Switzerland In 1873. Lucerne
It sounds like a platitude when any one nowadays ventures to lament returning to the prose from the poetry of travel, so universal is this feeling, and so constantly is it expressed; yet it is impossible to avoid noticing it when recalling a railway journey that followed abruptly on weeks of Alpine rambles. My friend and I had been gradually gathering discontent, it is true, from the causes I have already stated, and yesterday, at Berne, had felt that a complete change was necessary; but further than this we had not stopped to reflect. No sooner, however, had we started in the train than the scream of the engine‐whistle, the jerking of the carriages at the stations, the rush of passengers and hoarse cries of the fruit‐sellers, grated discordantly on our nerves, and a sudden pining for the grand mountains, with their quiet, simple life and its elevating tone, took possession of us. Had we carried out our intention of going to Lyons, it would speedily have grown into a real Swiss mal du pays. Heartily, therefore, did we thank Mrs. C—— for having appeared so opportunely, and acted the part of a good angel in saving us from a species of suicide; for we felt that our spirits would have completely evaporated long before we could have reached Notre Dame de Fourvières or any other such congenial haven.
“Well, yes,” she answered; “the flat plains of France would assuredly have proved too harsh a contrast. Now you will still have mountains, besides so many other matters that must deeply interest you.”
These reflections having restored us to good‐humor, we fully enjoyed the approach to Lucerne, as the train wound round the wooded hills alongside the green Reuss, rushing on in full‐grown vigor from the lake, and past the mediæval walls and towers that still guard the sturdy old town. The sun was setting as we entered the station, just as happened a few nights previously when we drove into Interlachen; but in other respects everything was different. Here, the train was rapidly emptied of its hundreds of Northerners, still brimful of their city ways, or ill at ease in some faultless Alpine costume fresh from a London shop; while there, though one could detect many season‐loungers, effort at display was not thought of, especially amongst tourists, for dress and such externals had long since lost their importance in the wear and tear of real mountaineering. And what a noise and bustle and clatter steam, and everything belonging to it, entails! Enough to drive one wild, after many weeks of leisurely excursion habits—the tinkling bells of the steamboats waiting at the pier to carry off impatient tourists to fifty different destinations, the crowd of omnibuses, the jostling of porters, and, to complete the trouble, the announcement that no rooms could be had at the Schweizerhof or Lucernerhof, or various other hofs; although we had telegraphed from Berne, and expected to find all ready. If we would try, it was said, at the Beau Rivage—the hotel furthest off—there was just a chance. Worn out by the noise and fuss, we two begged to walk, the remainder of our party offering to drive on in a carriage without delay, in order to secure any vacant places there might be before the omnibus and its load of new‐comers should reach the hotel.
No arrangement could have been happier; for as we crossed the handsome new bridge, on issuing from the station, the scene at once restored our shattered nerves. The sun had just sunk behind the wood‐clad hills, dotted all over with pretty villas and pensions, that rise to the northwest above the town, and whose sharp, dark outline every instant became blacker against the clear sky above, which, on its part, was rapidly changing from one tint to another, each more delicate than the preceding one. Below, the river moved like a mass of molten gold, whilst the covered bridge close by and the old tower at the corner wore a dark, warm brown hue, all the richer from the reflection of the waters beneath. Turning round towards the lake, on whose margin we stood, the magnificent panorama of snow‐ tipped mountains which encircle its upper end transfixed us with admiration. Every peak, every line, was visible in the clear atmosphere, from Mount Pilatus, bathed in a flood of purple, right in front, to the most distant of the long line rising beyond. In a few minutes the colors in the west grew faint and fainter, but a fresh after‐glow lit up the mountain‐crests opposite, fading gradually into the tenderest pink, until one by one they sank into the approaching night. How wonderfully beautiful it was! Impossible to be surpassed! And for an instant we felt half tempted to become unfaithful to the glorious Jungfrau and lovely Interlachen. But the abiding impression of all such scenes in this favored land is, without doubt, one of marvel at the varieties of God’s creation, and nowhere does one more cordially echo that inspired voice which of old cried: “Let every spirit praise the Lord!”
Lost in admiration at this effect of color on water, wood, and mountain, we grew deaf to the clatter of the passing crowd across the bridge, when suddenly the sound of bells aroused our attention. It seemed as if every church‐bell in the place had been set a‐ringing; and so it really was! We listened; but, unaccustomed as we had now so long been to the beautiful practice, some minutes elapsed before we recognized the true mark of a Catholic country—the Ave Maria or Angelus bell! A learned divine has written lately that it would simplify matters very much if the world were classed in two divisions only—namely, those who say the Angelus, and those who do not; or, in other words, those who, believing in the Incarnation and Redemption, boldly and lovingly profess it before God and men, and those Christians whose faith in the mystery is so feeble or their piety so lukewarm that it gives them no happiness to acknowledge it, and who are therefore worse than the heathens, who know not of it. No happier welcome could have been given to us, who had been suffering from a spiritual famine for the last few weeks. Calmed by the sweet sounds, which were even softened by the gurgling waters at our feet, we followed our guide along the quay, unmindful of its white dust, fussy tourists, and the general unæsthetic aspect of its many monster hotels, our eyes fixed, as we proceeded, on the Hofkirche, or principal church, which towers above it at one end.
It was late when we emerged after dinner from the glare of lights and hot, crowded table‐d’hôte rooms of the Beau Rivage on to the balcony of the hotel, and the same moon which had entranced us so recently when shining on the Jungfrau was beginning to climb up the heavens, right behind Mount Pilatus. The stern mountain stood opposite to us on the other shore, his rugged form showing dark and unfriendly against the silvered background, but a tremulous path of light came dancing towards us straight across the placid waters. Tiny boats, that were hitherto indistinguishable in the surrounding gloom, shot in numbers, freighted with mysterious figures, across the luminous, quivering pathway; the green and red lights of steamers were seen advancing gradually from out the distant darkness of the lake, like wicked monsters rising from the deep to devour the elves and nymphs gambolling peacefully in our midst, while close to us, round the near curve of the bay, the town, still busy with life and movement, shone in a perfect blaze of illumination, the lamps along its quay glittering like stars reflected in the still waters underneath. Poet or painter never imagined in their highest flights of fancy a more fairy‐ like, suggestive scene, and again we felt and acknowledged the truth that no art or science of man can approach God’s own handiwork in its exquisite variety and beauty.
It was impossible to sit indoors on such an evening, so we wandered down to the walk beside the water’s edge, an impulse evidently shared by all the inhabitants; for, as we passed on, it seemed as though every one, including tradesmen with their wives and families, had come forth to refresh mind and body after their busy day’s work. The promenade was alive with people, either sitting or quietly sauntering up and down in apparently happy groups, but without noise or boisterous sound, in perfect harmony with the beautiful surroundings.
“This scenery surely must have a powerful effect on the inhabitants,” I remarked to Mrs. C——, as we too at length sat down on a bench in front of the hotel. “I can’t conceive living constantly within view of all this beauty without having one’s mind raised to a higher tone by its influence.”
“No doubt,” she replied; “and now you can understand the full meaning of Swiss Heimweh, or mal du pays; how, when these people once begin to pine for their mountains, it becomes a true malady. It does not follow, however, that scenery, as a matter of course, produces admiration or appreciation of its charms. You know the world‐old observation of this lack in ancient Greek poetry. Nor have the modern Greeks any more feeling for natural beauty than their ancestors; in fact, they positively dislike the country. The Turks are different; but, generally speaking, southerners never give it a thought. It seems to be more a matter of race than of locality, and the Swiss, especially in these cantons, being Teutonic, have the true German love of nature, which makes them so worthy of living in this favored land! That accounts, too, for their love of the supernatural, to which their lively faith has always given a religious form. The very name of this Mt. Pilatus and its story show this tendency at once.”
“What is the story?” I inquired. “I remember reading about it, but have quite forgotten. At this moment one might fancy anything—dragons, concealed in caverns, swooping down on forlorn maidens, knights rescuing Hildegardes and Kunigundes, or any other thing you like, on an evening of this sort.”
“Oh! no,” she answered: “the homely, burgher lives of the Swiss rarely led them to the romantic, but their simple piety, as I have said, clothed their tales with a religious coloring. This, for instance, is where they believe that Pilate committed suicide; that, having been banished to Gaul by the Emperor Tiberius for failure in the administration of his province when governor, he could no longer bear living in public, and his uneasy conscience drove him from one wild district to another until he stopped here; but even then he continued miserable, and finally threw himself into the small lake near the summit yonder, over which his spirit still hovers. He is the author of all the storms hereabouts. He cannot bear strangers, but, especially if they disturb him maliciously by throwing stones into this lake, he avenges himself by thunder and lightning and a general confusion of the elements. They were so persuaded of this in the middle ages that the Lucerners actually made a statute forbidding any one to explore the mountains, and there are records of several persons being severely punished for venturing up in defiance of the order. He regulates the weather even now; for you can always tell by Pilatus what kind of day it is likely to be. Have you never heard the lines?
“ ‘Wenn Pilatus trägt sein Hut Darum wird das Wetter gut. Trägt er aber seinen Degen Darum wird’s wohl sicher regnen.’(31)
“The Hut, or Hood, is a little cloud which settles on the summit only, but the sword is a long streak across the centre of the mountain, which bodes rain and all manner of bad weather. There are ominous stories, besides, of dragons and winged serpents, which were formerly seen to fly from Pilatus to the Rigi at night, leaving fiery tracks behind them, and tormenting the shepherds and their flocks.”
“Well! if ever there were an excuse for pantheism and belief in a spirit‐ world animating nature, it certainly would be in Switzerland! Everywhere I go the mountains, cloudy sunsets, the whole moving face of nature, speak a language ever varying in one sense, but uniform in leading one’s thoughts upwards.”
“Yes; and even in bad weather you would not tire of it! Pilatus is never so grand as when the storm‐clouds gather round his brow and roll down pitilessly on this very spot.”
“I should very much like to know whether the people keep up their piety now, and how they are likely to act in the coming religious storm,” I remarked.
“I have just had an interesting conversation on that very point with an old Lucerner,” said Mr. C——, who now rejoined us, and who, we noticed, had stopped to speak to some acquaintance on the promenade when we first started. “That was old H——, whom we met at Kissingen three years ago,” he continued, addressing his wife. “He has retired from his appointment, and returned to this his native town. He was rejoiced to see me, and offered his services; and, thinking he might be useful as a guide, I have begged him to call at our hotel in the morning. He gave me a most interesting account of matters here. They are all staunch Catholics, he says, except a few, who are lukewarm and seduced by the rationalism and liberalism of Olten and Berne. From these alone do they fear dissension. But they are not numerous. However, they tried last winter to get one of the churches given up to them. Fortunately, the town council is orthodox and firm, and Herr H—— is certain that Lucerne will be true to her name, and continue a light to her neighbors.”
“What a happy play on the word!” I remarked—“a genuine jeu de mot. She certainly merits the title in a material sense already, with that girdle of brilliant lamps shining like jewels along the quay.”
“It is not a jeu de mot of my invention,” answered Mr. C——. “The name is said to take its origin from the fact itself. Some of the Swiss towns, such as Chur and Geneva, date from the Roman times of Switzerland; but there are no traces of Roman buildings or settlements here. It is said, however, that even then there was a lantern or kind of light‐house at this spot for the boats on the lake, which was dignified by the Latin name of Lucerna, or light; and this, amidst the vicissitudes of centuries, has clung to it, and, as you say, is as suitable as ever. The town itself, like so many others, is the offspring of a monastery somewhere about the same time as St. Gall and Einsiedeln. But those old walls, with the quaint towers which still encircle it, are only from the XIIIth or XIVth century. The barbarians, you may remember, overran the continent several times in the IXth, Xth, and XIth centuries, pillaging and burning on all sides; but it was noticed that the walled towns escaped, for they did not understand the art of besieging them. One of the German emperors, therefore, issued orders that all the towns should erect fortifications, and that, in times of war, the rural population should take refuge within them. Basel was one of the first that was enclosed in Switzerland, being on the frontier. Then St. Gall, which had sprung up round the great monastery, and was also near the frontier; Zurich and Lucerne followed later. Lucerne has kept up the old Swiss character better than almost any other town, from its position near these forest cantons, which have more or less imbued it with their spirit. The forest cantons,” he continued, as if in answer to my inquiring look, “are those which border this lake, and give it the name of the ‘Lake of the Four Cantons!’ They are Schwytz, Uri, Unterwalden; and now Lucerne makes the fourth—the cradle of Switzerland and the noblest portion of its people. Lucerne has hitherto been a sort of outpost for them—their point of connection with the political world beyond; and so far it has always held stoutly by its old friends. I remember the religious civil war and the Sonderbund, between 1842 and 1848, and Lucerne was the head and front of all that movement. Those old towns, amongst their various tales, could tell many even of that period; for within their walls, as well as in some of the churches, 1,800 prisoners were confined after the first victorious resistance Lucerne offered the Protestant Volunteers. Amongst the number was a certain Dr. Steiger, said to be the leader of the Protestants. He lay in one of the towers, condemned to banishment and imprisonment by the tribunals of Lucerne, when one night he escaped, aided by three countrymen who were devoted to him, and finally fled to America. I well recollect what a sensation it made, especially when, a few days afterwards the great champion of the Catholics—a peasant—was found murdered in his cottage! Then these Catholics made a defensive league amongst themselves to resist the interference of the Protestant cantons in their religious affairs, and which they therefore called the Sonderbund. On this the opposite faction took their stand, asserting that its principle was contrary to the spirit of the Confederacy. It was a good watchword in any case wherewith to rouse their partisans, and they succeeded in this so completely that the Diet soon voted that the league ought to be put down by force. A large army was at once collected, and, surrounding these Catholic cantons as with a cordon, they very soon crushed them. How well I remember it all! Whether the experience is recollected here it is hard to say; but Herr H—— muttered something about their all being determined to stand up manfully for their faith, even if it should ultimately be necessary to fight for it.”
“Fighting for one’s faith is sublime, and stirs one’s deepest feelings,” I replied, “and that the spirit which induces it still exists, despite our prosaic, material age, we have seen by the Papal Zouaves, and also, united with love of country, in the Bretons, Vendêans, and others during the French and Prussian war. But it is impossible to combine the idea of fighting of any kind with this poetic scene, and I would rather go to sleep to‐night dreaming of nymphs and sprites than of war and prisons, or even of Pilate himself or any other gloomy visions in this fairyland. I fear I am ungrateful for all your information, in feeling almost sorry that we touched on these topics,” I said, laughing, as we reluctantly turned homewards late that evening.
I had spoken wisely. Most difficult it is to pacify one’s mind after such a conversation, and, between reflections on the past and speculations on the future of these Swiss Catholics, the night was far advanced before my eyes closed in sleep. Suddenly I was awakened by a full‐toned church‐bell booming across the waters. It might again be the Angelus; but looking at my watch, it was only a quarter before five o’clock, and moreover it was still dark. Then it must be some convent‐bell summoning the community to Matins and Prime. It was an uncharitable proceeding on their part, thought I, to waken up a whole town; and the peal kept on for the entire quarter of an hour. At half‐past five came another similar bell; and then, soon after, a chorus of full tones, like that which had greeted our arrival on the previous evening, rang out the Angelus from every church‐tower in the place, followed at six and half‐past six by others in our immediate vicinity. It was quite impossible to sleep; yet, tired though we were, the joyful sensation of awakening in a Catholic land reconciled us to the penalty it thus imposed. Up and out we should at once go in search of the Masses which these bells indicated. But there be no such hurry, said the hotel servants; for there would be eight o’clock Mass in the Hofkirche close by. Then we discovered that, so far from the quarter to five bell belonging to any convent, it was in truth rung in order to rouse the towns‐people to Mass at the S. Peterskirche—the first each day of the series which ended at eight o’clock at the Hofkirche. And then we recollected how the same custom prevails in Germany, according to the early habits of all German races; how hopeless it seems ever to be up and out before the inhabitants of a small German town; and how, in the Rhenish provinces for instance, the five o’clock Mass in summer, and the six o’clock in winter, are the most fully attended, even in the severe seasons of frost and snow.
We felt, therefore, like sluggards as we ascended the paved hill and mounted the steps leading up to the Hofkirche. It was a bright morning, and pleasant, good‐humored faces met us, as we paused to notice the exterior, so plain and unadorned compared to the beautiful Cathedral of Berne. But this seemed all the more suitable to the simple life of Lucerne, with which the fact of the church standing, as it does, in the midst of its cemetery, is in perfect harmony. A curious piece of mediæval sculpture, representing the Garden of Olives, is let into the wall of one of the towers, and we were examining it when to our surprise sounds of music from the inside reached us. But a greater surprise awaited us when, on entering the church, we found it perfectly full. A most devout congregation occupied every seat in the nave. On one side knelt the men, on the opposite the women. Whilst High Mass for the dead was being sung at an altar outside the choir‐screen, in front of which was placed the bier, Low Masses were going on at side altars near, and another at the high altar behind. Everywhere earnestness and devotion were perceptible; and a more striking contrast to our previous day’s experience in the Cathedral of Berne, where daily services were unknown, it would be utterly impossible to imagine. Yet what must such a morning have been there in the olden days; for even now external advantages are in its favor. The Lucerne church has far fewer claims to architectural beauty, and its general ornamentation is in the bad taste of the last century. But these faults were at the moment imperceptible to us, who had eyes only for the life and spirit pervading the crowd of worshippers that filled it. It is a fine church, however, in its own way, and quite in keeping with the character of the inhabitants. The choir is imposing, and the metal‐work of its screen excellent. There are old stained‐glass windows too; and a wood carving of the Death of Our Lady over a side altar would be perfect, were it not for the amount of gilding and gaudy coloring with which it has been loaded.
But the benches are the most characteristic point in the building. At one period they must all have been appropriated, though they are now free; for each division still retains a shield, on which is painted a coat‐of‐arms and the name of a citizen, or of his wife or widow, with the date of the year, going back in some cases to the beginning of the last century. When High Mass was over, the women in going out passed round by the bier, on which they sprinkled holy‐water, followed by the men, who seriously and piously performed the same act of fraternal charity. Thence we followed them to the small mortuary chapel outside, but so filled was it by a weeping group that we turned back and sauntered round the covered gallery, or cloister, which borders this beautiful Gottesacker, or “God’s acre,” as the Germans so truly call their cemeteries. Sauntering it certainly was; for it was difficult to move quickly, so many were the inscriptions, so well tended the hundreds of pretty graves. Marks of affection and remembrance were visible at every step in fresh wreaths and baskets of beautiful flowers, arranged with a taste and art that told what loving hearts must have guided the skilful hands that made them. Some good oil‐ paintings and handsome monuments also adorn this gallery; but the most attractive part of the whole burial‐ground is its eastern end. This is appropriated to diminutive graves and crosses, hung with white bows of ribbon and white flowers. We knew that in the Catholic Church there is a special service for infants—one of pure joy without a word of grief; but never before had we seen any particular spot set apart for these baptized little angels. Later, we found that it is a custom universal in the burial‐grounds of these Catholic cantons; but none that we afterwards saw ever struck us so much as this one of Lucerne.
The whole place, too, was full of stone stoups, provided with water and branches of blessed box, wherewith to sprinkle the graves. Foot‐passengers have a right of way from an upper road through this churchyard, and we saw many stop, as they passed, to perform this work of charity over a tomb, with a pious aspiration for the repose of the souls. “Have pity on me, my friends,” is a prayer well responded to in this touching Gottesacker, where the dead still dwell in the hearts of the living, truly under the shadow and protecting influence of the church and of the cross. The doctrines of the Catholic faith in the communion of saints and intercession for the holy souls in purgatory are here so practically carried out, that they must get intertwined with the tenderest feelings of each Lucerner, and developed in their best sense from childhood upwards, becoming their comfort and mainstay from the cradle to the grave.
And then in what a beautiful position this old church stands—at the head of the town, guarding its flock, and a beacon to the weary‐minded! From our guide‐book we learned that originally it had formed part of a Benedictine convent, and is dedicated to S. Leodegarius, or S. Leger. The very name of this saint takes us back to the furthest antiquity, to the earliest days of Christianity in these parts; for he was the great Bishop of Autun in the VIIth century whose sanctity and courage shone conspicuously during sixty years in the stormy times of the Clovis and Clotaire kings and of their maires du palais, until he was at last cruelly put to death by order of Ebroin, one of the most wicked of that tribe, and who governed in the name of the Frankish king, Theodoric. It tells, too, of those days when the present Switzerland, having been included in Charlemagne’s empire, was still fluttering between his successors in Burgundy and those in Germany; and how far the fame of saints and martyrs spread and made their mark on countries which, in those days of slow communication, were distant from their own. The convent itself must have been an old foundation, for the church was formed into a collegiate chapter in 1456, and the two existing towers belong to that period. The remainder, destroyed by fire in 1633, was rebuilt soon after in the unarchitectural style of that century. Probably we owe the cloisters round the cemetery and the massive parochial house near, also to the monastic period. Quite worthy, in any case, of Benedictine refinement was the view obtained from the open arches on one side of the cloisters. But alas for modern innovations! My friends remembered this as one of the most lovely points of view in Switzerland some fifteen years ago; but now the roof of that huge caravansary, the International Hotel, rises just high enough close in front to shut out, from all but two openings, everything save the sight of its own ungainliness. From these two, however, it is possible to judge what the world has lost, looking out over the lake and surrounding mountains; and we lingered long, drinking in the charms of this matchless landscape, which again presented itself under an aspect quite different from that of the preceding evening.
On returning to the hotel we found Mr. and Mrs. C—— deep in conversation with Herr H——, who had come according to appointment. He was a shrivelled‐ up, active, little old man of about seventy, formerly professor in a gymnasium in the north of Germany, but the aim of whose life had been to save a certain sum, in order to return and end his days in his own beloved Switzerland. This he had accomplished within the last two years. The C——s had taken a great fancy to the old man when they made his acquaintance at Kissingen, and he was now burning to be of some use to them. And a great help he proved in planning the next week’s excursions, so as to make them finish off at Einsiedeln on the 14th, the chief feast of that monastery. The day was perfectly lovely, and the atmosphere so clear that he pleaded hard to take us up to the Linden Avenue, a terrace walk, twenty‐five minutes off, and commanding a magnificent panorama. But we should see the mountains during the rest of our travels, we argued in reply, and our minds were so full of Wordsworth and Longfellow, and, through them, of the covered bridges of Lucerne, that we could hear of nothing else. Our party consisted of Mr. and Mrs. C——, their two daughters, and a good‐humored, boyish son of eighteen, besides my friend and myself; so at last a compromise was effected by dividing our forces. One daughter went with Mr. and Mrs. C—— to the Linden walk, while our new Swiss acquaintance politely offered to conduct our division over his native place.
Our first visit, as a matter of course, was to “the Lion,” the pride and glory of modern Lucerne! Turning off from the fussy, bustling quay, leaving excitement and noise behind, we wandered through quiet, winding streets that led to the former Zurich road, until, in a leafy recess containing a large basin filled by trickling water, on which the sun played through the foliage of the overhanging beech‐trees, this grand king of animals lay right before us, hewn out of the perpendicular face of the living rock. Overhead is carved the inscription, Helvetiorum fidei ac virtuti.(32) This monument, erected in memory of the Swiss guards who fell whilst defending Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette at Versailles, and on the 2d and 3d of September, 1792, was designed by the great Thorwaldsen, and executed by a Zurich sculptor, the expenses being defrayed by subscriptions from all parts of Switzerland. The lion is dying, the spear still in his side, a bundle of spears under him, but one paw still firmly clasping the Bourbon shield. It is colossal; the whole attitude full of strength, firmness, and sorrow—a sorrow inspiring such sympathy that the longer one looks the more human it appears. Yet it is not that hopelessly sad expression of his grand Chæronean prototype, which once having had the good‐fortune to see on the spot, I never can forget. But then what different events they commemorate! The Greek, the defeat of an over‐glorious nation, crushed to despair; this of Lucerne, the loss, but also the noble heroism, of a few of Switzerland’s sons only, who, if they could be so faithful in the cause of strangers, what might not be expected from them and their brethren in defence of their own hearths and homes! And as we stood transfixed to the spot, unwilling to stir, it was pleasant to hear from Herr H—— that foreign service of this sort has now ceased. At least no body of Swiss serve abroad together, except as the Pope’s guards, whose picturesque Michael‐Angelesque costumes must be remembered by every one that visited Rome in its palmy days. Formerly, not only did they serve as mercenaries in various countries, but there were regular treaties in force between the Swiss government and foreign sovereigns, authorizing the latter to recruit throughout the cantons. These, however, have been swept away, and this “Lion” is now the only link with those times. Close by is a chapel where, according to pious custom, Mass is now and then said for the departed heroes, and the altar cloth of which has been worked by the Duchesse d’Angoulême, one of Marie Antoinette’s two children, protected and saved by those very soldiers.
We had not prepared ourselves for this beautiful, poetic work of art, and hence it was perhaps doubly difficult to leave it; but time pressed, and Herr H—— led the way back to the brilliant quay. He was eloquent on its palatial hotels, and proud that in this particular Lucerne is so far ahead of all other Swiss towns, except perhaps Geneva. But still, he said, this did not compensate him for olden days. How different it had been in his boyhood, in the years prior to 1820, when the present Schweizerhof Quay did not exist! A long, covered wooden bridge, 1,300 feet in length, ran, in its stead, from the middle of the town, near the Swan Hotel, right across here to the foot of the Hofkirche. And then, to our intense regret, we discovered that this was the chief bridge mentioned by Wordsworth in his continental tour. He first speaks of the Hafellbrücke, still existing, and then goes on to say:
“Like portraiture, from loftier source, endears That work of kindred frame, which spans the lake Just at the point of issue, when it fears The form and motion of a stream to take; When it begins to stir, yet voiceless as a snake.
“Volumes of sound, from the cathedral rolled, This long‐roofed vista penetrate; but see, One after one, its tablets, that unfold The whole design of Scripture history; From the first tasting of the fatal tree, Till the bright star appeared in eastern skies, Announcing One was born mankind to free; His acts, his wrongs, his final sacrifice; Lessons for every heart, a Bible for all eyes.
“our pride misleads, our timid likings kill. Long may these homely works devised of old, These simple efforts of Helvetian skill, Aid, with congenial influence, to uphold The state, the country’s destiny to mould; Turning, for them who pass, the common dust Of servile opportunity to gold; Filling the soul with sentiments august— The beautiful, the brave, the holy, and the just.”
Then in a note he goes on to relate that the pictures on the “cathedral bridge amounted to 240, all from Scripture history; subjects from the Old Testament faced the passenger going to the cathedral, and those from the New as he returns.” What would he have said could he have foreseen such a speedy annihilation of his aspirations for their long maintenance, and especially when replaced by all that drives away remembrance of that “history” and tends to keep men’s thoughts fastened to earth instead of raised to heaven!
When our first disappointment was over, we learned from Herr H—— that this quay, now so venerable‐looking from its shady chestnuts, has been won from the lake, like the Thames embankment, within the last forty years. It has one advantage, namely: that the whole tourist‐life which brings such gain to Lucerne has been added on to it, without in any way interfering with the ordinary life of its inhabitants. Happily, it would be impossible to change the old part without sweeping it entirely away—a summary proceeding that no one would think of. The original town lies on a strip of land between the lake and encircling hills, and is composed of solidly‐built old houses in narrow streets, that are thoroughly sheltered, but without any view, and consequently unfit for tourist requirements. Air and landscape—the two essentials for the wealth‐bringing strangers—were fortunately found available in the large space gained from the lake, while the neighboring hills seemed as if especially created for the countless pensions that now cover them in every direction. “Travellers,” said Herr H——, “—travellers are the great desire of Lucerne. They supply the place of trade and manufactures, which we do not possess, except in a small way in the Krienz valley yonder. Both here and throughout all these forest cantons, the whole energies of the population are of late years directed to this object. You will find them building hotels in all directions as you travel through that district,” pointing to the upper end of the lake, which we were lingering to admire from the promenade. “It sometimes seems like over‐building, but the larger the houses, the more quickly they seem to fill. The crowds that swarm here from June to October, from every quarter of the globe, are quite marvellous. Since the French war, especially, the Germans come in shoals. It is becoming like another invasion of the northerners! I suppose we dare not call them Huns and Vandals,” he continued, laughing. “But I confess I fear their influence in the long run, for they are chiefly the population of the manufacturing and commercial towns of Prussia and the North, and even when they are not decidedly infidel, they are not overburdened with religion, and are perfectly indifferent to its observances. I was stopping up at the Kaltbad for a month this summer, and only a few out of 420 guests ever thought about Sundays. ‘Who does, when at a watering‐place?’ said some. There was no Protestant service, it is true, except the English, but still there might have been some difference made between it and other days; but, except amongst the Catholics, one could notice none, unless that the dinner was sometimes rather better than on week‐days. And even the foreign Catholics were often very lukewarm. It is a very bad example, to say the least, for the natives. Fortunately, however, the strangers mix with them very little, and they fall back into their customary life when these crowds go home about the end of September. Then all is changed. The country hotels shut up, and even here they dismiss their large staff of servants, and only keep a small portion of each house open. But they are looking forward to a great increase of winter business in Lucerne later, when the St. Gothard tunnel, which is now begun, shall be finished; though, of course, it will be nothing compared to the summer influx.”
“And what becomes of the poor servants?” I asked. “Are they turned adrift on the world?”
“Oh! dear, no. They are engaged for the hotels at Nice and Mentone, and all along the Riviera, in bodies of a hundred at a time. If you happen to go south in November, you will doubtless fall in with many a Kellner or a house‐maid you met up here in the summer. That is the form the Swiss foreign service has taken in our days of steam and easy communication. And very much they distinguish themselves. Both men and women are considered more honest and active than those of any other nation, and consequently are at a premium. That wonderful race of ‘Kellners’—a race apart—which goes by the generic name of German waiter, is largely composed of the Swiss element. Strangely enough, however, every waitress you meet, even in these districts, is certain to come from the canton of Berne. The women there have a spécialité in that line. The peasants of the Catholic cantons keep to the housemaid department, as a rule, and our Lucerne maidens become ladies’ maids or governesses in English families. And very well they turn out, too. Both in this town and in the rural cantons they are a solidly good, pious population. Very conservative also; in fact, most conservative, in spite of our staunch republicanism, and most united at the same time.”
It suddenly occurred to us to ask whose funeral we had seen that morning. “No doubt of some distinguished citizen?”
“No,” replied Herr H——, “not particularly distinguished; only an old and highly‐respected tradesman. Oh! no; that is an every‐day occurrence. All the neighbors consider it a duty to attend the High Mass and to pray for each other. I was there, amongst others, just before I went to the Beau Rivage Hotel; for, although I have spent so many years away from Lucerne, I knew this man from my earliest childhood, and he has been working all his life for every one you saw there this morning, so that the least we might do was to go and pray for the repose of his soul, poor fellow! They will do the same for each one of us in turn. Here is a column of advertisements, composed of nothing but ‘Thanks’ from relatives,” he said, drawing a Lucerne daily paper from out of his pocket, and amongst the number we read the following touching one:
“The widow and children of —— return their heartfelt thanks to all the kind friends who spontaneously attended the High Mass for, and the funeral of, their lamented husband and father on ——. They are not only grateful for this mark of respect, but they wish to assure these good neighbors that the loving sympathy and the kind manner in which it was offered by each, have done more to soften their grief than they can now express.”
“We are a small community,” continued Herr H——,“ only 14,500 inhabitants—simple folk, working our way on through life without any rich manufacturers or overgrown proprietors, as at Zurich, Berne, and Geneva, so there cannot be much rivalry or pretension. You will not find private villas or large châteaus round this lake—nothing, for instance, even like those handsome ones on the Lake of Thun; but we all hold together, and I only hope the young generation will continue to walk in the footsteps of their fathers.”
To Be Concluded Next Month.
Roger The Rich.(33)
A Ballad.
Dedicated, Without Permission, To Victor Emanuel.
God prospereth King Stephen! His sway is o’er the land. The Empress Maud hath bowed her head; Her knights are slain, her armies fled, Herself beneath his hand! God prospereth King Stephen! The land is all his own. From north to south, from east to west, The whole wide kingdom is at rest— Firm sits he on his throne. God prospereth King Stephen! Yet he hath cast his eye On the rich lands of Sherbourn, spread O’er many a hill and kie‐cropt mead, And many a bosky lea. King Stephen sware a grimly oath— God wis he kept it true: “Since Roger Niger (bishop then) Hath led against us armèd men, Roger shall dearly rue!” Roger hath lands and riches too, Marks forty thousand told; And well I wot the monarch’s vow Hath less to do with justice now Than with the bishop’s gold. Roger hath to Devizes ta’en His wealth with all his speed; Stout men‐at‐arms, and billmen true, And bowmen armed with sturdy yew, Attend him in his need. Now he hath stored his fortelace well With beeves and sheep and grain. He standeth on his topmost tower; And sayeth in the pride of power, The king shall knock in vain! What, O my knights! the monarch cries, Shall he thus brave our wrath? Shake forth our banner to the blast, And gather round us, liegemen fast; We’ll sweep him from our path! The king, with mighty following, Hath sat before the tower; But massy walls and valiant hearts Have nobly played their several parts— The bishop mocks his power! And loudly sware King Stephen then A fearful oath to hear: “Build me a gallows‐tree before The haughty prelate’s guarded door; This yet shall cost him dear.” Now they have built the gallows‐tree, And raised it in the air— Its height is forty feet and three, A laidly thing it is to see— And led his nephew there. Roger the bishop stands and sees Young Roger led to die— The nephew he had reared with care, His only sister’s son and heir: A tear steals from his eye. Now he hath turned him to his knights; His words are sad and low: “God wot I am an old man now; He layeth sorrow on my brow, He willeth I should go. My nephew hath his course to run, And mine is near its close. I straight will render up my lands, My gold shall pass from out mine hands— I’ll yield me to my foe! But as God lives he prospereth not King Stephen’s arms again; His latest triumph he hath won. Henceforth his is a setting sun; His efforts shall be vain! God prospereth not King Stephen now— The Empress Maud hath fled; Fitz‐Empress Henry snatcheth now The golden circlet from the brow, The glory from his head. God prospereth not King Stephen’s arms— Anjou is in the field, And Winchester and Gloucester band To wrest the sceptre from his hand, And vanquished he must yield. God prospereth not King Stephen’s cause— Henry is named his heir; Still may he sit upon the throne Weakness forbids him call his own, In sorrow and despair. God prospereth not his family— Eustace, his only son, Pines from that moment, droops his head, And, withering like a flower, is dead, And his last prop is gone. God prospereth not King Stephen’s health— His heart is stricken sore; Sleep shunneth now his eyes by night; His days are stricken with a blight; He smileth now no more. And still ’tis said God prospereth not The holder of those lands, And Sarum’s heirs ne’er live to claim The heritage of land and name— It slippeth from their hands; For one, ’tis said, hath fallen by chance; Another falls in strife; A father’s hand unwitting smote Another scion through the throat; Law claims another’s life. God prospereth not that family— Two hundred years have sped, And still the bishop’s curse clings fast, As fell and fatal to the last As when those words were said. Then the Third Edward rendered back Unto the church its own, And the broad lands to Robert gave (Thou’lt see it figured on his grave); And now the curse is gone!
The Poem Of Izdubar
M. FRANÇOIS LENORMANT, in continuing the publication of his Essay on the Propagation of the Phœnician Alphabet in the Ancient World, and in editing a Selection of Cuneiform Texts, has just issued two volumes of important and interesting studies on Primitive Civilizations.(34)
The steps of this learned writer in the almost unknown regions which he explores so fearlessly, and usually with so much success, are not always perfectly sure; but, with a good faith so natural to him that it does not seem to cost him even an effort, he knows how to retrace his path and correct whatever may require rectification.
Les Premières Civilisations, several portions of which have been published in various collections, reappears developed and raised to the present level attained by scientific discovery. The work opens by a notice of prehistoric archæology and fossil man, the monuments of the neolithic period, and the invention of the use of metals and its introduction into the West. Studies on Egypt follow, including the Poem of Pentaour and the Romance of the Two Brothers. The second volume, with the exception of the “Legend of Cadmus, and the Phœnician Establishments in Greece,” is entirely devoted to Chaldæa, presenting us with a Chaldæan Vêda, or collection of liturgical and devotional hymns in honor of the principal gods worshipped on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates; the biography of a Babylonian prince of the VIIIth century before our era, Merodach Baladan, with whose name the Bible has already made us acquainted;(35) and, lastly, the Babylonian epic poem of Izdubar. It is this last work of which the range is the most general and the value the greatest in connection with the comparative history of the Semitic races, their national genius, and their religious ideas. It touches, amongst other things, upon three points which it is important to put particularly in relief, on account of the manner in which the inferences resulting from them strengthen the ground of Christian apologists—namely, the myths of one of the most important branches of the race of Sem (or, to speak accurately, the race that was equally descended from Sem and Cham), the Assyrio‐Chaldæan belief in the immortality of the soul, and the origin of the signs of the Zodiac. There is also a fourth point—that of the tradition of the Deluge.
It has been repeatedly maintained by the sceptic, M. Renan, and is in fact one of his favorite ideas, that the Semites were radically incapable of producing an epic poem. He refuses everything to this race—imagination, the power of invention, the knowledge of the experimental method, philosophy, and science. One thing alone he accords to them—the monotheistic instinct. Now, the cuneiform tablets demonstrate that the sciences, especially those of astronomy and mathematics, held a very considerable place in the intellectual pursuits of the Babylonians and Assyrians. The poem of Erech, published by Mr. G. Smith, is sufficient of itself alone, by means of the fragments which are known to us, to reduce to nothing all the assertions in his history of the Semitic languages, in which M. Renan affirms that “the imagination of the Semitic races has never gone beyond the narrow circle traced around it by the exclusive idea of the divine greatness. God and man, in presence of each other, in the bosom of the desert—behold the summary, or, as it is termed in the present day, the formula, of all their poetry.”(36) Assuredly one never found one’s self less in the desert in presence of God alone and of man alone than in the Semitic poems of Chaldæa.
The veritable name of the hero on the banks of the Euphrates, sung by Homer, has remained unknown to this day. It is constantly found written in ideographic characters, which, pronounced phonetically, give the three syllables Iz‐du‐bar; but we know that they were pronounced in quite a different manner by the Assyrio‐Chaldæans. We are equally certain, from the testimony of other cuneiform inscriptions, that this Izdubar was one of the gods of Chaldæa. Nevertheless, he figures here as a simple hero, and, according to M. Lenormant, is probably Nemrod, “the mighty hunter,” as he is called in the Book of Genesis, alluding to a popular saying, of which the remembrance is still preserved in Assyria, as well as in Palestine, and also in the Egyptian tradition. The historical inscriptions of Assurbanipal name Resen, one of the cities of Assyria, “the town of the hunter.”(37)
The Izdubar of the Babylonian inscription, like the Nemrod of the Bible, reigns over four cities,(38) three of which, named in Genesis, are certainly identical with those mentioned on the tablet, and which therefore furnish an argument in favor of the supposition. But however that may be, Izdubar, whose name signifies “God of fire,” “God of the body or mass of fire,” is without doubt the ancient Arcadian God of fire whose worship had so great an importance in the primitive epochs; and this idea throws much light on the Babylonian poem, to which it, in some sort, furnishes the key. This poem is divided into twelve cantos, if we may so call them, each forming a distinct episode and inscribed in a separate tablet. Sir Henry Rawlinson has proved that each canto relates to one of the twelve signs of the zodiac, and to one of the twelve months of the year. The god of fire is thus represented as being one with the sun, and the entire epic consists of a poetical history of the annual revolution of that luminary, and its accomplishment in the course of twelve months, around which revolution various incidental episodes have been grouped, amongst others the narrative of the Deluge. The dénouement of the poem is the cure of Izdubar, who, at the instigation of the man saved from the Deluge, plunges into the sea, from whence he issues delivered from a sort of leprosy which had threatened his life. M. Gubernatis remarks that this is identical with the Vedic myth of Indra, and also the Hellenic one of Tithonus. Leprosy is invariably the malady of kingly heroes, and signifies old age, which, according to popular belief, could only be cured either by the waters of youth or by the blood of a child. The old solar hero, the dying sun, sprang forth with renewed youth in the morning, after traversing the sea of night—a symbol which would naturally possess an additional force to the nations who beheld the departing sun‐god sink beneath the Western sea. The Chaldæan epic presents us, therefore, with the same mythological groundwork as the other polytheistic religions with regard to the worship of fire and of the sun—a groundwork presenting a point of contact among the Semitic, Aryan, and Egyptian races which it is necessary to bear in mind in tracing the comparative histories of the descendants of the sons of Noe.
The details of the Babylonian poem exhibit a mythology as multitudinous as that of India or of Greece; the adventures also of Izdubar for the most part closely resemble those of the classic heroes. He is a great conqueror, who wins immortality by his splendid exploits and his mighty labors, some of which remind one of those of Hercules. We see him successively capture the winged ox, and put an end to the ravages of a sea monster to which is given the name of Boul—two exploits almost identical with those of Perseus. As in Egypt the sun, under the name of Osiris, is the husband of Isis, the personification of the productive power, and sometimes the moon, so in Chaldæa the sun, Izdubar, espouses Istar, the moon, who is also the Assyrian Venus, and daughter of the god Sin. Istar is, however, at this period, already a widow, having lost her first spouse, whose name signifies “Son of Life.”
In the poem of Erech a great number of other deities appear, together with Istar. Besides her father, Sin, who is god of the months, we have firstly Anou, the Oannes of the Greeks, and the first personage of the supreme triad; then the second member of this triad, Bel, the demiurge; and lastly the third, Ao, Nesroch,(39) or Nouah. Around these great divinities are grouped Adar, the god of the planet Saturn; Samas, god of the sun; Nabo,(40) god of the planet Mercury, and his companion, Sarou; Bin, god of the atmosphere and tempest; Nergal, of the planet Mars; besides a vast army of Annunaki, or secondary genii; of Guzalu, or destroying spirits, and others of inferior race and power. These deities did not agree among themselves any better than did the gods of the Greek Olympus. Their heaven appears to have been anything but an abode of peace or love; and in heaven or hell they quarrelled alike. Istar seems especially to have distinguished herself by her unaccommodating disposition.
It is believed that the account of the journey of Istar into hell (for the story of such a journey in the Odyssey and the Æneid had also its precursor in Chaldæa) formed one of the episodes of the poem of Izdubar, although the tablet containing it has not yet been discovered; but we possess it on another fragment, and one which is of great value, as it furnishes an incontestable proof of the belief of the Assyrio‐Chaldæans in the immortality of the soul. The abode of the dead is called the “immutable land,”(41) and corresponds to the Hades of the ancient Greek poets. It is divided into seven circles, after the model of the celestial spheres, and is depicted as follows by the Chaldæan poet: “Towards the unchangeable land; the region [from whence none return]; Istar, the daughter of Sin, her ear—has turned: the daughter of Sin [has turned] her ear,—towards the dwelling of the dead, the throne of the god Ir ...,—towards the abode into which he has entered, and whence he has not come forth,—towards the way of his own descent, by which none return:—towards the dwelling whereinto he has entered, the prison,—the place where [the dead] have naught but dust wherewith [to appease] their hunger; and mud for nourishment:—from whence the light is not seen, and in darkness they dwell where shades (ghosts), like birds, fill the vaulted space,—where, above the uprights and lintel of the portal the earth is upheaped.”(42) Allusion is also made several times to this “unchangeable land” in other poems in the collection of Assurbanipal, as well as to spirits who wander back to earth, and dead who return to torment the living. In a note on the religious belief of the Assyrians Mr. Fox Talbot publishes two prayers composed to ask for eternal life to be granted to the king. The meaning of the first is not perfectly clear, but of the second, which is very explicit, we give the most important passage: “After the gift of the present days, in the festivals of the land of the silver sky, in the shining courts, in the abode of benedictions, in the light of the fields of felicity, may he live an eternal life, sacred in the presence of the gods of Assyria.”(43) Also, in a hymn to the god Marduk, are traces of a belief in the resurrection of the dead. This deity is repeatedly called “the merciful, who restores the dead to life.”
Thus, then, the Semites believed in the immortality of the soul; but monotheism was far from being a privilege of their race, by which it would be possible to explain the origin of the Judaic religion without providential intervention and regulation; and thus we see the Chaldæan poets combat along the whole line the assertions of M. Renan respecting their belief and genius alike. Never did facts with more pitiless emphasis give the lie to the learned; and it seems as if the historian of the Semetic languages had had a secret presentiment of humiliations which would result to him from a more generally extended study of Assyriology, when at its outset, about fifteen years ago, he attacked it with a determination which has not been forgotten.(44)
Another historical fact which may be gathered from the Babylonian epic is the mythological signification of the signs of the zodiac. The cuneiform inscriptions have already shown us that not only was Asia the cradle of the human race, but that it was also the primitive nursery of civilization. It can no longer be doubted that it was from thence, instead of, as has been supposed, from Egypt, that Greece herself received indirectly her first lessons in the arts, as it was also from thence that she received her metals. It is equally in Chaldæa that we find the origin of astronomy and of the zodiacal signs; the nomenclature of the latter, as it remains at the present day, differing in no essential point from that established by the Babylonian astronomers, although its value and signification have hitherto been very obscure. This obscurity has been dissipated by The Poem of Izdubar, which shows that the ancient Assyrian mythology bestowed on the signs their figures and their names. The myths relating to each of the months formed the subjects of the twelve episodes of the poem. Thus, for instance, the second narrated the capture of the winged bull; and the second month is designated as “the month of the propitious bull,” and has Taurus for its sign. Again, the sixth song related the marriage of Istar with Izdubar, and began with the goddess’ message to the hero: the sixth month is called “the month of the message of Istar,” and has for its sign the archeress, of which we have made Virgo, the virgin, who, according to the attestation of the prism of Assurbanipal, was the goddess Istar herself. The eleventh tablet is consecrated to the god Bin, “the inundator—he who pours abroad the rain,” and the sign of that month is the shedder of water, or the vase pouring it forth. Thus crumbles away the whole chronological scaffolding raised by the school of Dupuis, according to whom the zodiacal signs were only to be explained as having direct relation to agricultural labors, and the phases of the seasons to be regarded in reference to the productions of the earth—an interpretation which made it necessary to withdraw the origin of man to an enormously distant period of the past, in order to reach a time in which, owing to the precession of the equinoxes, the presence of the sun in the sign Taurus should coincide with the season of ploughing. All these calculations were equally fanciful with those founded on the famous zodiac of Denderah, and it is now ascertained beyond all reasonable doubt that the zodiacal signs have a religious or rather mythological, and not an agricultural, origin.
—The above is in great part translated from an article by M. Gregoire in the Revue des Questions Historiques, for April, 1874.
New Publications.
LIFE OF ANNE CATHARINE EMMERICH. By Helen Ram. London: Burns & Oates. 1874. (New York: Sold by The Catholic Publication Society.)
Many of our readers must have read that part of the record of Catharine Emmerich’s visions by Clement Brentano which has been translated into English. Those who have been pleased and edified by them will be delighted with this life of the holy and highly favored ecstatic virgin. It is a charming and wonderful life, especially that portion which relates the history of Anne Catharine’s miraculous infancy and childhood. The volume makes one of F. Coleridge’s series, which we have frequently had occasion to praise. We have been surprised to see in the pages of a book issued under the supervision of so accurate and careful an editor a number of inaccuracies in style and typographical errors.
BRIC‐A‐BRAC SERIES—NO. 2: ANECDOTE BIOGRAPHIES OF THACKERAY AND DICKENS. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. 1874.
These recollections and anecdotes of the two favorite English writers of fiction are very readable, and those which relate to Thackeray especially interesting.
THE YOUNG CATHOLIC’S ILLUSTRATED SCHOOL SERIES, comprising: The Young Catholic’s Illustrated Primer, Speller, First Reader, Second Reader, Third Reader, and Fourth Reader. New York: The Catholic Publication Society, 9 Warren St. 1874.
Every effort which is likely, in any way, to help on the great work of Catholic education, has of course our entire sympathy. Humanly speaking, the destiny of the church in the United States is to be determined by the education which we give to our children, and the almost universal recognition of this truth by the Catholics of America is, we are persuaded, the most certain evidence that we have really made progress. It is only within a comparatively recent time that we have come to fully realize the inevitable and fatal results of allowing our children to frequent the public schools, and to thoroughly understand that the common‐ school system of education, based, as it is, upon the implied assumption of the untruth of positive religion, logically and in fact leads to infidelity or to what is scarcely less an evil—religious indifference. The church without the school‐house is incomplete, and can at best do but half work; and we consequently find that almost all of our bishops are now beginning to demand that every parish shall have its parochial school.
We have been at some pains to examine the returns made by the different diocesan authorities to the publishers of the Catholic Almanac, and we find that last year there were in the whole country about three hundred and eighty thousand children attending our Catholic schools. This is probably less than half the number of Catholic children of school age in the United States; still, we are already doing enough to show that Catholic primary education must be recognized as one of the institutions of the country, and that those who have control of it should set to work without delay to give it a thorough organization. It is well to teach our people that the public schools are dangerous to the faith and morals of their children; it is far better to render them useless by bringing our own up to the standard of excellence which the more abundant means and opportunities of the state have enabled it to give to its educational establishments. There are, we know, many parochial schools which are in every respect equal to those of the state; but under the present system everything is left to the zeal and energy of the pastor. What we want is a system which will cause every parochial school to come up to the requirements of a prescribed standard of excellence. In a word, the necessity of the times demands the organization of Catholic education.
Each diocese should have its school boards and its official examiners and visitors. Annual diocesan school reports should be published, accompanied by remarks on the defects observed in the practical management of the schools and in the methods of teaching.
Out of these diocesan school boards and school reports in due time a national Catholic school system would grow into vigorous life. More of this another time; at present we are glad to take note of the greater desire for excellence in our elementary schools, shown by the demand for improved class‐books.
As our system of education is distinctively Catholic, it of course requires Catholic text‐books—books composed with a special view to the principles which underlie the Catholic theory of pedagogy.
This truth has been recognized by the bishops of the United States, who, both in the First and Second Plenary Councils of Baltimore, made this one of the subjects of their thought.
That The Catholic Publication Society, which has done so much to elevate the tone of our literature, has felt authorized to begin the issue of a complete series of such works, is undoubtedly an indication of the general feeling among Catholics of the want of improved class‐books, especially for our elementary schools, which are by far the most important, since they more directly concern the welfare of the masses of our people.
Whilst we are grateful for what has been done in this matter, we cannot shut our eyes to the many defects of most of the text‐books now in use. We have before us the Young Catholic’s Illustrated Primer, Speller, First, Second, Third, and Fourth Readers; and we have read and examined them with conscientious care, and we have at the same time compared them with similar publications of other houses, and we therefore feel competent to speak of their merits, if not with authority, at least with knowledge. That they should be superior to any other books of the kind is only what we had the right both to expect and to demand, and that they are has already been generally recognized by the Catholic press of the country.
In the choice and arrangement of the matter we discern admirable good sense and tact; in the illustrations, which are very numerous and nearly all original, being explanatory of the text, excellent taste; whilst in the mechanical execution we perceive the skilful workmanship that usually characterizes the books of The Catholic Publication Society.
The series is graded in strict accordance with scientific principles of education, and combines all that is important in the word and phonic methods of teaching, without, however, excluding the a, b, c drill. Books must always remain the indispensable instruments for imparting instruction in school, and hence it is of the greatest moment that the pupil should from the very start be attracted to them. Most children enter school eager to learn; the craving for knowledge is a divine instinct implanted in their hearts by the Author of their being, which they have already in a thousand ways sought to satisfy by their fruitless efforts to penetrate the mystery of beauty with which Nature surrounds them. When they enter school this intellectual activity should be stimulated, not repressed. The books first placed in their hands should be simple, offering many attractions and few difficulties, presenting to their minds under new forms the objects with which observation has already rendered them familiar, and which they now first learn to associate with printed words. These truths have been felt and acted upon by the compilers of the “Young Catholic’s Series,” which, in simplicity, in correct gradation, in beauty and attractiveness, far surpasses anything of the kind that has yet been offered to the Catholic English‐speaking public.
Another truth which can never be lost sight of in Catholic education is that religion should be the vital element of the whole process of instruction.
“Give me a lesson in geography,” said Mr. Arnold, “and I will make it religious.” This is what Catholics desire: that the light of religion should burnish as with fine gold all human knowledge. Indeed, in primary education religion is almost the only subject of real thought, the only power able to touch the heart, to raise the mind, and to evoke from brutish apathy the elements of humanity, and more especially the reason. As religion is the widest and deepest of all the elements of civilization, it ought to be the substratum and groundwork of all popular education.
“Popular education,” says Guizot, “to be truly good and socially useful, must be fundamentally religious.”
In the compilation of text‐books this is precisely the point which demands the greatest amount of good sense and the most consummate tact. Religion must run through the whole fabric like a thread of gold. It must form the atmosphere in which the pupil breathes; it must give coloring to everything, and everything must in one way or another be made to prove and explain its dogmas, and yet there must be no cant, no attempt at preaching, no dull moralizing, and above all no stupidity.
To accomplish all this, our readers will readily believe, is not an easy task, and yet we have no hesitation in saying that if they will take the trouble to examine thoroughly the “Young Catholic’s Series,” they will agree with us in the opinion that it can stand the test of even this standard of excellence.
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We learn that the Holy Father has sent a letter of commendation to the writer of “Italian Confiscation Laws” in THE CATHOLIC WORLD for Oct., 1873, and ordered a translation of the article.
THE CATHOLIC WORLD. VOL. XX., NO. 116.—NOVEMBER, 1874
Church Chant Versus Church Music.
An interesting colloquy took place in our mind as we finished the perusal of the paper entitled “Church Music” which appeared in the August and September numbers of THE CATHOLIC WORLD. We transcribe it as faithfully as our memory serves us.
SCENE—The cloister of a Benedictine monastery. Time, Anno Domini 1000. A number of monks rehearsing for a festival.
GREGORIUS, the choir‐master dictating from an open Gradual. “Listen, my brothers all. To‐morrow is the festival of S. Polycarp the martyr and the name‐day of our good father, the abbot. On such a joyous festival we must not fail to make his heart right glad with our chanting. Let us begin the Introit. (Sings.) ‘Gaudeamus omnes in Domino, diem festum celebrantes.’ ”
(All the monks repeating in chorus) “Gaudeamus omnes in Domino, diem—”
(_They are interrupted by a loud knocking at the floor leading from the cloister. Brother Gregorius, on opening it, is confronted by an aged stranger with a long, white, flowing beard, bearing in his hand a roll of printed music, on which the words __“__Boston,__”__ __“__Ditson__”__ and the date __“__1874__”__ can be discerned._)
GREGORIUS. “Salve, frater.”
AGED STRANGER. “Prof. Hubanus, at your service; and having come from a great distance, and happily being born at a much later date, I guess you will find my services on this eve of your joyous festival of some value, for I am well acquainted with all the best Masses published. By the way, is one of the brethren lately departed this life?”
GREGORIUS (with astonishment). “No, God be praised! Brother Augustine yonder did leave the infirmary vacant this morning, thanks to Our Blessed Lady, that no voice might be wanting in the choir on the morrow; but wherefore the question, good domne Hubanus?”
HUBANUS. “Because I heard you but just now rehearsing such a sorrowful, in fact, so lugubrious, a morceau—an Offertory piece, I presume, for a Requiem Mass—that I supposed you were getting up the music for some such occasion.”
(The monks regard the aged stranger with no little surprise, mingled with curiosity.)
GREGORIUS. “We must have made indeed sad work of it in our rehearsing. Worthy Hubanus, it was the Gaudeamus you heard.”
HUBANUS. “The Gaudeamus, eh? (Aside. I don’t remember seeing that in Ditson’s catalogue. I wonder what it is. To Gregorius.) Would you mind repeating it once more?”
GREGORIUS. “With pleasure. Sing, my brothers.” (They sing the whole Introit.)
HUBANUS. “Ah! fine; quite solemn! A Gregorian chant, I perceive. A very plaintive movement. The finale has an exceedingly mournful effect. In D minor, is it not? Still, for a Requiem Offertory I think Rossini’s Pro Peccatis, or Gounod’s Ave Maria, or ‘Angels ever Bright and Fair,’ for a change, would please the congregation better.”
ALL THE MONKS. “Plaintive! Our Gaudeamus mournful! Calls an Introit an Offertory piece! Like a Requiem Offertory indeed! An Ave Maria for that too! What does he mean by D minor? (Blessing themselves.) Ab omni malo, libera nos, Domine!”
HUBANUS. “Oh! beg pardon. That is an Introit, is it? Indeed! But, as I said, I have the honor to be born at a much later date than yourselves, and we don’t bother ourselves with singing those things in my day and country. We bring out the finest music, however, in our choir of the Church of S. Botolph, in the United States, that you can hear. I’m the organist and director.”
GREGORIUS. “Not sing the Introit! Why, good domne Hubanus, our grand and joyous festival on the morrow would be robbed of one of its chief features if we failed to sing the Gaudeamus—I mean the Gaudeamus that you have just heard.”
HUBANUS. “ ‘De gustibus non est disputandum.’ Hem! excuse my indulging in the classics; those old Latin fellows say a good deal in a few words, you know. But you don’t seriously mean to say that such monotonous stuff—excuse my plain speaking on your plain singing—is fit for a joyous festival? As my friend, Dr. ——, says in his late paper on ‘Church Music,’ ‘to hear Gregorian chant for a long time, and nothing else, becomes extremely monotonous, and burdens the ear with a dull weight of sound not always tolerable.’ He says, moreover, that ‘this is admitted by all who in seminaries and monasteries have been most accustomed to hear it.’ ”
GREGORIUS. “Your learned friend did not seek our judgment, I assure you, and I am at a loss to know who could have made so silly an admission to him.”
HUBANUS. “But do you not ‘resort to every device,’ as he says again, ‘to escape its monotony on festival days, by harmonies on the chant which are out of all keeping with it,’ and so forth?”
GREGORIUS. “We do not, I trust. What little harmony we sing is in strict keeping with the mode of the chant; and as to escaping anything, we know the rubrics, domne Hubanus, and respect them, and, what is more, we observe them.”
HUBANUS. “On that score I have the advantage of you; for it doesn’t require much knowledge of what you call rubrics to bring out a Mass and grand Vespers with us. However, this question of plain chant is settled long ago. It ought to have been settled long before you were born. For, as Dr. —— continues in his paper, ‘No one will deny the appropriateness and impressiveness of plain chant on certain solemn occasions, especially those of sorrow; but it is confessedly unequal to the task of evoking and expressing the feelings of Christian joy and triumph.’ Ah! Brother Gregorius, you should have been born later.”
GREGORIUS. “Then we monks, and the generations of the faithful throughout the world, have for the past thousand years been shut out from the feelings of Christian joy and triumph, have we? Verily, either we or you can have known very little of one or of the other, as the observation of your learned doctor may happen to be true or not. Did the church put a lie into the mouths of her cantors when she bade them sing, ‘Repleatur os meum laude tua, alleluia; ut possim cantare, alleluia; gaudebunt labia mea, dum cantavero tibi, alleluia, alleluia’?”(45)
HUBANUS. “You are a trifle sarcastic, Brother Gregorius; but I willingly pardon it, for I’m a plain‐spoken man myself, and call a spade a spade. Besides, you know, you can always fall back on the ‘De gustibus’—a quotation I often find very convenient; but I warrant me your prima donna doesn’t find much satisfaction in exhibiting her fine soprano on your dull chant, which you must confess, with Dr. ——, ‘is of limited, very limited, range,’ and in my opinion as poor in expression as a kettle‐ drum.”
GREGORIUS. “I crave your pardon, worthy sir. You are a stranger and quite aged—”
HUBANUS (interrupting). “Eighteen hundred and seventy‐four.”
GREGORIUS (continuing)—“as the length and whiteness of your beard proclaim, while we have only the experience of one thousand years, the lessons of the church, and the taste as well as the examples of the saints to profit by; but we must confess that of a prima donna we have never yet heard.”
ALL THE MONKS (very decidedly). “Never!”
HUBANUS. “Never heard of a prima donna! Why, when were you born? I mean, of course, the chief lady soprano who sings in the choir.”
(Here all the monks burst out laughing.)
GREGORIUS (having got his breath). “Come, come, my ancient stranger, that explains all. We knew you must be ‘chaffing’ us, from the very first, with your ‘mournful Gaudeamus’ and your never singing Introits or obeying the rubrics and the rest. Ha! ha! Truly, a ‘chief lady in the choir’—prima donna, I think you named such a mythical personage—was only needed to cap the climax of your excellent joke.”
HUBANUS. “Joke! I’m not joking at all. We have ladies in our choir—(aside) and it’s no joke to manage them either—(to Gregorius) and pay them good salaries, as you must; for without that, you know, you never can have good music.”
(_Here the laughing of the monks suddenly subsided, followed by loud and angry whispers, of which the __ word __“__heretic__”__ was unmistakably heard. Brother Gregorius interposed._) “Judge not too hastily, good brothers. True, no church which oweth obedience to our Holy Father; the Pope, and which hath a right therefore to call itself Catholic, did ever yet permit women to sing in church choirs; but what she might have done in this matter in the country from which this aged stranger comes—be it ever so contrary to all the rubrics and traditions known unto us—we will the better learn from his own lips. Women, then, good domne Hubanus, do sing in the choir in the Catholic churches of your strange land, standing, perchance, beside the men‐singers?”
HUBANUS. “Where else would they stand? You see we put the sopranos and tenors on one side, and the altos and basses on the other.”
GREGORIUS (scratching his shaven crown in great perplexity). “We have yet to learn many wonderful things! Canst tell me, worthy Hubanus, how comes it? Does your learned friend, Dr. ——, speak of this matter in his celebrated ‘paper’? Doubtless he mentions some decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites which hath allowed this—this (another scratch) unheard‐of novelty?”
HUBANUS. “I cannot remember that he made any allusion to it. In fact, I fancy that he would rather not, and I am glad he didn’t. But where’s the use of making a fuss over it? Haven’t women got voices as well as men, and what did the Lord give them voices for, if he did not intend them for use?”
GREGORIUS. “In the choir?”
HUBANUS. “In the choir, or out of the choir, what’s the difference?”
GREGORIUS. “Do the rubrics allow it?”
HUBANUS. “Ma foi! I do not know. (Aside.) I hope they do, if old fogies like you are going to stir up that question. (To Gregorius.) No lady‐singers! If that were to happen, my occupation, as well as theirs, would be like Othello’s—gone. For hark you, Brother Gregorius, although I know but little of your old‐fashioned, barbarous chant—can’t read a note of it, to tell the truth—if women‐singers are banished from the choir, music goes with them. The music I like requires the female voice. I wouldn’t waste my time with a parcel of boys and on such music as they can sing.”
GREGORIUS. “What music is this of which you speak so often? Hath the church adopted a new style of melody which is not chant?”
HUBANUS. “No, not adopted precisely, but there is a new music—everybody knows it—written by Mozart, Haydn, Mercadante, Peters, and several others, which organists and choirs make use of in our day. Some prefer one, some another, according to taste. ‘De gustibus,’ you know.”
GREGORIUS. “Yet tell me—for here the strangeness of your news almost surpasses belief—how dare the organists and choirs make use of any melody in accompanying the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and absolving the Divine Office which has not been adopted, or at least distinctly sanctioned, by holy church, to whom it appertains to dispose the ordering even of the most minute rubric in these important matters concerning the due praise of God and the sure edification of the people?”
HUBANUS. “All I can say is, we do it. It is tolerated in some places, and my friend in his paper quotes some ‘Instructions’ which the cardinal vicar in Rome issued to his own clergy to prove the toleration; but, to my thinking, they sound very much like the careful mother’s permission to her boy who asked leave to learn to swim—‘Certainly, my child, but don’t you never go near the water, leastways any water that is over your ankles.’ ”
GREGORIUS. “I think I understand, for I have heard our good father, the abbot, say that ‘he who would be well carried must not drive with too stiff a rein’; and my holy novice‐master, Father Ambrose—to whose soul may God grant rest!—did oft chide my hasty judgment upon my fellow‐novices, saying in his sweet way, and after the manner of his wise speech, ‘Thou wouldst _re_form monks, good Brother Gregorius, before they are formed. All they need is a little instruction.’ At present every one is well pleased with your music?”
HUBANUS. “Oh! that is quite another question. Dr. —— himself does not seem to think so, for he says in his paper: ‘In consequence of the failure of modern composers to meet the requirements of Catholic devotion, though their music has been introduced into our churches and given every chance of trial, complaints against it are heard on every side. We grumble about it in our conversations; we write against its excesses in the public journals; bishops complain of it in pastoral letters; provincial councils are forced to issue decrees about it; the Sovereign Pontiffs themselves not unfrequently raise their voices, sometimes in warning, sometimes in threats—in a word, the evil seems to have attracted a good deal of attention.’ ”
ALL THE MONKS. “Ab omni malo, libera nos, Domine!”
GREGORIUS. “His account of your music—which you seem, nevertheless, to prize so much more highly than our dear holy chant, which hath the undoubted sanction of the church—gives pretty plain evidence that the church hath not adopted it in any wise. It rather suggests the thought that she would gladly be rid of it altogether, abstaining, however, like Father Ambrose, from reforming musicians before they are formed, and resolving, as he did often pleasantly say, to my comfort, ‘Thou shalt see, Brother Gregorius, that I shall make no change in our holy Rule.’ ”
HUBANUS. “One would think you were born later, after all; for it would appear that our Holy Father, Pius the Ninth—pity you haven’t lived to know him, Brother Gregorius, for he is the dearest pope that has ruled the church since the days of S. Peter—is in the van among the leaders of the ‘Gregorian movement,’ since a little while ago he made a decree that the Gregorian chant should be taught in all the ecclesiastical schools of the states of the church, to the exclusion of every other kind of music—‘Cantus Gregorianus, omni alio rejecto, tradetur.’ You see he wishes to get the Roman priests educated up to it—Rome rules the world—and the thing is done. ‘Othello’s occupation is gone!’ But how in the world we shall ever get up a Christmas or an Easter Mass that is fit to listen to when that day comes is more than I can tell.”
GREGORIUS. “Despair not, good Hubanus. Remain with us past the morrow, and thou shalt hear a holy Mass and solemn Vespers which will warm the cockles of thy heart, chanted in strains of melody that belie neither the sentences of joyful praise which are uttered nor the exultation which doth lift the hearts of the brethren to heaven, and fill the festival hours with a divine gladness. (To the monks.) Brothers, let us rehearse the Gloria in Excelsis.”
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As the curtains of our memory dropped upon the scene we have just been present at, our eyes caught sight again of the sentence quoted by Prof. Hubanus: “In consequence of the failure of modern composers to meet the requirements of Catholic devotion”—which failure is so utter that, in the judgment of the same writer, he “thinks it no exaggeration to say that, if all their compositions, except a very few, were burned, or should otherwise perish, the church would suffer no loss.”
But what of the figured musical compositions of those musicians who may in our time be honored with the title of “ancient,” such as Palestrina and his imitators? The music of this style forms, we are told, the staple of what is commonly heard in S. Peter’s. The writer of the article we allude to evidently believes any attempt to make such music popular would be no less a failure. The intricacy of the style, the exceeding difficulties attendant upon its artistic execution, and its restricted vocal character, are “fatal” objections.
We fully agree with him. In our former articles on this subject (THE CATHOLIC WORLD, December, 1869, and February and March, 1870) we not only pronounced modern figured music to be in practice a failure as church music, but intended also to be understood as asserting that the cause of this failure lay chiefly in the melodious form of such music—the necessary result of a tonality essentially sensuous, which renders it, despite every effort of the artist, intrinsically unsuitable for the expression of the “prayer of the church.” That there is prayerful music we do not deny, but it will never obtain any more positive sanction from the church than she gives to the hundred and one sentimental “prayers” and turgid “litanies” which fill the pages of our “largest books of devotion” ad nauseam, and are equally supposed by the uneducated Catholic and the ignorant Protestant to be the masterpieces of Catholic musical and liturgical art.
We did not think it necessary, writing as we did for a special class of readers, to explain the distinguishing characteristics of the church’s “prayer,” being, as our learned friend says, fourfold—latreutic, impetratory, propitiatory, and eucharistic. To us the church was not wanting in wisdom in the adoption alone of plain chant to express her divine prayer, whether it happen to be latreutic, impetratory, propitiatory, or eucharistic. She never made any distinction that we know of. But our learned friend, while he cannot help but admit that for the purposes of adoration, propitiation, and supplication it is not only all that could be desired, but is also better than any other melody, denies, with an ipse dixit, its capability of expressing praise and thanksgiving. Argument does not seem to be worth seeking. “Plain chant,” he says, “is confessedly unequal to the task of evoking and expressing the feelings of Christian joy and triumph.” And again: “It certainly must borrow from figured music the triumphant strains of praise and thanksgiving.”
Neither one nor the other. We confess to nothing of the kind. And although, by the rule of argumentation, we are not called upon to prove a negative, we refer to the response good Brother Gregorius has already made, and would furthermore ask if the Te Deum, the Exultet, the Preface for Easter Sunday, the Alleluia of Holy Saturday, or the Lauda Sion, are confessedly unequal to the task assigned them?
As far as the question has any practical importance, we feel that not another word need be said. Plain chant is in lawful possession, and cannot be ousted by personal caprice or taste, nor by gratuitous assumptions of its inability to answer the end proposed by the wise authority of the church; still less by a proposed substitution of a system which, after three centuries of vain efforts to supplant the rightful possessor, is declared, even by its own friends, to be “a failure,” and the majority of its painfully‐produced works fit only to be consigned to the flames.
We have, however, a question of more merit to discuss. If modern music has failed to meet the requirements of Catholic devotion, it will be not a little interesting to examine into the true cause of this failure. It will be found to lie in its melodic form (not in the use of harmony), which came into being with the introduction of the chord of the diminished seventh and the substitution of the instrumental, factitious scales called major and minor for the four natural vocal, authentic scales and their four correlative plagal scales. Like seeks like, and as this chord of the seventh was an inspiration of sentimental, languishing, passional feeling, the new music sought its language in poetry, and chiefly in lyric poetry, in which every sort of human passion finds smooth expression; and as this latter is divided into regular feet, with recurring emphasis and cadence, music soon found itself set to time. Its melody became measured. Pegasus found himself in harness. To express the sublime, the heroic, was only possible now by knocking down the bars, putting it all ad libitum, and calling the phrase recitative; and as the passage from the sublime to the ridiculous is proverbially short, the composition of many of these recitatives, in their leaping intervals and startling contrasts, vividly remind one of Pegasus let loose to scamper and roll unbridled in the open fields.
The invention and perfection of musical instruments are coincident with the rise and progress of the system of melody known as “modern music,” the organ and piano holding the mastery. To these are due, in great measure, the universal cultivation of the modern tonality, and the consequent loss of appreciation of the tonality of the ecclesiastical modes. It is heard in the lullaby at the cradle’s side, whistled by boys in the streets, sung by children in popular melodies and hymns at school, confirmed by all the concerts given by orchestras in halls, theatres, and public meetings; every young lady strums it forth from her piano, every organist modulates it in church, while all bells, from thousands upon thousands of churches, jangle it forth from one end of Christendom to the other. That the church has been able to withstand the pressure of all this, and still dares to command her priests to chant “per omnia sæcula sæculorum” to her own ancient mode, is, even in that simple and significant sentence, a proof of her divine strength to resist the most alluring seductions and powerful onslaughts of the world, and a note of calm defiance to its “fashion which passeth away.”
We are now prepared to enter into a critical examination of the essential character of music as distinguished from plain chant. In the first place, we find, as we have already noted, that it is measured in its melody—that is, it is written, as it is said, in time; and, as a consequence of its lyrical movement, it became equally subjected to certain laws of versification and of phraseology corresponding to the stanza. When musicians began to write for the language of the church, and to set the sublime prose of her Gloria in Excelsis, Credo, etc., to its form of melody, this supposed necessity of making musical stanzas compelled the application of what is known in music as the theme, on which certain fanciful variations were built, shorter or longer, as the musician deemed necessary to complete his “work,” altogether forming a sort of Procrustean bed, on which the sacred words of the Liturgy were either dismembered or stretched by repetition in order to make them fit the melody. To make the “work” fit the words was not to be thought of; whence we judge it well for the peace of Mr. Richardson that Mozart and Haydn have departed this life. We remember, when a boy, long before we had made more than a child’s acquaintance with the modern “Masses,” squeezing the Kyrie Eleison after this fashion on the framework of one of De Beriot’s celebrated airs for violin and piano, and gave ourselves as much credit for the originality of the “adaptation” as we are willing to give to the man who first of all (to the misfortune of true church chant) tried to compose a musical theme for the same words of prayer. We refer our readers to the late paper on “Church Music” in the August and September numbers of this magazine, and to the translation of the Gloria in Excelsis of Mozart’s Twelfth Mass, as given in one of our former articles, as proofs of the perfectly outrageous extent to which this “adaptation” has already been carried.
Now, we affirm, as a principle, that the expression of the “Prayer of sacrifice and of praise,” as we may term the Holy Mass and the recitation of the Divine Office, should be consonant with, and conformed to, the manner in which the church directs the celebration of the acts of the same. The celebrant and his ministers, the acolytes and the chorus, do not march, halt, turn about, or otherwise conduct themselves like soldiers or like puppets on wires, neither do they hop and glide and go through set figures like dancers. Melody in measure is therefore wholly unsuited to the character and spirit of the acts of the performers.
In connection with the acts of Catholic worship, melody in measure is therefore incongruous, unmeaning, and absurd. For, to put the question plainly, if neither celebrant, ministers, chorus, nor people are to march—to do which, even in her sacred processions, would be shocking and profane—why sing a march? If they are not to waltz, why sing one? If the church does not want to
“Make the soul dance a jig to heaven,”
then, in the name of common sense, why shall Master Haydn be permitted to offer the church singers a musical jig? The truth of the matter is that such measured movements, added to the gymnastic feats of melody which characterize the phrasing of the greater number of modern “Masses,” are ignorantly supposed to faithfully express that Christian joy and triumph which plain chant is quite as ignorantly supposed to be unable to inspire.
Let any one examine the church’s chant, and especially its movement, and he will not fail to be struck with its remarkable consonance with, and the sense of exact propriety of, its accompaniment to the movements and demeanor of the sacred ministers and of all who are appointed to assist them in carrying out the sacred functions of divine worship. How majestic and dignified, how modest and devout, are its measures! A sort of continuous procession of sound, resembling now the deep murmurings of the waves of the ocean, now the gentle breathings of the wind, now the prolonged echoes of distant thunder, now the soft whispering of the woods in summer! Always grave and decorous in its phrasing. Never indulging in trivial antics or in meretricious languishing and voluptuous undulations. Time and arithmetical measures do not straiten and confine its heavenly inspirations, for the thoughts of the soul, and chiefly the thoughts of prayer, do not move like clockwork. One does not adore five minutes, propitiate two minutes, supplicate half a minute, and give thanks ten seconds; and to do either in 2/4 3/4 or 6/8 time would be the height of the ridiculous. A friend tells us that the only time he ever had to do either at High Mass was during the performance of that part of the score called “point d’orgue.” Is it any wonder that music for the church is a failure, and that plain chant still holds its own?
Secondly. The melody of modern music is essentially mechanical. Formed as it has been upon improved instrumentation, it is neither more nor less than a musical performance. The melody is therefore the chief thing; the words and their expression are only secondary. From which, as a necessary result—if the music be worth listening to—the most accomplished vocalists that the pecuniary resources of the church can procure are called in to render the selections. Hence, also, the introduction of women into the choir, contrary to the laws and traditions of the church, the banishment of the chorus from the sanctuary, and the erection of the detestable Protestant singing‐gallery over the doorway of the church. This latter flagrant innovation on the proper rubrical disposition of the choir has been lately specially condemned in the “Instructions” of the cardinal vicar at Rome. No one surely will have the hardihood to call modern music an “ecclesiastical song,” as it should be called or it has no place in the church. It is the song of professional singers, distinctly a mechanical performance, and open, without the possibility of reform, to the most shocking abuses. What organist cannot recall instances in which the male and female singers carried on and perfected their courtship in the choir, and where in the same holy (?) place eating and drinking were indulged in during the sermon, and the daily newspapers read? The drinking of water or the chewing of tobacco—well, we would like to see the priest who has been able to banish either from his singing‐gallery. These and other numerous irregularities we think ourselves fully justified in adducing as argument in this connection, simply because they exist, are common, notorious, and are a tolerated incumbrance with the mechanism; and, if effectually banished, would leave the said mechanism subject to no little friction and the production of tones of complaint which, whether they proceed from unoiled hinges or choirs, are not agreeable, considered as music.
Compare, again, the character and movement of those upon whom the ceremonies devolve. They are not at all mechanical, but strictly personal. In the first place, the actors are of a restricted class. They must be either men or boys. Women and girls are not permitted to celebrate or serve in any capacity at the sacred functions. The services of a graceful and intelligent acolyte are exceedingly pleasant and edifying to behold, but the stupidest and most awkward, blundering and unkempt boy would be preferable, and must be preferred, before any number of the brightest, most beautiful and quick‐witted girls, because he alone possesses the one personal qualification requisite for that office—he is of the male sex. Intelligence, beauty, and graceful manners are not employed by the church for their own sake.
Again, the celebrant must be a priest, the deacon must have received deacon’s orders, and all others who, although laymen, may, as acolytes and choristers, aid the consecrated personages in their duties, are invested with a quasi‐ecclesiastical character while in office. No one should ever dream of engaging the services of Jews, Protestants, or infidels, or even of Catholics whose lives were notoriously bad, or who scandalously neglected receiving the sacraments, as our “gallery‐choirs” are constituted in many a church in this country.
In the event of the priest not been able to sing, through any infirmity, no layman of the congregation could take his place, although he were the finest singer in the world, the very prince of cæremoniarii, and a greater saint than S. Peter himself.
From which considerations it will readily be seen how unsuited music is for the use of such persons acting in such a capacity.
Practically, music is the song of women. We shall show further on that it is essentially effeminate. There is music which men and boys can perform, it is true, but it is not the genuine article. The want of the female voice for the soprano is always felt; and in some countries where women are not yet admitted as church singers, and “church music” is highly prized, this want is supplied by castrati. It is not the song of ecclesiastics. That the use of it is tolerated, we know; that the singing of women and castrati in church is also tolerated, we know; but the “Instructions” (we guarantee that nineteen out of twenty would agree with us in saying that “Restrictions” would be their better title) of the cardinal vicar on “church music,” referred to by the writer of the late articles on that subject in THE CATHOLIC WORLD, remind us of the probable “instructions” that would be given if the abuse of female acolytes were to creep in to any great extent. We would find, without doubt, prohibitions against the wearing of the hair in curls, or frisée, or à la Pompadour, short sleeves, low necks, and crinoline. They would be instructed also, without doubt, to wear a plain black cassock and linen surplice, be shod like men, and let not their courtesies savor of the débût of actresses upon the stage of a theatre. If these instructions would be faithfully observed ex animo, and boys were not extinct as a sex in the congregation, we do not think they would very long have any practical application.
Contrast now the character of plain chant with music as a suitable song for the duly‐qualified church singers, from the priest down to the humblest cantor. That it is the only song fit for the consecrated priest needs no argument. Thank God, there is no “toleration” of “priests’ music,” “sacerdotal solos,” “Prefaces,” and “Pater Nosters,” à la Mozart, Haydn, Cherubini, or Peters! It is distinguished especially by that gravity of movement, that modestie ecclesiastique, in its intonation, which becomes the sacerdotal character. Any other melody from the mouth of a priest at the altar would scandalize not only the least ones of the brethren of Christ, but the greatest also; and however terrible the “woe” our Lord would pronounce upon those who might scandalize the latter, we are not left in ignorance of what is reserved for those who fall under his judgment for scandalizing the former. Any one who has had the good fortune of assisting at a Mass chanted by a properly vested chorus, in strict Gregorian melody, with organ accompaniment, if you will—that is, nothing more than an accompaniment, as the cardinal vicar desires—will assuredly bear testimony that it was not a musical performance—that is, a melodious concert performed for its own sake in any degree—but a religious performance, a chant of priests and the “likes of them,” suggesting nothing of this world’s vanities or luxury, and as unlike modern music and its mechanism as the melodious whisperings of an æolian harp are unlike a hand‐organ with monkey obbligato.
What is, to say the least, astonishing, if not lamentable, is to see so many priests devoted with ardor to the study of music, and so many more sanctioning and furthering its inroads upon the domain which it behooves them to cultivate, whilst remaining wholly ignorant of the chant, and unable to intone the Gloria in Excelsis or to sing a Collect or Gospel without blundering at every inflection. We see no impropriety in pressing these facts home upon those who are bound by the laws of their profession to interest themselves in the claims which Gregorian chant makes upon them, in order that they may decently perform the sacred functions committed to their care—how sacred one single reflection will show. For what is the song of the priest? It is not a private performance of his own, but rather an inspired expression of the mind of the church, herself the divine voice of God. When she prays and sings, she prays a divine prayer, and sings a divine song. God prays and sings within the walls of the church, the New Jerusalem, which has come down like a bride out of heaven upon the earth. True, it is the priest who prays and sings; but let him not forget that there is a Voice of supplication which ascends to the throne of the Almighty and Eternal Majesty that is not his, and a song which sounds sweetly in the ears of the Divine Mercy, and celebrates the praises of the Most High, whose melody is not the inspiration of his soul.
The Divine, Incarnate Victim of Calvary is the Suppliant, and the Son of David and of Mary is the Singer. And we are told—do our senses not deceive us?—that his song is become extremely monotonous, and burdens the ear with a weight of sound not always tolerable! No, we will not allow in excuse that this sneer of disdain and expression of contempt is only for the chorus, and is not meant for the consecrated priest. There is a divine unity and faultless harmony in the “prayer” of Jesus Christ as the church utters it. It is the seamless garment which clothes his mystic body; who shall dare to rend it?
What master‐mind conceived and executed the magnificent and inimitable spectacle which that prayer presents in a solemn Mass and Vespers to the minds and hearts of devout worshippers? What cunning artificer devised the harmony of a composition so complete? Who breathed into all those prayers and anthems, hymns and psalms, Epistles and Gospels from Holy Writ, that spirit of devotion and piety, and informed them with those lessons of the purest morality and professions of the universal faith of Christendom? What more than angelic Artist knew how to dye the martyr’s chasuble in blood, and transfer the spotless purity of the lily to the stole of the confessor and the virgin; to weave the robes of penance with the violet’s mournful hue, and paint the verdure of the grass upon the ferial vesture? Who is that heavenly Musician whose soul gave birth to that sweet, intellectual, majestic melody espoused so happily to those chosen words of devout contemplation, of lofty praise, of innocent joy, of dolorous compassion, and of sanctified sorrow? We must look to other sources than mere human science or artistic skill for a solution of these questions. The mind and hand of a divine Artist must be in that work whose unity and harmony the hand of man will not sooner or later disfigure, mutilate, reject, or destroy. That artist is the Holy Ghost, who is the Lord and Life‐giver of the church, in whom the mystic life of Jesus Christ is perpetuated by the like ineffable overshadowing which wrought his conception in the womb of the Immaculate Virgin—that Spirit of wisdom, from whom come all those inspirations of genius whose matchless productions and marvellous power are the wonder of the world, the envy of the flesh, and the hate of the devil.
But, no; we must believe that the divine Artist has failed, “confessedly” failed, in this one of his masterpieces. Its noblest, highest purpose found no adequate expression. Jesus Christ has been unable to manifest the joy and triumph of his Sacred Heart, the sublimest purpose of his eucharistic life, and his song is fit only to be chanted as a wail over the dead or as groans of penance in sackcloth and ashes!
Do you believe it? We don’t.
To Be Concluded Next Month.
A Vision
A vision of our Mary, heavenly Queen, Appeared to me in silence of the night. Around her flowed a stream of golden light In which she stood with sweet, celestial mien And beauty but before by angels seen. With rapture I beheld the blessèd sight, That beamed upon me ravishingly bright; And while entranced, methought her eyes serene Did rest upon me, and a holy spell My being thrilled with ecstasy unknown; But darkness soon upon my senses fell, Though not before the bliss and joy were shown That those enjoy who with her ever dwell In life eternal round the holy throne.
On The Wing. A Southern Flight. VII. Concluded
“I wish you and Mary would go down to the Vernons, Jane,” said Frank, coming into our room one morning about three weeks after my engagement with Don Emidio. “I did not see Ida; but Elizabeth tells me she is not well, and I believe it all arises from the annoyances to which they have been exposed through the conduct of the Casinelli. It has grown into a complete persecution, for people never forgive those they have injured.”
“What are they doing now to vex Ida?” asked Mary.
“I do not understand all the pros and cons of the matter; but I found Elizabeth rather anxious about Ida, and she could not leave her to walk with me, as she had promised last night.”
That, of course, was a very serious affair, and one which demanded immediate rectification, at least in Frank’s opinion—as any similar event would have done in the estimation of the other gentleman who so often formed one of our small circle; for I had long since found out that I was not to be allowed the privilege of a headache, or any other excuse for solitude, without a rigorous investigation of the merits of the case being set on foot by Don Emidio.
Of course Mary and I lost no time in going to Villa Casinelli. We took the path that had been cleared through the vineyard, on purpose to save Mary the fatigue of the longer way by the road. The vigneroli had taken great pains to make this little approach for the “padre’s friends,” as we were always called; and they had thrown a plank with a fragile hand‐rail across the little, rocky stream where they washed the clothes, and which stream formed the boundary between the property of the Casinelli and that of their neighbors. For a short walk it was nevertheless rather a fatiguing one; for it was up and down all the way, and included one or two short flights of stone steps.
In the early spring the yellow oxalis had covered the ground like a carpet embroidered in gold and green. Now the beans had taken the place of the gayer blossoms, and filled the air with their sweet perfume.
The donkey that took the cart full of clean linen twice a week to Naples had his al fresco stable beneath the shade of a venerable fig‐tree close by—a blessing promised to his betters in Biblical times, and one which I am sure he too merited in his degree, and I have no doubt considered the fig‐tree as his own. Being noisy and loquacious, like all other two or four legged creatures in Naples, he always greeted us with a loud bray when we passed by.
I do not believe any donkey was ever so fond of expressing his opinions as that particular animal. I had for some time tried to discover whether his utterances predicted rain, according to the general belief that asses bray when it is going to be wet. But not a cloud could be seen, and no rain fell for weeks; and certainly this particular ass was by no means barometrical in his utterances.
I sometimes had my fears that, as formerly it had been Paolino’s duty to feed the poor beast, and that now the lad was in our service, perhaps the fodder was sometimes forgotten by his young master’s younger sisters, and that the loud, inharmonious greeting he gave us was meant as a perpetual protest against the injustice of which we were indirectly the cause.
We found Ida suffering from nervous reaction occasioned by the effort to appear cheerful and composed under the various annoyances, and by the feeling that a good work had been put an end to by the malice of designing people. In addition to which, her mother was exposed to a variety of irritating insults which it was hard for her daughters to bear in patience. Mrs. Vernon was exceedingly fond of flowers, and thoroughly understood the cultivation of a garden. She had taken great pains with the very small enclosure which was allotted to their apartment, and from it the altar and their own rooms had been supplied in abundance. But now, no matter how early in the morning she visited her garden, the Casinelli’s gardener had always the advantage of her, and had picked not only the best flowers, but even the strawberries, which she had been watching with the kind intention of giving them to us. He plainly told her one day, when he met her as he came out of her garden with a basketful of her flowers on his arm, that he had gathered them by his mistress’ special desire. These things were trifles in themselves; but they were a severe trial when they came to be repeated day by day, in one form or another of petty insult and daring impertinence, and generally directed either against Padre Cataldo, who could not revenge his own cause, or against an aged lady in the enjoyment of her few pleasures, or, lastly, in attacking the moral character of the servants, and trying to spread about unfounded accusations. Ida’s strong sense of justice, which amounted to a passion, and which made it intolerable to her to see the weak “put upon,” had worked her up into a state of nerves injurious to her health. Mary and I spent the day with the Vernons, trying to divert their thoughts, and preaching that patience which we were far from feeling ourselves.
About the time that these troublesome events were occurring we made an excursion to the Carthusian church and monastery of San Martino, which stands on the same summit as the Castle of St. Elmo, a little in front of it, and facing the bay. It commands a glorious view of the city and all the surrounding country; and the delight of visiting so beautiful a place tempered my indignation at the robbery of the government in depriving the monks of their home. Few things of the kind can be more beautiful than the church, where formerly no woman entered. The walls, floor, and roof are entirely composed of marbles of many colors. The altar‐rails, or rather the low screen which cuts off the sanctuary—for rails there are none—is sculptured à jour in white marble, and looks like some exquisite lace‐ work. The choir behind the altar has also a marble screen of the same wonderful open work. There are pictures by Spagnoletto of Moses and Elias and the prophets. Nothing could be more appropriate to the austere life of a Carthusian monk than that the chapel of his monastery should be decorated by such an artist as Spagnoletto. Nor is the choice of subjects less appropriate. Strength and depth of coloring; the expression of masculine force in all the forms; bold outlines, deep shadows, and strong lights, seem all in harmony with the condition of mind likely to be eliminated by a life of silence and real, though not apparent, solitude; for the monks, though many, dwelt alone in separate cells. It was a life which called to mind the stern grandeur of Old Testament prophecies and the ascetic life of the Old Testament prophets; while the richness of the decoration; the elaborate carving—not in a friable material, such as wood, but in enduring marble; the extraordinarily lavish use of precious stones; the minuteness of detail, combined with the unity of plan, are just the characteristics that we should expect to grow out of the leisure of perpetual silence, and the digging deep down into the mines of thought consequent on all but unbroken solitude. It was impossible not to be struck with the whole as the outward growth of the peculiar inner life of the remarkable order to which it had once belonged; and one marvels to find that the extraordinary degree and nature of the beauty it possesses had not addressed itself to the common sense of even a godless government as a plea for its continued existence in the hands of those for whom it had been reared. It should also be remembered that connected with this life of leisurely meditation there were great opportunities for deep and continued study; for the Carthusians are a learned order.
I may perhaps be fanciful in thus tracing the character of the edifice to the tendencies of the order, for it must be owned that the present building dates no further back than the middle of the XVIIth century, and that S. Bruno, the founder of the order, probably never foresaw so magnificent an abode for his silent disciples. But those who have observed how, unless thwarted by unfavorable circumstances, every religious order in the church stamps its character upon all that pertains to it, will feel that there must have existed a synthesis between the inhabitants of San Martino and the place itself, and that the white‐robed Carthusians were in the very home which was specially appropriate to them, and in all ways suited their devotional and intellectual tendencies. And in proof of the above reflections it is well to remark that the beautiful pavement of the church was designed by a Carthusian. We had of course been acquainted with many of the valuable paintings in the monastery, so far as engravings could make us so, and thus we hailed the Deposition from the Cross, by Spagnoletto, which is in the sacristy, as an old friend, also the Baptism of our Lord, by Carlo Maratta, and many of Vaccaro’s and Cesari’s paintings. The sacristy and the chapter‐house are equally full of valuable pictures. It is impossible to exaggerate what must ever be the refining and elevating influence of such treasures of art, and such harmony and beauty, combined with a religious vocation of the highest order, heightened by the practice of silence and fostered by solitude.
The cloister breathes the very spirit of peace. The white‐marble Doric columns gleam in the sunshine, and cut the tessellated pavement with the black shadows of their shafts, carrying them up the white wall with the arches of intense light between. I can imagine the monks learning to know the exact hour of the day by the fall of those shadows without needing to consult the old clock, also with a glaring white face, which is just below the little belfry with its two bells, one large, one small, that the deep‐ toned toll of one or the sharp, quick tinkle of the other might denote the various offices and duties to which they summoned the inmates. The cloister court is laid out with formal box‐hedges enclosing little plots of garden ground, and one garden more precious than the others, Gottesacker,(46) where are sown the mortal remains of the departed brethren, awaiting in the midst of their survivors and successors the day‐ dawn of immortality. There is an iron cross in the centre on a twisted white‐marble pilaster. And the oblong square of this interesting cemetery is surrounded by a white‐marble balustrade, with skulls carved at intervals. In the centre of the court is a marble well of singularly graceful proportions. Around it is a pavement of bricks symmetrically arranged, but now with the blades of grass and tiny weeds intruding their innocent familiarity where they have no right. Statues of saints, vases and balls alternating, run along the entablature of the cloister. We longed for a vision of the old, white‐robed inhabitants of this white marble dwelling; and for once I felt not the lack of color, but, on the contrary, perceived a harmony in the white and subdued gray tints, relieved only by the blue sky and green grass. But when we looked out from the loggia on the wide view beneath us, it was not color that was wanting. There lay Naples, with its motley buildings, backed by purple Vesuvius, and the rose‐colored cliffs of Sorrento beyond. Nature had used all the pigments of her pallet when she painted that lovely scene.
We paid another visit to a suppressed monastery—that of the Camaldoli—before leaving Naples. There is nothing very remarkable in the building itself or in the chapel. But the view is at once one of the most beautiful and the most singular I have ever beheld. We had above an hour’s ride on donkey‐back to get there; the carriage taking us no further than the picturesque village of Antignano. The lane up which we wound amid young chestnut‐trees, the remains of what was once a magnificent forest, was at that time in all the verdant beauty of early spring. It was a glorious day, and I ought to have enjoyed the ride. But, in the first place, I have a feeling amounting to animosity against a donkey the moment I have the misfortune to find myself on his back. I rather like him than otherwise when cropping thistles by the roadside or in a huckster’s cart. I appreciate his patient nature and long‐enduring powers when they are unconnected with myself. But from the moment I find myself condemned to be carried by him—that I feel his horrid little jogging pace under me, and his utterly insensible mouth within the influence, or I should rather say not within the influence, of my reins—a feeling of antipathy to the beast seizes me, and is rendered all the more painful to me that his resignation and the long history of his habitual ill‐usage fill me with an emotion of compassion painfully at variance with my intense dislike of him in the character of a steed.
I do not think I ever suffered more in this way than during our ride to the Camaldoli. I was escorted by a half‐drunken donkey‐boy, of the most brutal disposition towards the unfortunate animal, whom I at once hated and pitied. I was furious at the way he behaved to my donkey; while he, not supposing I knew enough Italian to understand his abominable patois, kept turning all my complaints and reproaches into ridicule to the other donkey men or boys accompanying him. I would gladly have taken the stick out of his hands with which he belabored my poor donkey. Indeed, at last I succeeded in doing so; but nothing short of having Emidio with me to apply the stick to the boy instead of the other animal would have sufficed to soothe my irritation. Unfortunately, my future protector, who I felt certain would punch any head I might wish submitted to that process, had been called away to Rome on business.
The lane was very narrow, and, even had it been as wide as Piccadilly or Broad Street, no doubt our donkeys would equally have considered themselves bound to go in single file. Consequently we were not always within reach of each other for any mutual assistance; and Frank, whom I longed to call to my aid, was altogether absorbed in taking care of Mrs. Vernon, to whom this donkey‐climbing of a steep mountain‐path amounted to a perilous adventure.
Not many days after, we heard that two or three foreign gentlemen, making the same ascent as ourselves, had been attacked and robbed by these most obnoxious donkey‐men. I am afraid the observance of law and the moral condition generally of little, out‐of‐the‐way villages like Antignano, in the vicinity of Naples, is as bad as it well can be at the present time.
When we reached the summit, on which stands the monastery, we went at once to the ridge of the hill to see the view; and I have seldom been more struck by anything of the kind. Naples lay before us, about fifteen hundred feet below; but what was so unexpected was the aspect of Mount Vesuvius, right in front of us, and that of the Monte Somma and a series of other mountainous heights of volcanic origin; and far away to the Apennines, with the wide plains and cities lying in the bright sunshine, Caserta, Capua, and all the Campania Felix. On the spot where we stood a line straight from the eye would have hit about one‐third of the height of Mount Vesuvius. To the right we could see all the range of mountains to Salerno and Amalfi. On the other side were Pozzuoli, Nisita, Ischia, and Baiæ. I will not multiply names, nor will I heap up epithets in the attempt to describe what words cannot tell. In short, I forgot all I had said in favor of the position formerly occupied by the Carthusians at San Martino in my enthusiasm for the superior view once enjoyed by the Camaldoli; and had the question been open to me, I believe my vocation to the latter order would have been decided on the spot.
My donkey‐boy had sobered down by the time I had again to trust myself and my steed to his tender mercies, and nothing occurred to mar the enjoyment of our long but interesting excursion. It must, however, have been a far more beautiful place before the present government of Italy, by permitting the wholesale destruction of the magnificent trees which formerly clothed the mountain’s sides, had done so much to impair the climate as well as to destroy the beauty of the country. It is a fact in natural history that trees emit warmth in winter as they produce coolness in summer; and consequently that in a latitude like that of Italy they are specially beneficial, as tending to equalize the temperature. It is notorious that the climate of Italy has become hotter in the summer, while it is colder in the winter than was the case formerly. The country has also been subject to terrible ravages from mountain torrents, the downward course of which was formerly intercepted by the grand old trees of immense forests. Their impetuosity was broken and their waters partially absorbed. Now they tear down the barren sides of the mountains unchecked, and devastate the plains below, to the ruin of the crops and consequent impoverishment of the country. It is the short‐sighted custom of the government to let whole tracts of mountainous forest‐lands, leaving the lessee the liberty of cutting down as it may seem good to him; and generally he is a greedy man, in a hurry to make a fortune before the present régime shall have come to an end, as it must do some day.
I must not leave my readers to suppose that all our excursions and daily drives were on the grandly æsthetic plan of those I have described. We were not always mythological, classical, or even early‐Christian in our researches, our walks or drives. We went shopping about the streets of Naples in a thoroughly womanly fashion, and condescended to red and pink coral, amber and tortoise‐shell ornaments, with a full appreciation of their prettiness. The bracelets, earrings, and brooches made out of lava never appeared to me otherwise than as remains of barbarism. Much of the coral‐work, though very ingenious, is also in bad taste. But a string of pink coral beads is always a beautiful ornament, and also always an expensive one. Amber abounds, not of course as a native product, but imported from the East. The tortoise‐shell is very delicately carved, and inlaid with gold, and some of it is extremely pretty. There is also a great deal of alabaster‐work in figures and vases, white and colored. Neither Mary nor I could bear it, though we did our best to try and be tempted by a shop in the Toledo(47) which was filled with it. It is always connected in my mind with shell ornaments and wool mats. They are things that generally seem to go together, and equally impress me with their uselessness and ugliness. I must include in my list of horrors the lava and even the terracotta figures of lazzaroni and Neapolitan peasants. Mary was rather disappointed at not finding shops of old furniture and rococo. She had collected a variety of pretty and even valuable objects when she was here many years ago; but now she was told by the Neapolitans that the English and Americans had bought up all there was to be had of that nature. No doubt, however, we might still have found treasures had we known where to look for them. But the days are over when bargains could be picked up in Continental towns. All those things have now a real marketable value, and no vendors are ignorant of what that value is. Of course there are occasional exceptions.
We went once to a flower‐show held in the Villa Reale, the beautiful public promenade which runs by the sea‐shore and the Chiaia. I believe it was the first of the kind which had been attempted, and as such was worthy of all praise. But, apart from that consideration, it was inferior to most of the numerous flower‐shows held in the rural districts of England. We often drove up and down the Chiaia, which is the name of the fashionable street of Naples, and along which there is a tan road for the sake of horsemen, who ride backwards and forwards at a furious rate. It is neither very long nor very broad; but the gentlemen who frequent it are evidently greatly impressed with their manly bearing and distinguished horsemanship. For my own part, I prefer a Neapolitan on the driving‐box to one in the saddle. They are excellent coachmen and but indifferent horsemen, as all men must be who are deficient in phlegm and in external calm. The horse is a dignified animal, and demands corresponding dignity in his rider. We used often to stop at the caffe in the Via Reale, and refresh ourselves with “granite”—that is, a glass of snow sweetened, and with the juice of fresh lemons squeezed into it.
As a rule, I cannot say that the shops in Naples are particularly good, and certainly they are very dear. The same may be said of provisions. And as the taxes are every year on the increase, this misfortune is not likely to be remedied. I frequently used to walk through the generally narrow and always crowded streets of Naples accompanied by Frank, and as often Emidio, who had arranged some point of meeting with my brother, would come down from the heights of Capo di Monte, where his lovely villa stood, and join us in our saunter through the busy city. I have seen him stop where a piece of rope was hung near a tobacconist’s shop‐door, or at the corner of the street, and light his cigar from the smouldering end which had been set fire to for that purpose. I have never seen a burning rope in the streets in England or in France for the accommodation of smokers.
We visited most of the churches, but they were as nothing to me after the churches in Rome. The flower‐boys soon got to know us as we walked and drove about, and the most lovely roses and bunches of orange‐blossoms would be pressed upon us for a few pence. The boys would sometimes cling to the carriage‐door with one hand, while the horses were going fast, imploring us to buy the bouquets they held in the other, till I used to think they must fall and be run over. But they are so lithe and supple, and they seemed to bound about so much as if they were made of india‐ rubber, that at last I got hardened, and would stand to my bargain half‐ way down a street without any apprehension for the safety of my dark‐eyed, jabbering flower‐boys. They generally addressed us in a jargon of Italian, French, and English, and as generally sold their flowers for half the price first named.
I greatly enjoyed the freedom and absence of restraint in these our rambles; for, having my brother with me, I was not afraid of gratifying my curiosity about the manners and customs of the humbler classes. I frequently stood by the fountains in the streets, where the women washed the linen, and entered into conversation with them; or I would buy fritture of various kinds (which is, in fact, fried batter, sometimes sweet, sometimes savory). I did not find it always to my taste, because it was made with rancid olive‐oil quite as often as with fat. But the piles of light‐brown fritters lying on the little tables in the open streets, or being tossed about, smoking hot, in iron pans, had a very inviting appearance. Then I would get Frank to let me have a glass of lemonade from the pretty little booths that are so numerous for the sale of that delightful beverage, with festoons of fresh lemons hanging from the gayly‐ painted poles. I delighted all the more in my freedom that I knew, when I should be Emidio’s wife, and drive about Naples as the Contessa Gandolfi, I could no longer expect to enjoy these privileges. I said so one day to Emidio, when I was taking my second glass of lemonade in a peculiarly dingy and out‐of‐the‐way street in Naples. He laughed at the assertion, though he did not for a moment attempt to deny it; and meanwhile he enjoyed as much as I did the absence of all form and ceremony, which as foreigners we could allow ourselves. It was then that jestingly he asked me whether it should be put in my marriage‐settlements that he was to take me, at least once, to the Festa di Monte Vergine. I could not understand what he could possibly mean, until he explained that so much is thought of this feast by the Neapolitan peasantry that if a girl has a good dot, it is generally inserted in the marriage‐deeds that her husband is bound to give her this gratification. The feast takes place on Whit‐Monday, and Emidio assured me that my marriage‐portion was enough to entitle me to more than one excursion to the sanctuary of the Madonna, if such was my desire. It is held at Monte Vergine, near Avellino; and as we had not been able to attend it during our stay at Posilippo, I declared that I should expect to be taken some day, though I declined to puzzle our family lawyer by the introduction of so strange an article in my marriage‐settlements.
We had reserved Pompeii for the close of our stay at Naples, because from thence we meant to go on to Sorrento. We entered Pompeii by the “Sea Gate,” having left our travelling‐bags and shawls at the little hotel Diomède—such a grand name for such a mean, vulgar little place! How full of flies it was! How bad was the food! How miserable the accommodations, with advertisements of Bass’ pale ale adorning the walls! Nothing, however, of the kind could diminish the interest with which we were about to enter the dead city of the dead. Mary remembered having come to this same little public‐house five‐and‐twenty years before. It has been added to since then. At that time it afforded very little refreshment for either man or beast. She had taken some tea with her, and they accommodated her with hot water. Milk was not to be had, so she floated a slice of lemon in the tea‐cup, after the Russian fashion. And all the time a handsome youth, indifferently clad, and with the red Phrygian cap covering his crisp black curls, sang a native song to the accompaniment of a small guitar, and danced the while. The cotton‐plants were ready to give up their bursting pods of snow‐white fluff in the fields around, and the heat was extreme. The scene had been much less invaded in those days by ordinary sight‐ seers; but also, it must be owned, there was less to see, as many of the most important excavations have been made since that date. As the heat was very great, and as, even without seeing anything like all that is worth seeing, we could not possibly devote less than two or three hours to walking in those shadeless streets, it was decided Mary and I should be carried by the guides in open sedan‐chairs. The guides are appointed by government, and are thoroughly well informed on the subject, and are able to answer most questions.
We first visited the Forum. It is, even in its utter ruin, very imposing, for it stands on rising ground, and all the principal streets lead to it. Several Doric columns, arches or gateways, and the pedestals which formerly supported statues, remain. The Temple of Venus is close to the Forum; the entrance steps are intact, and the altar stands in front of them. Words fail me to express the intense melancholy of the scene, as we wandered from Temple to Baths, and from house to house, down the narrow streets—for all the streets are narrow—whose flag‐stones are dented by the wheels of the chariots, and have a raised path for foot‐passengers, so high that there are stones placed at intervals to enable one to step across the road, with a space left for the wheels of the chariot to pass between. This was to keep the passengers from having to step into the water which in rainy weather must have poured down these gutterless streets. From the houses being now all reduced to the ground floor, with the exception of a few in which the stairs leading to the first story and some portions of the wall remain, it cannot be said that any of the streets produce at all an imposing effect. Perhaps the absence of this, except in the ruins of the temples and public buildings, rather adds to the pathetic sadness of the scene, by bringing all the more vividly before us the fact of the utter and sudden destruction which swept away a vast city of crowded human beings, leading the daily life of all of us, in a few short hours! We saw the casts of several dead bodies that had been found—one, of a man making his escape with a sack of money; another, of a matron with her young daughter. What masses of hair, what round and slender limbs, what beautiful teeth! It is ghastly, and yet fascinating; for it seems to bridge over so wide a gulf of time, and by one touch of nature makes us akin to the ancient dead. I felt this specially as we went down the “Street of Abundance,” as it was named—mere dwelling‐houses and shops on either side; a long, ordinary street, where men came and went in their round of every‐day life, buying and selling and paying visits. The green lizards ran over the whitened walls and the small, brown‐red bricks. The sun poured down his relentless rays from a perfectly cloudless sky. Except ourselves and the guides, no footsteps were heard, no sound broke the death‐like silence. And at the far end of the “Street of Abundance,” just beyond the limits of the doomed city, a solitary pine‐tree, looking like a black spot in the white shimmer of the mid‐day heat, alone indicated a world of nature and of life and growth beyond. Here is an oil‐ shop, full of the beautifully‐shaped, huge jars in which the oil was kept. There, on that slab of marble, are the stains of wine. You see the oven, with what once was soft white bread—the real bread; and you feel that it might have happened a few years ago, and that somewhere or other, perhaps even at Naples, it might happen again to‐morrow. And two thoughts rush in upon us, one full of yearning pity, and one of awful inquiry—they were our brethren, and where are they now?
The first eruption of Mount Vesuvius occurred in the reign of the Emperor Titus, A.D. 79. Pompeii, Herculaneum, and even Naples itself, had suffered before them from earthquakes, and a portion of the two first‐named towns had been laid low. But nothing had ever happened to prepare the inhabitants for the terrible calamity which was about to befall them, when, in their villa at Misenum, the younger Pliny’s mother called the attention of Pliny the elder to the cloud, in the form of a pine‐tree, which she saw rising up into the heavens. When she did so, she did not even know that it was from Vesuvius that the cloud ascended. Pliny the elder invited his nephew, then only eighteen, to accompany him in his galley to Retinæ, a town on the coast, whither he intended to go, with the idea that the people might be in distress. But so little was any one prepared for what was really about to occur that young Pliny did not even lay aside his volume of Livy which he was reading; while his uncle took his tablets in his hand, that he might note down the curious phenomena he was about to investigate, and left the house to go on board. It was with great difficulty and at immense risk that he effected a landing and made his way to Stabiæ, near Pompeii, where dwelt his friend Pomponianus. In attempting to escape from thence in the night, he was suffocated by the noxious vapors that accompanied the eruption. It would seem that young Pliny continued his study for some hours, never realizing what an awful tragedy was going on beyond the Bay of Naples. There had been shocks of earthquake for some days previous, but these were not unusual occurrences, and therefore excited but little alarm, until they became so violent as to threaten utter destruction through the night. He seems to have been seriously frightened about the same time as his mother; for each had risen with the intention of calling the other. By this time the air was black with falling ashes, and the morning light could scarcely penetrate the gloom. Pliny would not leave his mother, while she, being aged and very heavy, feared she should not be able to follow him, and implored him to go away without her, which he would not do. They escaped together into the country, in danger of being trodden down by the crowds of flying people, and of being smothered by the falling ashes. The day was spent in agony and terror, and all but total darkness. But that night they were able to return to Misenum, though not to enjoy much repose, as the shocks of earthquake still continued. Then the young Pliny learnt that his uncle, whom he had, happily for himself, declined to accompany, had perished. This eruption did not resemble the more recent ones, inasmuch as no lava poured from the mountain, but burning stones of enormous size, and ashes, together with volumes of steam, which poured down in torrents of water, filled with ashes, upon the earth beneath. The shape of the mountain was altered entirely by this eruption, as it has been in a much less degree by that which occurred in April, 1872, and which our friends, the Vernons, had witnessed. The Neapolitans firmly believe that their city will ultimately perish as Pompeii has perished; and probably science is still unable to prognosticate whether the awful mountain has or has not too far exhausted its volcanic powers to produce a second destruction as terrible as that which Pliny has described with such accurate detail, and yet in so calm and unimpassioned a style.
Sensational writing is a discovery of modern times. We exhaust our subject in describing it diffusely and minutely. But nevertheless the scene Pliny’s letters call up before our imagination—the young lad poring over his book in company with his devoted mother, and the brave and learned elder Pliny calmly setting sail, tablets in hand, to study the scene, and to assist those in danger, and then perishing in the attempt—is as replete with pathos and human feeling as language can make it. It is full of a language not put into words.
On the afternoon of the day we visited Pompeii we drove to Sorrento, and took up our abode at a quiet little pension recently established, and literally hidden amongst orange‐groves. There was a small chapel close by. Our rooms were bright and clean, and the greater part of the time we had the house entirely to ourselves.
Let no one presume he knows the beauty of Italy who has not visited Sorrento. Can anything be more lovely than the approach to Vico, Meta, and Sant’ Angelo, and the aspect of these little towns nestling amid gardens, with their feet in the blue ripples of that tideless sea?
The Sorrentines are a different race from the Neapolitans, and no love is lost between them. They are a more reserved and more dignified people. They make less noise, and are not so excitable. The land they live on is not volcanic, the vegetation is more luxuriant, and the people are more pastoral in their habits. The air is softer and less exciting than at Naples. Mary and I felt as if we had drifted into the land “where it is always afternoon,” and a lotos‐eating calm and serenity seemed to come over us—a pleasant change after the nervous tension which Naples produces, and which is singularly inimical to sleep.
Every description of food is better at Sorrento than it is at Naples. Sorrento beef is excellent, and Sorrento pigs have a world‐wide reputation for making good pork, though they are ugly animals to look at, having large, flabby, white bodies on tall, thin, greyhound legs, and very large, pink ears. Naples seems never at any time to have been well famed for producing good food.
Nearly all Cicero’s letters to Papirius Pætus contain allusions to eating and drinking, and in one he says: “It is a better thing, let me tell you, to be sick with good eating at Rome, than for want of victuals at Naples.”
When he was thinking of buying Sylla’s house at Naples, he asks Pætus to take some workmen to survey it for him, saying: “If the walls and roof are in good repair, I shall perfectly well approve of the rest.” “If I can procure a house at Naples, it is my purpose to live so abstemiously that what our late sumptuary law allows for one day’s expense shall suffice me ten.” This last sentence, when coupled with that quoted from the other letter, looks rather like making a virtue of necessity. The marvel is that the Naples market is not more abundantly provided with Sorrento produce. The fruit is very good; and we all agreed we had never known the real merit of cherries until we had eaten them at Sorrento, and even better still at Capri. In our own land, in France, and even in cherry‐loving Germany, I had always considered them as a very poor fruit, unless cooked or preserved. But I entertained a very different opinion of them when I had feasted on them in the South of Italy. They are as different as the fresh oranges, picked from the tree, are from those that have been plucked while green, and have ripened in a box during a long voyage.
I never cared for cherries in England. I used to believe in oranges as I found them in the fruiterers’ shops. But now they appear to me a snare and a delusion when eaten in the north.
When we arrived at Sorrento, the Empress of Russia and her daughter, the grand duchess, were still there. We met them driving just as we entered the town, and of course looked eagerly at her who was so soon to become our own Duchess of Edinburgh, and were charmed with her amiable and youthful expression, and with the pretty smile with which she returned our bow. They were to leave Sorrento in a very few days. The yacht was already moored close to the cliffs, awaiting them. The empress shed tears, as the people crowded round to see her embark and wished her farewell in their own graceful way and soft language. She said she had grown to love Sorrento and its inhabitants more than she could express, and that she should always hope some day to return amongst them.
The house in which Tasso was born is now converted into a hotel, much to the detriment of all poetic sentiment.
Nothing can be more lovely than the neighborhood of Sorrento, though a great deal is unapproachable, except on horseback, donkeys, or mules; and much more is equally so for all but very vigorous pedestrians. We went more than once to the small, picturesque town of Massa, at the extreme point of the Peninsula. We visited Il Deserto, the name given to a Franciscan monastery situated on the top of a somewhat barren hill, and which commands a magnificent view. We found only a few lay brothers at home, and about half a dozen orphan boys, who were there by way of learning the art of agriculture. The land around the monastery was mostly barren, and to the left was covered with brushwood. No agriculture was there, at any rate. There was a large garden enclosed within walls; and as the small agricultural were in it, I hoped to see some evidence of their labors. I am bound, however, to speak the truth, much as it tells against the expectations of Sorrento with regard to the future tillers of the soil, as also, which is worse, against the efficiency of the Franciscan instructors in this particular case. The garden was quite full of weeds. I scarcely saw a vegetable or plant of any kind likely to prove edible to anybody except our donkeys; but for them there was hope, as thistles abounded. The juvenile agriculturists were by no means usefully engaged, but were listlessly roving about, doing nothing in particular. They looked bored; and I could not wonder at it. Certainly, the orphans learned no agriculture, and I doubt if either the fathers or lay brothers can teach it. It is to be hoped that at least they learn something else.
One bright morning we resolved on a trip to Capri. We chartered a boat, a man, and two boys, the party consisting of Ida and Elizabeth Vernon, Mary, and me. The wind was not altogether in our favor, and our three sailors had hard work to row us. Nothing can well be more beautiful than the line of coast, with picturesque ruins, deep sea‐caves, varied rocks, and green slopes down to the water’s edge. We had resolved to spend one night at Capri, and intended visiting the Blue Grotto the next day. But the wind was blowing fresh, and it seemed but too probable that, if we did not accomplish our visit at once, we might miss it altogether. Our boatmen made no objection to this addition to our original bargain, and we soon found ourselves rowing up to an entrance into the rock that did not present a different appearance to many other such small, slit‐like fissures and holes, some of which had been pointed out to us as the sirens’ caves. We found two boats moored to the rock; one was empty, and in the other was a lad.
We were given to understand that only two of us at a time could enter the mysterious cave, and that our boat was a great deal too large to pass through that low, dark hole in the rock which the restless blue sea was lapping incessantly with a rapidity of motion that seemed to be momentarily on the increase. We were moreover told that il vecchio(48) was inside—a piece of information which, conveying no express ideas to my mind, awoke a vague apprehension that perhaps I might have touched on the abode of the Old Man of the Sea—a prospect not altogether desirable. There was a great question who was to enter the little boat and first encounter the passage and the old man. Ida and Elizabeth refused to be separated, and Mary, with an exclamation—something about being responsible to their mother for their safety—saw them embark with a pang. In an instant, obedient to the sailor lad’s injunctions, they both disappeared, lying flat down at the bottom of the boat. The sailor gave one vigorous stroke of his oar, ducked down himself, and the boat was sucked into the awful cavern between the heaving sea and the low arch. Mary and I sat silent. Of course we knew there was no danger. It was what everybody did, and there could be nothing to apprehend; nevertheless, I am free to acknowledge that those twenty minutes, during which we were as much shut out from all sight and sound of them as if they were gone to the bottom, while the treacherous waves slapped and lapped the rock like some hungry live thing, and in so doing almost closed the orifice through which the boat had disappeared, were not by any means minutes of absolute serenity to our nerves. Presently, however, the prow of the little boat reappeared, and in a second up jumped Ida and Elizabeth like Jack in the box.
“Well!” we both exclaimed.
“Oh! it is beautiful. Make haste!”
“And the old man?” said I dubiously.
“Oh! yes, he is there,” was the only reply, and no more satisfactory than my previous information.
Of course Mary and I, on getting into the boat, made ourselves as flat as we could at the bottom of it; and suddenly a heaving of the sea shot us into the grotto. Instantly I forgot the old man and everything else in the marvellous beauty of the scene around me. The sides of the cave, one or two large shelving rocks, and the roof were perfectly blue. The very air seemed blue. The water itself was ultramarine. I dipped in my hand, and instantly it shone and flashed like brilliant silver. We approached one of the large rocks where there is a landing‐place. On it I beheld some strange, dark object. Suddenly the object leaped into the blue water, and was transfigured before my eyes into a huge silver frog, swimming about in all directions with a white head above the water. It was my much‐dreaded old man; and certainly the result, in point of color and brilliancy, of the disporting of this venerable individual in the blue water, which converted him into sparkling silver, was very remarkable. But it is not often given, to female eyes at least, to behold a mortal swimming close to her, and to notice the peculiarly frog‐like and ungraceful action which swimming necessitates, and which is heightened by the apparent foreshortening of the limbs from the refraction of the light in the water. It suddenly flashed upon me: was it thus that Hero saw Leander?—minus the silver of course. Poor Hero! The silver frog croaked an indescribable patois, calling our attention vociferously to his own extraordinary brilliancy. At length we entreated him to spare his aged limbs any more aquatic gymnastics, and to return to his rock; which he did, resuming his garments in some niche of a darker blue than the rest.
Meanwhile, our lad had rowed the boat close up to the other large rock on the opposite side of the grotto, telling us that he would gather some coral for us. It was getting dark, and, as we sat alone in the boat, we could neither see nor hear him. A deep‐violet hue began to spread over the grotto and the water. Evening was drawing near, and I began to conjure our sole protector to leave his coral reefs and return to the boat. Then we ducked down once more, and, with the edge of the boat absolutely grating against the mouth of the cave, we emerged into the open sea and the fair white light of heaven.
It happened once upon a time that some one, perhaps an ordinary traveller, perhaps another professional and belated old man, went into the blue grotto alone, and stayed too long. The wind blew hard, and the sea rose. For three days no boat could pass through the closed mouth of the cave. Happily, his friends succeeded in floating in a loaf of bread, which he devoured on his solitary blue rock. I have often wished to know the history of those three days. Did the sirens come and sing to him? Did no mermaid bear him company, or was he left a prey to “the blue devils”?
We had a stiff breeze as we steered our course to the Marina Piccola, one of the only two landing‐places of the Island of Capri. We determined, as we were to be there for so short a time, to sleep at the small inn close by, called the “Little Tiberius,” and which we found comfortable, though very unassuming and not quite finished. We dined in the loggia, shaded by a vine, and they brought us cherries the size of plums that melted like a ripe peach, and beautiful oranges, gathered with the green leaves around them.
The only way to get about on the little Island of Capri is on donkeys or on foot. We chose the former, and directed our course to where stood the Palace of Tiberius. The village of Anacapri is very picturesque, with its narrow streets, sometimes raised a step or two, dark, wide doorways, and domed roofs. We went to the top of the precipitous rock called “Il salto di Tiberio,”(49) which falls sheer and smooth down to the sea, without a break save a few tufts of wild flowers, and over which Tiberius is said to have flung his victims, whose bodies then floated away to the coast of Baiæ. When Augustus was dying, he said of his successor, “I pity the Romans. They are about to be ground between slow jaws.” Never was the cruelty of a coward better expressed than by these words.
I suppose the only history that will ever be correctly written will be that which will date from the day of judgment—that day which alone will clear up the falsehoods, misapprehensions, and delusions with which all history abounds, and will leave probably only the devil as black as he is painted, while it will also prove that many of our angels are fallen ones. It is always difficult, perhaps impossible, to arrive at the secret motives of a man who is a coward, is reserved, has a certain superficial refinement of taste and intellect, and is cursed with absolute power. Tiberius appreciated the extraordinary beauty of his favorite Capri; and yet he dwelt there only to commit the most hideous crimes in secret, while discoursing on the subtleties of grammar and the beauty of art, and writing elegies and love songs. He seemed to have no human affection save for the low‐born Sejanus, whom nevertheless years afterwards he accused to the Roman Senate in a pitiful, whining letter, and who was torn to pieces in consequence. He always hated those who in any way belonged to him, whether by a natural tie or by that of a supposed intimacy. He hated Rome; but even the terror and dread he had of it, giving way to the longing to know how far his bloody orders were being carried out, he approached the gates. That day his pet serpent, the friend of his bosom, was killed and eaten by a million of midges.
“Multitudes are dangerous,” remarked the sententious emperor, and back he went to the top of his solitary rock at Capri.
The same type of man returns from time to time upon the face of the earth to show us the deep hell within itself of which, alas! the human heart is capable. Robespierre was a man of affable manners, who loved flowers and kept canaries. He had delicate white hands and a simper for ever on his thin lips. In early life he wrote a pamphlet against capital punishment. When his turn came to die on the guillotine, he showed no fraction of the courage of the youngest and weakest of his many victims. He too was soft and cruel. There are many such, but happily the outward circumstances are wanting which would develop them into the monsters to which, as a race, they belong.
We spent only a few hours at Salerno, just time enough to visit the tomb of the great Hildebrand, S. Gregory VII., the little man with a great soul, the spiritual Alexander of the church, who, as he said himself, “without being allowed the liberty of speech or deliberation, had been violently carried away and placed on the pontifical throne”; and through volumes of intimate and interesting letters relates his sorrows, his anxieties, and his efforts to the friend of his soul, Cardinal Didier, the Abbot of Monte‐Casino. In the crypt we visited the altar and relics of S. Matthew. The same evening we drove along the coast to Amalfi. It was growing dark before we got there, and I think, though no one said a word about it till we were safe in the Hotel of the Capuchins, we were not altogether without some apprehension that the towering rocks, the dark caves, the mountain heights, and the thick woodlands which filled us with admiration, did not also suggest an unpleasant suspicion of possible banditti. But here I stop. If Amalfi is not seen, it may be painted; but it cannot be described in any words I know of which will tell its beauty. The world has many jewels from nature’s casket, but few more lovely and in more gorgeous setting than the little mediæval town of Amalfi.
I am writing these pages in an English village. I see a low line of pale, misty hills to my left. A venerable church tower peeps from amid large elms and red brick cottage chimneys. In front of my trim garden is a green meadow. The white butterflies are coursing each other in the noontide warmth, and the village children have crowned themselves with tall paper caps, and are holding some jubilee of their own, the mysteries of which are undiscernable to older minds. The clematis which climbs my porch breathes soft, perfumed sighs at my open window. It is pretty, simple, homely. But between this and the dreamlike beauty of Amalfi there lies far more than the distance of many hundreds of miles. There lie the yearning of the soul for the best of God’s beautiful creation—for the warmth of the sun, that natural god of life and gladness—the thirst of the artist’s eye for color, and the poet’s love of the language of song; there lie the Catholic’s hunger for the land of faith and the longing for the regions of old memories and heroic sanctities.
Yes, I love my own pale land, with her brief, scarce summer smiles, her windy autumns, and her long, fireside, wintry evenings. But while I write it and feel it, there comes up before my mind the rose‐tints and blue and silver sparkle, the golden rocks and emerald verdure, of the land with the “fatal gift of beauty,” and I feel my heart sink as I recall Amalfi.
A few more days, and we had looked our last on Southern Italy. There were other reasons besides the thirst for sunshine and beauty why our leaving Naples should prove so sad. There was the close friendship with the Vernons and Padre Cataldo; and as regarded four hearts, there was something more, I suppose, than friendship.
On leaving Amalfi we only slept one night at Naples (for Posilippo we saw no more), and that was a dream‐tost, tearful night. We would not suffer any of our friends to accompany us to the station. Public farewells would be unbearable.
The last thing I remember, as I drove through the hot, bright streets teeming with life, was two young girls with naked feet gayly dancing the tarantella on the burning pavement. Lightly, trippingly, daintily they danced—these two supple‐limbed daughters of the sunny south. How joyous, how free from care, from afterthought or forethought, did they seem! A few figs (they were just ripe) in summer, a few chestnuts and some yellow bread of Indian corn, are all they need for food; and one scant frock, that hides neither arms nor ankles, is all that decency demands. The sun does the rest, pouring rich color into their veins, bright sparkles into their eyes. And so at mid‐day shall they dance, on flags which would scorch my northern skin, singing the while to their own steps, unchallenged by police, unreproached by man, and know no harm, while we go back to our mists and showers amidst our “advanced civilization.”
While writing this my eyes rest upon these lines: “Many take root in this soil, and find themselves unable to leave it again. A species of contemplative epicurism takes possession of them—a life freed from all vain desires and sterile agitation; an ideal existence which is shocked by no inconvenient reality. Others return to their hyperborean country, bringing with them a luminous remembrance to light up the gray twilight of their frozen sky for evermore; others still have quaffed the enchantress’ charmed potion, and can no longer resist the gentle desires which draw them periodically back to her.”
May I also be numbered with those who return to the southern shores of beautiful Italy!
The Three Edens
Bloom’d the first Eden not with man alone, But woman, equal woman, at his side. And seemly was it when, together tried, They fell together—for the two were one. On Calvary stood the Mother by the Son: New Eve with Second Adam crucified; And as through Eve in Adam we had died, Through Mary was our loss in Christ undone. Then how should not the Paradise regained Behold its Eve beside her Adam throned; Both risen, both ascended—unprofaned Each virginal body, by the grave disowned? Else had our foe his conquest half maintained, The primal ruin been but half atoned.
LAKE GEORGE, FEAST OF THE ASSUMPTION, 1874.
A Discussion With An Infidel.
XIV. The Seat Of The Soul.
Büchner. You will admit, I presume, that “the brain is not merely the organ of thought and of all the higher mental faculties, but also the sole and exclusive seat of the soul. Every thought is produced in the brain, every kind of feeling and sensation, exertion of the will, and voluntary motion, proceeds from it” (p. 141).
Reader. Not exactly “from it,” but from the soul, as I have already established; though certainly the brain is instrumental in all vital operations. As to the brain being “the sole and exclusive” seat of the soul I think that physiologists do not agree, and that philosophers have something to object.
Büchner. It is now a recognized truth. “It took a long time before it was recognized, and it is even to this day difficult for those who are not physicians to convince themselves of its correctness” (ibid.)
Reader. It must be difficult indeed; for although we have reason to believe that the brain is, so to say, the central telegraphic office where every intelligence from the other parts of the body is received, yet it is but natural to suppose that there cannot be a central office if there are no other offices destined to correspond with it. On the other hand, philosophers teach that the soul is the form of the body; which implies that there are other parts of our body, besides the brain, where the soul must be present.
Büchner. “These philosophers are a singular people. They talk of the creation of the world as if they had been present on the occasion; they define the Absolute as if they had sat at its table for years; they babble about the nothing and the something, the ego and non‐ego, the per se and in se, universals and particulars, perishability and absolute existence, the unknown x, etc., etc., with a confidence as if a celestial codex had given them exact information about all these ideas and things, and they plaster up the simplest notions with such a confused mass of high‐sounding and learned but incomprehensible words and phrases as to turn the head of a rational man. But, in spite of all this, upon their metaphysical eminence they are not unfrequently so far off from any positive knowledge that they commit the most amusing blunders, especially in those cases in which philosophy and science meet, and when the latter threatens to destroy the results of metaphysical speculation. Thus almost all philosophical psychologists have struggled with rare energy against the theory of the seat of the soul in the brain, and continue in their opposition without taking the least notice of the progress of experimental science” (pp. 142, 143).
Reader. I am surprised, doctor, at your declamation against philosophers. You have no right to denounce them either in general or in particular. I admit that rationalistic philosophers richly deserve all the contempt you can heap upon them, but it is not fair in you to attack them; for they are better than you. To lay your own faults on the shoulders of your opponents is an old trick. The burglar calls his victim a thief; designing Freemasons always prate about Jesuitical machinations; and writers whose philosophical baggage is as light as their pretensions are high inveigh against those by whom they dread to be exposed, refuted, and supplanted. Such is the case with you. While pretending to describe others, you have made the portrait of yourself. It is certainly difficult to find another man in the world who babbles with as much confidence as you do about, or rather against, creation, the Absolute, and the unknown x, etc., etc. Yet your opponents are not infallible, nor do they pretend to be; but if they “commit the most amusing blunders,” it is not owing to their “metaphysical eminence,” as you suppose, but rather to their metaphysical incapacity. Science, you say, sometimes “threatens to destroy the results of metaphysical speculation”; but you should have added that metaphysical speculation oftentimes saves science from shipwreck; for empiricism without philosophy is a ship without a rudder.
You denounce your adversaries as men who do not take “the least notice of the progress of experimental science.” This is a calumny. In fact, you yourself inform us that one of your adversaries is philosopher Fischer, a man who not only took notice of the progress of experimental science, but greatly contributed to such a progress by his own intelligent and indefatigable labors. You cannot therefore pretend that such a man lacked “positive knowledge.” Now, he says: “That the soul is immanent in the whole nervous system is proved, as it feels, perceives, and acts in every part thereof. I do not feel pain in a central part of the brain, but in a particular spot and place.”
Büchner. “And yet what Fischer denies is undoubtedly the fact. The nerves themselves do not perceive; they merely call forth sensations by conducting the impressions received to the brain. We do not feel pain in the place injured, but in the brain. If a nerve of sensation be divided in its course to the brain, all the parts which are supplied by it lose their sensibility, for no other reason than that the conducting of the impression to the brain is no longer possible. Every man who has no knowledge of physiological processes believes the feeling of hunger to be in the stomach. This is not so; the brain alone makes us conscious of the feeling. If the nerve uniting brain and stomach be divided, hunger is at an end, nor does it return. Neither does anger arise in the liver, or courage in the chest, but in the brain only” (pp. 143, 144). “Habit and external appearance have led to the false notion that we feel in places subjected to external irritation. Physiology calls this relation ‘the law of eccentric phenomena.’ According to it, we falsely attribute the feeling perceived in the brain to the place where the impression is made.... Persons who have lost their arms or legs by amputation often feel during their whole lives, in atmospheric changes, pains in limbs which they no longer possess. If all his limbs were removed, man would still feel them. From these facts it can scarcely be doubted that there must exist in the brain a topography by means of which the various sensations of the different parts of the body arise. Every part of the body which can be separately perceived must have a corresponding spot in the brain which in some degree represents it in the forum of consciousness” (pp. 144, 145).
Reader. This answer, doctor, is not altogether satisfactory. “The nerves,” of course, “do not perceive.” This I willingly admit; but neither does the brain perceive; for it is the soul that perceives. The nerves “merely call forth sensations by conducting the impressions received to the brain.” This cannot be denied; but it does not prove the non‐existence of the soul in the nervous system. Suppose that a pin or a thorn presses the finger; before the impression can be transmitted from the finger to the brain, its reception in the finger must give rise to a change of relation between the soul and the finger itself; which would be impossible, if the soul were not in the finger. For, if the soul is not in the finger, the impression made by the thorn will consist of a merely mechanical movement; and when this movement is communicated to the brain, what sensation can be called forth? A sensation of pain? No; for mere mechanical movement cannot produce a sense of pain, unless it is felt to disagree with the living organism. Now, the pricking is not felt to disagree with the brain, but with the finger. It is therefore in the finger and not in the brain that we feel the pain; which shows that the soul really is in the finger, and in every other part of the body in which we may experience any sensation.
Your reason for pretending that “we do not feel pain in the place injured, but in the brain,” is quite unsatisfactory. It is true that if a nerve of sensation be divided in its course to the brain, all the parts which are supplied by it lose their sensibility; but what of that? Those parts lose their sensibility because they lose their sensitiveness; that is, because the cutting of the nerve, by impairing the body, causes the soul to abandon the organic parts supplied by that nerve. You argue that, if the soul is not present in a given part of the body, when the nerve has been injured, the soul was not present in that same part before the nerve was injured. This inference is evidently wrong. The soul informs the organism, and any part of it, as long as the organs are suitably disposed for the vital operations, and abandons the organism, or any part of it, as soon as the organs have become unfit for the vital operations. Hence, as you cannot infer the non‐existence of the soul in the brain of a living man from the non‐existence of the same in the brain of a corpse, so you cannot infer its non‐existence in a part of the body before the cutting of the nerve from its non‐existence in the same part after the nerve has been cut.
The feeling of hunger, you say, is not in the stomach, because “if the nerve uniting brain and stomach be divided, hunger is at an end.” Is not this very curious? Men need none of your theories to know where they feel hungry; and they not only believe, as you say, but also experience, that their feeling of hunger is in the stomach. How can this be reconciled with your theory? You try to discredit the common belief by observing that we “have no knowledge of physiological processes.” This, however, is not true; for although we may not possess your speculative knowledge of those processes, yet we have an experimental knowledge of them, which beats all your speculations. The simplest common sense teaches that a theory contradicted by facts is worth nothing. Now, the fact is that we experience the sensation of hunger in the stomach, and not in the brain; and therefore no physiological theory that contradicts such a fact can be of any value.
You pretend that “habit and external appearance have led to the false notion that we feel in places subjected to external irritation.” This assertion cannot be justified. Habits are acquired by repeated acts; and to assume that habit leads us to a false notion is to assume that we are cheated by our actual sensations; which is inadmissible. As to “external appearances,” it is evident that they have nothing to do with the question, as sensations are not external appearances, but internal realities. Hence when we say that “we feel in places subjected to external irritation,” we express a real fact of which we have experimental evidence, and in regard to which no habit or external appearance can make us err.
The fact that “persons who have lost their arms or legs by amputation often feel during their whole life, in atmospheric changes, pains in limbs which they no longer possess,” does not tend to prove that the brain is the exclusive seat of the soul. Hence I dismiss it altogether. With regard to your conclusion that “every part of the body which can be separately perceived must have a corresponding spot in the brain which in some degree represents it in the forum of consciousness,” I have not the least objection against it; I merely add that no part of the body in which the soul is not actually present can be represented in the forum of consciousness. For if the soul is not in the finger when the thorn pricks it, the soul cannot say, I feel the pain; it could only say, I know that a material organ, with which I have nothing to do, is being injured. The soul would, in fact, but receive a telegram announcing what happens in some distant quarter. If a telegram comes to you from Siberia, announcing twenty degrees of cold, do you feel the sensation of cold?
Büchner. Yet “the theory that the brain is the seat of the soul is so incontrovertible that it has long been adopted in the rules of law in regard to monstrosities. A monstrosity with one body and two heads counts for two persons; one with two bodies and one head, only for one person. Monstrosities without brain, so‐called acephali, possess no personality” (pp. 147, 148).
Reader. This is true; and therefore the soul certainly informs the brain. But it does not follow that other parts of the body are not informed. Hence your remark has no bearing on the question; and it remains true that the soul, as the form of the body, is directly connected with every part of the organism in which vital acts are performed.
XV. Spiritism.
Reader. May I ask, doctor, what you think of spiritism?
Büchner. I think it to be a fraud.
Reader. Of course, when a man denies the existence of spiritual substances, he cannot but deny their manifestation. Yet the phenomena of spiritism are so well known that we can scarcely be of your opinion.
Büchner. “Some of these phenomena, clairvoyance especially, have been laid hold of to prove the existence of supernatural and supersensual phenomena. They were considered as the link of connection between the spiritual and the material world; and it was surmised that these phenomena opened a gate through which man might pass, and succeed in obtaining some immediate clue regarding transcendental existence, personal continuance, and the laws of the spirit. All these things are now, by science and an investigation of the facts, considered as idle fancies which human nature is so much inclined to indulge in to satisfy its longing after what appears miraculous and supersensual” (p. 149).
Reader. I apprehend, doctor, that science has no means of showing that “all these things are idle fancies.” Materialism, of course, assumes, though it cannot show, that spirits do not exist; but materialism is no science at all; and if the “investigation of the facts” has been conducted by materialists, we may well be sure that their verdict was not unbiassed. On the other hand, men of science, who are not materialists, a great number of physicians, philosophers, and theologians, are convinced that the phenomena of spiritism are neither inventions nor delusions. And, though human nature feels a certain propensity to believe what is wonderful, we cannot assume that learned and prudent men yield to this propensity without good reasons.
Büchner. “This propensity has given rise to the most curious errors of the human mind. Though it sometimes appears that the progress of science arrests its development in some place, it suddenly breaks forth with greater force at some other place where it was less expected. The events of the last few years afford a striking example. What the belief in sorcery, witchcraft, demoniac possession, vampirism, etc., was in former centuries, reappears now under the agreeable forms of table‐moving, spirit‐rapping, psychography, somnambulism, etc.” (p. 150).
Reader. You are right. Spiritism is only a new form of old superstitions and diabolic manifestations. But you are mistaken, if you believe that science can show such manifestations to have been fables. Your scientific argument against spiritual manifestations is, you must own it, inconsistent with your scientific process. Your process requires a basis of facts; for it is from facts that science draws its generalizations. You should, therefore, first ascertain that sorcery, witchcraft, etc., never existed in the world, and that not one of the thousand facts narrated in profane, sacred, or ecclesiastical history has ever happened; and then you might conclude that all mankind have been very stupid to believe such absurdities. But you follow quite a different course. You argue à priori, and say: Spiritual manifestations are an impossibility; therefore all the pretended facts of spiritism are impositions. This manner of arguing is not scientific; for evidently it is not based on facts, and the assumption that spiritual manifestations are impossible cannot be granted; for it cannot be proved. Hence not only the ignorant classes, but also educated persons, as you complain, believe in spiritual manifestations, in spite of your pretended science; for, when they see the facts, they will only smile at your denial of their possibility.
Büchner. But the facts themselves are incredible. “Magnetic sleep, induced either by continued passes on the body, or spontaneously without external means, as in idiosomnambulism, is stated to be frequently attended by an intellectual ecstasy, which in certain privileged persons, chiefly females, rises to what is called clairvoyance. In this state those persons are said to exhibit mental faculties not natural to them, to speak fluently foreign languages, and to discuss things perfectly unknown to them in the waking state.... The person perceives things beyond the sphere of his senses, he reads sealed letters, guesses the thoughts of other persons, reveals the past, etc. Finally, such individuals sometimes give us information about the arrangements in heaven and hell, our state after death, and so forth; but we cannot help mentioning that these revelations are ever in remarkable harmony with the religious views of the church, or of the priest under whose influence the patient may be for the time” (p. 151).
Reader. Poor Doctor Büchner! You are most unlucky in your allusion to the church. Spiritism is not a priestly invention, nor is it practised under the influence of the priest. The whole world knows that the practice of spiritism is utterly forbidden by the church; and you cannot be ignorant that your insinuation of the contrary is a slander. Perhaps your Masonic conscience allows you to tell lies; but is it wise to do so when the lie is so patent that no one can believe it?
Büchner. “There can be no doubt that all pretended cases of clairvoyance rest upon fraud or illusion. Clairvoyance—that is, a perception of external objects without the use of the senses—is an impossibility. It is a law of nature which cannot be gainsaid that we require our eyes to see, our ears to hear, and that these senses are limited in their action by space. No one can read an opaque sealed letter, extend his vision to America, see with closed eyes what passes around him, look into the future, or guess the thoughts of others. These truths rest upon natural laws which are irrefutable, and admit, like other natural laws, of no exception. All that we know we know by the medium of our senses. There exist no supersensual and supernatural things and capacities, and they never can exist, as the eternal conformity of the laws of nature would thereby be suspended. As little as a stone can ever fall in any other direction than towards the centre of the earth, so little can a man see without using his eyes” (p. 152).
Reader. Your reasoning is not sound, doctor. The stone can fall in any direction, if it receives an impetus in that direction; it is only when it is left to itself that it must fall directly towards the centre of the earth. So also a man, when left to himself and his natural powers, cannot see without using his eyes; but if acted on by a preternatural agency, he may be made acquainted with what his eyes cannot see. Your mention of natural laws is uncalled for. You will certainly not pretend that the natural laws, which hold in regard to this visible world, can be assumed to rule the world of the spirits. Moreover, when you say that “there exist no supersensual and supernatural things,” because “the eternal conformity of the laws of nature would thereby be suspended,” you merely make a gratuitous assertion. For as you can raise a weight without suspending the law of gravitation, so can other agents do other things conflicting with the uniform execution of natural laws without the natural laws becoming suspended. Thus your assertion that “there exist no supersensual and supernatural things” is wholly gratuitous, and therefore cannot be the basis of a sound argument against the facts of spiritism. “There is no fighting against facts; it is like kicking against the pricks,” as you say in one of your prefaces (p. xviii.)
Büchner. “Ghosts and spirits have hitherto only been seen by children, or ignorant and superstitious individuals” (p. 152).
Reader. Did not Saul see the ghost of Samuel?
Büchner. “All that has been narrated of the visits of departed spirits is sheer nonsense; never has a dead man returned to this world. There are neither table‐spirits nor any other spirits” (p. 153).
Reader. How can you account for such a singular assertion?
Büchner. “The naturalist entertains, from observation and experience, no doubt as to these truths; a constant intercourse with nature and its laws has convinced him that they admit of no exception” (p. 153).
Reader. This is not true. Naturalists, with their observation and experience of natural things, do not and cannot reject facts of a higher order, though they have not observed them. Their non‐observation is no argument, especially when we have other witnesses of the facts, and when we know that the naturalists of your school are pledged to materialism, and therefore shut their eyes to the facts which oppose their theory. The majority of educated persons admit the facts; not indeed all the facts narrated, but many of them which no critical rule allows us to reject.
Büchner. Where are those facts? “The scientific impossibility of clairvoyance has been confirmed by an examination of the facts by sober and unprejudiced observers, and were proved to be deceptions and illusions” (p. 153).
Reader. Of course there are juggleries and impositions; but what of that? Would you maintain that there can be no doctors because there are quacks? I appeal to your logic.
Büchner. “The faculty of medicine of Paris many years ago took the trouble of submitting a number of such cases to a scientific examination; they were all proved to be deceptions, nor could a single case be established of a perception without the use of the senses. In 1837 the same academy offered a prize of 3,000 francs to any one who could read through a board. No one gained the prize” (ibid.)
Reader. You forget, doctor, that in 1837 spiritism was as yet most imperfectly known. It was only about ten years later that it developed throughout America and Europe. Let the medical faculty of Paris again offer a prize to any one who can read through a board; and no one doubts there would be no lack of competitors. When we see that physicians and others, owing to their own experience of spiritual manifestations, were compelled to repudiate their previous materialistic opinions; when we know that infidels by the same manifestations were brought to believe the immortality of the soul; when the learned and the ignorant, the rich and the poor, the layman and the churchman, the diplomatist, the philosopher, and the theologian, bear witness to the reality of the spiritual phenomena, and are ready to bring forward innumerable facts in support of their affirmation, we do not care what the faculty of medicine of Paris may have pronounced many years ago. You say that the faculty “submitted a number of such cases to a scientific examination,” and that “they were all proved to be deceptions”; but you would be very much embarrassed to say in what that “scientific examination” consisted. On the other hand, the proofs of the deception have never appeared; and the simple truth is that the spiritual phenomena were à priori rejected, as clashing with the materialistic theory of the faculty. You pretend that “whenever the proper means were employed to prevent deception, clairvoyance was at an end” (p. 153). Such an assertion proves that you are completely ignorant of what is going on in the world, or that you are determined obstinately to ignore whatever could compel you to acknowledge the existence of spiritual substances.
Büchner. “I have had the opportunity of examining a clairvoyant, of whom remarkable things were told, under circumstances when a deception on the part of the magnetizer was out of the question. The lady failed in all her indications; they were either absolutely false or so expressed that nothing could be made of them. She, moreover, made the most ridiculous excuses for her shortcomings. As she failed in her clairvoyance, she preferred to fall into a state of heavenly ecstasy, in which she discoursed with her ange or tutelar genius, and recited religious verses. In reciting a poem of this kind she once stopped short, and recommenced the verse to assist her memory. She manifested, withal, in this ecstasy, no superior mental capacities; her language was common, and her manner awkward. I left with the conviction that the lady was an impostor who deceived her patron. Still, several gentlemen present were by no means convinced of the deception practised on them” (p. 154).
Reader. If these gentlemen could by no means be convinced of the deception, must we not presume that there was no deception, and that your peculiar construction of the case was brought about by a strong desire of not being disturbed in your fixed idea that there is nothing but matter? If “the lady failed in all her indications,” if “she made the most ridiculous excuses for her shortcomings,” if “she manifested no superior capacities,” it should have been evident to those “several gentlemen” that she was a fraud. Their inability to be convinced of the deception would therefore show that the lady did not fail in all her indications, but manifested superior capacities. Be this as it may, the truth and reality of spiritual manifestations cannot be disproved by particular attempts at imposition. Spiritualists admit that many impositions have been practised under the name of spiritual manifestations, but they aver that in most instances cheats could not have been palmed off, even if designed; and that in other cases there could be no possible motive for deception, as the investigations were carried on in private families where the mediums were their own sons and daughters.(50) Spirit‐rapping is a fact. Table‐ turning is a fact. Clairvoyance is a fact. Thousands of all conditions, sects, and nations have witnessed, watched, and examined all such facts with a degree of attention, suspicion, and incredulity proportionate to their novelty, strangeness, and unnaturalness. What has been the result? A verdict acknowledging the reality of the facts and the impossibility of accounting for them without intelligent preternatural agencies. This verdict disposes of your materialism. To deny the facts in order to save materialism is so much time lost. Facts speak for themselves.
XVI. Innate Ideas
Reader. And now I should like to know, doctor, why you thought proper to fill twenty‐seven pages of your Force and Matter with a discussion about innate ideas.
Büchner. For two reasons, sir. First, because “the question whether there be innate ideas is a very old one, and, in our opinion, one of the most important in relation to the contemplation of nature. It decides to some extent whether man, considered as the product of a higher world, has received a form of existence as something foreign and external to his essence, with the tendency to shake off this earthly covering, and to return to his spiritual home; or whether, both in his spiritual and bodily capacity, man stands to the earth which has produced him in a necessary, inseparable connection, and whether he has received his essential nature from this world; so that he cannot be torn from the earth, like the plant which cannot exist without its maternal soil. The question is, at the same time, one which does not dissolve itself in a philosophical mist, but which, so to speak, has flesh and blood, and, resting upon empirical facts, can be discussed and decided without high‐sounding phrases” (p. 157). The second reason is, that “if it be correct that there are no innate intuitions, then must the assertion of those be incorrect who assume that the idea of a God, or the conception of a supreme personal being, who created, who governs and preserves the world, is innate in the human mind, and therefore incontrovertible by any mode of reasoning” (p. 184).
Reader. Do you mean, that, by refuting the theory of innate ideas, you will cut the ground from under the feet of the theist and the spiritualist?
Büchner. Yes, sir. Such is the drift of my argumentation.
Reader. Then your labor is all in vain. For you must know that we do not base our demonstration of the substantiality and immortality of the soul on the doctrine of innate ideas, nor do we assume that the notion of a God is an “innate intuition.” Had you been even superficially acquainted with the works of our scholastic philosophers, you would have known that innate ideas are totally foreign to their psychological and theological doctrines. You would have known that the axiom, Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu—that is, “There is nothing in our intellect which has not entered by the gate of the senses”—is not a discovery of your Moleschott, to whom you attribute it, but is an old dictum familiar to all the schoolmen of past centuries, and approved by the most orthodox philosophers of our own time. Now, these philosophers, while denying that we have any innate idea, admit at the same time that our soul is a special substance and is immortal, and show that the human intellect can easily form a concept of God as a supreme cause, and ascertain his existence without need of innate intuitions. This might convince you that your chapter on innate ideas has no bearing on the questions concerning the nature of the soul and the notion of a God. Your assumption that if man has innate ideas, he will have a tendency “to shake off this earthly covering, and to return to his spiritual home,” is incorrect. For the human body has no spiritual home, as is evident; and the human soul, as having no previous existence in a separate state, has no home but in the body, and the presence of innate ideas would not create in it a tendency to shake off its earthly covering. On the other hand, your other assumption, that, if man has no innate ideas, he is “a production of the earth alone, and cannot be torn from the earth, with which he is inseparably connected both in his spiritual and bodily capacity,” is even more incorrect. For the absence of innate ideas does not mean, and does not entail, the absence of an intellectual principle; and such a principle, as evidently immaterial, is not a production of the earth, and has no need of earthly things to continue its existence.
Büchner. How can a soul exist without ideas? And, if all ideas come through our senses, how can a soul exist without being united to the organs? “Daily experience teaches us that man begins his intellectual life only with the gradual development of his senses, and in proportion as he enters into a definite relation to the external world; and that the development of his intellect keeps pace with that of his organs of sense and his organ of thought, and also with the number and importance of the impressions received. ‘Every unprejudiced observer,’ says Virchow, ‘has arrived at the conviction that thought is only gradually developed in man.’ The new‐born child thinks as little, and has as little a soul, as the unborn child; it is, in our view, living in the body, but intellectually dead.... The embryo neither thinks nor feels, and is not conscious of its existence. Man recollects nothing of this state, nor of the first period of his existence in which the senses were dormant; and this perfect unconsciousness proves his spiritual non‐existence at that period. The reason can only be that, during the fœtal state, there are no impressions whatever received from without, and so weak and imperfect are they in the first few weeks that the intellect cannot be said to exist” (p. 159).
Reader. It is plain that the new‐born child cannot form an idea of exterior objects without the use of his senses. But is it true that the new‐born child is not conscious of its own existence? Certainly not; for, without a previous knowledge of its own existence, it would never be able to attribute to itself the feelings awakened in it by exterior objects. The mind cannot say, I feel, if it is not already acquainted with the I. Nor does it matter that “man recollects nothing of the first period of his existence.” Recollection is impossible so long as the brain has not acquired a certain consistency; and therefore whatever happens with us in the first period of our existence leaves no durable trace in our organs, and is entirely forgotten. Hence your assertions “that the senses of the new‐born child are dormant, and that its perfect unconsciousness proves its spiritual non‐existence,” are both false. The child feels its being, its senses are quite ready to receive impressions, and its soul is quite alive to such impressions.
You say that “the development of the intellect keeps pace with that of the organs of sense.” What do you mean by development of the intellect? If you simply mean that the intellect is furnished with materials of thought in proportion as sensible objects are perceived, and that, by being so furnished, it can easily perform a number of intellectual operations, I admit your assertion; but if you mean that the soul itself is substantially developed in proportion as the organs are growing more perfect, then your assertion is both groundless and absurd. Now, it is evident, by your manner of reasoning, that this second meaning is the one you adopt. And therefore it is evident that your conclusion is wrong. “The impressions,” you say, “are so weak and imperfect that the intellect cannot be said to exist.” This is simply ludicrous. Would you allow us to say that at night the impressions of light are so weak and imperfect that the eye cannot be said to exist? Or that the impressions made on a piece of paper by a bad pencil are so weak and imperfect that the paper cannot be said to exist? It is obvious that the impressions do not cause the existence of their subject; and, therefore, if the intellect “cannot be said to exist” before the impressions, the time will never come when it can be said to exist.
And now, suppose that a newborn child dies without having acquired through its senses any knowledge of the exterior world. What shall we say of its soul? Will such a soul be entirely destitute of ideas, and unable to think? By no means. Such a soul, after its short permanence in the body, where it felt its own being, will henceforward understand its own being as actually present in its own individuality; it will perceive its own essence as well as its existence; it will be able to abstract from self, and to behold essence, existence, and being, secundum se—that is, according to their objective intelligibility; and, finally, it will be able to commune with other spiritual beings with the same facility with which, while in the body, it could communicate with the exterior world by means of its organic potencies. I know that you do not believe this; but your unbelief will not change things. The soul, when out of the body, is competent to perform intellectual operations about intellectual objects as freely and as perfectly as it performs the sensitive operations in its present condition. If you consult the works of our philosophers and theologians, you will find the proofs of my proposition. As to your opposite assumption, since you have no means of establishing it, we are free to dismiss it without further discussion.
Büchner. If the soul is a separate substance, how and when is it introduced into the body? “The scientific and logical impossibility of determining the time (of its introduction) proves the absurdity of the whole theory, which assumes that a higher power breathes the soul into the nostrils of the fœtus” (p. 160).
Reader. You are grossly mistaken, doctor. The impossibility of determining the time of the animation of the fœtus proves nothing but our ignorance. Do you deny that Paris was built by the Gauls on the plea that you do not know the date of its foundation? Again, since the animation of the fœtus is not an operation of the mind, how can you speak of logical impossibility? Evidently, you write at random, and know not what you say. As to the question itself, one thing is clear, viz., the child cannot be born alive, unless its body has been animated in the womb.
Büchner. “Moses and the Egyptians entertained a decided opinion that the child was not animated while in the womb” (p. 161).
Reader. False. Moses describes in the Book of Genesis the fighting of Jacob and Esau while in the womb of their mother. Could he assume that they would fight before being animated?
Büchner. “In some countries they know nothing of an animated fœtus” (ibid.)
Reader. False. Every mother will give you the lie.
Büchner. “The destruction of the fœtus and infanticide are, according to Williams, common occurrences in Madagascar. It is also common in China and the Society Islands” (ibid.)
Reader. This shows the immorality of those nations, not their ignorance of the fœtal life. But why should you appeal to the presumed ignorance of barbarians against the verdict of civilized nations? Are you an apostle of barbarity and brutality? Do you wish your reader to persuade himself that the destruction of the fœtus is no crime?
Büchner. “The Roman lawyers did not look upon the fœtus as an individual being, but as a part of the mother. The destruction of the fœtus was therefore permitted to the women of Rome, and we find that Plato and Aristotle had already adopted the same view” (p. 160).
Reader. Do not calumniate Aristotle. This great philosopher and naturalist is decidedly not of your opinion. He teaches that the fœtus is animated in the womb. And, pray, are the legal fictions of the Roman lawyers of any weight against the facts averred by modern medicine? Do you again appeal to ignorance against science?
Büchner. Physicians have not yet decided the question. “Even at birth, when the child is separated from the mother, it is impossible to assume that a ready‐made soul, lying in wait, should suddenly rush in and take possession of its new habitation. The soul, on the contrary, is only gradually developed in proportion to the relations which, by the awakening senses, are now established between the individual and the external world” (p. 161).
Reader. No, sir. If this last assertion were true, it would follow that every child would be lifeless at its birth; for without a soul no animal life can be conceived. What is “gradually developed” is not the substance of the soul, but the exercise of its faculties. This is a point already settled. As to your other assertion, that the question has not yet been decided by the physicians, I need only say that, although there are different opinions regarding the time of the animation of the embryo, yet no physician (unless he is a materialist) denies that the embryo is animated long before its nativity. Hence your notion of a ready‐made soul lying in wait, and suddenly rushing in when the child is born, is only a dream of your fancy or an unworthy attempt at ridiculing the proceedings of nature.
What you add about the development of the child’s mind by means of the senses, education, and example does not prove the subjective, but only the objective, growth of the mind, as you yourself seem to concede (p. 162). And as the objective growth means an accidental acquisition of knowledge without any substantial change of the soul, hence nothing that you may say in refutation of innate ideas can have the least weight or afford the least ground against the doctrine of the immortality and substantiality of the soul.
XVII. The Idea Of A God.
Reader. From the non‐existence of innate ideas you infer, doctor, that “the idea of a God, or the conception of a supreme personal being, who created, who governs and preserves the world, is not innate in the human mind, and therefore is not incontrovertible” (p. 184). On the other hand, you say with Luther that “God is a blank sheet, upon which nothing is found but what you have yourself written” (ibid.) Do you mean that our notion of God is merely subjective—that is, a creation of our fancy without any objective foundation?
Büchner. Yes, sir. “We can have neither any knowledge nor any conception of the absolute—of that which transcends the surrounding sensual world. However much metaphysicians may vainly attempt to define the absolute, however much religion may endeavor to excite faith in the absolute by the assumption of a revelation, nothing can conceal the defect of the definition. All our knowledge is relative, and results from the comparison of surrounding sensible objects. We could have no notion of darkness without light, no conception of high without low, of heat without coldness, etc.; absolute ideas we have none. We are not able to form any conception of ‘everlasting’ or ‘infinite,’ as our understanding, limited by time and space, finds an impassable barrier for that conception. From being in the sensual world accustomed to find a cause for every effect, we have falsely concluded that there exists a primary cause of all things, although such a cause is perfectly inaccessible to our ideas, and is contradicted by scientific experience” (p. 179).
Reader. How do you show that we have neither any knowledge nor any conception of the absolute? or that our understanding is limited by time and space? or that, from being accustomed to find a cause for every effect, we have falsely concluded that there exists a primary cause of all things? or that its existence is contradicted by scientific experience? Of course you cannot expect that a rational man will swallow such paradoxes on your puny authority.
Büchner. We know neither absolute truth, nor absolute good, nor absolute beauty. This I have shown by proving that all our notions of truth, of good, and of beauty are the fruit of experience, observation, and comparison, and that such notions vary according to the character of the nations in which they are to be found. It is only after this demonstration that I concluded “that we can have neither any knowledge nor any conception of the absolute.”
Reader. Yes; this is the only point which you have tried to establish, and you have failed, as I am ready to show. But that our understanding is limited by time and space you merely assert. That we falsely conclude that there is a primary cause you boldly assume. That God’s existence is contradicted by scientific experience you impudently affirm, well knowing that it is a lie.
And now, with regard to the knowledge of the absolute, you are much mistaken if you believe that we know no absolute truth, no absolute good, and no absolute beauty. We know absolute being; and therefore we know absolute truth, absolute good, and absolute beauty.
Büchner. We know of no absolute being, sir.
Reader. Be modest, doctor; for you know of how many blunders you stand already convicted. Absolute being is not necessarily “that which transcends the surrounding sensual world.” The sun, the moon, the planets have their absolute being, and yet do not transcend matter. Now, can we not form a notion of the absolute being of these bodies? You say that “all our knowledge is relative, and results from the comparison of surrounding sensible objects”; but you should reflect that all relative knowledge implies the knowledge of the absolute terms from the comparison of which the relation is to be detected. Hence you cannot admit the knowledge of the relative without assuming the knowledge of the absolute. Accordingly, it is false that “all our knowledge is relative,” at least in the sense of your argumentation. Nor is it true that all our knowledge “results from the comparison of surrounding sensible objects.” There is a kind of knowledge which results from the comparison of intellectual principles, as the knowledge of the logical rules; and there is also a knowledge which results, not from the comparison, but from the intellectual analysis, of things, as the knowledge of the constituent principles of being. If I ask you what is distance, you will soon point out any two sensible objects, by the comparison of which distance may become known; but if I ask you what is syllogism, or what is judgment, or what is philosophy, I defy you to point out any “surrounding sensible objects,” by the comparison of which such notions may be understood.
I need not discuss your assertion that “we could have no notion of darkness without light, no conception of high without low, of heat without coldness, etc.” I may concede the assertion as irrelevant for, whenever we designate things by relative terms, it is clear that each relative carries within itself the connotation of its correlative. But it does not follow that all our knowledge is relative. How can we know, for instance, the relation of brotherhood intervening between James and John, if we know neither the one nor the other? Can we conceive the brother without the man? Or is it necessary, when we know the man, that in such a man we should see his peculiar relation to another man?
You pretend that we are not able to form any conception of “ever‐lasting” or “infinite”; and, to prove this, you affirm that “our understanding, being limited by time and space, finds an impassable barrier for that conception.” Very well; but what did you mean when you contended that matter is “eternal” and “infinite”? Had you then any conception of “eternal” and “infinite”? If you had not such conceptions, you made a fool of yourself by using terms which you did not understand; while, if you had such conceptions, then it is false that we are not able to form them. In the same manner, have you any conception of the “absolute”? If you have it, then it is ridiculous to pretend that we cannot conceive the absolute; while, if you have it not, you know not about what you are speaking. Alas! poor doctor. What can you answer? It is the common fate of the enemies of truth to be inconsistent with themselves, and to demolish with one hand what they build with the other.
But is it true that our intellect “is limited by time and space”? No, it is not true. Imagination is indeed limited by time and space, as all our philosophers concede; but intellect understands things independently of either space or time. This is evident. For in what space do we place the universals? To what time do we confine mathematical truths? Two and two are known to make four in all places and in all times—that is, without restriction or limit in space and time; and the same is true of all intellectual principles. Hence it is obvious that our understanding transcends both space and time, and can reach the infinite and the eternal. It is through abstraction, of course, and not by comprehension or by intuition, that we form such notions; for our intellect, though not limited by time and space, is limited in its own entity, and therefore it cannot conceive the unlimited, except by the help of the abstractive process—that is, by removing the limits by which the objective reality of the finite is circumscribed. That we can do this I need not prove to you; for you admit that space is infinite, and pretend that matter itself is infinite, as I have just remarked; and consequently you cannot deny that we have the notion of infinity.
What shall I say of your next assertion, that, from being accustomed to find a cause for every effect, “we have falsely concluded that there exists a primary cause of all things”? Do you think that the principle of causality has no other ground than experience? or that, when we do not “find” the cause of a certain effect, we are to conclude that the effect has had no cause? I hope you will not deny that the notions of cause and effect are so essentially connected that there is no need of experiment to compel the admission of a cause for every effect. Hence we are certain, not only that all the effects for which we have found a cause proceed from a cause, but also that all the effects for which we cannot find a cause likewise proceed from a cause. This amounts to saying that the principle of causality is analytical, not empirical, as you seem to hold. Now, if all effects must have a cause, on what ground do you assert that “we have falsely concluded that there exists a primary cause of all things”? Our conclusion cannot be false, unless it be false that the world has been created; for if it was created, we must admit a Creator—that is, a primary cause. But the fact of creation is, even philosophically, undeniable, since the contingent nature of the world is manifestly established by its liability to continuous change. And therefore it is manifestly established that our admission of a primary cause is not a false conclusion. I might say more on this point; but what need is there of refuting assertions which have not even a shadow of plausibility? The primary cause, you say, “is perfectly inaccessible to our ideas.” I answer that, if the word “idea” means “concept,” your statement is perfectly wrong. You add that the existence of a primary cause “is contradicted by scientific experience.” I answer by challenging you to bring forward a single fact of experimental science which supports your blasphemous assertion.
You must agree, doctor, that a man who in a few phrases commits so many unconceivable blunders has no right to censure the metaphysicians or to attack revelation. It is rash, therefore, on your part, to declare that “however much metaphysicians may vainly attempt to define the absolute, however much religion may endeavor to excite faith in the absolute by the assumption of a revelation, nothing can conceal the defect of the definition.” Of what definition do you speak? Your own definition of the absolute, as “that which transcends the surrounding sensual world,” is certainly most deficient; but religion and metaphysics are not to be made responsible for it. Why did you not, before censuring the metaphysicians and the theologians, ascertain their definitions? We call absolute a being whose existence does not depend on the existence of another being; and in this sense God alone is absolute. He is the absolute antonomastically. And we call absolute analogically any being also whose existence does not depend on any created being, although it depends on the creative and conservative action of God; and in this sense every created substance is absolute. And we call absolute logically whatever is conceived through its own intrinsic constituents without reference to any other distinct entity; and in this sense we speak of absolute movement, absolute weight, absolute volume, etc. Without enumerating other less important meanings of the term, I simply observe that the absolute may be defined as that which is independent of extraneous conditions; and that the greater its independence, the more absolute and the more perfect is the being. Have you anything to say against this definition?
We must, then, conclude that all your argumentation is nothing but a shocking display of false assertions, and, I may add, of “intellectual jugglery.”
Büchner. I will accept your conclusion, if you can show that our conception of a God is not a childish delusion of our fancy. “An exact knowledge and unprejudiced observation of individuals and nations in an uncivilized state prove the contrary to be the fact. Only a prejudiced mind can, in the worship of animals practised by ancient and existing nations, find something analogous to a real belief in a God. It by no means corresponds to the idea of a God when we see man worshipping such animals as he from experience knows may injure or be useful to him.... A stone, a tree, a river, an alligator, a parcel of rags, a snake, form the idols of the negro of Guinea. Such a worship does not express the idea of an almighty being, governing the world and ruling nature and man, but merely a blind fear of natural forces, which frighten uncivilized man, or appear supernatural, as he is not able to trace the natural connection of things.... A god in the shape of an animal is no God, but a caricature” (pp. 184, 185).
Reader. True. But individuals and nations existing “in an uncivilized state” are scarcely to be appealed to for a decision of the question. The notion of worship implies the notion of a supreme being; but rude and brutal men, thinking of nothing but of the development of their animal nature and the pursuit of degrading pleasure, though they know that there is some superior being, are not the men we ought to consult about the nature and attributes of divinity. It seems, doctor, as if you had a great predilection for uncivilized and barbarous nations. You have already tried to countenance abortion and fœticide, on the ground that barbarians admitted the horrible practice; and now you would have us believe that our conception of a God is a childish delusion, on the ground that barbarians worship the snake, the alligator, or any other caricature of a god. This will not do.
Büchner. But civilized men are not much in advance of barbarians with regard to the notion of divinity. “No one has better expounded the purely human origin of the idea of God than Ludwig Feuerbach. He calls all conceptions of God and divinity anthropomorphisms—i.e., products of human fancies and perceptions, formed after the model of human individuality. Feuerbach finds this anthropomorphism in the feeling of dependence inherent in the human nature. ‘An extraneous and superhuman God,’ says Feuerbach, ‘is nothing but an extraneous and supernatural self, a subjective being placed, by transgressing its limits, above the objective nature of man.’ The history of all religions is indeed a continuous argument for this assertion; and how could it be otherwise? Without any knowledge or any notion of the absolute, without any immediate revelation, the existence of which is indeed asserted by all, but not proved by any religious sect, all ideas of God, no matter of what religion, can only be human; and as man knows in animated nature no being intellectually superior to himself, it follows that his conception of a supreme being can only be abstracted from his own self, and must represent a self‐idealization” (p. 190). Hence it is plain that our idea of a God is a mere delusion.
Reader. It is by no means plain, doctor. Feuerbach’s authority, you know, is worth very little. Your German philosophers, as you own, “have pretty much lost their authority, and are now but little attended to” (p. 158). On the other hand, “nothing,” says Herschel, “is so improbable but a German will find a theory for it” (p. 155). Therefore let Feuerbach alone.
As for the reasons which you adduce in support of the assumption, we need not go into deep reasonings to lay open their true value. Is “the history of all religions a continuous argument for Feuerbach’s assertion”? No. For the history of the Mosaic and of the Christian religion is a continuous refutation of such a slander. Are men “without any knowledge or any notion of the absolute”? No. This I have already shown to be entirely false. Men, however, are “without any immediate revelation.” This is true, but it has nothing to do with the question; first, because philosophy and reason are competent without supernatural revelation to ascertain the existence of a primary cause infinitely superior to all the natural beings; secondly, because, although we have no immediate revelations, we have the old revelation transmitted to us by written and oral tradition, and by the teaching of the living church. That this revelation “is asserted by all, but not proved by any religious sect,” is one of those lies which it is quite unnecessary to refute, as there are whole libraries of Scriptural treatises, in which the truth of revelation is superabundantly vindicated. I would therefore conclude, without any further discussion, that it is to yourself, and not to your opponents, that you should apply that low criticism with which you close the twenty‐sixth chapter of your work. For it is you that “delight in hashing up cold meat with new phrases, and dishing them up as the last invention of the materialistic kitchen” (p. 194).
To sum up: Do you admit that man is a finite being?
Büchner. Of course.
Reader. Do you admit that man had a beginning? That man is ignorant, weak, wicked, and subject to death?
Büchner. Who can doubt that?
Reader. Then man by self‐idealization cannot form an anthropomorphic notion of a supreme being without involving limitation, ignorance, impotence, malice, an origin, and an end of existence. Such, and no other, would be the result of self‐idealization. Now, our notion of God is that of a being eternal, infinite, omniscient, omnipotent, holy, immense. Is this anthropomorphism?
To Be Continued.