposal,
mechanism and finality; we show that they do not fit, neither
the one nor the other, but that one of them might be re-cut and
re-sewn, and in this new form fit less badly than the other.*
The mechanistic philosophy is to be taken or left: it
must be left if the least grain of dust, by straying from the
path foreseen by mechanics, should show the slightest trace of
spontaneity.f
But spontaneity is observable everywhere. The comparison
of the human eye with that of the pecten (commonly known as
the scallop) is a most marvelous and conclusive proof that these
organs have not been formed by the mechanical exigencies of en-
vironment.
In a totally different environment the coordination of the
extremely complex structure of the eye has been as perfectly^
accomplished in the mollusc as in man. Mechanism might account
for the construction of one of its infinitestimal parts, but it throws
no li^ht whatever on their wondrous coordination.
^Creative Evolution, pp. xiv. and xv. f/fetd., p. 42.
1913.] BERGSON AND FINALISM 375
The rejection of mechanism, however, involves the acceptation
of some sort of finalism. So M. Bergson admits the necessity
of some kind of direction over and above that of individual effort
in order to account for variation.
If the accidental variations that bring about evolution are
insensible variations, some good genius must be appealed to
the genius of the future species in order to preserve and
accumulate these variations, for selection will not look after
this. If, on the other hand, the accidental variations are sud-
den, then, for the previous function to go on, or for a new func-
tion to take its place, all the changes that have happened together
must be complementary. So we have to fall back on the good
genius again, this time to obtain the convergence of simultaneous
changes, as before to be assured of the continuity of direction
of successive variations.*
Naturally we ask who this good genius may be, and we are
referred to our old friend the vital effort.
An effort common to most representatives of the same species,
inherent in the germs they bear rather than in their substance
alone, an effort thereby assured of being passed on to their
descendants. So we come back, by a somewhat roundabout
way, to the idea we started from, that of an original impetus
of life, passing from one generation of germs to the following
generation of germs through the developed organisms which
bridge the interval between the generations.!
This vital impulse gnaws into the future, sometimes creating
more and more complex forms, and rising to higher and higher
destinies, sometimes resting not merely for years or centuries, but
for whole geological periods.
M. Bergson may call his vital impulse a good genius or any-
thing else he likes. If it is able to create the various species ranging
from the amoeba up to man, and if it is able to abstain from creating
and to rest, as in the Lingulse, for aeons of time, then it must know
something about the making of plans.
Why then does he object to finalism? He is obsessed by his
singular views on the nature and function of time. If there be such
a thing as a plan according to which the universe moves, then there
is no use for time. There are no new forms for it to create, for
*Creative Evolution, p. 72. Mbld., p. 92.
376 BERGSON AND FINALISM [June,
practically everything has been created. If the plan is given to
begin with, then teleology is but mechanism inverted. The only
difference being that finalism puts our supposed guiding light in
front of us, whilst mechanism puts it behind us. One acts as an
attraction, whilst the other acts as an impulsion. If, however, we
must accept some sort of finalism, and yet not that which supposes
a general plan conceived and willed beforehand, what sort of final-
ism does M. Bergson propose ?
His thesis may be stated as follows : The vital impulse which
carries on the evolutionary process starts off without any prelim-
inary plan. In the effort of ascending life to overcome descending
matter, certain problems present themselves. The vital impulse
freely resolves each problem in turn by creating absolutely new
forms, forms so absolutely new that they could not have been
foreseen even by an infinite intellect.
This thesis has a certain vagueness. We are not told whether
the problems present themselves in intelligible terms or in unin-
telligible mist. The supposed clash between life and matter might
conceivably produce smoke.
M. Bergson's first reason for the rejection of a preliminary
general plan is that it is too anthropomorphic, too much at variance
with the observed operations of nature. The labor of nature is not
like that of a workman who chooses first a piece from here and
then a piece from there, and eventually puts all together according
to a preconceived idea, plan or model. " Life does not proceed by
the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and
division."* The process referred to is, of course, the well-known
method of cell division.
In reply to M. Bergson's argument, we would point out that the
organism of a cell is an organism. It has been organized. It con-
tains definite potentialities. The potentialities must first have been
put into it before they can actualize out, and when they begin to
actualize out they do so on a plan which can be foreseen with infal-
lible certitude. The embryonic cell of a horse will not sub-divide
into a cow. Nor will bantam eggs plan out into ducklings. All
this is conclusive proof of a prearranged and foreseeable plan.
Moreover, even in the matter of choice of material, M. Berg-
son's comparison of nature with a workman tells in favor of final-
ism in its complete sense. Before life can proceed by dissociation
and division, it must first proceed by association and addition of
* Creative Evolution, p. 94. Italics are M. Bergson's.
1913.] BERGSON AND FINALISM 377
elements. Before the mother cell can make even one single division,
it must assimilate its distinctive food and nutrition.
Such power of assimilation implies a prearranged plan. The
results too are foreseeable. I know with infallible certitude that
if men breathe nothing but carbonic acid gas, and that if plants
breathe nothing but pure oxygen, all will surely die. The plan
conceived in advance must be followed if life is to have a fruitful
issue.
Again, argues M. Bergson, if the course of nature is nothing
more than a plan in course of realization, then the future is closed.
But in the evolution of life the portals must remain wide open,
else there will be no opportunity for the creation of new forms.
The unity of life is found solely in the impetus that pushes it
along the road of time.
This movement constitutes the unity of the organized world
a prolific unity, of an infinite richness, superior to any that
the intellect could dream of, for the intellect is only one of its
aspects or products.*
Let us freely admit that the future is closed whilst the plan
is being realized. But what about the future before the plan began
its realization? And what about the future after the plan is
realized? Surely the portals have been and will be wide open.
It is only the immediate future that is closed so that the world
may be carried on intelligently.
When a carpenter begins to make a chair, he usually intends
to finish it. If he decided to leave the future open so that he
might be always creating new forms, he would never get any
further.
Nor could nature keep the future open. Suppose the future
were not closed to a bantam egg. Suppose the embryo began
by evolving towards a bantam, then changed its future to a duck-
ling, then after two weeks incubation thought of becoming a kitten,
and finally decided to be a puppy, what a funny thing it would look
when it was born!
No. Both nature and art require a definite plan foreseeable
and foreseen. And what is true of the transformation of parts of
the universe is true also of the whole. Certainly a human intellect
cannot see the correlation of all the parts, but the intellect of the
Creator can. The God Who transcends nature lives in eternity.
With Him there is one eternal present. It is not strictly correct
^Creative Evolution, p. no.
378 BERGSON AND FINALISM [June,
to speak of God forseeing things. By one single intuition He sees
directly that which to us is past, present, and future. He sees
at once both the proximate end and the final end of every creature.
There can be no system of evolution at all intelligible which
does not involve finalism right from the beginning to the end.
When the initial impulse, postulated by M. Bergson, first started off,
either it did so in a definite direction or it did not. If it had a
definite direction it had a goal. If it had no direction, it never
started. Whichever way you take it, you must either go some-
where or stay where you are. To start off for nowhere, as Berg-
sonian philosophy teaches, is a contradiction in terms.
Further, a theory of proximate ends implies a theory of an
ultimate end. Let us grant for a moment that the semi-finalism
proposed by M. Bergson is coherent. Let us suppose that the vital
impulse can create both ideas and forms for its immediate needs
without reference to any exemplar. Even so there is required an
ultimate and complete finalism in order to give meaning to the
proximate semi-finalism which we have supposed.
The doctrine of semi-finalism declares that the vital impulse
solves particular problems according to the measure in which they
present themselves. But if they are to be rightly solved,
they must be solved in view of the final problem of which they are
a part or to which they are related. Each individual problem
which presents itself directly to the vital impulse leads sooner
or later to the ultimate problem. A semi-finalism is meaningless
without a complete finalism.
M. Bergson stumbles into this incoherence again and again.
He thrusts out the general plan with his right hand, only to drag it
back with his left. Nor does his right hand know what his left
hand does.
English admirers of M. Bergson, men who have been attracted
by his theories of change and intuition, have been invariably
brought to a check by his doctrine of finalism. Our philosopher-
statesman, Mr. A. J. Balfour, boggles at it. Sir Oliver Lodge
tries to explain it away. But in doing so he gives away the whole
case to finalism :
Yet there is clearly an aim in all this, and life is always sub-
ject to its own laws. There is a controlling entity in a seed
whereby the same product results, no matter amid what sur-
roundings. If an acorn can grow at all, an oak results.*
*Hibbert Journal, January, 1912, p. 306.
1913.] BERGSON AND FINALISM 379
But this principle is just what is denied in the process of
creative evolution by M. Bergson. The controlling entity does not
exist beforehand, but is created to meet a particular problem at a
particular crisis. The concept of flowing time excludes the con-
cept of controlling laws. These belong to the artificial sphere of
intellect, not to the vital sphere of intuitive vision. Sir Oliver
may be true to the facts of his own science, but he is not true
to the theories of M. Bergson.
Mr. Balfour would seem to have read the new philosopher with
more care. He sums up and disposes of the new theory of finalism
thus:
But why should he banish teleology? In his philosophy su-
perconsciousness is so indeterminate that it is not permitted
to hamper itself with any purpose more definite than that of
self -augmentation. It is ignorant not only of its course, but
of its goal; and for the sufficient reason that, in M. Bergson 5 s
view, these things are not only unknown but unknowable. But
is there not a certain incongruity between the substance of such
a philosophy and the sentiments associated with it by its au-
thor? Creation, freedom, will these doubtless are great
things; but we cannot lastingly admire them unless we know
their drift. We cannot, I submit, rest satisfied with what
differs so little from the haphazard; joy is no fitting consequent
of efforts which are so nearly aimless. If values are to be
taken into account, it is surely better to invoke God with a
purpose than supra-consciousness with none.*
When St. Thomas treats of this question of finalism he pro-
poses thus the identical difficulty of M. Bergson :
It would seem that God is not the final cause of all things,
for to act on account of an end would seem to imply that the
agent was in need of something. But God is in need of nothing.
Therefore He does not act for the sake of an end.f
And in answer he quotes the inspired word : " The Lord
hath made all things for Himself."! This he takes on faith, and
then sets his faith to seek to understand.
Every agent acts for the sake of an end. Otherwise from
any given action neither this particular thing nor that would
*Hibbert Journal, October, 1911, p. 23.
t.Smma, pars. ia., qu. xliv., a. iv., diff. i.
tProv. xvi. 4.
380 BERGSON AND FINALISM [June,
happen, except by chance. But there are some agents which
both act and are acted upon. These are imperfect agents, and
whenever they act they must intend to acquire some new
perfection. But the first agent, who acts only and is not acted
upon, does not act for the sake of attaining to some end, but
intends only to communicate His own perfection, which is His
own goodness. Thus, therefore, the divine goodness is the end
of all things. Wherefore to act on account of a need is but
the action of an imperfect agent, which is made to act and to
be acted upon. But this is not so with God's action. So
it is that He alone is supremely generous, for He does not act
for His own benefit, but merely on account of His goodness.
In the divine goodness then we must seek for the root of the
divine finalism. He Who is the beginning of creatures is also their
end. " I am the Alpha and the Omega." God being perfectly
happy in Himself could not desire an additional perfection. He
could only desire to communicate His goodness to others. Such
communication would be an outward imitation of His own intrinsic
perfections. God Himself, therefore, is the plan or ideal upon
which the universe was formed.
All created things may be traced to their first principle, the
Divine Wisdom which thought out the order of the universe. In
the Divine Wisdom are to be sought the reasons of all things.
The ideas which are their exemplar are found in the divine Mind.
But as there can only be one infinite, the outward representation
of the divine ideal must be finite and inadequate. Hence each
separate creature is a finite likeness of the infinite divine essence.
A prudent man is one who has a good memory of past events,
who is able to grasp a large present situation, and from his knowl-
edge of past and present is able to make plans against future con-
tingencies. The man who knows the first principles of things,
who is able to coordinate his principles into general knowledge,
and who can apply his general knowledge for the attainment of
some desirable end is said to be eminently wise.
But God can do all these things with one thought and one
volition. He, therefore, is supereminently wise and prudent. He,
therefore, can and does exercise a providence over the created world,
adapting right means to right ends, coordinating and subordinating
all proximate and intermediate ends to the one final end. What we
understand by "prudence" or "wisdom" or "providence" in
man is realized in God infinitely. Hence we have the classic defin-
1913.] BERGSON AND FINALISM 381
ition of divine providence ipsa divina ratio in summo omnium
principe constituta, qua cuncta disponit the all-regulating and
stable plan of God, the supreme Ruler of the universe.
Moreover, the God Who is infinitely perfect is unchangeable.
Change would imply the acquisition of a new perfection. Since,
therefore, God is unchangeable, He must have settled from all
eternity the final goal to which all His creatures should be directed.
Again, since His wisdom existed from eternity, He must from
eternity have fixed the various ways by which these creatures
should come to their ultimate end. He not only has set Himself
a plan, but He also has applied His intelligence and will to the
working out of the plan in such a way that nothing shall happen to
prevent His desire from being realized.
At this point we must distinguish carefully between that which
God approves and that which for good reasons He merely tolerates.
He approves of good acts, whilst He only tolerates or permits
bad acts. When we speak of God tolerating or permitting sin,
we do not mean that He gives permission to sin, but only that He
does not hinder the creature from exercising his free will in sinning.
God could hinder it, but does not, and so we speak of Him as
tolerating it. With this distinction before our minds, we are able
to lay down the principle that whatever happens in the world,
happens according to the will of God, positively or permissively.
The external representation of divine perfections is called the
external glory of God. His internal glory can be known to none
but Himself. In so far as creatures, by their existence and activity,
are apt to manifest some divine perfection, they are said to render
a material glory to God. " The heavens show forth the glory of
God, and the firmament declareth the work of His hands." And
when intelligent beings, seeing the reflections of the divine perfec-
tions in creation, acknowledge them in thought, word, and deed,
then they are said to render formal glory to God. Thus all parts
of creation, rational and irrational, have this for their final end:
to make one harmonious hymn of praise to their Creator.
Hence the finalism which we adopt is the very antithesis of
mechanism, direct or inverted. The very nature of the ideal and
of the means of realizing it expressly includes the operation of
free will.
In the first place, the final end is not some benefit accruing
to the Creator of which He stands in need. God is the object of
external praise and glory. He chooses to receive it, however,
382 BERGSON AND FINALISM [June,
because it implies His bounteousness, His spontaneity in giving
of His treasure.
Whatever of mechanism there is in the universe, it is intended
to be at the service of the rational creation; and the right use
of it is one of the ways in which man renders formal praise to the
Creator. Thus the plan supposes that some intermediate ends
should be brought about by contingent causes and some by necessary
causes.
There has ever been a tendency in certain schools to look upon
this action of God moving the will as something mechanical, and
savoring of determinism. This comes about through an abuse of
analogy. The divine strength does not come from ourselves. It
comes from God Who is transcendent. But the transcendent God
is also immanent. The power and particular movement which
He gives to our wills, therefore, is not mechanical and superimposed
from without, but vital and communicated from within. The God
Who is the Life of life is the energizing principle of the action.
Thus Christian finalism is the very antithesis of the doctrine of
man's self-perfectibility. The whole meaning of Alpha and Omega
is that man realizes himself most by depending absolutely on God.
Man is dependent on God for his beginning, for his continuation,
and for his end. If he chooses his own method of perfecting him-
self, following only such goodness as attracts his sensual appetites,
he will most assuredly not attain to independence. If he does not
depend on God willingly as a vessel of mercy, he will have to depend
upon Him unwillingly as a victim of justice. " I call heaven and
earth to witness this day, that I have set before you life and death,
blessing and cursing. Choose therefore life."*
Christian finalism may be summed up in the beautiful words
of Lactantius : " The world was made that we might be born.
We were born that we might know God. We know Him that we
may worship Him. We worship Him that we may earn immortal-
ity. We are rewarded with immortality that, being made like unto
the angels, we may serve our Father and Lord forever, and be
the eternal kingdom of God.''f
*Deut. xxx. 19. Mnstit., vii., 6.
SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME.
BY W. E. CAMPBELL.
VIII.
ORE was now fairly launched upon his political and
diplomatic career, but without a general idea of Eng-
lish foreign policy, it is a little difficult to be interested
in such scanty records as we possess of his share in it.
Three young monarchs of unusual ambition
and ability were contesting for the palm of European supremacy.
Charles V. had just been elected Emperor; Francis I. had been four
years King of France; while Henry VIII., the oldest of the three,
had reigned since 1509. In 1518, as before mentioned. More had
been a signatory to a treaty of Universal Peace with France, and
two days later to a treaty of marriage between the Dauphin and
Princess Mary. This arrangement was very suitable both to Henry
and Wolsey, for the time being, as it brought a subsidy to the one
and a pension to the other from the French exchequer. But there
were deeper reasons which, in the event of war, would compel
England to take the imperialist side against France.
Charles V. was inclined to an English alliance, for England
was rich, and he had little money and was largely in debt; he de-
pended on the free use of the Channel for his voyages from Flan-
ders to Spain; his dominions, though extensive, were very loosely
united by ties of sentiment, of race, and of position; Flemings,
Germans, Spaniards, and Neopolitans had little in common; in
each country there were problems which promoted instability and
called for grave consideration, while his authority was as yet un-
established and his mind as yet uninformed. He needed, in fact,
all the support he could get against a prosperous and united France ;
an alliance with England was, therefore, a matter of necessity.
England, for her part, was just as necessarily favorable to an
alliance with Charles V. His claims were strongly urged by his
aunt, Queen Katherine, and by all the Council, with the exception
of Wolsey. Not only was this the case, but the whole country
was strongly imperialist in sympathy, and that for the best of
English reasons that friendship with Charles meant prosperity to
384 SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME [June,
English trade. War with him would bring ruin to her export trade,
since he controlled the wool market of the Netherlands. Eight
years later, Henry did declare war against Charles V.; but this
course of action made him so unpopular with his subjects, that
he was in some danger of losing his throne, and was obliged to
conclude a peace three months after the commencement of hostilities.
At any rate, in 1521, such a war was out of the question, and
for the next two years the chief end of English foreign policy
was to squeeze money out of France without the slightest ultimate
intention of assisting her against her powerful rival.
On November 10, 1518, Queen Katherine gave birth to a
daughter, a great disappointment to everyone from the King down-
wards. It was feared, too, that in consequence of the betrothal
of Princess Mary to the Dauphin, the English crown might event-
ually pass into the power of France, a possibility very distasteful
to English sentiment. Francis I. was therefore very anxious
to meet Henry, with a view to allaying suspicion and cementing
the alliance. Henry, on his side, was willing to temporize, but
was more anxious to come to a definite understanding with Charles
before such meeting took place. In January, 1520, Wolsey was
commissioned to arrange a meeting with Francis; but not until
the King himself had written to Charles a pressing invitation
to visit England, which the latter accepted. In the meanwhile, the
Bishop of Durham, Tunstal, Pace, and More had been appointed
to negotiate a Treaty of Intercourse* with the Emperor's emissary
at Greenwich, and also to arrange the details of the royal meeting.
Charles V. was delayed in starting from Spain, and again delayed
on his voyage by contrary winds, so that he did not reach Dover
till May 26th, the eve of Pentecost. More writing to Erasmus
from Canterbury on the same day, says that the Emperor is ex-
pected ; that the King will set out to meet him either the same night
or on the following morning, and that it is impossible to describe the
delight of all, even the country people, when they heard that the
Emperor was on his way.f On his arrival, Charles was met by
Wolsey, and joined by the King on the following morning, Whit
Sunday. The two monarchs set out in company to Canterbury,
where they found the Queen w r ith her court, this being the first op-
portunity afforded to Katherine of seeing her imperial nephew.
On May 3ist the Emperor sailed from Sandwich for Flanders, and
^Letters and Papers, vol. iii., nos. 731-2, 740-1, 798. The treaty was ratified
on ft^ay 8th. Wbid., no. 838.
1913-] SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME 385
on the same day the King crossed to Calais, arriving at Guisnes,
a town on English territory fixed for the meeting between himself
and Francis, and henceforward to be known as " The Field of the
Cloth of Gold."
This last great ceremonial of the age of chivalry must have
stirred up many thoughts and memories in the mind of More, who
occupied a prominent place among the retinue of Henry VIII.
We who live in times still tinged with the sadness and parsi-
mony of Puritanism, feel an almost involuntary protest against
such extravagant display, more especially as we remember the
mutual insincerity of the high contracting parties. But, after all,
this magnificence was something more than a cloak for royal in-
sincerities. England was, for the first time since the days of
Henry V., proclaiming her place and power among the great
European nations. France, she would have it understood, with
her long tradition of superiority in every art of life and war, had now
an equal, if not a superior. " For the time being," writes Brewer,
"Wolsey had by his genius raised his master to the first rank and
foremost place among the potentates of Christendom. It was the
purpose of this interview to show him to the world, surrounded
by all the accessories to which the imagination of nine-tenths of
mankind at that time lent itself a willing prisoner." And he con-
cluded rather cynically, " Railway scrip, or a supposed balance
at a man's bankers, effects that now." More himself must have
indulged in an equally cynical mood as he gazed at this flat and
practical contradiction of his own Utopian ideals. The age of
chivalry had declined to an age of childishness; it had lost its
heroic and unselfish touch, had become, in fact, nothing more
than a splendid make-believe, a ritual signifying nothing but inor-
^dinate vanity and calculated intrigue. More was too full of human-
ity to despise the sincere and appropriate ritual to a great occasion ;
but such was not " The Field of the Cloth of Gold."
On June 24th the Kings of England and France bade each
other farewell, Henry returning to Calais. On July loth he met
the Emperor at Gravelines, and returned with him to Calais, where
in a three days' interview the negotiations commenced at Canter-
bury were completed. For reasons already given, an alliance with
the Emperor was much more sincerely desirable than an alliance
with France ; but while Henry was anxious to complete the under-
standing without delay, Charles had weighty reasons for a slower
procedure. The case stood thus from his point of view. The
VOL. XCVII. 25.
386 SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME [June,
English alliance with Francis must first be broken off, and with it
the marriage contract between Princess Mary and the Dauphin.
This could only be done by substituting a marriage contract between
the Princess Mary and himself. On the other hand, he was per-
sonally inclined to marry the Princess Isabella of Portugal, who
would bring with her a far richer dowry than her English rival.
His policy, then, was to promise much and do little, hoping at last
to secure not only a firm English friendship, but also the hand of
the Portuguese princess and her money as well.
During his stay at Calais with the English Court, More had
the pleasure of meeting many literary friends, his beloved Erasmus
among them. He was also introduced to Francis Crane field, a
Councillor of the Empire, and to Budseus, a celebrated Greek scholar
and secretary to the French King, with whom he appears to have
corresponded for some time. In September he was at Bruges, one
of an expensive and dilatory embassy to the Hanse Merchants.
In January, 1521, he is already acting as Under-Treasurer, and
Erasmus mentions the fact, though not quite accurately, when
writing to Pace and Budaeus a few months later.
Meanwhile, the Emperor and Francis I. were again at war,
and Wolsey crossed to Calais with the ostensible purpose of acting
as a peacemaker between the two monarchs, but in reality to throw
his influence on the side of the Emperor. More was ordered to
join him as soon as his work at Bruges was finished, and on July
25th Pace writes to Wolsey on behalf of the King, " that whereas
old men do now decay greatly within this his realm, his mind is
to acquaint other young men with his great affairs, and, therefore,
he desireth your Grace to make Sir William Sandys and Sir
Thomas More privy to all such matters as your Grace shall treat
at Calais."
An event took place at this time which showed the true nature
and trend of Tudor rule. The Duke of Buckingham, " with
manors, castles, parks, stewardships scattered over eleven of the
best counties of England," one of the last survivors of the old
great landed nobility who held aloof from the Court, and would
not bow the knee to Wolsey, being suspected on the slenderest
grounds of designs on the throne, was prejudged by the King in
Council, summoned before his peers, by them condemned of high
treason, and led to execution all within a few days. Such deeds
as this were to become commonplace within a very few years,
but t now they were regarded with horror not only in England, but
1913-] SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME 387
throughout the continent. More, in his De Quatuor Novissimis,
published in the following year, evidently refers to it in the medita-
tion on Death.
Under the date of May 8, 1522, we find a grant to Sir Thomas
More of the manor of South Kent, a property formerly in the
Duke's possession.*
One of Erasmus' characteristic letters to Budseus written at this
time, gives us a further vivid glimpse into More's life. " He is
delighted," he tells his correspondent, " to have met so many of
his friends at Bruges where the Emperor and the Cardinal were
in conference. Tunstal, More, Mountjoy, and many others were
there. More expected that Budseus would have been at Calais with
the French embassy. He himself had hopes that Wolsey by his
wisdom and authority would have settled the differences between
the Empire and France, but he is now in doubt as to the issue.
He speaks of More's promotion in a passage quoted above. Un-
married men, he says, have more chance at Court than married
ones, but More is so wedded to wedlock that nothing can emanci-
pate him. He has three daughters, the eldest, whose name is Mar-
garet, is just married to a young man (Roper) of good fortune
and unspotted morals, and with an inclination to learning. More
had all his daughters educated from their infancy : first paying great
attention to their morals, and then to their learning. He brings
up another girl as a companion to his daughters. He has also a
stepdaughter of great beauty and genius, now, married some years
to a young man, non indocto, sed cujus moribus nihil sit magis
aureum. He has a son by a former wife,- aged thirteen, the young-
est of his children. He ordered them a year ago to write an
essay to Erasmus on any subject they liked to choose. When they
showed their father their exercises, all he did was to have them
fairly copied, without changing a syllable, and seal and send them
to Erasmus, who greatly admired them. They read Livy and
similar authors Budaeus complains that he himself has brought
a scandal upon learning, because it has entailed upon him two evils
ill-health and ill-husbandry. More, on the other hand, produces
the opposite impression. He says that his health is better for
study, and that he has more influence with the King, more popular-
ity at home and abroad, is more pleasant and useful to his friends
and his relatives, abler for business and politics and life generally,
and more thankful (gratior) to heaven. It has been said that
^Letters and Papers, vol. iii., no. 2,239.
388 SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME [June,
learning is unfavorable to common sense. There is no greater
reader than More, yet you will not find a man who is a more com-
plete master of his faculties, on all occasions and with all persons,
more accessible, more ready to oblige, more quick-witted in con-
versation, or combining so much true prudence with such agreeable
manners. His influence has been such that there is scarcely
a nobleman in the land who considers his children fit for their
rank except they have been 'well-educated, and learning has become
fashionable at Court/'
Then follows a few remarks on the education of women, which
show More in a very modern light. I venture to recommend it to
the attention of all those who think learning and true womanhood
to be incompatible. " Erasmus confesses that he once thought
with others that learning was useless to the female sex; More has
quite changed that opinion. He now thinks that nothing so com-
pletely preserves modesty or so sensibly employs the thoughts of
young girls as learning. By such employments they are kept from
pernicious idleness, imbibe noble precepts, and their minds are
trained to virtue Nor do I see why husbands should fear lest
a learned wife should be less obedient, except they would exact
from their wives what should not be exacted from honest and vir-
tuous dames. I think that nothing is more intractable than ignor-
ance ; to say nothing of the fact that similarity of tastes and literary
inclinations is a much stronger bond of union between husband
and wife than mere sensual affection." Erasmus has heard of
women who returning from church wonderfully applauded the
preacher, and graphically described his countenance, but could not
repeat a word he has said or explain the course of his argument.
More's daughters, and such as they, can form an opinion on what
they have heard, and discriminate between the good and the bad.
When Erasmus told More that he would grieve more if he had
lost his daughters after bestowing so much care upon their educa-
tion, he replied he would rather they died learned than unlearned.
This put Erasmus in mind of Phocion's answer to his wife, who
lamented that her husband was to suffer death innocently. " Wife,"
said he, " would it be better that I should die guilty? "*
In the May of 1522 Charles V.f again visited England. He
was received with great ceremony, and More was choosen to wel-
come him to London in a Latin speech. More was evidently in
^Letters and Papers, vol. Hi., no. 1,527.
l tHe landed at Dover on May 27th. On May 2Qth war was declared against
France.
1913-] SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME 389
close attendance upon the King at this time, for we find an instruc-
tion from the King to the effect that " besides Mr. More " some
personages should be found about him, both noble and sage, for the
entertainment of strangers.* He had risen steadily in favor with
Wolsey as well as with the King.
We now come to the year 1523. England was at war with
France and with Scotland; her resources were taxed beyond quiet
endurance, and yet more money was required. It, therefore, be-
came necessary, after an interval of eight years, to summon a
Parliament. The King was very popular, and a war with France
only tended to increase his popularity; so the Parliament met in
good spirits and in a seemingly complaisant humor. As Brewer
points out, it brought together for the first time in close personal
contact Tres Thomi, three Thomases, who of themselves made the
reign remarkable, though in remarkably different ways Thomas
Wolsey, Thomas More, and Thomas Campbell. It was further-
more interesting as being the first English Parliament of which
we have something more than a mere official account.
The House assembled on the I5th of April, a Mass of the Holy
Spirit was sung, the Lords attending in state. The King then
entered the Parliament chamber, and took his seat upon the throne,
while Cardinal Wolsey and the Archbishop of Canterbury sat at
his feet on either side. The usual oration was made by Tunstal,
Bishop of London, the Commons then retiring to their own House
to elect More as Speaker. When presented to the King after his
election, More, according to Hall's account, " disabled himself both
in wit and learning and discretion, to speak before the King, and
brought in for his purpose how one Phormio desired Hannibal
to come to his reading, which thereto assented ; and when Hannibal
was come he began to read de re militari. When Hannibal per-
ceived him he called him an arrogant fool, because he presumed
to teach him, which was a master of chivalry, in the feats of war."
Wolsey replied to this modest speech by saying " that the King knew
his wit, learning, and discretion by long experience in his service,"
and congratulated the Commons on their selection. It should be
understood, however, that " the Speaker of Tudor reigns was
the manager of business on the part of the crown." More, then,
was really the King's nominee, but being such he was a man in no
way to be dazzled by the royal favor, or to be deflected thereby
one inch from the path of rectitude. As an arbiter he had no
^Letters and Papers, vol. iii., no. 2,317.
390 SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME [June,
superior; scholars, theologians, politicians, parents, landowners,
and humbler folk equally valued his strict integrity, his inflexible
justice, and his sound common sense, and so we find him entrusted
with the settlement of all sorts of intricate disputes arising amid
the various ranks and classes of the community.
More's services in Parliament were much appreciated in high
quarters. " The King is aware," writes Wolsey,* " of the faith-
ful diligence of More in the late Parliament about the subsidy,
so that no man could better deserve the reward -of 100 which
it has been usual to give the Speaker as a reward, beside the 100
ordinary. He will, therefore, cause the sum to be advanced on
hearing the King's pleasure. I am rather moved," he
adds, " to put your Highness in mind thereof, because he is not
the most ready to speak and solicit his own cause." The grant
was duly sanctioned by the King, and More writes, shortly after,
to thank Wolsey, saying how grateful he is that his services are
so well liked.f
More was now kept close at the royal heels, as we see from
his frequent correspondence with Wolsey on the Henry's behalf.
He seems generally to have attended on the King after supper,
when he would read any letters from Wolsey, and take his master's
opinions as to their reply.
Though Wolsey thoroughly appreciated his sterling qualities,
and was more than pleased at his successful engineering of the
war subsidy, " More was a man he rather feared than liked."
More was without personal ambitions; he was also without the
weakness of human respect; he was therefore able to distinguish,
perhaps more than anyone else in the Court, between Wolsey's high
policy and his low ambition. When, for instance, the latter pro-
posed that a new office, that of Supreme Constable of the Kingdom,
should be created, evidently meaning to fill it himself, More opposed
him, and persuaded the Council to abandon the scheme, much to the
Cardinal's displeasure. " Are you not ashamed, Mr. More, being the
last in place and dignity to dissent from so many noble and prudent
men? You show yourself a foolish Councillor." "Thanks be
to God," was More's quick and effective reply, " that his royal
Highness has but one fool in his Council."
A literary incident took place during these years, which was
certainly regrettable, and added nothing to More's reputation ; but it
^Letters and Papers, vol. in., no. 3.267.
Papers, vol. i., p. 143 ; Letters and Papers, vol. iii., nos. 3,302 and 3,363.
1913-] SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME 391
was one so characteristic of the times that it must not be passed over.
A certain Germain de Brie or Brixius, a Frenchman, had written a
poem in praise of the gallant feat of a French man-o'-war, the
Chordighera, which during the hostilities of 1512 had taken fire, and
in this condition had borne down upon an English vessel, which of
course took fire as well. More thinking such a panegyric altogether
improper, took care to make some very cutting allusions to it in
his Epigrammata, but when Erasmus and other friends suggested
their publication, he thought it would be better to omit them. Con-
trary to his wish, they were included, and before he could prevent
it a copy reached Brixius himself. Brixius was infuriated, and im-
mediately set about the composition of his Anti-Morus, a satire of
the bitterest kind. When it was too late, Erasmus wrote to More,
begging him to withhold publication, and short of that at least to
refrain from retaliation. But More did retaliate, and with so heavy
a hand that Erasmus wrote to Budseus, saying that, although he
thought himself rather an adept in the bitter personalities of con-
troversy, anything he had done was comparatively mild compared
with More's effusion against Brixius. At present we may leave the
matter thus, but something more will be said about it in a later ex-
amination of More's controversial style.
In the autumn of 1523, More paid a short visit to Calais, where
Wolsey was engaged on diplomatic business. One gathers from
Roper, who, by the way, was never specially devoted to Wolsey's
memory, that the Cardinal was growing a little impatient of More's
influence at Court, and " for revengement of his displeasure coun-
selled the King to send him Ambassador into Spain Which
when the King had broken to Sir Thomas More, and that he had
declared unto his Grace how unfit a journey it was for him
that he should never be likely to do his Grace acceptable service
therein, knowing right well that if his Grace sent him thither, he
should send him to his grave; but showing himself, nevertheless,
ready according to his duty, albeit with the loss of his life, to fulfill
his Grace's pleasure therein, the King allowing well his answer,
said unto him, 'It is not our meaning, Mr. More, to do you hurt,
but to do you good we should be glad. We, therefore, for this
purpose will devise some other, and employ your service other-
IRew Boohs.
CONFESSIONS OF A CONVERT. By Robert Hugh Benson.
New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $1.20 net.
We are glad that Monsignor Benson has at last yielded to the
requests of his many friends by publishing in permanent form
this simple and straightforward apologia of his, which appeared in
the Ave Maria some six years ago. It will silence for all time
those bitter Anglican critics who have given the most absurd and
contradictory reasons why he became a Catholic.
The opening chapter tells of his original religious education
and position. He paints a perfect portrait of his father, though
some of the Archbishop's co-religionists have, strangely enough,
questioned its accuracy, and spoken of his son's bad taste in daring
to attempt it. They were angry forsooth at the charges that " he
failed to carry out his principles," and failed to develop in his son
" the spiritual side of religion." They were too blind to see that
a sense of logic or a grasp of the true principles of spirituality
would have made the father a convert as well as the son.
He describes the religious and moral tone of the Eton of his
time as rather low. He writes :
Chapel services at Eton counted for very little indeed usually
in a religious direction; they were rather artistic, very aca-
demic, and represented, I think, the same kind of official homage
to Almighty God as cheering the Queen when she came to see
us Some things you must not be : you must not be per-
sonally dirty, or a coward, or a bully, or a thief ; but in this other
matter [of purity] you could choose for yourself without being
thought either a blackguard or a prude
After leaving Eton he stayed in London for a year, becoming
vaguely interested for a while in theosophy; entirely absorbed
and fascinated by the music at St. Paul's, and having his sense
of worship developed and directed by an absolute passion for
Shorthouse's book, John Inglesant.
At Cambridge he neglected his prayers, almost gave up Com-
munion, and the religion he did possess " had no spark in it of
real vitality." One of his closest friends at this time was an
explicitly dogmatic atheist, yet he oddly enough says : " I was
conscious of no particularly alarming gulf between us." This
1913.] NEW BOOKS 393
friend must at least have had a logical mind, for he once declared
" that, granted Christianity, Catholicism was its only possible inter-
pretation."
Why he decided to study for the Anglican ministry, he has
not discovered up to the present time, although he imagines that
a life spent in an ecclesiastical household, and the absence of
any other particular interest, seemed to point to a clerical life
as the line of least resistance. His ideal was that of a " quiet
country gentleman, with a beautiful garden and exquisite choir,
and a sober bachelor existence."
His first start on the road to the Catholic Church, though he did
not realize it at the time, was given by Father Maturin of the
Cowley Fathers during a retreat at Kensing. He tells us that
this eloquent preacher touched his heart profoundly as well as
his head, revealing to him the springs and motives of his own
nature in a completely new manner. Father Maturin's conversion
to the Church later on was a great shock to him, but at the same
time a great help on his onward journey.
After his father's death, he traveled in the East for five
months, both in Egypt and the Holy Land, and there began to
realize for the first time what a very small and unimportant affair
the Anglican communion really was. The rest of Christendom
seemed to regard it purely as a Protestant sect of recent origin.
Again, he began to worry over the strong case for Roman con-
tinuity with the pre-re formation Church, and the respective weak-
ness of his own. He tried to conquer these intellectual doubts by
reading anti-Roman books, by speaking contemptuously of the
" Italian Mission," and by working hard to reclaim waverers.
About this time he joined the Anglican Community of the Resurrec-
tion, believing that the only hope ot peace was in the direction
of religious life.
He has only words of praise for the community at Mirfield.
He says : " It will be impossible for me ever to acknowledge ade-
quately the debt of gratitude which I owe to the Community of the
Resurrection, or the admiration which I have always felt, and still
feel, toward their method and spirit." While with them he learned
practically to hold all the dogmas of the Catholic Church, ex-
cept the infallibility of the Pope, although the community in
general seemed most anxious at the time to dissociate themselves
from the extreme party of the Church of England.
The moderate High Church theory of his youth had now
394 NEW BOOKS [June,
given way to what he calls the " Diffusive Theory." Instead of
declaring that Rome and the East had erred through excess, and
the Nonconformists through defect, and that the Church of
England was in her appeal and supposed resemblance to the primi-
tive Church the most orthodox body in Christendom, he now
maintained that the Catholic Church comprised Rome, Moscow, and
Canterbury, with a certain speaking voice, i. e., her silent consensus.
Where the three agreed, there was the explicit voice of the Holy
Spirit; where they dogmatically disagreed, there was the field for
private opinion.
By degrees the untenableness of this theory became manifest,
and the need of an infallible teaching Church to preserve and inter-
pret the truths of Christianity to each succeeding generation began
to dawn upon him. He writes : " I am an official of a Church
that did not seem to know her own mind, even on matters directly
connected with the salvation of the soul."
With humility and singleness of motive, he asked himself
whether or not Rome was that teaching Church. He mentioned his
Roman difficulties to his superior and to his mother, who alone
had the right to know them; he consulted the friends, clerical and
lay, whom they suggested ; he " devoured " everything he could
find on both sides of the controversy. The books that helped him
most were Spencer Jones' England and the Holy See, Mallock's
Doctrine and Doctrinal Disruption, and Newman's Development
of Doctrine, that " like a magician waved away the last floating
mists, and let me see the City of God in her strength and beauty."
Finally and supremely, it was the reading of the Scriptures that
satisfied him as to the positive claims of Rome. He found the
Petrine claim there " like a great jewel, blazing on the surface."
Some of the letters that Monsignor Benson received after his
reception into the Church spoke of him as " a deliberate traitor,
an infatuated fool, an impatient, headstrong, and ungrateful bigot
who had dishonored his father's name and memory." But one
Anglican clergyman with a conscience congratulated him for having
found his way into the City of Peace. Eight years later he also
entered that city.
We are grateful to Monsignor Benson for this book. It is a
simple story of a soul, naturally Catholic, longing for the truth,
and accepting it wholeheartedly once it revealed itself. It will
prove helpful to other earnest seekers who are facing the same
difficulties, and looking for the divine answer to their questioning.
1913.] NEW BOOKS 395
LEVIA-PONDERA. By John Ayscough. New York: Long-
mans, Green & Co. $1.75 net.
It would seem that Monsignor Bicker staffe-Drew was trying
to outdo Monsignor Benson in producing volume after volume.
We loved him best as a novelist; we liked him least as a maker
of guide books, and lo ! now he gathers together his scattered papers,
ties them in a bundle, and wins new laurels as an essayist of
considerable merit. He tells us what a good essayist must be,
and he for the most part lives up to the ideal he sets before us.
Style is half the battle, and the author of San Celestino and
of Hurdcott is certainly not wanting here; the true essayist is
never quite young, and our entertainer and instructor is over
sixty; he should be able to write on the lid of a tea-kettle, or
even on such a poetic thing as the kitchen poker, and John Ayscough
can talk interestingly about Footnotes, or Great Age.
Perhaps his best paper is the one on Walter Scott. No other
lover of the great Sir Walter might agree with his dogmatic ar-
rangement of the novels in order of merit, but every Catholic
will agree with his estimate of Scott's ignorance of the Catholic
Church. He says truly:
The real influence of the Church in the Middle Ages was
never revealed to this man of genius, for revelation is accorded
not to talent but to sincerity; and in this matter Scott was not
sincere, but opportunistic. He did not grasp the heart of the
Middle Age ; for its heart was its faith ; he had merely read of
its behavior, which was sometimes queer and sometimes scan-
dalous, as was the behavior of the much-admired Primitive Age,
as has been that of the age enlightened by all the pure beams
of Scott's beloved Reformation how it thought he had
not the least idea.
We think that the author might better have omitted the paper
on Fickle Fame, for it repeats quite a number of the good things
we have already read in the Entail. Once is enough to tell us that
" few to-day read Dr. Johnson," especially his Rasselas; " that
Johnson thought Tristram Shandy odd ;" " that Withering Heights
is a unique and singular book, etc., etc. We did not think that
his model essayist, be he Lamb or Birrell, would have been so
careless in his book-making.
There are many quotable things throughout the volume, in
turn humorous, sarcastic, and instructive. For example :
396 NEW BOOKS [June,
Protestant nuns are all feet. They talk at large about educa-
tion, but their first principle in education is elimination of God.
There is no such a thing as Protestant Church architecture.
The Cathedrals have never turned Protestant. Beauty is ac-
counted meritorious because no one by any degree of merit can
achieve it. Had Henry VIII. been respectable, Queen Elizabeth
would never have existed. The saints were mere Papists, all
of them. There are decent people in general who never give
scandal: they take it about once a week. One may even see,
nowadays, meeting-houses with crosses on them venerated
as religiously as the cross on a hot-cross bun. The most fatal
of all pessimisms is that which calls Evil Good, and sees no
menace in evil growing, but declares it all healthy progress.
The loss of faith does not tend to cheerfulness in individuals,
and never will tend that way in nations. In Scotland and Nor-
way the prevalence of illegitimate births is due to the chill of
the climate. It is odd that in Catholic Ireland the humidity and
softness of the climate should produce a contrary result; odd,
but certainly fortunate. The reformers would have no more
saints, and they never have had, etc.
We hope we have said enough to make our readers buy these
suggestive essays, and not imitate the poor lady he speaks of,
" struggling along on six thousand pounds a year, who always did
get a certain author's book, but waited until she could get them
from Boots for ninepence."
OUR BOOK OF MEMORIES. Letters of Justin McCarthy to
Mrs. Campbell Praed. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co.
$4.00 net.
Cardinal Newman has well said that " not only for the inter-
ests of a biography, but for arriving at the inside of things the
publication of letters is the true method. Biographers varnish,
they assign motives, they conjecture feelings, they interpret Lord
Burleigh's nod, but contemporary letters are facts."
Mrs. Campbell Praed rightly deems these words especially
applicable to the letters Justin McCarthy wrote her during their
long friendship and literary co-partnership. After they had writ-
ten three novels in collaboration, he suggested that they might
collaborate pleasurably in a volume of personal impressions about
politics, literature, and London life of the eighties and early nineties,
to be published after the dramatic period of Mr. Parnell's fight for
Home Rule should have ended. But the book as originally planned
1913-] NEW BOOKS 397
was never written ; so she determined, therefore, to make up for it
by publishing the many letters he wrote to her from 1884 to 1911.
Justin McCarthy reveals himself in these letters as a most
genial personality, "always a man of noble ideas, the most chivalric
of gentlemen, and the most loyal of friends/' For twelve years
(1884-1896) no man worked harder or sacrificed more for the
Irish cause than he. As he himself put it strongly : " I should
liked to have died on some battlefield for the cause of Ireland."
He did his utmost by pen and tongue to further the two Home
Rule bills of 1886 and 1892, and despite his own poor health, his
longing for literary quiet, and the disunion in the Irish ranks, he
never once faltered in the hard but hopeless struggle.
These letters do not tell us anything that we did not know
before of those stirring days of Irish politics, but they help con-
siderably to confirm the facts we have already learned through
many a recent political biography. There are many brief but
accurate sketches of the men who made history in those days
Gladstone, Parnell, Morley, and many others.
But Justin McCarthy's interests were not all political. In
fact, from at least a score of letters it becomes perfectly
evident that political life was not entirely congenial to him, though
he followed it from a deep sense of duty and patriotism. He was
always longing for the Irish fight to be over and won, that he might
settle down to a life of quiet literary work.
He was a most prolific and indefatigable writer. Besides his
thousands of letters, he published many novels and biographies;
he wrote numerous leaders for the Daily News; he contributed
scores of articles and stories to magazines in England and America,
and lectured on political and literary subjects on every possible
occasion. He wrote with the greatest ease perhaps too easily as
he once said himself and lived too strenuous a life to allow himself
ever to hold one of the first places in the literary world.
Mrs. Praed tells us that " Justin McCarthy had been brought
up a devout Catholic, and, in the later years of his life, attended
Mass regularly with his daughter, and was a firm believer in the
tenets of the Church of Rome." She publishes one of his letters
on the subject, which we are sorry to say is not at all Catholic
in tone. Speaking of dogmatic and mystical questions he says:
Even on those questions the Catholic Church seems to me
more likely to be right than any other but I put those mysteries
398 NEW BOOKS [June,
aside as insoluble for you and me and I only think that if
one is beaten a good deal by the storms and the buffets of the
world, the safest and the most inviting harbor is to be found
in that Church. Perhaps some other and profounder faith may
come too in its time (sic.), but I would let it come if it will.
I would not yearn for it I would not even seek it there
seems something morbid and even artificial in the deliberate
quest after it; if there is genuine efficacy in it, then I suppose
it will come. But anyhow, I feel that, with some of us at least,
it is to be the Church of Rome or no Church at all.
Mrs. Campbell Praed has edited these letters as a labor of love.
Her wreath of immortelles so she styles her book is the best of
tributes to a man of spotless integrity in political life, of absolute
fidelity to chosen friends, and of exceptional talent in literary
achievement.
BETROTHMENT AND MARRIAGE. By Canon de Smet. Vol.
I. Translated from the French edition of 1912 by Rev. W.
Dobell. St. Louis: B. Herder. $2.25.
We welcome Father Dobell's translation of Canon de Smet's
de Sponsalibus et Matrimonio, which we consider the best of the
many scholarly volumes which the theological faculty of Bruges
has published. Without question it is the most complete and
most satisfactory treatise on the marriage laws that we have in
English. Theoretically it studies every problem from the view-
point of dogma, history, and canon law, while practically it answers
all the questions of the busy pastor and confessor.
The translation is well done, having been supervised by the
author himself, who has enriched it with many valuable additions.
The references are many and accurate, the subdivisions are an
improvement on the original Latin text; and while the critics
have rightly disputed a few of the author's conclusions, the book as
a whole is beyond criticism. In the second volume, which we
trust will soon appear, we are promised special appendices on the
laws of England and America.
A PILGRIM OF ETERNITY. By Rev. G. S. Hitchcock. St.
Louis: B. Herder. 60 cents.
These papers of a Unitarian minister describe some of the
phases of his soul's journey on the road to the Catholic Church.
As the author well states : " Had I written a straightforward
narrative the work would have been easier and the result clearer,
1913.] NEW BOOKS 399
precisely because the adding fact to fact would have been within
my limitations." But he preferred to publish these desultory notes,
hoping thereby that one in a similar intellectual position might
the better realize the fact and the beauty of the supernatural.
We have in these pages interesting essays on ancient Greek
and modern German philosophy; a critique of Martineau and a
discussion of the Fourth Gospel; an estimate of Socialism, and an
appreciation of the Catholic Church as a true lover of the poor;
a philosophy of revelation and a treatise on the Last Things.
It is a most thoughtful book, and will prove of great service to
souls brought up in the vagueness and uncertainity of liberal Prot-
estantism.
POOR, DEAR MARGARET KIRBY, AND OTHER STORIES.
By Kathleen Norris. New York: The Macmillan Co. $1.30.
Kathleen Norris has given us a feast of good things in this
collection of short stories. They are all wholesome in tone, charm-
ing in style, and drive home needed truths without being at all
prosy. They are most varied, being pathetic, humorous, and heroic
in turn. Very often they illustrate her favorite commandment:
"Marry not for money but for love; have plenty of babies, and
happiness of the truest sort will be yours."
Margaret Kirby only begins to appreciate what home life
and true affection mean when her husband's failure compels her to
taste the blessedness of poverty. Annie Warriner forgets at once
all her mental and physical discomfort when she hears the pathetic
story of another couple's uphill struggle. For pure fun and frolic
we recommend the wooing of Dr. Bates, and the experience of
shiftless Susanna, who managed to help her husband more by
breaking appointments with him than by keeping them. Tide
Marsh and Rising Water show excellently well the wonderful
sacrifices women are ever ready to make for the sake of little chil-
dren. The whole book is a cheerful message of peace and happi-
ness to the true modern woman.
COME RACK! COME ROPE! By Robert Hugh Benson. New
York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons. $1.35.
This book is unequalled in the vivid picture it presents of the
days when English martyrs by the score gladly gave up their lives
for the Mass and the Papal Supremacy. As Monsignor Benson
tells us in the preface : " Very near the whole of this book is sober,
400 NEW BOOKS [June,
historical fact; and by far the greater number of the personages
named in it once lived and acted in the manner in which I have
presented them."
Many a reader, however, who will fight shy of the sober his-
torical facts of Challoner's Memoirs of Missionary Priests or Dom
Bede Camm's Forgotten Shrines, will gladly take up this fascinating
novel, which makes the heroic souls of the past live again in all
the beauty and strength of their pure Catholic Faith.
The hero of the story is Robert Audrey, who called by God
to labor on the English mission in the Society of Jesus, gives up
all that is dear to him in this world, and at the end dies nobly
for the Faith on the gallows. Monsignor Benson has the dramatic
instinct, and never perhaps in all his books has he manifested it
to better advantage. Scene after scene follows in such profusion
that we begin to understand the author's fears, that some might
think his book "too sensational."
Part I. describes in excellent contrast the fidelity of Robin
to the old Faith, and the apostasy of his father, who cannot stand
the stress of persecution, or overcome the fear of impending ruin.
Nothing grips the heart of the reader so strongly as that pathetic
scene which describes the old squire's first Communion in a Prot-
estant Church. That passage is worth a score of scholarly argu-
ments against the absurd Anglican claim of continuity. Later on
in the story the weakening of Sir Thomas Fitzherbert pictures
another type of that recreant laity, that sold the Faith for money
and peace and preferment in Elizabethan England.
Part II. introduces us to Father Campion, from whose speech
after torture the title of the book is taken. "He was indeed a fire,
a smoke in the nostrils of his adversaries, a flame in the heart of
his friends."
Part III. centres around Mary Stuart, whose innocence our
author maintains, true to the old Catholic tradition. We follow
her to Chartley, and assist at her execution at Fotheringay.
Part IV. describes the last days of Audrey's ministry. We
pity his father when, as magistrate, he is called upon to arrest,
despite himself, the priests in hiding; and we realize the despair
in his heart when among them he discovers his own son. We hope
that at the end he repented of his disloyalty to the Church of
his fathers, and that Audrey's absolution was a valid one. The
vivid portrayal of the horrors of the torture chamber, and the final
scene on the gallows, will bring tears to many eyes.
1913.] NEW BOOKS 401
The martyr's last speech will linger long in the memory, giving
as it does the lie to those who still maintain that the priests who
suffered under Elizabeth were all traitors. " I die here as a Catho-
lic man, for my priesthood, which I now confess before all the
world. There have been alleged against me crimes in which I had
neither act nor part; against the life of her Grace and the peace of
her dominions. It is for the Catholic Faith that I die that which
was once the Faith of all England and which, I pray, may be one
day its Faith again."
We hope that Monsignor Benson will henceforth avoid the
field of prophecy, and keep to the historical novel. Besides enter-
taining us, he is at the same time doing an apologetic work of
the highest importance.
A GUIDE BOOK TO COLORADO. By Eugene Parsons. Boston:
Little, Brown & Co. $1.50 net.
Mr. Parsons has written a complete and interesting guide
book to that Switzerland of America, Colorado. While he has
chiefly in mind the tourist " telling him where to go and what
to see " he also intends it as a book of reference to the possible
settler. He tells us of Colorado county by county, giving us
brief but excellent sketches of its first explorers, the pioneers'
contests with the Indians, and the opening up of its rich mines
of gold and silver. All the scenic beauties of the State are
well described, and all details of interest to the traveler and
sportsman are minutely set forth. We recommend this book highly
to the thousands of tourists who intend to go to California for
the first time during the Panama Exposition of 1915.
THE AMATEUR GENTLEMAN. By Jeffery Farnol. Boston:
Little, Brown & Co. $1.40 net.
Barnabas Barty, son of the ex-champion of England, and
landlord of the Coursing Hound, is left a fortune of 700,000
by an uncle in America. Straightway he determines to set forth
against his father's will for London, to become a gentleman of
fashion. A most wonderful valet, whom he picks up on the road,
endeavors to dissuade him from entering " that fashionable world
so heartless, cruel, and shallow; where inexperience is made a
mock of, and generosity laughed to scorn," but our hero will not
be dissuaded.
On he goes in his career, falling in love at the outset with
VOL. XCVII. 26.
402 NEW BOOKS [June,
the Lady Cleone, thrashing one leader of fashion who becomes his
enemy, and then another who becomes his best friend, continually
frustrating the schemes of the villain, vainly striving to help his
sweetheart's scoundrel brother, and winning at last the gentleman's
steeplechase, which gives him at once the leadership in the world
of fashion. But lo! at the banquet given in his honor at White's,
his humble father rushes in unexpectedly, reveals his identity, and
at once all the dukes, viscounts, and barons present desert the
"Amateur Gentleman," who by his deceit had gained a standing
in their illustrious company. In the depth of his despair he is
helped, against all the probabilities, by an " almost human duchess."
who sees to it that he marries the Lady Cleone. Love laughs at
all distinction of class and birth.
Mr. Farnol writes well, many of his characters like the Bo'sun,
Smivvle and the Bow Street runner, Shrig, reminding one forcibly
of Dickens. However, he keeps his readers too much on the alert
with his hero's interminable adventures and his marvelous hair-
breadth escapes.
The book is absolutely pagan in tone from start to finish,
but it will satisfy the unthinking novel reader who only seeks
to pass away an idle hour.
THE DECIDING VOICE OF THE MONUMENTS IN BIBLICAL
CRITICISM. By Melvin Grove Kyle, D.D. Oberlin, Ohio:
Bibliotheca Sacra Co. $2.15.
Dr. Kyle, of the Xenia Theological Seminary, has written this
volume to defend the authenticity of the books of the Old Testa-
ment against the attacks of the modern, destructive Higher Crit-
icism. He has endeavored to refute its a priori theorizing from
the data afforded by the study of archaeology. '..
His thesis as stated, by Professor James Orr in the Intro-
duction, is that
the progress of knowledge has not overthrown, but has in
innumerable and surprising ways helped to confirm, the view one
derives from the Bible itself as to the beginnings of human
history; the character of ancient civilizations, and the place of
the Hebrews in the midst of these ; the old family relationships
and distributions of mankind; the verisimilitude of the picture
of patriarchal conditions; of life in Egypt, in the desert, and
in Canaan ; of the later history of the kingdoms, and altogether
i % of the course of events as depicted in Holy Scripture, in contrast
with the violent and hypothetical constructions based largely
1913.] NEW BOOKS 403
on an a priori theory of development of the modern critical
schools.
He quotes largely from the works of scholars like Sayce,
Naville, Halevy, and Petrie. He does not seem to be acquainted
with many Catholic authorities, for the only two cited are Father
Oussani of the Dunwoodie Seminary, and Father Vincent of the
Biblical School in Jerusalem. It is an honest and labored attempt
to defend the old conservative theories, but we hardly think it will
prove very effective among the adversaries he seeks to confute.
" He who tries to prove too much proves nothing," as the wise old
adage puts it.
THE INVADERS. By Mrs. Frances N. S. Allen. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co. $1.30 net.
The invaders of Mrs. Allen's story are the Irish and Polish
settlers, who are rapidly taking over the farms of the shiftless
and so-called " aristocratic " New Englander. The old settlers of a
little New England village are at first most bitterly prejudiced
against these newcomers, but their bitterness turns to affection,
once their excellent qualities become known. The invasion ends
in the surrender of the two heroines, Olivia and Prunella, to the
superior charms of Patrick Joyce and Stefan Posadowski.
Although the Irish hero and his kindly sister are supposed
to be well-educated, they speak in a language never spoken before
by any convent-bred girl or any university man ; the broken English
too of our Polish genius, Stefan, and his genial pastor is also most
wonderful and unique. But these are only minor blemishes in an
otherwise well-written story. The characters are well drawn, and
the village life with all its gossip, meanness, narrowness, and pseudo-
aristocracy well described. There is a kindly humor and winning
naturalness about the book that make one loath to put it down at
the end.
We were rather pleased to learn that the Polish pastor, Father
Zujewski, was a subscriber to THE CATHOLIC WORLD, and that he
was courteous enough to pass it on to his friend, the Congrega-
tionalist minister.
TWO AND TWO MAKE FOUR. By Bird S. Coler. New York:
Frank D. Beattys & Co. $1.50 net.
Mr. Coler has written a common sense plea, or as he calls
it, a two-and-two-make-four argument, for the teaching of religion
in the schools. The volume contains a long historical digression, de-
404 NEW BOOKS [June,
fending the Catholic Church against the lies and calumnies of Prot-
estant prejudice, which is as rare as it is refreshing, coming as it
does from an outsider. And why ? Because he says :
It is plain to me that Catholicism can stand up against a State-
supported educational system from which God is excluded, and
equally plain that Protestantism cannot, and that the result of
the public policy so many Protestants blindly support will be a
complete extinction of their branch of Christianity, and a divi-
sion of the world of opinion between Catholicism on the one
hand and atheism on the other.
He is an outspoken critic of the public schools of the United
States, which he declares " are not making for righteousness."
The present system has been tried and found wanting in the one
thing essential, the religious training of the child. He says:
We must regain for God the children of the nation. If we
were all of one creed, it might be done through our present pub-
lic-school system. But we are of many creeds, so that the only
practical plan is to let each creed teach its own, and let the
State pay, out of the taxes from all, a just compensation to
each educational agency, secular or religious, for the educational
work it shall perform.
He gives us a brief critique of Socialism, which, he feels
certain, would capture the elementary schools if it could, as it
realizes the importance of beginning its propaganda early. He
cites Spargo, who, in his Socialism, writes:
Whether the Socialist regime could tolerate the existence of
elementary schools other than its own, such as privately con-
ducted kindergartens and schools, religious, and so on, is ques-
tionable. Probably not. It would probably not content itself
with refusing to permit religious doctrine or ideas to be taught
in its schools, but would go further, and, as the natural pro-
tector of the child, guard its independence of thought in later
life, as far as possible, by forbidding religious teaching of any
kind in schools for children up to a certain age This
restriction of religious education to the years of judgment and
discretion implies no hostility (sic.) to religion on the part of the
State, but neutrality.
The so-called neutral school in France, as Mr. Coler well
points out, has boldly attacked all religion, laughed at morality,
and the very idea of God, with the result of increasing illiteracy,
lowering the birth-rate, and adding greatly to the sum of criminality.
It is most rare to find in the pages of a non-Catholic writer
1913.] NEW BOOKS 405
so clear an assertion of Catholic principles, and so fair an account
of historical facts. We trust that his fairness will be emulated by
many of his co-religionists.
SHAKESPEARE, BACON, AND THE GREAT UNKNOWN. By
Andrew Lang. New York : Longmans, Green & Co. $3.00 net.
This last book of Andrew Lang is a strong defense of the
Shakespearian authorship against the claims of Bacon and the
Great Unknown. As a valiant knight, Lang enters the lists against
Mr. G. G. Greenwood, a man " worth fighting, cunning of fence,
and learned," and therefore worthy of his steel. The theory that
Bacon was in the main the author of Shakespeare's plays has been
defended for the last forty years in England and America, as the
preface tells us, " by methods, logic, and hypotheses closely resem-
bling those applied by many British and foreign scholars to Homer,
and by critics of the very highest school to Holy Writ. Yet the
Baconian theory is universally rejected in England by the professors
and historians of English literature; and generally by students who
have no profession save that of Letters."
Mr. Greenwood, his opponent, is not a Baconian. His posi-
tion is merely negative; Shakespeare is not the author of the plays
and poems. Although the Baconian theory is " an extremely reas-
onable one," and " serviceable if not even essential " to his argu-
ment, he never commits himself to any positive statement regarding
the real author.
Lang answers all the arguments of Mr. Greenwood in a clear,
concise manner, mercilessly showing forth his mistakes of fact,
his want of logic, and his faults of interpretation. He proves
that Shakespeare was recognized as the author of the plays that
bear his name by Ben Johnson, Heywood, Heminge, and Condell,
the actors, all contemporaries, while there was no hint given of any
other possible author until 1856, " when the twin stars of Miss
Delia Bacon and Mr. Smith arose." The argument drawn from
the silence of Philip Henslowe is met by the common sense answer :
" Henslowe records no loans to Shakespeare the actor, because he
lent him no money. He records no payments for plays to Shakes-
peare, the author-actor, because to Henslowe the actor sold no
plays." The so-called impossible argument, viz., it is impossible
that the bookless, untutored lad of Stratford should have possessed
the wide, deep, and accurate scholarship displayed by the author
of the plays, he meets by denying the evidence of any deep scholar-
ship. While Shakespeare did possess some of the lore that scholars
406 NEW BOOKS [June,
did possess, he did not use his knowledge like a scholar. He makes
the second syllable in Posthumus long, and the penultimate syllable
of Andronicus short. He calls Delphi " Delphos " (a non-existent
word) ; he confuses " Delphos " with Delos, and places the Delphian
oracle in an island. In the same play, The Winter's Tale, he
makes the artist, Giulio Romani (1492-1546) contemporary with
the flourishing age of the Pythian Apollo. No man who knew the
foreign politics of his age as Bacon did, could have written so
extremely eccentric a play as Love's Labour's Lost.
Lang's view is that Shakespeare pickec^ up his " small Latin " .
as a boy in the Stratford school, and that he used the English
translations then current. If Lucre ce and The Comedy of Errors
show a knowledge of Latin texts still untranslated, " he could " get
a construe " in London, or help in reading, from a more academic
acquaintance, or buy a construe at no high ransom from some poor
scholar." The Baconians forgot that the English literature of his
day was saturated with every kind of classical information.
Most of his knowledge of court life he could pick up in the
hundreds of plays and stories published in his time, and an actor
who played at court could write of courtly manners without ever
having been a courtier. " It seems scarcely credible that men should
hold that only a Bacon, intimately familiar with the society of the
great, could make the great speak as in the plays they do and
as in real life they probably did not"
So our brave knight goes on, breaking through, with the great-
est ease, all the weak points in his opponent's armor, until at last
his adversary lies dead upon the field. Every lover of the Swan
of Avon will read with the greatest pleasure this kindly but most
effective bit of controversy.
CARDINAL MANNING; THE DECAY OF IDEALISM IN
FRANCE; THE INSTITUTE OF FRANCE. Three Essays
by J. E. C. Bodley. New York: Longmans, Green & Co.
$3.00 net.
We are glad that Mr. Bodley did not see his way to accept Mr.
Longman's proposal to expand this gossipy essay into a monograph
on the whole career of Cardinal Manning. For while Monsignor
Purcell abused his trust most shamefully by the mean caricature he
drew, Mr. Bodley, despite his absolute confidence in himself, which
breathes on every page, is to our mind the last man in the world to
attempt so delicate and difficult a task. He believes in the first place
that " there are few ecclesiastics in modern times, of any denomina-
1913.] NEW BOOKS 407
tion, who accept the creed they profess without some mental reserva-
tion," and proves it by a story of an Eton boy " of whom it was said
that he would make an admirable clergyman, if he were not so
transparently honest."
Again he lacks an essential quality in a biographer of Manning,
viz., a perfect understanding of the character of Cardinal Newman.
On the contrary, he is most bitter and prejudiced. So much so
that the excellent Life of Cardinal Newman, lately published by
Wilfrid Ward, proves, in his estimate, Newman to be " the most
attractive and the most colossal egoist that ever lived neither
a great Englishman, nor a great Oxford man, nor a great Catholic."
What a pity that Ward wrote to so little purpose !
Again, he has read Ward so superficially that he never realized
that Newman went over to the Catholic Church the very instant
his conscience told him he could no longer honestly remain in the
Church of England. " No, he was dishonest," says Mr. Bodley,
voicing an oft-repeated calumny that a certain Apologia answered
years ago rather effectively, for " he considered that he was jus-
tified in remaining within the English Church for some years,
while his teaching was sending Oxford men over to Rome." Is
such a man competent to handle the many intricate questions that
must needs come up in a biography of a great Catholic ecclesiastic?
We are very skeptical of another statement of Mr. Bodley's, viz.,
" Manning sincerely believed that Newman was not an orthodox
Catholic." He does not seem to grasp the fact that there is a
great deal of freedom allowed in the Catholic Church to thinkers,
outside the field of defined doctrine.
The essay on The Decay of Idealism in France is more in
Mr. Bodley's line. It is a discussion, "not of the idealism of meta-
physical philosophy, but the idealism of every-day life, the idealism
of the man on the boulevards, of the peasant, the politician, the
journalist, the playwright, and also of the philosopher who speaks
the language of the people." The chief reasons, therefore, which
he develops are the general pessimism produced by the Franco-Ger-
man war, and the particular disillusion of sanguine republicans, who
failed to find the Utopia of their dreams in the Third Republic;
the influence of the characterless modern press, which is creating a
mentality devoid of distinctivcHess ; the dulcet inconoclasm of writ-
ers like Renan and the withering nihilism of moderns like Ana-
tole France, to whom no ideals have ever been sacred ; the displace-
ment of the classics in the modern French system of education by
subjects deemed more serviceable; and finally the blighting effect
4 o8 NEW BOOKS [June,
of this mechanical age, which, in changing all the conditions of
human life, is changing human nature itself. It is a thoughtful
paper, but a little too dogmatic in its utterances. We could imagine
Rene Doumic writing a counter thesis on Contemporary French
Idealism, and making out a fairly good case. But, of course, this
would be at once condemned by our pessimistic Mr. Bodley as
heretical.
The third essay on The Institute of France gives a brief but
entertaining account of the five Academies of which the Institute
is composed.
RELIGIOUS HISTORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. By
Pierre de la Gorce. Paris: Plon-Nourrit & Co. 2 Vols.
i$frs.
The eminent French jurist, Pierre de la Gorce, is well known
in France by his History of the Second French Republic (2 vols.)
and his History of the Second Empire (7 vols.). In his Religious
History of the French Revolution, he purposes to give a complete
picture of the Catholic laity and clergy of France from the first
days of the Revolution until the restoration of peace under the
First Consul (1789-1801). He has just completed the second
volume of this projected work.
Volume I. deals with the period dating from the opening of
the States General until the end of the Constituent Assembly.
During it the Catholic Church lost all its property and its privi-
leges, the religious orders were prohibited by law, and the schismatic
Civil Constitution of the clergy was enacted, which caused untold
harm to religion for years.
Volume II. deals with the laws of proscription passed in the
Legislative Assembly, and perfected by the Convention. By these
decrees the priests loyal to the Holy See were deprived of their
citizenship, declared suspect, and arbitrarily punished by either exile
or imprisonment. The most thrilling pages of these two volumes
are those that describe the cruel massacres of September, and the
heroic but hopeless fight made by the peasants of La Vendee for
their faith. The author says in his preface that some critics may
think that he paints the Revolution in too dark colors. But he
declares that he aims to write objectively, without passion and
without prejudice, although not with that impartiality which is born
of indifference. He says well : " In giving an account of the trials
through which our Christian forefathers passed, my heart feels
keenly the suffering they underwent for the Church of God."
1913.] NEW BOOKS 409
He has purposely refrained from comparing the policy of
persecution inaugurated by the present French Republic to the
persecution in the days of '89. He wishes his readers to draw
their own lessons.
VERSES AND REVERSES. By Wilfrid Meynell. London:
Herbert and Daniel. 50 cents.
It is seldom enough that a volume of so charmingly playful
an intimacy as these Verses and Reverses flutters out to the world
of general readers. The little book was privately printed some two
or three years back for Mr. Meynell's own family and a group of
fortunate friends : now importunity has given it to the larger
if less personal public. Its pages abound in the gently whimsical;
they are rich in epigram, in pun and paradox, in tender reminis-
cence, and in a philosophy of life and love profound enough to
suffer no whit from the self -assumed motley.
The lines To Gilbert Chesterton, or better still To George
Meredith in Old Age are, in their unique field, classics; and we
of cis- Atlantic affiliation (somewhat given, alas! to the fault of
experimental conjugality!) must rejoice in the wit and wisdom of
that delicious arraignment, United States. But here, under the
quaint, Southwellian title, A Christian Comforter, is a fragment
that gives pause a fragment redolent with the remembered per-
fume of Patmore's mystic philosophy :
" A waverer, Lord, am I," saith one
" Here, there, I run."
" My messenger be thou, to tell
Of heaven to hell."
" How little love, O Lord, I feel
My heart is steel."
" But I the Magnet am," saith He,
"And steel's for Me."
" Ah, Lord, I lean with love on man
Whene'er I can."
" Who clings to man, My proxy, he
Clings so to Me."
Those who know Mr. Wilfrid Meynell only as critic and
editor as primal friend and literary executor of Francis Thomp-
son or, perchance, in his charming but self-effacing biographical
work, will be richly repaid for seizing the opportunity of closer
approach in these delectable pages. " If," he himself says by way
of introduction to his "game of words:" "If I have not been
410 NEW BOOKS [June,
at pains to separate the intended sprightly from the intended grave,
it is because I have little love of such barriers; nor does the hand of
fate observe such partitioning when it deals out to us blindly the
good and bad cards whereof we build our House of Life.'*
IN THE LEAN YEARS. By Felicia Curtis. St. Louis: B.
Herder. $1.60 net.
When Under the Rose appeared and presented itself as, to
our best knowledge, the first attempt of the author, Felicia Curtis,
we noted it as one of the finest historical novels of recent years.
Its successor, now published under the title, In the Lean Years,
deserves just as hearty praise. Its setting is England under the
second George, when the Catholics were hated and banned, and
when, as indeed happens in the story, a younger son could, by
taking the oaths of the Established Church, seize his dead father's
property and disinherit his Catholic elder brother. The hero and
heroine of the tale are Catholics and Jacobites, and in their hot
enthusiasm for the forlorn Stuart cause they revive in us all that
romantic fervor that fired our blood when we first read Scott.
The author certainly knows how to write a tale of adventure,
intrigue, and excitement; besides which she here gives us two love
themes of real interest, and a picture of eighteenth century life
that is both complete and vivid.
most serviceable apologetic work on all matters that con-
cern Catholic faith and doctrine is the Dictionnaire Apologeti-
que de la Fol Catholique, now being published by Gabriel Beau-
chesne of Paris, France. The energetic publishers are counting
neither cost nor time in the execution of this monumental work.
Some years have passed since the publication of the first fasciculus
or part, and only the ninth part, which goes as far as the " Instruc-
tion of Youth " under the letter I, has so far been published.
All who read French, and particularly priests, will find in
these volumes the readiest and most practical help in explaining
the doctrines of our holy Faith; in setting forth the positive
proofs of religion, and answering the many modern difficulties
that have sprung from the material sciences. No matter of im-
portance that touches even remotely upon the history, teaching,
and discipline of the Catholic Church is neglected, and to all are
given a thoroughness and completeness of treatment that bring
the inquirer in touch with the best sources and the surest findings.
We heartily recommend the work, and will continue to call it
1913.] NEW BOOKS 411
to the attention of our readers as other portions of it come from
the press. (Price, 5 frs. per part.)
DARTLY because of the recent anti-alien enactments of Cali-
fornia and their far-reaching consequences, the Japanese are
a much-discussed people to-day. There will be interest, therefore,
in a very solid, practical little book called Our Neighbors: The
Japanese. (Chicago: F. G. Browne & Co. $1.25 net.) Written
by Joseph King Goodrich, it deals with the religion, education,
customs, and divisions of the Japanese, and gives its information
thoroughly and carefully.
OLD CHINA AND YOUNG AMERICA, by Sarah Pike Conger
(Chicago: F. G. Browne & Co. 75 cents), is intended for
children. Its first half comprises little stories of things and people
Chinese; Mrs. Conger, as wife of the Minister to China, became,
of course, familiar with that country, and writes of it entertainingly.
The second half of the book is made up of patriotic and moral
sermons of the Protestant Sunday-school type.
'THE RIGHT OF THE STRONGEST, by Frances Nimmo
* Greene (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.35 net),
is a romance of the mountains of Alabama. Its theme is the
problem of education and of commercial progress as opposed to
tradition and the rights of the individual; its plot is full of ex-
citement; and its characters are well drawn, particularly the rural
potentate and philosopher, Uncle Beck.
A CHARMING little volume for the nursery is The Princess
*"* and the Goblin. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co. 50
cents net.) One of the prettiest of Hans Andersen's fairy tales,
we have it here in George Macdonald's version, as simplified by
Elizabeth Lewis, and illustrated very daintily in color.
WILLIAM DANA ORCUTT, known as a novelist, has taken
a new pen for this pretty little tale, which he calls The Ma-
donna of Sacrifice. (Chicago: F. G. Browne & Co.) Its setting
is Florence, and its theme the passionate devotion of a little, con-
sumptive serving-boy to a valuable and famous painting belonging
to his master, and called the " Madonna of Sacrifice." It is
charmingly told, and is published as a gift-book.
jpenoMcals.
The Penalties of Excommunication. By Rev. Herbert Thurs-
ton. The counsel for the plaintiff in the recent action of Mathew
vs. The Times made great capital out of the damage likely to be
done his client by the Papal sentence of excommunication. Father
David Fleming's exposition of the leniency of the approved can-
onical teaching at the present day was received with evident in-
credulity. But even at the height of Papal authority canonists
recognized many causes which excused, even from the slightest
fault, those who held social relations with the excommunicated
person. Hollweck says : " I believe that at the present day our
judgment concerning all these matters must be emphatically a
lenient one. As long as in such intercourse there is no indication
of a flippant disregard of ecclesiastical prohibitions, there can be
no question of grievous sin in transgressing them, and as long as
there is some definite reason for such conduct we must exclude
even the idea of venial sin." The Month, March.
A Successful Catholic Experiment in India. By Saint Nihal
Singh. In the Sialkot district of the province of the Punjab,
an out-of-the-way corner of Hindustan, an experiment in trans-
forming densely-ignorant, poverty-stricken, dirty, down-trodden
humanity into capable, conscientious citizens, possessing an assured
economic position, and quickened with high spiritual and moral
ideals, is being carried on by the Belgian Franciscan Fathers. In
1892 three families were chosen to make the purchased site habit-
able; the first settlement was named Maryabad, " Mary's Village."
After untold hardships from heat, disease, suspicion on the part
of the natives, a completely organized town has been laid out,
and a moral and economic transformation worked in the inhabit-
ants. In 1900 the local government granted the Mission 2,376
acres for about half a crown per acre, levied to cover the cost
of laying water channels. A new settlement, Khushpur, was
founded which numbers 1,450 people. In Maryabad the Mission
own the land, leasing it to the converts; in Khushpur the govern-
ment reserves proprietary rights, granting only occupancy rights,
which, however, descend from father to son. The Bishop of
Lahore is officially recognized as headman of Khushpur. In spirit-
1913.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 413
ual and educational affairs, both settlements are organized like any
Catholic parish in the Occident. Dublin Review, April.
The Catholic Party in the Netherlands. By Lady Dorothy
Acton. " The impression left by Dutch Catholicism on the mind of
the writer almost approaches an ideal picture." Especially since
the restoration of the hierarchy in 1853 has the progress of the
Church been marked. Between 1830 and 1900 some five hundred
new churches are said to have been built, and one hundred and
fifty enlarged, at a cost of five hundred millions of florins, and this
although the Dutch Catholics are predominantly of the peasant and
shop-keeping class. In politics they have formed an alliance with
the Anti-Revolutionary Party, led by Dr. Kuyper, which though
essentially Calvinist, is with the Catholics as against the Liberals,
especially on the education question. The great victories of this
alliance occurred in the elections of 1887 and 1909. In the latter
election the Catholics had twenty-five out of a hundred members
in the Second Chamber, and in 1910 held eighteen out of fifty
seats in the First Chamber. Their leader, until his death in 1903,
was Abbe Schaepman. Their social and philanthropic organiza-
tions are strong; their obedience to the Episcopate and the Holy
See unswerving : their programme the reconstruction of society on
a Christian basis; their policy frankly democratic. Dublin Re-
view, April.
The Saturday Half-Holiday. By Charles Calippe. A rest
from work immediately preceding the Sunday rest was early guar-
anteed to slaves, as we see from the Apostolic Constitutions, that
compilation of religious laws published in the fourth or fifth cen-
tury, but originating much earlier; the purpose was to secure the
giving of religious instruction. In the Middle Ages a similar
reduction of hours of work obtained on every Saturday and on
some twenty vigils of feasts ; the reduction varied according to the
trade and the season. The same practice endured in England
until the industrial revolution of the early nineteenth century.
The Saturday half-holiday now obtains in the United States, Eng-
land, France, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, and Australia. Its
real purpose is to insure a full day's rest on Sunday, and it is
thus a social and semi-religious institution. The practice was in-
troduced into France in 1879 by a Catholic employer of Roanne,
M. Grenot, influenced by a conversation with Pius IX. ; and Count
414 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [June,
de Mun has, from 1886 to 1911, urged laws to secure this rest, but
thus far his propositions have not been adopted. Revue du Clerge
Frangais, May i.
Toleration. By Gustave Neyron. The ideal of the Church is
naturally the supremacy of the one true religion. But she does not
intend to strive for this end by intrigue or violence, but by charity,
patience, truth, and high morality. Even were she supreme, she
would recognize the freedom of conscience among non-Catholics,
and merely suppress open crimes against religion. To prove this
the author quotes from the staunchest defenders of the Church's
rights, and the most determined opponents of Liberalism, such as
Bonald, Manning, Cardinal Pie, and especially Louis Veuillot, and
Leo XIII., contrasting the mildness of their language and the
breadth of their views with the narrowness and intolerance of
Luther and Eugene Mayer. Etudes, April 5.
Trouble in Algiers. By Commandant Davin. France for the
past century has been mistress of Algiers, and it has been causing
her of late no little worriment. Hundreds of native families have
been leaving Algiers for other Mussulman regions such as Egypt
or Syria. One reason for this exodus is the Pan-Islamism move-
ment which has been going on in India, Egypt, Persia, Arabia, etc.
But the principal reason is the maladministration, of the gov-
ernors appointed by France. In the Governor's hands lies all
power in connection with the natives, such as casting them into
prison without trial and excessive taxation. The writer of the
article ends it by instructions and a plea for a more just govern-
ment of the country. Le Correspondent, April 10.
The Tablet (April 19): "Down Tools" in Belgium deals
with the general strike promoted by the Socialists not for " eco-
nomic gain, but to secure a change in the conditions of franchise."
At the last election the Catholic party secured a large majority of
the votes, so the Socialists desire a change that will enable them
to control. The strike is the means to obtain this, but it is a
failure, " because it has only a minority at its back."
(April 26) : Frederick Ozanam: A short consideration of
this celebrated Frenchman's work as a Christian apologist in the
schools of France and as founder of the St. Vincent de Paul Society.
In another column the letter of Cardinal Merrv del Val for the
1913.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 415
Holy Father to the Archbishop of Lyons on the occasion of the
Ozanam centenary celebration is published.- A Monumental
Edition of the "Divine Comedy:" Attention is directed to the new
edition of Dante's work by Leo S. Olschki of Florence (limited
to three hundred copies). The ever-increasing appreciation of
Dante receives consideration; from 1801 to the end of 1911 no
fewer than three hundred and twenty-five editions have been pub-
lished in every part of the world. Literary Notes: The greatest
of Holland's poets, Joost van den Vondel, is the subject of these
notes. Born a Baptist, he became a Catholic at a time when such
a move brought him poverty and contempt, as nine-tenths of the
Hollanders were then Protestant. His Lucifer has been compared
with Paradise Lost.
The Month (March) : W. Randolph, in Modern Ugli-
ness and Its Meaning, deplores the loss of beauty in modern art.
"Ugliness and worthlessness in human handiwork of whatever order
was, until the age almost immediately preceding our own, a phe-
nomenon practically unknown. The special force of these facts
as to bygone beauty and modern ugliness lies in their moral and
social significance decay and deformity in man's handiwork
is a sign of sickness in the body politic."
The Church Quarterly Review (April) : E. Wordsworth eu-
logizes St. Francis of Assisi, dwelling on the biographies by Father
Cuthbert and Miss Grierson. The Religious Philosophy of
Rudolf Eucken is treated by the Rev. A. Caldecott.
Dublin Review (April) : Wilfrid Ward gives a second paper
on Moneypenny's Life of Disraeli. Louise Imogen Guiney
writes on Epitaphs, Catholic and Catholic-Minded, especially since
the Reformation, showing how an instinctive belief in Purgatory
and prayers for the dead has made Anglicans defy their own
formularies. J. F. Scheltema writes of Music in Moslem Spain.
Canon William Barry, praising Monsignor Ward's magnum
opus, dwells on the incidents leading to Catholic Emancipation, and
especially on O'Connell's part in securing it. In The Rheims
Version of the New Testament, Father Hugh Pope, O.P., declares
that our text of the Old Testament demands revision, and appeals
for this even before the completion of the revision of the Cle-
mentine Vulgate now going on.
416 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [June,
Le Correspondent (April 10) : An Austrian under the pen
name of Schwarz Gelb, defends Austria's attitude in the Balkan
war. P. .de Nolhac gives a sketch of Andre Le Notre, the archi-
tect of the palace of Versailles.
(April 25) : The Catholic Church, both by her preachers, and
her writers, has been proclaiming the danger to a nation from
divorce and other social diseases. M. Henry Bordeaux has made
this the problem in three of his books. George Fonsgrieve treats
of his work, and particularly of his latest volume, The Home.
L. Jenouvrier discusses the decline of the birth-rate throughout
France, which is causing such great uneasiness.
Etudes (April 20) : Abbe J. Riviere, whose book on The
Dogma of the Redemption was so well received some eight years
ago, has recently argued that the ideas of ransom, sacrifice, and
penal expiation are metaphorical, and should be avoided. Adhemar
d'Ales undertakes to show that these Biblical and patristic notions
contribute a measure of truth to the understanding of this mystery
which cannot safely be overlooked. Yves de la Briere discusses
the writing and conferences of R. P. Ambrose Matignon, S.J., who
died on March loth last. His essays, published in the Etudes
from 1859 to 1871, dealt with the doctrine of the Society on liberty,
Papal Infallibility, and the moral regeneration of France.
The writer defends him from the charge of liberalism, but con-
siders him to have been too indulgent towards certain Liberals
like Montalembert, and too harsh towards Veuillot.
Etudes Franciscaines (May) : S. Belmond defends Scotus
against the attacks of Father Lagrange, O.P., and M. Vacant.
H. Matrod begins a description of the conquest of Germany by the
Friars Minor, under Blessed Caesar of Spires, from 1221 to 1238.
Jacopone de Todi as a Popular Preacher is the subject of
a study by Jules Pacheu. P. Exupere eulogizes a recent volume,
Religious Policy, written by Charles Mauras, an agnostic and pos-
itivist, in praise of the Church, and urging her support by the State.
IRecent Events.
The Barthou Ministry is still maintaining an
France. existence which from its very beginning was
looked upon as extremely precarious. That
it has lasted so long is probably due to the fact that the Parliament
has been having a long recess. The proposed increase to three
years for service in the army, rendered necessary by the large addi-
tions to the peace standing of the German Army, was received
at first almost with enthusiasm. Further reflection, however, has
developed, somewhat serious opposition. Not only have the Col-
lective Socialists, who are led by M. Jaures, made counter-proposals
which involve serious modifications of those of the government;
but similar proposals have been made by such influential members
as M. Joseph Reinach and M. de Montebello. The Extreme Rad-
icals, too, who were expected to support the present Ministry, have
joined the opposition. It seems quite certain that even if carried,
considerable modifications will be made in the proposals of the
government.
Among the difficulties attached to the proposed change is that
even at present there is a great dearth of officers, the number
of candidates for the two military schools of Saint Cyr and Saint
Maixent has diminished almost by fifty per cent. Officers are
resigning every year in order to take posts in private industrial
establishments. The government proposes as a remedy for this evil
to introduce a bill to increase the pay of officers. The reasons for
the opposition of the Extreme Radicals to the Three Years' Service
Bill is fear on their part that the army will become an instrument
of social reaction. The soldiers, it is thought, will lose touch with
the people. The reactionaries, it is said, are trying to make use of
the patriotism of the country in furtherance of their own political
objects. The requirements of national defense can be better sat-
isfied by a more rigorous application of the Two Years' Service
Bill.
The opposition has become so strong that M. Jaures predicts
that the government's proposals will be defeated. Other opponents
are not so sanguine. While in Germany there have been certain
organs in the Press who have asserted that France was the cause
of the German increase of her own army, the German Chancellor
has recognized that there is nothing provocative in the recent pro-
posal of the French government. There is no doubt, however, that
VOL. XCVII. 27.
418 RECENT EVENTS [June,
there has recently been a great revival of enthusiasm for the
army in France, and that immense progress has been made in its
training, equipment, and alertness. This improvement is largely
due to the action of Germany in Morocco in 1911, which brought
home to the French people the necessity of being prepared for the
worst.
The religious ceremonies and processions which have been held
annually at Orleans for four hundred and forty-eight years, with
only two breaks, in celebration of the raising of the siege of that
city by Joan of Arc, will not be held this year, because the Mayor
insisted upon imposing upon the clergy, who would have taken
part, conditions which the Bishop considered to be humiliating.
France has acted in unison with Europe in the endeavor to
keep the peace that has been so much endangered by the occurrences
in the Balkans. These events, in the view of the French Premier,
have suddenly disturbed the old balance of power, and have raised
new problems. The defeat of Turkey has disconcerted diplomacy,
and it has now to find new bearings. During the past six months,
France has done its duty to Europe. But notwithstanding all
their best efforts for the maintenance of peace, no one could say
that it was sheltered from all peril. The government, therefore,
would stake its existence upon the bill for three years' service
being passed without any change that would affect its vital prin-
ciple. Moreover, it had decided to keep with the colors for a
further period the men whose two years' term will expire next
October.
The Entente Cordiale with Great Britain is to receive a fresh
endorsement by the visit of M. Poincare to London. King
Alfonso's visit to Paris has manifested the good relations which
exist between France and Spain, although vehement protests were
made by Syndicalists and Anarchists in Paris against receiving the
visit. Ferrer's execution has not been forgotten.
The bill for increasing the peace strength
Germany. of the army, and the bills for raising the
funds thereby rendered necessary, have been
the chief subject of discussion in Germany. The first of these
bills has been under the consideration of the Budget Committee,
by which most of the proposals of the government have been
acceptedi. The Committee, however, refused to grant the six
new regiments of cavalry demanded, and brought the number down
to \hree. Certain other proposals have still to be discussed.
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 419
The Imperial Chancellor, Herr von Bethmann Hollweg, in his
statement on the opening of the discussion in the Reichstag, justified
the demands of the government by alleging that they were, " neces-
sary in order to secure the future of Germany." No man, he said,
could know whether and when there would be a war in
Europe. A new situation had arisen, due to the war in
the Balkans. The place of an impotent and passive Turkey had
been taken by States which had exhibited a quite extraordinary
active vitality. These States were Slavs in race, and not friendly,
to say the least, to those of German descent. A conflict might arise
between Slaventum and Germanentiim, and it was, therefore, the
duty of the German Empire to be prepared; the more so because
its ally, Austria-Hungary, had suffered greatly from the same
cause. The German element in the Dual Monarchy had been
weakened, while the Slav had received an immense accession of
strength. There was, however, no intention on the part of Ger-
many to stir up a war.
Towards France the Empire cherished equally peaceful inten-
tions. There were in France, however, the Chancellor said, large
circles not only of Chauvinists, but of the quieter and thinking
people, who believed that the French were now at least equal, if
not superior to Germany, and had full confidence " in the excellence
of their own army, in the alliance with Russia,, and perhaps also
in the hope of England." Some even boasted of the superior train-
ing of the French soldier, and of the French artillery, and saw
visions of Germany overrun by masses of Russian infantry and
cavalry. The defeats of Turkey were looked upon as defeats of
the Germans. Therefore it was the clear duty of Germany, wedged
in as she was between the Slav world and the French, without
any well-defined boundaries capable of affording a natural defense,
to have an army large enough to make herself so fully respected that
she need fear no attack. The army bill was presented, not because
Germany wanted war, but because she wanted peace.
The Chancellor's view of the attitude of the French people,
although itself exaggerated, is moderation itself compared with
the misrepresentations of that attitude made by a part of the German
Press. These organs for the promotion of ill-will between the
two countries, represent France as the real enemy, and as seething
with hatred of Germany; its only reason, they say, for not making
war is the lack of courage. The more responsible among the organs
of public opinion in Germany, as well of the government, have re-
buked this attitude, but certain incidents which have taken place have
420 RECENT EVENTS [June,
tended to inflame warlike feelings, and the notice taken of them in-
dicates a certain tension among sections, more or less large, of people
in the two countries. At two places, Luneville and Arracourt,
German military airships, containing officers, made a descent upon
French territory, and caused no little excitement in Germany,
because *of the reception met with on the part of the inhabitants;
and in France on account of the suspicion of the objects of the
visit. Satisfactory explanations, however, were made by the au-
thorities on both sides. The French people consoled themselves
with the thought that the descent was due to the fact that German
officers had not yet become skillful steerers; that an opportunity
had been given them to learn the secrets of the New Zeppelin
tended to afford them a further degree of satisfaction.
A more serious incident occurred at Nancy. Some German
visitors to that city were jeered at by certain students, and hustled
at the railway station. The French government at once instituted
an investigation, and having discovered the fact that the local
authorities had not fully fulfilled the duty of protecting the strang-
ers, relieved of his duties the Prefect of the Department, for failing
to report the incident, transferred to other posts two of the chief
officials of the Nancy police, and dismissed the policemen in charge
at the station. The local authorities prohibited the performance
of the patriotic melodrama which had excited the feelings of the
students; this prohibition, however, was not persisted in. These
events indicate, indeed, the existence of strong feelings of animosity
in certain sections. They do not, however, affect the whole of the
people; still less do they represent the deliberate purpose of either
government.
The economic evils with which this country has been afflicted,
owing to the selfish greed of the trusts, protected, as they have
been by certain provisions of the Constitution, have occasioned
much anxiety to those who seek the well-being of the common-
wealth. Certain revelations made in Germany, however, will, if
proved to be true, make it clear that no form of government is
capable itself of protecting the people from the depredations of
organized capital. If there is one institution in the hands of
private persons of which the Germans have been proud, it is
the great firm of Krupp, in the celebration of whose centenary last
August the German Emperor himself took a prominent part, and
made one of his speeches.
It is now alleged, on the authority of Dr. Liebknecht, the
leader of the Socialists in the Reichstag, that this firm,
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 421
in collusion with certain others, has, for a long time,
maintained an agent in Berlin, whose business it was
to bribe officials in the Admiralty and War Office, in
order to obtain secret documents, and so to anticipate the com-
petition of other firms. This, however, is only a part, and that
a small one, of the proceedings of these sordid money seekers.
Some of the firms in the conspiracy work partly with French
capital and with French directors, and so promote in both nations
the armaments for which the people have to pay. With the object
of causing rivalry between the two countries, a German firm belong-
ing to the cartel, " placed " an article in a widely-read French
paper announcing that the French authorities intended to accelerate
certain armaments. This was the way, Dr. Leibknecht alleged,
in which the armament makers had accumulated millions taken out
of the pockets of the people. Instead of Germany, as had been
said, being in debt to the Krupps, it was the Krupps who were
in debt to the German people. These accusations were made on
the authority of copies of the secret documents in Dr. Leibknecht's
possession. The Krupps have made a denial of the charges against
them, but it is not generally considered as satisfactory. The truth
of these charges cannot be said to have been yet definitely estab-
lished; they have been referred to a Court of Law.
Moreover, the Reichstag has appointed a commission of
inquiry into the question of the supplies of armaments. This
commission is to include members of the Reichstag, as well as
experts selected by it. This was done by the united vote of the
Centre, the Radicals, and the Socialists, and was opposed only by
the Conservatives, on the ground that Parliament had no power to
call into question the proceedings of the Executive.
It is not for want of salutary admonition that certain capitalists
in Germany have gone so far astray. The Crown Prince has
already entered upon the role of instructor of the country, if not by
speech-making at least by writing. In the introduction to a book
called Germany in Arms, he utters a warning against the growing
love of luxury and wealth, which threatens to displace the old
ideals. "Good work to-day," he says, " often counts far less
than the wealth of a man, inherited or snatched. How wealth is
earned is hardly asked any more, and things which were once not
regarded as fair or decent, are now silently tolerated. Everything
is sacrificed to the eager race for money. Yet history teaches us
that all the States which in the decisive hour were ruled by their
commercial interests alone, perished in misery." Perhaps it may
422 RECENT EVENTS [June,
be useful for others besides the Germans to ponder these words,
and to draw from them a better conclusion than that which the
Crown Prince has drawn.
The General Strike, as it was called, but
Belgium. which on account of the abstention of the
Christian Unions was far from being really
general, lasted about two weeks. The strikers numbered some
four hundred thousand ; whereas the non-strikers amounted to
nine hundred thousand. A remarkable feature of the strike was
the perfect abstention from violence; order was not disturbed for
a single moment; non-strikers were in no way molested.
The object of the strike was not directly to secure better con-
ditions for the workingman shorter hours or higher wages; al-
though doubtless this was looked forward to as an ultimate result
of success. What the strikers wanted was a change in the Belgian
Constitution. As things are at present, all males of twenty-five
years of age have one vote; two votes are given to heads of families
thirty-five years of age, and to others possessing a certain property
qualification; while those who possess certain diplomas, or other
proofs of superior education, have as many as three. This the
Socialists regard as giving undue advantage to the rich and the
well-to-do. In 1893, by means of a threatened strike, the existing
restricted franchise was granted in substitution for one still more
restricted. In 1902, a strike took place to secure the extension
of the franchise, but failed, owing to the loss of sympathy entailed
by acts of violence on the part of the strikers. The object of the
present strike is the securing of universal suffrage for both men
and women of the age of twenty-one.
The result is disputed. The leaders of the strikers claim that
it has been a success ; its opponents declare it to have been a failure.
The fact is that the strikers returned to work because the govern-
ment promised to appoint a commission to deal with the problem
of the local electorate. On this commission all parties are to be
represented. If this commission succeeds in arriving at complete
agreement on a definite proposal, such proposal will be extended
to the legislative electorate also. The Belgian Legislature by the
unanimous vote of all parties, accepted the government's proposal.
Thereupon the men on strike returned to work, being willing to
wait and see what the commission will do. Those who look upon
the strike as a failure treat the commission as illusory, and as known
to be such by the strikers. The latter accepted the government's
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 423
proposal because they saw their movement had utterly failed on
account of the opposition of the majority of the workingmen.
The attempt made upon the life of the King
Spain. by an Anarchist born in Barcelona, was the
occasion for the manifestation by the Span-
ish people of the loyal attachment they feel for his throne and
person. The great courage displayed by the King, and his perfect
presence of mind, contributed in no small degree to this result.
The public indignation was so great that it was with difficulty
that the assassin was saved from being lynched. Even the Repub-
lican organs in the Press heartily congratulated the King on his
escape. The leader of the Republican party, Serior Ascarate, went
to the palace to offer his congratulations. These facts show the
more moderate counsels that now prevail in Spain.
Another indication of this moderation is the decision of the
government to try the assassin by the ordinary courts, instead of
by a military tribunal. The programme of the Liberal government,
at tb head of which is Count Romanones, includes several demo-
cratic measures; the repeal of the Jurisdiction Law, and bills
dealing with the administration of local associations. The Liberal
Party is said now to be more united than it has been for many years.
Diplomatic relations have been resumed with the Holy Father,
as the government recognizes that that is the wish of the large
majority of the Spanish people.
When the Republic was established in Por-
Portugal. tugal, it was in the name of liberty and
progress, and with a view to the reform of
abuses. These promises have not been fulfilled, and new
evils have been added to the old. In fact, there exists
something like a reign of terror, owing to the domination of
the secret society of the Carbonarios. The treatment of the
royalist prisoners, and of those suspected of royalist sympathies,
has been so bad as to excite the indignation of the best friends of
Portugal. A lady distinguished in England for philanthropic
activity, Adeline, Duchess of Bedford, has paid a visit to three
of the prisons, and in a letter to the Times she gave an account
of the treatment she found the prisoners to be undergoing. Men
of all classes journalists, doctors, servants, nobles, and priests
were treated like common criminals. It was for the merest trifle
that many were confined. A system of espionage was spread like
424 RECENT EVENTS [June,
a network throughout Portugal, so that no one was safe, and every-
one knew that he was not safe. We lack space to enumerate a tenth
of the details mentioned by the Duchess.
Her letter excited so much indignation that a meeting of
protest was held in London. At this meeting, which was presided
over by Lord Lytton, and at which the grandson of Mr. Gladstone
was present, a resolution of censure was passed, and an appeal was
made to the Portuguese government to pass an amnesty bill.
In the view of the speakers at the meeting it was looked upon as
proved that the state of things now existent in Portugal was
a disgrace to civilization. Suspected persons were kept in prison
for long periods without being brought to trial; accused persons
were being brought to trial before irregular tribunals, courts-mar-
tial having been substituted for the ordinary tribunals of justice.
Prisoners so arrested and condemned were subjected to barbarous
and inhuman treatment in prison.
One of the most terrible of the ideals of the secret society
which now dominates by an organized system of secret denuncia-
tion over both the government and the people, is the fixed purpose
of exterminating the Christian faith. The little children, the
Duchess testifies, are wearing badges bearing the words : " No
God; no religion." The Bishops have recently addressed an ener-
getic protest to the President of the Republic against the serious
attacks on the Catholic Religion that are being made by the govern-
ment. They call attention in particular to the prohibition of
Church functions, the closing of churches, the profanation of
church yards and chapels, and the undermining of morality in
schools. They declare that they are ready in the name of God to
suffer any form of persecution at the hands of demagogues, being
strong in the faith that religion will triumph.
Bad as is the present government, there are those who wish
it to be worse. A conspiracy has been discovered organized by
still more extreme Republicans, whose object is to overturn the
government on account of its unfaithfulness to these principles.
Riots took place, but the authorities had been warned. Many
arrests have been made, and as all the prisons in Portugal are
full, a warship has been employed to carry the arrested to the
colonies, there to be tried.
The war in the Balkans seems to have come
' The Balkan War. to an end, although no treaty of peace has
yet been signed. The exact terms of such
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 425
a treaty even have not been settled. Hostilities, however, have
by mutual agreement been suspended. The Second Conference
for the purpose of making a definite treaty has just begun
sitting in London. But as the main points have been agreed upon,
both sides having accepted the mediation of the Powers, it is con-
fidently expected that no difficulty will arise.
A like hope is entertained that the even greater calamity of
a war between the Great Powers has been averted. For something
over a week, however, Europe was in suspense, owing to the defiance
offered by Montenegro to the demands of Europe. Although this
defiance was impolitic and unjustifiable, yet the bravery of the in-
habitants of this little kingdom, who are not so many in number as
the dwellers in Jersey City, called forth the admiration of the
world. The truth, however, is that Montenegro had no claim to the
possession of Skutari, however desirable such a possession might be.
Its inhabitants are almost entirely Albanian, and if there is to be
an autonomous Albania, Skutari clearly belongs to it.
The Powers have settled that this new State is to be called
into existence, but it is a case of might against right. The Albanians
have done little or nothing to deserve to have this favor bestowed
upon them. A small proportion is, indeed, Catholic, but the
largest number are apostates from Christianity to Mohammedan-
ism ; and they have for years been the main reliance of the Moslem
tyrants. In the recent war they would, without doubt, have sided
with the Turks, had these been the winners. But both Austria
and Italy came to the positive conclusion that to allow Servia to
extend its territory to the shore of the Adriatic would be opposed by
their interests. For the sake of peace the other Powers have ac-
quiesced.
What effect this arrangement will have upon the tran-
quility of this region in the future, it is too soon to be able to
see. There is reason to fear that it may perpetuate the system of
foreign interference which has been so baneful hitherto. Albania
will naturally rely upon Austria and Italy, rather than confederate
herself with the rest of the Balkan States. But this adds only one
more to the many questions which will soon arise, questions the
settlement of which will test to the utmost the real statesmanship of
those upon whom the duty of deciding falls. The land from which
the Turk has been driven has at one time or another in the past
belonged to the Servian, Bulgarian, and Greek Empires, and some
other principle of division of their conquest must therefore be
found.
426 RECENT EVENTS [June,
The armies of Bulgaria and Greece have already come into
armed conflict over a district near Salonika. Servia claims that
on account of the change of circumstances, a treaty made last year
with Bulgaria is not binding. Bulgaria's leading statesman has
declared that Bulgaria will hold Servia to the treaty. Greece
has massed her forces at Salonika in order to hold that place.
In fact, it was for that purpose that the late king took up his abode
in that city. A few weeks ago it looked as if war was imminent
between the Allied States a thing which inspired great hopes
in the hearts of the Turks. Now it is expected that a peaceful
solution will be found, perhaps by arbitration.
The deriders of arbitration and such exist have rejoiced
in the way in which it has been ignored in the course
of recent events. This, however, is a superficial view.
The arbitration movement, like every other, springs from the
strong desire for peace which is felt more or less widely; nor do
any of its most sanguine advocates expect, for a long time to come,
to effect a complete change in the sentiments of all nations. But to
anyone who is acquainted with the selfish ambitions which animate
certain classes in Europe, the fact that peace has been preserved
during the past six months is a convincing evidence of the
strength of the feeling which has produced the movement in favor
of arbitration. For many years it has been looked upon as cer-
tain that nothing except a European war would spiring from
the break-up of the Turkish Empire in Europe. That war has
not broken out is due to that strong desire for peace which pro-
duced the arbitration movement. It has been powerful enough
to impose sacrifices on Powers which a short time ago no con-
sideration would have held back from war.
This country is the first, and so far it is
China. the only one, that has recognized the Repub-
lic which was established in China in Feb-
ruary of last year. This has been done in advance of the election
of a President in the full and complete sense of the term Yuan
Shih-kai being no more than the provisional President. The United
States have been criticized for this course, on the ground that it
is a concession to the views of young China a concession which
will do no more than encourage them to make such further demands
as the abolition in China of extra-territorial rights, and the equal
treatment of Chinese immigrants with the Japanese in the matter
of trading rights in this country and emigration to it.
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 427
The recognition of the Chinese Republic was preceded by the
withdrawal of the United States from the Six Power Group, which
had for so long a time been negotiating a loan with China. The
only effect of this withdrawal was to change the Six Power into
a Five Power Group. This last has after more than half a year's
efforts at last concluded the so-much-needed loan. It is for one
hundred and twenty-five millions at five per cent, and the Chinese
will only receive eighty- four cents for each dollar. Foreign ad-
visers will in reality control the expenditure. Great excitement was
caused in Peking by the fact that the consent of the National As-
sembly, which has just been elected, had not been secured by the
provisional President. Sun Yat-sen has gone so far as formally to
warn the Consular body at Shanghai that the completion of the
loan without reference to the Assembly will provoke a breach be-
tween the North and the South. This adds another to the long
list of reasons for being anxious for the future of the Republic.
There is ground for thinking that Yuan Shih-kai looks upon his
being elected President as necessary for the well-being of the State ;
and that he will not be scrupulous about the use of any means that
may seem likely to secure this result. An assassination which took
place recently is widely thought to have been instigated by him. A
violent campaign has been conducted against him by an organiza-
tion called the Kuo-ming-tang, which declares that China south of
the Yantsze will repudiate the loan and fight unless Yuan Shih-kai
retires.
In these circumstances the government has made a request
which has caused much surprise, and which should receive
the approbation of all. It has made a solemn appeal to the leaders
of all the Christian churches within the Empire to offer prayer " for
the National Assembly now in session; for the newly-established
government; for the President yet to be elected; for the Constitu-
tion of the Republic; that the Government may be recognized
by the Powers; that peace may reign within our borders; that
strong, virtuous men may be raised to office; that the government
may be established upon a strong foundation.'' To this appeal
a cordial response has been given. That such an appeal should
have been made is taken as a proof of the Chinese desire to establish
their Constitution with the aid of a faith which a short time ago
they tried to drive from the country, and as an expression of their
consciousness that their own religion cannot give the help which
they need in these days of trial.
With Our Readers.
APOSTOLIC LETTER OF OUR HOLY FATHER PIUS X.
ESTABLISHING A UNIVERSAL JUBILEE IN MEMORY OF THE PEACE GIVEN
BY THE EMPEROR CONSTANTINE THE GREAT TO THE CHURCH.
PIUS PP. X.
To all the faithful in Christ who shall read this Our Letter, Health and
the Apostolic Benediction.
The commemoration of the great and happy event through which, sixteen
centuries ago, Peace was finally given to the Church, while it fills all Catho-
lics with the greatest joy and calls them to works of piety, moves Us to open
the treasures of celestial gifts that choice and copious fruits may accrue from
that solemnity. Nothing indeed could be more fitting and opportune than the
celebration of the Edict promulgated at Milan by the Emperor Constantine
the Great, following close upon the victory over Maxentius obtained under the
glorious Standard of the Cross the Edict which put an end to the cruel
persecution of the Christians, and placed them in possession of the liberty bought
at the price of the Blood of the Divine Redeemer and the Martyrs. Then at
last the Church Militant gained the first of those triumphs which throughout
its history have invariably followed persecutions of every sort, and from that
day ever-increasing benefits have accrued to the human race. For men, aban-
doning by degrees the superstitious worship of idols, in their laws, customs,
and institutions followed ever more the rule of Christian life, and so it came
to pass that justice and love flourished together on the earth. Therefore We
think it appropriate that on this happy occasion on which such a great event
is commemorated prayers should be multiplied to God, to His Virgin Mother,
and to all the Blessed, especially to the Holy Apostles, that all peoples, renewing
the dignity and glory of the Church, may take refuge in the bosom of this their
Mother, may root out the errors by which insensate enemies of the Church
strive to shroud its splendor in darkness, may surround the Roman Pontiff
with the highest homage, and, with their minds at rest in perfect trust, may
see indeed in the Catholic religion the defense and safeguard of all things.
Then will it be possible to hope that men, again fixing their eyes on the
Cross, the sign of salvation, will be able completely to overcome the enemies
of the Christian name and the unbridled lusts of their hearts. To the purpose,
then, that the humble prayers that should be offered on the occasion of this
solemn commemoration throughout the Catholic world may redound to the
greater spiritual good of the faithful, We ordain that they be enriched with a
Plenary Indulgence in Jubilee form, urgently exhorting all the children of the
Church that they unite their prayers and their works of piety to Ours, to the
end that by means of the spiritual favor of Jubilee offered to them these may
bear the greatest possible fruit both to the profit of souls and the advantage
of religion.
Relying therefore on the mercy of Almighty God and on the authority
of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and having consulted Our Venerable
Brethren, the Cardinal Inquisitors General of the Holy Roman Church, of that
power of binding and loosing which to Us though unworthy has been entrusted,
We, by this present Letter grant and impart, in the form of a general Jubilee,
a Plenary Indulgence of all sins to all and sundry of the faithful of both sexes,
whether resident in this dear City of Ours or coming to visit it, who in this
present year, from Low Sunday, when the secular celebrations intended to
commemorate the Peace of the Church begin, to the feast of the Immaculate
1913.] WITH OUR READERS 429
Conception of the Virgin Mother of God inclusive, twice visit each of the
Basilicas of St. John Lateran, St. Peter Prince of the Apostles, and St. Paul
outside the Walls ; who there, according to Our intention, for some time pour
forth their prayers to God for the prosperity and exaltation of the Catholic
Church and of this Apostolic See, for the extirpation of heresies and the con-
version of all who are in error, for concord amongst Christian Princes and
peace and unity amongst all the faithful; who, having properly confessed their
sins, refresh themselves during the period indicated with the celestial banquet;
and who furthermore, each one according to his means, give an alms to the needy
or, if preferred, assign it for some pious purpose. To those, however, who
cannot visit the City, We grant the same Plenary Indulgence, provided, during
the same interval, they visit six times in all a church or churches in their
own locality, to be designated by the Ordinary, and perform in their integrity
the other works of piety which we have above specified. Further, we permit
that this Plenary Indulgence may and can be applied by way of suffrage
to the souls who have passed from this life united to God by charity.
To sailors and those engaged in travel We grant that when they visit
their homes or otherwise when they arrive at any station, they can lawfully
gain the same Indulgence when they shall have performed the works above
prescribed, and shall have visited six times the Cathedral or the principal or the
parochial church of their home, or of the station.
As to the religious of both sexes, including those bound to perpetual en-
closure, as well as all others whomsoever, whether the laity, or ecclesiastics,
secular or regular, who are detained in prison or captivity, or who labor under
any bodily infirmity or under any other impediment whatsoever, and who
cannot perform the works mentioned or any one of them, We likewise grant
and permit that the confessor can commute those works into other works of
piety, or postpone them to another not distant time, and that he can enjoin
such works as his penitents can perform ; for childern who have not yet been
admitted to first Communion, We also grant him authority to dispense from
Holy Communion.
Further to all and sundry of the faithful, both the laity and ecclesiastics,
secular or regular, of whatsoever Order and Institute, even those that should
be specially named, We grant authority to select for this purpose any priest
whatever, secular or regular, who is an approved confessor; and it is per-
mitted also that nuns, novices, and other women living in enclosure avail of this
authorization, provided the confessor they select be approved for hearing the
confessions of nuns. All who go to confession within the aforesaid appointed
time, intending to gain the Jubilee and to perform the works necessary for
gaining it, any such confessor can absolve and is empowered to absolve, for
this occasion and in the tribunal of conscience only, from all sentences and
censures of excommunication and suspension, and from other ecclesiastical
sentences and censures, by the law or by man for whatever cause enacted or
inflicted, even from those reserved to Ordinaries and to Us or the Apostolic
See, even cases specially reserved no matter to whom and to the Sovereign
Pontiff and the Apostolic See, and which otherwise are not understood
to be granted by any concession how ample soever. He can also absolve and
is empowered to absolve from all sins and excesses, however grievous and
enormous, even from those reserved, as has been said, to the same Ordinaries
and to Us and the Apostolic See, but he is to impose a salutary penance, and
to observe the other things enjoined by the law; and if there is question of
heresy, he can absolve and is empowered to absolve from it, when, according
to the prescriptions of the law, error has been abjured and retracted. He
can also commute into other pious and salutary works vows of whatsoever
430 WITH OUR READERS [June,
kind, even those confirmed by oath and reserved to the Holy See, always
excepting vows of chastity, of religion, and of an obligation which has been
accepted from a third party or in which there is question of prejudice to a
third party, excepting also penal vows, which are called vows preserving from
sin, unless there be indicated a commutation of such a character as will in
future serve to restrain from sin as much as the subject-matter of the original
vow. And in regard to penitents of this kind who are in Holy Orders,
even Regulars, he can dispense and is empowered to dispense them from an
occult irregularity contracted solely for the exercise of their Orders and for
the attainment of higher Orders.
We do not intend, however, by Our present Letter to dispense from any
other irregularity whatsoever, whether arising from crime or from defect,
either public or hidden or known, nor from any other incapacity or disability
in what manner soever contracted. Nor do We intend to concede any authority
to dispense in the premises, or to rehabilitate or to restore to the pristine state
even in the tribunal of conscience. Nor do We intend to derogate from the
Constitution, with appended declarations, published by Our predecessor of
happy memory, Benedict XIV., which begins Sacramentum Poenitentiae. Nor
in fine do We intend that this same Letter can or should in any wise help
those who by Us and the Apostolic See or by any Prelate or Ecclesiastical
judge have been by name excommunicated, suspended, interdicted, or declared
to have incurred other sentences or censures, unless within the aforesaid time
they shall have made satisfaction, and, when necessary, come to terms with
the parties. But if within the appointed time they could not, in the judgment
of the confessor, make satisfaction, We grant that he can absolve them in
the tribunal of conscience, only in order that they may gain the Indulgences
of the Jubilee, the obligation of making satisfaction as soon as they can being
imposed upon them.
Wherefore, in virtue of holy obedience We, by this present Letter, strictly
order and command all Ordinaries wheresoever residing, and their Vicars and
Officials, and, failing them, those who are charged with the cure of souls,
that when they receive transcripts or printed copies of the present Letter,
they publish it, or take care that it be published in their churches and dioceses,
provinces, cities, towns, territories, and districts, and that to the people duly
prepared, as far as possible even by the preaching of the word of God, they
designate, as explained above, the church or churches to be visited.
Notwithstanding Apostolic Constitutions and Ordinances, especially those
by which the faculty of absolving in certain therein expressed cases is so
reserved to the Roman Pontiff for the time being that even similar or dissimilar
concessions of such indulgences and faculties cannot avail anybody unless
express mention and special derogation of them be made; notwithstanding also
the special rule against the granting of indulgences ad instar and of the indul-
gences of any whatsoever Orders, Congregations, and Institutes, even when
based and established on oath, Apostolic confirmation or any other guarantee,
also indult, privileges, and Apostolic Letters for said Orders, Congregations,
Institutes and persons thereof in whatsoever way conceded, approved and
introduced; all and several of which, although of them and of their whole
tenor a special, specific, express and individual mention, and not merely
mention by general clauses, would have to be made or any expression whatso-
ever indicated, or any other form whatsoever elaborated, for the observance
of this, regarding their tenor as sufficiently expressed in this present Letter and
the form prescribed for them as observed, We do for this once derogate specially,
nomination and expressly for the effect as aforesaid ; and all things else what-
soever to the contrary. Finally that this Our present Letter, which cannot
1913-] WITH OUR READERS 431
be taken to every place, may more easily come to the knowledge of all, We
will that transcripts or even printed copies, when signed by the hand of a Notary
Public and sealed with the seal of an ecclesiastical dignitary, shall everywhere
and for all have absolutely the same authority as would belong to this present
Letter, if exhibited and shown.
Given at Rome at St. Peter's, under the ring of the Fisherman, on the 8th
day of March, 1913, in the tenth year of Our Pontificate.
By special mandate of His Holiness,
R. CARD. MERRY DEL VAL, Secretary of State.
r PHE Catholic Educational Association of the United States will hold
1 its tenth annual meeting at New Orleans, La., beginning Monday,
June 3Oth, and ending Thursday, July 3d. The meeting is held under
the auspices of His Grace, Most Rev. James H. Blenk, D.D., Arch-
bishop of New Orleans. The programme gives promise of careful
consideration of grave problems, and the convention, bringing together
Catholic educators from all parts of the country, will undoubtedly
exert an extensive and fortunate influence on Catholic educational
work in the United States.
r PHE publishers of the works of Alfred Noyes, mentioned by Mr.
1 Colby in this issue of THE CATHOLIC WORLD, are Frederick A.
Stokes & Company, 443 Fourth Avenue, New York City.
AGNES REPPLIER contributed to the May Atlantic an article
entitled The Cost of Modern Sentiment. It gives us many wise
things in tabloid form, a few of which we reprint for our readers.
Sentiment is capable of raising us to a higher and clearer vision,
or of weakening our judgment and shattering our common sense.
We must forever bear in mind that sentiment is a subjective and
personal thing. However exalted and however ardent, it cannot be
accepted as a weight for justice or as a test of truth.
If we will blow our minds clear of genera) illusions, we shall
understand that an emotional verdict has no validity when offered as a
criterion of facts.
Believers in political faith-healing enjoy a supreme immunity
from doubt.
It is ill so to soften our hearts with a psychological interest in
the lawbreaker, that no criminal is safe from popularity.
Reason is powerless when sentiment takes the helm.
Sentiment is the motor power which drives us to intemperate
words and actions, which weakens our judgment and destroys our sense
of proportion.
The reformer whose heart is in the right place, but whose head is
elsewhere, represents a waste of force; and we cannot afford any
waste in the conservation of honor and goodness.
BOOKS RECEIVED.
BENZIGER BROTHERS, New York :
The Way of the Cross, and Other Verses. By Dismas. 50 cents net. Gospel
Verses for Holy Communion. By a Sister of Notre Dame. 5 cents each ;
50 cents a dozen. The Fundamentals of the Religious Life. By Rev. J. P. M.
Schleuter, SJ. 60 cents net. Doctrine Explanations: Communion of Saints,
Prayer, Purgatory, Indulgences, and Sacramentals. By the Sisters of Notre
Dame. 6 cents.
P. J. KENEDY & SONS, New York:
Callista. By Cardinal Newman. 50 cents. Faith, Hope, and Charity. Anony-
mous. 50 cents. Tears on the Diadem. By Mrs. Anna H. Dorsey. 50 cents.
LONGMANS, GREEN & Co., New York:
The Real Democracy. By J. E. F. Mann, N. J. Sievers, and R. W. T. Cox.
$1.50 net.
FREDERICK A. STOKES Co., New York :
Sherwood, or Robin Hood and the Three Kings. By Alfred Noyes. $1.75 net.
Tales of the Mermaid Tavern. By Alfred Noyes. $1.35 net.
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, New York :
European Cities at Work. By Frederic C. Howe, Ph.D. $1.75 net.
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN Co., Boston :
V. V.'s Eyes. By H. S. Harrison. $1.35 net.
JOHN JOSEPH McVEY, Philadelphia :
Uniform School Laws. By W. G. Smith, Esq. , VD cents. The Housing Problem
in Philadelphia. By G. W. Norris. Pamphlet. 10 cents.
THE ROSARY PRESS, Somerset, Ohio :
The Seven Last Words Upon the Cross. By Joseph Post Hall.
B. HERDER, St. Louis:
St. Gertrude the Great. $1.25 net. Three Years in the Libyan Desert. By
J. C. E. Falls. Translated by Elizabeth Lee. $4.50 net. The National
Evil of Divorce. By B. J. Otten, SJ. Pamphlet. 5 cents. The Nature
of Human Society. By B. J. Otten, SJ. Pamphlet. 5 cents. St. Gilbert
of Sempringham. $1.25 net. The Mantilla. By R. Aumerle. 80 cents.
A Little Sister. By M. Landrieux. Translated from the French by L. L. Y.
Smith. $1.50. Growth in the Knowledge of Our Lord. Adapted from the
French of Abbe de Brandt by Mother- Mary Fidelis. 3 Vpls. $6.50 net. Hin-
drances to Conversion to the Catholic Church, and Their Removal. By Rev.
Father Graham, M.A. 20 cents net. St. Francis de Sales and H*is Friends.
By Hon. Mrs. Maxwell Scott. $1.35 net. Luther. By Hartmann Grisar, SJ.
$3.25 net.
AUSTRALIAN CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY, Melbourne:
The Vocation of the Celt. By Rev. Robert Kane, SJ. Sister Etheldreda's
Experiment. By M. Elizabeth Walton. The Vision of Peace. By Rev. M.
Forrest, M.S.H. On Ghosts in General. By Rev. P. C. Yorke, D.D.
Pamphlets. One penny each.
R. & T. WASHBOURNE, LTD., London :
A White-Handed Saint. By Olive Katharine Parr. $1.25 net.
CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY OF IRELAND, Dublin :
Freemasonry and the Church of France. By Sir Henry Bellingham. Pamphlet.
One penny.
At H. GILL & SON, LTD., Dublin :
Alleluia's Sequence from " Harmonics." By R. T. J. O'Mahony, D.D. 6 d.
JAMES DUFFY & Co., LTD., Dublin :
Grievances in Ireland. By one of the Tolerant Majority. Pamphlet. One
penny.
GABRIEL BEAUCHESNE, Paris:
L'Unite de I'Eglise et le Schisme grec. Par Joseph Bousquet. 4 frs. Un probleme
d'Histoire: L'Empereur Alexandre est-il mort Cotholiquef Par R. P. Pierling.
1 fr. 50. La Vocation Sacerdotale. Par Joseph Lahitton. 5 frs. Ozanam:
Livre du Centenaire. Par G. Goyau, Leon Laborie, H. Cochin, E. Jordan,
E. Duthoit, Monsignor Baudrillart. 6 frs. Vita Vera. Par Johannes Joer-
gensen. 3 frs. 50.
PIERRE TEQUI, Paris :
Questions Theologiques et Canoniques. Par P. Renaudin. L'Eglise Catholique
aux Premiers Siecles. Par D. Vieillard-Lacharme. 3 frs. 50. Defendons-
nous ! Par Abbe C. Grimaud. 2 frs. La Vocation Ecclesiastique. Par
M. 1'Abbe H. Le Camus, i fr. Theorie de la Messe. Par J. C. Broussolle.
2 frs. Cos de Conscience. Par L. Desbrus. 2 frs. 50.
BIBLIOTHEQUE NOUVELLE, Paris :
Through Good Humor to Happiness. By Grace de Saint-Maurice. 2 frs. 50.
BLOUD ET CIE, Paris:
Francois^ Bacon. Par Paul Lemaire. o fr. 60. Henri Heine. Par Pierre-
Gauthiez. 2 frs. 50.
LIBSAIRIE LECOFFRE, Paris :
Initiatives Feminines. Par Max Turmann. 3 frs. 50.
THE
CATHOLIC WORLD,
VOL. XCVII.
JULY, 1913.
No. 580.
THE SOUL OF TUSCANY.
BY JOSEPH FRANCIS WICKHAM.
IDNIGHT has just echoed itself away, and the Cam-
panile bells are still. Not a tremor quivers through
the great chimes, not a murmur of vibrant music
lingers in the air. You are alone with the night in
Florence, under the shadow of the great Duomo.
Over you no crescent moon is beaming, but the lacy clouds are
fled, and the stars, clustering million-myriad, twinkle and gleam
in glad delight in the blue. And as you look up to them, they
fain would speak to you and tell you of bella Firenze, of the lily-
city, of the wonders that lie in her clasp, that rest in her precious
embrace, beneath the midnight and the sky, under their own beam-
ing eyes in the heaven. You look up at the Duomo, la Cattedrale di
Santa Maria del Fiore, at its elder and younger sisters, the Bat-
tistero and the Campanile, all wrapped in peaceful night, waiting
for the day, waiting, waiting for the sun. Watchers of the shad-
ows, sentinels of the dark, first welcoming heralds of God's new
golden day, they stand in their centuries-old station on the spacious
piazza, listening to your footfalls as you go away, even now know-
ing your happiness when the morrow will bring you back. For
it is only a moment's life that your tarrying enjoys, and you are
driving once more toward the stately Lung' Arno, where your
Florentine days and nights will meet, toward the welcome of the
pleasant avenue windows you will call home.
Copyright. 1913. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
VOL. xcvu. 28
434 THE SOUL OF TUSCANY [July.,
It is very quiet and hushed on the Lung' Arno. No sound
breaks the stillness, save, perhaps, the lonely, distant whistle of the
train speeding through the valley toward Rome. It is some time
since the deep-voiced bell on the tower struck the night's solemn
knell; even presently you will hear the single note telling the
progress of a day that is waiting the dawn-light for its name.
But you are not at all slumberous. For your window is open, and
you are looking out upon the river, the slow-moving Arno, that is
spectral in the lamplight, and that to-morrow, you think, will turn
brown in the brilliant day. In quiet watching you linger until
sleep finally wins you away from the contemplation of your new
love, from your first pale glimpses of the old river of Florence.
If dreams have any kinship with wakeful meditation, you will
dream the remaining hours of a beautiful city, of a wondrously
artistic city, that knows of her beauty, and is not unconscious of
her artist-soul. You will dream a dream peopled w r ith a varied
company the thinking visage of a master poet slowly passing
across the scene, the countenance of the supreme artistic genius
of the centuries, and the impassioned features of an inspired
preacher-idol. These three and they will be surrounded by eager
young faces, serious, mature faces, faces of those who have given
Florence fame and linked her in spirit to the choicest days, Athens
ever saw. Dante, Michelangelo, Savonarola; Giotto, Fra Angelico,
Botticelli; Fra Filippo Lippi, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Fra
Bartolommeo, Andrea del Sarto; Arnolfo di Cambio, Brunelles-
chi, Alberti; Ghiberti, Luca della Robbia, Donatello, Cellini; the
great Medici, Cosimo, Piero, Lorenzo; these are the dream-figures
that will come before you. Not all of these first saw life in
Florence, not all died within the shadows under her fair hills, but
all, and many, many more, brought her their gifts of mind and
heart and soul some more of one, some more of another and
laid them before her. And Florence welcomed them all, native
son and stranger guest, and gave them her spirit and her inspira-
tion and her guiding hand, and bade them win glory for Florence
and immortality for their own names. It is a dream, to be sure,
still the figures are not shadowy, but seem all real, all earnest,
all alive with the fire of the long ago. And when the waking
comes, and the day is again with you, and the Arno is shining in the
sunlight, and Italy is once more calling you to listen to her voice
and smile with her smiles and be happy in her happiness, then you
will go forth and ask Florence to offer you not the dream of
1913.] THE SOUL OF TUSCANY 435
the night, but the living work of the dream-people, and thus prove
to you that the spirits of the night once lived; prove to you that
in Italy, if nowhere else, the fondest dreams come true.
There is only one path to take when first one steps out into
the Florentine daylight the way to the Piazza della Signoria.
For here was gathered much of the daily life of old Florence
and the Florence of now is wondrous because of the old days
here are the memories of her full- veined years, and the lingering
voices of songs once sung, of tales once told, of life and battle
and death. Dante often walked through this square; Lorenzo
the Magnificent looked from yonder casement in the Palazzo Vec-
chio ; Michelangelo admired his " David " at the palace-gate ; Cel-
lini still hovers in spirit over his " Perseus " in the Loggia dei
Lanzi; Donatello watches his "Judith and Holof ernes;" Savon-
arola yielded up his life near the bronze slab where you now
stand. What city can boast such figures? Old Athens, possibly,
can play the rival none other. Indeed the Piazza, may be likened
to the Acropolis, for it calls up the masters of Florence as the
Attic citadel evokes the spirits of the city that looks upon the eastern
sea. That is the eloquent way the older civilizations built their
fair cities.
And this is Florence. And it is daytime, with a warm sun
lighting the square and making you wish to seek shelter under the
colonnades of the Loggia, as the little Florentine boys are wisely
doing. Perhaps the summer is trying to induce you to enter that
beautiful Palazzo degli Uffizi, where the art-goddess holds her
court and feels at home far from Olympian halls. But you yield
not to these impulses to-day, for up the Via dei Calzaioli the way
beckons to the Duomo that last night welcomed you to the city,
and that now would invite you to its altars and the treasures of its
sculptured aisles.
Beauteous was the shadowed Duomo in the starlight, but in the
day it is superb beyond words. When you come upon it first in the
not spacious piazza, your eyes are bewildered by the unusual ap-
pearance of the massive structure. You have looked upon cathe-
drals gray or white or brown, but here is one of variegated colors
in marble, with the green dominant in the blending with the red
and white, an immense, majestic mosaic. Rich in beauty of con-
tour rare to discover; with fagade rising to the heaven a marble
flower-garden in its exquisite sculpture; with many an angel and
prophet and fair-browed saint looking forth upon the city's life,
436 THE SOUL OF TUSCANY [July,
the cathedral culminates in the double dome that never was dreamed
before. It is all very pleasing, very harmonious, very magnificent.
Arnolfo di Cambio commenced this structure in 1296, but to
Brunelleschi is the glory of the noblest dome, save Saint Peter's,
the world knows.
Through the bronze doors you go into the immense nave, into
the prayerful atmosphere of the grand edifice. There is little
here, as compared with so many cathedrals, to make you wander
about for gazing. Everything is very quiet, very peaceful, and
the light is soft about the dome-windows, and the shadows are
delicate about the arches, and all your thinking centres upon the
altar lights and the devout worshippers who know not if you are
here. But if the Duomo is crowded not with art objects, there is
still a figure of John the Baptist by Donatello, a terra-cotta bas-
relief of the Ascension by Luca della Robbia, and an unfinished
" Pieta " by Michelangelo, a beautiful work indeed. But nothing
artistic below can distract your eyes from forever looking up
at the glorious dome that Brunelleschi achieved so wondrously,
the dome that Michelangelo could surpass in size at Rome, but
never in beauty.
Old, indeed, the Duomo is, but it counts fewer centuries than
its companion, the Battistero, the eight- faced domed structure which
stands opposite. This is the oldest building in the city. Built
probably in the seventh century, it was, perhaps, the cathedral
church of old Florence. In the thirteenth century Arnolfo di
Cambio covered it with marble, and so made it more beautiful
to look upon. But its great beauty and its far-traveled fame are
the bronze doors that Andrea Pisano and Lorenzo Ghiberti wrought
so marvelously. In 1336 Pisano finished the south door, with
its twenty bronze panels depicting the life of Saint John the Bap-
tist and the cardinal virtues, and won the ringing praises of all
Florence. Years later, in their magnificent enthusiasm, in that
splendid way they had of doing great things, the citizens proclaimed
a competition throughout all Italy for a sculptor for the north
and east doors. Ghiberti won the contest, and in ten years had
completed the north door with its scenes of the Gospel from Mary's
Annunciation to the Pentecostal Day. It is of the same genre
as his predecessor's work, but displays more harmony, and added
richness in execution. But Ghiberti's other door, which faces
the Duomo, shows the pictorial sculpture of the Renaissance come
with all the luxuriance of the new period. The Old Testament
1913.] THE SOUL OF TUSCANY 437
holds sway here, Adam and Eve, Moses on Sinai, David and Go-
liath, and other figures that make the Jewish history memorable.
It is this door, executed one hundred years after Pisano's work
called the senators from the Palazzo Vecchio to behold, that Michel-
angelo declared worthy to be the gate of Heaven.
Go through the portals, and you stand within walls that saw
Dante christened, and that whisper to the dome the baptismal names
of every Florentine, for to-day, as of old, every infant of the
flower city is carried here for the sacrament that makes it a
child of God. Indeed, while you are standing here in admiration of
Donatello's tomb of Baldassare Cossa, if you are very fortunate,
you may see some good Florentine woman bringing into the Battis-
tero a swaddled bambino, and there at the font offer it to the priest
for baptism. It is with simple thoughts and chastened heart that
you go forth into the air again, and turn your steps toward the
graceful, slender Campanile.
White and green and pale-pink rose is Giotto's lovely column,
the most beautiful Gothic campanile in Italy. Here also Andrea
Pisano shows the master hand in the reliefs set high from the
ground, and Donatello lives in the statues of David and Jere-
miah, and the arts bloom in happy gathering under the inspiration
of Luca della Robbia. The campanile bells are within, the chimes
that awakened you this morning, that call the hours for Florentine
life, and mark the time-spaces in the march of the years.
The Duomo and the Palazzo della Signoria are, and always
have been, the centres of the daily life of Florence, religious, civic,
artistic, commercial, all. So when one knows these well, one is
acquainted with much of the city's history. For the lover of
Florence then is conscious of the city's achievements, and meets
more intimately the figures that made her alive among the great
peoples of civilized Europe. How Dante gave Italy a language;
how Guelph and Ghibelline fought their battles; how the Signoria
had its being ; how Florence became banker to Europe ; how she con-
quered Pisa, Cortona and Leghorn; how the Renaissance was
cradled and nurtured; how the Medici fared in the seats of the
mighty; how love of liberty and reform came with Savonarola;
how Florence cherished all her great men; it is all reflected in or
near these centres.
Florence was founded by the Fiesolans, who came down from
the heights two hundred years before Christ. Then she lived the
usual life of an Italian town, waiting the inevitable, the coming
438 THE SOUL OF TUSCANY [July,
of Rome. Sulla and Caesar both made history in her valley, the
one razing the city to the ground because she supported the Marian
party, the other rebuilding for a military post. In time the town
grew up again, and after the fall of Rome became part of the
Lombard kingdom ; but when Charlemagne absorbed the territory,
Florence became the residence of a count. Upon the death of
Countess Matilda in the year 1115, there followed two centuries
of strife between the Popes and the emperors, a conflict in which
Florence always fought side by side with the Papacy against the
German aggression. For no less or greater reason than a broken
marriage-promise, in time there became engendered among the
nobles a fierce spirit of hatred, and out of it were created the rival
factions of Guelph and Ghibelline, the one democratic and lov-
ing liberty and the Pope, the other aristocratic and serving the
emperor. Many a battle they fought in and out of Florence, with
now the Ghibelline a banished force, and now the Guelph. Amid
the many conflicts, best of all, perhaps, we remember the battle
of Campaldino, in which no less a personage than the great Dante
fought on the winning Guelph side.
But continuous civil strife is scarcely compatible with proper
government at large, so in 1282 the guilds handed over the rule
to the Signoria, formed of their own presidents. Being human,
they created an aristocracy for themselves, and in one hundred
years we find the lower citizens in rebellion. Soon the aristocratic
Guelphic Albizzi were in charge, but there was another revolution,
and the Ghibelline Medici now first came into the coveted leadership.
They lived in a fortunate time. Florence's age of art-empire had
come with the Albizzi, and the Medici extended her dominance.
They ruled with little interruption until the line was extinct in
1737. Florence then fell to the Austrian Duke of Lorraine, whose
house held the city, save during the French period between 1801
and 1814, until the year 1860, when Florence joined the new king-
dom of Italy. From 1865 to J 875 Florence was the capital of
the kingdom, with Victor Emanuel a dweller within her walls.
Knowing all this well, for this you must know and ponder
many an hour to appreciate Florence, you will be more ardent by
tenfold to visit all the other jewels to which the city's treasury
bids you welcome. Your daily musings and evening memories will
be fuller of sympathy, and your imagination will be juster in its
conjuring with the men and things of a fairer day.
You will make no mistake if you go out to the old monastery
1913.] THE SOUL OF TUSCANY 439
of San Marco some fine morning, while you are still a stranger
to Florence, to see Fra Angelico's superb frescoes and the cell of
Savonarola. Cosimo the Elder built this monastery in 1437 for
the Dominicans, and though it is now a museum, the atmosphere
of the old days pervades the place like the scent of remembered
roses. You can still see, if you wish to, the gentle monk from
Fiesole spending his days and years painting the beautiful Madon-
nas and the noble Crucifixions and the sweet-visaged angels, and
all the paradisaic conceptions that filled his soul. You can still
behold the austere Fra Girolamo in the cell before his crucifix,
praying to heaven for Florence before he makes an impassioned ap-
peal to the people. You feel the presence of the long-gone brethren
about the empty corridors, and the small, plain rooms that open
from their echoing pathways. And when you go away from the
cloisters, and leave behind you the sun-kissed pavements and the
square of green grass and the shadows of the palms, you feel
the peace of heaven that must once have dwelt here, while gay
Florence danced and wooed the earth- joy along the avenues without.
Another morning you will attend Mass in the old Franciscan
church of Santa Croce, which Arnolfo di Cambio commenced in
1294, which Giotto also may claim as partly his. When the service
is over and you rise from your knees, it will not be to seek the
portal, but to stay and visit the tombs and memorials which make
this great edifice unique among the churches of the city. Here
you may see Vasari's tomb of Michelangelo, who chose the very
spot of his place of rest; as also the tomb of Machiavelli, and that
of the poet Alfieri from Canova's hand. Here Rossini and Cher-
ubini also lie; and monuments and tablets of beauty are here in
memory of days that saw the great architect Alberti, Donatello,
Galileo, and many others. One of the most exquisite tombs in
all Florence is that of Carlo Marsuppini, the humanist secretary
to the Republic. This masterpiece of Desiderio da Settignano is
opposite another fine work, Bernardo Rosselino's tomb of Mar-
suppini's predecessor, Leonardi Bruni. In a sense, the most re-
markable of the monuments is the empty sepulchre of Dante.
Hoping to receive his body from Ravenna, Florence was surprised
at the refusal of that municipality to restore for marble honors
him whom his native city had once exiled. So the tomb remains
a cenotaph, a constant reminder to Florentines of the ingratitude
of their ancestors. But perhaps Florence feels' no shame in the
dishonor of not possessing in death her supreme poet; perhaps she
440 THE SOUL OF TUSCANY [July,
accepts in humility the penance for her unhospitality of over
half a thousand years ago.
When you have seen the old frescoes of Giotto in the chapels
near the choir, you leave this church of tombs and emerge into the
air, once more to be reminded of immortality by the statue of
Dante that stands in the centre of the Piazza. In May, 1865,
on the six hundredth anniversary of the poet's birth, with all
Florence in the Piazza, and the bell of the Palazzo Vecchio trembling
from repeated pealing, and the strains of triumphant music calling
forth in every heart a loyal love for the peer of Homer and Shakes-
peare, the statue was unveiled by King Victor Emanuel.
So, as the days go by, your visits will have included many
of the other noted shrines that make Florence lovely, and that would
make a less favored people in a land across the seas vain and
rightly proud. Near the Via della Scala, the Gothic church of
Santa Maria Novella, begun in 1279, dreams of all the past and all
the famous men and women that the bells in its rosy spire have
called to worship. In its soft twilight interior you will pause
long before Dom Ghirlandaio's masterpieces, the exquisite frescoes
of the choir; nor will you wish to forget Cimabue's famous
Madonna in the Cappella Rucellai; and when you have seen the
'beauty of the Cappella degli Spagnuoli and have left the church,
you will look back and again admire Alberti's tasteful decoration
on the pointed fagade. In the church of San Lorenzo, built by
Brunelleschi and Manetti, you may look upon the sacristy Michel-
angelo constructed as a mausoleum for the Medici; and his
marvelous monuments therein for Giuliano and Lorenzo.
Across the Arno the church of Santo Spirito, of Brunelleschi's
planning, offers its sweet and serene beauty, and not far away the
church of Santa Maria del Carmine, with fifteenth century frescoes
of Masolino and his pupil Masaccio in the Cappella Brancacci, com-
pels a gladly-given visit. More than one Sunday will find you
attending Mass at the church of Santissima Annunziata de' Servi,
the fashionable church of Florence, where the crowded edifice
tells you that the spirit of Girolamo is still breathing piety and re-
ligion through the city. When you are departing from the flower-
fragrant church, you must needs stop again before the exquisite
frescoes of Andrea del Sarto. As you pass on, and through the
portals, and are bending homeward, you will delay a little for ad-
miring Andrea della Robbia's infant medallions between the arches
of the colonnades of the Spedale degli Innocenti ; and you wonder
1913.] THE SOUL OF TUSCANY 44*
when again the old days of the artists will have a blooming and a
resurrection from their forgetful sleep.
There are indeed magnificent churches in Florence, and beau-
tiful paintings and frescoes within. But no day of your religious
pilgrimage will offer you more infinite variety or more genuine
pleasure than some afternoon when the day is fine and the sun is
making ready to retreat, and you are on your way to Fiesole. You
will find it pleasant to go by tram, equally so to make the journey
by motor, and if you are a true pilgrim, you may be inclined
to walk. But however you go, you will wish you had gone before,
and will be hopeful of going again, for the excursion is surely a
delight not unrarely to be had for the asking. The route rises
by curving inclines, rather steep than gradual and gentle, until
a height of one thousand feet is reached. All the way cypresses and
olive trees throw their green outlines along the lovely slopes, and
many a splendid villa looks down upon you from the rose-clad
terraces, while the heaven-breeze sweeps your face, and makes you
wish for a home somewhere among the blossoms of those sun-
loved hills.
After a little you will pass near the gardens of Villa Palmieri,
and will view many a pleasant field where the story-teller of
Florence set his scene; it was a happy biding-place for the ten-
days' tourney of tales of lords and ladies fair, with ever the song
of birds and the soft blithe wind and the vistas of fairy groves
bringing oblivion of forced tarrying. Half-way up the heights
you reach the tiny village of San Domenico di Fiesole, with the
Dominican convent at your side, in which Fra Angelico lived, and
from which he derives his name. A little distance away is the
Badia, once the famous shrine of the Fiesolans, but later a Bene-
dictine abbey, and now a school. Here, in the loggia, the Platonic
Academy often met, and often listened to the youthful Pico della
Mirandola, with Lorenzo il Magnifico a willing patron. Not far
from the convent of San Domenico is the Villa Gherardesca, where
the Muses found shelter under Lander's protection, and were glad
of the lovely outlook over the valley and across the hills, for
miles and miles, even to the gateways of Vallombrosa. You do
not progress far before you pass the cypress-shaded terraces of
the Villa Medici, where Cosimo came for his leisure whilings;
and Lorenzo for the whisperings of the Stagirite's tutor and the
nearer voice of the blue heavens, for the Latin hexameters of the
loved Poliziano and the gentle laughter of Ficino.
442 THE SOUL OF TUSCANY [July,
The road winds on through the shadows and the light, past the
villas, with their garden terraces smooth and green, over the sloping
hills red with tulips and poppies, and supplying the stuff of dreams.
Then, at last, Fiesole is reached, the old, old Faesulse, which has
seen the face of many a famous man upon its heights. Catiline
was once a banished guest here; Puritan Milton looked upon
Florence from this hill; Ruskin came here in the cool of the evening
to view Giotto's campanile which he loved below; here Browning
mused on the God-gifts of Andrea del Sarto and the painter's dream
of the flame of immortals. Soon you are in the Piazza Mino da
Fiesole, with the cathedral's slender campanile looking down upon
you. The basilica was founded in 1028, and built in Tuscan-
Romanesque style. Of the works of art within the church there
is little to be noted, save the tomb of Bishop Salutati, the master-
piece of Mino da Fiesole.
The ancient Etruscan wall and the Roman theatre may keep
you a moment or two, and still longer the view of the valley where
the Mugnone threads its way, glistering like a shining thread of
gold floss below the ever-green hill. But up by the Franciscan
monastery, which occupies the site of the castle the Romans built,
you will stay, and willingly, for here you can see most wonderfully
all Florence, the soul of Tuscany, lying in the valley, with the
guardian Apennines encircling her silent beauty, and the brown-
gleaming Arno winding its way through her very heart. It is not
difficult to distinguish the many objects in the deep distance, for
the atmosphere is very clear and very transparent, with no pall of
unbeauteous smoke hanging over the fairy city. The tower on
the Palazzo Vecchio is conspicuous, and the shining summit of
Giotto's tower, and the great, glistening dome-flower of the Cathe-
dral, rising to the skies, graceful, serene, almost fragrant with
summer. And shining white and crimson the houses stretch on and
on in charming simplicity down the valley, towards the open arms
of the Tuscan hills.
Here I stood once as the summer afternoon was waning, and
looked down upon the fair city. Florence was quiet, restful, at
peace with herself and the gold-flamed west and the blue sky and
the rosy tints on the single cloud-ship that floated over the valley.
And I wondered how many in all that city were thinking, as I was,
of the olden glory and dead-lying days. Was a Florentine mother
rocking a tiny babe to sleep, and dreaming him an Andrea della
Robbia, or was she wishing him a Fra Angelico, and watching his
THE SOUL OF TUSCANY
443
lovely life unfold itself in the creation of angelic color-poems?
Was a little girl, who even now must be placing snow-white roses
before our Lady's shrine near the fountain, planning the way to
heaven, and was it the sainted, silent way? Was some small boy,
lying under a tree on the hillside across the city, weaving his little
rainbow-tinted thoughts that some day would evolve another " Vita
Nuova? " Was a pale stripling wooing harmony's soul in a tune-
mellowed chamber to find the secret of the tone-cathedrals of a
Rossini? Was a barefoot ragazzo in tatters playing with the
Arno's wet sand, and feeling in his budding youth thoughts that
another " David " might be waiting his manhood's chisel ? Were
all the lilies and iris and geranium blossoms in the flower-market
ever to bloom forth as souls of the goldsmiths and lapidaries and
mosaic-workers of the days to be?
I was still lost in wonder as I went away and prepared to
leave Fiesole. So I wondered as we moved in and out among the
olives, and turned sharply about the winding road down the billowy
hills, and hastened past the majestic cypresses, and left the vine-
yards behind, and the sweet-breathing roses, and the dainty jessa-
mines, and the courtyards, and the cool, plashing fountains of
the lovely villas. And we came back into the vale-city, just in
time to hear the prayer-hour ringing from the towers, and to see
the dying day reach forth its hands and give its greeting to the
evening and the coming stars. Through the streets, the now
friendly and familiar thoroughfares of Florence, we were carried to
our homing-place beside the Arno. The twilight settled over the
city, and the night came, and the angels of heaven held over the
valley a twinkling canopy of blue and silver-gold. As we looked
out the open windows, a gentle breeze was sweeping by, with a
message of gladness and goodness and love; and from over the
river floated the happy strains of song.
WHY THE CATHOLIC CHURCH CANNOT ACCEPT
SOCIALISM.
BY GEORGE M. SEARLE, C.S.P.
T may seem strange to many who have a fairly good
knowledge of the teaching and practice of the Cath-
olic Church, that there should be such a conflict as
we find existing between it and Socialism. For the
two seem to have a strong resemblance ; and it seems
that there should be sympathy rather than antagonism. If Social-
ism meant anarchy, of course the conflict would be easily under-
stood ; for the Church is a well-ordered and governed society. But
so is the ideal social state; in it everyone has his proper place and
regular duties.
And the ideals or aspirations of both seem really very similar.
The Church fully acknowledges that the highest form of its own
life is that practiced in its religious orders or communities, which
is modeled, we may say, on that led by our Lord Himself with His
chosen Apostles during His ministry on earth; with a common
purse, in charge of one of their number, for the common good.
And this form of life was the one adopted in the beginning by
the Church of Jerusalem. It did not become that of the whole
Church throughout the world ; but that was not because it was dis-
approved as a form of life, but simply because, as men are actually
constituted, it could not be successfully carried on by all. But
still we find the Church reverting to it here and there, in her
religious communities, and carrying it on most successfully; indeed
it is only in the Church that it has been an actual success. And it
has always, when showing signs or promise of such success, and
when undertaken in the manner necessary to produce it, been most
highly approved of by the higher Church authority.
Why, then, should the Church condemn in mankind at large
what she so highly approved among her own members? Why
should she tell men in general not to do what she so strongly recom-
mends and indeed invites some, at least, of her own children to do ?
This really seems to many a sort of scandal, and to imply that the
Church is not quite sincere in this approbation which she gives
to the common or, as it may be called, the socialist life in her
communities, but only tolerates it, her authorities really preferring
1913-] THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SOCIALISM 445
to have private property retained by the great mass of her mem-
bers, and indeed to a very large amount by some of them; and
this, it may be said, in order to receive substantial assistance for
themselves in this way.
These questions, which are not imaginary, but really raised,
are not, however, so puzzling as they may appear. Let us consider
the matter carefully, and we shall see why the Church cannot adopt
the socialist programme for a general one; why, if so adopted,
she must regard it as dangerous to the general welfare.
The first reason is that what we may call the fundamental idea
of Socialism is absolutely erroneous, and contradictory to Catholic
teaching. And that idea is, that morality is a matter entirely in the
jurisdiction of mankind, instead of being subject to the law of God;
that it rests on and can be determined by popular vote. This idea
may not be expressly formulated in all socialist teaching; but still
it exists. In particular, it finds utterance in the dogma, generally
held by Socialists, that private ownership of land, or of the means
of production in general, is intrinsically wrong, or at any rate can
be made so by popular consent. Some Socialists, still recognizing
that there is such a thing as Divine law, would content themselves
with declaring that private ownership is contrary to this law;
but others ignore the existence of any such law. Now the Catholic
Church not only holds that there is such a law, but also that
private ownership is not forbidden by it ; and that no vote or consent
of mankind can make it otherwise. The Church of course admits
that a man may lawfully abandon this right; but she denies that
he can be forced to do so. In what are called the solemn vows of
her religious orders, such an abandonment is made, but the Church
takes extreme care that it should be perfectly and absolutely volun-
tary, and that even such vows do not radically abolish the capacity
of those who make them to hold property, so that if circumstances
justify it, in the judgment of the Church, the capacity may return.
The words of our Lord Himself, Whom some Socialists are
desirous to claim as the first of their number, are quite explicit to
this effect. We read in St. Matthew's Gospel (chap, xix.) and
the same event is also recorded by St. Mark and St. Luke that
a rich young man came to our Lord, and inquired what he should
do to have life everlasting. Our Lord told him that he should
keep the commandments ; and on the young man's asking Him what
commandments He meant, He mentioned several of the Ten Com-
mandments of the Decalogue, adding also that of loving one's
neighbor as oneself. One of the Commandments He mentioned
446 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SOCIALISM [July,
was, " Thou shalt not steal." The young man answered that
he had kept all these. Our Lord did not say, " No, you have not,
for you have no right to possess private property of your own,
for you, in doing so, are taking what belongs to the community."
No, He acknowledged that the lawful possession of private prop-
erty is not stealing. But on the young man asking what yet was
wanting to him, our Lord said, " If thou wilt be perfect, go sell
what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure
in heaven; and come, follow me." In other words, "Join our
community." You will notice that He told the young man to sell
what he had. But how could he sell it, if it was not really his
to sell? Now notice just what these words of our Lord were in
reply to the young man's repeated question. He told him to sell
what he had and give the money to the poor. But He did not
absolutely require this. He told the young man to do this, if he
wanted to be perfect.
Now the Catholic, and really the only possible, explanation of
these last words is that there are some things which a man may do
to please God, but which are not required as of obligation, or under
pain of sin. These are known in the Church not as laws, but as
" counsels of perfection." They principally come under three
heads: namely, the renunciation of property, of marriage, and of
one's own will by obedience to someone to whom one gives a right
to require it in the name of God. This obedience, of course, only
extends to actions not contrary to the laws of God, or of some
regularly constituted general authority as that of the State
acting also, of course, in a way not contrary to the Divine law.
St. Paul writes specially in his first Epistle to the Corinthians
(chap, vii.) of the second of the counsels just named. He himself
had never married. He says, " I would that all men were even
as myself; but everyone hath his proper gift from God; one after
this manner, and another after that. But I say to the unmarried,
and to the widows: it is good for them if they so continue, even
as I. But if they do not contain themselves, let them marry."
Now in religious communities or orders, sanctioned by the
Church, which may be said to be on the socialist principle as to
property, the two other counsels which have been named form a
regular part of their rule. To give greater security, as well as merit
in their observance, all three are usually strengthened by vows
to be faithful to them. When these vows are taken, they of course
becpme not merely counsels, but real laws of conscience; that of
obedience, however, only being so under the restrictions mentioned
1913-] THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SOCIALISM 447
above. No religious Superior can require anything contrary to
the laws of God, or of the regular and general authorities which
God has established.
These religious communities have been the only experiments on
the socialist principle with regard to the first counsel, that of the
renunciation of private property, which have ever succeeded for
any length of time. And notice that they all rest in the beginning,
for each individual, on a voluntary act on his or her part. And,
also, the Church has always regarded this act as one resulting from
a special call or inspiration on God's part. She has distinctly,
especially at the Council of Trent, forbidden even parents to com-
pel their children to make such an act. She holds that, as St.
Paul says, everyone has his proper gift from God. This gift from
God she calls a " vocation." And she requires such a vocation even
for the priesthood, on account of the second counsel as well as on ac-
count of the special sacred duties and responsibilities which those
becoming priests undertake. She even requires this vocation for the
orders preparatory for the priesthood, of deacon and subdeacon.
It is or should be plain, then, why the Church does not and
cannot look with favor on the idea of making the socialist regime
or arrangement binding by law on all citizens of the State at large.
It can only work successfully when adopted by each individual
with absolute freedom of choice, and, moreover, with a special Di-
vine call. To establish it as the right course for all, is in her judg-
ment simply a case of " fools rushing in where angels fear to tread."
" But," it may be asked, " if this life in community, with prop-
erty in common, is so pleasing to God, why should He not give
this special call to all who would like to have it, and make it a
success for everyone, instead of merely for a few?." That is a
question which may be interesting, but one which no one has any
Divine commission to answer. The important fact is simply that
He does not, and that there is no reason to think He ever will.
With all the care, both for the sake of the community and of the
individual, that the Church takes in the matter, there are many who,
though at first fully persuaded that they have a vocation to this
common or as we call it religious life, find on trial that they
must have been mistaken. An actual trial of it is usually necessary,
and it is for this reason that the Church insists on what is called
a novitiate, or time of experiment for everyone desiring to engage
in it. It is not probable that many who have a Divine vocation to it
refuse to make this experiment; so there cannot be many who would
succeed in it outside of those who actually try. But the proportion
448 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SOCIALISM [July,
of those who even try is exceedingly small, and many of those who
do try fail. So it is evident that a vocation to it is a very rare
one, even among Catholics, who have every encouragement to make
the trial.
It does not, then, require any great perspicacity to see what
would be the result if everyone should be required to make it.
All would like to have it tried, if it simply meant that they should
have a share of other people's property; but when it came to giving
up their own, the result would not be satisfactory, even if their own
subsistence were secure, as is the case in most of the religious com-
munities of the Church. There is absolutely no reason to suppose
that if all were required to adopt the socialist manner of life,
all would be contented with it. In our religious communities, those
who find, in the novitiate, that it does not suit them can leave;
and indeed they can do so even afterward. No force compels
them to remain. And they can even obtain proper permission to
do so. But in a socialist state, comprising all citizens, such would
not be the case. The great majority, in fact, would, if not re-
turning by a revolution to the previous conditions, return to them
individually by disregarding its regulations so far as possible,
and by securing for their own use as large a share of the goods
of life as they were able. You can say no one can consider any-
thing as his own; but you cannot prevent his using it as his own,
if he wishes, and has an opportunity to do so. And, furthermore,
there must be officials of some kind in the social state, as well as
in any other; indeed everyone in it would be a sort of official,
with regular duties and responsibilities. In other words, you can-
not prevent what is known as " grafting " any better under Social-
ism than you can as things are now. The only thing that can effec-
tually prevent it is conscience, which says to a man : " Thou shalt
not steal;" and the force of this Commandment is much weakened
if you tell him that no individual has any real right to property.
As it is now, people have much less scruple against defrauding the
government than they have against cheating an individual; and
there is no reason why the government, in a socialist form, should
acquire a peculiar sanctity in the general estimation.
The only way in which a socialistic government can hope to suc-
ceed would be that in which those of the religious orders succeed,
that is to say, by- an enthusiastic and persistent devotion to its prin-
ciples on the part of the whole people. Simply establishing it will
not produce such a devotion.
Of course Socialists claim that if it is once introduced, every-
1913-] THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SOCIALISM 449
one will find its results so agreeable that such a devotion to it will
arise. But that is a mere assertion, not borne out by facts, even in
the case of religious communities, which always tend to lose their
first fervor instead of increasing it, though every individual mem-
ber has in the first place entered upon this life voluntarily.
For this common sense reason, the propaganda of Socialism, if
carefully considered, even though merely advocating that all should
begin by entering on it voluntarily, cannot be considered as resting
on a sound basis. Human nature cannot be expected to undergo
a complete and radical change. If such a change, or rather such a
victory over human nature, can only be expected in those who are
the very best disposed, and the least selfish of all, who have made the
sacrifice of their own property, and of all except the necessities
of life, in a Catholic religious order, and if even some of these fail
to persevere in these unselfish dispositions; how can it be expected
to continue steadily, even in those who first entered into the so-
cialistic agreement ; and how much less can this be expected in their
children and their children's children, or in immigrants who for
various reasons enter into a socialistic state? There are quite
enough as it is who refuse to admit the obligation in conscience of
submitting to any government at all ; anarchists we call them. How
many more will there be if sacrifices such as the socialistic plan
requires are exacted of them? Even if you succeed in convincing
them that private ownership is essentially wrong, or can be made
so by popular vote, how can you expect them to persevere in this
conviction, or to receive it as a certain dogma from their prede-
cessors, in face of the numerous and urgent temptations to a
contrary opinion?
No; Socialism, even if adopted in the only possible way that
the Church could approve, that is to say in the way in which it
exists in her religious orders, by a perfectly free and voluntary
consent, would, as was said in the beginning, lead only to disaster;
simply because it is certain that the consent of human nature
to it would not persevere. Catholics hold that perseverance in the
voluntary poverty of the religious life can only be obtained by a
special grace or supernatural help from God, which He will grant
to those whom He has called to that special virtue, but which it
would be rash to expect without such a call. To expect everyone
to persevere in it, simply because they had, even voluntarily, begun,
would really be almost, if not quite, as rash as to expect men in
general to keep absolute virginity through life, which is of course
VOL. XCVII. 2Q
450 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SOCIALISM [July,
the only lawful alternative to the state of matrimony. And if the
poverty of the religious life is not kept perfectly, the evil only
affects the delinquent, or at most the particular religious house
to which his example may spread; and, moreover, if he finds his
virtue inadequate to it, he can be permitted to go. But in attempt-
ing the same thing in a whole nation, the government will be a fail-
ure, either by the neglect of its principles or the departure of its
citizens. The idea that everyone will be even a passably good
citizen under it, is simply a rose-colored dream. It invites and is
sure to lead to corruption, and consequent failure and disaster;
for it is asking from nature more than it can accomplish without
a special supernatural help. The world in general may not believe
this, but we Catholics, if understanding our religion, know that it
is true. This is a quite sufficient reason for us to oppose the
socialist plan.
Strangely enough, there is another of the special virtues be-
longing to religious communities which Socialists would force on
the public at large. This is, evidently, the virtue of religious
obedience. The socialist plan necessarily involves this. In the
present state of things, as far as the government is concerned,
a man is quite probably able to fit himself for and enter upon any
occupation which seems to him most agreeable and suitable to him.
But on the socialist plan he must be assigned to his occupation
according to the needs of the community, rather than his own
preference. He is to be assigned to his post very much like an
officer or soldier in an army. Some pressure may, of course,
under the present system, be put on a young man in this way by
his parents or others; but he can generally manage, if he has a
decided preference, to gratify his own desire. He may want, for
instance, to become a medical man; and probably be able, at least,
to try. But in Socialism, the government must decide what will
be the best disposal of him for the common good. If it considers
that there are enough doctors already, or that he could do better
at something else, off he goes to that something else. He is,
indeed, very much like a Jesuit; for the Jesuits make a special
point of the virtue of obedience. But there are not so very many
Catholics who have a real vocation to be Jesuits. The socialist
young man, however, has to be as good a Jesuit as he can, without
any special vocation. From our somewhat extended experience,
success is hardly probable. It is not likely, indeed, that he will
even desire it. Love of the socialist regime, even if he has it, is
far from being as strong a motive as the love of God.
1913-] THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SOCIALISM 451
It would seem, then, very improbable that Socialism can suc-
ceed in enabling the average citizen to sacrifice his liberty in the
way that it is sacrificed in religious communities. It is liberty
which is more prized than anything else by men, especially at the
present day and in a country like ours; and the restraints placed
on it by government are very slight with us. But Socialism in-
creases them very decidedly. The only way in which the obedience
of a religious community can be observed is by regarding it as
paid to God through His representative in the Superior; and So-
cialism does not present this motive to us. Religion is a side issue
with it; a man may be religious if he wishes; it does not under-
take to prevent him from being so ; but certainly religion has nothing
to do, in the socialist idea, with his duties in the State.
If we now consider the remaining one of the three virtues of
the religious community life, that of absolute chastity, it is quite
evident that this does not and cannot form a part of the socialist
plan, unless, as among some non-Catholic communities like the
Shakers, inviting all to join them, it were proposed as a fitting
preparation for the end of the human race. Socialism may then
be considered as being the community life on the basis of the other
two virtues of poverty and obedience; in other words, of the re-
nunciation of individual ownership and of individual will. But
even with these it is quite arduous, as has been seen.
It may be presumed that for absolute chastity, Socialism would
substitute the married state, as the world in general does now,
always has, and always will. If it would abandon the idea of union
for life in marriage, that of course would be more than enough
to make any approval of it by the Church utterly impossible. We
would need nothing more to show why it could not be accepted by
us. We assume, then, that Socialism is to include marriage and
the natural existence of families.
But here, again, a difficulty immediately arises, namely, who is
to have charge of the family? The logical conclusion of the so-
cialistic scheme would seem to be that the ownership of it, as of
property, must reside in the State. It must be supposed to belong
to the State, though perhaps under the principal care of the
parents. But radically, like everything else, it must be a State
asset, and to be taken care of as the State directs. And this seems
to be the usual socialist view, as actually held by those who thor-
oughly develop that view or theory.
Now here we have an irreconcilable difference between the
452 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SOCIALISM [July,
teaching of Socialism and of the Church. In the Catholic view it is
to the parents, not to the State, that the direction of the children
is divinely committed. Even in case of the neglect of the parents,
or of their death, the State has no absolute right over them. It
only has the right to see that they are brought up to be good
citizens, not to injure the State or their fellow-citizens, and to
obey the laws of the State when these are not contrary to the law
of God. It must leave them to the control of the parents in other
matters, as long as they need such control. They are the natural
guardians of their own children, and the State must not take this
natural and Divine right of guardianship from them.
The parents are responsible to the State, in some matters, as
has just been said; but beside this the Catholic view is that
Catholic parents are also responsible to the Church in other matters,
particularly in regard to the religious instruction of their chil-
dren. And it is here that practically a very serious Catholic ob-
jection to Socialism comes in.
This difficulty is felt even now to a great extent in the exag-
gerated ideas prevalent as to the functions of the State in this
matter. And it would, in all probability, be much increased by the
still more exaggerated idea of the State which is inherent in the
socialistic theory.
Religion, with us, is not simply a matter of sentiment, to be
felt or carried out by each individual according to his own private
taste or preference. It is, in our view and belief, a system of
truths and consequent practical duties coming to us as a revelation
from God, through Christ and His Apostles, and committed to an
organization founded by Divine authority, and known to us as the
Church. We do not regard the Church as simply a society like
others in general, based on mutual consent and for mutual con-
venience. No ; we look upon it as a Divine association, into which
Almighty God requires that all should enter, though many may
be excused from sin in not doing so by ignorance of its claims.
But for those who do belong to it, its orders, when acting in its
proper spiritual sphere, are as binding as any laws of any State
can be. And we cannot agree that any secular government has
a right to override its orders, or ignore its laws, even though that
government, personally, should be in the hands of men who are
Catholics; and still greater, necessarily, is the difficulty if they
happen to be men who do not recognize the claims of the Church,
or who perhaps are infidels or even atheists.
1913.] THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND SOCIALISM 453
There is no need that we should prove our position on this
point at present, or even to show any reason for it; we are only
saying what the fact is with regard to our belief in this matter;
and why, finding considerable difficulty as we do from the opposi-
tion to this belief generally prevailing now, we cannot be inclined
to accept a system like Socialism, in which the difficulties, owing
to the overweening claims of the secular authority under the system,
would become much greater than they are. The probability, of
course, with regard to the last point, concerning the family and
children, is that the Socialist State would insist on Socialism being
taught in all schools, and the Catholic view of the authority of the
Church being entirely repudiated.
Let it be thoroughly understood then, that
1. The Church does not reject Socialism in the sense of a
voluntary agreement as to the renunciation of individual property,
or the sacrifice of the individual will among a certain number of
chosen souls called by God to this renunciation and sacrifice, and
specially aided by His grace to carry it out.
2. She does absolutely reject it as far as it teaches that indi-
vidual ownership is forbidden to all, or that the only right condition
of things in any nation is the thorough subjection of all to the
State system which Socialism proposes.
3. She holds that this system, so far from being the only
right system, is fraught with great dangers to the liberty which we
all so highly prize; since it is not in human nature, unaided by a
special grace, to carry it out in the perfection necessary to its
success; and that, therefore, corruption is sure to ensue in it, and
the virtues which it requires to become tyranny on the part of
some, slavery on that of others.
Now, in conclusion, it must also be thoroughly understood that
the Church fully realizes the great evils which have grown up by
the accumulation of immense amounts of wealth in the hands of
a few, which threatens to reduce the great majority of mankind
to a condition of practical slavery, and that she sympathizes with
the advocates of Socialism in their desire to abolish these evils; but
that she simply rejects this special plan as being primarily
founded on statements as to human rights which are absolutely
false, and which, if carried out in practice, would tend to increase
these very evils rather than to abate them.
THE RED ASCENT.
BY ESTHER W. NEILL.
CHAPTER IX.
N the way home Richard was very silent, Betty chat-
tered volubly. " Didn't the knight in armor look
like a frying pan ? How could he dance in all those
clattering clothes? Wasn't Boy Blue a dear?
Would you believe that Bob Fairfax could look beau-
tiful? Where did Queen Elizabeth buy that absurd ruff? Wasn't
the house gorgeous? Didn't the grounds look like fairyland?
Wasn't Jess Fielding an ideal hostess? Wasn't the supper elabor-
ate? A caterer brought the things on a special car. What was
the salad made of ? Did the punch have champagne in it ? Which
costume was the most mystifying? " At last she paused for a re-
sponse.
" Since I did not know the people they all seemed mystifying
to me."
" Why you knew Bob Fairfax, and Jim Peyton, and Tom
Bird."
" I hadn't seen any of them for twelve years."
" Didn't you see any of them when you were here two years
ago?"
" No they were all away, trying to make a living I guess."
" They come and visit their old homes in the summer, then the
county wakes up. Oh, I suppose we shall be very gay for a month
or two, and then we shall stagnate again. Someone told me that
Jess Fielding means to give a series of parties, but I don't suppose
they will be as beautiful as this one. Why every man there was a
picture, and the girls I have never seen so many lovely girls.
Which one did you like best ? "
"I only talked- to one."
" And who was she ? "
" I don't know."
" Couldn't you guess ? Didn't you see her when she un-
masked?"
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 455
" She wasn't there."
" Why, Dick, she must have been there. No girl would have
missed the fun of unmasking; no girl would leave before the re-
freshments were served."
" She did."
"What did she have on?"
" She was dressed as Fire."
" Betty laughed softly. " Don't you know who that was ? "
" No."
" She changed her dress."
"What for?"
" To fool you, I guess. Her costume was so extraordinary I
should think she would have liked to keep it on."
"Who was she?"
" Men are stupid," said Betty. " I've always believed you were
wonderfully clever, but I'll have to change my mind. Did you have
a good time? "
" I don't know whether I did or not."
" But it wasn't quite the bore that you thought it would be ? "
" No," he smiled, " I believe I can truthfully admit that."
" Did you find Fire interesting? "
" She was surprising."
" What did you talk about? "
He hesitated. " I believe we talked about ourselves."
" All men enjoy that," said Betty sagely. " I begin to have
hopes of you, Dicky; Jess Fielding seemed to go out of her way
to please you. There were two or three men there who were
insanely jealous because she chose you to bring her to supper."
" She didn't choose me. It was an accident. The party had
one serious side. The little old lady who chaperones Miss Field-
ing fainted on the porch. I had to carry her upstairs."
" Dear me ! How romantic. What made her? "
"I believe I frightened her."
"Why, Dick!"
" Oh, it was the old, worn story of a soldier lover or some-
thing. She seems very old for that sort of nonsense; but I be-
lieve she has made a study of spiritualism until she half believes
she can see ghosts. And in this case it wasn't so absurd because
she took me for my grandfather."
' You do look like his picture," said Betty with conviction,
" and I suppose the uniform was startling. I wonder if anybody
456 THE RED ASCENT [July,
ever lives single nowadays because he or she can't get the one
desired."
Richard laughed. " Whom does one marry, then, Betty, dear ;
somebody one doesn't want?"
" Somebody that asks her," answered Betty solemnly. " I
don't think it's quite fair that girls are not given the choosing."
" I thought they were," he said without much interest.
" Some people have so few opportunities," she went on reflec-
tively ; " of course there are girls like Jess Fielding who can travel
everywhere, meet all sorts of men, entertain lavishly, and dress
like princesses. I'm sure they can pick and choose. Why that
dress she had on to-night must have cost five or six dollars a yard.
"It was a sort of golden gauze. I never saw anything like it."
" Why I thought she had on white."
" Why, Dick, she was dressed as Fire. Don't tell me that you
are such a stupid as not to guess that before? You certainly will
never make a ladies' man."
" I guess not," he said after a long pause.
Betty was right, he had been " stupid." What other girl ex-
cept Jess Fielding would have talked to him in that amazing way?
She had tried to disguise her voice, but her conversation to-night
.seemed a part of that other interview he had had with her at the
.swimming pool. He found himself rehearsing every remark she
3iad made. What had she meant by saying that he would not
iorget her? Was it true? Did she really mean that he had always
Hield a place in her memory, or had she talked only to tease and
"bewilder him?
As they drove along in silence under the steely glitter of the
stars, fragments of his grandfather's love letters came back to him,
and he began to understand vaguely that it was possible for a
woman to command a man's whole mind until she actually absorbed
him.
But when they reached home, he put all thought of her aside.
The whole evening had seemed unreal a page from his half -for-
gotten fairy books that had charmed his imagination, but which had
no part in a utilitarian world where resistless forces chain down
the spirit of the dreamer.
Betty jumped out of the buggy, and ran into the house, while
he continued on his way to the stable; old Pedro had to be un-
hitched and watered, and by the time Richard entered his own
bedroom, it was after two o'clock. He threw himself upon the
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 457
bed to rest for a moment, and he slept soundly until morning,
dressed in his full uniform ; the prophecy of Fire had partly failed.
He had been too tired to remember.
The days began again monotonously, the garden beds must be
weeded and sprayed; all kinds of living things seemed to spring
up to devour the fresh green leaves of the vegetables. He sent
to the nearest manufacturing town and bought a sprayer, daring
to purchase it upon the installment plan, and he began to make a
study of chemical solutions, endeavoring to find the most economical,
as well as the most efficacious, for his needs. He was trying some
experiments in intensive farming, and he was becoming interested
in spite of the labor it entailed.
One morning when he was hard at work in one of the outlying
fields, he saw Miss Fielding come riding on horseback down the
unfrequented road. He pulled his battered straw hat over his eyes,
hoping that she would pass him by, for his clothes were mud daubed
and his shoes showed a long rent in the side ; but she stopped at the
fence and called : " May I come in for a moment ? "
He answered her with what cordiality he could, and started
towards her to open the gate, but before he reached it she had
urged her horse to the high jump, and Richard trembled for her
safety, even while he admired her skillful horsemanship, as he saw
her clear the five bars of the sagging gate.
" I just wanted to prove to you that I can ride," she said laugh-
ing. " I don't always land in mud puddles. Warm weather for
that sort of thing. I know you are busy, but I want you to look at
these plans for a moment, and tell me what you think of them. I call
them my Christmas tree village."
She held out a roll of papers to him, and he took it gingerly
in his dusty hands. " Christmas," he repeated, " its nearer Fourth
of July." *
" Please don't be so exact," she entreated. " Didn't you ever
have Christmas trees when you were a boy, and didn't they have
green moss gardens underneath, and neat little white houses perched
on the edge of a looking-glass lake? I arn building some homes for
those poor creatures at the mines. I'm sure you put the notion in
my head. I drew the plans roughly, and gave them to an architect
to work out for me. Those are the blue prints. I want to know
what you think of them."
He opened them with eagerness. He was forgetful now of his
own personal appearance. " I am so glad to hear it," he said en-
458 THE RED ASCENT [July,
thusiastically. " I see you have planned for detached houses, that's
fine; they can all have flower gardens. This kitchen seems very
practical, stationary tubs and running water will save lots of labor,
but I don't like the roof, it's too flat."
" Why what's the matter with a flat roof ? "
" Makes the house too hot in summer, unless it has some sort
of an air chamber above."
" Then put a peak on it."
He took the handle of his hoe and began drawing a plan in
the dust of the roadway. " That would be my idea; I don't believe
it would add greatly to the expense."
" I don't care if it does," she said. " Now give me the blue
prints and I'll go. This sun is terrible, I must get home. You
had better stop work for the day."
" I can't do that," he said hopelessly.
After she had gone he wondered why he had not tried to keep
her. Why had he not, at least, offered her the hospitality of the
house? Betty would have been glad to see her, and the big dark-
ened parlor promised cool and comfort after the glare of the sun
on the roads. He might have joined her there at lunch time.
Perhaps she would have played for him on the old piano that had
belonged to his mother perhaps she could sing. It had been so
long since he had heard any good music, and he had learned to
appreciate the best during his brief sojourns in Europe, until the
lack of it was a distinct privation whenever he allowed himself to
think about it.
The day grew warmer; the sun shone, a red-eyed monster,
threatening to wither and burn the far-reaching acres of. corn where
lay Richard's only hope of a harvest. The ground was gray and
cracked, thirsting for moisture, and whenever a breeze ventured
across the tips of the cornstalks it brought no refreshment, only
a hot fog of whirling dust. Richard prayed for rain. The heat
had become intense, and he had been at work ever since sunrise;
towards noon he turned suddenly sick and giddy, and he fell face
downwards in the cornfield, cutting himself upon the barbed wire
with which he had been repairing the fence.
Then the rain had come; great sheets of water that brought
renewed life to all growing things, rousing Richard from his semi-
conscious state. He crept back to the house, hardly knowing how
he accomplished the journey. Betty and the Colonel were sitting
on t the porch.
1913-] THE RED ASCENT 459
" I believe I have had a slight sunstroke," he said holding to
the porch railing for support. " I believe I shall have to go to
bed."
Betty helped him up the stairs with some show of sisterly
sympathy, then she ran to the well for water, and wetting cloths she
bound them around his head.
" We really ought to have ice," she said as she busied herself
with the bandages.
" Perhaps we will next year," he murmured drowsily.
There was always something lacking some necessity. Would
he ever be able to provide the simple comforts of life?
Betty staid by him for an hour, then the sun came out. " You
won't mind if I leave you now?" she asked. "I promised Bob
Fairfax I would go riding with him this afternoon. He has
brought a horse for me from his father's stables." She went to the
window and opened the blinds. " There he is now. Oh, Dicky,
you won't care if I go ? "
" Of course not."
After she left him the room seemed unbearably warmer, the
light from the unshuttered window shone directly in his eyes, and
he felt too weak to walk that far to close the blinds. Flies buzzed
about him in their maddening monotone, and lighted on his face,
his hands, until in sheer desperation he covered himself entirely
with the long linen sheet, then he felt that he was smothering. The
bandages grew hot upon his head, he took them off and dabbled
them feebly in the bucket that stood on a chair by the bed, but,
after an hour or two, even the well water lost its cool freshness,
the mere wetness alone was little comfort. The drippings from the
bandages soaked his pillow and attracted more flies. He had
screened the other windows of the house and neglected his own.
Why had Betty left those shutters open? Must he go on forever
exerting every energy, and asking for no gratitude or service in
return ?
" C-o-w cow, p-l-o-w plow," he began to spell words me-
chanically. His mind refused to worry itself further about his
bodily neglect. " C-o-w," the word brought no image, " p-l-o-w,"
the letters were repeated over and over again; the only thing
troubling him now was the arranging of those few letters : " c-l-o-w
no that was not right, p-o-w-." Where had he begun; where
ended? Over and over again the words reiterated themselves.
Every now and then the vague fear came that he was losing his
46o THE RED ASCENT [July,
mind, then the letters returned again to plague him, and he would
begin to spell anew, " c-l-o-w, p-o-w-."
At last he fell into a sort of stupor, and when he woke the
room was bright with moonlight, a life-giving breeze came in at
the open window, and Richard finding his wet pillows uncom-
fortable, staggered to his feet, and walking drunkenly to an old
armchair, he spent the rest of the night sleeping in its moth-eaten
depths.
For three days he rested; his head felt so strangely light
that he dared not go out in the sun, but he did not enjoy this en-
forced idleness, so many neglected tasks seemed piling up on him
that he grew restless and impatient at the restraint. He knew that
he had taxed his body mercilessly, and, now that it cried out for
some cessation of labor, he felt that it was only prudent to heed
the warning. He could not afford to break down when his work
was barely begun.
During this period of convalescence, he turned again to his
grandfather's letters. Perhaps after all they might hold a clue that
would relieve all this anxiety about the future. Now that the
drudgery of sorting them was finished, they promised entertaining
reading, for they had been written at a time when letter writing
was considered one of the fine arts. Richard turned the yellow
pages to find where he had left off. He glanced at some of the
love letters that he had already read. Somehow they did not seem
so extreme to him now. He paused for a moment over one little
verse that had appealed to his sense of humor
You chain my thought by day and night,
And once I struggled to be free,
Now, even if you scorn my love,
I cannot hope for liberty.
Unconsciously he began to compose couplets himself.
You came as a flame in the moonlight,
Fanned by an eerie breeze.
He could think of nothing to rhyme with breeze except sneeze;
the homeliness of the word brought him back abruptly to his task.
He turned away from the love letters. They were wild, passionate
extravaganzas with which he had nothing to do.
Here were letters written many years before the war, marking
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 461
the first parting of the young husband and wife. Letters full of
tender peace, happiness, and love stronger than passion. And, at
last, here was one from Texas. One paragraph read :
You remember that the year before we were married, some
years after my campaign in Mexico, my dear mother fancied
I had lung trouble, and sent me to this State to spend the
winter? To amuse myself in my idleness I bought a large
tract of land, intending to raise cattle. I begin to believe that
the idea was a good one. What would you think of our making
our home here permanently?
But evidently the young wife had objected to leaving her old
home and kinsfolk, and so her husband had returned to her side,
for there was a long interlude between the letters. The next was
a short jubilant note announcing his election to the United States
Senate. Then followed many more from Washington, vivid pic-
tures of the great men of "the day; long interviews that he had
had with Clay and Webster; detailed explanations of the burning
political questions that were hastening on the war, but though these
letters were full of enthusiasm and buoyant with the hope of a
young man just beginning to realize his own power, there was in
them a deep love and sympathy, a rare understanding for the suf-
fering little wife at home, who was soon again to become a mother.
I would not ask you to endure the hardship of the journey, but
I pray that these few months will quickly pass. The separation
is intolerable, and no material advancement counts when
weighed in the balance with your happiness.
Washington is not a pleasant place to live ; the boarding houses
are so inferior that many of the members reside in Baltimore,
traveling forty miles by train every morning. The streets are
muddy; I think the river flats make the place unhealthful
the city is only four feet above tide water. The northwest
part of the town is much more desirable, but it is difficult of
access; a small creek divides the city from the best residential
section, known as Georgetown.
The next letter was dated some years later :
I am so glad that you are enjoying your visit home. You are
correct in your surmising that my reelection is not assured, but
do not worry about our future. I feel sure that a fortune
462 THE RED ASCENT [July,
awaits us on our ranch in Texas. It is a great cattle country,
a great cotton growing State, its possibilities are endless. If,
in the after years, I should die before you, don't be persuaded
to part with those lands. We will hold them for our children.
It was this letter that decided Richard. He sat down that
night and wrote to Jefferson Wilcox :
Come down. Believe I have a case for you, if you will take
it on a contingent fee. All up in the air myself, but you may
see daylight. No danger of starvation now, if you are willing
to stick to farm products. Every known and unknown bug
and beetle have tried to devour the vegetables, but there are a
few onions left in the patch.
Jefferson replied by telegram: "Delighted. Will start at
once."
CHAPTER X.
Jefferson Wilcox arrived two days later without benefit to the
railroad; he came in his big touring car. Goggled, mud-besmat-
tered, enveloped in a grease-streaked linen duster, he was not pre-
possessing as he drove up to the Matterson door to greet the
punctilious Colonel who awaited him on the porch.
The Colonel limped forward doubtfully, he was uncertain of his
son's selection of friends, and he certainly was not accustomed to
these modern, disreputable outer garments that concealed every clue
to a gentleman's identity, but Jefferson, like one long practiced in
legerdemain, jerked off his coat, cap, goggles, gloves in a twinkling,
and stood before the Colonel immaculately clad, and, holding out
his hand with his most ingratiating smile, said :
" I'm Jefferson Wilcox ; so delighted to get an invitation to
Matterson Hall that I could not wait until train time."
The Colonel shook his hand warmly. "And I am delighted to
meet you." He was effusive in his hospitality, partly because of his
inherited instincts, and partly because his mind was relieved by
Jefferson's appearance. When Richard had first announced his
intention of consulting a lawyer friend and inviting him to the
house, the Colonel had made no outward objection, but he had
expected a dull visitor whose presence would give him no pleasure,
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 463
but Jefferson, over-bubbling with vitality and spirits, had a genius
for adapting himself to older men. Before he had been there half
an hour the Colonel had admitted him to intimacy, and when Betty
appeared to show the guest to the room she had prepared for him,
the Colonel had established a relationship dating back to the original
Wilcox, who had married a Matterson in some dim English cathe-
dral three hundred years before.
Jefferson's room looked very restful to him after his mad drive
through the summer heat; a great bowl of roses stood upon the
mantel, and the carved four-poster was fragrant with fresh linen.
Betty's efforts at housekeeping were very erratic. Most of the
time a soft lint-like dust lay on the waxed floors and the polished fur-
niture ; the rooms were almost always in disorder, then would come
a conscience-stricken upheaval, and everything was washed and
scrubbed, and loose-lying objects stowed away and their where-
abouts forgotten, until the Colonel's swearing sent Betty scurrying
to find them again; then, for a week or more, saddles and boots,
hats and newspapers lay on chairs, tables, anywhere they chanced
to fall, until another spasm for cleanliness seized Betty, and order
again prevailed for a day or two.
The announcement of an expected visitor had sent Betty and
Aunt Dinah into a vortex of mops, brooms, and dusting rags, and,
though the house was an uncomfortable place to live during the
process, Richard was grateful for the transformation. So many of
the rooms which had been shut up all winter as too bleak and big to
heat, were now opened to the sunlight.
The long parlor, which had been as cold and dark as a tomb
ever since his arrival, assumed an air of elegance and hospitality
as soon as it was swept and dusted, for, like most women, Betty
with all her carelessness possessed that inexplicable knack for home-
making that fine intangible art that conjures an atmosphere out
of unfeeling furniture. She moved through the room, pulling a
chair here, pushing a table there; she opened the yellow-keyed
piano, taking the trouble to put the music of an old song she could
not sing upon the rack; she piled pine boughs on the shining brass
andirons; she filled the vases with flowers; she left a book of
poetry she had never read upon the window sill; a photograph of
someone she did not know leaning against the shaded lamp.
Richard was amazed at the possibilities of his own home.
" Why, Betty, I believe you are a witch," he said.
" I hate house-cleaning," announced Betty, viewing her small
464 THE RED ASCENT [July,
hands shrivelled now with soap suds, " but if we are going to have
company to stay we must look our best. Is he young? "
" About twenty-eight."
"Is he good looking?"
" Fairly so."
"Is he tall?"
" About my height."
" Does he know how to dance ? "
" Seems to do a lot of it."
"Does he like it?"
" I suppose he does."
" How long will he stay ? "
" I don't know."
When Betty heard that the gentleman in question had arrived
in a big touring car to pay them an indefinite visit, she fairly danced
with delight, and even old Aunt Dinah's proverbial patience was
taxed by the conflicting orders that her young mistress fired at her
red-kerchiefed head.
" We'll have fried chicken no, we won't we'll have it
creamed put in a little sherry, or would it be nicer curried? I
don't know biscuits or waffles for lunch. Dear me! the flour
bin is nearly empty. Haven't we any honey left from last year?
Parsley around the chicken, Aunt Dinah. Asparagus, no it isn't
fit to pick. Wax beans do you suppose we can get enough wax
beans? Oh, I suppose he is used to everything. That's his auto-
mobile. Oh, I hope he will stay a month or more."
Aunt Dinah's mind moved slowly, keeping time to her billowy
body that lumbered heavily about her work.
" Fo de Lord's sake run long chile, you git me so flustered.
I'll git up dis mess of victuals you go long inter de house."
So Betty had wisely abandoned her position of commanding
officer, but she was very restless until lunch time. Jefferson was
still in his room; Richard had not returned from the village store;
the Colonel was dozing in his chair; she had only the dogs for
company. She was working off some of her surplus energy play-
ing with the puppies, when Richard came wearily up the gravelled
road. He quickened his pace when he saw the gray touring car.
" Has Jefferson come ? " he asked.
Jefferson heard through the open window and came hurrying
down the stairs. " Dicky, Dicky, Dick ! I'm tickled to death to
be here."
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 465
Richard held out both hands to him. " And I'm so glad to
have you. I believe I feel quite rejuvenated."
There were few reserves about Jefferson Wilcox. He was
pleased with his welcome, pleased with his first glimpse of this old
home, pleased that his friend's lot had not been cast in the poverty
and squalor that he had feared, and he expressed his delight quite
openly.
The luncheon was delicious in every detail. As Jefferson
helped himself to a sixth waffle and spread it with honey, he declared
that he would like to remain as a permanent guest. It was not
until he had been there two days that he fully realized the struggle
Richard was making. The first day he had spent joyfully touring
the country with the Colonel and Betty. The Colonel was a real
celebrity, for his remote ancestor who, it was whispered, had
streaks of royal blood in him, had also possessed a royal grant
of land that included several counties in colonial days. This was
sufficient distinction in a community that believed that it takes
" three generations to make a gentleman," but the Colonel also had
a war record, and, like many another valiant soldier, he had repeated
his experiences so often that they seemed present-day occurrences
instead of shredded reminiscences. Then the Colonel was an
orator of the old-fashioned, grandiloquent type, and he had been
a conspicuous figure at every political and patriotic celebration for
the last forty years. Jefferson appreciated, before he had been
out fifteen minutes, that he was traveling with a distinguished per-
sonage. The seams of the Colonel's coat might shine in the sun-
light, the Colonel's farm might be the attenuated remnants of a vast
estate, and the Colonel's daughter might be ashamed of her own
shabbiness, but the journey in the big automobile proved the Col-
onel's importance and popularity in his particular corner of his
State.
The next day, much to Betty's disappointment, their guest
stowed away his automobile in the old carriage house and spent the
day with Richard, lending him a willing hand in all his labors,
seeing with his keen eyes, feeling with his own tired muscles the
work that Richard repeated dully, day after day. With his cul-
tivated business sense he perceived, even more than Richard him-
self, the many difficulties that would vanish with the intelligent
investment of a little ready money; the fact that he had been
admitted to the house on trustful terms of intimacy, seemed to make
the suggestion of material assistance impossible. He felt that the
VOL. XCVII. 30
466 THE RED ASCENT [July,
Colonel would consider it an insult; Richard had already positively
refused his help. Winning the ancient law case seemed the only
hope of releasing his friend from this wearing routine of
drudgery.
That night he listened eagerly to the Colonel's visionary ac-
count of the Fielding forgery, secretly enjoying the old gentleman's
forceful language and his absurd aristocratic views, and after the
Colonel had hobbled off to bed, he and Richard spent the rest of
the night all night poring over the old box of letters, trying to
find out something more definite than the mere announcement : " We
will hold them for our children."
There was a faint streak of pink in the eastern sky when Jef-
ferson stretched himself and said with a yawn:
" This is no way for a second-class lawyer to preserve his
brains; I'm going to bed."
" Do you think there is any chance for us ? " asked Richard ; his
face looked pinched and wan in the glare of the sputtering lamp.
" Immense ! " said Jefferson optimistically. " Immense ! I
believe you've got a mercenary streak in you after all."
Richard deliberated for a moment : " I believe I'm afraid
I have."
"Why afraid?"
" Chasing money was the last of my intentions, and it is cer-
tainly not an idealistic pursuit. Fighting your neighbors is not
altruism."
" Do you know these Fieldings ? "
" Well, no yes that is I have met one of them, Miss Field-
ing."
Jefferson pricked up his ears suspiciously. " What kind is
she?"
" Well, you know I'm no authority on girls, but I believe she's
rather different from most of them, or at least she seemed so."
"Hm!" grunted Jefferson, "seemed so?"
Richard was a trifle confused. " Well I met her at a mas-
querade. Never went to one before. Felt like I was living in a
fairy tale. She was dressed as Fire most amazing costume. And
the first time I saw her, she suggested that the coal mines of her
father's might belong to me. I had been telling her that she was
responsible for the living conditions at the mines : unsanitary
houses, long hours, poor pay."
% Over Jefferson's mobile face there passed an expression of
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 467
relief. He grinned broadly. " Strange tete-a-tete for a party,"
he observed. " Couldn't you think of anything else to talk about? "
" She's a strange girl," said Richard reflectively.
Again Jefferson viewed his friend curiously. " Believe me,
all girls are strange," he said.
"Why?"
" Don't ask me. Can't understand them ; everyone is different.
Now men seem to belong to types; like newspapers with patent
insides not very interesting. Read it all before, but girls, don't
know them can't guess them. If this Miss Fielding thinks the
mines are yours, why don't she give them to you? "
" They don't belong to her."
" Then who owns them? "
" She has a father."
" Oh, yes. I had quite forgotten the father, and where is he ? "
" In Texas, the last I heard of him."
" Then I'm going to Texas. Much more sensible than trying
to fight it out in the courts here."
" But, Jeff, I can't pay you for this."
" Pay !" shouted Jeff, " why it's the biggest case I ever had.
It's coal mines, railroads, oil wells. Why it's millions, Dick. I
begin to feel like a bloated corporation lawyer already, and I'll
charge you I'll charge you a fee that will make you believe that
my time is worth money."
Richard looked relieved. " Then if you have made up your
mind to go, I think you ought to take some of these letters with
you;" he sorted them out with nervous fingers. "This one, for
instance, if the deed is dated prior to this, it ought to prove some-
thing. My grandfather certainly would not have announced his
intention of keeping the land for the children if he had sold it,
and if we are going to try and prove that the title was forged, you
will want some signatures for comparison."
" It's the most important case I ever had," said Jefferson
jubilantly. " I'll go loaded with these old love letters. I tell you,
Dick, they are hot stuff. Bet your life your grandfather wouldn't
have wasted moonlight talking wages and labor conditions to a
fiery phantom of a girl."
Richard smiled. " I guess not," he agreed, " but then he
belonged to another generation."
" Generation has nothing to do with it. Men have been
making fools of themselves ever since the beginning moonlight,
4 68 THE RED ASCENT [July,
mists, music, masquerade, and you're in love before you know it."
" Don't you usually know it? "
" Happens to me like a boomerang," answered Jeff cheerfully.
" I never doubt myself until next day ; that's where I slip up.
Doubting is fatal. Show a girl you're doubtful of your own heart-
throbs, and she's down the pike before you know it."
" But when it comes to the real thing, Jeff, love like my grand-
father's; love that in the after years brings out all the best in a
man; that holds him to his ideals; makes him willing to suffer,
to sacrifice, to live for someone else, there is something sacramental
in a love like that."
" Never felt it," said Jefferson with conviction. " Did you? "
Richard hesitated for a fraction of a moment : " No, but I be-
lieve I have felt it for the world at large. There is something so
appealing, so pitiful, so ignorant in God's poor that I wanted to
spend my life on them, plan for them, fight for them. I fancied
I could do a great deal if I had had a chance to follow out some
of my theories. Perhaps, after all, there has been something wrong
in my makeup, for it wasn't so much the individual that appealed
to me as the overpowering sense of obligation I have felt for the
masses of men. I wanted to bring about the millenium, and I've
fallen down flat I tell you I have fallen flat."
" How do you mean ?"
" Well, grovelling for bodily necessities takes all the vigor out
of a man. He's too tired to think, to pray, to realize he's got a
soul worth saving."
" But when you get your millions," said Jeff hopefully.
" I don't know," answered Richard wearily. " I'm not so
sure of myself. Just now leisure seems the most desirable thing
in life to me, and the priesthood a million miles away."
" But if you had the leisure, Dick? "
Richard gave a mirthless little laugh : " I'd go to bed for six
months," he said, " and take massage instead of exercise."
[TO BE CONTINUED.]
THE BALLAD OF THE JUDAS TREE.
(" Who wander through the world seeking the ruin of souls/')
BY EMILY HICKEY.
THE blossom is on the Judas Tree,
Rosed-white bells all fair to see,
What are they chiming mystically,
Those little bells so sweet and free?
What are they tolling heavily,
In a grim and drear monotony?
How is it now with thee and thee,
Woman and man by the Judas Tree?
Woman and man, be swift to flee
From the rosed-white bloom of the Judas Tree.
(But they pluck the flowers of the Judas Tree.)
The leafage is on the Judas Tree,
Clasping the blossom verdantly.
Man and woman, thee and thee,
Not I but the truth of God in me,
Lift a voice to bid you flee
From the blossom and leaf of the Judas Tree.
(But they gather the leaves of the Judas Tree.)
The fruitage is on the Judas Tree,
Purple glooming in deadly blee.
Oh, if ye pluck that ill berry,
Pluck the fruit of the Judas Tree,
Never again for thee and thee,
Woman and man, shall joyaunce be.
(But they eat the fruit of the Judas Tree.)
Sun, rain, and dews, 'twas never ye
That nurtured the deadly Judas Tree.
Never these gracious things to see,
Never the fair earth's sweetness free
Nurtured the deadly Judas Tree.
470 THE BALLAD OF THE JUDAS TREE [July,
Oh, the life of the Judas Tree
An ill spirit fed mortally.
(He once was incarnate treachery.)
He burrowed beneath the Judas Tree,
And rose with the sap of the Judas Tree,
Each bough and twiglet entered he,
And laughed a-low in his deathly glee.
Was this the curse of the Judas Tree?
God He knoweth how this may be ;
God He knoweth for thee and thee
If your two souls walked the way that he
Showed the world in Gethsemani,
With the greeting and kiss of treachery.
Ye two knelt on bended knee
Where the Light of Light shines veiledly;
Ye two vowed sweet vows to be
Children of Light for eternity.
Oh, what is this for thee and thee?
What was your sin by the Judas Tree ?
Not the sin of the leaping free
Of hearts high beating passionately ;
Not the sin of the pride and glee
Of the giver-soul that comes to be
Betrayed by its generosity;
But the deadly thing that chillingly
Pierced to the marrow of thee and thee
With its dart of utter falsity.
Oh, poor souls, poor souls who dree
The pains than which none heavier be,
Deaf ears, and eyes that cannot see.
Out of God's grace ye went, to be
Guests at His foes' base revelry;
Clasping the low things sordidly,
The low things lighter than vanity.
1913.] THE BALLAD OF THE JUDAS TREE 471
Thirty pieces of shining blee?
Nay, not a silverling to see;
Only the coinage false that we
Call the wages that devilry
Giveth its servants verily.
(But the wages of sin is death, said He.)
Was it the curse of the Judas Tree?
Was it thus, poor souls, for thee and thee,
Were ye wrapt in the strangling folds that be
Spun and woven in hell? Were ye
Drawn to your sin by the curse that he
Who once was incarnate treachery,
Brought from hell to the Judas Tree?
He Whom ye sold for pelf was He
Before Whose face one day shall flee
Sin and death for eternity;
He Whom ye sold your Judge shall be.
What of His doom for thee and thee;
Yea, but the Judge of all is He
Who loved you both on His gibbet Tree.
Haste to His infinite charity,
Clasp to His wounded Feet, and flee
From Him to Him for your lives, that He
May take to His mercy thee and thee.
The winter shall kill the Judas Tree,
When Christ on those looks mercifully
Who have known the bloom of the Judas Tree,
Who have sinned with the leaves of the Judas Tree,
Who were drugged with the juice of its mirk berry,
Who sinned their sin with the Judas Tree,
God's frost shall kill the Judas Tree,
The frost that burns eternally.
GLIMPSES OF A GREAT CATHOLIC SOUL.
LOUIS VEUILLOT.
BY F. DROUET, C.M.
O many an educated Catholic, even in his native coun-
try, Louis Veuillot is now hardly more than a name.
And yet, the son of the poor cooper of Boynes,
the man whose energetic and rugged features stand
boldly out, carved in white marble, in one of the side
chapels of the Sacred Heart Basilica at Montmartre, was easily
the most striking Catholic personality of nineteenth century France.
And if we may trust the judgment of that keenest of French liter-
ary critics, Jules Lemaitre, he was also one of the five or six really
great prose writers of the same period, one to be raised on the
same lofty pedestal as De Maistre, Montalembert, and Taine.
Finally, an exceptionally good judge of things Catholic, the lamented
Olle-Laprune, hails Veuillot as the most thorough representative
of the Catholic spirit, equalled, perhaps, but not surpassed by
O'Connell or Windthorst, nor even by the noblest living champion
of the Church in France, Count Albert de Mun.
With this particular side of Veuillot's character we are here
chiefly concerned.
To Louis Veuillot was denied the happiness of a Christian
childhood and of an early Catholic education. This son of rural
France, who was destined by Divine Providence to fight daily for
forty- five years the battles of the faith, grew up in an atmosphere
not only of dire poverty, but also of religious indifference. In one
of his first and most charming books (Rome et Loreite), he de-
scribes with bitter irony the divers phases of his early education:
" I was thrown into the infamous 'Mutual School ;' it took every
month two full days of the 'sacred labors' of my poor father to
pay for the lessons of corruption I received from my classmates,
and from a teacher who was drunk half the time." Yet the
school was styled " religious." " Even catechism was taught ! "
continues Veuillot. " It was (oh ! the horrible recollection !), it was
after that sort of instruction that I made my first Communion.
It was a crime : let the responsibility of it fall upon other heads !
1913-] GLIMPSES OF A GREAT CATHOLIC SOUL 473
it was not altogether mine. Driven to the holy table by ignorant,
if not decidedly impious hands, I approached it without realizing
in what great banquet I was taking part. I left it with all my stains
upon my soul, and did not return. Forgive me, my God, and for-
give them ! It is only to glorify Your mercy that I publicly confess
a crime from which You have deigned to absolve me."
At home, in the meanwhile, the question of daily sustenance
was becoming a most distressing problem. The family resources
were exhausted, and Louis, a child of thirteen, had to face life
and fight its battles alone. " Alone in the world," he writes,
" without a guiding hand, without a friend, almost without a
master, at thirteen years of age, and without God ! Oh ! the bitter
destiny! I found, indeed, some good people around me; I was
even shown some generosity. But no one thought of my soul, no
one made me drink from the sacred fountains of duty ! The streets
of Paris formed the education of my mind, and some young men
in whose company I had to live formed the education of my heart.
When in my misery, in my isolation, in my solitude, I needed to
learn a prayer, it was blasphemy that was taught me! It was
blasphemy that I saw everywhere, that I heard in all speeches,
that I read in all the books, blasphemy that I was called upon
to admire in all the scenes that met my eyes ! " And yet, even in
those dark days, there was in the bottom of his heart a disgust for
the low pleasures in which others freely revelled, and an anxious
craving for certitude and peace. Soon was to come the turning
of the road; a few years more and he would be walking in the
full and glorious light of faith.
The intelligent and devoted instrument of Veuillot's con-
version was a young man, who had himself tasted the emptiness of
liberal teachings. Gustave Olivier, a former companion of his labors,
had recently returned to the practice of his faith, and was now
( l8 37) planning a trip to Italy, Greece, and Constantinople. He
invited Veuillot to accompany him.
" Humanly speaking," writes Veuillot, " it was the height of
folly to accept, and yet, a week later, I was speeding along the road
to Marseilles. I thought I was going to Constantinople: I was
going farther than that, I was going to Rome, I was going to my
baptism ! "
In Rome, an excellent Catholic, Adolph Feburier welcomed
the pilgrims.
After a month of prayers and instructions, and also of hesita-
474 GLIMPSES OF A GREAT CATHOLIC SOUL [July,
tions and waverings, the triumph of grace was complete and final.
On Good Friday, 1838, Veuillot made his general confession to the
Jesuit Father Rosaven, and on Easter Sunday he received, in the
CHurch of Our Lady of the Snows, his second Communion, which
he justly termed his first. He was now twenty-five years of age.
From that day to his last, forty-five years later, his faith knew
no cloud; his devotion to the Catholic cause knew no waning, and
his love for his divine Master and His visible representative on
earth was " like the path of the just, a shining light that goeth
forward and increaseth, even to perfect day."
That noble soul in which energy had always been the dominant
characteristic, never thought of hiding for a moment from his
former friends the radical change which had just given a new
direction to his life. To a worldly lady who openly deplored the
fact of his conversion, he sent this significant and fearless pro-
fession of faith: "Yes, it is true! I am a convert! That is to
say, from the indifferent and irreligious person that I was I have be-
come a Christian, fulfilling all the obligations imposed upon one by
Catholic faith. Yes, madame, I say my morning and evening
prayers, I even pray often during the day; yes, madame, I go to
confession, like many other good people. I usually go to Com-
munion on Sunday, in company with the doorkeepers and servant
maids of my parish, a company which, to tell the truth, is by no
means so large as I would like to have it; an excellent company,
for all that, made up, in about equal proportion, of men and women :
those I consider to be my equal before God, my superiors in the
world. I do all these things, and your information is correct. But
it is not true that my friends should grieve over it, either for their
sake, for they don't lose my friendship, nor for mine, for I did
not lose my happiness thereby. I love all those I formerly loved,
and I love them much more and in a far better way."
With enthusiasm he celebrates and praises the splendors of
that " Kindly light " which has shone forth in his darkness, and
led him safely out of the shadow of death : " Before my conversion,
I was always tortured by 'perhaps/ But now there is no dark-
ness. God, looking down on me with merciful eyes, said: 'Be
light made in that soul/ And forthwith light was made It
seems to me that I am now gliding along with full sails upon an
ocean of light: I know my way, I know what I shall see when
I reach the limits of my horizon. Men are truly my brethren;
objects appear to me under new colors. What was dead is now
1913.] GLIMPSES OF A GREAT CATHOLIC SOUL 475
full of life; where I saw formerly nothing but the caprice of a
blind power, I now see a clear witness of the existence and power
of God. The most puzzling problems that used to baffle my ignor-
ance are now vanishing like smoke ; the iron doors everywhere shut
against me are opening now of their own accord. That sea upon
which I gaze used to offer me the sterile picture of my everlasting
unrest, and it is now the serene image of my deepest peace "
Upon a soul so disposed the marvels of Catholic Rome made,
of course, an enduring impression. Years later, when his
talent reached its full maturity, Veuillot gave expression to his
enthusiasm in the two compact volumes which he aptly named :
The Fragrance of Rome. It was the full growth of the fervor
he felt at the time of his conversion at the age of twenty-five.
Having discovered the splendors of the faith, he cannot, even for
an hour, keep that light under a bushel, nor drink alone from that
fountain of joy. He must tell to the world the happiness of his
soul, he must let his heart speak aloud of what that heart has felt
in the shadow of the Eternal City. For it is not with the idle
curiosity of the tourist, nor with the business-like method of the
archaeologist, it is with the faith of a child, the fervor of a convert,
and always, of course, with the eyes of an artist, that he makes
the round of the churches in Rome and of the sanctuaries of Swit-
zerland. At the feet of the Virgin of Einsiedeln, he pours out his
feelings in this prayer for his two sisters : " O Virgin, I have two
sisters, two saintly children, two white doves still hidden in their
mother's nest; they sing and they smile in their blessed ignorance,
but the hour is coming when they will set their foot on the thres-
hold of serious life. Virgin most prudent, preserve them from
the bitter wind that causes young flowers to wither away; preserve
them from sterile tears and from the grief that brings shame with it;
keep them humble and pure, loyal and faithful to the end of their
life."
To his younger brother Eugene, come back to the fold three
years after him, he writes this significant programme of life,
from which he himself never swerved : " Oh ! my dear child, what
a sweet happiness for you and me to be working together for the
glory of that holy religion which has been to us, we may say truly,
the bread of body and soul ! As far as I am concerned, I am fully
resolved to give to this cause my whole life, the best fruits of my
intelligence, to make it the sole aim of my efforts and labors.
I know I will have no position in the world, no bank account,.
476 GLIMPSES OF A GREAT CATHOLIC SOUL [July,
but I will have my duty done, the manna of heaven for every day,
the water of the torrent to drink from, and a few years less to
spend here below; that is enough to satisfy anyone. Do not say
I am speaking like a madman ; all the wisdom of the world cannot
change these facts: namely, that I have to break away from the
world and fight under the banner of God. I have seen many
things here on earth. I have trod on the carpets of those who
are the kings of the hour, and I have read their care-worn
souls; I have spoken with the sailor on the sea, with the farmer
in the fields ; I have seen in Rome the living miracle of mankind ; the
mountains of Switzerland have made me wonder at the splendors
of nature, but I have seen nothing so beautiful, so miraculously
admirable, as a heart burning with the love of God ! "
And that was Veuillot's heart. During his half-century of
life as a journalist, in the heat of controversies, in the haste of
daily improvisation, he, no doubt, made many mistakes. He at
times overreached the mark and dealt blows to his adversaries,
including priests and bishops, with no gentle hand, but no one
ever dared to question his motives : " To the faith that had invaded
and conquered his soul," says Father Longhaye, " he gave unswerv-
ing allegiance. He subordinated to it his whole mind, all his
knowledge, present and future; persons and things, history and
politics, science and literature; he judged everything in that light;
he brought everything to that central point." It is faith consulted
in all things, ever cloudless and always uppermost, that makes the
admirable and almost supernatural unity of the life of him whom
Jules Lemaitre terms " The great Catholic layman of the nine-
teenth century."
The fifty-five volumes which compose Veuillot's works fully
bear out this somewhat sweeping statement. The eight volumes
of his correspondence, for instance, besides being a storehouse
of information on the religious history of France, bear witness
to the fact that, from the day of his conversion, Veuillot was at
all times, in the intimacy of his private life or in the heated
debates of public questions, seeking to guide himself by Catholic
principles. The following quotations are taken exclusively from
that correspondence.
Love for the ceremonies of the Church, and ability to shape
one's spiritual life according to the various phases of the liturgical
year, is surely an infallible sign of a deep-seated Catholic sense.
VeuiUot possessed that love in the highest degree, and the most
1913-] GLIMPSES OF A GREAT CATHOLIC SOUL 477
modest service in a country chapel was enough to fill his soul with
religious delight. The eternal beauty of the Psalms appealed par-
ticularly to his heart: " I followed the whole office," he says, "in
giving an account of 'a delightful Christmas night/ and I really
don't know why I don't spend my life singing Psalms, for I cannot
conceive anything more beautiful. There one would learn good
politics, good literature, true love. The weather was worth a
poet's description: the moon veiled with a light mist, not to hide
itself, for sure, but to give a chance to the stars, shining like smiling
eyes, all the trees powdered with hoarfrost, the earth merrily
crackling under foot. I fancy it was all like this during the night
of the Gloria in Excelsis. Oh! when shall I see another Christmas
night like that? At any rate I thank God for giving me that one:
*O ye cold and heat, bless the Lord; O ye dews and hoarfrosts,
O ye ice and snow, bless the Lord; praise and exalt Him above
all forever!'"
The celebration of these feasts was once the common blessing
of all the people of France. It is so no longer. The work of moral
vandalism, which sought to uproot the faith, and deprive the poor
of their greatest consolation, made Veuillot burn with indignation.
Just before one Christmas day he wrote to his daughters : " Do you
weep when singing the Roratef Jerusalem desolata estl Con-
solamini, cito veniet salus tua! I feel in my heart an inexpressible
grief and sorrow when I think that they have taken away those
sublime things from the soul of the people, but I feel an equal
joy when I think that we, at least, are all on our knees at the
foot of the Cross, prostrate before that insulted glory and that
despised love. Let us hold on firmly and bless the rabble who spit
upon us. Their insults are like a shining snow that adorns us far
better than the winter frost adorns the leaves of the holly. Ah!
this is true silver, silver that perishes not!"
During a stay at Plombieres, he witnesses the procession of the
Blessed Sacrament, and receives the Benediction, " In the midst of
the public square, in the good dust of the good God."
The famous Abbey of Solesmes, with its imposing buildings in
a picturesque region justly called the garden of France, was for
Veuillot a favorite resting place. The monks were his friends, and
he was nowhere so perfectly at home as when among them. In
that Abbey he worked and prayed, and he wrote some of his
most charming letters. To the Viscountess de Pitray (Olga de
Segur), one of his most faithful correspondents, whose "dear,
478 GLIMPSES OF A GREAT CATHOLIC SOUL [July,
bad handwriting he was always longing to gaze upon," he wrote :
" I have adopted the regime of the place for rising, retiring, and
everything else. I go to matins, to complin, and to High Mass.
I only indulge in the luxury of a few meditations a day in the
garden, which is cheerful and prosperous looking, with a vista
of several miles of open country, a river in the distance, and an
army of singing, chirping birds ; there, while musing on my stupid
old sins, I take a bite at white and black currants, rosy straw-
berries, and all kinds of red fruits recommended by Dr. Purgon.
" Believe me, this sort of life would suit me forever. I wish
I could change into a living reality the good joke which you have
just played at my expense, you who are such a dignified mother.
Your recent letter was addressed: Dom Louis Veuillot, Benedic-
tine Monk! The Brother who handed it to me smiled signifi-
cantly as if to say: 'For a serious man you seem to have rather
light-headed friends in the world yonder/ I answered the smile
and said : 'It is from a lady !' 'Ah ! the ladies,' said he, and with
a sweeping gesture of his hand he sent you down and down to
the very bottom of purgatory, there to stay until doomsday. Well,
I advise you not to worry much about it; to be valid the verdict
ought to be ratified by the Father Abbot, and even then you might
appeal to the Pope. And now, madame, and my friend, I lay
aside my frock for a moment in order to kiss your hand. Nothing
could be more contrary to monastic rules, but you are well worth it.
Deus del nobis suatn pacem! B RO THER Louis "
To a friend who seemed to grieve over his daughter's entering
the Good Shepherd Convent, he says : " My dear friend, weep as
much as you please, I congratulate you. Servant of the poor, that
sounds good, but servant of the poor sinful women, that sounds
better still. Just think of it! To run barefooted through thorns
and briars to find the lost and scabby sheep ! I have five daughters ;
I would willingly distribute them among various religious families :
one Carmelite, one Little Sister of the Poor, one Ursuline, etc., and
if they all wanted to become Good Shepherd Sisters, I would not
say 'Oh!' nor 'Alas!' And yet God knows how I love them.
Our children do not belong to us any more than the fruits to the
tree. When they are ripe, they fall off. Happy those who fall into
the hands of God! Happy the Virgins who follow the Lamb!
Happy the father whose daughter is sheltered in the shadow of the
cloister ! "
1913.] GLIMPSES OF A GREAT CATHOLIC SOUL 479
To a soul in distress he writes : " All that God wills is good.
We have only to say amen to it. And we will not know how to sing
the true song until we sing it to that tune ! Amen ! Amen ! Who
could believe that so short a refrain is so hard to learn by heart? But
we shall succeed if we try long enough ! I read to-day the beautiful
saying of a saint, dying on Easter Sunday. As he was asked:
'How are you?' he answered: 'Crucifixus. Alleluia!' I leave you
on that word; there is food in it for more than one meditation."
The following fragment is from a letter to a young seminarian,
and seems a leaf from the correspondence of a saint : " Pray, then,
O you guardians of the sanctuary. I shall pray for you that
God may preserve and make fruitful in your soul the vocation to
be an apostle. Oh! how that vocation, beautiful at all times,
appears more beautiful still in a time like ours! It is the great
plough passing over the world, digging in every direction deep
furrows for the seeds of eternity. Prepare your arms and your
hearts for the coming harvest. You will bend down under the
weight of the sheaves ; or perhaps you will die at the hands of the
enemy, who will come upon you, in an attempt to destroy the divine
harvest."
To a lady of high rank who had just secured permission to have
Mass offered in her home, he wrote : " You have a private oratory
and I congratulate you. We must, when possible, have in our
homes a reserved room for God. He is such an accommodating
Guest, and He asks for so little-! And, moreover, He repays us
so liberally for whatever He asks. Every evening, when reciting
the Litanies of the Blessed Virgin, I say three times for you :
'Cause of our joy, pray for us,' that you may desire and seek
and taste and love only the pure and holy joys with which Mary's
kindness shall inspire you."
The most intimate of his letters, to his family and to a few
bosom friends, the letters that were not destined, at least during his
lifetime, to go beyond the family circle, are, perhaps, from our point
of view, the most admirable. Some few extracts have been already
given in the preceding pages, enough, I hope, to whet my readers'
appetite, and make them hungry for more. Therein the loving
husband, tender father, and incomparable friend, shows himself
exactly as he was, not clad in the steel armor of daily polemics,
but at home, among his own, in the gentle surroundings of every-
day life. When these letters were published for the first time,
they were to many a revelation and a distinct surprise. Was it
480 GLIMPSES OF A GREAT CATHOLIC SOUL [July,
really possible? The dreaded fighter, the Catholic Bluebeard, the
bulldog of Christ (as he was amiably termed by his enemies),
the man who boasted of slaying at least one Philistine every morn-
ing before breakfast, was a man, after all, like any other man,
cheerful and tender, with a big heart capable of the warmest affec-
tions, of the most durable and most disinterested friendships; all
the time and everywhere a Christian, forsooth, but one who could,
without ever forgetting he was the soldier of Christ, laugh and make
merry, indulge in jokes and puns, enjoy a good meal and describe
it with gastronomic enthusiasm.
" I went to show my tobacco box to the Jesuits," he writes
to his wife in 1850; "they asked where I got that marvel, and
I said it was the gift of a kingly hand. 'What King? Louis-
Philip? Henry V.? The Pope?' No, Reverend Fathers, Ma-
dame Veuillot !"
To a most intimate, but rather timid friend, who did not always
relish the tone of Veuillot's polemics, he said in a teasing mood:
" I can see you, in the solitude of your distant Burgundy, reading
the Univers with the terror of a hen which, unknown to herself,
has been hatching ducks. Where are they going? They will get
drowned, for sure ! "
" Dear brother," he writes to Eugene, " the present letter is
to inform you that I have absolutely nothing to say. I just want
to kiss you and to spend four cents (the price of a stamp)." He
writes home just to rest himself after working " like a white man,"
like the poor laborer who, after breaking stones in the hot sun,
stops for a while and gets a drink from the fountain in the grass,
under the shade of the beautiful trees."
Sometimes he writes to wife and children to tell them he will
arrive home as soon as the letter itself. " Papa will be waiting
for you with arms stretched out, on the stairs landing. Come
quick and laugh aloud. Come and kiss me! come and laugh on
my heart ! "
The conversion of Eugene did not fail to tighten the bonds of
affection between the two brothers. " Let us pray God to unite
us in His service in the same bivouac, and we will not feel the
hardships of the war. We need two pens, but one inkstand will
do for the two of us."
During a journey through Savoy, he was ten days without
receiving a letter from his wife, " his sweet Mathilda." " Dear
Mathilda, do you intend to write to me but once a week? I would
1913-] GLIMPSES OF A GREAT CATHOLIC SOUL 481
fain write, not once, but several times a day, just to make you
feel how often I think of you. You would surely cry if you
knew my bitter disappointment when told there was no letter for
me to-day. I visit several churches every day, and everywhere
I ask for some special favor for my wife and child; not an hour
passes that I do not give you before God some new proof of my
love I have formed beautiful resolutions: First. To love
you more than ever. Second. To give up drinking coffee. Third.
To become a better Christian and to serve God more ardently, lest
my thirty-fourth year be as empty as the others before."
After the birth of Mary, his eldest daughter, his joy knew no
bounds. " The first merit of this dear little person is that she
had the good idea of coming into this world on a Saturday, during
the month of the Blessed Virgin We took her to the church
two hours later, and there she received with perfect good grace
the name of Mary, and accepted the salt of wisdom without making
any face Oh ! what gratitude I feel towards our Almighty
and tender God, Who bestows upon the feeble hearts of men such
duties and such joys ! Oh ! how I wish I were a saint to obtain
from God that this child be a saint ! "
It is with his sister Eliza, the faithful companion of his life-
time, his " secretary and cashier," and the second mother of his
children after the premature death of his wife, that he indulges
without restraint in " small talk." It is insignificant, at times,
and now and then nonsensical, but charming withal, betraying, as
it does, the most attractive side of a man's character. To her he
complains about "these women of his household (Eliza herself
and his two daughters), these three women who know Latin and
forget to put a razor strop in his trunk ! " Oh ! his trunk ! That
was his nightmare, his " bete noire." He would prefer, so he
informs us in the same letter, to kill all the Philistines in creation,
rather than to have to build up that shaky pile of indispensable
but unruly and unmanageable clothes and utensils. " I really think
I will be packing trunks in purgatory: Oh! my! what a hard
penance it will be ! "
This family happiness, to which some of the foregoing extracts
bear eloquent witness, was destined to be rudely shaken. For
the great controversialist not only knew the bitterness of the daily
conflict with political adversaries who were perhaps the friends of
yesterday, but was also visited early in life by the most cruel
sorrows which can prey upon a human heart. In less than three
VOL. xcvu. 31
482 GLIMPSES OF A GREAT CATHOLIC SOUL [July,
years he lost his wife and four of his six children, three of whom
were snatched away by death within the space of six weeks. Under
the weight of such a grief, the souls that do not know how to look
up to heaven through their tears are doomed to despondency and
despair. For Veuillot these trials, crowding, as they did, one upon
the other, were the triumph of his faith. The letters he wrote
during this dark period of his life have perhaps no parallel in the
annals of human sorrow, and they would do honor to the pen,
let us say rather to the heart, of a St. Augustine or of a St.
Ambrose.
" God be blessed for all ! I know why He has been so merciful
to my little Teresa and so hard towards me. I needed a warning.
I have received it. I hope I will profit by it. My heart is more
deeply wounded now than it was when, running in haste to the
bedside of my little daughter, I found her dead in her crib, having
lost even those sweet looks which I knew and loved so well. And
yet, I would not want to be freed from my sorrow. I beg God to
keep it alive in my soul, for it is a salutary burden and a purifying
flame. I am better now than I ever was in time of joy; joy puts
us to sleep on the brink of the abyss; sorrow obliges us to think
constantly of God.'*
After the death of his saintly wife, although his grief was
beyond description, his first act was to adore the Hand that struck
him, and his first words were words of resignation and Christian
fortitude. " Let the Holy Will of God be done and His Holy
Name eternally blessed. A saintly life has been crowned by a
saintly death. As to me, I deserve it all, and this terrible blow
is also a grace. Thanks to her who is no more, I am not consoled
I do not want to be, I cannot be consoled but I am strengthened,
and my heart is full of thanks as it is of tears. Pray God to increase
my courage and to leave me my sorrow."
His first daughter Mary died far away from home, and even
the supreme consolation of seeing her on her deathbed was refused
him.
" Our little Mary was snatched away by a contagious disease
in a few hours, I should rather say in a few minutes. For a long
time I could not even cry: but I was able to bow down at once
before the justice of God. Yes, I do say justice, and this is the
proper name for it. I know what I am and what God owes me,
and His mercy is infinite Our joy has been taken away from
us; nothing is left us of this child, not even a grave; we shall
1913-] GLIMPSES OF A GREAT CATHOLIC SOUL 483
not even have the consolation of kissing the ground that keeps
our treasure."
Again: "My little Gertrude also is dead. The severity of
God which keeps me away from the dying bed of my children, did
not permit me to arrive in time to see her pass away. Death has
extended its hand over those dear children, and God gave it per-
mission to take two of them. Let Him have pity at least on
my poor sister, who suffers like a veritable mother. As to me,
I am a sinner ; crushed under the Hand that strikes me ; I recognize
it; I adore it; I bless it; but that Hand alone can give me the
strength I need in order not to sink under the burden of sorrows.
" How could I fail to bless God ? How could I fail to hope
that those pure victims will efficaciously pray for me to the spotless
Victim? And yet, I weep; but my tears are not hiding from me
the clear view of the mercies of God. I love Him the more; I
am resolved to serve the truth better than ever; I feel I am raised
above myself. Oh! my God, let me enjoy for a long time that
bitter but purifying balsam!
" When I learned the death of my Mary, after a minute of in-
describable grief, I went to kneel down before her empty bed.
Alone with God alone, I examined my whole life and made my
general confession. On leaving that spot I did not dare to weep,
and when Gertrude followed I was never tempted to cry out:
This is too much!' Pity me, indeed, pray for me, but, if you
have any mercy on me, do not praise me ! There are souls which
God deigns to adorn, mine is one of those which He deigns to
cleanse.
" No, I am not crushed. I am only on my knees. God knows
what He is doing: He is just, He is merciful. I have only to bless
Him. The future before me is a gloomy one, but I know I am only
a traveler, and the harder the voyage, the sweeter shall be the repose.
Pray for me, not that my sorrow be allayed, but that I should
bear it like a Christian. I feel that the ploughshare which is
tearing up my soul prepares the ground for the seeds of eternal
life, for seeds of faith, hope, and love."
Are we to conclude that this Christian fortitude had dried
up in his heart all the sources of real human sorrow, and that the
undaunted Catholic athlete could look with an impassible face on
the grave of his wife and children? Such a judgment would be
grossly unjust to him, who was a most tender husband and a
most loving father. Let us listen to this last fragment of a letter
484 GLIMPSES OF A GREAT CATHOLIC SOUL [July,
still wet with tears : " During the procession (in the Mother House
of the Little Sisters of the Poor) I suddenly saw Eliza and my two
daughters leaning against the wall of the cemetery. The sight
of these children reminded me of the others : Mary who had spent
some days in this house; Teresa, godchild of the Little Sisters;
Magdalen who died in their arms, and Gertrude who loved them
so much. My heart, as though overcome by a sudden storm, burst
out in spite of me, all the tears I had driven back for two months
past gushed forth, and I would have wished to have rolled myself
on the ground and to have died on the spot. My brother who was
by my side understood the storm in my soul, and his sighs answered
mine. There is no happiness left for me in this world! Let us
pray for one another ! May God preserve you, dear wife, and may
you never know what goes on in the heart of a father, when he
weeps over his orphan children ! "
Such was the man whom his adversaries were wont to repre-
sent as a heartless controversialist, as one who never dipped his pen
in the milk of human tenderness, but wrote only with vinegar and
gall. That he struck hard at times; that his pen was usually a
sword, sharp and flashing, wielded by the vigorous hand of an
experienced fighter; that he loved, as he puts it himself, to " slash
and scar the insolent face of heresy," no one even slightly ac-
quainted with his polemical works would care or dare to deny.
But to make him a sort of condottiere of the pen, to bring into sharp
relief the pugnacious side of his character and leave all others
in the background, is a proof of painful ignorance or of deliberate
injustice. Open at random the two volumes of Letters to his Sister,
or such delightful collection of vignettes as Historiettes et Fan-
taisies, Qa et La, Corbin et d'Aubecourt, and after smiling, laughing,
and weeping with Veuillot the man, the brother, the essayist, you
will, no doubt, ratify the verdict of a critic, who thus summed up
his impressions after a prolonged contact with Veuillot's works:
" I have been listening to the beatings of a big human heart; I have
been breathing the perfume of a great Christian soul."
SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME.
BY W. E. CAMPBELL.
IX.
ROM 1523 onwards More became still further in-
volved in public business, not only of a political but
also of a theological nature. On the death of Sir
Richard Wingfield in July, 1525, he was made
Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Though
not yet promoted to his highest office, he seemed to feel that
the sun of his worldly prosperity had passed its meridian, and
that the shadows of approaching catastrophe were already length-
ening. He clearly understood the character of Henry VIII., and
foresaw a direct conflict of principle between his master and him-
self. At this time the King was showing him unusual signs of
favor, but More was not to be deceived; such signs were rather
for warning than enjoyment.
And for the pleasure he took in his company would his
Grace suddenly sometimes come to his house at Chelsea to be
merry with him, whither, on a time unlooked-for, he came to
dinner, and after dinner, in a fair garden of his, walked with
him by the space of an hour, holding his arm about his neck.
And as soon as his Grace was gone [continues Roper], I, rejoic-
ing thereat, said to Sir Thomas More, how happy he was whom
the King had so familiarly entertained, as I never had seen
him do to any before, except Cardinal Wolsey, whom I saw
his Grace walk once with arm in arm. " I thank our Lord, sir,"
quoth More, " I find his Grace my very good lord indeed,
and I believe he doth as singularly favor me as any subject
within his realm. Howbeit, son Roper, I may tell thee I have
no cause to be proud thereof, for if my head would win him
a castle in France it should not fail to go."
More's promotion and the King's unusual familiarity were not
unconnected with his Grace's desire to enlist More in the cause of his
divorce, a matter at this time entirely occupying the royal mind.
At this period of his life, Sir Thomas More appears, according
to many of his biographers, to change his character. Up to
486 SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME [July,
now he is set forth as the apostle of the New Learning, the friend
of Erasmus, the despiser of ignorance, and the hater of corrup-
tion in high places ; a man at once humane, liberal-minded, " hon-
orable, learned, and enlightened, and the very soul of equity."
But from this point onwards these same biographers of his find
a sudden change for the worse. He becomes blind, perverse, and
bigoted; an intolerant defender of decayed ecclesiasticism ; a hater
and indeed a persecutor of all who differed from the doctrines of
the Catholic Church. But, on the other hand again, they can but
admit the splendid fearlessness and integrity of his opposition
to royal licentiousness, and his heroic martyrdom in defence of
the old spiritual as against the new secular supremacy. Are we
then to admit this paradoxical judgment on More as final or are
we to question it? "How two such absolutely contrary characters
could be united in one man is something more than a paradox,"
wrote Dr. Gairdner in 1908, " it is a moral impossibility."*
More's period was one of religious and social restlessness, and
the causes of this restlessness were historical, moral, and intellectual.
The discovery of America, the fall of Constantinople, the invention
of printing, the newly-recovered treasures of classical literature and
art, opened up with tremendous suddenness undreamed of prospects
of business enterprise, of travel, of intellectual and artistic enjoy-
ment. Such blessings, indeed, came upon a Europe too unprepared
to use and enjoy them as they should have been used and enjoyed.
A double re-action was set up in a society unready for such rich and
novel experience, and people went to opposite extremes in their ac-
ceptance or refusal of it. I think it may be claimed for Sir Thomas
More that he of all his contemporaries took up a central and
balanced position, both with regard to what was new and what
was old in the world of his day. A sweet reasonableness, and a
profoundly spiritual criterion of life, gave him the just measure
of things both new and old. What was good for the soul of man
was good for the society of men for him a spiritual good was
always of social value, and this, I think, is the consistent keynote
of all his thought and action. It gave him an orderly system of
ideals, in which the natural and supernatural never clashed, because
they were one and the same.
For Sir Thomas More life and religion had each a public and
visible side, a side that was orderly, institutional, and impressive
because spectacular. Church and State were fruitful partners in
i
*James Gairdner, Lollardy and the Reformation in England, vol. i., p. 507.
1913.] SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME 487
the social scheme. He could not conceive of a polity in which
there was no effective and obvious spiritual power, softening the
inequalities of class, ability, and circumstances, promoting a gener-
ous leaven of charity, resting upon an unquestioned faith. He had
taken the measure of man's earthly and probationary existence ; he
knew that it was not an end in itself, but a means to an end which
used, while it transcended, all its perishable and material values.
Apart from religious faith, what steady and spiritual criterion of
social good could be found for a man who had but a few short
years to live in so small a compass; mere pleasure was self-de-
structive, mere toil was brutally exhausting, mere reasoning ended
in cynical denial, and none nor all of these things together could
sufficiently check the natural selfishness of human nature; could
guarantee human liberty or even secure a minimum of social order
and stability.
More's objection to heresy and his eagerness to suppress it is
justified again and again in his controversial writings by its dis-
astrous effect on social stability, quite apart from its more directly
spiritual effect. More did not confuse, as many do now, public
ideals as set forth by the Church with private failures to realize
these ideals. He recognized that while the Church provided the
former, it could not guarantee the latter. The Church was divinely
appointed to set forth and explain the ideal of perfected human
nature which had been lived out by our Lord Himself, and she
could never fail in her commission; she was also appointed to
protect and provide the means and graces which were necessary
for the following of that ideal; but more than that she was not
commissioned to do. Whether each individual soul, endowed as
it was with free will, corresponded with the ideal was, in the truest
sense, its own affair. So More, while as well aware of the human
frailties of Catholic churchmen and laymen as the most zealous
of the Protestant reformers, clearly distinguished between ideal
and practice, his faith was unaffected by scandal, never for a mo-
ment did he doubt the Church's ideal or refuse her sacramental help ;
and, further, he was reasonable enough to believe that a nation
which did these things would lose alike its spiritual life and its
social vision.*
*That venerable and eminent scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace, has just pub-
lished a small volume on the social condition of England. He gives various
statistics as to over-crowding, insanitation, long hours, low pay, high mortality,
lack of food, air, play, and rest among the poor; he points out that legal justice
is practically denied to them ; he finds that adulteration, bribery, and gambling
SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME [July,
" More saw what was at stake," writes Dr. Gairdner, " and
endeavored, so far as he could, to save even the King from the
effects of his own recklessness. But his chief aim was to save
religion itself from insult, and public morals and social order from
being subverted by the perversity of heretics."*
With this hint at the secret of More's consistency, we may now
go on to examine the evidences of his actual thought and conduct
during the troubled year which led to national apostasy.
In 1521 Henry VIII. published his book against Luther, which
was called Assertio Sept em Sacrament or um. More's share in it
was merely to arrange an index. Luther replied, but with such
scurrility as to prevent the King from taking further part in the
controversy, but More was evidently asked to do so, though very
much against his will. He chose the pseudonym of William Ross,
and adopted a temper of mind and a form of expression that were
something of a match for Luther's own. This was unfortunate,
as he himself realized when he complained that he could not clean
Luther's mouth without befouling his own fingers. Fisher had
done the more respectable part of the business by replying as a
theologian to Luther's contentions; it was left for More to ad-
minister personal chastisement, and having once undertaken the
distasteful task he did it thoroughly, though not without apology
to his more refined readers. He considered the work as of merely
occasional value, and probably hoped that its real authorship would
be left in mystery. At the end of it he confesses that it is
the kind of book which only those should read who have already
been influenced by Luther's own. He apologizes for its tone quite
frankly. "I doubt not, good reader, that your fairness will pardon
me that in this book you read so often what causes you shame.
Nothing could have been more painful to me than to be forced to
are the chief characteristics of modern business ; that luxury, not to say debauchery
which rivals that of the worst pagan times, is frightfully prevalent among the
rich, while moral degradation, as shown by the steady increase in death from
alcoholism, suicide, and premature birth is invading all classes. He concludes
that Parliament, which should give active and practical expression to the social
conscience, is responsible for these things, but, alas, it does anything rather than
that, " anything rather than the immediate saving of human life and abolishing
widespread human misery and all for fear of offending the rich and power-
ful by some diminution of their ever-increasing accumulations. No thinking man
or woman can believe that this state of things is absolutely irremediable ; and the
persistent acquiescence in it, while loudly boasting of our science, or our national
prosperity, and of our Christianity, is the proof of a hypocritical lack of national
morality that has never been surpassed in any former age." More judged wisely of
the future.
*Op. c\t., p. 510.
1913-] SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME 489
speak foul words to pure ears. But there was no help for it,
unless I left Luther's scurrilous book utterly untouched, which is
a thing I most earnestly desired."*
But there are passages in this work which are deeply spiritual,
and indeed prophetic in their wisdom. Luther's teaching, says
More, has led to the contempt of the Mass; to the neglect of the
Liturgy; to the abolition of prayers to the saints and prayers
for the dead; and what are the early fruits of such impiety?
These wretches, " made perfect in the spirit," have aban-
doned the festivals of the Church in order that they may give
themselves every day to bacchanalian festivities. Virginity and
married life are equally dishonored, while polygamy and even
worse things are tolerated and excused by the impious doctrine
which declares that wicked men are what they are by the pre-
destined will of God. O illustrious Germany, can you doubt,
when they sow such spiritual things, what kind of corporal
things they will reap? Indeed the thistles, as I hear, are
already showing an ugly crop, and God is beginning to make
known how He regards that sect, when He does not permit the
priests who marry to take other wives than public prostitutes.
And these bridegrooms, first sunk in infamy, and then ruined
with disease and want, and giving themselves up to robbery,
His justice is at last punishing with public executions. Would
that His anger might stop short in the punishment of these
dregs of men; but unless it is propitiated it will go farther.
For many princes see, not zvithout pleasure, the apostasy of the
clergy, gaping as they do after the possessions of the apostates,
which they hope to seize as derelict. And they rejoice to see
obedience withdrawn -from the Sovereign Pontiff, conceiving
then the hope that they may dispose of everything, and may
divide and dissipate it among themselves at home.
How very accurately More foretells the direct political con-
sequences of the Reformation the rise of a purely secular power,
aristocratic, covetous, oppressive, and brutal, acknowledging no
spiritual or social obligations, without justice, mercy or fear. He
also predicts its more disastrous and revolutionary effects two
years before the outbreak of the peasants' war.
But they (the princes) need not doubt, but that the people
in their turn will throw off their yoke and deprive them of their
*It is unnecessary for me to make further reference to this matter, which has
been dealt with very fully by Father Bridgett in his Life of Sir Thomas More,
pp. 209-222.
490 SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME [July,
possessions. And when they shall come to do this, drunk
with the blood of princes, and exulting in the slaughter of the
nobles, they will not submit even to plebeian governors; but
following the dogma of Luther (about Christian liberty), and
trampling the law underfoot, then, at last without government
and without law, without rein and without understanding, they
will turn their hands against each other, and like the earth-
born brothers of old, will perish in mutual conflict. I beg
of Christ that I may be a false prophet.*
This answer to Luther (1523), and the Letter against Pom-
eranus (c. 1626), were written before the Reformation tenets had
made much headway in England ; but More understanding the trend
of the King's thought with regard to divorce, and anxious to avoid
entanglement with so unsavory and dangerous a matter, turned
his interests and occupation as far as possible away from the Court.
From this time until his death, the saving of his country from the
effects of the Reformation was the main object of his life and prayer.
We must clearly understand that More was zealous to defend a state
of society altogether different from our own, one indeed of which
we have far too dim a recollection. In the England of 1525
" Church and State " were as certainly united and as certainly
distinct as partners in marriage. I may be allowed the comparison,
because it illustrates the real relations of Church and State in pre-
Reformation times. The Church was one institution and the State
was another, but in their mutual intercourse and relationship they
provided alike for the energy and stability of social life. What was
hurtful to the one was hurtful to the other, and vice versa; heretics
assaulting the authority of the Church were a danger to the State;
rebellion against State authority brought weakness of the Church;
but of the two heresy was the more fatal, as being not only an
attack upon authority, but an attempt to dissolve the very prin-
ciple upon which all authority rests.
When More became Lord Chancellor it was his business as
the highest officer in the State to resist heresy and punish heretics,
and this, clearly, for the reasons given above. We who have been
brought up in a Protestant country find it really difficult to realize
the conditions of pre-Re formation life, for the strong and living
bonds which publicly united the religious and the secular powers
have been broken. Religion has long since ceased, in any real sense,
to be an affair of public importance, and the modern State can
*Bridgett's translation. Op. cit., pp. 217-219.
1913-] SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME 491
find no proper place for it either as superior to or in subjection
to itself. In 1525 things were very different.
We are now in a position to ask what amount of heresy existed
in England at this time. The answer is simple. Until Henry VIII.
himself became a heretic, heresy in England was a very small affair.
"Hitherto/' writes Lee to the King in 1525, "blessed by God,
your realm is safe from the infection of Luther's sect, as for so
much that although, peradventure, any be secretly blotted within,
yet for fear of your royal majesty, which hath drawn his sword
in God's cause, they dare not openly avow."
Of course there had always been disbelievers of this or that
particular doctrine of the Church, but as yet there had been no pub-
lic assault upon Church authority, no question as to the universal
jurisdiction of the Holy See. As Dr. Gairdner, the latest, the best-
informed, and the most impartial student of this period, points out,
at this time the discussion of theological matters
by mere laymen was accounted rash and presumptuous, though
there was nothing to prevent reverent inquiry on the part of a
layman who consulted a competent spiritual adviser. The es-
sence of heresy was not erroneous thinking for all men are
liable to that but arrogance, tending to contempt of the de-
cisions of learned Councils and the most approved judgments
of ancient Fathers. The Church offered no obstacle to thought-
ful inquiry by which her tenets might be carefully tested,
explained, or developed; but she did not love rough treatment
of things sacred by men ill-qualified to handle them.
It is this state of matters [he continues] which we find now
so difficult to realize. The right of private judgment in religious
matters is recognized and claimed by everyone; the right of
pronouncing very rash judgment on very insufficient grounds.
Everyone may think as he pleases, and the uneducated layman,
who may give one hour a week to thoughts about theology
against forty which he devotes to the state of the markets,
has but little misgivings on the question of faith and works,
or even perhaps as to the mystery of the Real Presence. What-
ever theology may say upon these subjects, he believes his
own view to be pure common sense.
People of More's time were logical, and were as unwilling
to rely on an ill-informed private judgment in matters of religion
as people of our own day would be unwilling to rely on an ill-
informed private judgment in some delicate and difficult scientific
matter. If people were as intent on religious as on scientific prob-
492 SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME [July,
lems, they would soon awake to the absurdity of " private judg-
ment."
An examination of the nature and extent of the heretical opin-
ions held previous to Henry VIII. 's apostasy, will show how much
they differed from what followed after that event. What was
known as Lollardy in the fifteenth century and in the early part
of the sixteenth, was " not by any means a 'higher criticism'
impugning Biblical and Church authority by the use of reason, but
really a sort of Biblical superstition exalting the written word
over human reason and Church authority alike. It was the belief
of 'known men' in their own infallibility as interpreters of Holy
Writ, and the treatment of human reason as the enemy of faith
that made zealots think themselves superior to all exterior authority
whatever."*
As to the prevalence of these views, in London, the most popu-
lous diocese in the country, the number of heretics summoned before
the Bishop from 1510 to 1522 is thirty-nine. Of these, thirty-
seven abjured their heresies and returned to the Church. The re-
maining two abjured but relapsed, and being a second time led
to trial were afterwards burned, but not until they had made their
peace with the Church. From 1523 to 1527 there were four more
cases of heretics who returned to the Faith, thus making a total
of forty-three cases against heretics in seventeen years, two of
whom suffered extreme penalties, and all of whom returned to the
Church. Up to 1527, then, no impartial examination of evidences
will lead to a conclusion that there was a strong or widespread move-
ment against Church authority.
The charges brought against these heretical people are enu-
merated by Foxe, the Protestant compiler of the well-known Book
of Martyrs. He omits, however, certain " horrible and blasphe-
mous lies against the majesty and truth of God," for the curious
reason that those charged with using them asserted themselves to
be guiltless in this respect. For the rest, according to him, they
are accused of refusing reverence to the crucifix; of putting doubts
into the mind of a friend at the point of death as to whether pil-
grimages or images served any spiritual purpose, or as to whether
the Pope could give pardons ; of asserting that there were six Gods,
with irreverent explanations; of denying the Real Presence and
the holiness of saints' days; of saying that St. Paul's Church was
a house of thieves because the clergy were not liberal in their alms-
*Lollardy and the Reformation, vol. i., pp. 516, 517.
1913-] ^R THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME 493
giving, or that the Church was too rich; or, again, that heretics
had been harbored, or that erroneous books had been read. But
these charges were denied, and those accused of them set free.
Only at the close of this pre-Re formation period do we get any
charges of a fresh nature, as, for instance, that some are accused of
favoring Lutheran doctrines, or of irreverence to Our Lady. But
what is most important to observe is that very little is said against
the Pope, and even what little there is in no way questions his
spiritual authority. " The nearest thing we find to the modern
Protestant position," writes the Anglican historian quoted before,
" was very far indeed from a repudiation of the actual jurisdiction
of the Church, and of its existing Head. It was needless speaking
against a jurisdiction so firmly established. Only royal power could
possibly shake that, and the idea of royal power being so exerted
was the last that would occur to anyone at this time."* This,
as I have said, was as late as 1527.
In this same year, More accompanied Wolsey on an important
mission to France. f Considering the momentous questions at issue,
of which More must have had some first-hand knowledge, and of
which mention will be made later, it seems more than probable
that on this same occasion he acquired an insight, clearer than ever
before, into the 'fatal possibilities which threatened his country and
his Faith. The great imperialist victory at Pavia in 1525, when
Francis I. was captured, left the Roman court at the mercy of
Charles V., and the Pope practically his prisoner. In July, 1526,
Moncada captured the Papal palace, and the Pope fled in terror to
St. Angelo. In May, 1527, the Holy City was itself sacked, with
accompanying horrors that shocked the conscience of Europe. "All
the churches/' wrote Cardinal Como who was present, " and the
monasteries, both of monks and nuns, were sacked. Many monks
were beheaded, even priests at the altar; many aged nuns were
beaten with sticks, and young ones violated, robbed, and made pris-
oners; all the vestments, chalices, silver, were taken from the
churches Cardinals, bishops, monks, priests, old nuns, infants,
pages, and servants the very poorest were tormented with un-
heard-of cruelties the son in the presence of his father, the babe
in the sight of its mother. All the registers and documents of
the Camera Apostolica were sacked, torn in pieces and partly burnt."
Another witness writes to Charles V. : " Our men sacked the whole
Borgo, and killed almost everyone they found The Church
*James Gairdner, A History of the English Church, vol. v., p. 58.
^Letters and Papers, vol. iv., nos. 3,216, 3,337.
494 SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME [July,
of St. Peter and the Papal palace, from the basement to the top,
were turned into stables for horses." He concludes with a state-
ment which shows most unmistakably how greatly the balance
of European powers, both religious and political, was upset, and
that even kings were wondering what would happen next. " We
are expecting to hear from your majesty how the city is to be
governed, and whether the Holy See is to be retained (in Rome)
or not. Some are of opinion it should not continue in Rome, lest
the French King should make a patriarch in his kingdom, and deny
obedience to the said See, and the King of England and all other
Christian princes do the same."*
Now More went to France with Wolsey, who was to discuss
this very question, and also to disclose to Francis I., " in a dark
and cloudy manner," the " secret matter " of Henry's wish for a
divorce, f In a letter of July ist, Wolsey says that he is not a little
troubled that the King should question his zeal in the " secret
matter;" there is nothing he is so desirous to advance, and he gives
a theological reason in justification of his master's intention. In
all things which concern the King's honor he protests that he will
be constant even if others fail.$
On July 3d he starts with a brilliant train, consisting of cer-
tain lords, spiritual and temporal, together with Sir Thomas More,
Sir Henry Guilford, Sir Francis Bryan, Stephen Gardiner, and
an accompaniment of nine hundred horsemen. He was invested
with unusual powers, as " King's lieutenant, and not as an ordinary
ambassador, combining for the time in his own person the highest
spiritual and temporal dignity of the realm." Setting out from
Westminster, he passed through London and over London Bridge,
with the evident intention of marking the public importance of
his mission, for it was more usual to go down the Thames. His
first business was to meet the Archbishop of Canterbury, and then
to interview Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, and so to France. On
July 5th he reports to the King his meeting with Warham, who
seems willing to follow his instructions, but Fisher was not so
amenable. " I told him," writes Wolsey, " the whole matter of
the proposed marriage between Francis and the Princess Mary, and
of the objection made^by the Bishop of Tarbe (on the score of the
invalidity of Henry VIII.'s marriage with Katherine, the Princess
Mary's mother, who had previously been the wife of the King's
*Quoted in Pollard's Henry VII I. from // Sacco di Roma, pp. 471, 499, 517.
^Letters and Papers, vol. iv., no. 3,350.
^Letters and Papers, vol. iv., nos. 3,217, 3,231.
1913-] SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME 495
brother, the deceased Prince Arthur), and the investigations to
which it had given rise, as to the dispensing power of the Pope,
etc., for which I was sent into France; thus declaring the whole
matter to him as was devised with you at York Place. I added
that some inkling of the matter had come to the Queen's knowl-
edge, who casting further doubts than was intended had broken
with your Grace thereof after a very displeasant manner, saying,
that, by my procurement and setting forth, a divorce was purposed
between her and your Highness."*
Whether or not it was by Wolsey's " procurement and setting
forth " that the divorce was first suggested to the King, the whole
miserable business was now set in train. Wolsey, not only out
of pure devotion to his master's interests, but for the very safety
of his high but precarious position, was committed to this disastrous
course. But it was no easy matter, even apart from theological
considerations, to bring it to completion. Charles V. was Queen
Katherine's nephew, already informed, and, as was quite natural,
very strongly opposed to it. Wolsey's policy was therefore directed
to counteract Charles' powerful influence with the Pope, and in
order to successfully accomplish this it might even be necessary
under threat or compulsion to remove the Pope from Rome, where
at that time he was nothing less than a prisoner in the Emperor's
keeping. It must be clearly understood, and this has not always
been clearly understood by Protestant historians, that in what
immediately followed there was no attempt to weaken the Papacy
either in fact or theory, much less to destroy it. Henry VIII. and
Francis I. wanted to get the Papacy freed from imperial compulsion,
and to effect this purpose all sorts of expedients were threatened.
All this was done, at this time, for their own political and per-
sonal ends, and without any intentions consciously subversive to
the spiritual authority of the Holy See.
The proposals, spoken of above, which after the sack of Rome
were communicated to Charles V., had evidently a diplomatic back-
ing, and we can now see why. On July I4th we find Lee writing
to Wolsey that in certain letters which he had seen " it was ex-
pressed that the French King had intended to offer you the papality
or patriarchate of France, as the French would no longer obey the
Church of Rome. Buclans said to me, 'My lord Cardinal much
desired to have the legacy per inferior em Germaniam. If he will
have it now, or the patriarchate, I doubt not he shall have it.' I
^Letters and Papers, vol. iv., nos. 3,217, 3,231.
496 SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS TIME [July,
refused to report this, saying that you would little esteem that
thing"*
What Wolsey readily wanted is clear from his own letter to
Henry of July 29th.
Daily and hourly musing and thinking on your Grace's
great and secret affair, and how the same may come to good
effect and desired end, as well for the deliverance of your
Grace out of thrauld, pensive, and dolorous life that the same
is in, as for the continuance of your health, etc I consider
the Pope's consent must be gained in case the Queen should
decline my jurisdiction, or the application of the Cardinals
be had. For the first the Pope's deliverance will be necessary,
for the other the convocation of the Cardinals of France. The
Pope's deliverance cannot be accomplished except by a peace
between the Emperor and the French King, which is not likely,
considering the high demands of the former. If the Pope
were delivered, I doubt not he would easily be induced to do
everything to your satisfaction. The Cardinals can meet at
no place except Avignon, whither I propose to repair, to devise
with them for the government of the Church during the Pope's
captivity, which shall be a good ground and fundament for
the effectual execution of your Grace's secret affair.^
On August 9th Wolsey writes to the King of his meeting with
Francis, and mentions that the French King had saluted More
and the other important members of the embassy. But of More's
own feelings, thoughts, and actions during this time we have no
evidence. He must certainly have talked with Fisher, when he
stayed at Rochester, but the Bishop's lips were sealed as to " the
secret matter." We cannot doubt, however, that a man of such
acumen, living close as he did to the very centre of intrigue,
understood the nature of Henry's wishes and of Wolsey's willing-
ness to gratify them. The technical aspects of the question would
hardly, at this early date, have been within the sphere of his com-
petent judgment, especially as he was a layman, and even theo-
logians were yet doubtful as to facts, and divided in their opinions
on the matter.
The embassy returned to England in September. Wolsey's
plans for a General Council were not carried out. The King was
probably not at all anxious that his minister should acquire further
spiritual powers, for the Boleyn influence was waxing, and would
soon be strong enough to bring about Wolsey's ruin.
^Letters and Papers, vol. iv., no. 3,263. Mbid., no. 3,311.
LIGHT AND SHADE IN ALBANIA.
BY ELIZABETH CHRISTITCH.
| HE Albanians have never formed that ethnical entity
which can be called a State, but the tribes have cer-
tainly retained such common characteristics as en-
title them to be considered a nation. At the bottom
of their savagery, there must be some sterling qual-
ities which preserved this nationality through the course of many
vicissitudes under various conquerors. Greek, Roman, Servian,
Venetian, and finally Turk held nominal sway over the untamable
Albanian, but he fused with none, not even after the adoption of
Islamism, which enabled him to claim equality with the lordly
Turk.
The Albanians have been connected, and have often intermixed,
with the Servian race, and Servians like to dwell on the facts
that Scanderbeg was the son of a Servian Princess, Voyisava;
that his wife, Danitsa, was also a Servian; and that all the docu-
ments he ever wrote were in the Servian tongue. The two races
are, however, quite distinct, and have been warring with each other
for centuries, more fiercely since the advent of the Turk in the
Balkan Peninsula and the renunciation by the Albanians of the
Christian creed. The number of those who remained faithful is
computed at no more than one hundred and twenty thousand by
the Catholic Bishop of Nansati; and Bishop Coletti of Sepia, in
conversation with a Servian officer, gave it as eighty thousand, if
Scutari were lost to Albania. Scutari is supposed to have thirty
thousand inhabitants, of whom two-thirds are Mohammedan, and
only one-third Christian. It is difficult to estimate the population
of any Turkish province, and more particularly that of a region
wherein the Turkish gendarmes themselves dared not pene-
trate. Some authorities give five hundred and thirty thou-
sand, and some one million two hundred thousand as the
population of Albania, but Nelegoev, a Russian savant and ex-
plorer, admits that all figures given by himself, as well as by
Austrians, are merely guesses. One thing is agreed upon : Alba-
nians of the orthodox creed are so few as to be a negligible quantity
in all schemes for the unification and reconciliation of the race.
VOL. xcvii. 32
498 LIGHT AND SHADE IN ALBANIA [July,
Under the name of Illyrians, we first hear of the dwellers
on the east Adriatic coast, in the time of Alexander the Great.
They were included in the kingdom of Epirus, and, later, were
the flower of the Roman Legions during the seventh, eighth, and
ninth centuries, till they came under Servian rule. A Servian
king, Vladimir, is interred in the monastery of Elbasan. They
passed for a time under Bulgarian sway, and eventually fell to
Byzantium. In 1343 the Servian King Stefan Dushan conquered
them once more, and towards the close of the fourteenth century
they fought with the Slavs and Venetians against the Turks. At
the battle of Kossovo, in 1389, they fell in great numbers, but hence-
forth we do not hear of them among the ranks of those who resisted
the conqueror till the advent of their great leader, Scanderbeg.
The fifteenth century is the heroic age of the Albanians.
They had continued to form part of a Servian principality, Zetta,
a remnant of the Empire destroyed at Kossovo, and were governed
by the Catholic Balsha dynasty; but from 1443 to 1467 several
tribes coalesced and took for their chief Ivan Castriota, father of
George, after Alexander (Xander Beg). The feats of arms which
make Scanderbeg's name imperishable are the greatest glory of
the Albanians. His short reign, which was a military dictatorship,
gave the Turks more trouble than they had had with all the rest
of Christendom. Albania's name and fame expired with him, al-
though it is certain that there was a strong Albanian contingent
in the Venetian garrison that held Scutari in the Turkish siege
of 1478. The most detailed account of the Christian tribes of
Albania in modern times is given by a Servian monk, Dosithens
Obradovitch, who traveled in 1788 through the mountains to which
they had retreated before Turkish tyranny. He was everywhere
well received, and spent several months with the Chromovites, a
tribe numbering two thousand, who had neither church nor pastor,
but still remembered the lessons of Christianity. They knelt to
ask the monk's blessing as soon as they saw the cross on his breast,
and showed their sense of the necessity for prayer by entreating
him to stay with them, as none of the tribe knew well how to pray.
"We will take care of you," they said, " and you will pray
for us when we go to fight. We will give you as much mutton
as you can eat, and ground corn for your bread, and our young
men will fetch cool water for you from the spring."
Dosithens explained that he was obliged to return to his mon-
astery, where he would not forget them, and that he would do
1913-] LIGHT AND SHADE IN ALBANIA 499
his best to send them a priest. Trouble broke out soon after
among the neighboring tribes, and the monk never had occasion
to communicate with the Chromovites again.
The Montenegrin Servians and the Albanians of Malessia were
constantly engaged in border fights till 1892, when a pact was made
at Vinitza, a small village, to renounce the vendetta. One of each
nation advanced hand in hand and threw a stone into the Drin say-
ing : " So long as this stone lies at the bottom of the river will
our pact remain." The relations between the two peoples have been
friendly ever since, and the Malissoris, who rebelled against the or-
dinance of the Young Turks three years ago, found a refuge in
Montenegro when their tyrants attempted reprisals. At the time
of Bosnia's annexation by Austria, the Montenegrins could easily
have occupied Scutari if it depended on the will of the citizens.
The idea of uniting the peoples once more under one ruler had
existed among the Krasnitsh, Gashi, Befish tribes of Albania and
their cousins, the Montenegrin clans of Bielopavlitch, Kutchim and
Vassoyevitch since 1833, when together they enabled Bishop Peter
II. to wrest Podgoritza from the Turks. In the recent war the
Malissoris fought under King Nicholas' banner, and made common
cause with the Balkan Allies, while the Mirdite tribe maintained
a more neutral attitude. The Mirdites are noted for fealty to
their Catholic faith and loyalty to the Sultan.
This tribe represents the best elements of the Albanian nation
and of the Catholics. The Mirdites claim descent from the early
Dukajin tribe, whose chief, Leka, gave the famous code that regu-
lates the blood- feud, or vendetta, which is still adhered to by
Christian and Mohammedan alike. In 1467 the Mirdites fought
with such fury against the Turks that they were left in peace
for many decades, while their brethren were still persecuted. The
dynasty which held them together owes its origin to the Pope,
who, in writing to the chief of the Mirdites, gave him the title
of Princeps, and expressed a hope that his son would follow his
father's good example. This was enough to make the rulership
hereditary, and it has remained so for three centuries.
John Marko is the legendary hero of the Mirdites. He lived
for battle, and died leading a charge against the Turks. Most
of his successors had the same fate. Marko's family enjoyed
such prestige that other tribes made the Prince of the Mirdites
their arbiter in thorny questions. The famous despot of Lower
Albania, Ali Pasha Tepelen of Yanina, treated with the Mirdites
500 LIGHT AND SHADE IN ALBANIA [July,
as with equals. More than once they helped to subdue their kin,
the orthodox Albanians called Suliotes, and it was in the tent of the
Mirdite chief, Lesh-i-Ziy (Alexander the Dark) that the Suliote
leader, Botsarno, was slain.
Lesh-i-Ziy was then governing the tribe, in lieu of his nephew,
Kola. He took part in many combats, fighting sometimes in the
Turkish ranks and sometimes in those of their enemies. Finally
he was taken prisoner by the Sultan; and Kola then assumed the
power which rightfully belonged to him. Kola threw in his lot
completely with the Turks, fought for them at home and in Asia
Minor, and was covered with honors and distinctions. The three
sons of Lesh, jealous of their father's fame, conspired to get rid
of Kola, and obtain Lesh's release and reinstatement as chief of the
tribe. This came to the ears of Kola, who caused all three to be
slain in one night. Meantime, the Turkish government, having reason
to be discontented with Kola, played him the bad turn of setting
Lesh free, knowing he would work retribution. Lesh returned
to Oroshi, his native place, full of the desire for vengeance, but
he was met on the road by the Abbot Bishop and all the priests
of the tribe, who conjured him to forgive Kola. Lesh was truly
affected by the exhortations of the devoted clergy, and he consented
not only to pardon the murderer of his children, but to embrace
him in public. Uncle and nephew lived in amity for a time, but the
consciousness of his failure to execute the first duty of the tribal
law began to weigh heavy on Lesh, and he finally succumbed to the
rule of Dukadin. One day after they had dined together, he
stabbed Kola to death. This was as late as 1837.
The Albanians have always been a law unto themselves. An
Austrian tourist, Karl Steinmetz, relates that he saw a noted
brigand, Osman Mullah, walking freely in the streets of Jakovitsa,
having returned from " perpetual banishment " in Asia Minor.
The Turkish authorities were only too pleased that he left them
unmolested. He had formerly slain nine soldiers sent to arrest him.
In Jakovitsa every merchant and tradesman has a revolver on the
counter, and a gun hangs on the wall within reach. The servant
of the Catholic priest, says Steinmetz, was the sole survivor of
a family of twenty-two members who had succumbed to the law of
the blood-feud.
A stranger in these regions is viewed with mistrust, particularly
if he wears a hat (shapkali) and not a fez. When accompanied
bya " Faud," however, he is sacred, and treated as an honored guest.
1913-] LIGHT AND SHADE IN ALBANIA 501
The Fauds are a branch of the Mirdite tribe who have settled in
the plains round Jakovitsa, and maintained their ground among the
Mohammedans by practising such fierce retaliation for attack that
they are now respected and unmolested. They never attack first;
are quiet, industrious tillers of the soil, and known to keep their
word, " bessa," inviolate. There are forty Faud families in Jako-
vitsa, all practising Catholics. It was a group of Fauds who
elected to die with Mehmed Ali Pasha, because they had undertaken
to be his bodyguard when he came to Jakovitsa to restore order,
and although they were invited to save themselves and leave him
to his fate he was massacred by the Mohammedan Albanians
they refused, and were hewn down by his side, martyrs to the
" bessa " they had given him. All Albanian Catholics are
not of this calibre. Many hang to their faith by a mere thread, and
pass from Catholicity to orthodoxy or Islamism, and back again as it
suits them. The mentality of these oppressed and demoralized
tribes is a poor asset for the re-conversion of the land to Christian-
ity, and the hatred between Mohammedan and Christian is so
deadly, that the prospect of a united state composed of these con-
flicting elements is not promising.
A Servian officer who took part in the Albanian campaign
told me his Mohammedan guides stopped at the river Drin, and
refused to accompany him any further. They had never crossed
to the other side, and could give no information about the inhabit-
ants, except that they were Christians. The Servians had to pro-
ceed with their own scouts in this unknown land, which was not
entirely Christian, as they soon learned to their cost. The villages
of Patchran and Pistoli, the first Mohammedan, the second Chris-
tian, existed side by side in mortal feud since the memory of
man. A Servian scout came first on Patchran, and accosted an
Albanian whom he saw cutting branches on the outskirts of the
village. To his inquiry in halting Albanian : " Shum Turaka ? "
(" Any Mohammedans here? ") he got the laconic answer, " Pak "
("A few"). He then asked if the Servian troops would be
allowed to pass unmolested, and the Albanian said distinctly three
times, " Po, Po, Po " (" Yes "). The scout then made sign to him
to walk by his horse's side through the dirty narrow lane that
formed the street of the village, and the Albanian did so. Four
or five others now came forward, and corroborated the first man's
assurance that the Servians were free to pass that way and purchase
provender. Next clay an entire squadron acting on this in forma-
502 LIGHT AND SHADE IN ALBANIA [July,
tion rode through the village, and was fired at from every door
and window. The instant a soldier fell the Albanians darted out
and hacked him with knives, which gave the Servians a chance of
retaliation. The rest of the troops soon came up and bombarded
the village to the great joy of the men of Pistoli, who now appeared
on the scene and wreaked the vengeance of centuries on their foes.
They begged the Servians to allow them to wipe out Patchran
for ever, but promised that the fugitives from the burning village
would not be slain on their way to the nearest Mohammedan centre.
In the Balkan War there have been several striking examples of
Mohammedan readiness to sacrifice life for the sake of the place in
heaven which awaits the slayer of a " giaour " (unbeliever). This
scout told me he frequently saw a Mohammedan deliberately court
death by shooting a Servian soldier, knowing that the moment after
he would himself be riddled with bullets. The two creeds survive
in Albania by mutual avoidance of contact. The Mohammedans
are always the aggressors, and, as a rule, it is they who terror-
ize. On the river Matsi, north of Durazzo, a number of marauders
were singled out of a crowd of prisoners in the Servian camp by
the Catholic priest of the place, who detailed the outrages they
had committed on his flock. At his behest all were executed.
The hamlets of Kosmatch and Ashti near Scutari are another
instance of Albanian " fraternity." The Catholic Bishop of Ales-
sio, in his visits to Ashti, was obliged to make a long round, so as to
avoid the environs of Kosmatch, a nest of Mohammedans. The
men of Ashti and Kosmatch shot at each other whenever they met,
but this duty was obviated by the use of different paths to the valley
below when they left the shelter of their villages. After the defeat
of the Turks near Alessio, the Servians advanced quickly to seize
Kosmatch, but they found it a mass of smoking ruins. The men
of Ashti had been before them, and the Servians were incensed
at the destruction of large stores of hay that would have been of
value to the cavalry convoy. The Servian commander was amused at
the effrontery of the plunderers, who offered to sell him the flocks
they had driven off at the approach of the victors; but a more equit-
able arrangement was made with regard to these spoils of war by
the mediation of the Bishop. All the inhabitants of Kosmatch had
fled to Scutari, imperfectly surrounded at that time by the Monte-
negrins, except one family consisting of an aged man, his wife,
and a grandson of eight, who already described himself as a
" Turk." The Mohammedan Albanians invariably call themselves
1913-] LIGHT AND SHADE IN ALBANIA 503
" Turks," and are thus designated by their Christian compatriots.
This family was given the protection of a Servian guard, and made
itself useful in many ways to the troops of occupation, its only
fear being to fall into the hands of the men of Ashti.
The Servian detachment at Kosmatch had strict orders not
to engage in any combat while their numbers were so inferior,
and this quiescence encouraged the garrison of Scutari to make
raids on Ashti for food supplies. The Servian commander, rinding
Ashti could become also a point of strategic importance for the
enemy, resolved to destroy it, and warned the villagers to remove
their belongings, and remain behind the Servian positions until
the fall of Scutari. They did so, compensation for their ruined
dwellings being distributed as usual according to the advice of the
Bishop. The burning of an Albanian village is an easy matter,
for the walls of the houses are of mud and the roof of thatch.
There is little or no furniture. Burning each other's villages is a.
favorite pastime of Mohammedan and Christian Albanians, but
the damage done is not considerable.
The Malissori tribe in these regions do not call themselves
Albanians but " Catholics," so that the name has come to be con-
sidered as a kind of nationality. The men have a cross tattoed
on their arm and the women on their breast. At the approach
of the Servian troops the Malissoris ran to meet them, calling
out " Catholic ! Catholic ! " and rubbing back their sleeves to show
the hidden cross. Throughout the period of occupation they be-
haved as friends and allies, doing every good turn but that of help-
ing in pitched battle. The Servian relay post between Durazzo and
Alessio was, on one occasion, attacked by the " Turks," and eight
cavalrymen were besieged in a hut for several days. The Catholics
who heard of it ran at night to inform the Servians at Durazzo,
and a relieving force was dispatched, which arrived just in time.
The besieged postmen were not only hungry, but had used up
their ammunition in keeping at bay the Mohammedan Albanians
who tried to set fire to the hut.
The Servians got full appreciation for the manner in which
they preserved order, protected life and property wherever they
were quartered, and paid for whatever they requisitioned. In a
speech by the Bishop of Nansati on February I5th, the Servian
commander was thanked for his generosity and prudence in dealing
with the Albanians. A sum of money, gift of the Servian Red
Cross Society, was distributed by the Bishop and his four assistant
priests to the families whose homes had been destroyed by Risa
504 LIGHT AND SHADE IN ALBANIA [July,
Beg, then Governor of Scutari, and on this occasion the recipients
cheered loudly for their " deliverers." The Servians soon realized,
nevertheless, that the clergy of Albania owed allegiance to Austria,
and that the blood shed by Servians for the freedom of Albania
would not alter that allegiance. Austria has certainly done much
for religion among the Catholic tribes. In the village of Nansati
there is a handsome church built by the Emperor Francis Joseph,
whose features are supposed to be reproduced in the picture of St.
Francis that hangs over the altar.
An Albanian Bishop is a fine military-looking figure, generally
under forty, with a smart gold-braided cap, moustaches brushed
upward at the points, dark purple soutane, and an authoritative
mien. He is sure to speak fluent Italian, and to be a highly-cultured
man. His orders are strictly obeyed, except in the remote parts
of his diocese, where they may still come in conflict with the retri-
butive laws of Dukadin. The Servians were much impressed at
the ecclesiastical discipline, unknown to themeslves, evident among
the Catholic Albanians, as well as at the regular attendance at
Mass of people who came miles over the mountains, and had to
start long before dawn. The celebration at Easter was imposing
in Alessio, in spite of poverty and primitive conditions. The Al-
banian flag (a black eagle on a red ground, above a white cross)
waved from the little church spire, and the bell rang loudly after
a silence of centuries. The church is a modest structure, dating
from 1240, but well preserved. Over the altar is a fine old painting
of the Annunciation, which has a rent in the middle, due to a
Turkish sword slash. This rent is a reminder that the cross on
the Catholic Albanian flag must be replaced by the crescent, or
simply eliminated, if there is to be any pretense of harmony in the
new autonomous Albania.
The women enter the church first, and kneel on the stone
floor in front of the altar. The men have low wide stools on which
to squat as well as kneel. Mass is said in Latin, and at its
close an Albanian hymn was sung with fervor on this occasion.
Father Seraphim, the officiating priest, told the strangers that it
was called " Vai in Kagnout," which means " The Sorrows of
Jesus," and the first verse runs thus :
Krushti dashtom mekouop
Ci fay tur kush tesflernoy.
(Dear loving Lord Whom I bound
With cords as is done to thieves.)
1913-] LIGHT AND SHADE IN ALBANIA 505
After the hymn came the sermon, which treated of the Resur-
rection, and the preacher also alluded to current events, advising his
flock to be peaceful, patient, and confident, for these virtues were
especially suited to their circumstances. Permission was asked
from the Servian commander for the congregation to fire off their
rifles in honor of the day. It was given on condition that there
were to be no shots on the road home, as there was danger of
rousing and irritating the Mohammedans in the environs. The
firing was done outside the church door, Father Seraphim leading
off with the first shot, as delighted as a child. Such volleys
were never heard before in Alessio, except during the Mohammedan
feast of Bairam.
An Albanian of Nishli, named Zef (Joseph) Mala invited a
group of the Servians to visit him, and they proceeded to his
village in the course of the afternoon. The houses were similar
to those of the Mohammedan Albanians on the other side of the
river Drin, poor structures of two stories, the lower for cattle, the
upper for the family. The latter is reached by an outside staircase,
and consists of but one apartment. Through the defective plank
floor the odor of the stables ascends and vitiates the air. There are
no windows, but light comes from loopholes in the wall, which serve
chiefly as gun rests whence to fire on the enemy outside. There is
no chimney, so that when fire is made in winter the smoke gathers
in a thick mass near the ceiling.
It was at once evident that all Zef s household were Christians,
for the hostess and her daughters and sons came with him to the
gate of the enclosure to receive the guests. The interior too gave
an impression of civilization superior to what the Servians had
seen in Mohammedan dwellings. There were strips of carpet and
cushions on the floors, a picture of St. Nicola on the walls, and
plank shelves at one end of the room. Cigarettes and small Turkish
bowls of coffee were served to the guests as soon as they had seated
themselves on the cushions. The Albanians sat cross-legged on
the floor, but not like the Turks, for they first knelt, and then
let the weight of their bodies rest on their heels. The women
did not sit, nor take any part in the conversation, which was carried
on by means of an interpreter. Zef behaved with great politeness.
He complimented the Servians on their victory over the Turks, and
said Albanians would be forever grateful to them. He remarked
on the similarity of many words in the Servian and the Albanian
languages, and said the two peoples should henceforth live in amity.
The Servian custom of the " Slava," celebrating the feast of a
5o6 POETS [July,
patron saint, existed among many Albanian tribes. Zef himself
celebrated the feast of St. Nicola after the manner of the Catho-
lics in the villages near Prisren, who make a candle the height of
the master of the house, and let it burn three days and three
nights before the ikon of the patron saint. As many cakes are made
as there are members of the family male, of course, for the
females do not count. When an Albanian Catholic swears by his
Slava candle, it is the most binding oath he can take. Should he
fail to keep it, his cattle must be slain, and not even his nearest
relatives may address a word to him for three years. These are
the penalties introduced by the pastors who are endeavoring to oust
by degrees the Draconian laws of Dukadin. With the Mohamme-
dan Albanians an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth continues
to be the dogma of justice that governs their relations with each
other.
The few months of the Servian occupation of Albania have
brought these two Balkan peoples closer together, and laid the
foundation for a better understanding in the future. The Bishop of
Alessio, in bidding the Servian commander farewell, said that his
flock had never enjoyed a period of such peace and prosperity
as during the sojourn of the Servian troops among them.
POETS.
BY JOYCE KILMER.
VAIN is the chiming of forgotten bells
That the wind sways above a ruined shrine.
Vainer his voice in whom no longer dwells
Hunger that craves immortal Bread and Wine.
Light songs we breathe that perish with our breath
Out of our lips that have not kissed the rod.
They shall not live who have not tasted death.
They only sing who are struck dumb by God.
WAHWOUNI.
BY " OLIVER."
I.
T fell to my lot to place a balancing weight of stones in
the bows of the canoes before launching them again
on the lake. This last leg of our course would take
us diagonally across four miles of exposed water
to our permanent camp, so cosily hidden under the
pines on the other shore of Baskahegan. Peol had all morning
been predicting a stiff wind when the day would be older, so that
it behoved us now to hasten our departure; for the crossing of the
lake in a birch canoe was at most times a matter of luck or
chance, so well known were its winds and cross currents. Hitherto
we had been following a sheltered shore, on the surface of a mirror
which the lea of a close forest on our left created in the calm of
early morning; but outside, on our right, we could already per-
ceive a ruffling of the water, with now and then the hint of a white
cap.
We had come a good distance counting in a troublesome
portage and breakfast had been a welcome and restful meal.
Peol was now busy collecting his " cookin' tools " preparatory to
our departure. Thus it fell to me, as I have already observed,
to fit our boats to the venturesome voyage ahead of us. A birch
canoe is a parlous and precarious support when waves run high;
she must balance to a hair, or there is likely to be a catastrophe;
to steer her at all in a head wind she must hold well to the water
at the bows. If she be allowed to ride high in such circumstances,
no man living no, not even Peol can keep her on her course.
So I chose the counterpoising stones with care from the beach,
where they lay waterwashed since the prehistoric days when the
Abenaki first camped on Baskahegan.
As we swung out I was gratified to note that the old chief
at no time an easy mentor in the exactions of a canoe after a few
strokes settled down to work, evidently satisfied with the set of
his boat. He took the lead, as usual if there was going to be a
rough time I should be quite content in his wake.
508 WAHWOUNI [July,
The freshness of early morning was over everything; the sun
shone intermittingly, however, through level clouds which appeared
to hurry across the sky; the great plane of water ahead darkened
ominously, rising up to meet us as we left the shore behind us. On
our left, the leafy verdure of the forest, from the sky line down
to the drab and narrow beach, made a slope of velvet carpet which in
the joy and greenness of its colors no human weaver could imitate.
Away off, on the other shore, a diminished perspective of forest
showed a flatter and more habitable region, and there our camp
awaited us.
Peol was evidently anxious to get across. He plied his paddle
with a vigor which I could easily interpret, but not so comfortably
emulate; I could imagine him reaching our quarters far ahead of
me, and, meeting me on the beach, inquire with great pretense of
curiosity where I had been. Much to my own mystification, how-
ever, my canoe kept steadily in his wake, while his plunged and
labored heavily; still there was as yet no wind to signify.
" Eat him too much breakfast for one good Indian," he threw
at me, as my bow nosed in on him. " This old canoe is surely
sick."
Now I knew that his was a new canoe, and that he was much
attached to it for its seaworthy qualities.
"Perhaps she's down too heavy by the head," I replied; "I
may have weighted her too heavily." For I could now see how
sluggishly she rose to the sea to me she appeared waterlogged.
At this moment a gust of wind which had strayed somewhere
from the hills behind us on a frolic, came down upon us, but being
of uncertain mind, as most lake winds are apt to be, lost its bear-
ings and struck up slantingly across the bows. I had all I could
manage to keep my course, Peol's bark wriggled precisely like a
snake which hides itself in the grass. This was the signal for the
play of winds to begin. They circled, they squared, down the
centre, up the sides, changed partners, bowed, rested, and renewed
the dance. The white caps followed, and then the inrush of greater
waves; my canoe tossed about so willfully that I could hardly tell
which end of my paddle was in the water. Still I held my course,
and my gunnels ran even with Peol's. Suddenly with a snap, like
the crack of a whip, a wedge of wind came between us, and actually
pushed me backward. I could feel the impact like the powerful
pressure of some unseen hand. My canoe backed away in the
stress as if she were some living thing frighted; there was indeed
1913.] WAHWOUNI 509
something unusually mischievous, nay malignant, in the purposes
of the wind. As for Peol, when I recovered headway sufficiently
to take heed of him, he was in the very centre of a maelstrom,
if I may employ the word. His canoe had slanted so far from her
course as no longer to be easily brought back to it, held as she was
by the wind across her bow, although Peol was making a desperate
effort to bring her to. Spume and spray shot up around him,
drenching him, I could see, and no doubt falling into his boat.
I hastened as best I could to his succor, if succor he
needed. The grimness of the fighter was on his face,
but behind it an utterly unchecked amazement. I could see the ques-
tion in his eyes and on his lips. What under high heaven had come
over his boat? Like some wayward creature, she refused to answer
his efforts, countervailing as they must have been to the pressure
on her bow. And all the time the winds fought around us, and
sought in their blind ways to send us to the bottom.
" Here's for the shore," I shouted at the pitch of my voice
it would be just like Peol to fight there until he was upset. I
knew that if I turned back he would have to do so ; we were both in
real danger. Taking advantage of a momentary lull, I turned the
bow of my bark shoreward and rode in on the combers. Peol fol-
lowed, as I knew he would, and thus in a few moments we were
back almost where we had started from.
" That was a close one," I cried cheerily to him as his canoe
splashed heavily on the shore by mine. I knew he was feeling
humiliated. " What can be wrong with your canoe ? "
" Bewitched, I think. I know of nuthin' else. She won't ride,
she won't bail, she won't steer just lie like a log in the water
and shake her head. Fit only for a trout stream," he wound up in
utter disgust. Having thus relieved his feelings, he added in a
milder tone, " We have to catamaran or stay here without dinner."
The most commonplace observer could at once infer that the
old chief had no thought of missing his dinner; for he was soon,
axe in hand, among the young saplings seeking two suitable poles
with which to parallel our canoes, catamaran fashion.
In the meanwhile I directed my attention to his canoe, to
solve if possible the mystery of its vagaries. To this end I began to
remove the stones from the bow. I was so occupied when, as I
turned to drop on the ground a peculiarly shaped stone which had
at the outset attracted my attention, my action was arrested by a
cry of alarm from Peol. He was close to me by this time, a pole
5io WAHWOUNI [July,
in each hand; he seemed to have uttered the cry without knowing
he did so. I dropped the strange stone to the ground, and looked
from it to the Indian. It might have been some poisonous reptile,
so disgustedly and yet not without alarm did Peol fix his eyes
upon it.
It was a common bit of feldspar, rudely fashioned into the
form of a truncated pyramid, not more than six inches in height;
had its base been strictly circular, the diameter would not have ex-
ceeded eight inches. Apart from its unusual shape, there was
one other curious thing about it: in the flat top a round well had
been sunk, obviously to hold water there was still some in it.
I turned to Peol for an explanation, and then stopped to lift the
stone.
" Stop ! " he cried in no uncertain accents. " I know it now.
That's one devil stone one devil of the old time. He lives in
that stone; aoutem they call him long ago. He come out some-
time and tell my people when trouble come, where good huntin/
how to fight the enemy. Sometimes good, sometimes bad no
tellin'."
" He was pretty vicious a moment ago," I could not forbear
remarking, "if it was he who raised all that pother on the lake."
" Yes, he bad now," Peol admitted, still keeping at a respect-
ful distance from the stone. " He want to drown me because we
disturb him and take him away from his place here," making a
gesture towards the shore.
" And so this is the wretch who has been raising all the sea
and wind against us," I exclaimed sarcastically. " What do you call
him?"
" They call him Wahwouni in the olden time," Peol answered.
" Because he never forget. This lake is his lake Baskahegan,
spirit lake. He live here, no man know where till you find him
better lose him quick." There could be ho mistaking Peol's earn-
estness.
" Wahwouni ? That's a sweet name for such a vicious spirit,"
I remarked nonchalantly, bending over, and at the same time making
the sign of the cross on the stone. Peol understood my action,
but shook his head. " It takes prayer and fasting to drive that
devil out," he muttered. " He too long time there."
Now whether it was imagination or the wash of the
waves on the canoe that made the sound, I clearly heard a hiss,
subdued but sharp, and what I might for lack of a better word call
1913.] WAHWOUNI 511
bitter. Likewise it may have been only the nuance of a passing
cloud, but a shadow passed over and out of the stone, leaving it
pallid and dry. As I said, this may have been pure imagination
in me. I now picked up the stone, and, judging it politic to make
light of the Indian's superstition, I inquired the purpose of the hole
or circular depression in the top. " Is that his eye, Peol, do you
believe ? "
" That holdem water," he answered, retreating with most un-
graceful agility when I held the stone out for his inspection. " Our
sorcerer see things there things which going to happen. He
readem future, he readem past, all in that little pool. I lookem
in there I might see things, too, things I no like to see. My
fathers saw queer sights in that stone, perhaps I see 'em too.
Throw him away, lose him quick," he entreated. " We have no
time to waste if we cross the lake." With an outward show of
bravery and indifference, he proceeded to the work on hand, but
I could see him keep a sharp eye on the stone.
I had no idea, however, of losing my find so quickly. It was
not every day that one picked up a stone with such marvelous
powers, and such a singular history as this. I proposed that we
should carry it into camp with us. As to any present preter-
natural power which Wahwouni, this spirit stone, might possess,
I was openly skeptical. I knew that in the minds of the super-
stitious the idols of the Orient still retained their mysterious
power, which was generally of a malignant cast. Moreover, I had
the words of the Psalmist that the gods of the heathen were
demons; still I could not bring myself to admit that possibly this
instrument of a blind superstition could at this day still work evil.
It was a curio, and I would keep it.
But I had not reckoned with the superstitious repugnance of
my guide. He refused to be coaxed or cajoled into accepting the
stone as a shipmate during the hazardous run across to our en-
campment. It had already come near sending us to the bottom;
it had put enmity in his heart against his good canoe, which was
like a wife to him; it had turned him back in shame, broken in
spirit, overcome by the waves of a lake which he had crossed in
all weathers since he was a boy no, he would have none of it.
Now that he knew the reason of his defeat, that his mind was
relieved, and that he could look himself in the face again and not
be ashamed, he would take no new chances.
" If you still want him," he concluded, " leave him here, and
5 i2 WAHWOUNI [July,
get him when you go home. Wahwouni, now that he's found, do
no good lying round here. How can I tell you long story about
him and him listenin' in camp?"
This naive intimation that he would reward me with a story
if I were generous enough to respect his wishes, was, as he fully
expected, a conclusive argument in his favor. -Peol's stories were
ever too good to be missed on account of a mean conjuring stone,
especially as the stone itself would, no doubt, figure in the narrative.
Already I could picture the camp fire lazying under the pines, Peol
sitting comfortably with his back against a log, his belt and hunting
knife dangling within reach overhead, while the shadows gathered
and the departing sun was hidden from us, except where its fare-
well shafts spread over the lake like a benediction, and gentled the
waters. An owl might interrupt from the forest near us, or per-
haps a cawquaw rustle in the underbrush, but I should listen in
great contentment of spirit, for Peol's tales of the ancient days,
" before white man come to spoil good huntin'," were replete
with quaint and savage interest. Nevertheless I hid Wahwouni
in my sweater when his back was turned, and religiously sat upon
it during our trip across the lake. Much against our expectations,
the crossing was made without trouble or incident. Our canoes,
like well-matched steeds, behaved admirably in harness Peol's
bark rode the waves like a thing of life. For the time being, ob-
viously, our demon had lost his grip.
II.
Peol was at some pains to admonish me that his story was
dangerously out of season. It was a tale to be told by the winter
fireside only, when the spirits of wood and wold were closely im-
prisoned in the frost and ice of grass and flower and tree; it was
no talk for an evening in August, beneath listening pines and the
water lilies not yet closed for the night not to speak of the
sinister and vindictive demon of the lake, whose servants these
lesser spirits were.
Altogether he gave the impression that he was venturing on
dangerous ground, and was rudely ignoring tribal comity towards
the spirits. A misgiving in turn now possessed me. What if this
Wahwouni who never forgot an insult should deliberately walk
in on us or rather out on us, for in my hurry I had placed him
1913.] WAHWOUNI 513
on the edge of my washstand in my tent and punish Peol's
temerity ?
Out of deference, then, to the spirits the Indian related his
tale pianissimo, as it were ; for the old chief, despite his Christianity,
was every whit as firm a believer in those old-time credulities
of his tribe as any of his pagan ancestors had been. From them
no doubt he had inherited this inalienable superstition; for in line
of direct and legitimate descent he represented one of the noted
families of the Abenakis ; his forbears had been chiefs and leaders
time out of mind, and he himself was still chief and sagamore,
official depositary likewise of tribal history and what we are pleased
to call folklore.
I will put his story into such English as I can command.
Peol's English was quaint and commatic, so that what this tale may
lose in picturesqueness of diction may be atoned ior by its greater
clearness and intelligibility. Again, I may be forgiven too if
in places I skip portions of his narrative, with the hope thus of
not tiring my readers unduly, for Peol was apt to be specific in
his descriptions of trails and movements with which the reader can
have no concern. So we sit around, in every posture of comfort,
and listen while he calls up unwritten memories of the olden days.
" The winter had been a presage of unaccountable things ; out
of the ordinary in the contrariety of its unseasonable mildness.
There was little snow and much rain, with a tantalizing uncertainty
between whiles as to whether it meant to snow or rain. In conse-
quence the lakes and rivers refused to freeze over; hunting and
trapping became impossible; and more than one life was sacrificed
to accident. Happily the larger game did not retire to the hilly
country, so that moose and deer were plentiful on the plains. The
unseasonableness of the weather might therefore have been neg-
lected as an omen, had it not been for the strange aspect of the
sun. It was that which depressed our old men. In the morn-
ings he rose sluggishly, as if dragging himself unwillingly out of
bed, and often with strange illuminations of bloody red; through-
out the day he ran his course in a leaden sky, now with the burning
heat of August, again like a painted fire which gives no heat.
" Here was, indeed, a distressing and significant presage of evil
to come. To increase the general anxiety, the forests which in
summer delighted the eye with their greenness, blackened as if death
had touched them as he passed. At first, roots and shrubs and
trees, misled by the prevailing mildness and goaded by those un-
VOL. xcvii. 33
514 WAHWOUNI [July,
natural swells of heat, sent up sap and then burgeoned and blos-
somed into leaf, only to have their premature offerings blackened
and killed by intervening frosts. Not disheartened by this first
mischance, the poor things, under the inflammation of a succeeding
spell of heat, again removed their leafing; to be again set back,
their sap wasted, and their lives put in jeopardy. Blackened and
decrepit, they saddened the outlook; only the evergreens and the
few hardwoods which bud late remained to soften the mourning
of the forests.
" In the tribe, too, many unnatural occurrences came to awe
and dismay the weak of heart. Dreams of frightful augury were
of nightly occurrence ; strong men died suddenly, without warning ;
children were born of monstrous shapes, so that their mothers
disowned them; while over all the land brooded the dark ex-
pectancy of impending tragedy. As a climax to the general dis-
tress, runners brought in tidings of a woeful plague among the
Micmacs, and that our other allies, the Malicetes, were stricken
with some strange distemper. Report said that the salmon were
dying on the shores of the Ouigoudi. Rain had long ceased to
fall, the earth, parched and thirsty, glowered in the sunshine of
spring when it should have smiled and rejoiced; rivers knew no
rush of great waters, and our lakes seethed and muddied from
the bottom.
''' There was a great outcry for the aoutmom, or sorcerers, to
consult the spirits; but the sorcerers were helpless, for the spirits
refused to speak. The chiefs were anxious to know what to do.
Should the tribe remain in its present position or retire to its great
hunting grounds far away in the depths of the northern woods?
Still no answer came. The young warriors and all who loved
novelty and adventure clamored for the change, but the old men
clung to their homes and refused to go. So by general consent
it was left to the head chief, who was also the great aoutmoin, and
knew the spirits best, to call up the demon of the tribe men
dared not call upon him heedlessly and ask his guidance.
" Thus it happened that the devil stone, Wahwouni " here
Peol made a silent gesture with his pipe to the farther shore " was
brought."
At this conjuncture a most untimely racket arose within my
tent, the flap of which was held back. A sharp squeal, followed by
a muffled fall, frightened rustlings among the spruce bows that
formed my bed, brought me to my feet. I hurried within, drawing
1913.] WAHWOUNI 515
the flap close after me; somehow I had a premonition that Wah-
wouni was bestirring himself. Sure enough, he was down on the
ground near the door, beneath my feet, while the saucy flirt of a
privileged tail and the cunning glance of two sharp eyes dis-
covered to me the cause of the disturbance. A large gray squirrel,
which had grown to be a pet with me, in its search for a stray
bit of lump sugar, had unwittingly upset Wahwouni from his pre-
carious eminence. Hastily bundling him among the blankets, and
making a pretense of chasing the squirrel, I made noise enough
to acquaint Peol with the cause of the disturbance. Still I could
not divert my mind from the thought that Wahwouni had tried to
come out and interrupt him.
" They brought out Wahwouni " Peol resumed, having re-
lighted his pipe in the meantime, " from the sacred recess where
he was kept, and with him the framework of the conjuror's hut
in which Nadoga, the chief, would consult the spirit. On such a
day of expectancy the whole tribe assembled. It was a serious
occasion, and one which might not occur again within the span
of a man's life. From all the outlying encampments, therefore,
men hurried in so as not to lose the spectacle. Babies at the breast
were brought that it might be said in later days that they were
present when Wahwouni spoke last to his people. My grandmother
told me that her great-grandmother had told her mother how shaken
and terrified old Nadoga the sorcerer was that day as well he
might, for Wahwouni had a reputation for temper and violence;
a sorcerer consulting him was likely to be left unconscious for
hours afterward. He bade his family good-bye in a sorrowful
frame of mind, and, with Wahwouni on his arm, entered his
conjuring hut. Around, at a respectful distance, the chiefs and
warriors were gathered in circles according to dignity, and behind
them the women and children.
" Nadoga was lost to view amid the stillness of the people.
In a little while those who were nearest could hear him talk as
if to himself. For some minutes there was silence, and then he
groaned loudly as if his heart would break. Then he appeared to
rouse himself; the sides and corners of the hut began to quiver
and sway; a seething sound like the falling of water on a red-
hot stone followed; vapor-like steam mounted through the opening
at the top; the structure danced round and round in circles; and
finally flew into the air as if thrown by some mighty hand. Nadoga
lay on the ground in full view, unconscious, while from the stone
516 WAHWOUNI [July,
at his side a white vapor arose, which quickly enveloped him. The
crowd, awe-struck, fell on their faces, from chief to stripling, and
from out the steam cloud came a voice which was not the voice
of Nadoga:
" 'Seek ye, O children of the seashore, another home far
from the rumbling of the sea, for there comes a spirit whom we
cannot resist. I would save you from his power, for he would
make women of you. Plague and death have come to the Ouigoudi
and to the shores of the Micmacs, the earth is drying up, the sun
shines in anger, the rain has forgotten to fall, because of his
coming. Save yourselves, O Abenaki, before it is too late.'
" The voice was dying away, in a moment the presence would
be gone. Then did Mauwesta a daring deed, which won him
renown in after years. Rising while still the echoes of the spirit
voice were carrying on the breeze, he put the question which was in
every mind:
" 'O Spirit, when shall we return to these homes of our people ?'
" Like the echo of a voice in the summer evening when the
speaker speaks lightly, forgetting that any one listens, came the
answer :
" 'When a virgin maid of the Abenaki shall lead great
warriors by a thread, and bring their scalps to your knives, then
shall you return with joy,' the voice trailed off into the wail of a
child, and floated on the breeze to the depths of the forest.
" The multitude lifted their heads with a sigh, which traveled
from rank to rank. The cloud was gone; Nadoga stood erect,
rubbing his eyes like a man who had awakened from a deep sleep.
Suddenly his hands went out before his face, as if he would shut
out something he did not wish to see. 'Canoes ! Canoes !' he cried,
'four abreast O men of the Abenaki, must a woman die to save us ?'
And then he fell like one dead, and they carried him away. But
the stone, Wahwouni, still lay upon the ground.
" Some of the knowing ones afterward claimed that they
knew from Nadoga's sorrow that day who the maid would be ; but
that was after the fact, when it is always easy to know things.
" I am mighty glad," said Peol in an altered voice, as if he
no longer courted secrecy for his story, " I am mighty glad to be
quit of Wahwouni henceforth in this story. I have not felt well
since I began to tell it sort of uncomfortable as if he were some-
where near threatening me."
And I was in turn glad that Wahwouni was well wrapped in
1913.] WAHWOUNI 517
the blankets. No doubt he had heard Peol's tale, nevertheless, so
far. What form his vengeance may take against the old man,
I cannot foresee, but I have a steady premonition that he will do
something awkward.
III.
" Which route the tribe took to reach its new hunting grounds
in the north country, does not matter much to this story," Peol
resumed. " It is not likely that, with the plague among the Mali-
cetes, they would go by the Ouigoudi, although that trail, which they
called the Medoctic, was a favorite one. On the shores of the lake
which is now called Squawpan, they built their council house.
There they dwelt in the heart of a country overspread with lakes
and streams, resting one arm on the Ouigoudi, the other on the
Allegash and Penobscot. The rivers were full of fish, the forests
abounded in game, rain fell in generous showers; and while the
women missed their garden vegetables, another year would bring
abundance. Thus the tribe settled down to their new life, away
from the rote of the sea which they loved. The country, it is
true, was not unknown to them; it had been theirs for centuries,
and so all the more resignedly they now accepted it.
" But always they grieved for the homes they had left, particu-
larly the aged people, who could not so easily accept new things and
changes. The decree of Wahwouni barred the way, however,
together with fear of the plague, the rusting of the land, and the
strange spirit which would make them women. Still the longing
could not be driven from their hearts. The strange and what ap-
peared impossible condition, on the fulfillment of which their return
would be permitted, gave still less hope of speedy relief. No enemy
was in sight, whose defeat and destruction at the hand of a young
girl would verify the prophecy. North and west of them the Hur-
ons and Algonquins held the ridge of highlands to the great river
and beyond, but these tribes never had been their enemies. How
then should their emancipation be effected ? And so the outlook for
an early return was disheartening. Still the life of the tribe went
on unbroken. Children were born, and men died, and love-making
on the shores of the lake never ceased in the evenings when the
maidens drew water from the springs.
" To keep the minds of the people occupied, scouts were sent
among the Hurons and Algonquins to discover whether any war
5i8 WAHWOUNI [July,
spirit possessed these tribes against the Abenaki, but no such spirit
could be found. The Hurons rather were incensed against the
Mengwe of the west, who had been making bold forays against the
Andastes of the Adirondacks, and had even encroached on the
Huron hunting grounds. But these were rumors which had but
little interest for our people. Within their own confederacy they
were known as the fence around the bear trap they kept the hostile
tribes of the south at bay until the other allies the Malicetes and
Micmacs could come into the fight. So they dismissed the story
of the raiding Mengwe if they gave it thought at all and busied
themselves in security with their home affairs.
" Besides, winter was now close at hand, and the hunters were
making ready for the season's work. Some would take their fam-
ilies with them, others would leave them behind, the unmarried
men would hunt and trap in companies; to all it was a time of
hurry and preparation. At this moment when the thoughts of
the tribe were so fully occupied, came in runners, breathless with
a wonderful tale of men with white skins white as the frilling
bark of the birch, who had come in great canoes like council houses
and met the Micmacs. They were dressed in strange garments, and
their canoes spouted fire and thunder. They had come from the
sea to the mouth of the Ouigoudi after crossing the bay of waves,
and were now in the waters of the Abenaki building an encampment.
" This alarming news spread like fire in dry brush. The war-
riors hastened to the council hall to learn the meaning of the in-
credible tale. In their presence the runners repeated their tidings
of the wonderful events which were happening down by the sea
in the ancient seats of the tribe. The assembly listened in dumb
surprise. Was this tale true? Could it be true? Nadoga ques-
tioned the messengers. They adhered to their story, and added
that rumor among the Malicetes said that the Micmacs had wel-
comed the newcomers because their chief, Membertou, now one
hundred winters old, had met such white men in his youth, and
made a treaty of peace with them; the strangers had renewed the
pact, and given the Micmacs presents of great worth.
" The disquieting fact remained, nevertheless, that the new-
comers, however peaceable they might be or acceptable to the Mic-
macs, were about to occupy Abenaki territory. The hot blood
of the tribe grew hotter at the thought. The younger warriors
boldly proclaimed their intention to return in a body and dispossess
the ,invaders; the older men temporized and urged the need of
1913.] WAHWOUNI 519
counsel and more definite knowledge. All turned to Nadoga, priest
of Wahwouni, who had suffered this injury to the tribe.
" His words were reassuring. Had not their guiding spirit
who never failed them in times of difficulty had he not sent them
to their present hunting ground expressly to save them from the
stronger spirit of these strangers? for all could now see whom
Wahwouni meant. Obediently they had left the homes of their
fathers to come into this wilderness, where the cry of the sea
reached them only in their dreams. Would he not see to it that
these strangers should not prosper in Abenaki territory? Nadoga
believed he would. Wahwouni had not lost his power to employ
the chills of winter and the mischances of disease. Leave the
matter with him. In any case winter was on; when spring came
they would know better what to do.
" This wise advice prevailed. The tribe scattered to their
winter vocations; but by every fireside the character and purposes
of the strangers afforded constant material for conjecture and dis-
cussion to the exclusion even of the problem of their return to
the sea. No further tidings came of the strangers; ice and snow
held both Frenchmen and Abenaki each in his own place."
I nodded assent to Peol's last statement. It agreed fully
with the records of that dreadful winter which the inexperienced
French passed on the Saint Croix. No Indian was seen by them,
until in early spring a stray Micmac wandered in upon them in time
to teach them the virtues of an infusion of spruce as a remedy for
the scurvy. The old chief ignored my gesture of approval did he
not know every tradition of his tribe, and were not these traditions
true ? The tone of his narrative now changed, however ; it had been
serious as became such serious subjects.
Did I remember Guesca of the birchbark temper? Guesca
of the panther fight? sister of Malpooga? the Guesca of other
tales? Why, surely I remembered her; how could the memory of
that Abenaki maiden ever leave me?
" The thought of her warms me here," said the old man, putting
his hand to his heart ; " greatest maid or woman our tribe ever
produced."
And then I understood how stupid of me it was not to have
known that she lived and flourished at the time of Peol's story.
" She was a girl of eighteen or nineteen about this time," he
continued, " and knew her own mind in many things which young
girls are uncertain about. Nature evidently had set her apart for
520 WAHWOUNI [July,
great things; for her pleasures were not in love-making like other
girls of her age, but in the serious concerns of life, in the councils
of the wise men, in the planning of good hunting, in fearlessness of
danger. Hers was the blood of great chiefs, and her tribe was
dearer to her than life. So that when Wahwouni's strange oracle
set men's minds a-thinking, their thoughts ran at once to her as
to the hope of the tribe. Nadoga's ill-concealed grief gave further
direction to this expectation. One thing was certain always : Given
the occasion, Guesca would risk and lose her life for her tribe.
" Guesca, of course, heard this public gossip, and lightly ban-
tered her grandfather, Nadoga, because neither he nor Wahwouni
was in a hurry to provide the opportunity she wanted. Nadoga
always looked grave when she rallied him about the prophecy, and
in turn he reproached her that she had no lovers. In sober fact,
the old man was anxious to see her married in this one regard
I fear he allowed his personal feelings to override his duty towards
the decree of Wahwouni. He brought in eligible suitors on every
occasion he could decently use; he chided her mother and scolded
herself for her indifference ; even when Guesca, bored by this persist-
tency, deliberately refused to entertain the old man's suggestions and
dismissed the suitors of his choice, he did not lose heart. Under one
pretense or another, he planned a trip into the Huron country, and
took her with him, hoping that some young chief of that tribe might
catch her fancy. But she returned heart-whole from the experi-
ment, whereas Nadoga's plans resulted in unforeseen embarrass-
ments to himself and possible danger to the tribe. For the Huron
youths were so taken with her bearing that they followed her back
in such numbers, and were so insistent in their purposes, that it
required all Nadoga's diplomacy to get rid of them without exciting
their permanent ill will towards his tribe. As to Guesca, she dealt
out no honied words or half-truths to these suitors she was born
by the sea and was a daughter of the seashore; she would marry
no man whose home was far from the sound of its waves. In this
she was upheld by the young people of both sexes within the tribe.
In fact, her loyalty to her old home, with the implication of a cer-
tain return to it, warmed all hearts towards her. Should there be
a break with the Hurons, they would gladly defend her right to
choose her own husband.
" Still there was real danger of a misunderstanding with the
Hurons that might lead to war. Need I say that some of our
people, misinterpreting this incident, confidently expected that out
1913.] WAHWOUNI 521
of it would come a realization of the prophecy? Why not let it run
into war, and thus perhaps open a way to their long-looked- for
return? Nadoga was honestly embarrassed.
" Spring was now well on, when young men make love, and the
Hurons were sending a final embassy of their best chiefs, in order to
make a last effort to induce the recalcitrant maid to marry one of
their bravest warriors. Nadoga suddenly disappeared, and with
him Guesca. Word was given out that he had gone into the wilds
to consult the spirit regarding the attitude of the tribe towards the
white men down by the sea. Guesca had accompanied him to do his
cooking. They were not to be followed on any pretext. Mauwesta
and his son, Malpooga, were also in attendance, but only for the
purpose of supplying game and food. No trespass on the mystic
rites which Nadoga was performing would be allowed. Thus did
the ancient sorcerer plan relief for himself and for Guesca from
the importunities of the Hurons not that the Abenaki at any
time feared the Hurons, but that a misunderstanding at the time
would have been particularly unfortunate, seeing that our tribe
had in mind the greater question of how to view the white men.
So Nadoga disappeared, and with, him his granddaughter, but the
maid did not care how the Huron took her absence.
" Nadoga carried the girl with him to Ouigoudi, within the
sound of whose turbulent waters he would perform his conjuration.
In his absence a strong faction of the tribe began to urge a mas-
sacre of the forthcoming embassy of Hurons. Mauwesta knew that
heart-hunger for their old hunting grounds inspired such treachery,
and so he forgave it; but to set at rest all such conspiracies, he
counter-planned and organized a flying column of warriors with
which to safeguard his daughter and his father's safety. They
bivouacked near the river, but well out of sight and hearing of
Nadoga. Guesca knew, however, for Malpooga could keep nothing
from her.
'The Ouigoudi, even in our day, is in springtime a raging
flood of unbridled waters. The noise of its rushing waters is then
the hum of a great city. On its bank Nadoga chose to erect his wig-
wams and set up his divining hut. Thither too he carried Wah-
wouni, and daily cried out to the spirit, but without avail. Guesca
fished and carried on the household duties, with now and then a
ramble or a turn in her canoe along the shore where the current ran
gently. Malpooga came and went, carrying game, while Mauwesta
and his warriors watched in patience. In the night they drew
522 WAHWOUNI [July,
closer to the river, and lay, a line of sleeping warriors, under the
stars.
" In the bend of the Ouigoudi, where the river turns like
my elbow, Nadago had set up his encampment. Below him, a score
of miles distance, the river dropped from its bed to lower depths
full eighty feet beneath, making a fall so great that to be caught in
its grasp meant certain death. Giant trees, going over that awful
precipice, were twisted and broken, the rebound on the rocky bot-
tom splintering the ends of them like brooms. And yet the roar
of that infinite rush of water was through some magic of the hedg-
ing chasms subdued and modulated to a deep undertone, over which
the pitch of the lighter sounds for miles above and below the falls
raised their triumphant clamor.
* * * *
"Of that long line of protecting warriors no man was awake
when the blow fell. Out of the murk of the night they came, those
terrible Mengwe warriors, Mohawks on the warpath. Canoe was
bridged to canoe four abreast; their landing was as silent as the
padded steps of a panther. In a moment they surrounded both
cabins. Nadoga's medicine availed him nothing in this his last
hour. They struck him in his sleep had they scalped him the
Abenaki never could have made the proud boast, as they did in
after years, that no scalp lock from their tribe had ever graced the
wigwam of a Mohawk. Others dragged Guesca from her slumbers
into the open, and shook her rudely ; had they not needed informa-
tion and a guide, her fate would have been as Nadoga's.
" Thus roughly awakened, the girl could not at first realize
that she was in the hands of mortal enemies. She mistook them for
Hurons, and started to shake herself free; such wooing was not to
her liking. But fierce faces flared into hers, while an old warrior,
his scalplock hanging to his shoulder, addressed her in a strange
tongue. She understood him she afterwards used to tell much
as we understand the speech of spirits in our dreams in fact, at
first she took it all for a malignant dream.
" 'Who was she ?' the fierce old man demanded. 'Where was
her tribe? Were she and her father alone?' Without respite of
time for her to reply, he continued, his rough painted face bearing
down almost against her own, 'Did she know the river? did it run
unbroken to the sea? why the sound on the night like the mean
of dying men?'
" These questions he asked her in a voice which the noise of
1913.] WAHWOUNI 523
the river drowned to all but those about him. When she answered
him, his eyes and the eyes of the fierce men surrounding her bored
into hers as if they searched the inmost secrets of her heart.
Helpless she looked into the forbidding faces, and then to the
dark line of canoes still filled with warriors. The billowy under-
tone of the distant falls, through some magic of the night, touched
her hearing. Her resolve was taken; she would deceive them, and
if possible lure them to destruction in the falls. What matter it if
she died too ? Wahwouni had so decreed in any case.
" 'My tribe/ she answered in faltering tones as of one whom
fear holds in leash, lives a day's journey down the river, but we
have disowned them because they were unjust to my father' here
she made a motion in the direction of the other hut. They nodded,
as if they approved of her feelings. 'I hate them,' she continued
with a bitterness which they could not misunderstand. 'You great
warriors will revenge my father's wrongs, and I will gladly guide
you. The river runs unbroken to the sea like the lines on my hand.
Fear not the sounds of the night: the river revels in the spring.'
" A groan from Nadoga's tent sent the blood to her heart.
Had they killed the old man? All the hot temper within her rose
at the thought. She was on the point of denouncing them to their
faces, when at a sign from the old warrior she was carried bodily
to the canoes. They placed her in the hindmost of the line, in what
her eyes taught her was the guiding influence of the whole fleet.
Silently, like a great serpent, the flotilla nosed its way into the river.
" Guesca looked back at the receding shore with sorrow, that
Nadoga should die without a word of comfort from her. In the
half-light she was startled to see him on his knees leaning heavily
against the framework of his cabin, trying hard to steady himself.
She could see his eyes settle on her, and then he threw himself
face forward on the ground, while from his throat issued the
dying war cry of the Abenaki. There was not one of her father's
warriors whom that cry would not reach.
" This was indeed true. At the sound, every Abenaki was on
his feet, alive to the alarm. Malpooga headed the rush for the
river bank, and, heedless of ambush, was the first to the dying
Nadoga. The others scattered at the command of Mauwesta to
search for signs of the invaders. It did not take them long to
learn that a large party had passed in canoes, carrying Guesca
off a captive, and giving Nadoga his deathblow. He was still
alive, but in the last throes. Mauwesta bent over him and caught
524
WAHWOUNI
[July,
his dying words, 'Mengwe, Mengwe! the falls!' With that
he was dead.
" Knowing his daughter's spirit, Mauwesta guessed her pur-
pose at once. 'We will find the enemy,' he said in a few words,
'at the leaning pine, or at the bottom of the falls. Hasten by the
shortest road, move slowly on the river when you get there. I will
seek my daughter on the water.'
" Malpooga, though as yet only a stripling, anticipated his
father's intention, and now appeared with Guesca's canoe. His
father motioned to him to disembark. ' This is a man's job, my
son,' he said. This canoe must go to the edge of the falls or over
to save your sister. Your tribe will need you, for I may not come
back.' Malpooga begged so hard to be allowed to share his father's
risk that he was suffered to remain. One volunteer was needed
for the dangerous trip, a man of stout arm and strong heart
to wield the bow paddle; from the many who offered Mauwesta
chose a close friend of his own.
" And thus the three bodies moved onward in the night : the
Mengwe ahead drifting unconsciously to their fate, guided by the
noiseless paddle of a stern-faced girl; behind them in the distance,
covered by the darkness, a swift canoe followed, using every ad-
vantage of current to overtake them; while along the beaten trail
which led to the falls coursed a band of Abenaki warriors in pur-
suit. Theirs was the shorter route, for the river doubled on itself
in places.
" Guesca sat in the hindmost canoe. It had been cunningly
inset into the line ahead, so that while it projected out behind suf-
ficiently to give the steersman full scope for the play of his paddle,
it was still tightly and strongly bound to the others. To give it
greater guiding force, it was perhaps more heavily weighted than
any of the others. Guesca counted six sleeping warriors at her feet.
" The Mengwe, trusting in their numbers, and vainglorious
as they ever were, took few precautions against surprise. Guesca
gathered from their conversation that they ran the river during
the night only, lying hidden in daytime. She noted with satis-
faction that from the outset they trusted to her guidance, deliber-
ately composing themselves to sleep as best they might in their
cramped and narrow quarters. The murmur of voices gradually
fell off as time went by; the fiery old chief who at first had kept
a vigilant eye on her, himself relaxed his watch and was now in
deep sleep.
1913.] WAHWOUNI 525
" This was well, for the undertone of the approaching falls
could now be distinctly heard. Should any alert ear be listening,
it must surely recognize that crooning sound. Guesca prayed to
Wahwouni and to the spirits of the river to keep all ears closed.
She realized that she was going to her death death if the Mengwe
awoke and discovered their peril in time; death in the falls if
fate held them asleep. That her father was following fast to her
rescue, she never doubted. Ever and anon she looked steadily
into the darkness behind her for some sign of his approach. She
watched too the right hand bankior the great pine which, projecting
out as if it would fall into the river, marked the limit of safety.
Beyond it no canoe dare venture and hope to escape the irresistible
suction of the falls. Canoes travel faster at night than in the day
to Guesca the river banks seemed to fly past her.
" Still the Mengwe slept. Slowly on the right shore something-
dark loomed up; it took shape at last, so that 'she had no doubt it
was the pine. Her time for action had come; these canoes bound
together into one inseparable line, would move as one great bark to
destruction. Bravely she held her place while the fatal pine grew
momentarily more distinct; she would jump into the river only at
the last moment. Now she felt the rocking and straining of the
boats ahead ; it passed like a tremor from bow to stern. She slipped
her foot over the side to make the plunge and there nosing
itself at her elbow rode a silent bark with three figures in it.
She drew the bow towards her, and noiselessly stepped into Mal-
pooga's arms. Then, despite the common danger, flushed with the
fires of resentment and victory, she stood up, and with all the power
of her lungs gave forth the war cry of the Abenaki.
" The yell which went forth from the doomed flotilla was
never forgotten by those who heard it. The rocking and swaying
mass rushed onward, a hundred hasty paddles could not arrest its
momentum. The rolling river bore it to destruction amid the cries
of the Mengwe. The forward line of canoes perched a moment
outwards above the awful chasm, and then took the inevitable
leap to death; above the thunder of the cataract and the crashing
of boats rang the despairing death yell of the Mohawks.
" A line of exultant but awe-struck Abenaki warriors stood
on the right shore, and heard and sensed the dreadful fate of their
enemies. Mauwesta had timed his approach, so that the rescue of
Guesca might be effected at the critical moment. Swiftly now the
two strong paddles forced their canoe backward beyond the danger
526 WAHWOUNI [July,
line; it was soon in safety near the shore. Ready arms were there
to draw it into security, and Guesca stepped ashore beneath the
shadow of the pine, having performed a feat which shall ever
live in the memories of the Abenaki.
" In the morning when the mists had cleared away from the
fatal basin of the falls, our men drew ashore, and scalped at their
leisure one hundred and fifty dead Mohawks. No warrior claimed
a single scalp ; they called them Guesca's. Clinging to the battered
remains of a canoe, a string of thirty scalps was found; Huron
scalps they were; and then our tribe knew what had been the
fate of the embassy which had been on its way to ask the hand of
Guesca. They sent the scalps back with many words of sympathy ;
and from that day onward the Hurons and the Abenaki have
been friends.
" Among the Mohawks to this day the tradition prevails of a
great war party which went from them and down into the land of
the Micmacs and never returned, being swallowed alive by the
a\vful demons which inhabit those waters. But our people knew
better, for they were in at the death.
" It was thus that a maiden brought many scalps to our hands
in the clden days, and saved the Malicetes, our allies, from in-
vasion. In all this she fulfilled the prophecy of Wahwouni, and
opened the way with honor for the return of the tribe to its old
home. What they thought of her, and how they greeted her, and
after due decorum and sorrow had been shown to the dead Nadoga,
what a feast they gave in her honor, when all the people had
gathered together for the return to the sea all this I will not stop
to tell you.
" Strange it was that Nadoga should himself be the victim,
when he had so sorrowfully looked forward to Guesca's dying for
the tribe. Stranger still, that on the return to the seashore the
white men were found to have vacated Abenaki terriory and moved
over among the Micmacs. Wahwouni had killed some by frost and
others by disease, as old Nadoga had promised.
" So that, you see," Peol concluded, " that stone we left on
the other shore was great medicine in the olden times, and very
dangerous to meddle with. Dangerous now " (we will let Peol end
in his own speech), " for no man can tell whether the demon not
still in him. I am of the blood and race of Nadoga and Guesca;
that stone know me at once."
My watch showed midnight when Peol ended his tale. That
1913-] WAHWOUNI 527
there were coincidences in it which were difficult to explain, I
could not deny when I came to think it over. It was, therefore,
with some gingerly respect that I laid Wahwouni away for the
night in a corner of my tent. And still I queried what malfeasance
it might work on Peol before morning.
Upon myself, however, Wahwouni's wrath was destined to
fall. All night my slumbers were broken by the most distressing
dreams, a veritable nightmare of malignant fancies. Now I was
one of the doomed Mohawks slipping over the falls. I could hear
my own groans; again I was Nadoga, scalped and suffering; while
all through the night in a sort of waking consciousness, I was
aware that near by, indistinct but bulky, stood a malignant figure
seeking ever to injure me. It was a relief when morning came, and
with it Peol and his morning coffee. His eyes showed that he, too,
had passed a sleepless night. Had I heard the tramping and ram-
paging of a bull moose around the tents during the night? It had
been so persistent as to keep him from sleep; he had risen to in-
vestigate, but could see nothing; stranger still, he found no traces
of the animal now that morning had come. But he had found that
my canoe had broken adrift during the night, and now lay with
a hole in her bow from pounding on the rocks.
To the sinister Wahwouni I traced, of course, my evil dreams,
Peol's disturbances, and the injury to my canoe he was surely a
malicious spirit. So, while the Indian was absent fishing, I carried
the pyramidal stone to a woody recess, congenial by its darkness,
and there in the bowels of a hollow pine, in which some wild
beast made its winter lair, I left it. Should any of my readers by
chance or of purpose come across this curious reminder of the
ancient worship of the Abenaki, I pray him to beware of the malev-
olence which is contained in that demon stone.
IRew Boohs.
LUTHER. By Hartmann Grisar, SJ. Authorized Translation
from the German by E. M. Lamond. Edited by Luigi Cap-
padelta. Vol. I. St. Louis: B. Herder. $3.25 net.
Father Grisar tells us in his preface that he intends " to give
an exact historical and psychological picture of Luther's person-
ality, which still remains an enigma from so many points of view
to place his interior life, his spiritual development, and his
psychic history well in the foreground." He has endeavored
throughout to make his picture as lifelike as possible by quoting
on nearly every page Luther's very words. Some may object,
he tells us, to this continual quoting, but it gives Luther the fullest
opportunity of defending or accusing himself, especially in matters
which have been diversely interpreted, and on which he was some-
what uncertain himself. There is no danger of the reader's being
bored thereby, for the reformer's originality of expression, and his
vivid, drastic, and often coarse style retains one's interest through-
out. As this book is intended for scholars and not for the edifica-
tion of the young, Luther's words are given, unvarnished and un-
expurgated, just as they appear in his printed pamphlets, his
confidential letters, and his chats with friends and table com-
panions.
Father Grisar makes a special point of refuting the many
extraordinary Luther legends which have sprung up in the course
of controversy, and appear both in the panegyrics of his friends
and in the bitter attacks of his uncritical Catholic opponents.
The book is objective throughout. Father Grisar asks the
question : " Is it really possible for a Catholic to depict Luther
as he really was, without offending Protestant feelings in any way?"
Without any exaggerated optimism, he answers, " I believe it to be
quite possible, because honesty and historical justice must always
be able to find a place somewhere under the sun and wherever
light can be thrown, even in delicate historical questions." He
expressly disclaims any idea of polemics, for he is writing not a
Catholic estimate of the Protestant Reformation, but an impartial
life of Luther. While he never forgets that he is a Catholic, he
hopes that his personal convictions have never led him to misrepre-
sen other people's doctrines, to commit an injustice, or even to
1913.] NEW BOOKS 529
pass an unkind judgment. He asks the reader simply to see for
himself whether every assertion made is, or is not, proved by the
facts or by witnesses.
The English translation is to appear in six volumes. The
first volume treats of Luther up to the year 1519. In the first
five chapters, Father Grisar discusses Luther's early life and his
novitiate in the Erfurt Priory ; his studies and lectures at Erfurt and
Wittenberg; the evil effects of his Roman visit; the positive and
negative influence of Occamism upon his theological views; his ig-
norance of the best scholastics ; his misinterpretation of Tauler and
the German mystics, and the first shaping of his heretical views,
viz., the imputation of Christ's righteousness; denial of all human
freedom for good; the sinful character of natural virtue; the
denial of merit; the persistence of original sin after baptism,
and the identification of concupiscence with sin, etc., etc.
Father Grisar denies that Luther's new and heretical teaching
was due to the direct influence of Humanists like Hutten, Crotus,
and Mutian. On the contrary, full as he was of his one-sided
supra-naturalism, he was forced to disapprove* utterly of the Hu-
manist ideal. Again, it is false to maintain that Luther's struggle
against the old Church originated in his attack on indulgences,
in his desire to reform the Church, or in the rivalry between his
own order and the Dominicans. On the contrary : First, the ques-
tion of indulgences was raised only subsequent to Luther's first
great departure from the Church's doctrine; second, he was far
more preoccupied in the beginning with the question of the theology
of St. Paul and of St. Augustine than with the abuses of the
Church, and, third, his erroneous teaching appeared prior to his
controversy with Tetzel, and before he had even thought of the
Dominicans, Prierias and Cardinal Cajetan. Jealousy against his
adversaries, the Dominicans, afterwards added fuel to the flames,
but it was not the starting point.
The real origin of Luther's teaching must be sought in the
fundamental principle which governed him, which was fostered
by the decline in his life as a religious and a priest, and more
particularly by his inordinate love of his own opinions, and by
the uncharitable criticisms he passed, upon others. This was his
unfavorable estimate of good works, and of every effort, na-
tural or supernatural, on the part of man. He made his own
the deadly error that man by his natural powers is unable to do
anything but sin. To this he added that the man who, by
VOL. xcvu. 34
530 NEW BOOKS [July,
God's grace, is raised to justification through divinely-infused
faith and trust must, it is true, perform good works, but that
the latter are not to be accounted meritorious. All works avail
nothing as means for arriving at righteousness and eternal sal-
vation ; faith alone effects both.
Father Grisar gives a number of reasons to account for Lu-
ther's becoming a heretic, " without perhaps at -first being aware
of it." Among them are the following : his meagre and superficial
theological studies, which left him utterly unacquainted with the
golden age of scholasticism; his faulty training in the decadent,
nominalistic school of Occam; his growing antipathy to so-called
holiness by' works ; his obstinacy and egotism, which made him
credit St. Paul, St. Augustine, and the writers of Holy Writ with
his own peculiar views; his false mysticism which made him
travesty Tauler and St. Bernard, and clothe his new ideas in the
deceptive dress of piety; his own morbid personal condition, which
made him doubt about his own election, and fear that he was pre-
destined to hell, and, lastly, his spiritual pride, which, as Denifle says,
" made him despair of himself and despair of God's grace, which
assists us to keep the law of God, that our concupiscence resists."
Chapters VI. -X. give a good account of Luther's heretical
views as set forth in his Commentary on Romans (1515-1516) and
on Galatians (1516-1517) ; of his life as Superior of eleven Augus-
tinian houses ; of his indulgence theses, and of his final " dis-
covery " in the monastery tower of salvation by faith alone, and
the absolute assurance of one's state of grace.
One of the most interesting chapters in the whole volume is
the ninth, which deals with Tetzel and the indulgence granted by
Leo X. for the building of St. Peter's. Our author is outspoken
in his condemnation of the unworthy bargaining whereby Albert of
Brandenburg, Archbishop and Elector of Mayence, managed to
secure for his diocese one-half of the total proceeds of the indul-
gence fund, in order to repay his indebtedness to his bankers, the
Fuggers of Augsburg. He says:
We cannot here refrain from drawing attention to a fact
which stands for all time as a solemn warning to the pastors
of the Church It was a transaction which certainly was
unworthy of so sacred a cause as that of an indulgence, and
which can only be explained by the evil customs of that day,
the pressure applied by Albert's agents, and the influence of
% the avaricious Florentine party at the Papal Court It sup-
1913-] NEW BOOKS 531
plied Luther with welcome matter for his charges, and with a
deceitful pretext for the seducing of countless souls.
Of Tetzel, Father Grisar writes that, although he did not
exactly shine as an example of virtue, the charges of immorality
against him are as baseless as the reproach of gross ignorance.
He was in no sense a great theologian, and as a popular preacher
was forward, audacious, given to exaggeration, and noted for
expressions that were strange and ill-considered. Luther's accusa-
tions against him of having sold forgiveness of sins for money
without requiring contrition, and of having even been ready to
absolve from future sins for a price, are utterly false and unjust,
as the Protestant Paulus has very well shown. Even Carlstadt,
after he had left the Church, admitted that Tetzel's indulgence
sermons were Catholic in tone. Tetzel surely knew what an indul-
gence was, for he writes in his Vorlegung: " The Indulgence remits
only the penalty of sins which have been repented of and confessed."
"No one merits an indulgence unless he is in a truly contrite
state."
Yet we must admit on the testimony of his own confreres of
the time that he brought the pecuniary side of the indulgence too
much in the foreground, and advocated in his sermons an opinion
held by some scholastics, that an indulgence gained for the dead
was at once infallibly applied to the soul for whom it was destined.
Luther, however, was altogether wrong in declaring this opinion
a teaching of the Church or of the Popes. Tetzel also taught
the erroneous proposition that a plenary indulgence for the dead
could be obtained without contrition and penance on the part of
the living, simply by means of a money payment. But to consider
Tetzel, as many do, the cause of the whole Reformation movement
which began in 1517, is fanciful in the extreme. "Notwithstand-
ing the efforts which Luther made to represent the matter in this
light, it has been clearly proved that his own spiritual development
was the cause, or at least the principal cause."
We are certain that this book will remain for all time the
standard life of Luther. While utilizing in innumerable passages
the scholarly researches of his great predecessor Benin 1 e, Father
Grisar now and then differs from his conclusions, and on the whole
is more inclined to give Luther the benefit of the doubt in con-
troverted questions. The volume before us is very well translated.
We trust that the many errata will disappear in the second edition.
532 NEW BOOKS [July,
THE HISTORY OF THE POPES, FROM THE CLOSE OF THE
MIDDLE AGES. From the German of Dr. Ludwig Pastor.
Edited by Ralph Francis Kerr, of the London Oratory. Vols.
XL and XII. St. Louis: B. Herder. $3.00 net.
The latest volumes, eleven and twelve, in Pastor's Plistory
of the Popes covers the period 1534-1549. If one will even hur-
riedly recall the many events, of supreme importance to the Church,
that were crowded into these fifteen years, it will not seem surprising
that Dr. Pastor devotes two volumes, almost twelve hundred pages,
to the history of that brief space of time. The spread of Prot-
estantism in almost every country of Europe; the rise and growth
of the Jesuit order; the Catholic reformation, culminating in the
Council of Trent ; the crusade against the Turks ; the politico-relig-
ious activities of Charles V., Francis L, and Henry VIII., must
all be told in such a work as that in hand. Furthermore, Dr.
Pastor invariably and very wisely gives space for a rather
thorough treatment of matters beyond the bare narrative of events.
Indeed he is writing a history of the times, as well as a history of
the Popes; and his occasional descriptions of human life, of the
manners and customs of the period, are not the least important, and
perhaps the most illuminating and interesting feature of the work.
We dare say, therefore, that the author's principal difficulty, es-
pecially in view of the amazing extent of his reading amongst
books and manuscripts, has been to condense the story of fifteen
years into two volumes, and to make the fourteen volumes, as origi-
nally planned, suffice for the most-crowded and perhaps most-impor-
tant and critical two hundred and fifty years in all the history of
the Church.
At this distance from the early years of the Protestant ref-
ormation, it is difficult to understand how the leaders of the Church
could have acted so supinely, when face to face with such a calamit-
ous schism. What seems to us so obvious, was, apparently, to
be learned by them only by means of repeated and accumulated dis-
asters. Up to the time of the Council of Trent, the moral and
disciplinary abuses in the ecclesiastical world, while somewhat less
than in the days of the Renaissance, were yet serious enough to give
an apparent justification to the Protestant claim for change. As
a matter of fact, the spirit of the Renaissance was still a powerful
influence. And, as Pastor says, " the new ecclesiastical tendencies
were met by a vigorous opposition. Paul III. was himself the
incarnate spirit of the times. His life, previous to his elevation
1913.] NEW BOOKS 533
to the supreme power, had been far from exemplary. As Pope
he seems to have undergone a moral revolution; but the mental
revolution so necessary for him came about but slowly. He awak-
ened but gradually to a full realization of the seriousness of what
was being done before his eyes, and he was always inclined to
permit, in his court, a spirit of gayety quite out of keeping with the
lamentable condition of the Church in general. It is surprising, for
example, if not shocking, to read that he encouraged the renewal
of the carnival in 1536, 1538, 1541, and 1545, the very years when
the schism in Germany and in England was attaining its complete
strength. There was martyrdom in England and merrymaking in
Rome at the same time. Again, Vergeno, the nuncio at Vienna,
was compelled to labor hard to convince the Pope that conditions
in Bavaria, and throughout Germany, were terribly sad. Paul III.
did, indeed, come to a realization of that fact, but the wonder is
that he had not learned it earlier. He was the closest man to
the papal throne in several pontificates previous to his own; yet
he seems to have awakened to an understanding of the hopeless
condition in Germany only after his own reign was pretty well
under way. The state of affairs in England he appreciated rightly
only after Henry VIII. had given evidence again and again that he
was in deadly earnest in his opposition to Rome.
Of course it must be admitted that the Pope was unfortunate
in being obliged to deal with three such slippery knaves as Henry
VIIL, Charles V., and Francis I. ; and he was, besides, too near
the events to realize their meaning, but when all allowance has
been made, it remains a melancholy fact that neither the Pope
nor the Roman court seems to have understood fully that they
were witnesses to a tremendous religious cataclysm.
Finally, the awakening came. The Catholic reform was under-
taken. The two chief elements in that true reformation were
the Council of Trent and the Jesuit order. The story of the
attempts to convene the Council is painful reading. The story of
the rise and growth of the Society of Jesus is thrilling, and alto-
gether the most encouraging phenomenon in all that period. There
is more immediate evidence of the presence of the Spirit of God
in the undoubtedly supernatural success of St. Ignatius and his
companions than in all the plans of the ecclesiastics for an im-
possible reconciliation with Protestants. Pastor says of Le Jay, the
companion of Peter Faber, " he looked for salvation much more in a
reformation of morals than in the contests of theologians." And
534 NEW BOOKS [July,
it is to the eternal honor of the Jesuits that they led the Church
in effecting that reformation of morals. They lived and taught
the reformation that was later demanded at Trent.
And there is the truly inspiriting fact that is evident in the
history of that melancholy generation God never abandons His
people ; He is ever with His Church. Ideals are never lost. Ideal-
ists, nay saints, will always respond to the call of the Church, even
in times of greatest calamity. Companions to Ignatius seem to
have sprung from the ground like the fighters of Roderick Dhu.
The Jesuits gave the impulse. A score of other orders and societies
leaped from the earth. The Church took courage. The true ref-
ormation began, and as soon as it grew to maturity, Protestant-
ism stopped still in its tracks.
All this, and more, is evident to the reader of these two
volumes. The story is told with all the well-known skill of that
master-historian, Pastor. Of course, these volumes, with the rest
of the work, are indispensable for students, and for all who would
know Church History.
WINDS OF DOCTRINE. Studies in Contemporary Opinion. By
G. Santayana, late Professor of Philosophy in Harvard Uni-
versity. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.75 net.
However strongly one may differ from Mr. Santayana's view
of life, it is always a pleasure to read what he has written. In liter-
ary quality and mental distinction, there are few to equal him, as
those who have read his Sense of Beauty, his Poetry and Religion,
and his Three Philosophical Poets, not to mention the Life of Rea-
son, already know. But this new book of his should attract the at-
tention of thinking Catholics, for in a manner especially detached
and impartial he reviews the various phases of religious and philo-
sophical opinion just now popular in the English-speaking world.
Standing high above the swirl of conventional thought, an intel-
lectual ascetic with no personal or practical interests, he is content
to observe and analyze it as an expression and revelation of modern
life. " Our whole life and mind," he cries, " is saturated with
the slow upward filtration of a new spirit that of an emancipated,
atheistic, international democracy. These epithets," he tells us,
" may make us shudder ; but what they describe is something posi-
tive and self-justified, something deeply rooted in our animal nature
which, like every vital impulse, is pregnant with a morality of its
own." Such a challenging accusation is typical of many more, and
1913.] NEW BOOKS 535
there is enough truth in it to make us qualify it with searching
thoughts of our own. Or take his very acute analysis of the
mental instability so characteristic of all who are without some
positive religious conviction.
Moral confusion is not limited to the world at large, always
the scene of profound conflicts, but it has penetrated to the
mind and heart of the average individual. Never perhaps were
men so like one another and so divided within themselves. In
other ages, even more than at present, different classes of < men
have stood at different levels of culture, with a magnificent
readiness to persecute or to be martyred for their respective
principles. These militant believers have been keenly conscious
that they had enemies ; but their enemies were strangers to them,
whom they could think of merely as such, regarding them as
blank negative forces, hateful black devils, whose existence
might make life difficult but could not confuse the ideal of life
Everyone sincerely felt that the right was entirely on his
side, a proof that such intelligence as he had moved freely and
exclusively within the lines of his faith. The result of this was
that his faith was intelligent (and may we add morally dy-
namic), I mean, that he understood it, and had a clear, almost
instinctive perception of what was compatible or incompatible
with it. He defended his walls and cultivated his garden.
How very clearly such a paragraph as this justifies the Catho-
lic position, and to no one more than to the Catholic himself.
Human nature is a limited thing, its very perfection is conditional
on some wise limitation; we must have our walls to defend, if we
wish to have our gardens to cultivate. Voltaire it was who coun-
selled us to destroy our walls, and then to cultivate our gardens.
Limitation is the basis of Catholic thought, just as humility is the
basis of Catholic life. Outside the Church there is nothing but
confusion of clear intelligence and the blurring of moral distinc-
tions; there is no pattern of life; there is no energy to live it out.
A book of this kind is useful, then, in so far as it goes now to one
philosophy or creed, now to another, and picks up the separate
pieces of the human puzzle which go to the making of the great
Catholic plan.
We have no space to notice each of these brilliant essays in de-
tail; they include a criticism of the Bergson philosophy, of Mr. Ber-
trand Russell's work, and of American contemporary life; also an
appreciation of Shelley, and a very damaging examination of the
536 NEW BOOKS [July,
Modernist theory. According to Mr. Santayana, the Modernist
Movement against the Church is wholly illogical. " To divorce,
as Modernists do, the history of the world from the story of salva-
tion, and God's government and the sanctions of religion from the
operation of matter, is a fundamental apostasy from Christianity."
It is merely silly, he thinks, for the Modernists to accuse the Church
of being untrue to the sublime ideals of the Gospel. " They talk
a great deal of development, and they do not see that what they
detest in the Church is a perfect development of its original essence;
that monachism, scholasticism, Jesuitism, ultramontanism, and vati-
canism are all thoroughly apostolic; beneath the overtones imposed
by a series of ages they give out the full and exact note of the
New Testament. Much has been added but nothing has been
lost." This essay should be carefully studied by Catholic apolo-
gists.
THE NAMES OF GOD. By Yen. Leonard Lessius, S.J. Trans-
lated by T. J. Campbell, S.J. New York : The America Press.
$1.08 postpaid.
For the average believer the attributes of God are puzzling,
inconceivable, dazzling realities, of which he cannot form clear,
definite concepts; realities which are to be grasped and securely
held by faith while we see things as in a glass, since they can be
understood and appreciated only when we see Him face to face.
The divine perfections, however, have often been favorite sub-
jects of meditation for holy souls. They may have found them
difficult, but they also found them full of meat and drink for the
soul. What is meant by these attributes, and how they are in
God, is simply and briefly explained by Lessius in that work of his
which forms the first part of this translation by Father Campbell,
and provides its title. Some of the author's pious reflections on
the Divine attributes, put in the form of prayers, make up the
second part of the work.
IN GOD'S NURSERY. By C. C. Martindale, S.J. New York:
Longmans, Green & Co. $1.25 net.
A volume of quiet unusual short stories is this called In
God's Nursery. They are written by C. C. Martindale, S.J., and
appeared originally in the pages of the Month. Most of them deal
with some ancient civilization, and their manner is unique. We
have had ancient civilization portrayed for us often in fiction, to
1913.] NEW BOOKS 537
be sure ; Ben Hur and Fabiola and Callista had a host of imitators.
But a novel like Ben Hur or Fabiola is one grand and splendid
panorama of history a long painting of glowing colors and vast
distances. These little stories are bits of mosaic. They are dainty
and delicate; it might at first seem petty in scope. But rather are
they like a quatrain by Father Tabb, a tiny cup exquisitely fash-
ioned to hold a dewdrop. The thought in each is single and
crystal-clear.
Several of the stories tell of those almost forgotten little
personages, the children of the far past. We meet the naughty
little Greek boy, Theon, who sends a letter on papyrus to his
father, to announce in bad spelling and worse temper that he wants
a lyre, and " won't never " eat and drink if he doesn't get it. Much
more appealing is the little Roman girl, Calpurnia the Less, who
runs away from her nurse, and is terrified by the tales of a little
boy she meets, tales of the revengeful ghosts, the Manes, and the
ceremonies of bean-throwing in propitiation. She is reassured
later, however, by her kindly Uncle Ovid, who reads to her the
gentle epitaphs on the tombs along the Flaminian Way, and who
even lets her witness the pretty ceremonies of the Parentalia.
Gradually her fear of the dead is diminished ; she learns to wreathe
flowers for their graves, and to hope that they have found a
" perpetual peace."
Throughout the story of Calpurnia the author traces the purest
religious instinct among the Romans, and the vague but sure belief
in a future life that was theirs as a part of their human heritage.
And even prettier is the tale of six-year-old Manlius, who broke
off the head of his sister Petronilla's doll, and suffered agonies
of remorse after Petronilla had been sent to the temple to become a
Vestal Virgin.
In the story called Roma Felix, the main idea of the author's
mind is definitely phrased. I mean the idea of our religious kinship
with the peoples of antiquity. More lights have been lighted for
us, but they in their darkness were also struggling toward the
same "lux ceterna" In Roma Felix an Englishman reading the
Eclogues in a garden in Sussex holds an interview with the shade
of Vergil, and the two naturally fall to discussing philosophy and
religion. At last the poet rises to depart, and says, with his
gentle smile : " There were millions and millions of us, of one
blood with you over all the earth, groping after God if haply we
might find Him, tendebantque manus ripce ulterioris amore, stretch-
538 NEW BOOKS [July,
ing out their hands in longing for the farther shore. Well," he
ended,
" 'Attulit et nobis aliquando optantibus atas
Adventum auxiliumque Dei.' "
THREE YEARS IN THE LIBYAN DESERT. Travels, Discov-
eries, and Excavations of the Menas Expedition. By J. C.
Ewald Falls. St. Louis: B. Herder. $4.50 net.
The object of the Kaufmann Expedition was " to rediscover
the highly important, long, and vainly-sought early Christian sanc-
tuary in the Libyan Desert, the Tomb of St. Menas. St. Menas
whose feast is celebrated by the Catholic and Greek Churches on
November nth, and by the Coptic Church on the fifteenth of the
month of Hatur, was an Egyptian officer in the Roman serv-
ice towards the end of the third century. His father was Prefect
of Phrygia in Asia Minor. The young Menas was brought up
a Christian by his parents, and against his will was compelled
by his father's successor in the prefecture to enter the regiment
of the Rutilaces. All went well until the persecution of Dio-
cletian. It was carried on with great severity, especially against
the Christian soldiers of the provinces. In due course the decree
came to Kotyaion (now Kutahia), where in 1833 Mohammed AH
of Egypt concluded a peace with Turkey. Menas, who was sta-
tioned there, fled into the outskirts of the desert, where he lived
a hard-working life of self-denial. Here a vision was vouch-
safed him, which stimulated him to martyrdom, and prophesied the
importance of his future sanctuary.
On the day of the riders' festival in the stadium of Kotyaion,
just as the games were about to begin, Menas stepped boldly
into the arena, and in a loud voice declared himself a Christian.
The governor, a friend of his family, was most friendly to the pop-
ular young officer. He imprisoned him according to law, but
did his utmost to make him abjure. As Menas remained stead-
fast, the angry governor eventually ordered him to be whipped
with thorns or ox-hide, and his flesh torn with iron scorpions.
As no torture could shake his constancy, he was at last beheaded,
A. D. 296. His body was burned, although the Christians succeeded
in snatching it from the flames, hoping some day to bury it, as was
his wish, in his native Egypt. Soon after, some of the Phrygian
troops were ordered to Cyrenaica, and the Christian officer, Athana-
sius> was given the command. He took the remains of the martyr
1913.] NEW BOOKS 539
with him. At the lake of Mareotis, the first stopping place between
Alexandria and Cyrenaica, a great battle was fought and won.
When Athanasius attempted to proceed with the body of Menas, the
camel who bore it refused to stir, and so the saint was buried on
the spot. A church was built over this grave in the days when
St. Athanasius ruled as Patriarch of Alexandria. All the bishops
and priests of Egypt took part in the consecration of the sanctuary.
As the church became too small for the innumerable pilgrims who
came to visit the shrine, an enormous basilica was built on 'the
site by the Emperor Arcadius. Later on the Emperor Zeno built
a city and erected a palace for himself near the church, and es-
tablished a large permanent garrison as a protection against .the
Bedouins.
It was this city and church which Monsignor Kaufmann of
Frankfort, and his nephew who wrote the volume before us, located
on July 7, 1905, after a long and persevering search. Backed by
the moral support of the influential Schiess Pascha, the President
of the Alexandrian Antiquities Commission, they obtained per-
mission from the Egyptian government to excavate the ruins of
what has been aptly called The Egyptian Lourdes. Dr. Bode of
the Berlin Museum and other friends furnished the money, and
the two archaeologists spent the next three years unearthing the
tomb of St. Menas, the Constantine Church, the Arcadius basilica,
the baptistry and consignatorium, and the baths of Menas. In
all the rooms of the baths water vessels were found, and many of
the well-known Menas ampullae, on which were written invocations
to the saint. Just as at Lourdes to-day, the pilgrims of this
fourth century shrine bathed in the baths of St. Menas, and carried
home some of the water with them to use in sickness.
There is an excellent chapter on the religion and customs
of the Bedouins. The story of the three years labors of these
two indefatigable savants keeps one's interest to the end. The book
is fairly well translated, though now and again the careful reader
will realize that it is a translation.
FROM HUSSAR TO PRIEST. A Memoir of Charles Rose Chase.
By H. P. Russell. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner
& Co. 5 s. net.
" This memoir of a friend " writes the author in his Epilogue,
" was undertaken, not without hesitation, at the request of friends
who are desirous of some such memorial of one who exercised so
540 NEW BOOKS [July,
great an influence for good, and hope that a memoir may in some
measure help to perpetuate that influence."
In May, 1875, Father Chase, then a High Church Anglican
clergyman, met Monsignor Robinson at the Hotel Schweizerhof in
Lucerne. They discussed together the utter lack of unity in the
Established Church, and Father Chase left for England, as he him-
self said, " absolutely convinced of the claims of the Catholic
Church to his allegiance." He stopped over in Paris on his way
home, entered the church of Notre Dame de Victoire, and there
spent a whole day in prayer for light. Strangely enough, he rose
from his knees feeling convinced that the Anglican Church was
right. He spent the next twenty-five years in perfect good faith as
a clergyman of the Church of England, until in 1900 the public
denial of the Real Presence by the two Anglican archbishops con-
vinced him that communion with the Anglican system was hence-
forth impossible.
He wrote in a letter from Milan at the time : " After all,
though there are many saintly men and women in the Church of
England, they do not represent her teaching who can do that but
her two archbishops who have denied the Real Presence, and the
bishops who, without a word, acquiesce in their heresy? If the
Church of England was the Catholic Church in England, every
bishop, priest, and layman would denounce the archbishops as
heretics. St. Ambrose, fifteen hundred years ago, writing from
this same Milan, said : ( Ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia where Peter is,
there is the Church.' But it has taken me a lamentable time to
find that out that there must always be a Peter in the Church
to feed the Christian sheep." At the shrine of his great patron,
St. Charles, in the Cathedral of Milan, all the clouds of doubt
rolled away forever. The veil fell from his eyes, and the cer-
tainty of faith was his.
Every one agrees that Father Chase was a most winning
and lovable man. His appearance was singularly striking and
attractive. He was tall and dignified, of courteous bearing, of
refined address, and with something of the soldier's manner still
clinging to him. He had a strong yet loving disposition, and his
cheerfulness won him countless friends and many converts.
When Cardinal Vaughan, realizing the great good affected
by the special apostolate of the Paulist Fathers in the United
States among non-Catholics, looked around for a man to carry on
the same work in England, he selected Father Chase, making him
1913.] NEW BOOKS 541
Superior of the Diocesan Missionaries of Our Lady of Compassion.
The author says : " These missions to non-Catholics appeared at
first to have been looked at askance by seemingly everyone except
the Cardinal. Their results, however, have proved so encour-
aging as to have brought about a great change of feeling in regard
to them. So true is this that priests all over the country are
anxious for them, and other priests besides the missionaries es-
tablished by Cardinal Vaughan are now giving them."
We recommend this book most highly, and feel confident
that Father Chase's singleness of purpose, and his personal love
of our Lord, will prove an inspiration to the clergy of both England
and America.
EUROPEAN CITIES AT WORK. By Frederick C. Howe, Ph.D.
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.75 net.
This book is a study of the cities of Germany and Great
Britain gained by personal contact with burgomasters, officials,
and business men in Berlin, Frankfort, Hamburg, Diisseldorf, Dres-
den, and Munich; and with the mayors and councilmen of Glas-
gow, Manchester, Liverpool, and London. It is the result of many
visits to Europe by the author, who went abroad to make munic-
ipal investigations for the United States Government and for the
Boston Chamber of Commerce.
Mr. Howe writes most enthusiastically of the cities of Ger-
many. In most respects he declares them superior to ours. To
his mind the chief reason of our inferiority lies in the American
denial of home rule, our cities being in bondage to a higher author-
ity, the State, to which they must constantly go for relief. They
cannot enter on the smallest undertaking until a reluctant legislature
has granted the required permission. Our cities are often obliged
to spend $100,000 instead of a $1,000,000, because of the debt limit
arbitrarily fixed at the State Capitol. They cannot independently
regulate the public service corporations; secure better street-car
or subway service; extend new territory; regulate the tenements
or slums, or limit the height, style, and character of their buildings.
Privileged interests, political bosses, and suspicious farmers have
rendered most of our cities hopelessly incompetent.
Strangely enough, monarchial Germany seems far more dem-
ocratic than free America.
It assumes as a matter of course that the city should be as
powerful as a private individual, certainly as powerful as a
542 NEW BOOKS [July,
private corporation. And the things forbidden are relatively
few. The city has wide latitude in the ways it can raise its
revenues. It can adopt business, license, or real-estate taxes,
and fix the rates that shall be paid. There is no legal limit
to the tax rate nor are there any limits on the amount of
money that can be borrowed, or the purposes for which it can
be used The city engages in land speculation for profit ;
it owns farms and forests, docks and harbors, savings banks,
mortgage institutions, and pawn shops. It loans money for
house building, erects houses for its working people, owns opera
houses, theatres, and exposition buildings, and operates wine
handling businesses for profit. It controls the land speculator
and plans his land for him ; it determines the purposes for which
the land shall be used before it is sold The cities pre-
scribe where factories shall go, etc., etc.
The German city is governed by experts who devote their
lives to it. They prepare themselves for city administration as
they do for law, medicine or any other profession. They take
special courses at the universities and technical schools, the better
to fit themselves for town planning, sanitation, engineering, finance,
and education. On graduation, they compete for a municipal post
with candidates from all over Germany, for municipal administra-
tion is for the expert and not for the mere politician.
Town planning has received more attention with the Germans
than with us. Within the past fifteen years almost every German
city has undertaken a more or less ambitious planning project.
Experts have been employed to lay out suburbs, plan city centres,
locate public buildings; introduce new streets into old quarters,
and to give advice on sanitation, housing, etc. The American
rectangular arrangement of streets is generally rejected as monot-
onous and lacking in beauty. The main thoroughfares are often a
hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty feet in width. The
Germans have this advantage over us in town planning, in that
the German city is often the largest land owner in a community.
The building ordinances insist generally on a universal sky line as
well as on a universal house frontage. The water fronts which with
us are often given over to railway tracks, warehouses, and factories,
are features of the German city's beauty, and are developed as
promenades and parkways.
Municipal ownership has made great progress in Germany.
Mr. Howe describes in detail its working in Dusseldorf, a town of
over three hundred and fifty thousand. This city owns the gas
1913.] NEW BOOKS 543
works, the electric plant, and the street railway ; it speculates largely
in land; runs a municipal mortgage bank and a savings bank; oper-
ates a pawn shop; maintains a labor exchange; carries on a wine
business, and owns a number of restaurants. All this has been
done not by socialists, but by hard-headed business men, who
deem this the best sort of municipal investment. The budget of
Dusseldorf is, however, very large $28,250,000, or about $100
per capita, which is about five times the per capita budget of Cleve-
land, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, or Chicago. Its indebtedness is about
the same amount, but the city possesses assets of over $40,000,000,
which not only earn the interest charges on the cost, but turn into
the city treasury a substantial revenue for the relief of taxation.
Mr. Howe is not so enthusiastic about the British cities,
although he grants they are generally honest and efficient. He
calls special attention to the great extent of land monopoly. One-
fourth of the land of the United Kingdom is owned by twelve
hundred persons, another fourth by sixty-two hundred owners,
while the remaining half is distributed between 312,150 persons.
There are twelve landlords who own 4,500,000 acres. The land
underlying London with its 7,000,000 people is owned in large part
by nine estates. Incredible as it may seem, land as land pays no
direct taxes for local purposes at all. In fact the land has not
been assessed for taxation since 1692, when Great Britain was an
agricultural country, and London was little more than a village.
Such powers as the American city enjoys as a matter of course
in condemnation proceedings, special assessments, the issuance of
bonds, the management of water undertakings, the building of
docks, and the opening of markets, do not exist in Great Britain.
We think that Mr. Howe might have devoted more than two
pages on the many things which are being done better by the
American city than by any other city in the world. But in his
interesting volume he has pointed out many things that our city
fathers could study with profit, even if we do not want the pater-
nalism of Germany to rule supreme in these free United States.
THE DRIFT OF ROMANTICISM. By Paul Elmer More. Bos-
ton: Houghton Mifflin Co. $1.25 net.
Mr. More states in his preface : " The romantic movement,
beneath all its show of expansion and vitality, seems to me at
its heart to be just a drift towards disintegration and disease."
To prove this strange thesis, he discusses in turn " the morbid
544 NEW BOOKS [July,
egotism of Beckford; the religious defalcation of Newman; the
sestheticism of Pater; the naturalistic pantheism of Fiona Macleod
(William Sharp) ; the impotent revolt from humanitarian sym-
pathy of Nietzsche, and the confusion of ideas of Huxley."
When one sees this most extraordinary group put forward as
types of degenerate romanticism, one wonders how Mr. More
is going to define the term. On reading his definition, we are
conscious of the feeling of irritation which he professes to have
felt while reading Pater. "If I had to designate very briefly
this underlying principle which gives to historic romance a char-
acter radically different from the mystery and wonder of classic
art, I should define it as that expansive conceit of the emotions
which goes with the illusion of beholding the infinite within the
stream of nature itself instead of apart from the stream."
The sane thinker is obliged to confess that Mr. More's earnest
striving after an original synthesis is but a vain beating of the
air. He fails utterly to prove his thesis, although occasionally
he manages to give us a few critical estimates of some of the writers
he discusses. Of Fiona Macleod he writes : " The simple fact is
that Mr. Sharp, having got the trick of this sort of symbolic writ-
ing, found it delightfully easy, and indulged in it without restraint.
Possibly he deceived himself into believing that to write without
thought is to write with inspiration."
Of Nietzsche he writes : " His writing is too often in a style of
spasmodic commonplace, displaying a tortured effort to appear pro-
found."
The sum of Pater's philosophy was : " The admonition to train
our body and mind to the highest point of acuteness so as to catch,
as it were, each fleeting glimpse of beauty on the wing, and by
the intensity of our participation to compensate for the insecurity
of the world's gifts in a word, the admonition to make of life itself
an art."
The essay on Cardinal Newman best shows Mr. More's limit-
ations. He is as capable of understanding him as the average
layman is of understanding the intricacies of Hindu law. Newman,
we are told, was seldom at his best as a letter writer, and there-
fore Wilfrid Ward in his Life " printed a good deal of unentertain-
ing correspondence that was not necessary to an understanding of
Newman's character." Of course Catholicism " if it did not silence,
at least muffled his magic voice;" i. e., from the viewpoint of style.
We rub our eyes when we read the following : " Newman's con-
1913.] NEW BOOKS 545
version was a failure in duty, a betrayal of the will. In succumbing
to an authority which promised to allay the anguish of his intel-
lect, he rejected the great mission of faith." In other words :
" He might have accepted manfully the skeptical demolition of
the Christian mythology, and the whole fabric of external religion,
and on the ruins of such creeds he might have risen to that supreme
insight which demands no revelation, and is dependent on no
authority, but is content with itself." Or again : " He might
have held to the national worship as a symbol of the religious ex-
perience of the people, and into that worship and that symbol he
might have breathed the new fervor of his own faith."
Mr. More's theology negatives all notion of a divine revelation,
and a divine teaching authority ; his philosophy knows nothing either
of logic or of objective truth.
No wonder then that he fails to understand Cardinal New-
man's place either in literature or in philosophy. Why Newman
should have figured in this volume at all is utterly beyond us.
In conclusion we might say of Mr. More's essays what he says
of Nietzsche : " Most of his book is just the sort of spasmodic
commonplace that enraptures the half -cultured, and flatters them
with thinking they have discovered a profound philosophical basis
for their untutored emotions."
SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT AND MORAL PROGRESS. By
Alfred Russel Wallace, F.R.S. New York: The Cassell Co.
$1.25.
Alfred Russel Wallace will ever be associated with Charles
Darwin as the author of the Theory of Natural Selection. And
now, at ninety years of age, this venerable scientist has written a
little sociological manual full of vision and moral hope, in which
he makes an urgent demand for the spiritual invigoration of civil-
ized life. How is such a profound and collective realization of
moral principles to be directed? "No definite advance in morals
can occur in any race unless there is some selective or segregative
agency at zvork." Where are we to look for such an agency?
Before attempting to answer this last and vitally important question,
he addresses himself to a consideration of the facts of historic and
contemporary life. He asserts, in the face of a prevalent and
shallow optimism, a few of the facts of human nature which Catho-
lics have always and everywhere believed. There is no necessary
connection, he believes, between the lapse of ages and the improve-
VOL. xcvu. 35
546 NEW BOOKS [July,
ment of the human race. Indeed there is a tendency to degeneration
or recession directly an individual or a society abstains from con-
scious moral or intellectual effort; there is, in fact, a general weak-
ness inherent in human nature which prevents automatic progress
towards what is best. He holds that intellectual and moral genius
is rare and infrequent, because the higher intellectual and moral
powers are so rarely of a life-preserving value. May we not argue
from this that they are given us for ends which transcend the
needs of this present life, and are only intended to reach their
fullest development and use in the life which is to come?
He also holds that "there has been no definite advance of
morality from age to age, and even that the lowest races, at each
period, possessed the same intellectual and moral nature as the
higher." There have been risings and fallings, periods and places
of improvement or decay; individuals in all ages of astonishing vir-
tues or vices ; now one and now another nation sitting in darkness
and in the shadow of death, now one and now another finding a pre-
carious place in the sun. Coming to our own time, he points out
how mechanical invention has enabled man to ransack the treasures
of the world, and to produce an unprecedented accumulation of
wealth. But with what results? "This rapid growth of wealth,
and increase of our power over Nature, put too great a strain upon
our crude civilization and our superficial Christianity, and it was
accompanied by various forms of social immorality amazing
and unprecedented." In the five following chapters he gives details
of this social immorality, and sums up with the verdict that we are
" guilty of a lack of national morality that has never been surpassed
in any former age."
What is to be done? The remaining chapters of the book
provide a basis of solution conceived on spiritual and scientific
lines. Dr. Russel Wallace at first is careful to explain exactly
what the Theory of Natural Selection really is and what it is not,
where it holds good and where it ceases to apply. As applied to
the brute world it rests upon two facts : ( i ) the great variability in
all common and widespread species, and (2) their enormous power
of increase. The great variability in these animal species allows
the strongest of their number to adapt themselves gradually to the
environment in which they are placed, while their enormous power
of increase enables these same stronger members of each species
to survive, while the weaker ones die out. In this way it happens
tha,t only the fittest survive. Now this process of Natural Selec-
[
1913.] NEW BOOKS 547
tion obtains throughout the whole brute creation, and there is no
other process at work there sufficiently powerful to check or super-
sede it. But with man the case is entirely different. The mis-
take of many eminent scientists, and of most popular scientific
writers in the past, and even in the present generation, has been
to apply the theory of Natural Selection to man without stopping
to inquire how its action has been checked and even superseded
when applied to human life. There is an absolute distinction be-
tween brute life and human life, says Dr. Russel Wallace, a dis-
tinction which Natural Selection, as the basis of the evolutionary
theory, can never account for.
Man, according to Dr. Wallace, is possessed of a lofty intel-
lect, and
besides this lofty intellect is gifted with what we term a moral
sense : insistent perception of justice and injustice, of right and
wrong, of order and beauty and truth, which as a whole con-
stitute his moral and aesthetic nature The long course of
human history leads us to the conclusion that this higher nature
of man arose at some far distant epoch at a time when by
the influx of some portion of the spirit of Deity man became
a " living soul."
What change, then, asks the author, has this higher nature of
man produced in the action of the laws of variation and Natural
Selection? A detailed answer to this question is given which may
be summed up in the final conclusion, that in the realm of human
nature Natural Selection has been very largely superseded by a
higher form of selection based on the Christian law of life. The
" survival of the fittest " gives place to " mutual aid." We select
for moral and mental and not merely for physical qualities, and
the highest of the former may co-exist with the lowest of the latter.
But there are many who in theory or fact repudiate this higher
Christian law,
who are so imbued with the universality of Natural Selection as
a beneficial law of Nature that they object to our interference
with its action in, as they urge, the elimination of the unfit by
disease and death, even when such diseases are caused by the
insanitary conditions of our modern cities, or the misery and
destitution due to our immoral and irrational social system.
Such writers entirely ignore the undoubted fact that affection,
sympathy, compassion form as essential a part of human nature
as do the higher intellectual and moral faculties; that in the
very earliest periods of history, and among the lowest of exist-
548 NEW BOOKS [July,
ing savages, they are fully manifested, not merely between
members of the same family, but throughout the whole tribe,
and also in most cases to every stranger who is not a known or
imagined enemy.
The last part of this valuable little book is to my mind the
least conclusive. From the outset, it will be remembered the author
demanded " some selective or segregative agency " of a high moral
order to raise the standard of spiritual theory and practice through-
out the civilized world. He suggests that given economic equality
between man and woman, family life may provide such an agency.
But may we not ask him what spiritual agency will he provide
to sweeten and elevate the family before it can achieve its high
and proper moral mission to the world ? Has God, Who made man
a living soul, forgotten to provide an environment, an atmosphere,
a standard and a city, visible to all the world, where man may
freely choose to live and lead the higher life?
Urbs Jerusalem beata,
Dicta pacis visio
Nova veniens e coelo
Nuptiali thalamo
Plateae et muri ejus
Ex auro purissimo.
THE DISTRIBUTION OF INCOMES IN THE UNITED STATES.
By Frank Hatch Streightoff, M.A. (Studies in History, Eco-
nomics, and Public Law. Edited by the Faculty of Political
Science of Columbia University.) New York : Columbia Uni-
versity. Longmans, Green & Co., Agents.
Following up a line of investigation in which he has already
achieved both success and reputation, Mr. Streightoff now publishes
a valuable monograph on the Distribution of Incomes in the United
States. In the opening pages he discusses the question of what
statistics are available and desirable, and his characteristically clear
style makes his study especially useful to the amateur. The ob-
jective and painstaking nature of all his work promises many
helpful contributions from him in the field that is coming
to be associated with his name. It is a field which is becoming
yearly more important, in view of the present tendency of legisla-
tion to concern itself with private incomes as matter of public
interest. The author's complaint and indeed demonstration that
the available information is deplorably insufficient, will help to
1913-] NEW BOOKS 549
further the movement for more scientific and practical work on the
part of statistical bureaus.
The upshot of the matter is this : " Knowledge of the dis-
tribution of incomes is vital to sane legislative direction of progress.
In a form definite enough for practical use, this knowledge does
not exist. No time should be wasted in obtaining this knowledge."
The writer has performed a useful piece of work clearly and
thoroughly.
ALMA MATER, OR THE GEORGETOWN CENTENNIAL, AND
OTHER DRAMAS. By M. S. Pine. Washington, D. C. :
Georgetown Visitation Convent. $1.15.
This elegantly printed and bound book of school plays is
offered to the public with every right to favorable consideration.
There are eight dramas, all of which have been acted, revised, and
perfected. They each and all won much applause from the varied
audiences which attend college celebrations. The religious tone
running through them only enhances their dominating romantic
spirit. They are pleasant, workable, easily-prepared entertain-
ments; never wearisome; sometimes of thrilling interest.
Such means of profitable relaxation can never be dispensed
with, however rudely jostled by the bizarre contrivances some-
times intruded upon visitors to the more important academic occa-
sions. Taste is purified, sentiment is directed into nobler channels,
the eye is pleased and the ear charmed, whilst the intelligence is
cultivated.
We earnestly recommend these dramas to all who would
show our young ladies how true life is when inspired by bright
and spiritual ideals.
THE CATECHIST'S MANUAL. By the Brothers of the Christian
Schools. Philadelphia: John Joseph McVey. 75 cents.
This volume contains a well- written exposition of the various
methods of teaching Christian doctrine, a book that should be of
great service to all who aim at being competent catechists. The
methods are treated concisely and clearly, both from the view-
point of teacher and pupil, and embody many valuable suggestions.
Pupils mentally deficient, or slow of comprehension, the dread of
all inexperienced teachers, and frequently of experienced teachers
as well, need a specially adapted course of instruction. Several
methods of treating such cases have been carefully outlined. It
550 NEW BOOKS [July,
is a timely and much-needed book, and has the hearty endorsement
of His Holiness Pius X.
MIZRAIM; SOUVENIRS OF EGYPT. By Godefroid Kurth.
Paris: Pierre Tequi.
Mizraim is not a mere Baedeker guide book, but a scholar's
literary account of a vacation trip made through the chief cities of
Egypt Cairo, Memphis, Luxor, Karnak, etc. We are entertained
with brief but accurate estimate of Egyptian art; we learn a good
deal of quaint Egyptian history; we traverse every nook and corner
of the Museum of Cairo, and wander through the intricate passages
of the temples of Luxor and Karnak, we enjoy an extended trip
along the Nile. Ever and always our guide is declaiming against
the modern cult of the ugly, and comparing the despair and mo-
notony of pagan civilization with the hopefulness and progress
of the Christian. Altogether it is a most entertaining and sug-
gestive volume.
A WHITE-HANDED SAINT. By Olive Katharine Parr. Lon-
don: R. & T. Washbourne. $1.25 net.
The author of Back Slum Idylls and A Red-Handed Saint
attracted, especially by the latter, much attention and much praise.
Her latest story is called A White-Handed Saint, and instead of
a murderess led back to grace and developed almost into saintliness,
as in the story parallel in name, we find in its pages a character
of an innocence never stained by sin a mystic of a very high
type. On the day after his ordination, and before the anticipated
first Mass, Percivale Douglas was hurt in a railroad accident, and
his right arm suffered paralysis. Deprived thus cruelly of his
dearest hope, he worked bravely in his poverty and physical help-
lessness to further his ambition of building a tiny chapel in honor
of Our Lady. And his reward, though slow in coming, was
" exceeding great." His soul is revealed very tenderly and beau-
tifully by the young girl who is the story-teller. Her own con-
version to the Church, through the medium of the " white-handed
saint," and her love-story form the other half of the book.
The author chose a theme whose delicacy and fragile beauty
made it difficult in the extreme; the soul of a mystic does not fall
easily into twentieth century phrases. But she has succeeded sur-
prisingly well. The most obvious criticism is that her touch is very,
very feminine, but to some readers that will be a charm, and to
fdw, perhaps, a defect.
1913.] NEW BOOKS 551
T^HREE small volumes companions in external appearance, in
-* devotional character, and in the previous history of their con-
tents have been published recently by the Apostleship of Prayer.
Father O'Rourke's Fountains of the Saviour is a series of sixteen
studies of the Beatitudes, the example of John the Baptist, and the
visits of our Lord to the home of Martha and Mary at Bethany.
The King's Table, by Father Dwight, sets forth in short, devo-
tional conferences, the necessity and fruit fulness of receiving Holy
Communion frequently.
In his Heart of Revelation, Father Donnelly describes different
traits and tendencies of humanity sadness, generosity, patience,
contentment, etc. as they were manifested for our instruction and
encouragement in the Heart of Christ. All three books are de-
cidedly instructive and edifying. Price, 56 cents, postpaid.
A HUNDREDFOLD is a simple, pretty little story, signed only
*"*' as by the author of From a Garden Jungle. (New York:
Benziger Brothers. 75 cents net.) The first half of the book
is located in Belgium, but with the homeward return of the heroine,
the scene changes to England. The will-finding, heir-thwarting
theme, buried long ago with hoop skirts, bobs up again serenely,
but since it is woven into a pleasant story, no one need object.
r PHE ROAD OF LIVING MEN is the latest book by Will Lev-
* ington Comfort. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co. $1.25
net.) It is a story of romance and adventure, and again romance,
told in the author's quite individual style. Incidentally it gives
an intimate picture of China and the Chinese.
title, Eucharistic Lilies, or Youthful Lovers of Jesus in the
Blessed Sacrament, is given to a little book by Helen Maery.
(New York: Benziger Brothers. $1.00.) It includes, among
others, the stories of Tarciscius, of Blessed Imelda, and of the
Little Flower of Jesus. Written clearly and simply, it will serve
admirably as a help and inspiration to children preparing for
their First Communion.
1U EMORY AND THE EXECUTIVE MIND, by Arthur Ray-
?** mond Robinson (Chicago: M. A. Donahue Co. $1.50 net),
is an earnest little book, showing throughout a high purpose on the
part of the author. He dwells on the importance of memory as a
faculty, and the need of its greater development among men who
would wish to cultivate " the executive mind."
periobfcals.
The Social Value of Frequent Communion. By Father Her-
bert Lucas, SJ. In a paper read before the Annual Conference of
the Catholic Young Men's Societies of Great Britain, Father Lucas
considered the existence of evils and abuses in the social and indus-
trial world; the duty of Catholics to promote remedial measures;
the fact that opportunities to fulfill this duty are only occasional,
and that the best possible remedial measures, even if properly en-
forced, can only palliate or mitigate the evils. Therefore he rea-
sons that the best positive contribution to the cause is the example
of a fervent Catholic life, and the most efficacious means to help
us set this example is the practice of very frequent, and, if possible,
daily Communion. He places human selfishness at the root of the
evils and abuses, and this cannot be eradicated by human legislation,
since selfishness can always evade law. Modern society needs leav-
ening. It needs the practical example of fervent Catholic lives
to raise it above the plane of present-day individualism, and dem-
onstrate practically the value of sacrifice and virtue. Taking Jesus
Christ as the examplar, Father Lucas directs attention to the
fact that He did not play the part, ostensibly, of a social reformer,
but He set a supremely perfect example of a flawless domestic life;
of an utterly self-sacrificing devotion to moral reformation, dog-
matic teaching and works of mercy, and of an uncompromising
fidelity to truth at the cost of cruel suffering and ignominious death.
His example and His influence have nevertheless been the cause of
all the best " social work " for the last nineteen hundred years.
This conclusion Father Lucas emphasizes with comparison between
mediaeval and modern labor conditions, the one communal, the other
individual. He then considers the value of good example; how its
work is hidden; how following the one thing necessary, as did
Mary in contradistinction to Martha, brings about the happiest
results. The society of to-day tends pagan- ward. The proverbial
good example and standing of a Catholic employer or employees
exerts an influence powerful out of all proportion to their numerical
strength. If fervent Catholic lives must be the leaven of society,
so th,e Body and Blood of the Savior must be the leaven of Catholic
1913.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 553
lives. It is the Sacrament of purity; of remembrance, calling to
mind the sacrificial quality of the true Christian life; and of union
with our Lord and Savior in the fullness of His Humanity and
Divinity. The Tablet, May 24.
The Missions of China. By A. Hilliard Atteridge. The proc-
lamation of the new Chinese Republic was accompanied by an as-
surance that the new regime would not only tolerate but welcome
and protect the missions; moreover, the President has shown his
attitude toward foreigners by inviting Dr. Morrison Hart to act
as his official adviser. The Prime Minister is a Catholic, con-
verted by his Belgian wife. The Christians were asked to make the
last Sunday of April a day of special prayer for the prosperity
and progress of the nation, an official act completely abandoning
the old attitude of professed friendship and secret hostility towards
the missions ; this proclamation is, therefore, not unworthy of com-
parison with the Peace Edict of Constantine. About twenty thou-
sand non-Catholics, of different faiths and standards of member-
ship, are at work, and they claim some 324,890 followers. This
number is smaller than the number of Catholics in the single prov-
ince of Chi-li. At the close of 1911 there were in China, 1,3.63,697
baptized Catholics, with 390,985 catechumens under instruction or
awaiting baptism. These were grouped in forty-seven missionary
dioceses or vicariates. There were forty-nine Bishops, 1,426 Euro-
pean and 701 Chinese priests, and 1,215 Chinese students for the
priesthood. Out of 1,896 nuns, 1,328 were Chinese. In Chi-li
there are families that have been Catholic for centuries. The prin-
cipal communities of missionaries are the Lazarists, Franciscans,
Jesuits, and the Society for Foreign Missions, though many others
are represented. Thirty years ago the baptized Catholics of China
numbered only 470,000. The great need now is for English-speak-
ing priests. The Month, June.
Suarez and Civil Authority. By Gaston Sortais. According
to Suarez, civil authority is from God, and is conferred directly
upon the people. They can reserve this power for themselves, as
in a democracy, or transfer it to a single person or group of per-
sons, as in a monarchy or an aristocracy. But when once they have
made this transfer, they have no longer the right to recall the
authority outside conditions stipulated in the original pact, unless
the sovereign turns to his own personal profit what was intended
554 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [July,
for the common good. Was this system of mediated divine right
condemned by Pope Pius' recent letter against Le Sillon, in which
he quotes from the Diuturnum Illud of Leo XIII. a condemnation
of the view that all power comes from the people, and that sov-
ereigns act only as delegates? No, because Pope Leo evidently
did not intend to condemn a system supported by such great au-
thorities by a mere passing phrase; because he did not use either
of the terms, mediate or immediate, on which the controversy is
based; and because he was concerned only with vindicating the
Divine origin of civil authority against the so-called philosophers
of the eighteenth century. The view of Suarez remains one which
a Catholic may defend. Nevertheless his assertion that the people
are the prime source of power has to meet the serious objection, that
since the people must confer it upon some one to exercise it in their
stead, it seems strange that God should give to them a power so pre-
carious, a prerogative whose full use is almost always impracticable.
Revue Pratique d'Apologetique, May i.
Liberal Judaism. By L. Cl. Fillion. Liberal Judaism, as
seen in the writings of Claude G. Montefiore, is related to ortho-
dox Judaism much as modernism is to Catholicism. It denies the
historicity of the facts of Genesis; the revelation of the Law
through Moses ; the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch ; the credi-
bility of Old Testament miracles; the present binding force of the
laws regarding unclean meats. It would replace Hebrew by the
popular language in religious ceremonies; introduce organs into
synagogues; allow the men to keep their heads uncovered, and the
women to mingle freely in the body of the building. It holds
strongly to the inviolability of the Sabbath, and celebrates the
usual orthodox feasts. Upon social effort it lays great stress.
The Bible, it says, has in ,all its parts dross mingled with its gold.
Liberal Judaism does not believe in a personal Messiah, nor in the
Incarnation, nor Redemption, either past or to come, but in the per-
petual; endless, and universal progress of humanity. In this evo-
lution the special role of Judaism is to preserve undefiled the mon-
otheistic idea; the "imperfections" of Christianity and other re-
ligions are to be swept aside by liberal Judaism. Mr. Montefiore
presents our Lord in a very sympathetic light, though regarding
Him merely as a man, and this admiring attitude has subjected him
to severe criticism from orthodox Jews. Revue Pratique d'Apolo-
getique, April 13.
1913.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 555
Does the Church Grant Divorce? By B. Sienne. To recog-
nize that a marriage was null from the beginning is in no sense the
same as granting a divorce. This declaration of nullity is rather
a proof of the Church's regard for the sanctity of marriage. The
ground for the declaration of nullity in the Castellane-Gould mar-
riage was the fact of its being entered into as something revocable
at will. An essential element of a true marriage was, therefore,
in the eyes of the Church, lacking. As is well known, the judges 'of
the Rota act in threes. The decision of the first terna was against
the declaration of nullity; that of the second in favor of it. The
decision of the third group will be definitive. Such trials are not
reserved only for the rich. On the contrary, the canon law guar-
antees them as a right, and, in case of necessity, without any ex-
pense whatever, to the poor. One of the first cases to be settled by
the Rota was precisely of this kind. Revue du Clerge Frangais,
April 15.
The Gelasian Decree. Herr von Dobschutz, after a careful
study of the famous decree of Gelasius, comes to the conclusion that
the five parts of the decree constitute an indivisible whole, whose
date is not earlier than Gelasius (492-496), nor later than Hormis-
das (514-523). Moreover, he considers the document as the work
of some private student of the first years of the sixth century.
D. J. Chapman, however, does not entirely agree with these con-
clusions. In the present article, he endeavors to demonstrate that
in spite of the fact that the document, as we now possess it, shows
apparent unity, it really had a twofold origin. He believes that
positive reasons, internal and external, support the evidence of
those manuscripts that attribute the document conjointly to Hormis-
das, Gelasius, and Damasus. He agrees with von Dobschiitz that
the date of the document is earlier that Hormisdas, and prefers
a Gelasian origin. Revue Benedictine, April.
The Tablet (May 17) : The Bishop of Manchester's Protest:
From the protest of the Bishop against the marriage law of the
Catholic Church, because it does not coincide with the civil law,
this article shows that he does not hold the " continuity " theory
of the Anglican Church. Concrete evidence is also given that the
Liberal party holds the same position as the Bishop. Congress
of Benedictine Abbots: The Abbot of Downside writes on the Con-
gress held at Monte Cassino in May to elect a coadjutor to the pres-
556 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [July,
ent aged Abbot Primate, who, by special appointment of Pope Leo
XIIL, holds the office for life, as " the greatest meeting of Benedic-
tine Abbots since mediaeval times." Sedgley Park gives at length
the varied history of this school founded by Bishop Challoner, now
celebrating its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary. An account
of the festivities in connection with the celebration is found in the
May 24th issue.
(May 24) : The Way of Unity A Modern Instance: Father
McNabb, O.P., cites the case of the Caldey Benedictines to show
that he who takes up any line of the spiritual life whole-heartedly
must, sooner or later, whether he will or no, come to Rome. The
Caldey monks attempted to live the essential life of the Church
while not belonging to its organization; they were not interested
in controversy; they were purely contemplative: praying, fasting,
laboring for God's glory and their fellowmen, yet they found that
they must fall back on " the strictly Papal basis of authority."
Father McNabb concludes with the statement that " if the claims
of Peter are true, they must be supremely true."
(May 31) : The Hope for Peace: The Powers have insisted
that peace negotiations between the Balkan Allies and the Turks
be speedily concluded. It is expected that, if Russia does not under-
take the task alone, the Powers will force a settlement of the ques-
tions the Allies are disputing among themselves. Arma Vir-
umque: France is reaping the harvest of her campaign against
religion in a failing of army enlistments due to decrease of popu-
lation, and in anarchistic upheavals in the army. Still the cam-
paign proceeds. Measures are contemplated to drive out religion
by compelling attendance at lay schools, where religion is made the
" butt of ridicule and insult." Comment in " Notes " is made on
the declaration of the Italian Ministers in the Senate to the effect
that Freemasonry should be rooted from the army and navy be-
cause it is fatal to military discipline. The Italian Press concur
in this opinion. The Roman Correspondent also treats this subject.
The National Review (June) : The Earl Percy writes very
strongly against The Voluntary System, in military service. He
reviews history to show its ineffectiveness. National Service
Ideals is two addresses by Field Marshal Earl Roberts in defence
of a proposed law that would create a citizen army in England.
The Future of the Balkan Alliance speaks in a disheartening way of
the chances for peace in the Balkan Peninsula. A fresh Balkan
1913.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 557
war, thinks the writer, might be a blessing in disguise, as it would
clear the atmosphere, and settle for some time the sore problem of
Balkan hegemony. Frank Fox, who ought to know because he
worked in the Balkan War, says that the day of the war correspond-
ent has gone. Owing to conditions imposed by the belligerents,
his work is no longer possible.
Le Correspondant (June 10) : J. Per itch reviews the different
stages through which the question of war in the East passed before
the Balkan War actually occurred, and discusses the plans for the
future from the Servian point of view. The origin and cultiva-
tion of art in the East, particularly in Greece, Assyria, and Egypt,
is treated by R. P. Lagrange. Maurice Vaussard sketches the
life of Contardo Ferrini, the Italian Ozanam. Sometime profes-
sor at the University of Paria, Ferrini cultivated every branch of
knowledge, yet remained the model of humility and piety. He
was born in Milan in 1859 and died in Palestine in 1902. The
process for his canonization was begun in 1910. The dilettan-
tism of Ernest Renan and his successor, M. Anatole France, forms
the subject of an article by G. Michant.
Revue du Clerge Frangais (April 15) : J. Bricout continues
his exposition of the meaning of the Syllabus of Pius IX., showing
how Leo XIII. and Pius X. reproducers teaching. Eugene
Evrard writes on Present Day Literature as typified in new books
by Maurice Barres, Rene Bazin, Pierre Loti, and Adolfpe Rette.
/. K. Huysmans, by L. Laurec. As Gustave Coquiot's recent
study shows, Huysmans was a recluse, egoistic and pessimistic; for
thirty-two years a most regular, exact, and zealous official under
the Minister of the Interior, at which time he wrote several of his
books. He was unappreciative of the classic masters, Racine,
Corneille, Moliere, Dante, Goethe, Schiller. Touched by Cathol-
icism on his vulnerable point, the love of art, he was driven to her
bosom by disappointment with himself.
Revue Pratique d'Apologetique (May i) : E. Maugenot begins
an examination and criticism of the views of M. Reitzenstein as to
the influence of the pagan mysteries upon St. Paul. Charles
Pellet contributes extracts from a new volume on Lourdes by the
Danish convert, Jorgensen. The Report of the Society of For-
eign Missions for 1912 shows that it is exercising an apostolate in
558
FOREIGN PERIODICALS
[July,
thirty- four missions of the Far East among 1,548,576 Catholics,
30,000 more than in 1911. It employs the services of 1,200 mis-
sionaries and 800 native priests.
( May 15): Stoicism and Christianity, by J. Calvet. From the
years 1550 to 1650 moral treatises, tragedies, even sermons in France
breathed the spirit of Stoicism rather than of Christianity. Hu-
mility and resignation were out of date; hope of indefinite progress,
a victorious and active self-confidence suited the new age better.
In Montaigne the man and the Christian try to live apart. Pierre
Charron wrote an essay on The Three Truths to prove the necessity
of a natural religion, the reality of revelation, and the truth of the
Catholic Church. But though a priest, a friend of Bishops Com-
dom and Cahors, he was also Montaigne's friend; the author of
Wisdom, a treatise which so exalted the powers of man apart from
grace as practically to make grace useless.
(June i) : Dr. de Grandmaison de Bruno proves that the
visions of Bernadette Soubirous were not of the nature of hallu-
cinations. The supernatural element at Lourdes is further em-
phasized by the appearance of the miraculous spring, the physical
cures, the miracles of grace and of charity, and the failure of search-
ing criticism to relegate Lourdes to its former obscurity.
Etudes (May) : Cottolengo: The little town of Cottolengo
in the environs of Turin bears the name of the Venerable Joseph
Cottolengo, who founded there the " Little House of Divine Prov-
idence/' probably the largest hospital in the world. Around this
institution, called by Pius IX. " la maison du miracle," grew up a
city, a city of charity. Its seven thousand inhabitants are divided
into thirty-four " families," fourteen of which are religious, who
have come there to carry on the work of devotion so humbly begun
by Canon Cottolengo. The Primitive Canon of the Mass:
By a comparative study of the various liturgical texts, the author
arrives at the probable text of the second or, possibly, even of the
first century. The Heart of Mary, Singular Vessel of Devotion,
by Jean Bainvel, defines devotion, and shows the exceptional and
perfect character of the Blessed Virgin's devotion from the first
moment of her existence.
Etudes Franciscaines (June) : S. Belmond opens an exposition
of the arguments of St. Bonaventure against the theory that the
worjd is eternal, or was created from eternity, which Aristotle
1913.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 559
and St. Thomas thought possible. P. Dieudonne contributes an
exhaustive analysis of two essays, one dogmatic, one historical, by
Louis Caperan on the problem of the salvation of unbelievers.
England in India: P. Symphorien tells of the effects on the natives
of the educational facilities provided by the English Government
in Bengal; the consequent division of the province; the change of
capital announced by George V. at the Durbar last year, and the
blessing of the banners of the " Connaught Rangers " by the Catho-
lic Archbishop of Agra on that occasion.
Revue des Deux Mondes ( April i ) : The Centenary of Fred-
erick Ozanam, by M. Rene Doumic dwells chiefly on his literary
work and its influence on the thought of the day. A series of
articles on St. Augustine is begun in this number. The first one
deals with his childhood. Mme. de Stael, her salon and her
relations with Napoleon Bonaparte, are discussed by the Conte
d'Haussonville.
(May 15) : In A French House, Louis Madelin, gives the
history of the valiant de Vogue family, which since the eleventh
century has consistently shared the fortunes of France, and
sacrificed everything for God and their country. The Salons of
1913 and the Salon Which is Needed is an able critique of modern
art, though the writer, Robert de la Sizeranne, makes the unwar-
ranted statement that neither the United States nor Switzerland
has ever produced an artistic genius. His argument being that
" Art " is impossible in so-called free countries.
IRecent Events.
When the Briand government before its
France. defeat proposed to increase the term of serv-
ice in the army from two to three years,
it seemed as if the whole of France without distinction of party
or class would accept the proposal. Opposition, however, sub-
sequently developed, not only on the part of the Collective Social-
ists, but also from among the Radicals, who are supporters of M.
Barthou's ministry. When the further step was taken of keeping
in active service for a longer term the men whose two years
was on the point of expiring, the opposition took the form of some-
thing like a military revolt. Soldiers in garrisons on the frontier,
as well as in Paris, made public demonstrations against this un-
expected addition to their burden. They were willing to fight,
but objected to being kept idling in barracks. This movement
affected, however, a very small minority of the soldiers. It is
attributed in part to the propagation of anti-militarist doctrines by
the notorious Confederation of Labor, in part to an Anarchist
propaganda. The government has seized upon large quantities
of literature destined to be circulated among the soldiers. On the
other hand, opponents of the new President, such as M. Clemenceau,
have assured him of their determination to give whole-hearted
support to the government's proposals. Certain modifications have
been made to lighten the burden which the increase of that term of
service will impose: for example, when a unit has attained to the
fixed and determined strength, those beyond that number will be
allowed to return home. But the government will not admit any
substantial change in its proposals.
It is frankly recognized that it is beyond the power of France
to have an army equal in numbers to that of Germany. There are
conflicting statements as to the respective numbers of the two
armies, but the most reliable statistics give to Germany a peace
force of 681,000 men, whereas France has only 486,000. The
difference between the peace strengths is thus 195,000 men. Ger-
many, moreover, has a population of some sixty-five millions, which
is increasing with normal rapidity, whereas France has only some
forty millions, and this is not increasing at all. The only hope,
therefore, for success in a conflict with Germany is based upon
such a better training of its soldiers as will be given by the longer
service.
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 561
France's weakness is largely due to the diminution of its
birth-rate. This is recognized by the recent appointment of a
commission to study the question, and to propose remedies. M.
Bourgeois, who is looked upon as one of the wise men of the
country, has pointed to this diminution as one of the two great
disasters which threaten the future, in fact as the cause of the other
of the two the danger from the foreign enemy. A century ago,
France within her present frontiers contained sixteen per cent of
the population of Europe; to-day she has only nine per cent of that
population. Yet the French abroad, in Canada and Algeria, in-
crease more rapidly than any of the races that are their neighbors.
The death-rate, too, is greater in France than in Germany or
England. Legislation, M. Bourgeois declared, could furnish no
adequate remedy : a moral crusade was necessary, the motive power
of which should be the defence of their country.
M. Ribot, another very eminent statesman, takes an even
darker view of the situation. " The country," he says, " is sick,
and it ought to be proclaimed aloud. Alcoholism, tuberculosis, and
the lack of an intelligent hygiene are decimating our country. The
people must be informed of the peril by which it is menaced. All
the efforts of the legislature and the government must be concen-
trated upon grappling with this peril/'
As an offset to these dark pictures it may be worthy of men-
tion that Father Bernard Vaughan, who has recently been paying
a visit to France, declares that the Separation Law has proved one
of the very greatest of the blessings bestowed on the Church in
France during the past one hundred years. It has given freedom
to the clergy to take a part in social and philanthropic movements ;
a freedom of which they are taking full advantage.
Some degree of alarm is being felt at the spread of the taste
for gamblingfthroughout the country. The national code of ethics
in France does not forbid the State's deriving part of its income
from the receipts of gaming tables. One hundred and forty-seven
watering-places have authorized gambling houses which pay to
the government a part of their receipts. Two hundred millions
a year are said to be staked at these places of entertainment.
Theoretically it is recognized by all that this is a great social evil,
but neither the government nor the watering-places are prepared to
make the sacrifice involved in their suppression. As a step towards
remedying the evil, the government has introduced a bill to
enable it to collect an increased tax upon the net takings, ranging
VOL. XCVII. 36
562 RECENT EVENTS [July,
from fifteen per cent to forty-five per cent, according to their
amount. Any more drastic measure, it is said, would only result in
sending people to Monte Carlo.
Another of the evils affecting the French nation is the fre-
quency of duels. No hope is entertained of their abolition, but the
National Fencing Federation, and some of the fashionable clubs
for these seem to be the recognized authorities in this matter have
issued an edict that the advertising of affairs of honor must be
limited to a notice of the challenge, and the publication of the
result of the meeting. It is hoped by diminishing the publicity
hitherto existing to lessen the number a step, indeed, in the right
direction.
One more must be added to the list of France's afflictions
the enormous increase of the national expenditure and the conse-
quent addition to the burden cast upon the people. In the last
five years two hundred additional millions have been voted by
Parliament to carry out costly measures of various kinds, and
although there has been an enormous growth of revenue, the deficits
have been still larger. This year the excess of expenditure over
normal revenue amounts to no less a sum than eighty-five mil-
lions. For the increase of the term of army service the expense
will be very great. A loan of some two hundred millions for this
purpose is about to be issued.
The government has announced a fairly extensive scheme of
social legislation. A part of it is the introduction of a measure
to facilitate the formation of companies in which capital and labor
will participate as shareholders. The bill aims at enabling labor
to take a share in the control of the industries in which it is en-
gaged. Another bill lays down regulations for labor credit so-
cieties, and makes financial provision for their formation. By a
third bill the civil rights of trade unions are extended in a con-
siderable degree.
France has loyally cooperated with the rest of the Great Powers
in the effort to preserve the peace during the recent crisis. It was
indeed with considerable reluctance that the government took part
in enforcing the demands of Europe upon Montenegro, and thereby
supporting the policy of Austria. The desire for peace, however,
carried the day. The visit of the King of Spain has removed
any trace of bad feeling that had been caused by the Morocco
question, and there is now some talk of Spain's entry into the
Entente with Great Britain and Russia. This would then become
quadruple.
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 563
The marriage of the Emperor's only
Germany. daughter, the Princess Victoria Luise, to
Prince Ernest Augustus of Brunswick-
Liineberg, the only surviving son of the Duke of Cumberland, was
the cause of the meeting of the Emperors of Russia and Germany
and the King of England. Assurances were given, as is wont in
such cases, that the meeting had no political bearing, and was a
purely family affair. No doubt is entertained on this point, so
far as the visit of King George was concerned, although even in
this case it may have contributed to that better understanding
between Great Britain and Germany of which there have been so
many signs. The release of the Englishmen convicted of espio-
nage is a pledge of the good will of Germany. But the Kaiser in
Germany and the Tsar in Russia hold a much different position than
that which is held by the King in England, and it is hard to think
that they had no political conversation. What it was, however,
the newspapers have not revealed.
Germany is still in the midst of the war-like preparations
which have already been announced. The bills to legalize them and
to pay the cost are before the Reichstag under discussion. This
has not prevented the Kaiser's jubilee being celebrated as a peace
festival. Our own Mr. Andrew Carnegie was at the head of one
of the first delegations to present to his Imperial Majesty an
address which congratulated him on having maintained for twenty-
five years unbroken peace with all the world. It quoted the declara-
tion made by the Emperor shortly after ascending the throne : " The
peace of my country is sacred to me," and praised his majesty not
only for his own peaceful forbearance, but for having inspired the
same in others.
The proposals made by the government of Alsace-Lorraine to
the Federal Council for the sanction of more vigorous measures of
repression to be applied to the Press, and to the holding of meetings
in the Reichsland, is considered by a large part even of the German
Press to be a great blunder. Such a course is inefficacious if
needed, and exasperating if not needed. But the government
seems determined to carry the proposal into effect. It will, no
doubt, tend to accentuate the less friendly feelings between the two
countries, of which there have lately been several indications.
Although the Tercentenary of the Roman-
Russia, offs was celebrated with every manifestation
of popular enthusiasm, it would seem that
564 RECENT EVENTS [July,
the Tsar has not perfect confidence in his people. On his recent
visit to Berlin he had to travel from St. Petersburg in an armored
train, and extraordinary precautions were taken to protect him dur-
ing the journey, and during his stay in the German capital. This
was in marked contrast with the way in which his cousin King
George of England made the journey, and serves as a reminder
that all is not yet well in Russia. It is indeed true that she is
just now passing through a period of greater prosperity than
ever before. She is entering upon a new era of industrial activ-
ity. The national revenues have never been so great. Her pop-
ulation, which already amounts to 170,000,000, shows an unusual
increase of 3,000,000. Through the wisdom and moderation of
her statesmen, she has escaped being driven into war during the
recent Balkan crisis. The Russian people were enthusiastic in sup-
port of their Slav brethren, and had to be held in check by the
government. For the maintenance of peace under no little provo-
cation, a debt of gratitude is due to the Tsar and his foreign min-
ister, M. Sazonoff. It was owing chiefly to their urgent warnings
that King Nicholas yielded up the possession of Skutari.
In one of the last of the celebrations of the tercentenary fes-
tivities, the Tsar told a deputation of peasants that Russia had
grown great and strong through belief in God, the Emperor's
love of his people, and the people's attachment to the imperial
throne. The oldest village elder replied, addressing the Tsar
in the second person singular : " Thou, lord, art our protection
against all enemies. In thee is truth, in thee is mercy. Thou hast
granted us peasants many tokens of thy favor." And yet with
all these manifestations of external prosperity and demonstrative
assertions of loyalty, the prisons of Russia are filled to overflowing,
and political executions have multiplied tenfold. This indicates
that beneath the surface there is no little discontent. Doubtless
this is to be found more in the towns than in the country, and is due
to that very fact of increasing industrial activity which is one of
the manifestations of the existent prosperity. A town population
is always more discontented and desirous of change than is that of
the country.
There is reason to think that the Tsar himself and his present
ministers are more ready to extend liberal institutions, and to give
greater power to the people, than is a large number of the aristoc-
racy, who are sunk deep in the defence of their own selfish interests.
An attempt recently made to give greater powers to municipal
governments in Poland by giving to them similar privileges
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 565
to those which have been granted to Russian towns,
was resisted and considerably modified by that branch of
the legislature which is more subject to reactionary in-
fluences. It is worthy of note that a warm advocate of the pro-
posed change was a former Ambassador of Russia to Washington.
He advocated the adoption of a broad-minded policy for the fron-
tier regions, based on intelligent sympathy with local needs and sus-
ceptibilities. Only in this way, he said, could voluntary allegiance,
the true bond of union, be created. Here perhaps may be seen
another of the many instances of the influence of American insti-
tutions.
On the thirtieth of May the Treaty of Peace
The Balkan War. between Turkey and the Balkan States was
signed in London. This treaty is as im-
portant as any that have been made for the last three hundred
years, perhaps in some respects more important; for it brings to
an end that domination of the Turk over the Christian which has
for so long cast a dark shadow over Christendom. The treaty
had been prepared by Sir Edward Grey, the British Minister of
Foreign Affairs, after consultation with the delegates of the Allied
States and those of Turkey, and in collaboration with the Ambas-
sadors of the Great Powers, who have been meeting for consultation
even since the war began. Great credit is due to the British Min-
ister. It is to his efforts that the chief credit must be given for
having held the Great Powers together, and for having averted
the war which the statesmen of two generations looked upon as
inevitable on the death of the Sick Man. In the words of the
Tribunal " Sir Edward Grey will certainly be considered as the
principal author and the greatest promoter of the Treaty of London,
which closes one of the most important and difficult periods of
European history. Sir Edward has earned the unreserved grati-
tude of all the Powers of Europe interested in the maintenance
of peace and the limitation of the Balkan conflicts."
The treaty marks the practical extinction of the Ottoman
power in Europe, and the end of a period in which the Crusades
were only an episode. The way in which it was accomplished is
as surprising as the result. The Turk has been dying for years,
and the only question has been which of the Great Powers was
to give him the death stroke. Their selfish jealousies held them
back, and it has been left for the smallest and weakest of the Euro-
pean States to do without any aid from outside the work which
566 RECENT EVENTS [July,
the whole of Europe failed to accomplish, and to do it in one brief
campaign. The outcome is but another lesson in the fallibility
of human judgment. Equally unexpected was the collapse of
China in 1894 in her conflict with Japan, and the subsequent defeat
of Russia by the same power. There are those who would not be
surprised if a certain Great Power which has dominated Europe of
late were to prove wanting if brought to the test
By the treaty an area of some forty thousand square miles,
of what for centuries has been Turkish territory, has been ceded
to the Allies. That is to say, all the territory on the mainland of
Europe west of a line to be drawn from Enos on the coast of the
^Egean to Midia on the Black Sea. This leaves some five thousand
square miles to Turkey, and includes Constantinople, the whole
of the Sea of Marmora, the Dardanelles, and the Bosporus. That
Constantinople still remains in Turkish hands is due to that jeal-
ousy which has for so long been the mainstay of Turkey. Russia
is said to have conveyed to Bulgaria her determination that the
latter power would not be allowed to capture Constantinople.
Sancta Sophia therefore remains a mosque.
The treaty provides also that Crete is to be ceded to the Allies,
while the ultimate possession of the other Turkish islands situated
in the ^Egean is to be left to the decision of the Powers. Financial
questions are to be settled by an International Commission, which is
to meet at Paris. No indemnity is given to the Allies by the treaty.
Although the Treaty of Peace has been signed, no end of
questions remain, and it is still doubtful whether the settlement
of these questions will not involve further warfare. It is, in fact,
said that one reason for the delay in signing the treaty on the part
of Servia and Greece a delay which was only brought to an end
by a somewhat peremptory summons by Sir Edward Grey was the
desire of those States to keep the bulk of the Bulgarian forces occu-
pied before the lines of Tchataldja in order that Greece and Servia
might be able to seize upon certain districts. Before the war began,
a treaty was made by Servia and Bulgaria, by which an allotment
was made of the districts which should fall to the share of each in
the event of the war being successful. The war was more suc-
cessful than was expected, from which success the Bulgarians de-
rived the chief advantage. The intrusion of Austria-Hungary, to
which the formation of the new State of Albania is due, still fur-
ther diminished the region which should have fallen to Servia. A
very natural desire to have the treaty changed, to which Bulgaria
would not listen, has led to a very warlike feeling in Servia against
1913.] RECENT EVENTS $67
Bulgaria. It is hoped that the intervention of Russia may avert
an armed collision.
Between Greeks and Bulgarians armed collisions have actually
taken place on more than one occasion. The Greeks seemed deter-
mined to retain the possession of Salonika. They are said to have-
entered into a treaty with Servia to deprive Bulgaria of certain
districts. How the question will be settled is still uncertain.
That Crete will be annexed to Greece admits of no doubt,
but what will be done with the rest of the ^Egean Islands is not so
certain. Greece claims the whole of them, on the ground of the
nationality of their inhabitants and the capture of others. But
Italy is in the possession of about a dozen, taken during the war
with Turkey. She is under the obligation, by the Treaty of
Lausanne, to restore them to Turkey. This she now has no thought
of doing, nor yet is she willing to give them to Greece. It is
in fact suspected that she intends to hold on to them.
The new State of Albania opens another series of problems.
Its northern boundaries have been settled by the Ambassadors of
the Great Powers during their sittings in London. But the settle-
ment of the southern boundaries has brought Italy and Greece into
disagreement. Italy wants to give to Albania a boundary which
Greece thinks unjust, including, as it does, many districts inhabited
by Greeks. Italy on her part fears that the demands of Greece,
if conceded, would endanger the control of the Adriatic. Then the
constitution of Albania has to be settled, and a ruler to be chosen.
It is now seen to be doubtful whether any kind of order can be
preserved in the new State except by at least a temporary occupation
by troops of foreign powers. To what powers is this task to be
entrusted? Meanwhile Skutari, the occupation of which cost Mon-
tenegro so much, is now in the possession of marines and under
the governorship of a British Admiral. Montenegro itself, which
was the first to declare war with Turkey, is the one State which
so far has gained scarcely anything. Her sacrifice of Skutari
preserved the peace of Europe : for there is no doubt that Austria-
Hungary and Italy would have taken steps in alliance to deprive
Montenegro of her prize steps which probably would have brought
Russia into the field.
It must not be thought that because Turkey has practically
been driven from Europe, no more interest need be taken in her
by practical politicians. The integrity of her possessions in Asia
becomes now a European question. Great Britain, France, Russia,
and Germany have various political and commercial interests at
568 RECENT EVENTS [July,
stake, and are mutually afraid of any one of their number getting
an advantage. Although not so acute, the difficulties which Turk-
ish rulers have had in the Balkans exist also in Asia. There are
Kurds and Armenians and Arabs, each of them have national as-
pirations which the defeats of their overlords, the Turks, will
accentuate. The Armenians to whose shame it must be said that
they now boast that they fought for the Turks in the recent war
are bringing their grievances to the front. Even the Arabs are
showing signs of restlessness. The government is seeking by
measures of decentralization to make concessions to these desires for
a greater measure of self-government. But there are those who
think that Europe will have to do for Turkey in Asia something
analogous to what she did for a time in the Balkans appoint a
financial commission to control the revenue, and to supervise the
administration of the provinces. The despotism of Abdul Hamid
has had the usual effect of all despotisms it has laid the people
so low for the advantage of the ruler that no man can be found
to be a saviour.
The conclusion of the war leaves the grouping of the Powers
unchanged. On the one side there is the Triple Alliance of Ger-
many, Austria-Hungary, and Italy; on the other what is called the
Triple Entente between France, Russia, and Great Britain. After
the capture of Skutari by the Montenegrins, it is now admitted
that war was on the point of breaking out. Austria-Hungary
and Italy were bent upon taking action in common in Albania :
its northern part was to have been the sphere assigned to Austria,
while Italy was to have acted in Southern Albania. Avlona, the
key of the Adriatic, would, had this plan been carried, have fallen
into the hands of Italy. Little prescience is necessary to see that the
common action of these two powers would soon have turned into
a bitter conflict a conflict which would have brought to an end
the Triple Alliance. This was averted by the surrender of Skutari.
The war has inflicted severe wounds upon the Dual Monarchy.
Had she acted at the beginning of the war with a venture-all
audacity, and not have allowed Servia to enter the Sanjak of
Novi-Bazar, she might have succeeded in maintaining a dominating
position. As it is she has lost every chance of reaching the ygean.
She has made enemies of the Slavs not only in the Balkan States,
but within her own dominions ; she has incurred vast expense which
will weigh down still further an already overburdened people.
t On the other side, the formation of Albania is to be attributed
to her efforts. How advantageous this may prove is an open
1913.] RECENT EVENTS
question, especially when the jealousy of Italy is taken into account.
The weakening of Austria is given by the German Chancellor as a
reason for the addition to the peace strength of the German army.
This in its turn has led France to add to its military power. And
so everything works together for the increase of armaments. Nor
is this movement confined to Europe: Great Britain's dread of
Germany has led to the proposal of Mr. Borden, the Prime Minister
of Canada, to build three Dreadnoughts for the defence of the Ern-
pire. This proposal has just been rejected by the Senate. This
rejection may lead to a fundamental change in the constitution of
that body: it has hitherto been nominated; Mr. Borden proposes
to make it elective. Such is the sequence of events.
The Concert of the Powers which still maintains an existence,
notwithstanding their division into the Triple Alliance and the
Triple Entente, has regained the respect which it lost at the begin-
ning of the war. It was then flaunted and set at nought by the
Balkan States its threats and commands being alike slighted.
It has, however, been so successful in the maintenance of peace
between the Great Powers during a most trying time, that a deep
debt of gratitude is felt for the influence for good which it has
been able to exert. Its success is attributed to the fact that meet-
ings of the Ambassadors of all the Great Powers were held in
London throughout the whole period, at which all questions
were discussed as they arose, and an opportunity was offered
to come to an understanding. It was at these meetings that the
creation of the new State of Albania was settled.
The long-deferred recognition by Great
Belgium. Britain of the annexation of the Congo by
Belgium marks the complete triumph of the
efforts of the Congo Reform Association to secure the suppression
of the fearful crimes wrought by the late King in that region.
With one exception all the reforms advocated by the Association
have been carried out by the Belgian administration. The whole
Leopoldian policy has been abandoned, the concessionnaire compan-
ies have either disappeared or been reduced to impotence. The rev-
enues are no longer supplied by forced or slave labor, the rubber
tax has gone, the native is free to gather the products of his toil,
and to dispose of them in trade, and to buy and sell at his own
pleasure. A responsible government has displaced an irresponsible
despotism. Belgium, instead of deriving enormous sums of money
extorted from the wretched natives, has expended over twenty mil-
570 RECENT EVENTS [July,
lions on the administration of the country during a period of four
years. The only point about which doubt is entertained is whether
the legal rights of the natives to hold land is satisfactorily secured.
Assurances, however, have been given by the Belgian government
on this point, and so the last objection to recognition has been re-
moved. Let us hope that the Duchess of Bedford's efforts to
secure the reform of Portuguese methods of treating political pris-
oners may be equally successful.
The prospects for the stability of the Chinese
China. Republic are somewhat brighter. The Pro-
visional President, Yuan Shih-kai, has made
it clearly understood that he is determined to suppress at all costs
all attempts at revolution. He has, moreover, been supplied with
the means of which all earthly governments stand in need. The
loan which has been for an extraordinarily long period a subject
of negotiation, has been not only issued, but fully subscribed. Its
success was indeed phenomenal. The part issued in London was
taken up twelve times over within an hour and a half. This does
not necessarily mean an expression of the confidence of the financial
world in the stability of the present government, or even of the
Republican form of government. For it is well known that China's
need of money is so great that any substitute for the present
would have to recognize the validity of the loan. It indicates,
however, the confidence felt in the resources of China. Moreover,
the financiers have their governments' express endorsement behind
them.
An event still more worthy of being chronicled is the definite
extinction of the trade in opium. In the British House of Com-
mons the Under- Secretary for India recently announced that the
Indian government had abandoned altogether the revenue derived
from the sale of opium, and were no longer selling any to China.
It was the first time in the modern history of India that they were
selling not an ounce of the poppy. The Under- Secretary said he
was very proud to be able to make that declaration. The chief
credit, however, is due to the societies which have for so long been
striving for the suppression of a traffic which has had for its support
that greed of nations and of traders that has wrought such fearful
evils in the Congo, and in such districts as the Putumayo. Great
credit is also due to the Chinese Republican government, which in
defiance of treaties refused to receive any more importations of
opium.
With Our Readers.
'PHE year 1912 was a banner year for the Society for the Propaga-
1 tion of the Faith as shown by the report issued in the June
Annals. The receipts for the past year footed up to $1,610,315.11, an
increase of $155,469.78 over the amount received in 1911, and the
largest ever collected by the Society since its foundation, ninety-one
years ago.
As usual, France leads the Catholic world in contributing to this
world-wide missionary organization, giving $621,366.19. The other
countries that contributed the largest amounts come in the following
order :
United States $366,460.59
Germany 196,013.53
Belgium 71,246.23
Argentine 61,188.81
Italy 54476.91
Ireland 52,736.96
Spain 40,855.08
Mexico 24,330.86
Switzerland 20,414.77
England 20,127.16
Chili 19,129.77
From those figures it appears that the offerings of the faithful
in the United States increased by $85,226.21 over those of the previous
year. France, England, and Germany made also a considerable ad-
vance, and Ireland nearly doubled the sum of its former contributions.
This is certainly gratifying, and shows a growing interest in the work
of the missions the world over, and more especially in this country.
The systematic conduct of the affairs of the Propagation of the
Faith commands American confidence. Each year the Society pre-
sents a complete report of its receipts. When the allocations to
the missions have been determined on and made, a complete report
of the expenditures is also given to the world. It is the Catholic
public that gives this money, and the Catholic public has, therefore,
the right to know all about it. This is the policy and procedure of the
Society.
When it is recalled that the Propagation of the Faith is the chief
support of the Catholic foreign missions, and when it is further re-
called that the Protestant missions receive an amount ten times larger,
572 WITH OUR READERS [July,
it will be granted that those contributions are much too small to meet
even the necessary expenses of our missions. We understand that
they come mostly from the poor; let us hope that the time is not far
distant when our wealthy Catholic brethren will open wide their
treasures and sustain the hands that are consecrated to the Christ-like
task of extending God's kingdom on earth.
pILBERT K. CHESTERTON lately made the following criticism
\J of Mr. H. G. Well's advocacy of the determinist theory of history :
" I see by one of his original and suggestive lectures, republished
in pamphlet form, that Mr. H. G. Wells is still hovering round the
notion that future history may perhaps become a fixed and calculable
thing, like the rotation of the stars. Everything that Mr. Wells
writes is of value ; but in this case my respect is solely for the doctrin-
aire, and not in the least for the doctrine. I should detest the doc-
trine if I thought it were true. I despise it, or even tolerate it,
because I know it is false. But Mr. Wells has a way of putting even
false doctrines so as to suggest the alternative of the true ones. He is
a very transparent writer: and I mean the phrase as a compliment,
for clear and flawless glass is not an easy thing to make. When
he says that the action of empires or peoples might come to be foreseen
like the changes of chemistry, he is fighting very fairly ; for he is mak-
ing the answer easy. If chemicals had a power of choice, it would
be impossible to be certain that a chemical experiment would come off.
It often doesn't come off even now. If a chemical element had ever
been in a state of indecision, it would be impossible to predict what it
would do. If an acid ever prayed not to be led into temptation,
chemistry would not be an exact science. We can prophesy about
these things because they are dead. We cannot prophesy about twenty
million people who will be alive when we are dead. They will have
the mixed motives, the sudden reactions, the unconscious prejudices,
the desperate choice of the less of two evils, that we all know in our
private lives in short, they will be human beings. That is my
prophecy about them. After that remarkable pronouncement, I put
off the prophet's robe.
" But while I think it absurd and unimaginative to say that there
is one separate and certain thing that must happen, I do not count it
so absurd to say that there are four or five things, one of which will
most probably happen. Human life is not a destiny; but it is a
drama. And while a drama is quite undramatic if there is only one
way out of the difficulty, it is generally most dramatic of all if there
are only two or three. Humanity in the future will not merely move
along t a path of progress ; which is as heathen and heartless as a maze
1913-] WITH OUR READERS 573
with no heart. But it will come to a cross-road ; which is as Christian
as a cross. There really are certain things that are all pretty probable,
none of them impossible, none of them inevitable. We may become
slaves. We may, by a rather more abrupt alteration, become free
men. We may have a new religon. We may return to the old one.
But among all these possibilities there is one that will strike many
people as more serious than the rest. We may relapse into barbarism."
WITH pleasing seriousness the writer of The Point of View, in the
June Scribner's, seeks to call the attention of his non-Catholic
brethren to the dangers of that wide sea of latitudinarianism whereon
they are wildly tossed by every wind of doctrine. He yearns for a
sense of conviction and of definite principle, so rare to-day. He
points out an evident danger of democracy wherein life is made a
dead flat land, and there is no guiding star but the unstable, passing
opinion of the crowd. We quote some portions of his thoughtful
essay :
" What significance, the serious or the humorous, should be at-
tached to our practice of putting weather-vanes on church spires?
Old-fashioned meeting-houses with faded green blinds nestle among
elms and maples; tall white spires still point heavenward, but many
of them wear this smart device to tell which way the wind blows.
Hamlet said he was 'but mad north-northwest;' are we but religious
north-northwest also, or east, as the wind of opinion may blow? It
is unpleasantly suggestive of faith rationalized, faith that is a matter
of changing thought, not of steady, heavenward-pointing hope founded
on something more solid than the play of mere intellect. The old-
fashioned Catholic church does better, at least in the matter of the
symbol on its spires; there shines the cross, against the blue of noon-
day, or golden against gray gathering clouds; and there is no gain-
saying, no evading, its unchanging significance.
" I am ardently democratic, but I am beginning to wonder if
the spirit of demos has not eaten too far into our very bones. Must
this constant endeavor to turn opinion to the changing public mind be
a necessary outcome of democracy?
" We veer and shift too readily, trying to find the exact path of
the prevailing mind. In the voting that I do, concerning, for the
most part, educational matters, I cannot help feeling that there is often
less clear-cut individual conviction on the part of the members of the
voting body than desire to be one of the majority, to seem good
fellows, to be 'in with the boys/ Yet the people considering educa-
tional questions are doubtless among the most enlightened in the
country. There is a hasty glance round, when any new opinion is
574 WITH OUR READERS [July,
launched, to see what the others are thinking; there is an unconfessed
feeling that the important thing is to get the sum total of expressions.
I do not like these questioning glances. It is well not to be too
isolated, and he with whom no one agrees is doubtless insane, but I
cannot help thinking that vox populi should hush itself now and then
to see whether it really is vox Dei. We nowadays take counsel too
much with our contemporaries, and do not admit our forebears suf-
ficiently to those decisions wherein they still have a right to speak.
As I look back on history it seems to me, as more than one thinker has
suggested, that the majority have seldom found out anything, whether
in matters spiritual or temporal, without the leadership of some nobler
and more gifted soul. One man's unswerving faith in the fine and
high outweighs, in the long run, ten thousand wavering voices from
the shifting, unsure mass
" There is that weather-vane again ! It keeps getting in my line
of vision, as I look from the green hill to westward, as I come out
from the sunken walk along the aqueduct, and see, beyond the grass-
grown path and the deep-foliaged trees, its gilded letters shining sig-
nificantly in the sun. I cannot get away from it! And it gives its
inevitable suggestion of unstable force, enduring at most but a few
hours. As I passed, on a clouded day last week, religion seemed
nor'-nor'-east, while, on a sunny afternoon it was but yesterday
faith was blowing due south. How it whips about in a real gale!
When will the churches take off their weather-vanes, and leave their
spires pointing to the north star?
ONE page from actual life is worth many volumes of academic
and theoretical discussion. How will it be possible for govern-
ment to deal with a generation that has never been trained in the
principles of religion and morality? A State that goes unconcernedly
on its way thinking that it need have no care for the religious training
of its children, is surely headed for the rocks. Many who have been
long asleep are waking up. Perhaps this story from every-day life
will arouse many more. In one of New York City's Police Courts
an eleven-year-old schoolboy, when asked what would happen to him
if he told a lie, said he did not know, and showed no concern about the
matter. The boy was a witness against another boy charged with
theft. The Magistrate declared he could not hold the prisoner, because
the sworn testimony of the boy, who did not know or care what would
happen to him if he told a lie, might not be received. Turning to the
prisoner the Magistrate said : " You ought to be very thankful to the
inefficient public school system of this city for your discharge. Cer-
tainly it is a sad commentary on the system when a boy nearly twelve
1913.] WITH OUR READERS 575
years old is unable to answer the question I've asked We spend
$40,000,000 a year in public instruction and here's a specimen."
An Assistant District Attorney suggested that the boy might not
have understood the question. The Magistrate replied:
" Understand the question ! Just go out and ask the business men
of the city what they think of the public school graduate. Why,
they're hanging out signs now which read: 'Public school boys and
girls need not apply for this position.' J:
The boy said he had attended a public school for five years.
A TIMELY and important pamphlet in answer to the charges
made against the Catholic Church by the Christian Herald
charges which we have already considered in THE CATHOLIC WORLD
is a reprint of an article from the Marian by J. P. McKey, C.M.
Copies of the pamphlet may be obtained from Rev. D. J. Downing,
C.M., St. Vincent's Mission House, Springfield, Mass. It sells at
three cents a copy; four cents by mail. A reduction is allowed when
ordered in quantities.
AN evidently modest correspondent has sent us the following verses,
asking us to publish them anonymously, and in the department
of With Our Readers. We think his request merits a favorable answer.
TO MARGARET.
(Five years old, and born blind.)
Two gardens fair, enclosed
From earthly ray,
Her virgin eyes await
Their marriage day.
They spurn all lesser love,
Though dark the night;
Content that their first Love
Is Perfect Light.
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THE
CATHOLIC WORLD,
VOL. XCVIL
AUGUST, 1913.
No. 581.
THE NEW MOVEMENT IN FRENCH LITERATURE.
A CATHOLIC RENAISSANCE.
BY JOSEPH L. O'BRIEN, M.A.
STUDY of the political history of France of the last
thirty years gives a Catholic student little hope for
better things from the " eldest daughter of the
Church." For that history is little more than the
continuous record of a brutal and relentless perse-
cution of Catholic truth and Catholic ideals, which aimed at nothing
else than the utter destruction, not of Catholicism, as our Protest-
ant friends complacently imagine, but of Christianity itself. The
ideal of the French politicians has been a new state in which God
would be eliminated and humanity deified ; in which the " lights of
heaven would be extinguished " and the lights of earth be man's
guides. With devilish ingenuity they reversed the Gospel precept.
" Destroy first the kingdom of God," they cried, " and all things
else will be added." We Catholics who have Christ's promise that
the gates of hell shall not prevail against His Church, have no fear
of the outcome. But withal we are grieved and depressed when we
reflect upon the cruelty and injustice perpetrated upon the Church
in the name of liberty.
Turning from the political history to the literary history, the
same epoch presents quite a different picture; one which buoys up
hope after the depression caused by the political retrospect, and
which may be taken as an indication of brighter days to come.
Within the past thirty years French thought has passed through a
Copyright. 1913. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
VOL. xcvu. 37
578 NEW MOVEMENT IN FRENCH LITERATURE [Aug.,
revolution. The story of this revolution is told in the literature
of the period. The strongest current in this literature has been
a gradual inclination toward Christian ideals, and to-day, for the
first time in two centuries, the principles underlying the work of
the " masters of the hour " in the world of French letters, are
Catholic. This may seem a strange thing to say of the literature
of a nation which has always professed the Catholic religion, even
if it has practiced that religion indifferently. But none the less
it is true, as a most casual reading of the history of French litera-
ture will prove. Even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
when France withstood the ravages of the Protestant revolt and
clung to the old faith, religion had little influence on literature.
The Muse of literature in France has ever followed willingly
in the train of her " pagan seducer." In the past religion seems
to have undervalued the services of literature, and so with the
enemies of religion she allied herself. With what terrible results
to both religion and literature we well know. Literature, in France,
succeeded in doing what the Protestant revolt had failed to ac-
complish. Wedded to the philosophy of a Voltaire and a Rousseau
to a great extent, she undermined the faith of the nation and
wrought a work of death. All through the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries literature in France was a veritable plague a
Black Death for faith and morals.
Call to mind a few of the masters of French literature of the
last century who have won renown not only at home, but whose
work is well known in other countries. Balzac, Flaubert, Mau-
passant, Dumas, Zola, Gautier, novelists; Baudelaire, Musset, de
Lisle, poets; Sainte-Beuve and Taine, critics; all of whom, when
not openly combating faith and morals, were at least ridiculing
and contemning them. Clustered around these luminaries were
a thousand satellites only too anxious to reflect the sentiments of
their masters. The result of their work is evident in the France
of to-day. France dangerously wounded and bleeding France
almost morally paralyzed but not yet dead. She is struggling
to free herself from her terrible bondage. And her liberation
seems at hand.
It is our purpose to sketch the rise of a new movement in
French literature, and to try to determine some of its causes. This
movement is distinctively Catholic, and as such has been persist-
ently overlooked by the majority of writers, when treating of
French literature in the most prominent reviews published in the
1913-] NEW MOVEMENT IN FRENCH LITERATURE 579
English language. They as yet cling to the delusion that the
France of to-day is the France of yesterday; that Catholicism
has been choked out of the life of the nation. Such writers com-
placently ignore the Catholic influences which are now making
themselves felt in English literature. We cannot therefore expect
them to recognize similar influences working abroad. For such
recognition, Catholics have learned by experience to look to the
Catholic press.
The most commanding figure in French literature for the
closing decades of the nineteenth century was Ferdinand Brunetiere,
one of the keenest literary critics France has known. Brunetiere,
single-handed, cut away much of the undergrowth of schools
and philosophies, which had choked not only morality but art
itself out of French letters, and infused new life into a literature
dying of dry-rot. His life and work furnish us with a striking
example of the " evolution religieuse " of modern French thought.
Born in 1849, Brunetiere received his classical education at the
Lycee of Marseilles, in an atmosphere, if not anti-religious, at
least irreligious. The philosophy of Victor Cousin and Jules
Simon, a practical liberalism mixed with a disdain of positive re-
ligion, was the official philosophy of the state schools in France
the philosophy of the baccalaureate at this time. The young
Brunetiere, a brilliant student and by nature a thinker, like all
young students of his generation, absorbed this philosophy, and
moulded his ideals into the indifference which was its aim. But
as he advanced in years, the theoretic agnosticism which he had
imbibed in his youth gave way to practical atheism. Comte, Spen-
cer, and Darwin became his masters. " I have spent/' he tells
us later in his life, " thirty years of my life to turn them into
blood and bone."* From Marseilles, Brunetiere went to Paris
and entered the Lycee of Louis-le-Grand, where he continued his
literary and philosophical studies. After the war of 1870, in
which he did military service, he took up his residence in Paris,
determined to devote his life to literary pursuits. For some years
his way was hard and thorny. As private tutor in a school which
prepared young men for the baccalaureate examination, he man-
aged to eke out a living. Teaching all day, he worked far into
the night preparing himself for the battles he was to wage on the
fields of literary criticism.
In 1875 Brunetiere, after several unsuccessful attempts, gained
*Discours de Combat, ist series.
580 NEW MOVEMENT IN FRENCH LITERATURE [Aug.,
Admission into the exclusive number of contributors to the powerful
Revue des Deux Mondes, and by 1880 his name as a critic was
firmly established. From that time until his death in 1907, he
was the arbiter of elegance in French letters.
His first great work as a critic was to slay the dragon of
naturalism, which was in full power when he took up arms against
it, and which was exploited with consummate skill by Zola. De-
spite the philosophic systems in which he had been trained, and
though he himself may not have been fully aware of it, the under-
lying principles of Brunetiere's work, Le Roman Naturaliste, are
Christian. They are far from the teachings of either positivist
or determinist philosophy. Such propositions as: human nature
is fallen; man has a free will; man is responsible for his actions
which are not mere fatal resultants, are the foundations of his
attacks upon naturalism. Here in the first great work which comes
from his pen, we find application of Christian standards to literary
criticism. Brunetiere was far from being a Christian. He had
a long way to travel, and many years were to pass before he made
an act of faith, but a break with established ideals and an inclina-
tion toward something radically opposed to them is betrayed in
this book. In it the young critic revivified a standard which had
fallen into decay in France, and with that standard exposed the
purulence of naturalism. Zola's star died out under the light
of the rising Brunetiere, and the way was opened for novels
which aimed at being something other than a " slice of life."
After ridding literature of the influence of Zola, Brunetiere
occupied himself with Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopedists.
In 1878 the " intellectuals " of France planned a celebration in
honor of the centenary of the death of Voltaire, in which they
hoped to deify the father of French emancipation. Voltairism had
been momentarily eclipsed by romanticism. The anniversary of
his death was an opportune time to restore the man and his work
to their former glory. With this end in view the celebration
was planned and carried out, but it was far from fulfilling the
expectations of its promoters. When all was over the position of
Voltaire, " the patron saint of irreligion," w r as shaken. His cult
instead of gaining in worshippers had diminished, and the man,
such as he really was, was better known. With terrible precision,
rigorous logic, and undisputed documentary knowledge Brunetiere
exposed Voltaire. In a famous article published in the Revue des
Deuq Mondes, Brunetiere drew a parallel between the lives and
1913.] NEW MOVEMENT IN FRENCH LITERATURE 581
works of Voltaire and Bossuet, and showed to which of these two
men French literature was most indebted. Brunetiere, falling under
the influence of Bossuet and defending his ideals, became more open
in his attacks upon the decadent schools of philosophy dominating
literature.
Renan was another of the popular radical philosophers to fall
as Brunetiere advanced. In his younger days the great critic
had yielded for a time to the lure of Kenan's skepticism, and knew
from experience the failure of this system to satisfy the needs of a
soul which was not totally blind. He was also aware of its blight-
ing effect on literature owing to its instability and vagueness. In
the same relentless method with which he had dealt with Zola and
Voltaire, Brunetiere attacked Renan, not without signal success.
" After having killed the naturalism of Zola, Brunetiere by his
attitude helped more than any one else to kill the skepticism
of Renan."*
No modern literature was so affected by the school of " art
for art's sake " as was the French. This fallacy inspired some of
the most telling pages of Brunetiere's work. Against its de-
fenders he held that art is not free to do as it pleases, but that
the artist, like every other man, is bound by the moral laws. The
poet, the writer, is not merely a maker of harmonious lines or a
designer of beautiful verbal pictures. His words clothe his
thoughts in his work a philosophy is reflected. For his thoughts
and reflections the writer is responsible. If they are false, then
his work, regardless of its formal merit, is false. Here Brunetiere
lays down a fundamental principle of Christian criticism. In ap-
plying it he throws his tremendous influence on the side of morality
in its continual campaign against a soulless literature, and inspired
that campaign in France with new vigor.
Brunetiere's work was crowned with the highest success. His
career as litterateur was most brilliant. As director of the Revue
des Deux Mondes, as professor at the Sorbonne, as member of the
French Academy,f and as a powerful and prolific writer some
thirty volumes touching on every side of French literature flowed
from his pen the extent of his influence can hardly be estimated.
He stood for all that was great and good in literature, and im-
pressed his views on his countrymen. He found French litera-
*Ames d'Aujourd'hui. Par Francois Vincent, p. 376.
t Elected in 1894. His rival for the seat was Zola. By its choice the Academy
repudiated Zola once and for all.
582 NEW MOVEMENT IN FRENCH LITERATURE [Aug.,
ture blighted by naturalism and atheism, and spent his life in
combating these forces. When death stilled his pen, a new ideal-
ism, a Catholic idealism, had burst forth. The debt the new school
owes to him time alone will tell.
We have seen that the philosophic opinions of Brunetiere
underwent a radical change. This change is shown forth in his
works. Did it affect his life? In November, 1900, addressing
the Catholic congress of Northern France in session at Lille, he
himself answered the question. He had long searched for the
truth, and at last he found it. " What I believe," he said, " what
I believe, not what I suppose, nor what I imagine, not what I know,
nor what I understand, but what I believe go and ask of
Rome."* His submission to the Church was the logical outcome
of his study. He had sounded the prevailing systems to the
depths, but he found them delusions. Only in the doctrines of the
Church did he find that stay which can support the honest soul.
He died in 1907, in his fifty-eighth year, after devoting the closing
years of his life in making known to the world the treasure
he had found. He was regretted by all, and he died the acknowl-
edged master critic of his time.
Frangois Coppee, y poet, novelist, and dramatist, member of
the Academy, and one of the most popular of French writers,
stands out prominently in the development of the new idealism.
During the early years of his poetic career, Coppee was a disciple
of the school of poetry which arose in France along in the '6o's,
known as " Le Parnasse," from the publication La Parnasse Con-
temp oraine, which was the organ of the school. If not the greatest
of the " parnassiens," Coppee was " the most popular and the most
widely read."$ His ambition was to write poetry which could
be read and enjoyed, not only in the salons, as was the classic
poetry, nor again in the cenacles, as was the romantic poetry,
but also in the great world of every-day life. And he succeeded
admirably in fulfilling his ambition. The great popularity his
work enjoys is due in large part to his choice of subjects. He
broke away from the perpetual melancholy note of the romantic
poets, and found his inspiration in the common walks of life.
His poetry of the " daily life " brought him in touch with
the common people from whom he had sprung, and attracted their
attention. They became enthusiastic readers of his work. Not
*Discours de Combat, II., p. 43. tBorn 1842.
$ Journal des debats, 24 mars, 1908.
1913.] NEW MOVEMENT IN FRENCH LITERATURE 583
only his poems, but also his dramas and novels were eminently
successful, and they extended his influence to all classes of readers.
At an early age he fell a victim to the skepticism of his times,
and drifted away from the Catholic faith, in which he had been
brought up. Despite increasing success and worldly honors, there
remained a void in his soul, which he tried, in vain, to fill. He
could find nothing to replace the faith which he had deserted.
With grieved heart he saw whither the Muse of poetry had strayed
without that guidance which Truth alone can give. In 1892,
addressing a circle of young litterateurs who had invited him to
speak to them, he betrayed the secret aspirations of his soul. He
expressed to them the hope that from among their ranks a poet
would arise who would reconcile the modern world with the
Christian ideal. " I have not the faith," he continued. " I am
not a Christian, but I am under the impression that such recon-
ciliation is necessary."
Five years later Coppee was to avow his Christianity to the
world. He returned to the Church from which he had long been a
stranger, but the love of which had never altogether died out in
his heart. Smitten with a malady which brought him to the verge
of the grave, the poet in his hours of desolation and suffering
confronted himself with the problems of eternity, of which in the
hardihood of his youth, and among the honors and successes of
life, he had little thought. In his earnest soul grace worked
the miracle, and the shackles of his past life fell from him. He
arose from his bed of sickness a Christian knight, sworn to devote
his remaining years " pour Dieu et pour la France."
Although most of CoppeVs writings antedate his conversion,
there is little in them which is offensive. He was never a scoffer.
" One may meet in my books some few pages which I disown
and detest where I have spoken of religious things with a foolish
levity, at times even with a most culpable boldness; one will look
in vain for a blasphemy." Thus he writes in La Bonne Soiif-
france* looking back on his writings after his return to the
Church. The few books which he produced between 1897 anc ^
1908, the year of his death, are written in the same charming
style which was ever characteristic of him, and are replete with
the fervor and glow of faith. They were inspired by one motive
to help those of his countrymen, " for whom doubt is not the smooth
pillow of which Montaigne speaks For a long time I was one
*Preface, p. 7.
584 NEW MOVEMENT IN FRENCH LITERATURE [Aug.,
of them, I suffered from the same malady. I offer them the
remedy which has cured me."*
Coppee exerted a far-reaching influence on the popular mind.
The immense circulation of his books, the articles written in his
later years, and contributed to one of the great Paris dailies,
brought his ideas to the notice of thousands who were far from
Christian influence, and who could not be reached by the usual
means. He created a public well disposed toward the new idealism
in literature. What Brunetiere had done in the intellectual world,
Coppee repeated with no little success in the common every-day
world.
Few names in contemporaneous French literature are better
known than that of Paul Bourget,f psychologist and novelist.
Many years of fruitful labor in the world of letters have won for
him an unrivalled prestige. Some few years ago when this eminent
Academician made his submission to the Church, " philosophic "
Europe gasped for breath. Tolstoy, the idol of literary Philis-
tinism, wrote from his Russian retreat apropos of Bourget's re-
jection of modern philosophy : "I am particularly surprised by
the fact that such men as Paul Bourget and his friends can, in
1910, still speak seriously of Catholicism in France after Voltaire,
Rousseau, and so many other thinkers. Nothing shows more clearly
the frightful decay into which these men have fallen." But what
Tolstoy and his followers failed to perceive, Bourget and his
friends not only perceived, but courageously acknowledged. The
ideals of Voltaire and Rousseau had collapsed. They were in-
capable of satisfying the aspirations of the soul, or of inspiring
it with motives worth an effort. Psychologists were wont to ex-
plain the conversion of Verlaine, Rette, Huysmans, and Coppee
on the ground that they turned to Catholicism in search of new
sensations, after exhausting all that philosophy and the world had
to offer. They were poets, nevroses, men of imagination rather
than of intellect. But when Bourget, a psychologist whose power
of cold analysis had been applauded for years, and Brunetiere,
whose scientific criticism had become world- famed, rejected as
worthless the various schools of thought which were in vogue, and
returned to Catholicism, no such explanations were forthcoming.
The high priests in the temples of literature were deserting the
altars of false gods. The fanatics shrieked, but the sober-minded
began to think and to follow their leaders. The example .afforded
*Preface, p. 5. tBorn 1852.
1913.] NEW MOVEMENT IN FRENCH LITERATURE 585
by men of the calibre of Brunetiere, Coppee, and Bourget has been
the force which gave thousands of their countrymen the courage
to be true to their convictions. " Exempla trahunt " is especially
true of the vacillating and undecided temperament characteristic
of the French.
This unprecedented awakening of Catholic idealism which has
asserted itself in French literature in recent times, drives home to
the world one very important lesson. Philosophy, which was to
re-establish a new heaven on earth, has collapsed. Philosophy
which was to answer all the whys and wherefores which torture
the unanchored mind, has not kept its promises. It has drifted
into hopeless confusion and leads nowhere. All the schools of
philosophy which have followed in the wake of the Renaissance and
the Protestant revolt, have done nothing to ease the human smart.
And men have grown weary of waiting. They are sick of delu-
sions. They search for relief from the shattered world which lies
about them. And from amidst the ruins they catch sight of the
one system which has stood strong and firm against the shocks of
two thousand years, and which fearlessly proclaims : " I am the
Truth." Is it to be wondered at if they turn to it for light? No
nation placed fonder hopes in modern philosophy to bring about
a new order of things than did France. None has suffered a
greater disappointment. Hence the unrest. Hence the revival of
the faith which for two centuries the philosophers of the nation
blindly sought to destroy.
This collapse of philosophy and its pretentions is the great
cause of the religious renaissance which to-day is sweeping through-
out the land. " People who thirty years ago would have been
fanatic materialists and fervent' devotees of irreligion in the train
of Robin and of Littre, snapped their fingers at science and felt
their souls warm under the breath of a new-Christianity."*
" Never/ 5 laments the anti-clerical Mercure de France, " never since
the time of the Reformation has such a curiosity about everything
that pertains to religion been evident."
Although the movement which so unexpectedly made its ap-
pearance in French literature at the close of the last century is
as yet in its infancy, it has impressed itself upon the life of the
*Lanson, Histoire de la LittSrature frangaise. 12 Ed. Lanson seems to mean
by new-Christianity (neo-christianisme) a sort of agreement with the will of God
without believing in Him. On 'the next page he tells us that new-Christianity soon
split up, some going over to Catholicism, others returning to the pursuit of relative
truth. Lanson's book is rationalistic throughout, and as such his testimony to
the religious unrest is valuable.
586 NEW MOVEMENT IN FRENCH LITERATURE [Aug.,
nation, and has been supported by many of the ablest writers
of the day. Bazin, Bordeaux, Victor Favet, and Baumann have
supplanted the Zolas, Daudets, and Maupassants of a generation
ago, and are producing novels in keeping with Christian ideals.
These writers are among the most widely read in France at the
present time, and the work of all is of exceptional artistic merit.
Rene Doumic and Victor Giraud, keen, sharp critics, are continuing
the work of Brunetiere. Theodore Wyzewa, by his excellent trans-
lations of Joergensen's famous Franciscan trilogy and of Monsignor
Benson's works, has put before the reading public of France two
of the greatest Catholic writers of the day. Georges Goyau and
Paul Thureau-Dangin,* writers on social and historical questions,
have produced books well calculated to stimulate the interest of
their readers in such subjects. These few names represent the
leaders of the movement at the present time. Around them is
clustered a host of lesser lights inspired by the work of such
masters, and filled with the traditions of Brunetiere and Coppee.
With such forces the work of reconstruction is pushing rapidly on.
Outside of the avowed Catholic writers, Maurice Barres, Henri
Levedan, Jules Lemaitre, and Pierre Loti stand as if undecided
with what current to cast their lot. Barres and Levedan are
apparently Catholics in all but name. Of late years their work
reveals marked Catholic tendencies. Lemaitre, friend and admirer
of Coppee, not long ago said to a friend : " Ah, I love the priests,
the religious. I love all that you love, you Catholics." Christian
heart, pagan head! Such is Lemaitre at present. Like Loti he
has passed through all the pangs of uncertainty and doubt, and is
as yet drifting on the waves of discontent. Perhaps ere long
they will find the way so well indicated by Coppee.
The greatest glories of France date from the times when
France was Catholic. " La douce France " was ever Catholic
France. The mighty wave of Catholicism which to-day rolls on
with increasing strength, shows the struggle the soul of the nation
is making to reassert itself. This effort is general. It has effected
every domain of activity, save one. Especially in literature a
nation's perpetual examination of conscience has it wrought a
notable change. When we least expect it, it may extend itself to
the political world always the last to yield to a reforming influence,
and bring home to French politicians the meaning of a word they
have as yet to learn liberty.
*Died Feb. 24, 1913.
THE LAVINGTON OF MANNING.
BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY.
ARDINAL MANNING in his Anglican days was, as
all the world knows, Archdeacon of Chichester.
He was also Rector of Lavington. There are three
Lavingtons in Sussex, widely scattered, carrying di-
verse prefixes, almost indiscoverably small, and
equally beautiful. The village associated with the Cardinal is called
East Lavington, or, more properly, Woollavington. It lies close
to the high South Downs, on the northerly and landward side.
Four miles from a railway station and nearly three times that dis-
tance from a town, it is very much " on the road to Nowhere," and
in consequence has what is to-day a rarely blessed fate in remaining
unprofaned by touring motors. A large manor, a little church,
a few cottages, comprise it. Ash and beech woods, interspersed
with evergreens, climbing an abrupt slope, wave high over it, and
a clear brook tumbles along its wayward channel at their feet.
Enchanting paths on every side lead to the patches of breezy plain
on top of the Downs, whence on a fine day you can see the Isle of
Wight, and yachts and warships riding in the Solent. All about
you, up there, lie the round mysterious hillocks, the tumuli which
the ordnance maps show like the bosses of a belt far across these
historic coasts of the southern counties; graves of lonely grandeur
heaped over West Saxon chieftans, or over primeval warriors
dead long before the Heptarchy came into being. Over them,
like a never-ceasing shower from mid-April to mid- June, pours
the heavenly music of countless nightingales. In all England is no
more characteristically English scene than rolls outspread in undu-
lating pasture, coppice, and harvest, to the violet-misted horizon.
The ground above Lavington is some seven hundred feet high, and
with so many neighboring forest glooms, it is hard to believe
oneself in a detimbered ancient land, and not among the virgin
hills of New Hampshire.
Lavington House is a comfortable, spacious, rather plain stone
manse, set in the middle of its several hundred acres. Like most
English enclosures, it has always had a public right of way clear
across it, between Graff ham and Duncton. Close to the Hall
588 THE LAVINGTON OF MANNING [Aug.,
nestles the pretty Early English church, " blossomed high in tufted
trees." The estate has a long but very tranquil history. For over
two hunderd years it belonged to a family who, as legal patrons,
could nominate their incumbent, and at various times supplied the
needed ecclesiastic from among its own members. In this family, it
is said, the succession in the male line always failed, save once : and
that was when the Rev. John Sargent, son of John, became both
squire and rector in the year 1805. He died in the summer of
1833, J ust as Newman came back, fever-shaken, from Sicily, to
his old comradeship with Hurrell Froude, and his " work to do
in England," and just as Keble mounted the pulpit-stair of St.
Mary the Virgin's in Oxford, to sound the tocsin of the great
Movement. Mr. Sargent was a Master of Arts of Cambridge
University, an old-fashioned Tory, a Low Church evangelical, who
had no sympathy to waste on the religious changes close at hand.
It was a joy to the villagers when it became known that Mr. Sar-
gent's curate, a young Fellow of Merton College, was to succeed
him in the living, and pursue on a larger scale his super-intelligent
and profoundly unselfish ministrations among them. He was al-
ready greatly loved; much was expected of his career from those
who best knew him; in 1833, as always, he looked more like a
spirit than a mortal man. His name was Henry Edward Manning.
Readers of his noble survey, called England and Christendom, may
remember a movingly beautiful passage, referable to cherished Lav-
ington, about " the little church under a green hillside, where the
Morning and Evening Prayers, and the music of the English Bible,
became for seventeen years a part of my soul."
Mr. John Sargent and Mary his wife had two sons, both of
special promise. The elder predeceased his father by four years,
having died aged twenty, in 1829. His brother, Henry Martyn
Sargent, a boy of seventeen, became the heir of Lavington, and,
true to the strange fate which seemed to overhang the men of his
blood, lived only long enough to reach his majority. There were
four sisters left to mourn him, all of them modestly famous for
their loveliness of face, form, and character. One after another,
they all married clergymen. The history of these marriages has
no little interest, both to modern Anglicans and to us who are
aware how convert Anglicans have strengthened the parching life
of the Catholic Church in England. The eldest Miss Sargent,
Emily, married in her father's lifetime Samuel Wilber force, who
already stood before his university as something more than the dis-
1913-] THE LAVINGTON OF MANNING 589
tinguished Liberator's son, and was soon to be widely known as
the Bishop first of Oxford, then of Winchester. His brother,
Newman's dear Henry Wilberforce, engaged himself promptly to
another of the Sargents, and was afraid to tell Newman! (The
inner circle at Oriel, who had come into close touch with that
fiery reformer, Hurrell Froude, were strongly celibate, and looked
upon matrimony as an outright defection from the cause.) The
youngest daughter of Lavington House became the wife of
George Dudley Ryder, a son of His Lordship of Coventry and
Lichfield, and himself not the least attractive in this group of
high-minded friends. And Caroline, aged twenty-one, third of the
Sargent girls, six months after her father's death in November,
I 833, was quietly married by her brother-in-law, Samuel Wilber-
force, in Lavington Church, to the Rev. Mr. Manning, the incum-
bent; and a bright day it long remained in the memory of the
parishioners, who had reason to cherish both bridegroom and bride.
In an atmosphere of very strong mutual affection, unbroken for
many years, all these young kinsfolk began their linked and varied
and idyllic lives. It was a great blow to them all, as well as to
his devoted mother, when her only son, Henry Sargent, died in
1836. Mrs. Samuel Wilberforce then inherited Lavington House,
and she and her husband came to make it their home. The Man-
nings lived a stone's throw away, near the Park gates, but facing
the Park, in the attractive old dwelling called Beechwood House,
which served the beloved parson for a parsonage. He found plenty
to do in his remote little parish of Woollavington-cum-Graffham.
But Caroline Sargent, like her brilliant brothers, was early
called away. She lay dying of consumption when the first of
Manning's professional honors came to him, his appointment to
the second rural Deanery of Midhurst; and in July, 1837, she
was laid to rest in Lavington churchyard, after three and a half
childless but most happy wedded years. To the heart of her hus-
band, intensely sensitive and tender, it was an overwhelming sor-
row. It was also a wordless one. He buried himself in tasks
and plans of ever-widening scope, and in a courageous acceptance of
the inscrutable Will of God. He was received into the Catholic
Church in 1851, little foreseeing that he was to survive his angelic
wife (and through what worlds of change, and what workings of
the grace of God !) for more than another forty years. The name
of the dead seems to have been mentioned but once, and then in an
hour of sudden emotion and alarm, to Robert Isaac Wilberforce,
590 THE LAVINGTON OF MANNING [Aug.,
when the two famous converts, in the first glow of their splendid
renunciation, were travelling to Rome. As an Anglican, while as
yet Manning had not realized the consoling truth that a departed
soul
can drink
The dew of all the prayers that I can say,
he had kept religiously each anniversary of his loss; and he kept
it with a far more efficacious loyalty afterwards, on to the close
of his long life. In those after-years, it was broached more than
once by his relatives to the ageing Cardinal Archbishop of West-
minster that it would be well to mark the dear grave far away.
"No: let the grass grow over it." He had always been of the
same mind. Thoughtful persons, Catholics, can best appreciate
that ascetic answer, its circumstance, and its finality. Surely it
was better, in view of what is, in a way among us, the instinctive
congregational jealousy concerning the priesthood, that nothing
should be said or done to recall a private tie of the chief shepherd.
It was better that the thousands who recognized in Manning the
spark of an almost matchless human sympathy, should be barred
from reading what sacred domestic experience had fanned that
flame to the great comfort of all men, " Parthians and Medes and
Elamites, and inhabitants of Mesopotamia, and the parts of Lybia
about Cyrene." And yet there is to be seen to-day this simple
inscription on a little cross against the west wall of Woollavington
churchyard, an old wall of flint and rubble, overhung in summer
with the delicate tendrils and flowers of wild snapdragon :
CAROLINE
WIFE OF HENRY EDWARD MANNING
BORN 1812,
DIED JULY 24, 1837.
i
Some pilgrim of to-morrow will wonder who put it there, and
when it was put there, since it was not in existence when the
Cardinal died in 1892. The explanation is a simple one. Mr.
Reginald Carton Wilberforce, one of the Bishop's three surviving
sons, and heir to the estate, through his mother, sold the property
about eleven years ago. Before leaving it, with its network of
old and dear associations, to strangers, Caroline Manning's rela-
1913.] THE LAVINGTON OF MANNING 591
tives (some of whom could remember her) raised the little head-
stone above her unforgotten grave. There are others of that race
laid in the long row under the wall, some with similar crosses
of stone or iron, lettered in red and black, some with no memorial
at all. The dead gentry and the dead rustics lie close here. No
divisions, no " lots," no copings, no piled-up inane marbles ! Only
a few rose-bushes, and the laurel and cypress beyond the borders
mark this garden of eternal rest, utterly beautiful in its cloistral
simplicity. The sun-shot woods almost overhang the graves; and
on the other side is Manning's peaceful church with its red steep-
sloping roofs, its lancet windows and quaint bell-cot. Church and
manor seem separated from the outer world by oceans of grass
and air. The loudest sound thereabouts is the cheery light note of
the linnet, or the rain-like scurry of rabbits in the lane beside the
churchyard. It seems an micro wded place, judged by the few
unpretending monuments, none more than four feet high, until
one notices the innumerable unmarked graves all about, green
furrows and mounds which look exactly like the ripplings of a
quiet sea. Then one remembers what a long-used ground it really
is (closed now), and how it served other villages, as well as this,
for burying-place for time out of mind. The ripples will die down
soon, and all will be as it was when some mediaeval bishop first
walked around it with his incense and holy water, and the cares-
sing prayers of the Latin ritual.
" Sam. Oxon " is among those who rest here ; his sailor son
upon his right hand, and his wife upon his left. They brought
him home in July, 1873, from the Hampshire uplands, where the
slight stumble of a perfectly trained horse had ended in a moment
his valued life. For a local memorial to him, they rebuilt the
old church at Graff ham, (Manning's Graff ham once) ; it is a mile
away, but shares, and has always shared, one rector with tiny
Lavington. But Lavington church has his pastoral staff, brought
from Culdesdon, and set relicwise in a recess of the wall, and the
modern transeptal side chapel is full of glass and brass which recall
his " most dear memory." Somehow, Bishop Wilberforce, for all
of his worth, usefulness, piety, and wit, does not mean much to
us Catholics. He filled his office acceptably as an Anglican Right
Reverend Father in God. But we do not feel quite towards him
as we feel towards a Wilson or a Forbes, or a King: utinam si
noster esses! Place him beside his intensely unworldly brothers
and his brother-in-law Manning, and Bishop Wilberforce looks
592 THE LAVINGTON OF MANNING [Aug.,
interesting as ever, but most curiously unsupernatural. He had
been one of Newman's circle at Oriel, and he was Newman's dio-
cesan when the final break came in 1845, an< ^ ne nac ^ l ve( i New-
man. May he rest in peace!
From the union of Samuel Wilber force and Emily Sargent
have sprung several men of mark, clerical and lay, all of whom
have clung to the Church of England. But the Bishop's one
daughter, Mrs. Pye, became a Catholic, as did her husband. As
to the other Sargent- Wilberforce marriage, it ended in a far
more generous gift to the Faith. Mr. and Mrs. Henry Wilber-
force, fools for Christ's sake, made a total sacrifice of their income,
their position, and the advantages of their sheltered country life.
They came together into the bosom of the true Mother of souls,
and were richly blest in their remarkable children, full of charm
and humor and holiness. Chief of these was their eldest son
Arthur, better known to us as Father Bertrand Wilberforce of the
Order of Preachers. His delightful and most edifying Life and
Letters will always beget a great love and veneration for his sainted
memory, and carry on the apostolate to which he gave himself
whole-heartedly.
Yet another daughter of Lavington House, Mrs. Ryder, be-
came a Catholic in Rome with her little children and her husband.
Two of their sons were priests of immense power and influence,
whom we lost only yesterday. One was Father Henry Ignatius
Dudley Ryder, Superior of the Birmingham Oratory, a poet and
a controversialist (an odd blend but a fine one!) of extraordinary
quality. He was destined, by a pleasant accident, to carry into
the sanctuary, in his own person, the full tradition of the Sargent
nobleness of mien and sweetness of mind. His brother, Father
Cyril Ryder the Redemptorist, was no less active a soldier of
Christ up to the threshold of old age. There are other men, and
other women, of the Sargent descent of whose goodness much
might be said.
Lavington is not, in the nature of things, a place to which
great changes come. The few low vine-hung cottages are what
they always were, and there are one or two old people in their
doorways who remember " Mr. Manning," and how sad they all
were when he " turned to Rome." It was a far, incredible journey !
and he did not go alone, for his curate, Mr. Laprimandaye, went
with him; and truly awe-struck orphans these old folk felt in those
wonderful days when they were young. They look at you wistfully
1913.] THE LAVINGTON OF MANNING 593
if you tell them you are, too, what they have been taught to call a
" Roman." You see, you cannot pose successfully as any kind of
a monster if you fly the colors of their Cardinal! But if Lav-
ington, including Beechwood House, has stood stock-still, its manor
has not done so. The east end, dignified and Georgian, with its
date over the porch, and its great chimneys and beautiful balus-
trades, is all of it which was there seventy-odd years ago. Even
this has a new interior. The rest is all modern. The rich people
who bought the estate have enlarged the house and the lawns and
the gardens, and built big stables, and lodges to flank the drives.
The results are not undignified. The Park, which was always
homelike and lovely, rather than romantic, remains " unfussed,"
and the funny little steep footways sink to it from the summit
of the Downs through the same natural underbrush. Beyond the
sylvan peace of its situation and outlook, Lavington, after all,
can have small attraction for strangers. Yet a certain intimate
everlasting interest centres there. Some humanist of the Fold will
from time to time find his way thither to look at Manning's
altar, below its lowered chancel arch : that altar which was to him,
happily, " no continuing city/' although the love of his youth lay
beside it, in dust. Such a wayfarer will think also, perhaps, of the
four sweet girls born in these Sussex woodlands long ago : of the
two who sleep here, and of the Catholic two who sleep elsewhere
by their Catholic husbands. The great generative genius of Henry
Edward Manning may owe .something to one of these graves; to
the tutelary care, rather, of her who on earth had known only
the beauty of its spiritual twilight. Protestants and pre-Victorians,
the Sargent sisters grew up to be the undeliberate instruments of
an all-mysterious Providence. Magnificently have they helped to
build up the walls of Sion in their robbed England, either in them-
selves, or in their posterity. Remote Woollavington, in its measure,
is a seedplot of the saints of God.
VOL. XCVII. 38
THE RED ASCENT.
BY ESTHER W. NEILL.
CHAPTER XL
HE Colonel had been asked to deliver the oration
at the Fourth of July picnic. It was a compliment
that he always expected. This year he agreed to
make the speech with his usual apparent reluctance.
There was so much " young blood " in the county,
people were " tired " of hearing him, etc. The assurances that fol-
lowed these protests, tickled his insatiable vanity; he would have
been mortally hurt if they had turned to the younger generation for
a representative man.
In this part of the world there were few days that were con-
sidered legal holidays. Not that the people were consumed with
energy, or so puritanical that picnicking was considered a waste of
time, but they had their prejudices that precluded certain celebra-
tions popular in other parts of the United States. The thirtieth of
May was plainly a Yankee holiday. Why should the children of
these sharpshooting Confederates stop all their legitimate duties to
decorate the graves their fathers had so cheerfully made necessary ?
Lincoln's birthday was passed over in charitable silence. Labor Day
did not appeal to these old-time slave owners. Thanksgiving was a
New England festival, instituted in a rigorous climate where all
fruition seemed doubtful, and prayer was prudently postponed until
the scanty crops were gathered into commodious barns. Here, in
this fertile land, they cultivated a spirit of perpetual thankfulness
for the warmth and sunlight of their Southern skies.
Christmas, of course, was celebrated with all the old plantation
customs; holiday for the servants until the back log burned away,
and the back log, systematically soaked in the mill pond, sputtered
and smouldered for days while the village made merry. There
was calling and dancing, and an interminable exchange of presents;
there was rum punch and eggnog in every house, and pantry shelves
sagged beneath their layers of mince pies, fruit cake, and other in-
digestible provender; but Christmas was a festival kept within
doors. Fourth of July was the only holiday in the year that called
for 'the oratorical gifts of the most distinguished citizen, and on
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 595
the third of July the Colonel suffered an attack of laryngitis that
reduced his grandiloquence to an irate whisper.
Jefferson Wilcox, who had postponed his journey to Texas so
that he might share in this July jollification, was full of sympathy.
He cranked up his automobile and speeded to the nearest town
to bring atomizers, prescriptions, gargles, but the Colonel's voice
could not be coaxed to a key above a pathetic croak.
" Dick will have to go for you," said Jeff consolingly.
" Can can Dick talk?"
" Talk," exclaimed Jeff in some surprise. " Haven't you ever
heard him make a speech? Why he was head of our debating
society. Won all the prizes. Why when Dick began to talk, the
other side knew it was all up with them and sat down. It's a gift,"
he explained tactfully, " a gift, no doubt, inherited from you."
" Perhaps," said the Colonel. " God knows he comes by it
legitimately. My father was an orator. Could hold his own with
men like Clay and Webster. Yes, Dick will go and take my place.
They'll run in that 'cock-eyed Yankee judge' if Dick don't go. I'll
make him. Send him to me."
Jefferson sauntered off to look for Richard. He found him in
the stable mending a stall that Spangles, in one of her vicious
moods, had pawed into splinters.
" The Colonel wants you," he said.
" What for? " said Richard looking up. " I don't mind con-
fessing that I'm trying to keep out of the Colonel's way this morn-
ing."
" Well his temper is fierce," agreed Jefferson, " so I don't know
how you are going to fill the bill as his proxy." He took off his
hat, and assuming a ridiculous attitude he added dramatically,
" I now have the honor of presenting to you the orator of the day,
Mr. Richard Matterson."
" What's that ? " asked Richard uncomprehendingly.
Jefferson sat down upon a heap of straw and leisurely lighted
a cigarette. " Very simple proposition. The Colonel has lost his
voice, and insists that you take his place to-morrow. You will pro-
ceed to enlighten your fellow-citizens upon the glory of the Declara-
tion of Independence and the loveliness of the ladies, God bless
'em."
" I can't," said Richard. " You know I can't."
" Can't! In the bright lexicon of youth. Can't! I'd like to
know why you can't ? "
596 THE RED ASCENT [Aug.,
"But why should I?"
" The Colonel having lost his voice, fears a certain 'cock-
eyed Yankee judge!' Since a Matterson is pledged to the job, a
Matterson must go."
Richard looked down upon his mud-stained trousers. " I'd
cut a pretty figure in these clothes," he said with some show of
impatience.
" It seems to me," said Jefferson lightly, " that I saw a gray
suit of familiar angles hanging in my wardrobe. If you will accept
the loan of them a second time "
" Didn't I send those clothes back to you? "
" I am delighted to admit your absent-mindedness."
"But how can I talk, Jeff?"
" How? " repeated Jeff, sending circles of smoke into the air.
"With your tongue, man; with your tongue."
" Your jokes, Jeff, are frequently of the vaudeville variety.
Excuse me if I do not smile."
Jeff grinned. " I was merely accentuating the obvious.
Here, give me that hammer and those nails; as a carpenter you
are not a success. Go upstairs and get busy on your oration. Go
talk to the Colonel. Seems to me if I lived in this county I'd
run for Congress. Here's your opportunity. Send yourself to
Washington on a Fourth of July peroration."
Richard abandoned his work as a carpenter, and hurried to the
house to register his protest, but the Colonel was obdurate. If
Richard had any sense, any judgment, any power for speech-
making, then there was no escape from this civic duty. If he had
intended to become a " preacher," he must have received some train-
ing in oratory that would enable him to talk in a way that would
reflect credit on the family. The Colonel's face was growing
apoplectic as he choked out the various reasons why his son should
represent him, and Richard, realizing that this whispered colloquy
was increasing the Colonel's irritation, finally agreed to go.
With a wet towel wound around his head to offset the drowsi-
ness that now seemed habitual, Richard sat up all night, and labored
over his first county speech. Towards dawn he had finished, but
his mind was too busy to sleep. He took off his shoes and crept
softly down the stairs, meaning to go out on the porch, and lie
down under the paling stars and wait for the sunrise, but as he
passed the library door, he saw that the lamp still burned upon the
centre table, and going into the room he found the Colonel lying in
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 597
a drunken stupor on the floor. Lifting him tenderly, he placed him
upon the leather lounge in the corner, and, covering him with an
old raincoat, he went out into the daydawn, his heart heavy with
a sense of failure.
He had longed to be a moral force in the world, and yet here,
in his own home, he wielded no influence. Of what use were his
high aspirations, his cultivated idealism? He had believed and
the belief had been accepted humbly that he had been chosen to
better a sin-stained world; to bring a sense of the supernatural
into toiling lives; to ease their burdens with immortal promises,
and now, as he stood leaning against the white pillar of the porch
and facing the dim glow in the eastern sky, he wondered at the
darkness that seemed to be engulfing him. Why had he believed
himself to be chosen to give his life to others? Had he no right
to his own energy ; no right to the ease that in the years to come his
own energy might bring? He had struggled so hard for his edu-
cation; had he no right to the intellectual enjoyment that comes
to the scholar in a life of tranquil plenty? If he had millions
the Fielding millions he could employ others to do his work for
him; he could build churches, orphan asylums, colleges. He need
not offer himself as a laborer in the Lord's vineyard. He could
grasp at the beauty, the love, the liberty that the world offers with-
out sacrificing himself to priestly functions. In the stillness of
the dew-wet morning he seemed to hear that blatant cry as old as
creation : " I am not my brother's keeper." Why had he believed
that he was, and believing, why had he changed ?
He had been forced by circumstances out of the seminary, and
he had worked in a sort of torpor ever since. To-night his speech-
making had roused him to intellectual activity again. He ques-
tioned himself endlessly, and his merciless introspection made him
doubtful of all his motives. But when the sun rose, he was calmed
by the familiar objects around him. Why should he dream of
impossible contingencies? Why should he worry himself with
vague motives when his present duty was so clearly defined ? For
the first time he welcomed the arduous tasks of the morning
they offered him an escape from himself.
- * * * *
The small platform, decorated with red and white bunting and
reserved for the celebrities of the county, creaked ominously as
Richard stepped upon it. The chairman of the " committee on en-
tertainment " regretted at great length Colonel Matterson's dis-
598 THE RED ASCENT [Aug.,
ability, and then, with carelessly concealed apologies, introduced
" his son."
The good-humored picnickers crowded closer; they were so
used to the Colonel's oratorical flights that they welcomed a change
of programme; the foreigners from the Fielding coal mines, who
were there in holiday attire, fastened their trusting eyes upon the
young man who was to tell them of the freedom of this country,
which they had sought and failed to find.
A number of automobiles, carriages, hay wagons had formed
themselves, a hastily improvised dress circle, around the stage,
when Miss Fielding rode up on horseback. Betty, who was sitting
beside Jefferson in his big touring car, called out to her to come
and join them.
" Your horse may get frightened by the fireworks," Richard
heard Betty say.
" Dear me, is his speech going to be as pyrotechnic as all that ? "
Betty flushed her confusion. " The firecrackers are to come
afterwards," she explained, and she introduced Jefferson, who held
out a willing hand to assist the pretty stranger into his hospitable car.
To Richard's own surprise her presence seemed to add to
the stimulation he always felt when facing an audience. He glanced
at his notes and began.
It was a strange speech for a conservative county to listen to,
and a stranger speech for Colonel Matterson's son to deliver. The
" cock-eyed Yankee judge " was roused to some degree of interest;
the laborers from the mines lost their expression of dull hopeless-
ness. Richard's voice was full and resonant as he went on:
" Liberty is a divine right an indelible mark imprinted on our
souls that have received the heritage of free will from the in-
spiration of an Almighty God.
" In the eyes of the world the Declaration of Independence was
a daring protestation; the signers placed their lives in jeopardy.
Have we measured up to the ideal that they placed before us?
Have we not abused our privileges of freedom? Less than fifty
years ago we bartered for immortal souls in this old slave market ;
now, though we no longer buy and sell in name, we bargain for
laborers for less than they can live upon. Capital is but an added
responsibility in the eternal scheme of things a power to be used
for or against us in the judgment."
As he proceeded, old Major Brown and General Cartwright,
who, were seated on the stage behind him, frowned their displeasure ;
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 599
though they begrudgingly conceded that the Colonel's son had sur-
passing ofatorical gifts, his ideas were dangerous and misleading.
He was disrupting the doctrine of predestination that so many of
the church-going audience found consoling, and he was talking as
if the half -human creatures from the mines, the niggers in the fields,
were made of the same material as a " gentleman." Souls, no
doubt, were vaporous commodities without color, but as long as a
man had the health and strength to remain in his own body there
were distinctions; some people were born to privileges, and some
were born to none, so why make such believe they had any?
But when he had finished, the .applause sounded so deafening
that the General and the Major were ashamed not to add a few feeble
handclaps to the general tumult. After all Richard Matterson was
a product of their own State, the son of their oldest friend, so that
even if his education had been faulty, even if they did not approve
of his ideas, he deserved some commendation for his brilliant rhe-
torical phrases.
Jefferson, from his high vantage ground, beamed his pleasure
at this ovation. He saw the foreigners from the mines press for-
ward to shake Richard's hand; he noticed a new light in Richard's
eyes ; the light that comes at the end of successful effort ; but, having
felt the response of his audience, he did not care for the after
praise; he wedged his way through the crowd to the automobile.
" Here get me out of this," he said to Jefferson.
Jefferson demurred. " I thought we had come to a picnic,"
he said.
" Crank up," said Richard. " If we have any food I suppose
we can eat it just as well ten miles from here."
" You are coming to my house to lunch," said Miss Fielding.
" I want to tell you that I didn't know you could talk so well."
He looked down, seeming to realize for the first time that she
was seated close to him. " I thought you were on horseback,"
he said lamely.
" I was," she laughed, " it seems that I ought to be, since I
have received no invitation to ride with you, but my groom can take
my horse back to the stable if I am permitted to stay here."
" We're delighted," said Jefferson hastily.
" Then turn down that road," she commanded, " to the left.
Prunesy will be waiting for us I know."
" We really cannot go to lunch," said Richard, laying a re-
straining hand upon the steering wheel. " We really cannot go."
6oo THE RED ASCENT [Aug.,
" Now, Dick, don't spoil things," pleaded Betty. " He has
some absurd notions, Jessica."
" Tell me. I like absurd notions."
*' Oh, I see," said Jefferson. I've been as blind as a bat. Must
have been dazzled by your unexpected appearance, Miss Fielding.
I quite forgot."
"What?"
" That you were Miss Fielding," he added awkwardly.
" You all talk in riddles," she smiled, " and I can guess them
every one. Betty told me a week ago. Mr. Jefferson Wilcox,
lawyer, called as counsel by Richard Matterson who is curious about
a Texas land claim. Didn't I suggest your looking into it fully
two months ago? If you act upon my suggestion, why should I
quarrel with you ? Now will you come home to lunch ? "
" Well of all amazing law cases ! " gasped Jefferson.
" It's all foolishness," said Betty. " We haven't a shadow
of a chance to prove our claim. I told Jess because I knew it
would amuse her, and I thought it only fair to let her know that
we were not as friendly as we seemed."
" I like enemies," said Miss Fielding reflectively. " There's a
certain distinction in having them. Now will you come home
with me, or are you going to ask me to get out ? "
" Even Dick wouldn't be so rude to a lady as all that," laughed
Jefferson. " I think we shall accept your invitation."
CHAPTER XII.
The summer fashion, common in the county, of reducing rooms
to funereal darkness, and shrouding furniture in drab petticoats, had
not been followed in the Fielding household. When chairs and
sofas looked uncomfortably warm, they were covered with art-
linens as beautiful in coloring as the brocade or velour beneath;
the paintings on the walls were not befogged with layers of mos-
quito netting; the valuable art objects were not stowed away; the
doors and windows were left wide open, then carefully screened,
and, where the sun was too bright, awnings had been added, or
tall shrubs had been arranged to produce shadow without gloom.
As Richard entered the long, cool library, and looked at the
rare volumes that stretched from floor to ceiling, he felt that he
had returned to a cherished world from which he had long been
banished. To own books, to buy them without stint, this had
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 601
always been one of his daydreams. The few volumes that he had
been able to purchase in the past, had meant denial of his actual
necessities. He had delved into vault-like second-hand shops where
dim gas jets seem to burn unremittingly, and he had spent hours
poring over the musty shelves, while the thin, faded proprietor
eyed him suspiciously. He had bought his favorite authors in
ragged cloth and paper, bringing them into the daylight half-
ashamed that he could provide them with no worthier habiliments.
Poets, saints, and sages and here they were, familiar friends ar-
rayed as they deserved to be, attesting to the art of bookbinding.
" I'll never leave," he said. " Til stay here for a year or two."
He sank down in an armchair by the table, oblivious to the fact
that the ladies were standing, and picking up a volume of Ruskin
he began to read, apparently unconscious of the fact that he was
not alone.
" Leave him," said Jefferson smiling. " We'll go eat our
lunch and forget him."
"Forget him," repeated Miss Fielding. "Yes, that's what
he deserves. We will try to forget him if we can."
There was something about her tone that arrested Jefferson's
attention, and he asked curiously, " You two are old friends? "
" Friends ? Well, I don't believe he would acknowledge it.
This is his first visit, and you see how he behaves."
Her half -laughing words found their way to Richard's ears.
" Forgive me," he said getting up. " I'm a barbarian when I get
among books. I haven't seen any for so long. I believe the sight
of such riches went to my head."
" It is a fine library," she admitted. " It was owned by an
impractical dreamer, who spent his days and nights shut in from
the world while his sons gambled his fortune away, until there
was nothing left but the books. Then, when the old dreamer was
dying, he sent for father. 'These books have been my only friends/
he said. 'I have spent a lifetime among them, now I must sell
them to someone who will promise to keep the collection complete/
So father bought even the bookcases, and then had the walls of the
room built to fit. It's a topsy-turvy story, for a man usually
selects his own library, and his books typify his own tastes, his own
ideals, but father has had to fashion his mind and build his room
to fit."
"But don't we all do that?" said Richard.
"Do what?"
602 THE RED ASCENT [Aug.,
" Fit our minds to receive the best things the noblest things
of life?"
" I thought some of us were ready-made," she laughed. " As
for myself "
" Go on."
" No, I'll not talk about myself. Prunesy says I talk too much.
What I need is criticism. I've never had enough of it. In fact,
I've had so little that I don't receive it patiently. I'm headstrong,
domineering, thoroughly unpleasant when I get ready. Didn't I
bring you all here to-day in spite of your protests ? Perhaps after
lunch you will forgive me."
" Forgive you," repeated Jefferson. " You never heard me
protest."
" Nor me," said Betty.
" Well, then it was Dick. One would fancy that he was half-
afraid of me."
Richard stood in the doorway holding aside the light portiere
for the others to pass. " Perhaps I am," he said in an undertone.
Her face flushed. She looked at him wonderingly, but made no
reply; and the next moment she was busy placing her guests, and
introducing little Miss White who presided over the silver tea urn.
It was a merry meal. Jefferson's joy was contagious, Betty
loved the good things of life, and openly confessed that she was
" dreadfully tired " of home products. Grape fruit, olives, salted
almonds, bon bons, all the luxuries of the table were partaken of
with unfeigned delight in their novelty. Miss White kept her gold-
rimmed spectacles focused upon Jessica, an adoring look of maternal
solicitude in her watery-blue eyes ; Miss Fielding seemed brimming
over with good will towards the guests that she had captured.
" It was very unflattering, Prunesy," she explained; " but I had
to bring my company by force."
" Don't say that again," pleaded Betty. " You know I wanted
to come."
" Bless you, child, I believe you did, but then you weren't going
to law. I know it's very bad form to mention it, but Dick here
thinks he has a claim to our Texas land, and this is Mr. Wilcox,
his lawyer, employed to prove it."
Miss White dropped her fork. It rattled against her plate, and
left a dent in the flowered rim. " What what's that? " she asked,
and her voice quavered.
" Prunesy, dear, I know my unforgiveable manners have al-
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 603
ways given you grave concern; I know I shall be a source of great
embarrassment to my husband, if I ever find one."
" Are are you looking for one ? " asked Jefferson audaciously.
" Of course, all girls look more or less, though they won't ac-
knowledge it. Women keep on hugging the delusion that they are
sought sought by half a hundred suitors, when half the time
they don't have one to their names until they go and look for him."
" My dear my dear," remonstrated Miss White. " I'm
sure"
"Sure of what, Prunesy? Times have changed since you
were a girl. You wore hoop-skirts and an adorable scoop bonnet,
and if you hadn't lived in coldblooded Massachusetts no doubt you
would have been a coquette instead of a conservative. Don't be
sure of anything, now, except your eternal salvation don't be too
sure of me "
" But, my dear, you know you have been greatly admired."
Jessica laughed : " Oh, I know it's unconventional to talk about
one's matrimonial chances, but you know, Prunesy, and I don't mind
confessing, that I have not seen any brilliant openings as yet. Let
me see," she began to count gravely on her fingers, " there was the
count, a ridiculous little idiot who wanted my money ; the German
professor who wanted my help in the house; that college boy we
met on the steamer he needed a mother, and that bald-headed
old bachelor who wanted to be rejuvenated by some young com-
panionship. Men are selfish. I'll stick to you and Beppo, Prunesy."
" Fortunate Beppo," murmured Jefferson. " Is he man or
bird or beast?"
" He's over there," she said, pointing to a canary that hung in a
gold cage by the window. " He will come if I call him." She
gave a faint whistle. " I forgot the cage is fastened. Open it,
Dick. Remember how you used to charm birds in the old days
when you were a boy? I suppose you have grown too intellectual,
too bookish, for that sort of thing now."
He rose to do her bidding, and unfastening the gilded door he
made a strange sound with his lips, and the bird fluttered to his
finger. " See," he said triumphantly, holding the bright bird at
arm's length. " I don't believe the mind has anything to do with
sympathy."
"I wish you wouldn't talk abstractions," said Betty. "Sit down,
Dick, and finish your lunch. I think hearts and heads are the same."
" My dear Betty," laughed Jessica, " we couldn't be as unana-
604 THE RED ASCENT [Aug.,
tomical as that. I will acknowledge that hearts are continually
getting in the way of heads, but then I suppose that was ordained
since the beginning."
"And if you could choose between them," suggested Jeff,
would you prefer the 'brilliant matrimonial opportunity* to have
a heart or a head ? "
" A heart," answered Betty promptly.
" My dear child," said Miss Fielding, her eyes twinkling, "your
wedding would be a painful affair a guillotined groom to begin
with."
" You know what I mean, Jess. Would you rather a man
love you with his heart or his head ? "
For a moment Miss Fielding fed sugar to Beppo without an-
swering.
" I think I should prefer his head," she said at length.
"You are right, my dear," said little Miss White with start-
ling emphasis. " A man who loves with his head knows the reason
why, and if he loves with reason "
" But isn't all love unreasonable? " said Jefferson.
" I don't think so," answered Richard.
"You!" exclaimed Jefferson. "Now that's the last thing
I expected you to say."
"Why?"
" Because," interrupted Betty, " you don't know anything about
it. You never knew any girls; you never had anything to say to
them when you were at college, and I'm sure since you have been
home I can't drag you out to see any."
Richard pushed back his chair. " You people south of Mason
and Dixon's line are all sentimentalists," he said good-humo redly.
" There's all kind of love in the world. If you don't know one
kind, you may know another, but I know there's not enough of
any kind to go round."
" Dick won't be personal," sighed Jefferson. " When you
think you have him cornered, he goes floating off in the nebula
of speculation. If everybody loved everybody else we lawyers
would be out of a job."
" There are still the Texas lands," suggested Jessica with a
mischievous twinkle in her eyes.
Miss White looked up, and fingered her dessert spoon nerv-
ously. " I wish you would tell me exactly what you mean," she
began. " Is is there any doubt as to your Texas claim, Jessica ? "
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 605
" I don't know," said the girl still smiling. " Dick and Mr.
Wilcox are the conspirators. They say grandfather forged the
title."
" Forged ! " repeated the old lady.
" It's a long time ago," said Jessica, " and, of course, if father
has no right to the land he will give it back. I know I'm not
going to quarrel about it. I'm tired of having money anyhow.
I don't want to sit forever on a hilltop like a lily of the field, doing
nothing."
" Aren't you getting your similes slightly mixed ? " asked
Richard.
" Well, perhaps," she admitted, " if you didn't have a sense
of humor to save you, Dick, your solemnity would make you un-
bearably dull. Don't worry, Prunesy. If I have to retire to a cave
or a hut I'll take you with me. If I'm reduced to a state of penury
I'll study trained nursing or keep a cent shop, and sell innocuous
lollipops to children."
But Miss White was not listening: "Forged," she repeated
again dully. " Did anybody ever accuse your grandfather before ?"
" My dear Prunesy, I never knew my grandfather, and I don't
know that I regret the slight divergence in our ages that kept us
apart. From all I ever heard of him, he seems to have been a sort
of thug, beating his way through the world, and flogging my poor
father whenever he felt in the humor."
" But if he forged? " repeated the old lady.
" Then you better pray for the repose of his soul. I'm sure
he needs it."
She turned the conversation to other things. She criticized
Richard's speech; then finding that her praise worried him, she
invented more fulsome compliments. No one noticed when little
Miss White, pale, trembling and without apology, arose from the
table and hastily left the room.
Jefferson was in his happiest mood. To have the company
of his best friend, combined with the society of pretty girls, seemed
to him a most fortunate occurrence. He was charmed, and at
the same time puzzled, by Miss Fielding. If Dick and she were
such old friends, why had not Dick mentioned her name before?
Was Dick's indifference to her overtures real or fancied, for she
was certainly making overtures of friendship that any other man
would have found irresistible, or perhaps she was merely flirting
with him because she was curious to know how he would respond
6o6 THE RED ASCENT [Aug.,
to such treatment. Animated by some half-formed sense of loy-
alty that he did not stop to analyze, Jefferson strove to preserve
Richard's pinnacle of prudence; he began to tell absurd stories of
their college days that accentuated Richard's position of aloofness.
It was a gay party, and the guests did not leave until twilight.
" Have you had a good time? " said Jessica at parting, as she
stood for a moment with her hand in Richard's. " I tried to make
you feel uncomfortable. It's my way of getting even."
"For what?"
" For you being an ice man," she taunted.
His face looked white in the afterglow of the sunset. " Are
you sure that I am ? " The question was all the more real to her
because it was uttered with no trace of gallantry ; it had been forced
from his confidence, and seemed half ah appeal for enlightenment.
Jefferson was industriously cranking his machine. " I hate
the French as a nation," he said, " but I believe they know every-
thing. Who was the fellow that wrote Woman is like a shadow,
fly and she follows, follow and she flies ?' "
" I'm not quite sure," said Richard, " but your judgment is
bad, Jeff. Besides, French epigrams sound more sensible in
French."
" But my fragile French," began Jefferson.
"What's the matter with your French? Didn't I teach you
myself?"
Jefferson laughed. " That's the reason I'm afraid to use it,"
he said.
CHAPTER XIII.
Early next morning when Richard was busy in the garden, he
received a fragrant note from Miss Fielding, asking him to call
as soon as he conveniently could, and begging him not to allow
Mr. Wilcox to start for Texas until the next day. The postscript
added : " Can you imagine Prunesy the heroine of a melodrama ?
Where does one buy lollipops wholesale ? "
The possibilities that this final sentence implied haunted him
all day, and he was so distracted at luncheon that even the Colonel
noticed his abstraction, and called him to account.
" You're about to put the sugar spoon in the gravy. For the
Lord's sake, what's the matter with you, Dick ? "
/' I've just had a most extraordinary note from Miss Fielding,"
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 607
he said. " I believe she has discovered something about the Texas
land claim."
" Don't believe her/' stormed the Colonel.
" But she seems to think it will be to our advantage."
" She wants to compromise, that's what she wants to do.
She's afraid of a lawsuit. She knows they will lose. Her grand-
father ought to be in jail."
" Why he's been dead years and years," said Betty mildly.
" Then no doubt he's in ," said the Colonel with great
finality. " Mike Fielding was a scoundrel ; I haven't any use for
any of his brood."
Jefferson opened his lips to protest, but realizing that any
contradiction would increase the Colonel's irritation, he turned the
conversation to county politics.
The Colonel at once waxed eloquent, the laryngitis days of
forced silence had left him more than unusually loquacious. Jef-
ferson was a flattering listener, and the Colonel had not yet re-
covered from his sense of surprise that Dick should make such
an agreeable and presentable friend during the years that he had
seemed barred from all normal desires by a bulwark of books.
It was not until after three o'clock in the afternoon that
Richard felt free to obey Miss Fielding's summons. All kinds
of trifling tasks had claimed his attention. The hogs had rooted
into the cantaloupe patch and had to be driven out, and the sty
boarded up at the bottom to prevent further devastation; a pest
of some sort was on the potatoes, and he had spent two hours in
an atmosphere of Paris green; Aunt Dinah complained that a part
of her stove pipe had fallen down, and that the kitchen was full
of smoke; he wrestled with this unaccustomed problem until his
hands and face were as black as a chimney sweep's, and he had
to go for a bath in the swimming pool before he was recognizable.
Then he dressed, mounted Spangles, and rode along shaded bridle-
paths until he reached the black barrenness of the mines.
The cabins of the miners built like lean-tos in the shadow of
the hill, looked unbearably warm for human habitations. The July
sun, slanting towards the westward, was beating down upon the
worn door sills, where half-naked children played listlessly. In
front of one or two of the cabins an imaginative woman had
struggled for a bit of green in her garden, and the few sickly
plants that had struck root below the layers of coal dust bloomed
bravely, making the dullness around them more complete.
6o8 THE RED ASCENT [Aug.,
But it was a short stretch of sterility. All the wooded hills
seemed full of life and color, and the creaking of the machinery in
the old shaft house sounded a discordant note among the bird
calls. Spangles passed quickly up the road, around the bend of en-
circling trees, into the carefully-planned Italian garden now bloom-
ing with rare exotics. Jessica was waiting for her visitor in a
rustic arbor, which was overgrown with climbing roses.
" I've been watching you for some time," she said, making a
place for him on the bench beside her. " See, if you part these
rose vines, you can look down the road all the way to the mines.
When the new houses are built the valley will not seem so dismal."
He realized vaguely that she was in a softer mood than he
had yet seen her ; her eyes were full of tenderness and sympathy in-
stead of dancing light ; she was dressed in some thin blue stuff that
accentuated the bronze in her hair; her hands played idly with
some wisps of honeysuckle that had crept sinuously along the
lattice work, threatening to choke the roses.
Richard was silently comparing the heat, the dust, the grime
of the mines with the charm of this breeze-swept paradise. He had
always found sharp contrasts mystifying. The silence continued
for some time. Then she began again in her old bantering way:
" Your promptness is very flattering. I have been waiting
for you all day."
" I did not know the sun had set," he said quietly.
" Weren't you interested in my revelations ? "
" I haven't heard them yet."
" Don't you want to hear them ? "
" Of course."
" Does it seem amazing that I tell you ? "
" Nothing that you do seems amazing."
"Is that a compliment?"
" I don't know," he answered smiling. " It happens to be the
truth."
" Do you know that this is the first time you have been to see
me?"
" I thought I was here yesterday."
" You were brought yesterday."
"And to-day?"
" You were summoned," she laughed, but there was a lack of
spontaneity about it that he noted dimly. " I sent for you because
Primesy told me a story last night, and I want to tell it to you."
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 609
He made no reply, waiting patiently for her to go on. From
the first she had bewildered him, and now, as he sat watching her,
her companionship seemed very pleasant and desirable, or perhaps
after all it might be the charm of this rustic retreat after his long
hot ride up the hill.
"Did you notice that Prunesy was agitated yesterday?" she
began. ; ,
" No."
" And she left the room before we were quite through lunch-
eon ? "
" I did not notice."
" I knew that something had happened, for she possesses so
much formal politeness, and she went without apology, without
bidding you good-bye. She told me the reason last night. Between
her New England conscience and her fear of doing me harm, she
was almost incoherent, but I'll patch the facts together as well
as I can."
" Then perhaps you have distorted the facts."
" No, my mind is not acrobatic. Don't you want to hear the
story?"
" I'm not quite sure."
" Story-tellers need some sort of impetus."
" Go on then," he said resignedly.
"Well, it's all ancient history," she began again, "so I'll
begin with our grandfathers. Yours was a type of the old-time
aristocrat; mine seems to have been an uneducated boor from the
mountains. Your grandfather was in the Mexican war, and after
the war he staid in Texas, or he went back there some years later
to try cattle raising or farming on a big tract of land he had ac-
quired for his services in the army, or perhaps he had bought the
ranch, I don't know which. My grandfather went down there
as his overseer, but they fell out. Prunesy isn't sure of the details,
and she is so charitable that she never likes to mention anyone's
failings, but I fancy they flew at each other's throats and flourished
pistols and tomahawks and bowie knives. I like to .think of all the
picturesque paraphernalia that seems to belong to the early days
of Texas.
:< Well, into this wild, woodsy place Prunesy was sent to teach
school. Of course, she didn't want to go, but there weren't many
positions open to women in those days, and Prunesy must have
been a suffragette in embryo, for she didn't want to live with
VOL. xcvu. 39
6io THE RED ASCENT [Aug.,
either of her two married sisters, she wanted to be independent.
An old friend of her mother's was living in Texas, and he offered
her the position as school-teacher. Prunesy was only seventeen;
she had heard dreadful stories of cowboys and Indians, but she
put her fears in her capacious pockets they had pockets in those
days and she started on her perilous way. Prunesy says the
school wasn't so bad, she liked children, and your grandfather,
who happened to live in the neighborhood I suppose twenty-five
or fifty miles was counted as neighborhood in those days used
to ride over quite frequently to see how she was getting on. She
was the only young lady in the vicinity. 'He never actually made
love to me;' Prunesy carefully explained, 'but he paid me
little attentions' that she seems to have found most gratifying.
Twice he brought her oranges from Galveston, and three times he
ordered candy shipped all the way from New Orleans ; she seems to
have kept numerical account all these years.
" My private opinion is that Prunesy rather lost her head.
She was a little Puritan, you see, not used to the ways and wiles of
Southern men. If Prunesy was the only pretty girl in the neigh-
borhood, I'm sure your grandfather said all sorts of pleasant things
that she accepted literally."
Richard smiled. " Are all Southern men like that?" he asked.
She looked him straight in the eyes, and returned his smile
half-heartedly. " Not all, but you are an alien."
" Do you like aliens ? " and as soon as he had said it, he won-
dered at his own question.
"Women need some encouragement," she began; then she
seemed confused and added : " You are very impolite to interrupt
my story; don't you want to hear the end? "
" I promise not to speak again. Go on."
" Where was I ? Oh, yes, we had reached the orange and
candy stage, and, then, there was poetry he sent her some verses
tucked away among the oranges. I know it was very sentimental.
Everybody wrote poetry in the old days, even George Washington.
Terrible habit wasn't it? "
His eyes twinkled. " Was Washington a Mexican war vet-
eran ? " he asked.
" Now, Dick, don't be so accurate ; the fact that two people
wrote atrocious verses doesn't prove that they lived in the same gen-
eration. Now let me go on. " One day your grandfather came
to the school and Prunesy was out. One of the children had broken
1913-] THE RED ASCENT 611
its arm or leg at recess, and had to be carried home. Your grand-
father wrote his name on the blackboard. Don't suppose they
worried with cards down there, and he wanted her to know he had
called.
" Prunesy came back sometime later to straighten up the
room, and close the doors and windows for the night. While
she was at work sorting the children's exercises she heard a foot-
step, and thinking it was your grandfather she went on with her
work. Why are women like that, pretending indifference?"
" I'm sure I don't know."
" Well, instead of your grandfather in walked mine. Prunesy
was too loyal to me to describe him, but she did acknowledge she
was frightened. He was so big, she said, and he talked like he
had a cold in his throat, and he had a six-shooter stuck in his belt
in full view. He asked if she was the school-teacher, and she had
to confess that she was; he said he wanted some 'learnin',' but he
wasn't willing 'to go to school with kids.' Would she give him
some lessons after hours, he would pay her well for them. I suspect
that Prunesy had inherited a thrifty spirit along with her other
virtues, and she wasn't averse to turning an honest dollar; so she
agreed to his proposition at once. He wanted to begin that after-
noon. That's good writin' on the board, ain't it?' he said. Td like
you to learn me to write like that; that's the name I want to copy.'
" He came regularly after that for a month, and every day
Prunesy taught him to write like your grandfather. One day
she said: 'I'll set you another copy,' but he protested. 'I don't
want to learn to write like a woman ;' he said 'that is the way I want
to write,' and he spent hours just copying that signature. She told
me that his progress in reading was 'astounding.' At the end of the
month he paid Prunesy fifty dollars, and she never saw him again.
The rest of the story was hazy. Your grandfather didn't make
a success. Cattle all got lumpy jaw, or something, and he went
East, settled down in his old home, and married and died, but he
seems to have been the only romance in Prunesy 's life, and you re-
vived all the old recollections your name, the resemblance and the
old uniform. That night of the masquerade she actually believed
that you were your grandfather's spirit. Now you see the point is
this : My grandfather must have had some reason for wanting to
copy your grandfather's signature; and our talk about the forged
deed the other day at luncheon set Prunesy to thinking that perhaps
she was responsible for the whole affair."
6i2 THE RED ASCENT [Aug.,
" But the story really doesn't prove anything," he said slowly.
" But it can be made to prove things. Prunesy knows the
exact date she is always exact that your grandfather left Texas.
If the deed is dated after that time, don't you see?"
" Yes, I see," he admitted reluctantly, " but where does this
leave you ? "
" Why I I'll sell lollipops," she answered smiling.
He took her hand impulsively in his. " I can't go on, Jessica,"
and she noticed that it was the first time that he had used the old
familiar name. " I can't go on and impoverish you. I've been
poor all my life. How could you give up all this?" his eyes swept
the stately house, the flowering gardens. " It's worse for a girl
to make her way. I have my health and strength."
" So" have I."
" But it is so much easier for a man."
" The whole of life is harder for women," and the smile was
gone now. " Can't you see that I want you to have things, Dick ?
Don't you know that I have seen the struggle you've been making? "
" But I cannot take it from you, Jessica. I can't go on."
" And why not ? " A wild hope was in her heart, her hands
trembled a little among the honeysuckle, but he did not see. He
was looking past her through the tangle of rose vines down at the
blackened mining camp below.
" It is not fair," he said slowly. " It is not fair."
Her face was white now. " It is the Colonel's," she said
slowly. " If you do not care for yourself, it is the Colonel's and
Betty's."
" But it may all be a myth after all," he said reflectively. " The
fact that Miss White taught your grandfather to write does not
prove anything conclusively."
" But it will help to prove something."
But apparently he did not hear her. A wail of fear had come
echoing from the valley. Richard started to his feet. " What's
that ? " he cried. Through the rose vines they could see men and
women scurrying like ants towards the mines. " There some-
thing has happened down there. I must go go and see if I can
help." And without a word of parting, he mounted Spangles and
went galloping down the sun-baked road, leaving Jessica alone in
the arbor.
[TO BE CONCLUDED.]
THE CHARM OF FLORENCE.
BY JOSEPH FRANCIS WICKHAM.
HERE is no solitary guest in the Sala di Saturno in
the Pitti Gallery, but the room has been well peopled
with visitors from the moment the doors swung open
in the morning; and if this is your first acquaintance
with the magnificent palace Brunelleschi designed for
Messer Luca Pitti, you will wonder what great art work is holding
all so rapt and solemnly attentive in admiring. But even upon enter-
ing the hall, you make the discovery. There near the door hangs the
picture by which you will best remember Florence, and which will
link itself in association with the ten or twelve others that you will
choose to represent in your own soul all European painting, and that
in an especial way symbolize your own art canons and beliefs.
For you are looking at Raphael's " Madonna della Sedia." No
tenderer conception of the Madonna has ever been attempted, and
one doubts if a sweeter and more touching group could be painted
than this trio of Virgin and Child and Saint John. Less majestic,
less queenly, perhaps, than its Dresden sister, possibly inferior in
technique, this picture cannot be surpassed for the soulful sympathy
in the faces, the watchful, half-bodeful caring of pure mother love.
There is tranquil joy in the Mother's countenance, but withal a
thoughtful, serious expression that pierces the veil of the morrow
and sees the sadness of the end. The Child is baby-like, trustful,
with all His world seeming to rest in the precious clasp of the Vir-
gin-mother, still with a face and head that possess nobility and
stately mien; and the face of the youthful John is prayerful and
angelic and all-spiritual. For long you are compelled to look upon
this circular painting, and you will come back to the Pitti many
times to renew your love; and if you were disposed to make a fetish
of objects of art, I think you would wander far without find-
ing a worthier idol than the "Madonna della Sedia."
There are other masterpieces by Raphael in the Pitti palace.
In the same room there is the " Madonna del Granduca," a work
of his Florentine period. It was painted six years earlier than
the more noted Madonna, and, reflecting more of the style of his
614 THE CHARM OF FLORENCE [Aug.,
master, Perugino, in its simplicity and quietness, is well worthy of
Raphael's growing genius. In the portrait of Pope Julius the
Second, of which he made several replicas, one may observe the
wonderful execution which only the nephew of Bramante could
achieve.
The Pitti is indeed a gallery of masterpieces. The faultless
Andrea del Sarto is represented here by the " Assumption " and the
famous " Holy Family ;" Fra Bartolommeo is remembered by
the " Risen Christ," the " Marriage of Saint Catherine," and the
exquisitely pathetic group of the " Pieta." Paolo Veronese's
" Venetian Scholar," Fra Filippo Lippi's " Madonna and Child,"
the well-known " Concert " of Giorgione, and the " Deposition "
of Perugino are also among the treasures ; and many another work
of art that the Medici dukes brought together into this splendid
palace. Perhaps it is Titian that may be said to share ascendancy
here with Perugino's famous pupil. There are ten pictures from
his hand, the most noteworthy being portraits. One may look
upon the cunning, able, vulgar face of the prince of blackguards
and blackmailers, Pietro Aretino, the sad countenance of Ippolito
de' Medici, and the marvelously beautiful and romantic figure of
the " Young Englishman."
The charm of the Pitti palace does not exhaust itself in its
pictures. But outside, between the gallery and the palace proper,
lie the magnificent Boboli Gardens. The name is derived from that
of the family who once lived in a house here. Cosimo the First
laid out the grounds, and adorned them with statuary and fountains.
From the amphitheatre of seats one may have a lovely view of the
spires and pinnacles of Florence, and the mass of sunlit trees on the
green hills beyond the town. It is delightful to rest here for a
moment, and under the shading cypress and pine breathe the fra-
grant air that seems to blow fresh and blithe from Arcadia.
The halls of the Uffizi galleries are more numerous than those
of the Pitti, and offer a wider survey of the various schools of
painting. The pictures which the two great palaces contain, un-
questionably form the greatest collection of paintings of the Italian
schools of art in the world. In the Uffizi palace are also to be
found noted pieces of sculpture, an excellent collection of jewels
and drawings, and valuable libraries rich in association and intrinsic
worth.
The Tuscan school of art is represented, among other works,
by the lovely " Coronation of our Lady " of Lorenzo Monaco, monk
1913.] THE CHARM OF FLORENCE 615
of the Angeli in Florence; by the exquisite masterpiece of Fra
Angelico, the " Coronation of the Virgin," and by his famous
altar pieces; by the beautiful " Madonna " of Fra Filippo Lippi, his
only picture in the entire gallery; by the " Madonna of the Mag-
nificat " of Botticelli ; by the well-faded " Adoration of the Magi ; '
of Leonardo da Vinci ; by the lovely " Annunciation " of Ver-
rocchio, once thought to be Leonardo's, too ; by the " Adoration of
the Child " of Fra Bartolommeo ; and by the " Holy Family " of
Michelangelo, one of the two pictures he painted outside of Rome.
When we come to a contemplation of the Umbrian school, we
shall find it well messaged by the work of Perugino, its greatest
master, save Raphael, who really was of Rome. Perugino has
four pictures here, three portraits, and the " Madonna and Child "
in the octagonal Tribuna. His pupil Raphael has the " Madonna
del Cardellino " and a replica of the portrait of Julius the Second,
which is in the Pitti palace. The religion and mystic sweetness
of soul that Umbria ever exhales is evident in the altar piece of
Gentile da Fabriano, and in the beauteous colored panels of the
" Annunciation " of Melozzo da Forli.
Titian, to be sure, is the great master of the Venetian school,
and in the Uffizi galleries he may be seen to advantage, though a
larger number of his pictures are in the Pitti halls. The portraits
of Eleonora Gonzaga and Francesco-Maria della Rovere, Duke and
Duchess of Urbino, and of Bishop Beccadelli, are typical of his
better work. His friend Giorgione is remembered here by his
rare portrait of the " Knight of Malta." The teacher of these two,
Giovanni Bellini, one of the earlier masters of the Venetian school,
is represented by one of the finest works of the Quattrocento, the
allegorical grouping in which our Lady rests beside a lagoon,
with the several saints near by in the wondrous landscape.
Siena and her school offer the magnificent " Annunciation "
of Simone Martini, one of the most beautiful and most graceful
of all religious paintings. The Northern schools are seen in the
marvelous triptych consisting of the " Three Kings," the " Pre-
sentation," and the " Ascension," and in the " Madonna and Child
among the Flowers," both by Mantegna ; and in the " Madonna and
Child with Angels " and the " Repose in Egypt " by Correggio.
Obviously enough these are but a choice few of the Uffizi
pictures; many others will share the hours and days you will wish
to bestow upon the vast collection founded by the Medici in the
palace which Vasari, the historian of Italian painters, built for
6i6 THE CHARM OF FLORENCE [Aug.,
Cosimo the First. Then when you are rested in mind from the
patient and lovable work of dreaming the dreams of these artist-
poets, you will go over some day to the Academia di Belle Arti,
once St. Matthew's Hospital, near the Piazza San Marco.
In the Academia there are few paintings of highest merit, but
an excellent idea of the earlier work may be gained here, the evolu-
tion of the art of the Florentine school through Giotto onward.
Gentile da Fabriano's masterpiece, the lovely "Adoration of the
Shepherds," is in this gallery, and Fra Angelico's wonderful "Last
Judgment;" and an exquisite "Adoration" by Ghirlandajo. Bot-
ticelli is represented by several pictures, one of which, the " Prima-
vera," seems to sing the pagan Hellenism of the new-come Ren-
aissance. More interesting than any of the paintings one will find
Michelangelo's gigantic " David," which once stood near the gate
of the Palazzo Vecchio, a position the sculptor himself chose for
his work.
It is in the Bargello, that castellated structure built in 1265
for the Capitano del Populo, and later the palace of the Podesta,
that Michelangelo once more is seen as the matchless sculptor.
Such he discloses himself in the drowsy dream-poise of the " Bac-
chus," no less than in the calm strength and beauty of the relief of
the " Holy Family." Here, too, his great predecessor, Donatello,
expresses in marble and bronze and terra cotta the genius that
Phidias passed on over the bridge of the years. Better than else-
where in the world may his works be studied here, for there
are ten of his creations in the Bargello, beside a great many casts
of his statues that rest in other cities. The " Marzocco " is in
this museum, the fantastic lion that used to stand in front of the
Palazzo Vecchio; the youthful figure of John the Baptist, with the
rapt, half-melancholy, half-pondering expression which bodies forth
the soul-beauty of him whose voice was crying in the wilderness;
the beautiful terra cotta bust of Nicola da Ozzano; and the marble
" Saint George." Probably his best work is this statue of the
dragon slayer, with all the faith and fire and fearlessness of the
hero caught in the chiselled stone. As one looks upon the lively
figure, one can understand why Michelangelo whispered to it, as
he stopped to admire, the command, " March."
The wonderful sweetness of the work of Luca della Robbia
and his nephew Andrea, and the other exponents of their peculiar
school, is to be won here by all who will. The lovely terra cotta
conceptions, flowering in blue and white, like precious fleurs-de-lis,
1913-] THE CHARM OF FLORENCE 617
are blossomed forth in the exquisite perfection of many a Madonna
and Annunciation.
Another sculptor beside Michelangelo and Donatello and the
Robbia family you may study in the Bargello. It is Andrea Ver-
rocchio, one of the greatest masters of the second half of the
fifteenth century. A pupil, perhaps, of Donatello, he, too, has
chosen to be known as a maker of a " David," a superb figure stand-
ing in the calm consciousness of strength over the slain giant at
his feet. Willingly one will also admire his bust of Monna Vanna
degli Albizzi, one of the most beautiful sculptures of the whole
Renaissance.
Florence is brimful of the art of the Renaissance and the
years before. One can never reach an end to the maze of bronze
and marble and wild-flower terra cotta. But one needs frequent
withdrawals from the joyful study of the galleries to avoid the
weariness that knows no value in anything save laughing waters
and the blue sky. Driving through the fair Cascine gardens will
afford one delightful afternoons, when the shadows are stretching
out and the sun lets one look upon its face while it makes ready
to say its arrivederci. Here where once the dairy farm of the
grand dukes extended, it is pleasant to feel the cooling air wafted
through the ilex and pine. As one enjoys the quiet life of the
green fields near by, and the scenes of beauty that lie onward toward
Bellosguardo, the thoughts of the great men come flooding back.
Cimabue is no misty figure in mythland, Mino da Fiesole seems
quite alive, Orcagna is more than a sounding echo from the past.
Probably on more than one afternoon you will drive up to the
hill of San Miniato by the Viale dei Colli, which begins at the Porta
Romana near the Boboli Gardens. Nothing more charming can be
wished for than this enchanting road, winding gracefully through
gardens of red and white roses, amid bordering masses of magnolia
and laurel, between tall and green-waving planes and elms, with the
afternoon drowsy from the delicious odors that drench the air,
and tuneful with the joyous humming of the bees and the trilling
speech of the little yellow-breasted birds. Soon you come close
to the city fortification that Michelangelo laid out in 1529, and,
within its protection, the great church of San Miniato.
The church of San Miniato is a fine old edifice of lovely
marble, built in the eleventh century in commemoration of a saint
who suffered martyrdom under the Emperor Decius in the mid-
third century. It is an interesting chapter that Villani writes in
6i8 THE CHARM OF FLORENCE [Aug.,
the Cronica, of the seeking out of the hermit Miniato by the
emperor, who was then at Florence. Miniato, it seems, was living
in solitude among the quiet shelter of the trees of Arisbotto di
Firenze, a wood behind the site of the present church. He had
left his kingdom in Armenia for this humble position in Christ's
service, and was happy in the prayerful heights above the Arno.
But Decius offered the one-time prince gifts of great value to allure
him to the old ways: no gifts could win over the loyal hermit.
So the thoroughgoing Decius offered him instead the torments
which Roman persecution had devised; and in the end Miniato
was beheaded. But by a miracle, as the legend runs, the martyr
replaced the head upon his trunk and ascended the hill, where
the bodies of many martyrs lay buried. When he had reached
the place where his church now stands, he gave up his soul to
God. A little church was soon built in his honor, but it was many
centuries afterward that the great church was erected, which now
is so noble and venerable to look upon.
Indeed the church of San Miniato is the most beautiful of the
Tuscan-Romanesque churches remaining in Florence, and within its
peaceful walls are precious memorials of the old-time art. Among
them is Rossellino's masterpiece, that exquisite tomb of the youth-
ful Cardinal Jacopo of Portugal. Many an old Florentine has wor-
shipped in this temple, and as one walks down the broad nave, one
can almost fancy Brunetto Latini's immortal pupil kneeling near
one of the ancient pillars, rapt in visions of paradise.
When you leave the tranquil aisles and their paling frescoes,
and emerge again into the air, it is to see a Campo Santo along
the terraces, a city of the dead rising in ghostly array of stately
marble tombs and humble graves not less impressive in their simple
adornments. Flowers are growing beside the pathways, and amid
the white crosses over the graves roses and ferns may be seen, the
quiet offerings a loving hand has given to those who rest here in
the pleasant dreams of eternity. It is all very beautiful and calm
and peaceful. As you walk amid the tombs and read the names
here and there, you think Florence has chosen well when she grants
this fair hill to her children as one by one they go back to the
mother of all.
Standing on the church terrace, you turn from thoughts of
frail mortality to the serene life of the wonderful maiden city be-
neath you. For lovely Florence is down in the valley, sweet and
delicate and ever young, blossoming like a sun-favored flower-
1913.] THE CHARM OF FLORENCE 619
garden, and perfect in the exquisite harmony of her growing ver-
dure. Circling the vale of beauty extend the olive-green crests
of the Tuscan Apennines, with the Carrara hills a misty purple-
blue, and the villas of Milton's Fiesole smiling happily over the
way. In the midst of the fragile fairy city the slow-flowing Arno
moves westward, burning a long golden gleam across the summer
afternoon. The bower of the Palazzo Vecchio, the Campanile of
Giotto, and the world-famed dome of Brunelleschi rise above all
else in the valley, but you can see the spire of Santa Croce, too,
and many another palace and pinnacle glorified in the bright sun,
and shining full worthy of the princess city at your feet. The
shadows are closing in from the foothills, and so before evening
falls you will leave the quiet terrace and go down the hill into
the town. You will cross the river by the Ponte Vecchio, the old
bridge with the little shops bordering its memory-laden pathway,
and onward you will hasten along the Lung' Arno to the welcome
of home.
So, indeed, we once came from San Miniato on the evening
before we left Florence. When late night came, and it was time
to enter slumberland, we could not banish our day wanderings
from our minds, but all our Florentine days wished most eagerly
to mingle with the full-lived days of old, and the visions of the
past came trooping by, like a gaily-colored procession, with fan-
tastic banners and blue and green and crimson lights alluring us
to gladsome watching. All of Florence's great citizens woke
to life under the spell of imagination, and we could see them all,
with never a son or foster-child missing from the resurrected com-
pany. Donatello, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Leonardo da Vinci, Luca
della Robbia, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, .Galileo, Vespucci but a leg-
ion of mighty Caesar would scarce enroll them all. Infinitely easier
were little Pippa's counting that sunlit day in Asolo. It is as if
the guardian spirit of Florence should gently drop into a silver
bowl a rose for every one of the city's distinguished children, red
roses and white and yellow and sunset pink, such as blossom on
the hills of Fiesole, until the broad-brimmed vase heaps high, and
the circling lips overflow, and nothing but roses can be seen all
about. For even so are the sons of old Florence, even as this the
fair city overflows with the famed flowers of her own bloom.
So the fairy-host in the darkness will weave their fragile
tapestry. In the twilight middle way between wakeful dreaming
and dreamful sleep, I saw Cellini at night near his furnace while
620 THE CHARM OF FLORENCE [Aug.,
the fire's gleam shadowed him on the wall, and I watched the tense,
grave face bidding encouragement until soon the artist- joy leaped
to his eyes as the mold filled and his " Perseus " was coming right.
My soul traveled down a winding lane, and met some Donatello
coming home in the near-morn from a night's loving toil in the
atelier. And farther on I passed a poor artisan with the coat of
a peasant and the soul of a genius, stealing his way through the
shadows, while he jealously clasped the silver goblet on which he
had wreathed a Medici crest. I could see, as I projected myself into
the pulsing days of the Renaissance, the lights glowing at a stately
palace window, where a pallid scholar was patiently transcribing
a treasured copy of the Phado for Cosimo de' Medici. I could
see the never-wearying Villani writing his voluminous chronicles
in the house on the Via Giraldi. I could see Dante smiling and
glad in the old house on the Via San Martino, in the days of the
" vita nuova," and the child Beatrice, crimson-clad and beautiful and
sweet at the May-day festa within the Portinari grounds. I be-
held up at old San Marco monastery a gentle Fra Angelico pray-
ing at night in a lonely cell, and waiting the dawn that would once
again call his frescoed dream-paintings to life.
Then I would seem to be standing on Taddeo Galdi's Ponte
Vecchio, looking into the Arno, where every shadow falling from
the arches and shops gathers a pensive memory of the goldsmiths
of old, and the glass workers and the weavers of lace and the
venders of precious gems ; and not least of all, a memory of young
Buondelmonte, whose death near the statue of Mars brought the
memorable struggle which rent Florence in twain. Traveling in
spirit across the bridge, I would see near the Pitti palace the win-
dows of Casa Guidi, where the author of Aurora Leigh lived
so many years, and died in 1861. My imagination would now
carry me through the roll of all the foreign wooers of the Muses'
flame, who came to Florence and loved her and lived within
her hill-cinctured welcome: Montaigne, Milton, Gray; Smollett,
Samuel Rogers, Shelley, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt ; Browning, Ruskin,
Landor, George Eliot; Charles Lever, Dickens, Mrs. Trollope,
Arthur Hugh Clough; Cooper, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell,
Mark Twain, and many more beside.
Though I was asleep now, Florence, the beautiful, would not
leave me, and my slumbers were sweetly colored by the roseate
thoughts of the day. Still the mural portrait of Dante in the Bar-
gello would come into my visions, and the " Winged Mercury V of
1913.] THE CHARM OF FLORENCE -621
Giovanni da Bologna, and that perfect Gothic shrine Orcagna
made in the church of Or San Michele, and the " Madonna della
Cintola " in her oval mandorla, sculptured above the north door of
the Duomo, and the fresh young faces of the singing boys on the
Cantorie of Donatello and Luca della Robbia in the Opera del
Duomo, and the sweet baby eyes of the little Child in the " Ma-
donna della Sedia " of the Pitti gallery. Then the peaceful dreams
would float away, and there would flash before me the throng of
imperial Ghibellines shouting their defiance to the Guelphs, while
frighted mothers hurried their children within doors and out of
the battle's tide. Now the scene would suddenly shift to the brooks
of Vallombrosa, where the monastic hospitality of olden days was
suppressed by an unwise Sardinian government; and onward to-
ward the plain of Campaldino, where Dante saw the Guelphs defeat
their rivals; and to La Vernia, that still speaks to one of the
" Fioretti " of Saint Francis, where the spirit of II Poverello
hovers everywhere, where Franciscan monks still sing compline
and vespers and chant hymns in honor of the stigmata of their
founder, while as in the seven centuries agone the violets and
daffodils and primroses blossom forth, every one a fragrant symbol
of the Assisian's simple, unquestioning love of God.
When the dawn came and the sun was beaming in joy, and we
were ready to go, we went forth to say once more a farewell to
the Duomo waiting in the Piazza. As I turned away, I could
almost fancy Florence herself as an old cathedral, with its vast
interior glorious and wonderful and mellow under the subdued
morning light streaming in through the stained glass. Rarest
tinting colored the sunbeams' gleaming on the marvelous rose-
window on the eastern face : the crimson of the Medici ; the deep
purple of Savonarola; the dark green of Dante; the heaven-blue
of Raphael; the opalescent of Fra Angelico; the glowing gold of
Cellini; the rich violet of Michelangelo; an old, old cathedral,
with its soul's memory reaching back into the long ago, and its
heart beating strong and full for the days that are, and its loving
voice calling out to the future ages as an inspiration and a symbol
and a faith.
From the fair flower city of the valley we went away, not
as weary readers who would gladly close a well-studied book,
but as those who would lingeringly whisper an au revoir to a dearest
friend, and be tearful in the parting, as those who would remem-
ber every loved smile and every tender glance of a gentle sister,
622 C01MBRA OF THE HILLS [Aug.,
and be knightly to her wishes, as those who expect again to return
and ask a welcome and a hand-clasp and the envied embrace of
fond affection. As we drove down the quaint old avenues of
Florence, we passed a little shrine of the Madonna, before which a
small boy was arranging some pretty flowers; we saw a happy-
faced old lady, telling her beads at an open, vine-shaded window;
we answered the kindly good-bye of a tiny Bice who sat near a
wayside fountain. There was no garish blaze in the streets of
Florence, but shadow met shadow in the peaceful lanes, and a sub-
dued, tempered light overspread the pathway, like the soft, un-
hurried, quiet afterglow of remembered genius and fulfillment.
COXMBRA OF THE HILLS.
BY THOMAS WALSH.
As I came down from the Hill of Longing,
The Hill of Longing and loneliness-
It seemed as though some sharp caress
Of flowers would stay me with their thronging
So late I lingered on that hill,
So sweet a sadness held my will.
But the voice of the river breeze would call me :
" Come down where the streams of singing are,
Where poets' tears, and sighs of far
Old lovers as in waves befall me ! "
Till stole I down Co'imbra's heights
From songs of youth, and casement lights.
Then up the Hill of Meditation
I turned me, bathed, and cooled, and healed
Until the moon afar revealed
The peaks of my young desolation;
Nor flower, nor thorn would stay me here
Yet a star comes out in every tear.
THE SONG.
BY T. B. REILLY.
S Peter turned the corner of the little crooked street
that made a short cut to the railway station, he came
to a momentary halt. Midway between the houses a
man stood singing. The melody, sweet yet very sad,
held Peter spellbound. He stepped nearer and stood
listening. The singer suddenly turned full toward him. Peter
drew back involuntarily. The man, though young, was cruelly
maimed. His left arm was missing; he had lost an eye, and his
face was horribly disfigured by scar tissue. As the song died away,
Peter stepped forward and offered the young man a lira.
" A thousand thanks, signore," said the unfortunate.
" That was a very sweet song," remarked Peter.
" It was my first composition, signore, for the cello."
" Ah," murmured Peter with sympathetic comprehension, and
after a moment's pause : " A very happy inspiration."
A painful memory flashed across the young man's face, and
he said slowly : " Signore will excuse me. I would rather not
remember. I dare not."
" Oh ! " returned Peter, and in his voice sounded a note of
sincere apology.
" I had thought to let it sleep here, signore," said the man,
striking his breast, " but to-day until to-day, none, except
the friend for whom it was written and myself, has ever heard it."
" Such songs are very rare," said Peter, his interest aroused,
"one should not let them die."
The young man shook his head, and then, with a note of poig-
nant regret, remarked : " Some things are best forgotten."
Peter, at a loss, stood silent.
" Signore sees what I am," said the man softly. " It hap-
pened over there in America a railway accident."
" Ah ! " murmured Peter gently.
" For two years just like that " the man made a balancing
gesture with his hand.
Peter understood him to exemplify a wavering between life
and death.
624 THE SONG [Aug.,
" It changed all everything my whole life. I "
And, suddenly breaking off, the man inclined his head toward
Peter and with a precipitate, " A thousand thanks, adieu," moved
quickly down the street.
Peter, very curious, much puzzled, looked after the retreating
figure for a moment or two, then went on toward the station. Ten
minutes later he was seated in the express that was to take him
across the blazing Campagna to the foothills of the distant moun-
tains. From there an omnibus would bring him fifteen hundred
feet up the slopes, and to the ancient highway that wound along
the windy flanks of the hills southward to the sea.
Peter was fulfilling a promise, long since made to himself, of
a fortnight's excursion on that historic roadway. His first day
came to a close that evening, when, tired, dusty, and very hungry,
he crossed the public square in the little village of Santa Lucia,
and made for the entrance of what he conjectured would be his
haven for the night.
Peter entered the foreyard, and passed along the vine-covered
pathway that was sweet with the smell of ripening grapes. In the
garden proper, under the olive trees, were several tables and benches.
Peter seated himself at one of the tables, and a moment later
found himself looking up into the sharp eyes of an extremely
business-like old woman. There was authority in her glance. Her
attitude was a demand a peremptory challenge. This, to Peter,
suggested several things; chiefly the suitability of mentioning his
needs. He declared his wants. The woman stated her terms.
A few minutes later, Peter, duly inducted into his room, laid
hold of the accommodations to hand, refreshed himself, and then
repaired to the garden. There, at a table under an old olive, he
seated himself to await his much-desired dinner. He rolled a
cigarette, leaned back, and, looking up through the sunlit leaves
overhead, suddenly fell to thinking of the singer and his song.
" Two years like that," mused Peter, making a balancing
motion with his hand. " Imagine ! "
" Suppose," said Peter to himself, " suppose such an accident
had befallen me. I wonder if I'd have had the courage to sing.
Poor chap ! No doubt he had his dreams of a career, fame, hap-
piness. And now everything is changed labors, hopes, his whole
life." The notes of the song came back to him. " A sweet song
that," said Peter. He was just on the point of humming the
remembered strains when something happened.
1913-] THE SONG 625
She was coming down the pathway toward him. Peter, in-
credulous, took her in with steady and admiring glance. And as
she drew near he said softly : " Oh ! "
" The wine, signore," said the girl.
" Oh, thank you," returned Peter, smiling up at her.
" Signore would be English," remarked the girl.
" American," said Peter in a note of polite correction.
" It's the same," she declared with an expressive shrug of her
shoulders.
" Not quite," dissented Peter with a shake of his head, and
added : " What makes you think so ? "
" Vincenzo once told me they were all the same," she replied.
Peter regarded her more critically. She was really handsome.
Her dark beauty was striking. Her blue-black hair, wonderfully
abundant, shimmered in the late afternoon sunlight. In her ears
were fastened rings of old gold. Her cheeks were oval, olive,
dusky, warm with the covert red of her race. Her lips were clean-
cut and scarlet. But it was on her eyes that Peter dwelt longest.
They were large and brown and very luminous. They were
beautiful eyes. And just at present they were smiling down at
him.
" Your friend Vincenzo has seen a bit of the world, perhaps ? "
conjectured Peter.
" He has been to England, signore ; he is in America now,
but"
She broke off suddenly and stood looking across the garden.
Peter, in spite of his emotions, managed to get two and two
together. " Oh o ! " he returned.
" Eh ! " said the girl with another expressive shrug. " What
is there in this land for one that has talent and wishes to get on in
the world ? Nothing ! "
" I dare say there aren't many opportunities for a man of
spirit," agreed Peter. Then with a smile up at her pensive face:
"Still, if I were Vincenzo"
:t Yes ? " she picked him up quickly, somewhat eagerly.
" Well," concluded Peter with a polite inclination of the head,
" I should find the world a dull place, and hurry home."
" Eh ! " she threw out suddenly with an inimitable gesture.
" When they are away, they quickly forget."
" It may occasionally fall out that way," admitted Peter, " but
not where one's friends are like Vincenzo's."
VOL. xcvii. 40
626 THE SONG [Aug.,
She regarded him solemnly for a moment or two, then, with a
smiling uplift of her eyebrows: "You like me?"
Peter, honestly confused, hesitated; then returned gallantly:
" But of course."
She considered that confession a second, gazed steadily down
at him, the red in her cheeks stirring, then slowly half -asserted, half-
sought : " You think I am very pretty ? "
Peter may have been impressionable. But Peter was truthful.
He turned, looked up into her disconcerting eyes and acknowledged :
" I think you are charming."
Again for a moment or two she gazed solemnly down at him.
" What perfectly beautiful eyes," thought Peter.
But she, with hands on hips, suddenly threw back her head and
laughed mockingly at him. The laughter bubbled from her lips
as notes tumbling from a mellow flute. The music took Peter's
inconsequence by storm. But the girl, with another change of
mood, and with a note of reminiscence, naively informed him:
" Vincenzo said I should some day be the most beautiful woman in
the world."
" A truthful prophet," said Peter, " and when he comes this
way again "
" No ! " she broke in quickly, shaking her head, as one facing
the inevitable.
" Oh, that's all right," declared Peter encouragingly. " These
little misunderstandings "
" There was no misunderstanding," she interrupted.
Peter looked up inquiringly.
" We we were friends, nothing more," she advised him with
a shrug. And the next moment, " Signore will excuse me." And
with a little bow toward Peter, she went up the garden path.
Peter, turning in his seat, followed her retreating figure with a
glance of curiosity, interest, wonder.
Five minutes later she brought Peter his dinner, and, seating
herself opposite, became the pleasing, if unconventional, observer
of a young man making the most of a prodigious appetite.
Peter, the first pangs of hunger appeased, looked up
smiling. " Signore has travelled much ? " asked the girl medi-
tatively.
" No," replied Peter, setting to work on a dish of salad, " in
fact, I'm a bit disappointed. I made less than twenty: but to-
1913.] THE SONG 627
" Signore does not understand," interrupted the girl. " Sig-
nore has seen many countries, many people, many cities ? "
" Oh ! " said Peter, carefully dropping some oil upon the crisp
leaves before him, " that's what you mean. Well, I think I've
seen my share. But, it isn't what it's cracked up to be, you know."
" Ah ! " she returned musingly. " I should like to see all the
countries of the world, all, all ! "
" Indeed," said Peter between bites, for a salad neglected is
a salad lost, " and suppose you did ? "
" Eh ! " she threw out with a gesture, " I should then be happy.
Poverty is a great burden."
" Money is a greater," advanced Peter.
" I don't believe it," she dissented, shaking her head from
side to side.
" You may take my word for it," said Peter.
" Mache!" she exclaimed sharply with an emphasis, an ac-
cent, a vigor.
It was like a cuff on the cheek; an unexpected box across the
ears. Peter's complacency suffered a shock. For the moment, he
sat silent, fascinated by her flashing eyes.
" Without money," she announced feelingly, " there is nothing,
nothing."
" Don't you believe any such thing," Peter warned her, rolling
a cigarette, " the best things in life have nothing at all to do
with money."
" Signore is rich ? " she asked.
" That's no argument," countered Peter.
" Would he be willing to give up his wealth for existence
in such a place as this ? "
She glanced about her swiftly, scornfully.
" Well," replied Peter amused, interested, " I don't know
why not? "
He glanced about him slowly, appreciatively.
" No ! " she cried with a disdainful toss of her head, " signore
would quickly regret the loss of his money."
" That's merely an assumption," returned Peter.
" No," she said, " that is the truth the real truth."
And suddenly turning toward Peter she asked : " Signore has
seen many beautiful women?"
Peter frowned, readjusted his thoughts, and then smilingly
advised her : " Not so many."
628 THE SONG [Aug.,
She regarded him through half-closed eyes. And again Peter
took in the attractive face, the beautiful eyes, the lips
severed lips,
Parted with sugared breath,
thought Peter, and he remarked: "They were what you might
call beautiful by persuasion. The rose was a rose grown gray
and re-colored. They were beautiful with a difference."
" There must be many beautiful women in the world," she
mused reflectively. And after a moment's pause : " There must be
many beautiful women in the signore's country."
" Oh," said Peter, a light dawning, " well, I believe we've
something of a reputation in that regard, but "
He paused a second and then, smilingly : " Your friend, Vin-
cenzo, is tolerably safe."
" He must be very rich by this time," she advanced anxiously,
and with a look at Peter as if for sympathetic comprehension.
" Your fear is groundless," said Peter with a wave of his hand.
She stood frowning down at him.
" Riches aren't such a high card in the game over there,"
went on Peter.
" Signore says things I do not understand," she complained
with reproachful patience.
" Let us put it another way," returned Peter, " this friend of
yours, this Vincenzo, does he possess so magical a thing as a title?
Is he, for instance, prince, duke, count or even plain commen-
datore?"
" M ache I " she threw out with a gesture," he is none of those
things; but "
She looked up through the vines a second.
" He is very handsome," she answered ; then sighed and
softly concluded : "He was the most beautiful man in all the
province."
" That's nothing," said Peter, " good looks won't carry him
far in the present state of the market. He'll return, never fear."
She stood shaking her head.
" Men," Peter informed her, " are hard to get started. Be-
sides you must make allowances. Don't let a few months absence
worry you."
" Months ! " she exclaimed. But from the note in her voice,
the light in her eyes, her meaning was unmistakable.
1913-] THE SONG 629
" But/' said Peter, " you wouldn't marry a man solely because
he was handsome ? "
She stared at him a moment. Her dark eyes searched him
through and through.
" Would the signore marry an ugly woman ? "
" That's not a fair question," objected Peter. " The point in
discussion is not one of masculine folly, but one of womanly
wisdom."
She looked at him, frowning, uncertain.
" Nevertheless," went on Peter, " I dare say that given an
ugly woman with wit and wealth and a lovely creature with
neither " He paused a second, then smiling up at her : " Well,
what do you think?"
, " I don't know what the signore is talking about," she replied
with a shrug. Then with a toss of her head, her eyes flashing:
" The man that marries me must be handsome. He must be rich.
He must be able and willing to take me everywhere; show me all
the wonderful places and beautiful cities of the world.
She made a gesture toward the regions beyond the gar-
den. " He must show me what it is to live ; to go where I wish ;
to have what I will ; do what I please ! "
" But," argued Peter, marvelling at the outburst, " what good
would all that do you? You'd find it the dullest sort of work.
You'd tire of it in less than no time. Why why you'd give any-
thing to get back again to this little sheltered paradise."
" Never ! " she exclaimed passionately, getting to her feet.
Peter looked up at her. " What a little dramatic beauty she
is;" he said to himself, "all fire and ice; aloes and honey." But
aloud : " Do you know what I think ? "
" Tell me," she demanded, gazing down at him with something
of a challenge in her dark eyes.
" I don't believe you really care two cents about riches."
She drew back in an attitude of derision. Her eyes flashed.
And, with a sudden toss of her head, she laughed scornfully at him.
And before Peter could make reply, she had called out:
" Good-evening, signorino," and was on her way up the gar-
den walk.
" Huh! " said Peter to himself.
That " signorino " had shocked his sense of the fitness of
things. For Peter was two and thirty a very seasonable age.
Ten minutes later, he sighed and got to his feet. The day had
630 THE SONG [Aug.,
come to a close. The sun was behind the mountains. There was a
chill in the air. The garden was gray and very quiet.
" It's positively lonesome," mused Peter, looking up the garden
path.
He went slowly up to his room, drew a chair to the window,
and sat looking out across the valley. On the dark flank of the
distant mountains, he could make out the village of San Marco
a patchwork of wonderful silver grays. Suddenly he gave a start.
Someone was singing. He leaned forward and looked down into
the garden. It was the girl.
The melody, sweet yet very sad, drifted up through the vines.
Peter found himself humming the music softly to himself. It was
a sweet song. He had heard it once before in the hot city, miles
away to the west.
As the song died away in plaintive minors, Peter sat thinking.
A few moments later he gave another start, and again looked down
into the garden. He could just make out the form of the girl sitting
on a bench under the grape arbor. She was sobbing. For the
briefest of moments Peter had a startlingly vivid glimpse of a little
crooked street, and of a young man who was saying with a note
of poignant regret : " Some things are best forgotten."
" Nonsense," murmured Peter.
He stared frowningly out into the deepening dusk, thinking,
wondering. And then he remembered.
" Until to-day, none, except the friend for whom it was written
and myself, has ever heard it."
BERGSON AND THE DIVINE FECUNDITY.
BY THOMAS J. GERRARD.
INCE everything in the philosophy of change is, up-
side down, so we must examine the first cause last.
We have seen the creative evolution in its flux,
we have gathered that it can only be caught during
flashes of intuition, we have understood that its
direction is determined neither by mechanical forces nor intellectual
motives, and we have tried to apprehend how the whole process
could happen without any preconceived plan. We come now to
examine the actual principle itself which is supposed to do all
these things.
Of course we intend to use our intelligence in our inquiry. It
is needful to make this remark, because M. Befgson rather postu-
lates that we shall not do so. " Everything," he says, " is obscure
in the idea of creation if we think of things which are created,
and a thing which creates, as we habitually do, as the understanding
cannot help doing."*
That is just what the hatter said.
" If you knew Time as well as I do," said the hatter, " you
wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him/'
" I don't know what you mean," said Alice.
"Of course you don't," the hatter said, tossing his head con-
temp tuously.f
If the new god Chronos is not intelligible, then it was silly
to write a book describing him. If we cannot make him intelligible,
we can at least show where he is unintelligible.
Our first point of inquiry will be to see how far the god
Time involves a dualist or a monist universe. In our first articlej
we said that M. Bergson professed to be a dualist. We now
venture to declare that, in spite of what he says, and in spite
of what his disciples may say, he is a radical monist.
Monism is a term invented by Wolff to designate any philos-
ophy which recognizes in the whole sphere of existence only one
^Creative Evolution, p. 261. ^Alice in Wonderland, p. 84.
$THE CATHOLIC WORLD, January, 1913, p. 435.
For a full treatment of this subject see: Der Monismus und Seine Philo-
sophische Grundlagen, von Friedrich Klimke, S J., Freiburg : Herder.
632 BERGSON AND THE DIVINE FECUNDITY [Aug.,
((x6vos) kind of being. This kind of being may be either matter
or spirit. If the one substance be regarded as matter, then
the monism is called materialist; if spirit, then it is called
spiritualist. Spiritualist monism may be either intellectualist, vol-
untarist or transcendental. A philosophy which teaches that there
are two distinct kinds of being is known as dualist ( &Jo two).
If the monism is spiritualist, it will include God, and thus will be
pantheistic. If it is materialist, it will exclude God, and thus will
be atheistic.
At first sight there would seem to be in the system of M. Berg-
son two kinds of being, ascending life and descending matter.
The ascending life is variously spoken of as " consciousness,"
" super-consciousness," " duration," " vital push," " choice," " free-
dom," " intuition," " will." It is never defined because it is seen
only by intuition, and so cannot be defined. From what we have
observed, however, of its action and functions, we may describe
it as a conscious vital push which sees intuitively, and which wills
according to the exigencies of creation.
Whatever else this force is or is not, it is original in the strict-
est sense of the word. However incoherent the statement may
seem, we are bound to say that in the system of M. Bergson
this force creates itself. All at once, in the twinkling of an eye,
with no sound of trumpet to herald its coming, nay, with no eye
to twinkle upon it, it begins.*
Again, this life which starts itself and intensifies itself also
bifurcates itself. The division into animal and vegetable lines, into
the lines of instinct and reason, are due to two causes which life
bears within itself. As to the cause of these causes, well it
simply began at the given centre at which life began. f
Here, be it noticed, we find matter already in existence, and
exercising its function of modifying life. But whence did the
matter come? Did it start of itself from some given centre?
In order to find out the genesis of matter, we must recall the whole
of the Bergsonian doctrine of time, space, intuition, and intellect.
Then we shall see that this descending matter is but the inversion
of ascending force.
First let us make a number of efforts at intuition. Each
glimpse will give us a sight of the extra-spatial. Then as each
glimpse fades away, the extra-spatial will be observed to degrade
itself into spatiality. This will be all the more evident to us in
fc ^Creative Evolution, p. 27. Wbid., pp. 103, 104.
1913.] BERGSON AND THE DIVINE FECUNDITY 633
proportion to the strain we put upon ourselves. Let us make our-
selves self-conscious in the highest possible degree. Then we shall
feel ourselves, as it were, outside space, and right in the midst of
the fluid " now."
But then let us relax ourselves and fall back little by little.
Then we shall feel that we are in the solid flesh after all, and
that what was an indivisible flux has become a divisible extension.
" We have an extension of the self into recollections that are
fixed and external to one another, in place of the tension it pos-
sessed as an indivisible active will."*
Our consciousness in this way shows us the direction of the
movement. But it is not able to follow the whole course of the
movement. Our intellect sees matter whilst our intuition sees life.
And as our consciousness assumes now the form of intuition, and
now the form of intellect, we recognize that we hold two ends
of a chain, though we do not succeed in seizing the intervening
links.
Philosophy, that is, intuition, has not yet become completely
conscious of itself. But, since it is in a process of evolution,
it may eventually come to see matter in its actual genesis. For
the present, however, we may infer, by comparing our intuitional
views with our intellectual views, that matter is but the inversion
of life.
Physics has hitherto done its duty in pushing matter in the
direction of spatiality. But metaphysics has been on the wrong
track in simply treading in the footsteps of physics. It was a
chimerical hope to expect to be able to go further in the same
direction. It should have recognized that the direction of intuition
is the very opposite to that of intellect. The task of metaphysics
should be
to remount the incline which physics descends, to bring back
matter to its origins, and to build up progressively a cos-
mology which would be, so to speak, a reversed psychology.
All that which seems positive to the physicist and to the geo-
metrician would become, from this new point of view, an inter-
ruption or inversion of the true positivity, which would have
to be denned in psychological terms.f
Now if matter is but the inversion of spirit, if metaphysics
is but the inversion of physics, and cosmology of psychology,
^Creative Evolution, p. 219. ^Ibid.
634 BERGSON AND THE DIVINE FECUNDITY [Aug.,
then obviously there is but one radical kind of being. M. Berg-
son's observations are shrewd enough to show him the great differ-
ence between body and spirit. On the surface then he is a dualist.
But he has to make this doctrine square with the doctrine of
change. He has to account for the origin of that which is inert.
So he makes matter the inversion of life. He begins as a dualist,
but ends as a monist.
Doubtless this idea of matter being but the inversion of life,
will not commend itself as being clear and coherent in itself. In-
deed, M. Bergson warns us that here we are entering the most
obscure regions of metaphysics. Let us decline, however, to be
hoodwinked. If M. Bergson is going to take us from the known to
the unknown, he must satisfy us as to the stepping-stones. He
must not ask us to step out on to soft ooze, or into the dark, pre-
suming that it will be all right. Observe then a few of his nebu-
losities.
This long analysis (i. e., of the ideas of order and disorder)
was necessary to show how the real can pass from tension to
extension, and from freedom to mechanical necessity by way of
inversion We must now examine more closely the inver-
sion whose consequences we have just described. What then
is the principle that has only to let go its tension we may say
to detend in order to extend, the interruption of the cause here
being equivalent to a reversal of the effect ? For the want of a
better word we have to call it consciousness. But we do not
mean the narrowed consciousness that functions in each of us.
Our own consciousness is the consciousness of a certain living
being, placed in a certain point of space; and though it does
indeed move in the same direction as its principle, it is con-
tinually drawn the opposite way, obliged, though it goes for-
ward, to look behind. This retrospective vision is, as we have
shown, the natural function of the intellect, and consequently
of distinct consciousness.*
This is one of the most luminous passages we can find. We
venture to interpret it as follows: Consciousness stretches itself
as far as possible. Then it lets go. Or again, first it concen-
trates itself on itself for a living active moment. Then it allows
itself to be distracted. Thus the stretching or concentrating makes
tension. The letting go or dissipation makes detension. When
the detending has finished extension is the result. Consciousness
^Creative Evolution, p. 250.
1913.] BERGSON AND THE DIVINE FECUNDITY 635
detends in order to extend. But only life can stretch itself or
concentrate itself. And since matter is found already extended,
we presume that it has arrived through the detension of life.
Hence we see that matter has its origin in life. If that is not
clear, pray listen again:
Is it extension in general that we are considering in abstracto?
Extension, we said, appears only as a tension which is inter-
rupted. Or, are we considering the concrete reality that fills
this extension? The order which reigns there, and which is
manifested by the laws of nature, is an order which must
be born of itself when the inverse order is suppressed; a de-
tension of the will would produce precisely this suppression.
Lastly, we find that the direction which this reality takes,
suggests to us the idea of a thing unmaking itself; such, no
doubt, is one of the essential characters of materiality. What
conclusion are we to draw from all this, if not that the process
by which this thing makes itself is directed in a contrary way
to that of physical processes, and that it is, therefore, by its
very definition, immaterial?
The vision we have of the material world is that of a weight
which falls: no image drawn from matter, properly so-called,
will ever give us the idea of weight rising ...... All our analyses
show us, in life, an effort to remount the incline that matter
descends. In that they reveal to us the possibility, the necessity
even of a process the inverse of materiality, creative of matter
by its interruption alone.*
For the present let us suspend our judgment as to the co-
herence of this idea of inversion. Let us suppose that the inter-
ruption of the stream of life creates matter. Let us grant that
the words represent a validly logical process, and not a mere jumble
of ideas. Then the point we have undertaken to make is estab-
lished. If matter is but the inversion of spirit, then both are
ultimately one and the same thing, and M. Bergson, whilst nomin-
ally a dualist, is radically a monist. " Intellect and matter," he says,
" have progressively adapted themselves one to the other in order to
attain at last a common form. This adaptation has, moreover,
been brought about quite naturally, because it is the same inversion
of the same movement which creates at once the intellectuality
of mind and the materiality of things"^
^Creative Evolution, pp. 258, 259. ^Ibid., p. 217
636 BERGSON AND THE DIVINE FECUNDITY [Aug.,
This unification of the universe turns M. Bergson into a poet.
Listen to his dithyramb:
Thus to the eyes of a philosophy that attempts to re-absorb
intellect in intuition, many difficulties vanish or become light.
But such a doctrine does not only facilitate speculation; it
gives us also more power to act and to live. For, with it,
we feel ourselves no longer isolated in humanity, humanity
no longer seems isolated in the nature that it dominates. As
the smallest grain of dust is bound up with our entire solar
system, drawn along with it in that undivided movement of
descent which is materiality itself, so all organized beings, from
the humblest to the highest, from the first origins of life to the
time in which we are, and in all places as in all times, do but
evidence a single impulsion, the inverse of the movement of
matter, and in itself indivisible. All the living hold together,
and all yield to the same tremendous push.*
Next we may note the incoherence of this new notion of
inversion. An original impulse first starts off. But how does it
turn back upon itself ? Whence does it derive a direction antagonis-
tic to itself ? How can the very contradiction of a force spring from
that force? How can descent be produced by ascent? Granting,
in a word, that the vital push has certain potentialities, whence
does it derive the principle by which these potentialities are act-
uated? Until these questions are answered, the whole concept
must be written off as fraught with inconsistency and self-con-
tradiction.
Or again, we may note a vicious circle in the process. In
order that life may ascend, it is supposed to require matter to
enable it to do so. Its ascent is a march of conquest. Matter
is wanted to provide life with problems, the solution of which
constitutes creative evolution. But in order that matter may
be thus placed at the service of life, life must first ascend and
become inverted. The ladder is upstairs. How shall we get it
down ? Here is a lacuna in the philosophy of change. The polite
thing is just to peep at it, and then cover it over again with abund-
ance of flowers which M. Bergson provides for us.
We have already seen, in our study of finalism, that no evo-
lution could possibly have been set in motion without some in-
telligent direction. But something more is required than mere
aim. The arrow does not fly off to the target by reason of its own
% ^Creative Evolution, p. 285.
1913-] BERGSON AND THE DIVINE FECUNDITY 637
self -propulsion. Motion presupposes a motor. So also is it with
this vital push. Who started it pushing ? Who pressed the button
for such a wonderful system of change-ringing?
Both the principle of identity and the principle of causality
are here skipped over as if they did not matter. But they do
matter. We must write them down again, else we may be beguiled
from the path of common sense. A thing is what it is as long as
it is what it is, and so long as it is what it is, it is not something
else. That means that amoebas do not of themselves change their
essence and merge into monkeys. An amceba is always an amceba,
and a monkey is always a monkey. Further, every effect must
have a cause. But every change is an effect. Therefore, every
change must have a cause.
Most especially are these principles applicable to the changes
in creative evolution. Here invariably the changes are from some-
thing less to something greater. They involve the extremely active
conditions of intuition and freedom. Their glory is that by them
are created absolutely new forms, unforeseen and unforeseeable.
Whence come all these potentialities and activities? What makes
instinct develop so astonishingly in the line of bees ? What makes
intelligence appear rather in the line of man? What holds back
the mollusc with its splendid eyesight from entering into com-
petition with man?
Evidently these questions have troubled M. Bergson. He
speaks of the " torturing problems " to which the idea of " nothing "
gives rise. Eventually he dares to admit that there is some great
Principle at the bottom of the universe.
Whence comes it [he asks], and how can it be understood
that anything exists? Even here in the present work, when
matter has been defined as a kind of descent, this descent as
the interruption of a rise, this rise itself as a growth, when
finally a Principle of creation has been put at the base of
things, the same question springs up: How why does this
principle exist rather than nothing?
The answer to this question would be simple enough if M.
Bergson had not poisoned the wells of knowledge. By willfully
suppressing the concept of " being " and substituting the concept of
" becoming," he has blinded himself to that most obvious and
primary truth, that a thing is what it is as long as it is what it is,
638 BERGSON AND THE DIVINE FECUNDITY [Aug.,
the truth known as the principle of identity. Consequently he has
cut himself off from that Being Who is essentially being. He
has no place for being which exists of itself in one eternal and
unchanging present. Having burnt his boats, he has destroyed his
only chance of escape. Hence he is in this predicament : he must
create a God according to his own image and likeness.
On the one hand he allows himself to speak of his God as
"a centre from which worlds shoot out like rockets in a fire-
works display."* But on the other hand, he says that he " does
not present this centre as a thing, but as a continuity of shooting
out. God, thus defined, has nothing of the already made; He is
unceasing life, action, freedom. "f In other words his God is
the God of Change, not the unchangeable God; the God of Time,
not the God of Eternity.
M. Bergson has a number of names for this God, each more
or less descriptive. First we may consider the great Principle
as Time. That would be all very well if we used the word as a
metaphor. Time, for instance, can heal a broken heart. But putting
metaphor aside, we cannot think of Time as creating anything at
all. It is not even an active principle. It is merely an effect,
the measurement of motion.
Or again, we may consider the Principle as Duration (la
duree). If I have endured from my birth until now, again, that
is an effect, not a cause. If the creative Principle is to produce
anything at all, it must at least produce existence. But duration
presupposes existence. I must actually be in existence in order to
continue in existence. To say that duration is the creative prin-
ciple of existence, is to say that the effect is the cause of the cause.
Then we may regard the Principle as a vital push. But a push
supposes a pusher. There can be no action without an agent.
Action without an agent would be a very useful commodity in
business. There is a fortune awaiting the man who will discover it.
It will drive steam engines without steam and electrical engines
without electricity. But where will you find it? It is as elusive
as a snark. You may seek it with thimbles, with care, with
smiles, with forks, with hope, and with soap, and even then every
time you put your finger on it you will find it not there. Why?
Because self -creation is an incoherent idea. And if it cannot exist
as a concept of the mind, a fortiori it cannot exist in the world of
reality.
^Creative Evolution, p. 262. ilbid.
1913-] BERGSON AND THE DIVINE FECUNDITY 639
No one gives what he has not got. Therefore, no one can
give existence who does not already possess it. The very notion
of creation postulates a Creator.
Let us, however, for the sake of argument, grant that there is
a pure Becoming which creates the things which we see, our-
selves included. Even then the ultimate question would be still
unanswered, for pure Becoming could never be a First Cause.
M. Bergson, indeed, admits and claims that the pure Becoming
possesses some perfections, and is devoid of others. It is partly in
actuality and partly in potentiality. Being possessed of this double
quality, it necessarily presupposes a pure actuality. An absolutely
first cause must be one that is actuated to every possible per-
fection.
Here we are at the very foundation of philosophy. We must
begin with axioms. We submit the following as self-evident :
A thing is perfect in so far as it is in actuality ; it is imperfect,
however, in so far as it is in potentiality.
An altogether pure actuality is altogether perfect.
A potentiality, as such, can never reduce itself to actuality,
but it must be reduced to actuality by some active principle.
Every changeable being possesses actuality and potentiality.
Actuality is always prior to potentiality.
Wherefore, since Becoming has some perfection, it is partly
in actuality. And since it is devoid of some perfection, it is
partly in potentiality. Now whence did it derive its actuality?
Certainly not from its potentiality, for no potentiality can reduce
itself to actuality. We must, therefore, have recourse to some
ultimate active principle which is pure actuality.
Hence we are driven back from the God of Change, as de-
scribed by M. Bergson, to the God of a full and active eternity,
as described by St. Thomas.
Everything that has in its substance [writes the Angelic
Doctor] an admixture of potentiality, to the extent that it has
potentiality, is liable not to be: because what can be, can also
not be. But God in Himself cannot not be, seeing that He is
everlasting; therefore there is in God no potentiality.
Although in order of time that which is sometimes in poten-
tiality, sometimes in actuality, is in potentiality before it is
in actuality, yet, absolutely speaking, actuality is prior to po-
tentiality, because potentiality does not bring itself into actuality,
but is brought into actuality by something which is already
640 BERGSON AND THE DIVINE FECUNDITY [Aug.,
in actuality. Everything, therefore, that is any way in poten-
tiality has something else prior to it. But God is the First
Being and the First Cause, and, therefore, has not in Himself
any admixture of potentiality.
Everything acts inasmuch as it is in actuality. Whatever then
is not all actuality, does not act by its whole self, is not a prime
agent; for it acts by participation in something else, not by
its own essence. The prime agent then, which is God, has no
admixture of potentiality, but is pure actuality.
We see that there is that in the world which passes from po-
tentiality to actuality. But it does not educe itself from poten-
tiality to actuality, because what is in potentiality is not as
yet, and, therefore, cannot act. Therefore, there must be some
other prior thing, whereby this thing may be brought out from
potentiality to actuality. And again, if this further thing is
going out from potentiality to actuality, there must be posited
before it yet some other thing, whereby it may be reduced
to actuality. But this process cannot go on for ever : therefore,
we must come to something that is only in actuality, and nowise
in potentiality ; and that we call God.*
Even then though we did grant that the principle of creative
evolution were a pure Becoming, the problem would still remain as
to how, why, when, and wherefore that Becoming began to become.
The truth is that M. Bergson has reversed the dictates of com-
mon sense. He has made becoming prior to being; he has made
potentiality superior to actuality; he has made non-being superior
to being. Worked out to its ultimate absurdity, his philosophy
implies that the First Cause is Non-Being. Then where did we
all come from ? We simply grew.
Listen how M. Bergson avows all this. " We said," he writes,
" there is more in a movement than in the successive positions
attributed to the moving object, more in a becoming than in the
forms passed through in turn, more in the evolution of form
than the forms assumed one after another."f Thus becoming is
more perfect than being, a mixture of potentiality, and actuality
more perfect than pure actuality.
But, once again, no one can give what he has not got. A
man can not do more than he is " up to." The imperfect cannot
of itself roll out into the perfect. Hence self-perfectibility is seen
to be not only a theological heresy, but also a metaphysical ab-
surdity.
*Contra Gentiles, Lib. I., Cap. XVI. ^Creative Evolution, p. 333.
1913-] BERGSON AND THE DIVINE FECUNDITY 641
At this point we may ask why should M. Bergson, and with him
the whole school of modernist philosophy, prefer a changeable and
perfectible God to an unchangeable and all-perfect God? It is because
they will not take the trouble to understand St. Thomas* doctrine.
They will regard unchangeableness as a sort of petrifaction. They
will not see in it the very fullness of activity. They, who are
ready to impute anthropomorphism to the orthodox, are themselves
shut up in the crudest anthropomorphism. Seeing that the an-
thropos is always changing, they are unable to rise to the concept
of a theos which never changes. Their mistake is not that of
thinking of God in human thought-forms. We all do that, nor
can we think of God in any other way. Their mistake is in
forgetting that their thought-forms are human, and in taking them
to be adequate representations of the ultimate unspeakable Reality.
Having pointed out the shortcomings of the God of Time and
Change, it remains for us to give a more positive description of
our own timeless and unchangeable God. He not only possesses
life, and gives life to all living creatures, but He is life itself.
Our knowledge of God's life can only be obtained by inference
from what we know of our own. Now we know of our own
lives that they are imperfect. Every day we gain new experience.
There is always something new for us to know and to enjoy.
No morrow comes and finds us exactly in the same condition
as we were yesterday. We are always in a state of transition from
potentiality to actuality.
God, on the contrary, since He is absolutely perfect, is in-
capable of acquiring new perfections. His incapacity to change
is due not to an exhaustion or want of activity, but to a complete
fullness of activity. This activity, indeed, is so perfect and abso-
lute that it admits of no potentiality whatever. Hence He is
incapable of any transition from potentiality to actuality.
The life, therefore, which we attribute to God is life of the
most eminent kind, a kind wholly different from ours, for it is
all pure actuality. Ours is only a participation of life, and so
we are said to possess life. But God is all life, and so we say
that He is Life. No one gives it to Him. He is it from all
eternity.
Moreover, He gives it to all who share in it. He is the
Life of all lives. " Ye men of Athens God Who made the
world and all things therein, He, being Lord of heaven and earth,
dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is He served
VOL. xcvn. 41
642 BERGSON AND THE DIVINE FECUNDITY [Aug.,
with men's hands as if He needed anything; seeing it is He Who
giveth to all life, and breath, and all things."*
Nor is the life of God a sort of fiery volcano, nor a huge
disordered sphere of activity with a continuity of shooting-out.
Divine life is activity of the highest order. We give it the nearest
description possible when we say that it is a life of perfect Wisdom.
Again, even the wisdom which we attribute to God is known
only by the analogy of human wisdom. Human wisdom is that
mental activity which peers into both speculative and practical
truth, and ordains things to their proper end. This is undoubtedly
the supreme attribute of God. It is the highest form of spirit
life that we can imagine. When we speak of God as the Being,
that does not express to us His vital activity. When we speak of
Him as the Life, that does not express to us the more interesting
attributes of knowledge and love. But when we speak of Him as
the Wisdom, then we express His life of intelligence and love,
and we see how this intelligence and love acts both within and
without, inwardly understanding and loving the Divine Essence,
outwardly understanding and loving all creation.
Thus it is by His wisdom that God knows all possible truth,
and loves all possible good. It is by His wisdom that He forms
a due estimate of the value of all things in reference to His final
plan. It is by His wisdom that He is able to economize and order
all things in accord with this plan. Hence, Wisdom expresses
the sum total of God's activities, that full perfection of life, so
perfect as to admit of no further perfection.
Moreover, this activity of divine intellect and will is no cold
intellectualism or uninterested volitionalism. It is an activity
which constitutes an infinite Happiness and Glory.
Happiness is the satisfaction and restfulness in the fruition of
some good known and loved. But God both knows and loves
the most perfect goodness and beauty. He is Himself the exemplar
and source of all possible goodness and beauty. But He knows
Himself. Such knowledge can only prompt the most perfect love.
Such love can only make the most perfect rapture and hap-
piness.
This divine activity, too, produces the greatest possible splen-
dor. The divine intelligence and love are aglow with the riches
of truth and goodness. We all know the brightness of a household
where a happy child is playing about. Happiness sheds brightness
*Acts xvii, 22, et. seq.
1913-] BERGSON AND THE DIVINE FECUNDITY 643
everywhere and always. Every little ray of brightness which is
shed by a happy creature is an indication of the glory which
emanates from the divine blessedness. If God's happiness is su-
preme, so also must His Splendor be supreme. Well may St.
Paul speak of " the glory of the blessed God."*
This fact of God deriving His happiness and splendor from
His own intrinsic wealth, serves again to show up the fallacy
of the modern doctrine of man's self-perfectibility. If one thing
is obvious in the present rush and tear of society, it is that a man
can never be satisfied with his own intrinsic wealth. He must be
always seeking happiness from without. Every improvement in
his well-being is due to some educative influence from without.
And if the series of causes which contribute to man's happiness
be traced to their ultimate source, they will be found to lead to that
Cause which is uncaused, the God Whose happiness and splendor
is supreme, the Wisdom which has no needs within itself, but which
is the satisfaction of all needs outside itself.
Naturally we pay more attention to the divine fecundity which
is manifested in creation, than to that which is active within the
bosom of God Himself. Yet, after all, the inner fecundity of God
is the most important of all mysteries. It has a practical bearing
on our own lives. If only we could realize a little more the intrinsic
beauties of the Godhead, we should appreciate more the divine con-
descension in creating an outer world to share in the divine
happiness. The outward fecundity of God takes on a much greater
significance when considered together with the inward fecundity of
God, the mystery of the Blessed Trinity.
We do not pretend that we can explain either the mystery
without or the mystery within. A mystery is a truth which is
partly revealed and partly concealed. But what we do say is that
if we take these mysteries as we know them, that is, in so far as
they are revealed to our understanding, even then they are far
more intelligible than the Bergsonian fireworks.
Let us first try to apprehend something of the richness, fullness,
and consistency of the inner fecundity of the divine life.
To begin with, God is a pure and infinite actuality. In this
He is essentially different from all His creatures. Consequently
His internal productivity will be quite different from that which
we observe in creatures. It is not a reproduction of the divine
nature as the formation of a new man is the reproduction of a
*i Tim. i. ii.
644 BERGSON AND THE DIVINE FECUNDITY [Aug.,
human nature. We are forbidden to say that there can be three
Gods.
Nor yet is the inner fecundity a production of organisms
whereby the divine life may develop and extend itself. It is wholly
within, wholly immanent. It is an energy which is expressed in
distinct subjects, yet all within the one divine nature. What can
these subjects be?
Once again we have recourse to human analogies. We ask
ourselves what are the highest forms of activity that we know.
They are intelligence and will. And the subject in which intel-
ligence and will are united is a personality. Hence if the inner
divine fecundity is to express itself in the highest possible form,
if it is to issue in subjects which are units of intelligence and will,
it must issue in personalities. How shall we describe these per-
sonalities ?
We have seen that the attribute of Wisdom is the most ade-
quate description of the divine life that we can think of. This
term also indicates the kind of the fecundity. Wisdom is at once
the most perfect knowledge of the most perfect truth, and the most
perfect love of the most perfect good. The divine fecundity there-
fore issues as acts of the divine Intellect and the divine Will. The
results of these acts must express and complete the divine Knowl-
edge and Volition. As finished products they are the most perfect
outcome of the divine Wisdom. Each of them is a complete
actuality, unmixed with the slightest trace of any potentiality.
If this were not so they would not be complete. They would still
be capable of additional perfection.
But the perfect Wisdom of God consists of two activities,
namely, knowledge and volition. As the outcome of the divine
fecundity, therefore, there will be two personalities, one issuing
as the divine intelligence, the other as the divine love. But in-
telligence and love in God are not independent of each other.
God neither understands without loving nor loves without under-
standing. Knowledge is the way to love. Even in the divine
fecundity nothing can be loved that is not already known. Hence
the Knowledge which is the term of the divine Understanding is a
Knowledge which breathes forth Love. To the personality which
is the principle of the divine fecundity there is given the appro-
priate name of Father; to that which is the offspring by way of
understanding, the name of Son; and to that which is the offspring
of a double breathing out of love, the name of Holy Ghost.
1913.] BERGSON AND THE DIVINE FECUNDITY 645
Taken at its lowest estimate, this account of the inner fecund-
ity of God is a magnificent working hypothesis. It is fraught with
none of the puerilities of the Bergsonian half-made centre, which
is a continuity of shooting-out. Although the union of three per-
sons in one nature is a truth transcending human reason, it does
not do violence to human reason in the way that the Bergsonian
speculations do. And when the theory is read in the light of the
inspired word, it becomes much more than a reasonable working
hypothesis. It becomes a certitude of a very high order.
See, for instance, how the title Wisdom is appropriated to the
Son because He is the reflection of the Wisdom of the Father.
Notice how the title Logos of the Greek Testament harmonizes with
the Verbum. of the scholastics. Both concepts were derived from
widely different sources, yet both are most aptly used to express
the supreme, initial, eternal, and final judgment of the Godhead.
So too with the Holy Spirit. He is said to proceed as the " Gift "
or " Pledge " of love. And if love in human beings is essentially
an act of the will, and not passion or feeling, much more so is it
in God. Just as knowledge tends towards expression, so love
tends towards effusion.
The difficulty of forming a mental picture of all this produc-
tivity, is due to our experience of ourselves. When we produce
things, it is because we want them. In God there is no want.
The real basis of the divine fecundity is not a need to produce
something. It is not the need of further perfection. It is the
very fullness of divine life. By the light of reason we could never
have guessed that this fecundity would issue in two divine persons.
But after the revelation has been received, we can see how very
reasonable it is.
So too is it with the mystery of creation. Without the reve-
lation we should be in the same boat with M. Bergson, tortured
with the problem as to why anything should be. But, knowing the
fullness and the richness of the divine fecundity, we have no dif-
ficulty in looking to God's Will as the reason for the existence
of creation.
Since God is the only necessary Being, the only perfect and
full Actuality, all other beings must owe their existence to Him.
Nor are they made out of His substance. His perfect actuality,
simplicity, and unchangeableness excludes that supposition. They
must, therefore, be made out of nothing. And when, in this con-
text, we use the word " nothing " we do not mean " something."
646 BERGSON AND THE DIVINE FECUNDITY [Aug.,
The nought is not a sort of half-defined blue jelly out of which
things were made. It is merely the term from which things begin
to be. The word " nothing " simply means non-being.
Our apology for making such crude remarks is that M. Berg-
son, in his characteristic way, juggles with the word " nothing,"
endeavoring to show that, through misuse of the word, the prob-
lem of existence is but a pseudo-problem. Hitherto, he says, man
has had a false idea of the nought. If only we could get rid
of the false idea of nothingness, then the problem as to why
anything should exist would vanish.
Through twenty-six highly decorative pages* of literature,
M. Bergson labors to show up this false idea of nothingness.
The idea of " nothing " is either an image, or a positive idea, or a
negative idea. Quite easily he disposes of the first two suppo-
sitions, and incidentally paints a word picture of " nothing," which
is worthy of a frame and a place in a post-impressionist gallery.
We quite agree with him in his contention, that we can neither
form an image of " nothing," nor identify it with " something."
We disagree with him, however, when he contends that we
cannot have even a negative idea of " nothing."
To sum up [he says] for a mind which should follow purely and
simply the thread of experience, there would be no void, no
nought, even relative or partial, no possible negation. Such
a mind would see facts succeed facts, states succeed states,-
things succeed things. What it would note at each moment
would be things existing, states appearing, events happening.
It would live in the actual, and, if it were capable of judging,
it would never affirm anything except the existence of the
present.f
Here we must answer with a distinction. We grant that an
absolute nought cannot be affirmed. We deny that an absolute
nought cannot be thought. The absolute nought is a being of the
mind (ens rationis), not a being amongst things which appear and
happen (ens reale) . Our whole contention throughout these studies
has been that the real is that which exists, whether the mind knows
about it or not. So, too, the unreal is that which does not exist,
notwithstanding whether the mind thinks about it or not. Hence
we can think of the nought, without the nought having any objective
reality. The absolute nought is a pure figment of the mind.
i ^Creative Evolution, pp. 288-314. ^Ibid., p. 310.
1913.] BERGSON AND THE DIVINE FECUNDITY 647
With this distinction before him, let the reader go through
M. Bergson's last statement, and notice the logical fallacy uttered
in every word. The fallacy is known as the illicit transit from
the ontological to the logical order. Thus the author asks us to
follow the thread of concrete experience; to observe that facts
succeed facts, states succeed states, and things succeed things; to
notice that there is no " nought " in the realm of reality; and then
to jump to the conclusion that there can be no " nought " in the
realm of abstraction. Of course this logical fallacy arises from
the previous psychological fallacy of confusing abstract thought
with concrete feeling.
Once again St. Thomas has anticipated the difficulty and an-
swered it. Discussing the question as to whether truth is con>
mensurate and identical with being, he thus formulates his ob-
jection : " That which extends to being and non-being is not
identical and commensurate with being. But truth extends to being
and non-being: for both statements are equally true, that what
is is, and what is not is not. Therefore truth and being are not
identical and commensurate."
To this difficulty he replies as follows : " Non-being has not
got that in itself whereby it may be recognized. Still it may be
recognized in so far as the intellect renders it knowable. Hence
truth is only based on non-being in so far as non-being is a being
of the reason, that is, in so far as it is apprehended by the reason."*
Then if we turn to the Contra Gentiles, we shall find passages
which might have been expressly written to refute the philosophy
of change.
Hence appears the futility of arguments against creation drawn
from the nature of movement or change as that creation must
be in some subject, or that not-being must be transmitted
into being: for creation is not a change, but is the mere de-
pendence of created being on the principle by which it is set up,
and so comes under the category of relation: hence the sub-
ject of creation may very well be said to be the thing created.
Nevertheless creation is spoken of as a " change " according
to our mode of conceiving it, inasmuch as our understanding
takes one and the same thing to be now non-existent and after-
wards existing.f
*Summa, p. i., qu. XVI., a. 3., ad. 2m. The Latin is more apt than English
for manipulating the verb " to be." Id quod extendit ad ens et non ens, non
convertitur cum ente : sed verum se extendit ad ens et non ens: nam vernm est,
quod est esse, et quod non est non esse ; ergo verum et ens non convertuntur.
^Contra Gentiles, Lib. II., Cap. XVIII. See also Cap. XIX.
648 BERGSON AND THE DIVINE FECUNDITY [Aug.,
So St. Thomas was quite alive to the tendency of the human
mind to regard "nothing" as "something." But, on the other
hand, he was not such a muddled thinker as to be beguiled into
confusing the " nought " of thought with the " nought " of reality.
The " nought " of thought must of necessity be retained to desig-
nate the non-being from which, through the activity of the all-
active Creator, creation began to be.
Thus the last fallacy of the philosophy of change is seen to
spring from the same source as the first and all intervening ones,
namely, the denial of the validity of human intelligence. If we
maim the natural instrument of thought, then we must not be sur-
prised if we see things upside down or inside out. If we destroy
intelligence, the faculty of truth, then we must not expect to
enjoy that repose and satisfaction which comes only of the con-
templation of truth.
But, on the other hand, if we resolutely determine that we will
not prostitute our reason, but that we will keep it enthroned as
the ruler of life, then we may hope to make the best of life.
Through intuitive reason we can see the first principles of
knowledge, that things are what they normally appear to be, that
every effect must have a cause, and that no effect is greater than
its cause.
Through discursive reason we can argue back to the uncaused
Cause of all causes, to the pure Actuality whence comes all par-
ticipated actuality, to that infinitely fecund Life which is the Life
of life. Does M. Bergson tell us that by turning away from
intelligence and turning to animal instinct, we shall get into touch
with life? Pooh! Does he tell us that by retracing the steps
which reason has laboriously cut out for us, we shall attain to the
highest life? Pooh! Pooh! It might take us to the life of time.
But that is not what we happen to want. We want the life of
eternity, the perfect possession, wholly and all at once, of life
without end. And that happens to consist of intellectual knowl-
edge, the knowledge of the only true God, and of Jesus Christ
Whom He has sent.
THE SPIRITUAL NOTE IN THE RENAISSANCE.
BY EVELYN MARCH PHILLIPPS.
N endeavor has been made in a previous essay* on
this subject to show how far the efforts of the men
of the Renaissance to make the revival a purely in-
tellectual one, on the lines of the masters of classic
thought, were discounted by a great influence, un-
perceived by their preoccupied minds, and it was proposed to trace,
through the medium of the art of those days, some signs by which
this influence was manifested.
To say that art is the expression of life, is to say that it is
the outcome and the interpreter of its age. It is so intensely the
product of its environment that the two cannot be separated. Prob-
ably the study of art on these lines, conduces to a more profound
and accurate knowledge of its time than comes to us in any other
way. The historian reconstructing the story, is biased by his own
perception and temperament, and the facts read in one way by
one man will produce an entirely different impression on another.
But the surviving works of any age are their own witness. They
are the impress which past generations have made of themselves,
and from every period in which art was able to find adequate
expression, we are able to extract the character and bias of the
aims and thoughts of those among whom its creations arose.
We are not to stop short with classic buildings and statues.
The same interpretative medium poured itself into the later civiliza-
tion. Following down the current of human affairs, it takes charge
of the Renaissance, investigating alike the intellectual bias which
looked back to Athens, and the spiritual bias which looked back
to Bethlehem, and to find both elements uneasily mingled all through
Renaissance life and art.
At some future time it may be possible to analyze how fully
the atmosphere of officialdom and arrested individuality are illus-
trated by the later Byzantine school. That was the stagnant pool
across which the earliest breath of the coming revival blew like
the freshening breeze of early dawn. It is with the advent of
Giotto that it first gathers strength and volume. We have sug-
*See THE CATHOLIC WORLD, June, 1913.
650 THE SPIRITUAL NOTE IN THE RENAISSANCE [Aug.,
gested St. Francis as the origin of that re-awakened spiritual
tendency which was so opposed to the triumphant march of reason.
It was inevitable that Giotto's transcendent talent should have been
called upon to chronicle the events in the Saint's life; events
which were so picturesque and so endeared to his followers as
to supply artists through succeeding centuries with an inexhaustible
wealth of subject matter, and yet the connection of Giotto and
St. Francis is almost ironic, for all the frescoes from the hand
of the great Florentine tell of a nature radically opposed to that
of the Saint, and peculiarly devoid of the characteristics for which
St. Francis stood.
If ever a man spoke the mind of his age and surroundings,
Giotto spoke that of Florence and the Renaissance. The first
typical Florentine painter, he vigorously shows the determination
to see things as they really are. In his hands art puts on the in-
tellectual guise, and adopts those methods of the reason which
already existed in full force in the life around him. The art of
the fourteenth century was less an awakening than a ply or bias
given it in the direction of the mind, and Giotto was before all else
a man of intellect. In the painter and the subject which the
inclination of society naturally allotted to him, we have the whole
dual movement expressed. The contrast between St. Francis and
the first great illustrator of his career is one which has largely
escaped notice, owing mainly to Ruskin treating of Giotto as
if he were imbued with the same spirit, whereas we can see without
the slightest doubt that he is a man of totally opposite nature.
Rational, shrewd, practical, absorbent in creating great works,
more engrossed in unravelling art problems than in expressing the
spiritual idea, he reveals himself as a man of artistic aptitude, of
intense vitality, but not as one of spiritual vision. He is grandly
dramatic, but he is not pathetic or moving. He has little intuition
of that temper of joyous romance, rather than of mortification and
renunciation, in which St. Francis cast off all that was not essential
to the union of the soul with its Savior.
The frescoes at Assisi witness unmistakably to this intellectual
and rational spirit. Where " St. Francis renounces his heritage,"
Giotto grasps the unusual opportunity afforded for painting the
nude, and makes a powerful muscular study for his Saint, giving
a sense of solid form, but conveying little idea of one who has
fought and agonized in a great spiritual conflict. The figures
standing round, the father, the ecclesiastics, are finely composed and
learnedly built, but they are cold and unconcerned in feeling, in
1913.] THE SPIRITUAL NOTE IN THE RENAISSANCE 651
spite of their appropriate gestures. In Santa Croce, the painter
in a splendid scene before the Soldan, presents heroic types in
action, but his natural, his evident leaning is towards the monu-
mental and dramatic; he is not possessed of the frenzy of faith.
In the famous scene of the Saint's deathbed, the indifferent, pillar-
like group of churchmen on either hand is introduced to set-off
the undulating figures of the mourners, and excessive feeling is
subordinated to the fascination of scientific composition. So,
throughout, the stately rhythm and movement in the " Procession
of the Virgin" (at Padua), the grandeur and simplicity of Mary
as she leads the Blessed in the " Last Judgment," are Greek in their
monumental quality, in the treatment of form and drapery. They
show every gift save that poetic fervor, that atmosphere of spirit-
ual evocation, upon which Florence, well on its way to the full
Renaissance, no longer set great store.
And here, let us realize, was the key to the whole situation.
If all other chronicles failed us, we could guess from Giotto's
frescoes what were the demands society was making upon the
men commissioned to express its ideals. The world in which
Giotto lived, the patrons for whom he worked, no longer asked for
religious thought. Not that the Renaissance lacked men still nom-
inally in touch with traditional faith, and even men definitely re-
ligious, who like Cosimo de' Medici, in the next generation, were
eager to reconcile Christian with Pagan teaching, but that the
dominant tendency of society was more and more concerned to
exalt the claims of man to mental freedom, and to break the fetters
which had been imposed by mediaeval authority.
So those coming after Giotto, the scientific discoverers, the
students of anatomy and perspective and other forms of research,
broke away still more definitely from the dominion of religious
feeling. The forms were retained but the spirit vanished. The
Realists, the disciples of form (the quality of pure intellect), still
carved and painted Madonnas and Crucifixions and Holy Conversa-
tions, but the subject was hardly more than a peg upon which to
hang the result of anatomical studies, illustration of values, the
fascinating formulae of perspective. To those who saw the studies of
Pollajuolo, the experiments of Castagno and Domenico Veneziano,
of Piero de' Franceschi, and Paolo Uccello, the intellectual aspect
of art for a time must have seemed the logical outcome of the
scientific culture in which their whole world was steeped. It was
the voice and outward manifestation of what they were all thinking
of, and caring for. Not in Florence shall we find an early art
652 THE SPIRITUAL NOTE IN THE RENAISSANCE [Aug.,
showing a high spiritual level, and testifying to the existence of that
note of thought which in the end stole away the power of the
Renaissance completely to assimilate classic tradition.
Among the towns which stood apart from Florence, Siena is
the most conspicuous. She lived an isolated life, antagonistic in
its main lines to that of the city on the Arno. The Sienese were
the most emotional, the most fiercely mystical of all the people
of Italy, nurturing saints as freely as Florence produced humanists
and men of science. In Siena the Renaissance took the form of a
religious rather than a scientific movement, and instead of re-
ligion being subordinated to science, it remained the dominant
interest. In that bare, mountainous country, among a fervent
and idealistic race, the painters witness to the spirit that ran
through it. With Duccio, they cling to the mysticism of the East,
as handed down by the Byzantine School, and the sacred subjects
are treated in a way that shows by what sympathies all their en-
vironment was permeated ; a method deficient on the scientific side,
but which keeps the old spiritual perfume.
A hundred years after Giotto, a Sienese painter, Stefano Sas-
setta, produced a series of frescoes dealing with the same incidents
in the life of the beloved Saint that Giotto had painted on the walls
of Assisi, and any of my readers who will take the trouble to
compare photographs of the work of the two men, perhaps most
readily accessible in Mr. Berenson's book, A Painter of the Fran-
ciscan Legend, will realize the strength of my argument. Sassetta
is specially instanced, not because he was anything like so great
a painter as Giotto, but because, like him, he was the head of a
school, and bequeathed his characteristics to the whole group of
Sienese painters, by whom he was followed. In Sassetta we find
just those qualities which Giotto lacked. He is sadly wanting in
knowledge and science as Florence understood them, but his St.
Francis, whether renouncing his worldly career, or giving his cloak
to the beggar, or espousing Holy Poverty, really commends to us
a type adequate and touching. Sassetta's aim is to realize the
personality of that seraphic, romantic soul who exalted poverty
and self-sacrifice into an idyllic incarnation, which had power to in-
spire rapture rather than resignation.
Mr. Berenson points out that in the " Marriage of St. Francis "
in the Lower Church at Assisi, which if not painted by Giotto, was
produced under his immediate influence, the artist has been en-
grossed in planning his figures into a fine decorative composition,
in which the Saint, " a sleek young monk," has been created with
1913-] THE SPIRITUAL NOTE IN THE RENAISSANCE 653
no poignant emotion ; but Sassetta, in his version of the same inci-
dent, gives the whole chivalrous reading of the Fioretti. And
this is what the poet-painter, full still of the ardent love and rev-
erence that lingers in his city, has made of it:
" In the foreground of a spacious plain, three maidens stand
side by side The one in brown is barefooted and most plainly
clad, but it is on her hand that the ardent Saint, with an eager
bend of his body, bestows his ring. Then swiftly they take flight,
and as they disappear over the celestially pure horizon of Monte
Aninata, they display symbols which reveal them as Poverty, Chas-
tity, and Obedience. And when last we see them floating away
in the pure ether, Lady Poverty looks back lovingly at Francis."
Spiritual imagination is at work here, and has taught the
painter how to give that unearthly character to his undulating,
unsubstantial figures, which is lacking in Giotto's massive and
superbly realized types, and in the statuesque forms of Orcagna,
while his faces have an aroma of unearthly ecstasy, telling of a keen
realization of the life from within. Nature speaks to Sassetta
as it perhaps never did to the Florentines. To him it means " the
great cloister which his Lady Poverty brought down to her faithful
knight;" his soaring skies uplift and dematerialize ; the far pure
horizons impress with the same emotion that he imparts to his
keen and thrilling countenances, and assure us that the Sienese
were not so much interested in scientific problems as inspired by
that spiritual passion which always writes so legibly.
Nor did Siena stand alone, though perhaps she stood the
highest. To all who love to wander in Italy, the name of Umbria
brings a vision of wide spaces, of mountains stretching away,
fold over fold, beneath the play of light and shadow. It is a
country which in its spirituality and its joyousness seems a fit setting
for that most human and loveable of Saints, who has left such
deep traces upon its life. The broad and simple charm of Umbrian
art is allied to a deep strain of mysticism. Among those quiet
hills, war and rapine did their worst; the history of every little
hill city is one of carnage and revenge; the annals of every
famous house are deep-dyed in blood; yet through it all the people
were adoring the memory of St. Francis, and listening fervently
to the preaching of St. Bernardino.
The sentiment of the Umbrian School is less ecstastic and
melancholy than that of the Sienese, but it is as far removed from
the obvious science of the Florentines. It is cheerful and practical,
654 THE SPIRITUAL NOTE IN THE RENAISSANCE [Aug.,
as St. Francis was cheerful and practical, but the bias of a man's
character is shown in what delights him, and as St. Francis de-
rived light and joy not through the intellectual, but the spiritual
faculty, so the inhabitants of these hill cities asked their painters
for qualities of the heart rather than of the mind, for the grati-
fication of that spiritual delight which the Renaissance tried to
kill, but was not able.
Of all the qualities that set Umbria sharply apart from those
who had but assimilated what reason could give, there is none
that indirectly so contributes as that marvelous, that essentially
spiritual quality of space which the painters seem to have drank in
from the high skies and boundless expanses which surrounded them.
We all feel the effect of wide, extended country, or of spacious,
airy buildings : they arouse an emotion which carries us out of
ourselves; they transport and exalt as those things do which build
up the higher life, and those who excel in presenting them, if not
necessarily mystical or spiritual themselves, are sufficiently pene-
trated by their environment to yield themselves to its inspiration.
Other evidences there are in Umbria that the old fervent
mediaeval faith was still strong. Among them is banner-painting.
The Gonfaloniere or banner was so important to these cities, that
the municipalities made special grants to confraternities for its
acquisition. These banners had no connection with triumphal
processions, but were suppliant banners, borne against the awful
visitations of the plague. They were followed by hosts of terror-
stricken survivors, and were inspired by and received with that
glowing faith in spiritual protection which the humanists
looked on as an amiable weakness. Many of these little cities
still cherish the banner painted for their cathedral. The subject
is the Madonna of Mercy or the Patron Saint, with the distressed
suppliants cowering under their outspread mantle, and the tender-
ness of such pictures, with the centuries of association which cling
to them, makes an impression not easily effaced.
But what effect could this simple and almost primitive ad-
herence to the old faith have upon that alertness, that eager and
acute quality of Florentine life, the give and take of wit and
thought, the play of mind which pervaded the city on the Arno ? In-
tellectualism seemed to be enthroned there beyond all attack. The
men who aspired to get all out of reason that reason could give,
were whole-heartedly convinced that the old authorities were out-
worn, and of no account, and yet all the time, with literature and
1913-] THE SPIRITUAL NOTE IN THE RENAISSANCE 655
art apparently emancipating themselves, with all that was most
distinguished in mind devoted to the same end, another element
was entering life.
The problem set before the Renaissance could not be solved
by the mere study of classic perfection. The resources of the in-
tellect were all inadequate. The Greeks had no experience of the
whole inner life, the mental maladies created by Christianity. But
the Florentine learning could not keep such elements at bay. Dona-
tello is one of the first Florentine artists who perceives that the
very soul of man, with all its load of new struggles and uncer-
tainties, must shine through the marble. The influence of pagan-
ism gives way to the sense of the pathetic in mankind, and the
real, with all its imperfections, its human feeling and interest,
becomes the object of the artist.
With Lorenzo de' Medici as the leader of thought, the fortress
of the intellect seems at its most impregnable, yet in its very
stronghold we are aware of a soul unsatisfied. Lorenzo's mysti-
cism stands for the need of a dimly-apprehended good. As art
drew nearer to perfection it grew more dead. We may believe
that the spiritual note which is so strong in Botticelli was not
more characteristic of what the painter yearned to give, than
of what the people asked. Limited that demand may have been,
but it looks out on our generation through the eyes of his wistful
Madonnas and fervid saints. Who can look at those wonderful
countenances in the background of Leonardo's great unfinished
monochrome, "the Adoration of the Magi" (Uffizi), without
knowing as surely as we can know anything that in the Florence
of his day he had encountered a strain of thought which perhaps
not everyone could hear ? " The broken chords that marred the
tune," that told of beings into whom " the soil with all its maladies
had been poured," yearning, asking, dying for the Light.
And at last, in Michelangelo, the man who in his art carried
science to its height, who from the first was conversant with all
the knowledge and learning of his day, the two strains are recon-
ciled. Compare the Theseus of the Parthenon with the Adam of
the Sistine Chapel. They are as far apart in spirit as they are
alike in attitude and young, vigorous form. The one, throned
upon Olympian heights, serene, impassible, incarnates the calm
assurance of Greek life. The other, trembling, doubting, appre-
hensive, appeals to the omniscient Being Who kindles the electric
spark of destiny. Well might Goethe say, " Phidias created serene
656 THE SPIRITUAL NOTE IN THE RENAISSANCE [Aug.,
gods; Michelanglo, suffering heroes." It is the note that runs
through all his work; the mournful and piercing recognition of
human weakness; the realization of the spirit that has mastered
earthly ambition and sapped its power. The forms from his
brush and chisel strengthen and uplift, preach a sterner purity,
and sweep aside the mean and trivial, yet he suggests the help-
lessness and dependence of the soul in a way that would have been
entirely alien to the classic mind.
Though from time to time, every faculty of the human mind
has been exercised against Christianity, it has never ceased its
struggle for expression. " The genius of Christianity," says Mr.
Osborn Taylor,* " has achieved full mastery over the arts of
painting and sculpture. It has penetrated and transformed them,
and can utter the sentiments and emotions of the Christian souL
Its types differ from the ancient Greek and Roman types, because
they are the types of times and races into which Christianity has
poured the many things which it embodies."
To-day we have long been under the dominion of that ply of
thought which modern Europe took from Florence, and the in-
tensity with which the mind is set on intellectual culture is working
out to the inevitable result. It is the intellectual rather than the
emotional qualities which are most manifest in modern achievement,
and both the merits and defects of its works, their cleverness and
coldness, are intellectual merits and defects. Modern fiction bears
witness to the same inspiration; it shows careful analysis, pains-
taking vivisection of characters and motives, but not the spon-
taneous vitality which arises from intuitive perception, and as
surely as in any age, art being the expression of life, we expect to
find, and we do succeed in finding, the same one-sided development.
Men think and reason, but do they feel deeply?
But the end is not yet. We cannot permanently reassume
those limitations. We cannot confine " thoughts that wander
through eternity," or stem the tide of feeling by the most persistent
devotion to the light of reason. Nor need we regret it. Classical
life was a stranger to spiritual gloom and imperfection, but it was
also a stranger to peace and rapture of a quality known only to
later ages, and signs are not wanting that the human mind is even
now feeling after that mystic consciousness, that philosophy of
feeling, that spiritual note which alone assures a solution of life
in which it may rest and be satisfied.
% *The Classic Heritage of the Middle Ages.
WITH THE MULLAKONS OF SIBERIA.
BY RICHARDSON L. WRIGHT.
N America you may argue over religion, but you rarely
come to blows: in Siberia you may come to blows
over religion, but you rarely argue. It was a blow,
not an argument, that first aroused my interest in
the Mullakons.
I was voyaging on an Amur River post boat through the
hitherlands of the Tsar's realm bound for Blagowestchensk, the
commercial capital of Amurland which, among Far East itinerate
salesmen, is known as " The New York of Siberia." Four days
had our little side-wheel steamer been chugging along, always at
a snail's pace, for the river was low and the shoals shifting and
treacherous. Four days had sounded in our ears the palatal wail
of the Chinese " leadsman " who stood in the prow of the boat, a
striped pole in his hand, calling out the depth : " Sem ! Sem-
polyvini ! " Seven ! Seven and a half ! Four days had I eaten
the Russian meals and drunk the Russian tea, and disputed on
Justinian with the Russian advocate, and discussed Russian music
with his petite Russian wife. Four days had I marvelled at the
scenery and wealth of plant-life on the banks, and listened to the
palaver of the couple of hundred immigrants we carried in our
stuffy hold. One morning I chanced to lean over the rear deck
rail, to watch the crew stack the birch logs we had taken aboard
that morning at a riverside fuel reserve.
They were a motley, this crew : Three Chinese, very dirty and
very happy; a sailor in full, though dilapidated, uniform; and a
handful of Russians in red shirts, baggy blue trousers and shape-
less, knee boots. Above these men, on a coiled hawser, stood
the second mate. Save for a shabby chevroned jacket, he wore
no uniform to indicate his rank. Now and again he censured em-
phatically the laziness of his crew. Several times he swore at
them. The swearing had no effect. Finally, in sheer desperation,
he threatened the nearest sailor. A sudden impact of fists against
flesh, an oath, a scuffle, and a lout in a red shirt went sprawling
across the deck. When he had recovered his feet, he stood at a
judicious distance from the officer, glared a moment, and then
VOL. XCVIL 42
658 WITH THE MULLAKONS OF SIBERIA [Aug.,
growled out, " Mullakon ! " A flush passed over the mate's face ;
but there were no more words, and the matter ended there. As
" Mullakon " was an insult foreign to my Russian vocabulary,
I went in search of my friend, the " advocat."
Disillusionment came soon. " Mullakon," he explained, was
not an imprecation, it was merely a reproach, much as an angry
Catholic, once on a day, might have called his enemy " Protestant."
Well, the Mullakons are more than Protestants; they boast the
additional distinctive virtue of being Puritans, in fact, very rig-
orous Puritans. They are Protestants in that they protest against
what they believe to be the errors of dogma and ritual in the
Greek Orthodox Church; Puritans in that their lives are distinctly
ascetic, a contradistinction to the lives of the orthodox peasantry
of Siberia.
The Raskolinks (dissenters), whose numbers, by the way,
for the entire empire, total much over twenty-five millions, fall into
two classes : the Popovshchina, those who permit the ministrations
of priests; and the Bezpopovshchina, those who, repudiating sacer-
dotalism, chose " elders " to conduct their services. To the latter
belong the Mullakons.
And of the score-old heretical sects in Russia, the Mullakons
are by far the most sane and most commendable. They do not
run to the unbalanced vagaries of their closely-related sect, the
Doukoboors, or the hideous self-immolation of the Philippovsti, or
the loathsome promiscuousness of the Byeguni, or the avowed
silence of the Molchalyniki, or the unspeakable practices of the
Khlistovstchina. Their name, meaning " the milk drinkers,"
marks one of their points of departure from the orthodox faith;
they drink milk on fast days when such indulgence is forbidden.
Both among themselves and to their orthodox countrymen they
are known as " Mullakons," though in the latter instance, as was
shown by the ill-tempered deckhand on the Blagowestchensk boat,
the name is usually held a reproach.
It is peculiar to note, in this respect, how illogical are the
religious prejudices of the orthodox Russian. He will start a
pogrom and commit atrocities on the Jews, but it never will
occur to him to voice even the slightest protest against his Moham-
medan neighbor, the Tartar, or to pillage the local mosque. He will
scorn and insult his sectarian fellow-townsman, but the Mongols
and Booriats who worship the spirits of mountains and old trees and
tumbling rivers, he will take to his arms. The reason is not in-
1913-] WITH THE MULLAKONS OF SIBERIA 659
explicable. The rise of heretical sects in Russia has invariably
been due not so much to religious revolt as to some political or
economic reaction. Now the Moslem and the Booriat are good
traders, trusting, veracious, and above board in their business trans-
actions. What more could a Russian ask? Why should he turn
an honest barter of fox pelts into a wrangle on apologetics? But
the Jew and the sectarian, so many Russians assert, are covertly
shrewd, perfidious, and rascally. Why shouldn't the orthodox cast
their heresy in their teeth?
As in the case of many other Russian sects, political reaction
first brought the Mullakons to notice. In 1765 a band of them, who
had refused to bear arms and pay their taxes, was arrested.
Thenceforward they have been an appreciable factor in Russian
life, though they refuse no longer to serve their term in the army
or contribute to the revenues. Obscurity veils their origin. A
possible precursor, Dmitri Tveratinov, was persecuted in 1714 for
preaching Calvinism, but the supposition is that the beginnings of
the sect are to be traced directly to the teachings of Luther, the
seeds of the Reformation having been brought to Russia by those
foreigners who, during the reign of Peter the Great, poured in
hosts across the western frontier. From time to time, groups
of Mullakons have been persecuted and banished. The Church has
made efforts to bring them into the fold, always without success.
Only recently the Holy Synod authorized a missionary campaign
to the Mullakons of Siberia. Now and again the world hears of
them a chance item of news that strays over the newspaper
cables; Tolstoy acknowledges his indebtedness to their teachings;
but perhaps the oddest reference, and one which serves also as an
excellent epitome, was that made by a Quaker writer in 1818,
who spoke of the Mullakons as " the Pennsylvanians of Moscovy."
To-day the Caucasus, tracts of Little Russia and Amurland to the
westward of Lake Baikal in Siberia are their habitat. In Amur-
land where settle many immigrants from Little Russia, they con-
stitute half the population.
Wishing to learn more about these sectants, I had a chat with
the president of the Blagowestchensk branch of the Russo- Asiatic
bank, and through his kindly offices was able to collect first-hand
data, and eventually to visit a Mullakon village.
The valley of the Amur, which is one of Siberia's most fertile
spots, is owned by the Mullakons. They have a monopoly of
the river traffic; a syndicate of their richest men not only owning
660 WITH THE MULLAKONS OF SIBERIA [Aug.,
nearly every vessel plying between Blagowestchensk, Khabarovsk,
Nikolaievsk, Kharbin, and Stretensk, but exacting a tariff the rates
of which are exorbitant. Denunciation of them brings a prompt
reprisal in the refusal to freight cargoes, or the alternative still
higher rates. The month preceding the freezing of the Amur and
Soungari Rivers, when demand for transportation is greatest, sees
even more high-handed ruling. After the ice is set, their camel
caravans pad the three thousand miles up and down the frozen
Amur. Besides thus controlling the traffic of Amurland's one
avenue of communication, the Mullakons own and operate the
nine immense flour mills of Blagowestchensk, the iron foundry,
and any number of shops.
But if their business acumen is unsurpassed, so is their honesty.
The books of the bank show that they invariably carry heavy
balances. Among shopkeepers, the Mullakon is proverbially a good
payer, though he will haggle and bargain until the wearied shopman
is only too glad to let his articles go at the lowest figure.
To appreciate the Mullakon village, and to understand the
raison d'etre of their lives, one must first live in a hamlet inhabited
entirely by orthodox peasants. During the summer and winter of
1911, I had been vagabondaging about Siberia: traveling third
and fourth-class on the Trans-Siberian with the immigrants, sledg-
ing or riding in a tarantass, or on horseback across the steppes
of the Yeniseisk and Tomsk Governments, and staying in the big
cities, Tcheliabinsk, Omsk, Tomsk, and Irkutsk. Most of the time,
however, was passed in hamlets, some of them on the post road
where I stayed only over night, or so long as it took to change
horses; others off the general route of communication where my
stay extended for many days. In all, I lived in a score or more
of these villages, and was in a favored position to see the Siberian
peasant as he really is, and to comprehend the genus loci of his
hamlet.
The Siberian village is invariably ugly and squalid. There are
no avenues of shade trees or oaks and cedars in the hut yard. The
peasant sedms to have a marked antipathy for any tree that
dares to spring up within the confines of the town. So soon
as it has reached an appreciable size, he will hack it down. Evi-
dencing the utter absence of communal pride, the streets and lanes
are in an appalling condition, quagmires in wet weather and deserts
of dust in dry. Three spots alone in the village stand out for
their orderly condition the tractir, or dram-shop, the church, and
1913.] WITH THE MULLAKONS OF SIBERIA 661
the schoolhouse, with its adjoining yard full of swings and parallel
bars and wooden horses. While the interior of the houses show
a degree of cleanliness, one could hardly call them spotless. In
summer when only dust drifts in from the road, they are bearable;
but in winter one has to exercise exceptional fortitude to tolerate
even one night indoors, for the outside temperature being fatal
to the live stock, the farmer will often herd his whole barnful into
the one eating, sleeping, washing, living, and dying room of the
hut, where they are stalled with the family, the pigs, the ducks, and
the cat.
The dress of the women and children is slipshod save on Sun-
days and holy days, when the show of feminine finery varicolored
shawls, and pink and pale-blue bombazine skirts is wonderful to
behold.
But the worst note of the village life is the laziness and
drunkenness of the men. The male population passes three out
of the seven days of the week in hanging about a vodka tractir.
In each week comes at least one saint's day, sometimes two or
three. Half the day previous is spent in preparations: the day
following, in recuperations. Meantime the fields lie untended.
Until a few years ago a fine and imprisonment were imposed on
him who labored on a festival day. Then, recognizing the evil
consequences of the statute, the Government revoked it, with the
result that a man is now free to work as much as he pleases. In
the villages in which I lived, and they were not the exception, the
men seem to take little or no advantage of the new ruling and
the tractirs thrived.
Vodka is a universal medium. By the birth bed, at the grave-
side, and in all events between those mortal extremes, one must
stop to take his share of this raw white whiskey. Call on a farmer
to transact a little business, and he will produce the vodka bottle,
and refuse to discuss roubles and kopecks until he has become light-
headed from drink.
It must not be concluded from this unpleasant picture that the
orthodox Siberian peasant is wholly without his fine traits. In
fact, I found him a fraternal, passingly honest soul despite his
shortcomings. He takes a bath once a week, and a very good bath
it is, too; he has a fondness for house fairies and wood nymphs;
he works hard when he does work. In sorrow and defeat, he is
philosophical. Fortified by a firm faith, he accepts the material
worries of this life with humility. He obeys his priest, and dis-
662 WITH THE MULLAKONS OF SIBERIA [Aug.,
charges his church duties with commendable regularity. He loves
his children, and his wife loves to have them; and even in his most
Rabelaisian cups he is a God-fearing bon vivant.
When you pass to a Mullakon village, the contrast is marked,
indeed. The ride from Blagowestchensk to Gelzeoocha was mostly
uphill, but our shaggy Siberian ponies picked out the trail, and
carried us without a single mishap over craggy hare tracks and
down deep ravines, until we struck the bed of a mountain brook
that led us, at late afternoon, to the outskirts of the village.
Throughout the journey my guide was puzzled to know why I
should come to a Mullakon settlement, when I intended neither to
bargain nor barter. " There is nothing to see," he commented
with a grunt. " You might have stayed back in Blagowestchensk,
where there is a park and a cafe chantant." But as he failed to
grasp my explanations, he lapsed into a stubborn silence.
There was just one street to Gelzeoocha, one tree-lined street,
and a narrow lane that crept up the hillside to the graveyard
beyond. The houses were stockaded as in all Siberian villages.
The absence of the church, whose blue dome and gilded three-
armed cross usually broods over the roofs of the houses, gave the
village a note of individuality.
Hugh pariah dogs rushed out from the yards and snapped at
us. Women's faces peered through the windows. Here and there
a child peeped cautiously out the crack of a door.
On the steps of the third house sat an ancient of days in
a blue blouse, who rose as we reined in beside him. Yes, there
was a zemstkaia kvatura, he replied to my question, but it was
occupied at the time.
According to the Russian rule of hospitality, each village
which is off the line of travel, and consequently has no posthouse
for the accommodation of wayfarers, must reserve one room where
the passerby can put in for the night. Now I had had several
unpleasant experiences with zemstkaia kvatura, for they are pre-
sided over usually by women whose traits are like the traits of
our average American boarding-house mistress in fact, the genus
landlady is universal so the prospect of the Gelzeoocha kvatura
being full, did not displease me. Finally, it was arranged that
I should sleep in the old man's hut, while my guide, whose fatigue
by this time had overcome his prejudice for Mullakon hospitality,
was only too glad for six feet of the floor of the hut opposite,
and ,a square meal.
1913.] WITH THE MULLAKONS OF SIBERIA 663
Vladimir Dianlovski's izbas (hut) consisted of one large room,
whose windows looked down the road, and a smaller compartment
that served as kitchen. There was a row of books on a wall
shelf the first row of books I had seen in a Siberian hut and
on the window sills stood jars with flowering plants. As I stepped
across the threshold, I instinctively doffed my hat, and looked
around for the ikon corner to return thanks to the Russian St.
Christopher, who had led me safely on the road. There was no
ikon corner!
" Why do you look for the ikon? " the old man asked, noticing
my surprise. " You are not a Russian." Then I explained to him
that, while I was an American from New York City, I had com-
plied with Russian customs so long as I was in Siberia.
" And will you do as we Mullakons while you are here ? " he
asked.
" If you permit me," I replied.
The ice was broken, and from that moment on the old man
addressed me as " little brother," and I called him Batchuska, little
father.
While he was making a place for my bags on the settle that was
to serve as my bed, his wife and young daughter came in and
were introduced to the American. A moment later we were joined
by a son, a strapping youth of eighteen. Other members of the
family, a married son and daughter who lived down the road
farther, were called in. Supper that night was a family reunion.
Apart from the absence of the ikon corner and the presence of
the row of books and the flowers on the window sills, there was little
to mark Vladimir's izbas from that of any in an orthodox village.
It was immaculate, and evidenced the exercise of a certain amount
of taste in the arrangement of the chairs, the few family photo-
graphs for which all Siberians and Russians alike have a marked
weakness and the rough deal table on which was set the samovar
and a bowl-full of blue iris that carpet the Amurland fields in late
spring.
After the manner of peasant folk, the world over, they wanted
to know all about me who I was; why I had come to Siberia;
was I married; how many children did I have; was New York
really so large a place ; aren't New Yorkers afraid the tall buildings
will topple over on them a million and one questions that I
answered to the ultimate satisfaction of the family. Then, when
they had grown silent, I took my turn at questions, and, lest
664 WITH THE MULLAKONS OF SIBERIA [Aug.,
Vladimir would be wary of discussing his religion at the start,
I commented on their books.
"What do you read?" I asked.
" Tolstoy, Gogol, and the Bible," Vladimir replied. " We also
have one book of Dostoievski's, one of Turgeniev, and when we go
into Blagowestchensk we get a paper." One of the sons, who had
been to Poland with the army, confided to me that he had read
Sherlock Holmes. I was not surprised, for the " marvelous "
detective is a favorite with the Russians.
Gelzeoocha, they told me, had but thirty families, in all,
two hundred and fifty souls, but they boasted a Narodnija Utchilist-
cha, a primary school where the three R's were taught. This was,
indeed, quite the exception for a town of that size. The school-
master had taken a course at the University of Tomsk, they added,
and when any of the boys or girls wished to go further in their
education, he would tutor them into the gymnasium. Each of
Vladimir's sons had attended the gymnasium at Blagowestchensk,
residing while they were there with friends. From conversation
they did not prove above the average of the Siberian youth for
intellect, and I suspected that had their father not insisted on
continuing their studies, they would never have risen above medi-
ocrity. However, their gymnasium course had not affected their
heads, for each one had returned to Gelzeoocha and taken up
farming. They seemed contented. The next day I found at least
one result of this teaching they had learned intensive farming,
and at that time were buying some American farming utensils
on the installment plan.
"You have relatives in Blagowestchensk?" I asked, recalling
how these lads had gone to live in the city during their course.
" No, they lived with friends," responded Vladimir, and then
he went on to explain that the Mullakons were all held together by
the bond of brotherhood; that they united in business, giving each
other opportunities that they did not offer to the orthodox; and
that one of their first principles was never to allow one of their
sect to be destitute. Here I found a parallel between the Mullakons
and the Quakers. In fact, the strict regard for education is also
one of the marks of the Mullakon. It was later acknowledged to me
by a Russian official that of all the schools in Siberia, those in the
Mullakon villages are the best. And Professor Tovey, Dean of
the Tomsk Technology Institute, told me that the brightest students
at both the university and the institute come from Amurland, where
1913-] WITH THE MULLAKONS OF SIBERIA 665
they receive the foundation of their education in Mullakon
schools.
The conversation drifted to the army. I asked if the boys
had served their terms. Both had.
" We used not to enter the army," Vladimir said with a sigh,
" but we do now, though we do not believe in it. War is bad.
We love peace. But/' he shrugged his shoulders, " if my boys
did not go into the army, the officers would have come along and
dragged them out and put me in jail. Ivan has served in Warsaw."
I glanced over at Ivan for he it was who had read Sherlock
Holmes, and I felt that we had a bond between us.
" Usually people who refuse to serve in the army refuse to
take an oath," I remarked. " The Quakers in America "
" We are just like them," Vladimir finished my observation.
" We do not take oaths. Why should we ? Doesn't the Scripture
say, ' Swear not at all ?' '
I was glad that he had introduced the Scriptures, for I was
wishing to approach the subject of the Mullakon religious beliefs
before the old man grew tired. With that end in view I asked him
several questions.
The Mullakons and Doukoboors, he said, were once one body,
but the latter fell into the corrupt habit of interpreting the Scrip-
tures mystically, so the Mullakons, who favored the literal interpre-
tation, broke away. That was many years since, and the gulf be-
tween the two has grown so wide that they have few remaining
parallels. The Doukoboors are an erratic, ungovernable folk, while
the Mullakons live the lives of Quakers, simple, peaceful,
frugal.
As he was explaining these points, the little daughter, Katrina,
came over and sat beside me on the settle. She was a pretty child,
with flaxen hair and rosy cheeks and a quiet disposition. All the
family, for that matter, became peculiarly silent, I noticed, just so
soon as Vladimir began to discuss religious subjects. He was an
"elder," it appears, and though he had no sacerdotal position, he
was held in regard for his views.
"Do you have sacraments?" I began to question him on de-
tails, " Marriage, Holy Communion, Confession, and such ? "
Vladimir shook his head. " We have nothing that the others
have save God. We have no churches. A church is not builded
of beams and boards, but of ribs." He patted his heart. " We
have no ikons or holy pictures; we keep no festivals and have no
666 WITH THE MULLAKONS OF SIBERIA [Aug.,
ritual. We have no pontiff, nor teacher of the faith but Christ.
We are all priests. Our only guide is the Bible."
" You believe in the Blessed Trinity God the Father, God the
Son, and God the Holy Ghost?"
Again he shook his shaggy head.
" But what of marriage ? What do you do when "
" I was going to explain that," he broke in. " When the
two young people agree to live together, they come and get their
parents' blessing. Dmitri here and Tatiana both did that," he said
indicating the two married children.
" That is a Quaker belief," I remarked.
" No, Mullakon ! " he exclaimed, and then seeing that he had
misunderstood me, began to laugh.
" When we confess," he continued, " we do not confess to a
priest, but to God and to our fellowmen whom we have injured."
" But do you have a Holy Communion ? "
" We break bread and share it at a service."
His last answer I felt was curt, and to mask my embarrass-
ment, I pulled out my cigarette case and proceeded to smoke.
Scarcely had I begun than Vladimir straightened up his position,
and I heard his wife whisper an instruction to Katrina. Promptly
the little girl left my side, entered the kitchen, and appeared with
a mop cloth, with which she wiped the floor about my feet.
" So sorry," I apologized. " I didn't know that I had tracked
in dirt."
"Not dirt, but the devil," spoke up the wife.
I glanced over at her where she sat scowling at me, and would
have spoken had not the old man interrupted.
" He does not understand," I heard him whisper to her. Then
he turned to me. " You see, little brother, we Mullakons do not
smoke nor drink vodka. They defile men. They are works of
the devil. But you did not understand."
And thus I happened on another Mullakon custom; invariably
when you smoke in a Mullakon house, the wife or the daughter
will wash the floor where your feet have rested. It drives away
the devil, they say.
But Vladimir did not permit my -faux pas to interrupt the con-
versation. He told me that the members of his sect do not eat
pork nor scaleless fish, nor any of the foods forbidden in the Old
Testament, adding that many of the sectants in Russia were joining
the Hebrews.
1913.] WITH THE MULLAKONS OF SIBERIA 667
" Because their beliefs are alike or because they are against
the government?" I suggested. A smile crept over his face, but
he did not reply. I am led to suspect that it was the latter. His
statement, I since have found, is only too true. Judaism is being
embraced by hundreds of the Russian sectants. The reason is
purely political, however, for they claim that the taxes are far too
heavy, and they allege immorality and corruption among the priests
of the Greek Church.
We had been talking for over an hour. As I glanced about at
the faces of the family, I noticed drowsiness on them. Batchuska
yawned once, and I consulted my watch.
" What is the time? " he asked.
" Five minutes past eight," I replied.
" So late ! " He jumped to his feet, and crossing the room,
took down from the shelves a Bible. Katrina, without instruction
from her mother, brought a candle and set it on the table. Then
for five minutes the old man read us from the First Epistle of St.
John. Some prayers followed, after which the family dispersed
the married children leaving for their houses down the road, and
the wife getting me blankets to soften the settle. Within five
minutes Batchuska with the young son by his side and the wife
with little Katrina by hers, were all fast asleep on the floor. A
foot above them in the place of honor, I lay wondering at the
queer things I had seen and heard that night.
Eight o'clock ! It was the first time I had gone to bed at eight
o'clock for ages. In the cities, Russian midnight comes at four
A. M. You breakfast at ten, lunch at four, and dine at eleven or
twelve. In the ordinary village, we rarely went to bed until ten,
and rose never earlier than eight. But not so the Mullakons.
They go to bed at eight; and five o'clock sees the entire household
up and about the day's work.
As I lay awake on my settle I tried to formulate a definition
of the Mullakons. It finally resolved itself into this: they live
the lives of Quakers and hold the belief of Unitarians. Here they
have fought, as did the early settlers of America, with rugged nature
until the fields have given their increase. Here they have builded
their schools, and trained their children to read, mark, and learn.
A simple, stern, loving folk, they are setting up a bulwark of the
Russian kingdom that will be more impregnable than the iron-stone
defences of Vladivostok, a Pennsylvania in the New Moscovy.
MRS. MEYNELL AND HER POETRY.*
BY KATHARINE TYNAN.
OT so long ago Sir W. Robertson Nicoll, LL.D., in
the British Weekly, the leading organ of British Non-
conformity, asked how it was that the best religious
poetry of the day was being produced by Catholics,
especially by Catholic women. He instanced Mrs.
Meynell, Miss Louise Imogen Guiney, and a person who shall be
nameless, who had contributed to the Pall Mall Gazette a poem,
Planting Bulbs, which was the occasion of his remarks. Sir W. Rob-
ertson Nicoll is a true lover of poetry, and brings to it a genuine
touchstone for deciding what is or is not poetry: and how many
critics are led away by " fake " in poetry nowadays ! After all
it takes a poet to criticize poetry : and that critics prove to be blind
guides in our day is only in keeping with their traditions. You
have but to turn up a publisher's advertisement of the seventies
and eighties to see the fine raptures of the critics over Lewis Morris
and Sir Edwin Arnold in those days. The critic who leads the
public into a ditch, is no worse than his brother of yesterday
and his brother of the day before.
One has but to read the British Weekly to discover that the
editor has a real flair for poetry, as well as a capacity for spirit-
ual things which lifts him out of the troubled atmosphere of the
controversialist.
He asked " Why? " in that pronouncement of his, and no one
answered him. Of the three women poets he mentioned, one was
English, one was Irish, one was Irish-American.
I think I could give reasons why Mrs. Meynell's poetry
should flourish in the soil of English Catholicism, which at its
best belongs to the highest order of spiritual beauty. Catholicity
in England, apart from the Irish immigrants, takes its color from
the days of its persecution. It is a cloistered thing.
Mrs. Meynell is an English Catholic, but not a Catholic born :
and there were other influences as well in her spiritual making.
^Collected Poems. By Alice Meynell. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons.
$1.50 net. London: Burns & Gates.
1913-] MRS. MEYNELL AND HER POETRY 669
She grew up in Italy; and she was received into the Church by
an Irish priest.
She looks the English Catholic lady to the life. I have met
some such daughters of the old English Catholic aristocracy who
for centuries were hidden in their beautiful homes when they
were not persecuted. Many of those English Catholic houses pos-
sess a relic of some martyr of the blood a hand chopped off
at Tyburn Tree that had consecrated the Bread and Wine, a rOsary
beads, a lock of hair, a handkerchief steeped in the blood of
martyrdom. In those houses you feel the influence of
the relic before you cross the threshold. Something spirit-
ual, austere, mysterious, comes out to meet you. There will
be a chapel, very often a priest's hiding hole; or one or two
or three, as there are in an ancient house I know which possesses
Catherine of Aragon's traveling trunk and a quilt she made
with her ladies, as well as Mary Stuart's rosary beads and a lock
of her hair. Voices are low and sweet in those houses; the feet
tread softly along the carpeted corridor, and a lamp stands at the far
end which leads to the chapel. A loud voice or laugh, a noisy
tread, violence of any kind, were out of place in this air of a con-
ventual peace.
The young women and girls are apt to be flower-like, lily-
like, something of the young angel about them. It is an exotic
beauty, a beauty of the spirit, which may make an otherwise plain
face beautiful. They have a height, a slenderness, a gliding grace.
There is something lovely about them, a beauty other-worldly, not
of this.
I have said they have a height. Well perhaps some-
times they only simulate height. Mrs. Meynell is scarcely
tall, but she had been my friend for many happy years before I
discovered we were of a height. Sargent sketched her tall, and
he is a painter of the mind rather than of the body. Tall and
slender, with trailing garments, a thrilling, beautifully modulated
voice, eyes like somewhat mournful stars, a curious likeness to
Dante, with feminine softness and beauty added to the stern and
lonely grandeur that is Mrs. Meynell as nearly as I can get to it.
!< Windows of the soul " was never more fittingly applied to eyes
than to hers. Once in a London suburban garden, while she
stood and watched the flight of a bird across the sky, I saw her
soul. The body disguises the soul in too many of us. In Mrs.
Meynell the body expresses the soul, as Francis Thompson
670 MRS. MEYNELL AND HER POETRY [Aug.,
has said it in some of the noblest praises ever lavished upon a
woman.
How should I gauge what beauty is her dole,
Who cannot see her countenance for her soul;
As birds see not the casement for the sky?
And as 'tis check they prove its presence by,
I know not of her body till I find
My flight debarred the Heaven of her mind.
Hers is the face whence all should copied be,
Did God make replicas of such as she.
More than any other poet I have ever seen, does Mrs. Meynell
look her poetry. She not only looks a Muse, even to the eyes of
the dull and common, she looks her own Muse.
She has carried her claustral air and her face,
Careful for a whole world of sin and pain,
through the ways of the world, and she has never been of the world,
never been lightly touched by it. As one meets her at a London
rout, she might have walked out of an Italian cloister.
It was somewhere towards the close of the seventies that
Father Matthew Russell, of holy and happy memory, received a
letter from Lady Georgiana Fullerton, in which prayers were asked
for two young Catholic girls in danger to their souls from the
world and its praises. The two girls were Elizabeth Thompson
(Lady Butler), whose picture, " The Roll Call," hung in the Royal
Academy Exhibition of 1877, nad already met with a unique success,
and Alice Thompson who had published Preludes, a slender young
volume which the elect of the world had been quick to recognize
as a thing with the authentic air: and the latter success, conceiv-
ably, might be a greater danger than the hurly-burly of a huge
popular success. The two young sisters were lionized. When
they attended a London party, crowds gathered before the house
on the rumor of the presence within of the painter of " The Roll
Call," and the young celebrity had to be smuggled out by the
back door.
I have seen a picture of the young poet of those days,
A young probationer
And candidate of Heaven,
as Dryden says of Mrs. Killigrew.
Long afterwards Alice Meynell, smiling over the memory of
Lady Georgiana Fullerton's concern she was a dowdy little wo-
1913.] MRS. MEYNELL AND HER POETRY 671
man, a daughter of the proud Granvilles, who went ungloved on her
Master's business up and down London in those years said : " We
were too level-headed for that danger."
Their upbringing had indeed been one to prepare them and
arm them against the temptations of the market-place. Their
parents were people of great distinction of mind and character.
The father was one of those men who from their seclusion influence
the mind and thought of their time. Possessing enough money 1 to
spend a leisured life, he chose to spend it in Italy. He did
indeed make one or two attempts to enter Parliament: but one
may well believe that he was pushed on from behind for his
friends were of the great and the greatly-placed and that he
returned to his hermitage well content with his defeats. His work
in life was to educate his daughters. " A Remembrance " in Mrs.
Meynell's Rhythm of Life keeps him for us, and is doubly felt
because so much of what she has written of her father might,
with slight modifications, have been written of herself.
When the memories of two or three persons now upon earth
shall be rolled up and sealed with their records within them,
there will be no remembrance left open, except this, of a man
whose silence seems better worth interpreting than the speech
of many another. Of himself he has left no vestiges. It was
a common reproach against him that he never acknowledged the
obligation to any kind of restlessness. The kingdom of heaven
suffereth violence, but as he did none there was nothing for it
but that the kingdom of heaven should yield to his leisure.
The delicate, the abstinent, the reticent graces were his in
the heroic degree. Where shall I find a pen fastidious enough
to define and limit and enforce so many significant negatives?
Words seem to offend by too much assertion, and to check the
suggestions of his reserve. That reserve was life-long. Lov-
ing literature, he never lifted a pen except to write a letter.
He was not inarticulate, he was only silent. He had an
exquisite style from which to refrain. The things he ab-
stained from were all exquisite. They were brought from afar
to undergo his judgment, if haply he might have selected them.
Things ignoble never approached near enough for his refusal;
they had not with him so much as that negative connection.
If I had to equip an author, I should ask no better than to arm
him and invest him with precisely the riches that were re-
nounced by the man whose intellect, by integrity, had become
a presence-chamber.
672 MRS. MEYNELL AND HER POETRY [Aug.,
In this noble " Remembrance " she goes on to tell what manner
of training she had at this father's hands, and that makes the
essay a notable bit of literary deviation. We recognize her fount,
her origin.
Memnonian lips
Smitten with singing from thy mother's East,
says Francis Thompson again.
One can imagine that she brought the writing of Preludes
to the bar of her father's opinion. I do not know if they were
written in his lifetime, but they were shaped, perfected, winnowed,
rejected, perhaps, by a most fastidious taste. Never was there
a young book with so little of immaturity. Preludes, with very
few alterations or rejections, take their place fittingly with the
forty-one other poems which make up the sheaf of Mrs. Mey-
nell's years of marriage, of motherhood, of friendship, of love,
of spring and harvest.
Mrs. Meynell's mother I remember. She died some time in
the first decade of the twentieth century. I was under one roof
with her in 1889, when I spent a beautiful summer in England,
much of it with the dear and gracious Meynells, or country-house
visiting in their company. Mrs. Thompson .was an accomplished
and exquisite musician. Those sisters, like their mother, are vo-
taries of all the arts. Music strays through Mrs. Meynell's
poetry, unseen but heard. It was the morning of the day of a
musical party. Mrs. Thompson is at the piano. The cool dim
rooms are full of the feeling of June in the London streets. June
yet green, not yet dusty. There is a distant low roll of traffic:
not yet have motors made the earth a place of screaming. The
blinds are drawn against the sunshine without. The room is aus-
tere very little furniture but many flowers in all manner of re-
ceptacles. Mrs. Thompson is improvising at the piano with an
enraptured face. " Come here, Alice, come ! " she calls quickly
as a foot passes the door, on the uncarpeted stone staircase. " Lis-
ten to the songs of the birds. I have found out where they learnt
them. They were taught by an angel. Their songs come straight
from Heaven."
There is a curious feeling of Italy about my memory of that
big London house on a June morning twenty-four years ago.
Mrs. Thompson had many adorers in her day. Her husband's
friends set her on some such pinnacle with a difference as her
1913.] MRS. MEYNELL AND HER POETRY 673
daughter was to be set by Francis Thompson, by Coventry Patmore,
by George Meredith, by a whole crowd of lesser people who could
appreciate beauty when they found it. The correspondence be-
tween Dickens and Mrs. Thompson has been published. He was
romantically attracted by the lady who was to marry one of his
dearest friends. Quaintly enough one of his characters most un-
expectedly bears her name Weller.
Soon after her success with Preludes, Mrs. Meynell married a
young literary man, Wilfred Meynell, who had fallen in love with
the author of My Heart Shall Be Thy Garden. They started out
very happily on a career of letters. They lived in those early
days close to the Pro-Cathedral at Kensington, where, every morn-
ing, they heard Mass before beginning the labors of the day. Mr.
Meynell was at that time a recent convert.
I first visited the Meynells in 1884. It was my first visit
to London, and it was almost my first touch with literature. I
remember the drawing-room at 21 Phillimore Place, with its aus-
tere simple furnishing. Mrs. Meynell was delicate, and lay much
of her time on a sofa. I stayed in London that year for some three
months or so, with occasional excursions into the country, and
from the time of that visit our friendship was an established thing.
We wrote frequently to each other, and I constantly sent flowers
from fields, which are in my memory now like Elysian Fields.
I have all the letters of those days.
But it is too much of myself, and I must get on to Mrs. Mey-
nell's Collected Poems, which have just been issued by Charles
Scribner's Sons of New York, and Burns and Gates of London.
Until the year 1893 Preludes was Mrs. Meynell's sole achievement.
But in that year she had begun to write her exquisite prose for
the Pall Mall Gazette, under the distinguished editorship of Mr.
Henry Cust. There were then two editors in London whose praise
one was greedy to catch Henry Cust and W. E. Henley. Mrs.
Meynell pleased both, and her beautiful prose became a feature of
the Friday issue of the Pall Mall. Most of her beautiful new
things appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette. There was
She walks the lady of my delight
A shepherdess of sheep,
and The Lady Poverty and November Blue and A Dead Harvest.
I was at the making of At Night, and I have the first rough
draft of it. She used to make her poems and prose, having come
VOL. xcvii. 43
674 MRS. MEYNELL AND HER POETRY [Aug.,
in from shopping or afternoon visiting, comfortlessly, I thought,
with her outdoor things still on, seated on a hard chair, the children
playing about her feet perhaps, two or three intimate visitors
talking about the fire, occasionally including her in the conversation.
She would come back as from a long distance : but she would come
back, and be interested, before losing herself again.
No wonder her poetry had always preached a doctrine of
abnegation. And yet austerity has always been so native to her,
that abnegation can hardly have been a positive thing. There
was always something of the Lady Poverty of St. Francis about
her. It came natural to her to do without so that other people
might have. She did without leisure so that other people might
have share of her leisure. She suffered fools gladly, to use the
Scriptural phrase. I think her intellect might have been arrogant
because of fastidiousness, if grace had not made her humble. The
bores she endured! The dullards whose work she made pass by
her emendations! The open hand of hospitality! The real spirit
of austerity which made her turn away from the comfortable and
soft things women far more robust than she seek after! There
were moments when one of those who loved her ached to give
her the luxuries she would have put away if they had been offered
to her. Withal happily one need not write in a past tense
she is very human, simple, and tolerant; much of the child about
her; she has a ringing laughter which it is lovely to capture; she
has a wide tolerance, of everything except what she herself would
call the cheap and the trivial. There is always the child in
her eyes something of the lost child so that I cannot look at her
without recalling Wordsworth's
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized.
Of all things from which she has refrained, her own poetry is
the most beautiful. Preludes, the precious early volume, bulks large
in the Collected Poems. Not very much of it has been rejected.
I would have rejected nothing. Always I miss the few exclu-
sions. There is A Study, the long obliquely narrative poem, which,
since I first knew Preludes, I have known so well that it seems to
have become part of me. I find its thoughts appearing in my own
poems and stories many a time.
Qthers of the poems have long been in my memory. I think I
1913.] MRS. MEYNELL AND HER POETRY 675
know a great portion of Preludes by -heart. Long ago a girl used
to walk the Irish country roads chanting to herself:
The leaves are many under my feet
And drift one way,
or
As the inhastening tide doth roll
till the amazed face of some little cattle-herd sitting in the green
grass of the roadside made her recognize that her neighbors thought
her mad.
So dear were those poems that the slight emendations of
later years cause me positive grief.
I have said that no poet I know looks his poetry as Mrs.
Meynell does. I would go further, and say that no poet comes
face to face with us in his poetry as she does. The bitter sweet-
ness, the proud humility, " ah ! heavenly Incognite," are in such
a few pregnant lines as
"You never attained to Him." "If to attain
Be to abide: then that may be."
Endless the way followed with how much pain.
" The Way was He."
And again this is her very self.
THE FUGITIVE.
"Nous avons chasse ce Jesus-Christ." French Publicist.
Yes, from the ingrate heart, the street
Of garrulous tongue, the warm retreat
Within the village and the town;
Not from the lands where ripen brown
A thousand thousand hills of wheat;
Not from the long Burgundian line,
The Southward, sunward range of vine.
Hunted, He never will escape
The flesh, the blood, the sheaf, the grape,
That feed His man the bread, the wine.
I am sure that this most worthy of poets has never written
a line or phrase of poetry without a white heat of thought, that
676 MRS. MEYNELL AND HER POETRY [Aug.,
sought for the finest expression in the briefest manner possible.
She has no prettinesses. White heat is perhaps the right word
for an intensity of feeling which takes a shape as fine as a Greek
marble. She extracts from words, that cunning instrument by
which man reveals his heart, their uttermost significance: she in-
vests them with a new meaning, a new dignity. Her thoughts
have a flight, a direct poignancy, which at times takes the breath
away as in this.
VENI CREATOR.
So humble things Thou hast borne for us, O God,
Left'st Thou a path of lowliness untrod?
Yes, one, till now; another Olive-Garden.
For we endure the tender pain of pardon,
One with another we forbear. Give heed,
Look at the mournful world Thou hast decreed.
The time has come. At last we hapless men
Know all our haplessness all through. Come, then,
Endure undreamed humility : Lord of Heaven,
Come to our ignorant hearts and be forgiven.
And here again is the bitter cry of a heart intolerably wrung.
PARENTAGE.
" When Augustus Casar legislated against the unmarried citizens
of Rome, he declared them to be, in some sort, slayers of the people."
Ah no, not these!
These, who were childless, are not they who gave
So many dead unto the journeying wave,
The helpless nurselings of the cradling seas;
Not they who doomed by infallible decrees
Unnumbered man to the innumerable grave.
But those who slay
Are fathers. Theirs are armies. Death is theirs ;
The death of innocences and despairs;
The dying of the golden and the grey.
The sentence, when these speak it, has no Nay.
And she who slays is she who bears, who bears.
" I, child of process," she says once of herself. Well, through
processes and progressions, she, who began by a perfect young
book, has gone on to her greatest heights. What heights may be
1913.] MRS. MEYNELL AND HER POETRY 677
beyond we know not : but one feels that the flowering time of her
genius has given place to so noble a fruitage in those later poems,
that she need write no more to be on the heights.
She hath a glory from that sun
Who falls not from Olympus hill.
The volume of her Collected Poems contains altogether forty-
one poems later than Preludes. She has not written two poems
in a year since Preludes gave her an assured place. " The things
she abstained from" well, who knows what she abstained from?
Or how much her poems have gained by abstention, by self-denial ?
She is on the very heights with these later poems. Beautiful as
was Preludes, and the poems which came one by one after Pre-
ludes, there has been nothing to reach the heights of To the Body,
The Two Poets, and the latest of her poems. With her it has been
always that the best was yet to be. She has kept the finest vintage
for the last.
TO THE BODY.
Thou inmost, ultimate
Council of judgment, palace of decrees,
Where the high senses hold their spiritual state,
Sued by earth's embassies,
And sign, approve, accept, conceive, create;
Create thy senses close
With the world's pleas. The random odors reach
Their sweetness in the place of thy repose,
Upon thy tongue the peach,
And in thy nostrils breathes the breathing rose.
To thee, secluded one,
The dark vibrations of the sightless skies,
The lovely inexplicit colors run;
The light gfopes for those eyes.
O thou august ! thou dost command the sun.
Music, all dumb, hath trod
Into thine ear her one effectual way;
And fire and cold approach to gain thy nod,
Where thou call'st up the day,
Where thou awaitest the appeal of God.
678 MRS. MEYNELL AND HER POETRY [Aug.,
Someone said to me not long since that poetry was for the
young a vain saying. The poetry that departs with youth has
the seed of mortality in it before it is born. Through processes of
waiting, of silences, of lofty abstentions, this Muse has reached its
heights. She is worthy of the noble praises she has received, and
the noble friendships that have sought her as an equal. Listen to
the lofty music in this of the wind in the beech tree:
THE TWO POETS.
Whose is the speech
That moves the voices of this lonely beech?
Out of the long west did this wild wind come
O strong and silent ! And the tree was dumb,
Ready and dumb, until
The dumb gale struck it on the darkened hill.
Two memories,
Two powers, two promises, two silences
Closed in this cry, closed in these thousand leaves
Articulate. This sudden hour retrieves
The purpose of the past,
Separate, apart embraced, embraced at last.
" Whose is the word ?
Is it I that spake ? Is it thou ? Is it I that heard ? "
" Thine earth was solitary, yet I found thee ! "
" Thy sky was pathless, but I caught, I bound thee,
Thou visitant divine."
" O thou my Voice, the word was thine." " Was thine."
These are not her finest fruit, though they are of her finest
fruit. I would quote The Launch, The Modern Mother, Tzvo
Boyhoods, The Crucifixion, The Unexpected Peril, Christ in the
Universe, and any one of them would prove her of the heights.
I would say of her, borrowing a fancy from herself, that from her
rejections, her abstentions, from what she has spared to Say, many
poets might have found a noble equipment.
Boohs.
THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF JOHN PAUL JONES. By Mrs.
Reginald de Koven. 2 Vols. New York : Charles Scribner's
Sons. $5.00 per set.
These two handsome volumes, enriched by well-executed il-
lustrations, contain most of the important letters of John Paul
Jones gathered by Mrs. de Koven from many sources, chiefly,
however, from the Jones papers and the Papers of the Conti-
nental Congress in the Library of Congress. She has carried
them into a narrative life of Jones, but they are the valuable
part of the work. She has, however, given much independent
investigation to her subject, with good results on certain phases
of Jones' career. The work is interesting, and it must stand
as the best of the several lives of Jones. This is not to say,
however, that it is a good biography, for the author's limitations
of ability for her task have not permitted her to write a good
biography. She is not a naval expert; she is not a ripe historical
scholar; she does not weigh evidence judiciously; she does not
manifest keen insight into character. One finishes the book without
a clear idea of Jones the naval officer, or of Jones the man, or of
the naval history of the Revolution, except as one may have derived
such knowledge from Jones' letters.
Was Jones a great naval commander ? Mrs. de Koven is
positive that he was; but one desperate battle and hard won
victory, that of the Bon Homme Richard over the Serapis, is
not enough to convince the layman that he proved his preeminence.
His other victories were not important; or, if they were, Mrs.
de Koven has not made them appear so. It is her own fault if
the reader does not share her opinion of Jones. As for the con-
troversies with the Continental Congress, with jealous captains,
unappreciative French authorities, and false Russian officials, Jones'
letters are too full of them; neither does the narrative spare the
reader. We should like to see them brushed aside, and the man's
work and worth estimated independently of them.
Who was Jones? Ostensibly, the son of John Paul, a Scotch
gardener. But Thomas Chase, a Massachusetts sailor and pri-
vateersman, afterwards seaman on the Alliance under Jones, dic-
tated certain statements to his grandson, and the narrative was
privately printed. In it he leads us to suppose that in 1773
Jones was a pirate, and that then and for some years afterwards,
68o NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
he believed himself to be the illegitimate son of the Earl of Sel-
kirk. These things may be true, but Chase's narrative sounds
apocryphal. We have the " sharp, rakish, clipper built craft,
painted entirely black, with no name whatever marked upon her,"
and other earmarks of sea fiction. Mrs. de Koven finds that Chase
was on the Alliance during the fight between the Bon Homme
Richard and the Serapis. Then how does she account for the nar-
rative leading the reader to suppose that he was on the Richard
during the battle? She says of Chase's narrative of the Ranger's
cruise, that he was not an eyewitness, and relied on tradition and
hearsay reports, and it has no value. Again, an old man eighty
years old declared he had, when a youth, heard another old man
say Jones once stated that he had been a pirate. This is not much
better than Chase's evidence. We are still in doubt whether Jones
was a pirate or not.
Now for the question of Jones' birth. That he believed him-
self to be the son of the Earl of Selkirk is an assertion of Thomas
Chase's, and, apparently, of the other old man. That seems to
have been a general belief at one time, although Mrs. de Koven
has not made it clear. (Was it in school histories, as one of the
letters she quotes says it was?) She knows, however, that the
older Lord Selkirk died before Jones was born, and that the
younger was not living in the part of Scotland where he was born
for seven years before and after the event. So she has him the
illegitimate son of George Paul, John Paul's brother. She weaves
a suspicion on this point, but it is absolutely unsupported by any-
thing worthy of being called evidence. It rests entirely upon the
statement of a descendant of the Pauls, that his mother said
Jones was not the son of the Earl of Selkirk, but was a Paul;
and as she did not say he was the son of John Paul, and as
Jones' earliest recollection (according to Chase again) was of
Saint Mary's Isle, where George Paul lived, and not of Arbigland,
where John Paul lived; therefore, he was George Paul's son!
These two points are sufficient to show Mrs. de Koven's
limitations. She is honest, however, and does not conceal facts,
even if they do not support her conclusions.
NEWMAN'S APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA. The two Versions of
1864 an d 1865 > preceded by Newman's and Kingsley's Pamph-
lets. With an Introduction by Wilfrid Ward. New York:
Oxford University Press. 50 cents net.
The fact that within a few months two distinct editions have
1913-] NEW BOOKS 681
appeared of the Apologia in its old form, as distinguished from The
History of My Religious Opinions, one in Everyman's Library,
and the present one printed at the Oxford University Press, is an
indication there exists a widespread interest in that epoch-making
work. Of the two, the new Oxford edition is by far the more
satisfactory. The Everyman edition is a practically complete re-
print of the edition published in 1864, with an introduction by
Dr. Charles Sarolea. The Oxford edition is a reprint of both
the 1864 and 1865 edition of the Apologia. This is done, by
clearly indicating, by certain signs, even the smallest differences
between the two. Before this reprint of the Apologia are placed
the pamphlets of Dr. Newman, which contains the correspondence
with Mr. Kingsley, and Mr. Kingsley's pamphlet, What, Then,
Does Dr. Newman Mean? If there were an index, it might be
looked upon as the definitive edition of -the Apologia.
Mr. Wilfrid Ward, the author of the Life of Cardinal New-
man, than whom no one could be more competent, has contributed
an introduction. In it he gives some interesting details of the
relations between Dr. Newman and Dr. W. G. Ward. There
is also a translation of two appendices which Dr. Newman wrote
for the French edition of the Apologia, which, so far as we are
aware, have never appeared in English before. These appendices
give an account of the Constitution and History of the Church
of England and of the University of Oxford. Mr. Ward points
out how inapplicable to the present day is the statement made fifty
years ago by Dr. Newman, that the clergy of the Church of Eng-
land, and especially the high dignitaries, are always distinguished
for their High Toryism. What, he asks, would Dr. Newman
have thought of their recent alliance with democracy, which went
so far as giving help to pass the Parliament Bill.
THE CULT OF MARY. By Rev. Thomas J. Gerrard. New
York: Benziger Brothers. 40 cents net.
This is a very excellent statement of the Catholic teaching re-
garding the Cult of Mary in the Catholic Church. Father Ger-
rard shows in his opening chapter that the Catholic devotion to the
Virgin Mary is by no means derived from the pagan worship of the
Hindu Maya or Devaki, the Asiatic Astarte or Cybele, or the
Egyptian Isis. The other chapters deal with the Divine Maternity,
the Immaculate Conception, the Perpetual Virginity, and the As-
sumption.
682 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
Father Martindale prefaces the volume with the following
verses that are worth quoting :
Magna Mater.
Lost on the lonely hills the lamb bleats for its mother,
Startled with frustrate hope by reed and shadow and rock ;
And wailing across the world humanity's desolate flock
Cries if perchance it be She upon many an alien other,
Maya and Ishtar and Isis
These die with the centuries' death.
Thou Israel, Son
Of the Eternal One,
Cease from thy wanderings: lo, Mary of Nazareth!
JOHN WESLEY'S LAST LOVE. By J. A. Leger. New York :
E. P. Button & Co. $1.25 net.
The manuscript containing the following account of Wesley's
love for Grace Murray (pp. 1-105) was received at the British
Museum, May 9, 1829. It has been published twice before, in
1848 and 1862. The work is not in John Wesley's own handwrit-
ing, apart from a few corrections and the rough sketch of the
first nineteen stanzas of the poem at the end. Still it is authen-
ticated by the correspondence of almost every detail in it, either
with Wesley's Extracts from His Journal, or other printed docu-
ments. No student of Methodism has ever questioned it.
The author, Mr. Leger, Professor of English at the Naval
College at Brest, writes us that he was attracted towards the study
of Methodism " by the apparent paradox of that certainly far-
reaching revival in the very country from which Voltaire and others
were at that very time bringing back to France ideas that issued in
so widely different results."
The author assures us in his preface that none but " narrow-
minded hero worshippers, blind lovers of the unreally superhuman,
would discover in the pages of Wesley's diary anything likely
to lower his moral stature or to stain his memory." Perhaps not.
But if one can read this book and the comments upon the incidents
here recorded from various Protestant sources, and dare compare
Wesley with the least of the saints of the Catholic Church, he is
beyond all argument.
That John Wesley was in love with Grace Murray is evident
from his extravagant praise of her. He declares it " no hyperbole,
but plain demonstrable fact, that Grace has done more good than
NEW BOOKS 683
any other woman in all ye English Annals, or, I might say, in
all ye History of the Church from ye death of Our Lord to this
day "(p. 73).
To a disinterested outsider, these very pages prove her to be
a very ordinary uneducated servant, vain, fickle, selfish, deceit-
ful and hysterical. Uncertain for a long time whether to marry
John Wesley or John Bennett, she kept both of them dangling on
the hooks, until finally Charles Wesley convinced her that she ought
not to marry his brother. While helping Wesley in his missionary
work, we find her continually falling in fainting fits, " roaring aloud
for disquietness of soul," declaring her willingness to go to hell
for the glory of God, almost constantly in hot water with her
neighbors, and going through her Methodistic duties at the very
time she was skeptical about the Divinity of Christ.
Wesley married in the end the widow Vazeille a most un-
fortunate match. She was a regular Xantippe; jealous, covetous,
mean, and possessed of an ugly temper. She read his private
letters and gave them to the public press ; in her anger she accused
him of living in adultery for twenty years; she separated from
him more than once. John Hampson, the preacher, relates the
following: "Once when I was in the north of Ireland, I went
into a room, and found Mrs. Wesley foaming with fury. Her hus-
band was on the floor, where she had been trailing him by the hair
of his head ; and she herself was still holding in her hand venerable
locks, which she had plucked out by the roots (Tyerman, Life and
Times of Rev. John Wesley. Vol. ii., p. 201).
Perhaps the most interesting chapter in Mr. Leger's volume,
is Chaper V. on John Wesley's mind and character. He often
claimed to speak on trivial matters as the Herald of God, the
acme of fanatic dogmatism. His domineering spirit was unmis-
takable, for he seemed to make as much fuss over rules of his own
devising as he did about the precepts of the Gospel. He was
stubborn almost to the point of perversity. He was most auto-
cratic, never allowing his authority to be slighted or set at naught.
His father's bombastic claims to an imperious undivided sway as
a condition of all sound government, and his mother's well-regu-
lated family discipline, left a lasting trace on his mind. His
brother Charles tells of him : " He could never keep secrets since
he was born. It is a gift which God has not given him." He
certainly had a very inflammable heart, for his sweethearts were
many: Sarah Kirkham, the gifted and intellectual writer, Mary
Granville, the brilliant aristocratic charmer; Sophy Hopkey, the
68 4 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
bewitching, if rather disingenuous, jilt. He was naturally a woman
worshipper most susceptible to female attractions, yet always
honorable and delicate in his feeling and conduct. He was cer-
tainly fond of sensational spirituality. He laid incredible weight
upon all extraordinary occurrences, believing that strangeness
and their startling effects upon the recipients were proofs
of their divine origin. We find him intent upon omens and dreams,
as means of ascertaining and carrying out providential pur-
poses. While he occasionally acknowledged that some of his " rag-
ing " converts were simply epileptics or devil-possessed, under pres-
sure of opponents who challenged him to work wonders, he often
pointed to the extraordinary manifestations at his meetings as
miracles.
One thing is certainly evident, that he never had the slightest
intention of founding a Church, he simply wished to form a con-
fraternity closely allied to the Establishment as a supplementary
means of spiritual help and edification.
Notwithstanding occasional flashes of philosophic insight, we
must not expect from his writings anything like constructive specu-
lative thought, far-reaching original ideas, or any sign of the critical
faculty. Sentiment in Wesley was more than a strain or graft;
it was the very essence of his soul.
Our author brings out his kindness to the poor; his honesty
of speech; his neatness in personal attire; his punctuality; his
tremendous will power over himself and others; his unflinching
courage ; and his evident sincerity. Whatever knowledge he may
have had of the general motives and principles of human nature,
he does not seem to have been happy penetrating into the views
and characters of individuals. This particularly appears in his
love affairs, in which he was undoubtedly unfortunate. Many
readers of this volume will agree that his attachment to Grace
Murray was rather injudicious. No one will deny that his marry-
ing Mary Vazeille was an absolute mistake. The marvelous trials
and experiences of the one, the " sorrowful spirit " of the other,
had won his heart, and blinded him to everything else.
HINDRANCES TO CONVERSION TO THE CATHOLIC
CHURCH AND THEIR REMOVAL. By Rev. Father Gra-
ham. St. Louis : B. Herder. 20 cents net.
Father Graham writes a direct simple treatise on the . in-
fluences which keep Protestants to-day outside the fold of the One
1913.] NEW BOOKS 685
True Church. He speaks, of course, chiefly of the Presbyterians
and Anglicans of Scotland, though his words apply to orthodox
Protestants the world over. The chief obstacles he enumerates
are : prejudice, which paints the Catholic Church " black, guilty,
detestable and dreadful;" utter ignorance of the very A B C of
Catholic doctrine and practice; a feeling of satisfaction and con-
tentment in their present position; the fear of losing worldly
position; the pride of intellect, which fights shy of authority, and
the pride of will, which considers confession the very depth of
degradation; the unreasoning attachment to the church of one's
baptism, etc., etc.
He devotes a special chapter to hindrances placed by Catholics,
telling them to never let opportunities slip of enlightening their
Protestant friends, and always to work and pray earnestly for their
conversion.
At the end of this practical little volume, he publishes a list
of useful books which will prove helpful to the average inquirer.
LIFE AND TIMES OF CALVIN. Translated from the Dutch of
L. Penning by the Rev. B. S. Berrington. London: Kegan,
Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. $3.50 net.
This volume is not worthy of an extended notice, for it is
the work of a mere rhetorician rather than of a scholar. It is full
of inaccurate statements, devoid of true historical perspective, and
its continual appeal to anti-Catholic prejudice reminds one of the
fourth-rate controversialists of the A. P. A. days of the early
nineties. In discussing the burning of Servetus, the author as-
serts without proof that the Bern Council demanded the stake,
contrary to Calvin's wish. He admits that the leaders of the
Protestantism of the day Beza, Haller, Sulzer, Musculus, Me-
lanchthon, etc. rejoiced at the tidings of Servetus' death, but
this intolerant spirit " was the Roman Catholic leaven in the Prot-
estant dough." Moreover, he adds : "It was a well-known fact
that Anabaptists, Libertines, and Rationalists, all preachers of
false doctrines like Servetus, found and obtained followers in the
Reformed circles. In this way, Protestants got a bad reputation;
they were said to be tainted, infected with revolutionary ideas,
and, without the slightest doubt, this opinion would have been con-
firmed if Servetus, who had been condemned by the Roman Catho-
lic court of justice in Vienna, had got off scot-free in Geneva."
Is it not rather amusing to find our author speaking on one
686 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
page of Calvin's erecting the " temple of liberty/' and on the
next telling of the laws of the Genevan Sparta, which punished
adultery with death, banished all who refused to swear to the new
confession of faith, forbade dancing, prescribed moderate eating
and drinking, etc., and then sent elders to every house once a year
to see that the laws were carried out?
CHRISTOLOGY; A DOGMATIC TREATISE ON THE INCAR-
NATION. By Rev. Joseph Pohle, D.D. Authorized English
Version by Arthur Preuss. St. Louis: B. Herder. $1.50.
Dr. Pohle, one time Professor at the Catholic University of
Washington, should need no introduction to American readers.
His German work on Dogmatic Theology, which is now being trans-
lated, thanks to Arthur Preuss, is one of the most successful theo-
logical manuals in Germany.
The present volume on the natures and personality of Christ
can be whole-heartedly commended. Against the modernistic works
that would rob Christ of His Divinity, this book will prove invalu-
able. It is solidly conservative, and contains the traditional armory
of the Church for the repulse of all attacks. Not merely does it
present sound arguments, but a wide and varied erudition. It is
well-documented, as the French would say.
The language used by the translator is highly technical, at
times even Latin in character. Technical language is sometimes
a necessity, and must be excused where a paraphrase would have to
be used for a time-saving single word. Perhaps, however, the
translator might find a better translation than " communication
of idioms," when " idiom " has in English a completely different
sense from the similar word in Latin. On the whole, the work
of both author and translator is characterized by extensive erudi-
tion, and Teutonic thoroughness.
CEASE FIRING. By Mary Johnston. Boston: Houghton Mif-
flin Co. $1.40 net.
It seems to be the fashion for women novelists to write war
stories of epic proportions. A British author has recently thrilled
us with tales of mighty race conflicts in South Africa and in the
Crimea. It remained for a daughter of the South to give us a
gripping recital of the four years' strife waged upon our own
continent. The drama set in motion to the accompanying beat of
1913-] NEW BOOKS 687
The Long Roll, Miss Mary Johnston has now brought to a finish
with the command Cease Firing.
It is some years since our own Miss Repplier said that " no
living novelist begins a story better than Miss Mary Johnston,"
but we doubt that any new star has since appeared that could
eclipse the brilliance of the opening chapters containing a descrip-
tion of the Mississippi fretted both with heavy rains and with war,
the disastrous floods, the meeting of the hero and heroine, their
marriage, and the siege of Vicksburg. From here the scene rapidly
changes to Virginia, indeed throughout the book the impression is
well conveyed of a harassed country obliged to defend simulta-
neously its widely-separated frontiers. The feminine pen has
spared us no detail of the horrors of war, depopulation, famine,
pestilence, carnage, field-hospitals, transporting of the wounded
after battle, burying the dead, prisons of the scarcely more for-
tunate survivors. Much is depicted, too, of the deprivations of
those who remained in their desolate homes ; many of the incidents
and stories drawn from " the records of men and women writing
of that through which they lived." We meet again several of the
gracious women who figured in the earlier story.
The descriptions are all made with the minuteness and preci-
sion of a Van Eyck if one might conceive of a Van Eyck stretched
upon a canvass of titanic dimensions; indeed the mass of detail is
such as to bewilder the reader and to obscure the perspective. One
instinctively echoes the sentiment of the harassed tourist who, after
faithfully making the circuit of the Uffizi, remarked that he con-
sidered " water colors more suitable to the home." To those ac-
customed to the impressionistic sketches of some of our popular
authors, these four hundred and fifty pages may seem " heavy," but
to all who appreciate painstaking collation of material, honest
craftsmanship and a classic style, Cease Firing will have a perma-
nent value equal to that of the author's earlier book, The Long Roll,
of which it is the sequel.
V. V.'S EYES. By Henry Sydnor Harrison. Boston : Houghton
Mifflin Co. $1.35 net.
Mr. Harrison has equalled if not surpassed Queed, his novel
of two years ago. Dr. V. Vivian, the slum doctor with the in-
sistent, soul-stirring eyes, manages after years of patient endeavor
to awaken the soul of the heroine, Carlisle, a worldly, thoughtless,
and utterly selfish girl.
688 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
The whole story hinges on a very slender incident a boat
upsetting which recurs on page after page with rather irritating
emphasis. "Why didn't she tell the truth at once," says the
exasperated reader, "and save poor Jack's reputation?" But
then we would not have had this long drawn-out tale; and Cally
at the end of the third chapter would have married Canning, the
millionaire prince of her dreams, without having ever understood
the principles of the incomparable V. V.
Mr. Harrison writes well, although frequently we notice an
overstrained artificiality of expression. One can see that he has
spared no effort to perfect every sentence. His character-draw-
ing is excellent. We all recognize at a glance V. V., the idealist;
Heth, the ignoramus money-getter ; Mrs. Heth, the social climber ;
Canning, the unmoral society man, and Cally the vapid worlding,
who is hardly worth redeeming. Altogether it is a novel that we
recommend you to take with you on your summer vacation.
CALLISTA. By Cardinal Newman. New York: P. J. Kenedy
& Sons. 50 cents.
The coming to hand of this cheap and satisfactory edition of
Newman's Callista serves as a reminder that the story has not
yet received its full meed of appreciation. That it has been far
less generally popular than the Fabiola of Cardinal Wiseman is due
probably to the fact that it appeals not to the emotional, but almost
altogether to the intellectual, in its readers. It is, of course, a
splendid picture of the third century, of the strife between pagans
and Christians, of the uprisings and the persecutions. It traces,
moreover, the transition of a cultured mind, a mind typical of the
age and the race, from pagan philosophy to Christian religion.
The Greek girl, Callista, maker of images, and seeker after truth,
becomes at last the lover of Christ, and for His sake the heroic
martyr.
Without dilating on the truth that Callista should be much more
familiar than it is to Catholics in general, we should like to par-
ticularize in respect to our Catholic high schools. The study of
this novel should be included in the English course of every
secondary school. It will assist the children in their ancient history,
by giving them definite ideas of the development of the Church in
the first centuries; it will familiarize them with Roman names and
terms, thus correlating and vitalizing their Latin lessons; and it
will introduce them to the perfect prose of Newman. Its study is
1913-] NEW BOOKS 689
already on the list of entrance requirements for several of our
Catholic colleges a step in the right direction. And it should
most certainly be taken up, even by the pupils who are not preparing
for college. The high school teachers who have read it with their
classes, have found that its interest and value well repay for its
difficulties.
THE MEANING OF GOD IN HUMAN EXPERIENCE. By Wil-
liam Ernest Hocking, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Philos-
ophy in Yale University. New Haven : Yale University Press.
$3.00 net.
The present work, we are of opinion, comes under the pro-
hibition of the Index of the Catholic Church, which forbids the
reading of non-Catholic works treating professedly of religion,
unless it be established that they contain nothing against Catholic
faith. Unfortunately in the chapter on the Prophetic Conscious-
ness, the author seems to speak of Christ as if He were merely
human, like Buddha and Mohammed.
For those dispensed from the Catholic laws of the Index,
the book contains much excellent thought. The author shows the
limitations of idealism, and of modern pragmatism, and proves the
necessity of the objective and of the absolute. While admitting
some truth in the doctrine that the will is the maker of truth,
that, for example, the will to believe a man good, inspires goodness,
the author wisely places restrictions on voluntarism. To a very
great extent the author's tendencies are for sanity, naturalness,
and common sense in philosophy, and pity it is that these have
not a wider influence in modern thought. As for religion, colored
by a limited and sound pragmatism, the author's position is the
idea of God is not lazy; it works.
Dr. Hocking is to be congratulated when he breaks with the
modern spirit, and says the true Church is to be found among in-
fallible Churches; also when he asserts that the modern theory
of knowledge is over-dogmatic in placing physical knowledge as
the only real kind of knowledge. The style of the work is, gener-
ally, crude and obscure, but this is not a fault of Dr. Hocking's
alone, but, to a large extent, of the philosophic spirit of the time.
One of the fruits of religion, of a belief in God, is said to be a
prophetic consciousness, a knowledge that our acts will be his-
toric, will triumph, will have a divinity about them. That seems
to be another, but obscurer, way of saying that we, severally, " can
VOL. xcvu. 44
690 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
make our lives sublime," and leave lasting footprints in time's shift-
ing sands. This inspiring thought is believed by the author to be
the root of happiness.
FOLK TALES OF EAST AND WEST. By John Harrington Cox.
Boston: Little, Brown & Co. $1.10 net.
When Professor Cox, of West Virginia University, published
his Chevalier of Old France, an adaptation of the Song of Roland,
intended for boys and girls of eleven or older, we noticed it very
gladly as the proper thing in juvenile literature. Such adapted
versions of real history and real literature are exactly what we
hope soon to find superseding the Nick the Boy Pirate and the
Dotty Dimple creations. Just as hearty praise may be given to
Professor Cox's latest volume, Folk Tales of East and W-est, which
he describes as " a collection of old tales, so old that they are new."
It includes a story from the Swedish, one from the Anglo-Saxon,
one from the Japanese, two from Chaucer, and even a " Judith and
Holofernes " from the Old Testament. In each of these Professor
Cox retains admirably the atmosphere and, as far as possible, the
vocabulary of the original writing. He avoids in this way the
tendency to " write down " to the child mind by confining himself
to everyday, one-syllable words, and he also throws over each
story a separate glamor, always the glamor of the unfamiliar, the
mysterious. The child's curiosity is thus spurred, his vocabulary
increased, and the content of his mind vaguely but certainly broad-
ened.
Our sole criticism of the book would be levelled at the story
of " Sister Beatrice," which is translated from the poem Beatrifs
by the Dutch poet, Mr. P. C. Boutens. The old legend of the faith-
less nun, whose place was filled by the Blessed Virgin, is here
repeated with dignity and with beauty; from the Catholic point of
view, however indeed, from the ethical point of view it is not
acceptable, because the idea of sin and remorse is omitted. We
have the tale in sweeter, truer guise as A Legend of Provence, by
Adelaide Proctor.
TOLERANCE. By Rev. A. Vermeersch, SJ. Translated by W.
Humphrey Page, K.S.G. New York: Benziger Brothers.
$1.75 net.
Father Vermeersch tells us that, " strictly speaking," tolerance
has always some evil for its object, such as a physical defect,
1913-] NEW BOOKS 691
an intellectual error or a moral deformity. We tolerate an af-
front or an injury, but not a favor; and even in speaking of
physical sensations, it is not pleasure, but pain, that we describe
as tolerable or intolerable. He deals with tolerance or, we pre-
fer to write, toleration from the viewpoint of the individual,
the Church, and the State. His first chapter deals with tolera-
tion in private life. No one will question this part of his thesis,
for it is the mere expression of the most elemental Christian
principles. He says : " Except for the right to resist violence and
to defend himself against injustice, the private individual has no
control over the acts of another, and no right to constitute him-
self a judge in respect of such acts; he is bound to respect the
liberty of his fellowman as a right, even if that liberty be im-
properly granted. He may endeavor to dissuade another from a
particular line of conduct, or blame him if he persists in it; but
he has no right to prevent or to punish." In a word, a man is
really tolerant when he endures the existence of opinions contrary
to his own without any feeling of vexation or irritation.
The doctrinal intolerance of the Catholic Church consists in
the rigor with which she imposes upon her members the inward
acceptance and outward profession of her Credo, or her dogmatic
or moral teaching. The Catholic Church, as guardian of the faith,
has never allowed the slightest compromise with error, but has
demanded of her children constancy in the faith even unto death.
She must, as a divine infallible teacher, expel from her fold any
member, clerical or lay, who questions even one of her defined
doctrines. Once this is granted, it follows necessarily that the
Church must protect the faith and morals of her children, just as a
parent must protect the faith and morals of his family. Of course
this disciplinary intolerance can only be exercised over her own sub-
jects. She claims no power over Jew or unbeliever, and she has
always maintained with St. Augustine : " No one is brought to the
faith by force," or with St. Athanasius : " It is the part of religion
not to compel but to persuade." Father Vermeersch states that
Vacandard considers this distinction illogical, but to our mind
he agrees with it perfectly (The Inquisition, pp. 256, 257).
How far this disciplinary intolerance may be exercised to-
wards her own subjects, is a matter in dispute among theologians.
Some have maintained that the Church has the right to inflict
capital punishment in certain cases. They teach that " for eccle-
siastical criminal cases, the right of the sword exists in the Pope, as
692 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
in one who has the power of ordering punishment, and in the
Sovereign as in one who carries out the orders of another." With-
out making this opinion, even in its modified form, an article of
faith, Bellarmine and Suarez give it as that of the schools. Father
Vermeersch in a note endeavors, unsuccessfully we think, to ex-
clude St. Thomas from the list. But the words of the Summa are
explicit : " In like manner, the Catholic Church saves some of her
children by the death of others, and consoles her sorrowing heart
by reflecting that she is acting for the general good " (Summa
Ha, Ilae, quaest. X., art. 8, ad 4m).
He also regrets Vacandard's criticism of the arguments of
St. Thomas, and declares his interpretation, incorrect (pp. 64, 166).
We do not think the Jesuit Father has proven his point ( Vacandard,
The Inquisition, pp. 171-173). We are pleased to see that our
author, against certain moderns like Tarquini, Mazella, and Lepi-
cier, denies the Church's right to inflict capital punishment.
He proves his viewpoint from the teaching of Tertullian,
Lactantius, St. Cyprian, Origen, St. John Chrysostom, St. Augus-
tine, and Leo the Great in the early Church, and from St. Theodore,
Alcuin, Rabanus Maurus, St. Peter Damian, St. Anselm, St.
Bernard, etc., in the mediaeval period. His own opinion about the
coercive power of the Church is as follows : " Neither by her own
powers nor by concession of the State, can the Church, as such,
inflict irreparable punishments. She has possessed the power of
inflicting all other temporal punishments, and we recognize
in her the right to claim the assistance of the State for the
application of those temporal punishments which, in view of her
spiritual end, she considers it proper in certain circumstances to
prescribe or inflict. But if we confine our attention to the in-
herent power of the Church, that power which she possesses al-
ways and everywhere, we consider that her power is limited to
those penalities, spiritual or temporal, which find their last sanction
in the supreme penalty of excommunication." This is a bit vague,
for there are reparable temporal punishments that are just as much
opposed to the authorities he cites as the death penalty itself.
Father Vermeersch accuses Vacandard of attaching too much
weight to the work of Don Salvatore di Bartolo (the Criteri Teol-
ogici), in which he proves the two following theses: I. Constraint
in the sense of employing violence to enforce ecclesiastical laws
originated with the State. II. The constraint of ecclesiastical
laws is by divine right exclusively a moral constraint.
1913.] NEW BOOKS 693
We are well aware that the first edition of this book was
put upon the Index, but as the second edition was revised and
corrected by the author, and published with the approbation of
Father Lepidi, the Master of the Sacred Palace, it has all the more
weight and authority. Some have declared the Syllabus con-
demned this view, but the question under dispute is whether the
coercive power comprises merely spiritual penalties or temporal
and corporal penalties as well. The editor of the Syllabus did
not decide this question; he merely referred us to the letter Ad
Apostolica Sedis of August 22, 1851. But this letter is not at
all explicit; it merely condemns those who pretend " to deprive the
Church of the external jurisdiction and coercive power which was
given her to win back sinners to the ways of righteousness." The
theologians who at the Vatican Council prepared canons ten and
twelve of the Schema, De Ecclesia, on this very point of doctrine,
did not remove the ambiguity. They explicitly affirmed that the
Church had the right to exercise over her erring children " con-
straint by an external judgment and salutary penalties," but they
said nothing about the nature of those penalties. Cardinal Soglia,
in a work approved by Gregory XVI. and Pius IX., declared that
the limiting of the Church's coercive power to merely moral re-
straint was " more in harmony with the gentleness of the Church "
(Vacandard, op. cit., pp. 250-252).
In his chapter on the Inquisition, Father Vermeersch, to our
mind, is a whit too laudatory of the practical workings of that
institution.
While the book as a whole is an earnest attempt to solve all
the problems suggested, we cannot say that it says the last word on
this all-important matter. The author repeats himself a great
deal, and we do not think him at all fair to some of his Catholic
opponents. He has done a good work, however, in calling attention
to the modern rationalistic preachers of toleration, who profess
the doctrine with their lips, but give the lie direct to it in practice.
The intolerance of France and Portugal to-day are instances in
point. The translation is very poorly done.
FOREIGN PUBLICATIONS.
TTNDER the title La Foi, P. Lethielleux publishes the Lenten Conferences
\J for 1912, preached in Notre Dame, Paris, by Father Janvier, O.P.
Other publications of the same house are La Predication Contemporaine, trans-
lated from the German of Monsignor Keppler of Rotenburg, a very sug-
gestive treatise on preaching, containing brief analyses of characteristic ten-
694 ' NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
dencies of the times, with useful hints and directions on the subject matter,
form, delivery, and spirit of preaching; and Questions de Moral, de Droit
Canonique et de Liturgie, in which Cardinal Gennari answers nearly eighteen
hundred important questions, most of them new, or at least involving compara-
tively recent decisions of the Roman Congregations. Eugene Figuiere (Paris)
publishes The Era of the Drama, by Henri-Martin Barzun. M. Barzun com-
plains of the decadence of the modern drama, especially in France. He wishes
to see in Paris an independent theatre for dramatic art a Louvre Dramatique
as well as a Louvre Pictural. Les Fous, by Remy Montalee, from the same
house, is a most original and striking book. It is a trenchant and effective
satire on modern scientific dogmatism. Bloud of Paris publishes Harnack et
le Miracle, translated by Chas. Senoutzen, S.J., from the Italian of Herman
van Laak, S.J. It is against Harnack's thesis that Christianity became Catholic
in the second century. Father van Laak gives a thorough and detailed refuta-
tion. The same house publishes Bellarmine's Notes of the True Church. This
is a translation of the fourth book of the fourth controversy of the Cardinal's
celebrated Controversies of the Christian Faith Against the Heretics of the Day.
It contains also an excellent sketch of the life and writings of Cardinal Bellar-
mine. Another publication of Bloud, L'Objet Integral d I'Apologetique,
by E. A. Poulpiquet, discusses the proper scope and scientific methods of
apologetics according to the principles of St. Thomas. The book may be highly
recommended to theological students. The same house is publishing an
excellent series of philosophical brochures Philosophers and Thinkers espe-
cially intended for young students preparing for their degrees. Jean Didier,
who has already written three volumes of the series on Locke, Berkeley, and
Condillac, has in the present volume analyzed briefly but accurately the philo-
sophical writings of Hume, " the great modern skeptic who for over a hundred
years dominated English thought." In Les Quinze Etapes ou Pas Spirituels
dans la voie des Exercises de Saint Ignace, by le Pere Emile Becker, S.J.
(Lethielleux), the author shows us the steps by which St. Ignatius leads to
the heights of perfection. Les Semeurs de Vent, by Francisque Parn
(Lethielleux), is a well-written novel that aims to show the evil effects of in-
sincere modern journalism. Vendeenne, by Jean Charruau (Tequi), is a good
pen picture of the stirring revolutionary days in La Vendee. The Foundations
of the Faith, by Mario La Plana, S.J. (Tequi), is a popular little manual of
apologetics in the form of questions and answers. From this last-
named firm comes to us also the second and third volumes
of Abbe Duplessy's Le Pain Evangelique, conversational explanations of the
Gospels for the Sundays and Holydays between the beginning of Lent and
Advent; Jeunesse et Ideal, by Abbe Henri Morice, a series of conferences
written in line with the belief that the best way of persuading men to lead a
Christian life is by dwelling on the reasonableness, the beauty, the joys, the
rewards of virtue, and not by denouncing vice; Sentiment de Napoleon I. sur
le Christianisme, the fourteenth edition of a little work which proves that
Napoleon had strong Catholic convictions, and that his last days were blest
with the consolations of religion. The anecdotes, fragments of conversations,
and testimonies of which this book is made, were originally compiled a few
years after the Emperor's death by the Chevalier de Beauterne. The present
edition was revised by Ph.-G. Laborie.
foreign perfobfcals.
The Balkan War. By Spyr. P. Lambros. This article deals
with the Balkan War from the point of view of Greece. The writer
claims that the idea of a union of the Balkan States is not of
recent origin, but dates back to the year 1797. It was the idea
of a Greek, one Rhigas, who had been a schoolmaster in Thessaly,
a secretary later on to the Greek prince in Valachie, and who was
impregnated with the spirit current during the French Revolu-
tion. He then made his centre at Vienna, and thence sent out his
literature advocating the independence of the Balkans. He is con-
sidered the protomartyr of Greek independence.
The more proximate cause of the recent troubles with Turkey
arose from the treatment accorded the Greeks during the uprising
of the Young Turks. They were chiefly these : the diminution of
the prerogative of the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople ; the mas-
sacre of the Primates of the Church; slaughter of the Greek popu-
lation of Turkey, due to hatred of the Balkan races; the re-
striction of the freedom allowed hitherto to the Greek
Press, and the plan of transformation of the ethnological conditions
of Greek countries by the introduction into them by the Turks of
a heterogeneous population from every corner of Asia. The article
then takes up the different troubles during the past two centuries
between Greece and Turkey. Le Correspondant, June 10.
A Great French Statesman. By Henri Welschinger. This
article is a biographical sketch of Charles Chesnelong, a great
statesman who labored for God and country. He was born at
Orthez in the year 1820, and died in 1899. As a defender of
his faith, he is worthy to be ranked with Montalembert and Ozanam,
as his voice was always ready to defend his beloved faith in the
legislating halls of his native land, for he lived at a time when the
Church in France needed a fearless defender among the laity, and
Charles Chesnelong did not prove wanting. In everything which
was for his nation's good he displayed the same energy which
marked his love for the Church, and by his life he proved that a
man cannot be a good citizen without at the same time being an
exemplary Catholic. Le Correspondant, June 10.
Belgian Politics. By Adolphe Hardy. This article opens with
696 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Aug.,
the tributes paid to the Catholic direction of the welfare of Belgium
by such antagonists of the Church as Luzatti of Italy and Henri
Charriaut of France. Even Edmond Picard, the ex-chief of the
Belgian Socialists, seconds every word of praise which M. Char-
riaut pays in his work entitled, Modern Belgium, the Land of
Experience. Since Belgium gained her independence from Holland
in 1830 three great electoral systems have prevailed in Bel-
gium. The article then gives a history of these electoral systems,
with their revisions and additions. The rising strength of So-
cialism presents a serious condition of affairs. A commission
of thirty-one members of every political belief has been formed
to study out the serious question of a different electoral system.
Le Correspondant, June 10.
Asiatic Turkey. By Andre Cheradame. The administration
of the " Young Turks " in the brief space of four years has been
far from successful. The confusion and disorder in government
which confronted them when they seized the power from Abdul
Hamid, have not been removed or even decreased. The public
debt in these four years is far greater than that incurred during
the thirty-three years of Abdul Hamid. Their subjects have utterly
lost faith in them.
They have utterly ignored Asiatic Turkey with its motley
population of Arabs, Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, Israelites,
and others.
The Kurds are a race living in tribes one part of which are
nomads, and the chief scourge of the Armenians. In Article 61
of the Treaty of Berlin, the protection of Europe was promised to
Armenia, but this has never gone into effect, as Turkey herself
has utterly ignored it by allowing the Kurds to carry on their
massacres. The Armenians themselves have demanded three con-
cessions from the Turks: i. The nomination of a ruler chosen
by the Sublime Porte, and agreed to by the European Powers.
2. A mixed commission composed of three Mussulmans, three Ar-
menians, and three Europeans. 3. The appropriation of a part
of the revenues for local needs.
The Arabs are the most important of these Asiatic Turks,
considering themselves the superiors in every way of the European
Turk. They have constituted from their most learned men of all
professions a commission to draw up a programme of reform,
which will meet the best interests of the Arabian districts.
1913.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 697
The great cry of these different races is decentralization of
power, and the Young Turks have been unable to cope with the
question. As a fundamental basis for the reform of the manner of
governing Asiatic Turkey, an article appeared in the London
Times of the fourteenth of May signed "Vekil," which recom-
mended that Asiatic Turkey be divided into six regions. Five of
these regions would have a European Inspector General, assisted
by a European officer for reorganizing the gendarmes, and also
a European Financial Counsellor. The sixth region would form
a centre, a model territory of administration, all the chiefs of the
departments to be Europeans. In this way " Vekil " argues that
the financial reform would be immediate and general; and the
administrative reform would have begun in the sixth region.
Le Correspondent, June 25.
Labor. By Baronne Brincard. The writer of this article
narrates the sad conditions of the needle-women of Paris. The
meagre pay given to the laborer has been discovered through the
examination of the workers themselves, who are striving, out of
their small pittance, to support not only themselves, but also aged
parents and children dependent upon them. The writer appeals
to the purchasers of these fineries, bought at an enormous price, to
strive for a bettering of the conditions of the needle-women. She
advocates a system in vogue in this country, known as the " Con-
sumer's League." She also gives the addresses of business houses
where the workers are banded together, and thus through union
secure a living wage. Le Correspondent, June 25.
Japan. Unsigned. This article first takes up the troubles,
outside its own borders, which are causing Japan distress the
latest is the Alien Land Bill of California. The Japanese consider
this a great insult to their nation, and absolutely refuse to consider
the individual rights of the States of our Union. Yet it is not
only in the United States that Japan is having trouble, but also in
Australia, where the cry is " No Yellow Labor ! " New Zealand
threatens to follow suit, and this is causing great uneasiness to
Great Britain.
But the greatest trouble for Japan is within her own Empire.
With the accession to the throne of Yoshohito, the son of the late
Emperor Mutsuhito, there has been a complete severance between
the old and the new Japan. This really had begun before the death
698 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Aug.,
of the late Mikado, and can be traced to the education of the
young Japanese at the universities of England and the United
States, where their students have drunk deep of the fallacious philo-
sophies of Herbert Spencer and Immanuel Kant, and the Socialism
of Karl Marx. With the introduction of these principles into
Japan by their foreign-educated subjects, all that sacredness at-
tached to the person of the Mikado, which had been a growth of
centuries, died. In its place has sprung up the development of
extreme socialistic and even anarchical ideas. This accounts for
the attempts on the life of the late Mikado.
Another factor due to ideas of the Western world is that of
materialism, i. e., the greed for gold, which has become the passion
of the race. It was as a lesson for his people that Gen. Nogi
chose death by suicide.
Within the last six months, Japan has had three ministerial
crises, and, unlike the Japan of former days, in all these dif-
ferent changes of government have shown a complete disregard
and disrespect for the Mikado. Another cause of discontent
was the Portsmouth Peace Treaty at the close of the Russo-Japanese
War. The intervention of Great Britain and the United States
has been a source of great disappointment to Japan. Le Corre-
spondent, June 25.
Spiritism. By Lucien Roure. Leon Rivail (Allan Kardec),
the founder of spiritual philosophy, was born at Lyons in 1804. I n
1847 tne Fox sisters of New York began to attract attention by
their seances. Meanwhile Kardec was investigating Spiritism, and
in 1857 published The Book of Spirits, which in 1912 reached its
sixty-second edition. Soon after the appearance of this book the
Spiritist Review and the Spiritist Society of Paris were founded.
Spiritism became a religion. The spirits, said Kardec, would
render intelligible to all the words of Scripture; revelation had
three principal stages: Moses, Christ, and Spiritism. Kardec's
works are anti-Christian in doctrine and morality. Leon Denis,
of Tours, was the most representative successor of Kardec; his
work marks a new development in Spiritism and a further departure
from orthodox Christianity. Spiritist authors have tried to take
over the contemporary discoveries of science to confirm their teach-
ing, and have identified themselves in some degree with the occult-
ism of the East. Spiritism has in recent years made great progress
both in Europe and America, due in large measure to the support
1913-] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 699
of such men as Lombroso, Wallace, Crookes, and Lodge. The
Church condemns Spiritism as dangerous and superstitious.
Etudes, June 5 and 20.
Religion and Sociology. By H. A. Montagne, O.P. Durk-
heim, Mauss, Hubert, and others, calling themselves the socio-
logical school of religious philosophers, heirs of the method and
thought of Comte and Guyau, hold that religion has for its cause
and its object society. It is true, as Brunetiere said, every re-
ligion must be a society of beliefs. Protestantism, with its indi-
vidual reason opposing the common Credo, is a dying faith. It is
true, also, that proselytism, the desire to make others share what
we strongly believe, is an evidence of the social aspect of religion.
But is religion only "a universal sociomorphism ? " Is it im-
posed on the individual from without by the collective body ? Is the
divinity, worshipped in religion, only society transfigured ? Is there
but one religion, that of humanity? They who answer " Yes," build
upon an absolutely false method of observation. They take ac-
count solely of external facts rites, ceremonies, and the like; and
they rule out a priori the interior sentiments, the reasoned conclu-
sions which gave birth to these rites. They deny the intervention
of God because He is not an external fact. They confound the
external forced constraint imposed by society with the internal
free submission imposed by truth. They falsely assert that the
act of faith is blind. But as M. A. Lanz, the anthropologist, says,
religion is the spontaneous expression of the human soul, reasonably
arguing to an Author of the visible world, which man did not
and could not create. Revue Thomiste, May- June.
The Religious Movement in German-Speaking Countries. By
G. G. Lapeyre. The year 1912 has, in Germany, rightly been
called " Election Year." The Centre Party has, indeed, lost some-
what in numbers, but it polled two million three hundred thousand
votes, a greater number than ever before. The Socialists gained,
and mostly in those districts in which the Protestant population pre-
dominates. 1912 has been, too, a year of congresses for both
Protestants and Catholics. Catholic Congresses were held at
Treves, at Aix-la-Chapelle, and at Vienna. One of the most im-
portant reunions was that of the " Society for the Protection of the
Schools and Christian Education." Revue du Clerge Frangais,
June.
7 oo FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Aug.,
The Youth of France. By Francis Vincent. Two notable books
on this subject have recently been published, one by "Agathon,"
pen-name of Messrs. Henri Massis and Alfred deTarde, and another
by Emile Heuriot, which prove by definite information how truly the
convictions of the young men of France are turning toward the
Catholic Church. Twenty-five years ago it was not thus. Non-
Catholic, even Radical, writers are remarking the change. Novel-
ists, poets, musicians, painters, sculptors, students of the normal
school, students of law, medicine, in every important institution of
education, and every branch of knowledge, publicly profess their
faith, are monthly communicants, keep the night watch at Mont-
martre before the Blessed Sacrament, and are active members of
the St. Vincent de Paul Society. Revue Pratique d'Apologetique,
June 15.
The Tablet (June 7) : The Archbishop of Canterbury and the
Schools: In 1895 the Archbishops of Canterbury and York took
the position that the Church of England did not wish the govern-
ment to contribute its proper share to the education of children in
denominational schools, a stand opposite to Cardinal Vaughan's;
that as the parents of these children contributed to the public
educational funds, they were entitled to share in them. The pres-
ent Archbishop of Canterbury now pleads for the life of the denomi-
national schools, which is threatened by the Liberal Party, not so
much through adverse legislation, as through unjust, illegal dis-
crimination, only to be set right by an expensive legal proceeding,
which it is expected will ultimately exhaust the denominational
school. He asks that a special fund be provided by the government
to cover the cost of such litigation. He describes another means
used by the Liberals to secularize the schools the ultimate pur-
pose of this party the unfair competition to which denominational
training colleges are exposed. By controlling the training colleges,
and permitting no definite religious instruction to be given therein,
and by permitting no inquiry into the religious training or fitness
of candidates for teachers in the Provided (i. e. } Public) schools,
sooner or later these schools must be without any religious in-
struction.
(June 21 ) : Sir Mark Sykes and the Irish Clergy: A letter
from the pen of this Catholic Unionist, personally opposed to grant-
ing Home Rule, refutes the charges made by the special corre-
spondent of the Daily Telegraph against the Irish Catholic clergy.
1913.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 701
What the Irish are to-day and the strides forward they are making,
Sir Mark attributes to the clergy.- The Roman Correspondent
relates that the Pope on Sunday, June 1 5th, received five thousand
children who had made their First Communion that morning.
(July 5) : Monsignor James Canon Connelly summarizes a
reprinted Tract on the Present State of English Pronunciation, by
Robert Bridges, the new Poet Laureate. A full report of the
papers and proceedings of the International Congress of Catholic
Women's Leagues, recently held in London, is given. The
ninth historical medal struck during the Pontificate of Pius X.
represents the great seminary for the sixteen dioceses of Calabria,
built and furnished by the munificence of the Pope. It symbolizes
his efforts to suppress the small and inefficient seminaries which
many poor dioceses, in obedience to the Council of Trent, were try-
ing to support. Difficulties in the carrying out of his plans in
Rome are discussed.
The Month (July) : The First Evangelist of America: Father
Thurston treats this question : " By whom was the first Mass cele-
brated in the New World?" His reason for the inquiry is the
" extraordinary persistence of a quite baseless legend that has es-
tablished itself regarding the personality of the first apostle of
Christianity in America." The present article is given to a dis-
cussion of the untrue and distorted presentment of the career of
the first evangelist. As to his identity, Father Thurston con-
cludes : " For the present there is not a shadow of reason for
affirming that there were two Bernardo Boyls, both eminent re-
ligious who lived in the time of Columbus. Secondly, it is now
certain that the Boyl who went with Columbus on his second voyage
was neither a Benedictine nor a Franciscan, but a hermit of the
Order of Minims." These facts will be discussed later. Father
Sydney Smith, in The Gospel of the Non-Miraculous, scores J. M.
Thompson's Miracles and the New Testament for his attitude
towards the Gospel miracles. Those who believe in miracles do not,
as Thompson hints, base their belief on the supposition that mira-
cles "must have taken place, because there are excellent reasons why
they should have done so," but on the contrary they look to the
historical data, examined in the light of sound criticism for the
conclusive proof that the Gospel miracles are historical facts.
Father Smith shows the universal extent of Christ's miracles over all
creation. The wind and the sea, man and the spirit world, were all
7 02 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Aug.,
subject to Him. It does follow, as Mr. Thompson claims, that
because we know of no natural laws by which men could walk on
the water, multiply bread, restore men to life, that therefore
these things did not happen. " Real intellectual suicide " does
not follow from the admission of a true miracle, but rather from
the out and out a priori denial of miracle." R. Herdman Fender
contributes a review of German Catholic Literature. H. Grierson
describes La Vernas, where St. Francis of Assisi received the
stigmata.
The Irish Ecclesiastical Record (July) : The Golden Jubilee
of the Apostolic Union of Secular Priests, commends the Rule of
the Union to those of the secular clergy who have not as yet
adopted it. It is written by the same author, the Very Rev. Arthur
Canon Ryan, who at the time of the silver jubilee of the Union
made a similar exposition of the aims, the obligations, and the
blessings attendant upon this union of priests to which the Pope
has given such a cordial commendation. New Physical Theories
and Old Metaphysical Concepts is a criticism from a philosophical
standpoint of the theories connected with the recently-published
researches of Sir William Ramsay, Professor Collie, and Mr. Pat-
terson concerning the presence of helium in x-ray and other
vacuum tubes, with special relation to the notion of a single sub-
stratum and common origin of material substances. The author,
Rev. B. J. Swindells, S.J., shows that " even in the light of modern
knowledge, the old scholastic doctrines are by no means absurd
or ridiculous," as is seen from a comparison of materia prima
with the modern protyle. Pastoral Work in a Great City: Paris,
1913, is properly called A Study in Pastoral Theology. It is a
chronicle of the effort of zealous pastors to reach every member of
their flock, and to bring to each the message given to the world so
long ago by the Master of the Fold. " In every department of
pastoral work," writes the author, tne Very Rev. Patrick Boyle,
" there is activity and progress ;" a new spirit has been awakened,
and during the past six years success has come in many forms
to bless the efforts of those who have given their lives that all
may come to a knowledge of the Truth. The Episcopal Suc-
cession of Killaloe (1326-1525) : An effort is here made by W. H.
Grattan Flood to clear up the obscurity and the apparent inconsist-
encies in the line of succession of Bishops in the diocese of Killaloe
during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
1913.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 703
Revue Pratique d'Apologetique (June 15) : In The Penances
of the Saints, J. Riviere writes that no material affliction as such,
unaccompanied by faith and love, has any merit before God. But
granted these dispositions, the penances of a sinner may satisfy
for his own sins ; those of a saint for the sins of others, not
indeed as a quantitative and juridical exchange of pain for pardon,
but only as a more efficacious prayer. God's wrath is not softened
by the sight of their suffering itself, but of the love manifested 1 in
and through the suffering. Then, too, all the unapplied merits
of the Saints with those of Christ form a spiritual treasury from
which the divine mercy distributes grace at will, and on which
the Church offically draws when granting indulgences. Nothing
in the economy of the supernatural order is lost. F. Cimetier
summarizes a volume by M. Auguste Rivet on the financial re-
sources of Catholic institutions, and the means of safeguarding
them before the civil law. Michael d'Herbigny praises a study
by the late Abbe Bousquet on the causes of the Greek Schism,
the present condition of the " Orthodox " Church, and the prospects
of reunion with Rome.
Annales de Philosophic Chretienne (May- June) : Victor Del-
bos discusses the positions of Arnauld and of Malebranche on the
nature and origin of ideas. P. de Bernardis summarizes M.
Le Roy's resume of Bergsonism, and shows the relation of " the
new philosophy " with moral and religious problems. The
Editors announce complete submission to the recent decree which
put the issues of their magazine from 1905-1913 on the Index,
and they announce a suspension of publication until next October.
Etudes Franciscaines (July) : P. Hugues gives a complete sum-
mary and criticism of the Welhausen theory as to the composite
character of the Pentateuch, and indicates the purpose and con-
cessions of the decree of the Biblical Commission on this subject,
with a glimpse at the recent attitudes of Catholic critics.
P. Hilaire describes the dangers that beset the Capuchins of Paris
during the Commune.
IRecent Bvents.
The Ministry of M. Barthou has proved
France. stronger than was at first expected. Owing
to its firmness in resisting the efforts of
the Socialists to weaken the proposed measures of defence, the
patriotic sentiment of the country has rallied to its support. The
opposition to the Three Years' Service Bill has not scrupled to
practise obstruction, and has prolonged the debate by speeches
many hours in length. M. Jaures, the most conspicuous opponent
of the bill, was expected to take no less than three days in bringing
forward his objections to the measure.
The discussion has been the occasion of bringing to light the
extent of the anti-militarist propaganda, and the lengths to which
it has been willing to go. In a certain degree the working classes
are involved, that is, so far as the Confederation of Labor is their
representative. This organization has adopted many methods of
persuading the men serving their time in the army to desert the
ranks, even in the face of the enemy. How large is the number
of French citizens who are willing to act in this way cannot of
course be exactly ascertained. It is large enough, however, to
be a real source of danger. The government has not hesitated to
take the most drastic of measures allowed by the law for the pur-
pose of punishing the malefactors, and in the hope of preventing
further efforts of the same kind. Existing legislation, however,
does not give it the power of dissolving the Confederation.
It would be unjust to accuse the Socialists, who are opposing
the army bill, of complicity in the proceedings of the Anti-Mili-
tarists. They are doubtless mistaken, but the position they take
is at least a matter of argument. They deny the need of any
increase in the strength of the army; or if there is any such a
necessity, they contend that it can best be met by the proper
execution of existing laws, and the better utilization of the reserves.
In this way the people would be saved from the additional burden
which the proposal will throw upon them. The extent of the
German preparations, and the character of the sudden assault on
France should Germany decide upon an attack, have, however,
brought it home to the mass of the French people that the govern-
1913-] RECENT EVENTS 705
ment is right, and it is felt to be certain that the bill will be
adopted substantially in the form in which it was proposed.
The government has made an effort to proceed with the Re-
form of the Electoral System which is considered so necessary.
The members of the Chambers are now so completely under the
control of their constituents, that they dare not consider the higher
interests of the country. The constituencies are small, and the
electors are chiefly bent upon the local or even personal advantages
which they can derive from the assistance of their representatives
in the National Assembly. The principal object of the reform is
to free the members from this ignominious situation by making
the bodies that elect them larger. The government has, however,
so far found it impossible to reconcile the divergent views of the
House and Senate. The chief cause of difference is the precise
way in which to secure the representation of minorities.
One defeat the government has suffered, but it was speedily
retrieved. Some Republican young men wished to place a wreath
upon the statue of Joan of Arc; this wreath bore the inscription:
" Joan of Arc, betrayed by her king and burned by the priests."
The Director of the Paris Municipal Police refused to allow a
thing to be done which involved such a perversion of the facts.
For this he was placed upon the retired list. On further con-
sideration, however, the Director was reinstated. The Radicals,
thereupon, demanded explanations, and that the question should
take the form of an interpellation. To this the government would
not consent, and on a vote being taken were defeated by 267 votes
to 257. The Prime Minister insisted upon an immediate debate.
He admitted that the retirement of M. Touny, the Director in
question, had been an error. It had now been rectified. When
the motion of censure was put to the vote, confidence was ex-
pressed in the government by a substantial majority.
The principal event of the past month has been the visit to
England of M. Poincare, the President. The enthusiastic reception
which he received has convinced the two countries and the whole
world that the Entente Cordiale is still a living force, and the
pivot upon which the European situation turns. M. Pichon, the
French Minister for Foreign Affairs, accompanied the President,
and had a long conference with Sir Edward Grey. Perfect agree-
ment on all points of international relations has, it is announced,
been established. The war in the Balkans has not rendered neces-
sary any change in the grouping of the Powers.
VOL. xcvn . 45
7 o6 RECENT EVENTS [Aug.,
From time to time reports of fighting between French forces
and certain of the tribes in Morocco have appeared. There is still
a Pretender in the field, and a few tribes are refractory. By
far the larger part of the country has acquiesced in the French
occupation. In consequence, competent witnesses assure us, the
old state of barbarity, corruption, and cruelty has disappeared, and
a new era of security and prosperity has been introduced. This
work has necessitated many sacrifices, and may necessitate more;
but no doubt is now entertained of the success of the work of
civilization which France has undertaken. Native assemblies are
being formed, schools are multiplying, and a judicial system is
being introduced. The army numbers fifty thousand men.
A slight change for the better has taken place in the vital
statistics for 1912. The addition to the population is about fifty-
eight thousand, whereas it was the other way in 1911 the de-
crease then having been thirty thousand. Births, however, have
only increased by eight thousand five hundred: the increase is
really due to the decrease of deaths, which has amounted to no
less than eighty- four thousand.
The celebration of the centenary of the birthday of Frederic
Ozanam, may serve as a reminder that there were true sons of the
Church who were pioneers in the social movements which are dis-
tinctive of our time. In his earliest years he was touched by
the misery of the working classes, their unproductive toil, their
aimless lives. For their relief and uplifting he was able to form
a fraternity which, beginning with seven in 1832, numbers at the
present time more than one hundred thousand members.
The celebration of the completion of the
Germany. twenty-fifth year of the Emperor's reign
gave rise to many manifestations of the
satisfaction of the German people. It is generally felt that he
has in a good sense disappointed expectations. From his demeanor
and temperament at the beginning of his reign, the fear was great
and widespread that he was bent on war; and yet peace has not
once been broken. Pope Leo XIII. is reported to have said : " He
will come to a bad end; he is an unclutiful son;" and yet he has
proved himself a faithful husband, and a good father. He is
autocratic and domineering; and yet during his reign the German
people have passed from a more or less feudal system to a con-
dition where, to a large extent, democracy controls, and com-
1913-] RECENT EVENTS 707
mercial and industrial interests predominate; and however re-
pugnant to the Emperor's feeling this may have been, he has never
come into conflict with the will of the people. He has, in fact, been
one of the first to promote the social reforms which have become
in every country characteristic of our times; and yet so little has
this been to the satisfaction of the German people, that one in
every three is a Social Democrat. The one jarring note, indeed,
was the abstention of that part in the Reichstag along with the
Poles from being present at the Jubilee celebration. He found Ger-
many at his accession in the possession of the greatest army in the
world; he has been the cause of her now being one of the great sea
powers. When he began his reign, Germany was, indeed, the
most powerful nation on the Continent of Europe; she is now a
power, with possessions in every part of the old world.
At one of the chief celebrations an interesting disclosure was
made. At the University of Berlin a lecture was given by the
Professor of History, Dr. Hintze, of which the position of Ger-
many in the world and the way in which it had been reached
was the theme. The professor went on to say that the idea of
social justice was the necessary complement of world power, and
claimed that it was this idea of social justice that had guided
the Emperor throughout his reign. The conclusion of the pro-
fessor was that the true aim of a State could only be realized
by means of democratic institutions under a monarchical govern-
ment. No one was less inclined than the present Emperor, he said,
to govern in a sense contrary to the Constitution. This he showed
by the following incident. It was by Frederick William IV. that
the Constitution was given to Prussia. He was, however, much
opposed to it ; -but his conscience not being elastic enough to allow
him to break the oath which he had taken, he left a sealed docu-
ment to be opened by his successors, charging them to reverse the
Constitution before the oath was taken. This injunction was not
listened to, on their accession, by William I. or Frederick, the inter-
vening sovereigns. When it came in due course to the knowledge
of the present Emperor, not only had he no thought of complying
with it, but he ordered the testament of his ancestor to be destroyed,
so that it might be impossible in the future for some young and
inexperienced ruler to be influenced by it. He said to Dr. Hintze :
" From the moment I saw the document I felt as if I had a barrel
of gunpowder in my house, and I had no peace until the testament
was destroyed."
7 o8 RECENT EVENTS [Aug.,
The proposals of the government for the increase of the army
have been accepted by the Reichstag without any substantial change.
The way of raising the money to pay for this increase has met
with greater modifications, although in this case, too, no substantial
change has been made. Even the mediaeval plan of seizing upon
a portion of the capital of the subject for the service of the State
has been accepted by the Budget Committee, although it was modi-
fied by graduating the amount to be taken according to the amount
of the property in which the levy is to be made. It is for the
non-recurring expense involved in the increase of the army that
this levy is taken. For the recurring additional expense the Reich-
stag agreed upon a method which is called by the Conservatives
a breach of the Constitution of the Empire, involving, as it is
asserted, the assumption of a right not given by it to the Central
authority to tax property directly in the several States. A strange
coalition of the Centre and Liberals with the Social Democrats
carried this proposal, in which the government acquiesced.
Another misfortune has befallen the Dual
Austria-Hungary. Monarchy. When Austria was holding
Italy in subjection, it tried to effect its pur-
pose by a system of spies. Upon the spies, too, there were spies,
and upon these yet another set. The same system is still in exist-
ence in the Austrian as in other armies. It cannot, however, be
continued indefinitely, for there must be a beginning. In this case
the one at the top, an officer on the Chief Staff of the Army,
has confessed himself to have been guilty of having sold to Russia,
on the eve of what looked like a war between the two countries,
the plans for the cooperation of the Austro-Hungarian and Ger-
man armies. For fourteen years this staff officer, it is said, had
been in the service of Russia, protecting her spies in Austria,
and giving to Russia full information of the proceedings of the
Austrian spies. Russia by this means had been placed in posses-
sion of every important military document. Nor was it to the
Austrian plans alone that his revelations were confined, the close
cooperation which has of late existed between Germany and Austria
having given him access to the plans for their common military
action. The extent of this on the part of the delinquent is not,
however, certain. No wonder that there was a feeling of dismay
in Austria in the public and the army at the discovery that the
1913-] RECENT EVENTS 709
Russian military authorities have been, by the treason of an
Austrian officer, placed in a position to parry every blow that
Austria and perhaps Germany would have struck had the war re-
cently threatened actually broken out. Never during his whole
life, it is stated, has the Emperor manifested so much indignation.
If this manifestation of the demoralizing effects of the system of
espionage should lead to its abolition, it would, indeed, be an
instance of good springing from evil. But this is more than can
be hoped for. It may, however, lead to less reliance being placed
upon it, and to a search at least for some better way.
In Hungary, too, the moral sense of the country has been
shocked, although in a somewhat different manner. In this case it is
the Parliament and government that are at fault. The opposition
has found no other way of doing its work than by adoption of
the most defiant methods of obstruction. To this the government
has replied by the use of force. Soldiers and police have been
placed in control to such an extent, that finally the opposition with-
drew altogether. This in one form or another has been going on
for more than a year.
To the great satisfaction of the opposition, a recent trial in
a court of law has brought the head of the government, Dr. de
Lukacs, to the ground. Its result was to show that he had been
guilty of corrupt practices in giving privileges to a bank, the con-
sideration for which was money paid into the funds of the gov-
ernment party. Great rejoicing was felt at the condemnation
thereby given of the odious practices which have been character-
istic of his government. The rejoicing, however, was mitigated
when the chief agent of the violent treatment accorded to the
opposition was called upon to form a new government. This was
Count Tisza, said to be a rigid Calvinist, who as President of the
Chamber, has, up to the present time, made use of the violent
measures by which the opposition was suppressed. The result of
the change, therefore, is to leave things as they were; for scarcely
any alteration has been made in the Cabinet. It will be hard in-
deed for the Tisza Cabinet to have a worse record than that of the
one it has replaced. The Lukacs regime has been responsible for
the maintenance of the Cuvaj dictatorship in Croatia ; for the pass-
ing of an iniquitious Suffrage Reform Bill; for many acts of ad-
ministration oppression; for not only securing the election of its
own supporters by bribery and violence, but also for preventing
the return by the same means of prominent representatives of
7 io RECENT EVENTS [Aug.,
non-Magyar nationality. It has earned for the Magyar State
the implacable hatred of both the Rumanians and Serbo-Croatians
within the Empire, and has done great harm to the foreign rela-
tions of the monarchy.
The soul of the Italians has been vexed in a
Italy. twofold way by the Palace of Justice, which
has at last been brought to completion. In
the first place the building has proved an eyesore to their sense of
beauty, being monstrous and hideous. In the second place, the
contractors have reaped enormous profits as much it is declared
as thirty per cent, and this with the connivance of certain members
of the Chambers. At least this was the report of a commission
appointed to examine into the question. The justice and accuracy
of this report were indeed called in question, and have been the
subject of long and acrimonious debates in the Chambers. In the
end two or three members resigned. It is yet to be seen whether
or no further action will be taken.
The Freemasons, to whom for the establishment of the king-
dom Italy is so much indebted, must now be feeling how true is
the old proverb about the ingratitude of man. Some little time ago
the Minister of War, General Spingardi, speaking before the Senate
declared that it was not only desirable, but a matter of duty, that
no member of the military service should belong to a secret associa-
tion. This public manifestation of his views was to be taken, he
said, as a warning to all who had doubts on the subject. The
same views were expressed by the Minister of Marine, Admiral
Cattolica. These utterances met with the complete assent of the
Senate, being received with loud applause. The Liberal Press,
even the organs of the Extreme Left, uttered no word of protest.
All secret societies have at last been banned, no single voice being
raised in their defence. The Press is warning all officers not to
enter the ranks of Freemasonry in particular, and calling upon
those who are already members to leave the association at once.
The reason for this condemnation is the belief that its members
are banded together for the selfish purpose of promoting one an-
other's interest. This belief is so strong that the public in general
is not satisfied that the government is acting severely enough against
Freemasonry. They fear that its activity is not confined to the
army and navy, but that the Civil Services as well are subject to
its influences. No regard is now paid by the public voice to the
1913-] RECENT EVENTS 711
services admitted to have been rendered in the past. Its day is
over. Freemasonry is an obsolete instrument.
The peaceful possession of Tripoli has not yet been secured;
news comes of conflicts, generally of Italian successes, in one or two
cases of reverses. The good faith of Turkey is being called in
question; it is asserted that not a few soldiers of the regular army
of Turkey are taking part with the Arabs in contesting the Italian
rule. A reason is thus given for Italy's retaining the possession of
the ^Egean islands which were seized during the war.
Affairs in Spain are in more confusion than
Spain. usual. Within the short space of a fort-
night, Count Romanones, the successor of
Senor Canalejas, gave in his resignation, and in each case was
asked by the King to continue to hold the reins. The cause of the
first resignation was the refusal of the leader of the opposition,
Senor Maura, to continue the normal functions of his position. In
Spain there has long been a well-recognized system of rotation
between the two parties. This is not of the sordid corrupt char-
acter which has ruined Portugal, but it springs rather from a
recognition of the duty of the other side to bear the burden of
governing the country. The Liberal government of Count Ro-
manones had by and with the consent of the King entered into
relations with the Republican Party. This was considered so great
a departure from the old understanding between the Liberals and
Conservatives, that the leader of the latter refused further coopera-
tion. The King, however, would not accept the resignation of
Count Romanones. The reason for the King's action seems to be
the fear of revolution in the event of Senor Maura's return to
office. His methods of governing are so detested by large num-
bers of the Spanish people, that his recall might be the signal for
an uprising.
No sooner, however, had Count Romanones resumed the Pre-
miership, than want of confidence was manifested among his own
followers. Again he resigned, and a second time was he called
upon to return. On his so doing, he adjourned the Cortes, a
step which has excited more extended dissatisfaction. What will
be the end of it all remains to be seen.
Another war in Morocco seems to be imminent. The Moors
for the most part have acquiesced in the rule of the French, but
for that of Spain a large number living in the zone now under
;i2 RECENT EVENTS [Aug.,
its control have manifested implacable hostility. They have risen
in large numbers, and the Spanish government has had to send
a large force to suppress the movement. Riots have consequently
taken place in Barcelona, where the war is most unpopular.
The state of things in the Balkans is so dis-
The Balkans. gusting that the temptation is strong to ig-
nore the whole matter. No one knows the
real position, still less what will be the outcome. The latest report
is that the Turks are on the move to recover their lost possessions,
and that they have found an ally in Rumania. Bad as things are,
this is the worst that could happen; unless perchance it should
bring on the European war which has been so far averted.
The way in which was formed what has proved so short-
lived a union of the Balkan States and Greece, has at last been re-
vealed. The initiative came from the statesman who averted in
1909 a revolution in Greece M. Venezelos. A previous attempt to
bring about some kind of cooperation had been made in 1891 by an-
other Greek statesman, M. Tricoupis, without success, however. The
atrocities committed by the Young Turks in Macedonia led M. Vene-
zelos in April, 1911, to propose to M. Gueshoff, then head of the
Bulgarian government, that Greece and Bulgaria should cooperate
to put pressure on Turkey in defence of the Christians who were
being exterminated in Macedonia. There was no thought of mak-
ing war against Turkey, nor at the moment of any other alliance.
The negotiations were conducted so secretly that only two persons
in Greece the King and M. Venezelos knew what was being
done ; the diplomatic world knew nothing. Equal secrecy was main-
tained in Bulgaria. The negotiations were protracted so long
that it was not until May, 1912, that a treaty was signed. In fact
Servia and Bulgaria were able to come to an agreement before that
between Greece and Bulgaria was definitely made.
The treaty, as has been said, was not made with a view to the
making of war against Turkey. On the contrary, the peace of the
Balkan Peninsula was its declared object, and war was to come
only in self-defence. Nothing was to be done to provoke hos-
tilities; in fact the maintenance of good relations with the Otto-
man Empire was one of its express objects. The chief end of
the treaty was to bind the two States to exert their moral influence
over the kindred populations in Turkey, to induce them to con-
tribute sincerely to the peaceful co-existence of the elements con-
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 713
stituting the population of the Empire. Force was only to be
resorted to in case of the unprovoked aggression of Turkey.
The negotiations between Bulgaria and Servia were begun later,
but came to a conclusion earlier, than those between Greece and
Bulgaria. A treaty between the two first-named Powers was made
on the 1 3th of March, 1912. This is the treaty the provisions of
which have formed one of the chief causes of the existing quarrel.
It followed the same lines as that between Greece and Bulgaria.
The alliance was to be of a purely defensive character, all aggres-
sive action against Turkey was to be abstained from; but the two
governments were to help each other in protecting their fellow
countrymen in the Ottoman Empire in the enjoyment of their
rights. This treaty, however, went further than that between
Greece and Bulgaria, for it made definite arrangements for the
partition of Macedonia between Servia and Bulgaria in the event
of a successful war with Turkey. It is these proposals that have
led to the unhappy conflict that is now going on. The last link
of the chain which bound the Balkan States together was the ad-
hesion of the King of Montenegro. In this case no definite treaty
seems to have been signed, such as those between Bulgaria and
Greece, and Bulgaria and Servia there was only a mutual entente,
at least at first. In September, 1912, however, just before the
war broke out, an alliance was formed with Servia. Although
the last to join, the King of Montenegro was the first to enter
upon hostilities and the last to bring them to a close if they have
been brought to a close. It seemed, too, as if he had gained the
least advantage from the war, but it is too early to say, things
being as they are at present.
It will be seen that there has never been formed that formal
Confederation of the Balkan States of which so much has been
heard, nor was a deliberate purpose cherished of making war, still
less of driving Turkey out of Europe. The war was forced upon
the Allies, and the unlooked-for weakness of Turkey was one of
the chief factors in their success. This success intoxicated them,
and revived in each of the nationalities that perennial animosity
towards one another which it has been Turkey's policy to cherish
for the past five hundred years, and which of late has been the
only condition of the existence of its domination. These animos-
ities have proved too strong to be conquered by a few months
cooperation, and when it became necessary to divide the territory,
not one of the States was ready to make the required sacrifices.
714 RECENT EVENTS [Aug.,
For sacrifices were necessary on the part of each State, if any
partition was to be reached, the various nationalities being mingled
one with another in all parts, and to no one State could pos-
sibly be given merely its own nationals.
The evil spirit of the whole trouble has been Austria. It was
her action that forced Europe for the sake of peace to form the new
State of Albania. The formation of this State deprived Servia of a
part of her conquests, and shut her off from any part of her own on
the Adriatic. She sought, in consequence, a compensation from Bul-
garia and a modification of the Treaty of March, 1812. To this
Bulgaria would not listen, and held Servia to the strict letter of
that contract. This cut Servia off from the ^Egean as well as
from the Adriatic. She was left as much isolated as at the be-
ginning of the war. To this she would not consent, was unwilling,
as it was put, to stand in the relation to Bulgaria that Bavaria stands
to Prussia. Russia tried to intervene, but no terms at first could
be found as a basis for arbitration Bulgaria insisting on the
treaty being taken as its basis, while Servia insisted on its being set
aside altogether. Just before the hostilities broke out between the
two States, it was stated that the difficulties had been removed, and
that Russian arbitration had been accepted by the two States.
The clash of arms, however, has set all this on one side.
It is hard to decide which of the States is responsible for
the conflict which is now raging. All are more or less guilty, but
it seems as if Bulgaria is the one chiefly to be blamed. She has
insisted upon strict adherence to the letter of a treaty
made in quite different circumstances, has been aggressive and
overbearing, claiming the right to settle with each of the Allies
separately what each shall receive, instead of by a mutual agree-
ment made in a conference. By so doing she has incurred the
enmity of the rest of the Allies, and now Rumania has taken ad-
vantage of Bulgaria to secure further " compensation " than that
which she has already received. If Bulgaria has acted in so proud
a way, some little consolation may be found in a doleful situation,
in the fact that she has been defeated by both Servia and Greece,
and has had to appeal to Russia for protection.
The assassination of the Grand Vizier Mah-
Turkey. mud Shevket Pasha has been followed by
the arrest of a large number of persons,
and the banishment of a still larger number. Of those arrested,
1913-] RECENT EVENTS 7*5
twelve have been hanged in the presence of a large crowd. Their
trial was not conducted in a way to inspire confidence in its fair-
ness. The prisoners were not permitted to call witnesses in their
defence, nor were they allowed the services of an advocate. All
the proceedings took place behind closed doors. Newspapers were
allowed to circulate reports clearly designed to prejudice the case
in the eyes of the public. In fact, political animosity, and not the
love of justice, was clearly manifested. There are those who fear
that these proceedings are a prelude to a period of revolutionary
violence and bloodshed. The reason for the assassination is not
certainly known; there is ground to think, however, that it
was an act of revenge on the part of army officers for the assassina-
tion of the Commander-in-Chief, Nazin Pasha. The new Premier
is a member of the Committee of Union and Progress, and therefore
no change has taken place in the character of the administration.
What Turkey's future will be no one can guess. The Powers
profess the strong desire, based on their selfish interests, that its
power in Asia may be maintained in strength and vigor. But it
seems likely that the Near Eastern question which has so long been
a source of anxiety, will be changed into one only a little farther
East. Whether or no there is any truth in the statement that Turkey
is taking advantage of the struggle between the Balkan States
to regain her lost possessions in Europe, cannot, at the time that
these lines are being written, be ascertained.
With Our Readers.
T^REEMASONRY is anti-patriotic. It seeks its own advancement,
1 and the welfare of its members, first ; and to both it subordinates
the welfare of the nation. The anti-patriotic spirit of Masonry is
now arousing the spirit of the Italian people, and the Italian press,
even where there is no clerical sympathy whatever. The absolute
incompatability of Masonry and military discipline has been shown
lately by such journals as the Tribuna and // Corriere della Sera.
The defence and security of the country, they realize, rest upon the
discipline and fidelity of the army. Both are being undermined by
the secret workings of the Masonic society. As stated in the Recent
Events of this issue of THE CATHOLIC WORLD, the present Italian
Minister of War, in a speech delivered on May I3th, laid stress upon
the impossibility of any army officer, who is a member of a secret
society, being faithful to his duty; he hoped that his words would
stand as a warning; and he declared that measures would be taken
against all officers who place their obligations as Masons before their
duty as soldiers. In spite of his public declaration, the good faith of
the Minister may be questioned, for his own attitude towards the
Masons, such is their power, has been a favorable one. But public
opinion is against the Masons and so publicly the government Min-
isters must always wear an innocent face. Masonry in Italy uses
the government, the army, and the navy; the schools, public institu-
tions, and works of all kind to advance its own cause and its own
influence. It constantly and secretly propagates the notion, that the
influence of Masonry is an easy and sure way to secure promotion.
In payment for such promotion, fidelity to Masonic plans and aims;
securing contracts for fellow Masons; recommending in turn fellow
Masons for promotion; political support and propaganda to have
Masons appointed to high office, until the body political and social
is honeycombed by this secret selfish influence of a secret, unpatriotic
society of self-seekers. The infiltration of Masonry in the
army in Italy constitutes a great national danger. Freemasonry,
because of its secrecy and its selfishness, is unpatriotic. And for
the irreligious and unpatriotic propaganda carried on in France by
the Freemasons, we would refer our readers to a pamphlet lately
published by the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland, entitled Free-
masonry and the Church of France, by Sir Henry Bellingham.
1913.] WITH OUR READERS 7*7
SPAIN is often spoken of by those who do not know as a country
very backward in all that concerns modern physical comfort and
material well-being. Clement K. Shorter writes in the London Sphere
a letter that will be a great surprise to many:
T ET no one be deterred from traveling in Spain by fears that are
JL/ constantly held over one of the indifferent railway accommodation
or of the deficiency in hotels. The traveler who desires it may lunch
and dine and sleep with all the luxury that he can obtain in London at
the Ritz, the Carlton, or the Savoy. There is one hotel in Madrid, for
example the Palace Hotel which has six hundred bedrooms, each of
them with a bathroom, and it is no exaggeration to say that it covers
an area equal to any two of the largest hotels in London. Then
there is a beautiful hotel at Granada, the Alhambra Palace, in which
I recall a perfect view over the town from its every window. Yet
another hotel at Ronda has a magnificent view down unforgettable
precipices, and still another at Algeciras has a garden always in flower,
always in perfect foliage and a superb view of Gibraltar in the near
distance from every window.
* * * *
QUITE apart from these magnificent caravansaries, the visitor who
desires a more homely Spain will now find in every town hotels
of a secondary character, in which he will enjoy the novelties of
Spanish life and Spanish cooking. This is a sordid aspect of the
subject, and equally material is any reference to railways. Even
here, however, something should be said, and the would-be traveler
requires to be reminded that the International Car Company runs its
sleeping cars and its restaurant cars to every important city in Spain,
while to those who wish to take a daylight journey the very slowness
of the train has its own charm. What matter that the guard and the
stationmaster will hold long conversations with one another with a
splendid indifference to time tables? The traveler from his carriage
window may enjoy many picturesque experiences. Children will
sell him oranges which have a quite different flavor to the palate
than the same fruit when transported to another country, and there
are many little things to pass the time, particularly in gay-hearted
Andalusia.
* * * *
LET us hear no more of the old story, of which the writings of
Washington Irving are largely responsible, of Spain as a place
where the hotel and traveling accommodation is bad. In one respect,
indeed, it will hold its own with any country to-day in its extra-
ordinary cleanliness. We note that particularly in the children with
;i8 WITH OUR READERS [Aug.,
their chubby arms and legs. Murillo children are around you at every
turn, and beautiful children they are. Many of them might have
stepped gaily out of that great painter's canvases. I will not weary
my reader by going over familiar ground and tell of my visit to
Burgos, with its splendid cathedral; to Madrid with its wonderful
Velasquez pictures; to Seville, the city of beautiful women, always
hatless, but with the rose in the hair and the fan in the hand, with which
a thousand artists have familiarized us; to Seville with its Passeo
de las Delicias so splendidly reminiscent of the joy of living.
WHAT could be said of Granada to-day that would possess any
novelty that city of the famous Moorish palace and of the
equally interesting Moorish towers? What of Ronda, or Toledo, or
Cordova all of them full of pleasant memories? How beautiful,
indeed, are the cathedrals of Spain ; but assuredly the most wonderful
of all is that of Cordova, once a Moorish mosque. Its hundreds of
graceful columns remain in one's mind for ever even after a single
visit.
DR. ROBERT BRIDGES, who has just been appointed Poet Laure-
ate of England, is, as our readers will remember, the editor of the
poems of Digby Dolben. A critical article on Dr. Bridges' editing
and Dolben's poems was contributed by Louise Imogen Guiney to the
September, 1912, issue of THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
MANY questions of great importance were discussed by the ex-
perienced members of the Catholic Educational Convention, held
during the first week of July in New Orleans. The questions that
received most attention were that of free parochial schools, and free
textbooks; vocational training; and the need of a greater number
of male teachers in our Catholic schools. It was generally agreed that
in the earlier years of childhood female teachers were the better fitted,
but that after the eighth grade male teachers should be employed.
The danger of effeminization was emphasized.
Among the resolutions passed by the Convention are the following :
As Catholic educators we pledge ourselves to renewed efforts, under the
direction of ecclesiastical authority to the service of Church and country in
the grand cause of Christian education. We regard this work of religious
education as one on which the future welfare of our nation depends.
We call attention to the great waste of public funds, and the evil of the
constantly increasing burden of taxation. This extravagance has resulted largely
from a tendency on the part of the State to do for children what should be
done for them by parents, and to do for the citizen what he should do for
1913.] WITH OUR READERS 719
himself. Let the State urge and encourage the citizen to care for his chil-
dren, but let it not place unjust burdens on those who, at great sacrifice, are
discharging this primal duty of parenthood. Let the State cherish the idea of
parental responsibility as one of the foundation stones of American freedom.
As there seems to be a general agreement among educators that pupils
entering the secondary schools from the eighth grade are too far advanced
in age, and that secondary education should begin at or about the age of
twelve, we may be able to begin their high school course after the completion
of six years of elementary work.
Whereas, Liberty of education has always been recognized in our country
as a basic principle; and
Whereas, The right of the parents to educate is one of those fundamental
rights which can not without injustice be interfered with; and
Whereas, The continued recognition of this right is essential to the
preservation of a most cherished prerogative of American citizenship; be it
Resolved, That the Catholic Educational Association objects to any en-
croachment on this right to liberty of education; be it further
Resolved, That the Catholic Educational Association views with alarm the
activities of certain individuals and corporations whose utterances and efforts
threaten to interfere with the just liberties of private educational institutions.
Whereas, The Council of Education of the American Medical Association
has elicited the aid of the Carnegie Foundation in the examination and classifi-
cation of hospitals; and
Whereas, Said Carnegie Foundation has shown a spirit antagonistic to
institutions under religious control; and
Whereas, There are more than five hundred hospitals in the United States
under the direction and control of Catholics; be it
Resolved, That we hereby protest to the American Medical Association
against the action of the Medical Council; and be it
Resolved, That we request the American Medical Association to instruct
its Medical Council to discontinue the services of the Carnegie Foundation,
Whereas, All education should be so directed as to preserve moral purity,
and the communication of knowledge relating thereto should be adapted to
the age and growth of the child; and
Whereas, The communication of this necessary knowledge pertains of
right to the parents and the divinely-constituted guides of the children; be it
Resolved, That we protest against and condemn as subversive of true
morality, the imparting of sexual knowledge to children as at present carried
on in many private and public schools in the country.
Whereas, Five thousand and more Catholic deaf and mute children, de-
prived of opportunity for receiving religious instruction, are* losing their faith
under non-Catholic influences, be it again
Resolved, That every effort be made to give these handicapped children
the same educational advantages accorded to the normal children of our Catho-
lic parish schools.
BOOKS RECEIVED.
BENZIGER BROTHERS, New York :
The Apostle of Ceylon Father Joseph Vaz. Translated from the French
by Ambrose Cator. 60 cents net. Blessed Sacrament Book. By Rev. F. X.
Lasance. $1.50. Meditations on the Sacred Heart. By Rev. J. McDonnell,
SJ. 90 cents net.
FREDERICK PUSTET & Co., New York:
The Life of Martin Luther. By Rt. Rev. Wm. Stang, D.D. 25 cents. The
Mother of Jesus in Holy Scripture. By Rt. Rev. Dr. Aloys Schaefer.
Translated from the German by Very Rev. F. Brossart, V.G. $2.00 net.
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, New York :
Collected Poems. By Alice Meynell. $1.50 net. Collected Works of Francis
Thompson. Vols. I. and II., Poems. $3.50 net. Vol. III., Prose. $2.00 net.
ROBERT APPLETON Co., New York :
The Catholic Encyclopedia Pamphlet.
AMERICAN BOOK Co., New York :
5"*. Teresa; or the Garden of the Soul. Text by Adele Bauve. Music by Leon
Farge. 20 cents.
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, New York:
Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Preceded by Newman's and Kingsley's
Pamphlets. With an Introduction by Wilfrid Ward. 50 cents net.
LITTLE, BROWN & Co., Boston :
Crime and Its Repression. By Gustav Aschaffenburg. Translated by A. Al-
brecht. $4.00 net.
GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE, Washington, D. C. :
Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year Ended June 30. 1012.
Vols. I. and II.
B. HERDER, St. Louis :
Thirty Ways of Hearing Mass. Compiled by Rev. George Stebbing, C.SS.R.
75 cents. A Little History of the Love of the Holy Eucharist. By Freda
Mary Groves. $1.10 net. The Tears of the Royal Prophet, Poet of God.
60 cents net. Compendium Theologies Dogmatics. Auctore Christiano Pesch,
SJ. Tomus II. $1.60 net.
INTER-COLLEGIATE PRESS, Kansas City, Mo. :
Between Eras from Capitalism to Democracy. By Albion W. Small. $1.65.
JOHN C. STALLCUP, Tacoma, Wash. :
A Refutation of the Darwinian Conception of the Origin of Mankind. By
John C. Stallcup.
CATHOLIC BOOK AND SUPPLY Co., Portland, Oregon :
The Oregon Catholic Hymnal. 80 cents.
ST. ANTHONY'S COLLEGE, Santa Barbara, Cal. :
My Lady Poverty. A Drama in Five Acts. By Francis De Sales Gliebe,
O.F.M. 35 cents.
P. S. KING & SON, London:
Sweated Labour and the Trade Boards Act. By Rev. Thomas Wright. 6 d. net.
First Notions on Social Service. By Mrs. Philip Gibbs. 6 d. net. A Primer
of Social Science. By Rt. Rev. Mgr. H. Parkinson, D.D., Ph.D. 2 s.
AMPLEFORTH ABBEY, Malton, Yorkshire, England:
The Spirit of Our Lady's Litany. By Abbot Smith, O.S.B. i s.
INTERNATIONAL CATHOLIC PUBLISHING Co., Amsterdam, Holland :
The German Centre Party. By M. Erzberger. 50 cents.
AUSTRALIAN CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY, Melbourne :
Culture and Belief. By Very Rev. M. J. O'Reilly, C.M. Pamphlet. One penny.
Adventures in Papua with the Catholic Mission. By Beatrice Grimshaw.
Pamphlet. One penny.
LIBRAIRIE ARMAND COLIN, Paris:
Mon Filleul au " Jardin D'Enfants." Par Felix Klein. 3 frs. 50.
EUGENE FIGUIERE ET CIE, Paris :
Les Biases. Par Marcel Rogniat. 3 frs. 50.
THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XCVII. SEPTEMBER, 1913. No. 582.
SHAKESPEARE: RECENT DISCOVERIES AND A
REVIEW.
BY APPLETON MORGAN.
T is to-day quite a quarter of a century since I first,
and with considerable diffidence, offered to THE
CATHOLIC WORLD a paper touching Shakespeare
matters. I offered my work to THE CATHOLIC
WORLD because I felt myself dilated over a dis-
covery I thought I had made. It turned out that I actually had,
originally with myself, made a real discovery. But, as will appear,
others had made it before me, and I ought to have been ashamed
of myself for not having read the lay- works in which that dis-
covery was not only announced but elaborated!
Even at that date I had been, for almost as long a period of
time as has elapsed since, a student of the Shakespeare environ-
ment and genesis, and had become dissatisfied with the standard
biographies of the dramatist. (With the philological and textual-
critical problems I had never been much, except incidentally, occu-
pied.) All at once, in the midst of my attempts to reconcile facts
with traditions, it flashed upon me that everything was reconciled
with everything, and relatively explained, by supposing William
Shakespeare, like his father and his father's fathers, to have been
of the Old Faith!
This discovery, or acknowledgment, that the dramatist was a
Catholic true son of the Old Faith however, had been announced,
none too cheerfully, in that remarkable jumble of monody, solilo-
Copyright. 1913. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUL THE APOSTLE
IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.
VOL. XCVII. 46
722 SHAKESPEARE: RECENT DISCOVERIES [Sept.,
quy, spasm, and incoherence which Carlyle calls a History of the
French Revolution. But as I had never (as I suppose I should have
done) acquired a taste for Carlyle, who, whatever he wrote, was
always subjectively upon the stage himself, I had never happened
upon it! That statement, or (as it was in his mouth) "Confes-
sion," is in Chapter II. of Book First of The French Revolution.
Here it is : " Nay thus too if Catholicism with and against Feud-
alism (but not against Nature and her bounty) gave us English
a Shakespeare, and era of Shakespeare; and so produced a blossom
of Catholicism it was not until Catholicism itself, so far as law
could abolish it, had been abolished here ! " It is not always
easy to imagine what Carlyle meant in his interjected matter.
As he was supposed to be writing about things in France (though
the name of France is hard to find in the opening chapters of his
French Revolution), the " here " is ambiguous. But the term " us
English " sufficiently confesses that it was the English Shakespeare
which Catholicism produced.
Here, then, I might have found it! But I shall never forget
the moment when it came upon me, with the impact of conviction,
that every inconsistency of the biographies, and all the problems
of circumstantial evidence, were explained, satisfied and laid at
rest by just knowing that the English dramatist, like Cer-
vantes and Dante (the greatest triumvirate of life and letters that
the world has ever known or ever can know), was a son of the
Catholic Church.
No longer is it a difficulty where Shakespeare derived that
absolute command of his own past, that fullness in minute and
current matters of past cycles immaterialities that had earned only
the slightest entry of record in records that had themselves perished,
but of which in his alembic he could make just one apposition
and then himself forget! As in the list of his Hapax Legomena,
he used once and then forever discarded a larger number of words
than John Milton possessed in his entire vocabulary, so in the
materials of his plays he absolutely foreclosed the material he
worked in! Where did he get it? Where, indeed, but from the
storehouses where alone was preserved the lore and the literature
that otherwise would have been utterly lost to mankind perished
from the face of the planet from the religious establishments,
the monasteries and the convents, in which alone letters and learn-
ing had been cherished and its muniments preserved, during the
Dark Ages, by the Catholic Church?
1913.] SHAKESPEARE: RECENT DISCOVERIES 723
I.
When, under Henry the Eighth, these religious establishments
were despoiled, stripped and razed by his royal escheaters (a title
even then, for obvious reasons, abbreviated to " cheaters "), where
could the dispersed scholars have recourse for food and shelter
but to good Catholics like Shakespeare? And Shakespeare could
not only have given them food and shelter, but employment too !
How simple the whole explanation is ! No need of any Bacon-
ian theory now!
Was it strange that, when I found no escape from the truth
that the literature that had been my adored study for almost a
quarter of a century was Catholic in that it was born of a
Catholic pen and a Catholic Church inspiration I sought the
hospitality of a Catholic magazine for whatever I could add, or
imagine that I could add, to the hermeneutics of Catholic Shake-
speareana ?*
Perhaps I may be suffered to note here just a few of the
instances in these investigations, where the fact that William Shake-
speare was a son of the Old Faith at once clears the air, and ex-
plains an item or a circumstance where we had been blindly guess-
ing or conjuring up possibilities, or meandering away afield after
all sorts of whimsical and bizarre theories to account for them ever
since Shakespeare was studied at all!
King Henry had divorced himself from his pious and stately
consort Katherine, not by axe and block (as he began to do later
as his conscience required), but through form of what he called
the " law ! " The comment of the kingdom was not awry, how-
ever, as Shakespeare himself records in one deft Shakespearean
touch :
Chamberlain: It seems the marriage with his brother's wife
Has crept too near his conscience.
Suffolk: No, his conscience
Has crept too near another lady!
Henry the Eighth is the only one of the historical plays which
was not published during Shakespeare's lifetime. Why?
A careless, even the most perfunctory, reading of that play
shows us that the gravamen of the whole play is to ennoble and
*That the hospitality of THE CATHOLIC WORLD was ample, I may gratefully
note the following references from its index: Vols. xl., 379; xlii., 212; xliv., 29;
xlv., 348 ; 1., 65, 723 ; Hi., 849 ; Ivii., 777 ; Ixii., 449 ; Ixix., 285.
724 SHAKESPEARE: RECENT DISCOVERIES [Sept.,
eulogize the character of Queen Katherine. But Queen Eliza-
beth was the daughter of Queen ^Catherine's rival and supplanter,
Anne Bullen. To be sure, Shakespeare did not handle Queen
Elizabeth's mother very roughly. He was too full of the milk of
human kindness to deal very harshly with anybody. (Not Mac-
beth, or Richard, or even lago, will Shakespeare dismiss without
the best he can say of him. Even to lago he gives a last touch
of sympathy, and he always lets his villains go unpunished some-
how!) And so in this play Anne is merely flippant. She lets
Lord Sands kiss her. But kissing was the usual salutation be-
tween titled persons (Desdemona, according to the first folio, gave
Othello for his pains " a world of kisses " instead of " a world
of sighs "* as modern editions have it. And when Romeo at
Capulet's masked ball offers to kiss poor little Juliet on a first
meeting, she does not demur, although, in pretty allusion to Romeo's
monk's robe and cowl, she says " Hand to hand is holy palmer's
kiss"). And I cannot see why Anne, who has already begun
to catch the King's drift, should not have naively protested that she
would not for all the wealth in the world be a Queen, or why she
should not have said to the old waiting-lady :
Anne: Pray, do not deliver
What here you've heard to her [Queen Katherine].
Old Lady: What do you think me?
These are straws only, and very negligible straws too !
But, however lightly poor Anne Bullen is drawn, it is plain
that the play was lese-majeste in Queen Elizabeth's thinking!
Her policy was in nothing more strenuous than to wean the public
thought from her own bastardy by the Common as well as the
Ecclesiastic Law. Indeed, even in the rush of her own coronation
she did not forget it, and actually her first royal decree was to the
effect that no play, broadside, or publication of any sort " in which
matters of State or of religion should be handled or treated, "f
should be permitted throughout the realm. So of course this play
could neither be presented on a stage nor printed in broadside
(what we now call the " quartos ") during Elizabeth's reign. And
so we note aliunde that Shakespeare uttered no word of eulogy or
This reading, " kisses " instead of " sighs," is retained in all of the three
succeeding quartos, 1632, 1664, and 1685.
tProclamation of April 7, 1559. Repeated in Decree of May 16, 1559. Printed
in extenso, vol. i., Bankside Shakespeare (The New York Shakespeare Society,
1888), page 6.
1913-] SHAKESPEARE: RECENT DISCOVERIES 725
lament, or even expressed the least regret at Elizabeth's demise.
(The theory so congenial to most of my colleagues that the pas-
sage in The Midsummer Night's Dream beginning " I saw a mer-
maid on a dolphin's back," etc., is eulogy of Elizabeth, may be cor-
rect. But it is only theory. And even if correct, it was only a
sop to the Lord of Kenilworth.)
But as we now have it, the play is a dramatic solecism a
perfect Janus-Bifrons among plays ! The first four acts are an
exaltation of Queen Katherine of her noble bearing, her courtly
courtesy even to her enemies who are seeking to depose and divorce
her. It is in every line testimony to the affection of the English
people for her saintly character and her charities. Nay, it is even
testimony to the admiration and respect for her cherished by the
bloated King himself ! No effect to beatify her is wanting. She is
depicted as forgiving Cardinal Wolsey, in that he had aught to
reluctantly do with her fate. For Cardinal Wolsey who would
" have no Bullens " is given the sympathy of the spectators and
grandly eulogized, every honor paid him in his fall and every dig-
nity in him satisfied, in those first four acts. More lese-majeste
from an Elizabethan standpoint.
But, mirabile dictu! In the fifth act, as printed in 1623, all
this is changed ! Anne Bullen's child is now the subject of eulogy
the child of the illegal (from every English standpoint) consort
who has taken the queenly Katherine's place. We have the public
rejoicing at the christening ceremonies, the pageants, the cheering
crowds and, to crown all, the inconsistency, a glowing description
of the " glories " of Queen Elizabeth's reign. (A reign, by the
way, not yet a fait accompli. From any standpoint, not until the
end of it, could it have been known to have been " glorious ! " We
might be reminded, indeed, of that genius who wrote a novel
placing his scene in the year A. D. 800, and who makes one of his
characters say, " We men of the Middle Ages.") But, knowing
that Shakespeare was of the Old Faith, of a party that cherished
the memory of Catholic Queen Katherine, and looked upon Eliza-
beth as a usurper, as was her mother, how clearly this difficulty
is accounted for?
In order to make the play of Henry the Eighth publishable,
Shakespeare's own fifth act is removed, and an entirely new one,
eulogizing Elizabeth, is substituted. The lese-majeste is removed,
and the play is taken from beneath the ban ,of the stage censor !
Shakespeare's fifth act (the existence of which we predicate
726 SHAKESPEARE: RECENT DISCOVERIES [Sept.,
upon the custom which he always follows of writing his plays in
the canonical five-act scheme) was of course uniform in trend with
the other four. This sufficiently appears from the Prologue:
I come no more to make you laugh: things now,
That wear a weighty and a serious brow, etc.
That Prologue would never have served to usher in such a paean
upon Elizabeth's birth as the present fifth act is, as it stands to-day!
That our external evidence agrees for once with the unanimous
concurrence of every dramatic and textual critic, is surely a gratifi-
cation ! But every dramatic critic, at whatever consequence, admits
that the present fifth act of the Henry the Eighth is a dramatic
anti-climax! And that its style and phrasing is not that of the
author of the first four acts, every textual critic admits! Such a
concordance, I think, justifies us in the assertion that the stage
censor went to work at the play with his hatchet; and that, when
he had finished his work, the play was effectually purged of its
Elizabethan lese-majeste by the Lope de Vega method of sacri-
ficing consistency to practical purposes !
But I find it urged that Shakespeare, being the alter ego of
Lord Southampton, could write as he pleased. I doubt if this
can be very seriously urged. Not Southampton himself, any more
than Essex or Raleigh, was permitted to relax himself in hom-
age to Elizabeth's whims. The first use that the Tudors made of
their great men was to cut the great men's heads off. And
Elizabeth was every inch a Tudor. I don't myself believe in that
Southampton story, as I have so often set forth. There is no trace
of it in the Southampton family records or anywhere else. (Unless
a couple of dedications are evidence in a day when publishers
dedicated anything to anybody for commercial purposes. We have
George Wither's exact testimony as to that publisher's custom!)
But, brushing my own theories aside, now comes Dr. Wallace
with records proving that William Shakespeare actually lodged in
Mugwell Street with a refugee Frenchman, who made wigs for a
living in an obscure street, and eked out his livelihood by taking
lodgers. Those who can conceive of Southampton in his palaces
and Shakespeare in his lodgings at the wig-maker's, as Damon
and Pythias and alter egos, are, I admit, impervious to arguments
mine or anybody else's. I think myself that Shakespeare's Henry
the Eighth was not the play All is True, which was on the boards
of the Globe Theatre when that edifice was destroyed by fire; at
1913-] SHAKESPEARE: RECENT DISCOVERIES 727
the total loss, according to Sir Henry Wotton, " of a bit of straw
and a few forsaken cloakes." (But that is a long question which
I will not enter upon here.) The general explanation of the non-
appearance of the Henry the Eighth among the quartos is, I believe,
that the play was not Shakespeare's but Fletcher's, or Shakespeare's
and Fletcher's, and this is proved by the neo-Shakespeareans, by
counting the lines, classifying them as stopped-ending, unstopped-
ending, etc., lines. This mathematics of prosody, I am aware, con-
vinces many clever commentators. I have never taken it very
seriously myself. But the fact remains, however, proved !
In all his dramatic career, Shakespeare never but in this single
instance seems to have written a play " with a purpose." I do not
mean without a trend. Doubtless the trend of Othello is to teach
the reader to beware of jealousy, of Timon to teach the heartless-
ness of sycophants, and so on. Though whether Shakespeare ever
felt, over and above his dramatic instincts, a compulsion to preach
platitudes about anything to his fellowmen, I have my doubts.
However there is no possible matter of doubt as to the purpose of
the play of Henry the Eighth. There is a long story as to the
part played by the drama of Richard the Second, and its perform-
ance procured by the Essex conspirators, which Elizabeth herself
snuffed treason in, saying to Hayward, " Know ye not that I am
Richard ? " That episode is well enough recorded history. But
in that case the play was not claimed to have been written for any
treasonable purpose. It was only its presentation, at that particular
time, of which Elizabeth complained.*
II.
To be sure there are at least an hundred labored volumes
consorted to prove Shakespeare a Protestant and a Puritan, by
means of passages, phrases or whole sentences, torn from their
contexts throughout the plays. The very last of these volumes
that has reached my notice is one by a Rev. Dr. Carter, which
not only " proves " all it sets out to prove, but identifies the exact
English translation of the Bible that Shakespeare used (the so-
called "Bishop's Bible"). All these volumes are of course dis-
posed of by such a timid suggestion as that, perhaps, even a Shake-
*The student of this play may be, I think, pardoned a little impatience, when
he discovers not only this second playwright who eulogizes Elizabeth in the fifth
act ; but a third writer who, towards the end of this fifth act, runs in a bunch
of lines apotheosizing King James, son of Queen Mary, whom Elizabeth murdered.
(" So shall she leave her blessedness to one." Seq., V. V., 42.)
728
SHAKESPEARE: RECENT DISCOVERIES [Sept.,
speare was a dramatist! That even a Shakespeare would put into
the mouth of a character what that character would be expected to
say; certainly not what he would not be expected to say ! Even the
Rev. Dr. Carter would not argue that Shakespeare was a liar, a
scoundrel, and a murderer because he made lago talk like a liar, a
scoundrel, and a murderer ! No candid Protestant critic, whatever
his zeal for tour de force, can read the old and the later King John,
and note the elisions made by Shakespeare (albeit he knew that
the passages libelous of the Catholic Church were the very pas-
sages that would most appeal to his unspeakable audiences, the
groundlings), and doubt what Shakespeare's religious attachments
were! We have, I am beginning to think, almost enough of this
sort of sign-post criticism, and about enough Dr. Carters!
And again : There is that item which always intrudes itself just
about here, viz., the famous entry in the Stratford Town records
that John Shakespeare " cometh not to Church for fear of process
for debt ! "* I have already stated in these pages that that entry
was an evident subterfuge, since process for debt could not be
served upon a Sunday; that according to the law of England
^Readers of THE CATHOLIC WORLD will care to see this famous entry verb,
lit. et punct. which is not dated, but was made, as the following entries show,
a few days prior to September i, 1592. In examining it one cannot escape the
conviction that Queen Elizabeth's Acts of Contumacy were exceedingly unpopular
in Stratford-on-Avon, and that the Burgesses sought every possible pretext to
escape mulcting their neighbors for non-attendance on Protestant worship : every
one mentioned on the two lists (except Widow Wheeler, who " is conformed ")
being found exonerated, as far as the Burgesses could exonerate them, from the
statutory fine. It is interesting also to note that Shakespeare uses two of the
names on the first list, Fluelen and Bardolfe, in his plays of Henry V. and Henry IV. :
Th names of suche recusantes as have been heretofore presented for not coming
monthelie to th Churche according to Hir Maiesties laws, and yet are thowte
to forbeare th churche for debte and for feare of processe or for some other
worse faultes or for age sycknesse or impotencye of bodie
Mr John Wheeler 1
John Wheeler his son
Mr John Shackspeare
Mr John Nicholas Barneshurste
Thomas James alias Giles
William Bainton
Richard Harrington
William Fluellen
George Bardolfe
It is sayde that these last nine coom not
to churche for feare of processe for
debte
Mris Geffrewys. wid.
Mris Barber
Julian Coorte
Griffin ap Roberts
John Welshe
Mris Wheeler
Weare all here presented for recusantes, and do all
so continue saving Mris Wheeler who is conformed,
and Griffin ap Roberts now deade. But the presenters
saye that all or moste coom not to churche for age or
other infirmities
1913.] SHAKESPEARE: RECENT DISCOVERIES
(which is our Common law to-day in the United States too)
Sunday was the only day when a debtor could safely stray beyond
the portal of his house, which is his castle, without being served
with process for debt. (I don't want to be considered too in-
variable an inconoclast, and doubter of tales merely because they
are accepted ! But I might not be able to resist the temptation to
ask what debts John Shakespeare owed that kept him away from
church if he had wanted to go? We have the Stratford town
records. Who has found in them any entries concerning John
Shakespeare's debts?
But let us settle this question of John Shakespeare's debts,
as well as the question of John Shakespeare's religion, finally and
once for all! If John Shakespeare had been in debt, it would
have availed him nothing at all to stay away from church on Sun-
days. His creditors could have procured a writ of elegit whether
he attended services at Trinity or not! An elegit was a writ
issued to the sheriff commanding him to make deliverance of a
moiety of the debtor's lands and goods (beasts of the plough only
excepted). The sheriff on possessing himself of the debtor's
lands and personality, issued an inquest to ascertain the value
thereof. This realty and personal property is then delivered by
the sheriff to the creditors, to be retained by them until the debt
and costs are satisfied : the debtor meanwhile being a " tenant
by elegit" of his own lands and goods. This process is as old
as England, and in some of the United States is still resorted to.
If John Shakespeare had ever been a " tenant by elegit " Stratford
records or court appeals could not have failed to exhibit the fact.
Malone or Halliwell-Phillipps would have unearthed the record.
Even poor John Jour dan (who resurrected so many rumors and
traditions that led to so many discoveries of fact) would have
hit upon it somehow.
I am afraid that we will have to admit that this famous entry
in the Aldermen's minutes was made not to excuse John Shake-
speare, but to excuse themselves for not enforcing (as Elizabeth's
statutes made it their duty to do) John Shakespeare's fines for
his stout contumacy in refusing to attend the Protestant services
at the newly-converted Trinity Church.
And how do we know that John Shakespeare fell into dire
poverty? Why, it is proved as so many things passing strange
are proved concerning Shakespeare matters by an effort of pure
reason. Videlicet:
730 SHAKESPEARE: RECENT DISCOVERIES [Sept,
John Shakespeare must have been very poor, or he would
not have removed his son William from the Stratford Grammar
School at so early an age.
Question: How do we know that John Shakespeare ever placed
his son William at that Stratford Grammar School at all?
Answer: Why, if he had not placed him there, how could he
have taken him away?
But perhaps this is unfair. We argue mostly about Shake-
speare in a circle to be sure. But really not quite so palpable a
circle as that! It is bad enough as it is, without making it worse/
Let us say, rather, that we prove that young William Shakespeare
was a student at the Stratford Grammar School because his father
was an Alderman, and that it is likely, and probable even, that
a son of a Stratford Alderman should be sent to the Stratford
Grammar School! Of course, once a scholar there (which is
proved beyond the possibility of error by the fact that his father
was an Alderman, etc.), young Shakespeare would have been re-
moved from said Grammar School on his father becoming poor.
(It is not necessary to prove such a self-evident proposition as that.
Were it necessary we would start our circle in this wise : )
Stratford Grammar School was erected upon the ruins of the
old Guild of the Holy Cross, which went with the rest, of course,
when Henry the Eighth " conveyed " all church property to his own
use by force of arms. The Earl of Warwick, however, had moved
King Edward the Sixth to restore it as a Grammar School for
the poor of Stratford-on-Avon, and he himself (Earl Warwick
aforesaid) had become its Visitor and Patron. There were no fees
at all. It was as had been the Guild School which the Catholic
Church had maintained for the poor children of the vicinage.
Except that, whereas, the Guild had fed as well as taught these
poor children, King Edward's foundation only administered the
Grammar School function of what was supposed to be purely in-
tellectual pabulum.
And, being for the poor children ! But, alas here our
circle comes to grief! If there were no fees, and the Grammar
School was for the children of the poor, why was it necessary,
when John Shakespeare became poor, that little William should
have been taken away from its sessions? And echo answereth
not! Nor are we informed, either, why John Shakespeare, owner
in fee of three substantial residence-tenements on Henley Street
with their curtilages, should be obliged to avoid payment of his
1913-] SHAKESPEARE: RECENT DISCOVERIES 731
debts by the easy process of merely refraining from going to
church on Sundays! Or what sort of a debt it was that under
English law (at any period of English history, then or before
or since) could not be collected out of the real estate, but must
remain uncollectable except by what the late Mr. Micawber was
familiar with as " civil process ? " Would it not be passing
strange if this whole fuss about John Shakespeare's poverty was
a figment, born of the misreading of that single entry made to save
the Stratford Aldermen from reprimand, or worse, for not pro-
ceeding against their old associate and fellow-Catholic?
How, in common sense (if common sense is permitted in study-
ing Shakespeare matters) could an entry on the town records free
John Shakespeare from a debt? Or how, by a perfectly trans-
parent subterfuge, could he evade the law or take advantage of his
own wrong? But as an excuse for remissness in proceeding to
collect fines for non-attendance which Elizabeth's statute (I. Eliz.,
cap. 2) made it the Town Council's duty to collect, it was an
ingenious minute to record, as tending to show good faith, or the
attempt to do his duty, etc., should the necessity for pleading
good faith arise. What the record tells us is that John Shakespeare,
as any Stratford townsman might, had his financial ups and downs.
But that he was ever reduced to squalor, driven to secrete himself
from the bailiffs, or thrown into a sponging house, nobody knows
(or, rather, everybody does know to the contrary). But so firmly
has this idea of the father's poverty obscessed Englishmen, that
to this day the manufacturer of Shakespeare " relics " forgets
that William Shakespeare was the richest resident of Stratford,
living in its stateliest mansion ; and makes bogus relics of the mean-
est and most clumsy description a broken pipe, a vinegar pewter
mug, a clumsy shuffle board and places them in a hovel that, how-
ever " restored," is but a hovel still. And the tourist to-day at "The
Birthplace " (malgre the records of Stratford real estate transfers
which bear witness that the dramatist could not have been born
there unless he had managed to be born between his fifth and sixth
years) is humbled and disgusted with this rubbish ! This " Birth-
place," by the way, is now an adjunct of the British Crown. So
that it is actually the British Government that collects our fees
and gives us in quid pro quo the Shakespeare poverty, with the cor-
ollary aforesaid as to the non-attendance at Protestant worship.
But it is to be feared that much more generally accepted
propositions than this have accrued to general acceptance through
732 SHAKESPEARE: RECENT DISCOVERIES [Sept.,
even lesser data. What biographer fails to assert, for example,
that Shakespeare and his wife were estranged, and lived apart?
And where is there the least authority for such a statement of fact?
It has grown, I suppose, out of that " second best bed " inter-
lineation in the will, as basis for a consolation that Shakespeare
had forgotten that he had a wife at all: but, on his attention
being called to the fact, interlineated a slurring bequest ! But it is
equally, as well as exactly, within the presumption that a man and
his wife are not estranged; that Shakespeare made that interlinea-
tion from scrupulous anxiety, lest his wife should not have all that
she was entitled to. She already possessed her dower; and, as
we have now discovered finally, the dramatic rights and manu-
scripts of eighteen of the plays!
The real discoveries of the last twenty years of vigilant watch-
fulness for Shakespearean data, have actually been made only dur-
ing the last four years by a young American, my friend, Dr.
Charles William Wallace, but he has succeeded in unearthing
matters that all the impulses and accomplishments of three centuries
of students have never even suspected the existence of!
There is in London an establishment called " The Public
Records Office." It is a building as large as, perhaps, the New
York Custom House: and into it have been thrown pell-mell,
for at least seven hundred years, millions of records of old law-
suits that nobody could be supposed ever to care to refer to;
as forgotten as the parties and their grievances, whatever they
were, could be. To these must by law be given a receptacle. But
no statute can forbid them to fall to pieces by mildew or dry-rot,
and mildew and dry-rot are the state in which Dr. Wallace found
these parchments (or "skins," as called by the keepers). But,
useless and uncared for as they were, the moment an enterprising
young American startled the drowsy old custodians by applying
for permission to examine them, they suddenly became objects
of the tenderest and most scrupulous care! The application must
be made at one office, viseed at another, certificates of good char-
acter of the applicant must be verified and approved, and the whole
skein of red-tape submitted and re-submitted and recommended,
either for further approval or final reference, until the entire
Circumlocution Office had been memorialized or satisfied! And
then, this routine exhausted, several custodians must be appointed
and sworn to accompany Dr. Wallace upon his movements among
these time-eaten skins. And when Dr. Wallace should find one
1913.] SHAKESPEARE: RECENT DISCOVERIES 733
he wished to further examine or study at leisure, that skin must be
first carried to an official, and registered and stamped with the
great seal of the Records Office, thus identifying it as the property
of the Crown (making a surreptitious possession or mutilation of
it a sort of high treason without benefit of clergy) ! However,
Dr. Wallace was fortunate in possessing not only the zeal and
ability of the true scholar, but, what rarely accompanies these attri-
butes, that mental poise and phlegmatic temperament which enabled
him to grin with good-natured imperturbability at all this red-tape,
and patiently and philosophically to exhaust it, instead of permitting
it to exhaust either his zeal or himself ! Once this routine satisfied,
the authorities concluded to give Dr. Wallace a table at a window,
and every facility to dip into the work for which he had made his
pilgrimage to London. Besides their condition after hundreds of
years of neglect, these records Dr. Wallace found to be written
in the old law jargon, or dog-Latin and English, both arbitrarily
abbreviated according to each scrivener's fancy or convenience:
a jargon compared to which Greek or Hebrew or cuneiform
would doubtless have been a welcome sight to Dr. Wallace!
Dr. Wallace has not found, so far, that Shakespeare himself
(except in one instance where he was formally joined as a party
of record, in order that a friendly suit as to lands in St. Helen's
Place might, when carried to a decree, bind all parties neighboring
upon the premises involved) brought or was defendant or inter-
ested party of record to any lawsuits. But he (Dr. Wallace) has
so far found five lawsuits that at once add marvelously to our
knowledge of the London history and the London possession of
William Shakespeare! These lawsuits not to bother with the
names of interpleaded parties are Bendish vs. Bacon; Taylor vs.
Heminges ; Osteler vs. Heminges ; Witter vs. Heminges, and Belot
vs. Mountjoie. Musty and void of human interest as law papers
usually are, it can't be questioned that these documents are over-full
of interest to us. Each set of them reveals Shakespeare in a dif-
ferent relation. In the first-named suit, he is shown as a holder
of real properties in the Parish of St. Helen's, London (which we
have always known from the fact of some pence of unpaid taxes
still remaining on the books though it is fair to say that Mr.
Hales lately found in the " Pipe Rolls " proof that Shakespeare
was warranted in declining to pay them). In the next-named
two suits, Shakespeare is shown as a holder of shares in the Black-
friars and Globe Theatres, and as realizing about three thousand
734 SHAKESPEARE: RECENT DISCOVERIES [Sept.,.
dollars a year (present value of money), at the very least, from
them. And in the last-named suit, we find the dramatist lodging
at the house of a " tire " (wig) maker in Monkwell Street, where
he was involved in a suit for a marriage portion brought by one
Stephen Belot against the wig-maker himself, whose daughter
Belot had married. The great discovery here is that when
Shakespeare is cited to make a deposition he describes himself
under oath as " William Shakespeare, of Stratford-super-Avon in
the County of Warwickshire: Gentleman." This is important,
most important, not because we have not always been assured by
the standard biographers that Shakespeare was entitled to be so
described but because here he, himself, says so under oath. This
disposes of the doubters (and there are not a few of them, and
more at present than ever before) who have claimed that the
William Shakespeare of theatrical connection in London was not,
and could not be identified with, the William Shakespeare of Strat-
f ord-on-Avon !
Dr. Wallace is to be especially congratulated upon unearthing
these invaluable documents, because, just prior to his searches there,
an Englishman, the late James Greenstreet, had been stimulated
by his friend, Dr. Halliwell-Phillipps (who always maintained
that in this same Public Records Office would be found large yields
of Shakespearean information), to conduct investigations there.
Mr. Greenstreet's sudden death prevented him unearthing much,
but he did find these two entries :
1599, June 30, London, George Fenner to his partner Baltazar
Gybeis Antwerp, Therle of Darby is busyed only in
penning comedies for the common plaiers.*
1599, June 30, London, George Fenner to Sir Humfredo Gal-
delii or Guiseppe Tusinga Venice. Our earle of Darby
is busye in penning commodyes for the commoun
players.f
Now the fifth and sixth Earls of Derby were Catholics, and
these items are original intercepted letters in answer to inquiries
whether it would be well to call the attention of the then Earl
of Derby to a project then in hand looking to a Catholic movement.
The connection with Shakespeare is, that this very Earl of Derby
was the real patron of the company of players of which Shake-
* State Papers, Domestic, Elizabeth, vol. 271, no. 34.
Mbid,, no. 35.
1913-] SHAKESPEARE: RECENT DISCOVERIES 735
speare was a member, which was known as " Lord Strange's
Company."
I do not agree with many of my colleagues in these studies
who can see nothing good about Lord Bacon, or without crying
that his ingratitude to Essex covers all he ever did with infamy!
etc. Queen Elizabeth ordered Lord Bacon to take the part he did
in Essex's trial; and if he had not obeyed, his own head would
not have been worth an hour's purchase. I cannot see that it
would have been impossible for Shakespeare in " taking humours
of men daily " (as Aubrey says he did) to have absorbed or
appropriated somewhat that came from so prolific a pen as Bacon's
was. " That I light my candle at another man's candle does not
destroy my property in my own wick and my own wax," said
Jonathan Swift. And, as I am laying down my own Shakespeare
exegetics, it seems to me that I cannot say more, nor well say less,
as to the sundry contested physical sources of the Shakespeare text !
The Rev. Dr. Bowden has grouped in his fine book, The
Religion of Shakespeare, the internal proofs of all these matters
as to which it has been my limited province in this paper to present
some minor items of physical valuation. Perhaps I may note
though not necessarily as a part of my argument that Warwick-
shire was, all through those troublous Elizabethan years of the
Old Faith, the headquarters of the Catholic Party. And it is
notable that, when William Shakespeare applied to the Herald's
College for a grant of coat armor for John Shakespeare, the tricking
of the proposed arms made by the Herald followed the arms of
Nicholas Breakspeare, the first English Pope, Hadrian the Fourth.
The Rev. Richard Davies, in or about the year 1685, and using
a substantive that betrayed himself as, no less than Carlyle, an
unwilling witness, testified that Shakespeare "died a Papist." From
the foregoing it appears that Shakespeare not only died, but was
born and lived a loyal Catholic.
A CHALLENGE TO THE TIME-SPIRIT.
BY THOMAS J. GERRARD.
T an exhibition of Futurist pictures in Rome there was
a free fight. What was its significance? People
usually keep their fists for politics or religion. Is
there possibly something of both in Futurism?
Politics has to do with authority in secular matters;
religion with authority in spiritual matters. So in this free fight
amongst the sight-seers of a picture gallery, we may see a symptom
of the activity of the time-spirit. Futurist art illustrates the time-
spirit at its worst: exaggerated subjectivism, extreme individual-
ism; passion for revolution; lust after new sensation. It is self-
perfectibility reduced to absurdity.
We may not judge the time-spirit solely by its extreme mani-
festations, yet they help us to discern its tendencies. The free
fight in the Roman picture gallery shows that there is question
of authority and independence.
We may describe the time-spirit as a general tendency to
exaggerate subjective claims at the expense of objective evidence.
This general tendency manifests itself in particular tendencies, all
undervaluing authority the authority of evidence; the authority
of God; the authority of Christ; the authority of the Church.
Against the authority of evidence it attaches too much value
to subjective moods and impulses. Man must realize himself, it
says, must develop himself along the lines of his own nature. A
sound principle truly, if only the time-spirit would take an adequate
view of man's nature. If the time-spirit has discovered that man
is not merely a rational animal, it must still admit that he is
a rational animal. If it has discovered that he is an autonomous
organism, it must still admit that he is a member of a larger and
more complex organism.
Regarding the individual, the time-spirit is blind to the right
relationship of intellect, will, and feeling. To the impulse of pas-
sion is often given a higher place than to intelligent will. And
it ignores in the corporate organism the value of collective judg-
ments. The time-spirit professes to be up to date, but it has not
yet learned the new science of the psychology of crowds.
1913-] A CHALLENGE TO THE TIME-SPIRIT 737
What is the genesis of this individualism? Kant fouled the
sources of thought by confusing subject and object. Then Niet-
zsche fouled the sources of conduct by confusing intelligent volition
and sensual appetite. The practical result in the multitude is a
taste for vagueness of thought, lower morality, and decadent art.
Against the authority of God, the time-spirit manifests itself
in some form of monism, either a pantheism or a humanism.
The effect of either is to veil man's mind as to his proper
destiny, and to confuse his method of attaining it. For if man be
God or a part of God, he is responsible only to himself, and knows
no law other than his own. Or if he adopt a humanist concept
of life, he still appeals only to himself as final arbiter of good
and evil. All the boasted altruism of humanism is but egoism
making grimace.
The time-spirit meets the authority of Christ, either with a
frank denial of our Lord's Divinity or the exaltation of every man
to a divinity equal to His in kind, if not in degree. In its attitude
towards the Church, however, we find its most remarkable phenom-
enon. Herein the twentieth century time-spirit differs from that
of the nineteenth century.
The nineteenth century spirit professed to return to the sim-
plicity of Christ by casting off the accretions of Romanism. The
twentieth century is inclined to allow that Christ's intentions and
modern Roman Catholic intentions are one and the same. When
Christ, for instance, said : " This is my Body," He enunciated
the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. When He said :
" Thou art Peter," He enunciated the Roman Catholic doctrine of
Papal infallibility. But since these things are absurd, Christ must
have been wrong. German subjectivism sees only a German Christ.
Turning from the rationalist to the pragmatist phase of the
time-spirit, we hear that the authority of the Roman Church
differs in degree only, not in kind, from that of the other Churches.
She may have kept alive some truth, having devotional value,
which other Churches have allowed to flicker out. Her authority
is allowed to be similar to that of Christ, but dependent entirely
on subjective needs and exigencies. When the very pertinent
question is asked, who shall judge what is of healthy devotional
value? the answer must be sought in the region of pure subjectivism.
French pragmatism sees only a French Christ.
The problem of dealing with these tendencies is not solved by
a wholesale condemnation of them. It is the ever-recurring prob-
VOL. xcvii. 47
738 A CHALLENGE TO THE TIME-SPIRIT [Sept.,
lem of how to deal with human passions. Now human passions
are not bad in themselves. They are only bad when they escape
intelligent control. Reduced to intelligent control they are all good.
So the aspirations of the time-spirit are not to be destroyed. Their
due claims must be recognized, their rights allowed. But limits
must be set. They must be adjusted to the higher claims of the
Spirit of God.
This brings us to the formulation of our challenge in the
words of the Sermon on the Mount : " Seek ye first the kingdom
of God and His justice, and all these things shall be added unto
you."
We call it a challenge rather than an invitation, because it
implies a venture. Yet we are not asking for a blind venture.
The evidence justifying it is not such as to exclude all doubt, but
only such as to exclude imprudent doubt. Otherwise there would
be no venture, and consequently no reward.
The reasonableness of the challenge and the prudence of the
venture may be gathered from the harmony which exists between
the revelation of Jesus and the discoveries, or rather re-discoveries,
of modern psychology. The revelation of Jesus declared a sover-
eignty of the Spirit over the whole universe, nature and super-
nature. There are not two Gods, a God of nature and a God of
grace, at variance with each other.
The world of matter and the world of spirit, all subordinated
to the sovereignty of the one God, make up one beautiful and
harmonious cosmos. Again, the mind of man, made and taught
under the same sovereignty of the same Spirit, constitutes a micro-
cosmos. The spiritual, psychic, and physical laws, which minister
to its progress, are all reflections of the mind of the one Spirit.
Nature is made perfect in grace.
But it is precisely the unity of the mind which modern psy-
chology insists on most. Newman, full of the philosophy of the
Scotch school rather than that of the scholastics, declares for an
illative sense whose ratiocination and judgment shall sum up all
the truth known by the individual, be it natural or revealed. In-
deed, it was the fashion some time ago for modern writers like
Mr. Sully to sneer at the scholastic theory, as if it meant that the
human faculties were bound together like a bundle of sticks. But
a deeper study of St. Thomas, and his exploitation by the neo-
scholastics, has brought about a recognition of his doctrine of the
complete organic unity of the human ego.
1913.] A CHALLENGE TO THE TIME-SPIRIT 739
In the Sermon on the Mount we find these principles worked
out in further detail. Just as in the natural order intellectual gifts
are given for the purpose of attaining happiness or well-being, so
also in the supernatural order Jesus assigned a special happiness
to each infused intellectual gift.
To the gift of common sense there corresponds the happiness
of clear vision. " Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall
see God." The divine gift of common sense tells us that God,
being a Spirit, cannot adequately be represented by phantasms
or by heretical ideas. This same common sense tells that contra-
dictory religions cannot all be true. The sovereignty of the Spirit
must be obeyed when It speaks. Thus common sense, making the
venture of faith, is rewarded with a dim vision of God here, and
a clear vision of Him hereafter.
To the gift of science there corresponds the happiness of
fighting for the truth and of the satisfaction of gaining the truth.
" Blessed are they that mourn (lugent, luctus), for they shall be
comforted."
In the acquisition of science, especially the science of the spirit-
ual life, the battle is not merely against ignorance, but also against
sin. Whenever St. Thomas was about to sit down to study he used
to offer up the prayer : " Thou Who art called the true fountain
of light and the primary source of all wisdom, deign to shed on
the darkness of my intellect a ray of Thy brightness, that it may
remove from me the double darkness in which I was born, namely,
sin and ignorance."
Now in the theological conflict there is nothing more mean and
contemptible than the trick of imputing bad motives to those who
differ from us. It is simply vile to impute sin where, for all we
know, there may be only ignorance. Nevertheless all seekers after
truth do well to examine their consciences. Have you some plan
of sin before you? Are you fooling with some occasion of sin?
If so, then you are not in a fit condition to form judgments as
between faith and science, as between Catholicism and Modernism,
as between one Church and another Church. Spiritual things are
spiritually discerned. But if you have made up your mind to seek
first the sovereignty of the Spirit, then the conflict is a happy one,
then your travails are sustained by the glory of the cause, then
you know that in the end you shall be comforted, for all those
psychic harmonies which you so keenly desire shall be added unto
you.
740 A CHALLENGE TO THE TIME-SPIRIT [Sept.,
To the gift of wisdom there corresponds the happiness of
peace. Wisdom is that virtue of the intellect which puts things in
order. The wise man is he who knows how to order vast com-
plexities into one unity. Peace is not a quietness brought about by
senseless force. Peace is the tranquillity of order. And this hap-
piness follows on the gift of wisdom. " Blessed are the peace-
makers, for they shall be called the sons of God." In them the
passions have been reduced to order under the dominion of intelli-
gence. In them the natural faculties have been subordinated to the
sovereignty of the Spirit. They have " been made conformable to
the image of His Son." Theirs is not the wisdom of the flesh,
" for the wisdom of the flesh is death, but the wisdom of the Spirit
is life and peace."
We ask the time-spirit again : Do you wish to make common
sense the basis of your operations ? Do you wish to follow a strictly
scientific method, treating man as he is known to history? Do
you wish to act according to the highest wisdom? Will you probe
into the causes of causes and take into account the Cause of all
other causes; will you consider the effects of effects and look for-
ward to the final effect of them all?
First, then, put your economics under the sovereignty of the
Spirit. Remember that your workmen are not your goods and
chattels, but, like you, are sons of God and your brethren. Eight-
een shillings a week is not a living wage. Some of our latest
students will tell you that if you give your workmen more wages,
you will get more work out of them, and that from the point of
view of mammon you are making a good investment. But if you
take that as your primary motive, you will have missed the whole
point of the divine economics. You must seek first the sovereignty
of the Spirit and the dignity of the sons of God. And you must
wait for the result as it is distributed by the same Spirit.
Secondly, put your family and social life under the sovereignty
of the Spirit. The Spirit happens to have chosen the family as
the foundation of the social organism. Whenever, therefore, pro-
posals are made, purporting to improve the race by changing the
conditions of the marriage state, examine them in their social
as well as in their individual aspect; in their intellectual and moral
as well as in their physical aspect; in their eternal as well as in
their temporal aspect. In nearly all the reforms suggested by
eugenists, and those who would facilitate divorce, there is some
apparently good reason. But that show of reason is only ob-
1913-] A CHALLENGE TO THE TIME-SPIRIT 741
tained by fixing the attention on the material rather than the
spiritual; on the individual or on favored sections of the com-
munity rather than on the whole social organism; on a very limited
period of time rather than on all time and all eternity. In the
long run, the material, the individual, and the temporal well-being
also suffer, for the sovereignty of the eternal, all-loving Spirit must
be counted with first, and then the measure of material and spiritual
happiness will be breathed forth by Him according to His all-
knowing wisdom.
Thirdly, put your fine arts under the sovereignty of the Spirit.
They pertain even more to the Spirit than do the useful arts.
They are of their very nature free. They are the expression of
the human spirit that has freed itself from certain of the deter-
minations and limitations of the flesh. There are two chief reasons
why the artist should make the quest of this sovereignty his lead-
ing motive. The power of self-control which it gives to him
enlarges and strengthens his craftsmanship. The ideal which it
gives to him widens his field of vision, and multiplies his sources
of inspiration.
The time-spirit, however, moving through the fine arts, seems
to be bent only on the quest of formlessness. Now the formless
can never be beautiful. And that is why our age is so sterile in
poetry, in music, in drama, in painting, in sculpture. It has turned
its face away from the Archetype of all beautiful forms. It has
cut itself off from the source of liberal inspiration. We venture
to say plainly to it: If you are tired of the old forms which are
in our museums and galleries and libraries, if you want new forms
which shall please you as much and perhaps more than the old ones,
go look for them in the kingdom of the Spirit. That is the treas-
ure-house of old things and new. Have a little common sense.
Use your wits. Cease to be dragged and shoved and hustled by
your impulses.
Fourthly, put your philosophy under the sovereignty of the
Spirit. But, you will ask, is not that begging the question? It
is a semblance of it, certainly, but only a semblance. St. Augus-
tine masters the subtlety of the situation when he writes : " I could
not have sought Thee unless I had already found Thee." We have
granted that the quest is towards a prudent venture, not towards
a blatant certainty.
If this be a seeming begging of the question, the other alterna-
tive is a real one. If you take for granted that there is no over-
742 A CHALLENGE TO THE TIME-SPIRIT [Sept.,
ruling Spirit, if you take for granted that there is nothing of the
nature of spirit in man, and that what we call thought is nothing but
a kind of sensation, then you have not only failed to make the
venture, but you have also hopelessly begged the question. Let us
say it again : our challenge is to a venture.
Fifthly, put your theology under the sovereignty of the Spirit.
You seek a more perfect knowledge of the divine immanence. You
will not find it unless you first seek a more perfect knowledge of
the divine transcendence. Either you follow Spinoza, and hold
that God and nature are identical, or you follow Hegel, and hold
that nature is a mode of God's being, a necessary phase of His
self-realization. With Spinoza you make God and nature two
different aspects of the same substance. With Hegel you allow
that God is more than nature, at least in the order of thought, if
not in the order of time.
But neither of these forms of immanence satisfy the demands
of wisdom, science or common sense, for neither admits a doctrine
of real transcendence. God's immanence must be transcendent, and
His transcendence must be immanent. They are attributes, the
distinction of which exists only in our minds, not in God.
Ask yourself in your pragmatic way, what ought to be the
pragmatic value of the divine immanence? You must admit that
it is to explain to us, in some manner, the sweet accessibility of
God to the human soul. Now examine your conscience, and ask
yourself what has the pragmatic value of your doctrine of imma-
nence become ? You must admit that it has been to exalt man to
the level of a divinity; to make him a law unto himself; to inflate
him with a sense of absolute independence and absolute self-per-
fectibility.
No. Before you can properly appreciate the pragmatic value
of true immanence, you must understand something of the prag-
matic value of true transcendence. It explains to us the absolute
independence of God and our absolute dependence on him. It
is His sovereignty, both in the order of being and in the order
of thought, which comes first. Seek you first the sovereignty of
God, and then your true dignity and happiness will be added unto
you.
There were those in our Lord's time to whom the Baptist
came with this same doctrine of the divine transcendence immanent
in the world. But they would not believe it. Jesus said to them :
" Amen I say to you, that the publicans and the harlots shall go
1913-] A CHALLENGE TO THE TIME-SPIRIT 743
into the kingdom of God before you " the publicans and the harlots
who had believed.*
The same psychological laws are operative in us as in our
Lord's hearers. In us, as in them, the same Spirit worketh. To
us, as to them, the same challenge is given. If we wish to make
the best use of the material world, we must subordinate it to the
spiritual. If we wish to develop our own characters and per-
sonalities to the highest extent of their potential obedience (potentia
obedientialis), we must submit to the operative action of the Holy
Spirit.
.There is a natural preparation, however, for this temporal
mission of the Holy Spirit. Every act is conditioned by the
potency into which it is received. The fruitful operation of the
Holy Spirit presupposes that the various faculties of man are in
fair working order, the intellect guiding the will, the will controlling
the passions. The acts of natural preparation and supernatural
operation may be intimately commingled, but with, at least, a
theoretical distinction between them.
Thus the challenge to make a due equipoise between the king-
dom of the Spirit and the kingdom of the flesh involves an equi-
poise between intelligence and sensation; between objective in-
fluences and subjective receptiveness ; between authority and auton-
omy.
Hence there is such a thing as a sane subjectivism. The ob-
jective world must be subjectively appraised. The difference be-
tween a moderate and an exaggerated subjectivism is, that the one is
rightly informed; the other either uninformed or misinformed.
How, then, can the subjective be rightly informed ? By using
our wits. If a man accepts a proposition because it is beautiful
or because it is good, it is not yet a permanent light to him.
He must also accept it because it is true. He must use his wits
as well as his sympathies.
It may savor of platitude, yet we dare to write it down:
What the time-spirit mostly needs is a little common sense. If
we would be saved from mental suicide, let us not be tempted from
our platform of common sense.
*Matt. xxi. 31, 32.
IN MEMORIAM: FATHER DOYLE.
(Died August 9, 1912.)
BY MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN.
THE rippling dawn the beech wood crowned,
The nightingale sang one last note,
The sun upon the water wrote
The aubade of the glorious sound;
Yet desolate
This splendid morn for us who wait!
For us who felt the light and cheer
Of him whose life was one pure flame,
That burned out thoughts of pride and shame,
And made our doubtful vision clear;
He was the morn
In which new hopes and joys were born!
The Junes were once so full of him,
Who "was as warm and kind as June!
Above the clouds the August moon
Is shadowed to a silver rim;
He passed from sight
A moon upon an August night !
The nightingale in sombre leaves
Of his great soul a symbol is
So deeply hid that heart of his !
So deeply hid the bird that grieves,
And yet his voice
Makes our poor, longing souls rejoice.
1913-] IN MEMORIAM: FATHER DOYLE 745
Who knew this soul were not the gay
Or pompous or the proud of heart,
But those to whom the bitter part
Oft made them hate the light of day,
What words can tell
How sweet his benedictions fell!
How useless words! A voiceless prayer,
Perhaps the paintings of the sky,
Or hay-scent where the cornflowers lie,
Or music in the summer air,
May fitly speak
The grace his grace to help the weak.
But when I heard the nightingale
Thrill through the leaves upon the beech,
I knew that his was the one speech
That from my dumbness rent the veil;
Sweet, strong and sweet,
His message thrilled out, true and meet.
Against his heart he pressed the cross,
Its message was in all his voice,
And through that sorrow we rejoice:
(The pain of loss! the pain of loss!.
Sad August day!)
And yet Our Lady led the way.
THE RED ASCENT.
BY ESTHER W. NEILL.
ICHARD dismounted on the outskirts of the crowd,
and pushed his way through the human wall that sur-
rounded the main shaft of the mine. Men, women,
and little children were there, all drawn together
by that pitiful cry for help that Richard had heard
in the arbor.
"What has happened?" he asked of one of the on-
lookers.
The old miner, his face blackened by coal dust, shifted his quid
of tobacco and answered calmly : " Little fire in the mine, or mebbe
it's only the smoke from the last shots that was fired. All the
men out, thank God. Half holiday we all come out on the one-
thirty cage, but that thar woman says they ain't all out ! "
" My Peter, my Peter," cried a mother's frantic voice, " he
is down there I know. He staid to feed the mules. He is not
out. He is not home."
" He's drinking whiskey in the village," said one brutal by-
stander.
" No no my Peter is but fourteen. For God's sake, mister,
let down the cage. I will go myself to find him."
" I believe thar's others," said one young miner scratching his
head. " I ain't seen Costi, nor Angelo, nor Foliano. These here
dagoes don't know enough English to keep them alive. Boss
went round notifying the diggers to quit, and I reckon they never
heard him."
"Where's the superintendent?" asked Richard.
" I tell you this is a holiday."
" Where's the mine manager ? "
" God knows."
" Haven't you any system of checking off the men ? "
" Dunno ; that thar superintendent is a young fellow, and
he ain't worth his salt. Never was a mine run like this one."
"Where's the pit boss?"
" Pit boss ain't obliged to stay round here all the time. I tell
you this is a holiday, and I reckon the pit boss is off on a spree. I
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 747
ain't going down there to rescue no blind mules ain't nothing but
one of the mule boys been smoking in the stable."
" Maybe it ain't nothing but a hay wagon on fire, but I ain't
sure," said one of the men. " Here, Jake, let down that cage.
There sure is smoke; ain't anybody round here got the sense he
was born with ? "
" I'll go with you," said Richard quietly.
The two men stood out, leaders in the little impotent crowd,
and two others came forward to join them as they stepped into the
cage. There was some talk of signals, the engineer nodded as if
he understood, and the careless crowd watched with some degree
of interest as the cage slowly descended into the cavernous
depths.
The terror-stricken mother, finding solace in this attempt at
rescue, stopped crying and began to pray : " Holy Virgin guide
him save him ! God have mercy lead him spare him ! "
" They'll have the fire out in no time," said the old miner
comfortingly. " They can hitch up the hose and get water in the
air pump."
" Ain't the first time a hay wagon took fire."
" Pete's out bird-nesting."
" Bet your life no boy's goin' to stay in that hole on a holi-
day."
" Ain't got any business lightin' a mine with kerosene."
" Well you can't work in the dark."
" Ain't got no electricity."
"Why?"
" Main cable's water soaked."
"Wa'n't that a signal?"
" No, they ain't belled yet."
A tense hush of expectation fell upon the crowd. On the
wooded hill around them birds chirruped joyfully; bees droned in
and out of the pink cups of the wild honeysuckle; the calm peace
of the summer afternoon seemed to preclude calamity.
" Looks like more smoke coming out the shaft."
"My Lord! see that flame. What's the matter with Jake?
Why don't he hoist that cage? "
" Stop the fan. Don't yer see yer feeding the fire ? "
" For God's sake, Jake, hoist that cage."
" He's waitin' for the signal."
" Who's that comin' down the road? "
748 THE RED ASCENT [Sept.,
" Miss Fielding riding like mad. Wish to the Lord it was
the superintendent."
" Hoist that cage, man that mine's ablaze ! "
The old engineer looked through the smeared window of the
engine house, an agonized expression of uncertainty in his
eyes.
" They said three bells three bells," he repeated defensively.
" I ain't heard 'em yet."
" Hoist that cage, you crazy fool that rope's a-shaking. Hoist
'em, I tell you, you're cooking 'em alive."
The crowd, at first so tranquil in its disbelief of possible trag-
edy, was now roused to a frenzy of hysteria. As the cage ascended
a sickening stench filled the soft summer air, flames shot upward
from the shaft. Women shrieked. The cage itself was full of
fire. Six human bodies were ablaze. The miners rushed to the
rescue, but there was a scarcity of water. Men beat out the flames
with their coats, with the shawls they snatched from the women's
shoulders, but their comrades lay blackened and inert before them,
their hands and feet drawn up in convulsive postures ; one of them,
in his effort to escape the flames, had climbed to the top of the
cage, but he had perished like the rest. The old engineer had
obeyed his orders too well he had hesitated too long. As they
lifted the six bodies, one by one, from the smoking cage and bore
them by his window, he sank on the floor beside his engine, over-
come by the terrible catastrophe he had caused.
Peter's mother clawed at the dead men's clothes like a wild
creature.
" He is not here," she cried. " My Peter is not here. They
are men, all men. My Peter is but a boy."
" And the young man," said the old miner to whom Richard
had first spoken. " Where is the young man ? "
Miss Fielding was beside him, her face white with terror.
" Did did Dick Matterson go down there ? "
" Yes, that was him, I recollect now the Colonel's son. God !
it's an awful way to die." Tears fell unregarded down his rugged
face. " They can't have brought him out ; those men are all under-
sized they three of them are dagoes."
She clasped his ragged coat sleeve and leaned heavily on his
arm. " We we must do something," she cried.
" We can't now, lady," he said with the dull resignation of age.
" The timbers have caught fire. No man could live to get down
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 749
there. Fire must have been burning ever since we quit work.
Thar ain't no help could reach him now."
Jefferson Wilcox, touring gaily along the country roads with
Betty and the Colonel, stopped his machine abruptly when he saw
the crowd gathered about the mine.
" Looks like something had happened over there," he said
carelessly. " I thought the men stopped work at three- thirty."
The Colonel was not much interested. " Reckon one of the
niggers has fallen down the shaft and broken his good-for-nothing
neck," he said.
"Oh! hear that," cried Betty starting from her seat. "Wo-
men are screaming something dreadful must have happened. Go
on, Mr. Wilcox. Let us go and see."
" We're on the wrong road. I'll have to go around. Machine
will never get across that stubble field ; there's a ditch in the way."
" Oh ! look look ! " cried Betty. " There's a woman running
to meet us. It's Jess Fielding. I wonder where is Dick ? "
But Jefferson was heedless of her question. He was out of the
car hastening to meet the girl who came flying towards them. Her
blue dress was soiled with coal dust; her heavy hair, shedding all
hair pins in her mad flight, now hung about her shoulders.
" Dick Dick is down there," she cried breathlessly, pointing
to the mine. " What can we do ? Oh, God ! how can we save
him?"
Jefferson held out his arm to support her, she was trembling
with terror.
" Down down where ? " and even as he asked the question, he
had guessed at most of the truth.
" He went to save a boy," she sobbed, " the mine is on
fire the other men are out and they are dead, burned alive, and
Dick Dick is down there. Don't let them seal the mine don't
let them bury him alive. Oh, come come quickly, they say there
is no hope, that he is dead."
" Dead," repeated the Colonel, and he seemed to shrivel sud-
denly into a feeble old man, " Dick dead in that hole ? "
Betty sank down in the coarse grass, and covered her face with
her hands. " You're dreaming, Jessica. Oh, tell us it is not true."
" Come come," she said wildly, pulling Jefferson by the hand.
" You must not let them shut the mine they will not listen to me.
Come come."
750 THE RED ASCENT [Sept.,
Jefferson moved mechanically. He could not speak ; his throat
was choked; his feet were leaden weights. Jessica leaned upon
him for support, sobbing pitifully, her explanation growing more
and more incoherent. They had nearly reached the shaft, when
they heard a glad shout break from the wailing crowd, and they
saw Richard Richard rise, as if by a miracle, from the earth itself.
He staggered from the escape shaft, which was about two hundred
yards distant, with Peter, the mule boy, strapped to his back.
With a wild cry of exultation, Jefferson rushed forward. The
crowd surged around him. For a moment Richard stood like one
bewildered, blinded by the sudden glare of the sunlight, then,
falling down upon the ground, he murmured weakly :
" Unstrap the boy I cannot help "
The ropes were cut by eager hands, the mine doctor hurried
to his aid, glad of an opportunity to show his skill after his in-
effectual efforts to revive life in those stricken bodies on the hill-
side. Peter's mother was pushed to her son's side, she knelt beside
him inarticulate in her joy. After the suspense, the dread, the
certainty of death, she was emotionally exhausted.
The little foreign doctor bent over Richard solicitously, and
administered his restoratives. " He will live, thank God," he said
triumphantly. " He is a hero, and he will live." Then, as he turned
to Peter, the boy sat up.
" I'm all right," he said in his shrill, quavering voice, " 'twas
my foot. What yer cryin' about, mother? tain't nothin' but my
foot. It got twisted somehow and I fell. Heard the cage goin'
up and I hollered. He came back; he roped me on his back;
said 'twan't no other way of gettin' up them steps."
The crowd pressed closer to hear. Here was someone at last
who could tell them how the tragedy had occurred someone who
could reveal his resurrection. The boy wanted to talk. After the
blackness, the isolation of the mine, he found relief in the sound of
his own voice.
" I went to sleep must have fallen asleep forgot about the
holiday. That thar torch must have dripped kerosene on to the hay
car. First thing I knew it was afire tried to push the car to the
pump near the mule stable to get water, but the car was too heavy ;
then I saw the timbers were afire. I was a-runnin' for the escape
shaft to hike up them steps when my foot turned. Reckon it's
broke, Doc. Reckon I'd been burned same as a wisp of straw if
that man hadn't heard me when I hollered."
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 75*
He went on talking all the time the doctor was bandaging the
foot, crying out once or twice with the pain, and he watched anx-
iously as some of the men improvised a litter to carry Richard to
the automobile.
Jessica suggested that they bring Richard to her house, but the
Colonel, once assured that his son was alive, took command of the
situation; he did not propose to accept the Fielding hospitality if
he could avoid it.
" We will take him home," he said. " I will ride Spangles.
Mr. Wilcox drive the car as slowly as you can. Doctor, will you
go with us ? "
The doctor acceded willingly. Patients of such apparent dis-
tinction were a rarity in his professional experience. The dead
men lay in a rigid line beyond his help; Richard was the only one
left in need of his service.
Jessica watched the automobile as it disappeared in the black
dust of the beaten roadway. She felt weak and faint, but, in
Richard's greater need, no one had given a thought of her. She
seemed to stand alone and desolate in the midst of the crowd.
Had she the strength to mount her horse and go home, away from
this scene of horror, far away where she could not hear the con-
vulsive sobbing of the three women who had been widowed by
their husbands' heroism, or were there more than three who had
joined Richard in his work of rescue? Someone had told her, even
in the midst of the excitement, that the Italians had no one here
to mourn them ; they were newcomers. Somewhere perhaps in the
purpling vineyards of their native land mothers and sisters waited
hopefully for glad tidings that would never come.
Some compelling force drove Jessica back to the group that
surrounded the dead men. The bodies, so strong and full of health
half an hour ago, now lay impotent in their stillness, their black-
ened faces upturned to the smiling summer sky. The three wives,
one with a baby at her breast, were now sobbing softly. Life
for them had held little else than tragedy; the lines around their
youthful mouths showed power to suffer and endure. Tenderly
Jessica lifted the baby from the aching arms of the mother. "Come
home with me," she said to the weeping women. " We can do
nothing here. You and the little children come home with me."
752 THE RED ASCENT [Sept.,
CHAPTER XV.
But Richard did not recover with the promptness that the mine
doctor had prophesied. He was so ill that Jefferson daringly
took his place in the household. He hired labor without stint; he
telegraphed to the nearest hospital for two trained nurses, and he
brought a famous specialist a thousand miles to consult with the
little mine doctor, who was plainly puzzled by Richard's condition.
" It is not only the result of the disaster of which you speak,"
said the great man. " It is fever ; he must have been sick a long
time; the fact that he refused to acknowledge his illness has but
augmented the seriousness of the case."
For weeks Richard lingered, unconscious. One night when
his fever was at its height, they thought that he was dying, for
he started from his bed in his delirium crying out those wonderful
words of Isaias:
" The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord hath
anointed me; He hath sent me to preach to the meek, to heal the
contrite of heart, and to preach a release to the captives, and deliver-
ance to them that are shut up."
"What is he saying?" said the Colonel. "Is he trying to
pray?"
" He doesn't know," said the nurse with calm practicability.
" I must reduce his temperature somehow. We must have more ice.
I'll give him another alcohol bath. His fever should break to-
night or "
" Or," the Colonel repeated the small word with paternal solici-
tude. " I see, madam, you mean or he will die ? "
" He is very ill," admitted the nurse reluctantly.
It was the next morning that Richard woke to a dim realiza-
tion of his surroundings. Jefferson was seated by the window, and
caught the first normal glimpse of his eyes.
"Been sick a long time?" he questioned, holding up a white
hand that seemed almost transparent in the sunlight.
" Well, I guess," said Jeff joyfully, coming close to the bed-
side. "I'm glad you've waked up at last."
" Have you been here all the time? "
" Didn't expect me to leave you in this fix ? I've been running
the farm."
Richard smiled faintly. " Universal genius, eh ? "
1913-] THE RED ASCENT 753
Jefferson grinned. " You've guessed it. Now don't talk or
that nurse will blame me for a relapse."
" Then you do the talking," said Richard. " Tell me what has
happened all this time. Is that mule boy all right? "
Jefferson took a chair by the bed, and began to smooth Richard's
bare arm soothingly. " Couldn't kill him with an axe," he an-
swered. " Been here every day since you've been sick, brought all
kinds of messy dishes that his mother cooked for you. Nurse
wouldn't let you eat them, so she gave some of them to me don't
know why she has designs on my digestion. Then, of course, the
neighbors have hovered round. Sometimes I've felt I was in the
midst of a county delegation just like a presidential candidate
shaking hands with the gentry. You've had a carload of jellies
sent you and a hothouse of flowers. You're a hero you know,
though your heroism isn't your fault, it's inherited from your
father, and your great-grandfather, and the Lord knows who.
This is a great part of the country nothing seems worth while
unless it is inherited."
"And the Colonel?"
" The Colonel's blooming under all this publicity. You've
been a great political asset to the Colonel. You know old Senator
Wurth is dead, and durned if they haven't asked the Colonel to go
to Washington and fill out his unexpired term."
Dick turned weakly on his pillows. " And is he going? " he
asked.
" Going ! of course he's going. The Colonel may not agree
to what his party demands, but he's got very definite views that
the country is going to the bowwows, and he wants to tell a few of
the Senators what he thinks of them. I think I'll spend the winter
in Washington, and engage a permanent seat in the Senate
gallery."
Richard closed his eyes wearily, and was silent for a long
time, then he said : " If the Colonel is provided for we can drop
that Texas claim."
" Drop it ! " Jefferson ran his fingers through his yellow hair
until it bristled. " I'd like to tell you a thing or two, if I wasn't
afraid you would have a relapse."
" I'm not relapsing."
t( Well just settle down there and keep calm. Think you'll
get a fever if I tell you that the Texas claim is settled, that we
compromised for half a million out of court?"
VOL. XCVII. 48
754 TH E RED ASCENT [Sept.,
Richard's fingers tightened on those of his friend, " Oh, Jeff,
you didn't not when I was like this? I don't think it was fair
to her."
" Her," repeated Jeff defensively, and a strange expression
came into his eyes. " Why she did most of it herself. Did I tell
you that I had been here all the time ? Well that was a lie. I went
to Texas; was gone ten days. I found out the amazing fact,
that even the Colonel begrudgingly acknowledges, that this Mr.
Fielding is an honest man. It required neither my brilliant intellect,
nor my forensic ability, to convince him that we had a clear case.
You see the old letters that you had proved your grandfather wasn't
in Texas at the time, and Jessica had sent her father a peck of
special deliveries with Miss Prunesy's story in them. We spent the
best part of a day digging out the old deed, and the signature was
a sort of caricature on your grandfather's. You see the trouble
was old man Mike couldn't cart the blackboard copy around with
him. Then there was another point : Mike was your grandfather's
overseer, and acting as his agent, and according to the laws of
Texas well I won't go into the legal aspect I learned a lot.
Claims are different down there ; the fact that Texas was a republic,
and came into the union owning its own land, seems to make a
difference, and I tell you the rights of women and minors are
respected."
"Go on," said Richard anxiously.
" Well, Mr. Fielding, who proved to be a very pleasant fair-
minded person, said he thought the matter could be arranged out
of court. You see nobody had gobbled up your land, it was still
there, and he proposed to give it back to you. He said that he
had never questioned his father's legacy ; that the ground had given
him his start; he was down and out when he went there eighteen
years ago and began raising cattle. Every time he made an extra
dollar, if he didn't buy cows, he bought land. Then he struck oil,
not on your land but on his. Now well his bank account would
even make Wall street sit up and take notice. There was a syndi-
cate wanted to buy your ground; offered half a million. I nosed
round there long enough to find that that was a good price for it.
Colonel wired me to close the deal."
" Then then what did she mean by saying that she would have
to work for a living? "
" Well, I don't know; maybe she thought so, maybe she didn't.
That girl would keep anybody guessing. She's been here every day
1913.] THE RED ASCENT 755
since the accident. I heard her ask Betty what she thought you
would do next ? "
Jefferson paused, the question was very vital to him, and he
had chosen this way of asking it.
" Why, I'm going back," said Richard simply. " I'm going
back, they won't need me now. I've been lying here half-awake
wondering if the way wouldn't open somehow. I didn't speak
because it hardly seemed worth while. I believe I've been vaguely
conscious for a long time. I seemed to feel people moving around
me, waiting on me. I seemed to hear voices without being able
to understand what they were saying. My soul, the spirit part
of me, seemed to be caught in a trap trapped in my body. I
believe suffering makes people feel like that, unless they are wide
enough awake to take the transcendental view. As soon as I'm
free I'm going back."
" Do you want to go ? "
" Want what do you mean, Jeff ? "
" I mean do you want to go, or do you feel that you must? "
" Both," he smiled feebly, " the want seems to make the must.
In my dreams I've felt the old force pushing me on. Down in that
mine helping that poor little devil to the daylight, I felt that I
would have to go back to the seminary. That mine seemed to
symbolize what I wanted to do lifting people out of the blackness
to a glimpse of the supernatural. Since I've been home I've been
too tired to think. I even fancied I might have been mistaken in
my purpose in life. I dreamed of settling down here and living
forever, writing a thing now and then to settle world-wide ques-
tions. I believe I even dreamed vaguely of marriage."
Jefferson sat up waiting eagerly for his next words ; his hands
rumpled his hair nervously.
" It was only a passing mood," continued Richard. " I be-
lieve my grandfather's extravagant love letters set me wondering
why I didn't have some sentimental emotions of my own. But
a wife well, I wouldn't know what to do with one. If I married
a girl I should always feel that she deserved some consideration,
and I wouldn't want to consider her. I have always wanted to be
free."
" Poor girls ! " said a mocking voice in the doorway, and look-
ing up they saw Jessica standing in the dim light of the sick room,
her arms full of flowers. " I'm so glad you've waked up at last."
Betty came bustling in behind her. " Oh, Dick Dicky did
756 THE RED ASCENT [Sept.,
you know that we were really going to Washington? I'm so
excited I can neither eat nor sleep;" she knelt down beside the bed
and clasped Richard's hand. " I feel like a fairy princess."
Jessica came nearer and scattered the flowers over the bed.
" They count you a hero, even if you are a woman hater," she said.
" I feel more like a corpse," said Richard humorously, viewing
the flowers.
" Nonsense," said Jessica, " you look like Sleeping Beauty in
my fairy book."
" I'm sure I do."
" And I'm sure you must all get out of here," said Jefferson.
" I hear the nurse coming. If she sees you she will blame me for
letting you in."
Richard made no protest as Jefferson hurried his visitors to
the door. His attempt to think, to adjust his mind to his new
situation, had exhausted him, and when the nurse came in a few
minutes later she found that he had fallen into a restless sleep.
Jefferson walked through the shadowy woods with Jessica.
He had formed the habit of seeing her home every afternoon that
she came to inquire for the invalid. Usually they rode on horse-
back, but to-day they walked, leading their horses through the
fern-bordered bridle path. It was Jefferson's suggestion that they
dismount. It was easier " to talk " he said. Jessica had demurred
at first. With a woman's quick intuition she had guessed his reason.
" We have known each other for six weeks," he began after
a long silence.
" Seven," she corrected him.
" It is a long time."
" Wouldn't it be more flattering to consider it a short time ? "
she teased.
" Oh, it's no use to play with words," he said hopelessly, and
his eyes looked care-worn and afraid. " During those weeks we've
talked about birds, and bushes, and the Lord only knows how many
other things in which I did not feel a particle of interest. I believe
you know what I want to say, Jessica, and you know, too, that
I don't know how to say it."
She stopped by the side of a big oak, and she let her horse
walk deliberately between them. " Is this intended as an ardent
proposal ? " she asked.
" It is it is," he cried pushing the horse aside and clasping
1913-] THE RED ASCENT 757
both her hands. " You know that I love love you, and I did
not feel free to tell you so until to-day."
Her soft eyes had lost their look of mischief now.
"Why?" she asked.
" Because I thought Dick Matterson wanted you, and I
thought perhaps "
" Go on," she urged.
" I thought perhaps you cared for him."
" And suppose suppose, Jeff, I confessed that under some cir-
cumstances I might have cared ? "
His face looked haggard in the sunlight. " What circum-
stances?"
She hesitated. " Well, perhaps the most important circum-
stance : if he had cared for me."
"Then you are in love with him?"
" No no," she contradicted, " I only had symptoms you
see he was indifferent."
" How could he have been ? "
" Of course it was amazing," she smiled, " he wanted some-
thing else in life. I knew it all the time, that was one reason
I cared."
" I don't exactly see."
"Of course you don't, it was too complicated an emotion even
for me, for if he had given up all his high aspirations, his religious
ambitions, and loved me, no doubt I should have hated him."
" Then you really did not want him after all ? "
" No, I suppose I didn't."
He took her unresisting in his arms, and smiled happily down
upon her. " I believe I've had a few symptoms myself," he said.
[THE END.]
THE CENTENARY OF FREDERIC OZANAM.
(April 23, i8i3-September 8, 1853.)
BY WILLIAM P. H. KITCHIN, PH.D.
YEAR or two ago Spain feted the birth-centenary
of one of her most brilliant sons, Father James
Balmes, who in his brief life of thirty-eight years
wrote several volumes of philosophy, history, and
apologetics, which, seven decades after their pub-
lication, still retain their interest and their worth. This year
Catholic France celebrates the hundredth anniversary of another
knight of the pen, Frederic Ozanam, un preux chevalier sans peur
et sans reproche, whose whole ambition was to spend and be spent
in the service of the Church.
Forty years was the short span of life accorded by Providence
to this champion, only forty years, yet how full they were in good
works! Not satisfied with his duties as professor, nor his renown
as an author, he inaugurated the St. Vincent de Paul Societies,
devoting his time and attention to their expansion, and it is, thanks
to his energy and zeal, that they have ever since held a large
place in Catholic life. He was also instrumental in bringing Father
Lacordaire to the pulpit of Notre Dame. And he it was who
accompanied Monsignor Afire, Archbishop of Paris, on his glorious
and tragic embassy to the infuriated populace, where the prelate
won the martyr's crown.
Frederic Ozanam descended from an ancient French family
of the district of Bresse. This family, originally Jewish, had been
converted to Christianity by St. Didier. A certain Jacques Ozanam
was a distinguished mathematician in the seventeenth century,
and merited a eulogy from the pen of Fontenelle. He had, also,
more wit than usually falls to the lot of geometers. Alluding to
the theological quarrels of his time, which were convulsing France
with factions, he used to say : " It is the business of the Doctors
of the Sorbonne to dispute, of the Pope to decide, of mathemati-
cians to go straight to heaven by the perpendicular."
Frederic Ozanam was born at Milan, April 23, 1813. His
father, who had been first an officer in the armies of Napoleon,
1913.] THE CENTENARY >F FR&DZRIC OZANAM 759
and then engaged in commerce, had finally established himself
there as a doctor. Ozanam pere prepared his more famous son
for college. He was, as his son testifies, a man of rare information,
and of still rarer application. " My father loved art and science
and study. After leaving the army he had read the Bible of
Dom Calmet from cover to cover, and knew Latin as we pro-
fessors no longer know it now."
Thus prepared, Frederic completed his preliminary studies with
the greatest success. His father wished him to study law, so after
remaining a year with a barrister at Lyons, the young man was
sent to Paris at the age of twenty to complete his studies and
take his degrees. His inclinations were, however, for poetry and
literature, and while following the law course he found time to
attend many a lesson in history and belles-lettres as well. He
also utilized his opportunities of learning foreign languages, for
which he had a great aptitude. A letter to his young brother
tells of the severity of the regime he followed, and the drudgery
he imposed on himself. " In 1837," he writes, " for five months
I worked regularly ten hours a day without counting class hours,
and fourteen to fifteen hours the last month." Thanks to his talent
and unwearied application, he obtained the degree of Doctor of
Laws at the age of twenty- three, and two years later that of
Doctor of Literature. His theses on this occasion one in Latin,
On the Descent of the Heroes into Hell in the Poets of Antiquity,
the other in French on Dante were so brilliantly presented and
defended that Cousin, whose reputation was then European, ex-
claimed : " Mr. Ozanam, your eloquence could not be surpassed ! "
After teaching a year or two in Lyons, and refusing several
tempting offers elsewhere, in 1840, at the age of twenty-seven, he
became supplementary professor of foreign literature at the Sor-
bonne, and in 1844 full professor, a position he held till his death.
During these thirteen years of teaching he amassed an immense
quantity of lore and erudition, only some of which has ever seen
the light in his published works. In the edition before me, as I
write, there are nine volumes in octavo, and two large volumes of
Melanges in quarto. Yet his editor and friend, Ampere, warns
the reader that vast collections of his MSS. remain unpublished.
He adds, with a poignant touch of pathos:
During the last sad visit that Ozanam made to Italy in the
years 1852 and 1853, he had the courage, although dying, to*
*Lettres, vol. i., preface xiv.
THE CENTENARY OF FRDRIC OZANAM [Sept.,
write on his travels as he alone knew how; to make laborious
researches in the libraries of Florence, Pisa, and Siena ; to copy
several lengthy fragments of the sermons of Maurice de Sully,
Bishop of Paris in old French; to trace a plan for the
history of the commune of Milan, which was to form portion
of a work on the Italian communes His intention was to
follow the trend of civilization and literature in Italy from the
fifth century to the thirteenth. In the notes of his lectures
which have relation to this vast subject, he begins with the
arrival of the Goths in Italy ; the works of Boetius, the writings
of St. Gregory are analyzed, and the life of this great Pope
told The life of St. Benedict, the Carlovingian period in
Italy, the celebrated book of Peter Lombard, the philosophy of
St. Anselm, are thoroughly gone into. The doctrine of St.
Thomas, the mysticism of St. Bonaventure, are explained by
that fine mind, which showed as much force in dealing with
philosophy as it displayed taste in treating of literature.*
Ozanam was still a collegian when, with the splendid audacity
of youth, he dreamed of writing a " Demonstration of the Truth
of the Catholic Religion from the Antiquity of Religious and
Moral Beliefs." To realize this plan one should, he affirmed,
know ancient history in all its branches, and be master of a dozen
languages. As an initial step towards carrying out this rather
extended programme, he set himself bravely to work to add Hebrew
and Sanscrit to the ancient and modern languages he already knew.
A tour through Italy gave another direction to his thoughts,
and inspired him with a passion for the Middle Ages. This led
him to select for his doctor's thesis: Dante and Catholic Phil-
osophy in the Thirteenth Century. In this work, anticipating to
some extent the neo-scholastic movement of our own times, he
shows that Dante drew his philosophy from St. Thomas and St.
Bonaventure. To interpret the great Florentine with authority,
Ozanam tries to plunge himself in the milieu where that animo
sdegnoso, so sinned against and sinning, lived and thought and
suffered. In the first commentators on Dante, and more particu-
larly in the MS. texts of the Divina Comniedia, he finds the key
to that strange poem, which has proved so puzzling to critics.
Protestants saw in Dante merely a forerunner of Luther;
patriotic Italians looked upon him as the prophet of their national
independence; Fauriel, the immediate predecessor of Ozanam at
*Civ. au 5 Siecle, vol. i., preface, pp. 23, 24.
1913-] THE CENTENARY OF FRDRIC OZANAM 761
the Sorbonne, would lower the glorious epic to the level of a vul-
gar love-song. But Ozanam, noticing that symbolism and allegory
were the predominant notes of the literature of the Middle Ages,
remarking also that the Fathers of the Church applied the same
method to the interpretation of the Bible, finds therein the explana-
tion of Dante's sublime though obscure cantos. After pointing
out that, according to the Fathers of the Church, the personages
of the Bible have, in addition to their historical position, a prophetic
role and significance, he continues:
The genius of Dante fed on the Bible must have proceeded
in the same way. The personages whom he introduces are real
in his thought and prophetic in his intention; they are ideas
clothed in flesh, figures endowed with life It is essential
that this image be borrowed from realities, that it coincide
with the idea it represents, that one find in it, according to
the original energy of the word, a symbolon, that is an ap-
proximation.*
The Divine Comedy seen thus is an historical poem in the literal
sense, and a philosophical poem in the figurative sense. It is also
a political poem, wherein Dante gives his personal views on the
burning questions of the time.
Dante was Ozanam's first love, to whom he ever after re-
mained true. He says somewhere that a whole lifetime would not
be too much to give to explaining Dante, in order to make this
great man understood and loved, and to teach the due appreciation
of the things greater than himself which he loved and sung. As
time went on, he devoted other works to the interpretation of the
poet. He published a work on the Sources of the Divine Comedy,
one on the Poetes Franciscains en Italie, also Documents Inedits
pour servir a I'Histoire Litteraire de I'ltalie, and, last but not least,
after seven years study and meditation, he gave to the world
a commentary and translation of thirty-three cantos of the Purga-
torio.
Great poets and thinkers often throw some reflection of their
fame on the humble commentator or scholiast, whose business it is
to explain and illustrate the Master's thought for the benefit of the
uninitiated. Servius is always associated with Virgil; Atticus
and Tiro with Cicero; Malone with Shakespeare; Spencer with
Pope; Boswell with Johnson; Cajetan with St. Thomas. So it
*Second edition of Dante, p. 53.
762 THE CENTENARY OF FRDRIC OZANAM [Sept.,
has been with Ozanam. According to Father X. Kraus, the prince
of modern Danteists, this is the part of Ozanam's work that is of
greatest value to the scientific historian; it is also the part with
which time has dealt most leniently, for even to-day no student
of Dante can afford to pass by the pages of interpretation written,
and the documents gathered together by the industry of this Sor-
bonne professor of the early nineteenth century.*
From the thirteenth century, the culminating point of the
Middle Ages, Ozanam turned back to their dim and uncertain
beginnings in the fifth. He discovers a triple origin to them,
namely, barbarian, Roman, and Christian, all of which he treats
in his Etudes Germaniques, and his Civilisation au Cinquieme Siecle.
His object is to show how the Church produced modern civilization
from the ruins of Roman and barbarian times. " In the history
of literature," he says, " I study principally that civilization of
which it is the bloom and flower, and in civilization I notice par-
ticularly the work of Christianity." Should anyone object to this
mingling of history and apologetics on the ground that the author
strives to establish a thesis rather than to relate history, to sustain
a foregone conclusion rather than to draw conclusions from ascer-
tained facts, without hesitation or shame he admits the objection :
Those who repudiate religious belief in a scientific treatise
will accuse me of lack of independence ; but to my mind nothing
is more honorable than such a reproach. I know no self-
respecting man who would meddle with the difficult trade of
writing, unless he has some conviction that sways him, and
by .which consequently he is bound. I do not want that
wretched independence, whose watchword is to believe nothing
and to love nothing. Certainly it is not advisable to be too
lavish with one's professions of faith; but who pray would
have the courage to treat the most mysterious points of history
without ever taking a side on the everlasting questions
it raises? From the writer two things only may be expected:
firstly, that his conviction be free and intelligent, and the
Christian faith wants no other; this is the reasonable adhesion
St. Paul demands. Secondly, that the desire to prove a belief
never lead him to distort facts, or to content himself with
doubtful testimonies and unauthorized consequences.f
*Kraus, Dante sein Leben und sein Werk, pp. 17, 383, 426, 435. See also
Jordan, in Revue Pratique d'Apologetique, October 15, 1912; and Moeller, in
Revue d'Histoire Ecclesiastique, April 15, 1913.
^(Euvres Completes, vol. Hi., p. 16.
1913-] THE CENTENARY OF FRDRIC OZANAM 763
The man who wrote thus, and proposed such high ideals to
himself, was not likely to go astray through lack of inquiry, or
indulge unduly in private pet theories to the detriment of sound
criticism. If he erred sometimes, if later searchers found some of
his conclusions unwarranted, and some of his authorities of doubt-
ful authenticity, it was not through any esprit de systeme on his
part, but because his were the limitations of his age ; as an historian
he was not ahead of his time, nor could he be expected to profit
by documents and studies unknown in his day. In this connection
a very beautiful and eloquent passage may be quoted on the aims
and limitations of Catholic science.
It (Catholic science) is humble, and does not think a whole
life too much to give for any truth however small. It is
patient, too, because it has hope and confidence. We pursue,
microscope in hand, the smallest details of vegetable life; we
bend over the retorts and test-tubes of our laboratories; we
reconstruct with difficulty effaced inscriptions and languages
in ruins. It is not given to us to see the end of these dry
investigations; but we know that others will draw from them
conclusions glorious for God's providence. We are only at
the very beginning, and the road is long, but we know that
God is at the end. When our forefathers laid the first stones
of their cathedrals at Paris, at Chartres, at Rheims, they knew
full well that they would never enjoy the fruit of their toil.
But no matter how long the process of building might last,
they knew their faith would last longer still. They trusted
and believed in their Catholic posterity. They dug down into
the earth and rock to place therein the deep foundations in
the hope that future generations would build up those walls
and towers, until after five hundred years the cross rose
proudly above the steeple.*
Ozanam himself, notwithstanding his enormous reading and
almost encyclopedic knowledge, would be the last to assert that
his lectures or his books gave the final word on any point " I
never pretended to exhaust any of those subjects, one alone of
which would afford ample employment for many lives."f Natur-
ally historical science, as well as every other, has made immense
strides during the last sixty years, and Ozanam's histories in the
opinion of specialists have been excelled, and to a large extent
superseded, by more modern publications for instance, the monu-
*(Euvres Computes, vol. iii., p. 123. ^Lettres, vol. ii., p. 185.
764 THE CENTENARY OF FREDERIC OZANAM [Sept.,
mental Histoire Litteraire de France in thirty quarto volumes, or
its German synopsis by Elbert, Geschichte der Literatur des Mittel-
alters im Abendland. But for the educated public who need merely
a careful and fairly accurate presentation of any period, and do
not crave the excruciating exactness of the specialist, his works
have retained their interest and popularity, as is evidenced by all
having reached six and seven editions,. The elevation of his
thoughts, the felicity of his comparisons, the harmonious swing
and lilt of his oratorical periods, added to the very real informa-
tion they convey, make his books most agreeable and stimulating
reading. And we venture to prophesy that many decades must
yet pass by before his works will have lost their fascination and
hold over his countrymen.
Ozanam, the writer, acquired for himself deserved renown,
but still more precious because rarer and more difficult is the
aureola of Ozanam the philanthropist. Talented men are usually
to be found in sufficient abundance for all practical needs, but
unselfish and self-sacrificing men are pearls of great price met
with only once in a lifetime, and our eloquent professor was one
of these. While pursuing his studies at Paris, the irreligious youth
with whom he came in contact often pointed the finger of scorn
at his religion, saying, that although Catholicism had done great
things in the past, she was now a dead tree without sap or
foliage. Stung by this taunt at the age of twenty, Ozanam, with
seven other students, founded a Conference of Charity, which
afterwards they re-named the Society of St. Vincent de Paul.
Let him tell us himself of the humble beginnings of the work as
he told it to his confreres of Florence in the year 1853.
I must tell you that it is not due to my personal merit that
I have become Vice-President of the general Council of Paris,
but simply owing to my seniority. You see before you one of
the eight students, who twenty years ago, in May, 1833, grouped
themselves together under the protection of St. Vincent de Paul.
We were then deluged by philosophical and heterodox theories
which made great noise in the world, and we felt the need to
strengthen our faith in the midst of the attacks made against
it by a false science. Some of our student companions were
materialists, others disciples of Saint-Simon, others of Fourier,
others again deists. When we Catholics spoke to these stray
sheep of the. marvels of Christianity, they all replied to us:
" You are right if you speak of the past : Christianity formerly
1913-] THE CENTENARY OF FREDERIC OZANAM 765
worked wonders, but to-day Christianity is dead. You who
boast of being Catholics, what do you do? Where are the
works that at once prove your faith, and will make us respect
and receive it?" They were right: their objection was not
without some foundation. Then it was we said to ourselves:
come ! let us get to work ! let our acts be brought into accordance
with our beliefs ! Let us help our neighbor as our Lord
did, and let us place our faith under the protection of charity!
Eight of us then gathered together with this determination,
and at first as though jealous of our treasure, we did not
want to receive others into our ranks. But God had willed it
otherwise. The tiny association of intimate friends that we had
originally in view, became in His designs the starting-point
of an immense reunion of brethren, who were to spread them-
selves over a great part of Europe. You see then that we
have no right to decorate ourselves with the title of founders :
it is God Himself Who wanted and Who founded our Society!
I recollect in the beginning a good friend of mine, who was
fascinated by the theories of Saint-Simon, said to me with a
feeling of pity : " What do you hope to do ? You are only
eight poor students, and you dream of alleviating the poverty
and wretchedness which flourish in a city like Paris! And
even if you do meet with some success, you will not have done
much after all! We, on the other hand, are building up ideas
and a system which will reform the world and eradicate pain
and misery for ever! We shall do in a moment for humanity,
what you will not be able to do in many centuries ! " You
know, gentlemen, how these theories have turned out which so
deluded my poor friend ! And we on whom he had such com-
passion instead of eight, are now, in Paris alone, two thousand,
and we visit five thousand families, that is about twenty thou-
sand persons, or one-quarter of the poor whom the immense
city contains. In France alone our branches number five hun-
dred, and we have branches also in England, in Spain, in Bel-
gium, in America, and even at Jerusalem. Thus it is that by
humble beginnings one succeeds in great undertakings like our
Lord, Who from the lowliness of the crib rose to the glorifica-
tion of Thabor. And thus, too, God has deigned to make our
work His, and has spread it throughout the world and crowned
it with blessings.*
Even in Ozanam's lifetime the tiny mustard seed had grown
into a mighty tree, and to-day in nearly every Catholic diocese in the
^Melanges, vol. ii., pp. 41-45.
766 THE CENTENARY OF FRDRIC OZANAM [Sept.,
world there is a St. Vincent de Paul Society, and the sums ex-
pended in organized charity amount to millions. The Popes Greg-
ory XVI., Pius IX., and Leo XIII. issued briefs in favor of the
associations, and granted numerous indulgences not only to the
alumni, but also to the poor assisted by them, and to the families
of the members.
As long as Ozanam lived, his time, his talents, his purse were
at the service of the poor. Every year he made it a point to dis-
tribute to them at least the tenth part of his annual income. When-
ever he visited them, he always left behind him, besides money,
some pious object, such as a crucifix, a picture, or a small statue.
One New Year's day he heard that a family he knew had been
obliged to mortgage some heirlooms. His first impulse was to go
to their assistance, but his wife dissuaded him, presenting many
plausible reasons. When, however, night had come, and he looked
around his own comfortable home, and noticed all the presents he
had received from friends, pupils, and admirers, he could no longer
restrain his pity for those whom want had forced to part with
their cherished possessions, and then and there he went to the
pawnbroker's and redeemed the heirlooms for his proteges.
For several years he had been helping an Italian, and finally-
got a good situation for him. But the foreigner was guilty of
some misconduct, and had to be dismissed. Unabashed, he ap-
pealed again to his protector, but Ozanam turned a deaf ear, and
sternly refused him any assistance. Scarcely had the unfortunate
left the house when Ozanam's conscience began to prick him, and
he said to himself, " a man ought never to reduce another to
despair, nor has he the right to refuse bread even to the vilest
criminal; one day I shall need and expect that God will not be
merciless to me, as I have been towards one of these creatures re-
deemed by His blood." Immediately he picked up his hat, ran
after the Italian, and made up by a generous alms for his first and
quite legitimate indignation.
Such a strenuous life: study for ten and twelve hours a day;
writing articles for reviews and newspapers; giving lectures to
various societies; collating manuscripts, and searching libraries
would have sufficed to undermine the strongest constitution. Oza-
nam had always been delicate, and already at the age of thirty-
three his health began to fail. The various tours he made with
a view to recuperation scarcely afforded him any rest, as every-
where new literary projects, new problems to examine and to solve
1913-] THE CENTENARY OF FRDRIC OZANAM 767
presented themselves to his insatiable mind. Indeed, as already
mentioned, some of his most painstaking investigations, some of his
most delightful books, were the fruits of these so-called vacation
rambles.
During the Easter session of 1852 he was very ill, but hearing
that his pupils were calling for him at the Sorbonne, he rose from
his dying bed and hastened to the University. To the remon-
strances and entreaties of his wife and his physician he replied:
" I want to do honor to my profession." When he reached the
classroom pale and gasping, the students received him with a tempest
of applause, and enthusiastic acclamations were renewed several
times during the lecture. For a nervous, artistic temperament
like his, the sympathetic welcome of his pupils was just the spur
required to raise him to the highest flights of eloquence. He
launched forth into a magnificient improvisation, ending with the
touching words:
Gentlemen, they reproach our century with being selfish,
and they say that the professors suffer from the general epi-
demic. Yet it is here we ruin our health, here we wear out
our vital forces; I do not complain; our lives belong to you,
we owe them to you until our last breath, and you shall have
them. As for me, gentlemen, if I die, it will be in your service.
It was the song of the swan; never again did he hear the
plaudits of the youth, who had crowded around his chair for
thirteen years.
The following summer and autumn he spent in Spain. His
wish was to make a pilgrimage to the famous shrine of St. James
at Compostella, but he had not strength to travel beyond Burgos.
He published his notes and souvenirs of this trip in the charming
study entitled, Pelerinage au Pays du Cid, to be found in the first
volume of his Melanges. The winter of 1853 he spent in Italy,
principally at Pisa. Although sick and dying, he left no stone un-
turned to introduce the St. Vincent de Paul Societies into Tuscany,
for hitherto the then archduke and his executive had refused to
authorize them. But even cynical politicians could not resist the
magnetism of Ozanam's personal appeal, and within a few months
societies were established at Florence, Pisa, and Siena.
The valiant champion felt now that his work was done, and
he began to prepare himself quietly and calmly for the end. His
;68 THE CENTENARY OF FREDERIC OZANAM [Sept.,
death, which took place at Marseilles, September 8, 1853, was that
of a saint, full of piety, unction, and the most perfect resignation.
When the priest who assisted him in his last moments, urged him
to have confidence in God, " Why should I fear Him?" he answered,
" I love Him so much." In his will he expressed the wish that his
relatives and family might forever remain faithful to their heritage
of the Catholic religion.
For the edition of Ozanam's works published in 1883, Pope
Leo XIII. deigned to write an apostolic brief to the author's widow.
In this document His Holiness says :
We are certain that you desire nothing more than to pre-
serve piously that faith and filial piety towards Mother Church,
and thus to follow the footsteps of him, who consecrated him-
self to Her, as you say, and who was for his fellow-citizens
a model of religion and good works. It is then a pleasure
and a joy for Us to see the memory of this illustrious man
honored, in order that the number of those who wish to share in
the same glory may increase; particularly at a time so critical
for Christianity, when the struggle against the wicked must be
sustained by brave men of deep knowledge and earnest endeavor,
who will uphold the cause of truth, and lead others to the love
of virtue.
Could there be for any child of the Catholic Church a higher
reward than such weighty words of commendation from the Vicar
of Christ Himself, or for Frederic Ozanam a more glorious epitaph?
THE AMATEUR BARGEE.
BY LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY.
N this jaded world new amusements have their value.
Ours, one summer, lay very near the ground. It
is wonderful how long a person can contemplate
a thing, love it, and even desire it, without develop-
ing the instinct to grab it: and equally wonderful
how contagious is grabbism, once it gets recognized as a practical
thing. Here were several of us, all independently given, it seems,
to hanging over bridges, and watching with longing the movements
of barges on English canals. Oh, that utter rest from all art
and all morals betokened by a long grimy boat, drawn by a single
horse on the tow-path, slowly, slowly gliding under a dark arch,
with its generally invisible crew ! Oh, blessed and justifiable envy,
directed towards folk who so passed their days ! The bicycle, the
train, the motor, the aeroplane, and every other contrivance for
getting there what are they but vanity? Pre-historic transporta-
tion, the embodied negation of hustle, wore a halo by comparison.
We therefore thought it meeter
To carry off the latter.
We sighed for the barge ! More, we got it. It took some study,
and even diplomacy, plus various fees, not exorbitant, to find
a disused specimen. An aged nondescript, called the Moll, lay
at her moorings in another county : we had her emptied, fumigated,
made water-tight, and painted. This worthy receptacle, when sent
down to us, proved to be a sort of gigantic coffin, scooped deep,
and about seventy-two feet long from stem to stern. She was
adorned with many movable planks, each laid deckwise when not
in use as a gangway. Two sets of uprights, forming a double
stockade and placed well apart, served to make progress from one
end to the other a truly gymnastic matter ; incidentally, they offered
to hold up at need a huge tarpaulin, not without its uses, we thought,
under the wet English sky. As a matter of fact, it was never
stretched over the hold but once. We intended the Moll for a
beast of burden, not for a habitation, but the vast cavern was a
VOL. xcvii 49
770 THE AMATEUR BARGEE [Sept.,
convenience for luggage. There was a small cabin aft, full of cup-
boards and crannies, and built up with stuffy berths; the roof of
this formed a large, pleasant, and necessary loggia. At the entrance
to the cabin was the square of flooring for the steerer to stand in,
cheek by jowl with what seemed to be one of the most enormous
rudders known to man. One small " steps," moved hither and
thither, served as our only apparent means (short of supernatural
levitation) of getting from the hold to the saloon deck, or to the
upper stage of it farther along, which was the point of vantage
on the cabin roof. The cargo for a seventeen-days' cruise included
some pots and pans, a firkin for drinking-water, a spirit-lamp,
a flashlight, a mandolin, groceries, charts, a few topographical
books, a portable bathtub, a long chair, a dog, two tents, five
camp-beds wed to a prodigious array of blankets, rugs, and old
coats and shawls; also a medical and surgical case for accidents
and injuries, such as duly poured in upon us with a very abandon
of frequency and cordiality.
The crew, headed by Wags, the terrier, was six in number,
under the true out-of-doorer, the lady whom we elected captain.
Add to these a horse ; and lastly a man-of -all- work. We stipulated,
at the canal company's office, for a nice one : could they recommend
or obtain such? Promptly appeared a paragon, aged twenty-five
or thereabouts, and exhibiting all the steadiness and serenity of
advanced eld. Poor Watty had a history already. His young wife
had made a fatal misstep on the black slippery barge-planks, while
they had drawn up near a lock for the night, and her Watty was
absent, having gone up to the village to get milk for the two
babies; after that the canal was a bitter place to the widowed lad,
and he had taken up coal-heaving ashore. It was two years ago,
and more; and now he was persuaded to walk the tow-path again.
Watty was, to be brief, a brick : silent, patient, all-comprehend-
ing, infinitely quick, and pleasant to look at. He was spare and
straight, with a light curly head, a fine coat of tan, and a blue dogged
eye meeting yours squarely : the perfect type of some imagined Brit-
ish private in The Daily Mirror ', saving the colors in a far-away
scrimmage. He knew his business, and made a loyal scout to the
women and the men whom he must (at least at the outset) have
thought completely crazy. His costume was corduroy of a cinnamon
brown, hot weather as it was; his sleeves were rolled back to the
elbow over nervy arms tattooed up, down, and across with Lillie,
and the ineradicable marginal scroll-work to the same; his trousers
1913-] THE AMATEUR BARGEE 771
were clipped below the knee with metal rings, displaying to great
advantage shoes hobnailed and iron-crescented like the horse's own ;
his buckled belt was medievally gay, and carried in the middle,
behind, the huge key of the half-hundred locks we were to travel
through. Watty was a bargee born and bred, but had no opinion
of bargees as a class. For those wanderers of the Gentile world
to whom he alluded as " roadsters," he had less " dis-veneration."
Bargees were too rough for us, he said. This depreciation
whipped up our interest not a little. The women we passed all
wore striped calicoes and black sunbonnets; they were strong, taci-
turn, big-boned creatures, generally stationed at the helm, and
managing the huge tiller with half the fingers of one hand. The
men, one to a craft, trod the path with the plodding beast, and
threw the loose guiding-rope over bridges and boats with the most
careless dexterity. Watty was a wonder in the exercise of this
primitive but not uncomplicated art, stimulated, doubtless, by
the consciousness that his fares were there to be edified. He
put on an aggressive air as human beings hove in sight: one saw
his responsibilities coming erect, hair by hair, exactly as on Wags'
absurd little back. Watty certainly went prepared to defend us
with his life against the jibes our unexpected appearance might well
have provoked. For every other vessel on the canal was sunk low
to the waterline, transporting coal or stone, while ours towered high
in air as an "empty;" their crew were working- folk on their
rounds, and ours only tired brains frivolling in search of rest.
It behoved us to be civil toward the native element (a people
as much apart as the gypsies), whose realm we were traversing.
Civil we were, with our six honeyed " Good-mornings ! " full in
the teeth of the black-browed men, the stolid women, of the inland
waterways; civil they inevitably had to be in return. Some of our
party neither had, nor affected to have, any interest whatever
in the very young of the species, who invariably accompanied their
parents on the gaily-painted domestic part of the Ethiop or
Wild Rose or Royal Rover. But what most brigand-like
bargee on earth could resist A's perfectly genuine tributes : " See
that de-licious tiny mite ! What curls ! " etc., etc. We got nothing
but smiles from O to B and back again : hard, weather-
beaten, quizzical smiles, the substructure of which must have been
common or garden contumely. " It gave delight and hurt not."
In fact, the dire threats we had heard went up in smoke. Ap-
parently, there was no real incompatibility between brother vaga-
772 THE AMATEUR BARGEE [Sept.,
bonds, the aloof tribe and our idling selves. Our whole party got
quite corybantic, the third day out, on the subject, and filled the
lonely miles with neo-Georgian balladry of the impromptu sort.
It ran something like this :
Soprano solo. Animato, piano.
They told me of the cruel Bargee
With blood and oaths defiled :
But, oh! [allargando] the Bargee that I have met,
Than sucking-pig [con tenerezza] more mild!
Bassi. Furioso, ff.
They told me of the brass Bargee
Upstanding devilish grim:
Chorus. Molto soave ma marcato.
But, oh! the Bargee that I have met,
Would I were good like him!
And so on, interminably antiphonal. . So very pleasing seemed the
situation !
Just where did we go, just what did we see? One must be
non-biographical, to do honor to that journey and those adventures.
Nobody kept a diary; we set out with one unanimous passion and
aim: to get nowhere and to do nothing in particular. There is a
careful and charming book called Inland Navigation, worth the
study which it never won from any of us. Of course we carried
divers local charts, the inch-to-a-mile ones. They added greatly
to our lazy pleasure. Our course was a purely fatalistic choice:
we stuck to the local canal. It is one of many delectable and
intersecting waterways which cross the country in every conceivable
direction, but go unnoted by the casual scanner of ordnance maps.
Almost all the English canals were laid out at a time when inland
navigation was in its prime, and while nobody dreamed of any
upstart invention which might supersede it. Even when the great
railway companies became well-established, and had bought up their
sleepy water rivals, they were in most instances bound by contract
to maintain the canals in perfect repair: ^ hence these have been
well-kept through centuries of practical disuse. Even the Sapper-
ton Tunnel in the Cotswold hills, where no boat enters now, is
open and passable through its dark difficult miles ; and if one finds
a blocked way, as for instance in some of the loveliest scenery of
Berkshire and Wiltshire, it serves as occasion for the just wrath
1913.] THE AMATEUR BARGEE 773
of the conservative, and a grievance finds vent once more in the
newspapers.
A more delightful device for going the longest way round,
and with the greatest possible expenditure of time, cannot be imag-
ined. Our own actual rate of speed was little over two miles an
hour! The route lies, more often than not, through the most
unfrequented and romantic places, but sometimes in the near vicin-
ity of villages, and once in a while sheer across a town. Lowlands
and low hills are the natural mise-en-scene for a canal, unless this
runs, as it does on the Welsh Border, and elsewhere, along the
mountain sides. The velvet banks, the winding, tree-shadowed
reaches, the presence of fish and water-fowl, make these man-
made channels as full of natural graces (save only that there is
no gurgle of motion) as a stream. A canal always has some river,
indeed, for neighbor, and into the river, at given points, the canal
lock opens, so that for a hundred yards, or it may be a mile, the
two are one. Then a boat is received by an oozy gate, swinging
to behind ; the sudden torrent pours from under the keel, or should-
ers it buoyantly higher and higher until, upborne to the level, the
voyager emerges through the second gate upon the more sluggish
waters. A great charm hangs about these little old solitary pound-
locks. Leonardo da Vinci is said to have invented them, and
they seem well worthy of that eternal dreamer, while you let
yourself in and out of the roofless stone chamber, tapestried with
moss, and frescoed with emerald, bronze, and copper stains. A
bridge, being a road-carrier, is almost always hard by a lock,
so that the helmsman of a barge has the pleasure of shooting not
only the narrow lock-entrance, but an equally narrow stone corridor
under the arch: this has usually the perverse distinction of being
diagonal, and barely an inch wider, on each side, than the clumsy
craft it grudgingly accommodates.
The bargee idea of efficiency is of course to go through with-
out bump or hitch. The enormous tiller is as responsive as possible ;
yet some study is exacted from its ruling spirit, owing to the whims
of a deballasted hollow boat as long as a house. What does for the
fore part, in the matter of direction, will decidedly not do for the
middle or the rear; and a cross wind, with such a broadside on,
makes the craft quite unmanageable, without a counter-push from
the near tow-path to play up to the horse's rectangular rope-pull
ahead. This counter-push generally turned out to be Watty's un-
aided business. Much of his time, during our first days, was spent
774 THE AMATEUR BARGEE [Sept.,
in shoving the bulky Moll from banks and mud-shoals. Wind had
something to do with such curvatures, but so had the 'prentice
hand. Seventy times seven times per day would Watty seize that
hooked pole, on, under, or with which he performed, uncomplain-
ingly, his acrobatic feat. One's cumulative skill in steering eventu-
ally saved him the necessity of like efforts ; but while they lasted, he
was watched with thrilling concern. It seemed impossible that
the pole he was so grimly pushing into his person, to save our
seamanship, should not run out through his disinterested vitals, and
dislodge the lock-key in the process !
The professional bargee, unlike the amateur, cannot move about
in his grimy shell, laden as it is to the water's edge with a heavy
cargo. He is free only of the stuffy cabin where he eats and
sleeps, and of the bit of flooring from which he descends to it.
In the phenomenal English summer of 1911, the Moll became an
unbearable Tophet, with her black tarry sides, deep dungeon, blis-
tered planks, and ever-slipping little stairway, which with persist-
ence worthy of a better cause, broke all our skulls, spines, shins,
and elbows, one by one. We generally struck camp and started
on our way about half -past eight each morning, ran into the most
available bank before eleven, and kept under the shade of trees
thereabouts in peace until about four, when all trooped aboard
again, and became re-disposed " for to be'old the world so wide,"
until night should fall. Our only use for the Moll was to loll on
her high poop, or range along her counter-like side to snatch a
precarious late supper from her Spartan larder. In the long ex-
quisite English twilight, we would begin to bivouac about eight
o'clock, laboriously dragging all the collapsible beds and their bed-
ding into some sloping field which took our fancy. We always
offered the usual extremely moderate legal camping-fee; but in
one instance only was it accepted. Roasting weather as it was
by day, we all went to sleep clad in every extra old coat and dress-
ing-gown to be had, and snuggled down under a pile of rugs
peculiar, one would think, to a Polar expedition. Nobody ever
complained of heat at night: which marks a sufficient difference
between Albion's isle, and our unspeakable after-dark thermometer
in a New England July, peopled by mosquitoes. The sounds we
heard were all soothing. It was too late for the nightingales, but
the wood-pigeons cooed enchantingly. Old belfries bespoke us
hourly over acres of cornfields, or the grown lambs, with their yet
unbroken treble, bleated once or twice from the nearest fold; even
1913.] THE AMATEUR BARGEE 775
the Great Western had a far-off, not unmelodious rumble, mingled
with our dreams on some velvety hillside under the dark-blue
midnight sky. And what sleep it was ! of godlike depth, opacity,
and duration. We had nothing to learn from the Seven of Ephe-
sus.
One night an extremely wrathful thunderstorm broke sud-
denly over us, and of the five who slept without tents, only three
chose to go under cover. The two effiges who lay out had " the
time of their lives," not falling out of step thereby with a soldier
ancestry of hard campaigns. Conscious virtue lulled them to sleep
again, and there were no ugly rheumatics by the morning light.
Night is always divine under the stars, and in the fragrance of
blossomy fields. We grew quite soft and Capuan, and cast about
for an environment of haystacks, or for hedges providing wild
roses aloft or wild thyme underfoot. One of the party habitu-
ally said his night prayers, and laid him down to sleep on the
cabin roof of the Moll, under a sheltering willow bough : a romantic
site, and not roll-off-able. But it had its disadvantages, as to the
thus easily-localized victim fell the lot of drawing all the water
for ablutions in the morning, while our man Watty foraged among
the farms for milk, eggs, bread, and butter.
In the captain's roomy tent stood the tribal tub: a fearsome
shallow rubber thing, clean but squshy, from which in turn the
family emerged, looking its loveliest, in bewildering ole clo'. The
canal being ineligible, the swimmers of the party had often to travel
far in search of a pool, a thing not hard to find in normal weather,
but just then desperately rare; once, however, they found the
pool most beatifically realized in a disused ancient monastic reser-
voir, far up in the hills: very deep it was, and pure yet, though
so bearded with thick tall reeds that ingress and egress were muddy
and prickly matters, causative of cruel jibes from the non-amphib-
ious minority. At another time they tried the almost empty Cher-
well, and had hardly forded it to a sand-floored basin just under
five feet deep, and paused in a conclave consisting of heads to scan
the beauty of our
.... little patch of sky,
And little plot of stars,
i
when as silently as a shadow, and unaware until he was full upon
them, came a youth in a canoe, his face brightening into a sort of
affectionate apology as he glided past while the assembled kelpies
776 THE AMATEUR BARGEE [Sept.,
grinned their best at him the while, as at a visitant from the un-
known world. It was all an idyll of a moment, an idyll of lonely
places, like something out of Theocritus.
The weather saw to it that excursions were at a minimum.
Not that little walks and drives were wholly out of the question.
The smouldering antiquarianism of some of our party flamed up
almost daily, and involved much mooning over venerable churches
on hills and in vales. And of course the Catholics had to travel
to Sunday Mass : distance was literally " no object ! " and quite
material as well as spiritual was the reward when in their hot boots
they reached the door of some little Gothic sanctuary with a cool
quiet interior, and a reverent country congregation singing the
De Angelis under their own Roodbeam, with all their hearts.
Our table had limits, but was admirable within those limits.
It was a sad day when we had to deplete our stock, by throwing
overboard every pot of the jam, honey, and marmalade, with which
all Great Britain is on such loving terms. The unwonted heat
brought a plague of wasps all over the countryside; literally thou-
sands of them boarded the Moll, intent, not on molesting us, but on
raiding our preserves. It seemed judicious to come to a quick
decision. As Newman says somewhere of a bore, " You may yield,
or you may flee: you cannot conquer." One day we were fated
to run short of drinking water, though fortunately not of oranges.
Many were the British blessings, in those Lenten days, showered
upon canned sweet corn and Heinz's baked beans, and other life-
saving American condiments! Moreover, we were all poor to-
gether, and unaffectedly gay on half-rations. Nor did we fail
to "count our blessings." "There's the wind on the heath,
brother ! " was not quoted, or taken, ironically. All work, in-
cluding cooking, went by turns; dishwashing, though reduced to
a minimum by paper serviettes and cardboard plates, was not the
most popular department. Rather, it was the bedmaker who lived
in clover. The bursar managed to get the accounts straight, share
and share alike, to a ha'penny: the senior man and his pipe were
miracles of first aid and good-humor; the two midshipmites, nine-
teen and sixteen, went barefoot, shelled nuts, sang wild nonsense-
songs, and raised such complexions as have never been seen off an
ebony post : such were their magna opera, their contribution to the
arduosities of life on a barge. The beaming things! No
anathema could so much as scratch them.
Then, to add to the joy of life, there were always the two
1913.] THE AMATEUR BARGEE 777
beasts. The Irish terrier, Wags, a tight wiry rogue with an all-
knowing eye, never got entirely reconciled to the business which
his missis seemed to have adopted for life : gypsy ing was not quite
what he would have chosen for that adored being. When he was
not leaping ashore and back again, sometimes miscalculating, and
flopping sensationally into the muddy water, for the sake of hear-
ing her oboe-like plaint : " Oh, Wag-let mine ! " he kept tearing up
and down the unintelligible, unlovely moving house where no manly
diversion, not even cat-chasing, was to be had for love or money.
However, one morning, on his first surreptitious prowl, he cap-
tured a mole in the hedges: the poor little velvety funnel-shaped
beastie gave one dying squeak which woke some of us before
dawn.
On another occasion we arose unanimously and blessed
Wags (really not a murderer by instinct or habit), for purely
eleemosynary reasons. At the turn of the lane, in a village so
enchanting that we hung about it for five whole days of our short
seventeen, sat a large white contemplative hen. What she said
to Wags, going by alone, has not been clearly revealed; but what-
ever it was, her fluffy upholstery promptly strewed the ground. We
bore down in a body, wildly apologetic; Wags' contrite missis wal-
lopped Wags, and offered liberal blood money ; the bereaved farmer,
grinning from ear to ear in the teeth of such a tragedy, went
her one better, and had the holocaust plucked and roasted for us!
It was literally our only meat, save a cooked ham brought aboard
when we first loaded for the voyage. After that, large white
hens, doubtless in blind obedience to their owners, sat continuously
at that turn of the lane as the chastened, or sated, Wags went
by; but silver flowed perforce no more from his lady's depleted
wallet.
Then there was Dobbin, the strong little horse, perfectly tract-
able, but used neither to barge-pulling nor to bargees. Watty was
good to him, laughed at him, fed him, taught him much strange
lore, and sometimes expended upon him a vernacular not without
vigor. Overworked Dobbin was not. In fact, when we camped so
long in humble and beautiful C (chiefly, I fear me, because
King Charles, arrayed " in a velvet surcoate and white armour,
with ye collar of ye George," won a fight there once, down by the
bridge where Roundhead spurs and swords are washed up yet in
the freshets), Dobbin went to glory. Introduced into the big
" green caravanserai " where our fixtures and belongings lay from
778 THE AMATEUR BARGEE [Sept.,
five to fifteen feet apart, he got upon his back, and kicked and rolled
among them the whole length of the field; and this performance
he repeated every time we looked at him, with or without mention
of sugar. Now a certain solemn little old donkey, with the loveliest
dove-gray coat, was the proprietor of that broad, beautiful field,
with its close-cut slope, its walnut-trees, its hedgerows, its water-
front, and its view of the distant hills, its music of thrushes and
of church-bells. It was his, and he said so : not only to Dobbin
and Wags, but to four English and two Americans, singly and con-
jointly; also to Watty. Not being heeded, he took up an attitude
of unique protest. An attitude indeed it was.
Our memory of C will always include in the foreground
that long white nozzle, those resentful and utterly parallel little legs,
always and immovably turned towards the intruders. He ate not,
neither slept; whatever was his vocation in the rural world, he
eschewed it totally for the time; he made it his sole business to
stand and stare. At breakfast-time, at noon, at dusk, there Neddy's
statue rose on its mound-pedestal. Out of many naps, diurnal or
nocturnal, we awoke to find the eye of Neddy dominating the
situation, never a hair's breadth from the spot, where with the
indignation of the landed gentry driven to bay, he first watched our
entry. He was there when Watty swung the last planks aboard the
Moll, and began his tow-path trudge homeward, with his hand
on Dobbin's rope-hung, rotund back ; when we looked our last from
the fold of the uplands, over the still water, to the vanishing
tower of C , there was the consistent creature, still playing his
psychic solo, by no alien blandishments subdued. Bless his one-
idea'd little British heart!
Two nights before we were mustered out, we parted with the
gentle and resourceful captain, and with her Wags. Their belong-
ings went off in a country cart, and themselves, met by friends,
on foot over the fields. Emotionally, then, Wags had no further
interest in the barge, the one loved being having abandoned it with
him, in favor of home. But intellectually he continued to take
a vehement interest in all our goings-on. The Moll had by now
quitted the canal (which was to be closed over bank holiday) and
had worked into the upper Thames, where, among lush meadows,
we made our last bivouac, about a mile from Wags' domicile.
Down he came alone on each evening, planted himself on the oppo-
site bank, and with a most controlled civility, for an hour on end
rolled his eye heavenwards, inquiring why we still sat in the stalls
1913-] THE AMATEUR BARGEE 779
when the play was over ? Was there not a house yonder, his house ?
Did not bipeds of our species usually prefer houses? Was not
the pearl of the company, the crown of creation, the peerless she,
our own friend, in that house? Was not himself (this with a
world of ingratiating swagger), in that house, and more than
ready to give us all bed and board of a kind we were foregoing,
under this hard necessity of bargee life? And after the long argu-
ment, he would unstiffen his tail, and go very deprecatingly on his
way, often looking back with that unsatisfied Why-in-the-name-of-
common-sense query in his rational little brown eye.
We had set out, as I have said, with next to no plan, but we
traveled far and fell on divers wonders. Farmsteads, great and
small, with their perennial life and homelikeness ; venerable churches
in lonely places, full of architectural interest and historical mystery;
old battlefields, most critically crossed and recrossed, chart in hand :
these are but three of the ever-recurring delights of our odd
outing. Better even than these was the personal hold one seemed
to take on great things : on limitless horizons, spoiled by no city's
smoke, and on
.... lights and shades
That marched and countermarched across the hills
In glorious apparition.
No one of us ever so enjoyed motion : the dustless, unfelt,
unsmelt, motion of the creeping keel, whereby one comes through
such a primitive archway of pleasure into the inheritance of simple
hearts. Bargees are not a talkative people : none are, who live in
the open. We fell into their ways, and exchanged the high com-
pliment of much silence. The best outcome of the adventure was
that, when we came reluctantly to the urban canal wharf, beyond
which lay conversation and clothes and menus and brainwork,
and the other burdens of our mortal lot, we knew that we loved
one another better for a not riotous holiday, and a temporary with-
drawal from the world. May any who follow in our wake cap-
ture from nature and from human nature, if no more numerous
statistics, at least as much of peace !
THE RECTOR'S RESTITUTION.
BY GRACE V. CHRISTMAS.
I.
T seemed to me," remarked the Reverend James
Broughton in a meditative manner, as he handed
his coffee cup to be refilled, " that I heard various
unaccountable noises during the night."
Mrs. Broughton gave vent to an impatient
ejaculation as she took up the coffee pot.
r< What nonsense, James ! Here take your coffee. I must
beg of you not to let anyone hear you talk about noises in the
night, and that kind of rubbish. It is an old house, and, of course,
the church is older still, but we shan't keep our servants a week
if you set them off on ghosts. Besides there are no such things."
" I have no intention of doing so, my dear," replied her hus-
band mildly. " Even if I were convinced that I heard sounds
which are not easily to be explained or described, I should not
dream of taking my domestics into my confidence on the subject.
But there most certainly is a peculiar atmosphere about the place
which I noticed the day we arrived. However, since it annoys
you " He paused expressively, rose from the table, and passed
through the French window into the sunny garden.
It was only a week since James Broughton had been appointed
Rector of Marshley, and his friends and acquaintances considered
that he was in consequence a very ludky man. It was a living of
seven hundred a year, a charmingly situated house with a garden
and orchard sloping down to the bank of a river, while the pic-
turesque church of the early Norman period dated from the thir-
teenth century, and was a joy to the antiquarian.
" I wish James would not get such extraordinary notions into
his head," reflected Mrs. Broughton when she was left alone.
" If he once imagines there is a ghost here, Sybil will too, and
there will be no peace at all. Atmosphere indeed, I wonder what
he meant by that ! "
Mrs. Broughton belonged to that class of human beings who
are extremely definite in their views upon every subject, and are
always prepared at a moment's notice to give evidence to the faith
1913.] THE RECTOR'S RESTITUTION 781
or rather lack of it which is within them. Those things which
she could see and feel she believed in, but those others, and they
were a large number, which lay outside and beyond the circum-
scribed limits of her personal experience, she unhesitatingly labelled
rubbish. She was not only entirely devoid of sentiment, but also
of imagination, considered all novels trash, and freely expressed
her opinion that a man who wrote poetry was next door to a
fool. It was this woman whom James Broughton, with his head
in the stars and his dreamy scholarly nature, had fallen in love
with and married, and it was not until the end of the honeymoon
that he had discovered that what he had fallen in love with was
an ideal of his own creation, and what he had married bore not
the most remote resemblance to it. It was not, however, an un-
happy marriage on the whole. They got on fairly well together
on the surface, but, the days of glamor ended, neither entertained
any illusions respecting the other, and it was to his only daughter
Sybil that James Broughton turned for that sympathy and com-
prehension which is to men of his type the one essential. He was
waiting for her to join him now as he paced up and down the
broad grass walk by the old sundial, for she always kept him
company while he smoked his morning pipe, and in a few moments
he saw the flicker of her white skirts among the laurel bushes as
she ran across the lawn.
" I couldn't get away any sooner, dad, I was awfully late for
breakfast, and mother has been giving me her views on early rising
and punctuality and several other things, and that took time. She
seemed rather rubbed up somehow."
There was a passing gleam of amusement in the Rector's eyes
as he looked at his daughter. In one respect he was not exactly
true to type, for he was possessed of the saving grace of humor.
Not a great deal of it perhaps, but just enough to carry him
cheerfully over the rough places of life.
" I was telling your mother that the atmosphere of this place
struck me as a little out of the common."
Sybil nodded sympathetically, and her eyes lit up.
" Oh, I see, yes, that would account for it. Mother hasn't
any use for atmosphere. But you are quite right, dad, and I am
awfully glad it affects you too. I feel it everywhere. What do
you think it is ? "
The Rector considered for a moment. He was a studious,
cultivated man, had read much and thought much, and had conse-
782 THE RECTOR'S RESTITUTION [Sept.,
quently realized that his knowledge amounted to very little. Unlike
his wife, he was seldom prepared to give a definite opinion. " I
think it may possibly be on account of its past history," he
said at last. " Strange things may have happened here, and you
and I who are susceptible to such influences may find ourselves
affected by them. That is what I think at least I should not
be surprised if that were the case."
" It was awfully queer, the other afternoon," went on Sybil.
" I went into the church for a few minutes on my way home. It
was getting dusk, and I had the oddest feeling that there was
someone else in the church, though I couldn't see anyone. I
wasn't frightened exactly, more excited and interested, and I
felt very strongly that it whatever it was wanted to get into
communication with me and couldn't do it."
The Rector fixed his eyes on the gorgeously-tinted autumn
leaves which he was rustling with his feet, as they walked up and
down. His daughter had inadvertently but most accurately de-
scribed his own sensations during the early morning service, a fact
which he considered it wiser to keep to himself.
" We must not let this idea take too great a hold on us, my
child," he remarked with an abstracted air, " it will possibly wear
(M as we grow more accustomed to our new surroundings, and in
any case er it doesn't interest your mother."
Sybil smiled roguishly. Without being strictly pretty, her
face was full of charm, and her smile was a thing to be remem-
bered. l 'Doesn't interest' is rather good, but I could have put
it much more forcibly. Well, we will keep it to ourselves all
right, but my conviction is that instead of wearing off it will
become stronger, till it or they have found some way of letting
us know what they really want. There's mother calling, I must
rush."
James Broughton continued his quarter deck exercise for some
time after his daughter had left him. He was reviewing in his
own mind the sensations he had experienced during the early
service that morning, and finally arrived at the conclusion that
Sybil had somehow or other hit upon the word of the enigma.
" That is it," he murmured to himself, " whoever or whatever it is
whose influence affects us so powerfully, wants something or other,
but what, and how could we possibly give it to them? That is
the question." And it was one which the Rector of Marshley found
himself totally unable to answer.
1913-] THE RECTOR'S RESTITUTION 783
II.
" What is the matter, James ? You are very silent this morn-
ing. No one can get a word out of you."
It was a fortnight later, and the Rector of Marshley, and his
wife and daughter were at breakfast, Sybil having for once man-
aged to be in time and so escape maternal admonitions.
"Oh er am I more silent than usual, my dear?" inquired
the Rector taking refuge in evasion.
" Well, you have made exactly two remarks since you came
into the room, and one was to ask for the butter."
James Broughton glanced hastily and somewhat furtively at
his daughter, who was watching him intently from the other side
of the flower-decked table, and cleared his throat in an embar-
rassed manner. It was useless he had proved it by long ex-
perience to hoodwink his wife. As well might one hope to
distract a fox hound when the scent is burning, and his quarry
but one field ahead.
"Well, my dear, the fact is," he began hesitatingly, "I I
am not feeling very fit this morning. I er I had rather a bad
night."
" There," exclaimed Mrs. Broughton triumphantly, " I knew
it. You have been imagining a ghost again. How a man of your
age and well not exactly sense, but a certain amount of intelli-
gence can lend yourself to such follies, is one of those things
which I shall never be able to understand."
" I thought you understood everything, mummie," murmured
Sybil, dropping her eyes to hide their laughter, as she helped her-
self to a piece of toast.
"Don't be impertinent, Sybil. Well, James, what was your
visitor like? Was it dressed in a long white robe, and did it lay
an icy finger on your forehead? Let us hear all about it. It
will be quite amusing, and we all seem a little dull this morning,
it may cheer us up."
Mrs. Broughton was in a playful mood, and though her per-
siflage on these occasions resembled somewhat the gambols of an
elephant, they were yet the best she could accomplish in that line.
The Rector summoned his dignity to his aid. " I had no
visitors as you express it, and my imagination does not run away
with me to the extent of fancying I see white-robed figures. As
784 THE RECTOR'S RESTITUTION [Sept.,
I told you I have not had a very good night, and we will leave
it at that. I should like a little more coffee if you please."
Mrs. Broughton rilled his cup in silence. It was very rarely
that her husband asserted himself, but when he did it usually
subdued her for the time being. As soon as he had left the
room, however, on the pretext of an important letter to answer,
she began again :
" I cannot conceive why your father should have taken such
odd ideas into his head about this house. It doesn't strike me
as being what foolish people call haunted."
Sybil rose from the table with a little laugh. " No, mummie,
I daresay not," she said. " You see you are not susceptible to
supernatural influences, and dad and I are."
" Supernatural fiddlesticks," exclaimed Mrs. Broughton.
" Really the way modern girls talk is too ridiculous. When I
was young no one knew anything about such rubbish."
" No, mummie, and you don't now, so it's no use my trying to
explain it to you ! " And before her mother could find fitting words
to express her wrath, Sybil had made her escape and joined her
father in his study.
" Well, dad," she began expectantly.
The Rector looked up from his writing, and laid down his
pen. " Well, what ? " he said with a smile.
" Oh, don't be tiresome, dad ; you know what I mean quite well.
Did you feel anything special last night? "
The Rector hesitated. Chums as he and Sybil were, he was
not sure how far he was justified in taking her into his entire
confidence on this point, especially as their occult discussions were
a source of annoyance to her mother. He was no longer in love
with his wife, but he was very loyal to her, and that sums up the
man's character as well as anything.
" You may as well own up," went on Sybil, " because I felt it
too."
The Rector looked at her with a startled expression. " Felt it ?
Felt what, tell me what you mean, child ? "
Sybil laughed and perched herself on the arm of his chair.
" Ah, that is rather turning the tables ! However, I suppose I
shan't get anything out of you till I have given you a lead, so
here goes for the first fence. Well, I woke up suddenly last night,
just as though I had been roused, in fact my first idea was that
someone had awakened me, and I wondered drowsily whether you
1913-] THE RECTOR'S RESTITUTION 785
or mother were ill, so I started up in bed. The next instant I was
wide awake, and there was nothing to be seen, but the feeling
that somebody was in the room was unmistakable. You felt it,
too, I'll bet you anything you like."
" Well, yes," replied the Rector. " My feelings were almost
precisely similar to yours, but we must remember that waking up
suddenly is by no means an uncommon experience, and the fact
by itself is hardly sufficient to substantiate a proof that er "
" Bunkum, dad, don't use such long words. You think it is
your duty not to encourage me in occultism that's understood.
Now, let us talk sense. I know as well as you do that lots of people
wake up suddenly in the night, but it was not only last night that
we felt it. We have been in this house for three weeks now, and
ever since we entered it we you and I that is to say have been
haunted, yes, that is the word, haunted by an invisible presence,
and why? that is what I want to know."
The Rector remained silent for a moment. His nocturnal
experiences had differed from his daughter's in this respect, that
he was possessed all the time by the conviction that the presence
in his room desired something at his hands. There had been a
compelling force about it which had completely banished sleep,
and this was by no means the first or second visitation of the
kind.
" I am inclined to agree with you that something is required
of us," he said at last, " but I cannot imagine what it can be, or
why either of us should be selected as likely to gratify whoever
or whatever it is."
" Oh, that is easily explained," returned Sybil. She got off
the arm of the chair, and crossing over to the window gazed
dreamily out at the green smoothness of the lawn. " If there
is anything in this house or church, and I feel it more strongly
there, that wants anything, it wouldn't be likely to go near mother.
She would pay as little attention to it as she would to a mouse,
less in fact than in the case of a mouse, and the the influence,
I don't know what to call it, knows that we shall at any rate
feel it."
" You say you feel it in the church ? " questioned her father.
" That is strange, very strange, it would almost seem "
" Dad ! " interrupted Sybil, " I have got an idea let us have
the house blessed like Roman Catholics do, perhaps it can't rest
until something of that sort has been done."
VOL. xcvu. 50
786 THE RECTOR'S RESTITUTION [Sept.,
" Blessed ! " echoed the Rector in horror. " My dear Sybil,
the Church of England does not hold with such superstitious prac-
tices, and besides," he added naively, " I am not at all sure that I
should know the correct procedure."
" Oh, it would be no use for you to do it, dad. It ought to be a
priest; you see this church was a Roman Catholic one once upon
a time, and this house was probably inhabited by Romans too.
If it is a ghost of that sort, it would take more than a clergyman
to get rid of it."
" My dear child, you are expressing yourself in a very extra-
ordinary fashion, and while you are in this flippant frame of
mind I see no use in continuing this discussion. I should, besides,
be glad to get on with my letters."
Sybil danced over to him, and gave him a butterfly kiss on his
forehead. " There, he shan't be plagued any longer." Then as
she reached the door, she turned and looked back at him. " You
think it over, dad, and you will find there is something in my
idea."
The Rector's letters remained neglected for sometime while
he pondered over recent events. It was quite true what his daughter
had said, both he and she, and practically ever since their arrival at
Marshley, had been haunted by an intangible, indescribable in-
fluence which dogged their footsteps day and night. And it was
especially, as Sybil had also remarked, in the church that
it made itself felt. It was with this thought in his mind that
late in the afternoon he went there by himself, and paced up and
down the side aisle. It was growing dusk, and he could hardly
distinguish the glowing colors of the stained glass windows. One
of them, that which was above the communion table, was of far
greater antiquity than the rest. It was a representation of the
Nativity, and he could just make out a glimmer of blue on the
Madonna's mantle. As he stood peering up at it, Sybil's words
recurred to him. Once long ago this church had belonged to the
ancient faith, and although he was not a ritualist, the Rector of
Marshley, in his secret soul, hankered after a more gorgeous cere-
monial, a fuller ritual than that which belonged to the religion
he professed. He had an artist's eye for color, and an intense
appreciation for beauty in nature and in art, and there was very
little of either in the somewhat dreary form of worship which it
was his duty to conduct. As he stood alone in the empty church
in the twilight, he tried to reconstruct his surroundings, picture
I 9 i3-] THE RECTOR'S RESTITUTION 787
them as they had been in a monastic past. He imagined the altar
radiant with numerous lights, and the flashing of gems on a
jewelled monstrance. He heard the solemn chanting of sonorous
Latin words, and saw the blue smoke of incense as the censer
was swung slowly to and fro. In an instant it had all become
real to him, and it was with a tremendous effort that he detached
himself from it, and brought his thoughts back to the prosaic pres-
ent. As he did so, he heard, apparently at his elbow, a sigh, long
drawn out and unmistakable, the sigh of someone whose burden
was well nigh greater than he could bear. The Rector turned
round quickly, and stared into the fast gathering gloom.
" Is there anyone there? " he said aloud.
There was no answer. The wind moaned among the cypresses
in the churchyard outside, and the sudden cry of a screech owl, like
a child in pain, came from the belt of elm trees by the river,
but as far as he could see he was alone. Then, all at once, half-
frightened by the echoing sound of his own voice, he made for
the heavy oak door, opened it and locked it behind him.
III.
Not even to Sybil did the Rector make any comment regarding
his twilight experiences in the old church. He told himself
though he could not make it sound convincing to his inner ego
that it was all imagination, that he and his daughter had become
obsessed with the idea of an unseen but deeply-felt influence, and
that the less they discussed it between themselves the better. He
told himself this, but it left him unconvinced, and it seemed to him
as the weeks wore on, that the unexpressed wishes of the shadowy
presence, which had sighed at his elbow, grew more and more
intense.
The feeling began to weigh upon Sybil too, although outwardly
she was her usual gay, audacious self. And it was noticeable that
during her frequent talks with her father, she rather avoided the
subject. One day, however, when he and she were returning
in the gloaming from a long walk, she broached the matter of her
own accord.
" Have you ever examined any of those old documents in the
vestry, dad? I expect they would be awfully interesting, and,"
she hesitated, and glanced up at him with a roguish smile in her
;88 THE RECTOR'S RESTITUTION [Sept.,
eyes, " they might possibly throw some light on our invisible
friends ! "
The Rector started. It was a new light to him at any rate.
" Why, yes," he said slowly, " that never occurred to me, so it
might."
" Because you see, dad, there is getting to be just a little too
much of them even for my taste, and you know I love everything
connected with spooks."
" I cannot understand it," remarked the Rector pathetically,
" no one in the neighborhood seems to consider that the house is
haunted. I have made several inquiries lately guarded ones of
course in that direction, but have elicited nothing in the shape
of what one might call spiritual information. Even old Patty
Clack has nothing to say on the subject, and she would say it
fast enough if she had."
" Yes, indeed. And I don't think that any consideration for
our nerves would stop her if she had a spicy story to tell. But,"
Sybil paused with an unusually serious expression on her piquant
features, " in this case I don't think that it is the house that is
haunted but us ! "
"But why, in heaven's name?" broke out the Rector for-
getting his self-imposed vow of reticence, " such a thing has never
happened to us before ; we were all right at Mapperley."
" That was not a pre-Re formation church," returned Sybil with
the air of an oracle. " I have been reading up some old history
books lately and " she paused, broke off abruptly. " Well, dad,
you take my tip and examine those documents, and now we will try
to forget all about it."
For the remainder of their walk she laughed and chatted in
her usual lively vein, and when they caught sight of the lighted
windows of the ivy-covered rectory gleaming redly through the
dusk, she took hold of her father's arm.
" I say, dad, what do you think mummie would say if we
broke to her the fact that her husband and daughter were haunted?"
" Sybil, my child," exclaimed the Rector nervously, " I must
really beg of you "
" Oh, all right, dad, I am on, we won't break it to her." And
with a glance at her father's disturbed countenance, she gave way
to a fit of irrepressible laughter.
The following afternoon the Rector went off by himself to the
vestry, and for nearly an hour pored over the old documents in the
1913-] THE RECTOR'S RESTITUTION 789
muniment chest. At the end of that time, however, he was not very
much wiser than when he began, for the deciphering of the abbre-
viated script was a task beyond his powers. There was one in
particular which interested him more than the others, and he finally
brought it away with him, and took it to his study to examine
through a magnifying glass. But although he was a very fair
Latin scholar, he could make very little out of the ancient black
lettering before him. A name, that of a Sir Fulke de Heron,
occurred in it frequently, but in what connection was a riddle which
he found himself totally unable to solve, so with a sigh of baffled
curiosity he took it back to its former place. The November after-
noon was closing in as he re-entered the church, but as he opened
the oaken door he could just distinguish a faint shadowy form pass
into the vestry. He stopped short, his heart beating rapidly, and
then pulling himself together made his way quickly up the nave.
" It might have been Sybil," he murmured half-aloud, " she
has a light gray dress on, and it's getting too dark to make anything
out clearly." And then he entered the vestry, and was in reality
not at all surprised to find it empty. He replaced the document
with somewhat shaking fingers, glancing once or twice nervously
over his shoulder as he did so, and then leaving the vestry shut the
door behind him. As he walked down the side aisle rather quicker
than usual, he caught sight of a figure in one of the lower pews,
which started up on his approach.
" It's all right, dad, don't be dicky, it's only me," said Sybil,
and the Rector heaved a sigh of relief.
" Did I see you go into the vestry just now? " he asked.
" No, I came in this minute while you were there ; what is the
matter, you look anyhow have you have you seen anything? "
" Nothing that I could swear to," returned the Rector in a
guarded manner.
" But you thought you did? " said Sybil eagerly. " Oh, dad,
tell me all about it, do."
" It was imagination, I am convinced it was imagination ; our
eyes play odd tricks with us in the dusk, but I thought I saw
something gray flit into the vestry, and and I concluded it must
be you."
" Humph," murmured Sybil reflectively, " our friend is be-
ginning to materialize itself then. Dad," she went on with a
sudden change of tone, " have you been looking at those docu-
ments?"
790 THE RECTOR'S RESTITUTION [Sept.,
" Yes, and I can make nothing of them ; they are written in
the old style Latin, which I am not sufficiently expert to under-
stand."
" Oh, what a jolly nuisance. I wish we could get hold of an
expert. Don't wait for me, dad, if you want to go, I I came here
to " she paused and laughed a little to herself.
" I shall not leave you here, Sybil," remarked the Rector
with unusual firmness. " It will do you no good to sit mooning
here in the dark, come home with me at once." And the un-
expectedness of his manner so impressed Sybil that she obeyed.
Next Sunday, the Rector of Marshley preached a sermon that
somewhat astonished his hearers, as varying from the customary
lines of his discourse. He dwelt upon the supernatural influences
which surround the human race, he touched upon the gossamer-
like texture of the veil which divides the spiritual from the natural
world, and wound up by exhorting the congregation to cultivate
the spiritual side of their nature, and not to scoff at the existence
of mysteries which they could not understand. He spoke well
and^ eloquently, his dreamy eyes alight, and Sybil listened with a
proprietary glow at her heart.
" It seemed to me, James," remarked Mrs. Broughton, as she
carved cold beef at the early dinner, " that there was a decidedly
Popish tone about your sermon this morning, and what wasn't
Popish was nonsensical. Thin veils indeed, I suppose you were
thinking of your beloved ghosts, but I don't consider that it is the
right thing for the Rector of a parish to encourage his parish-
ioners in all that sort of thing."
" I regret that my sermon did not please you, my dear," re-
turned the Rector mildly, " but I was not aware it had a Romish
tendency, and I cannot recall any mention of ghosts."
" I thought the sermon was top hole, dad," put in Sybil vehe-
mently, " but I expect mummie," she went on turning to her mother
with an ingratiating smile, " it was just a tiny wee bit over your
head, and that was what made you think dad was talking through
his hat."
" I consider myself capable of understanding any of your
father's sermons, and I cannot conceive where you get your extra-
ordinary expressions. James, I should be obliged for the horse
radish sauce."
1913.] THE RECTOR'S RESTITUTION 79*
IV.
One morning, about a week before Christmas, Mrs. Broughton
came into her husband's study with an open letter in her hand.
" Sir Guy Darrell wants to come over and see the church, so I have
asked him to lunch to-morrow."
The Rector looked up blankly from his paper. " Who is Sir
Guy Darrell, and why should he be invited to lunch? "
" Really, James," said his wife briskly, " you grow more
mooney every day, and Sybil is as bad. I went to look for her
just now, and she said she had been in the church, and when I asked
her what for, said she wanted to think there. Think! I never
heard such rubbish in my life. Why don't you lower your blinds,
James, the sun will spoil the carpet, and it really is quite sunny
to-day."
" Yes, my dear, certainly, as you like, but er when are
we coming to Sir Guy ? "
" Oh, I am coming to him if you give me time. What was I
saying? Oh, yes, he is stopping with the Frasers, and she wrote
and asked if he might come. It appears some of his ancestors
used to live here or somewhere in the neighborhood, and he wants
to look up something in the registers; he is writing a book or
something of the sort. I want to be civil to the Frasers, so I asked
him to lunch, and look at things leisurely. He is young, ap-
parently, and well off, and " she paused and played with the tassel
of the blind.
" You thought he sounded eligible for Sybil," put in the
Rector with unusual perspicacity where his wife was concerned.
" Well, well, my little maid must choose for herself if she marries."
" I do not think you need be at all alarmed on that score,"
remarked Mrs. Broughton, with dignity as she walked to the door.
" Sybil is not in the least likely to allow herself to be guided
in the matter, even by you." And with that parting shot, aimed
in return for his having fathomed the motives of her unwonted
civility to a stranger, she disappeared.
But it failed in its effect, for one idea was filling the Rector's
mind to the exclusion of everything else. Sir Guy might be able
to throw some light on the meaning of the old Latin documents,
and it was on this account, and not as a possible suitor for Sybil,
that he was prepared to accord him a welcome. The same idea
had occurred to his daughter, and as soon as her mother had told
79 2 THE RECTOR'S RESTITUTION [Sept.,
her of the expected visitor, she went to communicate it to the
Rector.
" This man, dad, mother has told you I suppose? She seems
quite keen perky about it, heaven knows why. He may under-
stand old Latin, he is a Roman Catholic you know/'
The Rector looked at her in surprise. " A Roman Catholic!"
he echoed. " How do you know ? Your mother said nothing
about it; is she aware of the fact?"
" Oh, probably not; she would not be so keen about him if she
were, but it's true. Dick Fraser was telling me about him when
we were playing golf on Thursday. His family, Sir Guy's I mean,
have always been Romans, and he is related somehow to the people
whom Marshley Court belonged to centuries ago; not this present
lot. He goes in for archaeology and ancient legends, and all that
sort of thing, so these old documents will be nuts to him."
" I am quite sure that your mother does not realize that the
young man is a Romanist," said the Rector, his interest in the
documents momentarily banished by this new element in the case.
" In fact she er well, I gathered so from her remarks."
" Oh, what does it matter? If he can tell us what we want
to know he may be a Mohammedan for all I care ; we have no other
use for him you know. Now hurry up with your letters, and we
will go down to the links for an hour before lunch."
Mrs. Broughton had received the news of her expected guest's
religion carefully broken to her by her husband with unusual
resignation, remarking that as the poor fellow was born in error,
he was really not so much to blame, and on his arrival the fol-
lowing day, she greeted him with unwonted cordiality. He was a
tall, well-built man of thirty-one or two, clean shaven, with a pair
of observant blue eyes, which allowed nothing to escape them, and
a firmly-cut mouth and chin. There was a virile magnetism about
him, which immediately attracted the Rector, and Sybil, mentally
comparing him with Dick Fraser and her other male acquaintances
in the neighborhood, decided that the comparison was not to their
advantage. The conversation at luncheon turned upon archaeology
and the interest inseparable from ancient buildings, and when the
coffee had made its appearance, the Rector suggested an adjourn-
ment to the church. Sybil cast a beseeching look at him, and he
smiled back at her in a comprehending manner.
;< You had better come with us. She is very keen about all this
sort of thing," he added turning to his guest.
1913.] THE RECTOR'S RESTITUTION 793
Guy DarreH's eyes rested searchingly on the bright expressive
face opposite to him. " Really," he remarked, " I should like
to enlist your services, Miss Broughton. I am sure you could put
me up to a lot about this place."
" I will tell you all I know," returned Sybil, " and I expect,"
with a significant side glance at her father, " that you will be able
to enlighten us on one or two points."
Mrs. Broughton refused to accompany them to the church, but
watched them with some complacency as they walked to the gate.
" It was rather smart of James to suggest that Sybil should go
too; I should not have credited him with so much sense. As for
the man's religion, it's a pity of course, but I daresay he is not
very set on it. It seems the fashion with Romanists to be a
little lax nowadays, and as the son-in-law of a Rector he would
naturally realize that he must give it up."
Meanwhile the unconscious object of her thought was waxing
enthusiastic over the beauty of the old Norman edifice, and the
exquisite carving of the oaken pulpit.
"Can you read old Latin?" inquired the Rector as he led
the way through the low narrow door into the vestry.
" Well, yes, to a certain extent," answered Guy. " I have been
obliged to make a special study of it on account of " He paused
leaving his sentence unfinished. " Surely, he exclaimed, " that is
a very old specimen of stained glass in that window. I see the de
Heron's crest?"
The Rector started. " De Heron, why that was the name in
the"
" Who are the de Herons, Sir Guy? " broke in Sybil eagerly,
her eyes fixed on the heron in the stained glass above her, a relic
of very ancient times.
" The people who owned Marshley Court before the Reforma-
tion. They were connected with my ancestors, and Sir Fulke,
I believe, was buried in a side chapel of this church. Have you
ever found any traces of his tomb ? " he went on turning to the
Rector.
" No, I had no idea of it," he murmured. He felt, though
he could not have explained why, that he was on the brink of an
important discovery, and the invisible presence seemed at the
moment nearer to him than usual. He glanced at Sybil, and
noticed that she, too, seemed curiously moved ; her cheeks had lost
their color, and her eyes were shining.
794 THE RECTOR'S RESTITUTION [Sept.,
" Come and look at these documents," he said hurriedly, and
after a little search he produced the one in which the name of Sir
Fulke figured so prominently, and handed it to Guy. For a few
moments he studied it in silence. Sybil gave a little shiver, and
creeping closer to her father laid her fingers on his arm. The
mysterious influence was weighing upon her as it had never done
before, and she felt as if she were surrounded by unseen witnesses.
She stared nervously when Sir Guy spoke.
" This is apparently," he said, " a deed of gift of a consider-
able sum of money left by Sir Fulke de Heron in perpetuity to this
church, in order that Masses might be said for the repose of his
soul and those of his descendants."
" And ever since the Reformation," put in Sybil quickly, " there
have been no Masses said for him here."
" Precisely, the Reformation robbed him and his descendants
of them, and the money thus bequeathed has gone into the pockets
of Anglican " He stopped short and laughed in an apologetic
fashion. " I beg pardon," he added, " I er I did not realize
what I was saying, but it is a subject upon which I have always
felt very strongly; it it seems so beastly unfair, don't you know."
" It does," returned the Rector slowly. " Now that you have
mentioned it, it does seem most unfair." He returned the docu-
ment to its place in silence, while Sybil watched him earnestly, but
made no further comment. They left the church in silence, and
when they reached the lych gate, the Rector paused and faced his
companion.
" Is there no way," he began, " it sounds an unbusiness-like
proposition, but then as my wife would tell you, I am not a business
man is there no way in which restitution could be made? For
instance, could not the money be restored to Sir Fulke's descendants,
to be made use of as they consider fit? "
Guy shook his head. " The family is extinct, has been for
over a hundred years, and even so, his living descendants would
have no claim on the money. It was left as a foundation of
Masses, you see, for the dead, and the only way in which restitu-
tion could be made to them would be by having the Masses said,
which is now er not exactly feasible. I am awfully sorry to
have upset you," he added, struck by the ashy gray ness of the
Rector's face, " and if it is any comfort to you, I can assure you
that this is by no means an isolated case. There are a large
number of old churches throughout England endowed by Catholics,
1913-] THE RECTOR'S RESTITUTION 795
and containing similar deeds to this one of Sir Fulke's. You have
appropriated our cathedrals and our churches, and also though I
really believe that a good many of you do not realize it our
money too."
The Rector sighed. " You are right," he said ; " I at any rate,
had not realized it, and I am obliged to you for opening my eyes."
" Do you think they know ? " asked Sybil, suddenly as they
reached the Rectory.
Her father had gone in, and she and Guy were standing
together in the porch.
" They ? who ? " asked Guy with a smile. He was feeling
rather compunctious for the evident distress he had caused to both
father and daughter, and would have liked to bring back the laughter
to the girl's troubled eyes.
" Why the dead ; do they know that the Masses haven't been
said for them, and could they is it possible, do you think, that they
might return to find out ? "
" Well, they would know probably, because they might be
detained in Purgatory until the Masses had been said for their
release; that would certainly rub in the knowledge pretty sharply.
As for their returning well, of course, the general idea is that
the dead do not return, but my views on the subject are rather
peculiar ones, so perhaps I had better keep them to myself."
" But so are mine," returned Sybil promptly. And then,
urged on by some undefinable impulse, she told him of the invisible
presence which had haunted herself and the Rector at all times and
seasons, but more especially in the church and vestry. Guy listened
in silence. They were pacing up and down the rose walk by the
old sundial, and the last rosy glow of a stormy sunset was fading
from the sky.
" Do you think it really could have been Sir Fulke?" asked
Sybil when her story was finished.
" Well," returned Guy thoughtfully, " one hears of such
things, and in nine cases out of ten disbelieves them, but under
these exceptional circumstances, I personally am inclined to think
that it may be Sir Fulke de Heron who is impressing himself so
strongly upon you and your father, both of you being extra-
ordinarily sensitive to supernatural influences."
Sybil nodded. " Yes, we are ; we always have been, and
mother thinks it all rot."
" There is this also," went on Guy, " neither of you knew
796 THE RECTOR'S RESTITUTION [Sept.,
the story, you had no idea that money had been left for a founda-
tion of Masses, so there was no suggestion at work."
" No, that notion never entered our heads. All we knew
was that somebody wanted us to do something, and father has felt
it more frequently, and I fancy more strongly, than I have, and
that"
" Sybil, bring Sir Guy in to tea," called Mrs. Broughton
from the drawing-room window, and it was with the feeling of
being fast friends instead of merely the acquaintances of a day
that Guy Darrell and the Rector's daughter entered the house.
Dinner that evening was a very silent function. James
Broughton was wrapped in a brown study, from which not even
the gibes of his wife could rouse him, and Sybil contributed but
little to the conversation, which gradually became a monologue
delivered by Mrs. Broughton in praise of their late visitor. Later
on Sybil made her escape from the drawing-room and
joined the Rector in his study, where he had retired on the plea
of preparing his sermon. He was seated at his writing table,
with his face buried in his hands, and she stood behind him with
her arm on his shoulder.
" What are you going to do about it, dad ? "
He raised his face, and she noticed how white and drawn
it looked under the electric light. " God knows ! " he answered,
" that is what I have been thinking of ever since that young man
left us what am I to do ? " It was a question to which Sybil
could make no satisfactory reply.
" I don't see what you can do," she said at last. " Unless, of
course oh, but that would be impossible."
" What do you mean, Sybil? If you have ideas on the subject
at all, I must beg you to communicate them to me."
" Well, dad, what I thought was that you might ask some
Roman Catholic priest to say a certain number of Masses for
Sir Fulke's soul, as that is apparently what he wants, and then he
might leave us alone, but I suppose as a Rector of the Church of
England you could hardly do that. Besides you couldn't tell the
priest you were haunted, he would think you were dotty, and no,
I don't see what you can do unless," she paused and her eyes
lit up.
" Well, unless, go on Sybil," put in the Rector sharply.
(( Well, unless you resigned your living, and became a Roman
yourself there! that's what I meant, you would have it. Then
1913-] THE RECTOR'S RESTITUTION 797
you could devote part of your income to having Masses said for
the de Herons, and it is the only way I can see in which you could
make a real restitution."
The Rector looked at her with a dazed expression in his
dreamy eyes. " Sybil, have you entirely taken leave of your senses ?
I, the Rector of Marshley, become a Roman Catholic! What
what " he stopped short, and his daughter finished his sentence
for him.
"What would mother say? Yes, I know, that is where the
greatest difficulty would come in, and there she is calling me now,
I must run." She left him, and the Rector, after glancing un-
certainly at the blank sheets of sermon paper before him, sighed
heavily and let his face fall again into his hands.
V.
" There has been quite an excitement in our part of the world
lately," remarked Dick Eraser. " What will you drink, Darrell,
whiskey and soda ? "
"Thanks. And the excitement is?"
It was a warm night in June and Dick Fraser and Guy
Darrell were dining together at the Trocadero, the latter having
recently returned from Italy.
" Well, you would never guess it, though you have met the
parties concerned. Do you remember that mooney old Rector
with a pretty daughter and an overpowering better half? You
lunched with them I believe when you were with us in the autumn."
The somewhat-bored expression on Guy's features was imme-
diately replaced by one of keen interest. " Yes, rather, I remem-
ber them all quite well. What have they done?"
" Well, the Rector has unfrocked himself, or whatever you call
it. Resigned his living, and a jolly fat one it was too, refused to
accept another, and has gone to live abroad somewhere. In some
fusty old Belgian town I fancy, at least he and Sybil have, the
Rectoress I am told refused to accompany them, so there is a
parting of the ways."
" But why? " asked Guy eagerly. " What made him do it? "
" That is what everybody is asking. There is a rumor going
about that the Rectory was haunted, but of course that is all bun-
kum. Anyway he and Sybil have taken some crotchet into their
heads and sloped, and it's a great pity as far as she is concerned."
798 THE RECTOR'S RESTITUTION [Sept.,
" Do you know where they have gone ? " inquired Guy. He
had already solved the word of the enigma in a manner which
gave him the keenest satisfaction. " He was a white man after
all, that dreamy old parson," he reflected, " but it is I who am
responsible for his uprooting! I wonder whether his daughter
blames me."
" I can't remember the name of the place," returned Dick.
" What do you want to know for ? "
"Oh, idle curiosity," said Guy lightly. "Why Belgium?
He has not become a Catholic, I suppose?"
Dick stared at him across the little table. " Why in the world
should he? I never heard he had any leanings that way. Didn't
go in for fal lals in his services or anything of that kind, and yet
Jove! it never occurred to me, perhaps that is the real explanation
of the matter. And Sybil, too," he went on, with a disturbed look
on his boyish face, " she was a jolly little girl, but of course if that
is the case " He paused, and began absently to trace a pattern
on the cloth with the prongs of a fork. " Oh, it was only an idea
of mine," remarked Guy carelessly. " I daresay there is nothing
in it, but he must have been impelled by some very strong motive.
Well, Fraser, I must be off now. I promised the mater I would
call for her at ten, and take her to this affair at Devonshire House."
Guy Darrell hailed a taxi, and was driven swiftly through the
brilliantly-lighted London streets, but his mental vision saw once
more the ray of winter sunshine which had lit up the crest of the
de Herons one November afternoon.
AN APPEAL.
BY ELEANOR DOWNING.
MEN of to-day, whose footsteps echoing
Pass down the aisles of time with hollow tread,
You who build upward, but whose voices ring
With mocking mirthlessness, what Hope hath fled
Down vistaed years and left you sorrowing,
Left you no dreams to dream, no songs to sing,
No eyes to wonder with, or souls to dread?
Turn ye aside a moment; have ye thought
That those who have possessed the earth 'ere us,
A thousand generations that have fought
With fevered breath that ye might conquer thus,
Do ye not know that they have reared and wrought
With that before them which your hands have sought
To desecrate, the Vision Luminous?
There was a time when pierceless mystery
Lapt earth in its embrace, when stream and clod,
And the vast mountains and the wailing sea
Were strange and wonderful, and only God
Was known and near, and His eternity,
Enfolding time and space, wrapt tranquilly
The borders of the narrow paths men trod.
That was the time when rose the Gothic spire
To slender-shafted glory, when the earth
Thrilled with the melody of Dante's lyre;
When all the dream and wonder leaping forth
In aspiration, touched with sacred fire,
Burst from Aquinas' lips, and rising higher
Kindled the Heavens with its holy mirth.
But you are sad, you Toilers of to-day,
You that cry out, " Behold the ceaseless stream
Of the earth's progress bears us on its way;
Gone is the vision, banished is the gleam,
For we have found that earth is common clay."
Say, have you aught to show as fair as they,
Or found one truth more real than was their dream?
8oo AN APPEAL [Sept.,
Yea, brethren, your eyes are full of care,
Your shoulders bowed with labor, and your brow
Bent earthward. Is it then so fair,
The brown dull earth ye lift with spade and plough?
So sweet the rhythmic measure of the share
That ye must needs forget the heavens wear
A state more kingly than the clods below?
There was a time when man was king or clown;
When some lay fasting in the solitude
Of sandy wastes, and some for earth's renown
Emperilled hope, and yet in brotherhood
Might all clasp hands, because they bowed them down,
Helmet, and tonsured head, and royal crown,
In worship of a Higher Kinglihood.
That was the time when men were glad and strong,
When all their hearts leapt forth to ban or bless,
When love and wrath burnt red, and like a song
Their worship sanctified the wilderness;
Yet were both king and serf, the weak or strong,
Quick to confess the measure of their wrong,
Because they owned their common sinfulness.
But you who lift a puzzle-strained brow,
Who know not if the sky be gray or blue,
You who forgive because you say you know
Virtue nor vice, nor falseness from the true,
You who would say, " Because we know not, lo,
There is nor sin nor wickedness below "
Can you forgive as they who sinned and knew?
Mourners with haggard eyes and garb of gray,
Dust on your heads and dust beneath your feet,
You who despise the world of yesterday,
You who go wailing for to-day's defeat,
Have you, with grieving, done as much as they,
Who, looking down, have found that earth was gay,
And looking up have found the heavens sweet?
Ah ! ye that say, " Behold a newer light
Hath risen o'er the earth, a keener sword
Of truth and love hath pierced the veil of night
And showed us Man to be the Living Word
1913-] AN APPEAL 801
Whom all might worship," have you guessed aright
Man's exaltation to what lofty height
By him who saith, " I love thee in the Lord ? "
Ye that cry out, "The earth is full and free,
There are no vows that bind, no laws that tame;
Beauty and Truth, all things that breathe and be,
Sink back into the darkness whence they came"
Look ye within the temple-gates and see
A service sweeter than all liberty
To those who tend the Lord's fair altar-flame.
For have your gospels, preached from east to west,
Drowned in confusion and by Babeled tongues,
Lifted the burden from one troubled breast,
Or reft, as theirs, the iron-binding thongs
That knit the soul to earth ; have they but blest
One weary heart with peace, one harm redressed
From out the countless scoring of their "Wrongs?"
Say, have your promises and prophecies
Lifted one poet, crowned one lofty brow
With immortality, or have your skies
Opened to yield one prophet ; can you show
A Tuscan who looked forth with quiet eyes
And scanned earth's mystery of mysteries,
A Leonardo, or an Angelo?
ip."
Then wake and rise ! cast off the tainted pall
Of your denials and your doubts, and give
The faith withheld, the love for love; and all
The wondrous things for which you blindly strive
Shall be fulfilled. But rend the binding thrall,
And like a shroud your withered creeds shall fall
You shall look up, and shall be glad, and live!
They hear me not. O Lord Whose bounteousness
Gives and forgives, and calls from out the deep,
Wilt Thou not hear the voice of their distress
That cries against Thee, whilst their spirits keep
Watch in the night for Thee? O turn and bless;
Lord, have Thou pity on their foolishness,
And let Thy finger touch their tranced sleep.
VOL. xcvu. 51
TWO FLOWERS OF CARMEL.
BY WILLIAM VOWLES.
T has been frequently said that God plants His
choicest flowers in the enclosed garden of Carmel
and two beautiful books recently published* brings
a testimony of this truth very forcibly to our minds.
God creates saints in every walk of life and in every
age. In every phase of civilization He sets aside certain souls
who shall serve Him with special love and fidelity. Such souls are
the pillars of the universe; to them we may apply most aptly those
words of Holy Scripture which say that God's delight is to dwell
with the children of men. Their vocation is primarily a contem-
plative one they first seek the kingdom of God, then having
labored at their own sanctification and re-established in themselves
all things in Christ, God may or may not permit the history of
His dealings with their souls to be revealed to others. Their
apostolate is efficacious in proportion to the ascent of the soul, and
the greater the height to which they rise the more practical they be-
come. St. Paul's " All things to all men " was only possible after
he had been ravished to the third heaven, and the same law applies,
though in a lesser degree, to any soul passing along the road of
time to eternity, and wishing to help his fellow-travelers on the way.
Our own personal sanctification will always be the measure of
our usefulness, and the lowest degree of purity of conscience and
progress in pure love will be more acceptable to God than all the
zeal for souls or exterior works undertaken for the good of others.
The sacrifice on Calvary was agreeable to God because of the
perfect Victim ; our Lady's great prerogatives came to her through
her sinlessness ; St. Peter's supremacy was granted him when he had
proved his ardent love; St. Paul's zeal was only effective after
he had done penance, and the good he did in the Church was
measured by the degree of his share in the Passion of his Master.
In the lives of all the saints we can trace the same mysterious
*Saur Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower of Jesus. Edited by Rev. T. N.
Taylor. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, and Burns & Gates, London. Price,
$2.00.
The Praise of Glory. Translated from the French by the Benedictines of
Stanbtook. New York: Benziger Brothers, and R. & T. Washbourne, Ltd.,
London. Price, $1.25 net.
1913-] TWO FLOWERS OF CARMEL 803
dealing. As they advance in detachment, are freed from self
and all things, a secret virtue goes forth from them, which draws
souls to follow in the same paths of perfection and peace.
The saints love silence and solitude, they " keep their strength "
for the Lord; they know that the noise of the world drives away
the Holy Spirit, and therefore they shun contact with it, and hide
their secrets from it most carefully. But God Himself takes care
of their honor by granting favors to others through their inter-
cession, or by placing them in such conditions in this life that there
is near at hand a sister-soul ready to seize on any self-revelation
or exterior sign of the intense life and silence within.
It is unfortunately true that in many cases the lives of the
saints have been written without the necessary reticence and dis-
cernment; the accessories of sanctity have been made its distinctive
marks, and the dangerous path of visions, ecstasies, and miracles
put forward as the reason of holiness rather than its unusual
expression. To-day we have fallen to the other extreme: in re-
acting against the exaggeration of the past, authors of saints' lives
are inclined to fill their volumes with too much erudition, treat-
ing us to long discourses on hysteria, psychology, philosophy, and
history ; while not going to the lengths of another school of hagio-
logical writers, aptly called " denicheurs de saints," who eliminate
the supernatural whenever they meet with it, these do, however,
throw a certain distrust over the miraculous occurrences which
frequently take place in the lives of God's elect. On the one hand,
the more human qualities of the saints are thrown into the back-
ground, and on the other, divine grace is minimized and brought
to the level of a natural life. Is it not the fusion of the strong
nature with the transforming power of God's love that makes a
saint? God creates the strong will, the ardent temperament, the
bright intelligence, and vivid imagination, and then unifies them
by the gift of reason guided by faith and love.
What stronger proof could we ask of this union of natural
faculties and supernatural graces which makes the saint, than in
the lives of the two Carmelite nuns, one known already through-
out the Christian world as " The Little Flower of Jesus," the other
that of Sister Elizabeth of the Trinity, whose vocation she her-
self summed up in a name gathered from St. Paul's Epistle to
the Ephesians, "Praise of Glory?" They are both peculiarly
beautiful examples of lives of the most intense spirituality allied
to the soundest common sense. The miraculous has a very small
part in the story of their souls, and commences chiefly after their
804 TWO FLOWERS OF C ARM EL [Sept.,
death. They are essentially " modern " in their appeal, possessing
the mentality of our day; without having passed through the
" schools " or absorbed any artificial culture, they were endowed
with what is far better a keen and quick intelligence, doubled
by a will-power and logical sense which made them understand from
very early years that Christianity is not a creed for dreamers or
system makers, but one where logical consequences must follow the
accepted faith.
It is as though they had known that sentence of their spiritual
father, St. John of the Cross : " God is that suffices," and had
acted throughout their brief span of life in strict compliance with
it. Their " modern " touch is seen in the " divine discontent "
and world weariness which both experienced early in life, not indeed
that weariness which seeks repose, but that of the Christian long-
ing for transfiguration in a higher and more intense life and light.
Both were highly strung, sensitive children, with immense capa-
bilities in any direction ; both were born into pious homes, and were
surrounded in youth by loving and serious influences. The Hand
of God was upon them from the beginning, and His sanctifying
grace was given to each with a generosity that clearly indicates
a special predestination. Although they were assured by their
confessors that they had never lost their baptismal innocence, yet
in the life of each there is a special time from which they date their
" conversion."
Sister Teresa speaks of " a miracle on a small scale " which
was needed to give her strength of character all at once, and tells
us that God worked this long-desired miracle on Christmas Day,
1886, when she was nearly fourteen years old. This miracle was
the grace of overcoming an extreme sensitiveness, and withdrawing
her from those childish failings and innocent pleasures of which she
had been trying to cure herself since the age of four and a half.
" Since this day of grace," she writes, " a spirit of self-forgetfulness
took possession of me, and from that time I was perfectly happy."
This grace also kindled in her heart a burning zeal to save souls;
this consuming desire " to snatch sinners from the everlasting
flames of hell " was confirmed by the sudden repentance on the
scaffold of a notorious criminal, for whose conversion she had
specially prayed.
Sister Elizabeth dates her " conversion " from the time of her
first confession. The strong will power which is such a character-
istic of her whole life, already shows itself at this time; she
made a resolve to control her fiery temper, and to hold well in
1913.] TWO FLOWERS OF CARMEL 805
hand her impulsive nature. By the time of her First Communion
the victory was won. Henceforth a visible change was noticeable :
no movement of impatience was ever seen in her.
The Bridegroom had set aside these two souls for Himself,
and both received a vocation to the cloister in early childhood.
Sister Teresa writes of Carmel as the desert where God wished her
to hide, and adds that she felt it with the certainty of a divine
call. Although she was only about nine years old, she confided
her secret to one of her sisters, and eventually to the Mother
Prioress of a Carmelite convent, where another of her sisters
was a nun. Both believed in her vocation, but she was told that
postulants were not received before the age of sixteen, and the
Little Flower had many a trial to go through before blossoming
on the summit of Carmel.
Sister Elizabeth had said, when a child of seven, " I shall
be a nun ! I will be a nun ! " but it was seven years later that she
received the grace of a definite " call," and heard the word Carmel
pronounced within her soul one day after Holy Communion. Six
more years were to be spent in weary waiting before her one desire
to be hidden behind the grille was realized.
Such mysterious dealings of Providence with chosen" souls
when in extreme youth is not rare in the lives of the saints. More
exceptional is the clear perception of the spiritual way by which
each of these souls was led towards perfection; strongly attracted,
fascinated from their earliest years by the love of God, Sister
Teresa was to attain to it by the path of " spiritual childhood,"
and Sister Elizabeth by that of " interior recollection." Neither
of these souls understood half measures. Their minds made up, no
reasonable sacrifice was thought too difficult. To become saints
was the end in view. Sister Teresa, being, as she said, " too tiny
to climb the steep stairway of perfection," wished to find " a little
way, very short and very straight, a little way that is wholly new."
This was the path of " spiritual childhood." As in this age of
inventions people do not trouble to climb the stairs, but use lifts
instead, so she would try to find a lift by which she might be
raised unto God, and thus realize the desire of her heart in spite
of her littleness. She discovered what she sought in the two
texts, "Whosoever is a little one, let him come to Me" (Prov.
ix. 4), and " You shall be carried at the breasts and upon the knees;
. . . .as one whom the mother caresseth, so will I comfort you " (Is.
Ixvi. 12, 13). Here was the light she wanted the arms of Jesus
would be the lift to raise her up to heaven; and to get there she
8o6 TWO FLOWERS OF CARMEL [Sept.,
need not grow up; on the contrary, she must remain little, she
must become still less. Her way would be the way of a child's
love, proved by never allowing any little chance of sacrifice to
escape, making profit out of the smallest actions, and never allowing
a word or a look to escape without casting them as flowers at the
feet of Jesus.
We can trace back to the day of Sister Elizabeth's First
Communion, the awakening of her soul to the special way which
would lead her to sanctity. She was reminded that according to
the meaning of her name, she was the happy little " House of God."
She seized hold of. this idea as though it were an inspiration from
heaven, and when at a later time she was told that she would
never be heroic until the time when she would be " completely
recollected " in herself, she turned to this interior solitude . and
silence, as though drawn there by the action of the Holy Spirit.
In the depths of her soul she remained in continuous adoration of
the Blessed Trinity; there it was she found Christ to be her peace,
and dwelt with Him " in the invincible fortress of holy recollection."
Both these chosen souls furthered the work of grace in their
souls by the unflagging practice of the most entire self-renuncia-
tion. The war they waged against the senses, the first impulses
of nature and every tendency to fall into the commonplace, or
to be influenced by the promptings of self and its sensibilities,
was continued relentlessly; both knew that the path to sanctity
lay through suffering, and consciously they chose it, and never
turned aside; rather were they spellbound by its charms and in-
flamed with desire for it. Saintliness of this stamp in such young
children might easily lead to over-seriousness, but both retained
great natural liveliness of character, and were singularly endowed
with that rarest of gifts personal charm. Their love and devotion
to their families is deepened and strengthened in proportion to the
advance they make along the path of perfection.
Sister Teresa's devotion to the young martyr, Theophane
Venard, was mainly inspired by his tender love of his own family.
" I, too, love my family with a tender love ; I fail to understand
those saints who do not share my feelings." These words were
said by her to her own sisters shortly before her death. Sister
Elizabeth's letters to her mother and sister show us the same intense
love for kith and kin indeed it would be impossible to find two
more striking examples of the power of religion to spiritualize
and to intensify all that is best in the human heart than in the
case of these holy nuns. To go still further, we would add that
1913-] TWO FLOWERS OF CARMEL 807
neither of them would have attained their perfect development
outside the cloister, either in the affections or in the intelligence.
The school of perfection to which they were drawn by grace taught
them not only the love of God, but in learning to love Him, they
found as well the full life of the soul, and that also of the heart
and mind. **$
Both would have been remarkable women in any walk of life;
it would be difficult to discover two finer types of all-round develop-
ment than these " flowers of Carmel." Their natural gifts were
far beyond the average. I have already mentioned the force of
will, so strong in each ; in intelligence they are the worthy daughters
of St. Teresa; both wrote faultless French, and possessed a liter-
ary style which is as rare as it is beautiful. Both were blessed
with that rarest of gifts the creative faculty, doubled by a vivid
imagination. Their descriptions of nature, more especially of
flowers and of the sea, are of real poetic worth. Both were
inspired poets, their verse being full of ardor and expression.
Sister Teresa excelled in painting, while Sister Elizabeth was a
musician, with a genius for interpreting the great masters. Sanc-
tity no doubt is an effect of indwelling grace faithfully preserved
in the soul, but God surrounds the soul with those natural facul-
ties upon which He intends to build up the spiritual edifice, and
although in certain cases He leads His saints by the path of
ignorance, so that the infused knowledge of the Holy Spirit may be
more clearly manifested, yet the more normal road would be that
by which He led our two Carmelites. Here indeed is the practice
of virtue in a heroic degree, but without any semblance of the
extraordinary; here is the strong faith which removes every ob-
stacle and wins answer to prayer. The miraculous is mainly to
be found in the accounts of favors obtained through their inter-
cession after death, yet there are incidents enough to show the
special guiding of Providence in their lives.
Sister Teresa's autobiography is a mine of mystic theology
none the less deep on account of its apparent simplicity. She quotes
largely both from the Old and the New Testament, giving the texts
a vividness of meaning and a depth of interpretation which makes
the book the delight of the learned as well as the unlearned. From
this point of view Sister Elizabeth is also truly remarkable.
She based her spirituality on what she learnt from the Epistles
of St. Paul, whose spirit and teaching she had absorbed to a
degree rarely to be found outside the ranks of professed
8o8 TWO FLOWERS OF C ARM EL [Sept.,
theologians. Her piety, as well as that of Sister Teresa, was es-
sentially scriptural, and in this again they strike a modern note. As
their interior life became more intense, we can see the gradual
abandoning of all helps to devotion excepting the Holy Scriptures
and the Divine Liturgy. As they advanced along the road of per-
fection, these virile souls seemed to stand more and more detached
from every earthly succor, so that at last their whole life was one
long prayer of "loving regard;" nourished as they were upon the
whole truth, living hour by hour in closest communion with the
Sacred Humanity, no wonder their faith and love grew to the ex-
treme limit possible in human existence. But a love and faith of this
calibre implies much suffering in attaining, and still greater suffer-
ing in retaining. Neither was spared her full share of the cross.
It was an early desire of both to resemble the Divine Model
in everything; they did not think of suffering as a necessary
affliction to be borne with resignation, or for the sake of gaining
merit, but as the most enviable favor the Master could bestow.
This insatiable longing for suffering has been the characteristic of
many saints, and " predestinated to be conformed to Christ," they
knew Him through the " fellowship of His sufferings." Spiritual
trials, and finally physical pain in its acutest form, was the lot of
"The Little Flower" and "Praise of Glory." Both suffered
serenely and courageously ; without temerity and confiding in God's
love, they advanced rapidly towards the goal. The story of the
last few months of the earthly exile of these victims of love
is amongst the most wonderful testimonies of the power of the soul
over suffering, of mind over matter, of grace over nature. Sister
Teresa had said a few days before her death, " the death of love
which I desire is that of Jesus upon the cross;" and when the cup of
suffering was full to overflowing, and so intense that it seemed
impossible to suffer more, she exclaimed, " I can only explain
it by my extreme desire to save souls ;" and then, " Yes, all that
I have written about my thirst for suffering is really true! I do
not regret having surrendered myself to love." Her last words
were: " I do not wish to suffer less," then, looking at her crucifix,
" Oh, I love Him! My God, I love Thee! "
When Sister Elizabeth confided her desire of suffering to a
Dominican Father whose influence had helped to shape her soul in
the way of interior recollection, he told her not to limit herself
to that, but to yield herself in all simplicity to God, leaving
Him free to act in any way He chose. This was the signal for a
1913.] TWO FLOWERS OF CARMEL 809
still swifter ascension of her whole being towards God. She was
enduring a terrible physical agony, and was yet able to say, " I feel
love standing beside me as though it were a living being! It says
to me : 'I wish to love in thy companionship ; therefore I desire
thee to suffer without thinking that thou art suffering, submitting
thyself to my action upon thee,' " and when her tortures increased,
" God is a consuming fire, He is acting upon me." Her soul
seemed completely master of her physical state, and the few words
she was still able to utter gave abundant evidence of her deep
interior concentration on God. Those who surrounded her were
reminded of the choice she had made of dying in the abandonment
of Calvary rather than in an ecstasy " not on account of its
merit, but that I might glorify and resemble Him I depart in
pure faith, and prefer it, for I resemble my Master more closely,
and it is more real." Such were her sentiments on the eve of
death. Just before entering the great silence, the foretaste of which
she had so loved in Carmel, she murmured the words " I am
going to light, to love, to life ! " With a radiant expression of
ecstasy rather than agony, the little " Praise of Glory " left this
earth. She had said, " I shall hardly have reached the threshold
of Paradise when I shall rush there like a little rocket, for a
Traise of Glory' can have no other place to all eternity." There
was no sorrow round the graves of these innocent victims; the pain
of sacrifice gave way to a feeling of great hope and divine peace.
Their mission had barely begun both had spoken prophetically
of what would be their vocation in heaven. Sister Teresa
had concluded her autobiography with the following prayer:
" I entreat Thee to let Thy Divine Eyes rest upon a vast uumber of
little souls; I entreat Thee to choose, in this world, a legion
of little victims of Thy love." Her work would be to teach her
little ^vay to little souls, and when asked what that way was, she
answered, " It is the way of trust and of absolute self-surrender."
Sister Elizabeth writes to one of her friends that the special
grace of her little sister of Lisieux is " to dilate souls, to in-
spire them with love, confidence, and self -surrender." That she is
exerting this secret power is well known to those who are au cou-
rant of the numberless miracles and graces she has obtained from
God for those who invoke her. She is indeed true to her promise,
" I will spend my heaven in doing good on earth," and " the shower
of roses " which she said she would let fall upon the earth is fast
becoming a mighty torrent of flowers strewn over the whole earth.
810 TWO FLOWERS OF C ARM EL [Sept.,
The Process for her Beatification has begun, and the cause is likely
to make rapid progress towards Canonization.
The " Little Flower " died in 1897, and " Praise of Glory "
in 1906. She too has already given ample proof of the mission she
declared she would fulfill from heaven. " I believe that in heaven
my mission will be to draw souls to interior recollection by helping
them to go out of self, and to adhere to God by a simple and loving
impulse; to keep them in that profound inner silence which allows
God to imprint Himself upon souls, and to transform them into
Himself." This is the vocation of her who said, " I have found
heaven on earth, since heaven is God, and God is in my soul."
From all parts of the world we hear of many exterior signs con-
firming her work in souls. Her glory already shines with a clear
steady lustre, and many owe their divine awakening to her influence.
By the light shed by this little lamp many have found the "gift
of God," and found also the grace of initiation into a deeper interior
life of communion with her " Three," her " Almighty Counsellor "
as she called the Three Divine Persons. This power over souls, this
leading from self and all that is human to the life that " makes all
things new," to the life of adoration in spirit and in truth, is indeed
a mark revealing great sanctity. Many already kneel secretly be-
side her tomb, begging her to win for them some of those great
blessings she herself received in her lifetime.
Thus do these two chosen souls bear witness to the indwelling
of the Holy Ghost in us; to the divine life in the creature; to the
reality of the spiritual regeneration of humanity. The exquisite
simplicity and sincerity of the Little Flower, her " sure way " of
trust and complete abandonment to love, her bright nature and
admirable intelligence, would seem to have been raised up by God
as a special example in these modern days of complicated culture
and dispersed energies, to warn us away from the worldly spirit of
the century, and to show us what supernatural as well as natural
marvels God works in the soul wholly surrendered to His inspira-
tion. The influence too of modern civilization is one of disintegra-
tion, both moral and physical. There is little stability of character
or steady motive; souls evaporate in superficial piety, and mood
takes too frequently the place of reason. Sister Elizabeth runs
counter to this spirit; from her earliest years she makes a bold
stand against the first movements of nature, and stamps out with
all the energy of her ardent temperament the sensibility inseparable
from a delicate organization like her own. Her spirituality, like
1913-] TWO FLOWERS OF CARMEL 811
that of Sister Teresa, was entirely based upon the Holy Scriptures,
and has been aptly described as " doctrinal." They share, too, a
common veneration and love for the Divine Office, so that Sister
Elizabeth could say that she did not think it possible for anyone
to have prepared themselves with greater care for its recital than she
did. The strength of her intellect, as well as the depth and intensity
of her spiritual life, is marvelously revealed in the notes of her
last retreat, in which she explains what she understood by her
office of " Praise of Glory." This was the one idea of her life to
live already on this earth the life of praise of God's glory as we
shall do in heaven. For her, heaven on earth meant " heaven in
faith, with suffering and self-immolation " for Him she loved.
She believed that " we should give immense joy to the Heart
of God by imitating, in the heaven of our soul, this occupation of
{he blessed, adhering to Him by the simple contemplation which
resembles the state of innocence in which man was created." And
then she asks, " How can I imitate, within the heaven of my soul,
the ceaseless work of the blessed in the heaven of glory? How
can I maintain this constant praise, this uninterrupted adoration? "
She finds the answer given by St. Paul, " the father of her soul,"
as she termed him, " That the Father would grant you, ac-
cording to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened unto
the inward man. That Christ may dwell by faith in your hearts;
that being rooted and founded in charity " " To be rooted
and founded in charity," she exclaims, is the necessary condition
of worthily fulfilling the office of a " Praise of Glory." The
soul that enters into, that dwells in " the deep things of God,"
that consequently does all " by Him, with Him, and in Him,"
with the purity of intention that gives it a certain resemblance
to the one, simple Being this soul by its every aspiration, every
action, every movement, however commonplace, becomes more
deeply rooted in Him it loves. Everything within it renders
homage to the thrice-holy God ; it may be called a perpetual Sanctus,
a perpetual " Praise of Glory."
Such were these daughters of Saint Teresa, worthy indeed of
their Seraphic Mother! From her they inherited their burning
zeal and devotion to Holy Church ; from her, too, their ardent love
and apostolate of prayer. They are teaching the modern world
those lessons of which it stands most in need, and are bringing
back countless souls to the paths of simplicity, faith, and pure
love of God.
THE IMAGE OF OUR LADY.
BY JANE HALL.
EIL BURKE stood outside a bookshop in Royal
Street, New Orleans, and he had money in his
pocket, and this he counted a singular coincidence.
Thrusting his hands deep into his trousers pockets,
he rattled the silver to assure himself of its enduring
reality, and tossed a quarter to a negro boy who was grinding out
" Trovatore " on a hurdy-gurdy. Then he turned to his book-
shop window.
In Neil's opinion there was but one other place in the world
that presented so compelling an appeal to one's pocket book, and
that was the Quai Malaquais in Paris. On the Quai Malaquais
and in Royal Street, the exchange of money involved in a transfer
of ownership had always seemed to Neil a trivial farce maintained
by callous shopkeepers in the illusion that they profited thereby.
The idea that money could give adequate return for the possession
of rare old books and genuine antiques was, in itself, an evidence
of the callousness that had overgrown their souls.
Not since the days of Paris had Neil looked into such a
window, and having acquired some proficiency in estimating the
character of shopkeepers by their window displays, he registered
the impression that this shopkeeper knew his books and loved
them. Were this the case he foresaw impending difficulties. He
had met such shopkeepers before, and usually their hair was white,
and they appeared from the back of the shop when you entered,
always with a book, the thumb marking the page at which you
interrupted, and they waited on you with a manner of patient
interest that they did not feel. If you selected a book that was
not thumb marked, well and good; the shopkeeper gave it into
your possession unfeelingly, and accepted the equivalent of your
next three dinners with equal concern. But should you hit upon an
old worn volume, whose ragged edges and soiled leaves betokened an
affection of many years, your accumulated savings from a month of
fasting could not buy it. That book had become a part of him.
It had bound itself to him by a life-long friendship, and, notwith-
standing your disappointment, you came away refreshed with the
memory of this fine, white-haired, old gentleman, who placed so
high a value on friends.
1913.] THE IMAGE OF OUR LADY 813
Reflecting upon the problematical disposition of this shop-
keeper, Neil's mind had wandered from the bookshop window, but
now returned. His eye centred on the shelf of fiction, and he felt
the silver, in his pocket leap. Monsieur, the shopkeeper, under-
stood well the hunger of men's minds, and had, besides, the honesty
to give full measure for the want. The works of George Mere-
dith occupied the shelf of fiction; and so it was that Neil knew
the keeper of the shop.
Had there been one book less, he reflected in after years,
it might never have happened, and the incorrigible burden of life
then ! For it was in considering a volume of Meredith that Neil's
eyes wandered into a corner as yet unexplored, and fell upon a
dusty little image of the Virgin. It was no ordinary image such
as one may see in any shop of church supplies, but a group of
figures composed of (Adam, Eve, the Virgin, and two angels
bearing tapers. And to Neil, who usually saw in things what no
one else saw, there was a beautiful significance in the arrangement
of this little group. It was an intimation of the gift divine, he
said, that had placed the Mother of God midway between the
originators of sin and the angels.
Neil recognized the image as a replica of the central group
above the high altar in Notre Dame, and he knew these replicas
were rare; he had seen but one other like it. Again it was the
Quai Malaquais and in a bookshop window. It was not a perfect
image either, he remembered ; there had been a crack in the hem of
the Virgin's robe. He had tried to buy it, but the shopkeeper
was one of those fine, white-haired, old gentlemen to whom money
makes no appeal. He had wanted it merely because its oddness
appealed to him, and there was idle money in his pocket. He could
not possibly have foreseen the day, then, when he should come
to value it above everything.
" Surely," he thought, " it is by some favor of the Blessed
Virgin that I am standing now before this bookshop window."
Then he glanced at Meredith and smiled.
Neil entered the shop, and turned the pages of a magazine
while he waited the appearance of the shopkeeper. There was
time to read two complete articles before he came.
His hair was not white; it was of that particular color of
gray that denotes the swift passing of middle age. But in all
other respects Neil had estimated the man.
Neil said he wanted Meredith, but of the four novels still
unread he had, as yet, made no choice. He fingered them all
814 THE IMAGE OF OUR LADY [Sept.,
reflectively. Choosing was the supreme joy in the act of book
buying, and Neil was not in the humor to be deprived of it, but
the man who waited had his thumb in a book.
" Monsieur, I advise you to take Beauchamp's Career."
" As well that as anything," Neil replied.
" And would there be anything else ? "
" I should like to look at that little image of the Virgin you
have in the window."
" Certainly, monsieur, but the image is not for sale."
" Then why do you display it in your window ? "
" Dieu sait, perhaps it is to attract customers like yourself."
While he was speaking the shopkeeper removed the image
from the window, blew the dust from it, and handed it to Neil.
And Neil, accepting it, wondered if his trembling hands betrayed
his eagerness. But when he had examined it, his wonderment
surpassed the adequacy of his native tongue.
" Monsieur, it is you," he began excitedly. " It is you who
have lived on the Quai Malaquais."
" May I ask how monsieur knows that ? " The old man, for
so we may call him with his hair verging on white, and the years
heavy upon his shoulders, spoke slowly. His voice was steady and
even; it was the sudden brightness of his eyes that belied his tone.
" It is by this image that I know," Neil answered him. " See,
here is the crack in the hem of the Virgin's robe. It is not
possible that there are two images with two such cracks. This
image was once in a shop window on the Quai Malaquais, perhaps
for the same reason that it is here to attract customers like
myself, but certain it is that I could not buy it. That was ten
years ago. It was a mere whim that made me want it then, but
now now, God hear me, it is the thing I value most in this world,
and I must have it. I will give for it what I have, but I must
have it. You understand ? I must have this image and no other."
" That is impossible, monsieur."
" You can talk of impossibilities when it is the Blessed Lady
herself who has brought me here, who has put this image in my
hands. Is it you who know the ways of God? "
" Neither the ways of God nor the ways of men, monsieur.
It is yourself who eludes my understanding. You come into my
shop to buy Meredith, and suddenly you become mad about a piece
of colored plaster. It is
" What matters your understanding?" Neil interrupted him.
" What matters anything except that I have searched seven years
1913-] THE IMAGE OF OUR LADY 815
out of ten for the image of Our Lady, and that now I have it in
my hands. It is my whole happiness, this little image, and what
is it to you a piece of colored plaster : you have said it. Is it not
enough that I will give for it all I have ? "
" Monsieur, all that you have could not buy it," the shop-
keeper answered. " It is my heritage, that little piece of plaster.
It is that one must respect the wishes of the dead." .,;
" Is the image not the same, then, that I saw on the Quai
Malaquais ? "
"It is the same, though it was not in my shop window that
you saw it, but my father's. I was out in the world then, tasting
of its pleasures. I was not young, but I had remained always
at home, and I had still the great illusion that losing one's head
and flinging away one's money constituted life. For those years I
lost my heritage. The shop that you saw was to have been mine.
It is mine still by the law of the heart : to love is to possess, mon-
sieur, is it not so? I loved that little shop as a man loves his
mistress. I knew every book, every jewel, every antique, every
piece of bronze and ivory; they were my friends from childhood.
Often at night I would call to mind the loveliness of some design,
and with the memory of its beauty I slept, so that it was my first
thought on wakening.
" The heart has many claims, monsieur, but there comes to
each life but one great passion. For some it is a woman, for others
a work, for me it was my shop. Then to lose it! Dieu, it is
much to have paid for mistaken pleasure. It is again the tragedy
of unreason. My father did not remember my years of faithful
service; in his anger he willed the shop to my brother's son.
I could not believe it. I said, 'At the last he will see clearly, and
he will repent of his anger.' Monsieur, I had the great faith of love.
" But no, it was not so. Faith had betrayed my reason.
To me, his son, my father left the image of Our Lady. It is
rare, as monsieur knows. There are, perhaps, not three others
like it in the world. But it is not for that I cherish it. It is
because I am growing old and my life is broken, and that little
image speaks to me of the thing I loved. I yield my thoughts
to it, and I find relief from the deep silence. Monsieur knows;
he has the great gift of understanding. I cannot part from that
little image. Mon Dieu! I cannot. It is my soul!"
The old man turned from Neil abruptly. The schooling of
the years had taught him the suppression of emotion. He stood
quietly looking into the street.
816 THE IMAGE OF OUR LADY [Sept.,
Neil, captive of an impulse, stepped quickly to his side -and
touched his arm. " Monsieur," he said, unconsciously adopting
the old man's manner of speech, " will you shake hands with me?
I shall remember it happily when I am old."
" I do not understand."
"No? Then it is this: For the end of life I shall have
courage. I shall say: 'Now am I certain about God, for once I
met a man who would not barter his soul.' It is because of that,"
Neil continued, " that you must hear my story. You must know,
monsieur, that I do not ask a man that thing which is his soul
without a reason. 'There is but one great passion that comes to
every life,' yourself has said it. For you, monsieur, it is your shop,
but for me it is a woman. Her name is Renee. She is of your
country, and she has the soul that seeks always the unattainable.
She is my wife, monsieur. We have had our great joy, we have
had our dream, but now the shadow is upon us. Renee is a cripple.
For seven years she has not walked. There is no cure for her,
the doctors say, because they cannot name her illness. Her injury
came of a fall, and because of the great pain she lost her courage.
Since that time she has never walked. Now the muscles are weak
through long disuse, and she has no will to try. If you could see
her, monsieur, so white, so frail, with her dark restless eyes moving
from beauty to beauty, 'A soul that has lost its body/ you would
say. Yes, that is Renee.
" But life is never without hope, monsieur, and there is one
thing in which we both have great faith: it is the image of Our
Lady. For you are to know that it is the Blessed Mother who
has sent all good things into our lives. Before her shrine in Notre
Dame I found Renee, and immediately came the commission to
paint my first mural: so the Blessed Mother arranged it that we
should marry. Is it, then, a thing to wonder about that Renee
should say: 'Find me an image of Our Lady and I shall walk?'
" You say, monsieur, that you do not understand how a man
may read Meredith and put his faith in images. And I answer
you, neither do I understand, but one may believe though he does
not understand. Is it not so? Faith is a thing ever apart from
the intellect, and this I know : it is faith that occasions miracles,
never miracles that give our faith.
" Monsieur, I know what I am asking yourself has said it : it
is your soul. Well, then, I say to you : Give your soul that you may
find it again ! In the name of God I am asking of you Renee's life."
For a long time there was silence between them. They stood,
I9I3-] THE IMAGE OF OUR LADY 817
both of them, staring into the busy street, and trying to determine
there the question of faith and souls. But when at last Neil turned
to the man beside him, no word was required to tell him his
happiness was won; the light that shone on the shopkeeper's face
was one of peace.
" Take it, my son," he said, " and may you find that faith
has not deceived your intellect. But do not let us speak of money.
I will lend you the image of Our Lady, and when the miracle is
accomplished, you will return it to me so that I may find my soul
again." He smiled; even in sacrifice humor has its place.
" Monsieur, I have not words to thank you," Neil began.
" Do not; gratitude is essentially a thing of the heart."
When Monsieur Girard turned the key in the door of his shop
the day following, his eyes instinctively sought the window where
every morning for years he had looked upon the image of Our Lady.
Why had he placed it in the window ? To gather dust and attract
the curious? Counterfeit reasons, he knew. He must look upon
it first in the morning and last at night; as a man looks into the
eyes of a loved woman to find his soul there, so Monsieur Girard
looked upon his image. He looked and said to himself that he
was a fool for all his fifty years, and yet he understood the wisdom
of such folly.
But now the window was empty and life was empty. Yielding
to an impulse, he had parted with the thing he loved, and his
intellect condemned his action. Did he know anything of the boy
except the light in his eyes and the gentleness of his Irish voice?
Was reason never to be identified with age ? He had no more head
at fifty than he had had at thirty; life would always require of him
to play the fool.
" Norn de Dieu! " he finished, " but I argue poorly. If the boy
puts his faith in images, I'll put my faith in the boy. Dieu!
How many years since I have believed in anything!"
Three days passed, and on the morning of the fourth Monsieur
Girard received a telegram. He opened the envelope deliberately.
What need was there of haste? The great news was already in the
air. Observing that the telegram had been sent from New York,
Monsieur Girard smiled; he had forgotten to take Neil's address.
" The old intellect had some reason to grumble," he thought,
"but what does it matter now? " He unfolded the yellow paper,
and the great joy that is the end of sacrifice was in his heart.
VOL. xcvu. 52
818 THE IMAGE OF OUR LADY [Sept.,
"Renee walks," he read. "May the Mother of God reward you."
With the coming of every morning thereafter, Monsieur Girard
looked for the return of the image of Our Lady, and at the end
of every day, when it had not come, he felt his disappointment
growing heavier. He dared not consider what might have happened
to it, if it were lost or broken, or if the boy meant not to return it.
He dared not consider these things because his faith stood in the
way. His intellect whispered misgivings ; he would not listen. "The
harvest of the years," he said, " what is it if it is not faith in men? "
But when a week had passed and the image had not been re-
turned, neither had any other word come from Neil, Monsieur
Girard knew that his faith was on trial. So he waited and fought.
If one day brought him hope, the next returned to him his disbelief.
Thus the days moved slowly, with difficulty, and the face of
Monsieur Girard became whiter, and his smile a grimace that be-
trayed the terrible struggle within. A month passed, and the shop-
keeper, unable to endure the silence longer, told his story to an
old acquaintance.
" What you need is a change," his friend said. " You've let
this thing weigh upon your mind until you've come to exaggerate
its importance. What if the boy does abscond with your image?
What shall you have lost but an inartistic piece of plaster? "
"What shall I have lost?" the old man cried impatiently.
" How is it that you can ask ? It is my faith I shall have lost, my
faith in men which was returned to me after many unbelieving
years. Do you count that a little thing? My friend, it is I who
pity you. But no," he continued, " I have not lost it. I will believe.
Hear me, monsieur, it is you who shall witness my belief. Some
day the image of Our Lady will return to me. At this moment
I know that for a certainty. I have come to the end of the struggle.
Now I shall have peace."
So it was that Monsieur Girard kept his faith. The days did
not move more quickly now, but they were more endurable because
of the tranquillity that marked their progress. And in the strength-
ening of his faith from day to day, Monsieur Girard felt a new
vitality possess his body. Something of that vigor of will passed
into his muscles and his brain. He straightened his shoulders. He
held his head a little higher. He believed in his own efforts as he
had never believed in them before. Life was renewed to him
in his faith.
The day that ended his patient waiting brought the sun's
1913.] THE IMAGE OF OUR LADY 819
warmth to his heart, and Monsieur Girard, flinging off the years
like old garments, put on his youth again and danced. A letter
had come to him in an unfamiliar handwriting, which he knew
must be Neil's; a French stamp and a Paris postmark were dumb
apologies for its tardiness. " Paris," he sighed as he broke the seal.
MY DEAR MONSIEUR GIRARD:
I do not begin with apologies for my silence, though I should.
The story of the miracle is waiting to be told.
" Not so fast, young man," I hear you say. " We no longer
live in the age of miracles. Nowadays things happen because
we will them to or because we are lucky, or are sent a gift
from the gods."
As you will, monsieur, but hear my story ; then let your intel-
lect seek the answer. If you received my message, you must
know that Renee walks. To hold the image of Our Lady in
her hands, that was to confirm her faith. And there, monsieur,
is the reason for the symbol of one's belief: truth is never
so much truth as when the eye beholds it ; " seeing is believing "
we are told. And such was the influence of that little piece of
plaster on Renee's mind that once she had walked, she believed
she could not walk without it.
" Why did you not buy the image, Neil ? " she said. " Do
you not see that now I cannot do without it ? "
" But, Renee, I have told you. Monsieur Girard would not
sell. And I have given him my word that the image will be
returned to him."
"But not now please not now," Renee pleaded. "Surely
Monsieur Girard will not mind if I keep it until I am strong
again. Write and explain it to him. Tell him that just to
look upon the face of Our Lady is to feel my strength returning.
Tell him, Neil, that there is sunlight on the hills again."
And it was even after I had begun the letter, monsieur,
that the wonderful commission came. I must explain that
six months before, I had entered a competition for the murals
of a new theatre, and I do not know how it happened, but I won.
So I had won the competition, and Renee had her health, and
these things had come to us through our believing. Monsieur,
you will understand how dear to us the reminder of our faith
had become.
My work had to be done in Paris, and a year is but a little
time. It was necessary that I should go at once. But what
to do with the image of Our Lady? If I write to Monsieur
Girard, I reasoned, he will never consent to let me take it, and
820 THE IMAGE OF OUR LADY [Sept.,
leave it I cannot, as long as Renee needs it. Monsieur, before
you condemn my act, I ask you to remember the seven years
of our suffering.
" Let the sin be upon me," I said. " I will steal the image
until the time when Renee has no longer any need of it; then
I myself will return it to Monsieur Girard."
We packed the little image with great care, and carried it
in our satchel lest it should be injured. "If anything happens
to Our Lady," I said, " it is the end of both of us."
Imagine, then, the panic of my mind when I opened the
satchel in Paris and found the image in two pieces. Monsieur,
there are not words to describe the sickness I felt. It seemed
that life, which had been so fair, had suddenly the darkness
of sorrow. For what but sorrow could come of a broken thing
that was the joy of so many lives. I called for Renee, and
when she saw it the tears started down her cheeks.
" It was the porter at Cherbourg," she consoled me. " I saw
him put the satchel in the rack."
You see, monsieur, the crack, which was visible only in the
hem of the Virgin's robe, really extended clear through the
image, and the jar occasioned by a careless porter broke it
exactly in the place where it had been broken before. The
dust of many years must have lodged in the crack to have
covered it so completely.
And now we have arrived at that happening which seems
to me a miracle. For you must know that the image was hol-
low, and contained a little sack of silk. And the significance
of the little sack of silk? Monsieur, there was in it the second
will of your father. Grace a Dieu you have again that which
is your soul. Monsieur Sceptique, your intellect's answer?
We have established ourselves in the Rue Leopold-Robert.
You know it well; it is in that part of Paris which is a part
of yourself. And in our petite maison there is one room that
awaits an occupant. It has character, that little room. An
open fire greets you. The chairs, though French, solicit your
repose. The books are friendly, and the pictures beckon the
mind to the infinite spaces. The mantel is of a design that will
stir your memories; it is worthy the image of Our Lady,
which rests upon it.
Do not trouble to sell your stock, monsieur. Time spent
apart from that which one loves is time misspent. But bring
the books you cannot leave, turn the key in your door and come.
Your children,
RENE AND NEIL.
IRew Boohs.
HISTORY OF ROME AND THE POPES IN THE MIDDLE
AGES. By Hartmann Grisar, SJ. Translated by Luigi
Cappadelta. Vol. III. St. Louis: B. Herder. $4.50.
This third volume of Father Grisar's critical History of Rome
and the Popes brings us to the sixth century, or, as he calls it,
the Close of the Ancient World. It begins with a brief sketch
of Western monasticism and its relations with the Holy See. He
speaks of the two abuses of the fifth and sixth centuries, the Monachi
Gyrovagi, worldly, self-willed monks who kept traveling from
monastery to monastery, and the Sarabaitce, who lived in small
groups of two or three without any ecclesiastical superior. He
brings out clearly the successful efforts of St. Benedict to re-es-
tablish Western monasticism upon firmer ground by means of a
mild and wise rule, which left a great deal to the free will of the
individual. The whole constitution of the Order in fact was an
outcome of the spirit of Christian Rome. The Popes, therefore,
from Gregory the Great onwards gave it the preference.
In discussing the relations of Pope Vigilius with the Emperor
Justinian, Father Grisar shows, against many non-Catholic con-
troversialists, that there was no question of making any compro-
mise with heresy. Both could condemn the Three Chapters with-
out any deviation from the faith. The Emperor's Edict, which
was the cause of the whole dispute, in no way impaired the Church's
doctrine, but was really issued from an excess of zeal in favor
of the faith. The one question that caused such bitterness at the
time was this : " Was the Edict useful, or was it not rather in-
judicious, as actually tending to foment division, and even schism? "
Father Grisar devotes the major part of his work to describing
the churches, the Imperial Forums, the pagan columns and obe-
lisks, and the Christian cemeteries and catacombs of Rome. He
has some very interesting chapters on the language and art of
declining Rome, the education of the clergy, clerical celibacy,
ordinations, the Christian counterparts of pagan festivals, the
Ember Days, the Lenten Stations, and the reception of converts
into the Church.
Perhaps the most interesting chapter in the volume is his
critical estimate of the Biblical apocrypha, the Symmachian For-
822 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
genes, the legends of the martyrs, and the Liber Pontificalis. He
shows how zealous Catholic scholars have been in late years to clear
the ground of history from the legends which have encumbered it.
He writes:
Certainty is after all only to be attained at the price of
sacrificing falsehood to criticism. The sources which have sup-
plied us with material for our History of Rome and the Popes
are very different from that fictitious literature which falsely
claims the right to rank among the sources of history. Even
when we have been compelled to have recourse to works in
which truth is mingled with error, we have at least endeavored
to sift conscientiously what is trustworthy from that which is
not. All we have hitherto said has invariably been based on the
real sources of historical knowledge on official and contem-
porary documents of the Popes, on monuments which are still
before our eyes, and on the statements of the best informed and
most veracious chroniclers. In the future we shall not allow
either fear or favor to deter us from telling the truth in its
entirety. It has been rightly said that now, if ever, the history
of the Popes requires that the truth should be told, and nothing
but the truth. Cassiodorus points out that everything stated
by the historian of the Church is useful for instruction and
edification, and allows us to see the hand of Providence guiding
the course of human affairs. Surely this thought should en-
courage us to tell the truth under all circumstances, even when
by doing so we may seem disrespectful to persons or institu-
tions which we rightly hold in veneration.
Chapters V. and VI. deal with the Roman Primacy in the
sixth century, and the Roman See and the Franks. Thanks to
the Popes, the Church had brilliantly demonstrated that she could
stand alone, though the Roman Empire upon which she had once
reckoned for support was fast sinking into ruin. And not only did
this mighty body preserve its footing, but, with the help of the
spirit of unity infused into it from Rome, at the downfall of the
ancient polity and civilization, it was able to save for futurity the
best elements of the past. The Popes persistently maintained the
Church's unity in spite of every attack. Arianism was met and
overcome by Julius I. and Damasus ; Pelagianism by Innocent and
Celestine; Nestorianism by Celestine and Xystus III., and Euty-
chianism by Leo the Great and his successors.
The volume is well bound and well printed, and the excellent
illustrations add much to its interest. No priest can afford to be
without this scholarly history.
1913.] NEW BOOKS 823
THE BOOK OF THE FOUNDATIONS OF ST. TERESA OF
JESUS. Written by Herself. Translated from the Spanish
by David Lewis. New and Revised Edition, with Introduc-
tion by Very Rev. Benedict Zimmerman, Discalced Carmelite.
New York: Benziger Brothers. $2.25 net.
It speaks well for the influence of St. Teresa in our age and
country, that a new edition of her Book of Foundations follows
closely upon the publication by The Columbus Press of her Auto-
biography and the Foundations in one splendid volume. She draws
the more meditative spirits irresistibly; and David Lewis' English
versions of her writings must ever possess unchallenged preemi-
nence. Father Zimmerman's Introduction is of much value, espe-
cially for ascertaining dates and grouping persons.
Our readers must get and read these books if they would
understand how God acts through women for His highest purposes :
for it would be idle for us to try to impart even a little of their
marvelous instruction by a summary of events or a sketch of char-
acter. The Book of Foundations brings us down to St. Teresa's
last months, almost to her last days. It tells how she worked to
the end with the miraculous fortitude with which she began years
before. Her final foundation of the Carmel of Burgos was made
in the first half of 1852, the year she died. Returning from this
work, towards Avila, she met death at Alba de Tormes, October 4th,
having been foully treated by the Prioresses of two of her former
foundations, turned out of doors at both monasteries, hungry and
desolate, and forbidden to go to Avila. But the doors of Paradise
soon swung open for her noble soul, so humble and so aggressive, so
peaceful and so warlike.
Let the reader be content to read on with patience before criti-
cizing St. Teresa's desultory style of writing. She is apt to wander
from the straight line of her topic, a fault in most cases,
but in the case of a great teacher it may become a virtue of style
and method of the highest order. " We have," says Father Cole-
ridge, " everywhere in her writings a number of most valuable
digressions, and to anyone who would try her by the strict rules
of literary composition, she may seem to wander about. But the
digressions of St. Teresa are worth more than the direct and
formal reasons and discourse of others, and there is, besides, al-
ways a clear connection in what she says with her main subject "
(Life of St. Teresa, vol. i., ch. xi.).
The rule of life observed and enforced by St. Teresa during her
many long and wearisome journeys, was to make her little caravan
824 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
a traveling monastery. Nothing was omitted from her monastic
rule that was compatible with getting over the road towards the
aiew foundations. The nuns with her were always well-tried
religious, and were, with rare exceptions, volunteers; and
she treated them as being under serious obligation to them for
Coming with her. Before beginning any journey, all received Holy
Communion. The vehicles were palanquins portable chairs or
litters and coaches; but in both the inmates were always strictly
curtained off from wayside gazers. St. Teresa learned the need
of this by once suffering some rudeness for lack of it. She was
always accompanied by a chaplain, usually Don Julian of Avila,
a secular priest of great piety and discretion. Sometimes there
were other priests with her, either because of their interest in her
work, or because they represented the ecclesiastical authorities.
Once the start on the road was made, the Saint and her nuns
behaved as if they were in their convent. The monastic silence was
enforced rigidly, not only on the Sisters, but on the priests and secu-
lars, including the servants. These latter were very glad when so
unusual, and for them so irksome, an observance as absolute silence
was over. She rewarded them, dear thoughtful and generous soul,
with some special dishes at their meal at the night's halt.
Each litter or carriage containing nuns had its superior, ap-
pointed both for the sake of good order, and as a trial of how
those the Saint had chosen could exercise authority.
It sometimes happened that the journeys, or considerable]
parts of them, were made mounted on donkeys, with pack mules
to carry the baggage. This gave scant opportunity for conventual
observance, but abundant opportunity for the high virtue of pa-
tience. The sisters always kept their veils down, and practised as
best they might the recollection of their state of life. Another
serious addition to the hardship of these holy expeditions, was
that in the summer time the cavalcade often traveled by night
to avoid the sweltering heat of the Spanish dog days. This gave
rise to many little and some few perilous adventures, terrifying
at the time, but highly amusing when afterwards recalled.
To a highly developed contemplative no conditions could be
hindrances to almost constant recollection, and our Saint was
specially gifted with a realization of the Divine Presence. Her
journeys were often, indeed usually, times of extraordinary con-
solations. But sweet as must have been these communings with
heaven, St. Teresa talked in proper season with, her nuns with
unaffected gaiety, filling them with religious peace and gladness.
1913.] NEW BOOKS 825
The happenings of these slow, jolting, often interrupted travels,
were by her turned pleasantly to account, every hour of wayfaring
leading remotely or directly to some spiritual advantage. She
was master of all the arts, natural and acquired, of a perfect con-
versationalist, and traveling in her company must have had some
such charm as the younger Tobias enjoyed in his long journey
with the Archangel Raphael. Her gentle sway was also felt by
the rough muleteers and litter bearers. Swearing and blaspheming
and lewd talking, common to their class, were banished totally
from that cavalcade, and these rude men said that the best time
they ever had in their lives was when the holy Mother Teresa
spoke to them from behind her veil of the things of God.
Of the installation of the nuns, when all was done with high
festivity, our Saint gives a fine description in her account of the
foundation at Palencia :
At last when the house was fully prepared for the nuns, the
Bishop would have them go there with great solemnity; and
accordingly it was done one day within the Octave of Corpus
Christi. He came himself from Valladolid, and was attended
by the Chapter, the religious orders, and almost the whole
population of the place, to the sound of music. We went
from the house in which we were staying, all of us in procession,
in our white mantles, with veiled faces, to the parish church
close to the house of our Lady. Her image had come for us,
and we took the Most Holy Sacrament thence and carried it
into our church in great pomp and array, which stirred up
much devotion. There were more nuns, for those who were
going to make the foundation in Soria were there; and we
all had candles in our hands. I believe our Lord was greatly
honored that day in that place. May He grant that it may be
always so of all creatures ! Amen.
With this tumult of religious joy the Catholics of a Spanish
city in that age enclosed their sisters in sanctuaries of perpetual
silence and solitude, penance and prayer.
MYSTICAL CONTEMPLATION, OR THE PRINCIPLES OF
MYSTICAL THEOLOGY. By Rev. Father E. Lamballe,
Eudist. Translated by W. H. Mitchell. New York: Ben-
ziger Brothers. $1.00.
Father Lamballe in his Introduction tells us that, in the present
volume, he is setting forth the results of a long and conscientious
826 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
study of St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross, St. Thomas, and St.
Francis de Sales. He answers the four following questions : What
is contemplation? Who is called thereto? How are contempla-
tives to be dealt with ? Through what stages may they be expected
to pass?
From the seventeenth century many spiritual writers have con-
fused contemplation with graces gratis data. St. Thomas in the
Summa held that contemplation is a result of the gifts of the Holy
Ghost. Some recent writers teach that in contemplation occur acts
which are specifically different from those we are able to achieve
by means of ordinary graces. Father Lamballe endeavors to prove,
against Father Poulain, that contemplation is not extraordinary in
itself. St. John of the Cross teaches clearly that perfect mystical
union, to which he desired to direct the soul, consists in the total
losing of one's will in God by love, and that to attain this love there
is a way, and one way only, which leads on to the very end, and
that is the way of faith. While we must not expect to find in
St. Teresa's writings philosophical explanations of the same pre-
cision as in St. John of the Cross, her description of spiritual
phenomena is as exact and as living. We find her constantly
opposing mystical knowledge to vision. " Contemplation," says St.
Francis de Sales, " is nothing but an attention of mind to things di-
vine, directed thereto with loving simplicity and constancy." In
his second chapter our author finds fault with those who maintain
that contemplation is only for a few privileged souls, and that
meditation is the most sure way to holiness.
These men as directors are, he declares, an obstacle to grace;
they strongly bind to earth those who desire to fly to heaven. The
author's views on the point are well expressed in the words of St.
Francis de Sales: "The desire to obtain love makes us meditate,
but love once obtained makes us contemplate." Contemplation,
therefore, is the normal goal of the spiritual life: souls who are
eager for perfection have a right to try to secure it, and their
spiritual directors should prepare them for it.
Chapter III. deals with the general direction of contemplatives,
and the final chapter with the various phases of contemplation.
This is a good book for all priests who are directors of souls.
It will also prove useful to mother-superiors and novice-mistresses.
Father Lamballe is a whit dogmatic at times in his controversies
with other Catholic writers, but he may be pardoned his excess of
zeal in so good a cause. He seems to forget that his opponents have
the same guides as himself.
1913.] HEW BOOKS 827
WILLIAM GEORGE WARD AND THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL.
By Wilfrid Ward. Re-issue with a new Preface. New York :
Longmans, Green & Co. $2.40 net.
The great interest taken by the public in the recently-published
Life of Cardinal Newman, makes the present reprint most oppor-
tune, for as Wilfrid Ward says in his Preface : " The events it re-
lates belong to the same period as that covered by Newman's life,
but the view of the theological problems and ecclesiastical politics
of the time, which it presents most fully, is the opposite one to
Newman's. It contains also a full account of Newman's personal
relations with my father."
There is no need to praise the fairness, breadth of view, and
accurate scholarship that characterizes this master of biography.
Some think him too honest by far ; others of the ultra-conservative
school look upon him with the utmost suspicion. We are glad
to record ourselves in perfect sympathy with his biographical
method.
FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH POETRY. From Chaucer to
de Vere. By Rev. George O'Neill, S. J., M.A. New York :
Longmans, Green & Co. $1.25 net.
In his very practical and readable Introduction, Father O'Neill,
Professor of English at University College, Dublin, offers his
apologia for what given the variety of taste and the immensity
of the subject scarcely calls for apology: namely, a new anthol-
ogy of English verse. His desire has been to gather poetic speci-
mens useful mainly to literary students in " a year's work " on
the English poets, and there can be no question of the breadth,
variety, and substantial worth of his choice.
With the details of any such anthology, it is always possible
and often useful to disagree. For instance, we would seriously
question the wisdom of preserving The Weeper, one of Crashaw's
least inspired and most excessive poems, where Music's Duel or
the really great hymns to " St. Teresa " or to " The Name above
Every Name " might have been substituted with greater justice
to poet and student alike. Father O'Neill's avoidance of the lyric
is at times so marked that one half suspects some psychological
basis or prepossession for his evasions. It is easy to welcome four
cantos of the piquant artificiality of Pope's Rape of the Lock; but
most readers will see no very obvious reason to substitute the Tiva
Dogs for Burns' heart-shaking little love songs, nor thirty pages
828 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
of Hellas in lieu of the briefer Shelleyian song bursts. The scant
two pages devoted, on the other hand, to Shakespeare's lyrics
where entire scenes from the plays would have seemed in order
are comprehensible on the supposition (doubtless existing in the
editor's mind) of an outside course in the king dramatist.
In spite of these reservations, it is welcome to find a one-
volume anthology which does not neglect Southwell or Donne,
which finds room for Blake's curious raptures, and which includes
beside the inevitable names fragments from such radically dis-
similar poets as Mangan, Arthur Hugh Clough, and Aubrey de Vere.
Had the Catholic strain been traced a few decades further, we
might have been offering thanksgivings for a few pages of Patmore,
or perchance the Hound of Heaven!
A NEW VARIORUM EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE. The
Tragedie of Julius Caesar. Edited by Horace Howard Fur-
ness, Jr. Philadelphia : J. B. Lippincott Co. $4.00.
American scholarship may well be proud of Furness' edition of
the plays of Shakespeare. Even an Englishman will admit that it
is the best and most complete edition for student and actor that we
possess. Now that the father is dead, the son who assisted him
for many years, and contributed two volumes to the series, will
continue the work as originally planned. The earliest text of
Julius Caesar is that of the first folio. It is markedly free from
corruptions, and we might almost say that in but one or two
instances would an earlier quarto text be required to render any
doubtful readings more sure. By several of the older editors Julius
Caesar is considered as one of Shakespeare's later plays; but the
range of dates of composition stretches from 1599 as the earliest,
down to and including 1608. Shakespeare's indebtedness to Sir
Thomas North's translation of Plutarch for the plot of his tragedy,
and for countless details, has been universally admitted. His use
of the lives of Caesar, Brutus, and Antonius makes us realize
Shakespeare's marvelous ingenuity in dramatic construction. For
purposes of comparison, the editor prints in the Appendix a tran-
script from Leo's facsimile of those portions of North's Plutarch
(ed. 1595), on which the incidents of the tragedy are based, but
throughout the commentary references are made to the passages
in Skeat's Plutarch, which gives us the text of the edi-
tion of 1603. It is very improbable that Shakespeare consulted
either Suetonius' Lives of the Ccesars, or Dion Cassius' Annals of
1913.] NEW BOOKS 829
the Roman People, but Furness is of the opinion that certain points
in Antony's oration over Caesar were taken from Appian's Civil
Wars.
Strangely enough, the Caesar of Plutarch the intrepid warrior,
the astute statesman, and the sagacious governor becomes in
Shakespeare's hands " a braggart, inflated with the idea of his own
importance, and speaking of his decrees as those of a god."
The themes of the action [as the editor points out in his
Preface] are the conflict in the mind of Brutus between two
opposing interests love of country and love of Caesar as friend
and benefactor; his decision to sacrifice that friend upon the
altar of his country; and his tragic suicide in ignorance of his
complete failure as a patriot. It would seem as though Brutus
were rightly the titular hero. The bodily presence of Caesar,
it is true, disappears from the scene at the beginning of the third
act, yet thereafter his spiritual presence is omnipresent, and
brings about the final catastrophe.
The editor gives throughout every reading of the text, ex-
plains every peculiar grammatical construction, and records all the
different commentaries on difficult passages. At the close of the
volume, he gives sketches of the various characters in the play
by English and Continental scholars, criticisms of the play, its stage
history, the different dramatic versions, and a very complete
bibliography.
LACORDAIRE. By Count D'Haussonville. Translated by A. W.
Evans. St. Louis: B. Herder. $1.00.
In his Preface, the author gives three reasons why the life
of Lacordaire should be of interest. First, that he was the great-
est pulpit orator France ever produced with the exception of Bos-
suet ; then the ideal character of the man himself, and finally as one
of the precursors and authors of that Catholic renaissance of
which our contemporaries to-day are the surprised witnesses. In-
deed, among all the questions that engage and divide us to-day, it
would be difficult to name one that was not anticipated and debated
by Lacordaire.
Those who have read the Abbe Chocarne's Inner Life of Lacor-
daire, or Foisset's biography, will discover little new in the present
volume. We have a brief sketch of Lacordaire's childhood and
youth ; his seminary days ; the story of the Avenir and his rupture
8 3 o NEW BOOKS [Sept,
with Lamennais; the Stanislas lectures and the Sermons at Notre
Dame; the restoration of the Order of St. Dominic in France, etc.
Lacordaire was an indefatigable correspondent, as the eight
volumes of his published letters testify. He unburdens himself
with quite a filial confidence to that illustrious convert, Madame
Swetchine; he speaks of the things of God to his penitent, the
Baroness de Frailly; he writes vigorous letters to the Bishop of
Paris, Monsignor de Quelen, to prove the hollowness of the com-
plaints that had been made against his preaching; he writes most
touching letters to Lamennais, and to Montalembert at the time
of the Avenir difficulty, letters which show an almost incredible
ardor; indeed they are among the finest and most touching that
the love of souls has ever inspired.
The success of his Lenten course at Lyons in 1845 outstripped
anything he had obtained before. The enthusiasm rose to a de-
lirium. One evening he did not appear at dinner. Someone went
to look for him, and found him pale and in tears at the foot of a
crucifix. " What is the matter, Father? " he was asked. " I am
afraid," was the answer. " Afraid of what? " " Of success," he
replied. Many a time he prepared for his sermon by scourging
himself in the privacy of his cell.
Harsh to himself, he was always gentle to others. He knew
how to show to weak souls the consideration they needed, and
to lead them along easy paths. Still direction, properly so-called,
did not hold the principal place in his life, which was rather militant
and aggressive. Some of his enemies have said that he never con-
verted anybody, but we know on the contrary that he influenced
countless souls for God, both clerical and lay. It was Lacordaire's
winning personality that won Father Jandel to the Dominican
Order, and led, therefore, indirectly to its great reform and revival
in the nineteenth century.
As a pulpit orator, Lacordaire was an improvisator. Not that
he ever dared to enter the pulpit of Notre Dame without having
prepared his discourse, but his preparation was the fruit of his
meditation of the evening before, or of that very morning. From
these meditations nothing written ever resulted, except a very short
sketch. The one sermon he wrote out word for word was almost
a perfect failure. His plan alone was determined beforehand, and
only in its broad outlines, never in detail. He trusted to the
inspiration of the moment for the literary form. He was often a
bit rhetorical, his metaphors were occasionally incoherent, and he
1913.] NEW BOOKS 831
took pleasure in using doubtful and dangerous arguments. Still
withal no one appealed as he did to the people of Paris; no one
ever seemed to dive down so deeply into the hearts of his hearers.
We can never judge him by the written records of his sermons,
which are not in the slightest degree remarkable. The translation
of this life is very well done.
THE DOMINICAN REVIVAL IN THE NINETEENTH CEN-
TURY. By Father Raymund Devas, O.P. New York:
Longmans, Green & Co. $1.25 net.
In the early part of the nineteenth century, the religious Orders
everywhere were lacking in zeal and devotion. Strict discipline
and regular observance were conspicuous by their absence. The
Dominicans were no exception to the rule. The Order had declined
and sickened, and in many countries pessimists were not wanting
who thought the malady was mortal. In July, 1846, Cardinal
Newman asked, in a letter to Dalgairns, whether the Dominican
Order was " a great idea extinct." In 1804 Pius VII. had freed all
the religious Orders in Spain from the Roman jurisdiction, a ruling
which applied to South America and the Philippine Islands. In
England the outlook was so black in 1810 that some of the Fathers
at the Hinckley Chapter thought of disbanding the Province. In
France the men who followed Lacordaire into the Order in 1840,
with a view to its restoration, soon saw for themselves to what
practices, contradictions, and actual decadence even the best-in-
tentioned men can be led when they throw off the noble yoke of
the Constitutions of their Order.
Pius IX., fully aware of these conditions, chose Father Alex-
ander Vincent Jandel in 1850 to restore the Order to its primitive
purity. No better selection could have been made. Father Jandel
understood perfectly well that only one means or method could
enable the Order to fulfill satisfactorily its sacred and salutary
mission, and that was an avowed return to the original idea incar-
nate in St. Dominic and his first companions. Father Jandel's
plan was to endeavor to have in every Province at least one house
of strict observance, where novices might be trained, and where the
Fathers zealous for reform might live for a time. The first house
of observance aroused a great storm of criticism, dissension, and
active opposition. The General had insisted upon the night office,
and the abstinence in the refectory, but otherwise he was lenient
enough. Still he was nicknamed by his opponents the " Great
832 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
Tiger." This did not worry him in the least. In 1852, to appease
the malcontents, the hour for Matins was left to the discretion
of the local Superiors, although the midnight office was to continue
at St. Sabina's.
One of the chief methods adopted by the General was frequent
visitation of the Provinces. His visits were primarily visits of
inspection, and his influence consisted chiefly in the example that
he gave of poverty, kindness, charity, and the spirit of prayer.
In 1855 the Pope appointed Father Jandel Master- General for
six years, and at the end of this term he was elected by the votes
of the Order. At the General Chapter of 1871 a new edition of
the Constitutions was published, and in 1872 the Pope annulled
the decree of Pius VII., and restored the Order to unity. Father
Jandel could now chant his Nunc Dimittis without reserve. He died
in Rome on December n, 1872.
THE APOSTLE OF CEYLON FATHER JOSEPH VAZ, 1651
TO 1711. Translated from the French by Ambrose Cator.
New York : Benziger Brothers. 60 cents net.
This life of Father Vaz, the St. Francis Xavier of Ceylon,
is an abridgment of a life published in Lisbon in 1745 by Father
Sebastian Rego, an Oratorian of Goa. Father Vaz, like his biog-
rapher, was a Concani Indian of the Brahmin caste. From the
earliest days of his priesthood at Goa, he felt a divine call to labor
among the abandoned Christians and pagans of Ceylon. The Dutch
had captured Colombo in 1656 and Jaffna in 1658, and once in
possession of Portuguese territory, had inaugurated a most bitter
persecution against the Church. Catholics were compelled to attend
Protestant services, their churches were closed, and their priests
banished. Some few descendants of the Portuguese settlers and
some of the Singalese converts from Buddhism continued to meet
privately in their homes to recite the rosary, but the majority either
left Ceylon altogether, or fled to the neighboring territory of the
King of Kandy.
Father Vaz entered Jaffna in disguise in 1687, and for five
years said Mass, administered the sacraments, and baptized many
converts despite the Dutch penal laws. In 1692 he extended his
missionary labors to Kandy, and gained the favor of the Buddhist
king, Vimala-Dharma, although he was bitterly opposed by the
intolerant bonzes. He established missions all over the island, and
won the love of the natives by his care for the sick and poor,
I9I3-] NEW BOOKS 833
his devotedness during the plague, and his heroic life of unceasing
labor and self-denial. If all the miracles recorded by his biographer
can one day be verified, we may look forward confidently to his
Canonization. The book unfortunately is poorly written.
THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION IN THE LIGHT OF FACTS.
By Karl Frank, SJ. With a chapter on Ant Guests and
Termite Guests by Erich Wasmann, S.J. Translated from
the German by C. T. Druery. London : Kegan Paul, Trench,
Trubner & Co. $1.50.
" The object of the present work," says the author in his
Preface, " is to throw some light on the theory of descent. Among
many of the students of nature of the present day, we perceive
that greater and greater contradictions arise between the actual
results of their technical work, and that which they put forth as
'postulates' of the theory of evolution. Our object is to deal with
this. The certain or the probable should be separated from the
pure postulates, and the actual area of elucidation of the hypotheses
of Evolution be thereby clearly defined."
Part I. discusses the results of palceontological research.
Father Frank shows clearly that the fossil remains of plants
and animals say nothing conclusive for or against evolution. Ac-
cording to the present position of science, there is no unlimited
transformation in the animal world, and palaeolithic botany
affords no proof of any one group, family, or class having been
developed from lower forms.
His method of study is twofold in view of a true, scientific
hypothesis. " In the first place we have to inquire, by observation
of, and experiment with, the organisms of to-day, whether they
are generally capable of transformation, what causes are thereby
involved, and of what kind are the changes ascertained." Then
we are to "imagine the same causes as effective in the past, alone or
in connection with other influences of similar kind, and then to com-
pare the chronologically successive organisms of ascertainable form
and structural conditions with those still subject to observation."
Our author then proceeds to prove the following theses:
1. We are not justified in regarding the origin of organisms
on our earth as the result of an evolutionary process.
2. Between organisms and inorganic material there is an
essential difference, so that the inorganic material cannot develop
itself into an organism.
VOL. xcvii. 53
834 AT^ BOOKS [Sept.,
3. The attempts to demonstrate as possible a genetic connection
between vivified and non-vivified matter, must be regarded as
perfectly vain.
4. No organization, which is regarded only as a peculiar chem-
ico-physical quality or structure of inorganic matter, explains life.
5. The attempts to express the process of evolution in concrete
form, demonstrate the impossibility of spontaneous generation.
6. We are not justified in bringing animals and plants into
genetic connection.
Part III. deals with the theories of Lamarck and Darwin, and
makes some suggestions for reliable hypotheses of evolution.
" Theories of evolution," concludes Father Frank, " will remain,
since everything points to the fact that there was and is an evolution
of the organic world. This evolution, however, does not express
itself in quite impossible spontaneous leaps from the inorganic to
the organic, or from plants to animals, and also not in objectless
hither-and-thither variation, but in a constant maintenance of the
harmony between construction and function and the external con-
ditions of life, and in the constant development of the bases, since
bases must exist, as the result is always in one direction, viz., the
purposeful, the vitally capable.
The translator is the possessor of the Victoria gold medal of
honor in horticulture, but he certainly does not deserve a medal
for his translation of Father Frank's scholarly volume.
A HUNDRED YEARS OF IRISH HISTORY. By R. Barry
O'Brien, with an Introduction by John E. Redmond, M.P.
New York : P. J. Kenedy & Sons. 60 cents net.
This story of the hundred years (1800-1900) was originally
delivered as a lecture before the Irish Literary Society of London.
It is a judicial arraignment of the ignorance and ineptitude which
have in every generation characterized English misrule in Ireland.
We recommend it as wholesome reading to those English opponents
of Home Rule who are comforting themselves with the reflection
that they afe righteous men and just, though their ancestors did
govern Ireland infamously in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eight-
eenth century.
This interesting summary shows clearly why all English at-
tempts to reconcile the Irish people to English rule have utterly
failed. It is a tale of bad faith, broken promises, inane
and even criminal legislation. England never granted any con-
1913.] NEW BOOKS 835
cession, except under the stress of mortal fear. An Irishman once
said very aptly : " That the only chance you had of making an
impression on an English minister was by coming to him with the
head of a landlord in one hand, and the tail of a cow in the other."
Fenianism brought on Church disestablishment in Ireland, and begot
the Land Act of 1870.
Barry O'Brien describes in brief the Tithe War of 1830-1835,
that perfect illustration of what Mr. Redmond styles " the policy
of Hell and Bedlam combined;" the Repeal Movement of 1841-
1846, which rooted the idea of an Irish Parliament in the heart
of the Irish nation; the iniquitous land system which kept Irishmen
on the verge of pauperism, and sent millions of peasants to foreign
lands; the Young Ireland movement and the Rising of '48; the
beginnings of the Home Rule agitation, etc.
At the end of the volume, the author thanks the Irish of the
United States " who have so generously helped the Irish at home,
financially and politically." Despite Erin's sorrowful past, he does
not take a gloomy view of the future. He writes : " I have faith
in my race. I believe that the qualities which have preserved the
Irish Celt, under oppression and persecutions scarcely paralleled in
the history of any other civilized country, will preserve him to the
end."
A PRIMER OF SOCIAL SCIENCE. By Monsignor Parkinson,
D.D., Ph.D., Rector of Oscott College, Birmingham. New
York: The Devin-Adair Co. $1.00 net.
In a generation now passing away, social science was often
called a dismal science and not undeservedly. What science could
be more dismal than one which declared in effect that business was
business; that morality was morality, and that these two things
should be kept apart in the life of every sensible man. Thank
God we are coming out of the dismal atmosphere ! " You cannot
humbug all the people all the time." In Monsignor Parkinson's
valuable little book, we have a perfectly simple statement of the
moral principles which should guide the daily conduct of every
business man. These principles are neither new nor peculiar, for
they have always been taught by the Church, and they have always
been practised by good Catholics. But it is urgently necessary
that they should be set forth again and again, in season and out
of season, as well for the benefit of those within the Church
as for the benefit of those without. Many who are not Catholics
836 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
may have heard them partially or not at all; while we who are
Catholics are not a little in danger of forgetting them under the
constant assault of so much contrary opinion and practice.
Having clearly set forth these first great spiritual principles,
Monsignor Parkinson proceeds to review our modern social con-
ditions, and to test them by these principles. His work is char-
acterized by brevity and conciseness; it is the work of a sound
economic student and of an authoritative theologian. Every Eng-
lish-speaking layman should read it.
THE ROMAN CURIA. By Michael Martin, SJ. New York:
Benziger Brothers. $1.50 net.
Father Martin, Professor of Canon Law at the St. Louis
University, has written a full and accurate account of the Roman
Curia as it exists to-day. The work first appeared as a series of
articles in the American Ecclesiastical Review, soon after Pope
Pius X. had reorganized the Curia by the Constitution, Sapienti
consilio, June 29, 1908.
The author treats of the eleven Sacred Congregations, the
three Tribunals, and the five Offices of the Curia, setting forth
the province assigned to each department, and the method of pro-
cedure in the management of ecclesiastical business. In the ap-
pendices he publishes the full text of the Sapienti consilio, and
the latest decrees referring thereunto. He also adds some practical
hints upon the method of communicating with the various depart-
ments of the Roman Curia, and also some formulas of petitions.
It is a book that every Catholic should read, for under the
new canon law every Catholic is free to have recourse to any
department of the Curia whenever he wishes.
firm name of Robert Appleton Company, publishers of the
Catholic Encyclopedia, has been changed to The Encyclopedia
Press. The name of Robert Appleton caused confusion with the
older house of D. Appleton & Company. The new name will re-
move the possibility of such confusion; and the title Encyclopedia
Press well fits the character of the great publication already com-
pleted, and is suitable also for other similar publications.
FOREIGN PUBLICATIONS.
A VOLUME on Bossuet by Ferdinand Brunetiere, published by Hachette
^\ et Cie, Paris, is a compilation of all of the famous critic's articles,
reviews, and conferences on this subject, including the famous series of lee-
1913-] NEW BOOKS 837
tures delivered at the Sorbonne in 1894. The Preface is by Victor Giraud.
Islam, by Maurice Landrieux (Paris: P. Lethielleux), is a volume written
to refute the false and inaccurate accounts of the Turk and his religion, which
were published in France apropos of the Balkan war by African colonial
officials and literary men like Pierre Loti. Maurice Landrieux, who spent
many years among the Mohammedans of Asia, Africa, and Europe, declares
their vaunted piety merely external, their moral tone grossly sensual, and their
tolerance a mere pretense due to their lack of power. There are about one
thousand converts to Catholicism among the Kabyles, who have borne per-
secution of every kind with the utmost fortitude. Father Pierling, the
well-known author of Russia and the Holy See, discusses in a most entertaining
brochure the question, Did the Emperor Alexander I. Die a Catholic? Whether
the Emperor died a Catholic will ever remain a mystery. But that at various
times in his life he showed Catholic tendencies is beyond question. The bro-
chure is published by Gabriel Beauchesne, Paris. Bloud of Paris has pub-
lished a Manual of Christian Epigraphy, by Rene Aigrain, which contains over
four hundred Christian inscriptions of the first five centuries, accompanied by
an accurate French translation and excellent critical notes. The author has
written chiefly for those students of antiquity who are unacquainted with the
complete collections of De Rossi and Le Blant. The same house also pub-
lishes an excellent essay of Paul Lemaire on Francis Bacon. He defends him
against the strictures of Liebig and de Maistre, but shows clearly that he was
not the inventor of the inductive method, nor a savant of the calibre of either da
Vinci or Galileo. Another publication of Bloud consists of two volumes of
their series entitled, Famous Foreign Writers Carlyle by Louis Cazamian, and
Henri Heine by Pierre-Gauthiez. They are carefully-written treatises, both from
the standpoint of biography and of literary criticism. A little anti-Jewish preju-
dice is noticeable in the sketch of Heine. The study of Carlyle is more ob-
jective and philosophical, as becomes a professor of the Sorbonne. Pierre
Tequi of Paris has brought out a popular little manual of Biblical difficulties
by the Abbe Duplessy, entitled Matutinaud Reads the Bible. It has no critical
value whatever, but gives a brief answer to questions about the deluge, the
age of the patriarchs, Josue and the stopping of the sun, Jonas and the whale, etc.
The Abbe Broussolle's course of religious instruction on The Theory of the
Mass, delivered last year to his pupils at the lycee Michelet in Paris, is another
publication by Tequi. Each chapter closes with a good bibliography, and a
number of questions that bring out admirably the lessons learned. There are
fifty illustrations, drawn from Christian antiquity, and the masters of the Middle
Ages. Tequi also publishes two scholarly volumes by the Abbe Paul Renaudin.
The first is on The Doctrine of the Assumption, considered from the viewpoint
of its definability. The second, on Theological and Canonical Questions, treats
of the Eucharist in the Middle Ages; the Heresy of Berenger; the Ascetic
Formation of St. Thomas Aquinas; the Religious Orders; the Nomination to
Ecclesiastical Benefices, and the Indult of the Parliament of Paris. The
same firm publishes The Catholic Church in the First Centuries, by the Abbe
Viellard-Lacharme, a series of conferences delivered in the Church of Saint-
Louis-des-Franc.ais in Rome during the Lent of 1912. They are popular, rather
than critical in tone. Perrin & Co. of Paris reprints Ernest Hello's Man,
a well-known work of the eminent French critic and litterateur. It first saw
the light in 1871. The essays are divided into three parts, Life, Science, and Art.
pedobfcate.
Our Relations with the Nonconformists. By the Rev. Vin-
cent McNabb, O.P. Nonconformists is the name given Protestants
in England who are not members of the Established Church.
From them we are separated by an abyss which " cannot be called
love." The cause of this is ignorance. Hence it is our duty
to understand them and their history. Catholics have much in
common with the Nonconformists, and to the Nonconformists is
due much of our present liberty in England and the United States.
They consistently fought for a " Free Church," a church not dom-
inated by the State, and, in the time of the Stuarts, succeeded in
banishing " the last hope of any effective royal administration of
an Established Church." Whilst thus engaged they " insisted
largely on making their religion enter into their politics." It is
" altogether in the praise of the Nonconformist ideal of informing
political life with standards of conscience." In the spiritual life
Wesley subordinated organization to the interior life, and this was
not without its effect on many Catholics who had adjusted their
lives " to the ecclesiastical machinery in the interests of getting on."
The membership of Nonconformist bodies is decreasing. A
large number of those falling away are drifting into agnosticism
or indifferentism. In spite of this we can hope to win many of
these souls to the True Church. Their worship of Jesus as Savior
draws them to consider Him as Founder of the Church; their
apologetics resting on the doctrine of the Bible only, throws their
minds back upon the writer; some find that subjectivism will not do
in religion, and they seek objectivism in an organized authoritative
Church; others find that the organization of anti-Christian forces
necessitates an organized Christian force, and for such there must
be a head; and finally the mystical element finds that it must be
guided by the masters of mysticism. Quotations from writings and
statements of several Nonconformists of high standing plainly
indicate the trend of the religious-minded among them. The
Tablet, July 19.
Married Clerks, by Father Thurston, S.J., considers
assertions in the Guardian, the Ministry of Grace (1901, by Dr.
John Wordsworth, Bishop of Salisbury, Anglican), and volumes
two and three of the History of the English Church, edited by Dr.
1913.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 839
Hunt, to the effect that prior to the Reformation celibacy was
not strictly enforced upon the secular priesthood. These assertions
are inferences based on records proving the existence, especially
in the twelfth century, of persons described as sons and daughters
of priests, and some few references to priests' wives. The in-
ferences do not follow: for the records refer to wives of clerics.
In the Middle Ages many clerics never were ordained priests, and
those who were ordained, if they had been married between the re-
ceiving of tonsure which made them clerics and ordination to the
priesthood, separated from their wives at the time of ordination
to the sub-diaconate. Their wives were nevertheless entitled to be
known as such; the children of the union were in every sense of
the word legitimate. Many references supporting this position are
given. Incidentally a few arguments are adduced from facts to
indicate that the truth is, that celibacy was required among seculars
at a very early date. The Tablet, July 26.
The Catholic Press Abroad. By Irene Hernaman. In France
the " Bonne Presse " publishes upwards of twenty-five papers and
magazines, the most important of which is La Croix, with the
fourth largest circulation in the country. Other societies doing an
immense work are " The Popular Action Society " and the " Catho-
lic Women's League of France." The German Volksverein is a
model of press organizations. It edits eight periodicals, and pub-
lishes millions of pamphlets yearly. There are about two hundred
and fifty Catholic dailies in Germany. In Austria the Piusverein
does practically the same work, though on a much smaller scale.
Belgian Catholic journals far outnumber Socialist and anticlerical
ones. Thanks to the initiative of the famous Abbe Schaepereau,
there are in Holland thirteen Catholic dailies and one hundred and
fifty periodicals.
The many professional and workingmen's syndicates, each
with its own magazine, form a special feature of Catholic life in
Holland. In Italy and Spain the press propaganda lacks that en-
thusiastic support of the people so characteristic of the countries
just mentioned. The first Catholic daily in Switzerland was
started in 1871 against enormous obstacles, but the press flourishes
there now. In Canada and the United States there are periodicals,
but no dailies for English-speaking Catholics. In the States a
Catholic Press Association was founded two years ago. In all
countries (except Belgium and Switzerland where one exists), a
central information bureau is badly needed. Without this, and an
840 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Sept.,
International News Agency, Catholic Press endeavors are sadly
handicapped. The Month, August.
Popular Education in Britain, France, and Germany. By Rev.
T. Hannan. The superiority of the Continental system of educa-
tion over the English has been overestimated. Practically the same
spirit of rivalry and imitation prevails in educational matters as in
national defence. In France the Minister of Public Instruction
controls the whole system from the university to the smallest pri-
mary school. Between the ages of six and thirteen, education is
compulsory, but the law is difficult to enforce. La Morale is the
modern religion of the schools, and holds the first place in the
programmes. The system in France is bad for religion and for
France.
In Germany the educational system may be divided into three
grades: the Folk schools, which are elementary, correspond to the
English Board schools; the Real schools have their counterpart in
the British Secondary schools; but the Continuation schools are a
special and admirable product of Germany. They originated in the
sixteenth century as Sunday schools, with secular branches included.
Now classes are held on week days in the afternoon; attendance
is compulsory between the ages of fourteen and seventeen for at
least two hours a week. In this regard German education is su-
perior to that in other European countries. Religious instruction
is insisted upon in the lowest schools, and is imparted by the Lutheran
minister and the parish priest to their respective parishioners; in
Cologne the Catholics and the Lutherans have separate schools,
both supported by the government. Church Quarterly Review,
July.
Is the Confessional an Institution of the Middle Ages? By J.
Tixeront. M. C. Lea, an American, has claimed that confession,
as we have it to-day, owes its establishment to the scholastics and
especially to St. Thomas. His three-volumed work, History of
Auricular Confession and of Indulgences in the Latin Church, ap-
peared in 1896. Harnack, who is more familiar with ancient
documents than M. Lea, has expressed practically the same opinion.
And in a recent article in The Review of History and Religious
Literature, entitled Did Pope Saint Gregory Know of Confession?
M. Andre Lagardi also tries to prove Mr. Lea's thesis. But what
is the testimony of the past? If we look back a bit we find at the
very end of the eighth century Theodolphus, the friend of Charle-
1913-] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 841
magne, and Bishop of Orleans, describing the mode of confessions
just as we have it to-day. So, too, in the earlier part of the same
century do St. Boniface of Mayence (755) and St. Chrodegand,
Bishop of Metz (742). The venerable Bede, five hundred years
before St. Thomas, also openly speaks of the confessional just as
we have it to-day. It is, therefore, evident that it was not unknown
in the eighth century. St. Isidore of Seville, who died in 636, wrote
on confession in his Etymologies and his Ecclesiastical Offices.
So we may go back through each century and collect evidence from
Victor of Cortenna, St. Leo, St. John Climacus, Origen, Tertul-
lian, St. Irenseus, and a host of others, to prove that, far from
arising in the Middle Ages, the confessional dates directly to Jesus
Christ and Apostolic times. Revue du Clerge Frangais, July.
The Tablet (July 12) : The Plymouth Congress: The report
of the proceedings of the National Catholic Congress gives the
inaugural address of Cardinal Bourne on Religious Indifference, a
sermon preached by Abbot Gasquet on the sufferings of Catholics
in the west of England, and papers on Christianity in Modern
England, and Catholic Schools, by Father Martindale, S.J., and
Monsignor Bickerstaffe-Drew (John Ayscough), respectively.
(July 19) : Seminaries in Rome: The Apostolic Constitution
consolidating the small seminaries scattered about Rome into one
central seminary, known as the Lateran, is published. The semi-
nary is to serve as a grande seminaire for Rome and Italy. A petite
seminaire is also established at the present Vatican seminary.
The Roman Correspondent comments briefly on the above-men-
tioned constitution. He calls attention to the civil funeral of
Socialist Councillor Montemartini as furnishing a good example
of the influence of Socialists over the Italians of Rome, even if
they be Catholics. Eighty-five Socialist and allied societies were
represented at this funeral, and everyone of these will at election
time " go against the Church." " The procession showed the ex-
tent to which labor has been organized. The political opinions of
their societies are, no doubt, in innumerable cases, in direct opposi-
tion to the conscientious opinions of individual members. But
when the time comes they vote, if at all, as the society directs."
In Literary Notes, W. H. K. considers the extremely high praise
given in the Times Literary Supplement to the first instalment of
the Westminster Version of the Sacred Scriptures, to wit, the
Epistles to the Thessalonians, translated by Father Lattey, S.J.
The Times reviewer writes : " It is a pleasure to notice that they
842 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Sept.,
(Father Lattey's notes) are marked by a desire to arrive at the
immediate purpose of St. Paul, and are free from polemical bias.
They give evidence of sound scholarship, allied with a frank accept-
ance of modern critical results," etc. Attention is then directed to
the Rheims-Douay version, " which has its faults and limitations/'
but which has been the subject of much censure that is ignorant
and criticism that is unintelligent. The reviewer recognizes that
the necessity of following an official version, i, e., the Vulgate, had
some advantages in point of critical accuracy, since the Vulgate,
" in not a few places, provided a better text than they would
have found in the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts at their dis-
posals." The Douay Version has also a literary value of its own,
according to Professor J. S. Phillimore, writing in the present
Dublin Review. It represents the excellent English style of pre-
Elizabethan days, which Elizabeth's government attempted to de-
stroy, and succeeded in marring to some extent.
(August 2) : Mr. Pease's Little Bill: The new educational bill
introduced by the Liberal Minister provides for a small building
grant, and a smaller grant for medical inspection and treatment.
Previously a Parliamentary building grant was illegal. The grants
are destined for the Council Schools in which no dogmatic religious
instruction is given, and indirectly discriminates against denomina-
tional schools, which theoretically are supposed to be on the same
footing. The latter class must still provide their own building
fund. The suspicion is voiced that the ultimate purpose of the
Liberals is to foster the decline of the denominational school.
The Philosophy of Hans, by Claude Harrison, shows that the fairy
tales of Hans Andersen " contain a philosophy, the main thesis of
which " is " that the secret of happiness lies in the pleasures of
affection and a moderate sufficiency of worldly goods." By his
own route Andersen reached St. Augustine's conclusion : " Our
heart is restless, O Lord, till it rest in Thee." Passages from
Andersen's works are quoted bearing on the subject of this paper.
Catholic Missions in China: A paper read at the Plymouth
Congress by Father Wolferstan, S.J., recounts the difficulties,
and some results of the missionary's life, and the outlook of Catho-
lic missions in China.
The Month (August) : A full account of The Plymouth Con-
gress is given by Rev. Sydney F. Smith. Although still behind
the great dioceses of the Midlands and the North, the success of
the recent National Congress in Plymouth argues well for its re-
1913.] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 843
ligious future. The prominence of the Catholic Social Guild and
their timely and practical discussions, and along the lines of Leo
XIII.'s Encyclical, receives special mention. Other Societies and
Unions were also ably represented at the Congress, covering the
field of social and religious work incumbent upon Catholics.
The Dublin Review (July) : Francis McCullogh shows that
The Belgian Strike, in failing to obtain the abolition of plural
voting, has recorded a defeat for the workers, a fact acknowledged
by the less diplomatic of the Socialists. The leading periodicals
of Europe have approved the attitude of the Premier in refusing to
yield to force and grant the demands of the Socialists. Belgium,
although the headquarters of international Socialism, is to some
extent, also, the headquarters of international clericalism. The-
oretically Belgian Socialists are not anticlerical; practically they
are, yet the immediate prospects of Catholicism in Belgium are
universally admitted to be bright. Some Oxford Essays, by
Wilfrid Ward, treats of Foundations: A Statement of Christian
Belief in Terms of Modern Thought, composed by seven Oxford
men. Mr. Ward enumerates the difficulties proposed by science to
theology, and explains that theology is not stultified by a gradual
transformation in inaccurate or undefined ideas. But he then
passes from Foundations to Monsignor Benson's work : Confessions
of a Convert, to show that " the Catholic Church in things that
practically and directly affect souls, not only knows her mind, but
is constantly declaring it." Rev. J. G. Vaud, D.D., in Science
and Philosophy at Louvain, traces the changes since the days of
the Renaissance in the relations of philosophy to science, considers
outstanding problems in contemporary thought, and estimates how
far changes in method and angle of vision may be due to the success
of the natural sciences. This brief criticism of current methods
and tendencies leads up to an appreciation of the philosophical
ideal of the Louvain School, which follows the principles of St.
Thomas. In Blessed Thomas More and the Arrest of Human-
ism in England, J. S. Phillimore claims that the humanist movement
in England was arrested in the middle of the sixteenth century, and
did not mature till more than a century later; that the movement
was typically personified in More, and that his death was the blow
which paralyzed it. The writer defines humanism as "an aesthetic
movement towards finer forms of expression, an intellectual move-
ment of expatiating curiosity, and a stirring of moral restlessness."
The Napoleon of San Domingo, by Harry Graham, gives an
844 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Sept.,
interesting sketch of that remarkable negro, Toussaint L'Ouver-
ture, who, through sheer force of character, rose from slavery to
the dictatorship of his people. L'Ouverture won freedom for his
people, only to die in captivity at Joux in 1803.
Irish Theological Quarterly (July) : Rev. Hugh Pope, O.P.,
calls attention to A Neglected Factor in the Study of the Synoptic
Problem. A recent volume of Oxford Studies assumes as demon-
strated that the resemblances in the Synoptic Gospels are due to
the use of common documents; that a complete Gospel practically
identical with our Mark was used by Matthew and Luke; and that
there was a collection (mainly of discourses) possibly known to
Mark, and certainly furnishing the groundwork of common matter
in Matthew and Luke. The theory is not baseless, but the differ-
ences between the latter two and Mark are not to be neglected
as has been done hitherto. Rev. James MacCaffrey presents a
study of The Catholic School System in the United States, based
on Father Burns' work on this subject. In The Testimony of St.
Irenceus in Favour of the Roman Primacy, the Rev. Bruno Walk-
ley, O.P., gives a translation and interpretation of the disputed
text from the Saint's work, Against All Heresies, Book III., chap-
ter iii. Rev. Thomas Gogarty gives an account of The Dawn of
the Reformation in Ireland (1534-1547) under George Browne.
Rev. M. J. O'Donnell has an article on Post-Lateran develop-
ments as to The Seal of Confession.
Irish Ecclesiastical Record (August) : The Greek Fathers and
Original Sin, by Rev. B. V. Miller, S.T.D. The doctrine of orig-
inal sin was not so fully developed in the Greek Church during the
first four centuries as it was among the Latins, but the value of
Greek witness to this dogma is often minimized. Dr. Miller
examines the testimony of Origen, Athanasius, Gregory of Nazian-
zen, St. Basil, and St. Cyril of Jerusalem. There has been much
controversy over the belief of St. Chrysostom on original sin, but
from quotations by St. Augustine from lost writings it is evident
that he held substantially the Catholic teaching. The main differ-'
ence between the early East and West is one of phraseology.
Alcoholism, by Rev. W. J. Mulcahy, P.P., gives the startling sta-
tistics which speak so loudly of the far-reaching effects on society
resulting from alcohol. He suggests as the principal remedy for
alcoholism, a well-grounded education on the science of the sub-
ject, together with the aids of religion.
1913-] FOREIGN PERIODICALS 845
Le Correspondant (July 10) : An anonymous writer presents
a dark picture of the consequences of the Balkan war to Catholic
and French interests. Ludovic Naudeau describes the initial man-
oeuvre of the Bulgarians, and their present conflict with the Serv-
ians. And Jean Leune gives a detailed account of the surrender
of Salonika.
Revue du Clerge Franc,ais (July i) : Ch. Calippe tells of The
Circles for Sacerdotal Studies, which have sprung up in France
in amazing numbers, to give French priests the " equivalents for
common and religious life " now denied to them. The aim of
these circles is not purely theoretical ; above all it is practical. As
Canon Paulot has said : " At this time of separation, one separation
above all is to be feared, that of priest from priest." To obviate
this possibility, this new social movement has been born, under
the patronage of the highest ecclesiastical authority. There is no
doubt but it will contribute efficaciously to the work of religious
and social regeneration now going on. -Monsignor Herscher
gives a study of The Politics Behind the " Kulturkampf ," based on
new and interesting lights thrown on Bismarck, the man and the
statesman, by Georges Goyau, in his four-volume work. This
deeper study of Bismarck's point of view explains much of his
untiring activity against religious orders and the hierarchy. To
his mind Catholicism was a barrier to his one idea German unity,
hence the May Laws and his political cruelty. By God's grace,
however, the Church, aided by the Centre Party under Windthorst
triumphed; triumphed because the faithful were united to their
bishops and the Holy See, and in unswerving resistance to the
Church's opponents.
(July 15) : In Literature That Remains, Eugene Evrard speaks
of our recent works which are likely to stand the test of time, viz.,
Henry Bordeaux's beautiful romance, The House; M. Romain
Roland's three dramas now republished, Saint Louis, Aert, and
The Triumph of Reason; M. Henri Blaudin's new light on that
favorite topic in France, Huysmans, and The True Mystery of the
Passion, by Arnold Greban, a book published in 1452, and now
happily adopted by Ch. Gailly de Taurines and L. de La Tournasse.
The original, as well as the adaptation, is in verse, and was seen
on the stage in the fifteenth century. It has recently been put on at
the Odeon. It is to be hoped that its field will be still more widened.
A. Boudinhon gives a list of Prohibited Books and Periodicals
846 FOREIGN PERIODICALS [Sept.,
from 1901-1913, thus adding a three years' complete appendix to
the new Index published in 1910.
Revue ^Pratique d'Apologetique (July 15) : The Struggle
Against Alcoholism and Immorality, by E. Beaupin, in a report
read before the Congress of the Works of Diocesan Missions in
Paris, names as the three chief weapons to use against these two
great evils, sermons, confessions, and the confessional. The Moral
Value of our Federations, by A. Beaulieu, claims that Federation,
besides organizations for the moral, religious, and social formation
of the young man, ought to include provision for his intellectual,
physical, artistic, and even professional formation. Young men
must be taken as they are; they must be interested, but care must
be taken to keep these things in their proper place. The Catholic
Church alone can give the ideals and the power to organization
which will enable it to fulfill its work.
Etudes (July 5) : Louis Chervaillot gives a sketch of Giacomo
Leopardi, as a pious and laborious youth ; devoting his first literary
efforts to the defence of Christianity, who later, under the influence
of Giordani, the free-thinker, lost his faith, and became the poet
of pessimism. He died in 1837.
(July 20) : Charles Chesnelong (Rene Moreau), the great
French Catholic parliamentarian, was born in 1820 in the small
commune of Lagor. Deeply pious, he reared a large family in
the sound principles of Christianity. One son became Archbishop
of Sens, and a daughter a Sister of Charity in the Foreign Missions.
Chesnelong was a " passionate and disinterested servant of the
Church and of France." True patriotism led him into politics,
where he was an intrepid defender of the Temporal Power. In
1876 he was elected irremovable Senator. He was active in all the
big Catholic movements in France from this time till his death in
1894. Saint Irenaus, by Paul Galthier. St. Irenseus was one of
the founders of Catholic theology; for a long time his work was
the classic on original sin, the Real Presence, and ecclesiastical
penance; he anticipated the dogma of the Incarnation as formu-
lated by the Church against Nestorius. " He has proclaimed the
rule of Apostolic faith," says Harnack. His work is still the model
of those writers who undertake the defence of the traditional faith
against novelties. He is truly a Doctor of the Church besides
being Bishop and Martyr.
IRecent Events.
So great was the opposition encountered by
France. the Three Years' Service Bill that it took
ten weeks for it to pass through the Cham-
ber of Deputies, after which it has gone to the Senate, where it
has had a smoother course. The Socialists and the Socialist-
Radicals, under the leadership of M. Caillaux, did everything in
their power to change the character of the bill, and in fact many
important amendments were accepted. The chief changes it makes
in the military law of France are as follows: It lays down the
effective strength below which no unit of the army is to be allowed
to drop. Length of service with the active army in increased from
two years to three. Physically selected conscripts will be incor-
porated in the army at twenty years of age instead of as hitherto
at twenty-one, adding thereby to the existing strength one hundred
and forty-four thousand men. The total period of military lia-
bility is extended from twenty-five to twenty-eight years. This
provision will enable France to call out an additional four hun-
dred and fifty thousand men in times of grave peril. The mini-
mum number of effectives provided for by the bill amount to
seven hundred and twelve thousand three hundred and twenty-
nine men. On account of the leaves of absence which have been
granted, the three years of service will in practice be reduced to
two years and nine months. This modified three years' service
will not have its full effect until 1916.
The reason for which so strenuous an opposition was offered
to the bill by Socialists and many Radicals, was their view that
it involved the renouncement of the idea of a nation in arms,
to which the nation had been tending on the line of Republican
evolution, and which had found its expression to a large extent
in the law of 1905. They look upon the present proposal as
the work of reactionaries. By accepting the assistance of the
Right, the government had for the first time in the history of
the Republic caused a division in the Republican parties on the
question of defence.
The bill will involve a large increase of expenditure. Upon
whose shoulders the cost will be placed, will be a matter of keen
848 RECENT EVENTS [Sept.,
controversy between the bourgeoisie and the Socialists, the latter
insisting that the burden should be borne by the rich. To this
M. Barthou and his colleagues are said to have agreed, and it is
expected that they will bring in fresh income-tax proposals, and
even a tax on capital somewhat similar in character to the levy
recently adopted by Germany. But there are those who anticipate
that the government will not live long enough to make these pro-
posals.
Even apart from this fresh military expenditure, the financial
state of France is serious; so serious, indeed, that national bank-
ruptcy is sometimes said to be imminent. The budget statements
are so obscure that it is hard to discover the real state of the
finances. Good authorities, however, say that while the official
budget of this year shows a surplus of ten thousand dollars, the
deficit is in reality more than two hundred millions. This seems
incredible, and is in fact disputed. But all are agreed in recog-
nizing the necessity for financial reform, and it is as to the nature
of this reform that the chief conflicts between French parties will
take place. The state of the finances will stand in the way of
the carrying into effect of the many costly measures of social
legislation that have been proposed.
A distinguishing feature of this year's celebration of the four-
teenth of July, the national Fete Day of Republican France, was
the presence at the review at Longchamp of detachments of troops
from the numerous French colonies. These came from Senegal,
the Gaboon, Morocco, Algeria, Madagascar, Tonkin, and Annam.
The Senegal sharpshooters attracted particular attention. Some of
the troops had a record of almost unbroken service for ten years.
Their presence has led to the consideration of the possibility of
making fuller use of the valuable military material to be found in
France's African colonies. The attempt made by the Socialists,
Syndicalists, and Anarchists on the occasion of the review to arouse
popular indignation against the Three Years' Service Bill was
a distinct failure.
The foreign relations of France have undergone no change.
The passing through Paris of the King of Spain on his way to
England, gave an occasion for the manifestation of the satisfaction
felt at the restoration of perfectly cordial relations between the
two countries. The visit of the President to England showed
clearly that no change has taken place in the entente cordiale, ex-
cept it be that the friendship is striking deeper roots. The Con-
1913-] RECENT EVENTS 849
ferences which took place between the Ministers of Foreign Affairs
of France and England, proved that on all matters concerning the
maintenance of peace, and upon all political questions in general,
the two Powers were in absolute and complete agreement. French
satisfaction found expression in the declaration of M. Ribot: "I
have always considered that close friendship between France and
England was absolutely necessary, not merely from the French
point of view, but also for the progress of civilization."
The army bill having been passed, the
Germany. Reichstag has adjourned to the twentieth
of November. The bill was carried, against
the votes of the Socialists and the Poles, substantially in the form
proposed by the government. It increases the peace strength of
the army by four thousand officers, fifteen thousand non-commis-
sioned officers, one hundred and seventeen thousand men, and
twenty-seven thousand horses. About ninety per cent of the addi-
tion will be made by October of this year. As a result of these
changes, the German army will eventually reach eight hundred and
sixty-six thousand men of all ranks. The spirit by which the increase
is animated is well indicated by the words of the War Minister:
" The best parry is the lunge; the best covering force is the offen-
sive." To be a neighbor of Germany is no pleasant position.
The additional expense involved in the increase, so far as
regards the non-recurring expenditure, was raised by an extra-
ordinary levy on property. This was carried against the votes of
the Poles and Alsatians ; the Socialists voting for it, as they looked
upon the proposal as a valuable precedent for themselves. For the
same reason they supported the tax on the increment of fortunes.
This is a tax upon every increment to the extent of not more than
two thousand five hundred dollars of a fortune which is not less
than five thousand dollars, and is considered by many to be a
strange and hazardous proceeding. A possibly more important
feature of the new measures of taxation is that a start has been
made on the path of direct imperial taxation..- , This involves, ac-
cording to the Conservative view, a violation of the Constitution.
The Socialists, on the other hand, are jubilant, looking upon the
result as a triumph of their principles. In the country the strength
of this party seems to be growing, for at a recent by-election they
have beaten the Conservatives. The latter have lost two seats
within a few days.
VOL. xcvu. 54
850 RECENT EVENTS [Sept.,
The trial of the military officials who are charged with im-
parting government information to the head of Krupp's office
in Berlin, resulted in the conviction of the accused. Nothing treas-
onable was revealed, nor was there anything approaching to a
" Panama " scandal. Cooperation with the Krupps in the desire
of the latter to underbid their competitors for government contracts
was the utmost extent of their wrong-doing. The Socialists, who
brought the matter to light, are said -to have been animated by
hatred of the Krupp firm, because they can make no headway
amongst their workmen. Further light, perhaps, may be thrown
upon the matter by a civil trial which is to come on. Nothing was
disclosed as to the attempt alleged to have been made to excite,
by articles in newspapers, warlike feeling in France so as to facilitate
the demand for an increase of armaments in Germany.
The resignation of Herr von Cuvaj as
Austria-Hungary. Royal Commissioner of Croatia, and the
appointment of a successor, are taken as
indications that the Hungarian government is prepared for the resti-
tution of the constitutional government of which for so long a time
it has arbitrarily deprived the Croatians. But no sooner is the
normal state of things re-established in one part of the Austro-
Hungarian domitiions, than it is destroyed in another. By Im-
perial Letters Patent the Bohemian Diet has been dissolved, and
in place of the ordinary executive body a Commission of Adminis-
tration has been appointed to perform its duties. This amounts
to a suspension of Bohemian autonomy, and is due to racial
quarrels between the Germans and Czechs, and to the obstruction
of the proceedings of the Diet, which for a long time has been
practised by both. This had resulted in a financial deadlock.
The treasury had become almost empty, and the officials had no
salaries.
The newly-appointed Commission is not satisfactory to the
Germans, for out of the eight members of which it consists five are
Czechs. The Constitution gives the Crown a right to intervene
in this way in case of emergency, but it is said in this instance
to have overstepped its rights, inasmuch as it has not at once
proceeded to hold an election for a new Diet. The measure is
declared to be merely provisionary, but has met with a storm of
protest among the Czechs. It is condemned as a breach of the
Constitution, as a blow aimed at the kingdom of Bohemia and the
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 851
Czech nation, and as a measure of absolutism. This constant inter-
vention of the monarch makes the equilibrium unstable in countries
in which so great a degree of power is left in the hands of the ruler.
The Dual Monarchy is proceeding further on the same road
as France and Germany. It is announced that in consequence of
the changes in the strategical conditions of Southeastern Europe,
the strength of the Austro-Hungarian army will be considerably
increased. The standing army is to have thirty thousand more
men and the militia twenty thousand.
Constitutional government, within the limits
Russia. conceded by the " Emperor and Autocrat
of all the Russias," has become so well
established an institution that, it is said, no English Minister could
have held more correct and respectful language towards the House
of Commons than did M. Kokovtzoff, the Russian Prime Minister,
when he explained his budget to the Duma. The Chamber and
the government, after an experience of seven years, have become
accustomed to work calmly together with feelings of mutual re-
spect, and sometimes of full confidence. Especially in financial
matters, on which in other countries conflicts between governments
and Parliaments have been most frequent, a friendly spirit has
existed, and amicable cooperation has been the rule. The mem-
bers of the Duma have made such progress in their political educa-
tion, that they have found that the best way to secure for the
Chamber a fair share in the control of finance, is to cooperate
with the government, so far as this is possible, rather than to
offer systematic opposition. This course doubtless has been facil-
itated by the fact that the country has been prosperous, especially in
that which is still the mainstay of Russia's prosperity agriculture.
There has been a series of good harvests, and as a consequence a
succession of surpluses, and hence no reason for new taxation that
frequent bone of contention. The healthy control which the Duma
has succeeded in obtaining over the finances of the Empire, justifies
the hope that it will establish a strong claim for the gradual exten-
sion of its influence to other spheres of political activity.
The harmonious relations which exist between the government
and the Duma on financial matters do not, however, extend so
completely to every branch of the administration. During the
revolutionary period, Russia was placed under exceptional laws,
which gave to the authorities far larger powers of arrest and
852 RECENT EVENTS [Sept.,
imprisonment than those given by the ordinary law. This period
came to an end in 1907, and yet these exceptional laws still re-
main in force. By a resolution recently passed by the Duma, the
Minister of the Interior was condemned for illegally prolonging
this period, and thereby destroying the respect due to the ordinary
law, and unduly increasing its own power, and thereby exciting
discontent. The resolution went on to accuse the administration
of delaying the reforms admitted to be necessary in the Imperial
Manifesto of October, 1905. As an instance of what a Russian
government is still capable of doing, it may be mentioned that for
a fortnight before the Tsar's visit all goods' traffic was forbidden
on the Volga a procedure which inflicted great loss and hardship
to multitudes.
The Minister of Public Instruction has also fallen under the
condemnation of the Duma. It has passed a resolution by which
it affirmed that there existed an urgent need of radical educational
reforms, in order to give the pupils a practical preparation for
life; the present methods of intellectual instruction and physical
training, it declared, were unsatisfactory; the whole system was
characterized as dry and formal. The Ministry in fact had shown
itself insensible to the needs of the country. Of these two resolu-
tions the government took no notice, and, therefore, they are not
likely to have any practical effect. They show, however, that the
Duma is not in any respect subservient to the government, as well as
that the harmony between the two is not quite perfect. That the
Cabinet itself is moving in a more liberal direction, is made clear
by the fact that it has rejected a new reactionary press law which
had been drawn up by the Minister of the Interior, and has required
that it should be remodelled before its introduction to the Duma.
A spectacle unique in our times the use of soldiers for the
suppression of heresy has been seen, not exactly in Russian ter-
ritory, but in territory subject in some respects to Russian juris-
diction. Certain monks of Mount Athos fell into what the Holy
Synod declared to be heresy, and all efforts on the part of the Or-
thodox Church to bring about a retractation having failed, soldiers
were landed from a Russian vessel, and the heretics were carried
off to Russia. What was done to them on their arrival is not
yet known.
While between the government and the Duma the relations
may be looked upon as fairly satisfactory, there is a wider diver-
gence between it and the mass of the Russian people. If the latter
1913-] RECENT EVENTS 853
had had their way, it is almost certain that Russia would have been
drawn into the Balkan war in support of the brother Slavs of the
Russian people in opposition to the action of Austria-Hungary.
Feeling ran very high, and force had to be used to suppress
popular demonstrations. But the government stood firm, being
resolved to maintain the European concert, and in this way it
appears to have been wiser than the people. In entering into war
with each other, the Balkan States inflicted a severe rebuff on the
Tsar and his advisers, for he warned them solemnly that he would
look with disfavor on the nation responsible for beginning the war.
As it progressed, something like a common course of action was
adopted by Russia and Austria-Hungary; hence it may be hoped
that the relations between the two countries may improve.
By a treaty made at Bukarest, the war be-
The Balkan War. tween the former Allies has been brought
to an end at least for a time. This war
was carried on with a ferocity worthy of savages, in which all the
mitigations which have of late been adopted by civilized nations
were disregarded. Not only did the actual combatants
suffer, but thousands of non-combatants, old men, women, and
children were massacred, mutilated, and outraged. Bulgarian
soldiers were found with the hands of little children suspended
round their necks as a charm. The King of Greece, in a public
proclamation, called his former allies monsters of cruelty, treacher-
ous, without any sense of honor. But if the accounts are true
which have been given of the Greeks especially, and of the Servians
in a less degree, there is little to choose between the combatant
States. All have acted with the greatest cruelty.
So far as the facts are known, it was Bulgarian ambition that
brought on the war. She wished to secure the hegemony in the
Balkan region, or, as we should say in this country, to be the boss,
and to get possession of the lion's share of the spoils. In this
she had some justification, for she had made the greatest sacrifices,
and had won the most important victories over the common foe.
This led to undue elation, and to the confident expectation that she
could defeat the Servians and the Greeks as easily as she had done
the Turks. There is good evidence that she acted with deliberate
treachery, that while discussing terms of settlement, she was at
the same moment carrying on warlike operations. Never, how-
ever, did conduct of this time meet with so swift a nemesis. Within
854 RECENT EVENTS [Sept.,
a few weeks Bulgaria became a mere geographical expression.
The Turks were in the south, the Greeks and Servians to the
west, while the Rumanians were within a short distance of the
capital. So weak had Bulgaria become, that to the advance of
the latter not the smallest opposition had been offered.
That peace has been concluded is chiefly due to Rumania,
with Russia and the Powers in the background. The terms of the
treaty impose great sacrifices upon Bulgaria, and deprive her of
the objects which she was most desirous of obtaining. The posses-
sion of a seaport on the ^Egean has been denied to her, Kavala
having been given to Greece. The coast line which has been con-
ceded contains no place suitable for a port. The large number
of Bulgarians who dwell in Macedonia, for whose sake the war
with Turkey began, are placed by the new treaty under the rule
of Servia. Rumania has obtained a slice of Bulgaria the strategic
frontier she desired. The boundaries of Greece and Servia have
been made conterminous a thing to which Bulgaria had offered
the strongest opposition. Thrace is left to her, but on what terms
the Turks will be forced to evacuate Adrianople is not yet settled,
and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that this district, the
chief of Bulgaria's acquisitions, may be made into an autonomous
State. Under these conditions, it is no wonder that the submission
of Bulgaria is merely that rendered to force majeure, and that it
is fully expected that when, if ever, she should be strong enough
to make the attempt, she will take steps to free herself. For
this reason the new treaty is not looked upon as a permanent settle-
ment. In fact, claims are being made by some of the Powers that
they have the right to subject it to revision.
The populations of the States and their gains in territory
are as follows: Rumania, with a population of 7,600,000, stands
at the head, although her territorial gain is no greater than that of
Montenegro 4,200 square miles. Bulgaria comes next with
5,000,000 inhabitants, and a gain of 19,800 square miles. Servia
will have a population of 4,000,000, and gains 19,200 square miles.
Greece has the largest accession of territory, 27,000 square miles,
and her population is now 4,500,000. The boundaries of the new
State of Albania have not yet been definitely settled, but its popu-
lation is estimated at 2,000,000. Montenegro is still the smallest
of the States, with a population of 500,000, and a gain of territory
of 4,200 square miles. Such hegemony as exists must be conceded
to Rumania.
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 855
The Turks have been called upon, by an identic note of the
Powers, presented at Constantinople, and couched in the most cate-
gorical terms, to show respect to the Treaty of London, and to
evacuate Adrianople. So far they have not complied. No meas-
ures to enforce compliance have yet been taken. The Turks are
becoming their own worst enemy. A more impudent document
than that presented to the Powers in justification of their re-entering
Adrianople, was never composed. They made the claim that they
were not, by so doing, breaking the Treaty of London. This had,
indeed, settled the boundary line as extending from Enos to Midia,
the boundary they said would still be from Enos to Midia, but it
would go round by Adrianople, that is to say, it would go round the
two sides of a triangle and not along its base. The existence of
Turkey, even in Asia, depends not merely upon the forbearance
of the Powers, but even upon their being united in exercising for-
bearance; and also upon there being willing to grant financial as-
sistance. Turkey's action in seizing upon Adrianople has been the
thing best calculated to alienate them.
The public attention directed by Adeline
Portugal. Duchess of Bedford to the treatment of the
Royalist prisoners in Portugal, has not been
altogether without effect. Some relief has been granted them, but
the amnesty so long expected has not yet come. Senhor Affonso
Costa still holds the Premiership. He has been in office for more
than six months a long time for a Portuguese minister under
the Republican regime. His hold upon the government is said to
have steadily increased, although he is popular nowhere, and it is
largely by means of a secret police that he maintains his power.
To a certain extent he has come to be looked upon as an indis-
pensable man. Under his administration the state of the finances
has improved. The rich individuals and powerful corporations
who used formerly to avoid payment, by means of bribery, of their
due share of the taxes have been forced to obey the law, and, as a
consequence, the treasury has been better filled, and the immense
floating debt, which for so long has been a drain on the country,
has notably decreased. Laws have been passed imposing new taxes
to relieve the tenant at the expense of the landlord, and the poor
at the expense of the rich. So promising is the prospect that a sub-
stantial surplus is expected this year.
But in other respects the outlook is gloomy. The cost of
856 RECENT EVENTS [Sept.,
living has increased; and this has led to grave discontent among
the proletariat of = Lisbon, who expected that the Republic would
bring the millenium. Stern methods of repression have been taken,
and these have inflamed large numbers. Nor have the moderate
elements become reconciled to the new ideas, the Separation Law
having proved a great obstacle. There are also monarchists, who
still hope for the restoration of the royal family, and are said
to be conspiring for this end. But the most active enemy at the
present time are the extremists of Senhor Costa's own party. So
dissatisfied are they that they have adopted the methods of Con-
tinental Syndicalism. By outrages and violence they have been
making repeated efforts to overthrow the government. In each
case officers of the army and navy have been included among the
conspirators. The fact that an almost inexhaustible supply of
bombs has been at their disposal, seems to show that the movement
is widespread. The government has not hesitated to take as drastic
measures against these its former friends as were formerly dealt
out to the rebellious monarchists. In one day thirty conspirators
were shipped off to the Azores, there to be summarily tried and
confined to prison.
So little capacity for the civilized government of their own
country is being shown by those now in power that the question is be-
ing raised, both in Great Britain and elsewhere, as to their methods
of government of the large tracts of territory which are possessed
by Portugal in Africa. It is said that not only slave holding
exists on the mainland and in the islands which belong to Por-
tugal, but also that slave trading is carried on. The Republic on
its advent promised to suppress these evils, and has made some
efforts to keep its promises, but with so little success that every
one acquainted with the state of things recognizes that the condi-
tions of labor under which the natives are working is in effect
bondage. The attention which has been called to the matter will,
it is to be hoped, lead to as satisfactory a result as that attained
by the Congo agitation. So far, however, it has only had the
effect of exciting the indignation of the Carbonarios of Portugal,
and has led them to threaten an extension to London of the methods
of control which they have so long practised in Lisbon.
It is left to the future to disclose whether the marriage, which
is announced as about to take place, of the ex-King Manoel with
a Princess of the Catholic branch of the Hohenzollerns, will ever
have any effect on the course of events in Portugal. It will not,
1913.] RECENT EVENTS 857
of course, be the first time that German blood has been introduced
into the Portuguese royal family, for to go no farther back, his
great-grandmother, Maria da Gloria, married Ferdinand of Saxe-
Coburg.
Little has been heard lately of the course
Persia. of events in Persia. It is not, however, be-
cause it is in the happy position of those
countries that have no history. On the contrary, things have
been going from bad to worse; so much that an opportunity is
presented to the students of history of witnessing what looks like
the deathbed of an ancient kingdom. A bluebook has been recently
published by the British government, which shows that southern
Persia is in the throes of dissolution, given up to rapine and bri-
gandage; trade is at a standstill; armed bands roam about the
country doing as they please. The central government is impotent,
and the local government ignored. It is not so much misrule,
but the absolute disappearance of all ordered and coherent rule.
Not only is the authority of the government dissolved, but also
that of the tribes within themselves ; they are split up into warring
factions, and only unite from time to time when an opportunity
presents itself of despoiling caravans or of stripping chance trav-
elers.
The only part in which there is even the semblance of order
is northern Persia, and this because it is occupied by the Russian
forces. Promises have been made that these would be withdrawn,
or at least reduced in number. So far, however, is this from hav-
ing been done, that an increase has taken place from three thousand
in December, 1911, to seventeen thousand five hundred at the pres-
ent time. Possibly the Persian government, so far as there is one,
is not unwilling that order should be kept even by such means.
The Cabinet, it is said, resigns once a week; the Regent has been
an absentee in Europe for more than a year; the Shah is a boy
about fifteen years of age; the ex- Shah is lying in wait to pounce
upon the throne; his brother, Salar-ed-Dowleh, has been taking
active steps to secure it for himself; while the treasury is empty.
Such are some of the signs of Persia's decay.
Some little satisfaction may be derived from the remembrance
that had our countryman, Mr. Shuster, not been interfered with by
Russia and Great Britain, the country would have been put in a
fair way to recovery. The prospect now is that it will be par-
titioned between Russia and Great Britain. It will be with great
858 RECENT EVENTS [Sept.,
reluctance that the latter will be drawn into such a course of
action; and only in the event of Russia seizing upon northern
Persia. She is in fact making every effort to avoid such a con-
tingency. Swedish officers are at the head of a gendarmerie which
is the only force making for order in the country, and small
loans are being made from time to time to keep it in existence.
Within the last few weeks it has been announced that the Regent
is on the way back to Teheran, and that a Mejliss is again to be
elected. It remains to be seen whether or no this will be only
the prolongation of the agony. Of the development of the coun-
try's resources, better prospects exist. A concession for a railway
has been granted to Russia in the north, and an option to a British
syndicate in the south. The project for a railway through
Persia to connect the Russian and the Indian systems, seems to
be in the way of being realized, although it is meeting with
powerful opposition in Great Britain, where it is looked upon as
likely to endanger the peaceful possession of India.
In the course of last year, when Dr. Sun
China. Yat-sen offered sacrifice at the shrine of the
founder of the Ming Dynasty, he declared :
" Everywhere a beautiful repose doth reign." This was just after
the resignation of the Emperor, and the accession to the Provisional
Presidency of the Republic of Yuan Shih-kai. To this " beautiful
repose " Sun Yat-sen had contributed by his magnanimous resigna-
tion of the Presidency, to which he had been elected by the Revo-
lutionaries who had brought about the fall of the Manchu Dynasty.
The repose has soon come to an end, and a conflict has arisen be-
tween Yuan Shih-kai and the one who made way for him. For
this there are several reasons. There is between the Northern
and the Southern Provinces of China a chronic rivalry and jealousy,
which has been inflamed by what is said to have been the unfair
distribution of the spoils of office by the government. The methods
adopted by Yuan Shih-kai form another reason. They by no
means conform with the constitutional methods which are the ideal
of the young Chinese, of whom Sun Yat-sen is a leader.
A glaring instance 'of this is the way in which the recent
loan with the Five Powers was contracted. Although the first Par-
liament was just upon the point of opening its session, the Provi-
sional President did not seek to obtain its sanction for the loan. This
is but one instance out of many of arbitrary proceedings on his part.
I9I3-] RECENT EVENTS 859
Moreover, Yuan Shih-kai is thought not to be loyal to the Re-
public. In fact, for a long time he opposed its establishment, and
only accepted it as the less of two evils. It is even said that he
would not be sorry to see the restoration of absolute rule. Yet
he is thought so great is the demoralization of the Empire the
only man among the Chinese millions who is able to preserve even
a semblance of order. The desire of money is predominant and
all-absorbing: there is no one who has not his price there is no
countervailing consideration.
The expectation that Yuan Shih-kai will succeed in the con-
flict, is based mainly on the fact that he is its possessor: in fact
that this might be the case is the reason for his anxiety to con-
clude the loan. Up to the present the course of events has been
in his favor; the attempt of the rebels appears to be failing. What-
ever the result may be, the mass of the Chinese will not be affected,
at least directly. In their eyes all who have rule over them are
hopelessly corrupt. Their only hope is to escape from their depre-
dations in the easiest possible way. The politicians on both sides
are equally rapacious. The only piece of constructive legislation
of the new Senate so far has been the voting to each of their
number the sum of three thousand dollars a year. It is to be hoped
for the sake of the much-suffering Chinese masses, that a settlement
of one kind or another will be made before long. Residents in China
assert that the accounts disseminated by journalists of the peace-
ful establishment of the Republic are a fiction. On the contrary,
no one outside China can have more than a faint conception of the
sufferings which have been endured by the defenceless peasantry
since the revolution of October, 1911, let loose upon them bands
of rabble soldiery, pirates, and brigands.
The way in which the cultivation of the poppy has recently been
suppressed casts a light upon Chinese methods, even when the
regular soldiers are employed. These were sent to scour the coun-
try in search of the growing crops, and as they went they beheaded
the cultivators right and left. The fights between the villagers
and the destroyers of the condemned crops were numberless. Exe-
cutions, sentences to beating, violation of women, and pillage were
of constant occurrence. The crops were ruthlessly destroyed, and
this entailed starvation in large numbers. There is no one who will
not rejoice at the suppression of the opium trade, but all will
deplore the means by which it has been effected.
With Our Readers.
READERS of Charlotte Bronte's novel Villette will recall " Mon-
sieur Paul Emanuel," who in real life was Professor Heger, at
whose school in Brussels Charlotte Bronte was a pupil. The relations
between teacher and pupil have always been a matter of romantic
interest, and to some of unpleasant gossip. There was never the
least evidence that those relations were in any way sinful. The London
Times lately printed four lost letters from Charlotte Bronte to M.
Heger. They are given to the public by M. Heger's son Paul, who
wishes to end all dispute and speculation. The letters show that
Charlotte Bronte had idealized Monsieur Paul Emanuel, and wished
to be well thought of and remembered by him.
* * * *
'"PHE following extract shows how the sensitive and introspective
1 soul of Charlotte Bronte yearned in the alien solitude of Brussels,
and its own greater interior loneliness, for even a touch of human
affection.
" MONSIEUR : The poor have no need for much to sustain them. They
ask only for the crumbs that have fallen from rich men's tables. If they are
refused the crumbs they will die of hunger. Nor do I need much affection
from those I love. I should not know what to do with a friendship entire and
complete. I am not used to it, but you showed me of yore a little interest
when I was your pupil in Brussels, and I hold on maintenance that little in-
terest hold on to it as I would hold on to life."
* * * #
appearance of these letters reminds us that Villette is the work
in which Charlotte Bronte has some good words to say of
the Catholic Church. She said such words seldom. She was care-
fully nurtured in severe Protestant prejudice, but her experience in
Brussels widened her outlook, and added much to her literary ability,
because through it she learned a more sympathetic touch with human
kind.
At the time of which she writes, she has been left alone in the
school for the long vacation.
" One evening and I was not delirious : I was in my sane mind, I got
up I dressed myself, weak and shaking. The solitude and the stillness of the
long dormitory could not be borne any longer. That evening more firmly
than ever fastened into my soul the conviction that Fate was of stone, and
Hope a false idol blind, bloodless, and of granite core. I felt, too, that the
trial God had appointed me was gaining its climax, and must now be turned
by my own hands, hot, feeble, trembling as they were. Covered with a cloak
(I could not be delirious, for I had sense and recollection to put on warm
clothing), forth I set. The bells of a church arrested me in passing; they
seemed to call me in to the salut, and I went in. I knelt down with others
on the stone pavement.
" Few worshippers were assembled, and, the salut over, half of them
1913.] WITH OUR READERS > 861
departed. I discovered soon that those left remained to confess. I did not stir.
After a space, breathless and spent in prayer, a penitent approached the con-
fessional. I watched. She whispered her avowal; her shrift was whispered
back; she returned consoled. Another went, and another. A pale lady, kneel-
ing near me, said in a low, kind voice :
" 'Go you now, I am not quite prepared.'
" Mechanically obedient, I rose and went. I knew what I was about ; my
mind had run over the intent with lightning-speed. To take this step could
not make me more wretched than I was; it might soothe me.
"The priest within the confessional never turned his eyes to regard me;
he only quietly inclined his ear to my lips. I said: 'Mon pere, je suis Prot-
estante.' He inquired, not unkindly, why, being a Protestant, I came to him?
"I said I was perishing for a word of advice or an accent of comfort. I
had been living for some weeks quite alone; I had been ill; I had a pressure
of affliction on my mind of which it would hardly any longer endure the weight.
" 'Was it a sin, a crime ?' he inquired, somewhat startled.
"I reassured him on this point, and, as well as I could, I showed him the
mere outline of my experience.
" He looked thoughtful, surprised, puzzled. 'You take me unawares/ said he.
'I am hardly furnished with counsel fitting the circumstances/
" Of course, I had not expected he would be ; but the mere relief of com-
munication in an ear which was human and sentient, yet consecrated the
mere pouring out of some portion of long accumulating, long pent-up pain
into a vessel whence it could not be again diffused had done me good. I was
already solaced.
"'Must I go, Father?' I asked of him as he sat silent.
" 'My daughter/ he said kindly and I am sure he was a kind man : he had
a compassionate eye 'for the present you had better go : but I assure you your
words have struck me. Confession, like other things, is apt to become formal
and trivial with habit. You have come and poured your heart out; a thing
seldom done. I would fain think your case over, and take it with me to my
oratory. Were you of our faith I should know what to say a mind so tossed
can find repose but in the bosom of retreat, and the punctual practice of piety.
The world, it is well known, has no satisfaction for that class of natures.
Holy men have bidden penitents like you to hasten their path upward by
penance, self-denial, and difficult good works. Tears are given them here for
meat and drink bread of affliction and waters of affliction their recompense
comes hereafter. It is my own conviction that these impressions under which
you are smarting are messengers from God to bring you back to the True Church.
You were made for our faith: depend upon it our faith alone could heal and
help you Protestantism is altogether too dry, cold, prosaic for you. The
further I look into this matter, the more plainly I see it is entirely out of the
common order of things. On no account would I lose sight of you. Go,
my daughter, for the present; but return to me again/
" I rose and thanked him. I was withdrawing when he signed me to return.
" 'You must not come to this church/ said he : 'I see you are ill, and this
church is too cold; you must come to my house; I live ' (and he gave me
his address). 'Be there to-morrow morning at ten.'
"In reply to this appointment, I only bowed; and pulling down my veil,
and gathering round me my cloak, I glided away."
And then Charlotte Bronte fears that perhaps she has gone too
far, that the smug and bigoted ones of the public for whom she wrote
might begin to believe she had " Roman " tendencies and not read
862 WITH OUR READERS [Sept.,
her books. She hastens to reassure the Protestant reader that she
was wise enough ; that he need not fear for her safety. " Did I, do you
suppose, dear reader, contemplate venturing again within that worthy
priest's reach? As soon should I have thought of walking into a
Babylonish furnace." Nevertheless she must record that the priest
" was kind when I needed kindness : he did me good. May Heaven
bless him."
And Charlotte Bronte realizes, at times, that Protestantism was
too dry, cold, and prosaic for her? If she had hastened her steps
to the priest's house, would she not also have hastened her path
upward; and would not English literature have been still further en-
riched because Charlotte Bronte was made happier and had seen the
cloud lifted?
THE tendency towards prurient discussions recently manifested
and furthered in many of our magazines, receives a fitting rebuke
in the columns of the New York Sun and of the New York Times.
Catholic morality, as voiced in Catholic journals, has often and vigor-
ously called attention to the danger resultant upon the public discussion
of sex questions, and upon the purveying of loose morality in articles
and works of fiction. The secular press is being aroused to this
danger. This fact serves, indeed, but to reveal the proportions which
the evil has assumed; but it likewise gives us hope that the healthier
sense of morality will prevail.
Under the caption Flinging Slime in the Public's Face, the New
York Sun has this to say:
" The persons who have complained to the Postmaster-General of the treat-
ment of sexual matters in certain magazines and weeklies, have attacked a grave
and disgusting evil of this time.
" Starting under the specious pretext of giving needed instruction to the
young, an instruction that should not and need not be public, the virtuous
exploiters of popular credulity and ignorance have come to be poisoners of
the public imagination, inspirers of loathsome ideas and images, utterers
of foulness, degraders and destroyers of innocence. By the side of the money
they make and they would not stick to this hypocritical-licentious branch
of literature if they didn't make money out of it Henry Fielding's 'dirtiest
money in the world' earned by a Bow Street magistrate is angel gold,
and even the wages of a Broadway bully look almost respectable.
"It is the shameful fact that some abhorrent article or picture is likely
to leap at the eye from almost any page of certain periodicals. In the
name, usually, of virtue and progress, the young are being dishonored; girls
and women ought to be safe, and are not, from this contamination. It looks
at them from every news stand. The civilization of Pompeii ought not to be,
and is, inculcated in the mellifluent accents of Mr. Chadband. Babylon is
become a nest of every unclean bird.
"Mr. Burleson's services are not needed for the suppression of these
'improving' obscenities, these labors, whether of the bigot or the sensualist, to
make a United States in which is no heart without the full knowledge
1913-] WITH OUR READERS 863
of evil, no eye without some unhealthy gleam. Punish the venders of impurity
by not reading them. In addition, if necessary, lug them before the courts.
The remedy for this spreading disease is in the hands of the public whom it
infects."
* * * *
THIS protest is strong, but none too strong. The magazine " seek*
ers after gold," not long since with surface sanctimonious-
ness, made a speciality of revealing and decrying " graf t " in all its
phases. As a money-getter this pursuit no longer brings results.
Now, with hardly even a pretense of public need or public good,
these same magazines, through their pages, are begetting a race of
sensualists and hypocrites that will prove more degrading to society
than all the " grafters " on the globe. One sad feature connected
with their unseemly work is that they can command the services of
authors who have proved that they possess higher instincts, but who,
for the sake of the penny, become ministers to indecency. Every pro-
test possible, through the spoken and the written word, through the
invoking of the law, and through any other means available, should be
made against the continuance of the vile food that many magazines
especially those that pretend to decency but have it not set before
the public.
PLYMOUTH was the scene of the Fourth Catholic National Con-
1 gress of England. The Congress itself was an instance of that
characteristic which was most prominent in the papers presented,
namely, Catholic vitality. This vitality showed itself first in a recog-
nition of the obstacles that oppose themselves to the advance of our
religion. His Eminence Cardinal Bourne said, in the course of a
searching address : " It is one purpose of these National Catholic
Congresses to focus attention upon some points of more urgent interest
and to see how actual difficulties can be met." The recognition of dif-
ficulties and defects to be overcome, did not deprive the Congress of its
inspiriting tone.
The topics discussed plainly showed the power of Catholic Faith,
not only in its intimate relation to the individual, but also to the social
body. The Church and the Living Wage, Temperance Societies,
Catholic Insurance Societies, Our Conception of Catholic Federation, a
very clear exposition by Very Rev. Canon Sharrock, are some of the
subjects calculated to awaken or sustain the interest of Catholics in
movements towards the improvement of social conditions.
* * * *
OTHER papers and addresses, such as the Cardinal's inaugural
address on Religious Indifference, Abbot Gasquet's sermon on
The Tragedy of the Reformation, and Father McNabb's unusual pre-
sentation of the relations between Catholics and Nonconformists, deal
864 BOOKS RECEIVED [Sept., 1913.]
more directly with purely religious matters. An address of most
hopeful outlook for Christianity in England was given by Rev. C. C.
Martindale, S J. After dwelling upon the evil results of the process of
destructive criticism, so noticeable in recent years, he tells of the re-
vival of interest in religious matters throughout England. In doing so
he draws an interesting illustration from improved conditions in France.
The world-wide effect of such a Congress, in spite of the present
force of irreligion, is to awaken and sustain Catholic zeal, and to in-
crease hopefulness in the Catholic heart.
BOOKS RECEIVED.
BENZIGER BROTHERS, New York:
The " Summa Theologica" of St. Thomas Aquinas. Part III. Vol. I. Trans-
lated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. $2.00 net. Flowers
of the Cloister. By Sister Mary Wilfrid La Motte. $1.25. Christ's Cadets.
By C. C. Martindale, SJ. 35 cents net. The Maid of Spinges. By Mrs.
Edward Wayne. 85 cents net.
LONGMANS, GREEN & Co., New York:
The New Testament. The Epistle to the Thessalonians. By Rev. Cuthbert
Lattey, SJ. Paper, 20 cents net ; boards, 40 cents net. Gracechurch. By
John Ayscough. $1.75 net.
AMERICAN BOOK Co., New York :
Standard Catholic Readers. By Mary E. Doyle. . First Year, 20 cents ; second
Year, 30 cents. Third Year to Eighth Year, 35 cents each. Political
Economy for Catholic Colleges, High Schools, and Academies. By E. J.
Burke, SJ. $1.40.
H. W. GRAY Co., New York:
Twenty-Two Hymns. (Music.) By Franklin Hopkins. 50 cents.
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, New York :
The Dominican Order and Convocation. By Ernest Barker, M.A. 3 s. net.
H. L. KILNER & Co., Philadelphia:
Ronald's Mission. By Henriette E. Delamare. 60 cents.
J. B. LIPPINCOTT Co., Philadelphia :
The Woman Thou Gavest Me. By Hall Caine. $1.35 net.
JOHN MURPHY Co., Baltimore :
Lessons in English Literature. By J. O'Kane Murray, M.A.
B. HERDER, St. Louis :
The New France. By W. S. Lilly. $2.25 net.
W. B. CONKEY, Hammond, Indiana :
Religious Orders of Women in the United States. By E. T. Dehey. $3.00 net.
G. LYALL, London:
' Homely Thoughts on the Method of Spiritual Science Explained and Applied
to the Gospel According to Saint John. By John Coutts. 2 d.
R. & T. WASHBOURNE, LTD., London :
Sister Mary of St. Francis, S.N.D. Edited by Dom Bede Camm, O.S.B. 5 s. net.
AUSTRALIAN CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY, Melbourne :
The Church. By Rev. Dr. Keane, O.P. Spiritualism and Christianity. By
Rev. P. J. Manly. Pamphlets, i penny.
P. LETHIELLEUX, Paris:
Le Deplacement Administratif Des Cures. Par 1'Abbe A. Villien. 3 frs. 50.
GABRIEL BEAUCHESNE, Paris :
" Hors de I'Eglise, pas de Salut." Par J,-V. Bainvel. o fr. 75.
AP The Catholic world
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