A memoir of William A. Stanton, S. J.

Front matter

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CDFXRIGHT DEPOSIT.

WILLIA^I STANTON, IN IQOO

Author's Preface

When we take up a work of biography to read, we find, ordinarily, that it is the story of a man whose name at least we have known before. The title page is vaguely reminiscent. The man's name brings up sketchy memories. He figured largely in such and such a war; he wrote such and such books; he was a statesman of such and such a period of history, or a poet, or a notable rascal, or the brewer of a noble beer, or a successful usurer who held a high place in the councils of government; possibly (and most vaguely of all to us) he was a saint. But he comes before us in the book with some credentials of history, with a letter of introduction which he himself wrote upon the fading tablets of time. We set ourselves to read with a sense of being about to enlarge upon an acquaintance we have already made. We are keeping the convention of polite society in not venturing beyond the circle of the properly introduced.

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Heaven defend us from decrying that convention, whether in life or in books. No doubt it serves a good purpose. But heaven defend us more stoutly still from becoming its bondmen. He has not savoured life fully who has never welcomed an unknown comrade in the way, who has never stepped out stride for stride with one whose sole known credentials were his sonship of Adam and the image of God in his soul. The high romance and sweeping adventure of life lies not alone on strange mountains or in uncharted seas; it is often upon the road before our doors; it is in the faces and hearts of unheralded pilgrims who meet up with us on our plodding way.

I remember a man once saying that he considered the most delightful avocation in the world to be that of an agent of Baedeker^s. He grew quite rhapsodic about it: to wander about this good earth, ferreting out its beauties, noting places of interest, discovering hidden nooks and corners full of charm and nobility and restful hotels with French chefs, and bringing all these nice things to the notice of grateful travellers. I doubt if he knew much of what he was talking about : yet, let us grant, there may be something in his idea. But there is an incomparably finer search open to men. For just as

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

in the material world there are secret haunts of beauty and delight, so also in the world of men God makes fine fellows whom we must hunt out for ourselves, who sound no great trumpet in life, who will not catch our eye by any civic monument or gleaming halo when they are dead, nor have even the meagre credit of an advocatus diaholi: but whom it is a matter of pride for us to have known and loved.

Of the number of such was William Stanton, whom you, most amiable reader, in all likelihood never so much as heard of. But if you read this book bravely and persistently, despising all querulousness of the flesh, I promise you that you shall at least know something of him; and I hope that even under the poverty of my presentation you may catch some gleam of his fine gold.

Father Stanton was a young Jesuit priest. He died when he was only forty years old. He had done but ten or twelve years of actual work in his Jesuit career, and that for the most part away off in half-barbaric places where the spot-light does not reach. He would have been most hugely amused over the notion that any one should make a sort of hero of him: and he might have beaten me about the head with this book, had it come into his hands. Yet for all that, a heroic man he was, and rather

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

particularly (I like to believe) the kind of heroic man that our temper of to-day most delights in: a man who, with an easy grin and an utter lack of pose or self -consciousness, made enormous personal sacrifices and underwent constant hardships for a great cause ; a great, generous man, with the heart of a boy, the physique of an athlete, the intellectual gifts of a real scientist, and the faith of a Breton peasant woman. He was the sort of man whose very existence makes us think better of humanity, makes us think better even of ourselves: for with all his fineness he was very close to the commonest of us.

It is in the certain confidence that many will be glad to know such a man, and in the hope that some will be encouraged to imitate him, that I have written this little book.

I wish to make grateful acknowledgment to the relatives and comrades of Fr. Stanton, who, often with considerable inconvenience to themselves, have generously supplied me with the material for this memoir.

Introduction

I had known the subject of this memoir from his boyhood. I had known well, back in St. Louis, the splendid Catholic families from which he sprung. When I came to Manila in 1904, I found Father Stanton already a figure of note in the island capital. He had the distinction of being the first American to be ordained a priest in the Philippines under the American regime. He had the more enviable distinction of holding the high regard and warm affection of all who knew him.

His position as the first American priest ordained in Manila gave him a really important influence. In the chaotic conditions resulting upon the changed relations of Church and State in the Islands, he was a visible link between the old and the new ; between the spiritual existence that dated back to the coming of the Spaniards, three hundred and fifty years before, and the new civil rule of the Americans. And his beautiful gifts of character enabled him to use that influence for an immense good. His services,

INTRODUCTION

at a time when the need of them was so great, were most valuable. His fine poise of character, his smiling, kindly common-sense, smoothed over many a difficulty, for his fellow-religious, for Spaniard and American and Filipino alike.

The Jesuit Observatory in Manila had been taken over by the new government, and its officials received salaries from the government. But the American voucher system puzzled the good Spanish padres, and gave them such scruples and fears of violating religious poverty that they were on the verge of relinquishing their fine work altogether. Stanton steadied them, and in his easy, drawling way made the situation at least clear enough to get them to sign the salary-vouchers and continue with their work.

He was welcomed by the American residents, whom he gathered with some others to form an English-speaking congregation at the church of La Ermita. The soldiers at the barracks idolized him. The Filipinos trusted and loved him. Demands were made upon him from every quarter, and to all he responded cheerfully, generously. He attended the stricken in the cholera hospitals, he rounded up the Catholic soldiers in the neighbouring pueblos, he preached to his Americans, soldiers and

INTRODUCTION

civilians, instructed converts, looked after the sick and dying : and all this in addition to an abundance of hard work in the Observatory.

He became in time quite a famous man in Manila, even throughout the Islands. There was nothing at all spectacular in his methods or his achievements. The charm of the man was in his unselfish, devoted, priestly character. He spent himself for others. He won men by that which has ever won them, the priestly spirit of self-sacrifice. What he did was only the common duty that falls to the priest of God all the world over : his supreme distinction was that he did it most uncommonly well.

That this spirit ruled his whole life, this memoir of Father Stanton shows. I am glad to be able to introduce it to its readers. Father Stanton went through life swiftly, " a burning and a shining light " ; and the gleam of him in his passing still lingers in many hearts. May God give us all to be more like him.

^ J. J. Harty.

Chapter I

The problem of every work of biography, even the most unpretentious, is to set the subject of it, the man himself, clearly before the reader. What the man said and did rs really secondary: the chief thing is what he was. Even if the account of him be, in point of fact, largely a record of dates and events, it is because only through these externals can we lay hold upon the substance of him; it is because they interpret the man to us, give him to us in his setting and place. For the rest, it is a question of choice, guided by that main purpose and by the decent conventions of life, as to what facts and incidents shall be stressed, what touched upon lightly, what ignored completely.

I should like to begin this short memoir after a fashion dear to the heart of Stevenson — something like this : Stanton went over the side of the steamer and down the ladder, tossed his bags into the open boat bobbing at the ladder's foot, and swung out, running before the trade, for the palm- fringed coast half a league to the west.

Thus we might leap plump into the middle of things, and follow the man swiftly into that field of action where he is most fully made manifest. But alas ! in this sort of book the conventions must have their say. Let us walk measuredly, lest we offend. Of the south seas and of tropic lands, there shall be talk hereafter: meanwhile, let us prosily begin at the beginning. The reader, however, is fairly warned that these first chapters, written merely with conscience driving my pen, will be rather extraordinarily dull.

William Jerome Stanton, born of American parents, was remotely of Irish and French descent. His father's family hailed from Limerick, Ireland: his mother belonged to the old Creole family of the Chappes. His father was Thomas Stanton, an architect and builder, who was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1838, but came as a boy to St. Louis, Missouri. His mother was Regina Helen Brawner, of Florissant, Missouri. Miss Brawner's parents were dead when, in 1865, she married Thomas Stanton; hence the marriage took place at the home of her aunt, Mrs. Spalding, in the little town of Staun-

CHILDHOOD 3

ton, Illinois, distant some forty miles from St. Louis. After the marriage the Stantons returned to St. Louis, to take up their residence there. But five years later, Mrs. Stanton, as the time drew near for the birth of her first child, went again to Staunton, where William was bom, on February 28, 1870. The similarity between his family name and the name of his birth-place is, of course, a mere accidental coincidence. Two other children were afterwards bom to the Stantons : Mary Regina, and John, both of whom survive their brother William.

There is scarcely need to say that the Stantons were Catholics, of old Catholic families. William's mother, in particular, was an exceptionally earnest Catholic, a woman of deep piety, of great generosity and sweetness of character. She was not of robust health, and much of the care and education of her children fell upon her husband's sister, Mrs. Joanna Siedekum. William's education, at home and at school, was careful and thoroughly Catholic. He was sent to school when he was a little over five years old ; a preposterously tender age for the rigors of school life, some may think; but not uncommon amongst Catholics of a generation ago. Of that first school there is nothing to be said here, beyond the fact that it was attached to the Jesuit church in

St. Louis, that it was conducted by Miss Anna Mc- Crea, and that the boy spent six years in it.

He had not been very vigorous in his early babyhood, but thereafter grew into a healthy, robust, lively youngster. He showed even in his years of childhood something of the combination, which so struck us who knew him in after life, of great physical and mental activity with a remarkable evenness and natural poise of manner. He was fond of games and excelled in them, and was decently obedient in all matters except that of swimming. St. Louis is built upon limestone, the great beds of rock being in many plac-es practically on the surface: hence the city abounded in stone-quarries. These, when abandoned, promptly filled with water, and made excellent, though rather dangerous, swimming pools. Young Stanton early made their acquaintance, and the keenest memories of his school-mates are of his daring feats in the cold waters of the old quarries.

In 1 88 1 he entered the Academy of St. Louis University, where his father before him had been a student. He was a good student, one of the leaders of his class, but not extraordinarily brilliant. About this time he became also an acolyte at the old Saint Francis Xavier Church, and continued to

CHILDHOOD S

serve Mass there during the whole of his college course. He was a thoroughly good boy : one of his friends from boyhood says, " as clean a boy as ever I knew." But he was by no means notably pious. He had that deep, unostentatious faith, which was his heritage of Catholic blood and training, which moves into and out of the supernatural atmosphere without any fuss or posings or violence or selfconsciousness, which counts God in its life as naturally as a man takes the earth and sun and air. There was no need to preface this memoir with the disclaimer commanded by Pope Urban VUI, for I shall nowhere in it call Stanton a saint. If the reader do so when he finishes, that is his affair, not mine.

Whatever the custom be in other lands, the hallmark of acceptance amongst American boys is to have been dubbed with a nick-name. Stanton, whether at his first school or at college, but at some early time in his boyhood, was deemed worthy by his fellows to be known as " Buck," and " Buck " Stanton he continued to be to his friends until he died. The name seems to smack of the dare-devil, perhaps of the swaggerer and blusterer. Well, swaggerer and blusterer Stanton was not; but of the dare-devil he had plenty in him. Under a quiet exterior, adorned with the most companionable and dependable smile I have ever known, he had a cool and persistent pluck that would face anything; and he had a fund of animal spirits which led him into many a situation that required some facing. His pranks and escapades at college, though innocent enough, were sufficient in frequency and unexpectedness to ward off effectually from his teachers and prefects all danger of ennui.

A comrade of school-days tells of a typical incident. In the early part of March one year, he and Stanton sallied forth for a day in the woods west of the city. Their wanderings brought them to a small lake, still filmed with the frost of late winter. At the edge of the lake a small, rude raft was fastened. Of course they loosed the raft, and set out with a bit of board to paddle across the little lake. Some hundred yards out the unwieldy craft upended and pitched Stanton into the water, where he struck out, swimming and pushing the raft, till they reached the shore. The cold began to stiffen his clothes upon him, so they made a little fire and dried their clothes at it, whilst they went back into the water for a " real swim." Stanton was " laid up for repairs " for two weeks after.

His grit was of the dogged kind that can endure

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as well as venture. The same comrade recalls how a bigger boy, in the bullying sort of play that some boys indulge in, once twisted and pummelled " Buck's " arm until he should cry quits. But there was no cry from Stanton; only the steady, undaunted grin with which a real boy masks the inner stubborn resolve.

These things are trifles, but they may show something of the quality of the boy.

A boy's idea of honor does not always square with his elders' notions. Many a live, normal boy practices at times what grown-ups may call wicked evasions, but which are to him the mere necessary defense of his liberties against an invading adult world. Chewing gum and smoking cigarettes were made taboo to young Stanton : a most iniquitous and tyrannical taboo as some boys may believe. Hence he was put to casting a handkerchief, veil fashion, over his head when he sat at his books at home, in order safely to masticate the delectable but forbidden gum. His aunt was violently shocked one day, when he was about sixteen years old, to discover him, as he went along with a group of college mates, smoking a horrid cigarette. When he got home, she questioned him, and he owned up frankly to the felony. (Lying, you see, is ruled out by the boys'

code. ) And to her upbraiding, he answered with a twinkle, " Well, you said never to let you see me smoking. And I tried my best not to let you see me!"

Some folk would call that sort of boy dishonorable. Yet the chap who did this would not, on another occasion, report a boy who stole his theme and cheated him of a prize in school. That would be caddish in the boys' code. The other, according to them, was fair game. And who are we pitiful, blundering grown-ups to venture arbitrary rulings in the subtile realm of boyhood? We have lost the vision which is theirs, and would rashly judge where we cannot see. I am not defending his disobedience. I am but trying honestly to sketch his defects as well as his qualities. Even a crude portrait is not done all in white. Yet, defects and all, any boy who knew " Buck " Stanton well would have sworn to his absolute honesty and honorableness. Let us take their word for it : they know.

And in the boys* notion of honor, generosity has a big part. There are not merely certain things you must not do ; there are also a host of things you must do; and many of these latter call for a deal of unselfishness and liberality. Stanton could pass that test too amongst his fellows: even, stranger still,

CHILDHOOD 9

could pass it at home. Brother and sister knew him as one who delighted to give, who, beneath the noble sternness and proper dignity of a big brother, had a finely masked interest in their infantile concerns and a gruff large-handedness with even such treasures as lucky taws and iron-wood tops and rockaway skates.

The boy was affectionate and had the quick intuition of affection ; but obviously, for a boy, that was a thing most especially to be disguised. What real boy but has a horror of being thought " soft " ! The dear old Aunt Joanna, at eighty-three, says, "Willie is the one who understands me. I don't even have to speak to him: he knows." But "Willie" (who confided to the writer that one of the agonies of boyhood at home was to be called " Willie "; yet who signed himself so in "his letters home to the end) would have been most horribly embarrassed to hear her say so.

It would not be quite correct to say that he was quick-tempered. His general air of cheerful poise and fun belies that. But his temper was fierce when aroused. He nearly killed a young scamp who threw a broken bottle and put out an eye of his dog. Felt. All through his life, one sensed in Stanton latent fires of wrath; which, on the rare occasions when they came to the top, were decidedly volcanic.

It has been said of him that he was handsome. Well, tastes differ. I never thought him so ; though something of the fineness of the man shone in his face and made him wonderfully winning. You have his portrait in this book, and can decide for yourself. It matters little either way. He certainly had a native ease and grace, and a perfect social tact, uncommonly notable in a boy. He was a good dancer. He was popular with girls of his acquaintance. But he had a boy's exalted scorn and fine condescension toward such matters. You would have tested his temper disastrously if you so much as hinted at classing him with the " sissies."

Of course there is a whole world more that might be written of Stanton's boyhood. Let these scrappy notes suffice. We have better things to tell of him. But if they have given you the notion that he was any singularly precocious or astounding sort of boy, they have been misleading. He was indeed a very fine and likable boy, but most healthily normal, with a good, wholesome share of boy faults. He lived in modest circumstances, but with a well-to-do bachelor uncle, John Stanton, handily in the offing, to pinch his ear and line his palm with most satisfactory frequency. He battered his homely way amongst his

CHILDHOOD II

fellows, esteemed with their rough esteem, tested and trained in the crude but efficient school of boy comradeship, unspoiled, unaffected, and — as they would sum it up — " a mighty decent fellow."

Chapter II

We come now to speak of Stanton's vocation to the Society of Jesus and of the beginnings of his life in that Society. His vocation is of a sort that is really astonishing, though by no means uncommon. The boy simply thought all along, from an early day which even he himself could not mark, that he was to be a Jesuit. If you had put him to it, with his back to the wall, he would have admitted it at any time from his thirteenth or fourteenth year. But he never said much about it. It was one of those fixed things, to be tucked away in a corner of the soul, sacred from prying eyes, not even to be much discussed or reflected on by its owner: but which you knew always was there, almost as a part of yourself.

That sort of vocation is, I say, astonishing. God's finger is most appreciably in it. It is an interior grace so strong and clear as to leave no room for doubts in the mind of him who has it. It seems due to no external circumstance, to owe little or nothing directly to suggestion or even to training.

It comes into the soul, one knows not just when, like a gentle breath of air, without violence, without noise, without apparent effort : and once in, it enters almost into the very substance of a man, and will urge him even when he kicks against the goad. Yet because of its nature we can say little of it beyond a brief chronicling of the fact, and the remark that, with all its awesome strangeness, it is wonderfully common as a type of vocation. Those who have experienced its like will recognize it even in these halting words : those who have not, might find it incomprehensible after a folio volume upon it.

Though there was little talk at home of Stanton's vocation, it was an accepted fact, and to the quiet, sweet-tempered mother a cause of private joy. Her health, for years frail, was failing more and more swiftly in the latter years of William's course at the University. But with the secret sacrifice which mothers know how to make, she concealed the fact as much as possible. She dreaded lest it might in some way be an obstacle to her boy's following of God's call. And when, on July 16, 1887, in his eighteenth year, he entered the Jesuit house of noviciate near Florissant, Missouri, she was ready to sing her Nunc Dimittis,

Becoming a Jesuit novice is a most unromantic affair. A young man makes application, in a vague sort of way, to some one in authority at a Jesuit house, and is directed to the proper superior, who says, " We'll see." After a time, he is again directed to present himself to three or four grave and reverend fathers in turn, and answers questions which strike him at the time as a bit impertinent. He is rather impatient: the matter has all been settled between God and himself; what have these reverend busybodies to do with it? After another little time, he is told a day when he should go to the house of noviciate. He fetches a sigh, perhaps; packs his belongings, with a touch of reluctance, perhaps; and goes. That is all there is to it. Of course, the applicant might be astonished to know that his request has been very seriously and prudently weighed, and that the whole proceeding was by no means so cock-sure and simple as he had fancied. At any rate, there he is at last, a novice, and the life begins.

So much has been written of the Jesuit noviceship that nowadays all the world is acquainted with it. There is no need for us here to dwell minutely upon it. The noviceship has a two-fold purpose : to test the genuineness of vocation, and the quality of the novice to follow it : and to introduce the novice to the religious life and begin to train him in its virtues. In practice the two purposes are secured mainly by the common life of the novices. There are " experiments," as every one knows, rather specially designed as tests : working in the kitchen and scullery, the month of retreat in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, teaching catechism to children. But the real test is the life itself : a humdrum, quiet, monotonous two years of prayer and instruction, of obedience in little things, of self-adaptation to one's fellows, of silence and reserve and quiet self-control, of striving to enter into what we may call God's point of view, of building up in one's self the supernatural structure of sacrifice. There are few, if any, thrills; plenty of grey days, — but rarely black ones. No detail of the life is really hard : it is the sum of it which tries a man's moral temper.

During the month of October, 1887, Stanton, with the other novices, went through the " long retreat," the full Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. They were to have, for him, a tragic close. A few days before the end, he was called home by the critical condition of his mother. He spent two or three hours with her, and had to hurry back to his retreat. Indeed, she urged him to return. Her work was nearly over, she knew, but it was no part of her desire in laying it down that its early completing should interfere with her son's high calling. He went back to his noviceship ; and on the last day of the Exercises, October 31, his mother died. He was not with her at the end, but came into the city the day following. She died holily, peacefully, rejoicing in the good gift that God had given her through her boy.

We have no record of Stanton's thoughts or feelings at this sad time ; nor, indeed, have we any need of such. He was sorely stricken, no doubt, with that most sacred grief which it would be barbaric in us to unveil. The Florissant house of noviciate is only a scant twenty miles from St. Louis, so that his relatives could easily see him from time to time, and particularly during the first lonely days after his mother's death. Henceforth the good Aunt Joanna was to be a mother to the young Stantons.

There are a half-dozen or so letters to this aunt during the noviceship, saved from utter inanity only by the kindly and affectionate concern they show for all the little interests of his family. That is the only gleam of intelligence or interest in them. Mentally a novice's life is decidedly bare. His little round of days, centered upon God and himself, furnishes the scantiest matter for external record in letters. Besides, the noviceship almost infallibly breeds aloofness; the novice has a great dread of distractions; he is in a state of moral violence, with all his energies taken up in an intense interior effort. If one adds to that the native reticence of northern blood and the moral bashfulness of one little more than a boy in years, one can readily understand how ill-equipped young Stanton was for self-expression.

Nor could even his fellow-novices tell much of him beyond comparatively insignificant external details ; for the novice is no more communicative with his fellows, ordinarily, than with outsiders. Stanton went about his work with his usual easy poise of manner, but with an almost savage intensity within. Some little of that latter leaks out, accidentally, in the discovery of certain indiscreet austerities which he practised: with a good will and the rash earnestness of youth, going far beyond the small measure of corporal penance permitted the novices in general. A fellow-novice tells of Stanton^s wearing the sharp-pointed iron girdle, common enough in use amongst religious communities, not for an hour or so in the early morning, but continuously for days. And there are some kindred instances, which go to show the resolute earnestness with which he set about these beginnings of his life in the Society. But time and common sense gradually tempered this indiscretion of zeal, yet without diminishing the generous spirit which prompted it. Men wise in the spiritual life tell us insistently that the stability of the religious structure in after life depends singularly upon the foundation of whole-hearted devotedness to God laid in the noviceship. A man who does not make there il gran rifiuto, may possibly make it later : but the odds are against his doing so. We have no doubt of Stanton's prompt and complete self-sacrifice in the beginning, both from the little we know of his noviceship and from the wider knowledge of his succeeding years in the Society.