The Catholic World, Vol. 16, October 1872-March 1873

by Various

Where Are You Going?

We happened, the other day, to notice in the columns of a ribald infidel newspaper an advertisement in which a young lady gave notice of her desire to find “board in an infidel or atheist family.” There are many persons nowadays who are looking for a lodging-place and for food which will give rest and refreshment to their minds and hearts, in the bosom of the infidel and atheistic family circle. They may not, in most cases, distinctly perceive and expressly avow that they are going over to dwell in the tents of atheism, but they have turned their faces and steps in that direction, and into the path leading thitherward, and those who keep on their way must arrive, sooner or later, at that destination. It is to these that we address the question: Where are you going? We would like to have them reflect a little on the kind of entertainment which they may reasonably expect to find in the private family of the household, and in the larger family of human society, when these are constituted on atheistic principles.

Before going any further, we will designate more precisely what class of persons we intend by the above description. In general, all who do not believe in a law made known to the mind and conscience by Almighty God, and, in particular, those who, having been brought up in the Catholic faith, no longer believe in that law as made known by the authority of the church. We class these last individuals, for whose benefit chiefly though not exclusively we are writing, with those first mentioned advisedly and for a reason; and warn them that they are included in the number of those whose faces are set toward atheism. Nevertheless, we do not say this on the ground that every one who is not a Catholic is either incapable of knowing God and his law, or logically bound to deny their existence. A Theist, a Jew, or a Protestant has a rational ground for holding against the atheist or infidel all that portion of Catholic truth which his religion includes. Therefore, we have not included any of these in the number of the atheistical.

Those only who do not believe in any law of God over the conscience we have charged with this tendency to positive atheism. Against such, the justice of the charge is manifest. For they are practically atheists already, and by denying an essential attribute of the Creator, and a relation which the creature must have toward him on account of this attribute, the way is opened to a denial of his existence. As for those who have been instructed in the Catholic faith and have thrown off its authority over their conscience, we say that they have turned towards atheism, because we are convinced that, as a matter of fact, the motives and reasonings which have induced them to this fatal apostasy are practically and theoretically atheistical, even if they themselves are not distinctly aware of their ultimate tendency. We do not deny that a Catholic may lapse into some imperfect form of Christianity or natural religion. The first Protestants had been originally Catholics, and so have been some of the so-called philosophers professing natural religion. But the present tendency of unbelief is toward atheism, and those believers in positive, revealed religion, whether Catholics, Protestants, or Jews, who are swept by this current, are carried toward the abyss whither it is rushing. Those who reject the law of God which is proclaimed and enjoined by the authority of the church, do so because its moral or intellectual restraints are irksome, and they wish to be at liberty. In plain words, they wish to be free to sin, to follow the proclivity of our fallen nature to indulge in pride and concupiscence, without any fear of God before their eyes to disturb their peace. Therefore, they deny the authority of the church to bind their conscience to believe the doctrines and obey the moral precepts which she promulgates in the name of God. Their revolt is against the law itself and the sovereign authority of God. They sin against faith and against reason also; against the natural as well as the revealed law. They sin with the understanding as well as with the will, and their sin is one which goes to the root of all moral obligation and responsibility in the creature toward the Creator. It is an assertion of perfect individual liberty of thought and action, of independence and self-sovereignty; and as such an independence is completely incompatible with the existence of God, it is but a step to deny that he exists, or at least that we have any knowledge of his existence. Moreover, modern unbelief proceeds by the way of objections, difficulties, and doubts. It is sceptical in its principle; and one who rejects the authority of the church and of divine revelation on the principle of scepticism, easily rejects all philosophy and natural religion on the same principle, and runs down into pure materialism and atheism.

There are many persons in Europe, and some in this country, who have sunk into a state of avowed impiety and violent hostility to all religion which places them beyond the reach of every appeal to reason, conscience, or right feeling. We do not attempt to argue with such as these; but we suppose in those whom we address a condition of the mind and heart much less degenerate and hopeless. We suppose them to recognize the excellence and necessity of the private and social virtues, and to retain some intellectual and moral ideal in their minds which they cherish and venerate. They believe in truthfulness, honor, fidelity, honesty, true love, friendship, in the cultivation of knowledge and the fine arts, [pg 223] in all that can give decorum, refinement, and charm to domestic and social life, power, dignity, and splendor to political society. But all this is looked on as a spontaneous, natural growth, which finds its perfection and its end from and on this earth, and in this life, without any direct relation to God and an immortal life in another sphere of existence. Now, that such persons are intellectually and morally on a height which elevates them far above those who are wholly degraded in mind and character, we readily admit. But they are on the verge of a precipice. It is the black and awful abyss of atheism which yawns beneath them. And we invite them to look over the brink, and down into those dark depths, that they may consider deliberately whither their steps are leading them, before it is too late to retreat to a safer position.

In what consists the reality of truth, let us ask of one who professes to love truth, or the obligation of respecting it, if Christianity is a falsehood, and its Founder a deceiver of mankind? One who knows the evidence on which Christianity rests, and rejects it as a delusion, has adopted a principle of scepticism which destroys all the evidence on which any truth can rest. The principles of reason are denied or called in question, unbelief or doubt extends to everything. The existence of God is doubted, the distinct and immortal existence of the soul is questioned, nothing remains but the senses and the phenomena which are called sensible facts. Take away God, the Essential Truth, who can neither be deceived nor deceive us, and who has manifested to us the truth by the lights of reason and revelation, and there is no such thing as truth. The descendants of apes, whose whole existence is merely one of sensation, who have sprung from material forces and are resolved into them by dissolution, can have no more obligation of speaking the truth than their cousins the monkeys. If lying, calumny, or perjury will increase the means of your sensible enjoyment, why not employ them against your brother-apes, as well as entrap a monkey and cage him for your amusement? Whence comes the excellence and obligation of honor, that principle which impels a man rather to die than to betray a trust or abandon the post of duty? On what is based honesty? Why should one choose to pass his life, and to make his family pass their lives, in poverty and privation, rather than take the gold of another, when he can steal it with impunity? Where lies the detestable baseness of bribery and swindling? Why does the heart revolt against the conduct of the man or woman who is faithless to conjugal, parental, or filial love, who is a false friend, ungrateful for kindness, a traitor to his country? It is all very well to say that our natural instincts impel us to love certain qualities and detest others, as we spontaneously admire beauty and are displeased with ugliness. This is certainly true. And it is very well to say that happiness and well-being are, on the whole, promoted by virtuous sentiments and actions, and hindered by those which are vicious. But if mere selfish, sensitive enjoyment of the good of this life be the end of life itself, all virtue is resolved at last into the quest of this enjoyment by the most sure and suitable means. When virtue requires the sacrifice of this enjoyment, it is no longer virtue. Why should a wife sacrifice her happiness to a cruel, sickly, or disagreeable husband, a husband preserve fidelity to a wife who is hopelessly deranged or who [pg 224] has violated her marriage vows? Why should a soldier expose his life in obedience to the order of a stupid or reckless commander, or shed his blood in an unnecessary war brought on by the folly or ambition of incompetent or unscrupulous rulers? Why should a seaman die for the sake of saving passengers who are nothing to him, and many of whom are perhaps worthless persons, leaving his widow and children without a protector? Why trouble ourselves about taking care of the poor, ruined wrecks of humanity, who can never more be capable of enjoying life or contributing to the enjoyment of others? If we are not the offspring of God, but of the earth, mere sensitive and mortal animals, existing for the pleasure of a day, all the virtues which demand self-sacrifice are absurd; and the sentiments which we feel about these virtues are illusions. It is very well to appeal to these sentiments; but those who do so must admit that these sentiments must be capable of being justified by reason. An atheist or a sceptic cannot do this. If a man is essentially the same with a pig, there cannot be any reason for treating him otherwise than as a pig. Our natural sentiments, which revolt against the practical consequences of the degrading doctrine of atheism, prove that it is contrary to nature, and therefore false. It is because our nature is rational and immortal that we owe to ourselves and our fellows those obligations and charities which are not due to the brutes; that life, chastity, property, honor, love and friendship, promises and engagements, political, social, and personal rights of all kinds, are to be respected and held sacred. Our rational and immortal nature cannot exist except by participation from God, and its constitutive principle is the capacity to know God and recognize his law as our supreme rule. The obligation of doing that which is just and honorable is derived from that law. Our own rights and the rights of our neighbor are inviolable, because God has given them. They are the rights of God, as that great philosopher Dr. Brownson has so frequently and conclusively proved. God, as our lawgiver, must necessarily give us a law which is plain and certain. It can be no other than the Christian law. And every one who has been instructed in the Catholic faith must see that Christianity and the Christian law are guaranteed, defined, proclaimed, and enforced on the conscience by the authority of the church.

Let him reject that authority, and he has disowned God; and by so doing has taken away the basis of virtue. Self-interest, sentiment, and human instincts are no sufficient support for it. For, although our temporal interests coincide in great part with the claims of virtue, and natural sentiments and instincts are radically good, we are subject to inordinate and even violent passions. Take away the fear of God, and the passions will sweep away all slighter barriers. Pride and concupiscence will assert their sway, make a wreck of virtue, and eventually destroy even our earthly and temporal happiness.

Even with all the power and influence which religion can exercise over men under the most favorable circumstances, there is enough of sin and misery in the world; but what are we to expect if atheism should prevail? The practical atheism, or, to speak Saxon, the ungodliness of the age, has produced enough of bitter and deadly fruit to give us a taste of the entertainment which is awaiting us if the time ever comes when the power which religion still retains is [pg 225] altogether taken away. We do not need to refer to the pages of professed moralists, or to quote sermons on this topic. It is enough to take what we find in the works of those masterly novelists who describe and satirize the crimes and follies of modern society and depict its tragic miseries, and what we read every day in the newspapers. The intrigues, villanies, swindlings, divorces, murders, and suicides which blacken the record of each passing month, and the hidden, untold tragedies going on perpetually in private life, give us proof enough of the ravages which the passions of fallen, weak human nature will make when all fear of God is removed, and they are left uncontrolled by anything stronger than self-interest, and physical coercion in the hands of the civil power. No one who casts off all faith in God, allegiance to his authority, and fear of his just retribution, can foresee what he himself may become, or what he may do before his life is ended. The natural virtues, the intellectual gifts, the education, refinement, elevated sentiments, and pure affections which such a person may possess in youth, whether it be a young man or a young woman, are no sure guarantee or safeguard, even in a religious and moral community. Much less are they in one which is wholly irreligious. No one knows, therefore, how wicked he may become, or how miserable he may make himself. Still less can any one foresee what treachery, cruelty, and ingratitude, what bitter sufferings, and what ruin, may await him at the hands of others, if he is to be a member of a great infidel or atheist family which he has helped to form. He will be like the unhappy Alpine tourist who fell down from the Matterhorn, dragging with him and dragged by his companions from his dangerous foothold, and all dashed in pieces in the abyss beneath.

Let any one who has been brought up in the enjoyment of those advantages which give decorum, charm, and refined pleasure to life—and who wishes and expects to possess the same in the future which he looks forward to in this world, with a zest and freedom increased by the riddance of all fear of God—think for a moment about one very important question. To what is he indebted for the blessings he has already enjoyed, and to what can he look for those he is expecting? In order that he should have a happy home, his parents must fulfil all the obligations of the conjugal and parental relations. If he is born to wealth, his father has had to work for him, or at least to take care of his property. If he has had a good mother, it is needless to expatiate on all that a woman must be, must do, and must suffer, to give a child such a blessing as that which is expressed by the tender and holy name of mother. For his education, how many noble and disinterested men have toiled, how many generous sacrifices of time, and labor, and money have been required! To create the nation which gives him the advantages of political order, the civilization which gives him a society to live in, the arts which minister to his higher tastes and personal comforts, how many causes have concurred together, what a multitude of the most noble, self-sacrificing, heroic exertions of genius, philanthropy, patriotism, fructified by a plentiful besprinkling of the blood of just and faithful men, have been necessary through long ages of time! In his ideal of a happy life, which he hopes for in this world, what a multitude of things he requires which presuppose [pg 226] the fidelity of thousands of persons to those obligations and relations of life on which he is dependent as an individual. His bride must bring to the nuptial feast her virgin purity, and keep her wedding-ring unbroken and undimmed. His children must be such as a father's heart can regard with pride and joy. Those with whom he has relations of business must act with honesty and integrity. He must have good servants to work for him, and hundreds of skilful and industrious hands must minister to his wants or caprices. Society must be kept in order, the machinery of the world must be kept going, the law must protect his life and property, and the majority of his fellow-men must remain content with a lot of hard work and poverty, that he may enjoy his dignity, leisure, splendor, and comfort in peace and security.

Now it is a simple fact, that the principles and laws which have wrought out whatever is high and excellent in modern civilization, have been derived from the Christian religion. The public, social, and private virtues which alone preserve society from corruption and extinction, are the fruit either of religious conscientiousness, or of the influence of religion on the natural conscience of those who live in the atmosphere which it has purified and irradiated. There has never been such a thing as human society founded on atheism; and when atheism, practical or theoretical, has begun to prevail in any community, it has begun to perish. Whoever tampers with that poison is preparing suicide for himself, and death for all around him that is living. A large dose will kill at once all that is capable of death in a soul which is, in spite of itself, immortal. The slow sipping of small doses will gradually produce the same effect. The general distribution of the poison will destroy more or less rapidly the vital principle of the family, of society, of the state, of human civilization. Human beings cannot live together in peace and order, in love and friendship, in mutual truth and fidelity, in happiness and prosperity, if they believe that they are mere animals, whose only good is the brief pleasure which can be snatched from the present life. Even the imperfect amity and good-fellowship, the lower grade of society, the inferior well-being and enjoyment, the faint dim similitude of the rational order which exists among the irrational animals, cannot be attained by the human race when it strives to degenerate itself to the level of the brute creation. The irrepressible, inextinguishable, violent appetite for a satisfying good, when it is defrauded of its true object and turned away from its legitimate end, becomes a devastating tornado of passion. There is too much suffering, and too small a supply of sensible enjoyment in human life, to allow mankind to be quiet, and to agree together amicably in the relations of civilized society, in the common pursuit of temporal happiness. Pride and concupiscence are as insatiable as the grave and as cruel as death. The fear of God can alone restrain them. Take that away from the individual, and he will be faithless to the duties of life, friendship, honesty, patriotism, philanthropy, to his nobler instincts, his higher sentiments, his ideal standard of good, in proportion as his passions gain power over him. Take it away from the family and the social order, and mutual faithlessness, breeding mutual hatred and warfare, will be the result. Take it away from the masses of men, and the commune will come, the maddened rabble will rush for the coveted possessions of the smaller number who appear to have exclusive possession [pg 227] of the real good, and at last all will be resolved into a state of barbarism in which the race will become extinct.

This will never take place; for the church and religion of Jesus Christ are imperishable, and God will bring the world to a sudden end before the human race has had time to destroy itself. But such is the tendency of the infidelity and atheism of the age. Whoever turns his back on Christianity is a partaker in this tendency, and a companion of that band of conspirators against religion and society whose end is more infernal and whose means are more cruel than those of the Thugs of India.

Number Thirteen. An Episode Of The Commune. Concluded.

There was music enough chiming at No. 13 to keep a choir of angels busy. Mme. de Chanoir, with the petulance of weakness, grumbled unceasingly, lamenting the miseries of her own position, altogether ignoring the fact that it was no worse, but in some ways better, than that of those around her, whinging and whining from morning till night, pouring out futile invectives against the Prussians, the Emperor, the Republic, General Trochu, and everybody and everything remotely conducive to her sufferings. She threatened to let herself die of hunger rather than touch horse-flesh, and for some days she so perseveringly held to her determination that Aline was terrified, and believed she would hold it to the end. The only thing that remained to the younger sister of any value was her mother's watch, a costly little gem, with the cipher set in brilliants; it had been her grandfather's wedding present to his daughter-in-law. Aline took it to the jeweller who had made it, and sold it for one hundred and fifty francs. With this she bought a ham and a few other delicacies that tempted Mme. de Chanoir out of her suicidal abstinence; she ate heartily, neither asking nor guessing at what price the dainties had been bought; and Aline, only too glad to have had the sacrifice to make, said nothing of what it had cost her. Gradually everything went that could be sold or exchanged for food. Aline would have lived on the siege bread, and never repined, had she been alone, but it went to her heart to hear the never-ending complaints of Mme. de Chanoir, to see her childish indignation at the great public disasters which her egotism contracted into direct personal grievances. Fortunately for herself, Mlle. de Lemaque was not a constant witness of the irritating scene. From nine in the morning till late in the evening she was away at the Ambulance, active and helpful, and cheering many a heavy heart and aching head by her bright and gentle ministry, and forgetting her own sufferings in the effort to alleviate greater ones.

“If you only could come with me, Félicité, and see something of the miseries our poor soldiers are enduring, it would make your own seem light,” she often said to Mme. de Chanoir, when, on coming home from her labor of love, she was met by the unreasonable grumbling of the invalid; “it is such a delight to feel one's self a comfort and a help to them. I don't know how I am ever to settle down to the make-believe work of teaching after this long spell of real work.”

She enjoyed the work so much, in fact, that, if it had not been for the sufferings, real and imaginary, of her sister, this would have been the happiest time she had known since her school days. The make-believe work, as Aline called it, which had hitherto filled her time had never filled her heart. It was a means of living that kept her brains and her hands at work, nothing more; and it had often been a source of wonder to her in her busiest days to feel herself sometimes seized with ennui. That trivial, hackneyed word hardly, perhaps, expresses the void, the sort of hunger-pang, that more and more frequently of late years had made her soul ache and yearn, but now the light seemed to break upon her, and she understood why it had been so. The work itself was too superficial, too external. It had overrun her life without satisfying it; it had not penetrated the surface, and brought out the best and deepest resources of her mind and heart—it had only broken the crust, and left the soil below untilled. She had flitted like a butterfly from one study to another; history, and literature, and music had attracted her by turns; she had gone into them enthusiastically, mastered their difficulties, and appropriated their beauties; but after a time the spell waned, and she glided imperceptibly into the dry mechanism of the thing, and went on giving her lesson because it brought her so much a cachet. But this work of a Sister of Mercy was a different sort of life altogether. The enthusiasm, instead of waning, grew as she went on. At first, the prosaic details, the foul air, the physical fatigue and moral strain of the sick-nurse's life were unspeakably repugnant to her; her natural fastidiousness turned from them in disgust, and she would have thrown it all up after the first week but for sheer human respect; she persevered, however, and at the end of a fortnight she had grown interested in her patients; by degrees she got reconciled to the obnoxious duties their state demanded of her; and before a month had passed it had become a ministry of love, and her whole soul had thrown itself into the perfect performance of her duties. She was often tired and faint on leaving the Ambulance, but she always left it with regret, and the evident zest and gladness of heart with which she set out each morning became at last a grievance in the eyes of her sister. Mme. de Chanoir vented her discontent by harping all the time of breakfast on the hard-heartedness of some people who could look at wounds and all sorts of horrors without flinching; whereas the very sight of a drop of blood made her almost faint; but then she was so constituted as to feel other people's wounds as if they were her own; it was a great misfortune; she envied people who had hard hearts; it certainly enabled them to do more, while she could only weep and pity. Aline bore the querulous reproaches as cheerfully as if she had been blessed with one of those hearts of stone that Mme. de Chanoir so envied. She had the indulgence of a happy heart, and she had found the secret of making [pg 229] her life a poem. But the nurse's courage was greater than her strength. After the first three months, material privations, added to arduous attendance on the sick and wounded, began to tell; her health showed signs of rebellion.

M. Dalibouze was the first to notice it. He came regularly on the Saturday evenings as of old; his age exempted him from the terrible outpost work on the ramparts; and he profited by the circumstance to keep up, as far as possible, his ordinary habits and enjoyments, “afin de soutenir le morale,” as he said. When he noticed this change in Aline, he immediately used his privilege of friend of the family to interfere; he begged her to modify her zeal for the poor sufferers at the Ambulance, and to consider how precious her life was to her sister and her friends.

Aline took the advice very kindly, but assured him that, far from wearing out her strength as he supposed, her work was the only thing that sustained it. The tone in which she said this convinced him it was the truth. It then occurred to him that her pallor and languid step must be caused by the unhealthy diet of the siege. Everybody suffered in a more or less degree; but, as it always happens, those who suffered most said least about it. The gros rentier, who fared sumptuously on kangaroo, and Chinese puppies, and elephant at a hundred francs a pound, talked loud about the miseries of starvation which he underwent for the sake of his country; but the petit rentier, whose modest meal had long since been replaced by a scanty ration of horse-flesh, and that only to be had by “making tail,” as they call it, for hours at the butchers shop—the petit rentier said very little. He was perishing slowly off the face of the earth; but, with the pride of poverty strong in death, he gathered his rags around him, and made ready to die in silence.

It was on such people as Mme. de Chanoir and her sister that the siege pressed hardest; their concierge was far better off than they; she could claim her bons, and fight for her rations; and she had fifteen sous a day as the wife of a National Guard.

As to Mme. Cléry, she proved herself equal to the occasion. She had no National Guard to fall back upon, but she was sustained by the thought that she was suffering for her country; she, too, was a good patriot. Patriotism, however, has its limits of endurance, and hay bread was the border line that Mme. Cléry's patriotism refused to pass. When the good bread was rationed, she showed signs of mutiny; but when it degenerated into that hideous compound, of which we have all seen specimens, her indignation declared itself in open rage. “What is this?” she cried, when the first loaf was handed to her after three hours' waiting. “Are we cattle, to eat hay?” And, breaking the tawny, spongy lumps in two, she pulled out a long bit of the offensive weed, and held it up to the scorn of the queue.

As to Mme. de Chanoir, when she saw it she went into hysterics for the rest of the day. But Providence was mindful of No. 13. Just at this crisis, when Aline's altered looks aroused her sister from the selfish contemplation of her own ailments and wants, M. Dalibouze arrived early one morning soon after Mme. de Lemaque had started for the Ambulance, and announced that he had received the opportune present of a number of hams, tins of preserved meat, condensed milk, and an indefinite number of pots of jam. It was three times as much as he could consume before the siege was raised—for raised [pg 230] it infallibly would be, and, if he were not greatly mistaken, within forty-eight hours—so he begged Mme. la Générale to do him the favor of accepting the surplus.

Mme. de Chanoir, with infantine simplicity, believed this credible story, and did M. Dalibouze the favor he requested. So, thanks to his generous friend, the professor in turn became the benefactor of the two sisters, and had the delight of seeing Aline revive on the substantial fare that arrived so apropos. Well, it came at last, the end of the blocus; not, indeed, as M. Dalibouze had prognosticated. But that was not his fault. He had not reckoned with treachery. He could not suspect what a brood of traitors the glorious capital of civilization was nourishing in her patriotic bosom. But wait a little! It would be made square yet. Europe would see France rise by-and-by, like the Phœnix from her ashes, and spread her wings, and take a flight that would astonish the world. As to the Prussians, those vile vandals, whose greasy moustaches were not fit to brush the boots of Paris, let them bide a while, and they shall see what they should see!

Thus did M. Dalibouze resumer la situation, while Paris on her knees waited humbly the terms that Prussia might dictate as the price of a loaf of bread for her starving patriots.

But the worst was to come yet. Hardly had the little ménage at No. 13 drawn a long breath of relief after the prolonged miseries and terrors of the siege, than that saturnalia, the like of which assuredly the world never saw before, and let us hope never will again, the Commune, began. Like a fiery flood it rose in Paris, and rose and rose till the red wave swept from end to end of the city, spreading desolation and terror everywhere, and making the respectable party of order long to call back the Prussians, and help them out of the mess. How it began, and grew, and ended we have heard till we know the miserable story by heart. I am not going to tell it here. The Commune is only the last episode in the history of No. 13.

There was work to do and plenty in binding the wounds and smoothing the pillows of dying men, and words to be spoken that dying ears are open to when spoken in Christian love. Aline de Lemaque's courage did not fail her in this last and fearful ordeal. She resumed her duties as Sister of Mercy, asked no questions as to the politics of the wounded men, but did the best she could for them. Mme. de Chanoir could not understand how her sister spent her time and service on Red Republicans; the sooner the race died out, the better, and it was not the work of a Christian to preserve the lives of such snakes and fiends.

“There are dupes and victims as well as fiends among them,” Aline assured her; “and those who are guilty are the most to be pitied.” After a time, however, the dangers attendant on going into the streets became so great that Aline was forced to remain indoors. Barricades were thrown up in every direction, and made the circulation a dangerous and almost impracticable feat to members of the party of order. The Rue Royale, which had been safe during the first siege, was now a threatened centre of accumulated danger. It was armed to the teeth. The Faubourg end of it was barred by a stone barricade that might have passed for a fortress—a wall of heavy masonry weighted with cannon, two black giants that lay couched like monster slugs peeping through a hedge. But after those terrible weeks there came at last the final tug, the troops came [pg 231] in, and Greek met Greek. Shell and shot rained on the city like hailstones. The great black slugs gave tongue, bellowing with unintermitting fury; all round them came responsive roars from barricades and batteries; it was the discord of hell broke upward through the earth, and echoing through the streets of Paris.

Aline de Lemaque and her sister sat in the little saloon at No. 13, listening to the war-dogs without, and straining their ears to catch every sound that shot up with any significant distinctness from the chaos of noise. Mme. Cléry was with them; she stayed altogether at No. 13 now, sleeping on the sofa at night. It would have been impossible for her to come and go twice a day while the city was in this state of commotion. To-day the old woman could not keep quiet; she was constantly up and down to the concierge's lodge to pick up any stray report that came through the chinks of the porte-cochère. Once she went down and remained so long that the sisters were uneasy. An explosion had reverberated through the street, shaking the house from cellar to garret, and, like an electric shock, flinging both the sisters on their knees simultaneously. Mme. de Chanoir's spine had recovered itself within the last week as if by magic. She had abandoned her usual recumbent position, and came and went about the house like the rest of them. If the Commune did nothing else, it did this. We must give the devil his due.

“Félicité, I must go and see what it is. I hear groans close under the window; perhaps a shell has fallen in the court and killed her,” said Aline. And, rising, she turned to go.

“Don't leave me! For the love of heaven, don't leave me alone, Aline!” implored her sister. “I'll die with terror if that comes again while I'm here by myself.”

“Come with me, then,” said Aline. And, taking her sister's hand, they went down together.

Mme. Cléry was not killed. This fact was made clear to them at once by the spectacle of the old woman standing in the porte-cochère, and shaking her fist vehemently at somebody or something at the further end of it.

“Stay here,” said Aline to Mme. de Chanoir, motioning her back into the house. “I will see what it is; and if you can do anything I'll call you.”

It was the concierge that Mme. Cléry was apostrophizing. And this was why: a shell had burst, not in the yard, as the sisters fancied, but in the street just outside, and the explosion was followed by a shriek and a loud blow at the door, while something like a body fell heavily against it.

“Cordon!” cried Mme. Cléry; “it is some unfortunate hit by the shell.”

“More likely a communist coming to pillage and burn. I'll cordon to none of 'em!” declared the concierge. “The door is locked; if they want to get in, they may blow it open.” But Mme. Cléry flew at her throat, and swore, if she didn't give up the key, she, Mme. Cléry, would know the reason why. The concierge groaned, and felt, in bitterness of spirit, what a difficult task the cordon was. But she opened the door; under it lay two wounded men, both of them young; one was evidently dying; he had been mortally struck by a fragment of the shell that had burst over the thick oaken door and dealt death around and in front of it. The other was wounded, too, but much less seriously; he had been flung down by his companion, and the shock of the fall, more than his wound, had stunned [pg 232] him. Mme. Cléry dragged them in under the shelter of the porte-cochère, and proposed laying them on the floor of the lodge. But the concierge had no mind to take in a dead and a dying man, and vowed she would not have her lodge turned into a coffin. The dispute was waxing warm, Mme. Cléry threatening muscular argument, when Aline made her appearance. Her training in the Ambulance stood her in good stead now.

“Poor fellow! He will give no more trouble to any one,” she said, after feeling the pulse of the first, and laying her hand for a moment on his heart; “bring a cloth, and cover his face; he must lie here till he can be removed.”

The concierge obeyed her. They composed the features, and laid the body under cover of the gateway.

Aline then examined the other. His arm was badly wounded. While she was still probing the wound, the man opened his eyes, stared round him for a moment with a speculative gaze of returning consciousness, made a spasmodic effort to rise, but fell back at once. “You are wounded—not severely, I hope,” said Aline; “but you must not attempt to move till we have dressed your arm.”

She despatched Mme. Cléry for the box containing her ambulance appliances, lint, bandages, etc., and then, with an expertness that would have done credit to a medical student, she washed and dressed the shattered limb, while Mme. de Chanoir watched the operation in shuddering excitement through the glass door at the foot of the stairs. What to do next was the puzzle. The concierge resolutely refused to let him into her lodge; there was no knowing who or what he was, and she was a lone woman, and had no mind to compromise herself by taking in bad characters. The poor fellow was so much exhausted from loss of blood that he certainly could not help himself, and it would have been cruel to leave him down in the courtyard, where his unfortunate comrade was lying dead within sight of him. Aline saw there was nothing for it but to take him up to their own apartment. How to get him there was the difficulty. He looked about six feet long, and might have weighed any number of stone. She and Mme. Cléry could never succeed in carrying him. He had not spoken while she was dressing his arm, but lay so still with his eyes closed that they thought he had fainted.

“We must carry him,” said Aline in a determined voice, and beckoned the concierge to come and help.

But before proceeding to the gigantic enterprise, Mme. Cléry poured out a tumbler of wine, which she had had the wit to bring down with the lint-box, and held it to the sufferer's lips, while Aline supported his head against her knee. He drank it with avidity, and the draught seemed to revive him instantaneously; he sat up leaning on his right arm.

“We are going to carry you up-stairs, mon petit,” said Mme. Cléry, patting him on the shoulder with the patronizing manner an amazon might have assumed towards a dwarf.

“You carry me!” said the young man, measuring the short, trim figure of the charwoman with a sceptical twinkle in his eyes: they were dark-gray eyes, particularly clear, and piercing.

“Me and Mlle. Aline,” said Mme. Cléry, in a tone that testified against the supercilious way in which her measure was being taken.

Aline was behind him. He turned to look at her with a jest on his lips, but, changing his mind apparently, he bowed; then, with a resolute effort, [pg 233] he bent forward, and, before either she or Mme. Cléry could interfere, he was on his feet. It was well, however, they were both within reach of him, for he staggered, and must have fallen but for their prompt assistance.

“La!” said Mme. Cléry, “what it is to be proud! Lean on Mlle. Aline and me, and try and get up-stairs without breaking your neck.”

“It is the fortune of war,” said the gentleman laughing, and accepting the shoulder that Aline turned towards him.

They accomplished the ascent in safety, and then, in spite of his assertion that he was all right now, Mme. de Chanoir insisted on their guest lying down on her sofa while the charwoman prepared some food for him. But safety, in truth, was nowhere. The fighting grew brisker from minute to minute. The troops were in possession of the neighboring streets; they had taken the Federals in the rear, and were mowing them down like corn. The struggle could not last much longer, but it was desperate, and the loss of life, already appalling, must be still greater before it ended. The stranger who had introduced himself so unexpectedly to No. 13 had formed one of the party of order, he told his good Samaritans, who had gone unarmed, with a flag of truce, to the Federals in the Rue de la Paix; he had seen the ghastly butchery that followed, and only escaped as if by miracle himself; he had fought as a mobile against the Prussians, and received a sabre-cut in the head, which had kept him in the hospital for weeks; he had, of course, refused to join the Federals, and it was at the risk of his life that he showed himself abroad in Paris; just now he had been making an attempt to join the troops, when that shell burst, and stopped him in his venturesome career. All day and all night the four inmates of the little entresol waited and watched in breathless anxiety for the close of the battle that was raging around them. It never flagged for an instant, and as it went on the noise grew louder and more bewildering, the tocsin rang from every belfry in the city, the drum beat to arms in every direction, the chassepots hissed, the cannon boomed, and yells and shrieks of fratricidal murder filled the air, mingling with the smell and smoke of blood and powder. It was a night that drove hundreds mad who lived through it. Yet the worst was still to come. Late the next afternoon, Aline, who was constantly at the window, peeping from behind the mattress stuffed into it to protect them from the shells, thought she discovered something in the atmosphere indicative of a change of some sort. She said nothing, but slipped out of the room, and ran up to a bull's-eye at the top of the house that served as a sort of observatory to those who had the courage of their curiosity, as the French put it, and ventured their heads for a moment to the mercy of the missiles flying amongst the chimney-pots. It was an awful sight that met her. A fire was raging close to the house. Where it began and ended it was impossible to say, but clearly it was of immense magnitude, and blazed with a fury that threatened to spread the flames far and wide. She stood rooted to the spot, literally paralyzed with horror. Were they to be burnt to death, after living through such miseries, and escaping death in so many shapes? Yet how could they escape it? There were barricades on every side of them; if they were not shot down like dogs, which was the most likely event, they would never be allowed to pass. All this rushed through her mind as [pg 234] she gazed in blank despair out of the little bull's-eye, that embraced the whole area of the Rue Royale and the adjacent streets. As yet, there was a space between the fire and No. 13. Mercifully, there was no wind, and she saw by the swaying of the flames that they drew rather towards the Madeleine than in the direction of the Rue de Rivoli. Flight was a forlorn hope, but still they must try it. She turned abruptly from the window, and was crossing the room, when a loud crash made her heart leap. She looked back. The roof of another house, one nearer to No. 13, had fallen in, and the flames, leaping through like rattlesnakes out of a bag, sprang at the sky, writhing and hissing as they licked it with their long red tongues.

“O God, have pity on us!”

Aline fell on her knees for one moment, and then hurried down to the salon.

“We must leave this at once,” she said, speaking calmly, but with white lips; “the street is on fire.”

M. Varlay, citoyen Varlay, as he gave his name, started to his feet, and, pulling the mattress from the window, looked out. He saw the flames above the house-top.

“Let us go, with the help of God!” he exclaimed. “We must make for the Rue de Rivoli!”

Mme. de Chanoir and the charwoman, as soon as they caught sight of the fire, shrieked in chorus, and made a headlong rush at the stairs.

“You must be quiet, madame!” cried M. Varlay in a tone that arrested both the women; “if we lose our presence of mind, we had better stay where we are. Have you any valuables, papers or money, that you can take in your pocket?” he said, turning to Aline. She alone had not lost her head.

Yes; there were a few letters of her parents, and some trinkets, valuable only as souvenirs, which she had had the forethought to put together. She took them quickly, and the four went down the stairs. There was no one in the lodge. The concierge had taken refuge in her cellar, and her husband was supposed to be saving France somewhere else. Mme. Cléry pulled the string, and the little band sallied forth into the street. The air was so thick they could hardly see their way, except for the fiery forks of flame that shot up successively through the fog, illuminating dark spots with a momentary lurid brightness, while now and then the crash of a roof or a heavy beam was followed by a pillar of sparks that went rattling up into the sky like a fountain of rockets. The Babel of drums, and bells, and artillery added to the confusion of the scene as the fugitives hurried on singly under the shadow of the houses. They fared safely out of the Rue Royale and turned to the left. The Tuileries was enveloped in smoke, but the flames were nearly spent, only here and there a tongue of fire crept out of a crevice, licked the wall, twisted and twirled, and drew in again. A crowd was gathered under the portico of the Rue de Rivoli, watching the last throes of the conflagration, and discussing many questions in excited tones. Our travellers pushed on, and came unmolested to the corner of the Rue St. Florentine, where a sentry levelled his bayonet before them, and cried “Halt!” Mme. de Chanoir, who walked first, answered by a scream. Citoyen Varlay, laying his hand on her shoulder, drew her quickly behind him. “Stand here while I speak to him,” he said, and he advanced to parley with the Federal, at the same time putting his hand into his pocket. They had not exchanged half a dozen [pg 235] words when the sentinel shouldered his chassepot, and said:

“Quick, then, pass along!”

Varlay stood for the women to pass first. Mme. de Chanoir and the charwoman rushed on, but no sooner had they stepped into the street than, clasping their hands, they fell upon their knees with a cry of agonized terror. The sight that met them was indeed enough to make a brave heart quail. To the left, extending right across the street, rose a barricade, a fortress rather, surmounted at either end by two warriors of the Commune, bending over a cannon as if in the very act of firing; in the centre two amazon pétroleuses stood with chassepots slung en baudelière and red rags in their hands that they waved aloft proudly like women who felt that the eyes of Europe were upon them; the intermediate space on either side of them was filled up with soldiers planted singly or in groups, and poséd in the attitudes of men whom forty centuries look down upon. Just as Mme. de Chanoir and her bonne came in front of the terrible mise-en-scêne, and before they could go backward or forward, the word Fire! rang out from the fortress, two matches flashed in the hands of the gunners, and the women dropped to the ground with a shriek that would have waked the dead.

“What's the matter now?” cried the sentinel.

“They are going to fire!”

“Imbeciles! No, they are going to be photographed!”[112]

And so they were. A photographic battery was set up against the railings opposite. Aline and citoyen Varlay seized the two half-fainting women by the arm, and dragged them across and out of the range of the formidable tableau vivant. Meanwhile, the fire was gaining on No. 13. The house three doors down from it was flambée. It had been deserted the day before by all its occupants, save one family composed of a husband and wife, who had obstinately refused to believe in the danger till it was too late to evade it. They were friends of M. Dalibouze's and the professor turned in to see them this morning on his way to No. 13. “The situation was a difficult one,” he said; “it were foolhardy to defy it, and the time was come when good citizens should save themselves.” He convinced M. and Mme. X—— that this was the only reasonable thing to do. So casting a last look at their belongings, they sallied forth from their home accompanied by their servant, an ex-sapeur, too old for military service, but as hale and hearty as a youth of twenty. The professor had got in by a backway from the Faubourg St. Honoré, and thither he led his friends now; but, though less than fifteen minutes had elapsed since he had entered, the passage was already blocked: part of the wall had fallen and stopped it up. There was nothing for it but to go boldly out by the front door, and trust to Providence. But they reckoned without the pétroleuses. Those zealous daughters of the Commune, braving the shot, and the shell, and the vengeful flames of their own creation, sped from door to door, pouring the terrible fluid into holes and corners, through the gratings of cellars, under the doors, through the chinks of the windows, everywhere, dancing, and singing, and laughing all the time like tigers in human shape—tigers gone mad with fire and blood. When the sapeur opened the door, he beheld a group of them on the trottoir; one was rolling a barrel of petroleum on to the next house, another was steeping rags in a barrel already half empty, [pg 236] and handing them as fast as she could to others, who stuffed them into appropriate places, and set a light to them; every flame that rose was hailed by a shout of demoniacal exultation. The sapeur banged the door in their faces.

“We must set to work, and cut a hole through the wall,” he said; “it's the last chance left us.”

No sooner said than done. He knew where to lay his hands on a couple of crowbars and a pickaxe; the professor fired the contents of his chassepot at the wall, and then the three men went at it, and worked as men do when death is behind them and life before. It was an old house, built chiefly of stone and mortar, very little iron, and it yielded quickly to the hammering blows of the workmen. A breach was made—a small one, but big enough to let a man crawl through. M. X—— passed out first, and then helped out his wife. M. Dalibouze and the sapeur followed. They hurried through the next apartment. M. Dalibouze reloaded his gun; whiz! whiz! went the bullets; bang! bang! went the crowbars; down rattled the stones; another breach was made, and again they were saved. Three times they fought their way through the walls, while the fire like a lava torrent rolled after them, and then they found themselves at No. 13. M. Dalibouze's first thought was for the little apartment on the entresol at the other side. They made for it; but as they were crossing the court a blow, or rather a succession of blows, struck the great oak door; it opened like a nut, and fell in with a crash like thunder. The burglars beheld M. Dalibouze in his National Guard costume scudding across the yard, and greeted him with howls like a troop of jackals. Whiz! went the grape-shot. M. Dalibouze fell.

Mme. X—— and her husband had fallen back before the door gave way, and thus escaped observation. No one was left but the old sapeur.

“What sort of work is this?” he said, walking defiantly up to the men—there were five of them—“what do you mean by breaking into the houses of honest citizens?”

“You had better break out of this one if you don't want to grill,” answered one of the ruffians; “we are going to fire it, par ordre de le Commune.”

The women had disappeared, and left their implements in the hands of the men.

“Oh! par ordre de le Commune!” echoed the sapeur; “then I've nothing to say; I hope they pay you well for the work?”

“Not over and above for such work as it is,” said one of the incendiaries, rolling a barrel into the concierge's lodge.

“How much?”

“Ten francs apiece.”

“Ten francs for burning a house down! Pshaw! you're fools for your pains!”

The sapeur shrugged his shoulders, and, turning on his heels, walked off. Suddenly, as if a bright thought struck him, he turned back, and faced them with his hands in his pockets.

“Suppose you got twenty for leaving it alone?”

“Twenty apiece?”

“Twenty apiece, every man of you!”

They stopped their work, and looked from one to another.

“Ma foi, I'd take it, and leave it alone!” said one.

“Pardie! we've had enough of it, and, as the citoyen says, it's beggarly pay for the work,” said another.

“Done!” said the sapeur.[113]

He pulled out a leathern purse from his breast-pocket, and counted out one hundred francs in five gold pieces to the five communists.

“Une poignée de main, citoyen!” said the first spokesmen. The others followed suit, and the sapeur, after heartily wringing the five rascally hands, sent them on their way rejoicing to the cabaret round the corner. This is how No. 13 was saved. No. 11 was burnt to the ground, and then the fire stopped.

But to return to Aline and her friends. They got on well till they came to the Rue d'Alger, where they were caught in a panic, men, and women, and children struggling to get out of reach of the flames, and threatening to crush each other to death in their terror. Our friends got clear of it, but, on coming out of the mélée at separate points, the sisters found they had lost each other. Mme. de Chanoir had held fast by Mme. Cléry, and was satisfied that Aline was safe under the wing of citoyen Varlay. But she was mistaken. He had indeed lifted her off the ground, holding her like a child above the heads of the crowd, and so saved her from being trampled under foot, most likely; but when he set her down, and Aline turned to speak to him, he was gone. It would have been madness to attempt to look for him in the mélée, so she determined to wait at the nearest point of shelter, and then when the crowd dispersed they would be sure to meet. She made for the door-way of a mourning house at the corner of the Rue St. Honoré. But she had not been many minutes there when she heard a hue and cry from the Tuileries end of the street, and a troop of men and women came flying along, driving some people before them, and firing at random as they went. The sensible thing for Aline to do was, of course, to flatten herself against the wall, and stay where she was, and of course she did not do it. She saw a flock of people running, and she started from her hiding-place, and turned and ran with them. They tore along the Rue St. Honoré till they came to the Rue Rohan; here the band broke up, and many disappeared at opposite points; but one little group unluckily kept together, and, though diminished to a third its size at the starting point, it still held in view, and gave chase to the pursuers. Mlle. de Lemaque kept with this. On they flew like hares before the hounds, till, turning the corner of the Place du Palais Royal, they were stopped by two Federals, who levelled their chassepots and bade them stand. The fugitives turned, not like hares at bay to face the hunters and die, but to rush into an open shop, and fall on their knees, and cry, “Mercy!”

The Federals were after them in a second. Instead of shooting them right off, however, they set to discussing the propriety of taking them out and standing them in regulation order, with their backs to the wall, and doing the thing in a proper business-like manner. While this parley was going on, Aline de Lemaque cast a glance round her, and saw that her fellow-victims were two young lads and half a dozen women, all of them of the lower class apparently; most of them wore caps. The men who were making ready to shoot them without rhyme or reason, as if they were so many rats, were evidently of the very dregs of the Commune, and looked half-drunk with blood or wine, or both—it was hard to say—but there was no trace of manhood left upon the faces that gave a hope that mercy had still a lurking-place in their hearts. One of the women suddenly started to her feet. “What!” she cried, “you call [pg 238] yourselves men, and you are going in cold blood to shoot unarmed women and boys? Shame on you for cowards! There is not a man amongst you!”

She snapped her fingers right into their faces with an impudence that was positively sublime. The cowards were taken aback. They looked at each other, and burst out laughing.

“Sapristi! She's right,” exclaimed one of them; “they're not worth wasting our powder on!”

Like lightning, the women were on their feet, fraternizing with the men, embracing, shaking hands, and swearing fraternity in true communistic fashion. Mlle. de Lemaque alone stood aloof, a silent, terror-stricken spectator of the scene.

“What have we here? Une canaille d'aristocrate, I'll be bound! It's written on her face,” said one of the ruffians, seizing her by the arm; “let us make away with her, comrades! It will be a good job for the Republic to rid it of one more of the lazy aristos that live by the ouvrier's meat.” There was a lull in the kissing and hand-shaking, and they turned to stare at Aline. Her life hung by a thread. A timid word, a guilty look, and she was lost. But the soldier's blood rose up in her; she bethought her of her abus, and lancéd it.

“Lazy!” she cried; “I am a soldier's daughter; my father fought for France, and left his children nothing but his sword; I work for my bread as hard as any of you!”

The effect was galvanic; they gathered around her, shouting, “Bravo! Give us your hand, citoyenne!”

And Aline gave it, and, like the statesman who thanked God he had a country to sell, she blessed him that she had a hand to give.

—Blood ran like water in the sewers of Paris for a few days, and then the troops were masters of the field, and order was restored—restored so far as to enable honest men to sleep in their beds at night.

Mme. de Chanoir was back again in the little saloon at No. 13, and diligently reading the newspaper aloud to a gentleman who was lying on the sofa near her; the générale's spine complaint had been radically cured by the Commune, and she sat erect in a chair now like other people. The invalid's face and head were so elaborately bandaged that it was impossible to see what either were like, while his bodily proportions disappeared altogether under a voluminous travelling-rug. He listened for some time without comment to the political tirade which Mme. de Chanoir was reading to him, an invective against France, and her soldiers, and her generals, and the nation at large—a sweeping anathema, in fact, of everything and everybody, till he could bear it no longer, and, sitting bolt upright, he exclaimed:

“Madame, the man who wrote that article is a traitor. France is greater to-day in her unmerited misfortunes than she was in the apotheosis of her glory; she is more sublime in her widowed grief than her ignoble foe in his barbarous successes! She is, in fact, still France. The situation is compromised for a moment, but—”

“Lâ, lâ, voyons!” broke in Mme. Cléry, putting her head in at the door, and shaking the lid of a sauce-pan at the invalid. “How is the tisane to take effect if you will talk politics and put yourself into a rage about la situation! Mme. la Générale, make 'um keep still!”

The générale thus adjured laid down the newspaper, and gently insisted on M. Dalibouze's resuming his horizontal position on the couch. Aline was not there; she was off at her old work at the Ambulance again. The hospitals had been replenished [pg 239] to overflowing by the street-fighting of the last week of the Commune, la dénouement de la situation, as M. Dalibouze called it, and nurses were in great demand. Citoyen Varlay had not turned up since the night they had lost him in the crowd. The excitement and confusion which had reigned in the city ever since had made it difficult to set effective inquiries on foot, even if the sisters had been accurately informed regarding their quondam guest's identity and circumstances, which they were not. All they knew of him was his appearance, his name, and his wound. This was too vague to assist much in the search. Mme. de Chanoir was sincerely sorry for it; she had been attracted at once by the frank bearing and courteous manners of the young citoyen; but his cool courage, his forgetfulness of himself for others, and the stoical contempt for bodily pain which he had displayed on the occasion of their flight, had kindled sympathy into admiration, and she spoke of him now as a hero. She spoke of him constantly at first, loudly lamenting his loss; for lost she believed him. He had, no doubt, been overpowered by the crowd; his disabled arm deprived him of half his strength, and, exhausted as he was by previous pain, and the violent effort to protect Aline in the struggle, he had probably fainted and been suffocated or crushed to death. This was the conclusion Mme. de Chanoir arrived at; but when she mentioned it to Aline, the deadly paleness that suddenly overspread the young girl's features made her wish to recall her words, and from that out the name of the young soldier was never pronounced between the sisters.

Mme. Cléry had formed on her side an enthusiastic affection for him, and sincerely regretted his fate, but with a woman's instinct she guessed that the one who regretted it most said least about it. She never mentioned citoyen Varlay to Aline, but made up for the self-denial by pouring out his praises and her own grief into the sympathizing ear of the générale.

“What a pretty couple they would have made!” said the old woman one morning, wiping her eyes with the corner of her apron; “he was such a fine fellow, and so merry; he only wanted the particule to make him perfect; but, after all, who knows? He may not have been as good as he looked. One can never trust those parvenus.”

A month passed. Mme. de Chanoir was alone one afternoon, when Mme. Cléry rushed into the room in a state of breathless excitement, her eyes literally dancing out of her head.

“Madame! madame! I guessed it! I was sure of it! I'm not that woman not to know a gentleman when I see him. I told madame he was! Let madame never say but I did!”

And having explained herself thus coherently between laughing and crying, she held out a card to her mistress.

Mme. de Chanoir read aloud:

Le Baron de Varlay,

Avocat à la Cour de Cassation.

Another month elapsed, and the great door of the Madeleine was opened for a double marriage. The first bridegroom was a tall, slight man, on whose face and figure the word distingué was unmistakably stamped. The second was a plump, dapper little man, who, as he walked up the carpeted aisle of the church, seemed hardly to touch the ground, so elastic was his step; his countenance beamed, he was radiant, and it is hardly a figure of speech to say that he was buoyant with satisfaction. If he could have given utterance to [pg 240] his feelings, he would have said that “the situation was perfect, and absolutely nothing more could be desired.”

Mme. Cléry was present in her monumental cap, trimmed with Valenciennes lace brand-new for the occasion, and a chintz gown with a peacock pattern on a pea-green ground that would have lighted up a room without candles. She, too, looked the very personification of content. The first couple was all her heart could wish, and more than her wildest ambition had ever dreamed of for her favorite Aline. The second she had grown philosophically reconciled to. The marriage had one drawback, a grievous one, but the charwoman consoled herself with the reflection that Mme. de Chanoir might condone the bourgeoisie of her new name, by signing herself:

Felicite Dalibouze,

Née de Lemaque.

Use And Abuse Of The Novel.

If the question were put to us—What class of books, viewed merely as reading, without tutelage or commentary of any kind, had the greatest influence in moulding and training the thoughts, aspirations, mode of life, of the mass of readers in these days?—we should, notwithstanding the slur and sneer which it is fashionable for clever writers to cast upon them, answer unhesitatingly—Novels.

This answer, we have no doubt, might shock the sensibilities of some of our readers, as it might very cordially agree with those of a not insignificant body of others. Without going into a dry analytical discussion of the pros and cons of the question, we will adopt the easier course of taking at the outset everything we want for granted, and allowing the truth of it to emanate from the body of our article; merely premising that, if it be true, Catholics have too much neglected, are far too weak in, this very important collateral branch of modern education.

Every age, every cycle, every period in the history of the world has its distinctive features, its proper individualities, its representative men, systems, or facts, strongly and clearly marked. Ours is the iron age. Our province is matter. Our tastes are material. The world seems, strangely enough, to be working backwards. We began with intellect: we finish with matter. The signs of the past are stamped with intellect or the intellectual. The development of the present is steam and electricity. If we ask the ages, What have you given us? the answer comes rolling down out of the dim mountain of the past: Homer, Phidias, Apelles; the alphabet, the geometrical figure, the science of numbers; Plato and Aristotle; Virgil and the historians; the practical greatness of Rome; the great faith of the new-born middle ages; the Crusades, the Gothic order, the great masters, Dante, [pg 241] Shakespeare, and Milton. We have our distinctive mark; the one indicated: the mastery over the material world. In the intellectual order, if we look for one, we must set it in the daily newspaper and the novel. These are the peculiar intellectual development of the XIXth century. Against the names of Homer, Plato, Æschylus, Virgil, Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, we pit those of Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Eugene Sue, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Dumas, Bulwer, Wilkie Collins, Miss Braddon, and her kin.

Surely this is rank heresy. Is not this the age of the rationalists, the free-thinkers, “the swallowers of formula,” of Hegel, Cousin, Comte, Mill, Herbert Spencer, Huxley, Thomas Carlyle? All these are nothing to the purpose. Thinkers, dreamers, idealists, doubters, belong to all ages. The novelists belong to ours alone, as surely as do the steamboat, the railway, the electric telegraph, the daily press, the penny post.

In saying this, we are not blind to the fact that novels and romances were written long before our century dawned. Cervantes and Le Sage are old enough; the Romaunts are older still. De Foe, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Richardson, are names of a bygone century. But novelism, to use the word in a new sense, considered as a science—for such it has practically become—as the most popular branch of literature known in these days, with men and women of genius devoted to its pursuit, with an ever-increasing progeny spreading and growing, and stifling each other out of life, is an intellectual phase proper of to-day.

Philosophic historians trace the decline of peoples and periods in the decline of their literature; in its tone, its style, its subjects, and manner of treatment. If this test be applied to us, what a show should we make! But happily the test, though in the main a true one, is not an infallible one. The facility opened up by the invention of printing for writers of every shade of opinion to express their thoughts upon any given subject at any length and in any quantity, provided only they pay the printer, must weaken to some extent the theory that writers are the exact reflex of the times and peoples for and among whom they write. Still there rests the significant fact that to-day the novel, and particularly the worst form of it, is the book of the period; the most popular, widely read, best paid class of literature that we possess—a fact which tells its own tale of our intellectual and moral advance.

The ancients seem not to have conceived such a thing. And, despite the danger of such an admission in the face of what the novel has come to be among ourselves, we can only regret its loss among them. Had the Greeks and Romans caught the idea, and turned their brilliant, clear-sighted, manly, and truth-loving intellects to the portrayal of everyday life; to the picture of how the world wagged behind the scenes long ago, what a flood of light would have been let in on their history, its meaning, its philosophy, so as to render almost superfluous the works of such men as Niebuhr, Gibbon, Grote. We should have had plenty of evil undoubtedly, plenty to sicken us; but, after all, would the foulness of the pagans have been much worse than the spicy dishes cooked and served up to us every day by our own novelists; by gray-haired men; by ladies, at whose age we will not venture to guess; by smart young girls who have just bounced out of their teens? The glimpse we have had of Socrates' [pg 242] spouse makes us wish for a closer acquaintance with that dame. We are anxious to know how she received the news of his draught of hemlock, for she evidently entertained the utmost contempt for all his doctrine and philosophy, and must have been rather surprised at the state bothering itself so much about her husband. What an irreparable loss we have sustained in Diogenes, his sayings and doings, his snarls and life in that tub of his! What living pictures would have been left us of the life in the groves, the disputations, the clash of intellect with intellect where all was intellect; the great games, who betted, who lost, who won, who contended; of the mysteries and the sacrifices; of Greece at the invasions; of the party strifes; how Alcibiades pranked and ruled in turn; how Balbus built that famous wall of his that he is always building in the Delectus; how Agricola ploughed his field; how the Symposia passed off with Cicero and his friends; how Cæsar spent his youth, and how the conspiracy worked that destroyed him; what sort of companions brought Catiline's conspiracy about; the effect of the quousque tandem speech related by an eye-witness; the coming of the great Apostles; the dawn of Christianity; how the gay Greeks listened to that first strange sermon given from the altar to the Unknown God.

These things have been told us in a way. We can pick and sort them out of the brilliant works of the writers of the time. But had they been told us by a Greek or Roman novelist, a Thackeray, Dickens, or Bulwer, with the actors set living and real and palpable on the scenes, speaking the language, using all the little peculiarities, of everyday life, with all their natural surroundings and coincidents, what a lost world would have been opened up to us!

Abandoning, however, such vain and useless regrets, let us turn to the immediate subject of our own article. The title, Novel, we here use in the popular signification of the word, as comprising all works of fiction, distinct from those that are purely satirical, and history as written by such men as Mr. James Anthony Froude and Mr. John S. C. Abbott. Novelists, we know, are apt to be nice on the question of titles. No lady of third-rate society, who with time on her hands to do good devoted it to the study of the court balls and the pages of Debrett, was ever more so. Here is your romance, which looks down upon your mere story; your novelette which shrinks with awe from your psychological romance; your story of real life, a republican sort of fellow often, who hustles and bustles and shoulders them all and stands on his own legs; and a variety of others as numerous as they are, to the public at large—which is, as it should be, a poor respecter of titles—unnecessary. We purpose, in the name of the public, dealing very summarily with these titled folk, throwing them, high and low, in the same category, and designating one and all as novels pure and simple, with the single distinction, which shall appear in due time, of the sensational novel.

As we have arrived at this point, it may not be amiss to ask, What purpose do novels serve; with what object are they written?

A hard question truly. We reply to the second part of the query first. It may not be unnatural, nor dealing unfairly with their authors, to suppose that novels are written, in the first place, with the very laudable desire of earning one's bread: so that “the root of all evil” lies at the bottom of the “psychological romance,” [pg 243] as of far humbler things in this world. As to what purpose, earthly or unearthly, they serve, the answer to that depends, first of all, on the author's secondary motive in writing them; secondly, on the effect they produce on the reader—which are two very different things. We have not the slightest doubt that the French novelists, as popularly known, entertained the very loftiest ideas with regard to morality, Christianity, the laws of God and man, the conventional relations between husband and wife, and so on, before ushering into the world the representatives of their—to put it mildly—somewhat peculiar views on these questions. Well, if the world read them wrongly, mistook faith for infidelity, a deep lesson in purity for adultery, loyalty and obedience to the sovereign for rank outspoken disturbance and rebellion, who was to blame? The world was simply stupid. M. Dumas fils, for instance, has lately been good enough to enlighten us with his ideas on the vexed questions of matrimony and women in general. M. Dumas fils is undoubtedly an excellent guide on such subjects. He is an advanced man, a man of the age, of society, of the world. His testimonies on such subjects ought, therefore, to be of value. He has disposed of the whole question in, for a Dumas, a few words—a single volume. The moral of his doctrine comes to this: if your wife is faithless, kill her. We have not yet heard of any practical results arising from this new gospel, as preached by M. Dumas fils; from which, we have no doubt, he will draw the very agreeable inference that his remedy for the regeneration of society, and the nice adjustment of the marriage-knot once for all, was altogether unnecessary. If his doctrine should spread to any alarming extent, no doubt M. Dumas fils will be satisfied that at last the world is beginning a new era of advancement, that there is still hope for it; and he will hold himself answerable for all the consequences. By the bye, we believe he has omitted one little thing: the course to be adopted by the wife in the event of the husband's infidelity. But probably such a high-minded, virtuous man as M. Dumas never contemplated the possibility of such a contingency arising.

Mr. Collins, Mr. Reade, Miss Braddon, and the rest hold, doubtless, the same ideas with regard to the relative value of their productions. Whether their praiseworthy efforts have been duly appreciated; whether they have ever made man, woman, or child a whit better or sounder by the perusal of any of their works, we do not know. We are inclined to think not. If any reader would kindly come forward and show that we are wrong in this from his or her own experience, we shall only be too happy to stand corrected. At all events, the advantage derived must be in very small proportion to the quantity of literary medicine and advice administered by those social physicians to the craving multitude.

Laying aside, then, the invariably pure and lofty motives of the authors; laying aside the cloak which novels serve for at times, as in the hands of a Disraeli, to attack a policy or a system; and taking them as they affect ourselves, the readers, one may safely say that they serve mainly to amuse; to fill up those spare moments that nothing else can fill up. They constitute the play-ground of literature—a recreation and relief for the mind. We gulp them down as we are whirled along in the railway train. We take them with us on long voyages, as the Scotch patient [pg 244] took his weekly sermon at the kirk, as an opiate—thus fulfilling to the letter the traditional notion of the “Sabbath” being a day of rest. When the brain is heavy and the body worn, when to talk is labor and to think is pain, then we can seize the novel, loll on the sofa, or recline under the leafy shade by the brink of the musical river, and float away, half asleep, half awake, into dreamland. In a moment a new world, as real and living to the mind's eye as that in which we move, is conjured up before us. We are on intimate terms with a villain whose dagger is as air-drawn as Macbeth's. We can commit cold-blooded murders that will never bring us to the dock; or shocking improprieties that even the far-reaching nose of Mrs. Grundy will fail to catch scent of. Or we go over “the old, old story,” and are bumped, jerked, and jolted along the delicious course that never will run smooth; mapping it out if we have not yet had the fortune (or misfortune) to traverse it; filling it in with many a well-known form, if we have. And if the never-running-smooth theory be true of love, this much we ungrudgingly grant the novelists—they certainly hold to their tether. The labyrinth of Dædalus was nothing to it; the twistings, the windings, the sudden and unexpected meetings, the separations, the jiltings, the halts by the way, the joy, the sorrow, the ecstasy, the despair, the losings, the seekings, the findings, the torturing uncertainty, the wanderings through hopeless mazes, to end, as we knew at the outset it would and must end, according to “the eternal fitness of things,” in some man marrying some woman—the most extraordinary phenomenon that the world ever witnessed!

The novel invites us, as the noonday devil is supposed to do, at dangerous moments—those moments that come to all of us when matter holds the mastery over mind. Place in the hands of the reader at such a time a book which, while it interests, while it soothes, lulls, and gently enwraps in its kindly meshes the abstracted brain, never palls; containing at least what is harmless; and good, not very great certainly, but at least of a kind, is effected.

But let the novel be like the favorites of its class, a thing to fire the imagination with impure thoughts clothed in the thinnest veil of mock morality, at the very moment when the imagination of the reader is ready to run riot; and evil, great, sometimes irreparable, is produced.

“All the wrong that I have ever done or sung has come from that confounded book of yours,” writes Byron to Moore in a moment of bitterness. If the accusation be well founded, what an intellectual wreck has Moore to answer for; what a multitude of lesser disasters following in the train of a great genius, so early led astray!

The novelist beats every other writer from the field. We all read him, from the crop-haired schoolboy to the octogenarian who has quite grown through his hair; from the nearest approach to Mr. Darwin's ideal man to the philosopher “who would circumvent God”; from the artless maiden who fondly dotes over those wicked but excessively handsome villains, those athletic but ridiculously stupid lovers, those consumptive heroines with the luminous eyes and rippling glories of golden hair; those lady poisoners with the floating locks and sea-green orbs—to the dyspeptic lady who makes novel-reading a science, who dawdles out her languid existence in elegant nothingness, who looks to the production of a new story as men look [pg 245] to a change in the constitution, or as astronomers lately looked to the comet that would not come; who is, in a word, utterly useless for all the purposes of life, of wifehood, of womanhood—novel-struck, novel-bred, only fit to “resolve and thaw into a dew” of weak sentimentality and essence of inanity. From this category of readers we must not omit the typical old maid, who is continually telling us that she renounced such things as love and other rubbish long ago; yet daily treats herself to her spruce, strong, highly flavored dish of the purest, spiciest scandal, and takes her diurnal dose of immorality as regularly as her “drops” or her tea.

All the world lies open to the novelist. From no place is he excluded, save from a few high and dry quarterlies; and even they are stirred from their abstract regions into sledgehammer activity or solemn admiration by him from time to time. Of monthlies, fortnightlies, weeklies, dailies, he forms the chief ingredient. Even editors of metaphysical fortnightlies find they must flavor their own romance with a spice, of the more regular and orthodox in order to make it “go down with the public.”

What a field, then, is the novelist's!—what ground for a high, pureminded man or woman to sow seeds in that may sprout, and spread, and fill the world with truth, with purity, with noble aspirations, with right teachings set in the goodliest garb! The youth of the generations is their own.

Who has forgotten those earlier days when we stood, fair-haired, open-hearted children, on the threshold of life, steeped in the morning sun of a future that looked all golden? A warm mist hung about us, shrouding all in beautiful, mystical dimness. There was no storm, no darkness, no night. Whisperings of soft voices stole out of the magic mist, and called us on to do great things; to rift the mist and open up the glorious world of God, as we saw it in our imaginings. The morning of life, like the morning of the world, is all Eden. We walk with God, for we are innocent. But the doom is on us; we must pluck the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The moment we taste of it, the golden dream is no more; the mist is reft asunder; and slowly the world opens on our saddened eyes in all its hard reality, to be subjected by the labor of our hands and the sweat of our brow. As we merge from that innocence, so we go on. Some great event may change us; may make this one a saint, that a fiend. But, as a rule, the sapling grows into the tree, weakly or strong, straight and tall and looking heavenwards, or stunted, useless, and unsightly as it grew from the grafting.

The grafting is the mother's voice, the father's example, the companions around us, the guidance of our thoughts. And the great mass of our thoughts, at a time when we are all imagination, springs from the books we read. Here steps in the crying need of a series of story-books for Catholic children; for all children up to the age when study becomes a more serious work.

One other glance back at the days of our childhood, and the manner in which they were spent; for it is not the least important part of our subject. What a round of acquaintance we had, necessitating a corresponding round of visits! One day we dropped in on our best of friends, Robinson Crusoe, on that lonely island of his, wishing that all the world were islands and we were all Crusoes. All we wanted to live happily was a boat, six or seven guns and pistols, a goat-skin cap, a parrot, a Man [pg 246] Friday, an umbrella, and an occasional savage to kill. After taking a sail with him in his boat, helping him to build his castle, tending the goats, running down to see if we could find that second footprint on the sand, giving Friday a lesson in English, we bade him good-bye with the promise of calling again soon, and hurried off on that expedition to the other end of the world with our old acquaintance Captain Marryat, to search for our father, play our practical jokes, and fight our triangular duels. Then we had to hunt up that Indian trail for Cooper, and no redskin ever followed the track half so keenly as we, marking the way, notching the giant trunks with our six-bladed penknife, shooting the buffalo with our pop-guns, sleeping round the campfires in those limitless prairies and thickest jungles of our imagination. Ha! by'r Lady! Here we are at the gentle trial of spears at Ashby de la Zouch. How brave it was! The glinting of the lances, and the clash of steel on helm and hauberk; the gay plumes shorn and floating on the wind like thistledown. And out we rushed, and called the friend of our bosom a caitiff knight and a false knave, and plighted our troth to that imprisoned maiden—no matter who, and no matter where—to do her right, and do our devoir as leal and belted knight. That caitiff deals in leather now, and does a thriving business; his knightly limbs are cased in the best of cloth, cut by the cleverest of artists; his knightly stomach is naught the worse for wear, but quite beyond the girth of steel armor; and he has a son who, at this moment, is assisting at the joust as we did, spurring into the mêlée and bearing all down before us, to spur out again victor, and meet Charlie O'Malley waiting for us outside; to ride with him for dear life into to-day. What a race it is; how the world spins past us; how our heart throbs, and our eyes grow dim, and our hopes sink as we fall and dislocate our shoulder at that last fence. By heaven! up again—on, and in a winner! And we sink to the ground with the shouts of thousands ringing in our ears, to wake in a darkened chamber with low voices breaking on us—the voices of our dear Irish girls, who make “smithereens” of our hearts only to heal them the next minute, and sit there wooing us back into life and love.

Such was the favorite mental food of our earlier days, our literary candy. If the reading of youth were restricted to authors such as these, on the whole we might consider them in safe hands. But books multiply and cheapen day by day, and as usual “the cheap and nasty” carries everything before it. The favorite stories of the mass of boys that we see consist of what is known as the Dime Novel and those blood-and-thunder weeklies with the terrific titles and startling pictures. By some strange freak of nature, boys are fond of blood; the warlike element prevails; the peaceful is nowhere. We feel certain that, if Mr. Barnum possessed a real live murderer among his collection of curiosities—though we fear he could scarcely ticket such an animal “a curiosity” in these days—and caged him up among the other wild beasts, he would prove a greater attraction to the juvenile visitor than anything else in the famous exhibition. It were easy enough to satisfy this morbid craving for muscular Christianity in a safe and sound manner, if our writers of fiction took up systematically the incidents of history; the great wars; the crusades, the parts played by great Christian heroes, by [pg 247] the saints of God; the scenes of martyrdom, the labors of the missionaries, and a thousand other subjects as entertaining as they are instructive and strictly true. We know that there are many such; but we want to be overloaded with them, as we are with those others to which we referred. We can scarcely at the moment call to mind one Catholic story to compete at all with a crowd of children's books written by Protestants. The production of children's stories has grown into a science among them. We frequently see pages of stately reviews and the columns of the London Times devoted to as critical an examination of this class of books as to the works of the greatest writers. They recognize the necessity and the advantage of giving their children something to save them from the evil effects that must ensue from a continual history of daring and impossible feats by young burglars, detectives, spies, and the like. The best writers of this kind are, as they should be, women, who know best how to interest children, who watch them with an eye to their every want, that a man cannot attain. Here, then, is a field for Catholic ladies—a field wide open, which cries to be filled up.

But our article deals not alone with children and children's books. We purpose looking higher and looking deeper, at the mental recreation of the day, of the age; at the literature that loads our tables, our shelves, our public libraries, our bookstalls: the book “of the period”—the sensational novel.

What is a sensational novel? Who has defined it? Who dare define it? It is a pity the author of Rasselas had not some faint conception of it. The idea of calling Rasselas a novel in these days! We might imagine him to have dealt with it somewhat in the following style:

Sensational Novel: A complexity of improbabilities woven around a crowd of nonentities, interspersed with fashionable filth, and relieved by sleek-coated beastliness; meaning nothing, and good for less.

What is this word that possesses us! Sensation!—as though we had not enough of it. The age is so dreadfully prosaic, so workaday, so dull. We must run off the track, out of the common groove, or we are ill at ease. Where is the sensation in steam and electricity? We are whirled through a continent in a week: but that is a thing done every day. It almost equals the mantle of the genii in the Arabian Nights; we had only to step upon it, and find ourselves at whatever point of the compass we wished. We cross thousands of miles of ocean in a similar period, mastering the elements with a clockwork regularity, fair weather or foul. We knit sea to sea. We rise from foe-encircled cities, and sail safe away into the air. The whisper of what has been done in one quarter of the world has not had time to pass abroad before it is discussed in the others. We have linked the disjointed world by an electric flame that flashes knowledge throughout its circle instantaneously. We build up vast empires and topple down thrones every day, as though they were ninepins, and yet we want sensation! We sigh for the cap and bells; the jousts and games and junketings of old. Even the feast of horrors, crimes, and incidents, the births, deaths, and marriages, and the scandals of the “fashionable world,” served up to us at breakfast daily, with all the inventive genius of the newspaper correspondent, pall upon our surfeited appetites. “We have supped full of horrors. Time [pg 248] was when our fell of hair would have uplifted to hear a night-shriek. But now, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to us all the uses of this world of ours. Life is as dreary as a twice-told tale.” We are not satisfied; we feel a craving after something. Our want, our craving, springs not from the desire for a higher spirit in it all, not from an absence of faith and noble purpose, of something greater than utility, not from a horror of a daily widening infidelity and impurity that mocks the pagan; but simply and purely from a lack of sensation! In the face of the dull routine of this age of marvels that old Friar Bacon dimly saw in his dreams, and was deemed a madman for his foresight; in the face of wars like our own rebellion and the devastation of France; in the midst of fallen thrones and falling peoples—we ask for sensation! as the philosopher, though perhaps with more reason, took a lantern to look for a man. We find it not in these things; we pass them by, and bury ourselves in the pages of Wilkie Collins, Miss Braddon, and their kind. They are the wonder-workers of the age.

Here we find what we are seeking; here is a response to our ravenous craving, in those delicious, torturing plots that take our breath away. Here we sit hob and nob with what the fourth-rate newspaper is fond of calling “the scions of nobility.” We get an animated description and category of their articles of clothing, from their boots and who made them, to their linen and where it was bought. What a pleasure it is to know a count and a lord, and a lady and a duchess; to know how they eat and drink, and the chronicle of all the fearful scandal that goes on in what the newspaper man again knows as “certain circles”! What peeps we have into the green-room! Pages are devoted to the eyes of an opera-singer, the ankles of a danseuse, the charming slang of an actress. The scene is varied by dips into the purlieus of society; into the bagnio and the gin-mill; the prize-ring and the barracks; the dancing saloon and the gaming-table; the betting ring; into every place, every person, everything the lowest, the meanest, the worst.

Is this exaggeration? Is it a false, outrageous libel on this age, so full of great things, and still greater capabilities? Is it particularly false of ourselves, the simple-hearted, simple-mannered republicans, who have set our faces as sternly against the ungodly and the ways of sin as our old crop-haired, steeple-crowned Puritans professed to do? We shall only be too happy if somebody convinces us that such is the fact. In the meanwhile; incidentally to our purpose appeared a few statistics the other day from public libraries, bearing on this very question, showing that in libraries, which, as a rule, a class of intelligent and sensible readers are supposed to frequent, the books most in demand were of the style we deplore, and complaints were laid at their doors because they failed adequately to supply this demand.

There must be something very delicious in vice. Nothing else will satisfy us. The novelists have sounded the depths of depravity; and in their efforts to find a lower depth still, are driven to walking the hospitals, diving into blue-books, frequenting the asylums for the diseased, the depraved, the insane. The repertory of evil seems almost used up. They have so beaten the drawing-room carpet, so sifted and shaken out for the public gaze the smallest speck of fashionable filth that the most delicately organized imagination [pg 249] of the refined lady could discern, that there is nothing left on it. Titles even are growing common, and we want some new type of a coroneted brow to bind our scandal on. Dickens and Collins and Yates have overrun us with burglars and detectives. They did good service in their day; but even they are growing unromantic. The Krupp, the mitrailleuse, the needle-gun, have killed off the slashing cavalry heroes, who rode at everything, neck or nothing, in perfect safety, and were as irresistible in love as in war. We must abandon these higher regions with a sigh, and go down to the dirtiest columns of the dirtiest newspapers in our efforts to find “something rich and strange.” And to this men and women of “genius,” as it is called, bend their every effort. The gifts that God has given them to ennoble man they devote to stirring the puddle of filth which they take as the mirror of human nature, and, holding before the admiring gaze of humanity whatever they have fished up, say—Behold yourselves!

Are these the lessons society must look for in its gifted children? Is the great book of nature narrowed down to these limits? Is there nothing in human life, human thought, human activity, more worthy our attention, more deeply interesting to man, than the chronicle of his vices? Is the attractive in human nature confined to third or fourth hand glimpses of “the scions of nobility,” the bywords of the barracks, the slang of the gutter, the echoes of the footlights? Is vice alone captivating, and morality such an everyday, humdrum affair that we are sick of excess of it? Is love the thing they present to us?—love, the great passion, the pure divine flame that God has set in our hearts to link together and perpetuate the generations, and finally lead us up to him? Is this maudlin rubbish that the writers of the day surfeit us with, love?—this weak, puny, consumptive thing; inane, jejune, sickly, fleshly, sensual, impure, inhuman? Love is a divine-inspired passion of the soul, planted there by God, to grow and flourish in its great, pure, single strength. They have cut it, and hacked and torn it to shreds, and left nothing of divinity in it. They set it in the flesh, and convert a heaven-born gift into the lowest of animal passions.

It requires no very powerful stretch of the imagination to draw from the foul pens of these writers the germ of the question which to-day threaten to turn the world topsy-turvy—the so-called theory of Woman's Rights—which has for champions philosophers of the stamp of Stuart Mill and Professor Fawcett, and for first-born, Free Love.

We will suppose Mr. Stanley, of the New York Herald, to have brought back with him a native of the countries he visited in his marvellously successful search for Dr. Livingstone. The native has learned the English language on his journey. He is suddenly thrown among a people whom he can only look upon as gods, as the Indians first looked upon the Spaniards. He is surrounded by the results of all the ages. He wishes to learn something about these gods: how they live and move and have their being. A novel “of the period”—any one by any of the thousand authors of the species—is put into his hands as the faithful reflex of this society. What can we imagine would be his feelings at the end of its perusal? A comparison rather in favor of his own countrymen would be the most natural inference.

But it may be objected that we are pessimists. We attack a class [pg 250] whom no decent person would defend. There are more schools of novelists than the sensational school. There are Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer. Are these all that we would wish, or do they also fall under our sweeping condemnation?

As for Scott, we are still proud to acknowledge him by his old title—“The Wizard of the North.” He was a man who, taking into account the times in which he lived, the prejudices still rife, the people for whom he wrote, the purpose of his writings, turned every faculty of his marvellously gifted, richly stored mind to its best account. Even Livy's “pictured page” almost dims in our eyes before the range and variety of his. His works are the illumination of history; his characters almost as true, as rounded, as full as Shakespeare's, and partaking of the great master's “infinite variety.” His plots are deeply interesting, his fidelity to nature in character and scene sustained and equal, whether the subject be Queen Bess or Queen Mary of Scotland, Louis XI. or King Jamie, a moss-trooper or a crusader, a free-lance or a pirate, a bailie or a Poundtext; whether the scene lie in Palestine or in the Trosachs, in mediæval France or mediæval England, in the camp or the court, the prisons of Edinburgh or the purlieus of Alsatia. He has laughed at us Catholics good-naturedly sometimes, but despite that, his novels did us a vast service at a time when our road was very dark, and we were looked upon at best as something utterly inhuman—something, in fact, like what the sailor conceived who, when stranded somewhere with his mess-mate in the neighborhood of the North Pole, beheld for the first time a white bear squatted on its haunches before them, and taking a contented survey.

“What's that 'ere beggar, Jack?”

“Oh!” said the other, taking a solemn glance at the animal, between the whiffs of his pipe, “I can't say exactly, but I expect it's one o' them there what they call Roman Cawtholics too.”

Scott first made us known to the mass of English readers in a fair way. The barriers of anti-Catholic prejudice, centuries old, which had resisted stoutly and stubbornly every effort which reason, right, and common humanity made against it, crumbled at once beneath the fairy wand of the magician, and English Protestants came to know something of us and recognize us, though still in a cautious manner, as fellow-men.

From Scott all readers may undoubtedly derive much good. And now we turn to the others, the leaders of modern fiction: the standard, though, as we showed, not the most widely read authors of the day.

They are Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer; and though the men themselves, so far as their lives are known to us, had little or no faith in any particular church or any particular creed, and must therefore be wanting in a firm, steadfast groundwork, absolutely necessary to impart a pure, high-minded spirit to their writings, we lay this aside, and look at them only through their works. In Thackeray and Bulwer we have two eminently clever, highly cultivated men—writers who cannot fail to grace everything that they touch, who cannot fail to interest deeply and always. They were men of much learning, of great insight into character, whose mode of life and circle of acquaintances threw them into the heart of the world, their world, and gave them every facility of knowing it thoroughly. They came and saw. And what is the result of their investigation? They found it all a great sham. The [pg 251] genius of both consists in thoroughly exposing this great sham, in tearing off the gilded mask, and showing the hollow, empty, grim death's-head beneath it; in leaving not a rag to cover its nakedness. After reading Thackeray, there springs up in us an utter contempt for ourselves and for the world in general. All human nature is false, rotten, and utterly worthless. There is no religion in it, no faith, and as a consequence no honesty and no law save the law of expediency. If there are any characters to admire at all, they are certainly not his good men; for they, and those of Dickens also—Tom Pinch, for instance—are the most insipid numskulls that ever crossed our vision; the most wretched caricatures of goodness that could possibly be conceived. Very truly might he say that, “when he started a story, he was very dubious as to the morality of his characters.” We respect his good men infinitely less than his rogues. Among them he is at home: in his Lord Steynes, his Becky Sharpes, his drunken parsons, his wicked gray-hairs, his asses or black-legs among the young, his solemn humbugs, his tuft-hunters, his silly, useless, vain, untruthful women, his worldly mammas who hold up their charming daughters at auction; those charming daughters who submit to it with such good grace, who simper so chittishly under their pink bonnets and look for soft places on the sofa to faint; his designing and unprincipled adventuresses, to whom the world is as a market, a betting ring, or a faro-table, and the thing to be sold, the stake to be played for, is the virtue they never possessed. Such is Thackeray's world; and he has done well to show it up so openly and unsparingly in all its nakedness. But is it altogether a true portrait; could he do no more than this? Is this the true world, after all—so utterly depraved and given over to evil? Are there no such things as truth, honesty, morality, religion, among us? Are there no men and women, no bodies, endowed with sense enough, power enough, and wit enough to give the lie to this, and bring this false world with shame to their feet? If there be, it is not to be found in the pages of Thackeray.

In Bulwer, it is the same story told in Bulwer's way, with less of heart and more of licentiousness. Thackeray was, we believe, a virtuous man, as the phrase goes; that is, he was contented with one wife, paid his bills, kept his word, and very rarely woke with a headache. But Bulwer rather glories, or was wont to do, in the opposite character. He used to be fond of telling us that he knew the world; had mixed in, shared, felt its vices and its follies. He comes out of this world of his, sits down, and tells us all about it; what sort of men and women he found in it; what motives actuate them; what they live for, what code of morality they follow. Taken as a whole, their code of morality is fashion; their temple is the world; their religion, worldliness; their god, themselves. Crime is only crime in the humble; in the wealthy it is elevated into vice. Such is the doctrine of the Bulwer world; the doctrine that our children imbibe unconsciously, while only diverted momentarily by the interest of the story. So far, then, notwithstanding grace of style, elegance of diction, happiness of conception—all which may be found in a hundred writers infinitely superior, essayists and historians—we have nothing but a very doubtful negative gain.

And Dickens—who has made us weep over fireside virtues, the hardness and quiet nobleness of humble [pg 252] struggle, and the greatness of spirit that beats as strong in the cottage as on the throne—must we cast him into the same category? Hard as it is to say, we find him wanting, though in a less degree than the two above-mentioned. He has fought sham, and fought it, as few others have done, successfully. He did not take up the whole world and fight it as one gigantic falsehood. This is useless. The world is large enough and strong enough to withstand the mightiest single-handed and hold its own. It will not be put down in this way, and it only laughs at the tooting tin whistles that are continually blowing such shrill but tiny blasts of regeneration at it, till they crack and are silenced for ever. Dickens fought it as the first Napoleon fought the combinations arrayed against him; he cut them off in detachments. So with the world; you must take it by pieces. Show it one sham, and all the other shams will cry shame. The silks, and the satins, and the perfumed licentiousness of the drawing-room, Dickens left to other hands. But he opened up to the eyes of these fine folk, who sinned so elegantly in their carriages and palaces, a black, yawning, startling gulf right under their feet; with its hot elements seething in corruption and danger beneath them, because they would not look at it; because they would not recognize this other nation, as Disraeli called it in Sybil; because that world was to them as far off and unknown as Timbuctoo. He showed them the thieves' and harlots' dens, and how they were fed; by the innocent and pure, brutalized by the system of the jail, school, and workhouse, presided over by such men as have lately stood unabashed in the broad light of day before us, and openly confessed to cruelties that Squeers would have blushed at; who passed unharmed and triumphant from the court of justice, and found lawyers and excellent “ministers of God's Word” to uphold them, and proclaimed in the press and elsewhere that they were honest, humane men and maligned saints. Dickens showed us what these Squeerses and Stigginses were made of. He showed us what the jails were made of, the asylums, the workhouses, the schools; and undoubtedly aided in effecting many a reform. He warmed our hearts towards each other, and towards the unfortunates to whom all life was a bitter trial from birth to the grave. He undoubtedly did great good; and many a book of his is a never-ending, never-wearying sermon, preached to a broad humanity. As Catholics we owe him a deep debt for never having systematically or seriously abused his talents by abusing us, where abuse is ever welcome and well rewarded. But he has given us so much that we look for more from him; for some great, broad, sound principles to guide us through the hard battle of life; since his problem was life, human nature, its difficulties and its dangers. While confessing our debt to him for what he has done, we find a good deal in Dickens that we do not like. His code of ethics is a very easy one, and a very dangerous one, running into that indifferentism so prevalent and demoralizing to-day. We find, after reading him, that there is a great amount of evil in the world counterbalanced by a tolerably fair amount of good, and that it is useless to hope for anything more. That, so far as religion goes, mankind may be divided into two classes—the humbugs and the humbugged: the humbugs—the Chadbands, the Stigginses—getting decidedly the better of the bargain. [pg 253] That, provided a man is not intolerably bad, he is as good as the generality of his neighbors, and has a fair chance of arriving safe at the end of life's journey, wherever or whatever that end may be, without being extraordinarily particular about it. That drunkenness is not a vice unworthy of man, it is rather an amiable weakness, a good joke, something funny, something to be laughed at; something that you and ourselves might fall into now and again without doing much harm. Nowhere in Dickens, as far as we recollect, does drunkenness appear as what it is, a vice lower than the appetite of the brute. As for our quarrel with him as Americans, though a grievous and a just one, we will let that pass now. He endeavored to atone for it at the end, so let it rest with him in his grave. In considering his works as a whole, his almost unrivalled power of moving us to laughter or to tears, we cannot help contrasting what he has done, great as it is, with what he might have done had he been endowed with a clear religious belief, and not a heart open only to mere human goodness.

To conclude, then: the point of our article is this. The novel is a power among us to-day: a new weapon thrown into the midst of the strife of good and evil, to be taken up by either party. Those who would uproot all morality, all law, all faith, the basis of humanity, have been quick to see its efficacy, seize upon it, and turn it to a terrible account. It is not so much the open direct teachings of heathen, pagan, rationalistic—call it what you will, it means the same in the long run—philosophy that we are to fear. The intellects that breathe in that atmosphere are few and far between. But when this heathenism comes filtered down to us through sources that meet us at every turn, and impregnates and poisons the innocent streams that ought to beautify and fertilize the intellect of the mass—when it comes to us half disguised in the literature that we place in the hands of our sons and daughters, it is time for us to purge this poison out.

Stop novels we cannot. Let preachers thunder as they may, they will be written, and they will be read. It is for us to seize upon that weapon, and turn it to our own purpose. We have already done so to a degree. Our great thinkers, Wiseman, Newman, have recognized the necessity of this, and themselves set us the example. But not to such men as these are we to look for a Catholic school of novelists: their duties are higher, their work more laborious, though not, and we may say it advisedly, from the necessities of the day more important. We want a crowd of such writers as Gerald Griffin, Bernard McCabe, Lady Fullerton, the authoress of The House of Yorke. In France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Spain, we have been more successful. The Countess of Hahn Hahn, Bolanden, Mrs. Craven, Conscience, Manzoni, Fernan Caballero, show us that Catholic writers who give themselves to this necessary and noble work can make the novel their own, and compete successfully even in the matter of sale with the Dumases, the Eugene Sues, George Sands, Wilkie Collinses, Charles Reades, Miss Braddons. Their works are received with heartfelt approval by the critics of the Protestant press. And we cannot refrain from thanking these gentlemen for the very fair, honest and manly, and conscientious use they make of their pens in this particular at least. Critics are heartily weary of the mass of rubbish they are compelled to wade through week after week, month after month. [pg 254] If anything, they are too mild. We lack something of that hearty knock-down criticism which prevailed in the palmy days of the quarterlies; which killed or cured; which lashed Byron into savagery and brought out his true genius; which crushed the weakly and the worthless.

Catholic novelists, and Protestant also, have a noble field before them wherein to sow and reap. It is for them to show that vice and unchastity are not the only subjects which can interest us; that godliness and true love are not such dull, insipid, everyday things; that suffering and self-denial and sacrifice for a noble purpose, the soul-conflict of human passion against the eternal decrees, and its mastery after much struggle and weary strife, are full of the profoundest interest for man; that history is but the chronicle of this conflict, and when rightly read shows it forth in every page; that our souls can be fired, our flagging senses stimulated, our admiration aroused, by the well-told story of the struggle of right when we see a God moving and acting in it all, far more than by the adoration of indecency deified.

Review Of Vaughan's Life Of S. Thomas: Concluded.[114]

In our last number, we endeavored to give our readers some idea of Prior Vaughan's Life of S. Thomas of Aquin. We purposely omitted, however, to say anything of his treatment of the personal history of the saint himself. The name of Thomas of Aquin belongs to church history, to theology and philosophy; but it also belongs to what is known by the somewhat uncouth name of hagiography; and the story of the saint is more engaging to the greater number of readers, than the history of the theologian or the philosopher. We have already hinted that some of Prior Vaughan's best pages are to be found in the narrative of the saint's personal story.

Biography is as old as the days of Confucius, or at least as the times of his early disciples; and whilst its object has been, on the whole, the same in all ages, its forms have undergone infinite variety. Men have written Lives in order to cheat Death of his victims. They have tried to keep heroes alive by embalming them in incorruptible and imperishable speech, that all time might know them, and their influence might reach from age to age. Biography has always had a moral purpose: to make men patriotic, or brave, or virtuous—to make them better in heart, rather than more subtle in intellect. Example being the great motive power in the world, the images of men in books have done much to shape the world's course. But the books that have preserved the memory of heroic men have been of many different sorts. In old times, they used to be books [pg 255] of anecdote—books which were a threaded series of pithy sayings and generous deeds, each with a point of its own, and altogether tending to form the citizen, the soldier, or the virtuous man. And the style of Plutarch and of Diogenes Laertius was continued by Ven. Bede, by William of Malmesbury, by Froissart, and by the innumerable chroniclers of the middle ages. The biographer speaks in his own person now and then, but his words are very brief, and are often not so much an assistance to the tale, as a break in it or a sort of private aside with the reader. The personal features of the hero, his mind or his body, are not made much of by the old biographers. You hear about his height, his complexion, the color of his hair, or the length of his chin; but you are never told when his eye flashes or his lip curls. Dates are not matters of importance. You have his birth and his death, but there is none of that curious comparative chronology which modern readers know of. And as for any sense of the picturesque, any idea of scene-painting or putting in backgrounds, it need not be said that the old biographies are as plain as the background of a Greek theatre. They now and then give particulars of time, place, and circumstance which their modern transcribers seize upon as a miner seizes on the rare and welcome nugget; but these are entirely beyond their own intention. The historical and the moral are the only two elements to be found in lives from Xenophon down to Dr. Johnson. The latter biographer suggests that, in his days, the moralizing element had developed out of the merely moral. But the life of Prior and the life of Alcibiades are not very distantly related. The time was coming when lives began to be picturesque. The growth of the propensity to the picturesque is a curious problem. Why is it that Homer never describes Troy, that Herodotus never gives us a picture of Marathon, that Cæsar has no eye for the Rhine, and that Froissart does not paint St. Denis on the day of the Oriflamme, whilst, on the other hand, Montalembert stops his story to describe the Western Isles, De Broglie lets us see the Council of Nicea as it sat, Stanley consecrates pages to paint Judæa and Carmel, and every writer of a saint's life at the present hour provides for a picture or two in every chapter? Who began this? We do not mean who began the picturesque in literature, for that question, though a curious one is not so difficult to answer; but who began the picturesque in biography? It is Chateaubriand who usually gets the credit of having initiated all the romance and sentimentality that has crept into serious literature during the last half-century. Chateaubriand has only left, if we remember rightly, one attempt at biography, and the Vie de Rancé contains certainly sentiment and romance enough, but it is not graphic in the way that modern biographies are. The author dashes off brilliant sketches of society, he recites imaginary scenes, or rather episodes, in which nature plays her part, he makes incisive remarks, and utters beautiful poetry; but when he comes face to face with De Rancé, the penitent and the monk, his hand seems to falter, and he grows feeble and disappointing, just where a modern writer would have seized the opportunity of powerful painting and strong situation. For ourselves, whatever influence Chateaubriand had—and he had much—in directing men's thoughts to analogies that lie beneath the surface of nature, of history, and of the human heart, we are inclined to attribute [pg 256] the modern craving for the picturesque to the development of a quality in which Chateaubriand did not especially excel; we mean, earnestness and reality. Many causes, and most of all, perhaps, that series of political and religious phenomena which is summed up in the word revolution, have combined, during the present century, to take literature out of the hands of merely professional writers, or to make those only choose it as a profession who have something earnest to say. Style and thought have come to be considered one thing. As De Quincey observes, style is not the mere alien apparelling of a thought, but rather its very incarnation.

It is easy to see how earnestness leads to the picturesque in biography. In proportion as the writer is able to fix his mind upon his hero, in the same proportion he comes to realize him, as the phrase is. Not only are all the facts and circumstances collected with the care of a lawyer getting up a brief, but words and names that look dead and speechless are analyzed as with magnifying power, till they take significance and life. Every name, as Aristotle saw, is itself a picture; but it is a picture that only requires a more powerful imaginative lens to grow greater, fuller, and more living. And therefore the earnest writer, because he looks more intently at his subject, sees more in it to put upon his canvas; and the reader, struck by the significance that he cannot gainsay, and moved by the pictures, as pictures always move the human fancy, is held in bonds by the writer, and remembers long and vividly what impressed his thought so strongly at the first. He is like one who has seen the site of a great battle, and has once for all fixed for himself, as he gazed, the relative positions and movements of the fight; he will not easily forget it. Something must, no doubt, be added to this; something must be allowed to modern culture, to modern appreciation of art as art, to modern love of landscape, and to the general romanesque tendency begun by Chateaubriand. But so far from the tendency to picturesque biography being wholly attributable to sentiment, we hold that it is precisely our modern earnestness that makes us demand to see things nearer and more real. Doubtless the picturesque biographer is exposed to many dangers, and his readers to many trials. He may “realize” what does not exist; he may “analyze” out of his inner consciousness alone; he may usurp what is the privilege of the poet and the romancer, and give names and habitations not only to airy nothings, but, what is much more serious, to unsubstantial mistakes. And therefore we do not wonder that many well-meaning people, with the results of romantic biography or history before their eyes, and youthful remembrances of Lingard and Butler, have come to distrust every account of a personage or of a fact which contains the smallest mixture of imagination.

The length of these prefatory remarks may lead the reader to suppose that Prior Vaughan has written picturesquely and sensationally about S. Thomas of Aquin. Yet this, stated absolutely, would by no means be true. We shall presently give one or two passages, in which a fine imaginative and descriptive power, we think, is displayed. But the book bears no sign of a straining after pictorial effect. Yet its whole idea is pre-eminently picturesque. Prior Vaughan has written with the idea of not merely giving the history of his chosen saint, but of localizing it [pg 257] in time and in space. It is with this view that he enters into descriptions of Aquino, of Monte Cassino, of Paris and its University; it is for this that he brings S. Dominic and S. Francis on the canvas, and sketches the figures of Frederick II., of Abelard, of S. Bernard, of William of Paris. Each of these names has some connection with Thomas of Aquin, and each throws fresh light on the central object, when it is analyzed with care.

Here is the description, taken from the opening pages of the first volume, of the town of Aquino, which was, if not the birthplace of the saint, at least the principal seat of his family:

“The little town of Aquino occupies the centre of a vast and fertile plain, commonly called Campagna Felice, in the ancient Terra di Lavoro. This plain is nearly surrounded by bare and rugged mountains, one of which pushes further than the rest into the plain; and on its spur, which juts boldly out, and which was called significantly Rocca Sicca, was situated the ancient stronghold of the Aquinos. The remnants of this fortress, as seen at this day, seem so bound up with the living rock, that they appear more like the abrupt finish of the mountain than the ruins of a mediæval fortress. Yet they are sufficient to attest the ancient splendor and importance of the place; and the torrent of Melfi, which, tumbling out of the gorges of the Alps, runs round the castellated rock, marks it out as a fit habitation for the chivalrous and adventurous lords of Aquino, Loreto, and Belcastro.”—i. 3, 4.

Prior Vaughan, as a Benedictine, is naturally drawn to dwell upon the fact of S. Thomas having lived as a boy for five or six years in the Abbey of Monte Cassino. It certainly seems true that the child was placed by his parents in the abbey with a view to his continuing there after he came to years of discretion; just as so many children had been from the days of S. Benedict downwards. “To all intents and purposes,” says the author, “S. Thomas of Aquin was a Benedictine monk. Had he continued in the habit till his death—without any further solemnity beyond the offering of his parents—he would have been reckoned as much a Benedictine as S. Gregory, S. Augustine, S. Anselm, or S. Bede” (i. 20). We do not think that this can be denied. It was affirmed on oath, in the process of canonization, by an exceedingly trustworthy witness, that the saint's father “made him a monk” at Monte Cassino. And a monk he was, no doubt, as much as a boy of twelve can be a monk—and the Council of Trent, be it remembered, had not then fixed the age of religious vows at sixteen. But the frightful confusion of the times brought his Benedictine days to a premature close. Monte Cassino was pillaged and nearly destroyed, the community was scattered, and Thomas of Aquin went to Naples to study—and to find the habit of S. Dominic.

The personal character which is drawn in this work is that of a large-minded, serene man, of powerful natural genius and winning character, who steps forth from the ranks of mediæval nobility, and, turning his back on sword and lance, and giving no heed to the tumult of war and rapine, deliberately consecrated himself wholly to God, and, grace being added to natural gifts, illuminates the world as a doctor and as a saint. It would be interesting to dwell, if we had space, upon the circumstances of S. Thomas joining the Order of S. Dominic. The opposition of his family, the utter unscrupulousness with which they carried out their opposition, the quiet yet fervent persistence of the saint—feudal violence, maternal desperation, and ecclesiastical interference—all this makes up a scene of wonderful reality and deep suggestiveness. But [pg 258] we must pass it over. S. Thomas became a Dominican, and we follow him from Naples to Cologne, from Cologne to Paris. We follow the course of his academical life, his writings, his teaching, his promotion to the grade of bachelor, of licentiate, of doctor. The first chapter of the second volume is entitled “S. Thomas made doctor.” It contains a lively picture of the great University of Paris and its life from day to day; and with it, moreover, the author gives an eloquent summary of the character of his hero, part of which we extract, because it is in some sort a key to the whole story of his life.

“A man with the power possessed by the Angelical could afford to be serene and tranquil. He lived, as it were, behind the veil; he saw through, and valued at its intrinsic worth, this earth's stage, and took the measure of all the actors on it. Like Moses, he came down from the mountain, into the turmoil of the chafing world below, and, enlarged by the greatness of the vision in which he habitually lived, it shrank into insignificance before his eye; and those events or influences which excited the minds of others, and disturbed their peace, were looked upon by him somewhat in the same way as we may imagine some majestic, solitary eagle surveys from his high crag, with half-unconscious eye, the world of woods below him. The Angelical himself had drawn his first lessons from a mountain eyrie. His elastic mind, even as a boy, had expanded, as he looked down from the mighty abbey, on teeming plain and rugged mountain, with the far-distant ranges of the snowy Apennines standing up delicate and crisp against the sky. God, who made all this, had drawn him to himself, and the fingers of a heavenly hand, striking on his large, solitary heart, had sealed him imperially, for all his life to come, as the great master of the heavenly science, and as the gentle prince of peace.... Immense weight of character, surpassing grasp of mind, and keenness of logical discernment, added to a sovereign benignity and patience, and to a gentleness and grace which spoke from his eyes and thrilled in the accents of his voice, made men conscious, when in contact with him, that they were in presence of a man of untold gifts, and yet of one so exquisitely noble as never to display them, save for the benefit of others. Men knew that he had the power to crush them; but since he was so great, they knew also that he never would misuse it; they found him ever self-forgetting and self-restrained. A character with such a capability of asserting itself, and yet ever manifesting such gentle self-repression, must have acted with a singular fascination on any generous mind that came into relation with it.... He was a vast system in himself, and appears to have been specially created for achieving such an end. He was one single, simple man—doubtless. But he was a ‘system,’ or the representation of a system—the highest type of what heroism can do in human heart and mind. Christ, in choosing him, had chosen the most majestic of human creations, converting it into a powerful exponent of the light, peace, and splendor which strike out from the cross. He, if any man, had rested on the bosom of his Lord. He, the great Angelical, with the golden sun flashing from his breast, and the fire of heaven scintillating round his massive brow—he, if any man, had broken the bread of the strong, and had refreshed his lips with the blood of the grape, and had been transfigured by the draught. There is a largeness about him which, whilst it expands the heart, seems almost to take away the breath. We look up at him, and say: ‘How great art thou! how gently courteous, and how tenderly true! Sweet was the power of God, and the grace of Christ, which made thee all thou art. O gentle mighty sun, shine on in thy sweet radiance, spread thy pure invigorating rays amidst the deep sad shadows of the earth!’... Such was his character. And, prescinding from his natural gifts, how did he become so mighty? The cause has been touched on and partially developed already. The reader, adequately to realize it, would do well to study and master, with his heart as well as with his head, the monastic theology of S. Victor's—the Benedictine science of the saints. Grasp the spirit of S. Anselm, S. Bernard, and the Victorines, weigh it as a whole, follow its drift, mark its salient points, learn to recognize [pg 259]the aroma of that sweet mystic life of tough yet tender service and self-forgetfulness, and you will have discovered that spring of living waters which ran into the heart and mind of the great Angelical, and lent to all his faculties—aye, and even to his very person and expression—a warmth and glow which seemed to have come direct from heaven. From the rock, which was Christ, flowed straight and swift into the paradise of his soul four crystal waters: Love—fixing the entire being on the sovereign good, and doing all for him alone; Reverence—that is, self-distrust and self-forgetfulness, produced by the vision of God's high majesty awfully gazed on with the eye of faith; Purity—treading all created things, and self first, under the feet, and, with entire freedom of spirit, basking and feeding in the unseen world; Adoration—love, reverence, and purity, combined in one act of supreme worship, as the creature, with all he has and all he is, bends prone to the earth, and with a feeling of dust and ashes whispers to his soul: ‘The Lord he is God, he made us, and not we ourselves!’ ” (ii. 31-48.)

The mind and heart are both fond of dwelling on the heroic; and the heroic is met with at every step in the life of S. Thomas. We are reminded, as we read, of that Achilles on whose prowess hangs the fate of Troy and of the Greeks,

“Full in the midst, high-towering o'er the rest,”

his limbs encased in an armor that is more divine than that which the father of fire forged for the son of Peleus, the gold upon his breast, the sword of the Spirit by his side, the “broad refulgent shield” of heavenly faith upon his arm, and in his hand the great paternal spear that none but he can wield—not a “whole ash” felled upon Pelion by old Chiron; but the seven gifts of the Christian doctorate wielded by the force of seraphic love. His appearance in the lists of argument, in the contest of the schools, in the field of intellectual strife, has all the quelling power that is ascribed to the greatest heroes of the battle-field; and his place in the records of mental and theological history is that of a discoverer, a conqueror, and a king. Here is a scene which is perhaps more or less familiar, but it is a type of many scenes in this wonderful life. It occurred whilst Thomas was under Albertus Magnus, at Cologne:

“Master Albert had selected a very difficult question from the writings of Denis the Areopagite, and had given it to some of his scholars for solution. Whether in joke or in earnest, they passed on the difficulty to Thomas, and begged him to write his opinion upon it. Thomas took the paper to his cell, and, taking his pen, first stated, with great lucidity, all the objections that could be brought against the question; and then gave their solutions. As he was going out of his cell, this paper accidentally fell near the door. One of the brothers passing picked it up, and carried it at once to Master Albert. Albert was excessively astonished at the splendid talent which now, for the first time, by mere accident, he discovered in that big, silent student. He determined to bring out, in the most public manner, abilities which had been for so long a time so modestly concealed. He desired Thomas to defend a thesis before the assembled school, on the following day. The hour arrived. The hall was filled. There sat Master Albert. Doubtless the majority of those who were to witness the display imagined that they were about to assist at an egregious failure. How could that heavy, silent lad—who could not speak a word in private—defend in public school, against the keenest of opponents, the difficult niceties of theology? But they were soon undeceived, for Thomas spoke with such clearness, established his thesis with such remarkable dialectical skill, saw so far into the coming difficulties of the case, and handled the whole subject in so masterly a manner, that Albert himself was constrained to cry aloud, ‘Tu non videris tenere locum respondentis sed determinantis!’ ‘Master,’ replied Thomas with humility, ‘I know not how to treat the question otherwise.’ Albert then thought to puzzle him, and show him that he was still a disciple. So, one after another, he started objections, created a hundred labyrinths, weaving and interweaving all manner of subtle arguments, [pg 260]but in vain. Thomas, with his calm spirit and keen vision, saw through every complication, had the key to every fallacy, the solution for every enigma, and the art to unravel the most tangled skein—till, finally, Albert, no longer able to withhold the expression of his admiration, cried out to his disciples, who were almost stupefied with astonishment: ‘We call this young man a dumb ox, but so loud will be his bellowing in doctrine that it will resound throughout the whole world’ ” (i. 321, 322).

How exactly this prophecy was fulfilled need not be said. S. Thomas was soon employed in speaking to the world what God had given him to say. He spoke in the class-hall and in the church; he wrote for young and for old; and wherever his voice was heard men wondered as at a portent. The students of Paris, the professors of France and of Italy, his fellow-religious, the intimate friend of his privacy, the rough people round his pulpit, the pope himself as he sat and heard him preach, every one said over again the wondering words that Albert the Great had used in the hall at Cologne. And if we had no record of what men thought, we should still be secure in saying that they were astonished; for we are astonished ourselves. Many men who have made a great noise in their lifetime have left posterity to wonder, not at themselves, but at their reputation. But the writer of the Summa must have been great even in his lifetime. That breadth of view, that keenness of analysis, that comprehensive reach of thought, that enormous memory—we can see it for ourselves, and every story of his prowess we can readily credit from what the imperishable record of his written works attests to our own eye. Prior Vaughan relates interesting anecdotes of his power of discussion, and of his influence over the irreverent world of his scholastic compeers, filling up the outlines of the annalist with no greater exercise of imagination than is fairly permitted to the serious biographer.

But the heroic in the life of the Angel of the Schools would not be perfect unless the giant strength had been joined to the gentleness of the servant of Christ. There is nothing, perhaps, that will so strike a reader of this Life as his mild, equal, and gentle spirit. It does not seem that S. Thomas was naturally of a quick and impetuous nature, like S. Ignatius or S. Francis of Sales. From his youth he had been a contemplative in the cloisters of Monte Cassino; when but a child he had charmed his teachers by asking with childish meditative face, “What was God?” His quiet determination had conquered his mother when she opposed him being a Dominican; his calm courage had converted his sisters and shamed his brothers. And in the schools, his silence and his humility, virtues never more difficult to be practised than in the field of intellectual combat, had soon become the marvel of all who knew him. A great natural gift—the gift of a changeless serenity of heart and temper—was perfected in him by grace, until it became heroic. The contest he once had in the Paris schools with Brother John of Pisa, a Franciscan friar who afterwards became Archbishop of Canterbury, is typical of what always happened when the Angelical discussed:

“John of Pisa, though a keen and a learned man, had no chance with the Angelical. It would have been folly for any one, however skilled—yes, for Bonaventure, or Rochelle, or even Albert the Great himself—to attempt to cross rapiers with Br. Thomas. He was to the manner born. Br. John did all that was in him, used his utmost skill—but it was useless: the Angelical simply upset him time after time. The Minorite grew warm; the Angelical, bent simply on [pg 261]the truth, went on completing, with unmoved serenity, the full discomfiture of the poor Franciscan. John of Pisa at length could stand it no longer. In his heat he forgot his middle term and forgot himself, and turned upon the saint with sarcasm and invective. The Angelical in his own gentle, overpowering way, giving not the slightest heed to these impertinences, went on replying to him with inimitable tenderness and patience; and whilst teaching a lesson which, after so many hundred years, men can still learn, drew on himself, unconsciously, the surprise and admiration of that vast assembly. Such was the way in which the Angelical brought the influence of Benedictine quies and benignitas into the boisterous litigations of the Paris schools. And what is more, Frigerio tells us that the saint taught the great lesson of self-control, not only by the undeviating practice of his life, but also by his writings; that he looked upon it as an ‘ignominy’(ignominia) to soil the mouth with angry words; and contended that ‘quarrels,’ immoderate contentions, vain ostentation of knowledge, and the trick of puzzling an adversary with sophistical arguments—such as is often the practice of dialecticians—should be banished from the schools” (ii. 57-59).

The appearance of such a man as S. Thomas, in the midst of the scholastic agitation of the XIIIth century, partakes of that providential character which the eye of faith sees in the lives of all the great saints. We have already, in a former notice, touched upon the marvellous way in which he turned the current of thought against rationalism, heresy, and impiety. But his personal influence was no less than what we may term his official. At the moment when theology was beginning, with philosophy as her handmaid, to enter on that course of development in which system, on the one hand, advanced in equal steps with discovery on the other, it was the will of God that a saint should show the world in his own person a perfect model of the Catholic scholastic theologian. His powers were undeniable, his genius imperial, his rights undoubted; and he used his privileges and his grand position to enforce upon the noisy spirits of the time, and upon all generations of students yet to be, that the true type of theological discussion was “humilis collatio, pacifica disputatio.”

The theologian was to be no proud dogmatist, laying down the law as if he had discovered all truth, but one who, taking the faith for his standing-point, humbly put forth and peacefully discussed the views that he thought to be true. This was his great lesson; he taught it in the tone of his own lectures and discussions, in the turn of his phrase when he wrote, in the meekness of his answers, and in the moderation of his conclusions. And we may thank the Providence that sent S. Thomas for that calm and judicial serenity which has ever been the prevailing character of Catholic theology. The great Dominican school that he founded carried on the traditions of their master; and (to take an example not far from our own days) the weighty and admirably clear pages of a Billuart are not unworthy, in their broad, searching, yet tranquil argument, of the master whom they follow. A troubled reach of time separates Paris in the XIIIth century from Douay in the XVIIth; yet the spirit of S. Thomas had been living over it all. Not only in his own religious family was his influence strong. The Franciscan Order has its own tradition; but it is a tradition that sprung up side by side with the Dominican. It was the seraphic Bonaventure that sat beside Thomas of Aquin in the hall of the University of Paris on the day when each of them received the insignia of the doctorate. They were friends—more than friends, for each knew the other to be a saint. Each heard the [pg 262] other speak, and the spirit of one was the spirit of both. And in spite of divergences and varieties, such as our Lord permits in order to draw unity from diversity or good from evil, the two Orders have taught in harmonious spirit during all the long centuries they have been before the world. S. Thomas, who reverenced S. Bonaventure, has had the reverence of all S. Bonaventure's children; and we have before us as we write the Cursus Theologiæ of a venerable bearded Capuchin, considerably esteemed in the theological classes of the present day, who stops in his enumeration of fathers and of doctors to add his emphatic tribute of veneration to the Angelic Doctor, who, he reminds us, is, with S. Augustine, “præcipuus theologorum omnium temporum magister”—the great master of theologians of all ages. And what we say of the Franciscan Order we may say of that great school which dates its traditions from that Cardinal Toletus who was the pupil of the Dominican Soto. It is not that the Jesuit theologians, even the many-sided Suarez, have looked up to S. Thomas as to their prince and teacher: this they have done; but even if they had left his teaching, or where they have left his teaching, they have followed his spirit. That spirit we might name the spirit of conciliation. We do not mean the spirit of compromise, or of going only half-way in matters of truth. S. Thomas was as downright as Euclid. But what we refer to is that readiness to admit all the good or the true in an opposite view, the shrinking from forcing a vague word upon an adversary, the impartial dissection of words and phrases which issues from the scholastic and Thomistic method of distinction. The distinguo of the tyro or the sophist is a trick that is easily learned and easily laughed at; but we claim for the scholastic method that its distinguo is the touchstone of truth and of falsehood; it requires acuteness and stored-up learning to make it and sustain it; but it requires, above all, that perfect fairness of mind, that judicial impartiality of view, which calms the promptings of ambitious originality; it requires that patience which seeks only the truth and cares nothing for the victory, and that honesty which is afraid of declamation, and sets its matter out in unadorned and colorless simplicity. This is the true scholastic spirit, and it is pre-eminently the spirit of S. Thomas. If we might personify that grand science which has been so high in this world, and seems now to have sunk so low (yet, with the signs around us, we dare hardly say so now), it would be under the figure of him who is its prince and lawgiver.

“See him, then, our great Angelical, as with calm and princely bearing he advances, a mighty-looking man, built on a larger scale than those who stand around him, and takes the seat just vacated by Bonaventure. His portrait as a boy has been sketched already. Now he has grown into the maturity of a man, and his grand physique has expanded into its perfect symmetry and manly strength, manifesting, even in his frame, as Tocco says, that exquisite combination of force with true proportion which gave so majestic a balance to his mind. His countenance is pale with suffering, and his head is bald from intense and sustained mental application. Still, the placid serenity of his broad, lofty brow, the deep gray light in his meditative eyes, his firm, well-chiselled lips, and fully defined jaw, the whole pose of that large, splendid head—combining the manliness of the Roman with the refinement and delicacy of the Greek—impress the imagination with an indescribable sense of giant energy of intellect, of royal gentleness of heart, and untold tenacity of purpose. That sweet face reflects so exquisite a purity, that noble bust is cast in so imperial [pg 263]a mould, that the sculptor or the painter would be struck and arrested by it in a moment; the one would yearn to throw so classical a type into imperishable marble, and the other to transfer so much grandeur of contour, and such delicacy of expression, so harmonious a fusion of spotlessness with majesty, of southern loveliness with intellectual strength, to the enduring canvas” (ii. 108, 109).

The angelic quality of the Angel of the Schools—his calmness and his power over men—was not bought without a price. Like all the saints, he too had to bear the cross, and like all the saints he was not content with suffering the cross, but he sought it and courted it. We cannot quote much more of Prior Vaughan's narrative, or else we would fain draw attention to the account he gives from authentic sources of Thomas' holy distress of mind, and his midnight prayer the night before he received the doctorate. But the following paragraph must be transcribed:

“Let the carnal man, after looking on the sweet Angelical fascinating the crowded schools, take the trouble to follow him, as silently, after the day's work, he retires to his cell, seemingly to rest; let him watch him bent in prayer; see him take from its hiding-place, when all have gone to sleep, that hard iron chain; see him—as he looks up to heaven and humbles himself to earth—without mercy to his flesh, scourge himself with it, striking blow upon blow, lacerating his body through the greater portion of the sleepless night: let the carnal man look upon this touching sight; let him shrink back in horror if he will—still let him look on it, and he will learn how the saints labored to secure a chaste and spotless life, and how a man can so far annihilate self-seeking as to be gentle with all the world, severe with himself alone. If in human life there is anything mysteriously adorable, it is a man of heroic mould and surpassing gifts showing himself great enough to smite his own body, and to humble his entire being in pretence of his Judge” (ii. 60, 61).

S. Thomas died in the prime of life—when scarcely forty-eight years old. He was called away a little before his great work, the Summa, was completed, as if his Master wished to show the lamenting world that his own claims were paramount to every other thing. But it was that divine Master himself who had rendered it necessary to take away his servant when he did; for S. Thomas could write no more. After that vision and ecstasy which rapt his soul in the chapel of S. Nicholas at Naples, he ceased to write, he ceased to dictate; his pen lay idle, and the Summa stood still in the middle of the questions on penance. It was, as he said to his companion Reginald, Non possum! “I cannot! Everything that I have written appears to me as simply rubbish.” From that day of S. Nicholas he lived in a continual trance: he wrote no more. As the new year (1274) came in, he set out, at the pope's call, to attend the general council at Lyons: but he was never to get so far. He had not journeyed beyond Campania—he was still travelling along the shores of that sunny region which had given him birth, when mortal illness arrested him, and he was taken to the Abbey of Fossa Nuova to die.

“The abbot conducts him through the church into the silent cloister. Then the whole past seems to break in upon him like a burst of overflowing sunlight; the calm and quiet abbey, the meditative corridor, the gentle Benedictine monks; he seems as if he were at Cassino once again, amidst the glorious visions of his boyish days—amidst the tender friendships of his early youth, close on the bones of ancient kings, near the solemn tomb of Blessed Benedict, in the hallowed home of great traditions, and at the very shrine of all that is fair and noble in monastic life. He seemed completely overcome by the memories of the past, and, turning to the monks who surrounded him, exclaimed ‘This is the [pg 264]place where I shall find repose!’ and then ecstatically to Reginald in presence of them all: ‘Hæc est requies mea in sæculum sæculi, hic habitabo quoniam elegi eam—This is my rest for ever and ever; here will I dwell, for I have chosen it’ ” (ii. 921).

The whole of this last scene of the great saint's pilgrimage is admirably and most touchingly brought out by the author, and our readers must go to it themselves. As we conclude the story, we are forced to agree with Prior Vaughan when he exclaims, “It is but natural, it is but beautiful, that he who in early boyhood had been stamped with the signet of S. Benedict, should return to S. Benedict to die!”

We are sure that this life of S. Thomas of Aquin will do good. It is a large book, but it deals with a large and a grand life. It is the work of one who evidently has an interest in his subject far beyond that of the mere compiler. The earnestness, the warmth, the very redundancy and fulness of the author's style, leave the impression of one whose heart is strongly impressed by the glorious career which he has been following so minutely, and there is little doubt that his readers will sympathize with him. And there can be just as little doubt of the benefits which a practical study of the life of the great doctor will confer upon students, upon priests, and upon all serious men at the present day. Sanctity taught by example is always an important lesson; but the saintliness of learning and genius is still more important and still more rare. We live in an age when there are numbers of men who are profoundly scientific and splendidly accomplished in the different branches of knowledge which they profess; and there is no one who is more sure of the world's attention and reverence than the man who can show that he knows something which other men do not. The present time, therefore, is one at which we are to look for and to hope for men who in theology and Catholic philosophy shall be as able and as learned as are the leaders of profane science. Hard work and unwearying devotedness are essential to this; and the example of S. Thomas shows us what these things mean. But there is something which is more necessary still; something which is especially necessary in sacred science. “In malevolam animam non intrabit Sapientia, nec habitabit in corpore subdito peccatis.” There is no such thing as the highest wisdom without the highest purity of heart. The perfection of the Christian doctorate is the consequence of the perfect possession and exercise of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost. And the holy fathers who have written on Christian wisdom tell us repeatedly, using almost identical words, that a man might as well try to study the sun with purblind eyes as to be perfect in theology with a heart defiled. There has been no greater example in the range of sanctity of what S. Augustine calls the “mens purgatissima” than that of him who on account of his purity has been called the Angelical. Leaving the world as a child, his heart hardly knew what earthly concupiscence was. With his loins girded by angels' hands, with his body subdued by hard living, with his thought always ranging among high and elevating things, the soul of S. Thomas lived in a region that did not belong to the world. He learnt his wisdom of the crucifix, he found his inspirations at the foot of the altar; and the same lips that dictated the Commentaries on Aristotle were ready to break forth with the Lauda Sion and the Pange Lingua. If he taught in the daytime, he chastised [pg 265] his body during the watches of the night. Born to a gentle life, with powerful friends, with the world and its attractions within his reach, he lived in his narrow cell, cleaving to his desk and to his breviary, walking the streets with a quick step and downcast eye, letting the world go on its way. He wanted only one thing—not as a reward for his labor, because his labor was only a means to a great end—he wanted only that one object which he asked for when the figure spoke to him from the Cross, “Thee, O Lord! and thee alone!”

Prior Vaughan has accomplished a task for which he will receive the thanks of all English-speaking Catholics. His book will be read, and will be treasured; for it is a book with a large purpose, carried out with unwearying labor, presenting the results of wide reading, and offering the student and the general reader a large variety of solid information and of suggestive thought. If the book were less honestly wrought out than it is, we could excuse the author, in consideration of the heart and soul he has thrown into it. S. Thomas of Aquin is evidently a very real, living being with him. His hero is no abstraction of the past, no quintessence of a scholastic that must be looked at as one looks at an Egyptian papyrus in a museum. He is a man to know, not merely to know about; a man who taught in Paris and who reigns in heaven; a man who led an angel's life here below, and who can help us to lead a life more or less angelic from his place above. To have worked with such a spirit is to have worked in the true spirit of the Catholic faith. The saints are our teachers and masters; and, what is more, they are the trumpets that rouse us to battle, the living voices that make our hearts burn to follow them. And therefore a true life of a saint will live, and will do its work. Our wish is that Prior Vaughan's S. Thomas may make its way into the hearts of earnest men, and it is our conviction that it will make its way, and that men will be the better for it.