CATHOLIC LITERATURE IN ENGLAND SINCE THE REFORMATION.
It is not surprising that Catholic literature was at a low ebb for many years after Henry VIII., of evil memory. Deprived of the means of knowledge in their own country under Edward VI., Elizabeth, and James I., Catholics were compelled to seek education abroad in colleges where they forgot their mother-tongue and the writers of their native land. As to their brethren who remained at home, it was dangerous for them even to possess books, and they seldom had time or opportunity to make themselves acquainted with their contents. A prayer-book, black with use and carefully secreted, was all the library of those who were liable at any moment to be ferreted out of vaults and wainscots, and hanged, drawn, and quartered for believing in the Papal supremacy. The Puritan movement in the time of Charles I. and the Commonwealth was highly unfavorable to literature in general; and the Catholics who joined the royal standard were more anxious to wield the sword than the pen. But the fewer the authors who broke the long literary silence of the Catholic body in England, the more their names deserve to be cherished. We will endeavor, therefore, to make a catena auctorum, and to offer a few comments on each link in the chain. Though all of them were Catholics at some period or other of their lives, they were not all persistent in their faith nor exemplary in their practice. It will be understood that they are cited in their literary capacity, and not as saints, martyrs, and confessors in a calendar.
Robert Southwell, however, must head the list, as he was both author and martyr. He published many volumes in prose and verse, though his life was closed prematurely in his thirty-fifth year. Educated at Douay, he labored in England eight years during Elizabeth's reign. He was a member of the Society of Jesus, and he touched the hearts of his suffering brethren by his tender and plaintive verse. S. Peter's Complaint, with Other Poems, appeared in 1593, and Mœoniæ, or Certaine Excellent Poems and Spirituall Hymnes, in 1595, the year in which he was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn, under a false charge of being engaged in a political movement. His real offence was that of the Bishop of Ermeland and the Jesuits of Germany in the present day—his allegiance in spiritual matters to the authority of the Holy See. Robert Southwell's memory is still cherished in England, and it is not long since selections from his poems were read to a crowded audience in Hanover Square Rooms, London, by the Rev. F. Christie, S.J. They do not rise high in poetic merit, but they are full of noble, just, and devout sentiments. "Time Goes by Turns" is found in most collections of British poetry. The following are the last stanzas of his "Conscience":
"No change of fortune's calms
Can cast my comforts down;
When fortune smiles, I smile to think
How quickly she will frown.
"And when in froward mood
She moves an angry foe,
Small gain I find to let her come,
Less loss to let her go."
Religious writings—sermons, meditations, and even works of controversy—had more importance, in a literary point of view, in Queen Elizabeth's reign than they have now. At that time, people read little; books were few and dear. Books of piety cultivated the mind, though used chiefly to edify the heart. They exercised many persons in the art of reading, who, but for that branch of literature, would have read nothing at all. They kept up a habit which was good on secular grounds, apart from the higher spiritual consideration. Looked upon in this light, the tracts and letters of such holy men as Campion, Persons, and Allen (afterwards cardinal) had a twofold value. Edmund Campion was an accomplished scholar. He received his education at S. John's, Oxford, and being courteous and refined, as well as clever, he was universally beloved. After leaving college, he went to Ireland, and wrote a history of that country, which was highly esteemed. Having been reconciled to the church, he repaired to the new college at Douay, that he might there study theology; and after following the usual course, he was admitted into the Society of Jesus, and sent to England to comfort and strengthen his brethren who were contending for the faith. His friendship for Persons, his publication of a work written by that father, entitled Reasons for not Going to Church (that is, to the parish Protestant church), and the seizure of a private press, which a Catholic gentleman had given to the friends, that they might work off edifying books and tracts, led to his apprehension. He was dragged through the streets of London, with a paper fixed on his hat, stigmatizing him as "Campion, the seditious Jesuit" (July, 1581), and being tried for treason, of which he was quite guiltless, he was barbarously executed, after suffering the most horrible tortures. The life of Cardinal Allen, if carefully written, would be an important addition to English Catholic literature, and involve numerous particulars of thrilling interest respecting the political and domestic history of the times. His writings lie in the border-land between theology and politics. His Apology or Defence of the Jesuits and Seminarists was a reply, written in 1582, to the proclamations of the government which denounced the Catholic priests as traitors. Persons engaged in the same controversy, dwelling chiefly on the dogmatic and practical side of the question. All honor to these heroes of the cross, whom literature as well as religion claims as her own!
In placing "Rare Ben Jonson" among Catholic authors, it is not meant to claim him altogether as one of the church's children. In early youth, he bore arms and served a campaign in the Low Countries. His troop being disbanded, he took to the stage; but a hot temper often led him into brawls, and in one of these he had the misfortune to kill a brother actor. Being in prison, he contracted an intimacy with a fellow-prisoner, a Catholic priest, which ended in his conversion. During twelve years he remained a Catholic, and then returned to the Established Church. It was the only pathway to worldly success, and he became a favorite with James I., as Shakespeare had been with Queen Elizabeth. We name them together, for, indeed, they were rivals; yet what a difference between the texture and the productions of their brains! Ben Jonson was made poet-laureate, and wrote comedies and masques without number. Here and there we find in his works noble sentiments worthily expressed, as in that classical drama, Catiline's Conspiracy. We find also rhythmical sweetness, as in the song, "To Celia,"
"Drink to me only with thine eyes,"
and in the "Hymn to the Moon,"
"Queen and huntress, chaste and fair."
Now and then he touches a more sacred chord, and such as might suit a Catholic lyre, as in the following hymn:
"Hear me, O God!
A broken heart
Is my best part.
Use still thy rod,
That I may prove
Therein thy love.
"If thou hadst not
Been stern to me,
But left me free,
I had forgot
Myself and thee;
"For sin's so sweet,
As minds ill bent
Rarely repent,
Until they meet
Their punishment."
The way had been prepared for Ben Jonson's success as a dramatist—not to speak now of Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, and Marlowe—by the miracle plays or mysteries of the middle ages, similar to those which are acted at the present time among the Indians in Mexico, and the famous Ammergau, or Passion Play, in Bavaria. In these plays, The Fall of Man, The Death of Abel, The Flood, Lazarus, Pilate's Wife's Dream, St. Catharine's Wheel, and the like, were brought on the stage with the approbation of the clergy, in order that they might bring home the mysteries of the faith to people's heart and imagination, and supply in some measure the place of books. The miracle plays had been succeeded in time by moral plays, which, from the early part of Henry VI.'s long reign, had represented apologues, not histories, by means of allegorical characters. Vices and Virtues, however, did not stand their ground long at the theatre. They gradually changed into beings less vague and shadowy, who, while they represented vices or virtues in the concrete, had, in addition, the charm of resembling real life.
Richard Crashaw's fame as a poet rests mainly on one line, and that in Latin; nor was the rest of his poetry of sufficient force and merit to enable him always to retain the credit of that single line. It has over and over again been attributed to Dryden and other hands. Yet it is positively his, and a poem in itself. It is to be found in a volume of Latin poems published by Crashaw in the year in which he graduated at Cambridge (1635). The line is a pentameter—on the miracle at Cana of Galilee—and consists of two dactyls, a spondee, and two anapests. It is often quoted inaccurately, but we give it exactly:
Nympha pudica Deum vidit, et erubuit.
"The modest water saw its God, and blushed."
The author's mind was devotional from his earliest years. He had always been hearing about religion; for his father preached at the Temple, and took part largely in the controversies of the day. There was one favorable feature in the religious polemics of that period—both sides professed belief in God and in the Christian religion; now our warfare is with atheists, deists, pantheists, positivists, with whom we have scarcely any common ground. After his election as a Fellow of Peterhouse in 1637—about the time that Hampden, Pym, and Cromwell himself were embarking for New England, and were forcibly detained from sailing—he became noted in the university as a preacher, and passed so much of his time in devotion that the author of the preface to his poems says: "He lodged under Tertullian's roof of angels. There he made his nest more gladly than David's swallow near the house of God. There, like a primitive saint, he offered more prayers in the night than others usually offer in the day. There he penned these poems: Steps for Happy Souls to climb to Heaven by."
In 1644, sorrow came to his calm nest; and as he would not sign the covenant, he was driven from the university he loved and from surroundings increasingly dear. Accomplished in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, and Spanish, skilled in drawing, music, and engraving, he was still more noted for his talent in the higher art of poetry. He belonged to what is called the fantastic school of Cowley, which is full of conceits. But "conceits" are often original and beautiful ideas quaintly expressed. The poetry of conceits was a reflex of the times, and is, with all its faults, far preferable to classic platitudes in flowing verse.
The overthrow of the Church of England by the Commonwealth was to Crashaw a cause of poignant regret. He could no longer bear to look on the towers and spires of venerable churches given over into the hands of bawling, nasal Puritans. He quitted England, and, crossing the Channel, found that, in France, he was a member of no church at all. His own communion was extinct, and he was a stranger to the Catholic Church, before whose altars he now stood as an alien. But he had taken up his residence in France, and it was not long before he decided on embracing the faith which that land prized as its most precious heritage. After the decisive battle of the Civil War had been fought at Naseby, the poet Cowley, who was an ardent royalist, visited Paris, and found Crashaw in great distress. He represented his case to Henrietta Maria, the exiled queen of England, and presented him to her. He received kindness from her majesty, and letters of recommendation to her friends in Italy. Having made his way to Rome, he became secretary to one of the cardinals, and was subsequently appointed canon of the church of Our Lady at Loretto. Here he resided during the remainder of his days, and died "a poet and a saint" (as Cowley calls him) in 1650, the year after the execution of Charles I.
Two years after his death, a volume of his posthumous poems was published; and his memory was honored by Cowley in what Thomas Arnold calls "one of the most loving and beautiful elegies ever written." His Steps to the Temple: Sacred Poems, and other Delights of the Muses, which appeared in 1646, had reached a second edition before his decease, and a third was published in 1670. In 1785, his entire poems were published in London, and included a translation of part of the Sospetto di Herode of Marini. His style resembled that of Herbert, and a few lines breathing a Catholic spirit shall be quoted from his works. It is called A Hymn to the Nativity:
"Gloomy night embraced the place
Where the noble Infant lay:
The babe looked up, and showed his face—
In spite of darkness, it was day.
"We saw thee in thy balmy nest,
Bright dawn of our eternal day.
We saw thine eyes break from the east,
And chase the trembling shades away.
We saw thee, and we blessed the sight:
We saw thee by thine own sweet light.
"She sings thy tears asleep, and dips
Her kisses in thy weeping eye;
She spreads the red leaves of thy lips
That in their buds yet blushing lie.
Yet when young April's husband-showers
Shall bless the faithful Maia's bed,
We'll bring the first-born of her flowers
To kiss thy feet and crown thy head:
To thee, dread Lamb! whose love must keep
The shepherds while they feed their sheep."
Sir William Davenant was another poet-convert to the Catholic Church, and his conversion took place nearly at the same time as Crashaw's. Like that poet, also, he was in the favor of Queen Henrietta Maria during her exile in France. His life was full of adventure. As a child, he was acquainted with Shakespeare, who frequented the Crown Inn in the Corn Market, Oxford, kept by his father. That father rose to be mayor, and William entered at Lincoln College. Leaving Oxford without a degree, he became page to the Duchess of Richmond, and subsequently was attached to the household of the poet, Lord Brooke. Exhibiting a decided talent for dramatic composition, he was employed to write masques for the court of Charles I. These light plays, of which Milton's Comus is the best specimen ever produced, were highly popular, and served for private theatricals in the mansions and castles of lords and princes. William Davenant had fame enough to be celebrated in his time, and to be made poet-laureate when Ben Jonson died; but his writings had not body of thought, original conception, or sweetness of expression enough to preserve them long from oblivion. His ballad, "My Lodging is on the Cold Ground," seems to have had more of the principle of life in it than anything else he wrote. During the Civil War, like many other authors, he flung aside his books, and girded on the sword. He was then known as General Davenant, and he negotiated in the king's name with his majesty's friends in Paris. Twice captured, and having twice escaped to France, he nevertheless returned, took part in the siege of Gloucester, and was knighted by the king for his services on that critical occasion. In 1646, we find him in France, in the service of the exiled Queen of England, attending Mass, and conforming to the discipline of the Catholic Church. Living in the Louvre with Lord Jermyn, he had once more leisure to cultivate his taste for poetry. There he began writing his longest poem, and a very tedious production it is.
But his versatile mind was now occupied by a new scheme. He promoted an emigration of colonists from France to Virginia, and, having embarked for the distant settlement, the ship in which he was sailing fell into the hands of one of Cromwell's cruisers. He was captured and taken to Cowes Castle, and is said to have escaped trial for his life through the kind intercession of his brother poet, Milton. It was not till after two years of imprisonment that he regained his liberty; and when at last he did so, all his efforts were directed to a revival of dramatic performances, which the austere Puritans had entirely suppressed. He succeeded at last in establishing a theatre, and, gaining support by degrees, he ultimately restored the regular drama. With the return of Charles II. his difficulties ended. King and people alike heaped their favors on him. He died at his house, in Lincoln's Inn Fields, in 1668, and was buried with distinction in Westminster Abbey. He was very handsome, of ready wit and a singularly fertile mind; but it is to be supposed that his attachment to the Catholic religion was not by any means a prominent feature in his character and career.
Like several of those already mentioned, John Dryden is but an imperfect link in the chain of English Catholic authors since the Reformation. It was not till a late period of his life that he entered the true church, but he lived long enough to impress on his works a decidedly Catholic stamp. Indeed, The Hind and the Panther, published in 1687, some months after his conversion, was looked upon as a defence of Catholicism. The hind represented the Roman Church, and the panther the Church of England. It was a singular circumstance, to which, so far as we have observed, attention has never been drawn, that three poets-laureate in succession, Ben Jonson, Sir William Davenant, and Dryden, were converts to Catholicity. The life of the last of these poets was too long and too eventful to allow of our recalling even the chief occurrences by which it was marked. Suffice it to say that before he was twenty-eight years old he had passed from Westminster School to Trinity College, Cambridge, and had acted as secretary to his kinsman, Sir Gilbert Pickering, who stood high in the Protector's favor, and went by the name of "Noll's Lord Chamberlain." On the death of Cromwell, Dryden wrote an elegy upon him, which was also a eulogy; and soon after the Restoration, he commenced writing for the stage coarse comedies and stilted tragedies. Married to a daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, he was appointed poet-laureate, with £200 a year. This was in 1670, the tenth year of the reign of his licentious majesty, Charles II.
When that sovereign expired (having been reconciled on his death-bed to the Catholic Church), Dryden eulogized him as he had eulogized Cromwell, and in the same poem turned with alacrity to the praises of James II. Nor was it long before he embraced the religion of the Duke of York. The motives which induced him to take this step have often been made the subject of debate. The authority of Lord Macaulay is constantly adduced in support of Dryden's venality and insincere conversion. But in opposition to this, it must be remembered that Dr. Johnson and Sir Walter Scott arrived at a different conclusion. The latter biographer of Dryden contends that the poet's writings contain internal evidence of his convictions having been in complete accordance with the step he took, and that many external circumstances contributed to make it easy for him to act in the way he thought right. Duty and interest are not always at variance; and if Dryden gained by the change in the first instance, when James II. was on the throne, he lost eventually many temporal advantages. Having refused to take the oaths of allegiance or forsake his religion, he was dismissed, under William III., from his offices of poet-laureate and historiographer; he had the mortification of seeing Shadwell, the dramatist, whom he had often ridiculed, promoted to wear his laurel; and for the rest of his life, he was more or less harassed by the ills of poverty. He educated his children in the faith which he had embraced, and they showed the strongest signs of heartfelt attachment to the person of the Sovereign Pontiff and the church of which he is the head. One of them entered a religious order, another was usher of the palace to Pope Clement XI. In writing to them both in September, 1697, Dryden said: "I flatter not myself with any manner of hopes, but do my duty and suffer for God's sake, being assured beforehand never to be rewarded, even though the times should alter.... Remember me to poor Harry, whose prayers I earnestly desire.... I never can repent of my constancy, since I am thoroughly persuaded of the justice of the cause for which I suffer." This is not the language of one who had sold himself for a pension of £100 a year. Dryden did not, like Chillingworth, return after a time to the Established Church. He died in the religion of his choice, and many of his poems, particularly the paraphrase of the Veni Creator, and the two odes on St. Cecilia's Day, breathe alike the devotion and the well-ordered ideas of a Catholic. There is much force in the closing line of this stanza:
"Refine and clear our earthly parts,
But, oh! inflame and fire our hearts!
Our frailties help, our vice control;
Submit the senses to the soul;
And when rebellious they are grown,
Then lay thy hand, and hold them down."
When Dryden, in The Hind and the Panther, describes the different Protestant sects, he very naturally gives the preference to the Church of England, and speaks of her with a becoming tenderness, she having been the church in which he was nurtured:
"The panther, sure the noblest next the hind,
And fairest creature of the spotted kind,
Oh! could her inborn stains be washed away,
She were too good to be a beast of prey!
How can I praise or blame, and not offend,
Or how divide the frailty from the friend?
Her faults and virtues lie so mixed that she
Not wholly stands condemned, nor wholly free.
Then like her injured lion (James II.) let me speak,
He cannot bend her, and he would not break.
If, as our dreaming Platonists report,
There could be spirits of a middle sort.
Too black for heaven, and yet too white for hell,
Who just dropped half-way down, nor lower fell;
So poised, so gently she descends from high,
It seems a soft demission from the sky."
Dryden's successor on the throne of letters in England was Alexander Pope, who was also a Catholic, though not a convert. His father, a linen merchant of Lombard Street, London, was a Catholic before him, and had been led to embrace the faith by a residence in Lisbon. His were the days of penal laws and various disabilities, among which was exclusion from the public schools and universities. Alexander's education, therefore, was private, and not of a first-rate kind. He may almost be called a self-taught man. He had seen Dryden when a boy, and he knew Wycherley, the dramatist, who is here mentioned because he was in the number of those who adopted the Catholic profession under the auspices of James II. Wycherley was, as Arnold calls him, "a somewhat battered and worn-out relic of the gay reign of Charles II." Macaulay has little respect for him, for the very reason that he could interest us—because he became a Catholic. He styles him "the most licentious and hard-hearted writer of a singularly licentious and hard-hearted school." But the gentle Charles Lamb was more indulgent to his memory and his works. "I do not know," he says, in the Essays of Elia, "how it is with others, but I feel the better always for the perusal of one of Congreve's—nay, why should I not add even of Wycherley's?—comedies. I am the gayer, at least, for it; and I could never connect those sports of a witty fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn from them to imitation in real life. They are a world of themselves almost as much as fairyland."
We will not pause to discuss the soundness of this criticism; we have to do with Pope, and chiefly with his religious character. No one can read his "Dying Christian's Hymn," beginning,
"Vital spark of heavenly flame,"
without being convinced that the author was capable of the deepest religious feeling. The times were not favorable to a Catholic poet, nor is it in Pope's writings that we must look for the strongest evidence of his faith. The "Letter of Eloisa to Abelard," indeed, could hardly have been written by a Protestant; but it says nothing of his personal religion. We find, however, by his correspondence with Racine and others, that though infidelity and gallantry were the fashion of his day, he was known among his friends as a Papist, and that he speaks of himself as such unreservedly. The words of Dr. Johnson on this subject are as follows: "The religion in which he lived and died was that of the Church of Rome.... He professes himself a sincere adherent.... It does not appear that his principles were ever corrupted, or that he ever lost his belief of revelation.... After the priest had given him the last sacraments, he died in the evening of the 30th day of May, 1744."
It is pleasing to reflect that this illustrious poet, so distinguished by his deep thought, his affluent imagery, his pathos, his scathing satire and matchless versification, recoiled in his solitude and sickness from the false philosophy of his friends, and closed his weary and painful existence at the foot of the cross; that he departed hence, not only with laurels on his brow, but with the Viaticum on his lips and the church's blessing on his drooping head. But it was not at the awful hour of death merely that he began to prize the religion which England proscribed. There is a little anecdote related of him which shows that he had a distinct and warm feeling on the subject long before he came face to face with the last enemy. He and Mrs. Blount had been invited on one occasion to stay with Mr. Allen, at Prior Park, near Bath, on a visit. Pope left the house for a short time to go to Bristol; and while he was absent, it happened that Mrs. Blount, who was a Catholic as well as himself, wished to attend Mass in the chapel in Bath, and requested the use of Mr. Allen's chariot for that purpose. But her host, at that time being mayor of the city, had a decided objection to his carriage being seen at the doors of such a place, and begged to be excused lending it. Mrs. Blount felt deeply offended at this time-serving, and, when Pope returned, told him her feelings on the subject. The poet was so incensed at this offence offered to his religion and his friend that he, and Mrs. Martha Blount too, abruptly quitted the house.
There is, happily, no need of our contending for the places which Dryden and Pope should occupy among literary celebrities. Their attachment to Catholicism at a time when it was especially distasteful to the English people—during the reigns, we mean, of William the Third and Queen Anne—did not detract from the popularity of their writings even while they lived. The striking genius of Dryden as a translator, his racy language and manly style, have been fully appreciated by posterity; and if we put Pope above him in the rank of poets, it is because we discover in the latter more profound philosophy and rhythmical sweetness. He enjoyed, too, an advantage over his distinguished predecessor in that he was not a convert, but had from childhood been imbued with the doctrines of the ancient faith. The Catholic system, even more than he knew, lent force and color to his imagination, restrained his philosophic speculations within orthodox bounds, and imparted a certain majesty and consistency to his verse, even when it was concerned with purely secular topics. It had done the like for Dante, Chaucer, Calderon, and Corneille before him, and it has done the like since for Thomas Moore, as we shall endeavor to show in a future number.
TO BE CONTINUED.