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THE
^atholie^orld
Vol. CXV.
JULY, 1922.
No. 688.
GREGOR JOHANN MENDEL.
July 22, 1822— January 6, 1884,
BY SIR BERTRAM C. A. WINDLE, M.A., SCO., LL.D., F.R.S.
r is now one hundred years since a child, after-
wards christened Johann, was born in the small
farmhouse of a peasant farmer named Mendel,
at Heinzendorf, near Odrau, in what was then
Austrian Silesia. It is more than sixty years
since his epoch-making works were published and attracted
no attention. It is some thirty-five years since their author
died, chagrined at the cold reception of what he knew to be
important contributions to science, but confidently asserting
that his time would yet come. He was right. Some twenty-
five years ago his papers were discovered by several men of
science almost simultaneously. His time had come, and the
re-discovered papers have turned the biological world upside
down. Bateson, who is the prophet of Mendelism in Eng-
land, has declared that "his experiments are worthy to rank
with those which laid the foundations of the atomic laws of
Copyright. 1922. The Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle
IN the State of New York.
VOL. CXV. 28
434 GREGOR JOHANN MENDEL [July,
chemistry," whilst Lock, another biological writer, has
claimed that his discovery was "of an importance little infe-
rior to those of a Newton or a Dalton."
For the sake of the comparison which must naturally
arise at a later point, let us set down the chief dates in the
life of that other great biologist, Charles Darwin, for, though
he knew nothing of Mendel's work, which was almost con-
temporary with his own, that work has shaken the Darwinian
edifice. Bateson, in a Presidential address to the British
Association for the Promotion of Science, declared: "We go
to Darwin for his incomparable collection of facts. We would
fain emulate his scholarship, his width and his power of ex-
position, but to us he speaks no more with philosophical
authority. We read his scheme of evolution as we would
those of Lucretius or Lamarck, delighting in their simplicity
and their courage."
Darwin was born in 1809: his great work. The Origin of
Species by Natural Selection, was published exactly fifty
years later, and eight years before Mendel's work. It ex-
cited immediate attention. In fact, it convulsed the scien-
tific world, nor had its influence in any way abated at the
time of its author's death, in 1882, two years before that of
Mendel.
The centenary of so distinguished a man and so distin-
guished a Catholic as Mendel, should not pass unnoticed in a
Catholic periodical. The name Mendel has a Hebrew twang
to those familiar with German and Austrian names, neverthe-
less the Mendel family was of pure Austrian descent, poor
but fervent in their religion like most of their compatriots.
Johann was educated at the ordinary school at Leipnik, near
his home, and proving himself to be of uncommon abilities,
his parents made a great effort to send him on to the gym-
nasium or higher school at Troppau, and subsequently to the
still more important one at Olmutz. How great a strain this
was upon the meagre family resources, may be gathered from
the fact that Mendel's sister, at her own suggestion, gave up a
large part of her dowry that her brother's education might
not be interrupted. The magnitude of this sacrifice can only
be estimated by those who know that in some European coun-
tries the marriage of a dowerless girl is a most unlikely inci-
dent. It is pleasant to recall that her self-sacrifice was re-
1922.] GREGOR JOHANN MENDEL 435
warded, for her brother not only repaid what was lent, but
himself defrayed the expenses of the education of two of her
sons.
At Troppau Mendel had as one of his teachers a young
Augustinian from the monastery at Briinn, and it may have
been on this account that, when his time at the gymnasium
was up, he became a novice at the Abbey of St. Thomas, of
which his teacher was a member. This was in 1843, when
he was twenty-one years of age. Four years later he was or-
dained a priest. Another four years were spent in teaching,
and then the young Augustinian was sent for a two years'
course of study to the University of Vienna, where he devoted
his time to mathematics, physics and natural science. In
1853 he was back again in his monastery and was appointed
a teacher in the Realschule or Technical School of the town.
Here he labored for fifteen years and seems, as indeed one
might have anticipated, to have been a stimulating and much
appreciated teacher. It was during this time that he carried
out the experiments on which his papers are based. The
fact that he was engaged in research no doubt tended to give
a life and vigor to his teaching which can never characterize
the instruction of those whose knowledge is purely theoret-
ical. Then occurred what one can only call a real tragedy:
Mendel was appointed Prselatus of his abbey. This is the ac-
curate term, although he is generally called Abbot,^ the na-
ture of the office being identical. Here one cannot but be re-
minded of another great scientific ecclesiastic, Nikolaus Sten-
sen. Stensen, after making discoveries in Geology and in
Anatomy which won him the title of the Father of Modern
Geology and caused the assembled men of science of the
world, in the latter part of the last century, to place a tablet
over the spot where his remains rest, proclaiming him to be
''inter Geologos et Anatomicos prsestantissimus/' was, un-
fortunately for science, made a bishop, sent to a part of Eu-
rope, where he spent his latter days in what, to the human eye,
seemed fruitless toil, and was completely cut off from all
scientific work.
Such was the case with Mendel Quite possibly he said
to himself when he became Prelate : "Now I shall have time
1 The title of Abbe, so often employed when he first became known, has been
dropped by all but the most ignorant.
436 GREGOR JOHANN MENDEL [July,
to work more steadily at my beloved experiments, having no
more teaching to occupy me."
Of course, he reaped the fruit everyone reaps who aban-
dons teaching for administration, hoping for more time and a
fresher mind for scientific work. Stensen achieved nothing
more after he became a bishop; that perhaps was inevitable,
for he was sent far from laboratories and libraries. But
neither did Mendel, though he was not separated from the
garden which had been the scene of his labors. The general
routine business of his Abbey, if nothing had been super-
added, might have left him leisure for scientific work, but
Mendel was drawn into a long and troublesome dispute with
the Government in respect of a taxation scheme which he be-
lieved to be unjust to the religious houses. So, no doubt, did
the other houses, but many, if not most of them, capitulated
to the Government. Efforts were made to induce Mendel to
do likewise, but he steadily refused, and the contest was still
raging at his death, though not long afterwards matters
were settled along the lines for which he had always con-
tended.
The struggle in question was enough to embitter the last
years of Mendel's life, and it was not his only cross. Racial
feelings and strifes were then most acute in that part of Aus-
tria, and an Abbey with such wide ramifications as that at
Briinn, could not but be much affected thereby. Furthermore,
he felt very bitterly the chill neglect with which his papers
were received. This neglect is somewhat curious to explain
for, though his papers were not published in an important
periodical (the Proceedings of the Briinn Natural History So-
ciety are not of world-wide reputation), yet they were sent to
the Royal Society of London and doubtless to other important
libraries, and there is no doubt that Mendel corresponded with
Nageli, a very distinguished biologist of the day. Nageli's
failure to see the value of Mendel's papers is the more remark-
able because of his own views, of which more shortly.
Finally, the Abbot was the victim during the last years of
his life of Bright's disease, that depressing malady, of which
eventually he died. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore,
that, in a fit of depression, he destroj^ed a number of his notes,
including, apparently, those he had made on bees, on which
much-studied insects he is known to have carried out a num-
1922.] GREGOR JOHANN MENDEL 437
ber of experiments. After his death, no trace of the notes of
this and other researches were discoverable, nor has the most
careful search ever brought them to light.
A complete study of the Mendelian doctrines as at present
formulated is no part of the present writer's intention. They
have arrived at a complexity of detail and of nomenclature
only understandable by the expert. Some account of what
Mendel discovered must indeed be given, for, without it, to
estimate the importance of his position today would be im-
possible. Only an outline will be attempted. What is more
important, from our point of view, is to see the effect his dis-
coveries have had upon current biological opinion, and the re-
lation they bear to some of the great philosophical problems
of this and every age.
When we survey the realm of nature, we are confronted
with certain obvious facts which must form the basis of all
our study. In the first place, the picture which is unfolded
before our eyes is discontinuous in its character. There is no
apparent reason why all living things should not be of ex-
actly the same species. They are not. And, what is more,
they belong to species sometimes very sharply and always
with sufficient distinction separated from one another.
Again, the discontinuous picture is also characteristic of the
past, where we find, in continuous succession, the rise, climax
and, almost always, decline of various races of beings. There
were at one time the great saurians or lizards which have
completely disappeared. So has the Mammoth, to take but
two examples familiar to all. Why this discontinuity? It is
a question clamant of an answer. Then we find ourselves
face to face with the undoubted fact of Heredity — a wonder-
ful thing even if we are anaesthetized by its invariability and
seldom stop to think how remarkable it is that a duck never
comes from a hen's egg, nor is a colored child the offspring of
white parents. Finally, for our purpose, we must not forget
that, though heredity causes the offspring to resemble closely
the parents, they are not precisely similar; in other words,
we have to do with the factor of Variation.
Things may vary in two ways. There may be very slight
variations such as a twist to the eyebrow hairs at the inner
side of the eye — a small thing, yet one which has been known
to descend in families for generations. It was to these small
438 GREGOR JOHANN MENDEL [July,
variations that Darwin attached all importance in connection
with his doctrine of Natural Selection. Huxley told him that
he was making a mistake and that Natiira facit saltum at times
at any rate. We now know that such is the case, and many at
least are of opinion that the small variations merely swing
backwards and forwards around a fixed central point and
have very little, if anything, to do with any process of evolu-
tion which may be taking place. On the contrary, major vari-
ations, which their latest describer, de Vries, calls Mutations,
do seem to have a real effect. There is a well-known example
in connection with the Greater Celandine (Chelidonium
ma jus), of which a variant (afterwards named, from the lace-
like character of its leaves, Chelidonium laciniatum), sud-
denly appeared in the garden of one Sprenger, an apothecary
in Heidelberg, in the year 1590. At the time, what we may
call systematic (though there was not much system about it),
botany, was a favorite pursuit, and Sprenger sent specimens
to many botanists, none of whom knew the plant. They could
not well know it, as it was a perfectly new appearance. Yet
it has gone on breeding perfectly true ever since.
Heredity, Variations, Mutations, such are the factors
which confronted Mendel and confront all workers in the
biological field. Mendel determined to attack a problem
which had been attacked by others before and has been by
others since, and to adopt a perfectly original method of at-
tack — simple, like almost all great ideas, yet yielding, as
we shall see, almost astounding results. What he deter-
mined to study was the question of Heredity and Variation,
and to ascertain what, if any, were the laws connected
with these phenomena. Let us, for a moment, review the
attitude towards these factors of a few other great men of
science.
Lamarck (1744-1829) started out by accepting inheri-
tance which he did not try to explain. Moreover, he accepted
the inheritance of an acquired character, a subject, to this
day, of even bitter controversy, of which more presently.
What he did try to explain was Variation, which he looked
upon as nature's response to some pressing need.
Darwin tried through his theory of "Pangenesis" to ex-
plain Heredity, but he could not explain the origin of varia-
tions on which, however, he had to rely for his theory of Nat-
1922.] GREGOR JOHANN MENDEL 439
ural Selection. In the language of philosophy, Lamarck took
Heredity and Darwin took Variation as "given."
Weismann, who died only a short time ago, abandoned
the theory of the inheritance of acquired characters which
Herbert Spencer said was of such importance that, without it,
there could be no evolution. He had to admit Variation of
course and, in order to account for it, he formulated a
theory of internal germinal selection which we need not
linger over, since it never obtained any position in the scien-
tific world.
Now the road is clear for Mendel and his experiments.
Up to his time, workers had looked upon each living object
which they were studying as a whole. The human being pro-
duced a human being more or less like its parents. The pea
produced fresh peas more or less identical with the pro-
genitor peas and that was all. Mendel had the flash of
genius which led him to see that the proper path by which to
approach the problem was by that of individual and sharply
contrasted characters. The common pea was the first and
the most important object of his study. Now there are tall
and dwarf peas; there are peas with wrinkled skins and peas
with smooth; there are peas with yellow flesh and peas with
green (technical terms are rigorously excluded from this
article), and so on. Mendel's idea was to take these con-
trasted characters and study their heredity, and this is how
he did it, described as briefly and simply as possible.
Let us take the sweet pea which everybody knows. There
are two varieties for our present purpose — tall and dwarf or
"Cupid" as it is called. Several feet high and only a few
inches high — a sufficiently striking contrast. Mendel took
plants which had been breeding true for some time and he
saved their seed. When these seeds had been planted, had
germinated and grown up, he carefully fertilized the flowers
of one with pollen (the golden dust on the stamens of the male
plant which must reach the female flowers for seeds to be
formed) from the other. It does not niake any difference
which way the cross is made. He took every precaution to
prevent any other pollen but that which he had selected from
reaching the female flower. Then the resultant seeds were
saved, labeled, laid aside and, next year, planted. Now it
seems obvious that from such mixed parentage the most likely
440 GREGOR JOHANN MENDEL [July,
thing would be a mixed progeny, but such was not the result.
In the case we are studying all the progeny were tall. It
would appear as if the tall stock was so strong as to have
wiped out the puny, but attractive, "Cupid" variety. How-
ever, the experiment was not over, for the seeds of these tall
plants after being carefully excluded from the influence of any
alien pollen, were allowed to grow and to fertilize themselves
as they would do in a state of nature. The resultant seeds
were again sown and the result was another surprise, for now
there were a mixed group of descendants, tall and short, but
in definite proportions: three tall for every one short.
Mendel so far, then, came to the conclusion (for the same
things followed in connection with the other contrasting char-
acters such as wrinkled and smooth) that one of the characters
was suppressed or held in petto in the first generation, and
this he called recessive, whilst the other alone was visible and
thus dominant. Tallness, then, was dominant and dwarfish-
ness recessive in the case we have under consideration. Yet,
again, the experiment was not entirely concluded, for another
generation's breeding was observed, again as the sequence of
carefully protected self-fertilization. Now what came to pass
was that all the dwarfs produced dwarfs and, it may be
added, would go on producing dwarfs forever, so it would
seem. In other words, they were a pure strain. As to the
tails, they produced both tails and dwarfs. The dwarfs, as
before, are pure and will go on producing dwarfs. The tails
are partly pure and will go on producing tails. But partly
they are not pure and will go on producing a mixed breed in
the proportions just given. Thus after the first generation,
all tails, there will be a second of seventy-five per cent, tails
or dominants and twenty-five per cent, dwarfs or recessives.
These last will go on producing one hundred per cent, of
dwarfs, or breeding true; of the remaining seventy-five per
cent, of tails, twenty-five per cent, will be pure, breeding tails,
and the remaining fifty per cent, will be mixed, producing off-
spring in the numerical arrangement mentioned throughout,
namely, one recessive to three dominants.
The same proportions are maintained in many other pairs
of characters, and since the re-discovery of Mendel's papers,
a vast amount of work has been done in order to ascertain
what, if any, are the limits of this rule. Nowhere it may be
1922.] GREGOR JOHANN MENDEL 441
remarked has more striking or important work been carried
out than in the laboratories of Columbia University by Pro-
fessor Morgan and his fellow-workers; work, which with that
carried out by Professor Bateson and his assistants at the ex-
perimental garden over which he presides, have filled many
thousand pages of scientific works, and led to the formulation
of many theories of which Mendel knew nothing and of which
nothing will be said here.
One point, however, of prime importance must not be
overlooked before we turn to some general considerations.
Mendel's method shows us how a pure breed may be obtained,
pure that is in so far as concerns some important factor —
surely a point of first importance to breeders of horses and
cattle, not to speak of growers of wheat and other agricultural
products. A man wants a cow, let us say, with a certain char-
acteristic — it is to be a first-class milker. There are good
milkers and bad. Let us breed them and see if they work
on Mendelian lines. All characteristics do not, and the case
I have taken is purely imaginary. If it worked, it is easy to
see how a pure breed of good milkers could be obtained. Let
us take an instance where the principle was actually worked
out along economic lines. There is a certain kind of wheat
which alone will make the sort of bread people in England
wish to eat, and its quality is called "strength." That quality
is found in Canadian and American wheats, but not in Eng-
lish wheats, which can be grown at a profit, i. e., which have
a good yield per acre. If the "strong" American wheats are
brought over and grown in England they soon become "weak."
By means of experiments on Mendelian lines, it has been pos-
sible to produce a wheat with the "strong" quality which has
the free cropping characteristics of the less valuable variety.
Further, and in connection with another problem on Men-
delian lines, it has been possible to produce a "strong" wheat
which is insusceptible to the attacks of "rust," a fungoid
plague which had been previously a desperate enemy of the
desired varieties of wheat. Thus the "pure" scientific experi-
ments, as in so many other cases, lead to economic results or
become "applied." Thus again proving that any distinction
between "pure" and "applied" science is untenable and, in-
deed, absurd.
Let us now survey the field of science from the aspect pre-
442 GREGOR JOHANN MENDEL [July,
sented by Mendel's discovery. First of all, plain and distinct
as sunlight, is revealed a law. We cannot have a numerical
arrangement of unvarying character like that just described
and refuse to give to it the same significance that one does to
the laws called after Newton, for example. If one has a
series of occurrences which occur and recur with complete
regularity, and one has to account for them, one can only do
so in one of two ways. They come about by chance or they
come about by law. Huxley said somewhere that no one who
had ever seen a glimmer of scientific light, could stand by the
chance hypothesis and, indeed, it does not take much consid-
eration to see how untenable such a thing is here and in a
thousand other instances. "Personally, I always maintain
that, if there are laws of nature, it is only logical to admit that
there is a lawgiver. But of this lawgiver we can give no
account." These were the words of Professor Plate in
the well-known Berlin discussion between Father Wasmann,
the eminent Jesuit biologist, and the combined materialist tal-
ent of Germany. As to the latter part of his statement, much
might be said but cannot be said here. The first part contains
the needed admission. If there is a law, there must be some-
one to formulate that law.
"With the experimental proof that Variation consists
largely in the unpacking and repacking of an original com-
plexity, it is not so certain as we might like to think that the
order of these events is not predetermined." Professor Bate-
son, as I have pointed out before, in this passage uses a curi-
ous expression, for it is not clear why the scientific man
should "like" to think of anything but the truth, whatever that
may be. But he has clearly indicated an important point
which calls for an explanation and can only obtain one by
conceding the existence of a packer and a predestinator. In
other words, to drop paraphrase, we come back to the need of
a Lawgiver and a Creator. That is the first and, from our
point of view, at least, not the most negligible asset obtained
from Mendel's discoveries.
There are other things, however, to which we must direct
our attention. In the passage just quoted, the writer alludes
to an "original complexity," and on that phrase hangs a most
important consideration. The Darwinian view as to evolu-
tion, indeed we may say the general view of all Transformists,
1922.] GREGOR JOHANN MENDEL 443
was, it may be safely said, that of an original simplicity pass-
ing to greater and greater complexity. Thus we have the ef-
forts to show that life first appeared in some vaseline-like
carbonaceous jelly by the side of some steaming pond of mill-
ions of years ago, which somehow divided and somehow got
the habit of dividing, a process which in time became heredi-
tary, and that this jelly gradually became more complex, and
thus you have all the living things of the past and the present.
It takes some believing but, as a method of Creation, there is
nothing in it to turn a hair on the head of the firmest believer
in religion, though he may be assured, to begin with, that there
is not one particle of evidence for anything of the kind. It
may have been, but then, and a hundred times over, it may
not. But the view of some of the modern Mendelians is quite
a different thing. According to it, everything that ever was
to be, was in the original germ or germs. Germs we say, ad-
visedly, for we gather that Bateson and his following would
agree with Father Wasmann that evolution was polyphyletic;
that there is, as the Bible says — though not as a scientific pro-
nouncement, one flesh of fish and another of birds, and so
on. This text Bateson put on the title-page of his first and
greatest work.
Just how many sources of development or starting points,
to make our meaning clearer, they would allow, is nowhere
stated, but let us suppose — for the sake of clearness — that a
starting point was allowed for vertebrates. That would mean
that all the characteristics of all the vertebrate forms that
have ever existed, or will ever exist, were in that germ which
formed the starting point. That is a startling idea, but it fol-
lows from the statement of this school of Mendelians, that
nothing can ever be added to the germ, and that the differ-
ences we observe are due to the removal of some inhibiting
factor which permits the previously "stopped down" char-
acter to make its appearance. Let us take an illustrative quo-
tation: Professor Bateson expresses his confidence that "the
artistic gifts of mankind will prove to be due, not to some-
thing added to the make-up of an ordinary man, but to the
absence of factors which in the normal person inhibit the de-
velopment of these gifts. They are almost beyond doubt to
be looked upon as releases of powers normally suppressed.
The instrument is there, but it is 'stopped down.' "
444 GREGOR JOHANN MENDEL [July,
Now, if all the characters are in the original germ, we
have to account first of all for their being there, which on
materialistic lines seems absolutely impossible. There was
some wild kind of possibility — never coming within hailing
distance of a probability— that an originally simple germ
might develop and, without any direction, acquire further
complexities. I say that this is wildly thinkable, but the other
is not, wildly or otherwise. If you are going to begin with a
germ packed with all the characters which are to develop
afterwards into a rich and varied fauna or flora, they must
have been packed there by a Creator. There is absolutely
no other way out of it except by plunging into the agnos-
ticism of Professor Plate and saying: "Of course, there must
have been a Packer, but we cannot know anything about
Him."
Further, it is also abundantly obvious that if you are
going to achieve development by gradual shaking off of in-
hibiting characters, you must in your developing germ have
some directing factor. It is obvious that this train of thought
could never have passed through the mind of Nageli when
corresponding with Mendel, for Nageli was a strong upholder
of what he himself called orthogenesis, that is the existence
of something in the developing individual which impelled it
along a certain line of development and no other. Strange
that ignorance or prejudice should make men invent new
names for old things. Nageli's orthogenetic factor was, and
could be, nothing else but the "entelechy" of Aristotle and
today of Driesch and that, of course, as every educated per-
son knows, is nothing else but the "soul" of Scholastic Philos-
ophy — the "animal" or "vegetable" souls, the principles of
direction and of the perfection of the possessors.
But, if we have reached this conclusion, then where is the
original Darwinian Deposit of Faith? If everything is in the
original germ, then there is an end of any discussion as to the
Heredity of Acquired Conditions; there is an end to Natural
Selection; there is an end to almost everything that Darwin
and his followers have postulated and argued about. No
wonder that, this being the case, Bateson, the chief prophet
of Mendelism, should tell us that it is useless any more to
look upon Darwin's works as anything more than a storehouse
of facts. We are not now laying down the conclusion that
1922.] GREGOR JOHANN MENDEL 445
Bateson is right and all the Darwinians and Neo-Darwinians
wrong. It is not hard to understand why these latter classes
are not best pleased with the extreme Mendelians who are
challenging all the tenets which they had almost converted
into scientific dogmata. This final moral we may surely draw.
There was a time when the major scientific excommunication
seemed to await any daring mortal who appeared to deny any
part of the doctrine not only of Darwin, but also of Darwin's
numerous disciples. There was a time when not to believe in
Weismann was to earn a cold shrug of the shoulders. Pro-
fessor Bateson, let it be said at once, always had the courage
of his opinions. It may be that now he will become the enun-
ciator of dogmata, and that to deny some of the recent accre-
tions to the true Mendelian faith will become the sin that the
denial of other much lauded scientific keys to all mysteries
once was. And the moral? Well, it is not difficult to draw.
The non-scientific reader may bear in mind that the scientific
gospel of today may find its way tomorrow to the scrap-heap,
and, in that fact, find good reason to exhibit some decent
incredulity when he is told for the thousandth time that such
and such a discovery has put an end to the effete ideas of a
Creator and Maintainer of nature. Thus the non-scientific
man. The scientific student ought to know these facts, if he
does not, and to order his thoughts accordingly.
THE WOMEN OF SHAKESPEARE.
BY HELEN MORIARTY.
O impressions are so lasting as those of childhood.
We ourselves know this to be true. The loving
faces that floated above us in our awakening
consciousness, the emerald sward that enticed
our first tottering steps, the clouds that caught
our wandering vision, no less than the paths we trod and the
ways we knew in childhood's happy days, these go with us,
howsoever vaguely and indistinctly, all through life. Per-
haps unconsciously, they make more perfect our golden
moments. Certain it is, they brighten many a dark and
tedious hour, cheering them with glimpses of long-past in-
nocent joys, memories none the less sweet because thorned
with poignancy.
In Warwickshire, sometimes called "the garden of Eng-
land," Shakespeare was cradled. Through his native town
flowed the peaceful Avon, and green bank and grassy path
alike invited the dreamy boy to many an idle stroll, where in
youth's happy inconsequence he thought that "there was no
more behind, but such a day tomorrow as today, and to be
boy eternal." We are given to believe that his home was
gentle, and his early experiences such as to set in his plastic
mind ideals that were never to depart.
I like to think of him as a gentle, thoughtful lad — later in
life, he was to be known as the gentle Shakespeare — playing
by the picturesque stream, and making friends of the flowers
and birds and bees, or lying in the grateful shade to let his
thoughts sail away in cloudy armadas over "the long savan-
nahs of the blue." He took, I think, a "shining morning face"
to the Guild school where he studied and where he was prob-
ably not a very attentive student, learning "little Latin and
less Greek." What need had he of foreign tongues who was
to read the deepest secrets of the human heart? Indeed, as
Dryden said: "He needed not the spectacles of books." It is
thus I like to think of him, as child and boy and stripling,
imbibing the sweetness and peace of the quiet idyllic country-
1922.] THE WOMEN OF SHAKESPEARE 447
side. He was to require them later in turbulent, foul-smelling
London, and true to his dreams he often wandered back in
spirit, immortalizing with his pen the spots he earliest loved.
Shakespeare was born with the heritage of dreams, "the curse
of destinate verse," but on the harsh anvil of life a modicum
of practicality was forged into the shining metal of his soul.
Both were to stand him in good stead in the proper study
which was to engage the best years of his life.
But what has all this to do with the women of his plays?
I think it has much to do. For it is my belief that only a real
dreamer, one, that is to say, to whom dreams are as real as
the actual and the actual sometimes as visionary as dreams,
can properly interpret the heart of a woman, itself the shrine
and centre of all the dreams the world has ever known, or
distill from the fire and dew that are her soul the strange and
subtle sweetness that makes her so essentially human and so
essentially a woman. For not all the seers who dreamed of
life and saw it wonderful, had this sure and certain gift of
divination. Dante, I dare assert, did not really know his
Beatrice, for against the vision of the great Florentine the
heart of woman locked many secret doors. Poor Tasso, burn-
ing himself out against the slight flame of a woman's incon-
sequence, failed in that high and perfect understanding which
comes only to the serene of soul, and Cervantes, immortal in
his men, left us but pale spectres of women who refuse the
light of day. Still others give us weak imitations, sticks, as it
were, clothed in women's garments, who, like Hawthorne's
Featherhead, shrivel and die at the first touch of human
feeling.
Not so the women whom Shakespeare has depicted. They
are real because they are what we call, for lack of a better
term, human, by which we might mean any or all of a num-
ber of things — fallible, faulty, incouvsistent, proud, unreason-
able, weak and vacillating, foolish, passionate, petulant, de-
mandful; and yet how compellingly sweet and wonderful, how
engaging in naivete, how strong in virtue, pure, high-souled,
dignified, "instructing even their sorrows to be proud" — what
an array of attractions is theirs; what moods to match our
own, what cleverness we fain would snare, what brilliancy
one might dream to emulate, what sprightliness, what fancy,
what arresting yet elusive grace! And who, caught in the
448 THE WOMEN OF SHAKESPEARE [July,
trammels of a later civilization and hampered by the con-
ventions of polite society, has not had moments of envying
Katherine the frank directness of her vitriolic tongue?
Easy enough it is to picture the faults in a woman; easier
still to memorialize in her those admirable qualities which
we like to think belong to her as her own peculiar property;
but it is not so easy so to mingle the two — amazing fault, in-
credible virtue — as to build a character irrevocably "grappled
to our soul with hooks of steel." Who but Shakespeare could
have fashioned a Lady Macbeth, make her before our hor-
rified eyes by intent a murderess, and a few moments later
shake our very soul to tears by the mere sight of her tragic,
haunted figure and blood-stained "little hands?" Who but
he could have won us to the knowledge of how closely inter-
woven with the fibres of a woman's heart is the stinging,
searing, bitter, saving thread of quick remorse.
If it were one type of woman alone that Shakespeare had
presented, he would still have all the elements of greatness
in the charm of his drama no less than the depth of his phil-
osophy. But he was great again in his portrayal of women,
wonderful in the types he limns and the perfection of his
handling. All types are here, from the girlish Juliet flaming
innocently into first love, to the impassioned, unprincipled
daughter of a hundred Ptolemies, implacable in her evil
course, piteous in her final desolation, immortal in her death-
less love. Here is personified the beauty of filial love, there,
the incomprehensible horror of the thankless child, sending a
mad old king to desolation and death. Here is the brilliant,
charming, attractive Portia, strong to aid, but with a woman's
heart trembling under her masculine disguise, and there, flee-
ing away in the darkness from the falling house of her
usurious father, a perfect foil for the majestic figure of Portia,
is the shallow, deceitful, dishonest Jessica. Were I a Jew,
I would never resent Shylock, but I should resent Jessica, a
type uncommon in the Hebrew race. In all literature, there
is no more noble figure than that of Paulina in The Winter's
Tale, defending her young mistress, the Sicilian queen, against
the unjust accusations of the jealous king; but give me a tale
of fishwives and I will point out its prototype in the sharp,
not to say vulgar, exchange of personalities between Constance
and Queen Elinor in King John. Elinor says (to quote some
1922.] THE WOMEN OF SHAKESPEARE 449
of the most innocuous) : "There's a good mother, boy, that
blots thy father!" And "there's a good grandam, boy, that
would blot thee," retorts Constance.
"Gome to thy grandam, child," begs Elinor further on.
And Constance: "Do, child, go to its grandam, child; give
grandam kingdom, and its grandam will give it a plum, a
cherry and a fig; there's a good grandam!" She scolds su-
perbly, we must admit, until Elinor inveighs bitingly: "Thou
unadvised scold, I can produce a will that bars the title to
thy son!"
"Ay, who doubts that? A will! A wicked will; a
woman's will; a cankered grandam's will!"
In truth, a lusty fight, only retrieved from complete im-
mersion in the pit of sordidness by the motherly devotion of
Constance, which drives her to strike fiercely back at those
who sought to injure her son. Shakespeare, be it said, always
exalts mothers and motherly devotion, and in an age of moral
corruption pays strong tribute to wifely fidelity, a fidelity too
often unappreciated by recreant spouses. What womanly
truth and purity and goodness we have exemplified in Queen
Catherine, in Desdemona, Hermione, Imogen, what potential
devotion forecast in the gentle Miranda. All that is sweet and
admirable he has given us in womanly characters; sometimes,
too, all that is mean and contemptible; but transmuted by the
alchemy of his genius, some bit of golden light touches, how-
ever remotely, each one. Even to Dame Quickly we give the
tribute of a fugitive heart throb as she speaks of the dying
Falstaff.
But though all of Shakespeare's women are creations of
an inimitable sort, to them, as women, we cannot and do not
always yield our fullest admiration. Yet in judging them
we must take into consideration the character of the times in
which our author lived and wrote. It was to some extent
merry England, the England of The Merry Wives of Windsor,
of As You Like It, of prototypes of Falstaff and Touchstone,
of jester and fool and strolling player. It was likewise in
London a foul England, given over in the new freedom and
license of the period to loose speech, worse action, every
vulgar intrigue that evil imagination could spawn. In the
world's history it was perhaps the greatest period of change,
second only, one might say, to that in which we are living
vo». cxv. 29
450 THE WOMEN OF SHAKESPEARE [July,
today. England, in the main, had thrown off the shackles of
the old religion and, finding no like restrictions in the new,
laid hold again of that dark pagan strain so long held in
check by the wise impulse of spiritual forces. The old simple
faith had gone down, and with it the old simple, well-ordered
life of religious restraint.
The world was opening out, too, with new adventures on
land and sea, new colonies in far countries, and a new stim-
ulus was furnished to men's minds by the Italian renaissance,
the effects of which were but now penetrating to this little
isle, "set in a silver sea;" and novel ventures showed alluring
avenues to wealth, tossing fortunes into hands all unaccus-
tomed to the uses of prosperity. A mad orgy of spending en-
sued, luxury rioted, and fashion trickily gave rein to every
freakish fancy. Of styles, there were almost an endless
variety, some, as witness the ruff, inconceivable in their ab-
surdity. But women not only took to them with avidity, as
they always do, but set agile wits to work to invent others
still more striking. Out of the exigencies of the ruff, which
demanded something less rude than spikes to keep in place
its ever-growing width, was born the homely starch, a pointed
exemplification of the utilitarian following in the wake of the
ornamental, and that sartorial feminine genius was loudly
acclaimed who invented a colored starch to suit the taste, and
it might have been the complexion of the w^earer. Though,
to be sure, complexions were made to order then as now.
Despite this elegance in dress, this fair outward seem-
ing, mere bodily cleanliness was lightly esteemed and strong
perfumes took the place of the bath. The rushes with
which the floors were covered, even those in the very audience
chamber of Elizabeth, were allowed to disintegrate into foul-
ness before being removed. Masses of filth filled the streets
and those who were fortunate enough to escape the royal ax,
were like to be swept away by the pestilence which scourged
the unsanitary cities. Who is wise enough to say what re-
lation this general uncleanliness had to the loose speech and
degrading conversation of the day?
It is safe to say, however, that it would be strange indeed
were not the women of those times to suffer some contamina-
tion from these sinister influences, or that the bright lustre
of pure womanhood should not be dimmed in some measure
1922.] THE WOMEN OF SHAKESPEARE 451
by the foul miasma of the reeking streets. But the old faith
was not dead, though hunted, decried, contemned, and his-
tory has preserved for us the story of many a pure and ex-
quisite life whose influence, like a hidden rose, sent forth a
saving odor. There were many spots in England where
family life was still sacred and secure, spots even in the
teeming city itself, and places remote from London and the
glaring corruption of the court. And if we wince at the
coarse speech of the day, as wince we must, we need not for
that reason rashly condemn the speaker, for custom is power-
ful and impels betimes into strange ways. We have only to
look around us in our own times to see how custom makes
fashion to gibe at modesty. So far as dress was concerned,
the women of Shakespeare's time presented a more modest
mien than those of today, whose offensively scant attire has
won, if not international reprobation, at least to the doubtful
ascendancy of the international joke. Then, at any rate, the
ladies were well guarded behind the barricading ruff from
whatsoever gallant would fain steal a kiss. This may be one
reason why our poet puts so many of his heroines in male
attire, sending them forth unhampered by fripperies and trail-
ing skirts to seek the truth of the romance that beckoned,
beckoned, and would not be denied. But are they not as
modest as they are attractive in their disguises, Viola, Olivia,
Rosalind? We might never have come upon the tricksy
charm of Rosalind had we not adventured with her through
the Forest of Arden, and witnessed her naive girlish joy over
her swain's adoring verses yielded up so obligingly by the
friendly trees. We are fain to sympathize with Phoebe in
preferring this graceful youth to her own lovesick, tiresome
pursuer.
The only woman over whose characterization we like to
take special issue with Shakespeare is Joan of Arc, and even
at that we recognize that his misconception of the Maid was
due to the false opinions of his day. The years that justified
and crowned the Flower of France, produced in Andrew Lang,
who, though a Scotsman, is, of course, esteemed to be British,
another genius who helped, with Justin Huntley McCarthy,
to redeem England from the obloquy of Shakespeare's mis-
take.
A writer with some vogue among Shakespearean com-
452 THE WOMEN OF SHAKESPEARE [July,
mentators has arisen in our own day who chooses to read
into the character of Shakespeare's women a moral turpitude
which those who have loved them long will be slow to accept.
Perhaps he is a good judge of moral obliquity, but I suspect
that he has looked too long upon dunghills to vision the
flowers that may spring there. He would have us believe
that of that gracious and brilliant galaxy stepping ever se-
dately across the glass of Time, many were formed on the
character and personality of an infamous woman at Eliza-
beth's court for whom the poet-dramatist had cherished an
illicit attachment, and, to prove his case, he goes through the
plays like a carrion crow, picking out to his own satisfaction
lewd speeches and bald words. Now it is not for me to claim
that Shakespeare escaped the moral laxity of the time or failed
to pay homage at the shrine of court beauties. Perhaps he did
sometimes follow the line of least resistance. But shall we,
because Juliet falls unconsciously into the free speech of the
day, suffer a foul imagination to smirch the fair, white robe of
her virgin innocence? Besides, it is a foolish, as well as an
unprofitable, task to search for obscure motives, to find ul-
terior designs in casual complexions, or to probe the gentle
speech for hidden sores that may never have existed.
I venture to believe that, if Shakespeare "looked into his
heart" and wrote what he saw there, fixed in the fine, resilient
fabric of a mind that roamed widely and at will, was not the
shortcomings of any particular person who may, however un-
happily, have crossed his path; but the engaging faults, the
little weaknesses, the piteous sins, the dear inconsistencies,
the lost dreams and forgotten aspirations, the triumphs he
had visualized of right and justice and sweetness, though it
may have been in the dark night of death and tears. In a
word, what he saw there and wrote down for succeeding
generations, were all the splendid, fallible forces of the rest-
less, resistless, human soul, the same yesterday, today and
forever.
THE ETHICAL BASIS OF WAGES.
BY FATHER CUTHBERT, O.S.F.C.
N a previous article we drew attention to the fact
that the Labor programme is no longer con-
cerned primarily with the question of wages, but
with the general economic freedom of the
worker. The movement is definitely towards a
larger liberty in the economic sphere corresponding to the
democratic movement in the political sphere. On the general
claim involved in this question, the words of Leo XIII. con-
cerning political liberty may well be applied to economic lib-
erty : "It is not in itself wrong to prefer a democratic form of
government. . . . Unless it be otherwise determined by reason
of some exceptional condition of things, it is expedient to take
part in the administration of public affairs." ^ If this be true
of political liberty, it must be true also of economic and other
forms of human liberty. On the general question of economic
freedom, it may be taken that the Christian conscience regards
it as not merely lawful, but expedient, "unless it be otherwise
determined by reason of some exceptional condition of
things."
This limitation of its expediency will be admitted by every
serious thinker, and by none is it more candidly admitted
than by many of the leaders of the Labor movement itself.
Full economic freedom can come to the worker only in so far
as he is efficient and self-disciplined. Consequently, it can
only be achieved gradually, as the education of the worker,
intellectual and moral, proceeds apace. Yet, as we have said,
in placing this ideal of economic freedom in its wider sense
in the forefront of its endeavor, the Labor movement has
become more consciously ethical in character than when its
direct purpose was concerned merely with wages. The ques-
tion of wages, however, must always remain one of the fun-
damental problems: it can never be absent from any Labor
programme since it eagerly determines, even as it is largely
1 Encyclical, Libertas Prasstantissimum, In The Pope and the People, edit. 1912,
p. 129.
454 THE ETHICAL BASIS OF WAGES [July.
determined by, the other conditions of the worker's existence.
The worker and the economic student today are not less intent
upon the wages question than were the earlier Trade-Union-
ists: but this question has become envisaged in a larger con-
ception of economic and social well-being. Wages, it has
been said, are but a means towards the achievement of a
higher human existence. That being so, they must be deter-
mined with a view to that ultimate end.
The first consequence of admitting this principle is that
wages should properly be based not upon the market value of
a man's work, but upon the necessity of his well-being as a
man. Market value enters into the question not as a primary
determining factor, but as a secondary consideration for the
securing of the worker of a wage which will enable him to
attain to a proper human existence. In other words, market
value should not so much fix the rate of wage and, conse-
quently, the condition of the worker's life; but the claim of
the worker to a human existence must be a factor in deter-
mining market values. Any competition which ignores this
principle, is so far unethical and cannot be defended on moral
grounds. And thus the whole system of free competition as
it was understood by, let us say, the Manchester School of
economists, is revolutionized. That school of economic
thought was, from the point of view of Christian ethics, rad-
ically unsound, inasmuch as it considered a man's labor as
apart from the man himself and bartered with his labor in-
stead of with the man. The man as a human being did not
enter into the economic scheme: he entered into it merely as
a machine for turning out so much work : and the value of his
work was determined theoretically merely by the price it ob-
tained in the market.
As a matter of fact, the worker did not usually obtain the
price his labor was worth in the market, simply because there
was no real freedom in the barter on the worker's part: the
worker was at the mercy of the employer, who exploited his
necessity and manipulated the market to his own advantage,
with the result that the employers too frequently amassed
vast profits while the worker had a bare subsistence wage, or
less. But even apart from this abuse of the employer's power,
the taking of market value as the ultimate basis of the
worker's wage was wrong ethically, in that it limited the
1922.] THE ETHICAL BASIS OF WAGES 455
responsibility of the employer to paying a reasonable price
for the mere product of Labor apart from wider consider-
ations of the worker's welfare : it meant that the worker was
regarded as a mere tool, and not as a human cooperator in
industry whose work is indissolubly bound up with his per-
sonality. The system itself was ethically false in its first
principles: nor did the economists endeavor to justify it on
high ethical grounds. They fell back upon the proposition
that economics stand apart from ethics, in the same way as
political action was justified by its expediency without refer-
ence to the moral considerations which are recognized as
regulating individual conduct. So the worker was considered
to have no claim apart from the selling price of his labor in a
market uncontrolled by any consideration for the worker
himself.
Instinctively, the workers have taken other ground as the
basis of their demand. What they have almost consistently
claimed is that their wage should not be measured by the
market value of their work, but by the standard of life to
which they felt they had a just right.^ The economic value of
their labor might be above or below the wage necessary for
the sustaining of this standard of life: generally speaking, it
was above, as the wealth created by industry shows; but they
were content with a wage which would secure them a certain
standard of life. As a general principle, this claim of the
workers was sound: instinctively, they took the ground that
the first call upon Labor is the maintenance of the worker.
With the majority of them in the earlier days of Labor organ-
ization, it meant simply that they should have a sufficient wage
to prevent them from falling lower in the scale of human life.
Today it means more than that: what the Labor Organ-
izations have for years past aimed at, is a progressive raising
of the standard of life and the right of the worker to oppor-
tunities for bettering his human conditions and social status.
Wages are regarded as a means towards this progressive bet-
terment. But the important thing to be taken notice of is
2 For one period, the Trade Union movement in the early seventies of the last
century abandoned this principle, though not without protest from the organized
workers of certain industries. The principle then adopted was that wages should
be regulated by the price of product without insistence on a minimum wage. The
result was disastrous to the worker, and did much to bring about a Socialist
reaction. Cf. Sydney Webb, History of Trade Unionism, edit. 1907, p. 324, et seq.
456 THE ETHICAL BASIS OF WAGES [July,
that wages are not primarily to be adjudged by the output of
labor, but by the standard of life to which the worker has
raised himself. There can be no doubt that this principle is
ethically more sound than the "payment by output" theory:
and it may be well to remember that, after all, it is no new
principle. For a long time, it has been the basis of remuner-
ation generally recognized in the professional vocations. It
is only new in its application to workers generally.
The principle is ethically to be upheld for several reasons.
In the first place, there are no possible means by which a
man's labor can be absolutely or adequately reduced to a
money value. In all labor there are certain real but intan-
gible values beyond what falls under the eye : and these values
are the greater the more a man puts himself into his work.
A miner not merely brings coal to the surface : he contributes
to the comfort and well-being of his fellow-men: in propor-
tion as he does his work honestly, he is making himself a good
citizen: his work is a link in the general scheme of civilized
life and contributes, directly or indirectly, in the upbuilding
of the general social fabric, morally, intellectually, as well as
materially. No wage can be affixed to the moral and intel-
lectual product of a man's labor: and yet in all honest labor
there is a direct and indirect moral and intellectual value,
even in the meanest, which benefits not merely the individual
himself, but the community.
To base a man's wage absolutely, or even primarily, upon
the material output, is not to give him a just wage. His wage
should have a correspondence to his value as a man and a
citizen: and the only practical means to secure that corre-
spondence, is to give him a wage which will enable him to
maintain a standard of life and a status in the community such
as is needful for his moral and intellectual development and
welfare. In that way a wage acquires a real human value to
the worker: it is a recognition on the part of his fellow-men
of the worker's moral or intellectual value in the community,
and not a mere payment for the material product of his work.
From this point of view, the higher ethical value of the wage
based upon status and the standard of life, lies in the fact
that it is a recognition of personal worth : it is an acknowledg-
ment of the man in his labor.
But further it tends towards a recognition of a more moral
1922.] THE ETHICAL BASIS OF WAGES 457
character in labor itself. The idea that a man can sell his
labor in exactly the same way that he can sell impersonal
goods, is morally degrading. This is commonly felt in regard
to work which is mainly intellectual or spiritual. The man
who writes for mere gain seldom produces good literature;
the minister of religion whose work is weighed against his
salary, is generally reprobated by honest men. And much
the same feeling exists in regard to all men who hold any
high position of responsibility in the community. It is recog-
nized that their work is of higher value to the community
in so far as it is not governed by the thought of "market
values." The salary or honoraria given them is regarded in
the light of a maintenance allowance which will set them free
to devote themselves to the work they have undertaken. They
themselves will seldom confess that their emoluments are the
price of output, because they instinctively feel that to regard
them as such would degrade their work to mere menial
service.
All honorable labor must bear the character of a free
service or of a free activity of the human mind and will; and
it loses that character of freedom when shackled to mere mar-
ket values. Its motive must be dictated by spiritual or moral
interests — the service of God or of one's fellow-men, the sense
of duty or the desire for a higher self-development: and the
further removed is the motive of material gain, the better is it
for labor itself, and the more nobly will it express the man
in his work. Material gain will of necessity enter into the
worker's motives: the problem of the economist should be to
make it less prominent. And the means to that, is to appor-
tion the material reward by a regard to his status and stand-
ard of life rather than by the immediate output of his work.
There can, in fact, be no real freedom of labor until the wage-
earner's work is regarded in the same light as that of the
higher professional or public vocations — as a contribution to
the common good, in return for which the worker is main-
tained in that status of life to which his contribution of the
common life gives him a legitimate claim.
The general recognition of these principles would at once
tend to raise the moral dignity of labor and to increase its
value in the moral development of the worker: but it would,
at the same time, give a deeper meaning to the social value of
458 THE ETHICAL BASIS OF WAGES [July,
labor in the building up of a real common life in the com-
munity, and of a common life based in a true liberty of action.
The industrial system of the old competitive school took from
the worker both his liberty and his interest in the common
good of the community: it depressed his liberty by refusing to
allow him an economic status, and forced him to concentrate
his thought and energy upon a mere struggle to maintain him-
self against the social body at large. Market values, divorced
from the larger considerations of human life, were to him
nothing but a symbol of his servitude and a call to battle.
That he should consider the general welfare in his struggle
for his individual existence, quite intelligibly seemed to him
a cynical mockery of justice. The community which treated
him as a tool, could hardly expect him to respond to the re-
sponsibilities of a citizen. Status and freedom are the two
necessary qualifications for citizenship: and both these qual-
ifications have long been denied him in the economic world.
Given status and freedom — and by freedom we must under-
stand not merely the freedom of bargaining, but even more
an inducement to put himself into his work as into a human
and moral activity — industry will inevitably tend to assume a
more social character.
Much, of course, will depend upon the spirit in which the
new conditions are accepted by all concerned; it is not claimed
that the mere shifting of the basis of wages from output to
status, will, of itself, bring in an era of perfect peace and
Christian amity. The new system will have its own prob-
lems demanding reasonableness and good-will on all sides, if
strife is to be avoided. But in so far as the claims of the
human personality are considered in the estimating a
man's wage, the economic system will have been brought
into a closer harmony with Christian ethics and with the
Christian conception of society. The estimation of wages
by status and by the standard of life which the status implies,
will, at least, mean that the worker is recognized in his work :
industry will regard him no longer as a machine, but as a
man.
A difficulty, however, at once presents itself. By what
means is the status of the worker and his standard of life to
be determined? The answer is surely that once the principle
is accepted, the common sense and right feeling of the com-
1922.] THE ETHICAL BASIS OF WAGES 459
munity will determine its practical application, in the same
way as it already determines to some extent the status and
standard of life due to those in the higher professions. There
will, indeed, always be the temptation to create an artificial
standard of life, and a status which has no real correspond-
ence either to the necessities of the individual or to the func-
tion he discharges in organized society. That danger has
been apparent enough in the higher grades of society at all
times: it is already manifesting itself amongst the workers
in the highly paid industries. The only effective remedy lies
in a higher intellectual and moral education and in the foster-
ing of the religious sense. Without a moral and religious
background, no human system can work towards that rule of
justice and good-will, which is the basis of a free community.
It must, however, be frankly recognized that as regards
the individual worker and corporate bodies of workers, status
and the standard of life are not fixed quantities. No fixed
status or standard of life can be imposed upon the worker or
any man in the community, irrespective of his personal qual-
ities and abilities, without infringing his rightful liberty and
reducing him to a condition of serfdom. Every man has a
just claim to the conditions in which he can make the most of
himself or spend himself to the greater advantage of his fel-
low-men : to refuse him these conditions by any arbitrary rule,
is to deny his right to a full human existence. In any well-
organized community the endeavor will be to prevent its mem-
bers, individually and socially, from falling below their accus-
tomed standard of life and to maintain them in the status
which they have acquired : but it will go beyond that in hold-
ing out opportunities, and securing to them the liberty of legit-
imate advancement. And with this advancement necessarily
goes the right to a wage sufficient to secure a man in its
enjoyment.
Only when we recognize that the remuneration of the
wage-earner should have some correspondence with his legit-
imate standard of life, and his status in the community and
that his labor can never adequately be fixed by market
values — only then can we rightly approach the question of
the distribution of wealth as resulting from industry. For, to
some extent, wages do, and must, represent the worker's
share in the wealth his labor helps to produce : and there can
460 THE ETHICAL BASIS OF WAGES [July,
be no question as to his moral right to a share in the wealth
produced corresponding to his part in the production. As
economists point out, three factors nowadays have to be con-
sidered in industry, the capitalist who puts his money into the
concern, the employer who runs it, and the worker. Each of
these has his claim to a share in the wealth produced; and to
these must be added the State, which, in the interests of the
common well-being, has a right to a share in the wealth of the
country. Under whatever form industry may be conducted,
these four factors enter into the ethical question of the dis-
tribution of the wealth produced. For instance, where cap-
ital and employment of labor are in the hands of one man, a
share in the product may be claimed for the capital put into
the industry and another share as remuneration for the em-
ployers. Even if the State were the owner, the worker's claim
to a share in the wealth produced would not be morally
greater than under private ownership. Here we have to dis-
tinguish clearly between two problems : the right of a man to
the status and the standard of life due to him as a citizen, and
the right to his own property. In so far as labor produces
wealth, that wealth is the property of the worker: but in in-
dustry, as we have seen, several factors go to the production
of wealth besides the worker's labor : and the problem before
the ethical economist is to determine how far the product of
industry is the property of each of the partners in production.
It may be said at once that no practical determination of
the separate claims can be made with mathematical precision,
simply because no one can exactly define the limits of the
activity which each factor puts into the industry. The actual
workings and contributions, whether of capital or labor, of
State protection or of management, are so complex and, to a
large extent, intangible, that the right of each to the product
can never be exactly weighed up in money values. All one
can do is to determine certain principles which enter into the
problem: the practical application must depend upon the
common sense and good-will of those whom the question
affects.
The primary principle from which we must start is that
the product of industry is the joint property of all who are
engaged in the industry: consequently the distribution of
wages and profits — and we may add, taxes — must have regard
1922.] THE ETHICAL BASIS OF WAGES 461
to this right of property in the product. Thus, though the
State in return for the protection it affords an industry, has a
right to a share in the product, it cannot in justice so tax an
industry as to prevent a fair share of the product falling to the
other partners concerned. Equally as between these other
partners, the capitalist, the employer, and the worker, regard
must be had by each to the others' inherent right of property
in the concern. Hence, although it is impossible exactly to
determine the limits of each one's share, yet it may normally
be assumed that an increase in the value of the product, gives
a just right to an increase both of wages and of profits.
Equally does a decrease in product or the value of product,
mean a decrease in what can be justly claimed. But both in-
crease and decrease must, in justice, be shared proportionately
by all the partners.
Here, however, we are met by the principle implied in the
claim of the worker to a standard of life which necessarily
includes a more or less stable wage sufficient to maintain that
standard. Were the problem merely one of the distribution
of wealth as the product of industry, there would be no just
reason why, in a time of depression of trade, such a wage
should be maintained. The primary question, however, in
industry is not the distribution of wealth, but the maintenance
of the standard of life, which is the first duty on industry:
and, consequently, no industry, viewed merely as market pro-
duce, has a right to exist which does not provide the wage-
earner with a proper maintenance. Such industries are in-
jurious to the individual and to the public good. But nor-
mally industry tends to increase wealth : the transient fluctua-
tions in value eventually more than make good the losses
incurred in times of depression. It is true that in times of
depression someone must bear the transient inconvenience
and risk: but that inconvenience and risk justly falls on those
who are the better able to bear it, the employer and the
capitalist, especially as the remuneration of employer and
capitalist is partly based upon the risk they take. The wage-
earner dare not take the risk which is taken by the employer
and capitalist just because his labor is his only asset: he
necessarily demands a stable wage which shall not be liable
to sudden fluctuations.
As a consequence, in fixing the standard of wage at any
462 THE ETHICAL BASIS OF WAGES [July,
given time, a balance has to be struck between the transient
particular values. Thus the wage-earner is debarred from
seeking a rise in wages with every boom in trade by reason of
the condition of the security he claims, in the same way as he
rightly refuses to accept a decrease in wage with every de-
pression. Nevertheless, he has an undoubted right to a share
in the permanent rise in values as apart from fluctuating
values. The difficulty is to justly apportion his right share
or, in other words, to determine his right of property in the
product of his work. What is certain is that the more a man
puts himself into his work, the more does the product become
his rightful property. Thus a mere manual laborer, as such,
has less property in the product of industry than the man
who puts his training and intelligence into the industry, or
who brings his moral force into the building up of industry.
On this ground, a skilled workman has morally a claim to a
higher wage than one who is unskilled. On the same ground,
an employer or manager, whose part in production calls for
a greater output of character and intelligence, rightly claims
a larger share in the product. He has put more of himself
into the industry than has one whose part demands less intel-
ligence and moral force.
The case of the capitalist, who merely puts his money
into the concern and takes no further part in it, is more
difficult to determine. That he has a right to remuneration
for the loan of his money and that the remuneration should
be in proportion to the risk he takes, can hardly be gainsaid.
Yet he cannot claim the same direct right of property in the
product which belongs to the man to whose labor — whether as
employer or worker — the product is due; simply because his
part in production is less personal. Beyond a due interest
proportionate to his risk, therefore, it seems difficult to assign
him any absolute claim to a greater share in the product
corresponding to its increased value, in the same way that
such a share is due to both employer and wage-earner. For
if the right of property in industry is connected with the
personal activity put into it, it would, at least, follow that the
more personal the activity, the greater the claim to the in-
creased value of the product. Even admitting that the cap-
italist indirectly puts personal activity into the industry he
supports, in so far as his capital represents his labors in the
1922.] THE ETHICAL BASIS OF WAGES 463
past, yet such indirect labor cannot give an equal right of pro-
perty as does the direct labor of the workers. As a conse-
quence, wherever there is an absolute increase of value in
industry, the workers, whether employers or wage-earners,
should benefit more than the capitalist. For the capitalist
to take the greater share is nothing less than to defraud the
workers of their due and to fall into that "usurious deahng"
which Leo XIII. has classed with force and fraud as immoral
means of "cutting down the worker's wage." ^
That, of course, is a principle unrecognized in the old
school of economics, in which the buying power of money
is exalted as the main determining factor in industry, and in
which the necessity of one man is regarded as another man's
opportunity. Otherwise, we should not have witnessed the
gradual fall in real wages and the large increase in returns
on invested capital which has characterized the industrial
conditions during the past twenty years. But it must be re-
membered that upon no ethical principle could that school be
justified. It was as much a tyranny in the economic world
as Prussian autocracy has been in the political. And under
any economic system, unless the right of property is con-
ceded to the worker in his work, he must become a mere tool
and sink into servitude, whether capital and employment be
in private hands or in the hands of the State or public cor-
porations : nor will he attain to full economic freedom nor to
full justice, unless the share in the property of industry is ad-
judged in accordance with the human activity put into it.
But, further, it is from the standpoint of the worker's
property in his work, that wages — or the remuneration for
his labor, under whatever title it is made — will naturally find
a correspondence with the worker's proper standard of life,
since it is in his work that a man proves his own proper
value. Upon any other basis, the correspondence will be ar-
tificial and unenduring. A man's standard of life and his
status must, if it is to have any real significance, express his
personal worth either individually or socially, and his con-
tribution to the well-being of the community: and there is no
other way of determining that except by the work he produces.
An increase of wages based upon his right of property in his
work, though no absolute test of a man's value, at least gives
3 Encyclical, Rerum Novarum, in The Pope and the People.
464 THE ETHICAL BASIS OF WAGES [July,
some indication of his worth to the community. Moreover,
it is the quality of a man's work which determines the stand-
ard of life which is requisite for him to make the most of
himself; and when wages correspond to that quality, the re-
quisite standard of life will normally be realized.
We have, however, still to face the problem as to who
shall determine for practical purposes the fair share which
each of the partners may claim in an industry. Granted that
workman and employer, capitalist and the State, have each a
right to a share in the wealth produced, and that the wage-
earner and the employer, have a right to the greater share, there
is still the difficulty of precisely determining the value of each
one's claims: and the difficulty is the greater from the fact
that much of the activity put into industry is of its nature
so very intangible, though real. The practical question here
is not so much the fixing of the real values of industry, as of
fixing the rate at which each partner is willing to sell his right
of property in the industry for a money value. The only just
solution lies in the principle of free-bargaining: any other
solution strikes at that very principle of property which is
fundamental to economic freedom in the widest sense.
Neither State nor capitalist, neither employer nor worker can
arbitrarily fix their own or each other's interest and claim,
without regard to the rights of all concerned: yet each has a
right to obtain his full value or what he considers such and
equally a right — subject to certain moral considerations — to
accept less than his full value. But in the determination of
that value, each has the right to be heard and to put forth his
own price.
The worker has an equal right to bargain for the sale of
his labor as the merchant has for the sale of his goods. And
where there is no real standard for the fixing of values, free-
bargaining is the only means of arriving at a price which
satisfies a man's just claim to his own property. Hitherto, the
lack of freedom in his bargaining with the employer and
capitalist, has been one of the main grievances of the wage-
earner. He feels that his necessity has been exploited to the
advantage of others and that, in consequence, he has received
less than his due. To remedy this state of affairs was the
primary object of the Trade-JUnion movement. Its aim was
by collective action to obtain for the worker a larger freedom
1922.] THE ETHICAL BASIS OF WAGES 465
in bargaining with the employer, than could be obtained by
the isolated action of the individual.
That the Trade Unions have at times shown a tendency
to restrict unduly the liberty of the individual worker can
hardly be denied. But the difficulties are not to be over-
looked. The Unions had to teach the individual worker that
he may not willingly barter his labor for a wage which is
insufficient for a decent existence; they had to teach him that
no man may enter into a contract to the injury of his fellow-
men; and, consequently, that the individual wage-earner
should not accept a wage which is sufficient for his own actual
needs, if that wage is likely to be used as a standard for fixing
the wages of other men whose needs are greater than his.
Yet in aiming at establishing these and other rules of conduct,
which are morally justifiable, the Trade Union has not always
kept itself free from an arbitrary restraint from the indi-
vidual worker's freedom of action: and it is partly in con-
sequence of this arbitrary restraint that the workers are seek-
ing a greater liberty through the formation of workshop com-
mittees and such like associations; But in whatever way
it is to be attained, the right of free-bargaining is due to the
wage-earner equally with the employer. It follows as a
direct consequence from his right of property in the wealth
his labor helps to produce. This right — as are all particular
rights — is conditioned by moral considerations. As we have
already noted, the industrial worker may not bargain for
himself to the injury of his fellow-workers. Hence, normally,
it is a mere matter of justice to one's fellow-workers, to refuse
to accept less than the recognized standard of wages. Free-
bargaining does not imply either a right to starve oneself or
to starve others, which is what undercutting in the price of
labor frequently spells. So, again, he cannot morally extort
from an employer, either by force or fraud, a wage which
will react injuriously, either to the employer's own legitimate
interests or to the interests of the community at large, no more
than the employer can act in the same way towards the
worker.
So far we have mainly regarded this question of wages
from the standpoint of mere justice, or of a man's due. It
need hardly be pointed out that in any treatment of the ques-
tion on the basis of Christian ethics, there yet remains a
VOL. cxv. 30
466 THE ETHICAL BASIS OF WAGES [July,
higher rule of conduct than that of mere justice, the rule of
Christian fellowship or neighborly charity. Where this rule
is accepted and made the basis of social intercourse, the rights
of property and the right of free-bargaining and all such
rights which aim at giving a man his natural due, will tend
to fall into the background, so far as their practical assertion
is concerned. They come to the forefront when they are
called in question or when a line of conduct is based upon
their denial, as has been the case under the dominant eco-
nomic system of the past century. In so far as the sense of
Christian fellowship obtains amongst men, rights of property
and free-bargaining give place to the higher law of a common
life founded in a free service of each other and the com-
munity and a free partnership in the goods of life. Yet even
so, the fundamental rights of justice remain intact, nor can
there be any true Christian community of interests or of fel-
lowship which theoretically or practically denies these rights.
Any individual, for the sake of a greater good, may divest
himself of his natural right, but no individual or community
may take them from him against his will or to his injury.
There is no Christian charity where justice is denied. To
feed the poor, whilst at the same time denying them their
right to earn their living by their labor, is not Christian fel-
lowship, but a mere covering up of an essential act of tyranny :
and it is just that line of conduct which has given the word
"charity" so sinister a meaning amongst the honest poor.
Precisely the same fallacy as that which underlies this so-
called "charity," is at the root of many communistic theories :
the worker is to be given the sop of higher wages and a better
material condition, whilst his real freedom as a man is to be
taken from him; he is to be held in servitude by the State or
communistic society instead of by the private owner; but it
is servitude all the same.
The only proper function of a State or Society is to protect
the individual and common rights of its members : as soon as
it oversteps the limits of protection and assumes to itself the
rights which belong inherently to the individual, it becomes
a tyranny: the common life thus created is not fellowship,
but servitude, and that is true whether the form of govern-
ment be aristocratic or democratic : the substance remains the
same by whatever name it is labeled. To some extent, the
1922.] LIGHTS OF BLACKWELLS 4G7
workers are already aware of this truth: hence, the reaction
against the old collectivist theories. If, at the present mo-
ment, the worker still leans towards systems which deny the
right of property, it is because his own right of property in his
labor and in the product of his labor is still largely denied
him; and until that right is more widely recognized and con-
ceded. Christian fellowship and the neighborly charity which
it implies, will continue to bear the sinister meaning of the
"charity" he rebels against. The due recognition of his fun-
damental rights as a human worker is the first step towards
the spirit of good-will and fellowship, in which an industrial
economy will be built up such as the Christian Faith demands.
LIGHTS OF BLACKWELLS.
BY HARRY LEE.
BLACKWELLS CastlcS
Like phantoms loom,
Grim and ghostly
Along the gloom.
Castles of penance.
Castles of pain,
Castles of madness,
In wind and rain.
The dim lights flicker
And fade, and then
Out of the darkness
They flare again.
So on Blackwells
The souls of men
Fade and flicker
And flame again.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
BY BROTHER LEO.
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things.
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear :
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair I"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare.
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
T would require much ingenuity to find in those
lines an exact parallel to the character of Shelley,
the man; but it would require something like
obtuseness not to find in his picture of the desert's
"colossal wreck" a prophetic symbol of Shelley,
the poet. About the man there is to us of the twentieth cen-
tury nothing shattered or trunkless. A good sized Hbrary has
been written about his life and personality. He has been ap-
preciated by Dowden^ and depreciated by Jeaffreson^ and
"gribbled" — the verb merits incorporation into the language
— by an Oxonian who dispenses gossip with more assiduity
than Suetonius and with more piquancy than St. Simon.^ His
theories have been interpreted by Francis Thompson,* Mr.
Yeats ^ and Professor Santayana,^ and some of his associations
have been dramatized by Mr. Harvey.^ His life in England
has been memorialized in scholarly fashion by Mr. Ingpen,^
his life abroad has been sympathetically recorded by Mrs.
1 Edward Dowden, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
2 J. C. Jeaflfreson, The Real Shelley.
8 Francis Gribble, The Romantic Life of Shelley.
4 Francis Thompson, Essay on Shelley.
8 William Butler Yeats, Ideas of Good and Evil (The Philosophy of Shelley's
Poetry). 6 George Santayana, Winds of Doctrine.
7 Alexander Harvey, Shelley's Elopement. 8 Roger Ingpen, Shelley in England.
1922.] PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
469
Angeli,» and his deeds and moods and opinions, his plans
and preferences and prejudices, live for us anew in a remark-
ably complete collection of his letters,^" the first written when
he was a boy of eleven, the last within a week of his tragic
death. Opinions continue to differ concerning the upright-
ness of his character, the validity of his beliefs, the rationality
of his projects, the significance of his actions; but there is a
compelling unanimity in our recognition of the leading traits
of his personality and the motivating facts in his troubled
life.
As far as man can be known, the man Shelley we know;
and we know — whether we condemn him as a monster of
heartless irresponsibility or acclaim him as the Prometheus of
a new era of liberty and light or dissect him as a rare specimen
of personal reaction to an uncongenial environment — ^we know
that "Ozymandias" is not his picture in little. We know that,
though his big blue eyes often widened in wonder and nar-
rowed in perplexity, utterly alien to his countenance were
the "frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command."
That description might serve for a caricature of Byron — at
least of the Byron that Byron pretended to be; but it is too
remote from the real Shelley to possess even the fragmentary
resemblance essential to caricature. Shelley himself recog-
nized a vital distinction between the man and the poet. 'The
poet and the man," he wrote to the Gisbornes a year before
his death, "are two different natures; though they exist to-
gether, they may be unconscious of each other, and incapable
of deciding on each other's powers and efforts by any reflex
act." "
When Shelley wrote "Ozymandias," he did not paint his
own portrait; but he did, unknowing, foretell the fate of his
own poetry. Much that he wrote — indeed, the bulk of what
he wrote — though not forgotten, is ignored; today "Queen
Mab" and "The Revolt of Islam" and "The Genci" are truly
"lifeless things." But still potent above the sifting and ob-
literating sands of opinion, still visible against the fierce and
veering winds of time, loom, at once vast and trunkless, the
noble remnants of his verse. 'The Gloud," "To a Skylark,"
the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," thrillingly eloquent are
9 Helen Rossetti Angeli, Shelley and His Friends in Italy.
10 Roger Ingpen, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. ii Letters, July 19, 1821.
470 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY [July,
they of "The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed."
In the highest and best expression of his lyric gift, Shelley
is not only unsurpassed, but peerless. Isolation is his, the
splendid isolation of sheer and undisputed excellence: "The
lone and level sands stretch far away." And on the pedestal
of his genius gleam the ineffaceable words: "Look on my
works, ye Mighty, and despair."
One thing must be taken into account in seeking to under-
stand Shelley either as man or as poet: he died before com-
pleting his thirtieth year. And he was young, almost incred-
ibly young, for his age; he united, even to the end, a singular
precocity of expression with an exceptional ingenuousness of
character and temperament. Literally, his favorite amuse-
ment was to make and sail paper boats; figuratively, he was
habitually engaged in the same occupation. His school career
at Brentford and Eton, where he won the significant nick-
names of "Mad Shelley" and "Shelley the Atheist," and his
Oxford months at University College with their absorption in
experimental science and their culmination in his expulsion
on account of "The Necessity of Atheism," show him to have
been the victim of what the Freudian psychologists would
call an infantile fixation. He never quite grew up, and his
life, at almost every point, serves to illustrate La Bruyere's
reflections on childhood." It was boyish thoughtlessness
which brought about his quix,otic elopement with Harriet
Westbrook; and it was boyish thoughtlessness that cost him
his life. When his body drifted ashore near Via Reggio, his
friends found in his coat pocket a copy of Keats' poems with
the pages folded backward. Evidently, he had been practis-
ing his oft-formulated theory that, since reading is an intel-
lectual occupation and managing a boat a mechanical one,
it is possible to attend to both at the same time. That was
eminently boyish logic, and only in death did he discover its
underlying fallacy.
Boyish was Shelley's unreliability, his whimsical and pas-
sionate judgments, his self-pity, his fatuous conceit, his pen-
chant for novel and impractical theories; boyish, his youthful
revolt against revealed religion and his adoption of the athe-
istic materialism of "Queen Mab," which later merged into a
nebulous pantheism expressed in "The Sensitive Plant" and
12 La Bruyire, Le^ Caractires (De rhomme).
1922.] PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 471
"Epipsychidion." He was a reformer, a vegetarian, a tee-
totaler; to the last, he was an enthusiastic, even a rabid, foe
of tyranny and conventionality. Boyishly, he railed against
the institution of marriage, and boyishly inconsistent, he mar-
ried both Harriet Westbrook, whom he abandoned to her
suicide, and Mary Godwin, to whom he remained faithful,
less through his own sense of loyalty than through her very
capable tact and determination. Singularly immature were
his revolutionary theories and his opposition to militarism "
and to capital punishment.^* Boyish was his devotion to Wil-
liam Godwin's political principles and his interest in the God-
win coterie— "What a set!" cried the urbane Matthew Arnold.
And boyish beyond the verge of the farcical was his famous
invasion of Ireland to bestow upon the people of that island
their political and religious liberty.
The essential boyishness of the man Shelley is mani-
fested at every turn in episodes comic and episodes tragic,
in things little and things great. On the eve of his final de-
parture from England, he entertained a group of friends by
falling into a heavy slumber and compelling the adieus to be
addressed to his recumbent and unconscious figure;^* and it
was characteristic of him that he should subsequently re-
proach Leigh Hunt, one of the guests on the occasion, for not
waking him up. His unique invitation to his wife, Harriet,
to join him and Mary Godwin in Switzerland has rightly been
recognized as an indication of the lack of humor; but it is
most significantly a boyish lack. Amid all the linked fan-
tasies of his glowingly poetic essay on Shelley, Francis
Thompson is psychologically correct when he maintains that:
"To the last, in a degree uncommon among poets, Shelley re-
tained the idiosyncrasy of childhood, expanded and matured
without differentiation. To the last, he was the enchanted
child."
The application to Shelley's life and character of this
theory of boyishness, the envisaging of Shelley as "the en-
chanted child" and "the magnified child," may easily be
pushed too far; by Thompson it has been pushed too far.
Though it helps very considerably to explain Shelley to the
13 "Declaration of Rights," section 19.
14 "On the Punishment of Death;" also, "Address to the People on the Death of
the Princess Charlotte."
islngpen, Shelley in England^ vol. ii., pp. 529, 530.
472 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY [July,
psychologist, it does not altogether justify him in the eyes of
the moralist who might— rather ungraciously, perhaps, but
most consistently and logically — object that even the poet,
when he becomes a man, should put away the things of the
child. It is conceivable, though by no means probable, that
had Shelley lived longer he might have outgrown his seem-
ingly incurable boyishness. The fact is that, as Thompson
well puts it, "less tragic in its merely temporal aspect than
the life of Keats or Coleridge, the life of Shelley in its moral
aspect is, perhaps, more tragical than that of either; his
dying seems a myth, a figure of his living; the material ship-
wreck a figure of the immaterial." The case of Shelley calls
less for the strictures of the moralist than for the sympathetic
understanding of the student of human nature. Here was a
victim of inadequate home training, of grossly incompetent
education, of a state of society in which the letter of Christ's
teachings was accorded lip honor, but the spirit of it tacitly
ignored. The "ifs" of history are ever alluring. Had Shelley
encountered among the Oxford dons even one man big
enough and kindly enough to win his admiration and his con-
fidence, had he been led to perceive the rather elementary,
but not always obvious, truth that life is a discipline not less
than a field for self-expression, had his eyes been opened to
the essentially expansive and uplifting possibilities of re-
ligion, despite its inevitable and extraneous accretions of
human greed and human narrowness and human insincerity,
it is more than possible that the man's life would have been
cleaner and nobler and happier and that the poet's fruitage
would be, not "a shattered visage" and "two vast and trunkless
legs of stone," but a statue goodly and splendid of white and
enduring marble.
Certainly, for all the brevity of his life, Shelley revealed
growth and the possibilities of growth; he was always a child,
but not always a very young child. In 1813 he planned that
the notes to "Queen Mab" should be "long and philosoph-
ical" i« because "a poem very didactic is, I think, very stupid."
But presently he discarded the practice of burdening his
poetic flights with a panoply of explanations, and even grew
contemptuous of the juvenile incendiarism of "Queen Mab"
itself. Crabb Robinson found young Shelley's conversation
19 Letters, vol. i., p. 379.
1922.] PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 473
"vehement, arrogant, and intolerant;"" Byron and Trelawny
and the Williams, who knew Shelley at Pisa and Lerici,
could tell another tale. Indeed, whatever his conversation
may have been, Shelley as a poet was, unlike Byron, no adept
in the ungentle art of vituperation. Far removed from the
ferocity of "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" or the
mordant satire of the comminatory passages in "Don Juan"
is the mild expostulation of Shelley's "Lines to a Critic,"
beginning :
Honey from silkworms who can gather
Or silk from the yellow bee?
The grass may grow in winter weather
As soon as hate in me.
And, in one of the last letters he wrote, he embodies a
canon of literary appreciation which some day, had he lived
a little longer, he might have seen the wisdom of applying to
life itself:
I do not think much of not admiring Metastasio;
the nil admirari, however justly applied, seems to me a
bad sign in a young person. I had rather a pupil of mine
had conceived a frantic passion for Marini himself, than
that she had found but the critical defects of the most
deficient author. When she becomes of her own accord
full of genuine admiration for the first scene in the Pur-
gatorio, of the opening of the Paradiso, or some other
neglected piece of excellence, hope great things.^^
The note of boyishness is there, to be sure — it is remin-
iscent of advice imparted by the very young and condescend-
ing pedagogue — but in spirit how different from "The Revolt
of Islam!"
Shelley, the boy whom England had failed to educate,
was learning something from Italy, an older teacher and
more humane. Always reading, Shelley absorbed much of
Italian literature; and Dante and Petrarch did for him what
Eton and Oxford had failed to do. In the north, he had
learned the languages of the ancient civilization; beneath
southern skies, he began to sense something of their rich and
17 Crabb Robinson, Diarv, Nov. 6, 1817. 18 Letters, vol. 11., p. 976.
474 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY [July,
fascinating vital implications. Only a few days before he
embarked for the last time in the ill-fated Ariel, he could
enthusiastically write: "I still inhabit the divine bay, reading
Spanish dramas, and sailing, and listening to the most en-
chanting music." " The music was discoursed by Mrs. Wil-
liams' guitar, presented to her by Shelley. The dramas were
the plays of Calderon. Superficially considered, it is a bit
incongruous that Shelley, who professed such intense hatred
of religion in general and Catholicism in particular, should
find delight in the most religious and most Catholic of dra-
matists; but over and over again in his letters from Italy he
expresses his keen enjoyment of Calderon: "Plato and Cal-
deron have been my gods." ^^ "I am bathing myself in the
light and odor of the flowery and starry Autos.'* ^^ The author
of 'The Necessity of Atheism" immersed in devotional dramas
of the Blessed Sacrament! He even translated portions of
Calderon's El Mdgico prodigioso.^^
There were, then, intimations of maturity, hints that those
blue eyes were losing their hunted look of wonder, that that
shock of auburn hair had not prematurely grayed in vain.
Italy taught him much, even though to some of her most per-
suasive lessons he turned an unappreciative mind., After
viewing an alleged devotional painting by Guercino, he ex-
claimed: "Why write books against religion when we may
hang up such pictures?" ^^ His response to the highest re-
ligious art was equally unsympathetic. Says Dowden: "The
genius of Michelangelo disconcerted and almost repelled
him. . . . His 'Moses* was only less monstrous and detestable
than the Moses of the Old Testament; his 'Day of Judgment'
was a kind of 'Titus Andronicus' in painting. Of his tender-
ness, his ardor of love, his passion of inspiration, Shelley
could perceive nothing." ^4 Nothing in him responded to that
"sad sincerity," though in good sooth the sadness in his own
heart was genuine enough. Even Italian skies are occasion-
ally overcast, and we need no Francis Gribble to interpret
their portents. "Few poets," says Thompson, "were so mated
before." It may well be so, and it is beyond question that
19 Letters, June 29, 1822. 20 Letters, vol. ii., p. 831. 21 Letters, vol. ii., p. 833.
22 A suggestive study of the influence of Calderdn on Shelley is Shelley and
Calderdn, and Other Essays, by Salvador de Maderlaga (1921).
23 Mrs. Angeli, Shelley and His Friends in Italy, p. 48.
24 Dowden, Life of Shelley, pp. 419. 420.
1922.] PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 475
Shelley's union with Mary Godwin brought him congenial
companionship and a measure of happiness. Yet there were
times when, with his boyish habit of dreaming unrealizable
dreams, he longed mightily for solitude; and for true hap-
piness his heart was out of tune. We have his own word for
it in "The Woodman and the Nightingale:"
I think such hearts yet never came to good.
The thought of death, of sudden death, even of self-in-
flicted death, was to Shelley no strange visitant. One day
he gave Mrs. Williams a fright by suggesting — some would
say in jest, but the jest wore a sombre mask — that she and he
and her two children, being out in a boat, might together at-
tempt to solve "the great mystery." It is a coincidence that
when Shelley was drowned Mrs. Williams* husband shared his
fate. And he actually wrote to Trelawny for poison — "Prus-
sic acid, or essential oil of bitter almonds." "I would give
any price for this medicine. ... I need not tell you I have
no intention of suicide at present, but I confess it would be a
comfort to me to hold in my possession that golden key to the
chamber of perpetual rest." ^^
The phrase — was it an unconscious variant upon the lux
perpetua and the requiescat of the Catholic liturgy? — does
not sound the true note of Shelley's interest in the life beyond
life. It was not rest he sought, but certainty; not surcease,
but perfection; not inanition, but surpassing loveliness. And
in that unrest, by no means ignoble, the poet of beauty and
aspiration joined issue with the ineffectual man. The sting
of eternity had entered his heart, a hint of the abiding verities
had dazzled his imagination, and henceforth there could be
for him no complete satisfaction in the things of earth. For
upon Shelley, who worshipped Plato and translated the Sym-
posium, had fallen the spell of the Platonic quest.
Fell custom desecrates even the fairest things, so it is not
surprising that the popular impression of Platonic love is at
considerable variance with the signification animating the
phrase in the Phaedrus of Plato. In common parlance, Pla-
tonic love means "passionate attachment apart from desire," **
25 Letters, vol. II., p. 980.
^6 Edinburgh Review, cited in Standard Dictionary under "Platonic."
476 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY [July,
an affection in which the sensual element has no place. And
this popular connotation, though not altogether erroneous, is
inadequate and misleading; it substitutes a part for a whole,
a consequence for a principle. The true Platonic lover is he
who recognizes in even the most beautiful mundane objects
their innate imperfection and evanescence, who takes delight
in them not for themselves, but because the soul of him is
inevitably drawn to the Infinite Beauty and Perfection behind
and above them, and of which all that men call beautiful is but
a shattered and imperfect reflection.^^ Most of the supreme
poets have been in this sense Platonists, have in their finest
and highest strains sung the paean of Platonic love. Thomp-
son did so in The Hound of Heaven, Dante did so in the Corn-
media and in the Vita Nuova as well, Goethe did so in the
noblest passages in the Second Part of Faust. And Shelley
did so prevailingly and insistently.
For though Shelley the boy may have reputed himself
Shelley the Atheist and the implacable foe of religion, Shelley
the poet yielded himself fully and freely to the lure of the
Platonic quest. He was one of those who perceive the illusory
character of earthly delights, who detect flaws in the seem-
ingly perfect beauties of nature and of art, who find in life
and the experiences of life, not a cloying sweetness or a grate-
ful surcease, but only an ever-increasing thirst for more and
yet more loveliness, and an incentive to splendid hazard and
unending pursuit. Not all men are in this sense Platonists.
Every age and every country has its dominant quota of "fat
and greasy citizens" who find the world to be, on the whole,
a pleasant and satisfying place, who can do their work with
easeful industry and enjoy the fruits thereof with comfort
and complacence, who find a paradise terrestrial in human
love and domesticity and creature comforts, who eat and drink
and are merry and content. To such a man might be ad-
dressed the words in which Shelley greets his skylark:
Thou lovest; but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.
But the Platonist — whether he be a pagan philosopher or
a Catholic mystic or an expatriated English poet — knows well
27 See Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, by Creorge Santayana, chapter v.,
notably pp. 127, 137.
1922.] PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 477
the sad satiety of earthly life; for his heart is attuned to celes-
tial harmonies, his eyes fixed upon the vision of the stars.
He discerns things sub specie seternitatis and knows that, in-
terpret the intuition as he may, he hath not here a lasting city.
He can appreciate Thomas a Kempis' rhapsodical outpourings
on "The Wonderful Effects of Divine Love;" and he reads an
infinity of meaning into the familiar and soul-searching cry
of the Platonic Bishop of Hippo, "Thou hast made us for
Thyself, Lord, and our heart is restless ever till it rest in
Thee!"
The fitfulness and inconstancy of Shelley's human affec-
tions are in the light of this theory susceptible of psychological
explanation. Such an explanation is offered by Thompson,
himself a Platonist, when he insists that certain unpleasant
episodes in Shelley's life were occasioned by "no mere stray-
ing of the sensual appetite, but a straying, strange and deplor-
able, of the spirit," that "he left a woman not because he was
tired of her arms, but because he was tired of her soul." And
Shelley himself admitted as much. Within the compass of a
single sentence I know of no more complete and suggestive
formulation of the Platonic quest, and of the obstacles which
most commonly impede its advance, than that furnished in
one of the poet's letters: "I think one is always in love with
something or other; the error — and I confess it is not easy for
spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it — consists in seeking
in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal." ^^
That note, in infinite variety, is not infrequent in Shelley's
letters, but in his poetry, or in that portion of his poetry which
has preserved its vitality through more than a hundred years,
that portion of his poetry to which we turn for a vision of
sheer beauty and for high delight and an expansion of mood,
the Platonic quest is the insistent and glorifying refrain. It
seeks utterance in the philosophic idealism voiced by Ahas-
uerus in "Hellas." Wondrously is it phrased in his "Hymn
to Intellectual Beauty" where, at the intimation of perfect
loveliness he can say: "I shrieked, and clasp'd my hands in
ecstasy." It is the motif of his "Alastor, or the Spirit of Soli-
tude," w^herein with that wealth of moving imagery and that
suggestion of impalpable abstractions so characteristic of the
Shelleyan embodiment of human emotion, he recounts the
28Letter3p vol. 11., p. 976.
478 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY [July,
story of the poet who, at first happy and appeased with the
joys of earthly love, was smitten in his dreams with the vision
of a higher beauty and straightway rose up and followed it
over seas and sands to his ultimate glorious doom.
He liv'd, he died, he sung, in solitude.
The fire of those soft orbs has ceased to burn,
And Silence, too enamoured of that voice.
Locks its mute music in her rugged cell.
In his fragment, "Prince Athanase," Shelley sings once
more the quest of the Ideal Love. The poem was never com-
pleted; but Mrs. Shelley tells us in her notes that the poet's
plan "was a good deal modeled on *Alastor.' . . . Athanase
seeks through the world the One whom he may love. He
meets, on the ship in which he is embarked, a lady who ap-
pears to him to embody his ideal of love and beauty. But she
proves to be Pandemos, or the earthly and unworthy Venus;
who, after disappointing his cherished dreams and hopes,
deserts him. Athanase, crushed by sorrow, pines and dies.
*0n his deathbed, the lady who can really reply to his soul
comes and kisses his lips,' "
Her hair was brown, her sphered eyes were brown.
And in their dark and liquid moisture swam,
Like the dim orb of the eclipsed moon;
Yet when the spirit flashed beneath, there came
The light from them, as when tears of delight
Double the western planet's serene flame.
Shelley was not the first poet to recognize in "the earthly
and unworthy Venus" the most formidable obstacle to the
pursuit of the Ideal Beauty, but no other poet has given that
theme an ampler embodiment. There was in his genius
nothing of the dramatic, nor of the melodramatic, and he
lacked conspicuously — if we choose to consider it a lack — the
ability to weave his fancies and emotions into vivid, concrete
pictures. For these reasons, among others, he never has been
and never will be a singer of wide appeal. The dramatic ver-
sion of the Platonic quest we find in Calderon's La Vida es
sueno and, in a measure, in Hamlet; its popular poetic pre-
1922.] PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
479
sentation— unless we consider Thompson a popular poet— is
yet to come. But it may be long in coming. Popular poets
are popular for the very reason that, like Moore and Campbell
in Shelley's day and Noyes and Kipling in ours, they are im-
pervious to the light of the higher beauty to which the master
singers were usually so sensitive. Yet Shelley, in an isolated
passage of his "Ode to the West Wind," came nearer than his
wont to the tangible and concrete when he gave to the frus-
trated quest of the Ideal Beauty this vigorous and colorful
apostrophe:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere,
Destroyer and Preserver, hear, oh hear!
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
There is the heart cry of the poet, the exquisite agony of
the Platonic quest, there the vision of the surpassing love-
liness, the eternal verity, the ultimate good; there, too, the
realization of the pettiness, the inconsequence, the relativity,
the evanescence of earthly things, coupled with the realiza-
tion, not less keen and frantically bitter, that the shows of
things, the refractions of the Ideal, exercise a potent spell on
"spirits cased in flesh and blood." To open our eyes to this
basic aspect of human life we need both the philosopher and
the saint; it is not generally recognized that we likewise need
the poet.
Taine has rather well said that Shelley's error consisted
in giving full sway to his emotions and his imagination in
daily life, instead of confining their spontaneous activity to
the realm of art. Though it is a truism that, in a general
sense, literature reflects life, it is not less true that the very
qualities of temperament that make for distinction in creative
literature frequently make for failure in the workaday world,
that what is sublime in poetry may be ridiculous in conduct,
that the best and purest literature is an idealization of normal
living — that, in short, though art and life are similar, life
and art are not identic. Shelley was an extremist, and there-
fore a tragic figure because he failed to make that important
and fundamental distinction. Most men, also tragic figures,
480 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY [July,
err at the other extreme. They assume that life and art have
substantially nothing in common; in practice they keep liter-
ature and the business of living in vi^atertight compartments;
they are prone to regard poetry as a frill, an adornment, as
one of "the minor arts and graces," instead of a source of
growth and power and inspiration. Somehow, we like to
persuade ourselves that Shelley's was the nobler mistake.
The body of Shelley, found on the shore near Via Reggio
on July 18, 1822, was first buried in the sand, and later cre-
mated beside the sea. Byron and Leigh Hunt and the faithful
Trelawny conducted the unusual obsequies. The fire was in-
tense and consumed most of the poet's remains; but Trelawny
records that the heart remained entire and unaffected by the
flames. It was an impressive symbol of Shelley's poetry.
Despite the extravagant eulogiums and encomiums of his wor-
shippers — some of them none too wholesome in their moral
tone and none too judicial in their attitude toward literature —
much that he wrote shares the oblivion of his poor ashes,
which now repose with those of Keats in a Roman cemetery;
but, despite the hostility of his adversaries and the neglect
of the great masses of the English-speaking peoples, his finest
poems, his matchless songs of lyric loveliness, his unique tri-
umphs of quintessential poetry, remain, like the heart of him,
"tameless, and swift, and proud," untouched alike by the
waters of forgetfulness and the flames of searing censure.
And, surely, it is meet and just, right and salutary, that
what was weak and unworthy in his life and conduct be now,
a century after his death, consumed in the fire of charity;
that what in his verse was beautiful and sublime be cherished
of mortal men with gladness and admiration. "A poet,"
Shelley once wrote, and in so writing described his own poetic
gifts, "is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer
its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men
entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that
they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why." ^9
To be entranced and moved and softened — is it not enough?
29 A Defence of Poetry, part i.
SAINTS AND FAIRIES IN PROVENCE.
BY GERTRUDE ROBINSON.
HERE are corners of the world, to wit, certain hill-
sides of old Etruria, valleys of Thessaly, moors
of Scotland and Cornwall, fir-clad mountains of
Provence, some still bearing the names of the
gods whose shrines they guarded, where old
civilizations and old faiths seem to linger, not only as mem-
ories, but as potent, if unacknowledged, forces.
**Omnes dii gentium dsemonia:*' it is one thing to remem-
ber the words in modern Oxford, reeking with reason, com-
mon sense and culture; it is quite another when they recur to
a mind caught in the eerie mysteriousness of a Cornish moor
while the feet roam in the trackless wastes of a long-perished
Celtic village. It is one thing to apprize or criticize the Greek
Pantheon over the Iliad by an English fireside or to wander
through a museum between rows of satyrs and nymphs and
fauns, even with Pan himself looking on; it is quite another
to find oneself at midnight beside the marble image of a god
which, broken though it be, seems scintillating with life, under
the rays of a Greek moon in June, in a ruined and deserted
temple of Thessaly far from any human habitation. Then
there is real comfort in the memory that, while the gods of the
nations are indeed but dsemonia, "Dominus autem coelos
fecitr
More than any other land I know is Provence daemons-
ridden. There the gods of all the nations meet. Though
their reign is over, still in that land so like in some of its
physical aspects to the Holy Land, with its sun-dried hills
covered to the limit of cultivation with terraces of round, flat-
topped olives, its burnt-white rocks crowned with little hill
villages like in color and shape to the rocks on which they are
perched, with its wild mountains so like to those Syrian
heights where altars to Baal and Astarte were reared, there
is a deep satisfaction in the thought that "the mountains of
1 Using "daemon" in its wide sense.
ypit. cxv. 31
482 SAINTS AND FAIRIES IN PROVENCE [July,
the world are bent beneath the weight of God's eternal jour-
neyings." ^
For just as the ghosts of long dead peoples, Ligurians,
Phocians, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Saracens, seem
to jostle one another on those ancient roads, so the shadowy
images of their gods float, as it were, over their long since
desecrated altars on those high hills. There were altars many
as there were gods many. Belus, the Syrian, was worshipped
side by side with the guardian deity of the Voconces on the
mountains of Vaison, their capital. The great Phrygian
Mother shared her honors with Andarte, the Celtic goddess
of the Dienses, whose home was in the mountains of Drome.
The lesser divinities of the conquering people, the nymphs
and fauns and fates, welcomed into their ranks those strange
mysterious Celtic Deae matrae (Deesses Meres), who are now
said to wander about the land where they were once wor-
shipped in the form of fairies. After the Roman conquest of
Gaul, practically all the gods and goddesses of the country
were received into the Pantheon and given the title of Augus-
tus or Augusta, as the case might be. The Deesses Meres
shared with the nymphs in the guardianship of the springs,
with Ceres in the protection of fruitful lands, and with Juno
herself in her care for motherhood and childhood. They
were, indeed, the divinities of life and fruitfulness.
It is to this generosity of the gods of Rome towards their
Celtic brethren that the latter owe their survival. Apollo
shared his altar with Borvo, the Celtic protector of waters.
To Rudianus, the god of the great pagus Vertacomacorix, a
district of Voconces, a tablet was found at Vaison coupling
his name with that of Mars. The great mountain of the South,
Mont Ventoux, had for its tutelary god Albiorix; his name,
too, is found on the same votive tablet with the Roman god
of war. Albiorix means "king of the mountain," and it is
easy to imagine how much reverence would be paid to him,
connected as he was with that mountain of the Midi, who
stood there clothed with robes of kingly purple or dazzling
crimson, or collecting round him the mighty cohorts of winds
who sweep through the valley of the Rhone with fierce yells
and fiercer blasts.
2 Roman Breviary^ Friday Lauds for Lent:
Incurvati sunt colles mundi
Ab itineribas eeier^itatis ejus.
1922.] SAINTS AND FAIRIES IN PROVENCE 483
They all live, these old gods in broken altars and in votive
tablets,^ but the Deesses Meres, for the people of Provence,
still walk the land. Still, country festivals are held where
their altars used to stand beside deep green pools fed by
springs from some rocky mountain side. One such there is
in the shadow of Mont Ventoux at Malaucene, where the
waters of Groseau spring from the mountain's barren rocks,
making fertile all the country round. But they are not only
goddesses of the springs. Deae Matrse, Mairse, Matronse (not
Matronse), sometimes Matres Junones, Nemetiales (from
Nemetum, the Celtic word for a wood), or again, Matres fatuae,
sometimes simply Fatuse they are called on their votive tab-
lets. It is the latter name which has survived. The Latin
fatuus and fatua became in the chroniclers, fou (feu) and
folle and have become **fee*' in modern French.*
Wherever one goes one comes across the Fees. In im-
mense underground caves they dwell according to Mistral, the
great Provencal poet. "In majestic halls suffused by a light
veiled and pale, where altars and palaces, pillars and col-
onnades stand side by side in marvelous confusion, such as
Corinth or Babylon never knew, and which vanish at the
breath of a fairy. There, like trembling rays, the fairies
roam, there in those shadowy aisles, in that peaceful hermit-
age they live the life they once lived on earth." *
It is beneath the strange rock city of Les Baux that Mis-
tral images these spacious halls. And, indeed, nothing seems
impossible in that amazing place. An impregnable rock
whose history disappears into the dim past, the history of its
inhabitants is like the history of the ancient world. Their
traces lie thick about us as we walk amid the ruins; the caves
of primitive man, Greek and Phoenician pottery, Roman walls,
a tower where Saracens kept watch over the blue line of the
just visible Mediterranean, an impregnable castle whence the
Lords of Baux ruled all the country round, marvelous me-
diaeval houses with whose sculptured remains the rock is
strewn, and around and among these works of living men
the stone tombs of the dead, Gallo-Roman sarcophagi cut
closely together, one beside the other, in the rock.
3 Some of these tablets and heathen altars have been used to make holy water
fonts, or even Christian altars. Some are built into the walls of houses and
churches.
4 In Provengal Fado, 5 Mireille, Canto VI.
484 SAINTS AND FAIRIES IN PROVENCE [July,
Thither Marius came after his famous victory over the
Barbarians to rest his army in the sheltered plain below the
rocks. Thither, too, in the time of Alaric, the Arian, came
Catholics from Aries to hide in the caves which primitive man
had left. Thither, too, came Dante to find in the strangest
and wildest of rock valleys a setting for his dream of the In-
ferno.« It is just at the entrance to this VaP d'Enfer that
Mistral has placed his Trou des Fees, the entrance to the
Fairies' land, a dark and terrifying hole which leads to cavern
after cavern of a most mysterious underworld — a meet abode
for dethroned and dispossessed divinities.
But the Deesses Meres were not only Matrse and Fatuse,
they were, as their votive tablets show, **Domin3e*' and "Vir-
gines sacrse'* also. Partly for this reason, partly because they
were most frequently represented as three, they have become
curiously linked with the great Christian tradition of Pro-
vence, that of the Saintes Maries.
The coming of the Holy Women to Provence is too well
known to need retelling. The Office for St. Martha's feast
tells how, with a great company, they were wafted from Judea
by a wind from God to a safe landing where now stands the
great church of Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, and how there-
after the company dispersed to become the Apostles of the
South of France. Mary, the mother of St. James, with Sa-
lome and Sara, the servant, remained on the shore, died and
were buried there. In their honor, the great festival of Pro-
vence is held at the little village of Les Saintes Maries, when
the holy barque is let down from the roof of the church in the
sight of the multitudes who are gathered together.
But it is not at first apparent why the sacred barque,
venerated in the great fortress ^ church by the Mediterranean
where the saints' bodies rest, should have its counterpart in
the little church of Les Baux. Tradition, however, says that
when the little company scattered, St. Lazarus to Marseilles,
St. Maxim to Aries, St. Joseph of Arimathea to Glastonbury,
St. Martha to Tarascon, St. Mary Magdalene to St. Baume, that
« Dante's
In su Vestremitd d'un' alta ripa
Che facevan gran pietre rotte in cerchio
is an exact picture of the rock valley known as the "Val' d'Enfer."
7 The church of les Saintes Maries de la Mer is fortified. It was a refuge
for all the country round when the Saracens raided the coast, and is an excellent
place of defence.
1922.] SAINTS AND FAIRIES IN PROVENCE 485
Mary, the mother of James, with Salome and Sara, the serv-
ant, left their home by the sea on various apostolic missions.
On one of their journeys, they visited the Alpilles. Setting
sail in their barque up the Rhone, in itself a miracle, they
reached Aries, and from thence they made their way, taking
their lives in their hands, to that rocky country which lay to-
wards the north, and finally reached Les Baux.
It would be interesting to try to picture what the Les
Baux of those days was like. No great castle crowned the
rock, no Saracen towers looked over the plains towards the
sea. A bleak wild jagged rock it must have been, raked by
the wind; its unattainable peaks the dwelling places of wild
beasts and wilder men. Once the Greeks had colonized the
place and built a temple there. Had all traces of it disap-
peared, a prey to barbarian incursions and Roman military
operations?
The Holy Women, if they approached, as they probably
did, the rock from the south, must have come upon the Roman
road to the city of Glanum, and must have seen the remains
of the camp of Marius. Close to the camp, they would find
altars, votive tablets and all the traces of Roman worship.
Did they ever, we question, look with wonder at a great
archaic representation of three figures carved in bas-relief on
a mighty rock on the hillside? What would they have thought
had they known that one day this monument would be con-
nected with them and their mission? Yet so it is.
For a long time, its very existence in that wild and remote
place seems to have remained undiscovered. When it be-
came known, probably through the breaking away of a part
of the rock, it was at once conceived to be a representation
of the Saints of Provence. All kinds of legends circled about
it, and it was considered to prove without possibility of doubt
the presence of the Saints in Les Baux. A chapel was built
beneath it and a pilgrimage established, which, though shorn
of much of its glory, still takes place.
But if this monument does not represent the Salutes
Maries, whom does it represent?
It stands now just at the bottom of the hill among strewn
fragments of fallen rock. The figures are in a standing posi-
tion, the two at each side leaning towards the centre, one in
an attitude of dependence. This in itself seems enough to
486 SAINTS AND FAIRIES IN PROVENCE [July,
disprove the theory of the French savant, M. Gilles, which
has been adopted by certain Englkh writers, that the figures
represent Marius and his wife standing one on each side of
the Eastern prophetess, Martha, by whom he was always ac-
companied on his campaigns. Marius allowing himself to
be depicted in an attitude of dependence is unthinkable!
Other historians and archaeologists consider, with much more
probability, it seems to me, that the figures represent certain
indigenous Celtic deities, probably the Deesses Meres. It is
no detriment to this theory that one of the figures seems to be
bearded, for male deities were often associated with the
Matrae, especially in the guardianship of waters and trees.®
This monument close to the site of Marius' camp may
well have been the work of the Roman soldiers, who were
disposed to pay peculiar honor to the Deesses Meres. Pos-
sibly, it was a votive offering made on the discovery of a
spring; for though that side of the hill is without streams
now, water must have been at hand when Marius chose the
place to camp in.
But however we may speculate about the "Tremaie" to
the paysans, it is still the Saintes Maries. The shepherds, as
they pass with their flocks, uncover to it, old women gather-
ing sticks kneel for a moment before it; and on the twenty-
fifth of May, the Feast of the Saints, it feebly reflects as a
place of pilgrimage the great glory of the church of the
Saintes Maries de la Mer.
There is legend which says that on this day the Fees
leave their shadowy dwelling beneath the Val' d'Enfer to join
in the homage which all the world is paying to the Mother
Saints of Provence.
8 The name of the fountain just beneath Mont Ventoux, Groseau, comes from
Grosel, Its male guardian spirit who was associated with the Diesses Mires. Some-
times a male and female divinity are represented together, guarding trees as well as
streams. See Toutain, Les Cultes Paiens dans I'Empire Romain, and Bulletin
de I'Acadimie Delphinale "Dieux indigknes des Voconces" 1876-77.
"HIND-SWARAJ."
BY BRIAN P. O'SHASNAIN.
HERE exists in India today a movement towards
freedom which is shaking the British Empire to
its foundations. For Gandhi's "Swaraj" move-
ment is a revolt not merely against British rule,
but against the whole machinery of Western mili-
tarism, bureaucracy, materialism and commercial exploita-
tion. It is not only a political movement — it is industrial,
social, cultural, spiritual. It is old India snapping its chains
and standing upright after a century and a half of submis-
sion.
The Hindu revolt is undoubtedly the greatest menace that
the Empire has ever faced. Taken in conjunction with Egypt's
struggle for freedom and the partial breaking away of Ireland
from the "United Kingdom," it has assumed most serious
proportions. Naturally, the American people are asking
themselves: "What justification have the Hindus for their
revolt? Has not the Empire conferred upon them freedom
from local wars and the blessings of Western civilization?"
To answer these questions a candid examination of the
whole historical relation of India with the English is neces-
sary. One does not go very far, however, in studying the
story of the East without being compelled to abandon the
idea that the Hindus were at any time in the historic period
poor, ignorant or uncivilized. When Alexander the Great
entered the northern part of India, he found rich and flourish-
ing civilizations, which put forth, in opposition to his con-
quests, elaborately equipped armies commanded by chiefs
who traced their descent back to the mists of antiquity. After
his departure, the Greeks settled down into amicable inter-
course with mighty kingdoms, the existence of which were,
till then, unsuspected in Europe. That the Hindus were at
that time (317*312 B. G.) the inheritors of an old and settled
civilization is testified to in these words of Megasthenes, a
Greek Ambassador to the court of Asoka: "They live hap-
pily enough, being simple in their manners and frugal. They
488 "HIND'SWARAr [July,
never drink wine, except at sacrifices. . . . The simplicity of
their laws and their contracts is proved by the fact that they
seldom go to law. They have no suits about pledges and
deposits, nor do they require either seals or witnesses, but
make their deposits and confide in each other. Their houses
and property they generally leave unguarded. . . . Truth
and virtue they hold alike in esteem. Hence, they accord no
special privilege to the old unless they possess superior
wisdom."
That the Hindus had a love of freedom (self-determina-
tion) and that they were intolerant of permanent foreign rule,
is revealed by the successive national movements which de-
stroyed the Greek kingdoms in India and restored the forms
of native rule. It should be understood, however, that re-
gardless of who sat on the throne the primary administrative
unit of the nation — the village — kept its traditions and its
ancient life unchanged. Monier Williams writes: "The In-
dian village or township — meaning thereby not merely a col-
lection of houses forming a village or town, but a division
of territory three or four miles in extent, with its careful dis-
tribution of fixed occupations for the common good, with its
intertwining and interdependence of individual, family and
common interests, with its provisions for political independ-
ence and autonomy, is the original type, the first germ of
rural and civic society in mediaeval and modern Europe."
It is easy to see that when life in the rural villages was so
soundly based, the nation as a whole must have been creative
and prosperous. Old India, indeed, was as happy a place as
any land can be on this troubled earth. Her fame went
abroad among the nations. A great merchant fleet exchanged
her surplus with the traders of other lands. And the teach-
ings of the gentle Buddha permeated the creeds and softened
the relations of people with each other within the social
scheme. This is revealed by the writings of Ta Hian, a Chi-
nese traveler in the fifth century A. D., who states in his jour-
nal concerning Pataliputra : "The nobles and householders of
this country have founded hospitals within the city to which
the poor of all countries, the destitute, crippled and the
diseased may repair. They receive every kind of help gra-
tuitously. Physicians inspect their diseases, and according
to the cases order them food and drink, medicine or decoc-
1922.] '^HIND-SWARAr 489
tions, everything in fact that may contribute to their ease.
When cured, they depart at their convenience."
Another Chinese traveler, Houen Tsang, who lived in
India for fifteen years of the seventh century A. D., writes:
"As the administration of the country is conducted on benign
principles the executive is simple. . . . The private demesnes
of the crown are divided into four principal parts: the first
is for carrying out the affairs of state and providing sacrificial
offerings; the second is for providing subsidies for the min-
isters and chief officers of state, the third is for rewarding
men of distinguished ability, and the fourth is for charity to
religious bodies, whereby the field of merit is cultivated. In
this way the taxes on the people are light, and the personal
service required of them is moderate. Each one keeps his
own worldly goods in peace, and all till the ground for their
substance. Those who cultivate the royal estate pay a sixth
part of the produce as tribute. The merchants who engage in
commerce come and go in carrying out their transactions.
The river passages and the road barriers are open on payment
of a small toll. When the public works require it, labor is
exacted, but paid for. The payment is in strict proportion
to the work done. The military guard the frontiers, or go
out to punish the refractory. They also mount guard at night
around the palace. The soldiers are levied according to the
requirements of the service; they are promised certain pay-
ments and are publicly enrolled. The governors, ministers,
magistrates and officials have each a portion of land assigned
to them for their personal support."
We now have to consider India under Mohammedan
(Mogul) domination. From 646 to 1761 A. D. a stream of
tribal warriors flowed down upon her cultivated plains, and
contended with native rulers for these golden kingdoms of
which rumor had brought them the tale. They were Huns,
Turks and Tartars pouring in from the vast breeding grounds
of warriors in Central Asia. When the Mongul conquests
were consolidated, that part of India ruled by them settled
down to a philosophical acceptance of these newcomers, who
disturbed the political, but not the economic, structure of the
land. As distinguished from the English, who followed them,
the Moguls were native rulers, that is they lived among the
people they had conquered and spent at home the treasures
490 ''HIND-SWARAr [July,
they collected. They were easy of access to the people. The
throne was not eight thousand miles away. Dr. Bernier, a
French doctor, tells what he saw in Aurungzeb's Hall of
Audience about 1660: "All the petitions held up in the crowd
assembled in the Hall are brought to the King and read in his
hearing; and the persons concerned being ordered to approach,
are examined by the monarch himself, who often redresses
on the spot the wrongs of the grieved party. On another day
of the week he devotes two hours to hear in private the
petitions of ten persons selected from the lower orders and
presented to the King by a good and rich man. Nor does he
fail to attend the justice chamber on another day of the week
attended by the two principal chief justices."
Under Akbar (1556-1605) the Mohammedan civilization
reached its closest amalgamation with the Hindus. This en-
lightened ruler abolished Hindu-Mohammedan race distinc-
tions, inviting capable Hindus to share high offices of govern-
ment. Unfortunately, Aurungzeb did not carry out this hu-
mane policy. His bigotry re-opened the old wound, and on his
death the empire began to decay. Native India began again
to assert itself. The Sikhs broke loose and established a
league in the northwest. In the south, the Mahrattas carved
out a kingdom. The Rajput power began to grow.
It was at this critical point, when India was going through
civil wars and economic readjustments, that the European
appeared on her shores. He announced that he had come to
bring civilization, religion and protection to those who needed
it. Meanwhile he would set up a store and trade. Hospit-
able India opened the gates to him. Portuguese, French, Eng-
lish flocked to the treasure-house of the East and looked
with longing eyes — not on the poetry and art of wondrous
India, not on her temples or her renowned sages. Euro-
pean eyes then saw only her piled up treasures, fruits of the
labors of unnumbered generations of civilized and skillful
natives.
The white men had announced themselves followers of
the same Christ, yet, although they were all strangers in a
heathen land, no sooner did they discover each other's settle-
ments than they fell to fighting or intriguing — Dutch, Portu-
guese, French, English. This should have opened the eyes of
the native rulers, but it meant little to them, and they went
1922.] "HIND-SWARAr 491
on quarreling and plotting among each other, none, indeed,
realizing that their hour had struck. For by the time the
"Christians" had ceased slaying each other, there were no
Dutch, French, Portuguese — there were only English! These
were armed with weapons of precision such as the native
armies could not match. They were desperate adventurers,
to whom it was win all or lose all. At once, they found a
fertile field for intrigue among the native princes, whose sense
of patriotism had sunk so low that they did not hesitate to
seek the help of the white traders with their convincing
weapons. The rest of the story is soon told. The East India
Company advanced to the rulership of all India, after the
"Mutiny" passing on its title to the British Government. And
the Hindus found that it was not the religion of Christ that
had come to their shores, but a band of greedy and rapacious
shopkeepers — a company of men whom their own home gov-
ernment had repeatedly to restrain lest they kill the goose
that laid the golden egg. The servants of the East India Com-
pany, as Burke once said, were "birds of passage and beasts
of prey." They were the carpet-baggers of their day, ac-
cumulating enormous fortunes, not spent in India like the
loot of the Mogul conquerors, but taken across the sea, drained
out of the country forever.
It is interesting to listen to the testimony of the great
English historians as to the character and achievements of the
men who conquered India. Macaulay, who was neither a
friend nor admirer of India, wrote: "The Roman proconsul,
who, in a year or two, squeezed out of a province the means
of rearing marble palaces and baths on the shores of Cam-
pania, of drinking from amber, of feasting on singing birds,
of exhibiting armies of gladiators and flocks of camelopards,
the Spanish viceroy, who, leaving behind him the curses of
Mexico or Lima, entered Madrid, with a long train of gilded
coaches, and of sumpter horses trapped and shod with silver,
were now outdone. Cruelty, indeed, properly so-called, was
not among the vices of the servants of the Company. But
cruelty itself could hardly have produced greater evils than
sprang from their unprincipled eagerness to be rich."
Lecky says: "Nowhere in Europe, nowhere else, perhaps,
in the world, were large fortunes so easily amassed. Clive
himself had gone out a penniless clerk; when he returned to
492 "HIND'SWARAr [July,
India, at thirty-four, he had acquired a fortune of more than
£40,000 a year, besides giving £50,000 to his relatives."
India now began to experience a government of aliens.
Her people were gradually disarmed. Quietly, the white
traders began to destroy the old foundations in government,
economics, industry. Compared to them, the Mohammedans
were amateurs indeed. The process of bleeding the land
white began. The English mercantile aristocracy carried on,
without hindrance, in India that process of uprooting native
industries which, attempted in America on a far smaller scale,
brought on the revolt of the Colonies. Lecky, in A History
of England in the Eighteenth Century, writes: "The English
officials (of the Company) began everywhere to trade on
their own account, and to exercise their enormous power in
order to drive all competitors from the field. . . . They defied,
displaced or intimidated all native functionaries who at-
tempted to resist them. They refused to permit any other
traders to sell the goods in which they dealt. They even
descended upon the villages and forced the inhabitants by
flogging and confinement to purchase their goods at exorbitant
prices, or to sell what they desired to purchase at prices far
below the market value. . . . Monopolizing the trade in some
of the necessities of life, to the utter ruin of thousands of
native traders, and selling these necessities at famine prices
to a half-starving population, they reduced those who came
under their influence to a wretchedness they had never known
before. . . . Never before had the natives experienced a
tyranny which was at once so skillful, so searching and so
strong. . . . Whole districts which had once been populous
and flourishing were at last utterly depopulated, and it was
noticed that on the appearance of a party of English mer-
chants, the villages were at once deserted, and the shops shut,
and the roads thronged with panic-stricken fugitives."
Thus we observe in India the opening scenes of the dark
tragedy that was already being played to a cruel finish in
Ireland. The same characters and conditions are there — an
absentee government, the trader intent on the ruin of native
industry through the absolute rule of a military bureaucracy.
Let us glance at the scene through the eyes of another Eng-
lishman — one who was on the spot. William Bolts, in his
book, Considerations On Indian Affairs, says that "various
1922.] ''HIND-SWARAr 493
and innumerable are the methods of oppressing the poor
weavers, which are daily practised by the Company's agents,
and sub-agents in the country, such as by fines, imprison-
ments, floggings, forcing bonds from them, etc., by which the
number of weavers in the country has been greatly decreased.
The natural consequences whereof has been the scarcity, dear-
ness and debasement of the manufactures, as well as a great
diminution of the revenue."
Not only was India looted by the first servants of the
East India Company. It became the settled policy of the
foreign rulers to make the interests of the country entirely
subservient to those of England. From this time on, no better
image can be formed of that unfortunate situation than that
of England as drawing sustenance for its growing Empire
from the life-blood of India. The standard of living of the
natives began to go down as the standard of living in England
went up. The menace of famine, an occasional occurrence
under the native and Mogul rulers, now became an ever-
present possibility. Since it was the interest of the English to
prevent India from competing with them in the world markets,
prohibitive laws were passed whereby the ancient industries
and arts were destroyed, so that the whole country gradually
became a market for English manufactured goods. Thus the
artisans and craftsmen of the villages, finding no outlet for
the products of native looms or shops were thrown back on
the land, and having no income, save that from agriculture,
were certain to starve if the rains failed even for a season.
Is this an overdrawn picture? The late Hon. G. K. Gokhale
of the Viceroy's Council states that "from 60,000,000 to 70,-
000,000 of the people of India do not know what it is to have
their hunger satisfied even once in a year." The daily in-
come of the people of India per head was in 1850 two pence,
in 1882 it was one and one-half pence, and in 1900 it was less
than three-fourths of a penny. This, according to Mr. Wil-
liam Digby of the Indian Civil Service, in a book with the
ironic title. Prosperous India. The same author asserts that
before the coming of the English, India suffered from: "Two
famines in the eleventh century, both local. One famine in
the thirteenth century, near Delhi. Three famines in the
fourteenth century, all local. Two famines in the fifteenth
century, both local. Three famines in the sixteenth century.
494 *'HIND-SWARAr [July,
all local. Three famines in the seventeenth century, extent
not defined. Four famines in the eighteenth century, north-
west Provinces, all local."
With the invasions came widespread hunger. India was
called upon imperiously to give, give, give. Wealth flowed
in a steady stream out of the country. Her native industries
wrecked, dependent upon England for unmanufactured goods,
she fell rapidly behind the European races in material well-
being. Her poorer classes of population began to starve.
Between 1768 and 1800 India had four great famines. From
1800 to 1825 five famines with, perhaps, 1,000,000 deaths.
From 1825 to 1850 two famines with, perhaps, 500,000 deaths.
From 1850 to 1875 six famines, with 5,000,000 deaths, are re-
corded. And from 1875 to 1900, with the Western world at
the highest efiQux of material power and wealth, 26,000,000
people died in India of direct starvation. It must be remem-
bered that the evil effects of a famine are not measured
merely by the deaths from hunger. There are millions who
do not die, who live on, permanently injured by a year or a
two years* course of starvation diet. These fall an easy prey
to Famine's prompt second, the Plague, and to other sick-
nesses.
It is commonly believed that India is overcrowded and
that this is a main cause of famine. The density of popula-
tion of some modern centres of civilization is given as fol-
lows (population per square mile) :
Austria 246 Poland 247.4
Germany 310.4 Italy 313.7
Holland 470 Belgium
England and Wales. .519 India 244.27^
The London Times, in its issue of March 24, 1911, discus-
sing this question, admits that India's hunger is not a matter
of over-population. The Times said: "Two-thirds of the
people of India live within a quarter of its area. There are
vast unoccupied lands which have still to be populated. . . .
The problem of the Indian population is to distribute the
people more evenly. The process is slow, but the difficulty
is not insoluble, and every fresh migration increases pros-
1 These figures are from the Statesman's Year Book for 1912.
1922.] **HIND-^SWARAr 495
perity. The growth of numbers is not a subject for alarm,
but rather for congratulation."
The rains, of course, fall in India now as they did in pre-
British times. Nor is famine due to the incompetence of the
native agriculturalist. Mr. Vaugn Nash, an Englishman, in
his book. The Great Famine and Its Causes, writes as follows:
"The famine, let me say, is in no way due to defects of the
ryot, qua agriculturist. He is short of capital and hampered
by debt. But every competent judge admits his wonderful
knowledge of the land and the crops, his laborious industry
during the seasons of hard field work, and his eagerness to
improve his holdings. Agricultural enthusiasts from the
West, who came to scoff at his primitive customs remain to
admire and learn as they watch him at his work."
These statements will perhaps surprise the reader who
imagines that the Occident has said the last word in scien-
tific agriculture. Dr. G. A. Voeckler, consulting chemist of
the Royal Agricultural Society of England, was sent to India
in 1889 to suggest improvements for Indian agriculture. He
wrote that "in the ordinary acts of husbandry, nowhere would
one find better instances of keeping land scrupulously clean
from weeds, of ingenuity in device of water-raising appliances,
of knowledge of soils and their capabilities, as well as the
exact time to sow and reap, as one would in Indian agricul-
ture, and this, not at its best alone, but at its ordinary level.
It is wonderful, too, how much is known of rotation, the
system of mixed crops and of fallowing. Certain it is, that I,
at least, have never seen a more perfect picture of careful
cultivation, combined with hard labor, perseverance and fer-
tility of resource, than I have seen in many of the halting
places in my tour."
Such is the condition of India (once the world's wonder
for riches) in the twentieth century, that Dr. Sudhindra Bose
of the University of Iowa expressed its degradation in these
terrible words: "Famine has become a normal condition in
India." Further in his book, British Rule in India, he writes:
"The Indian famine is not a famine of food; it is a financial
famine. Poverty is its prime cause. The ryot lives con-
stantly on the borderland of starvation. And as he cannot
save enough even in good seasons to tide him over the bad,
he succumbs easily at the least touch of scarcity."
496 **HIND-SWARAr [July,
Although the Hindus are theoretically subjects of the
King, equal in rights with any other subjects, actually they
are treated as an inferior class in the outlying parts of the
Empire. Those who migrated to Australia, South Africa,
Canada, answering the call of these sections for cheap labor,
seeking a happier life, found themselves quickly disillusioned.
Discriminatory laws were passed against them, and they were
made to feel, even in the most trivial affairs of life, the sting
of inferiority. The writer just quoted says: "The Indians in
Natal, as indeed all over South Africa, are subjected to many
cruel indignities. They cannot find accommodations in pub-
lic hotels, they cannot use public baths, and in many places
they cannot travel even in municipal trolley cars. In Pretoria
and Johannesburg, they are prohibited by law from walking
on the sidewalks . . . and from use of the ordinary trolley
cars."
It was in South Africa, as a leader of these oppressed
Hindus, that M. K. Gandhi first came into public notice. Find-
ing that his poor compatriots had been deprived of their
elementary civil rights, that they were the most despised mem-
bers of the community, he organized a passive resistance
movement which, from 1894 on, proved that the Hindus yet
possessed one weapon before which all material force proved
vain. Gandhi, son of a distinguished family in India, had
gone to South Africa to practise law. Arrived there, he
quickly experienced in his own person the cruel persecutions
of the dominant race. Although a man of the highest spir-
itual attainment, a graduate of an English law college, and
expressing in his slight frame the utmost gentleness and tol-
erance, he was more than once brutally assaulted, kicked and
beaten by white men twice his weight and size. Despite such
experiences, despite repeated terms of imprisonment, he built
up a great movement of protest on passive, non-violent lines.
And then his genius went further. Passing beyond the
farthest dreams of the modern Hindu liberals, searching in
the souls of his humble followers, he found an ancient spirit
there and brought it forth into manifestation. He discovered
that the most powerful expression of Hindu genius is not
political, but spiritual, and that this s^piritual force, once
aroused into manifestation, conquers even its bitterest foes.
Since the hour of that discovery, he has been transforming
1922.] "HIND-SWARAr 497
the carnal weapons of the political plane — the walkout and
the boycott — into the spiritual weapons of passive non-resist-
ance — or as he would say, conquering one's enemy through
love. Coming to India in person during the Great War when
he was still devotedly serving the Empire, he has gradually
evolved his idea of "Swaraj," which may be roughly defined
as freedom or self-determination, along with "Swadeshi,"
which involves the using of home-made articles only, and the
revival of the historically celebrated arts and crafts of me-
diaeval India.
At once, he found himself the leader of millions of Hindus,
educated by the several great reform movements of the past
hundred years — such movements as the Brahmo Samaj
(Brahmo Society) founded in Calcutta in 1830 by Ram Mohan
Roy; the Arya Samaj founded in Bombay in 1875 by Daya-
nanda Saraswati; the Theosophical Society, which came to
India about the same time; the Ramakrishua Mission launched
by Swami Vivekananda during the eighteen-nineties. Through
these movements have evolved various types of Hindus, all
passionately devoted to the service of India, to the conserva-
tion of the best in her old life and faith. They find a com-
mon political platform in the Indian National Congress, and
a common leader in the strange and thrilling personality of
Mahatma Gandhi. The title "Mahatma" meaning Great Soul,
or as we would say in the west, "Saint," conferred on Gandhi
by universal choice, singles him out as unique among modern
national leaders. His doctrine subverts all established po-
litical and revolutionary practices, for he expects to free India
without using brute force, by using what he names soul-force
or love-force.
This is a strange doctrine to Western ears, to those peoples
skeptical and materialistic, who have forgotten that their own
spiritual teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, taught the same doctrine
in words even more emphatic than those of Gandhi, who
admits that the Sermon on the Mount has been a permanent
guide in all his activities; this along with the Hindu scrip-
tures, for he holds that Swadeshi means the acceptance of
the purified ancestral faith, not less than the ancestral in-
dustrial heritage. Also, he insists that his followers shall
practise "Ahimsa" — literally non-killing, and that this pro-
hibition shall be applied to animals as well as men. As
VOL. catv. 32
498 "HIND-SWARAr [July,
Gandhi interprets "Ahimsa," it really means much more than
non-killing. It means leading an innocent, a beautiful life.
The gradual giving up of Western machinery, the vow to wear
native cloth only, to be fearless, truthful, to regard no one
as an outcast or as untouchable, to use the vernacular lan-
guages of India in place of English, to work with the hand at
weaving or some other craft, to bring religion into politics —
all these are parts of the vast reform which this great leader
proposes for India. His methods are so unique, his person-
ality so innocent and simple, his spirit so fired with exalted
altruism that he makes all other political leaders of our day
seem very material indeed.
Yet Gandhi is not a visionary. He has actual political
power — the power given him by over a hundred million fol-
lowers. The British fear him more than any other man on
earth today — far more than they fear De Valera or Lenin e —
for they recognize that he is fighting them with weapons
which he knows how to use with consummate skill, but which
they do not know how to handle at all. Bullets, bayonets,
artillery, aeroplanes, bombs are useless against the man who
is teaching all India to despise death, even to die loving the
slayer. For Gandhi insists that his followers shall not harm
the British no matter what evil they do. He treats the British
as if they were ignorant children playing with forces they
know not of. He teaches his people to take an attitude of
spiritual leadership towards their oppressors, to be careless
of death and wounds, to have the sublime indifference of
martyrs. And this, he says, requires the ultimate reaches of
courage. "Believe me," he writes, "that a man devoid of
courage and manhood can never be a passive resister . . .
even a man weak in body is capable of offering this resistance.
One man can offer it just as well as millions. Both men and
women can indulge in it. It does not require the training of
an army; it needs no Jiu Jitsu. Control over the mind is
alone necessary, and when this is attained, man is free like
the king of the forest and his very glance withers the enemy."
Strange words to hear from the leader of a great political
movement. A sublime, but impossible, doctrine it will seem
to most of us in the West with our sudden rage at any invasion
of individual rights. But the sage who writes these words
is no doctrinaire. He has proved his spirit for twenty years
1922.] SHRINES 499
in the provincial bitter life of South Africa. Can he demon-
strate in India? Can three hundred millions endure the bay-
onet, the bullet, the aeroplane bombs, all the instruments of
repression possessed by the hundred thousand English among
them? Can the resistance of a mutinous people be subli-
mated to these heights of renunciation? If Mahatma Gandhi
and his people can do this thing, then, indeed, the West must
sit at the feet of the East as it did long ago, and learn again
an ancient message of love and pity and simplicity, which it
is far on the way to forget.
The arrest and imprisonment of Gandhi has not served
to effect any diminution of revolutionary fervor, even though
the leader, as he left the court, gave utterance to no thoughts
that were not pacific and constructive. India sits thinking,
while her Mahatma is behind the bars in a prison which seems
likely to become a shrine. Gandhi knows what will happen
if his great policy is carried out with uttermost sacrifice. If
human nature should prove incapable of a course so exalted,
then no one knows what will happen. If the British are wise,
generous and intelligent, India even yet may be turned to a
noble friend, a necessary friend in the parlous days to come.
One can only hope that there will be enough of the Christian
spirit left in the great sea empire to meet a challenge that all
empires must meet, sooner or later, the challenge to offer as
sacrifice, as her own laureate has expressed it, "an humble
and a contrite heart" at the shrine of the Lord of nations.
SHRINES.
BY HENRY ZIMMER.
The hills erect high altars, shrines of snow and light
Carved masterfully — shining marble-white.
Here sunset lays its gifts of gold and porphyry,
And day-close trails its fluttering pennants. See!
In this dim sanctuary, with the dusk aglow,
The vigil-lamps of twilight flicker low!
Slow falls the incense-dew, like clouds of mist-veiled foam,
And far off burns a blue star-frescoed dome.
Hush! A queen, the silver-girdled moon draws near,
In her white beauty, come to worship here.
IN FAIR VERONA.
BY JOSEPH FRANCIS WICKHAM.
T is dreaming, dreaming, all the way, in Italy.
From Sorrento to Siena, from Rome to Ravenna,
everywhere and always — one long vision of half-
eternal beauty. And so the pathland of your
fancy ever through Venetia is strewn with dream.
If I might guess your thoughts as the train rumbles in the
twilight through the maize fields and vineyards outside Ver-
ona, I should conjure up a garden, a beautiful moonlit gar-
den, and a palace balcony all fragrant with the scent of roses.
And there would be an eager lover in the garden by name of
Romeo, and there would be a maiden faithful in the balcony
who called herself Juliet; Romeo and Juliet, world-loved
lovers of world-famed "households, both alike dignity, in fair
Verona, where we lay our scene."
Verona is the city of Juliet, and is as beautiful as our
fancies of that fair daughter of the Gapuletti. Reautiful in
palaces, beautiful in streets, beautiful in churches, in cam-
panili, in pictures, in tombs, in cypress gardens, beautiful in
the rushing blue waters that flow through her heart, Verona
is the most magnificent city of Venetia. She will ask you to
remain longer than your leisure may allow.
A temple of beauty she is, of a certainty, but none less
surely is Verona a fortress and an armed camp. For stand-
ing here in north Italy at the foot of the Rrenner Pass, she is
the gateway of the northern world, the world that ever has
been an embattled host against the Italian peninsula. It will
not be uninteresting, when one thinks of Verona under this
aspect, to recall the chief events in her history.
Chronicle first remembers Verona as a city of the Euga-
nean Gauls. They yielded to the Cenomani five hundred and
fifty years before the Christian era. Two and a half centuries
later, Roman expansion had assimilated the Veronese land,
but Verona waited until the year 59 for the franchise. Under
imperial sway, she remained a fortified city, where the Italian
roads met, fighting Rome's battles against the hills. When,
1922.] IN FAIR VERONA 501
in 452, Attila swept through Venetia, Verona fell prostrate,
but she rose again, and was a fortress for Odoacer in 476.
But Theodoric, the great Ostrogoth king, drove him out in 493.
Theodoric built a fortress in Verona and kept the city until
552, when the Gothic rule was overthrown by the Byzantine
Valerian. In 569 the Lombard king, Alboin, captured the
town, and the rule of the Lombards now prevailed until
Charlemagne shattered their kingdom. The new kings of
Italy made Verona their residence, the Counts of San Boni-
facio governing the city.
But the citizens grew wealthy and powerful, and at the
opening of the twelfth century made Verona a commune.
When she joined the Lombard League, the factions of Guelphs
and Ghibellines sprang into being, bringing the usual local
disturbances with them. When death came to the Ghibelline,
Ezzelino da Romano, lord of Verona through a long period of
years in the thirteenth century, the Great Council of the city
elected Mastino della Scala as podestd. He succeeded in
making the rule of Verona an heirloom in his family, a coveted
possession which was to last until 1387. During this period
of a century and a quarter, the Scala family counted among
their number warriors, patrons of art, wealthy princes, and
at least two fratricides. The most famous of the Scala name
are Can Grande I., the protector of Dante who dedi-
cated the Paradiso to him, the patron of Petrarch, and the
conqueror of many a town in Venetia; Mastino II., the
conqueror of Brescia, the purchaser of Parma and Lucca,
next to the King of France the richest man in Europe, a prince
who fought and, of course, lost the struggle against the com-
bined force of Florence, Venice, the Visconti, the Gonzaga
and the Este; and Can Signorio, who built beautiful palaces
and bridged the Adige, and brought drinking water to the city,
an estimable prince if he had no brother's blood upon his
hands.
The Scaliger rule came to a close in October, 1387, after
Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan had exhausted Verona's
power of resistance. In 1404 Guglielmo, grandson of Mastino
II., led the people against the Milanese and drove them
out, but he died soon after; and, in 1405, when Gian was
dead, Venice became mistress of Verona. With the exception
of the years between 1490 and 1517, when the Emperor Maxi-
502 IN FAIR VERONA [July,
milian I. was in possession of the town, Verona was a lovely
city of the Venetian Republic until Napoleon came down, as
Charlemagne had done, and in 1797 ended the sway of the
queen of the Adriatic. Austria came next, but she, too, re-
turned home in 1866, when Verona, her southern fortress-city,
became the northern stronghold of the Italian king.
When Verona was a part of the civilization of the Roman
world, she had a Forum that served her as that great space
near the Golden Milestone ministered to the citizens of the
Tiber City. The Forum still remains, though the empire that
built it is dead, and to no other place should the visitor to
Verona make his initial visit. He will find it today a great
fruit and vegetable market, picturesque as any he may find in
Italy. The Piazza delle Erbe it is called, a busy centre of life
now, as it was nineteen hundred years ago, as it continued to
be through the long centuries of the Middle Ages.
When you first come in sight of the Piazza, you are be-
wildered by the multiple array of white umbrellas protecting
the market women's stalls from the sun, and you will find an
intense interest in the color and glow of the modern pag-
eantry. But you will cease to wonder after a little, and will
look about for the things of old. In the centre of the square
you will see a fountain originally of the time of Berengarius I.
of the tenth century, but rebuilt by Can Signorio in the four-
teenth century. Close beside stands the Tribuna, where the
judgments were announced to the people in the days of the
Scaligers and after. At the north side of the Piazza rises a
marble column bearing today a lion of St. Mark, as it did
when the Venetian Republic ruled beneficently over the land
of Verona. The home of Alberto delta Scala is here, the Casa
Mazzanti, as well as the Casa dei Mercanti, which he began,
and many another old house and palace; and there is the
Lamberti tower, and the Torre del Gardello, which once
boasted the first clock seen in Verona.
From the life and color of the Piazza delle Erbe to the
peace of the Piazza dei Signori is only a step. Dante's statue
presides over the enclosure, to commemorate his stay in Ver-
ona when he was banished from Florence; and on every side
beautiful buildings of mediaeval days stand together, com-
muning on proud centuries that have gone to dust with the
Scaligers that saw them. The Palazzo delle Ragione, built
1922.] IN FAIR VERONA 503
in 1183 for the law courts, has a courtyard fair to look upon
and a Gothic staircase that is the pride of the city. Beside a
brick campanile, which rises in a magnificence of three hun-
dred feet, stands the Tribunale, and across the way old pal-
aces of the Scaligers. On the north side is the ancient town
hall, the Palazzo del Consiglio, better known as the Loggia,
which Fra Gioconda, it is thought, built for the Venetian
government in the late fifteenth century. It is truly of won-
derful grace and loveliness, and is an exceptional specimen of
Italian Renaissance architecture. Upon the door, Girolamo
Gampagna has worked a bronze Annunciation, and above, the
Venetians have left their tribute to Verona, **Pro summa fide
summus amor, MDXCIL'* The busts of famed Veronese citi-
zens are ranged in niches along the facade, to tell the passerby
that the city is not forgetful.
An arched passage invites the wanderer to explore be-
yond, and he will follow the path to the church of Santa
Maria Antica. It is the Sainte Chapelle of Verona, the court
chapel of the Scaligers, nine hundred years old. One may
not imagine what prayers and what hopes have been breathed
in this chapel to the One Eternal Heart, for that is enshrouded
by the veil that lifts not. But outside the chapel there is
stimulus a plenty for the fancy, in those great reminders of
the great family, the magnificent Gothic tombs of the Scaligers.
Most noted among the Scala family was Can Grande,
who was lord of Verona between 1311 and 1329; it is
with a certain propriety that his sarcophagus rests in an
exalted position over the entrance of the church. On the
tomb, surrounded by bas-reliefs of the chief events of his life,
the prince lies in sculptured rest, his sword at peace by his
side; above, surmounting the pinnacle of an arched canopy,
he rides, a marble knight on a marble horse, seeking the
battles and the victories in a charge silent and motionless,
but lacking not the sweep and dash and irresistible confidence
of the life of fire and blood.
There is a tiny graveyard beside the church, enclosed
with an exquisite grille of wrought iron, which displays fre-
quently the ladder device of the Scala family. In this dimin-
utive Gampo Santo lie other members of the Scaligeri, with
noble sarcophagi guarding their dust, and many a sculptured
virtue and saint pleading for peace and love and salvation.
504 IN FAIR VERONA [July,
Mastino I., Alberto, Mastino II., Can Signorio, whose tomb by
Bonino da Campione is finest of all — the bones of these keep
watch with Can Grande's ashes, waiting for the Doomsday
Voice. It is quiet enough now in the little graveyard, uncom-
monly peaceful, indeed, for those who made such a stir in
the world hundreds of years ago. Would one wonder if, in
the solemn stillness of some dark Verona night, unheard
whisperings tremble along the trellis work, and unseen figures
walk together on the unpaved paths that only spirits know?
You will leave the tombs of the dead at last, and seek the
living welcome of the Duomo. On your way, you will visit
the exquisite Gothic church of Sant' Anastasia, which the Do-
minicans built in the thirteenth century. Caroto, Liberale da
Verona, Francesco Morone, and other native painters have
left their handiwork within the spacious interior; outside and
within, it is a beautiful edifice, a harmony of delicate blend-
ings of color and material. Beside the church, above a gate-
way, is the tomb of Can Grande's friend, Guglielmo da Castel-
barco, a monument of wonderful beauty.
A little way, and the fair outlines of the Duomo disclose
themselves. A work of the twelfth and fourteenth centuries,
the present cathedral is the successor of older churches, and
occupies ground once sacred to Minerva's worship. It is an
imposing edifice, the portal, with its canopy resting on grif-
fins, being particularly magnificent. Noticeable among the
reliefs of the entrance are the figures of Roland and Oliver,
the paladins of Charlemagne.
What first impresses the visitor to the interior is the
beauty of the eight red Verona pillars which support the
vaulting of the nave. And then he will seek out the charms
of Sanmicheli's superb Renaissance screen of marble, and
the bronze crucifix by Gian Battista da Verona; he will pause
in aesthetic contemplation over the Gothic loveliness of the
tomb known as Sant' Agata's; he will admire the "Adoration"
of Liberale; and he will spare more than a moment for the
fair glory of Titian's "Assumption." The Baptistery, with its
twelfth century font, and the cloisters still are in waiting, as
well as the rare palimpsests of the Biblioteca Capitolare.
Not far from the Duomo the Adige flows tumultuously
around a great bend. The oldest bridge in the city, the Ponte
Pietra, will take you across to the church of San Stef ano, once
1922.] IN FAIR VERONA 505
Verona's cathedral, a little journey from the ancient Roman
theatre. The edifice is a reconstructed sixth century build-
ing, the original resting place of many bishops and martyrs.
The Via Sant' Alessio will carry you now to the church of
San Georgio in Braida, where Sanmicheli, that greatest of
Veronese architects, again shows his skill. Within the
church are a number of very fine paintings. Chief among
them are the "Madonna and Saints" of Girolamo dai Libri, the
"Madonna in Clouds" of Moretto, and the "Martyrdom of St.
George" of Paolo Veronese. It is more than a picture gal-
lery; the church is full of that sweet compelling atmosphere
that bids you linger and rest and pray.
There is one more great church for you to see in Verona,
but it is some distance from San Georgio's. Your way thither
will lead you past much that is best in the city. Through the
promenades you fare, and across the river by the Ponte Gari-
baldi, to the Lung' Adige Panvinio. A turn leftward will
disclose the thirteenth century Gothic church of Santa Eu-
femia, where the cloisters designed by Sanmicheli, and
Moretto's "Madonna and Child," may make you pause. The
Corso Porta Borsari lies beyond, at the western end of which
the Porta de' Borsari, a Roman gate of the year 265, invites
you. Here the Corso Cavour begins its beautiful avenue of
palaces, some of them of Sanmicheli's planning. A church
or two are worth your noting, and all the steady stream of
busy people will tell you that this is a street of modern days.
At the end of the avenue the mighty fortress of the Castel
Vecchio, a Scaliger stronghold, looms up, a stern, bulky, mag-
nificent barracks now, with lofty towers speaking across to
the forked battlements of the grand bridge over the river.
The Rigaste San Zeno leads you on, and presently you reach
your destination, the church of San Zeno Maggiore, in the
peace and solitude of the city's edge.
There is no edifice in Verona that affords so much interest
as the church of San Zeno Maggiore, just as there is none in
north Italy that surpasses this as an achievement in Roman-
esque architecture. While, indeed, a church stood on this
site in the ninth century, the present structure, with its de-
tached brick and marble campanile, is a work of the twelfth,
and has passed through a nineteenth century restoration. A
red brick church, it stands, with a wonderful facade of red
506 IN FAIR VERONA [July,
and white and yellow marble. The exquisite portal rests on
columns supported by marble lions. One can gaze for hours
at a time studying the twelfth century sculptured figures that
adorn it. Bronze reliefs on the old doors call to mind the
life of San Zeno, the eighth bishop of Verona, a martyr of the
fourth century; above, the twelve months, with the duties
they bring, are plain to see; Theodoric rides in relief in pur-
suit of a stag, which leads him to the devil; and the sacred
story is told in varied scenes from the Scriptures Old and
New.
From the entrance a flight of thirteen steps lead down-
ward to the nave. The vast interior is a harmony of well-
proportioned space. It contains many interesting objects.
The visitor will see, among other things, an antique vase of
porphyry nine feet in diameter, an old font, Romanesque
statues of Christ and the Apostles on the choir screen, and
many a faded fresco telling sweet tales of former splendor.
The masterpiece, "Madonna and Saints," announces Man-
tegna's claim to rare merit; a painted statue of San Zeno, and
his simple tomb in the crypt remind everyone that this is
his church; and the fair loveliness of the old Benedictine
cloisters beg the grace of a tender sigh.
As you go away from the broad piazza, weary and happy
at once, you have no thoughts but of rest and shadowy win-
dows; but for all that you will wish to take the best way
home. You will drive along the road that leads by the old
Franciscan church of San Bernardino, where the Renaissance
perfection of Sanmicheli's Cappella Pellegrini should tempt
you, tired as you are, to alight and tarry; and then your way
lies up the Corso Cavour, and on to your Verona inn.
There are two centres of life in Verona. The Piazza
delle Erbe has a rival in the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, or
Piazza Bra, the old name by which it is still known. The
main interest here, for the stranger to the city, rests in the old
Roman amphitheatre that rises at the eastern side of the
Piazza, a brown, grim, massive pile. Since the days of Dio-
cletian, this arena has stood, witnessing the centuries pass
slowly, one by one, and outlasting their whips and scorns
even to this day. Many a time, have the old stones seen
twenty thousand people cheer a blood-reddened gladiator,
who had felled with brute strength a brute beast less strong;
1922.] IN FAIR VERONA 507
they have watched Christian martyrs dragged here for sacri-
fice; they have looked upon tournaments of the Middle Ages
and jousts of the Renaissance; Pius VI. they saw when he
gave benediction to an assembled multitude; and they re-
membered the great Napoleon who graced the arena at the
games he gave over a hundred years ago.
You will derive much pleasure in reconstructing past civ-
ilizations as you walk about this vast Verona Colosseum. It
will be easy for your mind's eye to follow each age dissolving
imperceptibly into its successor, merging itself and its heritage
into the ever-present, ever-passing time. And when you cross
the Piazza, and go away, you will tell yourself, as you have
so often told yourself in Italy, that the Roman empire is not
yet dead, nor will it wholly die until its monuments crumble
to the dust.
There is a broad way leading from the Piazza Bra, the
Corso Vittorio Emanuele, and it takes you to the Porta Nuova,
whence you may drive to the Porta del Palio. These gates are
objects of wonderful beauty in design and workmanship, but
the hand of Sanmicheli could make them nothing else.
Who will wish to leave Verona without seeing Juliet's
tomb? No one, to be sure — but everyone does. The sar-
cophagus shown as that of the heroine of Shakespeare's play,
is itself a play on a poor visitor's fancy, but as he probably is
aware of that fact, little harm is done him. Perhaps, the old
mediaeval house in the Via Cappello, supposed to be that of
the Capulets, may have been the scene of her maiden medi-
tations, and one may allow oneself the privilege of faith.
Verona's picture gallery and archaeological collections are
to be found in the Palazzo Lavezzola-Pompei, which lies
across the Adige. The Ponte delle Navi takes you there, and
generously gives you a fine vantage point from which to view
the Gothic beauty of the church of San Fermo Maggiori, which
you are leaving behind. In the gallery, there is much to see,
if you would give a careful study to the Veronese school of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It will repay you also
to visit two churches on this side of the river, that of Santi
Nazzaro e Celso and the church of Santa Maria in Organo.
Sanmicheli was the architect for each, and Fra Giovanni da
Verona built the campanile of the latter church. Both
churches are adorned with beautiful pictures.
508 IN FAIR VERONA [July,
But there is something else on this side of the stream that
is more lovely than any picture in Verona — the Giardino
Giusti. No one who comes to Verona can forget those tall,
straight, green-clad, ancient cypress trees, that stand so still
and solemn as they look over the city's life. For four hun-
dred years some of these trees have watched the streets grow
fair with palaces, and castles and churches wake into being.
They themselves are wondrously beauteous types of nature's
architecture, living, growing columns, yearning toward the
clouds. They lead the promenade to the terraces on high,
and thither you will go to see Verona as the cypress trees can
view her. How clearly each campanile lines itself against
the blue sky; how brilliantly every globing dome is glistening,
how roseately gleams every palace roof, how wonderful the
whole marble city proclaims herself. The old Gastello San
Pietro looms clear over yonder where Theodoric once guarded
his city, where Lombard kings waxed proud, where the Third
Army Corps of the Italian army watched the passes of the
Alps; the battlemented walls, five-strong, reveal themselves
encircling the town; and you can see the bridges, here and
there, spanning the Adige, which glides in sinuous swiftness
through the city, a Grand Canal through a little Venice.
A little Venice! Go at night to the Piazza Bra, and then
you will recall the nights you have left behind you on the
Piazza before St. Mark's. Here are the cafes, and the chairs
in front, and the tables; the people are thronging in from the
Via Nuova and promenading across the pavement; the band
is playing all joyously; the night is glad, and the care of the
day is a thing forgotten. Then do you, stranger you, sit here,
watching the gayety of Verona. The huge gray mass of the
Arena rises solemnly between you and a fair patch of star-
lit sky, and makes you wonder what the old Roman workers
would say if they could come back and see their walls still
here. The great arches, where the wares of the little shops
are exchanged for centessimi by day, seem quiet enough now,
and you know that within the walls there is flitting about the
Arena the spirit of Dietrich of Bern, come back to watch the
city that was his. And then, as some handsome, confident
Veronese youth walks by, you think of that son of the Mon-
tecchi, who would go to the enemy's banquet sans ceremonie;
and you think, too, of that faithful Mercutio that Tybalt
1922.] *'WHEN ISRAEL OUT OF EGYPT CAME" 509
ended. Then out the dreams of fancy comes that pale, fak
face of the little Juliet sleeping in the seeming death. "Ah,
dear Juliet, why art thou yet so fair" — the old loved words
still echo in your heart, as the crowds laugh and talk and
pass you by, little caring for your visions.
So the night wears on ; the moon travels slowly across the
sky, and the clouds are trailing its brilliance in an unending
procession of white. Soon the music ceases, and the throngs
dwindle away to seek the peace of home. The Municipio
looks sadly upon the emptiness, the tower of the mediaeval
gateway is a thing forlorn, the Gran Guardia Vecchia thinks
of the men and women it saw three hundred years ago. You
are alone with your echoing footsteps, and, as you turn home-
ward, you are happy, for you are in love with old Verona
and the beauty of her face; in love with the dreams of beauty
her name evokes, that visioned something that is delicate and
fragile and precious, like the charm of a melting rainbow or
the memory of a parting smile.
"WHEN ISRAEL OUT OF EGYPT CAME."
BY HELEN PARRY EDEN.
"Et creabit Dominus super omnem locum montis Sion et ubi invo-
catus est, nubem per diem, et fumum et splendorem ignis flammantis
in node, super omnem enim gloriam protectio." — Isaias iv. 5.
When Israel out of Egypt came
Along a desert way,
God went before to give them light,
His grace was as a fire by night
And as a cloud by day.
So Blessed Jesus, Thou shalt be,'
To all who call Thy name,
A shade by day, a light by night,
A covert and a flame.
Without Thy help how faint I stay
Captive in Egypt, tenuit me
Defectio.
510 *'WHEN ISRAEL OUT OF EGYPT CAME'* [July,
O lead me forth, Immortal Lamb,
For mine Thou art, as Thine I am.
Et super omnem gloriam
Protectio,
When Israel out of Egypt came
Along a weary track.
King Pharaoh's chase was keen and hot,
With horse and man and chariot.
To bring his bondsmen back.
So, O my spirit, thou shalt see.
When thou shalt turn from ill,
A world of evils in thy wake
To make thee serve them still.
And I who am so faint a prey.
How shall I shun them? Tenuit me
Defectio.
Take then my part, Victorious Lamb,
For mine Thou art, as Thine I am.
Et super omnem gloriam
Protectio.
When Israel out of Egypt came.
Through the Red Sea, alone.
King Pharaoh and his fatal host
Sank like a heavy stone.
So in the Passion of my Lord
If all my guilt is drowned,
My unacquainted feet shall tread
His city's golden ground;
Where none shall faint or fall away
But live secure, reliquit me
Defectio.
Whose Sun and Moon are Christ the Lamb,
Et super omnem gloriam
Protectio.
A CATHOLIC OUTPOST.
BY CHARLES /PHILLIPS.
*Nor can that endure which is not based on love."
N their pursuit of the Bolsheviks, after the first
Red retreat in the early spring of 1919, the Pol-
ish armies were able to go forward at such a pace
through the endless miles of marsh and forest
which lie to the north and east of Lwow — the
districts of Polesia and Lithuania — that even their own lead-
ers marveled. No foreign army had ever before advanced
through this militarily-impossible country without fatal de-
lays. Napoleon's disaster in 1812 had one of its chief sources
in the impenetrability of these woods and swamps. In the
World War, Russia had failed here, and Germany had halted.
But the Pole strode on. Roads and "corduroys" were
mended for them, bridges replaced; railways (destroyed by
the Bolos to cut off their pursuers) rebuilt in a few days by
volunteer bands of peasants. What was the reason?
The reason dated back five hundred years to the Treaty
of Horodlo, signed in 1413, when Poland and Lithuania
formed their unique union, embracing in its pact all of these
widespreading eastern territories, and sealed it with those
pregnant words: "Nor can that endure which is not based
on love." This union has endured for over five centuries.
Nothing except good-will and popular sympathy could have
made possible the penetration of Polesia by the Polish troops,
whom the natives hailed as liberators, offering them every
assistance in their advance towards Vilna and the countries of
the north, to clear the land of the Red Russian hordes. In
these districts neither Tsarist nor German nor Bolshevik
authority could ever have taken root. They have always re-
mained Poland to the natives. Old peasants in times past
would dismiss talk of anything otherwise with a laugh; many
persisted for years before the War in still paying their taxes,
as their forefathers had, "to the Polish King;" however, the
tax collectors relished it. One old huntsman was found who
512 A CATHOLIC OUTPOST [July,
had never heard of the partitions nor of the Napoleonic wars!
In their odd dress and shoes of birch bark, these Polesian
peasants are like figures out of an old story-book.
This country, lying between Lwow and Vilna, between
the rich plains of the Ukraine and the hills and forests of
Lithuania, forms one of the great borderlands of Poland, and
is one of the few original countries left in Europe. It is a
land of forests — its name, Polesia, means "along the forests"
(po — along; las — forest) — a land of great marshes, of in-
numerable small lakes and countless little streams. It is a
hunter's paradise, where otter and beaver still are trapped,
where wild deer abound, surpassing the dream of Nimrod;
the bear and the antlered elk, and even the almost extinct
white bison, of which only a few remain and which other-
wise have vanished from the earth, still haunt the unexplored
fastnesses. The famous forest of Bialowiez, the greatest for-
est in Europe, stretching from Brest Litovsk to Bialystok and
far beyond, was formerly the favorite hunting ground of the
Russian Tsar.
Through these forests thousands and tens of thousands
of Poland's four million refugees fled when the Russians re-
treated in 1916. Many of them went no further, but died in
the woods, after keeping body and soul together for weeks on
the food of grass and roots and bark. The place is full of
wayside graves.
Besides its wilderness of woods, swamps and lakes, Polesia
possesses a vast area of drained and arable soil, estimated at
some five million acres; and the possibilities of its further
reclamation and development, I should judge, are practically
unlimited. In the eighteenth century the Polish Government
began to organize road and water communication through
this part of the country, but the Russian partition put an end
to development. Two important waterways, however, were
organized, the Royal Canal and the Oginski Canal, joining the
Vistula and the Dnieper — the Baltic and the Black Sea.
We saw a good many cattle grazing here. The stock
raiser would find this a paradise, so rich is the natural pas-
turage. The timber wealth also of these vast resinous forest
tracts is almost untouched, save for the depredations of the
Germans, who cut over three per cent, of the Bialowiez.
Some enterprising Poles developed tar, pitch and charcoal
1922.] A CATHOLIC OUTPOST 513
industries here, in the past, to a certain extent; but under
the new Republic the forests are being all conserved to pre-
pare for a modern scheme of reafforestation.
We journey due north through the Lithuanian country,
passing many scenes which excite romantic fancy. We are
now possibly iiear the great trade route of ancient times
where Greek and Roman merchants traveled toward the Bal-
tic in search of amber. Then Vilna at last, set on picturesque
hills cut by the Vilja River, surrounded by pine forests, or-
chards and farms; in the springtime fairly buried under a
cloud of leafy verdure.
The quaint old domed and turreted city invites you at the
first sight of its ancient walls. Some of Vilna's historic walls
do still remain, dating from the days when Christopher Co-
lumbus discovered us; but these walls, after all, are "new,"
being the last ones built, after no one knows how many pre-
vious centuries of fortification. You enter the town by the
Ostrobrama, that is, by the Gate of the Virgin, with its double
device of heraldry over it, the White Eagle of Poland and the
Horseman of Lithuania. And, instantly, you note a curious
fact: that everyone passing under this high arched portal
bares his head as he goes; even Jews, marked in the throng
by their long black halats, remove their little round caps. A
crowded street, narrow and crooked, faces you beyond the
gate; and in it you see men and women kneeling on the side-
walk in prayer. I have seen them so, even in the depth of
winter, the snow ankle deep, oblivious to all passersby. Im-
pelled by the force about you, you, too, find that you have
removed your cap, though you may not yet know why. Then
turning, as you pass the gate, you see over the arch a chapel,
behind the glass doors of which stands an altar with many
votive lights and offerings and a great curtained picture at
the back.
There are two famous shrines in Poland, Chenstohova
(Czestochowa), near Krakow, and the Ostrobrama here in
Vilna. If by good chance you happen to pass Ostrobrama at
the proper hour, you will find the curtain of the shrine raised,
disclosing a very old, much discolored picture of the Blessed
Virgin, done in the Byzantine manner, painted on wood, but
entirely covered, excepting the face and hands, with silver
and gold. It is in the manner of what the Russians call an
VOL. cxv. 33
514 A CATHOLIC OUTPOST [July,
icon, a form of sacred art highly developed and very popular
in the Eastern countries.
The Ostrobrama was erected in 1671, but the picture, said
to have come originally from Italy, and long held miraculous
by the devotional, is thought to date about a century earlier.
Previous to the building of the chapel the picture hung out-
side the walls, above the gate, where the Eagle and the Horse-
man now proclaim the union of Poland and Lithuania.
If it be blossom time when you enter Vilna, with the pear
orchards, the cherries and the apples one drift of bloom; if it
be Easter, let us say, then you will hear a story told wherever
you go in the town that will make you enjoy and understand
Vilna and its people. It is the story of the Easter of 1919,
of the liberation of the city from the Bolsheviks, and of the
remarkable civic struggle the citizens of Vilna made for their
freedom during the Soviet occupation. It was a battle of the
Idea against brute force and terrorism, of old-fashioned Cath-
olic faith against the new paganism of the Soviets.
I heard the story from the Princess Anastasia of Georgia.
I could have gone to no more interesting or authentic source;
for this remarkable lady was one of the leaders in Vilna's
anti-Bolshevik fight. Her black eyes, her strong face, flashed
with a hundred emotions as she recounted the tale; and when
she came to her own dramatic adventures, there was a first-
hand thrill to it all which could not be communicated in the
written word. How she was thrown into prison, lying in a
crowded, filthy cell among so many others that there was
hardly room to breathe, sleeping on the floor or the table, half
starved and tortured with vermin; how, on Easter Saturday,
after ten weeks of this, they heard shooting in the town, and
the word began to pass through the prison that the Poles were
coming; how, at last, on Easter morning, the alarm did break,
with the Bolos, seen through the window of the cell, flying
in panic: the noise of artillery, the rattle of machine guns all
that day, all that night; then, on Easter Monday, the sudden
ceasing of all sound, all commotion and, at last, the cry,
"The Poles are here!" — with the prisoners falling on their
knees, weeping, praying, raising their voices in a loud joyous
Easter hymn half broken with happy sobs; the sudden burst-
ing open of the door; a young Polish officer, blackened beyond
recognition with smoke and blood and unshaven beard, cry-
1922.] A CATHOLIC OUTPOST 515
ing out in a familiar voice: "Is it you?"— and the Princess
swooning (the first time in all her life that she fainted) into
the arms of her adopted son whom she had not seen for two
years, and whom she supposed was dead : that is a story that
never could be told more than once as I heard it.
Yet this is only the ending (or at any rate, the middle)
of the real story of Vilna's fight with the Bolsheviks. That
actually begins three months earlier in February, 1919.
When the Bolsheviks first took Vilna, January 6, 1919,
following the withdrawal of the Germans (who did much more
in those days of fateful change than merely leave the back
door of Poland open when they pulled out), there was in
the city an army chaplain, Captain Muckerman, who had
served with the Polish conscripts in the German forces. This
man had been in Vilna ever since the Germans came three
years before; and he had so won the hearts of the Vilna people,
and had been so won by them — especially by the members of
St. Kasimir's Church, mostly workingmen — that he had stayed
on after the Bolshevik invasion.
Chaplain Muckerman was a Jesuit, a learned man, with
a special leaning toward social welfare work and the study
of economics. In the coming of the Bolos to Vilna, Father
Muckerman saw a rare chance to put some of its own ideas
of social reform into operation to counteract the heathen
communism of the Reds.
On the morning of January 11th, the sixth day of
the Bolshevik occupation, Vilna appeared literally plastered
with flaming red posters, the reddest of Moscow red,
summoning the workmen of the town to a public meeting in
St. Kasimir's Church. Even the walls and doors of the
church itself were covered with these flaring proclamations,
and, as the Princess Anastasia remarked in telling the story,
"the people were very displeased with that." "What next?"
they began to complain, beholding even their churches dis-
figured by what they supposed were "Trotzky's banners."
Some two thousand of them, however, attended the meeting,
curious and not in the best of temper. To their astonishment,
they found Father Muckerman in charge.
The result of that meeting was the organization of a pop-
ular workingmen's league, which grew so rapidly that within
one week it had eleven thousand members. Father Mucker-
516 A CATHOLIC OUTPOST [July,
man merely launched it; the leadership he at once placed in
the hands of the men themselves. From the first night, when
he made all who had anything to say get up into the pulpit
and say it, the league developed the workmen's own initiative.
"Bolshevism is strong," the Chaplain told them. "But it is
strong because it is organized. The only way to fight it is by
counter organization. Christian workmen, get together! Or-
ganize!"
They organized. They at once took over the former
Jesuits' school building, established a cooperative bank, a
bakery, a laundry, a school for little ones, a school for girls
and one for boys of fourteen and fifteen — the latter with a
separate Junior League of their own, holding their own meet-
ings and carrying on their own autonomous organization.
A kitchen was opened, serving seven hundred meals a day.
Bread was furnished at cost. A little farm was purchased
outside the city, with horses, pigs, goats, hens, and cows
to supply fresh milk for babies. A complete self-supporting
organization was established and in full operation within the
space of a few weeks.
The Bolshevik authorities were furious at this bold
snatching of power and prestige out of their hands. But they
could do nothing. Father Muckerman and his Vilna work-
men, not knowing fear, faced the Soviet Commissars full front,
not with explanations or apologies, but with demands. They
were brazen. They forced the Bolsheviks to give them light,
heat and other necessary concessions to carry on their estab-
lishment. The Vilna League was a workmen's league, an
actual soviet, and the Soviets dared not refuse. At first, they
thought to evade by making restrictions; but the League met
them at every turn and disarmed them, not with a defiance,
but with acquiescence. The name "Christian Workingmen"
could not be permitted. "Very well." Off came "Christian."
"St. Kasimir's— that is not allowed." "All right." "St. Kas-
imir" went the way of the Christians. The wise Vilnovians
freely let all unessential points go by the board. They were
out for bigger game than names. The Reds were balked at
every step.
But they were determined to put a stop to it. Nothing
is more infuriating than passive resistance. So, one day, they
came to Father Muckerman and informed him that he was
1922.] A CATHOLIC OUTPOST 517
to be transported; that he was a spy. "But if I'm a spy you
must not transport me. You must arrest me, court-martial me
and shoot me. I demand to be arrested and tried." The
Reds went away to talk it over.
That afternoon the Chaplain called a mass meeting to
explain the situation to the people, and to prepare them for
the arrest which now seemed to him inevitable. In fact, he
had determined to give himself up rather than to expose the
lives of his companions. Large crowds attended this meeting;
and in the midst of it the Bolsheviks, having come to a deci-
sion, suddenly drew up a regiment around the church, en-
circling it with a cordon of machine guns, and completely
surrounding the crowd. And then a curious thing happened.
Father Muckerman announced his intention of surrendering;
and his own people made him prisoner. They would not give
him up nor let him give himself up. They held him there in
the church, one man against five thousand of them, packed
into the building and gathered in the plaza. They refused
repeatedly to let him out, and they refused to disperse. "If
they want him, just let them try to take him!"
Parleys began. Conferences were held between League
delegates and Red officials, but no agreement could be reached.
The Bolshevik Commissars themselves were afraid to appear
before the crowd. "Do you want us to be mobbed?" they
asked the League representatives when the latter visited the
Soviet headquarters. The Princess Anastasia was one of the
League negotiators, and on the evening of the second day of
the "siege," she was arrested and jailed. Then the Reds cut
the electric wires lighting the church, leaving the crowd in
pitch darkness. But the workmen secured candles and still
stood their ground. For three days the people stayed there,
eating what food the League's kitchens could supply, praying,
singing hymns in great lusty choruses which challenged and
enraged the Bolsheviks. Every member of the League re-
ceived Holy Communion. They would do anything and every-
thing Father Muckerman suggested, except let him go. When-
ever he began to argue about that, they respectfully shut
him up.
At last, however, about five o'clock on the morning of
February 12th — Lincoln's birthday in America — the Reds
began to open fire on the church. At that, the Chaplain, put-
518 A CATHOLIC OUTPOST [July,
ting his people under a spiritual obedience, insisted on being
taken. "There shall be no bloodshed," he declared. And
the workmen at last acquiesced. "You may arrest him and
try him," they told the Bolsheviks, "but there's to be no pack-
ing him off in the night and all that."
The Bolos agreed. But, Bolshevik-like, within twenty-
four hours they had broken their word and had shipped
Father Muckerman to Minsk. At Minsk he was promptly sen-
tenced to be shot. But the Vilnovians followed him, and they
spread the fame of their "Christian Soviet" so effectively
abroad in the Minsk neighborhood that this town also rose up
and championed the priest. From there the Reds hustled him
to Smolensk; but they kicked him so badly that he was
seriously injured and fell ill. They were still afraid to shoot
him, so he was sent to the hospital. Here he was kept for
nine months; and here again he very nearly started another
"Christian Bolshevik" revolution among the Reds. At last,
they let him go. He was too troublesome a customer for them,
with his popular and practical ideas of workingmen's freedom
and human rights.
Vilna's "Christian Soviet" still flourishes. When I was
there last, in the spring of 1920, it had twenty thousand mem-
bers and was carrying on a more extensive work than ever,
enlarging its school and its cooperative store and adding a
harness shop to its activities. With generous supplies fur-
nished through the American Red Cross, the League was able
to feed and clothe thousands of needy instead of hundreds.
A shoe shop had also been opened, and here I saw huge
heaps of discarded old American shoes, of every imaginable
size, style and degree of depravity, being remade into good
stout footgear for the children and laborers of Vilna.
The Princess who told me this remarkable story was not
herself a Pole, but a Georgian, from the ancient Kingdom of
Georgia in the Caucasus. A refugee since the Bolshevik up-
heaval in Russia, she had thrown in her lot with the Poles,
and, as she spoke a remarkably fluent English and possessed
a high literary culture, she had now become professor of
English in the Vilna University.
To tell the story of Vilna and its University, we must go
back once more to the Treaty of Horodlo, with its historic
clause of union "based on love;" back even to pagan times,
1922.] A CATHOLIC OUTPOST
519
when Lithuania was still a land of heathens, adoring strange
gods. Traces of those unenlightened times are still to be
found in remote Lithuanian villages; but the country has been
for centuries Christian in faith and PoHsh in culture, the
terms being synonymous in this part of the world.
In the heart of Vilna, topping a steep hill (now the centre
of handsome public gardens) stands Gedymin's Tower, the
remains of the fortress and castle of Gedymin, the last pagan
ruler of Lithuania, and the first Lithuanian chieftain to seek a
union with Poland, in order to fight off the incursions of the
Teutons coming in from the North and West. At the foot of
this hill stands the beautiful Cathedral of St. Stanislaus, with
its stately campanile set apart; the Cathedral, itself an impos-
ing edifice built in the classic style of a Greek temple, with a
Doric portico, the coloring of the whole a creamy white, rich
against the green background of the hill.
Founded in 1387, this ancient Cathedral occupies the exact
site of the pagan sanctuary of Perkunas, the Lithuanian god
of light. Thus, if we stand at Gedymin's Tower, looking out
over the city, with the Cathedral of St. Stanislaus below us,
we can review, as it were, by the corporal eye, the history of
Vilna from its pagan days to its present state, from the time
that it was a little fortified town containing a few hundred
people, to its twentieth century population of tens of thou-
sands, its modern traffic and busy railway lines and factories.
If, by chance, an aeroplane whirrs overhead while you stand
there, then, indeed, the span seems long between other days
and this.
Invaded from the west by the always depredating Teu-
tons; harrassed on the east by the Muscovites, the moment
came when Lithuania's only safety lay in union with Poland.
That union was consummated in 1386, when Jadwiga of Kra-
kow, relinquishing her love romance with an Austrian Prince,
consented to marry Jagiello, Gedymin's son, and become Queen
of Lithuania as well as of her own Polish realm. From that
time, with Jagiello's conversion to Christianity, dates the rise
of Vilna as a capital and a centre of Western culture. All
Lithuania followed its Prince to baptism, and in the year
after his marriage he founded this Christian Cathedral which
rises below us at the foot of Gedymin's Hill, setting its found-
ations on the very spot where his ancestors from unremem-
520 A CATHOLIC OUTPOST [July,
bered time had worshipped their mythological deities. A few
years later, in 1413, he signed the Treaty of Horodio, "based
on love," which never has been abrogated and which remains
in effect to this day, despite even the long Russian occupation,
and the more recent German intriguing to the contrary. As
for the manner of the Russian's one hundred and fifty year
occupation of Vilna and Lithuania, it took its gesture from the
self-righteous declaration of the first Muscovite seizure, in
1656: "God gave Lithuania into the Tsar's hands, and the
Tsar must not return what God gave him to anyone!"
There is a famous "Silver Chapel" in the Vilna Cathedral,
a rich sanctuary of marbles and precious metals where the
sarcophagus of St. Kasimir is to be seen, and the tombs of eight
of the Kings and Queens of Poland. An interesting old Ma-
donna is here also, the gift of the Greek Emperor Palseologus.
Everything in sight speaks not only of Christianity, but of that
momentous change five hundred years ago, when Lithuania,
the last country in Europe to abandon paganism, accepted the
Latin faith and culture which Poland brought her. The
sacred fire of Perkunas is long extinguished. The sanctuary
lamp of the Holy Eucharist burns in its stead. Even Bolshe-
vism left no trace here of its brief but godless regime, not
daring to lay hand on these consecrated precincts; just as it
did not dare to keep on its cap when it passed the Ostrobrama.
The Soviet Commissars, Vilnovians will tell you, skirted clear
of the Virgin's Gate.
Jedwiga of Poland brought not only the Faith, but the
culture of the West, to this corner of the world. Schools de-
veloped rapidly. Within a little more than a century after
Horodio, the Polish educational system had progressed in Lith-
uania to such an extent that the foundation of a university
was demanded. In 1578 King Stefan Bathory, with the as-
sistance of the Jesuits, opened the University of Vilna, and a
new era of cultural development began, to continue uninter-
ruptedly for two hundred and fifty years, until the blind hate
of Russian despotism and the fear of the intellectual ascend-
ancy of the Pole put an end to it.
In 1830, following the Polish insurrection of that year.
Tsar Nicholas I. abolished the University. The closing of
schools was one of the favorite disciplines of the partitioners
of Poland whenever the Polish people dared to assert their
1922.] A CATHOLIC OUTPOST 521
national rights. Prussian and Russian alike knew well how
to touch the Pole to the quick. His appetite for education is
insatiable. But the first official act of the new Republic, fol-
lowing the liberation of Vilna on Easter, 1919, was the re-
opening of the old University. With its library of two hun-
dred and forty thousand volumes and its collection of ten
thousand priceless manuscripts, it is today one of the best
equipped seats of learning in Europe.
It was here that Father Hugo KoUontaj, one of Koscius-
zko's chief collaborators in the Revolution of 1794, worked
out those schemes which crystallized in the establishment of
the first national educational commission founded in Europe.
Lelewel, the father of Polish historians, whose ethnographical
maps created a new department in learning, studied at Vilna.
From Vilna also came the financier, Lubecki, who astounded
the diplomats at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 with his
mastery of economics. He was the founder of the Bank of
Poland, the "father of Polish industry."
To review the history of Vilna and of Lithuania is to
review five centuries of the progress of Polish culture. It is
a curious fact that more of the great and world-known names
among Polish leaders came from this district than from any
other part of the country. It was Lithuania that produced
Poland's greatest patriot, Kosciuszko, whose name at once
links this far-off land to America and seems to open the way
for those Americans who came in 1920 to repay in part our
debt to Poland — the Directors and Surgeons of the American
Red Cross who established at the Vilna University a great
hospital and school of modern war-surgery, and the scientists
of the Harvard Research Unit, who, under its auspices of the
League of Red Cross Societies, completed here the discovery
of the deadly typhus germ. The name of Mickiewicz, Po-
land's national poet, is inextricably woven into the story of
Vilna. It was at Vilna University that he began his long life
of patriotic apostleship, and it was from this university that
he was exiled by Russia, never to see his native forests again,
though he was to immortalize them in literature. Another of
Poland's chief poets, Krasinski, the prophetic author of The
Undivine Comedy, was the son of a Lithuanian mother, a
Radziwill. Kowalewski, a famous Orientalist, is still another
illustrious son of the Vilna school, a man whose life story in
522 A CATHOLIC OUTPOST [July,
a special manner sums up the Polish characteristics of tenacity
of purpose and common sense. He was an exile for thirty-
five years, but instead of repining in his devotion, he set about
to make life worth while as best he could in the Far East, to
which he had been banished, and became in time the first
authority of his day on Oriental languages and history. Un-
fortunately for scholarship, his entire collection of manu-
scripts and original documents was destroyed by the Russians,
when a bonfire was made of the contents of the Zamoyski
Palace in Warsaw in reprisal for the Polish uprising of 1863.
Other treasured relics, among them Chopin's piano and many
of his priceless letters to his mother, were burned in the
same heap.
The poet Slowacki, the statesman Czartoryski, the novel-
ist Kraszewski — the "Polish Dumas" he has been called, not
alone for the quality of his writings, but because he produced
six hundred and thirty volumes during his lifetime, not count-
ing journalistic writings — these are others of Vilna's honored
names, while the city's records in art and music reveal a civic
theatre opened as early as 1783, where the first opera of
Moniuszko, the composer of Halka, was produced in 1858.
Finally, in our own day, there is Sienkiewicz, whom we know
best as the author of Quo Vadis. And there is the Chief of
State of the Polish Republic at the present moment, the unique
soldier and statesman, Josef Pilsudski.
Vilna has been a storm centre always. Plundered by
Prussians, Swedes, Cossacks, Germans and Bolsheviks, it has
had the sort of history that makes or breaks a city's gener-
ations of men : either they go down or they stand. Vilna has
stood.
When the Germans lost in 1918, after hanging on as long
as they dared in these parts, they treacherously slipped the
keys of Vilna into the hand of their friend, Lenine. "We
sent Lenine into Russia," writes Ludendorf in his memoirs,
"to attempt the ruin of the Russian army. It was an ex-
tremely risky undertaking, but it succeeded beyond our great-
est expectations." (Assuredly, it did!) Then, in the spring
of 1919, as we have seen, the Poles liberated Vilna from the
Bolsheviks. In 1920 the Bolsheviks came again, this time
better equipped than ever with German officers, arms and
ammunition. Once more they were defeated by the Poles —
1922.] A CATHOLIC OUTPOST 523
but Vilna was not returned to Poland. Instead, it was claimed
by the Lithuanians, that is, by the "political" Lithuanians of
Kovno, a claim which was at once disputed by a small army
of Vilna Lithuanians and Poles, who seized the city under the
command of a Polish General, Zeligowski, and held it pend-
ing an agreement to be made between the Poles and the Lith-
uanian government of Kovno.
But who are the Lithuanians?
The Lithuanians are the racial descendants of those peo-
ple who, in Jagiello's day, signed the Treaty of Horodlo. That
Treaty, as I have said, still stands. But when the Germans
came into this great timber country, the forest wealth of which
it would be difficult to compute, she coveted it not only for
its untouched riches, but as a key to Baltic supremacy and a
corridor to Russia. She set about, therefore, to destroy that
union "based on love," which had existed for more than five
centuries, and sought to replace it by disunion, based on hate.
In other words, she began to play here in the north the game
of intrigue and quarrel-making that she had played in the
Ukraine among the Ruthenians, stirring up a "new national"
anti-Polish movement among the Lithuanian minorities.
The Lithuanians are not Slavs, and their mother tongue is
as different from Polish as Greek is from Latin. In all, there
are about 1,800,000 Lithuanians in their native land, with
some 800,000 immigrants scattered in different parts of the
world; the entire number of Lithuanians in existence being
thus hardly 3,000,000 at the very most. In the city of Vilna,
the old Lithuanian capital, with a population about 50,000,
there are not four thousand of the aboriginal people; in the
entire Vilna district, not seven thousand. Politically, these
few thousand are, according to the elections held in 1919, less
than negligible, either voting the Polish ticket as Poles or
abstaining altogether, no distinct Lithuanian vote being regis-
tered.
Where then, one asks, are the 1,800,000 Lithuanians noted
above as being in their native land? They are in the Kovno
district, east and north of Vilna, where Lithuania borders
on the East Prussian frontiers. This latter fact is signif-
icant.
At Kovno the Lithuanians have set up a government or
"Taryba" of their own. But this Kovno government has been
524 A CATHOLIC OUTPOST [July,
so markedly Prussian in its attitude and deliberations since
the period of German occupation, 1916-1918, that it has nevei
attained the degree of credit among neighboring peoples
which a legitimate and genuinely native Lithuanian govern-
ment would. To such a government or to the existence of a
separate Lithuania, the Poles seem to have no objection. On
the contrary, they would evidently welcome it as a solution
of the Lithuanian problem, realizing that such a government,
with the Lithuanian people really behind it, would be Poland's
natural ally. It is the palpable German nature of the Kovno
Taryba, as it has revealed itself so far, that must be question-
able, not alone to the Poles, but to all who are interested in
peace. A nation of less than 2,000,000 people, set in such an
important keystone situation as Lithuania's, must have a
strong ally to help preserve its integrity. Germany could not
be that ally: Lithuanian integrity would quickly disappear
undec German dominance.
But Germany, bent on converting the Baltic Sea into a
German lake, determined on domination in the East and an
open passageway into Russia, has clenched her fist tight on
Kovno, and will keep the strangle-hold as long as the Lith-
uanians or the Allies permit her; and the Lithuanians are not
strong enough to resist alone. Unsettlement in the Baltic
States is Germany's avowed policy, and her only means of
retaining what she calls "spheres of influence." "We need
Lithuania and the Ukraine as German outposts," Erzberger
wrote in April, 1919. "Poland must be weakened," he goes
on, "for if we succeed in keeping Poland down, it will mean
enormous gains for us. In the first place (i. e., with Poland
down), France's position on the continent in the long run is
untenable. Second, the way to Russia is then open. That is,
even to a blind man, Germany's future. We will undertake
the restoration of Russia, and in the possibility of such sup-
port we will be ready within ten or fifteen years to bring
France, without any difficulty, under our power. The march
toward Paris will be easier then than in 1914."
It was before this dictum of Erzberger's, however, that
Germany's Lithuanian scheme was disclosed. As early as
September, 1918, certain letters of Ludendorf, written to the
then German Foreign Minister, von Hintze, fell into the hands
of M. Korfanty, then a Polish delegate in the German Reich-
1922.] A CATHOLIC OUTPOST 525
stag. These letters, which revealed all, and more, than Erz-
berger said later, were read by Korfanty in the Reichstag in
November, 1918, but no newspaper publishing a word of them
was permitted to pass out of Germany.
So it is that Vilna, Catholic outpost, pioneer of Western
civilization in the Baltic hinterland, centre of Latin culture
and thriving modern commercial city, stands also as one of
the integral factors not alone in the pohtical problems of
the new Republic of Poland, but in the problems of the whole
new world which has been created by the War. In one sense,
it might be said that Vilna is the keystone to peace in Europe,
as well as the rock on which Poland's continued existence
rests. It is the outstanding point of direct contact between
Russia and Poland. That Russia, now in chaos, will rise again
all Poles believe. Will the new Russia be Poland's friend?
Or will she still be controlled, as she was for so many
years in the recent past, by Germany, whose efforts to hold
the Baltic continue unabated to this hour, and will never
cease?
Trade is the touchstone; and trade advantages would
point to a Polish-Russian entente. The more or less mutual
knowledge of the Polish and Russian tongues among the two
peoples, and their immediate contiguity along a frontier of
hundreds of miles, should be deciding factors in the problem.
Besides, Russia's bitter knowledge of the fruits of German
intrigue, the immediate cause of all her present ruin (the
military debacle, 1915-1917, engineered from Petrograd by
the German Sturmer; the Lenine-Trotzky disaster, 1917 to
date, planned and paid for by Germany) : all this terrible
experience may hold the Russia of tomorrow aloof from the
Teuton and incline her toward friendship with Poland. At
the same time, the general temper displayed by the people
of the two countries lends color to this possibihty; for the
Poles do not hate the Russians; and, outside of the old circle
of extreme reactionists, the Russians do not hate the Poles,
the Bolshevik politicians never having succeeded in rousing
any genuine anti-Polish feeling among the Russian masses.
Their attitude is well expressed in the words of the Russian
publicist, Marjkowsky, who, in speaking of the Polish Chief
of State, Pilsudski, declared: "He has no stones to throw at
Russia."
526 A CATHOLIC OUTPOST [July,
It all depends on who the leaders of the new Russia are
to be. There lies the world's mystery today. If they are
hostile to Poland; if German capital and German trade (al-
ready intrenched in Russia through the German-speaking
Jew) prove too strong a temptation, too attractive an aid to
Russian reconstruction, the Russians will not be slow in striv-
ing to regain the Polish dominions lost to them since 1915.
They will strike Vtlna first. The Polish-Russian boundary
treaties made between Warsaw and the Rolsheviks will mean
nothing then. There will be another war, which will inevit-
ably involve the whole of Europe; for France will be vitally
concerned.
Whatever the future, Vilna itself can never be anything
but Polish and Catholic, as she has been for over five hundred
years, and as she remained through more than a century of
Russian rule. Her sentiments went on record definitely as to
that in September, 1919, when the first election was held fol-
lowing the Rolshevik retreat, the city voting an overwhelming
majority for reunion with Poland. Even before that, in April,
1919, immediately after the Eastern liberation, a great mass
meeting of Vilna citizens sent a stirring message to Warsaw
proclaiming the town's allegiance to the Polish nation : "Vilna,
besprinkled with Polish blood, feels itself once more inti-
mately united to the great heart of Poland. It is because it
recognizes this unalterable union that it submits itself to the
will of the Polish Government and recognizes no other author-
ity as supreme. The heart of Vilna overflows with love and
gratitude, and turns toward Warsaw and the Vistula."
"Nor can that endure which is not based on love."
THE IMMUNE.
BY ANNETTE ESTY.
|OU'RE a hard-hearted girl, Melissa, unfeehng;
you couldn't any more really love anyone than
. . . than old Garner could!"
Tim's tall figure looked cool enough in white
outing shirt and flannels, but his handsome face,
under the short blond curls, was heated red from annoyance!
Two canoe paddles slanted across his shoulders and occupied
his hands. Before him, standing in the centre of the narrow
path of trampled brown earth that undulated over the roots
of the great elms, was little black-eyed Melissa holding up her
mouth to suggest that a kiss was balancing on its tempting
pucker.
Before her lover was quick enough to snatch the caress,
the teasing girl ran off laughing, down the path toward the
sunset, leaving Tim sputtering, foiled as usual.
But the reproach that the exasperated boy flung after
Melissa rounded out its vibrations until they reached the
ears of old Garner himself as he sat smoking in a broken,
kitchen chair tipped back on his vine-wrapped porch.
Through a hole in the thick leaf-curtain, he was watching the
young couple as they stopped on the river path where it ran
by his door.
"You couldn't any more really love anyone than . . .
than old Garner could!"
Tim's tongue, prompted by the proximity of Garner's
ruinous cottage, threw out this accusation which, strange to
say, reverberated not as a crimination, but as a welcome ac-
clamation in the old man's ears.
The sardonic line of his sunken mouth curved upward at
one end as he watched the pair go off" toward the river, the
boy fuming, the girl exulting in her tormenting power.
The unpruned vines over Garner's cottage crowded and
hugged and pushed their way to the peak of the roof; like
great cruel snakes they crushed and distorted the crouched
dwelling of blackened boards. Behind the twisted screen, old
528 THE IMMUNE [July,
Garner pulled gently on his foul pipe and stroked the cat on
his knees. Tim's words brought a crafty gleam into the eyes
of the bent, unkempt, old man; unwittingly they crowned a
satisfied spirit. Today, the day of his wife's funeral, a sense
of unusual achievement companioned the solitary man.
Two weeks ... or three? Garner couldn't remember —
since Mag kept her bed, didn't come down to cook breakfast.
He'd stopped on his way to work next morning and told that
neighbor woman . . . never spoken to her before. . . . Ben
Hensley's wife . . . she'd come over, dragging two kids . . .
the brats spent the day shooing the cat under the stove. Come
every day . . . curious, no doubt, to see the inside of the
house and how he got on.
Was it the Hensley woman or another of that crew, clat-
tering around, that had told him Mag was dead? Somehow
he knew it before he was told, although he hadn't gone up-
stairs. Today five or six of the women (they'd let Mag alone
sharply enough while she was alive!), five or six of 'em had
a funeral over her in the front room.
Gone now, the whole pack'n'boodle of 'em, left him in
peace ! Wouldn't be coming prying back either . . . and Mag
wouldn't be coming back.
Women, women, always disturbing and fussing, dying or
having kids ! Still, without Mag's tongue . . . he'd have to do
his own cooking . . . but peace, peace, 'n'better'n'peace ! He
knew . . . they'd gone off, those women, Hensley's wife and
the rest ... he hadn't thanked 'em for helping Mag die.
They'd got more'n the worth of their trouble . . . gone off,
with their tongues crawling out like snakes from the stone
piles . . . the wind blowing back their whispers of old Garner
and his shiftless ways.
Not over charged with charity . . . they'd left him alone
. . . good enough for him, too, they thought. Not one of 'em
smart enough to guess how the feeling of having beaten Fate
at her own game talks out pretty and soft and companionable
in the heart of a lonely man.
The cat lay sleepily watching the face of its owner. It
was a homely beast. When a kitten, half of its tail had been
viciously cut off, robbing it of its rightful curving adornment
and substituting a stump too long to be stylish. Its coat was
piebald, white and buff, with a splash of black surrounding
1922.] THE IMMUNE 529
one eye and running down over the side, startling, repellent
as a birthmark. The sum of its harsh experiences, com-
pressed within, gave out a perpetual burring sound. Its
fathomless yellow eyes slowly opened and closed with the
calm self-satisfied poise of a Buddha. It had passed through
the infelicities of life to see, forced upon its tormentors before
they died, the knowledge that it is easier to eliminate love
from the human heart than to oust a cat from its corner.
More sense in the animal, Garner realized, than in a
whole funeral of women. He remembered the tramp
slept one night in the shed . . . chopped the cat's tail off on
the kindling block, next morning, trying to scare the child.
A lot o' meanness can happen to a cat. But the tramp was
hung, he'd heard; the child was dead; and now Mag.
Garner looked out through the leaves toward the sunset
where Tim and Melissa had disappeared. Yesterday ... or
years ago? He was young then . . . he'd gone down that very
path that leads to the river. Tall, narrow-shouldered, a timid,
likable lad, his big feet following with new assurance after
Phoebe's little slippers. At the river bank, by the willow,
she had turned and looked up into his face. No coyness in
her big gray eyes — it was the look of trust in their depths that
had made him a man.
They climbed into the clumsy punt for their picnic supper.
He sat near her, but dared not touch her. He was busy wink-
ing back the tears so that he could see her plainly. Above
everything, he must see that look of trust in her eyes.
Phoebe sat composed and matronly in her modest blue
gown, the full skirt reaching to the scalloped edges of the
pantalets at her white-stockinged ankles. Her bosom rose
and fell under the crossing of the stiffly ruffled fichu, the deep
blue of the dress showing faintly through the sheer white of
the lawn. On her head was a large shade hat of yellow straw
with rosebuds tucked under the brim. Her round face, with
big eyes far apart, was pale from agitation. Black lace mits
covered her arms.
It was Phoebe who suggested getting out to watch the
sunset from Blueberry Point, he would have been content to
float on forever down the stream, seated near her in the old
punt. Mechanically, he rowed to a big rounded bowlder for
their landing place. The current was swift in the bend of
VOL. cxv. 34
530 THE IMMUNE [July,
the river, he tried to steady the boat with the oars while she
put out her foot to the stone. As her little, flat-soled, bronze
slipper touched it, Phoebe jumped onto the clay-covered
bowlder, pushing back the boat; it rocked under him with
the force of her spring. Suddenly, the girl slipped onto her
knees and slid downward, her hands marking long grooves
in the slimy surface. With a sharp cry of terror, she splashed
into the water between the boat and the rock. A wave rose
like the heave of a bosom, and for a moment her blue dress
showed faintly through rising white bubbles.
Terrified, he had flung himself into the deep river, reach-
ing and grabbing where he had seen her disappear. As the
water closed above his head, he stiffened rigid with horror,
whirring thunders filled his ears.
When he came to the surface he threw himself in panic
toward the boat and caught hold with one hand of the gun-
wale. He brushed the water from his blinded eyes. He
couldn't see Phoebe, a snag held her by her full blue skirt
far down in the water. The flat yellow hat floated away
with the pink rosebuds turned up.
His shouts brought old Hensley, Ben's father, who was
woodchopping, back a little way from the bank. The man
threw down his ax, stripped off his coat and swam toward
him as he was floating down stream, one hand clutching the
punt as if nailed to its edge; too dazed and indifferent to pull
himself into the boat.
"Ef ya'd knowed how to swim," Ben's father had told
him afterwards, "ya might hev saved the gel. As 't is, no
one's callin' ya a coward fer holdin' to the boat; wouldn't
comfort her pa'n'ma to know two was drowned."
These words had passed him by, all except one. That
one tore through his mind like a scream. "Coward!" If he
had only had the courage to take his hand from the boat . . .
he could have died with Phoebe.
Coward! The word rang in his ears next day when he
looked at her face. A contented smile lay on the drowned
girl's mouth, but her eyes were closed; he never saw again
the look that could have made him a man.
He planned to kill himself. Lying face downward, dig-
ging his hands and feet into the new turf on Phoebe's grave,
he bit his teeth into the soil. Through the night he lay there,
1922.] THE IMMUNE 531
picture after picture of suicidal horrors passing in his brain
but all the time he knew that as sure as morning he would
never have the courage to take his own life. In a swirl of
sorrow and self-reproach he clung desperately to life, hating
himself, torn by a tormented spu-it. Coward, coward!
Then, in the extremity of his anguish, he groped toward
escape from the possibihty of ever experiencing such suffering
again. There on Phoebe's grave wisdom was given him and
he made a compact with himself . . . never to love again
never to love an earthly sight, sound, place, or human being.
He must steel himself to insensibiUty, armor himself against
pain. Lacking strength to kill his body, he must turn his
whole being to the task of curbing his soul.
Ah, with what pluck he had kept his promise, with what
cunning he had schooled himself to keep his vow!
Years after Phoebe's death, he had married. Cross-eyed,
cross-tongued, ill-favored shrew! For what other man in
the world could Mag have answered a purpose? Little need
now for stifling love or pity!
Fear held him before the child was born! Only a girl,
thank goodness, sick and plain like its mother! Mag soon
spoiled its temper. Even so. Garner had undergone a fearful
struggle against the rising affections of a father. After a few
years, he breathed easier . . . the peevish child died.
He had things well in hand now, allowing himself few
acquaintances and no friends. Mag scolded, threatened. A
poor laborer . . . lost one job after another. Certainly, he
felt no interest in the work of his hands. To him . . . none
of them guessed ... but to him, to Garner, success lay
within.
Tonight he was realizing with unusual self-commendation
that he had passed a test. Today, they had buried Mag, yet no
ripple of regret stirred the frozen surface of his soul. Her
scolding and her cooking he might miss, but, on the whole,
her passing was as undisturbing as the lulling of the wind.
Old Garner tipped down the front legs- of his chair, rose,
and shuffled over the length of the narrow rickety piazza to
the kitchen. The Hensley woman had left four cold boiled
potatoes on a blue-edged pieplate in the cupboard. He shced
them into the frying pan with a bit of drippings. The neg-
lected fire in the range was low. Garner opened the drafts
532 THE IMMUNE [July,
and stuffed in wood. When the potatoes were warm, with-
out waiting to cover their soggy nakedness with crisp, warm,
appetizing coats, he ate his supper, leaving the cooling frying
pan on the floor for the cat to lick. Filling the stove with
coal for the night, as he had seen his wife do, he went slowly
upstairs, preceded by the ugly cat.
The smoothness of the other half of the bed excited no
pang in Garner's apathetic breast. He laid his head content-
edly on his lonely pillow and was soon asleep.
The odor of smoke and the crackling of heated boards
finally disturbed him. He jumped out of bed. Mag had been
a vigilant guardian of detail; accustomed to leave everything
to her, he had forgotten to close the drafts of the stove, and
the over-heated smoke pipe had set the woodwork on fire.
The house was in flames. Garner drew on his ragged clothes
as he hurried down the stairs. Safe in the fresh air of the
yard, he saw that nothing could save the little frame dwelling;
it was a wonder he himself escaped its doom.
A pleasant calm took the place of the usual agitation of
age at such an upheaval. From poverty — or was it wisdom?
— Garner had never allowed himself to own a home. If he
felt attachment for one house he had rapidly moved to an-
other. Such small possessions as were being consumed before
his eyes were associated with use, not with desire.
He was enjoying the fruits of a long toil, that gigantic
growth, cultivated until it had wrapped itself around and
insulated his soul. The success of his life plan was proved.
Alone, on the night after his wife's funeral, the childless old
man watched the burning of his home with only gladness in
his heart for his own immunity from pain.
A shout and a quick patter of feet! Up the river path,
between the elms, Tim and Melissa were hurrying to him.
Flames from the burning house threw a roseate glow to the
highest arches of the tall trees. From each slender ruddy
trunk were flung upwards garlands of infinite rose-clusters.
Through this vermilion aisle, over the path lying a brilliant
stain across the grass, the two ran toward him, their white
clothes dyed pink, their young faces flushed from excitement,
the boy panting ahead, the vigorous girl close behind.
"How'd it start?"
"Sent for the fire engine?"
^^^•^ THE IMMUNE 533
watchLTth^^^ ""' ""' ^^^^ '^ "^^ «-^^^ ^-e, silently
A sudden cry broke from the burning house, then cry
a ter cry gathered and mounted to terrific screams, the yelh
of an animann frantic fear. The deserted cat hurled itself
agamst the bedroom window, scratching the glass with its
claws. Its round eyes blazed as it dashed itself again and
agam against the panes, its paws uplifted against a back-
ground of leaping fire.
At the first cry Garner turned. For years the cat had
spent every evening in his lap. When a kitten, it was given
to the child, who maltreated it. Afterwards, Mag hated the
animal, accused it of bringing the contagion by which the
child died. To Garner the poor outcast had appealed with a
sure instinct, he had protected it and, without his realizing, it
had insinuated itself into his lap.
Again and again, the cat bobbed above the window sill
and fell back, an agonized Jack-in-the-box. A rush of tender-
ness for his imperiled pet blazed up in Garner's dry, empty
heart. He ran into the house, up the smoke-filled stairs, and
into the trembling heat of the bedroom. He threw open the
window, the cat was through it like a flash. Picking itself up
on the ground below, it scurried off under some bushes to
lick its stinging paws. Garner tried to go back. Flames
guarded the doorway. He turned to jump out of the window,
but smoke overpowered him, and he crumpled to the floor
like a pile of ashes.
To Garner it seemed as if he continued falling, falling,
but all was cool now after terrific heat, the air cleared of
stifling smoke, the sound of crackling and of rushing stilled —
all cool, fresh, still. He saw Phoebe's hat . . . Phoebe's wide
shade hat floating, not away from him now, but toward him
on slanting bands of crimson air, the roses no longer sodden
and brown from river ooze, but tinted a fresh pink. Then
up a glowing path under a rosy bower, Phoebe . . . Phoebe
herself was coming to him, her limbs moving with sober eager-
ness through that same arching avenue of dancing rose lights
where he had seen Tim and Melissa run. She opened her
mouth to speak, but at the sound of the first word, it was not
. . . not Phoebe's voice ... it was Melissa who broke into
the old man's dream.
534 THE IMMUNE [July,
"What did you do it for?" Melissa was crying, "what did
you do it for? You might have been killed, oh, Timmie,
Timmie-boy!"
Garner was awake now, he opened his smoke-scorched
eyes, he was lying on the grass in the side yard. Suddenly
the roof of the house crashed in, and a pyramid of flames and
sparks shot far up into the night. By the glaring light he
saw the boy and girl standing near, Tim kissing her, Melissa
crying. The boy was gray from smoke, his white clothes
smudged and burned.
The old man grunted and stirred, the young people turned
quickly and bent over him.
"Y'all right now, sir?" asked Tim, slipping an arm
round Melissa.
He understood now, old Garner understood. He winked
the soot from his eyes, the smoke cleared from his brain.
He jumped to his feet and sprang angrily at the boy, a gro-
tesque, humped, blackened demon, his yellow teeth clenched,
his fists doubled, words hissing from his mouth.
"Ya went in thar arter me . . . ya might o' been
killed. . ."
"Of course, he went in . . . climbed up outside by the
vines . . . you'd have been fried crisp if he hadn't!" Melissa
was instantly Tim's champion.
"Ya fool . . . ya fool . . . ya d fool!" Garner
lashed himself into a fury so hot that it threatened to incin-
erate the shriveled body Tim had rescued from the flames.
"Ya knew the gel cared, ya was reskin' ya life, ya was reskin'
her happiness fer a man ya wouldn't stop to kick from ya
path!"
Tim stood tall and straight, Melissa's dark head pressed
against his stained shirt.
"And you, sir," he said, grinning down at old Garner,
**you . . . you risked your life for a cat!"
IRew Boohs.
THE SCIENCE OF EDUCATION IN ITS SOCIOLOGICAL AND
HISTORICAL ASPECTS. By Otto Willmann, Ph.D Auth
orized Translation from the Fourth German Edition by Felix
M. Kirsch, CM.Cap. Beatty, Penna.: Archabbey Press.
$0.00.
Catholic educators have received, with universal approval
Father Kirsch's translation of Professor Otto Willman's The
Science of Education in Its Sociological and Historical Aspects
The need of this, and other translations along similar lines, has
been felt by everyone actively interested in the progress of the
science of education. American Catholic scholars have written
very little about education from the scientific point of view.
Their contributions have been mostly controversial, due to the
political and economic conditions under which the Catholic school
exists in our country. There has been little, too little, discussion
of the philosophical foundations which underlie the Catholic po-
sition in education. In practice, every Catholic educator has been
following the methods and principles consecrated by centuries of
acceptance and practical experience.
Dr. Willmann's work comes to us, we hope, as the beginning
of a long series of translations of French and German pedagogical
treatises. The consequence of the publication of such transla-
tions will be to stimulate Catholic educators to a more extended
study of their own problems, as well as to deepen our knowledge
and appreciation of the results of the fruitful scholarship of
European thinkers, which has been for so long to most of us
a closed book.
The first volume of The Science of Education is mainly his-
torical, reviewing in a scientific manner the growth and develop-
ment of educational theory and practice up to and including
modern times. Oriental, Greek, Roman, mediaeval and modern
education are treated successively, with the sure hand of a scholar
acquainted with all the historical facts. Wjllmann's interpre-
tations are based on sound psychology, and his evaluations are
the result of a deep insight into the correct philosophical prin-
ciples which support the Christian theory of life. Noteworthy is
his splendid analysis of the school system of the Middle Ages.
A special chapter is given to the ethos of mediaeval education.
His treatment of modern educators, and particularly of Herbart,
536 NEW BOOKS [July,
is admirable. Herbart has exercised a great influence on Amer-
ican education, and is chiefly responsible for its present socio-
logical trend. This process of educational socialization, under
the leadership of men like Professor Dewey, has reached such a
pass that public education has now become a mere machine for
turning out citizens. Willmann points out the defects in this
theory. He accepts the necessity of a more highly developed
social efficiency as one of the end results of the modern school,
but very vigorously protests against making this the only result.
Man is something more than a creature of the State. He has a
soul; he has religious, moral and aesthetic impulses which must
be educated and satisfied. To ignore their existence is to bring
disaster to the individual, and to the State as well.
"True progress consists in permeating the historical method
with the ideal and not in joining the ideal to the study of his-
torical facts." Catholic educators are not likely to forget this
axiom, imbued, as they are, with a deep-rooted sense of the his-
torical continuity of their system of education. The study of this
history will reveal to them its many excellencies; will point out
the errors to be avoided, and should develop a spirit of cooperation
and of mutual assistance, which will advance the efficiency of the
Catholic school to such a point that even its most prejudiced
critics must bow before the evidences of the thorough work it is
doing.
ST. BERNARD'S TREATISE ON CONSIDERATION. Translated
from the original Latin by a priest of Mount Melleray.
Dublin : Brown & Nolan. 7 s. 6 d.
Such a well-known classic on the spiritual life as St. Ber-
nard's De Consideratione needs neither a review nor a recom-
mendation. As well might one venture upon an appraisal of the
Epic of Homer, of the Divina Commedia of Dante, or of the
drama of Shakespeare, on whose unique excellence there is unan-
imous accord. But what is news, and welcome news to the
readers of The Catholic World, is the fact that this most pre-
cious work of the Mellifluous Doctor of the Church — one of the
safest and most attractive guides for souls — has found a worthy
expression in the vernacular. The translator, who modestly con-
ceals his personal and even religious name, under the general
title of a Mount Melleray priest, has done his work well. The
translation has an easy flow, a simplicity of style, and felicity of
idiomatic expression befitting the original, and not too common
to versions. The Treatise on Meditation was composed by the
holy monk of Clairvaux for the benefit of his former disciple,
1^22.] NEW BOOKS 537
the then Supreme Pontiff, Eugene III. One is impressed with
the frank courage of the spiritual adviser, and the docile patil^ce
of the eminent disciple who must have encouraged such cand d
criticism and outspoken direction. What St. Bernard did for
Pope Eugene he has done for all succeeding Popes, who find in
De Consideratione a luminous mirror in which they can behold
clearly reflected their own spiritual countenances. The treatise
has been well named the D enter onommm Pontificum— the ideal
of the divine law by which are guided the consciences of the
Vicars of Christ, who must conform their lives to the sublime
dignity of their office, and discharge properly their duties as the
ministers of the humble Nazarene, as "the Servants of the serv-
ants of God."
As the motives and means of eternal salvation are funda-
mentally alike for all mankind, from the sovereign Pontiff to the
simplest peasant, the treatise affords spiritual nutriment to satisfy
the souls of all, but is more especially adapted to the needs of
those dedicated to religion, and whose mission is to lead others
along the pathway of God. Here is no dry disquisition on medi-
tation, but a flowing fountain of limpid wisdom that refreshes
and inspires the reader. The priests library and prie dieu will
profit much by the presence of this precious volume. For to
save the land from desolation, religious meditation must find an
intimate place in the daily life of the spiritual leaders.
THE WORK OF THE BOLLANDISTS. By Hippolyte Delehaye,
S.J. Princeton: Princeton University Press. $2.50 net.
The Abbe Migne*s patristic and theological collection as-
tounded Matthew Arnold when he beheld it filling shelf after
shelf in the British Museum Library. It impressed him with a
sense of the immensity of the Church's sacred lore, and of the
rich treasures of human life which are stored within her pale.
Beside it, on the shelves, were "the white folios of the Acta Sanc-
torum," a work of similar magnitude, embracing a wide range
of human interests. To it the stricture which Arnold hastened
to pass on the Abbe Migne*s compilation: "Do not seek in it im-
partiality, the critical spirit," would be singularly inapplicable.
For the truth, and nothing but the truth, is the object of this
definitive edition of the lives and acts of the Saints — the work
of the Bollandists. It marks the introduction of the critical scien-
tific spirit into the domain of hagiography.
To quote Father Delehaye's notable memoir of the labors of
the Bollandists through three centuries, 1615-1915: "The Acta
Sanctorum is constructed as a series of three hundred and sixty-
538 NEW BOOKS [July,
five units corresponding to the dates of the calendar, each one
divided into a series of monographs, devoted to the saints honored
on each respective day." With a directness and simplicity of
presentation he narrates the story of this gigantic task, and the
respective parts played in it by the Jesuit Fathers, Rosweyde,
Bollandus, Henschen and Papebroch, in whom the ardor of re-
ligion and scholarship flamed with the passion of a consecration.
The diflBculties of their undertaking, which involved the quest of
materials through all the libraries of Europe, the collating and
redaction of countless manuscripts, the nice discrimination be-
tween credulity and hypercriticism in dealing with the legends of
the Saints, can be realized in all their actuality by a perusal of his
detailed treatment of them in these illuminating pages. When
to these problems are added the grave opposition aroused by the
decisions of the Bollandists in rejecting apocryphal traditions,
and the long obscuration of their energies occasioned by the sup-
pression of this Society, and the dispersion of their libraries at
the time of the French Revolution, the development of their enter-
prise to within measurable distance of completion seems a mar-
velous achievement. Of this age-long Lampadephoria — torch-
race — toward the goal of historic truth, Father Delehaye's mono-
graph is a remarkable record. Written with a singular compe-
tence and intimacy by a savant who is thoroughly au fait in all
the bearings of his subject, the book is a worthy memorial of the
tercentenary of the Acta Sanctorum. It is furnished with an
appendix containing a complete bibliography of the Bollandist
publications.
GOETHE'S LITERARY ESSAYS. Edited by J. E. Spingarn.
New York: Hareourt, Brace & Co. $2.00.
Professor Spingarn has done students of literature a real
favor; for he has gathered into a single and well-made volume,
golden pages from one of the great masters of literature. As
divergent-minded judges as Garlyle, Matthew Arnold and Sainte-
Beuve acclaimed Goethe the supreme literary critic of all time and,
whatever might be said against so superlative an opinion, cer-
tainly Goethe's many-sidedness, his undoubted genius, and his
keen insight all conspired to give his judgments on literature a
value too great to be ignored. All phases of his critical activity
are represented in this excellent volume, which is the work of
several translators, all of high standard. Some of the selections
now appear in English for the first time.
Goethe was keenly interested in French and in English liter-
ature, no less than in German, and for the English reader
1922.] NEW BOOKS 53g
there will be much to stimulate thought in his sympathetic appre
ciatxon o Shakespeare. Those of us who have found the ^
dramatist s plays strangely failing in power to lift us out of our-
selves, can find much to ponder over in Goethe's declaration-
Shakespeare gets his effect by means of the living word, and ii
is for this reason that one should hear him read, for then the
attention is not distracted either by a too adequate or too in-
adequate stage-setting. There is no higher . . . pleasure than to
sit with closed eyes and hear a naturally expressive voice recite,
not declaim, a play of Shakespeare's."
Goethe was no hard and fast critic, and as he re-read a book
and found that it appealed to him in a new light, he did not hesi-
tate to revise his earlier opinions and even to call attention to
corrected impressions or reversals of judgments. It was because
of his open-mindedness to new impressions that his critical dicta
appear perennially fresh and stimulate the reader by their frank-
ness and their vitality.
The task of collecting these admirable and valuable essays
required a scholar. It found one in Professor Spingarn, to whom
the lovers of the best in literature owe genuine gratitude for this
volume.
THE INDWELLING OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. By R. P. Froget,
O.P. Translated by the Rev. Sidney A. Raemers, M.A. New
York: The Paulist Press. $2.25.
One of the striking facts of Cardinal Manning's life— and
equally of others of the Oxford Movement — was the prominence
of his devotion to the Holy Ghost. This portion of Catholic
dogma, as much as any other, forced him to give his allegiance
to the Roman Catholic Church. It is strange, therefore, that in
the decades that have since passed, there have been but few
writings which consider the relation of the Holy Spirit to the
souls of men. Father Froget's admittedly standard work, in the
present excellent translation, should serve to revive interest in
this fascinating theology. The readers will find, perhaps to their
surprise, that there is not here question of the ecstasies of myst-
icism. They will have to bear with a scientific and technical ex-
position of dogma, that demands closest, most detailed and ab-
stract thought. The end, however, will repay the pains. It is
shown that every soul which possesses the grace of God, in this
world as in the next, is bound in most intimate ties with the
Spirit of God, and, through the Spirit, with the Father and the
Son. In the strictest meaning of the words, the Spirit dwells in
the soul; makes of the soul a temple and a sanctuary; raises the
540 NEW BOOKS [July,
soul to the dignity of being an adoptive son of God, co-heir with
Christ to the felicity of divine beatitude. In a word, St. Peter
spoke literal truth and not metaphor when he declared that the
faithful are partakers of the divine nature.
Father Froget proves on every page that his doctrine is not
the creation of pious imagination, but rather the constant tradi-
tion of the Church. He takes St. Thomas of Aquinas as his chief
guide; but there are, too, many beautiful transcriptions from the
writings of St. Augustine and the Greek Fathers. The reading
of this volume must give a new and deepened consciousness of
the meaning of Christian personality, and a strong inspiration to
a fuller and more Christian life.
ST. JUSTIN THE MARTYR. By C. C. Martindale, S.J. New
York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons. $1.75.
In this little treatise, Father Martindale considers in detail
the work of the early apologists of Christianity, which he sketched
in outline in the introductory volume of Catholic Thought and
Thinkers, He sums up the results of St. Justin's labors by say-
ing that he helped Europe to an understanding of God, of Christ
and of the Christo-centricity of history. He dwells at length on
the rationale of his defence of Christianity — his insistence on its
truth and moral beauty, and on divine revelation as the only
means of attaining an adequate knowledge of God. How St.
Justin disengaged the true idea of God from the false elements of
the pagan conception, how, for the Stoics and Platonists of his
time, he set forth the personality of Christ in terms of the Logos,
and emphasized for the Jews the unique fulfillment in Him of the
prophecies of the Old Testament — these are the main features
of his exposition. Father Martindale's study is decidedly indi-
vidual and discriminating.
THE LIFE OF THE WEEVIL. By J. H. Fabre. New York:
Dodd, Mead & Co. $2.50.
In 1915, at the age of ninety- two, still intent upon his studies,
died the author of this book, a living encyclopaedia of entomo-
logical knowledge, and by degrees the diligence of his translator,
Mr. Texeira de Mattos, is making his works known to the English
reading world. That which deals with the weevils has all the
fascination of the other volumes, in which Fabre*s wonderful
discoveries are summed up. Tliajweevil is a stubby snouted, un-
promising little beetle, of wtjrf^(iil^^^^^re many varieties. There
is even a New York Weevil, 4if^m^ceruywt)t;e&orace/i5i5 is its title),
though Fabre does not deii^KviiiiM!A^Ui|ii* {doubt because it prefers
1922.] NEW BOOKS
541
the fruit and hickory trees of its native State to those of Provence,
where, by the way, there are no hickories.
To anyone doubting the interest of this book, we would say:
"Begin at Chapter V. and study the Elephant Weevil, and then
you will not need to be told to begin at the beginning and go right
through." Of course, there are great lessons to be learned from
these humble creatures, altogether transcending their funny little
ways. Fabre, after his long life of study, comes to the conclusion
that the fathomless depths of instinct, almost terrifying in their
vastness, reveal a purpose and a guiding hand in nature. Though
he feels, with most other real workers, that "the last word of
knowledge is doubt,'* he has no doubt as to the point just men-
tioned. "Matter is governed by a sovereign will," and again "the
humble Cionus, for its part, tells us of a primordial force, the
motive power of the smallest as of the greatest things." The
book badly wants a much fuller index, and would be greatly im-
proved by a plate showing a few weevils, in order that the un-
biological reader — who can greatly profit by this book — may see
what kind of creatures it is that he is reading about.
THE SISTERS OF THE I. H. M. By a Member of the Scranton
Community. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons. $5.00.
An impressive history is presented here, of a sort, welcome
to all devout Catholics, as is implied in the foreword by the
Bishop of Scranton, to whom the work is dedicated. One mar-
vels to read of what were the beginnings of the Congregation of
the Sisters Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which in
1920 celebrated its diamond jubilee: how Father Louis Gilet,
Redemptorist, founded at Monroe, Michigan, the community "that
was to effect so much for God and for His holy Church," three
young women being the first candidates to be clothed in the
habit chosen by Father Gilet, and to make their vows according
to the formula of the Redemptorist Rule. In less than two
months, the first academy was opened— a log cabin of two
rooms — wherein, nevertheless, a system of education was at once
established which compares favorably with any to be found in
our modern institutions.
It is the old, but always new and wonderful, story of great
things from small, from the tiny foundation in Monroe to the
foundation in Pennsylvania, where throughout the diocese of
Scranton stately structures, convents, colleges, academies and
various other institutions rise in imposing numbers to bear wit-
ness to the growth of the congregation and the extent of its
achievements.
542 NEW BOOKS [July,
The book is admirably written. That it was a labor of love
is manifest in every line; but the author brought also to her task
powers of graceful, concise expression, discretion, and a rare
faculty of selection. It must have been scattered material that
she has amassed and coordinated into a coherent, vital narrative,
which ends with a description of the observances of the diamond
jubilee, and has for its final words the opening sentences of the
Magnificat.
Satisfying in every other respect, the work gives one cause
for regret, that so valuable a record was not made more easily
available for reference. A synopsis of each chapter, covering the
main points, is contained in the table of contents, but there is no
index; an omission which makes it difficult to refresh one's
memory concerning many unlisted items that are both interest-
ing and noteworthy.
A word of appreciation is due to the publishers for the
format of the volume, which, though large and profusely illus-
trated, is not unwieldy.
THE CHURCH IN ENGLAND. By the Rev. George Stebbing,
C.SS.R. St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co. $5.00 net.
Recent years have seen the publication of an exceptional
number of volumes on the history of the Church in England. To
the contributions of Bishop Ward and Monsignor Burton, for
example, have been added valuable period studies by the bril-
liant Jesuit, Father Hull, and much biographical matter by the
versatile Father Martindale of the same order.
Nevertheless, to those who know Father Stebbing's Story of
the Catholic Church, announcement that the scholarly Redemp-
torist has produced a study of the Church in England from the
first century to the twentieth will be welcome news. Nor will
any expectation raised by the quality of the former work fail of
realization for any reader of The Church in England. The same
thoroughness which marked the widely read Story is manifested
in every chapter of the present history. The same faculty of
presenting a striking situation in a few pages, not only without
minimizing its importance, but actually with the increased dra-
matic effect of few, but carefully chosen, words, makes the volume
as interesting as it is instructive.
'fhe quality of sane reasonableness, shown for instance in
the treatment of the difference in opinion between Newman and
Manning in regard to the use of the older universities by Catholics
and in the exposition of other matters, of which many readers
will have more or less first-hand knowledge, is applied from the
1922.] NEW BOOKS
543
first chapter to the last. It is difficult to call to mind a work on
English history which could be offered by Catholics to their non-
Catholic friends with more certainty that while the Catholic posi-
tion is consistently and capably maintained, nothing of bitterness
will be encountered from cover to cover.
In addition to a very complete general index and a chrono-
logical index, the volume contains a full list of English Catholic
leaders from Pope Adrian IV. (Nicholas Breakspear 1154-1159)
to Bishop Doubleday of Brentwood, appointed in 1920, and an ex-
cellent list of four pages of books of reference.
THE OPPIDAN. By Shane Leslie. New York: Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons. $2.50.
In these days, when every writer, sooner or later, tries his
hand at the novel, it is not surprising that so brilliant and versa-
tile a man of letters as Shane Leslie, the editor of the Dublin
Review, should make use of the form. The first work in fiction
that comes from his pen is a story of the English public school,
Eton, at the close of the nineteenth century. Himself a loyal
Etonian, he has attempted to preserve in a novel the period of
his own school days, and in the career of Peter Darley, the central
character of the story, one fancies there is a good deal of auto-
biography. As a novel, however, the book is too episodic; in fact,
it is less a novel than a series of vivid pictures and personal recol-
lections. Yet few are the readers who will not forgive the author
for these delightful digressions. The spirit of Eton, with all her
traditions, 'her customs, her routine, her "Dames," collegers and
oppidans, he has caught remarkably well; and in creating Darley,
Socston and Ullathorne he has added three portraits to the all too
small gallery of college characters.
THE JESUITS. By Rev. Thomas J. Campbell, S.J. New York:
The Encyclopedia Press. $5.00.
Father Campbell, well known for his excellent historical
studies, has written a popular history of the Society of Jesus that
is at once readable, interesting and impartial. He has acquitted
himself well of an almost impossible task: to give within the
compass of about nine hundred pages a summary of the history
of this most distinguished body of men, who have been maligned
and calumniated by critics from the very days of St. Ignatius.
This fascinating volume describes the origins of the Society,
and gives us brief sketches of St. Ignatius and his companions,
and a fair estimate of Jesuit scholarship, missionary activity, edu-
cational work and spirituality. All the old calumnies born of
544 NEW BOOKS [July,
Jansenism or the Protestant hatred of the Church's champions
in England and Germany, are here answered simply and fully.
The book is not all panegyric, for Father Campbell does not
hesitate to denounce the stupidity or malice of a La Valette, a
Gretser, a Bobadilla or a Rodriguez.
The book has been severely criticized by English reviews,
both Catholic and non-Catholic, but they fail to grasp the fact
that the author is not writing for scholars, but for the man in
the street. We willingly grant that there are a few mistakes of
fact, a few repetitions, and a few colloquialisms, but we challenge
Father Campbell's critics to produce a volume equally as good
on so difficult and so comprehensive a subject. We recommend
this volume highly to our readers, and feel confident that the few
slips pointed out so earnestly by the critics will be corrected in
a new edition.
A SHORT STORY OF THE IRISH PEOPLE. By Mary Hayden
and George Moonan. New York: Longmans, Green & Co.
$7.00.
The authors of this work assert that "its only claim to orig-
inality is with regard to the manner of presentation, the method
of arrangement and the general treatment."
It is to be feared that many readers may be tempted to ask
why such striving after originality was necessary. The manner
of presentation and the method of arrangement are not without
value, especially since they are supported by an admirable index;
but occasionally they are mildly exasperating. They appear to
call for some reference to every movement and every phase of
Irish development, and the result is sometimes both sketchy and
unsatisfactory. For example, the student of present-day offects
in Ireland who seeks to evaluate causes more or less recent, will
be surprised to find the "Plan of Campaign" dismissed in a few
lines with the statement that it was extensively adopted, "and it
resulted in some good certainly, but perhaps in more evil."
History in outline may be here, but history, to be of full
value, must be presented with some sense of proportion; merely
to chronicle the happenings, big and little, in the life of a national
family, without consideration for their relative importance, is not
to tell accurately the story of a people.
To this general criticism there must be one exception. An
endeavor is made to trace the development of Irish literature in
all of the stages of Ireland's life, and not without some degree of
success.
In a word, the volume may be recommended to those who
^^^•] NEW BOOKS
545
Ireland, and not quite enough about that. '^^^^ature of
LIFE OF ST. JOHN FRANCIS REGIS. By Robert E. Holland.
S.J. Chicago: Loyola University Press. $L00 net
th.r^'Z\''^ 'T'" ^"" 'P* *^ ^' ^^^^^*^^ ^y ^'^^^^ who need
them most, such as young people who crave tales of heroes and
high enterprise and who are attracted by a charming literary
Sh'.nf "'^"''' '*'^^ '' '*• ^^^-- ^^S- -' tale of
high enterprise, charmingly told, and through its pages walks a
more delightful figure than ever fiction produced. We meet him
firs , a hght-hearted youth at the end of a long journey, whose
goal was what the author calls the "forge in which religious are
fashioned"— the Jesuit novitiate. We are given a backward
glance at a happy childhood; we read about him as a happy
novice, affable and loving in his dealings with others, universally
hked. We are told about his high enterprises, about the diffl-
culties and disappointments which throughout his life continued
the shaping of the "forge," forming him into a fine instrument
for a great work. Finally, we are told of his call to his crown.
The book should delight young people of all ages, it should hold
their interest from the opening sentence to the last.
THE ITALIAN CONTRIBUTION TO AMERICAN DEMOCRACY.
By John H. Mariano, Ph.D. Boston; The Christopher Pub-
lishing House. $3.00 net.
In this work the author endeavors to present to us just what
the Italians have contributed to American democracy. He takes
the city of New York as the subject of his study. It is a book of
statistics with the necessary explanatory information, interesting
as statistical exposition often is, and written with an effort to
avoid bias and religious prejudice. How well the author has
succeeded in this respect will best be determined by those whose
knowledge of the Italians in America is large, and gained by per-
sonal observation and study. For the most part, he has the facts
well in hand. The book is a sociological study that deals with
the number and distribution of the Italian population, the occu-
pations, the health, the standard of living, literacy, citizenship,
and social welfare. It studies the psychological traits of the
Italian people, grouping them as "types"— the tenement type, the
business type, the college type and the professional type. It dis-
cusses minutely the social, religious, athletic and other clubs, and
VOL. cxv. 35
546 NEW BOOKS [July,
the various associations, dramatic, musical, educational and
recreational, that express the Italian activity in New York. One
of the interesting chapters is that which presents a symposium
on what the Americans of Italian extraction contribute to Amer-
ican democracy. In this, various individuals express their
opinions as to what the Italian gains and what he loses in his
contact with the institutions of this country. It is a valuable
work in many ways, not only to the social worker, the priest and
the educator, but to all who are interested in the question of how
the buoyant, ardent south Europeans find freedom in American
life.
THE NORSE DISCOVERERS OF AMERICA. By G. M. Gathorne-
Hardy. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Who first discovered America? It is the question with which
this very scholarly and fascinating book is occupied, and we are
sure that it will find, as it deserves, a host of readers on this side
of the Atlantic. The traveler who has labored up the steep sides
of Brandon Mountain in the Kingdom of Kerry and sat on the low
wall of the Oratory, now in ruins, which crowns its summit, will
never altogether abandon the belief that St. Brendan, "the Navi-
gator,'* whose Oratory this is, actually did get to the shores of
America in the fifth or sixth century, and that there is a grain of
truth in the intolerable amount of myth which forms the bulk of
the "Voyages" of this early saint. Mr. Hardy, of course, deals
only with the Norse documents and, in his opinion, Bjarni Her-
julfson was the first to see America, though he did not land on
its shores, in 986, that is to say four years after Eric, the Red,
had discovered Greenland and in the actual year in which, for
the first time, it was colonized. In 1000 Iceland became Chris-
tian, and two years afterwards Leif actually landed on the shores
of Vineland the Good, otherwise North America. On his voyage,
he first passed a land of flat rocks, which he called Helluland;
then one of a low-lying character with woods and white strands,
which he called Markland; arriving, finally, at a spot where Tyr-
ker, one of his crew and a German, found vines and grapes and
was able to identify them, which, of course, none of the Norsemen
could have done. Hence, the name Vineland.
Eighteen years after Leif, Karlsefni made a further voyage
to explore the sites already visited and to discover new ones.
The first place, not already mentioned, which he encountered he
called Furdustrands — the Wonderful Beaches — because "it was
a desolate place and there were long beaches and sands there."
From this he came to a fiord of strong currents, which he called
1922.] NEW BOOKS
547
Straumsfiord, and sailing down it, he reached a spot which he
called Hop, where he encountered the "skraelings," or savages,
a place where there was a land-locked estuary with a river run-
ning into it from the north.
What are these places in terms of modern geography? Many
attempts have been made to identify them, and there are natur-
ally considerable divergencies of opinion on the subject. We
shall briefly indicate Mr. Hardy's identifications with the state-
ment that he seems to us to have made out a very excellent case
for them. For a fuller account of that case, we must refer
readers to the book itself. Helluland is Newfoundland and Labra-
dor looked upon, as may well be done, as one country. Mark-
land is Nova Scotia. Vineland, the eastern seaboard of New
England, the landing having been made at "some place in the
neighborhood of Chatham harbor on the heel of the Barnstable
peninsula." Furdustrands, he thinks to be the beaches south
of Cape Cod, and Long Island Sound seems to be Straumsfiord,
in which case H6p would be the bay or estuary of the Hudson
River, constituting the modern approach to New York. One
further fact of interest: in 1221 Eric, Bishop of Greenland, for it
had a bishop in those days, sailed for Vineland, as we may feel
sure, with a view to preaching Christianity to the "skraelings."
He was never heard of more: perhaps he was the protomartyr of
North America: perhaps he never reached that country, but
perished at sea.
THE INTERNATIONAL PROTECTION OF LABOR. By Boutelle
Ellsworth Lowe, Ph.D. New York: The Macmillan Co. $2.50.
This book is concerned chiefly with the movement for inter-
national labor legislation before the outbreak of the World War
and with the results of that movement in the form of actual cove-
nants between nations. The labor clauses of the Treaty of Ver-
sailles and the draft conventions and recommendations of the
Labor Organization of the League of Nations, are recorded only in
a supplementary way. The value of the volume is to be found in
the description which it gives of the long fight for international
agreements for the establishment of labor rights, and of the very
considerable measure of success attained in the struggle before
the "Labor Charter" was incorporated in the Peace Treaty. It is
not an easily flowing narrative, but it offers to the student of this
phase of labor legislation a rich treasury of facts and documents
and an exhaustive bibliography.
The Catholic interested in programmes of social reform
through legislation, will naturally seek for some statement of the
548 NEW BOOKS [July,
activities of the Catholics of Europe in forwarding the movement
for protection of the workers through international agreement.
Nor will he be disappointed. Early in the story, He will meet
references to the important parts played by such individual leaders
as Count Albert de Mun and such groups as the German Catholic
Party. And he will be glad to find recognition of the fact that
several months before the Encyclical on The Condition of the
Working Classes was given to the world, Pope Leo XIII., in reply
to a request from the German Emperor that he lend his aid and
sanction to the Berlin Conference, **heartily endorsed the deliber-
ations of a conference that might tend to relieve the condition of
the worker, secure for him a Sabbath day's rest, and raise him
above the exploitation of those who, without respect to the dignity
of his manhood, his morality or his home, treat him as a vile
instrument."
THE GREAT DECEPTION. By Samuel Colcord. New York:
Boni & Liveright. $1.50 net.
The Great Deception is a deceptive title. The author fears
that a false interpretation may be put upon the vote given Presi-
dent Harding in his election to the Presidency. He asks if it is
not possible that a misunderstanding arise from this vote, and
then goes on to draw his conclusions from the results of the last
Presidential election. He believes that the tremendous vote was
a "mandate" to Senator Harding, but he feels also that "it would
be most unfortunate if he (President Harding) or the Senate or
other national leaders should hold an entirely wrong conception of
what that mandate really was and, in obedience to that wrong
conception, seek to put into effect a mandate which was never
given."
His view of what he calls the "great consummation" is not
primarily the establishment of the League of Nations, but that the
United States "do something effective for the prevention of war —
something to put the great influence of the United States actively
and permanently on the side of peace preservation." He then
explains why pro-League Republicans voted for Harding, and
shows that their vote was due to a determination not to tolerate
and forgive "a falling back into doing nothing — continued isola-
tion, which would mean destruction to our own financial, com-
mercial and industrial prosperity, destruction to the world in
which we must be inextricably involved and the end of hope for
world peace." In President Harding, the author sees a man
elected by the people's votes who will not disappoint them.
The book deals with a problem of the greatest importance,
1922.] NEW BOOKS ^^
not only to the statesmen and politicians of the United Sl«.
but also to the people at large. However 17^^... '
destroyed by its frankly partisan sSrU If' i , '"'•^'^^"^^^ '«
publishers in their '^ol\nn:Z:^L,lTJ::t ZV'l
sensational. It is not in the slightest sensafional U il a pTr
t san treatment of a question that has become a probi m beca„s;
It has always been treated in a partisan way.
''^^M^ftrVT''- ^y^-oJ^-More. Boston: The Corn-
hill Publishing Co. $2.00.
This handsomely gotten up volume contains seven poems
gracefu ly done and superbly illustrated. Mr. More has Tkren
sense of music in verse, considerable scholarship and an instinct
for subjects which lend themselves to poetical treatment. He ha
not, however, found himself as yet. His narrative is weak be-
cause he avoids the connections between episodic moments for
tear, by treating them, he may wander away from essential poetry
In consequence, he is frequently vague even when treating such
well-known themes as Orpheus and Eurydice. "Sinners All" is
vague as to point, as well as treatment. Mr. More harks back
frequently to the poets whomhe has studied and, no doubt, come to
love. The gallery is a diversified one: there are echoes of Chaucer
of Poe in *'The Valley Mysterious" and in "The Last of Lost
Eden" and of eighteenth century verse in such lines as "His lovely
mate restored by Pluto's grant," and such phrases as "that silent
valve" applied to a door. Mr. More has a slight poetic gift; he is
still far off from the domain of real poets.
THE HOPE OF THE FUTURE. By Edward E. Eagle. Boston:
The Cornhill Publishing Co. $2.00.
This book has been written, the author announces in his
preface, "for the hundred million Americans who have never
gone outside the boundaries of their continent." It has been
written to demonstrate to the fair-minded American business man
that "the British Empire is a philanthropic institution that might
have been designed for his especial benefit." Even the Monroe
Doctrine, which Mr. Eagle regards as "the corner-stone of our
foreign policy," appears to have become distinctly British since
our author returned from five years of travel, for "the American
taxpayer has not been required to contribute anything for its sup-
port. The real bulwark of its defence has been the British Navy."
But then, all kinds of things have happened while Mr. Eagle
was studying affairs abroad, noting that "instead of concealing
our lack of taste, we shout it for everyone to hear," and that "all
children (in England) are better mannered than American boys
550 NEW BOOKS [July,
and girls." For example, the seat of government of Canada has
been transferred over night from Ottawa to another city, and not a
single benighted American was aware of the change. Here is
the Honorable Arthur Meighan writing a commendation of The
Hope of the Future from "Prime Minister's OflBce, Toronto, Can-
ada." The Honorable Arthur is confident that "this book will
help its readers to know better the real character and purpose
of the Empire as it exists today." He thinks that, "above all,
we must endeavor to understand each other better." Doubtless
this was held firmly in mind by Mr. Meighan when, as one of the
leading opponents of Sir Wilfrid Laurier's reciprocity proposals,
he helped to bring into oflBce the party whose campaign slogan
had been: "No Truck or Trade With the Yankees."
Another letter of praise comes from "Prime Minister's Ojffice,
Belfast, Ireland." From Sir James Craig we learn that "men of
the old Ulster stock . . . served in the army at Washington."
We feel grateful. Washington is a mighty fine — and safe — place
in which to serve in the army.
Altogether an instructive and an entertaining book. A trifle
unfair, now and then, to the great British Empire perhaps, as in
that reference to Americans and "their Continent," but in all
other respects worthy a place on library shelves beside Gulliver
and The Innocents Abroad.
HUMAN DESTINY AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY, by J. Godfrey
Raupert, K.S.G. (Philadelphia: Peter Reilly. $1.25.) This little
book is timely and refreshing. The famous French astronomer and
scientist, Camille Flammarion, claims to have sure evidence that spir-
itistic phenomena are caused by the souls of the dead communicating
back to this plane. Professor Richet flatly contradicts this, and stoutly
maintains that all phenomena commonly attributed to spirits must
be attributed to the faculties of the human mind, of which we still
are ignorant. Mr. Raupert, with calm and poise, asserts that, when
rightly interpreted, the phenomena give a striking confirmation to
many of the fundamental truths of Christianity.
The author's well-known and valuable contributions on the sub-
ject of Spiritism gives this volume an authority too often lacking in
Catholic pronouncements.
Mr. Raupert believes, and with good grounds, that so-called spirit
manifestations are the work of "evil intelligences" with no good de-
sign toward those who are still on this plane, a cunning Satanism
to deceive, if possible, even the elect.
In Human Destiny and the New Psychology he uses his extensive
knowledge of the subsconscious mind to show to what an extent
modern research, when rightly interpreted, confirms the teaching of
the Catholic Church respecting the "Last Things."
1922.] NEW BOOKS 551
The chapters on Psychological Law and Human Immortality God
and Man, and Man's Spiritual Enemies are especially commendable
and timely in view of the present-day revival of spiritistic vagaries
Many theologians will diflfer from and regret the treatment of hell
and its torments on pages 65 and 66. But at a time when Spiritism
is attracting world-wide attention, this little volume, with its sane
and balanced views, will do much good.
THE ESSENCE OF THE HOLY MASS, a new theory by Rev. WiUi-
baldHackner. (St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co. 25 cents net.) For
centuries theologians have discussed the question: In what does the
essence of the Mass consist?
St. Thomas, St. Bonaventure and others find the sacrificial act in
the consecration. Others find it in the consecration and Communion
taken together (Cardinal Bellarmine), or in the breaking of the Host
and the dropping of the particle in the chahce in connection with
Communion. Others (De Lugo, Franzehn) hold a middle view: they
regard the consecration as the sacrificial act, and find the destruction
of the Victim in the self-abasement of Christ in the sacramental
species, wherein He renders His glorified body present on the altar.
Father Hackner thinks the problem may be solved if we establish
the right relation between the sacrifice of the Last Supper and the
sacrifice of the Cross. He holds that the sacrifice of the Last Supper
has the same relation to the sacrifice of the Cross as the matrimonium
ratum has to the matrimonium consummatiun. The Last Supper is a
sacrificium raium — a contract in which Christ assumes the obligations
towards His Heavenly Father of giving up His Body as a holocaust,
and of shedding His Blood for the forgiveness of sins (Luke xxii. 19, 20).
The sacrifice of the Cross is a sacrificium consummatum: i. e.,
on the Cross the contractual obligation assumed at the Last Supper
was actually fulfilled, namely, the surrender of the Body of Christ
unto death and the shedding of His Blood for the remission of sins.
When Our Lord said to His Apostles: "Do this for a commemora-
tion of Me," He commanded them to continue the sacrifice of the
Last Supper. Therefore, the Mass in its entire structure and nature
is a sacrificium ratum. Consequently, no actual destruction of the
Victim takes place therein, but merely a potential destruction of the
same, as in the Last Supper. This is expressed in the words of conse-
cration, by which the sacrificial act is accomplished in the Sacrifice
of the Mass.
It is not only the sacrificial spirit that Christ, the High Priest,
renews in the sacrifice of the Mass, but also the sacrificial contract
with His heavenly Father, concluded in the sacrifice of the Last
Supper. That means that in each Mass, Christ assumes the obligation
towards His Heavenly Father of surrendering His Body to destruction
and of shedding His Blood for our redemption.
In the Mass the contract remains potential; it is not actually
executed, as was done after the Last Supper. In the Mass, our Heav-
552 NEW BOOKS [July,
enly Father waives the consummation. For the one consummation
on the Cross sufficed for all times, in value and merit, even to redeem
a thousand worlds (Heb. ix. 12). Virtually, therefore, the Sacrifice
of the Mass reaches back to the sacrifice of the Cross, from which it
receives its value and substance. Christ need suffer and die no more,
as He did on the Cross; the Heavenly Father is contented with the
sacrificial spirit or the sacrificial contract of His only-begotten Son.
He dispenses with repeated destruction and shedding of blood, as
He did in the case of Abraham's sacrifice on Mount Moriah.
The Euchari Stic Sacrifice is identical with the Sacrifice of the
Cross, in as far as in both sacrifices the same High Priest offers the
same Victim, His Body and Blood, with this difference only, that on
the Cross the off'ering was made in acta solvendo: i. e., in a bloody
manner, whereas in the Mass (as at the Last Supper) it is made in
potentia et contrahendo: i. e., in an unbloody manner.
MEDITATIONS FOR GOD'S LOVING CHILDREN (To be used by
Mothers and Teachers). (New York City: The Cenacle of St.
Regis. $1.50.) Under the very modest title of "Meditations," the
Religious of the Cenacle have published a volume which will be a
valuable addition to the rather limited library available to the teacher
of Christian doctrine. The present book is unique, because it supplies
the untrained teacher with a method as well as with material. No
one would be foolish enough to deny that many a time the mother
heart, with its unmeasured resources of love and faith, guided by in-
stinct and grace alone, imparts to the child all that is needed and in
the way that is best; but then again, there are teachers, not a few, who,
without direction, achieve less than mediocre results. For these latter,
the present volume will, in numerous instances, mean the successful
completion of a duty that otherwise would remain practically undone.
As His Grace, the Archbishop of New York, writes in a brief
and lucid introductory note, precious results have already been ob-
tained by the use of the volume in the classes held at the Cenacle.
In fact, these lessons are the fruit of several years of experiment; and
constant revision, made on the basis of actual trial, impart a prac-
tical and objective character to the book which render it of quite
unusual worth.
The present series of Fifteen Lessons, which carry the learner
through what may be regarded as the first term, or first year, of
instruction, are concerned with the fundamental truths of revelation.
A succeeding volume is promised; and the discriminating catechist
will be sure to welcome it when it comes.
DENYS, THE DREAMER, by Kathryn Tynan Hinkson. (New York:
Benziger Brothers. $2.00.) An obvious story about obvious per-
sons is here presented to us. The scene is laid in Ireland, but the
finest characters drawn are those of Jews and Englishmen. Denys is,
indeed, a dreamer, a practical dreamer, we are often assured. What is
more to his credit, he effectively holds his position as hero between
^^22.] NEW BOOKS 553
the covers of the book. He is, of course Iri<ih »nH k ■
here rather because he is the hero ttan for »„' . " mentioned
skill expended on his behalf Ther'e U . T *""*""=' °' '"'■'"y
into oblivion beside th': fine chiTc l^UTr^^ t\T'"'''
trait of thp wifo r.f « t« • t. ^^awiug employed in the por-
iraii oi me wite or a Jewish monev-lendpr ^v.^ i,«„ u •
tions-she is someone to renieniber7iS? shf fs rsttr/r^;
as to render the other characters, in contrast, exceedingly vagL^^^^^^
INI^eligion, Second Course, and Religion, Second Manual, Dr. Mac
1 Eachen provides continued application of his theory for the teach-
ing of rehgion to older children of the primary grades. These two
volumes, as those already familiar with Teaching of Religion aid
Behgion, First Course, and Religion, First Manual, know, are to be
used in conjunction with each other. The method employed has
already been commended by ecclesiastical authority as in line with
Scholastic Philosophy, and by prominent educators as following the
best thought of modern pedagogues. It is truly educational in that
It develops the individual through the knowledge of Divine truths
and aims, as the Archbishop of Toronto so beautifully says: "To teach
the Christian religion as a life informed by truth." To make Catholic
faith dynamic is today a "consummation devoutly to be wished." Dr.
MacEachen is giving lead and direction towards this great end. (New
York: The Macmillan Co. 40 cents and $1.40 respectively.)
OT. GREGORY VII., POPE-the "Notre Dame" Series of Lives of the
O Saints. (St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co. $1.80 net.) There is
hardly a more stirring period in all Church history than the last
quarter of the eleventh century, which witnessed the contest of Pope
Gregory VII. with the Emperor Henry IV. over the vexed question of
investitures. The first chapter of this book traces briefly the early
relations of the Church with the Empire. Then we come to Hilda-
brand, his career as a monk of Cluny, and the events which led up
to his election as Pope at the age of sixty in the year 1073. There is
no glossing over wickedness in high places; we see clearly the tre-
mendous problem that faced the saintly Hildebrand when he assumed
the Papal dignity. Fortunately, Gregory was the type of saint who
is also emphatically a man of action; he proceeded at once to set the
Church's affairs in order both spiritually and temporally. One result
was that he died in exile; the other was that the Church entered upon
a holier and more brilliant epoch in her long history. The part
played by the Countess Matilda in behalf of Pope Gregory is clearly
set forth. It is interesting to note that in this much-maligned century,
here was a devout Christian woman, who was a warrior, who knew
four languages well and wrote Latin fluently. The book makes enter-
taining, as well as profitable, reading.
GOD'S WONDER BOOK, by Marie St. S. Ellerker, O.S.D., with
Preface by Very Rev. Vincent McNabb, O.P. (New York: P. J.
Kenedy & Sons. $1.50.) This valuable contribution to the literature of
554 NEW BOOKS [July,
the Mass is addressed especially to young people. The Mass is the epi-
tome of worship, and those who will study "God's Wonder Book," the
Missal, with this scholarly and ardent Dominican cannot fail to find
it a revelation and an inspiration to the deepest and highest in Cath-
olic life and doctrine. The book is admirably balanced and well
sustained, holding the interest from first to last. The history of the
Mass and the symbolism of the Mass not only inform, but inspire to
devotion that is basic. The association of ideas and variety of appeal
are of real psychological value. God*s Wonder Book is scarcely
adapted to very young readers, but the skillful teacher will find it
a guide in interpreting the Mass to the youngest. Children of the
higher Grammar Grades, High School students and adults should study
it first hand and read and re-read it as they surely will. At the end of
each chapter the variations of the Dominican from the Roman rite are
noted.
SKETCHES OF BUTTE, by George Wesley Davis (Boston : The Corn-
hill Publishing Co. $1.75), describes, in about twenty chapters,
Butte from the Vigilante days of the early sixties to its development
in the present day. The book is written in a flippant newspaper style,
and devotes most of its pages to the criminal life of the city, past and
present. It is crudely put together, and gives an utterly unfair picture
of the city.
THE DOOR, by Daniel Sargent. (Boston: Richard G. Badger.)
There are some fine things in this slim volume of poems, as
when Mr. Sargent speaks of a far-off time when
the hills stood tryst
For sign of a dawn's first amethyst.
The poems are but twenty-six in number, but each is graceful and
well turned. In "Verdun," there is the ring of unmistakable poetical
eloquence; in "Midnight," an unusual originality of thought; in "The
Burial of St. Elizabeth," a tenderness and sympathy which speak well
for Mr. Sargent's appreciation of spiritual beauty. There is ardor
in "The Annunciation" and an exquisite reverence in "Often at Night,"
the theme of which is the guardianship of the Blessed Virgin over
her earthly children who, tossing restlessly in weary beds, win her
compassion and are vouchsafed the boon of sleep.
rIE HABIT OF HEALTH, by Oliver Huckel. (New York: Thomas
Y. Crowell Co. $1.00 net.) This is a book of non-Catholic spir-
ituality, but it contains hardly anything to which we may not subscribe.
Of course, it bears no comparison with the masterpieces of Catholic
mysticism or asceticism, v. g., the works of St. Teresa or St. Francis de
Sales. But neither does it aim so high. Its object is to show that the
things of the spirit — prayer, unselfishness, humility, mortification —
apart altogether from their moral significance, possess a certain healing
I
l^^J NEW BOOKS 555
and therapeutic force as well. The book U «,ri>t^„ ■
stWe.^a„a the quotations, with whicttl™r a^t Zt^.
woHd. and a., our woe. A.thou J GoT^ Jh^^ eontneri?:
offences gratu.tously, in His providence He deemed it better tha
wrongdoing on man's part should entail the necessity of making re^ar
afon. From Adam on, the law has worked inevitably and inexorabW
Father Plus little book, ably translated by Madame Cecilia brieiy
sets forth this basic Christian doctrine under three heads: why repar
ation should be made, who is to make it. and how it may be made
Simple and unpretending, almost naive, in style, in the doctrine i
preaches hes the salvation of the world. From all sides we hear the
cry that mankind is spiritually sick, and there is but one cure- with
Clovis, we must burn what we have adored and adore what we have
burned. Only thus, will the problems agitating men's souls be ulti-
mately resolved.
nPHE MAN WHO VANISHED, by John Talbot Smith. (New York-
1 Blase Benziger & Co., Inc. $1.75 net.) It is twenty years since
Father Smith attracted the attention of thousands of New Yorkers,
non-Catholic as well as Catholic, by a clever novel which introduced,'
under thin disguise, many well-known public men of a period with
which most of the readers of that time were familiar. It is this work
known to a previous generation as The Art of Disappearing, that is
now republished under the title. The Man Who Vanished.
The art of writing books of this kind is itself an art in danger
of disappearing. Red blooded men and not introspective neurotics
are used by the author to develop a plot which really develops. Good
men and bad men, they do things; they are not merely sensation
experimenters and sensation recorders.
A PICTURE OF MODERN SPAIN, by J. B. Trend. (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co. $4.50.) The thirty or more essays on the art,
literature and music of Modern Spain in this volume have for the
most part appeared in English papers and magazines the past four
years. The author's sympathies are always with the rationalist anti-
clericals and apostates of Spain, a small but blatant minority, who, to
his mind, are "fighting the same battle against the anti-intellectual
attitude, which is being fought in England, France, Germany and Italy."
He has a few interesting things to say about the languages of
Spain — Castilian, Basque and Catalan — the novels of Perez Galdos and
Pio Baroja, the Assumption Mystery Play of Elche, the origins and his-
tory of Spanish theatre music, the Catalan contribution to Spanish
civilization. But he knows nothing of the glories of Catholic Spain,
and spoils his volume by his prejudice and unfair attacks upon every-
thing Catholic.
556 NEW BOOKS [July,
THE CASTAWAYS OF THE BANDA SEA, by Warren H. Miller.
(New York: The Macmillan Co. $1.75.) This is a tale for young-
sters, cut on about the same pattern as hundreds of other adventure
stories, but much above the average in its plausibility and interesting
detail. The locale is the sea, and various ports, of Borneo and New
Guinea, and in this unknown and colorful region, the young hero,
George, bears a manful part in the romantic happenings attendant
upon fire at sea, pearl hunting and leopard stalking. The book does
for juveniles, in an unpretending way, somewhat the same service as
the novels of Conrad so gorgeously perform for the maturer reader.
THE GANG, by Joseph Anthony. (New York: Henry Holt &
Co. $1.90.) Mr. Anthony's novel introduces us into the boy world
of a New York street, where Harold Diamond, King of the Kids, fights
valiantly for membership in the gang. The author gives us some
humorous pen pictures of life in a public school, and describes vividly
the many adventures of the gang in its constant struggle for supremacy.
STUDENTS of the New Testament will welcome a new edition of the
Abbe Fouard's The Christ, The Son of God, in paper cover, with-
out notes, put out by Messrs. Longmans, Green & Co., New York. That
this paper edition has already done good service to those who cannot
afford the two volume edition, or want a handy traveling companion,
is proved by the appearance of this new edition. (75 cents.)
PAMPHLET PUBLICATIONS.
From the Catholic Truth Society, London, we have a number
of interesting, instructive and devotional pamphlets at two pence each.
A short sketch of the life and work of Venerable Therese Haze, Foun-
dress of the Daughters of the Cross and The Life and Legend of St.
Ildefonsus, Archbishop of Toledo, by Abbot Cummins, O.S.B. A
pamphlet by J. W. Poynter dm Christadelphianism and its teaching;
The Duties of Parents Towards Their Children, an illuminating treatise
by Bertram Wolferstan, S.J.; l^he Doctrinal Witness of the Fourth
Gospel, by Rev. Vincent McNabb, O.P.; Catholic Foreign Missions, by
Rev. T. A. Sullivan, B.A., treating of the place of Foreign Missions in
the economy of the Church, native helpers and clergy, modern mis-
sionary organizations, some results of Protestant propaganda, etc.;
The Religion to be Born in, by Dom Columba Stenson, O.S.B. ; Life and
Its Origin, a scientific paper by B. J. Swindells, S.J., B.Sc; The Words
of Life, being "A Handbook of explanations for those seeking knowl-
edge of the Catholic Faith," compiled by C. C. Martindale, S.J.; the
story of Two Conversions; and "April Showers" and "Pierrette," by
G. R. Snell, printed together in a pamphlet, entitled Two Stories.
A leaflet, J'he Church and the Religion of Christ (price, one half
penny), also comes from The Catholic Truth Society.
Other pamphlet publications received are: Gracefulness or Folly,
edited by Dr. G. Bruehl, on the evil of the modern tendency in dress
(New York: Joseph Schaefer) ; The Our Father, five discourses on the
Lord's Prayer, by Rev. A. M. Skelly, O.P. (privately printed) ; and
Little Office of the Passion, by St. Bonaventure, printed by the Fran-
ciscan Herald Press, Chicago.
TRecent Events
The Genoa Economic Conference, after
France. sessions extending over six weeks, held its
final meeting on May 19th, with little to
show in the way of positive achievement and certainly with no
results comparable to the pleasant promise of its beginning.
Three things were the main outcome: First, a conference to be
held at The Hague to continue the Russian negotiations; second,
an eight months* truce whereby the Powers, on the one hand, and
Russia, on the other, agree not to attack each other for that
period; and third, the Rapallo Treaty between the Germans and
Russians.
Russia proved the chief stumbling-block to success, both in
herself and also because of the various and conflicting attitudes
towards her of France and England. After the Powers had re-
fused the Russian demand for a billion dollar loan in the early
sessions, and had laid down certain conditions before they would
render Russia any financial assistance whatever, the Russians, on
May 11th, sent a reply to the Powers* conditions which made an
agreement practically impossible. Not one of the conditions,
stipulated by the Powers as the price of resuming commercial
relations with Russia, was accepted.
Several attempts were made during the Conference to induce
participation by the United States, but these all met with failure.
Secretary Hughes making it plain on each occasion that there
would be no recognition of the Soviet Government by the
United States, or approval of trade between Russia and America,
until the Moscow authorities provide guarantees of safety of
life and property, the sanctity of contract and the rights of free
labor.
In accordance with the decision reached at Genoa, invitations
were issued on May 28th by the President of the Genoa Conference
for the parleys at The Hague. It is intended^ that two commis-
sions shall meet there on June 26th, one to comprise experts from
the States represented at Genoa, excluding Russia and Germany,
and the other commission to consist only of Russian econ-
omists.
A preliminary meeting will be held on June 15th, and will
be attended by not more than two delegates from all States repre-
558 RECENT EVENTS [July,
sented at Genoa, except Germany and Russia. They, with a
limited number of specialists, are expected to determine who will
participate in the non-Russian commission. By June 26th, at
the latest, it is expected that the names of the Nations and their
representatives will be communicated to the Secretariat General,
which is under the general jurisdiction of a Holland delegate.
The commissions will study the differences that exist between the
nations, particularly matters relating to debts, private property
and credits to Russia, and endeavor to formulate recommenda-
tions for submission to their respective Governments.
The Hague Conference opens with less prospect of success
than that at Genoa, as not only has the United States found it
necessary to decline participation in this Conference also, but
France shows an evident reluctance to attend. On June 3d, Pre-
mier Poincare sent to all the Powers, including the United States,
a carefully prepared note setting forth the French position to-
wards Russia.
The French Premier holds that all the Powers should unite
in declaring that, first of all, Moscow must withdraw the Russian
memorandum of May 11th, and accept unreservedly recogni-
tion of Russia's pre-war debt, her war debt, and the return of
foreign-owned private property nationalized in Russia! More-
over, the Russians must drop their counter-claims for 50,000,000,-
000 gold rubles, and must realize and accept the fact that they
can get no loan at this time.
It is M. Poincare's plan that only after the Soviet shall have
accepted these conditions, may experts of the Powers profitably
study the situation in Russia and the means which may be taken
to help the Russian peoples. He refuses absolutely to take part
at The Hague in another battle of politics as to the relative the-
oretic value of the capitalist and communist systems of govern-
ment.
The disquieting prospect that France would bring further
pressure to bear on Germany with the extension of her military
occupation, was eliminated on May 28th by the German reply to
the demands of the Reparations Commission. The Commission
had delivered an ultimatum giving Germany till May 31st in which
to comply with certain conditions, the most important of which
was the balancing of her budget by raising a 60,000,000,000
paper mark interior loan. The German reply, couched in a
satisfactory tone, said that Germany could do what was asked,
with the proviso that she must have aid in the shape of a foreign
loan.
Although the Commission had insisted on unconditional com-
1922.] RECENT EVENTS 559
pliance, on May 31st it unanimously approved the German reply
and decided to grant Germany a moratorium for the year 1922
The action taken by the German Government to put its finances
on a sound basis and eliminate as much as possible the whole-
sale printing of paper money, constitutes, according to the deci-
sion of the Commission, "a serious effort to meet the Commission's
requirements." In its letter to Chancellor Wirth, the Commission
states that, in view of the importance of an immediate decision
upon the question of postponement of payments, the Commission
felt justified m taking prompt action. With regard to the loan
requested by Germany, the Commission announced it would com-
municate its decision to the International Bankers' Committee
meeting in Paris.
This Committee, of which J. P. Morgan is a member, held its
opening session in Paris on May 24th, under the auspices of the
Reparations Commission, and is still meeting. The purpose of the
Committee is to decide under what conditions an international
loan could be granted to Germany, to be used in great part for
payment of reparations to the Allies. On June 7th, the Repar-
ations Commission by a three to one vote, overriding France's
negative ballot, gave the Bankers' Committee full authority to
propose an international loan for Germany on any basis the
Committee thought desirable. Although England, Belgium and
Italy voted in favor of this proposal, the French negative vote
represented the majority interest in reparations, since France is
to receive fifty-two per cent, of all German payments. It was the
opinion of J. P. Morgan that it was probably best for the Com-
mittee to close its work, it being his belief that with the repar-
ation total standing as it is, and with Germany liable to be called
on by the Allies to make payments in accordance with the London
schedule, it would not be feasible to sell a large amount of German
bonds in the United States. The French delegate, reflecting the
view of his Government, also favored adjournment sine die, but
Kindersley of the Bank of England and Delacroix (Belgium)
urged continuance of the bankers' work. It is recognized that
the French hold the key to the situation, and even though a plan
were drafted, it could not go into effect unless the French Gov-
ernment receded from its present position: that it will not
curtail its claims if there rs to be no curtailment of its debts.
Though, at last accounts, the Committee was still in session,
the prospect for its successful flotation of a German loan is not
bright.
The curtailment of the French debt, mentioned in the above
paragraph as a condition of French consent to a reduction of the
560 RECENT EVENTS [July,
German reparation payments, has of course special reference to
the amount owing the United States, and from recent develop-
ments this country is far from showing any inclination to reduce
its claims. Replying to the French Government's request that
the American Allied Debt Commission would state when it would
receive a special mission of French experts, the United States has
sent word that it was ready to discuss the subject at any time.
This French mission will not be sent until the Bankers' Committee
and the Reparations Commission finish their work, or arrive at a
point where it may be foreseen with some certainty what the
results will be.
On the other hand, word has unoflBcially come from England
that the English Government has completed arrangements to pay
during the coming fall, interest amounting to £25,000,000 on the
British debt to the United States. At the same time Great Britain
has notified France she reserves the right to call for the interest
the latter owes her on the war debt when Britain pays interest
on her debt to the United States. No official figure is obtainable,
but the French interest due England is understood to be about
16,000,000 pounds. Shortly before the Genoa Conference, Great
Britain, in a note to France, formally placed on paper her claim
to repaymenj of the French war debt, but no actual demand for
the money was made. The present request for interest, there-
fore, is a further move in the British plans for adjustment of the
inter-Allied and American war debts.
Although the United States refused to take part in either the
Genoa or The Hague Conference, announcement was made by
Secretary of State Hughes, early in June, that this Government
was prepared to join in the investigation of the reports relating
to the deportation of Christian minorities by the Turks in Ana-
tolia and the alleged atrocities connected therewith, as proposed
by Great Britain, France and Italy. The American Government
has furthermore suggested that a separate commission be formed
to investigate counter-charges of the Turks against the Greeks
and Armenians, and that the two commissions unite in a com-
prehensive report on the whole situation in Asia Minor. In ac-
cepting the invitation. Secretary Hughes stipulated that the in-
quiry should be limited to obtaining accurate data, and that the
United States "assumes no further obligation and enters into no
commitment."
Meanwhile, late reports from Constantinople state that the
Turkish Nationalists have started a strong offensive against the
Greeks in the Eski-Shehr district of Asia Minor. It is not be-
lieved that the Turks are strong enough to eject tlie Greeks from
1922.] RECENT EVENTS 551
the formidable positions which they have consolidated around
Eski-Shehr since last summer's fighting. Reports have been re-
ceived from Angora that a new Turkish volunteer army has been
created to invade Mesopotamia. On June 7th, a Greek fleet bom-
barded the Turkish town of Samsun in the Black Sea.
The outstanding result of the Genoa Con-
Germany, ference was, of course, the Rapallo Treaty
between Soviet Russia and Germany. De-
tails of how the Treaty will work have not yet been published,
and conferences are at present being held between Leonid Kras-
sin, the Soviet representative, and German officials. One definite
outcome of the pact, is the establishment of direct train service
between Berlin and Moscow, to begin on the end of June. The
route will be from Koenigsberg, across Lithuania and Latvia, but,
by special agreement, there will be but one inspection of baggage.
The most direct way would be through Warsaw, but the northern
route has been selected to avoid passing through Poland.
An important by-product of the Genoa meetings was the sign-
ing, early in May, by the German and Polish Ministers, of the
agreement embodying the division of Upper Silesia as made by
the League of Nations, together with the complex regulations
under which the mining area will be operated, for the next fifteen
years, as an industrial unit. The agreement, which is considered
the League of Nations' greatest political achievement, was ratified
by the German Reichstag amid scenes of mourning on May 30th.
According to a report of the Allied Commission for Upper Silesia
to the Council of Ambassadors on May 24th, the Allied military
occupation of the region was to come to an end on the last of
July. Since this report was made, however, numerous clashes
have occurred between the Poles and Germans, and martial law
has been proclaimed in the districts of Kattowitz, Gleiwitz, Hin-
denburg and Rybnik. Latest dispatches, dated June 7th, indi-
cate that, after a week of rioting, the disorder is subsiding under
the pressure of French and Italian troops.
A statement in the London Times on May 28th is to the
effect that the League of Nations at its September session, will
probably be called on to Consider the question of Germany's
admission to membership in the League. The Times adds that
the Council of the League, at its session early in May, examined
the question and that it is believed it fa-ored Germany's admis-
sion, provided she shows good faith in meeting the demands of
the Reparations Commission. A favorable impression was
created by the last German reply to the Commission's ultimatum,
VOL. cxv. 36
562 RECENT EVENTS [July,
as related above, and on May 16th the German Government de-
posited with the Belgian Treasury the final payment of 50,000,000
gold marks under the provisional moratorium granted by the
Commission.
The general moratorium granted to Germany by the Com-
mission and the possibility of a German loan being arranged by
an international banking syndicate, has focused attention upon
the receipts of the German Government from taxation and other
sources. Statistics received by the Foreign Information Depart-
ment of the Bankers' Trust Company of New York, indicate that
the entire yield from taxation in Germany for the fiscal year,
ending March 31st last, was 87,374,000,000 paper marks. This
was an increase of 41,275,000,000 paper marks over the revenue
from taxation last year. The floating debt on March 31st, 1922,
was 281,148,000,000 paper marks, an increase of almost exactly
100,000,000,000 paper marks. Advices received by the Bankers'
Trust Company disclose that about 115,000,000,000 paper marks
were required to carry out the provisions of the Peace Treaty
and about 122,000,000,000 for other expenses, including deficits
on railways, postal and telegraph services.
Through the rush of refugees from the East, and the home-
coming of a host of Germans from the lost colonies and amputated
sections of the former German Empire, the population of the
present German Republic was increased about 1,000,000 during
the World War and the two years immediately following it, ac-
cording to a recent memorandum issued by the German Minister
of the Interior. As the emigration from Germany since the end
of the War, according to recent estimates, has amounted to some
250,000, the net gain in population totals about 750,000.
The United States Secretary of War, Weeks, announced on
June 5th that approximately 1,000 American troops would remain
in Germany after July 1st. It had been previously announced
that all American troops of the occupational force would be com-
pletely withdrawn in May, but this order was countermanded,
following an appeal from Great Britain, France, Belgium and Ger-
many to this Government to reconsider its decision. The news
of the change in plans has been warmly approved in German
official quarters.
The German Government has extended, through the Amer-
ican Ambassador at Berlin, an invitation to the American Gov-
ernment to designate an American citizen as the third member
of the joint claims commission, which is to adjudicate outstand-
ing claims between the two countries. The proposed arrange-
ment will greatly expedite the work of settling such claims, and
1^22.] RECENT EVENTS 5^3
officials of the American Government are pleased at the action
of the Germans, which means that there will be two Americans
on the commission. The original plan for forming the so-called
Mixed Claims Commission was for the United States to name one
member Germany to name another, and the third member to be
selected from some neutral country.
10. tl ^ ''^'''^* ""^ revolutionizing the judicial system of Prussia,
124,968 persons who were convicted of crime and sentenced to
from one to three years* imprisonment during the year 1921
have received conditional or full pardons. This number affords
a striking contrast with 19,000 such pardons granted in 1912
when It was no secret that of every seven Prussian citizens, one
had been convicted in the courts. Formerly the right of pardon
lay m the hands of the King of Prussia or of the Minister of Jus-
tice, but under the latest reforms even the minor courts are
empowered to give a conditional pardon.
From various sources, both American and
Russia. foreign, it appears that the Russian famine
is still far from being broken. According
to a statement by Fritdjof Nansen, head of the League of Nations*
relief work, "in the eastern part of the Volga district, beyond the
Ural Mountains, the situation is desperate, for little or nothing
is being done there. Moreover, the famine has now spread to the
Ukraine and Crimea, where people are dying like flies." One of
the appalling features of the situation is the widespread practice
of cannibalism. Recent reports from Siberia are to the effect that
in this region, once the greatest grain producing section of the
world, only from fifty to sixty per cent, of last year's average of
wheat was sown last spring. With good weather, however, it is
believed that the crop will be sufficient to feed the local population,
and a little of the wheat be available for export.
Because of the persistence of famine conditions, President
Harding, on June 2d, let it be known that he was favorably dis-
posed towards the continuation of American relief work in Soviet
Russia so long as the famine lasted and there was need of outside
help. Originally, the work of the American Relief Administra-
tion was scheduled to end on September 1st. , Later, it was de-
cided to extend the Relief Administration's activities in Russia
until January 1st. Whether, and to what extent, it will be con-
tinued beyond that date will depend entirely upon conditions
and on reports received from Secretary Hoover's confidential
secretary, who has been sent to Russia to make a special inves-
tigation.
564 RECENT EVENTS [July,
The requisition of church treasures by the Soviet authorities
for the ostensible relief of the famine sufferers still continues, and
a number of persons, including several dignitaries of the Rus-
sian Church, have been given severe sentences for opposing the
requisitions. The most prominent of these has been the Pa-
triarch Tikhon, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, who since
his trial began last month has been forced to resign. Fear that,
the Soviet Government means to sentence the Patriarch to death,
on the charge of entering into a revolutionary intrigue with White
Russians and emigres, has aroused religious opinion in various
countries. Pope Pius XI. is reported to have protested to the
Russian Government, through the Soviet delegation to Genoa,
against the prosecution of the Patriarch, and the Archbishop of
Canterbury has asked the British Government to use its influence
to obtain a fair trial for him. Replying to the protest of the
Christian Churches of Great Britain, the Administration Manager
of the Council of Commissars denies any attack on the Church,
and says legal proceedings were taken against Patriarch Tikhon
and other ecclesiastics for having resisted the Soviet's measures
to save the lives of tens of millions of human beings. The Soviet
considers the protests to be "dictated by a narrow caste and
entirely directed against the real interest of the people and the
elementary demands of humanity.'*
On June 1st, President Merkuloff of the Government of
Vladivostok was deposed and placed under arrest at the order
of the Constituent Assembly, which denounced his "despotic
policy as head of the Vladivostok Government." Several days
later. General Diedrichs, former Russian Minister of War and at
one time commander of the western armies of the Omsk Govern-
ment, was elected as his successor. Pending the arrival of Gen-
eral Diedrichs in Vladivostok, General Moltchanoff is Acting
President. The Japanese Army command announced that, while
heretofore neutral, it would, if necessary, intervene to preserve
order.
While no move has been made by the American Government,
since the adjournment of the Arms Conference, to press the Japa-
nese Government to set a definite date for the evacuation of
Siberia, officials in Washington have been pleased by dispatches
from London stating that Great Britain, through the exertion of
friendly pressure, will seek to effect the withdrawal of the Japa-
nese forces. The American Government's attitude towards con-
tinued occupation of Siberia by Japan, is well understood in both
London and Tokio, namely, that the Japanese troops should, as
stated by Secretary Hughes at the Disarmament Conference, "be
1922.] RECENT EVENTS 5^5
withdrawn at the earliest possible momenit." The Anglo-Japa
nese alliance, which was negotiated for the purpose of "maintain
taming the peace of the Far East," remains in effect until auto-
matically terminated by the exchange of ratifications of the Four-
Power Treaty of Washington, and so long as the alliance remains
the British Government, as an ally of Japan, is in a position to
suggest the withdrawal of the Japanese troops as a means of
averting war in Eastern Siberia. During the Genoa Conference,
Viscount Ishii of the Japanese delegation told the Political Com-
mission of the Conference that Japan was negotiating a treaty
with Soviet Russia which, while primarily commercial, had also
^ political aspects, because it involved guarantees for Japanese citi-
'^ zens under which Tokio would withdraw Japanese troops from
Siberia.
Reports were persistent throughout the month of the grave
illness of Premier Lenine. his trouble being variously given as a
nervous breakdown, apoplexy and acute gastritis. Whatever the
disease, there seems no doubt that he is seriously ill and is at
present recuperating at a villa outside of Moscow. Those at
Moscow closely conversant with the political situation, say it is
impossible to determine whether War Minister Trotzky would
take control in the event of Lenine's passing, thus strengthening
military communism, or whether there will be an increase in the
prevailing movement towards the Right, or moderate, wing.
As showing the moderating tendencies of the Soviet, new
decrees promulgated coincidentally witk the close of the Genoa
Conference are of interest. One of these decrees which, accord-
ing to Government leaders, are designed to encourage the inde-
pendent capitalistic reconstruction of Russia, removes the State
monopoly on trade in agricultural implements and seeds, per-
mitting private persons to buy abroad through the Commissariat
of Foreign Trade. Probably, the most important change is that
in the laws concerning the right of private property, which ap-
plies to practically all property jwhich has not already been
"municipalized" by local Soviets. Individual citizens and com-
panies are permitted to own buildings and the land on which
they stand, except that the right to transfer a lease does not cover
land in rural districts. All "movables," which is interpreted to
include factories, all means of production, agricultural and indus-
trial products and "goods which have not been exempt from
private exchange by special laws," are included. The decree is
not retroactive. Requisitioning of private property is permitted
only with compensation and "by ^ue process of law." Rights to
inventions, copyrights, trademarks, industrial models and designs
566 RECENT EVENTS [July,
are guaranteed, subject to limitation of special laws. Inheritance
by will to the extent of 10,000 gold rubles is permitted only to
lawful spouses and direct line heirs. All sorts of banking and
credit deals are permitted, but the courts are empowered to nul-
lify agreements in cases of "excessive exploitation." Foreign
concerns "may obtain the rights of juridical persons only upon
permission of the persons charged with this duty by the Council
of Commissaries."
The Eucharistic Congress held its opening
Italy. session of 1922 in the Belvidere Court of
the Vatican on the afternoon of May 24th.
Pope Pius, after pointing out the importance of the Congress,
pronounced the Apostolic Benediction. On May 28th it is esti-
mated that more than 100,000 people participated in an imposing
procession of the Blessed Sacrament from St. John Lateran to the
Colosseum and back, marking one of the great ceremonies of the
Congress. The Congress was solemnly closed at St. Peter's on
May 29th with a Te Deum sung by the massed choirs of the
Vatican in the presence of Pope Pius, the Cardinals present in
Rome, and a great throng of pilgrims.
A commercial treaty between Soviet Russia and Italy was
signed in the Royal Palace on May 24th. The first section of the
agreement concerns the entire problem of Italo-Russian commer-
cial relations, and the second deals with maritime communica-
tions and transportation in general between the two countries.
A third section dealt with concessions, which Russia was ready to
make to Italians for the exploitation of Russian resources, but
this section was objected to by Signor Schanzer as infringing upon
the moral pledges taken by Italy with the other European coun-
tries to be represented at The Hague Conference. Presumably,
the treaty will become effective June 26th, when the present com-
mercial convention between the two countries expires. The
treaty just negotiated was approved by the Italian Council of Min-
isters on May 28th. It will be in operation for two years, after
which it will be automatically renewed for periods of six months,
unless denounced by either party six months before its ex-
piration.
A new phase of Soviet relations with Italy, and one par-
ticularly significant in view of Signor Schanzer's objections, was
entered upon on June 7th, when an agreement was signed be-
tween the two great Italian Communist Cooperative Societies and
the Russian economic delegation. This agreement, which is en-
tirely independent of the treaty between Italy and the Soviet Gov-
1922.J RECENT EVENTS
567
ernment, provides for a concession of not less than 100 000 hec
tares (247,000 acres) of Russian soil to the Italian Metal Workers'
Cooperative and the Red Cooperative of Forli Province, the two
largest extreme labor organizations in Italy. The importance of
the concession lies, of course, in the fact that such a huge tract
of land is placed at the entire disposal of Italian Cooperatives
But this importance is added to by the fact that in this agreement
the Soviets dealt for the first time with a foreign enterprise not
controlled by the State. The Soviets gave full guarantees for
the safety and liberty of the Italian Cooperatives, who on their
part agree to get the land under cultivation within six years from
today, and to give to the Soviets a certain percentage of the grain
produced.
Previous to the signing of the treaty with Russia, Foreign
Ministers Skirmund of Poland and Schanzer of Italy signed a
commercial treaty similar to the compact that has existed for
some time between France and Poland. This agreement con-
tains a most-favored nation clause, eliminates almost all pre-
viously existing prohibitions on importation and exportation, and
grants Italy the same rights as other countries with regard to
Polish oil.
Still another agreement is a general political and economic
pact at present being elaborated between Italy and Great Britain.
The chief object of this agreement is the guaranteeing of Italy's
position in the Mediterranean.
A review of Italy's economic situation, published in London
on the authority of the British Embassy at Rome, states that "the
industrial situation is improving. Agriculture is regaining, and
in some cases passing, its pre-war level. Livestock, except cows,
is at its pre-war numbers, and in a few years the export of dairy
produce should be large. Cooperative producing societies are
largely engaged in industry, and are preparing to take over dock
yards and arms factories. Consumers' cooperatives should help
to reduce the profiteering which keeps up the cost of living. The
textile trades, especially cotton, are recovering and new markets
have been found in the Balkan States. Some of the chemical
trades are making great progress, and electric power (chiefly for
the railroads) is being largely developed, notably in Apulia, Cala-
bria and Sardinia."
Despite this favorable report, numerous violent disturbances,
both physical and human, have characterized the month. These
included volcanic eruptions from Vesuvius, renewal of the land-
slides in the country surrounding Corato, near the Adriatic, where
great damage was done last month, a plague of locusts near
568 RECENT EVENTS [July,
Naples, which within four days destroyed many acres of wheat,
hops, clover and corn, a general strike in Rome, and innumerable
encounters throughout Italy between the Fascisti and Commun-
ists. The height of trouble from the last mentioned source was
reached in Bologna and the surrounding country, where 65,000
armed Fascisti gathered from nearby provinces and took over the
complete management of affairs, forcing various Socialist and
Communist Mayors in the region to resign. The Government is
much concerned over these outbreaks and, as a measure for the
restoration of order, it has prohibited all parades and assemblies.
On May 19th the Rome Tribuna announced that an agree-
ment had been concluded between Italy and Jugo-Slavia fixing the
status of the Adriatic seaports of Zara and Fiume. A disquieting
contrast to this announcement was the action of between 4,000
and 5,000 Italian youths who, on June 8th, swore to obey the call
of d'Annunzio at a moment's notice and adopted a resolution re-
newing their loyalty to him, following recent attacks against the
soldier-poet, who had been accused by leaders of the Fascisti of
having deserted them and gone over to the Socialists.
On May 22d word was received from Tripoli to the effect
that Italian troops were carrying out a great offensive against the
rebel Arabs in Tripolitania, where revolutionary activities broke
out in March of this year. The Italian forces are understood to
be composed largely of local levies, supported by some Italian
regiments under command of General Badoglio. The Italians
are reported to be using a considerable number of bombing air-
planes and have inflicted heavy losses upon the enemy.
June 15, 1922,
With Our Readers
T AW is the security of order. Without it human society would
^ not exist. Chaos is the sole alternative. Justice, peace
morality would then vanish from the earth. It will not be so'
for the instinct to preserve law is as strong as the individuars in-
stinct for self-defence. Law is society's self-defence.
But evident as these truths are, the thoughtful among men
are deeply disturbed by the growing disrespect and non-observ-
ance of the laws of the land. The speeches of our country's offi-
cial leaders, delivered within the last month, if reviewed, would
yield an emphatic indictment against our people on their growing
indifference to the laws of the land. The statements of these men
and women in high places have ample evidence in their support.
The public press of the country in its reporting of news: in its
own editorials : in its special articles, has done and is doing yeo-
man service in destroying respect for law. The press is playing
its effective part in tearing out the foundations of our country.
♦ * * *
TJISTORIANS and literary authorities inform us that the con-
* -^ temporary novel is the true index of a people's life and prin-
ciples. Recently, an American periodical published a symposium
on the present-day novel by a number of pre«ent-day novelists.
The journal in question called them the leading novelists of the
day. The symposium was for the most part a defence of the
"impressionistic" school. This school admits no such thing as
law: for law is permanent and stable: law is a standard to which
we conform our actions. The impressionists will not allow them-
selves to be so trammeled. They are the evangelists of anarchy.
They claim to be the rulers today in the literary world. Whether
they report a situation already existing, or whether the situation
is begotten of their propaganda, they are playing a very effective
part in destroying moral standards, in uprooting regard for law,
in making the individual's immediate touch with life the be-all
and the end-all whatever the cost.
To our mind, the impressionistic school is a product, not a
creator. It is born of theories, beliefs, of creeds, or the denial of
them, which existed and worked long before its birth.
* * * *
HUMAN law, standing alone, has no sanction: no enduring,
permanent force. It owes its existence to God. Therefore,
to the same Source it owes its power. God is the root of all life:
570 WITH OUR READERS [July,
the Eternal Law is the source of all law. Human society cannot
exist unless its members profess belief in and dependence upon,
a personal God. Extinguish the lights of heaven, and the world
is in darkness. For some time the borrowed light may endure,
its source having been denied. But eventually, seeking a source
and not finding any, it also will die.
The ultimate, the foundation-stone upon which rests observ-
ance of and respect for human law, is the belief of the individual
in his direct personal responsibility to God. Destroy that and law
becomes little more than a fiction. This is the catastrophe pend-
ing today — the loosening of the corner-stone. And as law is the
root of order, so lawlessness is the root of disorder. Unless the
Supreme Lawgiver is received in our hearts with filial reverence
and devotion, then our concept of and our relation to human law
is disordered, forced out of joint. If the Supreme Lawgiver is
put to one side, as One Who merits our religious worship, but
Who is divorced from the moral law — a Kantian theory that has
sent its roots very far into modern thought, God is forgotten as
the One to Whom, as Law, all things human must conform.
* * * *
THE personal misunderstanding and the displacement of hu-
man law is due to a process for the beginnings of which we
must look back three hundred years. It began with a denial of
any common objective knowledge of God's law: any visible and
audible authority to which all men are subject. It placed con-
formity to divine law in the personal opinion of the individual:
made each man the interpreter of God: subjected God to personal
conscience.
As the disorder grew, and the light, farther and farther re-
moved from its source, grew dim, the futility of making oneself
the arbiter of the moral universe became more evident. A com-
mon external authority there must be. The Protestant denied
the Catholic Church. Where would he find that authority which
even his natural instincts craved? Where could he find it except
in that only other social authority upon earth — the State? The
State has its own authority in its own field. To make it the
substitute for God is lawlessness. Not with deliberate knowl-
edge of its logical consequences was this done. But the non-
Catholic found himself compelled by circumstances. He could
not name himself the interpreter and judge of the law of God,
obligatory upon all: he denied that the Catholic Church knew it
or could know it. The society of his fellows — the State — was the
only remaining power.
* * * ♦
1922.] mm OUR READERS
571
pOR example, in the matter of marriage, upon which rests the
1 well-being of human society, the Protestant takes as his law
the law of the State. The vast majority of our legislators are non-
Catholic. Every legislature in the land claims the right to legis-
late, not alone on the conditions that shall accompany a marriage,
but on the very validity of the marriage itself. Divorce and the
conditions of divorce are likewise subject to the same human,
changing power, and respectability is not denied to any man or
woman as long as he lives according to State law. Whether it
is the law of God or not, is practically subservient to the ques-
tion: is it the law of the land?
The utter lawlessness of it all is seen clearly by the thought-
ful. But what can they do, having not the faith that solves and
overcomes the problems of the world? State law: human law can
help, and should help and support, the right ordering of the divine
law. But to place the State as the sole and ultimate power, is to
expose law to laughter and ridicule, as it is being ruthlessly ex-
posed today.
Human law is not always distasteful to the lawless. In its
external police power, where crime is clearly defined and can be
cleared proved, it is feared and effective. In its laws that regu-
late or strive to regulate the conduct of the individual or of bus-
iness, the State is not only frequently ineffective, but is often used
as a protector by the lawless. Innumerable are the devices by
which the law maj'^ be made ineffective; and justice defied.
AS the knowledge of God's revealed law and the individual's
personal responsibility thereto decreases: and the signs of
that personal anarchy show themselves in human society, they
who sincerely wish to save and better society, and who have
looked to the State as a saviour, look to the State more and more.
In their pitiable confusion, they ask the State to make more laws:
laws that will attempt to supply that very law of God which they
have neglected, that will regulate the private rights and conduct
of the individual.
^ * * *
WE are not defending any policy of laissez-faire: or any theory
that the individual may conduct his business and his life
entirely independent of the society in which he lives. We do
maintain that human society, since it is made up of individuals,
must count upon some power, other than itself, which will secure
the moral cooperation of the individual in the work and progress
of the State. No State power can do that fully, for State power
572 WITH OUR READERS [July,
is necessarily an external power. That power must be spiritual:
must be greater than the State: must be commonly obligatory
upon all humankind — must be God and His revealed law. With-
out a revealed law, God is not known.
And that revealed law necessarily demands an authoritative
guardian: interpreter: teacher.
* * * *
THE root trouble with modern society is that it has denied or
never known that Guardian: that Teacher which is the con-
dition of our peace. Every individual soul, add law to law as
you will, has its own personal problems and difficulties. Every
human law is subject to interpretation and to exception. The
most fundamental relations of our life can never be made sub-
ject to human law. The love of husband and wife: of father
and son: of mother and child: of brother and sister: our charity
towards one another: our respect and reverence for women — all
these, with their innumerable correlations that make the warp
and woof of life — are not the subject of human laws. A wisdom,
a temperance, a sacrifice, a faith above human laws, must guide
and sustain them. And the individual will seek from his fellows
the counsel, the advice that his soul craves. We are all needy
children of the one Father. Never was there a son who did not
crave and seek and find the advice of his father as he followed
the latter's footsteps. Law is but tyranny when it is not accented
by human sympathy and by human love.
GOD has not left us orphans. The Voice of the Father in
Heaven is heard upon earth, and the sons of men may hear
it in their distress and know the will wherein lies their peac^.
The fathers in Christ on earth are as the Father in Heaven to the
sons of men. "Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven
them. Go forth and teach all nations." Once the whole world
had the tribunal of Penance wherein the world could take its
secrets heavy with sin and perplexity: wherein law was shown
to be not slavery or compulsion : not trammeling or restriction, but
the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. The tribunal of
Penance where wisdom shows and exacts the higher sacrifice and
where temperance restrains and redeems. The world in great
part has lost it; but never will law be understood or reverenced
aright until the world again seeks its light, its power and its
peace.
1922.] WITH OUR READERS 573
A VERY valuable estimate of the development and worth of
^ Conan Doyle's spiritualistic theories is published in the
Magazine Section of the New York Times, Sunday. June 18th It
IS from the pen of the well-known newspaper correspondent P
W. Wilson.
The article gives this summary of Doyle's education:
Among the great public schools of England, Stonyhurst, with
its long Roman Catholic traditions, its powerful faculty of learned
Jesuit Fathers, its museum and collection of postage stamps,
rivaled only by King George's, holds a peculiar and honored posi-
tion. There is was that Conan Doyle, as a boy, spent seven years
of his impressionable youth. He entered at nine and left at six-
teen. While Stonyhurst made him no mean cricketer, it also con-
fronted him with the tremendous affirmations of revealed reli-
gion. And those affirmations were rooted in the authority of an
ancient Church.
At sixteen years of age, however, Doyle was removed from
Stonyhurst and, by a strange chance, plunged into a wholly dif-
ferent atmosphere, namely, Germany: and after Germany, into
the medical school of Edinburgh University. It was subjecting
his still immature soul to a Turkish bath. After breathing the
air of a warm, colorful, elaborate faith and bowing his will to a
tremendous spiritual loyalty, the lad was assailed with a cold
douche of pitiless negations.
"Driven underground, his beliefs vanished within his sub-
consciousness, and all the surface of his mind was covered with
the shallow syllogisms of cause and effect. He thought himself
an emancipated Rationalist. He did not realize that his somewhat
superficial physics could only be the veneer that would hide for a
time his ineradicable mysticism.
"As a medical student, what engrossed his attention was not
the teaching, but a teacher. His name was Dr. Joseph Bell, and
he was not merely the original of Sherlock Holmes; he was Sher-
lock Holmes. The uncanny actuality of this character in fiction
is due to the fact that Conan Doyle did not imagine his hero, he
described him. Joseph Bell was to Sir Arthur what Johnson was
to Boswell. It may have been a description with embellishments,
but. in the main, it was photography. Doyle's eye was the lens.
His memory was the plate. His books were the prints. We see
in his authorship an absolute submission to another's personality.
The novelist was simply a friend. Dr. Watson, taking down notes."
D
OYLE, far from being a Rationalist, is an intellectual depend-
ent. He has always followed some lead, always subjected
574 WITH OUR READERS [July,
himself to some control. "Awaiting our teacher may be other
controls, and, if we accept his present gospel, we may find to-
morrow that he has passed on his way to yet another equally in-
fallible, though different, revelation."
Having accepted at one time the control of Rationalism, he
has sought to escape from it because he "could not exclude the
unseen even from the logic of life."
Faced by the stress of war, he sought to recapture something
like faith.
"The ecclesiastical authority which dominated his youth no
longer held him. Of Protestant teaching he knows, or at least he
understands, so little that he gravely suggests a new Christianity
based on acceptance of the New Testament and rejection of the
Old. Apparently, it has not occurred to him to compare the
Magnificat with the Song of Hannah, or the parables of the Good
Shepherd with the Twenty-third Psalm, or the majestic symbolism
of the Apocalypse with the mystic dreams of Ezekiel.
"On the entire range of Jewish history, poetry and juris-
prudence, including the Ten Commandments, he passes an abrupt
verdict, intimating his decision, not at some Ecumenical Council
or other solemn conclave, but in the pages of an illustrated maga-
zine. Then he proceeds to a stance where he sings 'Nearer, My
God, to Thee,* apparently oblivious of the fact that it is derived,
in part at any rate, from the story of Jacob's dream, just con-
signed by the singer to the waste-paper basket of a better
Christianity."
* * * *
THE critic considers the value of spiritualistic evidence and
continues: "As a Spiritualist, Conan Doyle has been ap-
proached by multitudes of families bereaved during the War.
Warm-hearted, he has offered them comfort, but not, of course,
the usual consolations of religion. He sends his disciples to con-
sult mediums. In doing this, his motives are disinterested. In-
stead of making money, he spends it on his labor of love. But,
of course, the medium receives fees, and in Conan Doyle's recom-
mendation obtains at once an advertisement and a standing, not
without pecuniary value. There is not a medium the wide world
over who does not regard men like Doyle and Lodge as assets to
be cherished at all costs."
THE critic recites the tragic instances of murder and suicide on
the part of followers of Doyle's preaching, and then concludes
with the statement: "Doyle disclaims responsibility. But the
1922.] WITH OUR READERS 575
suicides happen, and they show either that Spiritualism weakens
the character or that weak characters favor SpirituaUsm "
And the article ends with this sentence: "After all the im
niortality of the soul is best demonstrated, not by photographic
effects, familiar m many movies, but by the lives-indeed, the mar-
tyrdoms—of the millions who for thousands of years have striven
and suffered in this sure and certain hope."
•^.
TTHE National Civic Federation has published a pamphlet en-
A titled. Symposium of Opinions Upon the Outline of History,
by H. G. Wells. The pamphlet for the most part confirms what
The Catholic World published with regard to Wells' volume in
its issues of January and August, 1921.
nPHE well-known writer, Father Stephen J. Brown, S.J., has
A written asking us to give publicity to his plans to open in
Dublin, Ireland, a "Central Catholic Library." "Dublin is to be-
come," writes Father Brown, "in a fuller sense than ever before,
the centre of Irish life, our political and administrative life, but
also our social and intellectual life. In the years before us a vast
scheme of national reconstruction will have to be thought out.
With this reconstruction work, religious interests are intimately
bound up. Now, owing chiefly to the circumstances of our past
history, education generally, and especially religious education,
on its intellectual side, is not on a high level. Little or no thought
from a Catholic standpoint has been given to the problems, intel-
lectual and social, of the modern world. It is clear that much
thought must henceforth be given to these things if our develop-
ment is not to take a wrong direction."
Hence the necessity of this new Catholic library which will
be open to the general public. AH the Dublin Lending Libraries
and the three chief Public Reference Libraries are under Protes-
tant control. The new library is to be housed at 34 Westmore-
land Street. We heartily join in the hope expressed by Father
Brown, that this library will become "a centre of Catholic thought,
an arsenal for Catholic controversy, a source of inspiration for
Catholic social and religious action, a permanent exhibition, as it
were, of Catholic achievement."
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The book in question is worthless.
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THE
^atholie^opld
Vol. CXV. AUGUST. 1922.
No. 689.
JOHN CARROLL, FIRST ARCHBISHOP OF BALTIMORE
(1735-1815).!
BY BERTRAND L. CONWAY, C.S.P.
OHN CARROLL, the first Bishop of the United
States, was born on January 8, 1735, at Upper
Marlboro, Prince George's County, Maryland.
His father, Daniel Carroll, was a prominent mer-
chant of the province, who had emigrated from
Ireland at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and his
mother, Eleanor Darnell, one of Maryland's richest and most
highly educated women.
The social and economic conditions of Maryland at the
time of Carroll's birth were inimical to the foundation of edu-
cational institutions. Towns were few, and the people lived
apart on large estates or plantations. Parents at all inter-
ested in the education of their children usually sent them
abroad, more for social than intellectual reasons. The first
attempt of the provincial government to found a college in
1671 was an utter failure, so that a hundred years went by
before Washington College at Charlestown was established
in 1782.
Catholics labored under the additional disadvantage of a
hateful and irritating penal code, which harassed their every
move from 1650 to the eve of the Revolution. Their interest,
1 The Life and Times of John Carroll, Archbishop of Baltimore (1735-1815).
By Rev. Peter Guilday, D.D. New York: The Encyclopedia Press. 1922. |5.00.
CoPYHiGHT. 1922. The Missionary Society of St. Paul thb Apostlb
IN the State of New Yobk.
vol. CXV. 37
578 FIRST ARCHBISHOP OF BALTIMORE [Aug.,
however, in elementary education is proved by the forty-two
legacies for schools bequeathed between the years 1650 and
1685, and by the founding of an excellent private school in
1639 at Newtown, Maryland, then the centre of Jesuit mis-
sionary activity. The Orange Rebellion of 1688 closed this
school, and the Maryland Assembly of 1704 penalized Cath-
olic school activities for years by making their schools illegal.
From 1715 to 1751 Catholics were free from persecution
under a law of Queen Anne, which allowed priests to officiate
in private families. Bohemia Manor Academy, which John
Carroll attended for about a year with his cousin, Charles
Carroll of Carrollton, belongs to this period.
Both boys were sent to St. Omer's in Flanders for their
college course (1748-1753). Catholics in the Colonies, like
their brethren in Ireland, were forced to have their children
educated abroad, not only to safeguard their faith, but to
preserve their morals. The non-Catholic schools of the day
were grossly immoral, as we learn from the historians of the
Established Church of both Maryland and Virginia. All
honor to those valiant mothers who made a willing sacrifice
of their children's companionship for ten or fifteen years, the
better to safeguard their loved Catholic traditions of religion
and learning.
St. Omer's, founded by the famous Jesuit Father Robert
Persons in 1592, was the best loved school on the continent
by the boys of Maryland. With Douay it soon became the
best known and most efficient English college abroad. It was
a mixed school, made up of young men preparing for life in
the world, and of young levites preparing for the priesthood —
something like Mount St. Mary's of Emmitsburg today. It
had a high reputation among European schools, and visitors
"often expressed their astonishment at the easy and fluent
manner the students disputed and discoursed in both Greek
and Latin." The discipline was spartan in its severity, as
we learn from a copy of its rules and regulations still pre-
served in the Archives of Stonyhurst College.
We know nothing of Carroll's life there, for his letters
from home were lost in the confiscation of Bruges College
in 1773, and his own letters to his parents have been looked
for in vain both in the Baltimore Cathedral Archives and in
the Georgetown College collection.
1922.] FIRST ARCHBISHOP OF BALTIMORE 579
In 1753 he finished his humanities, and entered the Jesuit
novitiate at Watten, a town about seven miles from St. oS
."iH rl " t ?'"'* "^""^ "^^ ^^^ -' -*-e self-sacdfice
child-hke obedience, perfect poverty and self-denial. He
visited the city hospitals, and catechized the poor. He spent
a month's pilgrimage with one companion-an old Jesuit
custom-always on foot, and begging his way from door to
door. At this time he was at the most malleable stage in the
souls life, and it is hardly an over-estimate to state that in
these two years of solid piety and of practical spirituality in
the Jesuit novitiate the secret of John Carroll's religious
fervor, apostolic zeal and high-minded independence of
thought is to be found."
After completing his novitiate, John Carroll spent three
years (1755-1758) studying philosophy at Liege, and then re-
turned to St. Omer's to teach the classics. He remained there
four years— until the suppression of the Jesuits by the Parlia-
ment of Paris, August 6, 1762. He accompanied the exiled
professors and students to Bruges, where a new college was
at once founded, and, as far as we can learn, returned to Liege
the following year to begin his four year's course of theology
(1763-1767). He was ordained soon after — some time be-
tween 1767 and 1769 — and was finally professed on February
2, 1771.
The two years that followed his ordination were chiefly
spent traveling in Europe as guardian and tutor of a boy of
nineteen, the son of Lord Stourton of England. The Journal
of his trip is rather uninteresting and commonplace, but we
have four valuable letters that he wrote at this time to Father
Ellerker of Liege. They are important, for they furnish a
first-hand historical evidence of the suppression of the Jesuits,
and afford us a clear insight into the character of Father
Carroll. His tone in these letters is rather bitter and caustic,
for he felt keenly the injustice of the Roman authorities, who
were acting, he imagined, as the complacent tools of the un-
scrupulous Bourbon politicians of France, Spain and Por-
tugal.
The decree was issued on August 16, 1773. Father Carroll
was at Bruges at the time, and within two months he, with
Fathers Angier and Plowden, was arrested by the Austrian
Commissioners. Unfortunately, Father Carroll's private
580 FIRST ARCHBISHOP OF BALTIMORE [Aug.,
papers and letters were confiscated, and efforts to locate them
have always proved fruitless.
Father Carroll on his release stayed, for a short time, at
the College of Liege and as chaplain of Lord Arundell of
Wardour Castle, England. He might have remained perma-
nently at the college teaching or have kept his sinecure post as
private chaplain among his English friends, but conditions in
the Colonies called peremptorily for his return. He wanted
to be in his native land in time of trouble, for he was a pa-
triot in every fibre of his being. He left England in the spring
of 1774, and went at once to the house of his brother-in-law,
William Brent of Richland, Virginia.
"The political situation of the English colonies had been
growing intensely during the decade preceding Father Car-
roll's return. The public prints of London had kept up a
running commentary on the opposition to English rule in the
Colonies, and the debates in Parliament brought the revo-
lutionary spirit, which was alive in America, to the heart of
the Empire. During the year of his residence in England,
John Carroll had excellent opportunities to gauge public
opinion, and he returned fully equipped to take part in the
movement. There was no question of his patriotism, for he
was the first priest of the rebellious Colonies to refuse obe-
dience to the last of the Jesuit superiors. Father John Lewis,
who acted all through the war as Vicar-General of the London
District. This was not in a spirit of insubordination, but with
political cleavage from England, John Carroll believed eccle-
siastical separation went also. He declined to conform to the
English jurisdiction of Father Lewis, and chose to reside inde-
pendently with his mother at Rock Creek. He returned an
amiable, cultured and polished man, endowed with all the
acquirements of the learning of the day."
It is very difficult to give an accurate summary of the
status of the Catholic Church on the eve of the Revolution,
for the historian has to depend for the most part on legends
and uncertain traditions of the towns and cities along the At-
lantic coast. "The use of^ aliases on the part of the priests;
the fear of committing historical facts to paper; the inefficient
system of keeping records, and the hard missionary life of
the day have had the regrettable effect of wrapping these
years in a cloak of silence." Roughly speaking, the entire
1922.] FIRST ARCHBISHOP OF BALTIMORE m
population was three million, twenty-two thousand of whom
vZl h . ;•• J" ''''^'^"'' *^^ ^^*^^^-^ --e mosTlyTf
English and Irish origin; in Pennsylvania there were Irish
Scotch French and German Catholics, with the Germans pre-*
dominating. The Catholics of New York and New Jersey
could be counted by the hundreds, and all along the coast
from Massachusetts to Georgia were scattered colonies of the
Acadians (Massachusetts, 2,000; South Carolina, 1,500; Mary-
land, 2,000; Georgia, 400) who had been driven out of Nova
Scotia in 1755-56. West of the Proclamation Line were the
French Catholic settlements of Detroit, Green Bay, Prah-ie du
Chien, Peoria, Cahokia, Chartres, Kaskaskia, Vincennes, Nat-
chez, New Orleans and Mobile.
The eleven years that elapsed between the Treaty of Paris
(1763) and the passage of the Quebec Act (1774) ended in a
bitter No Popery campaign. Catholics could not enjoy any
place of profit or trust while they continued loyal to the
Church. "Toleration, when it did come, came not as the
result of any high-minded principles of liberty on the part
of the leaders of the Revolution, but accidentally as a by-
product of the policy which was born with the spirit of inde-
pendence." The story of religious liberty in the United States
begins with George Mason's Bill of Rights, presented in the
Virginia State Convention in 1776.
Despite the bitter anti-Catholic spirit aroused in the Col-
onies by the passing of the Quebec Act, as evidenced in such ^
documents as the Address to the People of Great Britain, the
Petition to the King, and Alexander Hamilton's Full Vindica-
tion of the Measures of Congress, Catholics took their full
share in the American Revolution. The anti-Catholic feeling
was offset largely by the French Alliance, the friendly attitude
of Spain, the loyalty of the Catholic Indians of Maine, the
assistance of Father Gibault in the West, and the gift of six
million dollars by the Catholic bishops and priests to the new
Republic in 1780. There was not a Catholic of important so-
cial and financial standing who sided with Great Britain in
the struggle. Charles Carroll of Carrollton was beyond ques-
tion one of the foremost Americans of the Revolution. *'His
action in the burning of the Peggy Stewart; his outspoken at-
titude on independence in the Maryland Convention and in
the First Continental Congress in 1774; his commission to
582 FIRST ARCHBISHOP OF BALTIMORE [Aug.,
Canada in 1776; his signature to the Declaration of Independ-
ence on August 2, 1776; his loyalty to Washington in the foil-
ing of the Gonway cabal; his three months' residence at Valley
Forge with Washington and the American troops; his part in
bringing about the French Alliance; his assistance in organ-
izing the Bank of North America with Robert Morris, Chase
and others; and his later career as First Citizen of the Land
down to his death in 1832 — these give him a place in our
annals, of which all Americans are proud."
There are many other names besides his which figure
largely among the patriots of the period: Commodore John
Barry, the Father of the American Navy; General Stephen
Moylan, Muster-Master General to the Army of the United
Colonies, and the Colonel of the Light Horse Dragoons; Colo-
nel John Fitzgerald, aide-de-camp and secretary to General
Washington; Thomas FitzSimons, a Catholic signer of the
Constitution; George Meade, Dr. Joseph Cauffman, Colonel
Francis Vigo, Orono, and the most romantic figure of adven-
ture during the whole war, Timothy Murphy.
The American army was made up chiefly of Irish and
French officers and soldiers. The final victory at Yorktown
was made a certainty by the presence of 7,800 Catholic French
soldiers and 20,000 Catholic French sailors of the fleets of de
Grasse and de Barras.
Father John Carroll himself took no active part in the
Revolution, save to accept the invitation of the Continental
Congress to accompany the American Commissioners — Frank-
lin, Chase and his cousin, Charles Carroll — to Quebec. The
mission to Canada was a failure, because the Bishop of Que-
bec, Briand, was loyal to Great Britain, and had no notion of
sacrificing the certain toleration of the Quebec Act for the
uncertain and, as he thought, hypocritical promises of the
United Congress' Address to the Inhabitants of Quebec.
Father Carroll received scant courtesy in Canada, even from
his ex-Jesuit confreres, one of whom. Father Floquet, was
punished by .Bishop Briand for entertaining Father Carroll
at dinner against his express command. The commissioners
could not in honesty explain the reason of their coun-
try's bigoted protest to England against the Quebec Act,
and the unjust laws and persecutions of Catholics in the
Colonies.
1922.] FIRST ARCHBISHOP OF BALTIMORE ^
^*Ir?T.'?u''^*''' stated-without a shadow of proof, how-
ever-that Father Carroll was directly instrumental in brini
mg about the great Constitutional triumph of religious equal
ity before the law. The sixth article of the Constitute
No rehgious test shall ever he required as a qualification to
any office or public trust under the United States-v^^s con-
sidered insufficient by some of the States, and dangerous to
the general welfare by others. The first amendment went
further m granting religious equality-Con^re.. shall make
no law respecting an establishment of religion. It took
many years for the several States to accept the principle of
complete religious freedom. (Georgia, 1798; South Carolina.
1790; New York, 1806; Connecticut, 1818; Delaware, 1831-
Massachusetts, 1833; North Carolina, 1835; New Jersey. 1844.)
New Plampshire to this day retains the word Protestant in its
religious clause, and all attempts thus far to change it have
failed.
Father Carroll, despite all legends to the contrary, had no
part in the drafting of the religious freedom clause of the
Constitution, although his sentiments on the matter were well
known. We have a letter of his written to Matthew Carey of
Philadelphia, January 30, 1789: "After having contributed in
proportion to their numbers, equally at least with every other
denomination, to the establishment of independence, and run
every risk in common with them, it is not only contradictory
to the avowed principles of equality in religious rights, but a
flagrant act of injustice to deprive them of these advantages
to the acquirement of which they so much contributed."
Theoretically, during the American Revolution, the Lon-
don Vicars- Apostolic (Dr. Challoner, 1759-1781; Dr. Talbot.
1781-1784), were the Superiors of the Catholic clergy and laity
in the "Thirteen Provinces of America." As early as 1756,
Bishop Challoner tried to persuade Rome to appoint an Amer-
ican Bishop or Vicar- Apostolic in the Colonies. He gave as
his reasons: the great distance, which did not permit him to
make a visitation in America; his constant' lack of informa-
tion, which hinders him from directing the Church there; the
destitute state of the people on account of the lack of the
sacrament of Confirmation; and his inability to send a repre-
sentative there by reason of the distance and the expense.
His charges against the Jesuits that they were unwilling to
584 FIRST ARCHBISHOP OF BALTIMORE [Aug.,
receive a Vicar-Apostolic or a Bisliop because they had ruled
the Church in the Colonies so long, are utterly without found-
ation. The Laity Remonstrance, of July 16, 1765, signed by
Charles Carroll, Ignatius Digges, Henry Darnall and two hun-
dred and fifty-six leading Catholic laymen of Maryland, pro-
testing against the appointment of an Apostolical Vicar, was,
as Charles Carroll himself assures us, not influenced by the
Jesuits in Marj^land. These laymen maintained, in a letter to
Bishop Challoner accompanying the Remonstrance, that the
bitter Puritanism of the Colonies at the time was absolutely
hostile to the coming of any bishop, Anglican or Catholic, and
that such an appointment would be destructive of peace and
harmony. The suggestion of Bishop Challoner that Bishop
Briand of Quebec go to the Colonies to give confirma-
tion was too absurd even to be considered. The delay in
Carroll's appointment was not due to any apathy on the part
of the Holy See, but was caused solely by motives of policy.
Rome fully realized the great danger to Church discipline
which might arise in the absence of a canonically appointed
superior, but there was nothing to gain by forcing the issue
upon the rebellious Colonies.
Father Carroll was finally appointed Vicar-Apostolic on
June 9, 1784. This luckily nipped in the bud the plans of the
Nuncio at Paris, Doria Pamphili, and Cardinal Antonelli, the
Prefect of Propaganda, who were trying to have France con-
trol the ecclesiastical aff'airs of the United States. The Nuncio
at Paris was as Ordinary to act with the knowledge and
understanding of the American Minister in Paris. Subor-
dinate to the Nuncio would be a French Vicar-Apostolic or
Bishop, with an official agent at Paris, who would act in con-
cert with the American Minister and the Nuncio. Mission-
aries for the Church in America were likewise to be selected
from among the French clergy. That such a scheme should
have been discussed with Franklin, who seemed at first to
favor it, proves conclusively how ignorant the Roman author-
ities were of American Catholic affairs. In fact, the "Amer-
ican clergy were to be at the mercy of meddlers and at the
mercy of badly informed chiefs in the Congregation to which
they are obliged to look as to their superiors, until an Arch-
bishop of Baltimore (Archbishop Neale to Pius VII., March
6, 1817) breaks the restraint the American clergy must have
1922.] FIRST ARCHBISHOP OF BALTIMORE 535
felt and appeals directly to the Pope in a letter, which lacks
nothing m its indignation at the sad situation in which Roman
cunal Ignorance had placed them."
Father Carroll's appointment officially ended the jurisdic-
tion of the Vicar-Apostolic of London, and gave the Church
m the United States its own autonomy under the jurisdiction
of Propaganda. Father Thorpe wrote Father Carroll from
Rome, stating the nature of the faculties imparted him by
Propaganda, particularly the power of administering con-
firmation, and stated that as soon as Propaganda had received
the necessary information regarding the state of the Church in
America, the Holy See would make him Bishop. Father Car-
roll at once presented this letter to his brethren at the White-
marsh Chapter on October 11, 1784, and they drew up a pro-
test against it on the plea that a bishop was unnecessary, and
appointed a committee of three to draw up a Memorial to
Rome against the appointment.
The appointment was not at all to the liking of Father
Carroll, and this protest left him free to decline it. His best
friends, however. Fathers Molyneux and Farmer of Phila-
delphia, wrote strong letters, telling him that it was his duty
to accept it for the good of religion. Only the dread of the
possible imposition of a foreigner as head of the Church in
America made him finally yield to the arguments of his
friends. His letter of acceptance was finally written Febru-
ary 27, 1785. This important letter contains the best account
of the religious state of the country in the Revolutionary
period, and is, therefore, one of the most valuable documents
in our history. On March 1st, he sent his famous Relation of
the State of Religion in the United States to Propaganda, an-
other most valuable document.
Father Carroll had a most difficult task before him. His
field was immense in extent and in possibilities. He had but
few priests, the majority of whom were old and utterly worn
out from the onerous labors of the missions. The means of
communication were slow and uncertain, and the liberty of
the new Republic invited to its shores many an ecclesiastical
adventurer. The administration of church property was to
cause quarrels in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore,
which threatened the unity of the Church. The spirit of na-
tionalism was beginning to cause untold trouble. There was
586 FIRST ARCHBISHOP OF BALTIMORE [Aug.,
no seminary to foster ecclesiastical vocations, and it was most
difficult to control the quality of the priests coming from
abroad. Only a man of extraordinary ability, piety and tact
could have faced those five critical years (1784-1789) and have
solved the many problems that met him at every turn.
Father Carroll's first visitation in the summer and fall of
1785 made him realize the imperative needs of the Church in
the new Republic. Schools and academies were needed for
the education of Catholic children, and a seminary for a
future clergy. The relations of the clergy and laity were in
a parlous state, owing to the number of intruders and vaga-
bondi, who were causing endless trouble in every centre of his
vast diocese. The strong hand of a bishop was absolutely
required to settle the many difficult problems of ecclesiastical
administration.
His courage and wisdom were shown in his masterly han-
dling of the clergy-trustee squabbles in New York, Boston,
Philadelphia and Baltimore. His attitude was always dignified,
just and eminently tactful. Most of the priests under Carroll
were ex-Jesuits, who had for years borne the brunt of the
struggle for the Faith in the bitter penal days. They had
acquired, by bequests, property enough to provide a mainte-
nance for the missionaries, and to carry out many charitable
and educational works. Many hoped for the restoration of
the Society within a few years, and they were naturally
anxious to keep this property intact for their successors.
Father Carroll felt that the question of restoration should be
set aside for the time being, and that they should at once
consolidate themselves and their estates under a recognized
chief. The fact that they were not incorporated under the
law of Maryland was a constant source of worry to Father
Carroll, as we learn from his letters to Cardinal Antonelli.
When the ex-Jesuits were attacked in a scurrilous pamphlet
by Father Smyth, one time pastor of Frederick, Maryland,
he defended them in an able pamphlet, still to be found in the
Baltimore Cathedral Archives.
A Memorial asking for a Bishop of the United States was
sent to Pope Pius VI. on March 12, 1788, by the American
clergy, and acted upon favorably by Propaganda on June 23d.
Carroll was at once elected, receiving twenty-four votes out
of twenty-eight. This election was confirmed by the Pope
1922.] FIRST ARCHBISHOP OF BALTIMORE 537
and Propaganda, the Brief appointing Carroll Bishop being
issued on November 6, 1789. He was consecrated by Bishop
Charles Walmesley, O.S.B., in the chapel of Lulworth CasUe
England, August 15, 1790. He remained but two months in
England, writing many letters to leading Catholics there
bringing to theu^ attention the needs of his diocese. He was
back in Baltimore again on December 7th. He preached in
the pro-Cathedral the following Sunday, outlining the tasks
that lay before him: "The religious education of Catholic
youth; seminary training for the priesthood; the unmediate
wants of the laity; the supply of the clergy; the preservation
of the faith; the inculcation of charity and forbearance, and
the safeguarding his people from heresy and religious indif-
ference."
"America's first Catholic bishop was one of the most
striking figures of the times. He saw America with Amer-
ican eyes, and spoke of America in terms understood by the
American people. He more than any other man knew Amer-
ica's needs, and more than any other man was capable of
supplying them."
His first task was to ensure the establishment of discipline
in the Church. For this purpose he held the first National
Synod in Baltimore, November 7, 1791. It passed many wise
laws on the administration of the sacraments, regulations re-
garding divine services and the observance of holydays, etc.
Before it closed. Bishop Carroll asked the clergy present to
consider seriously the advisability of petitioning the Holy See
for a division of the diocese or for a coadjutor.
Despite a great deal of opposition. Bishop Carroll suc-
ceeded in establishing a college at Georgetown in October,
1791. Its opening was made possible by the gifts of his Eng-
lish friends in 1790, and an annual subsidy of one hundred
scudi for three years from Propaganda. The burden of main-
taining the college fell upon the estate of the ex-Jesuits, and
that support was cheerfully given by its four first Presidents,
Fathers Plunkett, Molyneux, Du Bourg and Neale. In 1806
the college passed definitely into the hands of the Jesuits.
The coming of the Sulpicians to America was due not to
the direct invitation of Bishop Carroll, but to the troubled con-
ditions in France at the time. Bishop Carroll himself had
not the necessary funds to found or endow a diocesan Sem-
588 FIRST ARCHBISHOP OF BALTIMORE [Aug.,
inary, so the offer of Father-General Emery to contribute
130,000 livres for the purpose came to him from the clear sky.
Ten priests and seminarians left St. Malo on April 8, 1791,
and the seminary was opened in Baltimore on October 3d.
Bishop Carroll appreciated most highly the services of
these devoted priests. He wrote to Antonelli on April 23,
1792: "The establishment of a seminary is certainly a new
and extraordinary spectacle for the people of this Country;
the remarkable piety of these priests is admirable, and their
example is a stimulant and spur to all who feel themselves
called to work in the vineyard of the Lord. . . ."
For the first decade of its existence, the Seminary was a
practical failure owing to the lack of students. Indeed, the
Father-General had determined to close it and recall the
Fathers to France — he did recall three of them — but was
finally dissuaded by Pius VII., who said to Father Emery at
Paris at the coronation ceremony of Napoleon (December,
1804) : "Let the Seminary stand. It will bear fruit in its own
time." During Bishop Carroll's episcopate, only thirty priests
were ordained at St. Mary's. But in years to come it devel-
oped into the best nursery of the American clergy in the
United States.
When Carroll became Bishop in 1790 there were no in-
stitutions of charity in his vast diocese, and no communities
of women devoted to educational work. Outside the frontiers
of the United States the only community of women in charge
of schools was the Ursulines of New Orleans. For nearly two
hundred years their record under the flags of France, Spain
and the United States has been a glorious one for the cause of
Catholic education. The Ursulines of Cork came to New
York at the invitation of Father Kohlman in 1813, and to
Charlestown, Mass., in 1815. The Carmelite nuns came to
Maryland as early as 1790, and although Bishop Carroll was
anxious to have them found a school for young women, they
rightly pleaded that active work was against the spirit of
their vocation. The Visitation Convent and Academy at
Georgetown — originally established by the Poor Clares — ^was
founded by Bishop Neale in 1813. Bishop Carroll was instru-
mental in having Mrs. Seton found a Catholic girls' school in
Baltimore in 1808, and later on he established the Daughters
of Charity with Mother Seton as Superior at Emmitsburg,
1922.] FIRST ARCHBISHOP OF BALTIMORE 589
Maryland. Two other communities of nuns were founded
durmg Bishop Carroll's lifetime-the Sisters of Loretto bv
Father Nerincks, in 1812, and the Sisters of Charity of Naz-
areth, founded by Bishop David.
T.u'.^^'.^^^'''- ^ '^^'^ ""^ ^""^^^ ^^^^"^"^ ^"^ Pi^ty' came to
Philadelphia m 1796 from Dubhn to establish the first house
of the Augustinians. And in 1805 Father Fenwick established
the Dominican Province of St. Joseph in Kentucky, a territory
which he knew well on many an arduous missionary journey.
Other orders, such as the Franciscans and the Trappists, came
to the United States, but the Church had not yet reached a
stage of progress that warranted the successful founding of
religious houses of men. The Augustinians and Dominicans
were alone successful in making permanent foundations, and
even they had to wait several decades before they ventured
to multiply their activities.
In April, 1792, Bishop Carroll made a Report to Rome on
the state of his diocese, and requested Rome either to estab-
lish a new diocese in Philadelphia or New York, or to give
him a coadjutor. He realized that his diocese was too large
to be ruled efficiently by one bishop, and he felt it imperative
in view of the long distance from Rome to have a coadjutor
bishop on hand in America to assume episcopal authority im-
mediately in case of his death. Rome agreed at once with
regard to the appointment of a coadjutor, and asked him to
name a worthy candidate. He named Father Graessel of Phila-
delphia, but he died before the bulls appointing him were
received. Father Neale was then selected, and consecrated
Bishop on December 7th. Practically speaking, his coadjutor-
ship was of little value to Bishop Carroll, for he divided his
time between Georgetown College, of which he was President,
and the Visitation Convent, which he had founded. Soon
after, Bishop Carroll wrote again to Rome, asking for the
division of his immense diocese, and Propaganda finally an-
swered (June 26, 1802), suggesting the foundation of four or
five new dioceses, with Baltimore as the Metropolitan See.
Six years of constant letter writing were to pass before the
four new dioceses were finally formed.
On April 8, 1808, Pius VII. appointed Bishop Cheverus in
Boston, Bishop Concanen in New York, Bishop Egan in Phila-
delphia, and Bishop Flaget in Bardstown. Bishop Concanen
590 FIRST ARCHBISHOP OF BALTIMORE [Aug.,
never reached America, for he died in Naples; the other three
bishops were consecrated in October and November, 1810.
"No accurate description of the general condition of Cath-
olic life in the five dioceses can be given. It was a time of
pioneer civilization. The waves of the great emigration
which flowed towards the shores of America hardly reached
our coasts until after Archbishop Carroll had passed away to
his reward. The object nearest the hearts of these, our
earliest spiritual shepherds, was the strengthening the faith
of their people, the building of churches, the preparation of
young men for the priesthood, and, above all, the creation of a
thorough system of Catholic education for the young."
John Cheverus, New England's first Catholic Bishop, was
born at Mayenne in France, January 28, 1768. Ordained in
1790, he was Vicar-General of Mans, when he was forced to
leave France on account of the Revolution. He fled to Eng-
land, in September, 1792, and left for the United States on the
invitation of his friend. Father Matignon, of Boston. He at
once sent a characteristic letter to Bishop Carroll: "Send me
where you think I am most needed, without making yourself
anxious about the means of my support. I am willing to
work with my hands, if need be." He became an American
citizen, and identified himself with all public movements.
Bishop Cheverus ruled the diocese for eight years after the
death of Archbishop Carroll, and then returned to France,
where he died in 1836, Cardinal Archbishop of Bordeaux.
John Gilmary Shea, in his History of the Church in the
United States, declares that the appointment of Richard Luke
Concanen to the See of New York was due to the recommend-
ation of Archbishop Troy of Dublin, and he adds that "Arch-
bishop Carroll and Bishops Cheverus and Flaget saw with
gloomy forebodings their advice set aside at Rome in defer-
ence to that of prelates strangers to the country." There is
not the slightest foundation for these extraordinary state-
ments.
Bishop Connolly, Bishop Concanen's successor, reached
New York on November 24, 1815. New York then had a
population of between thirteen and fifteen thousand Catholics,
who were cared for by five priests. The Bishop was not re-
ceived with any enthusiasm, and "for the ten years of his
episcopate he found himself out of sympathy with some of his
1922.] FIRST ARCHBISHOP OF BALTIMORE 591
priests and people, and more than once during that period
his attitude on grave questions imperiled the safety and the
peace of the Church in his diocese."
Father Michael Egan was born in Ireland in 1761. He was
a learned, modest and humble priest, never very robust, and,
as an administrator, lacking in firmness. He was at St. Mary's!
Philadelphia, when he was made Bishop of that See, and he
at once started on a visitation "to correct bad customs, to
abolish abuses, and to encourage his priests in the perform-
ance of their duties." He lived to administer his diocese
only six years.
Archbishop Carroll was most anxious to have an Amer-
ican appointed as successor to Bishop Egan. He wrote to this
effect to all his suffragans, suggesting Fathers David, Du
Bourg, Hurley and Gallitzin. But despite all his efforts, the
Irish Bishops seemed to have the ear of the Holy See, and no
decision was reached concerning Philadelphia before his
death. In 1820, Bishop Conwell of Dungannon, Ireland, was
made Bishop of Philadelphia, "an appointment which was
more surprising to Archbishop Curtis of Armagh than if he
had been made Emperor of China."
The Sulpician Father Flaget was born in France in 1763.
He came to America in 1792, and was sent by Bishop Carroll
to Port Vincennes, then on the frontier of the Baltimore dio-
cese. Recalled by his Sulpician Superior in 1794, he became
a professor at Georgetown College, and in 1798 went to Ha-
vana to help Du Bourg with his college scheme. He returned
to Baltimore in 1801, and taught at St. Mary's College in 1805.
He was at Emmitsburg when called to the Bishopric of Bards-
town. He did his best to decline the honor conferred upon
him, appealing first to Bishop Carroll, and even going to
France to enlist the aid of his Father-General. Both com-
manded him to comply with the wishes of the Holy See, and
Bishop Flaget found himself chief shepherd of a flock that
was scattered from the Canadian border to the Savannahs of
Georgia.
In this immense territory. Bishop Flaget had eight priests
—three seculars, four Dominicans and one Sulpician— to help
him. He at once established a seminary at Bardstown, the
professors and seminarians making the bricks and cutting the
wood to build St. Thomas', the first institution of the kmd
592 FIRST ARCHBISHOP OF BALTIMORE [Aug.,
erected west of the Alleghenies. He spent about two years
making a complete visitation of his diocese, and embodied
the result of his travels in a remarkable Report, which he for-
warded to Pius VII. on April 10, 1815. He had by this time
ten priests, sixteen ecclesiastical students, a Catholic popula-
tion of ten thousand, and nineteen churches. Ohio had 50
families with no priest; Indiana, 130 families, with a priest
visiting them twice a year; Illinois, three parishes — Gahokia,
Kaskaskia and Prairie du Rocher — ^with two priests. Bishop
Flaget was the perfect type of missionary bishop — simple,
untiring, beloved by his people, devoted to work among the
Indians, and of remarkable influence in the councils of the
Church and of Rome. He resigned his See in 1832, and was
succeeded by another Sulpician, Father David.
"To a great extent, the last five years of Archbishop Car-
roll's life would seem, at first glance, to be overshadowed by
the march of events in the dioceses suffragan to Baltimore;
but a careful study of the state of religion in these different
parts of the country reveals the grasp he possessed to the very
end on all that concerned the good of religion and of Cathol-
icism as a factor in American life."
By a rescript of January 29, 1791, the whole tract of the
Mississippi Valley became automatically a part of Bishop Car-
roll's extra-diocesan jurisdiction. After the cession of Louis-
iana to the United States he, at the instance of Rome, wrote to
President Madison about church conditions in Louisiana, and
the President replied, saying that the American Government
would welcome an end to the religious strife which was dis-
tracting the city of New Orleans. Bishop Carroll had great
difficulty in persuading any of his priests to go to New Orleans,
but the post was finally accepted by Father Du Bourg, who
later on became Bishop of Louisiana, September 24, 1815.
On March 10, 1804, Propaganda also gave Archbishop Carroll
juridic powers over the Danish Islands of the West Indies, St.
Eustace, the Barbados, St. Kitt's, Antigua, and all other islands
not under the rule of a Bishop, Vicar-Apostolic or Prefect-
Apostolic.
The status of the Diocese of Baltimore, at Archbishop
Carroll's death, may be studied in Marechal's Report to Prop-
aganda on October 16, 1818. At that time there were 100,000
Catholics, chiefly in Maryland, who were cared for by fifty-
1922.] FIRST ARCHBISHOP OF BALTIMORE 593
two priests. Baltimore had four churches, a seminary, col-
leges, convents, schools and the beginnings of a Catholic press
to refute misrepresentations, and to diffuse Catholic truth
Durmg the whole of his episcopate. Bishop Carroll suffered
greatly from a constant influx of unworthy priests, who were
creatmg disturbance everywhere. More than once, he stated
that he would let some parishes do without a priest's ministra-
tions rather than send the people priests of whose doctrine
and conduct he was uncertain. The lack of priests was the
reason of many an apostasy in the early days, for the 25,000
Catholics of 1785 represent only a small part of the hundreds
of thousands of Catholics who had emigrated to America in
the two centuries preceding the Revolution.
The scarcity of Catholic schools was another reason of
the loss of faith. "The Church may flourish in poverty, even
abject poverty, but its light flickers and dies in the midst of
ignorance." The first parochial schools were in Philadelphia
(St. Mary's, 1781; Holy Trinity, 1789; St. Augustine's, 1811),
New York (St. Peter's, 1800), Boston, 1820, Vincennes, 1792,
Pottinger's Creek, 1805, and Baltimore (St. Peter's, St. Patrick's
and St. John's, 1815). There were only four colleges (George-
town, 1789; St. Mary's, Baltimore, 1805; Mount St. Mary's, Em-
mitsburg, 1809, and the New York Literary Institute, 1809).
The Trustee system caused untold trouble in the last five
years of Archbishop Carroll's episcopate, the laity rebelling
in many of the larger cities against the most essential part of
all canonical legislation — the spiritual authority of the bishop
over the pastorates of his diocese. Bishop Carroll came out
victor in every contest save in the Charleston case, and even
that was decided in favor of Archbishop Neale once the real
facts were known at Rome.
Archbishop Carroll died on December 3, 1815. His last
public act was to decline the gracious invitation sent him by
the committee in charge to pronounce the chief discourse at
the laying of the corner-stone of the Washington Monument
on July 4, 1815. He was feeble at the time! and was expecting
death at any moment.
Father Grassi gives a good estimate of his character in
his Memorie (1818). He writes: "To his courtesy of de-
meanor was joined a rare goodness of heart, qualities which
won him the merited esteem and respect of the public, not
VOL. cxv, 38 .
594 FIRST ARCHBISHOP OF BALTIMORE [Aug.,
only Catholic, but non-Catholic. In the eyes of some, he was
not cautious enough in his choice of confidants, and he was
prone to give in to Protestants more than he should have
done, and to appoint trustees over churches when he could
have done well without them, and so averted all the troubles
which our missionaries suffered at the hands of those same
persons, with damage to religion itself."
Shea writes of him : "Posterity has retained the veneration
and esteem entertained in this country for Archbishop Car-
roll, and the calm scrutiny of history in our day recognizes the
high estimate of his personal virtues, his purity, meekness,
prudence and his providential work in molding the diverse
elements in the United States into an organized Church. His
administrative ability stands out in high relief when we view
the results produced by others who, unacquainted with the
country and the Catholics here, rashly promised themselves to
cover the land with the blossoms of peace, but raised only
harvests of thorns. With his life of large experience in civil
and religious vicissitudes, through whose storms his faith in
the mission of the Church never wavered, closed a remarkable
period in the history of the Church in the United States."
As Bishop Cheverus well styled him in his address in
1810 at the establishment of the hierarchy, he was "the char-
ioteer of God." He led the army of God through every danger
with a courage that none could gainsay, and with a success
which is his perennial memory in the annals of the Catholic
faith in the Republic he had helped to create and mold."
We have tried to give a summary — often in the words of
the writer — of this remarkable biography of a most remark-
able Bishop. It is the work of a careful scholar, who has
gone to the sources for his every statement, and who has
given us the results of his studies honestly and impartially.
It is a work of which the American Church and the Catholic
University may well be proud, for it satisfies the standards
of the most exacting scholarship, and is, at the same time,
highly interesting, readable and well written.
THE PAGANISM OF MR. YEATS.
BY JAMES J. DALY, S.J.
|T is some twenty years ago that I listened to Mr.
William Butler Yeats explaining to a large Amer-
ican audience his gospel of the heautiful. A tall,
graceful form; a countenance of winning intel-
ligence, stamped with the preoccupied and
pathetic ardors of the visionary; dark hair parted at the side
and allowed to fall carelessly in a heavy mass over a high
forehead; a voice that paid no attention to itself, so engrossed
was it with ideas, but pleasing withal; gestures of natural
courtesy, and the aura of a great reputation— such external
recommendations as these were not lost upon the poet's
audience. He seemed like a young god of the Greeks,
Hyperion, as it were, in evening dress.
The suggestion of a Greek god was carried out in the
tenor of his speech. He presented himself to us as a leader
in a national movement. The modern spirit of commercial-
ism, he said, was destroying the beauty and happiness of the
world. It was rampant in England, and had penetrated Irish
life. He had consecrated all his powers to restore to his
native land the antique reverence and heroic gesture of its
pagan gods, its fighting men and milk-white valorous women
of pre-Christian days. Ireland was to be redeemed from its
bondage to England and the modern spirit of commercialism
by a revival of popular belief in fairies. The folk-lore of
the people on the western coast of Ireland, where English
tradition had made least headway, was saturated with poetry
of an unearthly loveliness, which would regenerate decadent
Ireland.
The eloquent young lecturer kept in touch with his hard-
headed American audience by admitting that the Gaehc re-
vival, as it was outlined by him, was most probably a move-
ment of defeat. But he won all hearts by the fervor of his
declaration that a true man wrought according to his ideals,
never stopping to calculate chances or to ask whether defeat
or success awaited the end of his day's work. It was a most
596 THE PAGANISM OF MR, YEATS [Aug.,
unworldly attitude: and there are few persons so worldly as
not to enjoy the spectacle of other-worldliness, especially
when it is invested with the charm of poetry and the accents
of a comely and youthful dreamer.
I can recall the puzzled state of my feelings at the time.
The lecturer's other world was different from mine. His was
a world of shadowy and baleful forms and voices, evoked
from the glooms of night and the terrors and tendernesses of
winds and waves and lonely mountain glades. Mine was a
world of spiritual realities, divinely gracious, as actual to me
as the body I wore, and far more precious. This world of
mine, which has been called the Kingdom of Heaven, had sup-
planted that world of his at Infinite cost, and had inspired
heroisms of service and sacrifice in order to carry light and
hope and gladness to that whilom world which the Irish poet
depicted in such attractive colors. He cheapened everything
that I held sacred and passing fair, and glorified a system of
life and conduct, which, whatever may be said about the ex-
ternals of its pageantry, harbored horror and corruption at
its heart. Nowhere was my world so quickly and firmly and
gratefully established in the hearts of the people as in the
land of his birth, where it has endured through centuries of
prosperity, at first, and, then, of unparalleled trials, as a most
potent spiritual force at the service of all mankind. The
young poet seemed actually to resent the completeness of the
Christian conquest of his native land. There was an unac-
customed note of stridency in his voice when he asserted that
his movement would brook no dictation from the pulpits of
his country.
And yet one could not find it in his heart to dislike the
young poet who was so obviously sincere in advocating a lost
cause, even though it was the lost cause of all the spirits of
darkness. I could only sit and wonder and make surmises
about the formation of mind, the prejudice, the habits, the
association and studies and temper of soul, which could so
blind a man of high intelligence to the moral and spiritual
beauty of Christianity as to lead him to express a deliberate
preference, on ethical as well as aesthetic grounds, for the
weird paganisms of the past. If there are any good reasons
for Matthew Arnold's definition of poetry, namely, that it is a
criticism of life, what are we to think of poetry which declares
1922.] THE PAGANISM OF MR. YEATS 597
Rrtln'f """" '' f "^"'^ ^'"^"^^^ *^^"^ *h-° Christianity.
Rationalism merely registers a broad fact at its minimum
valuation when it tells us through one of its favorite W^
torians: "It was reserved for Christianity to present to the
world an ideal character, which through all the changes of
eighteen centuries has inspired the hearts of men with an im-
passioned love; has shown itself capable of acting on all ages
nations, temperaments and conditions; has been not only the
highest pattern of virtue, but the strongest incentive to its
practice, and has exercised so deep an influence that it mav
be truly said that the simple record of three short years of
active life has done more to regenerate and to soften man-
kind, than all the disquisitions of phUosophers, and all the
exhortations of moralists." And it might be added without
fear of contradiction, "than all poems ancient and modern."
I could not help concluding, after hearing Mr. Yeats ex-
plain the principles of his art, that he was living strangely
apart from the great streams of humanity. His points of
contact with life, especially in his native land, were its fancies
and extravagances rather than its realities. Subsequent con-
firmation was not lacking in certain essays, in which the
Irish poet writes about fairies in a vein of religious reverence
and belief, and in casual allusions met with in the publica-
tions of his friends where they refer to him as "Willie" Yeats
in a tone of amused indulgence, as if he were hopelessly com-
mitted to eccentricities of thought.
I need not say that many men prefer paganism to Chris-
tianity for worse reasons than an obstinately unpractical turn
of mind. Perhaps this is the consideration which procures
for Mr. Yeats a kindly tolerance from people who find neo-
paganism a bore and a nuisance. He seems so simple and
honest in the weaving of his filmy lace-work of pale dreams
that one pities him for finding Christianity "lower than the
heart's desire." One has to understand Mr. Yeats; his is the
winsome willfulness of infancy; concessions must be made to
peculiarities of mind out of the common run; if he hurts us
with his pretty arrows, he does it as a child does it, that is,
in the least offensive of all possible modes of assault.
But great poetry cannot spring from such a soil. Sanity
and sobriety of judgment on the large issues of life are still,
and always have been, the marks of major poets and prose-
598 THE PAGANISM OF MR. YEATS [Aug.,
writers. "I'd rather be a kitten and cry, Mew! than write
the best poetry in the world on condition of laying aside com-
mon sense in the ordinary transactions and business of the
world." It is probable Sir Walter Scott knew very well that
great poetry could never be written on such a condition; but
his words serve to illustrate the attitude of genius of the
highest rank in the relationship of art to life.
It is unfortunate for the cause of poetry that a man of
Mr. Yeats' fine fervor of workmanship should have become
early and permanently obsessed by an impossible idea. "The
attempt to revive an ancient myth — as distinguished from an
ancient story of human life — however alluring, however illus-
trated by poets of genius, seems to me," says that acute critic
of poetry, Francis T. Palgrave, "essentially impossible. It is
for the details, not for the whole, that we read Hyperion, or
Prometheus Unbound, or the German Iphigenia. Like the
great majority of post-classical verse in classical languages,
those modern myths are but exercises on a splendid scale."
The Gaelic revival became for Mr. Yeats nothing else than
precisely that, namely, an endeavor to resuscitate a dead past,
and to furnish forth out of its outworn emotions and primitive
religious experiences food and raiment for modern needs.
Mr. Yeats has succeeded in composing some graceful academic
exercises; nothing more. With doubts about the vital actual-
ity of his method, he has employed a loose symbolism to
establish contact with the world of living men; but the device
can hardly be said to have succeeded in winning for his verse
attention more serious than that which we pay to mere bril-
liant exercises of an accomplished artist. Mr. Yeats has
wasted excellent poetic capacity in becoming a minor poet,
engaged in the gentle but ineffectual labor of rescuing a re-
mote twilight and an ancient darkness from the floods of
splendor, in which St. Patrick's flaming sword engulfed them.
If anyone wishes to study the sterility of the sources to
which Mr. Yeats has gone for inspiration, he will discover a
striking object-lesson in the poet's recently published volume
of selected poems.^ They are conveniently divided for such
a study into chronological periods. If we confine ourselves
to the lyrics, which are more characteristic of Mr. Yeats'
genius than his dramatic pieces and contain the flower of his
1 Selected Poems. By William Butler Yeats. New York: The Macmillan Co.
1922.] THE PAGANISM OF MR. YEATS 599
achievement, we shall find a curiously progressive deterior-
i1ri«o/''7'''^' ^^^ '"'"''* ^'^^P «^ P^^"^^ i« dated
1885-189^ and contains such favorites as "The Lake Isle of
Innisfree," "The Fiddler of Dooney," and "The Ballad of
Father Gilligan." Here are the new and entrancing magic
and music which charmed us years ago and sharpened the
edge of expectation. Alas, for youthful promise ! The young
poet sang from the peak of his excellence. He has never sur-
passed these little miracles of rare Celtic rapture: their secret
has escaped the bewildered singer, and his song since then
has been a groping effort, successful at ever lengthening in-
tervals, to recover that first fine careless rapture. There are
notes of sadness and failure in the later poems of the period
between 1904 and 1919, and it is rather poignant to read, in
one of the last poems in the collection,
I have no speech but symbol, the pagan speech 1 made
Amid the dreams of youth.
If there is need of a crowning proof of the falseness and
futility of the trail which Mr. Yeats has been following, it can
be found in the rather astounding absence, in these later
poems, of any sign of interest in the recent stirring history
of his country. When he was young he declared his pagan
creed, with all the bold confidence of youth, in his "To Ireland
in the Coining Times," turning his back on the traditional
sanctities of his land and sighing ecstatically.
Ah, faeries, dancing under the moon,
A Druid land, a Druid tune!
and he promises himself, in spite of his recusancy, a secure
place among the patriot bards of Irish history:
Nor may I less be counted one
With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson.
How pitiful sounds this young boast in the presence of the
mature performance! The little red Rose has been plunged
in its bath of heroic blood, and the deeds of Cuchulainn and
all the chariot-chiefs and kings of Ulster have been outdone,
while cities flamed and tumbled, and all the world looked on
600 THE PAGANISM OF MR. YEATS [Aug.,
in wonder; and Mr. Yeats can find nothing to inspire a song
except some cryptic discontent of his own at the course of
events. I know nothing whatever concerning the political
ideas of Mr. Yeats during the last six years; but I gather from
these poems that he has been out of sympathy with the men
who cast life and liberty and possessions into the scales in a
supreme conflict for their country's freedom. If I am correct
in my surmise, it is a sinister commentary on the uselessness
of a false intellectualism in any practical crisis. I do not
deny the sincerity and fervor of Mr. Yeats' patriotism. It is
through no immediate fault of his that the great Dawn of
his dreams should break at long last and find him listless.
The fault is to be traced back to that remote day when he so
far departed from realities as to scorn the living Faith which
has been the mainstay of his people, through trials in which
pretty Druid fancies would be insults if they were offered as
hopes or alleviations.
The strange irony of the situation lies in the fact that the
men who blew the smoldering dreams of Ireland into the
white flame of Easter Week and perished in it with exultation,
caught much of their enthusiasm from Mr. Yeats' own sources.
The two Pearses, Padraic and William, Thomas MacDonagh
and Joseph Plunkett, not to mention others, drew inspiration
and instruction from the fine idealism of old Celtic legends
of early paganism. The fire which Mr. Yeats was so prom-
inent in kindling, gave them warmth at the supreme moment,
but could impart no life-giving heat to himself. For the Irish
poet's theory of life is a paralyzing thing. The nature-wor-
ship of Celtic paganism, which so captivates him, contains no
concepts of right or wrong, duty or obligation. "No thought
of Calvary," he makes one of the characters say in "The
Land of Heart's Desire," "troubled the morning stars in their
first song." It is hard for the ordinary Christian to see why
the thought of Calvary should cause trouble, rather than great
love and hope, to anyone; but, of course, the poet is correct.
Stars and mountains and winds and similar objects of nature
are never troubled by any thoughts whatever. The irrespon-
sible freedom of the wild things of nature fascinates the poet.
The trouble of living rationally, of thinking and obeying and
performing duty, is distasteful to him. Any religion which
emphasizes the responsibility of the individual, and presents
1922.] THE PAGANISM OF MR. YEATS 601
touth with a corollary of precept-as the Catholic rehgion
does-fatigues and disgusts Mr. Yeats. And so we have lyrics
like the following, in which he draws his robe about him and
withdraws disdainfully from the human world, as from a
lower world than the mindless world which he loves:
Outworn heart, in a time outworn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the gray twilight,
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.
Your mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight gray;
Though hope fall from you and love decay.
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.
Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill :
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will;
And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the gray twilight.
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.
As the beautiful expression of a common mood, these verses
can be accorded due admiration. Wordsworth has done it
better in a famous sonnet, though he was not "a pagan suckled
in a creed outworn." As an expression of a philosophy of
life it is fatuous and futile.
Padraic Pearse's philosophy was different, and can be in-
ferred from the verses which he could write for his mother
while he was waiting for the firing squad ;
Dear Mary, thou who saw thy first-born Son
Go forth to die amidst the scorn of men.
Receive my first-born son into thy arms
Who also goeth forth to die for men;
And keep him by thee till 1 come for him.
Dear Mary, I have shared thy sorrows,
And soon shall share thy joys.
Thomas MacDonagh passed the hours between the time his
sister, a nun, left his cell and the moment of execution, kneel-
602 THE PAGANISM OF MR. YEATS [Aug.,
ing before his crucifix. These leaders, in a desperate chance,
all went to Confession and Holy Communion as a preparation
for fighting and dying. Michael Mallen, we read, "prayed
into the very rifles of the men who shot him, and his last
words were: 'Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!'" And in his
last letter to his wife we find, among other instructions, the
following: "If you can, I would like you to dedicate Una
to the service of God, and also Joseph. Do this if you can,
and pray Our Divine Lord that it may be so. . . . Una, my
little one, be a nun. Joseph, my little man, be a priest if you
can."
Mr. Yeats' "September, 1913," inclines us to suspect that
his view of facts like these is derisory and contemptuous :
What need you, being come to sense.
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the half pence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save :
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
Yet they were of a different kind
The names that stilled your childish play.
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman's rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save :
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
Was it for this the wild geese spread
The gray wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave;
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.
Yet could we turn the years again.
And call those exiles as they were,
1922.] THE PAGANISM OF MR. YEATS 603
In all their loneliness and pain
You'd cry "some woman's yellow hair
Has maddened every mother's son:"
They weighed so lightly what they gave;
But let them be, they're dead and gone,'
They're with O'Leary in the grave.
Thus Mr. Yeats in "September, 1913." Only two years later,
there broke forth such a delirium of the brave as Mr. Yeats
never dreamed. And the only men who figured prominently
in the outbreak were young clerks and teachers who found
time to pray, waiting for the executioner, because prayer had
been a life-long habit. As between Pearse and Mr. Yeats,
there can be no doubt which Emmet would recognize as a
kindred spirit. Was ever a poet's reading of his people so
palpably and so quickly falsified? I am astonished that Mr.
Yeats should have the courage to include in his Selected
Poems "September, 1913," after Easter Week, 1916.
It is a rather ungracious speculation, but one can hardly
help wondering whether Mr. Yeats' lyrical inertness in the
stirring events of recent years is due to the marked Christian
character of the valor so epically displayed. I am certain he
shares none of the blind bigotry of the sectaries of the North.
But even a kindly and tolerant paganism loses patience some-
times with an inflexible creed; and we are not surprised to
find the furry, soft and charming paganism of Mr. Yeats un-
sheathing acerbities in a note appended to "The Countess
Cathleen." At the first performance of this play in Dublin,
the actors, we are told, "had to face a very vehement opposi-
tion stirred up by a politician and a newspaper, the one ac-
cusing me in a pamphlet, the other in long articles, day after
day, of blasphemy because of the language of the demons or
of Shemus Rua, and because I made a woman sell her soul
and yet escape damnation, and of a lack of patriotism because
I made Irish men and women, who, it seems, never did such a
thing, sell theirs. The politician or the newspaper persuaded
some forty Catholic students to sign a protest against the play,
and a Cardinal, who avowed that he bad not read it, to make
another, and both politician and newspaper made such ob-
vious appeals to the audience to break the peace, that a score
or so of police were sent to the theatre to see that they did not.
604 THE PAGANISM OF MR, YEATS [Aug.,
I had, however, no reason to regret the result, for the stalls,
containing almost all that was distinguished in Dublin, and a
gallery of artisans alike insisted on the freedom of literature."
Literature, of course, must be free, free to hurt the weakest
and to desecrate the highest, even though one must sell his
soul to exercise that freedom. But when I reflect that the
poet, who thought it admirable for a lady to sell her soul for
her country, sat in safe seclusion while the Catholic students,
who denounced the nefarious transaction, were selling their
lives for his country, I am again astonished at some of the
inclusions in this volume of selected poems.
The frozen apathy of Mr. Yeats' muse in the high-tide
of his country's heroic mood can be due only to his poor
understanding of the soul of Ireland. He worships beauty
in the abstract, and believes that a poet should be concerned
with the making of beautiful poems, regardless of moral,
religious or patriotic import. He tells us in verses which do
not find a place in his selected poems that:
When I was young
I had not given a penny for a song
Did not the poet sing it with such airs
That one believed he had a sword upstairs,
and he snorts at this allegiance of poetry to any cause what-
eyer. In those young days, he thought he saw beauty in a
far-off paganism, whose harshnesses came softened to him by
the mists of distance, and he dedicated his muse to the service
of paganism with a devotion that can hardly be said to have
languished much in the interval. Now, I do not think I shall
oifend historical judgment in any sane quarter by saying that
the soul of Ireland, if it has worn beauty as a garment any
times these fifteen hundred years, has worn it woven of the
faith and aspiration and white purities and rubrical sacrifices
of Catholic fidelities and consecrations. How can a poet, who
seems to be organically bereft of the power to see so prom-
inent a reality, hope to "be counted one with Davis, Mangan,
Ferguson" in the memory of his country and mankind?
The sad fact is that the early impulse of "The Wind
Among the Reeds" has been too tenuous and too unrelated
with reality to survive. Mr. Yeats, having lost his lyric voice.
1922.] TO ONE WHO OUGHT TO BE A CATHOLIC 605
busies himself now with fantastic experiments in drama His
"Four Plays for Dancers," appearing almost simultaneously
with his volume of "Selected Poems," offers small compeLa-
tion to those who have liked him for his singing quality. In
these new plays, he has gone to the old Greek theatre for hints
m construction, setting and properties. It is not easy to
describe the result. The vague, shadowy, formless visions
of Oism are not happy amid the precise proprieties of classic
Greece. Mr. Yeats and the school of Irish poets, which he has
founded, remind me of Lady Penelope and Lady Binks and
the other fair revelers at Shaws-Castle : "Who can describe
the wonders wrought by active needles and scissors, aided by
thimbles and thread, upon silver gauze and sprigged muslin?
Or, who can show how, if the fair nymphs of the spring did
not entirely succeed in attaining the desired resemblance to
heathen Greeks, they at least contrived to get rid of all simil-
itude to sober Christians?"
TO ONE WHO OUGHT TO BE A CATHOLIC.
BY SUMMERFIELD BALDWIN, 3d.
And have my prayers and words been all in vain?
Dost thou reject the treasure I have found?
Must the great cloud of witnesses around
Lament to see thee lingering in the plain,
Weep as they watch thy powers slowly wane,
Grieving that with earth's shackles thou art bound?
Has the good seed been sown in stony ground
That might a hundred fold have brought forth grain?
God will provide. Nor shall I cease to pray
That thou, become partaker with the throng,
May live expectant of the eternal day.
Thy death made life, thy weaknesses made strong,
That arm in arm with thee, good friend, I may
Press on to hear the high triumphal song.
"SISTER ANSELMINE."
A PORTRAIT BY A SKEPTIC.
BY E. M. WALKER.
HE name of Ernest Psichari is familiar to many,
even to those who have not read the strange,
mystical and moving document which recounts
the conversion of Kenan's grandson in the scorch-
ing desert of Sahara — "an unforgettable record,"
as a critic has termed it. Fewer still know that the mystic's
father, a distinguished Greek philologist, has since written a
book which, although lacking the literary qualities, the genius
and the passion of Le Voyage du Centurion (A Soldier* s Pil-
grimage, as the English publisher has called the translation),
is yet of considerable interest because it, too, is in its way a
human document. Moreover, it voices for us the feelings and
opinions of a growing number of Frenchmen. Noble, and
touched by the flame of Vunion sacree, yet unable to believe,
these men have dissociated themselves from the violence and
injustice of the anti-clericals; they are respectful of the old
Faith, and preach Amenity and Love, striving to understand
where they do not believe, finding Catholicism so deeply
rooted in the soil of France that it would be impossible, and
undesirable even were it possible, to destroy it.
With what insight and discrimination M. Jean Psichari
has grasped the Catholic ideal of sanctity is proved by his
inimitable pen portrait of the heroine of his novel. Sister
Anselmine, She gives the book its title (Sceur Anselmine) ;
and the motto on the front page taken from Dante, Piii che la
Stella, brighter than the stars, refers to her. We are not sur-
prised that she ends by converting, first her brother, and
then that brother's friend. She is first presented to us in the
winter of 1869-1870 as a little girl of eleven:
A tall child, with blue eyes innocent and clear. Clarity,
that is the word which best describes her, clarity not only
of face, but of her whole being. She was beautiful, and she
1922.] ''SISTER ANSELMINE" ^
was radiantly clear. This clarity (but how express the
mexpressiblep was the color of her soul-if clarity L I
color Simplicity, a simplicity manifested by her gestures
her glances, her heart, her thoughts, seemed to be an ema:
nation from this clarity, a natural gift. That which is
simple. The simplicity of Anselmine and her clarity had.
as their necessary complement, gayety, which was. as it
were, the natural sound given forth by this smooth, trans-
parent crystal.
Her devotion, intense though it was, called up no image
of sombre flame, but rather suggested a fire whose rosy
diaphanous brilliance was undimmed by the slightest
suspicion of smoke. When she sacrificed herself, which
she did often, there was no trace in her self-sacrifice of
black resolutions, still less (which is even more meritor-
ious) of that tendency we, most of us, have to admire our-
selves in our sacrifices.
Similarly, when she prayed, the upward flight of her
prayer was fervent and tranquil, passionate and joyous.
But in describing Anselmine, it is difficult to find a word
with the exact shade of meaning, for when we think of
her, expressions occur to us that make us afraid. She
- looked forward to Sunday and all other festivals as days on
which she was going to amuse herself thoroughly. Yes,
that is the word which best describes the state of this clear
and gay and simple soul. To be there, in the House of
God, to give herself up to her devotions, to offer herself
to God, to pray to Him, to think of Him — above all, to
think of Him — why, these formed a whole series of good
and pleasant things. There was nothing austere in them,
nothing repellent, nothing obligatory. The free offering,
the complete gift of herself could but gladden her heart.
Anselmine found happiness in her piety.
By the time she was thirteen, her clear and gay simplicity
had already found in sacrifice the solution of every diffi-
culty — sacrifice, which dominated and determined her
whole existence.
Already, when as quite a little child she had knelt by
Jean's side at the bedside of their father, she had been
conscious of the need her brother would have of her; later,
at the deathbed of their elder brother in 1870, she resolved
to consecrate her life to Jean, not to marry, to remain with
their mother and him, to give her whole self, angel of
608 "SISTER ANSELMINE" [Aug.,
devotion and simplicity that she was, for the good of Jean.
This course was envisaged and willed by her in an instant.
Her instinct was probably true, for Jean, though charm-
ing, talented and lovable, was weak. He was not twenty when
he allowed an unhappy love affair to cast over his young life
a gloom that was never subsequently dissipated. This, it
seems to us, was not faithfulness, but selfish blindness, for
assuredly the lady was unworthy of his devotion. Moreover,
he sacrificed his sister, who long remained unmarried for his
sake, and who, when she did at length marry a certain Mar-
quis, a devoted Catholic and celebrated Hebrew scholar who
had been injured by an accident during his excavations in
Palestine, did so mainly for Jean's sake and in the hope of
aiding his conversion. For it had happened that her brother's
Greek and Hebrew studies had led him to skepticism, whereas,
Anselmine argued, in view of her Marquis' robust faith, "the
Bible rightly understood would save him." This marriage,
as it turned out, brought to Anselmine what she had never
looked for, a season of perfect and passionate love. But her
earthly happiness did not last long, and after the death of her
husband, she turned again to Jean, determined to save him,
having learned from the very depth of her own personal grief
how great is the misery of the creature, how insistent and
exacting the duties that lie near us. And Jean, in the long
run, was converted. A serious illness, his first glimpse of
the abyss of death, the strong pull of his long line of ancestors,
all did their part. For, says the chronicler:
Ideas, sensations, sentiments even, lie sleeping within us,
silent amid the tumult of existence. ... It is easy to speak
of the fears of the dying who seek absolution. Yes, doubt-
less, fear is present, but it is not all. There is something
higher: there is seemliness, decency, tradition, the Past:
there is History. And these are noble motives.
Such a paragraph is typical of one phase of Latin skep-
ticism. But, besides all this, for Jean de Warlaing there was
Anselmine :
The dear and limpid visage smiled at him with so happy
a simplicity, so natural a gayety; the brother felt himself
1922.] -SISTER ANSELMINE^ ^09
at that moment so utterly of the same flesh as his sister-
so intense a communion was established between them a
communion born of centuries of consanguinity, that it ap-
peared to him only natural to believe as she believed
The momentary faith passed on the morrow, but the' light
of Anselmine remained. This light he saw it always, rest-
ing on her childlike gracious face. And, sincerely, he
asked himself this question: Did not the depth and the
sincerity of Anselmine hide a foundation of the truth?
Have we the right to disdain this fact, belief; this human
reality, the believer?
So much for Jean's standpoint, but we are also told:
At the critical moment of Jean de Warlaing*s syncope,
this gay and luminous and simple being, judged it quite
natural to promise herself to God if He would grant her
brother time for conversion, and to undertake to renounce
the world herself directly she had lost him. She had two
seconds in which to decide, so far as in her lay, the eternal
fate of Jean, and she decided after this fashion. She knew
that he was saved when he opened his eyes once more and
smiled at her. The eiiicacity of sacrifice appeared to her
at that moment more self-evident than ever.
Strange portrait for a skeptic, this heroine who becomes a
nun and ultimately saves her brother and her childhood's
friend ! Yet not so strange when we consider France and all
she stands for. A Frenchman who believes in goodness and
beauty has no need to seek them in the curious by-paths of
new faiths and high-sounding so-called Religions of Humanity.
The Christian and Catholic ideal of sanctity is rooted in his
native soil, flourishes under his eyes, making the present solid
with the past. Belief, or unbelief: the issue is clear to him,
clear with French clearness. To have known an Anselmine is
a great responsibility, but a great grace, too. It is not won-
derful that many Frenchmen end by crying out, as M. Psichari
makes Andre Pauron cry: "Everything for the religion that
produces such beings!"
VOL. cxv. 39
HAS THE CATHOLIC PRESS FAILED?
BY GEORGE N. KRAMER.
ATHOLIGS in the United States today stand at
the crossroads in their press development. They
are experiencing a period of agitation which will
result in either a better Catholic press or a return
to the dismal past and failure. As in all cam-
paigns, the situation will be either better or worse; it can
never be quite the same.
The first practical step in this new era was taken by the
archbishops and bishops in their first annual meeting in Sep-
tember, 1919, when they established and personally financed
the Department of Press and Publicity of the National Cath-
olic Welfare Council in Washington, D.C. The final decision
was announced at the national convention of the Catholic
Press Association in January, 1920. By March of the same
year the personnel of the news bureau was selected, and by
the second week in April the practical results of the service
were available to Catholic publications.
In the following year, March was set apart as Catholic
press month, a kind of campaigning period. The purpose was
to interest the laity in Catholic publications, to solicit sub-
scriptions and to build up a deserving press. Again, in 1922,
we have had "press month." There were meetings to urge the
laity to give better support to the diocesan organs; there were
exhortations from the pulpit and from the columns of the
papers themselves, calling to the attention of Catholics their
obligations in this regard; there were pamphlets and notices
and subscription blanks. No definite information has been
gathered on the results of these drives. It may be safely
stated, however, that all Catholic subscription lists have been
swelled as a result of press month activities.
Yet this is no indication of the success or failure of the
movement. A new era has undoubtedly opened. Will it
bring a substantial change in the Catholic press or will it be
a mere repetition of the past? It ill befits Catholics to stumble
along, trusting to luck that their feet stay in the right path,
1922.] HAS THE CATHOLIC PRESS FAILED ? 611
without giving some attention to the signs along the roadside
to find out how far or in what direction they have been travel-
ing. The signs that should in this instance be carefully read
are the conclusions drawn from an unbiased study of the
press itself. If the new era is to bring success, the Catholic
press must be unfettered from the faults and weaknesses that
have prevented it from prospering in the past. It will be of
no avail to make drives for more subscribers if there is some-
thing radically wrong with the press itself.
No honest research can exclude those features of any
question which are disagreeable, and no progress can be made
if the investigator close his eyes to the truth of unpleasant
conclusions. The discussion of such here is not in the vein
of adverse criticism. On the contrary, they are noted as the
result of honest convictions derived from first-hand knowl-
edge and practical experience. Some are painful facts pre-
sented by one who has made a careful study of the subject
and whose hope is the establishment of a powerful, worthy,
efficient Catholic press in the United States.
Although the Catholic press really includes all publica-
tions under Catholic supervision regardless of the frequency
at which they are issued, it is here taken to mean all those
weekly, semi-weekly, tri-weekly, and daily publications pur-
porting to carry news of the day as the first object of their
being. This excludes such periodicals as reviews, journals of
opinion, special interest organs, such as fraternal, institu-
tional, Irish propaganda and children's papers. Thus limited,
the term would include at the very most, fifty-seven publica-
tions in the English language and thirty-four in foreign lan-
guages.
The Catholic press, then, has either been a success or it
has been a failure. If it has been a success, it is impossible to
explain why only one Catholic out of every twenty in the
United States subscribes for any Catholic publication, why the
clergy insistently encourage the laity to support Catholic
papers, why the laity who do subscribe are not enthusiastic
over these same papers, do not recommend them, praise them,
comment upon them. If the Catholic press movement as a
whole has been a success, it is difiicult to account for the
numerous failures of Catholic publications and to excuse the
almost despairing attitude of sincere thinking laymen.
612 HAS THE CATHOLIC PRESS FAILED ? [Aug.,
Taken from the historical standpoint, from the number of
subscribers to Catholic papers in proportion to the total num-
ber of Catholics in the United States, and from a consideration
of the standards of the publications themselves, the Catholic
press must be pronounced a failure. Not a failure in the
sense that it has ceased to exist, but a failure in so far as it has
not fulfilled its mission, has been a thing of weakness instead
of strength, has accomplished very little for that greatest of
institutions which it should defend and whose interests it
should promote, the Catholic Church.
The Catholic press in this country is just one hundred
years old. The first distinctly Catholic periodical in the new
world was The Catholic Miscellany, founded by Bishop Eng-
land, in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822. During these
hundred years, no accurate account has been kept of the
number of papers that failed, yet a fair approximate would
show that three times as many went out of existence as are
now being published. As a rule, the few that continued to
struggle on were in danger of collapsing for want of sufficient
subscribers and lack of advertising. Of the many papers
established before 1870, only seven remain. With one excep-
tion, none of these has a large subscription list or carries
much advertising.
It is estimated that there are in the United States about
twenty million Catholics, yet the fifty-seven papers printed
in English are not adequately supported. Of these fifty-seven,
only eighteen have a circulation ranging from 10,000 to 40,000,
in one case 50,000. The remainder show subscription lists of
no more than 1,500 to 10,000. (These figures may have slightly
increased within the past eight or ten months.)
Why has the Catholic press been a failure? It has stag-
gered near the brink of absolute ruin for the same reason
that any business firm which does not supply its patrons with
satisfactory goods, but depends upon their charity, loses trade
and succumbs to the inevitable. Catholic papers have not
been sold on their merits; they have been supported by char-
ity. This is the fundamental reason why they have not
prospered.
The publication of a paper is primarily a business prop-
osition, and anyone attempting to conduct it on any other
basis must eventually fail. Charity can be conducted on a
1922.] HAS THE CATHOLIC PRESS FAILED ? 613
business foundation, but business cannot be successfully
based on charity. However, this is what has caused the
lamentable condition of the Catholic press. The consequences
of that charity have been disastrous, and so long as the same
system is employed, the same consequences will be visited
upon the unbusiness-like Catholic press. Even a great por-
tion of the advertising carried in the columns of Catholic pa-
pers is given in partial charity. This does not mean that the
methods of many of our secular papers should be imitated in
catering to special interests, but it does mean that CathoHc
news columns should be attractive enough to warrant a will-
ingness on the part of the advertiser to pay for space instead
of being coerced to do so.
Just where the blame for this ineffectual system in the
Catholic press should be placed, is quite another and a diffi-
cult matter. The editors usually blame the clergy for indif-
ference; the clergy censure the laity for failing to support
the press; the laity blame the editors for not oJBfering better
papers. There is a certain amount of fault in each of the
three corners of this triangle, but the little game of bouncing
the blame from one to the other will never solve the problem.
Few priests are apathetic in regard to the cause of the
Catholic press when the matter is once brought to their atten-
tion, and these few are in sjntnpathy with the idea but dis-
couraged with the poor showing of the past. The hierarchy
cannot be accused of indifference. As a rule, it is they who
have initiated whatever steps have been taken in Catholic
journalism, or at least given new ventures their moral sup-
port. They are responsible for the existence of most of our
Catholic publications at the present time. In the Third
Plenary Council of Baltimore (1884), a decree on Catholic
Literature and Journalism was issued by the hierarchy. In
part, they said: In reference to periodicals, it would be in-
deed our most earnest desire to have one representative pub-
lication for each provi^ce— a publication that would be de-
serving of encouragement and moral support; and worthy, if
need be, to receive pecuniary aid from the bishops, as they
judge proper, whether assembled in provincial synod or
otherwise.
With the establishment of many diocesan papers under
the direction of the bishops since this decree was promulgated
614 HAS THE CATHOLIC PRESS FAILED ? [Aug.,
up to the time of the institution of the N. C. W. C. News Serv-
ice, there is little fault to find with the hierarchy or clergy.
The difficulty lies in the fact that the clergy, not being prac-
tical newspapermen or being unable to apply their knowledge
in a practical manner, the editing of the papers passes into
the hands of laymen who depend solely upon the assistance
of the priests and bishops and upon the charity of the people
to keep the paper on its feet.
The laity have the most credits of excuse to balance
against their debits account of responsibility. Their unfor-
tunate attitude is that whenever they give their money for a
year's subscription for a Catholic paper, they are thereby ful-
filling an obligation of charity. They consider it a duty to
donate a few dollars each year as a gift to the Catholic press,
the same as they contribute to collections for orphans. The
lamentable effect of this state of mind is that it frustrates the
very purpose of the press. The laity consider their obligation
complete with the signing of a subscription blank, and the
result is that many of these papers are brought into the home
but never read. Since the reader is the ultimate reason for
the existence of a paper, the question resolves itself to this:
Is the Catholic subscriber justified in his attitude toward
Catholic publications? In other words, is there something
amiss in the press itself or has the Catholic reader a peculiar
prejudice against it? The only answer lies in a study of the
Catholic publications and an investigation into their qualities
and characteristics.
Catholic editors appear to have forgotten one very essen-
tial fact. Catholics are human. They want to read interest-
ing news, timely articles, original comment, as well as do their
non-Catholic neighbors. They are American citizens as well
as adherents to a religious creed, and they look upon these
two aspects of their lives, not as two distinct and separate
parts, but as a complete interwoven unit. The Church stands
for certain principles, and as Catholics and Americans they
wish to combine these same principles. They expect to find
in their Catholic papers guidance to make them better citizens
and social beings. They want comment on the topics of the
day, the political, the economic, the social questions inter-
preted and explained from the standpoint of the Church. All
this they fail to find. Some few Catholic editors have made
I
1922.] HAS THE CATHOLIC PRESS FAILED ? 615
noble efforts to live up to the standards expected of them but
they, too, labor under difficulties which they cannot com-
pletely master. Generally speaking, however, there is the
merest attempt at editorial comment, most of which is of a
purely religious aspect. There is no enlightenment, no inter-
pretation, no decisive or reliable comment on current events
in which every modern Catholic is interested. Often the same
trite article or editorial is clipped and re-hashed, and for
months continues to make its rounds in the columns of our
Catholic papers.
The laity have been accused of being insensible to, and
even intolerant of, Catholic news and religious articles. This
is not true. It is not the subject matter, but the manner of
presentation that has caused the laity to become lax in the
perusal of these topjcs. Religion can be made as interesting
and attractive and salutary in the columns and editorials of
a paper as in any other form, especially the great principles of
the Catholic Church, which are not only Sunday truths, but
practical every-day precepts. It is not necessary to fill pages
with pietistic, unliving sermons and dull religious articles in
order to have a Catholic paper; on the contrary, religion is
something living, and should be treated as such. Then the
paper will not become repulsive to the average reader, and
the accusation against the laity will soon be withdrawn.
Anything that borders on politics is strictly taboo in the
offices of most of our Catholic papers. The erroneous con-
cept that religion and politics cannot be associated seems to
hold. If by religion is meant denominational religion, and
if by politics is meant partisan politics, this view is indisput-
ably correct. It would never do for Catholics, or Baptists,
or Methodists as such to take sides on party platforms, for the
necessary result would be conflict among the churches, bigotry
and religious hatred. But religion and politics are so closely
related and interwoven in modern life that they cannot suc-
cessfully be dissociated. Take away the religious element
from politics and it will become absolutely corrupt and in-
imical to religion itself. On the other hand, what assurance
has religion of putting those great principles of mankmd
given by Christ into effect except through that necessary
agent, politics. i. * *u
Because Catholic editors have either not thought out the
616 HAS THE CATHOLIC PRESS FAILED ? [Aug.,
question or because they have accepted an unfounded plat-
itude at its face value, they refrain from even touching the
subject of politics. As a fair example of the attitude that
should be taken by Catholic papers, the following extract
from an editorial written just before the last presidential
election may be cited: "Partisan politics is not our province,
but a general appreciation of the nature of the planks com-
posing the platforms in the light of ethical principle comes
well within our scope." As a matter of fact, an examination
of the files of Catholic papers preceding this same election,
fails to disclose anything more than a very general advice to
Catholics to vote for the man they considered best qualified
to hold office. Vital questions of the campaign were never
touched; the stand of the Church in regard to certain prin-
ciples was not given; the whole trend of^what little so-called
political editorial there was, smacked of a shrinking, fearful,
let-it-alone policy.
Closely related to the question of politics, another ex-
ample of the weakness of the Catholic press can be shown in
the campaign against the old Smith-Towner educational bill.
For months, Catholic leaders, seeing the danger of the bill,
waged war against it and progressive Catholic periodicals
fought it tooth and nail. Until the agitation had practically
defeated the proposed measure, the Catholic papers were
almost silent. When they did carry an article or comment,
it was a clipped bit of discussion found in the leading Cath-
olic reviews and magazines or the pamphlet published and
issued by the Knights of Columbus. Few new or original
editorials could be found in the Catholic papers.
For the past two years the N. C. W. C. News Service in
Washington, D. C, established by the bishops, has been at
the service of the Catholic papers. Although much could be
done to improve this bureau, it has accomplished a great deal
during the brief time of its existence, and promises to develop
into an invaluable institution for the future. But it has not
been used; it has been abused. This news gathering agency
has benefited Catholic papers in that they have been supplied
with much news they would otherwise never have had, and
which now takes the place of the accustomed "fillers." At
the same time, these several papers had a certain individual-
ity when unaided by the News Service; there was at least a
1922.] HAS THE CATHOLIC PRESS FAILED ? g^
^^tZ^L'ZT:,i2'T ^^.^-«T °^ '^"PPe'i news.
CathoHc paper ^'S^Z:^-^ """^'^ ^'^'^ "^
N C W^'rT 'V'' '^^ '^^*"^^ d"^'' "°t He with the
papers, in many instances not even takin» tZT J
re write the headings to .ake thercU^^J^^^^^^^^^^^^
iTsWnt ; P"^^^^^*--- ^- other words, with the eSah
hshment of a necessary and valuable news service, the
several Cathohc papers have lost their individuality and hive
followed more or less the one stereotyped form, if is a was^e
of time and money to have fifty-seven papers set up and
prmt, with the exception of a few local or diocesan items,
fifty-seven editions of the same matter. This is especially
unnecessary since few Catholics ever read more than one
Catholic paper. For practical purposes, then, these fifty-
seven papers could be one.
In the light of these facts, the wonder at this time is not
that there are not more Catholic papers, but that there are
as many as we have. The wonder is not that our young peo-
ple do not read Catholic papers more, but that they ever read
them. The laity should not be condemned for failing to sup-
port their papers, but praised for supporting them as well as
they have.
It would seem that at last we are enabled to fix the blame
on the third corner of the triangle, on the Catholic editors.
But the editors are not altogether to blame either, for they
are only the first victims of that system which generally works
out in this way: they are placed in their positions by the
clergy or hierarchy who are too busy to devote much time to
the practical affairs of the papers they have founded. The
editors fail to make both ends meet because their papers do
not readily sell, and they appeal to the clergy. The clergy
in turn urge and, in many cases, morally compel the laity to
support their diocesan organs. The editors getting the re-
quired support, feel that they are under no further obligation
than to furnish, as a token of appreciation, a four or eight-
page paper at stated intervals. The readers become dis-
couraged with the few weak columns of clippings and stale
618 HAS THE CATHOLIC PRESS FAILED ? [Aug.,
news, and unless they have boundless charity, they will have
their names struck from the subscription lists, and the same
old cycle has again commenced.
The solution to the whole question is centred in one im-
portant fact — furnish the laity with good, reliable, newsy
papers and they will readily support the Catholic press. But
to accomplish this, one of the first requisites is to fill the
editorial chairs with live, progressive editors.
Here another great difficulty is encountered in Catholic
press development. Up to this time, the press has been in the
hands of devoted, sincere, hard-working pioneers who at least
have kept the Catholic press from being submerged altogether.
To these men every praise is due, for they have labored under
difficulties and for little remuneration, carrying on, for the
most part, for the sake of an ideal. Those who remain are
no longer able to cope with the modern situation. New
blood must be infused into the Catholic press movement.
The chairs of the pioneers must be filled by young Americans,
well-educated, progressive, fully equipped, to cope with the
problems which confront Catholic journalism in this new era.
Contrary to what one would expect, few of our college
graduates turn to Catholic journalism. One possible cause
for their lack of interest may be that they have never been
educated to appreciate the true meaning of the Catholic press,
or that they have become antipathetic as a result of the Cath-
olic paper they had read. At any rate, it is difficult to awaken
the interest of students today when speaking of Catholic jour-
nalism. It would be expected that the establishment of Cath-
olic schools of journalism would remedy the situation, and
that the offices of our Catholic publications would be flooded
with youthful aspirants to the cause and apostleship of the
press. The very opposite is true.
There must be a deeper reason, a reason that lies beyond
the Catholic schools of journalism and their products, to
account for this fact. It lies in the offices of our Catholic
papers. Not for lack of ability or education or training are
even the few aspirants to Catholic journalism turned away,
for they always find ready positions on the secular press, but
for lack of proper inducements in the way of fair remuner-
ation for their valuable services. As a rule, wages and sal-
aries are low in the newspaper game, but in the Catholic field
1922.] HAS THE CATHOLIC PRESS FAILED ? 619
they have been notoriously low. The deserving aspirant to
Cahohc journahsm is turned away because there is no future
not even a fair return for his services, even when the years'
spent m education have been left out of consideration. Cah-
ohc edUors cannot be too well trained, and when well
equipped students do attempt to enter Catholic journalism
they are forced to the secular press, thus losing to the Chrh
and the cause of the press many valuable editors of tomorrow.
If the Cathohc press wants, needs good editors, why can
It not afford to pay for their services? Because the system
of charity upon which it is founded prevents it from doing so
Catholic schools of journalism are of little value, if there is
no other place to send their graduates than to the secular
press where they have little or no direct influence.
Tracing all these consequences back, we come again to
the undermining evil in our press. From charity to the
laissez faire attitude of Catholic editors, from weak papers
to few homes, from ill-support to its undoing, an indelible
line marks the downward path on the historical chart of the
Catholic press.
It would be inaccurate to say that all these criticisms
have been directed against Catholic newspapers. With one
single exception, the Church in the United States has no Eng-
lish newspaper. Up to this point, the term newspaper has
been purposely omitted when referring to the Catholic press.
A weekly paper is not necessarily a newspaper; neither can a
paper carrying some news be so classed. This is especially
true since Catholic papers concern themselves with only the
more important Catholic news, yet even items of great im-
portance are neglected or carried long after the occurrence
of the event. With the establishment of the N. C. W. C. News
Service, much of this has been remedied, still some news is
so stale that it would be unfair to call it news. It appears to
be the attitude of Catholic editors that their readers neces-
sarily subscribe for secular papers, and that Catholic papers
are brought into the home as an antidote to offset any poisons
that may be found in the secular sheets. But few people
will read the same item in a Catholic weekly after they have
read it in their daily paper, no matter how the secular press
distorted the facts.
Some of our good Catholic papers have gone so far as to
620 HAS THE CATHOLIC PRESS FAILED ? [Aug.,
carry whole page advertisements of Hearst's and other dailies
in their editions. Thus, contrary to all Catholic teachings,
principles, ideals, aspirations, the standards of the Church and
Catholic journalism have been dragged down to the sordid
business methods of the very press the Catholic press would
oppose.
The average American today must have his daily news-
paper. He is no longer satisfied with the weekly narration
of events. In fact, even the up-to-date news is losing favor
in this swiftly moving age; it is the up-to-the-minute news
that is required. An account of events that happened ten
days and two weeks ago will not even attract the passing
attention of the average reader today. As newspapers,
weeklies of all descriptions are antiquated, they no longer
find a place in the lives of the modern reader. In this light,
nothing more can be said in favor of Catholic papers than that
they have come to be considered as special interest journals.
A Catholic begins to look upon his subscription to a diocesan
organ in the same light as any business man or tradesman
would consider his trade papers. They are a kind of ad-
vertisement, and Catholic papers are considered advertising
organs for the Catholic Church. But even in this capacity
they have proved inefficient.
Propaganda at this time is necessary, yet it cannot be
served without a goodly portion of news sauce. The greater
the organization or the larger the scheme of any business,
the more is the news column sought for free advertising.
Propaganda in special interest journals is deemed no longer
sufficient. An organization gets control of some daily news-
paper and gives the people news of the day as the first object,
but between the lines sandwiches propaganda good or bad.
If the organization cannot gain control of the daily, it resorts
to all kinds of schemes to break into the news columns. The
least bit of news is spread over a great amount of propaganda
to escape the blue pencil of the editor. Every society of any
importance has its special interest journals: Republicans,
Democrats, Socialists, Labor, Capital, theorists, religious sects,
promoters, all have them, but it is upon the daily press that
they depend for success. Hearst did not establish a string of
trade publications to promulgate his ideas, but he created a
string of daily newspapers, and he is today considered the
1922.] HAS THE CATHOLIC PRESS FAILED ? 621
greatest molder of public opinion. The Christian Scientists did
not depend upon a special interest paper to teach thdr doc
trmes; they founded a daily newspaper, The ChristianScienl
Momtor. which was ranked as the second most influeXl
paper in the United States in a ballot taken by all the eSor
m this country This is remarkable when it is'known tha th
adherents to that religious sect number only a few hundred
thousand whereas Catholics number almost twenty millions.
Gathohcs must have their dailies, if the Catholic press is
to continue. The clergy and hierarchy have become inter-
ested m the venture; one Catholic daily, the Daily American
Tribune of Dubuque, Iowa, shows promise and points to a
favorable future; the laity are coming to realize the necessity
of better daily papers. The hierarchy, however, long ago
foresaw the possibility of a string of Catholic dailies when
m the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, in 1884, they said:
"It is very much to be desired, indeed, that in some of our
larger cities a daily newspaper be established, quite equal to
the existing dailies, in financial resources, in recognized abil-
ity of contributors, and in the worth and influence of its con-
tributions. It does not follow that the title of such a paper
must be Catholic. Its purposes would be attained if, in addi-
tion to the latest news, which is eagerly sought in the other
dailies, it were to uphold the Catholic religion against false
charges and the attacks of its enemies, and explain the mean-
ing of Catholic teaching. Moreover, such a paper should ex-
clude from its columns everything that is openly indecent and
scandalous."
Nothing need be added to the bishops' concept of what
a Catholic daily should be. "All the news that's fit to print"
would be a worthy slogan for such publications. Once such
papers would be established under the guidance of able busi-
ness directors and progressive Catholic journalists, success
would be almost assured, for the laity would be willing to
subscribe. The day seems to be past in which the reader
scanned the newspaper stands to find the most salacious edi-
tion. What is wanted at this time is reliable news. The
average reader anywhere may be observed with his favorite
daily paper. He glances at the scandal story, the objection-
able picture, and then becomes absorbed in the better news
of the day or turns to his stock markets or sporting page.
622 OUR LADY OF GOOD VOYAGE [Aug.,
Catholics do not lack talent, they do not lack the means,
they do not lack prestige or numbers sufficient to establish a
string of dailies. There are many Catholic journalists eager
to work on Catholic dailies, and there are millions of Cath-
olics willing to support such publications. There stands but
one great obstacle in the way of making complete success out
of failure. It is the existence of that system which has been
tried and found defective in building up a strong Catholic
press — charity in business.
The local Catholic daily is a thing of the near future, but
the only way to bring it about is to organize a stock corpor-
ation in every large city, put reliable business managers and
editors at the head of the undertaking, and conduct the pub-
lications on a strictly business basis. Catholics have never
failed to finance great ventures or even to give liberal dona-
tions to drives for the cause of their religion, and it is not too
much to expect that little difficulty would be encountered in
forming stock companies in which a purely business proposi-
tion is involved besides the higher cause of Catholic press
development.
OUR LADY OF GOOD VOYAGE.
(GLOUCESTER.)
BY ANNA MCCLURE SHOLL.
Nor'east wind and sou*east wind,
All our winds together !
"Star of Sea" in flyin' foam
Ridin* like a feather.
Back in town between the towers.
Stands our Lady Mother.
In her arms a schooner trim,
Like to any other.
1922.] OUR LADY OF GOOD VOYAGE
"Neptune," "Rover," "Slappin' Sal."
Sailin' out together,
Herrin* boats and mack*rel nets-
Lucky fishin* weather!
Back I look and wave my hand,
"Mary keep the sailor!"
"Star of Sea" I named for you.
And you'll never fail her.
Lifts her nose o'er every swell.
Scuds like she was flyin*
Past the light-house; through the spray.
And the sea-gulls cryin'.
Back in town Our Lady stands,
Where the candles burning,
Tell the words we cannot say.
All the sailors' yearning.
May we come to port some day.
And Our Lady Mother
Reach her hands to weary salts.
Show us Christ, our Brother.
"Neptune," "Rover," "Slappin' Sal,"
Sailin' out together.
Herrin' boats and mack'rel nets —
Lucky fishin' weather!
623
IN PRAISE OF AN OLD BOOK.^
BY M. E. GOLDINGHAM.
F all the scarce old books I know, remarkable as
being works of wide utility and of solid and safe
teaching, I prefer the old Benedictine book, The
Spiritual Conflict and Conquest.** So wrote
Bishop Ullathorne of a book less appreciated
than it deserves to be, although better known since the days
when the good Bishop wrote, thanks to the modern edition
largely due to his encouragement.
Some books have been epoch-making in the history of
mankind at large. Others have been such in the history of the
individual soul. To this last category, the Spiritual Conflict
and Conquest seems to belong, for although it has run the
Imitation of Christ very closely in the matter of general pop-
ularity and acceptance by the Church, it has not the genius of
universality — this must be admitted — which has made the
Imitation unique among devotional works, and given it a cir-
culation second only to the Holy Scriptures. Doubtless, when
Juan de Gastaniza published his Batalla Espiritual — as the
title runs in Spanish — it created comparatively little stir.
Well-known and highly esteemed as the saintly author was in
ecclesiastical circles and at the Court of Philip XL, he does not
seem to have taken the trouble to issue it under the shelter of
his already illustrious name, and in time his very authorship
was questioned, and his work appropriated by another.
It is a curious fact, that many of those supreme works of
genius, which are the treasures of the human race and enjoy
inalienable possession of immortality, are those whose crea-
tion and authorship posterity disputes. Posterity has tried to
persuade us that Homer is the product of many hands; that
Shakespeare came to be written by one Lord Bacon; that the
authorship of the Fourth Gospel is undiscoverable; that the
Imitation of Christy attributed to a Kempis, might as fitly
1 The Spiritual Conflict and Conquest. By Dom J. Gastaniza, O.S.B. Edited with
preface and notes by Canon Vaughan, O.S.B. Reprinted from thie old Englisli Trans-
lation of 1652. 1874.
1922.] IN PRAISE OF AN OLD BOOK 625
claim Gerson, or even St. Bernard or St. Bonaventure as its
author; that the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola
were borrowed from, or remodeled upon Gisneros' Exicitorio
de la vida espiritual. We need not extend the list.
Gastaniza's work has fared more strangely than any, and
perhaps there has never been a more thorough, if justifiable
piece of literary larceny. His Spiritual Conflict was swal-
lowed whole by the Theatine, Scupoli, and the result was a
neat little pocket volume, companion to the Imitation; which
the devout reading public knows as The Spiritual Combat,
bearing the name of Lorenzo Scupoli on its title-page. In
this form an immense impetus was given to its popularity.
What Scupoli did was to modernize the work, making it
perhaps more practical, certainly more acceptable to the aver-
age pious person. He re-wrote and transposed chapters, com-
pressed or enlarged passages, pared down diffuseness of
style, added practical directions in keeping with the spiritual
needs of his time; but in the process, the charm, the fragrance,
the peculiar unction of the old Benedictine has completely
evaporated. Moreover, the larger and more individualistic
portion of the book, the Spiritual Conflict, Scupoli left un-
touched; so it is to Gastaniza's pages we must go for this
beautiful treatise on the perfection of Ghristian life.
It is a matter for congratulation to English-speaking Gath-
olics, that we possess a version of the old Spanish writer
which reproduces both his matter and his manner with such
great fidelity. Indeed, in the 1652 version (reprinted in 1874
and prefaced by Ganon Vaughan, O.S.B.) we have more than
a mere translation. It is Gastaniza's work created anew in
the language most akin to the old Gastihan— the full-blooded,
nervous, sonorous speech which has come down to us from
"the spacious days of great Elizabeth"— "thoroughly English,"
to quote Bishop Ullathorne again; an English classic in lieu of
the Spanish one. And we owe it to the Sons of St. Benedict.
Naturally, the Order which Gastaniza adorned has regarded
the Spiritual Conflict and Conquest as its legacy— for this 1652
version, although published anonymously, no doubt comes
from the hand of a Benedictine, and was dedicated to his
religious family: "To the Right Reverend, Fathers, Religious
Dames and devout Brothers and Sisters of the Holy Order of
St. Rennet." It, moreover, bore an "Approbation" from the
VOL. cxv. 40
626 IN PRAISE OF AN OLD BOOK [Aug.,
Benedictine President of Douai, the Right Rev. Rudesind
Barlow; and appears to have been issued under his auspices.
"Therein," he says, "nothing is found dissonant to our Cath-
olic Faith, or repugnant to piety, but a holy, sound and solid
doctrine."
It is not easy to quote from The Spiritual Conflict. It is
unlike the Imitation of Christ, where almost every sentence
can stand alone, a gem of concise spiritual thought, perfect,
whether in its setting within the chapter, or out of it. Here
each chapter forms part of a Treatise, each Treatise is an
integral whole which every sentence contributes to build up.
The style is diffuse; there is a redundancy of phrase which
sometimes wraps up the point, but where the ideas are simple,
it is as simple and limpid as the Bible : vigorous and trenchant
when driving home the great truths of man's existence; rely-
ing sometimes upon accumulative epithets to produce an
effect, much as a painter will load his canvas with daubs of
color to increase the depth of gloom or enhance the intensity
of light. The following passage is most characteristic of the
devout style:
O sweet waters of Divine love, which flow from the open
side of my Saviour's humanity, run into my bowels, and
like pure oil, penetrate and possess every part of my spirit;
irrigate and inebriate it, overflow and absorb it, that it may
be transformed and conformed to the Divine Spirit, so that
all my actions, thoughts and affections may be spiritual,
divine and deiform.
The book is composed of five Treatises. In the first
Treatise we have those profoundly psychological studies —
"Ambushes" of the Christian soul, in which self-love or the
human spirit is detected in all its chameleon-like forms and
run to earth, elusive quarry though it be! In the fifth, and
last, are the beautiful "Maxims," a compendium of spiritual
riches, and a mine of wealth for the substance of prayer.
Our author breaks frequently into ejaculations, amorous and
tender, such as later on Father Baker and Dame Gertrude
More delighted in, and used so effectively by St. Alphonsus
Liguori in his smaller spiritual works as little levers to arouse
the affections in mental prayer: "Wound me, O sweet God,"
he exclaims, "burn me, consume me, crucify me! Let m^
1922.] IN PRAISE OF AN OLD BOOK
627
-L-,
cry out with that lover: Restrain, Lord, the floods of
Thy grace or enlarge my heart, for I can endure no
longer. I thirst. Lord, give me this water. when*? How
much?"
"O that I could get out of myself and get into Thee!" he
exclaims elsewhere; "that I could thrust my caitiff heart out
of this breast to establish Thine, my sweet Saviour, in its
place!" "Live, O rich nakedness! Live my Beloved to me,
and I to Him! Let me see no one but only Jesus." And in a
phrase recalling one of an earlier mystical writer, he says:
'*0 sweet God of my heart, let me embrace Thee with the two
arms of profound humility and perfect charity."
Our author is quaintly and continuously alliterative, a
trick of style which sits well on him, though not to be endured
among moderns: "My Father, my Physician, my Food, hear
me, help me, heal me!" "I am wounded, I am wicked, I am
wretched." Or again: "Lhave given my heart, and sold my
affections to fond, frail, filthy and fading creatures." "Thy
whole Humanity, O gracious Jesus, was martyred and mur-
dered." "I stretch out my opened folds to meet Thy holy and
heavenly huggings."
He satirizes the pedigree and nature of man in words
which call to mind some passages in Hamlet or Lear:
Ay me! I have a body all clay, a soul all sin, a life all
frailty, and a substance all nothing. My material part is
but slime of the earth, the very worst part of the basest
element. Ah! poor man, and canst thou look so big, who
earnest from so low an extraction? . . . Who then can
justly boast of state, strength, beauty or nobility, since the
groundwork of all is but a little dung and corruption? . . .
And what art thou in thy best and most flourishing condi-
tion in the world, but a clog and a cage to thy enthralled
soul; a painted sack or plastered ^ sepulchre, full of filth,
froth and ordure. ... Ah, how canst thou be proud of thy
perfections, poor clay and ashes? Why shouldst thou look
to be so highly prized and so daintily pampered, thou stink-
ing puddle? Dust thou art, and to dust thou must return.
Hast thou not always before thy eyes these ashes for thy
glass, and death for thy mistress? Why then, dost thou
suffer so many sparkles of vanity to arise from this thy
caitiff condition?
2 Original text— "Pargetled."
628 IN PRAISE OF AN OLD BOOK [Aug.,
It is not, we need hardly say, to engender a morbid cyni-
cism that man is here exhibited as the "quintessence of dust."
Man is still God's creature and the noblest work of His hands,
albeit broken and defaced. But he must fight to recover his
lost inheritance. He must wage this necessary "spiritual con-
flict." He must, as our author expresses it, "enter these lists
with a cheerful and heroic mind, and attend carefully to every
counsel and command of thy Captain, Christ Jesus," and so he
shall progress to a glorious victory. Castaniza furnishes him,
in his book, with a complete spiritual armory. With this in
his hand, he may go forth in the words of Browning :
Fearless and unperplexed,
When 1 wage battle next,
What weapons to select, what armor to indue.
Like his more famous countryman, the soldier-saint, Ignatius,
he thinks the spiritual life out in terms of warfare. It is, from
first to last, the Batalla EspirituaL
We have alluded to St. Ignatius. The Spiritual Exercises
saw the light in the first half of that momentous century to
which Castaniza's work belongs — 1548 being the date usually
given for its publication. St. Teresa was writing her Life in
1565; the Interior Castle in 1577; the Ascent of Mount Carmel
came from the pen of St. John of the Gross a few years after
(circa 1578) ; while Spain's great theologian, Suarez, pub-
lished his Opere between 1590 and 1613.
It was a century of great works and great men. Juan de
Castaniza was born in its opening years. He passed to his
eternal reward on St. Luke's day, 1599. Much had he labored
in the Lord's vineyard; as a preacher, as a theologian, as an
ascetical writer and a learned man, he attained eminence;
sought after alike both at Court and in the seclusion of his
monastery. Over and above all else, he was a true Benedic-
tine, a devout religious, preferring nothing that the world
could offer him of titles and dignities to the life of prayer and
contemplation he enjoyed in the cloister. The Spiritual Con-
flict and Conquest is the ripe experience of that life, and that
it has achieved the object for which it was written — to enable
the soul "to reach the height of Christian perfection" — is its
chiefest praise. Only a great book, it may be said, can help
1922.] INTIMACY ((29
a great soul, and this book has contributed to the formation
of great souls, nay to saints. St. Francis of Sales made it his
spiritual director, as he declared to the Bishop of Bellay, and
impressed its value upon St. Jane Frances and her daughters.
We have quoted Bishop UUathorne and the esteem he had for
it; he bequeathed it as a legacy to Mother Margaret Mary Hal-
lahan, that great and remarkable soul who nourished herself
and her community upon its solid and practical spirituality.
And countless souls, unknown to men, and known only to
God, have found in its pages light, strength and consolation.
We take our leave of it in the words which are its quintes-
sence :
Learn, O my soul, this short and secure lesson. Leave
all things, and thou shalt find the One Thing which is all
and all.
INTIMACY.
BY FRANCIS CARLIN.
Of late I am as one
Familiar with Thy sun;
Being old, I would be near
Thy fire kindled here.
And later still I'll grow
Familiar with — Ah, no!
Unless I learn desire
For clarifying fire.
But later still— O Lord.
Familiar with both word
And wish herein, teach me
Familiarity !
RUSKIN AND CATHOLICISM.
BY H. E. G. ROPE, M.A.
O careful reader of Ruskin can have failed to
remark the great influence which the Catholic
Church had upon him. Of non-Catholic masters
in bookcraft, few, indeed, have written and
spoken in so Catholic a manner as he. More
than one soul has been helped forward towards the Church
by this gifted prose poet and thinker. "The pity of it," one
cries on reaching the end of all his teaching, the pity of it that
he should never have been gathered into the Fold; the pity of
it, that his mind in his last years was injured and clouded;
the pity of it, that an artist so superb, an observer and teacher
so zealous and wise, a soul so reverent — reverent even in
perversity — witness his disastrous worship of Carlyle ^ —
should have been so preoccupied with things beautiful indeed,
but far short of the highest, so much with the speaking crea-
ture, so little with the spoken Creator.
"It is strange," says a great Irish writer, "how great minds
invariably turn, by some instinct or attraction, towards this
eternal miracle — the Church. Carlyle admits in his extreme
old age that the Mass is the most genuine act of religious
belief left in the world. Goethe was forever introducing the
Church into his conversations, coupling it with the idea of
power, massive strength and ubiquitous influence. Byron
would insist that his daughter, Allegra, should be educated
in a convent, and brought up a Catholic, and nothing else.
And Ruskin, although he did say some bitter things about us,
tells us what a strong leaning he has towards monks and
monasteries; how he pensively shivered with Augustinians at
St. Bernard; happily made hay with Franciscans at Fiesole;
sat silent with the Carthusians in the little gardens south of
Florence, and mooned through many a daydream at Bolton
and Melrose. Then he closes his little litany of sympathy
with the quaintly Protestant conclusion: 'But the wonder is
1 "Carlyle was deep-hearted — ^though not by any means, as his votaries fancy,
deep-minded." — Aubrey de Vere, Reminiscences, pp. 328, 329.
1922.] RUSKIN AND CATHOLICISM 631
always to me, not how much, but how little, the monks have
on the whole done, with all that leisure, and all that good-
will.'
"He cannot understand! That is all. But why? Be-
cause he cannot search the archives of Heaven. He knows
nothing of the supernatural— of the invisible work of prayer—
of work that is worship. He has never seen the ten thousand
thousand words of praise that have ascended to the Most
High; and the soft dews of graces innumerable that have
come down from Heaven in answer to prayer. He has painted,
as no one else, except as perhaps Carlyle could, the abom-
inations of modern life; and he has flung all the strength of
his righteous anger against them. He has never asked him-
self why God is so patient, while John Ruskin rages; or why
fire and brimstone are not showered from Heaven, as whilom
on the Cities of the Plain. He has read his Bible year by year,
hard words, Levitical laws, comminatory Psalms, from iv
dp7f)to Amen; and, what is more rare, he believed in it.
Yet he never tried to fathom the mystery of the imequal
dealings of God with mankind. He never saw the anger of
the Most High soothed, and His hand stayed by the midnight
prayer and scourge of the Trappist and the Carthusian.
Dante could never have written the Paradiso, if he had not
heard Cistercians chanting at midnight." ^
In a letter from a priest friend, whose name I may not
give, dated July 4, 1908, I find: "He (Ruskin) was very near
the Church, and I have good reason to know that it is owing
to the fact that he was so carefully guarded from *priesUy
influence' during his last days, that he was not actually re-
ceived into the Church." I have also a postcard from Father
M. Power, S.J., which reads:
Edinb. Aug. 3, '08. Many thanks for "Ruskin." When
his powers were almost gone I gave him a medal of the
B V. M., and reminded him of the glowing tributes which
he had paid her. He smiled and said: "Ah, the Madonna!
From Ruskin's house at Brantwood, Aubrey de Vere
writes to Professor Norton on December 8, 1878: *I cannot
but believe that, if Ruskin had not in some matters been
2 Canon Sheehan, Under the Cedars and the Stars, pp. 131. 132.
632 RUSKIN AND CATHOLICISM [Aug.,
carried out of his natural course by an exaggerated admir-
ation for Carlyle, he would before now have reached a happier
goal. I trust, however, that he will one day reach it. He is
a man who for me has quite a peculiar interest — he has such
high aspirations, and warm sympathies, and friendly con-
fidings (things much better than even his great abilities), and
his trials have been so many and so sad ! These last are, how-
ever, to me an additional pledge that he is watched over by
that Providence which shapes our ends, 'rough hew them as
we may;' and a vivid, realizing Faith, which, as Wordsworth
affirms (in his 'Despondency Corrected'), is the one only sup-
port under the trials of life."
In another letter de Vere urges Patmore to use his in-
fluence over Ruskin, to press upon him seriously the claims
of the Church on those who "see as much of its character and
work, when not in perverse moods, as he does" (1890).
About 1879 Patmore himself writes: "I leave here to-
morrow for Carstairs. ... I daresay I shall have a good
time, but not so good as I am having here, with Ruskin almost
all to myself. He is very fond of talking about the Catholic
Religion, and says he thinks it likely he shall become a Cath-
olic some day — but I think it is attractive to him only from
the idea of pleasant intellectual repose which it presents to
him. The arguments for its truth strike him just for the
moment, but leave no impression, as far as I can see." ^
3 B. Champney's Life of Coventry Patmore (1900), vol. i., p. 285. A letter from
Ruskin to Patmore may be added in confirmation:
Brantwood,
Coniston, Lancashire,
Dear Patmore: 20th April, '80.
It was good of you to write to me, but your letter still leaves me very anxious
about you. I do not at all understand the feelings of religious people about death.
All my own sorrow is absolutely infldel, and part of the general failure and mean-
ness of my heart. Were I a Catholic, I do not think I should ever feel sorrow in
any deep sense — but only a constant brightening of day as I drew nearer companion-
ship — perhaps not chiefly with those I had cared for in this world — and certainly
with others beside them. My own longing, and what trust I have, is only for my
own people. But I have been putting chords of music lately, such as I can, to
Herick's "Comfort"—
In endless bliss
She thinks not on
What's said or done
In earth.
Nor does she mind
Or think on't now
That ever thou
Wast kind.
— ^fearing only that it is too true. Ever your affectionate,
J. R.
1922.] RUSKIN AND CATHOLICISM 633
Certainly, he had infidel moods; certainly faith Vas„,o'e
ban once eclipsed, if not lost; but that, th'ank God was ^o
the case with his last years in spite of his fondness for affect-
mg the standpoint of a Turk. Often he claimed to take h s
stand as a writer on the great natural truths admitted by the
wise m all times, by Plato as by Samuel Johnson. I do not
disguise from myself that ugly passages can be culled from
occasional letters. In one of the Letters to the Rev J P
Faunthorpe (1896), he compares St. Paul's Epistles to Levit-'
icus, and says he is not bound by them. There are a few
deplorable passages in the JEthics of the Dust very fully dis-
cussed in the letters of Father Wilberforce.* There were
moods, too, of horrible pride, as against many more of gen-
uine humility. I claim, however, without fear, that the cu-
mulative testimony of his life, published writings and private
letters is decisively Christian with an increasing leaning to
the Catholic Faith. I do not propose to discuss his bona fides.
It is perilous to intrude into the forum internum.
For my own part, I think of him with hope. I have quoted
a well-informed opinion that he would actually have reached
the goal had he been free, and I know positively that he
loved the society of the priest at Coniston and presented the
Catholic Church there with a stained glass window, to the
great indignation of the sectaries.^ In judging his perverse
moods and utterances, too, we must bear in mind his mental
breakdowns. The years in which Ruskin was sometimes sub-
ject to doubts upon Revelation were, roughly, the early sixties.
In the following letter we have his own express testimony
that he never disbelieved in God. It speaks rather of diffi-
culties than any real doubt: "Suicide in a case like Prevost-
Paradol's — assuming he was in his right mind — seems to me
to be consistent only with a knowledge that we have no God,
a state of mind I cannot conceive, and utterly different from
any sort of doubt I have experienced. Indeed, the more I
suffer from doubt, the deeper becomes the feeling that this
suffering is of His giving who could reniove it.
4 1906, pp. 253, 254, etc.
5 See A. A. Isaacs' The Fountain of Siena (the correspondence of Ruskin and a
rabid anti-Catholic of the Hocking type in 1884-5).
634 RUSKIN AND CATHOLICISM [Aug.,
"I was very much touched by the Passion-play, and wrote
some very bad verses at Ammergau, which I send you only as
a proof how chronically different from the state of mind you
suppose, my actual state of mind is. Pray don't show them
again, and destroy them when you have read them." ^
"The fact is well known that the mind of this vigorous
and subtle thinker, great writer, and most generous and, in
many respects, admirable man, broke down at times; to blink
this fact would be useless. I gather that the year 1860, when
he was abroad, was the first in which he showed something
of a morbid habit of mind, or incipient hypochondria. Cer-
tainly, when I saw him in my brother's chambers in February,
1862, immediately after the death of my sister-in-law, Lizzie
(Siddal), I found the whole tone of his thought on religious
subjects changed, and the ardent devout Protestant figured as
a total disbeliever in any form of the Christian or other de-
fined faith. I might add the expression of my own opinion
that the great ascendancy which Thomas Carlyle obtained to-
wards this time over the mind of Ruskin did him more harm
than good: Carlyle being one of those strong, but extreme,
men who may brave very robust natures, but who usurp upon
the innate function of more delicate organisms." ^ "He was
broken by sorrow long before he died." ^
It is curious that the mighty genius who, according to
Canon Barry, divides with Ruskin the palm of English prose,
has left, so far as I can find, no allusion to him. Yet both
were contemporaries and both wielded an enormous influence
in the English-speaking world. References to Newman are
likewise all but completely lacking on Ruskin's part. In a
letter from Rome (of the year 1840, I think) he rejoices to
hear of Newman's submission to "episcopal authority," be-
cause it shows consistency, and complains that all the es-
timable people were on the "wrong" (Tractarian) side at
Oxford, and all the vulgar, pig-headed and conceited folk on
the "right" (evangelical) side.^ On June 27, 1846, he refers
to "the late melancholy schisms." In the essay written at the
age of sixteen he, brought up in the strictest puritanism, in-
6 July, 1870, p. 299.
7 W. M. Rossetti, Some Reminiscences (1906), vol. i., ch. xii., p. 183.
8 Mrs. Meynell, John Ruskin, 1900, Introduction, p. 8.
9 Three Letters and an Essay on Literature (1893).
1922.] RUSKIN AND CATHOLICISM 635
veighs vigorously and buoyantly against those who consider
sour faces and joylessness signs of sanctity.
At twenty-five, he wrote that Catholic-hearted poem on
the lagoon shrine of La Madonna delP Acqua (included in the
Carmina Mariana), ending thus:
Oh! lone Madonna— angel of the deep-
When the night falls, and deadly winds are loud.
Will not thy love be with us while we keep
Our watch upon the waters, and the gaze
Of thy soft eyes, that slumber not, nor sleep?
Deem not thou stranger, that such trust is vain;
Faith walks not on these weary waves alone.
Though weakness dread or apathy disdain
The spot which God has hallowed for His own.
They sin who pass it lightly — ill divining
The glory of this bitter place of prayer;
And hoping against hope, and self-resigning.
And reach of faith, and wrestling with despair;
And resurrection of the last distress.
Into the sense of Heaven, when earth is bare.
And of God's voice, when man's is comfortless.^o
The greater and more famous part of Modern Painters
was written before that shock which, in 1859, destroyed his
inherited evangelicanism. "I was still in the bonds of my old
Evangelical faith, and, in 1858, it was with me, Protestantism
or nothing: the crisis of the whole turn of my thoughts being
one Sunday morning at Turin, when, from before Paul Ver-
onese's Queen of Sheba, and under quite overwhelmed sense
of his God-given power, I went away to a Waldensian chapel,
where a little squeaking idiot was preaching to an audience
of seventeen old women and three louts, that they were the
only children of God in Turin; and that all the people in the
world outside the chapel, and the people in the world out of
sight of Monte Viso, would be damned. I came out of the
chapel, sum of twenty years of thought, a conclusively un-
converted man— converted by this little Piedmontese gentle-
10 Poems (Routledge, 1907), p. 233. Compare Fors xli. (vol. li., p. 250, in the
1906 edition). "After the most careful examinaUon neither as adversary nor as
friend, of the influence of Catholicism for good and evil. I am persuaded that the
worship of the Madonna has been one of the noblest and most vital graces, and has
never been otherwise than productive of true holiness of life and purity or
character."
636 RUSKIN AND CATHOLICISM [Aug.,
man, so powerful in his organ-grinding, inside out, as it were.
*Here is an end to my "Mother-Law" of Protestantism anyhow !
— and now — ^what is there left?' You will find what was left,
as, in much darkness and sorrow of heart I gathered it,
variously taught in my books written between 1858 and 1874.
It is all sound and good, as far as it goes: whereas all that
went before was so mixed with Protestant egotism and inso-
lence, that, as you have probably heard, I won't republish,
in their first form, any of those former books."
"Thus then it went with me till 1874, when I had lived
sixteen full years with 'the religion of Humanity,' for rough
and strong and sure foundation of everything; but on that,
building Greek and Arabian superstructure, taught me at
Venice, full of sacred color and melancholy shade. Which
is the under meaning of my answer to the Gapuchin,^^ that
I was *more a Turk than a Ghristian.' The Gapuchin insisted,
as you see, nevertheless that I might have a bit of St. Francis'
cloak : which accepting thankfully, I went on to Assisi, and
there, by the kindness of my good friend. Padre Tini, and
others, I was allowed (and I believe I am the first painter who
ever was allowed), to have scaffolding erected above the high
altar, and, therefore, above the body of St. Francis, which
lies in the lower chapel beneath it, and thence to draw what
I could of the great fresco of Giotto, 'The marriage of Poverty
and Francis.' " ^^ In the same number (dated March 4, 1877) ,
he continues: "Meantime, don't be afraid that I am going to
become a Roman Gatholic, or that I am one, in disguise. I
could no more become a /?o7nan-Gatholic, than again an Evan-
gelical-Protestant. I am a 'Gatholic' of those Gatholics, to
whom the Gatholic Epistle of St. James is addressed: 'the
Twelve Tribes which are scattered abroad' — the literally or
spiritually wandering Israel of all the Earth. The St. George's
creed includes Turks, Jews, infidels and heretics; and I am
myself much of a Turk, more of a Jew; alas, most of all, an
infidel; but not an atom of a heretic: Gatholic, I, of the Gath-
olics; holding for sure God's order to His scattered Israel —
'He hath shown thee, oh man, what is good; and what doth
the Lord thy God require of thee, but to do justice, and to
love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?' "
Ruskin had — it appears in his letters to Gardinal Manning
11 Fors Ivl. 12 Fors Ixxvl.
1922.] mSKIN AND CATHOLICISM 537
and elsewhere-a confused notion that "Romanists," as well
tJTTT\TT^ ''' *^' "^^^* '^ *^^ Trent period"
The Protestant habit of interpreting Scripture at his own
sweet caprice never quite left Ruskin; I think he was uncon-
scious of Its absurdity. On the other hand, he writes in after
years to Mr. Faunthorpe that by "Catholic," "of course" he
means "Roman Catholic," the Church of England he holds
to be "Cockney-Catholic." Even in his most morbid period
he did not abandon prayer.
^ "I can see him now" (1863), says Mr. Allen in remin-
iscences of Days at Mornex; "clouds and stones, hills and
flowers all interested him in the same intense way; and his
printed passages of adoration in presence of the sublimity of
nature were the expression of his inmost feelings and in
accord with his own practice. I seem to hear him now break-
ing forth into a rhapsody of delight as we come unexpectedly,
during a walk up the Brezon, upon a sloping bank of the star-
gentian. He was full, too, of sympathy with the life of the
people. I can see him now kneeling down, as he knelt on
Easter Sunday, 1863, to pray with a peasant woman at a way-
side chapel. *When I first reach the Alps,' he said to me once,
*I always pray.' " ^*
On another occasion : "Next day there were far more in-
teresting experiences in a visit to St. Bernard's birthplace.
He has described this fully in his lecture, called *Mending the
Sieve,' in the volume of *Verona,' etc., and I need only recall
the surprise of a bystander not wholly unsympathetic, when
Ruskin knelt down on the spot of the great saint's nativity,
and stayed long in prayer. He was little given to outward
show of piety, and his talk, although enthusiastic, had been
no preparation for this burst of intense feeling." "
In a letter of January 23, 1877, to the ladies of the
Thwaite,^^' he tells them how he is "writing such a Cathohc
history of Venice, and chiseling all the Protestantism off the
old stones as they do here the grass off steps. All the pigeons
of St. Mark's Place (Venice) send you their love. St. Ursula
adds hers to the eleven thousand birds' love. ... My new
13 In The Fountain of Siena, ut supr., Ruskin avows that his view of the Refor-
mation is one with Cobbett's.
14 In Works (1905), xvll., Introduction, p. Ixl.
15 W. G. Collingwood, Ruskin Relics, iv., 51.
iGHortus Inclusus (1887), pp. 43, 44.
638 RUSKIN AND CATHOLICISM [Aug.,
Catholic history of Venice is to be called *St. Mark's Rest.' "
In a quaint, but I hope to them not unacceptable, way, Ruskin
had in his older years a real devotion to the Saints, especially
to St. Benedict, St. Ursula, St. Christopher, St. Francis: "And
for myself (I) can say that the most gentle, refined, and in
the deepest sense amiable, phases of character I have ever
known, have been either those of monks, or of domestic serv-
ants trained in the Catholic Faith." ^^
It is noteworthy that the religious, Carthusians, Fran-
ciscans, had a special attraction for him from the days of his
early travels. Even the ill-starred St. George's Guild is an
indirect testimony. "It has been told them (my young read-
ers) ; in the Laws of Fiesole, that all great Art is Praise.
So is all faithful History, and all high Philosophy. For these
three. Art, History and Philosophy, are each but one part of
the Heavenly Wisdom, which seeth not as man seeth, but
with Eternal Charity; and because she rejoices not in Iniquity,
therefore rejoices in the Truth." ^^
The Catholic peasants of Italy, un-Garibaldian Italy,
seemed to him among the best and happiest of human beings.
"It seems to me that the best Christian work I can do this
year . . . will be to gather out of this treasure of letters what
part might, with the writer's permission, and without pain to
any of her loved friends, be laid before those of the English
public who have either seen enough of the Italian peasantry
to recognize the truth of these ritratti, or have respect enough
for the faith of the incorrupt Catholic Church to admit the
sincerity, and rejoice in the virtue of a people still living as
in the presence of Christ and under the instant teaching of His
saints and apostles." ^^ He even contemplated living at Assisi
or elsewhere. "It is very clear that I am too enthusiastically
carrying out my own principles, and making more haste to
be poor than is prudent at my present date of possible life,
for, at my present rate of expenditure, the cell at Assisi, above
contemplated as advisably a pious mortification of my luxury,
would soon become a necessary refuge for my 'holy pov-
erty.' " 20
n Bible of Amiens, iii., 113, note.
18 Bible of Amiens, Pref., pp. 6, 7. Compare "The fair tree, Igdrasll, of human
art can only flomish when its dew Is affection; its air Devotion; the rock of its
roots. Patience, and its sunshine, God." — Laws of Fiesole, x., section 40.
19 Preface to Christ's Folk in the Apennines, p. 7 (1887). 20 Fors Ixli.
1922.] RUSKIN AND CATHOLICISM 639
Though believing in Garibaldi's honesty, Ruskin held that
his war was rendered utterly ruinous to Italy, bv his setting
himself against the Priesthood,"" and in his fifth lecture on
the art of England (November, 1883), he blames TenniePs
anti-Papal work as "impious in its representation of the Cath-
olic power to which Italy owed, and still owes, whatever has
made her glorious among the nations of Christendom, or
happy among the families of the earth," a fact forgotten by
many Catholics today.
In view of the vast literature and correspondence Ruskin
has left us, it is impossible to deal adequately with the sub-
ject of his attitude towards and relations to Catholicism. My
aim has been merely to bring together various passages and
considerations that betoken the Catholic inspiration of much
of his work.
Above all, in political economy he stood, single-handed
among Protestants, for the true Catholic principles, for which
he has been justly praised by Mrs. Meynell and the late
Charles Devas. His main economical contentions, hooted
down savagely in the sixties, are now generally admitted, as
the way of the world is, without thanks and without apology.
But the sadness and the sum of his life are best recounted
in the exquisitely chosen words of Mrs. Meynell: "It was not
failure or rejection, or even partial and futile acceptance,
that finally and interiorly bowed him. Tour poor John
Ruskin' (his signature in writing to one who loved and under-
stood him) was the John Ruskin who never pardoned himself
for stopping short of the whole renunciation of a St. Francis.
Lonely and unhappy, does the student perceive him to have
been who was one of the greatest of great ones of all ages;
but the student who is most cut to the heart by the perception,
is compelled to wish him to have been not less, but more, a
man sacrificed." ^^
21 For* Ixxvl. 22 Mrs. Meynell, John Ruskin (1900), IntroducUon, p. 9.
THE IDEA OF CAUSALITY AND ITS PLACE IN THINKING.
AN ARISTOTELIAN STUDY.
BY JEREMIAH M. PRENDERGAST, S.J.
LL exact thinking rests on definition and division,
which are but two aspects of one process. "De-
finitivum est distinctivum" — what defines, di-
vides. When one cuts out, one also "cuts in" a
garment. Now all abiding definition is through
causality. It is the refusal of our modern thinkers to go about
the business of thinking deliberately in this way, which
renders all modern thinking casual and useless.
Causality, how much soever we theorize about its exist-
ence, is one of the basic and first-born ideas of the human
mind when it begins to think. Although it is the most ticklish
and baffling thing in the world to analyze the actual sequence
in which ideas arise in the child's mind — in all probability,
they do not arrive in the same order in any two children —
still it is in logical keeping that in many the first idea will be
that of the "me," and the "not me," and the next, born of the
child's action on the "not me," will be the idea of causality.
"Who?" "what?" and "why?"— the causal questions— are
among the first and the most frequent in the child's vocab-
ulary. The ease, also, with which the child accepts the idea
of God, the great First Cause, when taught it, shows how soon
the idea of causality dominates the mind's view of things.
The idea of a Supreme Being is difficult in many lights; it is
superlatively easy to grasp from the causal side. The prin-
ciple of causality is the basis of all logical thought on the
world.
If the objective reality of this idea be not assumed as
giving a sufficient reason for existing things, all thinking be-
comes an illusion. It follows that the object of thought, what-
ever it be in itself, is for me an illusion; that I myself, for all
I know, may be an illusion also. Nothing stable is left. For
if the link between objective and subjective reality is illusory,
the things linked may be illusory as well. The basis for
1922.] CAUSALITY AND ITS PLACE IN THINKING 641
I am. But If the basis of my thinking be not real, then the
thmker, hke the thought, may be unreal. As Newman putl
It: I am what I am or I am nothing. There is no medium
between usmg my faculties as I have them, and simply flinging
myself upon the external world, as spray upon the surface of
the waves and simply forgetting that I am." So that unless
we accept the notion of causality as expressing a reality, not
only do we lack a sufficient reason for anything, but we also
lack sufficient reason for assuming the reality of anything
ourselves included. At the risk of being egotistical, let me
illustrate this feeling of living in an unreal world. Bergson's
Creative Evolution is an attempt to treat of the world avoiding
efficient causality as far as possible and final causality alto-
gether. As a consequence, there was page upon page of the
book, in reading which I had all the sensations of one who is
lost. It was literally impossible to conceive what the author
was talking about. One may understand an author and dis-
agree with him. Here it was as though one attempted to read
a book in Chinese. One could neither agree nor disagree
with the author's thought.
Our first step in defining and dividing through causality,
is to define and divide metaphysically the causes themselves,
and here we can have no better guide than Aristotle, "the
master of them that know." Quite evidently he starts from
the child's questions, "who did it?" "what did he do?" "why
did he do it?" Passing them through the prism of causality,
his mind divided them into four reasons or causes, which
together give a satisfactory reply. So interdependent are
they, even when separated by the mind's prismatic action,
that one may begin by explaining any one of them first. Let
us start with the material cause, which we shall call hereafter
the material constituent. (Causality itself we shall not at-
tempt to define. To define is to analyze into still more prim-
itive ideas, and there is no more primitive idea than causality.
The attempt to analyze it into simpler ideas,' therefore, serves
merely to confuse instead of clarifying it.)
The constituent of anything first borne in upon us by our
senses, is matter. Let us take, for illustration, a chair and a
dog, a living and a dead object. The material constituent of
the chair is the wood of which it is made, the nails, varnish,
VOL. cxv. 41
642 CAUSALITY AND ITS PLACE IN THINKING [Aug.,
the cane or cloth of the seat. In the case of the dog, the
material constituent is bone, blood, muscles, nerves — in gen-
eral flesh. If we wish to be more modern, it is living cells.
The material constituent needs but one further remark. It
is the potential and determinable constituent, needing, to be-
come a definite something, determination by another con-
stituent. This other we call, after Aristotle, the formal con-
stituent, the causality most misunderstood by modern thinkers
and most neglected.
The formal constituent of such objects as chairs gave rise,
without doubt, to the name of formal cause. For the material
of a chair, before determinable, is constituted or determined
to be a chair by the form or arrangement of its material con-
stituent. It is this arrangement, adapted to a certain purpose
or end, which enables us to define a chair, and to distinguish
it from the same material, it may be, formed into a table.
The formal constituent, therefore, is the distinguishing or
determinant constituent in the compound of matter and form.
It is indissolubly linked, in this determining, to the final cause
or reason of the compound. The chair, for example, has its
form, or determining formal constituent, because its final
reason is to serve as a seat. With this we shall deal presently,
but we have much more to say, still, of the formal constituent.
In the case of the chair, it is evident that its formal constituent
comes to a material constituent already determined by one
formal constituent, that of wood. Hence, the formal con-
stituent of "chairness" affects the material accidentally. The
state of "chairness" is an accidental state which may come
and go, leaving the material constituent, except for its "chair-
ness," the same.
It is otherwise in the case of the dog. Once the life
which is the formal constituent of his "dogness" departs, not
only does the sound and shape peculiar to the dog depart as
well, but the characteristic material of the dog also departs,
slowly but surely, body, bones and all. This change is dif-
ferent from what happens when the formal constituent of a
chair is lost. It is a substantial, not an accidental change.
Hence, Aristotle calls the formal constituent of a dog, the
substantial form. It constitutes the dog's "Dogness," but it
constitutes much more as well. The dog material substan-
tially disintegrates in its absence. This concept, representing
1922.] CAUSALITY AND ITS PLACE IN THINKING 643
a physical fact not a metaphysical entity, is the most mis-
understood and least clearly grasped of all essential concT^ s
m our modern thmking. If such were not the case, no thinker
could accept the framework for thinking set up by evolution.
For the substantial form, or formal substantial constituent
besides being the principle of determination in the compound
of matter and form, is also the main principle of action, for
the action follows the nature. The action of the compound
proceeds-and all experience verifies this-according to the
formal principle, and toward a definite end, neither can it
effect another and except by accident. Evolution means that
it does produce a different one. Now if this production is by
accident and therefore variable in its nature, the world is a
series of accidents not worth the wasted trouble of our inves-
tigation. If this different effect produced is substantial, and
according to the nature of the compound, then we have the
inconsistency of the same formal constituent, which gives a
definite '*esse/' or nature to the compound, giving at the same
time to the same compound an indefinite and variable oper-
ation. This, as St. Thomas would say, is "valde inconveniens,"
most unsuitable, for "operatio sequitur esse" the operation
follows the nature.
The formal constituent cause gives the sufficient reason
for calling one tree an oak and another a maple, one animal
a dog and another a cat. Without it, there is no thinking pos-
sible, for there is no definition and nothing definite to furnish
a stable object of thought. While I am thinking and reason-
ing about the object, it may suddenly become an entirely dif-
ferent object, and having tarried in that state till I come up
with it, it may again fluctuate into something else.
I thought it was an elephant, aflying round my lamp.
I looked again and found it was a penny postage stamp.
You'd best be getting in, I said, the nights are rather damp.
This is as near as we €an get to science or stable knowl-
edge without admitting a formal constituent cause. For the
material constituent is fluctuating and determinable, the
formal constituent is the fixing and determinant cause of the
thing being what it is.
The fact that a determinant and a determinable have been
644 CAUSALITY AND ITS PLACE IN THINKING [Aug.,
brought together, gives rise in the mind, viewing facts through
the prism of causality, to a new causal concept, that of the
bringer about of this union, the efficient cause. For it is
evident that the determinable did not cause the determinant
constituent, nor did the determinant make the determinable
constituent. Moreover, the determinant or formal constituent
only comes into existence with the existence of the compound,
the chair or the dog. Hence, though it causes the "chairness"
of the chair and the "dogness" of the dog, respectively, it
cannot cause its own existence prior to existing itself. There-
fore the coming into being of the chair and dog requires a
cause external to the chair and dog. This making cause we
term the efficient cause. Now to fit a determinant to a deter-
minable and so constitute a compound, connotes intelligence.
The only alternative of an efficient intelligent cause is chance,
which negatives experience, reduces the world to chaos, and
forbids the possibility of ordered knowledge. An unintel-
ligent compound of material and formal constituent may, and
does, in its turn, become an efficient cause, but it does so only
by virtue of the intelligent efficient cause which united the
material determinable and formal determinant for this pur-
pose. Every efficient cause acts either through intelligence of
its own, or through an intelligence from without, impressing
its purpose upon it. All our experience tells us this. Take
an automobile for example! Its purposeful action is the
result of intelligent combination of determinable and determ-
inant constituent, impressed upon it by its maker who
caused it.
This purpose, evident in the action of the thing caused,
leads the mind, gazing through the prism of causality, to dis-
tinguish still one more cause completing the sufficient reason
for the existence of the thing caused, the final cause or end
evident in its activity. This, in the compound caused, is
merely a capacity to produce, or cause in its turn, a certain
effect by its action. It is the intrinsic end or reason of its
being. But in the mind of the efficient cause, this intrinsic
end or reason was present beforehand as an idea or motive
urging him to make the compound — to unite determinable and
determinant constituents, and this is properly the causality
of the final cause. It moves the maker to make. Without it
the efficient cause would have no motive to act, nor to make
1922.] CAUSALITY AND ITS PLACE IN THINKING 645
this rather than that. Chance, which all sane thinking abhors
would again be the last explanation and final sufficient reason
for things, which means that they would have no reason at all.
There would be no reason, that is, why things are.
This leads to absolute skepticism, for the mind under
such conditions has no reason for reasoning—as we concluded
above. Further than this no other causalities are distinguish-
able. For the instrumental causality, so-called, is but an ex-
tention of the efficient cause, enabling it more easily to act.
Again, the exemplary cause, so-called, pertains to the efficient
cause. It is the image or idea according to which the cause
works. For an intelligent efficient cause acts necessarily ac-
cording to its nature. Now the nature of intelligence is to
work by plan and not blindly.
These four causalities, while furnishing the mind with a
sufficient reason for things being as they are, furnishes also
the scientific knowledge of them by definition and division.
Neither is there any other idea under heaven given to men by
which they can positively and permanently distinguish and
define.
All this is in the nature of a scientific apologia for the
opening questions and answers of the catechism : "Who made
man?" "What is man?" "Why was man made?" It is also the
reason for saying, with scientific accuracy, that a Christian
child knows more than many a great scientist.
How keen the human mind is to search for these causes,
and how it enjoys finding them, is shown by the universal
appeal of "Detective Stories." These are only a dramatic
finding and linking of causalities. The story opens with the
finding of the material cause or constituent, a dead man or
woman— formality of death undetermined. First problem-
find the formality— natural death, accident, suicide, murder?
The compound is then determined by its formal constituent to
be a murdered man or woman. The next quest is for the
efficient cause. To find it, the search proceeds by way of the
final cause or end which induced the murder. Was he or she
murdered for money, revenge, in a quarrel, or for hire? This
final cause, when found leads to the efficient cause motived by
such reason to act. And so the circle of causahty is completed
and the story is done.
THE PASSING OF McCARTENAY.
BY FREDERICK WENNERBERG.
URE, Chaplain, I knew ye for clergy when first I
laid eyes on ye, 'twas the manner now, gentle like,
but un-sanc-ti-monius."
"You're far from Erin's shore, McCartenay,
but you've not lost the blarney. There now, don't
move that arm."
"But I wasn't rightly sure of de-nom-in-a-tion, y'see. I've
learned there's many odd ways of worship, what with these
Roosian priests and their greasy beards and three wives and
the like."
"Steady, man! Now, your arm about my neck, so.
Slowly, slowly — there, now you're easier !"
"Thank you, kindly. Father. But, as I was sayin', a man's
profession will show through his clothes. They've put me in a
Chinaman's heathen pyjamas, but ye know me for a British
soldier. As my old K.O., Captain Hathgate, said, God rest his
soul, we left him in Mesopotamia, and all souls — 'McCartenay,'
he said, 'McCartenay, if ye parted your hair in the middle,
ye'd look like Kitchener.' 'Twas on parade, an' the Somerset
Fuseliers. 'Right wheel!' he says, 'an', McCartenay, take your
chest off your back!' Ah!"
A wrench of pain constricted the wounded man's features,
haggardly revealed by a single swaying lantern. Then a smile
triumphed ! "Father, are we on the track or no ?"
The tiny goods-wagon bumped and rattled like a dice-box.
It was heated by what seemed a single coal in a small stove
at the centre. The dim, erratic light revealed some thirty men
lying on improvised plank bunks, all Russians save McCar-
tenay, all alike dirty, unkempt, thin, gray-skinned and heavily
bearded. Each wore hospital pyjamas and was scantily cov-
ered with a single blanket, supplemented by rags and scraps
of clothing. A few showed bandages, filthy with crusted blood
and dirt. Squatted near the stove, a Russian priest held thin,
white hands over the fire. A man in the uniform of a British
army officer bent over the British soldier's bunk and attempted
1922.] THE PASSING OF McCARTENAY 647
to keep the restless and feverish man covered with a fur coat
which the officer had evidently doffed himself.
"And I thought ye a medico. Father, for long. But God
sent the priest instead. Sure to die in such a damn cold coun-
try, 'twould be a great change of climate! Chill your hand is
Father, take ye your coat, now, and warm you at the fire. It's
hot I am, God knows."
The man's touch was burning, but his teeth chattered.
"Get you to the fire now. Father— if that Protestant priest
with the long beard hasn't put it out with warming his fat
by it—
"Dan, Dan, the Protestant priest,
Stole a pig at the Kelly's feast.
The fiddler he fell off the stool
And so they—'*
The mumbled rhyme driveled into incoherence and then
labored breath. The outstretched arm dropped inert.
The officer stood a moment to assure himself that the
wounded man slept, then turned to the stove, lit a cigarette
from a glowing ember, and stood, feet braced against the con-
stant jar of springless truck and flattened wheel, gazing out
of a small window improvised in the door. Wind-blown snow
drove into his face through the cracks. A meteor-like stream
of engine sparks whirled past, and there was dimly revealed
a Siberian mountain slope under veiled stars.
Major Arthur Gompton of the British Royal Army Medical
Corps Reserve was puzzled. He faced a novel situation. It
had been entirely an accident that he was a passenger on this
unsavory hospital train, but transportation was at a premium.
In the eastward movement of retreat before the victorious Bol-
shevik forces, the long-disorganized railroad system had ut-
terly broken down — and any accommodation was better than
long delay in the path of the advancing Reds.. The great "All-
Russian" army, financed and equipped by the Powers, was a
thing of shreds and patches. Furthermore, the peasantry were
seething with revolt clear from Baikal to the Japan Sea. No
longer could they be overawed by Cossack sabre and whipping
post. The railroad had been attacked at many points by
guerrilla bands. Allied troops, guarding the precious line of
648 THE PASSING OF McCARTENAY [Aug.,
communication, were thinly scattered along many thousand
versts of rail, bridge and tunnel.
It was also an accident that Compton had found McCar-
tenay. There was not another doctor on the train: the orig-
inal three had succumbed to the dread spotted plague, typhus.
Indeed, there was little a doctor could do when medical sup-
plies were limited to a few yards of bandage and a jarful of
morphine tablets. Four ill-trained Russian nurses composed
the entire staif. The train carried a section of Kolchak troop-
ers as a guard, but they refused to lift a finger in aid. And
there were four hundred patients on board, to say nothing of
the skeleton forms piled high in the straw of the last two cars.
In this caravan of death, the British surgeon had made a
half-hearted attempt to single out the more hopeful cases and
isolate them for what care and treatment he could give. Mak-
ing the rounds, he had come upon McCartenay. This British
sergeant had been one of the group of officers and non-coms
detailed from the Mesopotamian veterans, in Siberia, as in-
structors to Kolchak's regiments. In the melee of the Ekater-
inburg defeat, he had been isolated from his comrades, and,
seriously wounded, had been mistaken for a Russian and con-
signed to one of the ill-fated "sanitary" trains.
Compton had found him in a delirium of fever, reciting
snatches of music-hall songs and bits of the "Hail Mary," in a
car of typhus patients. He had brought him to his own car
and taken him in special charge; dressed and roughly cleaned
his gangrened wound, bathed him, fed him, and at last brought
him from successive delirium and coma.
One morning, McCartenay woke to consciousness and
identified the patient caretaker, whom in his fever he had mis-
taken for a chaplain. Seeing Compton reading from a black-
bound leather copy of Epictetus, which had companioned the
surgeon through these far lands, he had confirmed his own
mistake.
"Being so bold, what was the holy office today. Father?"
Compton, though not a believer, had taken advantage of
the mistake, especially when he saw the child-like joy in the
sunken blue eyes. Though drugs and medicines there were
none, the touch of the supposed physician of souls had brought
visible improvement to the stricken man. His irrational pe-
riods were fewer, the fever was gradually allayed, and Comp-
1922.] THE PASSING OF McCARTENAY 649
ton marveled at signs of regaining health in one whom his
practiced eye had doomed for death.
With this change for the better came a new difficulty
McCartenay called for the sacraments. All the adroit tact for
which the doctor had been famed in Regent Street sick rooms
had been called into play to circumvent this issue.
"Tomorrow," he would temporize, "when you're thor-
oughly rested. I want all your thoughts. Now you must
sleep." And he would practice the soothing power of sugges-
tion that London dowagers, at the nerve-wracked stub of a sea-
son, had called — hypnotic.
Even in delirium, the troubled soul sought the relief of
confession.
"Bless me, Father—" At these words, Compton would
turn aside, respecting the secrecy of an institution in which he
had no belief.
Now, turning from the window, he thrust his cigarette end
into the stove, after wedging the huddled man of the skirted
cassock aside to admit of opening the door. The priest grunted
and relapsed into another position of slumber. The major re-
garded him. Despite the practicality of his profession, he was
something of a mystic, and the greasy priest of a fallen Tsar
was not repellent to him, but rather uncouthly symbohc of a
nation wandering in an age-long nightmare of sleep away from
the light and into dark and treacherous ways.
And yet, he thought, how mighty the power of Rome ! The
centuries have passed, still is her ritual performed, her eternal
message is proclaimed, her traditions are revered in this dark
northern land, though, generations since, Rome disowned her
brotherhood who bowed to a new Vicar in a Muscovite sov-
ereign. She proclaims their ceremonies, all save the rites for
the dying, though celebrated in churches decked with barbaric
pearl and gold and intoned by choirs of ravishing harmony be-
fore prostrate and adoring throngs, to be iUicit and unworthy.
Notwithstanding, the ancient forms survive; the Host is still
raised over multitudinous worshippers, though the State call
it a mockery, and the Vicar of Christ name it a sacrilege.
To Compton, "Church" meant a "mediaeval" thing, and that
adjective connoted the strange and curiously ornamented work
of a remote age, like the scrolled lettering of a thirteenth cen-
tury Bible, beautifully useless.
650 THE PASSING OF McCARTENAY [Aug.,
Just then, the priest's snores multiplied into a spasm, and,
waking, he spat profusely, then, laboriously rising, set a small
battered kettle on the stove, and fumbled from the folds of his
gown a blackened cake resembling American chewing tobacco.
The eternal tea was in process of preparation.
Shrugging his shoulders, the major turned again to his bit
of window. That gray blur was the sky, those shapeless blots
were stunted pines. The grade had been mounted; now, on
an upland plateau, the train gained momentum.
He recalled the luxuries of travel at home, long lines of
massive coaches with polished fittings, plate glass, upholstery,
vestibules. He thought of the palace train that once drew
nobility and globe-trotters at scented ease over endless reaches
of plain and mountain from Vladivostok, "The Ruler of the
East," to Moscow and Paris.
"Whong!" A long blast from the engine. It seemed that
a human cry wailed answer. A square hut, a sidetrack, three
houses, a barking dog, two swaying lanterns — again vague
landscape and sky behind the sparks.
Now ensued slackening of speed and, with it, comparative
ease of motion. The rain of sparks died out and a wan land-
scape showed, shadow without color, and a faint foreboding
of dawn. Slower and yet slower turned the dragging wheels,
till at last the progress scarcely exceeded that of a man walk-
ing. Finally, with no definite jar of brakes, motion ceased.
At once, dead silence.
To the ears, long numbed with clank of iron and strain of
timbers, smaller vibrations returned no impression. Then
voices came from a great distance up the track and footsteps
crunched the frosted snow. The lantern still swayed. A few
of the sleepers stirred and muttered, disturbed by the quiet.
The priest, overtaken by sleep in his tea-making, crowded
closer to the dying fire. Compton realized that his eyelids
were smarting. He placed a single remaining fagot in the
stove, and setting his shoulder against the staple, pushed open
the car door and leaped out.
No wind blew, but cold lay heavy like a deadly gas, sear-
ing to the lungs. Hastily, he climbed a rough ladder, care-
fully avoiding blistering iron rods and took an armful of the
precious firewood that was stacked on the car roof. Backing
down, he slipped from the last frosted rung and sprawled
1922.] THE PASSING OF McCARTENAY 651
upon a man crawling at the moment from under the car
The victim, a huge bearded fellow in black military greatcoai
and shako, cried out sharply, and scrambled off the way he
had come. ^
Compton rubbed a bruised elbow, chuckled ruefully and
bent to regain his scattered load. As he did so, a loud,'high
scream of pain and fright rang from the distant front of the
tram. Immediately, there followed the clear-cut report of a
pistol, a sound of running feet, two more shots and, after an
mterval, a fourth— then again utter silence.
For the first time, Compton noted that the engine was
missing. Around a curve the long line of wooden boxes
showed in the half-light of dawn, silent, desolate, aban-
doned.
The place was a cut between a sheer cliff X)n the further
side of the train, and a whitened slope that rose fifty yards to
a line of scrawny pines.
There was no further sound. A few sparks straggled
from the stovepipes in the car roofs out upon the windless air.
There was no other motion.
Suddenly a line of fire penciled the ridge crest. With a
rattle like the slide of a rock-pile upon iron, a fusillade of
bullets rapped through the cars, whined off the rails, spatted
on the cliff.
As Compton leaped toward the car, where his pistol was,
his knee crumpled under him, and he sank to the ground, dis-
abled by a leg wound.
The next ten minutes were an age of hurried impressions.
From many cars, shouting patients leaped and scrambled
about, some throwing themselves prone, some frantically
seeking shelter anywhere; between the tracks, in the shallow
ditch, behind the trucks— some even diving ridiculously into
the snow drifts for protection against bullets.
But the fire was not at once resumed. Following their
usual tactics, the guerrilla band of Bolsheviks had taken posi-
tion at short range and fired a carefully-aimed volley.
Compton, helplessly sprawled under the car, called, un-
heeded, for his pistol, for a weapon, for anything, shouted
orders and advice, then, realizing the futility of his words,
shut his teeth and waited.
It was an eternal minute of suspense. As yet, the train
652 THE PASSING OF McCARTENAY [Aug.,
had not replied. From the cars came the moans of the
wounded and of those too sick to move.
Now appeared one, two — three black figures, cautiously
reconnoitering around the corner of the ridge. Bent and
watchful, rifles advanced, they approached, and other black
figures trailed after them.
Just then Compton heard, from down the track, a shouted
command in English.
McCartenay's voice! McCartenay, rallying the Russian
non-coms whom he had trained in British drill. The drive of
command was in his steel tones:
"Fire at will! An' give 'em helir
The rifles barked, not in volley, but individually, as the
men sighted and aimed, true to their training. In the in-
creasing distinctness of the dawn black figures all along the
line whirled and fell. The Bolsheviks shouted and scattered
for the ridge.
Compton could see McCartenay kneeling and firing me-
thodically, the while he shouted correction and encourage-
ment to the group of patients and train guards firing prone in
front of him. The Major crawled feverishly toward this little
skirmish line, his useless leg dragging behind him.
The attackers rallied.
There ensued a sharp interchange of fire, then the reply
of the defenders died down and ceased. Sick at heart, Comp-
ton realized that their ammunition had given out. The as-
saulting party knew it, as well, for they came on by succes-
sive rushes down the slope.
At twenty yards distance, they halted, a motley mob,
laughing, shouting, gesticulating — then, to Compton's horror,
they deliberately squatted down and aimed their rifles at the
scattered groups of their victims.
McCartenay rose, swinging a clubbed rifle, his unkempt
red hair, fiery in the dawn light. In a great voice, he shouted :
"Follow me, men! Carry on!" And a handful actually
did follow him in the pitiful charge, till he stumbled and sank
to his knees.
At this moment there dashed forward from beneath the
train an uncouth figure with long beard and curls. The priest.
He held his arms outstretched and shouted again and again
to the savage enemy one potent word.
I
1922.] THE PASSING OF McCARTENAY 653
"Angeleski!"
It was the name of a race whose power has been carried
by men of McCartenay's breed into the furthest reaches of
the world.
Compton rising to one knee, shouted too, and pointed
behind him There, upon the car door where he had nailed
It, the flag of England showed in the morning light, red with
the threat of a mighty retribution that all of Asia's peoples
know.
The outlaws hesitated and muttered among themselves
At this moment, a whistle screamed and an engine appeared
around the curve. Drab-uniformed figures were grouped on
Its front and a Lewis gun looked down the track.
At that the Bolsheviks turned and fled. They floundered
up the hill. They threw aside coats and rifles. They toppled
in the drifts as the Lewis gun spoke:
"Br-r-r-up ! Br-r-r-up ! Br-r-r-up !'*
By dint of vast exertion, Compton had crawled to Mc-
Cartenay's side. The soldier lay supine, eyes shut, his head
tossing from side to side.
Sobbing, the surgeon ripped and tore away the wretched
coverings. The new wound was small, a notched gap in the
abdomen. McCartenay opened his eyes, smiled wanly, drew
Compton's head down to his.
"We gave them a fight. Father, any how, the dirty dogs!
And now — now," the voice was a hoarse whisper, "now — bless
me, Father, for — I have — sinned," and he gripped the doctor's
hand. Then his eyelids fell while the lips formed inaudible
words.
Compton choked and turned his head. There, beside
him, stood the priest, silent, expressionless. His skirts were
muddled and torn. Upon his forehead a crimson bruise red-
dened the long matted hair. His arms were folded, and in
his right hand he held a small black Byzantine crucifix.
A new thought came to Compton.
From the closed eyes and mumbling lips of the wounded
man, he looked to the stoical gaze of this bystander. Then,
roughly, he seized the priest's arm and drew him down be-
side him.
A transforming light gleamed in the Russian's blue eyes.
654 THE PASSING OF McCARTENAY [Aug.,
Paying no further attention to Gompton, he drew from his
gown a little vial. In the oil which it contained he dipped
the thumb of his right hand, and with it made a sign. He
made that sign upon the soldier's eyes, that fluttered but did
not see . . . upon the lips that could now utter neither prayer
nor curse, then upon the hands, that clutched at emptiness, and
lastly upon those weary feet that had trod frozen steppes and
burning sands for England's crown.
Meanwhile, he besought Unseen Powers in a monotone of
rolling Slavonic sounds that rose to a weird climax with a cry
that rang upon the frozen silence :
"Christiis!*' he exhorted.
**Christusr he implored.
At full arm's reach he held the crucifix aloft, then set it to
the soldier's wordless lips. The kiss became a smile which
did not change.
As the days passed, that thin-lipped frozen smile became
to the surgeon not a ghastly thing, no, rather an expression
strangely ascetic, deeply peaceful, and full of joy. Whereat,
being something of a mystic, he pondered.
In England that morning it was night. At a meeting of
the House of Commons, measures were discussed to suppress
the Sein Fein Republic. In the same hour, a Russian Jew
preached revolution in Union Square, New York. And in
Ireland, a priest was shot and an altar defiled.
FRANCIS THOMPSON AND HIS POETRY.
• BY JOHN CRAIG.
N a day in the springtime of 1888, in London, Wil-
frid Meynell, at the office of Merry England, a
monthly magazine of which he was the editor,
was informed that Francis Thompson had called
and wished to see him. To understand the signif-
icance of this call, let us briefly sketch the circumstances of it.
On February 23, 1887, Francis had addressed a letter to the
editor of Merry England, enclosing a prose article and, seem-
ingly as an afterthought, a "few specimens" of his poetry,
"with the off chance that one may be less poor than the rest,"
and with a postscript request to address the rejection to the
Charing Cross Post Office. The manuscripts were "most un-
inviting and difficult in outward aspect," Everard Meynell tells
us in his admirable Life of Francis Thompson.^ "My father
and mother decided to accept the essay and a poem, and to
seek the author. To this end my father wrote a letter ad-
dressed to the Charing Cross Post Office, asking the author to
call for a proof and to discuss the chances of future work.
To that letter came no reply and publication was postponed.
Then this letter was returned through the dead-letter office,
and the editor could only print the Tassion of Mary' as a
possible way of getting into communication with the author.
The poem appeared in Merry England for April, 1888."
Thereupon, on April 14th, Francis wrote to Wilfrid Mey-
nell. Mr. Meynell responded with an explanation of his
reasons for publishing the poem as he did, and again asked
the author to call, sending the letter by a messenger to the
address Francis had given, a chemist's shop in Drury Lane.
Many days after that the young poet received it and decided to
call. Thus:
" 'Show him up,' " said Mr. Meynell, and sat alone waiting
in his office.
"Then the door opened, and a strange hand was thrust m.
The door closed, but Thompson had not entered. Agam it
iNew York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
656 FRANCIS THOMPSON AND HIS POETRY [Aug.,
opened, again it shut. At the third attempt a waif of a man
came in. No such figure had been looked for; more ragged
and unkempt than the average beggar, with no shirt beneath
his coat and bare feet in broken shoes. . . ."
It is little wonder that his first glimpse of that pathetic
figure rendered Wilfrid Meynell — beloved for his gentleness
by everybody with whom he comes in contact — momentarily
speechless.
Thus began the literary career of this "waif of a man"
"with no shirt beneath his coat and bare feet in broken shoes."
Thus, too, fortuitously did he find a friend whose esteem until
his last breath was the most precious gift of an otherwise
apathetic world. And as to the worth of his poetry let us, out
of a sheaf of appreciations, quote Arnold Bennett, who wrote,
seven years later, of the first volume, Poems:
"My belief is that Francis Thompson has a richer natural
genius, a finer poetical equipment, than any poet save Shake-
speare. Show me the divinest glories of Shelley and Keats,
even of Tennyson . . . and I think I can match them all out
of this one book, this little book that can be bought at an
ordinary bookseller's shop for an ordinary, prosaic crown.
. . . Every critic with an atom of discretion knows that a poet
must not be called great until he is either dead or very old.
Well, please yourself what you may think. But, in time to
come, don't say I didn't tell you."
Significant words, these, coming from the pen of so dis-
cerning a judge of literary values as Arnold Bennett — even
allowing for the ardor of the youth of twenty-five years
ago. What that writer's opinion of Francis Thompson is
today, a quarter of a century after he thus apotheosized
him, I am unable to say. Another instance, however, is per-
tinent here and deserves consideration: A few years out of
college, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch wrote in the London Daily
News:
"It was at Cambridge, in the height of the summer term
and in a Fellows' Garden, that the revelation [of Thompson's
"The Mistress of Vision"] came. I thought then in my en-
thusiasm that no such poem had been written or attempted
since Coleridge attempted, and left off writing, Kubla Khan.
In a cooler hour I think so yet; and were my age twenty-five
or so, it would delight me to swear to it, riding to any man's
1922.] FRANCIS THOMPSON AND HIS POETRY 657
drawbridge who shuts his gates against it. and blowing the
horn of challenge. To me my admiration seemed too hot
to last; but four or five years leave me unrepentant. It seemed
to me to be more likely to be a perishable joy. . . ."
As a significant commentary on the wearing qualities of
Francis Thompson, it may be added that the year 1921 found
Sir Arthur presumably still "unrepentant" and his joy still
unperished. For in his book, On the Art of Reading,^ we find
him listing Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven" among the
thirty-six literary productions in the Enghsh language that
one ought to read.
Indeed, the second-only-to-Shakespeare estimate (the ex-
pression at that time had none of its subsequent triteness) is
voiced by several other critics. One young reviewer, Vernon
Blackburn, once startled the members of his college crew by
shouting through their bedroom doors his new discovered joy
—a poem in Merry England by F. T. " 1 know at last,' was
his loud confidence, *that there is a poet who may worthily take
a place as Shakespeare's second.'" And Canon Sheehan wrote
of Francis in the American Ecclesiastical Review for June,
1898: "For the present he will write no more poetry. Why?
I should hardly like to intrude upon the privacy of another's
thoughts; but Francis Thompson, who, with all his incon-
gruities, ranks in English poetry with Shelley, and only be-
neath Shakespeare, has hardly had any recognition in Cath-
olic circles. If Francis Thompson had been an Anglican or a
Unitarian, his praises would have been sung unto the ends of
the earth." Again, J. L. Garvin, writing in the Bookman for
March, 1897, said: "Mr. Thompson's poetry scarcely comes
by way of the outward eye at all. He scarcely depends upon
occasions. In a dungeon one imagines that he would be no
less a poet. The regal airs, the prophetic ardors, the apoca-
lyptic vision, the supreme utterance — he has them all. A
rarer, more intense, more strictly predestinate genius has
never been known to poetry. To many this may well appear
the simple delirium of over-emphasis. The. writer signs for
those others, nowise ashamed, who range after Shakespeare's
very Sonnets the poetry of a living poet, Francis Thompson."
These are but a few, selected somewhat at random, out of
a ponderable number of testimonies penned upon a somewhat
2 New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
VOL. cxv. 42
658 FRANCIS THOMPSON AND HIS POETRY [Aug.,
similar plane of appreciation by the literary critics. The ob-
vious question, therefore, arises: Why is Francis Thompson's
poetry not more widely known and quoted, why has he not been
allotted the position in the history and the vogue of literature
to which his genius would seem to be entitled? To answer
that question one must consider the fates of most geniuses of
the seven arts from the beginnings of human history during
or immediately subsequent to their lifetimes. There are some
persons (of impartial religious convictions) who incline to
the belief that Francis Thompson has been the victim of a
conspiracy of silence among the literati^ which has its
origin in the fact that he was a Roman Catholic. Heaven
forbid that that were so; if it is, it is one of the most lament-
able examples of intolerance in the whole category of sins
of intolerance. The present writer ventures his humble
opinion that it is not so. It is almost inconceivable that the
honest judgment of the literary world would, even subcon-
sciously, allow itself to be affected by the myopia of religious
antipathy or in differ entism in such degree as to shut from its
regard the poet's splendid contribution to our precious her-
itage of letters. It would seem that the explanation is con-
tained in Mr. Garvin's words, already quoted: "Mr. Thomp-
son's poetry scarcely comes by way of the outward eye at all."
Or in William Archer's comment: "This is not work which
can possibly be popular in the wide sense; but it is work that
will be read and treasured centuries hence by those who really
care for poetry." As against the explanation of anti-Catholic
predilections, it were more probable that present-day readers
are not better acquainted with the poetry of Francis Thomp-
son for the very reason that they do not make the mental
effort to plumb the depth of his mystical utterances. And let
him among us be the first to cast a stone who is without the
sin of indifference referred to by Canon Sheehan!
It is not within the scope of an article like this to do any-
thing approaching justice to a career and a personality, the
detailed exposition of which involved for Everard Meynell the
writing of a book of three hundred and fifty pages that fairly
teem with interest. To him we are indebted for the story of
Francis' life. It will be possible to give here only the sketch-
iest record of that life.
Francis Joseph Thompson was born on December 16, 1859,
1922.] FRANCIS THOMPSON AND HIS POETRY 659
at Preston in Lancashire. His father, a doctor by profession
7Z I'T"'! ^"^ ^^tholicism, as was also his mother. In
1864 the family moved to Ashton-under-Lyne, the home of
Francis until his trip to London at the age of twenty-one
His sister entered a convent, and became Mother Austin of the
Presentation Convent, Manchester. Two paternal aunts, also
were nuns: Sister Mary of St. Jane Frances de Chantal of the'
Order of the Good Shepherd, and Sister Mary Ignatius of the
Order of Mercy. These ancestral facts are presented for what-
ever they may be worth as indicating the religious heritage of
Francis.
As a schoolboy, we find him one of the most timid of
youths, with an utter disinclination to mix with his fellows,
and almost morbidly sensitive to ridicule, fancied or otherwise.
Even in his tender years there seems to have been about him
an aura of the tragedy that was his destiny in after life.
"Yes, childhood is tragic to me," was found written in one of
his notebooks. At seven, says Everard Meynell, he was read-
ing poetry !
In 1870 he entered Ushaw College, near Durham, with the
purpose eventually of becoming a priest. Here his awkward
shyness and his aversion for the society of his fellow-students
still characterized him. Two other unfortunate foibles that
manifested themselves were his indolence and extraordinary
absent-mindedness. As for his scholarship, the statement of
the late Monsignor Corbishly, recorded by Everard Meynell,
speaks volumes : "In Latin he was first six times, second three
times, and twice he was third. The lowest place he got was
sixth, except when he composed in so-called Latin verse. In
Greek his place was from second to tenth. In French, average
place about eighth. In English, first sixteen times; of his
Arithmetic, Algebra and Geometry, the less said the better.
He was a good, quiet, shy lad. Physically, a weakling: he
had a halting way of walking, and gave the impression that
physical existence would be rather a struggle for him. He did
practically nothing at the games. Hxc haheo quae dicam de
nostra poet a prxclarissimo."
When he was eighteen, his preceptors advised him
to abandon the idea of becoming a priest; his abnormal
absent-mindedness, they feared, would prove too great a
handicap. It was a rude termination of the cherished dream
660 FRANCIS THOMPSON AND HIS POETRY [Aug.,
of his parents — and, according to reliable opinion, a bitter
and permanent grief to Francis.
For the next six years, this odd youth made a pretense
of study for the medical profession at Owens College, in
Manchester — a career for which he was totally unfitted, and
to which he made no attempt to apply himself, though daily
he made the journey to Manchester from Ashton "under the
compulsion of the family eye." But once round the corner
he was safe from the too strict inquiry by a father never stern.
The hours of his actual attendance at lectures were com-
paratively few.
In 1879 Francis was stricken with fever. "It is probably
at this time," says Everard Meynell, "that he first tasted
laudanum." Significant, here, at this time also was the gift
from his mother, shortly before her death, of a copy of
Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of An Opium Eater. Man-
chester, in those days, was a very breeding-nest of the habit of
opium eating; temptation, stalking the byways of the city in
the persons of illicit traffickers of the drug, panderers to the
physical stress under which the cotton-spinners of Manchester
lived, held a still greater lure for medical students, who could
legitimately obtain the drug at any apothecary store for their
professional work. . . . Francis, the physical weakling, con-
tracted the habit, whose first seed, as in the case of Coleridge
and De Quincey, had been planted in a time of physical illness.
In 1879 Francis went to London for his medical exam-
ination. "I have not passed," was all he could report, later,
to his father. In 1882, after two more years of pretended
study, he went through the same dismal experience. Again,
he was prevailed upon to take the medical examination at
Glasgow, again he failed, and this time fell under the lash of
his father's impatience. He now obtained a position with a
surgical instrument maker. It lasted two weeks! His next
employment was the selling of an encyclopedia; he spent two
months in reading it, and then decided he couldn't sell it.
Totally unfitted for the practicalities of the business side of
life, in desperation he now turned to an occupation that
would relieve him of its responsibilities : he decided to become
— a soldier, no less ! He enlisted in the army, indeed, but still
the ghost of failure stalked at his heels; he was rejected at
the physical examination. In November, 1885, his physical
1922.] FRANCIS THOMPSON AND HIS POETRY 661
appearance and his demeanor aroused in his father's mind
the suspicion that he was drinking. He left home shortly
afterward, and fled to London. He delayed for a week in
Manchester, selling his meagre effects; ninety-five poetry
books were disposed of in this way "But to the remnant
of a library he would cling with a persistence that defied even
the terrific imp of the laudanum bottle."
In London, penniless and friendless, he could find no
better job than trudging the streets from bookstore to book-
store, a sack slung over his shoulder, collecting volumes for
a bookseller. The job was soon lost. His clothes soon wore
away to tatters; he slept in common lodging-houses, in arch-
ways, in houses of refuge, according to the condition of his
purse. He found an occupation which yielded him a pittance,
hailing cabs; another was that of selling matches, newspapers;
still another, blacking boots! A kindly bootmaker, a Mr.
McMaster, an Episcopalian churchwarden, befriended him,
offered him a job in his shop, running messages, putting up
the shutters, doing other odd services to "pay" for his food
and lodging. This lasted for three months. A trip to his
home followed, at Christmastime, 1886. Of that visit little is
known. He soon returned to the London streets. Of his
abject misery and suffering, the dread disease searing the
wretched tenement of his body with yelping pangs that de-
manded the drug for its alleviation, we can only guess. As
in the case of De Quincey, Francis now was befriended — by a
prostitute of the streets.
Lest these lines seem to convey any sinister intimation, a
word here may be pertinent: Be it known that at no time, even
among those who in after years may have been unfriendly
to Francis Thompson, even among his "enemies"— if, indeed,
he ever had any— no word, not even a suggestion, has ever
been uttered to stain his beautiful character with the stigma
of shame.
It is not improbable, says his biographer, that the lines
which follow were written while he was befriended by the
girl who, having noticed his forlorn state, did all in her power
to assist him:
Heirs gates revolve upon her yet alive;
To her no Christ the beautiful is nigh:
662 FRANCIS THOMPSON AND HIS POETRY [Aug.,
The stony world has daffed His teaching by;
"Go," saith it; "sin on still that you may thrive,
Let one sin be as queen for all the hive
Of sins to swarm around;"
Jl« * * * :tc
The gates of Hell have shut her in alive.
Out of the squandered heritage of her soul she gave of
her charity to this wretched fellow outcast of society. Wan-
dering absent-mindedly and bewildered through a busy thor-
oughfare late at night, he was knocked down and ground be-
neath the wheels of a cab. Finding him, she hailed another
cab and carried him to a room and gave him food and cover-
ing to warm his chilled and broken body. Then, having
nursed him with a motherly affection, she fled from him; and
into this last act may be interpreted the tenderest, the noblest,
even if mute, tribute of her withered heart to the true, the
chaste character of Francis Thompson. Of that beautiful
flower of friendship and charity, blooming in a byway where
such precious blossoms are so little looked for, he was later
(in "A Child's Kiss") to write:
Forlorn, and faint, and stark,
I had endured through watches of the dark
The abashless inquisition of each star,
Yea, was the outcast mark
Of all those heavenly passers' scrutiny;
Stood bound and helplessly
For Time to shoot his barbed minutes at me;
Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour
In night's slow- wheeled car;
Until the tardy dawn dragged me at length
From under those dread wheels; and, bled of strength,
I awaited the inevitable last.
Then there came past
A child; like thee, a spring-flower; but a flower
Fallen from the budded coronal of Spring,
And through the city-streets blown withering.
She passed — O brave, sad, lovingest, tender thing! —
And of her own scant pittance did she give.
That I might eat and live:
Then fled, a swift and trackless fugitive.
Therefore I kissed in thee
1922.] FRANCIS THOMPSON AND HIS POETRY 668
The heart of Childhood, so divine for me;
And her, through what sore ways,
And what unchildish days,
Borne from me now, as then, a trackless fugitive
Therefore I kissed in thee
Her, child! and innocency.
A sense of guilt oppresses the present writer for thus
apparently emphasizing the seamy details of Francis Thomp-
son's life. But they constitute the purgatory through which
his soul reached the sublime heights of later years. Poverty
(and its handmaiden, Suffering) was to his dying hour to be
his self-chosen Bride— as in the case of the beloved Assisian.
Came now to Francis the heavenly gift of a friendship-that
of the Meynells— that is so precious because it is so rarely to
be found on this side of Heaven. Their gift to him is only
partially encompassed by the fourteen corporal and spiritual
Works of Mercy. Through them he was, to use a much-
abused expression, to "find himself."
His renunciation of opium dates from this period. In
the case of Coleridge, opium had killed the poet in him: with
Francis, it had only delayed the development of his latent
gift. Like the tender sapling that, shorn of its imminent
foliage and twisted into grotesque shapes by the winter's
gales, with the coming of spring burgeons forth in all its
glory, so also of Francis we read that now "his images came
toppling about his thoughts overflowingly during the pains of
abstinence."
The young poet was sent to Storrington Priory to regain,
in the companionship of the Franciscan monks, some of his
wasted vitality. Here, in mid-summer, 1889, was written the
"Ode to the Setting Sun," and the famous essay on Shelley,
the latter to be rejected by the Dublin Review, which, in July,
1908, after the death of Francis, had the good fortune to pub-
lish it (an event which necessitated the then unique expe-
rience for the Review of going to press a second time), and
which later was to be considered by George. Wyndham "the
most important contribution made to English literature for
twenty years."
In February, 1890, he left Storrington and returned to
London. Now followed the writing of "Love in Diana's Lap,"
and of Sister Songs (1891), both written in pencil in a "penny
664 FRANCIS THOMPSON AND HIS POETRY [Aug.,
exercise book," which came as a Christmas offering to the
Meynells. To Sister Songs he attached an "Inscription," and
of his sentiments, after watching the "piling up of Christmas
presents" at the Meynell home, he writes:
But one I marked who Hngered still behind,
As for such souls no seemly gift had he:
He was not of their strain,
Nor worthy so bright beings to entertain,
Nor fit compeer for such high company;
Yet was he surely born to them in mind,
Their youngest nursling of the spirit's kind.
Last stole this one,
With timid glance, of watching eyes adread,
And dropped his frightened flower when all were gone;
And where the frail flower fell, it withered.
But yet methought those high souls smiled thereon;
As when a child, upstraining at your knees
Some fond and fancied nothings, says, "I give you these."
To this period also belongs the writing of "The Hound of
Heaven."
Back in London, says Everard Meynell, he was "put to
small tasks as much that he might be put out of train for talk
as for the use he was," about the "close-packed table in the
private room where, every Thursday, my father produced
with superhuman effort a fresh number of his Weekly
Register." One gets a picture of Francis as a good-natured
nuisance in that "frenzied atmosphere." Of it he indites a
whimsy, in which he refers to "this blighting frenzy for jingles
and jangles," and pictures himself biting his pencil, inviting
inspiration, and plighting
My hair into elf-locks most wild, and affrighting
And Registering, and daying and nighting.
From this "blighting frenzy" he would be sent into the
country, to Crawley, to breathe a modicum of health into his
never-strong body, or off on an expedition with the Meynell
children, or again to Friston, in Suffolk. The children, romp-
ing with him the hills and fields, were afterward to appear in
the silvery cadences of his Poems on Children. Of one of
them, Monica, we read a tender incident in "The Poppy:"
1922,] FRANCIS THOMPSON AND HIS POETRY 665
A child and man paced side by side
Treading the skirts of eventide;
But between the clasp of his hand and hers
Lay, felt not, twenty withered years.
She turned, with the rout of her dusk South hair,
And saw the sleeping gipsy there;
And snatched and snapped it in swift child's whim,
With— "Keep it long as you live"— to him.
Once, while at Crawley, his eye scanned a random notice
in the Register of the death of one "Monica Mary." "My heart
stood still," he writes. Happily, it was not the Monica of
"The Poppy," but of his feelings occasioned by that terrifying
death notice we have an inkling in his poem, "To Monica
Thought Dying," the opening lines of which read:
You, O the piteous you!
Who all the long night through
Anticipatedly
Disclose yourself to me
Already in the ways
Beyond our human comfortable days;
How can you deem what Death
Impitiably saith
To me, who listening wake
For your poor sake?
And of her childish prattle :
Was it such things could make
Me sob all night for your implacable sake?
Of the incident of the flower he was later, in 1903, to write
to Monica upon the announcement of her engagement to be
married :
"Most warmly and sincerely I congratulate you, dear
Monica, on what is the greatest event in a woman's life—
or a man's, to my thinking. . . . Extend to him, if he will
allow me, the affection which you once— so long since--
purchased with a poppy in that Friston field. 'Keep it.*
you said (though you have doubtless forgotten what you
said) *as long as you live.' I have kept it. and with it I keep
666 FRANCIS THOMPSON AND HIS POETRY [Aug.,
you, my dearest. I do not say or show much, for I am an
old man compared with you, and no companion for your
young life. But never, my dear, doul^t I love you."
No printed word can convey more than a hint of the in-
effable imagery of another poem, "The Making of Viola."
One has often, upon looking at the angelic loveliness of a
little child, dwelt, even if nebulously, upon the thought that
such beauty could only be made in Heaven. Who but a
Heaven-inspired genius could have expressed such a thought
so beautifully as has Francis in this exquisite verse! In it he
has pictured the Father of Heaven ordering the making of
Viola:
The Father of Heaven:
Spin, daughter Mary, spin.
Twirl your wheel with silver din;
Spin, daughter Mary, spin,
Spin a tress for Viola.
(To which the chorus of angels respond:)
Spin, Queen Mary, a
Brown tress for Viola.
The Father of Heaven:
Weave, hands angelical,
Weave a woof of flesh to pall —
Weave, hands angelical —
Flesh to pall our Viola.
Angels:
Weave, singing brothers, a
Velvet flesh for Viola.
And so on, until the making of Viola is completed, and down
to earth
Wheeling angels, past espial,
Danced her down with sound of viol.
Early in 1892, he went to Pantasaph, in Wales, "where
he lodged at the gates of the Capuchin Monastery." Here
he prepared the volume. Poems, for publication, in 1893, by
Messrs. Elkin Mathews and John Lane. In 1895, Sister Songs
was published. New Poems appeared in 1897.
1922.] CLOUDS SEEN IN A SUMMER SKY 667
He died, this artist son of the Mother of Arts, of consump-
tion, at the Hospital of St. John and St. Elizabeth, in London,
on November 13, 1907, among nuns who "smiled happily be-
cause he had received the Sacraments."
Francis Thompson brought to the writing of his poetry
a preciosity of words and a subtility of phrase that were —
and are — at once the emulation and the despair of the minor
poets and critics and the wonder and delight of his readers.
His song at times suggests the rippling music of a mountain
brook at the dawn of a June morning, the awesome majesty
of midsummer thunder, the indescribable grandeur of blazing
sunsets. Ardent Catholic that he was at the time of his death,
we can readily believe that his soul inhabits Elysian fields —
this mystical vagabond who once trod the London streets of
his misery. But whether or not, there is little doubt that, in
the words of Wilfrid Meynell: "He made all men his debtors,
leaving to those who loved him the memory of his personality,
and to English poetry an imperishable name."
CLOUDS SEEN IN A SUMMER SKY.
BY CHARLES J. QUIRK, S.J.
Slumbrous they drift upon the sky's deep blue,
Like young archangels steeped in visions blest.
Dreaming of God and Heaven's Holy Land,
Of everlasting love and peace and . .-. rest!
MARIAN DEVOTION IN GREECE.
BY G. D. MEADOWS.
HERE used to exist among the Jesuit novices at
Roehampton, in England, a domestic tradition of
an old Irish priest of great learning and holiness
and imbued with an ardent devotion to the
^ Mother of God. When some neophyte, fuller of
zeal than of knowledge, deplored with more fervor than char-
ity the apparent stupidity which kept millions of Eastern
Christians, with a genuine priesthood, real sacraments and a
glorious liturgy, in perpetual schism, the venerable Father
would exclaim: "Don't be too hard on the poor schismatics,
my boy: they do at least 'butter-up' the Holy One." The old
priest, with all the militant orthodoxy of a Catholic Celt, had,
nevertheless, a corner in a very large and human heart for
the Eastern "Orthodox" Christians, on account of their uncom-
promising devotion to her whom they name the *'Panagia/*
literally the "All-Holy." Any Catholic who is brought into
contact with the schismatic churches of the Near East must be
struck by this feature of "Orthodox" worship. Accustomed
in America and England to the charges of "Mariolatry," of
"adding a fourth person to the Trinity," and all the other
calumnies of the lower strata of Protestant controversialists,
we find it strange to hear, as the writer heard in an eccle-
siastical talk with a Greek friend: "Oh, but you of the Latin
Church have so little devotion to the Mother of God."
Two or three features of the cultus of the Rlessed Virgin
in the "Orthodox" and other schismatic churches of the Orient
stand out prominently, and are apparent even to a very
casual student of the matter. In the first place, it is essentially
a devotion, a pervading spirit and not merely a collection of
devotions and traditional practices. Of "devotions," as the
term is understood by modern Catholics, we find few traces
in the East. Marian sodalities and confraternities are un-
known, scapulars have not been heard of and rosary there is
none, though the newcomer to the Balkans may be inclined
to think differently when he sees the people fingering strings
1922.] MARIAN DEVOTION IN GREECE 669
of beads as they walk the streets or sit in the gardens This
however, is merely an amusement for nervous fingers and
Levantine restlessness.
Though without our aids to devotion, the schismatics of
Greece, of Russia and of the Christian communities in Asia
Minor and Syria are undoubtedly inspired with a very deep
reverence for the Blessed Virgin, based on sound theology.
She exists for them primarily in her relation to the mystery
of the Incarnation. In the icons, or sacred pictures, in the
churches she is invariably shown with her Child in her arms,
while above her halo of silver or beaten gold is inscribed her
title of highest honor— 'rheotokosr L e., "The Bearer of God."
As a logical outcome of this realization of the intimate con-
nection between Mary and the Incarnation, there is a keen
sense of the honor which is her due and must always have
been accorded her in the scheme of Providence, from the
moment she accepted the sublime mission announced to her
by St. Gabriel. The feasts of Our Lady, that of the Assump-
tion in particular, hold prominent places in the Greek cal-
endar. The incidents of the temporary subjection of Our
Lady to the dominion of death and her subsequent assump-
tion, are frequently depicted in the churches and chapels
under the pleasing title of "The Sleep of the Theotokos."
In the liturgies of St. Basil and St. Chrysostom, still
used in the daily worship of the Greek Church, we find
the fullest and noblest expression of this devotion. These
masterpieces of the religious spirit of Eastern Catholicism
before the miserable schism which lost Byzantium to Rome,
may still be heard in their entirety, chanted nasally by some
peasant priest in the meanest of Greek villages, rendered with
imposing ritual in the basilicas of Athens, Constantinople and
Smyrna, or celebrated for the benefit of the thriving colonies
of Greeks in London, Paris and New York. In the liturgy, the
Theotokion or, as we should call it, the collect of the Blessed
Virgin, invariably refers to her under some title of enthu-
siastic but dignified praise, such as "Our all-holy, undefiled,
exceedingly blessed, glorious Lady, Theotokos and ever-virgin
Mary."
In the service of the Orthros is sung the Magnificat or, as
the Greeks call it, "The Ode of the Theotokos," after the
deacon has invited the people to join in praising her: "The
670 MARIAN DEVOTION IN GREECE [Aug.,
Theotokos and the Mother of the Light let us praise in hymns
of honor." After the Magnificat comes a versicle that bears a
close resemblance to part of the Easter Saturday Exsultet of
the Roman rite:
Most blessed art thou, O God-Bearer and Virgin, for
through Him that was Incarnate of thee, Hades is led
captive, Adam is recalled, the curse is become barren. Eve
is set free, death is slain, and we are made to live.
The following is a literal translation of a typical Theotokion,
or Collect of Our Lady :
Of thy tenderness of heart, open to us the gate, O blessed
Theotokos, for hoping in thee we shall not fail; may we
be delivered through thee from misfortunes, for thou art
the salvation of the Christian people.
In the Liturgy proper or Eucharistic service, often erroneously
referred to as the "Greek Mass," the icon of the Blessed
Virgin is incensed by the celebrant, who kisses it and then
recites the Tropdrion:
Being a fountain of tenderness of heart, bestow on us
thy sympathy, O Mother of God ; regard the people who have
sinned. Show as ever, thy power, for, hoping in thee, we
cry out to thee, "Hail," as formerly did Gabriel, the leader
of the angels.
These few details should suffice to give some idea of the
whole-hearted character of the veneration of God's Mother
in the official worship of the Eastern churches.
The traditional cultus of Our Lady is also reflected in the
every-day life of the people throughout Greece and the
Balkans generally. Although the Greeks have always been
reputed a worldly-minded race, living for the moment and
its joy and almost impervious to ideas of the supernatural,
they have not remained untouched by the spirit of Marian
devotion that was so conspicuous a feature of the early days
of the Eastern Church, and which filled the streets and basil-
icas with an indignant and clamorous populace when the
honor of the Theotokos was assailed by heretics. In every
house and cottage in Greece there is an icon of the Blessed
1922.] MARIAN DEVOTION IN GREECE
671
Virgin, often with a lamp burning perpetually before it. Even
the poorest of Greek servant girls will buy, for a few lepta,
a little crudely colored print of the Panagia to hang in her
room. Along the country roads and mountain paths, on the
fashionable boulevards of Athens and in the tortuous alleys
and streets of Smyrna, the traveler sees little shrines of the
Mother of God, each a simple column of white marble or
stone, surmounted by a cross and holding a small picture of
the "Holy One" and a metal box for the ten and twenty-lepta
pieces of the devout.
The quaintly clad peasants of the hills and plains and
the less picturesque artisans and laborers of the towns will
stop before these little shrines and, with bared heads and
many signs of the cross, kiss the icon, place an offering in the
little iron box and pass on to their work. High up on the
mountains amongst the gray rocks and the dwarf pine trees,
where the wanderer meets few living beings save the flocks
of goats with their bearded, grizzled herdsmen and the fierce
wolf-like dogs of the hills, tiny chapels of Our Lady will be
found, built in replica of the more imposing churches of the
cities, with the little, yellow tapers burned by occasional pil-
grims and the silver or brass lamp lighted before the picture
of the Blessed Virgin.
Many of the Levantine vessels, with their painted prows
and big lateen sails, carry a picture of the Mother of God, in
addition to the usual one of St. Nicholas, fixed to the mast as
a protection on their voyage amidst the myriad islands of
the iEgean Sea. In moments of distress or when threatened
by the fierce squalls which are apt to spring up at short
notice in these Eastern waters, the captains of these boats will
vow a heavy candle or some more expensive votive gift, a
gold-encrusted icon or a model ship in silver, to the Virgin
of Tenedos or Naxos or some small islet of the archipelago.
As in Catholic Ireland and Spain and Italy, girls are in-
variably given "Mary" as one of their names, and the visitor
who listens to the prattling of the wealthy Athenian children
in the Royal Gardens of the capital or the half-naked, olive-
skinned urchins in some country village, will hear many
times an hour the name ''Maria!' or its affectionate form,
**Marikar One notices, too, that many of the women and
children have little medals of Our Lady in gold or silver, as
672 MARIAN DEVOTION IN GREECE [Aug.,
well as the plain cross commonly worn by the Orthodox.
Almost always the Blessed Virgin is referred to as the "All-
Holy" when she is mentioned, and if you stand among the
steerage passengers on a Greek steanier entering Marseilles
at sunrise, you will hear the peasant women draw the atten-
tion of their children to the statue of Notre Dame de la Garde
overlooking the harbor, *'Blepeis ten Panagian, paidi-moa?"
(Do you see the All-Holy One, my child?)
In writing a mere descriptive sketch, one is naturally un-
willing to introduce any note of polemic. However, certain
recent events prompt a reflection on the subject. Our separ-
ated brethren, on both sides of the Atlantic, have lately shown
a marked revival of interest in the schismatic churches of
the near East, and the Greek Patriarch of Cyprus was an
honored guest at the Anglican Congress in London. Further-
more, the "Reunion" party, whose zeal we must admire even
while deploring its futility, is giving much attention to Greece,
where their ideas are beginning to arouse the interest of some
of the Orthodox, both clerics and laymen. The writer, how-
ever, ventures to think that what is envisaged in the East is a
kind of fraternization or exchange of friendship, not the close
"communion" desired by Anglicans.
Protestants have always been bitter and unjust in their
charges of "idolatry" and "Mariolatry," and even our more
moderate Anglican and Episcopal friends have not hesitated
to accuse us of exaggeration and corruption in our Marian
devotions. They are now stretching forth the hand of friend-
ship towards a religious body in which "Mary-worship" is
expressed with a freedom seldom dared by the more precise
and cautious theologians of the West. It may, therefore, not
be unreasonable to hope that this movement will at least do
something to lessen the body of non-Catholic prejudice against
one of the most cherished features of Catholic spiritual life.
THE KEY TO SUCCESS.
BY FELIX KELLY.
jHE whole universe of matter and mind is under
the absolute control of exact laws. There is no
world too ponderous, nor floating mote too
minute to be beyond the reach of these systematic
methods of God's working. Even the comets
that so frighten the untaught by then- seemingly wild dashing
among the stars, vary not a hair's breadth from the circuits
assigned them by unchangeable laws. How exact is the human
eye in its structure. How exact, the laws of refraction which
light obeys in giving perfection to the image it paints on the
retina. In the vegetable kingdom are met the workings of
alike immutable laws. By some strange alchemy, whose
secret has been intrusted to them by Him Who fixed its un-
erring laws, plants convert invisible gases into tinted flowers,
and turn carbonic poison into wholesome food. So exact and
universal are the laws that govern the structure of animal
organisms, if you take to a comparative anatomist a fossil
bone, he will tell you the size, weight and form of the animal
of which it once formed part, where it lived, and on what
kind of food it was its custom to feed. The very wildest
forces in nature implicitly obey the dictates of law.
Higher in the scale of existences are found the same sys-
tematized methods of working. Metaphysicians give the laws
of sequence that control those endless trains of ideas that
begin at birth; of association that govern their recall; and of
conception which fancy is forced to follow in fashioning, out
of this rough lumber of the brain, its gorgeous palaces of
thought. Science discovers the laws that underlie phenom-
ena; art uses them. Search where you will among creations
of matter or conceptions of mind, you will find the same im-
mutable laws reaching and ruling all. Eff'ective geniuses are
-they who, having diligently investigated, implicitly obey these
fixed laws. They readily dazzle the unsuspecting by their
seeming miracles of attainment, simply because they alone are
cognizant of the existence of such laws. But if we have ex-
voL. cxv. 43
674 THE KEY TO SUCCESS [Aug.,
plained to us the training and drudgery submitted to by those
brains through a long series of years, their painful, persistent,
persevering efforts, the numberless rules and regulations they
carefully sought out and strictly obeyed; if we are allowed to
follow the process step by step, all traces of mysterious mental
withcraft rapidly disappear; its resources of power are found
quite attainable.
To secure accurate knowledge of these hidden laws that
underlie phenomena, and effectually to practicalize, in any
field, their restless energies by skilled appliances, demand
frequently the unremittent industry of a lifetime. On final
analysis, the essential elements of success can be resolved
into an enlightened and sustained enthusiasm. There must
be enkindled an intense longing to realize a definitely
conceived ideal; that ideal must appear worthy of any sacri-
fice; that longing must glow with white heat. Thoroughness,
concentration and courage are the main distinguishing traits
of great men, qualities rather of the heart than head. If we
sharply scrutinize the lives of persons eminent in any depart-
ment of action or meditation, we shall find that it is not so
much brilliancy and fertility as constancy and continuous-
ness of effort which makes a man great.
One of Wellington's chief sources of success was his
thorough mastery of details. No great commander leaves
anything to chance, but seeks to anticipate every emergency
and to provide for it. Gray spent seven years perfecting his
Elegy which you can readily read in seven minutes. Into
it he generously poured the very ripest scholarship, an inti-
mate acquaintance with the rules of rhythm and an exhaustive
study of the varied excellencies of English and Latin classics.
The scenery and personages breathed before his mental vision
with all the sharply outlined vividness of real life. Macaulay
says: "Dante is the eye-witness and the ear-witness of that
which he relates. He is the very man who has heard the tor-
mented spirits crying out for the second death." Handel,
being asked about his ideas and feelings when composing the
Hallelujah Chorus, replied: "I did think I did see all Heaven
before me and the great God Himself."
Inseparable with these traits of thoroughness and con-
centration is that of unfaltering courage, a courage to under-
take great enterprises, "to scorn delights and live laborious
1922.] THE KEY TO SUCCESS 675
days," to brave public sentiment in faithful adhesion to con-
clusions of your own thinking; courage that will not fail even
in the hour of last extremity, but inspire you to do or die.
Cortez when entering upon that series of triumphs which
finally overwhelmed the proud throne of the Montezumas,
resolutely burned every ship behind him, keenly discerning
that by lessening the hopes of retreat, he proportionately les-
sened the chances of failure. Wellington conquered the
armies of Napoleon, mainly because he was a general who
durst carry out his own matured ways of warfare despite the
mad clamor of all England. Wordsworth's sublime adoption
and advocacy of his own deliberately formed judgment of
true taste against the adverse criticism of the entire world of
letters, his jeopardizing every prospect of earthly preferment
rather than violate his convictions of poetic excellence, de-
manded as great moral bravery as is required to climb a ship's
mast in a storm or face the fire of an enemy.
These traits, thoroughness, concentration and courage, I
conceive to be the three essential gifts of greatness. Without
them, no alertness of intellect has ever achieved a work which
bears the impress of immortality; with them, rarely need any
one dispair of accomplishing "that which the world will not
willingly let die." These gifts I further conceive to be but
different manifestations of some one master passion, enkin-
dling and controlling every mental faculty; appearing either
as an intense love of the perfect, seeking satisfaction in some
acquired excellence, combined with a keen relish and aptitude
for the chosen work; or as a thirst for power and fame, akin,
in the imperative nature of its calls, to bodily thirst; or else,
as the soul's nobler devotion that grows out of its warm attach-
ments to home, country or the Cross of Christ. These pas-
sions, separate or combined, must be the mainspring of every
action; they must be the inspiration of every thought; they
must flood the whole life with an irresistible and perpetual in-
fluence. Through them, unlettered and ill-balanced minds
have worked wonders in the world. Infuse men of enlight-
ened common sense with their deathless fires, and obstructing
walls of adamant crumble at their touch.
Enlightened and sustained enthusiasm has been the real
source of strength to those who have acquired eminence, and
only through its influence have been developed the mighty
676 THE KEY TO SUCCESS [Aug.,
mental forces that have molded the character and controlled
the destiny of any era; only intense temperaments, working
under the stimulus of profound passion, could ever have ex-
hibited such exhaustless patience, such concentration of
thought, such heroic fixedness of purpose, that hunger, igno-
miny, even death, proved powerless to damp their ardor.
What wonder that the world has ever persisted in calling its
geniuses madmen.
Prescott, we are told, spent twenty years in the libraries
of Europe, collecting from musty manuscripts and neglected
letters, material for his Spanish histories, and a large portion
of that time he was stricken with blindness so that he had to
make use of the eyes of another. Gibbon re-wrote his Memoirs,
nine; Newton, his Chronology, fifteen; and Addison, his inim-
itable essays, twenty times. Spinoza and Buckle each spent
twenty years in carefully forming and maturing their judg-
ment before they published their systems of thought. Mon-
tesquieu, speaking of one of his own writings, remarked to a
friend: "You will read this book in a few hours, but I assure
you, it has cost me so much labor it has whitened my hair."
Goldsmith's style, famed for its simplicity, was acquired by
strict examination of every word, every vowel sound, every
consonant. Ghiberti, a Florentine artist, who executed for
the Baptistery of his native city bronze doors, "worthy to be
the very gates of Paradise," spent forty busy years in con-
ceiving this work. Paganini profoundly studied the relations
of sound to emotion, and disciplined his muscles to utmost
nicety of movement before he was prepared to move and melt
his audiences. Raphael copied hundreds of the designs of
the great painters, and spent years in the study of perspective
before giving to the world his masterpieces. Though Igna-
tius of Loyola was in the full noon of life, without the least
knowledge of books, yet such was his enthusiasm to realize
his ideal, that he spent ten toilsome years in study, then
kindled in the breast of Francis Xavier and other of his
countrymen the same fierce fires of devotion that burned in
his own.
Time would fail me to speak of Hayden and Huber,
Milton and Beethoven, who despite defects in sight and hear-
ing, sufficient to have paralyzed any but those of unconquer-
able spirit, have left acknowledged masterpieces in painting,
1922.] THE KEY TO SUCCESS
677
science, poetry and music, the four highest departments in
human achievement. It is beyond all controversy, that it is
to the enlightened, persistent, painstaking enthusiasts this
world belongs and the fullness thereof. Whence comes this
irresistible impetus of zeal? Thoroughness, concentration and
courage, the distinguishing traits of great men, are but differ-
ent manifestations of some master passion, appearing either
as an intense love of the perfect, combined with a keen relish
and aptitude for the chosen work, or as an imperative thirst
for fame and power, or else as the soul's nobler devotion to
home, or the Cross of Christ. At least some one of these pas-
sions must flood the whole life with an irresistible and per-
petual influence.
With this enthusiasm of individualism should also be
combined the zeal of emulation. This is too axiomatic to
demand any extended proof, or even any special emphasis of
statement. It is simply necessary to caution against any selfish
or meretricious phase of it. No personal advancement not
founded upon pronounced personal merit, should ever be
sought for or accepted. And then, when to these two are
added, as their crown and finish, the world-embracing sym-
pathy, the self -forgetting love, that "enthusiasm of humanity,"
as the author of **Ecce Homo" styles it, which Christ embodied
in His life and sought to enkindle in the hearts of His dis-
ciples, the soul comes into its best estate of creative energy
and accomplishes its most enduring work.
THE BISHOP'S GARDEN.
BY MATT J. HOLT.
HE main portal of the bishop's palace is closed by
two great doors, strong enough to resist the earn-
est assault of a mob; and he who seeks to enter
pounds with a great metal knocker. Then the
portimaio, who with his family lives within the
palace to the left of the door, deliberately descends from his
living-room and, withdrawing a great wooden bolt, slowly
swings back a ponderous door; and greeting you with a smile
and a profound bow, bids you enter.
Having gained an entrance, you turn to the right up a
broad marble stairway that, in this country, would be con-
sidered a credit to a State capitol, and ascend to the upper
floor, where the Bishop and his secretary live in simple, ele-
gant solitude; a perfect environment for a student.
There are probably fifteen rooms on this floor, any one of
which has floor space equaling the modern American apart-
ment of "four rooms and a bath," and height of ceiling suffi-
cient to be bisected by an economical modern landlord, into
an upper and lower apartment. The walls are not papered,
but beautifully painted and fretted and hung with old prints
and engravings that would delight the heart of one loving old
things. The windows are double shutter-like affairs of small
panes, opening outward.
Each room has its own heating appliance; a great tile
stove which heats like a brick and once hot, remains so long
after the last ember has ceased to glow. The fuel used con-
sists of bundles of twigs; such refuse, we designate as "trash"
and leave in our forests to destroy the trees, when someone
carelessly starts a fire. Until I saw these bundles of twigs, I
had not understood why so many of the trees along the great
highways and private drives were gnarled and stunted; they
were overworked fuel producers; having in relation to our
trees the same look that a woman who each year nourishes a
new-born babe bears to that woman who is too careful of
self to know the joy of motherhood. These trees each year
1922.] THE BISHOP'S GARDEN 679
budded out and blossomed with the hope of a new growth,
and at the end of a season were stripped again to the old,
gnarled trunk.
The rooms are electrically lighted, but the plant has a
way of snuffing out occasionally, leaving you in the dark; then
Giulietta comes around, bringing to each occupied room a
small antique brass lamp burning olive oil; the Hght of which
in power equals a wax candle and is soft and inoffensive.
The furnishings of the palace and the dinner service are
of great age and the table wines, old, mild and unsweetened,
are sweet in their purity.
The Bishop at table, ate as though food and drink were
sacred things to be sparingly used. The only exercise he had
beyond that incidental to his sacerdotal duties and a sun bath
in his garden, was a rare walk with his secretary, along the
gallery-covered sidewalks of Carpi; when the people bowed
and kissed his hand with great reverence. Never until I knew
how he toiled and studied to serve God, knowing that the mes-
sage of a preacher who does not work is soon delivered; saw
the purity of his seemingly perfect life and the way his peo-
ple loved and respected him, did I comprehend the real mean-
ing of the Catholic Church to the devout of Carpi.
A lover of old books, who read Italian as his own tongue,
might spend a decade in the Bishop's study in company with
the immortals. There or in his garden, the Bishop, old in
years, but young and bright of soul, was most at home.
The garden was perhaps fifty yards square. On two sides
the windows of the palace looked out upon it; the other two
were hemmed about by the bare walls of other buildings.
The sun rose late for that garden; but when it smiled it was
with the glory of the countenance that it turns on Italy. No
wonder the grapes grew in great emerald, ebon and purple
clusters, and that the vines climbed the walls with avid ten-
drils; no wonder that even the white roses seemed to blush in
their hearts from very gladness; or that the red, red rose grew
red as the poppies that grow in the greater freedom of the
fields, between rows of mulberry trees; or that the violets gave
forth an unceasing incense and the other flowers opened their
breasts with beauty and fragrance; all were cared for with
loving hands and appreciated as God^s gifts to the bishop.
Here he would sit of an afternoon in a stillness in which
680 THE BISHOP'S GARDEN [Aug.,
one might fancy hearing the fanning fins of the lazy gold fish
of the fountain; while a land tortoise, perhaps as old as the
Bishop and with as great a possessory claim, in his stroll
through his world — the garden — slowly and cautiously drew
near the rustic bench. As a Diogenes, satisfied with life as he
found it, he eyed the Bishop, asking only that he come not
between him and the sun; and looked upon himself as master
of the Bishop and owner of the garden — therefore the world.
I looked out from an overhanging window upon the
Bishop and the tortoise. Did I see farther than they? Even
from the garden they might see the sun by day and the stars
by night. What were their thoughts?
Mine were of home — of the wife and boy five thousand
miles away. The occupants of the garden were at home; but
they knew nothing of a family life such as mine; and I knew
nothing of a life given wholly to the Church such as the
Bishop's.
I believe that the Bishop, with a soul made white and
clean by a long life of service, enjoyed a peace without alloy;
had no thought that marred an intimate communion with God,
and therefore no regret that he had not a son to bear his name,
sharing with God, His Son, and no bride but the Church. I
believe that to both Bishop and tortoise the garden was a
place of pleasant thought, of satisfied memories, of glorious
hope; and not a silhouette from which the glory of the light
of hope had departed.
I was in the Bishop's palace and had access to his garden,
an invitation to share his table, a private way to the church
and a private gallery within the church in which I might have
prayed; all because I was in the service of the Y. M. C. A.;
which was doing what it might for the physical welfare of the
soldiers in Italy.
My parting from the Bishop and his secretary was with
reverence and feeling. And I, a Presbyterian, bent my head
and for the first time kissed the hand of a man. My soul told
me that here was an Ambassador of Christ.
Ulew Booke.
MONASTICISM AND CIVILIZATION. By Very Rev John B
O'Connor, O.P., P.G. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons!
$1.75 net.
Gratitude prompts men to preserve in storied stone the in-
spirational memory of great national benefactors. This volume
should urge every right-minded reader to erect along the broad
boulevard of thought a memorial to monasticism. benefactor of
the entire civilized world.
The author, because of voluntary brevity, traces only the
outlines of the work of the monks in the West, and excludes the
magnificent contributions of such great families of friars as the
Franciscans and Dominicans, because he is employing the word
"monk" in its technical signification. His outlines, however, are
not stiff and unadorned, but undulating historical accounts
formed to fascinate the general reader, and to stimulate the
student to dip into the sources of information which he enumer-
ates. With ease, the mind follows page after page of irrefragable
evidence presenting the progress in agriculture, industry and
municipal life accruing incidentally from the operation of monas-
ticism, incidentally accruing, for it must be remembered that St.
Benedict and others founded their Orders fundamentally for the
glory of God and the salvation of souls. It is next shown how
the monastic copyists and chroniclers proved to be new Noes in
constructing the literary ark which saved what remains of Greek
and Latin art and science from the inundation of Goth, Hun and
Vandal from the North. The chapters on monastic charity and
the work of evangelization should serve to impress the reader
with admiration for both the extent and quality of Catholic social
work, effectively operating for over sixteen hundred years.
While lively enthusiasm pulsates in the pen of the author,
he is not to be accused of vainglory. Wishing to add to the
apologetic value of his pages, he quotes largely from Protestant
historians. As an example of the fervor that is to be found even
in non-Catholic sources, we reprint a quotation concerning the
efforts of the monks in behalf of education from Canon Farrar,
who writes: "Consider what the Church did for education. Her
ten thousand monasteries kept alive and transmitted that torch
of learning that otherwise would have been extinguished long
since. A religious education, incomparably superior to the mere
athleticism of the noble's hall, was extended to the meanest serf
682 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
who wished it. This fact alone by proclaiming the dignity of
the individual elevated the entire hopes and destiny of the race.**
The book itself should exercise monastic influence — in felling
the forests of prejudice, in planting sound seeds of truth, and per-
chance in serving as an occasion of God's grace whereby the true
faith may take root and flourish in formerly arid souls.
HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES FROM THE COMPROMISE
OF 1850 TO THE FINAL RESTORATION OF HOME RULE
IN THE SOUTH IN 1877. Vol. VI. By James Ford Rhodes.
New York: The Macmillan Co. $4.00.
The era from 1850 to 1877, the part of American history
covered by this work, is the most eventful since the establishment
of our favored Republic. In 1850 the political branches of our
Government passed the celebrated measures designed to set at
rest the agitation over slavery. However, not even the keen eye
of statesmanship can pierce the future, for later interpretations
of one of the provisions of that memorable compromise proved
to be the seed-plot of new troubles. By its principal authors it
was fondly believed that the bargain between the sections would
last forever. As is entertainingly related in the first volume,
there was from the very beginning no little difficulty in enforcing
the provision for the recovery of fugitive slaves, but in a short
time this trouble almost sank to rest. Thereafter vigilant citizens
believed that they had entered upon a season of cloudless days.
However, the passage in 1854 of the Kansas-Nebraska bill showed
on how slender a foundation rested patriotic hopes. The present
volume, however, is concerned not with the causes or the conduct
of the war for Southern independence, but rather with the impor-
tant events to follow, namely, the restoration of loyal governments
in the States that had seceded. In other words. Volume VI. of
this interesting inquiry begins with a brief consideration of the
efforts of President Johnson to restore the members of the late
Confederacy to their normal relations in the Union, while it ends
with a statement of the defeat of Horace Greeley in the presi-
dential contest of 1872, and an account of his untimely death.
The main theme of Mr. Rhodes is the Congressional plan of Re-
construction, though many related topics are likewise treated;
also some happenings connected with the major subject by only
a slender filament.
In the advertising section of this book, the publishers have
impartially mustered the press comments. It nowhere appears,
however, whether this formidable phalanx has been assembled to
intimidate a hesitant reviewer or to illuminate the dark paths of
1922.] NEW BOOKS
history for those about to become wayfarers. In our opinion, the
present volume is not less interesting or less accurate than those
which preceded it, while the work as a whole will long continue
to be regarded as the most authoritative on the period of which it
treats. Some of its conclusions, indeed, may be slightly modified
by the discoveries of time, though in its integrity this work is
destined to stand as an enduring monument to Mr. Rhodes.
Perhaps its conspicuous limitation is its failure fully to appreciate
the endeavors of President Lincoln to shape a system for restoring
the Union. No historian, it is true, has given a more enlightened
estimate of the place of the martyr President in the pages of
history. New historians with a mastery of expression equal to
that of Hume, of Lingard, of Green or of Gibbon may arise and
re-write the annals of this epoch, but they will not materially
alter the picture drawn by Doctor Rhodes. The present volume,
1866-1872, with its grave lessons, should be thoroughly familiar
to every citizen privileged to sit in a legislative assembly.
THE GOSPEL OF A COUNTRY PASTOR. By the Rev. J. M.
Lelen. St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co. $L00 net.
The fortunes of many a good book have been blasted by a
poor title, and often a good title has been the means of floating,
at least temporarily, an otherwise mediocre book. Happy the
stroke whereby both title and book are up to the mark and — as
in the case before us — worthy of each other. The name of the
present book is redolent of green fields and refreshing airs and
the quiet ways of the countryside, and the text happily bears out
the promise implied by the title.
The plan of the work is unusual, namely, to link up the
scenes and incidents of Our Lord's life and the problems of the
country people of His day with their rural counterparts of the
present, and though the author disclaims anything in the way of
literary art — "In the hands of a priest," he says, "the height of
art is not to conceal art, but to ignore it"— the fact is that Father
Lelen is a consummate writer. There is only one word ade-
quately to describe his style and his method — simplicity — and it
is the unrivaled simplicity of the French, sparkling, fresh, grace-
ful and unlabored — not the heavy-handed article that too often
passes under that name with the Anglo-Saxon.
Paraphrasing the author's remark about "those little villages
of French Canada whose names sound like a litany of saints,"
we may say that Father Lelen's chapter headings, e. g., "A Coun-
try Wedding," "Birds of the Air and Lilies of the Field," "Trees,"
"About Animals," and "Our Lord with His Harvesters," sound
684 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
like the chiming of bells, at evening, in a fair country. Gentle-
ness, beauty and the peace that passeth all understanding breathe
from the pages of this book a message that should surely be wel-
come in these feverish and disordered days.
CATHOLIC CHURCH IN CHICAGO. By Gilbert J. Garraghan,
S.J. Chicago: Loyola University Press. $2.50 net.
The author, in his introduction, states that the history of
Chicago may be divided into two distinct periods — that which
preceded the great fire in 1871, the period of pioneering, and that
which was subsequent, a period of great expansion.
This volume tells the story of the beginnings of the Catholic
Church and its sturdy growth up to the time of the great fire.
The author considered this period a unified whole and properly
a subject for historical review. He shows that the first threads in
the religious history of Chicago must be picked up in the distant
past when Chicago emerged into the light of history. He tells of
th^ coming of LaSalle and Marquette, of Father Allouez, the es-
tablishment of a Catholic Mission in 1696 by Father Pinet, the
work of the Missionaries and the coming of Father St. Cyr, who
was the first to establish a parish in Chicago. During his pas-
torate, the Catholics under his charge grew to about two thousand
in number, and, in 1843, Gregory VI. erected the Diocese of Chi-
cago and appointed Rev. William J. Quarter incumbent of the
new See. Bishop Quarter was succeeded on his death by Bishop
Van de Velde, who was in turn succeeded by Bishop O'Regan.
The author concludes the period by narrating the growth of
the Church under Bishop Duggan and Bishop Foley. The growth
of the Church in Chicago may be seen from the fact that in 1833
the Catholics of Chicago, in a petition for the appointment of a
priest, stated that there were "almost one hundred Catholics in
this town." While in 1871 "there were in the city twenty-four
parishes, twenty-two parish schools, fifty-five priests of the secular
and regular clergy, and a Catholic population of probably a hun-
dred thousand." "Today," the author tells us, "the Catholic
Church in that city counts two hundred and twenty-seven par-
ishes, five hundred and more priests of the secular and regular
clergy and over a million communicants."
This volume is important in that it embodies a connected
story of a period most important in the history of the Catholic
Church in America. It is a scholarly work that reflects great
credit upon the writer. Its many references and excerpts from
original documents make it a very valuable contribution to Cath-
olic literature.
1922.] NEW BOOKS
685
TOWARDS THE GREAT PEACE. By Ralph Adams Cram.
Boston: Marshall Jones Co. $2.50.
Under this title are published eight lectures of Mr. Cram de-
livered at the season's course of the Dartmouth Alumni Lecture-
ships for 1921. The whole series is a development of the thesis
that modern civilization is at the crossroads of rejuvenation and
decay, and that it is fast moving towards a great rise or a great
fall according as the men of the present age are ready or not to
readjust the scale of human endeavor and to correct the standard
of its values.
Few contemporary books are more thought-provoking and
morally stimulating and healthful. Though it may not be within
the possibility of human things as actually constituted, for Mr.
Cram's scheme of reconstruction to work the great reform, which
according to the author's rhythmic theory of history should come
about the year 2000, yet for all that, Mr. Cram's idealism is thor-
oughly wholesome and nothing if not constructive.
We fear, however, that many would not subscribe to Mr.
Cram's estimate of races and race-values except under carefully
defined limits; nor to his assumption of the superiority of old
New England stock. To minimize the share which the Latin, Celtic,
German and Slavic races have contributed to America's greatness
both in peace and in war, savors of Anglo-Saxonism and does
scant justice to the heroes who left their lives in France. His
recommendation that "the mating of various racial stock" should
be controlled and even prohibited, is at least ethically question-
able. Nature is a much better corrective in such matters than
man's art.
RICHARD PHILIP GARROLD, S.J. By C. C. Martindale, S.J.
New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $1.75 net.
The subject of this brief sketch of a hundred-odd pages, was
an English Jesuit, who, as a Homer of school-life, bore to the
English boy a position not unlike that of Father Finn to American
boys. He was a convert, making his submission to the Church in
his twenty-first year, and shortly afterwards entering a Jesuit
novitiate, where Father Martindale, his biographer, was a fellow-
novice. Most of the book is concerned with Father Garrold's life
in the Society, as a special student at Oxford, as scholastic and
later as priest at St. Francis Xavier's, Liverpool. He was about
to be sent to a house in South Africa when the exigencies of war
swept him into service as a chaplain. He was wounded in France,
and upon recovery was sent with the Expeditionary Force to East
Africa, where, during two years' service, his health was so sen-
686 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
ously impaired that he died, in 1920, at the premature age of
forty-six. The incidents of his life, as Father Martindale as-
sembles them, make easy reading. His military diary is par-
ticularly interesting, often amusing, and conveys a vivid picture
of his impressionable personality.
Father Garrold was a trained historian, with a scheme of his
own for studying and teaching history. His historical method
consisted essentially in graphic representation and in insistence
on visualization. While these are well-understood pedagogical
principles, Father Garrold's application was quite original. He
literally built up history before a class by a system of charts,
each a century long, and each attachable to its predecessor; po-
litical disturbances and wars were registered by the wavy
"seismic'* line by which newspapers often illustrate earthquake
shocks; Magna Gharta was represented by an egg, for out of it
England's future grew. Examples of this kind are numerous.
Much of Father Garrold's theory is quoted in his own words, the
combination of theory and example making a valuable source of
suggestion for any history teacher.
MEDIiEVAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO MODERN CIVILIZATION.
Edited by F. C. J. Hearnshaw. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
$3.50.
Save for the fact that it has no index we can un-
reservedly praise this book, and most strongly commend it to all
who desire to grasp the meaning of the Middle Ages, and perhaps
even more, the change of opinion which is coming over English
thought in connection with the mediaeval world. Of course, all
the articles are not of equal value : in a collection of chapters by
different authors this must needs be so. But from all something
may be learned and some, such as those on The Religious Con-
tribution of the Middle Ages; Philosophy (by Professor Wildon
Carr — an admirable study) and Science by that well of learning.
Professor Charles Singer, are worthy of all praise. We can only
indicate in a short notice what has chiefly interested us and, first
and foremost, we have to welcome the attitude of all the writers
to the Scholastic Philosophy and to St. Thomas Aquinas in par-
ticular: "The type of Scholasticism represented by Aquinas is the
supreme triumph of human reason in the Middle Ages." Again:
"St. Thomas Aquinas, who raised in his marvelous Summa the
flawless temple of mediaeval thought." It is refreshing to read
remarks of this kind, and generally to discover the generous
appreciation of a number of things in which we have not im-
proved upon the Middle Ages. At the same time, the writers are
1922.] NEW BOOKS
687
careful to warn us that the "roses, roses all the way'* pictures of
some enthusiasts are as misleading as the depreciations of others.
No human eye ever did see at any time London "small and white
and clean," as William Morris pictured it. The enthusiasms of
the modern guild-socialists are expended upon organizations
about as unlike those which they dream of bringing into existence
as any two things can be. A most interesting and valuable book.
ERASMUS OF ROTTERDAM. By Maurice Wilkinson. New
York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons. $1.75.
This volume of the Catholic Thought and Thinkers Series,
edited by Father Martindale, sketches the life and friendships of
Erasmus, and defines his attitude toward the momentous re-
ligious issues of the Renaissance and Reformation. The author
judges Erasmus tolerantly in view of the conditions of his time,
and emphasizes his submission to the Church, while admitting
that "he laid an intellectual basis for revolt." He dwells, how-
ever, less on the destructive elements of his work, than on the
service of his opposition to Luther. He balances the merits and
the defects of the great humanist, and points out the curious
dualism in his nature and religious outlook that is answerable
for many inconsistencies of his fluid personality. Altogether,
Mr. Wilkinson has written an interesting and competent estimate
of Erasmus as a Catholic apologist.
THE HISTORY AND NATURE OF INTERNATIONAL RELA-
TIONS. Edited by Edmund A. Walsh, S.J., Ph.D. New
York: The Macmillan Co. $2.50.
Under the above title are gathered a series of ten lectures
delivered at the School of Foreign Service of Georgetown Uni-
versity during the academic year, 1920-21. Each lecture is the
work of a scholar distinguished in the field assigned to him, and
the entire series forms an analytical and historical survey of the
chief problems of international law and diplomacy. Professor
Duggan contributes a study of the nature and methods of diplom-
acy. Professors Rostovtseff, Hayes and Scott present an outline of
diplomacy in ancient, mediaeval and modern times. Professors
Loughlin and Moore discuss the economic factors in international
relations and the procedure of peace and of war. Doctors Rowe
and Reinsch and Professor Borchard show the special position of
Latin America, the Far East and the United States as factors in
the development of international relations.
The volume will be found admirably adapted as supple-
mentary reading in courses on modern history. It avoids the
688 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
dullness of the formal text-book, and will be read with interest by
layman as well as student. The editor's emphasis upon the pres-
ent need of a scientific study of the principles and practice of
international relations is fully justified, and the volume he has
put together should contribute usefully to that end.
PAGES FROM THE PAST. By John Ayscough. New York:
Longmans, Green & Co. $2.50 net.
Pages from the Past has a greater value than its title sug-
gests. The Right Rev. Monsignor Drew, whose books are
published under the name of John Ayscough, discusses in his
singularly pleasant and easy manner the present in relation to a
past which stretches as far back as the Indian Mutiny. He main-
tains that men of his age can "by the aid of personal memory and
experience contrast two worlds as different as any that ever
existed." Certainly, no one is better fitted to do so than Mon-
signor Drew, both by right of personal contact and versatility.
He discusses personalities, history, manners, living in general
and literature with equal grace. Particularly valuable is his
adroit examination of the modern novel. Monsignor Drew first
contrasts the writing of Disraeli and Gladstone. He then describes
the gradual growth which produced Hardy and Meredith. Those
whose especial interest is the novel, will find in Pages from the
Past an excellent outline for their study.
PAUL, HERO AND SAINT. By Rev. Leo Gregory Fink. New
York: The Paulist Press. $2.00 net.
It is strange that the greatest missionary of all time should
be practically without a cultus; particularly, as in the life of St.
Paul we have all the elements that make for real interest and
devotion: an active career inspired by a deep love of God and a
burning zeal for souls, wonderful miracles, bitter conflicts, tense
dramatic situations, a heroic death. Furthermore, for most of
St. Paul's life we have an absolutely reliable authority — the in-
spired Word of God itself — which is considerably more than we
can say for many of the Saints who have received popular homage.
It is a shame that until very recently we had no original
life of St. Paul in English by a Catholic; the translation of Fouard
has done splendid service for many years, and is still unreplaced.
A year or two ago, an English Passionist published a Life of St.
Paul, and now an American priest of the Archdiocese of Philadel-
phia has written a biography of the Apostle, which makes a
special appeal to the youth of the land. There is no pretense of
great erudition, there are no scholarly footnotes, there is no discus-
1^22.] NEW BOOKS
689
sion of the difficulties of chronology and hermeneutics. This is a
straightforward narrative in a language and a style thoroughly
up-to-date and American: St. Luke is "Doctor" Luke, Tertius is
a "stenographer," the riot of the silversmiths is a "strike," St.
Peter is the "Commander-in-chief." Father Fink's book ought
to be widely read; it is sure to hold the interest of any who pick
it up, young or old, and the reader will gain a vivid and accurate
picture of St. Paul and the early Christian Church.
The book contains good illustrations and a serviceable map,
a comprehensive index, and an introduction by the Very Rev.
Thomas F. Burke, C.S.P., Superior General of the Paulists.
OBSTETRICAL NURSING. A text-book of the nursing care of
the expectant mother, the woman in labor, the young mother
and her baby. By Carolyn Conant Van Blarcom, R.N. New
York : The Macmillan Co. $3.00.
This volume is specially worthy of our notice because it
states so clearly the position of the Catholic Church with regard
to the practice of obstetrics. The medical world has been slow to
understand that there are very definite moral principles to be
observed by those who wish to maintain a definite standard of
morality, quite apart from the positive law enacted by our legis-
latures. The Church's position in these matters is now asked
for sympathetically, recognized as authoritative and stated very
straightforwardly. At first, the assertion of Catholic principles in
this country was considered a sort of obtrusion into a field with
which religion had nothing to do; where the physician must be
the judge. Now it is very properly appreciated that the Church
must have the ultimate decision in these matters, at least as re-
gards Catholic patients and for Catholic physicians and nurses.
The author says with regard to destructive operations in
obstetrical practice that "they are never sanctioned by the Cath-
olic Church in cases where the child is alive." She also notes
that these operations are performed less and less frequently.
In the paragraphs on induced abortion, the author closes what
she has to say with the sentence, "the termination of pregnancy
before viability is never sanctioned by the Catholic Church be-
cause of the almost certain loss of the child."
In the paragraphs on therapeutic abortions the author notes
that under certain circumstances these are countenanced by law,
but adds "the Catholic Church, however, teaches that it is never
permissible to take the life of the child in order to save the life
of the mother. It teaches that even according to natural law the
child is not an unjust aggressor: and that both child and mother
VOL. cxv. 44
690 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
have an equal right to life." The author quotes Dr. Slemons as
to the seriousness of unjustified abortion in terms which make it
very clear that there can be no middle ground of doubt as to the
nature of the crime. If mother or child dies as the result of
measures aimed at abortion, the crime is murder.
Miss Van Blarcom has succeeded in a sustained and conscious
effort "to give the young nurse something of the feeling of rever-
ence for the great mystery of birth.*' In her final word, she has
dwelt particularly on the importance of the nurse teaching the
young mother the proper care of her infant in such a way as to
give a real training without hurting the mother's feelings. Her
concluding words are indeed well chosen: "She will also awaken
for many a young woman an interest that will be ever fresh and
absorbing, and point the way to unexpected joys and delights in
her motherhood. Can there be any higher work than this, can
any woman wish for a more womanly work?"
THE LIGHT OF THE LAGOON. By Isabel Clarke. New York:
Benziger Brothers. $2.00 net.
Miss Clarke has a large circle of readers. To these her last
novel. The Light on the Lagoon, will be welcome as those which
preceded it. Our former criticisms of her tales, of their power
to hold the interest of those who enjoy her style of story-telling,
and of their strong Catholicism, fits this new book as well, per-
haps, as those which already have come from her pen. But we
think that in The Light on the Lagoon, the sensuous attractions
of Church music and art, and their temperamental appeal, are too
much stressed. Consequently, the conclusion leaves us question-
ing the stability and sincerity of the professed convictions of the
pathetic little heroine.
THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE ENVIRONMENT. By J. E. Adam-
son. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $4.50.
This book, by the director of education in the Transvaal
Province, is an essay toward a correct conception of education.
Briefly summarized, Mr. Adamson's theory is as follows: Educa-
tion is not something that can be transmitted by a direct process
from teacher to student; it is not the product of knowledge
abstractly communicated. Rather, it is a proper adjustment of
the individual to his environment, to the physical, social and
moral worlds about him. This adjustment goes on from birth to
death; it is the continual transition from empirical knowledge
(mere awareness of facts) to rational knowledge (intelligent
understanding of facts and of their relation to each other). For
1922.] NEW BOOKS
691
example, a boy toils through a series of exercises in decimal frac-
tions. The decimal system means nothing to him. But sud-
denly he perceives the basis of it and its meaning and purpose.
This rational perception, this overcoming of the "magnificent
opposition" between his mind and the objective fact, constitutes
adjustment, and is a distinct and real step in his education.
Thus it will be seen that education may be independent of formal
schooling. Indeed, the function of the school and the most that
it can do is to bring the student into more vital contact with his
environment. Beyond this the school cannot go, for "the whole
business is between the individual and his worlds, and the teacher
is outside it, external to it. . . . Within that mysterious syn-
thetic activity through which the individual is at once appro-
priating and contributing to his environment, forming and being
formed by it, and which we are considering under the conception
of adjustment, the teacher has neither place nor part." Even
in the moral adjustment, the teacher is a negative factor. "The
seal and impress of the master should not be found on the boy.
The similitude of moral truth and power, of divinity, yes; but not
the similitude of a finite being."
The theory, of course, is not new, many aspects of it being
found in Rousseau, James, Bergson and others. But synthesized,
for the first time, into a unified and coherent whole, it forms an
important contribution to pedagogy. To educators who have felt
the need of a definite and psychologically sound criterion for
both the purpose and practice of education, the book will prove
invaluable.
THE iESTHETIC MOTIF FROM THALES TO PLATO. A Dis-
sertation for the University of Colorado towards the Degree
of Doctor of Philosophy. By Sister M. Basiline, B.V.M.
New York: Schwartz, Kirwin & Fauss.
"Every judgment is aesthetic, in that it brings a unity out of
the data, and a satisfaction to the investigator." This, the first
statement of the text of the dissertation, is on the right way
towards the notion of beauty, which is subjectively a satisfaction
of the cognitive faculties. It is not the author's purpose to tell
us how this aesthetic satisfaction differs from the satisfaction of
truth. She assumes correctly the cognitive -nature of the satis-
faction, postulates "symmetry, balance, proportion" and other
qualities as the objective elements of beauty, and then cites the
pertinent passages from early Greek philosophers. The evidence
is fragmentary at first and does not afford much "satisfaction to
the investigator," sesthetic or merely cognitive, until Plato ap-
692 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
pears. In Plato the aesthetic motif emerges clearly from cosmog-
ony into metaphysics, ethics and education.
All origins lead us to Greece, not merely because Greece was
the first to speculate and create, but more so because Greece
was fundamental and continues still to furnish modern specula-
tion with theories as well as terminology. Dr. Basiline imposes
a heavier task than ordinary on her readers by using the original
Greek terms, even in cases where there are sanctioned English
terms of almost exact equivalence. Perhaps, the severe science
of a dissertation called for this exactness, but we should like to see
Dr. Basiline build up the material so carefully collected and ar-
ranged into an illuminative essay for a wider circle of readers.
Many incidental and "satisfactory" judgments prove her quite
competent.
Modern aesthetics has lost itself in the subjective and in the
obscure realms of feeling. May this well-printed dissertation
serve to centre thought upon the objective elements of beauty,
which are found in the Greek philosophers, of whom many wrote
in poetry. Plato began as a poet and never lost the beautifying
effect of poetry in his language.
THE CRISIS OF THE CHURCHES. By Leighton Parks. New
York: Charles Scribner*s Sons. $2.50.
Anyone anxious to know what the modernistic Mr. Parks
does not believe, will read this book. As a contribution to religious
thought it is utterly negligible. He says so many things that are
not so, and he says them with such an air of dogmatic cocksure-
ness, that the intelligent reader is apt to toss the book aside after
reading a few pages.
Here are a few of his unproved ipse dixits: "Jesus never
called Himself God. Perhaps He spoke of Himself as the Son of
God — certainly the evangelists so spoke of Him — the perfect man-
ifestation of the eternal as far as such manifestation is possible
in a perfect human being." "Jesus knew nothing of the im-
manence of God.*' "The creeds are a relic of anthropomor-
phism." "Sacramentarianism means a religion of magic." "The
material symbol cannot be a channel of grace." "The Church
is that part of humanity which has learned the meaning of human
life." "The Jesuit theory crushes individuality as an evil thing."
"The Mass, and to a less extent, the Communion, is a relic of
animism." "An ecumenical council is as unthinkable as the
restoration of the Holy Roman Empire."
The author's thesis seems to be: Inasmuch as Protestantism
is hopelessly divided after four hundred years of secession, we
1922.] NEW BOOKS
693
must abandon all idea of any real unity save that of the spirit.
All Protestant churches, orthodox and liberal alike, must con-
fidently set aside all the separatist creeds of the past and, eschew-
ing dogma, unite in a vague fellowship of life and love. Mr.
Parks longs for an Anglican Bishop broad enough to hold a union
service in one of the great Anglican city cathedrals— a service
calling upon every sect of Christendom to agree that all have
equal value in the sight of God.
PIERRE AND LUCE. By Romain Rolland. New York: Henry
Holt & Co.
The companionship of Dame Misery is difficult indeed to
bear when she is unattended by her frequent hand-maidens. Love
and Hope. During the Great War, unhappy France would well-
nigh have perished saving their presence, although it occurred
only in brief intervals. Such an interval Romain Rolland has
depicted in Pierre and Luce, an idyll of longing love which dares
to exult despite the knowledge of certain disaster. In humble
circumstances, Pierre, a poor student, and Luce, artist of inferior
merit, are imbued by Rolland with that sweet gentility which
springs from humility and instinctive purity.
The description of their affection can only be described as a
work of great artistic genius. Like the Romain Rolland of Jean
Christophe and Colasbreugnon, he is powerful here with the
strength of admirable restraint. In Pierre and Luce we are pre-
sented with still another jewel of rare lustre.
Through the skilled translation of Charles De Kay, the ex-
quisite simplicity of the original French persists.
TIDE RIPS. By James B. Connolly. New York: Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons. $1.75.
Readers who have grown weary of the morbid preoccupation
of fiction writers with the neurotic and the unclean, will find a
refreshing relief in Mr. Connolly's latest volume. Nowhere in
the nine tales that comprise the book is there the taint of Freud-
ianism or any of its variations, which, in one form or another,
sullies the pages of much of the fiction published today. But
the present volume merits more than such negative praise.
Mr. Connolly, for many years, has been widely known by
magazine readers as an unsurpassed writer of sea stories, and
Tide Rips will do much to maintain that reputation. With a fine
gusto and vigor, he depicts the rugged virtues of the fishermen
"out of Gloucester," the skippers and the other folk whose lives
are a continual battle with the forces of the sea. "What Price
694 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
for Fish?" *The Sugar Ship," and "Beejum's Progress," each cele-
brates indomitable courage and heroic triumph over the turbulent
deep. "The Rakish Brigantine," with its drollery and romantic
fancy, is quite as enchanting as its title. If in some of the
stories, as *'His Three Fair Wishes'* and "Not Down in the Log,"
the character drawing lacks the subtle, analytic skill of Conrad
and approaches the broad effects of melodrama, few readers will
object, since an excellent narrative element and an atmosphere
full of the breath of the sea make ample compensation.
THE FOLLY OF NATIONS. By Frederick Palmer. New York:
Dodd, Mead & Co. $2.00 net.
If there is anyone qualified to speak upon the subject matter
contained in this volume it is Frederick Palmer. This famous
war correspondent, who had his finger upon the pulse of nations
in crises great and small, has witnessed the bubblings of teapot
tempests and the terrible destruction of international conflagra-
tion. His words, for these reasons, are worth heeding. Not only
did he see the phenomena of many wars, but his trained mind is
able to dig beneath the surface causes and arrive at general con-
clusions from the occurrences he witnessed. Besides, he presents
his facts and inferences in that terse, lucid manner which is
characteristic of the writings of an experienced newspaperman.
The result, therefore, is a volume that is highly entertaining
and abundantly rich in the lessons it points. The author shows
the transitions that have occurred in the passing wars and the
manner in which wars originate. He describes also what he
calls the plague spots of Europe, and shows how they have con-
tributed to the destruction of the welfare of nations.
It would be well if the contents of this book were more widely
known and observed by those responsible for the conduct of our
international relations.
THE MECHANISM OF LIFE IN RELATION TO MODERN
PHYSICAL THEORY. By James Johnstone, D.Sc. New
York: Longmans, Green & Co. $5.25 net.
This very interesting book, which we commend to the atten-
tion of all teachers of philosophy and especially to psychologists,
divides itself into two parts. The first consists of a very excel-
lent and well-illustrated account of the physical processes which
take place in the body. Especially noticeable are the parts re-
lating to the brain and nervous system. The second is a phil-
osophical discussion, of varied aspects, which reveals the fact
that the writer is largely under the spell of Bergson and Einstein.
1922.] NEW BOOKS
695
However, he has some knowledge of philosophy, which is a good
deal more than can be said for most scientific writers. He needs,
however, to learn or to remember what he has learned of logic,
for a more shameless abandonment of logic for a parti pris we
have never met than that which is to be found in the two para-
graphs now to be quoted: "We are convinced that an evolutionary
process has occurred, and that there must, therefore, be absolute
continuity between the human and animal minds" (p. 192). "We
cannot think of a time in the past when the universe did not
exist'* (p. 197). But if it had existed from eternity, it must have
come to an end long ago under the second law of thermodynamics.
Therefore, "we are compelled to postulate that somewhere or
other, or some time or other, the second law of thermodynamics
must reverse itself . . . otherwise we shall be compelled (as Sir
William Thompson was) to postulate a beginning, or creation"
(p. 203). The late Lord Kelvin, here alluded to under his earlier
title, was a not less distinguished man of science than our author
and was certainly a better logician.
PAINTED WINDOWS. By a Gentleman with a Duster. New
York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. $2.50.
The aim of the author (Harold Begbie it is said) is "to dis-
cover a reason for the present rather ignoble situation of the
Church in the affections of men." Christianity is a failure, our
penny a liner tells us, because it still clings to effete dogmas, such
as Original Sin, the Divinity of Christ, the Atonement, the Church
as a divine institution and the like. If you want to see how un-
attractive dogma is to the modern rationalist, or should we say
broadchurchman — stroll into Westminster Cathedral with the
writer and listen to the nonsense given forth with assurance by
that shallow dogmatist and traditionalist. Father Ronald Knox.
He dared speak of the Fall of Man as a certainty; he spoke con-
tinually of a God offended by sin; of a Christ Who was divine,
and Who founded a divine infallible society of which an infal-
lible Pope was the head.
This was too much for our friend, so he smiled at such child-
ishness, and pitied a great intellect that had gone astray once it
had gone over to Rome. The brilliant University man, who had
shown such promise in his youth had become a shallow casuist—
and so, unable to refute his arguments, our intellectual friend at
once proceeds, like the vulgar man in the street, to call names.
The heroes whose portraits he paints are for the most part
English Churchmen who have lost the faith of their fathers, and
teach a creedless, vapid Christianity, indistinguishable from the
696 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
non-Christian unbelief which has rejected its every teaching.
They tell us for example : "The traditions of the first six centuries
are the traditions of the rattle and the feeding bottle;" "the mind
of man (by dogma) was put in fetters as well as his body:'* "the
Church built one prison, the State another;'* "Christians are a
small sect in a pagan society;** the Eucharist means that "men
should take their whole human life, and break it, and give it for
the good of others.'*
Protestant Christianity is certainly a failure when it allows
its professors to hold oflBce in a Christian Church, and deny
without a qualm its divine institutions, laws, dogmas and worship.
THE HOME WORLD, by Francis X. Doyle. (New York: Benziger
Brothers. Cloth, $1.25; paper, 25 cents.) The author points out
the supreme opportunities that lie before us in our homes. It is there
that God wills our earthly happiness to be, and no matter into what
worlds our daily life may lead us, our truest and our best should be
given to our home. He truly says that "the finest gentleman and the
finest lady are to be found at home." There is an inspiring chapter
on the joy of work, and he goes on to show how the struggle of
each day, offered to God, makes the world "nothing more than a
Noe*s Ark of delightful toys, wherewith we win Heaven.*' The need
today for Catholic leaders is imperative, who would carry into public
life for the benefit of a restless world the point of view and the prin-
ciples inculcated in their homes. Now humorous, now pathetic, this
charming book deals with the intimate problems of our daily life in a
cheering and helpful manner, and is evidently the work of a man who
possesses a deep understanding of human nature.
MOTION PICTURES FOR COMMUNITY NEEDS, by Gladys and
Henry Bollman. (New York: Henry Holt & Go.) According to
the author, the aim of this volume is to "place in the hands of the
non-theatrical exhibitor a key to the showing of motion pictures in
such a way that the maximum result may be derived." Inasmuch as
Mr. Bollman has always been in the educational film business, and is
at present the head of a firm which supplies films to universities,
school boards and non-theatrical exchanges, we conclude that his pur-
pose is sincere and his information well founded. The first part of the
book deals with such general subjects as the development of the edu-
cational "movie," production, distribution and government "movies."
The last named is one of the most interesting chapters of the book.
It tells of the films which have been made under the auspices of the
various departments of the United States Government — as the Signal
Corps, which has made available complete and invaluable World War
pictures; the Department of the Interior — Reclamation Service, Bureau
of Education, Bureau of Mines, National Park Service — the Marine
1922.] NEW BOOKS
697
Corps, the Bureau of Navigation, the Army Medical Museum, the Chil-
dren's Bureau, and the Department of Agriculture. The second part of
the book deals with the problems of exhibitors, such as equipment,
lighting effects and audiences. One hundred programmes are sug-
gested in Part III., and mechanical and legal aspects of the problem-
equipment, safety regulations, etc. — constitute the fourth and last part
of the book. There is nothing trivial about the work in substance or
in style. It is not destined to arouse interest in the subject, but for
those already seriously interested it offers a wealth of valuable material.
LUCRETIA LOMBARD, by Kathleen Norris. (Garden City, N. Y.:
Doubleday, Page & Co. $1.75 net.) Here, "a prosperous little
city placed somewhere between Boston and New York, and drawing
its intellectual ideals from one as surely as it drew its fashions and
amusements from the other," forms the background for a potpourri of
emotions. Stephen Winship becomes engaged to his wealthy young
ward, Mimi Warren, whose devotion to her guardian approaches blind
adoration, but finds himself absorbed in a newcomer, Lucretia Lom-
bard. Upon the subsequent action of these two chance acquaintances
depends the none too original plot. The book is essentially right-
minded, but it is also remarkably dull. The persevering reader wiU
encounter a hopeless amount of detail, and of Kathleen Norris, as of
Kathleen Mavourneen, he may, perhaps, be forgiven for asking: "Hast
thou forgotten how soon we must sever?"
THE YELLOW POPPY, by D. K. Broster. (New York: Robert Mc-
Bride & Co.) is a stirring tale of the last days of the French Revo-
lution, when the Chouans of La Vendee, led by a few emigre leaders,
rose against the intolerable tyranny of the Directory. The story
centres about the adventures of the Due de Trelan, disguised as the
Marquis de Kersaint, who tries his utmost to secure the treasures of
Mirabel, his old family estate that has been sequestered by the Revo-
lution. He fights a losing fight against superior numbers, but has the
joy of reunion with his Duchess before the end comes, through Napo-
leon's cynical disregard of a safe-conduct. There are sufficient ro-
mantic happenings to satisfy the most exacting reader.
UNNY'S HOUSE, by E. R. Walker. (New York: Benziger Brothers.
' $2.00.) Though marred by discursiveness and the lack of a def-
inite plan, this is an attractive story. The writer has certain endow-
ments of humor, sympathy and accuracy of observation, which unite
with a pleasant manner of narration to leave in the reader's mind a
willingness to read more from the same pen. The story concerns a
modern English lad whose somewhat desultory stroll through his
teens to young manhood leads, always with the effect of chance, from
irreligion to the very borders of Catholicism. While unremarkaWe
in every way, Ernie is likeable and even charming, and at the ena we
B
698 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
wonder, without excitement, but with real friendliness, what he did
in Canada, and whether St. Anne de Beaupre worked upon him the
miracle we suspect to be forthcoming — possibly in a sequel.
COLLEGE LATIN COMPOSITION, by Professor H. C. Nutting.
(New York: Allyn & Bacon. $1.00.) This is an exceptionally
useful exercise manual written in view of mistakes that most frequently
recur, and designed to prevent the formation of habits that will later
demand correction. A Grammatical Conspectus arranges in orderly
sequence the material gathered from experience with successive classes.
This is followed by Suggestions for Use of Material, while forty-eight
English-Latin exercises, with foot-note helps and general vocabulary,
provide ample matter for practice.
THE MODERN KU KLUX KLAN, by Henry P. Fry. (Boston: Small
Maynard & Co.) This interesting volume gives a full account of
the New York World's exposure and investigation of the un-American
and un-Christian organization known as the Ku Klux Klan. The
author, who knew the workings of this contemptible body from the
inside, is unsparing in his denunciation of its low appeal to group
hatred and group prejudice — of its unfair and lawless attacks on
Catholics, Jews and negroes. The good sense of the American people
will soon laugh it out of existence.
THE LIFE OF SAINT WALBURGA, by Francesca M. Steele. (St.
Louis: B. Herder Book Co. $1.75 net.) This book tells much
about conditions in England in the eighth century; it contains almost
complete resumes of the lives of SS. Willibald, Winnibald and
Lioba; besides profuse allusions to many other holy persons; and it
further includes the translation of a large part of the Hodoeporicon,
or Travels, of St. Willibald. Inevitably, St. Walburga seems to be
crowded out, the comparatively brief passages which deal with her
appear to lack continuity, and fail to make her living and real to the
reader. The book bears signs of painstaking research, its references
are verilBed, and it is carefully written.
MR. PROHACK, by Arnold Bennett. (New York: George H. Doran
Co. $1.75 net.) Dehghtful, is the word that first comes to mind
with the thought of this contribution by the versatile Mr. Bennett; his
latest and one of his best. He has given us a study of London post-
war social transvaluations and readjustments, as exemplified in his
protagonist. Mr. Prohack is a welcome, lovable addition to our
acquaintance, a middle-aged husband and father, whose sudden, un-
expected acquisition of a large fortune forces upon him the consider-
ation of many things not hitherto within the orbit of his personal
experiences. Amid change of circumstance, he remains unchangingly
affectionate, tolerant and shrewd, seeing all in the sunshine of an un-
1922.] NEW BOOKS
699
failing sense of humor; thus, he is able to steer his course without loss
of sympathy or self-respect by unworthy compromise.
The novel has no plot whatever, no momentous crises, no sensa-
tional incidents; nevertheless, when we close this volume of more than
four hundred solidly printed pages, it is with the unusual feeling of
having been agreeably interested from beginning to end.
SAINT BENEDICT, by F. A. Forbes. (New York: P. J. Kenedy &
Sons. $1.00 net.) Many of the well-known anecdotes and legends
of St. Benedict are related in this account of his life, and some less
well-known stories are also given. Yet, though it is announced to be
for the reading of both young and old, it seems questionable whether
young people will find it attractive. The first chapter is dry and
introductory, with no mention of Benedict. The second deals mainly
With incidents, historical and otherwise, which, it is asserted, Benedict
was likely to have heard in his youth; and not until Chapter III.
can he be said to come in person upon the scene. Notwithstanding its
richness of anecdote and legend, the book is disappointing.
THE BRIDGETTINE ORDER, by Benedict WilUamson. (London:
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. 2 s. net.) This httle book
contains a brief sketch of the life of St. Bridget of Sweden, as wife and
mother in her native land, as a widow in Rome during the dark days
of the Great Western Schism, and in the Holy Land where she expe-
rienced the wonderful revelations of Our Lord's Passion. She died
in Rome, and then, for the first time, she was clothed in the habit of
the Order she had founded, by her daughter, St. Catherine.
The second part of the book gives the history of the Bridgettine
Order. The Monastery at Vadstena was the cradle of the new Order.
The Rule provided for both monks and nuns, but the monks have dis-
appeared. The Order spread rapidly throughout Europe, but only
twelve houses remain, and of these only three go back to very early
days.
THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $2.00.) Ever since This Side of
Paradise made its startling first appearance, F. Scott Fitzgerald has
stood forth the flapper's acknowledged chronicler. To make double,
perhaps, remembering Flappers and Philosophers, we should say
triple sure, this somewhat questionable honor, Mr. Fitzgerald has
recently produced The Beautiful and Damned, the story of one who
remained a flapper beyond her time. Hence, the steady downfall of
those two young egotists, Gloria and her husband, Anthony. More
than once in recounting the dismal details of their deterioration, Mr.
Fitzgerald seems a diluted Compton Mackenzie, with the difference
that in Mr. Mackenzie's serious work, at least, there is that essential
quality— orientation. Here there is neither starting place nor goal.
700 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
Mr. Fitzgerald tells a sordid story of the excited gayety in New York,
promoted in large measure by those homeless drifters from out-of-town
who live in her hotels. He neither gets us anywhere, nor attempts
to do so. More and more frequently, one asks one's self: to what end
this vivid picture? In short, Mr. Fitzgerald is a doer of poor things
well. There is amazing ignorance beneath his superficial brilliance,
and, coming into contact with one shallow personality after another,
one asks if Mr. Fitzgerald has ever met true greatness of character.
Yet the writer's gift is his, and he speaks with power. Nevertheless,
because of affectation, his work is artificial rather than artistic.
CALIFORNIAN TRAILS— AN INTIMATE GUIDE TO THE OLD MIS-
SIONS, by Trowbridge Hall. (New York: The Macmillan Co. $2.50.)
The three authorities on the California Missions, Bancroft & Co.,
Hittel, and especially Father Zephyrin Engelhardt, have so thoroughly
exhausted all original sources that little remains to be done along the
line of research. The author does not pretend to compete with them,
and prefers to call himself a "saunterer" along the old Franciscan
trails. This was a term applied to the French Crusaders by those who
did not speak their language, and signified pilgrims to the Holy Land.
The author goes on his modern pilgrimage along the Camino Real —
that famous royal road which led from Mission to Mission, now re-
paired through the efforts of a few devoted men and women — and as
he leisurely journeys, he recalls memories of the past, tales of the
founding of the Missions, biographies of the Padres, interesting bits
of history and tradition. Although, evidently not a Catholic, he has,
on the whole, an appreciation of the sacrificing spirit of the Padres
and a sympathetic attitude towards their work. The result is a pleas-
ing and picturesque book, although the author's style is rather too
rambling and disconnected.
There is a moving account of Father Buckler, who rescued the
Mission of Santa liies from utter ruin, cleaning the debris out with his
own hands, straightening the cracked walls, and roofing it with the
aid of wanderers to whom he had given a night's lodging. "Should
you happily see Father Buckler as the setting sun glorifies his poor
shabby library, seated before the organ, his fingers dreamily running
over the keyboard, you will recognize the kindly soul that has stamped
these lifeless walls of brick and mortar with a living sweetness that
will endure as long as the buildings stand."
SAFEGUARDING AMERICAN IDEALS, by Harry F. Atwood. (Chi-
cago : Laird & Lee, Inc.) There is an unpretentious sincerity
in Mr. Atwood's digest of American traditions, which makes this
little book refreshing reading. A deep and plain-spoken belief in
America's austere past and her responsibilities to the future, is a wel-
come relief from the spurious and windy "patriotism" pf political
rhetoricians, on the one hand, and from hopelessness and cynical dis-
1922.] NEW BOOKS
701
belief, on the other. Unfortunately for the book's possibilities of in-
fluencing a wide circle of readers, it is what may be called a positive,
instead of a practical, analysis; that is, it concerns itself with ideal
desirable results, in the shape of (to quote part of the table of con-
tents) The Moral Home, The Patriotic School, The Spiritual Church,
Individual Rights, Avoidance of Class Consciousness, Unselfish Na-
tionalism, and so forth, rather than with the question of how we, of
the present, may thus re-create the past and come into our destined
heritage.
LIFE AND DEATH OF HARRIETT FREAN, by May Sinclair. (New
York: The Macraillan Co. $1.25.) In this character-study the
writer, with feminine nicety, traces the gradual development of a
child of much natural goodness and extreme sensitiveness. Through-
out life, Harriett Frean grows in worshipful love of her father and
mother. This parent-love is strong and real, as is the spirit of self-
sacrifice which it begets in her, but withal, these traits of character
never mount higher than the natural. In the intimate story of her
life and death, there is not a frank mention of God, and twice only is
there a faint suggestion of things spiritual. It is a painful story for
anyone with the notion of God as the motive of life, and pathetic for
those who have known and loved such as Harriett Frean.
The inevitable strain of melancholy is prominent in the book as
it is in life when God has no part in it. However, the story is told
with interest, dignity and refinement, and is refreshing after the por-
trayals of unconventional and emancipated women that abound in
so much of our contemporary fiction.
FOREIGN PUBLICATIONS.
Concilii Tridentini Epistulse, Vol. X., Pars Prima Collegit, Edidit,
Illustravit, Godofredus Buschbell (B. Herder, Freiburg. $26.00). Dr.
Buschbell in this masterly volume has gathered together over 2,500
letters written concerning the Council of Trent from March 5, 1546,
to the opening of the eighth session, March 11, 1547. These letters
are of great interest to the historian of the Council of Trent. Hundreds
of them have never been printed before. Moreover, the many errors
of the Monumenta Tridentina of Druffel and his continuator Brandi,
have been corrected by a careful going over of the originals. Ihey
give us many clear-cut portraits of the officials of both Church and
State who took part in the Conciliar proceedings, and afford us many a
sidelight on both the doctrinal and discipHnary decrees Passed in the
first eight sessions of the Council. But hundreds of/^^se letters are
concerned, not with the proceedings of fe Council itself but yith
the continued opposition to the plans of the Pope and the Legates by
the Emperor, the King of France and the political B^^hops of the time
Some of the Bishops present held the false theory of Constance and of
Basle that a General Council was superior to the Pope, and /hey tried
their utmost to have the words, "Representing the Universal Church
inserted in the title of the Council at the head of each decree In tms
of course, they were not successful. The gratitude of scholars tt^e
world over is due to the Gorres Society for the publishing of this
702 NEW BOOKS [Aug.,
monumental history of the Council of Trent, six volumes of which —
there will be twelve in all — have now been published. It is the last
word in scholarship and, without question, is the most important work
undertaken by Catholic scholars in the past century.
From P. Marietti, Turin: Commentarium in Codicem Juris Canon-
ici ad Usum Scholariim. De Personis, by Rev. G. Cocchi, CM. 2 vols.
(17 /r.) In this excellent commentary on the first and second sec-
tions of the second book of the code of canon law, the matter is well
arranged, the definitions clear cut, the explanations detailed, and the
references most copious. Caeremoniale Missse Privatas, by Rev. Felice
Zualdi, P.G.M. (4 /r.) Father Salvatore Capoferri of the Roman
Pontifical Academy of Liturgy has brought out a new edition — the
seventh — of Father Zualdi's well-known manual. It is in accord with
the latest edition of the Roman Missal and the latest decrees of the
Sacred Congregation of Rites.
L'Evangile de Notre-Seigneur Jesus-Christ, le Fils de Dieu, by
Rev. Dom Paul Delatte, Abbe de Solesmes (Tours: Maison Alfred
Mame et Fils.) Here we possess, without scientific apparel, the
sequence of events in the life of Our Lord obtained by arranging, com-
paring and blending the narrative of the Four Gospels. The Abbe of
Solesmes has condensed the wealth of very traditional, very living and,
at the same time, very personal teaching. Instead of offering souls the
meagre pasture of dry exegesis, he makes them straightway taste the
incomparable charm of the inspired word; he initiates them into the
letter and spirit of the Gospel with the tact, distinction and solicitude
for beauty characteristic of the great Benedictine training. Perhaps a
future edition will be enriched with maps and an alphabetical index
of contents, which would greatly facilitate the serviceableness of the
work.
From P. Tequi, Paris: Le Regne de la Conscience, by Monsigneur
Gibier (Qfr.), treats of the necessity of a well-formed conscience
for the accomplishment of any lasting good, whether in the scientific,
political or moral order. L'Ideal Nouveau et la Religion, by Monsignor
Herscher (3 /r. 50), treats of the necessity of religion for the stabiliza-
tion of society.
Les Penseurs d'Islam, by Baron Carra de Vaux (Paris: Paul
Geuthner. 12 /r. 50), is a noteworthy attempt to popularize the liter-
ature and life of the Orient. Sainte Gertrude. Sa Vie Interieure, by
Dom Gilbert Dolan, O.S.B. (Paris: P. Lethielleux. 6/r.) The nuns
of the Abbey of St. Scholastica of Dourgne have given us a perfect
translation of Dom Dolan's Life of St. Gertrude of Helfta, the well-
known Benedictine mystic of the thirteenth century (1256-1302), con-
sulting always the original Latin text of the saint, especially the
difficult Legatus Divinas Pietatis — The Herald of Divine Love — so often
quoted in these pages. Une Ame Forte, by Urbain Crohare (Lesbordes,
Tarbes. 3 fr.), is the life of rugged beauty and simplicity of the Vener-
able Michel (joricoits, founder of the Fathers of the Sacred Heart of
Jesus of Betharram, told with charm and spiritual appeal.
Le Recit du Pelerin, by Eugene Thibaut, S.J. (Louvain, Belgium).
This first French translation of the notes of Pere Louis Gonzales, while
by no means biographical, give us word for word those intimacies
always so interesting, of the human side of a saint. The book will
prove of greatest interest, however, to those already familiar with a
Life of St. Ignatius. Le Musee Saint Jean Berchmans, a Louvain
(8/r.), contains a full description, with photographs of the many
relics, pictures and documents relative to St. John Berchmans, which
were gathered at Louvain from all parts of Europe. A concluding
chapter contains a complete bibliography of the lives of the saint.
TRecent Events,
Despite its evident reluctance, the French
France. Government finally decided to attend the
Conference at The Hague, which held its
opening session on June 15th. The meetings of the first two
weeks were taken up with the formation of sub-committees and
the formation of a general programme preliminary to the admis-
sion of the Russian delegation, who did not arrive till June 26th.
The Russians from the outset took up the position held by them
at Genoa as expressed in their memorandum of May 11th, namely,
a demand for a loan or credit, raising the amount, however, from
the $1,000,000,000 demanded by Tchitcherin to $1,600,000,000.
To date, the Conference has revolved around this point without
progress, the delegates of the Powers taking the stand that if, and
only if, the Russians recognized their obligations, would they have
any chance of obtaining credits, while the Russians hold that the
Soviets would recognize their debts only on condition that they
first received credits.
The latest development of the situation, one offering only a
slight probability of escape from the impasse stated, is the sug-
gestion of the Russian delegate, Krassin, that the discussion be
put into hypothetical form, that is, the Russians to discuss what
they could do provided credit was forthcoming, and the Powers
to discuss what credits might be found provided a guarantee were
given by the Russians.
The outlook for the success of the negotiations at this writing
is extremely unfavorable, the general opinion being that the Rus-
sians are disclosing an absolute lack of good will. They proclaim
openly that whatever they do, they will do as expedient, not
because they think it right.
As forecast in these notes last month, the Committee of In-
ternational Bankers, meeting at Paris, adjourned towards the
middle of July after announcing that as the reparation situation
stood, it was not feasible to float an international loan for Ger-
many. This action was taken because of the French refusal to
sanction discussion of changes in the reparation payments. M.
Sergent, the French member of the Bankers' Committee, refused
to sign the Committee's finding on the ground that it was an
unfair reflection on the French point of view. The Committee
704 RECENT EVENTS [Aug.,
had originally planned to adjourn for three months, but at their
final session the bankers announced that they would meet again
at the call of the Reparations Commission when there had been
any changes in the situation, which seemed to make a new dis-
cussion worth while. The bankers set forth that while they
intended to undertake no discussion of Inter-Allied indebtedness,
there existed the necessary connection between the claims of the
Allied Governments and their debts.
On June 13th the French Senate voted an advance of 55,000,-
000 francs to Austria, after a sharp debate, in which some of the
speakers severely criticized the Treaty of Versailles in respect
to its mutilation of Austria. This action followed the declaration
of Premier Poincare that it was necessary to go to Austria's aid
at this time to keep her from falling into the hands of Germany.
He quoted from a report sent by the French Minister in Vienna
and from a letter written by Baron Eichoff, the Austrian Minister
in Paris, showing that these diplomats agreed that anarchy or
absorption by Germany threatened Austria if she were not im-
mediately relieved.
On the day following this action by the French Senate, the
Allies' Council of Ambassadors decided to request the few remain-
ing Governments having claims against Austria which have not
yet been renounced, to withhold these claims for a period of
twenty years. By such a universal moratorium, it is hoped to
apply the credit system which has been elaborated for the restor-
ation of the former dual monarchy. Since then, the Austrian
Government has sent the Reparations Commission a note asking
the immediate release of her revenues, such as customs, State
monopolies and other assets, including mines and forests, so
that she may use these as collateral for a foreign loan.
At the end of June, the Council of Ambassadors decided to
recognize Lithuania. No representative of the United States par-
ticipated in this decision, nor in the discussion which preceded
the action of the Council. Opinion was withheld on the part of
the United States Government, leaving it to take whatever attitude
it saw fit later.
Although the naval agreement and other treaties included at
the Washington Conference have been ratified both by England
and Japan, present indications are that these will not be laid
before the French Parliament for ratification before the summer
adjournment, which is due July 14th. This means that, at the
earliest, ratification will not take place until late in the fall, and
it may even then be delayed. The reason for the delay is the
opposition to the naval treaty by certain members of the Chamber
1922.] RECENT EVENTS 795
of Deputies' Commission, whose task it is to prepare a report on
It and lay it before the Chamber for guidance and discussion
Both M. Pomcare's Government and a majority in the Chamber
are anxious for ratification as soon as possible, but in the face
of the opposition which has developed in this Commission, they
are powerless to speed action.
Considerable objection has been raised both by Christians and
Moslems against the plan whereby, under a British mandate.
Palestine will become the Jewish home land. The Holy See has
sent communications both to the Government of Great Britain
and to the League of Nations, in which, while readily agreeing
that the Jews in Palestine must have equal civil rights with other
nationalities, it cannot consent to the Jews enjoying a privileged,
preponderant position over the other nationalities or faiths, or to
the rights of Christians being insufficiently safeguarded. On
June 21st the British House of Lords, by a vote of 60 to 29,
practically endorsed the Papal objection, in spite of the eloquent
contradiction made by the Earl of Balfour as Acting Foreign
Minister. When the debate was raised in the House of Commons,
however, on July 4th, though sharply attacked, the Government
policy was sustained by a vote of 292 to 35. At present, the Holy
See is making strenuous efforts to save for Christianity, if not all
Palestine, at least the sanctuary of the "Cenaculum" in Jerusalem,
where the Last Supper took place.
The French, Italian and United States Governments have ac-
cepted in principle the proposals of the British Government for
an inquiry into the alleged atrocities in Asia Minor, but certain
modifications suggested are under consideration. Meanwhile,
fighting between the Turkish Nationalist forces and the Greeks
has become largely a matter of petty skirmishes, and it is the
opinion of Allied military observers in Constantinople that no
serious military campaign is likely to be launched this summer by
either the Greeks or the Turks. The Greeks have great numer-
ical superiority on the front line, but the opinion is that this
superiority is not sufficient to justify an offensive, in view of the
difficulties of the terrain. The present Greek force is estimated
at 110,000 men, while the Turks number 70,000.
The outstanding feature of the closing session of the League
of Nations Disarmament Commission at Paris on July 7th was
the announcement by Dr. Bivas Vicufia, Chilean Ambassador at
Paris, that Chile would demand that the whole question of world
disarmament, both naval and military, be included in the agenda
of the Fifth Pan-American Conference, to be held next March
in Santiago. The basis of discussion, he said, will be the Wash-
VOL. cxv. 45
706 RECENT EVENTS [Aug.,
ington naval accords and the work of the Commission of the
League, which has been gathering disarmament data for the last
eight months. According to this data, which will be presented at
the League general assembly next September, Europe is now
spending more on armaments than in 1913, and this notwith-
standing that Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria are prac-
tically disarmed, and despite the Washington Disarmament Con-
ference. In League of Nations' circles at Genoa, it is alleged that
America is the largest vendor of arms and ammunition, and sells
these especially to countries where slavery still persists, thus
making it impossible for civilized countries to abolish it. As for
the lessening of European armaments, France is accused of per-
sistently putting obstacles in the way of the League's Armaments
Commission.
On June 29th the French Chamber of Deputies finally passed
the Recruiting Bill, which fixes the period of active service in the
army at eighteen months. The vote was 400 to 202. The bill
now goes to the Senate. As passed by the Chamber, it provides
that, in addition to eighteen month's active service, soldiers may
be called back to the colors, if necessary, any time during two and
a half years after the completion of their regular service, after
which they are to remain sixteen years in reserve for service in
France and ten years more in reserve for territorial service.
Subscription books were opened June 26th by the French
Minister of Finance for another loan in the series being issued by
the Government to obtain funds for reconstruction purposes. The
new credit will total 3,200,000,000 francs and bear six per cent,
interest. It will be issued at ninety-nine and three-fifths, and be
payable at one hundred and three, with various optional matur-
ities.
On June 30th the American Red Cross completed its active
work in France and disbanded its organization. The forces which
started operation in Paris in June, 1917, and rapidly grew into an
organization of 7,500, has been gradually withdrawn during the
last two years until at the last only eighty were left. Since 1917
the Red Cross has aided 1,700,000 French refugees, treated 250,-
000 French in hospitals and dispensaries, and succored 87,650
French families. They also have subsidized 847 tuberculosis hos-
pitals. The work has been effected at a cost of $140,000,000.
In Paris, there are 235,863 widows and 50,892 widowers.
These figures, which have been extracted from the recent census
returns, show more clearly than anything else what the War cost
the French capital. Among the unwed, too, there is a majority
of 100,000 women out of a total of both sexes of 1,200,000, Men
1922.] RECENT EVENTS
707
who have been divorced by their wives number 16.700, while
divorced women living in the capital total the much bieeer figure
of 28,700. ^
On the morning of June 23d, Dr. Walter
Germany. Rathenau, German Foreign Minister and
former Minister of Reconstruction, was
shot and killed by two or more unknown assassins while on his
way from his residence to the Foreign Office. Dr. Rathenau,
regarded as probably the ablest man in the Wirth Cabinet, with
a decisive influence in shaping the Government's policy with
respect to reparations and other important questions affecting the
outside world, was much disliked by the monarchist elements,
and also by the Nationalist Party, which objected to his policies
and were prejudiced against his Jewish extraction. Besides his
political importance. Dr. Rathenau was also notable for his
eminent position in the industrial world, being the head of the
German General Electric Company and one of the wealthiest men
in Germany. In addition, he had won distinction as a writer,
one of his books, printed also in English, running into more than
sixty-five editions. In politics, he was a Socialist. The police
have definitely identified the assassins, three in number, but to
date have apprehended only one. The accused are supposed to
be members of the monarchist and anti-Semitic organization
"Council," with ramifications throughout Germany, and former
members of the brigade of Captain Ebrhardt, who last year
planned the overthrow of the Ebert Government and whose name
was mentioned in connection with the assassination of Mathias
Erzberger.
On July 3d an attempt was made, apparently by members of
the same organization, to assassinate Maximilian Harden, the
well-known German publicist and editor of Die Zukunft, by
stabbing and blackjacking. Though severely wounded, he was
not killed.
As a result of the Rathenau murder. President Ebert promul-
gated a drastic supplementary ordinance whereby, under the
emergency clause of the Republic's Constitution, "all persons who
participate in meetings or associations of which they know the
purpose to be to eliminate by death a member of the Government
or a member of a former Republican Government, shall be pun-
ished by death or life imprisonment; likewise, persons who finan-
cially aid such associations or organizations." This marks an-
other important advance in the Wirth Government's offensive
against reaction under the slogan: "In Defence of the Republic."
708 RECENT EVENTS [Aug.,
For several days preceding, rumors were current that on July
4th there would be a massing of royalist elements in Berlin with
a probability of clashes between them and the workers and rad-
icals who were to hold a demonstration on that day. These
rumors were greatly fostered by the Berlin newspaper strike, the
striking printers permitting only the circulation of socialistic and
communistic organs. As a matter of fact, the day passed without
disorder, the reactionaries and monarchists being cowed by a
monster demonstration, when more than 100,000 organized
workers, radicals, Socialists and Communists paraded through
the streets of Berlin "for the Republic."
On June 17th a Committee on Guarantees appointed by the
Reparations Commission left Paris for Berlin to organize the
control of the receipts and expenditures of Germany, to study
questions connected with the abusive export of capital and exam-
ine statistics, as outlined by the Reparations Commission. The
Committee is composed of the chiefs of the financial services of
all the Allied delegations to the Reparations Commission. On
July 6th they made their first report to the Reparations Commis-
sion, the gist of which was that Germany is on the verge of being
engulfed by a social and economic catastrophe which will shake
Europe to its very foundations. Marks have broken away from
all control, falling on July 7th to 535 marks for a dollar, and ac-
cording to the belief of the Commission, its final collapse will be
the signal for the stoppage of reparation payments, disorder for
the financial and commercial equilibrium of Europe and the con-
fusion of German industry.
The present economic and financial crisis is largely due to
the failure of the Bankers' Conference, for the success of which
the Germans had been ardently hoping. According to latest ad-
vices, representatives of the German Government, on July 10th,
informed the President of the Reparations Commission that the
financial situation of Germany had reached such a desperate state
that cash payments of the indemnity would soon become impos-
sible.
Members of the Commission have indicated that they believe
the immediate reason for the present German financial situation
is the failure of Germany to end the wholesale printing of paper
marks and the widespread exportation of capital from the country.
In other circles, however, the opinion seems to be gaining ground
daily that the fundamental reason for the German financial chaos
lies in the total of the reparations required, 132,000,000,000 gold
marks, which is regarded in many quarters as being impossibly
high.
1922.] RECENT EVENTS
709
On the other hand, it has been made clear France will not
consent to an adjustment of the total indemnity to what would
be regarded as a reasonable figure, until there is a definite settle-
ment of the whole question of the Inter- Allied debts, which either
would result in cancellation or lead to indefinite postponement of
payments. It is held in France that that country cannot possibly
pay her debt to the United States under present conditions.
France, it is declared, probably would agree to a material reduc-
tion of the German indemnity, if there were such a readjustment
of the Inter-Allied obligations, and belief was expressed that,
sooner or later, this idea would have to be laid before the Amer-
ican Government.
On June 21st the German authorities began taking over from
the Inter-Allied Commission the second zone of Upper Silesia,
retained by Germany under the partition treaty. On the preced-
ing day, the Poles completed their occupation of the first zone,
and on June 24th took over the third zone, also allotted to Poland.
Flags on official buildings throughout Germany were flown at
half-mast as a sign of mourning for Germany's lost territory.
According to data in German newspapers, the division of the pleb-
iscite region by the League of Nations transferred 196,005 in-
dustrial workers from German to Polish sovereignty, leaving only
73,152 under the German flag. Of the 173.859 anthracite coal
miners, 43,232 remain German citizens, while 130,625 become
Polish, and of the 63,134 iron smelter workers, 39,697 go to
Poland. Both before and after the occupation, several clashes
occurred at various points between civilians and French troops, in
one of which fifteen people were killed and twenty-five wounded.
As a result of these clashes, Chancellor Wirth, on July 6th, issued
an appeal to the German population of Upper Silesia to refrain
from molesting Inter-Allied troops during the evacuation of the
province.
On June 16th the British Government officially asked Ger-
many whether she would be willing to submit a request to join
the League of Nations at the third League Assembly next Sep-
tember. Germany has replied that she is prepared to submit such
a request, provided she is assured that no special conditions will
be laid down concerning her joining and that she immediately
receives a seat on the League Council. It is understood that
France will raise no opposition to Germany's becoming a member
of the League and attending its Assembly, but is opposed to her
sitting on the Council. Germany, however, insists on having full
League membership or equality with Great Britian, France, Italy
and Japan; otherwise she declines to apply for membership.
710 RECENT EVENTS [Aug.,
On July 4th the Treaty of Rapailo, signed between Germany
and Russia during the Genoa Conference and negotiated by the
late Foreign Minister, Dr. Rathenau, was ratified by the Reichstag.
There was no debate over the question of ratification.
The 150,000 freight cars and 5,000 locomotives delivered to
France by Germany since the armistice have already been re-
placed by new material according to a Swiss delegate, who has
recently been in attendance at a technical conference of railway
men at Berlin. So extraordinary has been the progress in the
construction of rolling stock in Germany, this expert says, that
by August German railways will be as well equipped as they were
at the outbreak of the War, so far as the quantity of rolling stock
is concerned, while the quality will be superior.
On July 6th the Petrograd Revolutionary
Russia. Tribunal, in session at Moscow, sentenced
to death the Petrograd Metropolitan, Ben-
jamin, Archbishop Sergius, Bishop Benedict, canons of three of
the largest churches in Petrograd, and Professors Ognieff and
Novitsky, for interfering with the seizure of church treasures.
Fifty-three others had previously been sentenced to various terms
of imprisonment on the same charge. Twenty-two who had been
accused were acquitted. The trial lasted more than three weeks.
The Tribunal decided to transfer to Petrograd the proceedings
against the Patriarch Tikhon, in whose behalf the Holy See, the
Archbishop of Canterbury, and various foreign religious bodies
had pleaded.
Meanwhile, the trial of the thirty-four Social Revolutionists
charged with sedition, which began on June 8th, is still proceed-
ing. During the first week of the trial, the prisoners were de-
fended by three foreign Socialist lawyers, Emile Vandervelde,
former Minister of Justice of Belgium, and Theodore Liebknecht
and Kurt Rosenfeld of Germany, but these quickly withdrew from
the trial as a protest against what they considered the unfair con-
ditions under which the proceedings were conducted. They were
succeeded by Russian counsel, who in turn withdrew from the
case, after a vain attempt to have new judges and a new pros-
ecutor appointed. At present the accused are represented by one
lawyer, a young woman. Messrs. Vandervelde, Liebknecht and
Rosenfeld have issued a statement appealing to the workmen of
all countries to protest against the punishment by death of the
defendants. The Socialist Federation of Buenos Aires has sent
a resolution to the Russian authorities and also to Arthur Hender-
son, British Member of Parliament and Secretary of the Second
1922.] RECENT EVENTS
711
International, saying, that the execution of the accused men
would be contrary to the ideas of advanced civilization. The
defendants are accused, among other things, of betraying the
Russian revolution, of assisting Kolchak and Denikin and of
conspiring to assassinate Lenine, Trotzky and other Bolshevik
leaders.
Premier Lenine, about the nature of whose illness many and
varied rumors have been in circulation for some time, is now
reported to be out of danger. From an authoritative source, it
seems that the basic trouble is weakness of the digestive and
assimilative processes, with an accompanying nervous breakdown.
His condition at present is described as one of slow improvement,
but he is not expected to be able to resume work for several
months. The Council of Commissars has granted him a leave of
absence till autumn. Meanwhile, M. Rikoff and M. Tsurupoff
have taken over the technical duties of the Premier's office, while
Leon Trotzky, Minister of War, and Leo Kameneff, President of
the Moscow Soviet, are reported to be acting as an advisory direc-
torate.
On July 5th authoritative advices reached Washington to the
effect that Trotzky had massed 350,000 troops on the Polish and
Rumanian frontiers. The total strength of the Soviet armies is
estimated at approximately 1,500,000 men, inclusive of 125,000
of the so-called Cheka, or Secret Service troops. About one-half
of the 350,000 mentioned are concentrated on the Polish border,
with 125,000 on the Rumanian border and the remainder in the
Karkoff area. The best information available indicates that these
concentration movements were begun originally as an implied
threat toward Europe, at the time of the Genoa Conference, and
have been continued with the intention of giving Soviet Russia
a more impressive voice in the present exchanges at The Hague.
Despite the fact that milita^ experts consider no extensive
operations will be undertaken at this time by the Soviet Govern-
ment, considerable alarm has been aroused in Poland and
Rumania. On June 23d the Polish Government sent a vigorous
protest against an invasion of Polish territory by bands of Bol-
shevik troops, and earlier in the month the Rumanian Govern-
ment sent a formal communication to the Conference at The
Hague, declaring that Soviet Russia had violated the non-aggres-
sion compact entered into at Genoa by sending propaganda into
Rumania by airplane.
All this follows a proposal for a disarmament conference
made early in June by the Russian Government to the Baltic
States— Latvia, Esthonia and Finland— and to Poland, a proposal
712 RECENT EVENTS [Aug.,
which was rejected on June 30th, when the Polish, Finnish and
Latvian Governments replied with a declaration that no agree-
ment to reduce arms could be made until Russia fulfilled her
obligations entered into by peace treaties with those countries.
According to the American Relief Administration, the Volga
famine has been definitely brought under control. Taking Rus-
sia as a whole, Soviet estimates show that there will be a surplus
of grain this year, and as soon as the new crops are harvested,
Soviet officials say it is probable that Russia will be able to export
some grain. It is officially estimated at present that Russia's
1922 grain crops will reach a minimum of 3,500,000,000 poods
(63,000,000 tons), or 1,000,000,000 poods more than those of last
year. However, some foreign relief, in the form of child feeding,
aid to invalids and assistance in the rehabilitation of peasants
striken by the famine, is still necessary.
Official notification has been given the American Govern-
ment by the Government of Japan of the latter's intention to
withdraw its armed forces from the maritime provinces of Siberia
by the end of next October. More than almost any other single
act, this withdrawal from Siberia is expected to be conducive to
establishing the belief among Americans that Japan had definitely
abandoned aggressive policies and intends to fulfill its Washing-
ton pledges.
According to an announcement by the Soviet Government on
June 28th, the Japanese Government, which last month broke off
negotiations with the Chita Government at Dairen, has expressed
a wish to re-open pourparlers with Russia. On the other hand, a
cablegram has been received, by the special trade delegation of
the Far Eastern Republic in Washington, that a German mission
has arrived at Chita and been received by the Minister of Foreign
Affairs of the Far Eastern Republic. The object of the German
mission is stated to be the investigation of economic conditions in
the Far Eastern Republic, and the effecting of a rapprochement
between the Russian Far East and Germany.
President Merkulov, who, on June 2d, was deposed by the
Constituent Assembly as President of the Priamur Government at
Vladivostok, has resumed his place as head of the central Govern-
ment. Trouble originally arose over the order of the Government
for the dissolution of the Priamur Constituent Assembly, which
refused to submit and made an effort to organize a new Govern-
ment, supported by a part of the divided military forces. The
Presidency was offered to General Diedricks, but he refused to
accept the position and swung his influence to the reinstatement
of Merkuloflf.
1922.] RECENT EVENTS
713
A great sensation was caused in Italian
Italy. political circles on June 15th, when the
Moderate Socialist deputies, numbering be-
tween eighty and one hundred, decided to adopt a policy of par-
ticipation in the Government. The move was looked upon as en-
tailing another disintegration of the parliamentary groups, since
the Socialist group, which up to now has been the largest and
the most compact, has finally succumbed to division. For some
time, the Moderate Socialists have been favoring the Catholic
Party, and it is now predicted in some quarters that these two
groups will combine to overthrow the present Administration,
which is looked upon as a Giolitti combination under Premier
Facta, the Catholics being still disgruntled with former Premier
Giolitti over the fall of the Bonomi Government, which desired
officially to recognize the death of the late Pope Benedict.
What makes the decision of the Moderates particularly re-
markable, is the fact that it is contrary to the official stand of the
party's National Council, which has held to an intransigeant
policy of non-participation in Government. To settle the differ-
ences between the Deputies and the party's National Council, a
special party convention will be called during the summer. Mean-
while, a significant step, and one perhaps forecasting the decision
to be made by the Council, was the action of the Italian Socialist
Party and the Confederation of Labor through their representa-
tives at a joint meeting at Genoa on July 4th, whereby they voted
in favor of the principle of collaboration with the Italian mon-
archy. The vote was 537,351 to 499,991. A resolution in favor
of Communism was defeated.
From a recent statement by the ItaUan Finance Minister, it
appears that during the last eighteen months Italy has reduced
its paper circulation by 2,500,000,000 lire. It was also shown in
banking statements that the Italian Government had for the three
preceding months been able to dispense with the issue of Treasury
bonds. The yield of the direct taxes, recently imposed in Italy,
was estimated to be nine times the product of similar pre-war
taxes.
On the other hand, Minister of the Treasury Peano, in a
report to the Council of Ministers, on July 6th, announced that
the deficit for 1921-22 would be at least 6,500,000.000 lire, and
forecast that the deficit for 1922-23 would amount to 4,000,000,000
lire. The ministers considered it impossible to impose further
taxes on a greatly burdened country, but decided that the present
system of taxation should be revised to prevent anyone from es-
caping payment of the proper amount. It was also agreed to
714 RECENT EVENTS [Aug.,
effect drastic cuts in Government expenditures, in the hope of
reducing next year's expected deficit.
In dispatches from Rome, on July 7th, it was announced that
a new "Council for the General Work of the Propagation of the
Faith" has been formed, this being a development of the century-
old French Catholic mission centre at Lyons, which was trans-
ferred to Rome by Pope Pius XI. shortly after his election. All
the nations are represented in the new council, the President of
which is Monsignor Fumasoni Biondi. The representative of the
United States is Monsignor O'Hern, rector of the American Col-
lege in Rome; of South America, Monsignor Riera; England,
Monsignor Prior, and Canada, Monsignor Lajoie.
The Fascisti still continue their activities. At Trieste, early
in June, a number of Fascisti and Republicans seized the Italian
steamer Argentina and prevented carabineers and Royal Guards
from boarding the liner. The steamer was due to sail, but this
occurrence prevented her from putting to sea. The cause of this
interference was the strike in progress among longshoremen,
seamen and port workers because of a reduction in wages.
Frequent clashes occurred between the Fascisti and the Com-
munist workmen over the strike policy to be followed. On June
18th Fascisti set fire to the Labor Exchange at Reggio shortly
after a visit of King Victor Emmanuel, and on July 4th another
band occupied the town of Andria, near Bari, replacing the red
flag by the national colors over the public buildings. Reports of
Fascisti outbreaks, however, must be accepted with the caution
that they are incidents out of the ordinary and may be no more
representative of general conditions in Italy than reports of Ku
Klux Klan outrages, cabled abroad, would give a true picture of
conditions in America.
A Tripoli dispatch of June 14th says that Arab rebels in the
Italian colony in Tripolitania met with a severe reverse at the
hands of the Italian garrison when the latter captured the outpost
of Giose. On June 29th a large force of Tripolitan rebels was
defeated by Italian troops in a sanguinary battle near Azizian.
The rebel casualties were given as several hundred killed or
wounded, while the Italian forces lost seventeen native soldiers
killed and one officer wounded. Large quantities of arms and
ammunition were abandoned by the rebels.
July 13, 1922.
With Our Readers
IN an account of the recent Eucharistic Congress at Rome, given
1 us by the London Tablet, the correspondent quotes this re-
mark of a Jewish financier: "What is certain." he said, "is that
what we have seen at Rome surpasses what we have seen else-
where, at Paris, Washington, San Remo, Cannes, Spa or Genoa.
For in those congresses of many nations of opposing views one
had the impression of living in the ephemeral and contingent,
one had to build more or less on sand, or at best on piles. Rut
here we have the feeling of a work of enormous import, long
prepared, with its foundations deep in the ages of the past and its
cupola in the future." The thought here stated, inspiration of the
wonderful religious gathering in the City of the Popes, is worthy
of the attention of the many who look to the best interests of
humanity. The contrast between the ephemeral and the lasting
finds an almost universal application; and the understanding of
their respective values at least suggests a solution to many prob-
lems or a guidance in the way of difiBculties.
* * * *
ACONTRIRUTOR to one of our literary papers recently la-
mented the passing from our writings of the references to
the Greek and Roman classics : he lamented likewise the disuse of
Biblical references and Biblical terms and the evil effect of this
cessation upon our language, spoken and written. The vigor,
the simplicity, the beauty of Scriptural English were fast disap-
pearing; the English of the Bible was becoming unknown because
the Bible was not being read and studied as in the past. We had
forgotten that the great classics of our language were born of our
strong Biblical English. Do we not find that the literary produc-
tions of the day die while those of the sturdier past live on?
Do we not find that in most of our modern writing there is a
predominance of the ephemeral, and that we rarely find those ele-
ments that partake of the eternal and that give promise of lasting
existence.
* * ♦ ' *
OR, to glance in another direction, is not the same contrast
drawn and the same characteristic lamented in regard to the
field and the manner of our present-day education? Mr. Hughes,
Secretary of State, speaking before the National Education Asso-
ciation, had this to say: "As the restraints we believe to be impor-
716 WITH OUR READERS [Aug.,
tant to our security and progress must be self-imposed, there is no
reason why we should entertain the delusion that democracy will
confer blessings except in so far as it represents the rule of an
intelligent and cultured people.
"We cannot fail to be gratified by the evidence on every hand
of an increased demand for educational opportunity, and it is
most encouraging to observe the extraordinary efforts that are
being made, especially in the field of higher education, to provide
new facilities. Public funds are available to an unprecedented
extent, while the outpourings of private benevolence have gone
beyond anything that we have hitherto deemed to be possible.
But it is also apparent that there is much confusion with respect
to standards and aims, and that there will be little gain in con-
sidering the mechanism of education until we have reexamined
the more fundamental needs.
"It is not likely that there will be lack of opportunity for
vocational education, for the sort of training which will fit men
and women to earn a living. The exigencies of our complex life
are too apparent and the rewards too obvious to admit of neglect :
and we shall have whatever vocational or technical schools are
required. But democracy cannot live on bread alone. It is not
enough that one shall be able to earn a living, or a good living.
This is the foundation, but not the structure. What is needed is
to have life more abundantly.
"From the standpoint of the individual, the exclusively mate-
rialistic view is inadmissible, for the individual life should be
enriched with the ampler resources of a wider culture."
The voice of Secretary Hughes is the voice of all too few,
but it is the voice of the saner educators who realize that in the
training of youth it is not the ephemeral that counts, but it is the
lasting: it is the understanding of those fundamental principles
of life and conduct that are as old as the human race. Ever old,
yet ever new, these principles have their universal application,
and are an absolute need to every mind no matter how specialized
the form of its development. Every educator who needs to be
convinced of this truth, would do well to familiarize himself with
Cardinal Newman's classic. The Idea of a University.
* * * *
IN a very marked way, this contrast impresses itself upon us
when we read the frequent lucubrations put forth today on the
delicate and important subject of mysticism. Mysticism has be-
come, in certain circles, the fashion. The fact has its good side.
It also has its dangerous side. It is good to know that many
souls crave a spirituality and an understanding of their soul's
1922.] WITH OUR READERS 717
relationship with God. It is not so good to be compelled to
realize, as we must when we read much that is published on this
subject, that a concomitant vagueness of treatment and a lack of
definite and eternal principles constitute a real danger to the un-
initiated. While many books on this topic are now being pub-
lished, and while the more serious magazines devote many pages
to it, the result to the general reader is bound to be confusing
and disconcerting. This, no doubt, is largely due to the varying
definitions of mysticism that are offered, but it is also in great
measure due to the adaptation of the subject to the ideas and
trends of thought that are peculiarly ephemeral, the products of
one day, to die in the next. There is the failure to realize that
mysticism, in the true and fundamental concept of it, must have
existed in all those days in which there have been souls that
sought God intensely and unselfishly. Any brand of mysticism
that is offered becomes ephemeral when it is lacking in those
fundamental elements which were the very rocks of foundation
upon which the structure of the soul's mounting was built by the
saints of old.
The attempts at explanation that ignore the fact of creation
and the relationship thus established between the created soul
and its Maker; that ignore the fact of the Incarnation and the
consequent establishment of an intimate understanding between
the redeemed and the Redeemer; that ignore the fact of the King-
dom of Christ established on earth and the resultant guidance of
a divine nature, cannot but be ephemeral, to pass with the pass-
ing day. These great facts are the permanent and lasting ele-
ments that give meaning to the mystic way and safe certainty to
those who walk in that way.
* * * *
FOR a long time, too, the same contrast between the ephemeral
and the lasting has asserted itself in practically all the phases
of religious thinking and religious preaching. The tendency in
many Christian pulpits and in many so-called Christian writings,
has been to deal with the topics and problems of the day not in
the light of eternal principles, but with the deliberate disregard
for such principles and with the employment of only the super-
ficial and passing theories of the moment.
We must indeed have progress in thought and action. We
must recognize that our own day has its own difficulties as well
as its own life. We must be thoroughly alive to the necessity of
meeting them in a modern way. This is all true, but at the same
time we must realize that running through all the phases of life
and conduct there are unchangeable elements, fundamental in
718 WITH OUR READERS [Aug.,
nature, that remain intact when all others are shattered; and that
any solution or any teaching, whether it deal with theory or con-
duct, that ignores these permanencies, will fail.
IS it too much to say that amid all changes there is just one
Guardian of the permanent? The thought that was aroused
in the mind of the onlooker as he witnessed the ceremonies of the
Eucharistic Congress in Rome, almost forces itself upon anyone
that considers seriously any matter of religious, moral or spir-
itual import today. When various persons or bodies seek to
deal with them, there is something ephemeral in their conclu-
sions and their attempts. When the Catholic Church speaks,
there is aroused immediately the consciousness of definiteness,
stability, certainty: the consciousness that through her one is
linked with the everlasting truth; the consciousness that, amid
all changes, she stands today as the spokesman of truth that
reaches back into the eternity of the past and forward into the
eternity of the future.
Her Master is Christ, and Christ dealt in the permanent.
He is the great teacher of the world. He gave His teaching, not
content that man should yield to them simply the perfunctory
assent of the intellect, but that man might also find in them the
formative principles of conduct and good living. Such teachings
are the animating elements of the spiritual life. Since all men's
souls are called equally to the divine destiny of life with God,
since their relationship which exists between the soul and its
Maker is fundamentally and essentially the same for all, it is nat-
ural to conclude that the principles of soul-life should have the
quality of permanency.
* * * *
CHRIST came that "all may have life." That life is the life
of grace, the gift of God ; it is the life of friendship and union
whose power takes us from the abode of earth's darkness into the
regions of light. And grace is eternal.
That life is the life of heaven, a life that infuses us with the
consciousness that our lasting home is not here, but in the country
beyond whither, if we walk well, we are treading with all the
forces within us. And heaven is eternal.
That life is the life of God, through which we are reborn into
the inheritance of divinity itself; through which we receive the
privilege and favor to be, in very truth, the sons of the Most High.
And God is eternal.
It is for us and for the world to distinguish between the
1922.] WITH OUR READERS 7^9
ephemeral and the permanent and to trust to the latter rather
than tnp fnrmAf
TT IS good to learn that the Holy Father, Pope Pius XL. has
1 recently conferred a special blessing upon the National Cath-
olic Welfare Council; and has made void the untoward rumors
in Its regard which found their way into our daily press, and even
into some of our Catholic papers. The important work of the
Council under the Bishops of the country will continue. The
defence of Catholic doctrine, the protection of Catholic interests,
the spread of Catholic education, the inculcation of Catholic social
and moral principles; together with a lively interest in the welfare
of our whole country and of the citizens that go to make up our
nation, will constitute, in the future as in the past, the purposes
of this united body of Bishops laboring, under their Chief
Shepherd, for the glory of God and the good of human souls. As
we consider the various forces now working for the well-being
of our land, the one that affords the strongest reason for hope is
the National Catholic Welfare Council.
IT is interesting to note the following— the leading article in
A the Princeton Theological Review for July is an address deliv-
ered at the 110th Commencement of the Princeton Theological
Seminary. In the course of that address, the speaker described
how, on a recent Sunday, he listened to three sermons in three
Protestant churches of New York. He asks the question: "Is it
conceivable, by any stretch of the imagination, that .the kind of
preaching which these three New York ministers gave the people,
and which I have heard today, could make any impression on the
minds of that heathen world (the world just after the Resur-
rection of Christ) or gained the slightest foothold for Christianity
in that pagan civilization? To such a question there can be but
one answer — it could not.'*
He continues : "That same day I visited the beautiful Roman
Catholic chapel built for the devotions of Spanish people in New
York. The church was empty. I saw no man there: I heard no
hymn or prayer or sermon. Yet at the end of the day I felt that
I had heard more of the Gospel of Jesus Chrirst in the Catholic
chapel than in all three Protestant churches because along the
walls of the chapel were the beautiful paintings of a Spanish
artist, representing the 'stations' of the cross, and these paintings
told of One Who was wounded for my transgressions and bruised
for my iniquities. One Who loved me and gave Himself for me."
BOOKS RECEIVED.
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THE
^atholie^opld
Vol. CXV.
SEPTEMBER, 1922.
No. 690.
A CENTURY OF BRAZILIAN INDEPENDENCE.
BY JOHN F. O'HARA, C.S.C.
NDEPENDENCE or Death," the cry of Dom Pedro
Primeiro on the banks of the Ypiranga, was the
Brazilian declaration of independence; and in
commemoration of the centennial anniversary of
this event, distinguished representatives of all
the principal nations will meet in Rio de Janeiro on the
seventh of September of this year to extend felicitations to
Brazil, and to inaugm:ate an international exposition.
Napoleon was the "provoking cause" of independence
throughout South America. His invasion of Spain broke the
hereditary succession to the Spanish throne, and the American
colonies, which were crown property, felt that rebellion, long
cherished as a sweet, but wicked, thought, would be stripped
of its sacrilegious character if directed against a usurper.
The general movement for independence came of the protest
of the cabildos, or local governments, against the recognition
of Napoleonic rule.
In Brazil, by a strange set of circumstances, royalty led
COPYMGHT. 1922.
VOL. CXV. 46
The Missionaby Society op St. Paul the Apostxb
IN THE State of New Yobk.
722 BRAZILIAN INDEPENDENCE [Sept.,
rebellion. Napoleon's invasion of Portugal sent the Prince-
Regent, Dom Joao, with his family and court, fleeing across
the seas to Brazil, the giant colony of the diminutive kingdom.
Escorted by a British fleet, Dom Joao arrived at Rio de Ja-
neiro, March 8, 1808, where he was welcomed with joy by his
Brazilian subjects. ^
His new perspective gave Prince John a better idea of
the needs of Brazil, and the country began to prosper accord-
ingly. One of his first official acts w^as to throw open the
ports to the commerce of the world. He next developed in-
dustry and agriculture in order to furnish the materials of
commerce, and created the famous Botanical Garden in Rio
de Janeiro for the adaptation of foreign plants to Brazilian
soils and climatic conditions. With his own private collec-
tions he founded the museums of fine arts and of natural
history, and he gave a great impetus to higher education by
establishing the law schools of Pernambuco (Recife) and Sao
Paulo, the engineering school of Rio de Janeiro, and the
medical schools of Rio de Janeiro and Bahia.
In 1816 Brazil became, by royal charter, a kingdom co-
equal with Portugal, with King John as ruler of both. The
King soon found his new position difficult. His Portuguese
subjects clamored for his presence in their midst, and he
finally consented to their demands, setting sail from Brazil on
April 21, 1821, leaving his son, Dom Pedro, then twenty- three
years of age, as regent. His return to Portugal did not pacify
the Cortes, or Portuguese parliament, which was distrustful
of the progress made by Brazil under its new status. A pop-
ular outcry was raised to reduce Brazil again to the rank of a
colony, cut off its new commercial privileges, and force the
return of Dom Pedro to his native land.
Matters came to a climax when Dom Pedro, while on a
journey from Sao Paulo to Minas Geraes, received a royal
communication ordering him to Lisbon. He knew the needs
and aspirations of Brazil, he saw the vital mistake in the
Portuguese policy, and he resolved to make the most of his
opportunit3^ He tore the Portuguese insignia from his hat
and breast, and declared the country independent. Only the
weakest resistance was offered by any of the Portuguese gar-
risons, and the royal squadron was driven back to the mouth
of the Tagus by Admiral Cochrane. On October 12, 1822,
1922.] BRAZILIAN INDEPENDENCE 723
just thirty.five days after the declaration of independence,
Dom Pedro was crowned as emperor.
Although the new ruler had wise and liberal designs for
the welfare of his country, he soon found himself in conflict
with various republican factions. Revolts broke out in
several parts of the country and threatened to split up and
destroy the vast infant nation, which comprised a territory
larger than the present extent of the United States, over which
were scattered only three millions of people. Personal ani-
mosities grew out of the banishment of obnoxious political
leaders, and Brazilian pride was injured by Dom Pedro's
preference for Portuguese for positions of importance. His
reign had lasted only nine years when determined opposition
caused his abdication in favor of his five-year-old son, Dom
Pedro de Alcantara (April 7, 1831).
The regency established during the minority of the prince
lasted nine years. It first consisted of three individuals, and
then of one — Father Diogo Feijo. Discontent and revolt con-
tinued during the regency. One of the most interesting po-
litical disturbances was the secession of the southernmost
State of Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, which set itself up as an
independent republic, and continued its opposition for five
years after the regency was abolished. The leader of the
republican army was Giuseppi Garibaldi, who later became a
national Italian hero by waring on the Pope.^
At the end of these nine turbulent years, in 1840, the magic
of royalty was again invoked. Dom Pedro, then fourteen
years of age, was declared of age at his own request, and was
proclaimed emperor. He had the aid of wise counselors and
assistants, who soon pacified the country, and there began a
long reign of peaceful prosperity and progress.
Dom Pedro Segundo ruled Brazil wisely for forty-nine
years. Two foreign wars occurred during this period: one
against the Argentine tyrant, Rosas, and the other— in league
with Argentina and Uruguay— against the most wicked of all
the South American dictators, the tyrant, Lopez, of Paraguay.
This latter war, which lasted seven years, bore heavily on
Brazil's man-power and financial resources.
The Emperor visited the United States on the occasion of
1 After the return of Rio Grande to the fold. Garibaldi removed to Montevideo,
where, it is said, he followed the pious occupaUon of smuggler A tablet now marks
the house where he lived, and where his son was born.
724 BRAZILIAN INDEPENDENCE [Sept.,
the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, and charmed our
people by his genial democracy. He refused many official
honors, and paid a delicate compliment to the founders of
Philadelphia by his dress, which was of Quaker simplicity —
a plain suit of broadcloth and a black, broad-brimmed hat.
Dom Pedro's simple trustfulness of his people proved his
own political undoing. He was over-tolerant of republican-
ism, and an enemy to political scheming. During the last two
decades of his reign, Positivism made great inroads into the
religious fibre of the "intellectuals," and Freemasonry unij&ed
this group into an active party. The bloodless abolition of
slavery (first, in 1870, by a decree declaring free all children
born within the Empire, and later, in 1888, by universal eman-
cipation) disturbed the economic regime of the great planta-
tions and caused many of the large landholders to join the
opposition to the Emperor. Some of Dom Pedro's closest
associates and advisers were among the leaders of the move-
ment, which, on November 15, 1889, declared a Republic and
called upon the Emperor to resign. Out of love for Brazil,
Dom Pedro offered no resistance, and with a prayer on his
lips for the safety of the country, he accepted, with his family,
the decree of exile. He sailed for Portugal on the day follow-
ing his deposition, refusing a subsidy of $2,500,000 voted by
the new rulers.
The Republic has known many vicissitudes, but they have
been economic rather than political. Three minor disturb-
ances, popularly called revolutions, have threatened the con-
stitutional Government, but they were lifeless movements.
As late as July of this year, a hotly-contested presidential
election caused an exchange of shots, but public apathy to
what was looked upon as a personal quarrel, prevented this
affair from becoming an "incident."
Economic troubles have been plentiful, because Brazil,
not being an industrial country, depends for its prosperity
upon a constant foreign outlet for a few staple products,
mainly coffee and rubber. The rubber comes from the dense
forests of the Amazon valley, where it is gathered from the
wild rubber trees and prepared in crude fashion for shipment
to Europe and the United States. In recent years, the superior
product of the British plantations of Ceylon and East India
has made great inroads into the Brazilian market.
1922.] BRAZILIAN INDEPENDENCE 725
Coffee is raised chiefly in the progressive State of Sao
Paulo, south and west of Rio de Janeiro. Brazil, normally
produces three-fourths of the world's supply of coffee and
when this market is active the whole of southern Brazil
prospers. The State of Sao Paulo has even been successful
m overreaching the law of supply and demand, by holding
over the surplus of a bumper crop to meet the demands of a
lean year.
In addition to coffee and rubber, Brazil regularly exports
great quantities of cacao, sugar, hides and skins, yerba mate
(Paraguayan tea), beans, rice, tobacco, cotton and manganese
ore. Diamonds and other precious stones are also exported in
small quantities.
Brazil, after a hundred years of independence, occupies
an honored place, not only among the American republics,
but in the family of nations. In Europe, where South Amer-
ica is better known than in the United States, the Brazilian is
looked upon as a man of refinement, a lover of the best in art,
music and literature, and a suave diplomat. Brazil has set a
noble example in the use of arbitration, by settling its numer-
ous boundary disputes by arbitral award in every case where
direct negotiation failed of its purpose. In such assemblies
as the Hague Tribunal, the League of Nations and the Wash-
ington Conference, Brazil has stood for universal peace. In
Pan-American affairs it has welcomed the friendship of the
United States, from the first recognition of its independence
down to the present time, and it can be said in all sincerity
that Brazil is the most loyal friend we have in South America
today.
In spite of its wonderful possibilities, Brazil has its handi-
caps. Its 22,000 miles of railroad serve a very limited ter-
ritory, and while it has, for purposes of transportation, the
largest navigable river system in the world, this is under-
developed. The country lacks coal for industry, although its
water-power resources seem limitless. Most of all it lacks
man-power, in both quantity and quality. The present popu-
lation of 31,000,000 is composed largely of Portuguese, of pure
or of mixed strain. To my mind the mixture is Brazil's
most serious drawback. Many wise Brazilian statesmen have
declared that Brazil has no negro problem, since whites have,
by miscegenation, absorbed the negro blood; but the weight
726 BRAZILIAN INDEPENDENCE [Sept.,
of authority has not been able to over-balance my personal
judgment that the opposite is too often the case. There have
been many fine intellectual products of the mixture of black
and white in Brazil, but too often negro characteristics of
temperament seem to predominate.'*
Italian immigration has been a boon to the country.
There are now nearly 2,000,000 Italians in Brazil, and they
have been a large factor in the development of business.
Germans and Spaniards in the country number about 400,000
each. My own observation has been that the German is not
a complete success in Brazil. The climate has had, in general,
an enervating influence, and the average Brazilian German is
not as industrious or thrifty as his brother in the United
States. Japanese immigration has been tried recently on a
small scale.
Two American colonies were established in Brazil after
the Civil War — by slave-holders who refused to be recon-
structed — and the results have been so tragic that one shud-
ders to speak of them. Once wealthy and proud families of
the South, the survivors now live in miserable poverty, and
few of them possess more than the rudiments of an educa-
tion. One of the original colonists, a little old lady whose
body was emaciated and whose spirit was broken by suffering,
told me once that could she but get back to the country
she had spurned in her pride, she would kneel and kiss the
ground and then die of joy.
Religion in Brazil has prospered since the separation of
Church and State under the Republic. Although practically
the whole country is nominally Catholic, Freemasonry and
"liberalism" have claimed a heavy toll, and an American is
scandalized at the indifference of a great portion of the men,
supposedly Catholics, to the obligation of the Sunday Mass.
The intolerance of our rash judgment is exposed, however,
when we learn that great numbers of these "careless Cath-
olics" receive the grace of the last Sacraments. God, the
"Searcher of Hearts," knows where there is faith.
A helpful reorganization of the Church in Brazil was
begun under Pius X. At that time there were but two eccle-
siastical provinces in the vast country, and one of these, Rio
2 A splendid discussion of the negro problem In Brazil will be found in Zahm's
Through South America's Southlands pp. 39-43.
1922.] BRAZILIAN INDEPENDENCE 727
de Janeiro, had been erected only ten years before. In 1905
Pope Pius named the Archbishop of Rio, Most Rev. Arcoverde
de Albuquerque Cavalcanti, the first South American Cardinal.
His Holiness sent various investigators to the country, and
called to Rome for personal consultation some of the most
prominent ecclesiastics of Brazil, and acting upon their advice
undertook a new division of the territory.
The first division was made in 1906. Bahia, a bishopric
since 1555, an archbishopric since 1676, and recognized by the
Vatican Council as the primatial see of Brazil, was divided,
and the immense Caribbean coast was made into a separate
province, with its archiepiscopal seat at Para, at the mouth
of the Amazon.^ The hinterland of Rio de Janeiro was sep-
arated from that province, and the bishopric of Marianna was
elevated and made the seat of a new province with jurisdic-
tion over the great interior States of Minas Geraes and Matto
Grosso. The project for a third new province was not exe-
cuted until two years later, when Sao Paulo was made an
archdiocese, with suffragan sees in the southern States of
Parana, Santa Catherina and Rio Grande do Sul.
Another division was made in 1910, and the provinces of
Olinda, Porto Alegre and Cuyaba were added. The first of
these lay between Bahia and Para, and included the jutting
northeast corner of Brazil, which looks towards Africa. Porto
Alegre is the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, and Cuyaba, which
can be reached conveniently only by a river trip of 1,500 miles
up from Buenos Aires, is the capital of the jungle State of
Matto Grosso. Three more archbishoprics have been created
since 1910: Parahyba (1914), Fortaleza (1915) and Diamantina
(1917), re-dividing again, in the order named, the coastal
regions of the south and north, and the interior State of
Minas Geraes.
This wider distribution of ecclesiastical powers and divi-
sion of responsibilities has brought new life to the Church in
Brazil. The educational standards of seminaries and colleges
have been raised, and the number of these institutions in-
creased, although they are still quite inadequate to the needs
of the country.
The Benedictines, Salesians, Jesuits and Brothers of Mary
8 Under the difficult condlUons of transportation at that time. Para wa« more
accessible to New York than to Bahia.
728 BRAZILIAN INDEPENDENCE [Sept.,
are the principal religious orders engaged in the education of
boys. The foremost Catholic college of the country is the
Gymnasio Sao Bento, of Sao Paulo, conducted by the Benedic-
tine Fathers. Its president is a keen-minded and affable
German. Realizing the importance attached to American
education by Brazilians, he has adapted our system to the
needs of Brazil, and has had the satisfaction of having credits
from his school accepted by some of the leading American
universities for entrance without examination.
Although the Jesuit Fathers were first in the field in Brazil,
their expulsion under Pombal, in the eighteenth century,
destroyed many of the institutions which they had built up.
The first college in Brazil was their College of Sao Paulo,
which was placed by Father Nobrega, the founder, under the
care of a young scholastic, Jose de Anchieta, who was destined
to become one of the shining lights of the Order. Father
Anchieta lived among the Indians, and gave his life entirely
for them. He composed a grammar of the lingoa geral, or
"general language," of the Brazilian Indians, and numerous
other works in both prose and verse. It is said that on one
occasion, during a period of captivity among the Indians, he
composed a poem of five thousand lines, which he preserved
by committing it to memory, since he had no paper on which
to write it down. The beautiful traditions of Anchieta and his
confreres were lost during the period of expulsion, and since
the return of the Jesuits to Brazil they have been engaged in
the seminaries and parishes more than in the secular col-
leges. Thus their work has not attained the prominence
which it enjoys in other parts of the world.
The peculiar duties of the Salesian Fathers are worthy
of special mention. Although Italian in origin, and of com-
paratively recent introduction into South America, this com-
munity has attracted more native vocations than any of the
older Orders operating there. Their principal work in the
cities is to conduct colleges and trade schools, where poor
boys can receive an education free or at a nominal cost.
Cabinet-making, lathe-work, printing, baking — all sorts of
useful trades are taught, the only limit to their activities being
the resources at the command of each particular house.
Priests and Brothers work with students at manual labor and
instruct them in the classroom, and this Christ-like humility
1922.] BRAZILIAN INDEPENDENCE 729
gives to labor a new dignity, badly needed in Latin America
while It fosters a touching affection for the religion taught by
the laborers.
In the wilderness these humble priests and Brothers, and
their affiliated Sisterhood of Maria Aussiliatrice. labor for the
conversion of savage Indian tribes. Like their predecessors
of three or four centuries ago, they realize that little can be
done with the adult Indian, and they pin their faith to the
children, for whose instruction they labor, in season and out
of season, in the palm-thatched bamboo huts where they have
their schools. And God has blessed their work in these mis-
sions! Thousands of Indians have embraced the Faith and
live the simple lives of pious Christians. The skill of the
children of the forest would abash many a white child of the
coast towns; for illiteracy still prevails among eighty per cent,
of the Brazilian population.
There is great need for parochial schools in Brazil. The
public education laws of the various states are liberal, and the
state governments, generally friendly to the Church, would
look with favor upon efforts made by the clergy and religious
Orders to relieve the prevailing ignorance of the poorer classes.
Tropical lassitude is largely to blame for the unfavorable con-
dition of popular instruction, and until laws make elementary
education compulsory, little relief can be expected. The
means are not wanting: they want direction. The hundreds
of well-kept orphanages, hospitals, hospices and homes for
the aged, testify to the warm charity of the Brazilian in reliev-
ing bodily distress; but the relief of ignorance among the
masses has not yet attracted the charity of any great number
among the wealthier classes.
Brazil is one of the show-places of the western hemis-
phere, and is well worth a visit. Until a few years ago, the
trip to Rio de Janeiro required eighteen days, but the United
States Shipping Board has cut the time to twelve days, placing
fast, luxurious steamers on the route. The exposition in Rio
will undoubtedly draw many Americans to «pend the winter
months in the summer of Brazil, and as the country becomes
better known to the travel-loving public, Rio and Santos will
undoubtedly rival the Florida coast as a winter resort.
The country itself is a paradise. Three-fourths of its vast
territory lie within the tropics, where nature is most lavish
730 BRAZILIAN INDEPENDENCE [Sept.,
with scenic decorations; and the elevation of the great central
plateau, which runs back from the sea-girt Serra do Mar,
modifies the intensity of the tropical heat.
Travelers generally say that Rio de Janeiro possesses the
most beautiful harbor in the world. At the entrance to the
bay, rising sheer from the water to a height of 1,300 feet, is
the bare rock of Pdo de Assucar, or Sugar Loaf, placed there
by God, as one traveler puts it, as an exclamation point to
draw attention to the marvels that lie within the bay. Beyond
Sugar Loaf rise Gavea and Corcovado, a thousand feet higher
than the sentinel at the gate. Again beyond Corcovado rises
Tijuca, another thousand feet in the air; and in the distance,
when the mist does not obscure the view, the fluted sides of Os
Orgdos» the Organ Mountains, can be seen at the lorldly height
of six thousand feet. With the exception of Sugar Loaf, these
mountains are all decked out in the verdure of the tropics,
and if the ship makes the harbor at daybreak, the combination
of dewy, glistening green, with the pink and gold of dawn, is
indescribably beautiful.
Islands dot the baj^ and seem to play about its little coves
and capes, as it recedes in the distance. Eighteen miles long
and twelve miles wide, Guanabara Bay gives shipping at Rio
de Janeiro as much accommodation as can be found at Seattle
or San Francisco; but the loveliness of the setting makes one
forget the commercial possibilities. These are recalled
quickly, however, by the ships lying in the harbor, flying the
flags of every maritime nation on earth.
The new city of Rio de Janeiro is fast becoming worthy of
the matchless setting God has given it. Twenty years ago Rio
was anything but fair to gaze upon, but a happy, artistic sense,
backed up by courage, energy and capital, has wrought a
transformation which makes the capital of Brazil rank far
above the other beautiful cities of America.
As late as the early nineties, Rio was a pesthole. Yellow
fever and malaria, cholera and smallpox, numbered their vic-
tims in thousands, and took turns in isolating the city from the
world. Then a bold stroke brought health and beauty to the
low-lying district near the wharves. A strip of land, a mile
and a half long and six hundred and fifty feet wide, was con-
demned by the municipality, and although it ran through the
most densely populated district of the city, every building in
1922.] BRAZILIAN INDEPENDENCE 731
it was leveled to the ground. Sections of the bay lay at either
end of the strip, which now gave ventilation to the heart of the
city. A broad and beautifully-decorated avenue was then laid
out — the Avenida Central, now called Rio Branco in honor of
a late Minister of Foreign Affairs — and the ground on both
sides was sold, at greatly appreciated value, to compensate the
previous owners of the condemned property. Buildings
erected along this avenue had to have their plans approved
by a municipal board of architects, to insure a high standard
of artistic merit in construction.
Where the avenue met the bay on the east side, it was
broadened into a boulevard — the Beira Mar — which now ranks
without a peer among the world's panoramic drives. A white
sea wall shuts off the bay on the left, and on the right a broad
park, artistically strewn with tropical palms and flowers, gives
fragrance and color and the effect of a rainbow to this crescent-
shaped drive. A rock projecting to the water's edge breaks
the sweep of Beira-Mar, and the boulevard is then continued
along four similar bays which indent the coast.
Even the Canal do Mangue, a drainage canal built in 1906
to destroy the breeding placee of the fever mosquitoes, has, by
a combination of artistic sense with engineering skill, been
made to serve its purpose in the decorative scheme.
The principal features to attract the tourist who has
made the rounds of the boulevards will be the Monroe Palace,
which was the Brazilian Building at the St. Louis Exposition,
the National Library, the Municipal Theatre and the Botanical
Garden. He will also want to ascend the peaks of Sugar
Loaf— reached by an aerial tramway— Corcovado and Tijuca,
and look out upon the natural splendors of Rio from these
distinct points of vantage.
The visitor will also want to make the journey by train to
Sao Paulo (a night's ride), and see this hustling, up-to-date,
American city. Italians, Germans and Americans have all
had their part in making Sao Paulo a lively city, but it still
preserves its Brazilian caste in its tropical gardens and ar-
tistic buildings. Its most attractive show-place is the Museo
de Ypiranga, but the tourist should not miss the Municipal
Theatre, which is finer than any amusement place in the
United States.
The journey from Sao Paulo to Santos is made over the
732 BRAZILIAN INDEPENDENCE [Sept.,
Sao Paulo Railway, eight miles of which, near Santos, present
one of the most gorgeous mountain panoramas in the world.
Santos itself, during the past ten years, has been transformed
from an ugly business town into one of the prettiest spots on
the coast. The business district is busier than New York,
and the port offers cargo-handling facilities far surpassing
anything our metropolis can boast. But the tourist will
prefer to spend his time along the beaches, either on the
land-locked island of Santos itself, or at Guaruja, on the
northern arm of the mainland, which encircles the island.
Everything is modern, and elegant with the profusion of the
tropics. Santos, once the grave of white men and the bone-
yard of ships, has become a very popular health resort.
Happily, Brazil is only in its infancy, and it has a fair
start on the road to greatness. Brazil welcomes American
cooperation in its work of progress, and American Catholics
especially are received with favor. The spirit of Positivism
which has animated its statesmen has been tempered more
or less by a traditional reverence for the Church, and the
Catholic spirit prevails. Epitacio Pessoa, the President, whose
term is just expiring, made a visit to the Vatican while Presi-
dent-elect of Brazil. His interview with Pope Benedict was
looked upon as foreshadowing still more cordial relations
between Catholics and the indifferentists, and the present
development of Catholic life in Brazil seems to justify a spirit
of optimism.
0-,
COMPTON MACKENZIE.
BY MAY BATEMAN.
SUPPOSE that those of us to whom writing is
the symbol of a vital force will look upon any
collection of books with a certain secret rever-
ence, quite removed from sentimentality, though
sentiment has part in it. For, after all, very few
books are written merely for the sake of commerce. Even
in his most optimistic hour, no literary man can hope to
achieve, at the cost of as little personal trouble, the quick
returns of, say, a war-profiteer or a business magnate who
conducts major operations. The writer may not have indi-
vidually a very high motive in writing, but, like the spider, the
web he spins comes from his inmost self. His books, for
good or ill, are obviously the most complete form of self-
expression; his choice of subjects, the shape and texture and
quality of his work are all spontaneous revelations of "the
real John," as he shows, not to the man he could conciliate,
but to God. "This is ... me: for the rest, I eat and drank,
and slept, loved, hated like another; my life was as the vapor,
and is not; but this I saw and knew." *
Essential as it is, then, that the critic who seeks to find the
soul of an author in his work, should set about his task in all
due reverence, duly "respecting its dignity," as Marcus Aure-
lius bade men in the past, he may surely expect the writer
himself equally to respect the dignity of the reader's soul.
A maker of books should keep before him, as he writes,
knowledge of the vital stretch of his own power, and its
creative properties; remember that, if what he says is worth
saying at all, it is worth "putting the whole strength of his
spirit into the saying of it," and that the germinating quality
of the printed word has an almost terrible significance for
those who know that the geographical boundaries, which
mark the limits of its distribution, cannot confine it.
1 John RiuUn.
734 COMPTON MACKENZIE [Sept.,
The new voice which was heard in the land at the close
of the Victorian era, in rebellion against "mid- Victorian
prudery and false sentiment," did not do full justice to, nor
always ring with the clear note of those amongst its prede-
cessors, who had spoken out without fear or favor, showing
life as it was, and not as mere romance would have it. Un-
doubtedly, evils had flourished in the past; social evils, subtle
evils, which conventionality had tried to hide out of sight. A
hundred and one inconsistences of the period lent themselves
to ridicule by a later generation; a hundred and one poseurs
could profitably be stripped of their halos; a hundred and one
would-be philanthropists shown up in their true colors; a
hundred and one glaring wrongs set right. But Thackeray,
Dickens, Charles Kingsley, Reade, Meredith, Browning and a
dozen others, to limit our view to novelists and poets, had,
each in his own way, thrown the limelight on these pictures,
and they were men whose sincerity, even if it were occasion-
ally prejudiced as in Kingsley's case, was unquestionable.
Neither Meredith nor Browning could be accused of "soft-
ness" in presenting a case, nor did either hesitate to tear off
the veils under which the Victorian traditions hid its garbage.
Consistently, they made war equally upon the supine and
inept, and the shame and base.
The "mob-spirit" of clamor came to the fore in the new
revolt, and running riot obscured, as it so often does, the
main object of legitimate rebellion. In its unbridled on-
slaught everything that was Victorian was derided or swept
aside, without judgment or selection. The mere fact that it
was Victorian put it, apparently, beyond the pale. Men with
"cranks;" women with wrongs, real or fancied; fanatics with
axes to grind, shrilled their opinions deafeningly. "Progress
and enlightenment" was the slogan of the movement, but
"license and egotism" would have described it better. In the
realm especially of sex-psychology, all barriers of restraint
were recklessly overthrown. Plain speech was demanded on
any and every subject. Why, cried the revolutionists, should
there be any "taboo" on any topic which secretly concerned or
interested humanity? Novelists pricked up their ears. Here
were new fields to be exploited, or if not new fields, refuse
heaps.
Why shouldn't their literary morality go threadbare in-
1922.] COMPTON MACKENZIE 735
stead of, as now, their personal garments, if immorality paid
better? argued the novelists and dramatists. Mrs. Grundy,
with her absurd fears for the young person's morals, had
dominated the consciences of libraries which catered for the
general public far too long. Let the young person go hang,
or, better still, enlighten and emancipate her until— as the
prophetic saw — she would (as now) be able to discuss Dr.
Marie Stopes* processes of Birth Control, or measures to cure
diseases which at that epoch were never mentioned publicly —
and only privately amongst members of the medical profes-
sion — unperturbed, and without turning a hair, with a com-
plete stranger of the opposite sex.
Experimentalists in many directions naturally took
greater advantage of the new openings as time wore on.
The style of the modernists began by being more crisp and
terse than their predecessors had been, and less hidebound.
And now, when the ordinary means of expression failed them,
the}^ began, in self-defence, to coin new words for themselves.
Violently, they threw the old laws of construction and balance
and punctuation to the winds. Many authors were ruthless,
stark, and even coarse, with impunity. The majority cer-
tainly used words which expressed the meaning they in-
tended to convey, but others, intellectual magicians, increas-
ingly chose, in preference, words which, like the conjuror,
"deceived the eye" and bewildered the mind.
What is wrong with most modern writers is typical of
what is wrong with modern life. There was never a time
when the cult of self-sufficiency had more devotees. It is im-
possible to label the majority of the experimentalists of the
Edwardian, and our present era, as followers exclusively of
any particular School. Each marches under his own flag.
What links them is their effort each to assert his own indi-
vidualism in terms which cannot possibly be misinterpreted,
and, as a rule, their lack, or their distorted forms, of faith.
Bold adventure into unknown countries for some fine end
is one thing, braggart ([uests quite another; and while many
of our modern writers are honest enough, mental myopes,
merely, who mistakenly view morals and faith from the wrong
angle, there are too many who, impelled by the restless spirit
of the day, deliberately change the range of their glasses so
as to travesty the object focused. Men like these, to change
736 COMPTON MACKENZIE [Sept.,
the metaphor, throw stones at what is good and pure for no
better reason than that they innately hate goodness and purity.
They are "blind mouths," * unable to croak any but the dis-
cords of perverted worship.
Mawkish, hypocritical and sentimental as the Victorian
era shows to many of today's novelists ("the grave of our
England was dug by the Victorians," says one of them),^ the
writers of that day had, as a rule, some definite constructive
ethical standard of how life should be lived, to go by; some
root principle or moral code by which to regulate desire.
Meredith and Browning were not, after all, alone amongst
their contemporaries in showing that the soul's welfare needs
as much training and discipline as any athlete's body does, if
it is to endure a test. Victorian literature, as a whole, was
not out to show, as so much modern literature is, that material
pleasures, and material objects, are so essential to man that
he cannot conceive even of a future existence where he is in-
dependent of them.* Home-life, in the time of the Victorians,
was still held sacred, and women would have suffered almost
any private indignity rather than face the publicity of the
Divorce Court. The cult of beauty as an absolute end was
followed only by a few exotics of a School whose degradation
was to be presently complete, and the worship of the body was
still thought to be pagan. "Eminently respectable," the be-
whiskered or bearded writer's views may have been in the
days of our great-grandfathers or grandfathers, but with what
almost passionate desire, at times, today, does one crave for
the sight of that moribund quality !
At all events, in those days, man in general still openly
or interiorly cherished the now next-door-to extinct belief
that, great as he himself undoubtedly was, God, or whatever
he chose to call the Supreme Power which had originally
caused human life to be, was conceivably greater. The
writer sensed his (occasional) limitations; was known to ac-
knowledge that even he might grow. The recognition of spir-
itual values tinged his work, consciously or unconsciously,
as the case might be. It was a background against which his
little work, his little life stood iti perspective.
2 John Milton. a Sylvia and Michael, by Compton Mackenzie.
4 Raymond, by Sir Oliver Lodge; Mr. Vale-Owen's articles in the Weekly Dis-
patch, etc.
1922.] COMPTON MACKENZIE 737
Nowadays, "in a company of revolutionary souls, only the
Sinn Feiner had religious associations with the name of Jesus
Christ. . . . People's religions were so different when they
had any," says our great satirist, Rose Macaulay.'^ Whatever
he is not, the modern novelist, out-Heroding even the band
of Herods, who used the pen as a sword to slay Victorian
tradition, is supremely self-assured; as infallible upon ques-
tions of this world and the next as the Holy Father is only
when he speaks ex cathedra as to faith and morals. . . . Who
can know more than H. G. Wells? thinks H. G. Wells, com-
placently, having strayed far from that mood of temporary
abnegation when he could pray "save me from little sins and
small successes and the life that passes as the shadow of a
dream." Most writers of today seem to have over-eaten of
the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Secure in their omnip-
otence, they feel quite able, with Noel in The Saint's Progress,*
to instruct God.
I.
The Dutch are not alone in rating Compton Mackenzie's
talents high, and placing him in the front rank of contem-
porary novelists. The action taken by certain libraries in
connection with Sinister Street gave its author widespread
publicity, and few writers are better known to the average
man than Compton Mackenzie.
His brilliancy has many facets. One critic goes so far as
to compare him with Thackeray as a creator of character:
"Sylvia Scarlett is one of the few really great women in fic-
tion—can indeed hold her own with Beatrix Esmond and
Becky Sharp." ' Another calls him "glittering. ... All his
fountains of fancy have colored lights at the back of them. ...
He is the Kkalfy of the younger novelists." « His work is
spoken of as "possessing the permanency of a classic for all
who value form in a chaotic era," ' and "his future" as being
"bound up with what is most considerable in English
fiction." ^^^
Ever since the publication of Sinister Street, he has
counted as a force in the literary world. Before that he had
5 Dangerous Ages. « John Galsworthy. t Pall Mall Gazette.
8 Ellis Roberts. 9 Athen«um. lo Punch.
VOL. cxv. 47 , K . . •
738 COMPTON MACKENZIE [Sept.,
swayed a certain small section. He first tested his powers of
influence, of leadership, at St. Paul's School, as a boy. (Boy-
psychology, at root, is much the same everywhere; at Eton or
Harrow, as at Charterhouse or Winchester.) In later life,
his area of influence was sensibly extended, that was all.
What in embryo had intrigued and excited boys of a certain
type would, when developed, be likely to intrigue and excite
the larger world of men and women of a certain type, too?
It would emphatically "pay" to use that medium, when the
type prevailed. And the young writer had, in his favor, a
personality likely to captivate and capture an audience. The
successful author must, like the successful dramatist, possess
that indefinable qualitj^ which makes his work "get over" the
footlights; confidence in his power to grip you, to keep you
enthralled. Yet he must never lose himself so entirely in his
work as to be unaware of the effect he is making. He has to
be in it and outside it at the same time; never, merely because
he knows what he wants to say and the exact grade of impres-
sion he wants to make, to think he is "getting home" when
he is not.
Receptive, up to a point; sensitive, up to a point; mentally
alert and brilliant; knowing somewhat, at least, of the claims
art makes upon the artist — "everything has its drudgery : love
produces household cares; art, endless work," he writes" —
there were all manner of useful, marketable possessions
stored up in that magic knapsack of Compton Mackenzie's
when he set out in quest of fortune. He could note, with
meticulous care and accuracy, not only precisely what another
person was sensing in an emotional crisis, but the exact effect
which that emotion was likely to have upon himself. He
could, without strain, manage to be quite easily both in the
picture and out. He could give, for instance, as much of
himself as was necessary to make it appear that he gave all,
while retaining intact the critical, detached, sardonic view of
an experienced observer. This academic detachment gives
him certain unique and often sardonic powers of observation,
"as peculiarly his own as a voice or a laugh," ^- "in a style
which is that of no other writer."
If, as a game, excerpts from his work were read aloud
anonymously, I think his caustic or innately dramatic style
11 Sylvia and Michael. 12 Atheneeum,
1922.] COMPTON MACKENZIE 739
would be recognized, even if no clue were given to the identity
of his subject:
The embarrassment of death's presence hung heavily over
the household. The various members sat down to supper
with apologetic glances . . . and nobody took a second help-
ing of any dish. The children were only corrected in whis-
pers for their manners; but they were given to understand
that for a child to put his elbows on the table, or to crumble
his bread or drink with his mouth full, was at such a time
a cruel exhibition of levity. ...
"Think of dear Grandmama looking down at you from
Heaven, and don't kick the table-leg , my precious," said
Edith in tremulous accents. . . .^^
Dorothy possessed a selfishness that almost attained to
the dignity of ambition, though never quite, because her
conceit would not allow her to state an object in her career
for fear of failure; her method was invariably to seize the
best of any situation that came along, whether it was a bed,
a chair, a potato or a man : this method, with ordinary good
luck, should ensure success through life.^*
Since you must be decadent, it is better to decay from a
good source.^^
Had she been a poet, [she] would have sung of London,
of the thunder and grayness, of the lamps and rain, of long,
irresistible rides on the top of swaying tramcars, of wild
roars through the depths of the earth past the green lamps
flashing to red. She danced instead about the sea-girt
orchard-close all that her heart had found in London. She
danced the hopes of the many children of Apollo who work
so long for so little. ... She danced old age and the breath-
ing night of London and the sparrow-haunted dawn. She
danced the silly little shillings which the children of Apollo
earn. Fifteen pirouettes for fifteen shillings, fifteen pir-
ouettes for long rehearsals and long performances . . .
fifteen pirouettes for no fame, fifteen pirouettes for fif-
teen shillings, and one high beat for the funeral of a
marionette.i^
Versatile as he is, and with the saving grace of humor,
it is harder to condone in Compton Mackenzie, that "pre-
1? Poor Relations. ' i* The Adventures of Syluia Scarlett.
15 Sinister Street, vol. I. i« Carnival.
740 COMPTON MACKENZIE [Sept.,
ciousness" which makes him choose, at times, lengthy, archaic
words when simpler ones would serve his purpose better.
To come upon "noctambulatory cat" and "crenelated hori-
zon" and "pianos tintabbulating" in the space of twenty-one
lines, is to throw limelight on a clearer picture of Compton
Mackenzie's real image than the photograph of his clean-cut
intellectual features can conjure. "Style," is not "disem-
bodied. . . ." ^^ For the "task of illumination, the works of
a writer are all that is required. ... To the critic, the names
of Mr. Shaw and Mr. Conrad should call up, not the image of
two men with differently shaped beards, but two differentiated
minds." "By their works ye shall know them" might well,
without blasphemy, be applied here to the style, the subject-
matter, the conceptions of an artist.
Worthy means tell best in the end. Pose denotes weak-
ness, and lost sincerity means ultimate loss of grip. Imagine
Thackeray filling in the gaps of his own incompetency by
taking refuge in the hysterical asterisks, " ," so
greatly beloved by H. G. Wells and his disciples? Or the
Brontes, or George Eliot or Henry Kingsley or Mrs. Gaskell, to
cite a random list of writers with different temperaments and
aims, deliberately making use of such words as "inquiline" or
"reasty," ^^ because, presumably, as neither of them can be
found in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, the reader is sup-
posed to be proportionately impressed? Or again of writing
"perdurable for ever," when, the meaning of "perdurable"
being "permanent or eternal," ^^ the "for ever" is super-
fluous ?
Verbal gymnastics are totally unworthy of a writer who
can call Oxford, unforgettably, the city of "Dreaming Spires."
All lovers of Oxford are Compton Mackenzie's debtors for
that phrase. He knows its immortality : is moved profoundly,
or he could not write with such simplicity of the "ecstasy of
submission to this austere beneficence of stone that sheltered
even** a Michael Fane, **the worshipper of one day, with the
power of immortal pride,**
17 Edward Moore. is Sinister Street.
19 Vol. 11., Sinister Street, Author's note— Mr. Mackenzie's explanation is as
follows: "Inquiline" . . . has not yet been sentimentalized like "pilgrim," and
'Reasty" . . . seems exactly to describe the' London air at certain seasons.
1922.] COMPTON MACKENZIE 741
St. Mary's tower against the sky opening like a bloom
seemed to express for him a sudden aspiration of all life
towards immortal beauty. One May morning, when the
choir boys of St. Mary's hymned the rising sun, Michael
was granted on that occasion to hold the city, as it were!
imprisoned in a crystal globe, and by the intensity of his
evocation to recognize perfectly that uncapturable quintes-
sence of human desire and human vision so supremely dis-
played through the merely outward glory of a repository.
. . . Slowly, the sky lightened: slowly, the cold hues and
blushes of the sun's youth, that stood as symbol for so much
here in St. Mary's, made of the east one great shell of lucent
color. The gray stones of the college lost the mysterious
outlines of dawn and sharpened slowly to a rose-warmed
vitality. The choir boys gathered like twittering birds at
the base of the tower. . . . The moment of waiting was al-
most too poignant during the hush of expectancy that pre-
ceded the declaration of worship. Then flashed a silver
beam in the east; the massed choir boys with one accord
opened their mouths and sang . . . like the morning stars.
. . . The bells, incredibly loud here on the tower's top,
crashed out so ardently that every stone seemed to nod in
time as the tower trembled and swayed backwards and for-
wards while the sun mounted into the day. . . . Michael,
through all the length of that May day, dreamed himself
into the heart of England.^o
The description, too, of Venner's, and what Venner's
stands for, and of Venner's rebuke to the "young gentlemen"
when rebuke is necessary, is perfect in its way.^^
Nobody can doubt Compton Mackenzie's brilliancy or
dexterity. But he will only be the great novelist which some
call him now, when he eschews unworthy lures. "Deep
down," as the children say, he actually is a far more natural
and sincere character than, as yet, still to use a childish
phrase, he is "big" enough to let us see. The twist in his
nature, which makes him deliberately exploit one minute
section of the kaleidoscopic world in its alternating florid and
scarlet, or squalid and drab phases, limits his observation
and irretrievably restricts interest in his work. How is it
that a writer who has traveled so widely and has, withal, such
sensitive perceptions, can become thrall to an obsession, and
io Sinister Street, vol. 11. »ilbid.
742 COMPTON MACKENZIE [Sept.,
write and re-write part of the same story so continually?
Over and over again in his different books, we find allusions
to the same thing which happened to the same people —
Michael and Sylvia, Michael Avery and Jenny, Guy and
Pauline, Dorothy Lonsdale and Lily Haden, as the case may
be, until he ends by provincializing the half-world itself.
With hawk-like eyes that can see in many directions, he delib-
erately puts on blinkers; with the winged spirit of youth to
carry him far, he lurks in the incredibly narrow ways of one
small area of teeming life. How account for this limitation
of power except by an unworthy explanation? The man who
sells his birthright for a mess of pottage is neither true man
nor true artist.
IL
Take Compton Mackenzie's books, less as ends in them-
selves than as "starting-points for an inquiry into the human
spirit,"" and where do they lead us or him? Mr. Ellis
Roberts tells us that Mackenzie's actual "interest in a dirty
pond is purely confined to the glitter made by the scum if you
turn the right light on it." ^^ A story of Elizabeth Stuart
Phelps 24 tells how the heroine, whose poor drab youth was
suddenly transformed by love and happiness, caught up her
grubby small brother in her arms and cried, ecstatically:
"Just see how the mud-puddles shine, Moppets!" But I ques-
tion if the light on the little American girl's mud-puddles and
the light on Compton Mackenzie's "dirty ponds" spring from
the same channel.
For his work as it stands gives a half-view of English
character, which is more false than a lie. The half-world is
not the main interest of the average decent young English-
man's human education, although it may play a tremendous
part in it. There are other absorbing interests; making a
career; sport; responsibilities. The phases of erotic quest,
which Compton Mackenzie describes so realistically, become,
after a surfeit, inconceivably dull.
The life-stories of ladies of pleasure have a fatal similarity
even if they are described with Compton Mackenzie's sym-
pathy and insight, even when they record a struggle such as
22 Atheneeum. 23 Bookman. 24 A story in Men, Womtn and Ghosts.
1022.] COMPTON MACKENZIE 743
Sylvia Scarlett had before her innately gallant soul won
through. Indeed, only the magical color of her surroundings :
in France, England, Brazil, Sao Paulo, Spain, Morocco and
the East, save Sylvia's incorrigible egotism, from becoming
as wearisome as the repetition of Mr. Dick's famous "King
Charles' head." It is almost impossible to believe that a Cath-
olic who had ever practised his religion could have seriously
set down Sylvia's confession in Sylvia and Michael, and
imagined that any priest would have allowed an egoist to
dwell with such supreme self-interest, if remarkable candor,
on that prolonged revelation of herself. Not humility, but
intense interest in the affairs of a past in which, extremely
cleverly, she manages, in spite of her plain speaking, to appear
as the victim of circumstance throughout, was behind her
self-analysis, although it was a development in her spiritual
growth. But a non-Catholic, not knowing that Penance is a
Sacrament, is likely to believe that this kind of confession is
true to life because a Catholic wrote it. Artificiality like this
is actually the more amazing in view of what, from time to
time, Compton Mackenzie has written of kindred subjects:
When the priest held the monstrance aloft and gave the
Benediction, it seemed that the wind had died away: upon
her soul the company of God was shed like a gentle rain
which left behind it faith blossoming like a flower and hope
singing like a bird, and above them both, love shining like
the sun.^"'
And again:
"I've been pitching my ideals at a blank wall like so many
empty bottles and — "
"Were they empty? . . . Are you sure they were empty?
May they not have been cruses of ointment the more pre-
cious for being broken?"
Catholicism is God's method of throwing bottles at a blank
wall — but not empty bottles.2«
Rich Relatives, Compton Mackenzie's last published novel,
acts in a way as a pendant to Poor Relations. But it is a
25 Sylvia and Michael. 26 Sinister Street, vol. 1.
744 COMPTON MACKENZIE [Sept.,
satiric study of life from the opposite angle, the view of a
girl who, left suddenly bereaved by the death of her artist
father, with whom she has spent a happy-go-lucky existence
abroad, finds herself, penniless, at the mercy of the cold
"charity" offered by wealthy uncles and aunts in England.
It deals with a number of unpleasant characters, and however
caustic the wit which depicts such characters, too prolonged
intimacy with them becomes tedious.
The full humor of the book will probably only be sensed
by those who, from one cause or another, the depreciation of
stock investments, or a bank failure, have found themselves
in a similar position — dependent upon the fluctuating whims
or fantasies of rich relations or friends. A world seen sud-
denly in the light of poverty instead of comfort certainly has
uncommon features. If you have been accustomed, for in-
stance, to be a prominent figure in the foreground of a picture,
it is rather amazing to discover that you may be either in-
stantly eliminated from it by a sweep of the artist's brush,
or relegated to a position from which you can only occasion-
ally be recognized with the help of exceptionally strong mag-
nifying glasses. Only a very precise sense of proportion will
make you realize that in the eyes of the "world," what was
looked upon as "poise" or "finish" when you had a comfort-
able income, automatically becomes "unpleasant self-con-
fidence" without a bank balance behind it. The spiritual
view of our rocking world is not immediately apparent to
the fainting soul that is trying to find foothold; and it takes
time and insight to discover that what was taken away
was not worth a tithe of what was, later, to be given in such
overwhelming fullness.
But "to see" in this way is to pre-suppose a vision of "that
without which life is a sucked orange," and Jasmine Grant,
Catholic though she was by label, certainly did not apply any
Catholic principles to the problem of her singularly discon-
certing rich relations. It would be hard to find, in the whole
realms of prosaic misadventure, a set of more "cranky" or
annoying personages than her unknown "family" formed.
Prevented from earning, as she wished, a "living" in Sirene,
in sympathetic conditions, she finds the cup of "charity" a
very acid drink.
Admirable as each separate piece of characterization is
1922.] COMPTON MACKENZIE 745
in its own way, there is no reason this book, any more than
ninety-nine out of a hundred other modern novels, should
ever have been written at all.
III.
The subjects of fiction; the mere "story" which a novelist
gives us, are of course only illuminating in so far as they
reveal the habit of his mind, and show the nature of the
power he is sending out upon the world. "To the psycholog-
ical critic commonplace trivialities and meannesses," do not
matter in themselves, but the author's attitude towards them
counts.
Compton Mackenzie, with the great art of capturing
youth, has used it often to unworthy ends. The spirit of
individual books with their infinite possibilities is not a static,
but dynamic force. The choice of the right books is every
bit as important as is the choice of the right friends. This
is why a writer with the power not only to "see true" himself,
but to make others see it, acts culpably when he narrows
his vision and looks too long on what is perverted and
artificial.
But because I like to believe that the one fairy who was
so unaccountably forgotten when the invitations to Compton
Mackenzie's christening party went out, was a good fairy and
not a bad one, I think that though she emphatically withheld
her gift, as any self-respecting fairy would in such a case, she
did so for a time, and not "for ever." Fairies surely possess,
like politicians, the magical art of eating their own words —
and that special fairy will, I think, see that to condemn a
human being to go through life weighted with gaudy attributes
and decorations when all he really needs is more simplicity
and a child's heart, is punishment out of proportion to the
original offence. Nobody, more than Compton Mackenzie
himself, knows better how far short his little skiff fails of
reaching the haven where it would be, nor how much personal
ballast he has yet to overthrow before he wins there.
THOMISTIC AND AMERICAN RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES.
BY EDWARD F. MURPHY, S.S.J., PH.D.
HE politics of Aquinas could be epitomized in
his doctrine on rights. Incidentally, such a
synopsis would evince how modern this mediaeval
mind really was.
If we trail our eye over such a representative
bill of American rights as Virginia's, which ranks so important
in the story of our nascent days, and if we then turn to
Thomistic pages, an eloquent harmony of ideas is discovered.
If we consider the Declaration of Independence, and then mull
over Thomistic texts, we discover that five centuries before
Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Aquinas was just as true an apostle
of liberty — and sanity.
The Angelic Doctor strikes the American keynote per-
fectly when he declares: "Nature made all men equal in
liberty;"^ "Men are not superior to each other according to
the order of nature," ^ and "All men are equal by nature." *
That men, on entering a state of society, cannot by any com-
pact commit the injustice of depriving or divesting them-
selves, let alone their posterity, of their inherent rights, is
instinct in his principle: "If a measure is opposed to justice,
human will cannot make it just." * And so Aquinas seems to
stand with Hobbes and Spinoza no more than did the Col-
onists.
His contention : "It is the property of the whole people or
of the public person who has care of them, to make law," etc.,^
so strongly indicates his belief in the popular source of civil
power that any other interpretation of that text seems weak.
In his Contra Gentiles, Book III., chapter 31, he criticizes
power thus: the greater it is, the greater the number of those
on whom it depends; and that which depends on many may be
destroyed by many. Thus he suggests that the greater power
in the State originally resides not in any individual or indi-
1 n. Sententiee, d.44, qu.i. a.iii. 2 Ibid., d.6, qu.i. a.d, ad.5
3 Summa Theologica, 2a 2ae., qu.civ. a.v. 4 Ibid.
6 Ibid., la 2a., qu.xc. a.iii.
1922.] THOMISTIC AND AMERICAN RIGHTS 747
viduals, but in the greatest number, z. e., the people. And he
warns the possessors of power of their relation to the source
of it. In the De Eruditione Principum, a book of Thomistic
influence,^ we read: "If the head is higher than the human
body, nevertheless, the body is greater. . . . Thus the ruler has
power from the subjects and eminence. . . ."
The Doctor teaches as clearly as Virginia insists, that the
object of government is the benefit, the protection and the
security of the people, and that rulers must take these pur-
poses to mind and heart.^ He lays stress on the interior foes
of social and civil life; for he considers these even more
ominous than enemies from without. A united nation can
weather a storm like an iron-clad ship. He takes care to un-
fold what he means by the good living which he deems it
essential for the State to secure for its citizens; declaring that
it entails whatever benefits are procurable by human effort,
e. g.» wealth, profit, health, education.* And so, by the good
life which must be the aim of governor for the governed, St.
Thomas certainly signifies bodily, mental, economic and
moral well-being for everybody — education and opportunity
for all.
It is clear that the Angelic Doctor was as duly concerned
with "the danger of maladministration," and security against
it, as the Virginian sires of our Republic; for he teaches that
government should be so disposed that occasion of corruption
is removed, and that authority should be so circumscribed
or curtailed that it cannot readily turn into tyranny.^
There can be little doubt that Aquinas holds that a per-
nicious or inadequate polity is justly at the mercy of the
people, and that theirs is the right "to reform, alter or abolish
it." If it is the right of a people to provide themselves a
ruler, he sees no reason why they should not have the cor-
relative right of deposition in the event that their appointed
leader abuses his trust.^^ But his doctrine does not can-
onize Brutus, Cromwell or Charlotte Corday. Not by private
presumption, but by public authority, must the procedure
against abusive government be made; and even then only
with great circumspection, for the cure of an excessive ruler
or govermment may be worse than the malady. Further, St.
Thomas maintains that, if a government be unjust, or usurped,
« I., ch. 6. 7 De Regimine, L, 2. 8 Ibid.. L, 15. » Ibid., U 6. !• Ibid.
748 THOMISTIC AND AMERICAN RIGHTS [Sept.,
or if the rulers decree unjustly, the subjects are not held to
obedience, save accidentally to avoid scandal or peril.^^ Here
his politics is in notable accord with the Virginia Assembly
and the Boston Tea Party.
Aquinas believes with America, not only that "no man,
or set of men, are entitled to separate or exclusive emolu-
ments or privileges from the community" apart from merits
and deserts; but he positively teaches that to grant them such
honors is sinful.^^ He is one with Aristotle, Virginia and
Columbia in the idea that honors should not be descendible
when work and worth are not, and that the key to civil office
should be kept in the public hand.^^
It appears that the Angelic Doctor, under the spirit of
Aristotle, would go even further than the Virginia demand
with regard to the separation of the powers of government,
and would have not only the judiciary "separate" and "dis-
tinct" from the legislative and executive departments, but
the latter two also divided from each other.^* He was
aware, too, of the value of the limited tenure of office, so
necessary to the preservation of democratic ideals, and intro-
duced the idea fairly from Aristotle.
St. Thomas esteems the democratic form of government
most highly. He adjudges it vital that the governed have
some share in their own government. And he places the
right of suffrage beyond doubt by tracing the kind of polity
which must recognize it, to the divine plan.^^
As for taxation and other such demands on the posses-
sions of the people, Aquinas insists that the common good
must always be consulted; and this means popular consent,
for the people cannot rationally be unwilling to be benefited.
But, ordinarily, on Thomistic principle, they are not to be
deprived of their money or property in any way.^^
That the people are the practical basis of just law, in
themselves or in their representatives, is as indubitable in
Thomistic politics as in the Virginia Bill of Rights. Every
civil enactment must in some way come from them to be
binding on them." But while legislative power resides in the
people or their representatives, Aquinas believes that the
11 Summa Theologica, 2a 2«., qu.civ. a.vl. 12 Ibid., 2a 28b., qu.lxiii.
IS Com. Polit, m., 14. i4lMd., II., 1, and IV., 12.
18 Summa Theologica, la 2»., qu.ov. a.i. i« De Regimine Judeeorum.
17 Summa Theologica, la 2%., qu.xc. a.lli.
1922.] THOMISTIC AND AMERICAN RIGHTS 749
power of withholding legal force is in the hands of the ruler
of the community, for obvious reasons. However, the ruler
has no right to exercise the power always and at will, but only
when the law falls short and ever for the good of the people.
Moreover, only in the case of a law which "rests on his author-
ity" is he privileged to dispense; and he is always the vice-
gerent of the people. If he represents them in making the
law, equally he must represent them in suspending it or the
particular application of it. The Angelic Doctor is explicit
that the authority-wielder must not act arbitrarily in the
matter.^®
He proclaims the unlawful character of all civil measures
against a man beyond those which strict justice requires. In
this the right of a speedy trial is implied, and is further sug-
gested in his sensible remark that, fettering a man, we hinder
him "from doing not only evil, but also good."^® The need
of promptitude and facility in the administration of justice
is referred to as self-evident in the Summa Theologica, la
28e., qu.cv. a.ii.: "Since the necessity of judgments frequently
obtains, access to a judge should be ready." ^^ St. Thomas'
contention that "good is to be presumed of everyone unless the
contrary appears," ^^ unmistakably suggests the right of the
accused to be treated humanely and considerately prior to
trial.
There are Thomistic texts ^^ from which our modern idea
of trial by jury is not far removed. The thought that the
people should in somewise judge the people was Aristotle's,
and passed through the Angelic Doctor's Commentary into
mediaeval influence. When Thomas teaches that a man may
judge none others than his subjects, he is not counter to the
jury idea; for the accused is always, in a manner, inferior to
those who are appointed to pass a verdict on him.
Aquinas sets his doctrine rigidly against cruel and un-
usual punishments."
It indirectly follows from his teaching that the home is a
distinct institution, prior to the State, possessive of its own
character and hence, we must conclude, of its own rights,"
18 Ibid., la 2iB., qu.xcvil. a.iv. 19 Ibid., 2a 2tB., qu.lxv. a.lil.
20 Pretterea, VII. 21 Summa Theologica, 2a 2x., qu.lxx. a.iii.
22 Vide Com. Polit., IV., 15, and m., 1.
28 Summa Theologica, 2a 28e., qu.cix. a.i., ad.l, and a.Il., ad.l.
24 Com. Polit., I., 1.
750 THOMISTIC AND AMERICAN RIGHTS [Sept.,
that an undue invasion of it, even with civil sanction, is un-
just. He deems the home the civil unit and a moral person.^^
Hence he would have the inviolability of the home, as well as
of the individual, truly acknowledged. Under the name
"home," it would seem, Aquinas includes private houses and
places.
To be sure, the Angelic Doctor preceding Gutenberg and
Faust in history by nearly two centuries, is silent about the
liberty of the press. But he is eloquent on the right of liberty
of conscience and speech. His thoughts on these subjects,
conceived in a peculiarly religious age, are naturally bound
up in the topic of non-Christians and recusants from the
Faith. Here, particularl3% his principle must be distinguished
from its historical application. And his principle, democrat-
ically, is this: "Those who have never accepted the Faith are
in no wise to be forced into it; for to believe is an act of the
will." ^^ His advocacy of freedom of conscience is not weak-
ened in principle by his additional teaching, that those who
have freely accepted the Faith are bound to fulfill its obliga-
tions.
Of speech, he plainly admits the right;" but he speaks
rather on the abuse and misapplication of it, the better to
keep it from brimming over into a license and into the vul-
garity which once caused Lord Morely to describe the press as
"a perpetual engine for keeping discussion on a low level."
He urges that constructive criticism should be the aim of free
discussion, and that disputants have no right to disrespect
authorities greater than themselves. He offers monitions on
the proper use and purpose of free thought and speech, thus
assuming the right of them,^^ and raising it beyond cavil.
The Angelic Doctor views the State as a whole which
should never be severed, and hence should be administered
by a single legislature. In fact, whatever favor he manifests
for monarchy springs from a defence of this very Virginian
right itself: uniform government.^*
The Virginian cry for justice seems but a reverberation
of a deep Thomistic note. Obviously, justice, in St. Thomas'
doctrine, is in causal relation to the common good.^° He ob-
25 Snmnia Theelogica, 2a 28e., qu.l. a.iii. 28 Ibid., 2a 2ae., qu.x. a.vili.
27 Ibid., 2a 2ae., qu.x. a.i., ad.1,2. 28 Ibid., 2a 2«., q.x. a.vii., ad.3.
29 De Regimine, I., 1. so Summa Theologica, 2a 2ae., qu.lvlli. a.v.
1922.] THOMISTIC AND AMERICAN RIGHTS 751
serves that there can be no harmony, security or consistency
in human society unless each individual be granted his due.
More than this, democracy could not ask nor a free govern-
ment promise; and no less than this is the Thomistic demand
and pledge. His stand for the virtue of temperance is as
vivid as Virginia's.'^ According to him, intemperance renders
the individual a slave. A man must be master of himself
to be a fitting citizen in a democracy, which is really at the
mercy of the individual. For in such a form of government
every citizen has a hand.
As for the "frequent recurrence to fundamental prin-
ciple," on which the Virginia Bill insists, the politics of
Aquinas in its totality is a corroborative doctrine. Not once
does he snap connection with ethics to indulge a dizzy, spec-
tacular flight. His majestic concept of the natural law is the
beginning, the guide and the end of his political thought. It
is the consistent and immutable basis of rights, as well as the
vindication of duties. It perpetually prescribes reason and
approves all reasonable ideas of State. It teaches not only
liberty, but law; not only culture, but service; not only peace,
but prudence. So earnestly does Aquinas cling to its prin-
ciples that he may be accused of impracticality. But such a
judgment would be as unjust to him as to the patriots of
Virginia, who set for their own State and our young Republic
such noble political ideals.
Finally, like Virginia, Aquinas maintains that one's Chris-
tian attitude must not be limited by one's social sphere. The
helping hand should not be exclusive, but warm with democ-
racy.'2 The individual is to think and feel in large terms,
breaking the husks of pusillanimity and recognizing that
humanity is bigger than self. Here is not only democracy,
but also the assurance and protection of it.
The Massachusetts Declaration of Rights (1780), as agres-
sively American as the Virginian, is lengthier but substantially
the same. The original third article of this Bill mingles civics
and religion in a manner to make the anti-mediaeval American
wince; for right here in a document couched by the very
goddess of Liberty, we see an admission of the moral in-
si Ibid., 2a 2a5., qu.cxlii. a.iv.
a Ibid., 2a 2ae., qu.civ. a.v.; qu.xxvl. a.iv., ad.3; qu.xxxl. a.ll., ad.l, and a.ill..
ad.2.
752 THOMISTIC AND AMERICAN RIGHTS [Sept.,
fluence of Church on State, and an admiration for it. We
instantly feel all the more certain that the role which Thomas
Aquinas assigns religion in the State does not limit his ap-
preciation of liberty in the least. A comparison between the
Bay State Article and St. Thomas' doctrine on the place and
service of religion in the State ^^ would indicate that the
former is the stronger and bolder, though written in the very
heydey of the spirit of American freedom. It was later
toned down and became Article XI. of the amendments. Gov-
ernmental attention to expenses and coercion in the matter of
religious instruction are not mentioned in the new version.
In its softer notes, the article sounds even more Thomistic
than before.
Massachusetts guarantees protection to the individual.
Thomistic politics does as much and more. Not only protec-
tion, but subsistence, is the Angelic Doctor's insistence. The
Bay State proclaims the necessity of religion in a republic
if morality is to prevail. Aquinas says as much and more.
He believes and teaches that virtue may be vitally conditioned
by temporalities, and that government should, therefore, seek
to assure every worthy citizen of a sufficiency of bodily goods.
"Two things," he asserts in his treatise on rulership, "are
required for a good life : the principal one is working accord-
ing to virtue (for it is virtue by which we live well) ; the
other is secondary, and in a way instrumental, viz., a suf-
ficiency of bodily goods, the use of which is necessary to an
act of virtue." ^* Aquinas apparently would no more have a
hungry man in the State than a wronged one. His teaching
would make the Massachusetts declaration sound tame.
Massachusetts vindicates for the people the right of as-
sembly and discussion. Aquinas, too, holds the right of public
assertion against civil wrongs, and hence implies the further
right of the people to meet for such purpose.^^ In the case
where a civil body is the buffer between the multitude and the
chief official, Aquinas would have him dealt with through the
agency of that body. But the important fact is that he teaches
a practical relation of the people to their own welfare and
their legislature, which is the essence of the Massachusetts
demand.
The Angelic Doctor realizes both the stability and the in-
38 Ibid., 2a 2a., qu.xcix. a.lll. 34 De Regimine, I„ 15. 35 Ihid. I., 6.
1922.] THOMISTIC AND AMERICAN RIGHTS 753
adequacy of law, and teaches the necessity of remedying and
perfecting it.^^ This, of course, includes the necessity for the
legislative body to meet as frequently as the duties of mak-
ing new laws and the amelioration, abrogation or confirma-
tion of old ones require.
The Colonial stand against "taxation without representa-
tion" is forfeit in such texts of St. Thomas as: "To ordain
anything for the common good is the prerogative of the whole
people or of their representative;"" and "Rulers of the earth
are established by God not to seek their own advantage, but
the common good of the people." ^* Thus the substance of
the shibboleth which blazed the way to the American Revo-
lution had lain in Thomistic pages for five centuries before
the Boston Tea Party.
These cursory observations sufficiently show that the
Master Mind of the Middle Ages may not have been altogether
remote from the birth of the American Republic. The seed of
his politics sprouted in the centuries. He taught men what
they could not forget. Besides, all the Popes, from Urban IV.,
his contemporary, down to Pius XL, used their sincerest
sanctions to keep his voice, so eloquent of true democracy, a
living thing in world thought; Catholic and non-Catholic
writers, consciously or unconsciously, developed his ideas;
so that the final political harvest was a foregone con-
clusion.
One has but to turn to the Declaration of Independence
and compare it with Thomistic doctrine to be further con-
vinced of the intellectual relationship of Aquinas to the liberty
we enjoy. All "the self-evident truths" in this great Amer-
ican document are points of his politics.^^ We cannot but
conclude from such a comparison that the mind of Aquinas
was not far behind that of Thomas Jefferson when the bit of
literature, powerful enough to free America, was couched.
The Declaration already lay Latinized in the books of the
ablest general scholar in the history of the Catholic Church
and the best representative of its spirit and traditions: a
satisfying proof that the thought of Roman CathoHcism is
86 Summa Theologica, la 2se., qu.xcvil. a.ii.
37 Ibid., la 286., qu.xc. a.iii. 38 De Regimine Judeeorum.
39 Vide n. Sententite, d.xliv., qu.i. a.iii.; De Regimine, I., 1, 6; Summa Theologica.
la 286., qu.xc. a.iii.
VOL. cxv. 48
154: THOMISTIC AND AMERICAN RIGHTS [Sept.,
inimical to tyranny and indeed friendly to the people, their
rights and the rational reign of liberty.
We may even extend the parallel between American and
Thomistic tenets to show that the Angel of the Schools taught
the very principles which projected the existing Constitution
of the United States, and which Peletiah Webster embodied
in his "epoch-making tract" of February 16, 1783. Mr. Web-
ster's principle that the supreme authority ought to be suf-
ficiently powerful is advanced in St. Thomas' De Regimine,
I., 13. His second principle (that the supreme authority
should be limited) is to be found in the same work (I., 3 and
6). As for his third principle (that a number of sovereign
states uniting into one commonwealth must hand over to the
supreme power as much of their own sovereignty as is neces-
sary to render the ends of the union effectual), St. Thomas
has a number of texts which clearly show the relation of the
less to the greater and the necessity of the less becoming
even lesser in the greater in order to preserve itself the
better.*^
It is clear that Aquinas would have disapproved of a na-
tional condition which wrung froni George Washington the
complaint: "We are one nation today and thirteen tomorrow."
His propositions made for the civil synthesis which, without
destroying the individuality of the States any more than that
of the individuals composing them, would "form a more per-
fect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, pro-
vide for the common defence, promote the general welfare
and secure the blessing of liberty." In a word, he was the
advocate of "the perfect community," which Peletiah Web-
ster envisaged and our Constitution secured.
Two centuries before Columbus discovered America geo-
graphically, it would seem that a son of St. Dominic had lo-
cated it politically. In Thomistic politics, our country is in
embryo. The Angelic Doctor differs from the founders of
our Republic and their achievement only as summer from
springtime, or the full-blown blossom from the humble seed.
To admit the democracy and merit of the United States is to
concede the same of the presaging Thomistic thought. In the
right-bills of our sovereign States, in the document of our
40 Sum/na Theologica, la 2a., qu.lxiv. a.ii.; qu.xxix. a.ii., ad.2; Queestiones
Disputae, De Caritate, qu.i. a.iv., ad.2; Com. Polit., I., 1.
1922.] ON A BIRTHDAY 755
Declaration of Independence, in the rationale of our Con-
stitution, his finger appears. An invisible guest, he was
present at the founding of our nation; as he is also present
through its preservation. So long as she is true to justice and
reason, the spirits in which she tVas conceived, our country
cannot die. Justice and reason express the political apos-
tolate of Aquinas, and are the very substance of his message.
Ideally and practically, they are his theory of State. In
justice the people must find their due, which is democracy.
In reason, they must accept duty and claim right, which is
the salvation of democracy.
ON A BIRTHDAY.
BY MICHAEL EARLS, S.J.
All on a fair morning
At an altar place,
It was Our Lady's birthday
Spoke for thee a grace.
High above the altar
Lovely eyes looked down
All meek in white marble
And a blue window gown.
Brighter than dawn sounds
On a desert coast,
Bells in the Mass hour
Hailed the white Host.
Christ lit the silence
Like a still white Flame,
His Heart was a hid rose
Eager for thy name.
All on a fair morning,
Our Lady knows the place.
Thy name won a welcome
And thy heart a grace.
FETTERS OF GOLD.
BY MARY A. CARNE.
I.
F^IRST met him in a Colorado canyon.
I was out there for my health, a T. B.
suspect; one of those damaged, human cogwheels
the great business machines of the East are con-
tinually sending back to God's Nature-factory
to be mended, in the one place where it is still allowed free
operation, the mountains and prairies of the wonderful West.
I was progressing finely; the factory worked magic, and that
day I had ventured a little longer tramp than usual — through
one of the canyons I most admired.
A wild storm of wind and rain and thunder — one of the
frequent house-cleanings with which Mother Nature succeeds
in keeping Colorado air refreshing — drove me to seek shelter.
I found it in the shape of a little shack, nestled deep in one of
the gorges — just a shack, only one room and a little lean-to.
Its owner, a young man, was inside when I entered, bring-
ing a wild dash of weather with me. I was welcomed, of
course; it was a Western home if it was a shack. While the
thunder growled, we talked.
Of the weather, first, and the Japanese immigration ques-
tion, of course, and of politics in general — finally, of ourselves.
I told him who I was and why I came, and was congratulated
warmly on my improved health. Then I glanced at him,
curiously, for he was surely no T. B. suspect; his healthy tan
and broad shoulders mocking my newly-acquired color and
freshly gained few pounds.
"Why are you out here?" for from some chance remark
I knew he was not a Westerner. "You are not T. B.?"
He smiled and shook his head, then the smile faded into
seriousness.
"I'm worse."
My curiosity grew. Worse? I glanced at his face again.
1922.] FETTERS OF GOLD
757
Even in the gloom of the cabin the occasional lightning flashes
showed it plainly. It was clean, honest and manly, yet boyish.
No crime, surely, lurked behind those honest eyes. The place
was an ideal setting for a desperado, but he wasn't. I laughed
as I made my next suggestion.
"Bandit?"
The gloom on his face did not lift.
"It looks worse to me sometimes," he said.
A sudden gust of wind and thunder shook the cabin, dark-
ening it still more. Losing sight for a moment of the honest,
boyish face, I felt a distrust steal over me. Who, and what,
was this fellow? But I am no coward, and I spoke out
sharply :
"What are you then, anyhow?"
The darkness seemed to deepen further; I could see
nothing of his face— only the red light of his cigar. Then he
spoke slowly, remorsefully:
"Darn it all, I'm a millionaire!"
Laugh ! I don't think I ever laughed harder. The light-
ning lit up the cabin just then, showing the rude furnishings,
the pine walls and the boy, in khaki shirt and corduroy
trousers, beside me who said so remorsefully: "I'm a million-
aire." But he didn't laugh. He was in earnest; I saw that
at once, for I could see his face better now. The storm seemed
to have lessened somewhat.
"You can laugh if you want to," he said, grimly, "but, tell
me honestly, how many millionaires do you know?"
I couldn't truthfully say that I knew any. I was book-
keeper for a big lumber concern back home; my acquaintance
with millionaires was confined, as I told him, to reading about
them in the newspapers.
"I know," he said, moodily, "sepia pictures in Sunday
supplements, their country homes, wives and children, prize
dogs, golfing on the links and all that; full description of their
philanthropy in another section — hospital endowments and
that sort of things; political connections on the first page — oh,
yes, that's the way you know millionaires. It sounds good
on paper, but they're slaves, I tell you, they're slaves !"
He had risen from his chair now, and was pacing the little
room with long strides that nearly reached the wall at either
turn; they did not quite do it, and he had to give a quick, short
758 FETTERS OF GOLD [Sept.,
step to complete the walk. As I watched him, it gave the
effect of a bar of jerky music, a long note followed by a
quaver; he jerked out his sentences, too, now. He was in
dead earnest and was unburdening his soul to a stranger,
perhaps with greater confidence because he was a stranger;
maybe, the semi-gloom made it easier for him.
"You know," he went on, "you can own other things.
Your people and your friends — you can live in them and with
them — ^your horse and your dog are part of you — ^you can own
a house, and its yours — you can add to it — a window here, a
porch there — and it can express you. You can do that with
a yacht," he continued, "or a car, or anything like that — you
can make them serve you, but not money. Not much money,
I mean; you can own a little, but much owns you."
I ventured to remind him, as he paused for a moment, that
with money he could buy the other things by which he could
"express himself," as he called it.
"No, you can't," he answered. "I know what I mean.
If you have a little money, yes, but too great an amount dom-
inates you. I have lived among men of money, and I know.
It is not you who buy the house, or the 3^acht, or the car.
It is your money, and your money owns it. Tell me, when
you look at Rockefeller's home, or Gould's, in the Sunday
supplement, do you think of him or his money? When you
see his car, you do not notice what make he prefers. You
wonder with that much money what he will buy. When you
see their wives and children you wonder what a millionaire's
family looks like; even they don't represent him to the world,
only his money. It grows so," he continued, and the quick,
nervous pacing, which had stopped for a moment, began
again. "It increases so horribly! You can't stop it — once it
begins! Compound interest piled on compound interest —
and stocks and bonds that just can't help making money.
They drink it in ! Other things seem hard to make money out
of — but start money making money, and it goes on forever!"
I stared at him. The storm had ceased now; it was quite
light, and I could see him plainly. The boyish look was all
gone, or if there, it was rather the gaze of a terrified boy;
his eyes were full of fear and depression, almost dilated;
there were drawn lines about his mouth. I felt an intense
pity as I watched him, and yet there seemed something ludi-
1922.] FETTERS OF GOLD 759
crous about it all to the hard business sense which the world
had bred in me. Yet it was no stage-play; he was really
facing a nightmare.
I asked a question; partly to break the look of tension on
his face:
"Is that w^hy you are out here, then; you are taking a
vacation from stocks and bonds?"
A sudden smile lit up his face, sending the happy, boyish
look again to it.
"Yes," he said, "this is my vacation; maybe my last.
You see I am not a millionaire yet, not quite. I am only a
prospective one; my grandfather brought me up, and he is on
his last legs, poor old chap. The doctors only give him
months now, and I know when he is gone the noose will
descend on my neck. So I am out here— all by myself.
Nobody knows me, and I haven't a thing around me but stuff
like this," he waved his hand around him, "things that a tramp
might own. There isn't a person within miles of me. I meet
none but passersby like yourself. There is nothing between
me and the sky. I sleep under the stars. I never come in
except for rains, and not always then. I am going ere long
into the chains that wealth will put on me, but for this time,
at least, I am absolutely free."
His face lighted as he said the words into a radiance that
was real beauty. My worldliness melted under it; for the
moment the stocks and bonds — my own poor share of which
I had always tenderly cherished — suddenly seemed to me
really chains for this ardent young spirit.
"Why don't you chuck it all?" I asked. "After the old
man dies, I mean. Can't you refuse it, or something?"
He looked at me seriously.
"I have thought of it," he said, "but you know I can't.
We've been millionaires so long; it's in the family, you know,
and I — I expect Grandad was afraid I might, and he made
me promise to accept the money and not do anything foolish
with it. So I am bound by it; the poor old man, you see!
I am the last of the name, and I couldn't refuse him, but that
is my big temptation. No, I've got to take it some day," and
his eyes looked drearily ahead as if at a gray future, but
the mouth never lost its firmness.
I could have laughed again at the bizarreness of it all
760 FETTERS OF GOLD [Sept.,
but for the pathos; the lad so heroically resolving, for the
honor of the family, to accept the arduous portion of becoming
a millionaire.
As I looked a sudden beam of light fell over him, lighting
the sad, stern, young face with a sort of unearthly glory.
"By Jingo!" he cried. "Great Scott! Look, what a sun-
set," and, bursting open the crazy door, was outside.
I followed him, but to tell the truth, though a sunset is
glorious seen from a Colorado canyon, I saw most of it in his
face. He looked like a young demigod; he seemed to me the
very incarnation of the whole scene; the wild freedom of the
canyon, the blue sky framed above, the sunset glory, all
seemed alive in this superb specimen of young manhood with
the radiant face and the glowing eyes. Then all the splendor
faded; he turned to me, his eyes still shining.
"Glory!" he said, "that was fine! It's grand to be alive
here, isn't it?" and he threw out his arms and inhaled a long,
deep breath of the sweet, free air.
I grew pitiful again as I watched him; he seemed so made
for freedom; after all, it was cruel to put him in fetters of
gold.
A sudden chill in the air that followed the sunset warned
me. The doctor had cautioned me not to stay out after sun-
down. I must go home. I asked a few directions, and then
bade him good-bye.
"It's not entirely good-bye, though," he said, "I am coming
to see you. It will do you good to come up here, and I must
not hide entirely from my kind. It will come harder when I
put on my fetters of gold."
He had used my own words, but I tried to laugh at him.
"Come, now," I said, "don't be an absolute jackass. Most
men would be only too happy to be in your place."
"Most men, perhaps," he answered, smilingly, "but I pre-
fer it here if I am an absolute jackass. I am a millionaire
here already — a millionaire of freedom."
When I reached the turn, I looked back. He was smiling
still and waving, his splendid figure outlined against the sky
some feet above me; a millionaire of freedom in his soli-
tude, indeed. Then I turned and left him.
He had warned me of dangerous spots on the path, but
my mind was preoccupied, and I stumbled a little, once, and
1922.] FETTERS OF GOLD 751
had just resolved to be more careful when— it happened
One moment I was on safe ground, just realizing it was a
httle crumbly there; the next, I was caught, mercifully, caught
on an overhanging bush which alone saved me from dash-
ing to death on the rocks of the river that foamed in the gorge
below.
I could not remain there long; I knew it. I felt benumbed
with fear; I dared not move. My faculties of prayer were a
little rusty from disuse, perhaps, but I used them. I mur-
mured something, the "Hail Mary," I think it was, and sud-
denly felt an agonizing pain in my shoulders as someone
seized me in a grasp that was overpowering, and I was lifted—
dragged — to the path again.
I think I must have lost consciousness, for when I opened
my eyes I felt dirt and stones under my head and saw the blue
sky above me. I was flat on my back in the path, and
fumbling at my shirt collar to open it was my "absolute
jackass."
"Are you better now?" he asked. Don't try to stand up
yet. I hated to let you lie there in the dirt, but the path is too
risky to carry you. You had a close shave. I just could
reach you. No, don't get up."
But I was already on my feet, although I clung to him for
a moment. I could see it all so plainly. There was the very
spot where my feet had slid, for the earth showed it, and there
was the gorge so many feet below and the kindly bush that
had caught me, but, thanks to my rescuer, I was here. I
think my hand grasp spoke for me. I couldn't. Americans
are not demonstrative usually, and I was no exception to the
rule.
"How did you ever do it?" I believe that was all I said
in words. "Where did you stand?"
"Just there," he answered, laconically, "there was just
room enough, and no more."
It was a fact; he must have put one foot on the path and
the other on a place that could just be held by a resolute mind
in a strong body. It was dangerous at that; one misstep, and
there would have been two instead of one in the gorge below.
I shuddered —
"You were in an ace of death yourself," I said, "and I am
a stranger."
762 FETTERS OF GOLD [Sept.,
"Nonsense," he answered with a lorldly air that was yet
friendly, "there are no strangers here. Rather, we are all
strangers, that is it. Don't these canyons and mountains and
hig spaces give you a constant reminder that you are a stranger
and a pilgrim, as my old grandmother used to say the Good
Book said? The very vastness makes friends of strangers
here. We feel our insignificance. As for death, I suppose I
was near it, but what could I do? I could not stay here and
let you go. After all, though," he went on, a touch of boyish-
ness replacing his lordly air again, "I am glad it didn't happen.
Think of it! One minute living, rejoicing, exulting; the next,
gone, annihilated, nothing but a broken body down on those
rocks. Great Scott! I'm glad it didn't happen!"
I stared at him, astounded again. I was a Catholic,
although not a very strict one; one of the "shortest Mass on
Sundays" and "Sacraments at Christmas and Easter" sort,
but I was a Catholic. My young god of freedom was evidently
a splendid pagan; for him death was annihilation. I would
have liked to say something, but you cannot well enter into
a religious argument standing by the side of a precipice with
the man who has just rescued you. Besides, as I was aware,
my religion was not very fervent, and I felt that I was not at
all fitted for arguing with this mind which I recognized as
superior to my own. But in spite of myself the words left
my lips:
"You annihilated? Never!"
He did not seem to hear me, however, for just then he
gave a sudden exclamation:
"There's just the man I want," and forming a trumpet
with his hands, he began to shout: "Doc — tor Dal — ton . . .
Doc — tor . . . Dal — ton . . . hey — there — " and a carriage
just entering a path below was stopped, and Doctor Dalton,
who happened to be my physician, speedily reached us.
I received a tremendous scolding and was ordered to
drive home with him.
"You must come and see me, though," I pleaded with my
young rescuer. "You saved my life, remember."
"Yes," he answered, "I told you I was coming, and maybe
I shall ask a favor of you some day. I did save your life even
if you do consider me an absolute jackass."
"Now," said the Doctor as we drove off, "I like that
1922.] FETTERS OF GOLD
763
young fellow. He is fond of doing good turns. Why in
thunder did you call him an absolute jackass?"
But I did not answer. I was looking back to where my
absolute jackass tramped back to his mountain home, alone.
He did come to see me, but I was not at home. He left
a bunch of mountain flowers, however, and his card, and I
discovered that his name was Richard Saunders. My own,
by the way, is Jack Graham— I had forgotten to introduce
myself — this is his story, not mine.
I had no second chance to see him, for the next day I
received a summons from the East. My father was ill, and I
must return. It was thought safe, as I was so much improved
in health, and I left the West without meeting him again.
He was in my mind, however, in spite of my own anxiety,
and I wondered what would become of him.
As I rode East, I saw him a thousand times in fancy. As
a young demigod with the sunset glory around him, then as
a haunted man with the shadow of his dread of his wealth
in his eyes; above all, with that stern look of renunciation on
his face as the sunlight fell upon him like a young martyr,
but, alas, a pagan martyr. What would befall him? Would
his golden fetters enslave the nobility that dwelt in him, or
would his paganism force him to burst them. What lay
before my young pagan martyr with his longing for freedom?
I could not answer, for only God knew.
n.
Only God knew, but nine months later He made me a
sharer in that knowledge.
For the interest suddenly born, more suddenly and
strongly cemented, met, to my surprise, an equally sudden
revival, and one Ma}^ afternoon I again sat smoking and talk-
ing with my young millionaire. Millionaire of wealth this
time, for we were seated on the veranda of his Hudson River
home, his own property now. Before and around us stretched
the park-like beauty of his well-cared-for acres, and through
the long French window behind me I could see the elegant
appointments of the study we had just left. The whole house,
and I had seen most of it, was the sort of palace I had often
seen pictured but never entered before.
Astonishment at doing it now was still rife within me.
764 FETTERS OF GOLD [Sept.,
I had scarcely gotten over the surprise of the letter I had re-
ceived two days previous from "your true friend, Richard
Saunders," dated from Monskford-on-Hudson. It told me of
his grandfather's death some time before, and reminded me
that he had told me on the day on which he had saved my
life that, in virtue of this, he might some day ask a favor.
"I want it now, old fellow," the letter ran, "I am very
much alone. Somehow, it seems easy to confide in you. I
told you a whole lot about this absolute jackass in a Colorado
canyon one day. Will you come to a New York millionaire's
home and hear the sequel? A fellow must confide in some
one, and you know I saved your life. That gives me a claim
on you, doesn't it? And now I have another, which I will tell
you when we meet. You will come, won't you?"
Of course I would, and I did.
So here we sat, smoking and talking, in the May sunshine
amidst the costly appurtenances of wealth, as once we had
smoked and talked in a Western cabin during a Colorado
thunderstorm nine months before. Of many things again; of
politics once more, and of my father's health and my own —
both now restored — and again, finally, of himself.
I had noticed him from the first moment, keenly, and
I had seen some things that pleased and some that puzzled
me. He was no longer the young Westerner in khaki, but
the faultlessly dressed New Yorker in his spotless flannels,
and he was at home in this environment, too. He was to the
manner born, and his wealth fitted him like a glove. He
seemed to ennoble it; it had certainly not lowered him; there
was no hint of its mastering him, as he had so dreaded;
it seemed, rather, only a background to his personality. I
noticed another thing, too, and while the other pleased, this
puzzled me. His wealth seemed a fitting background, yet it
was only a background. He was detached from it and stood
away from it, and his air and manner perplexed me, too.
He was not less virile, less earnest than before, rather more so,
but there was another air to his virility — a repression of
strength that seemed to render it stronger. He was changed,
slightly, in looks, too: he had lost his tan and his face was
slightly thinner, and he had at times an expression which I
could not understand.
This impression lessened somewhat as we sat talking of
1922.] FETTERS OF GOLD
765
the world and its affairs, and I fell under the spell of the
potent influences around me. The atmosphere delighted me.
I began to revel in this sense of luxury, and he seemed to
become its type to me.
"Say, Dick, old fellow," I broke out at last, "do you re-
member the nonsense you talked out in Colorado? I was
blunt with you then, but it was the Western air, I believe. I
called you an absolute jackass. When you realize what all
this means to you," and I waved my hand around compre-
hensively, "don't you think you were?"
His face grew serious at once. Not with gloom; this was
a gentle seriousness, tinged with another look— peaceful and
pleasant to see.
"Yes, old chap," he said, slowly, "I think I was— not
exactly as you mean, though — an absolute jackass."
A sudden smile lit up his face as he said the words.
"That's what I wanted you for," he said. "That's the
story. I'll begin," and tossing away the butt of his costly
Havana, he picked out another from his heavily-carved silver
case and passed the handsome affair over to me. "Oh, you've
finished yours, too. Smoke another, do."
I accepted gladly. Cigars like these I had never smoked
in my life before. The blue haze of their smoke rose between
us as he spoke again:
"So you think this life suits me, do you?"
"Admirably," I said. "Why, it fits you to perfection. A
millionaire! It is what you were made for!"
He laughed.
"You like the place, do you? Had a good time? I'm
glad, for I can't ask you again. You see, I leave myself to-
morrow."
"Leave? You are going traveling for a while?"
"I'm not leaving for a while, but for good. I'm going to
chuck it all, as you once advised."
"But your promise to your grandfather," I gasped, "how
about that? And this represents power . . . You shouldn't
lightly—"
"It is not done lightly," he interrupted. "That promise no
longer binds me. I did accept it, and I leave it in good hands.
It will have power still, strong power, for good. And I will
be free."
766 FETTERS OF GOLD [Sept.,
Free! So his paganism had not stood the test of renun-
ciation. After all, how could it? But he was speaking:
"You know I have always longed for freedom. It has
been almost a passion with me, and I am going to have it now.
I shall be freer than I ever dreamed a man could be. I am
going to break every human tie, cast aside fetters of gold and
all fetters, and in a solitude, deeper than Colorado's moun-
tains, find freedom absolute."
The second stage of his paganism. His liberty would be
license, and he was going to resort to savagery in the extreme
of his nature-worship, but no man has a right to cast all
human bonds aside. I was not pious, but once more I had to
speak :
"But, after all, is that right? We are not entirely our
own. We owe something to man — and God."
A sudden radiance lit up his face, reminding me of an
alabaster lamp that I had seen illuminated in an old museum.
He echoed the word softly, "God!"
"Can't you guess?" he cried. "'The glorious liberty'" —
then he broke off suddenly and took my hand. "Jack, I said
a new tie bound us. I have known you were a Catholic ever
since I unfastened your collar and saw your scapular that
day in the canyon. I am one, too, now. I was received into
the Church in Kentucky two months ago."
Again I didn't say anything, but my hand-grasp did. He
returned it and went on:
"You understand, then, don't you about my being free?"
I only stared.
"Of course," I said, "there is no freedom broader than
Catholicism, but I don't understand you exactly."
"Oh, I thought you would," he said, boyishly and seemed
disappointed. He got up from his chair and took two or three
quick, nervous turns up and down the veranda, tossing his
half-smoked cigar away. He watched its spark glow among
the grass for a minute, then came back and stood with one
hand resting on the back of his chair. He reminded me of
when I had seen him out in Colorado, only the haunting dread
and the pained air of renunciation were both alike gone;
there was a look of exaltation on his face.
"I thought you would know," he said. "You're a Cath-
olic. I am going to seek the real freedom. I want freedom
1922.] FETTERS OF GOLD
767
\
from the cares of both poverty and wealth, from joy as well
as pain, freedom not only from others, but from myself;
freedom absolute, *the glorious liberty of the children of God,'
so I leave tomorrow for the Abbey of Gethsemane, in Ken-
tucky. I am going to be a Trappist monk."
III.
A Trappist monk! My head whirled.
I was a Catholic, and a slightly better one than formerly,
but — a Trappist monk ! I never had seen much use in monks.
I regarded them, with my twentieth-century wisdom, as a
venerable antiquity which the Church did not well know how
to get rid of, as a bit of medisevalism rather curiously retained.
I could appreciate the active orders; I had been nursed by
Sisters of Charity and admired the Christian Brothers very
much, for I had been taught by them once for a while. But
monks — I had always thought a monastery a resort for the
feeble-minded, or perhaps a good place for a man with some
terrible sin on his conscience. I had sometimes wondered,
half unconsciously, why the (5hurch did not suppress them as
suited to other times, but utterly out of date. Indeed, I had
heard that novices were few in American monasteries, and it
seemed reasonable; they didn't fit in with our free institutions
and modern business ideas at all.
And now, here in New York State, in a place which was
the essence of modern civilization in every appointment, to
hear a man who owned millions and smoked cigars that cost
more than my lunches, calmly informing me that he was
going to be a Trappist monk. He was going to give up all
this for a narrow cell, for bread and water, for everlasting
silence and prayer. I knew that men had done it; I had read
of it, but the fact had never touched me before. One thing
about it w^as stranger still. His craving for freedom had been
his passion. Now he was going to put on fetters, not of gold,
but of iron; he who had loved freedom so madly was going
to pas^ his days in confinement that made a prison seem
almost free. And he said he was seeking freedom. Was he
mad?
I looked at him. One thing struck me at once, hit me
between the eyes, It was the absolute calmness of his look,
768 FETTERS OF GOLD [Sept.,
the serene sanity of his gaze. Whatever else might be true
or not true, he was not mad, and he was not moved by a
whim of fancy; he was calmly and resolutely going to do
something which he believed would give him what he sought.
In the face of such facts, what could I say? I surrendered
entirely.
"Dick," I said, slo\vly, "I see you want me to congratulate
you, and I do. I don't know why and I don't know what for.
My experience tells me that you are more of an absolute
jackass than ever, but when I look at you I know you're not.
I'll tell you truly that I always thought — I suppose my Cathol-
icism isn't exactly what it should be — I always thought that
Trappist monks were fools or repentant criminals, but you
seem to have grasped something that I haven't."
He smiled as I went on and drew his chair close to mine
and laid his hand in boyish fashion on my knee.
"Old fellow," I said, "I've been a Catholic for twenty-
eight years and you've been one for two months, but you're in
the highest class. I'm coming to you for instruction. Tell
me what it means to be a Trappist monk and how it can make
you free. To me it looks as though you were resigning free-
dom, putting on fetters for the rest of your life."
"Putting on fetters!" He spoke slowly — half painfully —
to my surprise and a sudden look of restraint crossed his face.
"Yes, you're right, Jack. I am — ^putting on fetters, but" — he
leaned over, suddenly, and took a small volume from a carved
table beside him. Turning the pages, he read slowly :
" *Upon his will he binds a radiant chain;
For Freedom's sake he is no longer free.
It is his task, the slave of Liberty
With his own blood to wipe away a stain.
That pain may cease he yields himself to pain
To banish war he must a warrior be.
He dwells in night eternal dawn to see
And gladly dies abundant life to gain.'
"Jack," he had laid the book down now, "Joyce Kilmer
wrote of a man who put on war's chains to gain peace's free-
dom; I put on fetters that I may myself be free. I'll have to
tell you the whole story, but not here — not now. After din-
1922.] FETTERS OF GOLD
769
ner Fll take you to my den, for you shan't leave until the last
minute. I'll send you home in my car."
I could hardly wait; dinner seemed a farce, although it
was a sumptuous repast, and afterwards I entered his den.
It was a cheerful little room, with a narrow iron bed, a book-
shelf, a prie-dieu, some chairs and an ancient crucifix, a
masterpiece of carving, above the mantel. The night had
turned chilly, and there was a grate in which a fire had been
lighted.
Seated before it, he told me all I longed to know. I'll let
him tell it in his own way. The very words seem to linger
in my memory.
"My meeting with you was the first link in the chain.
Yes, even in the chain I mean to wear. You know you were
not home when I came, so I came again. You were gone
then, but I fell in with a young lad at my second visit, whom
I pitied. You were a T. B. suspect. Jack, but he was a cer-
iL-, tainty, and a dead certainty, pretty near. He knew it, and he
was nearly mad. Not at dying, not that— but he wanted to go
home. The very vastness I loved overpowered him, and the
mountains seemed to hem him in; the strange rocks, those
freaks of nature, tortured him. He wanted the rolling hills
of his own Kentucky, her smiling meadows and his little coun-
try home. He couldn't go back, for he had no one to go with
him. His mother was a widow, and old, and she couldn't
come, and, finally, one night someone played *My Old Ken-
tucky Home' on a violin as I sat with him on the porch of the
boarding-house, and the lad laid his head on my arm and
sobbed. 'My Old Kentucky Home!* That finished him, and
me, too, pretty near.
"I fought the devil like a wildcat that night. I knew I
was giving up, maybe, the last of my freedom, but I couldn't
let that boy die homesick like that. So I got him and came
East. I never took such a journey; you know how the moun-
tains look when the sun goes down, that absolute grayness —
and have you ever been in a sandstorm and felt the grit in
your mouth? That was my life just then. He didn't even
know it. I was glad of that. I must have kept up, because
when I got him home, he told me I was an awfully jolly
fellow and that he'd had a lovely trip. The little mother, too
— gee, she was glad !
770 FETTERS OF GOLD [Sept.,
"The sun came out for me then, and I left that cottage
happy, but when I got back to my hotel a telegram awaited
me — my grandfather was dying. I had only a few days more.
I knew I ought to go back, but I couldn't make connections
at once, and I was glad of it. I had one day still. It sounds
heartless, but we had never hit it off and he had been par-
alyzed for months and just lying there helpless, so I couldn't
grieve. I would have to leave the next day, however, and
the thought tightened like a noose about my neck, but — I had
one day more.
"I walked like a madman, I think, up the Kentucky hills,
losing myself, finding myself again, tramping on, first up,
then down, trying by drinking in what I could of the sweet
intoxication of the day to drown the memory of what the
morrow must bring. Nature brought me healing. I felt bet-
ter after my first mad tramping was over; there was a promise
of hope in the sunny sky, the sweet-scented grass and the
fragrant winds. Life could not be all barren, else these would
not have breathed of joy.
"I was just beginning to feel comforted when, suddenly,
I tripped and stumbled on some loosened stones lying by the
roadside. My foot twisted oddly; I was conscious of a cruel
pain in my ankle, and I fell, face downward on the little path.
I don't think I fainted, for I was aware all the time of the
pain in my ankle; it was caught, and I must wrench it free.
I did it at the cost of agony. It must have been trapped in
some of the loose stones. I had to set my teeth and pull hard
to free myself, and I expect I did faint then.
"When I opened my eyes again, I had evidently, in my
struggles, dragged myself from the path and I was lying on
my back in the sweet clover. I tried to rise. It was no go.
I couldn't, for my ankle would not bear me. There was no
one within call, I felt sure of that, for I must have walked
far from any human dwelling, and there I lay with my face
turned upwards towards the sunny sky, so glaring and pitiless
now.
"A myriad of little insects buzzed around and tormented
me. I was in agony, too, with my foot, and I had never
known much pain before. My outdoor life had kept me
healthy, and now this feverish throbbing in my ankle, the
glaring heat on my unprotected face and those stinging insects
1922.] FETTERS OF GOLD 771
formed a torturing combination. It is said, Jack, that
'xNature never did betray a heart that loved her,' but she be-
trayed me then. She was a friend no longer, rather my worst
enemy. I felt it, too, almost personally. I had practically
made an idol of nature; was this my goddess?
"Then there was the humiliation of my utter helplessness
—I had always been so vigorous and free. It seemed as if a
voice was taunting me, too. Tree P it said. 'Yes, you're free,
aren't you? You couldn't even stay free on your last day!'
"My last day! Yes, this was my last day, and I had lost
it. A sudden bitterness rose in my mind. If I only hadn't
brought that lad back home! He was going to die *^ so soon
anyway; it was a darn fool trick, and by it I had lost all the
days of freedom I might have had and put myself here. I had
never been a cursing man. Perhaps— it sounds ironic, and,
well it is— because I was not a Christian, No, Jack, don't
blush. Say never again, old man. At that moment, however,
one of the blackest of oaths leaped to my lips. I longed
heartily to curse the dying lad, pity for whom had put me
where I was. Thank God, I didn't. It was physical force,
I think, that kept it back. I grabbed a handful of that sweet
clover and chewed hard, forcing the words back on my lips.
'I did it myself,' I thought, 'Poor lad! I'll not harm him now
even in fancy.' God is wonderful in the greatness of His re-
wards to slight efforts. I was still chewing the clover when
the glaring sun above was refreshingly shut out; someone was
leaning over me. A kind face met my gaze, a thin face with
close-shorn hair and pitying, almost tender, eyes.
"'Poor lad!' the accent was slightly foreign. 'Poor boy!
You're hurt, maybe.'
"I explained the situation, briefly. With his help, and
clinging to him, I managed to rise, despite the cruel pain. I
experienced a slight shock as, standing upright, I realized
that the sleeve which I clasped belonged to a monk's habit.
He did not notice my surprise.
" 'This way, son,' he said, gently, 'our Abbey of Geth-
semane lies just below. I must take you there. Tis the
nearest place.'
"I was too wearied out with pain to protest, no matter
where he took me. I was led down the narrow path. I don't
remember many details of that journey. The air seemed
772 FETTERS OF GOLD [Sept.,
sweet again, then, suddenly, tall buildings and iron gratings
loomed before me. I was helped into a small, sparsely fur-
nished room, of which spotless cleanliness and bare simplicity
were the chief features. I noticed no more, for my kindly
guide, after seating me, began to take off my shoe.
"I fainted without doubt, then. It was an agony, sure.
I had broken some small ankle bones, and Jack, old fellow,
if you value comfort, break your neck if you want to, but
leave your ankle bones alone. I came to and then went off
again. I know they gave me ether, finally, or else chloroform,
while the monk, who was a surgeon, set those bones. I lived
through torture, and I am not sure, but I think it was about
forty-eight hours later when the world began to revolve again.
"And such a world! Did it revolve, or did it stand still?
Perhaps it was, partly, the anaesthetic — I had never taken one
before — and the shock of physical weakness to one usually
so strong, combined with the dread I felt of the future, but I
felt benumbed. I had tasted desolation in my journey East,
agony there among the clover, now I seemed frozen. The
monk-surgeon had told me I would be forced to stay three
weeks with them, as my nervous system seemed so upset and
any journey, even by automobile, would be bad for the heal-
ing of my ankle. So I stayed. As I said, I was bewildered;
it didn't matter. The whole thing seemed a gigantic mockery
of me.
"To be free, that had been my one craving, and now my
chains were being forged about me in this place, the home of
men who lived in iron fetters. I couldn't bear to look at them
at first, for the very sight of them filled me with dread. I
used to lie awake and look at the moon through my little
window. It showed the plain, severe furniture, the crucifix
on the wall — I never dared look at that either — and the bare
floor. That moon — I used to wonder if it was the same,
flaming, glorious lamp that had lighted my mountain passes.
Everything seemed dead; when I got better and could go about
on crutches I saw the monastery itself, with its noiseless footed
monks, the refectory where all ate in silence, and the long,
quiet corridors; it seemed like an abode of the dead, a king-
dom of slaves.
"I grew sullen, presently; I don't know why I didn't pro-
test and force them to send me home. Perhaps, I realized
1922.] FETTERS OF GOLD
773
that my strength was not fit for it; maybe I was becoming a
slave to my own fears; anyway, I stayed. I had had no news
from the outside world, and had been in no state of mind to
seek any. Finally, one night, the crisis came. I was feverish
and the little room seemed ahve with mocking voices. Every
laughing breeze, every rippling brook, every wild bird I Had
ever heard seemed to join the chorus.
"*You wanted to be free, you wanted to be free! Free!
Free ! And these are your last days, your last days, and you're
spending them in a prison— among slaves!' A sudden, sick
disgust swept over me; my own weak helplessness mocked me.
Just then a young monk passed the door, a lantern in his
hand. The flaring light shone plainly on his coarse habit;
what a splendid figure of a man he was, tall, straight, vigor-
ous, just what I had been. I stared after him in bewilder-
ment. *You had what I had and you made yourself a slav»!'
"With the thought a glow rushed over me. After all, my
fetters of gold were kingly chains; alongside of this man's
folly they looked like freedom. Did not wealth mean free-
dom, and even sovereignty? A sudden thrill of power swept
through me. Oh, for morning to come, for morning to come,
that I might taste the first fruits of my power.
"I would send to the nearest city for other doctors. They
would take me from here, and if poor old Grandad was dead
my freedom was complete and my reign would begin. Nature
had betrayed me, my goddess was no real one; I would serve
gold now, or rather it would serve me. Flushed with the
thought, I waited triumphantly for morning.
"When it came, I greeted my old friend. Father Anselm,
with a smile, a lorldly smile. I could afford to feel a con-
temptuous pity for these slaves of poverty — I was a million-
aire. He was more than willing to send by messenger to the
city for me. 'None of the brethren can leave,' he told me,
'but there is a little lad from the hills, Ben Davis, here on an
errand. I will send him to you, son.'
"Ben Davis proved to be a typical mountaineer, ragged of
clothing and slow and drawling of speech. I gave him my
message, accompanying it by a lavish gift of the money that
now seemed the key to my freedom. 'And hurry, sharp now,'
I bade him. 'No fooling.' Ben promised, and slowly strolled
off.
774 FETTERS OF GOLD [Sept.,
"My satisfaction increased as, newly released from
crutches, I crossed out into the monastery courtyard. Below
the monks, poor slaves, crept to their daily toil; while I — I
squared my shoulders. The sun seemed made to warm me
today, the air to fan me. Before I had worshipped at
nature's shrine, now she semed to bow before me, for I was
a king.
"A sudden and unpleasant end came to my glorified mus-
ings. Ben Davis had not even left the neighborhood. In the
road, outside the gates, he calmly played at marbles with
aiiother lad. I was wild to get away, and I felt that I was
losing precious time. Striding out with a step that sent the
marbles in all directions, I demanded:
"'Hey there, when are you going on that errand?'
"He lifted a smiling face.
" 'Oh, af teh while, when Pap hitches up, Mistah. We-alls
don't hurry much up heah.'
" 'We-alls don't hurry,' and this to me — a millionaire.
Not hurry on my errand, and he was a member of the po'
whites without a shoe even to his foot and / was one of the
largest of stockholders in banks and railroads which he had
never even heard of. An bath sprang from my lips this time;
my temper sprang, too, to my eyes and hands, for I struck him
a blow that sent him reeling in the dust and stones.
" 'You young hound, you,' I cried, Til teach you — ' I
stopped, stunned.
"I was a millionaire, but down in the dust a little lad,
with a bleeding cut on his forehead, shrank from me, hiding
his face with frightened sobs. I had wounded a fellow-crea-
ture, who shrank from me in terror.
"I had him in my arms in one moment, wiping the blood
from the slight cut on his brow. I hushed his sobs; I believe
I kissed the chubby, dirty face. I gathered up his marbles
and filled his hands with flowers. I couldn't bear to touch
that awful money to offer him that. I was in no hurry, I as-
sured him, so Pap needn't bother; tomorrow even would be
time enough and, finally, I left little Ben Davis smiling and
turned towards the gates once more.
"Slunk rather; I felt eager for them to rise around me
and shut me in. I longed for a cell even to hide me from the
world and myself. I had thought myself a monarch and
1922.] FETTERS OF GOLD
775
the first act of my reign had been to strike a little child. A
terror of myself possessed me.
"As I entered, slunk rather, as I say, within the gates, I
came face to face with a monk. I looked full in his face, and
one thing struck me. Not his coloring or features, or any-
thing like that, but his air of freedom, of detachment; it was
the face of a king. I, who had so longed for freedom, was
looking at someone who was free.
"I stopped him; I threw out my hands in my agony.
"Tather,' I cried, Hell me, for I believe you know. Is
this a place where a man can hide from himself?'
"The smile that lit up the calm, strong face was like sun-
light as he spoke:
" 'Man is so great,' he said, slowly, 'he has been made so
great that there is only one place where he can hide himself,
and that is in God. But in this house, thank God, He lets you
hide in Him.'
"I grasped his arm still tighter.
" 'Father,' I said, 'I want to be a Trappist monk.'
" 'You !' and the smile deepened. I knew now it was the
guest-master, the one who had found me and brought me
there, but I had scarcely looked at him since. 'You? Why
son, you are not even a Catholic!'
" 'I'll be one, then,' I said, stubbornly, 'tell me what to do.
I'll be anything you like, but. Father, listen, I have loved free-
dom, and I want to be free. I have tried every way earth
offers and they are all failures, and just now I have found
out that I never can be free until I lose myself. I do not
understand what you mean, but I am afraid of myself, and
if to be free I must hide in God then ask Him to let me hide.
Let me live here in your chains and find freedom.'
"Jack, there isn't much more to tell. He found out I was
in earnest, but it seemed odd to him at first. He had known
men to become Trappist monks after they were Catholics, he
said, but never one that became a Catholic in order to be a
Trappist monk. Of course, I had lots to .learn and unlearn
before I finally made my profession of faith, but it worked
out all right. Then I came East and divided my patrimony
among many sources of good, and tomorrow I leave to become
really free.
"And I shall be. The narrowness of my cell will be the
776 FETTERS OF GOLD [Sept.,
encircling Arms of Him, Who is wider than the universe;
the scanty fare will be sustaining, for I will receive it from
His Hand, Who is all-bountiful; the long hours of prayer and
labor will be short, for they will be one with the prayers and
labors of Him, Who once trod the earth He made. I own all
things now, really. Nature speaks again in love to me, now
that I know she is a servant and not a mistress, and I find
friends in that sun and moon, those winds and streams, which
are His ministers and serve and gladden us for His sake.
Even wealth is blessed when you break it, like the alabaster
box of ointment, on His feet, in the person of His poor.
"Jack, you're the heir of all the ages in owning the wonder
of the Church's sacred gifts; don't misuse them. And, old
fellow, remember, I saved your life, so — pray for me. It is a
hard life if it is a happy one. Losing self is a hard matter
even in a cell, so — ^pray for me. Fetters, yes, I am going to
put them on, but they are not fetters of iron; they are love's
fetters of gold."
The words lingered with me after I bade him a final
farewell, for once in his monastery I would hear his voice no
more. "Fetters of gold." It echoed through the night; that
was God's answer. That was His path to freedom, the wear-
ing of the two great chains — His love and His fear. And He
had not made this soul to crave freedom so strongly without
meaning it to be free. My pagan martyr was fast becoming a
Christian saint.
I vowed sternly to myself to use my wealth of Catholic
privilege with greater joy and care. Not in hiding as deep
as he, but, after all, we must all seek some cell of the soul.
The monk was right:
"Man is so great; he has been made so great that there is
only one place where he can hide himself, and that is in God."
Aye, and putting on fetters, find his freedom.
A DIALOGUE OF DEVOTION.
BY HELEN PARRY EDEN.
T came to pass on Sunday morn
When the Parish Mass was done,
Then men of Woodstock all went home,
And the women every one.
But Hugh the Glover set out north
By the banks of Glyme alone.
The sun shone hot on stem and stone,
The robin sang on the thorn,
The last mist lifted off the grass
Was tree-top high that morn,
When he doffed his shoes by Wootton Church
That stands high on a rocky perch,
Where the Glyme runs into the Dome.
And barefoot still, by vale and hill.
He took his pilgrim's way.
For the King's Glover of Woodstock
Sought a great grace that day —
To learn of the Anker of Dornford
Wherein Devotion lay.
Now Hugh the Glover was a rich burgess of Woodstock,
high in the favor of King John and his peers. He had a fair,
cheerful wife; six sons and two daughters; and a large two-
storied house with an arched door and a gabled roof. But for
all this he had been ill at ease for a long time, because he did
not know the meaning of the word "Devotion." I do not say
he could not hazard a guess at it — most of us could do as
much — but he did not think that was the right way to ap-
778 A DIALOGUE OF DEVOTION [Sept.,
proach so noble a word. And every time he heard Mass —
which was almost every day of his life — and the priest prayed
for Hugh the Glover and all the other bystanders, ^'quorum
tihi fides cognita est, et nota devotio*' — whose faith is known
to Thee and known their devotion," it troubled the good
burgess not a little, that he who held the Faith so clearly
should have so dim a grasp of Devotion. So he set out to
speak to the anchorite (or anker, as he called him), who
having given up more to God, he thought, than anybody else
in the neighborhood, was sure to know more about such high
matters than those less dedicated to Perfection. And herein
the Glover of Woodstock judged wisely; for, all things being
equal, the solitary's life is (as St. Thomas says) the most
perfect life of all.
The abode of the Anker of Dornford was a square stone
cell, with windows in the front and flanks, and a walled
orchard in the rear. The north window was covered with
horn, and let in a dim but constant light. The east window
was heavily shuttered and barred, and curtained with leather,
and let in what speech the Anker had with the outside world
and what food was bestowed on him by the faithful. And the
south window was quaintlier shuttered and lightlier barred,
and curtained with an old banner of the Holy Face; and this
let in the Light and Food of his soul whenever the Anker re-
ceived Our Blessed Lord at the hands of the Curate of Woot-
ton. The Glover knocked at the shutter of the east window;
and as soon as it was unlatched, which was not for some
little while, for the Anker within was busied with his psalms
and orisons, he knelt on the worn earth under the window
and asked the holy man's blessing. Then, without more ado,
he began as follows:
Hugo.
"O Blessed Recluse, I would know
What thing Devotion is?
Much of the matter I have heard.
All twisted and amiss;
Then how beholden should I be,
Wouldst thou but show me this."
Cor sapientis quaerit doctrinam.
■'^^v
1922.] A DIALOGUE OF DEVOTION 779
Anchorita.
"Devotion standeth in man's soul
With shoes of swiftness shod,
Tis thy prompt will to yield thyself
To the high hests of God,
*Tis the surrender of desire
To serve His lightest nod."
Devotio nihil esse videtur, quam voluntas
quxdam prompte tradendi se ad ea quae pertinent
ad Dei famulatum.
Hugo.
" *Yield' is a word I know of old
And plainly understand,
I yield me to the touch of Love
As the first curves of a shapely glove
Yield to a gentle hand;
'Surrender' hath a craven sound!
To hand me over gagged and bound!
How may so base a doom be found
With a man's pride to stand?"
Non trades servum domino suo.
Anchorita.
"No true Devotion can there be
If will is overborne,
Thou must surrender like a bride
Upon her wedding-morn,
Like a city opening wide its gates
At the sound of a king's horn."
Attollite portas principes vestras, et elevamim
portae aeternales; et introibit rex gloriae.
"Thy will is all the wealth thou hast
To give or to withhold
For He Who takes, as thou may'st see,
This thing or that away from thee,
Leaves thee thy soul's full liberty
Secure and uncontrolled.
780 A DIALOGUE OF DEVOTION [Sept.,
Devotion keeps not back one grain;
She is God's loving-cup to drain.
His managed steed to spur or rein;
His purse to spend (if He but deign)
To the last piece of gold."
Tua sunt omnia, et quae de manu tua accepimus,
dedimus tibi.
Hugo.
"Aye, that is plain, beyond a doubt,
But how to bring this will about,
Which is so rare to find?
Is it God's work or man's own wit?
Hath man no part but to submit?
Or may he help or hinder it,
According to his mind?"
Oblatus est quia ipse voluit.
Anchorita.
"Two causes give Devotion birth,
Both God and man take part:
The Spirit bloweth where He will.
And man may greet or grudge Him still.
Welcome or shun the dart:
But blest are they that hear the Word
And keep the message they have heard.
Pondering it in their heart."
At tile dixit: Quinimo beati, qui audiunt verbum
Dei et custodiunt illud.
(( i
Tis Meditation, then, shall wing
Devotion for her flight —
For every willful deed doth spring
Out of some sort of pondering
On what is wrong and right.
Thy thought of God shall lay the fire
His Grace shall set alight
Devotion clap her hands for mirth
And bring more wood to keep the hearth
Kindled both day and night."
In meditatione mea exardescet ignis.
1922.] A DIALOGUE OF DEVOTION TSi
Hugo.
"The thought of God lay in my mind,
A seed too small to see,
(Lost in my towering lust and pride
And greed for mastery)
Which now hath thrust such branches forth
And grown so great a tree.'*
Quod minimum quidem est omnibus seminibus;
cum autem creverit mains est omnibus oleribus.
"Like a vast cedar in my soul
It holds the ground alone.
And all my wishes haunt its shade,
This carols like a thrush in glade.
This hath a ring-dove's moan;
Now sorry is my soul, now glad,
Two notes my heart hath, gay and 'sad —
Which is Devotion's own?"
Laetamini cum Jerusalem, et exultate in ea
omnes, qui diligitis eam: gaudete cum ea gaudis
universi, qui lugetis super eam.
Anchorita.
"Chiefly Devotion causeth joy.
But grief thou can'st not miss;
Thoughts of God's goodness first awake
Thy will to put thy life at stake.
And all thou hast for His sweet sake,
There is great joy in this.
But sorrow follows hard apace,
Because thou hast so long a race
To run before thou see'st His Face
Who is thy Only Bliss."
Nam et in hoc ingescimus, habitationem nos-
trum, quae de caelo est, superindui cupientes,
"And if thy failings and thyself
Be first and foremost shown.
Then nought but sorrow seems in sight,
So hard and hopeless is thy plight
To strive for such a crown;
782 A DIALOGUE OF DEVOTION [Sept.,
But joy unbounded shall succeed.
For God is greater than thy need,
And Adam's sin, O blithe misdeed!
Hath brought thy Saviour down."
O felix culpa, qux talem ac tantum meruit
habere redemptoremi
Hugo.
"Here, too, a mist unscattered clings —
For if in thought of holy things
Devotion hath most skill,
The wisest wit, the theme most high.
The sage that writes his ink-pot dry
Upon the Blessed Trinity
Should sweetliest yield his will,
Yet know I many a simple dame.
Or crack-brained beggar, old and lame.
That scarce can lisp the Holy Name
Loves Our Lord better still."
. . . quia abscondisti haec a sapientibus et pru-
dentibus, et revelasti ea parvulis.
Anchorita.
*Two answers hast thou here besought —
What kind of thinker and what thought
Best find Devotion's clue?
The greatest thought is God above.
And He, Almighty Truth and Love,
Has most of all our mind to move,
If He were clear to view;
But we for weakness cannot see
Without Our Lord's Humanity,
Who taught us "Whoso seeth Me
Seeth the Father, too."
Et qui videt me, uidet eum qui misit me . . .
nemo venit ad Patrem, nisi per me.
"The thought is strong, the thinker weak,
Yet if a man can keep him meek,
All mortal wit and wisdom eke
Devotion's wide estate;
1922.] A DIALOGUE OF DEVOTION 783
Thou see*st the witless serf adore,
Thou see*st the learned vaunt their store,
Thou think'st they therefore love God more
Whom nothing can elate.
Yet saint on shining saint has shown
That by each gift a man may own.
Sought, held and used for God alone,
Devotion grows more great."
Ait illi Jesus: Diliges Dominum Deum tuum ex
toto corde tuo, et in tola tua, et in anima iota
mente tua.
Hugo.
"Aye, there again — I hear men pray
And with Devotion, as they say.
To that saint or to this;
Is it Devotion we bestow
On God's high favorites here below
And in the courts of bliss?'*
Non habebis deos alienos coram me,
Anchorita.
"Men are devout, as thou hast said.
To all God's friends alive and dead.
For love of Him Whose love and dread
Have filled them to the brim:
He is the virtue of each gem.
His saints are but His vesture's hem.
Devotion does not end in them
But passes on to Him."
. . . ef tetigit fimbriam vestimienti ejus . . , et
ait Jesus: Quis est qui me tetigit.
"For He thy God, the Lord of lords,
Himself hath taught by deeds and words
Devotion to mankind,
Who gave the world up to our will
With all its wealth to save or spill
As each man had a mind."
Tradidit nobis terram lacte et melle.
784 A DIALOGUE OF DEVOTION [Sept.,
"Then as a man who far doth fare
Leaves treasure in his servants' care
To squander or control,
He added to our mortal dower
All mortal beauty, wit and power.
And an immortal soul/*
Vocavit servos suos et tradidit illis bona sua.
"And when the world and we therein
Were brought to nought by willful sin,
He yielded up His Son to win
Our souls and set us free;
Who sought in all things to fullfil
Our welfare and His Father's will,
From Bethlehem's stable to the hill
Of bitter Calvary."
Qui dilexit me et tradidit semetipsum pro me.
"And He before that worst of ends.
As one who from a world of friends
Unwillingly departs,
Yielded Himself to dwell in bands
The captive of His own commands.
Surrendered to anointed hands
And to adoring hearts."
Hoc est corpus meum quod pro nobis tradetur.
When the anchorite had said this he had said everything :
and Hugh the Glover knew he had heard the last word on
Devotion. So he asked and received another benediction,
and with a light heart betook himself home.
O. HENRY: AN APPRECIATION.
BY P. A. SILLARD.
HE great American novel, the novel of American
life and manners, so long expected, so eagerly
looked for, has not yet been written. Indeed, it
never will be written. Life is too composite an
affair, too complex, to be expressed within the
compass of a novel. Even Balzac with his Comedie Humaine
has hardly expressed all of French life. While human nature
is fundamentally the same from China to Peru, its expression
varies with different nations; its manifestations have the
racial characteristics of each country. America is too vast,
its people too heterogeneous for even a great American novel,
could it be written, to comprehend it.
The writer known to literary fame as O. Henry never
attempted the long novel: he concentrated on the short story.
He studied and portrayed New York life as it never had been
done before. What Bret Harte did for the pioneer life of the
West and the mining camp, O. Henry has done for New York.
With the vividness and the compression of a Kipling ballad,
he presents in a short story a picture so true to life, so real-
istic, so simple that its art seems almost artless. In limiting
his area of adventure to the city on the Hudson, as with some
exceptions he did, he by no means narrowed his mind or the
scope of his vision. The universality of his genius had that
truth to nature that made it kin with the whole world, and
warrants comparison with de Maupassant and other masters
of world fiction.
Unlike Edgar Allan Foe, America's other great short
story writer, O. Henry deals with the realities of life. His
pages are almost photographic in their realism. He does not,
after the manner of Foe, seek to raise our hair, or to make
our flesh creep. Instead, he gives us the humor, the pathos,
or, mayhap, the tragedy of everyday life as his genius sees it.
His laughter is often the laughter with tears in it, as when he
tells of the young wife who cut off and sold her beautiful hair
VOL. CXV. 50
786 O. HENRY: AN APPRECIATION [Sept.,
to have money enough to buy a long-planned Christmas gift
for her husband. The secret of his wonderful success is his
sympathy. He looks on human nature with a kindly eye,
unlike Thomas Hardy who, in his masterly short stories, Life*s
Little Ironies, makes of Destiny a mocking devil delighting in
the misfortunes of his victims.
O. Henry served no apprenticeship to his craft. He
played the sedulous ape to no literary model. For him the
ready word sufficed. An observing eye, a nimble wit and a
facile pen, with abundant knowledge of human nature and
extreme sophistication made him a master of his art. With a
few illuminating touches the sordid tragedies of ignoble lives
and the unselfish devotion and patient heroism of everyday
people are revealed to us. Stevenson's story of Dr, Jekyl and
Mr. Hyde owes as much to the weirdness of its subject as to
its laborious perfection of style. With O. Henry, style and
matter are inseparably interwoven. The manner is exactly
adapted to the particular kind of story he is telling. Whether
it is an episode in the day of a Chevalier ^Industrie, or merely
the narrative of a new dress that a poor shopgirl has pinched
and scraped to buy with her meagre salary; or a pathetic
little love story like "The Skylight Room" — there is nothing
otiose, nothing out of the picture. His stories are the fruit of
close study of life. He has no cut and dried formula. Man
is not always selfish, nor woman always false. He makes no
new discoveries of old truths. The eternal verities are un-
changeable.
After all, there are really no new stories. All that a
writer can do is to tell the old stories in a new way if he has
the genius; and that 0. Henry had genius, no discriminating
critic can deny. His stories may be grouped, in the language
of the theatre, into tragedy, comedy, farce and burlesque.
Life, as Horace Walpole said, is often a tragedy for those
who feel, and a comedy for those who think. Sometimes,
indeed, it seems to be a jest, as the poet, Gay, professed to
have found it. Puck and his frolic elves still wanton mer-
rily, and the game of cross purposes has always new players.
Mariana still waits in the moated grange, and untold love
pales the ruddy cheek.
It is not to be supposed or expected that all of the two
hundred or more stories that O. Henry wrote are of unvarying
r^.
1922.] O. HENRY: AN APPRECIATION 787
excellence. Very many are unworthy of his reputation; and
only a complete collection justifies their preservation.
Measured by the span of years, 0. Henry's life was a short
one. But, as Sir Walter Scott so eloquently says :
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name.
William Sydney Porter, to give him his real name, was
born in Greensborough, North Carolina, in 1862, and he died
in New York in June, 1911. Between these dates, he was suc-
cessively a druggist's assistant, a rancher in Texas, a bank
clerk, an editor and a cartoonist. If he did not amass wealth,
he acquired a fund of experience; and he achieved that free-
dom from restraint which either makes a man a vagrant or
gives him poise and savoir-faire. As soon as he began to
write stories he discovered his true metier. He had the "story
sense" and the trick of telling them well. Besides a marvel-
ous fecundity of invention, seemingly inexhaustible, he had
the art of leading up to a wholly unexpected denouement
which even the blase reader hardly could anticipate. This is
most strikingly manifested in the tragic story, "The Furnished
Room," which has an inevitability and fatefulness that mark
it as a masterpiece. Its motto might have been "Magna ciui-
tas, magna solitudo/* for none knew better than 0. Henry its
desperate truth. This story of a young man, who searches
vainly and long for the girl he believes lost in New York, and
who meets his death in the same room in which she met hers
a week previous, and by the same means, impresses itself in-
effaceably on the reader's mind. The note of impending
doom echoes through it from the beginning. The cumulative
effect of each minute detail, from the renting of the room to
the tragic climax, is to picture a scene and a situation of utter
hopelessness and despair.
In a wholly different vein, humorously tragic, if the col-
location may be allowed, is "The Gift of the Magi," a story of
a young wife and a young husband who parted with their
greatest treasure to give each other a joyful surprise at Christ-
mas, and found their gifts rendered useless by the very sacri-
fice that procured them.
"A Service of Love," while idealizing mutual affection
788 O. HENRY: AN APPRECIATION [Sept.,
and self-sacrifice, shows how two young aspirants to Art were
brought to earth, and found their fate there.
Several phases of New York life are epitomized with
amazing vividness and acumen in "Dougherty's Eye-Opener,"
which, had it not been so aptly named, might have called a
lesson to husbands.
Without attempting to traverse the entire field of O.
Henry's achievement, it may be remarked that the sly humor
and delightful comedy of the stories named, pervade many
others, such as "The Third Ingredient," "Confessions of a
Humorist," "The Song and the Sergeant," "Transients in Ar-
cadia" and "Lost on Dress Parade." But, perhaps, his artistry
is nowhere better shown than in "A Retrieved Redemption,"
which is worthy of the art of Guy de Maupassant. In tech-
nique, it is almost perfect. There is hardly a superfluous
word. It develops naturally to an unexpected climax. No-
where does the author obtrude himself. It shows the ultimate
triumph of good in a man when he is responsive to the prompt-
ing of his better nature. Stories such as these prove 0. Henry
a master of his craft. They show him at the apex of his
achievement. In them he is the equal of the greatest — primus
inter pares.
Like a true artist, O. Henry respects the intelligence of his
readers. He postulates their imagination. There is much
more in his stories than appears on the printed page. For
instance, "Hearts and Hands," one of the shortest among them,
reveals between the lines, with consummate skill, the social
tragedy of a young man's blighted career and a woman's un-
spoken love. He can arrange as pretty a complication, and
untangle it as deftly as Dumas, per e, or the author of "Sher-
lock Holmes." His wit, humor and drollery were irrepres-
sible. To the rogue's gallery in fiction, he has added a few
delectable characters, whose adventures in getting possession
of other people's money make delightfully amusing reading.
Montague Tigg might not have disdained acquaintance with
such resourceful rascals as Andy Tucker and Jeff Peters. His
stories, depicting consular and other phases of life in South
American Republics, if not absolutely veracious, have, at least,
verisimilitude; the languorous and lotos-eating existence south
of the equator, as he describes it, has the seductive charm of
reality.
1922.] O. HENRY: AN APPRECIATION 7g9
Comparisons of O. Henry with Guy de Maupassant are
not always to the advantage of the author of **Boule de Soeuf:*
and "Mademoiselle Fifir O. Henry made no effort to acquire
the Martian point of view— the detachment of de Maupassant.
His wise sympathy and kindly tolerance for weak human
nature forbade.
Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman,
sings Robert Burns; and, like the wayward Scot, O. Henry was
slow to condemn; for
To step aside is human.
O. Henry was keenly observant of sociological conditions,
and the inequalities of fortune which give to misused wealth
a maleficent power. In stories like "Elsie in New York,"
^ "An Unfinished Story" and "The Trimmed Lamp," we glimpse
the perils that beset the lone dweller in a great city: the
struggles for rectitude that so often seem predestined to de-
feat: the quicksands that abound on every side, engulfing the
unwary. But our author was no propagandist. He was not
obsessed with any notion that he had a mission or a message.
He was a man of letters, who found in fiction his fitting form
of expression. As his day's work, he wrote his story, some-
times humorous, sometimes tragic, often seemingly a page
torn from life; but always clean and void of offence. While
so many writers of fiction misuse their talents, debase the
currency and poison the wells, it is O. Henry's distinction
that, for all his marvelous fecundity and variety, his work is
wholly free from any trace of vitiosity.
THE INCIDENT OF SALOME AND HER SONS.^
BY J. SIMON, O.S.M.
ATTHEW'S version of this incident is that of an
eyewitness. This Evangelist, writing for the Pal-
estinian Jews, brings in Salome, known by his
countrymen to be a near relative of Christ. He
does not mention the names of the two disciples,
Salome's children, as they were familiar to the Jews as the
"Sons of Zebedee." He repeats the very words of the con-
versation between Christ, Salome and her children, employ-
ing the apocalyptic, "Thy kingdom," instead of Mark's more
Hellenistic, "Thy glory."
Mark, according to his custom, relates summarily the ac-
count he had heard probably from St. Peter. Salome, as
having no special interest for his Roman readers, and perhaps
also to avoid drawing attention to the human relationships of
the Incarnate Word, is not mentioned: her words are laid in
the mouth of her sons, from whose ambition they had orig-
inated. This may be concluded from the plural of Matthew
XX. 22 : **Nescitis quid petatis** Mark, moreover, supplies the
opening sentence of Salome's petition, indicated by Matthew's,
"asking something of Him." Though, in plural form, its char-
acteristically feminine whimsicality is unmistakable: "Rabbi,
I want you to do for me whatever I am going to ask for." ^
James and John had never forgotten the ravishing glories
of Christ's Transfiguration which, with Peter, they had been
privileged to witness about a year previously. They had
noted then that the Transfiguration had directly followed upon
and been connected with Christ's prediction of His Passion,
and this, in turn, they had been taught to consider as the
necessary preliminary to His glorification. Hence, when
Christ once again, with even greater clearness of detail, spoke
to His Apostles of His proximate Passion,^ before the eyes of
the brothers, James and John, rose up the vision of the Trans-
figuration. And what then had been but a transitory glimpse,
lA Commentary on Matthew xx. 20-23; Mark x. 35-40.
2 Mark x. 35. 8 Mark x. 33, 34; Matthew xx. 18, 19.
1922.] SALOME AND HER SONS
791
though ravishing even unto ecstasy, they concluded would
now soon become a permanent reality in which all Christ's
disciples should share. Did they, perhaps, even emulate the
positions of Moses and Elias?
Moreover, the sons of Zebedee had not forgotten Christ's
words to Peter when that Apostle had asked what the dis-
ciples' reward for following the Messiah would be: "To you
I say indeed; that you who have followed me, when the time
of the re-creation of the world comes (|v ts xaXXtrreveafa)
and the Son of Man shall sit upon the throne of His glory,
you too shall sit upon twelve thrones, to judge the Twelve
Tribes of Israel." * It would seem that even now, in this last
year of their following of Christ, the disciples' comprehension
of the Messias' mission and function was still at times clouded
by foolish apocalyptic Jewish preconceptions. Their prin-
ciples were still too often "of the earth, earthy" carnal, "ac-
cording to the will of the flesh," ^ "of blood"— that is, they
made much of blood-relationship to the Messias, as was the
mind of the Jews : "We are the seed of Abraham." «
Basing themselves upon such considerations, James and
John had apparently some justification for their petition to
occupy posts of honor in the Jewishly conceived Messianic
Kingdom. For, it is probable that by their mother, Salome,
through St. Ann, they were the only disciples related to Christ.
Besides that, they together with Peter had been selected as
witnesses to the raising from the dead of the little daughter
of Ja'irus,^ and also had been present at the Transfiguration.
These same two Apostles previously had manifested fiery zeal
in the service of their Master by willing to call down fire from
heaven upon certain inhospitable Samaritans.^ Them also
Christ Himself had distinctively named "Sons of Thunder,"
z. e., The Thunderers, probably for the brilliancy and power
of their preaching. Then also John, possibly the youngest of
the Apostles, had always been treated with special affection by
Christ; he was indeed the favorite of the Master, "the disciple
. . . whom Jesus loved." ^
But James and John were not going to base their petition
for primacy upon their own personal standing alone. They
had not forgotten the exemplary rebuke administered when
4 Matthew xix. 28. 5 John 1. 13. e John vill. 33; Matthew 111. 9; Luke v. 8.
7 Mark v. 37. 8 Luke ix. 54. 9 John xlx. 26; xxi. 7.
792
SALOME AND HER SONS
[Sept.,
once before Christ had been directly appealed to in a conten-
tion for the honors of His Kingdom." Hence astutely, as be-
came the sons of Zebedee, they would employ as mediator a
person to whom Christ was deeply obligated in temporal mat-
ters, and who was at the same time their own mother, namely,
Salome. In the Gospels she is ever given a prominent place
among the benefactresses of Christ and His Apostles, to whom
she ministered of her substance.^^ This lady, who had given
her two sons to Our Lord, because of her husband's compar-
atively well-to-do position (he hired men in his fishing busi-
ness) could afford, with other women of means, to follow
Christ in His missionary travels, and to contribute toward His
living. Salome, the mother, then, was made a party to the
ambitious schemes of James the Elder and John the Favorite,
Matthew xx. 20-23.
20. Then came to Him the
mother of the sons of Zebedee
with her sons, adoring and asking
something of Him.
21. Who said to her: What wilt
thou? She said to Him: Say that
these my two sons may sit, the
one on Thy right hand, and the
other on Thy left, in Thy king-
dom.
22. And Jesus answering said:
You know not what you ask. Can
you drink the chalice that I shall
drink? They say to Him: We can.
23. He saith to them: My chal-
ice indeed you shall drink; but to
sit on My right or left hand is not
Mine to give to you, but to them
for whom it is prepared by My
Father.
Mark x. 35-40.
35. And James and John, the
sons of Zebedee, come to Him,
saying: Master, we desire that
whatsoever we shall ask. Thou
wouldst do it for us:
36. But He said to them: What
would you that I should do for
you?
37. And they said: Grant to us,
that w^e may sit, one on Thy right
hand, and the other on Thy left
hand, in Thy glory.
38. And Jesus said to them:
You know not what you ask. Can
you drink of the chalice that I
drink of: or be baptized with the
baptism wherewith I am bap-
tized?
39. But they said to Him: We
can. And Jesus saith to them:
You shall indeed drink of the
chalice that I drink of: and with
the baptism wherewith I am bap-
tized, you shall be baptized.
40. But to sit on My right hand,
or on My left, is not Mine to give
to you, but to them for whom it is
prepared.
Christ's little party was approaching Jericho on the last
10 Matthew xvUi. 1; Mark ix. 33; Luke Ix. 46. ii Luke viii. 3.
1922.] SALOME AND HER SONS 793
annual trip to Jerusalem for the celebration of the Pasch.
An air of gloomy foreboding hung over the devoted men and
women following the Master Who, according to His habit,
walked somewhat ahead in solitary communion with His
Father." The Saviour halts upon the way,^^ calls the Twelve
about Him, and with greater detail than upon the two previous
occasions announces to them His proximate Passion : "Lo, we
are going up to Jerusalem, and all things which have been
written through the Prophets concerning the Son of Man, shall
be fulfilled. He shall be betrayed to the chiefs of the hier-
archy, and to the Scribes, and they shall have Him sentenced
to death. And they shall hand Him over to the Gentiles,
by whom He shall be mocked and scourged and spit upon and
crucified and put to death — but on the third day thereafter He
shall rise again." ^*
Then the Master walked on ahead once more in solitary
contemplation of the horrors awaiting Him, whilst the Apos-
tles dropped back a respectful distance to discuss among them-
selves this doleful prophecy and to communicate it to the
others of the party. There was much shaking of heads and
wagging of beards, but all to no purpose. They believed, in-
deed, what the Master had told them, but could see no reason
therefor: the Passion pages of the Prophets were sealed to
their understanding until after the Resurrection.^^ "And they
grasped none of these things, and this matter remained ob-
scure to them, and they did not understand the things said." "
As for the two Sons of Thunder, though their understand-
ing of the Passion-phase in the economy of the Messianic King-
dom was probably no less defective than that of the others of
Christ's followers, nevertheless, their nimbler wit seized upon
the outstanding fact of some imminent change — and of the
Resurrection. Moreover, from their previous experience. Pas-
sion prophecy on the part of the Master was intimately asso-
ciated with Transfiguration glory. Now, therefore (tdxe), to
their minds it appeared high time to make secure the fulfill-
ment of their ambitious desires. They consult with their
pious mother. Thereupon Salome, accompanied by her two
stalwart sons, leaves the rest of the disciples and hastens
12 Luke ix. 55; x. 23; Matthew ix. 22. 13 Matthew xx. 17— Greek.
14 Matthew XX. 18, 19; Mark x. 33, 34; Luke xviU. 31-33.
15 Luke xxiv. 25-27. i« Luke xvlJi. 34.
794 SALOME AND HER SONS [Sept.,
forward toward the Master still walking alone ahead. He
stops on noticing her approach. She falls to her knees, whilst
her sons stand shamefacedly by. Then she opens their plea
in wily feminine form :
"Master, I desire that Thou wouldst grant what I am about
to ask of Thee!""
How great the simplicity of heart of this fond mother
striving to assure a signal favor to her sons! What familiar
confidence toward Christ, to attempt to catch Him in her art-
less, feminine trap of a blind blanket promise!
The Master looks upon her kneeling before Him, but does
not, perhaps, glance at her sons. He asks her gravely and
kindly :
"What dost thou desire?" ^^
Christ would not scold His favorite warm-hearted fol-
lowers, much less cause the least grief to their good mother.
Salome bursts forth with her plea :
"Promise that these two sons of mine be enthroned, the
one on Thy right hand, the other on Thy left, in the coming
Kingdom of Thy glery !" ^^
Then the Master's glance passes to His two brave Thun-
derers, standing timorously by whilst their mother pleads their
ambitious desire. But Christ's face is not stern; its gravity is
even illumined by a quiet smile, as He addresses the two
youthful Apostles, letting them know by the plural of His
language that He was quite aware of their so carefully ar-
ranged scheme:
"You do not understand what you are requesting." But
He will likewise take advantage of the occasion to put their
enthusiasm for Himself to the test and to draw from them a
meritorious pledge of their faithfulness. Therefore, He con-
tinues :
"Can you drink the bitter chalice of humiliation which I
am about to drink, or be baptized with the fiery ordeal of suf-
fering wherein I am about to be plunged?"
The Thunderers' enthusiastic loyalty to their beloved
Master flashes forth in one quick word :
"We can!"
The eyes of the Master light up in pleased appreciation of
their faithfulness, even though He knows that its source is as
17 Mark x. 35c. is MatUiew xx. 21a. 1 9 Mark x. 37; Matthew xx. 21.
1922.] SALOME AND HER SONS 795
yet, for the most part, but blind personal enthusiasm. There
remains much still to be purified and perfected by the Holy
Spirit, Who "will teach them all things." But Christ's vision
also looks ahead far into future years, and there beholds the
generous carrying out of the challenge, so bravely accepted, on
the road to Jericho. He sees James slain as the first martyr
of the apostolic band by the sword of Herod Agrippa I.;^^ He
sees John apprehended at Rome, cast into the cauldron of
boiling oil and, miraculously saved, laboring as an exile in
the mines of the isle of Patmos. With this vision before Him,
the Master could indeed prophetically announce :
"The chalice which I shall drink, you indeed also shall
drink, and with the baptism wherewith I am to be baptized
you also shall be baptized." ^^
But, though the unhesitating acceptance of Christ's chal-
lenge to suffering with Himself deserved His appreciation, the
spirit and the principles which had actuated the sons of
Zebedee in precipitating this scene was none the less worthy
of censure — or rather, it demanded an exposition of the cor-
rect principle of God's distribution of supernatural rewards.
Therefore, the Master went on :
"But the honor of sitting on My right hand or on My left
it is not for Me to give except unto those for whom this has
been prepared by My Father."" The meaning of the last
clause might more definitely, though less literally, be ex-
pressed: ". . . except unto those whom My Father has pre-
pared for this."
Our Lord informs James and John that He as Man has to
act within the scope of His own providential decrees as God.
It is a basic axiom of theology that all the divine opera ad
extra are wrought by the three Persons of the Trinity acting
together, or, perhaps better stated, they are wrought through
the one divine Nature. Nevertheless, by certain analogies of
fitness, divers external operations are specially ascribed to
certain of the divine Persons: thus creation, providence, pre-
destination are more particularly referred to the Father, as
redemption is to the Son and sanctification or perfection to
the Holy Ghost. In this sense, likewise, the Son cannot as-
sign heavenly honors except as their recipients have already
been designated by the Father's predestination. From the
20 Acts xil. 2. 21 Mark x. 39c. 22 Matthew xx. 23c; Mark x. 40.
796 SALOME AND HER SONS [Sept.,
closing texts of this incident the difficulty has been raised that
Christ seems to deny having power to confer the dignities of
His glorious reign upon whomsoever He pleased. A contrast
seems to be drawn between the power of the Father and that
of the Son, apparently in favor of the former.
This apparent contrast between the dispositive powers of
the Father and the Son seems to be indicated by the Vulgate
reading **vobis»" but quite disappears when the Greek text is
considered, where the best MSS. and many of the Fathers
omit "to you." But the Vulgate **vobis'* serves to draw atten-
tion to the real contrast which is implicitly drawn between the
sons of Zebedee, straightforwardly petitioning for certain
Messianic honors without even a suggestion of qualification
therefor, and the destinatories of heavenly dignities receiving
them through predestination, which is ever "m praevisis
merit is.**
For the "preparation" of honors in heaven, so frequently
mentioned in Scripture, is surely to be taken with St. Augus-
tine rather in the sense that Christ "parat . . . modo man-
siones, mansionibus praeparando mansores.*' ^^ The free pre-
destinational decreeing of certain supernal honors for any in-
dividual includes at the same time the decree of their being
correspondingly merited by that individual, just as it includes
the giving of the necessary graces by God. From man's
standpoint, then, an individual's degree of honor in heaven is
not derived from the Willkiir, arbitrary decision, of God, but
inextricably bound up with his own merits. And merit con-
sists not in mere empty desire, but in good works according
to capacity. For "not every one that saith to me: 'Lord!
Lord!' shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but he that
doth the will of My Father ;"2* and only "he that shall conquer,
shall thus be clothed in white garments," ^^ and "he that shall
conquer, I will make him a pillar in the temple of My God," ^^
and again only "to him that shall conquer I will give to sit
with Me on My throne, as I also have overcome, and am set
down with My Father on His throne." ^^ When penning those
lines, a generation later, did the Seer of Patmos recall that
incident of his youth and express the basic lesson it had in-
culcated?
23 Tract. 68 In loan. 24 Matthew vii. 21. 25 Apocalypse iii. 5.
2<ilbid. ill. 12. 27 Ibid. Iii. 21.
1922.] LE MOMENT INFINI 797
In the Gospel incident Christ ascribes the conferring of
supernal honors to His Father, by predestination inclusive of
merits to be earned; in the Apocalypse He vindicates the con-
ferring of these same honors as His own proper function as
judge of the merits acquired in life's battle, according as He
had said in His lifetime: "Neither doth the Father judge any
man, but hath given all judgment to the Son." ^s
28 John V. 22.
LE MOMENT INFINI.
BY ARMEL 0*C0NN0R.
White swans were sailing down the stream
Slowly. Deep silence was preferred
By all things here; and in this dream,
Music was realized unheard.
Music was made of open skies,
Of russet hedges, mellow fields.
And those untroubled memories
The unsuspected moment yields.
Through autumn colors, immanent
The couchant sun was, golden-hued.
Over the water, great trees bent
Blessing the perfect solitude.
The Lord was holding up His earth,
Loving, watching immortally
Death, transmutations, life at birth —
River and trees, white swans and me.
AMERICAN RECOGNITION OF ALBANIA AND THE BALTIC
STATES.
BY HERBERT F. WRIGHT, PH.D.
HE World War brought into being many new
States, but the road which a new State must
travel before it is welcomed into the family of
nations is not always an easy one, in fact, it Is
frequently fraught with many difficulties and
delays. It took Portugal nearly thirty years to secure the
recognition of her neighbor, Spain, from whom she had been
separated since 1640. And to come nearer home, it was only
in 1782 that Great Britain recognized our own United States.
The United States, however, is ever in the van in the
recognition of the aspirations of other peoples for sovereign
and independent existence. The case of Hungary in the late
forties is an instance in point. In March, 1850, President
Taylor in a special message declared:
My purpose . . . was to have acknowledged the inde-
pendence of Hungary had she succeeded in establishing a
government de facto on a basis sufficiently permanent in
its character to have justified me in doing so, according to
the usages and settled principles of this Government; and
although she is now fallen, and many of her gallant pa-
triots are in exile or in chains, I am free still to declare
that had she been successful in the maintenance of such a
government as we could have recognized, we should have
been the first to welcome her into the family of nations.
Consequently, the student of diplomatic affairs was not
much surprised by the announcement in the morning papers
of July 28th of this year that the Department of State, in two
separate statements, had recognized the Governments of Al-
bania, on the one hand, and of Esthonia, Latvia and Lithuania
on the other. Finland and all the so-called "Succession
States" — the States which succeeded to the German Empire
and the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy — had already been
recognized, and there remained but the logical step of accord-
ing the other Baltic States and Albania a similar favor.
1922.] ALBANIA AND THE BALTIC STATES 799
The importance of recognition by a foreign State is not
to be lightly considered. As Secretary of State Seward wrote
to the United States Minister to England in April, 1861 : "To
recognize the independence of a new State, and so favor,
possibly determine, its admission into the family of nations,
is the highest possible exercise of sovereign power, because
it affects in any case the welfare of two nations, and often the
peace of the world." But in just what does recognition con-
sist? Alphonse Rivier, in his Principes du Droit des Gens,
makes the statement that recognition is the assurance given
to a new State that it will be permitted to hold its place and
rank, in the character of an independent political organiza-
tion, in the society of nations. Of course, the rights and attri-
butions of sovereignty belong to the State independently of all
recognition, but it is only after it has been recognized that it is
assured of exercising them. And since regular political rela-
tions exist only between States that reciprocally recognize
them, recognition is useful and even necessary to the new
State.
In the present instance, the recognition of the Department
of State was announced, in the case of Albania, by the follow-
ing statement:
The Government of Albania has been recognized by the
principal Governments of Europe, including its immediate
neighbors, and in extending recognition on its part, the
Government of the United States takes cognizance of the
successful maintenance of a national Albanian Govern-
ment.
The same statement contained the announcement that "Mr.
Maxwell Blake will continue to act as Commissioner of the
United States in Albania, with the rank of Minister."
It may be remarked, however, that perhaps the World
War is not to be credited with the creation of this State, be-
cause the independence of Albania, a former province of
Turkey, was proclaimed at Avlona, on November 28, 1912,
and a provisional government was then formed under the
leadership of Ismail Kemal Bey. On December 20, 1912, the
London Conference of Ambassadors agreed that there should
be an autonomous Albania, and later approximately defined
the frontiers of the new country on the Adriatic Coast. This
Conference also appointed Prince William of Wied as sov-
800 ALBANIA AND THE BALTIC STATES [Sept.,
ereign (m'pret), to be supported and advised by an Inter-
national Commission of Control of six members. Prince Wil-
liam, having accepted the crown of the new country from an
Albanian delegation, which offered it to him at Neuwied,
February 21, 1914, six months before the beginning of the
World War, arrived at Durazzo on March 7th of the same
year, but after the outbreak of the War fled from the country
with most of the members of the Commission.
An attempt made by Essad Pasha to set up a military
form of government failed (October 5, 1914), and Albania fell
into a state of anarchy. In 1915 and 1916 the Austrians over-
ran Albania, and it was only on June 3, 1917, that the Italian
general in charge proclaimed Albania an independent coun-
try, and a provisional government was set up. On December
17, 1920, Albania was admitted to membership in the League
of Nations, and at the present time is ruled by a Council of
Regents, composed of a representative of each of the religious
bodies in the country (Bektashi Moslem, Sunni Moslem, Cath-
olic, Orthodox Greek), together with a Diet, although it has
been reported that the Albanians desire an American as their
sovereign.
Durazzo is the provisional capital and Scutari the prin-
cipal town. The predominant religion is Mohammedanism,
about one-third of the population being divided between the
Catholic and the Orthodox Greek Churches. There are few
schools, no railways, no roads, no banks and no currency.
The country is generally rugged, wild and mountainous, and,
for the most part, uncultivated. So much for Albania.
In recognizing the three Baltic States of Esthonia, Latvia
and Lithuania, the Department of State issued the following
statement :
The Governments of Esthonia, Latvia and Lithuania
have been recognized either de jure or de facto by the
principal Governments of Europe and have entered into
treaty relations with their neighbors.
In extending to them recognition on its part, the Govern-
ment of the United States takes cognizance of the actual
existence of these Governments during a considerable
period of time and of the successful maintenance within
their borders of political and economic stability.
The United States has consistently maintained that the
1922.] ALBANIA AND THE BALTIC STATES 801
disturbed condition of Russian affairs may not be made the
occasion for the alienation of Russian territory, and this
principle is not deemed to be infringed by the recognition
at this time of the Governments of Esthonia, Latvia and
Lithuania, which have been set up and maintained by an
indigenous population.
Accompanying this statement was the announcement that
"Mr. Evan E. Young will continue to act as Commissioner of
the United States in these countries, with the rank of Min-
ister."
A few remarks, therefore, about these infant States may
be in order. After the Bolshevist coup d'etat in Russia,
Esthonia, which comprises the former Russian Government
of Estland, the northern part of Livland, the northwestern
portion of the Pskoff Government, and the Islands Saaremaa
(Oesel), Hiiumaa (Dago), and Mahumaa in the Baltic Sea, on
February 24, 1918, declared her independence, and in the same
year, in rapid succession, was accorded recognition as a de
facto independent State by Great Britain, France and Italy.
The following year de facto recognition was granted by Japan,
Sweden and Poland, and in 1920 de jure by Russia and Fin-
land. It was not long, therefore, before the Supreme Council
of the League of Nations followed suit (January 26, 1921).
For a time, pending the elaboration of a permanent Con-
stitution, Esthonia was governed according to a Provisional
Constitution adopted by the Constituent Assembly on June 4,
1919. But on June, 15, 1920, a permanent Constitution was
adopted, which has been in force since December 20, 1920.
By the terms of this document, the sovereign power is assured
to the people by means of the elections to the Legislative As-
sembly, the referendum and the initiative, while the executive
power is exercised by the State Head and the ministers.
The area of Esthonia is about 23,000 square miles. Its
eastern and southern boundaries have been settled by treaties
with Russia and Latvia, respectively. The population is ap-
proximately 1,750,000, predominantly Lutheran, although there
is no State religion. Its capital is Reval, at the mouth of the
Gulf of Finland, and one of its chief cities is Dorpat, the seat
of the University. Primary education is compulsory and
free, while there are the usual secondary and technical schools.
The chief industry is agriculture.
vol., cxv. 51
802 ALBANIA AND THE BALTIC STATES [Sept.,
Just south of Esthonia, as one descends the Baltic littoral,
is Latvia, consisting of three districts, known at various times
under the names of Livonia, Latgale and Courland, respec-
tively. The inhabitants are called Letts, and the country has
recently considered the advisability of changing its name to
Lettonia. Lettish public opinion in favor of the separate
existence of Latvia was expressed as early as 1917, and was
officially announced in the Russian Constituent Assembly in
the following January. A provisional government was
formed, and the independence of Latvia was proclaimed on
November 18, 1918. Recognition by many of the Powers was
not slow in following, and admission to membership in the
League of Nations was granted on September 22, 1921. The
Constitution, adopted in the following month, provides for a
republic, with a president and a unicameral legislative body.
The area of Latvia comprises about 25,000 square miles,
with a population of approximately 1,500,000, about fifty-eight
per cent. Protestant, with the rest distributed among the Cath-
olics, the Orthodox Greeks and the Jews (the latter, about five
per cent.). Riga, the capital, is situated on the Gulf of Riga,
and is the seat of the Riga Polytechnic, recently raised to the
status of a University, when the University of Dorp at, which
had formerly served all of the Baltic provinces of Russia,
became an Esthonian institution. Among its chief cities are
Libau, on the coast, and Dvinsk, in the interior. The up-to-
dateness of this little Republic is shown by the fact that the
metric system has been established there by law.
Next along the Baltic Coast comes Lithuania, a country
still comparatively little known, despite its preservation of its
ethnical unity and unique language, which is neither Slav nor
Teutonic. For a long time, the history of Lithuania is linked
with that of its neighbor, Poland, and, like the latter, it fell
under a foreign foe, Russia. In 1917 a Lithuanian Conference
of two hundred representatives at Vilna elected a Lithuanian
State Council and demanded the complete independence of
Lithuania, which was proclaimed on February 16, 1918.
Recognition was subsequently accorded by many of the
Powers, including Soviet Russia, and on September 21, 1921,
admission to membership in the League of Nations was
granted.
A provisional constitution was adopted on June 2, 1920,
1922.] ALBANIA AND THE BALTIC STATES 803
providing for a democratic republic with a president as exec-
utive head, and a permanent constitution is about to undergo
its third reading. The area of Lithuania, according to the
claim of the Lithuanian Government, is about 60,000 square
miles, embracing the whole of the former Russian Province of
Kovno, most of the Province of Vilna and a part of the Prov-
inces of Grodno, Suvalki and Courland. The boundaries on
the north and east are regulated by treaties with Latvia and
Russia respectively, while the southern boundaries are still in
dispute with Poland. The inhabitants number about 4,800,000,
seventy-five per cent, being Catholics. The capital is Vilna,
and among the chief towns are Grodno, Kovno and MemeL
There are the usual primary and secondary schools, while
early this year the University of Kovno was opened. Like
its two Baltic sisters, it is preponderantly an agricultural
country.
No statement concerning the Baltic countries would be
quite complete without some mention of the northernmost
one, Finland. This country was disjoined from Sweden and
united to the Russian Empire in 1809. It continued under
Russian control as an * autonomous grand duchy, with some
constitutional reforms, until the dissolution of the Russian
Empire during the World War. On December 6, 1917, the
Lantdag, a unicameral legislative body, unanimously pro-
claimed Finland an independent and sovereign State, and
recognition as such by many of the Powers was not slow in
following, not the last of which was the United States, which
has exchanged diplomatic representatives with Finland for
some time. Shortly after the Armistice, the Constitutional
Committee completed its labors, and a permanent constitution
was ratified on June 21, 1919. A feature of this document is
the provision for two national languages, Finnish and Swedish,
which is worked out to such an extent that conscripts, as far
as possible and unless they desire otherwise, are to be as-
signed to troops speaking their language, although Finnish is
the language of command.
The area of this Republic is approximately 150,000 square
miles and the population is estimated at about 3,500,000, of
which the vast majority are Lutherans. There is an estab-
lished church, but freedom of conscience is guaranteed.
There are two universities, one Finnish, at the capital, Hel-
804 POTTERY [Sept.,
singfors (Helsinki), and one Swedish, at Turku. The educa-
tional system seems to be very highly developed. Agriculture
forms the chief occupation, although there are over 4,000 fac-
tories. The system of internal communication is remarkable,
consisting in lakes (joined by canals), roads, railways, post-
offices, telegraph and telephone — almost all State owned.
The apparent slowness of the United States in recognizing
all of the Baltic States (except Finland) is perhaps due to
their early leaning toward Sovietism, but their steadfastness
in democratic ideals in the face of Russian inducements has
finally been rewarded, so that, with Poland and Czecho-
slovakia (which have already been discussed in the pages of
The Catholic World) , they form an unbroken bar against the
entrance of Sovietism into the rest of Europe.
POTTERY.
BY ETHEL KING.
"No other arts with potter's art compare,
We make our pots of what we potters are."
— Inscription on an Old Jug.
Well, jug, then so you and I they say
Are fashioned out of the self-same clay.
The potter has shaped you true and fine.
The Master wrought me in a mold divine.
But break we must both at last some day,
And come once more to be common clay.
The potter must needs be skillful then,
To build from your ashes as well again.
The Master my shattered bits can take,
And out of my dust a wonder make.
For such is the grandeur of His art.
His touch can make me of Heaven a part.
THE IRISH IN IPSWICH (1630-1700),
BY GEORGE F. O'dWYER.
LONG the Massachusetts coast in the latter part
of the seventeenth century were scattered prob-
ably twelve settlements, inhabited mostly by
English, Irish and Scotch (many of the Irish
under the disguise of English names), and com-
prising about 20,000 men, women and children, not including
Indians. North from Boston, and some distance to the South,
stretched the Puritan or Congregational church settlements;
south from the limit of the Massachusetts Bay Colony stretched
the Plymouth Colony with its exclusive settlement of Pil-
grims. Beyond this still lay the Roger Williams settlement
in Rhode Island.
The majority of these people emigrated mainly to get
away from the hated oath of allegiance to the English Church;
their main desire was to go to a country where they would
have freedom of speech and a chance to practise their own
ideas of religion. But on arrival here, the very principles of
intolerance from which they fled, were put into effect by the
elders and officers of the congregations. After subjugating
the various hordes of Indians, killing a certain number of
wild animals and taming the forces of nature to suit the pur-
poses of the settlements, they proceeded to subjugate anyone
who professed to follow a different religious belief than their
own. Various little bands of well-meaning Quakers, Epis-
copalians, Catholics and others were forced to join the Con-
gregational church or leave. In 1651 this church amalga-
mated with the government. An oath of allegiance to this
government and the forces of the church, forswearing all
previous religious ties and habits, was necessary to become
a freeman or citizen of the settlements. Palfrey's History of
New England states:
806 THE IRISH IN IPSWICH [Sept.,
Persons were received into the several churches in the
Massachusetts Bay Colony by the consent of the officers
and the members, on a relation of their previous religious
experience or other satisfactory evidence of their Christian
character. They were then admitted to the Lord's Supper
and their children to baptism. Thus, it belonged to the
several churches to confer the franchises of the State, for
no person could be a freeman without being a church mem-
ber. In point of fact, it would very rarely happen that a
communicant in a church would fail to be a freeman of
the company.
On the records of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, bearing
the date, the seventh of March, 1643, is this statement:
It is ordered that the lands and the estates of all men,
wherever they dwell, are lyable to be rated [taxed] for all
town charges where the lands and the estates lye; their
persons to be rated to church and commonwealth in the
places where they dwell; but, in case they remove out of
jurisdiction, then their estates to be rated to all charges.
At the session of the Massachusetts Legislature, on the
tenth of May, the same year:
It is ordered; concerning members that refuse to take
their freedom; the churches shall be writ unto, to deale
wHh them.
Accordingly, the Irish men and women who were de-
ported to the settlements of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in
the latter part of the seventeenth century by order of Crom-
well and his co-conspirators, were admitted as freemen or
owners only in recognition of the above conditions — a com-
plete subservience to the established church. Now the ma-
jority of these first Irish emigrants were experienced husband-
men, weavers and fishermen. They arrived in the Colonies
at a time when labor was scarce, and workmen in the above
trades were generally received with open arms. As the first
manufactures and commerce of the Massachusetts and Ipswich
Colonies were centred in Boston and Ipswich, both places ap-
pealed immediately to hundreds of the above deported emi-
grants, and, hence, we find that in the latter part of the seven-
1922.] THE IRISH IN IPSWICH 807
teenth century there was a distinctive proportion of Irish
names among the freemen and owners of the towns named.
In Ipswich and around the shores of Cape Ann, there were
more names on the vital records than any town north of Bos-
ton. It is very probable that the officers and the members
of the church there were less intolerant and had more sym-
pathy for the oppressed Irish exiles. Whether this was be-
cause of the material aid given by these exiles to the towns, or
whether their well-springs of kindness were opened, is a mat-
ter of conjecture. At any rate, as the years went by, and the
settlements along the North shore grew into dignified towns
and cities, it was easily evident that this confidence was not
misplaced. But, as a sort of compensation for living in the
settlements, the early Irish settlers were also asked to join
the Congregational church in the towns — there was no other
to go to! Accordingly, we find that a certain proportion of
the Irish exiles were enrolled on the church books. In pledg-
ing this allegiance, they practically foreswore their religious
birthright, whether they were Protestants or Catholics. This
strict intolerance in church allegiance seems to have been in-
grained into the very consciousness of the Puritan forefathers.
Every officer of the established church constituted himself a
court of last resort in religious matters, and appointed him-
self a sort of keeper of his brother's conscience. Ipswich had
its quota of these "scriptural theorists," as an impartial writer
has stated.
The result was that the early Irish men and women who
drifted into the settlements by boat or by land, were forced
either to absolutely conform to the established church or to
get out into the wildernesses beyond the Colony.
When the younger John Winthrop was casting about to
induce desirable people to start his settlement at Ipswich, he
thought of his friends in Ireland and England, and even went
to Scotland for likely farmers and tradesmen and — above all
— pliable young people and children. The methods of se-
ducing these young people from their parents and relatives,
and the men whom Winthrop employed in his recruiting
enterprises, makes interesting reading for the student of his-
tory at this momentous period. The main reason given to
the parents, guardians and relatives of these young people
was the vital necessity of propagating the infant Colony for
808 THE IRISH IN IPSWICH [Sept.,
the cause of God and Congregationalism. In his recruiting
travels through Ireland — and Winthrop and his agents had a
warm spot in their hearts for the people of that country —
the younger Winthrop ran across his old friend, Sir John
Glotworthy, one of the most wily, astute religious politicians
of that degenerate period. As evidence of what was running
in the mind of that Scotchman, we give the following reprint
of a letter written June 5, 1634, to John Winthrop, Jr., regard-
ing the transport of young Irish children to the Ipswich and
Massachusetts Bay Colonies. The letter was dated Antrim.
Evidently Clotworthy had been working up interest in Win-
throp's Ipswich Colony in Antrim and the northern towns of
Ireland. Clotworthy wrote to Winthrop :
Whatt course yu & y'r freinds together can ppose [pro-
pose] for ye transmission of younge children vppon tearmes
of aprentishipp on ye conditions 1 haue spoken to y'r selfe
off. Or any other way as y'r Lo: [Lordship] shall dyrect.
Further, Mr. Francis AUin, jeweller, who dwells against
St. Dunstan's church or Mr. Emmett, who dwells in Lum-
berte Streete will geiue ye notice of some Irish merchants
yt [that] may be bound for Dublin by these be pleased
to dyrect y'r I'rs [letters] &c to Mr. Lake, merchant, in
Dublin, in ye Castle Streete.
John Clotworthy.
One notes that Clotworthy states in his letter, "younge
children." The wily Puritan pioneers inaugurated their
proselyting campaigns well. And, as history indicates, the
Clotworthy- Winthrop combination, assisted by exhorters, who
were well compensated later, were successful in inveigling
hundreds of young people at impressionable ages. Thus new
blood was added from time to time during the early years of
the Ipswich and Massachusetts Bay settlements. And the dis-
cerning student can see why the Celtic influence tended to
vitalize and stabilize the coast towns of the infant Colony.
From time to time, at this period of the infant Ipswich
Colony, meetings, at which Clotworthy was the principal ex-
horter and promoter, were held in Antrim and the towns
surrounding. As a result, when John Winthrop, Jr., the orig-
inal promoter of the Ipswich settlements, reached Antrim, in
the course of a recruiting campaign through Ireland in 1635,
-li/^,
1922] THE IRISH IN IPSWICH §09
he found the path pretty well cleared by his hustling agent,
Clotworthy. It would be enlightening, and of more than
ordinary interest, to know who were the persons that com-
posed that gathering in Clotworthy's house in Antrim when
Winthrop arrived. For their decisions and their actions must
have had more than a passing influence on the migrations of
the men, women and children three years later, when a little
bark left the port of Carrickfergus in the north of Ireland
for New England.
From the sailing of this little shipload in 1637 dates, it is
safe to say, the continued influxes of Irish into the Ipswich
and Massachusetts Bay Colonies. From 1640 onward, one
reading the names on the vital records of the old Colony at
the mouth of the Merrimac and around the shores of Cape
Ann sees, on page after page, surnames of Celtic origin; one,
looking over the land and court records, discerns the strong
influence of the early Irish influxes into the settlement. And
the same holds true of the Massachusetts Bay settlements.
Indeed, of all the settlements of the Atlantic Coast. Thus the
honest reader can note that the Irish race exerted, and has
since exerted, more than a passing influence. Of the number
of Irish in the towns along the North shore in the vicinity of
Ipswich, Salisbury and Newbury, there is no certain authority.
But, in an affidavit, made in 1654 by one Major Samuel
Symonds of Ipswich, in a court case in Boston which con-
cerned the buying of Philip Welch and William Downing,
Irish servants from one George Dell, a shipmaster, Symonds
made this statement, in the course of his testimony:
That there has come over many Irish before that tyme
(165^) and the plaintif p*ceived that some questions were
stirring in ye Court whether it were not best to make some
stop (in reference to people of that nation) [Ireland] which
occasioned the plaintif [Symonds] to make a pViso for
good assurance as it is, in the first part of ye said writing
[the contract with Dell for bringing over Welch and Down-
ing in his vessel].
In the appendix to Mr. Felt's History of Ipswich is the
following account of the kidnapping of Downing and Welch
in 1654, who were brought over in the ship Goodfellow [Dell's
vessel] :
810 THE IRISH IN IPSWICH [Sept.,
Among the crying wrongs to some of our race was that
of stealing young people, transporting them to America,
and selling them into servitude. Two of such sufferers
were sold in 1654 to a respectable (?) gentleman of Ipswich
(Symonds, mentioned above) for 9 years, for 26, in corn
and cattle. They were represented to him as transported
by the order of the State (of England). They were Wil-
liam Downing and Philip Welch. They, with others, living
in Ireland, all of whom were forcibly taken from their beds
at night by men dressed as English soldiers and compelled
to go on board the vessel in which they came in. The
persons who practised such a crime were called Spirits.
A royal order of England was passed against them in 1682.
At the preliminary trial of Symonds before the Salem
(Mass.) Quarterly Court on the twenty-sixth of June, 1661,
John Ring, an Irish servant, employed by different persons in
Ipswich and Salem at this period, testified as follows :
. . . That he, with divers others, were stolen in Ireland
by some of the English soldiers out of their beds in the
night and brought to Mr. Dell's ship when the boate lay
ready to receive them ; and in their way, as they went, some
others they tooke with them against their consents and
brought them aboard the said ship [the Goodfellow] where
there were divers others of their countrymen, weeping and
crying, because they were stolen away from theyr friends,
they all declaring the same; and amongst the rest were
these two men, Philip Welch and William Downing, and
there they were kept, until upon a Lord's day, in the morn-
ing, the Master [Dell] set sayle and left some of his water
and vessels behind — for haste, as I understood. (Sworn
in Court, 26th of June, 1661.)
Here is another instance from the records of the Ply-
mouth Colony Court :^
10th June, 1661 — Prence, Governor — Vpon the complaint
of William Hiferney, Irish man, seruant to John HoUot of
Scittuate, that hee is bounde to his said master the tearme
of twelve years, haueing been stolen away out of his owne
country and engageing to soe long a time when hee was
unacquainted with the English tongue, the Court haueing
heard what the said master and seruant could say in pmises
1 Plymouth Colony Records.
1922.] THE IRISH IN IPSWICH 811
haue pswaded the said John Hollot, and hee, by these
psents, hath engaged to the Court that if his said seruant
shall and doe perform vnto him faithful service and carrye
himself as he ought to doe, that hee doth and will remit
two years of his time and likewise, will perform the con-
ditions of his indenture to and with his said seruant.
The "Spirits," mentioned above, did not confine their
operations to Ireland, but even ravaged England and Scot-
land—anywhere that they get hold of stray children or adults
who would listen to their persuasions. As an evidence of
their work in London and vicinity there is an interesting
memorial written by the Lord Mayor and the Court of Alder-
man of London in 1664, addressed to the Privy Council. It is
as follows :
Certain persons, called "spirrits" do inveigle and by lewd
subtelties entice away youths against the consent of their
parents, friends or masters, whereby oftimes, great tumults,
uproars, etc are raised within the city to the breach of the
peace and the hazard of men's lives; which the Memorial-
ists request their Lordships to take into consideration and
devote some course for the suppressing of them, either by
proclamation or otherwise.^
Even the nobility were affected by the depredations of the
child-stealers. Lady Yerborough wrote in 1664 to Lord Wil-
liamson : "A poor boy, of whom she had care, has been stolen
away by spirits, as they call them, who convey such boys to
New England or Barbadoes. Begs a warrant for the bearer
whose apprentice he was, to search ships for him." ^
In 1668 one George C (name torn out in record)
wrote to Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper as follows:
Has inquired after the lost child John Brookes, and last
night, he was, after much trouble, and charge freed again:
he relates that there are divers other children in the ship,
the "Seven Brothers" enticed away from their parents.
Hears she is bound for Virginia and is fallen down to
Gravesend. Hears of two other ships in the river at the
same work and, though the parents see their children in
the ships, yet without money they will not let them have
2Dom. Charles H., vol. ccccvili., no. 17.
8Dom. Charles n., vol. clx., no. 23. Cal., p. 140.
812 THE IRISH IN IPSWICH [Sept.,
them. The woman and child will wait on him. It is be-
lieved that divers strangers and others are carried away,
so that it were good to get the ships searched. Begs him
to move it in the House to have it a law to make it death
and is confident that his mercy to those innocent children
will ground a blessing on himself and his own. Not to let
his great affairs to put this work out of his head to stop
the ships and discharge the children.*
The discerning student cafi easily see from a study of the
above instances of man-stealing and selling that Cromwell
and his agents and successors did not hesitate to stoop to any
means, fair or foul, to inveigle young people out of their
native country to accomplish their nefarious purposes. That
these methods were still in force from this period until a
century later is evidenced by the following extract, found in
Mr. Felt's History of Ipswich, in the appendix:
William Cunningham, keeper of the provost jail in New
York (where many American prisoners were huddled)
while under the British forces during the Revolution, con-
fessed that he had been engaged in such nefarious em-
ployment (kidnapping Irish people) and that he embarked
for our country in 1774 with some individuals of Ireland
whom he kidnapped.
Ipswich was not the only settlement to which Irish bond-
slaves and children were sent. Every settlement along the
Atlantic Coast had big quotas of these poor unfortunates.
Today their blood is flowing in the veins of some of the most
distinguished men and women in the country, although some
of these men or women would look their lofty disdain if the
fact were brought up before them. But fact it remains that
the noble blood of these Irish hirelings and bondslaves has
not ebbed and died out. It is even true that distinguished
citizens in positions of trust, who have unquestioned English
names, are nowadays wont to boast of "some Irish blood in
the family away back," and that they "are proud of it."
It is a historical fact that the early Irish settlers of Ips-
wich and other Massachusetts coast towns came to these
towns with a large majority bearing their names, disguised
4 Endorsed, "about spiriting," p. 1. Col. papers, vol. xxll., no. 56.
1922.] THE IRISH IN IPSWICH
813
on account of the unprincipled English laws put into force by
Cromwell and his accessories to the fact. These laws, under
heavy penalties, "obliged all Irishmen in certain towns in
Ireland to take English surnames— the name of some English
town, or color, or a particular trade or office, or of a certain
art or cult." Thus we find among early vital records of Mas-
sachusetts towns such names as Dyer, Smith, Carpenter,
Proctor, White, Black, Redding, Wright, etc. Further, in
those degenerate days, English plunderers tore children from
their fathers and mothers, and rushed them to vessels lying
in English ports, where they were forced to take these English
family and trade names. As, for instance, "Polly Richard-
son" was one of eighteen Irish girls on board an English bark
captured by a French privateer off Cape Breton, while en
route to New England in the early part of the eighteenth
century.
The influxes of the Irish into the Massachusetts Bay and
Ipswich Colonies was at its height in 1651, when "Cromwell
and his complaisant commissioners ordered the deportation of
recalcitrant Irish to the American plantations, and enterpris-
ing English merchants from Bristol and London carried on a
lucrative business in shipping and transporting their victims
to their destinations." ^ In some cases, the masters of these
vessels and the men operating the companies, by connivance
with English military governors and others, "were given leave
to fill their ships with destitute and homeless inhabitants from
the different counties of Ireland. Between 1651 and 1654,
6,400 such exiles were deported on these vessels. Men and
women were openly, sold into slavery in Cork and vicinity
during the latter part of the seventeenth century, so that the
plantations and colonies along the Atlantic Coast might be
filled up." These Irish people, purposely made defenceless,
before starting, were forced into English merchant vessels
like so many cattle. What wonder then that a certain pro-
portion of them, landed in a strange country where stern de-
crees of narrow laws and religious intolerance were in force
and confronted them no matter where they might choose to
settle, eventually assented to these laws and intolerance.
Human nature was weak, and a certain proportion gave in
to the hard-hearted demands of their new masters.
c Condon's Irish Race in America.
814 MY WISH [Sept.,
At the dawn of the eighteenth century, the Irish race was
strongly intrenched in Ipswich and reached out into the settle-
ments along the Merrimac River and into the province of
New Hampshire. Enterprising yeomanry and husbandmen
and weavers from the northern and southern counties of Ire-
land also blazed the roads and new settlements along the
North shore, and the old postroads leading from Boston and
Ipswich and Salem and Lynn were dotted, here and there,
with families from the ancient land. Today the towns and
cities of what was the ancient colony are still vitalized by
constant influxes of Irish, not only from the motherland, but
also from other parts of this land. From the first, the ancient
race has never faltered in its allegiance to the western land
of promise, and Massachusetts of today — the Plymouth,
Massachusetts Bay and Ipswich Colonies of yesterday — is
stabilized by the blood of thousands of Celtic extraction!
MY WISH.
BY ELIZABETH VOSS.
Happy the goldenrod
That lifts her shining head
To Thee, and brightly smiles.
The self-forgetting rose
Consoles Thy outraged Heart,
So I would love impart.
The violet humbly wafts
Her fragrance up to Thee,
Like her, I fain would live
In sweet humility;
I would I were a flower,
To bloom and die for Thee!
WHAT CAUSES HARD TIMES?
BY J. H. SCHACKMANN.
T was in the club car of a transcontinental train,
that place of all places where men may express
opinions and discuss things freely under the pro-
tecting cover of anonymity, and where rarely
there is met anyone who admits occupying a
position of a lower grade than president of some large bank.
The news vendor had just gone through with the April 1st
morning papers. The miners' strike was the leading news
item of the day, and further back the usual markets page had
its price lists and market comment.
With long journeys before them, the men in the car read
the papers more thoroughly than usual. Grouped together
were four men, neither of whom had ever seen the other three;
their names were respectively: Wealthson, Yunger, Knowlton
and Elder. Their appearances indicated nothing in common
either in their occupations or avocations. Wealthson was a
large man, about forty, well-groomed, and suggested inherited,
rather than personally achieved, riches. Yunger was of the
college student type, twenty-five would cover his age, athletic,
lithe, and with an eagerness of expression so often associated
with an enthusiastic and visionary temperament. Knowlton,
on the contrary, might have been Yunger's teacher, perhaps a
decade his senior, thin mobile lips, rather deep-set eyes, and
precision of thought and action written into his every feature.
All the conditions for the outbreak of a spontaneous discus-
sion were present; and the discussion came.
"Well, I see the miners are out,'* said Elder, a moderately
dressed, partially gray-haired man. He was looking at
Wealthson.
"Yes," answered Wealthson, "but they'll learn their lesson
before it's over. Strikes, strikes, strikes; that's about all one
hears and reads about these days. Labor must be taught its
place again. It was spoiled by the War; but now the other
side holds the whip hand. There's no use in kicking against
the goad of inexorable economic law. There must be a defla-
816 WHAT CAUSES HARD TIMES? [Sept.,
tion of wages as there has been in the prices of other com-
modities." Then there was silence for a while as both men
looked at the fast-flying countryside.
"Yes, prices have dropped somewhat in some markets,
and where wage scales have not been reduced, wages have
sometimes been abolished entirely by the simple process of
closing down the plant," observed Elder. "But the causes of
Labor trouble, I believe, lie deeper than we generally suspect,
deeper than the vision of those immediately concerned can
penetrate. The problem is intricate. The miners may be jus-
tified. I am holding my judgment in suspense."
Wealthson eyed him sharply as though trying to see
Elder's mental background.
"Are you a Labor sympathizer?" he asked.
"No," shot back Elder, "nor a Capital sympathizer either,"
and there was just a tinge of indignation in his voice; and
then he added : "In my day, I'm past sixty-five now, I've been
both employee and employer. Few men can be fair judges
in their own cases. I've had, by experience, the viewpoint of
each; my boyhood was not poverty-stricken, but poor; I know
manual labor by practice, not merely by theory; the shortness
of view of the uneducated mind was once mine; I tell you the
sense of oppression breeds a terrible feeling of resentment;
and if one's vision extends only to the limits of material
things, nothing except expediency can restrain from violence.
Experience has taught me that, if nothing else. Had you ever
thought that there were two sides, that there must be two sides,
to every Labor dispute?"
Before Wealthson could answer, Yunger pulled his chair
around, laid aside his paper, and with a "pardon my intru-
sion," asked if he might get into the discussion. Both nodded
assent and wondered what he might have to say. He said :
"I couldn't help hearing your conversation, and I did not
resist my inclination to listen. I studied economics in the
schools, just enough to become interested. Since then I've
read about everything I could lay my hands on — dry tomes
written by closest students of the so-called dismal science,
badly-thought-out and exaggerated writings of sincere, but
obviously prejudiced, men, and volumes upon volumes which
bore the earmarks of having been written under instruction,
either to attack or to defend the present system of private
^^
1922.] WHAT CAUSES HARD TIMES? 817
ownership and economic organization. In addition to that,
I've read daily the columns of comment written by the paid
writers of the financial press. I've read Labor journals, too.
On either side there seemed to be the echo and reecho of the
same old economic fallacies. Result: confusion for the un-
prejudiced inquirer, and the unpreventable conclusion that
few, if any, writers understand their subjects thoroughly, and
fewer still write honestly about them." And thus, with a ques-
tioning look at Elder and Wealthson, Yunger closed his re-
marks.
Knowlton from the beginning had listened to the discus-
sion. Without asking leave and without apology for thrusting
himself into it, he asked:
"Do you think there has been any intentional bemuddling
of the public mind, any set purpose to mislead and misinform,
any willful determination not to be fair to the other side,
whichever side the writer may be on?"
Yunger thought a moment.
"Considering the importance of correct information to
the public in a country governed such as ours is," he answered,
"it is a grave thing to suspect that almost all writers on either
side are willfully determined not to be fair; but when vital
facts opposed to the immediate interests of the groups with
which they have allied themselves, glance off their heads like
raindrops from a duck's back, can one avoid the suspicion
that they have oiled their mental feathers against them?"
Thus Yunger answered Knowlton's question by asking an-
other, which calls attention to another important phase of this
large and difficult Labor problem.
For months the newspapers and financial periodicals had
been filled with items regarding the industrial and commercial
depression, and the lack of work for a large army of men and
women. The President had called a conference on unemploy-
ment to meet at Washington, at which it was estimated that
several millions were idle. Strikes and Labor troubles were
common in all centres of industry. Thoughtful men every-
where had become concerned, and had formed opinions re-
garding causes, each according to his own interests, prejudices
and knowledge.
"I've been asked the question a few minutes ago," said
Wealthson, "if I had considered that there were two sides to
voi„ cxv. 52
818 WHAT CAUSES HARD TIMES? [Sept.,
these Labor disputes. I have. But these Labor fellows seem
never to have done so. To them there is but one side, and
that is theirs. More pay and less work seems to be the centre
and circumference of their philosophy. They never consider
the losses which employers sustain, the capitalists who give
them work, and who by their brains, initiative and foresight
have become the owners and directors of our large productive
and mercantile enterprises. Why, just examine the income
statements of our large corporations for the year 1921. Their
losses have been enormous, simply enormous. Prices fell;
markets failed; plants had to be closed down; production
could not go on. The cost of production, of which the largest
single item is wages, must be reduced before we can get out
of this slump."
The emphasis of finality was in this last sentence. Could
anyone doubt the fact that business men had been heavy
losers? Didn't the income statements settle that matter once
for all? Was there anything further to be said?
>" Knowlton then asked what caused these large losses,
"bookkeeping*' losses, as he called them, and whether Wealth-
son knew anything about bookkeeping. Wealthson replied
that as a business man of no small enterprise, he knew enough
about it to read balance sheets and income statements, and
that the chief cause of the large losses was the fall in the value
of the inventory because of the fall in prices. Knowlton
thought this a fair reply and just what he had expected to
hear. Then he wanted to know if Wealthson had ever given
any consideration to the value of money. Wealthson said he
had, and that he thought its value as money depended alto-
gether on its purchasing power.
"Then I'm going to ask you to try to crack a little book-
keeping nut for me which is simple yet not so easily answered.
Let us assume a fictitious business man who shall symbolize
all business men and property owners in the country, and let's
call him Uncle Sam. Let us also assume a fictitious com-
modity which shall symbolize the things necessary for ma-
terial welfare, food, clothing, shelter and the others. For the
want of a better word, let's call it foocloshelter. Are those
assumptions difficult?" Wealthson nodded a "no." "Then
let us assume further," continued Knowlton, "that the price
level for this fictitious commodity is one dollar per unit, and
1922.] WHAT CAUSES HARD TIMES? 819
that Uncle has a supply of seven billions, also that he has
three billion dollars in money. What are his total assets?"
"Ten billions," answered Wealtkson without hesitation.
"Let us assume further that there are no liabilities," con-
tinued Knowlton.
"But when there are liabilities, why assume that there are
none?" asked Yunger, who had been following the discussion
closely. He had taken the words out of the mouths of both
Wealthson and Elder, as each had a mind to ask that very
question.
"Because," answered Knowlton, "the liabihties of some
must be the assets of others. If our assumed business man
represents all business men and property owners, and if we
ignore such assets as debts owned we can also ignore the debts
owed, because the one must necessarily equal the other, as
both are but different sides of the same thing. We can like-
wise ignore debts owed to foreigners, because these are at least
fully offset by foreign debts owed to us. Is the matter clear
now, and have you the assumptions well in mind?"
The three answered yes.
"Now, after a year's business," continued Knowlton,
"Uncle finds that he has on hand the same quantity of fooclo-
shelter as at the beginning of the year, but for some reason
not entirely clear to him the price has declined to fifty cents
per unijt, so that the inventory value in money of his stock on
hand was only three and one-half billions. He had the same
amount of money as at the beginning. What were his total
assets at the close of the year?"
"Six and one-half billions," they answered in chorus.
"Has there been a loss?" asked Knowlton.
"Surely," answered Wealthson, who customarily thought
in dollar marks and figures.
"None," answered Elder, who never lost sight of real-
ities. Knowlton looked questioningly at Yunger.
"Depends on how you look at it," replied Yunger, "what
do you yourself say?"
"That's it, it depends on how you loolc at it. From one
point of view there has been a loss; from another, none; and
from still another, a gain."
"A gain, how can you possibly arrive at such a conclu-
sion," asked Wealthson.
820 WHAT CAUSES HARD TIMES? [Sept.,
Knowlton looked steadily at Wealthson for a few mo-
ments expecting that Wealthson's mind, on second thought,
would answer his own question; but Knowlton was doomed to
disappointment. Wealthson could not so quickly shift his
mental position.
"He had as much goods as at the beginning, didn't he;
and on your own idea of the value of money, his money was
worth twice as much, wasn't it?" asked Knowlton.
Wealthson saw some light and admitted that this phase
of the matter had never occurred to him. By degrees it
dawned on him that a fall in prices represented as much of a
gain to some as it represented a loss to others, and that, there-
fore, the country as a whole could never, directly, become
richer or poorer by one single cent from that cause, unless
there were debts owed to foreigners which were not offset by
foreigners' debts owned by us.
"I'm becoming interested in economics for the first time
in my life," he said as he pulled four cigars out of his pocket,
handing one to each, together with a match. "I find when
the air is filled with good tobacco smoke, to which I am con-
tributing my full share," he continued, "I am more inclined
to be considerate of interests opposed to my own."
Cigars were lighted, and then Elder in a reminiscence
said : "I remember the crisis of '73, a crisis followed by a severe
and prolonged depression. I was only sixteen then. My
father lived on a farm. He would read to us out of the
weekly papers the accounts of the bread lines, and of the
fruitless search for work by thousands of men in the large
industrial cities. I asked him what caused hard times. He
didn't know. That's been a half century ago. Since then we
have had other crises and other depressions; but what causes
them or how to prevent them seems as far from solution now
as then."
Wealthson had no definite recollections of either 73 or of
'93, as he had been born into a family who possessed wealth.
Yunger was not old enough to have known anything of either
period except what he had read about them afterwards in
books. But with Knowlton it was different. He had been
about the same age in '93 as Elder had been in '73. But un-
like Elder's father, his father was a factory hand. The factory
was closed down, and — but let Knowlton tell it himself :
1922.] WHAT CAUSES HARD TIMES? 821
"I'll never forget that night when father came home.
Mother knew what had happened before he entered the door.
'Well, Mary,' he said, *the factory's closed,' and then he walked
dejectedly into the kitchen to put away his tin dinner pail.
Mother threw her arms around him and kissed him again and
again, but said nothing. There were eight of us children, I
the eldest. Father's savings were small. With ten at table,
they would soon be exhausted. Then came week upon week
of fruitless search for other work. Oh! the uncertainty of it
all, the uncertainty! Then and there, was burned into my
mind the determination to learn the reasons why men, able
and willing to work, could find nothing to do; that determina-
tion has remained fixed in my mind unto this very day."
As he was speaking, the others began to observe more and
more that there was behind his voice a deep reservoir of
pent-up emotion, and this gave credence to his words.
"And have you succeeded?" they asked him.
"Last call for luncheon," cried the ebony-hued waiter as
he swayed his way through the car. All reached for their
watches in order to make sure that their ears were not deceiv-
ing them. None had perceived any previous calls.
"Yes," said Knowlton, "I have succeeded, at least as to the
chief causes. I believe I have convincingly shown you that a
fall in prices is not the cause of hard times, because it does
not decrease by one bit the wealth of the country. I believe
I have also shown you that the large losses we hear so much
about are more in the nature of 'bookkeeping' losses than of
real losses."
Before anyone else had time to speak, Wealthson did the
gracious thing of asking them all to take luncheon with him.
"After luncheon," he said, "I will want to discuss this problem
with you gentlemen in greater detail."
Ulew Books.
PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
By Maurice De Wulf. Princeton : Princeton University Press.
$3.00 net.
This volume is composed of the lectures delivered by Pro-
fessor De Wulf at Princeton University on Mediaeval Civilization.
The author has made this period of intellectual effloreseence pecu-
liarly his own. He has carried out many independent researches
into its history and its philosophy; has broken new ground in the
course of his investigations, and published texts which had lain
in manuscript for centuries. Some of his works, e. g., his study
of Godefroid de Fontaines and his Histoire de la Philosophic
scolastique dans les Pays Bas, have been crowned by the Academy
of Belgium. The present work aims at showing how the philos-
ophy of the Middle Ages and their entire civilization in art, archi-
tecture, literature, science and sociology interlock, act and re-act
upon one another. Thirteen chapters and an epilogue develop
this theme in suggestive and well-documented dissertations. The
author makes no claim to completeness, but he points the way to
many interesting studies and fascinating trains of thought. And
while he admires his chosen period, on which his own researches
have thrown a flood of light, still he is no hynoptized chauvinist,
nor is he blind to its numerous faults and shortcomings. Espe-
cially interesting is the seventh chapter, where Mr. De Wulf
establishes that philosophy in the Middle Ages, and in the hands
of the best Scholastic doctors, was an independent science, with
its own methods, aims, problems and solutions; and not by any
means a mere handmaiden to theology. Nor was this philosophy
an academic exercise confined strictly to the classroom. It per-
meated the realms of art, literature and everyday life. Distinct
echoes and reminiscences of it can be discerned in the Roman de
la Rose, in the Bataille des Sept Arts, in Chaucer's Parlement of
Foules and Canterbury Tales, and even in Shakespeare's plays.
Scholastic philosophy, the author sums up, is the work of
Western Races and is an original product. Its first characteristic
is its insistence on the worth and value of the individual, who is
immortal and indestructible. Its second note is its intellectual-
ism, which makes Reason the Queen and Guiding-Star of human
activity. This passion for clarity, distinctness of vision and ac-
curate, exact definition has profoundly affected the vocabulary
1922.] NEW BOOKS 823
of modern languages. The third mark of Scholasticism is its
spirit of moderation, its splendid, healthy sanity, and its conse-
quent distaste for far-fetched solutions and fantastic speculation.
Professor De Wulf concludes that the thirteenth century is the
watershed of European genius, and that modern philosophies and
thinkers are far more indebted to Scholasticism than is commonly
supposed.
THE WOMEN OF THE GAEL. By James F. Cassidy, B.A. Bos-
ton: The Stratford Co. $2.00.
We have here a unique production, being, as the author tells
us, "a more extensive tribute to the daughters of the Gael than has
hitherto appeared in print." It is a thorough, admirably written,
historical study of Irish womanhood from pagan days to the
present time. It is a noble record of the dominant position of
woman in Irish life, in all its phases, throughout the ages, main-
tained by steadfast loyalty to the highest ideals in religion and
patriotism, of courage and endurance, learning, intellect and
charm. Father Cassidy lays much emphasis upon the fact that
the distinguished individuals he cites in illustration are not to be
considered as exceptions, but representatives of their race and
civilization.
The book is concise to a fault. The author seems to have
been over-fearful of occupying too much time and space; conse-
quently, he deals but briefly with many points on which fuller in-
formation would be highly acceptable.
A portion of the content, not the least attractive and inter-
esting, is contributed by Padraic Colum in the form of an intro-
ductory article, inadequately termed a "prefatory note."
CHRIST, THE LIFE OF THE SOUL. Spiritual Conferences by
Rt. Rev. Columba Marmion, O.S.B. St. Louis: B. Herder
Book Co. $4.00 net.
In its original French form, this collection of conferences by
the Abbot of Marsedous, in Belgium, not only won golden words
of praise from Cardinal Mercier, but received the quite unusual
tribute of a personal letter of commendation from the late Holy
Father. The English translation, furthermore, is prefaced by a
letter from Cardinal Bourne, in which he very earnestly recom-
mends it to the clergy, both in the world and ki the cloister, to
religious communities of women, active and contemplative, and
to the devout laity. It would be the height of impertinence for
a reviewer to attempt to add to such authoritative expressions of
approval. Rather must he be satisfied with giving a brief sketch
824 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
of the subject-matter, that all may recognize a new source of
nourishment for the life of the spirit.
The conferences number nineteen; the first six deal with the
place of Christ as the centre of the divine economy. Of these,
the strongest is perhaps the fourth, in which the Right Reverend
author drives home a point which, amid a multiplicity of ascetical
methods, one is in danger of forgetting, namely, that Christ is the
efficient cause of all grace. Christ is not one of the means of the
s|>iritual life; He is all our spiritual life. The next twelve con-
ferences are concerned with the Christian life under the double
aspect of death to sin and life for God. The source of this life,
of course, is to be sought and found in the Eucharist and prayer ;
and the love of a soul who possesses "life more abundantly,**
according to Our Lord's own promise, will overflow in charity to
all members of Christ's mystical body, but primarily to the Virgin
Mother, who, by her cooperation with the Divine Will, entered
into the very essence of the Incarnation. The last conference
shows that the full flowering of this charity, the "fullness of the
mystical body of Christ," is reserved for the beatitude of Heaven,
which, indeed, it may be said to constitute.
Such is a summary outline of this truly inspiring book. A
synoptical table of contents and a very full analytical index en-
hance its value greatly. The conferences grew from conferences
and instructions delivered during retreats, and, as the author
testifies in a short preface, were not intended for publication. It
was then a most happy inspiration, as Pope Benedict remarked,
to publish them, so that not only the original hearers, but very
many others, might be helped along the way of perfection.
A NEW MEDLEY OF MEMORIES. By the Right Rev. Sir David
Hunter-Blair, O.S.B. New York: Longmans, Green & Co.
$5.50 net.
Urged by friends and critics to continue his reminiscences be-
yond the earlier Medley of Memories, which he closed with his
jubilee birthday in 1903, the well-known Scottish Benedictine has
set down in the present volume his recollections of the succeed-
ing decade, concluding with the outbreak of the World War.
Seldom has anyone been able to crowd so many activities into
ten years. Besides his labors in S. Paulo, Brazil, and his duties
as master of St. Benet's Hall at Oxford, and later as abbot of the
monastery at Fort Augustus, Scotland, Sir David found time for
innumerable visits to his relatives and friends, trips to monas-
teries, churches, castles, country houses, attendance at recep-
tions, weddings, lectures and college theatricals. All of these he
1922.] NEW BOOKS 825
records with unfailing interest and zest; but he is never so happy
as when recalling some odd circumstance that struck his quaint
fancy or his sense of humor. Now he visits some friends in a
castle near St. Andrews and says Mass in a billiard-room that has
been converted into a chapel. Again, on a sultry midsummer day
in London an illustrated lecture on the South Pole by Shackleton
makes him feel almost cool; and the groups of solemn penguins,
shown in the lantern pictures, in their black-and-white, pacing
along the shores, are "quite curiously reminiscent of a gathering
of portly bishops — say a Pan-Angliean Congress." He conducts
an Oxford Local Examination in a Dumfries convent-school — the
only available place — and is amused by two Protestant mothers,
who sit all day in the corridor outside the schoolroom keeping
watch over their daughters, lest they are "got at" between the
papers by the nuns and influenced in the direction of Popery.
Hardly a page is there that has not an anecdote or an odd
bit of lore; not infrequently the genial humor and whimsical
erudition overflow the text, and must needs be accommodated in
footnotes. In one instance, an appendix is required: in talking
classics with the Oxford Corpus Professor of Latin, he learns
what Cicero^s last words were; whereupon he displays his com-
pilation of the last words of forty other famous men. One other
appendix completes this most diverting book: to prevent modern
readers from pronouncing as "unkind and ill-mannered" his state-
ment that Darwin was an unbeliever in revelation and in Christ,
he produces the scientist's own words. For good measure, he
adds the similar credos of Huxley, Mill and Arnold.
THE JEWS. By Hilaire Belloc. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.
$3.00.
It is generally conceded that Belloc is a bold writer; and
Belloc on the Jews would seem, at first sight, to rival certain ex-
ploits of Prince Rupert or Jeb Stuart. Those who take up the
book with such expectations will, however, be disappointed by the
sober caution of the narrative. The subject is hazardous because
everybody is talking about it when everybody is supposed, by a
queer rule of manners, never to have mentioned it. This situa-
tion and the danger for the public welfare which it involves, is
one point which The Jews establishes almost beyond a doubt.
Naturally, the fundamental issue under discussion, "Is there a
Jewish Question?" may still seem to invite a negative answer, but
we are inclined to believe that Belloc's ringing affirmative will
satisfy most impartial people. That granted, the remainder of
his argument is as interesting and effective as any single man's
826 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
opinions on so tremendous a theme could well be. There is a
Jewish "nation," he says, nomadic and rather secret in character,
living within the domain of numerous other nations, separated
from them by a totally individual concept of social existence, and
pursuing, with obvious sense and success, its own purposes. His-
tory shows that whenever the Jew has reached considerable finan-
cial and political eminence he has been attacked; and contempor-
ary feeling, based on opposition to Hebraic financial power and
the rise of Bolshevism, and fed by a ridiculous Anti-Semitism, is
alarmingly headed for another such attack. The only preventive,
argues Belloc, is to bring the question into the open, and then to
create mutually a new attitude of understanding that will fmd
expression in custom and legislation adapted to guarantee peace.
These general considerations, set down with fine candor, intel-
ligence and generosity, should influence profoundly the public
mind, although numerous matters of detail might well be dis-
avowed. We do not feel, for example, that Belloc* s analysis of
the Jewish situation in the United States is even relatively com-
plete. But, all in all. The Jews is written by an unusually sym-
pathetic and lenient Belloc— you will find the old fighting debater
only in sentences which touch upon secondary issues like pro-
hibition and the press — who is at the same time very fascinating.
The book can easily be misquoted; has, in fact, been misquoted
with an ignorance rather plainly deliberate. But that will not
keep away readers inclined to admit the author's statement:
"Bolshevism stated the Jewish problem with a violence and in-
sistence such that it could no longer be denied either by the
blindest fanatic or the most resolute liar,'* and to wonder in
which of the two classes his vehement denunciators will belong.
THE FALL OF MARY STUART. By Frank A. Mumby. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Co. $5.00.
Mr. Mumby, whose former studies and researches into the
early life of Henry VIII., of Elizabeth, and of the relations between
Elizabeth and Mary Stuart have resulted in the publication of
several fascinating volumes of original letters, has added to the
number by covering, in the present volume, that phase of Mary's
life immediately preceding her flight into England. We have here
the murder of Rizzio, Darnley's courtship, marriage and brief
career ending with his murder at Kirk-a-Field, Bothwell's stormy
courtship and marriage, the kidnapping of Mary, her escape from
Loch Leven, and the Civil War with its evil days which followed.
Mr. Mumby has threaded his way with delicacy and fine judg-
ment through the maze of original letters, documents and reports
1922.] NEW BOOKS 827
which bear upon these tense days. Sometimes damaging rumors
are presented in one letter, only to be contradicted in another.
All the virulence and suspicion of the time appear. Distrust,
hatred, envy, unswerving devotion and the base treachery which
surrounded the unhappy queen, live again in Mr. Mumby's pages,
telling their own tale in the quaint language of the period.
Against this dark background, lit up luridly by the flames of
murder and treachery and vile passi©n, the figure of Mary stands
out vividly, and, whatever the reader's conclusion may be regard-
ing her stainlessness or her guilt, she remains an alluring and,
at the same time, a pathetic figure, in whose behalf men who be-
lieved in her were glad to sacrifice estates, position and life itself.
Mr. Mumby has performed with unfailing skill and tact the
difficult task to which he addressed himself. He has shown dis-
crimination and fairness in the selection of the documents and
letters to be presented, and the reader, whatever his personal
judgment may be regarding the character of Mary, is given an
impressive and unforgettable picture of one of the most tragic
figures of Scottish history.
IMMORTALITY AND THE MODERN MIND. By Kirsopp Lake,
M.A., D.D. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. $1.00.
The Ingersoll lecture for the current year was delivered by a
scholar eminent in Europe as in America, master of a graceful
style, and conversant with the most advanced thought of the
modern mind. For many reasons it deserves attention, partic-
ularly on the part of those who find in modernity no sure guar-
antee of truth.
Briefly, Professor Lake holds that the traditional teaching of
immortal life has been proven a vain imagination, and that the
new dogma of philanthropic altruism is gloriously reigning in its
place. "Men regard the permanent survival of their personality,"
he says, "much as they look at schemes for their permanent
rejuvenation: a pleasant dream, impossible of fulfillment." He
outlines the evolution of the concept. Man's imagination first
constructed the vision of a possible triumph over death, and in
due time this hopeful imagination gave rise to two other doctrines:
the resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul.
Primitive Christianity taught only the first. The second passed
into Church teaching from the Greek philosophies, and in the
course of time quite forced its predecessor out of recognition.
Today the one and the other are discarded. Science has disposed
of the doctrine that "a worn-out body would be re-assembled . . .
for souls, some of which had existed many centuries without
828 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
them.'* And as for the soul: "The theory that the body is a
mechanism operated by the soul, which is a material entity com-
posed of a lighter and more ethereal substance, has nothing to
commend it when viewed by the cold gaze of modern science."
Even the Society for Psychical Research has done nothing more
than re-open the old question on a new, but still doubtful, basis.
After the negation of the historical concept of immortality,
Professor Lake makes his own confessio fidei. He still believes in
the Immaterial — in Life, as distinguished from individual living.
He notes that men are laboring for "the improvement of the world
in which our children are to live. It is an unselfish object, and
the pursuit of a better world for our children to inherit has
become the surrogate for the hope of a better world for ourselves
to enjoy." This altruistic life of service brings moments akin to
the ecstasy of the artist, of true friendship, or of mysticism. The
hampering bars of our individuality drop away, and the Life
within us knows itself as one with the Life of the world, one with
the Life of others. There is "assurance that I and my friends
share in a common life that is ours, rather than mine and theirs
. . . the sense of individuality is swallowed up in unity. . . .
And, at times, I have thought that I have seen a glimpse of the
great light of eternity transfiguring the mountains of time."
One who reads the thirty-seven pages of this lecture with
memories of Scholastic precision of language and thought will be
bewildered and amazed. One finds a new distinction drawn be-
tween individuality and personality. In the sequel, individuality
is scarcely other than materiality, and personality is resolved into
the most impersonal, pantheistic Life. The soul is several times
defined, but always as a material wraith, never the immaterial
substance of the older teaching. Hence, it is that the arguments
proferred against the resurrection of the body are deemed con-
clusive in disposing of the immortality of the soul. Surely, this
is a paralogism that would amaze St. Thomas.
The modern mind, however, will permit no caviling at new
definitions; and indeed Professor Lake's purpose is other than to
establish in set terms the meaning of the words he uses. His
lecture in larger outline has two parts — the one historic, the other
pragmatic. Both are open to question.
Is it historically true that Christ taught only the resurrection
of the body, and that the dogma of the immortality of the soul
was imported from Greek philosophy? A host of texts and the
whole message of the Gospel read the contrary. Again, the
Church indeed taught that each man must seek in all things the
salvation of his soul. But is it true historically that thereby "the
1922.] NEW BOOKS 829
charity of the Middle Ages was less often inspired by love of man
than by love of heaven" and that, "in general, there was produced
a type of selfishness all the more repulsive because it was sanc-
tified?" And is it fair, in view of Christ*s unceasing teaching of
constant responsibility to God for every thought and act, and His
doctrine of individual judgment and reward or punishment, to
interpret Matthew x. 39, as teaching : "He that shall seek his 'soul*
shall lose it?"
In the practical order, too, altruistic devotion to humanity,
unceasing effort to make a better world for our children to inherit,
these are noble ideals. They have long been known as but an-
other version of Christ's command to love our neighbor. Pro-
fessor Lake urges these, however, without the basis of divine
charity, without even the saving measure of the high and eternal
dignity of human personality. Can history or everyday expe-
rience afford us any hope that such a foundationless, purposeless
altruism will ever be a motive force in human life? Someone has
well said that a man will labor for himself, his contemporaries,
and a generation or two more; but that a fifth or sixth generation
is so remote as to cause him no concern, as never to influence his
slightest act.
It is a well established law of Group Psychology that doc-
trines first promulgated among the erudite, gradually filter down
into the lives and thoughts of the average man of the streets and
the fields; and that, in the process, all the safeguards and qual-
ifications of the first formulation are lost and forgotten. Witness
Rousseau and the French Revolution, Marx and famine-stricken,
plague-ridden Russia. We have warning, then, that the fair
phrases and the alluring ideals with which the literati of today
cloak their destructive teachings will one day be torn away. A
future age will see in the "modern mind" only a strengthening
and deepening of the unreligious material spirit that is the curse
of our world today.
THE LE GALLIENNE BOOK OF ENGLISH VERSE. (From the
Tenth Century to the Present.) Edited with an Introduction
by Richard Le Gallienne. New York: Boni & Liveright.
$3.50.
After all there is no one like a poet to pick poems — just as
there is no one like a cobbler to make shoes; And Mr. Le Gal-
lienne, aiming in the present collection "to bring together as much
of the best poetry as it is possible to include in one companionable
volume," has done his work almost superhumanly well. His
choice begins with "Merrily Sang the Monks of Ely" and ends with
830 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
brief lyrics by Robert Nichols and Robert Graves; and if the
personal equation has inclined him to include more of modern,
even contemporary, English verse than is customary in these
judicial anthologies, few contemporary readers will quarrel with
him for that. In fact, most of us will find it quite as it should be
that the tradition which spoke through Chaucer, through Spencer,
through Shakespeare (whom one finds here represented not only
by detached lyrics, but also by brief, immortal pages from the
plays), should be followed not only into Swinburne, Tennyson and
Browning, but also into "The Hound of Heaven,*' the revealing
reticences of Alice Meynell, and even into the tentative minors
and very-minors of today and yesterday and tomorrow.
There will be a welcome on many a library table for this new
anthology — the latest, of course, of the interesting "Modern"
Series being issued by Boni & Liveright, and one of their most
commendable publications. It is a delectable book, small enough
to slip into a steamer trunk, yet large enough to console a poetry-
lover for being marooned on a desert island — or in a city hotel
in midsummer.
THE SOUL OF AN IMMIGRANT. By Constantine M. Panunzio.
New York: The Macmillan Co. $2.00.
This is an extremely interesting tale of an Italian boy of goed
parentage who, because of his love for the sea, enrolled in the
crew of a brig bound for America, Australia and the South Sea
Islands. Because of the cruelty and unreasonableness of the
ship's captain, the lad abandoned the boat at the first port, Boston,
and thus found himself a stranger in America, ignorant of all
American customs and unable to speak the language. We follow
him through all his adventures — with pick and shovel, in lumber
camps, on a New England farm, in an American University work-
ing his way, in settlement work in Boston, and, finally, through
the War as a Y. M. C. A. worker. It is a personal narrative told
in the first person in an unusually vivid and realistic style. There
is no waning of interest. Because it is personal, it is engrossing.
But for the same reasons it is impossible to draw any general
scientific conclusions on the broad problems of immigration and
Americanization. Possibly, the experiences of this one man may
cause all who read them to be more sympathetic and understand-
ing with the strangers in our land. If so, the book has accom-
plished a purpose, and the hours spent in reading it will have been
profitable, as well as pleasant. However, no great scientific value
can be placed on the work. Unique and individual experiences
cannot be considered as general conditions.
1922.] NEW BOOKS 831
The complete omission of any mention of the Catholic Church
as a factor in the lives of Italian immigrants, would indicate that
a narrow view had been taken of the situation. Surely, in his
Italian settlement work in Boston he must have come in contact
with some church influences. Very early in the book, he pro-
fesses his disinterestedness in religion and actual distaste for
whatever Catholic practices were forced upon him by his family.
He does not seem able to realize the need of an individual for any
formal religion.
Mr. Panunzio's early experiences in America were anything
but pleasant and, it would seem, not destined to arouse any love
or admiration for our country. The policemen he came in contact
with were nothing short of brutal. The turning points of his
life, his great resolves, never seemed to be the outcome of thought
or the natural reaction of circumstance, but rather emotional in-
spirations which welled up while standing on Plymouth Rock, or
walking through the Boston Common at night, or on viewing the
Stars and Stripes waving gloriously in the breeze. Perhaps, this
is characteristic of the romantic race, but it leaves us a little
skeptical of the sturdiness of his sentiments. We are, however,
in no doubt as to their sincerity.
The book contributes nothing to the general fund of in-
formation on immigration and Americanization, but it is interest-
ing and without pretense. It is a personal narrative, and masks
as nothing more.
MORAL PROBLEMS IN HOSPITAL PRACTICE. By Rev. Patrick
A. Finney, CM. St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co. $L25 net.
Father Finney has essayed a very difficult task. He has tried
to formulate in fifty-seven questions all the practical moral prob-
lems arising in hospital practice, and to answer them briefly and
clearly for laymen. Then, in a second portion, he repeats the
questions and answers, adding a discussion of the principles
underlying each case.
The author's wide experience in hospital work, through his
association with the Sisters of Charity, gives him a great vantage
ground in the practical appreciation of these problems, and he
has achieved a notable measure of success. But we fear that he
set himself an impossible task. There is no royal road to wis-
dom, and there seems no way of enabling those who have had no
training in moral theology to answer immediately and categor-
ically some of the most complicated problems in the field of
morals.
Father Finney tells us that "discussions of various opinions
832 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
upon certain points involved have been studiously avoided
throughout the manual, because it was judged that such discus-
sions would serve only to create new doubts, instead of removing
those which it was the primary purpose of the manual to settle."
But where the discussion of any problem has not brought unanim-
ity among Catholic moralists, and a doubt still remains, we do
not think that Father Finney is justified in ignoring it. He should
not answer with an unqualified Yes or No.
Desirable, therefore, as it is for hospital Sisters to have a
manual that will answer all their problems quickly and clearly
and unconditionally, we do not think that Father Finney has
given it to us — nor, indeed, that such a thing is possible.
A DREAM OF HEAVEN. By Robert Kane, S.J. New York:
Longmans, Green & Co. $2.00 net.
The many friends of Father Kane, S.J., who have read and
enjoyed earlier collections of his sermons and lectures will wel-
come this new volume, which brings together seventeen discourses
given on certain important occasions between 1896 and 1918.
Most of the discourses are sermons preached on events of historic
interest: the Seventh Centenary of the Foundation of the Domin-
icans, the Golden Jubilee of the Foundation of the Missioners of
the Most Holy Sacrament, the Beatification of Madame Barat,
and of the French Carmelite Martyrs. The sermon which gives
the title to the book, strangely placed at the end, is a New Year's
discourse. There is a sane and wholesome lecture on "Fiction:
A Fine Art" and one on "An Ideal of Patriotism," insisting on the
need of the supernatural element in any nation's ideals. All the
sermons and lectures were given in Ireland and England.
NOVISSIMA VERBA (Last Words). By Frederic Harrison.
New York: Henry Holt & Co. $3.00.
The final opinions of any man who has lived for ninety years
in the thick of English literary and political life, will be of value
to Americans if the subjects dealt with are interesting beyond
the author's domestic circle. In this book of crisp piece-meal
reflections, Frederic Harrison talks courageously — almost rashly —
about such universal concerns as poetry, government and the
Peace. Generally, the criticism is amiable, excepting when it
treats of Mr. Wilson, Lenine and the British Labor leaders. There
is present the resigned optimism of a rather eccentric, but wide-
awake, writer who has borne the standard of Comte and the Pos-
itivists so long that he seems inseparable from them. Indeed,
Mr. Harrison is probably responsible for the fact that Positivism
1922.1 MEW BOOKS ^M
strikes us now as a doctrine considerably more English than
French. It is an unsteady point of view, of course, but it has
not prevented him from being notably candid and fair, even
when Catholic principle, which he does not understand, enters
the discussion. His friends will find this last book typically
Harrisonian; others may be led to spend an hour or two agree-
ably with a man who prides himself on being a Victorian looking
upon the very modern year, 1920, with open eyes, and whose
comment has the piquant advantage of reminiscent conservatism.
DUBLIN UNIVERSITY AND THE NEW WORLD. By the Rev.
Robert H. Murray, Litt.D. New York: The Macmillan Co.
$1.25.
As the author explains, it has long been the custom, in Trin-
ity College, Dublin, to preach a sermon in memory of its distin-
guished alumni on Trinity Sunday. Last year, the preacher was
Dr. Murray, and of the four scholars of Trinity whose careers
were outlined, three — Samuel Mather, Increase Mather and John
Winthrop the Younger — are figures prominent in the history of
New England. When the College asked that the sermon be
printed, Dr. Murray took advantage of the opportunity to expand
it to a handy volume of nearly one hundred pages.
He is to be thanked for having done so, for while the dis-
course as enlarged may have greater appeal to Protestant than
to Catholic readers, it is a valuable contribution to the literature
of early Puritanism in America. It is doubtful if one could dis-
cover, within such small compass, a better revelation of the
motives and aspirations of these three worthies who claimed
Trinity as their alma mater. The style is fluid, yet scholarly;
the method is critical rather than fulsome, and the impression
left is of tolerance born of understanding.
SPIRITUAL HEALTH AND HEALING. By Horatio W. Dresser,
Ph.D. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co. $2.00.
Dr. Horatio Dresser sets forth in this volume his version of
the Spiritual Health Evangel. It is a very vague and unsatis-
factory faith, so fluid and protean as to defy strict statement.
The reviewer, anyhow, has not been able to discover in Dr.
Dresser's pages the slightest remedy for any ill — no, nor even
a thought that might help to beguile a toothache. The work
professes to be based upon Scripture, and in point of fact
numerous texts are quoted, especially from St. John. But these
receive interpretations and applications, which set at defiance all
rules of exegesis, linguistics and even common sense; and the con-
voL. cxv. 53
834 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
viction is irresistibly forced on the reader that the author must
never have been given a scientific grounding in Biblical analysis.
Nor do logic and metaphysics fare much better than hermeneutics.
Philosophical and theological terms, such as "Person,*' "Per-
sonality," "Principle," are employed to denote different concepts;
concepts and ideas are equated, which belong to absolutely
diverse realms of thought. For these reasons, it is extremely
diflBcult at times to disentangle the author's real meaning; but
his prevailing drift would appear to be towards pantheism.
Chapter III. entitled, "The Christ," teems with theological
enormities, and unproven and unprovable statements. "We may
begin," Dr. Dresser says, "by regarding the Christ as universal
divine love and wisdom" (p. 28). If this be not mere empty
rhetoric, it is certainly rank pantheism. Indeed, three pages
further on (p. 31), the author, commenting several detached
passages of St. John, says: "The Christ is here a principle such
that it (sic.) can abide in all who are faithful to the precepts and
the love set before the disciples as an ideal." And then, hard on
the heels of the foregoing, we have the astounding statement
that the Christ is a person and is God the Father! "We know,"
says the author with superb self-assurance, "that no man alone
can save his fellow-men, that the true Saviour is God the Father,
is the Christ. This wisdom is, in a sense, over and above each
one of us as a person, inasmuch as we may all abide in the
divine love as branches of the true vine" (p. 39). Dr. Dresser's
knowledge is extensive, and his faith is the faith which can
move mountains. We, however, fail to understand how the same
entity can be personal and impersonal, a vague abstraction, God
the Father and the Christ!
MAN— THE ANIMAL. By W. M. Smallwood, Ph.D. New York:
The Macmillan Co. $2.50.
If it possessed an index — and no book ever cried louder for
one — we could give almost unstinted praise to this work, for it is
marked by a sanity and a reserve that might well be imitated by
other biological writers. The author is not afraid to say that
such and such a question cannot yet be answered, and in his
desire for facts, rather than thin-spun theory, he has our hearty
sympathy. "We seem to be living," he writes, "in an age when
facts are not especially wanted. They interfere with our general-
izations. Real progress cannot ignore them." These words de-
serve to be printed on cards and hung up in various studies and
work-rooms. We may commend also his treatment of the Laws
of Nature, a subject on which there is lamentable ignorance on
1922.] NEW BOOKS 835
the part of the reading public, and as a result a complete mis-
understanding of a great deal of the work of science today. This
is not a book for children, but parents, especially male parents,
will read it with great benefit and, above all, teachers of the young
should make it their business to familiarize themselves with its
pages. The author does not touch on the subject of the soul —
that his title expressly excludes — and so he does not attempt a
treatise on mental training. In his preface, he defines his position
and adheres to it very faithfully. Eugenics is a subject which
is touched upon, but cautiously, and we are spared a great many
of the crude surmises masquerading as facts as to early man and
his supposed doings, which appear in too many books purporting
to convey information of the kind contained in this book.
ECONOMIC CIVICS. By R. O. Hughes. New York: Allyn &
Bacon. $1.25.
Mr. Hughes has attempted to combine civics and economics
for high school pupils. The idea is certainly good, and his treat-
ment is excellent in many ways. His definitions are clear and his
discussions interesting. Suggestive questions are inserted from
time to time, further reading is outlined, and at the end of each
chapter is stated a number of problems for papers. Typograph-
ically, the book leaves nothing to be desired. The only adverse
criticism is that the economic element is out of proportion to the
civics. We note with satisfaction that the author is not afraid
to mention the Creator.
THE MAN OF SORROWS. By Robert Eaton, Priest of the
Birmingham Oratory. St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co. $2.25
net.
The Archbishop of Birmingham says in the preface to this
work that the author needs not to crave pardon for adding
another to the already long list of studies on the Passion. As
the Church points out in her hymns on the Holy Eucharist and
the Holy Name, no tongue nor pen can frame an honor equal to
the love Our Lord has shown to us. The method Father Eaton
follows is to accompany the Saviour, step by step, along the way
of the Cross, arranging the incidents narrated by the various
Evangelists in orderly sequence, with appropriate and suggestive
comments. The details as given by each of the gospels are ar-
ranged in a tabular form in an appendix. The brief outline of
the sacred text must necessarily be filled out, as in all books of
this kind, by the fruit of the author's pious meditation. The
author is never unpleasantly dogmatic in his hypotheses as to
836 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
what Our Lord must have felt or must have said on occa-
sions where the gospels are silent. One word only would we
venture in adverse criticism: the more of the inspired word in
such a book the better, but Father Eaton sometimes includes,
within the same quotation points, literal quotations from the
New Testament, cognate passages from the prophets, sometimes
literally quoted, sometimes paraphrased, and subjective reflec-
tions of his own. No great harm is done by this practice, but
the confusion is a trifle distracting. With this very minor reser-
vation, we recommend the book most heartily.
THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY. By Viscount Bryce,
O.M. Being the Inaugural Lecture of the Sir George Watson
Chair of American History, Literature and Institutions, with
an Appendix relating to the foundation. New York: The
Macmillan Co. $1.50.
Of this little volume, significant, diplomatically and polit-
ically, rather than historically, the preface and appendix are most
interesting. Here we have an account of the origin of the Watson
Foundation, and its importance to a greater knowledge and ap-
preciation of the great "Transatlantic Commonwealth of English-
speaking people.*' The chair, founded by Sir George Watson, was
to provide annual lecturers, English and American scholars, the
first to be Viscount Bryce and the second ex-President Hadley
of Yale University.
On June 27, 1921, Lord Bryce gave the inaugural lecture,
a well-worded, cautiously advanced statement of the philosophy
of American history in a thinly disguised propaganda. There
was the note of friendship without a touch of antagonism, the
note of a man who knew America better than any foreigner,
and of a man applauded by America. As such, it was a most
effective propaganda, and will bear fruit, good or bad, depending
upon one's outlook.
PULLING TOGETHER. By John T. Broderick. Schenectady,
N. Y. : Robson & Adee. $1.00.
Cooperation of employer and workers through the agency of
employee representation within the plant is the theme of this little
book. The old device of the imaginary dialogue is used as a
medium of presentation, but the setting is modern — the smoking-
room of a parlor car. The merits and possibilities of this kind of
employee representation are sketchily, but pleasingly, set forth
in the course of a conversation led by a broad-minded and opti-
mistic *'president of a well-known corporation operating a group
1922.] NEW BOOKS 837
of plants in the middle West employing some thirty thousand
people."
Mr. Broderick's book is well worth reading because of the
interesting style in which it is written and the fine spirit which
it reflects. It is, however, but an introduction to the subject with
which it deals, and is a plea for a policy rather than a scientific
analysis of a plan of industrial relationship. The anonymity of
the "hero" and his company make the story a suggestion of pos-
sibilities instead of a record of achievement to which all may turn.
It does not dispose convincingly of objections to this type of col-
lective dealing as contrasted with alternative systems of joint
action. It is regrettable that there was not an officer of a national
trade union present in the smoking-room to compel a more search-
ing examination of some points that were accepted without chal-
lenge.
THE EDUCATIONAL IDEALS OF THE BLESSED JULIE BIL-
LIART. By a Member of her Congregation. New York:
Longmans, Green & Co. 75 cents net.
It was said of Coleridge that his deathless poems might be
printed on twenty pages, but that these pages deserved to be
bound in gold. Almost as much might be said of this brochure
of thrice twenty pages, for under an unpretending exterior are
contained the deathless principles of Christian pedagogy, formu-
lated by the Foundress of the Congregation of the Sisters of
Notre Dame de Namur over a century ago, and only strengthened
by the lapse of time.
The first and third chapters contain a biographical sketch of
Blessed Julie and a brief history of her Congregation, respectively;
the second consists of about thirty-five pages on the educational
principles which guided her in founding and directing her In-
stitute. For her the only true educators are they who are all the
while upbuilding their own being by deepening and purifying
their power of believing and loving. Great ideals propagate them-
selves best, if not only, through the lives of those in whom they
have become incorporate. It was said of old that the orator was a
good man who was skillful in speech, and the good teacher no
less is one who loves perfection, and labors to achieve it first in
himself and then in his disciples. This is the corner-stone upon
which Blessed Julie built her "art of arts," as she called educa-
tion. *'One cannot give what one has not got," she writes to her
Sisters, "if you are not virtuous yourself, you will not make
others so." It is a lesson which can never be too thoroughly as-
similated by teachers, and coupled with it is another which makes
838 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
for success, a sovereign means to enable them to do well and
easily what lies within their powers, a means long since revealed
in the pregnant words of the great Augustine: "Where there is
love, there is no labor, or, if there be labor, the labor is love."
UP STREAM. An American Chronicle, By Ludwig Lewisohn.
New York: Boni & Liveright. $3.00.
Another very tired egoist has made his confession and nailed
his defiance upon the gates of smug America. Ludwig Lewisohn's
book is the story of his soul, working to assimilate and re-fashion,
amid the dull, indifferent whirr of American life, the great real-
ities of beauty and thought. Of course, he failed, and his criti-
cism is therefore bitter with indignation that is almost despair.
One concedes the terrible truth of much he says, while viewing
with a certain pity and astonishment the weakness of his ultimate
philosophy. He came to America, as a child, from Germany; his
father was an emancipated Jew; no religious belief stirred him
except (it is worth noting) a brief response to the aesthetic side
of the Church; he studied and toiled to overcome poverty, ostra-
cism, misunderstanding; and as a university professor and literary
critic underwent the trial of a war in which he did not believe.
It is all very serious and intense, the relief being supplied by
heroic enthusiasm for poetry and philosophy. And yet, after this
wide experience and education, what has Lewisohn to offer as a
remedy for American mediocrity? An impotent egoism, a shabby
sex psychology, a form of erotic German romanticism so hollow
and so hopeless that no phrases can hide its flabby contours.
Under all his bravado, there is no bravoure; for the thunder of
Carlyle he substitutes, frequently, a screech; and his repudiation
of Christianity is purely external. A little faith, a saving sense
of humor, even, perhaps, a diligent reading of Don Quixote, would
have drummed into his head the saving phrase — Memento homo
quia pulvis es.
FRENCH GRAMMAR MADE CLEAR. For use in American
Schools. By Ernest Dimnet. New York: Funk & Wagnalls
Co. $1.50 net.
It is doubtful if any but a Frenchman could have treated
what Father Tabb used to call the hone dry rules of speech so
humanly and vivaciously as the present book. And it is further
doubtful if any Frenchman except the Canon Dimnet could quite
have achieved it. For here is the work of an experienced pro-
fessor — in fact, of an internationally celebrated scholar — a prac-
tical working grammar, built up with the main idea of interesting
1922.] NEW BOOKS 839
and intriguing the American student. Obviously, it is bound to
succeed. It will succeed, first, because of its conciseness and
simplicity, its determination to omit "everything not generally
known to an educated Frenchman." And then it will succeed
because of its inclusiveness : because to the usual and inevitable
groundwork of conjugation, rule and vocabulary, it adds a highly
useful and stimulating list of Current Twentieth Century Phrases
— and a page of really practical (and polite) suggestions for letter-
writing in French — and three amazingly brief, but comprehensive,
appendices dealing with French Versification, the Landmarks of
French Literature and the Main Periods of French History.
And, perhaps, the little volume will succeed most of all
because of the tact and taste with which its information is pre-
sented. It is something more than a text-book, since to class-
room work or home study it brings both freshness and sympathy.
ONE. By Sarah Warder MacConpell. New York: The Macmil-
lan Co. $2.00.
We must confess that this, Miss MacConnell's third novel, is
a little disappointing when we compare it with its forerunners,
Why Theodora! and Many Mansions. The reason for the falling-
off is possibly to be found in the fact that the book deals — unlike
the earlier novels — with that dreariest of all things. New York
suburban society. We cannot become interested in the charac-
ters, and we do not believe that Miss MacConnell is greatly in-
terested in them.
Yet One possesses some merits. It is sincere; it has insight;
and it is full of courage. The background of the book is cleverly
painted. Without attempting definite satire, and delicately avoid-
ing the usual facile, coarse realism. Miss MacConnell gives us the
women with "hennaed hair that seemed to scream with pain,"
the "bizarre clothes that were the wildly colored expression of
unhappiness," "the appearance of Husbands as a topic, sent round
like the cigarettes."
In such a society Alethea, the heroine of the story, moves,
tolerant and contemptuous of its meanness and vice. She mar-
ries, with her eyes open, the brilliant Frederick Haviland, noto-
rious as a philanderer. Her problem is how to make her mar-
riage a success, and her method is the renunciation of jealousy.
It is a hard job, but she wins in the end.
Miss MacConnell, we understand, is a High Anglican; but
she is careful not to use any supernatural argument. Neverthe-
less, the argument she does use — though upon a purely natural-
istic basis — is sound, as far as it goes. The bond of marriage
840 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
exists even when romance is dead; her divorced men and women
are all fish out the matrimonial water, more desolate in separ-
ation than they were together. Even in disaster the tie holds:
it was Alethea's dilficult business, alone in her precious set, to
attempt and to achieve unity.
A FRANCISCAN VIEW OF THE SPIRITUAL AND RELIGIOUS LIFE,
being three treatises from the writings of St. Bonaventure. Done
into English by Dominic Devas, O.F.M. (New York: Benziger
Brothers. $1.50 net.) This is a book that can be highly recommended
to all religious superiors or those likely to be superiors. We may
go further, and say that it is a book that should be carefully and
meditatively read by all such. From its pages, they may learn the
qualifications and virtues of the true religious superior, and this
knowledge may serve to deter some who otherwise might be ambitious
to hold office. It is not easy to be a good superior, as St. Bona-
venture makes evident. Yet for those who are chosen to exercise
such an office these treatises will afford much light. The twenty-two
pages at the end, containing eight general and twenty-five special in-
junctions in reference to the ordering of one's spiritual life, are all
that will be likely to prove of special interest or value to the general
reader.
NEW GROWTHS AND CANCER, by Simeon Burt Wolbach, M.D.
(Harvard Health Talks.) (New York: Harvard University Press.
$1.00.) Perhaps the most serious problem before the medical profes-
sion at the present time is cancer. About a million of people die of it
every year — nearly 100,000 of them in this country alone. Cancer
is on the increase. About two and one-half per cent, more of patients
die from it every year. It is easy to understand then that this little
book, summing up our most recent knowledge of cancer, is of great
popular interest. Certain changes have come in recent times. "Twen-
ty-five years ago the possibility of cancer being caused by a parasite
was eagerly entertained and heredity was given a prominent place in
all discussions." Today "the parasitic theory of cancer causation is
almost wholly abandoned. . . . The statistician has disproved heredity,
and insurance companies attach no importance of penalty to history
of cancer in the family of an applicant for insurance."
What to do for cancer? On the first suspicious sign of a mole or
wart showing a tendency to grow, have it removed. Internal trouble
after middle life that persists, should be submitted to a reliable
physician. Pain is a late symptom of cancer. Avoid quacks and pre-
tenders. If you have a good watch, you make inquiries before in-
trusting it to someone for cleaning or repairs. Do at least that much
with regard to your body. Look out for remedies that claim to save
you from the knife; they will, at the expense of your life. Here you
have the Harvard advice on the most important medical problem of
the day.
1922.] NEW BOOKS 841
nPHE EPISTLES AND GOSPELS FOR PULPIT USE. Being the Eng-
1 lish Version of the Epistles and Gospels read in the Masses of
Sundays and Holydays throughout the year, edited by Rev. Ferdinand
E. Bogner. (New York: Leo A. Kelly.) We commend heartily this
new edition of the Epistles and Gospels for Pulpit Use as being at once
both scholarly and practical. The volume is of convenient size, ad-
mirably printed and bound, and very sensibly arranged. It will be of
no little value in assisting priests to read the Gospel intelligently and
impressively to the people; and it will be available also for those of
the faithful who care to keep the Sunday Gospels at hand for reading
or meditation. Father Bogner and Mr. Kelly are to be complimented
on the doing of a very fine piece of work. The price is most reason-
able, $1.00.
MANUAL FOR NOVICES, compiled from the Disciplina Claustralis
of the Venerable Father John of Jesus and Mary, the Vade-Mecum
Novitiorum by a Master of Novices, and other authentic sources.
Translated from the Latin. (New York: Benziger Brothers. $2.00
net.) This little manual, as the preface states, was compiled chiefly
for the use of Discalced Carmelites; yet it may be used with profit by
other Religious as well. In fact, we believe the Religious of all Orders
or Congregations will welcome this volume. It is brief in treatment,
but full in sense and very thoroughgoing in the principles it inculcates.
The specimen acts of the various virtues and the chapters on Prayer,
Mortification, the Annual and the Monthly Retreat will be found spe-
cially helpful. In the Table of Contents the pagination of the sections
up to XIII. is wrong. Otherwise the volume is well printed, and is
neatly bound in black cloth.
THE COUNTER-REFORMATION IN SCOTLAND, by Rev. J. H.
Pollen, S.J. (St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co. $L00 net.) Father
Pollen has rewritten and enlarged the paper on the Counter-Reforma-
tion in Scotland, which he read two years ago, before the Catholic
Students' Guild of the University of Glasgow. In the brief space of
some eighty pages, the writer sketches the circumstances that led to
the first Catholic counter-reformation in the coming of Gordon and
Crichton in 1584. He describes Scotland's long resistance to the Ref-
ormation and her complete collapse; the policy of Queen Mary Stuart;
the changing viewpoint of King James in 1579 and 1589; the mission
of Edmund Hay and John Dury. "We hope some day for a fuller
treatment of this period from the hands of this eminent Jesuit scholar.
A GREAT MISTAKE, by Mrs. G. J. Romanes. (St. Louis: B. Herder
Book Co. $2.00 net.) In days when so many strong-minded
wives ignore the wishes of their husbands, it is interesting to compare
the result of their independent behavior with that of the young
married heroine who so firmly believes it is her duty to obey her
husband. Other story-ladies of our acquaintance say, firmly: "I intend
842 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
to do so-and-so." But Margot asks: "What do you wish, Philip? If
you tell me not to, I will not." It is not hard to guess the effect on
Philip.
The title of this book is misleading. There is an old Scotch
friend of ours who likes to say, when things seem to go wrong and
disappointingly: "Eh, but He makes no mistakes." Readers of A
Great Mistake may be assured that no mistake whatever has been made,
and they will enjoy this wholesome little Catholic story by a convert
writer.
THREE of Uncle Pat's Picture Books, "designed, printed and bound
in Ireland" (St. Louis: B. Herder Book Go. 75 cents each), are:
Tales of the Gaels, which will hold the attention and delight the
hearts of the small adventure-loving boys and girls, and hold a very
special charm for them if they be of Irish extraction. In it they will
read of the terrible tests to which those who wished to join the
Fenians had to submit, and will revel in the marvelous feats of "Finn
MacCool," of his adventures in "The Witch's Gave at Kesh," of "Coalty's
Rabble," "The Clown of the Ragged Coat," and many other stories,
each more fascinating than the last. An added attraction will be
found in the numerous and artistic illustrations by Austin Molloy.
Uncle Pat's Playtime Book, for the very small child, provides a treasure
house of fun with its stories, verses, puzzles and jokes. George Monks
illustrates this book, both delightfully and profusely. Credo, the third
of the Uncle Pat books, is also for the small child, and explains the
Apostles' Creed, phrase by phrase, briefly and in the simplest language,
teaching in connection with it the prayers that even the smallest of
our children should know. Credo is illustrated quite as fully as the
Finn MacCool and Playtime books. Unfortunately these illustrations
cannot compare in artistic value with the others, yet the subject
matter is worthy of the best. We feel that our religious books should
be bound and illustrated at least as attractively and artistically as
those simply intended to amuse.
THE GLANDS REGULATING PERSONALITY— a Study of the
Glands of Internal Secretion in Relation to the Types of Human
Nature — by Louis Berman, M.D. (New York: The Macmillan Co.)
The book opens with an introductory chapter on "Attitudes Towards
Human Nature." This introduction is quasi-philosophical and, from
the point of view of clearness and consistency, is quite hopeless. In
fact, the author's exact attitude is beyond discovery.
The value of the thirteen chapters that follow varies greatly ac-
cording to content. The first on "How the Glands of Internal Secre-
tion Were Discovered" is full of interesting information. So, too, the
discussion of the anatomy and physiology of the several glands is good
when the author confines himself to the description of experimental
results. But, unfortunately, he is not prudent in this regard; very
Qften he goes way beyond the experimental data in hand at present.
1922.] NEW BOOKS 843
He sets down hopes and fears, predictions and admonitions seemingly
with all the ease of a novelist. And this condition becomes more
evident as the book proceeds.
His description of some historic personages in terms of gland
physiology is, I beheve, premature. There is still too little known
about the subject theoretically to warrant its application in analyzing
the life histories of the heroes of the past.
Again, the author's use of the term personality is empirical, z. c,
there is no question of a metaphysical concept of person. Very prob-
ably the introductory chapter is designed to reduce personality to
chemical reaction, but this is a logical absurdity — not to speak of the
physical impossibility involved.
On the whole, one can say that the book, good as a summary of
experimental results, is vitiated by the introduction of much non-
scientific matter of a distinctly emotional coloring.
FOR WHAT DO WE LIVE? By Edward Howard Griggs. (Croton-
on-Hudson, N. Y.: Orchard Hill Press. $1.00.) In some seventy-
four small pages of large print, Mr. Griggs gives us his own philosopny
of life. He gives us also fair warning of what we are to expect.
"I have no fixed and finished solutions to offer; I do not believe such
are possible" (pp. 23, 24). Cathohcs, then, have nothing to learn from
this book. The author, who acclaims the ideal and the noble, main-
tains a high standard; he strongly condemns the self-seeking and the
lust for wealth, which stain present-day society. He regrets that
scientific discoveries have dissolved the old faith, and made it, so he
believes, impossible. His own religious viewpoint, at least in certain
pages, would seem to gravitate towards a vague pantheism.
MORAL EMBLEMS AND OTHER POEMS, by Robert Louis Steven-
son. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $1.25.) The much-
loved, and now well-grown, little stepson of Robert Louis Stevenson
has recently re-published Moral Emblems, that most delicious and
most precious bit of nonsense which helped to alleviate both the sad-
ness and the poverty of his slowly dying father. Obviously, these
little rhymes are the work of a humorous master, whose eyes twinkle
as he writes, and for the time, at least, he sees himself and the rest
of the world only as a subject for fun-making. The book is illus-
trated by delightfully absurd wood-cuts of the jingler's own, and the
introduction, by Lloyd Osbourne, is charmingly informative.
COBRA ISLAND, by Nell Boyton, S.J. (New York: Benziger
Brothers. $1.15 net.) In this story of a Catholic scout's ad-
ventures, it is the young hero himself who tells the tale. Under his
father's care, "Scouty" Gaze sails from Brooklyn for India, anticipating
experiences that will be interesting and, perhaps, exciting; but not
such a series of adventures as fall to his lot, by sea and land. They
pass, as the book's jacket has it, "Hke a colorful circus rider;" yet
844 NEW BOOKS [Sept.,
the author makes them seem plausible enough as Scouty chatters
on, telling simply and naturally what he did and felt and said. Best
of all, is the tactful way in which is indicated the boy's unostentatious
fidelity, through all that befalls him, to the ideal of the Catholic scout.
Of the incidents that set this forth, one remains in the memory, both
from its inherent impressiveness and the picturesque, effective manner
in which it is written; the baptism, by Scouty, of poor, faithful, dark-
skinned Jim in the hour of his death, caused by a cobra's bite.
BRAZILIAN TALES, by Isaac Goldberg. (Boston: The Four Seas
Go. $2.00.) In this book of one hundred and forty-nine pages
there are forty-two of introduction and fourteen of sheer padding.
The remaining ninety-three pages contain translations of short stories
by various Brazilian writers. The volume is called a sample — though
rather a costly one — and its aim is clearly enunciated by the translator
when he writes, "when the literature of these United States is at last
(if ever, indeed I) released from the childish, hypocritical. Puritanic
inhibitions forced upon it by quasi-official societies, we may even
relish from among Azevedo's long shelf of novels, such a sensuous
product as Cortico."
"The Pigeons," by Netto, and "Aunt Zeze's Tears," by Garmen
Dolores, are the only stories in the book that may hope for a sym-
pathetic welcome among the English-reading public.
THE GOLLEGTED POEMS OF THOMAS O'HAGAN. (Toronto: Mc-
Glelland & Steward. $2.00.) Ganada assists her veterans of the
Great War by helping them to establish profitable farms. Frequently,
this occurs in sparsely settled territory, and widespread attention fol-
lows the work of the pioneers. Dr. Thomas O'Hagan, whose poetry so
graphically describes the life they must lead, has recently published
his collected poems. Many of them literally breathe the pioneer spirit.
Indeed, he is generally conceded to excel in verses of commemoration
and elegy. It is also true that some of his simpler verses contain much
real beauty.
HEPPLESTALLS, by Harold Brighouse. (New York: Robert Mc-
Bride & Go. $2.00 net.) This well-written novel describes in
most dramatic fashion the century-old feud between the Bradshaws
and the Hepplestalls. It begins with a seduction and a murder in the
days of the Prince Regent, and ends with a Hepplestall-Bradshaw mar-
riage. The author traces with a master hand the history and develop-
ment of the cotton industry of Lancashire from the days of the inven-
tion of steam, and gives a good sketch of the long-drawn-out fight
between Gapital and Labor in England during the past century.
THE EVERLASTING WHISPER, by Jackson Gregory. (New York:
Gharles Scribner's Sons. $1.75.) Jackson Gregory has written
another of his thrilling romances of the West. The reader is kept on
1922.] NEW BOOKS 845
the alert every moment, following the hero's strenuous search for a
lost gold mine in the California Sierras. Many months of life in the
open, molds the character of the wayward and impulsive city-bred
heroine, Gloria, who time and time again is saved from death and
dishonor by the man of her choice, who never knows fatigue or
failure. The bad men of the West figure largely in these pages, and
are guilty of every imaginable crime — murder, robbery and abduction.
PAMPHLET PUBLICATIONS.
The Methods of a Fanatic, by the Rev. O. R. Vassal-Phillips,
C.SS.R. (Catholic Truth Society), is an exposure of anti-Cathohc false-
hoods contained in a book called Priestcraft, by Mr. H. L. Stutfield,
and published in the National Review. Mr. Stutfield attacks three
Catholic theologians, Diana, Escotar and St. Alphonsus. He also makes
false statements about Pope Clement XIV. The author of the pamphlet
points out effectively the writer's complete lack of knowledge to write
on his subject, and his complete misunderstanding of the authorities
he quotes.
Treatises dealing with matters of Catholic doctrine are acceptable
at all times. The Catholic laity can never be too well informed. In
these days particularly, a complete knowledge of the Church's teach-
ing is needed. Answering this need, we recommend three other ex-
cellent pamphlets published by the Catholic Truth Society: The Im-
maculate Conception, by J. B. Jaggar, S.J.; Why We Resist Divorce,
by Herbert Thurston, S.J., and The True Church Visibly One, by Rev.
H. P. Russell.
The Problem of Evil, by M. C. D'Arcy, S.J., M.A., answers the
problem of the ages from the Catholic viewpoint, which shows how
God draws good out of all evil, and disposes us to take a happy view of
life despite its suffering and sin. A very instructive pamphlet. (Cath-
olic Truth Society.) "To meet an adverse movement with a counter-
movement is the only policy which assures success and proves sincerity
of purpose," says Rev. George Thomas Daly, C.SS.R., in his interesting
pamphlet on the Sisters of Service, a new community formed to meet the
exigencies of souls in the wilderness of the Canadian Northwest
(Catholic Truth Society of Canada). Freemasonry, by Rev. Lucian
Johnston is a kindly, heart to heart talk with Freemasons as to Masonry
and the Church's attitude towards it (International Catholic Truth
Society. 5 cents).
From St. Thomas' Publishing Society, Travancore, India, we have
a pamphlet appeal for cooperation with Catholic apostolic work in
India. The writer, Rev. Cyriacus Mattam, is a well-known native
priest and author.
The Committee for the Protection of Animal Experimentation,
Boston, Mass., has issued its Third Statement, dated February, 1922,
in defence of vivisection, answering its opponents. The Tract Com-
mission of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Cincinnati,
Ohio, sends us a Tract on Jewish Ethics, by Rabbi Samuel Schulman,
D.D., of Temple Beth El, New York City; one of a series of tracts which
they are issuing for distribution among "Jews and non-Jews," to
"convey information on the Jewish religion and Jewish history."
IRecent Events.
As forecast last month, the Conference at
France. The Hague ended in failure, the final ses-
sion being held on July 19th, with a rejec-
tion of the Russian proposals. What really stopped the Con-
ference, from a technical diplomatic viewpoint, was the Russian
attitude on private property. The Soviet delegation stood on the
ground that it had a right to confiscate any private property
under its jurisdiction, and, furthermore, maintained that they
were under no obligation to compensate for the property seized.
The Powers* delegates took the stand that they were not trying
to dictate to Russia what laws she should have; they were merely
telling Russia what sort of conditions must exist in a country,
with which their countries would do business. When the Rus-
sians flatly stated, in reply to a question which could not be
dodged, that they recognized no obligation in the premises, the
other delegates told them it was useless to continue the debates.
Thereupon the Conference ended.
After a month of constant note-passing between the various
Allies, particularly France and Great Britain, interspersed with
German pleas for a moratorium, the fifteenth Allied Conference
on War Debts and Reparations was opened in London on August
7th, with France insistent on strict measures and Great Britain
and, to a less degree, Italy inclined to leniency. Three days after
this meeting, the British Cabinet, following a two-hour session,
announced that the Ministers had approved the policy of Premier
Lloyd George and the committee of experts in declining to agree
to the Poincare plan to force Germany to meet the reparation
payment. The views of the British Cabinet were sent in writing
to all the delegates. They amount to a reaffirmation of the
British policy of limiting reparations to the amount Germany is
capable of paying, and granting her a moratorium to enable her
to recover.
Several weeks previous to the London meeting — on July 20th
— the Committee on Guarantees, which had been for some weeks
in Berlin working out a method for Allied supervision of German
public finances, returned to Paris and informed the Reparations
Commission that the German Government had agreed to its project
looking to supervision of the German budget, also supervision of
exportations and importations, the recovery of evaded capital
1922.] RECENT EVENTS 847
and the publication of reliable German Government statistics.
The trial of this plan, however, has been postponed by the Repar-
ations Commission till the French and British Premiers have
come to a closer agreement on the matter of a German mora-
torium — a prospect indefinitely remote.
The United States War Debt Funding Commission started
the first formal negotiations leading to the funding of the Allied
war debt coming to this country, on July 27th, when it met with
Jean V. Parmentier, Director of Finance of the French Treasury,
and special financial representatives of France. A week later,
however, the negotiations were temporarily halted pending
further instructions from France to its representatives here. The
French debt to the United States is $3,500,000,000, and as the
French representative seemed to be without authority to make
definite proposals regarding the manner in which payments could
be made, it was decided that further communication with the
French Government would be necessary before proceeding
further.
On August 1st, Lord Balfour, as Acting Foreign Secretary
of Great Britain, addressed a note to the Governments of France,
Italy, Jugo-Slavia, Rumania, Portugal and Greece, transmitting
at the same time a copy to the American Government, in which the
British Government declared it was regretfully constrained to
request these various countries to take steps to pay what they
owe Great Britain, stating, however, that the amount of payment
and interest for which it asked, depended less on what France
and the other Allies owe Great Britain than on what Great Britain
has to pay to the United States. The important feature of the note
lay in this last clause, the note going on to say that Great Britain
would be willing to surrender her share of German reparations
if there could be written off, through one great transaction, the
whole body of Inter-Allied indebtedness — in other words, the note
was primarily a round-about plea in favor of the cancellation by
America of what Great Britain and the other Allies owe her.
To this, however, the American Secretary of the Treasury Mellon,
the President and American public sentiment generally seems
unalterably opposed, and the note only served to bring into actual
light what has long been hinted at but never definitely proposed.
Negotiations with financial representatives of Great Britain, there-
fore, for the funding of that country's debt of $4,500,000,000 to
the United States are scheduled to begin some time towards the
end of September.
The nineteenth session of the Council of the League of Na-
tions began in London on July 17th and lasted for ten days, the
848 RECENT EVENTS [Sept.,
chief action taken being the formal approval of the British and
French mandates for Palestine and Syria respectively. These
mandates will not come into force, however, until certain ques-
tions concerning the Syrian mandate, at issue between Italy and
France, are settled. As soon as the Council is notified that this
has happened, both mandates will be placed in operation simul-
taneously. The next meeting of the Council will take place in
Geneva on August 30th.
Premier Lloyd George's statement last month, that it was
desirable that Germany should be admitted to the League of
Nations at the next assembly in September, was received with
disfavor in France, which took the stand that Germany should
not be admitted till she showed greater good-will in the execution
of the Treaty of Versailles. Definite news now comes from Ger-
many that she has no intention of applying for membership in
the League, her decision being obviously the result of France's
semi-oflBcial declaration on the subject.
Movements of the Greek army towards Constantinople, late
in July, caused considerable Allied apprehension that a Greek
attack on that city was meditated. A force of over 10,000 French,
British and Italian troops were rushed to Thrace and stationed
south of the Tchatalja line, thirty miles west of Constantinople,
along which was drawn a force of 70,000 Greeks. Latest dis-
patches are to the effect that the Greek commander has notified
Brigadier General Harrington, commander of the Allied forces,
that the Greeks have begun to withdraw from the Tchatalja line.
This action is in compliance with the request of General Har-
rington, who is endeavoring to establish a neutral zone, that the
Greeks and Allied troops withdraw for two miles on each side of
the line in order to avoid a clash.
On July 14th, the Turkish Nationalist Cabinet resigned as a
result of the adoption by the Angora Assembly of a new law,
providing that the nomination of the Executive Council shall be
made by Parliament as a whole, instead of by the Presidential
National Assembly. The new law is designed to curtail the
powers of Mustapha Kemal. Mustapha Kemal's party, which at
the beginning of the Nationalist movement numbered more than
two-thirds of the Assembly, now has only eighty members.
Meanwhile, the Allied Governments have decided to turn the in-
vestigation of Turkish atrocities in Armenia over to the Inter-
national Red Cross as a neutral organization.
Early in July, the Chamber of Deputies adopted a resolution
asking the Government to reduce the numbers of military units
in France so as to eliminate some of the skeleton organizations
1922.] RECENT EVENTS 849
and bring others up to fuller strength. This does not involve
any reduction in the general army strength, but affects only the
internal organization. The resolution asks for a change from
fifty divisions, as at present, to thirty- two.
That the falling birth-rate "dominates all other perils," is
the contention of a recent article in the Paris Figaro, which goes
on to say that '*since 1863, a record year in births — 1,012,000 — we
have continued to diminish. As a result of the nuptial abund-
ance of 1920-21, a slight excess of births over deaths was pro-
duced. It will not last. In France, which lost three million men
since 1914, there was an increase in population in 1921 of 140,000,
compared with 590,000 in England for the same year and 720,000
in Germany. The Germans are eagerly proceeding to repopulate
their country. What sentiments are animating the French, born
upon a fertile area, larger than that of the German Empire, whose
tillable soil requires the services of 55,000,000 inhabitants? If
the European birth-rates continue in their present ratios, France
will have, in twenty years, 35,000,000, or 36,000,000 inhabitants
with a majority of old people; Germany will have 75,000,000
with a majority of young men and women. What will happen
with the Reich congested by lack of room and empty spaces in
France next door? We must use our wits and our strength to
protect ourselves. The causes of this voluntary suicide are es-
sentially moral; they betray an obvious impairment of mentality,
and post-natal care of mothers and infants must play a part.
A plan of defence must forthwith be devised.'*
Italy has been in a state of political, indus-
Italy. trial and social turmoil throughout the
month. The beginning of the trouble oc-
curred towards the middle of July, when there was a Fascist!
outbreak at Cremona. Partly because in this affair the Fascisti
burned the house of Deputy Mifliolo, of the Communist Wing
of the Popular (Catholic) Party, the Catholic Deputies united
with the Socialists on July 20th in the motion of the Popularist
Deputy, Longinotti, to overthrow the Facta Government, the mo-
tion declaring that "the Government has not attained the pacifica-
tion of the country necessary for its economical reconstruction."
The Government was defeated by a vote of 288 to 102. An idea
of the mixed nature of Italian politics may be obtained from the
fact that part of the adverse vote included Fascisti, who so voted
because of the weakness of Government authority at Cremona.
The fact that the Government had maintained the most perfect
VOL. cx\. 54 . .
850 RECENT EVENTS [Sept.,
order during the Genoa Conference merely served as a contrast to
its later apparent delinquency.
In what was practically an interregnum, lasting from July
30th to August 1st, various attempts were made by former Pre-
miers Orlando, Bonomi and Nava, successively, to form a new
ministry, but without success. Finally, it was necessary to call
on Premier Facta to continue in office, with, however, a recon-
struction of his former Cabinet. The chief changes were the
appointment of four new ministers, the most prominent of whom
is Senator Paolino Taddei. Signor Taddei has been Prefect of
the Province of Turin for several years, and achieved a great repu-
tation in 1920 by bringing about a peaceful adjustment of the
workers and powers of the factories there, when the former took
possession of the plants and attempted to operate them in every
department.
Hardly had the new Ministry been formed, when renewed
conflicts between the Fascisti and other parties broke out all over
Italy on a hitherto unprecedented scale. The origin of this out-
break, which amounted virtually to civil war, was the declaration
of a general strike by all the labor unions throughout the country
on July 31st, instigated by the Communists and Socialists in pro-
test against Fascisti reprisals. Thereupon, the Fascisti began
taking measures to break up the strike, calling on their entire
force, estimated at over 1,000,000 men, to take action. Trouble
between the opposing forces quickly spread from Rome to Milan,
Genoa, and ultimately most of the other cities. Scores of persons
were killed and thousands wounded in the fighting, during which
the Fascisti seized the municipal organizations in various local-
ities, raided Communist newspaper offices, burned municipal
buildings, etc.
After a week of disorder, on August 6th the Government de-
clared martial law in the provinces of Genoa, Milan, Parma, An-
cona, Leghorn and Brescia, taking over complete control of those
territories; and, on the following day, Benito Mussolini, leader of
the Fascisti organization, ordered the demobilization of all the
Fascisti throughout Italy. In a manifesto issued at the same
time, the Fascisti chief declared that the object of the Fascisti
uprising had been achieved, namely, protection of the workers'
legitimate interests, abolition of the general strike forever, and
the defeat of the elements which were "blackmailing" the Govern-
ment.
The Chamber of Deputies re-assembles about the middle of
August. Until then the new Government, whose reception by the
Chamber is problematical, will administer by decrees. Those of
1922.] RECENT EVENTS 851
the Minister of the Interior, Senator Taddei. will be followed with
great interest, for he is now being asked to do for the nation what
he successfully achieved for his province two years ago. On him
depends the fate of the Government. Should he execute the
laws in too drastic a manner, in an endeavor to win favor with
the Fascisti, the Government is certain to find itself opposed by
all the Socialists and most of the Catholics. On the other hand,
should he ignore the red flags, the absence of the tricolor, and
local attempts to establish Soviets, he will arouse the wrath of
the Fascisti, with their numerous disciplined bands and their
growing faith in the support of the nation.
Meanwhile Pope Pius has expressed his deep distress at the
increasing hatred between the opposing factions, and has sent a
circular letter to the Italian Bishops, in which he reminds them
that pacification of the people is a part of their work, and urges
all the people to return to "an observance of the Golden Rule."
This letter has been commented on by the London Times as being
especially important, as that journal considers it very rare that
the Pope should take direct interest in affairs of State, except
when they are closely connected with the Church.
Count Teofllo Rossi, the Italian Minister of Industry, and
Count de Neurath, the German Ambassador to Italy, have signed
a convention for the purchase of former German property in
Italy by the German Government. The German Government will
buy back all the confiscated German property as a whole. It will
then be restored to its former owners. The purchase price is
fixed at 800,000,000 lire, to be paid in instalments, the first falling
due after the agreement is ratified. The property already liqui-
dated or nationalized by the Italian Government for political, his-
torical or military reasons, is excluded from the agreement.
The reproduction which the late Pope Benedict XV. ordered
made of the famous Madonna of Loretto, burned last year with
the altar on which it stood in the Holy House of Loreto, has
recently been completed. It is a small, black image of the Blessed
Virgin and the Infant Jesus, and, like the original, was carved
from Lebanon cedar. The original was popularly supposed to
have been sculptured by St. Luke, but the workmanship suggested
that it dated from the latter half of the fifteenth century. Pope
Pius will solemnly bless the new statue on. September 6th. As
soon as it is restored to the Holy House, there will be an imposing
religious ceremony, at which Pope Pius will be represented by a
special committee of Cardinals, including Cardinal Gasparri, who
has been appointed Papal legate for this occasion. Large pil-
grimages are being organized to visit the Holy House.
852 RECENT EVENTS [Sept.,
The internal political situation in Germany
Germany. during the month was characterized by two
important developments. One was the
friction that arose between Bavaria and the central Government
at Berlin, holding for a time almost the threat of civil war, but
which has now apparently been composed. This was the first
crisis literally worthy of the name since the Kapp counter-revolu-
tion, and in many respects was even more serious because quieter
and more fundamental. The trouble arose over the passage by
the Reichstag of certain laws **for safeguarding the Republic,"
immediately following the assassination of the late Foreign Min-
ister, Dr. Rathenau. These laws were so drastic as to amount to
constitutional changes, but, being passed by more than a two-
thirds majority, they became amendments to the Constitution.
Bavaria, however, refused to recognize these changes, principally on
the ground that they infringed on its rights as a sovereign State
in the defunct federation of the Bismarckian German Empire.
Specifically, what it objected to was, first, the creation of a new
political Supreme Court or high tribunal for trying political cases ;
and, secondly, the creation of a new Federal criminal police.
After several weeks* negotiation between Berlin and Munich, it
was finally announced on August 11th that an agreement had
been reached between the Berlin Government and Count Lerchen-
feld. Premier of Bavaria. President Ebert assured Count Ler-
chenfeld that the rights of individual States would not be im-
paired by the new defence law.
The other important development was the decision of the
Centre Party to give up its exclusively Catholic character and
endeavor to join to it "Christian Republicans" of all creeds —
"Christian Republicans" in this context meaning "anti-Marxian
Republicans." What the Centre is trying to do, it seems, is to
gather together all the sound bourgeois who are caught, at
present, between the overwhelming Socialist majority in the
Republican bloc, and the worshippers of gold and iron, who
control the parties of the Right. "At the next election a
large number of non-Catholic candidates will be nominated by
the Centrist Party without consideration as to whether these non-
Catholic candidates have the support of their own co-religionists
or not." This proclamation may be considered as an invitation
to the discontented of all other parties to join the rejuvenated
Centrist Party, and there can be no doubt that the call will be
answered from many quarters, by persons who joined the Social-
ists or the German People's Party simply because there was no
true Republican Party. The two men to whom this change in
1922.] RECENT EVENTS 833
policy is due, are Federal Labor Minister Braun, a priest, and ex-
Minister Slergerwald, though they were obliged to meet strong
opposition from the powerful Right Wing of the Centrist Party,
composed principally of Junkers and big industrialists. It is
expected that the change will strengthen Chancellor Wirth, him-
self a Centrist, and incidentally the Republic, by affording a rally-
ing point for all liberals and constitutionalists.
Still further tending to strengthen the Republic was the un-
expected action, early in July, of the Central Committee of the
German People's Party (the party with which Hugo Stinnes, the
capitalist, is prominently identified), which passed a resolution
embodying the clearest pronouncement yet made in favor of the
Republic by the People's Party. Among other things, the resolu-
tion declared: "We are convinced that the reconstruction of Ger-
many is only possible on the basis of a Republican constitution."
The Centrist and Social Democratic Parties had previously ad-
dressed a joint appeal to the German People's Party, inviting it to
enter the Government coalition, but little hope was entertained
that a favorable response would be forthcoming.
On August 2d German marks again suffered a severe slump,
being quoted on the London Exchange market at the new low
record of 3,840 to the pound sterling. This was primarily due
to the foreign political situation described above, and to the Earl
of Balfour's note on Inter- Allied debts, which appears to have
confused exchange. The latest trade figures, too, show a very
unhealthy state of affairs. Exports for June were more than
2,000,000 double hundredweights below the monthly average for
the half year. In all that time, Germany's export trade has been
shrinking, and the adverse trade balance for six months alone
means the loss of 200,000,000 gold marks. The textile industry
is refusing all orders, owing to the unstable conditions, and
several other industries are doing the same.
On the other hand, according to figures published by the
Berlin Tageblatt on July 28th, the number of unemployed in Ger-
many has dropped to a level seldom attained even before the War.
The total of completely unemployed persons receiving public
relief fell from 28,200 in June to 19,900 in July. In 354 of the
largest centres only 16,029 were unemployed, as compared with
19,108 for the previous month.
The cost of living in Germany took an unusual leap of thirty-
two per cent, in July, as compared with nine and two-tenths in
June. The index figure rose from 3.779 to 4,990. The index
figure for food alone went to 6,836, representing an increase of
thirty-three and five-tenths per cent, over June. The prices of
854 RECENT EVENTS [Sept.,
virtually everything, except rent, rose. This was especially true
of new potatoes. The increases were uniform in small and large
communities, none showing a rise of less than twenty per cent.
The further depreciation in the value of the mark is held re-
sponsible for the increase.
On August 10th the United States Government made an an-
nouncement that an agreement between the United States and Ger-
many, providing for the determination of the amount of claims
against Germany, had been signed in Berlin. The agreement pro-
vides for a claims commission to be composed of two commissioners
and an umpire. Associate Justice William R. Day, of the United
States Supreme Court, it was announced, has been selected by
President Harding as umpire. He will have authority to decide
finally upon questions on which the two commissioners — one to
be selected by each Government — may disagree. The selection of
Justice Day, it was stated, was made after the German GoverM-
ment expressed a desire to have an American citizen appointed as
umpire. Under the agreement, the commissioners, whose names
have not yet been announced, will meet in Washington within
two months from the date of its signature, and will pass upon:
(1) claims arising from seizure of or damage to American prop-
erty within the former German Empire; (2) claims arising as a
consequence of the War and occurring since July 31, 1914, and
(3) debts owed as between the nationals of the two countries.
Early in July negotiations, which had been in progress be-
tween representatives of the Belgian and German Governments
at Brussels for redemption of 6,000,000,000 marks which Germany
circulated in Belgium during her occupation of that country,
were broken off by the Belgians because they considered the Ger-
man proposals inadequate to meet the requirements. The Bel-
gian Government has decided to proceed immediately with liqui-
dation of sequestered German property, in order to raise a fund
for redemption of the marks in question.
That the German merchant fleet is creeping back towards its
pre-\var tonnage is shown by a recent cable to the American Com-
mercial Department from Commercial Attache C. E. Herring at
Berlin. On June 30th, Mr. Herring reported the German mer-
chant fleet was estimated at 1,618,000 gross tons, as compared
with a pre-war tonnage of 5,459,000 gross tons and with 1,500,000
gross tons for the calendar year 1921, figures for June 30, 1921,
being unavailable. During June eight ships were launched in
Germany, aggregating 66,600 tons; eight ships were completed,
totaling 48,600 tons, and seven ships were purchased, amounting
to 22,200 tons.
1922.] RECENT EVENTS 855
Endorsement of the stand taken by the
Russia. Soviet delegations at The Hague Confer-
i ence was made in resolutions adopted by
all the All-Russian Communist Party which began a five-day con-
ference in Moscow on August 5th. The programme included
chiefly economic affairs and questions of international policy.
Leo Kameneff, the Acting Premier, welcoming the delegates, said
that Premier Lenine*s health continued to improve, and he would
soon resume his duties.
Though the famine seems to have been definitely checked in
the greater part of Russia, conditions are still bad in Ukrainia and
Southern Russia. According to a bulletin published late in July
by the Famine Relief Commission of the All-Russian Central
Executive Committee, 247,000,000 gold rubles were devoted to
the relief of the famine, Russia herself having contributed 170,-
000,000 of that amount. American aid was given as $35,910,000
or 69,640,000 gold rubles. The English total was given as ex-
ceeding 2,500,000 gold rubles.
On July 25th the members of the Papal Relief Mission were
received in the throne room by Pope Pius before their departure
for the stricken regions. Pope Pius has ordered a special section
in the Papal Secretariat of State for dealing with the Russian
relief activities of the Vatican, and has addressed a letter to the
Patriarchs, Archbishops and Bishops, urging renewed efforts to
aid Russian famine sufferers. The Holy See, it states, will make
a further contribution of 2,500,000 lire for relief work in Russia.
Meanwhile, the crop prospects are unusually good. The
areas sown this year, perhaps, were less than last in many prov-
inces, but the crop itself is so good that the yield is expected
to be more than three and a half billion poods (a pood is thirty-
six pounds) of grain for all Russia, a billion more than last year.
On August 5th the Soviet Goyernment announced that, owing to
the excellent crop prospects, the Foreign Trade Department was
instructing its bureaus abroad to cease buying flour and sugar.
Despite the splendid harvest reports, however, food prices in
Russia have increased thirty to forty per cent, since the first of
August, Moscow being the chief sufferer.
On August 2d the Japanese Government made official an-
nouncement of the beginning of the promised withdrawal of Japa-
nese troops from the maritime province of Siberia. Advices state
that on July 28th the Japanese General Staff ordered the Com-
mander-in-Chief of the Japanese Army in Siberia to send home
two infantry battalions and one company of engineers stationed
at Nikolaievsk and De Castre.
856 RECENT EVENTS [Sept.,
Late in July Japan invited representatives of the Far Eastern
Republic and Soviet Russia to a conference at Harbin or Dairen.
In a joint note the Foreign Minister of the Far Eastern Republic
and Leonid Krassin, Acting Foreign Minister of Soviet Russia, re-
plied with an acceptance, but suggested Chita, the capital of the
Far Eastern Republic, or Moscow for the place of meeting. Great
importance is attached by the Moscow Government to this con-
ference, which is expected to open about August 21st. That the
Japanese should have requested it, despite their having broken
off the previous discussion with the Far Eastern Republic, is
taken in official Russian circles as even greater assurance that
they intend to evacuate the maritime provinces than their repeated
promise to do so.
On August 9th, fourteen of the thirty-four Social Revolution-
aries accused of high treason against the Soviet Government, were
sentenced to death by the Soviet tribunal which has been trying
the cases for many weeks at Moscow. Among the condemned
were several who had turned informers. Three of the other de-
fendants were acquitted, and the remainder sentenced to from
two to ten years. The death sentence against twelve of the first
group of defendants was upheld later by the Central Executive
Committee, but an indefinite stay of execution was ordered, upon
the condition that the Social Revolutionary Party cease its
counter-revolutionary activities against the Soviets. Otherwise
the sentenced leaders are liable to the Court's judgment. Mean-
while, all those sentenced to death or to various terms in prison
are to be held in strict confinement.
Two days previous to this decision, the Central Executive Com-
mittee denied the appeals of the Petrograd Metropolitan Renjamin,
Archbishop Shane, Professor Novitsky and a layman, Kosheroff,
who had been sentenced to death by the Petrograd tribunal for in-
terfering with the seizure of church treasures. Death sentences
brought against seven clergymen, who were tried simultaneously
with the Metropolitan, were commuted to long terms of imprison-
ment.
Late in Julyi reports were received of renewed fighting in the
suburbs of Vladivostok. Partisan bands were said to be operating
on the very outskirts of the town, and in Nikolsk-Ussurisk, one
hundred versts from Vladivostok, they entered the town and at-
tacked the guard defending the railway station.
The dispatch stated that railway bridges were being destroyed
daily and that the Suchan coal mines were surrounded by par-
tisan bands. It was added that the Japanese forces stationed at
Vladivostok had attacked many of these partisan detachments.
1922.] RECENT EVENTS 857
Conditions in Vladivostok are reported to be very bad, and
unemployment in the district is particularly menacing, more than
20,000 persons being out of work and practically on the verge of
starvation. Emigrants in large numbers are making their way
to the north to Kamchatka and the Okhotsk Coast in the hope
of finding employment.
From recent dispatches it appears that, despite certain mod-
ifications of the original system, the Soviet Government maintains
what is virtually a complete monopoly of foreign trade. With
two exceptions, all classes of import and export operations must
be submitted to the control of the Foreign Trade Office or its
representatives abroad. The exceptions are, first, that Russian
cooperatives may trade, either as to imports or exports, with
properly registered cooperatives abroad ; and, second, private indi-
viduals in Russia, whether foreign concessionaires, Russians, o-r a
combination of the two, may receive contracts permitting them
to do an import or export business. It is to be noted, however,
that, in the first case, by Russian cooperatives is meant the big
cooperatives or cooperatives' unions officially approved by the
Government. The so-called private cooperatives, which are in
reality partnership associations of two or more persons who
have formed a cooperative for their own convenience, must deal
through the larger official organizations or through the Foreign
Trade Bureau. In the second case, it appears at first sight, as if
the monopoly had been considerably relaxed, or at least as if the
door were open to relaxation. In practice, all contracts permit-
ting export or import trade without the control of the Foreign
Trade Bureau, must be approved by that Bureau, which thus
enforces control at the outset.
As a matter of actuality, imports into Russia, as well as ex-
ports from it, are declining steadily as a result of the dwindling
gold reserve and the inability to pay with Russian exports for
goods purchased abroad. The second is the more serious in-
fluence of the two. The approaching exhaustion of the gold re-
serve, has been all along inevitable but, whereas, in 1921, Russian
exports amounted in quantity to 13,500,000 poods, exports during
the first quarter of 1922 were only 1,600,000, or only 6,400,000 per
annum.
August 13, 1922.
With Our Readers
DIPLOMATS and soldiers seem to have a natural contempt
for historians. Talleyrand called history "a conspiracy
against the truth,** and Napoleon declared it to be *'Une fable con-
venue." The diplomat, presumably knows a lie when he sees
one, and is quick to recognize a conspiracy against the truth.
Such things are in his line. If he be a typical diplomat, it is
part of his daily work to deceive. He is an adept in the "char-
latanism of words.** He recognizes a likeness between the his-
torian's work and his own. Therefore, he distrusts the historian.
And the soldier, who makes history, is perhaps privileged to
despise the historian who only writes history. The soldier knows
that history as it is made and history as it is written are vastly
different. He knows that at least that part of history which is
made on the field of battle is wholly sordid, and ugly, and brutish.
But when the horrible fact has been worked over by the his-
torian, it becomes beautiful, stirring, romantic, perhaps even
poetic. It is indeed a "fable.** We wonder if Napoleon would
have recognized the Waterloo of Victor Hugo.
Of course, Hugo was a poet and a romancer. But we have
had professional historians with a style as brilliant and as graphic
as his, and not one of them has used his power to show warfare
as it really is. If it is only for the way that the historian writes
of battles, the soldier laughs at him.
BUT the rest of us, who are neither behind the scenes with the
diplomat, nor on the field of battle with the soldier, have
been accustomed to take history unsuspectingly, as a record of
facts — until recently. We shall do so no longer. Our eyes have
been opened. Our suspicions have been aroused. We have be-
come sophisticated — and skeptical. We who have read the "news,"
day after day, before, during, and after the War, can never again
naively credit the historians. Histories, perhaps, are not written
from newspapers. But the sources of information used by his-
torians are hardly more trustworthy. The best of the special
correspondents in the War, a writer who has every claim to be
considered not merely a journalist, but an historian, has given
1922.] WITH OUR READERS 859
us, under the title Now It Can Be Told, a large volume of im-
portant facts that were deliberately suppressed from his first
account of the conduct of the War. And he has still fmrther sup-
plied the omissions from what we thought to be a substantially
complete and sincere story, with a third volume, More That Must
Be Told. How are we to know when we have the whole story?
For our part, we find a deliberate suppression of the truth almost
as irritating as a lie.
WE have heard from the lips of a professor of Louvain, who
was in that stricken city when the Germans came, an
anecdote that is apropos. Meeting a German officer whom he
had known in his student days, he said to him: "What will the
world think of these atrocities when the history of them is
written?'* "Germany is going to win this War," was the brazen
answer, "and when Germany has won the War, Germany will
write the history of the War. In that history there will be no
account of German atrocities.'* But the Allies have won the War.
And the Allies are writing the history of the War. But will the
histories, written by the victors, contain "the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth?*'
THERE is an amusing confirmation of our skepticism in the
recent revelations concerning the text-books of history used
in the public schools in the city of New York. Mr. William L.
Ettinger, Superintendent of Schools, after receiving a number of
complaints that "some of the histories used in our schools con-
tain matter disparaging the accomplishments of noted characters
in American history," suggested to Mr. E. D. Shimer, associate
superintendent, the formation of a committee to investigate the
charges, and to make a careful and complete report upon the
matter. Their report, consisting of one hundred and seventy-five
pages, has been printed. The facts must be rather surprising to
the older generation of public school graduates, and to American
citizens in general.
With every appearance of collusion, a number of the writers
of authorized text-books have largely re-written American history
in accordance with a new principle. This' new principle seems
to be, that nothing must be permitted in our text-books that may
be offensive to other nations with which we are now friendly, and
in particular that nothing must remain that could possibly be un-
pleasant to England. Working upon that principle, the writers
860 WITH OUR READERS [Sept.,
have gone so far that they have offended and irritated many good
Americans.
IT may be asked whether any new evidence has come to light in
recent years to necessitate a revision of American history. It
would seem not. The change has been thought advisable, not
because of the discovery of new data, but because, as one of the
writers in question explains: "The momentous events of the last
five years have demonstrated that our history text-books must be
written from a new viewpoint. The American Revolution is no
longer to be studied as an isolated event, resulting from British
injustice. On the contrary, it should be placed in its true light
as one phase of a larger revolution against kingly usurpation. So
with the War of 1812, which takes on a new aspect when viewed
as an incident in the Napoleonic Wars, rather than as a British-
American contest."
This is interesting, but not very illuminating. The "mo-
mentous events" must be the War, and the Versailles Treaty. But
what is there in the War, or in the Treaty, to show that the
American Revolution did not "result from British injustice," or
that the War of 1812 was an "incident in the Napoleonic Wars?"
What the author (Guitteau) means is that the international al-
liance between Great Britain and the United States has made it
advisable to re-write the whole story of our former quarrels. In
other words, we may, and must, re-write the history so that it
will not offend our Allies. But this is a curious concept of his-
tory. We should be pleased to consider a revision if we had
some "momentous" new information, but why revise facts, simply
because of some more recent "momentous facts?"
Another author (West) puts the principle a little more
plainly. He says that in his book he has "emphasized the histor-
ical ground for friendship between America and England in spite
of old sins and misunderstandings." And he declares that
"throughout" he "has not hesitated to portray the weaknesses,
blunders and sins of democracy." He goes so far as to say that
"democracy is the meanest and worst form of government."
With these two guiding principles in his mind he has written a
text-book for American children.
THE revision as might be expected has been fairly radical. In
the new accounts, the American Revolution is described not
as a war between America and England, but as a civil war which
1922.] WITH OUR READERS 861
was won by "Britons fighting for liberty." In our own school
days, it was not customary to refer to the Americans as "Britons."
Even now it rather puzzles us.
Furthermore, the Revolution was really uncalled for. One
author (Hart) says: "To this day it is not easy to see just why
the Colonists felt so dissatisfied." "Dissatisfied" is excellent!
We had been led to believe that the Colonists were driven to
desperation as a result of continuous oppression. But it seems
that they were only dissatisfied, and without apparent reason.
The investigating committee remarks, rather rudely, that "one
who does not know why the Colonists were dissatisfied, is not
equipped to write a text-book."
Another work, that of McLaughlin and Van Tyne, also trying
to promote good will between America and England, declares that
"there is little use in trying to find whose fault it was that the
(Revolutionary) war began."
THE story of detailed events in the Revolutionary War has also
been largely reconstructed. We are informed that at the
Battle of Bunker Hill, "British pluck triumphed." Even so, the
battle was apparently unimportant. One text-book gives it only
three lines, another six, another ten, and "many books give no
account of the battle!" George Washington considered the Battle
of Bunker Hill important enough to be an augury of the final
triumph of the American arms. All England was in amazement
over the valor of the "irregular peasantry," who had stood their
ground and had twice repulsed "the best troops in the world
who had often chased the chosen battalions of France." But the
new books scarcely think it worth mentioning, or if they do men-
tion it, they do so to call attention to the "triumph of British
pluck."
On sea as well as on land, it would appear the victories of
the Americans did not amount to very much. John Paul Jones*
victory over the Serapis turns out to have been something of an
accident. "The Serapis had the better of the fight," says Barnes,
"and would have won had not a sailor on the Richard happened
to throw a hand grenade down a hatchway on the Serapis, where,
in exploding, it fired a large lot of powder which blew up the ship."
Again the same author refers to that event simply as an "acci-
dental explosion." The actual fact, according to Fiske, is that
"one bold fellow, crawling out to the end of the Bon Homme
Richard's mainyard, just over the main hatchway of the Serapis,
862 WITH OUR READERS [Sept.,
dropped one of these mischievous missiles through the hatchway."
It seems to us that Barnes might at least have given the sailor
credit for what the boys would call "a good shot." To talk about
"accident" when the sailor was actually aiming for a vulnerable
spot and went to such extremes to get one, and to talk about the
other fellow having "the better of it" and saying he "would have
won if," is too much like what the modern youth calls an
"alibi."
IN the revised text-books some of our heroes and, indeed, some
of the "fathers of the country," get rather rough treatment.
Washington escapes almost unrebuked, though he is called "a
born aristocrat" and "rather stiff," but "Jefferson," says Hart,
"was looked upon by the Federalists as an atheist, a liar and a
demagogue." The committee opines rather mildly that such a
statement is out of place in a text-book. John Hancock is called
a "smuggler," Samuel Adams "a political boss," guilty of "in-
trigue" and "cunning," and there are similar derogatory state-
ments concerning other heroes of the Revolution. With regard
to Nathan Hale there is almost a conspiracy of silence. Out of
six books particularly under investigation, four do not even men-
tion him, though they all have room for the "gallant" and "un-
fortunate" Andr^.
NOW the animus in all this re-written history is only too ob-
vious. If the American Revolution is said to have been un-
called for, if the victories of the American soldiers on land and on
sea, are pooh-poohed, if American heroes are ignored and criti-
cized, if the importance of all events hitherto considered glorious
to America, is consistently denied or discounted, if British pluck
is repeatedly praised while American pluck is called an "ac-
cident," it is plain that we are in the presence of "propaganda"
in the sinister sense.
SPEAKING of propaganda and of pro-British writers of Amer-
ican history, we wonder if there is any author today who
would care to insert in a text-book for American schools the fol-
lowing extract from that indubitably loyal and patriotic Amer-
ican historian, John Fiske : "The stupid George II., who could see
in Prussia nothing but a rival of Hanover, was preparing to join
the alliance against Frederick, when Pitt overruled him, and
1922.] BOOKS RECEIVED 863
threw the weight of England into the other side of the scale.
The same act which thus averted the destruction of Prussia
secured to England a most effective ally in her struggle with
France. Of this wise policy we now see the fruits in that reno-
vated German Empire, which has come to be the strongest p«wer
on the continent of Europe, which is daily establishing fresh
bonds of sympathy with the people of the United States, and
whose political interests are daily growing more and more visibly
identical with those of Great Britain. As in days to come, the
solidarity of the Teutonic race, in its three great nationalities —
America, England and Germany — becomes more and more clearly
manifest, the more will the student of history be impressed with
the wonderful fact that the founding of modern Germany, the
maritime supremacy of England and the winning of the Missis-
sippi valley for English-speaking America, were but the different
phases of one historic event" (Fiske, The American Revolution,
vol. ii., pp. 23, 24). That was written in 1896 when Harvard was
proud of its intellectual debt to Germany, and when it was thought
advisable to accentuate all things German and strengthen the
bonds of sympathy between Germany and America. *'Nous avons
changi tout qa,"
BOOKS RECEIVED.
Benzigeb Brothers, New York:
Mariquita. By John Ayscough. $2.00. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas
Aquinas. Part II. (second part) QQCI.-CXL. Literally translated by Fathers
of the English Dominican Province. $3.00. Holy Souls' Book. By Bev. F. X.
Lasance. $1.S0.
P. J. Kenedy & Sons, New York:
Christian Spirituality. By Bev. P. Pourrut. $4.20. The House Called Joyous
Garde. By Leslie Moore. $2.00.
BoBERT McBride & Co., New York:
The Old House. By Cecile Tormay. $2.00 net.
Thomas Y. Crowell Co., New York:
Four and Twenty Minds. Essays by Giovanni Papini, Selected and translated
by Ernest Hatch Wllkins. $2,50 net.
Alfred A. Knopf, New York:
Early Civilization. An Introduction to Anthropology. By Alexander A. Golden-
welser. $5.00 net.
Georqe H. Doran Co., New York:
The Breaking Point. By Mary Boberts Binehart. ?2.00.
864 BOOKS RECEIVED [Sept., 1922.]
BoNi & LivERiAHT, Ncw York:
The Hairy Ape, Anna Christie, The First Man (Plays). By Eugene O'Neill.
?2.00. Ascent. By Frances Rumsey. $2.00. My Alaskan Idyll. By H. Rutze-
beck. $2.00. The Ghost Girl. By Edgar Saltus. $2.00. Heartbeat. By Stacy
Aumonier. $2.00.
D. Appleton & Co., New York:
The Mercy of Allah. By Hilaire Belloc. $2.00.
The Macmillan Co., New York:
Food, Health and Growth. By L. Emmett Holt, M.D., Sc.D. $1.50. The Sky
Movies. By Gaylord Johnson. $1.50.
Oxford University Press, New York:
The American Indian. By Clark Wissler. $5.00. The Works of Aristotle. By
J. L. Stocks, M.A.
DouBLEDAY Page & Co., Garden City, N. Y. : .
Certain People of Importance. By Kathleen Norris. $2.00 net.
International Catholic Truth Society, Brooklyn:
Transubstantiation and the Real Presence. By the Rev. J. F. Splalne, S.J.
GiNN & Co., Boston:
Third Reader of the Corona Readers. By Maurice F. Egan, Brother Leo and
James H. Fassett.
Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C. :
Northern Ute Music. By Frances Densmore. Early History of the Creek Indians
and Their Neighbors. By John R. Swanton.
Loyola University Press, Chicago:
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. By Samuel T. Coleridge. Edited for School
Use by Aloysius J. Hogan, S.J.
B. Herder Book Co., St. Louis:
A Simple Life of Jesus for His Little Ones. By a Sister of Notre Dame. 85
cents. The Seven-Fold Gift. By William T. Robinson, S.J. $1.50 net.
Dispatch Printing & Stationery Co., Birmingham, Ala.:
"Rosemary and Violets." Poems. By the Very Rev. James E. Coyle, of Blessed
Memory. Edited by Isabel Beecher.
Catholic Truth Society, London:
Maxims of Mary Ward. 2 d. Trumpeter's Rock. By a Nun of Tyburn Convent.
2d. Canterbury. By Rev. John Morris, S.J. 2d. The Church in England in
1922. By Father Bede Jarrett, O.P. 2d. The Real Presence. By Rev. F.
Mangan, S.J. 2 d. Pamphlets.
Bloud et Gay, Paris:
L'Enseignement du Catichisme en France. Par J. Brlcout. 4/r. L'Education
du Clergi Frangats. Par J. Brlcout. 4 fr.
Ancienne Librairie Poussielgue, Paris:
Latin Grammar Made Clear. From the French of Professer H. Petltmangin.
Adopted into English of H. Petltmangin and John A. Fitzgerald, A.B. $1.50.
P. T6QUI, Paris:
Paroles d' Encouragement Extraites des Lettres de Saint Francois de Sales. Par
Ferdinand Million. 2 fr. Explication du Petit Office de la Sainte Vierge Marie.
Par Le R. P. Charles Willi. O'Femmesl ce que vous pourriez itre. Par G.
Joannes. 3 fr. 50. Conferences Spirituelles aux Religieuses de la Visitation
d'Orlians. Par Mgr. Chapon. 1 fr. 50. Futures Spouses. Par Abb6 Charles
(jrimaud. 5 fr. L'Abbi Jean Baptiste Debrabant. Par Mgr. Laveille. 10 fr.
Librairie Victor Lecoffre, Paris:
Evangtle Selon Saint Marc. Par P. M. J. Lagrange. 4/r. Saint Jean Baptiste.
Etudes Historiques et Critiques. Par D. Buzy. 8 fr. 50.
Vebloo Josef Kosel & Friedrich Pustet, Germany:
Gaframente und Gaframentalier. By Joseph Broun, S.J.
Examiner Press, Bombay:
Adventist Doctrines. By Ernest R. Hull, S.J. S annas. Pamphlet.
THE
^atholie^orld
Vol. CXVI.
OCTOBER, 1922.
No. 691.
THE BLESSINGS OF HERESY.
BY DANIEL A. LORD, S.J.
WELL-KNOWN critic of life and letters once
said flatly that no man ever thought himself out
of the Church. But unquestionably men have
believed they thought themselves out of the
Church. They have looked into the face of
heresy and seen that it was plausible. They have given up
their faith because someone who talked better than themselves,
knocked the wind out of their arguments and left them gasp-
ing for breath.
For heresy we have always with us. Many a man leaves
the Church under the conviction that the latest teacher to at-
tack her has proved, if not the soundness of his own position,
at least the falseness of hers. After all, it is a simple thing
to tear a creed to tatters and smash truth on the anvil, as
simple and interesting as the trick of the magician of your
boyhood, who smashed your watch or your father's silk hat
for the amusement of his audience. Not all the good debaters
are Catholics. And I believe that now, as in the days of
the Apostles, Catholics leave their faith because the other
side seems to have got the whip-hand. They regret the step,
but they walk with apparent logic into what is the tragedy
of supreme ignorance.
CopYBiGHT. 1922. The Missionary Society op St. Paul the Apostle
IN THE State of New Yobk.
VOL. cxvi. 1
2 THE BLESSINGS OF HERESY [Oct.,
Each generation has its own pet crop of doubts and diffi-
culties, the fruitage of that side of the human intellect which
quarrels with any authority, even the Divine. The Apostles
had hardly heard the echoes of their first triumphant preach-
ing of Christ die away before a school of men rose to ques-
tion, contradict, flatly deny the truth of that teaching. These
newcomers had another revelation beyond and above that of
the Apostles. They were clever men, so clever, in fact, that
they called themselves "Gnostics," "those who know;" and
in their hands we may be sure the arguments of the fisherman,
Peter, and the tax-gatherer, Matthew, seemed weak and more
than a bit silly. Many a Christian felt that they had out-
argued the Apostles and so turned from Christianity to Gnos-
ticism.
Gnosticism is hardly an interesting historical question
nowadays, but heresy flourishes like the bay tree. Though
the Gnostics are dead and forgotten, a hundred new schools
of heresy fill the place of the departed. True, they call them-
selves Science, Historical-criticism, Philosophy, New Thought,
but like the Gnostics of old they still play clever tricks with
Catholic doctrine, twist it into laughable shapes, and prove it
so utterly absurd that Catholics now and then turn disap-
pointedly and shamefacedly from the Church of their nativity.
We, who find ourselves face to face with modern heresy,
have one distinct advantage over the Christians who met the
arguments of the Gnostics. We have history to read, and
history is strewn with the fetid corpses of once powerful
heresies. For heresy has been a most remarkable way to
oblivion. The Church has threaded a path down the ages
that is lined with the tombs of enemies who once laid vigor-
ous hands on her throat. Perhaps the promise of Christ has,
after all, been fulfilled, and He has been with His Church and
will be to the consummation of the world.
In all history there was never an institution so in need of
unity and peace as the infant Church. Born among an out-
cast race, propagated by men whose clothes still stank of the
fish of their native lakes and who spoke Greek with a Hebrew
accent, with the most terrible stigma conceivable branded
into its soul, the shame of the Cross, and the greatest empire
of the ages banded with the world's most powerful religion
in a resolve to crush it, Christianity seemed absolutely doomed
1922.] THE BLESSINGS OF HERESY 3
unless its members fought shoulder to shoulder against their
uncounted foes.
But before the memory of Pentecost had grown dim.
Gnostic and Novatian and Donatist added civil war to the
shame of the Church's origin and the vigor of its avowed
enemies. Internal dissension broke the infant Church. Blood
had nurtured it; it thrived on the rack and grew strong in
the midst of flames; but these newcomers flung in the face of
loyal Christians doubts that staggered their faith, difficulties
for which they knew no answer. And Gnosticism, Novatian-
ism and Donatism spread like a living flame. It is hard for
us to realize that, to us, amusing curiosities, antequated
questions that time has piled high with dust, were, in their
day, living, pulsing issues that made the faith of strong
Christians tremble and the faith of weak ones fall crashing
to the earth. Men who faced the lions and the stake without
a tremor shrank back before the new-born doubts. And her-
esy, almost coeval with Christianity, for the first time lifted
its war club in the exultant thrill of certain victory.
But Gnostic and Novatian and Donatist are forgotten;
the very doubts with which they seemed to rock the Church
to its foundations are known only to the professional his-
torian with a taste for history's byways; while Christianity
lives today in undrained vigor and claims men's intellects
and hearts with the same calm assurance.
We who know none but the mild-mannered, white-gloved
heresies of today have no concept of the fury with which
Arianism broke over the Church. Carried on the spears of
the invading barbarians who were to become the makers of
modern Europe, swept onward by their sheer weight of num-
bers, Arianism overwhelmed the Church with brute force.
Whole countries were caught into its grip as the civil powers
fell back, crushed by the hairy-armed Goth and Vandal.
Christian bishops were toppled from their thrones, and
bishops of the Arian creed were set up by the conquerors.
From Rome itself the Pope was driven into exile, a hunted,
harried thing with these blood-lusting men from the north
hot on his heels. No sane man, during the three years that
followed, could have dared doubt that Arianism had con-
quered the world, for, as St. Jerome cried, "the whole world
groaned at finding itself Arian."
4 THE BLESSINGS OF HERESY [Oct.,
All this is history, penned between the covers of volumes
on the scholar's shelf. But Arianism is a phantom, a ghost
that may not walk with living men. The beaten Church
somehow lives today more vigorous, more flourishing than
ever, while Arianism lies buried in the sands of Mohammedan
Africa.
What Arianism was trying to achieve by force, Mani-
chaeism, Nestorianism and Pelagianism were striving to ac-
complish by weight of argument. Yet where today is Mani-
chsean, Nestorian, Pelagian? Our tongues stumble over
their unfamiliar names. What precisely were those doubts
and difficulties that seemed so formidable to their own times?
Of the millions who today enter Catholic churches, scarcely
a hundred ever heard of them or could tell you why those
arguments tortured weak souls in another generation.
Protestantism is so close to our own times that its final
history has still to be written. Yet, certainly, if any force
seemed to threaten the downfall of the Church it was that
tidal wave that broke over Europe. In less than a century, it
had caught to itself Germany, England, Sweden, Norway, Den-
mark, Scotland, the Dutch Republic, and half of France.
There seemed no stopping its rush. Yet significantly enough,
within a hundred years it had reached its highest level, beyond
which it has never passed, and from which today we have
more than a little reason to think it has vastly receded. But
more of that later.
Nowadays heresy shrinks from the name. But to the
Catholic the doubts and difficulties of Agnosticism, Material-
istic Science, the Higher Criticism, and the Newer Cults are
as much heresies as were those of Arius or Nestorius or
Luther. Even where the argument is new, the manner is
old as time. And precisely time it is that tests truth. Give
time its cliance, and time will corrode any heresy until it falls
into red rust. Time has not had its chance with modern
heresies. We can only study them in the light of the past.
Historically regarded, all heresies are identical in course;
and that course throws us back with ever-increasing con-
fidence on the divinity and unassailable strength of the
Church. Almost always are they backed by powerful civil
force, force that at times is simply overwhelming. For heresy,
with a correct instinct, turns from divine help to the human
1922.] THE BLESSINGS OF HERESY 5
help, which alone it has any right to claim. One might fancy
it would learn from Christianity that you can no more quench
truth with force than you can quench flame with oil. Beat
truth down with a sword, and it leaps like the flame you beat
with dry grass. Truth is stronger than any power that can
be hurled against it; but heresy has not the courage to face
that fact, so it comes marching on with leveled lances and the
roll of beating drums.
Thus came Arianism on the naked swords of barbarous
hosts. Arianism, pampered by Roman Emperors, had won
the invading nations almost before they began their triumphal
march. They cracked Rome like the hollow shell it was, and
flung their chieftains from their ox-hide shields into the chair
of the Caesars. Then they turned that mighty energy, as yet
scarcely exerted, against the Catholic Church; and the Church
seemed to rock beneath the blow. But the humble power
that, before the barbaric invasions, had conquered Rome,
now caught up and conquered Rome's conquerors. The force
that could throw bishops from their thrones and drive the
Pope into exile, was still too weak to crush that something
stronger than Pope or bishop, the Church built upon a rock.
Before the lapse of two centuries, Arianism had bowed to
Catholicism and disappeared with the melting of ephemeral
barbarous kingdoms.
The princes of Europe were quick to see the possibilities
of Protestantism, which placed in their hands not merely the
civil power, but the religious power as well. If it was pleasant
to be head of the State, and that by "Divine Right," it was
doubly pleasant to be head of the Church as well. And if they
could get rid of the bishops who had thwarted their absolutism
and the Pope who had been quick to check them in abuse of
power, then, cried the princes, the new religion could have
their armies, and gladly. So out flashed swords, and Luther,
Knox, Cranmer, and Calvin were quick to use this easiest
method of propaganda. Mohammed had taught Christianity
a valuable lesson in proselytism.
Modern heresy has laid aside the sword and the lance,
in most cases, as obsolete weapons. Yet it is interesting to
note how even the dainty heresies of our present day are not
ashamed of a well-directed blow against the Church. The
calm philosopher, the truth-seeking historian, the suave
6 THE BLESSINGS OF HERESY [Oct.,
scientist of France wrote the clever Law of Spoliation and
drove priests from the bedsides of their sick and dying, and
nuns from their classrooms and hospitals and convents. It
wasn't a very brave blow, not an honest sword-cut of one man
against another armed man; but it hurt the Church, so what
mattered it if frail women were driven from homes where they
served the poor into exile and beggary? The same spirit of
modern heresy directed the bitter persecution of the Kultur-
kampf, wrote the anti-clerical laws of Portugal, Italy, and
Mexico, and strove to keep in force the disability laws of
England and Scotland.
Modern heresy is not precisely logical. If the Catholic
Church is as rotten and weak as it claims, why must war be
waged on it through repressive laws? Why strike at its
schools and hospitals and works of charity, injuring women
and the orphans and the old people they have sheltered? Why
not trust to its own inherent weakness to bring it to an in-
evitable ruin? Heresy, which has always been so sure of its
superiority to Catholicism, is never willing to trust the modern
principle of the survival of the fittest. For, somehow, Cath-
olicism always seems to survive.
Between cultivated men of today, force is not regarded
as much of an argument. A show of physical violence simply
stiffens the back and sets the jaw of a red-blooded man or of
a woman of fine temper. History is proof that persecution
is always a good thing for truth; it kills off the weak and
vitalizes the strong. But attack a man's intellectual convic-
tions, and you have a weapon of quite another calibre. Some-
times, even those of us who feel sure of our positions, are
startled almost out of our calm by the bland assurance of
modern adversaries, who seem to take it for granted that the
Church is absolutely wrong, that they are absolutely right,
and that no one but the hopelessly stupid can be unaware of
the fact. That is an attitude that frightens the weak Catholic
more than any show of force could possibly do.
In reality, that pose is antiquated theatric harness that
still serves when the lines of the drama are essentially weak.
Just a few years ago, Joseph McCabe, ex-monk and fallen-
away Catholic, swaggered through a book that proved what a
dead and discredited thing Catholicism is. Those who were
impressed were only those who did not know that Voltaire,
1922.] THE BLESSINGS OF HERESY 7
one hundred and fifty years before, had swaggered in just
the same fashion and boasted the same boast. And Voltaire
was only echoing what Luther had vaunted in his day, as
Luther was the echo of Huss, of Arius, of Nestorius, of the
first Gnostic that ever talked down an Apostle.
Let us admit that the attitude is not a difficult one to as-
sume and that it is distinctly becoming. Each new heresy has
its battery of new doubts and objections, which it fires in a
perfect barrage into the camp of the believers. So heresy
comes and flings its new difficulties with tremendous rapidity
and assurance into the face of Catholicism. There is some
truth in them, some falsehood, and only a fool would allow
himself to answer them off-hand with a categoric yes or no.
Besides, at times, difficulties arise for which there is no answer
at hand, difficulties gathered from the latest findings of the
laboratory or from newly-opened archives, and only a slow
sifting will finally bring the correct answer.
But time for sifting is not allowed. Bang, goes the diffi-
culty! And if the answer is not batted back like a volleyed
ball in tennis, heresy crows triumphantly. It has proposed
a difficulty; the Church has not answered; there is no answer;
the Church has been proven wrong. Four short leaps, and a
difficulty has been turned into a deathblow to Christianity.
At this point, the weak Catholic or the ignorant Catholic
loses heart completely. He scurries about feverishly; he runs
his hand through his hair; he feels his jaw sagging and his
shoulder drooping under the blow; he dares not lift his eyes
to face the smile on the lips of his antagonist. Great heavens !
the Church at last is fronted with an unanswerable fact, is
down and the referee. Time, is telling off the dread seconds.
And another Catholic is lost to his faith.
It is all dreadfully sad, but, honestly, it is more than a bit
ludicrous. For every heretic that ever lived claimed that his
difficulty was unanswerable, shouted that he had dealt the
Church its deathblow, crowed loudly, and was too often
believed. Yet with the slow passing of days, time grinds his
arguments to powder, scatters them to the winds, and not
even the shadow of a memory is left of his insoluble diffi-
culties. Catholicism is a living, vital fact today, while the
ghosts of dead and gone heresies stalk the shadows, and, like
ghosts, are of interest only to those of morbid tendencies.
8 THE BLESSINGS OF HERESY [Oct.,
Doubts that thundered at the gates of Christianity lie molder-
ing in decaying tombs on which, with difficulty, the ante-
quarian traces their names.
No one who has watched with interest and sympathy the
futile effort of Protestantism to unite in a World Movement,
can help but wonder if modern Protestantism really knows
its own mind and its own belief. Modern Protestantism has
so shifted and changed its position that almost any shade of
belief or unbelief may be held under its generous roof tree.
Yet when Protestantism broke from the Church, it broke for
certain well-defined reasons: the Pope and the Episcopate
were intrusions thrust upon the Church during the dark days
of the eighth and ninth centuries; the Church was full of
novelties that no one had dreamed of until the Middle Ages;
faith alone was necessary; one was predestined to hell
without any demerits on his part; the Bible was the sole rule
of faith.
Had Catholic apologists left the arguments unanswered,
as they certainly did not, we could still read their answer in
the treatment accorded by time to those fundamental Prot-
estant theories. Four centuries have seen the arguments of
Protestantism undergo the most mysterious metamorphoses.
Protestant scholars, even more than Catholic, have pushed
back the veils that shrouded the first centuries of history to
find that the "innovations" which Luther claimed had slowly
changed Christianity into Catholicity, came out of the cata-
combs when the Church first issued into the light. Harnack,
Protestant and Professor in a Lutheran University, writes:
**The Reformation (of the sixteenth century) not only de-
stroyed the ecclesiastical constitution of the Middle Ages, but
broke off all connection with the ecclesiastical constitution
of the second and first centuries." Such an admission would
have called forth Luther's strongest German and his most
scathing abuse. Catacombs, early churches, newly-discovered
documents, careful research have all added their sum to the
proof that Protestantism had no more connection with the
early Church than it had with Shintoism, and that the so-
called innovations of the Church of the Middle Ages were
coeval with Christianity.
In the third century, when the watchful secrecy, with
which all Christian dogma was protected from Roman spies.
1922.] THE BLESSINGS OF HERESY 9
was at last slowly removed, we find the Bishop of Rome ap-
pealed to as the head of the Church, Mass and the Sacraments,
a completed hierarchy, prayers for the dead just as in the
days of the Reformation. It was a sad blow to Protestant
apologists to find among the men implicity condemned as
innovators and perverters of Christ's Church, Augustine,
Jerome, Cyril of Alexandria, and Cyprian of Rome.
The changed attitude of Protestantism toward the Bible
is nothing short of a complete right about face. For the Re-
formers, there was no other rule of faith. In the inspired
word of God was the only truth clearly spoken to men, ob-
viously intelligible, patent to all who ran and read. Now pro-
fessors in Protestant theological seminaries throw out, with a
careless toss of the hand, whole books of the Scriptures, es-
sential passages in the Gospels, any chapter or verse that
does not please their fancy.
As for faith without works, we have seen that original
doctrine of Protestantism stood on its head until it reads now,
not faith without works, but works without faith; or, to put
it less crudely, it makes no difference what you believe so long
as you do what you consider right. That leaves us the doc-
trine of Predestination, which is so unfashionable nowadays
that not only are souls no longer predestined to hell, but we
are told from Protestant pulpits that there is no hell to which
to predestine them.
What would those weak Catholics think, I wonder, were
they to come back and see what Protestantism had done with
the very arguments with which it attacked Catholicism in the
feverish days of the sixteenth century? Whatever Protestant-
ism may say to its followers of today, this at least it must
admit, that it gained its original converts under false pretences
with doctrines which it has been forced to abandon. A
church which must make this admission, can scarcely claim
for itself much credence today. No wonder that Protestant-
ism has become, year by year, less religious and more purely
social in character. The day is past when Protestantism
thinks its faith worth fighting for.
The generation of heretics just gone told us point blank
that Christianity was absurd and that science had made it so.
Simple as salt! Not even the most fundamental of Christian
beliefs had so much as a leg to stand on. Christianity was
10 THE BLESSINGS OF HERESY [Oct.,
based on the salvation of souls; science had proved that the
soul was less real than the creatures in Alice's Wonderland,
and distinctly less significant; therefore, the sole reason for
Christianity's continued existence had ceased to be.
That simple little syllogism, air-tight and waterproof, was
tricked out in every argument wrung from everything from
Darwin to the new applied psychology. And what a world
of good rhetoric made it palatable to the unscientific mind!
When the fury of materialism was at its height and each new
fakir, before the flap of his scientific tent, bally booed just a
little bit louder and a little bit more coarsely than his prede-
cessor over the particular charms of his pet collection of
missing links, the believing Christian looked on with real
horror at the damage that was done to the faith of the credu-
lous and the tranquillity of the timid. Men, who were told
they had no souls, and told this with all the solemn assurance
of teachers whose word was supposed to be law in their par-
ticular field, believed, and left Christianity by hundreds. One
shudders today at the calm assurance of those who blasted
faith without a qualm, and by the vehement force of an un-
proved assertion.
For not only was that age, as Sir Oliver Lodge admits,
pitifully anti-matter-of-fact and utterly impatient of inquiry,
but men like Sir Oliver have lived to say : "It may be doubted
whether Materialism as a philosophy exists any longer." More
interesting than that is the fact that the scientific world, which,
fifty years ago, was pooh-pooing the idea of souls, is now or-
ganized in a tremendous effort to prove the scientific character
of Spiritualism. In those days, you were told that psychology
had shown that all thought is brain and nerve action and
nothing more; and if you protested in a mild sort of way,
the crushing weight of a name was hurled at you: Wundt,
father of experimental psychology. Yet modern psychology
dodges brain and nerve explanation in favor of almost any
sort of soul, preferably a world soul like that of William
James' theory; and, almost at his death, Wundt announced
that the results of his laboratory work had led him to the soul
principle of Aristotle as the most satisfactory explanation of
his observations. And the soul principle of Aristotle has been
drummed into the head of every student in Catholic colleges
ever since St. Thomas caused such an intellectual stir in
1922.] THE BLESSINGS OF HERESY 11
Southern Europe. We are always wrong in the beginning, and
we are always right in the end.
So within our own half century we have seen a scientific
heresy that started with great waving of flags and beating of
drums, meekly admit that there was something wrong with
the cause for which it was fighting and something decidedly
shady about its leaders. But the admission at this late date
cannot give back faith to the weak souls whom it fooled and
befuddled, with proofs that did not prove and arguments that
cracked like glass.
About that same time, Higher Criticism started to handle
the Bible as a very young child handles a very precious book.
It ripped it chapter from chapter, broke it down the back, and
started to chew the battered remnants. The Pentateuch
written by Moses? Let's talk sense! For instance, as a simple
argument, is it possible you don't know that men did not learn
to write for almost five hundred years after Moses had been
gathered to his fathers? As for the New Testament, we have
proved conclusively that it was written about two hundred
years after the death of the Apostles.
But time has done its usual smashing work. History
knows now that men wrote for almost five hundred years
before the birth of Moses, and it has proved, to the satisfac-
tion even of those who reject Christianity, that the New Testa-
ment was written at the time it claims to have been written,
and by men who were essentially truthful in their relation of
facts. God pity the poor deluded Christians who were
frightened by a phantom that they took for a living proof;
and God pity still more the historians and critics who dared
dress up a pumpkin and a broom and frighten weak children
with a halloween ghost.
So the course of heresy, no matter when or where, is
astonishingly the same : swift in rise, arrogant in pretensions,
confident in boasts, and crashing in its fall to oblivion. The
Church, you notice, is always wrong; heresy is always right.
Yet heresies fall to ashes, and the Church moves majestically
on, a living, vital power. The unanswerable arguments are
answered or fall to pieces of their own inherent rottenness;
a splendid show of unity cracks into a thousand brittle pieces;
truth goes on, one and undivided; and heresy sinks to a dis-
honored grave.
12 THE BLESSINGS OF HERESY [Oct.,
For a study in interesting contrasts, I suggest the Puritan
and the Irishman of the seventeenth century. There was a
force — that Puritanism! With fierce, unflinching religious
realism, it sets its purpose working in quiet councils, mustered
its strength secretly for the great day, bided its time patiently,
and then, with its army of psalm-singing dragoons, toppled
the English king from his throne, gathered his handsome head
in a wicker basket, and placed Cromwell on the kingly dais
and an iron heel on the neck of England. Then it turned its
eyes across the channel to Ireland, still suffering from the days
of Henry and Elizabeth. Catholicism was there, so the un-
conquerable army crossed the sea to make an end of Popish
superstitition. Never was an army more utterly successful.
It drove Catholic Irishmen before it like sheep beaten back
with a lash. For the Irishmen who survived, there was a
choice between hell and Connaught, which Cromwell, with
grim humor, did not fancy much of a choice.
That was not so many centuries ago. Where now is the
Puritan that ruled England, conquered Ireland, and sent his
colonists to people America? Search him out in the pages of
Macaulay's "Milton," which the schoolboy reluctantly drags
with him to class. Any encyclopedia will give him five to
fifteen pages. A few notable statues of him ornament public
buildings, but he himself is gone from among men. And the
Irish Catholic that he drove, at the point of the sword, from
his native holdings? Proscribed, beaten, crushed, stripped
of lands and honorable estate, he has gone to the four quar-
ters of the globe, from Northern Canada to farthest South
America, from South Africa to Australia, and with his hated
religion has changed the religious face of the world.
Christianity has been proud to believe that its history is
very much the replica of that of its founder, Christ the
Saviour. Here as elsewhere it finds a striking parallel. For
heresy and unbelief can never again equal the triumph it
gained over Christ. Once in the world's history, error and
falsehood actually rose up and killed the Truth. That is an
impressive fact. The eternal Word of God, the infinite Truth
came down from Heaven and walked the earth in human
form. "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life," He said, and
the pure of heart and noble of mind heard Him gladly.
But doubt and unbelief laughed in His face and called the
1922.] THE BLESSINGS OF HERESY IS
living Truth a liar. What was more, they determined to
prove by an irrefutable argument what a liar He was. They
would kill the Truth, blot it out from the earth. And they did.
They took the Word of Truth and nailed Him to the Gross,
and then from the foot they taunted Him with His defeat.
Pagan incredulity stood guard there, and Jewish pride of in-
tellect that would not believe the Carpenter Who called Him-
self the Son of God. "We have killed Him," they bragged,
"so judge for yourselves if He be the Christ, the Word that was
made Flesh." It was a powerful argument, and the world
yet unborn stood on tiptoe for the answer.
Yet from the pulpit of the Cross the dead and murdered
Truth spoke with a voice whose silence was louder than the
most vehement shrieks of the doubt and unbelief that howled
joyously at His death. Truth, slain by those who would not
believe, was eloquent with an elocfuence that has thrilled the
thinking world and forced unwilling ears to listen. Truth
hung dead on Calvary's Cross, and Truth dead, taught the
world.
No doubt nor unbelief can kill the living Truth. The
Church, in its moments of most terrible intellectual assault,
was never nailed to the Cross as Christ was; doubt and un-
belief has never slain it as they slew its Master. But if some
of the disciples turned from Calvary with grief in their hearts
and the faith in Christ stricken from their souls, they would
speak feelingly today to the Christian who turns from his
Church in the conviction that doubt and unbelief have killed
it. For Christian truth is of God, and God cannot die.
ODE IN TIME OF DOUBT.
BY THEODORE MAYNARD.
I.
IGHT: and the skies that stretch are black;
The wild winds silent, though I seem to feel
Rather than hear their noiseless footsteps steal,
The whispers of their dark conspiracy
To lash to fury and a stormy wrack
This ocean sullen as a stagnant pool.
Lying awake, I listen to its breath
Rising and falling like a sleeping beast's.
Of one that, having eaten full,
In mimic death is unafraid of death.
But when it shall awaken
Beneath the torturer's hands in agony,
Then shall the air be shaken
With cries for all it knows as good —
With shrill, and frenzied cries for blood,
Loud as those uttered by the raving priests
Of some enormous, savage deity
Whose thirst's unslaken.
IL
Oh, now there is no hint of that old mild
Wordsworthian nature, that a child
Finds in a meadow, but a dread obscene
Rapacious monster, which will tear
All the bright loveliness that has ever been
Limb from limb in its lair!
1922.1 ODE IN TIME OF DOUBT 15
iir.
At such an hour no dreams can comfort me;
Nor can I slip in sweet oblivion
Into the cool waters of a fairy sea.
Delusive joys are gone;
And in my bitterness I loathe
The treacherous imagination that could both
Create and relish what it had created.
Now are there stripped away
The tinseled cloak of day.
The painted mask so often worn by night;
And truth, the pitiless,
Stares straight into my drawn, affrighted face.
With pleasant lies my soul is sated :
With all the fair illusion of delight.
The ignorance of happiness;
With all, that lacking substance, takes on seeming
And yet, and yet if truth had untruth's grace —
Or this were only dreaming!
IV.
I know the immitigable hour to be
A symbol of our weary, frightened age,
A microcosm of our world, epitome
Of all we hold as our poor heritage —
Our spirits* gloom.
Shut in a narrow room.
While in the nether night the North-winds rage
And bang against the fastened shutters.
The fire has burned to ashes in the grate;
The candle slowly gutters;
And I am left alone.
As cold as the coldest stone.
Empty of noble love and noble hate,
Empty of all the passion of belief,
Of ardor and of indignation,
Incapable of joy and her twin sister grief
(And who shall say which is more fair
Or potent for the soul's transfiguration?)
I only have despair.
16 ODE IN TIME OF DOUBT [Oct.,
V.
But, ah, more grievous still!
How shall man's paralyzed and shackled will
Onset and overcome —
When all the ringing cries of hope are dumb —
The captain evils that have him in thrall?
Although the strongest tyranny would fall
Before the lightest challenge of the slave.
The tempered metal of his chain
Were forged in vain,
Would he but lift the ensign of revolt:
The flashing of his eyes would be as swords,
'Gainst which all hostile hordes
Would break and run precipitously,
As though before the bronze Olympian bolt.
Let him but give one glance of hot disdain.
And he shall shout for liberty !
VI.
Alas ! I see the slave content,
Infamous, and innocent
Of the quick flame that thrills along the veins
And, burning, blesses him who would be free.
But fearing to accept the pains
Of pure and purging fire
Accompanying the rapture of desire —
Which is the pang of sanctity — -
He shuns desire as saints shun sin.
The difficult hope at enmity with ease,
The passionate discipline
That nerves the soul who, daring much,
Believes — all this he ventures not to touch —
But having made a desert calls it peace.
VII.
All that was once a mystery come to flower
Has now the steady throb of a machine.
By which the soul stands watching hour by hour.
Pulling the levers, keeping bearings clean —
1922.] ODE IN TIME OF DOUBT 17
For never has she seen
A higher energy than this,
Or known a spiritual hunger, or the bliss
Of beauty making trouble in the heart —
Stinging the will to exercise of art.
Since man in silly pride discrowned his gods,
Authors of starry night and early morning,
They wreak their vengeance with their hardest rods —
And he is impotent to capture
Spring's secret or his old religious rapture . . .
And he is unremindful of the warning.
VIII.
His engines lift laboriously on high
Huge towers against an empty sky.
Stark steel holds up its loveless head.
Magnificent and dead —
The first of all the skulls that never grinned !
His handiwork is mirthless,
And energy, grown sad, is worthless
However high it leaps into the wind.
Man*s empty architecture is unlit
With laughter, joy, or gay, audacious wit —
For man has sinned, has sinned,
Allowing doubt to eat his heart away.
His heart is heavy and grey.
IX.
Has he no memory how the streets ran red
When treason touched the charter of the guild?
When man, not iron, held up an iron head?
When happiness and holy laughter filled
His life with bounty and his lips with song?
Has he no memory of the wrong
The cunning prophets did him who destroyed
The living creed that he enjoyed?
Which sent him soaring like a bird in air —
Like a lark singing; like an eagle strong —
yoL. cxrt. 2
18 ODE IN TIME OF DOUBT [Oct.,
Which drew up, rather than builded up, the stair
His spirit used to gambol into prayer;
Lifting, as a church its spire.
His voice in the ecstatic choir
To pierce the heavens, sharp with strong desire.
I, lying in a darkened room awake.
And waiting for the tempest to begin,
Can have no comfort till these lead clouds break
And let the lurid sword of lightning in:
Such surely is the end of sin!
That God pours forth
The vials of His concentrated wrath,
Of which this gathering storm is but the type —
To purge with terror those who know no love.
And, lacking love, no joy;
'Gainst whom He will deploy
Angelic armies and the chiefs thereof.
The time is ripe, O God, the time is ripe!
XL
I am the child of this unhappy age;
I have known doubt that saps the brain and will:
My eyes have pored o*er many a pedant's page,
And I have heard them speaking cold and shrill —
With that incessant talking in my ears,
I heard a singing thrush at evening thrill
The listening wood with wonder;
And my heart traveled back ten thousand years.
Back, back to Eden's lovely glade,
To man's first laughter and to man's first tears:
All else is vain. . . . Now lightning draw your blade;
Break thunder!
SAINTS AND CHARLATANS.
BY JOSEPH J. REILLY, PH.D.
HE world has seen many great autobiographies.
Cellini, self-conscious, fervid, egotistical, unfail-
ingly in the right, swayed by violent passions and
sudden gusts of emotion, always a great artist
and always a great rogue, felt moved to tell the
world how he had made his way up to the mountain top
where dwell the great artists of all time, and how in the
course of it he had encountered jealousy and hatred, un-
scrupulous opposition, knavery and deceit, not only among
his fellows, but among those who sat in the seats of the mighty.
He had been imprisoned in a loathsome dungeon, but man-
aged to escape. The daggers of more than one assassin just
failed to find his heart. Driven by fear and allured by the
promise of honors and gold, he left one court after another,
content to dwell among strangers, if only Cellini the man might
be given honors, and Cellini the artist be granted a chance to
execute in peace the artistic conceptions of his brilliant
fancy.
His autobiography throbs with life. Kings and princes,
cardinals and popes pass before our eyes, not only in splendid
procession, but in the immediate intimacy of everyday life.
Around us are amazing contrasts, for we pass from the glitter
of a court into the mean and dusty chamber, out of whose
squalor and bareness was to issue the clean-limbed, godlike
Perseus, the story of whose creation has about it all the golden
glory of romance. We visit the Coliseum at midnight with
Cellini and others of his ilk, and take part in unhallowed in-
cantations, to which the spirits of evil must answer, and we
tremble with dread in the fitful light that shines upon the faces
of this impure crew. We breathe the air of more than one
foul haunt, catch the gleam of daggers plying in the night,
stifle in the dungeon of St. Angelo, and watch Rome writhe
in agony in the raid of the Constable of Bourbon. Then, by
20 SAINTS AND CHARLATANS [Oct.,
a dizzying and sudden turn of the wheel, we are at liberty
again with fine clothes on our backs, our pockets heavy with
gold, free once more to follow the beckoning of those adven-
turous stars which ruled the fate of Benvenuto.
Casanova had a different purpose. He had given up his
life to the enjoyment of forbidden fruit and wantoned with
the joy of a satyr in springtime. But spring could not endure
forever, and in the winter of his days Casanova had little
left him but his memories. Sensualist to the end, he found in
them some renewal, however pallid, of the joys of his earlier
years, and he wrote his memoirs to recover, so far as might
be, the gratification of old desires.
Alfieri, too, gave us his memoirs, Alfieri the emotional,
now victim of passion and now of remorse, who filled his plays
with windy denunciations of kings, only to transfer his hate
to the French who dethroned them; who scorned Metastasio
for dropping on his knees before his Empress at Schonbrunn;
who played like a moth about many a candle of desire, only
to marry in the end the widow of the hapless young Pre-
tender, and who, after a restless life, crowned by dramatic
successes, died in his bed as a Christian should.
Then there was the French Marmontel, whose Memoirs
are filled with fascinating pictures. We see his school days
with the Jesuit Fathers at Mauriac, who might have made a
priest of him, only that his head was turned when he won a
literary prize at the Academy of Toulouse and got into cor-
respondence with one Frangois-Marie Arouet. We see Arouet
called from the Duke of Sully's table to be cudgeled by the
bravos of the Chevalier de Bohan, and the comfortable and
likeable Marmontel himself consigned, suddenly, to the Bas-
tile for an alleged lampoon against a nobleman — the Bastile
proving anything but the grim dungeon of popular tradition.
We see the great, whom men of letters must court and flatter
and fawn upon and to whom, save for such adulation, they
were as the dust: skillfully sketched portraits of Voltaire,
Bousseau, Diderot, D'Alembert, Madame Geoffrin, and the
rest. We see the frenzied days of the Bevolution, when Ter-
ror stalked abroad on the ruins of that glittering, careless,
dissolute society, to whose fringes Marmontel had clung and
which, like Goldoni, he seems never to have thought could fall.
He was a good man, was Marmontel, no genius to be sure,
1922.] SAINTS AND CHARLATANS 21
but thought well of in his day, whose tragedies and moral
tales and the rest have long since been forgotten, but whose
Memoirs, written to point out the follies and pitfalls of life
to his children, promise him an abiding fame.
That clever woman, the Margravine of Baireuth, has
made imperishable the brutalities of her father — who openly
reviled his wife and starved and beat his children with cane
and fists, and whose pleasures were as bestial as his temper;
the follies of an indiscreet and intriguing mother; the long
days of terror and sadness under paternal tyranny, and the
qualities of lion and serpent, which even as a youth were
growing up in the heart of the boy, her brother, who was
afterward to be Frederick the Great.
There are many more, of course, each with its fascinating
pages, like the Memoirs of St. Simon with their picture of
princesses snowballing one another, set in the midst of the
gossip of the court of Louis XIV., turned rigorist, and that of
Louis XV., the roue; and Goldoni's with its joyous days in
seventeenth century Venice, and its odd adventures such as
Goldsmith must have met with and might have told if only
he had blessed us with an autobiography! But the catalogue
is too long to recount, even though one must pass over Gibbon
who, when bidden by his father to give up his French fiancee,
"sighed like a lover, but obeyed like a son;" and De Retz, with
his intrigues and his Fronde; and a host of others.
All these books have won the admiration of men. All of
them appeal to that side of human nature which knows by
instinct that the greatest romance in the world is the romance
of an individual's life. Dynasties rise and fall; armies fight
and perish, but we turn away from these great panoramas to
the sight of a conqueror reading to his little son on his knees;
or of a dramatist, with bursting heart, in the box of a theatre,
his fame resting upon the judgment of the first night's
audience; or of a great churchman after the nervous strain
of a long day toying with a kitten before the fireplace.
Cosmic happenings are too remote from us to hit home
closely, and too large to fall within the range of our every-
day imaginings. Should we be caught in the toils of an
epoch-making event, we should hardly be aware of it, but,
like Stendhal's hero at Waterloo, should realize only our per-
sonal emotions and the narrow field of incidents in which we
22 SAINTS AND CHARLATANS [Oct..
chanced to be engaged. Every man is his own Robinson
Crusoe; his moral life, through his round of days, is passed
as on some far-off island, where he finds himself alone with
temptation to fight, dangers to meet, challenges to take up,
fears to conquer, duties to perform, decisions to come to, in a
word, his life to live whatever its fear or sorrows or dis-
appointments.
For not a few men the scene of life changes. Like Cel-
lini and Casanova and Alfieri, they play their parts on many
different stages, "among new faces, other minds," but for the
majority of us the stage of life is set with but one scene, and
our part must be played, as far as its outer appearances go,
in narrow ways and through monotonous years. We are glad
to have Xenophon's record of the raid of the ten thousand,
for the shifting scenes of that gallant march make his cold
recital more than once blaze with splendid color. But how
we should like to have the diary of some soldier who took
part, not to find a record of events for the whole contingent,
but his own personal story, which might have many different
things to tell than those which met the eye of the Greek
student, turned soldier. But let us suppose some youthful
brother Greek who had never stirred away perhaps from the
place of his boyhood, but sat at the feet of Plato and felt his
heart swell within him at the musical words of the poet-
philosopher, and his soul kindle at the vision of a noble ideal-
ism undreamed of before. Surely, he might have given us a
story more fascinating than that of any warrior who had
passed through camp and battlefield and laughed in the face
of death; for, after all, the adventures of the body are as
nothing compared to the adventures of the spirit.
Of the millions who have felt their souls a stage where
Duty and Inclination, in protean forms "come nobly to the
grapple," how few have left a record! Beyond the passive
face or the laughing eyes of another, how far do we see? How
can we guess what thoughts sweep across the surgeon's mind
as he bends over his clinical table, scalpel in hand, while Life
and Death hover at his side? How much we should give to
know the thoughts of the statesman whose jeweled fingers
have played with the destiny of a nation, when, out-tricked
and ruined, he is repudiated by his people, and finds himself
an outcast? We wonder what emotions stir the general who,
1922.] SAINTS AND CHARLATANS 23
from his point of vantage, watches ten thousand men go
cheering up a ridge into the very jaws of death, knowing that
everyone who falls is sealing the fate of a great cause? What
thoughts arise in the orator as he watches men swaying like
bending corn beneath the thrilling thunder of his eloquence,
and knows that he is stirring them for good or ill to surrender
their wills and do his bidding?
These are things we should like to know, but never can,
except in a few instances, and in those, imperfectly. Men do
not make us the confidants of their innermost thoughts unless
they are decked out in some conventional or attractive garb.
How far do Cellini and Alfieri, De Retz, and the others admit
us into the inner sanctuary of their minds? How often they
are playing to the gallery — perhaps unconsciously — making,
as the result of the mental habits of a lifetime, the worse
appear the better cause? Do they want us to know, would
they permit us to know, the real dramas being played behind
the curtain of their souls?
After all, why should they? To throw aside the veil
which hides one's soul from the world, the veil which perhaps
for years has been weaving that prying glances might not see
within, is startling even to think of. To permit a myriad
eyes to be leveled upon one, hostile, or critical, or amazed, or
horror-stricken; to feel that they are gazing into hidden re-
cesses which only the eye of Omniscience itself had pene-
trated before; to confess from one's own lips the story of sur-
render and compromise, of struggles and victories won only
to be lost, of cowardice that yielded without a struggle, of
envy and bitterness, of falsehood and base desires — surely,
this is task enough to daunt all men except only the saint or
the charlatan.
Three men have attempted it; three men have declared
that the world might see their souls naked as their Maker
saw them — St. Augustine, Rousseau, and Newman.
St. Augustine poured out his heart in a book so lyrical,
simple, and burning in its fervor, that it has all the exaltation
of poetry. Every phase of his life is told with a simplicity
which conceals nothing. With a childlike candor he even
tells us that he stole pears as a boy, and as he laments this
as a great wrong, there comes to mind Newman's lamentation
in the Apologia, that at fifteen he had written "vile epithets"
24 SAINTS AND CHARLATANS [Oct.,
on the Pope in his Gradus. In this confession, we see the
whole attitude of both minds: life is nothing except seen in
its relation to the Divine and in a world that dwells under
the eye of God, and in the hollow of His hand nothing of
spiritual significance can be trivial.
At sixteen, the gusts of passionate desire swept over
Augustine's soul; Newman at fifteen had decided that he was
ordained for celibacy. In the pride of his young manhood,
Augustine "hated safety and a way without snares," and as
we read we recall one who "loved to choose and see his path,'*
but whose wandering was not far nor for long.
As Augustine pours out the stories of his misdeeds from
boyhood on, he is confessing to God and permitting the world
to overhear. Suddenly, as if in scorn, he asks: "What have
I to do with men that they should hear my voice — as if they
could heal my infirmities? Are they so curious to know the
lives of others, slothful to amend their own?" Slothful they
may be, O great Confessor; curious they have always been,
and must be forever! Did he object, the great Augustine, that
men should overhear? No; for he cared nothing for their
condemnation or their applause. To him, as to Newman,
there were two, and only two, luminously self-evident beings —
himself and his Creator.
In the light of eternal things, he regards the ambitions of
his youth as petty and his pride and joy in success, as well as
the satisfaction of his desires, as sinful, and he fills his pages
with lamentations that he has ever loved such utter vanities.
What a rending of bonds, when at last he resolves with iron
will to abandon them! What subtlety, no less than anguish,
is revealed when, on the threshold of renouncement, his
earthly love wells up within him, and he cries, brokenly:
"Give me chastity — but not yet."
At last the struggle is over; the bonds are broken and
even the insurgent memories of dead days, full of the ardor
of illicit love and the satisfaction of academic successes, are
repressed into humility by his iron will. The flesh and the
pride of life know him no more, and with eyes which see no
longer the joy of living, the incense of the multitude, and the
allurements of sense, he beholds one only love, "the Father
of all the brethren of thy Christ."
His great renunciation did not chill his heart. To human
1922.] SAINTS AND CHARLATANS 25
tenderness it was always open. As Newman loved Ambrose
St. John, so Augustine loved his Nebridius, at whose death he
cries: "And now he lives in Abraham's bosom: whatever that
be which is signified by that bosom, there lives my Nebridius,
my sweet friend." Somehow the thought of Thomas More
comes to mind and one thinks of him, with his fine capacity
for friendship, writing like that of someone loved and lost.
Of his mother he spoke with exquisite tenderness, recall-
ing her prayers and tears that he might abandon his ill-living.
"The son of those tears shall not perish," she had once been
told, and now that son ministers to her dying needs. When
the end comes, he can tell himself truly that what he has
renounced means naught to him compared with the joys of
that life to which she has gone, "where, beyond these voices,
there is peace." And how much he renounces! not merely
human desires and the yearning for the fleshpots of Egypt,
but even the beauty of sea and sky, and the harmonies of
music, save where, alone, they tell of the resplendent beauties
which he only shall enjoy who seeks God with all the ardor
of his heart. Not that Augustine lacked the seeing eye, for
only by possessing it could he have written thus : "This queen
of colors, the light . T. causes those beautiful patterns which,
through men's souls, are conveyed into their cunning hands,
and come from that Beauty which is above our souls." Nor did
he lack the hearing ear, else he could not be troubled lest
"those melodies which Thy words breathe soul into when sung
with a sweet and attuned voice," may come to move him
"more with the voice than with the words sung."
Once in young manhood, Augustine had dreamed such
dreams as had Thomas More in Utopia, and the founders of
Brook Farm, and Coleridge and Southey in their plans for an
Altruria on the banks of the Susquehanna, but "God derided
these plans and didst prepare His own." "Many of us friends
conferring about and detesting the turbulent turmoil of human
life had now adopted, now almost resolved on living apart
from business and the bustle of men, and this was to be thus
obtained: we were to bring whatever we might severally pro-
cure and make one household, so that, through the truth of
our friendship, nothing should belong especially to any; but
the whole, derived from all, should as a whole belong to each
and all to all."
26 SAINTS AND CHARLATANS [Oct..
Verily, God did deride Augustine's plans and prepare
His own; and when this willful, buoyant lad; this youth proud
of his fine mind, his learning, his magnetism; this man of
power and unquenchable ardor could become at last the pen-
itent and saint, all his gifts of mind and heart and body were
caught up and held enthralled before the beauty of One to
Whose service he gave himself in a very passion of self-
surrender. Augustine was poet as well as saint, and it is
both poet and saint who voices his love of God in this superb
outpouring in the very gold of poetry: "But what do I love
when I love Thee? Not beauties of body, nor the fair har-
monies of time, nor the brightness of the light so gladsome to
our eyes, nor sweet melodies of varying songs, nor the fra-
grant smell of flowers and spices, not manna and honey, not
limbs acceptable to embracements of flesh. None of these I
love when I love my God; and yet I love a kind of light and
melody and fragrance, and meat and embracement when I
love my God, the light melody, fragrance, meat and embrace-
ment of my inner man : where there shineth into my soul what
space cannot contain, and there soundest what time poureth
not in my ear, and there smelleth what breathing disperseth
not, and there tasteth what eating diminisheth not, and there
clingeth what satiety divorceth not."
At the opposite pole from Augustine stands Rousseau, the
sentimentalist, the self-deceiving poseur, the neurasthenic,
whose senses were so delicately alive to every reaction that
he became a creature of poignant delight, and of no less
poignant pain. The keenness of his senses he deliberately
incited, not by indulgence that was gross, but by indulgence
that was delicately discriminating, until he became an epicure
of sensations, an exquisite in what may be called the sensual-
ity of the mind. And he paid the price. He cut the middle
ground from under his feet and, like De Quincey with his
opium, he dwelt either among the fragrance and splendor of
a dream-Paradise or in the pangs of the inferno.
Augustine suffered as men of poetic souls always suffer at
beholding beauty stricken, life turned to death, and the love-
liness, even the loveliness of flowers and music, doomed to
end. But Augustine found one way that, dolorous though it
was, led to an Infinitude of Beauty where the glory and the
joy and the loveliness of earth were centred and became
1922.] SAINTS AND CHARLATANS 27
divine. The via dolorosa led through the dark forest of re-
nunciation, and he came to know that he who loses himself
shall find himself. Such a journey, such a discovery, such
a renunciation were impossible to Rousseau. Jean Jacques
was a sensualist, not a saint; and he was not a saint because
with all his passion he was not passionate enough; with
all his openness to impression he was too dull to receive those
which came from a nobler place than the valley of the
shadow; because with all his professed candor with the world
he was not candid with himself.
To read Rousseau's Confession is to learn how sordid,
and unhappy, and despairing and, above all things else, how
self-deceiving the human soul may be. Rousseau makes a
great show of frankness : "I am a bad man," he cries, "I have
done shameful things. Listen, and I will tell you all." Of
course, he does not tell all, but he tells enough to prove his
weaknesses and his baseness. He proclaims it while he sheds
tears of shame and wrings his hands and beats his breast,
but he does not forget to keep his eyes on his listeners, and
when he surprises them in a fit of astonishment or disgust,
his powers of self -hypnosis quite transform him. He steps
out of himself and, leaping over the footlights, becomes a part
of his own audience. Jean Jacques the spectator looks upon
Jean Jacques the performer, at first with surprise, and then
with admiration, until, suddenly, he bursts into applause at
his other self, arrayed in sackcloth and ashes and tearfully
proclaiming his weaknesses to the world. But stop! What
is this?
Jean Jacques becomes dismayed; he alone of the audience
is applauding. His nunc plaudite has failed of effect;
something is wrong. Jean Jacques grows angry. Who
are these Pharisees, this spawn of self-righteousness, whose
faces betray amazement and disgust instead of admiration?
Jean Jacques forgets that he is baring his breast to the multi-
tude, he forgets his sackcloth and tears, and he cries out:
"Good people, hear my warning. Do not be Pharisees; do
not pretend to be more righteous than I. As a matter of fact,
you all have committed the same sins as I. You, too, are
envious and slothful and sensual. But you are cowards, and
will not confess. If it happens (which I don't believe) that
you are as yet innocent, that is a mere accident. Wait until
28 SAINTS AND CHARLATANS [Oct.,
you have been tempted as strongly as poor Jean Jacques."
Herein lies Rousseau's fatal weakness. He is not talking to
God and permitting men to listen like Augustine; he is not
telling all the world of his struggle and his doubts and his
searchings for truth as God knew them like Newman; he is
proclaiming to all mankind that he is debased and that he
wants their applause for his candor. Says Lowell : "Rousseau
cries, 'I will bare my heart to you!* and, throwing open his
waistcoat, makes us the confidants of his dirty linen."
It was, after all, a question not of intellect but of soul.
The souls of Augustine and of Newman were great; the soul
of Rousseau was petty. Had it been otherwise, it would have
given a touch of the divine fire to his passions until, breaking
free, they might have swept him out of the dark cave, where
he dwelt alone with his monstrous egotism, into the vision of
more noble things than his sensuality and selfishness and
morbidity had ever dreamed of. But Rousseau's passions
were petty, and his emotions too delicately organized to be
stable except where the will of an Augustine or a Newman
might control them.
But, as has been said, it was a question of soul. Had
Rousseau a great soul, he might, with his other endowments,
have realized from the broken harmonies of earth the more
sublime and perfect harmony which belongs to "the conse-
cration and the poet's dream." Had he a great soul, he would
have first convinced himself of sin in his own heart before
attempting to indict his fellows, and, in doing this, he might
have been lifted up out of the valley of humiliation to that
high plane in which bitterness of spirit, the agony of blighted
hopes, and the pathos of madness do not abide.
Like St. Augustine and Rousseau, Newman was a poet.
Perhaps, that was his ultimate gift. Music was one of his
loves; "perhaps," he says somewhere, "music is thought." It
could awaken emotions buried in the depths of his heart and
even stir him to tears. He could be tender with that delicate
tenderness which belongs to all women and to those men who
are poets at heart. From the lips of the warm-blooded
African came these sentences on the death of his friend,
Nebridius: "At this grief my heart was utterly broken; and
whatever I beheld was death. My native country was a tor-
ment to me and my father's house a strange unhappiness;
1922.] SAINTS AND CHARLATANS 29
and whatever I had shared with him, wanting him, became
a distracting torture. Mine eyes sought him everywhere, but
he was not granted them; and I hated all places for that they
had not him; nor could they now tell me, *he is coming,' as
when he was absent. . . . Only tears were sweet to me, for
they succeeded my friend, in the dearest of my affections."
On reading that, it comes to mind that Newman wept at the
bier of his friend, Bowden, and that when Ambrose St. John
died, he spent the night in the death-room holding the body
in his arms.
Supersensitive and highly poetical, all three men were
doomed to suffer. Rousseau's sufferings were rooted in his
enormous egotism; he believed himself a great man, born out
of due time, whom the baseness of his fellows was bent on
destroying. Newman's suffering was due to the long struggle,
the details of which he recounts so minutely and so vividly in
the Apologia when, a prey to doubts about the sanctity of his
Father's House, he beheld truth glittering like a star in the
bosom of her he had termed the "scarlet woman." Augus-
tine's suffering camfe from the world-old conflict between the
flesh and the spirit, and, torn by conflicting emotions as New-
man was torn, he suffered as only men of great soul can
suffer. "When a deep consideration had, from the secret
bottom of my soul drawn together and heaped up all my
misery in the tide of my heart, there arose a mighty storm
bringing a mighty shower of tears. ... I cast myself down,
I know not how long, under a certain fig tree, giving full vent
to my tears; and the floods of mine eyes gushed out an accept-
able sacrifice to Thee."
In the Apologia, Newman tells us of his tears, and we
know how, upon leaving Littlemore, his long restrained emo-
tions overcame him, and he kissed the books and the very
furniture in his study, which had witnessed so much of his
suffering and his desolation of spirit. We recall that he had
planned to pass his life at Oxford, to become a very part of it
like the snapdragon on the walls of Trinity, but (Augustine
is speaking now) "God derided these plans and didst prepare
His own." There are passages in the Apologia as tender as
the one I have just quoted from Augustine, though in New-
man, naturally, there is more restraint in the expression of
emotion. The Englishman bares his heart, and for him, with
30 SAINTS AND CHARLATANS [Oct.,
blood less warm than Augustine's, this was an even harder
task. He says, in the beginning of Part V. of the Apologia:
And now that I am about to trace, as far as I can, the
course of that great revolution of mind, which led me to
leave my own home, to which I was bound by so many
strong and tender ties, I feel overcome with the difficulty
of satisfying myself in my account of it, and have recoiled
from doing so, till the near approach of the day, on which
these lines must be given to the world, forces me to set
about the task. For who can know himself, and the mul-
titude of subtle influences which act upon him? and who
can recollect, at the distance of twenty-five years, all that
he once knew about his thoughts and his deeds? And who
can suddenly gird himself to a new and anxious under-
taking, which he might be able indeed to perform well, had
he full and calm leisure allowed him to look through every-
thing that he has written, whether in published works Or
private letters? But, on the other hand, as to that calm
contemplation of the past, in itself so desirable, who can
afford to be leisurely and deliberate, while he practises on
himself a cruel operation, the ripping up of old griefs, and
the venturing again upon the infandum dolorem of years,
in which the stars of this lower heaven were one by one
going out? I could not, in cool blood, nor except upon the
imperious call of duty, attempt what I have set myself to
do. It is both to head and heart an extreme trial, thus to
analyze what has so long gone by, and to bring out the
results of that examination. I have done various bold
things in my life; this is the boldest; and, were,! not sure,
I should after all succeed in my object, it would be mad-
ness to set about it.
How deep the feeling is here in spite of its restraint! But as
you read between the lines you come to understand why
Newman wasted away to a shadow as he wrote this book,
and why its pages were often wet with tears.
Many and striking are the parallels between Newman
and St. Augustine. Both were churchmen; both reached that
goal only after years of doubt and anguish. Both devoted
their supreme gifts of heart and intellect to the cause of re-
ligion; both were in the forefront of the defensive struggles
waged by the Church against the hostile forces of their day.
1922.] SAINTS AND CHARLATANS 31
For, while Augustine attacked Manichaeans and Donatists, in
whom he beheld the most potent foes of Christianity, New-
man had ever in his thoughts the menace of what he termed
"liberalism," and against it devoted most of his literary labors.
Both Augustine and Newman were prolific writers in the
field of controversy; both were masters of pulpit eloquence;
both were outstanding figures among the ecclesiastical leaders
of their day; both, in consequence, drew the fire of enemies
who were eager to destroy their influence.
As men, both were marked by an unfailing human sym-
pathy which made them the confidants of more than one per-
plexed soul, and their letters are full of persuasive calls to
saintliness and of answers to spiritual difficulties. Both were
extremely sensitive and suffered at the hands of those who,
from jealousy or inability to understand them, misjudged their
motives and denounced their acts. Both, though dwelling on
intellectual heights, kept close to the hearts and aspirations
of the people. Both were capable of almost feminine tender-
ness, and Augustine's love of Nebridius has its counterpart in
Newman's love of St. John. Both had a magnetism which
could convert enemies into friends and friends into disciples.
The peace of Cassiciacum was dear to St. Augustine, as
that of Littlemore was dear to Newman, and the presence of
loving friends was as the balm of Gilead to their craving for
affection. But Cassiciacum, like Littlemore, beheld a yearn-
ing of spirit for a more perfect comprehension of truth and
a higher life that was to come. They were but milestones on
the journey to the heights. Augustine's Tagaste was New-
man's Edgbaston, with sacred joys abiding there, once those
two great souls had found a peace unknown before. The
"pitfalls of intellectualism" never menaced Newman except
for a single hour at Oxford; while Augustine, with all his keen
intellect, gained in his renunciation the simplicity of a child.
Each stands out as the embodiment of a supreme and uncon-
quered faith, never doubting, abiding always.
To few men as to Augustine and Newman have the un-
seen realities ever been so tremendously real. Though all the
world might be but the shadow of a dream, there remained
to each, himself and his Creator, and the very stir of the air
about them was, as Newman so beautifully said, "the waving
of their robes whose faces see God in heaven."
32 OUR LADY OF OXFORD [Oct.,
Augustine could not know Newman, but Newman could,
and did, know Augustine, not merely through his studies of
the Fathers, but, best of all, through the divination of a per-
fect sympathy. In his early thirties, Newman had pictured
Augustine as he was in those hectic years that preceded his
conversion, and he read aright his "fierce fevers of the mind"
and his pitiful cry for light. And when the vision of peace
dawned at last for Augustine, Newman took leave of him in
words that have a strange sound as of prophecy, as if a
glance into his own heart had given him thus early a pre-
monition of the desolating uncertainty that was to come, and
of the completeness of the final renunciation. "He had
'counted the cost,' and he acted like a man whose slowness to
begin a course was a pledge of zeal when he had once
begun it."
And of the three great autobiographies, what? St. Augus-
tine's is a lyric; Newman's, an elegy; Rousseau's, a tragic-
comedy.
OUR LADY OF OXFORD.
BY CHARLES J. QUIRK, S.J.
Here, 'mid the beauty of an elder day,
Upon an antique, crumbling arch on high.
Gazing with sweet, sad eyes on passerby,
Our Lady and her Child in vigil pray
That once again shall come beneath their sway
This fair old town of Oxford, whose tall spires
Now fingers seem in noonday's flashing fires,
Carven of God to point the Heavenward way.
Not only here, within this narrow street,
Is Mary and her Infant throned and crowned.
But in gray courtyards, bright with sun and sweet
With flowers and velvet sward, shall they be found,
Waiting to hear, in God's appointed time.
All Oxford praise their names, while Mass bells chime !
PAUL DEROULEDE THE PATRIOT.
BY WILLIAM H. SCHEIFLEY.
HE momentous events of the World War have
until recently tended to obscure in France the
career of Paul Deroulede, one of those who con-
tributed most to prepare his country for the con-
flict. Not that Deroulede's death in January,
1914, passed unnoticed. Millions of his countrymen mourned
him as a patriot to be ranked with Bayard, Jean Bart and Ney.
Captured during the Franco-Prussian War, but escaping from
prison, he burned with a passion for the recovery of Alsace
and Lorraine, and, as founder and promoter of the League
of Patriots, he strove incessantly to keep alive the sacred flame
until the "day of glory" should dawn. Alas! that the pane-
gyrist of Joan of Arc — loyal churchman and nationalist —
should not have lived to see his hopes realized! But the
fame is secure.
Paul Deroulede, son of a magistrate, was born at Paris
in 1846. His mother was a sister of Emile Augier, the dra-
matist, and a granddaughter of Pigault-Lebrun. He attended
the College of Vanves, the Lycde Louis-le-Grand, the Lycee
Bonaparte, and finally the Lyc^e de Versailles, proving an
excellent but erratic pupil, and evincing a strong inclination
toward poetry. Yet, like so many others of literary taste, he
was sent by his parents to the Law School. Though bored by
the law, he delighted in oratory, and never lost an occasion
on festival days in the Latin Quarter to declaim in praise of
liberty. Consumed by a desire to travel, he went to Egypt to
witness the opening of the Suez Canal, and, returning, visited
Italy, Austria, Germany, and Holland, setting down his im-
pressions in graphic style.
Having completed his law course, Deroulede gave himself
up to the enjoyment of letters until the opening of the War of
1870. Thus far he had been an internationalist, looking for-
ward to an era of universal peace and brotherhood. But no
VOL. CXVI. 3
34 PAUL DEROULEDE THE PATRIOT [Oct.,
cosmopolitanism— not even that of Renan and the "intel-
lectuals"— could keep his conscience easy. Through Victor
Duruy, he procured a commission in the Mobile Guards of
the Seine, although at the moment no one foresaw that the
Guards would be called to the frontier. Popular confidence
was not shaken until on the heels of news of the victory of
Reischoffen followed sinister tidings. Thereupon, Deroulede,
turned by defeat into an ardent patriot, hurried to Metz.
Rejected here, he enlisted as a private of Zouaves at Chalons.
A few days later, his mother brought to the same battalion
her younger son, Andre.
"Major," she said to the commanding officer, "I bring you
my second son, who has wished to join his older brother.
My only regret is that I have not a third to offer you to help
drive the invader from France."
In an engagement shortly afterward, Andre fell at Paul's
side, begging the brother not to abandon him as the Zouaves
retreated. Thus both were overtaken by the enemy. Al-
though Andre recovered, Paul was separated from him, being
sent as prisoner to Breslau. Here he was treated humanely,
and even began an interlude of romance with his jail keeper's
daughter, a girl of Polish descent and French s\anpathies.
Yet, upon learning of the disaster at Sedan, and Bazaine's
treason at Metz, Deroulede resolved to return to France.
Lacking money, unable to speak German, and knowing that
recapture would mean certain death, he outwitted the police,
reached Prague, and from there made his way home through
Italy.
Reporting at Tours, Deroulede was assigned as sergeant
to Colonel Lane's regiment of Zouaves, operating near Dijon.
On January 15th, when the regiment, in a brilliant engage-
ment, took Montbeliard, the poet won a second lieutenancy
and the Cross of the Legion of Honor. A few days later, on
the retreat of Lane's men into Switzerland, the officers were
allowed to return to France. Scarcely had Deroulede been
repatriated when an armistice was signed, and during his first
visit to relatives in Paris, the National Assembly ratified a
preliminary treaty with Germany. This was followed by the
famous protest from the deputies of Alsace and Lorraine — an
act which stirred Deroulede to the depths. Accordingly, on
March 1, 1871, he announced his resolution of remaining a
1922.] PAUL DEROULEDE THE PATRIOT 35
soldier. So long as half a million Frenchmen were involun-
tarily deprived of the joys of citizenship, he declared, he
would deprive himself of the joys of the fireside.
At the outbreak of the Commune, Paul and his younger
brother sided with the forces of order. Near the end of the
revolt, this brother, while snatching a red flag from a barri-
cade, had his arm shattered. Paul, whose foot was crushed
by an unmanageable horse, was so far incapacitated that, on
the representation of friends, he resigned his commission in
1874, rather than be retired. Seven years later, he sought to
reenlist that he might accompany his brother, Andr<e, an
artillery lieutenant, to Tunis; but Gambetta discouraged him,
explaining that he would be more useful at home. Deroulede,
yielding, wrote a stirring farewell to the troops, and there-
after it was with his pen that he fought the good fight.
Already, indeed, Deroulede had acquired some fame as a
writer. In 1869, the Comedie-Fran^aise had produced his
Juan Strenner, a play treating an episode in the life of Rubens.
After 1870 patriotic themes engaged him. His Chants du
Soldat are hymns of faith and hope dedicated to his parents,
as to "those who have taught me to love my country." The
guiding thought of these poems was the exaltation of cour-
age and patriotism. Says Camille Ducray, in his admirable
biography of Deroulede: "Many of these will remain im-
mortal."
The French Academy crowned the work, which already
has seen more than a hundred and fifty editions. As Theo-
dore de Banville remarked: "It is redolent of battles and
powder, and from the moment that you have opened the
volume it intoxicates you by its perfume of youthful bravado
and manly daring." The poet wrote from inspiration, and
was less concerned to polish his verses than to stir the martial
feelings. Indeed, the cadence of these poems is that of a
warlike march, heroism set to music. One poem, composed
in eulogy of Corneille, was long cherished by Coquelin for
stage recitation.
In 1875 appeared Deroulede's NoUveaux Chants du
Soldat. This volume, equally lyrical and sincere, was like its
predecessor crowned by the Academy. In 1881 followed
Marches et Sonneries, ardent lyrics dedicated to Alsace and
Lorraine, breathing the spirit of glad self-sacrifice.
36 PAUL DEROULEDE THE PATRIOT [Oct.,
Seven years later, in Refrains Militaires, the patriot added
to his verse other gems, one being a Testament, embodying
his fondest aspirations.
Militant as was Deroulede, he v^ras also devoted to rustic
life, and, when out of patience with politics, he would retire
to his ancestral manor in the Charente. It was there that he
composed Les Chants du Paysan (1894), a volume for which
the French Academy awarded him the Jean Reynaud prize,
given only once in five years. He published, also, novels and
biographical studies. Especially noteworthy was his biog-
raphy of Turenne — La Tour d*Auvergne.
More important, however, are D^roulede's dramas. To
be sure, he seemed to regard plot as only a pretext for enabling
his personages to express their sentiments in noble words.
He conceived that the theatre should educate by offering
sound and sober lessons. Chief among his plays are LHetman
(1877), La Modbite (1880), Messire du Guesclin (1895), and
La Mort de Hoche (1897) — all of patriotic significance.
The production of UHetman was eagerly awaited, since
the public knew that it treated in disguise a national question.
Love of country and the readiness of men to sacrifice them-
selves for the national life was his subject. The period chosen
is 1645, when the Ukraine (here representing Alsace) is suffer-
ing from the tyrannic oppression of Poland (here represent-
ing Germany). Gherasz, formerly hetman or leader of the
Ukrainian Cossacks, his daughter, Mikla, and her fiance,
Stenko, are virtual captives at the Polish Court. Uprisings
of the Ukrainians have but increased their sufferings, yet the
patriots again revolt and beg the aged hetman to lead them.
Gherasz declines, thinking further sacrifices vain until his
country is prepared for war. Stenko, on the other hand, joins
the insurgents, yet learning that his fiancee is held as hostage,
returns, having placed personal happiness above patriotism.
Angered by this selfishness, the stern old hetman now re-
sponds to the call of duty, and the revolt succeeds, after
the machinations of the Ukrainian renegade, Rogoviane
(perhaps Marshal Bazaine) have miscarried, and Mikla has
escaped. Here the war between the Cossacks and the Poles
is only a pretext; Deroulede has in mind a conflict nearer
home.
The piece, performed seventy times at the Od^on, was
1922.] PAUL DEROULEDE THE PATRIOT 37
praised by the people and by the press. If it was not uni-
formly excellent, it displayed none the less marked talent,
and among its verses were many breathing the spirit of the
great Corneille.
Like UHetman, La Modhite is a satire in disguise. It com-
bats the foes of religion and the Church. Deroulede, as a re-
publican and a Christian, would show that faith knows no
conflict with liberty, and that public morals are inadequate
unless based upon divine law. Strangely enough, the play
incurred the hostility of Jules Ferry, Minister of Public In-
struction, who, after the first rehearsals at the Comedie-
Frangaise, forbade its presentation. Although Ferry was
known as an implacable enemy of the Church, this narrow-
mindedness aroused deep indignation. His action was the
more hypocritical since he had but recently invited dramatists
to write political plays, "in order to give to France the moral
grandeur proper in a democracy. To that end," he said, "let
us allow in politics all the liberty compatible with the mainte-
nance of public peace, and let us keep our severity for licen-
tious situations and immoral pieces." It had not occurred to
Ferry that a dramatist might, in denouncing immorality,
attack its sources — his own atheism and hostility to the
Church. Deroulede, having withdrawn his play, published it
with a preface accusing the minister of fomenting religious
discord. "Yes, this poor minister has thrown France into a
turmoil, and, thanks to him, slight misunderstandings have so
nearly become dissensions; he has such mastery of the art of
inflaming religious passion in a skeptical age, that a play in
which God is spoken of with respect, licence with disgust and
liberty with love, such a play is regarded as so close to satire
as to be dangerous." Performed later at the home of Madam*
Juliette Adam, La Modhite delighted the audience.
Misael, son of the High Priest of Israel, during an expedi-
tion against the Moabites, has fallen in love with Kozby,
voluptuous and unprincipled. She would proclaim war on
the God of Israel and exalt only man and his instincts; but
MisaePs mother rebukes her for a doctrine so subversive of
God, family and country. Even Helias, a radical, realizes
that civilization must be achieved gradually. "Faith," he de-
clares, "is an essential. It is that which distinguishes the
shepherd from his flock, man frorh beast."
38 PAUL DEROULEDE THE PATRIOT [Oct.,
Retain for God a priest, that man may God retain;
A people without God is doomed and lives in vain.
The forebodings of Helias are justified v^hen Misael, sinking
deeper into degradation, plans to assassinate his father. For-
tunately, his plot is divulged and it is the would-be parricide
and not his father who meets death at the temple.
After administering this rebuke to those striving to sap
the religious convictions of his countrymen, Deroulede, in his
next play, drew from the life of the national hero, Bertrand
du Gueslin (1320-1380), salutary lessons for his contempor-
aries. Here he stresses duty, obedience, self-effacement and
the subordination of personal interests to the national weal,
and shows that the curse of Du Guesclin'g time lay in the
fact that too many desired to rule, and too few were willing
to obey. The application of such criticism to the France of
1895, with its individualism, anarchy and opposition to
authority, was patent.
Messire du Guesclin is set in the period following the de-
feat of the French by the English at the battle of Poitiers
(1356), when Jean le Bon was taken prisoner. The action
depicts the revolt of the bourgeoisie, led by Etienne Marcel;
the flight of the Dauphin, who was afterwards known as
Charles le Sage; and the devotion of the Breton, Du Guesclin,
to the French cause (Brittany being at the time independent)
— services which proved decisive in rescuing France from
anarchy and foreign domination. True, this play is a biog-
raphy of the popular hero rather than a drama in the strict
sense; but, as a spectacle dans un fauteuil, it is both informing
and entertaining. If the verses are not always rich and flow-
ing, the patriotic fervor that animates them is genuine and
contagious. The protagonist thinks only of the destiny of his
country. To expel the foreigner is the need of the moment.
But to accomplish this and prevent a recurrence of the evil,
the citizens must abandon their desire for self-assertion. Says
the poet: "You who would elevate France, learn to abase
yourselves."
Deroulede's plays, although not always successful on the
stage, are worthy of respect. They contain not only fine
ideas, but strong scenes, even if these be poorly connected.
This lack of cohesive force is apparent in his last drama. La
1922,] PAUL DEROULEDE THE PATRIOT 39
Mort de Hoche, little more than a loose biography of the
Revolutionary general. Here, as in Messire du Guesclin, the
dramatist denounces by implication the Third Republic.
Thus, in Act V., General Ney says : "The government does not
govern; it is governed. The deputies might do all, but they
spoil everything. There are many judges, but there is no
justice; there are many functionaries, but there is no admin-
istration; there are many taxes, but no resources." Similarly,
Hoche, in comparing the Republic of the Directory (1797)
with that of the Convention (1793), declares the rule of the
Terror to be less dangerous than that of the Marsh. "To cor-
rupt the blood is worse than to shed it!" he exclaims. "Like
Decius, I cast myself living and fully armed into the gulf in
the hope that I may save the nation."
These sentiments explain why Deroulede favored the
Boulangist party. Like millions of his countrymen, he be-
lieved that General Boulanger would establish a government
of authority. Even earlier, during the short-lived Gambetta
Ministry, Deroulede had been appointed, with Felix Faure
and others, upon an educational commission intended to de-
velop among pupils physical fitness and a spirit of patriotism.
But Gambetta was soon succeeded by Jules Ferry, with whom
Deroulede could not agree. After a heated dispute with the
new Premier, he resigned, declaring: "Your conception is not
mine; it would please you to make a nation without the mili-
tary spirit, as you have already endeavored to make a nation
without God."
Yet, the results of Deroulede's connection with this edu-
cational commission were beneficial. From it, he derived the
idea of organizing a patriotic society to aid in recovering the
lost provinces. In 1882, he succeeded in founding the League
of Patriots, which within a few years grew to three hundred
thousand members. On the first page of its list, he inscribed
its motto: "Who lives? France! In spite of everything!"
This was the motto of his own life. The grand old man,
whether in Parliament or traveling over the country to spread
his propaganda, wrought indefatigably by his pen and his
voice for the cause. Despairing of seeing his hopes realized
under a Masonic regime of parliamentary wrangling, he at-
tempted a coup d'etat in 1899, and as a result was banished
for six years.
40 PAUL DEROULEDE THE PATRIOT [Oct.,
In 1905, Deroulede returned to Paris. What an enthu-
siastic reception was his! A delirious crowd met him at the
station, and transformed his slow passage to the house of his
brother into a triumphal march. Affectionately assisted by
his secretary, Marcel Habert, Deroulede again plunged into
his work. The present writer, who in May, 1909, heard him
deliver a stirring address in eulogy of Joan of Arc, observed
that, though failing, he was still full of fire. Each year until
his death, he led a procession to the statue of Strassburg in
the Place de la Concorde, and addressed patriotic gatherings
at Buzenvat and Champigny, near Paris, in commemoration
of military engagements during the siege. It was at Cham-
pigny that, ignoring the entreaties of his physician, Deroulede
delivered his last speech, in December, 1913. His friends
bore him, exhausted, to the Riviera, but before departing from
Paris, he visited Notre Dame, and, a faithful Catholic, as he
had been a faithful soldier and patriot, he received the Blessed
Sacrament, although his weakness would not permit his hear-
ing Mass to the end. He died at Nice, January 30, 1914.
A patriot to the core, upright and noble, Deroulede rose
superior to discouragements and injustice. He strove not for
gold, but for glory. When defeated, he forgot his disappoint-
ment in resuming the brave fight. Gallic in his bravado and
volatile spirits, he was Latin in his love of authority. Though
asserting his devotion to the Republic, he wished to see it
function under the rule of a chief powerful enough to protect
it against itself. Says Camille Ducray: "This man was a
force compounded of self-reliance and faith in God. In him
the youth of France may find at the most critical moments
inspiration for long years to come. France will never forget
him. His name belongs to history."
OF SOME AMERICANS.
BY JOHN AYSCOUGH.
LL modern novelists, whatever their nationality,
have a filiation to Cervantes, though his parent-
hood may be marked by little or no trace of
family likeness between any of their works and
Don Quixote. Indeed, the unlikeness is, in cer-
tain instances, remarkable. Smolett was a diligent student of
Cervantes and translated him, yet the only resemblance be-
tween him and his master must be sought in the grossness and
cruelty of the practical jokes practised, for wit, on Don
Quixote and, say. Commodore Trunnion.
Dickens and Thackeray were child-students of Don
Quixote in those first years of conscious impression whose
stamp is so enduring. No writer could be more remote from
Cervantes than Thackeray : it would be hard to find anything
in Dickens in the least like Cervantes beyond the fact that the
latter's great work was a roman a these, and that several of
Dickens' works were novels with a purpose.
When we come to the great fictionists of America we
find, as it is natural to find, that they are still further remote
from the first great modern novelist. What signs of descent
from Cervantes can we trace in Washington Irving, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, William Dean Howells, Bret
Harte, Henry James or George Cable?
Between themselves, however, they do show signs of rela-
tionship. All are stylists, though in some of them the effort
to be so is more apparent and the result less successful.
In Washington Irving there is not a great deal beyond the
style: and the style is only excellent here and there. In the
papers grouped together under the heading, of Old Christmas
this writer attains to absolute charm, which is rarely attained
by any writer, by Mrs. Gaskell, for instance, in any one of her
many books, by George Eliot only perfectly attained in Silas
Marner. In Old Christmas Irving's style is at its best because
it is carried by what he has to say: where, as happens in
42 OF SOME AMERICANS [Oct.,
several parts of the Sketch Book, the style has itself to carry
the little or nothing he has to say, it entirely fails, and is
unsuccessful and tedious. The reader, being given little else
to attend to, is forced to admire it, and becomes irritated by
its failure, by its perfunctory quest of epithets, for instance,
and by the flatness and indistinction of the epithets them-
selves.
Of the seven American writers in the inexhaustive group
given above, Bret Harte is the least conscious stylist : because,
I think, he has most to say. His style is, all the same, fine,
and (what matters most) always related to his matter. The
subtlety of its excellence is perhaps best perceived by the
consideration of the company in which it often has to move.
Much of the great writer's work, almost certainly his most
splendid work, deals with very rough humanity, as rough in
speech as in conduct; consider how unflinching is his report
of their talk and of themselves, and note how in it the author's
own English never stoops, slouches or limps. That English
has unfailing clarity, definition and verve, and the singular
merit of complete apparent unconsciousness, as if it arrived
without the writer's eff'ort or summons.
He, less than any of the others in the group, shows rela-
tionship to the rest: though born at Albany he is much less
related to them than George Cable, from far Louisiana:
Howells, from Ohio, is typically New England as a writer.
Cable seems, hardly more than Bret Harte, to have reached
after style, but he attains it, though in a different manner.
His manner is akin to Hawthorne's, and it is almost impossible
to avoid falling into the obvious nickname for him, of the
Hawthorne of the South.
With Bret Harte he has nothing in common except a gift
of appreciation that amounts to affection. Their themes
were too immeasurably distant for similarity. One wrote of
pioneers, mostly of Saxon antecedents: prepotent, lawless, of
exuberant vitality and youth and masculinity. The other of
a people fading, listless, almost consciously dying, of Latin
tradition, Latin refinement, whose refinement was an heir-
loom, almost a relic: or of their slaves, over whom the only
light of refinement that had fallen was itself the wistful
shadow of Latin culture. I have said that Cable's literary
manner has a likeness to Hawthorne's: but his treatment is
1922.] OF SOME AMERICANS 43
diametrically opposite. The Louisianian has a soft and gentle
tenderness for the people whose story he tells musingly: he
loves them. Does Hawthorne love his New Englanders, whose
legend he relates broodingly? He is attracted irresistibly by
their darkest tales, and (what is worse) by their darkest
traits: he is not concerned to put forward what may have
been lovable and human in them, but studiously unearths
what in them revolts by its harshness; if he does not seek
to show them hateful, he is singularly unhappy in his results.
His atmosphere is not merely sad, as that of Gable often is,
but sombre, airless, cellar-like, chill, and at times lingeringly
noisome. No one could question his descent from those who
believed in witches, and had a morbid relish in pondering
them.
No reader can fail to be conscious that his veins were
filled with the blood of those whose preoccupation was con-
stantly more with the devil than with God. The great Enemy
was their theme far more persistently than the great Friend.
Hence, the chronic gloom of their air, a gloom reflected (if
darkness can be reflected) throughout the pages of Hawthorne.
That he was not, in his own person, a man of gloom we are
warmly assured by those who knew him well. None the less
was he obsessed by a black spirit, in his walk as a man of
letters.
I am far from accusing him of loving the Puritans, whose
character he dwells upon with slow, insistent deliberation.
He loved them, probably, no more than he loved Salem, but
he was the son of them and of Salem, and both loomed large
in his ever-recurrent consciousness. He must be forever wit-
nessing the paternity of both.
That Hawthorne was a great writer no man of letters
could deny or doubt. The Scarlet Letter is a great book: yet
a humble admirer of great wTiters and of great books, neither
able to abstain, nor desirous to abstain, from admiring that
book's power and subtlety, may confess frankly that he hates
and deplores it.
The graphic excellence is high. Its character drawing is,
in the main, of eminent distinction: though not all the char-
acters carry, what is the one indispensable quality in char-
acter-drawing, conviction. Little Pearl fails to convince.
Her mother's huSband is, what Hawthorne makes him, a real
H
44 OF SOME AMERICANS [Oct.,
devil: but whether he is a real man, or such a man could
really be, is a different question altogether. Hawthorne calls
up every power he has, strains every nerve of his genius, to
make Roger Chillingworth a devil as complete as Satan him-
self, and in succeeding achieves failure, because the man is
not a man at all. If a great writer chooses to depict a human
being as inhuman, and does what he attempts successfully, he
fails in this wise — what is given as an epic of earth becomes
a phantasm of hell. Ghillingworth's spiritual home was hell,
and on earth he is merely a monster, more monstrous than the
most outrageous ghost. Contrast him with Heathcliff in
Wuthering Heights, and see how vastly the moorland girl,
without experimental knowledge of her kind, has the advan-
tage of the practised man of letters, who had lived among
men all his days.
The two other protagonists of the tragedy are on a far
higher level. Some of the merely incidental portraits are
wonderful — the outline sketch of Mrs. Hibbins, the governor's
sister, for one: though it is seized clutchingly by the author
to indulge his greedy appetite for witch-folk and witch-char-
acter. No wonder the seventeenth century Salemites felt that
dark attraction for the theme, if in their nineteenth century
descendant the force of that attraction shows itself so little
attenuated, so absorbing still.
That brings us to the main ground of our detestation of
one of the most striking works in English-written fiction. Its
theme is not really Hester Prynne, but the devil himself. It
is a meditation on him, his power and his greatness. If it
were written by a devil-worshipper it might be called devout
to servility. If the author were a medicine-man of some devil-
worshipping cult, it could not be more morbidly pathological.
A great sin has been committed: not the greatest con-
ceivable, but one in its nature and its circumstances of terrible
blackness. That sin is the lingering, unvarying theme of the
book. Its savor is kept forever in the mind of the writer,
and in the mouth of the reader. In that alone is a morbidity
that it would be hard to rescue from unwholesomeness, and
can only be rescued in one way, not used by the author.
A great sin in its commission involves the complexity of
the agents and of their diabolic tempter: but Someone Else is
concerned, God Whom the sin has outraged. • Now the whole
1922.] OF SOME AMERICANS 45
of the Scarlet Letter is a meditation upon the sin of Dimmes-
dale and Hester Prynne, and upon the devil, their accomplice
and instigator, with the younger devil, whom their sin creates.
God is ignored.
That, in three words, makes not only the failure, but the
awfulness of the book. The sin was not against Satan, but
against God. He was infinitely more concerned in it than
Satan, a mere fallen angel. Yet He is left outside the story,
as He should not have been if the book were to have been on
the Fall of the Angels.
According to Catholic as to Puritan theology, God is the
Punisher of sin. But He is more, the Pardoner of sin. The
devil in the Scarlet Letter is made the only apparent avenger
of the sin, and no God is there to stoop down and pardon,
and save. Cervantes, the Castilian, could no more have
written the Scarlet Letter than Hawthorne, the devil-med-
itating writer of Salem, could have written Don Quixote.
The Scarlet Letter is ruthlessly cruel. It is a merciless
picture of fallible mankind between the millstone of its own
weakness and the nether-millstone of Satanic omnipotence.
Out of that libelous picture spring blasphemies and atheisms,
whether drawn by this or any other great writer of sombre
genius and perverse power. Omnipotence is divine, and
never has been, nor could be, diabolic.
Had this great writer ever read the story of what hap-
pened in the court of the Temple to another woman whose
sin was the same as Hester Prynne's: when the devil's work
was over, and Jesus Christ's appeared? Ah, for a grain of
that dust, wherein Christ made His only writing, in the hard
searching eyes of this writer of an unhealthy, and so false,
genius ! Is any weak human creature likely to be strengthened
by his fearful book? Must not such a one feel that both sin-
ners in it are punished over much? And must not such an
inevitable feeling tend to condone in his or her judgment the
later (and monstrously incredible) second fall? In the very
case of Chillingworth himself, is not he or. she likely to feel a
perverted, maudlin, mawkish compassion of the same sort
as might be claimed ^*for the puir de'il" himself? a compas-
sion, by the way, that the author has been careful not to sug-
gest for the outraged husband when the outrage was fresh
and keen upon him.
46 OF SOME AMERICANS [Oct.,
The German folk-picture of Satan is that of a stupid and
blundering malignant. Untrue as that picture is of a fallen
archangel, with intellect perverted but not gone, it is in essen-
tial truth, higher than that picture which presents him with
powers commensurate with those of God, at all events with
powers against which man is helpless and hopeless, in an
eternal and necessary minority. Man against devil would
indeed be an unequal combat: but there is no such combat.
It is man plus God versus devil, and there can be no doubt
of where, in that recollection of the fact, the strength must lie.
There are two ways in which Satan works, and always
has worked, against the weak or presumptuous spirit of man :
by deluding it into the ignorance of believing that he himself
is a name for an obsolete idea, a thing never actually existent,
or by terrifying it into the sombre acceptance of his being in
practical verity more potent than God, the real Omnipotence.
To measure the comparative evil of these two falsities is un-
fruitful. But, it would seem, at all events, that the latter is
the more disastrous of the two. It is not, apparently, the
more prevalent of the two among moderns. It was a dis-
tinctive, if unacknowledged, element in Puritanism. In Pur-
itanism the Enemy of mankind received a gross and unholy
flattery: it is hard to perceive what the Puritans thought the
Incarnation had done for mankind, how in it the head of the
serpent had been crushed : how far they really conceived that
the Crucifixion was the devil's triumph, instead of being his
predestined and decisive defeat.
At the head of this article I spoke of the literary descent
of all our modern novelists from Cervantes. He was, while
treating of figments of his exuberant fancy, a Castilian gentle-
man bred in the sanities of the Catholic faith, behind all lies
the cheerful horizon of the Catholic realities: in a thousand
obiter dicta one reads that Cervantes believed, not trembling,
but soundly happy. Might not the works of Hawthorne have
been precisely what they are if there had been no Incarnation?
Over them does not lie "the light that never was on sea or
land," but there broods the darkness that can be invoked from
below even the earth and its inhabitants, by a man of dis-
torted fancy and misled genius who chooses to direct all his
prying downward.
Though one of the protagonists is a Christian minister,
1922.] OF SOME AMERICANS 47
the book is un-Christian : its religion is, if it is anything,
Judaic. Behind that Judaic cloud the Divine Light is utterly
obscured: the Divine Mercy is ignored and the warmth and
healing of Divine Goodness. Kindness, humanism are not
suffered to bear the part they would have borne.
Hawthorne wrote other books. They have the same
literary quality, in each in its degree the same sort of
literary power. In general, they are darkened by something
of the same atmosphere, the presence of which is their bane,
though its absence might deprive them of their force, and
certainly would rob them of their character. For it is a lurid
air, heavy, sulphurous: stifling respiration, inimical to life
and health.
They present a series of pictures admirable in intensity,
remarkable and impossible to confuse with the pictures of any
other artist. Their brooding quietude is not dull, though it is
so intense that, even where there is action, there seems to be
none: and each sketch hardly appears to be a tale, but rather
to be a picture only, without motion, and indeed mostly
without color, a picture black and gray. Hawthorne is no-
where more skillful than in The House of the Seven Gables,
and nowhere is his power more morbidly shown. Mosses from
an Old Manse and Tanglewood Tales may have slightly less of
his genius, and may have proportionately less morbidity.
Nothing that he wrote oould have been written by a common
writer: he is always, in all his work, a craftsman of the
highest class : and all his work has the same unbaptized qual-
ity and spirit.
To The Scarlet Letter is prefixed a lengthy sketch, longer
than some of his stories, called The Custom House. It brought
upon him, we are told in its reprint, an angry storm of pro-
test. But it is as well worth reading as anything he wrote,
and is more satisfactory reading than much that he wrote.
The character-pictures are excellent, and (what his pictures
are not very commonly) highly entertaining and humorsome.
They are not drawn with a sparing pen; in some cases, notably
one, they are pretty merciless, and that they aroused resent-
ment is not surprising, though Hawthorne himself puts on a
childlike air of surprise at the resentment he reports: but
they are human and real, and afford a strong hint of what the
author could have done, had he chosen to be a novelist of
48 OF SOME AMERICANS [Oct.,
ordinary life and discarded his mania for the abnormal, the
monstrous, the subterranean.
Hawthorne was over fifty years George Cable's senior:
Twicetold Tales was published seven years before the South-
ern writer's birth. Mosses from an Old Manse before Gable
was two years old. The Scarlet Letter before he was six, The
House of the Seven Gables before he was seven. Without
knowing any of the intimate details of Gable's life, I feel
perfectly safe in assuming that he had read the New Eng-
lander's work before he started his own : and more than that,
it strongly influenced him, directing his aim at a style, and
(in a far distant area) suggesting a choice of subjects — I do
not mean of themes.
His style, however, became simpler than Hawthorne's, less
labored, less self-conscious. As for his subjects, he sought
them, as the New Englander found his, near at hand. His
Greoles have as much genuine likeness to each other, and as
much specific difference, or variety, among themselves as
Hawthorne's IS^ew Englanders. He is more thoroughly con-
cerned with themselves than with their actions, though he
reports enough of their action for his purpose and their illus-
tration. He is as much inclined to reverie as Hawthorne him-
self, but though he muses as much over his people, he broods
less. He is oftener pathetic and seldomer gloomy. Indeed,
Hawthorne is a singular illustration of the wide difference
between gloom and pathos. Perhaps, no great writer is so
often gloomy, or so rarely pathetic. In spite of the oppres-
sive melancholy of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the
Seven Gables, they are marvelously devoid of pathos. Gable,
while choosing subjects of characteristic quietness, with little
and silent action, never fails to make them interesting. This,
an ordinary reader, not much attracted by psychology or
analysis, cannot always say of Hawthorne's tales: they have,
by such readers, to be studied with purpose and persistence.
Gable can be read with ease and without effort by any reader,
though his characterization is not at all inferior in subtlety,
^ertainly equal in delicacy and depth, to that of the more
illustrious writer : perhaps because the Southern author has a
grace of spontaneity in his presentation of character denied to
the other.
To me the Louisianian seems more graceful altogether, as
1922.] OF SOME AMERICANS 49
he is more tender and more touching. The indefinable charm
that he throws, like a raiment that forms a part rather than an
ornament of themselves, about his women is' to seek in Haw-
thorne. Hester Prynne is more virile than Arthur Dimmes-
dale, and she is the most elaborate study of a woman Haw-
thorne has attempted.
Cable has also a tender grace of compassionateness, which
forms indeed almost the atmosphere of his whole scenery,
and may be a part or an efflorescence of that gift of femininity
bestowed on some of the greatest writers and denied to many,
which Shakespeare never fails of, which Thackeray never
gained, which Browning showed miraculously in Pompilia.
Its expression is never the floridity which Byron complained
of in Washington Irving to George Bancroft, while commend-
ing his style all the same.
It was, indeed, the floridity of Irving's style that was its
bane: if he had burned half his descriptions, the remainder
would be more welcome, and if in that remainder he had
discarded sixty per cent, of the lines and eighty per cent, of
the epithets, it would have been nearer securing the admir-
ation he was trudging after. Like Gable, he wais a reverist,
and he was at his best when calling up reveries of vanished
days and half-forgotten people. Byron, a very sane and in-
stinctive critic, pitched at once upon the Knickerbocker
Papers for warm and frank eulogy.
To Edgar Allen Foe from Gable and Hawthorne may seem
a far cry: and he is in truth different enough from either.
They were intrinsically American. Anyone reading him for
the first time must be struck by the impression that his inspir-
ation was French, as French as the inspiration of what is best
in the newer street architecture of New York. Yet he had
never read, and could never have read that which in French
literature seems most akin to him. He was dead seven and
twenty years before L* Affaire Leroiige was written. Gaboriau
could not have inspired him, though he may well have in-
spired Gaboriau.
Whether Foe had read Balzac in French, I do not know,
but I am certain he had read him. Nevertheless, Foe was
original, and his own master. Howe^^er clearly we recognize
that and insist upon it, it remains true that his literary affin-
ities are Latin, not North American or English. Especially,
VOL. CXVI. 4
50 OF SOME AMERICANS [Oct.,
though only partly, is this illustrated in his characterization,
which is always more akin in method and treatment to the
French than the American fashion, or the British. He de-
scribes character from without, not, like Hawthorne, from
within. His characterization is objective. With all the Amer-
ican psychological novelists it is subjective. It is, however,
also true that Poe is not entirely without relation to Haw-
thorne. Though a New Englander, and by birth quite a near
neighbor of Hawthorne, there is nothing of the great New
Englander's spirit in Poe. He goes far from New England
for his themes. The old Puritans obsess him not at all. Yet,
after all, he has Hawthorne's leaning to gloom of subject, he
turns almost instinctively, certainly impulsively, to the dark,
mysterious, clouded, abnormal. He is never willingly cheer-
ful, never humorous. He tosses disdainfully aside the happy :
wholesome lightness can only, he assumes, be tedious and dull.
He loves to handle the criminal, and handle it with a mastery
that is swifter than Hawthorne's, less gloating and studious,
but not much, if at all, less comprehensive and exact. He is,
however, less absorbed by the criminal than Hawthorne; it is
the crime he considers rather than the criminal, and is more
concerned with how it was done than with how it affected the
criminal who did it. This is only to repeat that Poe handles
his argument objectively and Hawthorne subjectively.
As a man, Hawthorne was wholesome and vigorous. Poor
Poe was far from that. Yet as a writer Poe was less un-
wholesome and more vigorous than Hawthorne : he was more
virile, and attained his results by a stronger method, with less
delay and labor. His lines and contours are bolder, his figures
require less description by the author, explaining themselves
more straightforwardly. They are, of course, often of a
coarser fibre than Hawthorne's, but by no means invariably
so. Above all, they are vital, not dream figures of spectral
gesture wading at us out of chill mists.
Poe's own figure belongs to the tragedy of letters. His
misfortunes cannot be laid at any door but his own. His life-
long enemy was himself. He had to bear the pangs of utter
penury; he had to endure the terrible anguish of his wife's
death, after ten years of marriage, though she was only
twenty-four when he lost her: but it cannot be said that he
was broken by calamity; he broke himself. His story is poig-
1922.] OF SOME AMERICANS 51
nantly wretched. Only the very sternly pitiless can abstain
from pitying him. His nature was tainted, but it was not evil.
He was not wicked. He died, still quite a young man, a prey
to deepest remorse: yet many have passed to their judgment
with far less sorrow for far more faults. He was chaste in his
own life, as he was clean in his written word.
Vilified unfairly after his death, he was not friendless
during life, but he was one of those, not rare, unfortunates
whom friendship can hardly serve effectually. His life, sad
as it was, was not loveless. He was loved loyally and tenderly
in his home, and by those who knew him best and must have
known his faults best. Though he could not rely upon him-
self any more than his friends could rely upon him, upon his
sobriety or his effort, yet he could work hard and well for a
year together, he could be sober, industrious, patient during
periods, till the reckless collapse of effort, patience, sobriety
came. Fortunately his judgment rests neither with biog-
raphers nor critics.
His genius is not open to attack. It was much greater
than himself, though not extremely unlike himself — the best
part of himself. He had ideality, too; he had a singular gift
of ratiocination and the rare faculty of clothing it with absorb-
ing interest. He was a capable critic. In American poetry
he must take a very high place.
But his greatest work, and his most expressive, is to be
found in his tales. In them he is wild, eccentric, but the eccen-
tricity and wildness are genuine and real, it is never posed or
assumed with self-conscious effort. It is not labored, but
splendidly spontaneous and natural. His wildest tales, there-
fore, interest unfailingly because they appear true. The
reader supposes they are true, not worked up from some
nucleus of fancy. The eccentricity has never the insult of
affectation. When he is fantastic, he is not impertinent. He
is often macabre: but not often morbid. Though he descend
for his theme into the very charnel-house, I do not find that
one rises from the reading of him with odors of mortality in
one's nostrils, the taste of corruption in one's mouth. At any
rate, the mortality he treats of is that of the body; he does not
lingeringly ponder the death of the soul.
He is as great a master of atmosphere as Hawthorne, and
sometimes renders it with greater mastery than Hawthorne,
52 OF SOME AMERICANS [Oct.,
who is not, even in The House of the Seven Gables, with all its
elaboration, so successful in this sort as Poe is in the much
briefer, hastier Fall of the House of Usher. The aim, of
course, is not the same in the two stories : one is to induce an
impression of spiritual horror, the other to excite an almost
physical dread.
Poe can be physically ghoulish. Hawthorne was ghoulish
in the ethical order. Neither success can be ranked among
the most wholesome of achievements, but the unwholesome-
ness of Poe's seems to me less stagnant, malarious, than Haw-
thorne's. Both authors leaned, one in the natural (or the
preternaturnal) order, the other in the spiritual, to the mon-
strous, the ghastly, the abnormal. Poe cared to surprise, and
could do it when he meant to do it. Hawthorne prefers to
neglect that element of interest, and has the more arduous
ambition of sustaining suspense without it.
Henry James and William Dean Howells were born as far
asunder as New York and Martin's Ferry in Ohio: but they
belong to the same school in literature — how far intentionally
cannot profitably be surmised. Howells was the elder man by
half a dozen years, and had published Their Wedding Jour-
ney, A Chance Acquaintance and a Foregone Conclusion
before the younger produced The American. But it is not
suggested that the senior's work had any effect whatever on
the junior. As to copying, no one can imagine Henry James
ever copying any writer but himself, which he did with fervor
and fidelity to the end.
Whether Howells regarded James as his literary superior
I cannot tell: many other people undoubtedly did, and do so
decide their relative positions in the Table of Precedency in
letters. But I am not so sure of the infallibility of that pro-
nouncement. Henry James was the more meticulous crafts-
man, but his work tends to the undesirable climax of contain-
ing hardly anything but craftsmanship. The most perfect
ebeniste must have wood to work on, and if he insists on dis-
carding all but the tiniest chips, he ends by producing only
amazing little boxes. They may astound by the perfection
of their form and of their polish, one realizes with deep
respect the pains and skill that have gone to their completion :
but they don't hold much.
Howells wrote with care and a certain trim neatness.
1922.] OF SOME AMERICANS 53
often delightfully, never boisterousl3% funny and entertaining;
he was far, very far, from being a sloven, or being hasty, in
his work: but he has a story to get on with, and liked to get
on with it; so do his readers, for his story is commonly worth
reading if not quite always worth writing, and it interests.
To change the metaphor — the majority of us do not care
so much for the mechanism of a watch as to look at its face
and ascertain promptly what time of day it is. Mr. James was
a little too much of a watchmaker, and cared too much to bid
us consider his minute skill in fashioning its insides. Your
desire to be told what o'clock it is, he thought impertinent
and trivial.
Neither of these authors is consistently equal to himself.
Perhaps Mr. James is at his best when at his biggest, when his
book is biggest: and Mr. How ells at his best when his work
is least protracted. I think both lost in interest what they
gained in experience. But Mr. Howells did not attain, with the
loss of freshness, that portentous, immaculate perfection that
Mr. James did attain.
For aught, I can surmise, it may seem to the genuine de-
votee of Henry James flat heresy to admire The American of
1878 more than The Ambassador of 1903, but I confess to that
heresy if it be one. And for me Washington Square has a
charm that its author never attained again. The Portrait of
a Lady, belonging to the same year, is more attractive than
The Bostonians of five years later, or What Marie Knew of
sixteen years later. So is Daisy Miller, of 1878, attractive,
though in it James had certainly not entered upon his rich
inheritance of fineness of manner. Like Jane Austen, he
chose to be a miniaturist, but he never attained her subtle,
spontaneous mastery of the elected medium. He fell short
of charm, which the miniature demands and whose absence
cannot be excused in it. Nor was it literary tact to treat in
miniature style some of the themes he selected. He shrank
from strength or depth of situation: as scrupulously, though
less naturally and instinctively, as Jane Austen shrank from
tragedy or pathos. That restraint in her we feel to be wisdom
and a sense of fitness. The male writer's abstention looks
more like timidity, and even contraction of purview. Tragedy
would be out of place in Jane Austen's dramatis personse,
pathos out of drawing. But there was room, even occasion,
54 OF SOME AMERICANS [Oct.,
for them among some of Henry James' people. He is, like
the Veneering's butler, an Analytical Chemist, and a me-
ticulous workman at his profession.
Howells, but much less obviously, because much less la-
boriously, was also an analyst. His fingers and pen do not
smell of the analytical laboratory and, using a somewhat
broader method, he seems to have more vigor than James.
Though Jane Austen discards the use of any violence of
event, and relies entirely on the presentation of character in
absolutely normal situations, she is too confident of power to
be verbose. A character is present to our realization in a
phrase or two : it takes Mr. James' reams of insistence to con-
vince us of many of his characters. Words were Miss Austen's
delighted servants, and came at her briefest call to do her
work instantaneously: words were Mr. James' rather tyran-
nical masters, keeping him a good deal on the stretch and
taking a good deal out of him — though it was a labor of love.
Not one line of Miss Austen's could be removed without in-
jury to the page, nor one word out of any line without loss.
Many lines could be excised out of many of Mr. James' stories,
without the least injury to the whole. His profusion is less
generous than extravagant. In very few instances does he
even wish to be powerful. In the Aspern Papers he does
wish it, and who can say he fails? But, if he is there power-
ful, is he not also unpleasant?
In that short book he conveys, with a success rarely
achieved by him, a special and peculiar atmosphere. And
that atmosphere is both local and moral. The interaction of
the local and the moral is given with real mastery. It is
grim and boding: it chills and horrifies. It is ruthless and
repulsive. It is everything the writer intended. Here he
rises to genuine power, whereas, in general, he arrives at only
portentous skill: but the power is so successfully unpleasant
that one cannot regret that the writer achieves it so seldom.
On the whole, one questions if he were so much a great author
as a first-rate man of letters.
I am not aware that anyone has called Howells a groat
author: as a man of letters he cannot be ranked on anything
like the same level as Henry James. But as an author he had
advantages over James. He had more humor, and his humor
was more easy and unstrained. To the general reader he is
1922.] OF SOME AMERICANS 55
easier reading (a thing that always counts in fiction). His
portraiture is much less labored. He can be acute with less
trouble. He can be epigrammatic with less obvious intention.
In analysis, to which he betook himself when there was no
imperative call to that function of the novelist, he was less
toilsome than James, but often more tedious. His portraits
are often striking, often amusing: but, with all his analysis,
he did not always catch with genuine sympathy what greater
artists would have seen in his sitters. If he makes us think of
Henry James, he does not make us think of George Eliot, nor
of the authoress of the perfect Cranford. But who would not
be sorry if the Aroostook had foundered before Mr. Howells
had been able to draw the picture of The Lady, who was her
passenger? Who so narrow as not to be interested in the
rise of Silas Lapham, in whose portrait just that qualiiy of
sympathy is a-wanting of which, a moment ago, we spoke?
A Chance Acquaintance, A Foregone Conclusion, Their
Wedding Journey, A Counterfeit Presentment — ^who that cares
to read real books, would not care to read these? Their truth
and sanity, their cheerfulness and wholesomeness, their hu-
manity, their absence of pose or bookishness, their pleasant-
ness, their ease of movement, their wit and fun, how much all
these qualities in them attract, retain and please the reader!
The Undiscovered Country has a darker, perhaps a deeper
atmosphere. It is, to use a pompous, rather creaky, reviewer's
expression, a human document by no means insignificant or
unimportant: it is interesting; but it departs from some of the
characteristics that please in the smaller books first cited.
Grimness of scene does not suit the author's genius so well,
nor murkiness of atmosphere. It is, we feel en route, an ex-
cursion with a purpose, and the author (like some of the
greatest) has more than he can manage in the attempt to
handle a roman a these. A Modern Instance is hardly so good
as its name: it may be said that this author's book-titles are
singularly happy.
It is highly tantalizing to the writer of this brief consider-
ation of some American authors to be compelled by the limits
of space, to do so little more than cite their names. Of one
of them, Bret Harte, he will not write till he can do so at less
haste, and less meagrely.
DEMOCRACY.
BY MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN.
I.
Straight to our souls the solemn splendor speeds-
An arrow quivering with a fervent light,
A perfumed jasmine-flower, gold and white —
(I hear a murmur as of praying reeds,
I see His lilies where the faint soul feeds —
The rose of love, the burning sword of might!)
O Beauty ever shining in our sight —
That holds the balm and solace of our needs.
The Mass! the Song, the one eternal Song —
That Solomon, the Poet, longed to sing.
It bears us like a boundless, surging sea.
With Love, our pilot, steadily along.
Unto His heart! — here kneel the clown, the king,
Each close to God, each equal, and each free!
n.
Slowly he passed, the last priest in the line,
With stately steps, a figure from the brush
Of Philip of Champagne — there fell a hush
Before the organ spoke in a divine
Recessional — his lace of point so fine
That a slight grasp might all its beauty crush
Stirred at the thrilling of the organ-thrush;
And came this thought: "There walks of Pride the Sign!'
The day declines; against the dusky wall
Stands the confessional; the tinted light abates,
Outside, a rumbling car, the creak of wheels,
A childish song, the seeking mother's call;
Inside, in patience, the proud prelate waits
To shrive the negro boy, who, praying, kneels.
A DOCTOR OF SALAMANCA.
BY D. C. N.
NE day in early March of this year, the historic
old University of Salamanca was the scene of a
remarkable and unique ceremony. A woman
was made a Doctor of Salamanca, and, stranger
still, a woman dead these three hundred years!
All the pomp and grandeur of an University function en-
hanced the brilliancy of the occasion. The Reverend Doctors
of the Faculty, the titled grandees of the Court of Madrid,
representing the King and the royal family, the municipal-
ities of Avila and of Salamanca, the highest ecclesiastical
dignitaries of the Church in Spain, all gathered within its
venerable walls that day. The world-famed University, which
dates from the twelfth century, was about to grant its most
coveted degree of Doctor of Theology and confer the symbolic
Cap and Hood and Ring upon Spain's greatest daughter,
Teresa de Ahumada, the glorious St. Teresa of Jesus.
It is a stately pile, the old University, with a wonderfully
carved facade, through whose portals all that is best and
noblest in the intellectual life of Spain has passed since St.
Ferdinand, King of Leon, by Letters Patent, April 6, 1243, took
the professors, students and their property under his royal
protection and became its real founder. Then began for it a
time of unrivaled prosperity, which for centuries, as Denifle
says, made the University "the glory of Spain." Salamanca
was under the control of the bishop, and even as late as 1830
the academic titles were conferred in the name of the Pope
and King both. Pope Martin V., in the fifteenth century,
numbered it among the four greatest universities of the world.
In the following century, its courses of theology drew all eyes
upon it : it was its **Siglo de oro." In the seventeenth century
it was the home of the "Salmanticenses" — those famous Car-
melite theologians — whose monumental work St. Alphonsus
quotes approvingly, and which has ever been esteemed at
Rome as a standard work on Thomistic Scholasticism.
58 A DOCTOR OF SALAMANCA [Oct.,
And now in the tercentenary year of the canonization of
St. Teresa of Jesus, the famous old University, eager to add
one ray to the glory which envelopes the dazzling figure of
**La Santa," arranged this unparalleled honor to her memory.
It has often been said that St. Teresa would long ago have
been proclaimed a Doctor of the Church, but her sex forbids.
The Church has indeed esteemed and accepted her as a
teacher — a teacher of prayer and of mystical theology — and
in the Liturgy prays God "that we may be nourished by the
food of her heavenly doctrine." "God Almighty so filled her
with the spirit of understanding, that she not only bequeathed
to the Church the example of her good works, but she be-
dewed it with the heavenly wisdom of her treatises on mystical
theology" (Bull of Canonization) . "Whoever wishes to lead a
life of holiness," wrote Pius X. of immortal memory, "let him
but study these, and he will have need of no others. For in
them this renowned mistress of piety points out a safe path
of Christian life from its inception up to the consummation
and perfection of virtue; she sets down accurately the ways
best suited for correcting vicious habits, quelling boisterous
passions, and effacing the defilements of sin; and she puts
before the reader every enticement to virtue. And, in ex-
plaining all these matters, she at once shows her admirable
knowledge of things divine, and gives proof of her intimate
acquaintance with the nature of the human soul, its recesses,
its inner workings" (Apostolic Letter of Pius X. to the Order
of Discalced Carmelites, March 7, 1914) .
The "Golden Age" of Salamanca has departed; today it is
a little town of perhaps twenty-five thousand inhabitants. Its
two Cathedrals, the Basilica of San Vincente and the church
and monastery of the Dominicans may be seen from afar.
The old Roman bridge of twenty-six arches still spans the
Tormes as it did in St. Teresa's day, for the Saint once trod
the streets of Salamanca, and her spirit is ever living in the
Monastery of her Reform, which she herself founded in the
shadow of the great University whose proudest boast she
now is.
The story of the foundation of the Carmel of Salamanca
has been told by St. Teresa in the nineteenth chapter of the
Book of Foundations, but "es cosa sabrosa" ^ as she so
1 Letter to F. Gra^an, October 31, 1576.
1922.] A DOCTOR OF SALAMANCA 59
naively says, it is so absorbingly interesting that it bears re-
telling.
It was in the year 1570. Teresa was fifty-five years old,
and had been occupied with the divinely-imposed task of the
Reform of Carmel since 1562. She was resting at Toledo
after the establishment of two houses at Pastrana, one for the
friars and one for the nuns, when a letter from Father Mar-
tin Gutierrez, the Rector of the Jesuit College at Salamanca,
reached her with an urgent request to come to that city. The
poverty of the place had hitherto deterred the Saint from
seeking to establish a house dependent for subsistence on
alms; the townspeople chiefly supported themselves by fur-
nishing board and lodging for the students (about ten thou-
sand of them) , who were most frequently in arrears with their
payments.
However, trusting in God, "Who never abandons, nor ever
will abandon anyone who serves Him,"^ and moved by the
weighty reasons adduced by Father Gutierrez, the Saint easily
obtained the permission of the bishop, Don Pedro Gongalez
de Mendoza, and set about renting a house to receive the
nuns. It is not difficult to imagine that St. Teresa found
peculiar satisfaction in the thought of this monastery, near
the great University where her daughters might have the spir-
itual direction of Spain's first theologians, a matter of primary
importance in her eyes. Piety without knowledge may lead
to delusions, and from puerile devotions she wished her nuns
to be free, **de devociones a bobas, nos libre, DiosT ^
A good-sized house was secured and the Saint set out very
quietly with one companion, Mary of the Blessed Sacrament,
to take possession. The house was inhabited by students, and
it was extremely troublesome to persuade them to vacate it
at once, as no reason was assigned for this summary ejection;
the utmost secrecy was observed by the Saint on such occa-
sions, until the nuns had safely taken possession of the new
Carmel. However, her friends exerted themselves so success-
fully that towards dusk on the eve of All Saints, 1570, the
house, "in a very unseemly state," was left empty for the two
nuns. There was no slight work to be done to make it ready
for Mass next morning, even though Father Gutierrez sent two
of the Fathers to assist in preparing the chapel, for the students
2 Foundations, ch. xvili., edited by John J, Burke, C.S.P.
8LV«, ch. xlll., 24, edited by John J. Burke, C.S.P.
60 A DOCTOR OF SALAMANCA [Oct.,
"had little regard for cleanliness." On November 1st the
Rector, Father Gutierrez, said the first Mass — a precious mem-
ory through the years, for less than three years (1573) later,
he was to shed his blood for the Faith at the hands of the
French Huguenots. More nuns were sent for from Medina
that same day, but the Saint and her companion spent All
Souls' night alone in the vast and deserted old house. Sister
Mary was very timid, and could not get the students out of her
thoughts, fearing lest some of them might still be hiding in
the many rambling garrets. All the church bells of Sala-
manca tolling for the dead did not add to the cheerfulness of
the situation. "We shut ourselves up in a room wherein the
straw was placed, that being the first thing I provided for the
founding of the house, for with the straw we could not fail
to have a bed. That night we slept on it, covered with two
blankets that had been lent to us.* When my companion
saw herself shut up in the room she seemed somewhat at her
ease about the students, though she did nothing but look about
her, first on this side, and then on the other ... I asked her
why she was looking about, seeing that nobody could pos-
sibly come in. She replied: *Mother, I am thinking, if I were
to die now, what you would do all alone.' I thought it would
be a very disagreeable thing if it happened. It made me dwell
on it for a moment, and even to be afraid, for, though I am
not afraid of dead bodies, they always cause a certain faint-
ness of the heart even when I am not alone. And, as the bells
were tolling — it was as I have said the eve of All Souls — the
devil took advantage of that to make us waste our thoughts
upon trifles. ... I answered her: *Sister, when that shall
happen I will consider what I shall do; now let me go to
sleep.' " '^ A typical Teresian answer !
One of the much dreaded students later became Bishop
of Barbastro, Juan Moriz, and his "Supplica'' for St. Teresa's
canonization has come down to us : it is addressed to Paul V.,
and is dated 1611: "It is with special joy that I have received
the Briefs of Your Holiness for the canonization of the vener-
able virgin, Teresa of Jesus. It is now forty years, since a
student at Salamanca, I left the house I occupied for this
blessed Mother, who had come to found a monastery of her
religious. From that time I have had for her the greatest
4 By the Jesuit Fathers. s Foundations, ch. xix., 5.
1922.] A DOCTOR OF SALAMANCA 61
devotion, both because of her heroic virtues and for the
striking miracles that God has granted, and still grants every
day, through her intercession." ^
With the arrival of Mother Anne of the Incarnation, and
Sister Mary of Christ from Medina, Hieronyma of Jesus from
Vallodolid, Anne of Jesus and Juana of Jesus from Avila, and
Mary of St. Francis from Toledo, the monastery of St. Joseph
of Salamanca was provided with a community after the
Seraphic Mother's own heart, but the house proved very un-
healthy, damp and excessively cold. Before a remedy for
this evil could be sought, obedience called St. Teresa to the
foundation of Alba de Tormes in January, 1571. Returning
almost immediately to her distressed Sisters at Salamanca,
she was obliged to stop on her way at the Castle of the Count
of Monterey, the Countess having secured the permission of
the Provincial to have her in her house. During her brief
stay at the Castle, two miracles are recorded of the Saint : one
was in favor of the little daughter of her hosts, whose life was
despaired of. The Saint prayed for the child, and, in vision,
St. Dominic and St. Catherine appeared to her, assuring her
that her prayer was answered, and that the child would
recover. The "miraculee" lived to become the mother of the
celebrated Olivarez.
Scarcely had she regained her beloved cloister when a
longer separation from her Sisters awaited the obedient Saint.
Her Superiors recalled her as Prioress of the Incarnation at
Avila, and once more she was forced to leave the nuns in their
misery. "In none of the monasteries of the Primitive Rule,
which Our Lord has hitherto founded, have the nuns had so
much to suffer," ^ is her own statement of the affairs at Sala-
manca. Indeed, seeing the troubles they had to bear, the
Apostolic Visitor, Fray Pedro Hernandez, had compassion on
them, and in 1573 sent the Saint back to them. They were
negotiating for another house, and her presence was urgently
required.
The Saint, in company with a nun of the Incarnation,
Julian of Avila, her devoted and self-constituted chaplain,
and several others, set out once more for Salamanca. The
journey was by night to escape the intolerable heat of the
August sun, and the manuscript accounts tell us how the
« Ano TeresUH9, v»l. t., May 6th. 7 Foundations, ch. xix., 10.
62 A DOCTOR OF SALAMANCA [Oct.,
angels lighted the dangerous stretches of road for the privi-
leged spouse of the Lord of the angels. During her absence,
St. Teresa had received that most exalted of supernatural
favors — the mystical espousals® — but her marvelous interior
life, which lifted her into another world, where she walked
alone with her Lord, did not prevent her from being the most
charming traveling companion imaginable! As the talented
daughter of John Boyle O'Reilly writes: "She was not in the
least a withered ascetic, but a well-bred Castilian lady of
winning manner and pleasing appearance, who, in courtesy,
dignity and simplicity, embodied in herself the best of Castile.
Her robust virility of mind, her complete absence of self-con-
sciousness, help us to understand the love she roused among
her nuns, and the respect she gained from the foremost men of
her time." ® No one could be sad in Teresa's company, "God
deliver me from frowning souls — Dios me libre de santos en-
capotados** she exclaims.^*'
On reaching Salamanca, Teresa visited the proposed
house, and, finding it quite suitable, quickly concluded the
bargain. There were many changes to be made, and a chapel
to be built, and, hasten the work as she could, it was the end
of September before the transfer was effected. There is an
anecdote told in connection with the alterations, which makes
hard reading for our modern zealous prohibitionists! The
master carpenter, in charge of the building, Pedro Hernandez,
deposed for the Saint's beatification. He had twenty or
twenty-two workmen employed, he relates, when one day
the Saint came to a window nearby and bade him give his
men something to drink. He answered her that wine was too
expensive, costing a real and a half a pint (a real was worth
about thirty-four marauedis), and that he had many work-
men. However, he sent for enough to give two marauedis
worth to each man, and took the precaution of increasing his
scanty supply with an addition of water. He poured out the
portion for each, and had but three or four more to serve,
when, glancing in his jug, he perceived that it was as full as
when he commenced. At this moment, the Saint returned to
the window to inquire if he had done as she desired. "Yes,
Mother," he replied, "but I think it has happened as at the
i Relations, ch. iii., 20. q Heroic Spain, p. 184.
10 Unpublished MS. of Anne of St. Bartholomew.
1922.] A DOCTOR OF SALAMANCA 63
wedding-feast of Gana, and the water has been changed to
wine!" "Hush," said the Saint, *'it is God Who has done
this.'' "It is easy to see that He has good helpers," returned
the carpenters, and calling to his men he exclaimed: "Drink,
brothers, your fill, for this is a wine of benediction!" He re-
filled the glasses, and tlie wine was not exhausted.^^
On the twenty-eighth of September, the Carmelites moved
into their new quarters in a downpour of rain, which revealed
to them that the roof of the chapel was unfinished, for the
sanctuary was quickly flooded. All the notables of Sala-
manca had been invited for the ceremony to take place the
next morning, and it was impossible to prepare an altar in the
inundation. Venerable Anne of Jesus, in her juridical depo-
sition for her blessed Mother's beatification, relates what oc-
curred: "Eight o'clock struck, and our holy Mother was still
looking at the roof of the chapel, through which the rain was
penetrating. I came to her with two other nuns, and said to
her very firmly : *You know. Reverend Mother, how much there
is to be done before tomorrow; you really might beg of God to
stop the rain, so as to give us time to arrange the altars.'
Then if it is so necessary, you should pray hard,' she said, a
little annoyed by the confidence I had so openly expressed in
her prayers. I left her, and had hardly returned to a neigh-
boring courtyard when I looked out and saw a cloudless sky,
looking as if it had never rained. I went straight back,
and said to her in the presence of the same witnesses: 'Your
Reverence might really have asked for this fine weather a
little sooner!' This time the Saint went away laughing, with-
out saying a word."
With the installation of the community in the new con-
vent, we might well take leave of the Carmel of Salamanca,
but its memories of its great **Fundadora** are too tempting.
In the spiritual Relations addressed to her confessors, there
is one to Father Gutierrez which gives an account of the graces
she received at Salamanca, chief among them being the won-
derful favor granted her one Palm Sunday, when the Host
liquefied in her mouth, and it was her Lord's will that the
Blood shed in such suffering should ravish her with Its exces-
sive sweetness.^2 But the last days of that Holy Week were
passed in indescribable anguish, in that mystical pain of "the
n Inform, of Salamanca. 12 Relations, ch. iv., 5.
64 A DOCTOR OF SALAMANCA fOot.,
absence of God," in a loneliness and solitude so profound that,
with the Psalmist, she could exclaim: **Vigilavi, et f actus sum
sicut passer solitarius in tecto." ^^ Even Easter brought her no
consolation, but, hiding the agony of her soul longing for its
Beloved, she went to recreation with her daughters. As was
her custom on great feasts, she asked one of the Sisters to
sing. Isabelle of Jesus, a novice, sang so sweetly of the suf-
fering of living without God, that Teresa was rapt out of
herself. The little hymn is well known in Spain :
VSanos mis ojos,
Dulce Jesus bueno;
V^anos mis ojos,
Y mu^rame luego.^*
At the refrain —
Only to see Thee, O Beauty divine!
For this I would gladly dit —
the eff'ect was such that, as previously, the Saint had known
ecstasies of joy, so now her soul was thrown into a trance
through the excessive pain. The nuns bore her to her cell,
and on coming to herself the following day, the hymn, known
as her **gloso,*' broke forth from the depths of her love-
wounded soul, with its piercing refrain: "I die because I
cannot die!"
Fenelon says that the accounts given by St. Teresa are
"not a story, but a picture," ^^ and if this be so, the nuns she
trained may well be its frame. The Prioress at Salamanca
was Mother Anne of the Incarnation, Anne de Tapia, a cousin
of the Saint, who was accustomed to say to her : "God reward
you, my daughter, for training such excellent religious for
me;" for from Salamanca many foundresses were drawn, and
its mission seemed to be the propagation of the Reform. Ven-
erable Anne of Jesus, whom the holy Mother called "her joy
and her crown," and whom St. John of the Cross, her con-
fessor, compared to a seraph, carried it thence into France
in 1604, and into the Low Countries in 1607; while another
religious of Salamanca, Mother Hieronyma of the Holy Spirit,
13 Psalm cl. 8. 14 AZ Pii del Altar, D. Miguel Mir.
15 Sermon for Feast of St. Teresa.
1922.] THE SISTER OF MERCY 65
went into Italy and founded a Reformed Carmel at Genoa in
1590.^«
The house first occupied by the great Reformatrix (Oc-
tober 31, 1570), known today as the "Casa de Santa Teresa,"
is now the property of the Marquis of Gastellac. A community
of Servants of St. Joseph, consecrated to the education of
young girls, has possession of it, and they have transformed
the cell of St. Teresa into an oratory, while over the porte-
cochere may be seen the window of the large hall, in which
the Saint and her companion spent that night of terror caused
by the students of the University which, on March 4, 1922, pro-
claimed her Doctor "honoris causa."
16 Reforma de los Descalzos, vol. iii., book ix., c. 2. Historia Generalis, by the
Congregation of St. Eliae, vol. 1., book 1., c. 32.
THE SISTER OF MERCY.
BY LAURA SIMMONS.
Mine are the broken ones of earth; the poor, the crucified —
Grant me unstinted love, oh, Christ, lest one should be denied!
Behold my alabaster box — my ointment rare and sweet —
My gifts of price wherewith I kneel before Thy holy Feet !
My eager feet — they may not tread the shores of Galilee,
But make them swift in bitter need — tireless in serving Thee!
And when, perchance, with weary limbs and spirit faint I stand —
Help me to bear my cross alone, Thou of the pierced Hand!
To see Thee face to face! sometimes my heart cries out in vain;
And yet, oh, soul of mine, rejoice! be comforted again!
Have I not known in vigils sad beside some anguished bed
The mystic, lovely Radiance of that sorrowing, thorn-crowned
Head?
VOL. CXVI. 5
mM
THE COMEDY OF EVOLUTION.
BY JAMES J. WALSH, M,D., PH.D.
ALFRED WATTERSON McCANN has recently
given us a distinctly up-to-the-minute book in
its digest and collation of works treating of evo-
lution.^ He has provided for the reading public a
treasure house of quotations. Even a cursory
perusal of the book leaves no doubt that its author has read
through the literature of evolution thoroughly, and knows it
as probably very few professed evolutionists do, except pos-
sibly teachers of biology, whose business it is to be constantly
occupied with it.
The inevitable conclusion, after reading the book, is that
the whole theory of evolution, as it exists in the available
literature issued by scientists, is a sad jumble of contradic-
tions, of serious disagreements over even essential elements,
while the history of the theory is a succession of definite
statements, made in the name of science, followed by just as
definite withdrawals of assertions, also in the name of science,
though some of these withdrawals were again withdrawn later,
or seriously modified. Nothing sure seems to be left, except
that the scientists want to hear, as a rule, no mention of
creation or of a Creator.
This is the more amusing because all the suggested factors
of evolution have been rejected, one after another, and the
theory is left very much in the air. Natural Selection, actually
selecting, has not been observed, though we have waited pa-
tiently and worked assiduously for two generations to find it.
Sexual Selection is long in the discard. The inheritance of
acquired characters has been proved a myth, yet the chasm
between species remains just as unbridged as ever. In spite
of all this, a few biologists, but with them a great many peo-
ple who know little of biology, insist that they can explain
the origin of living beings, though just how they are to do so
remains as much of a mystery as ever. What is still more
1 God or Gorilla: How the Monkey Theory of Evolution Exposes Its Own
Methods, Refutes Its Own Principles, Denies Its Own Inferences, Disproves Its Own
Case. New York: The Devln- Adair Co. $3.00.
1922.] THE COMEDY OF EVOLUTION 67
interesting is that apparently these good people do not realize
that their adhesion to Darwinism is now merely a belief,
and not at all a scientific conviction. They have simply
handed in their acceptance of what, as Professor Morgan of
Columbia declared some years since, has now become the
dogma of Darwinian evolution, which they seem to feel that no
scientist can refuse to believe in, under pain of major ex-
communication by his scientific friends.
Let us suppose a young historian with a sense of humor
should set himself the task — say about 1960, in the second
rising generation from now, just after the centenary of the
publication of Darwin's Origin of Species — of finding out not
merely the events, but the course of thought that preceded the
Great War of 1914. By that time, I think, the discussion of
the phases of evolution that have interested the past gener-
ation most, will have become, to a great extent, academic.
Men will then appreciate that, in spite of the amount of in-
terest manifested in it, there is nothing helpful for human
thought in the idea that living things, as we know them, just
came of themselves, and must be accepted in that way. The
young historian would soon discover, of course, that over and
over again during the latter half of the nineteenth century,
men had been quite sure that they were reaching the genuine
factors of evolution, only to find, after a time, that they were
as far away as ever from them. In spite of this, the next
theory explanatory of descent that came along was accepted
just as readily, and men, once more quite sure that now, at
last, they had a definite base for the theory of evolution, met
again with disappointment.
It seems to me quite possible to get at the humor of that
situation as the prospective historian will see it, and I wonder
if it would not be possible to suggest some of the things that
the imaginary iconoclast of forty years from now will prob-
ably say.
The first thing that will strike him because of his interest
in finding out the possible sources of the Great War of 1914,
will be the emphasis which was placed by the generation just
before that war on the **Struggle for Life.'* The exaggerated
significance given to it was due to Darwin's book. He called
his volume The Origin of Species, but he did not discuss
origins at all. He assumed an immense number and variety
68 THE COMEDY OF EVOLUTION [Oct..
of living beings in existence, and supposed also the principle
of variation. Then he suggested that those that were un-
suited to their environment and did not have it in them to
make a successful struggle for life, dropped out of existence.
The rest remained. His book should have been called by its
secondary title, "The Preservation of Favored Races in the
Struggle for Life." Indeed, Darwin wanted to call it so, but his
friends persuaded him to leave the title. The Origin of Species.
The prominence given the struggle for life impressed
a number of the younger biologists, and so the Dar-
winians, who always went much farther than Darwin himself,
proceeded to create the impression that this principle applied
also to human beings, and that only the men who were able
to fight it out successfully against their environment and,
above all, against the members of their own species, would
survive. This was the famous "survival of the fittest." The
principle was applied to nations as well as to individuals.
As can be very clearly seen now from a series of volumes
issued before the Great War, these ideas had not a little to do
with precipitating that war. An acute struggle was consid-
ered inevitable, as the result of biological impulses. The
nations would just have to fight it out. During the generation
before the war broke out, men had been applying the prin-
ciple very largely in commercial matters. Competition was
the life of trade, and success in competition marked the man
who was successful as representing a class of beings whom
nature wanted to preserve. The man who went down in com-
petition, was regarded as unworthy of nature's purpose to
preserve the fittest, in her great task of making the race
ever higher and better than before.
These supposed followers of biology seem never to have
realized that there is no such thing as the struggle for life
among individuals of the same species, except under very
special circumstances, as for instance, when there is a famine
in the land, or a mother is looking for food for her young,
or when males struggle over the female. Apart from these
special conditions, what we find among the animals is mutual
aid and helpfulness. They have instincts by which they live
together in herds and droves and packs, or in swarms or
flocks, because thus they are enabled to secure their food to
better advantage and protect themselves against their enemies.
IC
1922.] THE COMEDY OF EVOLUTION 69
This principle of the supposed struggle for existence was a
grim joke on humanity. It was presented to us as the gospel
truth of science. A great many unthinking people took it at
its face value. The nations of Europe went to war, per-
suaded apparently of its fundamental biological truth. Surely,
a future generation will hold the scientists responsible for
this.
Professor Cope of the University of Pennsylvania, used to
say: "So far as that expression [the survival of the fittest]
has any meaning, it is merely a tautology. It means that
those who are fittest to live will live, and that, of course, is the
assumption contained in the terms. If they are fittest to sur-
vive, they will survive." "What we are interested in," he
used to add, "is not the survival of the fittest, but the origin of
the fittest. How did the fittest to survive originate?" Of this,
as I have said, Darwin told us nothing, because his book has
nothing to say about origins, but only about survivals and the
preservation of favored races in the struggle for existence.
He did not emphasize the personal struggle between the mem-
bers of the species, but all the younger biologists did, until
actually a sort of mental delusion was created that they were
studying origins.
A still greater joke was ** Sexual Selection.*' Darwin argued
that the males, being gifted with brilliant colors or with strong
fighting qualities, or with sleek appearance or sweet songs,
were selected for the sake of these qualities by the females
who, under tlie influence of nature, were thus looking out
for qualities for their future progeny. It was all theory, and
every investigation that has been made, shows that insects and
birds are not at all affected by colors and sounds, and that,
as a rule, the female has very little to do with the question of
mating. But it took years of observation to upset the facile
theory of sexual selection. It was all a case of projecting
human feelings and reactions into animals of all kinds, and
even into the insects. For a score of years, scientists took it
very seriously. Even today our novelists, and not a few of
our teachers, and a good many editors and reporters, as well
as newspaper writers generally, slip into their writings ex-
pressions which indicate that sexual selection is still regarded
as a scientific reality and an important factor in biology. The
joke is on them, but they do not know it.
70 THE COMEDY OF EVOLUTION [Oct.,
About the time that Darwinism came of age, in the eighties
of the last century, a practical joke was played upon the
"struggle for life" by its step-mother, biology. Most Dar-
winians, feeling that the master, in his anxiety to be abso-
lutely sure, had not gone nearly far enough, were loud in
their declarations of what "the struggle" accomplished for
living beings. It was just a question of making themselves,
and the living beings that could struggle, accomplish their
purposes. The little ancestor of the horse, about the size of
the rabbit, or probably a little smaller to begin with, wanted
to be bigger and to run faster. He wanted so much to rdn
fast that he touched the ground in his eager haste only with
the middle toe of each foot, and did this so constantly that
gradually the other toes began to atrophy, and eventually
disappeared. His anxiety to get larger made him lift him-
self up ever more and more, until, finally, he began to run on
the toe nail of this middle toe, adding at least a part of a
cubit to his stature, and this middle toe became a hoof. See
how easy it is for the horse to create himself. We had a
whole sheaf of these stories written for the edification of the
young; to show them how anybody, who really wanted to,
could just change his whole character and, of course, transmit
all the changes that he thus acquired to his descendants. The
giraffe lengthened his neck just by stretching upwards for the
tender shoots at the top of the taller plants, and then passed
on his gains to his young. How easy it all was!
In the midst of this idyllic presentation of the significance
of the struggle for existence and its wonderful results, there
came along, very mal a propos, a marplot named Weismann.
He made it verj^ clear that acquired characters were not, and
could not, in the very nature of things be transmitted. Man-
kind had known this, but had somehow failed to apply it in
the question of evolution. We knew that if a man lost his
little finger early in life, his children would not be borne with
a little finger missing. We would laugh at such an idea.
Yet the little horse, having struggled and struggled to win
the race that is only for the swift, modified his characteristics
in various ways and then proceeded to transmit these char-
acters to his off'spring and among them, above all, the incen-
tive to further change. This, too, was transmitted, until the
squirrel-like horse original became the Arabian steed of today.
1922.] THE COMEDY OF EVOLUTION 71
What is the use of looking for jokes when statements like this
are lying around loose in what is called serious science?
Of course, the Darwinians would say this is Lamarckian,
and not Darwinian. That is good enough as an excuse, but it
will not hold for those who know the loose writing indulged
in by many w^ho thought themselves disciples of Darwin and
who, in schools and through popular lectures, have shaped
people's ideas with regard to the meaning of evolution. As a
matter of fact, the evolutionists generally, and above all the
Darwinians, admitted very grudgingly the truth of Weiss-
man's teaching and were very slow to recognize its full sig-
nificance. Even now, some of them haggle not a little over it,
for if there is no transmission of the changes that take place
in living things, how then can there ever have been any
gradual improvement in the course of descent. Species would
have remained just what they are, and indeed they do so
remain as far as we have any evidence, for we have never
been able to raise any intermediate species, and that is the
crux of the whole matter. In 1880, when Huxley wrote on
"The Coming of Age of Darwinism," he declared that, until
the gap between species could be bridged, there was no ques-
tion of anj^ proof for descent, and here we are, forty years
after that, without any more proof than he had, and with
Weissman's non-inheritance of acquired characteristics star-
ing us in the face.
In every other phase of popular evolution following Dar-
win's publications, there came the same sort of inconsequence.
The existence of a great many "useless organs" in the human
body (at one time they counted as many as two hundred of
them, the spleen among them, because it can be removed with-
out the organism dying), was supposed to be a very definite
proof of evolution. These were vestiges of man's evolution
from the animal. They had been left in his body because
the process of evolution was not quite complete. Their pres-
ence was hailed as one of those happy accidents that serve
to reveal nature's ways and her history to lis.
I wonder if there ever has been a greater joke than this
with regard to the useless organs. Most of these so-called
useless organs are now considered to be among the most im-
portant in the body, so far, at least, as the physiology of man
is concerned. Principal among them are the ductless glands,
72 THE COMEDY OF EVOLUTION [Oct.,
the thyroid, the thymus, the suprarenals, the hyphophysis.
These were the useless organs of a generation ago, but are
now known to be the great guiding organs of human func-
tions.
Other theories had been adduced in the meantime to sup-
port evolution. One of them was the "recapitulation theory"
stated by Herbert Spencer: **Oiitogeny Recapitulates Phylo-
geny/* that is to say, translating it out of the Greek, the life
of each being, in the course of its development, repeats the
history of its descent from all other beings. What a naive
conception it was! It supposed that all the single cells were
the same, or so nearly alike as to be considered the same,
though every living thing in the world begins in a single cell,
and some develop into plants and some into lower and some
into higher animals, and some must be comparatively simple
in composition and some almost infinitely complex. But the
absurdity made no difference. The principle of recapitula-
tion was adopted by educators and especially writers on edu-
cation as the solution of the problem of educational psy-
chology.
There was only one trouble, as Vernon Kellogg said, for
the pedagogue, and that was that "the recapitulation theory is
mostly wrong, and what is right in it is mostly so covered up
by the wrong part that few biologists any longer have any
confidence in discovering the right." And he asks very per-
tinently: "What then of our generalizing friends, the peda-
gogues?" But that did not prevent many sociologists from
taking up the recapitulation theory and using it as the basis
for all sorts of developments in what they would like to call
biological sociology. The books written in sociology twenty-
five years ago are now largely a huge joke. They exemplify
exactly what Josh Billings said shortly before they were writ-
ten : "It is better not to know so many things, than to know so
many things that ain't so."
Probably the greatest joke of all, and certainly the most
alluring in its effects on the thinking of our time, is that of the
"Theory of Descent:* According to this, all living things are
descended from a few forms, or perhaps a single living form.
There is supposed to be no doubt about this in a great many
minds. Yet we have no objective evidence for it, and a large
amount of evidence against it. A dozen years ago, Vernon
1922.] THE COMEDY OF EVOLUTION 73
Kellogg did not hesitate to say: "Speaking by and large, we
only tell the general truth when we declare that no indubitable
cases of species, forming or transforming, that is of descent,
have been observed." We have never seen one species by
any chance ever produce another. On the contrary, we know
very definitely that species are infertile with one another, and
that crossing leads to sterility. There are a few possible ex-
ceptions, but these exceptions only serve to show the law that
one species cannot descend from another. However, that
makes no difference. Every evolutionist is a believer in the
"theory of descent." Why? Well, he will tell you it must
be so. Now, whenever a scientist says that a thing must be
so, the expression is used only because he cannot prove that
it is so. It must be so because the animals resemble each
other and, therefore, they must be descended from each other.
The distance between that major, and the conclusion from it,
begs the whole question.
Many ardent evolutionists seem to think that man was
never considered an animal until Darwinism came. Appar-
ently, they are convinced that up to that time no one had
noted the close similarity between the skeleton of all the
larger animals and of man, nor the wonderful resemblances
between the various organs of the mammals and of man.
They seem to forget that when dissection of human bodies was
forbidden in the old pagan days, when the pagans had such
reverence for the body that they refused to permit human
dissection,^ animals were used for the study of anatomy. The
organs of the pig were considered to resemble so closely those
of man, that the anatomy of this animal was the favorite study
of even such great physicians and scientists as Galen.
Almost as long as the memory of man runs, certainly as
long as there has been any serious philosophy or psychology,
man has been defined as a rational animal. Men have always
been perfectly sure about the animal part, but, from time to
time, they have had their doubts about the rational part, at
least for the majority of men. That is the present position,
but, surely, no one can think for a moment that we owe it to
the evolutionists.
Darwin was one of the last men in the world who had the
2 In the Middle Ages there was abundance of dissection, and even the artists
dissected very freely.
74 THE COMEDY OF EVOLUTION [Oct.,
right to teach anything with regard to the origin or descent
of man. He confessed, with no little regret, toward the end
of his life that he had lost his appreciation for music and art
and poetry, and felt that he had just become a machine for
grinding out scientific opinions. The difference between man
and the animals, consists more in the power to appreciate
music and art and poetry than in any other quality that man
possesses. Raymond Lullius once suggested, in the Middle
Ages, that he might make a logic machine, and our invention
of calculating machines of various kinds would seem to
demonstrate that the old Scholastic was correct in his surmise,
but no one has ever thought for a moment that he could make
a machine that would turn out original poetry and art and
music.
One of the quietly humorous points about evolution is
the underlying assumption of all evolutionists that living
things begin low down in the scale and evolute upwards.
This is, of course, a contradiction of all our experiences in
physical science. Our clocks run down, but they do not wind
themselves up again. All our experience is with force grad-
ually having less and less potential. The life force, however,
according to evolutionists, acquires new energy, exhibits new
powers and develops new resources as time goes on. As to
how it does so, no explanation is afforded. It is just another
one of these things that must be so. Why must it be so?
Because evolution must be so. Why must evolution be so?
Because we cannot think of anything else to account for things
as they are or to explain their origin. Of course, if we cannot
think of anything else, meaning we, the scientists, there cannot
be anything else, for we would surely know it.
With the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in
1859, many people were convinced that the explanation of the
coming into existence of all the living beings had now been
reached. Matter, through the influence of moisture and heat,
acquired life, and then the principle of variation did the rest.
Everything living varied from generation to generation, some
upward and some downward, and those with the upward
tendency, being more suited to their surroundings, were better
fitted to exist, and remained in existence, while all the other
things dropped out. The mystery of the universe was the
easiest thing in the world. There was no need of creation
1922.] THE COMEDY OF EVOLUTION 75
or of anything, except the ordinary forces of nature, and they
came into existence of themselves. Under the influence of
some such impression, some matter was dredged from the
bottom of the ocean, and immediately was declared to be the
intermediate step between non-living and living matter, and
was given the learned name of bathybius, which is Greek for
deep life (how Greek does help to cloak ignorance!), and
after that there seemed nothing more to explain. But, alas
for Huxley, who was the sponsor for bathybius and who, I
believe, gave it its name, the substance turned out to be some-
thing very different, and those who had believed in it became
the laughing stock of the serious scientists of Europe.
About seven hundred years ago, dear old Friar Bacon
declared that the most important factor for advance in knowl-
edge is the readiness to say frankly "I do not know." When a
man knows that he does not know, he is usually quite pre-
pared to make investigations that will lead him to knowledge.
On the other hand. Bacon declared that there were four
grounds of human ignorance, four basic reasons why men do
not advance in knowledge. These are: "First, trust in in-
adequate authority; second, a force of custom which leads
men to accept without question what has been accepted before
their time; third, the placing of confidence in the opinion of
the inexperienced; and, fourth, the hiding of one's own ignor-
ance with a parade of superficial knowledge." Professor Henry
Morley, in the third volume of English Writers, after quoting
Bacon's four grounds of human ignorance, said: "No part of
that ground has yet been cut away from beneath the feet of
students, although six centuries ago (Morley wrote over half
a century ago), the Oxford friar clearly pointed out its char-
acter. We still make sheep walks of second, third and fourth
and fiftieth-hand references to authority, still we are the slaves
of habit; still we are found following too frequently the un-
taught crowd; still we flinch from the righteous and wholesome
phrase, *I do not know,' and acquiesce actively in the opinion
of others, that we know what we appear to. know. Substitute
honest research, original and independent thought, strict truth
in the comparison of only what we really know with what is
really known by others, and the strong redoubt of ignorance is
fallen."
ASTROLOGY.
BY SIR BERTRAM C. A. WINDLE, LL.D., F.R.S.
ORDSWORTH exclaimed that he would "rather
he a pagan suckled in a creed outworn" than
find himself delivered over wholly to a material
view of existence. Man was made for God, and
if he is ignorant of the true service of his Maker
he will run amok amongst strange superstitions like Spirit-
ism, Theosophy, Christian Science — all, with the exception
of the last, as old as humanity, and with the same exception,
coming from the east to pass westward and possessing at least
some semblance of a coherent philosophy. Since the war
stirred up the sluggish stream of popular thought, there has
been a recrudescence of these vagaries, and not least of As-
trology, whose motto, if we regard its history, now briefly to
be outlined, might well be : **Expellas furca tamen usque recur-
ret" ^ Astrology is an exception, as we shall see, to the other
creeds just mentioned in that it has had a day when it en-
slaved even some prominent Christians. This it was en-
abled to do because it never was a religion, but always occu-
pied the position of a neighboring, but differing character.
Even in our days it has been known to appeal to so sound a
Catholic and scholar as the late Marquis of Bute, the original
of "Lothair," and to so distinguished a writer as the late Dr.
Richard Garnett, keeper of the printed books in the British
Museum, who wrote (under a pseudonj^m) a book in its favor.
The history of such a subject is worth consideration, and
particularly that part of it which relates to the time when
Catholic Europe was the prey of astrologers.
Today astrology is the shadow of astronomy, just as al-
chemy is of chemistry, but in the earlier ages, even of the
Christian era, there was no real distinction between the two
first. St. Isidore of Seville (of which place he became Arch-
bishop in 594), that encyclopedia of the knowledge of his day,
was perhaps the first to draw a distinction between the two.
John of Salisbury, in the twelfth century, distinguished be-
1 "You may cast it out, but it wiU always return."
1922.] ASTROLOGY 77
tween mathesis, the legitimate study, and mathesis, the illegit-
imate; other Fathers attributed astronomy to good angels and
to Abraham, and astrology to Cham. Astrology was the
earlier study, though much true astronomy was mixed up
with it.
Kant said that the starry heavens and the moral law
within, were the two things which most stirred his wonder,
and there is little to cause surprise in the influence which the
sight of the starry heavens on a clear night must have exerted
on the minds of early races of mankind. To the people of
Accad and Sumer, perhaps, and certainly to their successors,
the Babylonians, we owe the first stages of astrology, and it
was the Chaldeans, as the priestly caste of Babylonia, who
carried it to western countries. To these people the firma-
ment was a populous place, and we can see how it was peopled
by looking at a celestial globe, an object more frequently to
be met with fifty years ago than now. There are Perseus and
Andromeda, Hercules, Cassiopea, and many another hero and
heroine who had once inhabited this planet. Moreover, the
planets themselves, whose ancient namet we still preserve,
had their intimate connections with colors, metals, and differ-
ent parts of the human body. Thus Saturn was associated with
gray and with lead, and looked after the right ear. Jupiter
had white and electrum (an alloy of gold and silver thought
to be an independent metal). Mars had red, and ruled the
bile, the blood, and the left ear. Venus had yellow, and took
charge of the loins and lower limbs. The sun had gold, very
naturally, and, equally naturally, the moon had silver. But
for what arbitrary reason is unknown, the former was inter-
ested in man's right eye and woman's left, and the latter in
man's left and woman's right. Finally, we must bear in mind
the Chaldseo-Persian doctrine that the souls of men were
brought down from celestial heights by bitter necessity to
inhabit the bodies of men. As they descended, they traversed
each planet and received from each some quality. This is not
far removed from the view of Plato, though in his theory the
rational soul which inhabited a star, after its creation by a
Demiurge, was filled with a desire for the material universe
and imprisoned in a body as a process of purification.
It was not wonderful that with views like this, a belief
should develop that the planets had an influence on the life
78 ASTROLOGY [Oct,,
of man, and from this sprang the whole business of judicial
astrology or the casting of horoscopes, which depended on a
host of complicated rules, but in their essence, on the position
of certain planets at the exact moment of a child's birth. It
sprang from Babylon, arising perhaps in the seventh century
before Christ. It attained great development in Egypt, and
less in India, and it was, says Jastrow, in the fourth century
that it began its triumphant journey westward. It caught
hold of other beliefs, ingrafting itself, for example, on Mithra-
ism, that ubiquitous religion of the Empire. It was so ram-
pant in Rome in B. C. 139, and so dangerous, that the praetor
in that year expelled all astrologers from Italy. Cicero, in
his De Divinatione, denounced astrology, and that in spite of
the fact that his tutor, Posidonius, was a distinguished pro-
fessor of the art. *'Tamen usque recurretT the people de-
manded it; it returned, and ultimately we find Augustus its
protector. And so it went on until Constantine, under the
influence of Christianity, expelled all Magi and Chaldeans
and their followers under pain of death. And so, for eight
centuries, Christendom was free from astrology, though it
never died out in Moslem Spain.
Yet it was to return. Al Mansur, the mighty, though
treacherous, caliph who built Bagdad, attracted to his capital
many learned men, chiefly Jews, of whom some had acquired,
from Arab sources, a deep knowledge of astrology. Thus,
once more from the east the pseudo-science began to make its
way westward. The Crusades and the increased contact with
the east on the part of the west assisted, and astrology rolled
like a rising tide over Europe, now Christian throughout. Its
progress was remarkable, and the results similar to those ex-
hibited in pagan Rome. For just as at the earlier period, so
at the later, astrologers were everywhere, and everywhere of
the first importance. Every court, including the Papal, had
its court astrologer, without whose concurrence no important
matter Was dealt with, even the Emperor and the Pope de-
ciding as to the day on which ambassadors should be received,
on the advice of their astrologer. There were professors of
astrology, as well as of the legitimate science, in the univer-
sities. Nor were they undistinguished men, for the great
Kepler occupied such a position in court and cast horoscopes
with the best of them. Yet. as we learn from the De Civitate
1922.] ASTROLOGY 79
Dei, St. Augustine had denounced astrology as unbefitting
Christians, though, by a strange irony of fate, it was in his
writings that the argument was to be found whereby it was
eventually to effect its entrance into Christendom. John of
Salisbury and others, long after Augustine, shared his views
concerning it, and even in the thirteenth century, Alexander
of Hales denounced the casting of nativities as a superstitious
art. Yet it is not so many years afterwards that we find
astrology, including the casting of nativities, in full blast in
Rome, indeed all over Christendom.
Let us study history and ascertain the explanation of this
apparent anomaly. With the knowledge of Aristotle, largely
due to Arab sources, came much other Arab learning and, no
doubt with it, astrology. Blessed Albertus Magnus and St.
Thomas Aquinas, confronted with the task of creating a phil-
osophy on Aristotelian lines, but agreeable to Christian prin-
ciples, had to meet the questions of the heavenly bodies and
their guidance, and, in connection therewith, of their influence
on the destinies of human beings. In connection with this, two
matters have to be borne in mind. First, that Christian phil-
osophy, up to the time of St. Thomas, was dominated by the
teachings of St. Augustine and that he, as everyone knows,
was saturated with Platonism, and so held views which may
roughly be described as those of Plato Christianized. In the
second place, the influence of the Ptolemaic explanation of the
universe, still, and for long afterwards, held the field. Such
was the environment. As to the problem of the heavens and
the motion of the planets, that matter was fully discussed by
St. Thomas. If the heavenly bodies are animated, then their
"souls" are to be numbered amongst the angels.- But, in
reply to the question as to whether the heavens are animated,
he tells us that the Doctors of the Church hold diverse opin-
ions, but that, whichever may be the case, the faith is in no
way involved. As to the relation of the other bodies to the
earth, naturally his knowledge, or rather ignorance, was that
of his period.
To anyone who bestows but a little thought upon the mat-
ter, it must be obvious what the real difficulty was. If all the
^ zDe Angelorum Natura, op. xiv., cap. i. For this and the following quotation,
Quodlibet, xii., art. 8, I am indebted to Wlcksteed, Reactions Between Dogma and
Philosophy.
80 ASTROLOGY [Oct.,
doings of a man are determined by the position of the planets
at the moment of his birth, then free-will and morality are,
of course, eliminated. Many writers on astrology, outside the
Church, fully admitted this, and in fact it was this which so
much commended the practice to the highly fatalistic Oriental.
Manilius, the poet of astrology, said : *Tata regunt orbem, certa
slant omnia lege" ^ Nor were there wanting writers within
the Church in the heyday of mediseval astrology, who went
too far in the direction of the acceptance of determinism. It
was, so Dr. Wedel thinks,* for this cause that Francesco degli
Stabili commonly called, as by the writer just mentioned,
Cecco d'Ascoli, was, in his seventieth year, burned at the
stake (1327). Dr. Wedel says that "his death forms an almost
isolated instance in the history of the Inquisition," and cer-
tainly neither Roger Bacon, who appears to have gone almost
dangerously far along the same road, nor Guido Bonati, one
of the most celebrated astrologers of any day, who seems
clearly, at least by implication, to have denied free-will, suf-
fered in any way for their opinions. Dante condemned Guido
by placing him with Michael Scot, another famous wizard of
old times, in the eighth circle of the Inferno,
As was hinted earlier, St. Augustine pointed the way out of
the difficulty. What that way was, may now be stated as briefly
as possible. No one denies, even today, that the weather has
an influence on a man, and even on his behavior. A bright
sunny day does fill the heart with a greater sense of joy
and hope and courage than one on which a snow-blizzard
is raging beneath a leaden sky. But the weather is the index
of happenings in the heavens. Therefore, some of the heav-
enly bodies, to wit, the sun, do exercise an influence on human
doings. If the sun, why not the moon? The word "lunatic'*
gives the reply of our forefathers. So do the terms, "jovial,"
"martial," "saturnine," convey their response to the further
question — ^why not the planets? Yes, but these influences are
corporal only in the first place, and exercise whatever effect
they may exercise on our actions only in a secondary and pre-
8 "Fate rules the world, all things are determined by law."
4 For much of that which follows I am Indebted to the very excellent and
scliolarly study of The Mediaeval Attitude Toward Asirologg of Dr. T. O. Wedel,
Instructor in English in Yale University, published by the Press of that University,
1920, a work which we can very heartily commend to the notice of all students of
the Middle Ages, as weU as to all interested in philosophy.
1922.] ASTROLOGY 81
veritable manner. In other words, our will can prevent our
actions being determined by our lower parts, however much
they may be affected by the weather or the heavenly bodies.
"Sapiens dominabitur astris/' ^ is a phrase used by the Angelic
Doctor and many another Christian writer. Nobody knows
where it originated. It has been attributed to Porphyry, in
whose works, however, the learned Dr. Wedel has failed to
find it. The locus classicus is still the Siimma of St. Thomas.
To put the matter in a nutshell, we need not be surly and un-
generous and generally objectionable, however much dull,
thundery weather may have upset our livers. St. Thomas
did condemn judicial astrology or the casting of horoscopes,
but to no effect. The door which he opened was narrow, but
wide enough to let in a flood of astrologers and their practices,
so that, as already stated, even the Papal Court, as well as
others, was provided with its official consulter of the stars.
Then came Copernicus and the gradual acceptance of his
cosmogony, which stripped our tiny planet of its precedence in
the system of the universe. That gave a considerable shock
to astrology, and Rabelais and Ariosto helped to laugh it out
of serious consideration on the continent of Europe. In Eng-
land, Swift, writing as Isaac Bickerstaffe, by his handling of
Partridge, an astrologer of that da)% with whom he played
as a cat does with a mouse, drove it out of the minds of all
but the most ignorant. Yet, from his earliest days up to
now, the present writer cannot remember any time that "Old
Moore's Almanack,*' the predictions in which claim to be of
astrological origin, was not being produced and sold and pre-
sumably paying its way. And at the present day, astrologers,
with crystal gazers, clairvoyants, mediums, and all the rabble
rout of occultism are making a splendid harvest out of those
still occupied in trying to build altars to an unknown god.
Tamen usque recurretl
8 "The wise man will be master of the stars."
MIKE.
BY THOMAS B. REILLY.
T was no idle curiosity that sent me hurrying east
Harlemward in search of my recalcitrant friend,
Michael Anthony Farello, more popularly known
in his immediate neighborhood as "Mike." Any-
thing at all might have happened in the five
weeks since last I had tried to save him from the folly of his
thoughts and, perhaps, the clutch of the law. Not only was
he camping on the trail of a false god, but he had reached the
stage of visions, and was preaching false prophets.
My friend, Michael, was willing to stake his salvation on
the proposition that all men — with or without collars — had an
inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,
a conviction that no one in his right senses would dream of
disputing. But from this point on he became delirious, and
argued himself into an apostolic certainty that he had been
defrauded of at least two-thirds of his birthright. Where-
fore, with the vehemence of his race, he demanded the ex-
tinction of the capitalist, the abolition of property, and the
instant per capita distribution of the present currenc}^ of the
realm. And this, in spite of the fact that he was otherwise
practical to a degree, and blessed with a sense of humor.
To make matters worse, Mike's stormy eloquence played
hob with the peace of the neighborhood. He had, in his own
language, a certain gift of popular oratory, which had secured
for him a small, but vociferous, following. His position, from
any slant, boded mischief, if not misfortune. And it was with
a laudable desire to save him that I hurried onward toward
the storm centre of his bristling presence.
It needed only the briefest of glances to show that the
five weeks' interim — unavoidable as it was — had been
fatal. The little shop with its bench and knives, awls and
waxends, had given place to a more colorful, but less philo-
sophical, business in fruits and vegetables. Mike, together
with his better half and their seven claims to the gratitude of
1922.] MIKE 83
posterity, had vanished. Had he, in his impassioned demands
for the other two-thirds of his birthright, brought about an
unmitigated breach of the peace? Had the forces of law and
order, conscious of their duty, swooped down upon him?
Was he even now languishing in prison? If so, where was
Rosa Maria, the wife of his bosom? Where were those seven
innocent claims to the plaudits of posterity? The light was
out — but where was Mike?
It was in the mid-swing of these uncertainties and vain
conjectures that the stalwart form of an old acquaintance.
Officer Timothy Gleason, hove into view.
"Bun jawrn," called out Tim, his blue, Irish eyes twin-
kling. Tim was inclined to tackle an occasional tongueful of
the Tuscan felicities.
"You're looking prosperous," he went on, "in spite of the
prices. What's on your mind?"
"Where's Mike?" I asked, pointing to the sadly altered
shop.
"Gone," replied Tim laconically.
"How long since?"
"Week ago today," said Tim, with a contemplative twirl
of his stick and a calculating survey of the fruit stand.
"Where?" sought I.
"Nobody knows," said he. "Simply faded away — bag and
baggage. Still, it's no more than I expected."
I encouraged him with a glance of inquiry.
"You can't repair shoes, reform the world at the same
time, and get away with it," announced Tim dogmatically.
"Hm-m," said I. "And yet he was perfectly sane in all
other respects."
"He was a first-class cobbler," agreed Tim. "And he had
the trade of the neighborhood."
"And a good little wife," I added, thinking.
"He had — that," affirmed Tim, musingly. "Some women
put up with a lot for a little."
I stood frowning, anxious, disturbed.
"Mike wasn't himself for the month past," said Tim.
"Something must have happened, though I haven't the rights
of it. Not a word out of him. And he kept shy of the old
crowd. It was pretty nearly time."
"A blessing," I agreed fervently.
84 MIKE [Oct..
"It was that and more," came the rejoinder. "The Cap-
tain's had an eye on him for a bit of while back. Mike must
have gotten a tip."
Tim's revelation was just what I had been fearing.
"Strange, he should have left no word," I remarked.
"They never do," said Tim, "not when they leave in a
hurry. Was it looking for him you were?"
"I've been more or less worried about him," I confessed.
"Gray hairs come soon enough," was the quiet reminder.
"Perhaps he finally realized where his nonsense was lead-
ing him," I threw out hopefully.
"Oh, he wasn't altogether crazy," remarked Tim. "He
had a great gift of the gab. There's little harm in those lads.
They never bluff themselves. They think they can talk
themselves into a better job. Some of them do. They're
born that way. Mike was a good cobbler, but no politician.
If he was — " Tim paused and twirled his stick reflectively.
"Well," I urged, lest he forget to drop the pendant pearl
of wisdom.
"He'd haTC followed the logic of the situation and let well
enough alone. Never start anything you can't finish — espe-
cially the reformation of the world."
A few minutes later, I was on my way to the West Side.
I lingered awhile under the trees of the Park, where I fell to
thinking of Mike and his contribution to the curve of human
activities. My thoughts took me back to a day when, in an
unexpected burst of confidence, he had spoken of himself
and his past.
A paternal foresight, it appears, had seen to it that Mike
should have a liberal education in the art of cobbling shoes.
Not that Mike would have chosen this particular field for the
display of his talents — not much! And the memory of his
enforced avocation always rankled. His most solemn decree
was that none of his offspring would ever be called upon to
master the business end of an awl or the art of a waxend.
And yet, in his own case, paternal foresight wanting, the world
would have been deprived of a thoroughly competent cobbler,
who kept faith no less with posterity than with his customers.
That it would have saved these troubled times from another
political tinker, who thirsted mightily for justice and a whack
at the other fellow's chattels, is a moot question.
1922.] MIKE 85
In younger days, under Neapolitan skies, he had found
Rosa Maria Tordello surpassing fair as a fact and distract-
ingly insistent as a memory. Now Rosa Maria was an orphan,
whose pathway through life had always been eased by a
fond and mindful uncle. His name was Luigi Tordello. He
had already made his way and his mark in the New World,
and was a man to be reckoned with by those at home. Where-
fore, little Rosa Maria opened her heart to him and, while
asking his advice, besought his blessing. Luigi, however, was
a conservative. He suggested the test of time, and casually
cited the possibilities of the New World. Hence, there were
tears and a parting, a ship pitching relentlessly across the
windy Atlantic, and Michael Anthony Farello at odds with
himself in the steerage.
Love, of course, conquers all things or, failing, outwits
them. Two years later, on a rare spring morning, my friend,
Mike, met and escorted the wonder-smitten Rosa Maria from
the marvelous sights opening northward from the Battery sea
wall to the more home-like scenes that fringe Jefferson Park.
They were married, and, of course, were happy. A fortnight
later they received, from the Southwest, a letter of simple
well-wishes from the resigned, but obviously skeptical Luigi.
And yet what is one tiny speck in the otherwise luminous
amber of felicity! That, at least, was the opinion of little
Rosa Maria. As for Michael Anthony? Well, you see, as he
subsequently confessed, it was only human nature for a man
of talent, who had taken to himself a twig of the Tordello
tree, to harbor expectations. The fact that a paternal solic-
itude had doomed him to the narrow limits of a cobbler's
bench, was no proof at all that he was in his right place. To
be sure, he could not lift himself by his boot straps — certainly
not! But give him even half a chance! He asked no more.
But then what could you expect from a man of Tordello's
vision ! Because of a few surplus dollars, he counted himself
wiser than those whose backs were bent to sterner burdens.
Nay more! Why should any man take pride unto himself
because each morning, after a substantial breakfast, he could
walk forth richer by an unearned increment. The prevailing
theory of economics had a criminal twist in it — somewhere.
No wonder that men of talent were forced to waste their
genius on waxends, skiving knives and sole leather! Away
86 MIKE [Oct.,
with this criminal precipitation of the unearned increment!
Away with privilege! On with the square deal!
No wonder I was worried about my good friend, Mike.
And Rosa Maria ! The thought that, in the five weeks of my
unavoidable absence, he had gone from bad to worse, invited
the suspicions of the local authorities, and then fled to scatter
elsewhere the poison of his doctrines, left me apprehensive,
forebodeful.
A week later found me actually enjoying the bracing
September days in an adjacent county to the north. Not that
I had forgotten Mike. Time and again, a vision of his little
shop would flash across the mind, and I would hear him again
verbally fashion the world anew according to the pet theories
of his particular school, and see him conclude his argument
with a prodigious whack of his hammer on a piece of sole
leather. And always at the end of these vivid memories
would be the pleading countenance of Rosa Maria.
And then, with a shock that left me dumb and incred-
ulous, the thing happened. The paragraph was tucked away
in the lower left-hand corner of the county weekly. I read it
for the third time, and then resigned myself to the worst.
The sound of the last trumpet couldn't have been more start-
ling than the import of this authoritative notice, which began
with the solemn declaration: "At a Special Term of the Su-
preme Court," and ended by publicly authorizing and direct-
ing, on the strength of a petition and affidavits, and the con-
sent of his wife, that forty days hence one Michael Anthony
Farello assume the name of Michael Anthony Farrell — and
no other!
The inference was all too clear. My friend, Mike, slip-
ping away from his old haunts, had sought to hide himself
under a new, if legally changed, name. He had even forced
little Rosa Maria to give her consent to this piece of subter-
fuge.
There was only one thing for an honest friend to do : pick
up the trail of this fugitive plotting mischief under an as-
sumed name, give him fair and final warning, and stand by to
rescue an innocent wife and children. As for Mike's present
whereabouts — that was comparatively simple. The county
seat was less than two miles distant. An examination of the
petition and affidavits would point the trail.
1922.] MIKE 87
I was still pondering Mike's craftiness, when the little
daughter of my host placed a letter in my hand. The missive
had been forwarded from the city. It was written in Mike's
very best chirography, every letter meticulously formed, with
here and there a gay little flourish that bespoke a steady hand,
serene mind, and more or less joyful heart. By not so much
as a tremor of the pen was there aught to suggest an uneasy
conscience. The only suspicious element was in the brevity
of the missive. And yet, for all its clarity, I was no wiser than
before. The letter, written, of course, in Mike's native lan-
guage, read:
Villa Rosa,
YoRKTOWN Heights, N. Y.
Dear Friend:
A thousand pardons for not letting you know in advance
our change of address. But we have been very busy.
There were so many things to think of and to be done in a
hurry. Besides, since you had not been to see us for more
than a month, we expected you daily.
We are now comfortably settled in our new home, and
lack only the honor of your presence to make our joy
boundless. In the hope that you will visit us without
delay, and thereby complete our happiness, I take the liberty
to subscribe myself your true friend, ardent admirer and
devoted servant,
M. A. Farello.
And there you were! Villa Rosa, if you please! But —
what had happened? There was no use in making two bites
of this particular cherry. My host's car stood idle. There
was an excellent auto route map of the county in the rack.
To consult the one, and impress the other was a labor of
mingled love and duty.
Three quarters of an hour at fair speed, and I found
myself under the same patch of sky that hovered above the
fugitive. By dint of an inquiry or two, I soon triangulated
his exact whereabouts. Five minutes later, in a spot that
would have charmed the eye of a world traveler, I stood
gazing upon the legend, "Villa Rosa," neatly painted in letters
of blue on a piece of board fastened to a more or less rustic
gate. To push through the gateway and seek what mystery
lay at the end of the onward path was the work of a moment.
88 MIKE [Oct.,
A sharp turn in the path brought me in sight of an old-fash-
ioned farmhouse, snuggled among trees and shrubs, colorful
flower beds and the bloom of many grapes. It was a vision
only less entrancing than the mystery that lay behind it all.
I was still lost in my surprise, when from somewhere
among the grapevines a voice hailed me. A second later, with
radiant smile and outstretched hands, Mike came hurrying
forward.
"Great-a-Scott!" he exclaimed, grasping my hand, and
pumping it vigorously. Then, lapsing into his own tongue,
went on : "A thousand welcomes to Villa Rosa 1 You received
my letter — ^yes? You could not understand — no? Rosa said
you were angry. Rut I said: 'Wait, you'll see, he'll come.'
For a certainty, she'll be glad to see you, believe me! And
she has something to tell you — but yes!"
And pausing, he struck a proprietary attitude, and waved
a proud gesture toward the house, the garden, the vineyard,
the orchard, and inquired: "Tell me, what do you think of it?"
"You don't like the place?" sought Mike, misunderstand-
ing my silence.
"Like it!" I exclaimed. "It's — why, it's a little paradise.
Rut—"
"Ah-h," murmured Mike, appeased, contented. He looked
up at me quizzically a second, then, with a more or less enig-
matic smile, suggested: "Rut — ^you don't understand — eh?
You'd like to know all about this sudden change. Perhaps,
you think we were crazy to buy this little farm?"
"You mean you own it?" I sought, frowning wonderment.
"Sure!" he threw out, vigorously. "Twelve hundred and
fifty dollars cash."
"Cash!" I repeated, in deeper than ever.
"Sure!" said Mike. "And we've got two hundred in the
bank for a rainy day."
"Well, well," I murmured. And it was only by a great
effort that I throttled the temptation to ask this recent enemy
of the root of all evil how he had "raised it." Nay, how he
reconciled his present proud proprietorship of smiling acres,
money in the bank and unearned increment with his recent
fiery pleas for the abolition of such iniquities, and his wild
clamor for an instant per capita distribution of the currency
of the realm. And the fifteen hundred dollars— more or less?
1922.] MIKE 89
What did they represent? Savings? Impossible. Loot? I
would not believe it. Subsidy? Improbable. I gave it up.
Sufficient for me to congratulate the renegade on his abjur-
ation of the great modern heresy. But before I could frame
my compliments, a joyous cry came floating down from the
neighborhood of the farmhouse. It was little Rosa Maria. I
could see her standing on the porch, waving her hands ex-
citedly.
"Eh!" said Mike with a shrug, "now you'll hear some-
thing."
"Just what?" I sought, seeking to gain a hint.
"Not a word," he dissented, shaking his head. "Rosa will
tell you the news. She does all the talking — now."
He paused to give me the benefit of a quizzical smile,
then remarked: "It does her good. It helps her forget."
And, as I looked at him inquiringly, he enlightened me:
"You see, she thought I was going out of my head, for
sure. She felt very badly about it — naturally. Of course,
she didn't understand. But now everything is all right."
"I'm glad of that," was my honest assurance. "It was
high time you got rid of that nonsense."
"Nonsense!" he flashed at me.
"You were on the road to anarchy," I charged him.
He looked at me, shook his head, smiled compassionately.
"You don't understand this thing," he informed me. He
considered silently a moment, then concluded: "Perhaps, it's
just as well you don't."
And the next moment little Rosa Marie, eyes brimming
with happiness, smiled a second at her husband, then im-
pulsively held out her hand to me. And in her soft, lazy
Neapolitan speech she welcomed me as one that had been lost
and was found again.
An hour later, during which, and under the proud leader-
ship of Mike, I enjoyed a personally conducted tour of Villa
Rosa, I was tendered an informal, but none the less appre-
ciated luncheon — al fresco, if you please — in the rear of the
farmhouse and under an arbor that was sweet and heavy with
purpled grapes.
But as yet not a word, not a whisper, from Rosa Maria
as to what it was all about. But then she was really very busy,
with one eye on the table and the other on a group of more or
90 MIKE [Oct..
less uncertain satellites visible in the offing. Toward the end
of the luncheon, however, Mike, accompanied by the seven
lesser stars, deleted himself from the setting, and left little
Rosa Maria smiling at me across the table. After a few
hesitant preliminaries, she approached the heart of the mat-
ter. And, as I sat listening, a glimmer of light began to filter
through the fog.
"Yes," she confided, "he was the best of husbands. He
loved his children. He loved his home. He worked hard.
But he was never quite satisfied. We never seemed able to
get ahead. Always there was something to take our savings.
It was this thing, then that for the children, although seven
are only a handful — "
"May you and your kind inherit the earth," thought I to
myself.
"And then," she went on, with a frown here and a gesture
there, "he took up this thing about money and property and
government. He was never done talking. He had everybody
upset. I was half out of my mind. I wrote and told Uncle
Gigi about it. I told him about you, and how you did every-
thing to make Michael see the folly of his words. But the only
answer I ever got was: *I understand, but patience, patience.'
How could he understand and talk like that! And then, sud-
denly, you stopped coming. I said to myself : *He thinks there
is no hope for my husband.' It was more than I could bear.
I saw nothing but prison for Michael and disgrace for his
children. It was then I begged Uncle Gigi to come take the
children and myself home with him, thinking this would bring
Michael to his senses. And then — " She!v,aused, and looked
round about her, smilingly. "I can't seem to realize it even
now. Michael received a letter. It was from Uncle Gigi.
Michael kept it for three days before letting me see it. I don't
know what he thought, nor how he felt, though he smiled and
smiled. And when I read the letter, I couldn't understand it
myself. Uncle Gigi said he had heard how well Michael was
doing and what a fine family he was bringing up, and that,
perhaps, Michael could do still better if he had a little capital,
and that if he thought fifteen hundred dollars would help,
why he was more than welcome to it. And a draft for the
money was in the letter! A miracle, if ever there was
one!"
1922.] MIKE 91
Rosa Maria leaned forward, and with black, flashing eyes
tacitly challenged me to name anything half as wonderful as
this or such a perfect old dear of an uncle as that. Of course,
I couldn't, and didn't. Instead of which, I brought her at
once to the point by remarking:
"And so you invested it in this little paradise?"
"Immediately!" she replied. "I didn't lose a second. I
wanted to get Michael away from temptation. Besides, he is
very fond of the country. He will make a great success of
the farm, you'll see! It is an opportunity^ something he has
always wanted. It's all for the best, don't you think?"
"You've done a very wise thing, and done it in time," I
assured her. "And I don't mind telling you now that I was
really worried about him. His talk might have gotten him in
serious trouble."
"Yes, indeed," she agreed. "He was in with a bad crowd
down at Colucci's wine place. I told Michael he'd have to
break off all such relations when we came up here."
"And how did he take that?" I asked, curious.
"Eh!" she exclaimed with an expressive shrug. "He
simply laughed at me, and said: *Don't you worry about me.
I'm all right — now."
She regarded me wonderingly a moment, then from the
pocket of her dress drew forth and handed me a blue-covered
document. It was a certified copy of the order legally chang-
ing their name.
"I wanted him to make a clean start all over again," she
confided.
"Oh — I see," said I, scanning and returning the document.
"And I made him take out his final papers for citizenship
a week ago. He'll vote this year," she said proudly.
"Better and better," said I. "Now you are real Amer-
icans."
"Eh!" she informed me. "We always have been. It is a
grand country. It is a wonderful land. All you need, as
Michael says, is an opportunity."
"Is he satisfied, do you think?" I asked.
"Michael?" she returned, drawing back, eyes sparkling.
"You'd scarcely know him. He is so happy he laughs even in
his sleep. But, yes ! And he is already planning great things.
Of course, you mustn't let on that I've told all this. I am sup-
92 MIKE [Oct.,
posed to tell you only about Uncle Gigi and our new name.
I think Michael feels ashamed of his past. But I don't think
he realized what he was saying or doing. Do you?"
"Of course, he didn't," I affirmed promptly. "The very
fact that he is so happy here in the country proves that."
"Do you like the place?" she sought. "Did you notice the
beautiful views?"
"Yes, indeed," I returned. "And the views are as beau-
tiful as the name above the gate — Villa Rosa."
A faint tide of color stained her cheeks. And with a flash
from her slumberous eyes, she confessed: "It was the first
thing Michael did when we got here. He is like a boy again —
in some things."
I was about to make a rejoinder when Mike, a basket of
mingled fruits and vegetables balanced on one shoulder, and
accompanied by seven grape-stained faces, brought the dual
conference to a close.
It was not until a half hour later, and then only on the
promise that I would come the following week and spend a
full day at Villa Rosa, that the happy twain consented to m}'
departure. Mike, shouldering the basket of fruit, which he
insisted I take along as proof of the existence of a new order
of things, accompanied me as far as the car. He strode along
beside me with all the conscious dignity of a landed pro-
prietor, trying hard to achieve satisfactory gestures with his
one free hand, but making up for it with a continual battery of
inimitable smiles. When I teased him about his new name,
he merely looked at me with pained resignation. But when
I mentioned Luigi Tordello, he regained his faith in human
nature, and remarked :
"Uncle Gigi is a fine man. He knows what is what, you
bet!"
"You should invite him to Villa Rosa," I threw out earn-
estly.
"You think that would make him feel good?" he sought
reflectively.
"It ought to,'* I replied. "It has made me feel ten years
younger."
Mike smiled a moment, but said nothing. A few strides
farther along, he came to a halt, looked up at me wonderingly,
and said: "I'll tell you a secret, only you mustn't tell Rosa."
1922.] MIKE 93
"You've already invited Gigi?" I exclaimed, leaping at a
conclusion.
"You bet!" said Mike warmly, as we moved on. "He
promises to come next year — sure. We're not telling Rosa a
thing about it. She'll be much surprised, eh? She has been
a good little wife to me."
"Yes, indeed," I agreed. "And I hope you'll always make
her as happy as she is today."
"She's just like a little girl again," he informed me with
a thoughtful smile. "Like the little girl that used to laugh
at me in the Giardino Nazionale in Naples." He regarded me
somewhat playfully a second before concluding his thought:
"I think she's almost in love with me again — what do you
think?"
"You rascal," said I, laughing, "of course, she is. And you
came near breaking her heart."
"Oh, it wasn't as bad as all that," he returned. "I think
she was frightened just a little bit. But — everything's all
right now. It's no good remembering things like that. It's
enough to think of what one has now."
"Well," said I, "you've got a lot more than you deserve."
"Perhaps," he admitted, with a twinkling glance up at me,
"but you don't know just what I paid for all this fun."
"Fun!" I exclaimed, frowning.
"Sure!" he asserted. "It was a good joke — a great joke."
He chuckled in merriment.
"I don't see it," said I with a look, "and good jokes are
scarce."
"Sure," he agreed, carefully depositing the basket on
the floor of the car. "They keep a long time. Some day when
I'm an old man — like this," he bent over an imaginary cane,
"and you're an old man — like that," he stroked an imaginary
pair of whiskers — "I'll tell you all about this thing. Then
you'll be as wise as I am. And we'll have a good laugh to-
gether. But you must never tell Rosa. You'll give me your
promise?"
"Providing you never talk political nonsense again,"
said I.
"Never again," he rejoined solemnly, but with a far-away
twinkle in his eyes,
"We'll shake hands on that," said I.
94 MIKE [Oct.,
And as our grips lingered, then parted, and the ear began
to move, he called out: "It will take a wise man more than a
little while to find that joke, all right!"
At the top of the grade that was to take me out of sight
of Villa Rosa, I drew up and looked back. Mike, still stand-
ing at the gate, waved me a parting salute. I returned it, and
went on, conscious of several doubts and a problem. For
instance, did my good friend, Mike, really know what he was
saying and doing in that recent phase of his career, when the
social, political and economic worlds trembled under the
thunderbolts of his impassioned oratorical assaults? Was he
really ashamed of his past? Was there a method in his mad-
ness? Michael Anthony's native sense of humor serves to
strengthen these legitimate doubts.
As for the problem, that is much more difficult. It was
all very well, and a cause for rejoicing, that the great modern
heresy had lost a champion; that to the hundred millions had
been added another citizen with landed interests and money
in the bank; that Rosa Maria should once more be her own
light-hearted self; that Mike should laugh even in his sleep:
but who, really, was the arch-conspirator behind this uproar
in behalf of Mike's inalienable birthright?
Whose, really, had been the master mind to bring about
this inspiring renaissance of peace and hope, love and happi-
ness? Was it the desperate and determined Rosa Maria that
deserved the credit? Should the medal go to one distant
Luigi Tordello, whose quiet song had been "patience, pa-
tience?" Or does the crown of immortelles properly descend
on the brows of one Michael Anthony, whose persuasive or-
atory had caused the captain of a precinct to sit up and take
notice? Who knows?
NOVALIS.
BY A. RAYBOULD.
T is a long cry from Novalis to our day — from
eighteenth century romanticism to twentieth cen-
tury impressionism — but antitheses are interest-
ing; and contrasts, if violent enough, may offer
points of similarity.
The experiences of Novalis by Sophie's grave, however
different in their results, were not unlike those claimed by
many modern advocates of the occult, nor, seeing that faith
and love remain ever the same, are his religious songs very
different from some of our Catholic hymns of today. Wenn
alle untreu werden might be a child's hymn to the Sacred
Heart, written yesterday:
Though all should prove unfaithful,
Yet I would faithful be.
That on this earth some gratitude
Might still be found towards Thee.
Oft' must I weep, and bitterly.
That Thou hast died for me,
And that among Thy children
So few now think of Thee.^
Many, too, of his pseudo-mystic early lyrics have much in
common with the would-be mystic songs of the hour, uniting,
as they do, supernatural longings with all too earthly desires.
Novalis, happily, unlike many of his modern prototypes,
succeeded in merging the earthly in the wholly spiritual
and in passing from human to divine love. It is the reality
of this change, more, perhaps, than its poetical expression,
which has made his writings a treasure store for all who seek
in faith a solution of life's ills, and in the love of Christ a
healing for life's sorrows.
Religious from childhood, conversant in his youth with
some of the great Catholic writers of the Middle Ages, more
I Sptritnal Songs.
96 NOVALIS [Oct.,
keenly alive than perhaps any other writer of that day to the
influence of Catholic thought upon the Romantic movement
in Germany; believing that no re-birth was possible for
Europe but through reconciliation with the old Church,
Novalis is, from the Catholic standpoint, if not the greatest,
the most important of the Romantic writers. His brilliant
defence of the older Catholic ideals in Die Christenheit oder
Europar his spiritual songs, full as they are of the personal
love of Christ, and of an ardent, tender devotion to Christ's
mother, have made of this great thinker, this poet among poets,
almost a Catholic author, though he died before he had
actually accomplished his intention of entering the Church.*
To Novalis all the greatness of the past was the outcome
of Christian belief and feeling. For him the preaching of
Christianity was the one great event in the world's history —
the one event that had given to man's life its true meaning,
lifting it from the dust to the courts of heaven; to him Chris-
tianity was the one great inspiration which had produced all
that was best in life, in literature, in art. No one felt as keenly
as he how religion had become orphaned and deprived of its
lawful rights — none fought so bravely as he against the spectre
of unbelief. He lived in a time of religious revival, even in
rationalistic Germany. Brentano was sitting by the bedside
of Catherine Emmerich, writing down her revelations on the
Passion; Friederich von Schlegel and the elder Hardenburg
had become Catholics; the whole Romantic movement was
impregnated with Catholic feeling, but no other defended the
older Christian ideals so openly and constantly as did Novalis.
Novalis, the poet, believed that the archfiend of unbelief
2 "These were beautiful, brilliant days when Europe was a Christian land —
when one Christianity occupied the Continent. Rightfully, did the wise head of
the Church oppose the insolent education of men at the expense of their holy
sense, and untimely, dangerous discoveries in the realm of knowledge. . . . The
insurgents separated the inseparable, divided the indivisible Church, and tore
themselves wickedly out of the universal Christian union, through which, and In
which alone, genuine and enduring regeneration was possible. . . . The old Catholic
belief was Christianity applied, become living. Its presence everywhere In life,
its love for art, its deep humanity, the indissolubility of Its marriages, its human
sympathy, its joy in poverty, obedience and fidelity, make it unmistakably a genuine
religion. It is made pure by the stream of time, it will eternally make happy this
earth. Shall not Protestantism finally cease, and give place to a new, more durable
Church?"
3 Sheehan, Under the Cedars and the Stars, p. 237, mentions that Hofmer always
maintained that Novalis was certainly a Catholic; and quotes a number of author-
ities to support that statement.
1022,] NOVAUS 97
could best be combated by the propagation of Christian
poetry; thinking that through religious poetry humanity,
frozen by the ice of unbelief, might again be warmed and en-
lightened. And his was the noblest effort made by any of the
Romantic writers to attain to the idea of some perfect har-
mony in art, literature, public and home life. For Novalis,
the thinker and the poet, in whom all knowledge quickly dis-
solved itself in feeling, all understanding in imagination, all
things visible in things invisible, all actuality in poetry, it was
but one step to romanticize the world and all things in it.
Poetry with him was a first principle, the creative and uphold-
ing power of order in the world; the crown of all human de-
velopment; the bridge from discord to harmony and from
doubt to certitude:
Faith is to the poet what reason is to the philosopher.
Love is the goal of the world's history, the Amen of the universe.*
For Novalis the one great certitude was that man can only
know himself in God, and find healing through the Divine
Redemption. Small wonder that, at last, he found no field for
his ideals but in the atmosphere of Catholicity, still smaller
wonder that he became the poet of spiritual desire:
Where love is freely given.
And parting is no more,
Full life forever flowing
Upon th* eternal shore.
One night of bUss unending
One long sweet perfect song;
One joy, God's face before me
Through all the ages long.^
Friederich von Hardenburg, otherwise Novalis, was bom
in 1772 in the province of Mansfield, studied philosophy in
Jena, where he came under the influence of Fichte and Schel-
ling. Later, he studied law in Leipzig and in Wittenberg,
and devoted himself for a short time to the practice of law!
He won the hearts of all who came in contact with him, not
only by the richness and variety of his intellectual gifts' but
also by the charm of his personality. The friend of many
4 Frm^meats. « Hgxniu, to the Night.
fOU OCTf, 7
98 NOVALIS [Oct.,
of the great men of that great period, notably of the Schlegels,
himself one of the most important figures of the Romantic
movement, Novalis was looked upon by his friends as a
prophet, as the very spirit of the romantic idea, as the per-
sonification of poetry. Unfortunately, the seeds of illness
were sown already in his extreme youth, and the loss of his
child bride, and of his elder brother, developed in his sensitive
nature the germs of consumption, and he died at Weisenfels
in 1801 at the early age of twenty-nine.
He wrote much, but all his work is fragmentary except
Christenheit oder Europa, a noble plea for the revival of
Christian ideals and a recognition of the Catholic Church as
the only possible teacher of the masses— a small work, but
written in strong and original prose; his famous Hymns to the
Night, written partly in verse and partly in rhythmed prose,
and, of course, his short poems, the best known of which are
The Spiritual Songs. Even Heinrich von Ofterdingen, a novel
in a fairy tale, or rather a series of fairy tales in which each
tale is an allegory — a book written as a direct antithesis to
Goethe's Wilhelm Meister — is not finished; while much of his
philosophical and miscellaneous writing remains mere frag-
ments of fragments.
The loss in extreme youth of one to whom he had given all
the romantic devotion of his boy heart, left an indelible im-
pression upon Novalis' life and writing, for, like Dante and
many another, he found in youth his Beatrice. His love for
Sophie is perhaps too exotic and rare quite to win our sym-
pathy; she comes to us through his pages rather as a spirit
than a woman, one of those fair illusive images, half child,
half angel, who know how to draw beyond the grave the souls
of those who have loved them. Sophie had been hardly be-
trothed to Novalis when she left him forever, but through her
loss he became a poet. By her grave he became a thinker and
a mystic, and through the greatness of his sorrow he turned
from earthly things to God. "Once as I wept bitter tears, as
my hopes dissolved by sorrow all melted away — as I stood
beside that barren mound, that mound that in its narrow dark-
ness hid all my life's meaning — lonely as none more lonely
could be, driven by unspeakable anguish, bereft of all force,
a mere thing of misery : and as I looked around for help, not
knowing how to go either backwards or forwards, clinging
1»22.] NOVALIS 99
with endless desire to that extinguished life, there came to me
out of the blue distance a faint twilight glimmer from the
heights of my former blessedness. Suddenly new birth bands
were loosened in my soul, and as all worldly desire fled from
me, so fled also my sorrow. My sad longings melted away
into a new and measureless world. It was thou — oh, intoxica-
tion of the night! — that then, as heaven's own slumber, didst
come to me. I seemed raised above the earth and able to look
down upon it with a newly-born spirit. The mound was
changed to a dust cloud, and through the cloud I saw the face
of my beloved: I took her hands; in her eyes eternity slum-
bered; from our tears a sparkling and unbreakable chain was
formed. Upon her neck I wept my new life's blissful tears.
It was the first, the only dream, and since it I feel unshaken
faith in the heaven of the night, and in its light, the beloved." ®
The passage of his soul from human love to divine may
be somewhat obscure, the images used to express his mystic
flights may prove a stumbling block to those who seek in him
only the religious poet, but it must be remembered that he had
not quite found the anchorage of a determined faith, and that
he was a mystic. The mystic often delights in daring, even
in sensual, images; but it remains fairly certain that through
human love he did attain to the divine ; and it is in his expres-
sion of the soul's striving after, and possession of, divine love
that his genius finds its highest expression. It is not so much
in the oft-quoted **Hinuher wall icK* in the first of his
Hymns to the Night, that we find the true Novalis, but rather
in the concluding lines of the last hymn, replete as they are
with Christian faith and love, and full of the mystic's un-
daunted hope of finding all things in God.
Novalis' courting of death, his portrayal of death as the
greatest and most desirable moment of life, may be considered
morbid and unhealthy — his own bad health may have in
some measure accounted for it — but to the mystic. Death and
its image. Night, are always subjects of glad contemplation;
and to the Romantic writer, who lives in the heroic past rather
than in the prosaic present, death must seem desirable as the
only real link with that past. To the romantically minded,
death is the one heroic event; to the truly religiously minded,
death is but the portal to God; to the mystic, life is rather
6 Hymns to the Night.
100 NOVAUS [Oct.,
the dream, and death, the reality. Novalis was a Romantic
^irriter he was deeply religious, and he was a mystic. To
him. personally, death was sweet and desirable; for death
alone cxyuld restore to him his girl bride, death alone could
show him the face of Mary, heaven's queen, whose beauty
he had sung; death alone could lull him to sleep in the
Father's arms:
A dream will burst our bands apart
And sink us in the Father's heart.'^
Deatli was the only door to "Jesus, the Beloved.*'
It is not as a maker of literature, not as a writer of perfect
lyrics, or of vigorous and imaginative prose that Novalis
makes an ultimate appeal; but rather as an original thinker
and as a deeply religious writer. He had a message to give
to the world: that message was the promise of finding all
things in God. Nearer to our time than the old mystics,
living when the full tide of rationalism was sweeping over
Europe, the personal friend of those men whose philosophy
has become a byword for infidelity, Novalis stood firm on the
rock of spiritual truth, and was the defender of Christian
ideals, even finding his way to the threshold of the Catholic
Church. Pietist rather than mystic in his own life, he com-
forts us, perhaps, more than the great mystics, seeing that it
was not in the abstract idea of the Deity that his spirit took
its flight, but rather in the intimate personal love of Christ
and of Christ's Mother.
In a world that had turned away from faith, he preached
the crying need for religion, and in a world chilled by the
cold winds of rationalism, he preached a gospel of love.
Poetry as the handmaid of love was the weapon he personally
chose to enlighten and warm his own generation and those
whicli might follow.
7 Hgmn^ to the Sight.
Ulew Books.
BISHOP BARLOW AND ANGLICAN ORDERS. A Study of the
Original Documents. By Arthur S. Barnes, M.A. New York :
Longmans, Green & Co. $4.00 net.
In his preface, the author states that if this book had been
written twenty-five years ago, it would have had value as a con-
tribution to the discussion regarding the validity of Anglican
Orders. "Now," says Monsignor Barnes, "that the question has been
decided by authority at Rome, the book has no longer the same
controversial value.*' The hope is expressed that the study may
be justified on purely historical grounds. It may be said that this
hope is justified fully. Although the author feels that the book
may have little or no practical influence on the controversies of
the day, it is diflBcult to understand how a careful reading of
Bishop Barlow and Anglican Orders can leave any reader un-
moved. True, the question of Anglican Orders has been settled;
but Monsignor Barnes has done real service to all who are inter-
ested in the subject. He shows that the historical side of the case
alone would have justified the conclusion of His Holiness, Leo
XIII., and the Commission appointed by him.
The purpose of the book is to throw new light on the story
of Bishop Barlow — a story so curious as to warrant the telling —
and also to indicate the connection of various historical incidents,
which have remained obscure up to the present time.
In a summary paragraph, the matter is put with praise-
worthy clarity and succinctness: "From the first, the Catholic
objections to Anglican Orders took two main forms, the one
historical and the other theological. It was argued, that is, either
that the historical chain had been broken, and Apostolic Succes-
sion thereby lost; or else that, even if the material succession had
been retained, the form of service employed had been insuf-
ficient to hand on the grace of Holy Order, so that the same result
had followed. The Commission might, it would appear, have
based its findings on either of these arguments, or on both com-
bined. . . . Because Leo XIII. did not care to use the argument
from history, having all that he needed ready to hand in the
argument from theology, they (Anglican controversialists) have
spoken as if he had pronounced the historical argument unsound
and devoid of utility, which is very far from being true."
The plan of the book is well conceived. The author points
out that Bishop Barlow is the link that connects present Anglican
102 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
Bishops with their Catholic predecessors. This makes the de-
tailed account of Barlow's life of paramount importance. Bar-
low's career is traced minutely. The wealth of detail which is
given is ample proof of the pains taken by the author. Monsignor
Barnes showns how Barlow's religious convictions, so to call
them, seem to have been dictated wholly by a temporizing spirit,
which allowed him to veer from Catholic faith to any amount of
Protestant negation. After all possible allowances have been
made, and after Barlow has been given the benefit of many doubts,
his protean character leaves his honesty open to the gravest sort
of question. Even when one admits the bare possibility of some
sort of excuse for Barlow's double-dealing, due as some of it
may have been, to the utterly chaotic condition of the England of
his day, it remains to be said that his dealings are hard to ex-
plain on any ground other than bad faith.
That great question which is raised by Monsignor Barnes is
this : was Barlow ever consecrated at all? The evidence, as the author
says, is in great part negative; but it is presented in a way that is
quite convincing. The results of the Act of Royal Supremacy are
traced plainly, and the fact that there is not one single document
extant, out of the fifteen that might and ought to be available, is
more than significant. In other words, there is no record of
Barlow's consecration which would pass as being adequate.
Possibly, the most striking piece of evidence is furnished by
the curious proceedings in the case of Bishop Bonner, the Cath-
olic Bishop who was the object of much plotting on the part of
his enemies. Twice he refused to take the Oath of Royal Su-
premacy. The second refusal was more than likely to cause his
indictment for high treason. In giving his reason for refusing
the second time to take the Oath — a refusal, be it said, that was
hailed with delight by his enemies, who were confident that it
would prove his undoing — the Catholic Bishop stated that Dr.
Home, the Protestant Bishop, who was to administer the Oath,
was "no Bishop at all, but only plain Dr. Home." To confirm
his statement, Bishop Bonner then demanded proof of Dr. Home's
consecration. That proof failed, because when Barlow's name
was reached in the Protestant line of succession, no satisfactory
record could be adduced, by means of which he could be accounted
a true bishop. The astonishing thing is this, that the proceed-
ings against Bishop Bonner were dropped. If Barlow's conse-
cration could have been proved — and there ought to have been
proof, and to spare, if any record existed at the time — Bishop
Bonner, the Catholic Bishop, could have been executed for high
treason, on the ground that he had refused a second time to take
1922.] NEW BOOKS 103
the Oath prescribed by the King. The simple fact that no such
proof was forthcoming must be taken to mean that it did not
exist, and that Barlow was a "bishop" only in virtue of the fact
that Henry VIII. had put into practice his Royal Supremacy, and
had created the new bishop by royal decree.
Examination of the Patent Rolls shows that in the Roll for
1536, there has been mutilation. It is in this mutilated Roll that
the record in question should be found.
With regard to Parker's consecration, there is a silence of
fifty years that is ominous, to say the least of it. The mystery
and silence which surround the consecration of Parker gave rise,
naturally enough, to the wild tales like the "Nag's Head Fable,"
and other queer stories.
A careful reading of Monsignor Barnes' book will disclose at
once the admirable scholarship and accurate construction as a
result of which he reaches his conclusions. It seems hardly neces-
sary to add that the book is excellently written, and that there is
abundant reference to documents. A good summary of contents,
and index, taken with a valuable appendix, add much to the use-
fulness of the book.
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE AND THE CATHOLIC FAITH. By A. M.
Bellwald, S.M. New York: The Macmillan Co. $2.50.
This volume contains a full account and an excellent crit-
icism of Christian Science from the Catholic standpoint. The
author has a wide acquaintance with St. Thomas, and he illus-
trates or confirms his text with apposite footnotes from the writ-
ings of the Angelic Doctor. He sketches well the career of Mary
Baker Eddy, the sibyl and prophetess of this new revelation.
Hers was not a lovely life, nor an attractive character. She left
her only son to be reared by strangers. She made life impossible
for her second husband, and married again during his lifetime.
She was not truthful, she was not honest, and of the ardent long-
ings and mystic flights of truly holy souls she had not the faintest
conception. But she was an able and energetic organizer; she
was capable of enormous labor; she appreciated thoroughly the
value of a dollar — in fact, to use an expressive vulgarism — she
sensed that large numbers of people asked nothing better than
to be fooled, and she was both capable and desirous of fooling
them. Her numerous quarrels with erstwhile friends and pro-
t^g^s, her repudiation of once trusted lieutenants, the selfishness,
bitterness and unholy strife displayed, make spicy, but most
unedifying, reading. And there is something exceptionally loath-
some and repulsive in all this, when one remembers that the chief
104 NEW BOOKS [Oct..
actress in these inglorious and sordid escapades posed as the
Teacher of the Race, and at times, with blasphemous audacity,
did not shrink from putting herself on a par with our Redeemer
Himself.
Still she achieved an astounding worldly success. A per-
fectly uneducated woman, whose writings largely consist of pre-
tentious emptiness and silly twaddle, she was looked up to as an
oracle by thousands; and a homeless wanderer, whose relations
had all grown weary of her, she died worth three million dollars.
In his criticism of Christian Science, Father Bellwald points
out that its basis is Pantheistic; that whatever religion it con-
tains is borrowed directly from the New England Unitarianism;
that its moral code is merely a refined Epicureanism; that this
life and its good things are the really important issues for the
Christian Scientist. A passage from Father Woods, quoted on
page 156, sums up in terse and vigorous language the Catholic
mind on Christian Science: "Christian Science is not a harmless
craze. It is one of the most diabolical of anti-Christian systems,
and in it the visible promoters are but tools of the prime-mover,
the devil. He goes about seeking to deceive men, and would
gladly use all the powers of his angelic nature to snatch souls
from Christ."
MOSES AND THE LAW. A Study of Pentateuch Problems by
Fathers of the Society of Jesus. Edited by Cuthbert Lattey,
S.J. London: G. C. Griffiths & Co.
This book embodies a series of articles by a group of Jesuit
scholars on the main problems presented by the first five books of
the Old Testament. The Days of Genesis, The Alleged Sources
of Genesis I.-IIL, The Flood, The Antiquity of Man, The Ark of
the Covenant, Wellhausen and the Levitical Priesthood, The
Chronology of the Pentateuch, Genesis and Evolution, The Re-
ligion of the Pentateuch — these titles indicate the scope of the
volume. They should rivet the attention of the intelligent Cath-
olic layman as well as of the priest, for the problems are of prime
importance for a grasp of the fundamental issues at stake be-
tween those who stand for the historical character of the Penta-
teuch and those who impugn it. Each essay bears the impress
of sound scholarship, and sets forth in a sane and simple manner
the solution of questions, with which the character of the Old
Testament as a whole is bound up. Between ultra-conservative
views on the one hand, and the vagaries of rationalism on the
other, the writers steer an even course, formulating principles
which, while simple in themselves, are easilv lost to view. In the
1922.] NEW BOOKS 105
essay on the Days of Genesis, Father O'Hea emphasizes the fact
that the aim of the inspired seer was to sum up the creation of the
world, not with an eye to the chronological sequence in which its
several parts appeared, but with a definite logical scheme in his
mind. Similarly in the article on the Antiquity of Man, Father
Parsons shows clearly that the Bible makes no claim to furnish
us with a chronology of prehistoric times, while Father Agius,
writing on Evolution, points out that what the evolutionist has
to prove is just the thing he assumes — the actual evolution of
human psychical functions from those of brutes. The book is an
admirable example of fine Catholic apologetics. Couched in
simple language and facing burning questions frankly and fairly,
keeping close the while to the norm of Catholic teaching, it is a
brief, and yet comprehensive, presentation of the Catholic position
on questions of the highest importance to the faith.
ITALY, OLD AND NEW. By Elizabeth Hazelton Haight, Profes-
sor of Latin, Vassar College. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.
$2.50.
To write a good book about Italy requires scholarship, imag-
ination, and an open mind, in addition to literary skill. But
sometimes people who have not these items of equipment essay
the task, with results either inadequate or deplorable, or both.
Miss Haight's volume may be somewhat inadequate, as almost
any book on Italy is, but it surely is not deplorable. So far from
being a matter to weep over, it is a book that is a real delight.
Scholarship the Professor of Latin unquestionably has, and she
loves beauty and thrills to its voice. "One of my greatest joys
in Rome has been my window,*' begins the author in a poetic sim-
plicity that characterizes the whole volume. For Miss Haight,
like all wise souls, evidently believes that simplicity is the keynote
to the most enduring harmonies of life.
Many people go to Italy every year with the desire to bring
back a little culture; and they succeed sometimes in spite of
themselves. But Miss Haight took her culture to Italy, and
brought it back a more finished product — because of herself. For
to seek the pleasant places about the Forum, with Horace in hand,
will make both the Forum and the friend of Maecenas a more vivid
element in one's life. To philosophize about Vergil in Mantua
will make the little city a dearer thing and Vergil a more living
influence. And this is what Miss Haight did. With the Roman
poets as her guides, she leads us over the paths they beckon
her to follow.
But the book is not all a glimpse of scholarship; for the
106 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
author glimpses modern life as entertainingly as she visions the
old. It is refreshing to read the chapter, "Tea Drinking in Rome,"
and with Miss Haight to become enthusiastic over spumone or
cassata Siciliana at Aragno's, for instance; or to dine al fresco
at the Castello dei Cesari on the Aventine. For a Catholic it is
delightful to find the author sensitive to the loveliness of a First
Communion, and full of feeling for the beauty of Italian devotion
to Our Lady. It is a further evidence of the author's poetic
insight and her love of truth, that she does not repress her admir-
ation for the things that do not touch closely her own spiritual
life.
A HANDBOOK OF SCRIPTURE STUDY. By Rev. H. Schumacher.
Vol III.— The New Testament. St. Louis: B. Herder Book
Co. $2.00.
Catholic Scripture scholars are becoming very active in recent
years, and are furnishing the reading public with Biblical liter-
ature of the highest quality. Dr. Grannan's introduction is fol-
lowed by a work on the New Testament from the pen of Dr.
Schumacher, Professor of New Testament Exegesis in the Cath-
olic University of America. The third volume is first to appear
in the series undertaken by Dr. Schumacher. The other two are
promised in a short time.
The present volume treats of the books of the New Testa-
ment. The contents of each book are briefly stated, and the
authorship is studied. Then follows the collection of testimony,
in the early Patristic literature, as to the authenticity of the
books. The date, the place, the language of the original are dis-
cussed and settled in the light of historical evidence. Special
problems concerning each book of the New Testament are con-
sidered, and the solution is indicated in brief, concise language.
The decisions of the Biblical Commission, where such have been
given, are stated at the end of each chapter.
The student of the New Testament will find in this work
an invaluable aid. As a scholarly compendium of the prob-
lems of the New Testament, the work has not been surpassed
by any text-book in English. The Seminarian and the professor
will find in Dr. Schumacher's treatise a reliable source of informa-
tion, gathered with years of patient research, sifted and summar-
ized. The bibliography is not voluminous, but is very choice.
Some of the "old reliables" are omitted from the list of books^
but their places are taken by more recent and equally sound
works. The publisher deserves great credit for clothing this
scholarly work in a most presentable form.
1922.] NEW BOOKS 107
THE BOYHOOD CONSCIOUSNESS OF CHRIST. A Critical Ex-
amination of Luke a. 49, By Rev. P. J. Temple, S.T.L. New
York: The Macmillan Co. $3.50.
In the domain of religion, the most important subject that
can engage the attention of serious minds is the Person of the
Founder of Christianity. Round about Him have ebbed and
flowed through the centuries the changing tides of human specu-
lation, and, as Father Temple well points out, never has He
challenged searching inquiry so deeply and so widely as during
the past fifty years. In that inquiry, with all its momentous
issues, it is the Consciousness of Christ, as expressed in His words
and deeds, that constitutes the supreme object of study — the final
test, the ultimate determinant. The volume before us deals with
one phase of that Consciousness — the Boyhood Consciousness of
Christ as it is found embodied in the first recorded words of Our
Lord: "Did you not know that I must be in the (things) of My
Father?" — a verse more familiar to our ears in its more common
rendering: "Did you not know that I must be about My Father's
business?" (Luke ii. 49.) To the study of these few words.
Father Temple's volume is devoted.
Our author traces the history of the text through the early
centuries, citing the interpretation of the great scholars of those
days. From the age of the Fathers he passes to the Middle
Ages, and then, coming to modern times, sets forth the welter of
conflicting theories that have raged round the Lord's first words.
He sums up the case thus far: "The early Church saw in Jesus'
first recorded words an expression of real Divine Sonship. This
interpretation was supported through the centuries, and is up-
held by certain conservative Protestant, as well as Catholic,
scholars of the present day."
Having traced the history of the question. Father Temple
sets himself to the study of the text itself, establishing its his-
torical trustworthiness, delineating its background, and, in a
masterly piece of exegesis, scrutinizing the words one by one,
showing that not only Divine Sonship is contained in it, but also
Messianic Consciousness. In the two following sections, he com-
pletes his analysis. He studies the context of the words — first,
the immediate context, and then the remote context, rounding out
and pressing home his interpretation, showing how admirably the
first words of Christ are in accord with all the testimony which
the Gospels render to the Person of the Lord. The reader lays
down the volume with the conviction that there are no signs or
hints in the Lucan verse, or in any text of Scripture, of any dawn-
ing of the consciousness of Divine Sonship, or of any time when
108 NEW BOOKS [Oct,
Christ's S€lf-consciousness of Divine Sonship was wanting to Him.
With a wonderful knowledge of all that has been written on the
subject, with clearness and cogency of argument, with sureness of
touch and simplicity of word, Father Temple proves that "there
never was a moment when Christ did not know exactly the nature
of His filial relation to God."
Father Temple has given us a volume with which all stu-
dents of Christology must in future count. It is something more
than a fine piece of Apologetic — it is the most helpful contribution
to the defence of the Christian religion that has come from a
Catholic pen in some years.
On page 8 an obvious misprint gives the date of the death of
St. Cyril of Alexandria as 144 instead of 441. An equally patent
misprint on page 196 should be corrected in a second edition.
The comprehensive bibliography enhances the value of the
volume. In such a well-chosen list The Person of Christ in
Modern Thought, by E. Diggs La Touche (London: James Clark
& Co.), is worthy of a place.
MARIQUITA. By John Ayscough. New York : Benziger Brothers.
$2.00 net.
To say of this novel that it is in every respect both worthy and
characteristic of its author, is to speak in terms of praise, such
as we have not always been able to apply to Monsignor Bicker-
staffe-Drew's recent works. In reading them, wistful memories
of his earliest achievements obtruded themselves, persistently
suggesting comparisons. Thoughts of Marotz and Dromina recur
in the present instance, but only to assign to Mariquita the same
exalted rank as theirs. It is an association of supreme excellence
solely; there is no similarity of varied scene and romantic dra-
matic action. The author has concentrated upon one personality,
the girl, Mariquita; and her environment is **a vast sun-swept,
breeze-swept upland," an Arizona ranch, of whose owner she is
the only child, his housekeeper and servant. Her dead mother
was a Protestant, her father, of Spanish and Indian blood, is just
enough of a Catholic to have baptized her himself and sent her,
at the age of ten, to the nuns at Loreto, beyond Denver. She
was recalled home five years' later: and for five years more she
lived the life of "a born contemplative," humble and ardent, un-
self-conscious, unquestioning, seeing in all the physical world
about her a manifestation of God's love, in every condition and
homely duty, the expression of His welcome will.
To our mind, the author has surpassed himself in this inti-
mate study of a crystalline spirituality, made fascinating and
1922.] NEW BOOKS 109
lovely by his artistry. A memorable picture is that of Mariquita
wending her way to the shade of a tree-clump out upon the
prairie where, every day, she hears Mass "her own way." for the
nearest church is fifty miles distant. There she follows, out of
her book, the Ordinary of the Mass, her face turned in the direc-
tion of the spot whither in heart and mind she is transported, her
old, far-distant school, with its chapel and its Tabernacle; ring-
ing a bell at the Elevation, "though she could elevate only her own
solitary soul." The story proper opens with the introduction of
circumstances, which ingeniously, though simply and plausibly,
reveal her vocation to her and prepare the path for her entrance
into the Carmelite Order.
The book has a twofold appeal. Not only is it an interpreta-
tion of the soul of a contemplative, it is also a special plea for the
Contemplative Orders. In the apology of one of the characters.
Sister Aquinas, replying to her non-Catholic listener's verdict
of "uselessness" pronounced upon the Carmelites, and in his own
further comments, the author makes an eloquent defence and
exposition of this high calling, a burning protest against the ma-
terialism and selfishness that seek to belittle it. Sister Aquinas
mentions "a chaplain" who informed her that nothing pleased his
soldiers so much as to hear him tell them about the Contemplative
Nuns. If, as we venture to suspect, the said chaplain was our
author, the strange, significant statement is easy to believe. They
must be exceptional readers, Catholic or not, who would not feel
the charm of the understanding and sympathy with which the
characters are drawn, principal and auxiliaries alike, the little,
warm, human touches, the outcroppings of delightful humor.
The content is somewhat shorter than the average, affording
one compensation, however, in thus bettering the chances for
reading it under the freedom from interruption that we all desire
when absorbed in a work of art.
WILLIAM DE MORGAN AND HIS WIFE. By A. M. W. Stirling.
New York: Henry Holt & Co. $6.00.
A novelist with a career so extraordinary as Mr. De Morgan's
ought to provide material for a splendid biography, and Mrs.
Stirling has done her best. As the title indicates, however, the
canvas has been widened to include Evelyn (Pickering) De Mor-
gan. This seems expedient because the novelist was, during
more than forty years of his life, a designer of pottery, tile and
stained glass, while his wife executed many notable paintings in
the Pre-Raphaelite tradition. But the book is likely to seem, as
ft result, more concerned with kilns and studios than with liter-
110 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
ature, and thus to repel the smockless reader, though he cannot
fail to enjoy the wealth of excellent illustrations. No pains have
been spared by the author to make her narrative complete. She
has some of Boswell's thoroughness — and of his platitudes. Still,
like that immortal admirer of the Doctor, she permits her subject
to talk and write letters copiously, so that his keen humor and
fine grace of character make a host of pages worth lingering over.
From the literary point of view, one would have preferred a some-
what more critical biographer. To let the exuberant Professor
Phelps do all the talking about Joseph Vance is just a bit naive.
Nor is the clumsy dragging-in of De Morgan's argument with
Father Vassal-Phillips over ritualistic details an index of good
judgment. All things considered, however, De Morgan lives in
this book very much as he probably did live — a middle-class Eng-
lishman, despite his inventive genius and artistic temperament,
the truest inheritor of the vitality and kindliness of Dickens.
AN INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY. By Wilhelm Windel-
band. Translated by Joseph McCabe. New York: Henry
Holt & Go. $4.00.
An eminent professor can hardly be expected to write an
elementary treatise on his subject; and even should he attempt it,
his chances of success are slight. For his teeming knowledge and
deep thoughts defy condensation, and above all simplification.
Monsignor Batiffol, for instance, has written no "Primer of Prim-
itive Catholicism," nor has Kautzsch produced an "Elementary
Hebrew Grammar.** Professor Windelband*s Introduction to
Philosophy has a simple title and, on account of its moderate size,
an ingenious air. It is in reality a most difficult work, and fit
only for those who have already received a thorough grounding
in philosophy.
The author examines the deep and ever-recurring problems
which have exercised the minds of men from the beginning — sub-
stance and accident, causality and time, the origin of knowledge
and its validity, the various shades and degrees of truth. These
questions occupy the first part of the present volume. Its second
part deals with what the author calls axiological problems, or
questions of value. Under this rubric, ethics, aesthetics and re-
ligious questions are considered. Of all these recondite and
elusive matters wide surveys are presented, surveys possible only
to one who had read enormously, thought deeply and acquired,
from reading and personal reflection, a complete mastery of his
subject. Many ancient philosophers and practically all modern
ones, are mentioned in these pages, with, however, one significant
1922.] NEW BOOKS 111
exception — there is no reference made to Catholic philosophy. It
is true, St. Augustine gets a line or two, Descartes a brief para-
graph or two — surely, a meagre showing for a philosophy that
boasts a succession of almost twenty centuries. Moreover, many
assertions occur to which no Catholic can subscribe. The book,
therefore, is suited only for those who will accept the ipse dixit
of no master however eminent, but can gauge accurately for
themselves wherein truth and falsehood lie.
A sentence taken from the closing pages of the volume shows
eloquently its despairing gospel: *'Our inquiry began," says Pro-
fessor Windelband, "with the unsatisfactoriness of knowledge: it
ends with the unsatisfactoriness of life*' (p. 351). A philosophy
which voices that conclusion is lethal. It is powerless to uplift
humanity or develop the divine in man.
THE CATHOLIC SPIRIT IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE.
By George N. Shuster. New York : The Macmillan Co. $2.00.
The very title of this book invites and intrigues. For here is
a subject to which no student of literature or religion can be in-
different — a phenomenon of which even the "general reader"
must be aware, because of the countless separate analyses and
examples in recent pages. To have all these threads gathered
together in a single pattern, these color-facets synthesized and
resolved back into pure light, were "a consummation devoutly
to be wished:" is it also a consummation too great for a single
hand within a single volume, one wonders?
In general scope and intent. Professor Shuster's work is mag-
nificent. Beginning with "The Days of Lost Tradition" and the
mediaeval affiliations of Kenelm Digby, it rightly devotes some
seventy-five pages to Newman and the Oxford Movement. Then
comes a chapter on Aubrey de Vere, Gerard Hopkins, and Coventry
Patmore. But it is not until after Francis Thompson and a group
somewhat equivocally described as "Inheritors" — they become
even more equivocal when they are found to include such con-
summate artists in prose and verse as Alice Meynell and Louise
Imogen Guiney! — that we meet a treatise on "Ruskin, Pater, and
the Pre-Raphaelites," with Lionel Johnson thrown in for good
measure. Such shuffling of the cards, such crossing and reversing
of the currents is curious and confusing to the reader. Again,
it is delightful to have the modern "Chroniclers of Christendom,"
from Lingard to Wilfrid Ward, brought together for appreciation
and to follow the adventures of Chesterton, the "journalist," and
Belloc, the "historian." But few readers will feel that justice has
been done to the many-sided genius of Robert Hugh Benson; and
112 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
fewer still will enjoy that note of patronage toward the venerable
and versatile "John Ayscough." or the dismissal of Mrs. Craigie in
less than a sentence.
The chapters dealing with *The Voice of Ireland*' and "Vistas
of the Catholic Spirit/* seem to suggest that various portions of
this extraordinary book may have been written as separate essays
and later brought rather hastily together — which would go far
toward explaining the qualities and the defects of the whole.
Professor Shuster has the gift of pungent phrase, as when he
describes Miss Agnes Repplier as "the ghost of Jane Austen
wedded to the spirit of Montaigne;" yet, taken all in all, his chap-
ter on the "American Contribution'* is probably the most uneven
of this whole uneven volume. Here one finds thoroughgoing ap-
preciation of Charles Warren Stoddard and Father Tabb, but a
total inability to appreciate any of the rarer lyric work of Joyce
Kilmer. While the writings of Archbishop Ireland are highly
praised. Archbishop Spalding is ignored until a final division
rightly called a "Miscellany."
It seems like mere caviling to cite further the omissions — or
commissions — in contemporary judgments. Yet one is forced to
take this strangely dual volume seriously, since it ranges all the
way from illuminating, first-hand criticism to cursory journalistic
cataloguing. It is difficult to conceive any work which more
imperatively needed to be written — or to cite another which more
imperatively needs to be revised. If it could, as a whole, be
brought up to the mood of its own best moments, it would be-
come a critical achievement of enormous value.
THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF DANTE ALIGHIERL By
John J. Rolbiecki, A.M. Washington: Salve Regina Press,
Catholic University of America. $2.25 net.
This valuable study is a Doctor's dissertation, submitted to
the Faculty of Philosophy of the Catholic University. As such, it
bears the scholar's earmarks of references to original and second-
ary sources, a critical estimate of other studies bearing upon the
subject, and a logical and authoritative presentation of the argu-
ment. It is a volume for students of history and philosophy,
rather than for the lay reader, although the latter will find in it
much that is stimulating and suggestive.
The author explains the note of a longing for universal peace
and the brotherhood of mankind that characterizes the works
of Dante. He undertakes to present a survey of the political phil-
osophy of Dante, his conception of the destiny of man, and of the
ideal state or political system through which that destiny might
1922.] ^EW BOOKS US
be realized. With this object he examines critically Dante's
theory of law and of the origin, necessity, aims, and organization
of the State. Dante's conception of the relation between Church
and State is next discussed, and a final chapter surveys Dante's
plan of universal empire. Interesting evidence is presented to
show that while Dante believed in unity of government, he was
not, as has been generally stated, in favor of absolute monarchy.
The central government, he held, should be limited to those mat-
ters which were common to all men. Evidence is also presented
showing that Dante believed in the sovereignty of the people, in
the sense that the rulers should be regarded as officials and serv-
ants of the people.
CONSIDERATIONS FOR CHRISTIAN TEACHERS. By Brother
Phillip. Baltimore: John Murphy Co. $1.75.
Brother Phillip is the Superior General of the Christian
Brothers, and his considerations are addressed directly to his
own spiritual children; but, dealing as they do with the basic
principles of Christian pedagogy, they will, and should, find a
much larger audience. In some of the seventy meditations, the
supernatural element is predominant; others are more practical,
dealing with the discipline of the classroom; but in them all, as
Bishop Shahan says in his introduction, one finds the pure spirit
of the Gospel as applied to the guidance of youth. Every page is
freighted with professional wisdom, the fruit of ripened expe-
rience; better still, with this natural endowment, the author has
combined most apposite quotations from Holy Writ, from the
conferences of the founder Of his Institute, St. John Baptist de la
Salle, or from the writings of notable French educators, like
Dupanloup. Not only the great community to whom it is im-
mediately addressed, but every Christian teacher should have
this book constantly at hand. It belongs to the third group of
Bacon's famous classification, one of the select few to be chewed
and digested.
EVERYDAY CIVICS. By Charles Edgar Finch, Director of Junior
High School Grades and Citizenship. Rochester, N. Y.:
American Book Co. $1.20.
During the last two years, many publishers have been pre-
senting new text-books in community civics. This may be taken
as an indication of dissatisfaction with the work in civics as it has
been conducted. It may also indicate that those who are inter-
ested in social studies are coming to some agreement concerning
the purposes of teaching social subjects.
VOL. CXVI. 8
114 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
Charles Edgar Finch's book, Everyday Civics, is written for
pupils between the ages of twelve and fifteen. Participation in
activities, rather than information, is emphasized. The school, the
playground, and the neighborhood are the laboratories in which
it is planned that civic truths are to be tested.
Some of the matters brought up for discussion, investigation,
and action are: Living together, so that the members of a com-
munity may contribute something, as well as get something;
understanding of means of carrying out purposes of government;
progress in government obtained through centuries of toil, suf-
fering and bloodshed; the machinery of government.
The plan is a commendable one — one which deserves the
attention of teachers. Many \vill wait wath interest the results,
which maj^ come from a trial of the book in the classroom.
FOOD, HEALTH AND GROWTH. A Discussion of the Nutrition
of Children. By L. Emmett Holt, M.D., LL.D., formerly Pro-
fessor of the Diseases of Children in the College of Physicians
and Surgeons, Columbia University. New York: The Mac-
millan Co. $L50.
This is a series of lectures delivered at the Medical School
of the Leland Stanford Junior University in San Francisco at the
end of last year, in the Lane Lecture Series. As might be ex-
pected from Dr. Holt's recognized thoroughness and broad knowl-
edge of the subject of children's health, it is a very practical and
complete presentation of present-day knowledge on the subject.
We have only come to realize in recent years how much such
knowledge is needed. Investigations in schools in various parts
of the country have shown that not a few of the children of well-
to-do parents are sub-normal in nutrition, not because of lack
of food, but because of definite deficiency in the variety of their
food. Many of them do not eat enough of the fresh vegetables,
and not a few of them fail to secure in their dietary sufiBcient of
the calcium salts and of phosphorus, which are so important for
the growth of the skeleton and for the building up of resistive
vitality to disease. Dr. Holt's book will be of very great value,
then. The work is published in connection with the Child Health
Organization, of which Dr. Holt is the President. He has empha-
sized in it the need for increased interest in child health if we are
to save the lives of many children, a very vital need in face of the
decreasing birth rate. Dr. Holt quotes Dr. Osier's address to a
public health meeting in Baltimore, in which he said:
" *We have a disease in this city more widely prevalent than
tuberculosis, more fatal than cancer, one that causes many more
1922.] NEW BOOKS 115
deaths every year than the intestinal diseases of children/ The
audience, the physicians as well as others, wondered what the
Doctor had in mind — when, after continuing in the same strain
for seme minutes, he announced that *the disease is Baltimore
apathy.* I fear this disease is not confined to Baltimore."
THE VEHEMENT FLAME. By Margaret Deland. New York:
Harper & Brothers. $2.00.
Faulty construction and a plethora of material are account-
able for the surprising fact that, in this instance, Mrs. Deland has
obscured her intention almost beyond identification.
Presumably, her objective is a study of jealousy, the "ve-
hement flame," consuming Eleanor, the wife, and twenty years
the senior, of Maurice Curtis, aged nineteen. This theme calls for
a more intensive treatment than has been employed. Jealousy
does not dominate Eleanor's erratic mentality; it is merely addi-
tional to many exasperating attributes and deficiencies that exceed
it as contributory factors in the inevitable unhappiness of this
inexplicable union, and in Maurice's infidelity. So small a part is
played by the unusual disparity of years, that we wonder why the
author introduced it. In fine, we find no clue to Eleanor's per-
sonality. She lives and dies elusive, isolated and unconvincing,
Not so with Lily Dale, the girl of the underworld, Maurice's
partner in a sordid affair into which the affections do not enter.
All that relates to her is done with a sure, skillful touch that
imparts vitality to Maurice, also, as he progresses, with the passing
of time, from frightened anger and shrinking at the birth of the
son, whose existence is a reproach, to love and shamefaced pride.
This phase is so well handled that we imagine for awhile that we
have, at last, discovered the author's real purpose, expressed in
Lily's furies of jealous resentment over Maurice's anxious efforts
for improvement of the ungrammatical, fibbing, pilfering little son,
whom she is ruining.
Our impression is strengthened by Eleanor's death, self-
sought, with the avowed object of enabling Maurice to marry
Lily, thus gaining control of his child ; therefore, our anticipations
are keyed high as we begin the last chapter, wherein Maurice
announces his future plans to his friends, the Houghtons, and
their daughter, Edith, whom he loves and who loves him. Much
has been said, and reiterated, of his bitter repentance for the
long-past sin, his soul-searchings, in which he has forever set
aside himself, his desires, ambitions and personal happiness, to
consider the one thing that matters — his boy's welfare. He now
gives, as the result of these profound and painful reflections, his
116 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
belief that the end to which he has devoted himself would be not
achieved, but defeated, by marriage with Lily, because of her
quarrelsome jealousy of his influence. It sounds genuine, and is
convincing; but it is followed by an extraordinary debate, a far-
rago of inconsistencies and evasions, ending with the establish-
ment of his personal happiness by prospective union with Edith.
This futile, stultifying finale is not the sort of thing we are
accustomed to receive from the author. No one hitherto has shown
clearer apprehension of the momentousness of spiritual issues,
the uncompromising nature of sincere repentance. The locale of
the story is Mercer, already familiar to us through her novels.
The Awakening of Helena Richie and The Iron Woman. Remem-
bering the exactness with which the mills of God ground in
Helena's case, we have wondered if, at the back of Mrs. Deland's
mind, there is not — or was not, in this book's incipiency — a pro-
jected sequel to be based upon the actual awakening of Maurice
Curtis.
VERGIL. By Tenney Frank. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
$2.00.
This work by the professor of Latin at Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity is excellently done. Professor Frank classes it as a biog-
raphy, but it is equally a discussion of the authorship of certain
poems attributed to Vergil, and of the significance, particularly
personal and historical, of his other works.
One of the most interesting of these discussions concerns the
famous fourth Georgic with its allusion to the child whose coming
will bring the Golden Age. It was largely the veiled and pro-
phetic allusion in this poem to the (as was supposed) coming of
Our Lord, which gave rise to the mediaeval opinion that Vergil
was a prophet and magician. Said Newman: "Vergil's single
words and phrases, his pathetic half lines, gave utterance, as the
voice of nature herself, to that pain and weariness, yet hope of
better things, which iS the experience of her children in every
time."
Professor Frank's chapter on "Materialism in the Service of
Poetry" is particularly illuminating and valuable. At times, the
author "lets himself go," and gives us in a vivid page sidelights
upon Ventidius, Cornelius Gallus, "the brilliant, hot-headed, over-
grown boy, whom everyone loved." and Horace, who for an hour
dreamed of a distant Utopia beyond the din of civil war, a dream
St. Augustine and Coleridge (and many another, no doubt)
were to dream in later days.
This biography is not lengthy, a fact which will commend it
1922.] NEW BOOKS 117
to the general reader no less than to advanced students of Latin.
The latter particularly will be glad of it, with its patient scholar-
ship and its many stimulating pages.
ANGELS AND MINISTERS. By Laurence Housman. New York:
Harcourt, Brace & Co. $1.50.
This little book consists of four plays of "Victorian Shade
and Character," written in the simple and beautiful prose of a
poet. In it Mr. Housman seeks to catch the atmosphere of what
we call the Mid- Victorian Era and to present vivid, intimate,
and yet delicate glimpses of Queen Victoria, Lord Beaconsfield,
Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone and Mr. Morley.
The playlet, "Possession," is called "A Peep-show in Para-
dise," and while, in conception, it reminds one of Barrie, it just
fails to show the inimitable J. M. B.'s brand of delicately ironic
humor. "His Favorite Flower," which ironically makes the point
that the statesman's suffering springs from the consciousness, not
that his people fail to appreciate him, but that they praise him
for the blunders he has made and the unhappiness he has caused
them. "The Queen: God Bless Her!" suggests Victoria in the
Highlands for an intimate quarter of an hour with her great
Tory prime minister, the description of whom is the best thing
in the book. Another playlet is the "Comforter," portraying Mrs.
Gladstone in the role, which she fills with a maternal tact and
understanding of her husband, not only beautiful but true to her
character.
This little book is worth while; there are in it poetic insight,
grace and a delicate handling which mark the real poet.
DE BEATA VITA; Soliloquiorum Duo Libri; Be Magistro; De Im-
mortalitate Animas. Sancti Aurelii Augustini Tractatus in Usum
Scholarum Adaptati, curante F. E. T. (Philadelphia: Peter Reilly.
35 to 40 cents each.) As far as the mass of men are concerned, the
treasures of Patristic lore are inaccessible in the oblivion to which they
are practically consigned. Only priests, as a rule, are privileged to
read the words and hear the voices of the saints and scholars who,
in the early days of the Church, built up the fair temple of Christian
truth. It was a happy idea of Father Francis E. Tourscher, of St.
Thomas College, Villanova, to bring within the reach of our Catholic
schools a few interesting treatises of St. Augustine. Father Tourscher
showed excellent judgment in his selections; he has, indeed, taken for
his purpose real gems of our Christian classics. De Beata Vita carries
the reader to the conclusion that only in the knowledge of God can
true happiness be found. Soliloquiorum Duo Libri are monologues on
the soul and God. De Magistro is a little treatise on the nature and
function of language, leading up to the truth that not by words, but
118 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
by Christ, the spirit of man is taught. De Immortalitate Animm is a
study of the human soul, its nature and destiny. These booklets, en-
shrining as they do the reflections of one of the master minds of all
time on themes of perennial interest and importance, could profitably
replace some of the works of pagan classics that we put in the hands
of our students of the Latin tongue.
A brief running commentary would light up these little editions of
Patristic classics, and closer proof-reading would bar some misprints
which, however, are so obvious that not even a tyro will be halted
by them.
A SIMPLE LIFE OF JESUS FOR HIS LITTLE ONES, by a Sister of
Notre Dame. (St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co. Cloth, 85 cents.)
Those who have read and enjoyed The Children's King and First Com-
munion Days, will welcome this little volume by the same author, for
it breathes a spirit of piety and devotion and the story of the Life of
Jesus is told in the simple language that characterizes her work. The
illustrations are exceptionally good, being selections of some of the
best works of the Old Masters. We heartily recommend it.
HOLY SOULS' BOOK, edited by Rev. F. X. Lasance (New York:
Benziger Brothers. Prices: $1.50, $2.00, $2.75 and $3.50, ac-
cording to binding desired), is a complete prayer book, including
special prayers in behalf of the Souls in Purgatory, and will be of
especial interest to those who have a great devotion to the Holy Souls.
BENEDICTIONALE, edited by Rev. J. B. O'Connell (Dublin, Ireland:
The Kenny Press), is a liturgical publication of special prac-
tical value to parish priests. It gives the full rite for exposition
of the Most Blessed Sacrament at different times and feasts, and includes
the hymns and special prayers ordered by the Pope to be recited in
various seasons. The American edition has been prepared, the pub-
lisher's announcement states, with the aid of an American prelate.
The book is tastefully printed, and in format and composition speaks
well for the progress of the publication in Ireland of liturgical books.
Once in the far past, Ireland led the world in artistic book making.
May America help her in her noble efforts to regain such supremacy.
MEDITATIONS ON OUR BLESSED LADY for every day of the Month
of May, by the Very Rev. J. Guibert, S.S. Authorized translation.
(Baltimore, Md.: O'Donovan Brothers. $1.25.) These Meditations were
dictated by the Very Reverend author while pinned to a bed of sick-
ness, which ended in death. They are, therefore, the last words of a
truly apostolic priest whose other writings are well known and have
been of great help to unnumbered souls. While arranged especially
for the Month of May, these meditations can be used at any time, and
will undoubtedly help those who use them to a deeper appreciation
of the Mother of God.
1922.] NEW BOOKS 119
POEMS, by Louise Hart. (Boston: The Cornhill Publishing Co.
$1.50.) This unpoetic age, strange to say, is singularly productive
of versification. And, stranger still, the majority of the melodists are,
if not infant prodigies, nearly always youthful. Take, for example,
the diminutive Louise Hart, whose free verse was first written down
at the age of four, but in whose latter poetry, as in the best French
Vers Libre, rhymes occur more and more frequently. There are, of
course, many groans from the critics, who maintain that her promises
were best nourished in silence, and yet one would be unwilling to
miss her Poems, published at the age of eleven. Although Louise Hart
is Wordsworthian in that her verse sings of the beauties of nature,
her work is at the same time strikingly original. It tells the wonders
of the sea and the rain, the trees and the butterflies. There is, too, the
coloring of distinct imaginative power. It will, indeed, be interesting
to watch the development of little Miss Hart, who wrote as early as
1917 such verse as this:
"Now the Sea foams.
And from it rises the Maiden of the Sea,
The clouds come dimly over.
And hide my Sea-Maiden from me."
MY AMERICAN DIARY, by Clare Sheridan. (New York: Boni
& Liveright. $3.00 net.) Mrs. Sheridan has dedicated her book
"to those I have met in this country who have not misunderstood me."
One wonders just how many there are who do not misunderstand
Mrs. Sheridan. What one can understand is that a sculptor is not
necessarily a writer. Mrs. Sheridan came to the public*s atten-
tion by her exploit in traveling through Russia to Moscow, and
there doing the busts of Lenine and Trotzky and the other Bolshevik
leaders. Her art may be of the highest perfection. However, when
she leaves her studio and poses as a radical thinker, she becomes at
once merely a noisy, chattering person of no profundity of thought,
with no appreciation of the underlying principles of philosophy, either
of government or life, and a person distinctly of the type of parlor
Bolshevik who listens enraptured to the sound of his own voice.
RUSSIA IN THE FAR EAST, by Leo Pasvolsky. (New York: The
Macmillan Co. $1.75.) It is the aim of this book to furnish a
background for a clear understanding of the Russian situation in the
Far East; a situation which, in the mind of the average American,
is hopelessly complex and confused. Mr. Pasvolsky's account unravels
it all, throwing upon it the light of a remarkably lucid analysis and
that of numerous texts of treaties and documents.
The rise of Russian imperialism and its eastward expansion to the
Pacific; its conflict with Japanese ambitions culminating in the dis-
astrous passage at arms in Manchuria and a* Port Arthur; the ensuing
Russo-Japanese intrigue, secret treaties, and masked understandings
at China's expense; the advent of the Bolsheviki and the rise of anti-
120 NEW BOOKS [Oct.,
Bolsheviki movements in Siberia; Japan's prestidigitating and fishing
in the troubled waters of the Russian revolution, all these are con-
cisely passed in review. By far the most instructive chapters, how-
ever, are those dealing with the mischievous activities of the Third
International and the workings of the Soviet diplomacy in the various
Asiatic communities. The policy of Soviet Communism is essentially
one of propaganda and deceitful tactics. That the Soviets are ready
for reasons of expediency to utilize non-Communist agencies and to
allow even uncongenial allies a passing triumph, as a means" of further-
ing the ulterior purpose of disrupting their institutions, is a secret
confessed by more than one Soviet leader. It is this utter want of
trust and faith in the present masters of potentially powerful Russia
that creates perhaps the most disturbing problem for international
security and well-being. Incidentally, one may gain from Russia in
the Far East an enlightened glimpse into some of the reasons of the
American Government's attitude towards the dictators of Moscow.
COLLEGE STANDARD DICTIONARY, abridged from the Funk &
Wagnalls Neiv Standard Dictionary of the English Language, by
Frank V. Vizetelly, Litt.D., LL.D. (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Co.
Cloth, $5.00 net.) The publishers claim for this work that it is
"designed primarily to meet the needs of the student in college or
university," and it would seem that their claim is justified, for, besides
answering questions as to pronunciation, definition, spelling, etymol-
ogy, etc., of any English word that may be encountered, it gives mod-
ern idioms, and is also a biographical dictionary, as well as a dic-
tionary of classical, mythological, and Biblical terms. These latter
features all appear in the body of the work, the only "Appendix" being
the section relating to "foreign words, phrases, etc., current in English
Literature." The College Standard Dictionary brings its information
down to the present day, giving such data as the date of the election
of Pope Pius XL, of the signing of the Treaties at the Washington Con-
ference on the Limitation of Armaments, and the establishment of the
Irish Free State.
THE CORONA READERS— r/iird Reader, compiled by Maurice Fran-
cis Egan, Brother Leo, and James H. Fassett. (New York: Ginn
& Co. 68 cents.) The names of the compilers of the Corona Readers
are sufficient to speak for their excellence, and the Third Reader of
the series, with its carefully selected poems, legends, religious and
educational stories, and excellent illustrations, will be found a useful
and a pleasant addition to the text-books used in schools.
Other educational books received are Le Tour de la France, by G.
Bruno (80 cents), an attractive and instructive reader, through whose
pages the pupil visits points of interest in France; Pour Apprendre
d Parler, by Francois J. Kueny ($1.20), easy lessons in French Gram-
mar and conversation; and Brief Spanish Grammar, by A. M. De Vitis
($L40). All from Allyn & Bacon, New York.
1922.] NEW BOOKS 121
ENGLISH LYRICS and Lancashire Songs, by George HulL (Preston,
England: J. Kitching.) The first half of Mr. HulPs volume gives
the graceful meditations and reveries of an English Catholic who
manifestly loves, and sometimes achieves, poetry. Its second part,
fenced in by Lancashire dialect, will win fewer pilgrims outside of the
initiated. The book is an uncommonly fine example of "private print-
ing," which one would like to see emulated on this side of the Atlantic.
THE BOOK OF ETIQUETTE, by Lillian Eichler (Oyster Bay, N. Y.:
Nelson Doubleday, Inc. Two volumes. $3.50), is a veritable com-
pendium of the best social usages. The introductory chapters point out
the charm and tests of true refinement, laying excellent bases upon
which to build the details of etiquette. They invite to the discipline
of good manners and courtesy. The book makes pleasant, easy read-
ing, and the chapter headings and sub-headings enable one to obtain
instantly exact information on any specific convention. It is alto-
gether worthy of commendation to young people, and to all who would
know how best to meet social exigencies and conform to social usages.
THE SKY MOVIES, by Gaylord Johnson. (New York: The Mac-
millan Co. $1.50.) In this little volume three very inquisitive
and acquisitive children learn much about the moon, the sun, the
motion of the earth and the other planets of our solar system. The
information conveyed is soundly scientific and deeply interesting, the
manner, for the most part, adapted to the understanding and enjoy-
ment of children. At times, however, the language is too grown-up,
and the reviewer questions whether, at other times, the effort to meet
the child mind is not overstrained. The introduction of the fairy
element tends to confuse rather than enlighten. Legend and folk-
lore fall into place more naturally. An entertaining example is the
interpretation of "Jack and Jill" as a "description of the way the moon
Waxes and wanes." A very attractive feature of the book is the ar-
rangement of fine pictures of the moon's phases so they may be shown
as a "movie" by rapidly turning the pages. The copious illustrations
are, for the most part, both artistically and scientifically perfect. It
is unfortunate that the book's excellence on this score should be marred
by dummy figures, much out of drawing, wherever the children appear
in illustration.
THE DIVINE STORY, a short Life of Our Blessed Lord written espe-
cially for young people by Rev. Cornelius J. Holland, S.T.L. (New
York: Blase Benziger & Co., Inc. $1.00 net.) The Divine Story is a
new printing of a work already presented to the public, since it was
copyrighted by the author in 1909, and contains a letter of recom-
mendation from the Bishop of Providence, dated 1910. The present
edition is tastefully bound in dark green and is adorned with several
familiar illustrations. It can be heartily recommended for children,
to be read to them by their elders, and later to be put in tlieir own
hands to be read by themselves.
122 N'EW BOOKS [Oct.,
TOPLESS TOWERS, by Margaret Ashmun (New York: The Mac-
millan Co. $2.00). In this book there is rather too much made
of the immoral sex-relations to which a great city lends cover. In
the end, the heroine, freed from the chains of the pseudo-refinements
of women's clubs, musicales, antique furniture and formal luncheons,
chooses the hardships of life on a ranch as the wife of a good man;
and makes the choice, not blindly, but counting the cost.
rIE recent additions to The Modern Library of the World* s Best
Books (New York: Boni & Liveright. 95 cents each) are two
volumes of short stories by English authors: Men, Women and Boats,
by Stephen Crane; Tales of Mean Streets, by Arthur Morrison, depicting
life in London's East End, and Passages from the Diary of Samuel
Pepys, with an introduction by Richard Le Gallienne, who edits the
book.
FOREIGN PUBLICATIONS.
Le Dogme Catholique dans les Pkres de Vl^glise, par Emile Amann.
(Paris: G. Beauchesne. 1 fr. 50.) The object of this volume is to
place the principal Patristic texts, which confirm and explain the great
truths of Catholic dogma, within the immediate reach of everyone
interested in religious matters — especially students of theology. How
the Christian Church, from the beginning, teaches the fundamental
articles of her creed in the same manner; how this "perpetuity of
faith" should strengthen Christians of our day, is what the author
wishes to show by an appropriate selection of texts, borrowed from
the Fathers of the Church. The selections are classified in chrono-
logical order, but at the same time the authors have been divided
as much as possible into the various schools to which they belong.
It appears to be the best method of presenting both the development of
Catholic dogma and its essential unity. Short introductions, placed
at the head of each series of selections, enable us to grasp very rapidly
the importance of each of the testimonies stated. An analytical table
also helps us to divide the different Patristic texts of which the book
is made up into each of the principal theses of theology.
U Intelligence Catholique dans I'ltalie du XX.e siecle, par M.
Maurice Vaussard. Preface by Georges Goyau. (Paris: Librairie Le-
coffre. 7 fr. 50.) Although Italy, by her art, her history and some of
her writers, has never ceased to attract the attention of the public,
even the elite in our own country are badly informed with regard to
the profound movements of contemporary Italian life. The cultured
traveler, who boasts of knowing his Italy, passes close to them without
perceiving them. In a penetrating and rigorously impartial work,
M. Vaussard throws light upon the "milieu Catholique," by a careful
study of its most representative men. His analysis of the lives and
works of the great pohtical and intellectual leaders of the Italian
Catholics of the twentieth century, will be read with deep interest by
all interested in Italy and in Catholic life throughout the world.
TRecent Events.
After a month of the usual alarms and
France. threatened, though unexecuted, excursions
by France into the Sarre Valley, the Ger-
man reparations problem received two unexpected alleviations.
The first came on August 31st from the Reparations Commission,
which, while refusing the out and out moratorium requested by
Germany, has relieved her of further monthly payments for the
rest of 1922, requiring her instead to give as security her Treasury
bills due in six months, and payable in gold. Under the former
arrangement, Germany was to have paid 270,000,000 gold marks
every month till the end of 1922, these monthly payments going
to Belgium under a priority agreement. Now Belgium has agreed
to accept German Treasury six-months' notes instead. While this
decision itself is of little economic importance, since it merely
postpones for a few months German cash payments, piling them
on top of what is due next spring, it is of very great political
importance because of two related results, namely, rescuing from
one more crisis the entente between England and France and
doing away, for the present, with any necessity or threat of mili-
tary action.
Even more important than the decision of the Reparations
Commission, was the agreement entered into on September 5th
between Hugo Stinnes, the German industrial magnate, and
Senator de Lubersac, President of the Federation of Cooperative
Societies of the French Liberated Regions, representing 130,000
proprietors in the devastated areas. By this agreement, thirteen
billion francs worth of made-up material, bricks, mortar, cement,
etc., will be sent from Germany to the French, and credited to the
indemnity account. These negotiations, which were really an
extension of the Wiesbaden agreement, sponsored last year by the
late Herr Rathenau, were authorized by the French Government,
which is expected soon to ratify the agreement. France's objec-
tion to the Wiesbaden agreement, was based on the ground that
reparations in goods, and especially services, would be prejudicial
to French workers, but in the present arrangement this difficulty
seems to have been successfully provided against. The agree-
ment is already credited with having relieved the tension between
France and Germany.
124 RECENT EVENTS [Oct..
On August 11th, the French authorities began the deporta-
tion of five hundred "German undesirables" from Alsace-Lorraine.
This was the first of the "other progressive measures" threatened
by the French Government in answer to Germany's stand against
continuing compensation payments to reimburse French holders
of German securities. Altogether 1,560 persons are to be ex-
pelled, these being either those who were denied French citizen-
ship or failed to apply for it.
On August 17th, Premier Poincar6 ordered the return to
Paris from Washington of the French Debt Commission, headed
by Jean V. Parmentier. M. Parmentier's mission to America, it
was explained, was merely to outline to the American Refunding
Commission the financial situation of France, and he was not
empowered to say when France could begin payments, but it
seems clear that there was some disappointment in the results
achieved. A further outcome of the French attitude was shown
in a note addressed to the British Government by M. Poincare,
on September 1st, replying to Lord Balfour's recent note on Inter-
Allied indebtedness. In this note the French Government pro-
posed that a conference be called of all those nations interested in
war debts, plainly including the United States without mentioning
that country by name. Until such a meeting is held, and until
arrangements are made for the payment of German reparations,
the French Government declares that it cannot promise payment
of its war debts. The British response to this note has been
favorable, and the meeting will probably occur in November,
when, the fall elections being over, it is hoped that the American
Government will participate.
The two commissions of the Chamber of Deputies, to which
were referred the treaties signed at the Washington Disarmament
Conference, have suspended their work owing to the lack of
certain documentary material from Washington. On the other
hand. Great Britain formally ratified the Treaties on August 10th.
Japan has ratified the Treaties, but will make no move for ex-
change of ratifications with the United States, until they have
been formally approved by France and Italy.
A strike of 22,000 men, including dock workers, tramway
and gas workers and masons, broke out at Havre towards the end
of August, and lasted for several days. During the course of the
strike, three persons were killed and over fifty wounded, but the
attempt of the Communists and other labor extremists to drive
the French workers into a general strike throughout the country
failed.
On August 26th, the battleship France, 23,000 tons, one of
IgSa.] RECENT EVENTS 125
the prides of the French Navy, struck a rock off Quiberon Bay
in the darkness of early morning, and went to the bottom in
seventy-five feet of water. All but three of the nine hundred
officers and men of the crew were rescued. The loss reduces
France's first naval line by one-seventh of its fighting strength,
and brings the French Navy down to an equality with Italy's.
The battleship was replaced, however, by a vessel of similar type,
as the Washington naval agreement gives France the right to
replace any unit lost by accident.
It was announced, on September 5th, thdt approximately
500,000,000 gold francs of the 1,948,000,000 of French gold on
deposit with the Bank of England since 1916, as guarantee for
credits advanced by Great Britain to the French Government,
would soon be returned to France. It is planned to continue the
payments against which the gold was hypothecated until the
entire amount is returned. This return is important, as giving
somewhat greater liberty of political action to France, which has
felt some humiliation at having such an enormous part of its gold
held abroad.
According to the Paris correspondent of the Journal of the
American Medical Association, up to September 1, 1921, the
French Pension Office had received 2,500,000 claims for pensions
or allowances, of which 1,712,000 were granted, being thus dis-
tributed: among the incapacitated, 830,000; among widows and
orphans, 447,000, and among parents, 413,000. Fifty-nine thou-
sand of the incapacitated were totally invalided and 60,000 suf-
fered disability, amounting to from eighty to ninety-five per cent.
Extraordinary measures are under consideration by the
French Government to remedy the slow death of the French
nation by the decline in the rate of births. Statistics published
on September 6th from the ten largest cities, showing a ten per
cent, decrease in births on a basis of the figures for 1921, have
aroused the press, which predicts 8,000 fewer births than deaths
this year, in the entire country, as compared with last year. The
first revelations of this crisis were made in June, when statistical
experts demonstrated that France would be entirely depopulated
within two hundred years unless a solution were found. Among
the remedies suggested are: "State adoption" of illegitimate, as
well as legitimate, children of poor parents; governmental assist-
ance for young married couples; increased' pensions for poor
parents of large families. Even polygamy has been advocated in
certain circles, but this has not been looked on with favor, from
practical, as well as moral reasons, it being argued that if a man
hesitates to take one wife^ it is ridiculous to suggest several.
126 RECENT EVENTS [Oct.,
The month was marked by food riots
Germany. throughout Germany, particularly in Ber-
lin, necessitating repression by the police.
The price of bread increased forty per cent., meat prices rose
twenty-five per cent., and the price of sugar doubled. Each rise
in price fanned the smoldering anger of the working classes,
whose wages fail to meet more than a small share of the daily
food costs of their households. The Government and municipal
authorities throughout the country are marshaling their forces
for the herculean task of minimizing the hardships threatened
on account of exorbitant prices demanded for food and fuel.
Chancellor Wirth states that the number of needy at present is
from four to five million, most of whom are concentrated in the
metropolitan centres. The Lord Mayor of Berlin stresses the need
for general diligence and self-control in meeting the tense eco-
nomic situation, and waging war against profiteers. He is of the
opinion that wholesale deaths of children are threatened, unless
feeding measures are adopted, declaring that "eighty per cent, of
our children are under-nourished and fifty per cent, tubercular."
Attention is also called to the shortage in coal. The price of
briquettes recently rose to 250 marks per centner (about 110
pounds), as compared with the previous price of 106 marks.
Coke for cooking purposes is quoted approximately at 435 marks
per centner.
Among other measures taken for the alleviation of the situa-
tion, the Imperial and State Governments and municipal author-
ities have contributed about 1,200,000,000 marks for the relief
of persons without private incomes ; the sick and accident benefits
are to be increased, and the Imperial subsidies for destitute per-
sons and men disabled in war, and for the support of war suf-
ferers, have been doubled. Many families in Dresden, Hamburg
and other centres are in dire straits because the banks have been
unable to supply paper money for the payment of wages.
Another feature of the month's new^s from Germany is the
cessation of numerous newspapers, many of them failing outright
and others reducing their output from daily to weekly issues.
No fewer than one hundred and forty-four newspapers suspended
in July. The August report is not yet in, but it is expected that
it will reach, and perhaps surpass, the figures for July. This dis-
appearance of journals en masse, many of them of considerable
importance, probably is unparalleled, and is due to the enormous
rise which has taken place in the cost of newspaper production.
Paper, for instance, is now four hundred times dearer than before
the war, and the cost of other materials has risen to almost as
1922.] imCENT EVENTS 127
great an extent. Wages, of course, have been enormously in-
creased, and home news service becomes daily more expensive.
As for foreign news service, owing to the fall of the mark, only a
few wealthy newspapers can afford it.
Towards the middle of August, Count Hugo Lerchenfeld, the
Bavarian Premier, and other Bavarian representatives succeeded,
after prolonged negotiations with Chancellor Wirth and his Cab-
inet, in composing their differences with the Central Government
at Berlin. Both Governments signed protocols meeting the dif-
ficulties which arose recently over the enforcement of the Re-
public's new defence law. Bavaria agreed to rescind the ordinance
adopted by her, in which she assumed special privileges in con-
nection with the operation of the law. The Federal Government,
in return, gave guarantees not to infringe upon Bavaria's sov-
ereignty.
On August 10th, an agreement was signed in Berlin by repre-
sentatives of the United States and Germany, providing for a
mixed claims commission to determine the amount of American
claims against Germany. Early in September, President Hard-
ing named Justice William R. Day as the third member of the
commission, who is to act as umpire on all disputed points, the
German member being Dr. Diesselbach, of Hamburg, an attorney.
The American member is not yet named.
On August 18th, the Economic Council of the Empire decided
by a small majority to increase the assessment on exports, in
order to make the amount correspond with the present deprecia-
tion of the mark. The surcharge on customs was fixed at one
hundred and seventy-four per cent, for the period between
August 23d and August 29th.
Germany's new measures against the importation of luxuries
are of a stringent character. On September 1st, the Ministry of
Economy announced that, from that date, the unrestricted im-
portation of raw tobacco would be prohibited, and that measures
would also be taken to restrict the importation of various food-
stuffs. The restrictions will be removed, it was announced, when-
ever adequate protection has been assured by increases in cus-
toms duties.
On August 31st, the Berlin Vorwdrts announced that negotia-
tions for the fusion of the Majority and Independent Social Parties
was proceeding favorably, and that a joint session w^ould probably
be held late in September.
Towards the end of August, a message from Berlin stated
that the German Government had received a note from the Council
of Ambassadors, declaring that the High Court at Leipzic in its
128 RECENT EVENTS [Oct..
trial of war criminals did not make sufiBcient efforts to disclose
the truth, that the Court acquitted a number of defendants who
were guilty, and imposed too light sentences on those convicted.
For these reasons, the note said, the Allies reserve the right,
under the Versailles Treaty, to deal with the cases themselves,
and, eventually, to sentence the defendants by default.
Late in August, an outbreak of pogroms in Kattowitz, Silesia,
was reported in a special dispatch from Beuthen. Crowds looted
the food shops conducted by Jews, and beat Jews wherever en-
countered in the streets. The pogroms are said to have been in-
spired by reports that the Jews were responsible for the high price
of food. Most of the victims were Jewish merchants, who mi-
grated to Kattowitz from Poland and Galicia.
On September 2d, the German Government sent a note to the
League of Nations, entering a fresh protest against the presence
of French troops in the Sarre district. In May of last year, the
Berlin Government entered a similar protest, which brought a
reply from the President of the Sarre Government Commission,
explaining that the French troops were not a force of occupation,
but a garrison placed at the disposal of the Commission to enable
it to fulfill its duties under the Peace Treaty.
Chiefly as a result of the engagements en-
Russia, tered into at the Washington Limitation of
Armaments Conference, the Japanese Gov-
ernment, early in Sepember, began the evacuation of Eastern
Siberia, and troops of the Far Eastern Republic have occupied
the town of Sanchung, less than one hundred miles north of
Vladivostok. Other minor localities were evacuated by the Japa-
nese on September 2d, and the important point of Novo Niko-
laievsk, on the Amur River, will be evacuated on September 22d.
Far Eastern Republican troops at Khabarovsk, one hundred and
fifty miles north, are preparing to march down to occupy Novo
Nikolaievsk when the Japanese leave. If the Japanese fulfill the
promise to evacuate Vladivostok, it is clear that the White Gov-
ernment of Merkulov, now ruling there with the collaboration of
one of Kolchak's Generals, Diederich, will be unable to withstand
the Far Eastern Republicans. Recent dispatches from the Far
East declare the Vladivostok Government has inaugurated a White
terror, which adds to the unpopularity its exactions from the
peasantry already have evoked. Indeed, ever since the fall of
Kolchak, the White movement in the Far East, alternately sup-
ported and bullied by the Japanese, has been little more than
organized banditry. Vladivostok^ Under control of the semi-inde-
1922.] RECENT EVENTS 129
pendent Far Eastern Republic, will mean that Russia will once
more have a Pacific outlet, since the Chita Government, at least in
foreign policy, is evidently subject to the control of Moscow.
Delegates from Moscow, Chita, and Tokio, resuming the abor-
tive conference of Dairen of several months ago, met early in
September at Chang Chun, in Manchuria and, after several days*
sessions, adjourned on September 7th to enable the delegates to
communicate with their Governments. The Moscow Soviet is
desirous of negotiating a general agreement with Japan, and to
that end is anxious to obtain recognition of the Soviet Govern-
ment by Japan. If, as seems likely, however, Japan refuses to
consider the question of recognition first, Russia will, on the
resumption of negotiations, consent to postponement of that issue,
and take up other problems.
Despite favorable crop reports, and statements to the effect
that no further relief work was necessary, it now appears that
Russia faces her worst winter, more from disease than hunger.
The American corn rations were cut off on September 1st through-
out Russia, except in the Crimea and the Ukraine, where the hor-
rors of famine still continue and where a comparatively heavy
American relief programme for the feeding of children will be
carried on next year. It is estimated that 3,000,000 children will
be fed in the Southern Ukraine this winter, and about an addi-
tional million in the rest of Russia.
That there is at present a radical reaction from fairly liberal
principles in Russia, is apparent from several reasons, among
others from a recent resolution passed by the Petrograd Soviet, in
which the stand of the Soviet delegation at The Hague, in refus-
ing to recognize the rights of foreign owners, was approved,
and an appeal made to the Government to maintain this prin-
ciple inviolate. Zinovieff, the President of the Petrograd Soviet,
with Karl Radek, represents the pure Communist-International
element among the Bolsheviki. His uncompromising tone at
the recent Communist Congress is taken to have been respon-
sible for the recent measures to expel all persons hostile to
the Soviet regime. Wholesale arrests of intellectuals have been
taking place throughout Russia, and in the last few weeks approx-
imately 1,500 persons, charged with secret counter-revolutionary
activity, have been exiled. On September 5th, fifty-five persons
were sentenced to death in South Russia, and the Ukrainian
Court at Kiev sentenced to death forty-eight members of Petlura's
Cossack bands, which, in connection with General Tutunuk's
forces, revolted against the Ukrainian Soviets. From Moscow a
recent dispatch states that Archbishop Benjamin, Metropolitan
VOL. crvi. 9
130 RECENT EVENTS [Oct.,
of Petrograd, and the others condemned for interfering with the
seizure of church treasures were executed by a firing squad in
Petrograd on the tenth of August.
Late in August and early in September, several unconfirmed
reports came through of rebellion in Southern Russia, the head
of the rebellion being placed at Odessa, which was said to have
proclaimed South Russia and the Crimea independent of Moscow,
and to have called on all citizens to unite against the "Commun-
ist usurpers." It is not believed, however, that these sections
would be able to make an effective stand against the Bolshevik
Army, which was furthermore strengthened, late in August, by the
mobilization of the men born in 1901.
For several weeks, the American State Department has been
negotiating, through Alanson R. Houghton, the American Am-
bassador at Berlin, with representatives of the Moscow Govern-
ment with regard to the attitude of the Soviet authorities should
the American Government consider sending an expert technical
commission to Russia to study and report on the economic situa-
tion. The question is in the hands of the Soviet Government
now for decision.
According to a statement issued on September 5th by the
United States Department of Commerce, American exports to
Russia and to the new nations formerly embraced in the Russian
Empire, for the first six months of 1922, were nearly ten times as
large as the imports for the same period. For Soviet Russia, in-
cluding the Caucasus, the difference was even more striking.
While the American imports from that country totaled only
$21,609 in value, the American exports were $11,756,282, or more
than five hundred times as much. Lithuania is the only former
Russian State from which more goods were imported to America
than America exported.
The capital of the new Russian State Bank under the auspices
of the Soviets has been fixed at 2,000,000,000 rubles. In addi-
tion, 200,000,000,000 paper rubles have been put at the disposal
of the bank by the Government. It is stated, the bank's oiBficial
money-lending rate has ranged between eight and twelve per cent,
a month, which would be ninety-six to one hundred and forty-
four per cent, per annum.
The Greco-Turkish War, which for several
Greece. months had subsided to quiescence, took
a sudden and dramatic turn late in August,
when the Turks opened a successful offensive in Afiun-Karahissar,
a vital key position on the Berlin-Bagdad Railway in Asia Minor,
1922.] RECENT EVENTS 131
forcing the Greeks to retire westward. The Turks immediately
followed up this success by a series of others — first, by the capture
of Eski-Shehr, the principal stronghold of the Greeks on the
northern fighting front, and, several days later, by the capture of
Ushak, an important point on the southern line, with the result
that the Greeks were driven in on Smyrna, their principal town on
the coast.
The origin of the Greek disaster is ascribed largely to the
designs of King Constantine on Constantinople, and the recent
transference of 50,000 of the Greek troops from Asia Minor to the
Thracian frontier, in order to make a demonstration against Con-
stantinople, thus greatly impairing the strength of their Anatolian
Army. It seems evident that the Turks shrewdly took advantage
of this situation, and launched their offensive at a critical junc-
ture and when it was least expected.
On September 14th, the remnants of the Greek Army aban-
doned Smyrna to the advancing Turks and embarked for Thrace.
With the seizure of Smyrna by the victorious Kemalists began
a terrible conflagration, which swept the city, reducing the Ar-
menian, Greek, and European sections to ashes, and causing a
property loss estimated at one billion francs (or $75,000,000 at the
present exchange rate). Along with this went massacres of the
defenceless non-Turkish populace, the number of victims being
estimated at first at 1,000 or 2,000, and being placed, according to
the latest report to the London Times, as high as 120,000. It is
thought, however, that this latter figure includes the killed,
wounded, and others who have suffered in consequence of the
capture of the city and the conflagration that followed.
The conflagration is ascribed by Turkish officials to the result
of the exchange of rifle shots between the invading Turkish Army
and the Greeks and the Armenians, the latter of whom attacked
the Turks from churches and houses. On the other hand, the
Greeks said that the Turks deliberately fired the city in order to
evacuate the entire Christian population and conceal the traces
of their misdeeds, a theory which seems borne out by the fact
that the Turkish quarter is the only section of the city that was
spared.
Italy, France, and Great Britain have notified Mustapha Kemal
that he must respect the neutrality zones on both sides of the
Straits of the Dardanelles and Constantinople,' fixed by the Treaty
of Sevres, and the British Asiatic fleet has been instructed to allow
no Turkish troops to cross from Asia to Europe. The Americaii
Government has joined with the Allies in preparations for emerg-
ency relief at Smyrna.
182 RECENT EVENTS [Oct.,
Austria's economic situation, which has
Austria. been growing steadily worse and worse,
forecasting a breakdown of the machinery
of government and the total collapse of the country, was brought
urgently to the attention of the world by the activities during
the month of Dr. Ignaz Seipel, the newly-appointed Austrian Fed-
eral Chancellor, and incidentally the first priest to become a prime
minister since the seventeenth century.
Dr. Seipel's opening move was a conference on August 21st
at Prague with Premier Benes of Czecho-Slovakia, in which he
took up the question of the dissolution of Austria as a separate
entity and its incorporation as a member of the Czecho-Slovakian
Federation. The significance of this became immediately ap-
parent with the counter proposal by Italy, on the following day,
that Austria become a part of Italy. So great, indeed, was Italian
opposition to Austria's annexation to any other of her neighbors,
that on August 24th the Italian Government addressed a note to
the Governments of Austria, Czecho-Slovakia, Germany, Jugo-
slavia and Rumania, reiterating its opposition to Austria's union
with Germany or her entry into the Little Entente, and stating
that, if Italy were confronted with such an accomplished fact,
she would consider it a casus belli.
Behind the protest of the Italian Government, lies Italy's fear
of the policy of France in Central Europe, the underlying principle
of which is the formation of an anti-German coalition. To this
end, France is unequivocally opposed to Austria's union with
Germany, but as Austria is doomed if she continues in her pres-
ent state of isolation, France has conceived the plan of getting
Austria into the Little Entente, thus isolating Germany politically,
as well as financially and economically. On the other hand, Italy,
which lived for years with the constant nightmare of having a
powerful Austro-Hungarian Empire as a neighbor, is now con-
fronted with the possibility of seeing the States which composed
the Dual Monarchy uniting in a new federation, just as anti-
Italian as the old one but strengthened by the addition of Serbia,
Rumania, and Poland.
Nothing came of the Italian project of annexation, the pro-
posal of which was officially denied later by the Italian Foreign
Secretary. After Dr. Seipel had held a series of meetings at
Verona, Paris, Berlin, and London, he was finally referred to the
League of Nations meeting at Geneva, where, on September 6th,
the Austrian Chancellor, in a powerful and favorably received
speech, impressed on the Council of the League the grave plight
in which Austria found herself. He warned the League that
1922.] RECENT EVENTS 138
Austria would take measures to break the economic ties surround-
ing her unless the League was able to come to her aid. Austria,
he declared, was ready to accept such control of her finances as
would not affect her sovereignty, but rather than sacrifice her
sovereignty, she might prefer to merge herself into a large eco-
nomic entity. At the conclusion of his speech, the League Coun-
cil immediately appointed a committee, which is now studying the
whole Austrian question, receiving statistics and other informa-
tion from the Austrian delegation in attendance at Genoa. The
committee represents Great Britain, France, Italy, Austria, and
Gzecho-Slovakia. It is commonly recognized that Austria fur-
nishes the most important case that has yet come before the
League.
As indicating the increasing gravity of Austria's financial
condition, the following table shows the number of Austrian
paper crowns required at a given date to purchase a pound ster-
ling: January 31, 1922, 12,000; February 28th, 20,500; March 31st,
32,500; April 30th, 35,000; May 31st, 48,500; June 30th, 84,500;
July 7th, 96,000; July 15th, 127,000; July 22d. 145,000. By
August, the price of the pound sterling in Austrian crowns had
risen to 250,000, as contrasted with 3,100 a year ago, and 620 at
this date in 1920. A shirt, which cost six crowns before the war,
now costs 200,000 crowns, and since August 1st of this year the
price of both bread and meat has increased one hundred per cent.
The Third Assembly of the League of Na-
Switzerland. tions began its sessions at Geneva on Sep-
tember 4th by electing as President, Augus-
tin Edwards, a Chilean delegate and Chilean Ambassador to Great
Britain. The importance of this Assembly lies chiefly in two
subjects: the Austrian situation, of which an account is given
above, and disarmament. For more than a year the League's
temporary Commission on Disarmament, under the Chairmanship
of Lord Esher, has been at work on a complete statistical analysis
of all the factors that bear on the question of armaments, and on
September 8th it made a preliminary report showing that in more
than a score of countries restrictions of military outlays had been
begun. Great Britain reported a reduction of fifty-five per cent,
in naval tonnage, France thirty-six per cent., Italy forty-nine per
cent., and Japan fifty-nine per cent. In land armaments, France
reported a reduction of 200,000 men under arms and shortening of
the term of military service by half. Sweden also reported the
cutting of her military service in two; Italy reduced the period of
service and suppressed eighty-eight battalions of infantry; Po-
134 RECENT EVENTS [Oct.,
land reduced her army of a million men to 260,000; Japan made
reductions, but failed to give the figures; while Switzerland re-
duced from seventy per cent, to fifty-five per cent, the proportion
of her men eligible to military service.
According to a proposal presented by the Earl of Balfour
to the Council of the League several days before the Assembly
met, a commission was to be appointed, presided over by an
American, to supervise the rights of the various religions in the
holy places of Palestine. The proposed commission would be
divided into three sub-commissions, composed of Christians, Mus-
sulmans, and Jews. To this scheme the Vatican is reported as
unalterably opposed, as, according to the Osservatore Romano,
"if the telegraphed report of the Balfour proposal is accurate, it
is evident that the rights of Catholics would be impaired, as they
would be in a minority on the three sub-commissions, and the
last word would rest with the president of the commission, who
would be an American Protestant.'*
The Permanent World Court held its final
Holland. session at The Hague on August 10th, and
adjourned until June 15, 1923, unless an
extraordinary session is called before that date. Final de-
cision was made in two advisory cases presented by the League
Council — one, whether the International Labor Organization was
competent to regulate the conditions of agricultural laborers, de-
cided in the affirmative; the other, whether the examination of
proposals for the organization and development of methods of
agricultural production fell within the competence of the Inter-
national Labor Organization, decided in the negative.
September 15, 1922.
Editorial Comment.
With this issue, "The Catholic World" appears under new edi-^
torial management. Rev. John J. Burke, C.S.P., is to devote all his
time to the National Catholic Welfare Council. His successor as
editor of "The Catholic World" is Rev. James M. Gillis, C.S.P.
THE eighteen years of Father John J. Burke's service as editor
of The Catholic World and manager of the Paulist Fathers'
apostolate of the press, may be expressed in a word — devotion.
To fulfill Father Hecker's ideal in the inception of the work
deserved and demanded his utmost power; and he gave unstint-
ingly.
* * * sK
THE CATHOLIC WORLD, when Father Burke took charge of
it, in September, 1904, was an illustrated monthly of popular
appeal. He believed it was his duty to restore it to the higher
literary standard set by Father Hecker. Gradually, illustrations
were eliminated, manuscripts were subjected to a more rigid
criticism, although this often left the editor with an empty file
when the day approached for setting the magazine. But Divine
Providence never failed to send something, just in time, and the
magazine never missed an issue. Writers of fame or promise
were sought out, leisure was found to visit, to discuss, to outline,
to invite contributions, until editor and contributor met in com-
mon enthusiasm to promote the service of the mind in the cause
of God. The lean years were rewarded with plenty, manuscripts
of w^orth became abundant, and welcome testimonials proved the
work "well done."
* He * :^
THE driving force in all Father Burke's contacts was the apos-
tle's greed for souls. He drew to him every worker in the es-
tablishment, talked with them personally, and, taking them as he
found them, by example, by counsel and command, he nerved them
to the realization of their powers in a spirit of devotion only second
to his own. What should be done for God, could be done, and
there was none too mean to do his part and bear his responsibility :
all things could, and must, be done in Him Who strengthemeth.
This spirit of consecration, one might say of vocation, in the per-
136 EDITORIAL COMMENT [Oct.,
sonnel of the Paulist Press work, cultivated and fostered by Father
Burke, is the rich inheritance and support of his successor.
♦ ♦ * *
THE first landmark in the past eighteen years of The Catholic
WoRLD*s history was its Golden Jubilee in April, 1915. The
list of notable contributors and of noteworthy articles given in
the Jubilee number is a record of accomplishment. Here the
editor summed up the policy and purpose of the magazine: "To
draw men by the capable, intelligent expression of Catholic truth;
to make fairness and beauty of style an index of the fairness and
beauty within; to show that Catholic truth illumines, fulfills all,
and leads man to the supernatural life of Jesus Christ, was the
lofty purpose of Father Hecker when he founded The Catholic
World. For fifty years his mission has endured. May God
grant us and our successors many, many years to continue it for
His glory and the glory of His holy Church; for the welfare of
souls and the well-being of our beloved country — America."
A second literary landmark was the Shakespeare centenary
number of 1916, containing valuable articles from Shakespearean
scholars. But Father Burke*s editorial years were crowned by
the "Dante Centenary Number," of September, 1921, which won a
Dante Memorial Medal from the National Dante Committee of the
Italy America Society.
* * * *
CONVERSANT with every detail of the mechanical work of the
press. Father Burke directed his unflagging attention to-
wards physical betterments and growth. Linotypes superseded
hand setting. A larger press room, presses of newer model, im-
proved ojffices were indications of increased work, necessitating,
flbtially, the removal of the business offices from the original
building assigned to the Paulist apostolate of the press.
The plant was unionized, and additional w^ork had to be
taken on to meet the additional cost of output and of betterments.
The publication of books and pamphlets, always an integral
part of Paulist work, was vigorously pushed under Father Burke's
management.
* * * :|c
/^^ALLED now to devote all his time to an even greater work
^-^ than that of The Catholic World and the Paulist Press,
Father Burke leaves behind him a record of devotion and achieve-
ment which it will be difficult, if not impossible, for his successor
to duplicate. We shall count our work successful if we can
but maintain the standards he has established.
1922.] EDITORIAL COMMENT 137
THE time seems opportune for a restatement of the editorial
policy of The Catholic World. But, by way of prelim-
inary, let us assure those readers who have learned to know and
to approve our traditional methods — that there will be no radical
change. We hope to improve. Perhaps, we may even say, in
the lingo of the latest health-philosophy, *'Day by day (or month
by month), in every way we grow better and better," But we
expect to grow better, not by means of any newly-devised magic
formula; but by a natural development, following principles laid
down by the founders and observed by the successive editors of
this magazine. These principles we take to be as follows :
FIRST, we are, or we shall try to be, modern in our spirit and
in our method of expressing the truth. This may seem dif-
ficult to those who think of the Catholic Church as merely the
**old'* Church. But the miracle of the Church is that she is
the oldest and the youngest. And Truth, like God, and like the
Church, though ancient, is ever new. Father Hecker, the chief
founder of the Paulist Community and the first editor of the
magazine, has said: "The Eternal- Absolute is ever creating new
forms of expressing itself. It is for this that we were created;
that we may give a new and individual expression of the Abso-
lute.'* If the new is but the reexpression of the old. Truth ceases,
is no longer living.
We believe, therefore, that there is no excuse for following
antiquated methods, or encouraging archaic forms of literary
expression, simply because, being Catholic, we belong to an "old"
Church.
FURTHERMORE, we value the modern civilization no less
highly than the ancient or mediaeval. We are not so dedi-
cated to the past as to fancy that the present is worthless. There
happens to be just now, amongst many Catholics, a renewed
devotion to mediaevalism (using that much-abused term in its
good sense). And this is good, if only as a just reaction against
those who have taught that "nothing good could come out of" the
"Age of Faith." Recently, some of the very best scholars and
writers, both Catholic and near-Catholic, have presented the beauty
of the mediaeval system so alluringly that it would be impossible
not to share their enthusiasm.
Nevertheless, we remain unconvinced of the inferiority of
the modern. We shall not damn our own times to exalt the
138 EDITORIAL COMMENT [Oct.,
times of our ancestors. Moreover, we shall not be, mere
laudatores temporis acti. We shall not too frequently indulge in
the nugatory occupation of "pointing proudly to the past." We
shall not "sing the songs of long ago." We shall not grow
dithyrambic over the "good old days." Not that we think that
the present times are perfect. We have created no fool's para-
dise for ourselves. The present days are not even "good enough."
But they are the best we have ever had. Previous times have all
been worse. We say this, not forgetting the war and its after-
math. Bold? Perhaps so, but we think that we have justifica-
tion. Personally, we are not disposed to argue the case. But
while we shall open our pages to the champions of the mediaeval,
or the ancient, we shall not close them to any worthy author who
wields a pen in defence of our much berated "modern civiliza-
tion."
♦ ♦ * *
WE say that we are modern. Let us express the idea more
concretely. For example : The fate of the National Catholic
Welfare Council in 1922 is a matter of more vital interest to us
than, let us say, the doings of the Council of Elvira in 306. An
article on H. G. Wells catches our attention more quickly and
holds it more firmly than one on Pico della Mirandola. As a
phenomenon, Mrs. Eddy interests us more than Cagliostro.
"Christian Science" amazes us, and amuses us, more than the
ancient worship of Isis. Conan Doyle, with his spirit photo-
graphs, is more entertaining than the Cumean sybil. Thomas A.
Edison seems more worthy of a "write-up" than the alchemists of
the Middle Ages. Henry Ford and his "flivver" are more im-
portant than Diogenes and his tub. We respect the opinions of
the boys who would rather hear stories of "Babe" Ruth than of
Hercules. And, though we may seem shamefully philistine, and
hopelessly unromantic, we confess that the foundation stones of
a new church in the most unpicturesque, modern, American city,
are more significant than the ivy-clad ruins of a mediaeval abbey,
seen in the mystic moonlight. The church looks to the future.
The ruin speaks only of the past. But the future is infinitely
more thrilling than the past. And any church crowded to the
doors ten times every Sunday is more soul-satisfying than an
empty Gothic Cathedral, dating from the thirteenth century.
NTOT that we despise the past. But to us the past means nothing
A ^ without the present, and if the present is, as some seem to
think, altogether deplorable, then the "glorious past" has been in
1922.] EDITORIAL COMMENT 139
vain. A backward-looking church, or a backward-looking society
or individual, is, to all intents and purposes, dead and buried.
"Where thy treasure is, there is thy heart also," and if both thy
treasure and thy heart are buried in the past, then thou art in
the tomb, even though thou know it not. It was no cynic who
first said: "Let the dead past bury the dead."
SECONDLY, we are — not merely by accident of birth, but by
conviction — Americans. This cardinal principle was also
expressed by Father Hecker: "So far as is compatible with faith
and piety, I am for accepting the American civilization, with its
usages and customs. Leaving aside other reasons, it is the only
way by which Catholicity can become the religion of our people.
The character and spirit of our people must find themselves at
home in our Church in the way those of other nations have done;
and it is on this basis alone that the Catholic Church can make
progress in this country." . . .
The reason given by Father Hecker, "leaving aside other
reasons," may seem to be a reason of expediency, but it is, none
the less, a good apostolic principle. It is a truism that we can do
little, if any good, for a people whom we do not love. If we were
publishing a magazine or preaching the Gospel in China, we
should try to love the Chinese: if in Japan, the Japanese: if in
Tierra del Fuego, we should, as far as possible, develop an affec-
tion for the unfortunate natives of that desolate region. We
think that St. Paul was able to make himself "all things to all
men," because he loved all men.
Some years ago, we met the Bishop of Hakodate, who had
at that time labored in Japan for twenty-five years. We inquired
his opinion concerning the judgments sometimes passed upon the
Japanese people; that they are dishonest and "immoral" beyond
others, and that they are a "race of agnostics." "Not in my prov-
ince," he answered quickly. "My Japanese are a simple, innocent,
lovable people." We loved and admired him for that statement.
St. Francis Xavier would have said the same thing.
But, fortunately, we do not have to learn to love America
and the American people. To paraphrase a line from Boyle
O'Reilly, we "would rather live in America than in any other
land." That will sound decidedly "Main Street" to the sophis-
ticated, who enjoy the anti- American tirades of H. L. Mencken and
George Jean Nathan, and perhaps to many others who have
recently learned to afi"ect a contempt for all things American.
Be it so; we repeat that a sincere love and admiration for America
140 EDITORIAL COMMENT [Oct..
is one of the corner-stone principles upon which The Catholic
World has built, and will continue to build.
♦ * * ♦
THERE are other principles to which we adhere. They will
appear from time to time in these pages, either explicitly or
implicitly. But let us conclude with the most important of all
principles, not peculiarly our own, but which we share with all
Catholic publications. We give them in Father Hecker's words:
To practise absolute and unswerving loyalty to the
authority of the Church, whenever and wherever expressed,
as God*s authority upon earth, and for all time.
To seek, in the same dispositions, the true spirit of
the Church, and to be unreservedly governed by it as the
wisdom of the Most High.
In the midst of the imperfections, abuses, scandals,
of the human side of the Church, never to allow our-
selves to think or express a word which might seem to place
a truth of the Catholic faith in doubt or to savor of the
spirit of disobedience.
With all this in view, to be the most earnest and
ardent friend of all true progress, and to work with all our
might for its promotion through existing authorities and
organizations.
r) resume the comparison between our times and centuries
that have passed. We confess that we have little sympathy
with the lament of the anti-moderns, "There never was a time
like this." We believe that, but in the sense in which they do
not mean it. We have, indeed, "troubles of our own," but, if
there is any consolation in comparisons, the ages that have gone
have had worse troubles than ours.
We may lament that when the nations met at Versailles to
reconstruct a badly damaged world, the fate of civilization was
in the hands of such a group as Clemenceau, Orlando, Lloyd
George, and the unhappy Mr. Wilson.
It would have been more desirable, of course, if we could
have had a reincarnate Gladstone, Chatham, Thomas Jefferson,
and George Washington. But we might have fared worse. If we
had "summoned spirits from the vasty deep," Pluto might have
sent us Talleyrand, and Metternich and Frederick the Great, and
Napoleon Bonaparte. But the Lord saved us from such as these.
nPHERE are those who attribute most of the political misfortunes
1 of recent days to the Kaiser. But the Kaiser, with all his
faults, is a better man than his forbears, Frederick Barbarossa
1922.] EDITORIAL COMMENT 141
and Henry IV. The mediaeval Hohenstaufens caused more calam-
ity than the modern Hohenzollerns. The Poles think, rightly
enough, that they were most outrageously treated by Von Hinden-
burg. But, if they will consult their own traditions, they will
recall that, compared with the Tartars of the thirteenth century,
who devastated, and all but depopulated, whole provinces. Von
Hindenburg was a mild-mannered gntleman.
The Belgians execrate Von Kluck. But the Irish could tell
them that, in contrast with Cromwell, Von Kluck was as a dove,
or a suckling babe. "Atrocities" were more atrocious, and more
frequent, in the "good old days."
We all are inclined to imagine that the recent war was the
"worst ever." Perhaps so, but let us not forget that mediaeval
and ancient wars were generally pressed to the point of the ex-
termination, or at least the decimation, of a conquered people.
In former times, the Allies would have devastated Germany.
In the Thirty Years' War, in the seventeenth century, fifteen mil-
lions in Germany alone were killed, directly or indirectly.
Or take the greatest present worry of our statesmen, Bol-
shevism. It is an ugly phenomenon, but there have been worse in
times past. Our Bolsheviki are, thus far, pretty well confined
within the boundaries of one country, or two. But in the fifth and
sixth and seventh century, the original Bolsheviki, the barbarians,
were trampling over every country in Europe. We have Lenine
and Trotzky. In those days they had Attila and Alaric and Gen-
seric; to say nothing of Mohammed and the Moslems.
* * * ♦
TAKE moral and social conditions. Our day is not without its
vices. Some observers think that we are decadent. But
morally sick as we are, we are healthier than ancient Corinth,
or mediaeval Florence, or Paris in the days when courtesans ruled
the kings.
In our generation there is not a little of infidelity — not heresy
merely, or indiflference — but sheer infidelity. But we have no Vol-
taire, and no Nietzsche. Here in America, we have not even an
adequate successor to Bob Ingersoll.
Again, we hear the modern alarmists complaining of what
they call "infiltration of paganism" into Christianity. We won-
der what they would have made of the deeply paganized Chris-
tianity of the Renaissance, when, under the intoxication of the
New Learning, men called God Jupiter, confounded Christ with
Apollo, and made none too clear the distinction between the
Blessed Virgin and Venus. If our modern reformers, even Cath-
olics, were confronted with the conditions that faced Savonarola,
142 EDITORIAL COMMENT [Oct.,
they would be driven to schism or to suicide. If they were face
to face with the world of St. Catharine of Siena, as depicted in
her Dialogue, they would have gone mad.
i. * * *
INCIDENTALLY, it may be recalled, that the Catholic religion
always survived these various crises. The Church always ex-
tricated herself from those ''impossible" situations. She saved
not only herself, but civilization. And she is not particularly
frightened by our comparatively trivial modern crises. Condi-
tions have always been bad. But they always become better.
Our readers remember the story of the pessimist, who, during an
unusually protracted "spell" of bad weather, exclaimed petu-
lantly: "Is it ever going to clear!" "It always did," said the op-
timist.
* * * ♦
HOWEVER, that is aside from the point. We were considering
the lament of those w^ho cry: "There never was a time like
this." Perhaps not, but again and again, there have been times
worse than this.
Therefore, we do not believe in whining and groaning about
the sins of the modern world. The world may be in a bad way,
but we cannot cure it by telling it that it is about to die. Our
modern civilization may be, to a degree, hysterical, but we shall
not cure it with more hysteria.
* * ♦ *
HERE is a curious anomaly. We Catholics are more hopeful
for modern civilization than are they who built modern civi-
lization. We cannot be said to be the creators of the modern
system, yet we do not consider it altogether hopeless. We be-
lieve that the world has a future. Many of the "moderns" hardly
dare believe as much. We are more modern than the moderns.
H. G. Wells, for example, seems to have an actual fear that the
world is to be utterly destroyed and that we are doomed to another
thousand years of barbarism. Here in America we have been
deluged of late with visitors and lecturers from Europe, and
almost all of them have been prophets of doom. We rather imag-
ined that they were only trying to give us a bit of a fright. They
had an "axe to grind." They wanted us to go into the League.
They wanted us to cancel their debt. So they tried to make us
think that conditions over there were desperate. So we thought.
But it seems that they really mean what they say. They truly
dread the probability of the dissolution of the entire political and
social system. Now, they were the creators of that system and,
until recently, they were very boastful about it. But they have
1922.] EDITORIAL COMMENT 143
lost confidence in the work of their own hands. They fear that
the elements that were meant to upbuild civilization, may bring
about its destruction. Steam, electricity, high power explosives,
may be used constructively or destructively, and it seems that
their destructive use may outrun their constructive use. The
chemists and the electricians may turn out to be worse enemies of
civilization than the Vandals, the Goths, and the original Huns.
The Frankenstein fantasy threatens to become a reality.
* ♦ ♦ *
IT is odd, in these circumstances, to find Christians of the old tra-
dition saying to the authors of modern civilization: "O ye of
little faith." We Catholics, who believe in the spiritual and the
supernatural, were left out of the scheme created by the scien-
tists, but now they may soon call us in again. They were the
creators of modern society. We shall be its saviors. Of course,
to save it, we shall have to depaganize it. Readers of Hilaire
Belloc will remember how powerfully and how ingeniously he
maintains the thesis that the ancient Roman civilization was
never really destroyed by the barbarians. It was Christianized,
and thus saved from annihilation. If modern civilization is in
danger of dissolution, the Church will doubtless be expected to
repeat the process, and save the world.
IN view of the hubbub created by Clare Sheridan's interview
with Rudyard Kipling, one may reasonably ask: "Is Kipling
merely an isolated jingo, or is he the voice of John Bull?" If he
speaks only for himself, why pay so much attention to him?
But when Kipling speaks, he is answered by Clemenceau, Geddes,
Weeks, Borah, and half a dozen other leading United States Sen-
ators; by practically all the newspapers in this country and by
the greatest of the foreign journals. Yet he has no official posi-
tion. He is no statesman. He is not even an historian. He is,
as the politicians would say, a "mere" novelist and poet. Then
why is he taken so seriously? We think the answer is that the
whole world supposes Kipling to be the mouthpiece of the great
mass of the people of England. If that supposition is justified,
the interview, even though it be disowned, is of momentous im-
portance.
THE most famous of the phrases coined by H. G. Wells, in fact,
the resume of his philosophy is "the race between education
and catastrophe." If the fate of civilization depends on that race,
we Catholics are certainly doing all in our power to help Educa-
144 BOOKS RECEIVED [Oct.. 1922.]
tion to win. In New York City alone there are more than one
hundred and fifty-five thousand children in our parochial schools.
In all the nation there are nearly two millions. It would cost
the public schools nearly two hundred million dollars to educate
those two million children. It costs us more than forty million
dollars, in addition to the tax levied upon us for the public schools.
Even so, we think it worth the price, for we entertain a conviction
that the kind of education we provide is the only kind that will
ward off "catastrophe."
BOOKS RECEIVED.
AixTH ft Bacqn. New York: ^ „ ^ „ ^ «». rv .^ ^a
French Composition and Grammar Review. By Joseph S. Galland, Ph.D. |1.4«.
Benzigeb Bhothebs, New York: ^ „ .
On the Run. By Francis J. Finn, S.J. fl.OO net. The Love of the Sacred Heart.
Ulustrated by St. Mechtllde. |2.00. A Jesuit at the English Court. The Life
of the Yen. Claude de la Columbiire, S.J. By Sr. Mary Philip. »1.25 net. The
Values Everlasting. By Rev. Edward F. Garesch6, S.J. ^1.25 net.
BOMi A LivERiOHT, New York:
Beyond Rope and Fence. By David Grew. ?2.00. The Singing Captives. By B.
B. C. Jones. ^2.00. Theg Call Me Carpenter. By Upton Sinclair. 11.75.
Babel. By John Coumos. $2.50.
Thb Encycxopedia Pbess, New York:
The Catholic Encyclopedia. Supplement I. Vol. XVII.
George H. Doran Co., New York:
The Altar Steps. By Compton Mackenzie. $2.00.
Harpeb & Brothers, New York:
Americans by Choice. By John Palmer Gavlt. $2.50.
The Macmillan Co., New York:
Preaching and Sermon Construction. By Paul B. Bull, M.A. $2.50.
Oxford Universfty Press, New York:
War and Armament Loans of Japan. By Ushisaburo Kobayashl, D.G.L. $2.25.
Foul Seas Co., Boston:
Studies in the Chinese Drama. By Kate Buss. $5.00 net.
Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston:
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THE
^atholie^opld
Vol. CXVI.
NOVEMBER, 1922.
No. 692.
WHERE ALL ROADS LEAD.
BY G. K. CHESTERTON.
L The Youth of the Church.
NTIL about the end of the nineteenth century, a
man was expected to give his reasons for joining
the Catholic Church. Today a man is really ex-
pected to give his reasons for not joining it. This
may seem an exaggeration; but I believe it to
stand for a subsconscious truth in thousands of minds. As
for the fundamental reasons for a man doing it, there are only
two that are really fundamental. One is that he believes it
to be the solid objective truth, which is true whether he likes
it or not; and the other that he seeks liberation from his sins.
If there be any man for whom these are not the main motives,
it is idle to inquire what were his philosophical or historical
Editor's Note. — ^We know that the readers of The Catholic World will rejoic«
with us in the fact that we commence, in this number, a series of articles by Mr. G. K.
Chesterton, on his recent conversion. For many years, we have considered him as
a near neighbor and a good friend. But now he has become "one of the family."
In the Editorial Comment of last month, we said, among otlier things, tliat there
are those "who think of tlie Catholic ChMrch merely as 'the old Church.* But the
miracle of the Church is that she is the oldest and the youngest." It gives us a par-
ticular joy to have Mr. Chesterton mention this "miracle" as one of the "strongest
of all the purely intellectual forces that dragged him towards the truth." All
Catholics will welcome him to the Fold, but we think that none can greet him more
cordially than those who enjoy The Cathoilic World. For we and he are of the
same spirit. The articles will be published synchronously in America and in
England. On the other side of the ocean they will run in Blackfriars.
Copyright.
1922. Thb Missionary Society op St. Paul the Apostle
IN thb State of New York.
VOL. cxvi. 10
146 WHERE ALL ROADS LEAD [Nov.,
or emotional reasons for joining the old religion; for he has
not joined it at all.
But a preliminary word or two may well be said about
the other matter; which may be called the challenge of the
Church. I mean that the world has recently become aware
of that challenge in a curious and almost creepy fashion. I
am literally one of the least, because one of the latest, of a
crowd of converts who have been thinking along the same
lines as I. There has been a happy increase in the number of
Catholics; but tnere has also been, if I may so express it, a
happy increase in the number of non-Catholics; in the sense
of conscious non-Catholics. The world has become conscious
that it is not Catholic. Only lately it would have been about
as likely to brood on the fact that it was not Confucian. And
all the array of reasons for not joining the Church of Rome
marked but the beginning of the ultimate reason for join-
ing it.
At this stage, let it be understood, I am speaking of a re-
action and rejection which was, as mine would once have been,
honestly, if conventionally, convinced. I am not speaking
now of the stage of mere self-deception or sulky excuses;
though such a stage there may be before the end. I am re-
marking that even while we truly think that the reasons are
reasonable, we tacitly assume that the reasons are required.
Far back at the beginning of all our changes, if I may speak
for many much better than myself, there was the idea that we
must have reasons for not joining the Catholic Church. I
never had any reasons for not joining the Greek Church, or
the religion of Mahomet, or the Theosophical Society, or the
Society of Friends. Doubtless, I could have discovered and
defined the reasons, had they been demanded; just as I could
have found the reasons for not going to live in Lithuania, or
not being a chartered accountant, or not changing my name to
Vortigern Brown, or not doing a thousand other things that it
had never occurred to me to do. But the point is, that I never
felt the presence or pressure of the possibility at all; I heard
no distant and distracting voice calling nae to Lithuania or to
Islam; I had no itch to explain to myself why my name was
not Vortigern, or why my religion was not Theosophy. That
sort of presence and pressure of the Church I believe to be
universal and ubiquitous today; not only among Anglicans,
1922.] WHERE ALL ROADS LEAD 147
but among Agnostics. I repeat that I do not mean that they
have no real objections; on the contrary, I mean that they
have begun really to object; they have begun to kick and
struggle.
One of the most famous modern masters of fiction
and social philosophy, perhaps the most famous of all, was
once listening to a discussion between a High Church curate
and myself about the Catholic theory of Christianity. About
half-way through it, the great novelist began to dance wildly
about the room with characteristic and hilarious energy, call-
ing out, "Fm not a Christian! Fm not a Christian!" flapping
about like one escaped as from the net of the fowler. He had
the sense of a huge vague army making an encircling move-
ment, and heading him and herding him in the direction of
Christianity, and ultimately Catholicism. He felt he had cut
his way out of the encirclement, and was not caught yet. With
all respect for his genius and sincerity, he had the air of one
delightedly doing a bolt, before anybody could say to him:
"Why do we not join the Catholic Church?"
Now, I have noted first this common consciousness of the
challenge of the Church, because I believe it to be connected
with something else. That something else is the strongest of
all the purely intellectual forces that dragged me towards the
truth. It is not merely the survival of the faith, but the sin-
gular nature of its survival. I have called it by a conventional
phrase "the old religion." But it is not an old religion; it is a
religion that refuses to grow old. At this moment of history,
it is a very young religion; rather especially a religion of
young men. It is much newer than the new religions; its
young men are more fiery, more full of their subject, more
eager to explain and argue than were the young Socialists of
my own youth. It does not merely stand firm like an old
guard; it has recaptured the initiative, and is conducting the
counter-attack. In short, it is what youth always is rightly or
wrongly; it is aggressive. It is this atmosphere of the ag-
gressiveness of Catholicism that has thrown the old intel-
lectuals on the defensive. It is this that has produced the
almost morbid self -consciousness of which I have spoken.
The converts are truly fighting, in those words which recur
like a burden at the opening of the Mass, for a thing which
giveth joy to their youth. I cannot understand how this
148 WHERE ALL ROADS LEAD [Nov.,
unearthly freshness in something so old can possibly be
explained, except on the supposition that it is indeed un-
earthly.
A very distinguished and dignified example of this pagan-
ism at bay is Mr. W. B. Yeats. He is a man I never read or
hear without stimulation; his prose is even better than his
poetry, and his talk is even better than his prose. But exactly
in this sense he is at bay; and indeed especially so; for, of
course, the hunt is up in Ireland in much fuller cry than in
England. And if I wanted an example of the pagan defense
at its best, I could not ask for a clearer statement than the
following passage from his delightful memoirs in the Mercury;
it refers to the more mournful poems of Lionel Johnson and
his other Catholic friends :
I think it (Christianity) but deepened despair and multi-
plied temptation. . . . Why are these strange souls born
everywhere today, with hearts that Christianity, as shaped
by history, cannot satisfy? Our love letters wear out our
love; no school of painting outlasts its founders, every
stroke of the brush exhausts the impulse; pre-Raphaelitism
had some twenty years; Impressionism, thirty, perhaps.
Why should we believe that religion can never bring round
its antithesis? Is is true that our air is disturbed, as Mel-
larm^ said, "by the trembling of the veil of the temple,'* or
"that our whole age is seeking to bring forth a sacred
book?" Some of us thought that book near towards the
end of last century, but the tide sank again.
Of course, there are many minor criticisms of all this.
The faith only multiplies temptation in the sense that it would
multiply temptation to turn a dog into a man. And it cer-
tainly does not deepen despair, if only for two reasons; first,
that despair to a Catholic is itself a spiritual sin and blas-
phemy; and, secpnd, that the despair of many pagans, often
including Mr. Yeats, could not possibly be deepened. But
what concerns me in these introductory remarks, is his sug-
gestion about the duration of movements. When he gently
asks why Catholic Christianity should last longer than other
movements, we may well answer even more gently: "Why,
indeed?" He might gain some light on why it should, if he
would begin by inquiring why it does. He seems curiously
1922.] WHERE ALL ROADS LEAD 149
unconscious that the very contrast he gives is against the case
he urges. If the proper duration of a movement is twenty
years, what sort of a movement is it that lasts nearly two
thousand? If a fashion should last no longer that Impression-
ism, what sort of a fashion is it that lasts about fifty times as
long? Is it just barely conceivable that it is not a fashion?
But it is exactly here that the first vital consideration re-
curs; which is not merely the fact that the thing remains, but
the manner in which it returns. By the poet's reckoning of
the chronology of such things, it is amazing enough that one
such thing has so survived. It is much more amazing that it
should have not survival, but revival, and revival with that
very vivacity for which the poet admits he has looked else-
where, and admits being disappointed when he looked else-
where. If he was expecting new things, surely he ought not to
be indifferent to something that seems unaccountably to be as
good as new. If the tide sank again, what about the other
tide that obviously rose again? The truth is that, like many
such pagan prophets, he expected to get something, but he
certainly never expected to get what he got. He was expecting
a trembling in the veil of the temple; but he never expected
that the veil of the most ancient temple would be rent. He
was expecting the whole age to bring forth a sacred book; but
he certainly never expected it to be a Mass book.
Yet this is really what has happened, not as a fancy or a
point of opinion, but as a fact of practical politics. The na-
tion to which his genius is an ornament has been filled with a
fury of fighting, of murder and of martyrdom. God knows it
has been tragic enough; but it has certainly not been without
that religious exaltation that has so often been the twin of
tragedy. Everyone knows that the revolution has been full
of religion, and of what religion? Nobody has more admira-
tion than I for the imaginative resurrections which Mr. Yeats
himself has effected, by the incantation of Celtic song. But I
doubt if Deirdre was the woman on whom men called in
battle; and it was not, I think, a portrait of Oisin that the
Black-and-Tan turned in shame to the wall.
THE POETRY OF ALICE MEYNELL.
BY RAY EDRIDGE.
HEN Alice Meynell writes a poem there is a sound
in English letters like the clear ringing of her
own "Chimes" in a night of clouds and wind:
"A verse of bells takes wing, and flies with the
cloud." It is a brief, infrequent sound, of quite
unmistakable quality, which serves to emphasize the darkness
and to contrast sharply with the voices of the wind. Com-
pared to these eerie libertines, it has the reality and the con-
straint of chimes, telling plainly of time and of the Eternity
that enfolds and ends it.
What is this quality? It might seem easy to determine,
for Mrs. Meynell has not written much; there is a remarkably
even level of excellence throughout her work, and very few
atypical poems. Moreover, as she herself says, she is "a poet
of one mood:"
... In your ears
I change not ever, bearing, for my part
One thought that is the treasure of my years. . . .
Then one should be able to divine that thought and demon-
strate the nature of this quality that makes her work unique.
So it might seem at first sight. But life defies analysis, and
Mrs. Meynell's poems are preeminently living things. Her
thought lives in their structure as the soul lives in the body,
excelling, informing, but dependent, and the crude dissection
of paraphrase leaves but a lifeless platitude.
Her genius was fortunate in its nurture. To that she owes
faith, philosophy, exquisite refinement, and, without doubt,
many characteristics of the spirit which irradiate her art and
are eloquent of the apprenticeship of which she speaks in
"A Father of Women." Rarely has careful and devoted
master been so rewarded by the event, and not the least of
that reward is the filial devotion with which she sings to him:
1922.] THE POETRY OF ALICE MEYNELL 151
O liberal, constant, dear!
Crush in my nature the ungenerous art
Of the inferior; set me high, and here,
Here garner up thy heart.
Thus well equipped, Mrs. Meynell entered the flood-tide of
Victorian letters, and was soon recognized as a writer of dis-
tinction. Her already trained mind was sharpened by con-
tact with the acknowledged leaders of that day, and it is well
for us to hear her when she speaks of those great names, lest
we listen too readily to a certain, contemporary, mushroom
spirit proffering, with shallow confidence, new lamps for
old.
But for all that, those "laboring, vast. Tellurian galleons"
were approaching the uncharted seas. That fleet exhibited, it
is true, superb, individual seamanship, but ultimate harborage
was already deemed doubtful by many, but the sound laws of
navigation were written in the heart of the newcomer. Tenny-
son might "hope to meet" his Pilot; Alice Meynell carried her
Pilot aboard, and would keep past question the incalculable
tryst. An extraordinary virility characterizes all her work.
But perhaps strength is a less invidious word. One remembers
the poem, "St. Catherine of Siena," an unanswerable rebuke
to any possible vanity of sex.
Thompson, singing of Mrs. Meynell in "Love in Dian's
Lap," asks:
How to the petty prison could she shrink
Of femineity?
But this was a qualified utterance and exonerated by the
sequel :
Nay, but I think
In a dear courtesy her spirit would
Woman assume for grace to womanhood.
Looking at Sargent's portrait of this wife and mother of
a family, with her poetry in our mind, we read in those sad
features the burden and the suffering of life borne with a
high courage.
Her philosophy is age-old and sure; and it is in the exact
152 THE POETRY OF ALICE MEYNELL [Nov.,
contemplation of truth in its intellectual, rather than in its
emotional, aspect that she finds her happiest, characteristic
inspiration. There is a thought ever recurring in this poetry.
It appears constantly in the earlier poems, and it has found
expression in the latest.^ We have Quality beleaguered by
Numbers and Succession. Essence at the mercy of accident.
In a word, we have the soul of man borne down by Time and
Change, and at shift to declare its high lineage in the teeth of
these vandal conquerors.
Her thought, in varying context, so often gravitates to
these considerations, that one may be allowed to guess at some
secret of the spirit peculiarly characteristic of Mrs. Meynell.
One imagines her on guard in some innermost citadel against
the molestations of Time, which, for all their daring intimacy,
shall not touch her soul.
"Builders of Ruins" sketches the completeness of Time's
conquest over material achievements:
We build with strength the deep tower wall
That shall be shattered thus and thus.
And where they wrought, these lives of ours,
So many worded, many souled,
A North- West wind will take the towers,
And dark with color, sunny and cold,
Will range alone among the flowers.
And here or there, at our desire.
The little clamorous owl shall sit
Through her still time; and we aspire
To make a law (and know not it)
Unto the life of a wild briar.
Mrs. Meynell accepts this inevitable metamorphosis of the ma-
terial with folded hands and without bitterness. She will even
regard as a benediction such quiet fruition, for the victor
brings in his train many things as beautiful as those he has
deposed.
Solace our labors, O our seers
The seasons, and our bards the days;
1 "Time's Reversals/' London Mercury, December, 1921.
1922.] THE POETRY OF ALICE MEYNELL 153
And make our pause and silence brim
With the shrill children's play, and sweets
Of those pathetic flowers and dim
Of those eternal flowers my Keats,
Dying, felt growing over him!
Time's ravages of our towers may leave Mrs. Meynell un-
moved; but when he lays his hand upon the temple of our
flesh, he touches the outposts of the kingdom she so jealously
guards, and there is an answering stir of power and a counter-
blow that stays the full conquest so long as the singer lives.
Memory and Love shall preserve Youth and Beauty from
Time's estrangements:
Hide, then, within my heart, oh, hide
All thou art loth should go from thee.
Be kinder to thyself and me.
My cupful from this river's tide
Shall never reach the long sad sea.
But this inexorable assailant presses his war, and the
singer contemplates her own penultimate defeat. There can
be few sadder poems in our language than "The Letter of a
Girl to Her Own Old Age:"
Only one youth, and the bright life was shrouded.
Only one morning, and the day was clouded.
And one old age with all regrets is crowded.
From out that innermost citadel comes a sound of tears.
Mrs. Meynell allows no mention of a larger hope than this
life holds, to solace us here. There is a hesitation to credit
age with the comforting philosophy of youth. This "Letter" is
a tender reaching out of Youth and Joy to Age and Sorrow,
and to speak to Age in terms of the hope of untried Youth
might seem, too, like presumption:
I have not writ this letter of divining
To make a glory of thy silent pining,
A triumph of thy mute and strange declining.
The declining is still piteous whatever ultimate glory
await the fainting traveler.
Thus far, Time has but touched the heart. In "San Lor-
154 THE POETRY OF ALICE MEYNELL [Nov.,
enzo's Mother," he has pierced it, and out of dereliction there
comes the sure and quiet note of the victory that overcometh
the world:
There is One alone Who cannot change;
Dreams are we, shadows, visions strange;
And all I give is given to One.
I might mistake my dearest son.
But never the Son Who cannot change.
Here is the victory hardly won, and at long last. Many de-
feats have gone to the making of it, and the heart is old that
speaks thus. It is the best that most of us can do : to learn to
live when we have all but done with living. But in the son-
net, "The Young Neophyte," an unearthly wisdom crowns our
youth, and the triumph is all anticipatory rather than all but
retrospective. This sonnet might well be read in conjunction
with "The Letter" and the two poems contrasted. In some
respects, they are so alike. In both of them, youth looks for-
ward to the day of the faded brow and the feeble knee. In
both of them, there is emphasized the idea of abiding identity
after much change. Yet the respective notes of the two poems
are utterly dissimilar. In the one, there are tears throughout.
In the other, a most significant smile. In the one. Youth
entreats Age to ponder upon the past. In the other. Youth,
with steadfast eyes, gazes beyond the future, ignoring the
tapers and trappings of the death chamber itself, and sees that
"Son Who cannot change" and Who is the Death of Death and
the Ruin of Hell:
"O mors, ero mors tua; morsus tuus ero, inferneV'
Mrs. Meynell often shows us her deepest thought in flashes.
In "The Neophyte" this tell-tale thought is but a fleeting paren-
thesis. But how pregnant and how invaluable!
O rash! (I smile) to pledge my hidden wheat.
Without that parenthesis, the note of faith would be absent
throughout, and the poem, although still beautiful, would
have kept wistfully upon the plane of the natural. That little
parenthetic touch is the slight movement of strong wings.
1922.] THE POETRY OF ALICE MEYNELL 155
lifting the frail creature into the realm of the supernatural
and on to the sure plane of grace.
The transfiguring thought is not always so effortlessly
effective, but it always has a quality of suddeness and of the
unusual; it cannot be foretold; it comes from a depth deeper
than is anticipated. It is not just depth, esoteric, desolate,
the achievement of a gifted modern. Where Mrs. Meynell
leads, there is nothing formless nor vague. There is clear-cut
outline, detail, amplitude, a prepared, familiar region where
the singer has dwelt. That exquisite poem, "A Thrush Before
Dawn," is a notable example of this phenomenon. Most poets
would have been content with the first four stanzas, telling of
the pictures conjured up by the singing of:
That wonderful one, alone, at peace.
Indeed, how could they not be content? What beauty there
is in all of them, and, perhaps, especially in the third :
And first first-loves, a multitude,
The exaltation of their pain;
Ancestral childhood long renewed;
And midnights of invisible rain;
And gardens, gardens, night and day.
Gardens and childhood all the way.
Not so Mrs. Meynell. For her there is much more than this:
All natural things! But more — Whence came
This yet remoter mystery?
How do these starry notes proclaim
A graver still divinity?
This hope, this sanctity of fear?
O innocent throat! O human earl
It is this more that makes Mrs. Meynell a true seer. She is of
the same high company as that poor, great poet whom she so
befriended — Francis Thompson. But how different in method !
The energy of Thompson's spirit in "dim escalade" of "the deific
peaks" wills to escape from and transcend the boundaries of
the dimensions. Alice Meynell's thought is a quieter and
surer guide to the same remote regions. But for her there is
156 THE POETRY OF ALICE MEYNELL [Nov.,
no ecstatic straining to escape from her surroundings; the
eagle does not "soar to find the air." This created world and
its laws are so eloquent of God that to name Him even seems a
redundancy. These are His thoughts. The "remoter mystery,"
evoked by the linking up of the innocent throat and the human
ear, was His device from the beginning. In one line, one
phrase, one word, unruffled and serene, she reaches:
. . . the open heavenward plot, with dew.
Ultimate poetry, enclosed, enskyed —
Her religion and its philosophy breathe through all her poetry;
they are as unobtrusive as respiration and as essential. Of
the poems dealing with directly religious subjects, it may be
said that each is a complete meditation having (which is es-
sential in a meditation) a quality of freshness and of the un-
usual, enabling the mind to escape from the incubus of famil-
iarity and to re-discover truth.
A recent poem, "Christmas Night," is an instance of this
freshness :
We do not find Him on the difficult earth.
In surging human kind.
In wayside death or accidental birth.
Or in the "march of mind."
Nature, her nests, her prey, the fed, the caught,
Hide Him so well, so well.
His steadfast secret there seems to our thought
Life's saddest miracle.
He*s but conjectured in man's happiness,
Suspected in man's tears,
Or lurks beyond the long, discouraged guess.
Grown fainter through the years.
But absent, absent now? Ah, what is this,
Near as in child-birth bed,
Laid on our sorrowful hearts, close to a kiss?
A homeless, childish head.
A poem such as that has to be read and pondered. The emo-
tion it evokes depends upon the full development of its
1922.] THE POETRY OF ALICE MEYNELL 157
thought. It is slow, but it is cumulative, and in the end it is
overwhelming. The fourth verse is found to have the sudden-
ness of the Incarnation and the intimacy of Bethlehem.
The problem of pain is the rock on which many poets
have made shipwreck. Not, perhaps, poetic shipwreck. Wit-
ness poor Henley standing in the breach against the Infinite:
Out of the night that covers me.
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods there be,
For my unconquerable soul.
Beneath the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
That may be poetry. It is poetry, indeed. It is also hysteria
and a refusal to recognize spiritual facts.
Francis Thompson epitomizes the test of a really great
poet in "The Mistress of Vision:"
When thy song is shield and mirror
To the fair, snake-curled Pain,
Where thou dar'st affront her terror
That on her thou may*st attain
Persean conquest; seek no more,
O seek no more!
Pass the gates of Luthany, tread the region, Elenore.
How Mrs. Meynell passes this test the poem, entitled "Messina,
1908," will show:
Lord, Thou hast crushed Thy tender ones, overthrown
Thy strong, Thy fair; Thy man Thou hast unmanned.
Thy elaborate works unwrought, Thy deeds undone.
Thy lovely, sentient, human plan unplanned;
Destroyer, we have cowered beneath Thine own
Immediate, unintelligible hand.
Lord, Thou hast hastened to retrieve, to heal.
To feed, to bind, to clothe, to quench the brand.
To prop the ruin, to bless and to anneal;
Hast sped Thy ships by sea, Thy trains by land.
Shed pity and tears; our shattered fingers feel
Thy mediate and intelligible hand.
158 THE POETRY OF ALICE MEYNELL [Nov.,
And the resignation that finds utterance in that beautiful poem,
"To Any Poet," is a last and final tribute to the Divine Will :
Thou Shalt intimately lie
In the roots of flowers that thrust
Upwards from thee to the sky,
With no more distrust,
When they blossom from thy dust.
Nought will fear thee, humbled creature.
There shall lie thy mortal burden
Pressed into the heart of Nature,
Songless in a garden.
With a long embrace of pardon.
Then the truth all creatures tell.
And His will Whom thou entreatest.
Shall absorb thee; there shall dwell
Silence, the completest
Of thy poems, last, and sweetest.
When we come to consider the form of Mrs. MeynelPs poetry,
what strikes us most is that such concentration of thought
should find entirely adequate expression in comparatively
simple forms. I do not for a moment mean to suggest that the
framing of the verses could have been a simple matter. Very
much the reverse! But, like all great works of art, the final
effect is one of completeness and simplicity.
Mrs. Meynell does not base her claim for a hearing on her
much speaking. She contents herself with a minimum of
words; but they are the right words — the only words possible.
Her unerring choice of words is seen most clearly in the cate-
gories which are to be found in many of the poems. In
"Christ in the Universe," for example:
Of His earth-visiting feet
None knows the secret, cherished, perilous.
The terrible, shamefast, frightened, whispered, sweet,
Heart-shattering secret of His way with us.
Examine each one of that sequence of attributes, and you will
find that you have traveled far in the realm of the spirit
1922.] THE POETRY OF ALICE MEYNELL 159
before you reach the verse's close. That each one of those
words should have been chosen for its inevitable Tightness,
and that there should be at the same time strict obedience to
the laws of prosody seems almost a miracle. One feels that
Mrs. Meynell would unhesitatingly sacrifice a poem, however
perfectly it represented her thought in substance, if it deviated
in any way from the rules in its expression.
There you have one example of what was meant by the
description, "A Saint of Intellect." To have deep and im-
perative thought almost compelling utterance, and yet to
stand rigidly on the order of its expression, or not express it at
all, is an exercise in mortification on the intellectual plane,
comparable in its degree to the austerity and detachment of a
higher sanctity:
Fiat justitia ruat ccelumi
Indeed, may it not be said without exaggeration that there
is a connection between these two austerities? The virtues
implied in each case are patience and fidelity. Minds cast in
Mrs. MeynelFs mold and trained in the school that nurtured
her, are apt to have few flaws, they are all of one piece :
Crush in my nature the ungenerous art
Of the inferior; set me high —
These virtues, practised in their degree upon the intellectual
plane, are not likely to be unrepresented in the spheres more
generally associated with sanctity. Like her own Shep-
herdess :
She holds her little thoughts in sight.
Though gay they run and leap.
She is so circumspect and right;
She has her soul to keep.
She walks — the lady of my delight —
A shepherdess of sheep.^
But the outraged Spirit of Quantity still pursues his elusive
prey, who will escape him to the end. Does one claim a place
for Mrs. Meynell amongst the greatest poets? This is a ques-
2 The italics are my own.
160 THE POETRY OF ALICE MEYNELL [Nov.,
tion which is sure to be asked. It is, perhaps, natural that it
should be asked. "You have made great assertions," says the
World. "Your appreciation has been tantamount to saying
that there is perfection of substance and perfection of form.
Very well, then ! Have the courage of your convictions and
make the inevitable comparisons. With Shakespeare! With
Milton!"
That is the world all over ! It is not content that one star
should differ from another star in glory. It is more interested
in magnitude and its categories. Bludgeon in hand, it de-
mands a crucial numerical test.
The answer is both "yes" and "no." If the test of the great-
est poetry lies in the extent to which it appeals to the heart
and mind, then emphatically Mrs. Meynell may take her place
amongst the greatest. But if there must be universality of
appeal, as our Numerical Inquisitor would have it, then the
answer must be in the negative. Intellectual appeal is never
universal. A poet who stresses thought and curbs emotion
can never be popular.
There is a certain saying of Pope Pius X. which would
serve as a superscription to all Mrs. MeynelPs work. Speak-
ing to the students of the Scotch College in Rome, this vener-
able and saintly Pontiff said: "Obey your collegiate rules; for
in rules there is order — in order there is peace — and in peace
there is God."
IRELAND— 1922.
BY SHANE LESLIE.
Betwixt the hills of grief and death.
She moves upon her thornclad road;
For others peace and wealth, God saith.
For her the rod, the Cross, the load.
"Oh, Holy Mother, bloody dew
Drips down your cheeks for us who sinned.
Hear you not Mary calling you,
And Heaven's anguish in the wind?"
Dark women touch your robe of gold
And kiss the silver dust away;
They keened by Calvary Hill of old,
They watched through Crucifixion Day.
"Oh, black-robed women, widowed ones !
Who sit at every river ford;
You Wring the shrouds of brothers, sons.
You washed the Body of the Lord!"
The ghosts of all the starved and slain
Rise from their graves about her head;
Her martyrs, prophets in their pain.
The phantoms of her lovers dead.
"Oh, Ireland, thou art set with few
To bear world's woe like Sorrow's star;
Yet faintly Heaven weeps for you
And Mary cries unseen afar!"
yot. cxvi. 11
THE FREEDOM OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.
BY PATRICK J. WARD.
[QNG the masses of the people of all countries
there exists a common sympathy, more marked
with the passage of time and the progress of
civilization, which has reached the first period
of maturity as the result of the recent world
conflict. Everywhere the "people" have had a continuous
struggle with the forces of ascendancy and reaction — a never-
ending fight to progress. It is an instinct in mankind, from the
savage in the wilds of Africa or the aborigine of Australia to the
most cultured and enlightened aifiongst civilized races, to
struggle ever upward and onward according to their respective
enlightenment. All have the same God, the same goal, and
the same destiny.
At present, when Ireland is taking her place on an ac-
knowledged plane as a nation, it is most interesting to make a
study of the comparative freedom of the Irish and English
peoples now, and at various stages of their history. One is
apt to forget that the English people have had their great
fight for the right to live, and to be governed according to
their own ideals and that, in many respects, the Irish people
have been more successful in that fight than the English.
It does not matter if they have been deluded into the belief
that they are a thoroughly free people. That only makes their
awakening more bitter, and the task to free themselves more
formidable. False friends are more dangerous than open
enemies.
This strikes a chord of sympathy between the Irish and
English democracies. The Irish have their faults, but one of
their most redeeming characteristics is their willingness to
forget, in a moment, the injuries of the past and to hold out the
hand of sympathy and help to those less fortunate. Political
spite is not an Irish weakness. Patriotism, based on the rotten
foundations of racial hatred, is a sham and is utterly opposed
to the fundamental principles of freedom and justice. True
patriotism is built on good will and good fellowship, and if
1922.] FREEDOM OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 163
the first sips from the cup of liberty are to make a people
drunken with the lust for revenge, they are not fit for freedom,
but slavery.
To return to the consideration of the past and present
state of English democracy — the truth is they are not as free
as they have been led to believe. They were taught to glory
in Magna Charta, and in looking back to the thirteenth century
their eyes became so strained that, for a period, they were
incapable of seeing the awful maze of tyranny about them.
Overshadowing their pride in free and representative institu-
tions, has hovered the grim ghoul of reaction and tyranny.
The history of the English people may be broadly divided
into three periods. In the first period, up to the thirteenth
century, the monarchy was well-nigh absolute, and the people
were, in fact, slaves. Up to the reign of Charles I., Parliament
had about as much say in the government as the German
Reichstag or the Russian Duma before the war. Then came
a period of government by the king and his barons, when the
condition of the people was unimproved, and, third, there was
a gradual transfer of the government to the hands of the
barons themselves and, later, to the merchant classes and
landed gentry. This last period reaches to our own time,
when the people are still looked upon as an incumbrance,
dangerous at times, for whom it is necessary to pass occa-
sional laws, either of conciliation or coercion.
The vital consideration in judging the freedom of a peo-
ple — the hallmark of a free constitution — is the voice of the
people in all matters closely aifecting their weal and interests,
and the most vital consideration affecting those interests is
their contribution to and control of the national purse and
benefits accruing to them therefrom. It is the first axiom of a
free constitution that "taxation without representation is
tyranny," and, taking this as a guide, the standard of govern-
ment of the English people may be judged.
The first manifestation of revolt in England against an
unconstitutional tyrant was that of the "people" against King
John. The "people" here, however, were only those who then
counted — the barons and clergy. The outcome of this revolt
was Magna Charta, which laid down what were in those days
two great principles of political freedom, namely, that no levy
should be made on the people without consent of the common
164 FREEDOM OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [Nov.,
council, and that no one should be punished or imprisoned
without fair trial. These were not by any means new prin-
ciples, but it was the first time in England that any body of the
people, even an utterly unrepresentative and privileged body,
sought to enforce it on its rulers. In spite of this advance, the
people gained practically no relief, as is evidenced by frequent
outbreaks of rebellion against low wages, unfair conditions,
and heavy taxes on the necessaries of life.
In those days, England was an entirely agricultural coun-
try, consequently, as far as the great mass of the people was
concerned, the land question was the vital one. Other mat-
ters, however, engaged the attention of the King and his nobles
— the fight for power. What consideration might be expected
for the mere people under such conditions?
How did the land question stand? The tillers of the soil
were little better than slaves or serfs, bought and sold with the
land. At the outset, it is well to remember that the English
are a feudal race, unlike the Irish, whose polity was the clan
system. Two classes in serfdom had arisen equivalent to
the farmer and his laborer. The farmer's conditions were
utterly bad, and his laborer's worse. Couple this with starva-
tion and plague, and one will hardly wonder at the frequent
outbursts of lawlessness and violence. In 1381. John Bell, the
"Mad Priest of Kent," roused the people from their miserable
lethargy, sounded the death knell of feudalism in England,
and boldly proclaimed the "rights of man." Wat Tyler led
the peasants into revolt, but the rebellion was crushed,
like many since, by false promises— never intended to be
fulfilled.
Turning from the people to those carrying on the govern-
ment of the country, the first mention in English history of a
"parliament" is when the King met his barons in the Mad
Parliament of 1258. (In the light of more modern customs,
perhaps, it does not seem to have been so mad after all.) It
was not until 1265, however, that an assembly approaching a
modern parliament was set up. This was Simon de Mont-
fort's parliament—a nominated assembly it is true, but a great
step in the right direction, inasmuch as the principle of repre-
sentative government was here first put into operation. Ed-
ward I. developed this principle further in his "Model Parlia-
ment" of King, Lords and Commons in 1295. From this, until
1922.] FREEDOM OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 165
1628, the date of the Petition of Right, a continual struggle
was going on between King and Parliament. The names of
Pym, Hampden, Hollis, and Vane will ever be associated with
the terrific battle against monarchical despotism. The Habeas
Corpus Act was about the first legislation that pierced the
cordon of privilege and reached the common man. Then
came the Bill of Rights, in 1689, embodying and expanding the
principles of Magna Charta and the Petition of Right.
It is rather ironical, not to say tragic, that all through
this development of the liberty of the subject, the subject in
the person of the workingman counted nothing, and benefited
nothing. All movements towards economic freedom failed
signally in this respect.
In 1695, a great, silent, but far-reaching revolution took
place in the abolition of the censorship of the press. In these
days, when the columns of the press are open to the most
insignificant contributor, one can hardly realize what a rigor-
ous censorship meant — to wit, a political control, such as
existed in Russia before revolution and in Great Britain down
to the end of the seventeenth century. This freedom, as one
would expect, conduced to the spread of education to a limited
extent. Other great changes were taking place. The agrarian
pursuits of the people were gradually giving way before in-
dustrial developments: the introduction of machinery and
manufacturing processes. The whole nature and condition of
the people was in transformation, but the same results accrued
to the masses — poverty and over-taxation, while the grand old
fight went on in high places as to who was to have the privilege
of imposing the taxes upon them.
From about the middle of the eighteenth century to the
early part of the nineteenth, some five million acres of com-
mon or enclosed land were transferred from the communities
to private owners by Acts of Parliament. This wholesale rob-
bery was done under the cloak of agricultural "improvement,"
the "improvement" being measured in the increased incomes
of the landowners and land-grabbers, while the peasantry were
reduced to abject poverty and starvation. It is doubtful if
the down-trodden peasantry of Ireland suffered more. The
same fight was going on in both England and Ireland: the
fight of man for the right to till and gain a sustenance from
the soil which the Almighty had placed at his disposal. The
166 FREEDOM OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [Nov.,
overwhelming forces of greed and avarice were arrayed
against him. As a result of his being driven from the land,
out of which he could no longer gain a subsistence, the peasant
sought the towns, only to place his neck under the heel of
industrial mammon. Denied the right of combination and
self-preservation under law, the working people lay at the
mercy of landlord and manufacturer. Misery and desolation
found an outlet in riot and disorder, the smashing of ma-
chinery and the burning of the farmers' haystacks and build-
ings. By this time, the Government realized that the best
method of dealing with widespread outbreaks of this nature,
was to concentrate public attention on alluring legislation,
and this was done by proposals for parliamentary reform.
At that period the electorate was in such a rotten con-
dition that while places like Manchester, Birmingham, and
Leeds were without franchise, "representatives," or rather
nominees of the landlord and capitalist, occupied seats repre-
senting fields, clumps of trees, and derelict houses. To rem-
edy this, the Reform Bill of 1831 was introduced. This has a
special interest, because it is in connection with this reform
that that time-honored assembly — the House of Lords — bared
its teeth against democratic reform. The Bill was rejected
once by the House of Commons and twice by the House of
Lords in 1831. In 1832, it was again introduced and passed
by the Commons, but this time the Lords passed it on the
threat of the Government to urge the creation of a large num-
ber of Whig peers. Even in this Bill the great mass of the
people of the country, who were led to believe that they were
to benefit directly by it, were totally excluded.
About this time, after the Act of 1832 had failed to redress
their grievances, a movement arose very similar in many
respects to agitation then going on in Ireland, namely, the
Chartist movement. The failure of trade unionism, after its
first outburst of violent activity, reduced the working classes
to despair. Agitation arose, and demand for redress was em-
bodied in the People's Charter, a second edition of Magna
Charta, but much more practical. It is worth noting that in
this movement, as in the Irish national struggle, two sections
were operating— one, for constitutional reform, believing that
remedial measures could be carried in the ordinary constitu-
tional way, and a physical force party, convinced (and with
1922.] FREEDOM OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 167
great reason) that the working classes had few if any friends
against the legislators of St. Stephen's. As often happens in
such a fight, the physical force party soon hammered their
brains out against a stone wall, leaving behind a dead,
dying, and exhausted mass, prey once more to landlord
and capitalist.
Such was the trend of political development of the Eng-
lish people from the earliest times down to what may be called
the dawn of contemporary history. Little more than slaves,
crushed by ascendancy, despite measures establishing great
principles of liberty, the people had no part in their fruits.
Ascendancy and the House of Lords are practically synony-
mous terms, and from the record of the Lords down to the
present time, or rather to the rise of the Liberal Party in
1906, one can form an estimate of the extent of freedom the
English people have enjoyed.
From the date of the Reform Act down to the present day,
there is hardly a single measure tending towards the amel-
ioration of the people which has not been strenuously opposed,
in most cases successfully, by the Lords. Any measure which
proposed to give the English people, in the slightest degree,
control of their own destinies was to the Lords anathema, and
was either completely and effectually wrecked, or rendered
absolutely useless as a measure of salvation to those for whom
it was framed. In modern times, spasmodic efforts of liberal
and progressive thought have made themselves felt, but to as-
cendancy the faintest breath of liberalism was, and is, a
symptom of disease to be eradicated as soon as possible. In
spite of ascendancy, however, several measures of reform
were made law. The two most important were Disraeli's
Reform Bill of 1867, the principal provisions of which were
to extend the franchise to every rate-paying householder in
towns, a reduction of the county franchise to a twelve pound
valuation, and the creation of the "lodger" vote. The Re-
form Act of 1884 extended the franchise to the agricultural
laborer.
This gradual extension of the franchise and the cumulative
effects of reform could have but one result: to waken the
people from their lethargy, lift them up from their miserable
position, and make them feel that, after all, they were in-
tended to fill some part in the destinies of their country. Thus
168 FREEDOM OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE [Nov.,
the nineteenth century may be considered the period of the
awakening of the English democracy, and only then did the
people of England begin to feel the chains of serfdom and
feudalism slacken.
It would take a volume to go into all the progressive
measures which have been ruthlessly mutilated and rejected
by the Lords. We but mention a few between the years
1869-1874, 1880-1885, and 1892-1895, when a non-reactionary
government was in the saddle. These were: The University
Tests Bill, Life Peerage Bill, Ballot Bill, Compensation for Dis-
turbance (Ireland), Land (Ireland), Arrears (Ireland), Fran-
chise, Employers' Liability, Parish Councils, Evicted Tenants,
Local Government, Education, and Plural Voting Bills. Com-
ing down to the period when the last desperate struggle at
close quarters, between Liberal and Reactionary took place,
beginning in 1906, when the first democratic government in
England came into power, the following Bills were mutilated or
rejected: Education, Plural Voting, Town Tenants, A Bill for
the Provision of Meals for Poor Children in Schools, Evicted
Tenants (Ireland), Scotch Small Landowners, Licensing Bills,
and many others.
Now we come to the year which marks the turn of the
tide, the year 1909, and the incident, the rejection of Lloyd
George's revolutionary Budget, a rejection which was a gross
violation of the principles of Magna Charta, the Petition of
Right, and Bill of Rights. The champions of democracy, with
unerring judgment, laid their cause before the people, crushed
for centuries under the heel of despotism and oppression.
The people, gulled by false promises and alluring and decep-
tive legislation, suddenly found themselves in the position of
judge, to pronounce the sentence which would sweep away for
ever the evil power of the House of Lords. The Veto Act has
put a curb upon ruthless interference with the causes of the
people. Under this Act, the people settled their right of con-
trol over taxation as laid down in the aforesaid Charters,
the House of Commons to have the power to pass over the
head of the Lords, a Bill twice presented by the Commons and
twice rejected by the Upper Chamber, and returned for a third
time to the Commons substantially as it left the latter.
Now, turn to Ireland, and contemplate her position all
these centuries, What part has she played in the great battle
1922.] FREEDOM OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 169
of democratic progress? It is no exaggeration to say that the
battle of English democratic liberty has been fought and won,
literally, on the soil of Ireland, for the break in the "line" of
Irish landlordism was a serious breach in the outer defences
of ascendancy in England. Just as the destinies of the great
nations of the world were molded on the fields of Belgium;
just as Belgium bore the heat and the brunt of the battle and
formed a turning point in the gigantic struggle, so it is Ire-
land's heroic struggle that today has placed in the hands of the
English people the key to their own emancipation. Ireland
has swept away for good the power for evil of the landlord,
and, in doing so, placed the English farmer and artisan in a
position to meet, engage, and overcome the army of Privilege
and Capital.
And what return has Ireland asked for all this? She
sought no favor, but claimed justice and right. She claims
her fair share in the fruits of emancipation. The English
democracy, now that the veil of racial distrust and misunder-
standing has been torn away, has recognized that claim. And
what does the future hold in store for the democracies of the
two countries? Out on the battlefields of France and Bel-
gium, Irish Catholic and Irish Protestant, without class dis-
tinction, were intrenched side by side with Englishmen of all
creeds and classes, leavened with the flower of American
democracy. Out of the cleansing fires of mutual suff'ering
will arise true national unity, good fellowship, and an Empire
of free self-governing and independent citizens, ruled accord-
ing to their own aspirations and ideals.
GOD'S LOVER FORSAKES THE WORLD.
BY CARYL COLEMAN.
HE fourteenth century in England was an age of
disintegration and unrest, a period when the
authority of both Church and State was ques-
tioned — a questioning which brought into being
the insurrections and riots that marked its closing
years, and from which were born the predisposing causes that
ultimately led to the great apostasy of the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries. It was a period of oppressive laws and
ruinous taxation, of abuse of patronage and dispensation, of
augmented traffic in clerical temporalities and greater toler-
ation of pluralism; there was great poverty and suffering
among the lower classes, and equally great luxury and ex-
travagance among people of rank and wealth.
The entire population seems to have been possessed with
a restlessness that coMtinuously clamored for greater justice.
This disquietude was kept alive and intensified by the luke-
warmness and negligence of many of the parochial clergy. To
make matters worse, England was ravaged, in 1347, by the Black
Death — a terrible pestilence which swept a considerable pro-
portion of the inhabitants, especially the agrarian population,
from off the land. This increased the moral laxity, leaving
the entire country in so a ruinous state there was hardly a
walk of life that did not need to be built anew.
Nevertheless, the century was also a period of deep reli-
gious thought, of vigorous awakening to greater spiritual ac-
tivity. A more urgent thirst for Christian perfection possessed
many souls, who accepted the penitential life as the way
thereto. A number of men and women, impelled both by the
calamitous condition of society and by the desire for God,
drew themselves in true humility from the world, and became
anchorets and anchoresses.
Many of these students of their own souls, who made
player and mortification the foundation stones of their lives.
1922.] GOD'S LOVER FORSAKES THE WORLD 171
and their will God's will, reached great perfection. Cer-
tain writings of these fourteenth century English mystics
have survived the ravages of time and neglect, and escaped the
ruthlessness and vandalism of the sixteenth century, only,
however, to be lost to sight for years, if not forgotten. An ex-
ception must be made of Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection
(A. D. 1395). This profound work, one of the first books
printed in England from movable type, luckily passed through
a number of editions before the advent of Elizabeth's drastic
laws against publishing, circulating, or even possessing, a
Catholic book. It was the only printed guide to the mystical
life available to English-speaking Catholics, until the publica-
tion, in the seventeenth century, of the venerable Augustine
Baker's Sancta Sophia,
Within the last few years, certain scholars and anti-
quarians have unearthed other writings of the mystics of the
fourteenth century, and have published them, not for their
religious value, but because of their importance in the
development of the English language and literature. Cath-
olics, however, will find in these publications, matters of
greater moment than their material help in philological and
literary research, for here we have marvelous expositions
of the art in which God is all in all, and everything else is
to be estimated only in relation to God — a logical answer to
a natural need of the soul : the constant craving of the human
heart for self-escape into something higher. St. Augustine's
familiar prayer, "O God, Thou has made us for Thyself and
our heart is restless until it finds rest in Thee," is echoed by
one of these fourteenth century mystics: "Man's soul is the
taker of God only, anything less than God cannot fill it."
One and all, these authors held the way of spiritual per-
fection to be, of necessity, always accompanied with a will
gladly to accept all things, things displeasing as well as pleas-
ing, together with a resolute determination to serve God out
of pure love. "Going," as one of them said, "out of our own
nature and identifying ourselves with the beautiful which
exists in thought, action, or person, not our own; seeking no
personal advantage, loving all God loves, and setting no
bounds to this love, recognizing that it is one of the properties
of love to love what is loved by the person we love." In other
words, they hold, with St. Thomas, that "in love the whole
172 GOD'S LOVER FORSAKES THE WORLD [Nov.,
spiritual life of man consists," and, with the Beloved Disciple,
that "he that loveth not, knoweth not God, for God is love."
Their understanding of mysticism may be briefly stated as
a love-illuminated quest of the soul to unite itself with the
Ultimate ReaHty : as a method of life by which the human spirit
comes to an intrinsic knowledge of Jesus, a knowledge not
attained merely by such acts of virtue and worship as are of
strict obligation for all Christians, but by dying to sensibil-
ities, by focusing the powers of the soul upon self-conquest
and self -surrender to the action of grace, doing all with purity
and directness of intention, humility, and love — a love spring-
ing from the intelligence, and directed always by Faith.
The memory and the will play the most important part in the
quest, and the understanding a minor one, as if it were neces-
sary, first, to perceive by love before comprehending by intel-
ligence. "The seeking is with the heart, the asking is with
the heart, the knocking is with the heart, the opening is to the
heart," said St. Augustine. Hence, to these mystics the process
was not analytical, but synthetical : aiming never to deal with
anything outside of God, to live and move and have the soul
well within the circle of His grace, the will in unison with His
will, and stripped of the I and me and mine. Knowledge of
the Divine Will was built on constant contemplation of Em-
manuel, by earnest endeavor to lead one life with Him, by
bathing the soul, through the Eucharistic Sacrament, in the
Precious Blood, striving to immerse it in the Heart of the
Crucified, so as to say, with St. Paul: "I live, now not I, but
Christ live th in me."
Among these fourteenth century English author-mystics
there was a lay-hermit, a man of singular merit and singleness
of purpose, of preeminent talent and intense piety, one Richard
Rolle, a Yorkshireman, born in the year 1300 at Thornton in
the North Riding. He was, withal, a gifted and prolific writer
both in prose and verse, seeking solely to bring knowledge of
the spiritual life to the souls of his contemporaries. He en-
tered Oxford when he was little more than a boy, and, in all
likelihood, became a member of Merton College, which at that
time was the college par excellence of the University. Scho-
lastic philosophy and logic formed its chief study.
Rolle, although he knew full well that these subjects
taught truth, yet knew also they alone "did not reach that
1922.] GOD'S LOVER FORSAKES THE WORLD 173
truth wherein is the soul's safetjs without which whatever is
is vain.'* Therefore, from the first, he mistrusted merely
intellectual teaching, and, above all, metaphysical and logical
hair-splitting over questions of no vital importance. He
never grew in sympathy with Oxford's scholastic atmosphere,
never took an interest at any time in its academic politics,
none whatsoever in the daily disputes of his fellow-collegians
over the definitions of Merton's greatest scholar — Duns Scotus.
On the contrary, this constant wrangling over questions he
thought unimportant, disgusted him. In fact, the whole tone
of the University shocked his childlike faith and intimate
realization of the supernatural. So, after a while, seeing no
way, amid the dry formalism and the disputation of the
Schools and the low spirituality of the scholastic body, to attain
his religious aspirations and ideals, he left Oxford without
taking a degree. He evidently preferred being good to being
learned, holding then, and ever after, "that virtue was para-
mount to all else in life, and that an old wife is often more
expert in God's love and less attached to worldly pleasure,
than many a great divine, whose study is often in vain, not
knowing what such a love means, not feeling the sweetness of
the eternal joy of God's love, he studies that he may appear in
the eyes of men glorious and so become known and may get
rents and dignities; which is worthy to be held a fool and not
a wise man."
When RoUe shook the dust of Oxford from off his feet, it
is plain that his clean and humble heart detested the duplicity
of intention, the pride of opinion, w^hich permeated the Univer-
sity, and that he fully grasped the true value of God's love in
contradistinction to that of learning or rank. Apparently,
although a mere lad, only nineteen years of age, he knew full
well that worldly success and the glories
Of human greatness are but pleasing dreams
And shadows soon decaying.
Therefore, it is not surprising that almost iiflmediately on
reaching his home, he turned his thoughts to the higher life.
In all sincerity of heart, he rejected the allurements of the
world, closed his eyes to the enticing visions of youth, and was
moved solely by the love of God to choose a life of prayer and
174 GOD'S LOVER FORSAKES THE WORLD [Nov.,
contemplation, in which he "believed that sweet and devout
love melts the heart of God's sweetness, so that the will of
man is made one with the Will of God in wonderful friend-
ship." With RoUe, it was seemingly a return of love for love.
It sprung from a clear recognition of his dependence as a crea-
ture upon his Creator and upon remembering, as Richard of
St. Victor put it, "that Christ ministered to men by His death,
in which He labored for them lest they should labor; and bore
a temporal, lest they should suffer an eternal pain."
For some time after leaving Oxford, Rolle lived at home,
in his father's house, hesitating just what he should make
of himself, continually yearning for the life of a hermit,
feeling confident that it would best make his soul a fit dwelling
place for God's love.
In the eyes of his family, he was wasting his time; they
could not understand why he did not finish his collegiate
studies, or at least settle down to some regular form of life.
To become a hermit was the height of foolishness to them, and
quite out of the question. So great became their opposition,
that at last it drove him from home and forced him to take ref-
uge with nearby and sympathetic neighbors, who gladly gave
him shelter and food — two of the younger members of the fam-
ily had been classmates with him at Oxford. The head of the
family, the father. Sir Richard Dalton, and also his wife,
were kind to this very young and comely seeker after a
vocation. They greatly valued his knowledge of things spir-
itual. Indeed, they induced their parish priest to call upon
him to preach to the people from the parish pulpit. And,
later, because of his prudence and understanding of the inner
life, he became, layman as he was, the spiritual director of a
number who aimed at the high life of the soul, in particular
one Margaret Kirby, a recluse, for whom he wrote a tract on
the spiritual life : The Form of Perfect Living ."^
The days of RoUe's uncertainty and doubt as to his true
vocation was not time lost, as he made great progress in spir-
itual perfection and self-knowledge; nevertheless, it was a
period of unrest and perplexity, of bitter strife with tempta-
tions; a wandering here and there, to all appearance without
iThis has been preserved to us In several manuscripts, and was first printed
In 1895 by Proftssor Horstman in his "Library of Early English Writers" and,
recenUy (1920), has been most beautifully rendered Into modem English by Geraldlne
E. Hodgson and published by Thomas Baker of London.
1922.] GOD'S LOVER FORSAKES THE WORLD 175
stability of purpose, finding nowhere rest for either soul or
body. His uncertain way of life called forth much adverse
criticism, and even more so his teaching, which struck at the
very root of the so-called wisdom of the worldly wise. His
fellow-laymen looked upon him as a fool; the clergy ques-
tioned his authority to instruct others in matters spiritual;
while scholars of all degrees "ridiculed his authorship and
scorned his inadequacy in things dialectic." Yet, in spite of
his perplexity of soul, in spite of disquietude from within and
carping from without, he persevered in his quest for a fuller
knowledge of God's will, feeling it to be of little profit to have
been born and redeemed, unless the soul was illumined by the
Holy Spirit on its journey to the object of its creation. To
Rolle the opinion of men mattered not; he knew that many
despised him, and he admitted freely, in his humility, that
they were right, for he knew his own deficiencies better than
they did. So, undisturbed, he pursued his own way, abiding
his time, ceasing not, he tells us, "from those things that were
profitable to my soul; truly, I used more prayer, and ever
found God favorably — and in process of time great profit in
spiritual joy was given me."
Some three years after leaving Oxford he settled down to
a hermit life at Hampole, near Doncaster, in Yorkshire, in the
neighborhood of a Cistercian Nunnery, where he remained for
twenty-nine years, until his death on the twenty-ninth of Sep-
tember, 1349. In all probability, he laid down his life while
ministering to the victims of the Black Death, a service which
he had commended and called "the precious ointment with
which a hallowed soul is best anointed and made fair with
God's love."
In the eyes of Richard Rolle, as in those of St. Peter
Damian, no life compared with that of a hermit, which was
"so straight, so sure, so unimpeded, so free from occasions of
sin, and in which could be cultivated the greater number of
virtues by which God may be pleased." Even in his Oxford
days, knowing that reason alone could not fathom the nature
of God or bring man to salvation, the whole tenor of his
thoughts was towards a life of mortification, and prayer, love
and meditation, an opening of the soul to the action of grace.
Later, when he returned home, he became convinced that the
most direct way to companionship with God was that of a
176 GOD'S LOVER FORSAKES THE WORLD [Nov.,
hermit: a life given, day and night, to contemplation and
penance, making the soul fallov^r ground for the grace of the
love of Christ.
The first and final steps he took in casting away all
things that kept him from the eremitical life, in making the
whole world an exile and the will of God the sole object of his
activity, he fully describes in his works : The Fire of Love and
The Mending of Life.^
Because of the extreme sanctity of Rolle's life many re-
garded him as a saint. The Cistercian nuns, his neighbors, who
witnessed his life and greatly profited by his spiritual direc-
tion, compiled after his death an office for the Feast of St.
Richard, Hermit, anticipating that he would be canonized.
Nothing selfish or willful actuated Rolle in becoming a
hermit. He aimed not only at attaining the higher life of the
soul individually, but also at leading others to the same Chris-
tian perfection, both in and out of the cloister, by example, by
writing books upon the ascetic life, by composing songs for
popular use on the Passion and Love of Jesus. In all of this,
he was more than successful; his example was followed, his
writings were read far and near, and his songs were sung all
over England, and he became of great moment in the spiritual
life of his contemporaries. And now, five hundred years after
his death, his writings bid fair to be once more a power for
good, because this mystic was never vague or unintelligible,
but simple and direct, the very embodiment of ascetical com-
mon sense.
Rolle's earliest venture in authorship, outside of his
lengthy epistle to his beloved friend, the recluse, Margaret
Kirby, and his no less interesting letter to a Benedictine nun,
/ slepe and my hert wakes, was a twofold rendition of the
Book of Psalms into the vernacular, one in verse and the other
in prose. Shortly after, he gave to the English-speaking world,
translations from the Latin works of St. Bonaventure, a writer
who materially influenced his way of life and whose teaching
in the way of spiritual perfection, he closely followed. About
the same time, he translated the Benjamin Minor of the Scotch
mystic, Richard of St. Victor; and, later, extracts from the
writings of Peter of Blois, the friend of Henry H., wrongly
credited by many with having coined the word, transub-
8 Both of these books were published in 1914 by Methuen & Co., London.
1922.] GOD'S LOVER FORSAKES THE WORLD 177
stantiation. After this, he composed and published in quick
succession, many original treatises, moral tracts, devotions,
letters, epigrams, and poetry, both lyrical and didactic. His
versatility and industry was remarkable; he wrote equally well
in prose or verse, in Latin or English; and all of his writings
are marked by practical sense, and originality of thought.
His Latin is often incorrect, that is, not classical, yet it was
essentially the Latin of his time, and easily understood; while
his English prose, which frequently becomes rhythmical, is
wonderfully beautiful. RoUe's shorter poems are ejaculatory
and very irregular. Even his longer poems exhibit the same
characteristics, and in both he used a great variety of forms :
rhyming couplets, six or eight line stanzas, alliterative verse.
His hymn, beginning "My trewest tresowre," has been very
much praised by modern critics. One of them goes so far as
to say, "the melody of these lines has never been surpassed,"
and Professor Saintsbury calls the attention of his readers to
the fact that the uncommon rhythm of this poem apparently
has influenced the modern poet, Swinburne.
The late Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, among his many
activities, found time to study the works of Richard Rolle.
He was one who, like Rolle, "looked forward rather to the
night when no man works, but when he can enjoy what he has
learned during the day." Monsignor Benson was particularly
interested in Rolle's poems and hymns, and published num-
bers of them in his little book, The Love of Jesus. He modern-
ized them somewhat, it is true. "The utmost," he says, "that
I have done to them, even in extreme instances (which are
few), is to melt down the old coin and re-issue it in a more
current mold." This he did only because he did not wish "to
let these treasures rust, unknown except to a few scholars."
In all of Rolle's writings in the vernacular there are many
French and Latin words, yet in construction and syntax, in
thought and method, in common sense and practicality, they
are emphatically English, and very original; nevertheless, he
would seem to have been largely influenced by the mystical
writings published at the same period in the Netherlands. So
strong is the similarity, that whole pages may be found in his
works that might have been written by Blessed John of
Ruysbroeck. This, however, is not strange, as their aim was
the same, as well as their method of life — a "total abandon-
VOL. CXVI. 12
178 GOD'S LOVER FORSAKES THE WORLD [Nov..
ment of all self-will and all that touches self," and both were
earnest students of St. Bonaventure, holding in common with
the Seraphic Doctor, that true spiritual life is a ladder of love
by which the soul climbs to the goal of its being: the first
rung is good will and the first step is prayer.
RoUe's writings show very clearly the growth and un-
folding of his soul and its spiritual development, making
plain that he perceived from the first the pivotal truths of the
way of holiness: "That every free human act is right and
meritorious only when it agrees with the Divine Will and is
set in God's love; and that the measure of the soul's love of
God is in proportion as it forgets itself, mortifies and sacri-
fices itself for God, and earnestly yearns and strives for that
mystical passion which interweaves divine and human nature."
It is plain to be seen that he brought to his chosen vocation a
proper foundation upon which to build the hermit life: an
unquestioning piety and deep humility, in union with an inti-
mate self-knowledge, a clear understanding of his own imper-
fections, a complete disfranchisement from personality, from
things of the senses, from every thought and affection which
was not turned toward God. Apparently, he was able to place
his soul in the hands of God, making the words of David his
words : "0 Lord, unto Thee have I fled ! Teach me to do Thy
will for Thou art God. Thy good Spirit shall lead me into the
right land. Make me to know the way wherein I should walk,
for to Thee have I lifted up my soul."
These pages are written in the hope that they may induce
many to acquaint themselves with the writings of Richard
Rolle — ^**God's Lover" — a man who in every way lived up to
his own definition: "Wherefore whosoever thou mayest be
that hopest, that lovest Christ, to this take heed; for if thou
yet behold earthly things with delight, and also find thy
soul too proud to suffer wrong, thou showest forsooth that
thou art not God's true lover. A true lover neither dresses
his eyes to the world nor dreads (fears) to suffer all that
seems heavy or hard to the body for God; and whatsoever
happens to him, yet he is not let (hindered) from thought of
Jesus, his Beloved."
Living, as so many of us do, in a non-believing com-
munity, often at a distance from the traditionary customs and
manners of Christian Catholic life, who can doubt our need
1922.] HOW SHALL I GO? 179
to read the biographies of the saints, their letters and writ-
ings; to make ourselves more conversant with such authors
as Richard RoUe? Thus may the fear of the Lord — the begin-
ning of Wisdom — enter our hearts, a fuller sense of the beau-
tiful and just be continually nourished in our minds, a more
intimate knowledge of the spiritual life of the Church become
ours, that we, too, may be found true lovers of God and doers
of His Holy Will.
HOW SHALL I GO?
BY MARION COUTHOUY SMITH.
How shall I go?
In the whirling snow,
Or the summer rain —
On the road I may not know?
Shall I go in pain,
Or in trance so deep.
That I cannot tell if the way be steep?
Shall I go on the wind —
Its wings spread wide —
In the clamoring tempest,
Through cries as of errant souls that sinned?
Or on the slow deep tide
Of an ebbing sea.
Rich with the drift of memory?
Shall I know when I give my breath
To the ether of planet and sun?
Shall I know when the fight is won? —
Thou wilt not answer, O Death!
But every hour I mark
That thy soundless call is clearer;
And thy strange wide eyes in the dark
Come nearer and nearer.
And in my heart I say :
Are these the eyes of One Who was sacrificed?
Do I meet at last, in this undreamed-of way.
The eyes of Christ?
THE LETTERS OF TOM MOORE'S NOBLE POET.
BY JOSEPH J. REILLY, PH.D.
OME, d — n it, Tom, don't be poeticaL" This was
not the impatient protest of some modern-day
efficiency engineer, to whom every factor in life
is more important than the human one, nor of
that professor of mathematics who, on reading
"Half a league, half a league, half a league onward," cried
impatiently: "Why didn't this dolt Tennyson say *a league
and a half in the first place, and be done with it?" Quite the
contrary. It was the protest of a poet whose generation ac-
corded him a place next to Shakespeare in the golden pag-
eant of English poets. To Italy and Lord Byron, Tom
Moore had journeyed for a holiday, and from a point of van-
tage at Ravenna the two stood gazing at the sunset, Moore
voicing his admiration in such rhapsodic terms as to evoke
an outburst from his friend, "the noble poet."
Few poets who died in their thirties were as prolific as
Byron, and yet he confessed that reading poetry bored him.
Small wonder. Much of it seemed to lack inspiration, to owe
more to pompous complacency than to that fine frenzy which
lies at the heart of the truest poetry in every language. The
best of his own work was white hot with sincerity, and yet it
was in sincerity often at war with itself, reflecting, as it did,
his passionate and contradictory moods.
Unfortunate in his heritage, Byron was no less unfortu-
nate in his bringing up. Under the misguidance of a mother
who was erratic and violent of temper, he never learned self-
control, and whatever restraint he managed to exercise at
Harrow, he forgot at Cambridge. His exits and entrances,
irregular and often approaching the scandalous, his escapades
with roistering companions, and his assumption of a reckless
disregard of convention, all conspired to make him notorious
when scarcely out of his teens.
Life at Newstead Abbey, the family seat, and his mother's
unreasonableness, sent him away from England at twenty-
one. But he did not set out upon his two-year journey across
1922.] LETTERS OF TOM MOORKS NOBLE POET 181
the Continent and into the Near East until he had winged a
Parthian shot at the foremost literary men of the day. His
poetic lucubrations at Cambridge had found their way into
print in 1807 as Hours of Idleness, only to come in for crit-
icism which Byron considered unjust. In an outburst of hurt
dignity, he struck at real and fancied foes in English Bards
and Scotch Reviewers, laying about him as lustily as AUan-a-
Dale with his quarter-staff. It doubtless tickled his vanity,
at nineteen, to feel that he had made the literati of his day
squirm under his bludgeoning, though to some of them, like
Walter Scott, he was later to express regret and apologies.
On his return to England, he mingled in London society
as became a Lord and a poet who thought well of himself.
He was taken at his own evaluation, socially, and duly petted,
sought after, and spoiled. He capitalized his travels in
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and in his own celebrated
phrase, awoke one morning to find himself famous. London
was at his feet, and when the intoxication of that brilliant
hour was passed, and later years had left him only the bitter
memories of Mrs. Grundy's slanders, he must have smiled
cynically at the remembrance of the incense which London
society had heaped high upon his altar.
He seized this golden moment to write poetical romances,
and with the "Giaour," "The Bride of Abydos," "Lara," and the
"Corsair," he made his fame secure during the following three
years. In the handsome, dark, and dare-devilish heroes of
these poems, the public beheld Byron himself, whose beauti-
fully molded features, curling hair, and brilliant eyes lent a
romantic interest to that naughtiness which Rumor attributed
to him. No doubt, he thought of himself as sailing wine-
colored seas, wreaking vengeance upon his foes, redressing
wrongs, and finding in the bright glances of some alluring
woman the power to make a hell or a heaven of his days.
But the Byron whose proud bark sailed romantic seas, passion
in his heart and a scimitar at his thigh, was never cursed with
that lameness which the real Byron strove heroically to con-
ceal, and which reacted disastrously upon his vitriolic temper.
It was during the days of his early and amazing successes
that Byron determined to marry. Whether he were the type
to be happy in marital bonds, is a question for psychologists
to decide, but certain it is that his method of selecting a wife
182 LETTERS OF TOM MOORKS NOBLE POET [Nov.,
was only too ironic an earnest of the unhappy outcome of
the Great Adventure. With startling flippancy, he wrote a
proposal to a young woman for whom he had no particular
affection, and upon receiving a refusal, mockingly dashed off
another proposal, on the spur of the moment, this time to a
Miss Milbanke. His companion (probably the poet Moore),
on hearing it read aloud, observed: "Well, really, this is a
very pretty letter. It is a pity it should not go." *Then go it
shall," said the noble Lord. And go it did. Byron was ac-
cepted, was married in January, 1815, and at first appeared
happy in what must have later seemed a fool's paradise.
Scarcely a year had passed before society was amazed to
learn of the separation of the Byrons, and though each main-
tained silence as to its cause, scandal made itself busy with
Byron's name, going to such outrageous lengths as to drive
him frantic with disgust and rage. He wrote to Moore in
February, 1816: "I am at war *with all the world and his
wife;' or rather, *all the world and my wife' are at war with
me, and have not yet crushed me — ^whatever they may do. I
don't know that in the course of a hairbreadth existence I was
ever, at home or abroad, in a situation so completely uproot-
ing of present pleasure, or rational hope in the future, as this
same." A few months later, he left England, never to return.
The eight years which remained to him of life, Byron
passed for the most part in Italy. He wrote numerous letters
typically Byronic, indicative of the mood of the moment,
now bitter, now buoyant, now schoolboyishly frank, as well
as those poems which have made him immortal. Partly from
pique, partly from passion, partly from a savage desire to
give the English Mrs. Grundy real food for scandal, the
"noble poet" plunged into excesses which grieved his ad-
mirers and later caused him to write to his friend, Bankes, in
self-disgust: "It is now seven years since you and I met;
which time you have employed better for others and more
honorably for yourself than I have done." And again: "As
to libertinism, I have sickened myself of that as was natural
in the way I went on."
Utter weariness oppressed him at times, and a longing for
peace such as his passionate spirit was never to attain. In
such a mood, he visited the cemetery at Ferrara, and recalled,
in a letter to Murray, some of the epitaphs which haunted
1922.] LETTERS OF TOM MOORE'S NOBLE POET 183
his memory: "For instance, *Lucrezia PincU implora eterna
quieta.* Can anything be more full of pathos? Those few
words say all that can be said, or ought; the dead had had
enough of life: all they wanted was rest, and that they im-
plore! There is all the helplessness, and humble hope, and
deathlike prayer, that can arise from the grave — Hmplora
pace: "
Periods of hectic industry followed periods of enervating
inaction. At times, his spirits were feverishly high, and,
again, so low that he complained in a letter to Moore, in 1821 :
"I feel, as your poor friend, Curran, said, before he died, *a
mountain of lead upon my heart,' which I believe to be con-
stitutional, that nothing will remove it but the same remedy."
Meanwhile, his poetical works, brought out in England by
Murray, were seized upon by the public less out of regard for
their merits than from the expectation of discovering in them
new food for scandal. Don Juan aroused a mingled storm
of applause and execration; Marino Falieri, produced at
Drury Lane, in 1821, was promptly damned; Cain, published
in the autumn of the same year, was heralded with extravagant
praise in some quarters and fervent condemnation in others.
It was probably true, as Byron asserted in one of his letters,
that he had not the patience to revise a poem, but must make
a bull's-eye at the first fire, if at all. But his lack of interest
in his work, when completed, was a mere pretense. "I do not
care a lump of sugar for my poetry," he protests, but a mo-
ment after, enraged at a misprint, he fumes to his publisher:
" *You have looked at it' to much purpose, to allow so stupid
a blunder to stand; it is not 'courage,' but *carnage,' and if
you don't want me to cut my throat, see it altered."
Byron writhed under what he regarded as unfair crit-
icism, although he affected a scornful indifference of English
opinion. In an outburst to Murray, he cries: "I am sure my
bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with
the earth of that country. I believe the thought would drive
me mad on my deathbed, could I suppose that any of my
friends would be base enough to convey my carcass back to
your soil. I would not even feed your worms, if I could help
it."
Such deep rooted bitterness would have corroded his heart
but for Allegra. Dark-haired, blue-eyed, the child of Byron's
184 LETTERS OF TOM MOORE'S NOBLE POET [Nov.,
liaison with Shelley's weak but passionate sister-in-law,
Allegra was her father's child in temper as in features, and
more than any other living creature, she evoked his purest
and tenderest feelings. Her name occurs frequently in his
correspondence, for her future gave him deep concern. Once
he dreamed of becoming a South American planter, and of
taking her with him amid "new faces, other minds." He
thinks seriously of her education, which is to be continental,
he says, not English, since thus her future will be free of many
difficulties, and, besides, "it is my wish that she should be a
Roman Catholic, which I look upon as the best religion, as it
is assuredly the oldest of the various branches of Christianity."
A year later, he assures Moore : "I am no enemy to religion,
but the contrary. As a proof, I am educating my natural
daughter a strict Catholic in a convent of Romagna; for I
think people can never have enough of religion, if they are to
have any. I incline," he adds, "myself, very much to the
Catholic doctrines."
His high hopes of Allegra were dashed, however, for her
eager, buoyant life, poor child, ended in 1822. In dull misery,
he writes Shelley: "The blow was stunning and unexpected
. . . but I have borne up against it as I best can. ... I sup-
pose that Time will do his usual work — Death has done his."
A few weeks later, he writes Murray, designating, in pathetic
detail, the precise place in Harrow Church where he wishes
the child interred, and the inscription which her tablet is to
bear.
One of the most interesting phases of his life in Italy was
his connection with Shelley, the irregularities of whose opin-
ions and of Byron's life did not tend to solidify their friend-
ship. Shelley considered Byron conceited, shook his head
over the noble Lord's libertinism, and regretted, an it please
you, that he was unable to "eradicate from Byron's great mind
the delusions of Christianity." After Shelley's tragic death,
in Byron's sailboat, the ill-starred Don Juan, Byron wrote
Moore, August 27, 1822: "We have been bringing the bodies
of Shelley and Williams on the seashore, to render them fit
for removal and regular interment. You can have no idea
what an extraordinary effect such a funeral pile has, on a
desolate shore, with mountains in the background and the
sea before, and the singular appearance the salt and frank-
1922.] LETTERS OF TOM MOORE'S NOBLE POET 185
incense gave to the flame. All of Shelley was consumed, ex-
cept his heart, which would not take the flame, and is now
preserved in spirits of wine."
This gruesome ceremony affected him profoundly. In-
deed, in him, as in Keats, the very thought that youth and
beauty should become the prey of death, inspired feelings of
revolt. In a letter to Murray, he complains of being "out of
sorts, out of nerves," lonely and unhappy. Occasionally, he
adds, "I revisit the Campo Santo, and my old friend, the Sex-
ton, has two — but one the prettiest daughter imaginable; and
I amuse myself with contrasting her beautiful and innocent
face of fifteen with the skulls with which he has peopled sev-
eral cells, and particularly with that of one skull dated 1776,
which was once covered (the tradition goes) by the most
lovely features of Bologna — noble and rich. When I look at
these, and at this girl — ^when I think of what they were, and
what she must be — why, then, my dear Murray, I won't shock
you by saying what I think. It is little matter what becomes
of us *bearded men,' but I don't like the notion of a beautiful
woman's lasting less than a beautiful tree — than her own pic-
ture — her own shadow, which won't change so to the Sun as
her face to the mirror. I must leave off, for my head aches
consumedly: I have never been quite well since the night of
the representation of Alfieri's Mirra a fortnight ago."
This reference to Alfieri's Mirra is significant. It had,
indeed, stirred Byron to the depths, and sent him from the
theatre weeping convulsively, a betrayal of an emotionalism
to which he fell victim more than once. On meeting his boy-
hood friend. Lord Glare, in 1821, after a separation since Har-
row, an inexplicable feeling thrilled him and set his heart to
beating strangely. On another occasion, an unexpected
rencontre with his friend, Hobhouse, evoked such violent emo-
tion, that Byron was forced to sit down in tears. On taking
leave of some friends just before his embarkation for Greece,
he said: "Here we are all now together; but when and
where shall we meet again? I have a sort of boding that we
see each other for the last time, as something tells me I shall
never again return from Greece," whereupon he leaned his
head upon the sofa and wept hysterically.
Despite these premonitions, Byron threw himself into the
cause of Greek independence with passionate ardor. Yet he
186 LETTERS OF TOM MOORE'S NOBLE POET [Nov.,
made no pretenses of being a democrat. Rather, he was more
than a casual snob, careful to insist that he was for the peo-
ple, not of them. But for the people he was, and the cause
of freedom, wherever at stake, never found him indifferent.
On first taking his seat in the House of Lords, he was an open
advocate of Catholic emancipation, and both in England and
on the Continent, unfailingly espoused the liberal side of
politics. His prophecy, uttered nearly a century ago, is strik-
ing when considered in the aftermath of the recent World
War : "The King-times are fast finishing," he wrote. "There
will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the
people will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but
I foresee it." Again : "Give me a republic. Look at the his-
tory of the world — Rome, Greece, Venice, Holland, France,
America, our too short commonwealth — and compare it with
what they did under masters."
In making the quarrel of Greece his own, Byron gave lib-
erally from his private purse to the almost bankrupt cause,
refusing, with his unfailing sense in financial matters, to allow
these sums to be squandered, or to pledge more, until the jeal-
ous squabbles among the Greek leaders should cease. The
moral effect of his active advocacy was enormous, and the
eyes of that world, whose interest had been compelled by his
poetry, as well as by his feverish career, were drawn to the
spectacle of a liberty-loving people, with noble traditions,
struggling to be free from an oppressive power.
Byron worked unflaggingly in Greece, and with a gen-
erous imprudence which brought on a violent fever. He
wrote Murray, February 25, 1824: "On Sunday, I had a
strong and sudden convulsive attack which left me speech-
less, though not motionless — ^for some strong men could not
hold me; but whether it was epilepsy, catalepsy, cachexy, or
apoplexy, or what other *exy' or 'epsy,' the doctors have not
decided; or whether it was spasmodic or nervous, etc.; but it
was very unpleasant, and nearly carried me off, and all that.
On Monday, they put leaches to my temples, but the blood
could not be stopped till eleven last night, and neither styptic
nor caustic would cauterize the orifice till after a hundred at-
tempts." For a time, the struggle back to health gave fair
promise, but by April the debility he had tried desperately to
shake off, left him prostrated with rheumatic fever. Raving,
1922.] LETTERS OF TOM MOORES NOBLE POET 187
he called for his sister, Mrs. Leigh, and his child, Ada, whom
he had not seen for years. "For the rest," he said, "I am con-
tent to die," and on the nineteenth of April, 1824, the curtain
was rung down on the drama of that brief but passionate
career.
Like every man who finds his own soul a mirror of life,
Byron was aware of his weaknesses. Behind his false pride,
his headstrong ways, his inclination to pose, the unhappy ten-
dencies which were his heritage, the real Byron now and then
appears in his letters, his haughty head bowed, mea culpa
upon his lips. In such a mood, he wrote Murray, in 1817:
"I have had a devilish deal of wear and tear of mind and body
in my time (he was only twenty-nine), besides having pub-
lished too often and much already. God grant me such judg-
ment to do what may be most fitting in that and everything
else, for I doubt my own exceedingly." About four years
later, an echo of that plea strangely reached him under touch-
ing circumstances. An Englishman, John Shepard, on look-
ing through the papers of his dead wife, discovered a prayer
which she had composed for Byron's conversion, and which
he forwarded to the poet with a tactful note of explanation.
If Mr. Shepard felt any doubts as to the reception which his
letter would receive, they were dispelled by Byron's reply,
written with a manliness and a delicacy which did him honor :
"I can assure you that all the fame which ever cheated hu-
manity into high notions of its own importance, would never
weigh in my mind against the pure and pious interest which a
virtuous being may be pleased to take in my welfare. In this
point of view, I would not exchange the prayer of the deceased
in my behalf for the united glory of Homer, Caesar, and
Napoleon, could such be accumulated upon a living head. Do
me at least the justice to suppose that video meliora proboque,
however, the 'deteriora sequor* may have been applied to my
conduct." Surely, the world owes him that justice, and more.
For noble impulses endured through sinister days, and the
passionate lad (he was scarcely more than that) who died a
martyr in the cause of Freedom, had never been either coward
or pharisee. And then, as now, that was much.
Our generation is more prone to yield him justice than his
own. And small wonder. For that Byron whom they could
not know, is revealed to us in numberless letters, not always
188
THE VALLEY [Nov.,
as "the noble poet" who is filled with social bravado, but as a
man of common clay, in his moments of self-abasement, who
may loiter in the valley, but who lifts his eyes to the distant
and starry spaces. Perhaps, for that, who knows, it was given
him to die nobly. Perhaps, for that, too (who shall deny it?),
he was vouchsafed, after life's fitful fever, the eterna quieta
which he craved.
THE VALLEY.
BY ELEANOR TH^R^SE DOWNING.
Time was I stood upon a mountain peak
And raised my face to God, and cried aloud :
"Lo! I have scorned and fled the vulgar crowd
And the vain dwellings that the foolish seek,
That so my feet might scale Thy mystic height.
And far removed from the human herd.
My soul might glean the beauty of Thy word.
And might hold commune with the Unmade Light.'
And from the cloud there came a Voice that spake—
"Know, child, I call unto my holy hill
And to my service only those I will.
Turn back thy feet; these lofty heights forsake.
That, turning bondsman to thy brethren,
When thou shalt serve the least as less than he
And love the lowliest for love of Me,
I may recall thee to My face again."
And I who serve in threadbare humbleness.
The servant of God's servants, who have trod
The valley of the little things of God,
Learning, in love, God's loving, scarce can guess
What newer blessedness my soul shall meet
Before the unveiled splendor of His face —
So sweet it is, beneath His holy place,
To serve Him in the dust about His feet.
MRS. EDDY, A CREATIVE INTELLECT.
BY JAMES MARTIN.
HERE is a general opinion that Mrs. Eddy's
famous work, Science and Health, is obscure in
style, heavily weighted with the terminology of
metaphysics, and that, in consequence, it makes
dull and dreary reading. There are those who
have tried diligently to go through it, but declare that they
"can make neither head nor tail of it." Mrs. Eddy herself has
stated that her masterpiece is equally intelligible whether read
backwards or forwards. That statement has been misinter-
preted by the impatient and the irreverent. "Just so," they
say, "equally intelligible; equally unintelligible." But, as a
matter of fact. Science and Health is not altogether obscure.
Considering the ideas that were in Mrs. Eddy's mind, it must
be conceded that she has made them about as plain as such
ideas can be made.
True, she does treat of philosophy and metaphysics. And,
ordinarily, readers do not take kindly to these subjects. But
Mrs. Eddy's philosophy and metaphysics are not of the or-
dinary sort. Her understanding of philosophical concepts and
her usage of philosophical words are "new, novel, and ne-
oteric" (to quote a recent "blurb"). Under her pen, even the
oldest and most hackneyed terms assume a new meaning.
Non-philosophical words, too, she invests with an altogether
new significance. This feature of her style alone should be
sufficient to prevent tedium in the mind of the alert reader.
There is a certain intellectual satisfaction in working out new
meanings of old words.
Before coming to a consideration of the book itself, let us
give an example or two from the miscellaneous writings of
the mother of Christian Science. We begin with words that
have an ethical rather than a metaphysical application. Mrs.
Eddy, on one occasion, was compelled to refer to one of her
former disciples as "an adulteress." The lady in question,
having been educated along the old lines and knowing only
the dictionary meaning of the word, was so indignant that she
190 MRS. EDDY, A CREATIVE INTELLECT [Nov.,
threatened a lawsuit. But Mrs. Eddy explained that an
"adulteress" is "one who adulterates the truth." Another
woman, formerly a friend, but later a rival, was accused by
Mrs. Eddy of "immorality." The woman became fairly fran-
tic, but on this occasion, as before, the more unpleasant con-
sequences were averted. "Immorality" was defined to mean
"unfaithfulness to Christian Science." Evidently, it requires
not only a deep mind, but a very agile one to follow Mrs.
Eddy's thought, which is both profound and swift. But
when once we have learned to know her method, we are re-
warded with a mental exhilaration that can hardly be obtained
from any other writings than hers. Words, especially nouns,
become threadbare from being always used in the same sense.
Hence, the dead monotony of most literature. But how re-
freshing it is to pick up a book in which one never knows,
from page to page, what may be the next meaning of an old
familiar word. The idea of constantly changing the meanings
of familiar terms is new to literature. Mrs. Eddy may honestly
claim to have discovered it. This is one reason why we refer
to hers as a "creative" intellect.
Let us take another example. The word "soul" has been
used in a stereotyped way by all Christians of various denom-
inations. They may differ in their understanding as to the
salvation of the soul, but they agree on the meaning of "soul."
It is the animating principle of the human body. It is the
spirit that vivifies the flesh. But Mrs. Eddy's mind, here as
always, is free and unfettered by tradition. She says "soul
means Deity, and nothing else." With that one definition
alone, she creates an entirely new Christian theology. Those
who have learned only the old theology will say that if Mrs.
Eddy teaches that the "soul means Deity," then she is a Pan-
theist. But, no, that cannot be, for she expressly states that
she is not a Pantheist.
But let us keep clear of the puzzling problem of Pan-
theism, and restrict ourselves to matters that are simpler and
more easily understood. According to the old theology, every
person has a soul. There are as many souls as persons. But,
"it is wrong," says Mrs. Eddy, "to use the word 'souls' in the
plural." Hence, to speak, as the careless do, of "a city of a
million souls," or a "congregation of a thousand souls," is a
mistake. There is only one soul, one spirit. Like all new
1922.] MRS. EDDY, A CREATIVE INTELLECT 191
revelations, this doctrine opens up wonderful vistas for the
mind, and the imagination. A man may go forth into crowded
streets, he may be squeezed and jammed in the teeming sub-
way, he may be jostled and hurtled hither and thither by
scurrying thousands, but he may say to himself: "Alone, all
alone, all soul alone!" At the time of the Spanish- American
War, when Colonel Roosevelt led the Rough Riders into Cuba
and won the war, another philosopher, Mr. Dooley, wrote a
skit upon the future President under the caption: "Alone in
Cuba!" Of course, Mr. Dooley, being a humorist, as well as a
philosopher, was only "spoofing." But with Mrs. Eddy there
can be no suspicion of humor. How thrilling, in the light of
the doctrine that there is only one soul, to be able to say, not
merely "alone in Cuba," or "alone in New York City," but
"alone in the Universe!" Thrilling, indeed. Some may say
appalling. But all grand ideas are at first bewildering.
Unfortunately, that definition of soul as "meaning Deity,
and nothing else," has not yet appeared in Webster, or Wor-
cester, or the Standard, or the Century. It is missing,
not only from the dictionaries, but from the Bible and the
Catechism. Still, since every new science creates a new vocab-
ulary, why should not every new religion enjoy the same privi-
lege, especially if the new religion^ is equally a "science?"
To return to the question of Mrs. Eddy's alleged obscurity
in dealing with metaphysical problems. R may be that many
pages of Science and Health are beyond the intellectual grasp
of the ordinary reader. But what will you? Can a butcher's
boy read Emmanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason with facil-
ity? Do shop girls pore over the pages of Hegel or Fichte?
Do messenger boys read Schopenhauer as they run? How,
then, can one expect that every digger in the ditch may under-
stand Mrs. Eddy's thought? Did not Einstein say that there
were only twelve men in the world who understood his theory
of relativity? Did not Hegel, a hundred years before Einstein,
say that only one man in the world understood him, and that
that one man did not understand 4iim? It is quite probable,
therefore, that not one understands Mrs. Eddy. Among the
many penalties attending upon genius is loneliness — mental
isolation.
However (and now we come to the most gratifying feature
of Mrs. Eddy's work), even though it is within her power to
192 MRS. EDDY. A CREATIVE INTELLECT [Nov.,
dwell habitually upon the heights, inaccessible even to the
intelligentsia, she does, from time to time, descend— and con-
descend. She is most at home upon Olympus, but she can,
and does, come down into the market place. She converses
freely, and easily, with the immortals, but she knows how to
speak even to the simplest of human beings. She does not
confine herself to deep and cryptic disquisitions upon "Mind,"
and "mortal mind." She speaks, occasionally, of bees and
butterflies, of babies and horses, of kittens and snowbirds, and
apple trees and lobsters.
She had a very difficult task to perform in communicating
to the mass of mankind an understanding of the idealistic
philosophy that is the basis of her revelation. Her mind was
struggling, may we say, with problems that had bafiQed the
power of expression of some of the greatest of the philosophers
who preceded her. Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Berkeley —
all had ideas to which Mrs. Eddy's have a certain relationship.
And we would not say that any of these philosophers pos-
sessed the gift of popularizing his ideas. Kant sets forth his
doctrine of the "noumenon" and the "phenomenon," but he
has left most of us somewhat in the dark as to his meaning.
Even one of Mrs. Eddy's disciples, writing in the Christian
Science Journal, uses that puzzling philosophical term, "phe-
nomena." "Material phenomena are nothing," says that
writer, "but the human mind made manifest to itself." "The
mind evolves for itself the phenomena that it attempts to
investigate," and frequently "gets lost in the maze of its own
hallucinations."
We confess that to us such language appears rather
learned, and indeed pedantic. But, "if you wish to under-
stand the disciple, read the master." Mrs. Eddy clarifies the
difficult doctrine very quickly and very prettily. She says:
"Mortal mind produces its own phenomena, and then charges
them to something else, like a kitten glancing in a mirror and
thinking that it sees another kitten." ^ Instantly, the difficult
philosophical theory of the automatic and unconscious pro-
duction of phenomena is made clear. The kitten sees its own
image, and imagines that there is another kitten behind the
mirror. The first kitten produces the "phenomenon" of the
second kitten. But there is only one kitten. So, you or I,
I Science and Umlth, p. 220. t913.
1922.] MRS, EDDY. A CREATIVE INTELLECT 193
look out into the world and imagine that we see, let us say,
another person. But the other person is not really there any
more than the other kitten. If we imagine that we see thou-
sands, or tens of thousands of other persons, if we even go out
and mingle in what seem to be great crowds, we are lost — not
lost in the crowd — but "lost in the maze of our own halluci-
nations."
Or take another instance of the facility with which Mrs.
Eddy adapts her explanations to the non-philosophical intel-
lect. She says: "Gender is a quality of mind, not matter.
Generation rests on no sexual basis." Now, to the unlearned,
these statements may be, for the moment, puzzling. But the
teacher of heavenly science does not leave even her simplest
readers in doubt as to her meaning. For she adds : "The sup-
position that life germinates in eggs is a mistake. The butter-
fly, moth, bee propagate without male companions." ^ The in-
ference to be drawn from these words is obvious. But it was
made even clearer to Mrs. Eddy's immediate friends and to her
scholars. Mrs. Woodbury, after ten years' intimate acquaint-
ance with Mrs. Eddy and her teachings, says that Mrs. Eddy
told the young women in her Massachusetts Metaphysical Col-
lege that they could be mothers "by thought." Still, the
teacher was always practical. She did not abolish marriage
immediately. She married three times, and she conceded
that the present convention of marriage should continue until
the knowledge of the truth of mental motherhood should be-
come more general. "Until the spiritual creation is discerned
intact, until it is learned that God is the Father of all, marriage
will continue." ^ It is said that no marriages are performed,
and that there are no funeral services in Christian Science
temples. That there will some day be no marriages and no
funerals anywhere is inevitable. For Mrs. Eddy says: "Man
has neither birth nor death." If there is no death, there need
be no funeral. If there is no birth, there need be no marriage.
It might still seem mysterious that although marriages do
continue, births frequently do not occur. But even that fact
is not altogether a mystery to us moderns. .
The question of death, in the teaching of Christian
Science, requires a little more elucidation. Persons of limited
intelligence, even now, almost fifty yeass after the first pro-
2 One Hundred and Fifth Edition, p. 541. 8 Ibid., p. 274.
yoL. cxvi. 13
104 MRS. EDDY, A CREATIVE INTELLECT [Nov.,
mulgation of Christian Science, imagine that death is caused
by sickness, or by accident, by poison, or by violence. But for
nearly two generations this common error has been discoun-
tenanced. What really causes death, is thought (It occurs
to us that the poet, Byron, may have enjoyed some anticipa-
tion of the truth of Christian Science when he says: "That
curse of life, that demon. Thought.") It is not that the indi-
vidual man thinks himself to death. He may die without
thinking. Or he may die when he is thinking that he is going
to live. But what kills him is really "a majority opinion."
So long as the majority of persons in the world think that
death is caused, let us say, by tuberculosis, or by strychnine,
or by a fall from a house, or by shot and shell on a battlefield,
just so long will death (apparently) be caused by these delu-
sions.
I have scarcely time, in this article, to explain how
there can be a majority opinion when there is only one soul.
A "majority of one" may have a new meaning. But let us
hurry along, for now we have come upon one of the most
interesting of all Christian Science doctrines — mental assas-
sination. The information on this particularly devilish form
of crime is rather fragmentary in Science and Health. But
Mrs. Eddy graciously condescended to explain it more at
length, even to so unsympathetic a person as a newspaper
reporter, who interviewed her upon the occasion of the
"death" (so-called) of Mr. Eddy. "My husband," she said,
"was killed by malicious mesmerism. It was poison that
killed him, not material poison, but mesmeric poison. After
a certain amount of mental poison has been administered,
no power of mind can resist it." *
In the Christian Science Journal, some seven years later,
there appeared this further reference to the crime of mental
murder. "One of the greatest crimes practised in or known
to all the ages is Malicious Animal Magnetism. The criminal
sits at the friendly board and fireside. He goes to places of
worship. He takes his victim by the hand. These secret
heaven-defying enormities must be proclaimed." The cause
of this indignant outburst was a certain Kennedy, a youth of
brilliant promise, handsome and talented, who for some years
was very close to Mrs. Eddy, but who became one of the worst
4 The Boston Post, June 5, 1882.
1922.] MRS. EDDY, A CREATIVE INTELLECT 195
exponents of mental malpractice. It seems that his power for
evil was almost diabolical. Finally, driven to desperation,
Mrs. Eddy was compelled to have recourse to the courts to
obtain an injunction against his using his mind to damage
her and her scholars. Not only that, but she had to go so
far as to gather her friends in a group and to hurl consump-
tion and other diseases at him. She and her scholars would
sit at stated times every day and think to Kennedy : "Your sins
have found you out. You are consumptive. You have liver
trouble. You have been poisoned by arsenic." '^ It will be
seen from 'this that the mind may work evil as well as good.
"Absent treatment*' may be maleficent, or beneficent, pro-
ducing sickness and death as easily as healing. It is terrify-
ing to think that one young man, apparently innocent, per-
haps smiling and chatting with his friends, may at the same
time be mentally hurling sickness and death upon persons far
away, and that the only way they can defend themselves is to
fight him with his own weapons.
The unique and incomparable genius of Mrs. Eddy may be
seen when we realize that not even the greatest masters of
imaginative fiction, not even Jules Verne, or Edgar Allen Poe,
or H. G. Wells, ever dreamed of the startling fact of mental
assassination. Their highest flight of fancy can never rival
the simple truth set down in sober sense by Mrs. Eddy.
Now that the fact of mental assassination is scientifically
established, it would seem the bounden duty of our statesmen
and our soldiers to agree upon complete disarmament, and to
devote the time hitherto consumed in drilling and preparing
for war, to the practice of thinking destruction. Mrs. Eddy
has given the idea to the world; let the statesmen develop it.
Thought is indeed a dangerous weapon. It might be hard to
arrange for practising it. Evidently, it would not be fair for
us to raise an army of thinkers who would, for mere practice,
mentally hurl destruction upon some people with whom we
are not at war. But they might be drilled to think death, let
us say, to all the wild beasts in the jungles, in the woods, and
on the mountains. And then, if an enemy nation should lay
siege to our cities and our harbors, the army of trained
thinkers, having practised on wild beasts, could turn their
thoughts against the invading hosts and annihilate them. If
sMilmlne, Lift of M. B, Eddu, p. 304.
196
MRS. EDDY, A CREATIVE INTELLECT [Nov.,
a single enemy could kill Mr. Eddy with arsenical poison men-
tally administered, if Mrs. Eddy and her "little group of serious
thinkers" could project tuberculosis into Kennedy, what might
not be done by an army of millions, thinking destruction to
the enemy! This is the strongest argument for disarmament
that has yet appeared. It was overlooked, or ignored at Ver-
sailles, but whichever nation first has the enterprise to seize
upon the fact of mental assassination, and utilize it, will be
ruler of the world.
But these are not pleasant thoughts. Let us turn again
from them to some of the lighter aspects of truth revealed by
Mrs. Eddy. Not that we may expect to find anything that is
trivial in Science and Health. But Mrs. Eddy has condescended
a great deal, and in order to make her profound thought in-
telligible to the "common run of mankind," she has given
some examples and illustrations that, in an author of inferior
genius, might be considered trifling. Take, for example, her
story about the father who "plunged his baby under water
every day from the time it was one day old until it could re-
main under water for twenty minutes like a fish." In a writer
of less serious purpose or of inferior genius, that story might
seem a trifle exaggerated, but Mrs. Eddy herself has assured us
that it is gospel truth.® However, speaking of babies and
water, let us hasten to add that elsewhere Mrs. Eddy explains
that washing a baby is unnatural and unnecessary. She had
at least one child of her own, and she assures us that "it is no
more natural or necessary to wash a baby all over every
day than to take a fish out of water and cover it with dirt."
The baby will remain "as sweet as a new blown flower"
without the daily bathing.^ Being a man, and a bachelor, I
admit that this sounds odd to me, but readers who are women
and mothers will doubtless assure me that Mrs. Eddy is right.
I have said that we can never detect Mrs. Eddy in a humorous
mood. But, as the adage says, "Homer sometimes nods,"
and it is permitted to think that Mrs. Eddy sometimes smiled.
For example, we are inclined to imagine that there may have
been a twinkle in her eye when she wrote the story of the
"unthinking lobster." The lobster, she explains, after losing
a claw, grows another in its place, because the lobster does not
6 Science and Health, p. 566. 1903 Edition.
r Ibid., One Himdred and Fifth Edition, p. 411.
1922.] MRS. EDDY, A CREATIVE INTELLECT 197
think; but man, when he loses a leg, does not grow another
in its place, because he thinks. Did Mrs. Eddy, when she
wrote these words, smile sweetly if the question leaped to her
mind: "Suppose the man were the unthinking lobster!"
I think we have seen enough to demonstrate the injustice
of the accusation that Science and Health is an altogether
ponderous and a laboriously metaphysical book. Mrs. Eddy
has the humor, though unobtrusively presented, of Mark
Twain. Indeed, there may be those who would say that Mark
Twain attacked Mrs. Eddy because of jealousy. The "un-
thinking lobster" is as funny as the "Jumping frog of Calaveras
County."
But let us have one more instance of the creative quality
of Mrs. Eddy's thought. There is, as my readers know, a corps
of lecturers in Christian Science, men and women trained to
know the mind of Mrs. Eddy, and authorized by the Mother
Church to deliver public discourses upon her doctrine. One
of these, a Mr. Marston, speaking in San Francisco some years
ago, explained that foods and drinks are either healthful or
poisonous, not because of any quality inhering in them, but
because of the "thought" of the majority of mankind. Bread
nourishes because we think it is nourishing. Toadstools
poison because we think they are poisonous. If the majority
of mankind thought that bread is poison, it would be as deadly
as toadstools. If the majority of men thought that toadstools
were nutritious, they would be as nutritious as bread. And
so on. Furthermore (and here is an epoch-making discovery),
whiskey is intoxicating because the majority of men think it
intoxicating. And buttermilk is non-intoxicating because the
majority think it non-intoxicating. But suppose the majority
should agree to change their opinion about buttermilk! This
prodigious idea has not been given the attention it deserves.
Imagine the throngs at the buttermilk counters, guzzling glass
after glass, and jeering drunkenly at the Eighteenth Amend-
ment! How true it is that Mrs. Eddy's creative thoughts may
be used for the damnation or the salvation of society. How
false it is that there is nothing but dry metaphysics in Science
and Health.
PAUL ELMER MORE.
BY BROTHER LEO.
ITERARY criticism is really an index of culture;
and the sparseness of it, and the generally low
standard of it in the United States, are not the
least convincing indication of our intellectual cal-
_ lowness. Our case would, indeed, be desperate,
our prospects far from bright, were it not for the existence of
at least a few such scholarly critics as Paul Elmer More. His
dozen little volumes of Shelburne Essays may not rank among
the "six best sellers," and may, like most good things, be
cavia» to the general; but, at least, they serve to assure the
world that in the things of the mind, America is not altogether
common and unclean.
Paul Elmer More is not without limitations and perver-
sities, but he does rank, and rank high, among those true
critics, those inspirers and initiators, those appreciators of
world hterature who possess scholarship and catholicity of
outlook, who have, as Lionel Johnson would say, preferences
rather than prejudices, who are intent less on evanescent
aspects than on those bleibende Verhdltnisse, those abiding
relations which Goethe made the object of his quest. Dur-
ing the several years of his editorial connection with The
Nation— in the era before The Nation had followed the gleam
and become the organ of current sociology, and the arena of
world politics, and the home of lost causes — ^Mr. More en-
gaged lavishly in what was technically book reviewing; but
the fruitage of his labors was more than mere ephemeral
comment. Even within the confines of semi-journalism, his
writings were remarkably free from the haste and flashiness
which mark and mar our literary magazines; and those same
writings, re-shaped and re-fashioned, and restored from the
ravages of his own editorial blue pencil, have, in book form,
burgeoned into their second spring. All in all, the Shelburne
Essays constitute the most important and distinguished con-
tribution to literary criticism that twentieth century Amer-
ica has thus far made. In the retreat of his book-lined study
1922.] PAUL ELMER MORE 199
at Princeton, Mr. More may well enjoy the consolation conse-
quent upon a good work well done.
All literary criticism that in any notable degree rises
above anonymous and superficial book-reviewing, has two
distinguishing marks. It is, in a liberal sense, autobiograph-
ical, and necessarily so; and it represents a fusion of literary
appreciation, with theories and standards derived from other
fields of human thought. Literary criticism that is exclu-
sively literary, cannot stand alone. Aside from that form of
it concerned with the mechanics of writing, and that other
form devoted to the aesthetics of authorship, there can be no
such thing as pure literary criticism. The moment our in-
terpretation of literature becomes vital — that is, the moment
we begin to correlate books with life — at that moment we are
compelled to associate literature with other phases of human
activity. Rightly to view the great books of the world, we
must, as it were, flood them with a light other than their own
— the light of history or the light of religion, the light of philos-
ophy or the light of science, the light of psychology or the
light of art. And so, in the writings of Mr. More, we find an
essential self-revelation, ordinarily indirect, but sometimes
conscious and deliberate; and we find, also, that, in common
with some of the very greatest literary critics of the world,
he habitually regards literature from the viewpoint of the
moralist and the philosopher.
That Mr. More has had religious experiences and doc-
trinal mutations, is manifest on almost every page of his
books. On one occasion, at least, he speaks out directly and
simply, and in a very few words depicts his spiritual pilgrim's
progress: "Having dropped away from allegiance to the
creed of Calvin, I had, for a number of years, sought a sub-
stitute for faith in the increase of knowledge; like many an-
other, I sought to conceal from myself the want of intellectual
purpose in miscellaneous curiosity."^
He is writing about St. Augustine, from his inevitable
point of view of philosophic dualism, and so it is eminently
fitting that Mr. More should thus approximate to the mode of
the Confessions; but it is significant that here, as elsewhere,
he should envisage religious faith as something mainly, if not
exclusively, intellectual. The wherefore of his defection
1 Sbelburne Essays, Sixth Series.
200 PAUL ELMER MORE [Nov..
from Calvinism, he does not explicitly state; but those of us
who know something of his writings, and his outlook on life
feel very sure that his religious transition was prompted and
sustained by serenely intellectual motives, that Calvinism, m
a word, he had found unsatisfying to his head rather than to
his heart. Some of Mr. More's extravagant censors have im-
pHed that the Princeton sage had no heart. Of course, they
are in error. But certain it is that Mr. More conscientiously
endeavors to keep his heart in its place. To him, emotion is
secondary and suspicious; cognition, primary and all-embrac-
ing. Yes, Mr. More has a heart; but I strongly suspect that
he is the least bit regretful of the fact.
That Mr. More prevailingly feels with his head rather
than with his heart, is the explanation of both his strength
and his weakness as a critic of books and of life. It explains,
on the one hand, his remarkably vast and accurate erudition,
an erudition that makes him equally at home with the poet-
philosophers of India, with the exponents of conservatism in
British politics, with the wise men of the Greeks; with William
Beckford and Emerson and Nietzsche, with Sainte-Beuve and
Newman and William James. Nothing that is intellectual,
is foreign to him. And, on the other hand, it explains his not
less obvious limitations— his unresponsiveness to the finer
strains of Shelley and Francis Thompson, his high estimate of
Pope as a poet, his laudation of Arnold to the disparagement
of Ruskin and Carlyle, his pensive disappointment in New-
man's acceptance of Catholicism, his cerebral enthusiasm over
the Port Royalists, and his amusing suspicion of the Jesuits
with all their works and pomps. It explains what constitutes
his essential shortcoming as a critic, the dwarfing and suppres-
sion of his emotional nature, and his insistence in the practical
realm of logical, even of mathematical, canons of certitude
and conduct. The distinguishing mark of a good critic, Mrs.
Humphry Ward claimed,^ is "reasoned rashness." In Mr.
More, the reason is in copious plenty; but the rashness is nil.
Mr. More is too dignified and decorous to call anybody names;
but were he capable of pelting Non-Conformists with epithets,
he would most certainly shriek "heretic!" at any thinker, little
or great, who is guilty of suffusing his intellectual processes
with the glow of vibrant human emotion.
2 Amlel's Journal^ introduction, p. ix.
1922.] PAUL ELMER MORE 201
Specifically, Mr. More's lack of emotional appreciation
explains the obliquity of vision revealed in his scholarly essay
on St. Augustine. He concedes that, in his "emotional psy-
chology, at once subtle and intense, Augustine is the father of
modern literature, and he has never been surpassed." But
here, according to Mr. More, is the head and front of the great
Doctor's offending:
Though there is a logical correctness in Augustine's main
syllogism, one cannot read much in his works without dis-
covering whole tracts of thought and exhortation that re-
fuse to take their place in his dogmatic system [as Mr.
More elects to conceive of it] ; one finds that in his practical
doctrine he builds upon what may be called the logic of emo-
tions rather than upon pure reason.^
Substantially, all fhe problems of life and literature, of
philosophy, science, and art, resolve themselves, in Mr. More's
conception, into the basic formula of dualism. "I confess,"
he avers, "that to me monism has always been merely another
word for monomania."* In the premises, therefore, we are
warranted in recognizing a manifestation of dualism, at once
ironic and pathetic, in the spiritual affinities and the intellec-
tual loyalties of Mr. More himself. And in his case, the par-
adox — ^for dualism involves a fundamental paradox — lies in
the fact that this frigidly intellectual devotee burns his incense
before a warmly human shrine, that Mr. More, the scholar of
the head, so sedulously worships Plato, the philosopher of the
heart. For him, all roads lead to Athens, as for Mr. Belloc,
all roads lead to Rome. The cast of his thought, the bent of
his mind, the flair of his temperament, one would think,
should lead him rather to St. Thomas of Aquin, and to Aris-
totle; yet to him, the Angelic Doctor is but a thinker of "ad-
mirable patience and inexhaustible cunning,"^ the deviser of
an "austere dialectic,"^ and the Stagirite has seemingly lived
and thought in vain. But he can tolerate St. Augustine, most
Platonic of the Fathers; and the Dialogues of Plato are his
Bible and his Book of Common Prayer.
His reading of Plato has been receptive and profound,
sShelburne Essays, Sixth Series: "St. Augustine. 4 Ibid., Seventh Series, p. 200.
5 Aristocracy and Justice, p. 79. 6 Ibid., p. 87.
202 PAUL ELMER MORE [Nov.,
and his comments on Plato are searching ^^^ .«^gf f ^^^'^ ^^-
sides the frequent references to the Dialogues m the Shelburne
Essavs. two of his books, Platonism and The Religion of Plato,
contain Mr. More's sometimes exasperating but mvariably
graceful and stimulating interpretation of the truly lummous
and penetrating mind which so long ago preserved for us, and
elaborated upon, the teachings of Socrates. In the preface to
Platonism, Mr. More has anticipated a stricture which em-
anates spontaneously from all Platonists and pseudo-Platon-
ists who do not see eye to eye with him :
To one criticism I should be sensitive. Those who have
read the eighth volume of my Shelburne Essays will recog-
nize that the present work is virtually an expansion of the
views there summed up in the "Definitions of Dualism,"
and they may think that I have tried to impose my own
theories on Plato, to measure him in my pint cup. In a
way, every interpreter of a great author must be open to
such a charge; he has no other measure than his own
capacity. But, at least, I am not guilty of attempting to
force Plato into conformity with a preconceived system; the
"Definitions of Dualism" were themselves the result of my
study of the Dialogues, and avowedly rejected any preten-
sions to originality.
Before so suave and adroit a stealth of the reviewer's
thunder, we must perforce bow in the silence of respect, if not
of acquiescence. His position, that every interpreter "has no
other measure than his own capacity," is impregnable; and we
cheerfully concede that Mr. More has not consciously attempted
to force Plato into conformity with anything. Nay, we are
even grateful that he has stressed the intellectual side of the
Dialogues, remembering, as we must, that too often com-
mentators have over-emphasized their emotional aspects, and
have envisaged Plato as a species of glorified Shelley in prose.
Despite Mr. More's honorable sensitiveness, we must report
that his view of Plato is not a balanced view; but it does much
to conserve in balance our conception of Plato and Platonism.
We recall Walter Pater, and we rest content.
Catholicism looms so large in any adequate conception
of world literature and world thought, that no critic, dowered
with depth and discernment, can consistently ignore either the
1922.] PAUL ELMER MORE 203
fact or its implications. At once profound and open-minded
in his attitude, and engrossed with the religious and philo-
sophical ramiiBcations of literature, Mr. More never seeks to
evade the issue. Though by temperament and outlook un-
sympathetic with the Christian theory of life — he designates
Christianity "mythology" in his famous "Definitions of Dual-
ism,"^ and elsewhere assumes, as a matter of course, the mod-
ern repudiation "of the mediaeval belief in the infinite, omnip-
otent deity"® — ^he habitually follows the prudential prompt-
ings of his "inner check," and avoids permitting his bias to
degenerate into prejudice. His serenity, his intellectual poise,
and his sometimes startlingly clear insight, enable him to
evaluate with truth and sanity — in essentials, at least — many
of the distinctively Catholic books of the world. And often,
in discussing works of general literature, he says things that
the most thoroughgoing Catholic critic must endorse. Thus,
in commenting on the spirit of a sadly gnarled zealot of
morality, he calls attention to a truth that now and then Cath-
olic thinkers have overlooked: "There is no joy in Tolstoy,
and, lacking joy, he lacks the deepest instinct of religion."®
That sentence is a potent reminder of the Apostle's exhorta-
tion to "rejoice in the Lord always," of the multitudinous
"alleluias" which spangle the liturgy of Mother Church, of
the "good tidings of great joy" whereof, one night in starlit
Bethlehem, the angelic chorus sang.
Here and there, of course, throughout his essays, Mr. More
falls short in his efforts to grasp the true signification of Cath-
olic literature and Catholic philosophy. Dwelling on a fa-
mous passage from St. Paul, Mr. More remarks:
I have not in mind to speak slightingly of the Christian
faith, or of any genuine faith; I know the sources of re-
ligious conviction; but when I see the perplexity into which
even St. Paul could be thrown by the fear of losing his
belief in a particular miraculous event [i. e., the Resurrec-
tion of Christ], I appreciate the force of Plato's boast that
he alone, with his master, had the courage to rest his faith
on the simple common sense of mankind. This is phil-
osophy.^^
7 The Drift of Romanticism, p. 296. i Aristocracy and Justice, p. 94.
9 Shelburne Essays, Flrgt Series, p. 216. lo Platonism, p. 76.
204 PAUL ELMER MORE [Nov.,
Nowhere has Mr. More given a more graphic revelation of
his inherent spiritual limitations. For him religion must have
no relish of the supernatural in it, it must not be that which
Cometh from above, it must rather be the illusory efforts of a
man seeking to exalt himself by pulling valiantly at his own
boot straps. This may be philosophy, indeed, philosophy of a
sort; but it is not the philosophy which can fire the hearts of
men and remove mountains and renew the face of the earth.
But it can be, and it is, the philosophy t)f one upon whose study
mantel stands engraved a Greek sentence, the substance of
which is that things do not really matter, but the irony of life
is such that we must make believe they do !
Such is the pint cup — more appositely, the Grecian urn —
into which Mr. More must needs decant the wine of life; small
wonder that we drink and are not sated, that sometimes we
miss its pervasive and delicate bouquet. Small wonder that
the intense religious practicality of Thomas a Kempis moves
the essayist to gentle strictures :
In such a work as the Imitation the brotherhood of
man, taught by the Apostles, was quite smothered by a
refined and spiritual form of egotism: nor can we imagine
St. John declaring: "As often as I have gone forth among
men, I have returned home less a man." ^^
The virile asceticism of the Brother of the Common Life
is incomprehensible to Mr. More, for asceticism Mr. More has
defined as "the attempt to attain the mystical release by
violence rather than by the gradual discipline of philosophy
and morality."" Nor does he recall that what Catholic
terminology, most philosophically, designates "vocation," calls
a St. John to one form of Christly life and a Thomas a Kempis
to another; that the Imitation was written by a monk for
monks, by a specialist for specialists; that in applied Chris-
tianity, as Catholicism understands it, there is room not only
for the free exercise of the altruistic impulses, but likewise for
the effective and salutary sublimation of the self-regarding
emotions. Surely, his beloved Plato, with his threefold classi-
fication of citizens and functions in the ideal commonwealth,
might have brought Mr. More a fuller understanding.
11 Shelburne E,Mau*. First Series, p. 208. 12 The Drift of Romanticism, p. 293.
1922.] PAUL ELMER MORE 205
Small wonder, too, that Mr. More finds his own placidly
philosophic personality out of harmony with the finer and
more exalted poetic flights of Crashaw and Thompson: "In
both there is the same breath of the prison house, something
close and febrile and spiritually exacerbating." ^^ The criti-
cism flows from a fundamental disparity of both principles
and temperament — the kind of criticism we might expect from
a mathematician discussing the poetry of Keats or an Hegelian
philosopher descanting on Mr. Chesterton's Orthodoxy. Yet
the very narrowness of Mr. More's viewpoint and the very
inadequacy of his interpretation serve, at least in a minor and
negative way, to make several of his comments on Thompson
apt and stimulating. Such is his exposure of a manifest in-
consistency in the structure of "The Hound of Heaven," where
first, the soul is represented as fleeing from the pursuing Feet,
and then, is aif ectionately reproached for having driven the
Divine Love away. It is a molehill of imperfection, to be
sure, but of imperfection none the less. And such is Mr.
More's statement that often Thompson's "tortured language
sounds like the beating on the ground of* wings that cannot
rise." ^* That is a true and, I think, a very beautiful figure,
and it illustrates the case of more poets than Thompson; its
range of application, indeed, is well-nigh as universal as liter-
ature itself.
But Thompson was undeniably a Romanticist, and that to
Mr. More is very nearly the unforgivable sin. Frankly, he
does not approve of Romanticism; and, also frankly, he has
urged against that tendency in art and letters practically
everything that can be urged. No Romantic poet will ever be
honored with literary canonization if our somewhat mad and
unphilosophical world will but give heed to the pleadings of
this formidable fidei defensor of the Classical tradition. He
stresses the "drift" of Romanticism, and most convincingly
urges that the general fault with the movement is that it is
just a drifting. It spells decadence, too, in many of its man-
ifestations, and some of its practitioners "appear like truant
boys who need to be spanked and sent again to their lessons." ^^
Oscar Wilde he unequivocally damns as "sincere with the
13 Shelbiirne Essays, Seventh Series, p. 165. 14 Ibid.. Seventh Series, p. 154.
15 Ibid., Tenth Series, p. 280.
2oe PAUL ELMER MORE [Nov..
pathos of conscious insincerity."" Resourceful prosecutor
that he is, all facts he finds grist for his miU; and in dismissing
the group of men who amazed the English-speaking world in
the "naughty nineties," he utilizes the argumentum ad horn-
inem with deadly effect:
It is, in fact, like a nightmare to read their lives. The
hectic decay of Aubrey Beardsley is almost health in com-
parison with the state of most of those who gave to the
movement its tone. Of the living we speak not; but there
is Lionel Johnson, the best artist of them all when he grew
serious, a victim of absinthe, found in the gutter with his
skull crushed; there is John Davidson, with his vision of a
new universe ended in mad suicide; there are Ernest Dow-
son and Francis Thompson, mingling their religion with
the fumes of alcohol and opium; there are others whose
tainted lives and early deaths need not be examined; and,
above all, is the hideous tragedy in Reading Jail. These /
men, who appeared to be treading so fantastically in "the \ /
variant bypaths of the uncertain heart," knew also in the \A-^
flesh the certain terrors of organic decay." \ ^ '^
"The variant bypaths of the uncertain heart" Mr. More
traces likewise in much semi-educational and semi-socio-
logical literature, especially in works of fiction, exploiting a
vague humanitarianism and substituting ideals of social serv-
ice for the older and sterner faith in God and conscience. He
is more than dubious of the so-called new morality; he dis-
approves of it because it is nebulous and lacks stamina, be-
cause it is amorphous and is deficient in bony structure. "The
whole effect of calling sympathy justice and putting it in the
place of judgment is to relax the fibre of character and nourish
the passions at the expense of reason and the will." ^* It is
distinctly refreshing to read his strictures on that well-mean-
ing, but alarmingly myopic, theory of civilization based on the
principle of man's humanity to man. Social sympathy as a
rule of conduct he judiciously mistrusts, not primarily because
it is social, but because it is sympathetic. After citing a
clerical preachment to the effect that "Faith's fellowship with
16 Shelburne Essays, Seventh Series, p. 232. it ibid.. Tenth Series, p. 281.
16 Aristocracu and Justice, p. 211.
1922.] PAUL ELMER MORE 207
Jesus is one with the realization of our fellowship in human-
ity," Mr. More is moved to remark:
If such a social passion means anything, it means the
reconstruction of life to the level of the gutter. It is the
modern sham righteousness which would have called from
Jesus the same utter scorn as that which He poured upon
the Pharisaical cant of His own day. ... In effect, the
first and great commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord
thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with
all thy mind," has been almost forgotten for the second,
"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Worship in the
temple is no longer a call to contrition and repentance, but
an organized flattery of our human nature, and the theo-
logical seminary is fast becoming a special school for in-
vestigating poverty and spreading agnosticism.^*
Opposed to Romanticism in literature and to emotional
humanitarianism in life, Mr. More is not less vigorously op-
posed to what is vaguejly called the evolutionary idea in
science. It is no distortion of his meaning, as conveyed in
one of his delightful personal prefaces, to say that in his view
The Origin of Species and The Yellow Book have met each
other, that Huxley and Wilde have kissed. In both literature
and science he combats "a belief that things of themselves, by
a kind of natural gravity of goodness in them, move always
on and on in the right direction; a confiding trust in human
nature as needing no restraint and compression, but rather full
liberty to follow its own impulsive desires to expand; an in-
clination to take sides with the emotions against the inhibi-
tions of judgment. This is not science nor any proper philos-
ophy of progress; but undoubtedly science, by the law of evo-
lution, has unwittingly, sometimes wittingly, lent authority to
this collapse of reason." ^o
For comfort and surcease, Mr. More turns to the classic
wits of the Popean age, and invokes their satiric shades to
flood the modern world with saving malice; for of wit, he
holds, malice is an essential ingredient:
I even think that nothing would be a more wholesome
tonic for our modern surfeit of sentimentalism than a little
19 Aristocracy and Justice, pp. 2#7, 288. 20 Ibid., preface, pp. vlil., Ix.
208 PAUL ELMER MORE [Nov.,
of the saving grace of malice, and that amidst the welter of
humanitarian optimism a proper counter-irritant might be
found in Swift's great foundation of misanthropy. ... We
suffer from a murky surfeit of self-flattery and sham phil-
anthropy, and a little of the opposite excess might help to
clear the air. . . . There are several people in the world
who need to be vexed."
Thus firmly intrenched behind the first line defences of
Classicism, Mr. More steadfastly holds fast that which is good.
For one thing, he is unequivocally on the side of decency. He
tells the plain truth about Congreve and Mrs. Behn and several
other of the lascivious Restoration writers, and he formulates
with a happy blending of discernment and good sense the all-
sufficient condemnation of what in our, as in other, days has
been eulogized as realism: "It is a nasty thing to take com-
placence in creating a nasty world, and there's an end on't." "
Whitman he can endure, but not the Whitmaniacs. "I do not
see why Americans should hesitate to accept him, with all his
imperfections and incompleteness, and with all his vaunted
pendantry of the pavement, as one of the most original and
characteristic of their poets; but," he adds significantly, "to
do this they must begin by forgetting his disciples." ^^
It is not surprising that some of the literary dabblers and
philosophic parvenus, who euphoniously style themselves the
Young Intellectuals — though most of them are old enough to
know better and all of them appear less concerned with the
human brain than with other organs — taunt Mr. More with
being in manner stodgy and in matter wearisome and ir-
relevant. But Mr. More has the last word, for here he is on the
side of the angels, and there's an end on't.
Yet there is no need to subpoena the angels. A random
page or two from any of his books, read with unbiased mind
and in a reasonably receptive mood, should convince even a
Young Intellectual that whatever else may be his failings, Mr.
More knows how to write English more than passing well.
He has ideas and convictions and a superb sense of form;
he is choice without being finicky in his use of words; he under-
stands the aesthetic potency of variety and vigor and suspense;
he can be epigrammatic without overdoing the thing, and he
21 With the Wits, preface, pp. ix., x. 22 Ibid., p. 78.
i^Shelbnrne Essays, Fourth Series, p. 211.
Id22.] PAUL ELMER MORE 209
is not totally devoid of humor. True, he demands much of his
readers in the way of general reading and intellectual back-
ground; but to some of us that is a virtue in him rather than
a defect. In fine, as a stylist, Mr. More, though less pyro-
technic than Mr. Chesterton, less incisive than Mr. Belloc, less
"popular" than Professor Phelps or Professor Sherman, and
less amusingly underbred and impertinent than Mr. Mencken,
has a command of the King's English that must win the favor,
though perhaps not the fervor, of any normal human being
intent on something more thoughtful than a jig or a tale of
bawdry.
Nevertheless, to wax enthusiastic over Mr. More as a stylist
is simply impossible. That truism of Buffon's never was more
true! Mr. More's style is Mr. More; and it sparkles often, but
rarely glows. It is a style to admire rather than to like.
There is something about it, not pedantic nor petulant, nor
even wholly condescending, but chill, aloof, inhibitive, some-
thing angularly ministerial, provocatively professorial, cappa-
magnacally episcopal — something, in short, one never learns
from Plato. We may find ourselves in accord with Mr. More
oftener than we find ourselves in accord with Carlyle; but we
can never love Mr. More as, with all his crochets, we love
Carlyle. Robert Louis Stevenson said of his idol. Sir Walter
Scott: "He makes me long to box his ears — God bless him!" ^4
We should be awed at the thought of boxing Mr. More's ears,
terrified at so incongruous a thing as praying for him. It
would be as reasonable to box the ears of a Venetian doge or
invoke a benediction on the law of gravitation.
And yet to close this fragmentary study of him on that
note were to do Mr. More a serious injustice. For there are
passages in his essays that stand out in memory as flawless
marbles against a fleckless sky, a keen wind scouring from
their polished surface the last particle of invisible dust, the
brilliant sunlight mellowing their contours into semblance of
throbbing life. Such is his modulated, but eloquent, plea for
classical education in Aristocracy and Justice ;^^ such are the
beautifully poised concluding paragraphs of Platonism; such
— and to quote it at length needs no apology — ^is that passage
in his essay on Pascal, wherein is set forth a distinction of
24 J. A. Hammerton, Stevensontana.
25 "The Paradox of Oxford," p. 90, et seq.
VOL. GXVI. 14
210 PAUL ELMER MORE [Nov..
values and of principles that, irrespective of what one's per-
sonal spiritual experiences and meditations may enable one to
read into it, thrills with "thoughts beyond the reaches of our
souls." He has quoted Pascal on the infirmities of human
nature, and Voltaire's reply: "I dare to take the part of human-
ity against this sublime misanthrope; I dare to assert that we
are neither so evil nor so wretched as he says." Whereupon,
writes Mr. More:
From the point of view of common sense, from the feel-
ings of the man absorbed in the tumult of diversion and
business, Voltaire is right, and Pascal himself admits as
much. But there is another point of view, and when once
the inner eye has been opened to this aspect of life, though
it catch but a glimpse of that vision and close again to its
own night, the words of Voltaire seem but the language of
one born blind. When once the sting of eternity has en-
tered the heart, and the desire to behold things sub specie
aeternitatis, when once the thirst of stability and repose has
been felt, for that soul there is no longer content in the
diversions of life, and, try as he will to conceal to himself
the truth, with every pleasure and amid every distraction
he tastes the cloying drop of bitterness. Henceforth, in the
midst of enjoyment, he knows, with Pascal, how "horrible
a thing it is to feel slip away all that one possesses;'* and
he cannot forget that "the last act is bloody, however fair
all the rest of the comedy; in the end, we throw a little
earth on the head, and it is over for ever." It is not ex-
aggeration to say that the consciousness or unconsciousness
of this duaHsm is the most fundamental mark of division
among men. Here lies the distinction between civilizations,
between faith and reason, between religion and rationalism,
between piety and morality, between genius and talent.^**
It were as unfair as it is facile to level at Mr. More the
strident charge of inconsistency, to point out that his view of
things, sub specie seternitatis, is difficult to reconcile with his
implied and express skepticism, that, to use the words in
which he himself criticizes St. Augustine, "one cannot read
much in his works without discovering whole tracts of thought
and exhortation that refuse to take their place in his dogmatic
system;" that his distinction between faith and religion seems
2«Shelburne Essays, Sixth Series, pp. 146, 147.
1922.] PAUL ELMER MORE 211
specious and speculative, that his almost monomaniacal in-
sistence on the theory of dualism in every department of life
and thought, might aptly enough be construed into a justifica-
tion of those very educational, literary, and sociological
vagaries which he so learnedly combats and so profoundly
deplores. It were unfair, and futile; for upon differences
regarding fundamental life principles argument is fruitless.
Wiser it is to accept him for what he is worth. Mr. More
is a thinker, a scholar, an essayist of pith and distinction; he
has much to teach both this generation and the next. I recall
a pregnant and significant thing that the late Bishop Spalding
wrote of Epictetus, Seneca, and Aurelius: "To derive profit
from their works ... all that is required is an open mind and
a tractable heart. What is speculative disappears in the pres-
ence of the practical worth of the truths they utter. To read
them aright, we need attentive and devout spirit rather than
an acute and curious intellect." " And so it is with Mr. More;
only for the reader of the Shelburne Essays "an acute and
curious intellect" will prove no negligible asset.
Personally, I find a hint of unconscious symbolism in the
description of himself, in "The Paradox of Oxford," ^^ standing
one gray day in the quadrangle of Oriel College and gazing up
at the windows of the rooms once occupied by John Henry
Newman. In a whimsical mood, while recognizing the het-
erogeneity between the two men, I perceive, none the less,
how much they have in common, how keen their zest for the
things of the mind, how unswerving their devotion to high
ideals, how intense their intellectual passion for the best in
the ancient culture. And as I wonder and dream, there flashes
across my mind a bit of verse, alien in spirit alike to Cardinal
Newman and to Mr. More, and, therefore, in accordance with
the latter's favorite dualistic theory, singularly apropos:
When all the Temple is prepared within,
Why nods the drowsy Worshipper outside?
27 Glimpses of Truth, "Epictetus." as Aristocracy and Justice, p. 80.
PROFESSOR DEWEY AND TRUTH.
BY JOSEPH T. BARRON.
ROFESSOR JOHN DEWEY of Columbia Univer-
sity is the pundit supreme of American philos-
ophy. He is the uncrowned king of our phil-
osophic intelligentsia, the successor of the late
William James, whose mantle he unassumingly
wears. Any pronouncement of Mr. Dewey's on things phil-
osophic, is therefore intriguing. Indeed, any of the output of
that small but sturdy band of American seekers after truth,
is of interest to us simply because it is American; but when
their leader speaks, it is for us to hearken, if not to agree.
Mr. Dewey has spoken to us through the pages of some four-
teen volumes, the latest just off the press, and through his
numerous contributions to periodicals. His writings have
evoked much controversy; like all who would lead us into the
promised land, he has won for himself enthusiastic support
and mordant criticism. Many and telling are the shafts
leveled against him. We shall content ourselves with an ex-
amination of a minor, if important, part of his system — his
views on a question that has harassed the minds of thinkers
from the dawn of Greek philosophy to our own day — the ques-
tion of the nature of truth.
Mr. Dewey professes that species of anti-intellectualistic
philosophy known as instrumentalism. The revolt against
reason has assumed wide proportions in our day. The his-
tory of philosophy shows that men rebel, periodically, against
an over-extravagant cult of the intellect; the Sophists and
Socrates protested against the rationalism of the earlier Greek
philosophers, while Rousseau embodied a similar protest
after the "Enlightenment" of the eighteenth century. In our
time, the worth of the intellect has been impugned because of
its alleged failure as regards knowledge and as regards life.
It is held that the intellect has failed in its effort to get into
contact with reality, and that it had best be supplanted by the
evangel of action and practicality. Agents are to be preferred
to thinkers— the sons of Martha are to take precedence over
1922.] PROFESSOR DEWEY AND TRUTH 213
the sons of Mary. This philosophy is the expression of the
world's admiration for the pushing man of affairs, for
the man who does things, as opposed to the recluse whose
thoughts do not issue into practical results. The doctrinaire
and academic "speculative" philosophy of our text-books is to
be scrapped as useless. If philosophy has any claim to exist-
ence, it must justify that claim by becoming operative. Thus
speaks anti-intellectualism. It is protean, embracing widely
divergent systems of thought, and among them we may place
the instrumentalism of Mr. Dewey.
Instrumentalism is so called because it regards thinking
as an instrument, a tool. The intellect is not an oracle, but
a practical instrument. We think solely in order that we
may foresee the future, and thus act intelligently. By pre-
vision, we acquire control over our environment and efficiency
in its management — ^we are enabled to adapt our environment
to human needs. Experience should not be undergone for its
own sake; it is but a means to an end, the end being action.
Theorizing divorced from action is futile; action guided by
theory is the end to which thinking is the means. Thinking is
first, last, and all the time for the sake of doing. The worth
of the entire cognitive function is planning and purposing.
To experience, in a word, is to experiment. By thus experi-
menting man can learn to tame his environment and make
it subject to him, because by understanding a thing he is
enabled to anticipate further experiences from it, and his con-
duct can thus be purposive. Knowing is essentially, there-
fore, an activity elicited by our environment, which in turn
alters the environment. The working hypotheses which we
form by our experience have as their end, today at least, the
amelioration of social, political, and economic conditions.
We should think in order to put an end to the many ills which
flow from existing conditions in the economic and political
orders; we should think to better society. Thus the task of
philosophy "is to clarify men's ideas as to the social and moral
strifes of their own day," and the instrumentalist philosopher
will find his "compensation in enlightening the moral forces
which move mankind, and in contributing to the aspirations
of men to attain to a more ordered and intelligent happi-
ness." ^
1 Reconstruction in Philosophy, pp. 26, 27. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
214 PROFESSOR DEWEY AND TRUTH [Nov.,
It is obvious that such a complete reorientation of the
nature and burden of philosophy will demand a new theory
of truth. The traditional theories of correspondence and
coherence can find no place in instrumentalism. It is forced
to discard the older conceptions, and to construct a theory
that will be consonant with its view of the meaning of philos-
ophy as a whole. It must even go beyond the idea of truth
held by the semi-pragmatists. The latter make utility the
criterion of truth; it is the norm or standard whereby we dis-
cern the false from the true. Utility is for them not the truth
itself, but a sign of the truth. Accordingly, we find Mr. Dewey
advancing beyond this mitigated pragmatic criterion. Where
they say, utility is a test of truth, he identifies it with
truth — utility is truth. In one place, he seems to make use-
fulness or "workability" a test of truth, when he says: "If
ideas, meanings, conceptions, notions, theories, systems are
instrumental to an active reorganization of the given environ-
ment, to a removal of some specific trouble and perplexity,
then the test of their validity and value lies in accomplishing
this work." ^ Nevertheless, the so-called Chicago school, of
which he is plumed as the founder, and he himself in former
writings, clearly identify truth with utility, and we have no
warrant to suppose he has receded from this position.^
The view that verification, or the effective working out of
the idea, and truth are one and the same thing, is expressed in
the following passages, where he gives us a definition of truth :
"Its (the claim, or pretension, or plan) active, dynamic func-
tion is the all-important thing about it, and in the quality of
activity induced by it lies all its truth and falsity. The hypoth-
esis that works is the true one; and truth is an abstract noun
applied to the collection of cases, actual, foreseen, and de-
sired, that receive confirmation in their works and conse-
quences." * It would appear, then, that truth is verification,
satisfaction, utility. This theory of truth we shall examine.
Mr. Dewey takes pains to forestall one of the common ob-
jections leveled against his theory of truth, viz., that it leads
to crass utilitarianism and ultra-individualism. The whole
pragmatic movement has been accused, because of its matter-
2 Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 156.
» Influence of Darwin, pp. 109, 139, 140; Mind, N. S., XVL, 1907, p. 837; Journal
of Philosophy, TV., 1907, p. 202.
4 Reconstruction in Philosophy, pp. 156, 157.
1922.] PROFESSOR DEWEY AND TRUTH 215
of -fact tendency, of being but a philosophic echo of the sordid
and mercenary spirit which is supposed to dominate our land.
It is this view of pragmatism which has led writers of other
countries to proclaim that it is an essentially American philos-
ophy. Thus an Englishman recently wrote that pragmatism
"demands a moral complacency more common in Boston than
in England.'* ^ So, too, others explain that it is but the out-
come of the money-grubbing temper of the western world.®
But this is a misinterpretation of this movement, since it does
not of itself determine a low scale of values. The instru-
mentalist may, and, in the present instance, does define high
standards of life. The question of a raffish or exalted view of
life does not depend on the doctrine that the true is the useful,
but on what is held to be the aim and purpose of life. The
instrumentalist may just as well seek to achieve the zenith as
the nadir of existence. Mr. Dewey deprecates this estimate
of his thought when he says: "So repulsive is a conception of
truth which makes it a mere tool of private ambition and
aggrandizement, that the wonder is that critics have attributed
such a notion to sane men." ^ He explains, too, that the ob-
jection that his theory leads to ultra-individualism is wide
of the mark. Truth has a social character, and utility and
satisfaction must not be construed to mean utility or satisfac-
tion to the individual alone. Satisfaction is not "a merely
emotional satisfaction, a private comfort, a meeting of a purely
personal end." ^ It is "a satisfaction of the needs and condi-
tions of the problem out of which the idea, the purpose and
method of action, arises. It includes subjective and objective
conditions. It is not to be manipulated by whim or personal
idiosyncracy." ®
But, while he repels these charges, there are other chinks
in his philosophic armor which are not quite so invulnerable.
In the first place, instrumentalism in its insistence on the es-
sential practicality of knowledge unduly circumscribes the
function of the intellect and depreciates the value of specula-
tive thought. Thinking is often a means to an end, but may it
not sometimes be an end in itself? It is frequently the instru-
ment to our realization of other values, but does its use stop
5 P. C. Mitchell, Evolution and the War, p. 2.
6 A. Schinz, Anti-Pragmatisme ; J. Bourdeau, Pragmatisme et Modernisme.
7 Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 157. 8 Ibid., p. 156. 9 Ibid.
216 PROFESSOR DEWEY AND TRUTH [Nov.,
there? We cannot live without thought— the more the
thought, the better the life— this we may admit, but a more
complete concept of the value of thought indicates that it is
both practical and speculative, because the enjoyment of
knowledge for its own sake, is a value which enhances life.
Many hard things have been said of late about "otiose
speculation" and "armchair philosophies" and "parasitic pro-
fessors," and many of them are deserved, but too great a stress-
ing of the worthlessness of speculation for speculation's sake
is a sin in the other extreme. Thought, as an end in itself,
may have a minor place, but, nevertheless, it has a place in
life, and it should not be ejected summarily from it. Novalis'
disclaimer against the narrowly utilitarian view of philosophy,
"philosophy can bake no bread," is rightly rejected by the in-
strumentalist, but he should not forget that there is a satis-
faction in the mere pursuit of the "ultimate causes of things,"
and a keen exhilaration in the chase; he should remember that
the latter have values for a number of people and that they
are not, because of this fact, to be discarded. There is a deal
of truth in what the instrumentalist says of philosophers. The
dilettante, who, from the shelter of his irresponsbility, shuns
the problems of life, or who distorts these problems to fit the
theories he has spun out of his own consciousness, the pro-
fessorial fact-shapers, who defend an established order of
things because they are its beneficiaries — these are not true
"lovers of wisdom." The philosopher, like the average citizen,
should not lose contact with society and its problems; he
should not divorce his theory from practice, but to say that
all philosophy is practical, to hold that the philosopher must
be always the active participant in, and never the dispassion-
ate spectator of, the world-riddle; this, it appears, is an ex-
treme view of the function of thought. A more adequate
notion would be that which admits the existence of both prac-
tical and speculative philosophy, which makes allowance for
that burning desire to know which is widespread among
men.
Instrumentalism, like most philosophies whose motto is
action, is inseparably bound up with a deep faith in progress.
Life is not a march towards a set goal, but it is a constant
advance towards new goals; having captured one objective, it
should proceed on to the achieving of another, simply because
1922.] PROFESSOR DEWEY AND TRUTH 217
it is another. Life means progress, and it is the task of the
intellect to construct new ideals towards which men must
strain. In thus progressing we shall formulate more ennobling
ideals and find a fuller good. But there is no guarantee that
mere movement is a movement for the better, that change is
always good. All progress is change, but not all change is
progress; change may be retrogressive as well as progressive.
The view that ideals are good, simply because they are later
in time than others, is an unproved and an unprovable as-
sumption; it is a naive acceptance of the doubtful creed of
universal evolution.
The man who enshrined his sentiments in that ancient
bit of doggerel, "I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my
way," seems to have been in the same predicament as the
instrumentalist. Their position, like most of those who bow
the knee to the credo of action for action's sake and change
at all hazards, is but the philosophic expression of the modern
cult of the recent and the novel, with its corresponding dis-
trust of the old and traditional. Antique, venerable have
become synonyms for untrue and out-of-date. If being young
was a crime in the salad days of William Pitt, surely criminal-
ity has now become the exclusive prerogative of the old. We
find this contempt for the past exhibited in the glib pronun-
ciamentos of our modern illuminati, anent the drama, liter-
ature, art, and even religion. And in more fields than these,
the most damning adjective that can be predicated of anything
is "out-of-date." Bertrand Russell has pointed out the very
evident fallacy in this rose-tinted view of the future as the
harbinger of all good things, in the following words: "Some-
how, without explicit statement, the assurance is slipped in
that the future, though we cannot foresee it, will be better
than the past or present: the reader is like the child who
expects a sweet because it has been told to open its mouth
and shut its eyes. ... I make only two criticisms of it — first,
that its truth does not follow from what science has rendered
probable concerning the facts of evolution, and, secondly,
that the motives and interests which inspire it are so exclu-
sively practical, and the problems with which it deals are so
special, that it can hardly be regarded as really touching any
of the questions that, to my mind, constitute genuine philos-
ophy. Except under the influence of desire, no one would
218 PROFESSOR DEWEY AND TRUTH [Nov.,
admit for a moment so crude a generalization from such a
tiny selection of facts." ^° Not that the instrumentalist incurs
this censure to the same degree as do his more radical
brethren; in practice he believes the object of philosophy is
collective human happiness, but in his haziness as to what
constitutes this happiness, in the principle of the value of
progress which underlies his thought, as well as in his insist-
ence on the lack of a definite end for society to attain, he leaves
himself open to this criticism, in principle at least.
To come now to the discussion of truth in instrumentalism.
The first objection to its theory of truth is derived from the
fact that it is based on the constant evolution and ceaseless
flux of things. If everything evolves, then the true and the
false also evolve; standards and ideals must evolve as well.
But if things which give satisfaction and which prove useful
are true, then it follows that the true may become the false
and the false the true. When a proposition or a system of
thought ceases to be useful it is no longer true. Truth, in a
word, is not fixed and immutable; it varies with times and
localities and men. Once true is not always true. There is,
and can be, no permanent truth; all truth is relative. This is
frankly admitted by those who hold to the evolution of truth.
So Schiller speaks of errors as "discarded ex-truths;" they
"were 'truths' in their day." ^^ And Sidgwick affirms that "all
truths are pro tem truths at best, and the duration of their
validity is uncertain." ^^ That Mr. Dewey concurs in this view
may be easily inferred from his doctrine that utility is
truth, although he does not specifically state it.
Now it is only fair to test any system of thought by its
own conclusions. A system which cannot stand against it-
self must fall. It is not unknown for philosophers to submit
the truth-claim of all other philosophies to their own rigid and
uncompromising demands, while they seem to fancy that their
own systems are exempt from any such procedure. Kant
wrote a book to prove that all the mind could attain was the
phenomenon, while this very book purports to give us the real
state of affairs. Others have demonstrated that all we can
know is what we have sensed, and, forgetting the while that
io Scientific Method in Philosophy, pp. 14-16.
11 Studies in Humanism, pp. 212, 213.
12 Journal of Philosophy, II., 1905, p. 269.
1922.] PROFESSOR DEWEY AND TRUTH 219
we cannot sense this theory, have in their very assertion
refuted themselves. But such a disingenuous attitude cannot
be countenanced by honest thought. Physicians have been
told to heal themselves, and philosophers would do well to
heed similar advice. A philosophy, if nothing else, must be
consistent; it must not be self-refuting.
In the first place, before we examine instrumentalism in
the light of these considerations, we must note that there are
a number of truths which seem to have withstood the shocks
of time and the blighting touch of age as yet. Should not the
instrumentalist withhold his dogmatic assertion, that they
will "have their day and cease to be" until that day comes?
But, apart from this, there are other questions which clamor
for answer from the instrumentalist, and answered they must
be before his theory can win our acceptance. Is it a change-
able truth, that all truth is changeable? Or putting the ques-
tion more pointedly: "Is instrumentalism to be accepted in-
strumentally, and is it to be interpreted in the same way?"
Consistency demands that it be so received and accepted, and
yet, if we do accept it because it is useful and satisfactory,
then, on its own assertion, it is only relatively, and not abso-
lutely, true.
But instrumentalists do not — no philosopher does — put
forth their theory as only relatively true. They thus are
impaled on the horns of a dilemma. Either truth is what
they say it is, or it is not. If the latter is the case, we
can dismiss them without further ado. If truth is what they
say it is, then their theory, being true, is only relatively true.
And if they insist that it is absolutely true, then they deny
their own theory in their very affirmation of it. In point of
fact, they take the position as regards their theory that truth
does not rest upon its usefulness; their theory is true because
what it maintains is true, i. e., there is a correspondence of
some kind between it and the real state of things; and because
it is true, it is useful and satisfactory. Hence the presump-
tion of instrumentalism is, that usefulness is not truth, but that
it is a mark of truth. But it cannot hold even to this view, for
it contravenes all other systems which are opposed to it, de-
spite the fact that these are eminently satisfactory to their re-
spective protagonists.
Looking at the problem from a slightly different angle, we
220 PROFESSOR DEWEY AND TRUTH [Nov.,
may ask: "Is the instrumentalist theory one which is true
only today, but which was false a century ago, and which will
be false a century hence?" Here, again, we may venture to
assert that this theory is put forth as a theory that was true in
the past before it was known to be true, and that it will be true
in the future, even though the thinkers of that time will have
relegated it to the museum of philosophical antiques. Which
is to say, that the supporters of this theory believe that the
state of affairs which it represents has not changed and has
not evolved; that which has evolved, is the knowledge of the
theory. But this is tantamount to admitting that the truth of
instrumentalism does not consist in its utility or satisfaction,
but that it is true because it represents things as they are. In
other words, it is ultimately based on the correspondence
theory of truth. It is difficult to see how it can escape the
vitiating charge of inconsistency.
Philosophies which adhere to the doctrine of the evolu-
tion of truth, gain plausibility from the constant parade of
hypotheses and theories through the ages, each of which were
held for a time by all, or at least by a considerable number of
men, but which were succeeded in turn by other hypotheses
and theories, the latter giving way with the passage of time to
new views. None of these systems hold that all truths evolve.
Historical facts do not change with time — they are stable and
imperishable. The date of the birth of Julius Caesar, the year
in which Columbus discovered America, will not evolve;
neither will the sum-total of home runs garnered by the titanic
Mr. Ruth, nor the epic effate of the Governor of North Caro-
lina to the Governor of his sister State. Facts like these, time
cannot wither. But it is maintained in regard to systems of
thought, both scientific and religious, that, while each of these
was the vogue, it was true because it suited the particular men
of that time or place. However, a modicum of reflection tells
us that, while human knowledge is capable of development
and change, both in content and extent, this by no means im-
plies that the true becomes the false, or vice versa. On the
contrary, the obvious reason why one hypothesis is rejected
in favor of another, is because it was found to be untrue— it
did not square with the facts— and not because it did not give
satisfaction. Hypotheses are, of their very nature, mere con-
jectures. And if they be supplanted, it is not because they are
1922.] PROFESSOR DEWEY AND TRUTH 221
not practical or suitable, but because they are not true, i. e.,
they give a false account of things. Things are useful, in a word,
because they are true; they are not true, because they are useful.
Utility presupposes truth already established. This may
be instanced by the welter of conflicting opinions which usu-
ally exist when knowledge of what is the truth is lacking, or
when knowledge is only opinionative. Witness the dispute rag-
ing today among the Brahmins, who guide our ship of state
over the advisability of our joining the League of Nations. If
we had positive knowledge whether or not our entrance into
that august assembly would benefit us, then the controversy
would be at an end — we would become members, or not. Wit-
ness, again, the dispute as to the wisdom of prohibition. If
we knew it was useful and satisfactory, then the issue would
be closed; but, not knowing — in part, at least — ^if it is useful,
the debate is loud and sustained. Examples too numerous to
mention could be adduced to confirm our point, viz., that,
when in default of certain knowledge, we are forced to base our
beliefs on utility, there is no end to disagreement; judgments
about utility or value or satisfaction are as variable as likes and
dislikes. Utility and satisfactoriness are inadequate for the-
oretical and practical purposes when it is a question of truth.
Instrumentalism is a philosophy actuated by a lofty
motive. Its desire is to put philosophy to work, to drag it
down from the clouds to terra fir ma; its aim is to harness the
thought of the Olympians to the problems of the day. It is
keenly aware of the faults of the traditional philosophies —
their sterility, their endless disputes, their Frankenstein prone-
ness to fashion objections which they cannot answer, their
aridity, their want of contact with reality, their far remove
from life. Believing that correction would be futile, it would
revolutionize the classic idea of philosophy, and by this rev-
olution it hopes to lead mankind to the millennium. We may
admit the truth of some of its strictures against the old order
of things, but the remedy it proffers is not a fit substitute,
because in one of its cardinal points, the nature of truth, it
lacks the jewel of consistency, a jewel which must adorn every
claimant which seeks to be adopted as the perennial phil-
osophy.
AT EVENTIDE.
BY EMILY HICKEY.
The shadows lengthen out
This eventide;
And, if Thou standest here,
Unglorified
In me and mine — oh, yet.
With me abide.
Here, in the evening light.
Clearer than day.
Looking behind, I see
My old life's way;
Oh, would to God, indeed,
That I could say:
Thou gavest penitence.
All-healing grief;
Thou gavest pardoning love,
In dear relief;
And now I bring to Thee
A tare-spoilt sheaf.
And yet, for that I sowed
Some little wheat.
Take it, and let Thy love
The tale complete;
I lay it down before
Thy blessed feet.
'Here, Lord, I went where Thou Thou knowest I could have done
Hadst bid me go;
Here, where I might have strayed,
I did not so;
I took what work, what rest.
Thou wouldst bestow."
And did not do;
Have paid the debts of love
That still are due;
Have given fair giving meet.
In measure true.
Nay, but full oft my feet
Have strayed and erred;
Full oft mine ears were deaf
To Thy dear word;
Full oft mine eyes looked out
With vision blurred.
Oh, little span of life.
That seemed so long
When the first bell was rung
For matin song,
And all Thy great love-choir
Sang sweet and strong.
Mine is no passionate grief
For love refused;
Mine is no glowing joy
For love well used;
Nor yet a heart that lies
Broken and bruised.
Thou knowest how I have sinned
Oft in Thy sight;
Thou knowest I tried to do
Some little right;
Forgive the wrong, accept
The rest tonight.
O Jesus, Jesus mine,
What words are these?
Deep in my heart I say,
On bended knees.
Do with me, dearest Lord,
As Thou shalt please.
My spirit, O Lord, O Love,
I do commend
Into Thy Hands, my Judge,
Who art my Friend,
Who, loving me, wilt love
Unto the end.
THE WORKINGMAN AND HIS WAGES.
BY JAMES F. CRONIN, C.S.P.
OR some years past, it is plain that events have
been so shaping themselves as to force even the
unwilling to pay heed to industrial conditions.
The interest in questions born of modern indus-
try is almost universal, and the time has arrived,
we believe, when it is neither safe nor sane for moral leaders
to ignore, or minimize, the gravity of what is at stake.
In the absence of clear thinking among the masses, it
must be made plain that our emphasis on the sacredness of
private property does not place us in the untenable position
of approving or defending the inherent or accidental faults
of Capitalism. And, in condemning Socialism, we must not
allow the unthinking to believe that we are committed to the
approbation or toleration of the abuses and injustices of Cap-
italism. We, indeed, insist that in any solution offered,
the inviolability of private property must be taken into con-
sideration, and we furthermore reject and condemn the par-
ticular solution, known as Socialism, but we in nowise ap-
prove the evils of the present system. Indeed, we are, and
must be, as solicitous of right and justice in industrial life
as in any other department of life.
It may be well for us, also, to remember that although
Socialism would usher in evils worse than the existing ones,
it is, at least, an effort to meet the situation. People may be-
lieve about Socialism what many believe about Prohibition,
that it is so poor a remedy for an evil that it is worse than
no remedy. To condemn one or the other, however, and to
offer no substitute reform, is to reject the attempt made to
solve a question; it is not constructive. If we do the easy
thing, we shall be satisfied with a policy of obstruction, and
simply condemn the efforts of others; if we do the right thing,
we shall not only point out the errors of others, we shall bring
forth our own programme. Boastful laudatores temporis acti,
who mistake a mental storehouse of prejudices and prepos-
224 THE WORKINGMAN AND HIS WAGES [Nov.,
sessions for reason, who contribute nothing to the solution of
a difficult problem except the condemnation of the efforts of
others to solve the question, must be appraised at their true
value; they are simply and solely offensive obstructionists.
It is painful and pathetic to find Catholics taking the part
of critical obstructionists, even when authoritative Catholic
teachings are being applied to modern questions of industry.
Our present industrial system did not come down from heaven
as a divine revelation, and it is not hnmune from the saving
grace of change and improvement.
No less an authority, indeed, than the Bishops' Programme
calls for a change, a change in fact which would ultimately
involve, to a great extent, the abolition of the wage system.
The present method of payment of wages is, after all, a com-
paratively new thing, the result of a social system that came
into existence gradually, did not at one time exist as we have
it today; and, conceivably, the world can again get along
without it.
The present wage system, moreover, has many disadvan-
tages, not accidental, which a little charity might remove, but
disadvantages inherent in the system itself, which laboring
men cannot be expected to overlook. In making the contract
of the wage, the employer has a distinct advantage over the
one seeking a position. Equality of bargaining power is want-
ing. The man seeking employment must work or starve,
while the employer can wait, or employ someone else. The
dependence of the employee on the will and power of the
employer "approaches that of the subject under a despot, and
finds expression in the phrase: *Well, you can take the job
or leave it.' " ^ Employers who are so fond of boldly pro-
claiming that they will never submit to "dictation" from organ-
ized labor, are forever assuring us that they can, and will,
"run their own business." Many of us are not concerned as
to the terms employed, whether "outside interference," "dic-
tation," or the more euphemistic "running my own business,'"
be employed. However, we see no reason for offering special
resistance to the workingmen who try, through equality of
bargaining power secured through organization, to write in the
wage contract the terms under which they will work, any
more than we should resist the efforts of the employer to se-
1 Primer of Social Science. Parkinson. London: T. S, King & Son. Page 167.
1922.] THE WORKINGMAN AND HIS WAGES 225
cure the services of these men on his terms. Both parties are
bargaining; one offers wages, the other offers service. The
employer states his conditions, and he is simply "running his
own business;" the workingman states his conditions, and he
is "dictating." Which reminds us that Lincoln once asked a
schoolboy: "Johnnie, if you call a dog's tail a leg, how many
legs will he have?" "Five," answered Johnnie. "No," said
Lincoln, "calling it a leg will not make it one, the dog will still
have only four legs."
Inherent, also, to the present wage system is the disadvan-
tage that the wage-earner labors under, of being excluded
from a share in the profits. It is not at all clear to the working
people why the employer should walk off with all the profits.
It is very clear, on the other hand, that the laborer "has a
strict right to profits in proportion to his effective cooperation
in production." It is clear, furthermore, that the laboring
men are not receiving these profits. Indeed, the laboring man
is forced to surrender, at least implicitly, his right to these
profits when he makes a wage contract, and, under the present
system, he must either make the wage contract or go hungry.
"Briefly," says Monsignor Parkinson, "the wage-earner in in-
dustry has abandoned his claim to a proportion of the profits.
He has become a mercenary rather than a partner, a com-
modity rather than an artist-craftsman. He remains actually
or practically at the same pay, while the employer or share-
holders draw large dividends for their inactive (i. c, non-
effective) participation in production. He is the victim of the
omnipotence of wealth, of the prejudices of station, and the
social inferiority of labor."
Here and there, of course, are found employers, and many
of them, who do the right thing towards their employees.
The number, also, is unquestionably growing year after year.
But conditions today are a sufficient warrant, nevertheless, for
repeating what Pope Leo said thirty years ago : "The laboring
men feel that they have been fooled by empty promises and
deceived by false appearances; they cannot but perceive that
their grasping employers too often treat theni with the greatest
inhumanity, and hardly care for them beyond the profit their
labor brings;" and "with the concentration of so many branches
of trade in the hands of a few individuals, a small number
of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming
I yoL. cxvi. 15
226
THE WORKINGMAN AND HIS WAGES [Nov.,
masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than slavery
itself." '
Again, not only is the laboring man, under the present
wage system, practically forced to sign away his right to a
share in the profits, but at times he cannot even secure a
remuneration "sufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved
wage-earner." In other words, the minimum of justice is
denied him. Even if it were true that the great majority of
workers were now receiving more than living wages (and it
is not true), "there are no good reasons," says the Bishops'
Programme,^ "why rates of pay should be lowered. After all, a
living wage is not necessarily the full measure of justice. All
the Catholic authorities on the subject explicitly declare that
that is only the minimum of justice. Since our industrial
resources and instrumentalities are sufficient to provide more
than a living wage for a very large proportion of the workers,
why should we acquiesce in a theory which denies them this
measure of the comforts of life? Such a policy is not only of
very questionable morality, but is unsound economically."
"On grounds of justice and sound economics," concludes the
paragraph, "we should give our hearty support to all legit-
imate efforts made by labor to resist general wage reductions."
The campaign for the reduction of wages attained during
the war has, however, been going on, rather merrily for some,
during the last few years. The "workman's silk shirt" served
as one of the allies in the holy war against the extravagances
of the working classes. Of course, there wasn't any silk shirt,
but that didn't matter. The United States Bureau of Labor
Statistics made a detailed study of the cost of living of 12,094
families of workingmen during the fall of 1918 and the winter
of 1919. The families were widely scattered about the coun-
try, and representative. "The matter of the silk shirt is illum-
inating. Out of the entire 12,000 families studied, only three
and six-tenths per cent, possessed silk shirts. The invest-
ments of these extravagant few, if such purchases are con-
sidered extravagant, increased the average budget for the
entire group only twenty-one cents, the price of a single soda
during war times. Apparently, even at the time of great
economic inflation the workman who could afford luxury was
2 Encyclical, Rerum Novarum.
» Social Reconstruction. Washington, D, C; National Catholic Welfare Council,
1922.] THE WORKINGMAN AND HIS WAGES 227
uncommon." The average expenditures of the different mem-
bers of the families for clothing reveal also the "appalling ex-
travagance" of the workingman and his family. The man clothed
himself on less than six dollars a month and the woman
dressed on five dollars and thirty cents a month, and this at a
time when prices were at the peak. But if there were no silk
shirts for the laboring men when they were "dictating" their
own terms and wages, there certainly was one expenditure of
which much has not been said. Churches throughout the
country, almost unanimously, reported that plate collections
had doubled!
The success of the Miners' Union, we hope, has put a
definite stop to the campaign for a reduction of wages. Since
March, last, an upward trend in wages is recorded. The aver-
age weekly earnings of factory-workers in New York State
were $25.10 in August, a gain of 33 cents over July, and an in-
crease of 85 cents over the lowest average earnings in April.
The Railroad Labor Board granted an increase to 451,911
members of the United Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way
employees and Railroad Shop Workers. Of this number,
track laborers and all common laborers constitute the largest
single class affected. Most of them are now receiving 35 to 36
cents an hour. They number about 112,000. The average
minimum wage now ranges from 23 to 37 cents an hour. The
United States Steel Corporation also voluntarily increased the
wages of its employees, and it is hoped that before long the
pressure, which compelled this increase in wages, will exert
itself in the direction of remedying the brutal practice of em-
ploying 300,000 on a twelve-hour basis. The United States
Steel Corporation might well begin by liberating its 70,000.
Among the factors accounting for the upward trend of
wages, emphasis must be placed on the new three per cent,
immigration law. The country's total net gain by alien immi-
gration during the first fiscal year under the quota law was
104,326 women and 6,518 men (both figures including chil-
dren) . The figure of 309,556 immigrant aliens admitted to our
country during this period "shrinks to nothing when it is
reduced to net gain in man-power. Moreover, there has been
an actual loss in net immigration in respect to most of the
countries upon which we have depended recently for our
supply of unskilled labor." During the fiscal year, 1921-1922,
228 THE WORKINGMAN AND HIS WAGES [Nov..
40 319 immigrants arrived from Italy, while during the same
period 53,651 Italians left this country. Figures show that in
regard to Poland, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Jugo-Slavia, and
several other countries we lost more by emigration than we
gained by immigration. The Nation points out that 400,000
skilled and unskilled workers were added annually to our
working forces during the five years before the war, and that
now "we have already dried up the sources of that man-power
upon which for the last fifty years American industry has
depended."
With this increased power thrust into the hands of labor
by the new immigration law, one should consider the growth
of unionism during the last decade. A glance at the new vol-
umes of the Encyclopedia Britannica reveals that the growth
of organized labor enrollment during the decade, 1911-1921, is
three hundred and fifty per cent, for the world, from 10,835,000
to 48,000,000. In the United States the growth has been one
hundred and fifty percent, during the same period, from
2,100,000 to 5,179,000. The growing scarcity of labor due to
the three per cent, restrictive law and the growth of unionism,
are two powerful factors which labor will not be slow to use
for the enforcement of its claims.
Some of us, however, are not at all alarmed. Something —
the coldness of facts we suspect — chills our enthusiasm when
we try to answer the call to save our country from what Mr.
Chamberlain recently called "the common foe." When we
learn from our Catechism of the Social Question that two per
cent, of the people own sixty per cent, of the wealth of the
United States and that the poorest, sixty-five per cent, of the
people, own only five per cent., and that four-fifths of the
people own only one-tenth of the wealth, our indignation at
labor's eff'rontery in trying to secure a fair protection of the
wealth it produces, somewhat subsides, and we are led to con-
fess that not even the waving of a silk shirt makes us panicky.
Nor shall we become desperately ill at ease if labor soon
succeeds in bringing the remaining twenty million organizable
workers into the ranks of unionism. Equality of bargaining
power can be attained by these millions in no other way save
by organization, and without this equality they are dependent
for a living upon the benevolence of employers. A mere
kindergarten acquaintance with the condition of unorganized
1922.] THE WORKINGMAN AND HIS WAGES 229
labor in the past is sufficient in itself to make us say with Pope
Leo: "We may lay it down as a general and lasting law that
workingmen's associations should be so organized and gov-
erned as to furnish the best and most suitable means for at-
taining what is aimed at, that is to say, for helping each indi-
vidual member to better his condition to the utmost in body,
mind, and property." *
Labor Unions may, like Capital, abuse their power, and
selfishly exact unfair remuneration. Labor has already, in
several instances, attempted just this very thing. It is the
plain duty of moralists to teach the moralities of the situation.
We can distinguish between the right to organize and the
abuse of a power. We can distinguish between a free con-
tract and a fair contract. We have our Catholic principles to
apply practically to all relations born of modern industry, and
the time is already at hand when it is neither safe nor sane to
ignore the gravity of the situation.
In our country, today, are millions and millions of wage-
earners. One may hate, with all his soul, the doctrine of eco-
nomic determinism and still understand that the food these
people eat, the clothes they wear, the very air they breathe in
their homes, are in some way conditioned by the wages they
receive. Their health, their thoughts, their outlook on life,
their moral and spiritual life, and their attitude towards re-
ligion and the Church are not unrelated to the size of their pay
envelope. Their souls are stirred and their passions aroused,
while resentment fills the hearts of many.
"As far as regards the Church," says Leo, "its assistance
will never be wanting, be the time or the occasion what it
may. . . . Every minister of Holy Religion must throw into
the conflict all the energy of his mind, and all the strength
of his endurance." And said Pope Benedict : "The clergy and
people, instead of merely opposing the claims of the prole-
tariat, ought to support them, provided that they are within
the bounds of what is just and honest, as set forth in the
immortal encyclical, Rerum Novarum, of Leo XIII." (From
a letter to Cardinal Lucon, 1919.)
4 Encyclical, Rerum Novarum.
THE WHITE LADY.
BY W. E. WALSH.
I.
1695-1850.
IMERICK was the end of all things. Not an Irish
gentleman remains in the land. Only the Kerne is
left — and his spirit is hopelessly broken. We have
looked on the last of the Gael, and now the later
Irish, it seems, must go. The Dutchmen — His Maj-
esty's friends — are fighting over the spoils. Confiscations were
begun before the ink was dry on the hapless Treaty.
"How long shall I be able to hold my own? The Geraldines
took this land from the native Chieftains, and my people took it
from them. When will my turn come? What would my father,
who fought under Hugh O'Neil, have done in this affair? Hugo
and I took different sides — ^he was in Limerick, and I outside its
walls. Which of us was right? Hugo is gone to France with
Sarsfield — and. Faith, I think he has the best of a bad bargain.
There will be good fighting there under a Christian King. As for
this country, there is a curse on it. It is crushed, and will rise
no more.***
Doctor Lacy handed the little book, with its worn and scuffed
binding, to Michael Valiancy. The two men looked at each other
for a long moment. The doctor ran his fingers through his
grizzled beard.
"But for the grace of God, or the prompting of the devil —
which was it? — you'd not be here today.**
The older man took him up with bitterness in his voice:
"And my elder son would not be a convicted felon — **
"Hold a minute, my dear Michael — a political convict is not
a common felon. It*s not the first time your family has bred a
rebel, or a patriot, whichever you like to call him. Don*t be for-
getting Hugo.**
"Ah, that was different. Right or wrong, there was no dis-
grace in fighting for the Stuarts— after all, James was our right-
ful King. But these Fenians — the dregs of the country — what
did they want? What could they hope to do?**
1 Diary of GiU>ert de Vallancie.
1922.] THE WHITE LADY 231
"What did they want? Sure, there's an easy answer to
that. They wanted what your grandfather wanted when he
joined Charlemont's volunteers and voted for Grattan's Bill to
make the Irish Parliament independent. Ah! that was a great
moment, Michael — there was never one like it in the long history
of this unhappy land. Your kind and my kind stood then for
the first time shoulder to shoulder with the native people."
Michael Valiancy shook his head impatiently:
**Yes, yes," he said, "but that, too, was different. Those
were men of power and substance — "
"Aye, it was different," the other interrupted. "There was
this difference, that England at that time was in trouble with
another set of rebels in the American Colonies, and could not
afford to provoke a united Ireland with two hundred thousand
Volunteers at her back; but if she had been as well prepared as
she was later, in '98, your grandfather might have shared the
fate of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and his friends — who were like-
wise men of power and substance. No, no, my dear old friend,
don't deceive yourself. England wasn't ready then, but when
she was, she knew that she could break that union of the people
and their natural leaders with the device that had never failed
since the Statute of Kilkenny was enacted; and she proved it in
1800, when many of the men who had voted with Grattan to free
their country from English domination, sold her back again into
a worse bondage. Your own brother, my Lord Ardilaun, bears
a title which came to him as part of the price of his father's con-
victions in that affair. Now, there's no need for you to be angry
because I tell you this — for I hold my own kindred to have been
no better.
"Hugh de Lacy despoiled the O'Ruaircs of the rich lands
of Meath, and accepted many an honor and title afterwards
to preserve the interest of an English King, and, though his
descendants held them for a long time, they lost them in the
end, like the Desmonds, to Elizabeth's undertakers — of whom
the first of your family was one. Sure, that's the history of every
one of our Anglo-Irish families — and a dirty one it is — and,
faith, I'll say this — that your boy, Roger, rebel or no, is a finer
gentleman than any you've had in your family, not excepting your
grandfather nor your grandfather's grand-uncle, Hugo, who
fought under Sarsfield at Limerick."
Michael Valiancy rose and stood by a deep-embrasured win-
dow which overlooked a noble expanse of lawn fringed with trees,
through whose upper branches the tower of Castle Ardilaun was
visible. The building in which he stood was known as the Dower
232
THE WHITE LADY [Nov.,
House, and was changed but little since the days when a Norman
Baron had built it; but the Castle had been renewed and re-
modeled a half century earlier with money which the doctor
would have described as the price of his father's perfidy. If he
lived long enough, he, too, would enjoy the advantages of that
questionable transaction, for his brother had married late in life
and had no issue; and one day Roger, his elder son— convicted
of treason and transported to a penal settlement— would have
been the fourth Baron Ardilaun, But now he would inherit
neither title nor estate — and his younger brother, Gilbert, would
be the richer for his fault.
Michael Valiancy turned to his friend, with the pain of that
thought working in his face. He had loved this errant son — a
dashing, handsome boy — more than anything else in the world.
"Perhaps you're right, Dan," he said in a lifeless tone. "And
I haven't heart to be angry, whether or no. If we'd had our own
Parliament these last years, I dare say we'd not have let the food
go out of the country while the people were starving; that's the
one thing that drove the boy to madness — and his mother with
him. They're her people, you know — more than yours or mine —
and though her heart is breaking for Roger, she'd not have had
him different. As for me, she'll hardly look at me. I let him go
without a word, and she can't forget it."
There was silence between them for a moment, and then he
went on with an eager break in his voice :
"Have you heard anything, Dan — anything more at all about
the report of their escape?"
"Not a word, old friend; but don't you be fretting now.
There's no doubt that some of them escaped — and Roger's not
the boy to sit back when a thing like that's in hand. I tell you,
if any got away, your lad is among them, and by this time he's
safe in America."
IL
1919.
When Gerald, sixth Baron Ardilaun, returned at the close of
the war to his home, in Ireland, he told himself, with a glow of
self-righteousness, that the world had been freed at last of tyr-
anny and oppression, and that he had done his share in bringing
about this desirable consummation.
If he had lived in Dublin, this comforting conviction might
have lasted for a longer period— for what he would have read in
the only paper patronized by his kind, would not have disturbed
him greatly. To the landed gentry in Ireland, discontent was a
1922.] THE WHITE LADY 233
perennial which flourished among those not so fortunate as to
have either a sufficiency of land or a lucrative berth in His Maj-
esty's service, and they regarded it as a mere commonplace that
persuasion of a more or less forcible character should be used to
keep it within bounds.
Lord Ardilaun, however, did not believe like the majority
of his class, that his less fortunate fellow-countrymen were hope-
lessly detrimental because they refused to accept the view that
their country was intended by Providence to be a sporting sub-
division and recruiting ground of the larger Island. On the con-
trary, he was always ready to excuse, if not to justify, the dis-
turbances which took place as a result of repeated denials of their
national aspirations. He had been conscious of a sense of dis-
appointment when the operation of the Home Rule Bill had been
postponed for the period of the war, but he had been easily led
to believe that this course was warranted by the attitude of the
dissentient minority.
But now that the war was over, a generous measure of self-
government would extend the blessings of peace, he was sure,
even to his distressful country. It is true, that in his absence
the Dail Eireann — a National Parliament — had been set up in
Ireland without the consent of the British Crown — ^but this, he
thought, need not be taken seriously. The people were being
imposed on by agitators, but as soon as they could feel quite sure
that Ulster was not going to be permitted to rule the British Is-
lands, they would welcome a reasonable settlement.
He had not been many days at home, however, before he
began to have doubts about the situation. In the first place, he
was dubious of the Government's policy. Wholesale arrests were
bad enough, but the show of military force, obviously intended
to intimidate the people, was worse. If he had not seen it him-
self, he would not have believed it possible, but it happened at
this time that the authorities were giving particular attention to
Limerick and the adjoining counties. Machine guns, tanks, and
armored cars were very much in evidence, and prohibited areas —
defined by barriers of barbed wire — were the fashion. Beside the
fact that he was sick of the panoply of war, there was the almost
incredible evidence that government by military force still existed ;
and his irritation was not allayed by the further fact that his
own movements were subject to restraint.
He returned from a visit to the city of Limerick in a very
thoughtful mood. That night, he studied a road map of the
counties south of the Shannon, and planned a tour in his car
which kept him away for the best part of a week.
234 THE WHITE LADY [Nov..
He came back from that expedition burning with shame and
indignation. Was this what he had been fighting for? Was it
for this, countless young lives had been sacrificed? He remem-
bered a sentence in one of Lloyd George's speeches — one that had
thrilled him at the time, and often afterwards : "When this war
is over, the whole world will be free; there will not be anywhere
on earth a people governed against its will." And now — what?
Every principle on which they prided themselves was violated.
The scenes he had witnessed with scorn and abhorrence in
Belgium, were duplicated here: prescribed areas, suppression of
speech, nightly raids on domiciles — with the inevitable accom-
paniment of insult and outrage, imprisonment without accusa-
tion or trial — if these meant anything, they meant deliberate and
systematic provocation. He had protested here and there to an
officer in command, and had been told that these people were in
sympathy with Sinn Fein. And this was the way they were to
be taught to love British rule! It was sheer madness! He had
refused to believe stories that were told about the treatment of
prisoners in Mount joy and Belfast, but now — anything was
possible.
Something must be done. He knew the Chief Secretary —
knew him very well. A decent sort, but too saturated with
Downing Street methods to be the right man at a time like this.
Would Englishmen never learn that Irishmen cannot be intim-
idated — that coercion merely spreads the disaflfection?
Something must be done. It was more than likely that his
effort would be wasted— but, at any rate, he must try. He would
go up to Dublin at once.
III.
Lord Ardilaun's journey was nearly ended, and already his
mind was busy with the agreeable task of selecting food and wine
for the dinner at his club, when adventure thrust itself into his
path.
It was almost dusk, and his car was traveling smoothly and
silently at the rate of a good thirty-five Irish miles, when a short,
sharp "honk" behind him broke the stillness, and he looked back
to find another car bearing down on him with amazing swiftness.
He gave way instantly, diminishing his speed as he did so, and a
powerful, low-bodied machine shot past him. It was going so
fast that he had hardly more than time to anathematize the folly
of such reckless driving before it had disappeared around a bend
of the road. Almost at the same moment a series of startling
1922.] THE WHITE LADY 235
sounds disturbed the serene and peaceful evening. First, there
was a grinding crash for which, he thought with a sinking heart,
there could be but one explanation. Then, after a momentary
silence, a man's voice cried out, and the report of a pistol shot
followed. Then another, and another.
Lord Ardilaun saw a man running towards him in the dusk,
holding a smoking revolver in his hand. Three other men ap-
peared at the curve of the road with leveled weapons. Another
report, and the one who ran stumbled and fell. He tried to rise,
lurched forward a pace, and lay prone again.
Lord Ardilaun brought his car to a stop and leaped down
beside the fallen man. As he put his hand on him, the fellow
turned over suddenly and looked up at him with a tense, ques-
tioning look:
"They got me, I guess," he said with an effort, "but you don't
look like a friend of theirs, and perhaps we can beat them yet.
Quick — lean over — take this; if you get clear of these black-
guards, deliver it at the Castle. It's important, you understand —
very important."
Lord Ardilaun, still bending and screening the operation,
thrust a letter-case into the left hand pocket of his motor coat
as a voice called out behind him :
"Stand clear there! Look sharp! No harm will come to
you if you do as you're told. First, put up your hands in the air
— quick! That's right. See that you keep them up."
Hands upraised, he watched the proceedings with a curious
sense of detachment. The situation was familiar. These men
were Irish — Sinn Feiners, no doubt — but, save that they wore no
uniform, they might have been French or British soldiers running
down a German spy. What part was he to play? At present,
there seemed to be no choice. Even if, by a sudden dash, he had
been able to get away, he could not go forward. If that desperate
fellow, willing to take any risk, had not been able to get through,
the road must be well blocked.
Two of the attacking party were kneeling, searching the
wounded man. The leader called to them impatiently:
"Hurry, boys, hurry! We've no time to lose."
One of the men looked up.
"It's not here, sir. He must have got rid of it — or maybe it's
in the car."
"Nonsense! He'd not have left it in the car — but did he
throw it away along the . . . Stop!" His gaze fell on Lord
Ardilaun. "Ah! perhaps you have been kind enough to under-
take its delivery. Come here, Sean. Keep your hands well up,
236
THE WHITE LADY [Nov.,
sir. I am sorry— but I must ask you to allow us to search you—
unless, indeed, you would prefer to save us the trouble—"
There was nothing else to be done. Lord Ardilaun yielded
gracefully.
"In my coat pocket," he said. "Shall I hand it to you?"
"One moment, if you please. Sean, see if he has a weapon.
Very good, sir. Now, will you kindly hand it to Sean. Thank
you very much, indeed."
The speaker took the leather case from the hand of his sub-
ordinate and, having glanced at its contents, placed it in his
breast pocket.
"Now, sir," he said, "I am afraid we shall have to ask a
greater favor of you. We need your car. Mine is hardly more
than a junk heap, as a result of the recklessness of our injured
friend here, and his is not much better. In the first place, we
must put him where he will be cared for, and then we must get
away ourselves. You cannot very well walk to Dublin, so I sup-
pose you had better go with us. You will miss a good dinner,
but I promise you that you shall not starve. I am sorry, but it
cannot be helped. After all, it is for the good of your country —
perhaps that will console you."
He gazed at his lordship with a half-cynical, but not un-
friendly, smile and, as the latter made no reply, shrugged his
shoulders and walked over to the car.
"Will you get in, sir — the far seat, if you please, I shall drive
myself. Ah! Rolls-Royce — a beautiful car." He turned to his
companions, who stood respectfully by: "Sean, yourself and
Michael will lift the wounded man into the tonneau. Steady!
handle him gently — so! You, Michael, will hold him in a com-
fortable position, and Sean will be on the lookout for trouble."
As he seated himself and turned the ignition switch, he
leaned towards his guest:
"Sean was my sergeant during the late war," he said, signif-
icantly, "and I can assure you that he is very reliable in an
emergency.
Lord Ardilaun's silence must not be misunderstood. He was
far from feeling anger or chagrin. On the contrary, the situa-
tion intrigued him greatly. He was sorry to go without his din-
ner—but it looked as if there might be compensations. He had
seen the working-methods of the Government; here was an op-
portunity to learn something about these dreamers who dared
to defy the might of the British Empire. Decidedly— it might be
very interesting.
1.922.] THE WHITE LADY 237
IV.
If Fate had intended to cast about Lord Ardilaun*s adventure
a glamour of romantic interest, the setting and dramatis personx
were well chosen. When, after a night of sleep, he found himself,
within the crumbling walls of an ancient ruin, sitting at break-
fast face to face with a lady who had sat opposite, or beside him,
many a time at a dinner table in Dublin, he felt inclined to pinch
himself to see if he were really awake. The fact that the lady
was the sister of one of the highest officials of the "Castle," did
not serve to lessen the sense of unreality which possessed him.
"It is strange," she was saying, "that you had never met Alan
Trench. Alan is, or was, one of the most popular men in Dub-
lin. You see, he has all the essentials — good looks, good con-
nections, and a large estate. But I suppose you were hardly
going about much in his time. He had been away in America
for a year when the war broke out, and he returned post-haste
and was off again in no time with the Fusileers. He went through
the Gallipoli fiasco, and was invalided home in very bad shape.
The war made a tremendous change in Alan. When he could
get around, and had his discharge, he went to Walter and told
him what he thought of the condition of things here. I fancy
you can guess the rest. Walter is my brother, and — well, the
fact that I am here shows what I think of his principles — ^but he
has one virtue, at least: he is absolutely honest. He is not like
the politicians — he doesn't preach what he won't practice. He
doesn't care whether it's right or wrong. It's better to break
Ireland, he says, than to break up the Empire. Rotten, isn't it?
A good German principle! That's what Alan thought. My
word! Alan was immense! He gave it to him straight. 'The
boys that died in the Dardanelles,' he said — *and I guess it was the
same everywhere — thought they were fighting for an Empire that
believed in what it preached. If these Prussian methods in Ire-
land are not dropped,' he said, 'I'm going to pitch my lot with Sinn
Fein.' *A11 right,' said Walter, *it might be a good thing if they
had one or two gentlemen among them.' And that's all. I backed
up Alan, and told Walter I was going with him. He only
laughed. 'You'll not like it in gaol, Molly,' he said. 'They'll not
let you take your breakfast in bed.* That was like Walter — he
makes a joke of everything — ^but, anyhow, you see I'm not getting
my breakfast in bed now — and I never felt so well in my life."
Lord Ardilaun looked and listened with a somewhat dazed
consciousness. This lady — one of his own sort — was virtually
his gaoler. Major Trench, his captor of the night before, after
238
THE WHITE LADY [Nov.,
more polite apologies, had again borrowed his car and departed.
The only other person who might possibly interfere with his
movements was the man, Michael, who had prepared the break-
fast. Sean had apparently gone with the major.
There was, however, nothing to tempt him in the prospect
of flight. His car was gone, and he knew nothing of his where-
abouts, save that he was on the summit of a hill overlooking, he
thought, the pasture lands of Meath— where human beings were
as scarce as cattle were plentiful. Besides, he would not be satis-
fied to go without learning something of the hopes and aims of
these people. He wanted more than anything else to have a quiet
talk with Major Trench.
But he gazed with increasing wonder at his companion. By
what miracle of moral transformation had this young and charm-
ing woman, who belonged, by tradition and training, to the
ascendant class, been ranged on the side of the despised masses
in so hopeless a struggle?
His face must have betrayed the direction of his thoughts,
for she interrupted them with an amused smile:
"My dear Gerald, please don't look at me as if the last prayer
had just been said over my dead body. You will be surprised to
learn how many of us there are in this movement. There's hardly
a Unionist family outside Ulster but has at least one son or
daughter, actively or passively, in sympathy with it."
"But, dear Molly," said his lordship, very gravely, "what
good, what possible good, can come of it?"
"Dear friend," she rejoined, "can you imagine the good of
being honest for the first time in your life? While you were
away fighting German aggression in Flanders, we have been fight-
ing British aggression here. You were spared the edifying spec-
tacle of a Government preaching freedom for small nations in
Europe, and putting it down by military force at home. But now
you are here and you must face the situation; and if you are
honest, you will not count the cost before you choose. That is
just what we have always done : we have stood aside and cheated
ourselves with lies and sophistries. You have only to look around
you to see the result. These people are our people. We have
always had a monopoly of the wealth and culture — and how
have we used it? Not for them— -not to guide and lead them— but
against them. Every concession they have won in local govern-
ment reform, has been won in spite of our opposition.
"I used to sneer," she went on after a pause, "like others of
my kind. I hated the endless talk, the rhetoric — the everlasting
pleading at Westminster, while English members sat back and
1922.] THE WHITE LADY 239
listened with a patronizing smile. When Carson put through
the gun-running and, lining up his Covenanters, defied the power
of the United Kingdom, I said: *There are people who do things!*
Of course, I didn't stop to think that Carson couldn't have done
it if he had not had the Tory Aristocracy of England behind him.
The gun-running at Howth followed. The troops which were
sent to intercept the landing, retreated before the determined
stand of the Volunteers — but they made no objection to firing a
volley into an unarmed crowd in Dublin. Perhaps this incident
set me thinking — and the promotion of Carson to the Cabinet may
have helped the process; I don't really know. But the Easter
Rising, which came like a sudden earthquake, turned the world
upside down for me — and for many others.
*'I remember the fierce, unreasoning joy which thrilled me
as I realized that these men had at last taken guns in their hands
and were fighting and dying — instead of talking — for Ireland. A
Nation was reborn — and baptized in its blood! I said this over
and over — and laughed to think that it was / who said it. Then
came the aftermath — the shooting without trial of Pearse and his
comrades.
"There was, at first, a sense of stupefaction — the stunning
effect of an incredible blow. This was succeeded by a spread-
ing flame of resentment, more deadly because it did not blaze
into wild anger. I think the Irish people realized their position
more clearly then than ever before. If these men had been Eng-
lish, they'd have been tried by their own countrymen; if they
had been Germans, they'd have been treated as prisoners of war.
But being Irish, they were outside the pale of civilized law, and
were shot like dogs without a trial.
"To me, there was a special sense of loss in the death of
Pearse. If only he could have been spared to the great work that
he was doing! Once, when they were giving some plays at St.
Enda's, Walter was, of course, invited, and took me with him. I
spoke to Pearse, and he told me of his work — of his ambition to
see Irish boys and girls brought up, at last, v^th a knowledge of
their language and their history. Over the entrance to the school
there was a picture of the Hero, Cuchulainn, and under it the in-
scription, quoted from the Saga: *I care not if my life be but
the span of a night and a day, so that my name be remembered
by the Men of Eirinn.' . . . Oentle teacher and dreamer! He is
surely entitled to share this epitaph with his great prototype of the
heroic period."
There were tears in the eyes of the Honorable Mary Nevill
as she finished her recital, and Lord Ardilaun stretched his hand
240
THE WHITE LADY [Nov.,
across the table in sympathy. He had set his face against the
sentimental aspects of this problem, but she had moved him in
spite of himself. She held his hand for a moment, and smiled
at him through her tears.
"I have told you only," she said, "of the events that induced
me to give up the traditions of my caste— but you know the rest
of the story as well as I do. You have asked me what good can
come of this movement, and I tell you now that great good has
already come. Our people whine and cringe no longer; they do
not beg for relief from a Congested Districts Board; they are
cultivating self-respect and self-reliance — these are good things,
are they not? We have a Parliament, chosen by ourselves, and
while we remain united as we are now, no power on earth can
force us to recognize another. If there is ever agreement be-
tween England and Ireland, it will be an agreement of equals,
sanctioned by the free people of both countries."
V.
Gerald, the sixth Baron, sat in the library at Castle Ardilaun.
More than a week had passed since his return, and his mind was
still seething with doubt and perplexity. His thoughts moved in
a circle, endlessly, bringing him back invariably to the point
where he had begun. It was not that the moral issue was clouded
— he had no doubt at all about that; if Ireland were subject to
Germany, every statesman in Britain would have championed her
cause. But now that England's liberty was no longer threatened,
those who governed her were setting a higher value on the Em-
pire's material greatness than on the Nation's word. That was
what he had to face! Could anything be gained for Ireland by
resistance?
Only yesterday he had further proof that the policy of Dub-
lin Castle was one of deliberate terrorism. An old man — one he
knew well, the most harmless of creatures — had been killed by
the soldiers in a revolting and cold-blooded manner. The old
fellow was teaching a Gaelic class in the town, when the hall was
raided by the military. An order was given to clear the room,
and the teacher, with an instinct to see his pupils go first, was
not quick enough in leaving, and received a bayonet thrust in the
back. He died three hours later.
This incident settled his lordship's mind on one point. He
was Deputy-Lieutenant for his county, and a Justice of the Peace.
Since the military were to rule, these honors must be resigned at
once. He would write to the Lord Chancellor, and give his rea-
sons fully.
1922.] THE WHITE LADY 241
Lord Ardilaun was in the act of writing this letter, when
Martin O'Gara appeared at the library door. Martin was the old-
est person on the estate, and his lordship had something of the
feeling for him that he had for the family pictures. The old man
had come to him, just as those inanimate things had come, out of
the twilight of other days. He belonged to a generation that was
almost forgotten. He had known Ardilaun's father, grandfather,
and great-grandfather. If he had lived in a more romantic age,
he would have been the family Bard, or Seanachie; but as it was,
he was only a sort of superior groom and gamekeeper. But
whether as gamekeeper, or — as he was in the lifetime of the late
Lord Ardilaun — in the more important office of trainer of a rac-
ing stable, Martin was always a person to be considered, and
from Mrs. Delany, the housekeeper, down to the humblest scul-
lery maid, he was treated by all with the greatest respect. As
one who had shared in the family greatness for four generations,
he was inclined to be jealous of his dignity, and this feeling was
deferred to by none more than by the master himself. His lord-
ship could never forget the hours he had spent as a boy at the
feet of this little old man who told such interesting stories of the
past — of his grandfather, and of the grand-uncle who had re-
belied and been transported, and of the mother who grieved so
deeply for him that when she died her spirit remained to haunt
the ancient Dower House — and who still haunted it, it was said,
to this very day.
The old man stood before him now with a troubled look in
the watery eyes that were so blue against the pink of his wrinkled
countenance.
"What bad news is it that's fretting you, Martin?*'
"It's bad news, sure enough, Master Gerald, for your beauti-
ful car is gone."
"The car — the motor, you mean?" Lord Ardilaun was in-
credulous.
"No less than that, y*r honor; and sure, it's a genteel way
they have with them — bad luck to their impudence! — for here's
a letter they left for you, asking your honor's pardon, no doubt,
for making so free with your property."
His lordship took the missive that was handed to him.
When he had read its contents, he sat for a while looking absently
out of the window. The old man watched him with eager, cu-
rious eyes.
"It's all right, Martin. The car will be returned in a few
days."
He smiled at the undisguised disappointment on Martin's
VOL. CXVI. 16
242
THE WHITE LADY [Nov.,
face. He rose and laid his hand affectionately on the old fellow's
shoulder.
"I can't tell you any more just now, 'a cava — these are
strange times, and strange things are happening around us."
Martin's face brightened at the kindness of his tone and
gesture.
"It's truth you're speaking, sir — and It's only God knows
what the end will be. But there's something else I ought to be
telling you, sir. The White Lady is come again."
"The White Lady! Ah, now, Martin, you've been listening
to the maids again."
"I have not, sir. I saw her with my own eyes."
"Come, now — are you quite sure of that?"
"I give you my word, sir — did I ever tell you a lie? Do you
think I'd be worrying y'r honor if there was any doubt at all?
Listen, Master Gerald — it was last evening, when those divils were
ravagin' your car. I heard the sound of the motor, and thought
to bate them to the gates by takin' the short cut past the Dower
House. I was runnin' as fast as me old legs would carry me,
when I saw her. She was in the winda', and I saw her as plain
as I'm seein' you this minute. Glory be to God! It was herself
as sure as I hope to go to Heaven."
Lord Ardilaun took a turn or two up and down the floor.
He was not convinced that Martin had seen the White Lady, but
he was an Irishman and, in spite of reason and common sense, he
could not rid himself of a certain uneasiness. He knew the story,
of course — always before some important event — a birth or a
death, usually — the White Lady appeared. He stopped and faced
the old man with a whimsical smile on his lips.
"Well, what do you make of it, Martin? Why has she come
back now?"
Martin O'Gara's old face was twisted in an expression of
anxious embarrassment. He shifted nervously from one foot to
the other.
"God save us, sir, I don't like to be thinking of it. I'd not
have said a word about it but for the fear that is on me. There's
only yourself left of the long line I've known. Sure, I remember
herself— a lovely, livin' woman— the time they took her boy from
her, as fme and brave a lad as ever lived. Master Gerald, sir, I'm
a very old man, and I've been hopin' to see you married and with
a son to succeed you before I go. And now, I don't know what
to do or say at all. If you would stay at home, sir, till all this
trouble is over. It's not safe to be drivin' about the country these
times. God help us! I'm afraid to think of what may happen."
1922.] THE WHITE LADY 243
Lord Ardilaun was more moved by this evidence of affection
and loyalty than he cared to show. He comforted his faithful
retainer, and sent him away with an assurance that he would go
about no more for a time. When he had finished the interrupted
letter, he sat pondering again the disquieting facts of the situa-
tion. There was no comfort in it anywhere. The thought of
passive acceptance was intolerable — and, on the other hand, re-
sistance was hopeless. Yet, hopeless or not, he must face the
issue.
The White Lady had not counted the cost: she had given
willingly the life that was dearer to her than her own. And now,
she had come, it seemed, to claim his. What nonsense he was
thinking. The dead cannot return — not even in Ireland. Yet,
Martin was very positive. Well, if the old man was right, he
would give the White Lady a chance to show herself, and to tell
him where his duty lay.
VL
Lord Ardilaun had not crossed the threshold of the Dower
House for many years; and the fact that it was believed to be
haunted, kept others away. It was built like the later structure,
on a point of land which had been originally an island. The
name in its Gaelic form indicates this fact: Ard-Ilan — high is-
land. In the course of time, the narrow channel separating it
from the mainland — and spanned, no doubt, by a drawbridge —
had been filled in and was now part of a driveway bordered by
stately trees. The Dower House stood on a hill on the right of
the driveway, which curved in a wide half-circle to the Castle,
for which, in less warlike times, a site more suitable for the nec-
essary lawns and garden had been chosen. The rear of the
Dower House overlooked the upper reaches of the Shannon, and
a flight of rude steps, cut into the declivity, led down to the
water's edge.
His lordship required no keys to enter; there were no locked
doors. In rural Ireland, under normal conditions, the rights of
property are universally respected. He expected to find the inte-
rior damp and musty, and was surprised that the air was quite
fresh. The reason was not far to seek : a window of the drawing-
room was wide open. He chuckled softly. The White Lady, it
seemed, was a believer in the virtue of fresh air.
His pulses quickened with a pleasurable sense of excitement.
Who was it Martin had seen? He thought of Mary Nevill. "We
shall call upon you soon," she had said at parting. The promise
244
THE WHITE LADY [Nov.,
had been kept. They had called and taken his car. Martin had
seen Miss Nevill at the window — his superstitious imagination
had done the rest. But what was she doing in the house?
While he stood thus, speculating, a distant sound caught his
ears the exhaust of a motor boat. He found himself listening
intently, with a sense of expectancy, and he smiled at the ab-
surdity of it. The situation was getting on his nerves. He was
scenting adventure in the most trifling things.
The pulsing rhythm ceased. A launch, white as a swan,
swam softly around the curve of the shore and approached the
decrepit landing. A woman leaped lightly ashore. She stooped,
a few words were spoken in low tones, and the craft resumed its
flight, its slim prow lifted, like a huge bird trailing its feet in the
stream.
Lord Ardilaun watched, crouching at the window. The
White Lady. Yes! As she climbed the steps, through the open-
ing of a long motor coat, he caught glimpses of a garment, not
white, but a pale saffron, which would look like white in the
gloom of evening. But who could she be? Not Miss Nevill —
nor anyone he had ever laid eyes on.
Long, heavy draperies hung by the deep embrasured window.
He hid himself in their ample folds. A footstep sounded on the
threshold — advanced softly into the room. A breathless silence
followed. When he could bear it no longer he looked out. She
was standing before a picture — a portrait of Roger Valiancy's
mother — she who was known as the White Lady. The golden
light from the window fell on her face. Heavens! It might
have been her own portrait she was gazing at.
She heard the sudden catching of his breath. She turned,
and they faced each other for a moment without words. A mad
thought went through his bewildered mind. The White Lady
was alive — had been reincarnated by some miracle. The woman
was the first to regain composure. She smiled at him.
"Well, cousin," she said coolly, "you have spoiled my little
game.'*
He stared blankly. "Cousin!" he echoed.
A smile rippled again about her mouth.
"Cousin," she repeated.
"Who are you?" he said, catching his breath again.
"I have told you twice," she said. "Have you never heard of
Roger Valiancy?"
"Roger Valiancy ! By Jove, yes ! You look like his mother."
She burst into a peal of laughter. The music of it echoed
strangely, almost weirdly, in that dim, old room.
1922.] THE SOWING 245
"Heavens! Do I look as old as that? I am his grand-
daughter, if you please.'*
Lord Ardilaun was silent, dazed, his mind grappling with
this strange disclosure; but the girl was quite at her ease. She
regarded him with a whimsical expression.
"Oh, I am glad you are dark. I was so worried about it."
"Dark!" He looked so puzzled and bewildered that she
broke into laughter again.
"Ah, it's a shame to be teasing you like this. But have you
never heard of the dark Valiancies and the fair Valiancies? No,
it is evident that you have not. Well, I will tell you. From the
time of Hugo and Gilbert, all the dark Valiancies have loved Ire-
land, and the fair ones have loved themselves, and their goods
and chattels. My grandfather was dark, and yours was fair.
Mine gave up everything for Ireland, and yours accepted a title
which was the price for which his country had been betrayed."
(to be concluded.)
THE SOWING.
BY JOHN R. MORELAND.
I CAST a handful of small sins
Like thorn-plant seed among life's wheat.
And then forgot them every one.
Youth was so sweet.
But had I kown my bleeding hands
Must reap the grain for autumn's need,
I w^ould have planted in life's field
Some nobler seed.
The BaE and the Cross.
The Ball and the Cross is one of the symbols of Christianity, It
signifies, as is obvious, the World and the Faith. It is our intention
to publish monthly in this department two or three short articles, which
may appropriately be grouped under the caption chosen.
THE REVIVAL OF CATHOLICISM AMONG THE
INTELLECTUALS OF FRANCE.
THOSE who have had an opportunity of coming in touch with
the intellectual elite of France during the last fifteen years,
have been deeply impressed by the mentality of the rising genera-
tion. One of its leaders spoke of it most exactly, when he said:
"We must return to the faith of our ancestors and take their part
against our fathers." The young men who came to manhood
about the year 1890 were altogether different from those of the
preceding generation, who had seen the defeat of 1871, and had
retained what has come to be known as the "mentality of the
vanquished." The skepticism of Ernest Renan, and the so-called
scientism of the positivists, did not satisfy the developing minds
of the new generation.
The change of religious ideas among the intellectuals began
in earnest when Brunetiere published the famous articles in which
he proclaimed the need of returning to the Catholic Church.
With Brunetiere, or after him, Blondel, 0116 Laprune, Paul
Bourget, and Maurice Barres led the way back to the Catholic
Church.
The young men who were to sacrifice their lives for their
country in the World War, gave the next, and greatest, impulse
to the Catholic movement. "To be truly French, we must be
Catholics," was the conclusion of the famous "Inquiry," made in
1910 by Massis, under the pen-name of Agaton. It would seem
that these young men had a presentiment of what was going to
take place. "Nous sommes une g^niration sacrifice" said one
of them, a representative of the Catholic revival among the intel-
lectuals, sometime before the war broke out. And never was
an heroic presentment more strikingly realized. The supreme
sacrifice made by many in defense of country has brought forth
wonderful results. Let us look at France today and study the
fruits of their efifort.
1922.] THE BALL AND THE CROSS 247
Leaving out of consideration Paris and Alsace-Lorraine, for
which no statistics have as yet been made, there are in France
ten million fervent Catholics in a population of thirty-four mill-
ions. By fervent Catholics, I mean those who perform regularly
all their religious duties and receive Communion at least four
times a year. Seventeen million more have been baptized, and
attend church more or less regularly. Thus only seven million
are indifferent, and among them very few are bigoted. It is in
the large cities that the return to Catholicism is most evident.
Of Paris much that is derogatory has been said, but, to be fair,
we must also say much that is complimentary. There are four
hundred thousand strangers in Paris, many of them are not par-
ticularly inclined to piety, yet six million Holy Communions are
distributed annually to a population of four million people. The
contributions of Catholics to their parishes amount annually to
three million francs. In 1905, there were in Paris and its suburbs
one hundred and fifty-three churches and chapels; in the first
months of 1922 there were two hundred and two.
In the entire country, there are at present twelve thousand
Catholic schools, employing twenty-nine thousand teachers, and
giving instruction to a million children. We should also recall
that last year France gave five million francs to the Propa-
gation of the Faith, the total amount contributed by the Catholics
of the whole world being twenty-three million. According to the
latest statistics, France is still giving two-thirds of the Catholic
missionaries of the world. This proves conclusively that the
Freemasons, during the fifty years of their supremacy, even if
they did de-Christianize the land to some extent by means of their
laicized school system, were ultimately unsuccessful, since most
of the population remains Catholic.
The revival of Catholicism is at present most conspicuous
among the educated classes. The influence of the intellectual
elite upon the public is perhaps greater in France than in any
other country of the world, the French nation as a whole being
influenced more by ideas than by facts. To strengthen my state-
ment, I shall give statistics. In the "Normal Superieure," a
State school in which the scholars who intend to become uni-
versity professors receive their classical training, the movement
toward the traditional faith started some years before the war
under the leadership of a young man called Pierre Payet. So
well did he and his companions succ'eed in the work of conver-
sion, that two-thirds of the students of the school are now fervent
Catholics.
The Polytechnique ranks highest among the scientific institu-
248
THE BALL AND THE CROSS [Nov.,
tions of the State. Like the Normal Sup6rieure, it admits only
those students who have shown themselves of remarkable ability;
consequently, its scholarship is very high, and the men it trains
have great influence upon the affairs of the country. Marshal
Foch and Fayolle took their courses in mathematics and engineer-
ing there. Just twenty years ago, the spirit of the school was
most anti-Catholic, for Catholicism was considered unscientific.
The change in the attitude of the students and authorities is,
therefore, of some interest.
As early as 1910, some of the scholars made up their minds
to become better acquainted with the Church. They formed a
club and invited a distinguished Sulpician, TAbb^ Labouche, to
lecture to them every week on Catholic dogma. The following
statement which they made to him bespeaks their attitude:
"We do not wish you to prove to us that the Catholic religion is
the true one, for of that we are all certain; she alone can answer
the important problems of life and give peace to society. But
we desire to become acquainted with her moral teachings."
At present, there is no opposition against Catholicism at that
great centre of learning; the military authorities who rule the
school have shown themselves very liberal, and the majority of
its students have a sympathetic understanding of Catholicism.
The Catholics have organized themselves into an association
which attends Mass in a body every Sunday in the Church of St.
Etienne, which is situated next to the school. The average attend-
ance is two hundred. In the same church, the Catholic "Poly-
technicians" and the graduates make their Easter duty each year.
In 1912, there were five hundred and fifty; in 1922, nine hundred.
Retreats have also been held for the students; the one given last
year was attended by two hundred and four. Lastly, of every
normal graduation class of from two hundred and sixty to three
hundred, ten are Jews, ten Protestants, and sixty are very
good Catholics. Nearly three-fifths of the total number of stu-
dents make their Easter duty.
American artists are well acquainted with the "Academic des
Beaux-Arts" of Paris. Perhaps they will be surprised to learn
that at present one-third of its students are Catholics, and that
they have a society of their own, "L'Arche," which exists for the
purpose of promoting the Catholic conception of art.
But the fact which manifests best the revival of the old faith
in France is the remarkable increase in vocations since the war.
I do not say that the number of vocations is sufficient to satisfy
the needs of the people, for many priests were killed in the war,
and there is a need of many parishes and schools. Many men who
1922.] THE BALL AND THE CROSS 249
occupied prominent positions in the world before the war, have
given them up to work for the glory of God. Among them, we
find lawyers, engineers, physicians, men who have been married,
and young students. Most of them are more than thirty-five years
old. We count among them a converted Socialist, three members
of the Socialist Labor Federation, sixty-four army officers, in-
cluding a general and a stafif colonel, and several navy officers,
who had distinguished themselves before the war. Most of these
men are now in the famous seminary of Issy, under the guidance
of the Sulpicians.
I do not say that all France is returning to the Church. I
do not lose sight of the fact that there is a great danger in France
due to birth control, but this is not true of France alone, but also
of many other countries. What I have endeavored to show is
simply that there is a marvelous revival of the Faith among
the intellectual 61ite of France. And this, of course, means much
for the revival of the Faith throughout the world.
OUT OF THE MOUTH OF A PAGAN.
FOR those who are worried about the "infiltrations" of pagan-
ism into Christianity, it may be consoling to know that the
process of osmosis works both ways, and that there are infiltra-
tions from Christianity into paganism.
The Christian religion is always in danger of being, to a
degree, paganized. But our religion is sufficiently vital to in-
fluence, at least slightly, the various forms of paganism with
which it comes in contact. In places where the Christian religion
has not utterly converted a pagan people, it has at least made
some impression upon their own worship.
Dr. Joseph McGlinchey, in his recent volume on The Con-
version of the Pagan World, reminds us that modern Hinduism
has borrowed from Buddhism, from Mohammedanism, and even
from Christianity.
Perhaps, the most remarkable recent instance of the influence
of a Christian idea upon a great mass of pagans is the episode
of the "non-resistance" revolution in India under Mahatma
Ghandi. The "revolution" is squelched. Ghandi is in jail. The
episode is closed. I trust, therefore, that we .may consider the
moral value of his adventure, quite apart from its political bearing.
It may be an exaggeration to say that, from the beginning of
the Swaraj movement, until his incarceration, Ghandi conducted
himself invariably in a Christ-like way. But his statements and
250
THE BALL AND THE CROSS [Nov.,
his actions, in the crisis, were not unworthy of being compared
with those of the One Who first preached and practised non-
resistance. And Ghandi claims that Christ was his inspiration.
"I remember," he said to his biographer,^ "how one verse of a
Gujarati poem, which, as a child, I learned in school, clung to me.
In substance, it was this: *If a man gives you a drink of water,
and you give him a drink in return, that is nothing; real beauty
consists of doing good against evil.' As a child, this verse had a
powerful influence over me, and I tried to carry it into practice.
Then came the 'Sermon on the Mount.' "
"But," said the biographer, "surely, the Bhagavad Gita came
first?"
"No," he replied, "of course, I knew the Bhagavad Gita in
Sanskrit tolerably well, but I had not made its teaching in that
particular a study. It was the New Testament which really
awakened me to the rightness and value of passive resistance.
When I read, in the *Sermon on the Mount,' such passages as:
'Resist not him that is evil, but whosoever smiteth thee on the
right cheek turn to him the other also,' and 'Love your enemies,
and pray for them that persecute you, that ye may be the sons of
your Father Who is in Heaven,' I was simply overjoyed, and
found my own opinion confirmed where I least expected it."
Having read the Sermon on the Mount, he absorbed it
thoroughly. Where can we find a more penetrating exegesis of
the gospel of non-resistance than in these words:
"Literally speaking, Ahimsa means non-killing." (We may
permit him to use the Hindu word. The idea is the idea of
Christ.) "But to me it has a world of meaning, and takes me into
realms much higher, infinitely higher, than the realm to which
I would go if I merely understood by Ahimsa non-killing. Ahimsa
really means that you may not offend anybody; you may not
harbor an uncharitable thought even in connection with one who
may consider himself to be your enemy. Pray notice the guarded
nature of this thought: I do not say 'whom you consider to be
your enemy,' but 'who may consider himself to be your enemy.'
For one who follows the doctrine of Ahimsa there is no room
for an enemy; he denies the existence of an enemy. But there
are people who consider themselves to be his enemies, and he
cannot help that circumstance. So it is held that we may not
harbor an evil thought even in connection with such persons.
If we return blow for blow, we depart from the doctrine of
Ahimsa. But I go further. If we resent a friend's action, or the
so-called enemies' action, we still fall short of this doctrine. But
1 Current History, February, 1922, p. 746.
1922.] THE BALL AND THE CROSS 251
when I say we should not resent, I do not say that we should
acquiesce; but by resenting I mean wishing that some harm
should be done to that enem3% or that he should be put out of
the way, even by the action of somebody else, or, say, by divine
agency. If we harbor even this thought we depart from the
doctrine of Ahimsa."
There may be those who scoff at the "misguided fanatic."
There may be others who, because of their political convictions,
have been unable to recognize the nobility of the attitude of
Ghandi when he was brought to trial. But, ignoring the futility
of his aims and eliminating from our minds all prejudice against
a "mere pagan," it is diflScult not to see in him a dignity and a
self-possession that are reminiscent of Christ before Pilate.
Directly addressing the judge, he said: "I have felt this
morning that I would be failing in my duty if I did not say all
that I said here just now. I wanted to avoid violence. Non-
violence is the first article of my faith. It is the last article of
my faith. . . . And I am here to submit, not to a light penalty,
but to the highest penalty. I do not ask for mercy. I do not
plead any extenuating act. I am here, therefore, to invite, and
submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for
what in law is a deliberate crime, and what appears to me to be
the highest duty of a citizen.
"The only course open to you, Mr. Judge, is, as I am just
going to say in my statement, either to resign your post or to
inflict on me the severest penalty. If you believe that the system
and law you are assisting to administer are good for the people,
I do not expect that kind of conversion. But, by the time I have
finished with my statement, you will, perhaps, have a glimpse
of what is raging within my breast to run this maddest risk
which a sane man can run."
The judge, replying, said: "The law is no respecter of per-
sons, but it is impossible to ignore the fact that you are in a
different category from any person I have ever tried, or am likely
to have to try. It is also impossible to ignore the fact, that in
the eyes of millions of your countrymen you are a great patriot
and a great leader. Even those who differ from you in politics
look upon you as a man of high ideals and of noble and saintly
life."
If Pilate had not been, by race and by temperament, laconic,
he might have said something like that to Our Saviour. Perhaps
he did say something like it. He may have expanded upon his
own brief word: "I see no cause of death in this just man."
Pilate was loath to punish Christ. The British judge in
252
THE BALL AND THE CROSS [Nov.,
India was loath to punish Ghandi. "There are probably few peo-
ple in India," he continued, "who do not sincerely regret that you
should have made it impossible for any government to leave you
at liberty. But it is so. I am trying to balance what is due to
you against what appears to me to be necessary, in the interest
of the public."
After many more deprecatory remarks, the judge sentenced
Ghandi to six years imprisonment, closing with the statement:
"I should like to say, in doing so, that if the course of events in
India should make it possible for the Government to release you,
no one will be better pleased than I."
Truly, that trial was one of the strangest episodes in all the
history, either of politics or of jurisprudence. A prophet of non-
resistance on trial for treason, asking the heaviest penalty — and
the judge, with many protestations of friendship, and even of
reverence, hardly doling out the minimum of punishment, even
though the "crime" was one that might have resulted in the dis-
memberment of an Empire.
How far we dare go with Ghandi, when he interprets the
Sermon on the Mount as non-patriotic, is a problem. "There is
no room for any violence," he says, ''even for the sake of your
country y and even for guarding the honor of precious ones that
may be under your charge. After all, that would be a poor de-
fense of honor. This doctrine tells us that we may guard the
honor of those who are under our charge by delivering ourselves
into the hands of the man who would commit the sacrilege. And
that requires far greater physical and mental courage than the
delivering of blows. You may have some degree of physical
power — I do not say courage — and you may use that power. But
after that is expended, what happens? The other man is filled
with wrath and indignation, and you have made him more angry
by matching your violence against his ; and when he has done you
to death, the rest of his violence is delivered against your charge.
But if you do not retaliate, but stand your ground between your
charge and the opponent, simply receiving the blows without
retaliating, what happens? Under this plan of life, there is no
conception of patriotism which justifies war."
We Christians are wont to repeat that warfare can never be
abolished until Christ's idea shall prevail. Is there any other
record in history, since the Roman persecutions, of an attempt
upon a large scale to demonstrate the wisdom and the practicabil-
ity of the Sermon on the Mount as a basis for the arbitrament of
international or interracial controversies?
THew Books^
ART AND RELIGION. By Von Ogden Vogt. New Haven: Yale
University Press. $5.00.
The aim of this book is to show that artistic externals of
worship may be made a powerful instrument for reuniting, re-
forming, and perfecting the divided Christian Churches of today
into an ideal church of the future.
The church of the future, according to the author, will differ
from the historic modes of Christianity, "accomplished largely
out of the pressures of practical life.'* It will be constructed "self-
consciously and deliberately.'* "With the modern scientific and
analytical studies of religion behind us," the author proposes to
transform the academic survey of the psychology of religion into
applied psychology of religion, "to marry naive popular religions
with critical rationalized experience,** "to weld the components of
historic faith with seething, aspiring, naturalistic humanism.*'
The church as thus seen will utilize the good in the historic
phases of Christianity and discard their limitations. The "creed-
alism** of the Protestant churches, their fear of art and symbols,
and "the dualistic view of human nature, which affords no legit-
imate basis for the fleshly appeal of art** must go. Wesleyans are
to forego "emotionalism;" Catholics must renounce "legalism,"
their opposition to a new liberal theology, their habit of viewing
morality as an end rather than a means. Miss Evelyn Underbill
in The Mystic Way, Mr. Stanton Colt in Social Worship, and others
are quoted as pointing the path.
Present-day Protestantism, as a whole, makes little use of
forms of worship with a strong physical appeal: the Catholic
Church still possesses forms of great variety, beauty, and power,
capable of stirring religious emotions. These forms, or rather
something as good or better, must be incorporated into the Church
of the Future. Here Mr. Vogt is not upon untrodden ground.
Ralph Adams Cram, A. K. Porter, and others have preceded him,
and blazed a trail of appreciation for mediaeval forms of art and
culture through a wilderness of ignorance, misunderstanding, and
misinterpretation. Mr. Vogt, a Congregational clergyman, views
that trail fearlessly, and proclaims openly that the Pre-Reforma-
tion Church possessed many excellencies of form and content
which could be adopted profitably by Protestantism. Modern
Americans have lost interest in creeds. They come to church
254 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
chiefly for "emotional lifts," experiences of religion. Might not
the experience of beauty kindle within them the experience of
worship? Why not make Art the stepping-stone to Rehgion?
Why not make apprehension of beauty lead to apprehension of
God, if, indeed, esthetic appreciation and worship are experiences
essentially alike?
No doubt, many, like Mr. Vogt, seldom read the Nicene Creed
or the Heidelberg Catechism, yet frequently derive pleasure and
benefit from some masterpiece of art; b^t can habits of this
emotional sort be bent towards the ultimate perfection of Chris-
tendom? Will they actually lead to union, when, according to
the author, the morality of the law, as typified in the Catholic
Church, and the intellectuality of creeds, typified in Protestantism,
have never accomplished anything but division?
Elaborate plans for inducing Art and Religion to live peace-
fully together and complement each other, would have seemed
grotesque and foolish in ancient and mediaeval times, when prac-
tically all the great masterpieces of art were created in the service
of religion. But what was true then is not true now in America.
The iconoclasts of the sixteenth century, who decreed the separ-
ation of art and religion, have held spiritual sway in this land.
Generations of men have been deprived of healthy, soul-inspiring,
aesthetic experiences, wherein their Pre-Reformation forefathers
could legitimately revel. Signs are not wanting of an extensive
revolt against that separation-act. Mr. Vogt is one of the re-
volters.
As to Mr. Vogt's "modern" view of worship, we should say,
that there is another view more firmly grounded in real life, and
which does not concede to art an essential, but a subsidiary, place
in the "experience of worship." While art has always flourished
best in times of peace and secular prosperity, religion has often
reached its greatest vitality during times of persecution, when it
was deprived of every secular advantage. Mr. Vogt, incidentally,
upbraids the Catholic Church in America with having brought to
this new nation during her past history, until recently, "no artistic
intelligence and culture," and with having built the ugliest of
church buildings. We plead guilty, but refuse apologies. Cath-
olic immigrants, the poorest of the poor, began their churches
with money begged abroad. They lacked the means and the
culture to carry on the artistic traditions of the ancient Church.
They built to provide the immediate essentials of religion, with
little thought of permanence and beauty. But this admission
argues for, not against, the power and vitality of the religion
housed in ugly Catholic churches. Power and vitality are not the
1922.] NEW BOOKS 255
essential products of aesthetic culture, but rather of that definite-
ness of thought and definiteness of moral purpose, which Mr. Vogt
decries as sources of discord.
Catholics reading this book will find in its pages a number
of familiar straw men, that bear no real resemblance to their
supposed counterparts. "Catholic legal morality," "the Church's
aversions to the functions of the prophetic oflBce," "the antiquated
nature of the Church's devotional life" are among them. But we
are at one with the author's main purpose: to revive a greater
interest in and appreciation of the beautiful in church and services.
EARLY CIVILIZATION. An Introduction to Anthropology. By
Alexander A. Goldenweiser. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
$5.00 net.
There is no subject about which more undependable rubbish
— the expression may seem to be harsh, but it is justifiable — is
written today than that of Anthropology, especially that section
which deals with the early days of mankind and, above all, with
the early phases of religion. The late Andrew Lang, an acute
critic and a deep reader in the subject under notice, in a criticism
of one of Frazer's works (which contain enough loose argument
to cast a serious blemish on his great collection of facts) quotes
a sentence from Sir Alfred Lyall: "One effect of the accumula-
tion of materials has been to encourage speculative generaliza-
tions, because it has provided a repertory, out of which one may
make arbitrary selection of examples and precedents to suit any
theory." This was written about forty years ago, and is truer
today than when it was written.
It is a pleasure to welcome a book as free from this prevalent
fallacy of selection, which has shaken off the bondage of the evolu-
tionary hypothesis in Anthropology, as the one under review. Not
that the author doubts the evolution of man. Unproved though it
is, that belief must necessarily be affirmed, we suppose, in all books
of this kind. But he does see that the older scheme of arranging all
customs in an ascending or descending scale and linking one step
with another, will no more work in actual practice than a similar
color arrangement will work in connection with sweet peas, as
Bateson has shown us to be the case, when the test of actual and
incontrovertible facts is applied. We are particularly interested
in the discussion of the problem of diffusion versus independent
discovery, which is so much debated today, and find ourselves very
largely in unison with the writer. Particularly, we agree that
Elliot Smith's "key to all the mythologies" is no more likely to be
successful than was that of the late Mr. Casaubon, in Middle-
256 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
march The discussion on magic and religion is also excellent,
and the writer sees that Lang and Father Schmidt are correct
when they urge that, so far from being the parent of rehgion
as Frazer would have us believe, magic is a disease of religion,
and requires a pre-existent religion to grow upon as the mistletoe
must have a tree to act as its host. "Prayer and the belief in
the other world," the author tells us, "are well-nigh universal,"
yet neither of these could arise out of the magical system, which
some have thought, and even think to be, the seed from which all
religion grew. We have not room to deal fully with this book,
but we can recommend it to those who wish to obtain a good idea
of the present position of sane anthropology.
SOUTH AMERICA FROM A SURGEON'S POINT OF VIEW. By
Franklin H. Martin, C.M.S., M.D., F.A.C.S. New York;
Fleming H. Revell Co. $3.00.
Dr. Martin, who is Director-General of the American College
of Surgeons, has had the collaboration of three eminent physicians
in the preparation of this work — William J. Mayo, Thomas J.
Watkins, and Francis P. Corrigan. These authors find so little
to condemn and so much to praise in their study of South Amer-
ica, that Dr. Mayo feels impelled to explain this position, so con-
trary to the common concept. His explanation is so sane and
timely that it will bear quotation :
I have been asked a number of times: "Do you mean to say
that all the surgeons of South America are of this high grade
you speak of?" I can only answer that all the work I saw was
high-grade, but I saw only the best men, and not by any means
all the best men. Relatively, the comparison with other coun-
tries is a fair one (page 202).
To the young lady who, a short time ago, asked a young
South American if he did not find it awkward to wear shoes, and
to other Americans whose ideas of South America are quite as
crude, another passage on page 104 will seem incredible :
One of the objects of our trip was to obtain a bird's-eye view
of the hospitals in the cities we visited. We passed through,
very hurriedly of course, a number of the principal hospitals in
each of the capitals, Valparaiso, and a few other cities. With only
minor exceptions, they all had suitable buildings and interiors,
and opened onto extensive and attractive gardens or patios.
Without exception, I believe all of them had a system of case
records, and the average of completeness in this respect was
above that found in the United States. Everywhere working
laboratories, including X-ray outfits, were in evidence, and were
1922.] NEW BOOKS 257
pointed to with pride. The operating rooms, with but few ex-
ceptions, were modern, and contained the most approved ster-
ihzing apparatus. Conveniences for diagnostic purposes and
instruments for operating rooms were in abundance. Nearly
all had provision for post-mortems and up-to-date morgues.
The provision for graduate internes seemed to be adequate,
especially in those hospitals connected with teaching institu-
tions. Mostly all of the large hospitals had rather complete
out-door dispensary departments. Some were deficient in mod-
ern plumbing, but a large percentage of the important hospitals
were elaborately equipped with these conveniences. Some had
the most approved hydrotherapeutic departments, and modern
laundries and kitchens were in evidence in nearly all of the
larger institutions.
The book may be described as a surgeon's Baedeker of South
America. It contains a thread of narrative which interlaces ac-
counts of three different voyages around South America. Its
ruison d^itre is a discussion of South American medical practice,
hospital facilities, hygienic measures, and its appendix, nearly
one-half the size of the rest of the volume, contains a "Summary
of Facts," a Spanish-English and Portuguese-English "vocabulary
and phrases,** and a full index. As may be surmised from this
analysis, the book is distracting in its make-up. This fact may
deter placid souls from its reading. Nevertheless, it is a very wel-
come addition to our South Americana, and should be in the
hands of every apologist of our much-maligned cousins of the
South. We welcome it as an antidote to such works as Franck*s
Vagabonding Down the Andes,
THE WORKS OF ARISTOTLE TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH—
De Cselo; De Generatione et Corruptione. By J. L. Stocks
and H. H. Joachim. New York: Oxford University Press.
$3.35.
Even good Latinists do not hesitate to keep on their shelves
the translation of St. Thomas, which the English Dominicans are
now issuing to the great comfort of those to whom Latin is not
a second tongue. And the far smaller body of philosophers
whose Greek is fluent, will not grudge their less favored and much
more numerous brethren a really good translation of the works
of Aristotle, on which depend the whole of Scholastic Philosophy.
Nor will they despise a translation with really adequate notes,
such as this carries, of two treatises containing such fundamental
portions of Aristotle's philosophy.
The second is, perhaps, the more interesting to us today, for
it deals with "the coming-to-be and the passing-away,** and thus
VOL. cacvi. 17
258 NEW BOOKS [Nov..
attacks problems, such as that of "becoming," full of actuality,
Tn spite of our changed ideas as to the "elements," and m spite
of the centuries which have rolled away since the author of these
works discussed the utterances of Empedokles, Anaxagoras, and
Leukippos We welcome this translation, and hope it may be
followed by other volumes until we have a really complete and
scholarly edition of the Stagirite in English.
THE MERCY OF ALLAH. By Hilaire Belloc. New York: D.
Appleton & Co. $2.00.
Hilaire Belloc is nothing if not many-sided. He can dash off
a volume of history that is sound and provocative, criticism of
military tactics, criticism of literature, fiction, and biography.
The present volume is a brilliant satire, cast into a mold made
immortal by LeSage in Gil Bias, Mahmoud, a Persian merchant,
recounts his adventures to his nephews, beginning with his ex-
pulsion from home by his father, and concluding with the golden
day when, having carved out his fortune, he became a captain of
industry, and sits himself down in self-complacent leisure with
a wife, a beautiful mansion, a fat income, and delectable memories
of his successes in the great game of high finance. Belloc's irony
is delicious. And as you follow Mahmoud through his brilliant
strokes of fortune and his heart-breaking reverses, you see in every
line a biting satire on present-day capitalists. Bagdad is New
York, Paris, London, Berlin. Mahmoud — but one must beware
of libel suits. The reader can insert for himself the names of a
dozen of our present-day millionaires.
In handling this satire as he does, Belloc proves that he has
learned the tricks of Montesquieu, in his Lettres Persannes, and of
Goldsmith, in his Chinese Letters, The Mercy of Allah is bound
to rank high among Belloc*s best work.
ENGLISH AND AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY SINCE 1800. A Crit-
ical Survey, By Arthur Kenyon Rogers. New York: The
Macmillan Co. $3.50.
Those conversant with Mr. Rogers* work in the field of his-
tory of philosophy, will welcome this volume. It is no easy task
to elucidate the muddled and tortuous ways of philosophers, espe-
cially those of the past few years. To succeed, one must be gifted
with a clarity of thought and expression that is only too rare,
both among thinkers and the chroniclers of thought. The author
has this gift in a preeminent degree. The survey he gives us is
not only expository, but critical. His own view of philosophy is
that it should justify the fundamental beliefs that are implied in
1922.] NEW BOOKS 259
human life, and he uses this view as the criterion whereby to
evaluate the worth of each school. Much that he tells us is, of
course, not new, especially in the historical part of the book, but
the tenets of the various schools are set forth in a fashion
both detached and objective — they are invariably viewed with a
sympathetic and an understanding eye. The critical part, while
acute, is distinguished by its dispassionateness and by its truly
philosophical temper.
Perhaps, the most intriguing section of the work is that de-
voted to contemporary philosophies. The protean forms of mod-
ern idealism, panpsychism, and pragmatism, are delineated, their
basic assumptions and fallacies are pointed out, while the numer-
ous protagonists of the now popular epistemological realism are
the subjects of a searching examination.
As might be expected. Catholic philosophy is not given prom-
inent notice. Newman receives a few pages, St. George Mivart is
mentioned, while "Howard" Joyce and "Lester" J. Walker, with
four others, are alluded to in a footnote. However, he concedes
that neo-Scholasticism " is a significant philosophical tendency."
THE SEVENFOLD GIFT. A Study of the Seven Sacraments. By
William F. Robison, S.J., Ph.D. St. Louis, Mo.: B. Herder
Book Co. $L50 net.
The Seven Sacraments of the Catholic Church are seven most
precious gifts bestowed on her by her Divine Founder, Jesus
Christ. They were intended to be channels of Divine Grace to all
mankind. Of their own power, they produce their graces in the
human soul. Nevertheless, most of them for their full efficacy
depend on the dispositions of the soul that receives them. Part of
this disposition lies in a realization of the meaning and effects of
these sacraments. This volume by Doctor Robison, consisting of
seven sermons originally delivered in St. Francis Xavier's Church,
will help the reader to a deeper understanding of the meaning and
effects of the sacraments.
CERTAIN PEOPLE OF IMPORTANCE. By Kathleen Norris.
New York: Doubleday, Page & Co. $2.00 net.
The protagonist of Mrs. Norris* novel is not an individual, but
a family. There is no plot; but in the varied lives and circum-
stances of her people, there is abundance of incidents, seldom
other than such as fall to the ordinary lot, yet holding the atten-
tion so satisfyijngly that we deprecate, as out of proportion, the
introduction of an event as sensational as the suicide of Victoria's
lover. Continuity is sustained throughout. To a really remark-
260
NEW BOOKS [Nov.
able extent, the author keeps control of the many threads of in-
terest allowing none to become detached from the central point,
the rise and decline of the Crabtree fortune. Nor does she digress
into too much description of the changing conditions of the grow-
ing city. She contents herself with vivid touches that form a
colorful background for her signally successful and elaborately
detailed delineation of an average non-Catholic, American family,
in the seventies and eighties.
This is the best of all Mrs. Norris* productions, a serious
work, with strong, distinctive features. She has achieved a very
striking effect in her pictures of the relations of parents to their
children, an attitude so definitely characteristic of that era as to
be essential to any faithful transcription. In particular, she
treats of the deliberate reserve maintained by mothers to their
daughters concerning precisely those experiences of life which
they believed to be the most desirable for all women; a delicate
subject, which she handles at considerable length with frankness,
and judgment, also, needless to say; even so, the book is not for
readers of all ages.
Its literary merit is great. For the most part, the author
stands aside, as it were, while her people speak, revealing them-
selves most convincingly real and human. It is, indeed, by this
means that she accomplishes some telling satire, especially in the
last chapter, where, in connection with Reuben's death, she makes
ruthless exhibition of the strange, almost universal, screen woven
of conventional phrases and outward observances, in which people
indistinguishingly blend the true and the false. Disconcertingly
keen are the shafts of ironic humor that increase the appeal of the
scene with which a sound artistic instinct has led Mrs. Norris
to close her novel.
JOCK, JACK, AND THE CORPORAL. By C. C. Martindale. Chi-
cago: Matre & Co. $1.50 net.
Jock, a Catholic soldier of singular innocence of life, lies
fatally injured in an English hospital. His hopeless suffering and
dereliction, made vicarious by a Catholic mysticism, leads to the
regeneration of his comrades. His nobility of character becomes
for them a seal of the truth of the Faith he so ardently practises.
Jack, the sergeant, takes instructions from the chaplain, who
gradually introduces him to the world of the supernatural, and to
the mysteries of the Catholic religion. This process of instruc-
tion, which forms the staple of the book, becomes, in the hands
of Father Martindale, a revelation of the beauty and truth of the
spiritual teaching of the Church. Every detail of Catholic belief
1922.] NEW BOOKS 261
and practice is made relevant to the exigencies of human existence
as God has provided for them in His divine economy. It is not
too much to say that one closes this novel with a new realization
of the immediacy of the things of the spirit to the secular affairs
of every-day life, and of the inwardness of the faith that one
lightly professes.
Father Martindale knows the language of his soldiers, and he
understands thoroughly their psychology. For instance, his
sketch of the Corporal, the wag of the regiment, is an admirable
piece of portraiture. The story is so vivid and realistic that it
must surely have been vecu. The chapters on Christmas at the
hospital, and on the death of Jock, reach a lyric intensity, and
have their place among the memorable things of fiction.
DISCOURSES AND ESSAYS. By John Ayscough. St. Louis: B.
Herder Book Co. $1.25 net.
This volume consists, for the most part, of occasional dis-
cursive papers on Catholic faith and practice, written by Mon-
signor Bickerstaffe-Drew against the assailants of the Church.
In vindicating the claims of Catholicity, John Ayscough proves
himself a witty and incisive polemic, who deftly unmasks the
prejudice that underlies the specious rationality of its opponents.
He unbares, for instance, the real motives that in the past
prompted the denial of miracles, as also the bad faith that would
gainsay all manifestations of the supernatural, or cavil at the
Church's spiritual ministry on the grounds of laxity. He pierces
the Anglican pretensions to continuity with the shafts of his
fleering humor. The essay on "Taste and Tolerance" contains
some wholesome comments on preaching. Other papers have the
purely personal interest of an apologia for the methods of a Cath-
olic novelist. In scope and substance, the book differs widely
from Levia Pondera, and has not quite the same engaging quality.
THE AMERICAN INDIAN. An Introduction to the Anthropology
of the New World. By Clark Wissler. Second Edition.
New York: Oxford University Press. $5.00.
The generally received opinion about the aborigines of this
Continent is that they came from Northern Asia by the land
bridge, then connecting it with Alaska, and that they came in com-
paratively recent times. For the learned Professor Hrdlicka has
come to the conclusion, after an exhaustive study of the question,
that all the skulls cited in evidence of a greater antiquity than
that of Neolithic days, including the celebrated Calaveras speci-
men, cannot establish the point that America was inhabited in
2g2 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
earlier days than those just named. Bearing this in mind, it is
amazing that there should be such variety in forms of cul ure
Td Tn speech as actually exist, or have existed, fron. the regions
of high culture, such as the Incas and Nahuas, to the degraded
races along the stormy waters of the Straits of Magellan.
Any intelligent person living on this side of the Atlantic must
be of singularly unimaginative disposition if he is indifferent to
the kind of people who inhabited it in pre-Columbian days, and
from whom his forerunners, though not often ancestors, annexed
it by force. In this matter, there can be no safer guide than the
erudite Curator of Anthropology in the Natural History Museum
of New York, who has written this book, already well received in
its first edition and largely re-written in this. The immense num-
ber of facts to be considered makes the book a rather close study.
Hardly a point in the life of the American aborigines is left un-
touched, and an excellent series of maps is a further aid towards
studying the extent of dififerent schemes of clothing, kinds of food,
of transport, and so on.
It seems to be now what the lawyers call "common form" to
assume the evolution of man's physical part from some lower
animal, and of course we find that assumption here, although we
are still awaiting any convincing demonstration of this theory.
The experienced reader has by this time no doubt learned to dis-
count this and to await "scientific" demonstration of the origin
of man. What we are concerned with here is the excellence and
accuracy of the account of his doings when he had appeared,
and after he had made his way to what we now call the New
World.
LIFE AND LETTERS OF ARCHPRIEST JOHN JOSEPH THERRY.
By Rev. Eris M. O'Brien. Sydney, Australia: Angus &
Robertson, Ltd. 25 s, net.
The history of this pioneer priest in Australia sets forth the
record of one man's superhuman struggle against overwhelming
odds to preserve the Catholic faith of the settlers in this far-off
island Continent. Most of the Catholics were Irish political ex-
iles; they were treated as convicts, they were ruled by English
military governors, and they were forced to attend English Church
services on Sunday.
Father Therry was a native of Cork. His life work was de-
cided upon one day when he saw a band of his fellow-countrymen
being taken off to the convict colony. There had been priests
there before; three had served terms as "convicts," a fourth had
volunteered his services, but, after a short ministry, the author-
1922.] NEW BOOKS 263
ities had forced him out. Upon his return to his native land, this
priest started a campaign of enlightenment. As a result, the
British Government voted an allowance for two Catholic chaplains
for the colonies. Fathers Philip Connolly and John Therry ac-
cepted the chaplaincies. The two missionaries arrived in Sydney
in 1820, but soon after Father Connolly departed for Van Dieman's
Land. The building of a church presented a problem which con-
sumed most of Father Therry*s career. A large part of this long
biography is devoted to the history of this church, the financial,
civil, and, finally, ecclesiastical difficulties, in which Father Therry
found himself as a result of his well-intentioned efforts.
When, through disagreement with the Government, this
valiant priest was deprived of his chaplaincy, he continued to labor
without compensation. For ten years he continued his ministry
practically alone, constantly battling against the bigotry of of-
ficials. Then four other priests were sent out, Sydney was made
first a bishopric, and then an archbishopric, and the Church
started on more prosperous times. The author does not spare
his hero; he paints in the shadows as well as the high lights;
it is an inspiring record, nevertheless. Father O'Brien has per-
formed his task well; original documents are quoted on almost
every page. But there is one thing lacking: a map to show the
location and the spread of the early missions.
SHORT SERMONS ON THE EPISTLES AND GOSPELS. By Rev.
F. P. Hickey, O.S.B. New York: Benziger Brothers. $2.00 net.
A new volume of sermons by Dom Hickey is a welcome addi-
tion to our pulpit literature, especially now, when the demand for
short sermons seems to be on the increase. Father Rickey's ser-
mons are short, and they are practical. There is one sermon for
each Sunday and Holy Day, either on the Gospel or the Epistle.
There is a uniformity in the arrangement of the discourses: the
title of the Sunday, the subject to be treated, four or five topical
sentences, then the sermon. While sermon books are helpful
chiefly to priests, the laity can find much profit in the carefully
planned sermons of Father Hickey.
BIRTH CONTROL. A Statement of Christian Doctrine Against
the Neo-Malthusians. By Halliday G. Sutherland, M.D. New
York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons. $1.75 net.
One of the most pernicious, and perhaps most prevalent prac-
tices of this pleasure-seeking and luxury-loving age is studied in
this little volume of one hundred and fifty pages with a skill and
refinement of touch possible only to a man who is an expert in
264 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
medical science and of devout and well-informed Catholic faith. Dr.
Sutherland, not content with emphasizing the immoral and sinful
character of artificial birth control, reveals, by ample evidence
from history and medical authorities, the inherent viciousness of
an unholy practice entailing many evil consequences. While
the Malthusian advocates and propagandists pose as the friends
and protectors of the home and as champions of the welfare of
the race, the author proves that their immoral methods produce
the very opposite results from those intended.
The fear that urged Malthus to suggest the practice, viz., that
men would multiply beyond earth's power to furnish sustenance,
is shown to be groundless. Equally fallacious is the theory that
poverty and hardships are due to an excessive birth rate; and that
diminution of quantity means improved quality. Artificial birth
control entails evils, physical and moral, of the gravest kind for
the parties concerned. Dr. Sutherland, in clear and forcible lan-
guage, yet free from exaggeration, presents such an array of facts
as must convince the reader that all who would derive from
wedded life such happiness as God and nature intend, and who
have at heart their own health and domestic bliss, and the well-
being of the State, must eschew artificial birth control. The thesis
of this volume is that Malthusianism is not only immoral, but
pragmatically unjustifiable. The book deserves the widest circu-
lation as an antidote to vicious propaganda.
FINDING A SOUL. A Spiritual Autobiography. By E. E. Ever-
est. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $1.50 net.
There are many roads to Rome. Men and women have
traveled from all points of the compass to the Eternal City set
upon a Hill. Here is the story of a soul attracted by the music of
Beethoven. The author gives a graphic picture of her childhood,
in a motherless home ruled by a father who was an avowed
atheist. But he was a devoted admirer of Beethoven, and the
child imbibed a love for the great master. At a convent school,
she learned Beethoven was a Catholic, and gained a deeper appre-
ciation of his music. The influence of convent life did the rest,
and in spite of violent opposition by her father, as soon as she
became of age she entered the Church. ORTV
ABBE PIERRE. By Jay William Hudson. New York: D. Apple-
ton & Co. $2.00. rf'^'J*4 l«
Under the still softly murmuring flow of this idyll of "sunny
Gascony," we sense the deep current of the "invisible." The
author, treading Gascony with the wise old Abb6 Pierre and ex-
1922.] NEW BOOKS 265
quisite Germaine, has penetrated the deeper things of Catholic
faith and life — the "sublime virtues" of the "sublime silences."
That he is not a Catholic is evident from the inadequate descrip-
tion of the Mass, and certain tournures de phrase unsuited to a
Catholic tongue, yet what Catholic has drawn a more beautiful
portrait of a priest.
The Abbe Pierre is of those who turn all dross to gold, find-
ing even in the Gascon philosopher, Montaigne, a stimulant to
faith; who, when he "talks about people," "talks about their
virtues."
Mr. Hudson has achieved a work of art. Never to be for-
gotten are the pages on "The Great Question," the picture of
"Moonrise in Gascony," and the flaming tongues of St. John's eve,
and that sum of human tragedy in one short page: "Have Pity,
O God."
We can wish our readers no greater pleasure than to see
with the Abbe Pierre the undulating tapestry "of the Gascon
landscape," the "brave, indomitable roads," the Pyrenees — "the
wall of the world" — the spire topped hills, the "homes that hug
the church so close" they "seem like happy children gathered
round their ancient mother," the moonlight on the "wide-stretched
arms" of the Man of Sorrows "that reach out over those who
sleep beneath the long grasses;" and, with him, to hearken to
the "sweet-toned bells that speak across the valleys."
We suspect that the author, himself, has "looked at the cru-
cifix for a moment with his heart in his eyes," and may yet come
to the Church "as to the Mother of all souls that seek Thy rest."
A LIFE'S OBLATION— rAe Biography of Genevieve Hennet de
Goutel, by Marthe Alambert. Translated from the French by
L. M. Leggatt. (New York: Benziger Brothers. Cloth, $2.00.) The
biography of Genevieve Hennet de Goutel is already well known in
the French, and the English translation of the biography of this noble
woman, one of the first of the French hospital workers to fall on
Rumanian soil, will be read with the greatest interest.
INDIANA UNIVERSITY STUDIES— Nos. 48, 49, 50. No. 48: ''Index
Verborum de Covarruvias Orozco: Tesoro de la Lengua Castellana
o Espanola. Madrid, 1673-167^," by Professor John M. Hill. Professor
Hill, appreciating the rarity of this Tesoro of the Spanish of the seven-
teenth century and the increasing need of the work, has reprinted the
edition of 1673-1674 for the use of students. The editors of the first
edition of the Diccionario de la Lengua Espanola (Madrid, 1726-1739)
recognized the high value of Covarruvias' Index, and based their work
upon his researches. It is, therefore, formative and authoritative in
266 NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
every respect, and specialists in philology must award Professor Hill
their sincere thanks. /^ ^ . *
No 49- "Juvenile Delinquency and Adult Crime. Certain Associa-
tions of Juvenile Delinquency and Adult Crime in Gary, Ind. with
Special Reference to the Immigrant Population," by Edna Hatfield Ed-
raondson, Ph.D., a study to determine the reliability of the prevalent
idea that juvenile delinquency and adult crime are more frequently
associated with the foreign-born than with the native-born population.
The conclusion reached is that juvenile delinquency and petty adult
crime is determined, not by the race or nationality group, but by the
social and economic class to which these races or nationalities belong.
Perhaps, the most valuable feature of the work is the bibliography,
which is very extensive and pertinent.
No. 50: "William De Morgan and the Greater Early Victorians,"
by Professor Will T. Hale, Ph.D., gives an optimistic comparison be-
tween the author of Joseph Vance and his illustrious predecessors^
Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot. The citations are of consider-
able value.
A SISTER'S POEMS, by Sister Margaret Mary (New York: P. J.
Kenedy & Sons. $1.50), of the^Sisters of Mercy, appears at a
time when interest in conventual life runs particularly high. Sister
Margaret Mary replies to the challenge with verses which give the
world a much keener understanding of the religious mind. Her verse
forms, however, and also her methods of expression, are not altogether
worthy of her inspiration.
LATIN GRAMMAR MADE CLEAR, with exercises and vocabulary,
from the original French of Professor H. Petitmangin, adapted into
English by H. Petitmangin and John A. Fitzgerald, A.B., with the col-
laboration of Ernest Dimnet (Paris: J. De Gigord. $1.50), is the result
of a painstaking and intelligent effort to provide a text-book which,
with the aid of a teacher, will eliminate from the study of Latin those
difficulties which are not inherent in the subject. It is based upon the
theory that there is "no royal road to learning," and that only the
earnest, industrious student will ever attain to a mastery of the classics.
But for the student who is willing to contribute his share, the book will,
we think, be found to provide very valuable assistance. It is the
translation, or rather the adaptation, of a text that has long served a
useful purpose in French schools. Its logical order is of the excel-
lence that might be expected from a Frenchman. The pedagogical
principles upon which it is based are those which experienced teachers
readily acknowledge to be valid. No doubt, in the course of time, this
book will obtain, in America, something like the same high degree of
popularity it has long enjoyed in France.
THE GHOST GIRL, by Edgar Saltus. (New York: Boni & Liveright.
$2.00.) Nellie Chilton, the heroine of this peculiar story, is killed
in an auto accident the very day of her marriage to Bradish, the New
1922.] NEW BOOKS 267
York millionaire. She has scarcely been laid in the family vault,
when she appears "in all her ghostly loveliness" to her husband and his
chum. Time and time again, they see her, but she vanishes at once
into nothingness. The author amuses himself at our expense for some
two hundred and fifty pages, making us guess at a possible solution of
these mysterious appearances. He suggests a perfect double of "the
incomparable Nellie,*' and then talks about the magic of Thibet, the
phenomena of Spiritism, astral bodies, hallucination, and insanity.
He even goes so far as to describe an orgy of Satanic magic the better
to confuse us. Finally, with his tongue in his cheek, he calmly solves
the riddle, and makes us ask ourselves why we wasted our time over
his book.
THE CITY OF FIRE, by Grace Livingston Hill. (Philadelphia: J.
B. Lippincott Co. $2.00.) Mrs. HilPs latest novel — her seven-
teenth — centres about the murder trial of a very unattractive, although
innocent, hero. The author draws a good portrait of a minister's
daughter, who remains true to her sweetheart despite all appearances
against him. Lynn has a very happy faculty of converting everyone
she meets. A word from her, and heartless millionaires begin to
interest themselves in the lives of the tenement poor, and evil-lived
women die in the odor of sanctity. The story is well written, although
rather ultra-pious.
ASCENT, by Frances Rumsey. (New York: Boni & Liveright.
$2.00.) This is a cleverly written psychological study of a cold-
blooded American girl, educated by a cynical, atheistic grandfather
on principles of utter selfishness and irreligion. She craves for life
and adventure, and is satisfied almost to the point of becoming a
wanton. The Paulist Fathers, who received her into the Church, made
a big mistake — she remains a sentimental, ignorant pagan to the end.
AMERICA FACES THE FUTURE, by Durant Drake, Ph.D. (New
York: The Macmillan Co. $2.50.) In this book a professor of
philosophy in Vassar College undertakes to tell America what is wrong
in our politics and industry, and to point out the ways we should tread.
His purpose, as disclosed in the preface, is to "consider in these pages
what our priceless heritage of American ideals actually is, and how
far we are being faithful to our inheritance."
The result is neither helpful nor interesting. The author attempts
to cover a multitude of subjects, and does it in a way that will leave
those who are not with him in the beginning, still unconvinced at
the end. Obviously, the author has not a thorough knowledge of the
fields through which he offers himself as a guide. The range of topics
he attempts to cover is so wide that this is not to be wondered at. It
is not through books of this kind that an intelligent grasp of the per-
plexing problems that confront us is to be broadcasted or the solution
of them along sound lines furthered.
268
NEW BOOKS [Nov.,
T
-HE September issue of The Annals of the American Academy of
X Political and Social Science is devoted to the study of "Industrial
Relations and the Churches." For each volume of this pubhcation,
specially qualified editors are selected. The editors of the present
issue are Dr. John A. Ryan, Director Department of Social Action,
National Catholic Welfare Council, and Dr. F. Ernest Johnson, Research
Secretary, Federal Council of the Churches. The issue carries articles
by Dr. Ryan, Dr. Kerby, Rev. R. A. McGowan, and Rev. Edwin O'Hara.
We recommend it to the attention of those interested in this very vital
topic.
PAMPHLET PUBLICATIONS.
The Catholic Truth Society (London) has a budget of new pamphlets
of exceptional interest: Rev. John Morris, S.J., provides the Catholic pil-
grim and tourist with Canterbury, a detailed and interesting guide
book of convenient size; The Church in England in 1922, by Rev. Bede
Jarrett, O.P., summarizes past history, indicates telling influences, and
dwells in detail on the status quo, pleading, finally, for "national ac-
tion" by Catholics, to meet effectively "the splendid prospect" for the
Church in England; Lister Drummond, by Robert E. Noble, tells the
virile story of a convert lay apostle who headed the Guild of Our Lady
of Ransom and paved the way for the CathoUc Evidence Guild; Dom
Norbert Birt, O.S.B., contributes a sketch of Father De Smet, The
Apostle of the Rocky Mountains; The Doctrine of Self-Discipline, by
Dom Justin McCann, presents the case for self-discipline in so attrac-
tive and reasonable a fashion as to force its claim, even upon modern
youth; The Real Presence, by Rev. F. Mangan, S.J., presents clearly
and succinctly the "Fact" and the "Fulfillment" of Our Lord's promise
and gift; Maxims of Mary Ward introduces the pithy spiritual maxims
of this remarkable foundress with a sketch of her life; Rev. Joseph
Rickaby, S.J., leaves the reader no doubt as to What Cranmer Meant
to Do and Did in robbing the English Church of the Holy Sacrifice;
Confession and Communion Prayers for Little Children is an admirable
little prayer book, well orientated and exquisitely childlike; a story
of the days of persecution in England, by a nun of Tyburn Convent,
is entitled Trumpeter's Rock.
The International Catholic Truth Society has a study of Transub-
stantiation and the Real Presence, short and clear and effective, by Rev.
J. F. Splaine, S.J. The Printed Message, by Rev. George Thomas Daly,
C.SS.R., is a strong appeal to put Catholic truth to the fore in the
"revaluation, readjustment, and reconstruction" of the world*s thought
(Catholic Truth Society of Canada).
The Catholic Mind for August 8th contains a study of "The Cult of
Psychoanalysis," by Rev. WiUiam J. McGucken, S.J., reprinted from the
American Ecclesiastical Review, which is lucid and judicial, and quite
final in its conclusions; and an address by Rev. John E. Wickham, LL.D.,
on "Catholicism and Culture."
In answer to many inquirers, Rev. Ernest Hull, S.J., has made a
full and careful presentation of Adventist Doctrines, in a pamphlet pub-
lished by the Bombay Examiner Press.
International Conciliation (407 West 117th Street, New York City),
brought out, in August, "Impressions of Berhn in 1922," by Professor
Henri Lichtenberger of the Sorbonne. And, in September, contribu-
tions concerning Cuba's relations to the Court of International Justice
and the League of Nations.
IRecent Events.
The Greek military disaster at the hands
Greece. of the Turkish Nationalists, early in Sep-
tember, spread out during the last thirty
days into a number of effects, military, political, and dynastic,
the whole surrounded by a thick atmosphere of Inter-Allied ac-
cusation and diplomatic intrigue. The first important event fol-
lowing the capture of Smyrna by the Turks, was the Allied pro-
hibition of a Nationalist advance against the neutral zones of
Ismid and the Dardanelles, a prohibition backed up by the dis-
patch of British military and naval forces. A week later — on
September 23d — the Allies invited Mustapha Kemal, leader of the
Nationalists, to a conference, which began at Mudania on October
3d, the Turks in the interval suspending all military operations.
Meanwhile, numerous conferences were held at Paris and
elsewhere between British, French, and Italian governmental
representatives, at which considerable differences of opinion be-
came apparent, the French for the most part, influenced by their
secret treaty with the Angora Government negotiated last spring,
supported the Nationalists, being backed, to some extent, by Italy,
and Great Britain insisting that under no conditions must Con-
stantinople be allowed to fall into the Nationalist's hands.
Finally, however, the Allies succeeded in presenting a united front
at Mudania, where, on October 10th, an armistice convention was
signed by representatives of all the Allied Powers and by the
Nationalist delegate.
This convention specifies, among other things, that the Greeks
shall evacuate Thrace within fifteen days, that Greek civil author-
ities shall leave as soon as possible, and that, as the Greeks leave,
they shall hand over affairs to Allied authorities, who, in turn, will
transmit them to the Turks within thirty days after the Greek
evacuation.
In addition, plans are now being prepared for two confer-
ences to bring about a definite peace in the Near East, one, to fix
general Near Eastern peace terms, and, another, to provide for
neutralization of the straits of the Dardanelles. Preparation for
both conferences are now being made by the various governments
who are to attend, as the settlements reached at the first confer-
ence must necessarily affect the second. It is believed that the
first conference will be held early in November, with the second
270
RECENT EVENTS [Nov.,
general conference sitting early in December, and possibly con-
eluding the entire settlement by Christmas.
As a result of the Greek defeat, a revolutionary movement
broke out in the Greek army and navy, gathering such impetus
that, on September 27th, the abdication of King Constantine was
forced. Crown Prince George was named as successor and, with
the approval of the revolutionists, was immediately sworn in as
the new King. The British, Italian, and Belgian diplomatic repre-
sentatives have since virtually recognized the new monarch, fore-
casting Entente recognition of the new regime. Ex-King Con-
stantine has departed for Italy, and the revolutionary committee
is in complete control, pending general elections on November
13th to constitute a new Parliament to succeed that deposed by
the revolution.
Various reports have also been received of the abdication of
Mohammed VI., Sultan of Turkey and head of the Government
at Constantinople, from which the Angora Republic of the vic-
torious Mustapha Kemal had broken away. These rumors, how-
ever, have been unconfirmed. The heir-apparent to the Turkish
throne is Prince Abdul Med j id, a cousin of the present Sultan,
and it is probable that if the succession has not yet devolved on
him, it soon will.
Over 250,000 persons are reported to have evacuated Smyrna
and neighboring ports since the Turks captured and set fire to
the city. Relief measures have been instituted by various coun-
tries, but the problem is gigantic. It is estimated that half a mil-
lion people require succor at the present time. President Harding
has appointed a Near East Relief Committee, with former Post-
master-General Hays as Chairman, and has called on all the prin-
cipal charitable organizations of the country to aid in a national
campaign for relief funds. The Executive Committee of the
American Red Cross has been authorized by that organization to
expend the full amount now in its Treasury, some $20,000,000,
in aid of the Near East sufferers.
The Third Assembly of the League of Na-
France. tions, meeting in Geneva for over a month,
held its final sessions on the thirtieth of
September. Two outstanding decisions were made by the As-
sembly—one, the adoption of Lord Robert Cecil's plan for world
peace and the other, the extension of definite aid to Austria.
The Cecil plan, which has been called an "international com-
pany assurance against war," contemplates continental peace com-
pacts between the various countries of Europe, South Africa, Asia,
1922.] RECENT EVENTS 271
and so forth. On its face, the system is a modification of Article
X. of the League Covenant, but, in reality, it would mean giving
specific guarantees instead of the generalities of Article X.: the
various nations pledging themselves definitely to take action
against any aggressor and to make it impossible for him to obtain
victory.
The scheme for Austrian relief is set forth in three docu-
ments. The first, is a declaration by Great Britain, France, Italy,
and Czecho-Slovakia, the, principal guarantors of the loan which
will be made to Austria, that they will respect the territorial
integrity, independence, and sovereignty of Austri^i, and will seek
no special or exclusive financial or economic advantages that
would compromise Austria's independence. The other two docu-
ments, authorize Austria to issue for sale bonds sufficient to
produce the equivalent of a maximum of 650,000,000 gold crowns,
and provide for the guarantee of interest on the sinking fund by
Great Britain, France, Italy, and Czecho-Slovakia of eighty per
cent, of that sum. Austria, on her part, pledges for the payment
of interest on the bonds her customs receipts and the tobacco
monopoly, and agrees to undertake reforms necessary to balance
her budget. This action of the League is expected to put Austria
on a footing of solvency within two years, and definitely disposes
of the possibility of her annexation to, or union with, Italy,
Czecho-Slovakia, or Germany, which had been contemplated.
Other important events connected with this year*s Assembly
were the admission of Hungary as a member of the League, the
announcement by the French delegation that it would oppose the
admission of Germany as a member at this time, the resignation
of Bolivia from the League, following the similar action by Peru,
due, it is thought, to the election of the Chilean, Augustin Edwards,
as President of the League, and the election of the six non-per-
manent members of the Council of the League, as follows : Brazil,
Spain, Uruguay, Belgium, Sweden, and China.
Several crises over German reparations payments threatened
to come to a head since these notes last appeared, but were finally
and definitely averted, on the nineteenth of September, as the
result of an agreement between Germany and Belgium, whereby
the latter accepted Germany's guarantee for payment. A few days
later, the German Government handed to the Reparations Com-
mission two bills, one for 47,400,000 gold marks and the other
for 48,600,000 gold marks, in payment of the two instalments for
reparations due August 15th and September 15th last. Mean-
while, plans have been made for a conference on the Inter-Allied
debts and the Germany indemnity, to be held iu Brussels^ the date
272 BECENT EVENTS [NoV.,
being tentatively set for December 1st. During the month Louis
Duboi the French member and President of the Commission on
Reparations, resigned, and Louis Barthou, Mimster of Justice m
the Poincare Cabinet, was appointed his successor.
During the month, various French ports were troubled with
strikes of seamen and port workers, notably Havre, Marseilles,
and Bordeaux, called in protest against a Governmental decree
modifying the eight-hour law on French vessels, in order to meet
foreign competition. The strike of the seamen at Bordeaux
ended on October 9th, but the dock workers and coal handlers at
Marseilles have tentatively voted in favor of a sympathetic strike
movement in that port. This is expected to intensify the tie-up
there, where the strike is at its worst.
The figures of the French 1923 budget, made public by the
Finance Committee of the Chamber of Deputies, show that the
ordinary French budget will have a deficit of about 4.000,000,000
francs paper. In addition, provision is madei for advancing
10,000,000,000 francs for reconstruction work, to be charged
against Germany, and to balance which, no revenue is provided.
That means that the French Finance Ministry must borrow some
14,000,000,000 francs for next year, less what can be realized from
German cash payments. Belgium has a priority claim on Ger-
many's cash payments this year, and although France will get
most of the cash payments which Germany may make next year,
still 1,000,000,000 marks gold is probably a favorable estimate of
what France will actually get in cash. A billion marks gold is
equal to about 3,000,000,000 francs paper, which means that the
French Government must borrow more than 10,000,000,000 francs
for the new budget. This will be effected by interior loans, the
first of which will be floated in November or. the end of December.
Important private commercial agreements, designed primarily
in the interest of the occupied regions, but broadly for the purpose
of aiding French industries in general, are expected to result from
the visit, some time in October, of a delegation representing lead-
ing business interests in Germany, which has been invited to visit
the devastated areas. The French Government has approved of
the visit, which is an outgrowth of the accord reached last month
by Herr Stinnes and the Marquis de Lubersac for the delivery of
materials to rebuild the devastated regions.
Expectations that the Washington naval treaty would be rat-
ified by the Chamber of Deputies this year, seem doomed to dis-
appointment, and it is probable that the treaty will never be
ratified so long as the present Poincar^ Government retains office.
There exists in tbe Chamber only a weak faction favoring ratifica-
1922.] RECENT EVENTS 273
tion of the treaty as it stands, and even those who favor it, demand
important changes. The chief demand is that the capital ship
ratio of 5-5-3-1.75 for the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and
France and Italy respectively, be changed to give France at least
a ratio of 2.50 to Italy's 1.75. Meanwhile, even those countries
which have ratified the agreement, including the United States,
have suspended further scrapping of war vessels in view of the
threatening aspect of affairs in Asia Minor.
The recent letter, to his adherents, of Joseph Caillaux, former
Premier, who was thoroughly discredited during the war and later
tried for treasonable correspondence with the enemy, is considered
to be a preliminary step towards his reentry into the political
arena. The letter in question declares the clericalists are instal-
ing themselves in the very establishments which they were obliged
to quit, in complete violation of the law and under the eyes of the
authorities. He also charges that an organized effort is under
way to suppress the non-sectarian public schools in favor of
independent schools. The letter urges true republicans to be on
guard, and, while proclaiming their respect for all beliefs, to
affirm their resolve not only to maintain, but to complete,
strengthen, and develop anti-clerical laws.
riaqzo'iq unim ^^ event of great importance in German
Germany. internal politics occurred toward the end
of September, when the Independent So-
cialist Party and the Social Democratic Party, after six years of
embittered internecine warfare, jointly decided on a formal re-
union. This decision was a direct result of the pressure of events
growing out of the economic and political post-war situation in
Germany. The original break between the two factions occurred
in September, 1916, over the question of voting war credits and
other policies with which the Socialist Party was confronted, by
reason of the World War. The demand for fusion has been
accelerated, on the one hand, by the menace of Communism, to-
wards which both divisions of the Party are inimical, and, on the
other, by the aggressiveness of German industrialism and big
finance. By pooling its mandates, the reunited party will com-
mand 169 out of 469 seats in the Beichstag. Defection on the part
of former Left Wing Independents may possibly reduce this total
by ten. Both wings of the party have a paying membership total-
ling 250,000, but this does not indicate the voting strength, as it
is merely viewed as the political section of German organized
labor, which has an enrollment of more than 10,000,000.
Germany's first popular Presidential election is scheduled tc
VOL. CXVI. 18
274 RECENT EVENTS [Nov.,
take Place on December 3d. The Reichstag, reconvening in the
mrddle of October for a short session, is expected to pass by a
ZTe majority, a law regarding the Presidential election framed
bv the Wirth Government, although it is possible that a plan may
be adopted to amend the Constitution in order to avoid a Presi-
dential election until 1925. President Ebert, who was elected
Provisional President by the first German National Assembly at
Weimar, in January, 1919, and has held office as such ever since,
will undoubtedly become the first Constitutional President of the
Republic. , . ^ ^ x tn
On September 24th, the ex-Kaiser, from his retreat at Doom,
Holland, officially announced his engagement to the Princess
Schoenaich-Carolath, a member of one of the minor German royal
houses. The Princess is thirty-five years of age, a widow, and
the mother of five children. The wedding has been tentatively
fixed for November 5th. The approaching marriage has some
political significance, being considered in many quarters as a sign
that the ex-Kaiser has, finally and forever, given up all hope of
regaining his throne.
Lloyd's Bank of London has published a study of the German
industrial and banking situation, based on a report from its Ger-
man correspondent. The statement of the case, which has at-
tracted great interest in London, is: "The seeming prosperity of
this country deceives the rest of the world, and it is scarcely yet
realized, even in England, how greatly Germany has been im-
poverished in the last eight years." The report goes on to say
that "reparations payments have been made, and the population
fed since the armistice to a large extent at the cost of the spec-
ulator in marks, and by the financial extinction of the old middle
class." The conclusion is reached that "if the most favorable
treatment possible is accorded to Germany by the Allies, the paper
mark can only be made stable (or be redeemed by a new currency
secured by gold values) at something approaching its present low
value (or the lowest value it may subsequently reach) in gold."
As a result of the serious depreciation in the value of the mark,
barter is, at present, replacing money in various parts of Germany.
A new and powerful so-called "vertical trustification," a com-
bination rivaling the famous Stinnes concern, was recently engi-
neered by a German industrialist. Otto Wolff, head of a large
iron merchant's firm of Cologne. Economic and financial pres-
sure welded the new concern together out of mutually dependent
or mutually interested parts. It divides logically into two allied
groups, the coal and iron group and the electrical group, with Herr
Wolff at the common apex. The capital is 684,000,000 marks.
1922.] RECENT EVENTS 275
which is shortly to be increased to 984,000,000. The capitaliza-
tion of the Stinnes "Rhein-Elbe-Siemens-Schuckert Union" is
1,138,000,000 marks. The new trust is significant as marking
another step in the concentration policy of German economics,
and is also hailed as "forming a new front against foreign com-
petition."
Serious differences have arisen over the contract entered into
last spring between the Russian Soviet Government and the Krupp
Corporation, whereby the latter was granted a concession of a
tract of territory in South Russia, comprising 56,000 acres, which
the Krupps agreed to cultivate, bringing in for the purpose large
quantities of agricultural implements of all kinds. The Krupps
are now said to have withdrawn from the agreement, on the
ground of financial inability to carry out the compact. The Soviet
authorities, however, suspect that the withdrawal is due to polit-
ical reasons, possibly French pressure, for the German Govern-
ment is understood to have approved cordially the agreement
when it was concluded. Leonid Krassin, the Soviet Minister of
Trade and Commerce, will probably bring action in the German
courts to compel fulfillment of the contract.
In September, several sporadic local railroad strikes threw the
whole body of German railroad workers into renewed unrest, pre-
liminary to a new demand for an increase in wages, which will again
add many billions to Germany's deficit. To meet partially the deficit
from operation of the State railroads, passenger rates will be
trebled and freight rates nearly trebled from November 1st. An
idea of German railroad finances may be gathered from the fact
that in April expenditures were quoted at the rate of 100,000,000,-
000 marks annually, and today it is estimated that expenditures
have risen to a rate of nearly 400,000,000,000 marks annually.
Poland's promise to the Allies to give home rule to Silesia
was realized on September 30th, when the first elections for the
Silesian Diet were held. The Poles secured thirty-four seats and
the Germans fourteen. The German representation is only twenty-
nine per cent, of the total, despite the fact that the German vote
in the March plebiscite ran to forty per cent. The opening session
of the Diet was held on October 10th.
Late in September, the closing performance of the world-
famous Passion Play at Oberammergau was given. Some 315,000
visitors came to see the Passion Play this season, the gross re-
ceipts of the play amounted to 20,000,000 marks, and the sale of
books and photographs netted a further 4,000,000. Altogether,
sixty-six performances were given this year since the dress re-
hearsal on May 9th. Beginning on May 14th, there were thirty-
276 RECENT EVENTS [Nov.,
one scheduled presentations, besides thirty-three extra public per-
formances given on account of the heavy demand for seats, and
two special play days for Catholic organizations. In 1910, only
fifty-seven performances were given, and the attendance was far
less, the seating capacity at that time being considerably smaller.
Figures are not yet available to show the season's attendance by
nationalities, but up to the end of August, 18.000 Americans had
visited the play. Various offers for permission to film the play,
running, in some cases, it is reported, as high as $1,000,000.
and even proposals to reproduce the actual play in London and
elsewhere, met with definite rejection by the villagers.
Negotiations between Japan, the Far-Eastern
Russia. Republic, and the Soviet Government of
Moscow, resumed early in September at
Chang Chun. Manchuria, again ended in failure on September
25th. Japan refused to meet the Russian demand for the evacua-
tion of the northern half of the island of Saghalien, off the
Siberian coast, which she is holding until she is indemnified for
the massacre of six hundred Japanese at Nikolaievsk in 1920.
On the other hand, Japan has since begun the evacuation of Si-
beria and Vladivostok, and expects to have her troops completely
withdrawn by the end of October.
As the evacuation of Siberia is being carried out, fighting has
become more and more frequent between Soviet forces and troops
of the White, or Vladivostok anti-Soviet, Government. In this
connection, a considerable scandal has broken out in Japan, where
accusations have been made to the effect that, as the evacuation
proceeded, great quantities of arms were handed over by Japanese
officers to General Dieterichs, in command at Vladivostok, who,
in turn, is said to have sold part of the arms to Chang Tso-lin,
the Manchurian military leader, the purpose of the Japanese mili-
tarists being to establish an anti-Soviet buffer state in conjunction
with General Dieterichs and Chang Tso-lin. A further complica-
tion in the affair is that the arms in question belonged to the
Czecho-Slovak troops, who evacuated Siberia two years ago. The
Czecho-Slovakian Government has entered a formal protest and
claim for eight hundred and sixty thousand kronen with the Japa-
nese Government, and the Tokio Cabinet has decided to take
drastic action against those responsible for disposing of the arms.
On September 30th, the Moscow Government issued a decree
reestablishing military service on the pre-war scale. Henceforth,
all male citizens are liable to service between the ages of twenty
and forty. It is learned from well-informed military circles,
1922.] RECENT EVENTS 277
however, that unless international complications arise, it is not
intended to put the law in full effect before next fall. At the
same time, the decree has significance, as showing that the Soviet
Government, like its Tsarist predecessor, is able and ready to
train a million youngsters every year for war service. It is sig-
nificant, too, that the Russian Baltic fleet, towards the end of Sep-
tember, began holding regular maneuvers, the first since the revo-
lution.
Early in September, a formal agreement was signed by Leonid
Krassin, Soviet Minister of Foreign Trade and Commerce, and
Leslie Urquhart, of London, providing for the complete restoration
of the title rights for ninety-nine years of the pre-war holdings of
the Russian-Asiatic Corporation, Ltd., amounting to over £56,000-
000. This action aroused considerable comment throughout the
world as forecasting a more favorable attitude on the part of the
Soviet authorities towards property rights, but these conclusions
proved erroneous when, on October 6th, the Soviet Government,
through Premier Lenine, as President of the Council of Commis-
sars, rejected the agreement, on the ground that **recent actions
of the British Government are not regarded as indicative of a
sufficiently friendly attitude to admit the signature of a contract
of such magnitude." There is reason to suppose, however, that
the real reason for rejection was because of internal opposition to
the agreement, because it was not wholly in accord with the prin-
ciples of Socialist Government.
Equally valueless, seems the reported grant to the Sinclair
Oil Company, an American concern, of the right to prospect and
develop the northern half of the island of Saghalien for a period
of five years, since this territory, although nominally Russian,
is now under the control of the Japanese Government, with no
early prospect of surrender.
Despite the fact that the United States Government was said
to have dropped the project of an American investigation conv-
mittee in Russia, the Soviet Government still seems to have hopes
of some sort of mutually satisfactory arrangement. Replying to
the original unofficial inquiry of the United States, the Moscow
Government, in September, dispatched a note which, while ob-
jecting to the proposed investigation, suggested a parley looking
towards the establishment of official relations. This counter-
proposal has met the fate of all its predecessors at the hands of
the Washington Government, whose object in sending a mission
to Russia was purely economic, and wholly outside of any political
relations.
On the general subject of Russian trade, recently published
278 RECENT EVENTS [Nov.,
statistics show that Russia's imports during the first half of 1922
amounted to 80,285,000 gold rubles, and its exports 20,743,294
these totals being reckoned on the basis of 1913 gold prices. Of
the imports, 46,174,000 rubles were for food. During the first
quarter of 1922, 46.9 per cent, of Russia's imports came from the
United States, 15.5 from England, and 11.8 from Germany; but
Germany preponderated overwhelmingly in manufactured im-
ports, supplying 67.4 per cent, of metal wares and machines, and
79 per cent, of textiles. In August, Germany delivered 198 loco-
motives to Russia, and will deliver another 150 before the closing
of navigation to Petrograd.
Late in September, the Soviet authorities issued a veto
against books and pamphlets of a theosophic or similar esoteric
character, for which there has been a considerable demand, par-
ticularly in theatrical and literary circles. The official prohibi-
tion extends to the "sale or publication of literature advancing
abstract philosophies opposed to concrete economic ideas." The
reason for the veto is the objection of the Government to anything
in the nature of secret societies or initiate groups with passwords
and the like, such as are formed among Theosophists, Rosi-
crucians, "New Cagliostrists," and so forth, on the ground that
they might easily become centres of counter-revolutionary
activity.
The most important event of the last two
Italy. months, in Italy, was the definite cleavage,
and therefore the probable collapse, as a
political power, of the Socialist Party, which, in a convention at
Rome, on October 3d, split into two sections: the Communists
with a following of something over 32,000 members, who wish to
pursue an out-and-out revolutionary policy, and the Collabora-
tionists, having about 30,000 followers, who are in favor of a pol-
icy of peaceful penetration and of sharing the responsibilities of
government. Two years ago the Socialists were the strongest
party in Italy, and even up to a few months ago, in spite of inter-
nal differences, they always managed to present a united front
against their opponents. The rise of the Fascisti, however, to-
gether with the liberal policy of the new Popular, or Catholic,
Party, drained their strength, and brought to a head the deep-
seated opposition between the extreme and moderate factions.
On October 4th, the two branches met in separate halls, the Max-
imalists, or extreme Socialists, deciding to adhere to the Third
Internationale, on condition that that body would not interfere
in the domestic affairs of their party, and the Collaborationists,
under the leadership of Turati, deciding to participate in govern-
1922.] RECENT EVENTS 279
mental activities whenever opportunity afforded, and to retain the
name of Socialist.
Although some semblance of order has been introduced by
the new Minister of the Interior, Taddei, in the last two months
isolated outbreaks of the Fascisti still continued to occur. Their
latest activity was the military occupation, on October 4th, of
Trent and Bolzano, former Austrian territories, which since their
acquirement by Italy, as a result of the World War, have been
treated, according to the Fascisti, with too much leniency by the
various Italian Governments. On the following day, the military
authorities took charge of the situation, and the Fascisti, 5,000
strong, temporarily retired.
In the field of politics, the Fascisti have recently demanded,
through their leader, Benito Mussolini, that the party receiving
a majority of the votes in a parliamentary election, be granted
three-fifths of the parliamentary seats. The Fascisti also in-
formed Premier Facta, that general elections must be held this
year. The Fascisti leaders are of the opinion that they will re-
ceive a majority of the votes in the next Chamber, and if their de-
mand for three-fifths of the seats be granted, they will have 321
places against 214 for all the other parties. At present, they
have but 46 seats.
During August, a number of great forest fires occurred in
several of the provinces, particularly in Messina, and partial esti-
mates of the losses caused thereby have been estimated, by the
Ministry of Agriculture, as high as $10,000,000. Troops were
called out to prevent the spreading of the fires.
On September 28th, the powder magazine of Falconara Fort,
near Spezia, was struck by lightning and one hundred and forty-
four persons killed in the explosion that followed. The entire
top of the hill, on which the fort was located, was blown away,
and great damage was caused within a radius of ten miles.
The statement of the Bank of Italy, for the latest date in
August on which returns have been received, shows a decrease in
the outstanding paper circulation of 179,078,000 lire during the
preceding ten-day period, and a decrease of 1,086,215,000 lire
since the end of last December. As compared with the final state-
ment of 1921, gold and silver holdings of the bank have increased
17,253,000 lire, and foreign exchange held, plus balances in for-
eign markets, have increased 22,585,000 lire.
October 13, 1922.
Editorial G)mment
WE have been accused of optimism— which is another way of
saying that we have been called a fool. For there are vari-
ous ways of imputing folly without directly violating the Scripture
injunction. One way is to "deny a man's major." Another is to
concede that he "means well." Still another is to say, "he is young
yet." But if he is no longer young, the most subtle and effective
way of saying that he is a fool, is to call him an "optimist." Does
not the adage say: "A pessimist before forty is a freak. An
optimist after forty is a fool?" And we are over forty!
The imputation carries with it the added charge of shallow
thinking. "All deep thought is sombre thought," says Canon
Sheehan. "The world's greatest literature is tinged with melan-
choly. Cheerfulness and philosophy won't go hand in hand.
The moment you think, you begin to sink. We can only bear
•the weight and burden of all this unintelligible world' by not
thinking of it. The 'intellectually throned' must suffer."
THEREFORE, we presume, anyone who cherishes a happy and
hopeful outlook upon the world is not "intellectually
throned." We hope that the good Canon — peace to his soul —
does not mean that the optimist's intellect is dethroned. To be
reckoned a fool is enough. To be reckoned a madman is too
heavy a penalty to pay for one's optimism.
IT must be confessed that many of the great thinkers have been
A pessimistic. "Dante gnashed his teeth at the world." "The
genius of Shakespeare is best manifested in such a succession of
horrors as are depicted in Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Lear.
The same note obtains in all the pages of Tennyson, and per-
meates all the poetry of Matthew Arnold, the truest interpreter
of the modern weariness of life."
"The modern weariness of life!" Must the emphasis be
placed on the word modern? Sheehan says that "the Welt
Schmerz, dreary, hopeless pessimism, has sunk like a thunder
cloud on the minds of all the modern thinkers, and blackens every
page of modern literature."
TVyE said last month, in our foolish, optimistic way, that we
desire to be modern. But if we would be modern, must we
"blacken every page" of The Catholic World with the Welt
1922.] EDITORIAL COMMENT 281
Schmerz? Even then, someone may remind us, our pages would
not necessarily be "literature." But will they never be literature
until they are pessimistic? Must we make a beginning by affect-
ing to be blas^, world-weary, cynical?
There, we imagine, is the secret of the pessimism of many
modern thinkers and writers. They affect pessimism. They are
not genuine pessimists. We have heard that one of the most
successful of recent actors of Hamlet, shuns society, lives aloof
from the metropolis on his country estate, wears black, reads only
**heavy" — and presumably pessimistic — literature, and, in gen-
eral, tries to live Hamlet off the stage as well as on. We wonder
if our modern literary cynics do likewise. Do H. L. Mencken,
Joseph Hergesheimer, Theodore Dreiser, and John Galsworthy
go about with the haggard, long-drawn, woe-begone visage of
Dante? When Henri Barbusse passes along the boulevards, do
the urchins back off the sidewalk, whispering to one another:
"There goes the man who has been in hell?" We think not. The
photographs of these, and other up-to-the-moment pessimists
show them to be, generally speaking, well groomed and well fed,
even rotund, jolly, comfortable creatures, not at all like the
•melancholy Dane, nor yet like the "lean and hungry Cassius.*'
They sleep well o* nights. They are not breaking their hearts
over the condition of mankind ; they sweat no blood in a midnight
vigil, worrying over the sins of the world. Their pessimism is
only a literary affectation. They are more like Goethe than like
Hamlet. "The Sorrows of Werther" started an epidemic of Sui-
cide in Europe, while Goethe, the original of Werther, continued
his wining and dining and his liaisons,
NOTICE that we have not conceded that pessimism is exclu-
sively or even peculiarly a modern vice. It is older than Job,
more ancient than the Kings of Israel. To quote Canon Sheehan
again: "What a low, sad wail seems to moan all through the
historical books and psalms of the Old Testament, until it cul-
minates in the woes and desolation of Isaias. And then, at its
culmination, it passes on to the terrors of Ezechiel, and the
threnodies of Jeremias, and seenis to die away in the burden of
the weeping of the wind in the minor prophecies of Amos and
Aggaeus. Even in the New Testament, the testament of love and
mercy, the same sadness predominates. The thunders of John
the Baptist, subside to the *soft wailings of infinite pity* of Him
of Whom he was precursor and prophet, until they, too, grow
and swell into that terrible crescendo that startled the darkness
of Golgotha, and broke into the final cry of desolation, *Eloi, Eloi,
w
282 EDITORIAL COMMENT [Nov.,
lamma sabacthanV So, too. in the Epistles of St Paul, if we
mTet, here and there, with a 'Gandete, iterum dice gaudete
somehow it seems forced by the pity and chanty of the grea
saint for his followers. The truer expression of his habitual
sentiments would be 'Cupio dissolvi et esse cum Christo: "
rE think that to be about the strongest case that can be made
. - for pessimism in the Bible. We have quoted it entire be-
cause of its eloquence, and in order to be fair. But we do not
altogether agree with Canon Sheehan. We think that in his
paragraphs on pessimism, he overstates the case and misleads the
unwary reader. We say this with infinite diffidence, for we rever-
ence Sheehan "as much as man may, this side of idolatry,'* and
we consider the book from which we have been quoting (Under
the Cedars and Stars), as almost incomparably wise. But just
here, the master does not entirely convince us.
We will not contend against him on the question of pes-
simism in the Old Testament. But when he gives the impres-
sion that even the gospels are predominantly sad, we protest;
and when he says that St. Paul's "cupio dissolvi" is more char-
acteristic than his ''Gaudete/* we think that he radically mis-
understands the valiant apostle.
The "Eloi, Eloi," was indeed the "final cry of desolation,"
but it was not the final cry. The seventh and last word on the
cross was "In manus tuas Domine.'' The Crucifixion is not the
last scene. It is a climax, but not a conclusion. Sadness and
sorrow run through the gospels like a leitmotif, but the pre-
dominating note is joy; "I bring you good tidings of great joy."
(■
AND here we reveal the heart of our own argument for op-
timism. Jesus Christ was an optimist. And He was no
fool. "He knew what was in man; He needed not that any man
should tell Him." Unlike our comfortable pseudo-pessimists, He
did sweat blood over the sins of mankind. Yet He believed in
man. "He who thought most seriously of the disease held it to
be curable. Those who thought less seriously of it, held it to be
incurable," says the author of Ecce Homo. Someone has defined
a true friend as "one who knows all about you and yet likes you."
Our Saviour knows all about us, and yet He loves us. And, even
more. He believes in us.
^ I 'HERE is the solution of the entire optimism versus pessimism
A controversy. Optimism is Christianity. Pessimism is pa-
ganism. And whether pessimism is ancient or modern. Oriental
1922.] EDITORIAL COMMENT 283
or Greco-Roman, Scandinavian, or Russian, or Prussian, it is al-
ways pagan. But genuine pagans are rare. There are few, if
any, English pessimists. There may be an occasional Irish pes-
simist. There are no American pessimists. Ours are only play-
ing at pessimism, as the parlor Bolsheviki are playing at Com-
munism. They have read Ibsen and Maxim Gorky as their grand-
fathers may have read Werther and Byron. Their pessimism is
a romantic attitude, not the hard reality. In other words, they
are not convinced pagans. Most of them have still in their make-
up some of the elements of Puritanism. The affectation of pa-
ganism, like the affectation of pessimism, gives their writings a
vogue, and provides their readers with a thrill as something
naughty. If they were genuine pagans, they would loathe pagan-
ism. If they were genuine pessimists, they would stop whining
and commit suicide. When a Japanese or a Chinese feels as
these men say they feel, he cuts his throat, or commits hari-kari.
That's the genuine article of paganism and of pessimism.
No Christian is a pessimist. "Confidence in the value of
existence, and in the intrinsic victory of virtue, is not optimism,
but religion," says Chesterton. By "religion," he means Christian
religion. A Buddhist with his Nirvana may be a pessimist, so
may a Shintoist or a Taoist or a Confucian, but we who believe
in Christ, believe in the "value of existence," and the "victory of
virtue."
BEFORE we drop this little dissertation, let us record the cu-
rious fact that some famous wits and humorists have been
deeply pessimistic. And still more curious is the fact that their
pessimism took the form of hating the human race. "I hate the
common horde" (Odi profanum valgus), said the sweetest-tem-
pered of the Roman poets, the most genial and gentle of Roman
humorists. It is a far cry from Horace to Dean Swift, both in
time and in spirit. Horace was a courtly gentleman. Swift was
a crabbed cynic. But they agree in their estimate of the ''pro-
fanum vulgus" "The most pernicious race of little odious ver-
min that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the
earth," is the Dean's definition of the human race. And he adds :
"I heartily hate and detest that animal called man." A certain
critic, Laurence Mason, remarks : "In the last analysis, his loath-
ing for human vileness diflfers only in its appalling sincerity from
the professed creeds of many great religions, philosophies, and
poesies the world over."
We have said that there is no American pessimist. Perhaps
we must make an exception. Mark Twain was, for a good part
284
EDITORIAL COMMENT [Nov.,
of his life, privately a pessimist. His philosophy of hfe finally
became public in one of his last books, The Mysterious Stranger.
His amazing thesis is that God and the Devil are identical, and
that the Power behind the Universe is both malicious and benef-
icent. This is the ne plus ultra of blasphemy. Even the Per-
sians separated Ormuzd, the good god, from Ahriman, the bad
god. Mark Twain combines them. Or, if you read him differ-
ently, he makes God neither good nor bad. But this, too, is blas-
phemy. It is also a curiosity, not only of literature, but of psy-
chology, that a man could carry a theory like that in his head
and yet have an international reputation as a joker, always brim-
ming over with irresistible fun. It reminds one of the old legend
of the clown who received a note announcing the death of his
child just before he goes out to his nightly task of buffoonery,
who yet compels himself to be funnier than ever. Even that
legend has been, to a degree, verified by a newspaper reporter
who interviewed Charley Chaplin and found him a serious-
minded philosopher, puzzling over the riddle of existence!
TIE advocates of the public school are becoming a bit discour-
aged. It seems that the system is not working out very well.
Many Americans are losing confidence in the public schools, for
one reason or other. In an article by Dallas Lore Sharp, in the
October Harper's, we read that a New York attorney, who is a
member of the Board of Education in a suburban community in
Westchester County, writes to ex-President Eliot of Harvard: "I
have been amazed to see how strong the sentiment is against pub-
lic education above the eighth grade, and how the college men in
our community who came through the private schools are so
completely out of touch as to be entirely unconcerned with the
equipment for public education.*' Even men who were them-
selves educated in the public schools refuse to send their own
children to them. "I used to think the American public school a
good thing," said an eminent college president the other day,
"until I had children of my own." "There speak a million Amer-
ican parents," says Mr. Sharp. Another college president says:
"My children have never gone to a public school, and never shall
go. The thing I hate about the public school — " That abrupt
dash is irritating. We wish that Mr. Sharp had let the college
president continue. We Catholics, while we do not hate the pub-
lic schools, have some criticisms to pass upon them. But we
should like to know why non-Catholic Americans go further and
hate the system.
1922.] EDITORIAL COMMENT 285
MR. SHARP had another and more painful experience. He
was addressing the Harvard and Radcliffe Teachers' Asso-
ciation, and had occasion to remark that "Harvard did not believe
in the public school; that so far as I could find out, only one
professor on the Harvard faculty had a child in the Cambridge
public schools." Thereupon arose a storm. The college president
of whom he had spoken, says Mr. Sharp, "called me a foreigner,
and told me that I was ignorant of democracy. He proceeded
to say that no father would send his son to the Boston Latin
School, if he could afford to send that son to a private school.
He (the president) had gone to that school as a boy, but *at that
time it was a good school, because it was a homogeneous school,*
homogeneity, and hence virtue being constituted it would seem,
of Bradstreets, Wigglesworths, Mathers, Lodges, Gabots, Eliots.
*Now,' he went on to say, *it is a heterogeneous school, i. e., made
up of odds and ends, from the Ahamovites to the Zweigenbaums,
and so it is no longer a good school.* "
So, "the cat is out of the bag." When the public school was
founded, it was "strictly native and national, and instinct with the
inmost soul of democracy." But the democrats who were trained
in the public school, it seems, have become aristocrats. And the
public schools are about to be abandoned to the children of for-
eigners and to the poorer native Americans.
THE Boston Latin School, of which Mr. Sharp speaks, has ex-
isted since 1635. The public school system as a national in-
stitution has existed since the days of Horace Mann, nearly a hun-
dren years ago. Its aim professedly was not only to educate, but
to democratize the American people. It is "instinct with the in-
most soul of democracy." "It is the hope, the strength, the beauty
of democracy; its way, and truth, and life."
But as such, after a hundred years — or three hundred years —
it has failed. It has not made its graduates democratic. Mr.
Sharp goes even further. He says : "We have never had a democ-
racy. There have never been enough of us who want one in
America. Each of us in America wants his theocracy, his plutoc-
racy, his aristocracy, and insists on getting it."
We fear that Mr. Sharp's experiences with the Harvard teach-
ers and the college president have gotten on his nerves. But there
is truth in what he says. In proportion as th% American people
add to their wealth and improve their social standing, they lose
devotion to the public school, precisely because it is public. When
America was "homogeneous" (blessed word), that is, when it was
Anglo-Saxon, it had no chance to demonstrate its democracy. All
256 EDITORIAL COMMENT [Nov.,
.fndents were of the same race, and all were of the same caste.
But w^^^^^^^^^ came to show a sincere belief in democratic
principle, by permitting the mingling of races and castes in the
public school, then the original Americans withdrew. Democracy
had not gotten very deeply into their blood.
IT is difficult to see how, in any wise, the Catholics are to blame
1 for this collapse of the experiment in democracy. Mr. Sharp's
quarrel would seem to be with his own kind. But, in the same
article, he turns upon us Catholics and beats us with the usual
rod. "One of the most mistaken institutions in America," he says,
"is the parochial school. Why, in the fundamental process of
making Americans, cannot the Catholic Church accept the historic,
the established, the fundamental institution for that purpose?"
Taking a cue from Mr. Sharp himself, we might reply that the
pmblic schools were not successful in teaching democracy, so we
built some schools in which there would be true democracy, with
no invidious distinction between rich and poor, race and race,
caste and caste.
But he might think that only a clever answer. So we will tell
him, if he really cares to know, that the reason we Catholics cannot
approve of the public school, is that it never has lived up, and by
its nature never can live up, to its primary purpose. That primary
purpose we will give in Mr. Sharp's own words, or rather the words
he quotes from the Ordinance of the thirteenth of July, 1787, when,
as he says, "the nation went on record, uttering its educational
creed in the famous words: 'Religion, morality, and knowledge
being necessary to good government and the happiness of man-
kind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encour-
aged.' " There is the fundamental principle which brought the
parochial schools into being. "Religion, morality, and knowledge
are necessary to good government."
Democracy is good. Religion and morality are better. The
three combined are excellent. The public schools cannot combine
the three. The parochial schools do combine the three. The
parochial schools are, therefore, the only true public schools of
the original pattern.
It is amusing to hear Mr. Sharp declaiming against those who
are undemocratic. He evidently thinks them snobs. But is he
not something of a snob himself? "Come, now," he says fervently,
"let us reason together. Surely in 54,800,000 of traditional Anglo-
Saxon stock, out of our total of 105,000.000, the Lord of Hosts
hath left us something of a remnant." And again: "We speak
the English tongue. We brought it with us, and we brought what
1922.] EDITORIAL COMMENT 287
is still the grander part of English literature with us. We have
Americanized the language. We have added a priceless portion
to the literature, and this English-American language is what we
were and are and shall be.** Whom does he mean when he so
constantly reiterates "we** and "us.** He means the Americans
of English origin. If he can only succeed in so far broadening
his own democracy as to say "we,** and "us,** and mean all Amer-
icans without exception, he will be a democrat indeed, and then
he may properly try to make the people democratic.
A GREAT deal of comment has been made upon the statement
of President Hopkins of Dartmouth College, that "too many
men are going to college.** "It is a curious turn of fate,** says
the New York Times, "that the college of which Daniel Webster
said, *It is a small college, but there are those who love it,* should
now be advertised as being too large and loved by too many.**
"Several thousand applicants for admission have been re-
fused,*' we read. The conditions at the "big** colleges are even
worse. It seems that the classrooms are cluttered with scholars
who are not mentally equipped to take advantage of the higher
education. The United States Bureau of Education, after a sur-
vey of a large number of colleges and universities, found that
whereas 39.3 per cent, of the total enrollment in the average col-
lege are freshmen, 25.7 per cent, are sophomores, 19.3 per cent,
are juniors, and only 15.7 per cent, are seniors. Economic con-
ditions may account partially for the gradual elimination of stu-
dents through the four years* course. But we are given to under-
stand that a large number of students are not "educable.** They
fall by the wayside because of deficiency of intelligence.
However, the statement, "too many men are going to college,'*
is probably untrue. During the draft for the war, it was esti-
mated that about 4V2 per cent, of the young men examined had
the "ability to make a superior record at college,** and 9 per cent,
more were thought to be capable of making an "average** record.
Upon that basis, it is estimated that there might well be in college
about one million men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-
three. But in all the colleges, universities, and professional schools
in the United States, there are less than a quarter of a million
men students (223,841 according to the World Almanac).
Meanwhile, let it be remembered that there is plenty of room
in the Catholic colleges. We have not more than 22,000 men
students in all the Catholic colleges and universities of the
country.
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THE
^atholie^opld
Vol. GXVI.
DECEMBER, 1922.
No. 693.
BY EMILY HICKEY.
ING, bells, ring, and tell the story afresh
Of the Word Made Flesh:
Tell of Infinitude taking the room of a span —
God Made Man.
Tell of a helpless Babe, Who in cradle mean will sleep :
Tell of His power on the scaleless height, in the fathomless deep.
Tell of a Child Who takes from a mortal breast His food :
Tell of the One Who feedeth creation's amplitude.
Tell of the baby cries, the baby laughter sweet:
Tell how the heaven of heavens is lying under His feet.
Tell of the low estate, of the little humble shed:
Tell of all wisdom and might and glory in that small bed.
Tell of His mother's joy, beholding His lovely face:
Tell how creation lives by this her Creator's grace.
Ring, bells, ring, and tell the story afresh
Of the Word Made Flesh:
Tell of Infinitude taking the room of a span —
God Made Man.
Copyright. 1922. The Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle
IN THE State of New York.
VOL. atvi. 19
ON GOING HOME FOR CHRISTMAS.
BY JOHN BUNKER.
OU are, let us suppose, of the metropolitan horde,
a human unit in the multitudinous heap, a sub-
wayite, a flat-dweller, a diner-out, a whirling
atomy amid roaring millions, divorced from all
the kindly associations, the ancient simplicities
of neighborhood . . . one of the great dispossessed, in other
words, a typical New Yorker. Or, if not a New Yorker, then
a Bostonian, a Chicagoan, a St. Louisan. At all events, you
are a stranger in a strange town, rolled about in the whelming
tides of urban existence and doing such work as it has been
given you to do — a clerk, a banker, a writer, a salesman, a
merchant, or one learned in the law. But whatever your oc-
cupation or place of sojourn, each year towards the December
solstice, you shake off the incubus of habit and determine to
be, for once at least out of the three hundred and sixty-five
days, no more a mere banker or supernumerary clerk, isolated
and lost amid numbers, but a human being with a human
background and definite human relationships, a recognized
member of a group, a gens, a tribe, a family. In short, you
decide to go home for Christmas.
Consider that pleasant custom which annually, every
twenty-fifth of December or thereabout, sends scurrying home-
ward some tens of thousands of people all over this broad
land of ours. A gracious phenomenon and one full of rich
significance. For this home-coming, this gathering of the
clans, is no mere transference of the human machine from
one point on the earth's surface to another, nor yet, as our
scientific friends might affirm, simply another instance of the
herd instinct, a primeval impulse harking back to the days of
the caveman and the dark dangers of the wild. No, it is
1922.] ON GOING HOME FOR CHRISTMAS 291
something far higher than these things — a spiritual act, a
sacramental participation.
But we grow too general and philosophic, whereas the
experience is special and individual and particular; and it is
to you, Reader, that we mean to address our remarks. What-
ever your departing-point, then, you decide, we have supposed,
to go home for the holidays — ^with what heart-warming antic-
ipations let memory declare. You board the train, and after
a certain number of miles, you reach the city (the mid-western
city, say), whence, years ago, you started out on your wander-
ings.
At last, you find yourself before the paternal door, you
ring, you enter, and there, standing with outstretched arms in
a gesture you have long pre-visualized, is your mother — and
a little behind her, perhaps, your father, beaming upon you
with a proud, affectionate, half -quizzical gaze. You advance,
you gather her into your arms — but over that scene, if you
please, we shall draw a veil. Suffice it to say, that for one
high, miraculous moment you are no longer a man, a woman;
in that instant the years shrivel up and drop off from you like
a shed garment; custom, habit, and all the mental and spir-
itual impedimenta with which you have laden your maturity
vanish at a touch, and you are back again in the days of
knickerbockers and pinafores. Whatever face you put upon
the matter elsewhere and at other seasons, now you are
simply a child, her boy, her girl, drawn in once more from the
storms of the world and sheltered beneath her protective
influence.
Then the good talk begins. First, of course, come your
adventures, your tales, your experiences, which, though flat
and unprofitable enough when they occurred, take on now, in
retrospect and in this sympathetic atmosphere, a strange and
romantic glamour. The hills far away are always green, and
stimulated by maternal wonder and appreciation, you rise to
unusual eloquence, enthralling interest.
And your auditors, also, have their story to tell: family
news, neighborhood gossip; births and deaths, arrivals and
departures, marriages and giving in marriage, romance, love,
children, school — all the homely details of homely existence.
"Much," your mother observes, "may happen in a year."
Much, indeed! And, truly, in the presence of these loving
292 ON GOING HOME FOR CHRISTMAS [Dec,
informers, things now begin to fall into their right perspective.
For, after all, what are wars or the fate of empires or the far-
off rumors of crumbling nations in comparison with this
simple and intimate recital? Here, indeed, you have "all life
in a life;" the whole of existence contracted to a span, and you
the cenU-e of the universe. This is the true microcosm; your
hand is on the pulse of the world.
The present occasion, however, is not only a home-com-
ing, the welcoming back of a far traveler. It is something
more, and on the morrow dawns the day, the most joyful of
the entire year, for
This is the month, and this the happy morn
Wherein the Son of Heaven's eternal King,
Of wedded Maid and Virgin Mother born,
Our great redemption from above did bring.
And, with the coming of that day, do you quite realize the
stupendous mystery of 'which it is the celebration? Are you
penetrated with a sense of the sublime dispensation of which
you and all the other children of Adam are the beneficiaries
and inheritors? Probably not. The shackles of the world
are not so easily unloosed. And of what, then, are you think-
ing as you wend your way along snowy or wind-swept streets
to Mass — or rather to the three Masses which, by old family
custom, you hear every Christmas for the good of your soul
and the honor of the Holy Trinity? Perhaps of the weather,
perhaps of the old acquaintance you meet on the way, usually
no doubt of the gifts you are going to give and the loved ones
who are going to receive them.
And you enter the church, where there are priests before
the several altars and rich vestments and incense and fes-
tooned evergreens and the glow of innumerable candles and
a choir singing "Adeste Fideles^ and other simple imme-
morial hymns, which, simple though they are, have an unac-
countable power to stir you. And so you dispose yourself to
devotion and join your hands in prayer, and, bowing your
head, you think of a tiny Babe Who— unfathomable mani-
festation of Divine Love! — ^was born in a stable and wrapped
in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. And, thinking of
these things, your heart is filled with praise and gratitude and
awe and unspeakable adoration —
1922.] ON GOING HOME FOR CHRISTMAS 293
It is, then, Christmas. And so you return home, where
other business is toward— not the artificial revel of metropol-
itan gaiety, dancing, and garish music and glittering elec-
troliers and obsequious servitors; nor yet the dry fare and
meagre circumstance of restaurant or boarding-house. Ah,
no; far otherwise is the day celebrated in all these countless
homes of the mid-western country.
The feast is spread; the clans arrive. It reminds you of a
stanza out of "John Gilpin:"
My sister and my sister's child,
Myself and children three
Will fill the—
table, and there the parallel breaks down, for you are the
honored guest, and so are not required to "ride on horseback
after we," though, perhaps, you have a tight squeeze for it,
what with brothers and their wives, and sisters with their
husbands, and gouty uncles, and maiden aunts, and stout
cousins, and children bobbing about, and, in general, insin-
uating their small persons into all sorts of impossible
places.
My, what a chatter and stir! The steaming dishes, the
aroma of food, laughter and talk, banter and gossip, the rattle
of plates, the faint sub-tinkle of plied cutlery, the musical ring
of authentic cut glass — was ever such a confused uproar heard
outside the regions of chaos and the reign of old Night?
Nevertheless, it strikes upon your ear like the chiming of
the spheres — a culinary symphony, a gastronomic orchestra-
tion.
Duly the courses pass before you, not without their levied
toll, and then, after the first edge of appetite has been re-
moved, you take time to look around you and observe. You
glance at Tom, that younger brother of yours, whom, only a
short while back, as it now seems, you were cuffing about and
ruling with the iron hand of three years' seniority. How pert
and frivolous he used to be — and how irritating ! and yet what
can surpass his dignity now as he sits there beside his wife of
a twelvemonth with all the gravity of conscious young-hus-
bandhood? Not Destiny herself could look more solemn and
294 ON GOING HOME FOR CHRISTMAS [Dec,
severe and you who have known married men of ten, twenty,
thirty years' standing, wonder, in your simple bachelor's way,
when the young prig will come off his perch and consent to be
human again.
But you must not neglect your dinner-partner. At your
side sits your doting maiden-aunt, your mother's sister, that
fond and lovable creature who has watched over you from the
days of infancy, through boyhood and adolescence, and up to
the point of manhood and beyond. She, good, innocent soul,
is busy with reminiscence. She inquires if you remember the
day when, at the age of five, you tumbled down the cellar-
steps and threw the household into consternation— or the
sanguinary combat you had with Willy Rathburne. Willy is
dead now these many years. Alas, poor Willy. She recalls
your first day at school, your fevers, your measles, your
mumps, and all the various ills that juvenile flesh is heir to.
To all these, you nod assent as to things dimly remembered;
and you remember, too, if dimly, at all events gratefully, other
matters to which she does not refer — how, when you were sick,
she stole into your room at odd moments, smuggling in for-
bidden delicacies, or to read you a story, or simply to place her
cool hand on your fevered forehead.
Meanwhile, talk is not still in other quarters. Your Uncle
Ned, a whilom drummer-boy of '61, says, with emphasis, that
he is certainly glad the war is over; and Aunt Emily replies
that it has indeed been a terrible strain. And as you sit lis-
tening to the ancient pair, you presently discover that despite
recent events, England is as distant to them as Spain under
Isabella, and the France they are thinking of is, for the most
part, the France of Lafayette and 1776.
Family, business, and war: discussion is in full swing all
around the board — all around the board, that is, except just
opposite you, where sits that pretty young cousin of yours,
just turned twenty, whom you last beheld as a chattering miss
with carroty hair and innumerable freckles. Really, you dis-
cover with surprise, she has blossomed out adorably — a verit-
able flower. And, like a flower, too, she droops the pensive
head and has nothing to say. Though corporeally present,
spiritually, it is clear, she is far away; nor are roguish intima-
tions wanting as to the cause of her reverie. Wrapt in sweet
dreams and fair musings, she is on a plane inexpressibly re-
1922.] ON GOING HOME FOR CHRISTMAS 295
moved from mundane concerns; she, at least, is not one
of you.
The guests arise; the tree is lit, and there is a general
swarming about its mystic splendor. Insensibly, you are
drawn into the magic circle of childhood and share the fresh
raptures of nieces and nephews. Or, putting on a clownish
mood, you tumble about on the floor careless of clothes and
the restraints of sophistication.
But lo, there is another attraction, for now is brought for-
ward for admiring inspection Tom's three-months-old baby,
warm from its nesting-place and blinking in the unaccustomed
glare. Or no, not blinking — ^what infant ever blinked? — but
with eyes as bright as beads or dollars, and as round. But
who can describe a baby? There it lies huddled in its
mother's arms, a tiny mass of pink and white, swathed in
voluminous garments. How is one to act in this presence?
You whistle, you chuck it under the chin, you wave your arms
and go through other absurd antics, and it only stares at you
with a solemnity, profound, abysmal, unearthly, before which
knowledge is abashed and wisdom bows the head. You prof-
fer it a tentative finger, and it is in half-a-mind whether to cry
or be silent. And, finally, you make the crucial move and ask,
as the phrase is, to "take it."
Why is it that mothers — at least, young mothers — are with
bachelors so chary of their infants? One would think that you
intended to swing it about your head or dangle it out the
window. Did a blundering male on some prehistoric occa-
sion drop the baby — or inadvertently pinch it? — and is this
reluctance a survival of primitive instinct? At any rate, you
have asked whether you may hold it, whereupon ensues, in the
mother's soul, a terrible struggle between nature and grace,
between constitutional misgiving and the claims of politeness.
But, after all, however hard she may find it to credit the fact,
you are Tom's brother, and so she hands over the precious
bundle — though the look in her eye says plainly enough that
all bachelors are clumsy brutes, and certainly you are far
from an exception. Orthodoxly, you grasp the infant firmly
under the arms and lift it on high. And then — wonder of
wonders ! — it smiles, it gurgles, it coos. You are a made man.
The mother is your friend for life. Henceforth, do what you
will, rob, murder, pillage, sink to the lowest degradation, there
296 ON GOING HOME FOR CHRISTMAS [Dec,
will always be one at least to discover and proclaim in you
high virtue and the possession of a noble soul.
Meanwhile, during this parley, all about you the revelry
goes on— laughter and music and song and childish merriment.
And then, imperceptibly, the tumult decreases. The parting-
hour has come, there is a bustle and scurry for wraps, and,
one by one, the guests depart, till, at last, you are left by the
fire, alone once more with those two who are dearer to you
than all the world beside. You kiss your mother good-night
and go up to your old prescriptive room, haunt of boyish
memories, whose least detail is as present, to your mind, as if
you had left it but yesterday. You stretch out luxuriously in
the ample bed, your ears yet ringing with jocund voices and
innocent mirth. And then, insensibly, you float off into the
region of dreams, peopled with friendly faces and familiar
forms, and, above all, shining down upon you with a tender
and holy light, the face of her who, through all change and
vicissitude, has loved you with a constant and an unwearying
love.
Hushed now are all the harsh noises of the world; far,
far away are its brutal contacts, its blundering cruelties, its
mean ambitions, its strange sorrows, and all the burdening
mystery of life. A great peace descends upon you. You are
asleep once more under your father's roof.
LOUIS PASTEUR.^
December 27, 1822~September 28, 1895,
BY SIR BERTRAM C. A. WINDLE, M.D., SCO., LL.D., F.R.S.
"Pour celebrer Louis Pasteur tous les mots ont dejd. ete employes
dans toutes les langues."^
HREE centenaries of scientific luminaries, in this
year of grace, 1922, give a decisive answer to
Huxley's ignorant jibe, that the Church is the
"implacable enemy" of science: the centenary of
Johan Gregor Mendel, the inaugurator of a new
biological era; the centenary of Abbe Hauy, who placed the
science of crystallography on unshakable foundations, and the
centenary of Pasteur, greatest of them all, since he embraced
all science as his kingdom.
At that famous nursery of great men, the Ecole Normale
de Paris, Pasteur pursued a course of studies intended to fit
him as a professional chemist. Curiously enough, his thesis
for the Degree of Doctor of Science was devoted to crystal-
lography, of which the founder, Abbe Hauy, had died the very
year of Pasteur's birth. Pasteur had now attained his twenty-
fifth year.
When Pasteur obtained his doctorate, in 1847, he was
apparently a mere child among scientists. A then unexplained
mystery in crystallography was the known fact that some
crystals have the optical property of rotating the plane of
polarization to the right, others to the left. This problem
confronted Pasteur and others of his day. The others won-
dered, Pasteur explained. So startling was his discovery, his
brother scientists met it with skepticism, and controversy
raged over his proposition. The matter was referred to Biot.
After full investigation of Pasteur's experiments and findings,
this distinguished man pronounced in his favor, saying: "My
1 Pasteur and His Work, by L. Descour, translated from the French by A. F.
and B. H. Wedd, M.D. (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co.), Is a recent accurate and
readable book, in which, however, Pasteur's Catholicity receives only passing notice.
2 "Language has been exhausted to pay tribute to Louis Pasteur." The President
of the Acad6mie des Sciences at the Jubilee Celebration of Pasteur.
298 LOUIS PASTEUR [Dec,
dear boy, I have so loved science all my life long that this
discovery of yours makes my heart throb with joy."
Pasteur's discovery was the germ of a mighty tree— the
science of stereo-chemistry, so assiduously cultivated since by
Le Bel and Van't Hoff. Here, for the first time, a glimpse was
afforded into the molecular architecture of chemical sub-
stances; of their arrangement in the three dimensions of space.
This science has grown rapidly since its initiation by Pasteur,
and, of late, by the discovery of the process of X-ray spectro-
scopy, it gives promise of solving questions of vast scientific
—and philosophic interest. Such a discovery marked Pas-
teur as a man of the first rank, and the Government of France,
more enlightened than some, soon found a place for him as
Professor of Chemistry in the University of Strasbourg— then,
as now, a French possession. At Strasbourg, he met and,
eventually, married Marie, daughter of M. Laurent, the Presi-
dent of the University. She became his devoted helper in his
future investigations.
The great scientific struggle over the origin of life was
then raging. For centuries, the doctrine of Spontaneous Gen-
eration had been held even by such men as St. Thomas Aqui-
nas. Redi, in 1698, was the first to subject it to criticism. He
found that, if meat were kept away from flies, no maggots
developed in it. Thus stood revealed, though distant, the
promised land of sterilization. A century later ensued a
strenuous contest between Needham, an Englishman — the first
priest to be made an F. R. S. — and Spallanzani, an Italian
priest, who took the side of Biogenesis, as opposed to Spon-
taneous Generation. Still a century later, in 1858, Pouchet, a
Frenchman and a Catholic, asserted the existence of Spon-
taneous Generation. Then Pasteur set to work on the sub-
ject. His procedure was that of Redi and of Spallanzani:
sterilize the substance and exclude from it all but perfectly
pure air, and no life will appear in it. To name but one prac-
tical result, the whole "canning" trade depends upon the truth
of this observation.
Pasteur, however, did not, as is sometimes foolishly in-
sisted, disprove the existence, still less the possibility, of
Spontaneous Generation. That process may be going on
around us without our knowing it, and invisible to our eyes.
It may be the Creator's method of producing lowly organisms,
1922.] LOUIS PASTEUR 299
as it may have been His method of starting life in the begin-
nings of the world — we do not know. What Pasteur did
show was that the experiments hitherto relied on to prove
Spontaneous Generation were fallacious. It is hardly too
much to say that no single discovery has ever had such re-
markable and beneficial effects for the human race^
Each fermentation is the product of the development of
a special microbe; this, Pasteur's first great discovery, laid the
foundation for the vast and wholly beneficent science of bac-
teriology. Pasteur found that, in connection with fermenta-
tion, there were beneficent and maleficent, or "wild," organ-
isms. All of these can be killed by heating the fluids contain-
ing them to a sufficient temperature and for a sufficient time,
thus completely sterilizing them. Most of the "wild" organ-
isms can be killed at a lower temperature, which does not in-
terfere with the useful properties in a fluid such as milk.
This is, in fact, the process known as "Pasteurization," to
which our morning milk is subjected in well-regulated cities.
Starting from this point, Pasteur engaged in a series of
investigations, all based on the fundamental principle just
laid down, and all of vast importance to the human race. The
first was in connection with the silk-worm disease (1865),
which raged in the south of France. Pasteur proved that this
disease, of dual character, part bacterial, part protozoal (part
vegetable, part animal), was preventable. He was equally
successful in finding the cause and cure of the so-called
chicken cholera, which ravaged rural France; and of anthrax,
so rampant and deadly in the herds of many countries, which,
in 1891, had destroyed forty per cent, of the 106,260,000 sheep
on the runs of Australia. In each case, Pasteur successfully
isolated the germ responsible for the condition, and laid the
foundation of his second great discovery: Each infectious
malady is produced by the development in the organism of a
special microbe. His third, and most amazing, discovery de-
veloped from his investigation of chicken cholera: The mi-
crobe of an infectious malady, if cultivated under suitable
conditions, ceases to be noxious and, becoming attenuated in
its operation, is a valuable remedy and preventative: instead
of a virus, it is a vaccine.
The narrative of this last discovery must be briefly given.
In investigating chicken cholera, and like conditions, Pasteur,
^^ LOUIS PASTEUR [Dec,
like the bacteriologist of today, made what are called "cul-
i^es " or growths of the organisms under observation, in
Zilon o'sorne organic jelly or fluid. With the products
of th se cultures, he inoculated living things, such as guinea-
Is in order to observe the results. Vivisection, no doubt:
3out that process, Pasteur could not have discovered any
of the facts which have saved millions of human lives, as
valuable, we hope, as the lives he was obliged to sacrifice; to
say nothing of the millions of animals he saved from pain and
death by the same experiments. Pasteur went off for a hoh-
day and while he was away his cultures of chicken cholera
were not renewed. On his return, he found, to his great sur-
prise the old cultures would no longer cause the disease,
when injected into fowls. "In the field of observation, chance
favors only the trained mind"— a profound saying. An or-
dinary man would have abused the culture for "going bad,"
and thrown it away, but Pasteur was no ordinary man. The
fact set him thinking: the result of his thought was the init-
iation of the vast method of vaccino-therapy. Jenner. in Eng-
land, years before, caught a glimpse of this truth, but the time
was not ripe for its discovery. He had not then the instru-
ments of precision which were at Pasteur's disposal; still less
those we have in our laboratories today. Jenner found that
cowpox, a common disease in those days, inoculated the
chapped hands of the dairy-maids employed in milking the
cows, and that these maids seldom caught the smallpox, or.
if they did. had the disease in a very mild form.
In Jenner's discovery lay the germ of Pasteur's monu-
mental one: find the bacillus of the disease, cultivate it in the
proper media until it has been sufficiently attenuated; if inoc-
ulated into an organism affected with the disease, it will cure
it: if into an organism unaffected with the disease, but in
danger of infection, it will prevent it. Here we have the prin-
ciple of the so-called autogenous vaccines, so much and so
beneficially employed today. In the case of boils, for instance,
the surgeon ascertains by bacteriological methods that a
staphylococcus, i. e., a lowly bacterial organism, is at the bot-
tom of the trouble. He makes a culture from the patient's
own bacteria. It is treated so as to become a vaccine, and
injected into the patient in proper doses, usually with suc-
cess. That is the cure of a disease in esse. The very word
1922.] LOUIS PASTEUR 301
"immune" was almost unknown in the present sense, and cer-
tainly quite uncomprehended, until the time of Pasteur.
Everybody knew that a person marked with smallpox was less
likely to catch that disease than another who had never had it,
and persons were even, like Lady Mary Wortley Montague,
inoculated from mild cases so that, if they had the disease,
it might be in a mild form, but the real reason for these un-
doubted facts was unknown until Pasteur discovered it. It is
too long a matter to take up here, but it is one of the most
interesting and beautiful discoveries of the last hundred years.
So far, the observations made concerned chiefly the lower
rungs of animal life: silkworms, chickens, sheep. Later, the
applicability of the facts to man became evident. Yet, even
from the business point of view, Pasteur's discoveries were of
enormous importance. Huxley said, after they had been in
operation but a few years, that they had already saved more
than would pay the war indemnity demanded by Germany
from France. We must now speak of Pasteur's achievements,
which have brought such amelioration to the sufferings of
humanity. Of primary importance is his discovery of a cure
for the horrible disease of Rabies or Hydrophobia. From the
days of Dioscorides, centuries past, there had been no cure
known, but the usually inadequate one of cutting out the
wound and cauterizing it. Sometimes, this was effectual;
where it was not, the victim was doomed to an end of in-
describable horror. For this terrible malady, Pasteur sought,
and found a cure.
The great difficulty of investigation arose from the fact
that the organism, or venom, of hydrophobia was not, and is
not, discoverable where one would expect, namely, in the mu-
cous saliva flowing from the mouth. Pasteur, naturally, se-
lected this saliva for his first experiments, obtaining what he
required from a little child who died of rabies, after twenty-
four hours of the most excruciating agony, in one of the Paris
hospitals. He found a bacterium in the sputum, and naturally
thought it was the organism of hydrophobia. But it failed
to produce the disease in a dog. It was a bacterium, no doubt,
but not the specific organism he was seeking. It would be
tedious to the general reader to detail Pasteur's experiments;
his suspicion that the poison must lurk in the regions of the
brain; his desperate and dangerous struggles with animals
3Q2 LOUIS PASTEUR [Dec,
suffering from the disease; the proof that his suspicion was
correct, and, finally, his discovery of the antidote.
In 1885 Pasteur first tried his remedy on a human bemg,
an Alsatian peasant child bitten in fourteen places by a cer-
tainly rabid dog. No surgeon being available, the cautery
was not applied until twelve hours after the bites had been
inflicted— too late even for the faint hope afforded by that
procedure— and, for some reason, the cauterization was only
attempted with carbolic acid, a very ineffective agent in hydro-
phobia. The boy was brought to Paris. Pasteur debated,
anxiously, whether he ought to risk a treatment never before
employed. His medical colleagues believed the attempt
should be made. The child must shortly die a horrible death
if nothing were done; at the worst, the inoculation would only
precipitate the inevitable. The decision was made, and the
child inoculated with the vaccine prepared from the material
obtained by Pasteur. Day by day, Pasteur administered
stronger and stronger doses of the injection, and night after
night he lay awake, in agony as to the result. Day by day,
rabbits were inoculated with the same cords with which the
boy was treated, in order to test the virulence. On the twelfth
day, the boy was treated with the deadly virus capable of
producing hydrophobia, but impotent — ex-hypothesi — to af-
fect those prepared for it by accurately increased doses of less
violent nature from day to day. The moment was one of
supreme anxiety. The same virus was inoculated into unpre-
pared rabbits. They all fell victims to hydrophobia, but the
boy, Joseph Meister, remained perfectly well. Pasteur's ex-
periments were justified: the cure for this dread disease was
found. "My turquoise," exclaimed Shylock, "I would not
have given it for a wilderness of monkeys.'* And one may
feel sure that Meister's parents would as little regard the sacri-
ficed rabbits which had helped to snatch their child from the
grave and — far worse — from a death of exquisite torture.
But we must turn to another direction, where Pasteur's
labors have had wider, though not more beneficent, effect,
namely, prophylactic inoculations. In hydrophobia, the in-
jections were only given after the patient had been bitten.
Naturally— for, after all, a bite from a rabid animal is not a
thing one need expect, nor prepare for by prophylaxis. The
same is true of tetanus. But there are conditions where it is
1922.] LOUIS PASTEUR 303
wise for every person to guard against some evil he is sure to
encounter, do what he will — typhoid or enteric fever, for
example.
This treacherous and deadly disease was bad enough in
private life, but worse, far worse, when it dogged the footsteps
of armies in the field. In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-
1871, nearly ten per cent, of the entire German Army were vic-
tims of typhoid fever, and eleven and three-tenths per cent, of
those affected died. Twenty years later, in the Boer War, the
number of men actually killed by the Boers was 7,781; the
number of men attacked with typhoid, in fly-infested South
Africa, was 57,684, of whom 8,022 died. "Bacteria were more
deadly than bullets," as the late Sir William Osier remarked.
Nothing was more remarkable in the late war than the small
number of cases and still smaller percentage of deaths from
typhoid fever. The difference was due to the protective in-
oculations of anti- typhoid serum (denounced by ignorant
fanatics as "pouring dirt into men's systems") , to which every
combatant or non-combatant going to the front was required
to submit. How many thousand lives were saved by these
inoculations, it is impossible to say, but they all go down in the
great ledger to the credit of Pasteur.
A similar story, by the way, not of protective, but ex post
facto, treatment, might be told about tetanus. The anti-te-
tanic serum used in the late war, another of the remedies de-
pendent on Pasteur's lines of investigation, was most success-
ful in combating this very fatal disease.
No story is more sickening than that of hospital surgery,
yet there is none more full of hope and encouragement. In the
time of Ambroise Pare when two, three, or more patients, suf-
fering from any miscellaneous collection of diseases were
bundled into the same hospital bed; when there were no
ansesthetics and no antiseptics, unless hot irons deserve that
name, it is no wonder that people perished in thousands. But
let us, for a moment, study conditions nearer our own times
that we may comprehend humanity's debt to Pasteur. In 1867,
the late Sir James Y. Simpson, of Edinburgh, published a
paper on "Hospitalism," which is the standard authority for
the subject. A very few figures may be given from this.
Taking all amputations, except those of a minor character and
those through joints, of 2,089 performed in hospitals, 855, or
3^ LOUIS PASTEUR [Dec,
o„» Hipd whilst of 2,098 performed in country
SS:r^ «ti fZ/^i^hMen-h. per cent, died. Thi, w.,
practice,^, ^^.^^ ^^ ^j^^ ^^^^t^^ practt-
'::L:X:1^^^^^^^^^ gangrene and other septic dis.
lases ie likely to occur in isolation outside, than inside the
crow^^^^^^^^ Simpson collected, also, a vast number of
auls on 'childbirth, so closely related to surgery, and hj
ound that of 888,302 women ^^^^^^'^J^'^'l'''^^^^^^
died-1 in every 29. Of 934,781 delivered at home, 4,045 died
—1 in 212. ^ *. 1 * fu^
A striking difference this, and one due entirely to the
greater amount of sepsis and consequent puerperal fever m the
hospitals. One of the first to take action in this matter, to his
honor be it said, was the late Oliver Wendell Holmes (better
known as a charming writer than as a medical man), m 184d,
but not until Pasteur, in 1879, showed its bacteriological cause
was the danger overcome. What are the resulting sta-
tistics? Home cases have been reduced to a percentage
mortality of 0.15 from the 0.47 of Simpson's day— a very sub-
stantial gain. But far more remarkable is the change in the
hospital figures. In the maternity hospitals of today, where ai
large number of cases are of a grave character, the percentage
is even lower than in private practice. Only God knows how
many homes, now tenanted by smiling mothers and children,
would have been desolate but for Pasteur.
Pasteur's influence in the field of surgery was indirect,
for he was not a medical man. He was made a member of the
French Academic de Medecine, it is true, and the University of
Bonn, prior to 1870, made him an Honorary Doctor of Medi-
cine,» but he had no medical training, and even his more im-
portant vivisections, such as the trephinings necessary in the
investigations of hydrophobia, were performed for him by
medical assistants. Yet it can fairly be said that, by the im-
provements in medical and surgical practice due to him, he
has saved more human lives than a whole college of phy-
sicians and surgeons. This was largely due to the apprecia-
tion of his work by the late Lord Lister and to the methods
based on it, which he devised. For right up to Lister's time, the
hospital conditions, already alluded to, continued.
3 The story of this diploma and the return thereof after the war, with the
correspondence between Pasteur and the University, is one of the few things in his
life ou which it is impossible to dwell with any satisfaction.
1922.] LOUIS PASTEUR 305
How are things now? When I entered upon medical
study the new order was just coming in — bitterly contested
and sneered at by many old practitioners even in the United
States where, as in England and Scotland, Listerism, as it was
called, had a very up-hill battle to fight. I have seen surgeons
operate in filthy old coats, with the carbolic spray blowing
vigorously on their backs, and then wonder why their pa-
tients did not do as well as those of X, who was, in their
opinion and very likely in fact, no better operator. Above all,
I may refer to operations for ovariotomy, just coming into
vogue in my student days, and regarded as of such gravity
as to warrant not only a special night nurse to each
patient, but a special senior student to sit up all night with her.
I can remember doing it myself, and how the surgeon felic-
itated himself if his patient eventually recovered. Well —
the Mayos — a glory, if a medical man not belonging to the
United States may respectfully say so — to the profession of
that part of the world, from 1905 to 1914, reported six hundred
and nine cases of ovariotomy with only five deaths — that is
eight-tenths of one per cent. Antisepticism or asepticism are
due to Pasteur and his fundamental discoveries, and the great-
ness of Pasteur is only imperfectly understood unless one
grasps the greatness of the surgical revolution produced by
Lister, working on Pasteurian lines. At Pasteur's jubilee
celebration. Lister said: "Truly, there does not exist in the
entire world any individual to whom the medical sciences owe
more than they do to you. . . . Thanks to you, surgery has
undergone a complete revolution, which has deprived it of its
terrors and has extended, almost without limit, its efficacious
power." On another occasion. Lister told his audience that
Pasteur had pointed out a path in which he had done his best
to walk.
An extraordinary canard, let loose in the United States not
many years after Pasteur's death, stated that he had never
been really a Catholic; never more than a fairly convinced
deist, believing in a future life, as indeed he had proclaimed
on more than one occasion. Who let fly this amazing canard,
or where it was fledged, I cannot say: it went from paper to
paper, reached England and was widely disseminated through-
out the United States. Not the slightest credence was at-
tached to the story on the other side of the Atlantic: people
vol.. cxvi. 20
306 LOUIS PASTEUR [Dec,
there were too close to Pasteur, too accustomed to hearing of
him as a Catholic— "A devout Catholic," says Chambers'
Biographical Dictionary. Nor, of course, could it be believed
in France, where all that is mortal of Pasteur lies in a chapel
where Mass is offered for his soul. Some French unbelievers
shook their heads over what one of them called Pasteur's
"ingrained enmity to the critical spirit" (superfatuous state-
ment about a man whose critical spirit was superlative).
Others wailed, with Le Dantec, a leader of materialism in
France: "He was a believer before he was Pasteur, and that
he has remained, although he is Pasteur." The story of Pas-
teur's own utterance as to his faith and the faith of the Breton
peasant and the Breton peasant's wife, is too well known to
be repeated here.
The credence given the tale in the United States that Pas-
teur was not a practical Catholic, happily induced Monsignor
Guillot to look into the matter and to publish the result of his
inquiry. A few facts from his statement settle the question.*
Pasteur, at his busiest, never failed to visit Arboy, the little
village where he was reared, to assist at the Corpus Christi
procession, and in the autumn, at the blessing of the first ripe
grapes at the vintage festival. His statement as to the Breton
peasant, which won such wide publicity, was made at the Dis-
tribution of Diplomas at Dole College. The year of his death,
1895, he made his Easter Communion, with his wife, in the
parish church of Dole,- and on Friday, September 25th, re-
ceived the Last Sacraments of the Church from one of the as-
sistant priests. To forestall any possible statement that he
was unconscious at the time and could not prevent his pious
wife from having her will, he had a long conversation, after
the ceremony, with Pere Boulanger, O.P., who was his regular
confessor.
Pasteur was a great discoverer; a great benefactor of the
human race; he was also a faithful child of the Holy Church,
which is Catholic and Roman, and not one of the least of her
glories.
4 1 am Indebted for the following data to the footnote on page 32 of Father
Husslein's very interesting book. Evolution and Social Progress (New York: P. J.
Kenedy &. Sons. 1920).
THE HOLY SEE AND THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT
OF MOSCOW.
BY AURELIO PALMIERI, O.S.A., D.D., PH.D.
HE Holy See has never ceased to look to Russia
as an important field for fruitful apostleship.
Russia drifted into the Eastern schism, not com-
prehending its significance, and because of geo-
graphical position. It was a great nation, separ-
ated from contact with Western Christianity. Thus isolated,
Russia could not feel the beneficent influence of the "foremost
see of the Christian world," to quote an expression of the most
ancient historians of the Church.
Therefore, the Catholic Church has ever been animated
with real affection for unfortunate Russia. One need only
peruse the first volume of A. Boudon's latest work, Le Saint-
Siege et la Russie,^ to find ample and convincing proof of the
Popes* paternal reasonableness towards the national aspira-
tions of tsaristic Russia, and of their desire to spread among
Russians the idea of true ecclesiastical unity.
Benedict XV. took a keen interest in the fate of the Rus-
sian Church under the Bolshevist regime. He sufifered and
wept with the Russian hierarchy. He appreciated the martyr-
dom of the Russian clergy, and when a letter came to him
from far Siberia, signed by three Russian bishops, asking for
help, he did what was humanly possible to alleviate the trials
of Russia. The allegation that only the Anglican clergy of
London have cared for the bleeding Church of Russia, is
wholly inaccurate. The late Pope exerted his influence in
every way to mitigate the persecutions of the Russian clergy
by the Bolsheviki. To be sure, his efforts were not crowned
with success. The red tyranny of Russia, which erects statues
in honor of Judas in Russian cities, has no respect for insti-
tutions or personalities. The Pope fulfilled his duty as Su-
preme Pastor of Christianity, when he sent large sums of
money for the relief of Russian refugees.
Pius XL has admirably continued the work of his prede-
1 Paris, 1922.
308 THE HOLY SEE AND THE SOVIETS [Dec,
cessor He looks upon wounded Russia with the compassion
of the good Samaritan. The press of certain countries has
stated, more than once, that the Pope aims only to take advan-
tage of the calamities of Russia, to extend his authority, and
to proselytize the Orthodox Russians. The truth is, the Pope,
at the present time, is only anxious to save human lives from
the terrors of famine. Through the initiative of Pius XL, a
mission has been sent to Russia, of priests of different nation-
alities, for relief work in the famished provinces. The pur-
pose of this mission is not religious propaganda. In spite of
limited resources, the Pope has appropriated the sum of
2,500,000 hre (approximately $100,000 at present exchange
rates) for the Russian provinces devastated by famine.
These apostles of charity, sent by the Roman See, have
begun their work in the Crimea. At present, the Holy See is
endeavoring to have them sent into the Volga region, where
the ravages of famine are beyond all imagination. The mis-
sion hopes to extend its beneficent work within the starving
Ukrainia, where a considerable number of ex-uniates long for
reunion with Rome. But it has been ascertained that the
commissaries of the Soviets are holding, for the red army,
food intended for starving civilians, and, therefore, the Pope
is forced, most reluctantly, to leave the Ukrainians to their
dreadful fate. For the honor of America, it may be said that
the practical chief of the mission is an American priest. Father
Edmund Walsh, S.J., and that the most difficult work of the
mission is being accomplished with the active cooperation
of the American Red Cross.
Russians are fully aware of the beneficent purpose of the
Holy See. But, on the occasion of the Conference of Genoa,
a large number of them, especially those who are working for
the reestablishment of the Russian autocracy, pretended to be
shocked by the alleged friendship of the Vatican with the Bol-
shevist chiefs. Certain Russian, Greek, Serbian, and even
Anglican papers have slandered the Catholic Church for her
would-be "philobolshevism."
This hostile press found a pretext for anger in the Pope's
letter to the Most Reverend Archbishop Signori of Genoa
(April 7, 1922), urging prayers for the success of the Confer-
ence there, and his letter to Cardinal Gasparri (April 29, 1922),
expressing his earnest desire for a new era of peace and jus-
1922.] THE HOLY SEE AND THE SOVIETS 309
tice. Moreover, Monsignor Pizzardo's mission to Genoa, with
a memorandum on the religious conditions of Russia, and the
Catholic interests in that country, has aroused the critics. It
was alleged that Archbishop Signori went out of his way to
show courtesies to Tchitcherin, the chief of the Russian
delegation.
In order to answer these charges, it is well to quote some
of the most important Orthodox documents concerning the
relations between the Holy See and the Russian Soviets.
First of all, we have an appeal to His Holiness from Demetrius
Merezhkovsky, well known as one of the most brilliant novel-
ists and literary critics in Russia, although he cannot be said
to merit our gratitude as Christians for his book, Julian, the
Apostate, Merezhkovsky is one of the leaders of that modern
Russian mysticism which aims to abolish or set aside Chris-
tian dogma as "unfit for our age," and to await a new revela-
tion by the Holy Ghost.
In his appeal, dated May 4, 1922, and published in the
Russian paper of Paris, Latest News (Posliednyia Novosti),
of May 10th, the Russian novelist writes as follows: "On the
sacred soil of Italy, some priests of the Western Church, with
the same hands which touch the most blessed particle, touch
also the bloody hands of the executioners. Do they know
what they are doing? Do they know that it is the very same
moment when the churches in Russia are desecrated and pil-
laged, and the faithful gathered around their sacred buildings
to defend them are shot down, and the sacred vessels are con-
fiscated and melted into gold and silver bullion, and sent to
the foreign countries for the expense of the Bolshevist propa-
ganda, or sold in one lump? . . . Do they know that their
words and speeches are addressed to the violators of all laws,
who, as soon as they have the supreme power in their hands,
will desecrate the Catholic Church as they have desecrated
their own? . . . Holy Father! In this fatal hour, when not
only Eastern Christianity, but all Christian mankind are in
danger, we appeal to you! The reunion of churches has long
since been the yearning of the prophetic spirits of Russia,
who had foreseen the catastrophe which has already occurred
in Russia, and which threatens the whole world. The uni-
versal Church, the one pastor, the one flock — this is our hope,
our faith, our love. But the reunion of the churches is also
310 THE HOLY SEE AND THE SOVIETS [Dec,
a great act of love, a great sacrifice. The Spirit of the Lord is
wherever love is, and wherever love is, there freedom is to be
found But, will the work of love ever be achieved by the
hands of men who preach the murder of their brothers and
civil war as the only means of social action? ... To alienate
the Western Church not only from the Eastern, but from
all the Russian people, to excite hatred against all churches
as instruments of slavery, there is no better method than
to conclude an alliance of the Holy See with the worst
enemies of Russia. We love Russia, and we are intimately
convinced that the hour is coming when her horrible chains
will be broken. But free Russia will never forget those who
took advantage of her past weakness in order to charge
her with still heavier serfdom. No! Russia will never forget
either in the present generation or in the future. If that takes
place — which we cannot believe — namely, a concordat be-
tween the Holy See and the international gang, who call them-
selves the Soviets of Russia, the work of reunion would be
ruined for all time."
Still harsher is the style of the Rul, a widely circulated
Russian paper of Berlin: "The Vatican hopes, by condescen-
sion, to pave the way to the reunion of churches : the Vatican
hopes to quench the thirst for faith of Russian souls ; but that
thirst cannot be quenched by any agreement with the perse-
cutors. The Patriarch of Moscow, surrounded by red guards,
morally is stronger than the Jesuits (!) who walk freely
through the streets of the capital of Russia under the protec-
tion of the Soviets ! The results of the policy of Rome will be
diametrically opposed to its aspirations! Rome will be de-
ceived like others who trust in Bolshevism. On the ground
of a fallacious tolerance, the Vatican is signing an alliance
with the murderers of the Tsars, and of Patriarch Tykhon.
It was for the Vatican to say its word, and that word, at last,
has been said." ^
The resentment of Orthodox Christianity towards the al-
leged policy of conciliation between Rome and the Soviets
has been strong in Serbia, where the Russian supporters of the
old tsaristic regime have found asylum. The official organ of
the government, Samouprava, published a violent protest of
the Serbian Orthodox Church against the Vatican. Among
2"SloDO Vatikana" (The Word of the Vatican), May 14, 1922, n. 453.
1922.] THE HOLY SEE AND THE SOVIETS 311
other banalities, it was declared: "That, by means of a
treaty stipulated between the Holy See and the Soviets,
the Pope and the Jesuits have conquered an unlimited right to
spread Catholicism within Bolshevist Russia, and to increase
the influence of the Roman Church. It is a great misfortune
for an Orthodox nation of 200,000,000 souls. The Serbian
Patriarch and hierarchy feel it their duty to protest against
the Catholic invasion of Russia, and appeal to the Patriarch of
Constantinople, who is the champion of the Orthodox faith.
The corrupted West has no right in the East. The Orthodox
people of Russia cannot be sacrificed to the interests of the
Vatican." «
Another Serbian paper, Balkan, calls the alleged con-
cordat between the Holy See and Bolshevism, the greatest
shame of the twentieth century : "The diplomatists of the Vat-
ican have embraced the murderers of Russia, those who have
transformed the churches into moving picture theatres, and
houses of prostitution: who have devastated the monasteries,
killed the priests and bishops, and shed the blood of number-
less innocent Christians! This brotherly relation of the Vat-
ican with the atheists of Bolshevism is aimed at the exploita-
tion of the national soul of Russia. Just as Lloyd George ob-
tained from the Bolsheviki the mineral oils of the Caucasus,
so the Vatican has gained the monopoly of Russian believers.
The guilt of the Vatican in buying consciences is no less than
that of the executioners of Moscow, who have sold them." *
We have quoted literally the most violent invectives of
Russian refugees against the supreme power of the Catholic
Church. As with all slanders of the Papacy, history has al-
ready passed upon these charges. Leo XHI. once wrote that
the Catholic Church needs truth, truth, only truth. Several
months have already passed since the vile accusations quoted
were written, and the facts have given them the lie.
We understand the psychological conditions of millions
of Russian refugees, who have been deprived of their property
and who, with bleeding hearts, witness the economic ruin,
martyrdom, and enslavement of their fatherland. They can-
not bear that anyone outside of Russia should have even the
3 "Srpska Crkva i katolicko — boljsevicki sporazuri" (The Serbian Church and the
accord between Catholicism and Bolshevism), June 1, 1922, n. 119.
4 May 14, 1922.
312 THE HOLY SEE AND THE SOVIETS [Dec.
slifihtest and most informal relations with the Bolsheviki
for the purpose of inveighing against their crimes. But
even
society cannot ignore a mass of one hundred and twenty mil-
Hon souls and go on as if that mass did not exist! The neces-
sitv of helping Russia, forces those who abhor the Russian
Soviets to enter into relations with them. It is a great mistake
for Russians to misunderstand such conduct.
First of all, as a French paper, Europe Nouvelle. stated,
the policy of the Vatican is the policy of eternity. This def-
inition indicates that the Vatican cannot be affected by the
political changes and turmoils of nations. The Gatiiohc
Church lives in close contact with human policy, but does not
follow its vicissitudes. The Catholic Church does not depend
upon the political conditions of society, as do the Orthodox
churches, which, as in the case of Russia, espouse the cause of
a regime, thrive and decay with it. They make their bed;
they must lie upon it. The mission of the Vatican is, first of
all, a religious one. The interests of the Catholic Church are
its constant preoccupation.
Bolshevism is, at present, the only form of government in
Russia, a nation having among its inhabitants a large number
of Catholics. It is, therefore, as necessary for the Vatican to
enter, in some respects, into relations with Bolshevism, as it
is incumbent upon the Greek Patriarch of Constantinople to
communicate with the Sublime Porte for the defense of
Greek Orthodoxy. But these necessary and sporadic rela-
tions have nothing to do with an eventual approbation of the
aims and methods of Bolshevism. They are imposed upon
the Vatican by the exigencies of the hour, just as, for instance,
during the Mongol domination over Little Russia, the Russian
metropolitans and bishops were obliged to entertain relations
with the Khans of the Golden Horde for the protection of their
subjects. The Church cannot make war upon political
regimes that have taken power by violence. She may con-
demn them, but she has a right to ask of them the necessary
guarantees for the faithful.
This is what the Vatican has sought in its communications
with the representatives of the Soviets. By sending Monsignor
Pizzardo to Tchitcherin in Genoa, the Holy Father asked only
for guarantees for both Catholics and Orthodox. In the name
of the laws of humanity, and of the rights of justice, the Pope
1922.] THE HOLY SEE AND THE SOVIETS 313
claimed full freedom of conscience for Russians and for for-
eigners; freedom of worship for all creeds in Russia — even
the Jews. The Pope has acted, not alone as the Supreme
Pastor of the Catholic Church, but as the Father of all Chris-
tendom, and as the symbol of elevated and ennobled humanity.
We know that the Russian Church was still struggling
under the leadership of Patriarch Tykhon for the defense of
ecclesiastical property and the inviolability of the churches.
The initiative of the Holy Father reenforced and invigorated
the course of the Patriarch of Moscow. When he speaks to
the Bolsheviki, Pope Pius XL addresses them not, indeed, as
a friend, but as the legal representative of the interests of
Christianity. He claims what is due to all Christians, and his
petition is an open condemnation of Bolshevist tyranny. Pre-
cisely because the Bolsheviki are trampling under foot free-
dom of conscience, the Pope, in a public document, demands
that they respect the rights of religious consciousness. By
this act, the Vatican maintains the spirit of solidarity between
the Christian East and the Christian West.
The Vatican knows full well what is going on in Russia.
The Osservatore Romano says: "The decree of the Soviets,
dated May 23, 1918, guarantees freedom of conscience and re-
ligion: but information received from authentic sources, in
various provinces of Russia, demonstrates that the reality does
not at all correspond to these promises.'*
The Vatican is aware of the mendacity and brutality of
Bolshevism. It is endeavoring, none the less, to obtain from
a tyrannical government some mitigation of the persecution
of both Catholic and Orthodox clergy. If the Bolsheviki have
massacred twenty-eight bishops and have sent to death, on
September 10th, Veniamin, Metropolitan of Petrograd, and the
Orthodox Archbishop of Irkutsk, it must not be forgotten that
the Catholic clergy are also subjected to violent persecution.
The relations, therefore, between the Vatican and the Soviets
have culminated in a protest against the satanic hatred of
Bolshevism for the Christian religion.
In short, it is absolutely untrue that the Holy See has
ever dreamed of concluding any concordat with the Soviets.
If the Bolshevist regime continue, with its destructive policy
of abolishing the hierarchical principle and the social con-
stitution of all Christian denominations, neither the Catholic
314 STARS [Dec,
Church nor the Orthodox can live in Russia. The Vatican has
raised its voice to claim, for the Christian Churches, the right
to exist.
It is a pity that the generous initiative of the Vatican
should have been greeted by passionate outbursts from Rus-
sian Orthodoxy. Now that the storm is over, the Pope's action
stands out as that of the Father of Christendom. Of course,
the Catholic Church longs for the return of the Orthodox
Churches to the centre of Christianity, but she does not pro-
pose "to buy souls" from the persecutors of the Christian
faith. She prays and she multiplies evidences of love; she
gives material and spiritual help, and labors for the final
reconciliation of Christianity. The evils that now beset Rus-
sian Orthodoxy, the domestic schism that is shattering its
masses, would, perhaps, never have taken place if the Russian
Church had been united with Rome. However this may be,
the spreading of the Catholic idea in Russia will never be the
result of any fantastic contract between Bolshevism and the
Papacy. The greatest joys and triumphs of the Church come
directly from God; Bolshevism stands revealed as the devilish
work of the enemies of God and his Divine Son, Jesus Christ,
Our Lord.
STARS.
BY CHARLES J. QUIRK, S.J.
These are the tears of all the sainted dead,
Which God upgathers to adorn the night.
He shrines them as great jewels overhead
To show that darkness but enhances light.
WHERE ALL ROADS LEAD.
BY G. K. CHESTERTON.
IL — The Youth of the Church.
HEN the Master-Builder spoke apprehensively of
the younger generation knocking at the door, it
certainly never occurred to him to apprehend
that it might be the church door. And yet, even
in the figure of Ibsen, might have been found
signs of so strange a sequel. The very words, Master-Builder,
are but a tradition from a mediaeval system, and it is that
very system which some would now make a rough model for
the modern system. And if the Master-Builder had been
driven by his ruthless lady friend to make a tour of Europe,
looking for the tallest towers to climb, he would soon have dis-
covered what people of what period had the right to be called
masters of building. He would have found himself in the
tracks of many a master, who not only climbed his own tower,
but carved his own angels or devils at the four corners of it,
hanging as on wings above the void.
The artists and art critics of the rising generation had al-
ready begun knocking at the church door fifty years ago, in the
time of Ruskin and William Morris. In our own time, a yet
younger generation of art students are justifying their bold,
or possibly bald, simplifications by yet severer doctrines drawn
from the Primitives. The new artists may be, in a chrono-
logical sense, Post-Impressionists, but they are also, in a strict
historical sense, Pre-Raphaelites. But this youngest genera-
tion knocks at the door of the Master-Builder, not only to ask
about the church of which he was a builder, but also about the
guild in which he was a master. Mediaevalism provokes a
study, not merely artistic, like Morris and Ruskin, but as eco-
nomic as that of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb* Let it be under-
stood that I am not here discussing whether these views are
accurate; I am only pointing out that, whatever they are, they
are not merely antiquated. We may denounce or delight in
the school of Mr. Eric Gill; but if we denounce it, it will not be
316 WHERE ALL ROADS LEAD [Dec,
merely for being too mediaeval; it is much more likely to be
for being very much too modern. We may quarrel or sym-
pathize with the Guild Socialists; but we cannot deny that
they do, in fact, think they are advancing a modern thing like
Socialism by adding to it an ancient word like guild. We
cannot deny that these men would, in fact, be stared at, guyed
or made game of merely as advanced and even anarchical
innovators. The rising generation is not necessarily right;
but this generation is certainly rising. Its enthusiasms cannot
be dismissed as emotions of elderly regret.
I could give, of course, any number of other examples,
but it is sufficient for this summary to say that there are now
not only movements, but new movements on our side. I de-
liberately refrain from dwelling on that with which I have
been rather more concerned, along with miy brother and many
of my friends; but which Mr. Belloc stood alone in England
in preaching twenty years ago. Mr. Belloc and my brother
were not exactly pallid aesthetic reactionaries seeking peace in
the ruins of the past. The Distributism which they preached
is now solidifying into a political party all over Europe. But
in Europe, as distinct from England, the movement had older
roots; and the glory of it, under God, goes without question to
the great Pope, Leo XIII. Here I only note briefly the facts
of the present, to show that they are part of a series that can
as clearly be traced in the past. It is not true, as the ration-
alist histories imply, that through the ages orthodoxy has
grown old slowly. It is rather heresy that has grown old
quickly.
The Reformation grew old amazingly quickly. It was the
Counter-Reformation that grew young. In England, it is
strange to note how soon Puritanism turned into Paganism,
or perhaps ultimately into Philistinism. It is strange to note
how soon the Puritans degenerated into Whigs. By the end
of the seventeenth century, English politics had dried up into
a wrinkled cynicism that might have been as old as Chinese
etiquette. It was the Counter-Reformation that was full of the
fire and even of the impatience of youth. It was in the Cath-
olic figures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that we
find the spirit of energy and, in the only noble sense, of
novelty. It was people like St. Teresa who reformed; people
like Bossuet who challenged; people like Pascal who ques-
1922.] WHERE ALL ROADS LEAD 317
tioned; people like Suarez who speculated. The counter-at-
tack was like a charge of the old spears of chivalry. And, in-
deed, the comparison is very relevant to the generalization.
I believe that this renovation, which has certainly happened
in our own time, and which certainly happened in a time so
recent as the Reformation, has really happened again and
again in the history of Christendom.
Working backwards on the same principle, I will mention
at least two examples which I suspect to have been similar:
the case of Islam and the case of Arianism. The Church had
any number of opportunities of dying, and even of being re-
spectfully interred. But the younger generation always began
once again to knock at the door; and never louder than when
it was knocking at the lid of the coffin, in which it had been
prematurely buried, Islam and Arianism were both attempts
to broaden the basis to a sane and simple Theism, the former
supported by great military success and the latter, by great
imperial prestige. They ought to have finally established a
new system, but for the one perplexing fact, that the old
system preserved the only seed and secret of novelty. Anyone
reading between the lines of the twelfth century record, can
see that the world was permeated by potential Pantheism and
Paganism; we can see it in the dread of the Arabian version
of Aristotle, in the rumors about great men being Moslems in
secret. Old men, seeing the simple faith of the Dark Ages
dissolving, might well have thought that the fading of Chris-
tendom into Islam would be the next thing to happen. If so,
the old men would have been very much surprised at what
did happen.
What did happen was a roar like thunder from thousands
and thousands of young men, throwing all their youth into one
exultant counter-charge: the Crusades. The actual effect of
the danger from the younger religion was the renewal of our
own youth. It was the sons of St. Francis, the Jugglers of
God, wandering singing over all the roads of the world; it was
the Gothic going up like a flight of arrows; it was the rejuv-
enation of Europe. And though I know kss of the older
period, I suspect that the same was true of Athanasian ortho-
doxy in revolt against Arian officialism. The older men had
submitted to a compromise, and St. Athanasius led the younger
like a divine demagogue. The persecuted carried into exile
318 WHERE ALL ROADS LEAD [Dec,
the sacred fire. It was a flaming torch that could be cast out,
but could not be trampled out.
Whenever Catholicism is driven out as an old thmg, it
always returns as a new thing. It suggests some parable in
which an old man should be driven forth from the fireside to
wander in the storm like Lear, but should return as a young
man at the head of a mob, to thunder at the door like Laertes.
The parable could not merely be a human tragedy, even a
Shakespearean tragedy. It would have to be, in the most
exact sense of the words, a divine comedy. In other words,
that tragedy could only be a miracle play. That particular
state of things could not be rendered in any story except a
supernatural story; or, as the skeptic would put it, a fairy
story. It would be easy enough to make a human tragedy
about the old man being right, or about the young man being
wrong, or even about the young man being punished for being
wrong. But, probably, the chief punishment of the young
man would be the death of the old man. It would be that he
had to weep with unavailing repentance beside a grave. It
would not be that the old man would suddenly jump up out
of the grave, and hit him a hearty thwack over the head.
That sort of punishment is only possible in a divine comedy;
but that sort of punishment is exactly the sort of poetical jus-
tice which has, age after age, marked the revivals of our re-
ligion. What the realists call real life does not exhibit any-
thing so lively as that. That sort of story is something much
livelier than a ghost story; it is not so much like any tales
of ghosts as like the old tales of the gods; and that also is very
much to the point.
It is not a survival. It is not impossible to imagine that
some very old thing might manage to survive. The Druids,
let us say, if the course of religious conflicts had been different,
might conceivably have lingered through some local traditions
for two thousand years to the present time. It is not easy to
imagine even this; but it is not impossible. But if it were
true, the Druids would look lingering; the Druids would look
two thousand years old; in short, the Druids would look like
Druids. The Catholic priests do not look in the least like
Druids. It is not a question of how many stones of Stone-
henge are still standing, and how many have fallen over, or
been knocked over. The stones of the Catholic Stonehenge
1922.] WHERE ALL ROADS LEAD 319
were knocked over; they always are knocked over; and they
always are laboriously put up again. The point is that as
many of the Druidic stones as fell, still lie where they fell, and
will lie there forever. There has not been a Druidic revolu-
tion every two or three hundred years, with young Druids,
crowned with fresh mistletoe, dancing in the sun on Salisbury
Plain. Stonehenge has not been re-built in every style of
architecture from the rude round Norman to the last rococo
of the Renaissance. The sacred place of the Druids is safe
from what is called the vandalism of restoration.
This, then, is the vital distinction, upon which I have dwelt
before going further, because its comprehension concerns the
argument later on. It is not endurance, but the kind of re-
covery. Doubtless, there are, in every such transition, groups
of good, and even glorious. Catholics, who have held to their
religion rather as a thing of the past; and I have far too much
admiration for their religious loyalty to insist here on any
regrets for their reactionary politics. It is possible to look
back to the passing of the monk, merely as one looks back to
the passing of the Stuarts; it is possible to look back to the
passing of the Stuarts merely as one looks back to the passing
of the Druids. But Catholicism is not a thing that faded with
the final failure of the Jacobites; rather it is a thing that
returned with a rush after the relative failure of the Jacobins.
There may have been ecclesiastics surviving from the Dark
Ages who did not understand the new movement of the Middle
Ages ; there certainly were good Catholics who did not see the
need for the great raid of the Jesuits or the reforms of St.
Teresa; and they were most probably much better people than
we are.
But the rejuvenation does recur; and it is the first fact
with which I have wished to start my argument. Its effect on
the question of the seat of authority and the limits of com-
munion I may proceed to consider at another time. But, for
the moment, I am content to say that we live in one of these
recurrent periods of Catholicism on the march; and to draw a
more simple moral from it. The real honor is due to those who
were with it when its cause seemed hopeless; and no credit,
beyond that of common intelligence, really belongs to anyone
who has joined it when it is so evidently the hope of the
world.
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
Born December U, 1822.
POET AND ESSAYIST.
BY BROTHER LEO.
HASTY glance at the writings of Matthew Arnold
is likely to produce as unpleasant an impression
of the critic as a bowing acquaintance with "the
son of Dr. Arnold of Rugby" seems to have pro-
duced of the man himself. If his portraits do
him justice, we can well understand that his personal appear-
ance went far to belie the finer and more essential elements
of his personality. It was the verdict of that sensitive and
observant little lady, Charlotte Bronte, that "his manner dis-
pleases from its seeming foppery. ... I was told, however,
that 'Mr. Arnold improved upon acquaintance.' " ^
Now, for aught we know, the novelist's dictum on the es-
sayist may be as unfair and misleading as the essayist's dictum
on the novelist; Miss Bronte's mind, Arnold wrote, was empty
of everything "but hunger, rebellion, and rage." ^ But there
can be no doubt that, though first impressions of Matthew
Arnold's writings often evoke "regretful surprise," fuller
knowledge wins admiration or at least respect. I am mindful
of an early reviewer of Literature and Dogma, who said in his
haste: "Mr. Arnold's book has no one good quality that even
his best friend could discover." ^ No twentieth century com-
mentator would say anything quite so sweepingly inaccurate.
It is probable that we of a later day perceive Arnold's limita-
tions and perversities even more clearly than did his protest-
ing contemporaries; but — otherwise we should scarcely be
concerned with him at all — our perception of his abiding ex-
cellence as a poet and of his distinctive contribution to the
theory of literary criticism has clarified with the years. His
penchant for phrase-making— at once a blessing and a ban—
1 Clement Shorter, Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle, p. 458.
2 Matthew Arnold, Letters, vol. i., p. 34.
a Dublin Review, April, 1873, p. 365.
1922.] MATTHEW ARNOLD 321
has exposed him to misunderstanding and ridicule; even yet
the hosts of the uncircumcised wax mirthful over "culture"
and "high seriousness" and "sweetness and light;" sometimes
even his admirers have been tempted to quote his famous
characterization of Shelley against himself and to describe the
"elegant Jeremiah" as a "beautiful and ineffectual angel, beat-
ing in the void his luminous wings in vain." But, in the main,
the centenary of his birth finds that to the world, as to indi-
viduals, Matthew Arnold has decidedly improved upon ac-
quaintance. Victorian reputations have declined on his right
hand and on his left, but the vogue of Arnold has widened
and increased.
Of the genuineness of Arnold's poetic endowment, and of
the enduring quality of his best verses, there can be now no
doubt. Several of his shorter rhymed poems, like "Requies-
cat" and his sonnet to Shakespeare, have won places in every
representative English anthology; his metrical narratives,
"Sohrab and Rustum," "The Forsaken Merman," and "Tris-
tram and Iseult," enjoy a generous measure of popularity, and
to the "remnant," at least, of his readers if not to the "num-
bers," his Obermann poems and "Dover Beach" and "Heine's
Grave" are moving and authentic transcriptions of a human
mood, in many ways characteristic of the middle years of the
last century. It is significant, however, that the poems which
Arnold himself most prized are the poems which the world has
most quickly forgotten — I mean his idyls on Greek themes,
executed in what he conceived to be an eminently Hellenic
spirit. "The Strayed Reveller," it is true, we would not will-
ingly part with, but in general it holds true that his poetic
studies of classical subjects, though in form well-nigh perfect
and in detail of structure almost meticulously exact, have
somehow missed the infusion of the breath of life; they are
marbles merely, white and hard and cold. Arnold set great
store on his "Merope;" but, in "Merope," he attempted to tell
a story already handled by so great a diversity of artists as
Euripides, Maffai, Voltaire, and Alfieri.
The distinctive, indeed the individual, note of Arnold as a
poet is sounded most clearly in his sonnet, "The Austerity of
Poetry." For austere his muse undeniably is, alike in her
view of life and in her technical resources. Utterly alien to
Arnold are Browning's eupeptic enthusiasms, Swinburne's
VOL. CXVI. 21
322 MATTHEW ARNOLD [Dec,
colorful fugues, Francis Thompson's superb abandon of man-
ner and of mood. The cry of anguish, decorous, but insistent.
That wild, unquench'd, deep-sunken, old-world pain,
echoes and reechoes through his verses, from the "nameless
sadness" of "The Buried Life" to "the lonely inn 'mid the
rocks" in "Rugby Chapel,"
Where the gaunt and taciturn host
Stands on the threshold, the wind
Shaking his thin white hairs —
But the austerity of Arnold is not merely the austerity of
pain; it is even more characteristically the austerity of resolute
and high endeavor, the austerity that, in his conception, would
seem to be the indispensable concomitant of "high and flaw-
less excellence." Inevitably, it limits his scope; and, inevit-
ably, as in "Calais Sands," it impedes the outpouring of the
conventional lover's fine frenzy; but it is not less a source of
power and even of inspiration. There is a contagious vigor
in the movement of "The Scholar Gypsy," and even those of
us who, unlike Arnold, know the sweetness and the potency of
a vital religious faith, cannot remain impervious to the elegiac
beauty of the picture he limns of his father in "Rugby Chapel:"
We were weary, and we
Fearful, and we in our march
Fain to drop down and to die.
Still thou turnedst, and still
Beckonedst the trembler, and still
Gavest the weary thy hand.
If, in the paths of the world,
Stones might have wounded thy feet,
Toil or dejection have tried
Thy spirit, of that we saw
Nothing— to us thou wast still
Cheerful, and helpful, and firm!
Those readers who maintain that Arnold the poet is an
appreciably more important figure than Arnold the critic and
dictator, are right in one sense at least, for his poetry embodies
the quintessence of his intellectual and emotional excellence,
1922.] MATTHEW ARNOLD 323
and in his verses he conveys the finest and highest, though by
no means the most complete, revelation of his personality.
As a poet, he invariably wears his robes pontifical; as an
essayist, he appears too often in negligee. In his poems, there
is no trace either of the seeming foppishness that repelled
Charlotte Bronte or of the "Olympian manners," which Max
Miiller observed in him at Oxford; but, in his essays, there is
abundant evidence of the superficial flippancy whereof certain
of his judicious friends complained, and of the good conceit of
himself that moved him to splenetic satire or to ironic self-
depreciation when anybody had the hardihood to disagree
with him. Of his verse it could never be said, as it has been
sagely said of his prose : "The moments when Matthew Arnold
is most provincial are the very moments when he endeavors
consciously to be urbane." * Nor does Arnold the poet indulge
in the vagaries of style which, in Arnold the essayist, are so
irritatingly manifest — the vain repetitions of savored phrases,
the reiterations ad absurdum of favorite ideas, the smirking
condescensions to supposedly untutored readers, the abrupt
shifting of moods, the inconsequential digressions, the humor
which too often degenerates into farce and sheer burlesque.
His contribution to English poetry, though quantitatively slight,
is qualitatively distinctive; but we could more equally suffer
the loss of even his "Rugby Chapel" and his exquisite shorter
pieces than we could of his essays on "The Study of Poetry,"
and "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," and
"The Literary Influence of Academies." With all its faults,
the prose of Arnold means more to us than does his poetry,
with all its "high and flawless excellence." Arnold the poet is
a rare spirit, but a more helpful and necessary man is Arnold
the dictator.
And this, as we have said, despite his considerable and
very palpable limitations. True, he possessed "that cognate
culture without which specific erudition produces a rather
lean result." ^ Matthew Arnold was a well educated man,
and a well read man; but, in the strict sense of the word,
Arnold was no scholar. His lack of high scholarly status
involves no reproach; but, at times, Arnold chose to ignore the
limitation and, with characteristic dogmatism and presump-
4 Edward J. O'Brien, Preface to Arnold's Essays, Third Series, p. 17.
5W. C. Brownell, Criticism, p. 20.
324 MATTHEW ARNOLD [Dec,
tion, to write upon topics for the handling of which he pos-
sessed neither adequate learning nor appropriate mental atti-
" \ case in point is illustrated in an anecdote related by
Professor Goldwin Smith. He and Arnold were traveling to-
gether in a railway carriage; and Arnold, pointmg to a pile
of books at his side, said, with a gay air: "These are Celtic
books which they send me. Because I have written on Celtic
literature, they fancy I must know something of the language."
"His ideas," adds Professor Smith, "had been formed by a few
weeks at a Welsh watering-place." « The story is enough to
freeze the blood in the veins of a present-day "research pro-
fessor" and to inspire Dr. Thomas O'Hagan to indite an ad-
dendum to his essay on "The Degradation of Scholarship!"
Yet, a special Providence seems to watch over the innocent;
for I have heard the eminent Celtic scholar, the late Dr. Kuno
Myer, vouch for the essential reliability of Arnold's essay.
"Despite his imperfect knowledge," said Myer, "Arnold was in
the main right in his estimate of Celtic poetry. He was in
error only in his contention that it represents a titanic rebel-
lion against the domination of fact, and in his finding in it a
pronounced strain of melancholy. Celtic poetry has no senti-
mentahsm of any kind." And William Sharp ("Fiona Mac-
leod") held that "it was Matthew Arnold who first disclosed
to his countrymen not only the beauty and the charm of Celtic
literature, but the need of a more intimate understanding of,
a livelier sympathy with, Celtic life and thought." ^ So it
would seem that, in this instance at least, Arnold's intuitions
were substantially correct, even though his scholarship was
egregiously defective.
Arnold's intuitions served him less admirably, however,
in his excursions into the field of Biblical criticism. It was
natural, even inevitable, that he should be drawn to a study
of religious literature, for the man possessed an impelling in-
terest in the things of the soul. In this, he was his father's
son, for the religious element was most pronounced in the
career and character of Dr. Arnold; and he was his brother's
brother, for the religious mutations of Thomas Arnold— the
"dear old Tom" of Matthew's letters— first an Anglican, then a
• Quoted by Lane Cooper, op. cit.
7 Papers Critical and Reminiscent, pp. 2, 3.
1922.] MATTHEW ARNOLD 325
Catholic, then a rationalist, and then a Catholic once more —
offer an entertaining contribution to the psychology of re-
ligious belief; and he was his niece's uncle, too, for religious
problems loomed large in the outlook of Mrs. Humphrey
Ward, the author of Robert Elsmere and Helbeck of Bannis-
dale, and the sympathetic translator of Amiel. Catholic de-
votional literature especially attracted Arnold; he never
wearied of thumbing The Imitation of Christ, as many a jot-
ting in his notebooks and many a passage in his letters attest;
and in his essays he has recognized the beauty and practicality
of the a Kempis view of life.® His interest in religion was
eminently creditable to him, however attenuated his concep-
tion of the subject; but his scholarship was not such as to
warrant his entering the lists as an authority. Yet he did
enter the lists, and repeatedly; and it never seems to have
occurred to him that he was a hopelessly ineffectual amateur.
The utter incompetency of his Literature and Dogma and of
its defensive supplement, God and the Bible, becomes ap-
parent when that diverting medley of pseudo-scholarship,
chop logic and refined vituperation is compared with a work
of real philosophic inquiry, like Mr. Paul Elmer More's The
Religion of Plato, or with such a masterpiece of controversial
scholarship as Ballerini's Gesii Crista e i suoi Moderni Critici;
and the extent to which his St, Paul and Protestantism fails
to grasp the spirit of the real St. Paul is shown by a compar-
ison with Abbot Vonier's The Christian Mind.
Arnold was no Biblical scholar, and when he assumes the
role of one he is perforce ridiculous; but he was a true ap-
preciator of great books, and so when he discusses the purely
literary aspects of the Bible, he is often persuasive and sug-
gestive. And again — this is notably true of Literature and
Dogma — though his application of principles is generally
wrong-headed, the principles themselves are stimulating and
dependable as points of approach in the study of literature.
Such is his insistence on the necessity of a sense of proportion
in the reader, the ability "to read between the lines, to dis-
cern where he ought to rest with his whole weight, and where
he ought to pass lightly."^ Such is his distinction between
8 "The most exquisite document after those of the New Testament, of all the
documents the Christian spirit has ever inspired." First Essays, p. 345: "Marcus
Aurelius."
» Preface to Literature and Dogma, p. xil.
326 MATTHEW ARNOLD [Dec.
rnoTd h" critic merges with Arnold the educator-^ his con-
fent'on that a mental training, mainly metaphysical unfits a
man for evaluating literature from the literary point of view.
This is not the occasion to discuss Arnold's contribution
to the theory of pedagogy. Let it suffice to say that in the
educational field he was a competent authority, and that his
school reports contain some of his most brilliant writing and
some of his most pregnant thoughts. He discerned from afar
the wooden horse of vocationalism, and he warned school-
men-his, alas, was the voice of one crying in the wilderness !--
of the danger of making education subservient to bread-and-
butter ideals. He pleaded for religious training-mconsist-
ently, if you will, in the light of his own neo-paganism— on the
grounds that such training conduces to culture and character
as no other discipline does, or can.^^ And he was the first
non-Catholic Englishman to preach and to practise urbanity
of educational perspective, and to recognize the merit of the
school systems fostered by the religious orders, notably the
Dominicans and the Brothers of the Christian Schools. Ar-
nold's place in the history of education is, in fine, distinguished
and assured.
Though not a practical educator of his father's eminence,
a teacher, in the larger meaning of that word, Arnold unques-
tionably was. To him the critic's office is largely a teaching
function, to be filled in the spirit of "sweet reasonableness"
and "flexibility of spirit." He exhorts the student of literature
to shun "habits of unintelligent routine and one-sided
growth,"" and to persuade himself that "excellence is not
common and abundant." ^^ He inculcates a wholesome habit
of discrimination, and illustrates it admirably in his review of
10 Literature and Dogma, p. 60. It is at least possible that this distinction sug-
gested the detailed development given the subject b^ Brother Azarias in his Phases
of Thought and Criticism, ch. v., "Literary and Scientific Habits of Thought."
11 "The enemies of catechisms have, perhaps, never considered how a catechism
is for the child in an elementary scho»l his only contact with metaphysics; it is
possible to have too much metaphysics, but some contact with them is to every active
mind suggestive and helpful. The Bible, again, is for the child in an elementary
school almost his only contact with poetry and philosophy." Quoted by W. H.
Dawson, Mathew Arnold, p. 123.
12 Culture and Anarchy, ch. v. 18 Second Essays, p. 58 : "Milton."
1922.] MATTHEW ARNOLD 327
Stopford Brooke's Primer of English Literature.^* "He had
no mind for fished-up authors, nor did he ever indulge in
swaggering rhapsodies over second-rate poets." ^^ For all his
warm admiration of Wordsworth, his fine sense of literary
values led him to recognize the arid spaces in "The Excursion"
and to distinguish, in a way in which the seer of Windermere
was incapable of doing, between pathos and bathos. Though
yielding to none in his veneration of Shakespeare, he could
point out the master dramatist's unevenness of style and un-
certainty of touch. Of a piece of loose construction in Mac-
beth, he can say: "There is but one name for such writing as
that, if Shakespeare had signed it a thousand times — it is
detestable. . . . He is the richest, the most wonderful, the
most powerful, the most delightful of poets; he is not alto-
gether, nor even eminently, an artist." ^^
The object of literary culture, the object, indeed, of all
education, Arnold conceived to be "intellectual deliverance;"
and what he means by the phrase he elucidates in his aca-
demic address, "On the Modern Element in Literature:"
But first let us ask ourselves why the demand for an in-
tellectual deliverance arises in such an age as the present,
and in what the deliverance itself consists? The demand
arises, because our present age has around it a copious and
complex present, and behind it a copious and complex past;
it arises, because the present age exhibits to the individual
man who contemplates it the spectacle of a vast multitude
of facts awaiting and inviting his comprehension. The de-
liverance consists in man's comprehension of this present
and past.i^
He applied the same principle to political issues when,
apropos of the Irish situation, he admonished his fellow-Eng-
lishmen "to acquire a larger and sweeter temper, a larger and
more lucid mind." ^^ It was the basis of his arraignment of the
higher class "Barbarians" and the middle class "Philistines;"
both stood in eminent need of intellectual deliverance, and
both should, therefore, read freely of the best that has been
written; both conspicuously lacked "the discipline of respect
I* Mixed Essays, "A Guide to English Literature.**
15 Augustine Birrell, Res Judicata, p. 191. 16 Mixed Essays, p. 145.
17 Third Essays, pp. 38, 39. 18 Preface to Irish Essays, p. vl.
328 MATTHEW ARNOLD [Dec,
. o hi^h and flawless excellence."- Such discipline the
It reSng of great literature supplies, for the potency o
tfrature W^^ - the refining and elevation wrough
TuX the high and rare excellence of a great style,
"what il really precious and inspiring in all that we get from
lilratuie," he elsewhere asks, "except this sense of an imme-
Ti^Zlaci with genius itself, and the stimulus toward what
is true and excellent which we derive from it?
For this very thing, Arnold has been censured by a diver-
sity of objectors assailing him from varied Pomts of view.
Does he not overlook the intellectual trainmg and the char-
acter formation secured through the formal, intensive study
of masterpieces in conformity with rigid scholarly ideals? Is
he not for all his unction and impressiveness, unduly given
to orotund generalities? Is not his viewpoint suspiciously
aloof from the needs and the duties of practical, workaday
life? Does he not carry his theory of the refining and elevat-
ing properties of literary study to unwarranted length? And
does he not make of his cherished culture a substitute for re-
ligion itself?
There may well be grounds for these and similar protests,
but all the objections in the world cannot impair the validity
of Arnold's fundamental plea for the cultural mission of liter-
ature. Himself not a scholar in the strict sense of the word,
Arnold could hardly be expected to wax enthusiastic over the
discipline of research; besides, he knew enough concerning
university methods and ideals, both at home and abroad, to
temper his appreciation of learning for learning's sake. His
facility for coining or adapting apt and quotable phrases
necessarily exposed him to the charge of pedantry, but to
know what pedantry is, is to shun its contamination. "The
pedant," wrote Arnold, "is he who is governed by phrases
and does not get to the reality of things." ^2 Nor was he in-
different to the importance of keeping both feet on the ground;
his comments on Lucretius ^^ testify to his conviction that the
literary interpreter, creative or critical, must sympathize with
the life he depicts. His conception of culture was rich and
copious and his conception of religion was cold and thin; yet
19 Second Essays, p. 61: "Milton." 20 ibid., pp. 63, 64.
21 First Essays, p. 205 : "Joubert."
22 Irish Essays, p. 275 : "The Incompatlbles."
U Third Essays, pp. 70, et seq.: "On the Modern Element in Literature."
1922.] MATTHEW ARNOLD 329
he could, approving, quote Strauss to this effect: "None but a
book-student could ever imagine that a creation of the brain,
woven of poetry and philosophy, can take the place of real
religion." 2*
Indeed, those carpers at Arnold who envisage him as a
spirit aloof from humanity and the times in which he lived,
as a man with circulating ice water in his veins, completely
miss the warm and vibrant humanism revealed continuously
in his letters to his kindred and friends, the letters which serve
better than any formal biography to set the man before us as
he really was. No "Barbarian" could surpass him in his devo-
tion to his deceased father, in his tender and affectionate
attitude toward his aged mother; no member of the despised
"Philistine" tribe could outdo his delightful ingenuous repro-
ductions of the baby talk of his children. To read his letters
with insight and sympathy is to learn to love not less than to
admire Matthew Arnold.
Nor did he stand apart from the affairs of his time. His
papers on political subjects constitute a considerable portion
of his works; he was deeply concerned with problems of gov-
ernment, and was on intimate terms with Disraeli and other
political leaders. Even when lecturing in America, he could
not get English politics out of his mind, and was annoyed by
the comments of the American newspapers on Gladstone and
Parnell. He states a fundamental phase of his philosophy of
life in the preface to his Mixed Essays:
Literature is a part of civilization; it is not the whole.
Civilization is the humanization of man in society. Man is
civilized when the whole body of society comes to live with
a life worthy to be called human, and corresponding to
man's true aspirations and powers.
Literature is, then, according to Arnold, a civilizing, a
humanizing agency; and in all his discussions of literary prob-
lems, from the translating of Homer to the writings of the de
Guerins, he is cognizant of the vital quality in books. Where-
fore, he defines poetry as "a criticism of life," and criticism
itself as an endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is
known and thought and said. Not only does he oppose the
dry-as-dust estimate of literature; he likewise points out the
24 Matthew Arnold's Notebooks, p. 95.
330 MATTHEW ARNOLD [Dec,
limitations of the personal estimate and the historical estimate
as opposed to the vital estimate.- The "disinterestedness," -
which he sets down as an essential attribute of true criticism,
is another word for catholicity of outlook, which enables the
reader to recognize the best wherever and whenever it appears,
and, by implication, to repudiate the unworthy and the mere-
tricious.
One detail of Arnold's critical technique deserves special
notice, particularly in these days of impressionistic criticism,
when it is accepted as an axiom of the craft that the business
of the critic is to make an exhibition of himself, even though
the process may result in the obfuscation of the author he
discusses. Arnold, to be sure, reveals himself in his essays;
that is something that every writer must perforce do, however
involuntarily. But he does not fall into the facile trick of
self-exploitation. He usually prefers to let the author he is
discussing speak for himself; he quotes generously and wisely
—even, if need be, from Matthew Arnold.^^ Much of the
charm and helpfulness of his essays on Marcus Aurelius, Gray,
Joubert, and Heine may be attributed to this salutary self-
effacement and artistic reserve. And the result is that when
we read Arnold we not only come into touch with a modern
mind of cultivated powers and unusual flexibility and grace of
expression — a mind that at least approximates to that "ency-
clopedic comprehension," so beloved of Balzac — but we also
enter into direct communication with some of the choicest
thoughts of some of the richest personalities in the goodly
kingdom of letters.
ARNOLD THE HUMANIST.
BY F. MOYNIHAN.
IN 1840, when Matthew Arnold entered Oxford, there were
voices in the air, the voices of the Tractarian movement,
but he remained unaffected by them. He succumbed, on the
contrary, to the scientific agnosticism of the "higher criticism"
of his time, and lost his faith in orthodox Christianity. He re-
25 Second Essays, «'The Study of Poetry." 26 First Essays, p. 20.
27 For Instance, In "On the Study of Poetry." Second Essays, and "Porro Vnum
est Necessarium," Mixed Essays.
1922.] MATTHEW ARNOLD 331
tained, however, its ethics as his religion, which, in the defect
of dogma, resolved itself into a system of "morality touched
with emotion.'* Having matriculated from Oxford as Fellow
of Oriel, he chose for his life-work the inspectorship of schools.
The duties of this office he continued to discharge faithfully
for thirty years. During that time, his avocation was poetry,
of which he developed a genre modeled upon Greek forms,
and imbued with the nature-passion of Wordsworth. Twice
appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford, he became the
recognized authority on the principles of criticism in literature,
and the apostle of culture to his generation. His career was
suddenly ended by his death, through heart failure, in Liver-
pool, March, 1888.
In "A Writer's Recollections," Mrs. Humphrey Ward
states that her uncle was partly of Irish ancestry. This fact
serves to account for the Celtic traits of his character, and for
the blend of melancholy, romanticism, spirituality in his
poetry. As a counterpoise to his emotionalism, he disciplined
himself in the self-contained objectivity of the Greek and
Roman classics. "I know not how it is," he writes, "but their
commerce with the ancients appears to me to produce in those
who constantly practise it, a steadying and composing effect
upon their judgment, not of literary works only, but of men
and events in general. They are like persons who have had
a very weighty and impressive experience. They are more
truly than others under the empire of facts, and more inde-
pendent of the language current among those with whom they
live." To see things as they really are, without bias or parti
pris, thus became the norm of his ideal in life and letters. It
is this bland dispassionateness that gives a sanative value to
his work. It finds issue in the balance, poise, and centrality
of his criticism, and in the "imaginative reason" of his poetry.
In the dearth of faith, however, its limitations are the re-
stricted vision, which results from an attempt to interpret life
solely in terms of rationalism.
In the interval that has elapsed since Arnold's death, his
poetry, not his prose, has come to be regarded as the true
index of his genius. In form and content, it reflects his pur-
pose to evade modern complexity in the clarity of the ancient
world. Like Sophocles, he holds the balance delicately ad-
justed between reason and passion, and presents the enigma
332 MATTHEW ARNOLD [Dec,
f hnmnn destinv in a medium breathing sympathy, melan-
ITZuiTZ^eea, the memorable words of (Edipus' ad-
dress'to Theseus, if taken in their modern acceptance, com-
prise all the notes of Arnold's lyre:
Fair Aigeus' son, only to gods in heaven
Comes no old age, nor death of anything;
All else is turmoiled by our master, Time.
The earth's strength fades, and manhood's glory fades.
Faith dies and unfaith blossoms like a flower,
And who shall find in the open streets of men,
Or secret places of his own heart's love.
One wind blow true forever ?i
His artistry is essentially classic: it has "the pure lines of an
Ionian horizon, the liquid clearness of an Ionian sky." This
distinctness of outline constitutes the excellence of a style that
depends for its effect upon its faithful imaging of the thought.
Its clearness of definition enhances the relief of the natural
landscapes that are limned in his pages. It gives, too, by con-
trast a poignancy to the passion that throbs beneath the mar-
moreal calm of the verse. For Arnold is not, like Words-
worth, the priest of beauty and bloom of the world. Rather
is he haunted by the frustration of human life as it unfolds
itself against the background of Midland Sea, or Alpine height,
or dewy English wold. It is the contrast between nature's
loveliness and man's infelicity that deepens his sense of the
tears in mortal things. Hence, the undertones of his Muse,
who invests his wistfulness in stately forms of beauty, but
rarely attains the rapture of the lyric cry.
While he worked in the spirit of the Greek writers, the
motif of the poems recalls the romanticism of Senancour
("Obermann") and Amiel, who sought an escape from the
confusion of modern life "with its sick hurry, its divided
aims" in the serenity and peace of Nature. For Arnold, too,
Nature became a refuge from the burden of this unintelligible
world, from the hopelessness of a life from which the light of
Christianity had gone out. From the untroubled calm, the
impersonality of natural things, he hoped to wrest the secret
of the endurance that would dull his too quick sense of dere-
liction. And because the Greeks had evolved a Stoic-Epi-
iCEdipus Coloneus (607-614).
1922.] MATTHEW ARNOLD 333
curean creed in obedience to cosmic law, which accorded with
the scientific trend of the time, he sought in their cult of
blitheness and fortitude the sanctions of his religion of con-
duct.
Yet this attempt to revive Greek naturalism in a Chris-
tian age was to prove a failure as the comfortless tone of his
poems attests. The ministry of Nature is no sure anodyne
for mortal ill. For the isolation in which human lives are
islanded, she has naught to offer but an answering solitariness :
The solemn peaks but to the stars are known,
But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams
Alone the sun rises, and alone
Spring the great streams.
The fragrant lawns, the cool trees, the tranquil Thames, the
moonlight and the dew could not assuage his Greek nightin-
gale, who still sang her "eternal passion, eternal pain" in the
pleasances of Victorian England. Nor are the amenities of
human affection proof against the hazards of a pitiless uni-
verse. The cri du coeur of "Dover Beach" is plangent with
his despair of the power of love to stem the miseries of exist-
ence:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another, for the world that seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new.
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light.
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight.
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
The special note of Greek melancholy, which envisaged the
uncertainty and futility of life bounded by the merely human
view, is sounded in all his longer poems — in "Mycerinus," in
the lyric musings of "Empedocles on Etna," in the epic frag-
ments of "Sohrab and Rustum," and in the Sophoclean drama
of"Merope."
The poems are also important as a rendering of the men-
tal temper of the middle of the last century. "No poet has
expressed more powerfully and poetically its spiritual weak-
nesses," writes Richard Holt Hutton, "its craving for a pas-
334 MATTHEW ARNOLD [Dec,
sion that it cannot feel, its admiration for a self-mastery that
it cannot achieve, its desire for a creed that it fails to accept,
its sympathy with a faith that it will not share, its aspirations
for a peace that it does not know." All these conflicting moods
of thought and feeling are vocal in the stanzas of "Obermann
Once More." Arnold's principle of philosophic doubt finds its
logical conclusion in James Thomson's "City of Dreadful
Night." Indeed, his poetic agnosticism is only a breathing
through silver compared with the blowing through bronze of
Thomson's iron music. While Arnold does not end in the
blankness of this negation, neither does he attain the affirma-
tion of Meredith's evolutionistic acceptance of earth. Still
less does he compass the sentiment of Browning's progressiv-
ism as expressed in the lines:
What are our failures here but a triumph's evidence
For the fullness of the days?
Rather, like Tennyson, he melodizes doubt, though, unlike him,
he cannot trust the larger hope. He remains fixed in an im-
passe between the claims of a finite classicism and a troubling
romanticism. His instincts counsel abandonment, but he has
not the assurance of faith that warrants the practice of the
anchorites of the Grande Chartreuse. His authentic utter-
ance sounds indubitably in the elegiac verses on "Thyrsis" —
Arthur Hugh Clough — who, through stress of spirit, renounced
an academic career to follow the promptings of a visionary
idealism. Though his intellect does not approve Clough's un-
conventionality, yet his heart is strangely in sympathy with
him. It is, no doubt, this community of sentiment that in-
spired the unforgettable picture he draws of the scholar-gypsy
rapt in the elusion of English woodlands :
Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade,
With a free onward impulse brushing through
By night, the silver'd branches of the glade —
Far on the forest skirts, where none pursue
On some mild pastoral slope
Emerge, and resting on the moonlit pales,
Freshen thy flowers as on former years
With dew, or listen with enchanted ears,
From the dark dingles to the nightingales !
1922.] MATTHEW ARNOLD 335
As a landscapist, Matthew Arnold depicts, in their natural
coloring of vivid greens and blues, browns and grays, scenes
that are redolent of the rural charm of England. In theme
and treatment, his sketches recall the canvases of Constable.
Indeed, the reaches of the river, the cornfield, the haywain,
the mill-weir, the valley farm of the painter are but render-
ings in pigment of the word-pictures of the poet, while the
distinctive atmosphere of dews, breezes, bloom, and freshness
is common to both. Arnold is especially the poet of the Ox-
ford country, of which he has penned many exquisite tran-
scripts: the stripling Thames, Bagley wood, the Cumnor hills,
the Berkshire moors; the shepherd tending his flocks on the
downs; the reaper at work in the lush meadows; the black-
winged swallows that haunt the glittering Thames; the blue-
bells trembling by the forest ways; the roses, stocks, and car-
nations of the garden-closes. The abiding impression of his
paysage is one of luxuriance, of mellow loveliness that saddens
with its hint of caducity:
So some tempestuous morn in early June,
When the year's primal burst of bloom is o'er,
Before the roses and the longest day —
When garden-walks, and all the grassy floor,
With blossoms, red and white, of fallen May,
And chestnut flowers are strewn —
So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry.
From the wet field, through the vexed garden-trees.
Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze:
The bloom is gone, and with the bloom go I!
In the sphere of criticism, Matthew Arnold's influence was
palmary, as is evidenced by the fact that his illuminating
criteria have become the hackneyed commonplaces of the art
today. Literature was prized by him not merely for its own
sake, but as a criticism of life. He was, like Joubert, an
esprit fin, whose evaluation of life and letters was at once
aesthetic and moral. The application of ideas to life, the
stressing of Hellenism, as well as of Hebraism, constituted his
evangel to England. He sought to supplement the practical
energies of the English people with the graces of culture, and
the luminous play of the free intelligence. The advocacy of
culture as a corrective for the grossness of utilitarianism, the
336 MATTHEW ARNOLD [Dec,
insistence on disinterestedness as an antidote to party spirit,
he plea for poetry as a succedaneum for religion were the
stapie of his mission. He strove to temper Anglo-Saxon ex-
travagance and commonness with Gallic justesse and distinc-
tion He wished to make English literature cosmopolitan, to
free it from its provincial spirit, and to federalize it with con-
tinental forms. In these ideals, his masters were Goethe and
Sainte-Beuve, whose flexibility of mind and breadth of vision
he emulated. They were the children of light, who were to
combat the Philistinism of his countrymen.
As a critic of letters, he used the touchstones of the
classics. They bred in him the delicacy of perception which,
unerringly, noted the faults of excess or defect in the authors
of English prose and poetry. In his splendid "Study of
Poetry," he is quick to sense the departure of the English
poets from attic standards of excellence. Elsewhere, he no-
tices the "over-curiousness" of Shakespeare's style, the strain
of deliquium in Keats' poetry, Shelley's lack of moral sanity,
the willfulness of Ruskin, the "confident shallowness" of Ma-
caulay. Though he is no longer credited with literary infal-
libility, his critiques are, for the most part, vital today as when
they were written. The shortcomings of his method are that
it is not sufficientiy comprehensive : he is too Wordsworthian
in spirit to be a catholic critic, and he does not plumb the
deeps of personality. While he has said memorable things
of Milton, Wordsworth, Gray, Byron, Keats, and Emerson,
he is happiest, perhaps, in the delightful papers on translating
Homer, where technique is the prime consideration.
Arnold's incursion into Biblical criticism was calamitous
because of his manifest incompetence for the task. Among
his religious opinions, it is interesting to note, in passing, his
imperfect sympathy with Nonconformity, and his feeling for
the poetry of Catholic worship. The sweetness and light of
Catholicism shine forth abundantly in his account of the
beauty of holiness, as illustrated by St. Francis, Lacordaire,
and Eugenie de Guerin. His social writings supplement the
impression of his character that we derive from his poetry.
They reveal him the arbiter of the elegances in whom "some-
what of the worldling mingled still with bard and sage." The
qualities of humor, playfulness, urbanity, which they display,
tend to lighten the gravity of the poet of skepticism. The
1922.] THE FIRST TOYS 337
blending of these elements is necessary to form a complete
portrait of the man. Yet the dominant note of his personality
is his high seriousness, his ethical idealism,
Set up a mark of everlasting light
Above the howling senses* ebb and flow,
which stands out luminously against the vicious insurgency of
the present day, even though his Anglican creed has sunk to
the proportions of a mere religio grammatici.
THE FIRST TOYS.
BY ARMEL o'CONNOR.
I MAKE a cave, a child's design;
Then dream the dwelling is not mine
Except to furnish and prepare
For One to be a baby there.
Angels I make, with folded wings.
Shepherds and treasure-laden Kings,
An OX, an ass, a manger small —
Baby's first toys, I make them all.
I wait now, watching, wonder-dumb . . .
It seems to me my travelers come
Right past an inn that knows them not.
Seeking my cave and manger-cot.
* * * *
Jesus, these things are in my heart.
Kept from the world, for You apart.
Breathe on the fashionings I give
With all my love— and they shall live.
VOL. cacvi. 22
ST. BERNARD AND ST. FRANCIS: A CONTRAST.
BY JOHN KEATING CARTWRIGHT, D.D.
IHE lives of the saints will teach us how the
Church has known the uses of diversity and, like
a Mighty Mother, has fostered the various endow-
ments of her children, disowning no good qual-
ity, thwarting no precious thrust of character in
Ihem. True, many of us have gotten our first concept of
hagiography from works of an admirable worthlessness.
Large tracts of what is called Catholic literature consist of
Wearisome treatises where scant knowledge of facts is made
up for by abundant stores of legend, where "the marvelous
replaces the supernatural," where all is fitted into the same
crude categories and related with stale and shallow piety of
phrase. Some saints thus must suffer a curtailment of their
glory and seem to us mere patterns. Still there exist a small
number of excellent works which make the Christian heroes
really known to us; and in the consideration of such biog-
raphies nothing is more engaging than to perceive how indi-
vidual each saint is, how different from others, of what pecu-
liar and personal haloes each one is possessed. The saints
whom we thus know, though superhuman in much, are human
at least in their divergences. So, when we become acquainted
with the yet living beings, Catherine of Siena, Philip Neri,
Teresa of Avila, or Lisieux, there is interest, satisfaction, lik-
ing, and, as a result, edification of no forced or sterile kind.
Now, it is our fortune that we can know thus intimately
two great mediaeval saints, Bernard and Francis of Assisi.
The first has left behind a vast correspondence of some five
hundred letters. The latter, though he wrote only a hymn, a
testament, a benediction, still lives in the genial and gracious
memoirs of a few friends. Both of them, within the last
quarter of a century, have had the destiny to be written about
in splendid modern biographies, so that we can know them
closely and well.
That their lives are a contrast might seem too obvious to
point out. Their times were not far distant. Yet their place,
1922.] ST. BERNARD AN'D ST. FRANCIS 339
their fortunes, their purposes, their achievements were greatly
and clearly unlike. Founders of great religious Orders, they
worked on different principles. The one is the last builder on
the ancient Benedictine foundation, the last to establish a
cloister-refuge. The other is the revolutionary of monasti-
cism, the first friar who sought, not solitude, but life and
evangelization, so that we might almost call him the "friar-
preacher;" and by these aims, with all his unworldliness, the
lover of and sympathizer with the world. Different in their
aims, they were different in accomplishment. Bernard was
the successful organizer, abbot over a community of seven
hundred, the rector of a social establishment, the ruler of no
mean city. Francis "could a people raise, but could not rule,"
found the control of his Order slip from him, his Constitutions
overridden, his work undone. Bernard, for all his principle
of **Weltflucht/* was in the world and its affairs, pacifier,
arbiter, enthusiast, until his last days. Francis ended his wan-
derings and preachings and minstrelsies in disappointment,
to spend his last hours on the islands of "reedy Thrasymene,"
or with the hawks and doves on Mt. La Verna.
All these things are obvious contrasts on the very surface
of their lives. Yet there are differences more subtle in their
intrinsic qualities, which are at the bottom of their outward
variety.
I.
One of the most striking things in the life of St. Francis is
his love of nature, a faculty he had for seeing the beauty and
divining the purposes of all created things. "When he be-
thought him of the first beginning of all things, he was filled
with a yet more overflowing charity, and would call the dumb
animals, howsoever small, by the name of brother and sister,
forasmuch as he recognized in them the same origin as him-
self." This characteristic was developed to the point of sin-
gularity. It was not only the animate creation which thus ap-
pealed to him, but the inanimate. To the endless incidents
concerning his love for lambs and birds, to his acts of kindness
to doves and fishes, to his diplomatic treatment of Brother
Wolf at Gubbio, and his influence over the cicada at Porziun-
cola, we can add his curious and touching love for the rocks
and woods and waters, for Frate Sole and Sora Luna, and
340 ST, BERNARD AND ST. FRANCIS [Dec,
his strange unwillingness that fire should be extinguished
There is the story of the cautery, how, when they were about
to sear his eyes, "the servant of God began to address the fire
as a friend, saying: 'My brother fire, the Most High hath created
thee beyond all other creatures mighty in thine enviable glory,
fair and useful I beseech the great Lord, Who created
thee', that He temper thy heat unto me, so that I may be able
to bear thy gentle burning.' "
These things are always treated at length in works about
St. Francis from the oldest to the newest, and beautifully by
Jorgensen in his chapter on the Canticle of the Sun. This
author, allowing that there was an element of symbolism in
these loves of St. Francis, very correctly goes on to say that
much was due to "a pure and direct love of nature" that was
sincere and spontaneous, that found "in each creature imme-
diately a living word of God. . . . The aspect of a flower in
morning freshness, or of little beaks in a bird's nest opened
with ingenuous confidence, all this revealed to him the purity
and the simple beauty of God, as well as the infinite tenderness
of the Divine Heart, whence it sprang."
All this seems very lovely to you and me. But it is painful
to contemplate how St. Bernard would have disapproved of it
and the dreadful, hurtful things he would have written to St.
Francis, or told him to his face. Fortunately, when time was
being thus wasted in Umbria, Bernard had been in heaven for
fifty years or so, and understood things better. On earth, he
could never have understood. We all remember the story
about the Lake of Lausanne. In the evening, after a day's
journey along its shore, the monks gathered in the hall of a
friendly monastery for rest and conversation, and began to
speak of the exquisite scenes through which they had passed.
Bernard, when questioned, answered, in surprise, that he had
seen no lake, having been busy with his thoughts of God. If
you do not know the story from the Exordium Magnum or
Vacandard, surely you have it from Gibbon, and have learned
from it, as he bade you, properly "to admire or to despise the
saint." We do not need to mind the sneer, but we must agree
as to the fact that Bernard cared nothing for nature as such.
His thoughts were then, as always, too much concerned with
the Creator to bother much about creation.
It is true that sometimes Bernard sought the solitude of
1922.] ST. BERNARD AND ST. FRANCIS 341
nature. There is a passage or two quoted by admirers, more
sentimental than critical, to the effect that the "woods and
stones will teach thee what thou canst not learn from masters."
From this, they deduce that he loved "woods and stones" a
great deal, and they say pretty things about his inheriting this
trait from his mother, and quote Wordsworth. But a discern-
ing reading of his life and letters can leave no doubt that
(apart from the souls of men) mere creatures were of no
interest to him. What he said about learning from the
beeches and oaks was no more than a conventionality or Scrip-
ture-reminiscence. When he did seek this society of the trees,
it was assuredly not to listen to them as "living words of God;"
but simply because they were quieter than men and cities, and
gave him opportunity for the entertainment of his own en-
grossing thoughts.
In this, then, is marked out one difference between the two
in their approach to God. Both these mystics lived in hourly
consciousness of the Divine Presence, and yearned constantly
after greater nearness to God. The object of their adoration
was the same; their devotion was equal, as far as we can
judge; the difference was in the starting-point or stimulus of
their thoughts of Him. Francis, by nature made to realize the
goodness of creation and to be glad of it, looked ever through
the facts to their cause, and thanked and praised the Maker
of so much loveliness. Bernard, finding much that was evil
in the only creatures about which he cared at all, turned aside
from the world of men and sought refuge in the contempla-
tion of the Eternal Sinlessness. Francis, not a Christian,
would have been a high type of pagan like Vergil. Bernard,
not a Christian, would have been a moralist philosopher like
Marcus Aurelius. Christians both, the one clung to his natural
concept of God the Creator, heightening and brightening it by
the Gospel pictures and devotion to the Crucified; the other
took revelation as his starting-point, dismissed creation with a
wave of the hand, and concentrated all his thought on what
had been revealed. "Praised be our Creator, my sister pheas-
ant!" And to the birds at Bevagna, "my little sisters, much
are ye beholden to God your Creator . . . for that He hath
given you a double and a triple vesture." So said the one,
thinking of his own reasons for gratitude for the joy of life.
But for Bernard the only reason for loving God is God Him-
342 ST, BERNARD AND ST, FRANCIS [Dec,
self: ^Xausa diUgendi Deum Dens est r God is to be loved,
no for what He has given us, but for what He is.
tJuT then, to put it in a simple formula, we see the
immense 'difference between the two sanctities. Francis saw
Go?s image in His handiwork, loved Him through the image,
and waited to behold the object, singing and rejoicing he
while. Bernard, no more passionate, was more direct, rested
upon a theological concept, and disregarded all images and
vestiges in impatience to think about the very object of his
love They were both far from the heavenly Jerusalem, their
home Francis recognized the exile, but found the place a
goodly one enough to wait in and so he could sing over the
waters of Babylon. Bernard hung up his harp, or if he took
it down, found heart for none but plaintive music.
II.
I have said above that Bernard was interested in no crea-
tures except souls. In these, he was assuredly deeply inter-
ested, no less so than was Francis. They were both ascetics,
unworldly, tending towards solitude as an ideal to be sought,
but they were not actually solitaries. However much they
may have admired and desired a Thebaid, there was nothing
of the desert solitary in their lives as they actually lived them.
Francis, indeed, often sought the caves of Subasio, as Bernard
sought Clairvaux, yet their isolations were only temporary.
There was in both a tremendous sense of responsibility to so-
ciety, or to God for society, that kept them from being morose
in their avoidance of the world. Their power to gather voca-
tions was phenomenal. Between 1115, when Bernard became
abbot, and the time of his death, Clairvaux had grown to
enormous proportions, having about seven hundred under its
direct jurisdiction, and being the parent of one hundred and
sixty monasteries, small and great. Similarly, Francis beheld
five thousand brethren assemble at the Porziuncola for the
Chapter of Mats. Most of these developments were due to the
personal influence of the two founders. If both sought after
souls with extraordinary zeal, both were sought after by souls.
Both left a deep mark on their age, yet with how diverse
operations of the same Spirit. For the difference we have
noted above seems to have its analogy in their love for souls.
1922.] ST, BERNARD AND ST, FRANCIS 343
While Francis loved each soul as a person, Bernard loved it
as a soul.
The life and legends of the Assisian owe no small part of
their charm to that galaxy of originals who were his friends
and associates. Leo, Bernard of Quintavalle, Giles, Juniper,
Elias are individualities. It needs no straining of texts to see
them separately. St. Francis, himself full of a rich person-
ality, drew round him natures that sparkled with varied rays
and that reflected subtle tints from his solar genius.
When we read the letters of St. Bernard, we are likewise
brought into contact with figures manifold. King, prince,
baron, peasant; pope, cardinal, abbot, monk, priest; templars
and missionaries, wealthy ladies, and recalcitrant novices, all
these pass before our thought. The relations Bernard has
with them are fruitful in results, and the reading of this
amazing correspondence gives a basis of vast information
concerning events of the twelfth century. But not of person-
alities. What Giotto, reading the Bernardine epistles, has
been moved to seize his brush? What Cistercian ever
dreamed of gathering "little flowers" of portraiture from his
founder's sober and purposeful treatises? The recipients of
the letters were fortunate to live through them in history; but
they live as names, as functionaries. He consults them on
tasks, advises them on duties, reprimands for lapses, petitions
charities, thanks for favors, lectures on policies, discourses on
the love of God. Occasionally, there are even expressions of
aff'ection, as in the well-known letter to Robert, or in those
to Haimeric, the chancellor. But what a regulated aff'ection!
How according to rule and explanation! "Mihi oh suam
religiositatem admodum familiaris amicus.'* He will have a
good reason to justify even his friendship. His attachment is
granted as a reward for goodness instead of being given as a
faith. Nor is it a feeling that will burst into uncontrolled ex-
pression. "What good," he says to the Canon Ogier, "to put
into vain and transitory little words true and eternal friend-
ships?" Or when he does speak, how his phrases are but-
tressed with Scripture precedent.
Francis called Leo his "little lamb of God," and Bernard
called Robert the "little sheep" that had strayed away. But,
if he used the same word, it was not with the same mind, and
we may be sure that he did not see in Robert, as Francis saw
344 ST, BERNARD AND ST, FRANCIS [Dec,
• T .n « creature soft and mild and woolly; but, simply, he
" Z a pSia e canonized by Scripture, and, therefore,
;?o'per as afvmTol and irrefutable as an argument Francs
who was careful in his dealings with women, still had a great
iJectTon for some of them, notably St. Clare and the Lady
Scoba de Settesoli, and with the latter was candid and un-
crventional, calling her "brother Jacoba." Bernard, on his
rrelpressed great affection for the Lady Ermengard, but
in language stately and dignified. It is impossible to imagme
him stooping to the indecorum of a jest with her.
The truth is that he pushed aside all developments of per-
sonality as mere irrelevances. He saw only the naked soul
The rest was a mere worthless shell. Was the soul in grace?
Then he felt himself to be bound to it, to possess it, to love it
with a powerful love that was a part of his love of God. Was
it in sin? Then he desired for it, yearned for it for God,
strove to overpower it with his knowledge of truth and con-
sciousness of right. Francis, on the other hand, looking on his
companions, saw that this one sang, this one laughed much,
that other was given to merry and surprising turns, that each,
for his own special gifts, was good and likable; and for these
things he loved souls. Was the soul he lo;ved in sin? Then
must he strive lest so dear a thing should perish. Was it in
grace? Then was he fain to be glad at the companionship
it would give him at his ragged Round Table, and to anticipate
happy courteous society in the communion of saints in Heaven.
So, in their very apostleship, these two followed their own
ways, the one loving souls as the creatures, the other as the
temples of God. To Francis they were good, as all things
He has made are good. To Bernard they were beautiful, only
because the Everlasting Beauty chose to make them His dwell-
ing place.
IIL
It would not be refining too much to say that in the action
of these two men on their contemporaries, we see the re-
spective power of personality and character. These words
are close to each other in meaning, but not identical. Per-
sonality, in English language and literature, is applied not
only in the strict philosophic meaning of **persona,'* but also,
and more frequently, in the sense of individual qualities —
1922.] ST. BERNARD AND ST. FRANCIS 345
what the Scholastics call "notae individuantesJ* It is the sum
of those properties that are spontaneous; hereditary rather
than acquired; growing and intensifying under favorable cir-
cumstances, but not created by circumstances; born in and
of the peculiar individual. It is a gift, not a virtue. It is
emotional. It does not depend upon our will. It is like our
features, which are indeed a part of it. It can be cultivated,
but not transplanted. It is the part of us which is manifest,
the part which interests others in us. It is the basis of the
value that we have to others for amusement and admiration.
If we lack it, we find others cold; if we have it, they are genial
and they seek our light.
On the other hand, character is the deliberate and pur-
posed product of the will. It is not inborn or hereditary. It
can be planted where it was not, and cultivated to a remark-
able degree. As it may come suddenly with resolve, it may
depart quickly with yielding. It is not complex, but simple.
It is not rich in variety, but severe in strength. Where per-
sonality is luxuriant, it is ordered; where its rival is like a
tropical forest, it resembles an Italian garden. It is a virtue
rather than a gift, and consists in the deliberate direction of
energies. Where it acts upon others, it does not attract by the
curiosity of loveliness; it compels by the force of right.
Assuredly, Francis did not lack character, nor Bernard
personality. There was probably never a saint without the
latter, certainly never one without the former. But when they
drew, guided, and ruled, the quality that gave Francis his
success was personality, attractiveness; what dominated in
Bernard was character, will.
The first Franciscan, Bernard of Quintavalle, became the
companion of the Poverello, not at any bidding or invitation,
but upon the observation of his leader's holy life. After
Francis had gone about Assisi for two years in his new way
of life, this Bernard, one of the city's rich men, "began to con-
sider wisely concerning St. Francis and to say within him-
self: 'Of a surety this friar hath great grace from God;'" so
he invited Francis to sup and spend the night with him, and
he arranged the guest-bed in his own chamber, and kept a light
burning so as to observe him well. Now, during the night,
when Francis thought that his host was asleep, he arose and
got on his knees, and began to pray. And for all the rest of
346 ST, BERNARD AND ST, FRANCIS [Dec,
the night he kept praying and repeating: "My God, my God."
"Now Bernard, when he beheld these most devout acts . . .
was moved and inspired by the Holy Ghost to change his
manner of life; wherefore, when morning was come, he called
St. Francis to him" and told him his new state of mind. Note
how, in all this story, the saint says nothing as a dictate of his
own! Simply, his lovableness and the originality of his holi-
ness gave the rich Assisian, as they were to give thousands,
"the homesickness for sanctity."
Turn, then, to Bernard of Clairvaux and his entrance into
religion. He comes to Citeaux, not alone, but bringing thirty
companions, most of whose vocations had been determined
only at his own urgent representations. There are few pages
more remarkable, even in the annals of sainthood, than the
ones which tell the story of apostleship of this youth of twenty-
one. His uncle, five of his brothers, and twenty-four other
young noblemen of his acquaintance yielded to his argu-
ments. Some came quite willingly. On others he had to use
persuasions, eloquence, warnings, and the resistless instru-
ment of his prayers. From the attractive apprenticeship of
arms, nay, from the excitement and glory of besieging a castle,
came Gaudry, his uncle, and Andrew, a brother. From a
happy marriage, Guy was, with some difficulty, persuaded to
join the party, while wife and children retired to a convent.
From the hopes of an already flourishing ecclesiastical career
came Hugh of Vitry. Imperiously, they were told that God
was calling them. The dreadfulness of disobedience was pic-
tured to them. And all left their pleasures and ambiti9ns at
life's very threshold to seek the retreat of Ghatillon, the cloister
of Citeaux, the hardship and starvation of the first days of
Clairvaux, the drudgery of farmwork on the Cistercian
granges, silence, abnegation, hours and years of prayer.
Such was the power even the youthful Bernard had, not
to draw, but to convince and compel others by his irresistible
tongue and overpowering moral strength into the ways that
he had determined to be their vocation. What a contrast to
the vocation of the first Friar! And the contrast continues
throughout the history. When Francis met men, he drew
them. He seemed to turn on, unconsciously, some shining of
celestial light, as the souls do in the "Paradise" of Dante, and
they remained in love with what they saw. Bernard directed
1922.] ST, BERNARD AND ST. FRANCIS 347
toward the perfection of other souls those same masterful
resources of mind and will which he used for his own per-
fecting; and then, with no mind to allure, but to compel them
into goodness, acted like a resistless, holy force. Francis was
like the angel guiding the willing Tobias; Bernard like the
spirit who seized Habacuc by the hair. The one was an at-
tracting, the other a compelling grace.
As it was in the beginning, so it was throughout life.
Francis always worked as he begun. His ideal of the Chris-
tian life was not reduced to a formula, but pictured as the
Lady Poverty. He was tolerant of other religious Orders and
respectful to even the faulty members of the secular clergy.
To the weak and lapsed, he was suave, his remonstrances
were full of tenderness, his reproaches, of pathos. He mingled
little with the mighty, but when he did, it was to captivate
them by his own gracious originality. Lastly, it was typical
of all his doings that, when his Order grew to such propor-
tions that many of its members could not see and know him
in the flesh, his power over them was gone. His power was
in and of himself, not in the system, which had therefore to
be buttressed, controlled, rebuilt by other genius than his.
The last two years he spent in retirement with his own on Mt.
La Verna.
In contrast with him, how stern, how efficient, how suc-
cessful the career of Bernard! Practical from the outset, he
had ideas that he could lay clearly before others. What
dreadfully lucid arguments he uses about vocations! What
astonishing letters of persuasion and invective and passionate
pleading he writes to those who have fallen away! What a
calm and courageous confidence he has in the superiority of
his white monks to the black, and how willing, at all times,
to insist on the greater severity of life as proof of the superior-
ity he claims! How he unveils his thoughts, as when he tells
the grieving parents of a novice that their sorrow is leading
them to hell! How bold he is with the great, count, king,
emperor; abbot, cardinal, pope, and what ringing words he
has, this New Testament Nathan, when he chooses to tell them
they do ill! How he almost hounds the Emperor Conrad
from place to place, until he takes the vow of the Second
Crusade ! What a genius he shows to organize and control his
vast establishment of Clairvaux and its dependents in their
348
ST. BERNARD AND ST. FRANCIS [Dec,
far-flung lines! Ever denouncing and defying wrong, ever
insisting upon the right and truth that men so dread to hear,
until, at last, the name of Bernard sounds over Europe from
Scandinavia to Naples like Gabriel's trumpet, in terror and
in beauty.
In the earlier Middle Ages, Europe was barbaric, semi-
Christian. Its people were in tutelage, having to depend
on the Church for instructions in mundane, as well as in
sacred lore. The double function was, in large part, filled by
the Benedictine Abbeys. The twelfth century was in the full
current of the true Renaissance, yet there were many vestiges
left of the ancient and barbaric day. Therefore, the great re-
ligious figure of that age partakes more of the nature of the
past, teaching the world, indeed, yet standing somewhat aloof,
holy and austere. Bernard has been called the last of the
Fathers.
When Francis came, there was a new age and a new neces-
sity. On the one hand, the peoples, having learned for them-
selves the arts of life, did not need so much schooling as their
ancestors. On the other, they were no longer half-pagan.
The missions were nearly over, and in spite of much mist of
sin and wrong (not even yet dispelled perhaps), Europe lay
in the sunlight of Christianity. It looked for leaders still,
but the leaders unto holiness could now afford to be in and
of the led. Therefore, Francis and the Friars came to fulfill
a new Providence of God.
THE SPIRITUALITY OF STONEWALL JACKSON AND
CATHOLIC INFLUENCES.
BY HENRY CHURCHILL SEMPLE, S.J.
HE striking piety of Thomas Jonathan Jackson,
the most picturesque figure among the heroes of
our Civil War, is a subject of special interest to
the Catholic student of history. Evidences are
not wanting of the play of Catholic influences in
the beginning and upbuilding of his marked spirituality. It
is interesting to trace testimonies to this effect in the biog-
raphy, compiled (1866) by Professor R. L. Dabney, D.D., of
the Union Theological Seminary, Virginia, who was Jackson's
Chief of Staff, and had access to Jackson's private correspond-
ence and the official papers of the War Department of the
Confederacy; and in that written by Jackson's widow (1892) —
both impartial witnesses.
Immediately after his graduation from West Point in
1846, Jackson was ordered to the Mexican War. He received
the most rapid promotion of all the officers of his grade in Gen-
eral Scott's army, and was Major of Artillery in the garrison
which occupied the city of Mexico during the armistice before
the final treaty of peace in 1843. With his customary thor-
oughness, he mastered the Spanish language and, conse-
quently, was able to enter into relations with the people
among whom he was stationed. Jackson loved to talk about
his many good warm Mexican friends, and to display the
cherished souvenirs with which they had loaded him. He
blushingly confessed that he was nearly captured by a certain
dark-eyed senorita, from whose charms he escaped only by
precipitate retreat. He accepted the invitation of a com-
munity of highly educated and refined priests to make his
quarters in their home, and never tired of telling of their
exquisite hospitality.
Here he made a study of the doctrines of the Catholic re-
ligion and, according to Dr. Dabney, "became acquainted with
the Archbishop of Mexico, and had a number of interviews
in which that prelate entered at large into an explanation of
350 SPIRITUALITY OF STONEWALL JACKSON [Dec,
the Romish system. Jackson always declared that he believed
him a sincere and honest advocate of that Church, and that he
found him not only affable, but able and learned. He also
said that the system, as expounded by intelligent Romanists,
was, by no means, so gross or so obnoxious to common sense
as is represented by the mass of decided Protestants" Mrs.
Jackson says: "His views of each denomination had been ob-
tained from itself, not from its opponents. Hence, he could
see excellences in all. Even of the Roman Catholic Church
he had a much more favorable impression than most Protes-
tants." Elsewhere, she tells that Jackson gladly furnished a
Catholic priest with a tent, to say Mass for his comrades of that
faith. This was only one of many such instances. Again Dr.
Dabney says: "His attitude towards all creeds and sects was
at this time singularly unbiased. His parentage cannot be
said to have belonged to any party in religion. His youth had
been passed in a household where Christianity was practically
unknown. And his later education was obtained among a
great company of young men, assembled from every church,
under the slender instruction of an army chaplain. His own
religious knowledge was at this time extremely scanty." His
studies, under the priests and the Archbishop, "seem to have
left Jackson's mind, for a long time, in a singular state. His
progress towards the full light was extremely gradual. He
was henceforward conscientious, and more than ever punctil-
ious about the purity of his life. He never remitted his in-
terest in the great question of his own salvation."
In 1848, Jackson was stationed at Fort Hamilton, Long
Island, and was baptized there on April 29, 1849, by Rev. M.
Schofield. His sponsors were Colonels Dimick and Taylor.
Dr. Dabney mentions this same Colonel Frank Taylor, as
having been Jackson's first official spiritual guide during the
Mexican campaign and armistice. Both Dr. Dabney and Mrs.
Jackson note that Jackson explicitly declared to the minister
of baptism that he would consider himself by that rite as be-
coming a member only of "the Catholic body of Christ," or
"the Holy Catholic Church," and not of the Episcopalian de-
nomination, in which he never was confirmed, although he did
receive holy communion in it. Later, while professor at
Lexington, Virginia, he finally became a deacon in the Pres-
byterian Church, and hence made its profession of faith.
1922.] SPIRITUALITY OF STONEWALL JACKSON 351
The above facts are taken, almost word for word, from
Dr. Dabney and Mrs. Jackson. The former intersperses his
record with personal reflections upon the faith and morals of
Catholics in general, and of Mexicans in particular, but he
does not ascribe any of these ugly remarks to Jackson himself.
Jackson's association with the Archbishop and the priests,
in whose home he lived, was evident cause for edification. At
least, he saw them saying, daily, their Mass and their Breviary.
If, as seems probable, his hospitable friends were members of
a religious Order or Congregation, he saw them devoting to
the spiritual exercises required by their special rule, much
more than the two hours for Mass and Breviary. He saw, too,
the churches packed on Sundays and Feasts, and largely
frequented every morning and throughout the day during the
week. He witnessed, moreover, the other constant manifesta-
tions of faith common among the great mass of Catholic peo-
ple. And now Jackson, himself, began to "pray always."
An intimate friend once asked, how can we "pray always"
or "pray w'ithout ceasing?" He answered that obedience to
this divine injunction ought not to be impracticable to a child
of God. When pushed further about his own practices, after
earnest apologies for seeming religious egotism and display,
he said:
"When we take our meals, there is the grace. When I
take a draught of water, I always pause, as my palate receives
refreshment, to life up my heart in thanks, and prayer for the
water of life. Whenever I drop a letter into the box at the post
office, I send a petition along with it, for God's blessing upon
its mission and upon the person to whom it is sent. When
I break the seal of a letter just received, I stop to pray to God
that He may prepare me for its contents, and make it a mes-
senger of good. When I go to my class-room, and await the
arrangement of the cadets in their places, that is my time to
intercede with God for them. And so of every familiar act of
the day."
"But," said his friend, "do you not often forget these
seasons, coming so frequently?"
"No," said he, "I have made the practice habitual to me.
I can no more forget it, than forget to drink when I am thirsty.
The usage has become as delightful as it is regular."
While teaching at Lexington, as his wife w'rites, summer
352 SPIRITUALITY OF STONEWALL JACKSON [Dec,
or winter, he rose at six and took a cold bath. Then, rain or
shine, he took a brisk walk. At seven, he had family prayers,
at which all his household had to be prompt to the minute.
As he once wrote his wife, "at morn the caroling birds and
all creatures (except men) seem to join in God's praises. At
eve they invite to silence and meditation. Before you go to
bed, put your head out of the window, and gaze at the stars,
and recall the eternal joys of heaven prepared for you, and the
glory which the Son of God left to come down to earth to save
us. When you look in the glass, remember that your body will
be reduced to dust, and your soul will never die, and you
should take the more care of it."
Jackson had to be present at Harper's Ferry, with the
Lexington cadets, at John Brown's execution. Beforehand,
he was absorbed in prayer that the unflinching victim might
prepare his soul to meet his divine Judge, and not incur the
sentence: "Depart into everlasting fire."
"At a council of war one night, Jackson listened atten-
tively to the views of his subordinates, and asked a delay until
the next morning to present his own. As they came away,
A. P. Hill laughingly said to Ewell : 'Well, I suppose Jackson
wants time to pray over it.' Having occasion to return soon
afterwards to get his sword, Ewell found Jackson on his knees,
and heard his ejaculatory prayers for God's guidance in the
perplexing movements then before them, by which he was so
deeply impressed, and by Jackson's general religious char-
acter, that he said : 'If that is religion, I must have it.' "
The remark of Jim, Jackson's devoted colored servant, is
well known: "The General is a great man for praying: night
and morning — all times. But when I see him get up several
times in the night besides to go off and pray, then I know there
is going to be something to pay. And I go straight and pack
his haversack, because I know he will call for it in the morn-
ing." The same Jim often said to soldiers who were noisy
near Jackson's tent: "Hush! The General is praying." They
would then peer through the canvas at Jackson on his knees
near the lighted candle. Even when his men were rushing past
him in a charge, they sometimes saw him on his horse with his
hands raised to heaven and his lips moving in prayer.
This constancy in prayer is common among Catholics in
thoroughly Catholic communities. Good old Irish men and
1922.] SPIRITUALITY OP STONEWALL JACKSON 353
women scarcely utter a sentence without invoking God or Our
Lord or the Blessed Mother or the saints. The same is true of
pious, old-fashioned Spaniards, Italians, and others. Jackson
had no such habit before he lived with pious Mexicans; he
did have it after he had been intimate with them.
According to the strict Galvinists, God creates only the
elect to be saved. Christ died not for all, but only for the
elect. God gives grace necessary for sanctification and salva-
tion only to the elect, and not to all. According to Catholic
faith, Christ died for all men, and God created all men to be
saved, and seriously wishes all men to be saved, and gives to
all the graces necessary to work out their own salvation. St.
Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor, teaches: "God, Who
gives to all abundantly, refuses grace to no one who does
what is in himself to prepare himself for grace." ^ It would
seem that Jackson's thoughts, desires, prayers, words, and
deeds, far from being prompted by Calvinistic motives, were
more in accord with St. Thomas; that he preserved, in fine, the
doctrinal impressions received in Mexico. I will outline the
facts that the reader may weigh them for himself.
Jackson prepared his soul negatively to receive super-
natural grace by removing impediments to it. By roughing it
in his childhood and youth, he cultivated the virtue of forti-
tude. He was his bachelor uncle's jockey, and the horse he
rode was thought sure to win. He enjoyed few school advan-
tages, and "squeezed through" his entrance examinations at
West Point with difficulty. At the end of the first year, he was
still behind, but he graduated seventeenth in a brilliant class,
and his classmate. General Dabney Maury, has said that had
there been a fifth year, Jackson would have graduated first,
even ahead of McClellan. He made it a practice never to
study a new lesson until he had mastered the preceding ones.
After the drum-call for lights out, he raked coals out on his
hearth and studied late, with his head near the blaze. In a
notebook of maxims written then, we read: "I can do what I
will to do." He was often heard to repeat these words in his
after life.
Jackson was the idol of the negroes. He organized a Sun-
day School, instructed them in the Catechism, and prayed with
them, and preached to them. When he rehearsed to them
1 4 dist. 20, q.l. a. 1.
VOL. cxvi. 23
854 SPIRITUALITY OF STONEWALL JACKSON [Dec,
the story of Our Lord's passion and death, his face beamed
like an angel's.
"A day or two after the second battle of Manassas," writes
Mrs. Jackson, "and before the news had reached Lexington
in authentic form, the post office was thronged with people,
awaiting with intense interest the opening of the mail. Soon a
letter was handed to Rev. Dr. White, who immediately recog-
nized the superscription of his deacon soldier, and exclaimed
to the eager and expectant group around him; *Now we shall
know all the facts.' The bulletin read thus: *My dear pastor,
in my tent last night, I remembered that I had failed to send
you my contribution for our colored Sunday School. En-
closed you will find my check for that object, which please
acknowledge at your earliest convenience, and oblige yours
f aithf uUy, T. J. Jackson.' "
Jackson's delicacy in the matter of truthfulness was sin-
gular. "While lieutenant of artillery in the Mexican War, his
company was ordered to proceed, by a narrow path, through a
dense thicket of 'chapparal,' which was believed to be infested
by guerrillas. He, himself, saw that the leaves of the shrubs
were riddled with fresh bullet-holes. The men were so intim-
idated by the dread of the unseen foe, that when the head of
the column approached the dangerous spot, it recoiled, and in
spite of the officer's expostulations refused to advance. At
length, the young lieutenant went alone far ahead of his men,
and, waving his sword, shouted to them : 'You see, there is no
danger. Forward I'" Yet, as he confessed, he knew at the
moment that the peril was extreme. This he believed to be his
nearest approach to a lie.^ He was once asked by a gentleman
whom he had visited:
"Why, in the name of reason, did you walk back a mile
in the dark in this pouring rain?" His reply was:
"Simply because I discovered that I had made a misstate-
ment, and I could not sleep comfortably tonight unless I cor-
rected it."
His faith in everything he knew to be taught by God was
that of a child. His was not the small mind— a "picker of
flaws and the hunter for exceptions." "Duty is ours. Conse-
quences are God's," was one of his oft-repeated principles.
His maxims resemble those of the soldier-saint, Ignatius.
2 Dabney, p. 18.
1922.] SPIRITUALITY OF STONEWALL JACKSON 355
Even in his love letters to his wife before their marriage, he
trusted that the controlling motive of their lives would be the
glory of God, He expressed the same hope for his wife and
himself and their babe, on the news of the latter's birth. In-
deed, he ever had that motive on his lips. So intense was his
desire for the glory of God and the salvation of his own soul,
that he was not only indifferent, but almost insensible to crea-
tures. His favorite maxim was: **To those who love God, all
things work together unto good" And he would add that he
knew he loved God. He never claimed any revelation to that
effect, however. As Dr. Dabney truly says : "To liken Jackson
to Cromwell is incorrect. ... He would never have mistaken
the heated impulses of excitement for the inspirations of the
Holy Ghost, to be asserted even beyond and against His own
revealed word."
Jackson did love God above all things for His own sake.
Normally, God, Who is generous to those who are generous to
Him, gives to the generous soul the humble and loving con-
fidence that he truly loves God, and is thence loved as a friend
by God. The sympathetic Catholic will see in Jackson's atti-
tude nothing repugnant to Catholic teaching and practice. It
is absurd to suppose that love for God for His own sake,
above all things, is so hard as to be the practice only of great
saints.
A friend familiar with Jackson's natural fears once cate-
chized him :
"Yes, he was confident that he was reconciled and adopted
through the work of Christ; and that, therefore, inasmuch as
every event was disposed by omniscience guided by redeeming
love for Him, seeming evils must be real blessings, and it was
not in the power of any earthly calamity to overthrow his
happiness."
"Suppose, Major, that you should lose your health irre-
parably, do you think you could be happy then?"
"Yes, I should be happy still," he answered.
"But suppose, in addition to chronic illness, you should
incur the total loss of your eyesight, would not that be too
much for you?"
He answered, firmly: "No."
"Suppose that, in addition to ruined health and total blind-
ness, you should lose all your property and be left thus, in-
356 SPIRITUALITY OF STONEWALL JACKSON [Dec,
capable of any useful occupation, to linger on a sick-bed de-
pendent on the charities of those who had no tie to you, would
not this be too much for your faith?"
Jackson pondered a moment, and then answered in a
reverent tone: "If it were the will of God to place me there.
He would enable me to lie there peacefully a hundred years."
Many might feel and speak thus in the sunshine of pros-
perity. Stonewall Jackson felt and spoke and acted thus
under the clouds of adversity.
After the amputation of his arm, he said: "You see me
severely wounded, but not depressed, not unhappy. I believe
it has been done according to God's holy will, and I acquiesce
entirely in it. You may think it strange, but you never saw
me more perfectly contented than I am today. For I am sure
that my Heavenly Father designs this affliction for my good.
I am perfectly satisfied that, either in this life or in that which
is to come, I shall discover that what is now regarded as a
calamity is a blessing. And if it appears a great calamity, as
it surely is a great inconvenience, to be deprived of my arm,
it will result in a great blessing. I can wait until God, in His
own time, shall make known to me the object He has in afflict-
ing me. But why should I not rather rejoice in it as a blessing,
and not look on it as a calamity at all? If it were in my power
to replace my arm, I would not dare to do it, unless I could
know it was the will of my Heavenly Father." One of his
aides. Lieutenant Smith, said: "All things work together for
the good of them that love Godr "Yes," he answered, "that's
it, that's it." His last utterance in the delusion that preceded
death was: "Tell Major Hawks to send forward provisions to
the men. Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade
of the trees."
WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT.
BY JOHN F. FENLON, D.D.
HE late Wilfrid Scawen Blunt — oriental traveler,
famous breeder of Arabian horses, friend and
champion of oppressed nations, poet, historian,
sculptor, and Squire of Crabbet Park, Sussex —
was long known as a Catholic, although never
prominent in Catholic affairs of England. The publication
of his diaries,^ not long before his death, revealed a strange
religious history that was something of a shock to Catholics
who knew him only in a public way. The story of his re-
ligious life, sad though it is, will, we think, not be without
interest and instruction.
Wilfrid Blunt was educated as a Catholic from the age
of eleven, when his mother, who was soon to leave him an
orphan, followed her spiritual adviser, Henry Edward Man-
ning, into the Catholic Church. Stonyhurst and Oscott, where
he spent six or seven happy years, always remained pleasant
memories. There he passed a sheltered and innocent boy-
hood, became deeply imbued with the Catholic faith and
spirit, and had his imagination filled with the beauty and
greatness of the Catholic Church. He learned to like priests,
and always remained at home in their society. Why he
changed from Stonyhurst to Oscott and why he quit college
at eighteen, we do not know; possibly his independent spirit,
his love of traveling a road all his own, already manifested
itself. We glean little knowledge of his academic career. He
never became a great scholar in any line, but he had a keen,
eager, alert mind and left Oscott knowing a little philosophy.
And in philosophy, of all branches of study, a little learning
is a dangerous thing.
Entering at once upon a diplomatic career, he saw eleven
years of service (1858-1869) at many different posts. He made
then his initiation into political and social. life, which re-
mained passions with him to the end. Handsome, lively,
friendly, the young diplomat seems to have devoted his chief
attention to the social side of life, as the custom is with young
1 My Diaries. By Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. New York : Alfred A. Knopf . 2 vols, f 12.00.
358 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT [Dec,
diplomats. He made many friends and acquaintances, espe-
cially in that little circle which always rules England. No
favorable environment, surely, this to his Catholic life, which
received wounds then from which it never really recovered.
In those days, the most talked-of book, if not the most
read, was the Origin of Species, which appeared in 1859. Wil-
frid read some of it with his young friends, was impressed,
and, as he says, solved the riddle of the universe gazing at
the stars. He had, of course, no knowledge of biology, and
there is no distinctive trace of Darwinism in his paper, written
at Frankfurt in 1861, which was to have a decisive influence on
his life. Out of his own head, he proves by a sort of meta-
physical argument that matter is God, infinite, eternal, self-
subsistent; mind, an accident of matter; and the Creator,
therefore, an unnecessary hypothesis. That a boy should
imagine his unsupported assertions to be arguments will sur-
prise no one who knows the mind of youth. From the mature
mind, we expect something different. What would not Tyn-
dall have given, for instance, to be able to prove by "irrefrag-
able arguments" that mind is an accident of matter? Yet it
pleased Mr. Blunt in his old age to re-read his youthful irre-
fragable argument and to recall "how rapidly" his "mind
worked," and how he had "jumped" to the philosophy of mon-
ism two years before Hseckel, to whom the world gives the
credit.
Having proved by a pair of syllogisms that God is not
necessary, the young philosopher was frightened at his dis-
covery. "The matter God I had imagined in place of the
personal God," he wrote years later, "was a thought that made
me giddy when it first presented itself to me, as a demon by
my incantations out of the forbidden books that I was reading;
and, in the middle of my intellectual debauch, I found life
unutterably sad. But, once evoked, I could not evade it nor the
destruction it involved of that other consoling doctrine of
man's supernatural destiny, his life beyond the grave." Thus
did he rush into danger and his faith swoon at the first sight
of the enemy. He appears to have consulted no priest, to
have studied no Catholic philosophy, and to have read no
Catholic books. While he did not accept the conclusion of
his argument and become forthwith an atheist and materialist,
his faith was at least shaken to its foundation.
1922.] WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 359
A moral crisis, under the circumstances, could not be ex-
pected to tarry long. The breakdown came a little later in
the Paris of the closing decade of the Second Empire. It fills
his verses, which he then began to write, stimulated, no doubt,
by the example of his great friend, Robert Lytton ("Owen
Meredith") , already well known as a poet. Lytton writes with
the easy tone of a man of the world; in Blunt, we hear an
undertone of deep sadness and regret, for the ideals of his
innocent boyhood had still a strong hold on his conscience.
At this time, too, he became enamored of the writings of Rous-
seau, who, by his sentimentality and false candor, influenced
Blunt far more, we judge, than has any other writer. The
concentration on self, which characterized Rousseau, became
dominant in the writings of Blunt, who had no genius and ap-
parently not enough imagination to deal easily with any topic
but himself. It was through the influence of Jean Jacques that
Wilfrid now resolved to write his memoirs — though he had as
yet no memories — and to live a life worth recording. Un-
happy resolution! Blunt was by nature a very sincere,
straightforward man, well named; the effect of his resolution
was a temptation to essay a role beyond his powers, and, we
fear, to act at times with an eye on his diary and future
readers. Better to have left the writing of his diary to the
recording angel, who never can be tempted to deliver to the
press even the most thrilling of stories.
Wilfrid's marriage with Lady Anne Noel in 1869 and his
succession to the Grabbet Park estates in 1872, mark a new
epoch in his life, when, a friend of his writes, he "settled down
to a country life on his ancestral acres." If he had really
been able to "settle down" to such a life, he would have en-
joyed much peace — and little fame; but fame had become one
of his idols at Paris. However, Squire Blunt busied himself
with his new property, and enjoyed his new dignity. His poem
on "The Old Squire" deserves to live, for it does a thing that
needed to be done in English verse, painting the character to
life. He had a sincere devotion to the memory of his brother,
from whom he inherited the estate. Major Henry Blunt, the
pious founder of the adjoining Capuchin Priory at Crawley.
In his honor, Wilfrid carved from memory, for he remembered
every feature, the recumbent figure of his brother in the habit
of a Franciscan tertiary, and placed it over his tomb. This is
360
WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT [Dec,
said to be a masterpiece, worthy of the early Renaissance. The
lines which he also consecrated to his memory show that
warmth and sincerity of feeling which make us understand
why Wilfrid Blunt always had many friends. About the same
time, he was elaborating, "in secret," his love sonnets and
living over in memory his old Parisian days. In hoc non laudo.
The sonnets were published anonymously in 1875, and entirely
lack that right feeling and decisiveness of character which, at
this period, would have made a good Catholic of Wilfrid
Blunt. There is small use in bewailing one's spiritual condi-
tion if one neglects to take the first step on the road to re-
covery; only the pure in heart will see God.
There was much in his surroundings at this time to aid
him. Mass was celebrated in the chapel at his house by priests
from Crawley, and Wilfrid seems to have been naturally re-
ligious ar^d fond of religious ceremony. Lady Anne was de-
vout, and a congenial companion. His difficulties remained,
however, and found vent in a correspondence he had with
his old friend. Dr. Charles Meynell, of Oscott, in which he re-
peated and reenforced his former arguments for materialism.
Cardinal Newman, to whom the correspondence had been sub-
mitted, had it published with an introduction, written at his
request, by Aubrey de Vere. Newman evidently did not think
Wilfrid's arguments very formidable, much less irrefragable;
and de Vere, while noting that the "deeper sympathies" of
"Proteus" (Blunt) do not lie with materialism, says he "for-
gets Lord Macaulay's memorable remark that no amount of
scientific discovery has ever affected or can ever touch the
great problem of religion and man's soul." A greater scien-
tific authority, Huxley, was to agree on this point at least
with Macaulay, de Vere, and Newman, as against Wilfrid
Blunt.
It was in connection with this correspondence that Wilfrid
visited Newman, not yet a cardinal, at the Edgbaston Oratory,
and remained with him three days. He happened to be re-
turning from a fishing trip, where, he records, "I had caught
a toothache, which worried me greatly, and I remember dis-
tinctly feehng, as I knocked at the door, that I should be thus
hors de combat at the moment of my coming to consult the
great man. Nevertheless, my distress was vain, for I was
shown up to him at once, and, at the instant of touching his
1922.] WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 361
hand when he received me, my pains vanished, nor did they
return while I w'as staying in the house. Newman's was a
wonderful hand, soft, nervous, emotional, electric; and I felt
that a miracle had been wrought. I told Father Ryder of it
at the time, but he 'charged me that I should tell no man,'
and I said no word of it to the saint himself. Newman, though
he knew well that I had come to consult him for the good of
my soul, and though I had much conversation indirectly with
him upon spiritual things, did not attempt to argue out any of
the fundamental principles of religious thought, and sought
to influence me rather through the heart by his great kindness,
and by the confidence with which I was admitted to all the
life of the community. It was a touching sight, indeed, to see
the old man taking his turn with the rest to wait on us at
table in the refectory, and living his simple life of piety and
cheerful unselfishness. The lives of monks and nuns are
alone in some accordance with the life of Jesus. All the rest
of Christianity is an imposture and an impudent negation of
Christ."
It should be stated that these remarks of Blunt date more
than twenty years after the event; the conclusion represents
his feelings when he had been confirmed in his pessimism and
contempt for mankind. Something of Newman's love for "the
unlettered crowd before the altar," or of the Saviour's com-
passion on the multitude would have enabled him to see that
the spirit of Christ lives in numberless souls, who are not
priests or nuns. Wilfrid sought no further help from New-
man, if his record tells all, and we may wonder why the great-
est dialectician of his day entered into no argument with the
inquirer. The answer, no doubt, is that Newman, whose
knowledge of the human heart was unrivaled, saw clearly that
Wilfrid's chief needs were moral, not intellectual. Newman
would argue with infinite patience with a man like William
Froude; he sought to win Blunt by kindness, hoping to subdue
that restless, impatient spirit which was to make him finally
an intellectual Ishmael.
Soon Wilfrid quit the quiet life at Crabbet Park for travel,
in company with Lady Anne. Their travels (1877-1879) lay
chiefly through Mohammedan lands, North Africa, Syria,
Mesopotamia, and particularly Arabia, and were in great part
voyages of exploration in wild and unfrequented territory.
362
WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT [Dec,
Lady Anne wrote the record of their travels in Mesopotamia,
Arabia, and Persia, in three volumes, which not only reveal
the pleasing personality, but the intelligence and the literary
ease and skill of Byron's granddaughter.
Wilfrid became greatly interested in the religion of the
desert tribes, and has treated of it in a chapter contributed by
him to his wife's first volume. One passage in it throws some
hght upon his own religious feelings in those days. "With the
belief in God, religion in the desert ends," he writes. "The
kindred belief, so essential to our happiness— that in a future
life—seems to have no place in the Bedouin mind ... It is
difficult for a European to put himself into the position of one
who is contented to die thus— who neither believes, nor
despairs because he does not believe." The value he set upon
the belief in immortality is evident, but in which class was he
— among those who believe or those who despair? Probably,
he was hovering between both. No doubt, it was the life of
a rich squire at home contrasted with his busy life in the
desert, which prompted the following reflection: "In Europe,
we suffer from the malady of thought, quite as much in con-
sequence of our idle habits as from an excess of intelligence."
What these journeys and sojournings in the desert gave to
Wilfrid was a love of the East, a sjrmpathy with backward
races, and a hope of a regenerated Islam. These were to
aflFect his life deeply, as well in a religious as in a political
sense.
We have no desire to retell here the story of Mr. Blunt's
political activities; a reference to them, however, is necessary
for a comprehension of his general religious attitude. From
the early eighties, the Blunts made their home in Egypt, close
to Cairo. There, on the edge of the desert, in a fine house
looking towards the Red Sea and Mount Sinai, and set in a
wonderful garden and orange grove which they had reclaimed
from the sands, Wilfrid and Lady Anne lived in an entirely
Arabian fashion. Their garden was a sanctuary, for it con-
tained the tomb of Sheikh Obeyd, a "saint" and companion of
Mohammed, and was also reputed to be a halting place of the
Holy Family. Their great establishment, we read, consisted
of a hundred souls. Naturally, Wilfrid soon became a famous
character, to natives and visitors, and was known as El Sheikh.
With the Egyptians, his name was a passport. Although he
1922.] WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 363
had much at stake, Wilfrid had, from the start, taken a deep
interest in Egyptian affairs. The nationalist movement had
his enthusiastic support. The bombardment of Alexandria in
1882 set the seal upon his "mission in life," which he pursued
with restless, unabating zeal for nearly forty years, but with
more discretion after an enforced exile of several winters.
"My mission in life," he wrote in 1919, "was to plead the cause
of the backward nations of the world, especially those of Asia
and Africa," and to help redeem them "from their slavery to
Europe." This was, alas, the hour of the floodtide of im-
perialism. No man could sweep it back. The Western Hemis-
phere was safe behind the high wall which the United States
had built according to the plans of Monroe; but there lay, close
to Europe, the great, rich, and almost undefended territories
of Asia, and especially of Africa. The powers of Europe,
great and small, all joined in the scramble. Mr. Blunt's wards
were powerless. He continued to champion rebellious and
separatist movements, and never ceased to denounce what he
believed to be the wrong-doings of his own country. He was
considered, accordingly, too violent to be a safe man in pol-
itics, and never reached Parliament.
His failure in politics turned his thoughts once more to
religion. He set out on a pilgrimage to Rome, of which he
has left two pathetic records, one in a sonnet sequence, the
other in a page of his Diary. "A New Pilgrimage" lays bare
the heart of the poor pilgrim, the weakness, the inconsistency,
the attractive qualities of this
latest fool of Time,
Sad child of doubt and passionate desires.
He stops en route at Paris, "the golden city of our soul," and
the old fascination revives:
What message has she to me on this day
Of my new life? Shall I, a pilgrim wan,
Sit at her board and revel at her play,
As in the days of old? Nay, this is done.
It cannot be; and yet I love her well
With her broad roads and pleasant paths to Hell.
Divided thus in heart, he journeys on to Rome. Imperial
364 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT [Dec,
Rome he loves not, true always to his loathing of imperialism;
b^t he wishes to love the "nobler Rome" of the samts and
martyrs :
This Rome I fain would love, though darkly hid
In mists of passion and desires scarce dead.
His visit to Pope Leo XIII. is told in a page of his Diaries,
which no Catholic, we fancy, can read without a tender pity
For a lost soul grown old in its dismay.
We quote it, slighty abridged, because not only does it mirror
his soul, but it shows him also in his Catholic social nature,
and helps us to understand why it was he retained so many
Catholic friends and continued to be counted a Catholic almost
to the end. "It was in the spring of 1886," he says, "I was sick
alike of the affairs of the world and of the vain pursuit of
happiness. I went to Rome as on a pilgrimage, with the vague
hope that, perhaps, I might there recover my lost faith in
supernatural things and end my days in piety. I had many
friends among the resident clergy, including Monsignor Stoner
and Cardinal Howard, Father Lockhart, head of the Rosmin-
ians, Prior Glyn, and others of the Irish Hierarchy; and a little
programme of holy pleasures had been sketched out for me,
and I was determined to open my mind wide to the influences
of the place, that my soul might have its full chance. It was
thus predisposed that I arrived at Rome. I made a general
confession of my sins; and, if I had been unmarried, I should
have attempted to join some religious Order as a desperate
protection against my unbelief. As it was, I indulged dreams
of living as custode to some church of the many churches in
and about Rome. It was in this mood that Monsignor Stoner
suggested that I should have an audience with the Pope, and
he, without difficulty procured me one. My reception by His
Holiness was of the kind which surprised and touched me
almost to bewilderment, when I found myself absolutely alone
with one so nearly divine, if there was divinity anywhere to
be found on earth. The vision that I saw before me was that
of a little old man of wonderful dignity, clad in white, and
seated on a low throne, his face pale, but lit with luminous
dark eyes, which seemed to hold all knowledge of this world
1922.] WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 365
and the other, the figure of a saint and, at the same time, of
one who knew the world, bending towards me with a look of
inquiring kindliness. When I had kissed his feet, he raised
me up, though I continued kneeling, and, on his invitation,
I spoke to him about Ireland. What he then said and the
personal interest he seemed to take in me, for he continued
to hold my left hand with his own right hand and to press it to
his knee, gave me the courage to speak of my own spiritual
affairs as in a confessional, and to ask his help. He could not
give me all I asked, but when I left him it was in tears."
Some years pass, and we find our pilgrim en route to a
very different shrine. Wilfrid had long taken a keen interest
in Mohammedanism, and been extremely friendly and cordial
with many Mohammedans. He dressed like an Arab, spoke
their language, adopted their ways, and often passed for an
Arab. To his very dear friend, the Grand Mufti, he almost
made his profession of faith in 1902. A year later, the drift
of his mind may be seen from a play of his, which celebrates
Islam's conquest of Egypt, and solves the love plot by con-
verting both the heroines to the new faith and bestowing them
on the conquering hero. However, he has little esteem for
Mohammedanism in the cities. Disappointments had made
him weary of all civilization. Christian and Mohammedan. In
the desert lies his hope: there he will find the hermitage he
dreams of and a purer Islam. He is ill, but he will no longer
delay his quest. He had heard much of the Senussia, a
widespread Mohammedan brotherhood that had restored
primitive Islamism and would have naught to do with west-
ern civilization. The chief of the Senussi lived at Jerabub,
far away in the desert, close to Tripoli, a forty days' journey
from Wilfrid's home near Cairo. Thither Wilfrid departs,
"in the highest of spirits," and in a mood for adventure, with
powerful recommendations and under the guidance of Beseys,
a religious brother. He likes his new religious guide in spite
of his "rugged, ugly face" and the loss of his front teeth, which
makes it difficult to understand what he says. Wilfrid con-
fides to him his wish for a hermit's life in the desert. Beseys
approves; he will bring him to his own spiritual father, a
hermit, who will initiate Wilfrid into the hermit life. They
become so enwrapped in religious conversation that they lose
their way. The journey turns out to be more dangerous than
366 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT [Dec,
•• • ,.A ■ and more than once, when danger threatens, Wil-
JrTrpe^^^^^ and prays to all his saints, Moham-
rome newlade friends, who treacherously rob and beat him.
He ideTerted for a time by old Beseys. He consoles him-
self wi^ t^^^^^^^^^ that the journey "has been all in the way
o? thi adventure I was seekmg." He discovers that ^xs treach-
erous friends were brothers of the Senussia, w^th whom he
had hoped to live and perhaps to end his days He retraces
his steps to Cairo, gravely disappomted with Islam of the
desert and the fruit of Mohammedan monasticism.
This adventure ended his longing for Mohammedanism.
"Personally, I have come back from my journey," he writes,
"with my mind cleared on one point, important to my life.
It is as to religion. My experience of the Senussia has con-
vinced me that there is no hope anywhere to be found m
Islam. I had made myself a romance about these reformers,
but I see it has no substantial basis. I shall never go further
now in the Mohammedan dkection." A year later, his opinion
is confirmed. "I feel now there is no reality at all in Islam.
The Moslems of today who believe, are mere wild beasts,
like the men of Siwah; the rest have lost the faith. Still less
does Christianity appeal to me."
It is only a month later than this entry in his diary, how-
ever, that we find Wilfrid making a pilgrimage to St. Wini-
fred's well at Holywell. Crippled with rheumatism and in
great pain, he prays for a cure. His state of mind is singular.
"I have a belief in holy places and in holy people," he says,
"quite apart from all religious creeds, and I felt a great con-
fidence in the Saint that she would do me good." Wilfrid is
cured, while professing in one breath his belief in her and
his disbelief in life after death. Perhaps, he would reconcile
the contradiction by the theory that only saints survive. The
truth, no doubt, is that St. Winifred's poor suppliant was in a
very bewildered state of mind. He still attends Mass, and in
the Canon prayer invokes St. Winifred as his patron. Six
months, later, in drizzle and fog, he makes his pilgrimage of
thanksgiving. He hangs up his crutches in token of his cure,
and kneels for ten minutes reciting the Penitential Psalms.
"The scene inside of the shrine," he records, "was the most
interesting I ever saw in Europe. Three men were being
1922.] WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 367
passed through the water, stark naked but for a slight bathing
drawer around the loins. Each time, after passing, they knelt
on the pavement, dripping wet and prayed aloud. A priest
was reciting *Hail Marys.' At the end of each Hail Mary:
*Holy Winifred, still, in an unbelieving age, miraculous.' The
fervor of these naked men, one a mere bag of skin and bones,
was tremendous. In the dim light of a foggy day, nothing at
all congruous to the nineteenth century was visible. It was a
thing wholly of the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, the darkest
of the Dark Ages, magnificent, touching — it brought tears to
my eyes." Wilfrid remained faithful to St. Winifred after
his fashion, for we find him, some years later, when ship-
wrecked in the Red Sea and in danger of death, saying his
"usual prayers to the dead and to St. Winifred, who may help
me as she did three years ago, a superstition which quiets the
mind."
Wilfrid was then going on a pilgrimage to Mount Sinai on
a ship that happened to carry a large number of Mohammedan
pilgrims, bound for the shrines of Hedjaz. The wreck, how-
ever, caused him to abandon his pilgrimage, as he had a super-
stitition, he says, against continuing a journey in the face of a
strong warning. On his return voyage, he dreamt he was in a
terrible storm, sent by God, and heard a voice crying: "There
are no pilgrims here to save you again by their prayers."
"Struck with terror, I made my profession of faith: *God is
God and Mohammed is His prophet.' "
This journey seems to have ended the pilgrimages of Wil-
frid Blunt. His interest in religion grew less and less, and
hardened at last into stark unbelief and materialism. How
prolonged, how hard was the agony of his faith ! At last it lies
dead and all quiet within him. So he would fain believe. Other
troubled souls of the period, as they drew nearer to death,
seemed to become more uneasy, as Huxley, who confesses his
greater repugnance to the prospect of extinction; but Blunt
comes to look upon annihilation, at least so he professes, no
longer as an evil, but as a rest to be desired. He was in this
frame of mind when he began his relations with Modernism.
He had made the acquaintance of Father Tyrrell in 1900, be-
fore that unhappy priest had published any of the books
which brought his orthodoxy into question. Blunt found him
enlightened and outspoken, and parted from him on this first
368 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT [Dec,
interview with the impression that, if forty years before he
Lad met a priest of his intelligence and candor, his faith might
have been saved. Tyrrell himself, however, was progressmg
rapidly on the road to unbelief, and came to look upon Blunt
as a teacher. j • *
Mr Blunt's home became a little Mecca for modernists,
who loved to find sympathy with their own views in the
most unlikely quarters. Blunt urged Tyrrell to hold his
ground, not to yield to either side, to those who wished him
outside the Church as a liberal Catholic, or within as an obe-
dient believer. Tyrrell's sudden death was a great blow to
Blunt; pure materialist as he thought himself to be, he writes
thus on seeing the dead priest: "There lay the dead here-
siarch, as sad a little shard of humanity as ever my eyes saw.
I could not have recognized it as the man I had known, so bril-
liant in his talk, so full of combative life, or, indeed, hardly as
a man at all. The body, with its poor small fingers, was
more like an accidental handful of shapeless clay than any-
thing that had been alive. Pious hands had clothed him in
surplice and stole, as befitted the priest he was, and there were
two tapers lighted at his head. I knelt a minute or two be-
side him, and recited a De Profundis, and kissed the hem of
his garment, and rose and went out, moved, as one could not
help being moved, to tears of pity. It was so utter an ending."
Modernism died in England under the blows of Pius X.,
or lingered on only in obscure corners, with no voice raised
in its defense. The publication of Tyrrell's Life removed
from it what little credit it had ever had among Catholics.
With it died all Blunt's interest in religion, and he threw him-
self more and more into eastern politics, particularly the
cause of Egypt. Surely, Egypt owes him a monument. The
noble and handsome figure of El Sheikh Blunt, riding forth on
his Arab steed and in his flowing Arabian robes to defend
the oppressed nations of the world, is one to tempt the finest
chisel of genius. We may smile a bit, but his dream was
noble, too noble, perhaps, for our eyes to behold in life,
when the great nations of the world shall look on the
weak, not as victuns to be exploited, but as brothers to be
helped. With all his faults, he was a brave and generous soul.
Wilfrid ended by believing himself a total failure, a teacher
without a single disciple. He saw no hope for a regenerated
1922.] AFTER SAPPHO 369
Islam, no future for the nations he had so long championed.
"Why should I mind? I ask myself, but I find no answer."
Sorrows multiply. His best friends die. Estrangements
come. Illness and old age afflict him. When the war came,
he saw the fulfillment of his prophecy, that ruin was the sure
result of imperialism. Perhaps, he got a melancholy satis-
faction in seeing the great governments that had partitioned
Africa proclaiming themselves the friends of small nations,
and Wilson inventing a new name for Blunt's old principle of
self-determination. But he had long lost all faith in humanity.
The pessimism of unbelief dyed the very substance of his
thoughts. Terrible was the silent wrath of the soul, which
will not be denied unavenged. Modern history shows no
sadder example of a man without God and without hope in
the world.
Wilfrid Blunt died Sunday, September 9th last, on his
Newbuildings estate, in his eighty-third year. In accordance
with the instructions of his will, the old Squire was carried by
his men to a spot he had chosen in the wood; wrapped in his
old eastern traveling carpet, he was consigned to Mother
Earth, and buried without a prayer.
AFTER SAPPHO.
BY WILLIAM A. DRAKE.
Evening, thou bringest all things home,
Though dawn hath scattered far their feet:
The sheep, wherever they may roam,
The goats from mountain pastures sweet;
To men, thy ageless boon of rest;
The tired child to its mother's breast.
VOL. CXVI. 24
THE WHITE LADY.
BY W. E. WALSH.
VII.
ORD ARDILAUN was so flustered by the extraordin-
ary episode which had made known to him the ex-
istence of a hitherto unheard-of cousin— a girl of
unusual beauty and, seemingly, unusual character—
^^^_^_ that he had no exact memory afterwards of what
dad passed between them. She appeared so unexpectedly and
departed so suddenly, that he found it difficult to believe the
incident was real. It was only now he remembered that he did
not even know her name.
It worried him, it shocked his sense of propriety, that one
of his blood— a woman gently born— .should be flying about the
country Uke a sort of female "Pimpernel." He had urged her to
stay with him, but she had only laughed and said: "Fd be sorry
to hurt your reputation, my noble cousin. What would your
British friends say if they knew you were harboring a rebel?"
The more he thought of it, the more it fretted him. After
all, she was the granddaughter of Roger Valiancy who, but for a
boyish imprudence, would have inherited both property and title.
She had come secretly, like a trespasser, to the home that should
have been her own. It was her second visit, she had told him.
The first time it had been too dark to see the pictures — that
had brought her back. She wanted to see, in particular, the
portrait of the mother her grandfather had loved so dearly. By
heaven! she needed no credentials to establish her own identity,
for she was the living image of that beautiful woman ! "
Lord Ardilaun had worried himself into a fever, and was
contemplating the impractical plan of going out in search of his
mysterious kinswoman when, on the third day following her visit,
the morning mail brought him a letter :
Dear Cousin [she wrote], I have changed my mind, and I am
going to accept your hospitality— not at the Castle, but at the
Dower House. It was once the home of ray people, and perhaps
it would be right that, for a little while, I should hve there. But,
I warn you in advance, I may do things you will not approve of,
and if your position as a loyal Briton is dear to you, you must
send me word to go away, and I promise you I will obey. I shall
be at the Dower House sometime tomorrow.
Aflfeclionately, Deirdre O'Donovan.
1922.] THE WHITE LADY 371
Lord Ardilaun was animated by the best of motives in his
desire to have his cousin near him. He hoped to be able to keep
her from participation in the political struggle. He told himself
that, when she knew more of the traditions of her family, she
would realize the unseemliness of the course she was pursuing.
Mrs. Delany, who was in charge of his household, was a gentle-
woman, and she would, no doubt, be able to exert an influence
over her.
When Gerald, of Ardilaun, saw his cousin again, she was
seated on the terrace of the Dower House, with old Martin, in a
high state of excitement, dancing attendance on her. It was a
fragrant June morning. On the crumbling pillars, roses were
climbing, and among the eaves, fretted by age and overgrown
with ivy, birds were stirring and singing. As he crossed the wide
lawn, her voice came to him, ringing with laughter. He thrilled
as he heard it. It seemed to him that an exiled spirit had re-
turned to the place. She was as much a part of this old-world
setting as the roses which clung to the decaying stone. He knew
that whatever happened, he would never look on this picture
again without seeing her in it.
Something like this was in the girFs mind, too. She felt that
she belonged there. It was her home, and she had come back to
it after a long absence. She was trying to visualize the old man
who had left it in his youth, banished and forbidden to return —
trying to see him here as he was, and as he might have been.
And while these thoughts possessed her, she turned and saw
approaching one who might be a youthful reincarnation of
him.
In the short interview she had had with him before, in the
dim light indoors, she had not noted, as she did now, with the
sunlight falling on his uncovered head, how much he resembled
her grandfather. There were the same straight brows over a
prominent nose, and the waving, abundant hair. The lines of
the young man's face were softer; the hair was untouched with
gray, and the figure broader and more upright — but in the play
of her imagination, it would have been easy to believe that this
was Roger Valiancy returned to the haunts of his boyhood.
She greeted her cousin with friendly eyes. She had a softer
feeling for him than at their first meeting. She hoped that he
would yet give her reason to think that he was not unworthy of
the good man whose lineaments he had inherited.
"Are you going to send me away?** she asked as he came
forward with extended hand.
"I am not,** he answered. "I am going to keep you always,
372 THE WHITE LADY [Dec,
if I can. It is only now I have realized that this place has been
waiting for you for a long time.'*
She flushed with pleasure at the sincerity of his tone.
"But please don't forget that I meant every word I said in
my letter. But one purpose has brought me to Ireland, and
nothing can alter that." . • . ^ *•
She stood before him with the light of an inspired devotion
in her eyes He was to learn that when she spoke of Ireland, it^
was as a crusader might speak of the Holy Grail. He was stirred
by an exhilaration that had something of fear in it, but was reck-
less of consequences. In that rare light, in which she suffused
him, his doubts were mean and contemptible.
The hours were winged periods. For Gerald, at least, a long
silence and a long solitude were broken. For the first time, it
seemed to him, he lived deeply and fully. A being from another
world— one for whom he had been waiting, unconsciously, al-
ways—had come to him speaking a strange and beautiful tongue.
He wanted nothing but to listen to her.
She told him of her life in the great American city, where
the streets were like canyons between cliffs of brick and stone;
but he could not picture her in such surroundings, lost in the
labyrinths of teeming millions. She was too rare, too distin-
guished for such a setting. She told him of the little family in
which the child was the only w^oman of the house — her mother
had died when she was an infant — and of her relationship to the
two men she loved — her father and her grandfather. She de-
scribed the small apartment in Gramercy Park — once part of
a greater home of wealth and fashion — where this oddly-assorted
trio had been happy in the thought that they were working for
Ireland : for when they were not earning a bare living, they were
planning, or writing, or speaking publicly for the only cause that
was dear to their hearts. It was there Roger Valiancy had died
in the summer of 1916, breathing love for Ireland with his last
breath. The Easter Rising, and its aftermath, had been too much
for him. It was only after his death, she learned that he had
insured his life in her favor — and it was this money which had
enabled her to realize the dream of her life. Her father was now
in Dublin, poring over precious Gaelic manuscripts in the library
of Trinity College.
In the afternoon, they had visitors. Miss Nevill and Major
Trench appeared without warning. They did not stay long be-
cause, as they explained, they were "on the run," which meant
that they expected arrest. Major Trench had a new car — a Rolls-
Royce, the latest and fastest model — and he wanted to leave it in
1922.] THE WHITE LADY 373
Lord Ardilaun's garage for a day or two. They were going up
the river — the major's motor launch would call for them.
Deirdre was very quiet after they had gone. Gerald knew
that she was fretting about them, and when he spoke to her, she
acknowledged it.
"It's not right that they should be in danger and I not with
them," she said. "They will be taken, while I am living at ease,
sheltered by your name."
Gerald tried to comfort her.
"It's not at all likely," he said, "that Molly Nevill's brother
would have her arrested."
"You don't understand," she replied. "They'll not put her
in gaol. She'll be taken away to a place in England where she'll
have no more freedom than if she were in gaol. But they'll put
him in the worst prison they've got, and they'll kill him with
hardship the way they killed poor Pierce McCan — and she knows
it, and that's what's troubling her. The people think more of
Alan Trench than of any other man in Ireland, and that's his
greatest danger. The Government knows that they will do what-
ever he says, and that he'll never compromise."
Then she told him something that she was not sure she
ought to divulge: Alan and Molly were man and wife; they had
been married that morning at his place, in Ballyclare. It was
a daring thing to do; but Alan was determined that the cere-
mony should take place where his people before him for many
generations had been married. The Constabulary kept con-
stant watch on the house, but he arranged that they should be
occupied elsewhere on this occasion. An assault on the barracks
was staged, and information of it was allowed to leak out. Alan
and Molly came down from Dublin during the night, took the
Anglican Rector from his bed in the gray of dawn, and — while
the police were engaged in repelling a very feeble attack, in
which no one on either side was hurt — they were married peace-
fully in the drawing-room of the Manor. Cards were sent to
the District Inspector and others, and the whole countryside was
laughing.
Major Trench was fond of such exploits. He took a mis-
chievous pleasure in outwitting the enemy. Many stories of his
audacity were current, some of which were true, and others the
product of the inventive genius of his friends. ' Once, when they
were looking for him in Dublin, he put a uniform on and helped
them in the search. Bets were freely made in the clubs as to
how long he would evade capture.
374 THE WHITE LADY [Dec.,
VIII.
Lord Ardilaun was not yet awake when a message was
brought to him from Martin O'Gara on the following morning
The S man had been enjoined by his lordship to take care of
Jhdr visUor, and a room had been given him in the Dower
HoTse Martin was in the seventh heaven! When he was pre-
sent d to her by his master, who told her something of his his-
ory, he stood before her with trembling limbs and such a look
on Lis face as he might have offered to the Blessed Virgin
Thereafter he went about talking to himself, praismg God that
he had been spared to see her, and going over in his mmd the
question he would ask when a good opportunity arose.
He was at the Castle about seven in the morning, m a very
excited state. His lordship must be called at once. The pohce
were watching the house. They might break in at any moment
—anything was possible. He shook with rage when he pictured
them laying hands on her. When Mrs. Delany had promised
to deliver the message instantly, he hurried back to the Dower
House.
When Lord Ardilaun, hastily and incompletely dressed,
came out on the terrace, he found the District Inspector waiting
for him. The official saluted him with a somewhat shamefaced
smile.
"I hope Fm not disturbing your lordship," he said. "Fve
been waiting a while, the way I'd not be taking you out of your
bed."
"What'« on your mind, Sharpe? Has the 'Castle* got me
on its blacklist?"
The D. I. C. waved his hand deprecatingly. His task was
not an agreeable one.
"Nothing of the kind, sir, and Fm hoping they'll have no
reason to do that. But I think your lordship knows who Fm
after. There's no one could be sorrier than I am, for Major
Trench is a gentleman, but I think he is making a mistake in
joining up with a lot of rascally Sinn Feiners."
"Quite so, Sharpe. Perhaps the major will give you his
reasons when you get him. In the meantime, you ought to know
that he is not here. He paid us a short call yesterday, to give
us a chance to congratulate him. You heard of his wedding,
I've no doubt."
The inspector smiled a sickly smile, and explained that he
was aware that Major Trench and his bride had gone up the river
in his launch after his call on his lordship, but he was led to
1922.] THE WHITE LADY 375
believe that they had come back and taken shelter in the Dower
House again. Lord Ardilaun assured him that his information
was inaccurate, but the inspector was sorry to say that, while
he didn't doubt his lordship's word at all, he had orders to search
both buildings, and he must do his duty.
Lord Ardilaun had no reason to complain of the conduct
of the Constabulary under Inspector Sharpe. The inspection of
the Castle was more or less perfunctory, but at the Dower House
a very thorough search was made. His lordship watched the
proceedings with an amused smile. It was evident that the an-
cient keep was under suspicion. Even the cellar was ransacked
with lighted candles; they left no hole or corner unexplored.
But while the work was done thoroughly, there was no insolence,
no provocation, such as he had witnessed more than once in the
towns.
There was one person who found nothing amusing in the
situation. Deirdre received the inspector with a stony gaze
which ignored his existence. After the first glance, she never
looked at him again, nor at any of his men. Lord Ardilaun
treated the matter as a joke, and when the police were gone, he
laughed over his cousin's attitude towards the inspector.
"I shouldn't have believed that you could look so wicked,"
he said, "and there was a moment when I saw that your hands
were shaking. If Sharpe had looked at you then, he'd have been
sure that we were hiding the major."
Deirdre allowed her work to drop into her lap. A faint color
crept into her cheeks, and she looked at her cousin with a peculiar
smile.
"Do you remember what the men were doing about that
time?" she asked.
"What were they doing!" he repeated. "Oh, poking about
the room. No, by Jove! I remember now, one of them was
hammering on the wall, as if he thought — oh, heavens!"
He stared at his cousin like one who sees a ghost.
At this moment someone entered the hall and, as Deirdre
put her finger quickly to her lips, Martin O'Gara appeared at
the door. Lord Ardilaun told him to come in, and the old man
advanced slowly, his eyes fastened adoringly on the young lady.
"Have they gone?" she asked in a whisper when he was
quite near.
"They have, m'lady."
"Are you sure that none have stayed behind?"
"Quite sure, m'lady. I watched them go, and I've been over
the grounds since."
375 THE WHITE LADY [Dec,
"We're depending on you, Martin, 'agradr she said softly.
The old man straightened his bent form, and his eyes
^^'^"^NevTr you'fear, m'lady, there's none'll come near the house
without I'll be givin' you warnin'." ^ ^ ^ . ^ .
When Martin had departed, Deirdre faced her cousin again
with that strange smile on her lips. u t * *
"Gerald," she said, "I'm going to show you how much I trust
^^" She went to the window and stood for a moment looking
out over the river. His lordship watched her in puzzled silence.
She turned suddenly and crossed the room to her great-grand-
mother's portrait. She grasped the heavy molding of the
frame and tugged at it. The picture swung forward and stood
at a right angle to the wall. She knocked thrice on a panel and
ran her fingers along its fluted edge. The panel slid away and
disclosed a cavity. Lord Ardilaun gasped as he saw a stooped
figure emerge and turn to help another through the opening.
His guests of the previous evening stood before him, hand
in hand. Deirdre indicated their presence with a sweeping ges-
ture. She laughed, but there was an undercurrent of nervous-
ness in her laughter:
"My lord," she said, "it is evident that you do not know the
hospitable capacity of your house."
Major Trench waved his free hand negligently:
"Here we are again, old chap — circumstances over which
we had no control, y'know. Hope we are not wearing out our
welcome."
IX.
Lord Ardilaun and his cousin were on their way to Bally-
clare. Major Trench wanted to have a message delivered to
his housekeeper, and Deirdre saw an opportunity to gratify a
desire of her own, and to give the honeymooners a day to them-
selves at the Dower House. There would be no risk in this mis-
sion, for they would not go near the Manor. They would have
luncheon at the Clare Arms, and their host would take the mes-
sage and see that it was delivered. In the meantime, Alan and
his wife would enjoy themselves without a care, for Martin
O'Gara would be on guard, and they had a safe refuge at
hand.
Deirdre was in high spirits. She had suggested to her
cousin that they should ride, for she preferred a horse to a motor.
1922.] THE WHITE LADY ^11
She had learned to ride almost as soon as she was able to walk.
Roger Valiancy's knowledge of horses was the one thing he had
been able to turn to commercial advantage, and at that time he
still retained an interest in a Riding School he had established
many years before. The girl was aquiver with an overflowing
sense of happiness, which she did not try to analyze. Yet there
was reason enough apparent. She breathed deeply the beauty
of a fragrant world: the air was sweet with the smell of flower-
ing hawthorn, and the sun's warmth on her cheek was like the
touch of caressing fingers. She loved horses, and she was rid-
ing the kind of beast she had dreamed of all her life — a perfect
creature, instinct with grace. Add to this that she was not un-
conscious — as, normally, no young woman is — of her own fit-
ness to complement the picture.
Lord Ardilaun, gazing wraptly, was quite sure there never
had been anything in the world so beautiful. He was afraid to
speak — he was almost afraid to breathe. He had a whimsical
fancy that if he did, she might vanish like a creature of the
Sidhe. He let her ride a little in front of him, that he might
feast his eyes on her. When they mounted a gentle incline, the
blue of the sky made an enchanting background for her head,
and the sun worked magic in her hair — ^yesterday it was dark,
but today it was a nest of golden lights.
She turned and looked at him, and the bewildering depth
of her eyes caught his breath away. She was saying to him,
wordlessly: "Gerald, this is my country — my Ireland — and I
love it; and I love you a little, I think, because — ^because — you
have not disappointed me." Something of this message, vaguely
and confusedly, he must have got, for he had an insane impulse
to commit an act of egregious folly, that would destroy their good
understanding and frighten her away from him. He was sud-
denly aware of a vast loneliness. He said to himself in despair:
"Oh, God! What will I do if she leaves me?"
When they were at luncheon, at Ballyclare, she tried to tell
him how grateful she was for his invitation to her friends to
remain at the Dower House, but he would not listen to
her.
"I don't want you to thank me for that," he said, "because
your thanks implies that you thought me a poor kind of crea-
ture — and I don't think I was ever so bad that I would have re-
fused them shelter — but there's one thing I wish you'd tell me:
why did they come back, and when? I asked you that question
yesterday, but you didn't answer it."
"I know," she said. I wanted to ask Molly if I might tell
378
THE WHITE LADY [Dec.,
you about it. She has given me permission. They have a hid-
ing place up the river— on Lough Derg. The police have never
been able to find it; but they are very active now. Alan had a
close call yesterday. Sharpe and his men were waiting for him
in the lake. At a certain point, he was signaled from the shore,
and decided to return. Sharpe must have got word that he had
turned back, for he followed. In the meantime, Alan and Molly
had the launch hidden and had come to us. The police were
watching the house all night; I imagine they felt quite sure they
had him."
"But how did Alan know about the secret place?"
"It was I who told him," she answered.
"But how did you know of it? Why, even to me it had been
only a fable, and I had completely forgotten it."
His cousin laughed, delighted.
"Isn't it strange!" she cried, "and I have known about it all
my life. I can't remember a time when I wasn't dreaming about
that wonderful place and building stories around it. Of course,
my grandfather told me of it — and* many thrilling tales of the
priest-hunters. What kind of a boy were you at all — that you
never tried to find it?"
"I was a queer, lonesome kind of lad, I think, and a horrid
little coward. You see, I had no brothers and sisters to knock
courage into me. The Dower House was supposed to be haunted,
and the servants wouldn't go near it. Old Martin told me of the
secret chamber, but I don't think he knew himself where to
look for the panel. Anyhow, I went away to school in England
and forgot it. But how did you manage to discover it so
quickly?"
She laughed again, with a childish enjoyment of her triumph.
"It was very simple— I knew exactly where to look. It was
the first thing I did that evening when I frightened poor Martin
out of his wits. The picture was not very difficult to move, but
to open the panel was another matter. Luckily, Alan always
carries a sort of burglar's kit. He says he never knows when
he may need it. Anyhow, we got it open at last, and Alan scraped
and oiled it until it worked quite freely. Wasn't it a bit of luck
that we were able to get it ready that evening?"
X.
They left the town behind, making their way slowly home-
ward. The horses sidled together like good comrades, biting
playfully at each other. Lord Ardilaun gazed furtively at the
1922.] THE WHITE LADY 379
curve of Deirdre's cheek. The sun was going down, and the
world was bathed in a magic light.
They turned into a lane on the edge of a plantation, taking
a short cut to the river. The lane led through a little wood
where clumps of hawthorn sent out waves of perfume. Between
the trees they had enchanting glimpses of the stream and of
slopes carpeted with golden whin. They came out on a clearing
overlooking the road and the valley of the river.
How peaceful — how serenely beautiful it was! How was it
possible that violence and cruelty could exist in such a world?
To this thought, that was in the hearts of both of them, there
came a sudden and shocking answer. The peace was shattered
by a cry of human anguish. Lord Ardilaun, turning startled
eyes on his cousin, saw that her face was livid. Before he had
time to utter a word, she plunged away from him, beating wildly
at the mare's flank. As he followed, he discovered the cause.
In the middle of the stream was a man struggling for life.
On the shore, others were running frantically back and forth,
and a few yards away two soldiers stood with leveled rifles. As
one of the onlookers, calmer than the rest, ran with a long pole
in his hands into the river, a soldier fired. The bullet skipped
on the water in front of him, and he dropped the pole hastily
and retreated.
When Ardilaun's horse cleared the road, Deirdre was charg-
ing the soldier who had just fired, and he caught a glimpse of a
face white and set and eyes that blazed with anger. The sol-
dier turned as she was almost on him, but he went down without
a word and lay motionless. His companion, who had called a
belated warning to him, cursed savagely and, raising his rifle
as the girl swept by, took deliberate aim. Lord Ardilaun prayed
heartily, if briefly, for the first time in his life, perhaps — but he
followed it up with a roar of such commanding authority, sound-
ing a note he had often used to his men in Flanders, that was
probably more effective than the prayer. The gun-barrel wav-
ered and descended, but before the fellow could look around,
his lordship brought him to earth with a swinging blow from
the butt of his riding-crop.
A quick glance told him that no imminent danger threat-
ened his cousin. He leaped from his horse, and, taking the guns
of the disabled soldiers, dropped them into the river. By this
time, Deirdre had ridden into the stream, and the mare was
swimming towards the almost exhausted man who, clinging des-
perately to life, had managed to keep himself afloat. Lord Ardi-
laun followed, but before he reached her side, the man was al-
380 THE WHITE LADY [Dec,
ready clinging to her stirrup, and the plucky little mare had
turned and was doing her best to get back to shore.
Together they brought him in. His friends ran out waist-
deep to take him, with praises and endless blessings for the res-
cuers. They knew his lordship, and they assured him that the men
of Clare would never forget his heroic conduct — never, till the
end of time; as for the young lady, words failed them: her like
for courage and beauty was never seen — not all the famous
Queens of Ireland— not Maeve herself — could equal her!
All this was very pleasant, but there was a more serious
matter to consider. One of the soldiers had a broken leg and
must be cared for. This was the one Deirdre had run down;
the other needed only a dash of cold water to bring him to his
senses, and he was tractable enough now that the odds were
against him. The materials for temporary splints were found,
and Lord Ardilaun bandaged the leg and made the injured man
as comfortable as possible. His companion was sent away to
fetch medical aid and a stretcher from the barracks.
Meanwhile, Jimmy Keane was telling his story. Jimmy was
married and lived at Ballyclare, but his old father and mother
were still on their bit of land across the river. This morning
he had got word that his mother was ill, and when his work
was finished, he had tried to cross by the bridge. He ought to
have known better, but he thought, considering the reason he
had, that the soldiers might let him pass. They refused, and
in the argument that followed, he had been beaten and thrown
over the rail into the river. His lordship knew the rest.
Jimmy's face gave evidence of the truth of his story: his lips
were cut, and one eye was swollen and discolored.
"It's a quare country to live in," he said bitterly, "where a
man would be destroyed for reason of wanting to see his old
mother, and she at the edge of death. And, sure, in the final
end, it's myself will pass away before her. It's marked for de-
struction I am by the token of what's happened today. Yer
honor can guess what they will be doing to me if they ketch me
after this. I'll be another was *shot trying to escape.' "
XL
"You can be quite sure of one thing, Ardilaun; they will
come after you, and unless I'm greatly mistaken, they will come
for you tomght. There are too many of our class going over to
the people, and they're bound to make an example of a man like
you. Take my advice, and come with us."
The speaker was Major Trench. Lord Ardilaun and his
1922.] THE WHITE LADY 381
cousin had just returned, and Deirdre had gone to her room to
change her wet clothes. Mrs. Trench was with her. Lord
Ardilaun looked thoughtfully at his companion and shook his
head.
"Sorry, I can't see it your way, Major. I've done only what
any decent citizen ought to do, no matter what his political con-
victions may be — prevented a dastardly crime. If I am arrested,
so much the better; it will give me a chance to tell them what I
think of the system, and I shall get all the publicity possible."
"My dear chap, what is the use of blinking facts? The truth
is never made public in Ireland. The story that the other side
will tell, is the one that will be made known, and it will be just
sufficiently different to put you in the wrong. Listen to this:
Jimmy Keane tries to cross without a permit. When he is
stopped, he jumps into the river and attempts to swim across.
A soldier fires a bullet in front of him, to frighten him, where-
upon you and your cousin attack the soldier, who is merely doing
his duty, and inflict grievous bodily injury on him. How does
that sound? Plausible, isn't it? — and your version will never
be heard."
Lord Ardilaun looked doubtful for a moment; but he shook
his head again, stubbornly. He had committed no crime, and
he was not going to run away like a criminal. They could not
dispose of him as they would of Jimmy Keane. He had influ-
ence, and he would exert it to the limit. There were good law-
yers to be had, and he would make the truth known if it cost
him every shilling he owned.
Major Trench was not one to waste argument on a man who
would not be convinced, especially as he was risking his own
freedom every moment that he remained with him. He was
anxious to save Ardilaun from arrest, all the more now that it
seemed likely his cousin would be able to convert him to the
cause; but he was still more anxious that Deirdre should not be
taken. She was too valuable to lose, and he knew that since she
had brought this trouble on him, she would not leave him to face
it alone. The only thing that remained was to save them in
spite of themselves. He had an idea — he wasn't at all sure it
was possible — ^but it might be worth risking, if circumstances
were favorable.
He called to his wife that they must be going. When Ardi-
laun suggested that they should stay and make use of the secret
chamber, if necessary, he declined, and told his lordship that
he was hoping he would think over what had been said, and use
the room himself, if the occasion should arise.
382 THE WHITE LADY [Dec.
•j«;rti,* xwhpn old Martin came to tell his
" Thi Tpou: wte TomLg He was devoutly thankful
master that V»e poHce w ^^ ^^^^^^
then that he had deeded to stay at the u ^^^^ ^^ ^^^
they would come here A-tj^jf^^J^^^^ed ,leepin^^^ this time.
^LTTit waTonrWm eUthey were looking for. he would
: S wUh tTem! aL she need not be disturbed. He would
i^«xro a mp<isace for her with Martin.
'" He P« on i; and coat and went out softly to the terrace.
The sta^s^vere shining brightly. He could see them dimly
larctog silently in double file between the trees He counted
Un of them, and the inspector at the head of the hne-he knew
Ms thin erect figure. As they came across the lawn, he went
Sown the ^dl steps to meet them. He leaned against the stone
balustrade, waiting for them.
"Well. Sharpe, I suppose it's myself you're wantmg this
time." , ^ . X I.
The inspector saluted and hesitated for an instant.
"Begging your pardon, my lord, it's the young lady."
"What?"
Lord Ardilaun's heart sank.
"Word has come from Dublin, sir, that they've been looking
for her. The little afifair this afternoon told them where she
was."
"Am I to understand that you have orders to arrest her, and
not myself?"
"Those are my orders, my lord."
His lordship felt the blood rushing to his head. He made
a desperate effort to control himself. He had considered it pos-
sible—even probable— that a warrant would be issued for her,
but he had foreseen merely a formal charge which he would
answer and give bonds for her appearance in due time. Com-
ing at this hour, he had been quite sure that they wanted only
himself— but now, the thing had a different aspect. Bail might
be refused. The thought of what might happen set his blood
boiling.
"Come inside," he said, shortly, and turned away.
As he mounted the steps, Sharpe said a few words to his
men. Four of them followed him, and the others divided and
went away to either side of the house.
Lord Ardilaun opened the library door and allowed the in-
spector and his men to pass through. He followed, closed the
door behind him, and switched on the lights. The men ranged
themselves silently along the wall, and Sharpe stood, grim and
1922.] THE WHITE LADY 383
erect, by the library table. His lordship walked over to the
hearth, in which a fire was still burning and, turning his back
to it, faced the inspector.
"If it is for my cousin you have come, will you be good
enough to tell me why you have come at this hour?"
The inspector moved uneasily from one foot to the other.
"I am sorry,'* he said, "but your lordship knows that a man
in my position cannot question orders."
The other cut him short peremptorily.
"I don*t know anything of the kind. I know that you are
inspector of this district, and that, as such, you have authority
to use your own discretion on such a point. Here is a woman,
gently born — my cousin — and because she would not stand by
and see an inoffensive fellow-creature drowned like a rat, by
brutal soldiers, she is to be dragged from her bed in the middle
of the night. Do you think I will permit it, Sharpe?"
"You cannot defy the law, my lord."
"When the law undertakes to perpetrate such an outrage,
I can, and will. You may wait here until morning, if you wish,
and my cousin and I will then go willingly with you."
"My lord, my orders are positive. I must take the young
lady into custody at once. It is not because of the attack on
the soldiers — there is something more than this. Dublin has
telegraphed instructions, and we must obey."
Lord Ardilaun was silent for a moment. The blood was
throbbing dangerously in his temples. A smoldering fury burned
in him. Why had he not brought a revolver with him? He
was ready to kill, or be killed — but she should not suffer in-
dignity while he was alive. He stood and picked the tongs
from the hearth. He moved over and placed his back against
the door.
"I shall not allow my cousin to be disturbed before the morn-
ing," he said coldly.
Inspector Sharpe was angry and perplexed. There was
something wrong with a situation which ranged the landed
gentry against him. He admired and respected his lordship —
to lay hands on him seemed almost like sacrilege — ^but how was
it to be avoided?
"My lord," he said, after a long pause, "I shall give you five
minutes to think it over. If you will not listen to reason, you
will force me to do what will be very disagreeable to both of us."
He drew his revolver from its holster as he spoke. "You do not
understand the situation, I think. This young lady is working
for Sinn Fein — she is valuable to them. At this moment, they
384
THE WHITE LADY [Dec,
may know that I am here— and before morning they may come
in force to — "
The inspector's sentence was cut off suddenly and dramat-
ically. A voice called briskly from a window behind him.
"Quite right. Sharpe— only you don't do full justice to our
efficiency— we were here before you. Don't stir— don't turn—
we have every man covered. Careful, Sharpe! I have a nerv-
ous trigger-finger— I shouldn't like to put a bullet between your
shoulders. Hands up, there— you iom— quick, I say— do you
want to die in your boots?"
Four pair of eyes stared, aghast, at the window. Four pair
of hands went up. Sharpe stood with sagging shoulders — a fig-
ure of despair. He knew that snapping voice, and he knew its
owner would shoot swiftly and surely. He saw inwardly the
picture he dared not turn his head to see. The voice rang out
again, clear and compelling.
"Hand your weapon to Lord Ardilaun, Inspector. Will you
kindly take it, Ardilaun? Thank you! Cheer up, Sharpe,
there's no disgrace in being taken this way — we had you on the
hip. Thoughtless of you, though, to scatter your men — ^you
made it very easy for us. They're safely locked in the stable."
Major Trench threw his legs over the sill and dropped
lightly into the room.
"Come in, Michael, and disarm these warriors," he called
back. "Come around by the door, Molly — and bring Deirdre
along." He turned to his lordship: "This little comedy was
for your benefit, Ardilaun. Deirdre was afraid that Sharpe
might so far overcome his respect for the aristocracy as to lay
hands on you, or even shoot you — otherwise, it would have been
simpler to let you finish your argument with him."
When Michael had collected the weapons of the police, Sean
came down from the window and joined him. Martin O'Gara
opened the door of the library and ushered in Deirdre and Mrs.
Trench. Lord Ardilaun stared when he saw that his cousin
was fully dressed. She went directly to him and put her hand
on his arm. They looked into each other's eyes for a moment.
His lordship's heart was beating rapidly. The girl caught her
breath in a little gasp of relief.
"Oh!" she said. "You shouldn't have done it, Gerald.
They would have shot you if Alan hadn't come."
Lord Ardilaun put his hand over hers and held it tight.
He'd have been shot willingly for the joy of this moment.
"How did you know?" he asked.
"I didn't go to bed. I was sure something would happen.
1922.] THE WHITE LADY 385
I heard you go out and I followed and listened at the door. I
heard what Sharpe said. If they weren't going to arrest you,
I didn't mind running away. I ran back to my room and dropped
from the window, just in time. As I reached the shrubbery, a
policeman came round the corner of the house. I found Alan
and the others in the shrubbery."
Major Trench was talking to Michael, while Sean kept an
eye on the prisoners.
"Drop them anywhere you like, Michael — the farther away,
the better — but don't lose any time. Meet me at the usual place
— we'll be waiting for you at the landing. I'll take Sharpe with
me and put him ashore a few miles up the river."
Michael and Sean, herding the four policemen in front of
them at the point of their revolvers, left the room. Major
Trench turned to the others:
"Come, my children, there's no time for mooning or spoon-
ing; are you coming, Ardilaun?"
His lordship looked at his cousin, whose hand he was still
holding. She shook her head slowly, as if in answer to a
question.
"It is you who must decide, Gerald," she whispered, but her
eyes never left his.
The major laid his hand on the drooping inspector's
shoulder.
"I'm going to give you a long walk, Sharpe, before break-
fast, and I'm hoping that you'll think seriously about quitting
the R. I. C. You're as decent a man as anyone can be who comes
from Antrim, and I've got a job for you when you've sent in your
resignation."
Lord Ardilaun whispered something to his cousin, and the
girl, with a sudden, impetuous movement, bent and kissed the
hand which held hers. His lordship had, fortunately, another
hand unoccupied — and he, too, could be impetuous.
Deirdre freed herself gently, and lifted a flushed face, and
eyes that were dim with happy tears.
"My lord," she said, "Roger Valiancy is at peace tonight."
[Concluded.]
VOL. GXVI. 25
The Ball and the Cross.
The Ball and the Cross is one of the symbols of Christianity. It
signifies, as is obvious, the World and the Faith. It is our intention
to publish monthly in this department two or three short articles, which
may appropriately be grouped under the caption chosen.
THE CHRIST-CHILD IN NICARAGUA.
THROUGHOUT the entire world the birth of the Christ-Child
will soon be observed, but perhaps nowhere is there a more
beautiful custom than will take place in the old Spanish churches
of Central America. It was the privilege of a Boston woman to
attend one of these services in the little town of Matagalpa, which
lies one hundred and twenty miles from a railroad, up in the
mountains of Nicaragua.
All roads led to the old cathedral on Christmas eve. Kneel-
ing on the stone floor before the flower-decked altar of the Blessed
Virgin was a picturesque throng, Indian and Spanish men, women,
and children — even the dogs were not unwelcome, but wandered
at will among the worshippers. Hundreds of candles illuminated
the big, gray adobe church, the masses of tropical flowers, the gay
colors of the silken reboses on the heads of the women made bril-
liant patches in the soft light. Only for the chosen few were
seats provided. These were ordinary chairs, which had been
kept in reserve for the owners by means of a chain stretched from
arm to arm, and fastened with a padlock. All evening long, from
nine o'clock until twelve, the ordinary folk knelt on the hard
stone floor, making their devotions.
While this service was being held, the priest, taking the
image of the Christ-Child from its sacred place, gave it to his mes-
senger, and bade him carry it to a certain home in the town. In
every home in Matagalpa there was an empty cradle awaiting the
coming of the Christ-Child, but no one except the priest and the
messenger knew who was to be honored that night. Kneeling
and praying, the worshippers awaited the pealing of the midnight
bells, which told them the Babe had found a resting place, then,
with shouts of joy and expectation, they ran, first to their own
home, and then, in groups, from house to house seeking the "new-
born Babe."
1922.] THE BALL AND THE CROSS 387
Close by the church, we entered an adobe house to find the
long, low front room divided in half by a low bank of palms and
masses of flowers, along the sides and across the back the decor-
ations were the same, only the palms reached to the ceiling and
the flowers were in greater profusion. The carpet in this en-
closure was unique and very lovely. Matting had been wet
and sprinkled with oats, which had sprouted, and by this time
were about three inches high, making the most exquisite floor
cover imaginable. A path of flower petals led from the front of
the room to the taU palms and flowers at the back, and there, fes-
tooned with tiny pink rosebuds and white lilies, was the cradle
awaiting the Christ-Child. Large stones had been placed here
and there under the matting to raise it, and on these "mountains"
small trees were placed. To make them appear like the moun-
tains around Matagalpa, they had fashioned little brown monkeys
of clay, which were playing in the trees, while prowling, very life-
like, were miniature tigers and lions. Village scenes were also
depicted, women grinding corn and making tortillas.
Leaving the house for a time, we searched in vain, passing
through street after street, but, at last, we saw a great crowd kneel-
ing before a very humble home. A poor woman, for the sake of
her little child, who had died, had spent her all in preparing her
home for this other Babe Who might come, and there, in one of
the lowliest homes in Matagalpa, to a childless mother, came the
Christ-Child as a comfort and guest.
CATHOLICISM IN SCOTLAND.
WHEN Protestantism dies in Scotland, it will be dead "in-
tirely." There is no country in which the Protestant re-
ligion was accepted more completely, or has held on more tena-
ciously. But even Scotland has begun to show the signs of re-
conversion to the ancient faith. Recently, in connection with a
general census of Great Britain, an interesting document came to
light concerning the number of Catholics in Scotland about a hun-
dred and thirty years ago. The contrast with the present number
is illuminating and very hopeful. The registrar-general in charge
of the new census, happened upon a computation of the relative
number of Protestants and Catholics in Scotland, made in 1755
by a certain minister of the Kirk, Rev. Alexander Webster, of
Edinburgh. It seems that at that date there was not a single
Catholic in Glasgow, whereas now there are approximately 500,000.
In many smaller towns and "parishes," according to the minister's
388 THE BALL AND THE CROSS [Dec,
r ihnlir.5 were all but non-existent. There were 12
calculations. C« ^oju^s w re all p^^^^^^^^^^. ^j^^, ^ere 85
Cathohcs •" S°\7^^^^7,„ts in Buittle, and only 22 Catholics
Catholics and 814 P^otestanis Dumfries. In Maxwell-
out of a population of more toan 5^000 mD^^^ ^^^ ^^^ ^^
T' M 3^r T heTe was'lTy o^n^Catholic inVtown of Paisley
fnrllythree?n Dundee, which at that tinie had a population of
12 477 Aberdeen had only 135 Catholics.
Naturally, in the Highlands, Catholics were more numerous.
In the parUh of Ardnamurchan. from which Catholicism had never
been expelled! th.re were 2.300 Catholics and 2 700 Protestants.
AUogether th^e were only 16.490 Catholics in Scotland. Today
there are over 600,000. . . -u
But even more conspicuous than the Catholic increase is the
Protestant decrease. Only half of the total population of 4 888,-
000 attend religious service of any kind. Consequently, Catholics
already form one quarter of the church-going population. In the
area of the Synod of Glasgow, the general population increased
by 87,000 in ten years, but the number of Protestant churches de-
creased by five. In Glasgow city there was in the same period an
increase of 25,000 people and a decrease of three churches.
The number of marriages and of school children in Scotland
is even more favorable to Catholicism. In 1907, there were 2,555
Catholic marriages. In 1921, there were 5,894. The number of
Catholic school children increased 1,037 in two years, while the
number of Protestant school children decreased 1,812. In Dun-
dee, in the same two years, the Catholic school children gained
by 176 and the Protestant school children lost by 873. In Edin-
burgh, for the same period, the Catholic increase was 175, and the
Protestant decrease 1,389. Those who would belittle the im-
portance of the Catholic gain may say that it is due, not to con-
version, but to the immigration of the Irish. Be that as it may,
the fact is that since 1755, while the general population of Scot-
land has multiplied six times, the Catholic population has mul-
tiplied forty times.
Evidently, the Church has reason to be hopeful, even in the
home of John Knox, the last stronghold of the most vigorous form
of the Protestant religion.
Mr. J. S. Phillimore, writing on this topic in the Dublin
Review (October), makes a remark that is full of significance for
the revival of Catholicism, not only in Scotland, but in every
Protestant country: "Of all the circumstances, none is more full
of encouragement than this; the Catholic case welcomes and de-
mands light, critical inquiry, re-trial of judgments; the Protestant
1922.] THE BALL AND THE CROSS 389
position is rooted in obscurantism and the sanctity of the chose
jugeeJ'
Here, evidently, is the precise reverse of the usual opinion.
Yet, upon observation, the fact becomes evident; the countries
that accepted the ^'Reformation" can scarcely afford to reconsider
the cause of the break with the Catholic Church. Reconsider-
ation leads to reconversion. The Catholic Church vvraits. She
can afford to wait. Her appeal is to time, as well as to truth.
And time is a test of truth.
MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE IN LATVIA.
ON the shores of the Baltic, I was speaking with a woman of
Latvia. She had spoken warmly — or had she trumpeted? —
her praise of the marriage code passed by the Latvian Constituent
Assembly in February of 1921, and her enthusiasm had given rise,
on my part, to a curiosity which, while it by no means equaled
her satisfaction with the law, did at least evoke eager questioning.
Had I indeed found in this brand-new republic the last word, the
ultima Thule of wisdom, on the most sacred, the most important
of human relationships? "Explain this code to me," I said.
"I shall explain the law by telling you what it means to me, for
instance," she said. "Understand, then, that for twenty-five years
— for twenty-five years, mind you — I have hated my husband —
think of living that long with a man you hate! — and now" (joy-
ously), "I'm going to get rid of him." "You are going to divorce
him? On what ground?" "On what ground?" — surprise at my
slow wit — "but I have told you — on the ground that I hate him
and don't want to be his wife any longer, of course." After that,
I read the law and inquired into the circumstances of its passage,
and my melancholy conclusion was that in Latvia there must be
many wives who hate their husbands.
There were other reasons, besides the elation of my Lettish
acquaintance, to be curious about the marriage code. The Letts
were newcomers, and interesting in the way that newcomers
always are. When a family moves into a community, the neigh-
bors watch the unpacking of the furniture, appraise the books and
pictures, and wonder whether these people will raise or lower the
town's moral and cultural tone. The Letts were unpacking their
furniture : for centuries they had been under, first, German, then
Russian, rule; after the armistice, they became an independent
nation. The marriage code was one of their first attempts to
express their own ideas as to how society should be constructed,
390 THE BALL AND THE CROSS [Dec,
a clue as to the kind of influence which this ne^v family would
""But te rn^S lent most interest to the law was the fact
that!h women, as I was given to understand, had had so much
:n7h its oassage. When independence was declared, the
L of Latvia were given the ballot and made equal partners
Tth the men n The government of the country. Presumably,
i::. !l: c^d" passed by the Assembly reflects the views of a very
Iflrse section of the women of Latvia. , ^ ,
The new code makes it by no means easy to take a husband
or a wife in Latvia. Hasty or clandestine marriages are impos-
sible. The law altogether prohibits the marriage of men under
eighteen years of age, of women under sixteen, and of persons of
both sexes afflicted with venereal diseases in a contagious state
Persons under legal age may not marry without the consent of
their parents or guardians, but if this be refused without good
reason, the court may authorize the marriage. Banns of matri-
mony, (here, as well as in prohibiting clandestine marriages,
Latvia has borrowed from the age-proved wisdom of the Church),
must be published for a period of two weeks in the local registry
of marriages at the dwelling place of both the bridegroom and the
bride. Application for publication of the banns must be docu-
mented with numerous certificates covering all conditions legally
prerequisite to the marriage. Those guilty of false declarations
are to be punished in accordance with the penal code. If the
candidates have complied with the law at every step and none of
the various documents discloses a legal barrier to marriage, they
may go forth and marry, either in a registry of marriages or before
a clergyman of any creed.
Marriage by proxy is forbidden. Both parties must be pres-
ent in person, attended by two witnesses of legal age. If mar-
riage be entered into before the manager of a registry office, the
ceremony must take place in public in the rooms of the registry;
outside the oflRce, the manager may unite people in marriage only
when sickness prevents one of the parties from coming to the
registry. Marriages not contracted before a clergyman or in a
registry office — with the above exception — are declared null.
From all this, it might appear that the majority of the Con-
stituent Assembly had a high conception of marriage. Certainly,
it did some things very well. Nevertheless, the majority of the
Assembly appears to have had a very low conception of marriage.
It looked upon it not only as a mere civil contract, but as one
without any binding force whatever. It revealed its mind, not in
making marriage difficult, but in making divorce childishly easy.
1922.] THE BALL AND THE CROSS 391
But perhaps, after all, we ought to pay the Letts the compli-
ment of saying that they are not hypocritical. What we do under
false pretenses, they do openly. When an American and his wife
both want a divorce, but have no legal ground, they are put to the
trouble of inventing a fiction. The husband is accused of cruel
and inhuman treatment, whereas he may consent to divorce be-
cause he is intimidated by his wife. In Latvia, husband and wife
merely say to the court : "We want a divorce." If the court asks
why, they may reply that that is no concern of his. And, under
the marriage code, it is no concern of his; the joint plaintiffs are
under no obligation to assign any reason whatever. The court*s
duty is to invite husband and wife to be friendly again, and then,
if they refuse, to grant the divorce.
Divorce is also granted on the usual grounds of infidelity,
abandonment, cruel treatment, and the like. A marriage may be
dissolved if husband and wife have lived apart uninterruptedly
for a period of three years; if either is afflicted with a lingering
mental or contagious disease difficult to cure; if either is sterile
in the marriage relation, physically unfit to discharge the marriage
debt, or feels a repugnance against sustaining the relation of hus-
band or wife towards the other. It was not difficult, one imagines,
for the woman who had hated her husband for twenty-five years
to find a ground for divorce. It is a poor law, however, even a
poor divorce law, which does not reveal at least some evidence
that those who wrote it did not go as far as they might have gone.
They could have won noisy applause from America by providing
for the dissolution of marriages when either party insisted on
more than two children. What they did provide was that either
might seek divorce if the other avoided bringing children into the
world. The Letts, apparently, are not parties to the international
conference on the limitation of progeny.
That portion of the code relating to divorce is disappointing,
but not surprising. Legislatures, as a rule, are not concerned to
guard the sanctity of marriage as a sacrament, even if the safety
of the state and the material welfare of society do demand the
preservation of the defenses built around marriage. To the Cath-
olics of Latvia, these sections of the code must be particularly
distasteful. With genuine social progress, neither a Lettish nor
any other Catholic can maintain a quarrel; with social changes
which begin with the breaking of the Commandments, no Catholic
can maintain peace.
Editorial Comment.
"T^HERE are no bad books. There are no
A Judge ^ good books. There are only badly-writ-
As ten books, and well-written books." The
Literary Critic, words are the words of Oscar Wilde. The sen-
timent is that of a majority of the literati, and
of a considerable number of publishers. That fact becomes obvious
whenever a test case arises. Recently, there was a suit-at-law,
brought by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice,
against a publishing firm which has specialized in producing mor-
ally obnoxious books. The volume chosen as particularly offen-
sive, is a translation of the Satyricon of Petronius. The Society
alleged that the publishers had violated the law against obscene
literature. The court decided in favor of the publishers.
Whereupon Mr. Sumner, Secretary of the Society, declared
that "no other book which has received the sanction of the courts
is anything like the Satyricon. Criminal acts are therein described
in the bluntest language. A man who would repeat phrases from
it on the street corner might be sent to jail for six months. The
Decameron is a Sunday School book beside it. If this decision
holds, anything that has ever been written by anybody may be
safely printed and circulated."
Neither the magistrate nor the publishers deny that the
Satyricon is, in part, obscene. And there is a section (1141) of the
Penal Code which prohibits the publication and sale of obscene
works. Yet the Court decided that the law had not been violated.
With the logic of the decision, we are not concerned.
What interests us particularly are the remarks and reason-
ings of the judge, in which he justifies his decision. In a disserta-
tion of some three thousand words, he has quoted the opinions of
literary critics on the work in question, and, weaving them to-
gether with his own observations, has produced a treatise on the
ethics of literature. The smartest of our weekly papers declares
that any first-rate critic might well be proud to sign his name to
the document produced by the city magistrate.
We cannot agree with that eulogy of the judge. But we will
say this for him: he has crowded into one essay, practically
every argument that can be made in defense of the publication of
obscene literature; he has given the most complete expose of the
pagan and neo-pagan view that we have ever seen in so short a
space; and he has demonstrated once again that the literati agree
with the unfortunate and degenerate Oscar Wilde. We think it
1922.] EDITORIAL COMMENT 393
well that our readers should know the argument of those who
do not accept our view about decency in literature. So we shall
give some excerpts from the magistrate's very unusual document,
together with a bit of commentary, on our own account.
SAYS the judge: "The book plays an im-
portant part in the history of civilization. So Eager
and the prosecution gives rise to the question for
whether the record of civilization can be sup- "History!"
pressed."
Now, what is this "contribution to the history of civilization,"
which the honorable judge is so reluctant to suppress, so eager to
perpetuate? It is, ostensibly, "a keen satire on the vulgarity of
mere wealth, its vanity and its grossness, the author of which was
interested in the intellectual pursuits, as well as the vices and
follies of his own evil time."
Note, in passing, the curious collocation of "intellectual pur-
suits" with "vices and follies." There will be more of that. But,
essentially, the "satire" is an over-frank description of the ob-
scenities, natural and unnatural, practised by the Court and the
upstart aristocracy of Rome in the days of Nero. But do we really
need a graphic description of the orgies that were practised by
society in the decadent days of the Empire? "Let these things be
not so much as mentioned among you," said St. Paul, who, quite
in harmony with the spirit, if not the letter, of his own dictum,
wisely gives us a mere catalogue of the same vices and crimes
which Petronius describes realistically and in detail.
If one is eager for historical information, why not take it
from the Epistle to the Romans, rather than from the Satyricon?
The answer is obvious. The readers of Petronius are not really
over-zealous for learning. They seek something that appeals to
the emotions and the imagination. They want their history with
a pleasurable thrill, and perhaps with a stimulus to passion.
Why, then, do they talk grandiloquently and hypocritically about
"a contribution to the history of civilization?" Why have they
not the honesty of the one critic who would not even review a
nasty novel, though it was charmingly written, because, as he
said: "I prefer my vulgarities straight."
WHEN we hear of "students" reading such. a manual as the
Satyricon, in order to obtain historical knowledge, we think
of those other "scholars" (or are they the same), who study
sociology by visiting houses of ill fame, and who have a partic-
ularly keen scientific interest in vice that is exotic, abnormal, or
394
EDITORIAL COMMENT [Dec,
degenerate. There are travelers who poke their way into the
most recherchd bagnios of Paris, who delve into the dives of Cairo,
or Yokohoma. They linger among certain portions of the ruins
of Pompeii. Their interest in learning is insatiable. Similarly,
there are those who must read the Satyricon, in order that nothing
that was done in Rome under that prince of moral perverts, Nero,
may escape them.
WHO are these "students" whose education would be so mis-
erably inadequate unless they read the Satyricon? The
publishers of that work, it seems, printed "a limited edition of
1,200 copies, and solicited orders directly from a private list of
subscribers" (italics ours), a list "made up of people who are
sophisticated, intelligent, respectable members of the community,"
so that "the immature, the young and the uneducated would not
obtain a copy." There is something instructive in that. It is in-
teresting to know that a "private list" is "in possession of the
publishers," and that when they are to serve some particularly
toothsome morsel, like the Satyricon^ the "sophisticated" are in-
vited to the feast.
But is it really necessary for those sophisticated ones to pur-
sue their studies further? Could there have been anything even
in the most degenerate days of Rome of which they have not yet
heard? Can Petronius — that ancient Oscar Wilde — teach them
anything? We doubt it.
'T'HE learned judge also explains that the
A Dubious, •■• book under discussion is a work of liter-
Ethical ary art. "It is part," he says, "of classical
Principle. literature. Its value has been recognized both
from the historical and the literary viewpoint.
Its value to the student and the scholar," (still harping on the
student and the scholar!), "is such that it would be too serious a
matter to deny access to it, for ancient literature enlarges and en-
riches the mind." St. Jerome, who was closer to that literature,
came to the conclusion that it poisoned the mind. However, let
that pass,— but what are we to say of the ethical principle, that
whatever is obscene must be tolerated if only it has literary or
artistic value? From our point of view, it would seem that
obscenity which is artistic is more dangerous than obscenity which
is crude. A dirty, slovenly, malodorous street-walker presents no
temptation to the normal man. She does less harm than some
beautiful, educated, nicely cultured enchantress, who practises
her wiles m the drawing-room, or the conservatory. But the
1922.] EDITORIAL COMMENT 395
poor unfortunate of the streets is hustled away as a menace to
morals; the exquisitely handsome and talented courtesan is not
only tolerated, but rapturously welcomed to the homes of the
61ite. As in life, so in literature. If the police find some filthy,
ugly, pornographic stuff that could hardly damage anyone, it is
confiscated and burned. But novels written with a fascinating,
alluring, beguiling, seductiveness, are defended by magisterial dis-
sertations. 'Twas ever thus. The world is always either stupid
or hypocritical in matters that pertain to purity.
SUPPOSE we stop for a minute to anticipate
and to answer that particular form of Are They
hypocrisy, which pretends that what is liter- Really
ary and artistic, cannot create temptation, ex- Immune?
cept to those who are evil-minded. To us, this
affectation of spiritual superiority on the part of authors and
critics is especially irritating. Do they, who accuse us Christians
of having "a bad mind," seriously expect us to believe that they
themselves are so confirmed in grace that temptation cannot touch
them? Are they superhuman? As for us, we confess that we
are human. We admit that we are not immune against the sug-
gestion of evil. Like St. Paul, we do not deny that the flesh
lusteth against the spirit. So we aim to practise eternal vigilance.
But have those people who read obscene literature no tempta-
tions? Are they angels — pure spirits? They certainly have not
primeval innocence. If they are immune, is it not rather because
they are blase? If they claim that nothing that is written, no
matter how seductively beautiful it may be, causes them to feel
the stimulus carnis, is it not because their passions are worn out?
Do they pretend that not all the indecent literature in the English
language, or in the French, can give them a thrill? And is this
the reason they go back to the most degenerate days in the his-
tory of the world, dig up an obscene romance, translate it, and
try it as a whip to their jaded carnal instincts? Have they ex-
hausted the possibilities of Stern, Fielding, Smollett, Rabelais,
Flaubert, de Maupassant, Zola, and the rest, that they must dig
up old Petronius out of his filthy grave?
DUT to return to our learned and literary
^ police magistrate. Adopting a partic- Reverting
ularly academic tone, he lectures us as fol- to
lows: "Due consideration must be given to Primitive T3rpc.
the environment and the age during which
the Satyricon was written. The standards of realism are different
396 EDITORIAL COMMENT [Dec,
today from those of the centuries gone by The works of
literature of an ancient age cannot be judged by modern stand-
*^ ^Now the judge who wrote those magisterial words is probably
a believer in the theory of evolution. We are frequently told that
all persons as highly educated as he are evolutionists. And, no
doubt, he believes in moral evolution, as well as physical evolu-
tion. Indeed, he says that we have grown away from the stand-
ards of the past. Presumably, then, we have evolved out of a
less perfect state, to a more nearly perfect state. Why then go
back? Why not hold the advantage we have so hardly gained?
If we may not judge the past by the standards of the present,
what is the advantage of evolution? Our idea is that we should
look back and say: "Thank God, we have outgrown that damnable
paganism of degenerate Rome. Let us stay out of it, and not
revert to it." Do those who believe we come from the ape, think
that we should always go back to the manners and morals of the
ape? Then why should we go back to the morals and manners
of an admittedly degenerate epoch?
The idea with which the magistrate is painfully struggling is
that we must not judge the men of another age for not having the
standards of this age. That is a very different proposition. But
we certainly can judge the men of this age for preferring to go
back to the vile conditions of an age from which we have been
mercifully delivered.
IT seems, furthermore, that Petronius was
xi*c ^oocuvv not only a fop, but a snob. "He was not a
of plebeian," says the judge. "The Satyricon is
Decadence. emphatically the production of a cultivated
aristocrat, who looks down with serene and
amused scorn on the vulgar bourgeois world that he is painting.
He is interested in it, but it is the interest of the detached, artistic
observer, whose own world is very far off. Encolopius and Tri-
malchio and his coarse freeman friends are people with whom the
author would never have dined, but whom, at a safe social dis-
tance, he found infinitely amusing, as well as disgusting."
Evidently, Petronius was another Horace, with his ''odi pro-
fanum valgus et arceoJ* But it is difficult to determine whether
or not the judge considers this aloofness a virtue. It would seem
that he rather admires the old Roman arbiter for his snobbish-
ness. And we imagine that a certain proportion of the "private
list" of those who paid $30.00 for the volume of the Satyricon,
are, like Petronius, rich, "aristocratic," and disdainful of the
1922.] EDITORIAL COMMENT 397
common horde. Having tried all the pleasures available in their
own set, they take an interest in the coarse pleasures of plebeians.
They find the ruck and the rabble "infinitely amusing, as well as
disgusting." They certainly would not dine with "common peo-
ple, but if "common people" have any secret of extracting joy from
crude, brutish vices, the aristocrat is anxious to know of it. For
his own pleasures have gone stale on him.
Now the Satyricon, though written by an aristocrat, is coarse
and vulgar in its obscenity. The judge tells us: "It is full of
humorous exaggerations and wild Aristophanic fun. . . . The
material of the romance was the squalid life, by land and sea,
by day and night."
In other words, like many another polished pagan, Petronius
had sucked dry all the means of entertainment known to his own
class. And to get what is nowadays called a "kick," he dabbled
in what was sordid and squalid. That is the surest sign of de-
cadence. It is Oscar Wilde again. Much of the literature of our
day, particularly of the new poetry, is decadent in that sense —
sordid, crude, brutal, vulgar, profane, blasphemous, filthy. Del-
icacy is thrown away. Coarse vulgarity is the mode. Any stu-
dent of human nature knows the reason. Decadence is the curse
of those who mount high but cannot remain high. The higher
they have been, the lower they fall. And, in literary taste, it is
the same as in life. When a man has risen to a high culture, but,
lacking moral balance, cannot maintain himself on the heights,
he plunges into the morass. From the pure delights of lofty
literature, he tumbles down into the enjoyment of obscenity.
With all possible reverence for the magistrate's homily on the
history of civilization, art, literature, and ethical standards, we
feel that the demand for such works as the Satyricon of Petronius
can be explained in one word. Decadence.
THERE is another book, of a different sort,
but perhaps equally vicious, that has been "Puffing"
most vigorously and persistently "boosted" Bad
by many critics, advertised by all the news- Books,
papers, and sold in almost every bookstore.
We need not name it. SuflBce it to say that it is a novel, written
with about the usual literary skill, or perhaps a little better than
ordinary style, but with a most amazing frankness in describing
the brazen attempts of a woman to tempt a man who is already
married to the sister of the temptress. The author describes,
with utmost shamelessness, scenes that wxuld be in the last
degree unhealthily stimulating even to the most stolid imagina-
398 EDITORIAL COMMENT [Dec,
T A oH fhP entire story is indecent, immoral, and seductive,
tion. Indeed, the ^?|!^^^ J^;^ ^j ^^^ metropolitan newspapers.
Nevertheless the ^^^^^^^^^ " ^^ "^ "^^
daily and weekly, ha 1 the vo ^f adventure." Its char-
^::^^ atrLfn!" "It will give great delight.
It is "a book with a meaning." It "possesses potent appeal I
a "frank, forceful, fearless delineation of primitive emotion.
ThP heroine is "vivid, passionate, intelligent, ruthless, strong-
wld bTgenU^^^ A^d'so on, and so on, but no word of indigna-
tion LL^ and immoralities, that are the warp and
"" ThVr'e^anTe no greater calamity for the individual soul or
for the nation than the obliteration of the moral sense. Yet m
the appreciation and criticism of literature, we seem to have come
to that. Novels are described, criticized, praised or condemned
solely on their literary merits or demerits. The only sm known
to critics is the sin of dullness. The value of Christian modesty
and purity are not merely discounted, but ignored. The mmds
of millions of readers are being constantly contaminated.
WELL, what then? Can nothing be
vcu^^uxox^,.. done? The literati rise in fury if any-
one so much as suggests the adoption of any
kind of censorship. For ourselves, we dislike the censorship.
We would prefer to trust that good taste and a sense of decency
on the part of publishers, would prevent their publishing
unclean books. But we are frequently disappointed. Even some
of the most "reputable" publishing firms are not above producing
objectionable works. There is no newspaper that will refuse
to advertise them, and few newspapers that will refrain, not only
from noticing, but from "puffing," any novel that has literary
quality, no matter how egregiously it may outrage decency.
What is to be done? For Catholics, the answer is plain. We
have the Index, and the Index automatically forbids us to read in-
decent books, just as it automatically forbids the reading of heret-
ical books. Then we have the Catholic doctrine of the "Occasions
of Sin." We have confession and spiritual direction. We have the
Catholic tradition of holy purity, as well as the Catholic theology
that any willful sin, even in thought, against the angelic virtue, is a
mortal sin. We have, finally, and most important of all, the
Catholic conscience. We have every safeguard. A genuine Cath-
olic needs no other censor. But what about non-Catholic Amer-
ica? The more brazen offenders against decency, be they authors,
publishers, or critics, may finally go to such extremes that the
1922.] EDITORIAL COMMENT 399
American people will be driven to some such drastic measure as
a federal censorship law. This would be as undesirable and
perhaps as futile as the federal prohibition amendment. But "it
should be remembered'* (says William Lyon Phelps, writing in
the department, "As I Like It,'* in Scribner's for November),
"that if the censorship should be established, and we pass under
arbitrary and irresponsible tyranny, it will not be the fault of
the prudes and the reformers and the bigots. It will be the fault
of those who destroy freedom by their selfish excesses. I should
like to state in four words what I believe to be a natural law:
Excess leads to Prohibition"
QUITE apropos of the question of immoral
books, is the incident of the editor-in- Sacrilege
chief of a students' magazine at Columbia and
University, who wrote on an episode in the "Freedom."
Life of Christ a sketch, "so shocking that it
cannot be reproduced." The student board demanded, and ob-
tained, the resignation of the editor and of the editorial staff.
The young man refused to make any apology, remarking, quite
in the spirit of the liberal press, "the mistake was made in
supposing that the time was ripe for the publication of such a
sketch.'* The new editor promises — or threatens — to continue the
work of the deposed editor, for he announces: "The magazine is
not anti-church . . . but it is greatly interested in the develop-
ment of young writers along their own lines." That is the usual
phrase of the "liberals" and radicals. They are morbidly fearful
that some young person will not have liberty to "live his own
life," or "express himself in his own way." A little repression in
this case would, we think, be no crime against civilization. The
only man who is free to "live his own life in his own way" is the
savage. Civilization implies restraint.
TN the September number of The Catholic
•■• World, we made some remarks on the un- Our Debt
fairness and inadequateness of school his- to
tories. Now comes a book from Holland the Dutch.
(Joan Derk van der Capellen), the reviewer
of which, in the Literary Review of November 11th, remarks
pertinently :
"Not even our standard histories, to say nothing of our pop-
ular text-books, have much more than an adumbration of the great
sunshine which, to our fathers, the Dutch Republic cast over
American affairs in *the time that tried men's souls.'
400 EDITORIAL COMMENT [Dec,
"What France did for us has been celebrated in song and story,
in private and in public art, in drama and in a voluminous liter-
ature. Yet who recalls that the republic that gave us the stripes
in our flag and almost every one of our national federal precedents
had a history in which were included revolt against unjust tax-
ation, a declaration of independence, an eight-year war for free-
dom, the formation of a federated system, having a written con-
stitution, and which survived the diseases of federal government,
with conflict between state right and national supremacy, seces-
sion, coercion, and reunion; so that John Adams declared of the
Dutch and the American Republics that their histories were so
much alike that a page from one seemed to be a transcript from
the other.
**Is it taught in our schools that the Dutch lent us a sum of
hard money, which, when paid up in 1808, amounted to $14,000,-
000; that they sent us officers to fortify West Point and drill our
soldiers, and that the first foreign salute to the American flag
was fired from Dutch cannon, by order of Governor John A. de
Graeff, at Fort Orange, in St. Eustatius, in the West Indies, after
he had read the Declaration of July 4, 1776? Is it stated in our
American school histories that probably a full half of our war
munitions and army clothing during the Revolution came from
this same source, and that Rodney left Cornwallis in the lurch in
order first to capture this island.
"Does the lack of public knowledge on these points arise be-
cause most of our historiography, popular and standard, has been
the product of one section of the country?"
TReccnt Events.
By passing death sentences upon the Turk-
Turkey, ish signatories of the Treaty of Sevres and
the members of the Cabinet of ex-Premier
Damad Ferid Pasha, on the last day of October, the Turkish Na-
tionalist Government at Angora introduced a series of acts, more
or less in contravention of the Mudania agreement. These cul-
minated, on November 5th, with invasion of the neutral zone and
the seizure of Constantinople. Towards the end of October, in
Allied circles it was thought that all danger of war had been
definitely removed by an agreement between the Allies and the
Nationalists to hold a general conference on Near Eastern affairs
at Lausanne, on the tentative date of November 13th. Shortly
thereafter, alarming reports were received that the Turks had in-
creased the force of 8,000 gendarmes allowed them in Eastern
Thrace, for the time being, under the terms of the Mudania agree-
ment, to 30,000. These reports were only too well founded, as
events soon disclosed.
On November 3d, the French Foreign Office was formally
notified that the Angora National Assembly had dethroned the
Sultan, and reserved to itself the right to elect the Caliph, as the
religious head of the Mohammedans. Two days later, Hamid Bey,
as representative of the Angora Government, proclaimed himself
Governor of Constantinople, and set up a civil administration,
which appears to be in full control. The new Governor's first
act was to send a note to the Allied authorities, demanding evac-
uation of all Allied forces from Turkish soil. To this, the British,
French, and Italian Governments have presented a united refusal,
and have authorized the Allied High Commissioners in Constanti-
nople to take what measures they find necessary to maintain the
Allied occupation of the city.
At present, telegraphic communication between Constanti-
nople and the Western World is interrupted, and only meagre
details of what is occurring reach us. Apparently, however, there
has been, as yet, no definite military clash between the Allies and
the Turks. The Sultan is confined to his palace, and is virtually
at the mercy of the Nationalists. Meanwhile, pourparlers are
continuing between the Allies, regarding the date for the Lausanne
Conference, which has now been postponed to November 15th.
At present, the Allied Commissioners are awaiting a reply from
the Angora Government to their demand that the Turks recede
VOL. cxvi. 26
402 RECENT EVENTS [Dec,
from their attitude, which the Allies regard as out of accord with
the Mudania convention. ^ ^
The evacuation of Greek civilians from Thrace has been prac-
tically completed. They removed with them from the country
nearly all the stock and means of transport, including cattle,
needed by the population that remained behind. All the Chris-
tians in Anatolia, numbering a million and a half, according to
the latest estimate of the League of Nations, are emigrating, ap-
parently on order of the Angora Government. Great destitution
is reported among these refugees.
At this writing, Greece is conducting negotiations for her
entry into the Little Entente. This news is of capital importance.
It means, in the event of a Turkish onslaught in Greece, that the
Turks would have to fight, in addition to the Greeks in Europe,
Rumania, Jugo-Slavia, and possibly Czecho-Slovakia.
The Revolutionary Committee in Greece has published a de-
cree ordering the trial by extraordinary court-martial of the
former Cabinet Ministers and general officers now under arrest,
charged with responsibility for the Greek disaster in Asia Minor.
The decree exempts former King Constantine from trial.
Probably the chief event of the month in-
France. fluencing French affairs, occurred outside
of France when, towards the end of Oc-
tober, the British Premier, Lloyd George, with his Coalition Gov-
ernment, was forced out of office by the withdrawal of Conserv-
ative support. He was succeeded by Andrew Bonar Law, head
of the Conservative Party. His policy differs from that of his
predecessor mainly in a declared abstention from armed inter-
vention in the Turkish imbroglio. As the French have been back-
ing the Nationalist cause, and have been in favor of non-inter-
ference with the victorious Kemalists, this change in the policy
of their principal ally fits in very well with their present plans.
The French are hoping, moreover, that the new head of the British
Government will adopt a stern attitude towards Germany in the
matter of reparations.
On that subject, there has continued throughout the month
the usual conferences, negotiations, and sessions of the Repara-
tions Commission, which, under the leadership of its new Chair-
man, M. Barthou, has been holding a series of meetings in Berlin,
from October 31st to November 8th, with the usual unsubstantial
results. Meanwhile, the French Minister of War has declared to
the Army Commission of the French Senate, that an army of
660,000 soldiers, including six divisions of troops in the occupied
1922.] RECENT EVENTS 403
area in the Rhineland, must be retained under arms in France
to preserve necessary effectiveness in national defense.
That there has been at least an approach to a change in one
of the cardinal principles of French foreign policy, namely, the
French attitude towards Moscow, seems borne out by the recent
mission to Russia of Edward Herrlot, Mayor of Lyons, and leader
in the Chamber of Deputies of the Radical Socialist Party. The
reception given to the mission on its return by the French press
and French officialdom is even more significant. Rivalry with
England and dominance of Germany are the keynotes of Premier
Poincare's policy, and since there no longer seems danger of a Red
uprising in France, both of these purposes would apparently be
served by a bargain with Russia. Besides, various Chambers of
Commerce and trade organizations throughout France have pro-
nounced in favor of a resumption of commercial relations with
the Soviets. Another significant move is a bill, introduced in the
Senate late in October, providing for the reimbursement, by the
French Government, of holders of Russian Government bonds to
the extent of fifty per cent, of their investment.
The Council of Ambassadors, meeting in Paris on October
26th, decided to refer the question whether the Kiel Canal should
be open to the ships of the world even in time of war, to the In-
ternational Court of Justice. The controversy over this question,
which has been going on now between the Allies and Germany for
a year and a half, arose out of the fact that Germany refused pas-
sage to Allied ships during the Russian assault upon Poland,
Germany claiming that free passage at all times is not required by
the Treaty of Versailles.
In accordance with the decision of the French Government
to try the German war guilty before French military tribunals,
evidence in two cases has been forwarded to the war councils of
the first and sixth regions. These cases concern the alleged mis-
conduct of two German Generals, Gloss and von Marwitz, and
notice has been forwarded to them to appear immediately before
the Courts.
A recent summary given out in Paris of the work done in the
devastated regions, shows that reconstruction of roads, railways,
and canals is virtually completed; that the reconstruction of fac-
tory and industrial plants is well along towards completion, and
that the clearing away of shells, barbed wire, and other obstacles
from the soil is also virtually finished. On the other hand, it is
stated that, out of 564,000 houses wholly or partly destroyed by
the German invasion, only 3,348 have been completely rebuilt.
180,417 have been "provisionally repaired" and 214,422 "definitely
RECENT EVENTS [D^c-.
404
• H" According to official figures issued by the French
repaired. ^ccormng 3 3^^ unemployed
Labor Department »« O'^*"''^^' *^*„t_i,er 1st. In fact, in most
persons ^^^;?f^\Z'Zi:!^f::S:.en exceeds the supply,
branches of labor the ^e^ana ^^^^ ^^^.^^t for
and the French «f ,h;" ^^ J^^J^ Xoa^ thousands of Italians
rd'oChr l?er/ the'tll" nd these are arriving in in-
"Taftl^TS tlThisTfdmon. no doubt, the French Com-
munfst Party has suffered the severe loss during the past
vea^ of fort^per cent, of its membership. This fact was an-
nounced by the Secretary-General to the Communist Congress
^Wch met in Paris on October 15th. One year ago. the total
membership was 131,476. whereas today the Party numbers only
78 828
* Another aspect of French conditions is presented, however, in
a late report of the French Ministry of Agriculture which states
that, on the basis of the estimated shortage in the French wheat
crop about 2,400,000 tons of wheat will have to be purchased
abroad during the present season, as against practically no pur-
chases abroad last year. The price of foodstuffs in France today
is higher than in 1918, at the time of the armistice, and this in
spite of the fact that the French Minister of Agriculture has an-
nounced that the number of cattle, pigs, horses, and poultry are
back again at the pre-war figures. In Paris particularly, almost
simultaneously with the fall in value of the franc, there has been
a veritable orgy of profiteering.
On November 3d, the Chamber of Deputies indorsed the Gov-
ernment's decree modifying the eight-hour day for workers in the
mercantile marine. The Government claimed that the modifying
decree was necessary because the eight-hour day had not been
adopted internationally. It was this decree which caused a sea-
men's strike in the various French ports the previous month.
The long continued turmoil, in which Fas-
Italy, cisti activities have kept Italy for the last
year, found its climax — and apparent
quiescence — on October 26th. Premier Facta and his entire Min-
istry were forced to resign, and were succeeded a few days there-
after by Benito Mussolini, the Fascisti chieftain, with a Cabinet of
his choosing. The resignation of the Facta Government was brought
about by concerted seizure of a number of the principal towns
by the Fascisti, and the rejection by the King of Premier Facta's
proposal to issue a decree proclaiming a state of siege throughout
1922.] RECENT EVENTS 405
Italy. Upon the King's refusal to sign the decree, the Facta Min-
istry resigned, and after conferring for several days with various
other party leaders, the King was finally obliged to ask Mussolini
to form a Government. In addition to the Premiership, Mussolini
holds the portfolios of Foreign Affairs and of the Interior. The
new Ministry is composed of five Fascisti, two Catholics, three
Democrats, one Nationalist, and one Liberal, with the addition of
General Diaz and Vice-Admiral Thaondi Revel, who have no party
designations.
The announced programme of the new Government com-
prises two main points: first, the pacification of the country by
firm governmental control, and second, the balancing of the bud-
get. In addition, Fascisti energies are being bent toward getting
Parliament to amend the electoral law, as soon as it reconvenes on
November 15th. Although the Fascisti are apparently the strong-
est party in the country, under the present electoral, even though
they gained many more seats than they have at present, they
could not obtain the majority necessary for them to remain in
power as a one-party Cabinet. For this reason, they desire an
amendment to the electoral law, whereby the party polling the
greatest number of votes, would be given three-fifths of the total
number of seats. Should the Parliament not pass the proposed
measure. Premier Mussolini has announced his intention of dis-
solving the Chamber and calling a general election.
Since the formation of the new Government, the 117,000 Fas-
cisti who had been concentrated at various important points, espe-
cially in Rome and its environs, have peacefully demobilized and
departed for their homes. In fact, one of the striking elements of
the revolution was its comparatively bloodless character.
In a recent speech, ex-Premier Nitti declared that many of
the country's great industries are dead, those still in operation are
in danger of suspending, and the exchange is getting worse. From
1914 to 1921, the country bought abroad over 41,000,000 lire
worth of goods more than it sold. Before the war, the Govern-
ment spent 2,600,000,000 lire yearly, but now spends ten times
that amount, while the provincial and municipal governments
have deficient budgets to the amount of 6,000,000,000 lire.
On November 4th, the fourth anniversary of Italy's victory
over Austria in the World War was celebrated throughout the
country with solemnity, and in profound emotion. It was the
first time that the day of victory was oflBcially and publicly ob-
served. The chief ceremonies in Rome took place in the mag-
nificent church, Santa Maria degli Angeli, with the King and the
new Premier in attendance at Mass.
405 RECENT EVENTS [Dec,
Fighting between d'Annunzio's legionaries and the Zanella
forces in Fiume was reported up to the middle of October, but
since then no reports have come through.
The Presidential election will not be held
Germany. this year after all. as had been expected,
owing to the action of the Reichstag, which,
on October 24th, adopted, by an overwhelming vote, an amend-
ment to the Constitution prolonging President Ebert's tenure of
office till June 30, 1925. Herr Ebert was elected provisionally,
in 1919, by the General National Assembly at Weimar, and was to
hold office only till a regular election could be held. Disturbed
political and economic conditions since that time, however, have
made an election inadvisable. The Constitution gives the Presi-
dent a term of seven years.
Towards the middle of October, the paper mark was quoted
on the Boerse at 3,000 for one dollar, and shortly thereafter Pres-
ident Ebert issued a decree against speculation in exchange. The
decree forbids domestic prices being fixed in foreign currency or
on the basis of such currency, and provides that purchases of
foreign currency are permissible only by consent of a special
control department.
This decree has aroused considerable criticism in Germany.
The Cotton Exchange of Bremen protests that the decree forces
home spinners to buy raw supplies in the United States instead of
in Bremen, and that it will shortly bring the domestic cotton in-
dustry to a complete standstill. In financial circles, no one be-
lieves that this legislation will retard the fall of the mark. Sim-
ilar legislation has failed in Austria, Hungary, and other places,
and experienced bankers point out that, If prohibiting purchase of
foreign currencies could of itself arrest the fall in exchange, the
problem of stopping currency depreciation would be very easy.
On November 3d, Count Hugo Lerchenfeld resigned as Prime
Minister of Bavaria, and was succeeded, on November 8th, by Dr.
Engen von Knilllng, of the German People's Party, who stands
pledged to an antl-Berlln policy. Count Lerchenfeld's resignation
was brought about by differences with the Agrarian Party, grow-
ing out of certain economic proposals made by him to the Cen-
tral Government In Berlin.
The latest activity of the German financial colossus, Hugo
Stlnnes, Is his purchase of one-third of the capital stock of the
Berliner Handelsgesellschaft, one of Germany's greatest banks
and the most conservative of them all.
For the first time since the beginning of the World War, Ger-
1922.] RECENT EVENTS 4ff7
many*s potash production this year promises to exceed the 1913
output. The Director-General of the German Potash Syndicate
recently stated that the total sales at home and abroad during
1922 may be expected to reach 12,500,000 double hundred weights.
In 1913, the potash output of Germany was approximately 11,000,-
000 double hundred weights.
Although there have been no recent general statistical esti-
mates on the rise of wages during the recent fall in the mark, the
ojfficial Wirthschaft and Statistik makes some interesting com-
parisons. These show that whereas, in 1913, the salary of the
highest-class olRcials was six times the average wage of unskilled
workers, today it is less than twice the unskilled average. Placing
the present average wage of the unskilled worker at 100, the
skilled wage would be 106, the salary of minor officials, 114, of
middle officials, 147, and of higher officials, 191.
On November 6th, Germany broke all her own previous
records in the speed of her money press for one week, eclipsing
all similar records in other countries, with the possible excep-
tion of Russia, when 59,500,000,000 paper marks were printed
within seven days.
The ordinary budget statement of the German railroads for
the first half of 1922 shows a revenue of 92,237,000,000 marks, as
against expenditures of 92,180,000,000. This is the first time
since the war that railway accounts have come into equilibrium.
After an occupation of more than four
Russia. years, Japanese troops finally evacuated
Siberia, including Vladivostok, on October
26th, and the forces of the Far Eastern Republic, which had been
steadily advancing for several weeks against their "white'* op-
ponents, took over control of affairs in the evacuated regions.
The only Japanese soldiers now remaining on Russian soil are
those in the northern part of Sakhalin Island. The Japanese
public is demanding their return also, as it is feared that restor-
ation of trade with Siberia will be impossible unless this is accom-
plished.
General Dieterichs, Commander of the White Army and suc-
cessor of President Merkuloff as head of the Provisional Govern-
ment, has established a base on Poisset Bay, but he is not ex-
pected to be able to hold this position. A new Government for
Siberia has been formed by the People's Revolutionary Party in
the Maritime Province, and Premier Kobozieff of the Far Eastern
Republic is preparing to establish himself as its head. Mean-
while, despite official assurances by the Provisional Government
408
RECENT EVENTS [Dec,
of protection for all inhabitants, foreigners as well as Russians,
virtually every town in Korea and Manchuria is reported as hav-
ing its quota of Siberian refugees, who have fled before each ad-
vancing wave of Red control. Many are destitute, all are with-
out homes, and nearly all are making either for Mukden or
Harbin, hoping that somewhere on friendly soil the remnants of
their army may be gathered for another blow at the Soviets. The
present plight of General Dieterichs would indicate that this hope
is fallacious. Moreover, the Rulgarian Government has ordered
all the oflBcers who belonged to the army of General Wrangel, the
Russian counter-revolutionist, to leave the country, threatening
forcible expulsion and deportation to Russia if they refuse. This
virtually ends the existence of General Wrangel's organization.
Since the Japanese evacuation of Siberia and the withdrawal
of all Allied troops from that territory, the United States Govern-
ment, following similar action by Great Britain, France, Italy, and
Japan, has relinquished control of the Chinese Eastern Railway.
Allied control of the railway was established in an agreement
drawn up at the time of the dispatch of American and Allied
troops into Siberia in the summer and fall of 1918. It was stipu-
lated at the time that this control should end upon the with-
drawal of foreign military forces from Siberia.
The still urgent necessity for relief work in Russia, especially
in the Ukraine, is the gist of reports from both Russian officials
and the heads of the American Relief Administration. Begin-
ning with November 1st, it is estimated that approximately four
and a half million persons will need some assistance in the way
of food, the number steadily increasing up to eight million as the
temperature drops. After fulfilling other requirements, the Soviet
authorities state that they will have only 6,000,000 poods of grain
left for feeding the famine-stricken.
Russia has 1,600,000 men under arms, mainly concentrated
along the western frontier, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, while
the Baltic States have only 120.000 men under their colors and
Poland 260,000 according to figures recently given out at Moscow.
These figures have been brought out in connection with the con-
ference of representatives of the Baltic States and Poland, held in
October at Reval in preparation for the proposed Moscow dis-
armament congress, called by the Soviet Foreign Minister, Tchit-
cherin.
November 13, 1922,
Ulew Boohs^
SECRET HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH OCCUPATION OF EGYPT.
Being a Personal Narrative of Events. By Wilfrid Scawen
Blunt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $5.00.
Any book that professes to reveal the "secret history" or the
"inside story" of a great event is received with eager curiosity
by the general public, and with cool suspicion by the careful
scholar. Mr. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's Secret History of the English
Occupation of Egypt is no exception to the rule. Like most
"secret" histories, it is not entirely true history; yet it is an in-
tensely interesting book, because, if the narrative be true, it proves
that England's seizure of Egypt was an outrageously unjust act,
which has too long been concealed by a flimsy veil of Anglo-
Saxon hypocrisy.
Such a book can hardly fail to disturb the faith of those who
believe with Kipling that "the White Man's Burden" of ruling over
backward races was shouldered by our genial neighbor, John Bull,
solely for the purpose of benefiting the backward races. The
English-speaking people has long been accustomed to accept un-
challenged the statement that English rule over African and
Asiatic people has been wisely beneficent, and that in Egypt,
above all, English imperialism was shown at its best. Popular
writers have dealt with Egypt in the spirit shown by the follow-
ing excerpt from a fairly recent work: "Great Britain has most
happily demonstrated [in the case of Egypt] how an enlightened
European state can free an oppressed and impoverished people
from the rule of a corrupt and selfish oligarchy . . . and set them
on the highroad of peace and happiness." (Harris, Intervention
and Colonization in Africa, p. 329.)
All this, Mr. Blunt warns us, is false. He is at least entitled
to a hearing, as a distinguished English publicist, who had inti-
mate personal relations with the Egyptian leaders and English
officials at the time of the English conquest. Our author was cer-
tainly not a dispassionate witness — and no one familiar with his
writings or his career could expect him to be coolly accurate — .
but he was a witness, and his testimony must be weighed.
When Mr. Blunt first visited Egypt, in 1875, Egypt was a
province of the Ottoman Empire, and was ruled by an hereditary
Khedive, Ismail Pasha, as viceroy of the Turkish Sultan. How
Ismail's wild extravagance led to foreign loans, then to foreign
NEW BOOKS [Dec.
41U
»• *i,pn to British conquest, Mr. Blunt proceeds to tell
interven lon,^^^^^^^^^^ <ietail, not unmixed with
EngUsh bondholders, who had advanced funds to Ismail were
constantly urging their Governments to mtervene as debt-col-
lectors The Rothschilds, the Jewish kings of European finance
move darkly behind the scenes of diplomacy, pulhng wires at
London, Paris, and Berlin to safeguard their vested interests in
ERvpt Mr. Blunt's account of the financial details is by no
means thorough, nor is it altogether accurate; but his insistence
upon the importance of economic interests is justified.
In writing of Gladstone's decision to send British troops to
Egypt, Mr. Blunt is merciless. Gladstone, we are told, was two
persons: in private, a charming and magnetic Liberal; in public,
to a large extent, a fraud (p. 181). As a private citizen before
1880, Gladstone had put himself on record as opposed to any
intervention in Egypt; but after 1880, as Premier, obedient to the
"higher duty" of "securing a Parliamentary majority," he ordered
British troops to the Nile. That Gladstone was inconsistent, no
one can deny. That he could have carried out his principles
despite the pressure of interested bondholders, of European di-
plomacy and of Downing Street officialdom, is open to question.
More valuable than his harsh judgment of Gladstone is Mr.
Blunfs sympathetic estimate of the Egyptian Nationalist leaders,
and particularly of Arabi Pasha, who has sometimes been pic-
tured as a disgruntled army officer, chiefly concerned about his
rank and salary, and sometimes as a figurehead for Moslem fanat-
icism. In the book before us, Arabi appears as a noble champion
of the oppressed Egyptian peasantry, a believer in the fraternity
of races and creeds, free from the least taint of fanatical intoler-
ance in regard to Christians (p. 100). This praise, the reviewer
believes, is much too generous. Nevertheless, it does, in a
measure, raise our opinion of the Egyptian patriots who fought
against foreign domination.
It must already be obvious that Mr. Blunt's "secret history"
must be taken with a grain of salt. The author makes too many
misstatements and historical blunders to win entire confidence.
He brings Ismail to the throne in "1860" (p. 12) ; if Ismail became
Khedive before 1863, it certainly has been a well-kept secret.
The account of Disraeli's canal purchase needs revision, by the
author's own admission (p. 16). On the authority of an Italian
1922.] NEW BOOKS 411
diplomat's casual reminiscences, the author tells how the dis-
closure of the Cyprus Convention, during the Berlin Congress, led
to a secret bargain between France and England for joint inter-
vention in Egypt and French intervention in Tunis; but an ap-
pendix confesses that not the Cyprus Convention, but an Anglo-
Russian agreement, was disclosed (pp. 26-28 and Appendix IV.).
In the text, Nubar Pasha is portrayed as a dishonest financier, who
acted as Ismail's broker, whereas, in an appendix, Nubar is ex-
onerated (pp. 14, 15 and Appendix II.). The account of French
intervention in Tunis (p. 93) is absurd. Numerous dates are
inaccurate, and, in one instance, two different sets of dates are
given for the same events (pp. 217, 237). To prolong the list
would be an ungrateful task. If the American publisher had
provided critical notes by a competent historian, the value of Mr.
Blunt's contribution, now obscured by errors, would have been
greatly enhanced for the general reader.
In closing, the reviewer cannot refrain from commenting on
the fervor with which Mr. Blunt defends Islam and Egypt. The
cause of Islam, we are told, is "essentially the *Cause of Good' over
an immense portion of the world" (p. 92). Therefore, "in God's
name," let England "take Is]am by the hand and encourage her
boldly in the path of virtue" (p. 93). In a poem appended to his
volume, Mr. Blunt grows lyrical in praise of the East. With such
effusions, the reviewer cannot sympathize, nor can he see any-
thing but a grotesquely inappropriate sacrilege in the stanza :
And thou, too, Egypt, mourner of the nations,
Though thou hast died today in all men's sight,
And though upon thy cross with thieves thou hangest,
Yet shall thy wrong be justified in right.
THE OUTLINE OF SCIENCE. Edited by J. Arthur Thomson.
New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Four volumes. $18.00.
These four volumes of the Outline of Science will have a
large and, it may be added, a deservedly large sale, and it is im-
perative that Catholic readers should get an estimate of their
worth. The illustrations are admirable; it is doubtful if so ex-
cellent a series have ever appeared before in a work of this char-
acter. We could have spared the imaginative portrait of Pithe-
canthropus Erectus, but, on the whole, the "restorations" of pre-
historic man give little reason for cavil, though we think the
pictures of the Broken Hill and the Piltdown men a little pre-
mature. However scientific men will know what amount of trust
can be placed in "restorations" and the unscientific will not per-
ceive the underlying suggestions.
412 iVEW BOOKS [Dec.
Of course it is impossible to criticize adequately so lengthy
a work nor are we informed, save in two instances, who is the
authori'ty for the articles. The editor is a man of prodigious out-
put but even he can scarce have written the whole book. One
of the articles in question is on Psychical Research, by Sir Oliver
Lodge and is of a much more moderate character than one
would' expect, containing little that any informed reader would
cavil at. Of the other, by Mr. Julian Huxley, we cannot
say quite so much. In discussing the origin of mind, he, first of
all, places only a difference of degree, not of kind, between animal
and human minds. On that point, he will find many to differ
from him. But when he goes further and says: "We have only
to be completely logical and believe that something of the same
general nature as mind exists in all life, to make the further step,
and believe that it exists, even in the matter from which life
sprang." We, and we think most others, must part company
with him with the remark that a little study of the science of
logic, which he invokes, would have led to the construction of a
sentence containing fewer fallacies. The editor (?) is on firmer
ground, when dealing with the same topic in another section, he
says: "By no jugglery with words, can we get Mind out of Mat-
ter and Motion. And since we are in ourselves quite sure of
our Mind, we are probably safe in saying that in the beginning
was Mind." The book is admirably written, as indeed we should
expect of Professor Thomson. It is sane and conservative on al-
most all points, though we think it exaggerates — as many do —
the period of man's existence on earth, and it is quite as sure that
Evolution was the process by which things have come to be as
they are, as M. de Dorlodot, of Louvain.
We are glad to be able to find ourselves in hearty agreement
with a further statement on what has been in the past a highly
controversial point. Religion, we are told, "sees an unseen uni-
verse, which throws light on the riddles of the observed world."
We quite agree. "Its language is not scientific language, and the
two cannot be spoken at once." It might be a paraphrase of the
*'Providentissimus Deus** of which we doubt if the writer ever
heard. "Religious interpretation and scientific description must
not be inconsistent, but they are incommensurable . . . while the
form of a reUgious idea, of Creation let us say, must be con-
gruent with the established scientific system." Certainly — but
where the trouble has come in, in the past, is that science has
been a little previous as to what was "established" science. Ex-
amples will occur to all well-informed persons. Where a fact or
explanation is really "established" and not the dogma of the
1922.] NEW BOOKS 413
moment, it can never, and will never, clash with any religious
tenets held by Catholics, at any rate, however it may possibly
clash with some of the forms of mischief.
If the teacher or parent or friend is able and willing to give a
very little direction and corrective, young people, who read this
book, will come away from it with a store of knowledge, which
ought to make life a much more interesting thing to them.
CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK-LOVER. By Maurice Francis Egan.
Garden City, N. Y. : Doubleday, Page & Co. $2.50.
A little while ago, it was the custom for literary criticism to
clothe itself with almost liturgical seriousness and a deal of
technical scholarship. Just at present, there is a fashion for
literary impressions (the word is exact in its very inexactness)
to boast that they are transient, familiar, and in no sense "high
brow." Midway between these two extremes of the ex cathedra
utterance and the momentary "reaction," comes this delectable
book by Maurice Francis Egan. In it, he writes not as professor
nor as technical critic (both of which he has done in other vol-
umes), but as book-lover — which he defines as "one who loves
men a little more than books." And to it, he brings the mellow-
ness of many years and many experiences, together with the per-
petual youthfulness of laughter and enthusiasm.
Dr. Egan is personal throughout these pages : one of the very
best chapters is the story of his own varied and vagrant "Boyhood
Reading." He is immensely tolerant, not sharing the popular
belief that whenever a book is mentioned it must be either con-
demned or approved — and betraying quite as candid a penchant
for the gallants of the Bourbon court as for the cloistral exquis-
iteness of Eugenie de Guerin. And he is hopeful: hopeful of
contemporary fiction in spite of its occasional vagaries and vul-
garities, and particularly hopeful because he believes that "any
evidence of a sincere interest in poetry is a good sign." Finely
human are his meditations upon St. Paul and the great "mouth-
filling" sentences with which that Apostle praised his friends and
pulverized his enemies. And there is something even more than
human in the simplicity with which the poet-diplomat confesses
his devotion to the letters of St. Francis of Sales — and in the
sanity which led him, even back in the ecstatic 70*s, to avoid the
works of Renan, because he "could never understand why any-
body should take a man seriously who was palpably wrong."
When Maurice Francis Egan protests that the present volume
is not to be taken dogmatically, since it is a series of essays upon
"the art of injudicious reading," he is merely hiding his light
^j4 NEW BOOKS [Dec,
behind a very beguiling lamp shade. The book is brimful of
wisdom, of humor, of well-digested culture, and of human sym-
Dathy Its appearance at this particular season is certain to add
many an extra plum to the Christmas puddings of the elect!
i
FOUR AND TWENTY MINDS. Essays by Giovanni Papini. Se-
lected and translated by Ernest Hatch Wilkins. New York:
Thomas Y. Crowell Co. $2.50 net.
Papini's essays are undoubtedly interesting. They grip the
reader's attention, and lure him to continue reading, even when
he differs completely from the views expressed. The sentences
are so crisp and vigorous, so many striking and relief-pointing
phrases occur that one experiences some difficulty in laying down
the volume when once one has taken it up. These essays cover a
wide range, stretching from Dante to himself in literature, and
from Berkeley to Croce in philosophy. The author is a good
hater, and words of blame and fault-finding flow eagerly, and
indeed too readily from his lips. In the essay on Hegel, Croce is
spoken of in most laudatory terms; while a few pages further on
(p. 163 et seq.), Croce is chaffed most unmercifully, and his phil-
osophy characterized as a theory which wavers constantly be-
tween nonsense and mere common sense. These two essays were
written at different periods, but their appreciations by no means
coincide, and what becomes of the consistency of their author?
Maeterlinck, likewise, another idolum fori, is reduced to very
small dimensions. While real men of genius, and creators in
poetry and prose like Verlaine and Mallarme starved in slums,
others gifted with scant literary ability, but much business acu-
men, picked their brains and attained wealth and renown for
themselves. To sum up the whole crushing indictment, Maeter-
linck is a translator, adapter, and popularizer.
The essay on "Hamlet'* is the most extraordinary of the col-
lection, and absolutely inadmissible. One really has to rub one's
eyes to make sure one is not dreaming, so many literary blas-
phemies are heaped together there. What can we think of a
"critic," who coolly asserts that Shakespeare is dead, that Hamlet
is a tissue of incoherences, and that the wonderful passage, "To
be or not to be," is no more than superficial commonplace? All
we can say is, such a "critic" knows absolutely nothing of what he
is talking about; and there is just as much sense in denying the
power of the ocean or the tides, the glory of the sunshine or the
rainbow as in denying the poetic inspiration of Shakespeare.
Astounding, too, is the perversity which brackets Shakespeare
with Carlyle, and ranks the latter as one of the four greatest
1922.] NEW BOOKS 415
writers of England. What, then, about Milton, great in prose and
verse? and Dryden and Scott and Newman? Does Signor Papini
seriously mean that all Carlyle's writings put together would
equal the "Ode on the Grecian Urn'* of Keats, or the poetry of
Coleridge, Shelley, or Francis Thompson? Surely, if he has any
sense of what is lovely in words, fancy, imagination, or expression,
he cannot maintain that. The essay on Nietzsche is the lament
of a disciple for a most dear master. It is overstrained and ex-
aggerated to represent Nietzsche as being victimized by men, and
in no sense can he be called a saint. Other statements in this
essay are controverted by Mr. Salter's laborious and authoritative
work, Nietzsche the Thinker. On page 203, Remy de Gourmont's
Latin Mystique is dubbed "almost a masterpiece." Experts in the
subject are of a different opinion, and consider the volume ama-
teurish and unequal.
In spite, however, of these faults, the essays make excellent
reading, and summarize well many longish books. Professor
Wilkins' translation is exceptionally fine.
PROPHETS OF THE BETTER HOPE. By Rev. William J. Kerby,
Ph.D., LL.D. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $2.00.
Our Catholic literature is rich with authoritative, well-written
books on the priest and the priesthood. The office of the priest,
his powers, his responsibility, are ever the same. But since every
priest is a product of his generation and must meet the new
problems of his time, so there is ever need of new works for his
guidance and his inspiration. That need in the present day has
been supplied by Dr. Kerby through his volume, entitled Prophets
of the Better Hope. It is a very modern book, written with the
age-long faith and love of the Catholic priest. The author ex-
emplifies his title. He knows intimately the modern world; and
priests are not altogether — nor can they be — apart from it.
The present-day problems that the priest must face, the forces
that will threaten his ideals and his fidelities, the challenge that
will stimulate and inspire, are presented here with clarity and
fullness. The priest is the sole prophet of a better world. With
insight and exceptional thoughtfulness, the author shows how
this prophet can effectively declare his message; what subtle
forces will attempt his undoing; what mental, spiritual, and social
forces in the economy of divine grace will keep him another
Christ for the salvation of others, as well as of himself. The soul-
searching of the book is very deep. No priest can read it with-
out receiving that precious reward— a truer knowledge of him-
self.
^jg NEW BOOKS [Dec,
Dr Kerby has done a larger work than, perhaps, he con-
templated He has been able, because of his experience, to chart
modern seas of social unrest, of rebellion, of religious doubt and
misgiving with religion itself. He would send the priest forth
thereon, warned of danger, fortified by grace and knowledge as a
pilot to guide the storm-tossed to the haven of peace.
Among its chapters is one entitled "Leisure in Clerical Life."
We earnestly hope that every priest in our country will give him-
self the leisure to read this book.
ANTHOLOGY OF IRISH VERSE. Edited with an Introduction by
Padraic Colum. New York: Boni & Liveright. $3.00.
While Padraic Columns fascinating anthology is not liable to
supplant the monumental Dublin Book of Irish Verse, it does sup-
plement it admirably. That is to say, it is particularly strong in
its modern note. It quotes generously from the poets of 1916—
it is aware of the Irish-American contribution, as in the work of
Eleanor Rogers Cox and Francis Carlin — and if, curiously enough,
it neglects Emily Hickey, it has the grace to include Katharine
Tynan. But by what false modesty has Mr. Colum been so nig-
gardly in quoting his own work? His "Drover" is here, but not
that superb piece of impressionism, his "Plougher;" and can he
expect anyone to forgive him for excluding the unforgettable
"Old Woman of the Roads?"
The introductory essay on Irish poetry is, naturally, of great
interest. And Mr. Colum, unlike the Dublin Book, has followed
the subjective rather than the chronological method in grouping
his selections. Following the winds of national "moods," he
gives us Songs of the Road and Home, Street Songs, Satires,
Faery Songs, Personal Poems, etc. And while something may,
very obviously, be urged against, as well as for, this method, it is
undeniably dramatic. And to be dramatic is, perhaps, merely
another way of being Celtic.
THE TOCSIN OF REVOLT, AND OTHER ESSAYS. By Brander
Matthews. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. $2.00.
That Professor Matthews* hosts of readers, a clientele built
up through half a century of faithful literary work, will welcome
his new book goes without saying; but what would be more inter-
esting would be the assurance that it will be read by that smaller,
but nevertheless considerable, audience, the "younglings," to
whom the opening essay is addressed, and whom the author
describes as the sounders of "the tocsin of revolt." Sage coun-
sel is given in this essay to both camps of the army of art,
1922.] NEW BOOKS 417
the conservatives as well as the radicals, but counsel given with
such winning charm that not even the most rabid of the revolu-
tionaries or the most rigid of the reactionaries could resent it.
And there is not one of them who could not study the book as
a model of style, its bland and fluent English flowing like a clear
stream under the glow of an autumnal sky. While the discern-
ing reader cannot help but regret that Professor Matthews, never
commonplace in manner, should take a commonplace view of "the
errors of Rome," and while others may not see eye to eye with
him in his appraisement of the Gothic of St. Patrick's Cathedral in
New York, none can fail to enjoy his essays, deft, good humored,
and glinting with thought, "On the Length of Cleopatra's Nose,"
**On Working Too Fast and Too Much," "Theodore Roosevelt as
a Man of Letters," "Memories of Mark Twain," and divers other
subjects. Among these essays is one entitled "What Is Amer-
ican Literature?" — a good answer to which query might be said
to be embodied in this volume. It is a worthy example of the
American essay at its best.
THE GATES OF OLIVET. By Lucille Borden. New York: The
Macmillan Co. $2.00.
Those who have seen the sunlight flooding the California
meadowland; those who have watched the blue sea of the Pacific
and heard its voice of welcome; those, who in western wanderings,
have caught the spell of the white monastery walls and felt a
peace and a benediction in their wearied souls; those who love fair
France and the Lourdes she offers for their marveling — these,
and others, too, will find The Gates of Olivet a thing of charm
and joy.
The tale of Damaris as she is guided to the convent cloisters,
is a sweet idyl that will appeal to those who believe that life is
more than the pursuing of pleasure on an ever-widening circle
of vanity. Throughout the book are to be found charming pic-
tures of the streets of Lourdes, vignettes of inns and inviting
shops, and, best of all, a simple, compelling philosophy of life and
love that will comfort the believer, and ask the faithless to pause
and think. For the pilgrimage of Damaris is a philosophy that
will give joy to the discontented and solace to those who have
found worldly life, even at its fullest and richest, not quite equal
to their hearts' desires.
Though not her first book, this is Mrs. Borden's first novel.
She has succeeded admirably in mastering problems of technique.
Her characterization, direct ^nd indirect, is handled with much
skill, and her plot, unusual in conception, never lags on its way
VOL. cxvx. 27
4jg NEW BOOKS [Dec,
. u- ,. in.« All things considered, the tale is written with
^denn'S rnT: fini^tha't serve fully to present another novelist
to the readers of contemporary literature.
DOGMATIC THEOLOGY. Vol. IX-Jhe ^^^^^f^^^^^^ ^^
Eschatology: Indexes, By Rev. Francis J. Hall, D.D. New
York- Longmans, Green & Co. $2.25 each,
[n this cou^^^^ of "Dogmatic Theology," justly called the An-
glican Summa, Dr. Hall presents, in -f /**-^*^^!:/^^^^^^^^^^
form, the achievements of a life-long scholarship He fed h s
m nd on the marrow of giants, and synthesizes the best resul
^Anglican historical and Catholic Scholastic theology. He is
fLuifr with the Summa of St. Thomas and with the courses o
other eminent Catholic theologians, and makes free use of their
studies. Anglicans may well rejoice and return thanks to Dr.
Hall for placing at their disposal a thorough and comprehensive
exposition of dogmatic theology, such as able and learned men
have long since made available to students of Cathohc theology.
But Dr. Hall's work has the advantage of greater accessibility
in that it is composed in the vernacular, and is rendered at-
tractive by a clear and simple style that makes its perusal a
pleasure.
The style of treatment is positive and irenic, never polemic
or controversial; while the doctrines expounded are derived from
divine revelation as recorded in Sacred Scripture, and attested
and interpreted by Christian history and tradition during the so-
called period of the undivided Church. The author has no sym-
pathy with the Protestant principle of independent private judg-
ment; and is wholly uncontaminated by the pervading and per-
nicious spirit of modernistic liberalism or rationalism. On this
account, the Catholic is much pleased, and, in view of the general
tendency to disintegration of dogmatic faith outside the Church
of Rome, is agreeably surprised to find such a conservative and
constructive work from a non-Catholic pen.
While the Catholic student can find much pleasure and profit
in the perusal of Dr. Hall's work on the seven sacraments, he
cannot admit his claim of Catholic continuity in the Anglican
Church through the "Reformation," when the Mass-priest was
repudiated in form and intent of ordination and the Mass-altar
destroyed: nor can he see why he demurs to Transubstantiation
while admitting "identification;" nor why he declines to admit
the penal aspect of satisfaction — except as excuses for the An-
glican break of the sixteenth century. Doesn't Henry VHL give a
simpler explanation?
1922.] NEW BOOKS 419
The volume entitled Eschatology studies the important prob-
lems concerned with the Last Things — death and judgment, pur-
gatory or the intermediate state, hell and heaven, the parousia,
the resurrection of the dead, and eternal life. All these doctrines,
which the author, in common with the Catholic Church, accepts
as matters of divine faith, are surveyed in the broad light of
Scripture and Christian tradition. The author has the happy art
of simplifying his subject to make it attractive. This he effects
by not overburdening his presentation with detailed proofs, but
is satisfied with a summary and positive statement of the best
positive results of scholarship, while referring the reader, for fuller
information, to monographs on each special question. That the
author depends much for theological precision on Catholic
scholars is evident from his many references.
His exposition of the doctrine on the Communion of Saints
and on the nature of eternal life is admirable : while his strictures
on the caricatures that have made belief in hell (despite the clear
evidence for the dogma in revelation) difficult, if not repugnant,
to many, are entirely acceptable. Yet the Catholic may not ac-
cept his assertion that a penal purgatory and admission to the
Vision of God before the Last Day are speculative problems that
lack ecumenical authority. (His appeal is to Christian antiquity;
ours is to the infallible voice of the living Church of Christ.) His
speculation as to post-mortem probation and possible salvation
for those denied supernatural light on earth; and his theory to
explain the continuity and identity of the resurrection body by
assuming that a germ-body (as it were) begotten in baptism and
nourished by the Eucharist, accompanies the soul after death;
and his surmise that the pains of hell are mitigated and become
more tolerable in course of time, are views that Catholic theology
does not favor; but they are not placed wholly beyond the pale of
discussion.
The Bibliographical Index is very complete; and the Subject
index is excellent, and most valuable as a ready means of locating
the treatment of any question comprised within the scope of the
ten volumes. The publisher, too, has done his work most satis-
factorily; each volume is neatly printed, well bound, light, and
portable.
THE APOCALYPSE OF ST. JOHN. By Rev. E. Sylvester Berry.
Columbus, 0.: John W. Winterich. $1.50.
Of all Apocalyptic literature, canonical and uncanonical, The
Apocalypse of St. John is the most picturesque. It abounds in
symbolism and imagery, allusions and references, which were un-
420
NEW BOOKS [Dec,
doubtedly more familiar to the readers of the time of composi-
tion than they are to us of the present day. The genius of St.
John under the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit has
reached spiritual heights never attained by the Old Testament
Apocalyptical writers. Parts of the book of the Apocalypse offer
no serious difficulty of interpretation. The letters are self-ex-
planatory. The last section is evidently eschatological. Some of
the symbols are explained by the author. The body of the book
has, however, puzzled exegetes. Three leading interpretations
have been advanced: (1) The book describes the infant Church of
Christ; (2) the author prophetically pictures the history of the
Church from the beginning to the end of time; (3) the book is en-
tirely eschatological.
Father Berry adopts and defends the second interpretation.
In his opinion, the author of the Apocalypse sees in a vision the
future of the Church — her trials and her triumphs. It is, how-
ever, not easy to associate the symbols of the Apocalypse with
actual great events in the history of the Church. The applica-
tion must remain broad amd general. Probable applications of
prophecies are made by Father Berry to many important events
in the history of the Church — y. g., to Arianism, Reformation,
Luther. He refers to the possibility of the complete destruction
of Rome and the transfer of the papacy to Jerusalem. The like-
lihood of such an event is to say the least extremely improbable :
the view is opposed to the general teaching of theologians. Never-
theless, Father Berry's work deserves to be classified with the two
principal volumes on the Apocalypse, those of Charles and Alio.
GENERAL AND PROFESSIONAL BIOLOGY, WITH SPECIAL
REFERENCE TO MAN. By Edward J. Menge, Ph.D. Mil-
waukee, Wis. : Bruce Publishing Co. $6.50.
This volume contains an extremely valuable compilation of
biological information. A thoroughly scientific book, without
any tinge of controversy, it is meant for pre-medical students as
an introduction to the biological sciences. It seems well fitted to
fulfill this purpose. A score of practical teachers of the subjects
included in it at various institutions have given it the advantage
of their technical criticism. The author has had years of expe-
rience in teaching the subject and, above all, in writing of it, for
it is of great importance to have written other books to make the
wording of a text-book of this kind direct, simple, and to the point.
So much of the terminology of modern science and the prin-
ciples underlying it, have crept into modern literary usage and
the discussion of social problems of all kinds, that it would be well
1922.] NEW BOOKS 421
worth the while of the educated man to renew his acquaintance
with the biological sciences to date by means of such a book as
this. One turns over the pages of it to find such varied subjects
as Immunity, Animal Psychology, Genetics, General Biology of the
Plant World, the Earth Worm, the Insects, and then the Prin-
ciples of the Physiology and Anatomy of the Higher Creatures.
There are besides chapters on the history of biology, a thoroughly,
scientific discussion of evolution showing the present status of the
question, and an immense amount of information with regard to
the development of individuals. It is, on the whole, a very inter-
esting contribution to the teaching of science, made by a pro-
fessor in the Catholic University, of which we may be proud.
If there were more thoroughly conservative scientific text-books
such as this, all the talk about the opposition between religion
and science would cease.
THE OLD HOUSE. By Cecile Tormay. Translated from the
Hungarian by E. Torday. New York: Robert M. McBride &
Co. $2.00.
From a literary standpoint, this book is unquestionably a
piece of fine art, written with an unusually high degree of skill
and insight — though in parts heavy with excess of detail. Yet
we find in it a misuse of the rare gifts of the writer, since its
story of decay and death is anything but one to uplift, inspire,
and leave us better for the reading. One faint note of hope is
struck, however, at the end, when ". . . her two sons came down
the graveled path. She looked at them, and her head rose."
THE VALUES EVERLASTING. By Edward F. Garesche, S.J.
New York: Benziger Brothers. $1.25 net.
Much of our devotional literature makes appeal to a very
limited number of the spiritual-reading public. One book will be
of interest to priests, another only to cloistered religious, a third
to working-girls, a rare fourth to all persons living in the world.
We know no class that will not read Father Garesche's book with
interest and profit.
Father Gareschd has treated a large range of subjects: every-
day heroism, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, considerations on
heaven and purgatory, a much-needed and eminently sensible
treatment of devotions in general and some in particular. It is a
book to be highly recommended. It is unfortunate that so many
of our writers and preachers will quote Acts xvii. 28 : "In Him we
live and move and have our being," which is not the Catholic
version.
422 NEW BOOKS {Dec.
AMERICANS BY CHOICE. By John Palmer Gavit. New York:
Harper Brothers. $2.50.
It is difficult in a short review to give any adequate idea of the
excellencies of Americans By Choice. This volume of the "Amer-
icanization Studies" is a scholarly treatment of the immigrant in
his political relations. It is written in a style that grips and holds
the attention every minute.
Naturally, Mr. Gavit gives large space to the working of the
naturalization law. In a great measure, it is a revelation of gov-
ernmental red tape that frequently works out most unjustly for
the immigrant. Only one who has had some direct contact
with the operation of this law, or who has made a study of it,
can realize all of the technicalities by which thoroughly desirable
aliens can be denied citizenship; and, on the other hand, how
powerless it is to keep out many undesirable citizens.
Incidentally, Mr. Gavit takes up and demolishes certain super-
stitions that have attached to thinking of the alien. One is that
the immigrant is the cause of much political corruption in this
country. He has not been the cause of corruption, but older
Americans have sometimes used him corruptly. Put, tersely, a
man cannot sell his vote unless somebody buys it, and the buyers
have been the older Americans. Mr. Gavit shows that naturalized
citizens are about as much interested in the ballot and use it as
unselfishly as any others.
Another superstition fostered by certain writers is that there
is a distinction in assimilability and desirability between the
"older" immigration — that from northern Europe — and the
"newer" — from southeastern Europe — with a decided advantage
on the side of the "older." But, after the most thorough study
that has yet been made of the actual facts in the case, Mr. Gavit
concludes that "if there is any substantial difference in Equality of
assimilability' between the 'older' races and the newer, it is in
favor of the latter'' (p. 252). A smaller percentage of the "newer"
than of the "older" races, for instance, was refused citizenship on
the ground of immorality. And if the length of time elapsing
between arrival and the filing of a petition for naturalization indi-
cates assimilability, the facts are decidedly in favor of the "newer"
immigration. At one end, we have Canada with 16.4 years and
at the other Turkey in Europe with only 8.1. The average for all
races is 10.6, and the only "older" race under ten years is Ireland;
whereas there are six of the "newer" races below this figure.
Most heartily, we recommend this study to all who are in-
terested in the problems of immigration and Americanization—
and all ought to be interested in them.
1922.] NEW BOOKS 423
A JESUIT AT THE ENGLISH COURT. The Life of the Ven.
Claude de la Colombi^re, S.J. By Sister Mary Philip, of the
Bar Convent, York. New York: Benziger Brothers. $2.00 net.
This book fills a gap in the library of literature on Devotion
to the Sacred Heart. The holy priest who was St. Margaret
Mary's spiritual guide during the period of the Revelations and
who was her stanch defender against those who misunderstood
and opposed her, deserves to be more widely and intimately
known. Sister Mary Philip has given to the English-reading
world a biography both interesting and devotional. Extracts
from Father de la Golombiere's letters and retreat notes afford us
an insight into the deep spirituality of this truly saintly priest.
NATURAL JUSTICE AND PRIVATE PROPERTY. By Rev.
Daniel Merino. Eindhoven, Netherlands: N. V. Lecturis.
Within the brief compass of one hundred and twenty pages,
in clear, concise, convincing style, the author deals with the
fundamental problems of natural justice and private property.
In discussing the origin of private property and the natural titles
thereto, such as occupation and production, he joins issue with
some of our modern Catholic moralists, such as Dr. Ryan and
Father Antoine, in favor of the sounder view of the mediaeval
Scholastics. Such questions as justice and exchange, justice and
profits, interest on capital, and justice and wages are considered
in a condensed and illuminating manner. The author, with seem-
ing reason, insists that in commutative justice the laborer is
entitled only to the current value of what he produces, even if
this falls below the living wage — as an enterprise cannot afford,
and is not bound, to return to a man more than he contributes.
But the need of, and claim to, a living wage, such as Pope Leo
XIII. insisted upon, is met by the exercise of distributive justice
on the part of society, which must so dispose conditions of em-
ployment as to ensure to each man, able and willing to work, a
salary sufficient to maintain him and his family in frugal and
decent comfort. The author seems well versed in the best liter-
ature on the subject.
THE ALTAR STEPS. By Compton Mackenzie. New York:
George H. Doran Co. $2.00.
Readers who enjoyed the youth of **Michael Fane" and his
entertaining childhood which Compton Mackenzie gave us in
Youth's Encounter, will be inclined to welcome the picture of
another boy that the author draws in The Altar Steps, which
although not marked by the same sparkle as the earlier work, is
^ NEW BOOKS [Dec.
happUy free from the patches of gratituous morbidity, which dis-
"^^hfbToltfSeTeasant iiavor of Mackenzie's style and
one enioys the same facility of expression which is found m ^1 of
one enjoys me ^one amazingly well. Even
; : tSTeLZhnX^^^^^^^^ is photographed. The .hole
Phantasmagoric jumble which confronts earnest members of the
Church of Ingland is depicted with astonishing accuracy Mark
Serdale, the hero, is made to come into touch with all shades
of Anglican "churchmanship"-high, low, and moderate
The volume has much excellent character-study to recom-
mend it that is not the work of a caricaturist. It gives a good
idea of the protean nature of the Church of England in such a way
as to interest those who know that Establishment only by name.
One can form a rather good conception of the almost incompre-
hensible divergencies of opinion, that allow members of the An-
glican Establishment to measure each for himself the amount of
doctrine that the individual wishes to accept. The different char-
acters show the liberally undefined pale of Church of England
orthodoxy.
There are many touches of humor in the book. It is a trifle
irritating, however, to feel that Monsignor Cripps, a Catholic priest
who appears for a few uninteresting pages, is typical of Catholic
priests in England. He seems too English to be Catholic, and
somewhat insignificant to be a Monsignor. This, however, is a
minor point. The book has much of the quiet and wholesome
romance of every-day living, which pleases the reader, because he
feels that it is true to facts. Such work goes far to prove that it
is not necessary to make a book noisome in order to make it en-
tertaining.
Since The Altar Steps is professedly a prelude to a forthcom-
ing one, to be called A Parson's Progress, one can form no com-
plete judgment regarding the final development of Mark Lidder-
dale. One hopes that the end will justify the beginning.
PSYCHOLOGY. A Study of Mental Life. By Robert S. Wood-
worth, Ph.D. New York: Henry Holt & Co. $2.50.
Everyone who is at all familiar with the notable contribu-
tions made by the laboratory investigations to the progress of
Psychology, will be willing to acknowledge and appreciate all
legitimate claims of experimental psychology. Ignoring, how-
ever, the rational or synthetic, the metaphysical aspect of this
science will leave the subject matter of this study incomplete and
fragmentary. Numerous problems, most vital and important, de-
1922.] NEW BOOKS 425
mand solutions that only metaphysics is in a position to offer.
There is a sense of incompleteness in our modern text-books on
psychology owing to this disregard of all metaphysics.
The work of Dr. Woodworth, whose name is familiar to stu-
dents of psychology, is a thoroughly modern, strictly up-to-date
book on this subject. It is, in many respects, a model text-book.
The student will appreciate the clearness of diction, the simplicity
of style, absence of unnecessary technical terminology. Drawings
and diagrams are numerous, carefully made and clear; they will
be of great help to the reader. "Exercizes," appended at the close
of each chapter serve as a review of the preceding material, and
stimulate the student to broader views and independent thinking.
Carefully selected books of reference at the termination of a chap-
ter give the opportunity for further reading and study. Dr.
Woodworth*s Psychology, undoubtedly, deserves a place of honor
on the long list of modern text-books on this important subject.
ROSEMARY AND VIOLETS, by the late Very Rev. James E. Coyle
(privately printed), is a tribute to the poetic fervor of Father
Coyle and to the devoted admiration of its editor. Miss Isabel Beecher.
Father Coyle was a true child of Thomas Moore, and his little book is
fragrant with the piety of his warm faith and his unconquerable love
of Ireland. Poem after poem rings with his spirited and poetic elo-
quence. It is an eloquence of an Ireland thrilling with the aspirations
of Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet, and those who made Easter Day of
1916 forever memorable. (Dispatch Printing & Stationery Co.,
Birmingham, Ala.)
THE GREAT EXPERIMENT, by Hon. Thomas Dillon O'Brien
(New York: The Encyclopedia Press. $1.25), is an essay on the
State and Federal Constitutions as securing liberty to our citizens.
Certainly, we need to have our attention called emphatically to these
documents. There is much wild criticism of our Government, par-
ticularly of our courts, and there are even proposals to abolish the
Supreme Court of the United States. In addition to many individual
violations of constitutional rights, there is a serious organized dis-
regard of constitutional provisions. But Judge O'Brien, we regret to
say, has not given us the study we need. His essay can best be summed
up in his own words: "The analysis of the American Government,
attempted in the preceding pages, is very incomplete."
NOTES OF A CATHOLIC BIOLOGIST, by Rev. George A. KreideL
(St. Louis: B. Herder Book Co. $1.50.) Not many writers have
the facility of making the dry facts of science attractive to the general
reader. The Rev. George A. Kreidel, of Dunwoodie Seminary, New
York, is one who deserves much praise for his pleasing, intelligent,
and lucid presentation of scientific facts to the popular mind. In this
426
NEW BOOKS [Dec,
book the author asserts "that the facts of science should not be al-
lowed to stand by themselves, isolated and alone. Ultimately, such
facts are not self-explanatory, but rather contain in themselves an
appeal beyond. They aid us in making the step from Nature to the
Author of Nature." In chapters two, three, and four, where he treats
of "God in Nature," "The Beginning and End of the World," and "The
Origin of Life," the writer clearly emphasizes this view, and thereby
performs a real service to the general reader, who has become nauseated
with the modern methods of pseudo-scientists. By holding the mirror
up to nature, the writer reflects the power, wisdom, and goodness of
God, without sacrificing scientific thoroughness. There can be no
doubt that this book will be welcomed as a splendid contribution to
popular scientific literature.
AHOOSIER AUTOBIOGRAPHY, by William Dudley Foulke. (New
York: Oxford University Press. $2.50 net.) In all modesty.
Dr. Foulke suggests that the life story of one who has been active in
Civil Service and Municipal Reform and other important movements,
may perhaps be accepted as a small contribution to the history of his
day and generation. Without desiring to detract in the slightest
degree from the meed of merit that is his for leadership in these
causes, we venture the opinion that the future historian will find in this
volume material of a nature perhaps unsuspected by the writer of the
autobiography. For in this record of service is to be discerned not
only the figure of Dr. Foulke, but the figures also of others of his
kind, studious yet simple, cultured yet kindly, who have made artic-
ulate the soul of hundreds of thousands of their fellow-citizens, who, if
they had not equal educational advantages, had the same standards of
righteousness and ideals that are imperishable. These are they whose
leaven of wholesomeness has worked silently, yet powerfully, to pre-
serve the Republic against the nostrums of noisy notoriety-seekers.
Informing every effort of Dr. Foulke for his city, his State, or his
country, was love of the greatest of American institutions — the home.
There is an intimacy in the telUng of the story that is far removed from
boastfulness and a buoyancy of optimism that is communicated to the
reader in a manner both sensible and satisfying.
MYRRHA: A TRAGEDY IN FIVE ACTS, by Charles V. H. Roberts.
(Boston: The Four Seas Co. $2.00 net.) The Rome of the days
of Nero has been used by many novelists and more than one play-
wright, but seldom with such satisfying results as are achieved in this^
tragedy. Not only is the verse itself of an even excellence, but the
sense of dramatic values, of the effectiveness of contrast and the signif-
icance of suspense is repeatedly revealed. The character drawing is
definite, and the character development consistent. Withal, there is
a freshness of treatment and a fluidity of action in the big scenes,
which mark the play as a production apart from many of the more
learned and more labored presentations of the life of the period treated.
1922.] NEW BOOKS 427
Too much cannot be said in praise of the religious aspects of the
play. The Christianity disclosed is virile and appealing; that it should
permeate the piece is not merely proof of piety, but very practical
playwriting, for the gripping power of the greatest of all tragedies is
used to carry the five acts in climactic crescendo to a convincing cul-
mination. In a day when Catholic dramatic societies are looking for
material for stage presentation, Myrrha should be welcomed as a
decidedly valuable addition to the available and really actable plays.
THE GIFT: A PLAY IN ONE ACT, by Marie A. Foley. (New York:
Samuel French, Ltd. 35 cents.) This short play, offered to ama-
teur players for use without payment of royalty, had a successful pre-
sentation in New York several months ago — at Columbia University, if
memory serves. There is no reason why it should not have many suc-
cessful productions. It should give to Catholic dramatic societies
opportunity for strong acting, while not making too great demand on
those having to memorize the individual parts.
THE LOVE OF THE SACRED HEART, illustrated by St. Mechtilde.
(New York: Benziger Brothers. $2.00 net.) This is the third in
a series of books for special spiritual reading on the love of the Sacred
Heart of Our Divine Saviour. The two previous volumes dealt with
the communications of the Sacred Heart to St. Margaret Mary and the
Blessed John Eudes and to St. Gertrude. The readings in this present
book are based on the revelations to St. Mechtilde as related in The
Book of Special Grace. The tender intimacy, which is there shown
to have been granted by the Sacred Heart to this Saint of the thirteenth
century, may well inspire those who meditate upon it with so ardent
a love for the Heart of Christ as to obtain for them some share in that
same intimacy. This volume forms a worthy addition to our Catholic
devotional literature.
INSTITUTIONES DOGMATICiE, by Rev. Bernard J. Otten, S.J. Vol.
III. — De Verbo Incarnato. (Chicago: Loyola Press. $3.50 net.)
Students of theology will welcome this new dogmatic text-book of
Father Otten's, which treats of the Incarnation, the Redemption, the
Blessed Virgin, and the Saints. Father Otten lays more stress than most
authors on the proof of the divinity of Christ, and he gives his students
a fairly complete and up-to-date bibliography.
THE ORIGIN OF LETTERS AND NUMERALS, by Phineas Mordell.
(Philadelphia: PubUshed by the Author. $2.00.) The Sefer Yet-
zirah, the difficulties of which Mr. Phineas Mordell endeavors to clear
up in his thesis, The Origin of Letters and Numerals, is one of the
Jewish writings deahng with the mysteries of letters and numerals.
Its difficulties are due not only to the obscure style of the book,
but also especially to the composite character of the extant work. For,
according to the author, commentators of the eighth and ninth cen-
NEW BOOKS [Dec,
turies combined with the original Sefer Yetzirah (=S Y. I.) an early
commentary ( = S. Y. XL), which often misses altogether the sense of the
Drimitive work, while making the S. Y. I. two or three times larger
than it was originally (pp. 5, et seq., 36). In the course of his inquiry,
the author notes a number of resemblances between the S. Y. and the
Pythagorean system— a point treated again especially in the supple-
ment to the book, and ventures the suggestion that the S. Y. may repre-
sent the genuine fragments of Philolaus, who was the first to publish
the Pythagorean philosophy: the Pythagorean system would thus be
of Hebrew origin 1
Mr. Mordell's thesis is rather hard to read. The reasoning is not
always clear, and one is liable to become confused when trying to fol-
low the author in matters where so much is conjectural: the S. Y. I.
is not a model of clear thought and simple expression! Few will look
to that strange book for the real explanation of the origin of the Alpha-
bet. Several statements of the author will appear surprising, and in
need of proof or explanation, as, for instance, the original vowel value
of the Ain, or that the Arabic Alphabet was originally invented to
represent the Assyrian-Babylonian language. The Table of Corrections
is far from complete: however the rather numerous misprints of Eng-
lish words will not cause any difficulty. A little more serious is the
failure (p. 9) to mark properly the emphatic letters, which are thus
printed just like the ordinary letters. On page 57 (Mishnah 8), the
punetuation signs of the last two lines have been misplaced in the
Hebrew, and on page 62 in the English translation, one clause ("stormed
them through air") has been transposed, as appears from the Hebrew.
THE CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA. Supplement I. Volume XVII.
(New York: The Encyclopedia Press, Inc.) The preface to
this volume calls attention to the permanent value of The Catholic En-
cyclopedia, as shown in the fact that, in issuing this first Supplement,
scarcely any revision was required of articles already published on
subjects other than biography and geography; additional or supple-
mental matter on these heads chiefly being needed to cover the changes
brought about since 1914. Noteworthy among the new articles are
valuable contributions by specialists on Americanization, Bolshevism,
Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, Soviet and Union of Christendom, to name
but a few, which renders the Encyclopedia a valuable reference book
to all those who wish to be informed on these timely questions.
TE October issue of The Font Hill Dial is an example of beautiful
workmanship and, both in format and matter, reflects credit on
the College of Mount Saint Vincent, which is celebrating, this year,
the seventy-fifth anniversary of its foundation.
rE LIFE OF LIVES— The Story of Our Lord Jesus Christ for Young
People, by Louise Morgan Sill. (New York : George H. Doran Co.
$1.50.) Beautiful simplicity and reverence are characteristics of the
1922.] NEW BOOKS 429
Life of Our Lord, which comes from the pen of Mrs. Louise Morgan
Sill, a writer already favorably known to discriminating readers. The
volume will give young people a clear idea of the chief events in the
divine story of the New Testament, though, of course, it will not fa-
miliarize them with Catholic doctrine nor with the words of the Cath-
olic text.
HELGA AND THE WHITE PEACOCK, by Cornelia Meigs (New
York: The Macmillan Co. $1.00), is a play in three acts, for chil-
dren. It is a fairy tale, fanciful and delightful, and the moral it points
is one that any child can understand. Another Macmillan book,
Charlie and His Kitten, Topsy, by Violet Maxwell and Helen Hill
($1.25), is a fascinating series of stories, all about Charlie, who is
the most real of real small boys. The illustrations add greatly to the
charm of the text.
Other children books recently issued are The Wonder Story (New
York: Benziger Brothers. 35 cents), that of the birth and childhood of
the Infant Jesus, here told by Miss Marion Ames Taggart in her own
inimitable way. It will bring home to children the true meaning of
Christmas, only too often lost sight of in their very natural delight over
the Christmas tree and the Christmas stocking. Chico, the Story of a
Homing Pigeon, by Lucy M. Blanchard (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.
$1.75), takes the small reader to Venice and introduces him to many
of its wonders. We love the little Chico from the time he breaks
through his shell to the time when he is one of the acknowledged
heroes of the World War.
Of especial interest to boys is Father Finn's On the Run (New
York: Benziger Brothers. $1.00), the story of Joe Ranley, an Amer-
ican boy, and his stirring adventures in the stormy Ireland of today.
FOREIGN PUBLICATIONS.
Der Heilige Bonifatius, by J. J. Laux. (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder
& Co. 53 marks.) In this small volume, of less than three hundred
pages. Father Laux portrays the sympathetic human side of the char-
acter of St, Boniface, which, to many of us, remains buried in the
extensive correspondence carried on by the Saint with relatives and
friends and brethren-in-religion in his homeland across the Channel.
We see St. Boniface take an interest in the poetic efforts of a youthful
relative in England. We see him write riddles in verse and give ad-
vice regarding the rules of metre. We see him receive from King
Ethelbert II. of Kent a golden chalice and two waterproof raincoats
with the request to procure for him two German hawks for crane-
hunting. We see him write to the Abbot of Wearmouth for Bede's
works, preferably his Homilies or Commentaries on the Proverbs,
which might be of use to him in his preaching. At the end of this re-
quest, we read the following: "Instead of a kiss, we send your Highness,
through the carrier of this letter two little kegs of wine, and ask you
to prepare, mindful of the love that is between us, for your brethren,
a joyous holiday." The book is written for the general reading public.
A student of history will find in the appendix, of thirty pages, an up-to-
date bibliography and also a short discussion of JQfteen disputed or un-
430
NEW BOOKS [Dec,
certain details of chronology, locality, genuinity, etc., of matters men-
''"''toV^nt vTde ^Occident. (Paris: P. Geuthner 4 /rs.) E. Dinet
and Sliman ben Ibrahim present us in this work with a brief apology
of Islam in reply to some misrepresentations of the faith by western
Orientahsts According to the authors, western historians are in-
canable of a correct and fair estimation of the Mohammedan Orient.
Two are singled out for the purpose of showing the errors into which
false methods and bias may lead scholars: Father Lammens, S.J. of
the St. Joseph University, Beyrouth, and Mr. Casanova, of the College
de France. Father Lammens (pp. 19-42) is evidently the authors bete
noire They recognize, indeed, his great learning, but they are pro-
voked to bitterness by his tone, which they find needlessly offensive,
and by his readiness to accuse or suspect Mohammed and his friends,
who hardly ever get the benefit of the doubt, while Mohammed's enemies
are rehabilitated (pp. 26-30). Mr. Casanova, on the contrary (pp. 43-
80), is praised for his fairness (pp. 44, et seq.; 79, et seq.), although
his thesis as to Mohammed's successor is declared extremely dangerous
to the Coranic Revelation (p. 46). In the BibUography, the descrip-
tion of the works is too vague — without any mention of place or date —
and the principle on which the works are selected is not clear:
several other recent volumes, adapted to the needs of the general
reader, could easily be added.
From P. T^qui, Paris: Explication dii Petit Office de la Sainte
Vierge Marie, by Rev. Charles Willi, is an excellent French translation
of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin, accompanying its every verse
with a most detailed and helpful commentary (314 pages). In six
preliminary chapters, he gives a brief historical sketch of devotion to
the Mother of God, and initiates her devout clients into the beauties of
the Little Office. Petit Manuel des Congregations de la T. S. Vierge.
(Ifr.) This little manual contains a number of prayers in honor of
the Blessed Virgin, the Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, and
the rules and regulations of the Congregation of the Immaculate Mary.
Futures Epouses, by Abbe Charles Grimaud. (5/rs.) The confer-
ences of this interesting volume are written for young women with a
view of preparing them for their future vocation of motherhood. The
Abbe's themes are purity, piety, home and social life, education, mar-
riage, divorce, race-suicide, and the like. L'Abbe Jean-Baptiste Debra-
bant. (10 frs.) Mgr. Laveille, the biographer of the Abbe Jean Marie
De Lamennais and the Abbe Champagnat, has added, in this, another
striking figure to his gallery of French ecclesiastics. Direction de
Conscience Psychotherapie des Troubles Nerveux, by the Abbe Arnaud
d'Agnel and Dr. d'Espiney. (8 frs.) Priests and physicians will find
this new volume on psychotherapy most useful, for it analyzes most
carefully all the symptoms and conditions common to morbid condi-
tions of both soul and body. A Catholic priest and a Cathohc doctor
join hands in telling us all that modern science knows of the proper
treatment of nervous diseases, and all that Catholic theology teaches
regarding the proper spiritual guidance of neurotic and scrupulous
souls. Les Chevaliers du Poignard, by Albert Monniot. (7 frs.) This
is a stirring tale of the French Revolution. It begins at the siege of
Yorktown, in America, and ends with the death of Robespierre. The
author has drawn a good picture of the reign of terror at its height, and
gives a most vivid account of the adventures of the Chevaliers du
Poignard.
From Bloud et Gay, Paris: UEnseignement du Catechisme en
France, (ifrs.) In this interesting volume, the Abbe Bricout, one
time editor of the Revue du Clergd Frangais, gives us a detailed history
of catechetical instruction in France from the days of the Council of
1922.] BOOKS RECEIVED 431
Trent. After a brief introductory chapter on the ideas and methods of
Gerson, St. Francis de Sales, St. Vincent de Paul, Olier, Fenelon, and
Bossuet, the writer discusses the causes of present-day ignorance in
matters of religion, the make-up of the three classes of the catechism
in current use, the duties of the efficient catechist, the use of modern
methods of teaching, etc. L'Education du Clerge Frangais, by the
Abbe J. Bricout. (4 frs.) This volume sums up, in a brief, but ac-
curate, outline, the history of clerical education in France during the
past four hundred years, both in the Petits and the Grands Seminaires.
The writer contrasts the methods of the Sulpicians, the Vincentians,
and the diocesan clergy, and discusses in detail the course of studies,
the text-books in current use, the ideals proposed to the students, the
training of the professors, and the results obtained.
From P. Lethielleux, Paris: Dom Bede Lebbe, of the Benedictine
Abbey of Maredsous, has translated Bishop Hedley's Lex Levitarum
(4 frs.) for the Benedictine series of ascetical and mystic volumes,
known as "Pax." These twelve conferences treat of vocation, purity
of heart, zeal for souls, the seminary life, the study of philosophy,
literature, and the Holy Scriptures. Les Mystiques Benedictins, des
Origines an XIII. siecle (6 frs.) contains those conferences given by Dom
Besse, which treat especially (with a general introduction) of the
Benedictine mystics up to the thirteenth century.
From Victor LecofFre, Paris: Evangile Selon Saint Marc, par P6re
Lagrange (4 frs.), is an abridgment of the author's more scholarly
work, divested of every appearance of erudition, and intended for
popular use. It consists of a translation of the Gospel, together with
a brief, though satisfactory, commentary. St. Jean-Baptiste, par D.
Buzy (8 frs. 50), is an historical and critical study of the highest order,
in which every phase of the Precursor's only too short life is fully
dwelt upon and all objections satisfactorily solved. Much space is
devoted to topography and controversy, but this is necessitated by the
nature of the work, which will be highly prized by teachers and
students of Sacred Scripture.
BOOKS RECEIVED.
Longmans, Green & Co., New York:
Catholicism and Criticism. By Etienne Hugueny. Translated by Rev. Stanislaus
M. Hogan. $3.50. From Vita Nuova to Paradiso. By Philip H. Wicksteed.
$1.75. Liberalism, Modernism, and Tradition. By Oliver C. Quick. $2.50.
Charles Scribner's Sons, New York:
Human Nature in the Bible. By William Lyon Phelps. $2.00. Dante and His
Influence. By Thomas Nelson Page. $2.00.
Alfred A. Knopf, New York:
Ireland's Literary Renaissance. By Ernest Boyd. $3.50. Prejudices. Tlilrd
Series. By H. L. Mencken. $2.50.
Russell Sage Foundation, New York:
Plans and Illustrations of Prisons and Reformatories. Collected by Hastings H.
Hart. $2.50.
P. J. Kenedy & Sons, New York:
Poems. By Canon Sheehan. $1.00. The Literary Life and Other Essays. By
Canon Sheehan. $2.25. The Divine Counsellor. By Martin J. Scott, S.J. $1.75.
The Macmillan Co., New York:
A Manual of the Short Story Art. By Glenn Clark. $1.75. The A B C's of
Business. By Henry S. McKee. $1.00. The Psychic Health of Jesus. By
Walter E. Bundy. $3.00.
Joseph F. Wagner, Inc., New York:
The Epistles of St. Paul. By Rev. Charles J. Callan, O.P. Vol. I. $6.00.
432
BOOKS RECEIVED [Dec, 1922.]
^' ^Th^iU o/^?7i'/sp Jra/id the Life of Today. By Evelyn Underbill. $2.50.
English Short Stories from Fifteenth to Twentieth Century. $1.00.
DouBLEDAY PAGE & Co., Garden City, New York:
Sinale Blessedness and Other Observations. By George Ade. $1.50. My Life
and Work By Henry Ford. In Collaboration witb Samuel Crowther. $3.50.
Woodroiv Wilson and World Settlement. By Ray S. Baker. 2 vols. $10.00.
BoNi & LivEBiGHT, Ncw York:
The White Heart of Mojave. By Edna Brush Perkins. $3.00. Tramping On Life.
By Harry Kemp. $3.00.
Bbnzigeb Bbothebs, New York:
Catechism of the "Summa Theologica." By Rev. Thomas Pegues. $2.00.. The
Hymns of the Breviary and Missal. Edited by Rev. Matthew Britt. $6.00.
Fleming H. Revell Co., New York:
Christianity and Progress. By Harry E. Fosdick. $1.50.
Henbt Holt & Co., New York:
Character Problems in Shakespeare's Plays. By Levin L. Schucklng. $3.50.
Habcoubt, Brace & Co., New York:
Definitions. By Henry S. Canby. $2.00. What Prohibition Has Done to America.
By Fabian Franklin. $1.00.
Geobge H. Dohan Co., New York:
Neither Here Nor There. By Oliver Herford. $1.50. Robin Hood's Barn. By
Margaret Emerson Bailey. $2.00. Mr. Lloyd George. By E. T. Raymond. $3.00
DoDD, Mead & Co., New York:
The Tale of Triona. By William J. Locke. $2.00. The Call of the Mountains.'
By LeRoy Jeffers. $5.00.
Bbbntano's, New York:
Degeneration in the Great French Masters. By Jean Carrfere. Translated by
Joseph McCabe. $4.00.
Columbia UNn^BsriY Press, New York:
An Introduction to the History of History. By James T. Shotwell. $4.00.
Lieber & Lewis, New York:
Against the Grain. By J. K. Huysmans. Translated by John Howard. $3.00.
The Centuby Co., New York:
The Problem of China. By Bertrand Russell. |2.00.
The Four Seas Co., Boston:
Poems. By B. Preston Qark, Jr. $2.00. Six Short Plays. By Wilbur S. Tupper.
Michal. By Alice C. Cook. $1.50. A Receivership for Civilization. By Duren
J. H. Ward. $3.50.
Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston:
A Critical Fable. $1.00. Tradition and Progress. By Gilbert Murray. $3.00.
The Letters of Franklin K. Lane. $5.00.
Small, Maynabd & Co., Boston:
The Best Plays of 19ii-22. Edited by Bums Mantle. $2.00.
Mabshall Jones Co., Boston:
John Raskin's Letters to William Ward. With a Short Biography of William
Ward by William C. Ward. $2.50. Horace and His Influence. By Grant
Showerman. $1.50.
The Stratford Co., Boston:
Father Glynn's Poems. $1.50.
C. A. Nichols Publishing Co., Springfield, Mass.:
The New Larned History for Ready Reference. Vols I. and II.
Habvard Univebsity Press, Cambridge:
The Causes of Heart Failure. By Wm. Henry Robey, M.D. $1.00.
J. B. LippiNCOTT Co., Philadelphia:
^%n'i!!l^'"nV\'^'^ Asperf/ffi*. By Felix E. SchelUng. $2.00. Seeing the Eastern
„ , A rare*. By John T. Paris. $5.00.
H. L. Kilner & Co., Philadelphia:
rnJtr^SlZl'X'cMZ^^:''' "• «"•"" ""•" ^- *• Brininstool. 2 vo.,, ?,2.50.
^o'sT'xTv^. 'bUT Too"' *'""''" '"'"'■ "^ ^^- "''^^'^ *'«'"^«"'-
"■ ^ "f"™". Eindhoven, Netherlands:
a.'rlf"'Sirsi" ij^."i^- «^ ""'■ «"" '^aninger. Translated hy Hev.
he THos. McDonnell co.
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