Opening
THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
A MONTHLY MAGAZINE OF
GENERAL LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.
------ VOL. XXIII. APRIL, 1876, TO SEPTEMBER, 1876. ------
NEW YORK: THE CATHOLIC PUBLICATION HOUSE 9 Warren Street.
1876.
CONTENTS. PAGE
Abroad, How we are Misrepresented, 1 Allies’ Formation of Christendom, 689 American Revolution, Catholics in, 488 Are You My Wife? 22, 186, 316 Assisi, 742 Aude, The Valley of, 640
Brownson, Dr., 366
Catholicity in the United States, Next Phase of, 577 Catholic Church in the United States, The, 1776-1876, 434 Catholics in the American Revolution, 488 Catholic Sunday and Puritan Sabbath, The, 550 Charitas Pirkheimer, 170 Charles Carroll of Carrollton, 537 Chillon, The Prisoner of, 857 Church and Liberty, The, 243
Daughter of the Puritans, A, 92 De Vere’s “Thomas à Becket,” 848 Devout Chapel of Notre Dame de Bétharram, The, 335 Dr. Brownson, 366
Easter in St. Peter’s, Rome, 1875, 255 Epigraphy, Sacred, 270 Eternal Years, The, 128, 258, 402, 565
Formation of Christendom, Allies’, 689 French Novel, A, 158 Frenchman’s View of It, A, 453
German Journalism, 289 Gladstone Controversy, Sequel of, 30
Hammond on the Nervous System, 388 Hobbies and their Riders, 413 Home-Rule Movement, Irish, 500, 623 How we are Misrepresented Abroad, 1 Hundred Years Ago, One, 802
Irish Home-Rule Movement, The, 500, 623 Italian Commerce in the Middle Ages, 79
Journey to the Land of Milliards, A, 773
Kiowas and Comanches, A Day among, 837
Labor in Europe and America, 59 Land of Milliards, A Journey to the, 773 Letters of a Young Irishwoman to her Sister, 464, 654, 687 Life and Works of Madame Barat, The, 592
Madame Barat, Life and Works of, 592 Miles Standish, Was He a Catholic? 668 Modern English Poetry, 213 More, Sir Thomas, 70, 224, 350, 517, 698, 817
Napoleon I. and Pius VII., 200 Next Phase of Catholicity in the United States, The, 577 Notre Dame de Bétharram, The Devout Chapel of, 335 Notre Dame de Pitié, 116 Novel, A French, 158
Philosophy, Thomistic, 327 Pirkheimer, Charitas, 170 Pius VII. and Napoleon I., 200 Plea for our Grandmothers, A, 421 Poet among the Poets, A, 14 Poetry, Modern English, 213 Poets, Some Forgotten Catholic, 302 Primeval Germans, 47 Prisoner of Chillon, The, 857 Protestant Bishop on Confession, A, 831 Prussia and the Church, 104
Religious Liberty in the United States, The Rise of, 721 Rise of Religious Liberty in the United States, 721 Root of Our Present Evils, The, 145
Sacred Epigraphy, 270 Scanderbeg, 234 Sequel of the Gladstone Controversy, A, 30 Sir Thomas More, 70, 224, 350, 517, 698, 817 Six Sunny Months, 606, 758 Some Forgotten Catholic Poets, 302 Some Odd Ideas, 710 Studio in Rome, A Quaint Old, 781
“Thomas à Becket,” De Vere’s, 848 Thomistic Philosophy, 327 Transcendental Movement in New England, The, 528 Typical Men of America, The, 479
Valley of the Aude, The, 640 Vittoria Colonna, 679
Was Miles Standish a Catholic? 668 Wild Rose of St. Regis, The, 379
Years, Eternal, The, 128, 258, 402, 565
POETRY.
Ascension, The, 377
Centenary of American Liberty, The, 433 Chorus from the “Hecuba,” 653 Consuelo, 816
Forty Hours’ Devotion, 223
Da Vinci’s “Virgin of the Rocks,” Lines on, 13
Lamartine, From, 424 Lines on Da Vinci’s “Virgin of the Rocks,” 13
Mysteries, 185
Sacerdos Alter Christus, 58 Sennuccio Mio, 233 Sunshine, 278
Vago Angelletto che Cantanas Vai? 7
NEW PUBLICATIONS.
Achsah, 718 Acolyte, The, 286 All Around the Moon, 430 Alzog’s Universal Church History, 279 Are You My Wife? 426 Asperges Me, etc., 430 Authority and Anarchy, 288
Breviarium Romanum, 288 Brief Biographies, 142 British and American Literature, Student’s Hand-book of, 138 Board of Education, Report of, 431 Boston to Washington, 432 Burning Questions, 280
Cantata Catholica, 429 Catechism for Confession and First Communion, 280 Catholic Church and Christian State, 425
Daniel O’Connell, Popular Life of, 143
Eden of Labor, The, 139 Elmwood; or, the Withered Arm, 143 Episcopal Succession in England, Scotland, and Ireland, 432 Episodes of the Paris Commune in 1871, 431 Explanatio Psalmorum, 287
Faber’s Hymns, 282 Father Segneri’s Sentimenti, 142 Faith and Modern Thought, 718 Five Lectures on the City of Ancient Rome, 142 Flaminia, and other Stories, 431
Geographical Text-Books, Mitchell’s, 860 German Political Leaders, 716 Gertrude Mannering, 285 Glories of the Sacred Heart, The, 576
Haydon, Benjamin Robert, The Life, Letters, and Table-Talk of, 860 Histoire de Madame Barat, 425 How to Write Letters, 287
Labor, the Eden of, 139 Labor and Capital in England and America, 139 Lectures on the City of Ancient Rome, 142 Life, Letters, and Table-Talk of Benjamin Robert Haydon, The, 860 Life of Rev. Mother St. Joseph, The, 427 Life of Daniel O’Connell, 143 Little Book of the Holy Child Jesus, 288 Literature for Little Folks, 287
Meditations and Considerations, 719 Men and Manners in America One Hundred Years Ago, 860 Mitchell’s Geographical Text-Books, 860
Newman, Characteristics from the Writings of, 288 New Month of the Sacred Heart, 720 Note to Article on Thomistic Philosophy, 432 Notiones Theologicæ, 720
Outlines of the Religion and Philosophy of Swedenborg, 281 Ordo Divini Officii Recitandi, 141
Pius IX. and his Times, 288 Principia or Basis of Social Science, 428 Principes de la Sagesse, Les, 287 Publications Received, 288
Revolutionary Times, 720
Sancta Sophia, 859 Science and Religion, 720 Scholastic Almanac for 1876, The, 144 Segneri’s Sentimenti, 142 Sermons by Fathers of the Society of Jesus, 141 Story of a Vocation, The, 432 Spectator, The, 144 Spiritualism and Allied Causes, 713 Student’s Hand-book of British and American Literature, The, 138
Universal Church History, Alzog’s, 279
Voyages dans l’Amérique Septentrionale, 432
Wyndham Family, The, 430
THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XXIII., No. 133.—APRIL, 1876.
Copyright: Rev. I. T. HECKER. 1876.
HOW WE ARE MISREPRESENTED ABROAD.
Following the example of older nations, the United States has been accustomed to keep at foreign courts and capitals certain diplomatic agents whose presence there seems to be considered necessary for the protection of our national interests, as well as a pledge of mutual friendship and comity. Under the more modest title of envoys or ministers these gentlemen exercise the powers and enjoy the immunities of ambassadors, and to their supposed wisdom, tact, and judgment are entrusted all difficult negotiations and the settlement of doubtful questions of international law.
In view of the increased facilities for communication between independent governments afforded by railroads and telegraphs, the general diffusion of accurate geographical and commercial knowledge, and the almost total disuse of the secret diplomacy of former times, it has been seriously considered whether this class of rather expensive officials might not be dispensed with altogether. Many persons, also, are inclined to believe that the public welfare would suffer little, if at all, by such a measure, on the principle that bad or incompetent representatives are worse than none. But if the custom, as appears probable, is still to be adhered to, it is becoming more and more apparent that the personnel of our diplomatic corps must speedily undergo a radical change for the better, if we would not bring our country into lasting disrepute and contempt in the eyes of all just and discerning men.
In Europe diplomacy is practically as much a profession as law or medicine. Its students begin their allotted course at an early age in the capacity of attachés or secretaries of legation. As they gain in experience they are moved from one court to another, in regular order of promotion, until finally, after years of practical observation and laborious study, they develop into accomplished diplomatists and ripe statesmen, whose services are invaluable to their country, at home and abroad. Not so in America; with us the post of minister resident or envoy extraordinary, is usually the reward of some obscure partisan, the solace of a disappointed Congressional aspirant, or the asylum in which superannuated cabinet officers can find dignified obscurity. Occasionally accomplished international lawyers like the late Mr. Wheaton or Reverdy Johnson are selected, but these rare cases are in sad contrast with the generality of persons chosen, every few years, to represent in foreign countries the power, dignity, and intelligence of the republic. They are almost invariably men of mediocre ability, contracted views, and defective education; unaccustomed to any high degree of social refinement, and sometimes ignorant of the very language of the country to which they are accredited, while not necessarily masters of their own. From a perusal of some volumes of state documents[1] we are led to conclude that the principal duty of our diplomats is to write long, prosy letters to the Secretary of State, and to encumber the archives of his office with copious extracts from foreign newspapers of no value or public interest whatever. In this mass of correspondence we look in vain for the keen, accurate criticism of men and manners, or the profound views of statesmanship which characterized the despatches of the Venetian ambassadors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the French and English emissaries of a later period.
On the contrary, we find these letters exhibiting a remarkable feebleness and crudity of mind, and, where matters relating to religion or morals are discussed, a purblind prejudice unworthy of any rational American, but especially reprehensible in an exalted official of our government. This latter blemish is so prominent, and withal so repeatedly displayed, as to be painfully suggestive of a desire on the part of the writers to win, by unworthy means, the favor of the appointing power at the federal capital. We also observe with regret that they are accustomed to use, with the greatest deliberation and upon the slightest occasion, the terms reactionist, Romanist, ultramontane, and other nicknames—all of which are inaccurate and most of them offensive—when describing the supporters of the Catholic Church, who, in various parts of the Christian world, are battling for the rights of conscience and the freedom of their religion; while eulogistic adjectives are lavished on all parties and measures, no matter how tyrannical or arbitrary, provided they are directed against the church and her priesthood. Just here we may as well ask at the start, Is there not occupation enough for our diplomatic service in attending to the great commercial and other secular interests of the republic, but that they must turn aside to devote their chief attention to the cultivation and spread of anti-Catholic bigotry?
One of the most glaring examples of this indecent partisanship is to be found in the records of our diplomatic relations with Mexico—our nearest neighbor and the most populous of the Spanish-American republics. Formerly the greatest care was exercised in filling this important mission, only gentlemen of sound discretion and liberal views being selected; but since the advent of Mr. Fish as Secretary of State, this wise precaution has been neglected, and, as a consequence, we have had at the Mexican capital, for several years, a deputy named John W. Foster, whose total misapprehension of the duties of his office is painfully apparent, even from his own reports. It will be remembered that in 1859 the partisans of Juarez, assembled at Vera Cruz, proclaimed war on the Catholic Church, abolished all religious communities, confiscated their property, and expelled their members of both sexes. They also declared marriage a civil contract, to be entered into only before a magistrate, abolished religious oaths, and attempted other “reforms” equally impertinent and detrimental to the public good. During the short reign of Maximilian these attempts on the liberty of the church were of course discontinued; but when Juarez assumed absolute control of the government they were renewed, and on the 25th of September, 1873, were declared by his successor, Lerdo de Tejada, a part of the constitution. This effort to make religious proscription the fundamental law of the republic seemed so judicious and praiseworthy to Mr. Foster that he immediately transmitted to Washington a full copy of Lerdo’s proclamation, with the remark: “Their incorporation into the federal constitution may be regarded as the crowning act of triumph of the liberal government in its long contest with the conservative or church party.”
Knowing something of the antecedents of Mr. Foster, we are not surprised at his sympathy with what may be called the illiberal or anti-church party; but the reply of our Secretary of State is simply inexplicable. On October 22 he writes:
“The Mexican government deserves congratulation upon the adoption of the amendments of its constitution to which the despatch relates. It may be regarded as a great step in advance, especially for a republic in name. We have had ample experience of the advantage of similar measures—an experience, too, which has fully shown that, while they have materially contributed to enlarge and secure general freedom and prosperity, they have by no means tended to weaken the just interests of religion or the due influence of clergymen in the body politic.”
How a gentleman of Mr. Fish’s acknowledged intelligence could permit himself to write such a document is incomprehensible. He knows well that “we”—meaning the United States—have not had “ample experience,” or any experience whatever, “of the advantage of similar measures.” “We” have had our moments of fanaticism, our church-burnings and convent-sackings, it is true; but neither the municipal law nor the Constitution has presumed to control the spiritual affairs of the church in this republic. Our seminaries, colleges, convents, and schools are yet untouched by the civil magistrate; our priests can administer the sacraments without the risk of police interference; and our Sisters of Mercy and Charity can pursue their holy avocations and not incur the risk of perpetual banishment. What has contributed to enlarge and to secure to us general freedom and prosperity is not such anti-Catholic legislation as that upon which Mr. Fish congratulates the “republic in name,” but the very contrary.
It would seem, however, that some of those entrusted with the highest offices of state regret this happy condition of things. Evidence crops out everywhere to strengthen the suspicion that our government, not finding interests at home of sufficient magnitude to occupy its attention, is drifting more and more into sympathy with the conspiracy now prevalent in Europe against the rights of the Catholic Church and that birthright of every American citizen—freedom of conscience.
But, however unsustained by fact, the moral sympathy thus tendered by the mouth-piece of our government to the Mexican president was highly valuable to his party at that juncture. The laws against the clergy and nuns were exceedingly unpopular with the great mass of the Mexicans, and it was necessary that the endorsement of the powerful and prosperous republic of the north should be secured in their favor. If such measures had “materially contributed to enlarge and secure general freedom and prosperity” in one country, as Mr. Fish solemnly asserted, why should they not have the same salutary effect in another? There is no reason for surprise, therefore, to find that when the elated Mr. Foster transmitted Mr. Fish’s letter, with his own felicitations, to Mr. Lafragua, the Mexican Minister of Foreign Affairs, he was answered in the following complimentary phrase:
“The president of the republic has received with special gratification the expression of the kind sentiments which animate the people and government of the United States respecting the people and government of Mexico, which sentiments could not have been interpreted by a more estimable person than your excellency. The president is sincerely thankful, as well for the cordial congratulation which his excellency the Secretary of State has had the kindness to address to you on account of the proclamation of the amendments to the federal constitution, as for the ardent wishes which your excellency manifests for the consolidation of the republican institutions and of peace, and for the prosperity and material development of the United Mexican States.”
It will thus be seen that by the wilfulness—or indiscretion, let us call it—of Mr. Fish “the people and government of the United States” are credited with a sympathy for, and approval of, what their conscience, their spirit, and their whole history up to this time repudiate—a legislation of tyranny and religious proscription. Mr. Fish—and no man better—knows that such sympathy has no foundation in the hearts of the American people or in the real policy of its government. He knows that the people abhor the sentiment expressed in the “amendments to the federal constitution” of Mexico. What are we to think, then, of a statesman who, actuated by whatever motive, shows himself so ready to play fast and loose with the solemn trusts confided to him? Is the vast power that he must exercise safe in the hands of one who is ready to veer with every wind that blows, especially when it blows against Rome? Is this the true expression of the policy of which we have lately heard so much—“Let the church and the state be for ever separate”? Our American feelings rise with indignation against so grave a misrepresentation of the principles and policy of our government, especially by one so familiar with them as Mr. Fish. There is no excuse for this.
Mr. Fish’s faux pas was too precious to the anti-Catholic faction not to receive the widest publicity. “This correspondence,” writes Mr. Foster to his principal, “was yesterday read in the national Congress by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, by direction of the president of the republic, and after its reading the president of Congress, in the name of that body, expressed the gratification with which the assembly had received the intelligence, and by a vote of Congress the correspondence was entered upon its journal. The Minister of Foreign Affairs has also caused its publication in the official newspaper, and it has appeared in all the periodicals of this capital.”
A year had scarcely passed away, during which every effort had been made thus to mislead and pervert public opinion, when De Tejada’s government found itself strong enough to pass additional “laws of reform” infringing still farther on the rights of conscience. On the 15th of December, 1874, the Sisters of Charity, the last remnant of the Catholic orders in Mexico, were also rudely expelled from their institutions and ordered to quit for ever the scenes of their pious and untiring labors. And in this connection, a curious comment on Mr. Fish’s congratulatory despatch was offered by the people of the city of San Francisco. The Sisters expelled by virtue of the constitution which met with such marked approval from Mr. Fish, were received with open arms and welcomed by our fellow-citizens in California. Surely, this was giving the lie direct to Mr. Fish by his own countrymen, whose conscience naturally revolted from a system of government which, as its chief claim to the sympathy and fellowship of foreign peoples, set up its power and willingness to banish from its jurisdiction all that was purest and holiest. Yet Mexico is as far from “general freedom and prosperity” as ever, and Messrs. Fish and Foster, the instigators of this last outrage on humanity, continue to be high and trusted officials of our freedom-loving republic.
Still, the faction that controls Mexican politics was not content with constitutional and statutory “reforms.” As long as the heart of the country remained Catholic its hold on power was feeble and uncertain. It therefore aimed at nothing less than a general conversion of the people, at a new Reformation, and selected what it considered the most fitting instruments for that purpose. These were itinerant Protestant missionaries of all sects, kindly furnished to order by the Boston American Board of Missions and the Pacific Theological Seminary of California, who soon overspread the promised land and began their labors of conversion. The states of Mexico, Vera Cruz, Guerrero, Puebla, Jalisco, Hidalgo, Zacatecas, and San Luis Potosi were especially favored by their presence, where, from their method of proceeding, their foul abuse of the religion of the populace, and the rank blasphemy that characterized their preaching, it was plain that they considered they had fallen among barbarians and idolaters. Going from place to place, and surrounded by armed guards, they not only fulminated the heresy of Protestantism, but scattered broadcast printed travesties of the Commandments and of the prayers and ritual of the church, some copies of which they had the hardihood to nail to the cathedrals and other places of Catholic worship. To make matters still more offensive, they frequently interspersed their harangues with laudations of the “liberal” party who patronized them, and direct attacks on all who opposed its iniquitous policy.
One of those zealots, a Rev. Mr. Stephens, after a nine months’ journey through several towns, found his way to Ahualulco, where, relying on the countenance of the government officials, he commenced a series of bitter assaults on Catholicity. A popular tumult was the result, during which the unfortunate man was killed, March 2, 1874. When news of this cruel, though not unprovoked, murder reached Mr. Foster, he waited on the Mexican minister, who informed him that “the principal assassins and two priests had been arrested, and that a judge had been despatched to the district with an extra corps of clerks to ensure a speedy investigation and trial.” This promise was faithfully and promptly kept, as we find by a despatch dated April 15, in which the minister says:
“Up to the present date seven of the guilty parties have been tried and condemned to death, from which sentence they have appealed to the supreme court. Twelve or fifteen more persons charged with complicity in the crime are under arrest awaiting trial, including the cura of the parish of Ahualulco.”
Yet this summary vengeance, nor even the indignity offered to the venerable cura, who had had no participation whatever in the disturbance, did not satisfy the insatiable soul of Mr. Foster. From his subsequent letter to Lafragua, and several despatches to our government, we infer that the condign punishment of the priest, innocent or guilty, was to him the most desirable of objects. To inaugurate the new Reformation by the execution of a Catholic clergyman appears to have been considered by him as a master-stroke of policy. But even the Lerdistas were not prepared for so desperate a step, and Foster was doomed to find his hopes blighted. Alluding to a conversation with Minister Lafragua in September, he writes to Mr. Fish, bemoaning his hard fate:
“I thanked him for communicating the intelligence in relation to the trials of the assassins of Rev. Mr. Stephens, the receipt of which I had anxiously awaited, but expressed my disappointment in finding no mention of the proceedings had in the trial of the cura of Ahualulco, to whom the published accounts attributed the responsibility of the assassination.…”
This information, and the fact that the appeal of the seven condemned persons had not been determined, drew forth one of Mr. Fish’s unaccountable diplomatic missives. “You may farther inform him orally,” says our Secretary, alluding to Lafragua, “but confidentially, if need be, that this must necessarily become an international affair, unless it shall be satisfactorily disposed of and without unreasonable delay.” Now, why should the information be given orally and confidentially if there was not some desire, some trick, to avoid responsibility for a doubtful act tending to intimidate a friendly power? and wherefore should the killing of the man Stephens be made an international affair—i.e., a just cause of war—when so many American citizens had been already murdered in Mexico with impunity? Foster had repeatedly complained that during the short time he had been in charge of the legation thirteen “murders of the most horrid character and revolting to our common civilization” had been committed on his countrymen, for which there had not been a single punishment; yet we hear of no intimation of making them international affairs. Were the lives of these persons, presumably following legitimate callings, collectively of less value than that of a mendacious preacher of a gospel of violence?
Emboldened by the words of Mr. Fish, Foster again returned to the attack in a note to Lafragua, in which he directly, and on his own responsibility, charges the cura with having been the instigator of the crime. The first intimation that the cura had had any participation in exciting the mob against Stephens was contained in a letter from a brother preacher named Watkins, who was stationed at Guadalajara, more than sixty miles from the scene of the disturbance. On this suspicious and slender foundation Foster had been in the habit of building up a mass of insinuations and charges against the priest, referring to “general” and “printed” reports as his authority. When after a searching investigation the cura was honorably discharged, and the minister again complained to Lafragua, that official replied rather tartly in the following unequivocal terms:
“In relation to the acquittal of those who were charged with being instigators of the crime, it is the result of a judicial act, which has taken place after the due process had been completed for the investigation of the truth, which is not always in accord with the prejudices of the public.”
If the minister had added: “and of Mr. Foster and the Board of Missions,” the sentence would have been more complete. Having failed to accomplish his grand design—the chastisement of the cura—the ultimate fate of the convicted laymen became a matter of little importance to our assiduous representative.
Another opportunity soon presented itself for Mr. Foster’s official interference. On the night of January 26, 1875, a riot occurred in Acapulco, in which five persons were killed and eleven wounded on both sides. Of the former, one was claimed to be an American. It appears that a Rev. M. N. Hutchinson, supported by the United States consul, J. A. Sutter, and a few native officials, had commenced his evangelical labors in that city by personally insulting the parish priest, Father J. P. Nava, and by openly abusing everything considered holy and venerable by Catholics. This method of preaching Christ’s Gospel so exasperated the populace that an attack was made on the building used as a Protestant church, and a street fight, with fatal results, followed. Hutchinson, the cause of the fray, escaped and found refuge on board a ship; while Sutter, who seems to have been as cowardly as he was vicious, threatened to abandon the consulate and follow his example. As in the case at Ahualulco, the “liberal” authorities at once arrested the cura, but so indignant were the citizens, and even some of the federal employees, at the act that he was at once set at liberty.
Here was a rare chance for Mr. Foster to display his reformatory energy, and on this occasion he had a most efficient associate in the gallant consul. That truthful gentleman writes to his chief, January 27, three days after the riot:
“All the Indians are under arms, and threaten to attack the town if the parish priest—who, in my opinion, is the prime mover of these heinous crimes—should be arrested. So he is still at large, and laughing, probably, at the impotence of the authorities.… Everybody in town is afraid of the Indians, who, incited by a fanatical priest, would perpetrate the most atrocious crimes.”
All this Mr. Foster believed, or appeared to believe; for we find him embodying it in his official communications to Lafragua, with some additional remarks of his own to give the calumny greater point and force. Supported by the American minister, Sutter now looms up as the defender of Protestant rights in general. Addressing personages of no less distinction than the governor of the state and the district judge, he requests them to “promptly take the necessary measures within your power to procure the speedy punishment, according to the law, of the instigators and perpetrators of the atrocious massacre of Protestants,” etc. There is no limitation here, it will be observed, to American citizens; the peremptory consul, “in obedience to instructions received yesterday from the Hon. John W. Foster, envoy extraordinary, etc.,” had assumed a protectorate over the entire evangelical body of Acapulco, and felt himself at liberty to insult the executive and judiciary of the state of Guerrero.
The people of Acapulco, however, differed materially in opinion from the consul. Not only did they not fear the Indians or regard their priest as an abettor of riot and murder, but, on the contrary, five or six hundred of them waited on Governor Alvarez, and, in the name of the rest, assured him that the disturbance was wholly caused by Hutchinson and his handful of Protestants, requesting him at the same time to remove the disturbers from their city, as he had the power to do under the laws of the state. Even the Minister of Foreign Affairs—though, like so many of his party, deadly opposed to the church—could not help but ascribe the riot to something like its proper cause. Annoyed, doubtless, by the impertinence of Sutter and the importunities of Foster, he writes to the latter in a vein of delicate irony:
“The consul in Acapulco cannot be ignorant of the fact that Protestant worship was a new propaganda among a people who, unfortunately, have not been able to attain to that degree of civilization to enable them to accept without aversion religious tenets which they disown, and it is well known that the religious sentiment is one of the most sensitive, and that, when attacked, it is all the more irritable.”
The logical position of the Mexican minister is unassailable. But what a humiliating predicament for our government to be placed in by her diplomatists abroad! Such is the natural result of selecting the kind of men for important posts, or indeed for any posts at all, complained of at the beginning of the article. It is clear that this Mr. Foster has missed his vocation. He would be more at home in a Protestant board of missions, or as a “worker” in “revivals,” than standing before a people as the representative of the truth, worth, and genius of a great nation.
Mr. Foster was not satisfied with the explanation. He had lost one priest, and he was not going to let another slip through his fingers without a struggle. He reminds Lafragua of Mr. Fish’s “congratulations,” and appeals to his gratitude. “While it is very natural that I,” he writes, “as the representative of a government which has officially congratulated that of Mexico on the constitutional triumph and recognition of the principles of religious liberty, should watch with deep interest the practical enforcement of these principles, I have made the outbreaks of fanatical mobs the subject of diplomatic intervention only when American citizens have been assassinated.” But the plea was in vain; even the government of Lerdo de Tejada dared not molest the cura of Acapulco, who, strong in his innocence and in the affection of his flock, continued to exercise the duties of his sacred office, regardless alike of native “reformers” and officious diplomats. Up to the latest dates Mr. Foster had not yet caught a cura, and the people of Mexico seem as far as ever from the enjoyment of the blessings of a new Reformation, so happily and characteristically begun.
The Central American States include Guatemala, San Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, each of which holds an undivided fifth interest in the official attention of Mr. George Williamson, our worthy minister peripatetic. When not involved in domestic brawls—which seldom happens—these miniature commonwealths have a habit of varying the monotony of peaceful life by a descent on one of their neighbors, and even a civil and a foreign war have been known to rage at the same time and place. Having such a vivacious people to look after, the attention of our representative might reasonably be considered fully occupied; yet we learn that he has ample leisure to devote himself to theological and educational speculations, and particularly to the subject of marriage. On this important social relation he not only becomes eloquent, though occasionally obscure, in his despatches, but is evidently looked upon as an authority by the “liberal” party on the Isthmus. Having been asked his opinion by President Barrios of Guatemala, who contemplated extending civil marriage to his people, “I replied,” he says, “it would in all probability soon come; … that in our country we considered the civil law supreme, and would neither furnish a hierarchy of Romanists nor Protestants, to assert its sanction was necessary to give validity to a contract which the law pronounced good.” It may be objected that this passage is not well constructed; so, in justice not only to the liberal views, but to the erudition of Mr. Williamson, we quote the following descriptive extract from a despatch on the condition of the Central American population:
“Intelligence is more generally diffused; people are slowly learning republican habits and adopting republican ideas; a monarchical hierarchy that fostered superstitions, that only allowed education in a certain direction, and which ‘gathered gear’ unto itself ‘by every wile,’ has been dethroned; agriculture now has the aid of the numerous laborers who were employed in the erection of large edifices for monks and nuns and religious exercises.”
A subsequent communication on the state of public education furnishes a rather strange commentary on the above:
“The present attempt at organizing a public-school system is, in my judgment, one of the most laudable acts of the present government, for which it should be entitled to credit, whether there be success or failure. My opinion is that there are too many obstacles to be overcome for the plan to be successful, and that the government is undertaking a grave experiment which is likely to create great dissatisfaction, and may result in revolution. But having driven out most of the priests and nuns, who were heretofore the instructors of the people, it seemed necessary the government should try to supply their place.”
The same latitude of opinion and ill-concealed hostility to the Catholic Church, the same desire to take advantage of every trifling circumstance to misrepresent and malign the motives of her supporters, pervade the correspondence of our other representatives in South America, almost without exception. Thus Mr. Thomas Russell has no scruple in lauding the usurping government of Venezuela, which, in 1870, first imprisoned and then banished perpetually the Archbishop of Caracas and Venezuela, suppressed the seminaries, confiscated the property of the monasteries, and expelled the nuns. Still less has Mr. Rumsey Wing in assuring the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador, in writing about an alleged desecration of a grave in Quito, that the news “of those outrages on the bodies of Protestants” “would create an intense feeling not only in my own country but throughout Europe”; while, having nothing else to send, we suppose, the same officious gentleman forwards to Washington copies of two decrees of Congress, one granting a tithe of the church revenues to his Holiness the Pope, and the other placing Ecuador under the protection of the Sacred Heart, “to show the intense Catholicism prevailing in this country.”
Then Mr. C. A. Logan, some time of Chili, appears to have interested himself very much in local politics, and it is not difficult to discover upon which side his sympathy rests. In a despatch to Secretary Fish, November 2, 1874, he has the hardihood to charge the Archbishop of Santiago with bribing congressmen, pending the passage of a bill for the partial repeal of a penal law against the clergy. He writes:
“The day arrived for the vote, and a large crowd gathered about the building, awaiting the result with the most breathless anxiety; among these was the archbishop himself, in full clerical robes. Much to the chagrin of the liberals, a two-third vote was gained by the church party under the spur and lash of the clericals, and, as it is freely asserted, by the liberal use of money. The senate is composed of only twenty members, which is not a large body to handle, if they take kindly to handling.”
Mr. Francis Thomas, of Lima, goes even farther than his confrère, and deliberately asserts the complicity of the Catholics, as a body, in the recent attempt to assassinate President Pardo.
“The conspirators,” he says, “had calculated upon the co-operation of all that class of the population of this country who have become hostile to the president of Peru on account of his proceedings, in which high dignitaries of the Catholic Church were concerned. The congress of Peru at its last session passed a law forbidding members of the order of Jesuits to reside within the jurisdiction of Peru. In violation of this law, members of that order who had been expelled from other Spanish republics took possession of a convent in the interior of Peru, and took measures to organize their society. President Pardo, in conformity to the law, issued a proclamation requiring them to leave the country, which has caused some degree of excitement.”
This fact, and the attempts of the government to introduce irreligious books and periodicals into the schools, were sufficient, in the opinion of our impartial minister, to provoke the Catholics of Peru to the foulest crimes.
The Emperor of Brazil, in his open war on the church, also finds an advocate and eulogist in Mr. Richard Cutts Shannon, the American chargé at his court, who employs his vicarious pen in justifying the arrest, trial, and condemnation of the Bishop of Olinda to four years’ imprisonment with hard labor. But he is surpassed by minister James R. Partridge, who, in alluding to the determined intention of the government to prosecute to the bitter end the various vicars who were named to take the place of those successively cast into prison, emphatically declares: “From present appearances, the ministerial party are going on and are determined to carry it through. It is to be hoped that their courage may not fail, neither by reason of the long list of those who are thus declared ready to become martyrs, nor by any political move of the ecclesiastical party.”
Such, in brief, are the views of the men sent to represent this country on American soil. If we turn to Europe—though we may acknowledge a higher order of ability in our diplomatic agents there—we discover prejudice as strong and partisanship equally conspicuous. Referring to the German Empire, we are pained to find so profound a student of the past as Mr. Bancroft our late minister at Berlin, so easily deceived in contemporary history. Nothing, certainly, can be more untrue than the following statement of the position of affairs in Prussia in 1873:
“The effect of the correspondence [between the Pope and Emperor William] has been only to increase the popularity and European reputation of the emperor, and to depress the influence of the clerical party, thus confirming the accounts, which I have always given you, that the ultramontane political influence can never become vitally dangerous to this empire. The Catholic clergy are obviously beginning to regret having commenced with the state a contest in which it is not possible for them to gain the advantage. The intelligent Catholics themselves for the most part support the government, and so have received from the ultramontanes the nickname of state Catholics.”
There is not a single sentence in the above which is not a misapprehension of facts. How far Mr. Bancroft’s easy assertions and confident predictions, made scarcely two years ago, have been justified by the event is a matter that happily needs no inquiry, while comment on our part would be almost cruel. Mr. Bancroft, however, was not content with supplying information to the State Department on matters exclusively pertaining to his mission. His wide range of vision took in all Europe, past and present. Of the old Helvetian republic he writes:
“Switzerland shows no sign of receding from its comprehensive measures against the ultramontane usurpations; and the spirit and courage of these republicans have something of the same effect on the population of Germany that was exercised by their forefathers in the time of the Reformation.”
And again:
“How widely the movement is extending in Europe is seen by what is passing in England, where choice has been made of a ministry disinclined to further concessions to the demands of the Catholic hierarchy, and where the archbishops of the Anglican Church are proposing measures to drive all Romanizing tendencies out of the forms of public worship in the Establishment. Here in Germany, where the question takes the form of a conflict between the authority of the state at home within its own precincts, and the influence of an alien ecclesiastical power, it is certain that the party of the state is consolidating its strength; and I see nothing, either in the history of the country, or in the present state of public opinion, or the development of public legislation, that can raise a doubt as to the persistency of the German government in the course upon which it has entered.”
What the “comprehensive measures” in Switzerland “against the ultramontane usurpations” mean readers of THE CATHOLIC WORLD already know. They are simply a rather aggravated form of the Falck laws—a form so aggravated that it is only within the past year M. Loyson himself warned the world that the “comprehensive measures against ultramontane usurpations,” which Mr. Bancroft finds such reasons to commend, were aimed, through Catholicity, at all Christianity. And yet a high official of our free government, a man of universal reputation and great authority in the world of letters, finds in this elaborate system of proscription and intolerance food for congratulation. One would suppose from the spirit so plainly animating Mr. Bancroft that he is a member of the O. A. U., and that he was chosen rather to represent that delectable society in Berlin than the American Government. It is to be presumed, from his own despatches, that he would have our government follow the tyrannical attempt of Prussia and Switzerland to “stamp out” freedom of conscience. Mr. Bancroft’s diplomatic experience, under the influence of the court of Prussia, seems destined to reverse his principles and maxims as an American historian. He has, we fear, remained too long abroad for the good of his native truth, character, and sense of right. It is to be hoped that this baneful influence of foreign courts does not pursue him on his return to his own country and people.
Mr. John Jay, who formerly acted as our envoy at Vienna, though not so pronounced or diffusive in his despatches, is not far behind Mr. Bancroft in expressing his entire concurrence with the restrictive policy recently adopted by the government of Austria towards the church; while Mr. George P. Marsh, our representative in Italy, is so great an admirer of Garibaldi that he is never tired of chanting his praises in grandiloquent prose. Those familiar with the life of that notorious bandit will be surprised to learn from so high an authority as the American minister that “he has never through life encouraged any appeal to popular passion or any resistance to governments, except by legal measures or in the way of organized and orderly attempts at revolution; and, from the moment of his arrival at Rome, he exerted himself to the utmost to restrain every manifestation of excitement.”
In marked contrast to the unfair and ungenerous spirit displayed in the despatches of those ministers are the letters from France, Spain, and England. The stirring political events which occupy the entire attention of the two former countries leave no room, perhaps, for the discussion of penal laws and judicial decrees against Catholicity; while the latter, having carried out Protestantism to its logical conclusion, and found it a sham, is more inclined to profit by the blunders and crimes of its neighbors, so as to push its commercial interests, than to imitate them and begin anew the rôle of persecutor for conscience’ sake.
In explanation of the erroneous views so frequently put forth by so many of our diplomatic officials, we are assured that most of those sent to Mexico and Central and South America have been members of secret societies, and, having been accustomed to affiliate with the lodges of those Freemason-ridden countries, have had whatever little sense of equity they originally possessed perverted by the sophisms of their new associates. Possibly; but let us consider how much harm may be done by following such a short-sighted course. All the independent countries south of us on this continent are largely Catholic, and, with the exception of Brazil, claim to be republican. They are bound to us by strong ties, political as well as commercial, and are naturally inclined to look upon the United States as their exemplar and guide, and, if need be, their protector. When they shall have shaken off the incubus of military dictation that now weighs upon them, and, restoring to the church its rights—as will eventually be done—have entered on a new career of freedom and material prosperity, how will they be disposed to feel towards a power which they have known only through its agents, and those the advocates and supporters of everything that is illiberal in politics and degrading in polemics?
In Europe the influence of incapable and unworthy representatives is likely to be even more deleterious to our national character. The affections of the people of the Old World are strongly inclined toward the free institutions of the New. But if we continue to permit our delegated authority to be used only in favor and encouragement of such enemies of human liberty as the usurper at the Eternal City, the tyrant at Berlin, and the communists of Geneva, the popular sympathy born of our protestations of liberality will soon fade away, to give place to feelings of mistrust, if not of positive aversion.
In calling public attention to the incapacity and perversity of the majority of our diplomatists—men who do not hesitate to put into their correspondence with foreign governments, and their private home despatches, sentiments they dare not utter publicly in the forum or through the press—we by no means desire to restrict proper expressions of opinion or limit the just criticisms of the agents of the Department of State. We only insist that these shall not be indulged in at the expense of a very large and respectable portion of this community. Neither do we require that they shall take sides with Catholics, as such, anywhere, no matter how harsh or unjust may be their grievances. This country is not Catholic, it is true, neither is it Protestant; and, indeed, it is questionable if, in any strict sense, it can be called Christian. But it is a country civilly and religiously free, by custom, statute, and Constitution, and we have a right to demand that whoever undertakes to act for it, as part and parcel of the machinery of our government, among foreigners, shall represent it as it is, in spirit as well as in fact—the opponent of all proscription for conscience’ sake, the enemy of tyranny whether exercised by the mob or the state. Is it not the true policy of our government to send abroad as representatives of our interests men who, while they are not hostile to the prevailing religious beliefs of the country to which they are accredited, are, at the same time, true and stanch Americans? If such men cannot be found, let us, in the name of common sense, have none at all. Some minor interests may perhaps suffer by the omission, but the honor and reputation of the republic will remain unsullied and unimpaired.
[1] Papers relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, etc., for 1874-5.
LINES ON LEONARDO DA VINCI’S “VIRGIN OF THE ROCKS.”
Maternal lady with the virgin grace, Heaven-born thy Jesus seemeth sure, And thou a virgin pure. Lady most perfect, when thy sinless face Men look upon, they wish to be A Catholic, Madonna fair, to worship thee. CHARLES LAMB.
A POET AMONG THE POETS.
It is of the last importance that English criticism should clearly discern what rule for its course, in order to avail itself of the field now opening to it, and to produce fruit for the future, it ought to take. The rule may be summed up in one word—disinterestedness.
Mr. James Russell Lowell[2] has applied Mr. Matthew Arnold’s rule with rare fidelity in his essays, just published, on Dante, Spenser, Wordsworth, Milton, and Keats. His estimate of the two greatest of modern poets, especially the paper on Dante, is calculated to attract general attention, and to arouse, we apprehend, some acrid sentiment in a certain class of literary butterflies who are accustomed to sip or decline according to the theological character of the garden. It requires considerable courage to place Dante above all his rivals and salute him as
“The loftiest of poets!”
in an hour when poetry has lost the qualities that made Dante lofty and Milton grand, and when the epithet “Catholic,” which Dante loved and Milton hated, has become again a reproach. Lowell’s consideration of both is characterized by disinterestedness as to time, religion, politics, and literature; and the sincere student who casts aside his prejudices, like his hat, when he approaches the temples that enshrine so much of divinity as God deposited in the souls of the Florentine and the Puritan, will find it difficult to dissent from the judgment of Lowell upon their individuality, their inspiration, or their art. Lowell is peculiarly adapted to the form of literature, semi-critical, semi-creative, in which he has recently distinguished himself. We believe his essay on Dante to be the most successfully-accomplished task which he has yet undertaken; and the cultivated American public should thank one who has amused and diverted it as well as he has done for the solid instruction which this volume conveys in a style at once scholarly, fresh, and refined. Lowell’s mental temperament is admirably adapted for the mirroring of poets’ minds. Himself a genuine poet, without ambition above his capacity, his agile fancy discerns the quicker and appreciates more intensely the imagination of epic souls; while his critical faculty, naturally acute, has the additional advantage of a keen sense of humor, which enables him to discover more readily the incongruous, and is, therefore, an invaluable assistant in literary discrimination.
It is the trade of criticism to expose blemishes; it is genius in criticism to appreciate the subject. The journeyman critic of the last two centuries has been so busy making authors miserable without felicitating mankind that when we read through an essay like Lowell’s on Dante, on Wordsworth, or on Spenser, we cheerfully recognize a man where experience has taught us to look only for an ingenious carper or spiteful ferret. However, critics are no worse than they used to be. Swift, who had excellent opportunity of forming an opinion, both in his own practice and in the observation of that of others, has left this dramatic picture, the truthfulness of which there is no reason yet to question: “The malignant deity Criticism dwelt on the top of a snowy mountain in Nova Zembla; Momus found her extended in her den upon the spoils of numberless volumes half devoured. At her right hand sat Ignorance, her father and husband, blind with age; at her left, Pride, her mother, dressing her up in the scraps of paper herself had torn. There was Opinion, her sister, light of foot, hoodwinked, and headstrong, yet giddy and perpetually turning. About her played her children, Noise and Impudence, Dulness and Vanity, Positiveness, Pedantry, and Ill-Manners.” Such is reckless and conscienceless criticism even to this day; and we turn from it, in grateful delight, to the reverential commentary which Lowell has produced upon one of the saddest of all human creatures—the great Catholic poet of the middle ages.
Dante, little understood by those who have the largest title to his legacies, is, after all, the universal poet—the poet of the soul. Homer chants the blood-red glories of war, and is the poet of a period; Virgil charms by the grace of his lines, and is the poet of an episode; Milton awes with the mighty sweeps of his rhetoric, and is the poet of the grandiose; Shakspeare astounds with his knowledge of human nature and enchains with his wit, and is the poet of the passions; Dante, when read aright, is found to be the poet of the Soul. The line that divides him from Shakspeare lies between the subjective and the objective—Shakspeare’s themes are men and women; Dante’s sole subject is Man—man within himself, as he is related to God, to religion, to eternity. As Lowell felicitously writes it, “Arma virumque cano; that is the motto of classic song. Dante says, Subjectum est homo, not vir—my theme is man, not a man.”
Why, then, do we not read him more and value him as he deserves? For two reasons: first, the difficulty of adequate translation; next, the mysterious richness of his thought, whose pearls are not strung across the door of the lines to warn us, as later poetry so candidly does, that within there is nothing but barrenness. The proper understanding of Dante has been a growth, beginning in Italy as soon as he was dead, extending gradually over Europe, into England, and now westward, gaining in clearness and glory as time recedes and space enlarges.
Within a century after the poet’s death lectures on his works were delivered in the churches, and, as soon as the invention of printing enabled, numerous editions were edited and circulated. The first translation was into Spanish; then into French; next into German; and a copy of a Latin translation of the Divine Comedy by a bishop was made at the request of two English bishops in the early part of the fifteenth century, and was sent to England. Spenser and Milton were familiar with the poet’s works, but the first complete English translation did not appear until 1802. Of the English translations since then, the most familiar are Cary’s and Longfellow’s; and to this catalogue Mr. Lowell adds: “A translation of the Inferno into quatrains by T. W. Parsons ranks with the best for spirit, truthfulness, and elegance”—praise which will be cordially endorsed by those who have profited by Mr. Parsons’ labor.
We propose to discuss Dante the man and Mr. Lowell’s estimate of him, as exhibited in his writings, and shall touch upon the latter only as they may be necessary to the clearer revelation of their author’s character. For Dante, like Milton, was not of common mould; in whatever aspect we view him he proves extraordinary to a degree which frequently becomes incomprehensible. It is natural to wish to throw the two under the same light, although the result of the experiment is only to magnify their points of difference and diminish those of comparison. The sum of the results appears to be that only in the accidents of life are they comparable; in the essentials of character, with a single exception—that of intense faith—they were radically unlike. Widely apart as their names appear—Dante dying in 1321 and Milton entering life in 1608—men were engaged during the lives of both in civil revolution, and each had his own theory of government and exercised the functions of political power. Both were men of sorrow, both were unappreciated in their day and generation, and the light and joy which each experienced emanated from within and supplied the fire of their genius. The noblest work of each was written in the gloomiest period of his life. Here the possibility of parallel ends.
There is a close relation—a much closer one than may at first be suspected—between Dante and the instant condition of American society and politics. Nearly six hundred years have passed away, and we have to go back to Dante to learn personal virtue in political life, as well as religion in social affairs. Lowell has escaped the poison of the time. He perceives the essence as well as the necessity of virtue, and fully realizes its absence in our own state.
“Very hateful to his fervid heart and sincere mind would have been the modern theory which deals with sin as involuntary error, and by shifting off the fault to the shoulders of Atavism or those of Society—personified for purposes of excuse, but escaping into impersonality again from the grasp of retribution—weakens that sense of personal responsibility which is the root of self-respect and the safeguard of character. Dante, indeed, saw clearly enough that the divine justice did at length overtake society in the ruin of states caused by the corruption of private, and thence of civic, morals; but a personality so intense as his could not be satisfied with such a tardy and generalized penalty as this. ‘It is Thou,’ he says sternly, ‘who hast done this thing, and Thou, not Society, shalt be damned for it; nay, damned all the worse for this paltry subterfuge. This is not my judgment, but that of the universal Nature, from before the beginning of the world.’… He believed in the righteous use of anger, and that baseness was its legitimate quarry. He did not think the Tweeds and Fisks, the political wire-pullers and convention-packers, of his day merely amusing, and he certainly did think it the duty of an upright and thoroughly-trained citizen to speak out severely and unmistakably. He believed firmly, almost fiercely, in a divine order of the universe, a conception whereof had been vouchsafed him, and that whatever or whoever hindered or jostled it, whether wilfully or blindly it mattered not, was to be got out of the way at all hazards; because obedience to God’s law, and not making things generally comfortable, was the highest duty of man, as it was also his only way to true felicity.… It would be of little consequence to show in which of two equally selfish and short-sighted parties a man enrolled himself six hundred years ago; but it is worth something to know that a man of ambitious temper and violent passions, aspiring to office in a city of factions, could rise to a level of principle so far above them all. Dante’s opinions have life in them still, because they were drawn from living sources of reflection and experience, because they were reasoned out from the astronomic laws of history and ethics, and were not weather-guesses snatched in a glance at the doubtful political sky of the hour.”
In this Dante strikingly differed from Milton, who was a revengeful and intensely-bigoted fanatic of his own faction, and he admitted to his companionship no man, high or low, who presumed to differ from him. Dante was a politician by principle, placing his country first, and setting a high value on himself as her servant. Milton was a politician by bigotry, placing himself first, and setting a high value on his country because he was her servant. But the manliness of Dante in demanding that the severe precepts of religion should be inflexibly applied to political administration in an age whose corruption was only less shocking than that of our own, is the particular lesson which this vigorous extract from Lowell conveys. If society in this era should esteem political wire-pullers, convention-packers, and politicians who deem patriotism the science of personal exigencies, as Dante esteemed and treated them, should we be any the worse off? Dante looked upon a thief as a thief, and the knave who conspired to defraud the government as fit only to “begone among the other dogs.” Would there not be a healthier tone in our political affairs if these classes of criminals were not met, as is usually the case, by justice daintily gloved and the bandage removed from her eyes, lest she should make a mistake as to persons?
The inspiration of Dante was strictly religious. So was Milton’s; but with this distinction: that Dante’s religiousness was real and beneficent, while Milton’s was unreal and malignant—as Lowell says, Milton’s “God was a Calvinistic Zeus.”
A brief and succinct analysis of the Divine Comedy will be found serviceable by those who have not analyzed it for themselves, and at the same time will make manifest the dependence of Dante’s inspiration upon Catholic doctrine:
“The poem consists of three parts—Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Each part is divided into thirty-three cantos, in allusion to the years of the Saviour’s life; for although the Hell contains thirty-four, the first canto is merely introductory. In the form of the verse (triple rhyme) we may find an emblem of the Trinity, and in the three divisions of the threefold state of man, sin, grace, and beatitude.… Lapse through sin, mediation, and redemption—these are the subjects of the three parts of the poem; or, otherwise stated, intellectual conviction of the result of sin, typified in Virgil; … moral conversion after repentance, by divine grace, typified in Beatrice; reconciliation with God, and actual, blinding vision of him—‘The pure in heart shall see God.’… The poem is also, in a very intimate sense, an apotheosis of woman.… Nothing is more wonderful than the power of absorption and assimilation in this man, who could take up into himself the world that then was, and reproduce it with such cosmopolitan truth, to human nature and to his own individuality as to reduce all contemporary history to a mere comment on his vision. We protest, therefore, against the parochial criticism which would degrade Dante to a mere partisan; which sees in him a Luther before his time, and would clap the bonnet rouge upon his heavenly muse.”
Dante proved himself a reformer of the most aggressive kind. The difference between him and Luther was that Dante endeavored to reform men by means of the church; Luther endeavored to destroy the church rather than reform himself. Evils existed within the church, as a part of society, during the periods of both. Dante helped to correct them as a conservative; Luther chose, as a radical, to tear the edifice down. Unlike the temple of Philistia, the church stood, and the Samson of the sixteenth century fell beneath the ruins of a single column.
No fact in the history of poetry is more striking than the necessity of religion as a source of inspiration. The Iliad and Odyssey acquire their epic quality from the religion of Greece; gods stalk about, and Minerva’s shield resounds in the clangor with that of Achilles. The Æneid would be beautiful without the association of mythology; but it is mythology which enhances its grace into grandeur. The Vedas are an expression of the religious aspirations of the Hindoos. The verse of Boccaccio is pleasing only in proportion as religion cleansed his pen. Petrarch’s sonnets would never have been written had not Laura taught him the distinction between pure love, as the church knows it, and the passions which carried Byron into hysterics. The Italian epic of the sixteenth century, Jerusalem Delivered, which is held by Hallam to be equal in grace to the Æneid, had the First Crusade for its theme. Would it have been possible for Milton to have written any poem equal to Paradise Lost out of other than Scriptural materials? Aside from the literary characteristics and dramatic strength of the plays of Shakspeare, does not their chief value lie in their correct morality—the morality which is found nowhere outside Catholic teaching? This is not the place to discuss the modern decline of poetry. Matthew Arnold’s theory—it is a general favorite—is that history and boldly-outlined epochs make poetry; and Lowell says, in his essay on Milton, “It is a high inspiration to be the neighbor of great events.” But the last two centuries have been crowded with history; boldly-outlined epochs have lifted their awful summits in England, in France, in Italy, in the United States, in Spain. Where are the great poets among the verse-makers who have been neighbors of these great events, and might have caught high inspiration from them? Since the Reformation the moral world has been growing iconoclastic, and there is no poetry in iconoclasm.
Next to religion, woman has been the great inspiration of poets; but the modern idea of marriage has shattered the sanctuary walls which Christianity erected around it; the sacredness of home is invaded, the oneness of love destroyed—there is no poetry in divorce.
Is not the decline of poetry a very curious, if not a fatal, reply to the hypothesis of evolution, carried logically into the moral and intellectual world?
Mr. Lowell completes his essay by a minute examination of Dante’s thought and style, as exhibited in the Divine Comedy; and we can find space only for the closing period:
“At the Round Table of King Arthur there was left always one seat empty for him who should accomplish the adventure of the Holy Grail. It was called the perilous seat, because of the dangers he would encounter who would win it. In the company of the epic poets there was a place left for whoever should embody the Christian idea of a triumphant life, outwardly all defeat, inwardly victorious; who should make us partakers in that cup of sorrow in which all are communicants with Christ. He who should do this would achieve indeed the perilous seat; for he must combine poesy with doctrine in such cunning wise that the one lose not its beauty nor the other its severity—and Dante has done it. As he takes possession of it we seem to hear the cry he himself heard when Virgil rejoined the company of great singers:
‘All honor to the loftiest of poets!’”
Mr. Lowell’s Dante is a man divinely inspired and overshadowed by divinity to the grave itself—a character austere, devoid of humor, unflinchingly faithful to his conceptions of right whether moral or political, self-respecting, and believing in his own commission from God; a mind logical, systematic, and illuminated by Heaven, consciously developing its marvellous genius in the midst of contumely; a heart consumed first by human love for Beatrice, and by it purged and refined out of personality into the love of God and the proper relative appreciation of all creatures; a sublime human soul, in brief, transformed from the individual into the universal, and teaching all men, as it was taught in sorrow and in love, to seek eternity as the sole object worthy of human effort; and teaching in a lofty splendor of phrase and successions of exquisite imagery which continue to astonish posterity and will for ever adorn general literature.
The essay on Milton is devoted rather to Mr. David Masson than to the poet. There is nothing to indicate that the critic is in love with either the poems or the personality of the sublime Puritan who officiated in the capacity of Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell, and who devoted himself to epic verse after his services ceased to be available for the oppression of his fellow-men. Still less is he enamored of Mr. David Masson as a biographer of Milton, and the jovial though thoroughly effective manner in which he demonstrates the Scotch professor’s unfitness for this office adds to his volume a flavor of pungency which brings back happy recollections of the “Table for Critics.” Masson is very voluminous and exasperatingly given to remote and often irrelevant detail; and Macaulay, in extinguishing some of the literary pretenders of his time, was never more dextrous than Lowell in this grotesque joust at the Edinburgh professor’s faults, nor half so witty. Referring to the length of the biography—there are eight volumes octavo of the Life and Works—Lowell says with perfect gravity: “We envy the secular leisures of Methuselah, and are thankful that his biography, at least (if written in the same longeval proportion), is irrecoverably lost to us. What a subject that would have been for a person of Mr. Masson’s spacious predilections!” And he goes on to say: “It is plain, from the preface to the second volume, that Mr. Masson himself has an uneasy consciousness that something is wrong, and that Milton ought to be more than a mere incident of his own biography.” Masson, on the other hand, is of opinion “that, whatever may be thought by a hasty person looking in on the subject from the outside,” no one can study Milton without being obliged to study also the history of England, Scotland, and Ireland; whereupon Lowell retorts that, even for a hasty person, eleven years is “rather long to have his button held by a biographer ere he begins his next sentence.”
Masson’s rambling history of the seventeenth century “is interrupted now and then,” says Lowell, “by an unexpected apparition of Milton, who, like Paul Pry, just pops in and hopes he does not intrude, to tell us what he has been doing in the meanwhile.” Blinded by the dust of old papers which Masson ransacks, to discover that they have no relation to his hero, the critic compares the ponderous biography to Allston’s picture of Elijah in the wilderness, “where a good deal of research at last enables us to guess at the prophet absconded like a conundrum in the landscape, where the very ravens could scarce have found him out.” This characterization of Edinburgh by Harvard will certainly inspire suggestion, if it does not awaken hope; but Lowell’s right to criticise the sedate and prolix gentleman who occupies in the Scottish metropolis the chair which he himself fills at Cambridge does not rest, as we have already seen in the essay on Dante, on Susarion’s faculty of turning the serious and dull into actual comedy.
Like all who have recently written of Milton—with the exception of Masson—Lowell looks upon him as a being “set apart.” To idealize the author of Paradise Lost is quite as natural as to idealize Dante, notwithstanding their relative distances from us; but in the former case, with Lowell, it is the idealization of admiring awe; in the latter, of tender and exquisitely appreciative love. He does not appear to hold Milton in any degree of the personal affection which he feels for the inspired Florentine, but is constrained to insist that Masson is disrespectful toward his subject, and that “Milton is the last man in the world to be slapped on the back with impunity.”
When Lowell writes of Milton’s literary style, although he does it sparingly, every stroke is a master’s. His estimate of Milton as a man is calm, judicial, and courageous. “He stands out,” he says, “in marked and solitary individuality, apart from the great movement of the civil war, apart from the supine acquiescence of the Restoration, a self-opinionated, unforgiving, and unforgetting man.” It is the habit of hurried teachers of our day, who have to teach so many more things than they know, to exalt Milton
“High on a throne of royal state,”
and swing before him the incense of a senseless and absurd homage. In our school-days most of us were led to look upon the sightless poet as a being more than man, if a little less than God. Virtues, as he understood them, he certainly possessed; but many more virtuous than he suffered ignominy and death for presuming to exercise the very liberty which he grandly claimed for himself, but which, we find on examining his prose, he was dilatory in awarding to others, even in the abstract. These prose writings are at once curious and monstrous, and exhibit the real Milton in a true and natural light, even as Samson Agonistes, Lycidas, and Paradise Lost manifest his superb and supreme characteristics as a poet. In prose he wrote as he thought; in verse he wrote as he could. He was always the rhetorician, making an art of what men of less genius can display only as the artificial; but while his poetry is the complete manifestation of his art, his prose, always written with an obvious and acknowledged personal purpose, manifests himself. His prose works are already scarce; the day is not distant when nothing will remain of them but their ashes, for the types will plead release from perpetuating the hard, angular, stony reality of a man whom taste, if not instinct, yearns to withdraw from our painful knowledge of what he was, and veil him in a radiant mistiness of what we wish he might have been. Nothing better illustrates the idealism with which the pencil of youth paints Milton than Macaulay’s essay, written while he was still a boy, but included with the mature expressions of his manhood. Nothing could more completely pulverize this roseate estimate than Milton’s own works in the days when he wrote for time and not for immortality. No matter what the theme, his prose is always ponderous and polysyllabic, abounding in magnificent metaphor, violent epithets, arrogant dogmatism, and personal abuse of those who differed from him, of which no trace, happily, remains in our day. The higher the man, the coarser the missile which he hurled at him with a giant’s force. In his reply to Salmasius he addresses that eminent scholar as “a vain, flashy man,” and, in the progress of his argument, reminds him that he is also a knave, a pragmatical coxcomb, a bribed beggar, a whipped dog, an impotent slave, a renegade, a sacrilegious wretch, a mongrel cur, an obscure scoundrel, a fearful liar, and a mass of corruption.
He seems to have lacked both consistency and clearness of conviction. He was apparently incapable of loving woman; he scarcely respected her; and, in his social theory, awarded the sex a place somewhat below that which it occupied under the patriarchs, and considerably lower than that described by Homer as peculiar to the heroic age of Greece. He obtained coy and pretty Mary Powell from her father in consideration of so many pounds of the coin of the realm, at a time when a mortgage had become embarrassing and a daughter was the only available means of extinguishing it. When that volatile young woman, shivering in the shadows of a Puritan despot, found courage enough to leave his roof, Milton was undoubtedly more impressed by her audacity than grieved by her absence. It was his pride that was hurt; and notwithstanding that he had previously advocated social views of the straitest and most conservative kind, he then published his essay on divorce, which, in amazing egotism, in wealth of classical and Scriptural allusion, in looseness of morals, and in equality of social privileges as between man and woman, is as veritable a curiosity as antiquarians have yet rescued from the monumental mysteries of old Assyria. In politics and religion he was as unsound and wavering as in his laws for society. An aristocrat of the most despotic type, he enthroned learning, and yet permitted his daughters to acquire only the alphabets, that he might use their senses as his slaves. He despised them as human beings, and they, in turn, hated and deceived him, and almost his last words on earth were terrible denunciations of those whom God intended to illumine his home, soothe his life, and deliver his whitened head, already aureoled, to
“Dear, beauteous Death.”
For many years—the very best of his life—he lent himself to the political schemes of Oliver Cromwell, and the violence and coarseness of his pamphlets made him one of the most conspicuous figures of a long series of civil storms; yet Lowell is constrained to admit that “neither in politics, theology, nor social ethics did Milton leave any distinguishable trace on the thought of his time or in the history of opinion.” He considered his ideas and inclinations correct and above appeal, simply because they were John Milton’s. The harshest word which Lowell says of his prose style is his comparison of a man of Milton’s personal character, which was without taint, to Martin Luther, whose writings were a true reflection of their author. Lowell is very gentle in saying of so noted a plagiarist as Milton: “A true Attic bee, he made boot on every lip where there was a trace of truly classic honey.” He did indeed, not in prose only, but in his verse. But we easily forgive him. There are thieves whom stolen garments more become than their owners.
[2] Among my Books. Second Series.
ARE YOU MY WIFE?
BY THE AUTHOR OF “PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” “NUMBER THIRTEEN,” “PIUS VI.,” ETC.